Credit: Pamela LittkyAlice in Chains has added another leg to its North American headlining tour. The fall outing begins October 16 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and wraps up October 28 in Hollywood, Florida. Tickets go on sale this Friday, June 22, at 10 a.m. local time via AliceinChains.com. The grunge icons will be touring in support of their forthcoming album, the follow-up to 2013's The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here. The album, whose title has yet to be revealed, is due out this year, and features the single "The One You Know." Before the fall leg kicks off, the band will launch a summer North American tour August 22 in Vancouver, Canada. Here are Alice in Chains' fall headlining tour dates: 10/16 -- Salt Lake City, UT, The Depot 10/18 -- Colorado Springs, CO, Pikes Peak Center 10/20 -- Newkirk, OK, First Council Casino 10/21 -- Durant, OK, Choctaw Grand Theater 10/23 -- New Orleans, LA, Saenger Theatre 10/24 -- Birmingham, AL, The BJCC 10/26 -- St. Augustine, FL, St. Augustine Amphitheatre 10/27 -- Orlando, FL, Hard Rock Live 10/28 -- Hollywood, FL, Hard Rock Events Center 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 The board has also appointed ICICI Prudential Life Insurance CEO and MD Sandeep Bakhshi as its chief operating officer. Chanda Kocchar will now go on leave till the enquiry in the ICICI-Videocon case is not completed. (Photo: File) Mumbai: In a complete reversal of its stance taken four months ago, the board of directors of ICICI Bank on Monday allowed its CEO Chanda Kochhar to go on leave until a probe into her role in an alleged conflict of interest while granting loans to the Videocon Group was completed. The board has also appointed ICICI Prudential Life Insurance CEO and MD Sandeep Bakhshi as its chief operating officer. Mr Bakhshi, who was the deputy MD of ICICI Bank before he was made the groups insurance head, would run the bank during the absence of Ms Kochhar. Mr Bakhshi would be COO for five years. Though as the COO he would reporting to CEO Kochhar, the bank said he would report to the board until Ms Kochhar resumes the office. All executive directors on the Board of ICICI Bank and the executive management will report to him. Ms Kochhar has been facing allegations made by a whistleblower about sanctioning of loans to the Videocon Group in lieu of investments made in the companies promoted by her husband. Ms Kochhar refuted the allegations. Thought the banks board had supported her initially, ruling out any probe into the matter, it had changed its stand after a second round of quid pro quo charges against Ms Kochhar have come to the fore on May 3. Following the allegations, the board met on May 29 and decided to institute an inquiry to examine complaints filed by the whistleblower relating to conflict of interest while dealing with certain customers or borrowers of the bank. Though Ms Kochhar went on what was billed as a routine annual leave on June 1, she extend her leave till the completion of the probe. In line with the highest levels of governance and corporate standards, Ms. Chanda Kochhar has decided to go on leave till the completion of the enquiry as announced on May 30, 2018. The Board has noted and accepted this. During her period of leave, the COO will report to the Board, the bank said after its board meeting on Monday evening. The board has decided to recommend ICICI Prudential to appoint N.S. Kannan as its MD and CEO in place of Mr Bakhshi. In the day, shares of ICICI Bank rose by four per cent amidst the speculation of a rejig in the top management. ICICI Bank was the top gainer among the 30-share basket. Kochhars silence may have created a lot of uncertainty for the bank as on now. But shareholders will have to wait for findings from the probe panel and whether it will be a damage control for the bank and herself. President Mamnoon Hussain and his Tajik counterpart Emomali Rahmon Tuesday held bilateral talks to further strengthen bilateral relations and cooperation between Pakistan and Tajikistan in diverse areas for mutual benefit. The two presidents had a one-to-one meeting before going for delegation level talks held here at the state guest house. Earlier, President Mamnoon Hussain visited Somoni Monument in Dushanbe today and laid a wreath. The statue of Ismoil Somoni celebrates the 10th-century founder of the Samanid dynasty. President Mamnoon is in Tajikistan for a bilateral visit on the invitation of President Emomali Rahmon and to participate in the international conference on water being held in Dushanbe tomorrow. The conference being hosted by Tajikistan in cooperation with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and other partners, will focus on sustainable development and integrated management of water resources for the achievement of social, economic and environmental objectives. The nomination papers of Pakistan Peoples Party chairperson Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz President Shehbaz Sharif for different constituencies have been accepted as the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) concludes the scrutiny process of nomination papers today. Bilawal's nominations papers for NA-246 (Karachi) have been accepted along with nomination papers of Shehbaz and his son, Hamza Shehbaz, for NA-132 (Lahore). Moreover, PML-N leader Maryam Nawaz's candidacy for PP-173 has been approved. On Monday, RO Asif Bashir had cleared the way for Maryam to contest for Lahore's NA-125 constituency after dismissing all objections raised during scrutiny of her nomination papers as well. However, Muttahida Qaumi Movement stalwart Farooq Sattar suffered a setback after his nomination papers for NA-245 (Karachi) were rejected today owing to his inclusion in two FIRs. Similarly, the nominations papers of Pak Sarzameen Party leader Arshad Vohra for NA-254 (Karachi) and NA-255 (Karachi) have also been approved, along with nomination papers of Jamiat Ulema-e Islam (F) chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman's for NA-38 (Dera Ismail Khan). Senior politician Javed Hashmi's candidature for NA-155 (Multan) has been approved, while former president Pervez Musharraf's nomination papers for NA-1 (Chitral) have been dismissed. Qaumi Watan Party chairperson Aftab Sherpao's nomination papers for NA-23 (Charsadda) have also been approved. The nomination papers of former Jamaat-e-Islami Sindh chief Asadullah Bhutto were rejected for NA-242 (Karachi) as his name is reportdly on a bank defaulters list. Speaking to the media, Bhutto shared that he will challenge his dismissal. I am not a defaulter. The bank has made some mistake, he remarked. Zulfiqar Mirza, who recently joined the Grand Democratic Alliance, has been allowed to contest election from PS-74 (Badin), while estranged PTI leader Ayesha Gulalai will contest the election from NA-231 (Sajawal). Former interior minister Ahsan Iqbal has also been cleared to contest from his hometown constituency of NA-78 (Narowal). Similarly, former prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi's nomination papers for NA-53 (Islamabad) have been approved. ECP reserves verdict on objections against Imran Moreover, PTI chief Imran Khans legal counsel Babar Awan appeared before a returning officer and presented his arguments over the objections to PTI chiefs candidacy for NA-53 (Islamabad). Awan remarked that they rejected the objections against Imran seven times in the written reply submitted to the ECP, adding that all the objections are based on falsehood. He further remarked that the photocopies used to incriminate Imran fall under the ambit of cyber crime. Following this, the counsel of Abdul Wahab Baloch, who had filed objections against Imrans candidacy, also presented his arguments. The RO then reserved the verdict and is expected to announce it shortly. Last day of scrutiny process The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) will conclude the scrutiny of nomination papers filed by the candidates for the upcoming general election today (Tuesday). The general election is expected to be held on July 25. A total of 21,482 nomination papers have been filed across the country for national and provincial assemblies, according to the electoral body. At least 6,063 candidates will contest for the 342 seats of the National Assembly, while 15,419 hopefuls have filed nomination papers for the seats of the provincial assemblies. The election schedule states that appeals against rejection or acceptance of nomination papers can be filed by June 22. The decision on the appeals will be made by June 27, after which the final list of the candidates will be shared on June 28. Alongside, the ECP Spokesperson Altaf Khan remarked that time for scrutiny of nomination papers will not be extended, adding that no such proposal is under consideration in this regard. Gun violence has claimed the lives of two rising hip-hop stars in one day. Billboard reports emerging Pittsburgh rapper Jimmy Wopo is dead at age 21 after a double-shooting in the city's Middle Hill neighborhood on Monday afternoon. Pittsburgh police said he and a second man were shot while inside a Mazda SUV around 4:22 p.m. "This was an isolated incident, an apparent drive-by," police spokesperson Alicia George said. According to WTAE, the second victim is in the hospital in stable condition, but has not been identified. An investigation is underway. "I lost my brother today and it's the worst feeling in the world. He was destined for greatness and he wanted the best for his friends, family and community," Wopo's manager Taylor Maglin said. "We lost a great person today, but just know I will do everything in my power to make his memory live on forever. Love you bro." Wopo, whose real name was Travon Smart, had been featured in Complex magazine and named "Pittsburgh's Next Rap Star" by Hot New Hip Hop last year. He earned big-name fans like Pusha T and Juicy J with his 2017 single "Elm Street." Note: Video contains explicit lyrics not suitable for younger viewers. According to the Daily Mail, Smart is survived by a 3-year-old daughter. His death came within hours of another rapper, "Sad!" hitmaker XXXTentacion. The 20-year-old born Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy was shot and killed Monday in his car in Florida; police called it an apparent robbery attempt. RIP XXXTENTACION & RIP Jimmy Wopo J.Carr (@INPJCarr) June 18, 2018 R.I.P. Jimmy Wopo juicy j (@therealjuicyj) June 18, 2018 Prayers To Jimmy Wopo MURDA ON THE BEAT (@murdabeatz_) June 18, 2018 Syracuse, NY -- A fourth former employee of the Central New York SPCA pleaded guilty today after being tied to an embezzlement scandal that robbed more than $1 million from the non-profit's coffers in the past decade. Theresa Para's total thefts amounted to $145,184 between May 2012 and June 2013. She pleaded guilty to grand larceny. Para will spend five years on probation after an agreement between the lawyers and County Court Judge Stephen Dougherty. Prosecutor Michael Kasmarek had pushed for 6 months' jail time, but consented to probation because he said Para could have avoid jail time anyway by negotiating with the judge directly. Para avoided jail time for a couple of reasons, her lawyer, Emil Rossi, said today. Unlike mastermind Paul Morgan, the former executive director in state prison for stealing nearly $600,000, Para has made an attempt to repay some of the money. In addition, she has very serious health issues, Rossi said. Even with a good-faith effort to repay, her theft is so much she won't come close to full repayment, even if she follows a judge's order to repay $500 a month. But Morgan and his primary sidekick, Taylor Gilkey, who stole nearly $250,000, repaid nothing. They were each sentenced to prison a year and a half ago. A third woman, Nicole Cafarchio, pleaded guilty to stealing a much less: around $60,000. She got probation after cooperating against Morgan and Gilkey. That brings us to Para. It's unclear why her case took so much longer to prosecute. Kasmarek declined comment. But she's also the only one to make significant restitution. So far, she has $20,000 to repay and was ordered to repay $500 a month while on probation. Even if she follows through with $500 a month for five years, that will only be an additional $30,000 by the time she is released from probation. That's still a total of $50,000 -- the current $20,000 plus the future $30,000 -- that the SPCA is poised to recoup for her theft. She benefited in the same way other SPCA employees did: Morgan would write checks out in her name using SPCA coffers. Para admitted today to cashing 36 of those checks. She will be sentenced in August and begin probation. PHOENIX, NY -- For all the medals that Lock 1 Distilling Co.'s Ryze Vodka has won in its first year, (and it's won several), co-owner Brenden Backus is really looking forward to what's coming next. It's a bourbon, still in the fermenter. It will then be distilled and aged in oak barrels. It won't be released to the public for at least two years. "Our passion is whiskey, and the bourbon is something I'm really excited about even if we have to wait for it," Backus said. "We want to show people that great bourbon doesn't have to come from Kentucky." In the meantime, Lock 1 is taking another big step. After a little more than a year in business, it's now opening a tasting room to the public. The Lock 1 tasting room opens Friday (June 22) at 17 Culvert St. in Phoenix, Oswego County. (And yes, Lock 1 on the Oswego River is just a block away). Behind the bar, you'll find all the spirits currently in Lock 1's lineup. The flagship spirit, for now, is the Ryze Vodka, made from winter wheat and rye (the name plays on the idea of the phoenix rising from the ashes). It's triple distilled in a 17-foot-high column. It's already won several awards, including Double Gold in the Great American Spirits Competition in Rochester and a Gold in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.) In addition to the vodka, there are two gins: Locktender (a traditional juniper-forward version) and Drawbridge (with more of a citrus/ginger character). There are also two flavored but clear and unaged whiskeys: Inferno (infused with cinnamon) and Candy Cane (with peppermint). The Lock 1 tasting room will offer flights and bottles of its own products and cocktails made with them; beer and wine from other New York producers (and eventually guest spirits from other distillers, too). For the grand opening Friday, which starts at 2 p.m., there will be a food truck -- Wolf's Patio Pizza. Lock 1 will add a wood-fired pizza oven at some point in the future and begin serving lunch and dinner. The distillery is owned by Backus and his cousins, Kevin and Stephen Dates. It opened round Memorial Day 2017. As with many distilleries, it started with clear, or unaged spirits because they can be produced more quickly, Brown or aged spirits, like bourbon, rye other whiskeys, need to time to age. Getting product out to the market was a priority. The family also owns PWF (Phoenix Welding and Fabricating) and they did most of the renovation work on the building, and all of the manufacturing of the distilling equipment, themselves. "You need something in the market to pay the bills," Backus said. Among the touches they added to the project: A cupola atop the building that acommodates that 17-foot-high column still. In the past year, Lock 1's spirits have been sold in bars, restaurants and liquor stores across Central New York, as far south as Binghamton and between Rochester and Utica. While the vodka has been a big seller, the gins have been a little slower. The big surprise has been the flavored whiskies, Backus said. The Inferno (cinnamon) is a take on popular brands like Fireball, so its success might be expected. But the Candy Cane (peppermint) was intended to be a limited batch for the holiday season. "But it kept selling out, so we kept making more," he said. Backus creates the recipes and oversees the distillation process. Working in the distillery on a day-to-day basis are Rod Longo and Backus' uncle, Brian Dates. Brian Dates once ran a bait shop at the distillery location. "We've gone from worms to whiskey," he said. But that whiskey is still a ways off. Backus said he won't cut corners to make it come out any sooner. Some distilleries age their first whiskeys is small barrels -- 5 or 10 gallons each -- to speed up the process and produce whiskey in as little as six months. But Lock 1 will use 53-gallon barrels, and take a full two years. Lock 1 also uses what Backus calls a "pre-Prohibition" method: The whiskey will be aged at a lower proof (with water added before it goes in the barrel). Some distilleries use a more modern method of aging at higher proof, then cutting the finished whiskey with water. "The way we're doing it extracts more from the wood," he said. Eventually, Backus hope to produce rye, wheat and malt whiskies, too. Lock 1 Distilling's hours, for now, are 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and, on Sundays, is likely to be open noon to 6 p.m. Lock 1 is Oswego County's only distillery, and one of more than 100 in the state. In Central New York, it joins such spirits makers as 1911 Established in LaFayette; Last Shot in Skaneateles; Old Home Distillers in Lebanon; and Life of Reilley and Madison County Distillery, both just east of Cazenovia. "The craft spirits business is really taking off," Backus said. Don Cazentre writes about craft beer, wine, spirits and beverages for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook. Symphoria, CNY's year-round professional orchestra, brings music to venues across the area this summer, starting with an evening performance July 3 at Auburn's Emerson Park. All but one of the dozen concerts are free, and most venues offer picnic grounds on site or nearby. Sean O'Loughlin, a Central New York native who has developed a national reputation appearing on television and in concert with Josh Groban, Sarah McLachlan, Pentatonix and other entertainers, will conduct the July 3, 4, 5 and 7 concerts. Associate Conductor Christian Capocaccia takes the baton at the Seneca Falls and Syracuse Inner Harbor celebrations of women's suffrage and will conduct at subsequent venues. Grammy Award winner Joanne Shenandoah will join Symphoria for two shows celebrating the centennial of Women's suffrage in America. She will perform "SkyWoman," a series of nine Iroquois legends, July 20 in Seneca Falls and July 21 at Syracuse Inner Harbor. Shenandoah's national popularity is built on her original compositions, storytelling, educational programs and vocal skill. A member of the Wolf Clan of the Oneidas, she describes herself as a peace advocate, and was honored in 2017 with the American Indian Society of Washington D. C.'s award for advancing the empowerment of Native Americans through social, political, legal, environmental, and educational initiatives. Some of the scheduled concerts have rain dates, which can be determined by contacting the sponsoring organization. Here is a list of performances: July 3 at 8 p.m. Emerson Park; Auburn Principal Pops Conductor Sean O'Loughlin conducts, and the program ends with 1812 Overture and fireworks. July 4 at 8 p.m. St. Joseph's Health Amphitheater at Lakeview; Syracuse Sean O'Loughlin leads Symphoria with the Syracuse Pops Chorus, directed by Lou Lemos, in celebration of Independence Day at St. Joseph's Health Amphitheater at Lakeview. The program includes selections from John Williams's The Patriot, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and Call of the Champions. In keeping with tradition, the concert will end with The Overture of 1812 and fireworks. Tickets cost $10 for adults; those 18 and under are free when accompanied by an adult. For tickets, call 315-435-5100 or visit www.ExperienceSymphoria.org July 5 at 7:30 p.m. Village Green; Hamilton Symphoria features Bernstein's energetic Overture to Candide, selections from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, and Nimrod, from Elgar's Enigma Variations. The second half of the program includes music from the E.T., The Greatest Showman, and music of John Williams. July 7 at 7:30 p.m. Beard Park; Fayetteville The program opens with Bernstein's energetic Overture to Candide and selections from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. The second half of the program includes music from the E.T., The Greatest Showman, and music of John Williams. Attendees can arrive early for a picnic, before an evening of music under the stars. July 20 at 8 p.m. Seneca Falls Symphoria kicks off its celebration of women's suffrage in America with Grammy Award winning vocalist Joanne Shenandoah performing "SkyWoman." This performance is in collaboration with the Women's Rights National Historical Park Convention Days Celebration. July 21 at 8 p.m. Syracuse Inner Harbor; Syracuse Symphoria continues its celebration of women's suffrage at the Inner Harbor in Syracuse with Grammy Award winning vocalist Joanne Shenandoah performing "SkyWoman," depicting nine Iroquois legends. Symphoria, led by Associate Conductor Christian Capocaccia, will also perform award winning music of female composers. July 22 at 7: p.m. Fort Ontario; Oswego Symphoria celebrates Oswego while overlooking Lake Ontario at Fort Ontario. Associate Conductor Christian Capocaccia leads Symphoria in this performance featuring music of Bernstein, the film score to E.T., The Greatest Showman, and music of John Williams. Early arrivals can picnic on the grounds. July 26 at 7 p.m. Austin Park Pavilion; Skaneateles This family friendly performance in Skaneateles is an annual tradition, with a diverse program ranging from well known classical works to music of the movies and popular songs. Bring lawn chair for free seating. Limited seating will be available for $5 July 28 at 8 p.m. Fort Stanwix; Rome Symphoria continues its tradition of performing in Rome for the annual Honor America Days. This program concludes with fireworks and features the firing of cannons on site. Chamber Music Performances: July 21 at noon Fayetteville Free Library Symphoria String Quartet performs music of award winning women composers as part of Symphoria's celebration of women's suffrage in America. July 22 at 2 p.m. May Memorial Church Symphoria String Quartet performs music of award winning women composers, as part of Symphoria's celebration of women's suffrage in America. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- As temperatures in Syracuse swelled past 90 degrees Monday, lawmakers at city hall ratified a rule punishing people who leave dogs tied up outside in extreme weather. The Common Council passed Adrian's Law 8-0 with all councilors in support. Councilor Chad Ryan was absent. The law is named for a pitbull, Adrian, who died after being left outside in subzero temperatures on Syracuse's south side earlier this year. It allows police to fine and jail anyone who leaves a dog tethered outside in temperatures below 32 degrees or above 90 degrees. Police can also seize the animal. The vote was cause for celebration among animal rights advocates, who fought a months-long losing battle with the Onondaga County Legislature for an identical law. Brian Shapiro, New York State director for The Humane Society of the United States, said Monday he was glad the city council "make the right decision." Adrian's Law, he said, has the support of the Onondaga County Sheriff and the Syracuse Police Department's animal cruelty investigator. Shapiro said he was surprised when the law fizzled in the county legislature earlier this year. After making multiple concessions and offering to compromise, he said an "overly politicized" process there stalled any sort of progress. "The Onondaga County Legislature dropped the ball," he said. "This is not reinventing the wheel. Communities from Buffalo to Long Island have enacted laws like this. From the perspective of a national organization, we didn't quite understand the contentiousness of this in the county legislature." Legislator Chris Ryan, a Democrat, introduced a version of Adrian's Law in February. After pushback from some Republicans, that law was tabled. Legislator Casey Jordan, a Republican, introduced a competing dog law that was more flexible. That law, too, was tabled. With progress bogged down at the county level, advocates decided to try their luck with the city. In Syracuse, Shapiro and others found a more welcoming group of lawmakers. The council held a committee meeting two weeks ago to listen to concerns and discuss the law. After hearing some issues about the duration of time outlined in the law, changes were made and the bill passed unanimously. Councilor Joe Carni, who chairs the parks committee that met to discuss the law, said Monday he has some reservations, but supports the intent of the law. He voted yes, but said he will hold a committee meeting in six to eight months to hear from law enforcement and residents about how things are going. "I would have preferred to see something a little more breed specific, but we would've gotten into the weeds on that," he said "My biggest concern is its ability to be upheld, and that's a conversation we'll have with the District Attorney's office six to eight months from now." Councilor Susan Boyle, who sponsored the law, said she's in favor of a committee meeting down the road to assess progress. And she was confident the concerns of specific groups had been addressed. "No one is still banging down my door demanding change. Things seem to be more agreeable," she said. "The sporting dog people came to our meeting and seemed satisfied with the sporting dog exceptions included in the law." The council Monday also approved a measure to buy food and utensils for community centers from Wegmans. A version of that purchasing resolution was voted down last month because it authorized the city to purchase from Walmart. Councilors said they would not spend city dollars on a company that doesn't pay its people enough to keep off public assistance. The resolution was revised to exclude Walmart and lower the overall purchasing amount. It passed by unanimous vote Monday. Syracuse, N.Y. -- When an ex-employee made all kinds of wild accusations against scrap dealer Adam Weitsman, including that he disposed of a murder victim's body in his car shredder, Weitsman sued him for defamation and won. But that wasn't enough for Weitsman, the owner of Owego-based Upstate Shredding, the East Coast's largest privately held scrap metal processor. He hired NY Polygraph, of New Hampton, to give him a lie detector test to prove to any doubters that Robert A. Levesque III's claims were 100 percent false. Weitsman posted the results of the test on his Facebook page Tuesday. I have had to put up with the most crazy rumor about me and my company for the past 17 years regarding a unsolved local... Posted by Adam Weitsman on Tuesday, June 19, 2018 A federal judge in April ordered Levesque to stop making false claims on social media that Weitsman was, among other things, involved in the 2001 murder of Michele Harris, was mixed up with a Colombian drug lord and is the secret head of a Southern Tier motorcycle gang. U.S. District Judge Mae D'Agostino called Levesque's claims "clearly defamatory." She is expected to determine in the next couple of weeks what damages, if any, to award Weitsman. "I have had to put up with the most crazy rumor about me and my company for the past 17 years regarding a unsolved local disappearance of a local car dealer's wife. (Who I didn't even know). The rumor was that she was murdered by others and disposed of at my Owego shredding plant with my knowledge. Even though I have never even been questioned by law enforcement on this, the rumor continues and exists almost 2 decades later. I called in the region's top polygraph examiner and took a complete lie detector test in my office yesterday during working hours to finally put an end to this hurtful, false gossip," Weitsman said in the Facebook post Tuesday. The examiner said in his report that Weitsman responded truthfully when he answered the following questions: "Regarding the body of Michele Harris, do you intend to answer all of my questions truthfully?" Yes. "Did you dispose of Michele Harris's body at the Upstate Shredding company?" No. "Did you use the Upstate Shredding company shredder to dispose of any females?" No. "Are you withholding any information regarding disposing of Michele Harris at the Upstate Shredding company?" No "Are there any questions about Michele Harris you are afraid I will ask you on this exam?" No. "Were you in any way involved with disposing of Michele Harris's body?" No. Weitsman told syracuse.com Tuesday that he took the test to eliminate "any shred of doubt in anybody's mind" that he was involved in the Harris murder. He said he paid the polygraph company $1,200 to conduct the test at his office in Owego. Michele Harris disappeared Sept. 11, 2001. Her body has never been found. Her husband, car dealer Cal Harris, was charged with killing her at the Southern Tier estate they shared with their four children. He was acquitted of all charges in 2016 following his fourth trial. Levesque, who, according to court records, is now living in Ramona, Calif., worked for Weitsman as a scrap metal inspector at Upstate Shredding's plant in Owego from 2011 to 2014. Weitsman fired him in March 2014 after Levesque started behaving bizarrely, according to a lawsuit Weitsman filed against him in June 2017. Levesque wore a devil mask to work and made "racially motivated and derogatory remarks" to and about the company's customers before he was fired, the lawsuit alleged. Weitsman rehired Levesque in April 2014 after he asked for a second chance, but the odd behavior continued and Weitsman wound up firing him again in December 2014, according to the suit. Levesque has made many dozens of claims, without offering any proof, against Weitsman in social media posts since his firing. He has also made wild accusations against other individuals in the Southern Tier. Contact Rick Moriarty anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-3148 Twelve years later, Kangana and her mentor are all set to team up for the third time for a film interestingly titled Imali. Kangana and Anurag Basu had worked together in Kites, during which, there were talks of a fallout between the two. But, that seems to be history now. Back in 2006, Anurag had introduced Kangana Ranaut in his crime-drama Gangster, which also featured Emraan Hashmi and Shiney Ahuja. Though still in her teens, the actress had made an instant impression and bagged some of the years coveted awards. Twelve years later, Kangana and her mentor are all set to team up for the third time for a film interestingly titled Imali. Kangana who is currently in London filming Ekta Kapoors Mental Hai Kya with Rajkummar Rao, is apparently playing the protagonist whose name has a sharp tangy taste to it and thats the flavour of this young urban love story too. According to a source close to the development, the actress will flag off Imali after she wraps up Ashwini Iyer Tiwarys kabaddi drama which rolls in October and for which she has already started attending advanced yoga lessons, and will also train with national-level kabaddi players. Anurag Basu The prep for Imali is expected to begin by August but the film should roll only towards the year-end. The search for the male lead is on, informs the source. Kangana and Anurag had previously reunited in 2010 for the Rakesh Roshan-produced Kites during which there were talks of a fallout between the two. The actress was reportedly upset that the other leading lady, Barbara Mori, had got more screen space while her role had not shaped up the way it had been narrated. She was later quoted as saying that she had done the film only because Anurag would not take no for an answer and he was one of the few people she could not refuse, given that he had launched her. Buzz is, after seeing Queen, Anurag called Kangana and told his protege that he was proud of her. Since then, everyones been waiting for a hat-trick from the duo. When we contacted Kangana, the Simran actor said, Its too early to talk about Imali as we are starting the film around the end of the year. All I can say is that Anurag is my godfather and everything I am today is because of him I cant wait to go back to the beginning. Kangana is currently excited about her next film, Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi. The period drama is expected to be released in next few months. Sylvan Beach, N.Y. -- When June Boardman narrowly escaped the bitterly cold water and ice that flooded her small home in January, she didn't know if she could ever rebuild. Her car was destroyed. The small house on the banks of Fish Creek was filled with 3 feet of water, sand and muck. "I've been here 30 years," Boardman said, "and I never saw anything like it." Thanks to the kindness of strangers, and a lot of hard work by her family, Boardman finally returned home last week. Boardman barely got out alive after an ice jam on the creek forced water into her home in the Hidden Point Campground. She had been recovering from hip surgery and a broken arm, and managed to ford the cold water with a friend who had been staying with her. After her harrowing escape was detailed on Syracuse.com, her family started a GoFundMe page. Boardman received a $200 donation from someone in California. Another person sent $1,000. All told, they raised about $6,500. "I can't express how I feel about all those donations," said Boardman, sitting on her new couch in the remodeled living room. "I wouldn't have been able to do it without that." Much of the work was done by Boardman's family, including her daughter, Marjorie Marks, who lives in Phoenix, N.Y. The first thing they had to deal with was several inches of sand that remained after the water receded. "It was like the Sahara desert in here," Boardman quipped. They removed the sand with shovels, brooms and vaccuums. "We burned out two Shop-Vacs," Marks said. Boardman's son, Bob Dunn, drove up in February from Oklahoma with his son, Brian, to start rebuilding. "We were feeling pretty positive until we walked into the house," Dunn recalled. "Then we just kind of looked at each other and said, 'What are we going to do with this?'" Mold was growing on the walls; the sheet rock and insulation were soaked. The electrical and plumbing systems were damaged. The living room floor sagged. The house had no power, so Dunn ran generators for heat and power. He and his son stripped the walls and wiring, replaced the insulation and paneling, and rebuilt the floor. "I figured we were going to be there a week," Dunn said. "We were there for three weeks." They had nearly finished when they ran out of money. A kitchen cabinet and the refrigerator still needed replacing, at a cost of about $700. That's when the folks at Dunn's home church, the Church of the Nazarene in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, stepped up. "Our church had a spaghetti dinner," Dunn said, "and it raised exactly what we needed for that cabinet and refrigerator." Boardman said she's happy to finally be back home with her 3-year-old Australian shepherd, Sabrina. Boardman credits Sabrina with saving her life by barking that night in January and waking her to the flood. The house looks nicer than it did before the flood, said Boardman's daughter, Marjorie Marks. "It came out so cute," Marks said. "Now we're working on the outside," Boardman added. Marks laughed. "She doesn't ever stop." Contact Glenn Coin: Email | Twitter | Google + | (315) 470-3251 By Salvador Rizzo | The Washington Post "I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law. That's their law."- President Donald Trump, in remarks to reporters at the White House, June 15 "We have the worst immigration laws in the entire world. Nobody has such sad, such bad and actually, in many cases, such horrible and tough - you see about child separation, you see what's going on there."- Trump, in remarks at the White House, June 18 "Because of the Flores consent decree and a 9th Circuit Court decision, ICE can only keep families detained together for a very short period of time."- Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a speech in Bozeman, Montana, June 7 "It's the law, and that's what the law states."- White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, at a news briefing, June 14 "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period."- Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, on Twitter, June 17 The president and top administration officials say U.S. laws or court rulings are forcing them to separate families that are caught trying to cross the southern border. These claims are false. Immigrant families are being separated primarily because the Trump administration in April began to prosecute as many border-crossing offenses as possible. This "zero-tolerance policy" applies to all adults, regardless of whether they cross alone or with their children. The Justice Department can't prosecute children along with their parents, so the natural result of the zero-tolerance policy has been a sharp rise in family separations. Nearly 2,000 immigrant children were separated from parents during six weeks in April and May, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The Trump administration implemented this policy by choice and could end it by choice. No law or court ruling mandates family separations. In fact, during its first 15 months, the Trump administration released nearly 100,000 immigrants who were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, a total that includes more than 37,500 unaccompanied minors and more than 61,000 family members. Children continue to be released to their relatives or to shelters. But since the zero-tolerance policy took effect, parents as a rule are being prosecuted. Any conviction in those proceedings would be grounds for deportation. We've published two fact-checks about family separations, but it turns out these Trumpian claims have a zombie quality and keep popping up in new ways. In the latest iteration, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted and then said at a White House briefing that the administration does not have "a policy of separating families at the border." This is Orwellian stuff. Granted, the administration has not written regulations or policy documents that advertise, "Hey, we're going to separate families." But that's the inevitable consequence, as Nielsen and other Trump administration officials acknowledge. "Operationally what that means is we will have to separate your family," Nielsen told NPR in May. "That's no different than what we do every day in every part of the United States when an adult of a family commits a crime. If you as a parent break into a house, you will be incarcerated by police and thereby separated from your family. We're doing the same thing at the border." Although we've fact-checked these family-separation claims twice, we hadn't had the opportunity to assign a Pinocchio rating yet. We'll do so now. The Facts Since 2014, hundreds of thousands of children and families have fled to the United States because of rampant violence and gang activity in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. U.S. laws provide asylum or refugee status to qualified applicants, but the Trump administration says smugglers and bad actors are exploiting these same laws to gain entry. Nielsen says the government has detected hundreds of cases of fraud among migrants traveling with children who are not their own. President Trump says he wants to close what he describes as "loopholes" in these humanitarian-relief laws. The Central American refugee crisis developed during President Barack Obama's administration and continues under Trump. The two administrations have taken different approaches. The Justice Department under Obama prioritized the deportation of dangerous people. Once he took office, Trump issued an executive order rolling back much of the Obama-era framework. Obama's guidelines prioritized the deportation of gang members, those who posed a national security risk and those who had committed felonies. Trump's January 2017 executive order does not include a priority list for deportations and refers only to "criminal offenses," which is broad enough to encompass serious felonies as well as misdemeanors. Then, in April 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rolled out the zero-tolerance policy. When families or individuals are apprehended by the Border Patrol, they're taken into DHS custody. Under the zero-tolerance policy, DHS officials refer any adult "believed to have committed any crime, including illegal entry," to the Justice Department for prosecution. If they're convicted, that triggers deportation proceedings. Illegal entry is a misdemeanor for first-time offenders, and a conviction is grounds for deportation. Because of Trump's executive order, DHS can deport people for misdemeanors more easily, because the government no longer prioritizes the removal of dangerous criminals, gang members or national-security threats. (A DHS fact sheet says, "Any individual processed for removal, including those who are criminally prosecuted for illegal entry, may seek asylum or other protection available under law.") Families essentially are put on two different tracks. One track ends with deportation. The other doesn't. After a holding period, DHS transfers children to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services. They spend an average 51 days at an ORR shelter before they're placed with a sponsor in the United States, according to HHS. The government is required to place these children with family members whenever possible, even if those family members might be undocumented immigrants. "Approximately 85 percent of sponsors are parents" who were already in the country "or close family members," according to HHS. Some children have no relatives available and in those cases the government may keep them in shelters for longer periods of time while suitable sponsors are identified and vetted. Adding it all up, this means the Trump administration is operating a system in which immigrant families that are apprehended at the border get split up, because children go into a process in which they eventually get placed with sponsors in the country while their parents are prosecuted and potentially deported. The White House tweeted "ENOUGH of the misinformation. This Administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border." This is a question of Trump and his Cabinet choosing to enforce some laws over others. The legal landscape did not change between the time the Trump administration released nearly 100,000 immigrants during its first 15 months and the time the zero-tolerance policy took effect in April 2018. What changed was the administration's handling of these cases. Undocumented immigrant families seeking asylum previously were released and went into the civil court system, but now the parents are being detained and sent to criminal courts while their kids are resettled in the United States as though they were unaccompanied minors. The government has limited resources and cannot prosecute every crime, so setting up a system that prioritizes the prosecution of some offenses over others is a policy choice. The Supreme Court has said, "In our criminal justice system, the government retains 'broad discretion' as to whom to prosecute." To charge or not to charge someone "generally rests entirely" on the prosecutor, the court has said. Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for Nielsen, said the administration does not have a family-separation policy. But Waldman agreed that Trump officials are exercising their prosecutorial discretion to charge more illegal-entry offenses, which in turn causes more family separations. The Obama administration also separated immigrant families, she said. "We're increasing the rate of what we were already doing," Waldman said. "Instead of letting some slip through, we're saying we're doing it for all." Waldman sent figures from fiscal 2010 through 2016 showing that, out of 2,362,966 adults apprehended at the southern border, 492,970, or 21 percent, were referred for prosecution. These figures include all adults, not just those who crossed with minor children, so they're not a measure of how many families were separated under Obama. "During the Obama administration there was no policy in place that resulted in the systematic separation of families at the border, like we are now seeing under the Trump administration," said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. "Our understanding is that generally parents were not prosecuted for illegal entry under President Obama. There may have been some separation if there was suspicion that the children were being trafficked or a claimed parent-child relationship did not actually exist. But nothing like the levels we are seeing today." Trump administration officials say they're trying to keep parents informed about their kids. But some families instead have wound up in wrenching scenarios. "Some of the most intense outrage at the measures has followed instances of parents deported to Central America without their children or spending weeks unable to locate their sons and daughters," The Washington Post's Nick Miroff reported. "In other instances, pediatricians and child advocates have reported seeing toddlers crying inconsolably for their mothers at shelters where staff are prohibited from physically comforting them." Administration officials have pointed to a set of laws and court rulings that they said forced their hand: --A 1997 federal consent decree that requires the government to release all children apprehended crossing the border. The "Flores" consent decree began as a class-action lawsuit. The Justice Department negotiated a settlement during President Bill Clinton's administration. According to a 2016 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the Flores settlement requires the federal government to release rather than detain all undocumented immigrant children, whether they crossed with parents or alone. The agreement doesn't cover any parents who might be accompanying those minors, but it doesn't mandate that parents be prosecuted or that families be separated. Moreover, Congress could pass a law that overrides the terms of the Flores settlement. Waldman said the Flores settlement requires the government to keep immigrant families together for only 20 days, but no part of the consent decree requires that families be separated after 20 days. Courts have ruled that children must be released from detention facilities within 20 days under the Flores consent decree, but none of these legal developments prevents the government from releasing parents along with children. --A 2008 law meant to curb human trafficking called the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA). This law covers children of all nationalities except Canadians and Mexicans. Central American children who are apprehended trying to enter the United States must be released rather than detained under the terms of the TVPRA, and they're exempt from prompt return to their home countries. The law passed with wide bipartisan support and was signed by a Republican president, George W. Bush. No part of the TVPRA requires family separations. --The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. This comprehensive law governs U.S. immigration and citizenship and makes a person's first illegal entry into the United States a misdemeanor. Clinton, Bush and Obama -- the presidents who were in office during the immigration boom of the past few decades -- never enforced the INA's illegal-entry provision with the Trump administration's zeal. The INA says nothing about separating families. It was sponsored by Democrats and passed by a Democratic-held Congress. President Harry Truman, also a Democrat, tried to veto the bill, describing it as a reactionary and "un-American" measure meant to keep out immigrants from Eastern Europe. Congress overrode his veto. "What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law," Nielsen said at a White House briefing June 18. "Everyone is subject to prosecution." It's unclear whether 100 percent of adults are being prosecuted. Experts on the ground say there are not enough resources on the border to process all these cases. Trump administration officials say immigrants should show up at a port of entry to request asylum if they want to avoid prosecution, but there's usually a big crowd and people often get turned away at these entry points, according to reporting from Texas Monthly. It's strange to behold Trump distancing himself from the zero-tolerance policy ("the Democrats gave us that law") while Nielsen claims it doesn't exist ("it's not a policy") and Sessions defends it in speech after speech. "We do have a policy of prosecuting adults who flout our laws to come here illegally instead of waiting their turn or claiming asylum at any port of entry," Sessions said in a speech on June 18 in New Orleans. "We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws." In a June 7 speech, he said: "I hope that we don't have to separate any more children from any more adults. But there's only one way to ensure that is the case: it's for people to stop smuggling children illegally. Stop crossing the border illegally with your children. Apply to enter lawfully. Wait your turn." The attorney general also suggested on June 7 that legal developments are forcing his hand. "Because of the Flores consent decree and a 9th Circuit Court decision, ICE can only keep families detained together for a very short period of time," he said. But as we've explained, this is misleading. Neither the consent decree nor the court ruling forces the government to separate families. What they do provide is accommodations for children that the government could extend to parents if it wanted to. For Trump, the family-separation policy is leverage as he seeks congressional funding for his promised border wall and other immigration priorities, according to reporting by The Washington Post. Top DHS officials have said that threatening adults with criminal charges and prison time would be the "most effective" way to reverse the rising number of illegal crossings. The Pinocchio Test The doublespeak coming from Trump and top administration officials on this issue is breathtaking, not only because of the sheer audacity of these claims but because they keep being repeated without evidence. Immigrant families are being separated at the border not because of Democrats and not because some law forces this result, as Trump insists. They're being separated because the Trump administration, under its zero-tolerance policy, is choosing to prosecute border-crossing adults for any offenses. This includes illegal-entry misdemeanors, which are being prosecuted at a rate not seen in previous administrations. Because the act of crossing itself is now being treated as an offense worthy of prosecution, any family that enters the United States illegally is likely to end up separated. Nielsen may choose not to call this a "family separation policy," but that's precisely the effect it has. Sessions, who otherwise owns up to what's happening, has suggested that the Flores settlement and a court ruling are forcing his hand. They're not. At heart, this is an issue of prosecutorial discretion: his discretion. The Trump administration owns this family-separation policy and, on the Pinocchio scale of one to four, its spin deserves Four Pinocchios. In other words, they are telling whoppers. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Several hundred protesters greeted Vice President Mike Pence and the rest of his entourage as they arrived at the Embassy Suites hotel near Destiny USA on Tuesday. The protesters lined several blocks of Solar Street across the street from the hotel, which was lined by orange barriers ahead of the vice president's visit. Pence and U.S. Rep. John Katko (R-Syracuse) arrived at the hotel for a $1,000-a-person fundraiser. Many of the signs held by protesters decried the separation of children from their immigrant parents arriving at the southern border. Others criticized Katko for not standing up to U.S. President Donald Trump's policies. "What do we want? Free the children!" the protesters shouted. "When do we want it? Now!" Groups including the CNY Solidarity Coalition, Indivisible Syracuse and 1199SEIU organized the protest. The protest reached a crescendo as the caravan with Pence arrived and turned north from Solar Street to the hotel, as protesters loudly booed, beat their drums and jeered at Pence's arrival. Jonah Minkoff-Zern, a campaign director for the group Public Citizen, said he was driven to protest by, among other things, the six-month anniversary of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. That's the recent tax overhaul, which Katko voted for, that the activist said rewards the rich at the expense of Central New Yorkers. "Katko, Pence and the Republicans put the needs of the ultra-wealthy over the needs of people like us in Central New York, and today is a perfect example," Minkoff-Zern said of the private fundraiser. Two Democrats hoping to unseat Katko this November -- Dana Balter and Juanita Perez Williams -- could be seen walking among the protesters. Also in attendance was Syracuse Common Council President Helen Hudson, who reminded protesters to stay on the sidewalk, per police instructions. After the vice president's arrival, the protesters stood at the corner of Solar Street and Hiawatha Boulevard, cheering loudly whenever drivers honked their vehicles at them. From there, protesters began a short march began heading north on Hiawatha. A protester wore a papier mache mask of the president, complete with small hands and a devil's tail, at the protest on Tuesday. Protesters stood at the corner of Solar and Hiawatha, cheering for honking cars, after Pence's arrival. This post will be updated. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- A downtown Dunkin' Donuts is set to close by the end of June, according to employees at the popular South Salina Street shop. The coffee and doughnut shop is at 217 S. Salina St. in the McCarthy Building at the corner of Fayette Street. Long lines of customers can be seen almost every morning. Two employees at the shop, who declined to be named, said the shop was set to close by June 28. A manager declined to comment. Joe Hucko, president of Washington Street Partners, which owns the building, did not respond to requests for comment. This post will be updated with additional information if it becomes available. Dear Vice President Pence, Welcome to Central New York. Since we have your ear, we'd like you to deliver a message to President Donald Trump: Stop separating children from their parents at the border. It is immoral, inhumane and traumatizing to rip children from the arms of their parents and to hold them in cages. It is reprehensible to intentionally harm children to deter legal asylum-seekers from knocking on America's golden door. It is wrong to use children as bargaining chips in the political negotiation over changes to our legal immigration system. It didn't work with the "Dreamers" who were brought here illegally as children. It is unlikely to work with babies, toddlers and young children who also could not consent to being brought here by their parents, despite the peril that awaited them. It is false to blame family separation on the law or on Democrats. The Trump administration made a policy decision to have "zero tolerance" for illegal immigration and to practice family separation as a deterrent. The Bush and Obama administrations operated under the same law, but did not separate families, even though they had the power to do so. You know you are on the wrong side of history when this tactic is assailed by first lady Melania Trump, former first lady Laura Bush, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Rev. Franklin Graham, conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci and the United Nations. Rep. John Katko, R-Camillus, for whom you are raising campaign money on this trip, says he opposes the president's tactic of separating parents and children. Katko is leading the charge for an immigration bill in the House. If he means what he says about family separation, Katko should attach a provision to the bill that bars the administration from doing it. The problem is that the leaders of the Republican Party lack the backbone to stand up to the president. A new Quinnipiac poll shows 66 percent of Americans oppose Trump's family separation strategy. Yet 55 percent of Republicans polled support it. Family separation's popularity with the base gives the president and GOP leaders political cover, but doesn't make it any less cruel. Laura Bush was right when she compared the current situation at the southern border to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. It took decades for Congress to admit that was wrong. If Trump won't halt family separations, Congress should do it -- the sooner, the better. Sincerely, The Editorial Board Syracuse.com editorials Editorials represent the collective opinion of the Advance Media New York editorial board. Our opinions are independent of news coverage. Read our Members of the editorial board are Tim Kennedy, Jason Murray and Marie Morelli. To respond to this editorial: Post a comment below, or submit a letter or commentary to . Read our If you have questions about the Opinions & Editorials section, contact Marie Morelli, editorial/opinion leader, at As Vice President Mike Pence visited Syracuse on Tuesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo wrote an open letter appealing to him as a father to stop separating children from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico. "I write to you as the governor of New York but also, like you, as the father of three," Cuomo wrote. "I cannot bear to imagine the pain and suffering the parents at the border face when their children are taken from them. If the parents' anguish does not compel you to end this policy, then the children's plight must." Cuomo issued the letter amid growing national outrage over a Trump administration border policy in which migrant children entering the country are detained separately from their parents. Here's the full text of Cuomo's letter: To Vice President Pence, Welcome to New York, a beacon of liberty and opportunity to the world. With the Statue of Liberty in our harbor, New York has proudly served as a symbol of our American values and a gateway for millions of immigrants arriving in this country, including your grandfather Richard Michael Cawley. Today this nation's commitment to openness and tolerance is under siege by your administration. Your policy of ripping children from their parents is a moral outrage and an assault on the values that built this state and this nation. This policy makes it very clear you have forgotten what made America great. I write to you as the Governor of New York but also, like you, as the father of three. I cannot bear to imagine the pain and suffering the parents at the border face when their children are taken from them. If the parents' anguish does not compel you to end this policy, then the children's plight must. I have heard the terrifying sobs of the children separated from their parents. And I know that your administration's actions will have devastating long-term consequences for these children. Research and common-sense point to the developmental effects of depriving children of their parents. Such a traumatic experience can in fact trigger irreversible physical and psychological harm. I have already expressed my grave concerns with this administration's anti-immigrant tactics, including when I requested the Department of Homeland Security Acting Inspector General to investigate their discriminatory tactics in our state and called on him to tell us what his office is doing about the assault on immigrant families along the border. And I will continue to fight to defend our American values and protect the rights of all New Yorkers. While you are in New York, I ask you to remember the words of Emma Lazarus mounted on a plaque inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751 WASHINGTON (AP) -- An unapologetic President Donald Trump defended his administration's border-protection policies Monday in the face of rising national outrage over the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. Calling for tough action against illegal immigration, Trump declared the U.S. "will not be a migrant camp" on his watch. Images of children held in fenced cages fueled a growing chorus of condemnation from both political parties, four former first ladies and national evangelical leaders. The children are being held separately from parents who are being prosecuted under the administration's "zero-tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings. "I say it's very strongly the Democrats' fault," Trump said Monday as his administration rejected criticism that the policy has resulted in inhuman and immoral conditions. Trump pointed to more lenient policies under past administrations that had not charged all migrants who had crossed illegally. "We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do," Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in an appearance before the National Sheriffs' Association in New Orleans. "Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards." Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new "zero-tolerance" policy that refers all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. Prior procedure had limited prosecution for many family entrants, in part because regulations prohibit detaining children with their parents since the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are. The policy change was meant to deter unlawful crossings -- and Sessions issued a warning last month to those entering the U.S. illegally that their children "inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions." The current holding areas have drawn widespread attention after journalists gained access to one site Sunday. At a McAllen, Texas, detention center hundreds of immigrant children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets. Administration officials said they do not like the family separations either -- calling it the result of legal loopholes -- but insist migrants who arrive illegally simply won't be released or loosely kept track of. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," Trump declared. "Not on my watch." Sessions, on Monday, echoed the administration's defense of the zero tolerance policy, and called on Congress to act. "We do not want to separate parents from their children," he said. "If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won't face these terrible choices." Still the White House said it would reject any narrow fix aimed solely at addressing the plight of children separated from their parents under the immigration crackdown. Press secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump's priorities, like funding a border wall and tightening immigration laws, must also be fulfilled as part of any legislation. "We want to fix the whole thing," she said. "We don't want to tinker with just part of it." The national debate over the family separation policy comes as Republican lawmakers are growing ever more concerned about negative effects on their re-election campaigns this fall. Trump is to travel to Capitol Hill Tuesday for a strategy session on upcoming immigration legislation. Underscoring the sensitivity of the issue, language curbing the taking of immigrant children from parents held in custody will be added to the House's conservative immigration bill, a House GOP aide said Monday, A similar provision is already in a compromise GOP immigration measure between party conservatives and moderates, with the House expected to vote on both late this week. The administration is hoping to force Democrats to vote for the bills or bear some of the political cost in November's midterm elections. White House officials have privately embraced the border policy as a negotiating tactic to win votes for legislation to fulfil the president's pledge to build a border wall and to tighten the nation's immigration laws. Trump's commitment to the current policy showed no sign of faltering as voices of outrage and condemnation grew louder and more diverse. In Massachusetts, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker reversed a decision to send a state National Guard helicopter to the southern border, citing what he called the administration's "cruel and inhumane" policy of separating children from their parents. The Rev. Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump ally, called the policy "disgraceful." Several religious groups, including some conservative ones, have pushed to stop the practice of separating immigrant children from their parents. The Mormon church said it was "deeply troubled" by the separation of families and urged national leaders to find compassionate solutions. Former first lady Laura Bush called the policy "cruel" and "immoral," and said it was "eerily reminiscent" of the U.S. internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. On Capitol Hill, Republicans joined Democrats in calling for an end to the separations. Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton called for an immediate end to this "ugly and inhumane practice," adding, "It's never acceptable to use kids as bargaining chips in political process." And Kansas GOP Sen. Pat Roberts said he is "against using parental separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration." --By Zeke Miller and Kevin McGill, Associated Press. AP writers Alan Fram, Ken Thomas, Jill Colvin and Catherine Lucey in Washington, and Nomaan Merchant in McAllen, Texas, contributed. Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday said the state intends to file a lawsuit against the federal government for violating the rights of more than 2,000 immigrant children separated from their families at the border. Cuomo said at least 70 of the children, taken from their families under a "zero tolerance" immigration policy, have been held in some of the 10 federal shelters for immigrant children in New York. None of the shelters are in Upstate New York. The governor said he directed state agencies working with the children to file lawsuit against President Donald Trump's administration and its "Separation of Families" policy. The administration has faced mounting outrage across the political spectrum over the policy this week. "The Trump Administration's policy to tear apart families is a moral failing and a human tragedy," Cuomo said. "We will not tolerate the Constitutional rights of children and their parents being violated by our federal government. New York will act and file suit to end this callous and deliberate attack on immigrant communities, and end this heartless policy once and for all." Cuomo said the lawsuit is intended to protect the health and well-being of the children. State officials said they did not know exactly which shelters held the children separated from their families, but they were certain at least 70 were in New York. Earlier Tuesday, Cuomo appealed to Vice President Mike Pence to end the policy, writing an open letter to Pence as he visited the Syracuse area. "I write to you as the governor of New York but also, like you, as the father of three," Cuomo wrote. "I cannot bear to imagine the pain and suffering the parents at the border face when their children are taken from them. If the parents' anguish does not compel you to end this policy, then the children's plight must." Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751 Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday singled out Rep. John Katko for criticism over an immigration reform bill the Syracuse-area congressman is helping to lead through the House. Cuomo made his comments after Katko urged President Donald Trump to end a policy that has resulted in the separation of some 2,000 migrant children from their families at the U.S. border over a six-week period. Katko, R-Camillus, said the bill he helped negotiate would keep those families together. But the governor said the bill would do no such thing. "While Katko pays lip service against the moral atrocity on our border, he is leading the charge to pass an extreme immigration bill that does nothing to stop it," Cuomo said in a statement. Cuomo said the bill, which restores protection for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children, fails to directly address the zero-tolerance policy the Trump "administration is using to force parents and children apart." The governor added, "If Katko really cared for the children being separated from their parents by this administration, then he would show some backbone and stop his overlords in the White House from tearing families apart." Cuomo made his comments on the eve of Vice President Mike Pence's visit to Syracuse, where he is due to attend a $1,000-per-person fundraiser for Katko and tour the Nucor steel plant in Auburn. Erin O'Connor, speaking for Katko, suggested that Cuomo's criticism wasn't sincere. "Rep. Katko is leading constructive efforts in Congress to tackle immigration reform," she said. "As a former prosecutor with experience on the southern border, he appreciates the input of the governor, who seems eager to change the subject with the start of this week's corruption trial in the Southern District of New York." Katko said earlier Monday that the U.S. must keep its border secure "in a humane way that preserves family unity and keeps young children safe." Cuomo called the separation of parents and children at the border "a moral outrage" and said he would refuse, if asked, to deploy the New York National Guard to help with border security. Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751 AUBURN, N.Y. -- At a steel plant Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence insisted the White House does not want to separate immigrant children from their families, something federal authorities have authorized at the southern border. Pence opened his remarks at Nucor Steel in Auburn with comments about the immigration crisis, which has drawn outrage from advocates and everyday citizens nationwide. More than 2,000 children, who entered the country illegally have been separated from their families and are being detained in a warehouse while their parents are arrested. "We want to solve this problem. We don't want children taken away from their parents," Pence said. "Our weak immigration laws have had dire consequences." President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed Democrats for his administration's policy of splitting up families of immigrants who cross the U.S. border illegally. White House officials have previously said the policy is meant to deter people from crossing illegally with children. Others have said the policy does not exist. The separations are part of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' zero tolerance policy for people crossing the border illegally. Pence put the onus on Congress and said the administration only has two options for dealing with unlawful immigrants right now: Release all immigrant families, including minors; or prosecute adults who cross illegally and detain children. He said neither is an acceptable option, though the administration has been doing the latter. Pence said the country's immigration system is broken, and weak immigration laws and loopholes encourage people to try coming here illegally. "The crisis of illegal immigration at our southern border is a direct result of failed immigration policy, failure to secure our border and crippling loopholes that induce vulnerable families to make the long and dangerous journey up the peninsula to illegally enter this country, resulting in a loss of their liberty and sometimes... sometimes worse," he said. Pence said Congress this week will consider legislation on immigration that will fund a border wall and give the government legal authority to "detain and remove families together." He applauded U.S. Rep. John Katko for backing the effort. Earlier in the day, Pence headlined a fundraiser for Katko in Syracuse. Katko, who attended the speech with Pence, said he is working with Republican leadership on a bill that would end the practice of separating families. He said the House of Representatives will vote on the bill Thursday. Details of the bill are still being ironed out. "What's going on at the border is tragic, but it's symptomatic of a larger problem," Katko said. "We have a huge, huge border security issue...but in the meantime we've got to be humane, we can't be separating parents from their kids." Pence used the remainder of his speech to praise U.S. steel workers and tout the benefits of the GOP tax cut bill passed late last year. "We are forging a new American future built on American steel," he said. He added that Trump's administration has rolled back federal red tape and will put American workers first. He also said Trump is fighting for more fair trade agreements with Canada that will "put American dairy farmers first." As Pence left the stage, a speaker piped The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." According to sources privy to the discussion at the meeting, these MPs are either unpopular in their constituencies, or are not known at all. New Delhi: As the BJP prepares for the 2019 electoral battle, feedback from the ground suggests that the saffron party could face serious threat not just from the might of a combined Opposition, but also anger against some of its own sitting MPs, leading to a loss of 60-75 parliamentary seats across the country. At the meeting of the RSS and BJPs top brass called by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday, leaders discussed how the party may have to replace 40 to 55 per cent of its sitting MPs, including ministers, who, according to feedback, are facing strong anti-incumbency. According to sources privy to the discussion at the meeting, these MPs are either unpopular in their constituencies, or are not known at all. Some of them have barely set foot in their constituencies in the four years since they won the seat riding on the Modi wave, sources said. Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh could be among the states where the BJP could see the maximum number of its MPs being replaced as feedback suggests that the party could lose nearly 25 to 30 seats in Uttar Pradesh alone. At the Saturday meeting, which was attended by RSS second-in-command Bhaiyya Joshi, BJP president Amit Shah and Union minister Rajnath Singh, along with other senior RSS leaders, it was decided that the RSS will depute its leaders on all parliamentary seats to collect feedback on various issues. Though the BJP has already decided to depute three office-bearers to each Lok Sabha seat, the Sangh Parivar cadre plays a crucial role in shaping and implementing the BJPs electoral strategies. In 2014, the BJP had registered a historic win when it won 282 out of the total 543 parliamentary seats. A loss of 60 seats would mean that BJP would not have a clear majority on its own. In Uttar Pradesh, where caste plays a crucial role, the RSS-BJP leadership discussed the possibility of taking on a joint Opposition, which had posed a serious challenge in some of the recently held bypolls in the state. Though the BJP performed exceptionally well in the last Lok Sabha polls by bagging 71 of the total 80 parliamentary seats and registered a massive sweep in the Assembly polls, feedback suggests that regional satraps will dominate and may control the narrative if they decide to join forces against the BJP in 2019. The BJP lost crucial Lok Sabha seats, including Gorakhpur, Phulpur and Kairana, in bypolls to the regional players who had joined forces against it. At the meeting leaders also discussed how the RSS-BJP leadership needs to make its reach-out programmes in Northeast and non-BJP ruled states more aggressive. Vice President Mike Pence plans to spend four hours in the Syracuse area today, promoting the Republican tax overhaul and raising money for Rep. John Katko's reelection campaign. The vice president will be accompanied by Second Lady Karen Pence, who plans to visit Upstate Golisano Children's Hospital, observe an art therapy session, and distribute coloring books featuring two Pence family pets. The couple is due to arrive on Air Force Two at 11:35 a.m. at Syracuse Hancock International Airport, where they'll be greeted by invited guests that include Katko and his wife, Robin, according to a White House official. Mike Pence will be the featured speaker at a $1,000-per-plate fundraiser for Katko at noon at the Embassy Suites hotel next to Destiny USA in Syracuse. The White House said the event will be closed to the public, and no press will be allowed inside the banquet facility. Pence, who is touring the country to promote the tax code changes signed into law by President Donald Trump in December, plans to discuss the benefits during a visit at 1:45 p.m. at the Nucor Steel plant in Auburn. The vice president plans to highlight the steel mill as "a powerful symbol of the American comeback in Central New York," the White House official said. While at Nucor, Pence plans to tour the steel mill, talk to workers, and deliver a speech about the impact of Trump's tax reform policies in New York. Pence will be introduced by Jason Curtis, general manager of Nucor Steel Auburn, a company that supported the bill that lowered corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 21 percent. Pence's office did not say whether he will discuss the Trump administration's decision last month to impose a 25 percent tariff on steel imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico. Nucor Steel, which operates mills across the nation, welcomed the tariffs. The company is the largest steel producer in the United States. Contact Mark Weiner: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751 AUBURN, N.Y. -- Following a tour of Nucor Steel mill Tuesday afternoon, Vice President Mike Pence promised a group of about 50 employees that "steel is back." "We are forging a new American future built on American steel," Pence said. "This mill is a powerful symbol of an American comeback, not just for steel but in every area of our economy." Pence used his remarks in Auburn to promote President Donald Trump's economic policies, including a tax reform bill passed last year and efforts to promote American made products, like steel. He also addressed an immigration crisis on the southern border, insisting the administration does not want to separate children from their parents. He praised Nucor's investment in a new, $30 million rolling mill last year. He said the corporate tax cuts passed last year allow companies like Nucor to invest in growth. He said Nucor's investment nationwide will create 745 new high-paying jobs. Nucor Steel makes rolled steel rebar. The manufacturing plant employs 300 people. The Vice President made no mention of tariffs placed on foreign steel by the Trump administration. But he did emphasize the role steel plays in national defense. "America needs steel to be strong," Pence said. "We didn't build those battleships with plastic. We're going to make sure that American steel is there now and for generations to come for a stronger and more secure America." AUBURN, N.Y. -- Vice President Mike Pence thanked U.S. Rep. John Katko for supporting President Donald Trump's principles on immigration. "I want to personally thank Congressman John Katko for taking the principles President Donald Trump articulated in his State of the Union address and helping to [draft] them into legislation," Pence said. "Congressman Katko, thank you for working on this issue in a principled and compassionate way." Pence was referring to Katko's work on a Republican bill to reform U.S. immigration policy. Katko is part of a group of Republicans bucking party leadership to force a vote on several immigration bills. That bill is still being worked out, but Katko said it will include a provision to stop the policy of separating children from their families at the border. He said the House of Representatives will vote Thursday. After Pence's speech, Katko emphasized his independence, insisting he isn't in lock-step with the administration. On trade with Canada, for example, he said he agrees with what Trump is trying to do, just not on how he is doing it. He also pointed to his vote against the GOP plan to replace the Affordable Care Act last year. "Take a look at my vote on one of the biggest votes we've had. I voted against the administration on healthcare," he said. "An independent ranking has me the 7th most bipartisan member of Congress...7th out of 535 people. That speaks for itself." Katko added he often drafts bills with Democrats. It's a tough spot for Katko, who was critical of Trump during the 2016 campaign, calling on him to drop out after a recording surfaced in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. Katko is up for reelection in November in a moderate district that Democrats have targeted in their effort to retake control of the House. Two Democrats -- Juanita Perez Williams and Dana Balter -- are running in a primary to challenge him. Each has repeatedly linked Katko to the Trump administration and the President's policies. Katko also responded to criticism from Gov. Andrew Cuomo Tuesday, who yesterday said Katko needs to "show some backbone" on immigration reform. "[Cuomo's] got five people running against him, he's got corruption trials all around his feet," Katko said. "He's trying to deflect...the fact is we're voting Thursday and we're addressing this issue." Pence was in town Tuesday to headline a fundraiser for Katko and to tout the benefits of the GOP tax plan passed last year. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Karen Pence - wife of Vice President Mike Pence - visited Upstate Golisano Children's Hospital Tuesday afternoon to learn about the hospital's art therapy program. Mike Pence attended a fundraiser for Rep. John Katko at the Embassy Suites hotel next to Destiny USA and visited steelworkers at the Nucor steel plant in Auburn. Karen Pence observed an art therapy session at the children's hospital and delivered coloring books to patients. She is visiting hospitals across the country and is working to bring attention to art therapy programs. Maria Fazzini, a licensed creative arts therapist at the hospital, works with more than 75 patients each month. She conducts individual art therapy sessions with patients at the bedside every day. Fazzini and DJ LaRock, 14, painted a picture with Karen Pence and Robin Katko, John Katko's wife, this afternoon. LaRock said the art therapy calms him down and relaxes him. The Oswego teen, who has been in the hospital since Saturday due to cystic fibrosis, said he was excited to meet the second lady. Karen Pence also met with other patients to deliver coloring books. The coloring books feature two of the Pence family's pets, a dog and a cat. They also have a pet rabbit, Marlon Bundo, who is featured in his own children's book. Casey Canavan, 16, of North Syracuse, broke his ankle and had surgery earlier today. Canavan had one request for Mrs. Pence. He wanted her to sign his cast. It was a request she gladly fulfilled. The media was invited to attend the second lady's visit to the hospital but organizers said Karen Pence would not make any statements and would not answer any questions. Karen Pence's spokeswoman would not allow questions on what the second lady thought about the new federal policy of separating children from their parents at the border -- an issue that protesters brought to the vice president during his CNY stops. "That's not what she's here for," said Kara Brooks, director of communications for the second lady. "She's here for art therapy." At a steel plant Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence insisted the White House does not want to separate immigrant children from their families. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- About 100 people crowded into a hangar near Hancock Airport Tuesday morning to greet Vice President Mike Pence as he touched down in Syracuse. Air Force Two landed at the 174th Attack Wing Air National Guard Base at Hancock Field at 11:35 a.m. The Vice President disembarked and greeted U.S. Rep. John Katko, Katko's wife, Robin, and Onondaga County Legislature Chairman Ryan McMahon. Flanked by Katko and Second Lady Karen Pence, the Vice President shook hands with the crowd, many of whom were uniformed Air National Guard members. One man told Pence he was a World War II veteran. The pair took a photo together. Pence then hopped in a black limousine and left, surrounded by a motorcade of more than 30 official vehicles from Syracuse Police, Syracuse University Police, New York State Police, a pair of ambulances and at least six motorcycles. A crowd waits for Vice President Mike Pence at the 174th Attack Wing Air National Guard Base in Syracuse on Tuesday. (Dennis Nett | syracuse.com) Pence will spend the afternoon in Central New York. He's hosting a fundraiser for Katko at the Embassy Suites near Destiny USA at lunchtime. From there, he will go to Auburn where he will tour the Nucor plant. Second Lady Karen Pence is joining her husband in Syracuse. She will visit Upstate Golisano Children's Hospital. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Stephanie Miner's foray into the governor's race Monday came as little surprise. But she's running with a barely known non-partisan outfit based in Denver that left many political observers scratching their heads, wondering, "what's that?" Miner, a Democrat, will carry the torch of an obscure new political group called the Serve America Movement -- a group of former partisans founded in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. By coincidence, the group goes by "SAM," which was Miner's moniker while in city hall. Her initials are S.A.M. In ditching the Democrats, Miner angered local party leaders, who accused her of playing spoiler in the gubernatorial race this fall. They're concerned her candidacy will help Republican Marc Molinaro by taking votes away from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. Miner and a spokesman for SAM dismissed those critics and said the group has no partisan bias either way. Miner is SAM's first candidate, though an official said plans are in the works for more. SAM is seeking ballot access across the nation, starting with New York. A SAM leader described Miner as a "vanguard" and "pioneer" in an article in the New York Times. But aside from a few paragraphs in the Times on Monday, little has been written or said about SAM. Who is this nascent group backing a former upstate mayor for New York's top job? And how did they decide on Miner as their first candidate? Who is SAM? SAM is based in Denver, Colorado, but has members in all 50 states. It was officially founded in April 2017. Its stated purpose is to "build a new political party for a new American majority." That includes investing in health care, education and infrastructure; using science and facts to guide environmental policy; ending mass incarceration; ensuring fair access to voting and disrupting the "political status quo." It also champions free markets, free trade and fiscal responsibility. Miner said Monday evening those values align with her own. She's devoted ample time and energy to criticizing top players in both political parties, namely Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo. She's railed against a system she described as "toxic," filled with half-truths and propelled by special interest money. "I really liked their statement of principles and their values," she said. "It's rare you can look through value statements and say you agree with all of this." SAM's leadership includes at least three people who worked for President George W. Bush and an executive at Morgan Stanley, one of the nation's largest banks. CEO and Director Sarah Lenti worked for National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice under Bush. Chairman Scott Muller is former general counsel for the CIA. Chief Strategist Reed Galen worked in Bush's administration and consulted on campaigns for Bush, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The group's vice chairman, Eric Grossman, is executive vice president at Morgan Stanley. Associate Director Drisana Hughes also worked for Morgan Stanley before joining SAM. The group also includes former Democrats, like Hagar Chemali, who served in President Barack Obama's administration. In an interview Monday, Reed, the strategist, said he left the Republican Party during the 2016 presidential election. He said the historic unpopularity of both candidates in that race showed him how badly the country needed other options. "I would say that everybody associated [with SAM] is a political independent," he said. "We all came to being independents from different directions, but are dedicated to building a new party that is not Republican or Democrat." In the last year, SAM has raised nearly $1.4 million and spent about $1.2 million, including money on local advertising, polling, consulting and content production, according to quarterly filings with the Internal Revenue Service. SAM's two top donors are an attorney in Colorado and an investor in New York, according to its most recent IRS filing in March. There are more than 60 individual donors. Charles R. Wall, a retired lawyer and former general counsel for Philip Morris International, has given the group $912,000. Richard Bennett of B-Fore Capital, a New York investment firm focusing on tech startups, has given $140,000. Bennett is also the signatory on the group's IRS filings. Other big donors include Grossman, the vice chairman and general counsel for Morgan Stanley, who has given $57,366 and Daniel Simkowitz, head of investment management at Morgan Stanley, who has given $50,000. Miner's involvement? Miner said representatives from multiple parties had approached her about running for governor, including Democrats, the Working Families Party, the Reform Party and even messengers from Republicans (whose inquiries she said she didn't entertain). "There's this uniform sense that the status quo and system was broken," she said. Then, about two months ago, she got connected with SAM after doing a podcast in New York. Their values aligned, she said, and they began a series of meetings and conversations. Galen said conversations with Miner began about six weeks ago. The board was swayed by the opinion piece she wrote in the New York Times in 2013, criticizing Andrew Cuomo for refusing to increase state aid to hurting cities like Syracuse. That op-ed sparked the very public rift between the state party's top official (Cuomo) and one of its rising young stars (Miner). "We had heard the mayor was considering a run and were duly introduced to her," he said. "We listened to her experience as mayor of Syracuse. Obviously the op-ed she wrote was very impactful to us." One of SAM's top goals in fostering a new party is earning ballot access in states like New York. If Miner gets 50,000 votes in the general election in November, SAM will get a permanent ballot line in New York for the next four years. There are currently eight parties in New York with ballot access - each needs to get 50,000 votes again this year to keep its line. Other parties, like the Libertarian Party, are also seeking a ballot line this year. That party is running Larry Sharpe in November's election as it tries for its own line. Miner said her priorities lie beyond any party affiliation or allegiance. "As a mayor, I never really asked someone if they were a Democrat or Republican," she said. "You have to solve problems in a fiscally responsible way." Ties to Republicans? Locally, and across the state, some Democrats seized an opportunity to link the SAM and Miner to Republicans. Two former Onondaga County Democratic chairs criticized Reed for commentary he wrote in 2015 for Breitbart, a right-wing blog once run by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon. "Today Stephanie Miner announced she was entering the race for New York's governor and revealed she's doing so with the backing of the Serve America Movement, a group staffed and run by former Bush administration with a history of Republican values," Diane Dwire and Robert Romeo wrote in a letter to syracuse.com. "We Democrats worked to elect Stephanie, and that's why this is incredibly disappointing." Former Common Council President Van Robinson penned a similar letter, in which he accused Miner of "casting her lot with conservatives and Republicans, and turning her back on her party..." Both Miner and Galen dismissed such criticism. Galen said his contributions to Breitbart were three years ago, and were specific to a California primary race. He's also written for left-leaning sites like Mic and Fusion, he said. He added that many people start off in politics affiliated with one of the two major parties, before migrating to groups like his. All of their members are political independents, he said. "I've seen some of the stuff about [Miner] playing spoiler or getting a Republican elected," Galen said. "That's knee-jerk and we are not at all surprised. One of the first things we hear is we're going to play spoiler. What are we spoiling? The two options are terrible." Miner said people should trump partisan interests. "People have made decisions about conduct based on whether somebody is a Democrat or a Republican, as opposed to whether that conduct is appropriate or not," Miner said. "The Democratic Party can't be outraged at a failure to hold Trump accountable and at the same time be silent on the corruption we're seeing right now." Fabio's Antica Cucina has closed temporarily. The restaurant plans to retool and reopen. Syracuse, N.Y. -- Fabio's Antica Cucina has closed, temporarily, according to a sign posted outside the downtown restaurant. The restaurant will reopen after staff reworks the concept, according to a message through Fabio's Facebook page. Changes include tweaking the overall concept and improving lunch service. As of about noon today, the phone number listed on the sign announcing the closing was disconnected. The news comes at Fabio's one-year anniversary in the Icon Tower on South Warren Street. Developers Grazi Zazzara Sr. and Grazi Zazzara Jr. and Chef Fabio Santalucia partnered to create the restaurant. Santalucia had run a restaurant in Cortland for many years before moving to the Syracuse area. He briefly ran Fabio's La Buona Cucina inside the Clarion Hotel in Geddes; that location closed last year. In its downtown iteration, Fabio's served house-made pastas and wood-fired pizzas. Santalucia described the food as more Italian than Italian-America. It was also home to Paco, a 25-pound fish that eats garlic. Syracuse.com and Post-Standard restaurant reviewer Jared Paventi listed Fabio's "priestchoker" pasta as one of his favorite dishes from 2017. NEW YORK CITY -- A $90 million-plus factory outside of Syracuse was crafted over drinks in Manhattan between the facility's eventual builder, NY's "nano czar," a top governor's economic development aide and a felonious lobbyist. That's what witness and former governor's aide Andrew Kennedy testified to in the first day of a corruption trial which began today in Manhattan. The builder, Steven Aiello of Cor Development, is standing trial with business partner Joseph Gerardi, former SUNY Polytechnic President and nanoscientist Alain Kaloyeros, and Buffalo developer Louis Ciminelli. After court was over for the day, Aiello's lawyer disputed Kennedy's testimony on the Soraa factory. The meeting described by Kennedy was "pure fiction," attorney Stephen Coffey said. "Steve [Aiello] had nothing to do with it," Coffey said, referencing the plan to build the factory outside of Syracuse. Kennedy, the former assistant secretary for economic development under Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was among the first witnesses called by the U.S. Attorney's Office. He helped oversee the development of "nano hubs" in Buffalo and Syracuse, and testified about how the projects in each city came about. The projects were part of Cuomo's signature upstate revitalization plan, which Kaloyeros came to lead despite the administration's initial skepticism about him, Kennedy said. The Cuomo administration initially had concerns about Kaloyeros' personality and his preferred business model, he said. Eventually, Cuomo embraced the Kaloyeros model, of developing state-owned real estate into facilities that could be leased to private companies. Kaloyeros' lawyers today said he was lauded in Albany for his ability to cut through red tape. After growing a relatively small physics school within SUNY Albany into the standalone SUNY Poly, Kaloyeros was "tasked by the governor to bring his magic to the rest of upstate New York," attorney Reid Weingarten said. The marquee project was the Buffalo Billion, but projects were planned for nearly every corner of the state. In Buffalo, the LED light bulb manufacturer Soraa was slated to be one of two anchor tenants for the project that became known as RiverBend. However, the other anchor tenant, which was eventually acquired by Tesla, needed more space, so the state had to find a new place for Soraa. It was Kaloyeros' suggestion to build Soraa a factory in the Syracuse area, Kennedy said. The change led state officials to spend an additional $20 million on the factory, up from $70 million -- a plan that was hatched at the Manhattan restaurant, Kennedy said. He, Kaloyeros and Aiello were joined by lobbyist Todd Howe at the "afterhours" meeting, he said. Coffey, Aiello's lawyer, said he never had a meeting involving Kaloyeros in New York City. He said Aiello was not involved in discussions about moving the factory to Syracuse or the increased cost as a result. "He never had a meeting on it. They never cooked up some plan," Coffey said. Given the opportunity, Coffey did not question Kennedy about the meeting on cross-examination. The pricetag on the factory has continued to increase since: Housed in DeWitt's Collamer Crossing Business Park across from the Central New York Film Hub, the plant will eventually cost taxpayers about $110 million overall. Soraa backed out of the project in December. A new company, NexGen Power Systems, has committed to occupying the space, but it will cost the state another $15 million to retrofit the the facility. Howe, who was arrested during his testimony in a previous corruption trial, looms large in this case, despite prosecutors' decision not to call him as a witness. He has pleaded to eight felonies in connection to the case. Howe counted both SUNY Poly and Cor as clients of his through the Albany firm Whiteman Osterman & Hanna. U.S. District Court Judge Valerie Caproni seemed puzzled by this relationship, at one point interjecting to ask Kennedy if SUNY Poly, a state school, hired Howe as a lobbyist to represent the school before the state government. Kennedy confirmed this, but defense lawyers took issue with her question, insisting Howe was not a "lobbyist" in part because he never registered as one with the state. Kennedy's testimony gave some insight into Howe's role in the alleged bid-rigging scheme, and his prominence in Albany politics before the investigation into this case. Howe's ties to Cuomo and other higher-ups in the administration date back 30 years. Kennedy distanced himself from Howe, shutting down a defense lawyer's suggestion that he considered Howe a "mentor." He said Howe enjoyed "a lot" of access to the Cuomo administration, but said his access wasn't exclusive. "He had access but it wasn't unique, to certain other lobbyists ... there were others like that." Editor's Note: (10:30 p.m.): This story was updated to include comments from Aiello attorney Stephen Coffey. Read our continuing coverage of the corruption trials Public Affairs Reporter Julie McMahon covers courts, government and other issues affecting taxpayers. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992 Agua Dulce, Calif. -- Authorities in California seized over 500 guns from the home of a convicted felon after getting a tip from a neighbor. State and local police raided the home of 60-year-old Manuel Fernandez last week, according to USA Today. Officials found 432 guns that day and another 91 the next day. The home is in Agua Dulce, about 45 miles north of Los Angeles. Authorities also recovered 30 more guns from the residence of a female associate of Fernandez, according to USA Today. Fernandez was charged with being a felon in possession of firearms and a felon in possession of ammunition, according to ABC News. He was also charged with possession of an assault rifle and possession of large capacity magazines. Officials announced the raid on Monday. The initial tip indicated that Fernandez was "in possession of a large arsenal of firearms," USA Today said. Deputies also seized computers, phones and hard drives believed to be involved the illegal purchase of firearms. The stash of weapons includes at least 57 handguns and row after row of rifles, ABC said. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is now working to trace the origin of the weapons. Fernandez was sentenced to 486 days in jail for an unspecified felony conviction in February 2017, but was released in August of that year, according to ABC. He was released on bail after his arrest on the weapons charges and is due back in court in July. "This case is a testament to the community's involvement in reducing crime and taking guns out of the hands of criminals," Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell said, according to USA Today. Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112 Rawat also told it that the supreme sacrifice rendered by the brave son of India will not go in vain. Srinagar: Army Chief General Bipin Rawat on Monday visited Salani, a remote village in Jammu and Kashmirs frontier district of Poonch, to meet the family of rifleman Aurangzeb who was killed by militants after kidnapping him from the Valley's Shopian district on June 14. The Army chief spent some time with the bereaved family to condole his death, Colonel N.N. Joshi, the Udhampur-based spokesman of the Northern Command said. He added, While speaking to the father of the brave-heart, Gen. Rawat assured all possible assistance to the family. He also told it that the supreme sacrifice rendered by the brave son of India will not go in vain. Rifleman Aurangzeb belonging to the Armys 44 Rashtriya Rifles and was posed in southern Shopian. He was abducted by militants while going home for Eid on June 14. Later his bullet-riddled corpse was found lying in Guso village of neighbouring Pulwama district the same evening. The police sources had said that the Army jawan was travelling in a private car which was intercepted by gunmen at Kalampora in Pulwama. The car had been earlier at around 9 am on that day stopped by the soldiers outside the 44 RR camp at Shadimarg in Shopian and asked the driver to drop the soldier at a bus stand in Shopian town. The slain soldier was the personal security guard of Major Shukla who suffered grievous injuries during an encounter with militants in which top Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander Sameer Tiger was killed along with another militant on April 30. Meanwhile, the Army Chief has visited forward areas in J&K and was also briefed by Lt. Gen. Saranjeet Singh, GOC White Knight Corps, on the prevailing security situation in the State. Lt. Gen. Ranbir Singh, Army Commander, Northern Command accompanied the Army Chief during his visit, defence spokesman Col. Joshi said. He added that the Army Chief, during his visit to forward areas, also interacted with the soldiers and complemented them for their professionalism, selfless commitment and loyalty. The spokesman further said, He exhorted the troops to continue to work with zeal and dedication to overcome the challenges posted by weather, enemy and terrorism. He also commended the synergy between all security agencies and civil administration in Jammu and Kashmir. What just happened? It looked as if ZTE had been handed an expensive lifeline by Donald Trump last month when it signed a $1 billion deal with the US government to lift a trade ban. But the President's plans could be thwarted by the US Senate, which has just voted against removing the sanctions placed on the Chinese tech giant. After admitting to selling US-made technology to Iran and North Korea, thereby violating US sanctions, ZTE agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and discipline the employees responsible. For failing to follow through with parts of the agreement, US companies were prohibited from selling to ZTE for seven years in April. With around 30 percent of the components in ZTE products coming from US businesses, including Qualcomm, Intel, and Microsoft, the company ceased major operating activities one month after the ban. But soon after, Trump tweeted that he wanted to help ZTE get back into business. President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2018 When it was reported that the firm had agreed to pay over $1 billion to resume trade with its US suppliers, it seemed that Trump had lived up to his words. But the Senate has put the brakes on his plan. A military spending bill called the National Defense Authorization Act was just passed by lawmakers by a vote of 85 to 10. It includes a provision that blocks the deal with ZTE and reinstates sanctions on the company, all in the name of national security. Trump faced criticism for his willingness to remove the ban on ZTE, especially as US intelligence agencies have issued warnings that the companys products could be used for spying purposesa result of its close ties with the Chinese government. The bill must still be reconciled with the version passed by the house, which does not include the ZTE provision. It then needs to be signed by Trump before it can become law. Recap: Tesla has been going through a difficult time lately, facing safety questions over its Autopilot system, layoffs, and production issues with its Model 3. But according to CEO Elon Musk, some of its problems were the result of internal sabotage by an employee, who may not have been working alone. CNBC obtained an email sent by Musk to every Tesla worker on Sunday. It says that the staff member in question had admitted to quite extensive and damaging sabotage to [Teslas] operations, which includes the modifications of the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames, and sending large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties. The employee, who is now being questioned by the company, says he was angry over not receiving a promotion. Musk says this was the right move, in light of these actions. A disgruntled worker taking out their anger on an employer isnt unusual, but Telsa and Musk are investigating whether this person was working with outside entities, such as Wall Street short-sellers or oil & gas companies. The CEO also questions if the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors were involved. If theyre willing to cheat so much about emissions, maybe theyre willing to cheat in other ways? he wrote. Musk sent a separate email addressed to everyone at his company yesterday. In it, he talks about another strange incident that was hard to explain: a small fire at the Fremont facility on Sundaythe fifth since 2014. While he says this could be a random event, Musk quotes former Intel CEO Andy Groves Only the paranoid survive warning. Musks email asks staff to be extremely vigilant, particularly as Tesla increases the production rate of the Model 3 to 5000 per week. This is when outside forces have the strongest motivation to stop us, he added. Recap: Back in December, the World Health Organization (WHO) surprised gamers and many medical professionals alike by including gaming disorder in its beta draft of International Classification of Diseases (ICD) for 2018. Now, the updated 11th edition of the ICD has been released, and with it comes the official definition of gaming addiction as a mental health disorder. The volume diagnoses the condition as being identifiable by three signs: Impaired control over gaming (e.g. onset, frequency, intensity, duration, termination, context). Increasing priority given to gaming to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests and daily activities. Continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences. According to the ICD-11, the behavioral pattern of someone suffering from gaming disorder results in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning. Dr. Vladimir Poznyak, the WHO member who proposed the new diagnoses, told CNN "I'm not creating a precedent." He said WHO has followed "the trends, the developments, which have taken place in populations and in the professional field." Most of the medical profession is against the Gaming Disorder inclusion; two papers opposing the proposal having already been released. In the UK, the countrys National Health Service has now started offering free treatment for those experiencing the disorder, though exactly what treatment would be most effective is still under discussion. The gaming industry is also speaking out against the move. Yesterday, a statement co-signed by the ESA, ESAC, EGDF, IESA, IGEA, ISFE, K-GAMES, and UBV&G explained that Videogames across all kinds of genres, devices and platforms are enjoyed safely and sensibly by more than 2 billion people worldwide, with the educational, therapeutic, and recreational value of games being well-founded and widely recognized. We are therefore concerned to see gaming disorder still contained in the latest version of the WHOs ICD-11 despite significant opposition from the medical and scientific community. The evidence for its inclusion remains highly contested and inconclusive. Its important to note that ICD-11 has not yet been finalized and the current draft wont be submitted until next year. As the online version points out: content in this platform may change on an ongoing basis." Video game addiction has come under the spotlight again recently, following news of a nine-year-old girl being placed into rehab because she couldnt stop playing Fortnite. In context: Domain hijacking is the act of illegally taking control over a domain name. It is usually done through a variety of methods including social engineering, exploiting vulnerabilities in a registrars system, or phishing. A man has received a 20-year sentence for domain hijacking. The fact that the hijacker attempted to take the domain at gunpoint is what makes this one unique. According to The Telegraph, Sherman Hopkins Jr of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, broke into the apartment of internet entrepreneur Ethan Deyo, wearing pantyhose over his head and dark sunglasses. He threatened Deyo at gunpoint demanding he get on his computer and transfer the registration of his domain name "DoItForState.com" over to another account. The domain had been inactive for over a month. Deyo had previously used it to host a University of Iowa forum where students could post party images and other aspects of college life. The website's tagline was, "College Stories, College Life, College Snaps." "Hopkins put the firearm against the victims head and ordered him to follow the directions on a piece of paper. Hopkins also took the victims cell phone and threw it so that he could not call for help." Deyo complied with Hopkins demands until the registration process asked for a postal address and phone number. When he asked what he should enter, Hopkins beat him with his handgun and used a taser on him several times. Frustrated that the hijacking was stalled, Hopkins cocked his gun and put it to Deyos head. Deyo quickly moved the firearm away, and a struggle commenced. He was able to wrestle the gun away from Hopkins, but not before being shot in the leg. Deyo then shot the assailant several times in the chest, before calling 911. Hopkins survived and was arrested. He was originally charged with multiple counts including kidnapping and use of a firearm during a violent crime. However, he ended up bargaining a plea deal, and pleaded guilty to one count of interference and attempted interference with commerce by threats and violence. US District Senior Judge Linde Reade called the act "brutal and senseless" and sentenced Hopkins to 20 years in prison. This case is the first known instance of someone trying to steal a web domain by use of physical force. What just happened? Apple has been slapped with a $9 million fine in Australia over the error 53 fiasco that was bricking iPhone back in 2016. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the fine comes over a complaint from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which alleged that Apple denied fixing phones with error 53 for customers who had received repairs from third-party shops. [The customers said] they were being refused a remedy of any kind by Apple on the basis that their device had had unauthorised repairs, and those repairs could be as minor as just having a cracked screen replaced on an iPhone or iPad, which all of us need to do from time to time, said ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court. These consumers were being told, because youve had this third party repair, you are not entitled to any remedy. Error 53 resulted after updates to iOS 9 locked down iPhones if it detected that the fingerprint sensor in the home button had been tampered with in any way. Unfortunately, this security feature was triggered by legitimate home button repairs or even by unrelated damages to the device. "If you want to sell your product into this market then our provisions apply and you need to adhere to those, and clearly that's what the court has found here." The real gripe came down to Apples stance that customers who had chosen to have the phones repaired by a third party, voided their warranty in doing so. Therefore, Apple was not obligated to resolve the error 53 issue. The ACCC did not take kindly to this stance and took the tech giant to court over it. The ACCC argued that under Australian law customers and consumers are free to have screens and other repairs done by third-parties as long as the repair doesnt damage the underlying system of the phone. An Australian Federal Court sided with the consumer protection group and fined Apple $9 million (about $6.66 million US) for the infraction. Cupertino also agreed to a court enforceable undertaking to abstain from such conduct in the future. Were constantly looking for ways to enhance the service we deliver and we had very productive conversations with the ACCC about this, an Apple spokesperson said of the decision. We will continue to do all we can to deliver excellent service to all of our customers in Australia. In context: Deepfake technology does not necessarily have to be used for nefarious purposes. Facebook is adapting the technique to retouch photos where the subject blinked to make it look like their eyes were open. As machine learning continues to advance, we see it used in more creative ways each day. Whether it is improving the quality of our voice assistants, smoothing out a slow-motion video, or predicting heart disease, machine learning applications are on the rise. Not one to be left behind, Facebook has been working on algorithms that can alter a selfie ruined by an accidental blink. Facebook researchers Brian Dolhansky and Cristian Canton Ferrer published a paper titled Eye In-Painting with Exemplar Generative Adversarial Networks, which outlines a machine-learning technique that can open the eyes on a picture of someone who blinked when the photo was snapped. The researchers point out that there are plenty of photo-retouching tools that fix things like red eye, and blemishes. Making one that takes care of poorly timed blinks would be a nice addition to photo editing tools. The technique uses generative adversarial networks (GANs), or more specifically "exemplar GANs" (ExGANs) to essentially paint on (or in-paint) a subjects eyes drawing from a number of photos of the person with their eyes open. The network trains on these photos to recreate photo-realistic looking eyes on the picture. We show that ExGANs can produce photo-realistic personalized in-painting results that are both perceptually and semantically plausible by applying them to the task of closed-to-open eye in-painting in natural pictures, Dolhansky and Ferrer write. The results are most effective with straight on shots. However, the system is a work-in-progress and still struggles with some aspects of certain photos such as eyeglasses, profile or semi-profile shots, and long fringes. I'm not entirely convinced though. Most of the above examples have an unnatural look that I can't quite put my finger on. The system is only in the research phase right now, and the social media giant does not have a marketing plan for it yet. Other companies such as Adobe and Pixelmator are using machine-learning techniques as well, but it is unclear if they have blink fixers in the works. On the one hand, these advances are making it easier to edit our photos and video. On the other hand, it is also making it easier to tamper with evidence and create fake images and video that didnt before exist. Capture lessons learned and build upon them Objectively define what works and what doesnt Identify and share best practices across all agencies and levels of government Create a safe space for failure and learning Develop a culture of openness and innovation Deliver user-oriented, accessible digital services In 2016, Techwire took an in-depth look at the use of agile methodologies in California state government. A key focus was the launch of the Child Welfare Digital Services (CWDS) project, a complete modernization of the states child welfare system that pivoted away from traditional waterfall project management.The effort was a bold move toward adopting agile and other innovative practices, but the question remained: Would the state be able to handle the challenges and harness the benefits of this new approach that had already proven so effective in the private sector?Many experts from government and industry said the although state was not ready to adopt an agile approach, that shouldnt stop officials from moving forward. The consensus was that government should definitely be moving toward agile, but that the CWDS effort might prove too large for the states first agile project.Another concern one echoed across government transformation efforts everywhere was that bureaucratic culture, with all its rules and risk-averse attitudes, would smother the innovation and willingness to experiment required for the successful adoption of agile approaches.I witnessed these challenges first-hand during the year I spent serving as communications director for the CWDS project. While the state deserves kudos for attempting to embrace agile methodologies, user-centered design, and free and open-source software, the project is beset with the daily struggles of the paradigm shift toward rapid iteration and honest retrospection.Fail fast, learn, and recover is a core tenet of agile practices (and innovation in general) but its a concept that still strikes fear into the heart of most public servants. Sadly the political reality is that taking responsibility (and blame) can be a career-killer. This needs to change.With the agile government community united in an effort to bring cultural transformation to government, California can confidently proceed with modernization efforts from digital service creation to agile procurement and beyond. Were not in this alone.There is no silver bullet that will instantly reverse Californias troubled history of failed IT endeavors. And the CWDS project may indeed be too complex for the state to learn what it needs to know, in such a relatively short amount of time, for the new child welfare system to be the poster child for the states agile journey. But thats OK because agile is all about learning from mistakes and creating something better every day (or at least every two weeks).It would be ill-advised for the state to revert to old ways, abandoning the value of agile because of fear, stagnation or the lure of maintaining the status quo. Following the commendable example of the Health and Human Services Agency with the CWDS project, California should continue to actively invest in its own future.Together with others in the agile government community, we can:Theres been a consistent drumbeat in the global gov tech community that agencies are ready to follow the private sector into the digital age and give taxpayers the friendly, useful services they deserve. But that will happen only when government culture truly supports and celebrates the process of learning and remembers why it started pursuing agile in the first place. "When the special conditions that diplomatic officials have are not respected, we are then in a vulnerable situation for the sovereignty of Venezuela," an activist said. | Read More Meanwhile in Mumbai, another BJP ally, Shiv Sena, said that the movement of Delhi chief minister is a unique one. New Delhi: In an embarrassment to the BJP, its allies Nitish Kumar-led JD(U) and the Shiv Sena on Monday came out in support of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal who is on an unprecedented sit-in at the office of lieutenant governor Anil Baijal to press for various demands, including an early end to an undeclared strike by the citys IAS officers who report to the Central government. While condemning the alleged misbehaviour against the chief secretary, now that the CM has assured IAS officers regarding their safety, and appealed to them to resume their mandated duties, they must do so immediately, for the people of Delhi, said JD(U) spokesperson Pavan Kumar Varma in a tweet. Referring to the tussle between the AAP government and bureaucrats, Mr Varma, a former diplomat, said that such a situation can destroy the foundation of democratic values in the long run. Those urging officers to non-cooperation against the elected government of the day may reap immediate political benefit, but will destroy the very foundations of our republic in the long run. What can happen against one elected govt can happen against another too! he said in a tweet. Meanwhile in Mumbai, another BJP ally, Shiv Sena, said that the movement of Delhi chief minister is a unique one. Sena leader Sanjay Raut said that his party chief Uddhav Thackarey spoke to Delhi chief minister and told him that he had the right to work for Delhi as the AAP government had been elected by people. The Shiv Sena feels that the ongoing Delhi impasse is not good for democracy, Mr Raut said. The support for Mr Kejriwal from the two constituents of BJP-led NDA comes a day after four non-BJP chief ministers took up the cause of the Delhi government and urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help resolve the impasse between Delhi L-G and chief minister. West Bengals Mamata Banerjee, Andhra Pradeshs N. Chandrababu Naidu, Karnatakas H.D. Kumaraswamy and Keralas Pinarayi Vijayan, requested Mr Modi to intervene so that the federal structure of the Constitution is maintained. Mr Kejriwal, along with his colleagues, has been on a dharna at the L-Gs office since June 13, demanding an end to the IAS officers strike and approval of the doorstep ration delivery scheme. On Monday, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, who has been on hunger strike along with Mr Kejriwal, was taken to hospital after his health deteriorated. Health minister Satyendar Jain, who was also part of the dharna, was hospitalised on Sunday night. The bureaucrats have allegedly boycotted meetings called by Mr Kejriwal and his Cabinet colleagues since February in protest against an alleged assault on chief secretary Anshu Prakash by some AAP MLAs at the chief ministers residence. The IAS officers claim they have been attending office regularly and communicating with ministers through files and no official work has suffered due to their protest. Nobody is suggesting the chairman of JP Morgans local operations Rob Priestley has done anything wrong. But given the cartel case over ANZ's multi-billion dollar capital raising, the consensus is that he did the right thing by standing down from the ASX and Future Fund boards while the court sorts out the mess. Rob Priestley. Credit:John Shakespeare The criminal case - brought by the ACCC against ANZ, Citi, Deutsche Bank and six senior executives, including former Australian bosses of Citi and Deutsche Bank - threatens to rival the bank royal commission as compulsive viewing for the entire industry. It is likely that this matter will take some time to resolve, and as there are limits to the information that can be discussed at this time, I think the right course of action in these circumstances is to step aside from the ASX board to allow the situation to be fully resolved, Priestly said in his resignation statement on Tuesday. South Yarra Vendors are moving to capitalise on good market conditions. An investor who purchased 123 Toorak Road in 2015 for $1,295,000 has offloaded it three years later at a 35 per cent gain for $1.8 million. The shop was leased to luxury retailer EcoD for $70,000, giving the deal negotiated by CBREs Rorey James, Nic Hage and JJ Heng a 3.6 per cent yield. The UltraTune at 9 Mayston Street. Credit:Terska Carson East Hawthorn A Richmond-based architect has paid $2.94 million for a securely leased investment property with development upside at 9 Mayston Street. Teska Carsons Michael Taylor and Richard Munday said the property ticked the box for small investors and SMSFs as it had a secure lease to national tenant UltraTune on rental of $90,000 per annum plus outgoings and GST. Sunbury A single-level property at 21 Brook Street leased to National Australia Bank for the past 30 years has sold for $2.75 million on a 4.55 per cent yield. Gross Waddells Raoul Salter and Benjamin Klein said the bank had a 5+5 year lease returning $125,000 a year net plus GST. The bank paid all outgoings including land tax. Prahran Fresh floral scents appealed to investors bidding for 200 Commercial Road, which changed hands for $2.85 million after interest from six bidders. Gross Waddells Raoul Salter and Benjamin Klein said the three-level property leased to a ground floor florist sold for 40 per cent above reserve on a 2.6 per cent yield. Springvale Daniel Philip and Jarrod Moran from CVA sold a versatile, clear span warehouse/office at 14/56 Smith Road for $1.1 million on a building rate of $1375 per sq m. Meanwhile, Ryan Milivojac and Stan Dawidowski sold a 630 sq m two-level industrial building at 2/1G Marine Parade in Abbotsford with vacant possession for $3.73 million to a local investor/developer. Epping An A-grade office/warehouse at 65 Willandra Drive has been sold to an investor for $1,697,000 with vacant possession in a deal negotiated by Colliers Internationals Corey Vraca, Damian Marinelli and Nick OBrien. Blackburn South Investors snapped up a modern office at 106 Middleborough Road at auction for $835,000, Prowse Burns Commercials Philip Prowse and Fred Bartlett said. Moorabbin A refurbished showroom/office at 189 Chesterville Road has sold for around $3860 per sq m. Nichols Crowders James Glen and Lachlan Mackenzie said the 200 sq m building with four car spaces and staff facilities sold under the hammer for $772,000. Rosebud An owner-occupier will be moving to 2 Seventh Avenue after acquiring a refurbished office for $1.15 million, Fitzroys James Lockwood and Chris Kombi said. Elwood Hockingstuart commercials Kenny Oliver sold 81 Glen Huntly Road for $1,005,000 at an auction where five bidders helped achieve a 2.7 per cent net yield Hampton The Meeting Spot Cafe at 416 Bluff Road has been purchased by a local private investor for $550,000 in a sale negotiated by Simple Industrial Commercials Tony Aminian. The 85 sq m property is leased to the cafe at annual rental of $21,642 plus outgoings and GST. LEASES Doncaster The Wonder Bowl restaurant will expand into Doncaster after taking a 10-year lease next to Aldi at 3 Mitchell Street. Burgess Rawsons Sam Fogarty and David Clarke from Pace Development Group negotiated the lease over 302 sq m for $120,000 per annum. Fitzroy Handmade craft retailer Guild of Objects will lease 35 Smith Street in a deal brokered by Teska Carsons Jack Kelliher and Luke Bisset. The Guild took a three-year lease at $70,000 per annum net plus GST with 4 per cent annual increases over the two-storey, 200 sq m Victorian building. Dandenong Al Armstrong and Angus Clark from Cameron have leased out 6-10 Micro Circuit Gliderol. The 1983 sq m older-style building was leased for $178,470 a year. The sites cranes and large yard pushed up the rent. Moorabbin EWE Group has moved into a new distribution facility in Chifley Business Park at 6 Chifley Drive in a deal negotiated by Colliers Internationals James Stott. Industrial rents in the estate are believed to be north of $100 per sq m. In another deal, Penguin Random House will occupy part of level four of the stand-alone five-level building at 700 Springvale Road in Mulgrave. Kevin Tutty, Damien Adkins and John Howell negotiated a three-year deal at $270 per sq m for the 412 sq m space. Melbourne Software company Remasys will relocate from 180 Flinders Street to 338 sq m on Level 8 at 278 Collins Street in a deal negotiated by Colliers Internationals Michael Darvell. In another lease, Simulation Group has relocated to Level 7 at 411 Collins Street (in 212 sq m) on a five-year deal with the rent estimated at about $575 per sq m (net). The deal was transacted by Mr Darvell, Zak Seccull and Milly Stockdale. Malvern The shrill warning about Bitcoin "breaking the internet" certainly makes for great copy. But to reach that point, demand for the digital currency would need to match that of mainstream payment systems. That won't happen anytime soon. But amid all the righteous in dignation, there was something missing: What exactly does BIS suggest we should do about regulating crypto? The Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements often described as "the bank for central banks" likes order, technocracy and not rocking the boat. Given Bitcoin's tumbling price and evaporating trading volumes, its 24-page report on the digital currency was always going to be withering. More important is the very immediate danger of fraud and criminality. That was summed up pretty well by BIS chief Agustin Carstens back in February, when he described Bitcoin as "a combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster." The word Ponzi is repeated in the BIS report to describe the fraudulent Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) that proliferated in 2017. Despite a clear analysis of the threat, central bankers seem conflicted about what to do. A global crypto-currency really needs global supervision to avoid regulatory arbitrage across borders. But policymakers are pulling in different directions, with China banning digital currencies, Japan embracing them and Europe somewhere in between. The G20's attempt to find common cause hasn't moved things forward much. A communique earlier this year warned of tax evasion and money-laundering risks, but could only muster a limp call for more "monitoring" and responses "as needed." Loading The BIS report goes into some detail on why it's so hard to regulate this market. Finance laws and regulations were crafted for yesterday's world. Crypto-assets can fall between the stools of different regulators: A paid-for video game that uses the blockchain and digital currencies, for example, might be a securities offering, a consumer product and a money-laundering risk all at the same time. When there's no central authority, it's hard to regulate. Before an eclectic audience of European royalty, Hollywood stars and news media executives, a parade of winners took their bow for the world's oldest television prize - the "golden nymphs" - at the Festival de Television de Monte-Carlo. The festival, which was founded by the tiny principality's late Prince Rainier III in 1961, is now in its 58th year and has, for almost six decades, been ahead of the curve in crowning television over its older, grainier cousin. This year's Australian nominees included the miniseries Sunshine, actor Anthony LaPaglia and the documentary series The Queen & Zak Grieve, but in a brutal finish all three came away empty handed. Instead, the UK drama Little Boy Blue, Scottish actor Ewan McGregor, American actor Tony Shalhoub and the Spanish drama La Casa De Papel ("The Money Heist") were among the night's big winners. Police investigating a suspicious fire at an under-construction house in Canberra are looking for a car seen in the area at the time of the blaze. Officers were called to Slim Dusty Circuit in Moncrieff about 10.30pm on Thursday, May 17. Firefighters also attended and extinguished the blaze, before referring it to police as suspicious. ACT Policing said officers had followed several leads and were now seeking information on a dark-coloured SUV seen in the area before and after the fire. BJP calls alliance untenable at the face of rising violence, attack on fundamental rights. BJP held 25 seats while the PDP held 28 seats in the 87 seat Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. (Photo: File) New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulled out of its alliance with Mehbooba Muftis Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Tuesday, ending a three-year rocky relationship that came to a flashpoint this week with the Centres decision to discontinue the Ramzan ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir. Untenable, the BJP called the alliance, blaming the government for the rise in violence in the Valley. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav told the media: We have taken a decision. It is untenable for the BJP to continue in alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir. Hence, we are withdrawing support. He added: Terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of citizens are in danger in the Valley. Shujaat Bukharis killing is an example. Madhav also cited the lack of development in Jammu and Ladakh. Party president Amit Shah had called all BJP lawmakers in the state to Delhi for a meeting in the morning. Madhav said the brainstorming was to review the alliance's goals and targets achieved in the last three years. Soon after the announcement Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti handed in her resignation, prompting the way for Governor's Rule, which the BJP favours. Jammu and Kashmir BJP lawmakers welcomed the Centre's decision to pull out from the PDP alliance. They also tendered their resignation to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti. Jammu Kashmir Deputy CM Kavinder Gupta said, "We have submitted our resignations to CM Mufti. We have now come out of the government." The BJP had 25 lawmakers and the PDP 28 in the state Assembly, where the majority mark is 45. The National Confrence has 15, the Congress 12 and others 7 MLAs in the state Assembly. BJP and the PDP, unlikely partners from the onset of their alliance, have had uneasy relations from time to time in the last three years. Things came to a head on Sunday when Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh lifted the ceasefire that the government had put in force during the month of Ramzan. Anti-terror operations would resume in full force, Singh said on Sunday. Data shows terrorist activity had more than doubled in this month. The killing of Rising Kashmir editor and a moderate voice Shujaat Bukhari was the last nail in PDPs hopes that the ceasefire would continue to promote harmony in the Valley. The ceasefire was Chief Minister Mehbooba Muftis brainchild, though it had met stiff opposition from the state BJP. Sources in Muftis Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said that after deciding not to extend the conditional ceasefire announced by the Centre for the Islamic fasting month of Ramzan, the Modi government has decided to launch a tough military campaign against separatist militants in the restive state and give a free hand to security forces to deal with the situation. The PDP did not agree to it which established the point of no return. The Chief Minister and the PDP had also pleaded for extending the Ramzan truce beyond Eid-ul-Fitr to pave the way for holding talks with the separatists which was ignored by the Centre, the sources said. However, sections of security forces and also senior Army commanders were against extending Ramzan ceasefire and even eager not only to resume but also bump up anti-militant and anti-terror operations across the Kashmir Valley at earliest. They were planning to launch Operation All Out II against the militants. In its first phase, more than three hundred militants, including several top commanders, were killed in 2017 and during the first four and half months of 2018. Local watchers see in the BJPs decision also an attempt to charm its constituency as the party was being openly accused of surrendering for power the interests of Jammu from where it won almost all seats in the 2014 Assembly election. On the other hand, the PDPs support base in Kashmir Valley has eroded because it chose the saffron party as its ally, and because of the unending killings in the Valley over the last three years. Ever since the two parties cobbled up an alliance to form the government in 2015, they have publicly differed on issues including Article 370 which guarantees special status to J&K within the Indian Union. While the PDP would repeatedly say it will never allow dilution of this provision, the BJP would vow that abrogation of Article 370 and its upshot including Article 35A are core agendas of the party and that it could never abandon it. Only for the purposes of running a coalition government in the state, the party had decided not to press for abrogation of Article 370 while in government. The agenda is not abandoned, the party would say. Tension had also simmered over the PDPs promise to talk to separatists, the proposal to remove the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which gives the Army more power in insurgent areas and even in the rollout of the Goods and Services tax in the state. This March, the PDP sacked its minister Haseeb Drabu who was a popular interlocutor between the allies. National Conference leader and former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah tweeted after Tuesday's fallout. And so it has come to pass........ Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) June 19, 2018 Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal also took to Twitter and called the BJP an "opportunistic party". An opportunistic BJP First an opportunistic alliance with PDP Now an opportunistic breakaway Both acts of political immorality Kaise Desh badlega ? Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) June 19, 2018 Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also tweeted that the BJP had pulled out of Kashmir "after ruining it". Chinese-Australian billionaire Chau Chak Wing is seeking vindication in his defamation battle with Fairfax Media and a damages payout is not the object for the wealthy property developer, the Federal Court has heard. Mr Chau, one of Australia's most generous political donors, is suing the publisher of The Sydney Morning Herald over an October 2015 online article linking him to a US bribery scandal. Chau Chak Wing leaves the Federal Court. Credit:Peter Rae On the final day of the five-day hearing, Mr Chau's barrister, Bruce McClintock, SC, told Justice Michael Wigney he was not inviting the court to exceed the $389,500 statutory cap on general damages in defamation cases because "it is vindication my client primarily seeks at Your Honour's hands" and it was "very, very important" to Mr Chau that he be cleared of bribery allegations. The Victorian Court of Appeal ruled last week in Bauer Media's appeal against the record $4.5 million damages payout to actress Rebel Wilson that the statutory cap on damages did not apply when aggravated damages are awarded. It reduced her payout to $600,000 well above the statutory cap including a component for aggravated damages that was not identified separately. Proposed new laws and tough penalties are set to further protect police and law enforcement officers. Criminals who seriously threaten or intimidate the families of police, protective service officers and prison guards will face up to a decade behind bars under proposed new laws. The state government proposed the bill after it found the issue to be an emerging one for those working in law enforcement. Offenders who shoot a firearm into the air or towards the ground in an attempt to threaten a police officer will also face tough penalties of up to 15 years in prison, under legislation to be introduced by the state government on Wednesday. The bill is designed to better protect law enforcement officers, including custodial officers working in correctional facilities. Many have questioned why I, as a regional member of Parliament, a former sheep farmer and someone who has spent more than half my life working in or advocating for Australias rural industries, has introduced a private member's bill which seeks to phase out the live sheep export trade. The reality is that producing food and fibre in the 21st century requires ethics and sustainability to remain globally competitive. The live sheep trade offers neither. Credit:Jessica Shapiro The electorate of Farrer is one of the most productive agricultural regions in Australia, representing the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Lower Darling valleys. The largest population centre is Albury, and from the front door of my electorate office I can see the building where Robert Menzies and others met in 1944 to agree on the structure and provisional constitution of a new political party the Liberal Party of Australia. The Liberal Party has a long tradition of members and senators crossing the floor. It was Menzies who declared Labor MPs were told what to do by "36 faceless men", taking aim at the opposition of Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam with the decree "no one could tell a Liberal how to vote". Reassuring though it is to know my party supports its backbenchers having freedom of expression, my stance is not about being a "rebel", more about persuading Liberals towards a sensible change of policy. A free and confidential WA sexual assault service has been given a $800,000 cash injection to provide more counselling and outreach services in the wake of a vigil held for Eurydice Dixon in Hyde Park on Monday night. The Sexual Assault Resource Centre, which is part of the Women and Newborn Health Service, provides specialist counselling for those affected by sexual assault or abuse from clinics around the state. Mourners were encouraged to leave notes, flowers and candles at the memorial at Hyde Park, Perth. Credit:Hannah Barry The funding was announced by Health Minister Roger Cook and Minister for Women's Interests Simone McGurk on Tuesday morning. The money, to be spent over four years, will provide additional counselling and clinical psychologist resources, as well as administration support. A 67-year-old man has been charged after City of Swan mayor David Lucas was injured at an electors' meeting that decended into "mayhem" on Monday night as tempers flared over a controversial plan to redevelop Midland Oval. City of Swan mayor David Lucas left bleeding after a special electors meeting over the Midland oval. Credit:Echo News Police will allege Cr Lucas was clocked with a microphone by an angry resident in an altercation after the meeting ended, leaving the mayor bleeding and his alleged attacker unconscious. The man reportedly wanted to deliver a deputation to the meeting, but ended up tackling the mayor and was knocked to the ground before being treated by paramedics who attended the scene. Councillor Andrew Kiely, who witnessed the incident, said he was disappointed the meeting had descended into chaos. Apple has been fined $9 million by the Federal Court for telling some Australian iPad and iPhone owners they could not have devices fixed as they had been previously repaired by a third party. The court action was started by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) after it received complaints about 'error 53', which disabled some Apple devices after an operating system update was downloaded. Apple US has been ordered to pay $9 million in penalties for making false or misleading representations to Australian customers about their consumer rights. "[The customers said] they were being refused a remedy of any kind by Apple on the basis that their device had had unauthorised repairs, and those repairs could be as minor as just having a cracked screen replaced on an iPhone or iPad, which all of us need to do from time to time," ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court said. "So these consumers were being told, 'because you've had this third party repair, you are not entitled to any remedy'." New York: There are over 1 billion firearms in the world today, including 857 million in civilian hands - with American men and women the dominant owners, according to a study released Monday. The Small Arms Survey says 393 million of the civilian-held firearms, 46 per cent, are in the United States, which is "more than those held by civilians in the other top 25 countries combined." Dozens of semi-automatic rifles on a wall in a gun shop in Lynnwood, Washington.. Credit:AP "The key to the United States, of course, is its unique gun culture," the report's author, Aaron Karp, said at a news conference. "American civilians buy an average of 14 million new firearms every year, and that means the United States is an overwhelming presence on civilian markets." The report said the numbers include legal and illegal firearms in civilian hands, ranging from improvised craft weapons to factory-made handguns, rifles, shotguns and, in some countries, even machine guns. Racist interpretations of Shakespeare's Othello have cast the title character as a hot-tempered barbarian easily manipulated by the crafty Venetian Iago. But this is untenable in the 21st century, with most productions highlighting racial discrimination against Othello, as if this is the only thing that matters in a play about jealousy, trust, revenge, and love. Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson is having none of it. He thrillingly rejects facile one-dimensional approaches, reaching for and grasping something meatier and a whole lot more challenging. Othello (Chukwudi Iwuji) is a Venetian general of Moorish (North African) origin. He has recently eloped with Desdemona (Heather Lind), daughter of the senator Brabantio (Miguel Perez). After some initial consternation, Dad accepts the marriage as Othello prepares to sail off to defend Cyprus from a Turkish invasion. This match enrages Roderigo (Motell Foster), who wanted Desdemona for his wife. Othello's deceitful ensign, Iago (Corey Stoll), sees an opportunity in all of this: He hates Othello and thinks that if he can make the Moor believe that Desdemona is unfaithful, he can lead him down a path of destruction. The presence of Othello's handsome yet credulous captain, Cassio (the ideally cast Babak Tafti), is sure to aid him in this plot. Babak Tafti and Flor De Liz Perez appear in the Shakespeare in the Park Othello. ( Joan Marcus) Santiago-Hudson has successfully led his cast to performances that make all of these characters complicated, contradictory, and fully human. That begins with Othello: Far from an irrational brute, Iwuji portrays a military man ahead of his time. Although his profession is killing, he melts into pure tenderness when he so much as glances at Desdemona. Acting with the decisiveness of a general and demanding "ocular proof" of any claim, he puts his confidence in empirical facts over faith. Yet once he has enough to form a theory (especially about something as precious as love), he eschews all conflicting evidence, irresistibly sliding into paranoia and rage. Armed with a bundle of circumstantial evidence and alternative facts, Stoll's Iago is confident, funny, and relaxed, making us understand why so many characters view him as a trusted source. He's not driven by pure malice but by his own irrational jealousy. Rather than being Shakespeare's most inexplicable evil villain, Iago a la Stoll is as clear about his motivations as he is deliberate in his machinations. While these two men typically consume all the air in Othello, Alison Wright gives a standout performance as Iago's wife, Emilia. With a confident gait and twisted grin, Wright ferociously embodies a woman strong enough to push back against her odious husband. It's no surprise that the men of the play leave her to die alone, perhaps relieved by the passing of such an inconveniently outspoken woman. Emilia (Alison Wright) looks in as Othello (Chukwudi Iwuji) embraces Desdemona (Heather Lind) in Othello. ( Joan Marcus) By contrast, Lind's Desdemona is the model of feminine submission, helplessly yielding to her husband's madness through the very end. Toni-Leslie James costumes her in an opulent dress with sleeves that look like ribbons tied into bows, a gift for Othello to unwrap and covet. Santiago-Hudson has set Othello during the period Shakespeare originally envisioned: The spectacular use of brocade and velvet in James's costumes places the story squarely in the 16th century, the time of Venetian rule on Cyprus. Taking full advantage of the remarkable width of the Delacorte, Rachel Hauck's set suggests a Mediterranean fortification with gothic arches, a hallmark of the merchant empire that for centuries served as a crossroads between East and West. Jane Cox's dazzling lighting flickers like torchlight under the faux limestone, while Jessica Paz expands the world further by tantalizing us with sounds seemingly from beyond the theater. In the production's one major misstep, Derek Wieland's synth-heavy original compositions attempt to capture the "shrill trump" and "spirit-stirring drum" of Othello's military glory, along with Desdemona's maiden-in-a-tower melancholy. Unfortunately, they end up sounding like the ambient music of a 1990s video game more MIDI than medieval. Emilia (Alison Wright) hands Iago (Corey Stoll) a significant handkerchief in front of a skewed map of the world in Othello. ( Joan Marcus) Luckily, it doesn't much detract from Santiago-Hudson's timely production. This Othello unnervingly casts doubt on the inviolability of "ocular proof," especially when we view that proof with less than clear eyes. Santiago-Hudson also makes a strong argument for Othello as a prescient challenge to the empiricism of Elizabethan thinkers like Francis Bacon. Are humans actually capable of approaching the truth with objective eyes when we're all products of subjective pasts? It's a question that cannot be asked enough as we place our trust in video and photographic evidence that is becoming increasingly easy to doctor. Seeing may be believing, but that's a frightening thought when all we see are lies. About Toyota Toyota Motor Corporation is a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan, and is currently the world's largest automaker. According to the 2008 Fortune Global 500, toyota is the fifth largest company in the world by revenue. In 1934, while still a department of Toyota Industries, it created its first product Type A engine and in 1936 its first passenger car the Toyota AA. The company was eventually founded by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937 as a spinoff from his father's company Toyota Industries to create automobiles. Toyota currently owns and operates Lexus and Scion brands and has a majority shareholding stake in Daihatsu Motors, and minority shareholdings in Fuji Heavy Industries, Isuzu Motors, and Yamaha Motors. The company includes 522 subsidiaries. Toyota is headquartered in Aichi, Nagoya and in Tokyo. In addition to manufacturing automobiles, Toyota provides financial services through its division Toyota Financial Services and also creates robots. Toyota Industries and Finance divisions form the bulk of the Toyota Group, one of the largest conglomerates in the world. In 1933, Toyoda Automatic Loom Works created a new division devoted to the production of automobiles under the direction of the founder's son, Kiichiro Toyoda. Kiichiro Toyoda had traveled to Europe and the United States in 1929 to investigate automobile production and had begun researching gasoline-powered engines in 1930. Toyoda Automatic Loom Works was encouraged to develop automobile production by the Japanese government, which needed domestic vehicle production partly due to the worldwide money shortage and partly due to the war with China. In 1934, the division produced its first Type A Engine, which was used in the first Model A1 passenger car in May 1935 and the G1 truck in August 1935. Production of the Model AA passenger car started in 1936. Early vehicles bear a striking resemblance to the Dodge Power Wagon and Chevrolet, with some parts actually interchanging with their American originals. Although the Toyota Group is best known today for its cars, it is still in the textile business and still makes automatic looms, which are now computerized, and electric sewing machines which are available worldwide. During the Pacific War (World War II) the company was dedicated to truck production for the Imperial Japanese Army. Because of severe shortages in Japan, military trucks were kept as simple as possible. For example, the trucks had only one headlight on the center of the hood. The war ended shortly before a scheduled Allied bombing run on the Toyota factories in Aichi. After the war, commercial passenger car production started in 1947 with the model SA. In 1950, a separate sales company, Toyota Motor Sales Co., was established (which lasted until July 1982). In April 1956, the Toyopet dealer chain was established. The following year, the Crown became the first Japanese car to be exported to the United States and Toyota's American and Brazilian divisions, Toyota Motor Sales Inc. and Toyota do Brasil S.A., were also established. Toyota began to expand in the 1960s with a new research and development facility, a presence in Thailand was established, the 10 millionth model was produced, a Deming Prize and partnerships with Hino Motors and Daihatsu were also established. The first Toyota built outside Japan was in April 1963, at Port Melbourne in Australia. By the end of the decade, Toyota had established a worldwide presence, as the company had exported its one-millionth unit. With high gas prices and a weak US economy in the summer of 2008, Toyota reported a double-digit decline in sales for the month of June, similar to figures reported by the Detroit Big Three. For Toyota, these were attributed mainly to slow sales of its Tundra pickup, as well as shortages of its fuel-efficient vehicles such as the Prius, Corolla and Yaris. In response, the company has announced plans to idle its truck plants, while shifting production at other facilities to manufacture in-demand vehicles. COLORADO ADOPTS CLEAN VEHICLE STANDARDS, JOINS 1/3RD OF NATION'S AUTO MARKET CALLING FOR CLEAN CARS Exciting news! Colorado has just announced they will joinA more than one-third of the nation's auto market in adopting clean vehicle standards that set limits on tailpipe pollution. With this move, announced via an Executive Order from Gov. John Hickenlooper, Colorado joins 13 other states and D.C. in calling for clean, efficient vehicles that save consumers money while limiting air pollution.A The announcement comes in the face of an imminent joint rule-making from EPA/NHTSA that is expected to propose a dramatic roll-back ofA the federalA tailpipe emissions and fuel-economy standards. It's also expected that the administration will launch an unprecedentedA attack on the very authority that Colorado is exercising to adopt stronger state standards, essentially gutting Section 177 of the Clean Air Act and reversing decades of national clean air policy.A I have health, legal and consumer experts and local electedsA available for interviews to discuss the importance of this move, and the impending efforts by the Trump administration to limit state freedom on clean vehicles.A Please let me know if you'd like to set something up.A Cheers!A Sage WelchA 615 715 6714 Sage@catercommunications.comA A co_gov_jh_rgb_308x69.png ** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Office of Gov. John Hickenlooper Jacque Montgomery | jacque.montgomery@state.co.us (mailto:jacque.montgomery@state.co.us) |303-518-0915 ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ Gov. Hickenlooper signs executive order calling for state to adopt low emissions vehicle standards DENVER a Tuesday, June 19, 2018 a Gov. John Hickenlooper signed an executive order that commits Colorado to adopting low emission vehicle (LEV) standards. Colorado has unmatched natural beauty, but our typography makes us especially vulnerable to greater impacts of pollution. The LEV action helps the state meet its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent by 2025. We can achieve this goal by harnessing technological advancements in the clean energy field and implementing cost-effective strategies that reduce our emissions while protecting our vibrant economy. aColorado has a choice. This executive order calls for the state to adopt air quality standards that will protect our quality of life in Colorado,a??? said Governor John Hickenlooper. aLow emissions vehicles are increasingly popular with consumers and are better for our air. Every move we make to safeguard our environment is a move in the right direction.a??? The executive order instructs the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to A develop a rule to establish a Colorado LEV program, which incorporates the requirements of the California LEV program; and A propose that rule to the Colorado Air Quality Control Commission during its August 2018 meeting for possible adoption into the Colorado Code of Regulations by December 30, 2018. View the executive order here (https://www.colorado.gov/governor/sites/default/files/b_2018-006_maintaining_progress_on_clean_vehicles.pdf) . ### ------------------------------------------------------------ www.colorado.gov/governor (http://www.colorado.gov/governor) ______________________ If you would rather not receive future communications from Cater Communications, please go to http://CaterCommunications.pr-optout.com/OptOut.aspx?524432x19954x139431x2x472868x24000x6&Email=submit%40theautochannel.com. Cater Communications, 1040 Court Street, San Rafael, CA 94901 United States Mr Shah was on a days tour to MP on June 12 when he interacted with the core group of state BJP and later addressed the party workers. Bhopal: BJP national president Amit Shah has dropped hints to the local leadership in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh that the saffron cadres, not a particular face, would play key role in election strategy of the party, sources said here on Monday. Sources said Mr Shah indicated that the partys strategy for the ensuing Assembly elections in MP, due in November this year, would focus more on the party cadres than the leadership in the state. Party cadres will play a key role in the election strategy, he hinted and reportedly asked the state leadership to devise plans accordingly. Mr Shah was on a days tour to MP on June 12 when he interacted with the core group of state BJP and later addressed the party workers. Sources said Mr Shah has emphasised on galvanising party cadres at the grassroots level by holding workers conferences at block and district headquarters. Emmanuel Macron. Photo: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images Today in international news, we have a high-profile fight between French president Emmanuel Macron and an extremely cool teen who publicly sassed him. The Washington Post reports that the showdown occurred on Monday at the Mont Valerien memorial honoring French Resistance members. It was there that Macron, who once said that he wanted to run his country like a start-up, met his foe. The teen on the rope line with some friends sang a couple of lines from the Socialist anthem the Internationale, a jab at Macrons pro-business overhauls. Hell yeah. Then, the middle school student greeted Macron with a cheeky, Hows it going, Manu? Sacrebleu! Macron did not simply move it along. No, you cant do that. Youre here at an official ceremony and you should behave, he scolded. You call me Mr. President or Sir. Okay? The day you want to start a revoltuion you study first in order to obtain a degree and feed yourself, okay? And then you can lecture others. The kids are, as they say, all right. Photo: Twentieth Century Fox Mary Z. liked fashion when she started her career. She interned in the fashion department of Cosmopolitan, then under the editorship of Kate White, and went on to an editorial assistant role at the magazine First for Women. Everyone was lovely, she said. Then, she took a job as an assistant in fashion PR. The owner of one firm she worked at, she said, threw hardcover books at her and her colleagues. He would throw things at us pretty often, she said. He would call us cunts. The mid-level employees at the company werent much better. I saw the way girls there treated their assistants they would berate them, she said. They would call them fat. After 15 years in fashion, sick of being subjected to and witnessing mistreatment, she moved to Washington D.C., where she now works happily at a software company run by people who genuinely care about you and how you feel and how you think. To the average person, The Devil Wears Prada is a farce. But to those who have worked in fashion, the 2006 film can feel like a documentary. When the movie came out 12 years ago, presocial media, assistants who had experienced emotional abuse were virtually powerless to do anything about it. But today, emboldened by the #MeToo movement that brought down powerful alleged sexual abusers in the industry like Terry Richardson and Mario Testino, theyre finding ways to organize and share their stories and managers have noticed. Assistants and former assistants interviewed for this story described working conditions that seem like fashion industry parodies. One former PR assistant said she was required to stand outside in 15-degree weather without a coat for hours to check people into a New York Fashion Week show. Assistants who earned salaries in the low $40,000 range were only allowed to wear black coats, and hers was the wrong color. I couldnt use the iPad because my fingers were so cold and so numb, she said. Another said her boss, furious that a certain shipment didnt arrive to a designers appointment overseas on time, screamed at her and threatened to take the money to overnight the items out of her paycheck (they never did). During Fashion Week, she was expected to work until 3 a.m. and come back to the office at 6 a.m. An assistant who is called fat on a daily basis by her manager is, understandably, less protected by the law than a sexual-assault victim. Unlike sexual or physical assault, emotional and verbal abuse arent illegal. In the case of an actual assault, there might be some kind of criminal action, said Susan Scafidi, the director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham. The likelihood of that, unless youre seriously injured by a flying stiletto, is small. Nonetheless, the balance of power in the fashion industry is undergoing a major shift. Models and other low-level workers have been organizing since 2012, when the Model Alliance formed to protect models from issues like sexual assault and non-payment. Also in 2012, a Harpers Bazaar intern sued Hearst Corporation for violating labor laws by not paying her, though she was effectively full-time. (She lost in court the following year.) Unpaid interns also filed a buzzy class action lawsuit against Conde Nast in 2013; the company settled for $5.8 million. Though Hearsts interns lost, the company ultimately decided to start paying its interns now called fellows an hourly wage anyway. Even a failed lawsuit has the effect of changing practices within the industry, Scafidi said. Both lawsuits sent a powerful message to fashions lowest level office workers: as fungible as you are, you are not helpless. The explosive #MeToo movement has only reinforced that notion, said Scafidi: I think what were seeing is the beginning of an overall sea change. As with the #MeToo movement, that change is beginning on social media. The @FashionAssistants Instagram account, which has more than 16,000 followers after starting in December, serves as a repository for assistants workplace horror stories. The person behind the account, who works as an assistant in the industry and spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, said it didnt start taking off until she began sharing anonymous confessions about abusers at the suggestion of a friend. Disturbingly common complaints on the account which various sources echoed in interviews for this story include bosses who yelled in front of crowds of people, fat-shamed assistants, and failed to pay. (Many assistants work on a freelance basis for individual stylists or photographers. They have no contracts and, therefore, virtually no protection, unless they want to pursue legal action in small claims court.) The person behind the account said she has been careful not to portray assistant abuse as being part of #MeToo. We never wanted to associate it with anything at all as serious as sexual assault because thats a whole other level. Yet, she talks about what shes created as though its the beginning of a movement. I want it to turn into something, she said. Already, shes gotten advice from Model Alliance founder Sara Ziff about how to create an organization that can protect freelancers, and helped organize a recent panel discussion in conjunction with the London College of Fashion. Yet even without a formal organization, she and other assistants get the sense that work environments are improving, if only because people are afraid to be called out on social media by former employees. One assistant told me a past abusive boss invited her to coffee to make amends after the @fashionassistants account starting attracting attention in the industry. I had moved on [from the abuse], but it made me feel great that they acknowledged that what they had done was wrong. And they said theyre changing and they have grown up themselves and theyre in a less stressful position at work, said this person, who knows other assistants who have had similar interactions with former bosses recently. Both assistants and those who employ them agree that the fashion industry understands the power social media has to expose abusers, which the #MeToo movement has only reinforced. Right after his Golden Globe win, tweets emerged accusing James Franco of sexual misconduct, with an investigation by the LA Times into such behaviors following shortly thereafter. Freelancers already use social media to call out clients in the fashion industry for non-payment. I do notice when you call out magazines or labels on social media, its the only way you get things resolved, said London-based stylist Jamie-Maree Shipton. We really have to fight for the things that we deserve. Formed in October, the Humans of Fashion Foundation aims to protect all fashion workers internationally, including assistants, from all forms of abuse. Founders Antoniette Costa, who studied fashion law at Fordham, and Kristina Romanova, a model, are developing an app that would allow the industrys abuse victims to connect anonymously with mentors, therapists, and lawyers. Ultimately, they hope to create a code of conduct for fashion workplaces, which might receive something like a HOFF seal if they undergo training to adopt the codes policies. Costa, who meets constantly with people at all levels in the industry, said assistant abuse can have an almost PTSD-type of effect on people. She added, I can tell you at least three people who I met with, who were assistants or who were assisting someone in the fashion industry they said, I feel better just talking to you and joining your movement. Bridgette Sena, a director of sales for accessories companies with 18 years of experience, thinks such an app could be a valuable way to anonymously warn people about abusive employers. Though she loves what she does, shes been both subjected to and witnessed egregious behavior over the course of her career. When she reached a director level, one particular boss treated her and her colleagues so horribly she couldnt sleep and found herself in tears on a daily basis. She later learned many people were aware of his reputation and was shocked no one told her before she decided to go work for him. Youre helpless, and HR, who was a woman, couldnt do anything about it, she said. You look at these assistants and interns, and the last thing you want is for them to experience this, she added. Ive had my former assistant hysterically cry to me, and Im just hugging and holding her. And youre not even supposed to do that. Meghan Markle at Royal Ascot. Photo: Samir Hussein/WireImage On Tuesday, Meghan Markle celebrated her one-month royal wedding anniversary (can you believe its already been a whole month??) in the most noble way imaginable: by wearing her most British hat yet at the very fancy Royal Ascot horse race with her husband, Prince Harry, and basically his entire extended family. Meghan, as youll recall, is American specifically, Californian by birth and is still in the process of becoming British by marriage, as she purportedly recently applied for a U.K. visa. Shes still new to the whole elaborate-hat thing that the British aristocracy covets. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry at Royal Ascot. Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images So far weve seen her in subtle berets (at royal church services, mostly, though she also wore an American-esque floppy hat one time, oops) as well as chic hats from top milliner Philip Treacy at two royal events over the past month. This weekend, she took her British hat-wearing to the next level when she wore an actual fascinator to a wedding. And on Tuesday, her British-looking hat transformation seemed to be complete, as Meghan was spotted at the Royal Ascot in a modern-ish, sculptural black-and-white hat with a translucent trim. If you wanted to liken the hat to a building (maybe you are into architecture?), wed say it looks like a British hat version on the Sydney Opera House. Meghan Markle arriving at Royal Ascot. Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images Meghans horse race hat was also designed by Philip Treacy, but her actual outfit was not made by a British brand instead, her white dress is from from the house of Givenchy, which notably designed her royal wedding dress and road-trip-with-the-queen attire. However, the house is led by the U.K.-born designer Clare Waight Keller, so its still pretty British if you think about it. Its been a true honor witnessing this transformation. A factor contributing to the need for deadly strategic weapons is the peculiarity of the security situation in South Asia. Of the worlds nine nuclear weaponised nations, India, Pakistan and China increased their stockpile of nuclear weapons in the year from the beginning of 2017 to January 2018. New Delhi: Amid a belligerent bilateral relationship of rancour and a legacy of wars between them, India and Pakistan are bucking a global trend by increasing the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenal. Of the worlds nine nuclear weaponised nations, India, Pakistan and China increased their stockpile of nuclear weapons in the year from the beginning of 2017 to January 2018. While the leading nuclear countries US and Russia reduced their nuclear arsenal, UK, France and Israel kept the numbers static. North Koreas figures were not available. According to the findings of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) put out in its SIPRI Yearbook 2018 released on Monday, Indias stock of nuclear weapons went up from 120-130 in 2017 to 130-140 in 2018 while Pakistans stockpile increased from 130-140 in 2017 to 140-150 in 2018. China increased its nuke arsenal from 270 in 2017 to 280 in 2018. These numbers actually bucked the global trend of a more than 3 per cent decrease in the number of nuclear weapons, from 14,935 to 14,465 due to cutbacks by the US and Russia in keeping with the provisions of the implementation of the 2010 treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START). But Russia and the US still maintained huge stockpiles of 6,450 and 6,850, respectively. Another facet of the increasing arsenal in India, Pakistan and China is also the concomitant development of land, sea, and air-based missile delivery systems that can carry nuclear payloads as also the development of missiles with greater ranges. A factor contributing to the need for deadly strategic weapons is the peculiarity of the security situation in South Asia. While India perceives a challenge from a rising China, Pakistans India-centric policy, a legacy of a perceived existential threat from India, results in it resorting to state-supported terrorism especially in the troubled Kashmir valley. The SIPRI Yearbook said, Pakistan has prioritised the development of nuclear-capable short-range missiles that appear to be intended for tactical nuclear roles and missions. In pursuing its full-spectrum deterrence posture, Pakistans defence planners have given particular attention to nuclear options for responding to an Indian military doctrine that envisages carrying out rapid but limited conventional attacks on Pakistani territory using forward-deployed forces. However, the international order continues to be haunted by a likely scenario in Pakistan that could arise if terrorists seize and gain control of the nuclear arsenal. 20-Year-Old Rapper XXXTentacion Shot Dead, Appeared to Foreshadow Own Death XXXTentacion, whose real name is Jahseh Onfroy, was shot and killed outside of a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, according to the Broward County Sheriffs Office. Police told media outlets that the shooting took place during a robbery attempt. The rapper appeared to have predicted his own death sometime before the shooting took place. Fans shared an undated Instagram Live video in which in stated that if he were to die, I at least want to know that the kids perceived my message and were able to make something of themselves and able to take my message and use it and turn it into something positive and to at least have a good life, CNN reported. If Im going to die or ever be a sacrifice, I want to make sure that my life made at least five million kids happy or they found some sort of answers or resolve in my life regardless of the negative around my name, regardless of the bad things people say to me, the rapper added. Local police tweeted that the adult male that was taken to the hospital has been pronounced dead. Officials in Florida are now searching for two suspects in the fatal shooting. No arrests have been made, and investigators do not have a motive, USA Today reported. A number of stars in the music industry reacted to the shooting death. His death prompted an outpouring of condolences from the likes of Kanye West, Diplo, J. Cole, and others. West wrote: Rest in peace I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing. Thanks for inspiring me, Diplo tweeted. RIP X. Enormous talent and limitless potential and a strong desire to be a better person. God bless his family, friends and fans, wrote J. Cole. One of the most interesting people Ive ever met. Lets love each other while were alive, wrote Diddy. REST IN PEACE YOUNG KING. Watch Next: 19 Years Later, New Yorkers Remember Historic April 25 Appeal in China The persecution remains arguably the most severe human rights issue in China today. 21-Year-Old Rapper Jimmy Wopo Shot, Killed in Pittsburgh Rapper Jimmy Wopo was killed during a drive-by shooting in Pittsburgh on Monday, police said. Officials told The Associated Press that Wopo, whose real name was Travon Smart, was shot dead and another man was injured. Someone opened fire on their car in Pittsburghs Hill District on Monday. Wopo was 21. His manager, Taylor Maglin, confirmed his death, saying in a Facebook post, I lost my brother today and its the worst feeling in the world. He was destined for greatness and he wanted the best for his friends, family and community. We lost a great person today, but just know I will do everything in my power to make his memory live on forever. Love you bro #LongLiveWopo, he added. He later posted a photo on Instagram with the caption: Ill never forget you. Cherished every moment working with you, cant believe your gone. Always and forever my brother. Wopo had several videos on YouTube with more than 1 million views. His attorney, Owen Seman, told AP that he had spoken with Wopo just moments before he was gunned down. I lost my brother today and its the worst feeling in the world. He was destined for greatness and he wanted the best Posted by Taylor Maglin on Monday, June 18, 2018 Pittsburgh rappers Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller mourned his death on social media. Rest up bro, Khalifa wrote. Miller tweeted a broken heart emoji. The shooting came hours after Florida rapper XXXTentacion was shot and killed in Broward County. XXXTentacion, whose real name was Jahseh Onfroy, died at a hospital after he was leaving a dealership. In the shooting, he was approached by two suspects, and police said that one of them opened fire, CBS News reported. They described it as a possible robbery. Watch Next: Why is Falun Gong Persecuted? Although its freely practiced in over 70 countries, doing this in China can lead to unlawful arrest, imprisonment, torture, or even death. 3 Small Children Left in Hot Car, Mother Arrested A Michigan woman was arrested after she left three children in a minivan, and police said that it happened during one of the hottest days in years. The three children were 6 and under, police told Fox2 in Detroit. Police got a 911 call on Sunday after people saw the children in a gold minivan parked in a Meijer store in Clinton Township. One officer worked to free the children while the other went into the store to find the mother. Eventually, the 6-year-old girl unlocked the door, and officers noticed that the children were sweating profusely. The 37-year-old mother, who was not identified, claimed that she went to check on her children. However, according to the Fox affiliate report, police said that she made no effort to go outside to see if they were in distress. The woman was arrested and now faces two counts of child neglect. Security video showed that she was in the store for approximately 25 minutes, The Associated Press reported. The children were evaluated after paramedics were called to the scene. They were handed over to their aunt. According to police, the 6-year-old was sweating pretty bad, reported ClickOnDetroit. The front windows were open about 1 inch. The Detroit News reported that Sunday was the second-hottest June 17 temperature recorded in the area. On that day, temperatures were well above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. She was released on Sunday after posting bond, MLive reported. 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. Armed Citizen Who Shot Walmart Gunman Is a Pastor Police have revealed new details in a carjacking and shooting spree in Washington state that ended with an armed assailant shot dead by a citizen with a concealed carry permit. The 47-year-old Oakville man who shot and killed the suspect outside the Tumwater Walmart on Sunday is reportedly an area pastor. Police have not released the mans name. The suspect, 44-year-old Tim O. Day, was shot moments after he fired multiple times at a man whose vehicle he was trying to carjack in the Walmart parking lot. The pastor, who also has medical emergency training, provided first aid to the critically wounded man before he was airlifted to a Seattle hospital. The gunman had earlier carjacked a vehicle and drove it to the Tumwater Walmart in an apparent attempt to steal ammunition. Day entered the store and made his way to a locked ammunition case in the sporting goods section, according to The Olympian. He then fired shots at the case to access its contents, and made his way out of the store. Day then tried to carjack several cars before being shot and killed by the Oakville pastor. Brian went to aid of shooting victim in #Walmart parking lot in Tumwater. Says armed pastor who is firearms expert killed gunman. Calls him a hero for acting and is convinced lives were saved as a result. pic.twitter.com/7a8KYZlZBK Austin Jenkins N3 (@AustinJenkinsN3) 18 czerwca 2018 Kyle Fievez, the son of the critically wounded man, told reporters that he was in the car with his mother and father when Day approached and fired multiple rounds through the cars glass. Day then reportedly moved on to another car and when the driver backed away, the armed pastor shot him. Another armed citizen on the scene, Jasse Zamora, described trying to intervene in the incident. He shot him. I came up and he said do you have this place secured? I said yes, Zamora says in a video recording tweeted by Austin Jenkins (@AustinJenkinsN3). Zamora told Jenkins that he did not fire his gun. Jesse Zamora, one of two armed citizens describes trying to intervene in yesterdays #tumwatershooting. He did not fire his gun but says he was prepared to shoot. pic.twitter.com/STwLLrCx8a Austin Jenkins N3 (@AustinJenkinsN3) 18 czerwca 2018 Fievez told reporters Day shot his father in the neck and torso, and that bullet fragments were lodged near his spine. A GoFundMe account set up for the man said he lost his spleen and part of his pancreas, and also ruptured his stomach he is paralyzed from the neck down. Police spokeswoman Laura Wohl told The Olympian that Day had a criminal record, and that he may have suffered from mental health and drug abuse problems. Tumwater spokeswoman says civilian shot and killed suspected gunman/carjacker in parking lot of Tumwater #walmart. Another civilian victim shot and airlifted to Harborview in Seattle. A 16 year old girl shot at a different scene has minor wounds pic.twitter.com/T4zS9ZTLRQ Austin Jenkins N3 (@AustinJenkinsN3) 18 czerwca 2018 Days former wife told Jenkins that he had a serious drug problem. Im not real shocked but my heart is so sad, I thought he was doing better. I told everyone hes going to get himself killed. He has a bad meth problem. Im so sad, she said. Former wife of suspected #Tumwater #Walmart gunman who was shot dead by armed citizen tells me: Im not real shocked but my heart is so sad, I thought he was doing better. I told everyone hes going to get himself killed. He has a bad meth problem. Im so sad. Austin Jenkins N3 (@AustinJenkinsN3) 18 czerwca 2018 Walmart issued a statement in response to the shooting. We are shocked that this happened on our property, and our thoughts and prayers are with those injured and affected, the statement reads, according to The Olympian. We are working closely with law enforcement on the investigation and are referring additional questions to them. Darren Gossler of Elma, who was in store at the time of the shootings, said he heard five or six pops while in store, and then ran out an emergency exit to get to his car, where he heard four more pops. I was in the dairy section. Heard about 5 or 6 pops. Ran out a side emergency exit and attempted to run to my car in the parking lot but heard 4 more pops in the lot. Caught a quick glimpse of a male with what appeared to be a handgun, Gossler said, according to the Seattle Times. Kailani Bailey, who was also inside the Supercenter at the time, said that a tall man entered the store and was shoving people out of the way. Moments later, popping sounds were heard inside the store. Then somebody yelled, Run, run! and everyone took off, Bailey said. Brian Adams, who was shopping at Walmart and took cover in the parking lot said: This guy could have taken out more people, wounded or killed. According to The Seattle Times, the suspects body remained lying in the parking lot for several hours while police conducted an extensive search in the area for shell casing and other evidence. According to The Olympian, the Tumwater Police Department will host a resource fair Wednesday for those impacted by the shooting. Watch Next: Sleepy Truck Driver Causes Multi-Vehicle Crash U.S. President Donald Trump, flanked by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, White House Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert, Assistant to the President Peter Navarro and Deputy Assistant to the President for International Economic Affairs Everett Eissenstat, delivers remarks before signing a memorandum on intellectual property tariffs on high-tech goods from China, at the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 22, 2018. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters) China Hits a Wall as US Retaliates With New Tariffs Beijing underestimates strong resolve of Trump, says top White House trade adviser President Donald Trump is striking back at Beijing by asking his administration to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for additional 10-percent tariffs. We have no choice. This should have been done many years ago, Trump said at the National Federation of Independent Business 75th-anniversary celebration on June 19. China has been taking out $500 billion a year out of our country and rebuilding China. The White Houses top trade advisor, Peter Navarro, said Beijing may have underestimated the resolve of President Donald J. Trump by refusing to meet the U.S. trade demands. If they thought that they could buy us off cheap with a few extra products sold and allow them to continue to steal our intellectual property and crown jewels, that was a miscalculation, he told reporters on a June 19 conference call. The United States demands that China cut the trade deficit by $200 billion and stop stealing American technology. Navarro, a sharp critic of Chinese trade policies, said the presidents action to impose new tariffs is both courageous and visionary. [Trump] has given China every chance to change its aggressive behavior, he added. Last year, China was given 100 days to come up with proposed structural changes. There were numerous meetings with Chinese delegations, but none of these efforts resulted in any progress, he explained. As a result, the United States announced on June 15 that it is moving ahead with a 25 percent tariff on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods. The action prompted an immediate response from China, which announced it would raise tariffs on an equal amount of U.S. goods, including beef, poultry, tobacco, and cars. China has also threatened to impose tariffs on U.S. crude oil imports, which are now worth almost $1 billion per month. This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, Trump said on June 18. He asked the U.S. Trade Representative to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for additional tariffs. Washington is ready to impose more tariffs on top of $200 billion if China continues to retaliate, Trump said. The tariffs will go into effect after the legal process is complete, according to the White House. Beijing is running out of American goods it can slap tariffs on, experts say, simply because it doesnt import as much American goods compared to what the United States imports from China. China imported nearly $130 billion from the United States last year, compared with $505 billion in exports, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. China made a major mistake early Saturday morning when it pledged to mirror the initial 25 percent U.S. tariffs on $50 billion of their exports, wrote Derek Scissors, Asia economist at the American Enterprise Institute. According to Scissors, Beijing walked down a path where it is guaranteed to a hit a wall since it has a limited number of measures to use in a tariff war. China, however, can still retaliate using some other measures, he wrote. The bilateral relationship is large and multifaceted; there are many choices. An obvious one is to punish American firms operating in the PRC, he said. Although China has a handful of other measures, according to experts, they are not as easy to implement as tariffs. Trump made it clear that he would not tolerate any type of Chinese response that harms American businesses, whether it is a farmer in Iowa or an American company in Shanghai, Navarro said. For decades, the Chinese regimes protectionist and trade-distorting policies have hurt American industries. According to the IP Commission report by the National Bureau of Asian Research, the annual cost of IP theft to the U.S. economy could be as high as $600 billion. China uses many tactics to steal technology, such as forcing foreign companies to partner with domestic firms and hand over their intellectual property and know-how to gain access to the Chinese market. The actions President Trump has taken are purely defensive in nature, Navarro said. They are designed to defend the crown jewels of American technology from Chinas aggressive behavior. The Chinese Communist Party wants to turn China into a manufacturing superpower by replacing foreign competitors in global high-tech markets. Its economic blueprint, the Made in China 2025 program, outlines 10 tech-related sectors it wants to develop by 2025, including advanced information technology, robotics and automated machine tools, aircraft and aircraft components, advanced rail equipment, and new energy vehicles. Trump will not allow China to use its established unfair trade practices and illicit behavior to capture the so-called Made in China 2025 industries, said Navarro. A pedestrian walks past a stocks display board after the Hang Seng Index closed at 29468.15, a loss of 2.78 percent, in Hong Kong on June 19, 2018. (Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images) China Stocks Plummet on Trump Tariff Threat When news emerged that U.S. President Donald Trump was threatening to impose a 10 percent tariff on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, it sent the Chinese stock market plunging. Shanghai stocks fell by almost 4 percent, to a two-year low, on June 19. Hong Kong stocks were also hit hard. The Hang Seng index tumbled nearly 3 percent to its lowest closing level in six months. After Trump first announced on June 15 that he would proceed with tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, China retaliated with its own tariffs on U.S. goods. Trump had vowed he would impose additional tariffs should that happen, and acted quickly on his word by proposing the additional $200 billion punishment on June 18. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told reporters during a June 19 briefing that Trump was resolved to implement the $200 billion should Beijing go ahead with its retaliatory tariffs. If they thought that they [China] could buy us off cheap with a few extra products sold and allow them to continue to steal our intellectual property and crown jewels, that was a miscalculation, Navarro said, reiterating Trumps stance that Chinas intellectual property theft practices are hurting the American economy. Nervous Investors in China The specter of a new round of trade disputes made Chinese investors nervous. They dumped stocks across the board, with more than 1,000 stocks dropping by their 10 percent daily limit on June 19. The Chinese yuan also fell in value, to 6.4754 against the U.S. dollar in afternoon trade, the weakest since January. In a further sign of trade-related jitters, Chinas central bank unexpectedly injected 200 billion yuan ($31 billion) in medium-term funds into the banking system on June 19. Analysts said the move suggests the Chinese regime is worried about liquidity and the potential economic ramifications of a full-out trade war. Yi Gang, governor of the Peoples Bank of China, urged investors to stay calm. We will use a combination of monetary policy tools to maintain liquidity at an appropriate and stable level, he said. Also on June 19, the central bank issued a working paper recommending that banks cut their reserve requirement ratiosthe percentage of deposits that banks must have on hand as cashanother sign of anxiety over investor decisions. As China already faces a sharp downturn in investment growth, a mounting debt burden, and rising credit defaults, a disruptive trade conflict with the United States could make a bad situation tentatively worse, Japanese financial services firm Nomura said in a note on June 19. The International Monetary Funds (IMF) latest assessment of Chinas financial stability found that the countrys total debtincluding central and local government, corporate, and householdamounted to 2.55 times its GDP (Gross Domestic Product). As an investor, I am not optimistic with my investments, Gu Xiaoliang, a 31-year-old personal investor in Shanghai, told Reuters in an interview. Right now, I dont have clear judgment so Im just going to wait and see. Official Response China was quick to respond. The countrys commerce ministry pledged that should Trump go ahead with the $200 billion tariffs, Beijing would fight back with qualitative and quantitative measures. Its state-run newspaper, Global Times, also published a strongly-worded editorial on June 19 lambasting Trump. It predicted that if China were to go tit-for-tat on the $200 billion tariffs, the United States could impose another set of tariffs on $200 billion more of Chinese goods. On June 19, the White House said it plans to carry out this scenario should China retaliate further. Trump is evidently trying to scare China, it said, perhaps aware that China would have more to lose in a drawn-out trade dispute. The United States is Chinas biggest customer. In 2017, it purchased $505.47 billion of Chinese products, according to U.S. data. The newspaper further claimed that Beijings decision to impose tariffs on American goods was because the United States violated World Trade Organization (WTO) regulations by first slapping tariffs on Chinese imports. The United States and the European Union have filed complaints to the WTO, alleging discriminatory policies in China that put foreign firms at a disadvantage. In particular, both stressed that American firms were being forced to transfer proprietary technology to their Chinese joint-venture partners. Reuters contributed to this report. President Donald Trump holds up an executive order for the creation of a Space Force, during a meeting of the National Space Council at the East Room of the White House June 18, 2018 in Washington. (Alex Wong/Getty Images) Creation of Space Force Necessary to Counter Developing Threats The U.S. military will soon have a sixth branch focused on warfare in space, after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on June 18 directing the Department of Defense to create the Space Force. The decision will overrule plans that were pending in the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that would have created a Space Corps as a sub branch of the Air Force, the option that Congress was leaning toward. According to one of the leading experts on weaponry and military threats in space, Trumps decision was necessary to guard against near-future threats. Trump is doing a very good thing, said Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center. He will suffer inevitable outrage and insult from the left, but in 25 years Americans will be very grateful that we have a Space Force. Already, U.S. adversaries have near-future ambitions to control space resources and protocols, and have military doctrines for the destruction of U.S. assets in space that could disable key functions of the U.S. military. China, today, has a Space Force, Fisher said. It has not yet been publicly acknowledged, but it resides under the Strategic Support Force, the latest branch of the Peoples Liberation Army. The first commander of the PLA space warfare branch also commanded the Chinese space launch facility that in 2007 shot down one of the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) weather satellites, sending dangerous debris barreling through space. The incident demonstrated the PLAs anti-satellite weapon program and was a key incident that led Congress to forbid NASA from cooperating with China on space technology. With this and later incidents in mind, Fisher noted that Chinas first Space Force commander is now the most military-experienced Space Force commander in the world. Securing the EarthMoon System Trump noted during his June 18 announcement that his administration is reclaiming Americas heritage as the worlds greatest space-faring nation. The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons and to tame new frontiers, Trump said. But our destiny beyond the Earth is not just a matter of national identity, but also a matter of national security. When it comes to defending America, its not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space. Among the stated interests of the CCP is to mine resources on the moon, particularly helium-3, which could act as a fuel source for experimental fusion energy. Other nations and organizations have expressed similar interests, including proposals to capture and mine asteroids. NASA has also expressed plans to mine water on the moon that then could be split into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen could be a fuel source, allowing spaceships to use the moon as a refueling station and thus need less fuel weight when launching from Earth. According to Fisher, one of the CCPs near-term goals is to control the Earthmoon system, starting with a denial strategy and dominance of low Earth orbit. Controlling this system, it would be able to impose a toll on any ambitions for a space economy. In history, the opening of a global economy on maritime trade created conflicts and thus a need for security. The United States has since the middle of the 20th century provided security for maritime trade channels and shipping chokepoints under the Pax Americana, at no cost to other nations. The CCPs attempts to control the Earthmoon system also raise concerns about the Partys ambitions to create a Pax Sinica to replace the Pax Americana. Eventually, the CCP could charge a toll for using its channels and deny access when and where it deems fit. The Future of NASA Among Trumps ambitions is for the United States to carry out a manned mission to Mars. With private companies creating civilian technologies for space, the prospects of a space economy are becoming very real. The human race is finally beginning to reach a point where we can realistically envision a space economy. Costs for access to space are rapidly declining thanks to innovative billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mr. Bigelow, the inventor of inflatable space structures, Fisher said. With such a reduction in cost, it becomes economically feasible to go to the moon and go to Mars to find out whether a presence is economically viable. According to Chris Mattmann, associate chief technology officer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the creation of a Space Corps could help NASA develop new forms of technologies. I think this Space Force could be an innovative thing for that, he said. Good relations with the U.S. military are seen as a very positive thing. Mattmann previously worked closely with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development branch of the Pentagon, on its Memex program to mine and index the unseen parts of the internet known as the dark web. He said the new Space Force could help streamline this type of cooperation in the future. As the United States begins to travel further into space, Mattmann said, there could be a very real need for a force that can provide security. As much as those are necessary things for our civilian Earth defense as we go out and explore more, we have to provide something thats safe and secure there, too, he said. According to Fisher, the creation of the Space Force will help NASA to largely maintain its civilian character, rather than force the agency to get directly involved in military programs. That is of some value in order to attract cooperation from other democracies, and to provide a necessary contrast with the military-managed space programs of China and Russia, Fisher said. As the programs move forward, Fisher said the Space Force will need to show leadership in cooperating with both NASA and emerging private space companies such as SpaceX. It is possible that in its early existence, the space force would put a greater emphasis on helping the private sector reach the moon and reach Mars than it would to develop specific or new military capabilities for space, Fisher said. The space force can become a powerful advocate for NASA and for the emerging private space sector. By creating a Space Force, he said, President Trump is exercising the leadership that the Americans who voted for him have come to expect from him. Whether this is simply his gut instinct or his evaluation based on what he knows, it is a correct decision and will have far-reaching positive benefits for the United States of America. Falun Dafa practitioners from all over the world meditate at the New York Chinese Consulate and Union Square, on May 12, 2016 in New York City. (Youzhi Ma/Epoch Times) Falun Gong to Hold Mass Rally and March in Washington WASHINGTONPractitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong will take center stage in the U.S. capital on June 20 and 22, with a rally held on the west lawn of the Capitol and a march through the city. There will be 5,000 Falun Gong practitioners from all over the world who have come to Washington to call for stopping the persecution of Falun Gong in China, said Mindy Ge, spokesperson of the Falun Dafa Association of Washington. Ge explained that Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime for almost 19 years. It has been too long, Ge said. It has to end. Falun Gong, an ancient spiritual practice, teaches individuals to improve themselves by living according to the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance and by doing five sets of meditative exercises. There will be support from members of Congress and NGOs, who will call for ending the persecution, Ge said. Following the rally, a grand march will head down Pennsylvania Avenue, circle around the White House, and end at the Washington Monument. Other activities will include a candlelight vigil and demonstrations by Falun Gong practitioners of the disciplines slow-moving meditative exercises in large groups at various locations around Washington. One such demonstration will also be a character formation near the Washington Monument, in which practitioners perform the Falun Gong exercises while standing in such a way that, when seen from above, they form an image of the Falun, the symbol of Falun Gong. The candlelight vigil will be held to mourn the thousands of practitioners who have been killed during the persecution in China. Ge explained that in 1999, then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin feared that the Chinese people were preferring the traditional moral teachings of Falun Gong to the Communist Partys atheism and materialism, and so he started a campaign to eradicate the practice. Human rights organizations have documented mass detentions, widespread torture, and the harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners organs for use in Chinas large organ transplantation industry. Ge hopes that locals and tourists alike will come to enjoy the activities. People can learn a little about the practice and benefit from that. And maybe they can pray for ending the persecution, Ge said. Falun Gong Activities in Washington Wednesday, June 20, 2018 Public rally, grand march, group exercises Falun Gong group exercises 8 a.m.10 a.m. Public rally and speech on the West Terrace Lawn of the U.S. Capitol (Capitol Hill & Capitol Reflecting Pool) 10 a.m.11:30 a.m. Grand march 11:45 a.m.3:00 p.m. Falun Gong group exercises in front of the Washington Monument (close to Constitution Avenue) 3:30 p.m.6:10 p.m. Falun Gong group exercises at Freedom Plaza (Pennsylvania Avenue and 14th Street, NW) 3:30 p.m.6:30 p.m. Falun Gong group exercises in front of the Chinese Embassy (3505 International Place, NW) 3:30 p.m.6:30 p.m. FRIDAY, June 22, 2018 Falun Gong group exercises with a character formation at Washington Monument (close to Constitution Avenue) Falun Gong practitioners will perform the exercises while in a formation that represents the symbol of Falun Gong, the Falun. 8:30 a.m.1:30 p.m. Falun Gong group exercises at McPherson Square Park 2:30 p.m.4 p.m. Candlelight vigil at Washington Monument (close to Constitution Avenue) Mourning the deaths of Falun Gong practitioners persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party 8 p.m.10 p.m. Mr Kumaraswamy, who was in Delhi to attend a Niti Ayog meeting convened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Bengaluru: With disgruntled Congress legislators continuing to embarrass the JD(S)-Congress coalition government in Karnataka over Cabinet berths, chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy has appealed to Congress president Rahul Gandhi to step in and quell the rebellion in his party. Mr Kumaraswamy, who was in Delhi to attend a Niti Ayog meeting convened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, stayed back to meet Mr Gandhi and discuss the current political situation in the state with him, according to party sources . He is reported to have told him that the coalition government that came to power over a month ago, was yet to take off due to an open rebellion by a section of legislators de-manding Cabinet berths, and barring a couple of ministers like deputy CM G. Parameshwar, who was in charge of Bengaluru Development, a majority had still not got around to doing their job. Observing that senior leaders like M.B. Patil, H.K. Patil, Satish Jarkiholi, and Dr Sudhakar were openly rebelling, putting the coalition government in an awkward position, he is said to have noted that his intervention was not welcomed when he tried to pacify one of them. Sources said Mr Kumar-aswamy had also lamented former CM Siddaramaiahs stand against tabling a new Budget when it was a tradition to present a new Budget whenever a new government came to power. Maintaining that pressure was mounting on JD(S) leaders to show the Congress its place, he advised Mr Gandhi to go in for another Cabinet expansion soon, sources revealed. Florida Woman Went to Liquor Store at 11 p.m., Leaves 3-Year-Old in Car Overnight A Florida woman was arrested after she left a young child in her car overnight, leaving the 3-year-old girl overheated and drifting in and out consciousness, officials said on Sunday. The Seminole County Sheriffs Office, in a statement, wrote that Casey Dyan Keller, 33, of Sanford, was charged with child neglect with great bodily harm. The investigation began today at approximately 11:12 a.m. when deputies responded to the Vista Haven Apartments located in the 200 block of Petunia Terrace in unincorporated Sanford, in reference to a missing 3-year-old child left in a vehicle that was possibly stolen, officials said. The vehicle was discovered in the parking lot, not running with the windows were rolled up. Deputies found the missing 3-year-old child, who was overheated, the office said. The child was rushed to a local hospital where she remains in critical but stable condition, the sheriffs office added. Officials told ClickOrlando that the child is expected to make a full recovery. Keller had traveled to a liquor store on Saturday night with three children, returning home at 11:15 p.m. She took the two other children into an apartment, leaving the 3-year-old in the car. Keller realized that the child was missing, prompting her to call 911 to report it. Investigators found no evidence that the vehicle was tampered with or stolen and determined Keller left the child inside overnight. Keller was arrested and booked into the John E. Polk Correctional Facility on a $15,000 bond, the office stated. It upsets me very bad, said neighbor Brenda Johnson, ClickOrlando reported. I cried. Honestly, I cried. It shook me up pretty bad. She laid there lifelessly. I just cant see any mother thats a responsible mother to not know your kids in the car, especially all night, Johnson added. Johnson, who apparently witnessed the rescue, said that the officer pulled the child out of the car and ran to his truck really quick, then bolted to the hospital. Neighbor Barbara Pitts said Keller knocked on her door before she knew the child went missing. Last night she came and she was banging on my door, and I had no idea what was going on, and she did it for 30 minutes, and I kept trying to tell her she had the wrong door, Pitts told ClickOrlando. The two other children are now staying with family members. Keller is slated to appear in court on Monday. Watch Next: Why is Falun Gong Persecuted? Although its freely practiced in over 70 countries, doing this in China can lead to unlawful arrest, imprisonment, torture, or even death. The US Department of State seal is seen on the podium-lectern area in the State Department briefing room in Washington in 2013. (Paul J. richards/AFP/Getty Images) Judicial Watch Sues for Obama-era Records on Refugee Resettlement Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, has filed a FOIA lawsuit with the State Department on June 18 for records on where the Obama administration resettled refugees in 2015 and 2016, leading up to the presidential election. Judicial Watch is suing to find out which towns across America were, without input and over the objections of residents, targeted for refugee settlements by the Obama administration, said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, in a press release. And we are investigating to make sure now that the current State Department is being more transparent in its placement of refugees. The lawsuit follows a similar FOIA request filed by Judicial Watch on Feb. 23, 2017, which the State Department allegedly did not respond to. The previous request asked for records on locations where refugees were resettled in 2015 and 2016, records on the criteria used to determine the locations, and records showing names of organizations that promoted the locations. The Obama administration significantly increased the number of refugees resettled in the United States between 2015 and 2016. According to a release from the International Organization for Migration, 1,682 Syrian refugees were admitted into the United States in 2015, and this was increased to 12,587 Syrian refugees in 2016. This exceeded the 10,000 planned by former President Barack Obama. The report notes that altogether the United States resettled 85,000 refugees in 2016, which in addition to the Syrian refugees included 16,370 from Congo, 12,347 from Burma, 9,880 from Iraq, and 9,020 from Somalia. This was an increase from the close to 70,000 admitted in 2015. President Donald Trump suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program through his Executive Order 13769 on Jan. 27, 2017. According to Judicial Watch, 29,022 were admitted into the United States in 2017, which was the lowest number since 2002. Kansas Mother Asked to Pay $132,000 After 5-Year-Old Son Breaks Sculpture An insurance company wants a Kansas mother to pay $132,000 after her 5-year-old son damaged a sculpture at a community center. Surveillance footage shows two children playing in a room full of art on May 19. They run around the room, filled with many sculptures and paintings, while the three adults are seated, possibly reading magazines and chatting. The 5-year-old stops to climb one of the sculptures and ends up pulling down its top half. Its clear accidents happen and this was an accident, said Sarah Goodman, mother of the 5-year-old, via The Kansas City Star. I dont want to diminish the value of their art. But I cant pay for that. Goodman was with her husband and four children at the Tomahawk Ridge Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas, to celebrate a wedding. She said she didnt see the statue come down as she was saying her goodbyes and preparing to leave, according to the Star. Goodman said she saw the sculpture on the ground and didnt think it was badly damaged. She also said the sculpture was not properly secured in a place which families and children frequent, according to the Star. He probably hugged it, Goodman said, via the Star. Maybe my son hugged a torso because hes a loving, sweet nice boy who just graduated from preschool. Afterward, she received a letter from the insurance company asking for the $132,000. She said that nobody asked her if the boy was injured after the incident, according to the Star. This loss occurred when your son was in a closed area of the property and toppled a glass sculpture. Under common law in Kansas, you are responsible for the supervision of a minor child and your failure to monitor them during this loss could be considered negligent, read the letter, as obtained by the Star. The artist, Bill Lyons, valued the art at $132,000, according to the Star. Hence the reason why the insurance company asked for that amount from Goodman. I want to be reimbursed for the amount of time that I spent on it and for what I think it is worth, said Lyons, via the Star. The art was on loan to the city at the time it sustained the damage. The city has a responsibility to file a claim with our insurance company, and we do that any time city property is damaged, said Overland Park city spokesman Sean Reilly, via the Star. It will be up to the insurance companies to get this worked out. Watch Next: Surveillance Footage Shows Robber Attack Virginia Store Employee Kelloggs Recalls 1.3M Cases of Honey Smacks Cereal Over Salmonella Risk Kellogg Co is recalling an estimated 1.3 million cases of its Honey Smacks cereal from more than 30 US states due to the potential for Salmonella contamination, the company announced on Thursday, June 14. The US Food & Drug Administration said it worked with Kellogg to issue the recall after preliminary evidence linked the product to more than 60 illnesses. The FDA is working with the company to quickly remove this cereal from the marketplace, the agency said in a statement. The FDA said it has asked Kellogg to request that all retailers of the product immediately put up signs saying Honey Smacks cereal has been recalled and to remove the potentially contaminated product from shelves. The US health regulator also said it is inspecting the facility that manufactures Honey Smacks. Kellogg earlier on Thursday said it launched an investigation with the third-party manufacturer that produces the cereal immediately after being contacted by the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding reports of illnesses. The company said the affected products had use by dates of June 14, 2018 through June 14, 2019. The voluntary recall involves its 15.3 ounce and 23 oz. Honey Smacks packages. No other Kellogg products are impacted by the recall, the company said. Earlier this month, the FDA warned residents of eight US states about recalled packages of pre-cut melon linked to a Salmonella outbreak. They had been distributed to stores operated by Costco Wholesale Corp, Kroger Co, Walmart Inc, and Amazon.com Incs Whole Foods. The FDA and CDC are investigating that outbreak, which has also been linked to more than 60 illnesses and at least 31 hospitalizations in five states. No deaths have been reported. Salmonella can cause diarrhea and severe abdominal cramps lasting up to three days and is particularly dangerous to young children, frail or elderly people and others with weakened immune systems. It causes an estimated 1.2 million illnesses, 23,000 hospitalizations and 450 deaths in the United States each year, according to the CDC. By Tamara Mathias and Uday Sampath Kumar Watch Next: 5 Imported Foods From China You Should Avoid Syrian Democratic Forces watch as a coalition airstrike hits its target on a known Islamic State of Iraq and Syria location near the Iraq-Syria border, May 13, 2018. (DoD photo by Army Staff Sgt. Timothy R. Koster) Large ISIS Drug Cache Destroyed by US Coalition A large cache of drugs belonging to the terrorist group ISIS was destroyed by the U.S.-led international coalition on June 12 in southern Syria. The Pentagon said in a June 18 report that the drugs had an estimated $1.4 million value on the black market, and included more than 300,000 pills of captagon, an addictive amphetamine that is heavily used by ISIS members. Despite ISIS facade of Islamic purity, its criminal terrorists are known drug users and traffickers, the Pentagon report says. The report notes the cache was discovered in a de-conflict zone by the Syrian rebel group Maghawir al-Thowra, partners of the Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, whose mission is to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The capture and destruction of the cache cuts off the supply of drugs used by ISIS fighters, and prevents them from selling drugs in order to acquire other items, including weapons. Our dedicated partner forces are committed to the defeat-ISIS mission, said Army Maj. Gen. James Jarrard, commander of the Special Operations Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, in the Pentagon report. This is another great example of their dedication and professionalism in the fight against ISIS and in the protection of the people of southern Syria. According to Military Times, the drug captagon is often referred to as the Jihadi pill due to its heavy use among ISIS terrorists. It notes a case where 122 Chinese-made machine guns were found in an ISIS cache south of Mosul in Irq, and that each weapon had one to three pouches of an amphetamine drug attached to it. It cites a report from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, which states, Captagon has emerged as a conflict drug helping to sustain the war, by providing terrorist groups with a source of illicit funding. Man Attempts to Jump White House Fence An alarm went off after a man attempted to climb over the south side fence at the White House. Alex Thomas Miner, 29, climbed over a barrier at the south side of the White House and dropped a backpack at around 12:45 p.m. He was immediately taken into custody as Secret Service investigated the nature of the contents in the backpack. The Secret Service also blocked off the Ellipse and E Street, in addition to 17th Street and D Street. Jim Tripp, a visiting tourist from Seattle who captured the incident on video, told Fox 5 that once Miner grabbed the fence, the alarm went off. Miner then apparently shouted shoot me to the Secret Service officers. Authorities later found that the backpack was harmless. Miner was charged with unlawful entry. At the time, President Trump was at a signing ceremony in the Oval Office for the Safe Neighbourhoods Grant Program Authorisation Act of 2018. An individual climbed over a security barrier on the south side of the @WhiteHouse Complex between the Ellipse and E Street. The individual dropped a backpack and was immediately taken into custody on E Street by Secret Service Uniformed Division Officers. U.S. Secret Service (@SecretService) June 18, 2018 Watch Next: Comedian Gives Hilarious Rundown of Events That Led Up to Release of FISA Abuse Memo Chappel gained a huge YouTube following with a channel dedicated to exposing the truth about China. His foray into American politics is already proving to be a success. His channel, American Uncovered, can be found here. Two men, possible cartel lookouts, mask their faces on the Mexican side of the border near Nogales, Ariz., on May 23, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Mexican Cartels Absolutely Control the Southwest Border, Says Sheriff PHOENIXEvery time politicians and media discuss border security, one particular group of people is paying very close attention: Mexican cartels. Because across the border in Mexico we have a complete, organized, criminal business of trafficking humans and drugs into the United States, said Sheriff Andy Louderback of Jackson County, Texas. The cartels absolutely control the southwest border, he said. Every day, every minute, some penetration of the Texas border, California border, New Mexico border, Arizona borderevery minute, someone is preparing to send a load in, or traffick humans in, or some type of criminal activity is going on. Every minute of every day. Thats their job, thats what theyre committed to do, thats how they get paid. And thats what were up against. The cartels control the trafficking routes throughout Mexico and the entry points, or plazas, into the United States. [They also] maintain drug distribution cells in designated cities across the United States that either report directly to TCO leaders in Mexico or indirectly through intermediaries, according to the Drug Enforcement Administrations (DEA) 2017 national drug threat assessment. The cartels are also known as TCOs, or transnational criminal organizations. Different cartels control different areas along the southwest border. For example, the Sinaloa Cartel is dominant in California and Arizona, whereas the Gulf Cartel reigns supreme in southeast Texas. The DEA says six cartels have the biggest impact on drug trafficking into the United States: Sinaloa Cartel, Jalisco New Generation Cartel (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, or CJNG), Juarez Cartel, Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas Cartel, and Beltran-Leyva Organization. The Sinaloa Cartel is one of the oldest and most well-established. It runs drug distribution hubs in large cities including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago, according to the DEA. Everything that we workall the Sinaloa cartel guys, all the cartel cases that we dotheyre not just drug traffickers, theyre doing multiple different crimes, said Doug Coleman, special agent in charge of the Arizona DEA. But drug trafficking is still the primary business of all those criminal organizations in Mexico. Marlene Castro, a supervisory Border Patrol agent in Texass Rio Grande Valley Sector, said smuggling organizations bring migrants up from Central America to the U.S.Mexico border, which is defined by the Rio Grande in Texas, but you will not cross from that bank into the United States without paying [the cartels] some money. You have to at some point pay something. Sadly, a lot of women pay with their bodies, she said last year. There are cases where the womenwith the expectation of getting rapedprepare themselves by getting on birth control for the purpose of the journey. Cartels also pressure juveniles to transport drugs across the border; thousands of children cross the border every day to attend school. Leadership and Operations The leadership in Mexico gets more sophisticated the higher up the ranks you go, Coleman said. They carry 15 to 20 different cellphones, they never let anyone buy from them that they dont know and havent vetted, and theyre moving constantly, because we are always tracking them in Mexico. When you get down to the lower levels and you get to the point where you are talking to a guy maybe here in Phoenix that is a load driver, that is not particularly sophisticated. He gets paid $1,000 to take that load of coke back to Chicago. Cartel activity in the United States is mainly overseen by Mexican nationals (often in the United States illegally), or U.S. citizens of Mexican origin. The cartels operate in cells that have specific functions such as distribution, transportation, consolidation of drug proceeds, and money laundering, according to the DEA. In most cases, individuals hired to transport drug shipments within the United States are independent, third-party contractors who may be working for multiple Mexican TCOs, the DEA report says. U.S.-based Mexican TCO members generally coordinate the transportation and distribution of bulk wholesale quantities of illicit drugs to U.S. markets, while retail-level distribution is mainly handled by smaller local groups and street gangs not directly affiliated with Mexican TCOs. Coleman, who is based in Phoenix, said his cases intercept and attack the cartel leadership in Mexico as well as the cells that operate in the United States. At any given time, well have 125 to 150 open active cases going all the time against high-level drug traffickers. So it gives you an idea how many of them there are, he said. When we are working an investigation now that may be reaching across multiple states and multiple countries, we rarely take it all off at the same time. We take off cells at different times so that we can see what the next cell is going to do. The days of car chases and gun battles have given way to surveillance, internet investigations, and communications interceptions, Coleman said. The problem that we always have, of course, is that we have to play by a set of rules. We have search warrants, we have probable causethe bad guys have no rules, he said. And so were always chasing because when youre playing against a team that plays with no rules at all, your hands are tied behind your back a little bit. But thats why were so good. Our guys are very innovative, and they figure out to get around those obstacles that are in their way. The good thing about DEA agents is they never give up. Well chase a guy forever. I mean, well chase him to the ends of the earth. Lookouts and Scouts On May 23, to the west of Nogales, Arizona, two men sat under a tree in Mexico, right next to the fencewatching. The only thing in sight was a Border Patrol agent and his truck. He said they were most likely lookouts working for the cartel, either human- or drug-smuggling. Coleman said lookouts are usually watching Border Patrol. If they are human smuggling they watch to see when the Border Patrol guys are shift changing or they move out of the area. Then they make a call and then you will see 10 guys run across the border, he said. The cartels also put scouts up on mountains in the United States when they are running loads across through the desert, said Coleman. They will be calling out where to go and where not to go cos they are looking that way at Border Patrol and looking that way at the dope car, he said. We bust those encampments all the time. There will be a scout up there, hell have a car battery that is powering his radio, and then hell have his snacks and his water and he just hangs out up there for two weeks at a time, and then they move them out and bring new guys in. Violence Compliance is generally elicited through violence. Drug dealing is a dirty, nasty business that involves really bad people moving a really dangerous product for a lot of money, Coleman said. So any time there is an arrest or a take off of that load of dope thats worth a million dollars, somebody has to pay the price for that. Coleman said cartel-related violence in the the United States is usually at the lower levels, fighting over turf. In Mexico, its all-out war. A turf war in the United States usually involves two or three guys at the lowest level, that are shooting at a couple of guys that decided to sell rocks in their neighborhood, he said. In Mexico, youre talking about they are trying to take over large portions of land so they can control the trafficking routes into the United States. and so you have small armies of guys that are associated with the cartel. Its similar with a leadership change, such as when El Chapo or Osiel Cardenas were taken down. The guys that are underneath them all start vying for control. They kill the guys to get power, Coleman said. Border Security The heightened border security under the Trump administration is helping the DEAs efforts, said Coleman. Anything that we can do that makes the cartel change the way that they operate a little bit, gives us a chance to exploit that change, he said. And so additional security on the border makes them change the way that they are going to traffick the drugs in. But combatting smuggling and trafficking across the border is an uphill battle, said Louderback. Its a daily, 24-hour business. And this is what they do, he said. And Im not sure that a large portion of the United States, the population here, understand exactly the task that we have to try and stop these folks. Theyre well-funded, [they] have more money than the U.S. government is willing to put into thisbecause we dont have enough money, theres never going to be enough money, to do that. Cadets wait the start of the U.S. Military Academy Class of 2017 graduation ceremony at Michie Stadium on May 27, 2017 in West Point, New York. U.S. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images) Millitary Grad Who Posed With Communism Will Win Cap Officially Discharged The cadet who caused an uproar in the military community last year after he held a cap with the words Communism Will Win written inside has been officially kicked out of the U.S. Army. Spenser Rapone was booted by top officials at Fort Drums 10th Mountain Division with an other-than-honorable discharge after they accepted his resignation on June 18. In an earlier statement, they said they had given him a warning for conduct unbecoming of an officer. The graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point received widespread criticism for photos posted on his Twitter account following his graduation, one of them showing the smirking young man opening his uniform to reveal a red T-shirt underneath with an image of Marxist icon Che Guevara. The photos, posted in September 2017, also sparked death threats and caught the attention of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who called on the Army to remove Rapone from their ranks. Rapone, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a prominent communist front group, has become known as the commie cadet. Last year, Army officials condemned Rapones actions. Second Lieutenant Rapones actions in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Army, an Army statement read. The highly controversial cadet first took the contentious photos during his May 2016 West Point graduation, before posting them on social media a year later. He told The Associated Press that he believes he is a revolutionary socialist. Rapone, who remained unapologetic in the wake of the scandal, yet again added fuel to the fire by posting a photo on Twitter on June 18 showing him giving the middle finger to a sign at the entrance to Fort Drum. The photo was accompanied by the words One final salute. Communism is estimated to have killed at least 100 million people around the world. Watch Next: US Border Patrol: There is no policy to separate families The United States Border Patrol on Sunday allowed reporters to briefly visit the facility where it holds families arrested at the southern US border, responding to questions over the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy. Party insiders claim that Ms Mayawati is under pressure from those who matter to stay away from alliances. Lucknow: Is the BSP deliberately shying away from pre-poll alliances under pressure from certain quarters? So it seems. The BSPs refusal to ally with the Congress in Madhya Pradesh and the partys studied silence over its alliance with SP in UP has now set tongues wagging. Party insiders claim that Ms Mayawati is under pressure from those who matter to stay away from alliances. The claim gains ground when one takes into consideration the fact that after her appeal for opposition candidates in the Gorakhpur-Phulpur by-elections in March, Ms Mayawati has not uttered a single word on the future of the alliance. She did not issue any appeal to her voters for the Kairana and Noorpur by-elections and neither did she express any happiness over the Opposition victory. It is clear that she is under pressure from certain quarters not to forge an alliance because a division of non-BJP votes will help the BJP to return to power. We do not know what kind of pressure she is facing but we are certain that there is pressure on her, said a party insider. It is noteworthy that when SP chief Akhilesh Yadav announced earlier this month that he was ready to play a junior partner in the alliance with BSP and would be willing to give up few more seats if needed, it was generally believed that there would be no obstacles in the way of the alliance that makes for a winning combination. With 21 per cent dalits and 45 per cent OBCs, the alliance can easily demolish the BJP which had secured 39.7 per cent votes in the 2017 Assembly polls. It seems that this has scared the daylights out of the BJP which is trying all tricks to drive a wedge in the alliance, said a senior SP leader. More Technical Issues Leave Passengers in Limbo at Charlotte Douglas International Airport PSA Airlines, an American Airlines regional carrier, canceled all flights out of Charlotte Douglas International on Sunday and operated on a reduced schedule Monday morning, attributing the problem to a technical issue related to a computer glitch. Thousands of passengers were inconvenienced. The carrier had previously announced a technical issue when it had to cancel 275 flights on Thursday night and 400 on Friday, reported Fox News. But just days after the problem appeared to have been fixed, PSA is experiencing more technical difficulties. The problem is affecting pilot and crew schedules and flight operationsthey were not receiving assignments fast enough, officials told Channel 9. CANCELED | Thousands of travelers are stranded at @CLTAirport again because more technical problems have grounded an additional 70 flights. American Airlines says its sending IT workers to Ohio to fix the glitch but the problem isnt expected to be resolved until noon. @wsoctv pic.twitter.com/RBgAQYoKLy Mark Barber (@MBarberWSOC9) June 18, 2018 The problems are putting a strain on car rentals, as many are resorting to driving to their destinations. One employee said that 900 vehicles were brought in to accommodate the demand, according to Channel 9. American Airlines has sent IT specialists to Dayton, Ohio, to help PSA fix the computer glitch, and encouraged customers to double check their flight status. We understand recent cancellations have been frustrating for customers and are doing everything in our power to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. American is working to contact all those impacted, but please check your flight status before going to the airport, PSA Airlines wrote on Twitter. We understand recent cancellations have been frustrating for customers and are doing everything in our power to get things back to normal as quickly as possible. American is working to contact all those impacted, but please check your flight status before going to the airport. PSA Airlines (@PSAAirlinesInc) June 18, 2018 We are rebooking passengers and Americans Customer Relations department will be reaching out to all affected customers, American Airlines wrote in a statement. We encourage all customers flying out Sunday evening or Monday to check their flight status on aa.com or the American Airlines app. On Monday, Charlotte Douglas International Airport released the following statement: Charlotte Douglas International Airport continues to provide assistance to the airlines and our passengers as PSA and American Airlines work to resolve their operational issues. We are not sure when these airline issues will be resolved. This issue appears to be isolated to PSA flights. Passengers on other carriers are not affected by this issue. The airport remains in an irregular operations plan, which was activated Thursday to assist stranded passengers and we remain in that operational status. This includes extended concession and checkpoint hours, additional aviation department support staff and making available emergency supplies to travelers including diapers, wipes and formula, blankets and pillows. We are also assisting in coordinating ground support with additional busses to bring passengers back to the terminal, as necessary. We remain in constant communications with American Airlines and PSA as they continue to work to resume normal operations. DHS Secretary Nielsen Addresses Backlash to Family Separations at Border YUMA, ArizonaThe political and media firestorm that has erupted over the separation of parents and children at the border was called irresponsible and unproductive by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on June 17. Nielsen took to Twitter to say the department does not have a blanket policy of separating families at the border, but rather is enforcing existing policy. For those seeking asylum at ports of entry, we have continued the policy from previous administrations and will only separate if the child is in danger, [or] there is no custodial relationship between family members, or if the adult has broken a law, Nielsen wrote in a tweet. Both the Obama and Bush administrations separated families at the border for the same reasons. What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law, Nielsen said at a White House press briefing on June 18. At issue is the zero tolerance policy that Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April in a push to decrease and deter illegal immigration by prosecuting all adults who cross the border illegally, under 8 U.S.C. Section 1325(a). More than 50,000 illegal immigrants have been apprehended at the southwest border in each of the last three months. Most are family units from Central America who are seeking asylum; however, they can simply avoid prosecution and separation if they cross the border legally, at a port of entry. Prosecuting illegal border crossers means parents and children must be separated while the parent is held by the U.S. Marshals Service pending charges. Any accompanying child will be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services and will be reclassified as an unaccompanied minor, in accordance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA). Numbers from the Department of Homeland Security show that for the six weeks between April 19 through May 31, Border Patrol separated 1,995 children from 1,940 adults. In response to questions by reporters about the separation being child abuse, Nielsen said most of the minors currently in detention crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors. The vast, vast majority of children who are in the care of Health and Human Services right now10,000 of the 12,000were sent here alone by their parents. Thats when they were separated. So somehow weve conflated everything, but theres two separate issues, she said. Ten thousand of those currently in custody were sent by their parents, with strangers, to undertake a completely dangerous and deadly travel, alone. We now care for them. Sessions told the National Sheriffs Association in Florida on June 18 that the administration doesnt want to separate children from their parents. We do not want adults to bring children into this country unlawfully, placing them at risk, Sessions said. But we do have a policy of prosecuting adults who flout our laws to come here illegally instead of waiting their turn or claiming asylum at any port of entry. We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws. Since this time last year, the number of unaccompanied minors crossing illegally has increased by 325 percent, while family units have jumped by 425 percent, according to Nielsen. Since 2013, the United States has admitted more than half a million illegal immigrant minors and family units from Central Americamost of whom today are at large in the United States, she said. Operation Streamline The same policy of prosecuting all adults who cross illegally was part of a 2005 push by former President George W. Bush to decrease illegal immigration, named Operation Streamline. Sheriff Leon Wilmot from Yuma County, Arizona, said, at the time, the combination of a new border fence in his sector and the zero tolerance prosecution policy dramatically reduced illegal crossings and related crimes. We were the worst in the nation in 2005, 2006, Wilmot said on May 25. In 2005, mass incursions across the border in the Yuma Sector often left agents outnumbered 50 to 1, and apprehensions steadily increased to more than 138,000. At the same time Operation Streamline was enacted, Yuma tripled manpower, added fencing and vehicle barriers and mobile surveillance. By 2009, Yuma apprehensions fell to about 7,000. We were able to reduce it by 91 percent as far as ancillary crimes that we are dealing withthe deaths in the desert, the rapes, the robberies, the homicides, the burglaries, the thefts, Wilmot said. He attributes the decrease to two things. The fence is part one, but part two was 100 percent prosecutionif you did try to cross and you got caught you were held accountable. There were consequences, he said. So the combination, the fence slowed them down but they are going to find a way over it, under it, through it, whatever. But the real issue was when you got caught you went to jail, it stopped. Wilmot said the Obama administration stopped prosecuting all illegal border crossers and by fiscal year 2016, the number of apprehensions in Yuma climbed back up to more than 14,000. When they did away with that [zero tolerance], they are coming again, and the numbers that are coming through Yuma are way back up, he said. Its not where they were but it is disturbing to see the trend increasing again. The tactics changed again, too. When you take away the prosecution, rather than trying to sneak through, now they just walk across and give themselves up. The lax enforcement led to the so-called catch-and-release policy, under which hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossers were briefly detained before being set free into the United States with a court date several years down the road. Immigration courts are so backlogged that it can be five years from when someone is apprehended at the border to their court date. The immigration court backlog for all immigration cases sits at almost 700,000 casestriple that in 2009. Trading Blame Critics are blaming the Trump administration for the family separations, calling it an atrocity and likening the detention centers to concentration camps. Photos of children crammed into detention facilities are being shared on social mediahowever, many of those photos are from 2014, when the Obama administration detained hundreds of illegal immigrants that flooded the border, many of whom were unaccompanied minors. Former First Lady Laura Bush wrote an op-ed on June 18 that called the zero tolerance policy cruel and immoral. However, she neglected to mention that it was a critical component of her husbands immigration priorities. House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) released a statement on June 18 saying the policy leaves a dark stain on our nation. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced legislation on June 8 that would prevent the Department of Homeland Security from separating parents and children unless the child is being trafficked or abused by their parents. As of June 18, it has 37 Democrat and two independent cosponsors, but is unlikely to pass. Donald Trump, stop this atrocity. America does not take children from parents in this vile manner, she said on Twitter on June 18. The administration says it is simply following the laws set by Congress and it is up to the legislative body, specifically Democrats, to fix the loopholes in the immigration system. There are some who would like us to look the other way when dealing with families at the border and not enforce the law passed by Congressincluding some members of Congress, Nielsen said. Past administrations may have done so, but we will not. We do not have the luxury of pretending all individuals claiming to be a family are, in fact, a family. We have to do our job. We will not apologize for that. We are sworn to do that. Nielsen said the main loopholes Congress needs to fix include the TVPRA, which has a provision that says a minor from a noncontiguous country cannot be turned back to Mexico or flown back to their home countryeven if the individual is not a victim of trafficking, nor if their age, identity, credible fear status, or criminal background cannot be verified. Another loophole is the Flores Settlement Agreement, which mandates that a minor be transferred to HHS Office of Refugee and Resettlement within 72 hours of apprehension by Border Patrol. HHS is mandated to temporarily house the minors and then release them to a sponsor within the United States. Most are released within an average of 57 days. Under the same agreement, family units are transferred from Border Patrol to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which must release them after 20 days. The administration wants Congress to terminate Floresa Clinton-era settlement of a class-action lawsuitand fold relevant care provisions into the TVPRA. Asylum System Over the last 10 years, asylum claims have increased by 1,700 percent, Nielsen said, adding that Congress also needs to address loopholes that allow people to take advantage of the system. At the border, illegal immigrants can claim asylum by passing a credible fear screeningof which around 80 percent pass. They are then released into the country and are expected to submit an asylum application within a year. Half do not file an official asylum application within the requisite year, according to administration officials, and most will not show up to their subsequent immigration hearing. If applicants do file an asylum claim (which is free) and it has been pending for six months, then they are routinely provided with work authorizationregardless of the merit of the application. I have no doubt that many of those crossing our border illegally are leaving behind difficult situations. But we cannot take everyone on this planet who is in a difficult situation, Sessions said on May 7. He cited a 2012 Gallup poll, which found that 150 million people around the world would like to immigrate to the United States. Sessions clarified in a June 11 court ruling that individuals who are fleeing crime and domestic violence, and are not persecuted by their own government, do not fall under the asylum criteria. Our nations immigration laws provide for asylum to be granted to individuals who have been persecuted, or who have a well-founded fear of persecution, on account of their membership in a particular social group, but most victims of personal crimes do not fit this definitionno matter how vile and reprehensible the crime perpetrated against them, a Justice Department spokesman said on June 11. Nielsen said the administration will continue to enforce the laws until Congress changes them. To a select few in the media, Congress, and the advocacy community, I have a message for you: This Department will no longer stand by and watch you attack law enforcement for enforcing the laws passed by Congress, she said. We will not apologize or back down for doing the job the American people expect us to do. US President Donald Trump speaks to the media as he walks with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un during a break in talks at their historic US-North Korea summit, at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa island in Singapore on June 12, 2018. (Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images) North Korea May Enter the Fold The talking heads at CNN were nearly unanimous: President Donald Trump was a dupe for meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The neo-cons concur. Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, tweeted Thumbs up to tyranny. But when President Barack Obama normalized relations with Cuba, he was hailed as a peacemaker. It was about time, said many politicians and reporters, apparently not overly concerned with the Castro brothers propensity for dictatorship. In exchange for restoring diplomatic relations, normalizing trade, and dropping sanctions, Obama obtained nothing. No accord. No release of political prisoners. No return of fugitives, such as FALN bomber Guillermo Morales and Black Liberation Army leader Assata Shakur (previously known as Joanne Chesimard, convicted in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper in 1973). Nor was there any liberalization of Cubas draconian enforcement of statutes suppressing political expression. By contrast, Kim has released Americans he held prisoner and apparently has destroyed a nuclear weapons test site. They may be token gestures, but they signal to the world positive intentions. Likewise, Trump has suspended joint military exercises with South Korea, intended no doubt as a reciprocal gesture, though all the parties concerned understand that war games or no war games, the United States retains the capability to quickly pulverize North Korea. Both leaders are unpredictable and respond impulsively to perceived insult, yet history has placed them in a position from which there is the potential for significant results. Richard Nixon was lauded, appropriately, for taking the first steps toward normalizing relations with communist China. Now, the threat of military hostilities with Beijing is minimal. Trade wars, yes. Nukes, no. Whether by design or by temperament, Trump is the first U.S. president to use the appropriate approach with North Korea, recognizing it to be a Stalinist state that understands only one approach: strength. Our bombs are more powerful, we have more of them, and were willing to use them. Saddam Hussein was in the same mold. When told by his foreign minister that Iran had expressed a willingness to negotiate over the disputed Kush Islands, Saddam responded true to form, went to war, and lost. To him, the Iranian offer to negotiate could have meant only one thing: weakness. This is how dictators and brutes reason. Western leaders, who are book smart but without street sense, without an understanding of how tough guys, dictators, and criminals think, employ a naive approach: Lets all sit at the table and talk like reasonable people. How can we thus not arrive at a reasonable result? We saw the naive approachs disastrous consequences in the Arab Spring, the destabilization of Libya being a prime example. Muammar Gaddafi, having finally come into the fold, dropping his WMDs and providing the West with real assistance in the war on terror, was then abandoned by Washington and left to be murdered by the mob as the country descended into anarchy and became a haven for terrorists. Force without a willingness to apply it is worse than useless. Remember the bright Red Line drawn by Obama across the Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assads feet? When Assad crossed the line with chemical weapons, Washington reacted with panic and inaction, which was followed by its pathetic reliance on assurances by Putin that Russia could handle things for us. There was little outcry about the ObamaPutin relationship by the media, it should be noted. Trump has not been duped by Kim. On the contrary, by choosing, or stumbling, onto the correct approach, he has taken the first steps to pacify the Far East, to the benefit of the world. Desperate to find flaws in the presidents bridge-building, many in the media chose not to report the summit as the first step in a process, what diplomats refer to as the initiation of a dialogue, but rather pointed to the absence of major concessions by Kim as being indicative of failure. But this is not the case, according to State Department North Korea expert Patrick McEachern, who is currently a fellow in residence at the Wilson Institute. The summit was not meant to be a capstone summit, according to McEachern. He interpreted the joint statement as indicating that North Korea expects what the United States expectsthat is, a step-by-step process, with no indication that Kim expects a front-loading of concessions by the United States. PBS NewsHour correspondent Nick Schifrin opined that Kim Jong Uns use of if in his statementthat if the U.S. takes genuine measures for building trustindicates ill will and the North Korean leaders lack of commitment. Former CIA analyst and linguist Soo Kim added that after the summit, there is no tangible hope of improvement, though she offered no facts to support this conclusion. Kim Jong Uns statement, taken as a whole, belies her interpretationparticularly in light of North Koreas state-run media which, having previously demonized the United States and its leadership, is now portraying them in a positive light. Having exposed his people to his new worldview, and using the states propaganda tool to do it, Kim would be hard put to reverse his new stand without empowering political enemies at homein particular, hardline military officers. The road has been opened to eventual diplomatic ties, bringing North Korea into the community of nations, and thereby eventually reducing its sense of isolation and diminishing the likelihood of hostilities. Economic ties by definition enhance peace. War is bad for business. Marc Ruskin, a 27-year veteran of the FBI, is a regular contributor and the author of The Pretender: My Life Undercover for the FBI. He served on the legislative staff of U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and as an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, N.Y. Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. A vehicle of a motorcade believed to be carrying North Korean leader Kim Jong Un makes its way down Fuxingmennei Street in central Beijing, China, on June 19, 2018. (Jason Lee/Reuters) North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un Visits China After Summit With Trump North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in China on June 19, his third visit to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping this year. Kims visit, just a week after the historic summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore, did not come as a surprise. The two leaders met in Beijing. China welcomed Kim with a ceremony, complete with honor guards, at the Great Hall of the People, demonstrating that the two communist allies have each others backs. Xi told Kim that he was happy to see the positive outcome of his meeting with Trump, and the important consensus reached on denuclearization, according to Chinese state television. Unlike Kims previous two visits, in which Chinese state media announced Kims visits after he had already returned to Pyongyang, Kims third visit was broadcasted while he was still in China. Citing Chinese mouthpiece CCTV, Japanese media Kyodo News reported that Kim told Xi that if the agreement reached at the summit could be implemented step by step, denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula will open up a new and important situation. China is North Koreas most important diplomatic and economic backer, so Kim had an ulterior motive for wanting to visit China, according to Tang Jingyuan, China current affairs commentator, in an interview with New York-based New Tang Dynasty Television (NTD). Tang said that Kim was trying to have his bread buttered on both sides, meaning that because he was able to meet Trump, Kim would try to leverage his improved political stature to obtain more economic assistance from China. At the same time, Tang explained that Kim would want China to publicly endorse the agreement between North Korea and the United States so that Kim would have better pull in any future negotiations with the United States. South Koreas foreign ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-deok said South Korea and China shared the same strategic goal of completely denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. Our government hopes China will play a constructive role in resolving this problem, Noh told a regular briefing. We hope Chairman Kim Jong Uns visit will contribute to that. Reuters contributed to this report. Russian Who Offered Clinton Dirt to Trump Campaign Outed Himself as Former FBI Informant A Russian man that offered to sell damaging information on Hillary Clinton to the campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump revealed in earlier court documents that he had been a long-time FBI informant. The man, Henry Greenberg, offered to sell the unspecified information for $2 million in late May, 2016, but the Trump campaign associate refused. Greenberg, who also used the name Oknyansky, filed two dozen documents with a federal court in 2015, showing an FBI agent repeatedly brokered his entry into the United States on a special visa for people assisting law enforcement. I cooperated with the FBI for 17 years, often put my life in danger, he said in an Aug. 18, 2015, court declaration under oath. Nine months later, he came uninvited to a gallery opening in Florida organized by a public relations firm run by Michael Caputo, who was working for the Trump Campaign at the time. There, he approached Caputos business partner, Sergey Petrushin, and said he had information helpful to the Trump Campaign. Petrushin told the Washington Post he called Caputo and handed the phone to Greenberg. Caputo told the paper that Greenbergs Russian accent didnt raise his suspicion. At the time, talking to Russians wasnt considered controversial yet and Caputo himself used to be an adviser to Boris Yeltsin, the first post-communist Russian president. Let me get somebody to vet it for you, Caputo recalled saying to Greenberg. He then connected Greenberg with Roger Stone, who lived in Florida. Stone is a Republican strategist and lobbyist who worked early on in Trumps campaign and had long been an advisor to the candidate. However, Trump fired Stone from his campaign in August 2015. Stone met Greenberg on May 29, 2016, in Sunny Isles. Stone told the Post that Greenberg came in a Trump shirt and a Make America Great Again hat. When Greenberg made his offer, Stone told him, You dont understand Donald Trump. He doesnt pay for anything. He said the two then parted ways. Both Stone and Caputo said they let the meeting out of their minds. But last month, Caputo was questioned about the meeting by the team of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is probing Russian meddling in the U.S. election and allegations of the Trump campaign colluding with the Kremlin. Caputo said Muellers people were greatly interested in his contact with Greenberg and apparently had access to text messages between Stone and Caputo from May 2016two months before the FBI claimed in leaks to The New York Times to have started the Trump-Russia investigation. The prosecutors showed Caputo the following texts from May 29, 2016: Caputo: How crazy is the Russian? Stone: Wants big &$ for the info- waste of time Caputo: The Russian way. Anything at all interesting? Stone: No Caputo said the messages refreshed his memory and his lawyer had since sent a letter to the House Intelligence Committee to amend his earlier testimony, where Caputo denied getting any offers for Clinton campaign information from a Russian. Greenberg acknowledged meeting with Stone, but said he didnt want any money and only accompanied his Ukrainian friend, Alexei, a disgruntled former Clinton Foundation employee wanting to spill the beans. The Clinton Foundation denied ever employing anyone named Alexei. Greenberg said his friend had since moved back to Ukraine and that theyre not in contact. Stone said Greenberg came alone. Caputo and Stone believe Greenbergs offer was arranged by the FBI, something Greenberg denied. Caputo hired a private investigator to look into Greenbergs background. The investigator collected extensive court records, media articles, and social media posts that showed Greenberg, 59, has an extensive criminal record of assault with a deadly weapon, theft, assault, DUI, and domestic violence in the United States, and at least two charges of theft in Russia, totalling $5 million. In the 2015 court papers, Greenberg said he stopped working with the FBI in 2013 after his handler retired and the FBI Miami Field Office failed to deliver on a promise to get him an immigrant visa, and instead handed him over to Homeland Security for deportation. However, he hasnt been deported since. It strains credulity that US immigration services would allow a violent out-of-status alien arrested four times in two states to remain in the country without supervision, the investigator noted, and suggested Greenberg has been shielded from deportation by a deal with the government. Watch Next: SpyGateCollusion Scandal bigger than Watergate [Part 1/2] Those Involved to Take Down Trump Americas most powerful agencies were weaponized against President Donald Trump in a collusion scandal perpetrated by top officials in the #Obama administration. Saudi-Led Coalition Captures Large Areas of Yemens Hodeidah Airport Arab coalition troops stormed the airport in Yemens main port Hodeidah on Tuesday and captured large areas of the compound in battles with Iran-aligned Houthis, according to a Yemeni military source, the UAE news agency, and local residents. Residents of the strategic Red Sea city said battles were also raging on the coastal road leading to the densely populated city center from the airport, with Apache helicopter gunships of the Western-backed coalition providing close air support. Wresting the airport from the Houthis would be a major step towards a takeover of Hodeidah by coalition-backed forces. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pledged a swift assault to avoid disrupting aid deliveries to Yemen through the port. We can hear the sounds of artillery, mortars and sporadic machinegun fire. The Houthis have been using tanks, a resident close to the coastal strip told Reuters by telephone, asking not to be identified. Water has been cut off to many of the areas near the Corniche area because the Houthis have dug trenches and closed water pipes. Many people are fleeing these neighborhoods and going deeper into the city center. Saudi and UAE state media accused the Houthis of shelling civilian districts. Residents said the Houthi tanks were targeting coalition forces. The Arab alliance launched the onslaught on Hodeidah, the Houthis sole port, on June 12 to try and turn the tables in a long-stalemated proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has exacerbated turmoil across the Middle East. They have stormed the airport, an anti-Houthi Yemeni military source told Reuters earlier on Tuesday. Large swathes of the airport compound had been taken by coalition forces, according to UAE state news agency, WAM. Coalition warplanes had carried out more than 40 strikes on the airport since the morning, Houthi media said. The escalation in fighting has wounded and displaced dozens of civilians and hampered humanitarian agencies trying to send vital aid to million of Yemenis via the Red Sea port. Terrified Tuesdays battles spread panic among local inhabitants. My children are terrified. The fighting and the sounds of explosions are everywhere and we are stuck in our house in the district of Rabsa with no running water, Iman, a 37-year-old mother of two, said tearfully. What have we done for all of this? Mohamed Sharaf, 44, a civil servant, said he had sent his entire family to Sanaa, the Houthi-held inland capital, several days ago and he was getting ready to leave himself. There is death and destruction everywhere in this city. The United Nations fears the offensive will worsen what is already the worlds most urgent humanitarian crisis, with 22 million Yemenis dependent on aid, and an estimated 8.4 million believed to be on the verge of starvation. U.N. officials estimate that 600,000 people live in and around Hodeidah and that in a worst-case scenario the battles could cost up to 250,000 lives. Hodeidah port remained open on Tuesday with the U.N. World Food Programme hastening to unload three ships containing enough food for six million people for one month, WFP spokeswoman Bettina Luescher told reporters in Geneva. UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said on Monday the coalition was taking a measured approach to minimize risks to civilians, and allowing the Houthis an escape route inland to their bastion in Sanaa. The Arab states say their aim is to seize the airport and port quickly and avoid street battles in the city center. But the Houthis were well dug into Hodeidah as it constitutes the key supply line to territory they control including Sanaa. Martin Griffiths, U.N. peace envoy for Yemen, returned to Sanaa on Saturday, four days after the coalition assault on Hodeidah began, in an apparent effort to dampen hostilities. But he departed on Tuesday without comment, witnesses said, leaving unclear whether any headway was made. A member of the Houthis ruling politburo, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, denied Gargashs assertion that the talks with Griffiths had focused on handing over Hodeidah because this request is unrealistic. During all his visits, the envoy has discussed a comprehensive political solution that addressesall fronts and not only Hodeidah, he told Reuters by telephone. The coalition intervened in Yemens war in 2015 to try and unseat the Houthis, restore the internationally recognized Yemeni government in exile and thwart what Riyadh and Abu Dhabi see as Irans expansionism in the region. The Houthis, who control the most populated regions in the chronically unstable nation of 30 million people, deny they are puppets of Iran. They say their movement reflects a popular revolt against state corruption and aims to protect Yemen from foreign invasion. Taking Hodeidah could hand a long-sought edge to the Arab alliance which, despite superior weaponry and firepower, has failed to defeat the Houthis in a grinding war that has killed more than 10,000 people. By Mohammed Ghobari. Additional reporting by Dahlia Nehme and Maha El Dahan, Stephanie Nebehay; Writing by Ghaida Ghantous Watch Next: Kushner Talks Peace in Middle East at US Embassy Jerusalem Dedication Ceremony Search Called Off for Missing 12-Year-Old Swimmer in Virginia The search for a 12-year-old swimmer who disappeared off the Virginia shore has been called off with no body. The search started Saturday, June 16 around 7 p.m. when a child disappeared about 50 yards off Norfolk, Virginias Ocean View Pier. Three children were spotted struggling in the water near the pier Saturday evening. A family member was able to rescue two of the children, WTKR reported, but could not reach the third. According to the Coast Guard, witnesses saw the child go under water about 50 yards offshore. The Coast Guard, Norfolk Fire and Rescue, and the Norfolk Police Department all searched for the boy or his body, using divers and an underwater grid search. The Coast Guard called off its search around 12:30 p.m. Sunday, June 17, WTVR reported. Norfolks Fire and Rescue and the police department kept on until about 5:45 p.m. Sunday before also calling off their searches. Watch Next: Firefighter Going Over 100 mph Before Deadly Crash Taiwans President Tsai Ing-wen (C) watches during the 'Han Kuang military exercise, some 4 miles from the city of Magong on the outlying Penghu islands on May 25, 2017. (Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images) Senate Passes Defense Bill Calling for Joint Military Exercises with Taiwan In another show of support for Taiwan, the U.S. Senate passed its latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which contains a clause calling for the United States to participate in exercises with the Taiwanese military. Observers say this measure would demonstrate U.S. resolve against Beijings growing aggression toward the island nation. The NDAA, which passed June 18 with an 85-10 vote, will now be the basis for negotiations with the House on a final bill. The annually renewed bill is a collection of policies and procedures that Congress makes for the Department of Defenses programs and activities. While the provisions on Taiwan are only a tiny part of the massive bill, it notably calls for U.S.Taiwan joint military exercises, an idea that almost certainly will invite objections from China, which considers Taiwan one of its provinces. The Secretary of Defense should promote Department of Defense policies concerning exchanges that enhance the security of Taiwan, the bill stipulates. This includes U.S. participation in appropriate Taiwan exercises, such as the annual Han Kuang exercise and also Taiwans participation in appropriate U.S. exercises. Han Kuang is the code name for the annual Taiwanese military exercise that typically is held in spring or at the beginning of summer. The exercise usually focuses on preparing the countrys moderately sized military to repel an attack or outright invasion from the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), which has seen rapid growth and modernization in recent decades. The bill only expresses the the sense of the Senate and as such does not legally compel the administration to act. Observers say however that it reflects the growing sense in the U.S. Congress of the need to push back against Beijings growing military provocations. It would be a meaningful step forward in enhancing U.S.Taiwan defense cooperation and thus deterrence against China, said Russell Hsiao, executive director of Global Taiwan Institute, who noted that participation needs to mean more than simply observing for such an act to have a greater effect. Parshuram told SIT officials that he met a man in Sindhagi, who assured him of all support if he was successful in killing Gauri. Bengaluru: Parshuram Waghmare, who allegedly pulled the trigger on journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh on September 5 last year, has told his interrogators that though he was paid Rs 13,000 for the hit, he did it because of her anti-Hindu views. I didnt do it for money. I agreed to do it because her views were anti-Hindu, Parshuram, 29, tolf the Special Investigation Team. He also told SIT officials that he met a man in Sindhagi, who assured him of all support if he was successful in killing Gauri. Parshuram said that he was given an advance of Rs 3,000 for food and accommodation in the city. After the murder, an unknown man handed him Rs 10,000 and he left the city soon after. After Gauris murder, I left for my hometown and no one contacted me, Parshuram allegedly told the SIT officials. Parshuram, who used to work at a utensil shop, stopped going to work after the murder. He did not discuss the murder with anyone, including his family members. He acted normal and this made his family members believe that he was not involved in the case when the officials picked him up, the SIT sources said. After the murder, Parshuram had organised a Hindu gathering in Vijayapura. He refused to comment on it when we questioned him, they said. We will continue to grill Parshuram to get more details on the man he met in Sindhagi. He is cooperating with us, an officer said. Prime Minister Theresa May finishes speaking following visiting patients at the Royal Free Hospital on June 18, 2018 in London, England. (Stefan Rousseau - WPA Pool/Getty Images) Setting Up New Showdown, Britains May Rejects Brexit Proposal LONDONPrime Minister Theresa May cannot accept a proposal to hand parliament more control over Brexit, her spokesman said on June 19, setting up a showdown with lawmakers who want the right to step in if Britain risks crashing out of the EU with no deal. May has struggled to get backing for an EU withdrawal bill that would cut ties with the bloc. She tried to find a compromise last week with pro-EU lawmakers in her Conservative Party, but the arrangement fell through. On Wednesday she will again try to head off a rebellion by pro-EU Conservatives over their demand for a meaningful vote on any Brexit deal. The pro-EU Conservative lawmakers want parliament to be able to intervene before Britains deadline to leave the EU by next March, if Mays government either fails to negotiate a deal with Brussels or if it reaches a deal that lawmakers reject. The government says giving parliament too big a say would tie its hands in talks, and has offered instead to give parliament a vote on a statement on its next steps. With no majority in the House of Commons, it takes only a handful of Conservatives to vote against the government for May to lose. But one lawmaker said ministers may have won over some of the rebels who had threatened to vote against its proposal. With party officials still trying to persuade lawmakers, Mays spokesman expressed hope that all MPs (members of parliament) will be able to support the governments position rather than a competing one which its backer, Conservative Dominic Grieve, says offers a meaningful vote. Grieves amendment has already won backing from the unelected House of Lords, setting up a vote in the elected Commons. We cannot accept the amendment on (a) meaningful vote agreed in the Lords, the spokesman told reporters, saying the proposal would allow parliament to direct the government on its approach to exiting the EU, binding the prime ministers hands and making it harder to secure a good deal for the UK The argument centers on whether Britain should be able to leave the EU with no deal governing its departure, which most businesses say would be a catastrophic outcome. One of Mays mantras is that no deal is better than a bad deal and Brexit campaigners say Britain would lose one of its negotiating tools if the government cannot threaten to walk away from the talks, which have all but stalled. One pro-Brexit Conservative lawmaker, Andrew Bridgen, said it was time to face down the rebellion. Its a fight weve got to have and its best sooner rather than later. If rebellions arent quashed, they only grow, Bridgen told Reuters. But Grieve, the pro-EU Conservative lawmaker who has led efforts to hand parliament a greater say, said he was still looking forward to having discussions with the government to find a way out of the dispute. I dont want to collapse the government at all, he told Sky News. But if we have no deal at all we are on the middle of frankly an extraordinary crisis. Theresa Mays Justice Minister resigned last week, saying he could not support the governments position on Brexit. Lee said in a statement: The practicalities, logistics, and implications of leaving the EU are far more complex than was ever envisaged and certainly more complex than the people were told in 2016. The UK is not going to be ready in time, neither is the EU. The outcome that is emerging will be neither fully to leave the EU, nor fully to stay. This is not an outcome for which anyone knowingly voted. In my view, this raises the important principle of legitimacy. The Department of Justice in Washington on June 17, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) 6-Year Prison Sentence for Nebraska Man Who Possessed Child Pornography Fighting child pornography and child sex abuse a focus of Trump administration A 46-year-old man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after police discovered on his computer dozens of pornographic images involving children. According to the Department of Justice (DOJ), the material included images and videos from 81 known child pornography series. The material possessed by Douglas Goldsberry of Elkhorn, Nebraska, also included depictions of infants and depictions involving bondage of children. Police had discovered the material on Goldsberrys digital devices after investigating allegations of pandering. He has been arrested in May 2017 after he was suspected of ordering escorts to his neighbors home without their knowledge. Goldsberry will serve his federal sentence for possessing child pornography concurrent with a state prison sentence for the pandering. Focus of Trump Administration The DOJ under the Trump administration has made combatting child sex abuse a key focus. On June 12, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that his department had arrested 2,300 people across the country on charges related to child sex trafficking, child sex abuse, and the production of child pornography. Among those arrested were Americans who abused children overseas, including in Thailand and the Philippines. FBI Director Christopher Wray revealed on June 14 that his agency so far this year rescued more than 1,000 children from child sex predators. This year alone, weve recovered 1,305 kids from child predatorssome as young as 7 months old, Wray said. According to the International Labor Organization, nearly 5 million people around the world are currently being sexually exploited. Nearly 1 million of those are children. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump signed the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 bill into law, providing law enforcement and victims with more tools to fight sex trafficking. No child should ever have to endure sexual abuse, Sessions said in a statement on June 12. And yet, in recent years, certain forms of modern technology have facilitated the spread of child pornography and created greater incentives for its production. U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walk in the Capella Hotel after their working lunch, on Sentosa island in Singapore June 12, 2018. (Susan Walsh/Pool via Reuters) South Korean Minister Calls for Cooperation in Achieving US-North Korea Summits Promise South Korea Vice-Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam admitted on Monday that the U.S.-North Korea agreement made in Singapore on June 12 provided the structure on which a full agreement will need to be built. The minister was responding to critics who have charged that Pyongyang has not yet conceded its nuclear ambitions, despite the appearance of a successful summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. In a joint statement with Trump following the summit on June 12, Kim promised that he will commit to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, though no specific details such as a timeline or method for disarmament were given. Trumps summit with Kim was loudly hailed by South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who has a record of supporting a conciliatory approach to North Korea. Some international observers also see the unprecedented meeting as instrumental in breaking the ice with the nuclear-toting Pyongyang regime. Many observers, however, are deeply skeptical of Kims promises, noting that North Korea has not yet demonstrated its commitment to fully liquidate its nuclear arsenal, which includes thermonuclear warheads that could be mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles and used to attack the continental United States. I am aware of the critical voices against the Singapore statement, Lim said at a forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington D.C. on June 18. Those who criticize [the Singapore agreement] may ask: Where is the beef? My answer would be the Singapore statement is the bone on which flesh should be added, consider it as the structural foundation of a house. It is our duty to turn this into a complete house. In this handout image provided by the News1-Dong-A Ilbo, a North Korean soldier explains the demolition process of the Punggye-ri nuclear test facility to the media at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site on May 24, 2018 in Punggye-ri, North Korea. (News1-Dong-A Ilbo via Getty Images) While calling on the United States and international observers to be optimistic about the future of the Korean peninsula following the historic summit last week, Lim also said that to make the Trump-Kim agreement work, both Washington and Seoul need to work together to add substance to the skeleton framework. Sue Mi Terry, a senior fellow and Korea chair at CSIS, said at the forum that North Korea had already gained a lot from the Singapore summit, such as a perceived relaxation in U.S. maximum pressure strategy, and the fact that Kim Jong Un gained legitimacy by meeting with Trump. Many sceptics of the Singapore summit believe that Kim will renege on the promises of denuclearization as soon as North Korea regains economic steam following a potential lifting of U.S. sanctions. INorth Korea has a long record of violating agreements, such as a string of six-party talks it conducted with United States and others throughout the 2000s. Lim promised that South Korea will continue to enforce U.S. sanctions on North Korea, until the Kim regime takes genuine steps to denuclearization. North Korean media have claimed that the progress to denuclearization would be step by step and reciprocal, with sanctions coming off as progress was made. On June 14 in Seoul, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a different interpretation of the meaning of the summit. President Trump has been incredibly clear about the sequencing of denuclearization and relief from the sanctions, Pompeo said. We are going to get complete denuclearization; only then will there be relief from the sanctions. Maajid Nawaz speaks on stage as The Business of Fashion presents VOICES on Dec. 2, 2016 in Oxfordshire, England. (John Phillips/Getty Images for The Business of Fashion) Southern Poverty Law Center Pays $3.3 Million to UK Reformist Put on Anti-Muslim Hate List An Islamic extremist-turned counterextremist, chat show host, mayoral candidate, and liberal advocate of secular islam who grew up on the streets of Britain, Maajid Nawaz doesnt fit a simple label, as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) learned at their own cost. On June 19, SPLC announced a $3.3 million settlement for placing Nawaz and his counterextremism organization Quillam on its hate list of anti-Muslim extremists. The settlement also compelled SPLC to apologize for including Islamic reformist Nawaz on the watchlist, where he appeared alongside extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and members of neo-Nazi organizations. Other groups that found themselves on the list, describing themselves simply as conservative organizations, said the settlement showed that SPLCs hate map was motivated by a progressive agenda. We were able to fight back against the Regressive Left and show them that moderate Muslims will not be silenced, Nawaz said in a statement issued by Qiillam. The regressive left is a pet phrase Nawaz, who classes himself as a true liberal, often riffs on during his British weekly radio show on LBC to criticize certain progressives. Nawaz founded counterextremism organization Quillamthe first in the worldto tackle the narratives that give rise to the extremist views driving Islamic terrorism. Maajids work is informed by years spent in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group, and his gradual transformation toward liberal democratic values, says a statement on the Quillam Foundation website. Having served four years as an Amnesty International adopted prisoner of conscience in Egypt, Maajid is now a leading critic of his former Islamist ideological dogma while remaining a secular liberal Muslim. Nawaz made a public appeal for donations to sue the SPLC for defamation back in July 2017. Speaking at the time, he said, The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, who made their money suing the KKK, was set up to defend people like me, but now have become the monster they have claimed they wanted to defeat. Ive been attacked countless times by religious fanatics, but I never thought factions on the left, who are meant to fight for the rights of people like me, would try to silence my voice, he added. In a statement issued on June 19, the SPLC said it offered its sincerest apology to Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation for including it in its publication A Journalists Manual: Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. It was our opinion at the time that the Field Guide was published that their inclusion was warranted. But after getting a deeper understanding of their views and after hearing from others for whom we have great respect, we realize that we were simply wrong to have included Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam in the Field Guide in the first place. However, Nawazs lawyers highlighted the fact that for two years the organization refused to retract its advice. Its a shame that it took impending litigation for the Southern Poverty Law Center to finally set the record straight and admit it was wrong all along, said Megan Meier, a partner at Clare Locke that represented Nawaz. Quilliam and Mr. Nawaz do admirable work, and we are honored to have restored their reputations and achieved this victory on their behalf. One of the 954 groups listed on the SPLCs hate map is The Family Research Council, which describes its mission as advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a Christian worldview. Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin said of the SPLC settlement in a statement, This massive settlement validates what weve been saying all along: The SPLCs illegitimate hate map is motivated by its radical progressive political agenda. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building is seen in Washington on Feb. 19, 2014. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images) States Seek to Expand Local Tax Deductions Narrowed by Congress Individual taxpayers may be caught between federal and state governments on conflict over SALT deductions Under the new tax code, taxpayers who itemize their deductions will be subject to a cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductions. States with higher individual income and property tax rates have objected to this cap and have created tax maneuvers to avoid the new limit. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act limits an individuals deduction for SALT to $10,000. Any state and local individual income or property tax payments in excess of that amount will no longer be deductible. New York, New Jersey, and California are some of the states attempting to use charitable contributions as a workaround to the new federal limit. One idea is to set up charitable trusts for education or general welfare purposes so that taxpayers can reduce their property tax liability by making a contribution to the charitable trust, said Steven Ebert, a partner at Barton LLP, a New York-based law firm. Conceptually, when you donate to a charity, you can receive a tax write off, he added. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), however, warned it would not tolerate states trying to skirt the federal limit. On May 23, the IRS issued a notice on state and local tax deductions and advised taxpayers to proceed with caution. 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 IRS stated in the notice. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin earlier rebuked states that were looking for loopholes. Its one of the more ridiculous comments to think that you can take a real estate tax that youre required to make, and dress that up as a charitable contribution, he said at a White House press briefing in January. I hope that the states are more focused on cutting their budgets and giving tax cuts to their people in their states than they are on trying to evade the law. Charitable Contributions New York was the first state to create a SALT deduction cap workaround. Gov. Andrew Cuomo claimed the SALT limitation will cost New York taxpayers $14.3 billion. He signed legislation on April 17 that provides new options for tax-deductible charitable contributions. Under the new law, the state-operated charitable funds permit taxpayers to claim a state tax credit of 85 percent of the donation to health care and education funds. The California State Assembly is considering two bills aimed at the SALT limitation. Similar to New York, both bills would allow an individual income tax credit of 85 percent of contributions to the California Excellence Fund. On May 4, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law a workaround bill that allows taxpayers to contribute to a municipal or school district charitable fund and get a credit on their property tax bill of up to 90 percent of the donation. Additionally, Illinois, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have related legislative actions in progress to skirt the federal deduction limit. States claim that they are not creating a tax loophole. This charity contribution mechanism has been in place and operating with no IRS objection for years in states like Missouri and Arizona. Ebert, however, believes that there is a problem with the new charity contribution workarounds. The IRS is highly unlikely to approve the new structure, as the so-called contributions do not bear the hallmarks of genuine charity. Thats going to be a very big political debate, he said. When they donate, taxpayers are getting a corresponding reduction in property taxes. According to IRS regulations, taxpayers cannot deduct as a charitable contribution any payment for which they receive a benefit in return. So the counter argument from the IRS and the federal government would be that the states are trying to create a loophole, not a real charity with donative intentions, he said. Thats going to be the tension. Despite the state efforts to circumvent the new cap on state and local tax deductions, the IRS warns taxpayers to be mindful that federal law controls the proper characterization of payments. Hence, while state governments will create their own standards, the IRS has the right to audit individual taxpayers and as a result, taxpayers may end up fighting with the federal government by themselves, Ebert said. This will potentially be very, very messy, he said, adding that individual taxpayers will be caught between the federal and state authorities. It is hard to know how the states and the federal government will settle the conflict, but millions of households may fall into this situation. Hence, instead of going after individual taxpayers, the federal government should seek to have a broader negotiation with states, he said. In 2015, the average New Yorkers SALT deduction was more than $22,000. In New Jersey and California, those deductions were nearly $18,000. Income Tax Deduction In addition to charitable donations, states like New York are devising mechanisms that allow statewide payroll taxes to be paid by employers. States are talking about partially switching from a state income tax to a payroll withholding paid by the employer, Ebert said. By shifting the income tax from an itemized deduction on the personal return to a business expense on the business return, he explained, the states would solve the SALT limitation problem as businesses are not capped on ordinary and necessary business expense deductions. The states would be in a strong position with the payroll tax withholding vis-a-vis the federal government as to any limit, but would now have a new problem, he argued. The employers have to come up with extra dollars to offset the loss and so may have to negotiate with employees to reduce their compensation, which would be a logistical nightmare, he said. The Treasury Department has not provided much guidance on this matter. The states are still contemplating this, but at the end of the day, its a private decision by the businesses, said Ebert. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was signed into law on Dec. 22, 2017, narrows itemized deductions to simplify the tax code. However, it nearly doubles the standard deduction for individuals from $6,350 to $12,000 and for married couples filing jointly from $12,700 to $24,000. It also reduces the individual tax rates but keeps the existing seven tax brackets. Under the new law, the individual tax rates are set at 10 percent, 12 percent, 22 percent, 24 percent, 32 percent, 35 percent, and 37 percent. The new code expands the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 for both individuals and married couples filing jointly. Many individual income tax provisions, including the child tax credit, will expire by the end of 2025, and the old rules will take effect unless the provisions are extended. According to Republican leaders, tax reform will simplify tax filing and enable 9 out of 10 people to fill their taxes on a single sheet. Police stand next to a cordon after a shooting on a street in central Malmo, Sweden June 18, 2018. (TT News Agency/Johan Nilsson/via Reuters) Three Men Killed in Gang-Related Shooting in Southern Sweden STOCKHOLMA third man died on Tuesday after a gang-related shooting in the Swedish city of Malmo, police said, amid growing concern about spiraling violent crime in the Nordic country. Six men ranging from 19 to 31 years old were shot in a Malmo internet cafe on Monday evening just 100 meters from a district police station near the city center. The persons who were shot are to be regarded as gang members and involved in serious organized crime in Malmo, city police chief Stefan Sinteus told a news conference. He said there were three to four gang-related conflicts in Malmo and the victims belonged to one of the factions involved. The murder rate in Sweden has not risen in recent years but shootings and gang-related crimes are up. Gang violence has become a central issue in the campaign for the September election, with the right wing Sweden Democrat party linking increased immigration and poor integration of newcomers to escalating gun violence. A recent European Union report said Sweden had the highest rate of lethal gun violence among males aged 15 to 29 in the 13 countries examined. Police said they had no suspects in Mondays shooting and called for any witnesses to come forward. By Johan Ahlander Watch Next: What is MS-13? Teenage Girl Tragically Killed in Utah Hiking Accident A 16-year-old girl died after falling 100 feet while hiking with a friend in Utah. The girl was identified as Kaylee Marvin of Santaquin. She and a friend were hiking in the Santaquin Canyon on Monday when she fell down a waterfall. Obviously this is a huge loss. A beautiful young lady now has tragically passed away from an unfortunate accident, Lt. Tom Hodgson with the Utah County Sheriffs Office told KTSU. Kaylees friend called authorities, who responded but found Kaylee died at the bottom of Pioneer Log Chute, a seasonal waterfall in the canyon. She took a misstep, she basically slipped while she was trying to navigate across a log, said Hodgson. With the water up there and the slick rocks the way they are, she just, unfortunately, didnt put her feet in the right locations and slipped off the edge. Other hikers, including Kaylees friend, tried to perform CPR until emergency responders arrived but to no avail. Kaylees father was hiking in the area as well and rushed to where his daughter had fallen when he heard of the fall. The office said in a statement obtained by Desert News, that detectives are investigating but at this point, there is nothing suspicious and the death appears to be a tragic accident. Utah County Sheriffs Sgt. Spencer Cannon said that Kaylees family described her as beautiful inside and out. She was just herself. Like, wherever she was, she was always Kaylee and nobody else, added friend Lindsey Jackson, whose cousin was the one hiking with Kaylee. She was so great, she wasnt afraid to speak her mind, and she was brave, and she was kind, and she was so funny. She still is, up in heavenloving horses, and camping and fishing. Watch Next: Firefighter Going Over 100 mph Before Deadly Crash Leader Mehbooba Mufti insisted that the PDP did not do it for power but to safeguard the interests of the people of J&K. Srinagar: Outgoing Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, on Tuesday sought to play the victim card and tried to wriggle out of the situation which she had been pushed in due to the BJPs abrupt decision to pull out of the alliance. Mufti said, Muscular security policy will not work in Jammu and Kashmir. The BJPs national general secretary Ram Madhav had earlier said that the alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was untenable and ought to blame the state government for the rise in violence, terrorism and radicalisation in the Valley. After concluding his consultations with all the major political parties in J&K, governor NN Vohra forwarded his report to the President for imposition of Governors Rule under Section 92 of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, reported news agency ANI. Mufti, apparently laying out a roadmap ahead for her party, said its patron Mufti Muhammad Sayeed had in 2015 opted to cobble up a coalition with the saffron party for a bigger cause. She said that the coalition was crafted with the BJP, the party which had formed government at the Centre after its landslide victory in the 2014 elections, only after taking the needs of the state into consideration. Also Read: Jammu Kashmir govt collapses as BJP pulls out of ruling alliance with PDP Our alliance with BJP was meticulously planned. We joined hands to solve the issues that Kashmir was facing, she said while speaking to reporters at her official residence after submitting her resignation to Governor, N.N. Vohra at Raj Bhavan here. Acknowledging the fact that choosing BJP as an ally did not go well with the people of the Valley, from where the PDP had won 28 seats in the 2014 Assembly elections, she said it was done for a bigger cause. The ideas for which we chose BJP as an ally to form the government were bigger. We wanted talks with the government, a unilateral ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir, a policy of reconciliation and confidence-building-measures to address the issues, she said. She insisted that the PDP did not do it for power but to safeguard the interests of the people of J&K. We didnt do it for power. Had we done it for power then there were numbers with National Conference and Congres. We did it for some objective, she asserted. Mufti also said that her government preserved Article 370 of the Constitution and also stood strong in defence of Article 35-A. She mentioned that the cases against 11,000 first time stone-pelters were withdrawn, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Pakistan for talks and unilateral ceasefire for Ramzan was announced. She said that her government also retained the territorial integrity of the state and addressed cases such as the insecurity of the minority in a case of cow vigilantism as well as the Kathua rape case. Replying to questions, she said that she was not shocked by the BJPs decision and reiterated that the main motive of forming the government with it was to preserve the special status of the state and build an atmosphere of reconciliation. Im not shocked. We didn't do this alliance for power. This alliance had a bigger motive- unilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of cases against 11,000 youth, she said. She also added that she handed over her resignation to the Governor and that her party was not interested in exploring the possibility of entering into an alliance with any other party to form a new government. Congress president Rahul Gandhi took to Twitter to speak on the alliance break-up, "The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails." The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 19, 2018 Delhi Chief Minsiter Arvind Kejriwal also expressed his concern on Twitter. 3 years lost in the valley, 3 years that saw huge civilian & army casualties, 3 years later the valley is worse-off from where it stood then. This is what happens when you put politics over people. I will not allow Delhi to suffer because of dirty politics of Modi Govt Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 National Conference vice president Omar Abdullah said Mehbooba should have resigned from the coalition before with some dignity intact rather than being shunted out. "I can't speculate what happened. I can't speculate if the killing of Shujaat Bukhari or the end of ceasefire was the final straw that broke the camel's back. Something happened but it is not for me to speculate that," he said. Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal also took to Twitter and called the BJP an "opportunistic party". 3 Killed in Swedens Worst Gang-Related Shooting For 30 Years STOCKHOLMThree men were shot to death and three more injured in an unusually violent incident in Swedens third-largest city, Malmo. The shooting took place outside an internet cafe on June 18, in the middle of a busy street downtown, according to local media reports. The three men who were killed were gang members involved in serious crime, Malmo police chief Stefan Sinteus said at a press conference. Despite a general fall in crime, gun violence and violent sex crimes like gang rapes are on the rise, becoming a major issue in the upcoming general election. The current Green-Left government has been widely criticized over its reorganization of the police force, recruitment problems, and a shortage of police officers. Meanwhile the nationalist/conservative Sweden Democrat party links rising gang crime to migration and problems with integrationanother big election issue. Criminologist Mikael Rying told Swedish public service television SVT that he views June 18s shooting as one of the worst gang-related shootings in Sweden in 30 years. One witness told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet that he heard some 15 to 20 shots fired. All six men knew each other, but according to the police, there is as of yet no clear motive behind the shooting. Police investigator Niklas Kirschhoff described the crime scene as chaotic after the shooting. Police Chief Sinteus said that there may be more violence to come, in retaliation for the triple killing. When these kinds of constellations are involved, there is always a risk, he said. Our most important task is to break the back of organized crime, he told local media TT, commenting on the latest shooting. A local resident, identified only by her first name, Sanna, described the situation in Malmo as the Wild West. Its sad, but I dont think Im the only one who will tell you that this is everyday stuff now, she said. Its not supposed to be this way, but I dont feel really safe in Malmo anymore. June has already seen several shootings in and around the capital of Stockholm. On June 1, a young man was shot in the face, but survived. On June 5, two men were shot and killed in separate incidents, and on June 13, a man was shot dead in his car in a residential area. 2018 also had a bloody start, with four people shot to death in separate incidents in a single week. In 2017, 42 people were killed and 140 injured in shootings nationwide, according to statistics from SVT. Most shootings happened in public, in densely populated urban areas. Gang-related gun violence among young men is high in Sweden compared to other European countries, according to a May report in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research. Fatal gun violence among men aged 15-29 was twice as high as the average of the other 12 countries studied, and ten times as high as in Germany, for instance. The general risk for males of being implicated in, or falling victim of, gun violence has also risen. The period studied stretched from 1996 to 2015. Trump Hosts King and Queen of Spain at White House President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump hosted the king and queen of Spain at the White House on June 19. King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia visited Texas and Louisiana before coming to Washington. The royal motorcade arrived at the White House shortly after 2 p.m. as a cool mist fell on the South Lawn, accompanied by thunder. The two couples shook hands and posed for photos before going inside just as the rain intensified. Its a great honor to have the king and queen of Spain, a beautiful country. We were in Spain not so long ago, and we love it. Very special people and a beautiful place, Trump told reporters. And our relationship has been outstanding over the years and, I think, especially right now, the president added. Excellent trade relationship, military relationshipjust about everything you can have. So we love Spain. And its really a tremendous honor to have you both at the Oval Office. Trump and the king held a closed-door bilateral meeting, while the first lady had tea with the queen. Spanish foreign minister Josep Borrell and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined the two nations delegations at the expanded bilateral meeting. Following Trumps remarks, King Felipe VI said: We appreciate very much our common history, our heritage, so many years that weve shared. And we like to use that as a good benchmark for our very excellent relationships that we enjoy today. As you said, that theres so many issues of common interest, of sharing the efforts in many areas. But as well, I think theres one basic common issue, which is our value for democracy. June 19 marked the first meeting between Trump and King Felipe VI, who last visited the White House in 2015. Watch Next: Trump, Kim Sign Joint Statement During Historic Summit US Tops Germany as Largest Receiver of New Asylum Requests The United States surpassed Germany to become the worlds leading receiver of new asylum applications, according to a new report by the U.N. Refugee Agency. More than 331,000 refugees submitted new applications for asylum to the United States in 2017, a 27 percent increase compared to last year, according to the Global Trends report published on June 19. Meanwhile, new applications in Germany fell by 73 percent in 2017 to 198,300, sending the United States to the top of the list for the first time since 2012. The latest numbers were released one day after President Donald Trump wrote a message on Twitter linking mass migration in Germany and Europe to a rise in violent crime. The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition, Trump wrote on Twitter on June 18. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture! On June 19, Trump followed up with a message doubting Germanys official crime statistics. Crime in Germany is up 10% plus (officials do not want to report these crimes) since migrants were accepted. Others countries are even worse, Trump wrote. Be smart America! According to the official statistics, the number of crimes in Germany has declined significantly. The police crime statistics presented by Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer in May show 5.76 million offenses last year, the lowest level since 1992. Though the interior ministers release was preceded by a flood of reports of the good news that Germany is now safer than it has been since 1992, some in Germany doubt the rosy figures. The interior ministers report doesnt include politically motivated crimes, violations of state laws, administrative offenses, some traffic offenses, and terrorism. When violent crime spiked in Germany in 2016, a review of the statistics by the Die Zeit newspaper attributed the increase to the refugee crisis. Watch Next: US Border Patrol: There is no policy to separate families The United States Border Patrol on Sunday allowed reporters to briefly visit the facility where it holds families arrested at the southern US border, responding to questions over the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy. Update: All B-1 Bombers Grounded by US Air Force to Resume Operations The U.S. Air Force is getting ready to resume B-1 bomber flights this week, weeks after the fleet was grounded over the planes faulty ejection system. We have high confidence that the fleets egress systems are capable and the fleet is ready to return to normal flight operations, said Maj. Gen. Thomas Bussiere, 8th Air Force commander, Fox News reported. A B-1B Lancer made an emergency landing at a civilian airport in Midland, Texas, and four crew members on board were not injured. During the safety investigation process following an emergency landing of a B-1B in Midland, an issue with ejection seat components was discovered that necessitated the stand-down, Air Force Global Strike officials said. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson on Monday confirmed that the B-1 made an emergency landing in Texas because the ejection seat didnt blow. And the indicator light goes off that they have a fire, she told Military.com. They go through their checklist of everything theyre supposed to do. The next thing on the checklist is to eject they start the ejection sequence. The cover comes off, and nothing else happens, she said. The seat doesnt fire. Within two seconds of knowing that that had happened, the aircraft commander said, Cease ejection, well try to land.' The courage it took and the values represented by that aircraft commander who decided were going to try for all of us to make it rather than sacrifice the one guy who cant get out. Those are the men and women who choose to wear the uniform of the U.S. Air Force, Wilson added. The incident took place on May 1. The supersonic B-1 carries the largest number of conventional weapons of any U.S. military aircraft, but it does not carry nuclear weapons. In April, B-1 bombers were sent to destroy an alleged chemical weapons production facility in Syria. Last year, they were also used in a show of force display near the Korean Peninsula. Watch Next: Why is Falun Gong Persecuted? Although its freely practiced in over 70 countries, doing this in China can lead to unlawful arrest, imprisonment, torture, or even death. Recipe: It's the Perfect Time of Year for a Side of Squash Why Yemen Is at War The battle for the western Yemeni port of Hodeidah could be an important milestone in the three-year civil war. But analysts say the conflict is so complex that even a decisive outcome there might not bring peace. Why is Yemen so divided? Yemens internal splits have festered for years. North and south Yemen united into a single state in 1990, but separatists in the south tried to secede from the pro-union north in 1994. Their forces were swiftly beaten, and more power and resources flowed to the northern capital of Sanaa, angering many southerners. Former president Ali Abdullah Saleh had ruled north Yemen since 1978 and the unified state after 1990. But he alienated many Yemenis. His relatives controlled core parts of the army and economy, and critics said corruption was rife. In the far north, some of the Zaydi sect of Shiite Islam also chafed. Zaydis had ruled northern Yemen until the 1962 revolution, but their heartland was now impoverished. In the late 1990s, some Zaydis formed the Houthi group, which fought Yemens army and grew friendly with Iran. Though allied to Saleh, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunni Islamists were also gaining strength, particularly under General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, who built a power base in the army. Taking advantage of factional rivalries, jihadist fugitives set up al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the groups most powerful wings, and began staging attacks. How did Arab Spring protests lead to war? When mass protests broke out in 2011, some of Salehs former allies turned on him. The army split between units loyal to Saleh and those who followed Ahmar. Separatists rallied in the south. The Houthis seized more areas. AQAP attacks increased. After a year of crisis, including a bombing that nearly killed Saleh, Yemens Gulf neighbors persuaded him to step down, but he stayed in Yemen. Deputy president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was elected in 2012 to a two-year term to oversee a democratic transition. A National Dialogue meeting of all Yemens opposing groups began hashing out a new constitution. But despite the dialogue, things were falling apart. Hadi was widely seen as weak and his administration corrupt. Salehs allies in the army and government undermined the transition. AQAP set up a mini-state and hit Sanaa with ever bloodier bombings. In 2014, the Houthis seized Sanaa with help from army units loyal to Saleh, forcing Hadi to share power. When the National Dialogue proposed a federal constitution, both Houthis and southern separatists rejected it for blunting their new-found sway. The Houthis arrested Hadi in early 2015, but he escaped and fled to Aden. The Houthis pursued him, battling loyalists of the transitional government. Days later, Saudi Arabia entered the war on Hadis side, backed by a coalition of Arab allies, to prevent Iran from gaining influence via the Houthis on its border and to preserve the Gulf-brokered transition. They plucked Hadi from Aden and took him to Riyadh, notionally preserving his internationally recognized government and the democratic transition plan. Why was there deadlock for so long? The crisis was now a war between two unstable coalitions. The Houthis and Saleh were old enemies jointly ruling the populous highlands and Red Sea coast. Hadi had no personal power base, but became a nominal figurehead for southern separatists, tribes in the northeast, Sunni Islamists and army remnants loyal to Ahmar. Internal rivalries even emerged in the coalition set up by Saudi Arabia to back Hadi. Riyadh and its main ally, the United Arab Emirates, differed over local allies and tactics. The Houthis and Salehs forces were driven from Aden and its environs in south Yemen, and from central Marib and the desert area to its east in 2015. Years of military stalemate followed. The Houthis held most of the easily defended highlands. They also held the flat Red Sea coast and its port of Hodeidah the last entry point for supplying northern Yemen. The coalition kept up intense air strikes, aiming to split the Houthis and Saleh. They imposed a partial blockade to stop Iran arming the Houthis, something it denies doing. But despite this pressure, U.N.-backed talks went nowhere. How have internal divisions played out? Then, last year Saleh finally abandoned his Houthi allies, hoping to cut a deal and regain power for his family. But he was killed fleeing Sanaa in December, 2017. His loyalists turned on the Houthis, helping the advance toward Hodeidah that culminated in this weeks assault. Divisions widened on the other side too. The UAE supported separatists in the south who sometimes clashed with fighters backed by Saudi Arabia. In the north, the Saudis brought in Ahmar to command forces around Mariba red flag for the UAE because of his connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, its biggest bugbear. Meanwhile, the death toll from air strikes and the near famine aggravated by the partial blockade prompted international outrage, making it harder for Gulf states key Western allies to maintain military aid. If the Hodeidah fighting lasts long, causing big coalition casualties and an outcry over a humanitarian catastrophe, the Houthis may hope the advance will fail. If the Houthis are driven out and lose all ability to keep supply lines open, they might lose the war. But there is no guarantee the victors could put aside their own divisions and build a real peace. By Angus McDowall ZTE Shares Tank After US Senate Puts Trump Reprieve in Doubt HONG KONGShares of ZTE plummeted on June 19 after the U.S. Senates passage of a defense bill set up a potential battle with the White House over whether the Chinese telecoms firm can resume business with its U.S. suppliers. The 85-10 bipartisan voteone of the few times the Republican-led Senate has veered from White House policycame on the same day that U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 10-percent tariff on $200 billion of Chinese goods. Trump is, however, expected to lobby hard against the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and before it can become law, the bill must be reconciled with one passed by the House of Representatives that does not include the amendment. Any compromise measure must then be passed by both chambers and signed into law by Trumpa series of hurdles that has Asia-based analysts predicting that ZTE will get eventually get its reprieve. The NDAA is not really a reversal of the ZTE deal, but will in all probability prolong the ban-lifting process for ZTE, said Nikhil Batra, a senior research manager with industry consultancy IDC. ZTEs Hong Kong-listed shares tumbled as much as 27 percent to HK$9.56, their lowest level in nearly two years, before ending the day down 25 percent. Its shares on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in mainland China fell by their daily limit of 10 percent. The stock has lost around 38 percent, or more than $7.4 billion in market value, since trading resumed last week after a suspension in mid-April when the sanctions were announced. The longer it goes by without the ban being lifted, the more uncertain and damaging it is, said Jefferies analyst Edison Lee. ZTE was hit in April with a seven-year ban barring U.S. suppliers from selling to it after it broke an agreement to discipline executives who conspired to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea. ZTE had pleaded guilty in 2017, admitting that it had shipped to Iran ZTE equipment fitted with U.S. tech parts, against sanctions. ZTE relies heavily on U.S. tech components to make its smartphones and other devices. A 2016 report released by a Chinese regime-affiliated think tank found that ZTE purchased 53 percent of its chips from American firms, worth $3.1 billion. It predicted that any U.S. sanctions would have a detrimental effect on ZTE and the Chinese tech industry in general. Semiconductors, which are chips necessary for powering almost all electronic devices, make up one of Chinas largest import categories by value. At Trumps urging, ZTE and the U.S. Commerce Department reached an agreement on June 7 to have the supplier ban lifted. According to the agreement, the ban would only be lifted after ZTE pays a $1 billion fine and puts another $400 million in escrow in a U.S. approved bank for 10 years. The firm was also ordered to radically overhaul its management. Last week, ZTE proposed a $10.7 billion financing plan and nominated eight board members as it seeks to rebuild its business. By Sijia Jiang. Epoch Times staff member Annie Wu contributed to this report. The Trump administration's tariff threats against China make sense as a bargaining strategy and probably won't bring about a devastating trade war, Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein said. "That's what you'd do if it was a negotiating position and you wanted to remind your negotiating counterparty of how much firepower you have," Blankfein said Tuesday in an interview at the Economic Club of New York. "I don't think we're in a suicide pact on this, so I suspect we're not going to cause the economies to collapse." A trade battle is brewing between the world's two biggest economies as China vows to retaliate against new tariffs planned by President Donald Trump. While the $50 billion in tariffs already announced were mainly on industrial goods, Trump is now targeting $200 billion in additional Chinese imports, a move that could push up prices for U.S. shoppers on items such as toys, tools and T-shirts. "I do think -- as some people have commented -- that this is part of a negotiating pattern, that would be my best take," Blankfein said of Trump's threats in the interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. In Blankfein's wide-ranging interview, the Goldman CEO also touched on the immigration debate in the U.S., where Trump's "zero tolerance" policy separating children from parents crossing the border illegally has sparked protests and calls for a legislative fix. The detentions have created a political crisis for Republican lawmakers trying to hold control of Congress in elections less than five months away. "Watching now is heart-rending and I wouldn't be on that side, but thank God I'm not there -- It's never right against wrong, good against evil," said Blankfein, who noted how immigration debates have roiled Europe. "Now what do you want to do? Both sides are right." On the cryptocurrency front, Blankfein reiterated that Goldman Sachs doesn't own bitcoin. He's previously said he doesn't consider a digital currency that fluctuates wildly to be a store of value. The price of bitcoin, the most ubiquitous of the digital currencies, has lost half its value this year. Speaking at a panel discussion in Mumbai, Sudheendra Kulkarni praised Rahul Gandhi, saying he is a 'leader with good heart'. Ahead of the 2019 general elections, Sudhendra Kulkarni said Rahul Gandhi should visit neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, China and Bangladesh and emerge with ideas to solve the 'big problems'. (Photo: PTI | File) Mumbai: BJP veteran L K Advani's former aide Sudheendra Kulkarni on Monday said India needs a leader who can solve "big problems" such as the Kashmir issue and therefore he would like to see Congress chief Rahul Gandhi as the future prime minister. Listing disputes with Pakistan and China, he said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has "failed" to solve the big problems. Speaking at a panel discussion in Mumbai, Sudheendra Kulkarni praised Rahul Gandhi, saying he is a "leader with good heart". He said dialogue is the only solution to solve the long-standing dispute with Pakistan, and normalising ties with the neighbouring country is key to India becoming a great nation. "We must state what is required for solving the problem with Pakistan. And which is why I made a suggestion that I would like to see Rahul Gandhi as future prime minister," he said at the event organised by All India Professionals' Congress. The event was attended by senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid, whose book 'Spectrum Politics' was launched there. Kulkarni added: "(Rahul Gandhi) is young and he is idealist. He is a man with compassion. No political leader in recent times had spoken the language of love, affection and compassion." Ahead of the 2019 general elections, Sudhendra Kulkarni said Rahul Gandhi should visit neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, China and Bangladesh and emerge with ideas to solve the "big problems". "Like Rajiv Gandhi did when he was in the opposition... He went to Afghanistan. Similarly, Rahul ji should go to Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and emerge as a leader with new ideas on how to solve big problems that Modi ji has failed to solve," Kulkarni said. He described himself as a "well-wisher" of the Congress and pitched for a dialogue between the party and the RSS notwithstanding their differences. NORWALK A crowd of more than 100 students, parents and community activists rallied in front of City Hall on Tuesday in protest of rumored plans to remove longtime West Rocks Middle School Principal Lynne Moore. The signs they carried and the messages they delivered spoke to the disservice it would be to West Rocks students and the Norwalk community if Moore were removed. Among them was Elisabeth Beausoleil, a West Rocks parent who organized the rally and created a petition to keep Moore at the school in response to the rumors. As of Tuesday, nearly 700 people signed the online petition. She is there night and day. You can go by there at 1 oclock in the morning and shes parked outside there, working, Beausoleil said. I dont know what we can do, but fight for Dr. Moore. District spokeswoman Brenda Wilcox-Williams said she is not able to comment on personnel matters, which is the same answer West Rocks school governance council received when they asked to have a meeting with the district upon hearing about Moores rumored removal, council members said. This is not the first time Moores employment has been called into question, according to Connecticut Association of School Administrators Chairman Anthony Ditrio, who worked in the district for 47 years. He said hes come into the central office for charges levied against Moore on a monthly basis, including a time she got written up for replacing an old rug at West Rocks. Shes gotten in trouble for so many things when shes just trying to do the right things for the kids. Shes being a good principal, Ditrio said. She tells you exactly what shes thinking and she acts on it. But behind it all are always the kids are what counts. While Ditrio and others admitted Moore can be cantankerous at times, they believe her strength as a leader has been misinterpreted over the years. Since becoming principal in 1998, Moore has faced lawsuits and four letters of reprimand for insubordination. She was sued by three former West Rocks teachers, who were all white, for racial discrimination, among other counts, in 2004 and 2005. Both cases, which quoted newspaper articles from Wisconsin and New York that told of controversy surrounding Moores management style and some race-related conflicts, were eventually dismissed. Between 2009 and 2016, Moore received four letters of reprimand from the district for what Superintendent of Schools Steven Adamwoski described, in his letter of reprimand in 2016, as insubordination or attempts to undermine the district. Adamowski wrote a letter of reprimand against Moore for discussing middle school redesign at a scheduled parent meeting in 2016 despite being advised not to by Chief School of Operations Frank Costanzo, since plans were not yet developed by the committee. Moore denied these claims and took Adamowski and the Board of Education to court in 2017, but was unsuccessful in her challenge against the letter of reprimand. While West Rocks PTO President Blaire Anderson declined to comment on the lawsuits, on the basis of not having enough information on the matter, she said the several letters of reprimand reveal a district vendetta against Moore. There is a definite vendetta. They definitely dont want her in that school, Anderson said. Thats what happens because she doesnt do things in the way that they want her to do them. Moore could not be reached for comment. skim@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2568; @stephaniehnkim NORWALK A Watertown entity has submitted to the Norwalk Department of Planning and Zoning a plan to open a medical marijuana dispensary on Connecticut Avenue. Healthport, LLC of 122 Curtiss Lane, Watertown, has proposed opening the dispensary the first such in Norwalk within 3,000 square feet of space on the first floor of the building at 495 Connecticut Ave. The space will include a locked vestibule where patients must sign in before gaining entry into the main floor area for appointments, consultations, purchase of product and other services, wrote Elizabeth Suchy, the attorney representing Healthport on the development application. The first floor also includes the dispensary area, locked storage for the product stock, and facility offices. Patients cannot simply present themselves unannounced or without appointment to obtain to their allotted amount of product. The property is next to the former banquet center Chatham Manor, across the street from the Kohls department store and along a stretch of Connecticut Avenue that is home to retail and restaurants. The Norwalk Zoning Commission tentatively will begin reviewing the dispensary plan on July 12 and, at some point, schedule a public hearing. More News Calls for more medical marijuana sites grow as New York expands eligibility The nearest medical marijuana dispensaries are currently located in Bethel and Milford. The Connecticut Avenue plan marks the first such application to come before the Norwalk Zoning Commission since it approved in September 2017 a zoning regulation permitting medical marijuana dispensaries in limited areas of the city. Those areas are Business No. 1 zones, on the south side of Connecticut Avenue, as well as along a short stretch of New Canaan Avenue. The property at 495 Connecticut Ave. is zoned Business No. 1 and is home to a two-story commercial structure built in 1978. A nail salon and gold dealership occupy the first floor; a dentists office and one residential unit are located above, according to Suchy. In 2012, state lawmakers approved a law permitting the sale of medical marijuana at licensed dispensaries subject to regulation by the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection. At present, Healthport is not among the nine medical marijuana dispensaries licensed by the department but that could change. The department initially approved six dispensary facility licenses, expanded that to nine in January 2016 and received additional applications in April, said DCP spokeswoman Lora Rae Anderson. Whenever there is need for expansion, which we determine based on patient need, we can issue a request for applications, Anderson said. This last January, we put out another RFA for anywhere from three to 10 dispensaries statewide. Those applications are currently in review. Anderson said the department hopes to make a decision by this fall. At that time, the names of the applicants will be released, she said. A patient may register for a medical marijuana certificate if he or she lives in Connecticut and is being treated for a debilitating medical condition by a Connecticut-licensed physician. For adults, such conditions include cancer, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Crohns disease and a terminal illness requiring end-of-life care, according to the DCP website. This is one of the most highly regulated industries in Connecticut, Suchy said. If approved by the commission and then the State Department of Consumer Protection, this dispensary will serve patients in this area who will benefit greatly from prescribed medical marijuana to help them deal with symptoms of many debilitating conditions. Before adopting the zoning regulation allowing medical marijuana dispensaries, the Norwalk Zoning Commission held a public hearing at which people weighed in for and against such facilities. Angela DiMecco, owner of Compassionate Care Center of Connecticut, a licensed medical marijuana dispensary facility in Bethel, told the commission that the center has worked mostly with Norwalk patients and seen cancer patients survive with medical marijuana use. At the time, she was considering relocating her business to Norwalk. We have patients that travel to us based upon our service and knowledge, DAmico said Tuesday. I hope that whatever new dispensaries open have the knowledge and expertise that we have. Ginger Katz and Larry Katz, who founded the nonprofit organization Courage to Speak to convince young people to remain drug-free after the death of their son in 1996, spoke against permitting medical marijuana dispensaries. She reiterated her concerns Tuesday upon learning that a plan had been submitted for Connecticut Avenue. We hope that were not sending the incorrect message, Ginger Katz said. Ive seen it not done properly in states where there wasnt planning for education and it just popped into a town, and kids are getting confused. They think its medical and its OK to use. On June 14, after passionate input from residents, the Westport Planning and Zoning Commission approved a plan for a medical marijuana dispensary at 1460 Post Road East but rejected applications for dispensaries at four other locations. NORWALK The gazebo at the East Avenue green has been decorated with a splash of color as part of the Paint the Town Purple campaign to raise awareness for the Alzheimers Association Connecticut Chapter during Alzheimers and Brain Awareness Month. On Monday, volunteers helped prepare the gazebo by placing purple ribbons on the supports and planting faux purple flowers around the structure. The spotlights around the gazebo have also been turned violet. The gazebo will remain decorated in purple through June 24. The goal of Paint the Town Purple is to increase awareness about Alzheimers disease and the free programs and services offered by the Alzheimers Association. This is the fourth consecutive year that the gazebo has been turned purple in order to increase awareness of this horrific disease and the Alzheimers Association Connecticut Chapter thanks and appreciates the support and assistance provided by the First Taxing District Water Department for all these years, said Mike Davis, chair for the Norwalk Walk to End Alzheimers in September. On June 22, there will be a kick-off event at Ripkas Beach Cafe at Calf Pasture Beach to bring awareness to the September walk. Walk team registration and fundraising materials will be available. The Fairfield County Walk to End Alzheimers will take place Sunday, Sept. 16 at Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk. The Alzheimers Association is the worlds leading voluntary health organization in Alzheimers care, support and research. It is the largest nonprofit funder of Alzheimers research. The Associations mission is to eliminate Alzheimers 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 Alzheimers. For more information, visit alz.org/ct or call 800-272-3900. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal called off his strike at Lieutenant Governor's house on Tuesday evening. The strike was to protest against the alleged strike of IAS officers in Delhi. (Photo: File) New Delhi: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal called off his strike at Lieutenant Governor's house on Tuesday evening. Kejriwal along with Deputy CM Manish Sisodia, Health Minister Satyendar Jain and Labour Minister Gopal Rai had began the sit-in protest on June 11 at Raj Niwas -- the residence of Delhis Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal. Breaking his silence on the protest, L-G Anil Baijal on Tuesday urged Arvind Kejriwal to urgently meet IAS officers at the Delhi Secretariat. Baijal shot off a letter to Kejriwal in response to his deputy Manish Sisodia's communication in which the latter had asked for a meeting between the government and bureaucrats to end the impasse. Also Read: Recovering fast, will try to resume work today: Delhi dy CM Manish Sisodia "The L-G requested the CM to urgently meet the officers at the Secretariat so that apprehensions and concerns of both sides can be suitably addressed through dialogue in the best interest of the people of Delhi," an official from Baijal's office said in a statement. The official said Baijal had earlier advised the AAP government to make efforts to restore trust between the elected government and the officers. The strike was to protest against the alleged strike of IAS officers in Delhi. Also Read: SC refuses urgent hearing of plea to declare Kejriwal's sit-in 'unconstitutional' Kejriwal had maintained that government work had taken a backseat and suffered majorly since IAS officers were skipping meetings for the last four months. (With inputs from agencies) The following companies are subsidiares of American International Group: AGC Life Insurance Company, AIG APAC HOLDINGS PTE. LTD., AIG Advisors S.r.l., AIG Aerospace Insurance Services Inc., AIG Asia Pacific Insurance Pte. 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To get your FREE dividend recommendations, click here now. Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said that the BJP had committed a 'Himalayan blunder' by forming a government with the PDP. Ghulam Nabi Azad said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. (Photo: File) New Delhi: The Congress on Tuesday ruled out any tie-up with the PDP after the BJP pulled out of the ruling alliance in Jammu and Kashmir. Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said in New Delhi that the BJP had committed a "Himalayan blunder" by forming a government with the PDP. He said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. "The regional parties should have been allowed to form an alliance among themselves," he told reporters here. The alliance has devastated the state, be it economically or socially, and has left Jammu and Kashmir in a state of "ruins", he said. The Shiv Sena also wondered if the BJP's decision to part ways with alliance partner PDP in Jammu and Kashmir was taken to avoid "uneasy questions" over violence in the state ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Also Read: BJP pulled out of alliance with PDP to avoid uneasy questions: Shiv Sena Outspoken, highly articulate with strong beliefs, Ravi Kiran is a rare musician. The face of the Chitravina (Gottuvadyam) today is Vidwan Ravi Kiran, whose family for the past two generations has been inextricably linked with the instrument. Indeed, the form the instrument is in today with 21 strings is a result of his grandfather's innovations. But it is not only his accomplishments on the Chitravina, which are extraordinary; Ravi Kiran has also taken Carnatic and North Indian classical music to Western teaching institutions through his creation of a new system of music that he calls mel-harmony, combining Western techniques with Eastern note patterns. Outspoken, highly articulate with strong beliefs, Ravi Kiran is a rare musician. Hailed as a child prodigy at the age of two, his music has been combined with scholarship and research in music throughout his life, resulting in early acclaim and awards Tamil Nadu State award at age of 17, Sangeet Natak Akademi at the young age of 39 (today, the SNA Yuva award is given to artists who are less than 40 years!) and Sangita Kalanidhi in 2017. He is indeed a Karishma (miracle) in music. It was illuminating getting his views on what he holds dearest; music. Q. You have recently received the Sangita Kalanidhi award, the pinnacle for a Carnatic musician. What does this mean to you? A. Coming from the Music Academy where I literally grew up, and I was projected first here, this award is very dear to me. As far as Carnatic music is concerned, The Madras Music Academy is like the Wimbledon of music. But I have always believed it's better to remembered for what you can give not what you have got. My father Narasimhan ji always used to say always look forward not at what you have achieved. The value of any award is like currency it changes. If an award is given to the wrong person, or too late, obviously its value will go down. The award committee needs to include experts, who have continuity, who know precedents, history of past awardees etc. Vidwan T.K. Murthy has accompanied seven generations of musicians; he was awarded a Padma Shri when he was 92 or 93 years old. He should have been given the Padma Vibhushan years back. Of course, awards are not the goal, they only spur you on in your journey. Q. So what goals do you have now? A. I would like to make the rare works of Venkata Kavi more known. He is a composer whose works have been forgotten and hidden for 200 years. Oottukkadu Venkata Kavi predated Tygaraja and was a contemporary of Bach. Whatever we do in music today, which we think are innovations, have already been done by him. (He quotes a passage in Sanskrit) See the lyrics of this passage, there is poetry, mythology, a complicated 17 "matra tala", and of course the music. There is everything in it. Ravi was an amazing, phenomenal composer was amongst the early ones to translate and introduce Jaideva's work in the Carnatic world. He focused more on Radha, unlike in the South where usually Rukmini is lauded. He wrote full operas on Radha, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Bhagavata. He also wrote compositions on the works of Jaideva and Valmiki. Also, my aim is to showcase our music in the West. I am lucky I have taken the Chitravina all over the world. It is not enough to simply talk about our tradition, which is a few thousand years old, while Western music is only 200 to 300 years old. When a respected Western music conductor praises our music, as he has heard and analysed our music, it has a different impact. Mel harmony has helped in this respect too. I would love to make a full 45-minute symphony based on Mel harmony, but I never set agendas for myself. Each of the things I do is a full time activity in itself. I cannot give my students as much time as I would like. Really, music in an ocean. Q. Do you think your musical training is even now being added to? A. Definitely. I have been influenced by my study of western music too. We all get the same information, how much we can connect the dots to absorb the information depends on individual to individual. Also your teacher matters one teacher may be strong in melody, another in laya, or poetry luckily my father was a very rounded man, he had everything, and he and I both had the time; he, to teach me fully, and me to absorb fully. He was not working when he taught me and I didn't go to school for my initial years, and only learnt from him. All my siblings are musicians too. V. Brinda from whom I learnt also had an amazing musical legacy - she was a musician's musician who was also linked musically with every great composer we have had. Just her 3-minute aalap would show the entire Ragam! Q. What do you have to say on the current thought that there are fewer classical music listeners, so one has to make the presentation more palatable, lighten it somewhat? A. You have to have strong convictions, and the will to carry through on your convictions. High quality authentic music will reach out to people no matter what the audience is, or how knowledgeable they are of our music. Obviously you have to have the expressiveness in your music. Please see the top artists in the last generation no one lightened their music, yet they were lauded universally, not just in in India. When you are asked to play somewhere, you are asked for what you are, what you represent musically, so you should not need to structure your recital to suit the tastes of your audience. The more popular you are, the more is your responsibility (response to your ability) to spread good listening values. Music is not only to entertain, but to elevate and to ennoble. I believe this is true of Western classical music too. Reviews of Western classical music concerts have talked about a concert not being good enough as it did not have enough melancholy, Rasa. You should also have the vision to create your own alternate universe. Its like when sage Vishwamitra was approached by a king to be allowed to go to heaven in his current body, he complied. But the king was kicked out of heaven and as he was falling, he appealed to Vishwamitra and reminded him of his promise. So Vishwamitra created an alternate heaven for the king, so that his promise would not be broken. I heard this story when I was five years old and I was influenced by it. I believe everyone should have the strength to create his alternate world. Q. Tell us about the challenges you face as a stage artist? A. For my Carnatic listeners definitely I have to play popular compositions as it's expected, but I always devote at least 25 per cent of my concert time to rare compositions, or something not usual. Chalong Underpass works force month-long overnight road closure PHUKET: Officials have announced that the busy section of Chao Fa West Rd immediately north of the Chalong Circle will be closed overnight from 9:30pm to 6:30am from June 29 to July 28 so that workers can safely continue the excavation of the Chalong Underpass. transportconstruction By The Phuket News Tuesday 19 June 2018, 12:16PM The month-long overnight closure of Chao Fa West Rd begins on Friday next week (June 29). Image: PR Dept The news was announced at a meeting yesterday (June 18), led by Phuket Vice Governor Snith Sriwihok and attended by Phuket Highways Office Director Somwang Lohanut, Phuket Provincial Police Deputy Commander Col Witoon Kongsudjai and Rawai Mayor Aroon Solos, officers from relevant government organisations and representative of contractor company. V/Gov Snith urged relevant organisations to conduct appropriate public relations campaigns to inform people of the road closure to minimise the impact on traffic. A map showing the redirections required was also released yesterday, showing that motorists travelling in small vehicles from either Karon or Rawai are urged to use Soi Anusorn from Patak Rd to travel around the road closure and continue their journey along Chao Fa West Rd further north of the road closure. Larger vehicles are to deviate at Chalong Circle and drive along Chao Fa East Rd to continue their journey northbound. Killer put to death in first execution in nine years BANGKOK: A 26-year-old convicted killer was executed by lethal injection yesteday (June 18), the seventh person to be put to death since the method was introduced and the first since 2009, Corrections Department chief Pol Col Naras Savestanan said. crimedeathpolice By Bangkok Post Tuesday 19 June 2018, 08:20AM Prison officials demonstrate the use of the death penalty by lethal injection. Yesterdays (June 18) execution was the first in Thailand since two drug traffickers were executed since 2009. Photo: Bangkok Post / File Theerasak Longji, 26, was convicted for the brutal killing of a 17-year-old boy in Trang. He stabbed his victim 24 times in a frenzied attack on July 17, 2012, before making off with his mobile phone and money. Theerasak was convicted of the crime and his conviction was upheld by the Appeal Court and the Supreme Court. The death sentence was carried out in line with regulations and the Criminal Code, Col Naras said. Theerasak was the seventh convict to be executed by lethal injection since it was introduced in 2003, replacing execution by firing squad. Col Naras said 326 convicts have now been put to death since modern-day executions were introduced in 1935. A total of 319 people faced a firing squad which was officially abolished on Dec 11, 2003. The first convict to receive a lethal injection came the next day. Theerasaks execution was the first death sentence to be carried out in Thailand since August, 2009, when two drug traffickers were executed simultaneously. Read original story here. When I told my parents about my interest all hell broke loose. Belly dance, also called Arabic dance or Raqs sharqi, literally means oriental dancing. It is an Arabic expressive dance which originated in Egypt and emphasises on the complex movements of the torso. If we dig into the history of certain dances, we will realise that traditionally there were some dances that were meant for women and some that were only meant for men. For centuries the rules were untouched and no one thought or even tried to ruffle the feathers which were fitted so well in the cultural cap of each dance form. Then came some revolutionaries, who did not believe in the stereotype, who did what they felt was right and followed what their heart said, who did not think twice before jumping into things which they felt was right for them. One such person is Arun Bhardwaj, Indias first tribal fusion male Belly dancer. Belly dance, also called Arabic dance or Raqs sharqi, literally means oriental dancing. It is an Arabic expressive dance which originated in Egypt and emphasises on the complex movements of the torso. It has evolved to take many different forms depending on the country and region, both in costume and dance style. In India Arun has given it a very tribal feel making it more earthy and also giving it a very traditional Indian touch. Arun Bhardwaj was born in Pathankot district in Punjab, a land where being a male child is a privilege for sure. But when a male child chooses a profession which is mostly practised by females the privilege can get a bit hampered. He started his career in Belly dancing at the age of 16 years, learning it professionally and now has been practising it for the last eight years. He learnt the skills of Belly dance from the Banjara School of dance and also attended many workshops done by acclaimed artists. He is Indias one and only male Belly dancer who is leading with this kind of dance style. He teaches American tribal style, improvisational techniques and other styles of Belly dancing as well like Egyptian classical, dynamic drum solos, tribal fusion, fluid tribal style besides jazz, modern ballet and Odissi. Arun has participated in many festivals such as Bellywood, Jashn-e-Banjar, Neon-Hafla, Kathak Fest, India Dance Week, HIDC (Hyderabad International Dance Congress), Hip Nosis (International Belly Dance Festival), Bwitch International Belly Dance Fusion Festival, Belly Dance Boothcamp, Bombay Fest, Bellysima Bellydance festival, Goa Tribal Fest, GIDC (Goa International Dance Congress) etc. I spoke to this young artist who only follows his dream and what I heard from him was a story which was very heart touching and indeed very heart warming. Excerpts: You come from a Punjabi family, what was the reaction of your family when you showed interest to learn Belly dance, an art mostly meant for women? When I told my parents about my interest all hell broke loose. My father and my mother both were in total shock, for days they did not talk to me, a Punjabi boy wanting to learn Belly dance was something beyond their imagination. What was the perception of your people toward you? Society is the main obstacle for a male to go ahead with his passion when it comes to Belly dance. People feel it is a cabaret form and has to be done only by women and not men. How did your family and friends finally come around? When I was learning no one even looked at me, it was as if I was committing a major sin. When I started teaching Belly dance nobody supported me in the beginning but after a few years my parents, friends and colleagues along with society started supporting me in this field. Now my parents are fine with it. How did you convince and break the mindsets of your own people? I kept telling them that in India, if classical dance is considered as pure dance form no matter if it is done by male or female then why the society feels bad about a male doing Belly dance in spite of knowing that it is a cultural dance form of Middle East. My repeated saying somewhere shook their minds a bit and turned it in my favour. What was the major hindrance you faced in the long convincing game? It was regards to the costume for sure, sometimes it is very bad for a person to feel about his/her own kid doing Belly dance because the costume is a bit revealing. But the fact remains that it is Belly dance and it is related with muscle movement, basically stomach so there has to be a costume that shows Belly portion of a person who is dancing. In Bollywood Belly dance is done with item songs considering it will make the song popular or increase the TRP of a daily soap. Whats your take on that? In many movies, various actresses have done Belly dance just wearing Belly dance attire. I am sorry to say but it was not actual Belly dance, it is just the way it has been choreographed by various choreographers. So what Kartina Kaif did in the super hit song Sheela Ki Jawani was not belly dance you mean? No, it was not pure Belly dance, she only made a fairly okay attempt to do it. Belly dance takes many years to master on certain techniques and steps which a person cant learn or teach in just few days because it needs lots of practice and affection towards that particular step or move. Bollywood actresses and choreographers still have to learn more about Belly dance before they teach or learn so that they can exactly feel what Belly dance is all about and can acquire that in their own body to present it more gracefully to the audience. Arun Bhardwaj being a male belly dancer has started his own company with the name Indian Tribal School which focuses on exact lessons of Belly dance. This school is in Pune and for the last few years he has got many students who are learning the pure and the authentic nuances of Belly dance and are enjoying performing it too at various places. The main motive of the school is to spread the right knowledge about belly dance and its community. Boys like Arun are very few who fight their way up by only believing and following their heart, they who try and gather knowledge from all over the world and from various different artist and their tricks and trade over the years. This talent that Arun has is what makes him the finest tribal fusion male belly dance artist in India. With this story I wish Arun more fire in his Belly so that he can take his love for belly dance deep into the hearts of many. The writer is a World Book Record holder, a well known ballroom dancer and a Bollywood choreographer who has been honoured with two National Excellence Awards and one National Achievement Award by the Govt of India. He can be contacted on sandipsoparrkar06@gmail.com People called to wear yellow for HM Kings birthday, auspicious July PHUKET: The government is inviting people to wear the colour yellow throughout July to celebrate the 66th birthday of His Majesty The King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun and to commemorate the auspicious Buddhist occasions of Asarnha Bucha and Vassa, also called Buddhist Lent. culturealcoholreligion By The Phuket News Tuesday 19 June 2018, 11:26AM Phuket Governor Norraphat Plodthong leads a ceremony to honour the birthday of HM King Maha Vajiralongkorn last year. Photo: The Phuket News / file HM King Maha Vajiralongkorns birthday will be celebrated with a public holiday on July 28, the same day that Buddhists observe Vassa, which marks the beginning of annual Khao Phansa rains retreat, when many novices enter the monkhood for three months during the rainy season. Immediately preceding both occasions, on July 27, is the important Buddhist religious day Asarnha Bucha, honouring the Buddha's first discourse. Asarnha Bucha is commemorated in Thailand with a special public holiday during which no alcohol sales are allowed. To mark the month of special events, the government is calling on households, workplaces and government offices to be decorated from July 1 with images of HM The King and national flags together with Royal Standards of the monarchy. Thai flags are to be set at the right side of the buildings and flags of the monarchy are to be set at the left. Community projects to honour the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej under the banner Volunteer for canal and life development on sufficiency for benefit and happiness of the people will be held through all provinces during the month, and there will be special religious ceremonies at Sanam Luang in Bangkok on July 22-28. A special multi-faith religious ceremony for charity will be held at the Santimaitri Building, Government House, on Thursday, July 26. A national cleanup day held in honour of HM The King, with the event led by the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, will be held near Government House also on July 26, with separate Big Cleaning Day projects conducted in every province across the country on Saturday, July 28. As part of the celebrations, the government has requested the Royal Family to lead a Royal Blessing Ceremony to honour His Majesty the King by inviting 243 monks to attend a ceremony at the Royal Court at Dusit Palace. A merit-making ceremony will be held nationwide at the same time, 7am, on Saturday, July 28. In Bangkok, the ceremony will involve involving 670 monks and novices and will be held at Sanam Luang, but in the provinces the ceremony will be held at the Provincial Hall. Similarly, leading government officials and representatives from the private industry and foundations, as well as members of the public will be invited to pay their respects to images of HM The King nationwide from 5pm Saturday, July 28. In Bangkok, the ceremony will be held at Sanam Luang, while in each province the ceremony will be held at the Provincial Hall. Also held simultaneously nationwide from 7pm on Saturday, July 28, will be a candle-lighting blessing ceremony in the name of the Thai people. Again, in Bangkok the ceremony will be held at Sanam Luang, while in the provinces the main ceremony will be held at the Provincial Hall, but may also be held at other appropriate places. As part of the celebrations, the Office of the Permanent Secretary of the Prime Minister's Office together with the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Labour, Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration will host a trade skills fair at Sanam Luang on July 27-28. The event will include free job training and a free household appliance repair service as well as stalls selling Thai desserts and herbal juice health drinks, cheap food and drinks from food trucks and Blue Flag products. The Permanent Secretary of the Prime Ministers Office also noted in an official release, All Thai people are invited to participate in the activities on the birthday of His Majesty the King on July 28 and dress in yellow throughout July. However, as this year HM The King's birthday falls on a religious holiday, Buddhists can dress in white as is tradition. Property owner taken to hospital following shed fire Friday A garden shed is destroyed after a fire Friday afternoon and the owner was taken to the hospital for treatment of burns. General Mills Inc. is betting that less sugar will help spark growth in the companys slumping yogurt unit. Called YQ by Yoplait, the new variety is made with so-called ultra-filtered milk and is less sweet than many popular products in the category. That includes the companys own traditional Yoplait brand, which has seen its sales and market share plummet in recent years as U.S. consumers embraced Greek-style yogurt. But as Greek sales slow, the search is on for the next trend that will drive growth in the yogurt case. A year ago, General Mills released Oui, a yogurt with French heritage, and the product is on track to reach $100 million (U.S.) in annual sales, making it one top-performing new product launches in the past few years, according to the company. Even so, that hasnt been enough to turn the tide for General Mills yogurt unit, which saw U.S. sales slide 8 per cent in the most recent quarter. While that was the third consecutive quarter of improving performance for the unit, the Minneapolis-based food giant is hoping YQ can help stabilize and turn the division around. There are a lot of people who are dissatisfied with the taste of Greek yogurt, said Doug Martin, who leads yogurt innovation at the company. Greek is not the end point for healthiness or tastiness. U.S. consumers essentially didnt eat Greek yogurt before Chobani burst onto the scene in 2007, rocketing to $1 billion in sales in its first five years. Much of that success came at the expense of General Mills. For years, Yoplait was the top-selling brand in the U.S., and as recently as 2012, it accounted for about 24 per cent of the U.S market. In 2016 Chobani took over the top spot in the U.S., and Yoplaits market share has dropped to about 14 per cent, according to Euromonitor. Dannon is the top seller of yogurt in the U.S. with 37 per cent of the market when accounting for all the companys brands, including Oikos and Activia. The hemorrhaging sales prompted General Mills to review its yogurt business about two years ago. And while Oui sold in small glass jars has helped, the company is facing an uphill battle as the overall yogurt market wanes. U.S. yogurt sales have dropped in each of the past two years, and Euromonitor estimates they will decline 2.6 per cent this year. Yogurt with less sugar is nothing new. Light varieties have been around for decades, but those products are typically sweetened artificially. YQ uses cane sugar, and ultra-filtered milk has less lactose. The plain variety has 1 gram of sugar per serving, with nine grams in the flavoured versions. Yoplaits original fruit yogurts can contain about twice that amount. Everyday, more and more people are focused on reducing sugar, Martin said. The question is how you do that without doing the things people dont want you to do. Being self-employed has many benefits. You can freelance in your PJs, choose interesting contracts from a variety of employers, and attend your kids school play without asking the boss for time off. Working in the gig economy is awesome, right? Not so fast. While many enjoy the flexibility of gig or on-demand work, there can be significant financial challenges to being disconnected from a corporate paycheque. Theres budgeting on a fluctuating income, saving for retirement without a group plan, and setting aside money to pay taxes since its not deducted from your pay. If youre feeling this financial stress, youre not alone. A 2018 study by staffing company Randstad Canada found 20 to 30 per cent of the Canadian workforce is comprised of non-traditional workers. By 2020, that number could grow to 45 per cent, according to Intuit Canada. As work patterns shift and the contractor model continues to grow, its wise to get a handle on saving and spending in the gig lane so you can meet your short-term obligations and longer-term financial goals. Ive been a gigger for 10 years and have learned a few tips and budgeting tricks along the way. The process may be simple, but you have to do the work. Create a budget using your average net income If you have one or more years of irregular pay, start by calculating the average net (after tax) income youve earned each year, divide by 12, and use that number to build your monthly budget. If youre new to the gig grind with only a few months to tally, you must revisit your average regularly to account for both lean and lucrative times. Next, calculate all your average monthly expenses, and compare this to your income. If the difference leaves you in the red, find ways to increase your earnings or cut expenses to make your budget balance. Budget using three bank accounts You will need three linked accounts: two high-interest savings accounts and a chequing account. The first savings account is your holding account. Deposit all your income from every source dont forget your tax refund, bonuses, and tips into this account and use it to pay yourself the monthly budgeted amount you calculated earlier. The key to making this system work is to hold a minimum of three to six months of expenses, so when youre raking in the dough during good months, your holding account balance grows, and with leaner months, the balance decreases. Be sure to keep your monthly pay the same and not be tempted to draw extra funds when youve had a profitable month this money needs to last for harder times, too. Your second savings account is for setting aside funds owed to the government, such as income taxes, HST or GST, and CPP contributions. Paying taxes shouldnt be a big surprise when the deadline comes, so you must save as you earn. Find an online personal tax calculator to estimate your average tax rate, and move that money from every deposit directly to your tax account. The third account is for paying your expenses. Move the monthly budgeted expenses from your holding account to your chequing account each month, and use the balance to pay for your housing, credit cards, food, transportation, debt repayment, and all other bills. Emergency Savings and Retirement Dont fall into the psychological trap of blaming your irregular income for not saving for the future. Build your budget to include a contribution to a TFSA and/or RRSP to ensure your retirement and future financial goals dont go to zero. Starting an emergency fund is also essential to gig economy workers because falling ill or losing a contract happens, and depending on credit cards or lines of credit to finance your life can go negative fast. Building a realistic budget and living life with flexible work and varied income can take a little patience and practice. Always re-evaluate your progress and adjust to make it work for you. American politicians are at it again: punching OPEC. The cartel has often been a bogeyman for U.S. politicians since the first oil crisis in 1973. Now OPEC is facing a renewed political assault in Washington, directly from U.S. President Donald Trumps Twitter account, and quietly, but potentially more dangerously, from Congress. In books and social media postings going back 30 years, Trump has repeatedly attacked the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), saying oil prices should be around $30 (U.S.) a barrel and arguing OPEC was stealing money from American citizens. The presidents track record is important now because U.S. lawmakers have resurrected the so-called No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act, or NOPEC, which proposes making the cartel subject to the Sherman antitrust law, used more than a century ago to break up the oil empire of John Rockefeller. The bill was reintroduced in late May and cleared its first legislative hurdle last week when the House Judiciary Committee quickly sent it to floor deliberation. It would allow the U.S. government to sue OPEC for manipulating the energy market, potentially seeking billions of dollars in reparations. For OPEC, which meets later this week in Vienna to discuss oil production, the bill is a fat-tail risk. The chances that it passes are small, but if it happened, the consequences would be enormous. For some, the NOPEC bill stands in comparison with the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, which for the first time permitted lawsuits against Saudi Arabia over the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. U.S. politicians have tried several times since 2000 to pass the NOPEC bill, but the White House opposed it both George W. Bush and Barack Obama threatened to use their veto. The risk for OPEC is that Trump may break with his predecessors. Unlike past presidents, Trump is much more likely to sign it, said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University in New York and a former Obama administration oil official. Trump, before becoming president, didnt just support the NOPEC bill, he was a cheerleader. We can start by suing OPEC for violating antitrust laws, he wrote in his 2011 book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again about the problem of high oil prices. Currently, bringing a lawsuit against OPEC is difficult, he wrote. The way to fix this is to make sure that Congress passes and the president signs the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act. Bob McNally, founder of consultant Rapidan Energy Group LLC and a former oil official at the White House under George W. Bush, said that given President Trumps strong past support for NOPEC in his book and maverick style, NOPECs chances have never been better. OPEC officials are worried, both about the bill itself and the potential for congressional hearings attacking the cartel. Hossein Kazempour Ardebili, Irans representative at OPEC, said over the weekend that the U.S. bill was an attempt to blackmail the group, adding that using antitrust law is nonsense legally speaking, and we in OPEC are fighting it. In Washington, however, U.S. lawmakers, facing raising pump prices in the months before midterm elections to decide which party controls Congress, are talking equally tough. OPEC is an international cartel whose members deliberately collude to limit crude oil production as a means to fixing prices, unfairly driving up the price of crude to satisfy the greed of oil producers, Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat lawmaker from New York, whos co-sponsoring the legislation, told the Judiciary Committee last week. The bill faces a long, difficult journey before it can become law. Previous attempts have cleared the Judiciary Committee four times, and despite a veto threat by then-president George W. Bush, the bill even got approved by the House of Representatives in 2007 in a 345-72 vote, and the Senate by 70-23, only to die afterward. It remains to be seen if House leadership will bring the bill to the floor for a vote, said Brian Griffith, a spokesperson for bill sponsor Rep. Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican. The White House has yet to signal where it stands. If Trump flip-flops, he wont be the first president to do so: Obama voted in favour of the bill as a senator in 2007, but opposed it as president. Yet Obama didnt have Trumps decades-long history of OPEC-bashing that started in its 1987 book Trump: The Art of the Deal, where he describes how the group was responsible for the troubles American airlines suffered in the 1970s. The attacks have lately increased as oil prices rose to $80 a barrel and gasoline prices soared. Looks like OPEC is at it again, Trump tweeted on April 20, his first comment on social media about OPEC since he became U.S. president. Oil prices are artificially Very High! He repeated his attack this month, saying: Oil prices are too high, OPEC is at it again. Not good! MONTREALCompetition is heating up for Canadas most price-sensitive travellers as WestJet Airlines gears up to launch the countrys second ultralow cost airline Wednesday. Swoop, an offshoot of WestJet Airlines, will make its maiden flight on its pink and white aircraft before the sun rises in Hamilton, Ont. on a trip to Abbotsford, B.C. From my perspective coming into this fresh Ive been in Canada four months now I personally believe theres a huge opportunity in Canada, said Swoop president Steven Greenway. Greenway is an Australian native who has worked in executive positions at airlines including Japanese low-cost carrier Peach, Virgin Blue, Virgin Atlantic and Qantas. Swoop marks his sixth airline startup. By discounting travel, Swoop, Flair Airlines and others are trying to repatriate the more than five million Canadians who cross the border to catch flights from airports in Buffalo and Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Bellingham, Wash. Swoop is entering an area of the airline business that doesnt have a stellar history of success in Canada: Jetsgo, Air Canadas Tango, Canada 3000 and Roots Air have all floundered in the past. Read more: WestJet pilots union will represent Swoop pilots, arbitrator rules From our perspective theres the opportunity to fill a gap, theres an opportunity to stimulate demand, theres an opportunity to welcome Canadians back from crossing the border. We believe theres a significant enough market to be able to thrive, Greenway said in an interview. He expects competition will increase significantly over the next 12 months as Canada Jetlines gears up to join Swoop and Flair in offering deeply discounted fares along with charges for everything from a on-board drink to carry-on and checked baggage. Share your thoughts Flair welcomed the extra competition. We think that having more people in the space helps promote the fact the space exists and will work to each others advantage, executive chairperson David Tait said in an interview. I dont think Canadas big enough for half a dozen players in this space, but theres certainly plenty of room for two and maybe three. Meanwhile, Tait said Flair plans to move its headquarters to Edmonton from Kelowna, B.C., over the coming months to help promote its growth. Kelowna was a fine base for a charter operator, but it didnt really give us the scope, the potential we need as were growing. Swoop is entering an area of the airline business that doesnt have a stellar history of success in Canada: Jetsgo, Air Canadas Tango, Canada 3000 and Roots Air have all floundered in the past. Canada is the only G7 country without a true ultra low-cost carrier (ULCC) and the model has been successful in Europe, Australia and the United States, said transportation analyst Chris Murray of AltaCorp Capital. I dont think weve ever seen a true ULCC model in the Canadian marketplace before so I think were in somewhat uncharted territory, he said. I think theres also frankly some opportunities if they do it well to be successful with it. Murray estimates the Canadian ultra low-cost market can handle 10 million passengers per year, enough to support up to 50 aircraft. The service is particularly suited to leisure flights to Las Vegas, Arizona and Florida, he added. Swoop says fares should be 30 to 40 per cent lower than a national carrier. The key will be to keep costs down from lower labour costs, cramming 189 seats into Boeing 737-800s, and stimulating demand from people who dont normally fly because of the high cost. The arrival of new travel options has contributed to a 20 per cent cut in domestic summer airfares from 2016 and a seven per cent reduction in one year, said Steve Sintra, Canada country manager for the Kayak search engine. One of the biggest changes were seeing is the fact that with ultralow cost carriers, youre seeing more options for Canadian travellers, whether that be new airports that airlines are travelling to or just the ability to choose what amenities they want to have included in their airfare. Swoop, however, has already had something of a bumpy takeoff. WestJets launch of Swoop had been a source of labour strife between the company and pilots, who were on the brink of a strike last month before reaching an 11th-hour deal. Earlier this year, the union won a Canada Industrial Relations Board challenge to the companys proposed policy to offer pilots a two-year leave of absence if they go to fly for Swoop. A federal arbitrator ruled earlier this month that WestJets unionized pilots will also fly Swoop, which means the airline can no longer outsource Swoop flying, a major disagreement in recent negotiations. Swoop will recognize the union as the exclusive bargaining agent for all Swoop pilots, who will be on the airlines one seniority list and fly aircraft at Swoop terms and conditions. Initial one-way flights start at $49 tax included from Abbotsford to Winnipeg, $129 between Hamilton and Abbotsford and $99 between Hamilton and Halifax. The fares dont include a range of fees, including for carry-on luggage and checked bags starting at $26.25, seat selection starting at $5, and an additional $15 to contact the call centre if service cant be carried out on the website. No pets aside from guide dogs are allowed on board and any credits are only valid for 90 days. No loyalty points will be awarded. Swoop is starting with two planes, with plans to roll out six by year-end and 10 in 2019. Instead of flying from Toronto Pearson International, flights will fly out of Hamiltons lower-cost airport. Other initial cities are Winnipeg, Edmonton, Halifax and Abbotsford. Additional destinations will be added, including international flights likely by the end of 2018, Greenway said. Flair plans to fly to Orlando and Palm Springs, Calif., next winter. While there is a real concern that passengers could feel being nickled and dimed by a series of ancillary fees, experience in Europe over the past 20 years suggests passengers ultimately focus on the fares, said Greenway. It is an education process and I think people will adapt over time. Read more about: CALGARYWhen his auto insurance company offered him the option to pay lower rates, Justin Lam leaped at the chance, even though it meant allowing his insurer to electronically tag along with him on every trip. The 39-year-old from Toronto downloaded TD Insurances Myadvantage app on his cellphone and started receiving scores out of 100 based on how fast he was going, whether his turns were too sudden, how hard he was braking and even what time of day he tended to get behind the wheel. They said there was no downside. So, even if you score terribly on the app, the (worst) you could do is pay the same rate, with no discount, Lam said. The payoff arrived last month with his insurance renewal notice. With an average score in his first year of about 85, he said he is saving around 20 per cent, dropping his $1,800 annual bill to less than $1,500. If a person doesnt mind the loss of privacy and their driving will stand up to intensive scrutiny, usage-based insurance may be right for them, experts say. Driver monitoring programs are generally delivered in two ways, by a smartphone app that sleeps until it senses driving has started, or by a telematics device plugged into the cars diagnostic port. Both use GPS and sensors to collect information and send it wirelessly to the insurers website. Drivers usually receive an enrolment discount of five or 10 per cent and then can earn up to another 15 to 25 per cent discount that is applied when their insurance policy is renewed. Users can go online to see how their driving stacks up and make corrections. For example, the TD Myadvantage app allows the policy holder to delete a trip if he or she was actually a passenger. The TD program is offered only in Ontario and Quebec, said Francois Langevin, assistant vice-president of product innovation, but the company is looking to expand it into other provinces. He estimated that about 40 per cent of new auto insurance clients sign up, adding thats similar to the industry average for these programs in Canada. If youre a driver who drives low kilometres, doesnt speed, and doesnt have jerky driving, that kind of thing, then you have a lower likelihood of making a claim so you get a discount based on that driving behaviour, said Kaitlynn Furse, spokeswoman for CAA South Central Ontario, which offers a service called CAA Connect that uses a telematics device plugged into the car. Auto insurance falls under provincial regulation and so the rules vary across Canada. Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Alberta, for instance, allow some but not all forms of usage-based insurance programs. The other provinces and territories are considering allowing the programs but havent done so yet. Provincial regulation has fallen behind the pace of technology, preventing insurers and clients from being able to harness the full potential of such programs, said senior policy adviser Rana Shamoon at the Insurance Bureau of Canada. Canadians have far fewer choices than in the United States, where 49 jurisdictions have 10 or more insurers offering user-based programs, she said. Fear that their information may be misused to raise their premiums or provide evidence against them in the event of a claim has hampered enrolment growth in telematics programs, said Andrew Lo, CEO of Kanetix Ltd., a company that helps consumers compare insurance products and rates. According to a recent Kanetix survey, only 27.7 per cent of respondents in Ontario said they are interested in allowing their insurer to monitor their driving in return for discounted rates. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has identified potential issues with transparency and use of telematics data about driving habits, said Anne-Marie Cenaiko, manager of public education and outreach. Federal and provincial privacy laws generally require data only be collected with informed consent and be used or disclosed only for the purpose for which it was collected, she said. Living up to the expectations of his monitoring app is difficult at times, Lam said staying below the speed limit when all the traffic around is going faster can seem more hazardous than just keeping up. He said he also found he was getting a few odd scores. It takes the app a while to realize youve stopped driving, he said. One time, I dropped my phone on the ground as I was getting out of the car and I got a mark of, like, five for braking too hard. Lexi took to Tinder saying she was just looking for a nice guy to pay penalty infringement. McHugh sent her a screenshot of a receipt for the payment of the fine via Facebook messenger. (Photo: Facebook / Tinder) An Autralian student, Lexi took to Tinder to ask someone to pay her $110 traffic fine. The 25-year-old was pleasantly surprised when a man on the other side of the world took care of it. Lexi, who studies at the University of Newcastle, had the infringement notice paid by a man from Shreveport, Louisiana. Network Engineer Matt McHugh said he paid the fine after the pair got chatting, but does not expect anything in return except friendship. Lexi too to her Tinder profile saying she was just looking for a nice guy to pay penalty infringement. McHugh then sent her a screenshot of a receipt for the payment of the fine via Facebook messenger. Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, he said that she was a good sport so he figured he would help her out. 'I don't have high hopes for anything more than friendship. We can all dream but it's hard to get one of those beautiful blonde Australians to come to America. McHugh said he stumbled across Lexi after using Tinder Plus to view people living in Australia. CALGARYCalgary will, perhaps unsurprisingly, take a conservative approach as it considers the viability of adding electric buses to its fleet, says a city transit official. The industry, in general, hasnt settled on what strategy is the right strategy, Russell Davis, Calgarys transit fleet manager, told StarMetro. We dont want to get stuck with the Betamax version, Davis said, referring to the home video format war of the 1970s and 1980s, which VHS eventually won. The city is seeking input from industry experts as it considers rolling out a $25-million pilot project involving 10 to 15 electric buses and charging stations by 2020 in a bid to diversify its fleet and hedge exposure to fuel price fluctuations and carbon costs. The project hinges on council approving the investment during Novembers budget deliberations. But the chair of the citys transit and transportation committee cast doubt on whether the pilot project will garner enough support on council during budget deliberations this fall. Councillor Shane Keating said the city has already invested heavily in a new compressed natural gas storage and transit facility, is exploring biodiesel, and that electric buses are not as reliable. I like the idea of going that route but is the time right now? Im not so sure, Keating said. I would hate for us to jump into a third wave just for the sake of piloting when were well on the way to finding our reduction in carbon targets. Calgarys fleet of 1,000 buses overwhelmingly runs on diesel (850) and gasoline (150). The city plans to replace roughly half of its diesel-powered buses with ones that run on natural gas over the next five years. While electric vehicles are often viewed as an effective way to reduce carbon emissions, the industry hasnt settled on whether its better to invest in long- or short-range vehicles, said Davis. Long-range buses require loads of batteries and a significant electrical system that can handle charging a fleet once a day. Conversely, short-range buses would rely on dozens of charging stations scattered throughout the city. If we jump too quickly and then the industry generally says, No, we should all go the other way, then weve made a fairly significant investment in the wrong direction, Davis said. So, were taking a little bit more of a conservative approach. While a handful of Canadian cities have or plan to add electric buses to their fleets, none has made a meaningful investment, said Davis. Given the state of the economy in Alberta I think there are more economically viable solutions than electric vehicles and they can get us a long way toward emissions reductions, as well, he said, noting the city pays about $26 million annually to fuel its fleet of buses. The city is negotiating with suppliers and the provincial government to use a product called renewable natural gas, which is produced using organic waste from landfills, water treatment plants and farms. What we understand is that will give us an 85 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (per bus), Davis said. That gets us a long way toward the electric goal, which, lets assume, is 100 per cent, but without the big investment. The pilot would, if approved, focus on community-scale and highly visible routes to ensure as many Calgarians are exposed to the buses as possible. Davis said a consultant has already suggested about 20 routes that would fit the bill, but declined to reveal which ones the city may choose. Read more about: EDMONTONMany American Albertans take pride in having roots on both sides of the border, but things are getting less comfortable as trade tensions heat up. Im hoping that American people down in those districts are letting their congressmen and their senators know that theyre not happy with the idea of a trade war with their No. 1 trading partner, said Kim Krushell, a former city councillor who now heads a tech company in Edmonton. Krushell moved to Canada in 1990, joining a significant number of Albertans who were born in the United States. There are now nearly 35,000, according to a 2016 Statistics Canada report. Even though some of them have been here for years and have acquired Canadian citizenship, Americans here cant help but get caught up in the latest trade spat between Canada and the United States. In May, the Trump administration announced 25 per cent steel tariffs and 10 per cent aluminum tariffs on Canada, Mexico and the European Union, all of which he had previously exempted. These were justified on the grounds of national security, after NAFTA talks stalled. In Krushells mind, an all-out trade war can be avoided if cooler heads prevail. Yet she believes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the right call by announcing retaliatory tariffs on a litany of products made in the U.S. On Tuesday, at a speech to business leaders in Washington, D.C., Trump accused Canadians of buying products south of the border and sneaking them back home all because of what he calls massive tariffs on American goods. He said Canada imposes such onerous tariffs on U.S. products shoes, for instance that people are forced to scuff em up in order to smuggle them home. Read more: Donald Trump accuses Canadians of smuggling shoes home from U.S. U.S. border family separations roil campaigns ahead of midterm elections Trudeau has billions of reasons to dig in against Trump on dairy Watching all of this unfold, Michael Di Massa, a communications specialist originally from California, couldnt help but feel disappointed. When I heard that the security threat was being used as justification for imposing these tariffs, I rolled my eyes, Di Massa said. If I could sum everything up in one word, it would be: disappointment. The two countries have built so much goodwill, which has been disregarded over the past few weeks, he said. I cant imagine that Canada or Canadians would pose any sort of threat to the United States, whether through border security or any other cause. Regardless, theres some evidence that the latest war of words has shaped perceptions on both sides of the border. In a 2016 poll by NBC, 75 per cent of Americans had a favourable view of Canada, with 3 per cent disapproving. In a February poll by Gallup, a full 94 per cent approved. But in a June poll by Public Policy Polling, just 66 per cent approved of Canada, 13 per cent disapproved and 22 per cent were unsure. In Canada, opposition leaders put aside their differences in a rare display of solidarity. NDP MP Tracey Ramseys bill to condemn tariffs imposed by the Trump administration received unanimous support in the House of Commons. On Twitter, Canadians talked about boycotting U.S. products, using the hashtag #BoycottUSProducts and #BuyCanadian. The Canadian people are mad and rightfully so and if they feel that is an outlet to express their opinion on how the tariffs are playing out, then more power to them, said Di Massa. Even though an Angus Reid poll from early this year showed that Albertans tend to have a more positive view of Trump when compared to the rest of Canada, businesses in the Edmonton area are plenty concerned about the tariffs. The implications are very severe for us, said Jon Hobbs, president of AltaSteel, a steel manufacturing company based in Edmonton. The company ships 20 per cent of its products by volume to the United States. Sales have dropped approximately four per cent in the days following the imposition of tariffs, said Hobbs. Industry in Edmonton can compete with the best without any need for tariffs, but once one party introduces a tariff there is an urgent need to relevel the playing field. While there have been several spats between Canadian prime ministers and U.S. presidents in the past, none have been this personal, said Greg Anderson, a professor in the department of political science at the University of Alberta. He moved to Alberta from Salt Lake City, Utah, for his current job over a decade ago. While Anderson believes there is a real concern steel and aluminum tariffs could be the tip of the iceberg, he thinks things will probably go back to normal soon. This will pass, he said of the trade dispute. A lot of this is smoke and mirrors. With files from The Canadian Press With files from Daniel Dale Read more about: HALIFAXDeputy Mayor Waye Mason worries that if Halifax doesnt get control of affordable housing back from the province, nothing will change. Ive been watching this for three governments, and Ive been dealing with the last two governments, and housing isnt getting built, Mason said. It doesnt have to be us. Its not about grandstanding, its not about political points, its not about expanding the empire. Its about, if not the province, then who? Mason brought the idea to regional council in January, seeking a staff report on taking housing back from the province. The pitch: an agency at arms length from council that would manage public housing, support the non-profit sector and build new homes. He proposes to fund it by keeping some of the tax dollars that go to the province for education (about $140 million annually in total) and housing (about $3.5 million in total). I will withdraw my demands or requests that housing be handed to the city the minute we start building hundreds of units a year as originally planned, Mason declared. Read more: Why housing affordability in Halifax is stuck in 1996 In late 2016, Halifax regional council approved a plan for 5,000 new and preserved units of affordable housing within five years. Today, with three and a half years to go, fewer than 500 new units have been created. The goal seems out of reach, and in the meantime the current public-housing stock is waiting for years worth of repairs. Frustration with the province is boiling over, but Masons proposal to take housing back is still getting a cool reception from the province and experts in the field alike. The move presents its own problems, with critics questioning whether the municipality is really better suited to handle housing. Though housing was always technically the provinces responsibility, prior to 1996 Nova Scotia delegated the file to municipalities. The former City of Halifax delivered housing on the peninsula and built most of the public housing stock still standing today, using mostly federal and provincial money. Now, that stock is managed by Housing Nova Scotia under the supervision of the provincial Department of Community Services (DCS). Masons request took that departments minister, Kelly Regan, by surprise. Mr. Mason hadnt contacted me about his concerns before, I think, airing them in public, Regan said. But I appreciate his enthusiasm. Asked for her perspective on the 5,000-unit goal, Regan emphasized that her government is making progress on the plans three key priorities: increasing the supply of affordable options, reducing the number of residents living without suitable, adequate or affordable housing and fostering a strong social-housing sector. My marching orders are to reduce the housing wait list, so thats what Ive been focusing on, she said. The government has improved matters across the province, reducing the wait list by 1,000 households since 2015. In Halifax, however, theres been no progress; the wait list stands at about 1,300 according to Housing Nova Scotia, about the same as it did in 2016. Regan wouldnt speak directly about Masons motion, but she doesnt think the municipality taking over is a good idea. I do think having a province-wide approach is better for all Nova Scotians. It provides programs and supports that are universally implemented across the entire province, she said. But again, I think its kind of premature for me to comment ... I dont know what theyre going to come up with in their report. Lindell Smith is eagerly awaiting that report from city staff. The District 8 Peninsula North councillor has long argued Halifax should assume a bigger role on social issues. As long as proper funding comes with it, he said, Halifax taking on housing could work. I honestly dont feel like it could be any worse than what it is now, Smith said. His district is home to much of the public housing in the municipality, and even though housing isnt his governments responsibility, residents already come to him with complaints. Theyre going to call the person that they know and they see and they trust, Smith said. When they call me and I say, I cant do anything, it (sends) a terrible message to them because its like, I thought I could rely on you. They understand, but still ... you want to be able to help them, but you cant. If Halifax took over housing, Smith argues, it could be more responsive to the needs of residents. The lines of communication are already in place. Complaints about housing maintenance could be handled the same as calls about sidewalk maintenance or waste collection: through the 311 hotline. Residents are given a reference number, which they can take to their councillor, who can look into the problem. If nothings happened, Im accountable. Someones accountable, Smith said. Mason agrees Halifax is well qualified to handle maintenance. The municipality knows how to repair properties and has lots of workers ready to field calls from 311. Its the other side of things, property management and the finances of development, where the municipality lacks experience. Mason believes Halifax would have to hire people who have a better understanding of the economics of development and investing in real estate. You need some very specialized expertise, Mason said. Jim Graham, executive director of the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia (AHANS), feels housing is better dealt with at the provincial level just not the way it is now. I think Wayes sort of on the right track, in the sense that something has to be different, Graham said. In my own head, I think its better as a provincial thing than as strictly a Halifax thing. AHANS advocates a return to the provinces old way of doing housing, with an arms-length agency. What we need here is housing out of DCS, Graham said, because the department is subject to the whims of the political leaders of the day. We need housing with a board of directors. The province doesnt give up its responsibilities, it has them, but it can take advice from its board of directors ... It can still fund it the way it pleases. None of that changes. It can put money in or not depending on the political will of the day. But the corporation, as a corporation, gets to manage its resources, the best way it knows how, with a competent board of directors. Such an arrangement, Graham argues, would free the housing file from the influence of political interests. In a political environment, governments tend to spread the wealth around the province, reaching as much of the electorate as possible, without necessarily looking at where the need is greatest. Graham wants to see Housing Nova Scotia work like a non-profit on a large scale: investing money in sustainable mixed-income projects in areas where theres a need for more units, and then putting any money made back into maintenance and building more units. Thats what Housing Nova Scotia should look like; it should look like a non-profit, he said. While Graham bills it as a simple solution, the idea isnt on Regans radar. If that proved to be a better solution to the running of Housing Nova Scotia then its something you could look at, she said, but it hasnt been something thats been presented to me, or in fact I havent had anyone raise it as a concern with me. Developer, property manager and consultant Ross Cantwell believes something simpler than political influence is hobbling progress on affordable housing: poor communication. As the president of the Housing Trust of Nova Scotia, Cantwell is working to develop two apartment buildings on Gottingen St. in Halifax, with half the units renting for 60 per cent of market rent in perpetuity. For the Housing Trust, we were trying to get some things done. We co-ordinated a meeting of (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation), Housing Nova Scotia, the municipality and people from our board, and were told it was the first time all those groups had met, Cantwell said. They should be meeting quarterly, Cantwell said. Maybe we dont have more money to solve these things, so weve got to work as a team, weve got to meet, weve got to co-ordinate, he said. Theres so many possible solutions out there, and its all about co-ordinating and working as a team. Mason agrees there are communication issues, even between the government and Housing Nova Scotia. There were provincial staff at the table when we set the goal of 1,000 units a year for five years, and that appears to have never made it into the business plan in a meaningful way ... Thats got to be fixed, Mason said. Regan said she and Mason spoke after he requested the staff report on taking housing back from the province, and the talk went well. I think its clear that we work better when we have conversations about these things, she said. With those conversations in the very early stages, its unclear whether the province would actually be willing to relinquish control. Graham is doubtful. He points out that much of the value of Housing Nova Scotias real-estate assets, which it could use to borrow money for other projects, is in Halifax. If I was the province, I would not let Halifax go, because the valuable assets that I might want to leverage are here, he said. By contrast, Cantwell thinks the province would love to give up the job of managing public housing a job he says you couldnt pay him enough to take on. My understanding is theres some people in the province who think, Fill your boots, buddy. You want this? You have no idea what youre getting into, he said. That said, he thinks Masons methods havent made him any friends. Hes fired a shot across the bow, Cantwell said. Instead of, How do we work together? Hes like, You guys arent doing a good job, so were going to take this over. Meanwhile, the man whose idea launched the whole debate was surprised at the provinces reaction. Its an understatement to say I was surprised about the negative pushback because I know that the province doesnt know what to do with housing and its very frustrated with housing, Mason said. Im trying to offer solutions to get stuff done, to build housing. Thats what I want to do. I dont care who does it. Read more about: HALIFAX Nova Scotia has nabbed four spots on Expedias 2018 list of the top 25 Friendliest Communities (and Towns) in Canada. Expedia released its first annual list of Canadas friendliest destinations last week. The international travel website said it looked at hotel review data from 2017 and selected the winning communities based on the highest-rated service scores. These ratings indicate the most helpful, dutiful, and welcoming experiences across the country, noted the write-up accompanying the list. The top 25 were compiled from a list of more than 750 destinations. Those who made the cut had at least 100 reviews and a four-star rating or higher. Truro, which landed fourth on the list, was lauded for its farmers market and downtown hub. Halifax grabbed spot number 10, with a note that the city has long been known for its fresh breezes and outlook on life. Must-see highlights included the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 and the Halifax Farmers Market. Right across the harbour, Expedia describes Dartmouths salty air and historic buildings as giving it a nostalgic vibe. The community captured spot number 13 on the list. Dartmouths Peace Pavilion and The Wooden Monkey Restaurant were given special mention. Enfield squeaked into the top 25 at spot number 24. Last year, three Nova Scotian communities made Expedias inaugural Friendliest Communities (and Towns) in Canada list. Annapolis Royal was ranked seventh, Liverpool was 13th and Membertou nabbed 14th on the list. Read more about: VANCOUVERA British Columbia mans Facebook posts allegedly threatening violence in support of Daesh, also known as ISIS, provide enough evidence to suggest he poses a security risk to Canada and should be deported, an official for the Canada Border Services Agency says. Othman Hamdans lawyer has argued his clients online views amounted to freedom of expression as guaranteed by the Charter. Randal Hyland, a hearings officer for the border services agency, told an admissibility hearing of the Immigration and Refugee Board on Monday that Hamdans praise and encouragement of martyrdom and so-called lone-wolf terrorist attacks mean he could incite others to commit such offences. The Jordanian national came to Canada in 2002 after living in the United States. He was arrested at his home in Fort St. John, B.C., in 2015 and charged with multiple terrorism offences related to 85 Facebook posts. A B.C. Supreme Court judge acquitted Hamdan last September citing insufficient evidence, but immigration authorities arrested him and have determined at 11 detention review hearings that he poses a threat to the public. Hyland said Hamdans violent mindset extended beyond his views on Facebook starting in 2014, adding he lashed out at the social media giant in a letter, saying its employees would be harmed because his accounts were deleted. He said Hamdan also told a cell mate he would attack RCMP personnel and bomb the forces headquarters in Surrey, B.C., after officers translated his posts, which were in Arabic and English. In May, an RCMP officer told Hamdams hearing about two translated Arabic posts in which Hamdan discussed infrastructure in Canada, including a dam in Revelstoke, B.C., and a bridge near Nipigon, Ont., suggesting they were weak targets. Hyland, who made submissions on behalf of Public Safety Canada, said that despite his acquittal, Hamdans threats of violence should be taken seriously. The (public safety) ministers position is that in total, Mr. Hamdans threats, online communications and other activity identified in the ministers initial submissions are factual evidence that he would be found a danger to the security of Canada, Hyland said. Hamdans posts have also supported violence against specific groups, including Semites in Israel, people in France and those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and transgender and believe in same-sex marriage, Hyland said. Mr. Hamdan has, and will continue to use social media to advocate and promote terrorism in support of the Islamic State (group), which is a listed terrorist entity, he said of Daesh. Hylands submissions were part of the Canada Border Service Agencys response to written submissions made by Hamdans lawyer, Peter Edelmann, on June 11. The written submission was not immediately available to the media. Edelmann told the hearing Monday that the Immigration and Refugee Boards view of his client as someone who tends to lash out doesnt take into account that he has never acted out in jail, where there is plenty of opportunity for people to commit violence. The fact that somebody will engage in violence is not enough to meet the danger-to-security-in-Canada threshold, he said. There is a large number of people who come before this division, who pose a threat to commit acts of violence against their spouses, against their children, against random people on the street. Theyre not threats to the security of Canada. Read more about: HALIFAXThe president of Dalhousie University has announced hes leaving the East Coast to lead a startup ideas lab in Waterloos tech mecca. Dalhousie said Richard Florizone will be leading the new Quantum Valley Ideas Lab, a non-profit focused on quantum devices and their applications. It has major funding from the Ontario government and connections to the University of Waterloo. Florizone, who has been Dalhousies president for five years, will leave the Halifax university in 2019. In a memo Monday, Lawrence Stordy, the chairperson of Dalhousies board of governors, said Florizone was leaving for a once in a lifetime opportunity in the Ontario tech hub. He cited Florizones track record at Dalhousie, including record enrolment and fundraising, new buildings and new ocean-studies initiatives. I am very proud of what this university, community and region have accomplished together and people are just getting started. The past five years have been an amazing honour, Florizone said on Twitter. Read more about: Worried that fake news is making it more difficult to find accurate sources of information? Youre not alone. A survey by Nanos Research for the organization Canadian Journalists for Free Expression found a strong majority of Canadians more than eight in 10 say false information that looks legitimate is making it harder to find out whats real. To help prevent the spread of fake news, seven out of 10 Canadians think the government should step in. Its great that people are this concerned about the issue ... the issue of fake news is such a pervasive one that its good to see that people are that tuned in, said CJFE vice-president Tom Henheffer. But Henheffer said its very much a double-edged sword. Its good that people are aware of this issue and concerned about it, but its also a little frightening that it makes you wonder (if) the overall trust in the institution of journalism has really dropped, which I think it has. Vote now Half of Canadians agreed, and 30 per cent somewhat agreed, that finding accurate information was growing more difficult. Thirty-eight per cent agreed, and 34 per cent agreed somewhat, that government regulation is needed to prevent the spread of fake news. Henheffer said the research is really still out in terms of how we can combat fake news. Anytime the government regulates the news industry is extremely uncomfortable and something that we are very concerned about, Henheffer said. But at the same time, the proliferation of fake news and the media bubble that people are insulated in on social media is really worrying because it means that people arent being exposed to the same types of differing opinions that they normally would be. The CJFE monitors and reports on free expression and access to information in Canada and around the world. The survey was conducted between Apr. 28 and May 4 with 1,000 Canadians. Survey results based on the total sample are considered accurate, plus or minus 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Toronto police have identified two more suspects wanted in a brazen shooting at a Scarborough playground last week that sent two young girls to hospital. Tarrick Rhoden and TQuan Robertson, both 23-year-olds from Toronto, are each wanted for attempted murder, discharging a firearm and aggravated assault. Rhoden is described as six-foot-one and 181 pounds; Robertson is five-foot-eight and 130 pounds. Police believe both men are armed and warn the public not to approach them if spotted. Sheldon Eriya, 21, of Markham was arrested last Friday in Pickering. He was charged with seven offences, including two counts of attempted murder. The girls were two of 11 children at the playground in Scarboroughs Alton Towers community when at least seven shots were fired Thursday at about 5 p.m. A man who was also at the playground was the intended target, police said. The gunman arrived by car, but walked to the playground and opened fire before fleeing, police said. A neighbour of two sisters aged five and nine who were injured after a man sprayed bullets into a Toronto park is encouraging the shooter to turn himself in. Ontario Premier-designate Doug Ford is promising extra resources for police. (The Canadian Press) The victims sisters who are 5 and 9 are recovering from gunshot wounds to the stomach and ankle at Sick Kids hospital. The shooting outraged the city and sparked political tough talk over the issue of gun violence. Neighbours told the Star that they were shocked by the incident. Derek Wellwood, who does landscaping work in the neighbourhood every month, said he went over to the street near the playground after hearing the shots. He saw a young girl on the ground with six people around her. Thats when the mother said, I dont want to lose you this way, he told the Star last Friday. The little girl said I dont feel very well, and then a moment later a neighbour came out with a fistful of paper towels, gave it to someone beside her and they put it on her. I did see her vomit on the ground. The playground is tucked between the townhouses, bordered by the street and the parking lot. Ten bullet holes could be seen, circled with black marker. Correction June 27, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version to remove a photo. Read more about: Residents are calling out owners of a heritage property in the Annex, alleging they are letting the home go to pot on purpose. The house at 6 Walmer Rd. has been boarded up for years, says Albert Koehl, vice-chair of the Annex Residents Association. The building is clearly deteriorating. I can clearly see an open area at the top, where it peaks, and therefore open to the air, the animals, rain and so on, said Koehl, an environmental lawyer, noting he believes eventually the structure will be irretrievable. Koehl said he believes its a case of demolition by neglect a situation in which a property owner intentionally lets a building fall to ruin with the hope that when it does, they can build something new in its stead. Its an situation a city staff member said isnt unheard of in Toronto. A land transfer deed obtained by the Star, which includes 6, 8 and 10 Walmer Rd., appears to show that a company called New Style Construction Ltd. transferred ownership to NSCL Investments Ltd. in 1988. Over the span of about one week, the Star made three attempts to reach president Michael Naiberg for comment by phone, then delivered a detailed set of questions to a house associated with his name. On Monday, a man who answered the phone declined to comment. Two letters have been sent to the city about the property one from the Annex Residents Association in 2017, and another from residents of 10 Walmer Rd, a nearby highrise, in 2013. Both characterize ongoing deterioration of the building and a lack of action to see it preserved. We want the city to use its powers to force the building owner to repair the heritage attributes, and thereby to convert the building from an eyesore and safety hazard to a properly maintained building that respects area residents and the appearance of the neighbourhood, Koehl said, adding the property is a public asset. If its been designated by bylaw as a heritage building we should be preserving our heritage, and its probably symptomatic of larger problem if the city isnt enforcing its own bylaws to maintain this building, Koehl said. The house, built in 1896 in the Queen Anne Revival style for a reverend named Thomas Goldsmith, was designated as a heritage building in 2013, according to a city bylaw document. Its architect was Frederick Herbert, one of the citys best-known practitioners specializing in residential architecture at the close of the 19th century, the document says, adding he took to designing homes for the rich. A year before the designation, a notice of objection to the status was filed, then withdrawn. Before that, in 2011, owners had submitted an application to demolish the building, and then withdrew, according to a city planning report the same year. Neil Jain, who has lived at 10 Walmer for 10 years, complained of large accumulations of garbage around 6 Walmer, graffiti, trespassers, and parking woes. He said he has a birds-eye view of the heritage property from his unit and although the street is a no-parking zone, large trucks park directly in front of the derelict properties (8 Walmer is also vacant, but does not have heritage status). In the last five years or so, the issues have become worse, he said. Weve had folks climb up onto the roof of 6 Walmer, enter the property through a hole. Ive personally called the police a couple of times. Jain said even basic maintenance seems to be flouted. 6 Walmer has all kinds of standards the owners supposed to abide by. It doesnt benefit anyone to have these abandoned houses, Jain said. According to a city property standards document, owners of heritage properties should be meet benchmark maintenance protocols to preserve heritage characteristics. Proprietors, it says, should Maintain, preserve and protect the heritage attributes so as to maintain the heritage character, visual and structural heritage integrity of the building or structure, adding that vacant buildings must be boarded up. Mark Sraga, director of investigative services for municipal licensing and standards, said city staff would inspect 6 Walmer this week, adding his office has received multiple complaints about the heritage house over the years. Demolition by neglect is not unheard of in Toronto, Sraga said. Its not just unique in Toronto, it happens everywhere in Ontario, he said. Anybody with a heritage designated structure that wants to replace it with something other, unscrupulous developers, property owners will do that, Sraga said. If you let the roof rot, it collapses, the building collapses, whatever, well, then you cant save it. Its sad, but thats what they say, Oops, too bad. Whether this is the case at 6 Walmer has yet to be determined, he said, but if an owner doesnt act to remedy potential problems, the city would make an inspection, ensuring the property is secured. We would go out and ask is it secure against illegal entry, if not we would issue a notice of violation with the property owner telling them they must secure it, Sraga said. And if they dont do it, we will, and charge it back onto their property taxes. We are charging the property owner for doing the work that they themselves ought to have done. Former Toronto mayor Barbara Hall has been appointed to distribute the $3.4 million raised so far for the Toronto Strong fund all of which will go to the victims of the Yonge St. van rampage and their families. Nothing can compensate for the loss these families have suffered, Hall said in a statement released by the city last week. The rampage last April on one of Torontos main thoroughfares left 10 dead and 16 injured. My job is to ensure that the #TorontoStrong Fund carries out the generous intentions of all its donors and offers the most support possible to those whose lives have been forever changed, she said. The Toronto Strong fundraiser will continue to accept donations until Aug. 31. Funds will be distributed by Sept. 28. City of Toronto spokesperson Andrea Martinelli said the money will be distributed based on an allocation formula modelled on best practices from around the world. Victims Services has already received an initial $500,000 to help families cover immediate expenses, including accommodation, travel and funerals. That works out to $20,000 per family. A memorial has sprung up along the stretch of Yonge Street in Toronto where the deadly van attack occurred on April 23. One resident who lives near Yonge and Finch says the area is usually very safe. (The Canadian Press) Read more: Thousands raised through #TorontoStrong, GoFundMe campaigns to help van victims Opinion | DiManno: Toronto van tragedy bonds city in blood. But no one will say the word terrorism Where your money goes when tragedy strikes Hall and the steering committee overseeing the fund will also provide recommendations on what can be done to help address and prevent future violent attacks. Mayor John Tory in the statement the fund was created so that the people of Toronto and beyond could express their support for these affected families. Ms. Hall has a distinguished career and I know that she will approach the task of distributing these donations with the compassion, empathy and rigour that is required. In early May, it had yet to be determined what would be done with the additional millions raised after the initial $500,000 was distributed. Julia Howell, vice-president of community engagement at the Toronto Foundation, said it was possible that some of the funds raised would not go directly to the victims and their families. At the steering committees first meeting, they opted to give all the money raised to victims and survivors. The couple married in May, and has carried out several royal engagements since then. LONDON: Prince Harry and his wife Meghan will make their first official trip abroad to Ireland next month. Kensington Palace said Tuesday that the royal couple will travel to Dublin for two days starting on July 10. The palace said Harry and his wife, now formally known as the Duchess of Sussex, are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and meeting people shaping its future. The couple married in May, and has carried out several royal engagements since then. They plan to join Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Ascot horse races Tuesday afternoon to present a trophy. The royal couple has also announced plans to make an official trip to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga in October. The Halton Catholic District School Board is set to consider feedback from hundreds of community members as they prepare to decide the future of a controversial policy that bans its schools from donating to charities that it says dont align with Catholic values. The feedback is contained in a report hundreds of pages long that will be considered at a meeting in Burlington Tuesday evening. Of the more than 900 responses, 74 per cent of people were against the motion. Our Catholic Board must distinguish itself by following Catholic teaching, one proponent of the policy wrote. All activities, events, and values should reflect who the Church truly is. This resolution is an obvious and necessary step toward honouring our Catholic faith. Jesus said to love thy neighbor and to treat others as you would like to be treated so why are we going against his word and refusing to aid those in need? wrote one opponent. The board is revisiting a motion it approved in February that bans any financial donations to any charities or non-profits that publicly support, either directly or indirectly, abortion, contraception, sterilization, euthanasia or embryonic stem cell research. The move had sparked an outcry from students and community members. After months of controversy including rejecting Ontarios then-minister of educations request to suspend the policy the board, on May 1, opted to put the motion on hold until the completion of community consultations. Feedback was compiled through email and an online form, a Catholic School Council form, the May 2018 Catholic Council of Chairs meeting and delegations at regular board meetings. The 21 per cent of people in support of the policy repeatedly mentioned the motion would uphold Catholic values and suggested those against the policy could donate where they wished on their own time, according to the report. One parent wrote they strongly supported the motion, saying the board should promote the values of the Catholic faith. The amendments made reflect who we are as children of God, the parent wrote. The (school board) should not support any institution or charity that promotes attacks on human life and human rights. Human life is Sacred. A Halton Catholic ratepayer wrote that as Catholic educators, the board has a moral responsibility to teach the students (and parents) that fall under your justification what it means to be Catholic in its fullest sense. The 671 people against the policy repeatedly said they wanted freedom to donate to organizations that benefited others and suggested the proposed changes would go against Catholic values to love and help without discriminating, according to the report. One parent wrote that the policy goes against everything that is the basis of our faith. The parent added that they do believe in the sanctity of life, but I dont agree on how this policy is attacking organizations that are working tirelessly to prolong life and helping those nearing the end of life. I was a student in the Catholic education system, and I believed putting my daughter in the Catholic education system would allow her to grow up in a community surrounded by faith, love, understanding, and compassion for others, another parent wrote. After reading this proposed policy, I believe I may have been wrong. A petition from Corpus Christi Catholic Secondary School students, in opposition to the motion, had 250 signatures. A 60-year-old man from Toronto was found dead on the shore of Lake Simcoe Sunday evening. Shortly before 8 p.m. on June 17, Durham emergency services responded to a call that a body has been found in the area of Shoreline Rd. and Regional Rd. 9 in Brock Township. People were walking their dogs when they found the victim next to his yellow kayak. The man was transported to a local hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. A post-mortem will be conducted to determine the cause of death, police said. Anyone with information is asked to contact Const. Hansson of the North Division at 1-888-578-1520 ext. 2672 or Durham Crime Stoppers. A worker pinned by heavy machinery in an Oshawa trench Tuesday morning was successfully rescued and is on his way to hospital. The man was pinned under the bucket of a backhoe while working on a water main on Verdun Avenue just north of Eulalie Avenue around 8 a.m. Oshawa Fire Services deputy chief Todd Wood reports the man was rescued at about 10:10 a.m. Hes now in the care of EMS and in the process of being transported to a trauma centre, said Wood, adding that the man was conscious when he was rescued. Everyone did a fantastic job, its a long arduous process, it took us a few hours, we had many obstacles to overcome, the heavy bucket being one of them, said Wood. He explains that firefighters had to shore up the walls before they could get into the trench to rescue the man and the conditions in the trench were muddy making it difficult to get a good footing to lift the bucket. Ultimately firefighters were able to rig the bucket up to a hauling device and then used people power to lift it off the man. There was a line of firefighters and we just took one step at at time to lift the bucket and tilt it off of him until we were able to free him, said Wood. Everyone did their jobs safely and professionally and we couldnt be more proud of them. The deputy chief confirmed that the Ministry of Labour was called to investigate the incident. Read more about: The prospect of finding a good job in the GTA has improved overall since 2011 but race, gender and a university education still determine your likelihood of landing one, a new report shows. While unemployment fell and more workers in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area were able to find stable jobs between 2011 and 2017, those without a university education saw no improvement in job security, according to a study of precarious work by United Way and McMaster University. For racialized women, even those with a higher education failed to see an increase in secure employment and those without a post-secondary degree continued to be the lowest paid in the region. That, the study says, suggests the adage that a rising tide will lift all boats proved to be false in Ontario. The growth in jobs and the growth in secure employment, it was only a few groups in our society that really benefitted from that, said McMaster labour and economics professor Wayne Lewchuk, one of the studys lead researchers. The GTA and Hamilton accounted for almost all of the employment growth in Ontario from 2011 to 2017, and its unemployment rate fell from 8 per cent to 6 per cent. But average weekly wages for all workers in the region only rose by 1 per cent when taking into account cost of living increases. The latest study, being released Tuesday, builds on previous research conducted by the Poverty and Employment Precarity in Southern Ontario project that delved into precarious work and its impact on workers income and overall well being. In 2017, around 37 per cent of workers were precariously employed in the region, suggesting that precarious employment has imprinted itself on the GTHA labour market, according to the report. Precarious work has also left a social imprint, the study found. Despite a growing economy, a third of all workers still reported poorer mental health in 2017, a slight increase from 2011. Some 40 per cent of workers reported feeling anxiety related to employment. For those who are precariously employed, they cant get ahead or plan for their future, said Daniele Zanotti, president and chief executive officer at United Way. For the bulk of workers, what were seeing from this research is their well-being hasnt improved with the economy. The study, entitled Getting Left Behind, is based on 2,000 individual phone surveys. It measured employment security in two ways: by looking at how many jobs are full-time permanent positions and by using a precarity index to measure job quality. The index includes factors like whether workers have access to benefits, are paid in cash, get paid if they miss a days work, and feel they are able to raise health and safety concerns without reprisal. Michelynn Lafleche, United Ways Vice President of Strategy, Research and Policy, said while some of those surveyed described having a permanent job, further questions revealed their role actually shared many characteristics of precarious employment suggesting an erosion of job quality even for full-timers. Its an increase of lack of control over the conditions of work and a decrease in security, she told the Star. The study said despite economic growth, the job market has become increasingly polarized with economic recovery since the recession serving to primarily help those who were already doing better. For example, white men and women with a university degree were least likely to report long periods of unemployment exceeding eight weeks, and were the only group to see an improvement in the prevalence of erratic scheduling in the workplace. The report also found that in 2017, racialized women without a degree were six times more likely to be low-income than a white men with a degree an increase from 2011 when they were four times more likely. Read more: In provincial election, battle lines drawn over minimum wage and good jobs Child poverty linked to discrimination and systemic inequality, study suggests This temp agency worker shows up at the same office every day. But his agency says hes not a real employee Salima Jaffer, 35, who is Canadian-born of East African background, has a Masters degree in education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and worked for almost four years as a teacher and community development in Africa and the United Kingdom before returning to Toronto in 2013. But since then, she has struggled to find a full-time job that matches her experience and education. Apart from 18-months in a permanent position where the pay was low and the work was not a good fit, Jaffer has had to settle for a string of contract positions in the non-profit sector. I came back to Canada expecting better, she said, noting her immigrant parents had a much easier time getting established in the 1980s. The contracts have been really interesting and its wonderful having so many different experiences, but it would also be quite a relief not to be job hunting year after year, Jaffer said. It makes me feel a bit insecure about what the future holds, she added. I have high hopes. But I worry long-term about things like retirement or even putting my daughter through university or college or whatever she decides to do. Last year, Kathleen Wynnes Liberal government updated the provinces employment and labour laws to include more protection for precarious workers, including equal pay for temp agency and part-time workers and two paid sick days for all employees. The legislation, Bill 148, also raised the minimum wage from $11.60 to $14 in January and promised another jump to $15 in 2019. Incoming Conservative premier Doug Ford has said he will freeze the increase at $14 but has not yet said whether his government will keep the rest of Bill 148 intact. The study makes several recommendations to improve job quality in the province, including bolstering employment protections for precarious workers and creating a floor of basic income and social supports. It also stressed the need to address racism and discrimination in the labour market. We have to spend some time naming that, understanding that, and then figuring what the right actions are around that, said Lafleche. We cannot have people excluded from the labour market because of their postal code, the colour of their skin, or their gender. These are things that are out of their control. One of two Toronto police officers accused of unlawfully arresting four teens for assaulting a police officer at a public housing complex took to the stand to defend himself at a police disciplinary tribunal Tuesday, saying he was scared and had never before seen anyone go after police like that. Const. Scharnil Pais testified that he had only been with the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy (TAVIS) unit a little more than a month when he and partner Const. Adam Lourenco pulled into the parking lot of the Neptune Dr. complex in an unmarked van on a November evening in 2011. Lourenco, who elected not to testify or present further evidence in the hearing, knew the area better than Pais, who had been with the police for four years at that point, Pais told the hearing. On the ride over, Lourenco spoke of a history of firearms and drugs in the area, said Pais, and there had been an earlier briefing about two recent robberies in the police division that included the Lawrence Heights neighbourhood. None of the four Black teenage boys aged 15 and 16, two of them twin brothers the officers spotted outside the Neptune Dr. complex matched descriptions of those wanted in the robberies, said Pais, Part of the drill that night was to enforce the Trespass to Property Act on Toronto Community Housing Corporation property. The officers, both in uniform, got out of the van to do just that, said Pais, and things quickly escalated into a dangerous arrest involving Lourenco pulling out his firearm and a call for backup, most of which was captured on a soundless security cameras, and became known as the case of the Neptune Four. Pais described his version of events for his lawyer, Joanne Mulcahy, and broke down images from the video, including the point where Lourenco tries to arrest one of the teens after he refused to identify himself and allegedly swore and spat at Lourenco, which the teen denied earlier in the hearing. I hear someone yelling, Thats my brother, said Pais. Yo, what the f k, dont touch my bro you cant do that. Pais testified two of the teens moved toward Lourenco and the teen being arrested. Pais struggled, successfully, to keep them back. Pais testified Lourenco also struggled to handcuff the teen and pulled out his firearm at one point. Once he had control of the other three one on his stomach, the other two refusing to assume that position but sitting down Pais called for backup and then helped Lourenco handcuff the teen. Asked by Mulcahy what he was thinking after all this, Pais, who was born in India and came to Canada at age 15 and described himself as a person of colour at the hearing, said hed never seen anything like it in his then relatively young career. It was the first time. I was scared. It was a shock. I would never expect anyone to go after an officer like that, said Pais. They were planning on attacking Lourenco. They were attacking Lourenco. The four teens all lived at the complex. They were on their way to an after-school learning program, and have said they were trying to exercise their rights by refusing to comply with police demands to identify themselves. They launched a complaint with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director, including an allegation that Lourenco punched one of the teens during the arrest and drew his gun. An investigation led to the charges now before the police tribunal at Toronto Police Service headquarters. Pais and Lourenco are charged with unlawful arrest. Lourenco faces two additional charges of disorderly conduct for allegedly using unreasonable force. One of the teens withdrew from the complaint is not part of the hearing. The hearing has heard different accounts of what was said that night. Asked by Mulcahy about the testimony of one of the teens, Pais said he did not hear his partner threaten to kill the boys, or call one names, such as bitch and thug, or say youre going to jail tonight. He denied that the police cruiser door was twice closed on the legs of one of the arrested teens by Lourenco, but did acknowledge there was some difficultly closing the door. It was a very tight fit getting the teen into the cruiser, he said. Pais said all of the teens were swearing that evening, contradicting the testimony of the teens, and that he believed he had good reason to make arrests. He also testified he noticed Lourenco had a cut thumb following the arrest and his partner seemed confused as to how it happened. Pais said he did not see Lourenco cut his thumb on his utility belt on purpose and then yell, Assault, as alleged by the teens. Pais testified that two of the teens later approached him to say they didnt have a problem with him, just Lourenco. I dont think youre a bad guy, just your partner, he said one told him. Another, he said, told him, I think youre a good guy and I got nothing against you. Under cross-examination by the police prosecutor, Insp. Domenic Sinopoli, Pais said he saw Lourenco strike the teen he was arresting. I observed one strike to his midsection, to his torso. It was a punch. Sinopoli asked why Pais initially positioned himself between his partner and the four teens, and asked what he knew about psychological detention. Pais replied that hed heard about it. Pais described his position as one of control that made him feel safe, but acknowledged that he could have walked to a position beside Lourenco to face the teens. A crowd can be seen gathering on the surveillance video following the arrest. Youth and support workers in the area have said the incident damaged police efforts to improve relations with the Lawrence Height community. TAVIS has since been mothballed. The hearing, held under the Ontario Police Services Act, is scheduled to continue Wednesday before the police adjudicator, Supt. Richard Hegedus. A man is in serious condition after a stabbing in Mississauga Monday night. Peel Regional police were called around 9:45 p.m. in a parking lot of a plaza in the area of Dundas St. E. and Camilla Rd., east of Hurontario St. When emergency services arrived, the victim was found suffering from serious injuries. He was taken to a Toronto hospital. Police are searching for at least one suspect who fled the area. No suspect description has been released. Anyone with information can call Peel police at 905-453-2121, ext. 1233 or Peel Crime Stoppers. Read more about: With public concern over traffic deaths in Toronto seemingly on the rise, a coalition of advocates is hoping to make road safety a major issue in this falls municipal election. In a report scheduled to be released Tuesday at city hall, the advocates set out 15 recommendations they say mayoral and council candidates should adopt to protect pedestrians and cyclists. The priority actions range from proposals to accelerate policies council has already approved to more controversial ideas like banning right turns on red lights and lowering the default speed limit for arterial and collector roads from 50 km/h to 40 km/h. The coalition plans to send questionnaires to candidates asking which of the 15 proposals they support, and then publish the results before the Oct. 22 vote. I think that people are just really fed up. Fed up with the amount of people that are dying in the street, to be frank, said Amanda ORourke, executive director of 8 80 Cities, one of the groups behind the report. Citing a wave of recent media coverage on the issue, she said Torontonians are increasingly concerned about road safety and want their elected officials to take action. Read more: Editorial | Toronto should boost Vision Zero budget to make streets safer These Toronto residents have tried to make streets safer. It hasnt worked John Tory to seek another $13M for road safety plan All of these deaths are preventable and unacceptable. We know the solutions, we know how to make our streets safer. Its not rocket science We just need decision-makers to do it, she said. The city introduced new road safety plan in June 2016, but ORourke asserted it has yet to make meaningful progress toward its goal of eliminating traffic deaths. According to police statistics, nearly 100 pedestrians or cyclists have died since Mayor John Tory unveiled the plan, which the city has dubbed Vision Zero after the international movement to end traffic fatalities. Numbers compiled by the Star show 18 pedestrians and four cyclists have died so far this year. The Stars numbers are higher than police statistics in part because the force doesnt count collisions on provincial highways within Toronto, or cyclist deaths that dont involve a motorist. In addition to 8 80 Cities, Walk Toronto, Friends and Families for Safe Streets, Cycle Toronto, and the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation contributed to the report, which is titled #BuildTheVisionTO. As justification for banning right turns on red lights, the report cites city statistics that show 13 per cent of all pedestrian injuries or deaths are a result of right-turning vehicles at intersections. New York and Montreal already have rules prohibiting drivers from making right turns on a red. ORourke said the reports most important recommendation is likely the call to lower default speed limits to 40 km/h on arterial and collector roads, and 30 km/h on residential streets. Research cited in a 2012 Toronto Public Health report determined a pedestrian struck by a car travelling 50 km/h has an 85-per-cent chance of death, but the risk drops to less than 5 per cent if the vehicle is travelling slower than 30 km/h. The idea of lower speed limits has gained traction at city hall before. In 2015, councillors representing the 12 wards in East York and the old city of Toronto voted for a blanket speed limit reduction to 30 km/h on local streets, but their colleagues in other parts of the city havent followed suit. Other recommendations in the report include: streamlining the time-consuming and confusing process to install traffic calming measures on residential streets. building sidewalks on all streets as part of routine reconstruction work. safe, connected bike routes in all 44 wards. increasing the use of automated traffic control technology like red light cameras. installing pedestrian crossings at all transit stops. boosting per capita funding for Vision Zero roughly sixfold to match New York Citys levels. funding a monthly Open Streets festival for five months of the year. Following the deaths of a pedestrian and a cyclist last week, Tory announced he would move a motion at his executive committee Tuesday to request an additional $13 million for the road safety plan. That would bring councils spending on the program to about $100 million over five years. Have your say Read more about: A teenage girl who went missing in North York Monday night has been found, Toronto police say. The girl had last been seen Monday at 10 p.m. in the area of Yonge St. and Finch Ave. E., close to the Finch TTC station. Members of the public who are attending Toronto police board meetings should no longer be subjected to a security search before entering police headquarters, an Ontario Superior Court judge has ruled, finding the current screening practice violates their Charter rights. Calling the mandatory security screening at the entrance of Toronto police headquarters a warrantless search, Justice Jill Copeland concluded in a written decision released Monday that requiring such searches as a precondition of attending a public board meeting infringes on the Charter-protected right to freedom of expression. The ruling comes after Kris Langenfeld, a Toronto school bus driver and regular attendee of the board meetings, mounted a one-man constitutional challenge last year. After years of strolling in the front doors of police headquarters at 40 College St., en route to a board meeting in the auditorium, he encountered special constables conducting bag searches and using metal-detecting wands after security measures were implemented in June 2017. Self-represented, the former accountant with no legal training traded arguments with four lawyers brought on by the Toronto police service and its board at a hearing earlier this year. While he waited for the decision, Langenfeld occasionally stood in quiet protest at the entrance to Toronto police headquarters as board meetings took place inside. Copelands decision is a win for the public, said Langenfeld, who began his near-religious attendance at police board meetings after the fatal shooting of Sammy Yatim, 18, by Toronto police Const. James Forcillo in 2013. Read more: I was scared, during Neptune Four arrest, Toronto police officer tells disciplinary hearing Police charge suspect with first-degree murder after man pushed off subway platform Toronto police take another look at body-worn cameras When police begin creating rules for themselves ... without any democratic process, thats the beginning of that slippery slope and thats when it has to be dealt with, he said in an interview. Toronto police spokesperson Meaghan Gray said in an email that the service is carefully reviewing the decision and will consider any changes that need to be made as a result. No decision has been made on whether there will be an appeal. Toronto Police Services Board chair Andy Pringle said the board is now receiving legal advice on next steps, but did not provide any other comment. Neither the Toronto police or its board confirmed that attendees at the next board meeting, this Thursday, will not be subjected to the search. Copeland wrote that a placing a delay on her ruling was not appropriate. Lawyers for Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders had argued that security measures were minimal, reasonable and required by the changing security landscape, according to Copelands ruling. They also argued that the act of attending a meeting does not have expressive content because there are others ways to watch and participate, including by watching the live-stream, the decision stated. Copeland disagreed. The right to attend and be informed of the activities of a government body at a public meeting has expressive content. Further, the right to make submissions to the government body, if it is a body that receives submissions, as the TPSB clearly does according to its bylaws, also engages freedom of expression, Copeland wrote in her 36-page ruling. The ruling applies only to those who are entering police headquarters to attend the monthly board meetings a distinction she acknowledges will create logistical issues, since members of the public come to the building for many other reasons. She also reiterated that her rulings application was narrow, and did not examine whether having security searches at the entrance of major public buildings is generally a good policy. Reasonable people may differ as to the merits of this type of policy decision, particularly in the developing security climate around the world, including Canada, she wrote. Toronto lawyer Selwyn Pieters believes Copelands ruling could have broader implications, including for the Toronto police tribunal hearings held at headquarters. Late last year, Pieters brought forward a motion at the Toronto police disciplinary tribunal alleging that searching people attending such hearings violated their constitutional rights, specifically, freedom of expression. That motion, which has not yet been adjudicated, asks for a change of venue for an upcoming hearing involving his client, Waseem Khan, whose complaint about police behaviour resulted in a misconduct charge against an officer. Certainly (Copelands) decision will have to be studied seriously and carefully, and acted upon by police, Pieters said. The ruling comes as a growing number of public buildings are upping security measures amid increasing concerns about public safety risks and terrorist threats. At city hall Tuesday, Mayor John Torys executive committee endorsed enhanced security measures that include bag screening at the public entrances to the building and walk-through metal detectors for members of the public entering the council chamber. The measures must be approved by council at a meeting next week. A city lawyer did not think that Copelands ruling would be applicable to Toronto city council. The decision also comes as a growing number of police services boards in Ontario have faced pressure to move their public meetings to other locations, in response to concerns that meetings at police headquarters can feel intimidating for some members of the public. In December, the London police service voted to move its meetings to city hall, with the ability to hold other meetings in community spaces such as libraries. Knia Singh, a Toronto lawyer who frequently attends police board meetings, said he has noticed a growing presence of police officers at the Toronto police board meetings in recent months, something he called a deterrent to public criticism. Singh acknowledged there is a delicate balance between public safety and ensuring freedom of expression, but said protecting the publics ability to express itself is of primary importance. With files from Jennifer Pagliaro If you were at Thornhills Promenade Mall on Saturday, June 9, to see the new Star Wars movie, you may have been exposed to the measles. Thats the message from investigators from York Regions public health, who say there was a confirmed care of the measles on that date. As a result, moviegoers might have been exposed to the measles while watching Solo: A Star Wars Story between 7 p.m. and 11:59 p.m. Some of the symptoms include a high fever, cough, runny nose, sore eyes or sensitivity to light or small spots with a white centre on the inside of the mouth and a rash on the body. Those who attended the theatre need to be vigilant about the possibilities of these symptoms appearing over 21 days, by June 30. Its not only those inside the theatre that need to be aware, according to the agency. Exposure could have taken place at Imagine Cinemas concession stands, washrooms and the theatre lobby. Anyone showing symptoms of measles should call their health care provider immediately and advise them they may have been exposed to the measles virus, said Dr. Karim Kurji, York Regions Medical Officer of Health. Anyone who attended the theatre at that time should check immunization records or speak with a health care provider to confirm they have been given two doses of measles vaccine, named MMR or MMRV, or they have documented measles immunity, which may include a previous laboratory confirmed measles infection. Measles is a highly contagious disease that spreads easily to those who are vulnerable or not immune, says a press release. The best defence against measles is vaccination. Anyone who has not received two doses of the measles vaccine or has not had measles in the past is at risk. The release also said that calling a doctors office before you visit is best to help avoid further transmission. Those who did not attend the cinema on this day do not need to be concerned. For more information about measles people can visit york.ca/health or contact York Region Public Health at 1-877-464-9675 ext. 73588 during weekly business hours. Otherwise residents can call 905-953-6478. Read more about: Delhi high court disapproves sit-in, asks govt who authorised such protest. New Delhi: The Delhi high court on Monday virtually disapproved of the sit-in led by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal at the lieutenant-governors office and asked the AAP government who had authorised such a protest. The court did not issue any interim directions, but observed that strikes or dharnas are held outside and not inside someones workplace or residence. The observation by a bench of Justices A.K. Chawla and Navin Chawla came while hearing two petitions, one against Mr Kejriwals protest and another against the alleged strike by IAS officers of the Delhi administration. After hearing arguments, the court listed the matter for next hearing on June 22. Mr Kejriwal and his ministers have been staging a sit-in at the L-Gs office since June 11 evening to press for their demands, including a direction to IAS officers to end their strike and action against those who have struck work. Who authorised the strike/dharna? You are sitting inside the L-Gs office. If its a strike, it has to be outside the office. You cannot hold a strike inside someones office or residence, said the court. Responding to the query by the bench, senior advocate Sudhir Na-ndrajog, who appeared for the Delhi government, said Mr Kejriwal and his Cabinet collea-gues took the decision to protest in their individual capacity and they were empowered to do so under Constitution. Mr Nandrajog also told the court that the only direction that can be issued by the bench in these matters was to the IAS officers to attend routine departmental meetings held by the ministers. An associat-ion representing the bureaucrats had admitted at a press conference on Sunday that they were not attending routine meetings, he added. During the arguments, the Central government told the court that no IAS officers were on strike and urged the bench to direct Mr Kejriwal and others to vacate lieutenant-governor Anil Baijals office. Leader of the Opposition in the Delhi Assembly Vijender Gupta also moved the high court on Monday against Mr Kejriwals protest. BJP MP Parvesh Singh Sahib, rebel AAP MLA Kapil Mishra and BJP MLA Manjinder Singh Sirsa are joint petitioners along with Mr Gupta. The court asked petitioner advocate Umesh Gupta, who moved a plea against the alleged strike by the bureaucrats, to make an association representing IAS officers as a party in the matter. Umesh Gupta, in his plea, has sought a direction to the LG to ensure that the alleged informal strike by IAS officers of Delhi is called off and they perform their duties as public servants. Another lawyer, Hari Nath Ram, has filed a petition to declare the sit-in by Mr Kejriwal and others Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and Health Minister Satyender Jain unconstitutional and illegal. A Toronto justice of the peaces intention to retire this summer means he will avoid facing discipline for allegedly bullying and mocking a self-represented defendant. Justice of the peace Alfred Budd Johnston was supposed to face a discipline hearing on June 7 before the Justices of the Peace Review Council, the independent body tasked with investigating and disciplining JPs. But he never showed. Instead, presenting counsel the outside lawyers tasked with presenting the case against Johnston noted that the JP had informed the associate chief justice on May 30 that he plans to retire effective Aug. 31 and was expected to be under doctors care until that date and unable to perform his duties, according to a decision posted on the review councils website. The discipline panel comprising a judge, a JP and community member decided to adjourn the matter until Sept. 5. Should Johnston retire as planned on Aug. 31, the panel will lose jurisdiction over him and the September hearing will not take place. Its not the first time that Johnston, appointed in 2003, has announced his intention to retire. Nor is it the first time that Johnston has been in the crosshairs of the review council, a body that Johnston himself says makes him fearful and gives him anxiety attacks. Read more: Justices of the peace play vital role in courts often without a law education Justice of the peace suspended for dismissing 68 cases at once Toronto justice of the peace accused of bullying and mocking defendant He was suspended for seven days without pay in 2014 for dismissing 68 traffic cases because the prosecutor was 71 seconds late, a move the review council described as an abuse of power. At the time, his lawyer told the panel that Johnston intended to retire the following summer, in 2015, but he never did. The latest discipline case against him stems from comments he made in provincial offences court in 2016, where he was allegedly condescending, sarcastic, bullying and mocking toward a self-represented defendant, according to a notice of hearing on the review councils website. The allegations havent been proven. According to the discipline panels decision adjourning the case until Sept. 5, in an April letter addressed to the review council registrar, Johnston lamented his treatment during his first discipline hearing. He noted in his letter that after that first hearing, he took ill and was under doctors care for a short time, and said he had been spending a lot of time preparing for his retirement as I am most certain that I could never go through the same ordeal ever again. I have been kicked around all my life, because I am the product of two minorities. I am just too old, nor do I have the strength to kick back, Johnston said in the letter. I cannot afford a lawyer to assist or represent me as I know I will get no assistance with costs. I am unable to appear before the Justices of the Peace Review Council, as I know I would not be able to handle the way I fear I will be treated. I am fearful and suffer from anxiety attacks whenever I even think of dealing with the Justices of the Peace Review Council. I am even afraid to open any mail because of the affect (sic) it may have on me. Justices of the peace, who earn about $132,000 a year, are appointed by the provincial government. They preside over bail hearings, authorize search warrants and conduct trials in provincial offences court, which deals with non-criminal charges, among other duties. A woman in her 60s is in critical condition after a four-vehicle collision in Mississauga Monday night. Peel Regional police were called around 8:40 p.m. in the intersection of Hurontario St. and Bristol Rd. W., south of Matheson Blvd. E., for a serious crash. The woman, who was the driver of one of the vehicles, was rushed to a Toronto hospital with life-threatening injuries. Police said they have arrested a male driver for impaired driving. He was taken to a local hospital in serious condition. Peel paramedics say two other people were taken to local hospitals with serious injuries. The intersection was closed for a police investigation but has since reopened. Read more about: BEIJINGChinese state media say North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will make a two-day visit to Beijing starting Tuesday following his groundbreaking summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore last week. Security was tight Tuesday morning at the Beijing airport where paramilitary police prevented journalists from shooting photos. A motorcade including sedans, minibuses, motorcycles and a stretch limo with a golden emblem was seen leaving the airport in vehicles that were not apparently carrying flags. The state media reports did not say if Kim had already arrived in Beijing. Roads near the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, where senior Chinese officials meet with visiting leaders, were being closed Tuesday morning and a motorcade with motorcycle escorts was seen heading into the compound. A ring of police vehicles and unmarked cars surrounded the perimeter of the guest house where Kim stayed on his first visit earlier this year. Kim has made two recent visits to China, North Koreas main ally and key source of trade and economic assistance. Following his summit with Trump, Kim was expected to meet with Chinese leaders to discuss progress in halting his countrys missile and nuclear weapons programs in exchange for economic incentives. China did not announce past visits by North Koreas leader until Kim returned home. The Singapore meeting resulted in a surprise announcement of a U.S. suspension of military drills with its South Korean ally, a goal long pursued by Beijing and Pyongyang. That move is seen as potentially weakening defences and diplomatic ties among U.S. allies in Asia, while bolstering rivals such as China and Russia. The U.S. has stationed combat troops in South Korea since the Korean War, in which China fought on North Koreas side, ended in 1953 with an armistice and no peace treaty. The more than 28,000 U.S. forces serve as a military tripwire against North Korean aggression. The next major exercise with South Korea is known as Ulchi Freedom Guardian; last years version was held for 11 days in August and involved about 17,500 U.S. troops. Read more: Opinion | Burman: How the history books will remember this bizarre and dangerous week in the Trump Era Opinion | Walkom: Trump, Kim deserve credit for breaking log jam Analysis | Donald Trump gave a summit to Kim Jong Un but its unclear what U.S. is getting in return Read more about: We asked religious leaders: How are you talking to your congregations about the separation of immigrant parents from their children on the U.S.-Mexico border? Dozens told us about the sermons they delivered in their churches on Sunday, and at their synagogues this Shabbat. Many said they typically avoid politics in their preaching, but this week they felt compelled to speak out. Here is a selection of their responses, ranging across the country and many denominations. Pastor Robert Franek preached at Faith Lutheran Church, a mainline Protestant church in Galesburg, Ill: In just six weeks from mid-April through May, some 2,000 children have been separated from their parents and placed in detention centres. This immoral and unconscionable policy is being justified by a twisting of scripture by those who know neither the biblical imperative to treat the foreigner with compassion and love nor the Constitution that protects the basic human rights of all people. Asylum seeking is not a crime. . . . This barbaric practice of taking a nursing infant out of her mothers embrace should alarm us all. There is no defence for this, not in the Bible, the Constitution, or international law. . . . Look around. Christ is present in the stranger who comes to our country. Look around. Christ is present in the eyes of the innocent children. Look around. The kingdom of God is here! Pastor Stan Cardwell preached at Community United Methodist Church, a mainline Protestant church in Crofton, Maryland: Make no mistake no matter where you stand on immigration, what we are doing to children and families in the name of the law is evil. And we, as Christ followers, have a moral responsibility to speak and stand against evil. You cannot remain silent. Chris Scott preached at The Exchange, a Mennonite church in Winchester, Virginia: As people of faith, we are bound to the law of love. What is legal is not always what (is) moral. And what is moral is not always what is legal. . . . What does love require of us? Love does not require that families be torn apart, with babies yanked from their mothers. We must follow love. I am so saddened by the faith that I hold to and the Bible that I cherish being used to support causes so clearly outside the law of love and the way of Christ. Read more: U.S. practice of separating migrant children from parents called vicious and cruel Analysis | Daniel Dale: Facing broad backlash for separating children, Trump digs in and lies Editorial | Separating families at the U.S. border crosses a line, even for Donald Trump U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is citing the Bible in defending the Trump administration's policy of separating immigrant parents from their children after they enter the U.S. illegally. (The Associated Press) Rabbi Eliott Perlstein preached at Ohev Shalom, a synagogue in Richboro, Pennsylvania: As a rabbi, it is not in my purview to comment on Mr. Sessionss usage of his verse from Romans. I would choose to quote from Deuteronomy 16:20 which Jews and Christians share in common: Justice, Justice shall you pursue. Who can claim that taking an innocent child from a parents arms is just? The great prophets of Israel spoke truth to power, as did the prophet Nathan even to King David when necessary. . . . We Jews have too often been the victim of unjust governments and laws. We have a special responsibility to heed the words of the Prophet Isaiah to be a light unto the nations. The Rev. Douglas Koesel at Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in Cleveland, said: We will be asking our congregation to call Senator Rob Portmans office to denounce from the Senate floor the inhumane, illegal, emotionally harmful and cruel abuse of children for political ends. We will give them five possible office numbers to call and will wait while everyone calls. Rabbi David Siff at Temple Torat Emet in Boynton Beach, Florida, emailed his congregation: The Torah wants us to help people find refuge, and help them create thriving, dignified lives. It is disturbing to me as both a scholar and religious leader when Bible is used to justify insensitivity and cruelty. May our leaders find ways of helping all humans around the world create safe, dignified lives. The Rev. Joe Genau preached at Edgewood Presbyterian Church, a mainline Protestant church in Birmingham, Ala: Our government cannot justify the way these families are being treated, and for people of faith, resistance must be given. And when our leaders use my traditions holy scriptures to do so, a stern rebuke is in order. WASHINGTON U.S. President Donald Trump has called Canada brutal, accused Canadas prime minister of being weak, and taken aim at Canadas supply management system for dairy. Now he is calling Canadians shoe smugglers. In the latest salvo in the presidents multi-front attack on Canadian trade practices, Trump told a story Tuesday about Canadians who cross the U.S. border to buy shoes. The tale left trade experts and apparel industry officials scratching their heads. Trump launched into it while delivering a rambling speech, focused on illegal immigration, to the National Federation of Independent Businesses. There was a story two days ago in a major newspaper talking about people living in Canada coming to the United States and smuggling things back into Canada because the tariffs are so massive. The tariffs to get common items back into Canada are so high that they have to smuggle em in, Trump said, apparently referring to an essay in the New York Post by Canadian journalist Isabel Vincent. They buy shoes, then they wear them. They scuff em up. They make them sound old or look old. No, were treated horribly. There was a grain of truth to the story. Crossing the border to shop in the U.S. and then sneaking an item or two past customs on the way back is a time-honoured Canadian pastime. On Twitter, several Canadians immediately confessed to making furtive attempts to make their new shoes look well-worn. Read more: Analysis | Facing broad backlash for separating children, Trump digs in and lies Trudeau has billions of reasons to dig in against Trump on dairy Trump says hell punish the people of Canada because of Trudeaus news conference But there is no indication that any of this has anything to do with tariffs. And Trumps claim that this shop-and-hide practice results in the U.S. being mistreated makes no sense at all, trade and apparel experts said. The Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, the U.S. industrys lobby group, said in a statement: The president seems misinformed about footwear trade. "On behalf of the American footwear industry, we welcome anyone from anywhere to come and purchase shoes in America. It helps both our brands and retailers grow. Period, the group said. We dont care where they wear them, and if they get scuffed up all the better so we can sell them more. Under NAFTA, there are no Canadian tariffs on shoes manufactured in the U.S. Since more than 95 per cent of shoes sold in the U.S. are made abroad, any Canadian shoppers avoiding Canadas tariffs upon their return home are actually avoiding tariffs on foreign-made items, mostly made-in-Asia goods. In other words, Trump was complaining about Canadians spending money at U.S. stores and then refusing to pay the Canadian government for goods made in other countries a process that does not victimize the U.S. in any way. There doesnt seem to be an issue. Im not sure why were talking about this. Yet again, were being led down this path when there really isnt anything there, said Bob Kirke, executive director of the Canadian Apparel Federation. I feel like I'm going down the rabbit hole here. In a tweet to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the U.S. industry group added: The US Footwear Industry welcomes you and all Canadians to come buy shoes in America! As many as you want and scuff them up if you want, we can sell you more! Kirke said he doesnt think theres any negotiation or discussion around footwear tariffs or rules of origin in the current NAFTA negotiation. Zero. Zip. And he said lower shoe prices in the U.S. are a result of the competitiveness of the U.S. retail market, not tariffs. Both countries have tariffs on imported footwear, said Karl Littler, vice-president of public affairs at the Retail Council of Canada. His critique of Canada he might level at the U.S. system as well. Canadians dont have to pay duties on their first $200 in purchases if theyre in the U.S. for 24 hours. They get an $800 exemption if theyre away 48 hours. Another cross-border shopping issue has been significant in NAFTA talks: Canadas $20 threshold, one of the lowest in the world, for duties on shipments mailed from abroad. The U.S. threshold is $800, and the Trump administration has called on Canada to raise its own. On Tuesday, Trump again floated the idea of making separate deals with Canada and Mexico rather than preserving the North American Free Trade Agreement. He also made some of his usual false claims about the trade balance with Canada, and he again criticized Canadas dairy tariffs. We can no longer be the stupid country. We want to be the smart country. So hopefully well be able to work it out with Canada. We have very good relationships with Canada, we have for a long time, and hopefully thatll work out, but Canadas not going to take advantage of the United States any longer. And Mexicos not going to take advantage of the United States any longer, he said. Trump also scoffed at Trudeaus argument against the steel and aluminum tariffs that Trump imposed on national security grounds. Trudeau has invoked the Canadian soldiers who have fought and died with American soldiers. On Tuesday, Trump paraphrased the argument with a hint of mockery. By the way, Canada, they like to talk, Trump said to laughter. Theyre our great neighbour. They fought World War II with us. We appreciate it. They fought World War I with us, and we appreciate it. But were protecting each other. Read more about: SKOPJE, MACEDONIA Macedonias parliament on Tuesday started debating a law ratifying an agreement with neighbouring Greece designed to end a decades-long dispute over Macedonias name. Lawmakers voted 69-40 to proceed with a bill to ratify the Greek-Macedonia deal to rename the latter country North Macedonia. The ratification will next be debated at a committee level before a vote by parliaments plenary session, expected on Friday. Greece had long insisted on the name change, arguing that its northern neighbours name implies claims on a northern Greek province also called Macedonia, and on ancient Greek heritage. The former Yugoslav republic must change its constitution to formalize the deal. Opposition parties and large sections of the population in both Greece and Macedonia are against the agreement, arguing it offers too many concessions to the other country. Several hundred people protested peacefully against the deal during Tuesdays parliamentary debate in Skopje, shouting traitors and burning a copy of the agreement. Read more: Violent protests follow Greece and Macedonia name agreement North Macedonian name deal hits hurdles right out of the gate Thousands rally in Greece to demand Republic of Macedonia change its name The conservative main opposition VMRO-DPMNE party walked out of the parliament debate in protest, and said they will boycott the ratification process later this week. While the left-led government, which controls 65 of parliaments 120 seats, should have little difficulty getting the bill approved, the countrys conservative president, Gjorge Ivanov, has said he will not sign off on the law. That would force a repeat of the ratification debate and vote, and if it is again approved then Ivanov would be unable to block it. Last weeks agreement between the two countries prime ministers was signed Sunday. Macedonia has to hold a referendum on the constitutional amendment, and Greeces parliament has to ratify the deal as well. Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov said Tuesday that the deal must be ratified by the end of this month, to meet deadlines for the launching of Macedonias NATO and EU membership process. Read more about: TRENTON, N.J.New Jersey is considering honouring celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain with a food trail. The famed cook, writer and host of the CNN series Parts Unknown killed himself nearly two weeks ago in a luxury hotel in France. The 61-year-old was born in New York, but grew up in the New Jersey suburb of Leonia. Democratic New Jersey Assemblyman Paul Moriarty on Monday introduced a resolution that would require the Travel and Tourism Division to establish the Anthony Bourdain Food Trail. Bourdain visited 10 eateries in the state in a 2015 episode of CNNs Parts Unknown. One of the stops was Donkeys Place in Camden, which Bourdain said rivalled nearby Philadelphia for cheesesteaks. MANAGUA, NICARAGUAAmid the deepening political crisis in Nicaragua, opposition leaders from a key city that had once cradled President Daniel Ortegas socialist revolution on Monday announced that they do not recognize Ortegas leadership and that they would create a commission to self-govern the city. The town of Masaya, about 24 kilometres south of the capital city of Managua, was a bastion of support for Ortega and his Sandinista rebels who overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. For the past few weeks, Masaya has been controlled by protesters, a warren of citizen-manned roadblocks and barricades, with city hall abandoned and police hunkered down in their barracks. Those protest leaders now say they dont recognize Ortegas government, which they blame for the deaths of more than 200 people over the past two months. Instead, a five-member junta of national salvation will govern Masaya, seeking to administer a city, including cleaning up trash and restocking food in a city of blocked streets. What we are doing is making it official, Yubrank Suazo, a co-ordinator of the protest movement in Masaya, said of the new governing commission. In fact, Masaya has not recognized this government for weeks. The events in Masaya represent the ever-growing divide between Ortega, in his third consecutive term, and vast swaths of Nicaragua, as violence spreads. Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, have held near-total power for years but protests in April over changes to social security quickly morphed into a nationwide movement demanding democracy and justice, and grew more emphatic after police and pro-government militias responded with violence against protesters. On Saturday, in one of the deadliest incidents since the unrest began, gunmen set fire to a building in the Carlos Marx neighbourhood of Managua and burned alive a family of six, including two young children, who were trapped inside, according to neighbours and witnesses. Read more: Nicaragua protests to honour mothers of students killed at past rallies leave at least 15 people dead Dozens reportedly killed in Nicaragua during anti-government demonstrations I managed to get out of the room and from a balcony on the second floor, I threw myself into the street, said Cinthia Velasquez, one member of the family, who survived the fire. Velasquez said she woke to noises early Saturday morning and looked outside to see masked gunmen accompanied by police. The men broke down a gate, locked the family inside, and started firing and hurling Molotov cocktails inside, she said. Her father, Oscar Velasquez, a 47-year-old Protestant pastor who made a living selling mattresses, died in the blaze, along with his wife, Maritza Lopez, and their son, his wife, and two children, ages 3 years old and 3 months old. We couldnt save them because when people began to leave their houses to help, police shot at us, said Nahun Dona, a neighbour who saw the fire. Relatives and neighbours said they do not know why government forces attacked the family. The neighbourhood is a stronghold of protesters and filled with barricades. Some speculated that police wanted the building as a sniper post and the family refused to move. Foreign Minister Denis Moncada Colindres denied that security forces were involved in the fire and attributed the crime to criminal groups that are prowling the neighbourhood. But such ongoing violence, and roving bands of pro-government militiamen accused of other killings and kidnappings, has frustrated attempts at dialogue. On Monday, leaders of student protesters and civil society groups in Managua said they were walking away from the negotiating table with Ortegas government, because Ortega had not invited the United Nations, European Union and human rights groups into the discussion. We cannot keep talking with this government, which does not have political will in terms of human rights, said Azahalea Solis, a civil society member involved in the talks, according to the La Prensa newspaper. Last week, protesters across Nicaragua held a one-day national strike. In some places, such as the city of Leon, protesters have said they would remain on strike indefinitely until Ortega and Murillo step down. In Masaya, which has been the scene of street battles between police, militiamen and protesters, some 20 people have been killed in recent weeks, according human rights groups. A public hospital in the city has been wrested from government control. Each night, residents using bullhorns call on a top police commander and his men to surrender and leave town, according to residents. Masaya is on strike, there is no presence of the central government, nor of the municipal government, and its logical that facing so much repression and death, the population does not feel represented, said Alvaro Leiva, director of the Nicaraguan Association for the Defense of Human Rights. At a Monday afternoon press conference, a group of protest leaders in Masaya announced the creation of the five-member municipal governing commission, but did not name the members. They blamed Ortegas government for the violence and said that security forces have the city surrounded. We proclaim to the world, we are partisans for peace, said Cristian Fajardo, one of the protest leaders. We dont want war. The crowd that had gathered chanted for our martyrs, justice! and long live the capital of the resistance! For the fifth year in a row, war, violence and persecution have driven more people out of their homes, pushing the number of displaced people worldwide to an unprecedented high of 68.5 million, up by 3 million from 2016, the United Nations says. In 2017, one person fled their home every two seconds due to man-made tragedies with the total number of forcibly displaced people almost equalling the entire population of Thailand, said the UN Refugee Agencys annual Global Trends Report, released on Tuesday on the eve of World Refugee Day. Of those, 25.4 million were refugees, who managed to flee to another country to escape conflict and persecution, up by 2.9 million from the year before. Asylum seekers, who were still waiting for the outcome of their claims, rose by 300,000 to 3.1 million during the same period. We are at a watershed, where success in managing forced displacement globally requires a new and far more comprehensive approach so that countries and communities arent left dealing with this alone, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said in a statement. No one becomes a refugee by choice, but the rest of us can have a choice about how we help. According to the report, 85 per cent of refugees were housed last year in developing countries, many of which are themselves extremely poor and receive little international support to care for these populations. Africa (excluding North Africa) sheltered 31.4 per cent of the worlds refugees; the Asia Pacific region, 21.1 per cent; and the Middle East and North Africa, 13.6 per cent. Although Europe hosted 30.7 per cent of the refugee population, more than half of them were in Turkey. The Americas were home to only 3.2 per cent of refugees. Refugees from 10 countries made up 82 per cent of those under the UNs mandate: Syria; Afghanistan; South Sudan; Myanmar; Somalia; Sudan; the Congo; Central African Republic; Eritrea and Burundi. The global displaced population is young 53 per cent are children, including many who are unaccompanied or separated from their families. Some 5 million people, both the internally displaced and refugees, were able to return to their homes in 2017, according to the report, but only 102,800 were resettled to a third country, down 47 per cent from 2016. The United States was the largest recipient of new asylum claims at its border, just ahead of Germany and Italy. Afghans submitted the most number of refugee claims, closely followed by Syrians, Iraqis and Venezuelans. Grandi said 14 of the 193 UN member states who supported the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants are already pioneering a new blueprint on their own for responding to refugee crises and later this year a new Global Compact on Refugees will be released for state members to adopt. The objective of the pact is to promote a more comprehensive international effort in protecting those who flee their homes and in supporting the refugee-hosting countries. On the eve of World Refugee Day, my message to member states is please support this, said Grandi. WASHINGTONDonald Trump is facing one of the most severe political crises of his presidency over his decision to separate children from their parents after they have unlawfully crossed the southern border. Concerned about his voter base above all others, Trump has always believed that a hard line on Latino immigration is a political winner even when his opponents are accusing him of cruelty and racism. But this stand has triggered a far broader outcry than usual, drawing emotional condemnation from people who have supported or stayed silent about his other provocative moves. Former first lady Laura Bush, who almost never expresses public opinions, wrote an essay in the Washington Post calling the separations immoral and heartbreaking. Talk host Ellen DeGeneres, whose online presence is largely apolitical, wrote on Twitter: I dont care what your politics are, we cant be a country that separates children from their parents. By Monday afternoon, Republican members of Congress worried about campaign damage were using words like heartless and inhumane. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, normally a hardliner on immigration, announced emergency legislation to kill the practice. Trump was unwavering. He was simultaneously pretending that he had nothing to do with the practice at all. Anti-immigration officials like Attorney General Jeff Sessions have proudly touted the separation policy. Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have chosen to both preserve it and lie about it falsely claiming again Monday that they are merely enforcing the law, though no such law exists, and are helpless to stop unless Congress passes new legislation, though Trump could end it at any time. Trump and Sessions are using immigration as an issue to agitate their base for midterm elections while at the same time trying to wash their hands of this as they lie to the American people, said Jess Morales Rocketto, political director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, who participated in a Sunday vigil outside a McAllen, Texas facility where children are being held. The furor erupted after Sessions announced in May that the administration would start criminally prosecuting anyone caught entering the U.S. illegally, including people who want to apply for legal asylum but do not present themselves at a legal port of entry. More than 2,700 families have been separated. Like the movement three years ago to help Syrian refugees, the firestorm has been fuelled by disturbing images of children suffering. Among them are a photo of a despondent 2-year-old girl and a photo of children caged into the McAllen warehouse. The optics got even worse on Monday afternoon, when ProPublica published audio of wailing children crying Mami and Papa as a Border Patrol agent joked about their orchestra. On other issues, such as the gassing of Syrian children, Trump has professed to be moved to action by photos of victimized kids. On immigration, though, the man who launched his campaign calling Mexican immigrants rapists has been consistent: he wants to show no mercy. Read more: Secret audio reveals the cries of children separated from their parents by U.S. border agents Hundreds of children wait in large metal cages with foil blankets at Texas Border Patrol facility First lady Melania Trump hates to see families separated at border, spokesperson says Nielsen brushed off reporters questions about the well-being of the children. Asked how the separations do not constitute child abuse, she responded: Enforcing the law? There is political incentive for the administration to stand firm. Polls released Monday showed that while the public as a whole was strongly against the separations (66 per cent were opposed, 27 per cent were in favour, Quinnipiac found), Republicans were strongly in favour (35 per cent opposed, 55 per cent in favour). But Republican strategists were still queasy. Scott Jennings, a senior adviser on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnells past campaigns, has applauded Trumps inflammatory use of the word animals about the street gang MS-13, calling it effective politics. Of the separations, however, Jennings said, The politics arent good and I suspect they will come to regret this policy. The battle over the separations is playing out as Republicans are debating immigration legislation that would deal with, among other things, the fate of the other group of young people whose future Trump has threatened: the DREAMers, people brought to the U.S. illegally as children. My advice to the president is be a hero. Say you got bad advice, end this family separation policy, and then go get your broader immigration deal, Jennings said. Read more about: Baijal appreciates CM appeal to officers assuring them safety. New Delhi: The nine-day stalemate between the Aam Aadmi Party dispensation on one hand and the lieutenant-governor and bureaucracy on the other that had plunged the national capital into a crisis finally came to an end on Tuesday. Chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and Delhi labour minister Gopal Rai, who were protesting at the L-G residence on Tuesday, finally left the premises and resumed work at Delhi secretariat on Tuesday evening. The L-G, who had ignored to respond to Mr Kejriwals and his deputys letters to resolve the issue, responded on Tuesday that he appreciated the CMs appeal to restore trust between the elected government and the officers. Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court had refused an urgent hearing on a plea seeking its direction to declare as unconstitutional the sit-in of Mr Kejriwal and his Cabinet colleagues inside lieutenant-governor Anil Baijals office-cum-residence. The deadlock thawed after the IAS association responded positively to Mr Kejriwals olive branch on Monday, assuring them of their safety and urging them to come back. On Tuesday, Mr Baijal issued an urgent letter asking the chief minister to meet IAS officers at the secretariat. The L-G stated that he was glad that the CM had tweeted an appeal to the officers assuring them of safety and security in their interactions with the elected government. The L-G observed that he has been informed that the officers have also welcomed the appeal and they are awaiting the CMs presence in the secretariat to hold discussions. As such, the L-G requested Mr Kejriwal to urgently meet the officers in the secretariat so that apprehensions and concerns of both sides can be suitably addressed through dialogue in the best interest of the people of Delhi, a Raj Niwas press release said on Tuesday. Meanwhile, deputy CM Manish Sisodia addressed a press conference announcing Mr Kejriwals decision to end the protest. The officials, even those who had been skipping work earlier, have attended all meetings that were called today. Officers have started attending meetings again and even started responding to phone calls. Hopefully, the officers will continue coming to meetings after this as well, Mr Sisodia said. The conflict relates to the mistrust between the elected government and the bureaucracy and the AAP governments claim that IAS officers have been on strike for the last four months. On June 11, the day he started his protest, Mr Kejriwal accused the L-G, along with the Prime Ministers Office (PMO), of being the architect of a bureaucratic rebellion within the Government of NCT of Delhi. For the last four months, bureaucrats in the Delhi government have been on strike. This is the first time in the history of India that there has been such dereliction of duty and open rebellion on part of the bureaucracy. What are their demands? Even they dont know. If you ask them, they will not be able to clearly tell you what their demands are, Mr Kejriwal had said. During his dharna, Mr Kejriwal got the support of various opposition parties, barring the Congress. Chief Ministers of four states Andhra Pradeshs Chandrababu Naidu, West Bengals Mamata Banerjee, HD Kumaraswamy of Karnataka and Pinarayi Vijayan of Kerala had even gone to the LG office to meet Mr Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues, who were staging a sit-in. However, they were denied permission to meet the leaders sitting on dharna. They met Mr Kejriwals family and addressed a joint press conference in support of Delhis demand for full statehood. This helped the AAP regain its lost momentum and the party launched an agitation against the Centre. IAS association responds positively, attends meetings SC had refused hearing on plea terming dharna unconstitutional Its fair to assume that when Justin Trudeau was elected prime minister in 2015 he could not have imagined that the animating issue for him and his government would be renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with Donald Trump. But, more than two years later, thats of course what has happened. The complicated and tumultuous negotiations have consumed considerable political oxygen and the attendant policy uncertainty has harmed the economy. It would be understandable if at times the prime minister wonders if its all worth it. The short answer is yes. The Canada-U. S. economic relationship in general and the NAFTA in particular is too critical to our economic interests to do nothing but continue to search for a solution. Failure is simply not an option. Trade data tell us a powerful story of the interdependence of our two economies. Readers know many of them well. Canadian exports to the U.S. total nearly $475 billion and our imports are nearly as much. This two-way trade amounts to $2.5 billion per day or $1.7 million per minute. If it sounds like a massive level of mutual exchange, its because it is. Canada trades more with Michigan than it does with the entire European Union. We also buy more goods from the United States than China, Japan and the United Kingdom combined. Millions of jobs on both sides of the border depend on this bilateral trade and investment. Nearly 2 million Canadian jobs are dependent on exports to the U.S. alone the equivalent of Canadas second largest city. Have your say Opposing view: Should Canada give up on NAFTA? Yes. Abandoning the NAFTA would put this economic activity and jobs at risk. Estimates on the magnitude of diminished investment and job losses range but theres little doubt that there would be a heavy financial cost particularly for trade-sensitive sectors. And these assumptions still likely underestimate the deleterious effects that post-NAFTA uncertainty would have on business investment. This should hardly be a controversial observation. The broad, negative reaction to the Trump administrations tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel imports is telling in this regard. Diverse voices, from Unifors Jerry Diaz to Ontario premier-designate Doug Ford, have criticized the protectionist action. Its a sign that the basic premise of free trade is no longer the subject of divisive political debate in our country. Its also a reminder of the invariable costs if these sectoral-based tariffs are extended across the economy. These are the facts. Theyre hard-headed, true, and transcend any one president or political moment. Canada and Canadians are better off when we have mostly uninhibited access to the U.S. market and vice versa. Those who advise in favour of abandoning or repealing the NAFTA choose to ignore these facts. Instead they would subordinate Canadas interests to old and failed ideas about economic nationalism (what the Canadian-born economist Harry Johnson once called a narrow and garbage-cluttered cul-de-sac) or legitimate yet tangential arguments about the offensiveness of Donald Trump. No matter the basis of the case, this is romanticism (or anti-Trumpism) disguised as serious analysis. The end result is the same: weakened competitiveness, less investment, and fewer jobs. And the idea that we can replace the Canada-U. S. relationship with others neglects the integration of our industries and supply chains along continental lines. Politicians and policy observers can speculate about trade diversification, but government strategies cannot counteract the north-south orientation of Canadian commercial activity. This was the basic insight of the Macdonald Commission in the mid-1980s. As its final report put it, We must concentrate our efforts on obtaining secure access to the American market We cannot choose to cut back significantly our trading integration with the United States without risking severe economic dislocation, cessation of economic growth, and a resultant political instability. The commissions assessment, which catalyzed the Canada-U. S. Free Trade Agreement, was right then and remains essentially correct now. Trumps erratic and often objectionable presidency doesnt change this equation. Which brings us back to where we started. No matter how difficult the negotiations with Trumps administration, or how offensive we may find the president, we cannot afford to walk away from table. Too much is at stake. Sean Speer is a Munk senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Read more about: It is difficult to find words scathing enough to denounce whats being done to families and thousands of children at United States borders. As New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote on Sunday, I am simply outraged beyond my ability to articulate it. To be sure, the images of terrified children, broken-hearted parents and the wire cages used to house youngsters require scant elaboration. But for those seeking language to convey the civilized worlds revulsion at what America has become under President Donald Trump, perhaps these two words will do. Laura Bush. She is, of course, a former First Lady and loyal Republican known chiefly for cookie recipes, parenting advice and maintaining a supportive silence during the worst episodes of her husband George W. Bushs two terms as president. When Laura Bush wrote a memoir called Spoken From the Heart after her husband had left office, the New York Times reviewed it as two books a keenly observed account of her Texas childhood, and banal boilerplate of her years in the White House. But now, even Bush, a woman who made a numbing art form of circumspection during the most troubling of times for her country during her residency in the White House, can apparently no longer countenance in silence what is happening in Donald Trumps America. Whereas once the Washington Post ran Mrs. Bushs recipe for cowboy-sized oatmeal cookies, the Post this week ran an op-ed essay in which she spoke her piece. I live in a border state, she wrote of her native Texas. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. Laura Bush is hardly the first to express abhorrence at the Trump administrations conduct. For his part, Charles Blow wrote that the separation of about 2,000 children from parents facing criminal prosecution for unlawfully crossing the border is one of the most callous policies the Trump administration has instituted in its zeal to crack down on illegal immigration. The Trump policy now charges every adult caught crossing the border illegally with federal crimes, as opposed to referring those with children mainly to immigration courts, as previous administrations did. Bizarrely, the sanctimonious U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has cited Biblical passages to justify this policy. Cravenly, the president blames it on the Democrats, who at the moment control nothing in Washington. That brazen dissembling is almost as offensive to American brains as the ripping apart of families should be reprehensible to their values and sense of decency. The American Psychological Association has said the policy is needless, cruel and threatens the mental and physical health of both the children and their caregivers. Still, its one thing to draw the ire of the Times, columning critics and a professional association of experts none of whom play well among Trumps base. Its quite another when you have been sufficiently barbarous to provoke even Laura Bush into public outrage. Americans pride themselves on being a moral nation, she wrote. If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents and to stop separating parents and children in the first place. Laura Bush was joined, if more guardedly, by the current First Lady in speaking out. Melania Trump, a woman who generally exhibits the sort of flatness of affect typically seen among the traumatized, said through a spokesperson that while laws matter, it is vital to have a country that governs with a heart. Sometimes, there are telling barometers in the realm of human affairs. Former president Lyndon Johnson once moaned, during a critical setback in the Vietnam War, that if he had lost iconic newsman Walter Cronkite, Ive lost Middle America. Its time for Americans to ask themselves what it says about the direction of their country when the White House has lost the First Ladies. Especially Laura Bush. Read more about: Justin Trudeau rose in the Commons this week to accuse New Democrats of playing politics with Donald Trumps inhumane treatment of children warehoused in cages. Some 99 times out of 100, the prime minister would have been correct. One needs not search very hard before tripping over an outbreak of politics in the nations capital. But in this case he was wrong. He was playing the politics, stalling for time and hoping against hope that the U.S. Congress moves quickly to restore some semblance of humanity to a nation that is having its international reputation badly tarnished. The longer this despicable practice continues, the harder it will be for Trudeau to remain silent. The longer he remains silent, the more vulnerable he is to charges of complicity. And the longer this continues, it will become all but impossible to explain on a moral basis why Canada still continues to view the United States as a safe country for asylum seekers and why this country has not suspended an agreement that formally deems the U.S. something that it isnt, namely a harbour where human rights are respected. Read more: Opinion | Mallick: Trump morality for all: do you go along to get along? Donald Trump accuses Canadians of smuggling shoes home from U.S. U.S. expected to back away from UN Human Rights Council Much has changed since the two governments signed the Safe Third Country Agreement in 2002. We are now living a historic period of migration and rootlessness. We are also living in a time when a U.S. president is using innocent children as political hostages. In 2002, both countries recognized the other as a nation that protects asylum-seekers and required those making a claim at recognized crossings to make it in the first country in which they arrived. Specifically, the Canadian language states, only countries that respect human rights and offer a high degree of protection to asylum seekers may be designated as safe third countries. To date, the United States is the only designated safe third country. The AP toured a holding facility in South Texas that's holding hundreds of immigrant children. While reporters were not allowed to record the tour, video released by border patrol shows them waiting in a series of cages created by metal fencing. (The Associated Press) The agreement requires continual review of countries designated as safe third countries to ensure original conditions, including its human rights record, have not changed. Yet, the Liberals have not moved to suspend an agreement that explicitly states the United States meets a high standard with respect to the protection of human rights. It is an open democracy with independent courts, separation of powers and constitutional guarantees of essential human rights and fundamental freedoms. This is clearly no longer the case. Pretending otherwise disrespects Canadians who can see and hear what is happening at the Mexican border. Last November, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale directed the Canadian Border and Security Agency to as much as humanly possible keep children out of detention and keep families together. Today, the Liberals are largely silent as the U.S. is engaged in the opposite, barbaric practice. Trudeau may have compelling political reasons to stay out of this. He doesnt need another flashpoint with Trump right now not necessarily a sign of weakness, but one of political prudence. His government is also vulnerable because of the spike in irregular crossings from asylum-seekers into this country and resources available have not kept pace with the number of crossings, even if it is making progress in slowing the number of such crossings. Morally, his silence and his continued insistence that the U.S. is a safe harbour for new arrivals is a tough sell to an outraged electorate. An audio recording that appears to capture the heartbreaking cries of children being processed by officials took center stage Monday in the growing uproar over the Trump administrations policy of separating immigrant children from parents. (The Associated Press) What would happen if the agreement was suspended? Would more people come to Canada? asked Sean Rehaag, a expert on refugee law at Osgoode Hall Law School. Nobody knows. Anyone who tells you they know is lying. But he said the numbers would be manageable and resources would no longer have to be funnelled to dealing with irregular crossings in Quebec. Canadian action would not help those families torn apart in southern Texas, but Canadian refusal to send asylum-seekers back to the U.S. under the agreement could prevent hundreds more enduring the same fate, he said. Most importantly, denunciation and suspension of the bilateral agreement, would be an example of Trudeau staking the high ground Canadians expect of their government. And suspension is just that. Its a suspension, not an end to an agreement and any change in asylum seekers in this country over a period of no more than months would be a drop in the global migration bucket. The Trudeau Liberals rode a carefully-cultivated image of empathy and compassion to electoral victory in 2015. They have to get to that hill again because waiting for sanity to return to the U.S. is no longer a viable strategy. In the meantime, enjoy World Refugee Day on Wednesday. Tim Harper is a former Star reporter who is a current freelance columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @nutgraf1 Read more about: Donald Trump is castigated for separating children from families who have illegally entered the United States and rightly so. There is no law that specifically requires the U.S. president to engage in this cruel practice. But before Canadians indulge in their favourite sport of Trump-bashing, we should keep a few things in mind. First, Trump is not unique in applying harsh solutions to the problems posed by large-scale movements of migrants. Australia intercepts would-be asylum seekers at sea and delivers them to detention camps in neighbouring Nauru and Papua New Guinea for processing. This hardline policy has been supported by both major parties in Australia, including left-leaning Labour. Thats because it is overwhelmingly popular. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkels coalition government is in danger of collapsing over the migrant issue. Many Germans argue that Merkel has been too welcoming. The conservative Christian Social Union, a necessary partner in the coalition, worries that unless it can be seen as taking a harder line against migrants it will lose support to the far right. Meanwhile, the latest Italian election has put in power an anti-migrant coalition government there. One of its first acts was to turn away a boatload of asylum seekers rescued from the Mediterranean. Second, the Trumpian practice of separating migrant families and detaining their children is not unheard of. Canada has done both, albeit on a much smaller scale. Between 2010 and 2014, according to a study by the University of Torontos International Human Rights Program, an average of 242 migrant children a year were put into detention. By 2017 that number had dropped to 162. In Nov. 2017, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale ordered the Canada Border Services Agency to avoid child detention and keep families together as much as humanly possible. Like the U.S. today, Canada faced United Nations criticism in 2012 for its policy of detaining migrant children. Third, the question of what to do with the children of people entering a country illegally poses a real problem. In the U.S., Barack Obamas administration set up family detention centres where parents and their children could be housed together while their cases were adjudicated. That worked until a judge ruled that detaining migrant children for any length of time was illegal. After that, the Obama administration responded by freeing from immigration detention any families with children often on a simple promise to appear later in court. It was a humane act. But it was also a signal to would-be illegal entrants that bringing children along might allow them to avoid detention. The Trumpists saw this as a loophole that needed to be plugged. Their response, which has been typically heavy-handed, is to separate families, put the adults in jail and treat the children like unaccompanied minors that is like those child migrants who have been smuggled into the U.S. without parents. While polls show the family separation policy is unpopular generally in the U.S. it does score well with most Republicans. The grandees of the party, like the Bushes, may not like it. But the rank and file do. Between mid-April and the end of May, almost 2,000 migrant children have been separated from their families. Trump says the problem could be fixed if Congress passed a law specifically allowing the detention of migrants as family units thus finessing the legal problem that bedevilled Obama. In the short run, he is probably right. A return to family detention centres would be more humane than separating parents from their children. There is, however, a long-run problem that this doesnt address. All over the world, people are on the move in search of a better life. Not everyone in the developed world welcomes their arrival. But unless conditions improve in places like Afghanistan, Africa and Central America, they will keep on coming. No Trump can stop them. Thomas Walkom is a Toronto-based columnist covering politics. Follow him on Twitter: is a Toronto-based columnist covering politics. Follow him on Twitter: @tomwalkom Read more about: You may have heard that, just in time for the municipal election, the city has redrawn the ward boundaries in Toronto and added some new wards. City council will grow from 44 to 47 members, plus the mayor, and everyone will need to figure out which ward they now live in. You may not have heard that, while the new ward boundaries are ready to take effect, the new ward names are not ready yet. On Tuesday, the mayors executive committee signed off on a plan for an advisory panel to suggest names for consideration after the election. You know how the government likes to take its time, consult widely, do things in stages. Those whove been watching the elevator installation at Dupont subway station dominate the roads in the area for going on three years now will understand the pace of change the city prefers. The upshot when it comes to wards is that if you used to live in Ward 13 Parkdale-High Park, you probably now live in plain old Ward 17. Ward 22 used to be near midtown, around Yonge and St. Clair, and was called St. Pauls. The new Ward 22 is on the waterfront downtown, and you just have to remember the number. Sometimes the old names were a puzzle to figure out. Each covered two numbered wards, and some didnt completely correspond with the neighbourhood names people use, but at least they offered clues. If you lived in Agincourt, there was a good chance your ward was one of the two Scarborough-Agincourts; in the middle of the city, in or near Rosedale, well, Toronto Centre-Rosedale was probably your electoral district. Now? Not so much. If youre reading about the candidates for office in Ward 33, you have basically a one in 47 chance of guessing whether this is voting information you can use. Applying new numbers and no names to redrawn and shuffled electoral districts is a great experiment in seeing whether people can be any more confused and underinformed about municipal politics. The result will be interesting to see. The existing level of awareness is already somewhere in the neighbourhood of a vague, hand-wavy theyre all full of crap, with voter turnout averaging less than 50 per cent in the past four elections. But the lag between drawing new boundaries and giving people a recognizable name to call them by also offers an opportunity. Perhaps we can name them ourselves, with names that actually mean something to us. Landmarks, for example: what could be simpler than naming the new ward that stretches along the cliffs of the Scarborough waterfront after that obvious feature: Ward 38Scarborough Bluffs. Simple. Ward 15Casa Loma. Done. Same with Ward 45Rouge Park. Easy. The new teensy ward between John and Bathurst south of Queen is obviously Ward 20Condoland. No one is going to be confused by that. Who needs an advisory committee? This naming stuff is easy if you stick with things people will immediately recognize and understand. Take Ward 37We Prefer to Call it The Beach Even Though There are Four of Them. No one needs to guess where that might be, right? And then obviously, that new ward up north of the 401 around the 404 becomes, as any real estate agent could tell you, Ward 31Upper Beaches. Then theres Ward 18Parkdale, Ward 1Rexdale, and Ward 36Riverdale. Some new areas contain more than one big landmark or neighbourhood. So theres Ward 24University-Cheese Magic, and Ward 22Finance n Ferries. You could get a bit creative, give people something they like to be known for or commemorate bits of local history. Maria Augimeri, who has long served the Downsview community, would certainly appreciate it if we all adopted the name Ward 9Torontos Central Park for that former North York area. Right above that on the map, given the mostly uncharted land above Steeles that we assume to be wild and untamed, you could go with Ward 8Gateway to Canadas North. The area surrounding High Park? How about Ward 17Watch For Roaming Capybaras. Obviously the district containing Cabbagetown can be named Ward 23Blue Isnt Even A Heritage Colour, to sum up a sort of area manifesto and offer a reminder to any local politician looking to tolerate any fun in the neighbourhood. The new Ward 11 should be known, for reasons that require no explanation, as Dolores. Of course, not every neighbourhood has a landmark or quality for which it is so well known, which is where aspirational names may come into play. For instance, the mystifyingly long-serving Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti has lobbied so long and hard to erect North Americas tallest flagpole in the area he represents; the least the rest of us can do is refer to it as Ward 7Future Home of Mammos Massive Pole. The area in central Scarborough soon to be home to one of the worlds most expensive single subway stops could be known as Ward 41A Hole In the Ground Into Which We Pour Money. You get the idea. Choosing a name for your new ward is likely simple and then you can just start using it and wait for the formal naming commission to catch on and adopt it. But in the meantime, once youve chosen a name, dont forget to look up the number already assigned to you. Come election day, your name wont matter, and were all just numbers to the authorities. I know, what else is new, right? VANCOUVERCanadas prison service decided to continue using, and even increased its reliance on, at least two tools to assess inmate risks at the same time it was battling a Metis inmate in court over the validity of those tools for Indigenous inmates, the Star has learned. Its a decision a top expert says has failed Indigenous people in prisons who form 5 per cent of the general population, and 27 per cent of the federal prison population but abandoning the tools could lead to even worse outcomes for them. Whats clear is that something about CSCs use of the tools will have to change in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court decision handed down last week involving Jeffrew Ewert, a Metis man from Surrey, B.C., whos been in prison more than three decades. Ewert sued the Correctional Services Canada (CSC) in 2015, alleging its use of certain statistical scales checklists that use personal information and criminal history to determine the likelihood that an inmate will reoffend infringed upon his rights and placed him at an unfair disadvantage. CSC uses dozens of tools in deciding whether inmates should be held in minimum, medium or maximum security; when they are eligible for parole; and the level of intervention they get while in prison. Research has shown some of the tools do not predict reoffending as effectively for Indigenous people as they do for other populations. Some have not been rigorously tested with Indigenous inmates. Three levels of court heard that CSC knew about the potential shortcomings of the tools for Indigenous inmates as early as 2000, but did not do further research on them. CSC maintained throughout the litigation that it fulfilled its obligation by ensuring accurate recording of its use of the tools. The SCC ruled in Ewerts favour last Wednesday, holding that the CSC failed to fulfil its obligation to use accurate information to make decisions about inmates incarceration. Ewert's lawyer said the decision will force CSC to do research to ensure the tools work the way theyre supposed to for Indigenous inmates or find something better. The clear danger posed by the CSCs continued use of assessment tools that may overestimate the risk posed by Indigenous inmates is that it could unjustifiably contribute to disparities in correctional outcomes in areas in which Indigenous offenders are already disadvantaged, wrote Justice Richard Wagner in the majority decision. Internal documents from CSC, obtained by a freedom of information request, reveal the service made decisions about two such assessment tools, the Static-99R and the Stable-2007, while Ewerts case was ongoing. The documents show that in scaling back one of its existing assessment processes, in early 2017, the CSC chose to leave the two statistical scales in place. The process the Specialized Sex Offender Assessment was used to determine what interventions were necessary for sex offenders while they were in prison. It included a psychological assessment as well as Static-99R and Stable 2007. In a public bulletin dated Jan. 23, 2017, the service said it had amended its policies on psychological risk assessment, including the elimination of the Specialized Sex Offender Assessment, following a comprehensive review prompted by increased pressures on the department and redundancy in the area of psychological risk assessments. Under the new process, Correctional Program Officers will use specific tools (Static-99R and Stable-2007) to complete the assessments, a portion of the bulletin reads. In response to questions from the Star about the changes, a CSC spokesperson said Static-99R and Stable 2007 would be used for program referrals. These assessment tools Static-99, STABLE 2007/ACUTE 2007 are widely used in the United States, European and Asian countries such as Latvia, Austria, Belgium, United Kingdom, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Hong Kong and Japan, the spokesperson wrote in an emailed response. In one of the obtained documents an Oct. 22, 2015, memorandum sent about one month after a federal appeal court ruled in Ewerts favour offers recommendations apparently in response to a request to find efficiencies within sex offender risk assessments. The memo, between two senior CSC division directors, makes no mention of Ewerts case or ongoing concerns about the tools validity. Given the sensitivity around the sex offender portfolio and that the aforementioned sex offender specific assessment tools are widely used internationally and are accepted actuarial measures of sexual offender risk, the Reintegration Programs Division strongly recommends that we continue to use the Static-99R and the Stable 2007 as instruments to predict risk for general and sexual recidivism, the memo states. According to research, Stable-2007, in particular, is ill-suited to predicting recidivism for Indigenous offenders. Maaike Helmus, one of the co-developers of both tools and a leading Canadian researcher on risk assessment tools, said Stable-2007 is much worse at predicting risk for Indigenous offenders compared to other inmates. The difference is quite marked, she said. I think there is a legitimate issue with the use of Stable with the Indigenous population. A CSC report obtained by StarMetro Determining which risk assessment tools should be used with sexual offenders shows CSC was aware of Stable-2007s shortcomings with the Indigenous population ahead of the removal of the Specialized Sex Offender Assessment. It cites research co-authored by Helmus and concludes, Stable-2007 did not significantly predict sexual, violent, or any recidivism. Nevertheless, the report recommends the continued use of Stable-2007, citing the need to use the most empirically validated tools in order to safeguard CSCs international reputation. Helmus said she thinks there has been a lack of due diligence in doing research, on the risk assessment tools. Quite frankly, we owe more to our Indigenous population, she said. At the same time, she said, Its a double-edged sword because the scales are also better than nothing. Thats because research also shows that all else equal people performing risk assessments are more likely to deem Indigenous inmates high-risk than other offenders. But Helmus said she thinks there are better tools out there. The VRSSO, she said, is another scale that has even more encouraging research showing it is valid for Indigenous offenders. This tool is not currently used by CSC. That leaves CSC in what Helmus calls a Catch-22 in the wake of the Supreme Court decision unable to justify the continued use of the scale and unable to abandon them. Her main hope is that the Supreme Court ruling will spark more research to improve the assessment tools used in Canadian prisons. My fear is that if the message that goes out is lets abandon them, whats likely to happen is even worse decisions being made, she said. Read more about: VANCOUVERCanadas detention of hundreds of children of asylum-seekers in recent years dont compare to the devastating images from the U.S. of kids in cages, which have drawn global condemnation. But immigration experts and government critics say Canada Border Services Agencys ongoing detention of minors generally with their families is deeply damaging to child welfare and mental health. According to refugee and immigration lawyer Hanna Gros, with the International Human Rights Program, the numbers have improved under the Liberal government, but continue to raise concerns about why children are detained at all while their parents await deportation proceedings. The evidence has made it clear that even a brief period of detention ... has profoundly detrimental consequences to childrens health and wellbeing, Gros said. These are human rights violations in Canada that have real-life impacts that people can appreciate. CBSA declined an interview request but directed StarMetro to the agency's online detention data, which show that, on average, 182 minors a year have been detained across Canada since Liberals took office in 2015. That is a significant drop from the average 242 minors over the three previous years, according to 2016 and 2017 reports co-authored by Gros for the IHRP. Read more: Editorial | Indefinite detention of migrants is indefensible Canada's longest serving immigration detainee appeals his five-year detention Reports reveal grim reality for refugee children fleeing war Gros alleged the practice of child separation occurs in Canada, but CBSA does not publish any data that would support her claim, and the agency was not able to provide a written response to StarMetros questions on the issue by press time. The crisis of border crossings and child detention was taken up in the House of Commons Monday, with NDP MP for Vancouver East Jenny Kwan hammering the Liberals over their reaction to child detentions in the U.S. In a phone interview Monday, she told StarMetro that just because Canada doesnt literally rip children from parents arms as in the U.S. where the Department of Homeland Security recently confirmed it separated 1,995 minors from April 19 through May 31 Canada needs to clean up its own act even as it condemns the U.S. The very fact people are put in detention in the first place is an issue, she said. Kwan also called on Ottawa to end the Safe Third Country Agreement with the U.S., which turns away border crossers at official ports of entry if they're coming via the U.S. or other countries deemed safe. She said its outrageous that the U.S. can be considered safe if it jails minors en masse in chain-link cages. Its true the numbers are improving, but people are still being detained in Canada, Kwan said. I dont think, unless theres a prevailing reason like terrorism or criminality, that asylum-seekers should be detained at all. Read more about: VANCOUVERA quarter of the seafood sold across Metro Vancouver from your local grocery store to your sushi restaurant is not what you think youre buying, according to a new study. Roughly 90 per cent of snapper was tilapia, while sutchi catfish masqueraded as halibut, snapper, sole and cod. Thats because the supply chain for seafood is both complex and opaque, said Yaxi Hu, lead author and food science PhD candidate at University of British Columbia. Researchers used DNA bar coding testing to test 281 samples of fish sold and determined a quarter were another species altogether. Restaurants scored the highest in terms of mislabelling at 29 per cent, then grocery stores at 24 per cent and sushi bars at 22 per cent. But there was evidence of both intentional and unintentional mislabelling. For instance, fish sold as snapper were far less valued species such as tilapia. Meanwhile, in other cases, sockeye was substituted as pink salmon where economic motivation was less likely, Hu explained. Much of the confusion lies in vernacular, she added. For example, Canada only requires seafood labels to be generic names, which can include multi-species, Hu said, pointing to pacific snapper or rockfish being used interchangeably. Analysis was done in partnership with independent charity Oceana Canada, the Hanner Lab at the University of Guelph and the University of B.C.s Lu Food Safety & Health Engineering Lab, with the aim of understanding how far fraudulent labelling goes in the seafood supply chain. Though consumers are very aware of sustainable methods, they cannot make informed decisions, Hu said. A fish can be caught in Canada, gutted in China, and then breaded in the United States, ultimately sold back to Canada. But that product would be labelled American, based on current Canadian Food Inspection Agency regulations, which label a fish based on the country of last processing. Misidentification can happen anywhere along the way, and its incredibly difficult to identify where, Hu said. Food fraud is the intentional mislabelling for economic gain and the problem is estimated to cost the world $52 billion. Seafood fraud can cause national and international problems, such as economic damage to consumers and irresponsible fishery industries, Hu said. It can also diminish consumer trust over governmental agencies. In addition, seafood fraud creates legal markets for illegal unreported and unregulated fishing, as well as cause potential health damages to susceptible populations, such as pregnant women, she added. Robert Hanner, chief technology officer at TRU-ID a Guelph-based company that provides DNA certification of foods told StarMetro Canada, as one of the top seafood-producing countries in the world, complies with much more stringent labelling when exporting products to the European Union. Thats because the EU requires the scientific species name, country of origin and packaging. Canadian consumers dont benefit from this same level of transparency at home, Hanner said. This situation compromises consumer choice and even facilities laundering illegally harvested seafood into the domestic market, at the expense of legitimate suppliers. The problem is not new: Groups such as Oceana have been calling for legislative changes to allow for more transparency for decades. Seafood fraud cheats Canadian consumers and hurts local, honest fishers as well as chefs and seafood companies looking to buy sustainable seafood, said Julia Levin, seafood fraud campaigner with Oceana Canada. It causes health concerns and masks global human rights abuses by creating a market for illegally caught fish. Thats why the key to fighting seafood fraud is boat-to-plate traceability, she added. This means tracking seafood all the way through the supply chain and requiring that key information travels along with the product. Authors supported several measures to help consumers understand what theyre buying including: harmonizing the common names of fish between major trading countries; requiring scientific names on labels; and providing consumers with information about where the fish was caught, processed and methods used. But the situation is not getting any better. Eight years ago, an Oceana study found the mislabelling rate to be roughly 33 per cent, while testing last fall in Ottawa revealed nearly half of all samples to be mislabelled. Oceana plans to release a national seafood fraud report this fall with findings from Halifax, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. Meanwhile, the United Nations issued a report this year calling for harmonized DNA-based system that provides universal access to a standard database using scientific names. And the UBC Lu Lab is developing a portable device that will allow consumers to test fish at their convenience. The study was published on Monday in Food Control and the research is supported by the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Read more about: VANCOUVERAfter a nomination meeting this weekend, OneCitys candidates for city council say theyll be concentrating on their message of opening up all of Vancouvers neighbourhoods to a variety of housing types. On Saturday, OneCity members nominated Brandon Yan and Christine Boyle as the partys council candidates, and Carrie Bercic, Jennifer Reddy and Erica Jaaf as the partys candidates for school board (Bercic won a seat on the school board in an October 2017 byelection). The left-wing party, which is a relative newcomer to Vancouvers civic political scene, will be fighting for attention and voters in a crowded field featuring no fewer than four progressive parties that fall on the left or centre-left spectrum. Read more: In an election of safe choices, Patrick Condon wants to be Vancouvers Bernie City election could make history with Ian Campbell on the left and Ken Sim on the right Adriane Carr decides not to run for mayor of Vancouver Boyle is a 33-year-old United Church minister, while Yan, 31, works at Out in Schools, a non-profit that educates students about homophobia, transphobia and bullying. I think one of the ways OneCity is differentiating itself in this election is really starting from the understanding that Vancouver is a city in crisis: the housing crisis and the opioid crisis, said Boyle who lives in Grandview-Woodland. So our policy platform thats taking shape prioritizes fighting for public and social and affordable housing in all neighbourhoods across the city. That means pushing to rezone land-use zoning in single-family neighbourhoods so that rental and social housing buildings are allowed in every neighbourhood. The party and Boyle have been lobbying in support of specific projects, such as a proposed social housing and detox centre at 1st Ave. and Clark Dr. Some neighbours have expressed concern about the building, saying theyre worried about the size of the building and its proximity to local schools. We want to be matching our policies with showing up to those neighbourhood fights to welcome and include more people, Boyle said. You see across the city a lot of the rhetoric is we theoretically support this, but just not here. And I think it matters a lot to figure out how we do consultation in a way that doesnt allow a neighbourhood to block those with lower incomes. Read more: Young candidates on both left and right push to allow apartment buildings in every Vancouver neighbourhood OneCity is not running a mayoral candidate; party members have yet to decide whether to endorse one of the independent candidates who are running for mayor, or the mayoral candidate of another party. Along with Vision Vancouver, the Coalition of Progressive Electors and the Green Party, OneCity has signed an agreement brokered by the Vancouver District Labour Council to run a set number of candidates in an attempt to not split the progressive vote. Correction - June 19, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly omitted Jennifer Reddys name from the list of OneCity nominees for school board candidates. Read more about: VANCOUVERThe remains of two people have been found near Ucluelet, B.C., where two men who recently sailed back to Canada from Panama vanished a little more than a month ago, according to the RCMP. Police are working with the BC Coroners Service to try to identify the remains, and stressed they have not made any connection to the missing 43-year-old Ryan Daley and 37-year-old Dan Archbald of Squamish, who were last seen leaving the Ucluelet harbour May 16. A family member of one of the men told the Star Vancouver not knowing who the remains belong to is just as hard as wondering how and why her brother-in-law, Daley, disappeared in the first place. Related: On Vancouver Island, three men go missing and a province wonders why Its just the horrible, horrible part of waiting to find out the actual, for sure ID, Lindsey Youell said. Youell said the police notified her family last Wednesday, June 13, that the remains of two people had been found. An RCMP release Monday afternoon said they were discovered by a woman walking her dog near Ucluelet but police did not divulge further information. Youell said beyond notifying them that remains had been discovered, the police didnt tell the family any other details. They have to be very careful about releasing anything, because its a pretty hardcore investigation right now, she said. With cases like this, they have to keep pretty tight lips about everything. Daley and Archbald had recently sailed a 15-metre boat named the Astral Blue from Panama, arriving in Ucluelet on May 13. Three days later, they disappeared after being seen leaving the Ucluelet small-craft harbour with large bags in tow. Family have said the men may have been headed to Jordan River, on southern Vancouver Island, when they disappeared. Read more about: Sena leader Sanjay Raut said that coming together of PDP-BJP to form government in state was He said Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray had opposed the tie-up, calling it an "anti-national" alliance. (Photo: PTI/File) Mumbai: The Shiv Sena on June 19 wondered if the BJP's decision to part ways with alliance partner PDP in Jammu and Kashmir was taken to avoid "uneasy questions" over violence in the state ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Dubbing the saffron party's decision as a "political move", Sena leader Sanjay Raut said the coming together of the PDP-BJP to form the government in the state was "unnatural and unholy". He said Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray had opposed the tie-up, calling it an "anti-national" alliance. "Uddhav ji's words have been proved correct today," he said. "The BJP-PDP had cut a deal to gain power. Our soldiers had to pay a big price for this. The incidents of our soldiers' martyrdom had gone up ever since the combine formed the government," Raut told reporters here. "If the BJP took this decision to avoid answering these issues in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, I think it is a political decision," he said. The BJP on Tuesday pulled out of its alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, saying it has become impossible to continue in the government in view of the growing radicalism and terrorism in the state. The decision was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah, BJP general secretary Ram Madhav said in Delhi. In the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections held in 2015, the BJP won 25 seats and the PDP 28, in the 87-member House. VANCOUVER The next time visitors stop by two of the citys downtown plazas, they will find them renamed in languages belonging to the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. The City of Vancouver announced Monday that it has designated the Vancouver Art Gallery north plaza as sxnq Xwtle7enk Square, and the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Plaza as sxexn Xwtla7shn a decision made in partnership with a committee made up of members of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nation. A pronunciation guide for those names is available on the citys website. Khelsilem, an elected councillor of the Squamish Nation, said the announcement represents a repatriation of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh heritage that has not been reflected in Vancouvers heritage for a long time. The move honours and affirms Indigenous languages, he added. Now that the names have been established, he hopes people will think about what it was like for First Nations to learn English names. Mayor Gregor Robertson said the naming was a historic move. The living legacy of Coast Salish Peoples is always with us, and today is an opportunity to acknowledge this legacy by naming two of Vancouvers landmark public spaces, he said. Also at the ceremony was Jinny Sims, Minister of Citizens Services, who said the B.C. government is committed to reconciliation with Indigenous people. Renaming these plazas will help ensure these three local Nations have a prominent presence in the downtown area, which is in the heart of their traditional territory, she said. Read more about: VANCOUVERAs the city continues to struggle with housing affordability, the latest report on urban development says that more density if done right could lead to greater returns on investment for developers. But one real estate expert from the University of British Columbia says attracting more investors is of little benefit if local residents cant afford to live in the city. The Urban Land Institute, a real estate think tank, released a report Monday suggesting there is a positive correlation between what it calls good density and benefits for urban residents, governments, and investors. One of the positive outcomes might be higher and more stable returns on real estate investment, thereby providing an incentive for property developers and owners to work with governments and other urban stakeholders towards a shared vision for a city, the report reads. The reports authors define good density as development that includes mixed-used buildings, public green spaces and strong alternatives to car-use. Vancouver, with more than 230 parks and a rapidly expanding bike network, appears to meet several of those factors. But while those things might be attractive to developers, as the report suggests, they have not made the city more affordable for residents. Its an important aspect that is missing in the report, said Tsur Somerville, a professor at UBCs Sauder School of Business who studies real estate investment. A city that attracts developers and investors cant be considered livable if local incomes dont keep up with housing prices, he said. We dont seem to be doing a very good job on affordability, full stop. Solving that problem means building more supply and the right kind of supply, he said. Read more: Vancouver wants single-family neighbourhoods to make room for more people All-inclusive dog resort in Olympic Village raises eyebrows as Vancouvers gap between rich and poor grows Its just beyond imaginable: Death at Tim Hortons exposes lack of resources for vulnerable people Vancouver needs a wider range of housing developments that includes purpose-built rentals for families and units for lower income households, he said. Higher levels of government also need to invest more into public transit, in order to convince people to leave their cars behind, he added. There have been significant improvements in recent years the Broadway subway line is on its way to being built and in 2017 and Vancouver approved permits for 1,702 units of social or supportive housing, 822 purpose-built rental units and 591 rental laneway homes. And yet, Vancouver has a ways to go if it wants to become an attractive-yet-affordable city like Vienna or Copenhagen, said Somerville. Many European cities are dense cities, compact cities, with significant public infrastructure and less of a car-centric way of living, he explained. Meanwhile, about 80 per cent of Vancouvers land is still reserved for single detached houses and people are buying more cars per capita in B.C. than ever before. At the same time, complaints about Airbnb eating up long-term rental supply and foreign investment artificially propping up housing prices have policy-makers eyeing the balance between tourism and affordability, said Somerville. Its tricky because part of being a tourist city is having options for people who might want to visit here or want to own something. Ultimately, Vancouver needs to do more of what it is already doing, he said increasing urban amenities while building more affordable housing options. It's not like we arent doing individual things that are good, were just not doing enough of it. Read more about: VANCOUVERAfter a massive run-up in home prices over the past decade, Vancouver is trying to get its lower-income residents back. A data analysis by city staff shows the share of residents making below $30,000 a year fell from 34 per cent in 2005 to 28 per cent in 2015, while the share of Vancouverites making over $80,000 increased from 13 per cent in 2005 to 28 per cent in 2015. While rising median incomes may account for some of this change, these trends indicate a risk to the long-term diversity and resilience of our city, city planners wrote in a report presented to council Tuesday. Six months ago, Vancouver city council approved a new direction for housing, one that emphasized building new housing targeted toward specific income bands. It was a departure from the mostly market-based approach that had been in place. On Tuesday, staff presented an updated report to mayor and council. We found in our investigation that much of the new supply generated in Vancouver since 2010 or 2012 has been very high end, and its really more of a result of investment of foreign and domestic capital, Gil Kelley, the citys chief planner, told reporters in a June 13 technical briefing. To create a place for low-income residents in Vancouver, the city will require that new large developments devote 30 per cent of the project to affordable housing (20 per cent for the lowest incomes and 10 per cent for moderate incomes). Previously, the city required 20 per cent of the project to be social housing. As well as the changes to single family zoning, city staff are also planning to consolidate social housing initiatives into a $2 billion endowment fund, which would include revenue from Vancouvers empty homes tax and developer fees, as well as contributions from the provincial and federal governments. That consolidated fund will be used to build the 12,000 units of social and supportive housing units the city wants over the next 10 years. While the city has led the region in building new rental housing, much of the new stock is targeted to people earning $50,000 to $100,000 a year. The lack of rental options for lower-income people may be driving a loss of income diversity in Vancouver, according to the staff report. Homelessness, which reached a 10-year high in 2016, continues to increase: between 2017 and 2018, the number of homeless people in Vancouver went up by two per cent. Read more about: ALTON A lawyer for the proposed new Community of Sunnybrook housing development said Monday he is mystified by Alton Mayor Brant Walkers flip flop on the matter. Clear representations of support were made by the mayor from the time of the execution of the Memorandum of Understanding on June 15, 2017 (one year ago today) through a meeting on Monday night of this week at City Hall, attorney Andrew Carruthers said in a news release. The mayor issued a statement Wednesday, claiming he was misquoted as being supportive of the project. He claimed it came to his attention in May that certain elements of a memorandum to which he agreed were not met. At the (Monday) meeting, one city official even stated the mayor wishes you success and good luck. It was for this reason that Ed Hightower (the majority owner of the development) did not give his planned presentation to the committee given the mayors reported continued support, Carruthers said. Corporation Counsel Jim Schrempf also disputed the quote from the mayor, but others in the room disputed Schrempf and the mayor. They said they heard Walker say, the mayor wishes you success and good luck. Yet, on Thursday of this week a statement was released by the mayor in which he reversed himself, allegedly based on information he received back in May. I find it odd that, in just three days, the mayor can go from fully supportive, wishing us good luck, to being against the project based on information that he has been sitting on for a month Carruthers said. Walker said he wanted a path for residents to become homeowners, rather than renters. He claimed in a statement released Wednesday, the wording to which he agreed was not included in the agreement from the Illinois Housing Development Authority, which has approved the project for tax credits for each dollar invested. Carruthers said that element of potential home ownership is still a part of the agreement. The Mayor signed a Memorandum of Understanding and at least two letters fully supporting the project. In the Mayors own words This project is directly in line with Altons growth and revitalization efforts.As Mayor of Alton, I affirm that the City strongly supports this project and the efforts of the development team. Our community wants a quality, affordable option for families and looks forward to partnering with this development team to make this a reality, Walker reportedly said in a letter to the state authority. At present, the development is 100 percent compliant with the terms of the memorandum and what has been discussed with the City over the past year, Carruthers said. It is unclear what has suddenly caused the Mayor to change his position. If there were some additional terms or restrictions the mayor wanted in the memorandum, he should have suggested they be included in that document. After all, the memorandum was prepared by the city, Carruthers said. The attorney Carruthers also took issue with the Mayors reference to the groups funding application and the rumor circulating that the mayor was somehow misled. The Mayor stated that a copy of the Illinois Housing Development Authority application was never provided to the City of Alton and they had to obtain it through a Freedom of Information Act request. The City never asked for a copy of the application in the first place and the development group would have certainly been willing to provide it if requested, Carruthers said. Regardless, the Mayor and the City have been advised throughout the process and provided input over the past year that led to several changes in the plans, including smaller building footprints, townhouses instead of all duplexes, longer setbacks to allow for more green space, and additional parking spaces, Carruthers said. Carruthers added, Despite involving the City from the beginning and the clear expressions of support throughout, the Mayor has flip-flopped on the project, presumably following complaints from residents operating on misinformation spread on social media and unwarranted fear. However, the most disappointing aspect of the Mayors sudden reversal is that he did not even bother to pick up the phone and personally notify the development group or give them an opportunity to address his still unspecified concern. There is a lot of misinformation being circulated in the community and on Facebook regarding this project. Let us be clear, this development will not be government owned or operated. There will be no publicly owned housing units or public ownership of this development. period. As for anticipated rents, Carruthers stated Residents will have to pay fixed rents no different than tenants in any other residential developments, ranging from $700 to over $1000 monthly, which is in excess of rates charged by public housing authorities. Eleven of the 40 units will be assisted with rental vouchers that will limit rent payments based on family incomes, three of which will be set aside for veterans only. This has been part of the plan from the beginning, so we do not understand the sudden expression of surprise from the Mayor, the attorney said. Regarding the tenants to be selected Carruthers added, All of the tenants will be screened by the Laborers management team, not a government agency. The project will also give ownership opportunities to tenants in good standing after the financing compliance period has lapsed. So while this will begin as leased residential units, within a number of years it is anticipated there will be as many owners as renters in this development. He said the group had to learn about the Mayors change in position through his press release. By his actions this week, Mayor Walker is telling potential developers seeking to do business in Alton that he will be enthusiastically supportive for over a year, cause you to invest time and money based on that support, and then pull the rug out from under you when everything is ready to go. The Sunnybrook project will continue as planned, he said. Walker did not return a call seeking comment. Reach reporter Sanford Schmidt at 618208-6449. TheRegional Administration Manager will be part of a three-person management teamworking alongside the Director and the Programs Manager. Reporting to theBoard, the team is responsible for guiding the strategy of the foundation,stakeholder engagement, fundraising, and the implementation of projects in EastAfrica. The Administration Manager is directly responsible for all theFinancial, Administrative and HR functions of the Foundation and will be taskedwith implementing policies and procedures that support the good governance ofthe organization. The Regional Administration Manager for the foundation willbe overseeing Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi. Slane Castle wedding shoot | Photography: Paul Kelly & Joe Carr, Assisted by: Flora Guerra, Mira Killiomaki | Video: Richard Finlay, Bride & Groom Films | Venue: Slane Castle & Slane Irish Whiskey | Wedding dresses: Sarah Foy Couture & weddingdress.ie | Groomswear: Louis Copeland & Sons | Hair: Lorraine Browne Hair | Make-up: Niamh Connolly | House Coat: Wilde by Design | Accessories: Jules Bridal Jewellery| Invitations: Creative Edge | Cake: Creative Cakes | Flowers: Flowers by Moira | Fragrances: Joe Browne & Burren Perfumery| Irish Wolfhounds: Guliagh Kennels Looking for some inspiration for a stunning, greenery-filled Irish wedding? Well look no further than today's stunning wedding shoot in Slane Castle, Co. Meath. Sent in to THEVOW.ie by talented hair stylist Lorraine Browne, the romantic shoot - from photographers Paul Kelly and Joe Carr - is sure to get your creative juices flowing - as it did for a host of super talented Irish wedding suppliers involved. With beautiful gowns by Sarah Foy Couture and weddingdresses.ie, and gorgeous groomswear by Louis Copeland & Sons, models Stephanie (with make-up by Niamh Connolly) and Wayne from Catwalk Models were styled to perfection, mirroring the stately yet informal surroundings of the mythical Slane Castle. Expand Close Slane Castle wedding shoot / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Slane Castle wedding shoot We especially love the beautiful bouquets by Flowers by Moira, the elegant invitation suite by Creative Edge - and that wedding sweet by Creative Cakes that look way too pretty to eat. Don't miss the video too. By Richard Finlay of Bride & Groom Films it shows the sunning Slane Castle and Slane Irish Whiskey at its finest. Expand Close Slane Castle wedding shoot | Photography: Paul Kelly & Joe Carr, Assisted by: Flora Guerra, Mira Killiomaki | Video: Richard Finlay, Bride & Groom Films | Venue: Slane Castle & Slane Irish Whiskey | Wedding dresses: Sarah Foy Couture & weddingdress.ie | Groomswear: Louis Copeland & Sons | Hair: Lorraine Browne Hair | Make-up: Niamh Connolly | House Coat: Wilde by Design | Accessories: Jules Bridal Jewellery| Invitations: Creative Edge | Cake: Creative Cakes | Flowers: Flowers by Moira | Fragrances: Joe Browne & Burren Perfumery| Irish Wolfhounds: Guliagh Kennels / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Slane Castle wedding shoot | Photography: Paul Kelly & Joe Carr, Assisted by: Flora Guerra, Mira Killiomaki | Video: Richard Finlay, Bride & Groom Films | Venue: Slane Castle & Slane Irish Whiskey | Wedding dresses: Sarah Foy Couture & weddingdress.ie | Groomswear: Louis Copeland & Sons | Hair: Lorraine Browne Hair | Make-up: Niamh Connolly | House Coat: Wilde by Design | Accessories: Jules Bridal Jewellery| Invitations: Creative Edge | Cake: Creative Cakes | Flowers: Flowers by Moira | Fragrances: Joe Browne & Burren Perfumery| Irish Wolfhounds: Guliagh Kennels The Ernakulam Principal District and Sessions Court on Monday dismissed a plea for a special court to hear the case in which a prominent actress was assaulted in a moving car in Kochi on February 17. The court turned down the plea by the victim actress and said the request to provide the services of a woman judge could not be granted. The court said the counsel for prime accused Pulsar Suni could view the 'visuals of the assault' in the presence of the court. The court posted to June 27 the hearing on all allied petitions. Actor Dileep, who reportedly masterminded the kidnap and assault, had filed a petition seeking 'all records.' The court will hear this plea as well on June 27. The court directed Dileep to mention in writing the documents needed. Criminal lawyer B.A. Aloor informed the court that he was no longer appearing for Pulsar Suni. Suni made an application for another lawyer. According to the lawyer, the procedure may take time because both the parties are behind bars. Mumbai: Former media baron Peter Mukerjea on Monday replied to a divorce notice sent via courier by his wife Indrani Mukerjea on April 25, agreeing to divorce by mutual consent. The couple, which is facing trial for murdering Indranis biological daughter Sheena Bora and disposing of her body, are in judicial custody. Advocate Edith Dey, who is representing Indrani in the divorce proceedings, said, We have received a reply via registered post from Peters lawyer and they have principally agreed to divorce by mutual consent. According to the lawyer, the procedure may take time because both the parties are behind bars. The lawyers from both sides will now file for divorce by mutual consent in the family court. However, before this stage, they need to work out division of assets amicably. In January last year, Indrani had informed the special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court that she wanted to end her 15-year-old marriage with Peter and had also sought the courts permission to file a divorce petition in the family court. CBI judge J.C. Jagdale at that time had told Indrani that she did not require the CBIs courts permission to do so. Peter and Indrani were married under the Special Marriage Act on November 8, 2002 and as per Hindu rituals on November 10, 2002 in Mumbai. Meanwhile, Peters lawyers Shrikant Shivde and Amit Ghag finished cross-examining Peter and Indranis former domestic help Pradeep Waghmare and pointed out some contradictions and improvements in his statements. According to Waghmares statement to the police, he had sought money from Indrani for his childrens education, but she refused. However, Waghmare said during cross-examination that this was not the reason he quit the job. His statement to police also stated that he was asked not to go to Indranis flat in Marlow building for two to three days because it had been given on rent. In court, Waghmare said that he had never stated that the flat was given on rent. According to the prosecution, Waghmare was asked not to go to Indranis flat because Sheenas body was being kept there at that time. A self-proclaimed RSS activist who threatened to kill Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan was arrested at Delhi Airport on Tuesday on his return from the UAE. Krishnakumar Nair, a native of Kothamangalam in Ernakulam district, was fired from his job in Abu Dhabi on June 6 after he uploaded a video on Facebook in which he threatened to kill Vijayan. Nair was apprehended by the police at Delhi Airport where he arrived on Tuesday. A police team from Kochi will take him into their custody and bring him to Kerala by train. A lookout notice had been issued against him. Nair had lost his job in an oil company in Abu Dhabi after his threat to Vijayan drew a slew of complaints. Nair made the threat in a Facebook Live session apparently in an inebriated state. In the video posted on the social media platform, Nair also threatened the chief minister's wife and daughter. He also identified himself as an RSS activist. Nair was advised by the police to travel to Delhi, instead of taking a direct flight to Kerala, as he also had to face some threats after the post went viral. In a second video post, Nair apologised for the comments he made earlier under the influence of alcohol. He said he was ready to face any penalty that the law of the land provides. The adage that failures can teach many lessons seems quite... The ambitious high-speed bullet train project between Ahmedabad and Mumbai faced its first major display of public opposition on Monday when a large number of farmers from Surat and nearby areas presented a memorandum to the Surat district collector. President of the Gujarat Khedut Samaj, Jayesh Patel, told THE WEEK that the farmers submitted a memorandum listing 14 objections to land acquisition for the bullet train project in connection with notifications issued as per section 11 (1) of Land Acquisition Act 2013. The farmers reached the Collectorate in a rally, riding tractors and motorcycles. For more than an hour, they were prevented from meeting the collector. The farmers were told that they did not have the permission to take out a rally. However, later on, they were allowed to submit the memorandum. Among several other things, the farmers demanded that the notification issued for the bullet train project be considered null and void. Patel claimed actions have not been taken as per the government's rehabilitation and resettlement policy. Patel and the farmers also alleged that an environment impact assessment was not undertaken. The farmers also held that they were not offered compensation as per the market rate. The farmers also citied the food security angle and said that land was being acquired despite the fact that there was a provision barring acquisition of land that gives more than one crop per year. Patel also said that there was no need to acquire land for the bullet train project as there was enough land already acquired under the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC). He said that the farmers would take out a four-day awareness drive from Ahmedabad to Valsad, beginning from June 22. Various civil rights activists and farmers' and environmental groups from Gujarat and Maharashtra are going to join hands for the awareness drive. The ground-breaking ceremony of the Japan-backed bullet train project was held last year in Ahmedabad. The bullet train project is among the 'pet' projects of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A former key aide of BJP veteran L.K. Advani on Monday said India needs a leader who can solve "big problems" such as the Kashmir issue and therefore he would like to see Congress chief Rahul Gandhi as the future prime minister. Listing disputes with Pakistan and China, Sudheendra Kulkarni, who is also a columnist, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has "failed" to solve the big problems. Speaking at a panel discussion in Mumbai, Kulkarni praised Gandhi, saying he is a "leader with good heart". Kulkarni said dialogue is the only solution to solve the long-standing dispute with Pakistan, and normalising ties with the neighbouring country is key to India becoming a great nation. "We must state what is required for solving the problem with Pakistan. And which is why I made a suggestion that I would like to see Rahul Gandhi as future prime minister," he said at the event organised by All India Professionals' Congress. The event was attended by senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid, whose book Spectrum Politics was launched there. Kulkarni added, "(Rahul Gandhi) is young and he is idealist. He is a man with compassion. No political leader in recent times had spoken the language of love, affection and compassion." Ahead of the 2019 general elections, Kulkarni said Gandhi should visit neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, China and Bangladesh and emerge with ideas to solve the "big problems". "Like Rajiv Gandhi did when he was in the opposition... He went to Afghanistan. Similarly, Rahul ji should go to Pakistan, China and Bangladesh and emerge as a leader with new ideas on how to solve big problems that Modi ji has failed to solve," Kulkarni said. He described himself as a "well-wisher" of the Congress and pitched for a dialogue between the party and the RSS notwithstanding their differences. At least five people were killed and several injured when a fire broke out at two hotels in the Charbagh area of Lucknow on Tuesday morning. Local media reports claimed more than 50 people were rescued from the flames. The fire began at the Hotel Viraat International, located in the Doodh Mandi locality of Charbagh, around 6am, before spreading to the adjacent SSJ International Hotel. A police official said the fire started in the basement and spread to the upper floors. Firefighters took more than two hours to douse the flames. Police expect the death toll from the fire to rise as people may still be trapped inside the two buildings. The confirmed fatalities include a woman and child who were staying at the Viraat International. Bandekar has stated that he does not want any allowance from the state government. Mumbai: Shiv Sena party secretary and Chairman of Mumbai's Siddhivinayak temple trust, Adesh Bandekar has been accorded the rank of Minister of State (MoS) by the state government. The government resolution (GR) issued mentions the protocols for the newly appointed MoS and other financial benefits which he will be eligible for. He will receive a monthly allowance of Rs 7500, Rs 3000 a month for telephone expenses, and travel allowances. He will also get 500 rupees allowance for attending every meeting of the Siddhivinayak temple trust. He will be entitled to have one PA, One Typist, and one peon. The GR also mentions that he is barred from using the national flag on his car. He will also not be entitled to have any telephone operator, bodyguard or security at home. However, he clarified while speaking to ANI that he will not be taking any allowances from the state government. "I won't take any allowance; I just want to serve people. The status of MoS has not been given to a particular person, it has been given to the position (Chairman of Siddhivinayak temple trust) in which I am right now," he told ANI. I won't take any allowance, I just want to serve people. The status of MoS has not been given to a man, it has been given to the position (Chairman of Shree Siddhivinayak Ganapati Temple) in which I am right now: Adesh Bandekar on being given MoS rank in Maharashtra cabinet pic.twitter.com/X8VyDnlV9U ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 On a related note, the Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led Madhya Pradesh government had on April 4 granted MoS status to five religious figures in the state. Baba Narmadanand, Baba Hariharanand, Computer Baba, Bhaiyyu Maharaj, and Pandit Yogendra Mahant were inducted in the state cabinet. The move had led to a petition in the Indore High Court against the decision as it was termed by the opposition as an 'appeasement politics' move. Bigotry in modern India is endangering the 'fictional' equality in the country. Social media outbursts, fake news and controversies are spread in the blink of an eye nowadays. The contradiction of the chest-thumping modern society is that on one hand, it is highlighting efforts to minimise the ill-effects of gender, caste and religious discriminations on various social media platforms, while on the other, the same platforms are used to add fuel to the fire in sensitive issues of discrimination. On Monday, a woman from Lucknow apparently refused to interact with the social media representative of telecom major Airtel on the basis of his religion. Pooja Singh, who claims herself to be a proud Hindu, tweeted, Dear Shohaib, as youre a Muslim and I have no faith in your working ethics because Kuran may have different version for customer service, thus requesting you to assign a Hindu representative for my request. Thanks. Dear Shohaib, as youre a Muslim and I have no faith in your working ethics because Kuran may have different version for customer service, thus requesting you to assign a Hindu representative for my request. Thanks Pooja Singh (@pooja303singh) June 18, 2018 In a bizarre decision on its part, Airtel went on obliging the irrational demand of the woman! It was only after the Twitter outburst, led by former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah, that the company put out a post saying they do not discriminate among different religions and castes. Dear @Airtel_Presence this conversation is genuine (Ive seen the timeline myself). I refuse to pay another penny to a company that condones such blatant bigotry. Im beginning the process of porting my number to another service provider & canceling my DTH & Broadband. pic.twitter.com/BZxJOaEsN6 Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) June 18, 2018 The death of a society is woven with the threads of discrimination. The hatred being built among the communities can lead to incurable disharmony in the country. India is a secular state where all religions co-exist peacefully. This may hold true theoretically, but the reality is far from the ideals of the Constitution. On April 11 this year, the Pew Research Centre, which had conducted a survey on 198 countries, ranked India as the fourth worst in the world for religious intolerance. Kudos to the secular state! Tensions between the religious groups, especially Hindus and Muslims, have long divided India; the rifts have never been reduced, but rather intensified. The Lucknow woman episode is only the latest example of the online racism unleashed by the glorious Hindutva brigade in the country. In April this year, Abhishekh Mishra, who claims to be linked with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, reportedly cancelled an Ola cab since the driver was a Muslim. Mishra tweeted that he cancelled the cab as he was not willing to give money to "jihadi people". His tweet triggered a huge controversy and debate on social media, but what was more shocking was that many people strongly came out to defend him, describing his move as freedom of expression. India has been witnessing religious dogmatism and communalism for a long time. Ever since independence, the country has been the victim of communal riots and violence which put its secular fabric under severe threat. Of late, the situation has reached an alarming stage, with the parallel co-existence of social media giving ample space for bigots and fanatics to exert considerable influence on the society. Being communally adherent is a cherished statement today. (DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the publication.) US President Donald Trump on Monday said he was ordering the creation of a sixth branch of the military to focus on space, a move critics said could harm the Air Force. It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space, Trump said before a meeting of his National Space Council. We are going to have the Air Force and were going to have the Space Force. Separate but equal. It is going to be something, he said later. The United States is a member of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bars the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space and only allows for the use of the moon and other celestial bodies for peaceful purposes. The idea of a Space Force has been raised before, by Trump and previous administrations, with proponents saying it would make the Pentagon more efficient. In 1983, then US President Ronald Reagan had proposed a missile defense system which was aimed at protecting the US from strategic nuclear weapons. This was called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The SDI was highly controversial and was often criticized for threatening the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). It was feared that the SDI would set off an arms race. The media often referred to the SDI as Star Wars, after the popular 1977 George Lucas film. Trump's move has also faced criticism from senior military officials. Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein told a 2017 congressional hearing that creating a new space branch would move us in the wrong direction. The Air Force oversees most of the countrys space-related military activity. The move would require the budgetary approval of the US Congress, which has been divided on the idea. Thankfully, the president cant do it without Congress because now is NOT the time to rip the Air Force apart. Too many missions at stake, US Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, said on Twitter. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said the departments policy board would prepare to implement Trumps order. Working with Congress, this will be a deliberate process with a great deal of input from multiple stakeholders, White said in a statement. In December, the president signed a directive that he said would enable astronauts to return to the moon and eventually lead a mission to Mars. He has ordered the government to review regulations on commercial space flights. Americans first landed on the moon in 1969, reaching a goal set by former President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and capping a decade-long space race between Washington and Moscow. Since then, US efforts to explore beyond the Earths orbit have largely focused on remote spacecraft that do not have human crew members, though American presidents have raised the idea of sending humans back to the moon or further. -Reuters The images of children separated from their parents at the US border and being held in cage-like structures had caused distress worldwide. Now, an audio recording of the children by investigative agency ProPublica has raised widespread concern and backlash against the Trump administration. The Trump administration, in an effort to deter migrants from seeking asylum in the US, as admitted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has been forcefully separating children from their parents at the US-Mexico border. Reportedly, more than 2,700 children have been separated from their parents since April. These children are being held in warehouses in South Texas in a series of cages, which former first lady Laura Bush compared to the internment camps used for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Some are also being held in tents or box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities. Though media was initially denied access, controlled images have been released to the press recently. The images showed children being held in cage-like structures, sitting on steel benches and sleeping on beds laid out on concrete floors. A view of inside US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention facility shows children at Rio Grande Valley Centralized Processing Center in Rio Grande City, Texas, US | Reuters The audio recording released by ProPublica has given a heartbreaking perspective to the situation inside the warehouses. It captured the cries of 10 children between the ages of four and ten, who can be heard crying loudly, asking for their Mami and Papa. The ProPublica report translates a voice heard in Spanish thus: Well, we have an orchestra here, he jokes. Whats missing is a conductor. This, according to the report, is a Border Patrol agent making a joke of the situation. A six-year-old from El Salvador, according to ProPublica, rattles off the phone number of her aunt. Are you going to call my aunt so that when Im done eating, she can pick me up? she asks in Spanish. The policy has met with condemnation from many sides, including the government's usual allies. Conservative religious groups and many Republicans have come together to criticise the Trump administration. Democrats have called the act barbaric and demanded an end to the policy. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said after visiting an immigration detention centre in San Diego: Our message to Mr. Trump is, stop this inhumane, barbaric policy. Many have equated the government's zero tolerance policy to zero humanity. Four former first ladiesRosalynn Carter, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clintonhave condemned the policy. Trump and his officials are facing questions from human rights activists, children's advocates and immigrant rights activists. The American Academy of Pediatrics has said the practice of separating children from their parents can cause the kids irreparable harm. First Lady Melania Trump | Reuters Melania Trump, the current first lady, released a statement. Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform, Trump spokesperson Stephanie Grisham said. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. Meanwhile, Trump has blamed Democrats for the immigration laws and said that his administration is enforcing laws put in place by the Democrats. Many media houses in the US have ripped apart this claim. It was the Trump administration's choice to approach the matter of illegal immigrants as a criminal case instead of a civil case. If youre smuggling a child, then were going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you dont want your child separated, then dont bring them across the border illegally, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had said while announcing the zero tolerance policy on May 7. Administration officials have defended the tactic as necessary to secure the border and suggested it would act as a deterrent to illegal immigration. The announcement meant that immigrants entering the US illegally would be criminally charged. This applies to those seeking asylum as well. Meanwhile, the country's protocol prohibits detaining children with their parents as they are not to be charged with their parent's crime. The children are hence taken away from their parents and held in separate detention centres. The increasing number of children being ripped away from their parents is sickening, said Democratic Senator Michael Bennet. Yet the president and his administration continue to perpetuate falsehoods and blame others for their own cruelty. Despite widespread criticism and condemnation, Trump's administration has continued to stand by its hostile policy. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen defended the Trump administrations policy during a speech in New Orleans, saying, We will not apologise for the job we do, or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do. People participate in a protest against a recent US immigration policy of separating children from their families when they enter the United States as undocumented immigrants, outside the Tornillo Tranit Centre, in Tornillo, Texas | Reuters In an interview with Fox News, Attorney General Sessions cited passages from the Bible in an attempt to establish religious justification. Sessions cited a chapter in Romans while defending the Trump administration's policy of separating parents from their children at the border. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order, said Sessions, who is also a Sunday school teacher at the Ashland Place United Methodist Church in Mobile, Alabama. When the White House press secretary Sarah Huckebee Sanders was questioned about Sessions's statement, Sanders said she wasn't familiar with the comments. But she went on to say that "it is very Biblical to enforce the law". At the same press conference, journalist Brian Karem expressed what everyone was feeling in the room. Don't you have any empathy? he asked Sarah, a mother of two, who just stared at the floor silently. Trump, meanwhile, is using this issue to push something close to his heart. Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change! he tweeted a few days ago. Trump has been accused of using the children as leverage to force the Democrats to vote on two Republican immigration bills, drafted without inputs from Democrats. One would limit, but not entirely prohibit, family separations, fund Trumps wall and give legal protections to young immigrants, known as Dreamers, who were brought to the country illegally as children. Britain's House of Lords inflicted another defeat on the government on Tuesday over its flagship Brexit bill, sending it back to MPs and setting up a fresh showdown between Prime Minister Theresa May and her pro-European rebels. Unelected peers in the upper house voted by 354 to 235 to support a rebel amendment on the role parliament should play if the government fails to secure a deal with the European Union before Britain leaves the bloc in March 2019. "I want to ensure that parliament does have a meaningful vote and I don't want to see that left to chance," said Lord Hailsham, the member of May's Conservative Party who proposed the motion. The amendment to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill was drawn up in consultation with pro-European MPs in the lower House of Commons, who will have a chance to vote on it themselves on Wednesday. They had threatened to rebel on the same issue when they debated the bill last week, but held off following personal assurances from May that she would heed their concerns. However, her compromise amendment fell short of their expectations, and peers agreed to back an alternative so the MPs could vote again when the bill returns to them, in a process known as "ping-pong". May earlier warned that any attempt by parliament to take control of the Brexit negotiations would weaken her hand. "Of course we have been listening to concerns about the role of parliament," she told reporters. "But we need to make sure that parliament can't tie the government's hands in negotiation and can't overturn the will of the British people." Despite the stuttering progress in the talks with Brussels, both sides still hope to reach a deal in October. The government has promised lawmakers a vote on the final deal, but the issue at stake is what happens if they reject it. Pro-Europeans want to ensure there is some way of holding the government to account in what would be a crisis situation. The EU (Withdrawal) Bill would formally end Britain's membership of the bloc and transfer more than 40 years of European law on to the British statute books. May is on a tightrope as her Conservative minority government relies on the backing of 10 MPs from Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party for a slim majority in the 650-seat elected Commons chamber. Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general who heads up the pro-European faction, told BBC television that a future vote on a Brexit deal could see May tumble. "We could collapse the government, and I assure you I wake up at 2:00 am in a cold sweat thinking about the problems that we have put on our shoulders," he said. An added risk for the rebels is that if May does fall, it could open the door for an arch-Brexiteer to take over. May risked stirring the pot further on Monday by announcing new money for the state-funded National Health Service (NHS) based on a "Brexit dividend". She said part of the ?20 billion ($27 billion, 23 billion euros) injection would be funded by "the money we no longer spend on our annual membership subscription to the European Union". The promise to divert money from the EU to the NHS was a key tenet of the pro-Brexit campaign in the 2016 referendum, but highly controversial. Independent experts warn the figures do not add up, arguing the economy is already slowing as a result of Brexit, which will cost far more than membership fees. May admitted some of the money would be funded by taxation, risking provoking the Brexit-supporting right wing of her party, who favour reducing public spending. LONDON, June 18, 2018 Executives think platforms should do more to combat fake news, are increasingly sceptical of social media and blame brands for adverts placed alongside inappropriate content but they increasingly see news brands as a source of trusted content, according to a survey published today by Reuters Plus. The third annual Tomorrows News survey, based on a new survey of 1,587 global executives, reveals that 87% of respondents think Google and Facebook should do more to control fake news, while 81% believe that Google and Facebook should be held accountable for content. The survey commissioned by the branded content studio of the world's largest international multimedia news provider also finds that three out of four executives claim to have seen brands advertising alongside unsavoury or objectionable stories or videos, and 77% agree that advertising next to inappropriate content can damage the perception of a brand. Furthermore, brands are held responsible for where adverts are placed: 62% agree that brands have full control over where their advertising appears. 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 [email protected] | (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 once invincible Barkha Dutt has been speaking of efforts to silence her by stopping TV entrepreneurs from hiring her. People offer funeral prayers of veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari at Kreeri in Baramulla district of north Kashmir. Bukhari and his two PSOs were shot dead by gunmen soon after he boarded his car from his office in Press Enclave in Lal Chowk on Thursday. (Photo: PTI ) Shujaat Bukhari was among the most informed and least exultant Kashmiri journalists I have met. He let his incorrigible smile and straight reporting do the talking. He was shot dead on Thursday evening outside the Srinagar office of the Rising Kashmir newspaper, of which he was editor. There is predictable confusion about who may have killed him together with his two security guards. As is known to happen in the tense and fractious city that Srinagar has become, there will be more whispers than clear pointers to the crime. There was a time not too long ago when journalists from Delhi would visit Srinagar and put their arms around their brave and courageous Kashmiri colleagues. The last four years have seen an equaliser of sorts. The shooting of Gauri Lankesh by suspected Hindutva killers underscored an atmosphere of terror and insecurity that the more upright Indian journalists in particular have been feeling quite palpably. The once invincible Barkha Dutt has been speaking of efforts to silence her by stopping TV entrepreneurs from hiring her. In a way, the best journalists are now working on news portals because their supposedly mainstream newspapers and TV channels will not be allowed to hire them. Teesta Setalvad and her husband Javed Anand, who exposed perhaps the worst crimes of the Gujarat pogroms, are facing legal cases and jail threats. Rana Ayyub, a courageous young woman, very reluctantly shares the mental torture she suffers from unspeakable palpable threats for her work in exposing the high and mighty in the field of communal violence. Anchor Ravish Kumar has worries about his family, but refuses to stand down as perhaps the boldest anchor in India today. What is happening with the Pakistani media is so identical that it is tempting to believe that tormentors on both sides perhaps exchange notes. All these fine journalists standing their ground on both sides are people who can be considered the most self-assured holders of free opinions and sharers of information and knowledge. But, like Shujaat Bukhari and Gauri Lankesh, they are all extremely vulnerable to galloping intolerance. The main players in the troubled strife-torn Kashmir Valley are India and Pakistan. Both have vehemently condemned Bukharis murder. Which reminds me of some of the better-known mysteries of our times. There was a film called No One Killed Jessica about a lovely girl who was shot dead at a party in Delhi. It was probably based on the storyline from Ayodhya: no one demolished the Babri mosque! The Pakistani equivalent would be: no one killed Benazir Bhutto. Two or three images come to my mind as it scans the canvas of memories and possibilities for clues. The murder took place on the day the UN Human Rights commission brought out its first-ever report on the abuses in Kashmir on both sides of the border. The murder thus became the story rather than the damning rights report, which incidentally was strongly rejected by India. There are factors that point to one direction and then to the other. Bukharis brother is a minister in the Mehbooba Mufti government of which the BJP is an ally. This fact can create one kind of narrative. But Bukharis newspaper was highlighting reports that pointed to an opposite reality. Take the story of the rape and murder of an eight-year-old tribal Muslim girl in Jammu in January this year. Right-wing Hindus have actively rallied in support of the accused. A report in Bukharis paper on April 4 nailed the lie that she was killed by someone in a land feud. Strands of hair found in a temple where eight-year-old Asifa Bano was held captive before being strangulated after rape have matched with the victims (Asifa) hair on DNA analysis, Rising Kashmir reported in the first week of April. Official sources said that the crime branch, probing the rape-and-murder, had found hair strands from Devistan temple in Hiranagar after one of the accused revealed during interrogation that Asifa was held captive inside the temple. The crime site was searched and the hair strands were found and sent to forensic laboratory (FSL) New Delhi. The report confirmed that they were that of Asifa, the sources said. Whose side was Bukhari on, according to his report? Lets also read a report Bukhari wrote on May 25. Veteran journalist and peace activist Om Thanvi shared it as the last one from the Kashmiri journalist in his email account. The report raises the prospect of the stalled Saarc summit being revived in Islamabad with Indias participation. Everyone knows who would oppose the move. Bukhari began the report by critiquing PM Narendra Modi for not addressing the Kashmir issue politically during his May 20 visit to Srinagar. He is preparing the ground to see that the Saarc summit takes place and instead of rhetoric, he might prefer peace to be sold to the electorate. Relations with Nepal and Maldives are also indicating towards this thread. In order to get Pakistan on board for a successful Saarc, it is imperative to cool down tempers in and on Kashmir. In this backdrop next few months will be interesting to watch. Sadly, Shujaat Bukhari will not be around with his notebook to jot down his astute reading of a complex and forbidding reality. By arrangement with Dawn Wall Street analysts have given CGI Group a "Buy" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but CGI Group wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. AltaGas Ltd. operates as a diversified energy infrastructure company in North America. The company operates through two segments, Utilities and Midstream. The Utilities segment owns and operates regulated natural gas distribution utilities in Michigan, Alaska, the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia; and two regulated natural gas storage utilities in the United States serving approximately 1.7 million customers. This segment also provides interstate natural gas transportation and storage services. It serves homes and businesses. The Midstream segment engages in the natural gas gathering and processing; natural gas liquids (NGL) extraction and fractionation, transmission, and storage; and natural gas and NGL marketing activities. This segment owns approximately 1.5 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas capacity. The company also holds interest in a regulated pipeline in the Marcellus/Utica gas formation in the northeastern United States; and engages in LPG exports and distribution, domestic terminals, wellsite fluids and fuels, and trucking and liquids handling businesses. It serves residential, commercial, and industrial customers primarily in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. Additionally, the company operates two natural gas-fired plants with 577 MW of generating capacity in California and Colorado; and energy storage assets in Alberta, Canada, as well as nine states and the district of Columbia in the United States. AltaGas Ltd. was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada. Read More Bank of Montreal provides diversified financial services primarily in North America. The company's personal banking products and services include checking and savings accounts, credit cards, mortgages, and financial and investment advice services; and commercial banking products and services comprise business deposit accounts, commercial credit cards, business loans and commercial mortgages, cash management solutions, foreign exchange, specialized banking programs, treasury and payment solutions, and risk management products for small business and commercial banking customers. It also offers investment and wealth advisory services; digital investing services; financial services and solutions; and investment management, and trust and custody services to institutional, retail, and high net worth investors. In addition, the company provides life insurance, accident and sickness insurance, and annuity products; creditor and travel insurance to bank customers; and reinsurance solutions. Further, it offers client's debt and equity capital-raising services, as well as loan origination and syndication, balance sheet management, and treasury management; strategic advice on mergers and acquisitions, restructurings, and recapitalizations, as well as valuation and fairness opinions; and trade finance, risk mitigation, and other operating services. Additionally, the company provides research and access to markets for institutional, corporate, and retail clients; trading solutions that include debt, foreign exchange, interest rate, credit, equity, securitization and commodities; new product development and origination services, as well as risk management advice and services to hedge against fluctuations; and funding and liquidity management services to its clients. It operates through approximately 1,400 bank branches and 4,800 automated banking machines in Canada and the United States. The company was founded in 1817 and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. Read More Genworth Financial, Inc. is a financial services company, which engages in the provision of insurance, wealth management, investment and financial solutions. It operates through the following segments: U.S. Mortgage Insurance, Australia Mortgage Insurance, U.S. Life Insurance, and Runoff. The U.S. Mortgage Insurance segment offers mortgage insurance products predominantly insuring prime-based, individually underwritten residential mortgage loans. The Australia Mortgage Insurance segment offers flow mortgage insurance and selectively provides bulk mortgage insurance that aids in the sale of mortgages to the capital markets and helps lenders manage capital and risk. The U.S. Life Insurance segment offers long-term care insurance products as well as service traditional life insurance and fixed annuity products in the United States. The Runoff segment includes the results of non-strategic products which are no longer actively sold but continue to service its existing blocks of business. Its non-strategic products primarily include variable annuity, variable life insurance, institutional, corporate-owned life insurance and other accident and health insurance products. The company was fo Read More Magna International Inc. designs, engineers, and manufactures components, assemblies, systems, subsystems, and modules for original equipment manufacturers of vehicles and light trucks worldwide. The company operates through four segments: Body Exteriors & Structures, Power & Vision, Seating Systems, and Complete Vehicles. Its Body Exteriors & Structures segment provides body and chassis systems, as well as engineering and testing services; exterior systems, including fascia and trims, front end modules, front integration panels, liftgate modules, active aerodynamics, engineered glass, running boards, truck bed access products, and side doors; and roof systems, such as modular and textile folding roofs, and hard and soft tops. The company's Power & Vision segment offers dedicated hybrid, dual and e-clutch, and manual transmissions; engine drive plates and accessories; AWD/4WD products, rear drive modules, and hybrid and battery electric drive systems; transmission, engine, and driveline components; advanced driver assistance systems, camera systems, ultrasonic sensors, and electronic controllers; interior and exterior mirrors, actuators, door handles, overhead consoles, and camera monitoring systems; head, tail, and fog lamps; signal and other lighting products; and latching systems, door modules, window systems, power closure systems, hinges and wire forming, and handle assemblies. Its Seating Systems segment provides seat structures, mechanism and hardware solutions, and foam and trim products. The company's Complete Vehicles segment offers vehicle manufacturing and engineering services. It also designs, engineers, and manufactures tooling products. Magna International Inc. was founded in 1957 and is headquartered in Aurora, Canada. Read More The writer is based in South India for the past 40 years. He writes on India, China, Tibet and Indo-French relations. India should not fall back into a Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai mood, even if a reset of bilateral relations is necessary. India should not fall back into a Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai mood, even if a reset of bilateral relations is necessary. (Photo: PTI/File) On June 9, the Civil Aviation Administration of China and the Tibetan Autonomous Regions (TAR) government announced that Tibet will soon have three new airports. A communique said: Construction of three airports, all above the altitude of 3,900 metres, should begin in 2019. Xinhua, the Chinese official news agency, gave the rationale: Tourist travel will be more convenient and economic development in Tibets agricultural and pastoral areas will also be assisted. The announcement came during a conference on Civil Aviation System Supporting Tibet Airport Construction Development held in Lhasa a day earlier. The Chinese language press gave more information about the location of the three airports one will be located in Lhuntse in Lhoka (called Shannan by the Chinese) area, north of the Upper Subansiri and Tawang districts of Arunachal Pradesh; the second will be between Tingri and Lhatse counties of Shigatse City, north of Zangmu, the border post with Nepal; and the last in Purang near the trijunction Nepal-Tibet-India, north of Pithoragarh district of Uttarakhand (on the yatris route to Mount Kailash). While Tingri airport is near the Nepali border, the other two (Lhuntse and Purang) are at a short distance from the Indian border. Xinhua said that Capital Airport Holding Company will be the contractor of the Lhoka, while the Shanghai Airport Authority will be responsible for the airport in Shigatse. The West Airport Group will take care of Purang. It reported: The three companies are scheduled to transfer the airports to local operators after one or two years operation. The airports should be completed in 2021, by which time there will be eight airports in the TAR region (plus three close to the Indian border in Xinjiang Kashgar, Hotan and Yarkand). At present, the preparatory work for the three airports is underway. The preferred sites have been determined, and the construction of temporary weather stations at each site is completed, added the news agency. The three airports will be high-altitude airports; they will be operated by companies, including Air China, China Eastern Airlines or Sichuan Airlines, which are already involved in Tibet. Let us not forget an important element; by law, these new airports will be for dual use meaning they will have to be built to suit both the civilian and military standards. The Peoples Liberation Army may use them when required. The conference was a high-level affair. Apart from TARs party secretary Wu Yingjie, Chinas civil aviation administrations secretary Feng Zhenglin, TAR governor (who is also the director of the TAR Border Defence Committee) Che Dalha, deputy secretaries Ding Yexian and Zhuang Yan and the commander of the Tibet Military District Lt. Gen. Xu Yong attended it. Three other PLA officers were also on the dais. The level of the participants shows the importance of these three new airports for Beijing, particularly after the post-Doklam reset of bilateral relations with India. One has to understand Chinese President Xi Jinpings plans for Tibet. The core leader had declared: Govern the nation by governing the borders; govern the borders by first stabilising Tibet; ensure social harmony and stability in Tibet and strengthen the development of border regions. For a few months, the authorities in Tibet have started implementing the boss theory while the partys propagandawing is doing its best to entice the local Tibetan population to side with it. This serious development is unfortunately largely being ignored in India. A new formula is mentioned in every speech of the local satraps the inhabitants of Chinas borders (with India) should be the protectors of the sacred homeland and the builders of happy homes. It has taken a concrete shape with the mushrooming of new model villages and towns on the Tibetan side of the Indian border, mainly north of Arunachal Pradesh, officially linked with poverty alleviation and the defence of the borders. The development of Chinas borders with India is indeed going on in full swing; the construction of three new airports has to be seen in this context. Several senior Communist leaders have visited the new villages, either north of Kibithu in the Lohit valley; in Metok, north of Upper Siang district; in Yume (also written Yumai), north of Takshing in Upper Subansari or in Lepo, Marmang and Tsona, north of Khenzimane and Tawang. The Lhuntse airport will serve the Tsona and Yume areas. Mr Wu recently gave an interview to the Peoples Daily on the happenings in the border areas; he spoke of the significance of implementing the new strategy of rejuvenating villages under the banner of the protectors of sacred homeland and the builders of happy homes. The new scheme started soon after the conclusion of the 19th party congress, when Mr Xi sent a reply to two young Tibetan herders who had written to him introducing their village, Yume. According to Xinhua, Mr Xi encouraged a herding family in Lhuntse County to set down roots in the border area, safeguard Chinese territory and develop their hometown. He acknowledged the familys efforts to safeguard Chinas territory, and thanked them for the loyalty and contributions they have made in the border area. Without the peace in the territory, there will be no peaceful lives for the millions of families, he wrote. The two Tibetan girls, Choekar and Yangzom, had told the CCP secretary-general about their experiences in safeguarding the border area and the development of their township over the years. The girls village, Yume, is located in Lhuntse county, not far from the remote Indian village of Takshing, which incidentally got its first motorable road earlier this month. Mr Xi further hoped that the girls family could motivate more herders to set down roots in the border area like kalsang flowers, blooming in hard conditions. China is ready to invest 110 million yuan in the Yume Well-Off Rural Construction Project. To start with, 56 sets of light-steel prefabricated residential houses are being built, linked by two new municipal roads, a central park and six squares. Electricity and water have already reached the border village. The rationale of the these post-Doklam measures is to consolidate the border and to promote the deep integration of the military and the people. Tourism and cultural industries remain the pillars of the scheme; it is supposed to help the population to get rid of poverty through participation in tourism while promoting ethnic exchanges with Han tourists. Yume is the model for the entire scheme. Another pet project of Mr Xi is the Military-Civilian Integration (or Fusion); this too applies to the border. Consider Zhayul County located north of Anjaw district of Arunachal Pradesh in the Lohit valley. According to China Tibet News, the villages of the county have started implementing the double-support model city, which translates into full military and civilian integration. India should not fall back into a Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai mood, even if a reset of bilateral relations is necessary. New Delhi should realise that Beijing is working hard to prepare itself for a new Doklam if such an eventuality arises anywhere along the 4,000-km-long border. It is definitely not the time for complacency. Albany The basic facts of the lives of Wayne Davis, 90, and Guenther Langner, 91, would suggest that the pair temporary roommates in a rehab facility were on opposite sides of one conflict 70 years ago, and today they're on opposite sides of another. Davis, who grew up in Otsego County, joined the U.S. Army for World War II and voted for Donald Trump, while Langner served in the military in his native Germany at the end of the war and cast his 2016 vote for Hillary Clinton. But their individual stories, intricate in nuance and rich in accomplishment, reveal much in common. For starters, both worked for IBM in the Hudson Valley. Davis was there in the early 1950s, where he witnessed the earliest models of IBM's mainframe computer, the size of half a room, and later sold typewriters for the company in the Midwest before spending decades as an attorney, including a stint in the state Attorney General's office. After the war, Langner earned a doctorate in theoretical physics and in 1967 was invited to come to America work for IBM. The company, as he said in his German-accented English, was part of the effort that was trying "to make true the promise of (President) Kennedy to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade." By the time he left more than 25 years later, he had been granted, solo or with partners, 14 patents for his work with electron beams and computer chips, among other pursuits. Their paths never crossed until 50 years later, when, single after spousal death or divorce, they were both residents of Beltrone Living Center, a senior residence in Colonie. "I don't think I knew him there," said Davis. "We did. His memory has some holes," said Langner. "It's from the stroke." The stroke brought Davis to Hudson Park Rehabilitation and Nursing Center 11 months ago. He's eager to leave and trying to figure out whether he can go back to Beltrone or, if not, to somewhere else. He's been discussing this with Langner, who has shared his room for the past two and a half weeks. Hudson Park was Langner's next stop after the hospital, where he landed after an infection got out of control. (He also has advanced prostate cancer.) He believes he could be discharged by the end of this week. "I've had 28 roommates since I got here," said Davis. "He's in the top three. Believe me, you don't want to hear about the bottom three." Both were still driving before their respective medical crises. Both want to get back behind the wheel, but Davis grumbles that Hudson Park staff won't let him have his keys, and Langner allows that he may not yet be up to the task. "I probably should take a driver's course first," he said. They've found much to talk about. They compare insurance and retirement savings, for instance. Langner has both in abundance: "IBM has been very generous." Davis does not, as a result of only short service in a senior state job followed by years and years in private law practice with cases more rewarding as noble pursuits than as wallet-fillers. One of Langner's daughters, a psychiatrist at the local VA hospital, visits him every day. There are five grandchildren, including one who's a French teacher. Davis occasionally sees one of his daughters, who lives locally in a group home for people with developmental disabilities, but his other two offspring live out of state, he said, and communication is occasional, visits less so. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. This they have in common: What a mess is America today. "I voted for that guy," Davis said of Trump, shaking his head, "but if I could take it back 100 times, I would." Langner became an American citizen in 1974 as part of the requirements of the government security clearance needed for his IBM work. He said, shaking his head even more glumly than Davis had, "I did vote for Hillary, but the Democrats have made so many big mistakes. I don't know who there will be to vote for the next time, but it's really important!" Davis will be sad to see his latest roommate go. "He's lucky he gets to leave," he said, lamenting the uncertainty of his own situation. He said, "When you get to be our age, all of your friends are dead, your family is spread out, and everybody else is interested in the little things that you don't care about at all. It's nice just to have somebody to talk to who has half a brain." "This," said Langner, "this is true." sbarnes@timesunion.com 518-454-5489 blog.timesunion.com/tablehopping @Tablehopping facebook.com/SteveBarnesFoodCritic Colonie Health and insurance records for more than 270,000 people from the Capital Region and elsewhere in the state were potentially stolen after computer hackers got into a healthcare billing claims company this spring. The break-in at Med Associates, which has been in business since 1988, is the fourth-largest records breach in the state since federal law required public disclosure of such attacks starting in 2010. It was also the second major Capital Region break-in this year, after records for more than 135,000 patients were compromised in March at the surgical center for St. Peter's Hospital. On March 22, Med Associates officials noticed "unusual activity" at a computer workstation at the company's Airport Park offices, said company President Catherine Alvey on Tuesday. The company provides claims services for more than 70 health care providers. An investigation later found an "unauthorized party accessed the workstation, and through that, may have had access to certain personal and protected information." That included patient names, addresses, date of birth, and insurance information including diagnosis and procedure codes. Last week, the company mailed out letters to people whose records may have been compromised, warning them to watch for potential identity theft or financial fraud. Nearly all the letters went to people in the Capital Region and elsewhere in the state, while about 1,700 notices went to people in Massachusetts, Vermont and Florida. Alvey said the "vast majority" of the potentially-compromised records did not include individual Social Security numbers. "Many of the calls we have received are from patients wanting to ensure that the notice we have provided is not part of a phishing scam and verify that it is O.K. to call the phone number provided," she said. "Our goal is to notify patients of the facts, provide them with accurate information and direct them to available resources." Med Associates is providing one year's free service at a credit monitoring agency in response to the break-in. Alvey said the breach was reported June 14 to the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as is required under a 2009 federal law. Since the first such reports were filed starting in early 2010, there have more than 16.8 million reported cases of compromised medical records in the state, according to figures from HHS. There were 110 reported breach cases from 2010 to 2016. Since 2016, there have been another 21 reported break-ins, including the largest ever in August 2016, when more than 3.4 million records were potentially compromised at Albany-based Newkirk Products. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Newkirk issues identification cards for health insurance plans including Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, HealthNow New York Inc., BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York, BlueShield of Northeastern New York, and Capital District Physicians' Health Plan, Inc. (CDPHP). Other recent medical records breaches in the Capital Region included data for some 4,600 patients at Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Albany in October 2017, and records of about 950 patients of MVP Health Care Inc. in April 2017, according to online HHS records. In August 2016, hackers compromised records for nearly 22,000 patients at the state Office of Mental Health. That data included names, addresses, dates of birth, telephone numbers, email addresses, and, in some cases, Social Security numbers, driver's license or state identification numbers, and coded health-related information from interviews or questionnaires. Health companies have been viewed in recent years as lagging in computer security compared to financial institutions and retail operations. In 2014, the FBI issued a warning to health companies that stronger computer security would be needed to deter hacking. In 2015, Anthem, the nation's second-largest health insurance company, was hit by hackers who broke into a database storing information on 80 million people that included Social Security numbers. Last fall, the company reached a class-action settlement with its customers that provided for a $115 million fund to cover potential losses or the cost of enhanced credit protection services to protect against potential identity theft. ALBANY Shootings on Saturday are not related to last week's killing of Equan Fallen, the 20-year-old city man who died after he was shot outside his home, Acting Police Chief Robert Sears said. No arrests have been made in Fallen's homicide. "The block was full that day," Sears said. "There are several people who saw something." Sears and Mayor Kathy Sheehan will meet with reporters Tuesday afternoon to discuss the recent spate of violence in the city. The city has seen five homicides in the first six months of 2018, with three of those five killings happening in the first three weeks of June. Albany police are investigating possible links between several of the shootings that have occurred over the last week. Two people were wounded in shootings on Saturday and there were several other incidents of shots fired where no one was hit. The gunfire came days after 20-year-old Equan Fallen was shot dead in front of his home on Livingston Avenue. Sears said Monday at this point police do not believe the Saturday shootings are connected with Fallens death but do believe several incidents where shots were fired and no one was injured may be connected. Sears declined to say if police knew the motive behind the shooting that killed Fallen or if he was the intended target. Sears said the department is working to get more people to cooperate in that shooting. Sears said the city typically sees one or two spikes in violence or shootings each year. This doesnt happen all the time, he said. The city has registered 18 shootings and five homicides through the first six months of the year. Anthony Malloy, a 35-year-old Albany man, was gunned down on Jan. 5 at the corner of First and Quail streets. Damien L. Sanders, a 38-year-old Albany man, was beaten and then shot multiple times on April 23 in front of 150 Clinton St. Neither man's killer has been caught. On June 3, Nahjayyah Daise, a 21-year-old Albany woman, was shot in the head by her ex-boyfriend, who then ran over her body on Erie Boulevard. The man 22-year-old Larnell Kennedy of Albany ran from the scene and was struck and killed by a car on Interstate-90 minutes later. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. On June 7, four men were stabbed during a fight on the corner of Lark Street and Madison Avenue. One of the victims Elijah Smith, a 22-year-old Albany man died from his injuries ten days later. Police charged Joseph Sanchez, 25, of Albany, in all four stabbings. At least four people have been injured in unsolved shootings and stabbings this month as well. On June 3, a 20-year-old man was shot in the foot near Garfield Place and Colby Street. On June 15, 37-year-old man was stabbed in the torso near the corner of Henry Johnson Boulevard and Sheridan Avenue. On June 16, 32-year-old man's head was grazed by a bullet on Clinton Avenue, between S. Swan Street and Henry Johnson Boulevard. Later that day, a 21-year-old man was shot in the arm on Second Avenue near Grandview Terrace. Police are also investigating reports of shots fired on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Sherman Street on June 13. No victims were found at the scene or at area hospitals, and a police spokesman said a substance was found on the sidewalk nearby that would be tested for blood. Anyone with information on any of these crimes is asked to call Albany detectives at 518-462-8039 or submit an anonymous tip to Capital Region Crime Stoppers at capitalregioncrimestoppers.com. Anonymous tips can also be called in to 1-(833)-ALB-TIPS or submitted via the free app. Apple has been fined after a regulator accused it of using a software update to disable iPhones with cracked screens fixed by third parties. An Australian court fined U.S. electronics giant Apple Inc A$9 million ($6.7 million) on Tuesday after a regulator accused it of using a software update to disable iPhones which had cracked screens fixed by third parties. The Australian Competitor and Consumer Commission (ACCC) sued the worlds biggest company by market value for bricking - or using a software update to disable - hundreds of smartphones and tablet devices, then refusing to unlock them if the devices had been serviced by non-Apple repairers. On Tuesday the Australian Federal Court found in the regulators favor, saying Apple had breached the countrys consumer law by telling some 275 customers they were not eligible for a remedy if their device had been repaired by a third party. The mere fact that an iPhone or iPad had been repaired by someone other than Apple did not, and could not, result in the consumer guarantees ceasing to apply, ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court said in a statement. Global companies must ensure their returns policies are compliant with the Australian Consumer Law, or they will face ACCC action, Court said. An Apple spokeswoman said in an email the company had very productive conversations with the ACCC about this without commenting further on the court finding. The ACCC said after it told Apple about its investigation, the U.S. company sought to compensate customers whose devices were made inoperable by the software update, known as error 53. So far, Apple had contacted about 5,000 customers, the ACCC said. Apple has also offered to improve staff training, information about warranties and consumer law on its website, and processes to ensure compliance, the ACCC said. (Source) ALBANY As New York prepares to expand its medical marijuana program to include people who are prescribed opioids, advocates are urging the state to simultaneously increase the number of dispensing sites. The expansion is a big deal to patient advocates, who have criticized the state's program as one of the most restrictive in the nation. While state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said Monday he is unsure how many more individuals would be made eligible for the program as a result of the change, it is sure to be many, as prescription opioids like hydrocodone, oxycodone and morphine remain the most common treatment for pain in America. "This means anyone who is taking prescription opioids can now use medical marijuana under our program, and our goal is for them to eventually get to a point where they can hopefully come off the opioids altogether," he said. As the nation reckons with an opioid epidemic, caused early on by a glut of prescription painkillers and fueled in recent years by a surge in illicit heroin and fentanyl use, medical marijuana has emerged as a safe and effective alternative for patients who legitimately need relief for their pain. Not only is marijuana less addictive than opioids, but no one has ever died from an overdose. A growing body of research suggests it can even cut down on opioid use and opioid-related overdose deaths. States with medical cannabis programs have been found to have lower rates of opioid overdose deaths, in some cases by as much as 25 percent, Zucker said. Other studies have found that states with medical marijuana laws have noted a 5.88 percent lower rate of opioid prescribing. But if New York really wants to combat its opioid epidemic by increasing medical marijuana use, advocates say, it needs to start adding more medical marijuana dispensaries. "Expanding the program to serve opioid users is an amazing thing, and it's going to save lives," said Fred Polsinelli, founder and CEO of Polsinelli Public Affairs, which represents several clients in the medical cannabis industry. "The problem is, it doesn't mean much because New York has practically no dispensaries. It has none in Brooklyn, none in Staten Island. When patients have to drive an hour away to get this medicine and pass 30 CVS's along the way that's a problem." There are currently 21 sites statewide where medical marijuana patients can pick up their medicine, including five in the Capital Region. Together they serve nearly 60,000 patients. More sites are expected to open soon. Last summer, the state Health Department increased the number of medical marijuana companies that are allowed to operate in New York from five to 10. Since each company is allowed to open one grow facility and four dispensaries, a maximum of 40 dispensaries are allowed under state law. A bill currently making its way through the state Senate would double the number of dispensaries each medical marijuana company is allowed to operate, bringing the total number of dispensaries statewide to 80. Advocates say that's not nearly enough. Polsinello uses Florida, which has a comparable population to New York and allows for up to 425 medical marijuana dispensaries, as an example. "It's just not enough, especially when you compare them to the number of opioid dispensaries statewide, which is pretty much all of your CVS's and Rite Aids," he said. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Three of the 10 companies operating in New York currently offer home delivery a way of easing access to patients who may not have easy transportation or who live far from the nearest dispensary. Vireo Health of New York, which operates a grow facility in Fulton County and has a dispensary in Albany, offers virtual consultations with its pharmacists as well as free home delivery for those patients who can't make it out to a dispensary. "Many of our patients have to travel hours to make it to our Binghamton dispensary, but it's hard to put a dispensary in a rural location. It just doesn't always make business sense," said Dr. Stephen Dahmer, chief medical officer at Vireo. "So that's where offering home delivery might make a big difference." Another way to ease the travel burden, Dahmer said, would be to increase the amount of medical marijuana a patient is allowed to take home on each visit. Patients are currently limited to a 30-day supply under state law. "We feel strongly about anything that's going to improve accessibility to this medicine for our patients," he said. The biggest hurdle to overcome, of course, is outside the state's control. Because marijuana remains illegal under federal law, insurance companies typically won't cover it meaning it's out of reach for anyone who can't afford to pay for it out of pocket. "We think the evidence supports medical cannabis over opioids when it comes to treating pain," Dahmer said. "So the fact that it costs just $6 after insurance for a bottle of opioids we feel is an unfair advantage." BALLSTON SPA After a nod to crying family and friends, former Stillwater mayor Rick W. Nelson was put in handcuffs and led away to serve 5 to 15 years in state prison for possession of child pornography. Saratoga County Judge James Murphy III imposed the agreed upon sentence on Tuesday telling Nelson that downloading and looking a child pornography videos is "not a victimless crime." "The images were manufactured and produced because real victims were being abused," Murphy told Nelson. "That is the basis the sentence comes." In April, Nelson pleaded guilty to five felony counts of child pornography possession in return for a sentence. Due to a change in the law, Nelson had to plead guilty to the five counts again on Tuesday. He admitted to knowingly having and accessing images of children less than 16 years of age engaged in sexual conduct in on various dates in August 2017. The 63-year-old told Judge Murphy that he didn't realize that his "addiction hurt anyone." He also apologized to his wife, his son and friends, saying "Sorry is just not enough." Nelson was accompanied to court by his wife and friends who gathered, holding hands in a prayer circle before entering the court. Well-aware of his fate, Nelson carried with him a bag of prescription drugs. His attorney, John McMahon, said that this case has been difficult because he "has known the good that (Nelson) has done." "Once his secret was discovered, he got the support and help from professionals for his sex addiction," McMahon said. "He even offered to be a guinea pig with psychologists who are actively studying the addiction. He has been sincere and helpful. Now he is facing close to a death sentence even with the minimum time served." Nelson was arrested last year after an investigation by a State Police Computer Crime Unit found a Stillwater IP address was being used to download child pornography, police said. The investigation led to a search of Nelson's home and his arrest, troopers said. Nelson's arrest marked at least the fifth time in the last 42 years that the former school bus driver has been accused of victimizing children or teenagers. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Nelson, a Republican who was a Democrat in the 1990s, faced three separate sex crime cases between 1975 and 1986 with one of the latter cases including allegations of rape and sodomy. And in 1982, the future mayor was accused of inappropriate behavior toward a 5-year-old on the school bus. Nelson was elected mayor of the village in early 2015, defeating a 23-year incumbent for the right to lead the village of about 1,700 inhabitants on the Hudson River. Nelson's son, Patrick, is running for Congress's 21st district as a Democrat. In April, he said he condemns his father's actions. LAKE PLACID Dylan Ratigan's audience is new, but his message is not. For almost a decade, the 46-year-old Lake Placid Democrat has been saying the country's political system is broken and failing ordinary Americans. Now he's spreading that message across the Adirondacks, as he campaigns for the Democratic nomination in the 21st Congressional District, which has been represented since 2015 by Republican Elise Stefanik. The seed for his candidacy, which is largely focused on independent redistricting and tough campaign finance laws, was planted during the financial crisis in 2008, which prompted him to walk away from a career in business reporting. Ratigan said the government's response to the collapse on Wall Street was a wakeup call for him, as he felt that homeowners were taking the fall for the mistakes of big banks. Informed by that experience, Ratigan became a host for MSNBC, where he pushed for political reforms. "It was the only outlet that had direct access to everyone in the government," he said. Ratigan is best remembered from his time with MSNBC for a 2011 diatribe in response to a bipartisan deal on the federal budget and debt ceiling, which he felt was recklessly negotiated, ignored the country's growing debt and avoided any hard choices. "I've been coming on [television] for three years doing this and the fact of the matter is there is refusal, on both the Democratic and the Republican side of the aisle, to acknowledge the mathematical problem, which is that the United State of America is being extracted," Ratigan shouted during the roundtable segment. "It's being extracted through banking, it's being extracted through trade, and it's being extracted through taxation. And there's not a single politician that has stepped forward ... to deal with this." The rant became a viral sensation and helped Ratigan launch a national organization advocating for campaign finance reform and gave him a platform for a book on political corruption. His ability to grab the spotlight is one of the reasons he gained the support of labor activist Tanya Boone, who dropped her own candidacy for the Democratic nomination in the district after Ratigan joined the race in February. "He has a big mouth and I think he can use that to benefit people in our area," she said. Boone expects that Ratigan's national profile will help increase the visibility of the race, which is regarded as a steep climb for any Democrat. Despite his oversized personality, Boone argued that Ratigan is connecting with voters in the district. "When people get to know him ... they realize he is one of us," she said. His campaign has also been resonating with labor organizations, which have gravitated toward him since Boone dropped out of the race. Their support could be critical in the crowded five-person Democratic primary, as union members traditionally make up a disproportionate share of the electorate, especially in low-turnout primaries. Boone said the labor leaders were drawn to Ratigan because he understands the challenge of creating jobs in the region and is focused on the infrastructure investments that could jump start their economy. Ratigan, who grew up in Saranac Lake and went to college in Schenectady, moved back to the area in 2012. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. While blaming both parties for the problems in Washington D.C., Ratigan said he registered with the Democratic party in 2005. "I'm a Democrat for the simple reason that it is the only political party, of the two that are available, that ultimately aspires to equality for all people," he said at a recent candidate forum. His message of reform, though, is one that he believes will cross party lines and help him build a large enough coalition to beat Stefanik in November. The idea that people are fed up with the status quo is one of the reasons why he believes President Donald Trump was able to garner support, including in the 21st Congressional District. "It's a referendum on the moment in time," he said. And even though he is a Democrat, Boone argued that Ratigan is very "independent" and not beholden to the party. Ratigan claims this is in sharp contrast to Stefanik, who he has described as a "party asset" and "a tool of the establishment." If elected, he wants to create a system that would help voters measure the work that he does in the district. The work that would be measured includes jobs created, access to broadband, access to health care and revenue from agriculture. Ratigan said the lack of accountability has contributed to politicians constantly getting re-elected. "We have a federal government where there is no measurement of anything," he said. David.Lombardo@timesunion.com 518.454.5427 - @Poozer87 Colonie Denver-based Frontier Airlines will begin offering seasonal service from Albany to Denver in September and to Orlando in October, officials at Albany International Airport announced Tuesday. Two flights a week will be offered to Denver, operating on Mondays and Fridays, with three flights, operating on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, offered to Orlando. Frontier operates a hub at Denver with a wide range of connecting flights available to other western domestic destinations and to Mexico City. From Orlando, passengers can connect to Frontier flights to San Juan. Introductory fares beginning at $44 one way are being offered at flyfrontier.com. Seth Neuschwander, the carrier's director, planning and revenue analysis, said that if the market responds to the new service, the airline will add flights. Travel agents welcomed news of the additional service. "I always welcome more service because it'll keep fares down," said Jean Gagnon, who manages Plaza Travel in Latham. "I hope they do well." Frontier flies twin-engine, single-aisle Airbus aircraft, and will use A320s in a one-class seating configuration, with extra legroom available in the front three or four rows and in the exit rows. The carrier will compete with both Southwest and JetBlue on the Orlando route, and with Southwest on the Denver route. With its limited service and low prices, Frontier likely will appeal to leisure travelers. Southwest and JetBlue both offer daily flights from Albany, likely giving them an edge with business travelers whose plans may change at the last minute. "Our business model is also very friendly for small business," said Neuschwander, where the traveler might be paying the fare out of his own pocket. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. One challenge for carriers with limited service: The lack of an interline agreement where another carrier flying to the same destination will honor your ticket. Frontier on July 2 will begin flying between Syracuse and both Denver and Raleigh/Durham, offering two round trips a week to each destination. Those flights will operate on Mondays and Fridays. It will add Orlando on Aug. 12, with two weekly round-trips, on Wednesday and Saturday, and Chicago O'Hare on Aug. 15, with three weekly round-trips, on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. In Colonie, local officials were pleased with the new service. Capital Region Chamber CEO Mark Eagan called on local residents to support the flights so that Frontier will add more. "We hope over time Frontier will (also) be flying to other destinations," Eagan said. NORWALK With summer weather and almost no air conditioning at Roton Middle School, seventh-grader Gracie Blackwell recently wore an outfit she and her mom thought was appropriate: a loose spaghetti strap tank top and shorts. However, the administrator who dress-coded her didnt asking her to cover up her shoulders so they wouldnt distract her classmates. While the school dress code prohibits spaghetti strap tank tops and off-shoulder T-shirts for this reason, Blackwell feels it is discriminative toward females. I think we should be allowed to show our shoulders and if a guy makes a complaint about how its affecting their education, they can just not look if its really distracting them that much, Blackwell said. I think in a way its a little insulting to boys to say that they cant concentrate because of what girls are wearing, her mom Pam added. Blackwell hopes to create change in the school dress code through a petition, as a friend did when she petitioned West Middle Schools dress code earlier his year, she said. Blackwell made the petition Friday and even sent it Mayor Harry Rilling, who responded and then forwarded it to Superintendent of Schools Steven Adamowski and Board of Edu cation Chairman Mike Barbis (who also responded). As of Friday, more than 200 people signed the petition, including seventh-grader Max Anderson. He said he knows a lot of girls whove been dress-coded and only one male friend who was because he was wearing a shirt that promoted alcohol. Anderson has never been dress-coded himself. I signed it because I felt that the dress code is unfair and unreasonable at times and can be very harsh, Anderson said. The dress code is more focused on girls than boys. Rotons dress code follows the districtwide policy established by the Board of Education in 1985 and was last updated in 1998, according to the district website. In the 27 years that hes been principal, Joe Vellucci said he hasnt come across too many issues regarding the school dress code and was surprised by the petition, as well as the fact that he wasnt approached about the topic. He said he welcomes discussion on the school dress code and will bring it up at the July meeting of the school governance council, which handles decisions on student attire, per Board of Education policy. He noted his open door policy for staff and students, and mentioned the school sends out reminder emails about dress code once the weather begins to warm up. One of the main reasons at Roton that we send out reminder about the dress code is mainly because we want to promote a type of environment that is really positive, Vellucci said. Meaning, we really want to have more like business-like, if you will. We dont want kids to really dress like theyre going to the beach. Vellucci seemed to think the policy is sufficient as it is, but said he is happy to take a look at it again with the school governance council. Like Norwalks dress code, Rotons requires that a students overall appearance falls within neat grooming, cleanliness and appropriate dress so as to neither distract other students or teachers, disrupt the education process, or pose a health or safety threat to anyone. This includes clothing that are unclean, torn and/or promotes or references drugs, alcohol, tobacco and offensive, defamatory signs, symbols or words toward a person, group or the school. The policy also states that restrictions on freedom of student dress may be applied if the attire is deemed unsafe either for the student or those around the student, disruptive to school operations and the education process in general, and/or is contrary to law. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Dan Barrett, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, said its not uncommon for students to debate the application and validity of school dress codes. Every now and then, the issue will be raised in the context of school, prom and graduation photos generally for two reasons, he said. The first, that I dont think the Norwalk student is raising, is the freedom of speech problem. Where if you read the policy and it says students have to wear appropriate clothing or clothing thats in good taste, thats a problem because the word appropriate doesnt have a legal definition, Blackwell said. The Norwalk policy has some of it in it but it seems to me that the student raising is the gender equity problem, which is the second reason. Based on Blackwells petiton and Norwalks dress code policy, Barrett recommended that the Norwalk policy be more specific, since it is in short in length and can leave room for different interpretations and therefore inconsistent application. He also emphasized the importance of making the dress code equal and equitable so that it does not place more burden on women than men. I think it probably starts with thinking about any dress code element thats based on the idea that boys are not to be provoked should be reconsidered and thought about very hard, Barrett. Any element of a dress code or a behavioral code that puts the burden on women, to modulate their behavior based on societal expectations on how men will react, ought to be looked at with a very critical eye. The link to the petition is https://www.change.org/p/roton-middle-school-dress-code. skim@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2568; @stephaniehnkim Two New York City men are facing multiple felonies after State Police say they found over 328 grams of cocaine in their car on the Thruway near New Paltz. State Police stopped a vehicle at around 2:20 a.m. on Sunday. During the stop troopers searched the car and found the drugs, according to a news release. The two men in the car, Santo E. Martinez, 56, and Carlos C. Nunez, 28, were charged with two felony counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance. ALBANY Motorists who ignore those Stop signs on school buses that are picking up or dropping off children may get some unexpected traffic tickets if a bill allowing cameras is passed in the Legislature. The measure would allow school districts to mount cameras near the stop arms that are lowered when a school bus stops for embarking or disembarking students. The devices, currently used in about a dozen states, would record the license plates of cars that ignore the Stop warnings and illegally drive past the buses. Cameras also could be mounted on the curb side to record motorists who pass on the inside including breakdown lanes or even sidewalks -- which happens more than people may realize. The measure passed in the state Senate on Tuesday and was working its way through the Assembly. Id like to think we got the message through, said Peter Manella, executive director of the New York State Association for Pupil Transportation. His group has been pushing the measure for several years but the legislation moved forward on a number of fronts recently. Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed the measure in his budget legislation although it wasnt in the final spending plan. Most (school) districts seem very much in support of this, said Diana Abdella, spokeswoman for Syracuse Democratic Assemblyman William Magnarelli who is sponsoring one of the bills. GOP Sen. Catharine Young, from Olean, sponsored the Senate bill. Despite the $250 fine, a surprising number of people each day ignore the blinking lights and Stop signs and drive past stopped school buses, noted Manella. Bus drivers see it at least once a day, he said. And an enforcement push one day last year in New York City led to 900 tickets on that day alone. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. If approved, school districts that choose to participate could get the cameras from one of several vendors such as Bus Patrol, Gatekeeper, or Fortress Mobile. The companies review and screen the pictures and would forward apparent violations on to local police. It would be up to the police agency in question to agree that a motorist made an illegal pass that warrants a fine. Based on estimates of violations and the $250 fine, the cameras could generate $4 million in fine revenue per year. Manella said illegal bus passings led to fatalities in 2004 and 2006. But they get reports of up to two dozen students each year who are hit or grazed by passing cars. More for you Getting There: Crack down on passing school buses rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RicKarlinTU ALBANY Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the state will challenge the federal government's zero-tolerance policy that he said has led to the "inhumane" separation of families and the detention of children at the United States-Mexico border. The governor, in a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, said there are now at least 70 children staying in 10 federal shelters across the state who were removed from their parents following arrests by immigration officials. Cuomo said the children were taken into custody along the southern U.S. border with Mexico and are being held in privately-run shelters in New York that contract with the the federal government. He did not note that migrant children are also taken into custody and separated from their parents when similar arrests take place along New York's border with Canada. A growing number of undocumented children are being detained in facilities across the nation because of the Trump administration's recent implementation of a "zero-tolerance" policy for prosecuting illegal entries into the country. In prior administrations, families who appeared with children at the border were processed and released with a date to appear in court, and critics of that policy said they often would disappear and not return for mandated court appearances. The state's Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, the Department of Health, and the Office of Children and Family Services have been ordered by the governor to initiate legal action against the federal policy. They said the litigation would be done to protect the health and well-being of children held in New York. "The Trump Administration's policy to tear apart families is a moral failing and a human tragedy," Cuomo said. "We will not tolerate the constitutional rights of children and their parents being violated by our federal government. New York will act and file suit to end this callous and deliberate attack on immigrant communities, and end this heartless policy once and for all." The state will sue the federal government on three grounds, Cuomo said, alleging that separating parents from their children violates the constitutional rights of both the parents and their children. He said parental rights are a fundamental right that applies to non-citizens in the United States. Cuomo said the Trump administration's treatment of families at the border also violates the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, which sets national standards for the treatment of children in immigration detention and prioritizes family unity. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Finally, the Supreme Court has expressed openness to the idea that it "may someday be presented with a situation in which the conduct of law enforcement agents is so outrageous that due-process principles would absolutely bar the government from invoking judicial processes to obtain a conviction," Cuomo said. "And clearly that day has come," he continued. "We've had a number of experiences with ICE in this state where I believe they have been turned into a political police apparatus." The governor noted the state has tried to offer health services and mental health services to the 70 children in federal custody, but he said they have been prevented from accessing the services. "Why the federal government would want to be in a position to stop a state from offering mental health services, support services, for young children suffering trauma just adds further insult to further injury," Cuomo said. Cuomo has also written an open letter to Vice President Mike Pence condemning the "zero-tolerance" policy and urging the federal government to end the mistreatment of immigrant families. Washington Undaunted and unapologetic, President Donald Trump defended his administration's border protection policies Monday in the face of rising national outrage over the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. Tough action is needed to fight illegal immigration, he declared and the U.S. "will not be a migrant camp" on his watch. Besides, the Democrats are to blame, not him, Trump insisted as images of children held in fenced cages fueled a growing chorus of condemnation from both political parties, four former first ladies and national evangelical leaders. The children are being held separately from parents who have been arrested under the administration's "zero-tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings. "I say it's very strongly the Democrats' fault," Trump said Monday, citing more lenient policies that had not charged all migrants who had crossed illegally. Republican lawmakers are growing ever more concerned about negative effects on their re-election campaigns this fall, and Trump was to travel to Capitol Hill Tuesday for a strategy session on possible legislation. Underscoring the sensitivity of the family separation issue, language curbing the taking of immigrant children from parents held in custody will be added to the House's conservative immigration bill, one House GOP aide said Monday. A similar provision is already in a compromise GOP immigration measure between party conservatives and moderates, with the House expected to vote on both late this week. The administration is hoping to force Democrats to vote for the bills or bear some of the political cost in November's midterm elections. Also Monday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced he will not send the National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border. In a statement, the governor said: "The administration's unconscionable treatment of families at our border is a moral outrage and an affront to the values that built this state and this nation. In the face of this ongoing human tragedy, let me be very clear: New York will not be party to this inhumane treatment of immigrant families. We will not deploy National Guard to the border, and we will not be complicit in a political agenda that governs by fear and division." Responding to "reports of disgraceful tactics" by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York and along the nation's border, Cuomo called on the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general "to investigate illegal and discriminatory ICE tactics in New York" and provide information "on what his office is doing about the assault on immigrant families along our border." The Trump the administration maintains it doesn't like the family separations but migrants who arrive illegally simply won't be released or loosely kept track of. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," he declared. "Not on my watch." Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new "zero-tolerance" policy that refers all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. Prior procedure had limited prosecution for many family entrants, in part because regulations prohibit detaining children with their parents since the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen rejected criticism accusing her department of inhuman and immoral actions. "We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does for doing the job that the American people expect us to do," she said in an appearance before the National Sheriffs' Association in New Orleans. "Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards." The policy change was meant to deter unlawful crossings and Sessions issued a warning last month to those entering the U.S. illegally that their children "inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions." White House officials have privately embraced the policy as negotiating tactic to win votes for legislation to fulfil the president's pledge to build a border wall and to tighten the nation's immigration laws. Trump's commitment to the current policy showed no sign of faltering as voices of outrage and condemnation grew louder and more diverse. Washington President Donald Trump said Monday that he will direct the Pentagon to establish a sixth branch of the armed forces dedicated to protecting U.S. interests in outer space, an idea that has troubled lawmakers and even some members of his administration, who have cautioned that the action could create unnecessary bureaucratic responsibilities for a military already burdened by conflicts. During a speech at a meeting of the National Space Council, Trump announced plans to protect U.S. interests in space through monitoring commercial traffic and debris, initiatives he said would be "great not only in terms of jobs and everything else, it's great for the psyche of our country." Minutes later, the president zeroed in on Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and tasked him with the undertaking of creating another branch of the military. "Gen. Dunford, if you would carry that assignment out, I would be very greatly honored," Trump said from the podium, after searching for him in the crowd. "We got it," the general replied. With his statement, Trump waded into a policy debate about space that has spanned administrations, beginning in earnest during the Clinton era. Trump, who has previously teased his desire to create a space force, entered the fray as he was scheduled to sign a less ambitious proposal, one that would establish a framework for directing commercial traffic in space and monitoring debris. Analysts were puzzling over the particulars. "Does that verbal order translate into something more concrete?" said Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project and director of Defense Budget Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The most he can really ask them to do is start planning for it." With his interest in space, Trump appears to be taking a more protective stance than his modern predecessors, who over the years have wrestled with ways and with rival governments, including Russia and China to keep military conflicts in space at bay while still protecting U.S. interests, including commercial operations and the current satellite system. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. "At best this is simply the creation of an additional DOD bureaucracy," Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said in an interview, referring to the Department of Defense. "At worst, it is the first step in an accelerated competition between the U.S., China and Russia in the space realm that is going to be more difficult to avert without direct talks about responsible rules of the road." The military and Congress have warned that a plan to establish another branch of the armed forces over space protection and space missions would require a long and detailed process, and that the current period of global conflict is not the time to weigh the armed forces down with bureaucratic measures. "At a time when we are trying to integrate the department's joint war-fighting functions, I do not wish to add a separate service that would likely present a narrower and even parochial approach to space operations," Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wrote in a letter last year to Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee. Turner has opposed a legislative effort by the House Armed Services Committee to create a space division of the military. Last year, Congress punted on a decision to establish a space corps through the National Defense Authorization Act, and asked for an independent study on the issue. That report is due in August. A more expansive report, which is required to include an extensive road map to a space force, is due by the end of the year. The United States is a member of the Outer Space Treaty, which bars the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space. Trump also signed a directive on the management of traffic and debris in space. (Photo: File) Washington: US President Donald Trump on Monday said he was ordering the establishment of a sixth branch of the military to clear the way for American dominance of space. "It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space," Trump said before a meeting of his National Space Council. "We are going to have the Air Force and we're going to have the 'Space Force.' Separate but equal. It is going to be something. So important," he said later. The United States, however, is a member of the Outer Space Treaty, which bars the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space and only allows for the use of the moon and other celestial bodies for peaceful purposes. Trump also signed a directive on the management of traffic and debris in space. The announcements were his administration's latest moves to scale up US space exploration. The United States wants to send robotic explorers to the moon as soon as next year as a preparatory step towards sending astronauts back there for the first time since 1972, a NASA official said on Monday. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is planning a series of lunar missions beginning next year aimed at developing the capacity for a return to the moon, said Cheryl Warner, a spokeswoman for NASA's Human Exploration Directorate. NASA will work with private companies, which have not yet been chosen, on the missions, Warner said in a phone interview. In December, Trump signed a directive that he said would enable astronauts to return to the moon and eventually lead a mission to Mars. He ordered the government last month to review regulations on commercial space flights. Americans first landed on the moon in 1969, reaching a goal set by former President John F Kennedy in 1961 and capping a decade-long space race between Washington and Moscow. Since then, US efforts to explore beyond the Earth's orbit have largely focused on remote spacecraft that do not have human crew members, though American presidents have repeatedly raised the idea of sending human explorers back to the moon or further. President George W Bush in 2004 said humans would return to the moon by 2020. His successor, President Barack Obama, said in 2016 the United States would send humans to Mars by the 2030s. [June 18, 2018] United States Credit Czar Celebrates the Best of Humanity With Hundreds of Thousands at Denver Gay Pride SubscriberWise, the nation's largest issuing consumer reporting agency for the communications industry and the leading protector of children victimized by identity theft, announced today the attendance at the 2018 Denver Gay Pride Festival (https://denverpride.org/) by SubscriberWise founder, national child identity guardian, and US Credit Czar David Edward Howe. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180618006288/en/ United States Credit Czar David Howe arrives in Miami after weekend celebration at Denver PrideFest 2018 (Photo: Business Wire) The annual event was attended by an estimated quarter million people and celebrates the incredible diversity, humanity, community concerns, love, and remarkable talents of the LGBTQ community -- including their families, friends, and supporters from around the nation and the world. "If any one is wondering if the United States Credit Czar is flying high as a kite after returning from the 'Mile High' city, then wonder no more," exclaimed David Howe, SubscriberWise founder and USA identity guardian for America's babies, girls, and boys. "But don't assume it's a high from the Colorado- widely-available miracle plant known as Cannabis. Rather, the Credit Czar achieved an unmedicated and blissful high from a weekend of celebration with hundreds of thousands of loving, generous, thoughtful, courageous, and profoundly creative individuals who marched for equity and justice around Denver and the Colorado State Capitol. "Yes, this year's Denver gay pride parade and festival was indeed a spectacular event," continued Howe. "However, among all the VIPs, the colorful parade and grand events, the corporate supporters including Coors, FedEx, Google, HP, Nissan, Sheraton, Target, United Airlines, US Bank, and so many others -- the most meaningful thing for Credit Czar was to witness so many families and so many children celebrating inclusion, diversity, tolerance, and acceptance for all. "But we must keep in mind that there is also a serious side to gay pride festivals here and around the world," insisted Howe. "The serious side involves the struggle for civil and human rights - and the rights of every human being for that matter. Yes, it's critical that each of us remember our nation's dark and shameful past with bigotry, hatred, and injustice against our fellow citizens so that we're not condemned to repeat it. "June is LGBTQ pride month and celebrations take place all over the USA and the world," added Howe. "The catalyst for gay pride is to honor the Stonewall riots in Manhattan decades ago and, in particular, the incredibly strong and courageous individuals who fought for their rights and the rights of others. Moreover, it's a time to recognize, appreciate, and celebrate the incredible and continuous impacts from the LGBTQ community on the inhabitants of the world. "Yes, I'm so grateful I had the opportunity to join the cause - and the celebration -- in Denver 2018," the United States Credit Czar concluded. About SubscriberWise SubscriberWise launched as the first issuing consumer reporting agency exclusively for the cable industry in 2006. The company filed extensive documentation and end-user agreements to access TransUnion's consumer database. In 2009, SubscriberWise and TransUnion announced a joint marketing agreement for the benefit of America's cable operators (http://newsroom.transunion.com/transunion-and-subscriberwise-announce-joint-marketing-agreement). Today SubscriberWise is a risk management preferred-solutions provider for the National Cable Television Cooperative (www.subscriberwise.com/nctc). SubscriberWise contributions to the communications industry are quantified in the billions of dollars annually. SubscriberWise is a U.S.A. federally registered trademark of the SubscriberWise Limited Liability Co. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180618006288/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Mediaocean And IBM Partner To Integrate Blockchain Across The Media Ecosystem; New Blockchain Consortium Includes Kellogg, Kimberly-Clark, Pfizer And Unilever CANNES, France, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mediaocean, the foundational software provider of the advertising world, and IBM iX, one of the world's largest digital agencies and global business design partners, today announced the launch of a blockchain consortium for the digital media supply chain. Bringing together some of the world's largest advertisers, agencies and publishers, including Kellogg, Kimberly-Clark, Pfizer, Unilever and IBM Watson Advertising, the solution aims to provide transparency and build trust and accountability in the advertising ecosystem. The new Mediaocean and IBM blockchain solution, powered by the IBM Blockchain platform, the leader in enterprise blockchain, will provide a comprehensive, timely and actionable view of the supply chain. It will tackle supply chain opacity from the rapid proliferation of intermediaries, which makes it difficult for advertisers and agencies to identify exactly how much spend is going towards "working media." "We must innovate our approach to the market by looking for new technologies like blockchain to help solve complex business challenges," said Mukund Kaushik, VP Digital Capabilities and Innovation for Kimberly-Clark. "In this partnership with IBM and Mediaocean, as well as other leaders in the media industry, we are on an exciting journey to use blockchain to solve the challenges of media spend transparency and assurance." Built on top of Mediaocean's end-to-end campaign management platform, which today processes over $140 billion in ad spend and is trusted by all agency holding companies, the Mediaocean and IBM blockchain solution aims to provide visibility into the entire lifecycle of an advertiser's media dollar flow. From issuing of the purchase order, to the execution of media and payment a blockchain is used to record all media transactions in a secure, immutable, standardized and comprehensive manner. The program will launch in July. "For over 50 years, Mediaocean has been the system of record forthe advertising industry," says Bill Wise, CEO, Mediaocean. "We have done so by providing reliable, neutral, and integrated systems for brands, agencies and suppliers to execute media, globally. In recent years, however, the industry has been plagued with unsustainable economics and transparency issues that hinder progress particularly around intermediary fees and non-working media. By partnering with IBM, we're able to launch the first advertising blockchain solution that will improve spend transparency - at scale. This will help us come together as an industry under a single source of truth and rebuild trust to push us into a new era of advertising transformation." "Blockchain is creating new ways of doing business across industries, particularly where greater trust and transparency is required. As it relates to media, we expect blockchain to be able to provide a single source of truth to any given media buy, eliminating the doubt and uncertainty that is common today," said Babs Rangaiah, Executive Partner, Global Marketing, IBM iX. "Measurement and transparency require new solutions across the programmatic supply chain and blockchain is a technology strategically used to create an environment of trust. It will bring tremendous benefits to media buying, especially with industry leaders like Mediaocean leading the charge." "Marketers today have to deal with a whole host of issues in the digital ad environment from quality control and security to financial transparency. What this pilot has shown us is the potential blockchain has to help us drive more quality into the digital ecosystem and get to one source of the truth for our digital investment," said Rob Master, VP Global Media, Unilever. Risa Wexler, VP, Media, Digital Chops & Innovation, Pfizer Inc., added, "Digital advertising can be tremendously valuable for companies and customers alike; but in any advertising medium, transparency, trust and simplicity are central. A blockchain solution has extraordinary potential to bring all three to the ecosystem." During the initial build phase, Mediaocean utilized the IBM Blockchain Platform Starter Plan, designed to help organizations quickly and cost effectively build blockchain proof of concepts and test networks using blockchain. Contact blockchain@mediaocean.com for more information. To learn more about IBM iX, visit www.ibm.com/IBMiX and follow @IBM_iX on Twitter. ABOUT MEDIAOCEAN Mediaocean is the world's leading media software company that automates every aspect of the advertising workflow - from planning, buying and selling, to analyzing and optimizing, to invoicing and payments. Mediaocean's open cross-media platforms power $140 billion in global media budgets and have unmatched reach and bridge traditional and digital media. Mediaocean serves more than 80,000 users across agencies, advertisers, broadcasters and publishers worldwide. The company employs 950 people worldwide and is part of the Vista Equity Partners portfolio of software companies. Mediaocean is headquartered in New York with fourteen offices worldwide. Learn more at mediaocean.com, or connect with Mediaocean on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Advertising. Powered by Mediaocean. Contact: press@mediaocean.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mediaocean-and-ibm-partner-to-integrate-blockchain-across-the-media-ecosystem-new-blockchain-consortium-includes-kellogg-kimberly-clark-pfizer-and-unilever-300668114.html SOURCE Mediaocean [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Shanghai International Blockchain Week 2018, an industrial gathering that cannot be missed SHANGHAI, June 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Once again, the "New Economy" themed Global Blockchain Summit, the most influential and iconic annual global blockchain gathering in Asia has set the course for a Shanghai International Blockchain Week in this September. Schedule and Arrangement Sep. 7th - 9th: Wanxiang Blockchain Hackathon Sep. 10th: Tech Open Day Sep. 11th - 12th: The 4th Global Blockchain Summit Location: Shanghai, China Expected participants: 2000+ Event Website: http://www.blockchainlabs.org/week2018 Registration Period: Hackathon participants must register before August 1st and await approval. Tech Day and Summit Tickets are being sold online with limited supply, and early bird tickets are available now. Host: Wanxiang Blockchain Labs History October 2015: The 1st Global Blockchain Summit, over 300 participants. September 2016: The 2nd Global Blockchain Summit, over 700 participants. (Part of the Shanghai International Blockchain Week 2016) September 2017: The 3rd Global Blockchain Summit, over 1200 participants. Three years ago, when Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, a leading Chinese research institution focused on the development of blockchain technology hosted the 1st Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai, more than 300 technicians entrepreneurs, academics, investors, representatives from financial institutions and regulatory bodies attended. Since then, the blockchain industry has been on a fast track, while this annual Global Blockchain Summit captures its latest development, challenges, and regulatory concerns with unique perspectives provided by world-renowned speakers from various industries and regulatory bodies. One can easily observe the level of attention of this summit by its previous speakers. An industrial gathering that cannot be missed "I have attended this annual blockchain summit held by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs as speakers in the past three years. It is one of the most serious and informative blockchain events I have ever attended," said Zeen Zhang, Vice President of Factom, "THE SUMMIT, that is what I would call it. The level of connections and perspectives you can acquire here are beyond comparison. I will be in Shanghai for this year's event, definitely." A hackathon with a real-world challenge As the warm-up event for the Blockchain Week, the two and a half days long hackathon will be a gathering for excellent development teams from around the world to demonstrate their innovative ideas through competition within limited timeframe. There are two types of challenges: one is provided by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs which is detailed as follows, and the other is provided by sponsors that will be introduced at the venue. Wanxiang Innova City is dedicated to new energies and smart city innovations, and the main theater for the deployment of blockchain application scenarios. The ultimate goal is to build a smart city where 90,000 people will study, research, work, and reside. Incorporating blockchain, artificial intelligence, IoT and cognitive computing on the edge, Innova City pioneers the next stage of urban intelligence that provides smart services, smart residence, and smart transportation. Tech Open Day On Tech Open Day, founders, development leads, and developers from major blockchain platforms will, among other things, introduce the latest development of their respective platforms and explore potential solutions to the technological challenges facing the industry. The speakers will dive into consensus mechanisms, side-chain and cross-chain systems, privacy protection, among other topics, in order to gain a better understanding towards the underlying technology of blockchain platforms. The 4th Global Blockchain Summit The two days long 4th Global Blockchain Summit will invite representatives from various industries to share their insights regarding the solutions empowered by blockchain technology, envisioning the true value of blockchain technology in the future industrial application. In the mist of hype, confusion, and exploration throughout the year, practitioners and leaders from various industries will share their thoughts and ideas relating to the further development and the real-world value of this empowering technology. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/shanghai-international-blockchain-week-2018-an-industrial-gathering-that-cannot-be-missed-300668225.html SOURCE Wanxiang Blockchain Labs [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] GTPL Hathway Announces Appointment of Mr. Viren Thakkar as New CFO AHMEDABAD, India, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- GTPL Hathway Limited (GTPL), India's leading Digital Cable TV and Broadband Service provider, today announced appointment of Mr. Viren Thakkar as the new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) effective from Monday, July 2, 2018. He has replaced Jayanta Kumar Pani, who is leaving GTPL at the end of this month to explore other career opportunities. (Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/598543/GTPL_Hathway_Logo.jpg ) Viren has 27 years of experience in corporate finance, cost control, budgeting, internal control & audit and corporate planning. Previously, Viren was the Chief Financial Officer for India, Middle East and Africa Region at Roquette Riddhi Siddhi Private Limited; a part of Roquette Freres Group of France, having operation in 42 countries with an annual turnover of 3.20 Billion Euro. Prior to that, between 2007 and 2012, Viren was General Manager - Finance at Torrent Power Limited, a part of Ahmedabad-based Torrent Group. Viren is a charteed accountant and a cost accountant. Commenting on the appointment, Anirudhasinhji Jadeja, Managing Director, GTPL Hathway, said, "I warmly welcome Viren to GTPL family. Viren brings wealth of experience in managing finance & accounts function at reputed companies. As GTPL continues to increase market share in digital cable TV and invest in technologically superior high-speed, low cost broadband services, the company will benefit immensely from Viren's deep knowledge and global experience across finance & accounts domain." Mr. Jadeja added, "On behalf of GTPL board, I would like to thank Jayanta for his substantial contribution to GTPL. In past one decade, Jayanta has built a solid foundation for GTPL and played a key role in taking the company public. I wish him great success in his future endeavours." Commenting on the new role, Viren Thakkar, said, "I am excited to join GTPL Hathway, one of the few profitable companies in digital cable and broadband space. I look forward to focus on future investment in technology, prudent capital allocation, margin expansion and value creation for all the stakeholders." About GTPL Hathway Limited GTPL Hathway Limited is one of India's leading Digital Cable TV and Broadband service providers. We are the number 1. Cable TV Provider in Gujarat with 67% market share. Our digital cable television services reached 500 plus towns across India, including towns in Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Bihar, Assam, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. As on March 31, 2018, we have seeded approximately 8.7 million STBs and had approximately 7.4 million active digital cable subscribers and 0.28 million Broadband Subscribers with a home pass of about 1.3 million. For media queries, please contact: Piyush Pankaj Chief Corporate Affairs Officer piyush.pankaj@gtpl.net +91-98113-21102 Mehul Mehta President - Dickenson Financial PR mehul.mehta@dickensonIR.com +91-98202-80325 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Gopher Protocol's Exclusive Licensor Files Patent Covering Proprietary GRC Blockchain-Based Radio Generated Digital Currency San Diego, CA, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gopher Protocol Inc. (OTCQB: GOPH) ("Gopher"), a company specializing in the creation of Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence enabled mobile technologies, is pleased to announce that Dr. Danny Rittman filed a patent for a blockchain-based radio generated digital currency. The application has been assigned the serial number 16/008,069, and the non-provisional filing date is June 14, 2018. Gopher is the exclusive licensee of the patent. Gopher is exclusive licensee of technology developed by Dr. Rittman. The patent application contemplates the use of the Gopher Radio Coin or GRC. Gopher envisions GRC as a new form of digital currency. A digital currency is a medium of exchange that is generated, stored and transferred electronically. Digital currencies are not typically associated with any country's government or represented in physical forms like the coins and notes of traditional (fiat) currencies. The GRC technology covered by the patent envisions a new, private, secured digital currency that is encapsulated within Gophers system to be used by Gophers customers and members. Gopher intends to generate the GRC through its communication technology, which is incorporated into its devices, i.e. tracking systems and the microchip-based products (GopherInsight). Gopher intends that each Gopher gadget that produces a signal processed by Gophers proprietary electronic system will, in turn, create the GRC. The GRC will then be stored in the users personal, private and secured Gopher account/wallet anywhere in the world. To power Gophers own blockchain, it is expected that each Gopher device will have the capability to mine/confirm all transactions that take place with the GRC, or communicate to dedicated mining machines each time a coin is created and a transaction takes place. "We intend for the GRC to be based on our highly secured algorithms and our radio technology, which will create a new type of digital currency. GRC, once developed, will provide users with full proprietorship much like having a bank account in their pocket," stated Danny Rittman, Gopher's CTO. "The system will be constructed by our electronic circuitry (Hardware) that is working in conjunction with our Avant! AI engine program. The GRC will be blockchain-based and its network is a peer-to-peer type that runs on a decentralized, distributed self-clearing ledger, continued Dr. Rittman. No assurance can be given that a definitive approvalwill be given to the proposed patent, that Gopher will be able to fully develop the GRC, that Gophers products, which, in turn, will create the GRC, will be adopted and used, that the GRC will be easily adopted or adopted at all by Gophers customers or that Gopher will be able to raise the requisite capital needed to fully develop the GRC. Gopher intends to fully comply with all legal requirements associated with the GRC and does not intend to implement the GRC in the United States unless all regulators have approved its implementation in the United States or there is an applicable exemption. About Gopher Protocol Inc. Gopher Protocol Inc. (OTCQB: GOPH) (Gopher) (http://gopherprotocol.com/) is a development-stage company which consider itself Native IoT creator, developing Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence enabled mobile technology. Gopher has a portfolio of Intellectual Property that when commercialized will include smart microchips, mobile application software and supporting cloud software. The system contemplates the creation of a global network. The core of the system will be its advanced microchip technology that can be installed in any mobile device worldwide. Gopher envisions this system as an internal, private network between all enabled mobile devices providing shared processing, advanced mobile database management/sharing and enhanced mobile features. Corporate Site: http://gopherprotocol.com Press page/ press kit - http://gopherprotocol.com/?page_id=228 Consumer and product website for Guardian Patch: http://www.guardianpatch.com/. About Guardian Pet Tracker http://www.guardianpettracker.com/ The Guardian Pet Tracker (Sphere Internal name - the "Sphere") system is a derivative technology of Gopher's Guardian Patch technology. The Sphere is designed to provide its users with local tracking capability using a re-chargeable/replaceable battery source. Gopher intends to release pre-production units in limited test in the near future. GOPH disclosure: More info: SEC link /technology abstract: Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements". Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors as disclosed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission located at their website (http://www.sec.gov). In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, governmental and public policy changes, the Companys ability to raise capital on acceptable terms, if at all, the Companys successful development of its products and the integration into its existing products and the commercial acceptance of the Companys products. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company's views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release. Contact: Dr. Danny Rittman, CTO Gopher Protocol Inc. VM Only 888-685-7336 Media: press@gopherprotocol.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] FundThrough raises $34M in New Funding to Bridge Cash Flow Gaps for Small and Growing Businesses TORONTO, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Financial technology company FundThrough announced today that it has secured $9 million in equity funding and a new $25 million credit facility. The Series A equity round is led by David Mirvish and ScaleUP Ventures, with participation from several successful entrepreneurs intimate with the cash flow hurdles that FundThrough is solving. This latest equity round brings FundThroughs total equity financing to $15.4 million. The credit facility is being provided by Intercap Inc., a merchant banking firm based in Toronto. This latest round of funding will enable FundThrough to accelerate its technology development so it can offer financing to a greater volume of businesses, build integrations with critical platform partners, and accelerate expansion into U.S. markets. With customers taking longer to pay invoices, business owners are facing increasingly large cash flow gaps for longer periods. FundThroughs invoice factoring service has experienced significant demand amongst small businesses who want control over when they are paid by their customers, and with partners who recognize that their users worry about covering cash flow gaps. Our mission of helping business owners succeed by enabling them to control their cash flow is empowering Canadian businesses and is gaining significant traction in the U.S., said Steven Uster, Co-Founder and CEO of FundThrough. This has led to tremendous growth and innovation since we first launched in 2014. David Mirvish had a natural connection to the business. Factoring was critical to my parents when they started the business that ended up being Honest Eds. They were selling dresses and letting their customers pay over time otherwise the customers wouldnt have been able to buy them. By factoring those receivables, they had the money that enabled them to buy more inventory to sell and that allowed them to grow their busness. I understand how factoring can be used by businesses to succeed. FundThrough has brought that traditional factoring that my parents used into the 21st century by using technology, said Mirvish. What excited me about FundThrough was its simple online platform that enables businesses to transform future funds into instantly available capital for any business that invoices its customers. We are thrilled by FundThroughs accomplishments and the traction they have made forging integrations with the likes of QuickBooks and partnerships with the likes of Cortex to reach business owners and building their innovative risk model, said Kent Thexton, Managing Partner of ScaleUP Ventures. FundThroughs revenue and user base has grown 8x and 5x year-over-year and their growth is poised to accelerate. James Merkur, President of Intercap added, We were drawn to FundThroughs innovative technology based underwriting model and the secured, short duration asset class. FundThrough provides an attractive, easy to use solution to help business owners navigate cash flow gaps that every entrepreneur knows too well. We are proud to partner with FundThrough as their largest lender. FundThrough has emerged as a leading player in the fintech small business working capital space and is investing in advancing its credit model using artificial intelligence and machine learning, ensuring a seamless onboarding and funding experience, and expanding across North America. About FundThrough FundThrough offers businesses flexible, on-demand working capital using their outstanding invoices to overcome cash flow gaps and accelerate their growth. The invoice factoring platform empowers small, new, and growing businesses in the U.S. and Canada to have their invoices paid when they want in as little as 24 hours. For more information, visit www.fundthrough.com About ScaleUP Ventures ScaleUP Ventures is Canada's premier early-stage venture fund designed to assist the nation's most promising startups by providing "Capital + Connections"; a unique combination of funding and strong connections to corporate Canada via seasoned executives, entrepreneurs, and investors. The fund targets Seed and Series-A sized investments in high growth technology companies that have begun to show traction in large, expanding markets. ScaleUP's unique model helps companies scale more rapidly toward global success. For more information please visit suv.vc or contact Danielle Smith, Marketing and Operations Manager at danielle@suv.vc About Intercap Inc. Intercap Inc. is a merchant bank based in Toronto, Canada. Intercap Income invests in attractive yield- oriented investments with strong principal protection. Intercap Equity invests across several industries, with a focus on growth-oriented technology and consumer companies. Intercap invests in early stage businesses as well as larger private and public corporations. We target opportunities where we can play a value added active role in partnering with great entrepreneurs. Unlike a traditional private equity fund, our focus is on long term investment returns. For further information, please contact: Jonathan Davis at media@fundthrough.com or 1-800-766-0460 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] IBM Watson, Iron Mountain, Microsoft, Vistaprint Tapped for MassTLC Board of Trustees BURLINGTON, Mass., June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Wednesday, June 20th MassTLC will welcome four of the regions top tech leaders on to its Board of Trustees. The new trustees, elected on May 15th, include: Craig Dillon, East Area Director, Microsoft Technology Centers; Fidelma Russo, CTO, Iron Mountain; Derek Schoettle, GM of IBM Watson Data Platform; and Trynka Shineman, CEO, Vistaprint. The rapid pace of innovation is disrupting markets and the way we do business, remarked MassTLC CEO Tom Hopcroft. Having a healthy influx of the regions top tech leaders helps keep our organization energized and at the forefront of technology leadership in the region. Im delighted to continue advancing the tech community in Massachusetts by joining the board of the MassTLC, said Vistaprint CEO Trynka Shineman. Im proud of this regions contribution to the global technology sector, and I believe MassTLC plays a critical role in supporting our regions innovators and technologists. The new trustees join a board comprising the Whos Who of the tech leadership in the region: Mohamad Ali , President & CEO, Carbonite , President & CEO, Carbonite Lynda Applegate , Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration and Chair of the Executive Education Programs for Business Owners & Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School , Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration and Chair of the Executive Education Programs for Business Owners & Entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School Kirk Arnold , former CEO, Data Intensity , former CEO, Data Intensity Sean Belka , Senior Vice President and Director of Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT), Fidelity Investments , Senior Vice President and Director of Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT), Fidelity Investments Peter Bowman , Vice President, MA/RI External Affairs, Verizon , Vice President, MA/RI External Affairs, Verizon Tye Brady , Chief Technologist, Amazon Robotics , Chief Technologist, Amazon Robotics Dan Bricklin , President & CEO, Software Garden , President & CEO, Software Garden Steve Conine , Co-Founder, Wayfair , Co-Founder, Wayfair Jim Daniell , Chief Transformation Officer NetHope , Chief Transformation Officer NetHope Craig Dillon , Managing Director, East Region, Microsoft Technology Centers (MTC), Microsoft , Managing Director, East Region, Microsoft Technology Centers (MTC), Microsoft Renee Foster , former President, Curriculum Associates , former President, Curriculum Associates Jim Heppelmann , President & CEO, PTC , President & CEO, PTC Mike Kinkead , Entrepreneurial Advisor, Green Swan Enterprises , Entrepreneurial Advisor, Green Swan Enterprises Dave Krupinski , Co-Founder & CTO, Care.com , Co-Founder & CTO, Care.com Jack Little , President, Mathworks , President, Mathworks Matthew Littlewood , Partner, PWC , Partner, PWC Mark Lorion , President & GM, Arxan , President & GM, Arxan Steve O'Leary , Managing Director, Aeris Partners , Managing Director, Aeris Partners Pam Reeve , Vice Chair, Commonwealth Institute , Vice Chair, Commonwealth Institute Susan Rousseau , Global Account Manager& Technology Executive, State Street , Global Account Manager& Technology Executive, State Street Fidelma Russo , CTO & EVP, Iron Mountain , CTO & EVP, Iron Mountain Derek Schoettle , GM of Watson Data Platform, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, IBM (former CEO, Cloudant) , GM of Watson Data Platform, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform, IBM (former CEO, Cloudant) Trynka Shineman , CEO, Vistaprint , CEO, Vistaprint Debbie Theobald , Executive Director, Vecna Cares , Executive Director, Vecna Cares Corey Thomas , President & CEO, Rapid7 , President & CEO, Rapid7 Anthony Williams , Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition and Diversity, Akamai Technologies , Vice President, Global Talent Acquisition and Diversity, Akamai Technologies Julie Yoo, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Kyruus Dave Krupinski, CTO, Co-Founder, Care.com, as incoming Co-Chair. He will serve a two-year term alongside current Co-Chair Julie Yoo, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Kyruus, whose term ends at the Annual Meeting of the Board in 2019. Krupinski succeeds Jim Daniell, Chief Transformation Officer, Center for the Digital Nonprofit, whose term as Co-Chair is ending in June 2018. Other officers elected include Matthew Littlewood, Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers, as Treasurer, and Debbie Theobald, Co-Founder, Vecna Technologies, as Secretary. I am honored to be taking this leadership role during such an exciting time of change in our community, said Dave Krupinski. I look forward to working with the MassTLC board, staff, and membership on our long-term vision and on how technology can drive both economic and social good in our community. Dave is a dedicated leader, champion for technology and passionate advocate for Massachusetts all qualities that make him an excellent fit in the role of co-chairperson, said Julie Yoo. His commitment to promoting and advancing the tech community is unwavering. Im excited to work closely with him in the year ahead. About the Mass Technology Leadership Council, Inc. The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) is the region's leading technology association and the premier network for tech executives, entrepreneurs, investors and policy leaders. With over 170,000 tech workers employed at member companies, MassTLC is the largest tech organization in New England. MassTLC drives growth and innovation by connecting people from across the innovation ecosystem, providing access to industry-leading content and ideas, and serving as a platform for member companies to develop talent, foster a tech friendly business climate, and advance the collective interests of our community. More at www.masstlc.org. MEDIA CONTACT: Sara Fraim sara@masstlc.org 617-869-5425 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Michael Loeb, Loeb.NYC Invest in Mercato and Tech Powering Specialty and Independent Grocers Michael Loeb, founder and CEO of Loeb.NYC, the New York City-based startup firm, has made an investment in Mercato, Inc. The investment supports Mercato's e-commerce platform that allows independent and specialty grocers to reach mobile-minded consumers with discriminating tastes and a preference for locally sourced food. The investment was committed by Michael Loeb's private investment platform, which supports a number of promising startups. The capital infusion will help Mercato increase marketing and sales efforts while expanding its roster of talented team members during this time of significant growth. Since launching in 2015, Mercato has been building robust networks of local butchers, seafood and produce markets, bakers and small grocers in seven U.S. markets. These independent retailers are drawn to Mercato's easy-to-use platform of marketing, e-commerce, and service tools that allow them to connect seamlessly with consumers. "Mercato allows purveyors of specialty foods to boost sales while satisfying the growing consumer demand for ordering artisanal foods via their mobile device," said Michael Loeb. "The solutions Mercato provides are being very well received and this momentum will only increase as the large players in food delivery continue to ignore consumer desire to purchase from hyper local and truly thoughtful fod purveyors." Bobby Brannigan, founder and CEO of Mercato, said: "In the month of April we added 22 specialty and small grocery stores to our platform and in the first week of June we added 35 new merchants. As more merchants flock to the app, Mercato users are enjoying a larger variety of local food purveyors to choose from. The result is increased ordering via Mercato with retailers reporting hundreds of transactions per week." Bobby Brannigan, an entrepreneur who grew up working in his father's butcher shop and grocery store in Brooklyn, NY, created Mercato to bring independent grocers into the future. The Mercato app is currently operating in New York (Brooklyn, Manhattan & Queens), Chicago, San Francisco, Alameda, CA (News - Alert) , Washington, DC, and Princeton, NJ. ABOUT MICHAEL LOEB Michael Loeb is a New York-based veteran entrepreneur who has backed, built, or funded over fifty successful companies. Chief among his successes are Priceline.com--known for its travel deals and travel search engine, and Synapse (acquired by Time, Inc.). Loeb now leads Loeb.NYC and Loeb Enterprises, a start up laboratory and private investment platform, respectively, based in New York City. A leading New York philanthropist, Loeb donates to a variety of charities, and he's donated the location fees related to his Hampton's home being used as a set for the Showtime television series Billions. ABOUT Loeb.NYC The venture arm of Loeb Enterprises and founded by CEO Michael Loeb, Loeb.NYC is a startup lab and early-stage private investor built on the belief that aligning the right people with the right ideas creates successful companies. More information can be found at www.loeb.nyc. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005350/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Leading BioSciences Reports Positive Interim Results from Phase 2 Trial of LB1148 in Patients Undergoing Major Surgery CARLSBAD, Calif., June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Leading BioSciences, a drug development company focused on improving human health through therapeutic protection of the Gastrobiome, today reported positive interim data from the companys ongoing Phase 2 clinical trial of its lead drug candidate, LB1148, in patients undergoing major cardiovascular surgery. Results from the planned interim analysis demonstrated that subjects treated with LB1148 had a decrease in stay in the intensive care unit (ICU) of 1.1 days and an overall decrease in hospital length of stay of 3.2 days, as compared to placebo. Additional findings demonstrated a statistically significant 18-hour improvement in return to normal bowel function for patients treated with LB1148 as compared to placebo (p = 0.044), the studys primary endpoint. As a point of comparison, the only currently approved treatment for improving post-surgery recovery of gastrointestinal (GI) function demonstrated less improvement in return to bowel function following GI surgery. The interim study results also suggest that LB1148 was well tolerated with an adverse event profile that was comparable to placebo. The statistically significant 18-hour improvement in return of normal GI function seen with LB1148 is very promising not only as it relates to improving patients overall surgical experience but also for its potential to reduce length of patient stays in the ICU and hospital, as well as the associated costs, said Tom Hallam, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Leading BioSciences. Importantly, when compared to the only treatment currently approved in the US to improve post-surgery bowel function recovery, these data for LB1148 show a more rapid recovery of GI function, as well as significant administration and safety benefits. We believe these results support the potential of LB1148 to address a key unmet medical need while providing dramatic cost savings for patients, hospitals and healthcare system. As a surgeon, I have firsthand experience with the limited nature of the current therapeutic options for addressing post-operative GI function restoration. said David B. Hoyt, M.D., FACS., former chairman, department of surgery, executive vice dean of the school of medicine, and JohnE. Connolly professor of surgery at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center, as well as a member of Leading BioSciences clinical steering committee. I am encouraged by the interim data reported for LB1148, as it suggests the treatment may ultimately be able to deliver important benefits to patients and hospitals alike. I will monitor the continued development of the treatment with interest and look forward to the reporting of this studys full data set later this year. The ongoing Phase 2 study is a randomized, double-blind, parallel, placebo-controlled trial in 120 subjects undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) and/or heart valve replacement surgery requiring cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). Patients are being randomized to receive LB1148 or placebo in conjunction with surgery. The trials primary objective is to evaluate the improvement in subjects post-operative recovery with LB1148 treatment as compared to placebo. This is being measured through assessment of treatment impact on the time to return of normal GI function, length of stay in the ICU, length of stay in the hospital, and mortality rate. There are more than 10 million surgeries conducted each year in the US that are at risk for resulting in a breakdown of the natural intestinal mucosal barrier and triggering post-operative interruption of GI function. Importantly, patients undergoing these surgeries generally cannot be discharged from the hospital until their GI function is restored, which can add several days to their hospital stay. It is estimated that each extra day a patient remains in the hospital awaiting return of GI function results in approximately $3,500 in hospital costs. As such, a treatment that can safely and effectively reduce delays in return of GI function following surgery has the potential to provide significant cost savings to hospitals, insurers and the healthcare system. Leading BioSciences will present these results of the interim trial analysis at a future medical meeting. About LB1148 LB1148 is a patent-protected formulation of a broad-spectrum serine protease inhibitor designed to neutralize the activity of potent digestive enzymes that can cause a range of serious complications if they escape the intestines through a compromised mucosal barrier. The ability to safely and effectively inhibit the activity of digestive proteases can prevent the damage they cause to GI tissues once they escape the intestines, speed the return of GI function and shorten patients post-surgery stay in the ICU and hospital. A Phase 2 clinical study of LB1148 in subjects undergoing major cardiovascular surgery is underway and a Phase 2/3 trial in patients undergoing gastrointestinal surgery is preparing to initiate patient enrollment. About Leading BioSciences Leading BioSciences is developing novel therapeutics designed to improve human health through therapeutic protection of the Gastrobiome. Leading BioSciences initial focus is combatting the interruption of GI function (ileus) following major surgery to reduce recovery times and shorten patients length of stay in the hospital. Additionally, the company believes that its programs have the potential to prevent the formation of post-operative adhesions (reducing hospital re-admissions and additional surgeries), as well as to address the myriad of health conditions and complications associated with chronic disruption of the intestinal mucosal barrier. Learn more at: www.leadingbiosciences.com Contacts: Vida Strategic Partners Stephanie Diaz (Investors) 415-675-7401 sdiaz@vidasp.com Tim Brons (Media) 415-675-7402 tbrons@vidasp.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] UrtheCast Corp. Appoints Donald F. Osborne as Chief Executive Officer /NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES/ VANCOUVER, June 19, 2018 /CNW/ - UrtheCast Corp. (TSX: UR) ("UrtheCast" or the "Company") today announced the appointment of Don Osborne as Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Osborne is a seasoned technology executive, having spent more than 30 years in the satellite, space and defence industries. Most recently, from 2009 to 2017 he was a senior executive at MDA, a Maxar Company, including as President of the MDA Information Systems Group where he was responsible for MDA's Canadian businesses. MDA is a leader in space robotics, satellite antennas and subsystems, and surveillance systems, among other business areas. Mr. Osborne will assume his role with UrtheCast on July 5, 2018. Said Adam Vore, UrtheCast's Chairman: "We are extremely excited to have a leader of Don's experience and industry expertise join the Company. He brings the technical and industry knowledge, and demonstrated management excellence that will lead UrtheCast through its next phase of development. With a strong and capable management team, supported by an aligned Board of Directors, we are confident that UrtheCast is well-positioned to create value." Said James Topham, UrtheCast Director and chair of the Board's search committee: "The Board conducted an international search process and interviewed a number of excellent candidates. We are unanimous in our view that Don is exceptionally qualified to lead UrtheCast and build on the Company's potential." Mr. Osborne has spent his entire career in the satellite and aerospace industry. Prior to his roles with MDA, he served as the President of Advantech Satellite Networks Inc. from 2006 to 2009. Mr. Osborne has also served as Vice President of EMS Technologies Inc. and Senior Vice President and General Manager for the EMS Satellite Networks group, a part of the Space & Technology/Montreal operations from 1999 to 2006. He joined EMS Technologies Inc. in January 1999, when it acquired the Spar Satellite Products business, where Don had served as Vice President of Marketing and other positions commencing in 1983 as a Mechanical Engineer. Mr. Osborne is a irector of 5N Plus Inc., and until recently served on the Board of Directors of the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada. Don holds Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. Said Mr. Osborne: "UrtheCast has a well-deserved reputation for innovation in its products and services, and I look forward to working with the UrtheCast team and its partners around the world to build on the potential that exists within the Company." UrtheCast Annual General and Special Meeting of Shareholders UrtheCast would also like to take the opportunity to remind shareholders that they have until 10:30 a.m. (Vancouver Time) on June 21, 2018 to vote their shares for the upcoming general annual and special meeting of shareholders to be held at 10:30 a.m. on June 25, 2018. The board of directors unanimously recommends a vote FOR all resolutions at the meeting. YOUR VOTE IS IMPORTANT REGARDLESS OF THE NUMBER OF SHARES YOU OWN. PLEASE VOTE TODAY. Shareholder Request for Voting Assistance Shareholders who have questions or require voting assistance may contact UrtheCast's proxy solicitor: Laurel Hill Advisory Group North America Toll-Free: 1-877-452-7184 Outside North America: 416-304-0211 Email: assistance@laurelhill.com About UrtheCast UrtheCast Corp. is a Vancouver-based technology company that serves the rapidly evolving geospatial and geoanalytics markets with a wide range of information-rich products and services. The Company operates Earth Observation (EO) sensors in space, through its subsidiary Deimos Imaging, S.L.U., including two satellites, Deimos-1 and Deimos-2, to produce imagery data for partners and customers in multiple markets. UrtheCast processes and distributes imagery data and value-added products on behalf of the PanGeo Alliance, a network of seven satellite operators with a combined 13 medium- and high-resolution EO sensors. UrtheCast is developing a satellite constellation designed to capture high-quality, medium resolution optical imagery of the Earth's entire landmass (excluding Antarctica) every day, called UrtheDaily. UrtheCast is also developing the world's first fully-integrated constellation of sixteen multispectral optical and SAR satellites, called OptiSAR. Common shares of UrtheCast trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange as ticker "UR". For more information, visit UrtheCast's website at www.urthecast.com. Forward Looking Information This release contains certain information which, as presented, constitutes "forward-looking information" or "forward-oriented financial information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking information involves statements that relate to future events and often addresses expected future business and financial performance, containing words such as "anticipate", "plan", "explore" and "expect", statements that an action or event "may", "should" or "will" be taken or occur, or other similar expressions. Such statements reflect UrtheCast's current views with respect to future events. Such statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by UrtheCast as at the date of this press release, are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies. Many factors could cause UrtheCast's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements; as well as those factors and assumptions discussed in UrtheCast's annual information form dated April 2, 2018, which is available under UrtheCast's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. UrtheCast cautions readers that such factors and uncertainties are not exhaustive and that should certain risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying estimates or assumptions prove incorrect, actual results, performance or achievements may vary significantly from those expected. There can be no assurance that the actual strategies, results, performance, events or activities anticipated by the Company will be realized or, even if substantially realized, that they will have the expected consequences to, or effects on, the Company. UrtheCast undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by Canadian securities laws. Readers are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. SOURCE UrtheCast Corp. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Swaraj arrived in France on 2nd leg of 4-nation tour, held discussion with French Prez over understandings reached during his India visit She said the visits of Prime Minister Modi to France in April 2015 and June 2017 and Macron to India have infused new momentum and dynamism to bilateral strategic partnership, brought about increased political convergence and built deep mutual trust. (Photo: @MEAIndia/Twitter) Paris: India and France are working to shape a strong development partnership, including in the fields of science and technology, clean energy and infrastructure, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has said as she met the country's top leadership and discussed issues of mutual interest from a strategic perspective. Swaraj, who arrived here from Rome on June 18 on the second leg of her four-nation tour, called on French President Emmanuel Macron and discussed follow up to the understandings reached during his visit to India in March this year. She also met her French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian and the two leaders held in-depth and constructive discussions on full range of bilateral relationship, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. "Our trade, capital and technology partnerships are registering impressive growth. Bilateral trade touched Euros 9.85 billion (or USD 10.95 billion) last year. But, we need to do more to reach the set target of trade in goods to 15 billion Euros by 2022," Swaraj was quoted as saying by Kumar. "India and France are also working to shape a strong development partnership, including in the fields of smart urbanisation, science & technology, clean energy, transportation, and infrastructure sectors," she said. She said the visits of Prime Minister Modi to France in April 2015 and June 2017 and Macron to India have infused new momentum and dynamism to bilateral strategic partnership, brought about increased political convergence and built deep mutual trust. Swaraj also met Philippe Etienne, Diplomatic Advisor to Macron, and exchanged views on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest from a strategic perspective. India and France are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their Strategic Partnership. [June 19, 2018] Commonwealth Financial Network Congratulates Honorees on the InvestmentNews "40 Under 40" List Commonwealth Financial Network, the nation's largest privately held Registered Investment Adviser-independent broker/dealer, congratulates affiliated advisors Magdalena Johndrow, MSc, CFS, financial advisor, Johndrow Wealth Group of Farmington River Financial, based in Farmington, Connecticut, and Nick Loring, CFP, MBA, CRPC, CRPS, CIMA (News - Alert), principal, Loring Advisory Group, based in Greenville, Rhode Island, on being named to the InvestmentNews "40 Under 40" list for 2018. The list was published in the June 18 issue of InvestmentNews and is featured online. The fifth annual "40 Under 40" project spotlights 40 dynamic honorees, all under age 40, who were selected from a pool of approximately 1,000 nominees by a panel of reporters, editors, and other representatives of InvestmentNews. Winners were chosen based on their level of accomplishment, contribution to the financial advice industry, leadership, and promise for the future.* For more information, visit investmentnews.com. "Congratulations to Magdalena Johndrow and Nick Loring on being recognized by InvestmentNews and honored on thi elite list of talented professionals in our industry," said Wayne Bloom, CEO of Commonwealth. "These advisors possess the passion and purpose to strategically grow their businesses, excel in their careers, and make their mark on the advice industry as they move it forward. With a strong focus on doing right by their clients, we remain committed to providing the progressive support, technology, and tools their thriving businesses and clients expect." About Commonwealth Financial Network Founded in 1979, Commonwealth Financial Network, member FINRA/SIPC, is the nation's largest privately held Registered Investment Adviser-independent broker/dealer, with headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts, and San Diego, California. The firm supports approximately 1,800 independent financial advisors nationwide. For more information, please visit www.commonwealth.com. Join Our Community: https://twitter.com/CommonwealthFN https://www.facebook.com/CommonwealthFinancialNetwork https://www.linkedin.com/company/commonwealth-financial-network/ https://blog.commonwealth.com/ *Nominations were solicited from InvestmentNews readers and financial planning industry professionals. Nominees must be 39 or younger and are judged, by the editors of InvestmentNews, on their accomplishments, industry contributions, leadership, and promise (passion, enthusiasm, and ideas). Approximately 1,000 advisors were considered; 4 percent of candidates were named to the list. Individuals were selected based solely on the subjective opinions of InvestmentNews editors, and selection is not indicative of the advisor's future performance. Your experience may vary. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005784/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Robin Systems Recognized by DBTA in the Top 100 Companies That Matter Most in Data SAN JOSE, Calif., June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DataWorks Summit -- Robin Systems, the only container-based Cloud Platform for Big-Data, & Databases, today announced that it has made Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) 6th Annual Top 100 list that includes a wide array of companies addressing the evolving demands for hardware, software and services. The list includes both long-standing, Fortune 500 companies and newer companies on the Data scene. As one of the top 100 companies to be chosen for this prestigious honor, Robin joins the ranks of companies such as Red Hat, Dell EMC, Microsoft, SAP, Teradata, Hortonworks, Oracle and Splunk. The full list of the DBTA 100 is available on the Database Trends and Applications website. According to DBTA, the diverse influences impacting the IT scene today include expanding streams of IoT (Internet of Things) data, the interrelated forces of virtualization and cloud technologies, the need for real-time computing, the rise of data lakes, and the continuing demand for high-level data analytics. At the same time, data is continuing to grow at a rapid pace in todays enterprises. Since the DBTA 100 list premiere 5 years ago, the IT landscape has become more complex. Robin Cloud Platform is designed and purpose-built for container technology. It helps enterprises slash application deployment period from days to minutes and provides an App-store experience to manage data in a more streamlined, simple, and cost-effective manner. We are thrilled that DBTA has recognized Robin as a key innovator that helps enterprises gain agility and meet performance SLAs that support their business objectives and mission critical requirements, said Premal Buch, CEO of Robin Systems. Todays enterprises are looking for simplicity and the ability to better utilize their resources versus additional layers of complexity and staffing needs. We will continue to enable organizations to consume this self-service model to deploy, manage, scale, clone, migrate and upgrade their Big Data Applications on-premise and in the cloud. Tweet this - #DBTA recognizes #Robin Systems in the 2018 DBTA Top 100 list that matter most in Data. Robin joins ranks of #Oracle, #SAP, #Hortonworks, #Splunk, #Dell EMC, #Teradata and #Microsoft and is recognized for bringing agility, improved utilization, better performance, and productivity to enterprises with an app-store experience using containers. About Robin Systems Robin transforms the way enterprise applications drive the infrastructure by bringing together purpose-built container-aware block storage with application-aware manager into the cloud (private and/or public). This demonstrates unique benefits to distributed, clustered and stateful applications including Big-Data and Databases. With a team that includes industry veterans from leading enterprise technology companies such as NetApp, Oracle, and Veritas, Robin seeks to disrupt the $20 billion-plus virtualization market with its container-based compute and storage platform software that delivers better performance higher consolidation and a much simpler application lifecycle management than traditional hypervisor-based virtualization. Founded in 2013, the San Jose California-based company has raised more than $27 million in venture funding from leading investors such as Clear Ventures, DN Capital, USAA, Hasso Plattner Ventures and CloudScale Capital Partners . Follow Robin Systems Website: www.RobinSystems.com Twitter: twitter.com/RobinSystems LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/robin-systems Facebook: www.facebook.com/RobinSystems Robin Systems, the Robin Systems logo and Robin Cloud Platform for Enterprise Applications and Application-to-Spindle Quality of Service Guarantee are trademarks or registered trademarks of Robin Systems, Inc., and are protected by trademark laws of the United States and other jurisdictions. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Media Contact for Robin Systems Andrea Corry (925) 640-5482 press@robinsystems.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Umbo CV to Host 'Building Compounding RMR with Autonomous Video Security Services and Artificial Intelligence' Webinar on June 26 SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Umbo CV (Umbo), the leading provider of autonomous video security technology, announces today that the company will be hosting the 'Building Compounding RMR with Autonomous Video Security Services and Artificial Intelligence' webinar on Tuesday, June 26 at 12:00pm - 12:30pm EDT. The webinar will be brought to attendees through the PSA Education and Security Network and will led by Fred Bohr, Sales Director, Western U.S., Umbo. What: This 30-minute webinar will demonstrate how Umbo's AI-based technology and solutions with build-in real-time streaming protocol (RTSP) can be used in concert with an end-users or system integrators' existing third-party hardware installations to build compounding recurring revene streams and manage hundreds of hours more security video. This will enable the organizations to better protect their property while using fewer human resources. Who: Fred Bohr, Sales Director, Western U.S., Umbo When: June, 26, 2018 at 12:00-12:30pm ET Register: To register for the webinar, please visit https://attendee.gototraining.com/r/5322447008934131457 About Umbo Computer Vision Umbo Computer Vision is an artificial intelligence company developing autonomous video security at enterprise scale. Our mission is to create a system that can understand human behavior, protect critical assets and keep people safe. The company was the recipient of the Best in Video Analytics award from SIA in 2017 and Best in Show from Nvidia GTC 2016 ECS. Learn more at https://umbocv.ai Press Contact: Laura Asendio Merritt Group on behalf of Umbo CV asendio@merrittgrp.com (703) 390-1512 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Charles Ryan Adds Strategic Growth Expertise as New Acronis Board Member SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Acronis, a global leader in hybrid cloud cyber protection currently celebrating its 15-year anniversary, today announced that Charles Ryan, Chairman and CEO of United Financial Group (UFG) Asset Management and a senior advisor to Deutsche Bank AG, joined the Acronis board of directors following a unanimous vote at a recent shareholders' meeting in Zurich. The American banker has a proven capacity to understand global political and economic context and develop businesses with ultimate transparency. As a board member, Ryan will help guide Acronis' global expansion, taking advantage of the company's Singaporean origin and Swiss-owned IP, reinforcing Acronis' position as the most reliable cyber protection vendor on the global market. Ryan co-founded UFG in 1994 and helped it become one of the most successful investment companies in Eastern Europe before Deutsche Bank acquired it in 2006. While he remains Senior Advisor to Deutsche Bank AG, Ryan's primary executive role is running UFG Asset Management, an independent entity that UFG founded in 1996. Today, UFG Asset Management is one of the leading alternative asset managers with over $1.8 billion of assets in hedge fund, private equity and real estate investments. Before founding UFG, Ryan worked as a financial analyst with CS irst Boston from 1989 to 1991 and as an associate and principal banker with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London from 1991 to 1994. "Charles is a pioneer in the financial industry supporting global IT projects, and we're excited to welcome him to Acronis' board of directors," said John Zanni, President of Acronis. "His top-level expertise and deep knowledge of international markets will be extremely valuable as Acronis continues to expand its presence around the world." "We were looking for someone who would further strengthen our board. As a truly independent company founded in Singapore, with corporate headquarters in Switzerland, and strong presence in the U.S., we are confident that Charles has the ability to understand our global nature and will have a positive impact on our business," said Serguei Beloussov, co-founder and CEO of Acronis. "Acronis is one of the most dynamic IT companies providing innovative data protection services to businesses around the world. I'm honored to be joining the board," said Ryan. Ryan graduated with honors in with a degree in Government from Harvard College. As an alumnus, Ryan has served on several leadership committees involved with undergraduate life and fundraising. About Acronis Acronis sets the standard for hybrid cloud IT data protection through its backup, active protection against ransomware, disaster recovery, and secure file sync and share solutions. Powered by the Acronis AnyData Engine and set apart by its image technology, Acronis delivers easy, fast, complete and affordable data protection of all files, applications and operating systems across any environmentvirtual, physical, cloud, mobile and applications. Founded in 2003 in Singapore, with global headquarters in Switzerland, Acronis protects the data of more than 5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses in over 150 countries and 20 languages. With more than 100 patents, Acronis products are consistently named best product of the year and cover a range of features, including migration, cloning, and replication. Today, Acronis solutions are available worldwide through a global network of service providers, distributors, and cloud resellers. Learn more at acronis.com. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/charles-ryan-adds-strategic-growth-expertise-as-new-acronis-board-member-300668555.html SOURCE Acronis [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] AQSACOM Unveils Distributed Cyber Intelligence for Multinational Operators to Cost-Effectively Satisfy Multi-Country Jurisdictional Requirements AQSACOM, a worldwide leader of cyber intelligence software solutions for communication service providers and law enforcement agencies, today announced a distributed approach for managing multinational lawful cyber intelligence compliance that streamlines communication service provider ( CSP (News - Alert) ) operations and reduces costs of deployment when multiple jurisdictions are involved. CSPs around the world are expanding their communication networks across multiple countries and regions for top line growth and to satisfy the requirements of multinational customers. While telecom infrastructure suppliers have provided distributed or cloud-based architectures to enable multi-border network expansion, the requisite cyber intelligence solutions have lacked the same kind of architectural flexibility. To date, satisfying the cyber intelligence requirements meant CSPs were forced to deploy end-to-end mediation solutions within each country to ensure lawful interception, geolocation, and data retention legal compliance. AQSACOM's software-based, cyber intelligence solution, ALIS, can provide CSPs with a more efficient, distributed cyber intelligence compliance architecture. With a centrally managed ALIS cyber intelligence mediation system, AQSACOM can deploy a distributed, country-by-country data collection and retention capabilities that are controlled at the network's operation center. This deployment method satisfies local-country lawful cyber intelligence and GDPR compliance, while enabling a significant reduction in CAPEX and OPEX (News - Alert) for the operator as they deliver services across multiple countries. The AQSACOM solution is ideal for CSPs with cloud-based or SaaS communications solutions, as well as those that have deployed hosted communications platforms such as BroadWorks by BroadSoft (News - Alert) . "AQSACOM's programmable software aproach enables a level of flexibility and scalability for cyber intelligence that alternative centralized, platform-based technologies can't match," explained Frederick Reynolds, vice president of marketing at AQSACOM. "With our distributed architecture, AQSACOM can help CSPs streamline operations and reduce costs when deploying communications services across multiple countries, while offering the highest level of data protection and preservation." ALIS software can be deployed in a virtual, bare-metal or hybrid environment. It provides a converged interception solution for all voice and data networks including 2G, 3G, 4G, VoLTE, IMS, IP, xDSL, FTTH, eRCS, Cable, PSTN, and satellite services. By deploying centralized mediation and management software at any location, ALIS can remotely connect to a distributed software framework that lawfully collects, mediates, delivers and stores any type of network data for each country allowing law enforcement agencies (LEA) the in-country interfaces necessary to satisfy jurisdictional and legal compliance. This is possible with a purpose-built Jurisdiction Management Engine, that is a capability unique to AQSACOM. Specifically, within a multinational, distributed model, ALIS provides the required control over the access, target provisioning and data delivery to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) accounting for national regulatory requirements in each country. This architecture offers an isolated virtual mediation node dedicated to LEA with an end-to-end data encryption. As a result, the AQSACOM solution ensures full compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The distribution of the mediation and delivery function provides the flexibility and scalability according to each country's requirements. The imbedded security features, LEA management, data segregation, encryption, and isolation provide the best-of-breed data protection, confidentiality, and system access control required for such cyber intelligence software. About AQSACOM Founded in 1994, AQSACOM is a leading provider of programmable cyber intelligence software and services. Leveraging its proprietary, highly scalable Virtual Mediation Engine, AQSACOM provides a range of legally mandated applications including lawful interception, data retention, and geolocation services. An ISO 9001:2015 certified company, AQSACOM's software is used worldwide by fixed, mobile, and virtual network operators, internet services providers, and law enforcement agencies. The Company's mission is to be the leading cyber intelligence software developer and greatly improve the probability of law enforcement's success while minimizing their level of risk. Headquartered in Paris and additional research and development centers in Dallas and Dubai, AQSACOM services a global customer base with sales and service from offices in Europe, US, UAE, Brazil and Australia. For more information about AQSACOM visit http://www.aqsacom.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005360/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Stem Software wheels in former Volkswagen, Michelin exec to fuel growth MIDLAND-ODESSA, Texas, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Stem Software is pleased to announce the addition of Dr. Robert Brescia as President and CEO. Dr. Brescia has twice served in the Pentagon, was Chief Administrative Officer of Army Materiel Command, served under two US presidents and has held top leadership roles in the private sector with Volkswagen and Michelin. He also has an impressive list of domestic and international achievements with various other governmental and private organizations. As Stem Softwares new CEO, Dr. Robert Brescia brings with him decades of leadership experience in military, government and education. Stem Founder, Joshua Crawford, is enhusiastic about the opportunity to bring in someone with such impressive credentials to lead the ten-year-old oilfield technology solutions and software company looking to expand its offerings. "We are building on the foundation we have laid," says Crawford. "I needed someone with a proven track record of success to help cultivate the offerings that we currently have, and expand these core offerings into new directions we are developing. These new directions are focused primarily on two new products - Reap AI and Reap Labs. Reap AI uses patent-pending artificial intelligence (AI) processes to predict and prevent equipment failures. Reap Labs will use real-world options for testing clients' new technology. Both of these will be coming on-line over the next few months. Reap AI will be strengthened by a panel of oil industry veterans that Crawford calls the "Silverback Guild." Leveraging their vast combined years of experience this panel will incorporate their decision-making processes into the platform, thus bridging the gap between technology and the human factor. Dr. Brescia affirmed his excitement about Stem's breakthrough software offerings for the energy sector. "Well optimization can be achieved and sustained through the regular use of the Reap AI platform. Additionally, we will offer a team of industry experts that can be utilized when a client needs extra help. With their expertise acquired through many years in the oil industry, in diverse disciplines, our "Silverbacks" can be your bench strength." says Dr. Brescia. ABOUT Stem Software: Stem Software is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company based out of the Permian Basin of west Texas. The company provides secured malleable field service, asset, and inventory management solutions for enterprise or startup oilfield service and E&P companies. Contact: Collin Simmons (432)789-1694 (877)505-7836 reap@stemsoftware.com www.stemsoftware.com A photo accompanying this announcement is available at //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/214d7fc9-ae7a-4913-83e5-dda706c2276a [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Ford Acquires Iconic Michigan Central Station as Centerpiece of New Detroit Campus to Usher in Ford's Smart, Connected Future Ford's (News - Alert) Highland Park plant helped create America's middle class. At Willow Run, Ford workers built the planes and tanks that helped win World War II, setting the stage for American prosperity. Generations of families have worked at the 100-year-old Rouge factory, putting the world on wheels and helping grow the middle class. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005788/en/ Ford has acquired the iconic Michigan Central Station and plans to transform it into the centerpiece of a vibrant new campus in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood that will serve as an innovation hub for Ford's vision for the future of transportation. (Photo: Business Wire) Now, as the company ushers in its next era, Ford adds Detroit's Corktown neighborhood to that transformative list. The new Corktown campus will be a hub where Ford and its partners will work on autonomous and electric vehicles, and design urban mobility services and solutions that includes smart, connected vehicles, roads, parking and public transit. In a week in which the company celebrated its 115th anniversary, Ford today formally announced the acquisition of Michigan Central Station. Ford employees, city and state officials, Corktown residents and Detroit civic leaders attended the ceremony at the iconic former train station. "Michigan Central Station is a place that in many ways tells the story of Detroit over the past century," said Bill Ford, the company's executive chairman. "We at Ford want to help write the next chapter, working together in Corktown with the best startups, the smartest talent, and the thinkers, engineers, and problem-solvers who see things differently - all to shape the future of mobility and transportation." The acquisition of Michigan Central Station comes alongside the company's purchase of the former Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, two acres of vacant land, the site of an old brass factory and the recent purchase of a refurbished former factory in Corktown, now home to Ford's electric vehicle and autonomous vehicle business teams. "What Rouge was to Ford in the industrial age, Corktown can be for Ford in the information age," said Ford President and CEO Jim Hackett. "It will be the proving ground where Ford and our partners design and test the services and solutions for the way people are going to live and get around tomorrow, creating a Southeast Michigan mobility corridor that spans west from Dearborn to Ann Arbor, and east to Detroit." Ford plans to have at least 1.2 million square feet of space in Corktown, three-quarters of which will be split between the company and its partners. Approximately 2,500 Ford employees, most from the mobility team, who will call Corktown their work home by 2022 - with space to accommodate 2,500 additional employees of partners and other businesses. The remaining 300,000 square feet will serve as a mix of community and retail space, and residential housing. This project is supported by our strong partnership with state and local government officials. Development of Michigan Central Station and other Corktown locations is critical to Ford's future as the company continues learning how urban areas are changing and the role transportation plays in revitalizing cities. Being in the heart of America's comeback city will help attract talent, startups and engineers that want to address these issues with Ford. At the same time, Ford is continuing with it Dearborn Campus Transformation plan that started in 2016. This summer the 150,000-square-foot Wagner Place development in West Dearborn is on track to open, as is a new driving dynamics lab located on Ford's Product Development Campus. The 10-year Dearborn plan will also continue to bring key work groups closer together, including the company's product development teams to one campus. Preparing smart vehicles for a smart world As cities cope with booming populations, aging infrastructure and new technology, the way people move is changing rapidly. Rather than simply integrating new technology into an aging transportation system, Ford's vision includes a fresh approach for how the overall transportation system can benefit from new ideas that help people lead better and more productive lives. The future of transportation requires more than new vehicles - or even self-driving vehicles. It requires smart vehicles that can communicate with an increasingly smart and connected world. That's why Ford is developing a Transportation Mobility Cloud - an open platform that manages information flow and transactions between different services - to help cities optimize their various modes of transit. The company is also committed to ensuring vehicles can communicate with tech-enabled surroundings to reduce CO2, lower congestion, and improve safety. In Corktown, Ford's efforts can come together in an urban environment, proving-out technology in the same environment where new ideas must be applied. This campus has the potential to help return Detroit to being the "mobility capital of the world" - shaping the future of transportation for the better. "This will be the kind of campus where the emerging economy thrives - a collaborative ecosystem of companies, educators, investors, and innovators," Hackett said. "This is where part of our team will live and work as a part of this community, alongside the customers and neighbors whose lives we're trying to make better." Working for the community While Ford's Corktown investments are crucial to the company's long-tern planning, it is also represents a commitment to the city of Detroit and its future, with Michigan Central Station envisioned as a beacon of development and opportunity. Ford's plans for the station to include restoration of the grand hall to its original luster; attraction of local shops and restaurants; and creating new residential options in the up-and-coming neighborhood. The station will serve as a public space for people to enjoy, with more details to come in the future. Ford is committed to working with Corktown residents and businesses to make certain its development efforts align with the historic nature of the community and complement other planned developments to revitalize the neighborhood. "Just as Dearborn does, Corktown holds a special place in my heart," said Bill Ford. "Henry Ford was the son of an immigrant. His father, William Ford, came over from Cork during Ireland's potato famine. And Corktown was a destination for immigrants like him who came here with little more than hope. It was a place where you could reimagine what's possible. That's what we want to do all over again, right here in Corktown - to build tomorrow, together." Ford thanks the Moroun family, the long-time owners of Michigan Central Station, for their support in making this project possible. Michigan Central Station, designed by the same architects that designed New York's Grand Central Station, was the main intercity passenger rail depot in Detroit. Built for the Michigan Central Railroad, it replaced the original depot in downtown Detroit, which was shuttered after a major fire in December 1913. Formally dedicated on Jan. 4, 1914, the station remained open for business until the cessation of Amtrak service on Jan. 6, 1988. With a train depot and 13-story office tower with a roof height of 230 feet, it was the world's tallest rail station when constructed. Before renovations begin, Ford is offering the public a chance to attend an open house at Michigan Central Station from June 22-24. Highlights of this complimentary tour include: Exhibit: Curated in partnership with the Detroit Historical Society, an open and airy exhibit allows guests to explore the rich history of Michigan Central Station and Detroit through visuals, text and artifacts, while taking in the grand architecture around them. The exhibit includes pieces from local artists who capture the spirit of Corktown today. Curated in partnership with the Detroit Historical Society, an open and airy exhibit allows guests to explore the rich history of Michigan Central Station and Detroit through visuals, text and artifacts, while taking in the grand architecture around them. The exhibit includes pieces from local artists who capture the spirit of Corktown today. Self-guided tour: Visitors will have rare access to the entire first floor of the train station with a self-guided tour that showcases images of what the train station once was, juxtaposed with how it looks today. Visitors will have rare access to the entire first floor of the train station with a self-guided tour that showcases images of what the train station once was, juxtaposed with how it looks today. Documentary preview: Visitors will get a first-look at "Detroit: Comeback City," a HISTORY documentary that charts the mutual rise, fall and rise again story of Detroit and Michigan Central Station in the words of real Detroiters. The documentary will debut at 9 p.m. eastern July 1 on HISTORY. Visitors will get a first-look at "Detroit: Comeback City," a HISTORY documentary that charts the mutual rise, fall and rise again story of Detroit and Michigan Central Station in the words of real Detroiters. The documentary will debut at 9 p.m. eastern July 1 on HISTORY. Community Area: Ford is hosting community engagements in partnership with the Ford Fund inside the station, highlighting local artists, entrepreneurs and the youth from Corktown. Activities include live mural making with Corktown artists and a student STEAM lab. For additional photos, video and other content, please visit this link. About Ford Motor Company (News - Alert) Ford Motor Company is a global company based in Dearborn, Michigan. The company designs, manufactures, markets and services a full line of Ford cars, trucks, SUVs, electrified vehicles and Lincoln luxury vehicles, provides financial services through Ford Motor Credit Company and is pursuing leadership positions in electrification, autonomous vehicles and mobility solutions. Ford employs approximately 202,000 people worldwide. For more information regarding Ford, its products and Ford Motor Credit Company, please visit www.corporate.ford.com. For news releases, related materials and high-resolution photos and video, visit www.media.ford.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005788/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] HEIDENHAIN is Proud to Support University of Michigan's Hyperloop Team HEIDENHAIN CORPORATION is proud to support the University of Michigan's Hyperloop team with a sponsorship, as well as donation of motion control feedback for its high-speed pod. The Michigan Hyperloop team is one of the 20 to make it to the next stage of competition based on Elon Musk's vision of future ground transportation. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005230/en/ HEIDENHAIN is Proud to Support University of Michigan's Hyperloop Team (Photo: Business Wire) Its goal is to race along the "Hypertube", a mile-long partial-vacuum tube in place at SpaceX's Hawthorne, CA (News - Alert) , campus where Musk's vision is being researched and designed. In Musk's 2013 ground transportation paper, pods of people and cargo trave between cities at transonic speeds in a network of low-pressure tubes, while self-driving electric cars transport goods from Hyperloop stations to their final destinations around the country. At the Hyperloop competition at SpaceX (News - Alert) this July, its third phase called "Competition III" will take place. In order to win, the pod must accelerate to a speed faster than all of its competitors before fully braking in the short distance provided by the track. To support these efforts, HEIDENHAIN CORPORATION in North America has provided funds to the Michigan team at the Wolverine level, as well as donated four compact ERO rotary encoders designed for high accuracy and reliability in servo drives. "HEIDENHAIN's encoders for motion control promise to provide the utmost in motor feedback," said Jonathan Dougherty, HEIDENHAIN Product Specialist, Automation Division, "and we are proud to support these forward-thinking young engineers with tools to enable our future. We wish them the best of luck!" Michigan's Hyperloop team credits their success as a truly collaborative effort with a team that has grown to fifty-plus dedicated members. Team Media Director Emanuel Papageorgiou (BFA '19) adds "It's great to see how many freshmen are actively involved on our team this year. Seeing how many fresh faces took the lead to complete assignments and parts before their deadline, even if they weren't assigned to them, has been really refreshing and provides our members with invaluable hands-on experience." About HEIDENHAIN Dr. Johannes HEIDENHAIN GmbH, headquartered in Traunreut, Germany, develops and supports motion control feedback solutions for the machine tool, semiconductor, electronics assembly and test, metrology, automation, medical, energy, biotechnology and other global markets. HEIDENHAIN employs approximately 6,000 people worldwide in its core business activities. The North American subsidiary is HEIDENHAIN CORPORATION, headquartered in Schaumburg, IL, and San Jose, CA, and has been serving the U.S. industry for over 50 years. www.heidenhain.us Downloadable image available at: http://www.heidenhain.us/wp-content/uploads/PIC-Mich-Hyperloop-Team.jpg View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005230/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Leading Private Equity Firm Acquires Largest Privately-Owned Telecommunications Provider in Nebraska WASHINGTON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Grain Management, LLC (Grain), a leading private equity firm focused on investments in the communications sector, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Great Plains Communications - the largest privately-owned telecommunications provider in Nebraska. "We are enthusiastic about the outstanding performance Great Plains Communications has delivered for its customers, and we are thrilled to partner with the current management team to continue pursuing their vision of being the region's leading provider of high-quality, fiber-based telecommunications services," said David Grain, Founder & CEO of Grain Management. Grain will acquire Great Plains Communications from its current owners, whose families have led the company's growth since 1910, when it began as a local telephone company. Throughout its long history, Great Plains Communications has strategically transitioned itself into a leading regional provider of fiber-based services through significant investment in its state-of-the-art network and facilities. The company offers residential services, such as digital phone, high-definition cable television, and broadband Internet through DSL, cable modem, satellite or fiber to more than 90 communities across the state. It also provides business services ranging from traditional voice and data products to installation and support of large business networks with scalable Ethernet solutions. "We were committed to choosing a buyer that would support the family's dedication to delivering high-quality services to our customers," said current owners, the Garrigan and Jensen families, who are third and fourth generation descendants of Founder E.C. Hunt. "Great Plains Communications' capable employees, led by CEO Todd Foje and the management team, will continue to carry on the mission of the family and Grain Management." "This acquisition is a positive step forward in our vision of providing the best telecommunications services to sustain and advance Nebraska," said Great Plains Communications CEO, Todd Foje. "Together with Grain Management, we will be able to expand our network and enhance our offerings to benefit our customers, employees and the local communities we serve. Our team looks forward to partnering with Grain Management and utilizing their deep experience in regional fiber investment." Upon completion of the acquisition, Great Plains Communications will operate over 9,500 route miles of high-quality network architecture. With additional resources from Grain Management, the company intends to enhance its presence throughout the Midwest, extending and improving its network for both customers and their communities. TD Bank served as financial advisor to Grain Management. Alston & Bird LLP served as legal counsel to Grain Management. UBS Investment Bank served as exclusive financial advisor to Great Plains Communications in the transaction. Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP served as legal counsel to Great Plains Communications with assistance from Kutak Rock LLP and Woods & Aitken LLP. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018, following the satisfaction of customary regulatory approvals. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. About Grain Management Grain Management, LLC is a leading private equity firm focused on investments in the communications sector. The firm was founded in 2007 with the objective of bringing a differentiated approach to the industry characterized by expansive sector knowledge, rigorous analytics, and dedicated, in-house operating and financial professionals. Grain is directed by a team of highly experienced investment professionals with deep industry knowledge and a specialized skillset, marked by extensive operating history, deep quantitative and analytical proficiency, and regulatory expertise. For more information visit www.graingp.com. About Great Plains Communications Great Plains Communications is the largest privately-owned telecommunications provider in Nebraska, delivering high speed Internet, cable television, and voice services to over 90 communities across the state. The company also prides itself on their progressive approach to accommodating the unique needs of all regional and national telecommunications carriers, LECs, ISPs, wireless carriers and other service providers utilizing superior engineering and custom build strategies. At the core of its service offering is an extensive 9,500-mile regional fiber network including over 300 fiber miles in the Omaha Metro area. The network extends beyond Nebraska into Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wyoming offering community access rings, last-mile, and middle-mile solutions, all fully supported by their 24x7x365 Network Operations Center. For more information visit www.gpcom.com. Contact: Lina Francis, PR@graingp.com View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/leading-private-equity-firm-acquires-largest-privately-owned-telecommunications-provider-in-nebraska-300668669.html SOURCE Grain Management, LLC [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Sweiderk Will Succeed Staatz as SECU President and CEO The Board of Directors at SECU - Maryland's largest credit union - announced today that Dave Sweiderk will succeed Rod Staatz as President and CEO of the $3.5 billion credit union. Staatz, who has served as SECU's President and CEO since 2003, announced earlier this year that he intends to retire in 2018. Sweiderk brings more than 25 years of experience leading high-performing financial services organizations to SECU. Most recently, he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at OneAZ Credit Union, where he was charged with transforming member engagement and leading the member-facing execution strategy. Before joining OneAZ, he held executive level management positions at First National Bank of Omaha, Sovereign Bank, and Chevy Chase Bank in Maryland. "While our national search produced a number of highly qualified candidates, it was evident to all on the Board that Dave was the right person to build upon Rod Staatz's many successes and work effectively in our highly collaborative environment," says Mark Reger, SECU Board Chairman. "We are very confident that under his leadership, SECU is very well-positioned to continue serving Marylanders into the future." "Dave is highly qualified and has the vision to grow SECU and continue building on the great work we've accomplished to date. I know he will do great things for SECU," adds Staatz. Sweiderk and his family, which includes his wife of 30 years, Cristina, and three children, will be relocating to Maryland from Arizona. Sweiderk fficially will become CEO on September 4. Staatz, meanwhile, will stay on board at SECU to work with Sweiderk as he transitions to his new position. During Staatz's tenure, SECU's assets grew from $1.36 billion to more than $3.5 billion over the past 15 years. SECU also continued to expand throughout Maryland, growing to more than a quarter of a million members with 22 branches and thousands of free ATMs. It joined a partnership with Bellco and Bethpage Credit Unions to become the third owner of Open Technology Solutions (News - Alert) (OTS), a Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) providing collaborative, technology-related services to its credit union partners. Staatz was also responsible for leading SECU through numerous banking evolutions, implementing a comprehensive growth strategy for the organization while expanding such innovative services as mobile and online banking, remote video tellers, and a sophisticated range of financial products and services. He became a staunch supporter of financial literacy for young adults, spearheading SECU's financial literacy initiatives which include involvement in three Millionaire's Clubs, Scholarship Programs for Maryland state employees and the University System of Maryland, and a partnership with the Maryland Coalition of Financial Literacy. "SECU made a quantum leap forward under Rod's leadership," Reger concludes. "He put Maryland's mark on the national credit union movement through his service as Chairman of the Credit Union National Association and became a widely respected voice for credit union regulatory and legislative advocacy efforts, all of which have helped to foster the growth of credit unions in Maryland and throughout the country." For more information about SECU, visit www.secumd.org. ABOUT SECU Founded in Baltimore in 1951, SECU is Maryland's largest credit union. SECU is ranked among the top 50 credit unions for total assets in the U.S. Headquartered in Linthicum, MD, SECU has 22 branches and 100+ ATMs throughout Maryland. SECU also provides access to thousands of free ATMs through the CO-OP network. For more information about SECU, visit www.secumd.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619006164/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Report showed 16.2 mn people were freshly displaced in 2017 which equates to 44,500 being displaced everyday, 1 person every 2 seconds. Rohingya Muslims, who spent four days in the open after crossing over from Myanmar into Bangladesh, carry their belongings after they were allowed to proceed towards a refugee camp, at Palong Khali, Bangladesh. (Photo: AP) United Nations: A record 68.5 million people have been forced flee their homes due to war, violence and persecution, notably in places like Myanmar and Syria, the UN said on Tuesday. By the end of 2017, the number was nearly three million higher than the previous year and showed a 50-per cent increase from the 42.7 million uprooted from their homes a decade ago, according to a report by the UN refugee agency. The current figure is equivalent to the entire population of Thailand, and the number of people forcibly displaced equates to one in every 110 persons worldwide, it said. "We are at a watershed, where success in managing forced displacement globally requires a new and far more comprehensive approach so that countries and communities aren't left dealing with this alone," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. But around 70 per cent of that number are people from just 10 countries, he told reporters in Geneva ahead of the report's launch. "If there were solutions to conflicts in those 10 countries, or in some of them at least, that huge figure, instead of rising every year, could start going down," he said, calling for more political will to halt the crises driving so many from their homes. Every two seconds The report showed that 16.2 million people were freshly displaced last year, and included those forced to flee for the first time as well as those who had been previously displaced. This equates to some 44,500 people being pushed out of their homes every day or one person every two seconds, UNHCR said. Most people flee within their own country and are defined as internally displaced people, or IDPs. By the end of 2017, there were some 40 million IDPs worldwide, down slightly from previous years, with Colombia, Syria and Democratic Republic of Congo accounting for the greatest numbers. Another 25.4 million people more than half of them children were registered as refugees last year. That is nearly three million more than in 2016, and "the highest known total to date", it said. South Sudan numbers soar Syria's seven-year conflict alone had, by the end of last year, pushed more than 6.3 million people out of the country, accounting for nearly one-third of the global refugee population. Another 6.2 million Syrians are internally displaced. The second largest refugee-producing country in 2017 was Afghanistan, whose refugee population grew by five per cent during the year to 2.6 million people. The increase was due mainly to births and more Afghans being granted asylum in Germany, UNHCR said. South Sudan meanwhile saw the largest increase last year, with the number of refugees fleeing the world's youngest nation soaring from 1.4 million at the beginning of the year to 2.4 million at the end. Grandi said South Sudan was experiencing "a very bad emergency" which had apparently escaped the notice of both the government and the opposition who did not appear to be "taking seriously the desperate situation of their own people." Most refugees in poor countries Refugees from Myanmar more than doubled last year to 1.2 million, as a brutal army crackdown forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to pour across the border into Bangladesh. Tuesday's report also highlighted large-scale displacements in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and DR Congo among others. And as Israel marks 70 years of independence, there are some 5.4 million Palestinians still living as refugees, it said. Despite the focus on migrant numbers arriving in Europe and the United States, a full 85 per cent of refugees are living in low- and middle-income countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Uganda, Grandi said. Turkey was hosting by far the largest number of refugees, with 3.5 million registered there by the end of 2017, most of them Syrians. [June 19, 2018] Garfield Celebrates 40th Birthday in Popular Mobile Game The Tribez VILNIUS, Lithuania, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- When The Tribez throws a birthday party for a friend, they always make sure the guest of honour feels at home. In celebration of Garfield's 40th anniversary today, Game Insight is welcoming Garfield and Odie into their very own limited time event in The Tribez. "Creating a beloved character that can stand the test of time is an incredible accomplishment," said Anatoly Ropotov, CEO of Game Insight. "We're excited about where The Tribez has been and where it's going, but building the kind of legacy that Jim Davis has with Garfield is the sort of thing that only happens once in a lifetime. Our Tribezmen have a lot in common with Garfield, from their love of food to their lament of hard work, so we couldn't be more grateful to Jim Davis and PAWS Inc. for letting us celebrate this accomplishment with them." The Tribes x Garfield is an exclusive event that kicks off with Garfield and Odie exploring a neighbor's house on a quest to find yet another delicious meal, only to accidentally stumble into a time machine that sends them back to an unknown island in the era of The Tribez. The Tribez x Garfield features a brand new island to explore, and 100 new quests that players will complete to repair the time machine and send Garfield and Odie back home. Like Garfield, The Tribez has accrued significant staying power of its own. Having reached 60 million players, the franchise is celebrating its 12th year -- both with today's launch of their in-game Garfield collaboration, and the impnding launch of the next game in the series this summer, Trade Island: Big City Tribez. The Tribez x Garfield is the second brand partnership Game Insight has undertaken in 2018, following the successful introduction of a brand tie-in featuring celebrated action hero Danny Trejo in their popular mobile game Guns of Boom. "The key to a successful brand partnership is finding a match that makes sense for the audience and complements both brands effectively," added Ropotov. "This is something we are always mindful of when considering how best to serve our community with new content. When it comes to Garfield, not only are we huge fans, but so are the fans of The Tribez. There's some clear overlap in our audiences, and when combined with Garfield's narrative potential that fits perfectly in The Tribez world, we knew we'd have something special to share with our gamers." The Tribez x Garfield begins today and will continue in the world of The Tribez throughout the summer. To learn more about The Tribez, visit game-insight.com. About Game Insight Founded in 2009, Game Insight is the world's leading innovator of mobile and social games, creating exceptional gameplay experiences across casual to hardcore titles. With more than 300 million players, Game Insight is one of the largest games companies in the world. The company is pushing the boundaries of technology and graphics across all platforms to make the most entertaining and fun experiences for everyone. Game Insight is based in Vilnius, Lithuania with development studios around the world. For more information go tohttp://www.game-insight.com/ or follow us on Twitter @game_insight. About PAWS, Incorporated Paws, Incorporated was founded in 1981 by cartoonist Jim Davis as a creative house to support Garfield licensing. Today, the company, located in rural Indiana, handles not only the creative angle, but also the business concerns of the corpulent kitty worldwide. Paws, Inc. is a privately held company and the sole owner of the copyrights and trademarks for GARFIELD and GARFIELD Characters. Media Contact Consort Partners for Game Insight Game-Insight@consortpartners.com View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/garfield-celebrates-40th-birthday-in-popular-mobile-game-the-tribez-300668787.html SOURCE Game Insight [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Mobility: Videotron launches Ottawa blitz MONTREAL, June 19, 2018 /CNW Telbec/ - Videotron is currently conducting a large-scale campaign to raise its profile in the Ottawa area and position itself as an alternative to the current mobile carriers. Videotron has been in the Ottawa market for several years with its high-performance mobile network. It is now gearing up to accelerate its business development in the region and win over Ottawa-area consumers. "We want to energize this market by offering innovative services, attractive plans and the best customer experience anywhere," said Bertrand Hebert, Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer of Videotron. "Like our entry into the Quebec mobile market, our presence in Ottawa creates another option for consumers looking for mobile services that truly meet their needs." Videotron's campaign will highlight advantages such as its award-winning customer service and powerful LTE mobile network. All of Videotron's mobile plans are Canada-wide and include extended national coverage. New customers can keep their phones and port their current 613 number to Videotron, if they wish. Videotron is the only carrier to offer the same plans and prices in Ontario and Quebec. Ottawa residents will therefore be able to take advantage of Videotron's competitive plans, most of which include Club illico mobile1, and attractive features such as the family discount, 2 which lets parents activate up to two free phones with unlimited calling and texting for their children. Videotron has two retail locations in the Ottawa area, at the St. Laurent Centre and Place d'Orleans, with a third one set to open this summer at the Bayshore Shopping Centre. The summer-long campaign will include billboards, online ads, radio commercials and major event sponsorships. About Videotron Videotron (www.videotron.com), a wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., is an integrated communications company engaged in cable television, interactive multimedia development, Internet access, cable telephone and mobile telephone services. Videotron is a leader in new technologies with its illico interactive television service and its broadband network, which supports high-speed cable Internet access, digital cable television, and other services. As of March 31, 2018, Videotron was serving 1,626,000 cable television customers. The Club illico over-the-top video service had 383,400 members. Videotron is also the Quebec leader in high-speed Internet access, with 1,674,600 subscribers to its cable service as of March 31, 2018. As of the same date, Videotron had 1,047,000 subscriber connections to its mobile telephone service and was providing cable telephone service to 1,169,600 Quebec households and organizations. For the thirteenth consecutive year, Videotron ranked as Quebec's most respected telecommunications company in the annual Leger survey. Follow us on the Web | facebook.com/videotron Follow us on Twitter | twitter.com/videotron _________________________________ 1 Club illico mobile is included in Videotron Premium Mobile plans. 2 This limited-time offer applies to Videotron Residential customers who subscribe to two Premium Mobile plans with a minimum monthly service rate of $64.95 each, and at least one Talk and Texts plan. The customer benefits from this special offer only if all the above-mentioned plans are under the same account. Maximum of two free Talk and Text plans per account. SOURCE Videotron [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Bird Eager to Participate in New, E-Scooter Pilot Program in Denver VENICE, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Bird today announced its intention to seek a permit to operate dockless scooters in Denver as part of a new pilot program the City and County is developing. The program integrates e-scooters with the City's bus and rail transit system to provide people convenient access to public transit. The pilot, which is still in development, would allow dockless scooters to be stationed at bus and light rail stops, providing increased access and transportation options for commuters. Denver's transit riders will be able to use e-scooters to get to and from transit hubs, and to easily get around town. The City expects to unveil the pilot program framework by June 29 and to allow operators of dockless technology to apply for a permit. "We look forward to working with the City of Denver, a fast-growing city that shares our commitment to delivering innovative mobility solutions," said David Estrada, Bird's Chief Legal Officer. "The innovative pilot program has the potential to be a model of how to bring low-cost, environmentally friendly transportation solutions to communities across the nation." Through the program, the City will offer permits to multiple dockless operators and set forth safe operating guidelines that bild upon Denver's mobility goals, as outlined in the City's Mobility Action Plan. These goals include offering people more options to get around town in ways that meet people's day-to-day needs and increasing the percentage of people who take public transit. "As Denver continues to grow, it is critically important for us to encourage greater use of multimodal transportation options to reduce vehicle congestion," said Eulois Cleckley, Executive Director of Denver Public Works. "We believe dockless technology has the potential to provide people with first-mile and last-mile links between their homes, destinations and public transit hubs more easily." Riders interested in finding a Bird near them can download the app and sign up at www.birdapp.com . About Bird Bird is a last-mile electric vehicle sharing company dedicated to bringing affordable, environmentally friendly transportation solutions to communities across the world. It provides a fleet of shared electric scooters that can be accessed via smartphone. Birds give people looking to take a short journey across town or down that "last-mile" from the subway or bus to their destination a way to do so that does not pollute the air or add to traffic. Bird works closely with the cities in which it operates so that Bird is a reliable and affordable transportation option for people who live and work there. Founded in 2017 by transportation pioneer Travis VanderZanden, Bird is headquartered in Venice, Calif., and is rapidly expanding across the country. Follow Bird on Instagram (www.instagram.com/bird), on Twitter at @BirdRide, and find more information at www.bird.co. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bird-eager-to-participate-in-new-e-scooter-pilot-program-in-denver-300668923.html SOURCE Bird [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] John Aaroe Returns from Retirement to Join Pacific Union International as Strategic Advisor SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Pacific Union International, the West Coast's leading luxury real estate brand and No. 1 independent brokerage in California by total sales volume, announced today that visionary real estate icon John Aaroe is joining the company as a strategic advisor. Aaroe, the former CEO and founder of John Aaroe Group, will support the company's core initiatives, including its growth strategy and the launch of The Estates of Pacific Union division and associated philanthropic efforts. "I am honored and excited to rejoin this growing company and to have an active role with Pacific Union International beyond being a shareholder," Aaroe says. "It's been thrilling to observe the incredible success Pacific Union has had over the past six months, and I am inspired to once again contribute and be part of the future of this company." "I am thrilled to have John back in the fold," Nick Segal, Pacific Union International president in Southern California, shares. "Together we are better! The collection of our intellectual capital only enhances the experiences and programs we have underway for our real estate professionals and their clients." "We're fortunate for John's return to real estate and to join us as a strategic advisor for the Pacific Union International brand and its bright future," Pacific Union International CEO Mark A. McLaughlin adds. "I look forward to John providing his unparalleled industry experience, extraordinary people skills, and long-standing passion for philanthropy as he contributes to the further growth of our business and specifically The Estates of Pacific Union division." Aaroe's return comes on the heels of Pacific Union's launch of Private View, a new online real estate marketplace featuring homes for sale not found on the MLS, Redfin, or Zillow that already has narly $200 million in listings. Pacific Union was also recently named the fifth-largest brokerage in the U.S. for sales volume from real estate industry media organizations REAL Trends and RISMedia. Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Business Journal named Pacific Union the No. 1 independent brokerage by sales volume, placing the company at No. 2 overall in Los Angeles County. Prior to his recent retirement in September 2017, Aaroe, a 43-year industry veteran, was CEO of John Aaroe Group, which he founded in 2009 and grew to 450 real estate professionals with $2.5 billion in sales volume annually. Aaroe merged John Aaroe Group with Pacific Union International in December 2016, and on Jan. 1, 2018, John Aaroe Group, along with Partners Trust and Gibson International, came together to launch the Pacific Union International brand in Southern California. About Pacific Union International Founded in San Francisco in 1975, Pacific Union International, Inc. is the West Coast's premier luxury real estate brand, with 2017 sales volume of $14.1 billion. In 2018, real estate industry leaders RISMedia and REAL Trends ranked Pacific Union as the fifth-largest brokerage in the U.S. Through its 2015 acquisition of The Mark Company, the nation's leading sales and marketing firm for new urban luxury developments, Pacific Union expanded its brand to development projects from San Diego to Seattle. In 2016, Pacific Union merged with Los Angeles-based brokerage John Aaroe Group, followed in 2017 with mergers with Partners Trust and Gibson International also based in Los Angeles, and Empire Realty Associates, extending the Pacific Union brand to become the preeminent leader and ultimate California real estate company. The strategic alliance of these five powerhouses supports 1,700 elite real estate professionals in more than 50 offices throughout the West Coast. Northern California markets include San Francisco, Marin, Contra Costa, Alameda, Napa, and Sonoma counties; Silicon Valley; and the Lake Tahoe region. Greater Los Angeles markets include Beverly Hills, Malibu, Downtown, Northeast L.A., the Westside, as well as the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys. To extend Pacific Union's international reach, the brokerage established an award-winning, Beijing-based China Concierge program in 2013 that fully supports its Chinese investors on the mainland. Additionally, Pacific Union offers a full range of personal and commercial real estate services, including buying, selling and relocation, in addition to operating joint-venture businesses that provide rental and commercial property management and insurance services. Locally owned, Pacific Union executes with a vision for the future, an entrepreneurial mindset and an unwavering commitment to deliver exceptional service and expertise. For more information, visit: www.pacificunion.com. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/john-aaroe-returns-from-retirement-to-join-pacific-union-international-as-strategic-advisor-300668940.html SOURCE Pacific Union International [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Visits Blackfoot Communications; Tours Fiber Network Sites Blackfoot, the owner and operator of the region's largest multi-gigabit network, welcomed FCC (News - Alert) Chairman Ajit Pai to Montana today. During Chairman Pai's visit, Blackfoot CEO, Jason Williams led a tour of the company's fiber construction, followed by a working session that was focused on delivering broadband access to rural communities across Blackfoot's service areas. "Bridging the digital divide and expanding Internet access to all corners of the country is my top priority at the FCC," said Chairman Pai. "That's why I appreciate the opportunity to visit states, including Montana, to see how service providers - large and small - are driving broadband access to communities. During my visit with Blackfoot Communications, I heard about their efforts to expand high-speed broadband to remote parts of the state. I also visited the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes f the Flathead Reservation to see firsthand the buildout happening to connect Tribal lands with digital opportunity. Everyone who wants to participate in the digital economy should be able to do so." In addition to its fiber construction, Chairman Pai met with key Blackfoot stakeholders to discuss new customer-focused initiatives including Blackfoot's open innovation lab C2M beta, new residential and enterprise-level product solutions, and company-wide smart growth projects. "We were proud to host Chairman Pai and his team at our offices to provide an update on our multi-year broadband network upgrade project," said Jason Williams. "In addition to extending our fiber across Montana, we were thrilled to describe the entrepreneurial opportunities created through our new open innovation lab; as well as our efforts to increase digital access to our residential and enterprise business customers by delivering new, state-of-the-art products and services." To learn more about Blackfoot, visit www.blackfoot.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619006345/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] FTE Networks Is Awarded New Multi-Year Service Contract in Five Markets to Build its Infrastructure with Leading Fortune 100 Telecommunications Company NAPLES, Fla., June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FTE Networks, Inc. (NYSE American:FTNW) ("FTE" or the "Company"), a leading provider of innovative technology-oriented solutions for smart platforms, network infrastructure and intelligent buildings, announced today that the Companys Infrastructure Segment has been awarded a contract expanding its Inside Plant (ISP) line of business footprint in five markets. FTE was awarded the contract by a Fortune 100 global telecommunications company due to FTE's consistent high-quality work performance. "This contract is significant because it represents an increase in the scope and size of work performed for this customer, said Mr. Anthony Sirotka, Chief Administrative Officer and Head of FTE's Infrastructure Segment. "We are excited to again be rewarded for our excellent service with some of the largest telecommunications carriers in the industry. "We are pleased to announce this new multi-year, multi-million dollar expansion with our globally recognized strategic partner and further strengthen our presence in the markets we serve, said Mr. Michael Palleschi, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of FTE. Our ISP business is high-margin in nature and the relationships we build and maintain with these customers will serve to facilitate the growth of all segments of our business. The commercial-based projects will deliver critical state-of-the-art customer driven infrastructure services. Under the terms of the Master Service Agreement, FTE will manage five turf markets and perform EF&I (engineer, furnish, install) services. The markets include the states of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. The engagement is slated to begin in July and extend through the end of 2019. About FTE Networks, Inc. Forward-Looking Statements This release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as: will, growth, and similar references to future periods. Examples of forward-looking statements in this release may include, without limitation, statements and forecasts regarding how this new contract award signals greater and continued market acceptance of our products and service offerings; our ability to successfully leverage this newly awarded contract to increase our market share; and other matters that involve known or unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from results expressed or implied by this release. Forward-looking statements are neither historical facts nor assurances of future performance. Instead, they are based only on our current beliefs, expectations, and assumptions regarding the future of our business, future plans and strategies, projections, anticipated events and market trends, the economy and other future conditions. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of our control. These risk factors and others are included from time to time in documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to, our Form 10-Ks, Form 10-Qs and Form 8-Ks. Our actual results and financial condition may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statement made by us in this release is based only on information currently available to us and speaks only as of the date on which it is made. We undertake no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise. For more information, please contact: Investor Contact: Ted Haberfield MZ Group Phone: (760) 755-2716 Email: thaberfield@mzgroup.us Corporate Contact: FTE Networks, Inc. 999 Vanderbilt Beach Rd., Suite 601 Naples, FL 23108 (877) 850-4308 ir@ftenet.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [June 19, 2018] Green Hills Software Expands Safety-Critical Integrated Cockpit Solutions with Automotive Grade Linux TOKYO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AUTOMOTIVE LINUX SUMMIT Green Hills Software, the global leader in high-assurance real-time operating systems, today announced the availability of INTEGRITY Multivisor secure virtualization and advanced development tools for Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) on leading 64-bit automotive grade SoCs. For the first time, AGL applications can be added to automotive systems meeting the highest ISO 26262 safety levels through the INTEGRITY real-time operating system (RTOS). As a result, OEMs can confidently run AGL-based infotainment and connected car applications in secure partitions alongside safety-critical and security-critical functions including instrument clusters, rear-view camera, ADAS, OTA, gateway and V2X. The results are lower system costs, more scalable platforms, shorter development times and lower ASIL certification costs. The Automotive Grade Linux project is a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open software stack for the software defined automotive cockpit and hosted by The Linux Foundation. "We are pleased to have Green Hills Software participating in our growing and global community," said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux. "Their experience and technology help customers build and deploy safe and secure AGL-based vehicle software and we look forward to their contributions to expand and further establish AGL as an industry standard." As a Member for AGL, Green Hills is demonstrating a consolidated integrated cockpit that incorporates AGL at the Automotive Linux Summit, June 20-22 in Tokyo. The INTEGRITY RTOS and Multivisor hypervisor safely and securely run a safety-critical instrument cluster alongside AGL-based infotainment applications. Both domains safely share high-performance and smooth 3D OpenGL graphics provided by the cross-platform Qt Automotive Suite graphics framework. Over its 25 years in the automotive industry, the Green Hills ecosystem for the integrated cockpit has grown to dozens of partners providing safe and secure integrated solutions running on all major automotive-grade SoC manufacturers including Qualcomm Technologies, Renesas, NXP, Intel, STMicroelectronics and NVIDIA. "Integrated cockpits toay need a scalable software architecture to safely and securely combine Linux and Android infotainment functions with critical vehicle functions that require automotive-grade safety and certification. When used with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820A Automotive platform, the Green Hills breakthrough INTEGRITY RTOS and Multivisor virtualization solution allows global Tier 1s and OEMs to take on this challenge," said Nakul Duggal, vice president for product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "We look forward to further strengthening our relationship with Green Hills, as we share the commitment to offer the safety-conscious and security-rich, performance solutions that can define the future of high-performance, scalable vehicle cockpits." "Renesas' R-Car is one of the standard reference platforms for AGL and has supported the system development of customers," said Masayasu Yoshida, Senior Director of Automotive Information Solution Business Division, at Renesas Electronics Corporation. "With INTEGRITY Multivisor now compatible with AGL, we are very pleased that INTEGRITY RTOS and AGL can be implemented safely and securely on the R-Car platform. We are confident that our achievement will contribute to further acceleration in the development of cockpit systems." Green Hills Software's INTEGRITY Multivisor is the system virtualization service for the certified INTEGRITY RTOS microkernel. The INTEGRITY RTOS architecture is certified at the highest levels of automotive safety ISO 2626262 ASIL D and is the only operating system architecture to ever achieve the world's highest level of security EAL 6+, Separation Kernel Protection Profile, Common Criteria. Since 2003, INTEGRITY Multivisor has been the industry's only safe and secure architecture with this trusted pedigree for simultaneously running one or more guest operating systems alongside life-critical functions on a single multicore SoC. Other features tailored to rigorous embedded systems are: Safe and secure device sharing, such as GPU, between AGL and critical applications Fast boot critical tasks in tens of milliseconds Single unified debugger gives developers deep visibility into Linux and INTEGRITY kernels, drivers and applications Secure IPC between native RTOS tasks and Linux Proven customer deployments since 2003 Availability INTEGRITY and INTEGRITY Multivisor for Automotive Grade Linux are available to early access customers today on the Qualcomm Technologies' Snapdragon 820A Automotive platform and Renesas R-Car H3 SoC. About Automotive Grade Linux Automotive Grade Linux is a collaborative open source project that aims to accelerate the development and adoption of a fully open software stack for the connected car. Leveraging the power and strength of Linux at its core, AGL is uniting automakers and technology companies to develop an open platform that offers OEMs complete control of the user experience so the industry can rapidly innovate where it counts. The AGL platform is available to all, and anyone can participate in its development. Learn more: https://www.automotivelinux.org/ About Green Hills Software Founded in 1982, Green Hills Software is the worldwide leader in embedded safety and security. In 2008, the Green Hills INTEGRITY-178 RTOS was the first and only operating system to be certified by NIAP (National Information Assurance Partnership comprised of NSA & NIST) to EAL 6+, High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved for any software product. Our open architecture integrated development solutions address deeply embedded, absolute security and high-reliability applications for the automotive military/avionics, medical, industrial, networking, consumer and other markets that demand industry-certified solutions. Green Hills Software is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA, with European headquarters in the United Kingdom. Visit Green Hills Software at www.ghs.com. Green Hills, the Green Hills logo, INTEGRITY and Multivisor are trademarks or registered trademarks of Green Hills Software, in the U.S. and/or internationally. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Qualcomm and Snapdragon are trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated, registered in the United States and other countries. Qualcomm Snapdragon is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/green-hills-software-expands-safety-critical-integrated-cockpit-solutions-with-automotive-grade-linux-300668107.html SOURCE Green Hills Software [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] by Nirmala Carvalho Fr George Muttathuparambil is the Salesian provincial superior in Bangalore, Karnataka. In 2016 he was in Yemen when an Islamist group took Fr Tom Uzhunnalil, killing four sisters of Mother Teresa. This is an unjust war, he says. Innocent people are suffering horribly. Mumbai (AsiaNews) Fr George Muttathuparambil, a Salesian from India and provincial superior in Bangalore, Karnataka, saw the horror of war in Yemen. For this reason, people must pray for peace, he told AsiaNews. He responded to appeals for peace in Yemen made by Pope Francis last Sunday during the Angelus, and Mgr Paul Hinder, apostolic vicar of southern Arabia (United Arab Emirates, Oman and Yemen), yesterday. "What people are going through is unimaginable. On 23 June we will offer Mass and Eucharistic adoration in solidarity [with the population]. Together with my community, I will fill Heaven [with prayers] for peace in Yemen." Fr Muttathuparambil knows Yemen well. He served in the Arab country between 2010 and 2016, where the Missionaries of Charity ran four parishes in Sana'a, Taiz, Hoddai and Aden. He was in the church in Taiz when on 4 March 2016, as the countrys war escalated, an Islamist group kidnapped Fr Tom Uzhunnalil, his confrere (who was released in September 2017), killing the four Sisters of Mother Teresa in a seniors home in Aden. Of that tragic day, "Sister Sally (the only survivor of the massacre) phoned me. She was crying, saying that the bodies of the four missionaries were lying in the compound, whilst Fr Tom was missing. "At that point I immediately called Mgr Hinder, the Mother House in Kolkata and the Salesian Provincial House in Bangalore and informed them of what had happened. Later someone told me that Fr Tom had been taken away." In view of the countrys insecurity, Fr Muttathuparambil left the mission on 30 March, 2016, and returned to India where he is still waiting to return to serve the Yemeni people. "Innocent people are suffering horribly. This is an unjust war. Let us pray to God that he may intervene and bring justice and peace. The situation is truly serious, people need food, water, medicine. Everything has been destroyed." According to the latest estimates, the conflict has killed more than 10,000 people with another 250,000 at risk. We join Mgr Hinder in prayer. He is very worried about the region and about the Christians who live in the four parishes." Shareholder groups, civil liberties organizations, and over 150,000 consumers have signed letters and petitions calling on Amazon to stop selling its facial recognition technology to law enforcement, fearing a high potential for abuse from the government. Amazon Shareholders Concerned About Governments' Use Of Rekognition In a letter to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, 19 shareholders expressed their concerns with Amazons Rekognition facial recognition technology being used by law enforcement. According to them, the technology poses not only privacy risks to customers, but also for Amazons stock value and the companys investors. The shareholders worry that while Rekognition may be used to aid law enforcement in legal activities, it could also be used to violate human rights. The letter comes at a time when the Trump administration is embroiled in a scandal over separating immigrant children from their parents. ACLU had warned before that Amazons Rekognition could be used to identify immigrants in order for the U.S. government to round them up and deport them. The shareholders also quoted several recent reports showing that facial recognition technology is either not sufficiently accurate, making many mistakes when trying to identify people, or its accurate mostly when trying to identify white people but not so much when identifying people of color. Erroneous matches could be quite troublesome for those misidentified by the system. In April 2018, a coalition of more than 40 leading U.S. civil and racial justice organizations said facial recognition technology developed by Axos would be categorically unethical to deploy and would inevitably misidentify some innocent civilians as suspects." The letter to Axon also said: In addition, research indicates that face recognition technology will never be perfectly accurate and reliable, and that accuracy rates are likely to differ based on subjects race and gender. Real-time face recognition therefore would inevitably misidentify some innocent civilians as suspects. These errors could have fatal consequencesconsequences that fall disproportionately on certain populations. Real-time face recognition could also prime officers to perceive individuals as more dangerous than they really are and to use more force than the situation requires. No policy or safeguard can mitigate these risks sufficiently well for real-time face recognition ever to be marketable. The Amazon shareholders are also concerned that the sale of Rekognition software would expand to less democratic countries, where those governments would use it to incarcerate and torture democracy advocates. The shareholders demanded that Amazon immediately halt the expansion, further development, and marketing of Rekognition to all governments until the Board of Directors has placed appropriate guidelines and policies to safeguard the rights of customers, shareholders, another citizens. Prior to this, Amazon refuted the claims that its facial recognition technology will be abused by law enforcement, saying that it will instead "benefit society." Civil Rights Groups Join The Call The ACLU, Demand Progress, CREDO, and the Congressional Black Caucus have also joined the shareholders in telling Amazon to stop selling its Rekognition technology to law enforcement. Nicole Ozer, Technology and Civil Liberties Director for the ACLU of California, said: The message sent to Amazon today by its shareholders, more than 150,000 consumers, and a nationwide coalition is loud and clear: If Amazon is indeed a customer-centric company that opposes secret government surveillance, it needs to stop selling dangerous face surveillance to the government that can be used to attack protesters, target immigrants, and spy on neighborhoods. Samsung Electronics Co. is facing a hefty penalty for improper use of a FinFET technology patent. According to Bloomberg, a federal jury in Texas on Friday said that the South Korean electronics company infringed a US patent owned by the licensing arm of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The jury told Samsung to hand over $400 million for damages, but the company could be facing three times that amount. Bloomberg reported that the jury found Samsungs actions to be willful, which gives the judge the authority to raise the fine by as much as three times the jurys figure. Qualcomm and GlobalFoundries joined Samsung to defend the use of the FinFET technology. GlobalFoundries also manufactures chips with FinFET technology and Qualcomm is a customer of both companies. The jury found them both guilty. However, Qualcomm and GlobalFoundries were not ordered to pay any damages to KAIST. Samsung disagrees with the jurys judgment, and it maintains that it did not infringe KAISTs patents because it helped develop the technology with the university. Samsung said that it was disappointed by the verdict. It also said that it will consider options to obtain an outcome that is reasonable, including an appeal. Verizon customers' smartphones will soon quit being snitches. The Associated Press reports that the company plans to stop selling location data to third-party companies, such as LocationSmart and Zumigo, which in turn sell that data to dozens of other companies, "as soon as possible." Most people know their smartphones are monitoring their every move. Yet relatively few knew that wireless carriers like Verizon, AT&T and Sprint sell that location data to brokers, effectively knocking over the first domino in a series of transactions involving their personal info. That changed in May, when it was revealed that anyone could access real-time location data about any phone in the U.S., thanks to LocationSmart. This leak was particularly worrisome because consumers have no way of stopping companies like LocationSmart and Zumigo from collecting this information. It's much like the Equifax data breach that put hundreds of millions of Americans' personal data at risk even though most probably had no idea the company was collecting their info to begin with. Wireless carriers, not their customers, decide if these companies are given data. Verizon is the first U.S. wireless carrier to announce plans to break ties with these data brokers. The Associated Press said the company wrote a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who often advocates for improved privacy and security, announcing its plans to stop working with LocationSmart and other data brokers. It will continue to offer data to fraud prevention and other security-focused companies, however. It's also important to note that Verizon said it will terminate its arrangements with data brokers "as soon as possible." That leaves the company a lot of wiggle room - it could have signed multi-year agreements with these data brokers, for example, or it could face technical difficulties along the way. Verizon's proclamations are the first step, not the last, to making sure access to its customers' data will be more carefully regulated. Now we'll just have to see if AT&T, Sprint and other North American wireless carriers follow Verizon's lead. They probably don't want to let the company advertise itself as the only carrier that doesn't sell your location information to data brokers. It's bad enough that they have to watch the "Can you hear me now?" guy roast their network availability. Being known as a company that enables smartphones to be snitches is an even worse look. Harley-Davidson returns to the AIMExpo in 2018 for its second appearance at the Nationwide event with all-new 2019 models. What better place to demo Harleys new lineup than in Las Vegas, Nevada, in one of the most scenic and expansive riding areas in the country? Harley-Davidson and Sin City; What Better Match? As part of its pledge of "50 new models in five years" and 100 new models by 2027, I am very much looking forward to what Harley-Davidson reveals this year. This years AIMExpo goes west to Las Vegas, Nevada, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center October 11-14 and coincides with Harleys 115th Anniversary celebration year. AIMExpo plays a valuable and much-needed role within the greater powersports marketplace of bringing the industry together as we look toward the future, said Harley-Davidson Vice President of Marketing, Heather Malenshek. Last year, in a keynote to show attendees, our CEO Matt Levatich provided invaluable insight into the great need to build new riders as an industry. As Americas leading manufacturer of motorcycles and one of the most customer-led companies in the world, we look forward to interacting with new and current riders in Las Vegas. The newly announced lineup will be prominently displayed and available for demo rides as well as its JUMPSTART Rider Experience for the initiation of new riders. As part of its pledge of 50 new models in five years and 100 new models by 2027, I am very much looking forward to what Harley-Davidson reveals this year. . References Motorcycle Manufacturers Are Scrambling For New Riders See our article on the shift in the market. 50 New Harley-Davidson Models In Five Years? See our article on Harleys promise of 50 new models in five years. Source: AIMExpo Over 3,000 Vespa scooters from 37 countries descended on Belfast, Northern Ireland, over the weekend for one of the most important gatherings of Vespa enthusiasts around the world: Vespa World Days . The annual event is a celebration of the Vespa legend, a scooter born in 1946 to become a true global icon that transcends generations, languages, and cultures. Vespa World Days The award for Solo Vespa Driver went to a woman from Prague who traveled over 3,700 miles by herself to attend the 12th annual Vespa event. Thousands of scooters and thousands more spectators made the trip to Northern Ireland for the four-day event. Folks arrived from, not only the U.K., but also from nations from all over Europe, North America, and Asia to show their love for the Vespa. Fewer Vespas registered for the event this year than last years gathering in Celle, Germany, but several more nations were represented in Belfast. Among the attendees this year was a very pristine 1951 Vespa Douglas, still with its original spare tire. Each year, the event finale is the announcement of the Vespa Trophy, which recognizes club members who spread the Vespa love by documenting all of their stops on the way to the event in photos and special stamps on their Travel Books. This year, the trophy, fittingly enough, went to Italy and the Vespa Club Verona. A first-time award for Solo Vespa Driver went to a woman from Prague who traveled over 3,700 miles by herself to attend the 12th annual Vespa event. Thats no small feat on a scooter. The 13th annual event slated for 2019 and will be held in Hungary. . The COMESA-Connect Industry Dialogue set for June 21st to 22nd, in Kigali, will bring together high level technical expertise from the public and private sector to provide common solutions that will prepare, protect, revolutionize and sustain competitive businesses, organizers say. Formed in December 1994 to replace the Preferential Trade Area, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) is a free trade area with 19 member states stretching from Libya to Swaziland. The dialogue themed Smart Technologies for Sustainable Businesses will seek to establish collective understanding and strategic focus on the potential of blockchain and other technologies for supporting trade and trade facilitation as well as the other business and industry within the African region and address constraints that affect business competitiveness in the region and promote positive interaction between industry and IT to promote the use of technology and growth of African private sector among others. Geoffrey Kamanzi, the Private Sector Federation Director of Trade and Business Development, said more than 200 private sector players are expected to attend the event which is co-organised by PSF and the COMESA Business Council (CBC), a private sector institution of COMESA that represents interests of businesses sectors at a regional level. Its majorly aimed at understanding the potential of blockchain and other technologies for supporting business. So, members from various sectors including ICT, manufacturing, finance, Agro- processing, textile and garments and others are expected to attend, Kamanzi said, further explaining that blockchain is a modern way of doing business using IT tools basically, transacting business without using paper money. Asked what the PSF especially hopes to again from the dialogue, he said: Our members will be introduced to modern and secure ways of carrying out businesses and engaging with their partners regionally and internationally than the usual way. So, new trends should be introduced and adopted by our members to facilitate trade generally. During the event, the private sector; industry leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, SME businesses and innovators from sectors such as manufacturing, agro-industry and services industries will dialogue with captains of industry in ICT and understand the importance of ICT across many sectors. Speaking prior to the dialogue, Dr Amany Asfour, the CBC Chairperson, is quoted saying that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is a canopy term that highlights all communication activities as well as other technological services in various sectors in industry that enhance business productivity. The importance of ICTs in industry cannot be over emphasized because it has the ability to create greater access to information that help businesses to operate efficiently, Dr. Asfour said. COMESA Secretary General, Sindiso Ngwenya, said: Globally the ICT sector continues to be a key pillar in terms of digital transformation across many other sectors in the modern economy. The competencies in ICT largely contribute to competitiveness of many industries and services in the economy. Therefore, industry must harness and get bulk benefits of the ICT revolution. It is noted that over the years, trends in ICT keep evolving and its importance on industry effectiveness has had positive impact on various sectors of the economy. African economies are also well within the technology playing field. Countries have just grasped the magnitude of importance for systems, units and organizations to collaborate to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. Smart synergies are now seen as a tool to eradicate poverty, increase intra- trade, establish strong cross border alliances and increase the continents overall trade facilitation systems, reads part of a press release by the organisers. As noted, from smart phones to smart homes to smart cars to artificial intelligence, technology is making these tools indispensable for man in every aspect of life. In 2017 alone, the number of mobile phone users across the globe was estimated to be 2.5 billion and in 2018 the number is expected to go higher. The number of smart cars been sold annually is rising steadily. Manufacturing and other processing industry is quickly adopting the technology of Industry 4.0 which allows for more efficient business operations and higher quality goods to be produced at a lower cost. This revolution in the manufacturing industry will foster industrial growth and enhance economic development of the sector across the globe. The dialogue will also aim to structure policy recommendations to ensure the use of technology address digital financial inclusion, industry competitiveness and revolutionary innovations for competitive sustainable enterprises; address the ideal structures that to ensure data protection policies in the region; and increase awareness and strengthen intellectual property framework. The saying "Honesty is the best policy" now sounds like a broken record. However, it is one of the truest quotes there is, especially in a store located in Batanes, Philippines. The Honesty Coffee Shop is an "honesty store" located in the Philippines' northernmost island. People ranging from locals and tourists come into the small hut to buy necessities and have to fend for themselves because no one mans the shop. People not only put their honesty to the test but also their morals in this seaside hut. Ivatan owners Elena and Jose Gabilo only come to the quaint coffee shop to restock their drinks and snacks but they don't do the cashier work. In a cafe where there is no cashier or barista, people are trusted to pay for what they get. The store is decorated with signs such as "get what you need, pay for what you need," and "this store is too small for dishonest people" to remind its customers. History The store was born out of necessity. The cafe was brought to life because its owners knew that people who crossed the sea by a small boat needed hot water to drink. According to the store's history written on its wall, Elena dreamt that when they would retire, she would set a table equipped with hot water and coffee for the people to drink after their journey. The original store built in the 1990s only had sugar, coffee, and hot water every morning. There was also a stove for people who wanted to cook rice or heat up additional water. Elena would only go to the store in the morning to prepare and pick up its earnings and clean by 5:00 p.m. Already on its 23rd year, the store has proven that honesty is good for business. Unlike famous coffee shops, its visitors have to forego an Instagram-worthy cappuccino or espresso for instant coffee, but tourists still flock the store which is now considered a tourist spot. Apart from the vibrant hues of blue and green which looks worthy of a desktop background, the town, also known as one of the top places to visit in the Philippines, also boasts its zero crime rate. How To Purchase The rules of the coffee shop hang on its wall. It is self-service, so after people get what they need, they pay for it at the designated area. People who have change need to knock next door to get it, and if no one answers, they'll just have to give more than the price. After, its customers need to list whatever they bought in a logbook. If they fancy leaving a note, they can also sign up in the guestbook where they can give messages to the owners and other visiting tourists. How To Go There People who want to visit Batanes have to fly from Manila through AirSWIFT, Skyget, or Cebgo. There are only three flights at most per day. From Basco Airport, people can reach the town proper by renting a tricycle for only $4, where they can reach the famous Honesty Coffee Shop in 30 to 40 minutes. Tourists may also rent a motorbike or join tours that make a stop at the thatched-roof store located along National Road, Ivana, Batanes. See Now: The U.S. had the highest number of Most Wanted properties, dominating the Hotels.com Loved By Guests Awards 2018 The Department of Justice has rejected the cancellation of nuns visa over alleged participation in political activities because it was without legal basis. The deportation order issued against the nun is still pending but is following a different path than the revocation of her visa. Manila (AsiaNews/Agencies) The Philippine Department of Justice (DOJ) has temporarily halted the expulsion order of Sister Patricia Fox, 71, allowing her to remain in the country. DOJ Secretary Menardo Guevarra yesterday accepted the nuns appeal to nullify the expulsion order issued by the Bureau of Immigration (BI), forfeiting her missionary visa. In April, following an investigation requested by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, BI chief Jaime Morente had ordered the nun to leave the country within 30 days. This came after the the Sister of Our Lady of Sion was arrested for participating in anti-government demonstrations". She was released a day later. Sister Patricia has lived in the Philippines for 27 years, working with peasants and indigenous people. Recently, she took part in an international investigation and solidarity mission into alleged violations of the rights of peasants and Lumad people, on the southern island of Mindanao. The authorities accuse the nun of taking part in political meetings in the cities of Davao and Tagum. For Guevarra, the decision to cancel her visa over alleged participation in partisan political activities was without legal basis. He explained that while the immigration laws give the BI broad powers in regulating the entry and stay of aliens in the country, visa forfeiture is not among those powers. What the BI did in this case is beyond what the law provides, that is why it has to be struck down, Guevarra said. The DOJ chief ordered the BI to ascertain whether the charge and the evidence against Fox make out a case for visa cancellation, for which specific grounds are stated in the law. The BI treated this as a case for visa forfeiture instead of for visa cancellation. As a result, the Bureau has yet to decide whether the supposed actions of Fox do indeed justify the cancellation of her visa. It would therefore be premature for us at the DOJ to decide that matter now, he said. The deportation order against the religious is still pending but is thus following a different path than the revocation of the visa. Until a final resolution of the visa cancellation and/or deportation proceedings is reached, or until the expiration of her missionary visa, whichever comes first, Sr Fox may continue to perform her duties as a missionary in the Philippines, he added. In 2017 the total was 68.5 million. Last year a jump of 3.1 million, far above 300 thousand in 2016. Globally one in 110 people fall under status of displaced. UN experts: we need a "new and more global" approach to the problem. Over a fifth of the total refugees are Palestinians. Beirut (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The number of refugees and internally displaced persons due to conflicts in the world has reached a new record in 2017. According to UN experts, for the fifth consecutive year there has been a growth, up to 68.5 million; of these, half are children. The annual report prepared by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) shows that the "jump" recorded last year (3.1 million people) far exceeds the increase in 2016, which was around 300 thousand units. This figure is explained by the peak in the number of refugees, while the number of internally displaced persons has decreased, albeit slightly. This means that, overall, one in 110 people in the world is in the status of displaced. "We are at a decisive moment" underlines Filippo Grandi, who has led the Unchr since 2015, and the "answer" to the issue of displaced persons globally "requires a new and more global approach". The central point, he warns, is "do not leave them alone" to face this problem the countries and the world communities concerned. According to UNHCR leaders, "refugees who have fled their country to escape conflicts and persecution represent about 25.4 million out of a total of 68.5 million people uprooted from their land". This means that, compared to 2016, last year there was "an increase of 2.9 million". This, they conclude, "is the highest growth ever recorded by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on an annual basis". At the same time, the number of asylum seekers waiting for refugee status at the end of 2017 increased by about 300 thousand, reaching 3.1 million. The internally displaced persons in their country of origin are 40 million, with a slight decrease compared to the 40.3 million registered in 2016. Finally, as far as refugees are concerned, just over a fifth of the total are Palestinians. The rest comes - in large majority - from just five states: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia. Donald Trump ran on a campaign promise to "get rid of" the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). There was even a bill introduced, H.R. 861, which states in its entirety: That bill won't make it to a vote but serves mainly to generate talking points. It certainly indicates the direction some legislators would like to go. Much of the talk focuses on Trump's EPA budget proposal for 2019 (pdf), which aims to cut EPA's budget 23% (from $8.7 billion to $6.1 billion). It would also slash headcount to 12,250 from the current level of 15,408 (if you believe EPA) or 14,140 (if you credit numbers being circulated by the EPA union, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE). To put this in perspective: the EPA budget is 0.1% of the total Federal budget in 2018. So the problem some people have with the EPA isn't what it costs to operate the agency with the mission to ensure we have clean water, healthy air, and proper waste management. The problem is that the regulations are perceived as too burdensome. In that context, a new threat bigger than budget cuts and brain drains has now become apparent. A Notice of Proposed Rulemaking just published seeks input on changes to how the EPA calculates the costs and benefits of their regulations. This suggests that while Trump may not get rid of the EPA (which turns out to be not so easy), but the agency could end up losing the power to get regulations passed. To understand what is at stake, it is important to know that the government has controls in place to evaluate and balance the burden of regulations on businesses with the benefits - the cost-benefit analysis requirement. In order to pass new regulations, the EPA must show that the cost of the regulation is lower than the benefits. Currently, the EPA considers ALL of the benefits of a regulation. This may include so-called co-benefits, which are advantages that may not related specifically to the contaminant(s) being regulated but will still contribute gains for human health or the environment or economy. For example, when the EPA sought to set limits on sulfur emissions to stop acid rain, it was clear that removing sulfur from the emissions would also significantly decrease the release of fine particulate matter, which can get into people's lungs and is a well known contributor to early deaths. Rather than regulate the particulate separately, EPA recognizes the two-for-the-price-of-one gains in the sulfur rule and the benefits calculated show a tremendous gain over the costs of installing sulfur scrubbers to clean up the air. The proposal suggests that including co-benefits in cost-benefit calculations should not be allowed. If this change is implemented, it will significantly curtail the ability of the agency to accurately assess the full benefits gained when industry responds to a new regulation. Of course, there is the opposing viewpoint as well. Read the Wall Street Journal's editorial for an opinion suggesting that EPA has been rigging the numbers to support regulations. Regardless of which side of the argument you take, the time to make your voice heard is now. Until the 13th of July, EPA will accept comments on this proposal. The proposal and process comments are found in the Federal Register. Or if you don't know enough to weigh in constructively yourself, look for comments being supported by your local environmental organization or business bureau and sign your weight onto their comments. Don't take those cheap yellow fruits for granted! They're at the center of a great agricultural turmoil. Bananas may go for dirt-cheap prices at the grocery store, but behind the scenes investors are flinging millions of dollars at the industry in an effort to save our favorite fruit. The plain yellow banana known as the Cavendish variety that is most commonly found in North American and European supermarkets is at risk of extinction, thanks to a virulent disease that has ravaged crops in Africa, Asia, Australia, and parts of the Middle East in recent years. The disease goes by several names -- 'fusarium wilt,' Panama disease, and Tropical Race 4 are a few of its monikers -- and experts are very concerned that it's only a matter of time till it spreads to Latin America, where the vast majority of the world's bananas are grown. The Cavendish accounts for 99.9 percent of all bananas traded globally, and it already has replaced a different and allegedly tastier variety called Gros Michel that was wiped out in the 1960s and '70s following a similar fungal outbreak. A number of biotech companies and researchers have jumped at the opportunity to create a fungal-resistant variety of banana. Tropic Biosciences is one such company. It has just received $10 million from investors and is using gene-editing techniques to make the Cavendish more resilient. The Guardian reports that Tropic Biosciences "has already conducted successful gene editing on a banana cell which can be grown into a full plant." The company's chief scientific officer, Eyal Maori, said: It is not just about disease resistance but also about easing the environmental burden. The new variety will mean the need for less fungicides and higher yields for farmers. The trials should show the plants can perform well in real world conditions and demonstrate value to the growers." Similar projects are underway elsewhere. Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane has been successful in transferring genes from a disease-resistant wild banana to the Cavendish, but is currently undergoing multi-year trials to see how it works over the long term. Other researchers are doing similar work in Israel and Ecuador. The USDA's Tropical Agriculture Research Center, based in Puerto Rico, is experimenting with wild varieties of bananas to see which can resist the fusarium wilt. As of 2016 only 10 percent had passed the test; but even when these are found, being wild varieties, they come with so many seeds that it's difficult to eat the pulp. This requires further cross-breeding, as described by NPR: "There's a special complication when breeding bananas. Breeders have to start with bananas that have seeds; otherwise, there are no offspring. But eventually their efforts have to produce a variety with no seeds, so that people will eat it. It can be done, and in the best of all worlds, this breeding effort would come up with multiple varieties, not just one." The BananEx Project out of Exeter University in England is led by Dan Bebber. He described the different projects to The Guardian: What we are seeing is gene editing versus gene modification with gene editing working with the existing DNA and gene modification adding in DNA of different organisms. But Bebber is concerned that, no matter what genetic tweaking occurs, we need to be looking at the broader picture. What we need is an agricultural industry that is not dominated by mono-crops, that has greater diversity, healthier soil systems that can naturally combat pathogens, and better biological pest and disease controls. The banana industry has not learned its lesson from the Gros Michel disaster, apparently, which is why we are facing a similar wipeout. As shoppers, in the meantime, we can do our part by buying unfamiliar varieties of bananas when we encounter them and opting for organic, which is kinder on the land and farm workers. I'll leave the last word to a commenter on a Washington Post article from last year called "Bananapocalypse": This is "an object lesson in the danger of mono-culture farming, whatever the ostensible benefits of the specific cultivar. This story should be a reference point for those who snort at efforts to preserve heritage breeds and seeds." For a woman, the moment she detects a lump in her breasts, panic sets in. Whether the biopsy results come back showing the lump as cancerous or benign, that womans life as well as that of her loved ones changes forever. 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. Pure madness. This was how Opposition Senator Jayanti Lutchmedial yesterday described the Presidents disclosure that an Order of Merit List for Police Commissioner was submitted to her office and then withdrawn. IN my last article on Saturday, September 25 (Express, Page 13) With Covid Theres No Divide, I called out to the unions of our nation and in particular the leadership of TTUTA, but it seems as though they did not hear or they are not listening. In one village, about 40 per cent of the population has been deported to a re-education camp. As Chinas persecution of the Uyghur continues, hundreds of thousands of people are arrested without cause. All men born in the 1980s and 1990s are considered a danger and interned. Urumqi (AsiaNews/RFA) The entire male population of a village in Xinjiang (western China) has been interned in a re-education camp, this according to Radio Free Asia. A duty officer with the Chinibagh township police station in Qaraqash recently said that in his home village of Yengisheher, almost all of the adult males have been deported. Overall, 40 per cent of the population in our village is currently in re-education camps, said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Only women, children and the elderly are left. This has decimated the local labour force. If the husband is taken away, his wife must take over his work, and where there are young children in a family . . . they must help in the fields, the officer said. For families with no remaining able-bodied members, the village cadres have made arrangements for their fields to be cultivated by other people, he added. The officer said none of his siblings had been placed in the camps because his grandfather had taught them to refrain from anything which would get us into trouble, and to always be loyal and give a good impression to the authorities. Village authorities are following an official directive that brands Uyghurs born in the 1980s and 1990s as members of an unreliable and untrustworthy generation and targets them for re-education because they are considered susceptible to influence by dangerous elements. A source in Aqsaray, a township in Qaraqash County, told RFA at the end of last year that he and other local officials had received an order from county-level authorities to target 40 per cent of the population for re-education. At the time, RFA found that around 5,000 of Qaraqashs population of 34,000 peopleor nearly 15 per cent of the countys residentshad already been taken away to re-education camps. Reports suggest similar orders for quotas have been given in other areas of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). China's central government has not publicly acknowledged the existence of re-education camps in the XUAR. The number of inmates and their conditions remain unknown. Citing credible reports, US lawmakers Marco Rubio and Chris Smith, who head the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said recently that as many as 500,000 to a million people are or have been detained in the re-education camps, calling it the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today. Adrian Zenz, a lecturer in social research methods at the Germany-based European School of Culture and Theology, said the number could be closer to 1.1 million, which equates to 10-11 percent of the adult Muslim population of the region." Uyghurs are a Muslim ethnic group, indigenous to Xinjiang, in north-western China. The persecution against them has intensified since April 2017. They have been accused of having "strong religious views" and "politically incorrect" opinions. For this reason, they have been frequently imprisoned or detained in camps. Others are interned in psychiatric clinics, where they go crazy. Uyghurs phones are controlled by the authorities, they are not allowed to celebrate Ramadan, and their language has been banned from schools. Since 2016, Xinjiang residents who apply for a passport must provide a DNA sample, all in the name of "national stability". Here is some good information on renting a car in Costa Rica. They also offer a discount on Adobe, which I am looking into for my next trip to Costa Rica. For me at least, Costa Rica (other than downtown San Jose or with horrible road conditions) is not a difficult place to drive, and the driving itself can be enjoyable. Guanacaste in general is one of the easier places to drive with good roads and in most cases only a 2WD is necessary. They did mention in the blog that whether you book with them or directly, that Adobe does not charge a couple fees because they do not have a kiosk in the airport (so they don't charge the airport tax). The airport tax is a percent (13%) so it could be a large amount on a longer rental. And the other fee they don't charge is the license plate fee which they say is just a way to nickel-and-dime you ($1.50 per day). You can email them (Yeison and Sammi) with any questions about Costa Rica. hello@mytanfeet.com -:- Message from Tripadvisor staff -:- Tripadvisor staff removed this post because it did not meet Tripadvisor's forum posting guidelines with prohibiting self-promotional advertising or solicitation. We ask all of our members to keep their forum messages free of self-promoting advertisements or solicitation of any kind - members affiliated with any tourism-related business should not include commercial contact information or URLs in their forum messages. 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. Welcome to the forum, John and Diana. Be aware Nov/Dec is summer in Fiji. It will be hot and humid. It is also during the rainy/cyclone season. Doesn't mean it will rain all day every day, or there will be a cyclone. Just something to be aware of. Travel insurance is a must to cover any unforeseen circumstances. There will be negative reviews for any resort. It is impossible for a resort to be all things to everyone. Most are from people who did no research, took the word of a travel agent then expected perfection. Would read through them to see if most are good or bad. There is always something that can put a damper on a resort. Here are some negative reviews I have read when researching resorts: The weather was bad. Unfortunately, can't be predicted or guaranteed, and no fault of the resort. It can rain any where at any time regardless of when or where you go. Food wasn't good. Meals can be hit or miss. We go to our favorite restaurants at home, and sometimes have a bad meal. We don't expect to like every meal when we go to Fiji. There are bugs, ants, and mosquitos. It is the tropics so they are to be expected though resorts do their best to control with sprays. The resort was overrun with kids. Chose a large resort popular with families instead of an adults only resort, or a smaller resort where there would be less children. Service is slow. Nothing happens very fast in Fiji. "Fiji time" takes some getting use to. Once we relaxed, and went with the flow we thoroughly enjoyed getting away from the hustle/bustle of the daily life in the states where you rush around like a chicken with your head cut off doing this and going there. Brookhouse School fees is one of the most expensive in Kenya. The day and boarding school offers their Kenyan as well as international students with an adapted form of IGCSE, British National Curriculum. Here is the Brookhouse School fees that is payable termly. Note that the payments are done in advance as far as there is no prior arrangements made by the department of account. Have a look at the fee structure to see how much you need to pay to have your child attend the school. Brookhouse school fees per term Source: Brookhouse.ac.ke Brookhouse School fees are billed termly after that total for the whole academic year has been done. The school has 3 terms in an academic year. Term 1 is from September to December, term 2 starts from January to March, and finally term 3 is from April to July. Which currency do parents use to pay the school fees? Well, the school gives the parents the liberty to make the payments either in Kenya shillings or the US dollar. You can make the payments via local bankers check or the telegraphic transfer, which is payable to the Brookside School Ltd. Read on for the boarding and the tuition fees per term. Brookhouse school tuition fees Note that the tuition fees includes the textbooks that the student will require as well as some of the vital stationery. The student and the parent is given a handbook that contain some items that a student will be required to provide. Little Brookies pay sh. 80, 000 Early years pay SH. 245,000 Year 1 pay sh. 30,000 Years 2 to 6 pay sh. 530, 000 Years 6 to 8 pay sh. 580, 000 Years 9 to 11 pay sh. 640, 000 Years 12 to 13 pay sh. 660, 000 BTEC courses pay sh. 300, 000 READ ALSO: List of international schools in Kenya Brookhouse School Karen branch fees for boarding and tuition Years 2 to 5 pay sh. 950, 000 Years 6 to 8 pay sh. 1 Million Years 9 to 11 pay sh. 1, 060, 000 Years 12 to 13 pay sh. 1, 080, 000 BTEC courses pay sh. 720, 000 Other Brookhouse school fees structure Brookhouse high school also offers some residential subject courses that will require an additional amount mostly for transport, accommodation, as well as food. For instance, the school might organize a class field trip and in most cases, they pay around sh. 6000 per night. The clubs activities and clubs also charge a small additional cost, which may require a termly or weekly payment; the activities are usually optional. Below are other payments required. You will pay sh. 45, 000 for the registration charge that is not refundable; you only pay ones. The day students are supposed to pay caution money, which goes for sh. 100, 000. The boarding students caution fee is sh. 200, 000 The IFY students pay caution money for sh. 100, 000; the fee is paid once and the good bit is that it is refundable. If the student will require transport for standard routes, he or she will pay sh. 50, 000 termly. If a student will require a door-to-door transport, then be ready to pay sh. 70, 000 termly. If the student will require an individual instrumental or vocal lessons, music, he or she will pay Sh. 8, 000 to sh,12, 000. Keep in mind that the music lessons payments are done directly to the music teachers. The annual yearbook that goes for Sh. 2, 500, which you will pay annually. The non-Kenyan students pay a pass and the entry pass that goes for sh. 15, 000. The boarding students medical cover goes for sh. 65, 000. The optional payments are done annually. Brookehouse high school organization Source: Brookhouse.ac.ke The school has qualified and experienced professional staffs. There are a mix of Kenyan, Asian, as well as British expatriates who are very much focused at delivering the best to the students. The students study from Monday to Friday and classes start off at 8:15 a.m. Of course, the timetable for the high school students will be different with the preparatory one, but all students are supposed to be in the school premises by 8:00A.M. The Brookhouse teachers avoid giving their students homework because they feel that they need to relax from the long day at school. However, as the student grows the more he or she will be required to be a bit committed by carrying an increased homework. During periods before an exam time, it is very vital for a student to do extra revisions and therefore parents should expect them to carry homework. What about the meals? The meals are inclusive in the Brookhouse international school fees and there is also a canteen in the school for the students to access. The school provides cooked meals for both the vegetarian and the non-vegetarian students. Brookhouse net profit The Brookhouse School Kenya fees are very high making one to prove that there are 2 categories in Kenya, the rich and the poor. The owners of the school sold it at sh. 3.6 billion in August 2015 to a British equity fund; honestly, it is one of the biggest transaction done in the Kenyan educational sector. The founder of the expensive school is Piyush Mehta that was back in 1981. The source also gives the estimated 2012 net profit of Brookhouse School, which was around sh. 121.8 million. That is 7 years ago meaning that the net profit now is much higher than that. READ ALSO: Brookhouse International School - Kenyan Hogwarts becomes more and more popular among students Brookhouse application and admissions Would you love your child to join the school? Well, the entry is mostly preferred at the beginning of the first time, August, but you still be accepted at any time of the year. What you need is to get your child prepared to do an entry test and show their previous academic records. The application is done online by filling an application form, which you later forward it to the school. You are also supposed to use the application form to request for an interview that is always practical. You can download the application form in the school website. Source: Tuko.co.ke - Midiwo claimed DP Ruto had stolen too much to qualify to go to heaven - The legislator said even the most corrupt Kenyans would get to heaven if Ruto himself was heaven bound - Ruto accused opposition leaders of investing in funerals while he was investing in heavenly matters - Midiwo said he did not believe President Uhuru Kenyatta was free of corruption - The DP said he was not worried about a lifestyle audit and was ready to highlight the source of his wealth When Deputy President William Ruto attended a church service in Thika on Sunday, June 17, he referred to a verse in the Bible which urges believers to store their treasures in heaven and not on earth where moths and vermin could destroy them. He used this in his defence against the Opposition's criticism of his regular fund raising activities in churches, emphasising that he was "investing in heavenly matters". Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens However, former Gem MP Jakoyo Midiwo has ridiculed Ruto's sentiments saying all Kenyans would make it to heaven if indeed the DP was heaven bound based on his character and actions. READ ALSO: Picha za bintiye Najib Balala zavutia sana, alandana kabisa na babake Former Gem MP Jakoyo Midiwo accused Deputy President William Ruto of stealing public resources. Photo: Jakoyo Midiwo/Facebook. Source: Facebook In a talk show with NTV on Tuesday, June 20, Midiwo in a thin veiled attack against Ruto claimed the DP was using funds acquired through dubious means to sustain his funds drives and other activities where he was dishing money, adding he did not qualify to get to heaven. The MP drew a parallel with Ruto's situation and used the scripture which states that it would be difficult for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. "He grabs school land, grabs land all over, has unexplained wealth. If that is what it takes to go to heaven then all Kenyans will go to heaven," claimed Midiwo in reference to the DP. READ ALSO: Nobody becomes wealthy through their salary - Murkomen defends Ruto's wealth Former Gem MP Jakoyo Midiwo said that if Deputy william Ruto's deeds were heavenly then all Kenyans were qualified to get to heaven. Photo: Jakoyo Midiwo/Faacebook. During the church service with clergy from different churches, Ruto hit out at the Opposition saying its members were busy investing in funerals at a time he was storing up his wealth in heavenly stores. "There are those who are known for investing in funerals. They have the right to continue with that. On the other hand I invest on heavenly matters. We are a democracy and everyone has the right to put their money where their heart is," Ruto said then. This was not the first time the former leader of minority in the National Assembly attacked Ruto accusinh him of swindling public resources. TUKO.co.ke, on Tuesday May 15, reported how Midiwo dismissed Ruto's claims that he was a hustler and best placed to represent ordinary Kenyans as a president. Deputy President William Ruto said opposition leaders they were used to investing in funerals at a time he was investing in heavenly matters through supporting churches. Photo: William Ruto/Facebook. The former legislator alleged Ruto had swindled a bulk of public resources and had no moral authority to declare himself a self-made hustler. Midiwo also said he did not believe the lifestyle audit on all public servants directive by President Uhuru Kenyatta would help much in the war against graft alleging the Head of State was not himself clean. "The president recently made an interesting pronouncement about lifestyle audit of all public servants. It will be wise we begin with him because I don't think he is clean," he said. 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. Matiang'i talks tough as he burns gambling machines - On Tuko TV Source: Tuko.co.ke - Chacha was on the spot for conning several politicians and high ranking government officials - He also sensationally claimed to have slept with a record 13 female MPs and senators - The man claimed his tribulations were a product of love gone sour between him and Sabina Chege Sometimes in April 2018, Murang'a Woman Representative Sabina Chege stunned the country with revelations that someone was using her name to con unsuspecting politicians. That someone who had also allegedly slept with a record 13 MPs and senators was later on identified as Waziri Benson Chacha. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens The police would issue an arrest warrant against the former Devolution Ministry employee who became an instant hit. READ ALSO: Man who allegedly slept with 13 female MPs now claims MP Sabina Chege is hitting back after their break-up Benson Chacha, the man believed to have been extorting cash from legislators, senators, Cabinet Secretaries and other Kenyans was arrested in Tanzania. Photo: Chacha Waziri./Instagram. READ ALSO: The lifestyle of man accused of conning MPs, Senators and cabinet secretaries as told in photos The police had laid a dragnet which ensnared the 23-year-old at Tarime in Tanzania, a few kilometres from his Kuria home. The extortionist was taken to court but later released on a KSh 1 million bail pending investigationss. An exclusive video by a local publisher on Wednesday, April 4, had Chacha speaking from a police cell alleging his tribulations were a product of love gone sour between him and Sabina. Once he was freed, Waziri decided to lay low and kept everyone keen to follow him guessing whether the man had stumbled upon another honourable goody somewhere. You would be wrong to imagine when he re-appeared, the IT specialist would stop flossing the good life. But unbowed like a python, he has coiled out from his 'cave' with even more juicy photo updates. 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. NYS Scam probe | Tuko TV: Source: Kenya Breaking News Today - Mbeya MP Sugu's new song was banned by BASATA on Tuesday, June 19 - BASATA held that the MP's song contained an incitement message that could cause war - The ban on Sugu came just days after BASATA banned several songs belonging to a number of Tanzanian artistes Baraza La Sanaa La Taifa (BASATA), a Tanzanian government institution that regulates music, movies and other creative works has banned Mbeya MP Joseph Mbilinyi's new song in the country. According to the regulatory body, MP Mbilinyi who is a rapper popularly known as Sugu went against the law by releasing an incitement song. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens In a press released sent to different Tanzanian media houses on Tuesday, June 19, and seen by TUKO.co.ke, BASATA claimed Sugu's new song dubbed #219 could lead to war among citizens. READ ALSO: Wazir Chacha, mwanamume aliyedaiwa kushiriki ngono na wabunge, arejea kwa mpigo Mbeya MP Sugus new song was banned by BASATA on Tuesday, June 19. Photo:Bongo5 READ ALSO: Diamond melts fans' hearts as he reveals plan to take children with Zari to USA Just like other Tanzanian artistes whose songs were banned, Sugu was also barred from taking part in any music business including recording, performing and distribution. ''BASATA has officially banned Joseph Mbilinyi's song #219 because of its violent nature and incitement nature. The institution also blocks the rapper from performing, recording or distributing his music,'' the press release read in part. The institution went ahead to justify its move stating that it was forced to act following incessant complaints from members of the public. READ ALSO: I am looking for a Tanzanian baby daddy - Huddah Monroe Tanzanian government bans MP Sugus song, claims its inciting and threat to peace READ ALSO: Tanzanian video vixen who ditched lover after giving birth claims her baby belongs to Diamond ''We have received a lot of phone calls and questions from the public, especially music stakeholders with most people complaining about content of the song. The song does not only contain incitement messages but also did not follow the due process of release according to BASATA laws,'' the letter read. The move to ban Sugu's song came just days after he released it. The ban however was somewhat different from previous ones imposed on other musicians such as Diamond and Nay Wa Mitego. Unlike other musicians whose songs were banned due to their explicit content, Sugu's song was banned because of it's message. 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. Ringtone Disses Diamond Platinumz, Maintains His Love for Zari Hassan | Tuko TV Source: Tuko Unvaccinated students in Forms Four, Five and Six will not have the benefit of online teaching and learning come Monday, as the TTUTA President says teachers cannot do both physical and virtual engagements simultaneously. A regular dialogue between Ukraine and Moldova at the governmental level has contributed to a significant increase in trade between the countries, which amounted to $885 million in 2017 and is expected to grow to $1 billion in 2018. Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Kistion said this at a meeting with Minister of Economy and Infrastructure of the Republic of Moldova Chiril Gaburici in Kyiv, the governments website reports. "We have every reason to speak about an increase in our bilateral trade up to $1 billion this year. In particular, it will be possible to achieve due to the roadmap for the development of the Moldovan-Ukrainian cooperation for 2018, signed by the prime ministers of Ukraine and Moldova in Chisinau in October last year," the Ukrainian deputy prime minister stressed. According to him, the recently signed bilateral agreements on air and road transport liberalization between the two countries also contribute to the deepening of economic and investment cooperation. In addition, the parties at the meeting discussed the issues of the next meeting of the intergovernmental Ukrainian-Moldovan commission for trade and economic cooperation. iy Shanghai is an important strategic partner of Kyiv. Deputy Chairman of Kyiv City State Administration Dmytro Davtian said this after a meeting with the delegation from Shanghai led by the vice mayor of the city, Xu Kunlin, the KCSAs press service informed. "I consider China in general and Shanghai in particular as extremely important strategic partners of Kyiv. I am convinced that we should develop not only infrastructure and road directions that we have already identified as promising. I've been to China twice in the past few months and I understand that the country is interesting as a technology leader and for its tourist opportunities. Actually, there are a lot of directions, the development indicators of Shanghai are amazing, and we would like not only to adopt experience - we prefer to be full partners with interesting investment projects," he said. According to him, despite the fact that Kyiv is smaller than Shanghai, however, it has significant prospects for development. "Shanghai is not only ready to sign official documents with Kyiv; our guests do want partnership relations. And we support this, and we are determined to be mutually beneficial," Davtian said. As noted, the next step should be a working visit of Ukrainian officials to the Chinese metropolis, as well as Ukraine's participation in the first China International Import Expo, which will be held in Shanghai in November, and in which 128 countries have already confirmed their participation. ish The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is a threat to Ukraine and the whole of Europe, as it promotes monopolization of the market rather than diversification of gas supplies to Europe. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said this after a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, an Ukrinform correspondent reported. "We constantly try to remind that this [Nord Stream 2] is a threat to Ukraine, and accordingly - to the whole of Europe. We also emphasize that de facto this means further monopolization rather than diversification of gas supplies," he said. He notes that this issue is extremely important and it is constantly raised by the Polish side. According to him, under the influence of Warsaw, Angela Merkel changed her rhetoric and "entered into a very intensive dialogue with Ukraine." "Previously, there was no talk at all about ensuring part of the transfer through Ukrainian gas pipelines," he stated, adding that it is worthwhile to see how the situation will develop in the future. Morawiecki notes that Poland convincingly demonstrates the risks of the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. "We count on the strong position of several countries that Nord Stream 2 as part of the Third Energy Package will be included into the EU Gas Directive," the Polish prime minister said. The head of the Polish government says that Poland is now putting pressure on the construction of the Baltic gas pipeline, which is underway according to plan. ish The United States is concerned about the growing number of prisoners in Russia on political and religious grounds and expressed concern over the hunger strike of Oleg Sentsov, Stanislav Klykh, Oleksandr Shumkov, and Volodymyr Balukh. This is stated in an official statement by the U.S. Department of State, an Ukrinform correspondent reported. "The United States is deeply concerned by the growing number of individuals now more than 150 identified by credible human rights organizations as political and religious prisoners held by the Government of the Russian Federation," the document reads. "We are especially concerned about the welfare of four Ukrainians unjustly imprisoned who are currently on hunger strikeOleh Sentsov, Stanislav Klykh, Oleksandr Shumkov, and Volodymyr Balukh. We are likewise troubled by the case of Oyub Titiyev, a human rights activist prosecuted on trumped-up drug charges in Chechnya, whose pre-trial detention was recently extended. In retaliation for peaceful religious practice, Russian authorities have detained Jehovahs Witness Dennis Christensen without trial since May 2017. Five Church of Scientology leaders have also been subjected to detention without trial since June 2017, as well as over a dozen Muslim followers of Turkish theologian Said Nursi," the U.S. Department of State stressed. The United States called on Russia to release all those identified as political or religious prisoners immediately and cease its use of the legal system to suppress dissent and peaceful religious practice. ish Yuriy Tandit, an advisor to the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Vasyl Hrytsak, has filled a letter of resignation. Tandit told this to an Ukrinform correspondent. "I'm no longer an adviser to the SBU head. I wrote a letter of resignation," he said. Tandit said he would continue to conduct the project on one of the Ukrainian TV channels, as well as work on the release of captives, in particular at the international level. Yuriy Tandit was appointed an advisor to Vasyl Hrytsak in July 2015. iy The Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) welcomes the European Parliaments resolution on Russia, notably the case of Ukrainian political prisoner Oleh Sentsov, UWC President Eugene Czolij has stated. According to him, in the context of an ongoing hunger strike by Oleh Sentsov and several other Ukrainian political prisoners, the resolution is a response to the blatant human rights violations by the Russian Federation, including illegal detentions, trials, imprisonments, and torture of Ukrainian citizens for political reasons. Czolij added he fully supports the call by the European Parliament for an immediate release of Sentsov. The Ukrainian World Congress joins the call by the European Parliament for an immediate and unconditional release of Oleh Sentsov and all other Ukrainian political prisoners who are persecuted by the Russian Federation, stated the UWC President. iy Verkhovna Rada Human Rights Commissioner Liudmyla Denisova has not been again allowed to visit Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov illegally imprisoned in Russia. "In accordance with our previous agreements [with Russian Ombudswoman Tatyana Moskalkova], which were held in the evening of June 18, the Ukrainian side did its utmost for minimal movements and maximum comfort of Tatyana Moskalkova's visits to those she wanted to see," she wrote on Facebook. During this time, Denisova was to go to Labytnangi, Russia, to meet with the human rights commissioner in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District, where Ukrainian political prisoner Oleg Sentsov is held. At the same time, Denisova noted that "nothing happened again. I again have to admit that Tatyana Moskalkova does not take decisions, and she only articulates what she was instructed to say. I was again invited to the talks. I'm going, but..." she wrote. ish Foreign Minister of the Republic of Latvia Edgars Rinkevics will be on a working visit to Ukraine on June 20. This was reported by the press service of the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine. "The purpose of his visit is to continue an active dialogue at the interstate level regarding practical involvement of the Latvian potential in the process of introducing reforms in our country, supporting the European integration aspirations of Ukraine, creating an enabling environment for the development of bilateral trade, economic and humanitarian cooperation, as well as consolidating international efforts in countering Russian aggression," the statement reads. The foreign ministers of Ukraine and Latvia will hold talks, during which the main attention will be paid to further common steps aimed at restoring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of our state. Klimkin and Rinkevics will also discuss issues of sectoral bilateral cooperation. ish Earlier, Moscow said that the illegally convicted Ukrainian filmmaker was not a "detainee." The Kremlin says that the major public outcry cannot affect the court decision that came into force in the case of Ukrainian film director Oleh Sentsov. Only Sentsov's personal request for pardon, addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin, can launch the process of the issue's consideration, an UNIAN correspondent in Russia reports, citing Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov. The spokesman recalled that Putin had repeatedly voiced his position on the issue and answered the relevant questions. Read alsoU.S. State Department calls on Russia to free Ukrainian political prisoners "The fact is that public resonance cannot in any way affect, naturally, the court decision of the Russian Federation that has come into force. These are completely different dimensions. Undoubtedly, we saw in press reports that once again a number of cultural figures had appealed to President Putin," Peskov said. "But you know that there is a procedure for pardoning that is initiated by the convict himself, that's what we need to proceed from," stressed Peskov. Earlier, the Kremlin said that Sentsov was not a "detainee," and refused to answer why Ukraine's Human Rights Commissioner, Liudmila Denisova, was denied access to the convicted filmmaker. UNIAN memo. Sentsov was detained by FSB operatives in Crimea in the spring of 2014. He was transferred to Russia, where he was tried on trumped-up charges of plotting terrorist attacks and arson of party offices on the peninsula. The Russian court in August 2015 sentenced Sentsov to 20 years in prison. On May 14, Sentsov announced an indefinite hunger strike demanding the release of all 64 Ukrainian political prisoners of the Kremlin. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is getting a crash course in Ukrainian politics as his investigation combs over Michael Cohens ties to Ukraine. According to former Radical Party member of parliament Andrii Artemenko, who finished testifying in the Mueller probe last week, Batkivschyna Party leader Yulia Tymoshenko knew in advance about a peace plan that Artemenko delivered to the White House in January 2017. [Yulia Tymoshenko] had been informed about my peace initiative because I discussed with her, my colleague, the possibility of promoting the peace plan, Artemenko told the Kyiv Post in a telephone interview from the United States. This was a couple of conversations where we discussed how we can work together against corruption of [President Petro] Poroshenko and prepare for the future, the Kyiv Post wrote. Natasha Lysova, a Batkivschyna spokeswoman, declined to directly confirm or deny Artemenkos statement, instead stating that Tymoshenko has consistently fought against corruption. Its one of her top priorities and demand of Ukrainian people. But Artemenkos quote isnt true and sounds like nonsense, Lysova added. Artemenko completed testimony on June 11 before a federal grand jury in Muellers investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The activities of Michael Cohen, an attorney for President Donald Trump, have caught the investigations attention amid allegations of influence peddling and Russian meddling. He added that he was asked about the meeting with (personal lawyer of U.S. President Donald Trump) Michael Cohen and (Trump business associate) Felix Sater in January 2017. Read alsoPOLITICO: Mueller probes Ukrainian who pitched peace plan to White House Artemenko was stripped of his position in parliament and his citizenship in May 2017, months after he proposed a so-called peace plan destined for the desk of then-U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. At the time of the plans release, Tymoshenko, now a frontrunner in the 2019 presidential elections, was travelling to the U.S. for brief, ambush-style meetings with President Trump, the Kyiv Post recalls. Under Artemenkos plan, Ukraine would have leased Crimea to Russia for 100 years in exchange for Russias withdrawal from Donbas and a change in government in Kyiv. He added that he had given over hundreds of documents, emails, and text messages to federal prosecutors. Artemenko says he still has sky-high domestic political ambitions, at one point catching himself after saying that he wants to run for president in 2019. Read alsoManafort, Ukraine's MP Artemenko could have contributed to Yanukovychs U-turn on UA-EU deal in 2013 - media He adds that he appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to have his citizenship restored, hoping for a positive ruling by the end of the year. Im preparing for the 2019 parliamentary election, he said, adding that he has a vision of Ukraine as an independent, unblocked country. Were not going to be a member of the EU, NATO, or of a Russian alliance, he said. We have to be an independent country. The five were arrested and charged by Russian authorities in 2015. A Russian court in Crimea has convicted five Crimean Tatar activists of taking part in "mass disturbances" in February 2014 and handed them suspended prison sentences ranging from 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 years. The court in Simferopol, the capital of the Russian-controlled Ukrainian region, pronounced the verdicts and sentences on June 19, RFE/RL reported. Read alsoUkraine submits to ICJ evidence of Russian crimes in Crimea, Donbas The five men Ali Asanov, Mustafa Degermendzhy, Eskendir Kantemirov, Eskendir Emirvaliev, and Arsen Yunusov were among a group who staged a protest outside the regional legislature in February 2014. The demonstration occurred as Russia moved to seize control of the Black Sea peninsula following street protests in Kyiv that pushed Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from power. The five were arrested and charged by Russian authorities in 2015. Akhtem Chiygoz, a prominent leader of the Crimean Tatars' local assembly, was also charged for his participation in the protest. He was sentenced to eight years in prison in September 2017, but weeks later he was taken to Turkey and freed. He later moved to Kyiv. Moscow's takeover of Crimea in March 2014 was vocally opposed by many members of the Crimea Tatar population, who make up a sizable minority of the peninsula. Last year alone, 1,590 Ukrainians were born in Poland, which is 65% more than the year before and almost 40 times more than 10 years ago. In 2017, a total of 2,705 children with foreign citizenship were born in Poland. Among newborns with non-Polish citizenship, there were more than 1,590 Ukrainians, Ukrayinska Pravda reported citing Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. The trend is associated with the growth in the number of foreigners whom Poland in recent years has granted permission for temporary or permanent residence. Last year, 317,400 foreign nationals received such permits, while in 2016, there were 243,200 such foreigners. Among them, citizens of Ukraine took up the largest share last year, they were issued 141,100 permits (this is 55% more than in 2016). Read alsoUkrainians in Poland receive almost same wages as Poles study According to Petr Szukalski, a Professor at the University of Lodz, foreigners staying in Poland tend to form families with their fellow citizens or spouses of the same nationality. Therefore, children born into such unions are not considered Poles. As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukrainians in 2017 became leaders among foreigners in buying up land plots in Poland. Citizens of Ukraine were granted every second land purchase permit. One of the attackers was wounded to the back and taken to a local hospital. In Starozhynetsky district of Ukraine's Chernivtsi region, a group of about 20 individuals attempted to block movement of a border patrol unit and further attacked the troops, according to the State Border Guard Service's press office. In order to put halt to the unlawful actions, border guards were forced to open fire at violators, according to the report. Read alsoUkraine's MFA concerned about unauthorized movement of Russian military hardware in Transnistria "Border guards were forced to defend themselves because no reaction followed to peaceful persuasion to stop the unlawful actions. As a result, when all attempts were exhausted to settle the situation without the use of force, after a verbal warning and a warning shot, the border patrol used their service weapons, targeting legs of one of the offenders," the report said. It is noted that one of the attackers was wounded. He was taken to the hospital and provided primary medical treatment. According to intelligence reports, one enemy armored combat vehicle and a GAZ-66 truck were destroyed. Russia's hybrid military forces mounted 28 attacks on Ukrainian army positions in Donbas in the past 24 hours, with two Ukrainian soldiers reported as wounded in action (WIA). "Two Ukrainian soldiers were wounded during the fighting with the use of small arms and grenade launchers near the town of Avdiyivka and the village of Opytne, which are in the Donetsk sector," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation said in an update on Facebook as of 07:00 Kyiv time on June 19, 2018. Read alsoMaiorsk checkpoint in Donbas resumes work JFO HQ Active hostilities continued in the Luhansk sector, where the Russian occupation forces resorted to provocations near the village of Novotoshkivske, as well as near the village of Verkhniotoretske, which is in the Horlivka sector. Fighting continues in the Mariupol sector, near the villages of Starohnativka, Chermalyk and Lebedynske, where the use of mortars by the occupiers endangered civilians. "According to intelligence reports, one enemy armored combat vehicle and a GAZ-66 truck were destroyed, and five occupiers were wounded as a result of concerted actions by the units of the Joint Forces," the report says. The night passed without aggravation of the situation. The enemy violated the ceasefire four times without using heavy weapons. There were no casualties among the Ukrainian defenders. The invaders employed 120mm and 82mm mortars, SPG-9 grenade launchers, BMP-2 infantry vehicle machine guns, and large-caliber Utes machine guns in their attack on the Ukrainian forces. On Monday, June 18, militants of Russian-occupation gang formations in Donbas damaged in their shelling a medevac vehicle of the 93rd separate mechanized brigade of Ukraine Armed Forces, the Brigade press service reports. According to the report posted on Facebook on Tuesday, the shelling lasted from 16:22 to 20:10 Kyiv time. The invaders employed 120mm and 82mm mortars, SPG-9 grenade launchers, BMP-2 infantry vehicle machine guns, and large-caliber Utes machine guns. Read alsoUkraine's Joint Forces show new evidence of Russian military presence in Donbas (Photo) Over 30 mine shells were fired in the attack. "Disregarding the norms of international military law, terrorists in their shelling hit the Brigade doctors' medevac vehicle," the 93rd Separate Mechanized Brigade reported. No casualties were reported in the Monday attack. DUBAI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 19th Jun, 2018) Dr. Hanif Hassan Al Qasim, Chairman of the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue, praised the decision of the UAE Cabinet, led by the Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, to grant one-year residency permits to the citizens of countries facing wars and disaster, as a humanitarian gesture that will help ease their suffering and provide them and their families with stability. Al Qasim said that the initiative highlights the vision of the countrys wise leadership and will be added to its record of humanitarian achievements while stressing that it reflects the UAEs efforts to support refugees without discrimination. Al Qasim pointed out that the initiative coincides with the Year of Zayed and continues the vision of the founding father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who established the countrys humanitarian values. The OPEC Fund for International Development, OFID, has approved a US$100,000 emergency aid grant to the International Federation of Red Cross, IFRC, and Red Crescent Societies to support humanitarian operations being carried out by the Guatemalan Red Cross for victims of a recent volcanic eruption. VIENNA, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 19th Jun, 2018) The OPEC Fund for International Development, OFID, has approved a US$100,000 emergency aid grant to the International Federation of Red Cross, IFRC, and Red Crescent Societies to support humanitarian operations being carried out by the Guatemalan Red Cross for victims of a recent volcanic eruption. Guatemalas Fuego volcano, located 40 km southwest of Guatemala City, has been deemed the most devastating eruption the country has seen in more than four decades. Guatemalan authorities have declared a state of emergency in the departments of Escuintla, Sacatepequez and Chimaltenango. More than 100 people have been killed, 200 are still missing and over 12,000 people have been evacuated. The IFRC has launched an international emergency appeal with the aim of delivering humanitarian assistance for a 12-month period to approximately 6,000 of the most vulnerable survivors of the disaster. High priority needs include shelter, medical care and food, as well as water, sanitation and hygiene services. OFID has a strong relationship with the IFRC, having extended emergency aid grants in support of 71 operations totaling nearly US$21 million. Pakistan and Tajikistan Tuesday agreed to further strengthen their relations by adopting measures to take bilateral trade to US $ 500 million per annum, immediate revival of air links and early implementation of CASA-1000 (Central Asia South Asia) electricity project. DUSHANBE, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Jun, 2018 ) :Pakistan and Tajikistan Tuesday agreed to further strengthen their relations by adopting measures to take bilateral trade to US $ 500 million per annum, immediate revival of air links and early implementation of CASA-1000 (Central Asia South Asia) electricity project. The two sides reached this agreement during talks between President Mamnoon Hussain and President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan held here at the State Guest House. President Mamnoon Hussain, who was in Dushanbe on a four-day official visit on the invitation of his Tajik counterpart, held one-on-one and delegation level talks with President Emomali Rahmon. During the talks, the two sides agreed to further strengthen their relations and giving "new impetus" to the ties through enhanced cooperation in diverse areas, including trade, energy, connectivity, defence, health, education and culture. President Mamnoon Hussain and President Emomali Rahmon later at a joint press stake-out expressed their satisfaction and were confident about the positive and mutually beneficial outcome of the talks. President Mamnoon said since Pakistan and Tajikistan enjoyed historical, cultural and fraternal bonds, their relations had been further strengthened by closer cooperation and regular exchange of high level visits since the latter's independence in 1991. Pakistan was among the very first countries to recognize Tajikistan's independence and establish diplomatic relations, he added. The President felicitated his Tajik counterpart and the Government of Tajikistan for the initiative to host the International High-Level Conference on International Decade for Action, 'Water for Sustainable Development,' 2018-2028. "Both our brotherly countries enjoy excellent cooperation at multilateral fora, including the UN, OIC, ECO, and SCO. Pakistan's full membership in the SCO last year has opened new avenues for increased cooperation between our two countries," he added. The President said he and his Tajik counterpart today discussed and reviewed the whole spectrum of bilateral cooperation, particularly in the areas of energy, connectivity, trade, and security and defence. "We also discussed important regional and international issues of mutual concern. We have agreed that there is vast potential for cooperation in all areas of our mutual interest," he added. Hundreds of millions of women suffer from pelvic floor disorders globally, often in silence. Women in developing countries do not disclose their problems due to associated social stigma or lack of access to services. Thus, the extent of the problem remains largely unknown. This study was conducted to assess the magnitude of pelvic floor disorders in Kersa district Eastern Ethiopia. We conducted a community-based cross-sectional study among ever married women who reside in Kersa district, Eastern Ethiopia. The study subjects were selected through stratified multistage probability sampling. The data were collected using a structured questionnaire through face-to-face interviews. The prevalence of various pelvic floor disorders are presented along with the 95% Confidence Intervals (CI). A total of 3432 women participated in the study, of which 704 (20.5%; 95% CI; 19.2, 21.8) reported at least one type of pelvic floor disorder and 349 (49.6%; 95% CI: 46.0, 53.0) reported two or more pelvic floor disorders. The most common pelvic floor disorders included an over active bladder (15.5%; 95% CI: 14.4, 16.8), pelvic organ prolapse (9.5%; 95% CI: 8.5,10.4), stress urinary incontinence (8.3%; 95% CI: 7.4, 9.2) and anal incontinence (1.9%; 95% CI: 1.5, 2.4). More than two-thirds of the women with pelvic floor disorders (68.0%; 95% CI:64.4, 71.3) reported having severe distress but had never sought health care. The magnitude of the health problem and the low level of health seeking behavior indicates the silent suffering of many women in the study area. Extrapolating these figure to national statistics would indicate the staggering number of women suffering from pelvic floor disorders in the country. This calls for urgent action to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment services to mitigate the suffering of women from pelvic floor disorders. BMC women's health. 2018 Jun 15*** epublish *** Merga Dheresa, Alemayehu Worku, Lemessa Oljira, Bizatu Mengiste, Nega Assefa, Yemane Berhane College of Health and Medical Sciences, Haramaya University, Harar, Ethiopia. ., Addis Continental Institute of Public Health, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia., College of Health and Medical Sciences, Haramaya University, Harar, Ethiopia. PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29902997 June the 19th marks the U.N.s International Day for the Elimination of Sexual violence in conflict. Experts have described it as a global epidemic that is taking place on a worrying scale in many nations around the world. By Susy Hodges The Plight and Rights of Children Born of War was the theme for the 2018 observance of the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence. In its message marking the day the United Nations wrote about how children conceived through rape in war-time are rarely accepted by society. Marginalized and shunned These children also often struggle with issues of identity and belonging for decades after the end of war, it said. The message noted that the mothers of these children conceived through rape may be marginalized and shunned by their own families and communities and this stigma may have life-long repercussions for both the mother and her child conceived in this way. Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, recently met refugee women from Myanmars Rohingya Muslim minority who have suffered sexual abuse. Rohingya woman tells her story Among those she met was a young woman who described how she and her family fled when the Myanmar military arrived but a soldier caught up with her in the forest and raped her. Patten described the measures that are being taken to help such women and the babies who are conceived as a result of sexual violence during conflict. No figures are available on the number of number of Rohingya women who have been raped by Myanmars military but an earlier UN report accused the nations armed forces of using rape as a weapon of war against the Rohingya community. Inferno: The Fire Spectacular, the stunning production featuring Europes Internationally acclaimed Magic Master, Joe Labero alongside Londons hottest fire group, The Fuel Girls, in a fiery magical and sexy spectacular, celebrated its 100th performance at the Paris Theater at Paris Las Vegas, Sunday, June 17, 2018 (Photo credit: Anna Vinterfall). Photo credit: Anna Vinterfall Inferno features critically acclaimed European Illusionist Joe Labero, a previous recipient of the Illusionist of the Decade, who has performed for sold-out stadiums and arenas around the world. Joining Labero, directly from the UK tour of Fall Out Boy, are globally renowned fire artists, The Fuel Girls, a multi-skilled, all-female group of visually captivating pyromaniacs. Inferno delivers a non-stop adrenaline rush, a show packed with gasoline, mind-boggling stunts and illusions. Labero and his pyromaniac followers will give audiences 90 minutes of the hottest entertainment on the Las Vegas Strip. For the 100th performance celebration the cast of Inferno gathered on stage to pose for photos with a spectacular flaming cake created by Freeds Bakery. XENXEN Las Vegas will celebrate International Yoga Day with complimentary classes and giveaways. The Boca Park based yoga sanctuary will offer free yoga classes to the public, all day (Pictured: Jen Barnet and Dray Gardner Photo credit: Kat Murzl). Additionally, all participants who take a class at XENXEN on International Yoga Day will receive a complimentary reusable water bottle and a card to give to a friend to take one free class at XENXEN. There will also be a raffle throughout the day, in which one winner will be selected to receive one free month of yoga classes at XENXEN. LATAM Airlines Brazil has announced a new direct route connecting Las Vegas McCarran Airport and Sao Paulo Guarulhos Airport, operated by a Boeing 767 to accommodate 191 passengers in Economy class and 30 passengers in Premium Business. Las Vegas is now the airlines sixth gateway in United States with direct flights to South America, and the fifth U.S. city with direct flights to Brazil. The Las Vegas to Sao Paulo flight will be operated in high-travel seasons, from June to September and December to March. LATAM Airlines arrived in Las Vegas achieving a key milestone as the only South American airline connecting passengers directly between Las Vegas and Sao Paulo, bringing the United States and Brazil even closer together, said Pablo Chiozza, senior vice president of the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Asia, LATAM Airlines Group. In 2018, the company has already announced 14 new international routes, debuted a new route connecting Sao Paulo and Rome, and is preparing to open operations in Boston and Tel Aviv later this year. Operations between June and September 2018 Throughout June, LATAM Airlines Brazils JJ8150 flight departs Sao Paulo Guarulhos at 11:55 p.m. (local time) on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, arriving Las Vegas McCarran at 8:35 a.m. (local time). The JJ8150 flight runs for 12 hours and 30 minutes. The return flight JJ8151 departs Las Vegas McCarran at 1:10 p.m. (local time) on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, arriving Sao Paulo Guarulhos at 5:25 a.m. (local time) the following day. The JJ8151 flight runs for 12 hours and 15 minutes. From early July to late September, LATAM Airlines Brazils JJ8150 flight from Sao Paulo Guarulhos at 11:55 p.m. (local time) on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, arriving Las Vegas McCarran at 8:25 a.m. (local time) the next day. The return flight JJ8151 departs Las Vegas McCarran at 1:00 p.m. (local time) on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, arriving in Sao Paulo Guarulhos at 5:25 a.m. (local time) the following day. Operations between December 2018 and March 2019 Between December 15, 2018 and March 1, 2019, LATAM Airlines Brazils JJ8150 flight will depart Sao Paulo Guarulhos at 11:55 p.m. (local time) on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, arriving Las Vegas McCarran at 6:35 a.m. (local time) the next day. The return flight JJ8151 will depart Las Vegas McCarran at11:00 a.m. (local time) on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, arriving Sao Paulo Guarulhos at 5:25 a.m. (local time) the next day. WWE NXT Live will return to Las Vegas at The Orleans Arena on Saturday, July 28, bringing professional wrestling superstars to the ring for an evening of entertaining, high-energy matches. The live event will feature NXT Champion Aleister Black, NXT Womens Champion Shayna Baszler, NXT North American Champion Adam Cole, and NXT Tag Team Champions Undisputed ERA wrestlers Ricochet, Velveteen Dream, Tommaso Ciampa, Johnny Gargano, Candice LeRae, and more. China has pledged to give Cambodia an additional $100 million in military aid following a visit to the country this week by Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe. Wei reportedly met with his counterpart, General Tea Banh to discuss the funding, according to General Chhum Socheat, a Cambodian defense spokesman. Both sides continue to strengthen ties of friendship with each other to grow stronger, especially now our Chinese friends have offered additional grants amounting to 645 million Yuan [$99.5 million] to Cambodia for the military sector in accordance with our needs, Socheat wrote on his Facebook page. He told VOA in an interview that defense officials were making plans to spend the money over the coming years, adding that the two countries had also agreed to continue their joint military drills, known as the Golden Dragon exercises. Wei was visiting Cambodia on a five-day trip during which he is also due to meet with other senior military officials, including Lieutenant General Mao Sophan, commander of Brigade 70, an auxiliary unit close to Prime Minister Hun Sen. Cambodias military, in particular, elite divisions including Hun Sens Bodyguard Unit, has been accused of gross human rights violations and grand corruption since the former Khmer Rouge commander came to power more than 30 years ago. Local media reports in Cambodia suggested that Sophan had requested China provide Brigade 70 with equipment to construct a live-fire training ground. Wei was also due to meet Hun Sen during his five-day visit, which ends on Wednesday. Em Sovannara, a political analyst, said China-Cambodia relations had reached an all-time high, partly due to a souring of relations with the west. Its good for Cambodia to have ties with China, but ... the ties between Cambodia and China must be transparent and acceptable for the people, he said. Cambodia should not be seen to be overly influenced by China. He added that Cambodia should also look to shore up relations with the United States and European Union, both major buyers of Cambodian garments and other products. The U.S. and E.U. have both imposed limited sanctions on Cambodia in recent months after the government oversaw the dissolution of the countrys main opposition, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, ahead of a general election in July. Cambodia has not abandoned the United States because Cambodia really needs the United States and European Union, for instance, for its reputation on the international stage, it needs strong support from the western world, Sovannara said. Joint military exercises with China have been ongoing since 2016, while the Angkor Sentinel exercises previously held with the United States were canceled. A joint fishing agreement reportedly being discussed between China and the Philippines would further calm an old maritime sovereignty dispute while deepening friendship that was once thought all but impossible, experts in the region say. Governments from the two Asian countries are talking about a tentative deal now after Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Philippine counterpart Rodrigo Duterte agreed to pursue it during a meeting in April, according to media outlets in Manila. If it will be actually reached, signed, implemented, that will signal not a milestone but a significant step forward in the relations between the two countries, said Fabrizio Bozzato, a Taiwan Strategy Research Association fellow specialized in East Asia and the Pacific. Sharing resources is not a light matter, light issue. The Philippines formally disputes Chinese fishing boat, coast guard and naval use of the South China Sea within its 370-kilometer-wide coastal exclusive economic zone. But months after Duterte took office in 2016, the two leaders met to form a friendship that has seen both sides set aside the maritime dispute. As part of those stronger relations, China is rolling out pledges of $24 billion in aid and investment to help the Philippines develop. Bitterness behind them? China cites historical maps to back its claims to about 90 percent of the sea despite competing sovereignty assertions from Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. Beijing and Manila sparred from 2012 to 2016 over fishery-rich Scarborough Shoal. The more militarily powerful China ended up taking control. When Duterte visited China in late 2016 to break ice, Xi called for stronger bilateral cooperation in fisheries among other sectors, Chinas official Xinhua News Agency said in October that year. But a fishing deal may go too far, some scholars say. The Philippines hands are legally tied constitutionally when it comes to signing formal fishing cooperation deals, said Jay Batongbacal, a University of the Philippines international maritime affairs professor. Any deal might be just a modus vivendi, he said. If it is within our EEZ (exclusive economic zone), its not an agreement, it should be a fishing permit, said Antonio Contreras, political scientist at De La Salle University in the Philippines. Ideally, he said, its not an agreement between equals, but its more like Im giving you permission to fish under my terms. A more formal agreement might say which side can fish where, including access for both to disputed waters. Because theres no actual agreement, then well have the potential for flare-ups again, Batongbacal said. Elsewhere in East Asia, the Philippines signed a fisheries-related law enforcement agreement with Taiwan in 2015. Vietnam and Malaysia were working on a fishery deal last year. Message to other countries China may hope the agreement shows goodwill to the other Southeast Asian countries with maritime claims, said Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan. It has angered the others by building up small disputed islets, in some cases for its own military use, and by declaring annual fishing moratoriums in the northern part of the 3.5 million-square-kilometer waterway. Probably China wanted to set up some kind of precedent so other countries can take reference to or think about those, Huang said. I dont think [a Philippine deal] will be anything thats related to the settlement of [a] sovereignty dispute. It will be seen as dispute prevention measures. China lost world court arbitration in 2016 to the Philippines over the extent of its claims. But it rejected the ruling. Since then it has sought peace with other claimants through bilateral deals and economic aid. A deal with the Philippines would mean China gets access to resources, they can send their people there and they look good nationally and regionally, Bozzato said. Risk of a raw deal? As many as 1.6 million vessels from all countries combined fish the South China Sea, according to research under the China Program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. But Filipino fishing boats generally stay inside the 370-kilometer line and in the nearby Spratly Islands as traditional fishing grounds, Batongbacal said. Their boats are often too small or weak to test more distant seas. Boats from China, Taiwan and Vietnam regularly fish farther out. A fishing deal might effectively let Chinese vessels use the Philippine maritime claim without risk, even while no Filipinos venture into waters closer to China itself, some scholars fear. A high-powered Afghan security delegation visited neighboring Pakistan on Tuesday for official talks on how to jointly push peace and reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan. Haneef Atmar, the Afghan national security advisor, led the team, which included the interior minister and the head of the Afghan spy agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). Afghan sources told VOA that Atmars delegation stayed in Islamabad for a few hours and mainly met with the head of the Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). They said the discussions happened in the context of the Afghan governments conflict with the Taliban and the successful mutual cease-fire over the three-day Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr. Taliban insists on three days The Taliban refused to extend its three-day cease-fire that ended on Sunday and has since returned to battlefield hostilities.The Afghan governments unilateral week-long cease-fire will end on Wednesday. Pakistani military spokesman, Major-General Asif Ghafoor, told VOA the Afghan delegations visit was part of ongoing bilateral engagements under a newly agreed framework known as Afghanistan Pakistan Action Plan for Peace and Solidarity (APAPPS). He did not share any details of Tuesdays discussions. The wide-ranging APAPPS dialogue is aimed at easing mutual tensions and improving security, intelligence, and counterterrorism, as we well as economic cooperation between the two uneasy neighboring countries, to promote peace on both sides of their long shared border. Afghan media reports said Atmars delegation also was intending to ask Pakistani officials to convince the Taliban to agree to extend its cease-fire. US renews talks Leaders in Afghanistan maintain that the Taliban operates out of Pakistan, and they have been calling on Islamabad to use its influence on the insurgents to end the violence and engage in peace talks with Kabul. After months of suspension in high-level contacts with Pakistan, the United States earlier this month resumed discussions with Islamabad and acknowledged it has asked for the countrys help in pushing the Taliban to the negotiating table. Pakistani officials acknowledge they have limited leverage with the Taliban and say they are willing to use it to help facilitate a peaceful settlement to the stalemated Afghan conflict. But the Pakistan military rejects charges that insurgents are using the country for orchestrating attacks inside Afghanistan. Officials do not rule out that there are small groups of insurgents among nearly 3 million Afghan refugees that Pakistan still hosts, and they have been calling for an early repatriation of the displaced population. George Clooney's Hollywood career spans more than three decades, with memorable roles including fighting vampires, playing Batman and drifting through space in "Gravity." But Clooney's other accomplishments, including directing, screenwriting and activism, led to him becoming the latest recipient of the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Clooney, 57, was honored at a star-studded tribute gala earlier this month at the Dolby Theatre, where he has been a frequent guest because of the Academy Awards, including in 2006 when Clooney won for best supporting actor. TNT will air the tribute on Thursday at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific. The star was all smiles during the tribute, where he was honored by stars from Jennifer Aniston to Bill Murray, along with his parents and his wife Amal. Photos of him playing his most memorable roles overlooked the stage as the celebration unfolded, and Clooney told his own story through video vignettes. Here are some of the highlights of the gala: The Early Years During his acceptance speech, Clooney spoke about when he was new to Hollywood. "When I was a young, broke unemployed actor, not only did I not have a job, I didn't have an agent, I couldn't get auditions," he said. "I was lucky enough to be able to do a few short films for some up-and-coming young directors at the AFI." Laura Dern was the first to mention one of Clooney's early films, "Grizzly 2," which was never officially released. Dern and Clooney both had a short sequence in the film in which they climb a mountain and get eaten by a bear. Dern reminisced about how the two were stranded in Hungary after the film ran out of funding. Clooney accrued more TV and film gigs with shows such as "ER" and "The Facts of Life" which eventually led to his major film roles in "From Dusk 'Till Dawn" and "Batman & Robin." Global Activism Amal Clooney, a distinguished human rights lawyer, noted her husband's Kentucky manners and tendency to stick up for the most vulnerable, even on the film set. The actor's social justice work was cited even early on in his Hollywood career. Actor Richard Kind said Clooney once convinced him to help clean up East Los Angeles after the LA riots in 1992. He also joined in the fight for same-sex marriage and more recently, helped raise money for victims of Hurricane Harvey and mentored survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. When Clooney tried to bring attention to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan in 2012, he was arrested for crossing a police line with his father, a moment he said he's proud of. He was also the U.N. designated Messenger of Peace from 2008 to 2014. "Look, if the cameras are going to follow me where I go, then I'm going to where the cameras should be," he said in one of his vignettes. "A Celebration of Life" Apart from his activism, Clooney is also known far and wide for his eternal trickster spirit. Jimmy Kimmel called Clooney "the world's most diabolical prankster" and told of the actor's biggest pranks. He once filled Bill Murray's luggage with gravel and Chris O'Donnell's car with popcorn. He also ended his film "Monuments Men" with a memorial dedication to his father, who is still alive. But the actor himself wasn't immune to the comic relief. Murray quipped about how Clooney was receiving the award at such a young age. "I know that all of you thought the same thing that I thought: George is dying," said Murray. "So, this isn't really a lifetime achievement award. It's a celebration of life." When the time finally came to receive his award, Shirley MacLaine gave Clooney a tongue-in-cheek lecture, encouraging Clooney to keep preserving his talent and ethics against time. "Please mix your comedy, your humanity, your serious need to help us understand who we are," said MacLaine. "Please direct more." An American student held in Vietnam for "causing public disorder" at violent protests this month has appeared on state television to say he regrets breaking the law and will stay away from future rallies. William Nguyen was detained on June 10 in Ho Chi Minh City after attending mass demonstrations against proposed special economic zones that would grant investors 99-year leases. Video footage shows the Texas-born 32-year-old with a bleeding head wound being dragged by plainclothes men through the streets into custody. Police accuse Nguyen of "causing public disorder" and trying to damage a fence and flip over police vehicles on the main road to the airport. Nguyen, a Yale graduate, appeared on television on Monday night to say he broke the law. "I understand that my acts violated [the law]... I regret that I caused trouble for people heading to the airport. I blocked traffic and caused trouble to my family and friends," Nguyen said in Vietnamese on HTV in footage provided by city police. "I will not join any anti-state activities anymore," added Nguyen, who was arrested while passing through Vietnam en route to Singapore to get his Masters degree next month. Choreographed confessions are common in Vietnam where accused criminals are paraded publicly to admit guilt - sometimes in exchange for a softer sentence - though rights groups have also accused the one-party state of forcibly extracting statements. Scores were detained this month after protests in several cities turned violent in some places, rare in the one-party state where demonstrations are routinely banned or broken up. Nguyen tweeted from the rallies, posting images of large crowds and saying he supported Vietnamese people "exercising their civic duty to protest injustice". Friends and family lobbying lawmakers in Washington for Nguyen's release say he did not have a political agenda. Torture claims At least 30 people are still in custody and security forces blanketed Ho Chi Minh City last weekend to deter further protests. Amnesty International said they had received "deeply disturbing" reports that several protesters were tortured by police in custody. "We urge the Vietnamese authorities to launch a prompt, thorough and effective investigation into the claims and to hold anyone suspected of being responsible to account," said Minar Pimple, Amnesty's senior director of global operations. Demonstrators had rallied against a draft law to grant lengthy leases in proposed special economic zones, citing fears valuable land would be handed over to China. The bill made no specific mention of China and the government has said it would consider shorter leases, but the concession did little to assuage anger. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said the government would consider public feedback but issued a warning to "bad seeds" looking to kick up unrest. "If you oppose officials on duty, vandalize state property... then you have to be strictly handled in accordance with the law," Phuc said Monday. When Brazilian native Kelly Oliveira signed up for the U.S. Army through a program that offered her citizenship for her service, she thought she had it made. But it took two years for the army to work through the added background checks. During that time she struggled to remain legal. Oliveira finally made it through the process and was sworn in as a citizen last week. She took the oath on a day designated to honor the U.S. flag, a group of 28 people from 18 countries became American citizens at the historic house where the flag that inspired the national anthem was made. I learned to love this country that I adopted as my own. Ive always [thought] of myself as an American by heart, she said. But it took 13 years to make it official. It's been a long journey. Of course there were moments that I was thinking Should I continue waiting? she said. Oliveiras wait was due to changes in a military program called Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest program, or MAVNI reported on by VOA last December. It was launched in 2009 to bring immigrants with medical or language skills into the armed services. She enlisted in the Army in March 2016 under MAVNI, which promised her citizenship in exchange for service. Enlisting for status Oliveira had tried other ways to stay legal. But nothing worked. I went to school and I had my OPT, and I got a teaching position job as a preschool teacher, Oliveira said. The OPT or Optional Practical Training allows international students with an F-1 visa to work in the U.S. for up to one year in a field related to their studies. She tried to get a work visa through the schools where she was employed at the time. Unfortunately the school where I was working at; they could not [sponsor] me, she said. Thats when she entered the MAVNI program. But on June 2016, the program was shut down, which affected Oliveiras enlistment. The U.S. government retroactively required background checks on anyone who had enlisted in the military through the MAVNI program, including anyone who was currently serving or waiting to be shipped to basic training. For Oliveira that meant a two-year wait. She went to training drills and struggled to stay legal. Those who witnessed her journey said it was tough. I don't think I'd be able to do it because it's, I mean, it's been a, it's been a long journey. It's been a struggle and it's, it's been like a nightmare, Lauren Schroeder, a D.C. native who has been friends with Oliveira for many years, told VOA. I mean the down was the fact that it took so long. And I guess the up is that she was able to join the military and get a citizenship that way. So finally, it happened, Schroeder said. Embarking on a 'new journey' Margaret Stock, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who created the MAVNI program, told VOA she is not surprised by Oliveiras successful story. Thats whats supposed to happen. Theyre eligible for citizenship and theyre supposed to be able to get it quickly, Stock said. But the retired Army lieutenant colonel said, even though there are stories like Oliveira's, lots of recruits are still falling out of status due to the additional checks. So people are timing out and they cant ship out to basic training until the [U.S. government] completes all these background checks, she said. In a previous interview with VOA, Stock said everyone who wants to serve in the military has to go through background checks but the government was already doing a lot more background checking on the MAVNIs. They are the most checked group of people that entered the U.S. military," Stock said adding this is an investigation normally done on someone getting top-secret clearance with the U.S. government. On Flag Day, Oliveira signed the papers. She checked in with immigration officials. Then the ceremony started. Sky's the limit for me now it's just the beginning of my new journey. Now I'm going to basic training in a couple of months, and I'm very excited about that, Oliveira said. Australia is planning to bring in tougher English language tests for migrants and new citizens. The center-right government says too many settlers do not speak English well enough to integrate into Australian society, while critics argue the changes are discriminatory. Australias first citizenship ceremony was held in 1949. Since then millions of migrants have pledged their loyalty to their adopted homeland. But the government says census figures indicate about one million people in Australia or about four percent of the population do not speak English or have the basic skills to understand the national language. New laws to administer tough English exams for migrants failed to pass parliament last October, but Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is reviving the plan. The key to successful integration into the Australian community, to economic success, to every success, social success is being able to speak English, he said. For more than a decade new citizens have had to pass a general knowledge test about Australias people, its democratic traditions and institutions. The Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, Alan Tudge, says a more stringent language exam is needed. One of the more important things there I do think is English language," he said. "And we need to ensure for the interests of the migrant as much as for social cohesion, that there is that common language across the community, that common glue which is so vital for social cohesion. The great Australian multicultural success story which has been built on integration, not on assimilation, where you have to give up your heritage, but nor separatism of where communities sit side by side one another. But integration where we merge together, learn from one another, work together, share experiences. Arabic is among more than 300 languages spoken in Australian homes. The most widely used after English is Mandarin. The government says migrants will need to have "conversational" English to pass the new test, but Jamal Daoud from the Social Justice Network worries that the bar will be set too high. These English tests are very difficult to pass. It is at academic level and even people who completed universities are struggling with this test. There is no credible evidence that this will benefit their settlement in the country, he said. The debate isnt whether new citizens should learn the language but how proficient they must become. Woman #1: We have to speak English to understand other people. That is the main language here, so we have to respect that. Man #1: It is impossible to get a job if you dont know the language. Its as easy as that. Thats why weve got so many people on the dole. Woman #2: Theres a lot of need out there and generally people do want to learn English, they do want to improve, they want to gain that independence and that autonomy in the community. Man #2: They should be able to speak English otherwise they just dont fit in." After ten years in Sydney, Ran Malik, a disability support worker from India, fears that he may never become an Australian citizen because in his opinion there are too many obstacles. He is on a temporary work visa and has thought about trying his luck elsewhere. I have got a lot of friends from back home who actually moved to Canada in the last three or four years and they already become citizens and I just thought that could be another option for me to move to Canada or maybe look close to Australia, maybe New Zealand, he said. Other critics of the language tests, including the Labor oppositions Justice spokesperson, Clare ONeil, believe they are an insult. I just find that sort of thing really offensive because its effectively devaluing the contribution that thousands of people that I represent have made to this country without much English and theyre making a very fine contribution to this country, said ONeil. Australia wants its new citizens to embrace not only its language but also its values, such as respect for democracy, and gender equality. The government plans to introduce the new language tests laws in the coming weeks. Imprisoned former Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zia is critically ill and needs urgent medical care, a top leader of her party said Tuesday. Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, a top aide to Zia, said the 72-year-old opposition leader had suffered a recent mild stroke and multiple complications. Doctors have warned that she could be paralyzed if she isn't treated quickly, he said, adding that she can no longer walk on her own. The government has offered to have Zia admitted to two state-run medical facilities, but Zia and her party insist she needs to go to the private hospital where she has long been treated. "She needs regular care by our trusted doctors," Alamgir, secretary general of Zia's Bangladesh Nationalist Party, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We don't have confidence" in the hospitals the government has offered, he said. Zia was convicted in February of misusing power by embezzling some $250,000 in donations meant for an orphanage trust. That conviction means that Zia, the archrival of current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, could be barred from running in December national elections. Bangladesh law says anyone imprisoned for more than two years cannot run for office for the next five years. She has been held since February, the only prisoner in a centuries-old jail in Dhaka. The government has accused the opposition party of using her illness to try to stir up sympathy for political gains. Hasina has rejected allegations that Zia's jailing was politically motivated. Zia's supporters believe that a transfer to a hospital would provide a large morale boost before December's national election. She was granted bail in May because of her age and health complications, but that does not mean she'll be freed soon. Her lawyers say she faces more than 30 charges, including sedition and instigating violence. Her party and its partners boycotted the last elections, in 2014, after Hasina scrapped a system of non-political caretaker governments to oversee national elections. Hasina was re-elected. Both Zia and Hasina emerged from political dynasties. Zia is the widow of Ziaur Rahman, a general-turned-president who was assassinated in 1981. Hasina is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country's first president, who was assassinated in 1975. It is a bright Tuesday morning, with children hawking goods to drivers and passersby on the congested streets of Yaounde. The number of these sidewalk sellers is increasing with the ongoing conflict in Cameroon's English-speaking northwest and southwest regions, where fighting between armed separatists and government troops has shut down schools and sent thousands of children fleeing to safer ground. Among the sidewalk peddlers is 16-year-old Delphine Tabe. She says she has been a hawker for more than a year since she fled from her village in Lebialem, an administrative unit in the southwest. "I am selling boiled groundnuts to have money and help my mother who is in the hospital. She was beaten by Cameroon gendarmes after a military man was killed in our village. My mother almost died. Our school was burned and students were beaten. Since that day in May 2017, we escaped to Yaounde and we do not have money to go to school." Delphine says her chances of pursuing her dream - becoming a teacher - are gradually slipping away as she has no one to sponsor her education. Instead, she has to look for money to help her sick mother. In the kitchen at the house where Delphine lives in Yaounde, food is being prepared for 32 people. Emmanuel Nembo, a 52-year old government worker originally from Lebialem, says that a year ago, he had only five mouths to feed. The number exploded as people from the southwest fled their villages and pleaded for him to feed and shelter them. Emmanuel says he is praying for the crisis to stop because many have been coming and he can no longer offer help. "We are stretching an olive hand of peace. Those in the bush should give a chance. Come back home, to their homes so that they could meet their mothers, brothers and sisters," he says. Many schools have been closed in the northwest and southwest areas since November 2016, when lawyers and teachers began a strike to stop what they see as the overbearing use of French. Separatists took over the movement, and began pushing for the regions to become independent. Since then, several dozen schools have been torched, and armed men have kidnapped or killed a number of teachers. Many students in the regions can no longer attend the few schools that are still open, for fear of the unknown. The United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 people, a majority of them children of school age, have fled the violence in the English-speaking regions for safer locations. Tens of thousands have crossed over to Nigeria, and no one knows when any of them will ever return to school. Turkey goes to the polls Sunday, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing his toughest test in his 16 years in power. Challenger Muharrem Inces platform of breaking down Turkeys deep political divides, especially between the religious and secular, have seen him reaching out beyond his pro-secular CHP partys base. An increasingly confident Ince has even begun courting voters in Erdogans backyard. WATCH: Turkey elections On Saturday, Ince took his campaign to Istanbuls Uskudar district. Historically religiously conservative, Uskudar is where Erdogan chose to build his private residence overlooking the Bosphorus waterway that divides Istanbul. Nearby, construction is the final stages on the massive $100 million Camlica mosque built by Erdogan supporters. The mosque has become a potent symbol of the presidents Islamist roots. With Erdogan portraying himself as the protector of religious rights, Uskudar has traditionally been a stronghold for the president. But Inces arrival in Uskudar was greeted by thousands of supporters, chanting president Ince. He is challenging Erdogan in front of his home, said one enthusiastic supporter, adding it is clearly seen here that Turkey needs Muharrem Ince. No one can stop him. A new page Inces CHP party has always been viewed with deep suspicion by religious voters because it was created by the founder of the secular state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The CHP used to strongly back controls on religion, including the banning of Islamic headscarves in universities and courts. Restrictions ended by Erdogan in the face of bitter opposition by the CHP. But Inces campaign is built on turning a page on Turkeys bitter polarizations. Addressing the packed Uskudar crowd, he repeated a message of freedom and justice for all. When we embrace the 81 million, there will no longer be the separation between right wing, left wing, between covered and uncovered women, between Turk and Kurd, between Sunni and Alevi. There will only be the 81 million, 81 million! Ince said. Ince saw the crowd erupt into chants, president Ince." Ince comes from a conservative family and the retired physics teacher regularly prays. On receiving his partys nomination, he went to a mosque to pray and then visited Ataturk's mausoleum, a building of symbolic importance to secularists. Bases challenged Listening to Inces Uskudar speech were two sisters, one wearing an Islamic headscarf. Both appeared ready to believe Ince has broken with CHPs past. [The CHP] couldnt in the past catch the right mood. But with Muharrem Ince, they have, said the sister in Islamic dress. He has a unifying discourse; I mean an integrating attitude. He doesnt have a divisive discourse, added the other sister. Definitely, concurred the covered sister. He (Ince) has certainly been able to overcome the traditional handicap of CHP which is to speak exclusively to its political audience, political analyst Sinan Ulgen of the Istanbul-based Edam research group said. He (Ince) has repeatedly said he was at ease with the freedom of religion that he is not the dogmatic secular candidate that CHP had selected in the past. Combined with his background, he comes from a conservative family, that makes him a candidate well liked even by the conservative constituencies, Ulgen added. Inces campaign has avoided angry polemics with Erdogan, which defined previous challenges by his party. Instead, he is using cutting wit to attack the incumbent president, a strategy that analysts suggest is resonating with the electorate. There is just this weariness with Erdogan; Erdogan is just too abrasive, too combative, political analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners said. I think the nation is tired regardless of the political views, 16 years of constant enemies, which the nation cant even see. Erdogan constantly threatens, whereas Ince smiles, he tries not to hurt people, added Yesilada. Voter turnout a key But Erdogan still retains strong support in Uskudar like in the rest of the country among his powerful religious base. He repeatedly warns the religious rights they have gained under his rule would be in peril if he should lose. On Sunday, in a dominant display of support, Erdogan addressed more than a million people for his main Istanbul rally. One of Erdogans defining achievements is the emergence of a large conservative prosperous middle class. But rather than any threat posed by the pro-secular CHP, fears of a looming economic recession, is dominating the presidential election. Erdogan supporters are traditionally loyal, but analyst Yesilada suggests Inces message of hope versus a politics of fear, can still pose a threat to the president. I dont think too many AKP party (Erdogans party) voters would switch to CHP. But they feel less threatened by Ince, so they could stay at home to protest [the] AKP, knowing under Ince their rights would not be threatened. We saw this in June (parliamentary) election 2015, AKP lost its majority because AKP voters stayed home and this could happen again, Yesilada said. The voices and faces of the Central American children separated from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico are now emerging, lending a heart-rending human element to the debate over President Donald Trump's controversial "zero-tolerance policy" towards illegal immigrants. The world heard several desperate, crying children Monday on an audio recording released by the investigative news site ProPublica, with the children pleading over and over to immigration agents to be with their "Mami" and "Papa" as the parents were questioned, detained and eventually split from their children. LISTEN: Children separated from parents at border Meanwhile, millions of people have viewed a photo of a 2-year-old girl from Honduras in a bright pink shirt screaming in fear last week as a U.S. border agent patted down her mother. The children on the audio, estimated to be between 4 and 10 years old, sobbed throughout the nearly eight-minute tape that was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. ProPublica said it was recorded by a person who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, handed to a long-time civil rights attorney in Texas, who then passed it to the news organization. As the children cried to be with their parents, one border agent joked in Spanish, "Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What we're missing is a conductor." Pleading with agents One determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl, identified as Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, pleaded with agents to be with her aunt, who along with her 9-year-old daughter is already seeking to stay in the United States. The aunt told ProPublica that her sister paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide her through Guatemala and Mexico to entry into the United States, where they were apprehended. "I want to go with my aunt," Alison told an agent on the tape. "I want my aunt to come so she can take me to her house." She told an agent she had her aunt's phone number and recited it to a consular worker. "Are you going to call my aunt so she can come pick me up?" the girl pleaded. "And then so my mom can come as soon as possible?" ProPublica said it called the number recited by the girl and reached the aunt. "It was the hardest moment in my life," the aunt said. "Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. She's crying and begging me to go get her. She says, 'I'll promise I'll behave, but please get me out of here. I'm all alone.'" The aunt said she had been able to talk to her sister, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, but that Alison and her mother had been separated and unable to speak to one another. The girl is being housed in a shelter, but was told that her mother might be deported without her. I know shes not an American citizen, the aunt said of her niece. But shes a human being. Shes a child. How can they treat her this way? Thousands stopped at border More than 2,000 children stopped at the U.S.-Mexican border have been separated from their parents, amid a growing outcry from Democratic and Republican lawmakers, political figures and others for Trump to reverse the policy, which his administration implemented in April in hopes of discouraging migrants from attempting to enter the United States. On Tuesday, Trump was scheduled to meet with majority Republican congressmen about immigration legislation the House of Representatives expects to vote on later in the week. The U.S. leader, in a Twitter comment, again defended the border policy leading to the separation of children from their parents. "We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally," Trump said. "Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2,000 are with their parents, many of whom have tried to enter our Country illegally on numerous occasions." Support for Trump policy Trump has some support in highly political Washington for his controversial policy. Conservative commentator Ann Coulter called the children detained at the border "child actors," while a second, Laura Ingraham, called the U.S. detention facilities for the children "essentially summer camps." China says it will take appropriate countermeasures if the United States follows through with additional tariffs on Chinese goods. U.S. President Donald Trump announced Monday that he had asked the U.S. trade representative to identify a list of products to subject to 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion worth of goods. The president said the move was in retaliation to Beijing's decision to impose tariffs on $50 billion in U.S. goods, matching the first set of tariffs imposed by Trump. In a statement issued Tuesday, China's commerce ministry criticized Trump's latest move as nothing more than "extreme pressure and blackmail" that "deviates from the consensus reached by both sides" during multiple talks. "China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology,'' Trump said in his statement Monday. "Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers and farmers who have done nothing wrong.'' He threatened even more tariffs if Beijing again hits back with tit-for-tat duties on American goods. Trump's comments came hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a Detroit business meeting that China was engaging in "predatory economics 101'' and an "unprecedented level of larceny'' of intellectual property. He said China's recent claims of "openness and globalization'' are "a joke.'' Pompeo said he raised the issue last week in a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, saying, "I reminded him that's not fair competition." Trump said he has an "excellent relationship'' with Xi, "but the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world.'' Women must be at the heart of climate action if the world is to limit the deadly impact of disasters such as floods, former Irish president and U.N. rights commissioner Mary Robinson said on Monday. Robinson, also a former U.N. climate envoy, said women were most adversely affected by disasters and yet are rarely "put front and center" of efforts to protect the most vulnerable. "Climate change is a man-made problem and must have a feminist solution," she said at a meeting of climate experts at London's Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Entrepreneurship. "Feminism doesn't mean excluding men, it's about being more inclusive of women and - in this case - acknowledging the role they can play in tackling climate change." Research has shown that women's vulnerabilities are exposed during the chaos of cyclones, earthquakes and floods, according to the British think-tank Overseas Development Institute. In many developing countries, for example, women are involved in food production, but are not allowed to manage the cash earned by selling their crops, said Robinson. The lack of access to financial resources can hamper their ability to cope with extreme weather, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of the event. "Women all over the world are ... on the front lines of the fall-out from climate change and therefore on the forefront of climate action," said Natalie Samarasinghe, executive director of Britain's United Nations Association. "What we -- the international community -- need to do is talk to them, learn from them and support them in scaling up what they know works best in their communities," she said at the meeting. Robinson served as Irish president from 1990-1997 before taking over as the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and now leads a foundation devoted to climate justice. Europe and the U.S. have found themselves, since President Donald Trump entered office, at odds on a range of issues from climate change to tariffs and the same holds true when it comes to migration especially with the handling of migrant children. The Trump administrations policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their parents is provoking not only a mounting furor in the U.S. but also in Europe, where a third of the refugees and migrants who have arrived in the past five years have been children. We dont want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us, President Trump tweeted Monday. The reverse sentiment is widely shared by Europeans when it comes to government-sanctioned separation of migrant children from their parents, even among some who are critical of open border policies and want tougher action to halt the migrant influx. Trumps zero-tolerance enforcement policy, which has resulted in the separation of nearly 2,000 children from their parents in the past six weeks, is drawing a backlash from European lawmakers, rights advocates and religious leaders, who describe the tactic as cruel and inhumane. But he does have some supporters among nationalist populist politicians. On Monday Nigel Farage, the former leader of the UK Independence Party and a prominent Brexiter, defended Trump in an exchange on his radio show with an irate Scottish caller, saying that the U.S. president is trying to deter illegal immigration. He said: What he is trying to do is to send a message, Dont come to America illegally. It does look very tough. But the alternative is to do what Mrs. Merkel has done and say, anyone can come, who wants to come. But on Tuesday, criticism grew in Europe over the Trump administration's policy, with Frances government spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, condemning the tactic, saying he did not want to see what is happening in the United States occurring in Europe. On French television, Griveaux said there was now a major transatlantic moral gap. We do not share the same model of civilization, clearly we don't share certain values, he said. Asked about video footage released by the U.S. government showing migrant children held in wire cages and sitting on concrete floors, President Emmanuel Macrons spokesman said the images are shocking. Many of the children who have been entering Europe are unaccompanied. Last year they numbered 20,000, compared to 13,000 who traveled with at least one parent, according to U.N. figures. Those with their parents are not separated on arrival and European Union policy, in line with U.N. guidelines, emphasizing the need to keep families together as the best, most humane way to protect children and to avoid long-term psychological harm. Keeping children in detention facilities with or without parents when it comes to unaccompanied children has been frowned both by EU and U.N. authorities. They see it as a breach of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. But Europe has also struggled with the challenges migrant children pose although no EU country has pursued a policy of separating children from their parents. Detaining children for migration management or asylum reasons with or without family members is difficult to justify and clearly not in the childs best interests, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights said last year in a major report on the legal and policy framework for immigration detention of children. Last year, the agency warned that efforts to speed up asylum processing and make returns more effective may prompt an increased use of immigration detention, possibly also affecting children. It added: This can entail serious risks of violating childrens right to liberty and security if the strict safeguards protecting children from arbitrary detention are disregarded. Children should be placed in open centers that provide for the necessary protection and care to which they are entitled, and which promote their best interests. Spain has been criticized in the past by rights workers for keeping some children in adult immigration detention centers, with or without their parents, pending return to their home countries. And harsh and illegal treatment has been meted out to unaccompanied children. Last week, Oxfam issued a report, Nowhere but Out, in which the charity accused French border police of beating, detaining and forcibly returning to Italy children as young as 12, all in breach of international norms and rules. Other vulnerable migrants have been physically abused, detained and forcibly returned to Italy by French border guards in breach of international norms, Oxfam said on Friday. The report said children who passed through Ventimiglia, a small town on the border with France, had complained about being physically and verbally abused, and detained overnight in cells without food, water or blankets and with no access to an official guardian, all contrary to French and EU law. The issue of unaccompanied children has been of increasing alarm in Europe. In 2016, Europol, the EUs police agency, said around 10,000 unaccompanied refugee children had gone missing in Europe in the previous two years, possibly victimized by human traffickers or turned into illegal child laborers. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday progress was being made in slow-moving talks to update the NAFTA trade accord between the United States, Canada and Mexico, but he held out the prospect of striking bilateral pacts if a three-way deal could not be reached. "We're trying to equalize it. It's not easy but we're getting there," he told a group of U.S. small business executives. "We'll see whether or not we can make a reasonable NAFTA deal." Renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump called a "disaster" for the United States, was a goal he had set out during his election campaign. Negotiations to modernize NAFTA started last August and were initially scheduled to finish by the end of December 2017. That deadline has been extended several times as Canada and Mexico struggle to accommodate far-reaching U.S. demands for change, such as a sunset clause that would allow one nation to pull out after five years. Canada and Mexico reject the idea. At a news conference in Mexico City, Mexican foreign minister Luis Videgaray said he expected the next negotiating meeting of ministers to be held in July. The Canadian government believes a deal to update NAFTA is still possible despite a U.S. move to impose tariffs on Canadian and Mexican steel and aluminum, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said Tuesday in Ottawa. Trade frictions between the United States and Canada have been particularly strained in recent weeks, with Trump taking umbrage at remarks by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that were critical of the heavy U.S. tariffs. Trump said on Tuesday the two nations had a good relationship, but that Americans were being taken advantage of when it came to trade. "We have to change our ways. We can no longer be the stupid country," Trump said. "We want to be the smart country." Many Egyptians hoped to ignore their economic hardship as they celebrated the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Instead, they were told they will have to tighten their belts even more. With the Eid al-Fitr feast in full swing, the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi on Saturday declared it was slashing fuel subsidies, pushing up prices of petrol and public transport by as much as 50 percent. People returning to work Tuesday in Cairo seethed at the new sums they had to pay to board buses or fill up their vehicles with petrol. "We knew there were going to be price rises, but didn't expect it to be this big," said Sabah Hassan, a mother of six who works as a cleaner at a nursery. Hassan said her transportation costs have jumped from around 5 pounds per trip ($0.28) to at least 10 ($0.56). "My household gas has doubled, and so has my water bill how will my 1,000-pound ($55) wages cover it all?" The fuel price increase was the latest in a raft of austerity measures Egypt is carrying out as part of major economic reforms, the price of a $12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. The country's economy, which was battered by the unrest that followed a 2011 popular uprising, has begun to improve since Sissi came to power in 2014. Authorities and many economists credit the reforms with helping to attract long-term foreign investment and accelerate growth in gross domestic product. But fiscal reforms have hit ordinary Egyptians hard. The fuel subsidy cuts came just days after the government said prices for electricity would rise by an average of 26 percent and for piped drinking water by nearly half. Sissi, who was re-elected against virtually no competition in a landslide April vote, has urged patience from the Egyptian people, saying recently the country could only reap the benefits of austerity with everyone on board. "I don't like to talk about other countries, but I hope we take note," he said earlier this month in an apparent reference to protests over tax increases in Jordan warning that similar unrest in Egypt threatened stability. The government has said it will increase welfare spending to help poor Egyptians. Some Egyptians said they would willingly foot the bill for stability and an improved economy. Aside from economic problems, Egypt faces an Islamist militancy in its Sinai Peninsula. "It'll cost me more to fuel my motorbike, but this is a small price to pay to support Sissi and put Egypt back on track," said Ahmed Mohamed, a 36-year-old cafe worker. 'All we do is spend' Mohamed said he was glad to see the back of the 2011 uprising that had toppled longtime leader Hosni Mubarak and then the Muslim Brotherhood. Other Egyptians did not share his views. "Sissi should think of ordinary people for once," said Nermin, a textile industry manager, declining to give her full name. "All we do is spend, and see nothing in return." A taxi driver, who gave his name as Mohamed Mubarak, said it was becoming more and more expensive to run his car. "In Mubarak's days, I would go to the petrol station with 50 pounds, fill her up, and have money left. Now it's 140 pounds. All for the sake of tahiya Masr [long live Egypt]," he said, mocking a Sissi slogan. Despite discontent, most Egyptians said they had no plans to protest out of fear of chaos that might follow, or of arrest. Rare, small-scale protests broke out last month over a sudden increase in fares on Cairo's metro system. Several people were arrested in connection with the demonstrations, which were made illegal in 2013 without permission from the interior ministry. "No one will raise their voice people are scared and feel shackled," Mubarak said. He charged 30 pounds for a normally 20-pound fare. European Union leaders will try to reassure Germany and Italy over migration at a summit next week as a stand-off in Berlin threatens Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition. The EU could take steps to stop asylum seekers moving on from the country in which they are registered and start deciding asylum requests at centers to be established beyond EU borders in the future, according to a draft summit statement. The proposed steps come ahead of the June 28-29 summit in Brussels at which EU leaders will attempt to agree on a joint migration policy three years after more than 1 million people arrived in Europe, causing a crisis for the union. Their joint draft statement is not public and its wording might change. But it showed the bloc is trying to accommodate a new, anti-establishment government in Italy, as well as Berlin where Merkel's coalition partner issued an ultimatum for an EU-wide deal on migration. If the summit fails to reach a satisfactory outcome, Berlin would issue a unilateral ban on refugees already registered in other EU states from entering the country, said the junior governing Christian Social Union that has the interior ministry. German police data suggest any such ban would only affect several hundred people a month and hence have no big impact on the overall number of refugees in Germany. The EU border agency Frontex said more than 90 percent of current arrivals in Italy, Greece and Spain register for asylum there. Many still often go north, including to Germany. This "secondary movement" violates EU law but has been widespread. "Member States should take all necessary internal legislative ... to counter such movements," the text said in an indirect response to German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer. Merkel opposes the proposal that comes from a party facing a tough vote in its home base in Bavaria in October against a resurgent far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has advocated harsh anti-immigration line. The AfD on Tuesday accused the CSU of copying its ideas on how to deal with the migrant crisis. French President Emmanuel Macron and Merkel called in a joint statement on Tuesday for a European solution on migration and said secondary movement must be tackled. Immigration low, tensions high The EU is bitterly divided over migration. It has struggled to reform its internal asylum rules, which broke down in 2015, and has instead tried to tighten its borders and prevent new arrivals. To that end, it has given aid and money to countries including Turkey, Jordan, Libya and Niger. Next week, EU leaders will also agree to look into opening "disembarkation platforms" in regions such as north Africa to decide asylum requests before people get to Europe. European capitals from Rome to Budapest advocate such centres but concerns that processing people outside EU borders could violate the law have long blocked any such initiative. "Such platforms should provide for rapid processing to distinguish between economic migrants and those in need of international protection, and reduce the incentive to embark on perilous journeys," the draft statement said. Italy closed its ports to rescue ships and said it prefers Frontex to work in Africa to prevent people from coming rather than patrol the Mediterranean and rescue those in distressed boats. Tripoli already runs migrant camps in Libya where the EU pays the U.N. migration and refugee agencies to help resettle people to Europe legally or deport them to other African countries. But reform of EU internal asylum rules is stuck. Southern and wealthy central states demand that all EU members host some new arrivals but eastern states refuse leading to a stalemate. In evidence of that division, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on Tuesday the CSU demand for internal border checks is unacceptable. Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said it would be "very difficult to reach a solution" on hosting asylum seekers next week. There is, however, agreement on strengthening external borders and bringing together the border protection databases. "So much progress has been made, we can't let all slip away now. So we need to give key countries something to keep them on board," one EU official said of the proposed text. Every workday, about 7,400 trucks mostly loaded with automotive parts rumble across the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Canada, at times snarling traffic along the busy corridor. But if President Donald Trump delivers on threats to slap 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles and components, there will be far fewer big rigs heading to factories that are now humming close to capacity on both sides of the border. The tariff threat could be a negotiating ploy to restart stalled talks on the North American Free Trade Agreement. But it also could be real, since the administration already has imposed duties on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, as well as steel and aluminum from China, the European Union, Canada and Mexico. Tariffs against China include some autos and parts but if those spread to Canada and Mexico, the impact will be far larger because auto manufacturing has been integrated between the three countries for nearly a quarter century. The Commerce Department said in a statement last week that it "has just launched its investigation into whether imports of auto and auto parts threaten to impair the national security. That investigation, which has only just begun, will inform recommendations to the president for action or inaction." If the wider auto tariffs are imposed, industry experts say they will disrupt a decades-old symbiotic parts supply chain, raise vehicle prices, cut new-vehicle sales, cost jobs in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and even slow related sectors of the economy. "It seems like it is going to be so devastating that I can't imagine that they're actually going to do it," said Kristen Dziczek, vice president of labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank. Trump, who was sniping on Twitter at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after a contentious economic summit of the Group of Seven earlier this month, told the Commerce Department to look at national security reasons to justify tariffs with hopes of bringing factory jobs to the U.S. He tweeted that the administration would "look at tariffs on automobiles flooding the U.S. Market!" But experts predict the tariffs likely would do the opposite, slowing the economy as other countries retaliate. Here's what they say is likely to happen: Auto prices rise, sales fall The tariffs would be charged on parts and assembled autos. Canada, Mexico and others would likely retaliate with duties, and automakers won't be able to absorb all of the increases. So, they will have to raise prices. Imported parts, which all cars and trucks have, will cost more, further raising costs. "We're all going to pay a lot more for vehicles," said Tim Galbraith, sales manager of Cavalier tool and manufacturing in Windsor, Ontario, near Detroit, maker of steel molds used to produce plastic auto parts. About 44 percent of the 17.2 million new vehicles sold last year in the U.S. were imported from other countries, and half of those came from Canada and Mexico. All have parts from outside the U.S., sometimes as much as 40 percent. Based on the 24-year-old NAFTA, automakers and suppliers constantly ship fully assembled vehicles as well as engines, transmissions and thousands of small widgets across both U.S. borders. Parts also come from China and other countries. It's difficult to determine how large any price increases would be. But some back-of-the-envelope calculations show that a Chevrolet Equinox small SUV made in Canada would cost about $5,250 more in the U.S. if General Motors doesn't eat part of it. That's based on an average price of $30,000 in the U.S. for the hot-selling Equinox, made primarily in Ingersoll, Ontario. Tariffs are charged on the manufacturing cost, which is about 70 percent of the sales price. Toyota's RAV4, a main Equinox competitor and the top-selling vehicle in the U.S. that's not a pickup truck, also is made in Canada and would face the same duties. "An import tariff would hurt consumers the most since it would increase the costs of vehicles and parts," Toyota said in a statement. Honda's CR-V, another small SUV, is made in Ohio and would be exempt from the tariff on assembled vehicles, so it would have a price advantage. But about one-quarter of its parts come from other countries. That would force Honda to raise its price too, said Dziczek. With higher prices, many people will either keep current vehicles or buy used ones. Jeff Schuster, senior vice president LMC Automotive, expects U.S. new-vehicle sales would fall 1 million to 2 million per year if tariffs are imposed. Since U.S. auto factories making popular models are running near capacity, automakers couldn't do much in the short run to build more vehicles in the U.S. and avoid the tariff, Schuster said. Jobs lost As sales fall, auto and parts makers would need to cut costs by laying off workers. Mexico and Canada would be hit first, but since they import parts from the U.S., component makers domestically also would have to cut. For instance, the RAV4's engines are made in Alabama and transmissions in West Virginia. If sales drop, those factories wouldn't need as many workers. On the assembly line at the Ontario Equinox factory, the 2,400 workers are worried about the escalating dispute, said Joe Graves, the union president. "I don't really see how one individual can change everything that was put in place over decades," Graves said of Trump. "It does cause a lot of uncertainty and instability with our members." As sales slump, dealers who sell imported cars would lay off workers, too. The pro-free trade Peterson Institute predicted that if other countries impose tariffs, U.S. auto production would fall 4 percent, costing 624,000 U.S. jobs in about one-to-three years. Other sectors of the economy would also be hit because autos touch nearly all manufacturing, said Dan Ujczo, a trade lawyer in Columbus, Ohio. Tariffs would "be a shock wave through the economy. And that will be a red line for Congress to step in and do something," he predicted. Retaliatory tariffs from other countries would likely hit U.S. agriculture and other businesses, curtailing exports and also costing jobs, Dziczek said. Companies with price advantages due to the tariffs may increase U.S. production, and that could bring more jobs. But Schuster and others expect they would raise production with the existing workforce. Although Trump would like to see auto and parts production relocated to the U.S., experts say such moves are not likely. It would take several years and billions of dollars to plan and build new plants, which companies would be reluctant to do without knowing the tariffs are permanent. It's possible the next president could undo the tariffs, and the industry likely would wait for that, Dziczek said. Kazakhstan is taking management lessons from warrior-emperor Genghis Khan as it seeks to conquer neighboring countries' food markets, Deputy Agriculture Minister Arman Yevniyev said Tuesday. The Central Asian nation, whose territory was once part of the Mongol Empire, wants to more than double exports of foodstuffs and other agricultural products over the next five years, Yevniyev told a government meeting. He said meat production was a particularly promising area that could generate up to $2.6 billion in annual export revenue and presented his ministry's plans to overhaul the industry's management and subsidy system. "Genghis Khan can be considered the founder of project management," he said unexpectedly, livening up the meeting which was broadcast online. Yevniyev then recalled the organizational structure of the Mongol army, divided into three wings and units of tens, hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands. "Using this approach, Genghis Khan conquered half of the world with his army," he said. "We will conquer [markets] with meat and other agricultural products." According to Yevniyev's presentation, the biggest potential markets for Kazakh meat are China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Russia which are, coincidentally, the directions of the medieval Mongol conquest. Breeding livestock was the main occupation of the ancestors of today's Kazakhs when they were not busy shooting arrows from horseback at opposing armies. Yevniyev said this nomadic heritage was another competitive advantage. Prime Minister Bakytzhan Sagintayev urged caution with the use of bellicose metaphors. "You've mentioned Genghis Khan I hope we do not scare our neighbors," he said with a laugh. The Mongol ruler is a revered figure in the former Soviet republic of 18 million, where a significant number of people trace their lineage directly to him. FBI Director Christopher Wray defended the bureau on Monday against criticisms leveled by Republicans following a scathing inspector general report about its handling of the 2016 Hillary Clinton email server investigation. Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee alongside the Justice Department's inspector general, Wray said the internal audit focused on the conduct of a small number of FBI employees during the email probe and did not reflect on the larger institution. Mistakes made by those employees do not define our 37,000 men and women and the great work they do every day, Wray said. Nothing in this report impugns the integrity of our workforce as a whole or the FBI as an institution. The FBI is determined to avoid repeating the mistakes identified in the 600-page report, Wray said, adding that hed already started acting on some of its recommendations, including referring misconduct highlighted by the report to the bureau's disciplinary arm. The comments followed the release last Thursday of the report by the Justice Departments inspector general, Michael Horowitz, on the FBIs investigation of Clintons use of a private email server while secretary of state. Took to task former FBI head The report blasted former FBI Director James Comey for deviating from long-standing policies and procedures during the investigation but said there was no evidence that political bias or other improper considerations had impacted the investigation. The review also criticized five FBI employees involved in the investigation for exchanging anti-Trump and pro-Clinton text messages during the probe, including two senior officials -- Peter Strzok and Lisa Page -- who also worked for special counsel Robert Mueller, who is heading an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. The inspector general said that while he found no evidence that improper considerations, including political bias, influenced the Clinton email investigation, the messages cast a cloud over the FBIs handling of the investigation and the investigations credibility. Mueller removed Strzok from his team after the inspector general flagged the pair last August. Page left the team and resigned from the FBI last month. President Donald Trump and his allies have seized on the report to renew their attack on the special counsel. In a Twitter message posted on Monday, Trump repeated a long-standing claim that the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt. Comey gave Strozk his marching orders. Mueller is Comeys best friend. Witch Hunt! Trump tweeted. Last week, Trump said told "Fox and Friends" that the report totally exonerates me. There was total bias when you look at Peter Strzok, what he said about me, when you look at Comey and all his moves, Trump said. Didn't focus on Mueller probe The report did not focus on the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Democrats on the committee repeatedly urged the inspector general to make that point. Horowitz said that the report focused on the FBIs handling of the Clinton investigation and only briefly touched on the Russia investigation when investigators brought the text messages between Strzok and Page to the attention of the special counsel and learned that Strzok wanted to prioritize the Russia investigation over the Clinton probe. Republican members of the committee cited the text messages to discredit the FBI and the Mueller investigators. There is a serious problem with the culture at FBI headquarters, Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch said. But Wray dismissed Trumps repeated characterization of the investigation as a witch hunt. As I said to you last month and as I said before, I do not believe special counsel Mueller is on a witch hunt, Wray said. Some 50 million migrant children worldwide were living in other countries or were still living in their native countries after having been forcibly displaced from their homes in 2016, according to the United Nations Children's Fund. The September 2016 report titled "Uprooted: The Growing Crisis for Refugee and Migrant Children," said "migrating and displaced children are at risk of some of the worst forms of abuse and harm." The report said the 10 countries that hosted the largest number of refugees are in Asia and Africa. Turkey had by far the largest number of refugees. More than 100 countries detain children for immigration reasons, according to the Global Campaign to End Child Immigration Detention. The campaign has researched only a small number of countries that detain children on the basis of their immigration status: Australia, Malaysia, Israel, South Africa, Greece, Mexico and the United States. The UNICEF report said some countries do not detain migrant children at all, while others separate them from their families by placing them in child care facilities. Other countries detain children with convicted adult felons. There is, however, a lack of verified information on the number of children "deprived of liberty each year," said the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child and more than 50 other human rights groups. While the campaign estimates that hundreds of thousands of children are locked in immigration centers every day, Human Rights Watch said in its report, "Children Behind Bars: The Global Overuse of Detention of Children," that more than 1 million children are behind bars around the world. The Human Rights Watch report also cited a U.N. human rights treaty that prohibits the "mandatory and indefinite detention of children." Nevertheless, the report said Australia has had a mandatory detention policy for all asylum seekers since 1992. At the end of October 2015, Australia held 112 children in mainland detention centers and another 95 children in a regional center on the island of Nauru. In the U.S., the administration of President Barack Obama "dramatically expanded family immigration detention capacity" from 100 beds to more than 3,000 in an attempt to deter migrants from Central America, the report said. The Obama administration, however, subsequently "backed away from that rationale." The report said Thailand's immigration laws allowed the "indefinite detention of all refugees" and that migrant children were detained in "squalid cells without adequate food or opportunity to exercise or receive an education." In Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico, there is "large-scale detention of migrant children," according to Human Rights Watch and other organizations. An argumentative computer proved formidable against two human debaters as IBM gave its first public demonstration of new artificial intelligence technology it's been working on for more than five years. The new skills show that computers are getting better at mastering human language and speech. The computer made its case for government-subsidized space research by pulling in evidence from its huge internal repository of newspapers, journals and other sources. After delivering opening arguments, the computer listened to a professional human debater's counter-argument and spent four minutes rebutting it. The company unveiled its Project Debater in San Francisco on Monday. IBM selected possible topics based on whether they were debatable, but neither the computer nor the human debaters knew the topic in advance. Nonetheless, the computer championed the topic fiercely with just a few awkward gaps in reasoning. "Subsidizing space exploration is like investing in really good tires," argued the computer system, its female voice embodied in a 5-foot-tall machine shaped like a monolith with TV screens on its sides. Such research would enrich the human mind, inspire young people and be a "very sound investment," it said, making it more important even than good roads, schools or health care. After closing arguments, it moved on to a second debate about telemedicine. An IBM research team based in Israel began working on the project not long after IBM's Watson computer beat two human quizmasters on a Jeopardy challenge in 2011. But rather than just scanning a giant trove of data in search of factoids, IBM's latest project taps into several more complex branches of AI. Search engine algorithms used by Google and Microsoft's Bing use similar technology to digest and summarize written content and compose new paragraphs. Voice assistants such as Amazon's Alexa rely on listening comprehension to answer questions posed by people. Google recently demonstrated an eerily human-like voice assistant that can call hair salons or restaurants to make appointments. But IBM says it's breaking new ground by creating a system that tackles deeper human practices of rhetoric and analysis, and how they're used to discuss big questions whose answers aren't always clear. "If you think of the rules of debate, they're far more open-ended than the rules of a board game," said Ranit Aharonov, who manages the debater project. IBM doesn't try to declare a winner of the debates, but Noa Ovadia, one of the human debaters, said the computer was a formidable opponent even if it made a few too many blanket statements about space exploration being the pinnacle of human achievement. Ovadia, a national debate champion in Israel, said she was impressed by its fluency in language and ability to construct sentences. She said the computer was able to "get to the bottom line of my arguments" and respond to them. Among several outside experts IBM invited to attend Project Debater's debut was Chris Reed, who directs the Centre for Argument Technology at the University of Dundee in Scotland. Reed said he was impressed by its grasp of "procatalepsis" a rhetorical technique that involves anticipating an opponent's argument and pre-emptively rebutting it. As expected, the machine tends to be better than humans at bringing in numbers and other detailed supporting evidence. It's also able to latch onto the most salient and attention-getting elements of an argument, and can even deliver some self-referential jokes about being a computer. But it lacks tact, researchers said. Sometimes the jokes don't come out right. And Monday, some of the sources it cited such as a German official and an Arab sheikh didn't seem particularly germane. "Humans tend to be better at using more expressive language, more original language," said Dario Gil, IBM's vice president of AI research. "They bring in their own personal experience as a way to illustrate the point. The machine doesn't live in the real world or have a life that it's able to tap into." There are no immediate plans to turn Project Debater into a commercial product, but Gil said it could be useful in the future in helping lawyers or other human workers make informed decisions. An audio recording was released Monday depicting children desperately crying and begging for their parents after being separated from them by U.S. immigration authorities at its southwestern border, sparking new outrage against the Trump administration and its new "zero-tolerance policy" towards illegal immigrants. The nearly eight-minute long recording was released by ProPublica, an independent, investigative news site. ProPublica says an unidentified whistleblower passed on the recording to a civil rights attorney, who gave it to the website. Among the disturbing sounds heard on the recording was a child identified by ProPublica as a six-year-old girl from El Salvador begging authorities in Spanish to call her aunt to pick her up from the detention center. At one point in the audio, a man identified as a Border Patrol agent said in Spanish over the cries of scores of children: "Well, we have an orchestra here. What's missing is a conductor." LISTEN: ProPublica recording of children President Donald Trump defended his administration's policy of forcibly separating children from parents at the U.S. border with Mexico on Monday, saying The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility." WATCH: Trump Immigration Enforcement Trump, speaking in the White House East Room during a National Space Council meeting, warned that whats happening in Europe we cant allow that to happen to the United States not on my watch. Earlier in the day, on the Twitter social media platform, the president inaccurately linked migration in Germany to a rising crime rate. (Actually, the latest German government statistics show reported crimes at the lowest level in 30 years.) Nearly 2,000 children were sent to mass detention centers or foster care from mid-April to the end of May, according to government officials. The regular White House briefing was delayed several times Monday amid the furor as officials huddled with Trump in the West Wing. 'Zero-tolerance' policy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders finally introduced Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen by late evening, and she defended the administrations zero-tolerance policy that is breaking up families at the southwestern U.S. border. Nielsen forcefully pushed back at the negative media coverage, asserting that what U.S. authorities are doing is properly enforcing the law. What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law, she said. Asked about critics accusing the administration of using children as pawns to demand legislative actions from Congress, the DHS secretary replied, I say that is a very cowardly response, adding it is clearly within Congress power to make the laws and change the laws. They should do so. Trump's Republican party controls both chambers in Congress, and the family border policies were set by his administration. In a tweet displaying photographs of a detention facility, showing children sleeping on mats with foil blankets, Democrat Senator Tim Kaine wrote: The real Trump Hotel. Kaine, a member of a subcommittee on children and families, was his partys vice presidential nominee on the ticket with Hillary Clinton, which lost to Trump and Mike Pence in 2016. Kamala Harris, one of the two Democratic Party senators from California, the most populous state, called Monday for Nielsens resignation. Harris, mentioned as a likely presidential candidate in 2020, said under Nielsens watch our government has committed human rights abuses by breaking up families along the southern border. And she has failed to be accountable and transparent with the American people. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also added her voice to those calling for Nielsen to quit her post. Both Nielsen and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in speeches to a law enforcement group in New Orleans earlier on Monday, defended the administration's stance. Sessions said that while the Trump administration does not want to separate children from their parents we cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws." UN rebuke In a rare rebuke of the United States, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said migrant children should not be separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Children must not be traumatized by being separated from their parents. Family unity must be preserved, a spokesman for Guterres said in a statement. This is a manufactured crisis. It is not necessary to separate parents and children to effectively enforce the nations immigration laws, said Doris Meissner, who was commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for seven years during the Clinton administration. Earlier administrations have grappled with comparable issues and their responsibility for enforcing the same laws," she added. "They have made different choices on how best to enforce the laws because they have understood and recognized that the practices we are witnessing today are at odds with fundamental American values and principles. The House of Representatives is preparing for expected votes this week on major changes to U.S. immigration laws. Trump is scheduled to meet with House Republicans on Tuesday to discuss two competing Republican immigration reform bills. Sanders on Monday told reporters Trump is willing to sign either bill. Both would provide legal status to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, make sweeping changes to legal immigration, and boost U.S. border security. However, it is unclear if either will attract enough votes to pass. The degree to which the president seemingly believes and continues to equate immigrants and refugees with crime and danger contributes to heightening fear and opposition to immigration, Meissner told VOA. This makes it very difficult for members of Congress to reach agreement on important legislative measures that the country should be taking to manage immigration challenges more effectively. Intel topped a list issued on Monday ranking how well technology companies combat the risk of forced labor in their supply chains, overtaking HP and Apple. Most of the top 40 global technology companies assessed in the study by KnowTheChain, an online resource for business, had made progress since the last report was published in 2016. But the study found there was still room for improvement. The sector needs to advance their efforts further down the supply chain in order to truly protect vulnerable workers, said Kilian Moote, project director of KnowTheChain, in a statement. Intel, HP and Apple scored the highest on the list, which looked at factors including purchasing practices, monitoring and auditing processes. China-based BOE Technology Group and Taiwan's Largan Precision came bottom. Workers who make the components used by technology companies are often migrants vulnerable to exploitative working conditions, the report said. About 25 million people globally were estimated to be trapped in forced labor in 2016, according to the International Labor Organization and rights group Walk Free Foundation. Laborers in technology companies supply chains are sometimes charged high recruitment fees to get jobs, trapped in debt servitude, or deprived of their passports or other documents, the report said. It highlighted a failure to give workers a voice through grievance mechanisms and tackle exploitative recruiting practices as the main areas of concern across the sector. In recent years modern slavery has increasingly come under the global spotlight, putting ever greater regulatory and consumer pressure on firms to ensure their supply chains are free of forced labor, child labor and other forms of slavery. From cosmetics and clothes to shrimp and smartphones, supply chains are often complex with multiple layers across various countries whether in sourcing the raw materials or creating the final product making it hard to identify exploitation. Overall, large technology companies fared better than smaller ones, suggesting a strong link between size and capacity to take action, the report said. Amazon, which ranked 20th, was a notable exception, it said. Top-ranking brands ... are listening to workers in their supply chains and weeding out unscrupulous recruitment processes, Phil Bloomer, head of the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. A spokesman for Amazon said the report drew from old and incomplete information and failed to take into account recently launched anti-slavery commitments and initiatives. HP said it regularly assessed its supply chain to identify and address any concerns and risks of exploitation. We strive to ensure that workers in our supply chain have fair treatment, safe working conditions, and freely chosen employment, said Annukka Dickens, HP's director for human rights and supply chain responsibility. Intel, Apple, BOE Technology and Largan Precision did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Italy's far-right anti-immigrant interior minister, Matteo Salvini, has announced plans to count the ethnic Roma community living in the country and deport those without Italian nationality. Salvini, who also serves as deputy prime minister and leads the Northern League party, said he has ordered a new census aimed at expelling non-Italian Roma. But reaction to his idea came from all sides. Salvini has been very clear about not wanting anyone who is illegal on Italian soil. He set off a storm of controversy in Europe last week when he refused to let a charity ship carrying more than 600 mainly African migrants dock in Italy. He said his ministry is looking at what he called "the Roma question" and wanted to see "who, and how many" there were. He was particularly clear that he did not want what he described as "these criminals" to be kept in Italian prisons and was looking at ways to deport them. He said an agreement is needed with the countries that must take them back, like Romania, Albania and Tunisia. He claimed that they are the countries of origin from which criminals in Italian prisons are most numerous and added that Italy would "unfortunately" have to keep Roma found to have Italian nationality. The policy was met with resistance by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who was quoted in Italian press reports as saying Salvini had gone "too far." The leader of the anti-establishment M5S, Luigi Di Maio, called Salvini's order "unconstitutional." Anna Maria Bernini, of the center-right Forza Italia party, said the government should guarantee the respect of the law without discrimination. The leader of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni, said a census of the Roma was "OK" obviously a first step. But the problem is much wider, she added, and requires strong decisions. The center-left Democratic Party (PD) was highly critical of Salvini, saying his call revived memories of "ethnic cleansing." Acting party secretary Maurizio Martina said nationalist and sovereignty positions like these are the worst and provide no real solutions to an enormous historical issue. Salvini subsequently explained that the government had no intention of setting up a separate archive for Roma. He said he wanted to protect Roma children whose parents bar them from going to local schools and instead instigate them to criminality. Tens of thousands of Roma live across Italy, many in squalid shantytowns on the outskirts of major cities. According to an Italian national statistics report in 2017, there were believed to be up to 180,000 Roma in the country, with 40 percent under age 14. About half were believed to be Italian citizens. Menstruation often means missing school for many girls in parts of Africa. But should the state provide sanitary products to girls who cannot afford them to prevent them from falling behind in their studies? That question continues to stir debate in several East African countries but especially in Kenya, where President Uhuru Kenyatta last year signed the Basic Education Amendment Act requiring the government to provide free sanitary towels to schoolgirls. A 2016 U.N. report estimated that one in 10 girls in Sub-Saharan Africa misses school during her menstrual cycle due to an inability to access affordable sanitary products. After two years of debate, Kenya's parliament voted overwhelmingly last year in favor of a measure that advocates say lifts that barrier to education. In June of 2017, President Kenyatta signed the amendment into law. Sanitary towels handed out This May, Gender Affairs Cabinet Secretary Margaret Kobia cleared the way for the distribution of one million sanitary towels to girls in Kenyas Makueni and Kitui counties. The government said it targeted more than 200,000 schoolgirls for distribution as part of a pilot program. Through funds provided by the government and channeled to the county governments, the new law is set to benefit girls in all of Kenyas 47 counties. The government allocated $4.6 million to the gender department ministry to buy the towels. Femme International Rachel Ouko is the Nairobi program coordinator for Femme International, a non-profit organization that provides menstrual cups and reusable, washable pads to underprivileged girls in Kenya and Tanzania. If that system can work very well, it will have a great impact on school-going girl, Ouko said. First of all, we have free education, so no girl should have an excuse of not going to school. Then there is free sanitary pads, so no girl should not have an excuse of going to school because they lack sanitary pads. Activists around the region say the issue is most pronounced in rural areas, and the problem is more complex than just supplying sanitary pads. In 2017, the U.N. Children's Fund estimated around 60 percent of girls in Uganda missed class because their schools lacked private toilets and washing facilities to help them manage during their periods. Cycle of frustration Regina Kasebe is a Uganda social worker with Action Alliance, also known as Solidarity Uganda. Issues of women and girls cut across nations and you find that in schools when these young girls, most of them come from poor families and in the schools where we majorly work with and the challenge they have is during menstruation, Kasebe said. Because they do not have sanitary towels, they do not use anything, so for those days you have to stay home you cannot go to school when you are in such a situation, so there is missing school during the days of menstruation and also they drop out because they get frustrated because they cannot continue handling the same issue over and over again, she said. Kasebe said girls in rural areas are also more likely to be married off once they have started menstruating, further contributing to drop-out rates. Several African nations have taken steps to improve access to sanitary products for both women and girls. Uganda announced in 2017 that sanitary pads would be exempt from value-added tax, and in November, Kenya removed duties on raw materials used in the production of sanitary pads to help make the product more affordable. Missed work, school According to Sustainable Health Enterprises, an NGO, 18 percent of women and girls in Rwanda missed work or school last year because they could not afford to buy menstrual pads. The NGO estimates that a lack of affordable sanitary pads costs Rwanda's economy $115 million per year. Activists hope other countries in the region will follow Kenyas example and take steps to make sanitary products more accessible, and thus help girls overcome a big disadvantage they have been facing at school. The Laos government has announced plans for a fourth major dam on the Mekong mainstream just months after the feasibility of another of its hydroelectric projects was thrown into question by a delayed power deal. Laos notified the Mekong River Commission (MRC) last week of its intention to build a 770 megawatt dam at Pak Lay in Xayaburi province, where it has already constructed another highly controversial mainstream dam. The notification follows Thailand's decision in February to delay signing a power purchase agreement for Laos 912-megawatt Pak Beng. Bangkok is said to be reconsidering its energy strategy in light of a reported electricity surplus. Maureen Harris, Southeast Asia director at International Rivers, an environmental watchdog group, said the government's notification on the Pak Lay dam is unusual. Firstly, the construction on the project in scheduled to start in 2022, which is over three years away. So thats initiating the process significantly sooner than has been the case for the other projects that have gone through the procedure to date, Harris said. Theres also no developer or power purchaser who has been identified in the notification," she added. Impact concerns Harris suspects there could be some concerns in Laos over the environmental impact of the dams. At a major summit in Cambodia in April, MRC representatives presented the findings of a landmark $4.7 million, scientific assessment of planned developments on a river crucial to fish stocks and food supplies across Southeast Asia. That study found that if current development plans went ahead, 39 to 40 percent of the entire fish biomass -- about $4.3 billion worth -- would be wiped out by 2040 in the Lower Mekong Basin, where about 200 million people rely on the river. Harris suggested the notification looked like a purposeful distraction from unresolved questions over Laos' existing dams, how to apply the MRC Council Studys findings and proposed reforms to the prior notification process itself. The MRC secretariat wrote in an emailed response to VOA that the fact that Laos had engaged in notification and consultation on all its mainstream projects demonstrates it has not disregarded such concerns. One shall recognize Laos constructive intent in submission of the project to the prior consultation instead of taking it as inflaming tensions, witnessing a case in the modern time when one state threatens to bomb a dam being built in the upstream area, the secretariat wrote, invoking a hypothetical situation. The submission is to prevent barbarian conflicts that the [sic] mankind experienced in its past," it wrote. Te Navuth, secretary general of the Cambodia National Mekong Committee, echoed those sentiments, saying that though all of Laos mainstream dams raised serious issues, those concerns are being handled through the established MRC mechanisms. The first one was a serious case already. So our concern is a concern overall on fish migrations, on sediment, blocking flow, river regime changing, these more common concerns. We could not say yes or no to the projects directly, so we have to talk to each other first using the findings from the council study, from any other sources that we have, he said. Nuanlaor Wongpinitwarodom, director of Thailand's Mekong Management Bureau, said she could not comment until she had seen the Laos government submission while representatives of Vietnam's National Mekong Committee did not respond to VOA inquires. The four member countries of the MRC -- Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos -- will now have six months to review the Laos government proposal for Pak Lay and urge strategies to mitigate its impacts but have no authority to stop it being constructed. Economically viable? Conservationists and renewable energy proponents at the April MRC summit heralded the Pak Beng power purchase delay as a tipping point in the transition from hydropower to renewables such as solar and wind. It came after a January report from the International Renewable Energy Agency found the so-called levelized price of solar generated electricity had plummeted by 73 percent from 2010 to 2017, predicting the cost would halve again by 2020 to become cheaper than hydropower competitors. Pak Lay would not come online until 2029, and the projected cost of the dam is thus far not known. Han Phoumin, a senior energy economist at the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia in Jakarta, said for now, hydro remains a more cost-competitive option, especially given its capacity to provide baseload power and comparative ease of integration into existing infrastructure. But if the timelines until 2029, I think the development of storage for solar and wind could be viable. In that case, I think it will provide a very important role as baseload power. In that case, I think they could, to some point, beat the hydro," Phoumin said. Selling the power generated by Pak Lay would not be a problem, he said, given that energy demand in the region is expected to increase over that time frame by about two to three times while ASEAN grid interconnectivity will continually expand to available markets. Securing upfront investment first though might be another story. The investor must have very strong backup already, perhaps we need to explore because the project cannot go ahead without a strong kind of PPA (power purchasing agreement) or off-taker agreement, he said. Delegates from several African countries gathered in Malawi over the weekend to commemorate the Day of the African Child. The event is celebrated each year on June 16 to honor children who were shot dead during a street protest against apartheid in South Africa in 1976. Discussions at this years event focused on ensuring African girls have the opportunity to get a good education. Lameck Masina reports from Malawi's capital city, Lilongwe. Chancellor Angela Merkel coolly rebuffed U.S. President Donald Trump's assertion that migrants were behind a surge in crime in Germany, pointing to statistics that showed crime was in fact down. "My answer is that the interior minister presented the crime statistics a short while ago and they speak for themselves," Merkel told a news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron when asked about a recent flurry of tweets from Trump. "We are seeing a slight positive development. We must always do more to fight criminiality. But they were very encouraging numbers," she added. Statistics published last month showed that overall crime fell 9.6 percent in Germany in 2017. A government-sponsored study published in January showed that violent crime had risen about 10 percent in 2015 and 2016, attributing more than 90 percent of the rise to young male asylum seekers. Merkel has faced opposition at home for a decision in 2015 to open Germany's borders to hundreds of thousands of migrants, mostly Middle Eastern asylum seekers who crossed by sea from Turkey to Greece and overland through the Balkans. That route has since been closed under a 2016 deal Turkey-EU deal. In a tweet on Monday, Trump said that the people of Germany were turning against their leadership because of loose migration policies. "Crime is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture," Trump said. He followed that up with a tweet on Tuesday that said: "Crime in Germany is up 10% plus [officials do not want to report these crimes] since migrants were accepted. Others countries are even worse. Be smart America!" His tweets come amid a storm of criticism from Democrats and some Republicans for his administration's policy of detaining immigrant children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said it was "not the American president's role to speculate as he did yesterday that the German people would march towards the chancellery to remove Mrs. Merkel." "Mr. Trump may govern the USA, he doesn't govern Europe," Juncker added. Angela Merkel says Germany remains fully committed to the Paris climate accord, despite U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the agreement. Germany's long-time chancellor said Tuesday that the U.S. move was "very regrettable'' at a time when the overwhelming majority of countries worldwide are trying to limit global warming. Merkel told a climate meeting with over 30 governments in Berlin that "climate change isn't a matter of faith ... it's a fact,'' citing new temperature records and the increase in extreme weather events around the world. She said efforts to curb global warming would help limit economic damage and boost innovation. Last year, at a global climate summit in Poland, Merkel urged delegates to hammer out a binding set of rules to govern the 2015 Paris agreement. Italy's new right-wing interior minister Matteo Salvini said his department has to look into "the Roma question" in Italy a comment the opposition said reminds them of Italian fascism. Salvini said Monday he wants to take a census of Italy's Roma population. "Unfortunately, we will have to keep the Italian Roma because we can't expel them," Salvini told Telelombardia television. Center-left politicians immediately jumped on Salvini's comments, likening it to ethnic cleansing. "You can work for security and respect for rules without becoming fascistic," lawmaker Ettore Rosato tweeted. "The announced census of Roma is vulgar and demagogical." But Salvini said he wants to help the Roma, an itinerant ethnic group. He said he wants to know who they are and where they live, and protect Roma children, whose parents he said did not want them to integrate into society. "We are aiming primarily to care for the children who aren't allowed to go to school regularly because they prefer to introduce them to a life of crime," he said. The interior minister said he has no desire to take fingerprints of the Roma or keep index cards of individuals. He also said he wants to see how European Union funds earmarked to help the Roma are spent. Many Roma live in camps on the outskirts of Italian cities. They complain of lifelong discrimination, being denied job and educational opportunities. But officials say many Roma are responsible for petty crimes, such as pickpocketing and theft. Salvini's comments about the Roma came a week after Italy refused to let a shipload of migrants dock at an Italian port. Spain gave permission for the ship to dock in its country Sunday. Arab media are reporting that Saudi-led coalition forces have captured dozens of Houthi militia fighters after taking control of large parts of Yemen's Hodeida airport. Witnesses say the Houthis have been reinforcing their positions around Hodeida's port, the country's largest, as coalition forces try to tighten their noose on the city. VOA could not independently confirm if the Houthis still controlled any parts of the airport complex. Hodeida airport is approximately 10 kilometers from the city's port, which is the real objective of the battle. The port supplies the capital, Sana'a, with about 70 percent of its needs, according to Arab media. Witnesses say the Houthis have been reinforcing their positions around Hodeida's port, the country's largest, as coalition forces try to tighten their noose on the city. According to witnesses, Apache helicopters belonging to the coalition fired on Houthi forces along Hodeida's coastal road, as the Houthis fired back with machine guns and mortar rounds. Yemeni journalist Ezzat Mustapha told al Arabiya TV that neighborhoods along the coastal road "have narrow streets and are heavily populated," making them difficult to enter. Houthi fighters reportedly have dug trenches along the seafront, cutting water and electricity lines and forcing many residents to flee. Sky News Arabia accused the Houthis of shelling civilian areas, although it was not immediately clear what the Houthis were firing at. The Houthis also have positioned tanks at various entrances into the city. Yemen analyst Greg Johnsen, who works for the Arabia Foundation and spent several years on the U.N. Security Council's Yemen Panel of Experts, told VOA the battle for Hodeida has been a long time in the making. "The Emiratis, the Saudis, and the internationally-recognized government of Yemen they've wanted to take Hodeida for quite a long time," he said. "The Houthis know this and the Houthis have been planning a defense of the city for quite a while, as well. So both sides are determined and both sides have their plans, and now we see how it plays out." The United Arab Emirates, which is leading the military forces in the battle for Hodeida, has been pushing to pressure the Houthis, according to Johnsen. "They are slowly tightening the noose on the Houthis and ratcheting up pressure," he said. "So they're trying to do this in a way that won't exacerbate the humanitarian crisis, while also attempting to put military pressure on the Houthis." Hilal Khashan, who teaches political science at the American University of Beirut, said he key objective of the military operation is to apply tremendous pressure to force the Houthis to withdraw from Hodeida's harbor without causing serious damage to the port's infrastructure. The goal, he added, is to convince the Houthis that "this is an unwinnable war so that they would pull out from Hodeida harbor and allow a United Nations team to administer the harbor, with the understanding that the Houthis would also continue to receive supplies through the harbor." Khashan added that the United States has urged the UAE not to target Hodeida's port infrastructure so that it may still be used after the battle is over. Aid groups, however, have warned that serious damage to the port could severely aggravate Yemen's already dire humanitarian crisis. Johnsen noted that U.N. special envoy Martin Griffiths, who briefed the U.N. Security Council Monday, has been attempting to broker a political solution to the conflict which would bring the Houthis back to the country's stalled national dialogue talks. Arab media reports that Griffiths left Sana'a for the Jordanian capital, Amman, Tuesday afternoon. Leaders of South American trade bloc Mercosur pushed for trade deals with Asian and other Western Hemisphere countries during a summit on Monday, as roadblocks remained in talks with the European Union (EU) despite optimism earlier this year. European officials said earlier this month that talks for a long-delayed trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay were nearing a close. But Uruguay's President Tabare Vazquez, who assumed the bloc's rotating presidency, criticized delays in negotiations. "We are not prepared to waste time in eternal negotiations," Vazquez said in a speech. "Nor are we prepared to sign a watered-down version." Vazquez reiterated that Uruguay was keen to sign a free-trade deal with China, its top trade partner, even if it had to sign it alone rather than as part of Mercosur. China is the main market for many of the raw materials the bloc produces, but its manufacturing exports also compete with domestic industries. The last round of EU-Mercosur talks in April ended with limited progress and finger-pointing about who was holding up a deal. Key gaps remain on how far to open each other's markets to industrial goods and farm products, such as Latin American beef and EU cars and dairy. The Mercosur countries emphasized in a joint statement on the need to "have the political support from both parties" to reach a deal. "We should not abandon the idea of this alliance," Brazilian President Michel Temer told reporters. "Closing the doors now would impede negotiations which recently have had reasonable success." Temer also pushed for trade talks with the neighboring Pacific Alliance countries of Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, which are generally far more open to international trade than their Mercosur counterparts. A meeting between the two blocs is scheduled for next month. In the joint statement, the bloc described recently launched trade talks with Canada and South Korea as an "assertive response against protectionist tendencies." Argentine Vice President Gabriela Michetti also called on the bloc to "advance quickly" in talks with Singapore, India and North Africa. In separate statements, the Mercosur members also condemned violence in Nicaragua, where a wave of anti-government protests have left 170 dead. The bloc also expressed concern about the humanitarian and migrant crisis in Venezuela, which was formerly a Mercosur member but got kicked out last year. Amnesty International is condemning Thailand's first execution since 2009. The country's Department of Correction says 26-year-old Theerasak Longj was put to death Monday by lethal injection at a prison outside of Bangkok. He was condemned for the brutal 2012 stabbing death of a 17-year-old boy for his cellphone. The agency issued a statement saying it hopes Monday's execution will serve as a warning for those who think of committing serious crimes or violating the law. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Katherine Gerson, Amnesty International's Thailand campaigner said in a written statement Tuesday. Gerson said the country "is shockingly reneging on its own commitment to move towards abolition of the death penalty... and is also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment." She said Amnesty was ready to classify Thailand as a nation that abolished the death penalty in practice, since it was close to reaching the important milestone of a decade without executions in 2019. Over 500 prisoners in Thailand are awaiting execution, including 94 women. Theerasak was the seventh convict executed by lethal injection since Thailand switched methods in 2003 from a firing squad. By Ivan Marusic, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Melbourne from www.shutterstock.com Making science for people is a series that explores how humanities, arts and social sciences expertise is applied to problems typically corralled into the science and technology space. The first piece in the series is here. Todays article takes a look at turbulence as a question of science and of humanity. Most of us have an understanding of what atmospheric turbulence is nauseating plane movement is hard to forget. But turbulence is all around us: not just in the air, but also in water, and even in crowds of moving people. Perhaps surprisingly though, details around the science of turbulence are not all that well understood. Researchers studying flow and turbulence within different disciplines are yet to fully understand its complex operation and as a result, solving problems related to turbulence is difficult. Read more: Explainer: how dangerous is turbulence ... and can it bring down a plane? Turbulence all around us In a simple sense, turbulence can be described as a state of fluid flow. And although it makes some plane flights uncomfortable, turbulence in our atmosphere is essential to the existence of all life on earth. Turbulence mixes heat, moisture, carbon dioxide and pollutants to and from the earths surface, maintaining our biosphere in a habitable state. Without turbulence, the air near the ground would be a lot hotter when the sun is up, your feet would melt while your head would be freezing! More than two-thirds of the Australian population live in capital cities, creating problematic forms of turbulence. Highly populated regions with reduced vegetation cover absorb heat from the sun and release it through buoyant turbulent plumes. This process can create complex micro-climates with significant air quality issues. Read more: Walking mightn't be good for you if it's through Australia's polluted city streets Smog and algal blooms are extreme circumstances where reduced levels of turbulence and flow affect us in a negative way. Willem van Aken, CSIRO/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY Turbulence in water certainly slows it down without turbulence, drifting in a canoe on the Yarra River would happen at a hair-raising 2,000 km per hour, instead of a lazy one km per hour. In engineering terms, our inability to precisely model and control turbulent flows leads to inefficient over-design, and limits future technologies in a vast array of applications. About 10% of all the electricity generated every year is currently consumed in the process of overcoming the effects of turbulence. Read more: Are toxic algal blooms the new normal for Australia's major rivers? Da Vincis turbolenza In the humanities disciplines, the notion of turbulence is widely employed in artistic representations and literary expressions right through to philosophical theories, economic modelling and descriptions of political revolution. By contrast to their scientist counterparts, humanities scholars tend to use the concept of turbulence almost exclusively in a negative sense as disorder, disruption, agitation and commotion. This sense of the word can be seen in one of the earliest documented considerations of flow patterns in water. Leonardo da Vinci, considering the whirling movement of water around an obstacle, described it as agitated and disrupted: as turbolenza. Da Vincis art and science did not occur in a vacuum but was deeply shaped by the world around him. This was a world at war, which drove him across the Italian states and eventually to France. Some of his studies of air and water flow, and his inventions adapting bird flight, were directly intended as contributions towards military technologies in these conflicts. Turbulence, therefore, was not just an abstract research subject for da Vinci but also a lived experience, and its design applications a critical source of income. Read more: Why Leonardo da Vinci was a genius Looking at Leonardo reminds us of the crucial but often ignored point that studies of turbulence have a long history. Understanding this history is fundamental to grasping how turbulence has been conceptualised in the past, which has informed how we understand it now, and how we will conceive of it in the future. Such considerations are determined by the current problems of the day be they technological, cultural, social and/or political. One of the most urgent issues of our time and one which encapsulates turbulence in all of these facets is the refugee crisis. This has created a flow of humans across lands in proportions historically unprecedented. The use of chemical warfare on civilians in Syria also reflects the intersections between industrialisation, atmospheric turbulence and human flow. Read more: Syria's latest chemical massacre demands a global response Solving problems with diverse expertise Understanding turbulence better may reduce drag, improve efficiency, lower fuel use and create better environmental outcomes when flying. This is especially important to a country like Australia which relies so heavily on long-haul air travel. Or, by establishing reliable and validated models for the magnitudes and scales of turbulence on wind and tidal energy farms, we could improve their reliability, and reduce risks associated with turbine failure and loss of power supply. Understanding turbulence in coastal and inland waters will assist in identifying best practice maintenance of riverine, estuarine and coastal ocean health. In the longer term, engineering capability regarding turbulence from may help us understand turbulent flow of people, for example following the use of chemical weapons in war and in refugee crises. Partnerships across science, technology, engineering, arts and humanities help us consider how and why turbulence is understood in different cultural knowledge systems, and understand how turbulent flows in everyday and extreme contexts are understood, modelled, and managed. That is how we can build a sustainable future. Read more: Creating research value needs more than just science arts, humanities, social sciences can help Ivan Marusic receives funding from the Australian Research Council Joy Damousi receives funding from the Australian Research Council Susan Broomhall receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Originally published in The Conversation. The Trump administration, escalating its fight with so-called sanctuary cities, asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to narrow a lower court's nationwide order preventing the federal government from denying public safety grants to municipalities that limit cooperation on immigration enforcement. The Justice Department asked the high court to make the injunction issued by a federal judge in Chicago cover only that city and not the entire country. Republican President Donald Trump's administration has gone on an offensive against Democratic-governed cities and states that protect illegal immigrants as part of his hard-line immigration policies. The Justice Department said the injunction "strays far beyond the traditional, proper role of federal courts." The justices likely will ask the city of Chicago for a response before deciding on the request. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has criticized lower courts for imposing nationwide injunctions against some of the administration's most contentious policies. Chicago sued the administration last year after Sessions said he would cut off cities from certain grants unless they allowed federal immigration authorities unlimited access to local jails and provided advance notice before releasing anyone wanted for immigration violations. Since the injunction was issued last year, the Justice Department said it has not issued grants to the nearly 1,000 state and local jurisdictions that have applied, amounting to more than $250 million in funds. The Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the injunction in April, saying Sessions likely exceeded his authority in imposing the conditions on the grants. The 7th Circuit said that because nationwide injunctions have such a powerful effect, judges should rarely grant them, but doing so was proper in this case. Nationwide injunctions also have blocked Trump's bid to wind down a program protecting immigrants brought into the United States illegally as children from deportation, and to exempt more religious-based employers from a requirement that health insurance provided to employees covers birth control for women. Special counsel Robert Mueller is examining a previously undisclosed meeting between longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone and a Russian figure who allegedly tried to sell him dirt on Hillary Clinton. The meeting between Stone and a man who identified himself as Henry Greenberg was described in a pair of letters sent Friday to the House Intelligence Committee and first reported by The Washington Post. Stone and Michael Caputo, a Trump campaign aide who arranged the 2016 meeting, did not disclose the contact in their interviews with the committee. But they now believe the man was an FBI informant trying to set them up in a bid to undermine Trump's campaign. Greenberg could not immediately be reached for comment, but in a text to the Post he denied he was working for the FBI when he met with Stone. The letters obtained by The Associated Press and written by Stone and Caputo's lawyers say that, in late May 2016, Caputo received a call from his Russian business partner introducing him to Greenberg, who claimed he had information about Clinton that he wanted to share with the campaign. Caputo suggested Greenberg meet with Stone, who had left the campaign in 2015 but remained an informal Trump adviser. At Caputo's request, Stone met with Greenberg at a Florida cafe, where Greenberg asked for $2 million in exchange for the information, according to Stone's lawyer. Stone swiftly rejected the offer, explaining that neither he nor Trump would ever pay for "political information," his lawyer wrote. Both men say they quickly forgot about the episode, which marks the latest in a long list of unusual contacts between Russians and Trump campaign officials as well as offers of help. The special counsel has spent months investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether Trump campaign aides played any role in the foreign interference plot. Trump and his lawyer, meanwhile, have tried to discredit the investigation, insisting it's unfounded and plagued by misconduct and political bias. "WITCH HUNT!" Trump tweeted on Sunday, insisting: "There was no Russian Collusion. Oh, I see, there was no Russian Collusion, so now they look for obstruction on the no Russian Collusion. The phony Russian Collusion was a made up Hoax. Too bad they didn't look at Crooked Hillary like this. Double Standard!" As part of their campaign, Trump and his loyalists have tried to convince the public that the FBI violated its usual operating procedures, including installing "spies" inside Trump's campaign, though there's no evidence that's the case. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a member of Trump's legal team, on Sunday dismissed the significance of the Stone meeting. "So, yes, sure, there was contact, as there was in that meeting. But that meeting led to nothing. This led to nothing. So, if anything, it's proof there was no collusion," he said in an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation," adding that Mueller's team "can investigate from here to, you know, to Timbuktu, and they're not going to find a darn thing." Both Stone and Caputo failed to disclose the Greenberg meeting in their interviews with the House Intelligence Committee an omission their lawyers said was accidental. Caputo's lawyer, Dennis Vacco, said his client had "simply forgotten about this brief encounter in 2016," and only remembered it as he was preparing for his interview with Mueller's team. Caputo told the AP that Mueller's team asked him at length about the meeting. "They knew more than I did, which set off alarms. I thought was this a setup?" he recalled. Caputo said he hired investigators using money from his legal defense fund to dig into Greenberg's background and has produced a "dossier" with the findings, which Stone endorses. "Mr. Stone believes it is likely that Mr. Greenberg was actively working on behalf of the FBI at the time of their meeting with the intention of entrapping Mr. Stone and to infiltrate and compromise the Trump effort," his lawyer, Grant J. Smith, wrote. The FBI declined to comment, but has said its counterintelligence investigation didn't begin until July 2016, two months after the meeting. The Washington Post, citing interviews and documents, reported that Greenberg has at times used the name Henry Oknyansky, and claimed in a 2015 court filing he had been providing information to the FBI for 17 years. The Post notes the meeting happened around the same time that others members of the Trump campaign were being approached by people with Russian ties offering dirt on Clinton. Several members of the campaign were also approached by another U.S. government informant in a possible bid to glean intelligence on Russian efforts to sway the race. Several news outlets including the Post, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News have identified an FBI confidential source as Cambridge University professor Stefan A. Halper. U.S. President Donald Trump told a group of Republican lawmakers at a meeting Tuesday he backs a pair of their immigration bills under consideration in the House of Representatives. The meeting came as criticism continued over the Trump administration's policy of separating children from their parents and other adults at the southern border with Mexico as they illegally enter the United States. In his remarks to lawmakers, according to White House principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah, Trump "endorsed both House immigration bills that build the wall, close legal loopholes, cancel the visa lottery, curb so-called "chain migration," and solve the border crisis and family separation issue by allowing for family detention and removal." WATCH: Trump Targets Immigration Law 'Loopholes' Republican Rep. Mark Meadows said Trump told the lawmakers they need to get something done on immigration "right away." House Homeland Security chairman Michael McCaul described the meeting with Trump as excellent, and confirmed that the president embraced the bill he and Congressman Bob Goodlatte are pushing. "The president is a thousand percent behind it," McCaul said. Asked whether the legislation would end the family separations, he responded, "They will not be separated if the bill passes," which he explained includes $18 billion for a border wall Trump desires. The House is set to vote later in the week on the two bills. It is not clear that either piece of legislation has enough votes to win passage. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday "all of the members of the Republican conference support a plan that keeps families together," adding he intends to ask Democrats to support the measure. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday, 28 percent of people said they support the policy, while 57 percent opposed it and the other 15 percent said they did not know. Trump administration officials have defended the policy. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen pushed back at the negative media coverage in a Monday briefing, asserting that what U.S. authorities are doing is properly enforcing the law. "What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law," she said. WATCH: A push for Republican support Late Tuesday, protesters interrupted Nielsen's dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Washington with chants of "shame" and calling for her to end family separations and what they called "Texas concentration camps." "Kirstjen Nielsen you're a villain locking up immigrant children," they said. Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America (MDCDSA) said it was behind the protest, and that it would continue to oppose family separations as well as deportation and detention of migrants. DHS spokesman Tyler Houlton said Nielsen encourages all, including the group of protesters, "who want to see an immigration system that works," contributes to the economy, protects security and "reflects our values." "While having a work dinner tonight, the Secretary and her staff heard from a small group of protestors who share her concern with our current immigration laws that have created a crisis on our southern border," Houlton said on Twitter. MDCDSA shared his tweet with a mocking response. The Associated Press reported Tuesday the Trump administration has been sending babies and other young children separate from their parents at the border to at least three "tender age" shelters in South Texas, and that the government plans to open another shelter to house hundreds of young migrants in Houston. AP cited lawyers and medical providers who have visited the shelters describing play rooms with crying preschool-age children in crisis. The report also quotes an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services saying the agency has "specialized facilities that are devoted to providing care to children with special needs and tender age children as we define as under 13 would fall into that category." Trump, in a speech Tuesday to small business owners in Washington, continued to stand defiant on the policy, saying that in order to prosecute illegal migrants in the United States "you have to take the children away." Trump claimed there are only two options to deal with the situation: "totally open borders or criminal prosecution." He said he wants Congress to provide him with a third option to deport families as a unit. "We have no border security," Trump said, adding the smuggling of children and women is now "the worst it's been in history." Trump also accused the news media, through its reporting of the issue, of "helping the smugglers, these traffickers" who are exploiting legislative loopholes. He did not elaborate on his claim. Trump made his remarks shortly after the powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced its opposition to the administration's policy. The lobbying organization, which represents big businesses, typically supports Republican Party candidates. "Thousands of children are being forcibly removed from their parents by our government. There is no other way to say it this is not who we are, and it must end now," said chamber president Tom Donohue. WATCH: 'We Want to Solve Family Separation' Trump also questioned the need for thousands of additional judges to handle immigration cases. "Who are these people?" he asked. "Can you imagine the graft that must take place?" The president said instead of more judges, he wants more border security. "I don't want to try people. I don't want people coming in," he declared. Trump also again expressed disappointment with America's southern neighbor. "Mexico does nothing for us," charged Trump. "They could stop it." Mexico weighed in just before Trump's speech, with a strong rebuke. "In the name of the Mexican government and people, I want to express our most categorical and energetic condemnation of this cruel and inhuman policy," foreign minister Luis Videgaray said at a news conference. To protest Trump's policy of breaking up families when they are detained, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia and Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland withdrew their respective state's small National Guard contingent from the border, where they had been assisting federal agents. Another Republican governor, Massachusetts' Charlie Baker, dropped his offer the previous day to send troops to the border. The United Nations refugee agency says a record 68.5 million people around the world were forced to flee their homes last year due to war, violence and persecution. Filippo Grandi, the world body's High Commissioner for Refugees, told reporters in Geneva Tuesday that the final numbers for 2017 were nearly three million higher than in 2016. He said more than 16 million people were newly displaced last year, due to ongoing, protracted conflicts and a lack of solutions to those conflicts that are putting "continuous pressure on civilians." Grandi said more than two-thirds of all refugees originated from only a handful of countries, including Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He said the agency has discovered that 85 percent of all refugees came from poor or middle-income countries, which "should be an element dispelling the notion" this is "a crisis of the rich world." The U.N. Childrens Fund has joined the growing chorus of universal outrage at the U.S. immigration policy of separating children from their families who cross the border illegally, calling it harmful to the welfare of children. UNICEFs executive director, Henrietta Fore, describes as heartbreaking the situation of children, many of them babies, who are separated from parents seeking safety in the United States. Speaking for her, UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac says regardless of their migration status, children are children and they have the right to be protected and to be with their families. Detention and family separation are traumatic experiences that can leave children more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, and can create toxic stress which, as multiple studies have shown, can impact childrens long-term development, Boulierac said. In April, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a "zero tolerance" policy in which children and parents who cross the U.S. border illegally are separated. That's because the adult is at least temporarily placed in a detention facility, while current law says children have to be placed in the "least restrictive" setting. Boulierac says there is abundant evidence showing that separating children from their families and putting them into detention can have a terrible impact on their physical and psychological well-being. Research shows that children who have not seen a parent for one month after the parents arrest experience more frequent changes in sleeping habits, anger, and withdrawing from family compared to children who have seen their parents within a month after arrest, Boulierac said. UNICEF's Fore describes the many generous actions taken by the U.S. government to help child refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Syria, South Sudan, Somalia, Haiti and other countries in crisis. She urges the current administration to show the same concern in working for the best interest of refugee and migrant children within its own territory. The United States has announced its official withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council, saying the organization is no longer worthy of its name. At a joint press availability at the State Department Monday with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley told reporters, For too long, the Human Rights Council has been a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias. She accused the council of chronic bias against Israel. She said the U.S.had tried for the past year to reform the council, but to no avail, adding. Look at the council membership, and you see an appalling disrespect for the most basic rights, she said, citing human rights abuses by Venezuela, China, Cuba and Democratic Republic of Congo. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo agreed, calling the council an exercise in shameless hypocrisy. Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for U.N.Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, released a statement in response. The Secretary-General would have much preferred for the United States to remain in the Human Rights Council. The U.N.s Human Rights architecture plays a very important role in the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide. A group of 12 prominent nongovernmental organizations, including Human Rights First, Freedom House and Save the Children, sent a letter to Pompeo, saying they are deeply disappointed with the decision. The letter recognized legitimate concerns about shortcomings in the councils structure and operations. WATCH: US, UN Human rights But none of these gaps warrants withdrawal from the council, and the U.S.s absence will only compound the councils weaknesses, the letter said. Salil Shetty, Amnesty Internationals secretary-general, called on the U.S. to reverse its decision, while admitting that the council has its flaws. Once again, President Trump is showing his complete disregard for the fundamental rights and freedoms the U.S. claims to uphold. While the Human Rights Council is by no means perfect and its membership is frequently under scrutiny, it remains an important force for accountability and justice. Phil Robertson, deputy director for Human Rights Watch in Asia, told VOA that if countries are blocking reforms, the solution is to work harder, not to leave. "The United States has allowed their myopia with Israel to blind itself to the fact that the human rights council works all around the world on North Korea, on Myanmar, on Cambodia, on Nepal, on other countries in other places, Syria, Yemen. I mean you name it, the human rights council is a critical piece of the international human rights architecture," Robertson said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the U.S. announcement, tweeting, The US decision to leave this prejudiced body is an unequivocal statement that enough is enough. University of South Carolina political science professor Josef Olmert told VOA, "This council has become an arena for anti-Semitic propaganda for years." Some analysts praised the decision, including Brett Schaefer of the Heritage Foundation, who credited the U.S. with taking a measured approach. The Trump administration could have left the council any time in the past 18 months, but it did not, he said. The decision came as the U.S. is coming under increasing criticism from a number of international human rights organizations for the Trump administration's separation of more than 2,000 children from their parents at the U.S. southern border. The U.N. General Assembly created the 47-member Human Rights Council in 2006 to replace the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Based in Geneva, the HRC is tasked with promoting and protecting global human rights and addressing rights violations. Haley visited the HRC last June and said the U.S. was not seeking to leave the body, but to reestablish the council's legitimacy. She said Washington wanted the council to remove Item Seven from its agenda on the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories which she called scandalous for singling out Israel for criticism. Haley also called for reforms to the body, including action to prevent some of the worlds worst rights abusers from having a seat on the council, in part by making the election process more competitive and transparent. Under the Trump administration, the U.S. has also announced its plans to withdraw at the end of this year from the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, citing its continuing anti-Israel bias, and has cut its contributions this year by 80 percent to UNRWA, the agency that assists Palestinian refugees. Margaret Besheer contributed to this report. The 10 millionth patent has been issued in the United States, almost 228 years after President George Washington signed the first one. The United States Patent and Trademark Office issued the newest patent Tuesday to the Raytheon Company, a defense contractor. Raytheon received the patent based on an invention by Joseph Marron, who works for the firm as an optical engineer. Marron created a system, known as LADAR, which improves laser detection and ranging. Patent officials say it has applications in areas that include autonomous vehicles, medical imaging devices, military defense systems and space and undersea exploration. Raytheon says the concept involves delivering real time data from a laser radar. "Innovation has been the lifeblood of this country since its founding," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement issued by the patent office. "Our patent system's importance to the daily lives of every American has never been greater. Given the rapid pace of change, we know that it will not take another 228 years to achieve the next 10-million-patent milestone," he added. The real deal The issuance of patent 10 million is an exceptional milestone," PTO spokesman Paul Fucito told VOA. "It is a timely and relevant opportunity to promote the importance of innovation, the ubiquity of intellectual property, and the history of Americas patent system. For his part, Marron said in a statement the 10 millionth patent is "equivalent to a guy who buys a lottery ticket every month." He added, "Eventually, it hits." Back in March, at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, patent officials revealed a new cover design to mark the issuance of the milestone license. Among the 10 million patents are inventions by Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Apple founder Steve Jobs. For every well-known inventor, however, there are many other, less recognizable individuals whose innovative products have greatly affected our world. Fifteen of those trailblazing men and women recently were honored for their unique contributions, in a special ceremony at the National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. On July 31, 1790, President Washington signed the first patent. The patent office said the document was issued for "a process of making potash, an ingredient used in fertilizer." VOA's Julie Taboh contributed to this report. U.S. senators who back a clampdown on China's ZTE said on Tuesday they intend to fight for the measure, and urged fellow lawmakers not to give in to White House pressure to give up on the legislation. In a rare break with President Donald Trump's policy, the Republican-led Senate voted 85-10 on Monday for a sweeping defense policy bill that included a provision that would kill the Trump administration's agreement to allow ZTE to resume business with U.S. suppliers. Trump is expected to lobby hard against the amendment to the defense bill, one of the few major pieces of legislation Congress passes every year. He has scheduled a meeting with Republican lawmakers at the Capitol on Wednesday where Senate aides said he would discuss the issue. Shares of the Chinese telecommunications firm and its U.S. business partners fell after the bill passed, although the measure could still be killed when Senate and House of Representatives lawmakers meet in the coming weeks to forge a final, compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA. White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Senator Chuck Schumer, the chamber's top Democrat, praised the bill's passage in the Senate on Tuesday. Noting that the ZTE measure was backed by some of the chamber's most conservative Republicans, including some who are very close to the White House, as well as its most liberal Democrats, Schumer said he was "heartened" by support for the amendment. He urged members of the House, where Trump's fellow Republicans control a much larger majority than in the Senate, to support the ZTE measure. "They should not let President Trump pressure them into reducing American security, both economic and defense," Schumer said. "They should not let President Trump pressure them into allowing ZTE to spy on every one of us which they could well do." Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican Trump ally and co-author of the ZTE amendment, said he was pleased it was adopted. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he would be part of the conference forging the compromise NDAA between now and the end of July. "We'll have to reconcile our provisions with the House. I'm hopeful that we can move them in our direction, but that'll be the subject of negotiations in the coming weeks," Cotton said on the "Hugh Hewitt" radio show. The U.S. Senate passed a $716 billion defense policy bill on Monday, backing President Donald Trumps call for a bigger, stronger military but setting up a potential battle with the White House over Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE Corp. The Republican-controlled Senate voted 85-10 for the annual National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, which authorizes U.S. military spending but is generally used as a vehicle for a broad range of policy matters. Before it can become law, the bill must be reconciled with one already passed by the House of Representatives. That compromise measure must then be passed by both chambers and signed into law by Trump. The fiscal 2019 Senate version of the NDAA authorizes $639 billion in base defense spending, for such things as buying weapons, ships and aircraft and paying the troops, with an additional $69 billion to fund ongoing conflicts. This year, the Senate included an amendment that would kill the Trump administrations agreement to allow ZTE to resume business with U.S. suppliers. That ZTE provision is not included in the House version of the NDAA. While strongly supported by some of Trumps fellow Republicans as well as some Democrats, the measure is opposed by the White House and some of its close Republican allies, who control the House as well as the Senate. It could face a difficult path to being included in the final NDAA. That bill is more likely to include a much less stringent provision, included in the House bill, that would bar the Defense Department from dealing with any entity using telecommunications equipment or services from ZTE or another Chinese company, Huawei Technologies. Republicans and Democrats have expressed national security concerns about ZTE after it broke an agreement to discipline executives who had conspired to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea. The U.S. government placed a ban on ZTE earlier this year, but the Trump administration reached an agreement to lift the ban while it is negotiating broader trade agreements with China and looking to Beijing for support during negotiations to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Foreign investment rules The Senate version of the NDAA also seeks to strengthen the inter-agency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which assesses deals to ensure they do not compromise national security. The bill would allow CFIUS to expand the deals that can be reviewed, for example making reviews of many proposed transactions mandatory instead of voluntary and allowing CFIUSto review land purchases near sensitive military sites. The Senate NDAA also includes an amendment prohibiting sales to Turkey of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin Corp unless Trump certifies Turkey is not threatening NATO, purchasing defense equipment from Russia or detaining U.S. citizens. Senators included the legislation because of the imprisonment of U.S. pastor Andrew Brunson and the purchase of the S-400 air defense system from Russia. Shipbuilders General Dynamics Corp and Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc could benefit from the bills authorization of advance procurement of materials needed for the Virginia class nuclear submarines. This years Senate bill was named after six-term Senator John McCain, the Armed Services Committees Republican chairman and Vietnam War prisoner of war, who has been absent from Washington all year as he undergoes treatment for brain cancer. Bakersfield, CA (93308) Today Clear skies early then increasing clouds with showers late. Low near 55F. Winds NNW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60%.. Tonight Clear skies early then increasing clouds with showers late. Low near 55F. Winds NNW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60%. Late last week, a report suggested that wanted terrorist leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who has been declared dead at least three times, might still be alive. In this latest twist, a Saudi magazine based in London, El Majaala, is reporting that two militant Islamist leaders arrested in Algeria said Belmokhtar is living somewhere along the lawless border areas of Mali, Niger or Chad. Experts on Islamist radical movements in Africa said such reports cannot be dismissed. I think its quite possible hes still alive, said John Campbell, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria, and a senior fellow for Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. There is absolutely no clear confirmation of his death from governments or jihadists, so you cannot rule out that he is alive, said Jacob Zenn, an expert on extremism at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington. A spokeswoman for the U.S. military's Africa Command, Samantha Reho, said AFRICOM is aware of allegations that Belmokhtar is still alive. However, we have no clear indications of his continued activity, she said in a statement to VOA. Notoriety Belmokhtar is best known for the hostage crisis he masterminded in January 2013 at the Ain Amenas gas facility in Algeria, where more than 800 people were taken hostage by his newly formed terrorist group, al-Mulathameen (Masked) Brigade. Thirty-nine of the hostages were killed before the rest were rescued. A few months later, Belmokhtars group attacked a French-owned uranium factory near the town of Arlit in northern Niger, an attack he later said was retaliation for France's intervention in Mali. He is among the most significant terrorist leaders in Africa because of his operational range from Algeria and Libya to Nigeria and his long-time loyalty to al-Qaida, despite his record of being an independent-minded terrorist who has clashed with AQIM leadership and hierarchies, said Zenn. 'Mystique' With the possible exception of Boko Haram's Abubakar Shekau, no African terrorist leader has been declared dead as many times as Belmokhtar. Belmokhtar was first declared dead in March of 2013 by Chadian state television, which reported that Chadian soldiers in Mali had killed the terrorist leader at a base in northern Mali. This was later repeated by Chadian President Idriss Deby, despite a denial from by al-Qaeda and Belmokhtars spokesman. In June 2015, the Libyan government announced that Belmokhtar had been killed in a U.S. air raid in Libya. The U.S. did confirm that Belmokhtar was targeted in the air raid, but never confirmed his death. In November 2016, French warplanes targeted Belmokhtar in air raids over southern Libya, based on intelligence from the U.S. He gained a mystique for being declared dead, yet resurfacing to be alive many times, said Zenn. 'Unique threat' According to Campbell, Belmokhtar presents a particular challenge as a terrorist leader. Hes a very good example of how a person can be a criminal (a smuggler or a kidnapper), can be a jihadi radical, and can be a revolutionary all at one time, and depending on what the circumstances are, he said. Zenn said Belmokhtars real contribution to jihadism has been his ability to bridge insurgent elements all the way from Nigeria and other parts of the Sahel to Algeria and Libya. He has extensive connections with the local tribes in the Sahel through marriage. So, his versatility at the local and international level makes him a unique threat, said Zenn. If anyone could work with both IS (Islamic State) and AQ (Al-Qaida) elements, it would also be him. US not deterred Campbell said there is a good reason for counterterrorism officials to be worried about reports that Belmokhtar is still alive. If hes still alive, he can conduct an operation against a government or privately owned facility anywhere across a large swath of West Africa, he said. He could carry out operations in the future, not dissimilar to those that he did in the past. And after all, some of them were really quite significant, he added. But the U.S. will not be deterred by these reports in its fight against terrorists and terrorist networks said AFRICOM spokeswoman Reho. Our mission in the region has not changed, she said. The United States will not relent in its mission to degrade, disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations and bring stability to the region. We are committed to maintaining pressure on the terror network and preventing terrorists from establishing safe havens, she added. Mehdi Jedinia contributed to this report. President Donald Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is in the Middle East to help lay the groundwork for an expected Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Kushner, along with White House envoy Jason Greenblatt, arrived in Jordan on Tuesday for talks with King Abdullah II, a key U.S. ally. A White House statement said the talks included discussions on the Gaza humanitarian situation and U.S. efforts to "facilitate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.'' U.S. officials have said their plan is near completion and could be released this summer. But it faces resistance from the Palestinians, who have cut off ties since Trump recognized contested Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Kushner's team also plans stops in Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No talks with the Palestinians are scheduled. The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has so far withheld the official voters roll from most parties a move that has raised concern over the bodys ability to run credible elections next month. The countrys main opposition has said Zimbabwe should not hold the polls if the commission does not show impartiality. Last week, some Zimbabwe opposition parties were unable to register their candidates for the July 30 presidential election. The parties blamed their plight on the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, saying they did not have the official voters roll from which to find the required 100 signatures of endorsement from registered voters. On Tuesday, the chief election agent of the Movement for Democratic Change Alliance, Jameson Timba, said even though the MDC managed to register, the issue of the voters roll was still problematic. This is disgusting. This is totally unacceptable, taking into account that a certain government is bragging on Twitter that they were given the roll, said Timba. That was a reference to the British Embassy in Harare, which said Monday it had received a copy of the voters roll from the commission. ZEC chairperson Priscilla Chigumba says her organization is working to ensure all 23 presidential candidates and prospective participants in the July 30th election receive the roll. There is nothing short of an earthquake which can stop the election, so whether candidates scrutinize the voters roll, whether they see any anomalies in it, whatever the anomalies are, whatever legal recourse they have, will not stop the election. I want that to be very clear that is the law," said Chigumba. Opposition parties say they also want the roll to check for ghost voters. Timba said there will be no election if the Commission does not answer opposition demands. We will continue to put pressure on ZEC to behave themselves. If our demands are not met, there will be no elections. ZEC chairperson is not a player in our electoral field," said Timba. "She is a referee. If the players say they are not going to play a game, what role will a referee play when there are no players to play a game? President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who appointed Chigumba, made a campaign pitch on social media Tuesday. He ended by calling for a peaceful election, from which he said all Zimbabweans can prosper. Mnangagwa, who took over after Robert Mugabe resigned under military pressure last November, has vowed to ensure a credible election. But a Harare-based senior researcher for Pretoria's Institute for Security Studies, Derek Matyszak, says the electoral commission's independence remains doubtful. "What should have happened is that the president [Mnangagwa], should have approached the electoral commission and the electoral commission should have said, 'Hold on we are not yet ready," he said. "We do not have a voters roll. Please hold back for a few days.' But because the electoral commission is not independent, it did not want to challenge the president. ... Chaos resulted." Zimbabwe's High Court has ordered the Electoral Commission to furnish the list of voters to the National Constitutional Assembly party, after Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights petitioned the court. Opposition parties have long accused the ruling ZANU-PF party of manipulating the elections commission to ensure victory at the polls. Reuters Staff HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwes President Emmerson Mnangagwa queued with punters to buy fried chicken this weekend, state media reported on Monday, setting out the former security chiefs everyman credentials a month ahead of an election. In scenes unthinkable last year under former leader Robert Mugabe, Mnangagwas convoy made an unscheduled stop on Sunday at a fast food outlet in the small town of Chegutu, 100 kilometres (62 miles) west of the capital Harare. He ordered a two-piecer and a minute maid (juice), paid $3.75 with $20 and told me to keep the change, said Isabel Mtongerwa, the cashier who served Mnangagwa. He is very welcoming and makes you feel comfortable in his presence. Mnangagwa is working hard to shed his image as Mugabes enforcer, engaging the public on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, something Mugabe frowned upon. Prior to coming to power last November when Mugabe was forced to resign following a de facto military coup, Mnangagwa was secretive and insular, preferring to operate under the radar, and was known by the monicker Ngwena, a Shona word which means Crocodile. Twenty three candidates have registered to contest the presidential election on July 30 but Mnangagwa and 40-year-old Nelson Chamisa, the leader of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, are the main contenders. (Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe Editing by Joe Brock and Susan Fenton) Click here to search our database for earlier earthquakes in the same area since 1900! Please wait while we search through millions of records.This can take up to 20-30 seconds. 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Improved multilanguage support Tsunami alerts Faster responsiveness Earthquake archive from 1900 onwards Detailed quake stats Additional seismic data sources Download and Upgrade the Volcanoes & Earthquakes app to get one of the fastest seismic and volcano alerts online: Android | IOS to get one of the fastest seismic and volcano alerts online: We truly love working to bring you the latest volcano and earthquake data from around the world.We need financing to increase hard- and software capacity as well as support our editor team.If you find the information useful and would like to support our team in integrating further features, write great content, and in upgrading our soft- and hardware, please PayPal or Online credit card payment )., these features have been added recently: If you havn't done it yet,to get one of the fastest volcano news online: Satellite image of Langila volcano (image by Google Earth View) Langila volcano stratovolcano 1330 m / 4,363 ft New Britain, Papua New Guinea, -5.53S / 148.42E Current status: minor activity or eruption warning (3 out of 5) Langila volcano eruptions: 2009-2013, 2002-08, 1973-2000, 1971-72, 1970, 1969, 1967-68, 1964-66, 1962-63, 1960-61, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1942 (?), 1907, 1900, 1890, 1884, 1878 Typical eruption style: explosive Last nearby quakes Latest satellite images stratovolcano 1330 m / 4,363 ftNew Britain, Papua New Guinea, -5.53S / 148.42E(3 out of 5)2009-2013, 2002-08, 1973-2000, 1971-72, 1970, 1969, 1967-68, 1964-66, 1962-63, 1960-61, 1958, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1942 (?), 1907, 1900, 1890, 1884, 1878explosive Background Langila volcano, whose activity record goes back to the 19th century only, is one of the most active volcanoes of New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Langila's frequent activity consists typically of mild-to-moderate explosive eruptions, that are sometimes accompanied by lava flows. The volcano consists of four small overlapping cones on the lower eastern flank of the extinct Talawe volcano,- the highest volcano in NW New Britain. The rectangular, 2.5-km-long crater of Talawe has a large gap to the SE; the younger Langila volcano formed NE of Talawe's breached crater. Extensive lava flows have reached the sea from the N and NE flanks of the volcano. Since observations have begun, 3 summit craters have been active. The youngest and smallest of these, with a diameter of 150 m, was formed in 1960. NASA Earth Observatory Explosion of Langila volcano 1985 But early rounds between the United States and China have made little progress, beyond a now-withdrawn Chinese offer to buy more American goods. Thats something that would cheer U.S. businesses and farmers but does little to resolve the structural forces that concern administration hard-liners. They say China seeks to acquire American technology via licit and illicit means to dominate industries of the future, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles and quantum computing. Saudi Arabia might also want to defuse threats from Congress, according to Robert McNally, president of the Rapidan Energy Group and a former National Security Council energy director. Lawmakers are unhappy with Saudi Arabias role in the civil war in Yemen. In addition, McNally notes, members of the House Judiciary Committee have marked up a bill called the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act (NOPEC), which would allow the Treasury Department to sue OPEC producers under the Sherman Antitrust Act. In his 2008 book, Trump had a chapter sub-heading that read: Sue OPEC. You may think you are expressing your opinion of a company when you complain, but did you know the company may also have an opinion of you? There are data brokers . . . creating secret consumer scores that rank you on how likely you are to make certain purchases, Schmitz said. If your consumer score indicates that you are less likely to make large purchases with a certain retailer, then you may not receive the same perks or remedies as a customer they deem more valuable. The solution? If you really are a loyal customer who is likely to make substantial or frequent purchases, be sure to tell the company that. The couple, who have a boy named Archie, announced on Jan. 8 that they would step back from being royals, become financially independent, and split their time between North America and the United Kingdom. Or as did the Atlantics James Fallows, talking about the audiotape: When Abu Ghraib photos came out in 2004, they had such effect because they were instantly understandable evidence of what was being done in the publics name, he wrote, referring to the torture of prisoners at the infamous American prison in Iraq. Thats what I thought of when I listened to @ProPublicas Papa! Papa! tape. The New York Times, for one, has taken the latter course. On Monday, it said it would not publish CBP-supplied photos. We thought it was a bad precedent to accept government handout photos when [photojournalists arent] allowed in, Dean Baquet, the papers editor, said in an interview. It would hurt any future case for access. And given the sensitivity of this story, I dont think we can assure readers that we are seeing a full picture when the government makes the choice of what we see and show. Readers want to know what these places look like, from the view of journalists who are witnesses. Hes not going to tell us how to approach the problem. . . . Were offered the freedom to do it, said McLane, who has worked with West for more than six years. Thats one of the reasons I stayed on with him as a graduate student. . . . He gives me a lot of space, and Ill come back two weeks later, and hopefully I have the answers. The teenagers, who attended the same middle school but did not know each other, were invited to the park by a mutual friend, Bostick said. After the friend left, the boy allegedly pinned the girl to the ground, fondled her breasts and rubbed his genitals against her, according to the girls account. Stephen Sugg, 40, a government relations manager at a national nonprofit organization that works in rural community development, is a resident of Rockville making his first run for office. He says the county ranks at or near the bottom statewide for time given to physical education, recess and the arts. He is emphasizing hands-on learning, arts, healthier foods, and getting students moving, which he said is linked to greater achievement. He also says that the school system has become top-heavy and taken a cookie-cutter approach rather than empowering educators to make the best decisions for their students. He is the father of three children, the eldest of whom just finished kindergarten in county schools. He earned his bachelors and masters degrees from the University of Missouri and his doctorate in education from the College of William & Mary. In addition, the plant appears to live up to the giant appelation in its name. According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, it can grow to between seven and 14 feet tall. Two incidents of indecent exposure occurred last week in Arlington within a short distance and time of each other, according to police. Earlier this year, Arlington police said they thought one man was involved in five such incidents. When Virginia deployed these resources to the border, we expected that they would play a role in preventing criminals, drug runners and other threats to our security from crossing into the United States not supporting a policy of arresting families and separating children from their parents, Northam said in a statement. Last month, lawyer Jim Shea become the second Maryland candidate to release his returns and joined Madalenos calls for others to do so. Tech entrepreneur Alec Ross, who told the Baltimore Sun he considered the issue an unwelcome distraction, released two years of returns this month. He listed $835,783 in income for 2017, which his campaign said came from his book, The Industries of the Future, his consulting work with start-ups, and his work as a distinguished senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm CA Veracode, said the information may have surfaced on the dark web, where criminals could have purchased it for as little as $20 to $30. He said there must have been a telltale sign that enabled investigators to confirm that it came from the OPM breach and not another data compromise. Todays Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning. Email address By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Authorities said they suspect the same man in eight other cases, three of which were sexual assaults in hotels in Arlington, Takoma Park and Alexandria. The five other cases mostly involved possible sightings. A man authorities say may be the assailant was questioned by a hotel employee in Greenbelt and seen roaming floors and trying to open doors at a hotel in Gaithersburg, Md. Housekeepers at a hotel at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport also reported seeing a man resembling the 2003 sketch. Wolfes attorneys cited Trumps near daily proclivity to issue attacks on the integrity of the judicial system as well as his views on guilt of individuals, appropriateness of sentences, and who and what should be investigated by the Department of Justice.Criminal defendants have a fundamental constitutional right to a fair trial by an impartial jury. That right is jeopardized when government officials make inflammatory, misleading pretrial statements to the public about a defendant or his or her case, particularly when those statements are highly publicized, wrote attorneys Preston Burton and Benjamin B. Klubes of the Buckley Sandler law firm. Its incredibly difficult for a family that has low cash income and then has to pay more towards rent to have money for transportation to do things like go out and look for a job, Harrison said. The less cash you have at home during the month, the less youre going to be able to do things like that to change your situation. 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. No other state has been as aggressive as Kansas in imposing proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirements. Alabama and Georgia have proof-of-citizenship laws that are not being enforced, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Arizona is the only other state with a similar law in effect, but that law is far more lenient and allows people to satisfy it by writing their drivers license number on the voter registration form. Over 25,000 have fled fighting in western Yemen, U.N. says: A spokesman for the United Nations said tens of thousands of residents have fled fighting along Yemen's western coastline, where Yemeni fighters backed by a Saudi-led coalition are engaged in fierce battles with Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Stephane Dujarric said that about 5,200 families, or around 26,000 people, have fled and sought safety within their own districts or in other areas in Hodeida governorate. United Arab Emirates troops, along with irregular and loyalist forces in Yemen, have been battling Houthi fighters since Wednesday in a campaign to recapture the port city of Hodeida. ISIS oil, gas head killed in Syria, U.S.-led coalition says: The U.S.-led coalition in Syria said it had disrupted the Islamic State's funding by killing the man who ran its oil and gas network and other members of the group last month. The coalition said it killed Abu Khattab al-Iraqi and three other Islamic State members on May 26 in the "Middle Euphrates River valley." Iraqi had "managed revenue generation through the illicit sale of oil and gas," it said. This case was no mere tempest in Topeka. Kobach, as much as any individual, is the author of right-wing mania over mass voter fraud. Tilting at the windmills of his mind, he has traveled far and wide promoting his theories to state legislators and Republican policy groups. When President Trump urgently sought to wave away Hillary Clintons popular-vote margin of more than 2.8 million in 2016, it was Kobach to the rescue. A week after a visit from the Kansas conspiracy theorist, the president-elect tweeted: In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. That sort of hedging statement might make a prosecutor less inclined to pursue a case, but it sheds little or no light on the potential criminality of Giulianis statement in the Daily News. More important, what he told NPR isnt much of a hedge. It can be read as communicating to Manafort that he might have to wait longer than originally planned for his deliverance from Muellers supposedly outrageous behavior. Even in his walk-back, Giuliani still managed to suggest to that he was speaking with authority about the presidents likely future actions. The established norm of defending the constitutionality of congressional acts arose from the fact that the Justice Department is a law office with a single client: the people of the United States. When the peoples representatives in Washington have enacted a law, they have a legitimate interest in seeing the law carried out unless and until it is repealed. If the law has a reasonable basis in the Constitution, the attorney general, as lawyer for the people, has an ethical obligation to defend it in court, just as any lawyer has the obligation to zealously defend his clients interests even if his own theories of the law might differ. It should not matter that the president himself has concluded the statute is unconstitutional. President Trump is not Sessionss client. He is Sessionss supervisor which means that he has the ultimate constitutional obligation to ensure that Sessions is faithfully executing his responsibilities. In this case, that means defending a statute even if both Trump and Sessions think it should be held unconstitutional. The fundamental question was whether state power can be deployed to discriminate based on partisan affiliation. The usual answer is clearly no. For redistricting, we have to settle for well see: The court punted each case on procedural grounds. And while there are other cases in the works, for now, federal courts rarely offer relief when the officials we pay work to entrench some of us against others of us, on the basis of the parties we prefer. There are many situations in which world powers must cooperate with dictators on security issues despite their human rights abuses. Even in the context of such tactical alliances, however, it is a mistake to praise relations between an unjust regime and those who suffer under it. Soviet dissidents were acutely sensitive to every statement coming from foreign leaders, relying heavily on the knowledge that they kept tabs on our fate and had not abandoned us to our tormentors. Just as standing firmly with dissidents back then furthered the long-term goals of the United States, so too standing with the North Korean people now will advance rather than hinder Americas objectives. It offers the biggest benefits to high earners, who are disproportionately older workers since earnings peak around age 50 . And despite the administrations laughable claims that the tax law will pay for itself through added growth, every single independent budgetary model finds that it will massively swell the debt. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will increase our federal debt by about $1.9 trillion over the next decade. The narratives you dont see are the narratives of the crime, of the opioids, of the smugglers, of the people who are killed by gang members, Nielsen said. So we dont have a balanced view of whats happening. But . . . the border is being overrun by those who have no right to cross it. Like most Republicans, and many other people, I agree with what hes trying to do, many, if not all, of his policy initiatives, Pawlenty said in an interview last week in Hutchinson, a small town about an hour west of Minneapolis where he was speaking to a group of local business leaders. Not all of them, but many of them. But I dont agree with his behavior in all instances, or his language. And thats where most people in the Republican Party have landed. At a meeting with Sens. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) at the White House on Monday, Trump reupped his threat to shut down the government in September if he doesnt get money for the border wall, according to two people familiar with the meeting. The president told the senators he was willing to take such a drastic action, these people said, and wanted his wall funding along with strong border security measures. The Senate voted 85 to 10 to approve the $716 billion piece of legislation with little fanfare a sign of how much common ground there is between the House and Senate versions of the bill, which must still be woven into a single piece of legislation. It also serves as a reminder that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee has steered the bill through many a floor fight in recent years, continues to battle a rare and serious form of brain cancer. The measure is named after him. The two bills differ in several ways, however. One takes a more aggressive approach to immigration enforcement for instance, requiring employers to screen their workers for legal work status using the federal E-Verify database and does not guarantee dreamers a path to permanent legal residency. The other, which has been written to garner more Republican votes, omits some of the hard-line measures and offers dreamers a path to permanent residency and eventual citizenship. Horowitz also acknowledged that his office is reviewing whether Comey may have mishandled memos he wrote about his interactions with Trump and his senior staff. Horowitz said the FBI had made a referral to his office about the memos and that he planned to issue a report on the matter, as well as another one on leaks from the FBI. U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who has sought major changes on the council throughout her tenure, issued a blistering critique of the panel, saying it had grown more callous over the past year and become a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias. She cited the admission of Congo as a member even as mass graves were being discovered there, and the failure to address human rights abuses in Venezuela and Iran. Masaya, about 15 miles south of the capital, Managua, was a bastion of support for Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista rebels, who overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. For the past few weeks, Masaya has been controlled by protesters opposed to Ortega, who is now president. City hall is abandoned, and police hunker down in their barracks. It is a political act, said Andressa Maciel, a 26-year-old filmmaker. My hair is the first thing people see. It says: This is Andressa. This is her ancestry. She sees her hair as a way to reclaim her African roots. Racism makes you not want to be who you are, Maciel said. I want kids to see my hair. It needs to be in the mirror, so they know black hair is natural and beautiful, that they came from kings and queens. Mexicos network of 50 consulates in the United States has been working since the policy was first announced to find separated children and get them back to their families, he said. So far, fewer than 25 of the more than 2,000 migrant children who have been taken from their parents or about 1 percent are Mexican, he said, noting that the vast majority have come from the Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Most of the Mexican children have already been deported. Western Australia's capital city must halt urban sprawl and its devotion to mining in order to maintain its high level of liveability, a report has found. Commissioned by the Property Council, the Creating Great Australian Cities study warns Perth cannot afford to keep expanding but must contain housing and development growth within its current borders. Perth has increased its number of globally connected businesses, overtaking Brisbane. Credit:Stefan Gosatti Lead researcher, urbanist Greg Clark said the recent mining boom had fuelled population growth and building projects but in the bust the city needed to embrace innovation. "Although commodities will still be important for Perth for some time to come, the economy is going to have to evolve," Professor Clark said. WA universities have defended their stance on banning gendered language from students and staff, saying such guidelines and policies have been in existence for decades at Australian tertiary institutions. Curtin University came under fire on Monday for reportedly warning its students against using gender-specific language or risk being docked marks through its Inclusive Language Procedure. Curtin University. However, deputy vice-chancellor Professor Jill Downie said it was important to recognise the Curtin guidelines were not a policy, and the university would always try to educate regarding discriminatory language, rather than penalise. Our preference would be to work with students to educate them on the use of inclusive language and this would be typically handled in the feedback provided to learners, she said. No belongings, no clothing. No body. The back seat of the car had washed up on the beach. A shoulder bag Ms Cutler was known to carry has also never been found. WAtoday can reveal a review of the case file was carried out last year by the Cold Case Homicide Squad in an attempt to unearth new clues. But to this day no charges have been laid in connection to the case and Ms Cutler's body has never been located. In an interview with WAtoday, Mr Carey, who spent 30 years with WA Police, reflected on the three decade old mystery. He believes that by speaking out, there is a chance someone in the community who knows what happened will finally come forward after all these years. Ron Carey was one of the original lead investigators on the Cutler case. Credit:Phil Hickey Mr Carey, who rose to the rank of superintendent before retiring in 2005, first became attached to the case when he was sent to Cottesloe beach, the day Ms Cutler's car was found. He was then a detective senior constable. When we received the report that a vehicle registered in Ms Cutlers name had been found in the ocean at Cottesloe beach, I guess we expected the worst, thinking that we might find her body inside the car, he said. When the vehicle was found to be empty, we began our inquiry in earnest to establish what had happened to her. Over the next few days Mr Carey searched the 22-year-old's home, spoke to her work colleagues and guests of the hotel and examined her car with a fine-toothed comb. "After we recovered Julies vehicle...we were able to establish that one of the rear doors of her car couldn't be locked, he said. So we looked at the possibility that someone may have secreted themselves in the back seat while it was parked at the hotel without her knowing and that she was forced to drive somewhere. Mr Carey said some time after the 22-year-old went missing, police received information which suggested she could have gone to the Burswood Casino after she left the Parmelia. "We went there but unfortunately the CCTV footage did not extend back to the night she disappeared," he said. In the months following Julies disappearance, we spoke to numerous people in the hope we might have been able to establish what had happened to her. Despite our best efforts, we were not able to solve this mystery. The former cop believes Ms Cutler succumbed to whatever fate she met in a five-hour window between 12.30am on June 20 and daybreak that morning. Ms Cutler's car is taken out of the water by two police divers. Credit:WA Police "In my view someone must have intervened between the time Julie left the Parmelia Hotel and daybreak, he said. (For the car) to have found its way into the ocean, we concluded that it must have been driven off or rolled off the wall straight into the water where it must have floated momentarily, before being taken out with the motion of the waves, before sinking to the floor of the ocean. We were able to arrive at that conclusion because there was no sign of the vehicle at the beach when the regular swimmers arrived at daybreak to undertake their daily exercises. That particular night, there were strong winds and rain to the extent that the waves were lapping the retaining the wall of the Cottesloe Surf Club. It had to go into the water that night because the next day, the water had subsided, the tide had gone out leaving a wide gap of sand between the edge of the retaining wall and the surf. Mr Carey said he was convinced Ms Cutler was never in the car when it went into the water. The car is towed back onto the beach. Credit:WA Police He said this was because nothing belonging to her was ever found on the ocean floor, or washed-up on the beach. Knowing that the back seat of her vehicle was able to find its way to the beach, we would have expected that something belonging to Julie would have washed up, had she been in the vehicle," he said. The former cop said he often wondered if there was someone who could have helped police solve the case in 1988, but who chose not to come forward. All these years later I am still wondering if that person did exist, then maybe their relationship with the person or persons responsible for Julies disappearance has changed or soured to the point whereby he or she no longer feels the need to remain silent, he said. That being the case, I call on those persons to do the right thing. Senior Sergeant Quentin Flatman, of the Cold Case Homicide Squad, said police remained committed to finding out what happened to Ms Cutler. The suspicious disappearance of Julie Cutler in 1988 is an open and active case at the Cold Case Homicide Squad," he said. "The WA Police Force is committed to solving this and other long-term unsolved missing persons cases." Britain is strongly tipped to win the hard-fought contest to design and build Australias new $35 billion fleet of naval frigates in a move that would firm up the partnership with a key ally at a time of international political uncertainty. Sources in Canberra and defence industry circles said it was all but certain that Britains BAE Systems would be chosen as the international partner to design and help build what will form the backbone of the Royal Australian Navys surface fleet for the coming decades. The national security committee of cabinet is expected to discuss the decision soon, with an announcement possible by the end of next week. An artist's portrayal of BAE System's Global Combat Ship, which is among the contenders for a $35 billion Australian tender. The British firm has been in a race against Italys Fincantieri and Spains Navantia for the contract to provide a design and help Australia build nine new frigates, starting in 2020. BAE has previously said the project will create more than 5000 jobs. Chinas ambassador has branded ridiculous the idea that Beijing is threatening the sovereignty of small Pacific nations by building infrastructure that saddles them with unsustainable debt. His comments followed remarks by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop that the Australian government was concerned some Chinese financing arrangements in the Pacific would damage the island nations' sovereignty and that Australia would offer alternatives to Chinese infrastructure development. Speaking in Canberra, ambassador Cheng Jingye indicated he was not aware of Ms Bishops remarks but said the proposition China was creating so-called debt-traps for small nations was ridiculous. We have a growing economic co-operation with some of the island countries. They are on [an] equal footing and I think its mutually beneficial, as has been said by the local people - both the local people and both the government," he said. The Turnbull government will fight the next election with a pledge to workers earning $75,000 or more, in a political clash over who gains the most from rival income tax cuts. Setting a pivotal benchmark in the impending campaign, the Coalition will promise a bigger income tax cut than Labor for workers on average full-time wages - if they wait the full seven years for the government's reforms to take effect. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten will take the tax row to the brink in Parliament this week by voting against generous cuts to workers on higher incomes, forcing Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to negotiate crossbench support for his full $144 billion personal tax package. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten during a Question Time dominated by income tax cuts. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Treasurer Scott Morrison told Fairfax Media the Labor plan was a tax on aspiration based on political envy to divide voters. ABC boss Michelle Guthrie has dramatically hit back at the Liberal Party over its call to privatise the public broadcaster, vowing the ABC will not be a "punching bag" for political and vested interests, and labelling the attacks as cynical, misplaced and ignorant. In a provocative speech intended to "call out" the ABC's critics, Ms Guthrie also presented new data showing the broadcaster generates as much annual economic activity as it receives from taxpayers. And she declared the ABC was viewed by the public as a "priceless asset" that should not be sold, no matter how much a commercial buyer might be prepared to fork out. "[Australians] regard the ABC as one of the great national institutions [and] deeply resent it being used as a punching bag by narrow political, commercial or ideological interests," Ms Guthrie said. "Inherent in the drive against the independent public broadcaster is a belief that it can be pushed and prodded into different shapes to suit the prevailing climate. It can't. Nor should it be." Labor's campaign in the Perth byelection has seized on a vote of the Liberal party's federal council meeting which called for the privatisation of the ABC, while WA Liberal sources described the idea as "virtue signalling". About 110 delegates, representing party branches from across the country, voted to sell off the public broadcaster, which costs the taxpayer about $1.1 billion a year to keep on the air. Labor's candidate for Perth, Patrick Gorman (left), is campaigning on a defence of the ABC after a Liberal party federal council voted to sell the public broadcaster. Credit:AAP Image/Richard Wainwright The vote prompted assurances from Treasurer Scott Morrison and communications minister Mitch Fifield that the government would not sell the ABC. But Labor's Perth candidate Patrick Gorman said the issue was worrying voters, especially after an $84 million cut to the ABC's budget in this year's federal budget. Manila: Australian nun Sister Patricia Fox can remain in the Philippines for now after the country's Justice Department overturned an order for her deportation. Justice Department Secretary Menardo Guevarra on Monday determined that the cancellation of her missionary visa was without legal basis. Sister Patricia Fox. Credit:AP Fox, 71, from the Sisters of Our Lady of Sion, was arrested on April 16 and detained for 22 hours for purportedly being involved in partisan political protests. She was subsequently ordered to leave the Philippines by May 25, but Guevarra announced a reprieve on the day of the deadline pending a review of her case. Washington: The Trump administration has withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council, making good on a pledge to leave a body it accused of hypocrisy and criticised as biased against Israel. "For too long, the Human Rights Council has been a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias," Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, said on Tuesday at the State Department in Washington. She said the decision was an affirmation of US respect for human rights, a commitment that "does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organisation that makes a mockery of human rights." The 47-member council, created in 2006 and based in Geneva, began its latest session on Monday with a broadside against President Donald Trump's immigration policy by the UN's high commissioner for human rights. He called the policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegally "unconscionable." Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/6/2018 (1216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Manitobas securities watchdog issued a warning Monday about house-flippers using aggressive tactics to dupe vulnerable citizens in Winnipeg. The Manitoba Securities Commission says it has received several complaints from homeowners, after they were contacted by people wanting to buy their home. In most instances, the homeowners being contacted are known or believed to be in financial distress, the commission said in a news release. "These house-flippers are actively seeking out vulnerable citizens and using their financial problems as a bargaining chip," said Jason Roy, a senior investigator with the commission. "We want Manitobans to be aware. This could be a family member, friend or neighbour being coerced to sell their home for much less than its worth." The commission said a "flipper" identifies a potential target and leaves the homeowner a handwritten note explaining they have someone interested in buying their home. 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 then make a below-market-value offer, hoping to take advantage of the homeowners difficult financial situation. They also discourage the homeowner from contacting a real estate agent. The homeowner may then be asked to sign a contract allowing engineers or architects access to the property before the sale is finalized, who turn out to be potential investors in the property, there to assess whether they can profit on the "flip." "These aggressive and misleading tactics can create additional hardships for those who may already be experiencing financial distress, and in some instances, the flippers may be acting in violation of the Real Estate Brokers Act," the securities commission said. It said people should take steps to ensure their personal interests are protected, which can include getting independent advice from someone not tied to the transaction. The Manitoba Securities Commission is a division of the Manitoba Financial Services Agency, a special operating agency of the government of Manitoba set up to protect investors and promote fair and efficient capital markets in the province. staff Red River Co-operative Ltd. is picking up three more grocery stores this time outside the city and continues to look for more locations inside Winnipeg, as well. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/6/2018 (1216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Red River Co-operative Ltd. is picking up three more grocery stores this time outside the city and continues to look for more locations inside Winnipeg, as well. The co-op announced it is picking up Marketplace stores in Selkirk, Stonewall and Lorette from Federated Co-operatives Ltd. (FCL), which is transitioning out of retail. The leases are for 20 years with options to purchase, said Doug Wiebe, Red River chief executive officer. Depending on how the operations perform, that will determine a final purchase price, he said. "Weve put together some feasibility studies and we want to make sure the numbers weve identified for growth are achievable. That will dictate whether we continue to lease or if we look at acquiring the stores," Wiebe said. Red River Co-op entered the grocery sector in 2014 when the federal Competition Bureau ordered Sobeys, which had acquired Safeway, to sell off some stores across Western Canada. The co-operative network ended up buying 14, including four by Red River Co-op: in St. Vital Shopping Centre, Southdale, Grant Park Shopping Centre and on North Main Street. The Main Street location was later closed. The acquisition of an additional three stores enlarges its footprint in the grocery sector, but also expands its services to members beyond the Perimeter Highway. Red River already has gas bars in Selkirk and Stonewall. Wiebe said there will be extensive upgrades to the three Marketplaces, including new equipment, refrigeration upgrades, relocation of assets and new decor. "Youll see the co-op shields just like at our gas bars," he said. Red River also wants to expand inside Winnipeg, where it has 300,000 members but no services outside of gas bars in many parts of the city. "We are pursuing other sites in the city," Wiebe said. "Were fairly new in the food game its since mid-2014 when we entered the food business so we continue to look at sites to expand in the city. We know we need more." Wiebe said its former Main Street store was a very old facility that Red River managed to grow significantly. Then an abandoned Extra Foods store next door was reopened as a No Frills and the co-op grocery lost volume. As well, the landlord refused to sell the property and wanted a significant increase in rent. So Red River shuttered the store. Federated Co-op vice-president Pat Smith said earlier this year FCL was looking to divest itself of the Marketplace stores and focus on its core business as a wholesaler. He reiterated that in a prepared statement on Monday. "FCLs primary business is serving the more than 180 independent retail co-operatives across Western Canada, largely as a wholesaler," Smith said. "This is an opportunity for Red River Co-op to expand its network and allow FCL to step back from directly operative brick and mortar stores." Red River wasnt interested in acquiring the Marketplace store on Henderson Highway. That is slated to be closed. "That one has been underperforming for some time," Wiebe said. "We knew it wasnt going to be a viable option." With the Henderson Marketplace closing, that leaves just the Marketplace in St. Norbert as the last one owned by FCL. It was closed in January due to flood damage from a water-main break. It is being rebuilt into a larger grocery store, in the 25,000 to 30,000 square foot range, that will reopen next year. FCLs Smith said earlier this year the St. Norbert store will be leased to another co-op, as well. An FCL spokesman said Monday that retail co-ops are evaluating and conducting feasibility reviews on the store. Wiebe said a new Red River store in Winnipeg wouldnt have to be gigantic like many newer grocery stores. Current Red River Co-op grocery stores include the 57,000 square feet on Grant Avenue and 48,000 square feet in Southdale. "I think if we were building a store today, wed probably be looking in the 35,000-square-foot range," he said. Red River Co-op members enjoy membership benefits, including profit sharing. In 2017, Red River Co-op members shared in $29.3 million of profits. 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. About 150 staff working at the three rural Marketplace locations will continue their employment. Both sides have agreed to work together to ensure customer service during the transition. The dates when the stores will open under Red River Co-op ownership are: July 12: Selkirk 335 Main St. July 17: Stonewall 420 Main St. July 19: Lorette 11 Laramee Dr. bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca The state of child poverty in Canada appears dire, according to a report released Monday by Campaign 2000, a national advocacy group. But in no federal riding is the situation worse than in the northern Manitoba riding of Churchill-Keewatinook Aski, where nearly two thirds of children live in poverty. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/6/2018 (1217 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The state of child poverty in Canada appears dire, according to a report released Monday by Campaign 2000, a national advocacy group. But in no federal riding is the situation worse than in the northern Manitoba riding of Churchill-Keewatinook Aski, where nearly two thirds of children live in poverty. The report analyzed the number of Canadian children living in poverty -- more than 1.2 million -- and calculated the child poverty rate in each federal riding. Three Manitoba ridings placed in the top 10, including Winnipeg Centre (ranked third, 41.1 per cent) and Dauphin-Swan River-Neepawa (ranked ninth, 33.8 per cent). But at a rate of 64.2 per cent, Churchill has the highest rate of child poverty among all federal ridings by nearly 10 percentage points. Campaign 2000 uses census data and a standard called low-income measure after-tax data to determine which families live in poverty. For example, a couple with one child would be characterized as living in poverty if they made less than $30,962 after taxes. "It is unconscionable that child poverty is more the norm than the exception [there]," the report says. "This didn't just happen," said Niki Ashton, the MP for Churchill, which is largely populated by Indigenous peoples. "It is the result of the history of colonization and continued chronic federal underfunding of housing, of health care, of education, of infrastructure more broadly." MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Chief Sheila North: Child poverty isnt just a First Nation issue. By no means is child poverty restricted to one region, the report shows. Of 338 ridings, 162 have child poverty rates higher than the national average, which sits at 17.4 per cent. Of the Manitoban federal ridings, only five fell below that mark. And as of 2015, Manitoba had the highest rate of any province at 27.5 per cent, with 81,970 children living in poverty according to Campaign 2000's fall report. Many of the ridings with the highest incidence of child poverty also feature higher-than-average proportions of visible minorities and racialized people. Nearly two-fifths of Indigenous children live in poverty, and about the same percentage of people living in the ridings in the highest quintile are visible minorities, as opposed to 14 per cent in the wealthier ridings. "Child poverty has an emotional, mental and spiritual impact on our youngest citizens, our future generations," MKO Grand Chief Sheila North said. "And this isnt just a First Nation issue, we see families among our Canadian neighbours who also struggle with the lack of services, supports, and infrastructure in northern Manitoba." "I think it's terrible," said Winnipeg Centre MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette of his riding's ranking and of the over-representation of Indigenous and racialized people below the poverty line. "I don't think anyone is surprised," he added. "I think we have a large Indigenous population which has been ignored in pretty well every area you can imagine for over a century." "Hopefully [the report] lights a fire under the seats of the decision makers," he said. Scott Fielding, Manitoba's families minister, questioned the accuracy of the data the Campaign 2000 report relied on, saying the low-income after tax figures didn't account for cost of living differences between provinces and territories. "More recent data sources, such as the 2016 Canadian Income Survey and Mass Basket Measure show Manitoba is no longer Canada's 'child poverty capital,'" he wrote to the Free Press. Sid Frankel, an associate professor of social work at the University of Manitoba and a member of Campaign 2000's steering committee, called the low-income measure "the international gold standard," and said it's used by both UNICEF and the Organization for Economic Co-operation. He called the basket measure and income survey preferred by Fielding an inadequate measure of poverty that excludes those on reserves and Aboriginal settlements. "This is a fatal flaw because Aboriginal people have very high rates of poverty," he added. Campaign 2000 began in 1989 when the House of Commons unanimously resolved to end child poverty in Canada by the start of the new millennium. But while several provinces have seen significant decreases in the nearly three decades since, Manitoba's rate of child poverty has jumped by about 20 per cent. MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Sid Frankel, associate professor of social work at the University of Manitoba. The organization is pushing for the prioritization of child poverty prevention, reduction and eradication ahead of the upcoming federal poverty reduction strategy. Ultimately, the group believes the government can reduce child and family poverty by half by 2020 and, by 2022, reduce the amount of households experiencing food insecurity by 50 per cent, among other goals which the report calls "bold but achievable." Recommendations include: increasing the base amount of the tax-free Canada Child Benefit, which provides $6,400 per child under the age of six and $5,400 per child between six and 17 years old on an annual basis to eligible families; applying employment equity criteria jobs created through federal infrastructure investments in order to curb discrimination against racialized people; and a "dignity dividend" of $1,800 per person living below the poverty line, which the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives projects to "lift 560,000 people out of poverty--half of whom are children." Kate Kehler, the executive director of the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg, said her organization and other local groups participated in consultation ahead of the federal and provincial strategy announcements. She said she's optimistic about the strategy treating each communities' needs as unique, and not through a "cookie-cutter" approach. Earlier in June, the Winnipeg Street Census was released and tallied 1,500 people experiencing homelessness in the city, many of whom were youth or became homeless before the age of 18. Kehler hopes the census and the poverty report will lead to swift action by all levels of government. 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. Fielding pointed to the increase of the basic personal amount and an expansion of rent assist and child care funding as moves the provincial government has already made to address child poverty, but Frankel disputes their efficacy. "Increasing the basic personal amount does little for the poor because the benefits are spread to all taxpayers," he said. "Moving from social assistance to a job is not necessarily a movement out of poverty," he added. "It doesn't take boutique responses," Ashton told reporters in Ottawa. "What we need is to address the underfunding more broadly and we need federal leadership. This is a question of priorities. Instead of investing in a $4.5-billion pipeline and running roughshod over First Nations rights, why isn't the government addressing the chronic underfunding and the legacy of colonialism that's so evident in abject child poverty?" The federal government has promised to put out their poverty-reduction strategy before the October 2019 election, and advocates expect it to come this fall, alongside the federal plan for Indigenous housing. with files from Dylan Robertson bwaldman@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @benjwaldman While some Winnipeggers have been outraged over emergency room closures and changes, the residents of Cross Lake have been waiting for the construction of a 24-hour health complex for more than two decades. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/6/2018 (1217 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. While some Winnipeggers have been outraged over emergency room closures and changes, the residents of Cross Lake have been waiting for the construction of a 24-hour health complex for more than two decades. Located more than 530 kilometres north of Winnipeg, Cross Lake is home to about 9,000 people. Residents need to travel to either Winnipeg or Thompson to receive most medical services, including blood work, dialysis and to give birth. Many take the bus to Winnipeg a 15-hour ride. There are about five medevacs that leave the community daily, costing as much as $10,000 per flight. That adds up to more than $18 million annually. Depending on the reason for the trip, the provincial or federal government picks up the tab. Chief Cathy Merrick has had enough. "I was on council when I declared a state of emergency in terms of the health of our people in 2006," she said. "Twelve years later, were here and its still going to be a state of emergency until we have our facility." Merrick said she doesn't understand why the province pays the huge cost of Lifeflight air ambulances, but hasn't agreed to chip in for the health complex. In 2016-17, the province spent $6.7 million on the Lifeflight program provincewide. Cross Lake councillor Donnie McKay reads a birthday card sent to the health minister from Cross Lake residents who are yearning for provincial funds to help build a health complex. (MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) She and band councillor Donnie McKay went to the legislature last week hoping to meet with Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen to discuss provincial funding for phase two of Cross Lakes planned health complex. The amount of funding they would request hasnt been determined. In July 2016, then-federal health minister Jane Philpott (who is now the minister of Indigenous services) travelled to Cross Lake to announce $40 million in support. Canadas contribution has since been upgraded to $55 million for phase one. The federal government's contribution wouldn't cover the entire project, however. A birthing centre, palliative care and a dialysis unit a priority because an estimated 1,200 people have diabetes in the community and may one day need dialysis fall under provincial responsibility, Merrick said. In 1964, the provincial and federal governments signed an agreement transferring those responsibilities to the province, the chief said. Last week, Goertzen repeatedly said the federal government should pay the entire cost of the project. "The federal government made an announcement a couple of years ago that they were going to build a hospital in Cross Lake, and we werent involved in the announcement. We werent there," he said. "And now it seems like the federal government has either changed their commitment or didnt have enough funding involved. We think the federal government should fulfil the commitment that they made to the people of Cross Lake." Goertzen said provincial health staff is in talks with Cross Lake to find out about their potential plans. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Chief Cathy Merrick of Cross Lake First Nation holds birthday cards on the steps of the Legislative Building Thursday. For Saturday story about Cross Lakes proposed health complex. Background info:Hundreds of birthday cards have been collected for the health minister from people from Cross Lake who are yearning for provincial funds to help build a health complex. See story by Jessica Botelho-UrbanskiManitoba Legislature Reporter June 14, 2018 The chief and council refuted the claim, saying theyve been trying to get the Manitoba government to the table for meetings since the PCs were elected in 2016. The former NDP government supported the project, the chief said, and their NDP MLA, Amanda Lathlin, has been challenging the Tories during question period about whether the government will recommit to the health complex. On Thursday, Merrick and McKay took about 100 birthday cards, which were signed by Cross Lake residents, to the legislature. They were intended for Goertzen, who celebrated his birthday last week. In the cards, residents urge him to reconsider funding. Della Robinson wrote an emotional plea, explaining why the community desperately needs a dialysis unit. "As you celebrate your birthday with cake and ice cream, please think of me. I am a 48-year-old woman who is in stage 3 kidney failure, I will eventually need to be on dialysis in the near future. (My right kidney failed completely)," she wrote. "Ever since I found out about my kidney disease, I made up my mind that I will not move anywhere to keep me alive. I would rather be here in my hometown with family by my side." In an interview, Robinson said she gets flown to Winnipeg for doctor appointments every few months. She doesn't want to leave home for long-term care. "I dont like being away from my family. I get really, really lonely when Im away, especially having to go live in Winnipeg. I dont want that for myself," she said. The Cross Lake nursing station doesn't have proper diagnostic services. When McKay had a heart attack, nurses had to send his electrocardiogram test by fax to a doctor in Thompson. He waited in agony for hours until the doctor called with the results. He was sent to the Thompson hospital for treatment, then flown to Winnipeg for a week of care, then back to Thompson for another week of bed rest. Cross Lake councillor Donnie McKay in front of a sampling birthday cards for the health minister from people from Cross Lake who are yearning for provincial funds to help build a health complex . (MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) "Its ridiculous. Its life and death, I would say, for our people every day," McKay said. In Cross Lake, suicide attempts skyrocketed in 2016 with hundreds reported every month that spring. Nine people have died by suicide since December 2015, most of them teens and young adults. Promoting mental wellness would be a top priority in the new health facility, said Coun. Hanson 'Cooper' Richard. "We got hit, and we got hit hard. Everybody felt it. Everybody was scared. You had to watch your kids and make sure if theres anybody that needed help, you were there to help," Richard said of the suicide crisis. "The best way for me to help is to get the infrastructure in for the hospital." Richard also said installing new water and sewage treatment facilities to replace aging systems will also be necessary before a health complex gets up and running. Resident Noretta Miswaggon has been one of the loudest advocates of a new health complex. The 45-year-old mother had to travel to Thompson or Winnipeg to give birth to her 11 children. She wishes other mothers wouldn't have to make the same risky trip by bus, which she said jeopardizes their pregnancies. Cross Lake residents ask for a health complex in a set of birthday cards sent to Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen. (MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS) Still, she believes a dialysis unit is the No. 1 need in Cross Lake. "I hope we can get at least a dialysis unit. At least for those of us who go out of the community to give birth, we get to come home after our babies are born," Miswaggon said. She also hopes a health complex will boost morale in the community. Setting aside space for the complex will begin this summer, regardless of whether the province agrees to fund the project. 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. "Its sad how the older population tells the younger population, Oh, get out of Cross Lake, theres nothing here,'" Miswaggon said. "Whats a youth supposed to think when their parents or grandparents or aunties or uncles tell them, Get out of here, theres nothing here. We should be telling them, Get an education, theres so much to do here. You could be a doctor, a nurse, an administrator in this new hospital'... we need to instill hope and that health complex will do that." Merrick said she will continue to lobby the province for funding until it comes around. "Even though the province does not think they have a responsibility for us as Aboriginal people, were Manitobans. It doesnt matter if Im an Aboriginal, Im still a Manitoban. and they are responsible for the health of my people," she said. "Were well on our way to the construction of this beautiful building, and its time. Its about damn time that the governments come and build something in our nation for our people." jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @_jessbu ST. LAURENT The federal and Manitoba governments have set the wheels in motion on a massive two-part infrastructure project to reduce flooding of communities surrounding Lake Manitoba and Lake St. Martin. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/6/2018 (1217 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. ST. LAURENT The federal and Manitoba governments have set the wheels in motion on a massive two-part infrastructure project to reduce flooding of communities surrounding Lake Manitoba and Lake St. Martin. Construction of two 23-kilometre-long outlet channels to control water levels on each of the two lakes could begin as soon as the fall of 2019. At a news conference to formally announce the project, Premier Brian Pallister and Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr said Monday the total budgeted cost would be $540 million, with Ottawa shelling out $247.5 million and the province contributing $292.5 million. MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Premier Brian Pallister and Jim Carr, Federal Minister of Natural Resources Canada, announced a $540 million infrastructure project for flood management of the Lake Manitoba and Lake St. Martin outlet channels at an event at Parc Gros Arbre, off Allard Road close to St. Laurent. "There are no impediments foreseen for this," said Carr. "The funding is in place. We believe it will proceed quickly, as it should." Pallister said the announcement is a recognition of decades of hardships "that have been imposed on the people of this basin." "For the entire history of our province, this is a region that's been vulnerable to flooding," he said, standing on Lake Manitoba's southeast shore, which has been battered by flooding in recent years. "Far too many times communities have been devastated." Environmental approvals and consultations with Indigenous groups are expected to continue until next spring. In the interim, construction of an access road to the Lake St. Martin construction area is underway. GOVERNMENT OF MANITOBA In 2011, a devastating flood displaced whole communities, swamped farmland, ruined cottages and businesses and cost governments hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation payments. The flooding sparked a renewed commitment to build outlet channels for the two lakes. Decades earlier, in 1970, the Portage Diversion, opened to protect Winnipeg and other communities on the Lower Assiniboine River, channelling water into Lake Manitoba during flood years. The Fairford and Dauphin rivers connect Lake Manitoba and Lake St. Martin with Lake Winnipeg. The two new outlets will run separately from those rivers. The new Lake Manitoba outlet channel will handle 7,500 cubic feet of water per second, while the Lake St. Martin outlet project will nearly triple the capacity of an emergency channel constructed in 2011 to 11,500 cfs. The Lake Manitoba outlet channel will run north from Watchorn Bay to Birch Bay on Lake St. Martin. The Lake St. Martin outlet will run northeast from Lake St. Martin to Lake Winnipeg, south of Willow Point. MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS MP Jim Carr: 'The funding is in place. We believe it will proceed quickly, as it should.' A number of Interlake landowners who will be directly impacted by the Lake Manitoba construction project claim the province could have chosen a shorter route that would have affected fewer farmers. They also say they've been largely left in the dark in the lead-up to Monday's announcement. They say details of compensation packages for the land they will lose have yet to be worked out. Brad Dreger, who farms a half mile west of Grahamdale, said he hasn't heard from any government officials since taking his concerns directly to the premier at a meeting in April. 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 have not contacted me once. And it's getting pretty frustrating because we'd like to know what's happening," he said Monday. "We seem to be the last ones to know, and we're losing our land. Dreger, who produces grain, alfalfa seed and leafcutter bees, said the proposed channel will cut through six quarter-sections of his land, necessitating lengthy detours to reach what are now parts of the same field. An area highway -- No. 239 -- will also be relocated to within 30 metres of his house. Dreger said Pallister told him in April that the government needed to complete consultations with Indigenous communities before it dealt with other landowners. He said he doesn't understand why the government can't talk to both groups simultaneously. Noting the impact of the lake channel construction on some landowners Monday, Pallister promised "a respectful process." "I think it's important we satisfy those needs for information. But I also think it's important we understand that the people in this basin have made tremendous sacrifices over a long period of time to keep safe the people of Winnipeg and others throughout the province, and they deserve to get their lives back." larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca National Energy Board hearings in Winnipeg this week regarding licensing of a proposed transmission line to Minnesota will be the latest venue for the Manitoba Metis Federation to air its dispute with the Pallister government and Manitoba Hydro. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/6/2018 (1216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. National Energy Board hearings in Winnipeg this week regarding licensing of a proposed transmission line to Minnesota will be the latest venue for the Manitoba Metis Federation to air its dispute with the Pallister government and Manitoba Hydro. Lawyers for the MMF are set to make a case today the federal tribunal should receive, as part of its proceedings, details of the contentious deal the federation made with Hydro on a $67.5-million, 50-year land entitlement tied to the MMFs approval of the Manitoba-Minnesota Transmission Project. News the province cancelled the agreement came out March 21, after nine of 10 Manitoba Hydro board members resigned. Premier Brian Pallister has referred to the deal as "hush money," so the MMF would agree to the planned $453-million transmission line to Minnesota. Jason Madden, a lawyer for the MMF, is scheduled to ask the NEB to put the deal, included in an MMF response to the panels request for information, on the record. "Manitoba Hydro has made the agreement, now they say, Dont look behind the curtain," Madden said Monday. "They want to have the agreement struck from the record." Prior to the MMFs inclusion of the deal in recent correspondence to the NEB, it had not been part of the voluminous submission on the project to the federal tribunal. "The MMFs support for the project is tied to this agreement being implemented," Madden said during a recess of the NEB hearings. "This is a federal approval. (The NEB) needs to make a condition for the licence that Manitoba Hydro will honour the agreements made with Indigenous people." The MMF and the province are scheduled to face off in court next week, to argue whether the deal is legally binding. "We say the agreement is still in place, and that it is binding on Manitoba Hydro," Madden said. "That is part of our litigation which we filed to the court to overturn the Manitoba governments decision." In the meantime, Madden said it is important the NEB be aware of what has transpired. He said he intends to argue the NEBs decision "will be faulty and subject to being quashed" if it doesnt acknowledge the MMF agreement and, if the court ultimately determines it is legally binding, to make honouring it one of the conditions of the licence for the transmission line project. Scott Powell, a spokesman for Manitoba Hydro, said: "We just dont feel the alleged agreement is relevant to the application before the NEB." Powell referred to the nixed deal as a "term sheet." "Because the action is before the courts, we really are not going to comment more than that," he said. "We had discussed a term sheet, which is essentially what we had, which is not an agreement." 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. Whether or not the dispute disrupts final approval for the $453-million, 213-kilometre transmission line remains to be seen. The line is to be built to service a 15-year deal for Manitoba Hydro to sell power to Minnesota Power, starting in 2020. The new power line is to run to the U.S. border crossing near Piney from the Dorsey Converter Station near Rosser. Powell said in addition to being needed to service that export sale, the new transmission line is also needed to enhance the reliability of the system, including more than doubling the provinces capability to import power in case of transmission emergency or drought. "There is an important reliability component to this, as well as energy security," he said. The hearings are scheduled to continue all week. The NEB has until March 20 to make its recommendation to federal cabinet. martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca No bigger than a minute and on the go every waking hour, Norma Hodgkins still sets her alarm for 5:30 a.m. every morning. With exercise and dance classes four days a week, shes particular about the details. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/6/2018 (1216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. No bigger than a minute and on the go every waking hour, Norma Hodgkins still sets her alarm for 5:30 a.m. every morning. With exercise and dance classes four days a week, shes particular about the details. "Make me good-looking," she asked a photographer for a story on her milestone as a nurse. SUPPLIED Norma Hodgkins graduated as a nurse 75 years ago, in 1943, from Winnipegs Grace Hospital. The Grace Hospital Nurses Association celebrated this petite, vivacious woman Monday night at its annual alumni dinner, paying tribute to her longevity. She graduated as a nurse from Winnipegs Grace Hospital in 1943 75 years ago. Hodgkins, a mother of four, grandmother of 11 and great-grandmother of another 11, is 97. It hardly matters she hasnt worked hospital wards, or any bedside for that matter, since 1961. She may not be the only nurse with a graduation date older than most people, but shes probably one of the few. "Shes a born caregiver," said her daughter Barbara Blacklaw, who, with her sister, are Hodgkins main family support people. Hodgkins greeted a Free Press reporter and photographer with firm handshakes and a copy of her the Salvation Army Grace Hospital rule book, circa 1940, the year she entered nurses training in Winnipeg. First thing she says is she knew she wanted to be a nurse at the age of six. "Or a hairdresser," she said. Shes rewarded with a blank look. "I dont think I knew much about careers," she deadpans. Grace Hospital nursing graduation photo 1943. Norma Hodgkins, is seated in the front row second from the left. Whats no joke, though, is a relic shes kept. Typewritten, yellowed sheets of paper, headed up with the title, "The Salvation Army Grace Hospital Training School for Nurses: Rules," declares it to be exactly what it looks like. The rules block off the 12-hour day to a royal minute, a timetable Hodgkins put in for three years before she graduated to a white cap and an armload of roses, the hallmarks of the mid-20th century for every successful nursing grad. Training was harder than nursing, Hodgkins suggested. Women answered roll call at 6:40 a.m., and if you didnt break any rules, you got half an afternoon off and one evening out of the hospital per week. "If you were late once for roll call, you forfeited late leave," Hodgkins recalled. She glanced at the old rules on her tiny coffee table in the supportive housing where she lives. "Im not a hoarder, but..." she paused. Her daughter first saw the book the night before. "Are they kidding?" Blacklaw exclaimed. "Look at this," she said, holding up a copy she made. "I didnt know my mother had this until she pulled it out last night." Rules forbade lipstick (and rouge). They forbade jewelry. Nurses werent allowed to exchange pleasantries with patients or physicians, or display any sign of "familiarity." If they were caught drinking or smoking, they were thrown out of school. Hodgkins might have kept the early-morning alarm time, but not the rest of it. To this day, Hodgkins turns out right every day. Shes always seen with jewelry a bracelet, a scarf, a brooch and always in a business shirt and dress pants. Nurses didnt have the professional standing they now enjoy, and the work was a lot harder, she said. "We did our training right on the wards, with a supervisor who was watching over you the whole time," Hodgkins said. Grace Hospital Nurses Association executive member Twyla Jaworski said technology and modern conveniences were in their infancy at the time. The old Grace Hospital, located on Arlington Street, had no elevators, for example. "Things as a student, and as a nurse, 75 years ago were way different from the way they are now... They slept on window ledges because it was so hot in their dorms. They carried patients up and down stairs. They boiled their syringes," Jaworski said. Hodgkins, who was the valedictorian of her 1943 graduating class, is a favourite, Jaworski said. "Shes always smiling at the dinners and lots of people from all the different classes come to say hello to her or see her. Its amazing to see so many people coming by and wishing her well and chatting with her." Jaworski sits beside Hodgkins at the annual dinner. "One cute little thing about Norma every year, I always say, What would you like to drink? and she says, A screw-up. And then shell say, Do you know what that is? Its a vodka, 7Up and orange juice. "So she has one little screw-up at the dinner. And I find that really cute," Jaworski 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. Back in the day, the regimented day ended with lights out at 10:30 p.m. Hodgkins nursed through the birth of three of her four children, unusual for a woman in the 1940s and 50s. She took the tough cases, signing on with a registry which would assign her patients who needed and could afford to pay for nursing in the days before medicare. She nursed patients after major surgery, men and women who suffered heart attacks and strokes. Her advice for a long life is simple. "I would like to think all of my life I have felt I would be happy. I would try to help everybody I could and in the 15 years Ive been living here," she said, gesturing to her tidy room with a brass bed and the latest afghan shes crocheting. A wall is lined with family photos. Across from her bed is another frame with filled with Masonic memorabilia and insignia that belonged to her late husband, a Second World War navy veteran and former grand master of his lodge. "I can honestly say I have not been unkind to anybody," Hodgkins said. alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca OTTAWA Omnitraxs Manitoba subsidiary says it plans to appeal the federal transport regulator's order last week to repair the washed-out railway to Churchill adding it will start doing those repairs anyway if ownership transfer talks linger. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 18/6/2018 (1217 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. OTTAWA Omnitraxs Manitoba subsidiary says it plans to appeal the federal transport regulator's order last week to repair the washed-out railway to Churchill adding it will start doing those repairs anyway if ownership transfer talks linger. Last Wednesday, the Canadian Transportation Agency ordered the Hudson Bay Railway to begin repairs along the line by July 3, and file monthly progress reports, starting Aug. 1. In a Monday statement, Denver-based Omnitraxs chief operating officer, who is also head of HBR, wrote the company had already put up a tender for contractors to repair the northern Manitoba rail line. "We have initiated a request for proposals to contractors and other relevant trades," wrote Sergio Sabatini. A company spokesman did not immediately produce that request, nor did a search for tenders on the Merx contracting website. Sabatini reiterated HBR cannot afford such repairs and is focused on ongoing federal talks aimed at transferring the railway into local hands. But curiously, the company said it will start repairs anyway should those talks drag on. "To the extent the CTA decision is not overturned, or the sale of the line is not completed in time, the company is prepared to start the repairs," reads a Monday afternoon statement. Meanwhile, Omnitrax also said it plans to appeal the CTA decision in Federal Court. Its not clear on what grounds; regulatory appeals require defendants to identify an error in the ruling or reasoning. MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Provincial NDP Leader Wab Kinew wrote to Premier Brian Pallister asking him to support the Canadian Transportation Agency's ruling which ordered the Hudson Bay Railway to begin repairs along the Churchill railway line by July 3. Its unclear whether the regulatory finding is having an impact on the transfer talks. Transport Minister Marc Garneau's office declined to comment as "this matter is the subject of legal proceedings." A spokeswoman for Western Economic Diversification said Ottawa is "diligently" continuing those negotiations. In Monday's question period, the area's NDP MP, Niki Ashton, asked Garneau to "get Churchill's port and railway back on-track, as soon as possible." Garneau read a statement saying the CTA ruling reinforces the case for the governments breach-of-contract suit against Omnitrax, though that case has sat idle for months. 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 CTA probe is a result of a formal complaint launched by the Manitoba NDP, after transportation lawyers told the Free Press Omnitrax had likely violated federal railway laws by leaving the line unfixed. Last Friday, provincial NDP Leader Wab Kinew asked the PC government to voice its support for the case; Infrastructure Minister Ron Schuler replied he was focused on the federal transfer talks and on public health and safety. On Monday, Kinew wrote to Premier Brian Pallister, asking him to support the CTA ruling, should it reach Federal Court, saying the cost of government lawyers would likely be lower than the cost of repairing the line. Churchills railway lifeline washed out May 23, 2017, near Gillam, which dramatically increased living costs and severed commercial links between Winnipeg and Nunavut. The government pledged May 30 to restore rail service "before winter 2018." dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca A byelection will be held July 17 in the provincial constituency of St. Boniface to fill the vacancy left by former Manitoba premier Greg Selinger's resignation earlier this year. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/6/2018 (1216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A byelection will be held July 17 in the provincial constituency of St. Boniface to fill the vacancy left by former Manitoba premier Greg Selinger's resignation earlier this year. Premier Brian Pallister called the byelection Tuesday, ending months of speculation as to its timing. The byelection presents an opportunity for the Liberals to achieve party status in the Manitoba legislature -- four seats -- and the extra funding and perks it brings. Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont, who does not hold a seat, will represent his party in the contest. 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. Blandine Tona, a community activist, is trying to retain the constituency for the NDP; Mamadou Ka, who sought the seat for the Progressive Conservatives in the 2016, will represent the Tories once again; Francoise Therrien Vrignon will be the Green party candidate. Selinger, who had represented St. Boniface since 1999, stepped down March 7. He had announced his departure the previous month, after being pressured to resign by NDP Leader Wab Kinew in the wake of multiple allegations of inappropriate touching levied against former MLA Stan Struthers. Under Manitoba law, the government is prevented from announcing any new spending or programs during the election period. Pallister said Tuesday, however, he will answer media questions periodically throughout the byelection. Nominations in the constituency will officially close July 3. On voting day, polls will remain open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Advance polls will be open July 7 to 14. There are currently 39 Progressive Conservatives, 12 New Democrats, three Liberals, two independents, and one vacant seat in the Manitoba legislature. larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/6/2018 (1216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Newcomer groups that help make Manitoba a friendly place for immigrants and refugees are joining forces. The Ethnocultural Council of Manitoba launches today at the South Sudanese Community Centre in Winnipeg. "When more people come together, we become stronger," said Reuben Garang, a member of the organizing committee. The council -- which has 20 members so far including Syrians, Yazidis, Congolese, Eritreans, Iraqis and Colombians -- has different religious and social needs as well as shared challenges and experiences, he said. "Many refugees, when they get here, feel a sense of isolation," said Abdikheir Ahmed, director of Immigration Partnership Winnipeg. "They find the best place to connect is with their own community." Eighty per cent of the jobs people get are through their ethnocultural communities, said Ahmed whose federally-funded agency is helping to set up the council. "If we get all these voices together, there's strength in numbers and in learning from each other and supporting each other." Ahmed said Manitoba has an estimated 100 ethnocultural communities and all are welcome. The plan is to create ethnic hubs for resources, to share ideas and have a voice when it comes to civic matters, settlement and integration of newcomers. One of the priorities they're preparing to speak up about is the need for a low-income transit pass, said Ahmed. The bulk of what Manitoba's ethnocultural groups do, however, is informal, voluntary, behind-the-scenes settlement work, said Garang, who came to Canada 14 years ago as a refugee from South Sudan and offered an example. "You get a call at night by a new member of the community who doesn't know the language. All the offices are closed and they need to go to the hospital or something has happened at night," said Garang, who knows from first-hand experience. 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. "That's the work that ethnocultural communities do that's ongoing. It's based on connections and unconditional. It's not formalized and not 'eight to four'," said Garang, a co-ordinator at Immigration Partnership Winnipeg. Manitoba is renowned for its successful resettlement services but users need to be aware of them to access them, said Garang. "There are barriers, including a lack of information, he said. "People who are here may not know where Welcome Place is," he said, referring to the Manitoba Interfaith Immigration Council, the largest resettlement service agency for government-assisted refugees in the province. Many resettlement services are available only during regular business hours and newcomer needs are 24-7, said Garang. "They need someone who understands where you buy food from your country -- simple things that are very important in people's day-to-day lives," said Garang. "Some are from communities that are very conservative. Here, they're in a new culture and we learn from each other about the values that are needed in our new country," he said. Community members need to be equipped to promote cultural diversity, gender equality and tolerance, said Garang. "Money's not the thing," he said. "We need to mobilize what they need -- and they need information and documents they can refer to," he said. The council, its terms of reference say, has an unlimited number of members made up of representatives of ethnocultural groups that signed a memorandum of understanding in order to join. An 11-member operating committee will "take action and lead discussions on issues identified as the short and long term priorities," it said. Workshops will be held every year to set priorities for the year ahead. carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca Our portfolio of high quality UK commercial property is focused on London Offices and Retail around the UK. We own or manage a portfolio valued at A13.7bn (British Land share: A10.3bn) as at 30 September 2020 making us one of Europe's largest listed real estate investment companies. Our strategy is to provide places which meet the needs of our customers and respond to changing lifestyles - Places People Prefer. We do this by creating great environments both inside and outside our buildings and use our scale and placemaking skills to enhance and enliven them. This expands their appeal to a broader range of occupiers, creating enduring demand and driving sustainable, long term performance. Our Offices portfolio comprises three office-led campuses in central London as well as high quality standalone buildings and accounts for 65% of our portfolio. Our Retail portfolio is focused on retail parks and shopping centres, and accounts for 31% of our portfolio. Increasingly our focus is on providing a mix of uses and this is most evident at Canada Water, our 53 acre redevelopment opportunity where we have plans to create a new neighbourhood for London. Sustainability is embedded throughout our business. Our places, which are designed to meet high sustainability standards, become part of local communities, provide opportunities for skills development and employment and promote wellbeing. In April 2016 British Land received the Queen's Award for Enterprise: Sustainable Development, the UK's highest accolade for business success for economic, social and environmental achievements over a period of five years. Read More Domtar Corporation designs, manufactures, markets, and distributes communication papers, specialty and packaging papers, and absorbent hygiene products in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and internationally. It operates through two segments, Pulp and Paper, and Personal Care. The company provides business papers, including copy and electronic imaging papers used in inkjet and laser printers, photocopiers, and plain-paper fax machines, as well as computer papers, preprinted forms, and digital papers for office and home use. It also offers commercial printing and publishing papers, such as offset papers and opaques used in sheet and roll fed offset presses; publishing papers, which include tradebook and lightweight uncoated papers for publishing textbooks, dictionaries, catalogs, magazines, hard cover novels, and financial documents; and converting papers for envelopes, tablets, business forms, and data processing/computer forms. In addition, the company provides papers for thermal printing, flexible packaging, food packaging, medical packaging, medical gowns and drapes, sandpaper backing, carbonless printing, labels and other coating, and laminating applications; and papers for industrial and specialty applications, such as carrier papers, treated papers, security papers, and specialized printing and converting applications. Further, it offers absorbent hygiene products, including absorbent briefs, protective underwear, underpads, pads, washcloths, and body patches under the Attends, Indasec, IndasSlip, and Reassure brands; and baby diapers, training and youth pants, and bed mats under the Comfees, Chelino, Nene, and Bambino brand names. The company serves merchants, retail outlets, stationers, printers, publishers, converters, and end-users. Domtar Corporation was founded in 1848 and is based in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Read More FedEx Corp. is a holding company, which engages in the provision of a portfolio of transportation, e-commerce, and business services. It operates through the following segments: FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Services, and Corporate, Other & Eliminations. The FedEx Express segment consists of domestic and international shipping services for delivery of packages and freight. The FedEx Ground segment focuses on small-package ground delivery services. The FedEx Freight segment offers less-than-truckload freight services across all lengths of haul. The FedEx Services segment provides sales, marketing, information technology, communications, customer service, technical support, billing and collection services, and certain back-office functions. The Corporate, Other & Eliminations segment includes corporate headquarters costs for executive officers and certain legal and finance functions, as well as certain other costs and credits not attributed to the firm's core business. The company was founded by Frederick Wallace Smith on June 18, 1971 and is headquartered in Memphis, TN. Read More President Energy Plc engages in the exploration, evaluation, and production of oil and gas properties primarily in South America. The company holds exploration assets in Argentina, the United States, and Paraguay. It also sells hydrocarbons. The company was formerly known as President Petroleum Company PLC and changed its name to President Energy Plc in September 2012. President Energy Plc was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Leeds, the United Kingdom. Read More Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. provides technical, professional, and construction services. The company's Aerospace, Technology, Environmental and Nuclear segment offers scientific, engineering, construction, nuclear, environmental, and technical support services to the aerospace, defense, technical, and automotive industries. Its Buildings, Infrastructure and Advanced Facilities segment develops/rehabilitates plans for highways, bridges, transit, tunnels, airports, railroads, intermodal facilities, and maritime or port projects; develops or rehabilitates critical water resource systems, water/wastewater conveyance systems, and flood defense projects; and provides engineering design, construction management, design build, and operations and maintenance. This segment also designs and constructs buildings; offers consulting, engineering, procurement, construction management, and delivery services for life sciences clients; and provides services relating to modular construction and other consulting and strategic planning services, as well as offers services in containment, barrier technology, locally controlled environments, building systems automation, off-the-site design, and fabrication of facility modules. The company's Energy, Chemicals and Resources segment offers services relating to onshore and offshore oil and gas production facilities, processing facilities, gathering systems, and transmission pipelines and terminals; feasibility/economic studies, technology evaluation, conceptual engineering, front end loading, detailed engineering, procurement, construction, maintenance, and commissioning services; and engineering, procurement, and construction solutions. This segment also provides services, such as manufacturing complex, expansions, modifications, and management of plant relocations; construction management and field construction services; and services to operate and maintain facilities. The company was founded in 1947 and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Dominion Energy: 96WI 8me LLC, Alamo Solar LLC, Align RNG Arizona LLC, Align RNG Arizona-Snowflake LLC, Align RNG California LLC, Align RNG California-Corcoran LLC, Align RNG Grady Road LLC, Align RNG LLC, Align RNG Magnolia LLC, Align RNG North Carolina LLC, Align RNG North Carolina-Bowdens LLC, Align RNG Utah LLC, Align RNG Utah-Milford LLC, Align RNG Virginia LLC, Align RNG Virginia-Waverly LLC, Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC, Azalea Solar LLC, BOE Holdings Inc., Blackville Solar Farm LLC, Blue Ocean Energy Marine LLC, BrightSuite Home LLC, BrightSuite Inc., BrightSuite Solar CT Inc., BrightSuite Solar SC Inc., BrightSuite Solar VA Inc., Buckingham Solar I LLC, CEA Americus LLC, CEA CO-Fort Morgan LLC, CEA Clovis LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Colorado LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Georgia LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Idaho LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Nevada LLC, CEA Dairy RNG New Mexico LLC, CEA Dairy RNG Texas LLC, CEA Greely LLC, CEA Mason LLC, CEA TX-Dimmitt LLC, CID Solar LLC, CNG Coal Company, CNG Power Services Corporation, Carolina Gas Transmission Corporation, Catalina Solar 2 LLC, Clean Energy Asset USA LLC, Clean Energy Enterprises Inc., Clipperton Holdings LLC, Consolidated Natural Gas Company, Correctional Solar LLC, Cottonwood Solar LLC, Cove Point LNG LP, Cove Point LNG Limited, DE Arlington Solar LLC, DE Fluvanna Solar LLC, DE Hanover Solar LLC, DE Henrico Solar LLC, DE King William Solar LLC, DE Louisa Solar LLC, DE Newport News Solar LLC, DE Powhatan Solar LLC, DE Virginia Beach Solar LLC, DECP Holdings Inc., Dairy RNG Holdings LLC, Dairy RNG NY LLC, Dairy RNG NY-Curtin LLC, Dairy RNG OH LLC, Denmark Solar LLC, Dominion ACP Holding Inc., Dominion Alternative Energy Holdings Inc., Dominion Atlantic Coast Pipeline LLC, Dominion Capital Inc., Dominion Cogen WV Inc., Dominion Energy Fuel Services Inc., Dominion Energy Gas Distribution LLC, Dominion Energy Generation Marketing Inc., Dominion Energy Inc., Dominion Energy Kewaunee Inc., Dominion Energy Marketplace LLC, Dominion Energy Nuclear Connecticut Inc., Dominion Energy Overthrust Pipeline LLC, Dominion Energy Payroll Company Inc., Dominion Energy Questar Corporation, Dominion Energy Questar Pipeline LLC, Dominion Energy Questar Pipeline Services Inc., Dominion Energy RNG Holdings II Inc., Dominion Energy RNG Holdings Inc., Dominion Energy Services Inc., Dominion Energy Solar CA LLC, Dominion Energy Solutions Inc., Dominion Energy South Carolina Inc., Dominion Energy Southeast Services Inc., Dominion Energy Technical Solutions Inc., Dominion Energy Technologies II Inc., Dominion Energy Technologies Inc., Dominion Energy Terminal Company Inc., Dominion Energy Wexpro Services Company, Dominion Equipment III Inc., Dominion Equipment Inc., Dominion Fairless Hills Inc., Dominion Fowler Ridge Wind LLC, Dominion Gas Projects Company LLC, Dominion Generation Inc., Dominion Greenbrier Inc., Dominion High Voltage Holdings Inc., Dominion High Voltage MidAtlantic Inc., Dominion Investments Inc., Dominion Keystone Pipeline Holdings Inc., Dominion Keystone Pipeline LLC, Dominion MLP Holding Company III Inc., Dominion Mt. Storm Wind LLC, Dominion Nuclear Projects Inc., Dominion Oklahoma Texas Exploration & Production Inc., Dominion Person Inc., Dominion Privatization Florida LLC, Dominion Privatization Georgia LLC, Dominion Privatization Holdings Inc., Dominion Privatization Kentucky LLC, Dominion Privatization Maryland LLC, Dominion Privatization Pennsylvania LLC, Dominion Privatization South Carolina LLC, Dominion Privatization Texas LLC, Dominion Privatization Virginia LLC, Dominion Products and Services Inc., Dominion Projects Services Inc., Dominion Resources Capital Trust III, Dominion Retail Gas Holdings Inc., Dominion Solar Construction and Maintenance LLC, Dominion Solar Gen-Tie LLC, Dominion Solar Holdings I LLC, Dominion Solar Holdings II LLC, Dominion Solar Holdings III LLC, Dominion Solar Holdings IV LLC, Dominion Solar Projects A Inc., Dominion Solar Projects B Inc., Dominion Solar Projects C Inc., Dominion Solar Projects D Inc., Dominion Solar Projects I Inc., Dominion Solar Projects II Inc., Dominion Solar Projects III Inc., Dominion Solar Projects IV Inc., Dominion Solar Projects V Inc., Dominion Solar Projects VI Inc., Dominion Solar Projects VII Inc., Dominion Solar Services Inc., Dominion State Line LLC, Dominion Voltage Inc., Dominion Wholesale Inc., Dominion Wind Development LLC, Dominion Wind Projects Inc., ESCT-SA-Suffield LLC, Eagle Holdco Solar LLC, Eagle Solar LLC, Eastern Shore Solar LLC, Enterprise Solar LLC, Escalante Solar I LLC, Escalante Solar II LLC, Escalante Solar III LLC, Four Brothers Solar LLC, Fremont Farm LLC, Granite Mountain Holdings LLC, Granite Mountain Solar East LLC, Granite Mountain Solar West LLC, Greenbrier Marketing Company LLC, Greenbrier Pipeline Company LLC, Greensville County Solar Project LLC, Hardin Solar Energy LLC, Hecate Energy Cherrydale LLC, Hecate Energy Clarke County LLC, Hope Gas Inc., Imperial Valley Solar Company (IVSC) 2 LLC, Indy Solar Development LLC, Indy Solar I LLC, Indy Solar II LLC, Indy Solar III LLC, Innovative Solar 37 LLC, Iron Springs Holdings LLC, Iron Springs Solar LLC, Louis Dreyfus Natural Gas, Maricopa West Solar PV LLC, Moffett Solar 1 LLC, Moorings Farm 2 LLC, Mulberry Farm LLC, Mustang Solar LLC, PSNC Blue Ridge Corporation, PSNC Cardinal Pipeline Company, Pavant Solar LLC, Phone House, Pikeville Farm LLC, Prairie Fork Wind Farm LLC, Public Service Company of North Carolina Incorporated, QPC Holding Company LLC, Questar Corporation, Questar Energy Services Inc., Questar Field Services LLC, Questar Gas Company, Questar InfoComm Inc., Questar Southern Trails Pipeline Company, Questar White River Hub LLC, RE Adams East LLC, RE Camelot LLC, RE Columbia Two LLC, RE Kansas LLC, RE Kent South LLC, RE Old River One LLC, Richland Solar Center LLC, Ridgeland Solar Farm I LLC, SBL Holdco LLC, SCANA, SCANA Communications Holdings Inc., SCANA Corporate Security Services Inc., SCANA Energy Marketing LLC, SCANA Pharmacy LLC, SRFI LLC, Scana Corporation, Scott-II Solar LLC, Seabrook Solar LLC, Selmer Farm LLC, Siler Solar LLC, Sol Madison Solar LLC, Somers Solar Center LLC, South Carolina Fuel Company Inc., South Carolina Generating Company Inc., Southampton Solar LLC, Summit Farms Solar LLC, Sussex Drive Solar Project LLC, TA - Acacia LLC, TWE Myrtle Solar Project LLC, The East Ohio Gas Company, Trask East Solar LLC, Tredegar Solar Fund I LLC, VP Property Inc., Virginia Electric And Power Company, Virginia Power Fuel Corporation, Virginia Power Nuclear Services Company, Virginia Power Services Energy Corp. Inc., Virginia Power Services LLC, Virginia Solar 201 Projects LLC, Wakefield Solar LLC, Wexpro Company, Wexpro Development Company, Wexpro II Company, Wilkinson Solar LLC, Wrangler Retail Gas Holdings LLC, and Yemassee Solar LLC. The Southern pays an annual dividend of $2.64 per share and currently has a dividend yield of 4.17%. SO has a dividend yield higher than 75% of all dividend-paying stocks, making it a leading dividend payer. The Southern has been increasing its dividend for 20 consecutive years, indicating the company has a strong committment to maintain and grow its dividend. The dividend payout ratio of The Southern is 81.23%. Payout ratios above 75% are not desirable because they may not be sustainable. Based on earnings estimates, The Southern will have a dividend payout ratio of 74.37% next year. This indicates that The Southern will be able to sustain or increase its dividend. View The Southern's dividend history. The following companies are subsidiares of Accenture: 2nd Road, 2nd Road Pty Ltd., ?What If!, ?What If! China Holdings Ltd, ?What If! Holdings Limited, ?What If! Innovation Singapore Holdings Pte, ?What If! Limited, ?What If! Shanghai Co. Ltd, ?What If! USA LLC, ACN Consulting Co Ltd, AD Dialeto Agencia de Publicidade SA, AD.Dialeto (Digital Agency acquired by Accenture), AGS Business and Technology Services Limited, ASM Research Inc., ASM Research LLC, ATAN, Accenture (Beijing) Mobile Technology Co Ltd, Accenture (Botswana) (Proprietary) Limited, Accenture (China) Co Ltd, Accenture (Shenzhen) Technology Co. Ltd., Accenture (South Africa) (Proprietary) Limited, Accenture (South Africa) Pty Limited, Accenture (UK) Ltd, Accenture 2 Business Process Services S.A., Accenture 2 LLC, Accenture A/S, Accenture AB, Accenture AG, Accenture AS, Accenture Africa Pty Ltd, Accenture Australia Holding B.V., Accenture Australia Holdings Pty Ltd, Accenture Australia Pty Ltd, Accenture Azerbaijan Ltd, Accenture BPM Operations Support Services S.A., Accenture BPM S.C.R.L., Accenture BV, Accenture Branch Holdings B.V., Accenture Bulgaria EOOD, Accenture Business Services for Utilities Inc, Accenture Business Services of British Columbia Limited Partnership, Accenture Business and Technology Services LLC, Accenture C.A, Accenture CAS GmbH, Accenture Canada Holdings Inc., Accenture Capital DAC, Accenture Capital Inc, Accenture Central Europe B.V., Accenture Chile Asesorias y Servicios Ltda, Accenture Cloud Services GmbH, Accenture Cloud Software Solutions Ltd, Accenture Cloud Solutions Australia Pty Ltd, Accenture Cloud Solutions LLC, Accenture Cloud Solutions Ltd, Accenture Cloud Solutions Pty Ltd, Accenture Co Ltd, Accenture Co Ltd., Accenture Communications Infrastructure Solutions Ltd, Accenture Company Ltd, Accenture Consulting Services Ltd Tanzania, Accenture Consultores de Gestao S.A., Accenture Consultoria de Industria e Consumo Ltda, Accenture Consultoria de Recursos Naturais Ltda, Accenture Credit Services LLC, Accenture Customer Services Distribution SAS, Accenture Customer Services Limited, Accenture Danismanlik Limited Sirketi, Accenture Defined Benefit Pension Plan Trustees Ltd, Accenture Defined Contribution Pension Plan Trustees Ltd, Accenture Delivery Poland sp. z o.o., Accenture Dienstleistungen GmbH, Accenture Digital France Holdings SA, Accenture Digital Holdings GmbH, Accenture East Africa Limited, Accenture Ecuador S.A., Accenture Egypt LLC, Accenture Enterprise Development (Shanghai) Co Ltd., Accenture Federal Services LLC, Accenture Finance (Gibraltar) III Ltd, Accenture Finance GmbH, Accenture Finance GmbH in liquidation, Accenture Finance II GmbH, Accenture Finance II GmbH in liquidation, Accenture Finance II Ltd, Accenture Finance Limited, Accenture Finance and Accounting BPO Services S.p.A., Accenture Finance and Accounting Services Srl, Accenture Flex LLC, Accenture GP LLC, Accenture Ghana Limited, Accenture Global Holdings Ltd., Accenture Global Services Ltd, Accenture Global Solutions Ltd, Accenture GmbH, Accenture HR Services Ltd, Accenture HR Services S.p.A., Accenture Healthcare Processing Inc., Accenture Holding GmbH, Accenture Holding GmbH & Co. KG, Accenture Holding GmbH in liquidation, Accenture Holdings (Iberia) S.L., Accenture Holdings B.V., Accenture Holdings France SAS, Accenture Holdings plc, Accenture Hungary Holdings Kft, Accenture Inc, Accenture Industrial Software Limited Liability Company (Accenture Endustriyel Yazylym Cozumleri Limited irketi), Accenture Industrial Software Limited Liability Company (Accenture Endustriyel Yazlm Cozumleri Limited Sirketi), Accenture Industrial Software Solutions Kft, Accenture Industrial Software Solutions SA, Accenture Insurance Services LLC, Accenture Insurance Services SAS, Accenture Insurance Services SpA, Accenture International BV, Accenture International Capital SCA, Accenture International LLC, Accenture International Limited, Accenture International Sarl, Accenture Japan Ltd, Accenture Korea BV, Accenture LLC, Accenture LLP, Accenture Lanka (Private) Ltd, Accenture Limited, Accenture Ltd, Accenture Ltda, Accenture Maghreb S.a.r.l., Accenture Managed Services SRL, Accenture Managed Services SpA, Accenture Management GmbH, Accenture Middle East B.V, Accenture Middle East BV, Accenture Minority I BV, Accenture Minority III Ltd, Accenture Mozambique Limitada, Accenture Mzansi (Pty) Ltd, Accenture NV/SA, Accenture NZ Limited, Accenture Newco LLC, Accenture Nova Scotia Unlimited Liability Co., Accenture OOO, Accenture Operations Sp. z o.o., Accenture Outsourcing SRL, Accenture Outsourcing Services, Accenture Outsourcing Services S.A., Accenture Oy, Accenture Panama Inc, Accenture Participations BV, Accenture Participations II Limited, Accenture Peru S.R.L, Accenture Peru S.R.L., Accenture Post Trade Processing SAS, Accenture Post-Trade Processing Limited, Accenture Process Ltd, Accenture Product Lifecycle Services, Accenture Properties, Accenture Pte Ltd, Accenture Puerto Rico LLC, Accenture S.A., Accenture S.C., Accenture S.L., Accenture S.R.L., Accenture SAS, Accenture SG Services Pte Ltd, Accenture SRL, Accenture Saudi Arabia Limited, Accenture Sendirian Berhad, Accenture Service Center SRL, Accenture Services (Mauritius) Ltd, Accenture Services AB, Accenture Services AG, Accenture Services AS, Accenture Services GmbH, Accenture Services Ltd, Accenture Services Morocco SA, Accenture Services Oy, Accenture Services Pty Ltd, Accenture Services S.r.l., Accenture Services SRL, Accenture Services Sp. z o.o., Accenture Services Sp. z.o.o., Accenture Services and Technology Srl, Accenture Services fur Kreditinstitute GmbH, Accenture Services s.r.o., Accenture Servicos Administrativos Ltda, Accenture Servicos de Suporte de Negocios Ltda, Accenture Solutions Co Ltd, Accenture Solutions Private Limited, Accenture Solutions Pte Ltd, Accenture Solutions Pty Ltd, Accenture Solutions Sdn Bhd, Accenture Sp. z o.o., Accenture Sp. z.o.o., Accenture SpA, Accenture State Healthcare Services LLC, Accenture Sub II Inc., Accenture Sub Inc, Accenture Sub LLC, Accenture Systems Integration Limited, Accenture Sarl, Accenture Tanacsado Kolatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Accenture Tanacsado Kolatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag KFT, Accenture Technologia, Accenture Technologia Consultoria e Outsourcing S.A., Accenture Technology Infrastructure Services Pty Ltd, Accenture Technology Solutions (Dalian) Co Ltd, Accenture Technology Solutions (HK) Co. Ltd., Accenture Technology Solutions (Thailand) Co. Ltd, Accenture Technology Solutions - Solucoes Informaticas Integradas, Accenture Technology Solutions - Solucoes Informaticas Integradas S.A., Accenture Technology Solutions GmbH, Accenture Technology Solutions Oy, Accenture Technology Solutions Pty Ltd, Accenture Technology Solutions S.A. de C.V., Accenture Technology Solutions SAS, Accenture Technology Solutions SRL, Accenture Technology Solutions Sdn. Bhd., Accenture Technology Solutions Slovakia s.r.o., Accenture Technology Ventures BV, Accenture Technology Ventures S.P.R.L., Accenture Uruguay SRL, Accenture Vietnam Co., Accenture Vietnam Co. LTD, Accenture Zambia Limited, Accenture do Brasil Limitada, Accenture plc, Accenture s.r.o., Acceria, Acquity Customer Insight Limited, Acquity Group, Adaptly LLC, Adaptly UK Limited, AddVal Technology, Adqptly, Advantium Inc., Agave Consultants Limited, Agilex Technologies Inc., Allen International, Allen International Consulting Group Ltd, Alnova Technologies Corporation S.L., AlphaBeta Advisors, Altima, Altima Asia Ltd., Altima SAS, Altitude, Altitude LLC, Analytics 8 LP, Analytics 8 Pty Ltd, Analytics8, Aorui Advertising (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Apis, Appaloosa Technology SAS, Arca, Ariba - BPO, Arismore, Aspiro Solutions (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Avanade, Avanade (Guangzhou) Computer Technology Development Co. Ltd., Avanade (Thailand) Co Ltd, Avanade Asia Pte Ltd, Avanade Australia Pty Ltd, Avanade Belgium SPRL, Avanade Canada Inc., Avanade Denmark A/S, Avanade Denmark ApS, Avanade Deutschland GmbH, Avanade Europe Holdings Ltd, Avanade Europe Services Ltd, Avanade Federal Services LLC, Avanade Finland Oy, Avanade France SAS, Avanade GZ Computer Technology Development Co. Ltd. (SH), Avanade Guangzhou, Avanade Holdings LLC, Avanade Hong Kong Ltd, Avanade International Corporation, Avanade Ireland Limited, Avanade Italy SRL, Avanade KK, Avanade Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Avanade Netherlands BV, Avanade Norway AS, Avanade Poland Sp. z o.o., Avanade Poland Sp. z.o.o., Avanade Schweiz GmbH, Avanade South Africa, Avanade South Africa Pty Ltd, Avanade Spain SL, Avanade Sweden AB, Avanade UK Ltd, Avanade do Brasil Limitada, Avanade Osterreich GmbH, AvantBiz Consulting Limited, Avenai, Axia Ltd., BABCN LLC, BCT Solutions, BCT Solutions Pty Ltd, BPO Servicos Administrativos Ltda, BRIDGE Energy Group, Beacon Consulting Group Inc., Beijing Genesis Interactive Technology Co. Ltd., Benext, Bionic, Blue Horseshoe, Boomerang Pharmaceutical Communications, Boomerang Pharmaceuticals Communications Ireland Limited, Bow & Arrow, Brand Learning, Brand Learning Group Limited, Brand Learning LLC, Brand Learning Ltd, Brand Learning Partners Limited, Brand Learning Pte Limited, Bridge Energy Group LLC, Brightstep AB, Byte Prophecy, CAS, CRMWaypoint, CadenceQuest Inc., Capable Marketer Limited, Capgemini - North American health practice, Capital Consultancy Services Inc., Certus Solutions Consulting Services Ltd, Certus Solutions Ltd, ChangeTrack Research Pty Ltd., Chaotic Moon Studios, Chengdu Mensa Advertising Co. Ltd., Cimation, Cimation UK Limited, Cirruseo, Cirruseo SAS, Clarity Insights, Clearhead, Clearhead Group, Clearhead Group LLC, ClientHouse GmbH, Cloud Sherpas, Cloud Sherpas (GA) LLC, Cloud Sherpas (SN) (PTE.) Limited, Cloud Sherpas New Zealand Ltd., Cloud Talent Limited, Cloudsherpas, Cloudsherpas Inc., Cloudworks, Codagenic Pty. Ltd., Computer Research and Telecommunications LLC, Concrete Desenvolvimento de Sistemas Ltda., Concrete Solutions, Concrete Solutions Ltda., Context Information Security, Coritel S.A., Corliant Inc., CreativeDrive, CustomerWorks Europe SL, Cutting Edge Solutions Ltd, D5 Global Holdings LLC, DAZ Systems Inc, DAZ Systems LLC, DAZSI Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd., DMA Solutions Limited, Davies Consulting, DayNine Consulting, DayNine Consulting (Australia) PTY LTD, DayNine Consulting (Deutschland) GmbH, DayNine Consulting (New Zealand) Limited, DayNine Consulting France SAS, DayNine Consulting Japan K.K., DayNine Consulting LLC, Declarative Holdings, Declarative Holdings LLC, Defense Point Security, Deja vu Security, Design Strategy and Research de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Designaffairs LLC, Digiplug S.A.S., Digiplug SAS, Digital Consulting & Software Services LLC, Droga5, Droga5 LLC, Droga5 Studios LLC, Droga5 UK Ltd., Duck Creek Technologies, Duck Creek Technologies LLC, Deja Vu Security LLC, ESR Labs, Elcurator SAS, Enaxis Consulting, Enaxis Consulting L.P., End-to-End Analytics, Energuia Web, Energuia Web S.A., Energy Management Brokers Ltd., Energy Quote Private Ltd., EnergyQuote JHA, EnergyQuote JHA Ltd., EnergyQuote Trading Ltd., Enimbos, Enkitec, Enterprise System Partners, Enterprise System Partners B.V. , Enterprise System Partners Bilisim Danismanlik Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Enterprise System Partners Global Corporation, Enterprise System Partners Limited, Enterprise System Partners PR LLC, Enterprise System Partners S.A.S., Entropia, Epylon, Ethica Consulting Group, Evopro Group, Exactside Limited, Exton Consulting, Fairway Technologies Inc, Fairway Technologies LLC, Filmproduction ApS, First Annapolis Consulting, First Annapolis Consulting Inc., First Annapolis Consulting LLC, First Annapolis International, Fjord, Focus Group Europe, Focus Group Europe Limited, Formicary, Formicary Holdings Limited, Formicary Limited, FusionX, FutureMove Automotive, Gapso Servicos de Informatica Ltda., Genfour, Genfour Limited, George Group Consulting L.P., Gestalt LLC, Gestion Altima Canada Inc., Gevity, Global Public Firm S.L., GlobalView SAS, GoodFilm GmbH Filmproduktion Stuttgart, H.B. Maynard and Co. Inc., HRC Retail Advisory, Hagberg Consulting Group, Hangzhou Aiyunzhe Technology Co. Ltd., Happen, Hjaltelin Stahl, Hjaltelin Stahl K/S, Hytracc Consulting AS, Hytracc Consulting Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Hytracc Consulting UK Limited, Hytracc Holding AS, I-Faber S.p.A., IBB Consulting, IMJ Corp, IMJ Corporation, INCAD, INSITUM, IT One Company Limited, ITBS Servicios Bancarios de Tecnologia de la Informacion SL, Icon Integration, Imagine Broadband (USA) Ltd, Imagine Broadband USA LLC, Imaginea Inc, Industrie&Co, Infoman AG, Infoman Schweiz AG, Informatica de Euskadi S.L., Infusion Development Inc., Infusion Development UK Limited, InfusionDev LLC, Innoveer Solutions India Pvt Ltd, Insitum Consultoria Argentina SRL, Insitum Consultoria Brasil LTDA, Insitum Consultoria Colombia SAS, Insitum Consultoria Europa SL, Insitum Consultoria Peru SAC, Insitum Consultoria S.A. de C.V., Intrepid, Intrigo Systems Inc, Intrigo Systems India Pvt. Limited, Intrigo Systems LLC, Inventor Advertisement (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Inventor Technology Limited, InvestTech, Investtech Systems Consulting LLC, Javelin Group, Javelin Group (Bulgaria) EOOD, Javelin Group Limited (UK), Javelin Group SASU, K Comms Group Limited, KCS.net AG, KCS.net AG West, KCS.net Deutschland GmbH, KCS.net Holding AG, KCS.net Osterreich GmbH, Kaper Communications Limited, Karma Communications Debtco Limited, Karma Communications Group Limited, Karma Communications Holdings Limited, Karmarama, Karmarama Comms Limited, Karmarama Limited, Knowledge Rules Inc., Knowledgent, Knowledgent Group LLC, Kogentix, Kogentix LLC, Kogentix Ltd, Kogentix Singapore Pte. Ltd, Kogentix Technologies Private Limited, Kolle Rebbe, Kolle Rebbe GmbH, Kream Comms Limited, Kunstmaan, Kunstmaan NV, Kurt Salmon, Kurt Salmon Canada LTD, Kurt Salmon UKI, Kurt Salmon UKI Ltd., Kurt Salmon US LLC, LEXTA, LINKBYNET, LabAnswer, LabAnswer Government, LemonXL Limited, Logistics Market Place Limited (UK), Loud & Clear Creative Pty Ltd, MAXIM Systems Inc., MCG US Holdings LLC, Mackevision CG Technology and Service (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Mackevision Corporation, Mackevision Japan Co. Ltd., Mackevision Korea Ltd, Mackevision Medien Design, Mackevision Medien Design GmbH, Mackevision Singapore Pte. Ltd., Mackevision UK Ltd, Maglan, Maglan Information Defense Technologies Research Ltd., Maihiro, Matter, Matter Llc, Maud Corp Pty Limited, Maxamine International, Media Audits Ltd., Media Hive, Mediasenz Pty Ltd., Meredith Specialty LLC, Meredith Xcelerated Marketing, Meredith Xcelerated Marketing Corporation, Meridian Informed Purchasing Ltd., Mindtribe, Mindtribe Product Engineering LLC, MobGen, MobGen Technology S.L, Moonrise NV, Mortgage Cadence, Mortgage Cadence an Accenture Company, Most Champion Ltd, Mudano, N3 LLC, NBS Marketing Inc., NYTEC, Nanjing Demeng Advertising Co. Ltd., Nashco Consulting, NaviSys Inc., NellArmonia, Neo Metrics Analytics S.L., Neo Metrics Chile, Neo Metrics Chile S.A., New Content, New Content Chile SpA, New Content Editora e Produtora Ltda., New Energy Aborda, New Energy Associates Ltd, New Energy Group, New Energy S.r.l., NewsPage, NewsPage (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, NewsPage China Ltd., NewsPage Pte Ltd, Nice Agency Limited, Northstream, Northstream AB, Northstream Holding AB, OCTO Technology, OPS Rules Management Consultants, Octagon Research Solutions Inc., Octo Technology LTDA, Octo Technology Pty Ltd, Octo Technology SA, Octo Technology SPRL, Octoman SAS, Odgaard ApS, Olikka, Openmind, Openminded, Operaciones Accenture S.A. de C.V., OpusLine, Orbium, Orbium Consulting Ltd, Orbium GmbH, Orbium Holding AG, Orbium Inc., Orbium International AG, Orbium International sp. z o.o., Orbium Licences AG, Orbium Limited, Orbium Pte. Ltd., Orbium Pty Ltd, Orbium Services sp. z o.o., Orbium Sarl, Origin Digital, PCO Innovation, PCO Innovation Canada Inc., PCO Innovation EURL, PIXO PUNCH Limited, PLM Systems S.r.l, POC Holdings, PRION GmbH, PT Accenture, PT Asta Catur Indra, PT Kogentix Teknologi Indonesia, Pach Invest SARL, Pach Invest SAS, PacificLink Group, PacificLink iMedia Ltd., Paja Finanssipalvelut Oy, Parker Fitzgerald Inc, Parker Fitzgerald Inc., Parker Fitzgerald International Limited, Parker Fitzgerald Limited, Parker Fitzgerald PTY Ltd, Parker Fitzgerald Services Limited, Parker Fitzgerald Solutions Limited, Partners Technology Mexico Holdings BV, Pecaso Ltd., Pegasus Production K/S, Perseroan Terbatas. Accenture, Phase One Consulting Group, Pillar Technology, Pollux, Pragsis Bidoop, Pragsis Bidoop UK Ltd, Pragsis Technologies S.L, PrimeQ, PrimeQ Australia Pty Ltd, PrimeQ Ltd, PrimeQ NZ Pty Ltd, Procurian Germany GmbH, Procurian Inc., Procurian International I LLC, Procurian International II LLC, Procurian LLC, Procurian Singapore Pte. Ltd., Procurian Switzerland GmbH, Procurian USA LLC, Proquire LLC, PureApps Ltd., Qi Jie Beijing Information Technologies Co Ltd, Radiant Services, Radiant Services LLC, Random Walk Computing Inc., Reactive Media Limited, Reactive Media Pty Ltd., Real Protect, Realworld OO Systems Ltd., Redcore, Redcore (Asia) Pte Ltd, Redcore (India) Private Limited (India), Redcore (New Zealand) Limited, Redcore Group Holdings Pty Ltd, Redcore Pty Ltd, Renacentis IT Services, Revolutionary Security, RiskControl, Rothco, Rothco Holdings Designated Activity Company, Rothco Unlimited Company, S.C. EnergyQuote S.r.l., S3 TV Technology Limited, S3 TV Technology Ltd., SEC Servizi, SEC Servizi S.p.A., SOPIA Corp., Sagacious Consultants, Sagacious Consultants LLC, Salt Solutions, Sanchez Capital Services Pvt Ltd, Schlumberger Business Consulting, Seabury Airline Planning Group, Seabury Aviation & Aerospace (UK) Limited, Seabury Aviation & Aerospace Asia (Hong Kong) Limited, Seabury Aviation Consulting LLC, Seabury Cargo Advisory B.V., Seabury Consulting, Seabury Corporate Advisors LLC, Seabury Human Capital LLC, Seabury Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Seabury Structured Finance LLC, Search Technologies BPO, Search Technologies BPO Inc., Search Technologies GmbH, Search Technologies International LLC, Search Technologies LATAM, Search Technologies LATAM S.A., Search Technologies LLC, Search Technologies Limited, Sente Partners LLC, Sentelis, Servicios Tecnicos de Programacion Accenture S.C., Shackleton, Shackleton Barcelona S.L., Shackleton Chile S.A., Shackleton Madrid S.L., Shackleton S.A., Shanghai Baiyue Advertising Co. Ltd., Shun Zhe Technology Development Co. Ltd., Silveo, Simian Pty Limited, SinnerSchrader AG, SinnerSchrader Commerce GmbH, SinnerSchrader Content GmbH, SinnerSchrader Deutschland GmbH, SinnerSchrader Praha s.r.o., SinnerSchrader Swipe GmbH, Sinnerschrader, Sistemes Consulting S.L., Solutions IQ, Solutions IQ LLC, SolutionsIQ, SolutionsIQ India Consulting Services Private Limited, Storm Digital, Storm Digital B.V., Structure Consulting Group, Structure Consulting Group LLC, Sutter Mills, Systor AG, TQuila Limited (UK), Tadata Creative Unlimited Company, Tara Insurance DAC, Tara Risk DAC, TargetST8, TargetST8 Consulting LLC, Tech - Avanade Portugal Unipessoal Lda, Tecnilogica Ecosistemas S.A., Tecnilogica Ltd., Tecnilogica, The Brand Learning Partners Limited, The Callisto Integration Corporation, The Monkeys, The Monkeys Pty Limited, The Myrtle Group, Total Logistics, Total Logistics Supply Chain Consultants Limited, Tquila, Trivadis AG, Troop Studios Pty Ltd, VanBerlo, Verax Solutions, Verax Solutions Corporation, Vertical Retail Consulting (Shanghai) Ltd., Vertical Retail Consulting Hong Kong, Vertical Retail Consulting Hong Kong Ltd., Vertical Retail Consulting Ltd., Vivere Brasil Servicos e Solucoes SA, Vivere Brasil Solucoes De Credito Ltda., Wabion GmbH, Weblinc Pty Ltd, Wire Stone, Wire Stone LLC, Wire Stone Sarl, Wolox, Workforce Insight Inc, Yesler, Zag, Zenta, Zenta Global Philippines, Zenta Global Philippines Inc., Zenta Mortgage Services LLC, Zenta Recoveries Inc, Zenta US Holdings Inc., Zielpuls, Zielpuls (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Zielpuls GmbH, avVenta, designaffairs, designaffairs Business Consulting (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., designaffairs GmbH, designaffairs group China Co. Ltd., dgroup, i4C Analytics, iDefense, and solid-serVision.com GmbH. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. The Socialist Equality Party (UK) and World Socialist Web Site are calling for a maximum mobilisation in support of tonights vigil outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London that is demanding freedom for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. The vigil is part of events being held internationally on June 19 to demand Assanges freedom. The SEP demands the Conservative government of Theresa May end its cruel persecution of Assange, drop the bail-related issues against him and allow him to leave the embassy and, if he chooses, the UK, without fear of arrest. The event follows the successful demonstration held June 17 in Sydneys Town Hall Square, which marked a major step forward in the fight for Assanges unconditional release. The rally, at which hundreds of people attended, demanded that the Australian government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull secure the release of Assange from his involuntary confinement in London and his safe return to Australia. Leading up to the vigil, the Socialist Equality Party in Britain has been contacted with messages of support for Assange. A number of people attending last Thursdays Silent March in memory of those who died in the Grenfell Tower also spoke out in support of Assange. Speaking to WSWS reporters at Saturdays demonstration outside Downing Street to mark the first anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, Graham, who attended, spoke about his opposition to the years-long detention of Assange by the ruling elite and his support for the campaign to free him. From the start its suspicious, he said. The allegations made against him had already been dropped in Sweden. Obviously, hes a wanted man. Hes on the right side of history. Obviously, him being stuck in the embassy for six years is detrimental to his health. Im pretty sure thereve been human rights problems with whats happened to him. The main focus is getting him out of there without having him deported to America. What WikiLeaks has done is show the people up who rule us for what they are, which is important. His information has moved us forward because without knowing what youre really fighting, how do you fight it? We have to fight to stop him being extradited. I plan to come to the vigil in London this Tuesday. Jude, a reader of the World Socialist Web Site, said, Julian Assange has been demonised by the most reactionary forces on this planet because he believed the public had a right to know about the criminal activities of our governments. Through WikiLeaks, he revealed the war crimes carried out against journalists and civilians in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan by the US and Western governments. The mainstream media, especially the Guardian, which published WikiLeaks documents in 2010, gaining a liberal-left kudos and readership in the process, now shamefully attacks Assange as it cosies up to the Western warmongers. The Guardian and their ilk are not journalists, they are despicable charlatans and opportunists. As the ruling bourgeoisie twists and turns this way and that under the powerful social forces released by capitalism in crisis, it further loses credibility and legitimacy, and control of the narrative. In a desperate attempt to regain control, it censors and denigrates the truth tellers who threaten these criminals and their control of public opinion. Free Julian Assange now! Phil, a student and WSWS reader who lives in Manchester, said, In this age of information few things are more important than its freedom of access. Those who seek to deny us access to information pave the way for the commission of egregious crimes against humanity and enable our rapid slide into despotism. Julian Assange has risked his life to expose the machinations and crimes perpetrated by societal elites in our democratic name. His courageous and selfless acts now demand we support him in securing his freedom. Janaka, a WSWS reader from Manchester, said, I would like to express my solidarity with the Socialist Equality Partys effort to mobilize the working class to free Julian Assange after being held for more than five years in the city of London. It demonstrates the anti-democratic character of the UK government and its international partners. They are spending millions of taxpayers money to guard the Ecuador embassy 24/7 to make sure they should be able to arrest Julian Assange in case he comes out of the embassy. In my opinion, today anyone who is concerned about or values democratic rights should defend Julian Assange and should support the SEPs effort to free him. Freedom for Julian Assange! * * * Attend the vigil at the Ecuador Embassy in London! Freedom for Julian Assange! Tuesday, June 19, 6-8 p.m. 3 Hans Crescent London, SW1X 0LN (nearest Tube station: Knightsbridge, Piccadilly Line) For further details of the vigil: www.facebook.com/events/584926061906910/ Vigils and demonstrations are being held in many cities around the world today in defence of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, who remains effectively jailed inside Ecuadors London embassy, and in grave danger of being handed over to British and US authorities. As the result of a deepening international campaign for Assanges freedom, rallies are being held in London, outside the Ecuadorian embassy, and globally, from New Zealand and Australia, to Sri Lanka and India, across Europe and in many US cities, including Washington DC. This follows a rally in Sydney on Sunday, organised by the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) (Australia), to demand that the Australian government intervene to protect Assange, an Australian citizen, and guarantee his right to return home and his freedom from being extradited to the US. Assange was granted political asylum by Ecuador six years ago today, on June 19, 2012, to protect him from being extradited to the United States to face lengthy imprisonment, and possibly the death penalty. But the British government has insisted that if he steps outside the embassy, he will be arrested. SEP (UK) assistant national secretary Julie Hyland, who is one of the speakers at todays London embassy vigil, has issued an appeal for workers and youth to attend. She called on them to demand that the British government end its vindictive persecution of Assange and allow him to leave the embassy and, if he chooses, to leave the UK without fear of arrest or interference. Hyland said: The vigils being held across the world in solidarity with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are of immense importance. Today marks exactly six years since Assange was forced to take refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to prevent plans for his extradition to the US to face charges of espionage, which carries the death penalty. He remains trapped in the embassy despite Sweden dropping the trumped-up allegations of sexual assault against him more than one year ago. Yet only in February a British judge stated that Assange faces arrest for breaching bail conditions if he tries to leave the building. This threat was made just one day after the US Justice Department confirmed that it is still seeking his extradition. For almost three months now, Assange has been denied contact with the outside world, save his lawyers. He cannot speak to his family, and is unable to receive visitors, make phone calls or access the Internet. There is the real and imminent danger that this is the prelude to his expulsion from the embassy as part of Ecuadors attempted rapprochement with Washington. Assange is being punished because he is someone all too rare these daysa journalist who tells the truth and courageously exposes the war crimes and corruption of governments, giant corporations and other powerful organisations. Vigils have already taken place today in Melbourne, Australia and in Wellington, New Zealand. Vigils will be held shortly in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, and in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The Sri Lankan protest will be streamed live on Facebook here, and the Indian event here. Speaking at the Melbourne demonstration, SEP (Australia) National Secretary James Cogan said the demonstrations being held around the world had to be a launching pad for a renewed and determined struggle to win Assanges freedom and defend all democratic rights. SEP national secretary James Cogan addressing the Melbourne Vigil in defence of Julian Assange Addressing a crowd of about 75 people outside the British consulate, Cogan condemned successive Australian governments, starting with the Gillard Labor government, for backing the US moves against Assange. Cogan emphasised that the WikiLeaks editors defence could not be based on appeals to the governments, media outlets and other organisations that had abandoned him, but on the independent political mobilisation of the working class. Over the past year, the Trump administration has escalated the threat to Assange because WikiLeaks has continued to expose the computer hacking and cyber warfare operations of the CIA. White House officials have declared it a priority to place Assange on trial on espionage and conspiracy charges for publishing secret documents telling the world the truth about war crimes, regime-change operations and mass surveillance being conducted by the US and its allies internationally. Almost three months ago, Ecuadors government, which is seeking closer relations with Washington, intensified the pressure on Assange. It cut off all his communications with the outside world, and all visits, except from his legal representatives. Yesterday, Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer for Assange, was permitted to make a brief statement to the current UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva. She urged the UN to send a special rapporteur to visit Assange to see the severe impact on his physical and mental health of his confinement inside the embassy for the past six years, denied sunlight or outdoor access. Robinson told the meeting the British authorities had made it clear that if Assange leaves the embassy to seek medical treatment he will be arrested. He cannot leave the embassy because the UK will not provide assurances against extradition to the US, she said. The UK is showing deliberate disregard for his medical needs by asking him to choose between his human right to asylum and his human right to medical treatment. No-one should have to make that choice. Robinson reminded the council that in 2016 the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled that Assange was being arbitrarily detained. The UN agency called on the Swedish and British authorities to end his deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation. Robinson visited Assange on June 7 with representatives from the Australian High Commission in Londonthe first visit by Australian officials in the six years he has been stuck in Ecuadors embassy. But there has been no announcement of any intervention by the government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Robinsons statement and the ongoing official silence make all the more critical and urgent the development of the campaign for Assanges defence. The World Socialist Web Site urges its readers internationally to join todays demonstrations to demand Assanges immediate release from involuntary confinement in London. The International Committee of the Fourth International, the world Trotskyist party, will continue to develop and extend the fight for his freedom, and to mobilise the vast social power of the international working class against the capitalist system in defence of fundamental social and democratic rights. London, UK June 19, 6-8 p.m. Ecuadoroian Embassy, No 3 Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge Speakers will include SEP (UK) Assistant National Secretary Julie Hyland Facebook Page Tamil Nadu, India June 19, 5 p.m. Sriperumbudur Bus Terminal Colombo, Sri Lanka June 19, 4 p.m. Fort Railway Station in central Colombo Los Angeles, California June 19, 2-8 p.m. UK and Australian Consulate, 2029 Century Park East Facebook Page New York, New York June 19, 2-8 p.m. UK Consulate, 845 Third Ave, between 51st and 52nd in Manhattan San Diego, California June 19, 4-7 p.m. Balboa Park by Lily Pond Washington, DC June 19, 11 a.m. Lafayette Park opposite the White House Washington, DC June 19, 2-8 p.m. British Embassy, 3100 Massachusetts Ave, NW Facebook Page More events are listed on this page. This is the first of a two-part series. Last month, the British government reached a deal with Libyan Islamist Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife Fatima Boudchar over its involvement in the couples kidnapping in 2004. The couple were rendered and then tortured at the behest of former ruler Muammar Gaddafi. In 2011, in a dramatic shift in foreign policy, Britain, along with the other NATO powers, went on to use Belhaj, his Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and similar jihadi groups in a military campaign, again in the guise of humanitarian intervention, to engineer Gaddafis overthrow. Hailed as revolutionaries and backed by the NATO powers, these terrorist groups were part of the Western-backed Transitional National Council (TNC) that took power in Libya, capturing, lynching and sodomising Gaddafi. These groups soon fell out, precipitating a civil war that has torn the country apart. The government agreed to pay $650,000 to Boudcharalthough Belhaj refused any compensationwith Prime Minister Theresa May issuing a formal apology. Her carefully worded statement did not admit liability, but was a tacit admission that Britain had colluded with the CIA and the Gaddafi regime in extraordinary rendition and torture. Jack Straw, foreign secretary in Tony Blairs Labour government at the time of the rendition, was forced to backtrack on his former disclaimer of involvement, saying he had approved some information to be shared with international partners over the case but had assumed any connected actions would be lawful. Blair refused to apologise or admit to any knowledge of the affair, saying, I have gone along with what the government has done, which is to issue an apology. I didnt know myself about this case until after I left office, so Im content to go along with that apology. The purpose of the deal was to prevent any further embarrassing disclosures about the governments collusion with Islamist forces at home and abroad, its deal with the Gaddafi regime to round up the UKs former Islamist allies and its subsequent collaboration with the same Islamists to overthrow Gaddafi and to attack the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. A review of the circumstances surrounding the case reveals the sordid nature of British foreign policy in pursuit of its geostrategic and economic interests, including assistance to the US in its global system of abductions and secret prisons in which hundreds were tortured and disappeared. The out-of-court settlement came just days after a court ruling that the government must release papers surrounding the events within two weeks. It follows similar multimillion-pound payoffs to avoid incriminating evidence emerging in court cases involving nine British nationals and residents who were secretly rendered to Guantanamo Bay, as well as other victims of Britains collusion with the CIAs extraordinary rendition program, including the rendition of other Libyan Islamists. Belhajs usefulness to British imperialism Belhaj, who had close relations with Al Qaeda and later the Taliban in Afghanistan, was a founding member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Its aim was to overthrow the Gaddafi regime and establish an Islamic state. Britain gave LIFG and other Libyan dissidents sanctuary in London in the 1990s, where they developed a base of logistical and financial support, and used them to mastermind Gaddafis assassination in an attack that killed or injured several civilians while leaving Gaddafi unhurt. LIFG members were heavily involved in multiple armed conflicts, including in Afghanistan, Algeria and Chechnya. This changed after Blairs infamous deal in the desert with Gaddafi that he said signalled a new relationship. With Libya brought in from the cold, Blair secured oil and gas contracts for Shell and BP worth hundreds of millions of pounds. In return, he provided Gaddafi with military equipment and training for his troops in Britain, supposedly to safeguard Libya against extremist threats. As part of the deal, Belhaj and his wife, along with other Libyan dissidents, were detained, rendered and tortured. Belhaj claimed that during his six years in a Libyan prison he was interrogated by US and British intelligence agents. His pregnant wife said she was chained to a wall for five days, then taped to a stretcher for the 17-hour flight to Libya where she was detained in prison until just before the delivery of her son, who was born weighing just four pounds. He and other Islamists were released from prison in 2010 under a deal with Gaddafi that was brokered by Qatar. In 2005, the Blair government banned LIFG and 14 other militant groups from operating in the UK, with membership of LIFG subject to a 10-year prison term. The groups assets were frozen. The US listed LIFG as a terrorist group until 2015. In 2010, Gaddafi released Belhaj and other LIFG and rival Islamists in a deal brokered by Qatar. In 2011, following the uprisings that overthrew the longstanding Washington-backed dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, the NATO-led invasion of Libya to topple the Gaddafi regime used these Islamist terrorists as its proxies, including Belhajs LIFG. Britains then-Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron played a major role in the NATO intervention, invoking the liberal imperialist Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. A parliamentary report in 2016 exposed the fraudulent basis of the war, criticising Cameron for claiming without evidence that Gaddafi was about to carry out a massacre of genocidal proportions against protesters in Benghazi. It castigated him for pursuing an opportunistic policy of regime change, while telling Parliament in March 2011 that the intervention was not for regime change. Just one month later, Cameron signed a joint letter with the French and US presidents declaring their aim was a future without Gaddafi. Theresa May was home secretary at the time the control orders were lifted, and the security services allowed LIFG members to travel to Libya, providing them with passports and security clearance. They were able to travel freely back and forth with no questions asked, even though many had previously been under counterterrorism control orders. This was because the UN resolution sanctioning the war on the Gaddafi regime specifically excluded ground troops, a restriction Britain later admitted it had covertly overridden. They were provided with $400 million of weaponry by Qatar, approved by Britain, which also helped covertly with their training. Belhajs LIFG and other jihadis joined the National Transitional Council (NTC), which constituted itself as Libyas government, with international backing, and played a significant role in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. The NTC, with the full backing of NATO, held power until August 2012 when the recently elected assembly took over. All this was despite Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, a leading member of LIFG, telling the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore in March 2011 that his fighters had links to Al Qaeda. The LIFG transformed itself into the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change (LIMC), with many of its leaders becoming members of the Tripoli Military Council (TMC). Belhaj became its commander after the rebels took over Tripoli and was appointed chief of security. As LIFGs commander, Belhaj was, said CNN, at the heart of Libyas revolution. Belhaj went on to found the al-Watan Party, which won no seats in the 2012 elections. In 2014, Belhaj and other LIFG members backed Libya Dawn, a coalition of Islamist militias that briefly seized control of Tripoli and proclaimed their own government. Since then he has been living in Turkey where he has, according to the Washington Post, turned his revolutionary connections into vast wealth and influence, commuting regularly between Turkey and Libya where he is involved in the current round-table talks on reconciliation. While he holds no official position in government, militias loyal to him wield power in Tripoli. Last year, Saudi Arabia and three other Arab nations supporting the anti-Islamist factions in Libya, including CIA asset Khalifa Hifter, put him on a list of alleged terrorists backed by Qatar. In 2012, these same Islamist militias were shipped off to take part in the next US-sponsored regime-change operation in Syria, alongside offshoots of Al Qaeda. A recent BBC Panorama program Jihadis You Pay For, revealed that the funding of a multimillion-pound UK foreign aid project was being directed to jihadi opposition groups in Syria. The British government and security forces worked closely with these organisations in Libya and Syria, and then allowed them to return without hesitation, helping to spawn a layer of British-born jihadis who have carried out terrorist attacks in Britain. Last April, the British government admitted in a written reply to an MPs question that it likely had contacts with two Islamist groups, the LIFG and the 17 February Martyrs Brigade, to which the alleged attackers of the 2017 Manchester Arena and the London Bridge/Borough market belonged, and whose families fought for during the 2011 war in Libya. The admission adds to the mounting evidence of how British intelligence and successive governments cultivated terror networks and protected these assets as part of their regime-change operations. To be continued It is now over two months since the Partido Obrero (Workers Party) of Argentina hosted a conference of the Committee to Refound the Fourth International (CRFI) in Buenos Aires in which one of the honored guests was a representative of the United Communist Party of Russia (OKP), Darya Mitina. The World Socialist Web Site published an exposure of the politics of this reconstruction and the history of both Mitinaa rabid Stalinist with intimate ties to the Russian stateand the middleman in arranging her presence in Buenos Aires, Savas Michael-Matsas, head of the Greek EEK (Workers Revolutionary Party). The Partido Obrero has issued no reply to this exposure and has rapidly deleted postings of the article and questions about its contents from the partys Facebook page. There have been no follow-up articles posted on the POs website dealing with the CRFI or any of the groups or individuals who attended it. It is evident that the leadership of the Partido Obrero around Jorge Altamira fears any discussion of the issues raised in the analysis by the WSWS and wants to conceal from the partys membership what they are up to. Altamira and the central leadership have carried out a major political initiative and know exactly what they are doing. The turn to elements like Mitina and Russian Stalinists is part of a broader turn toward developing an alliance with right-wing forces. Anyone who thinks that Mitina is being won to the perspective of Trotskyism through her association with the CRFI and the Partido Obrero is woefully ignorant and naive. As the OKPs secretary of international affairs, Mitina is in the business of forging connections on behalf of the Russian state not just with self-proclaimed socialists and leftists but, with far greater frequency and attention, to far-right and even neo-fascist forces. A case in point is her role in organizing and speaking at a conference convened in the Crimean city of Yalta in August 2014 titled Russia, Novorossiya, Ukraine: Global Problems and Challenges. It was organized by right-wing Russian nationalists, in particular the Izborsky Club, a far-right think tank in which Russian fascists like Alexander Prokhanov and Aleksandr Dugin participate, along with Mitina. Assembled at the Yalta conference was a collection of individuals, enthusiastically described by Mitina in an article lauding the conference: The forum brought together over 200 guests. Politicians, leaders of the resistance in the regions of former Ukraine, field commanders of the army of Novorossiya, representatives of the militia, members of the parliament of Novorossiya, intellectuals and social activists from Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, France, Serbia, Belgium, Latvia, Estonia and international journalists took part in its work. Who were these intellectuals and social activists? A partial list includes: * Frank Creyelman, a former member of the extreme-right Belgian group Vlaams Blok and current member of the extreme-right Vlaams Belang. * Luc Michel, a member of the Belgian neo-Nazi Parti Communautaire National-Europeen. * Marton Gyongyosi of the fascist Jobbik party in Hungary. * Roberto Fiore, leader of the fascist Forza Nuova Italy, who was convicted on conspiracy charges in relation to the 1980 terrorist bombing of the Bologna train station that killed 85 people. * Bartosz Bekier, leader of the fascist Falanga group in Poland. * Nick Griffin, leader of the fascist British National Party (BNP). Also present were members of the far-right Samooborona party in Poland and the far-right Ataka party in Bulgaria. The French National Front was also invited to attend. In her article on this gathering of neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, xenophobes, racists and extreme right-wing nationalists, Mitina wrote that all this could have been an excellent advertisement for the Crimean authorities, if they took a more clear position. Still, it is not every day in the republic that there is such a unique composition of guests. This is the same individual with whom Altamira proposes to refound the Fourth International. As we pointed out in our previous analysis, Mitina boasted of laying flowers at the foot of Stalins grave twice a year. It is also apparent that she enjoys intimate political ties with fascists throughout Europe. Introducing her to the PO membership last April, Altamira described her as a comrade who speaks in the name of the tradition of communism in Russia, which for her would be Stalinism, presenting the attempt to unite with such elements as a far superior method than the sectarian conception of a do it yourself international, i.e., the struggle to build a genuine international party by forging a principled unity based upon a common world program and perspective. The connections between Russian Stalinism and fascism have deep roots. As Leon Trotsky wrote in his monumental analysis of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union, The Revolution Betrayed: [T]he crushing of Soviet democracy by an all-powerful bureaucracy and the extermination of bourgeois democracy by fascism were produced by one and the same cause: the dilatoriness of the world proletariat in solving the problems set for it by history. Stalinism and fascism, in spite of a deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena. In many of their features they show a deadly similarity. Stripped of the social foundations of the nationalized property relations established by the October 1917 revolution and liquidated by the Stalinist bureaucracy with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, this deadly similarity between Russian Stalinism and fascism has become all the more open and direct. Stalinist agents of the Putin regime like Mitina can tailor their politics to suit different audiences, providing slightly more left verbiage in speaking to the PO membership than she would use in addressing a gathering of neo-fascists like the one in Yalta. The essentials, however, are the same: Russian chauvinism, populist denunciations of neo-liberalism and hostility to US hegemony. Such politics have nothing remotely in common with socialism and are far closer to those of fascism and the nationalist extreme right. That the Altamira leadership is making an alliance with elements like Mitina is a warning. The international politics of an organization like the PO are an extension of its national politics. If such relations can be established internationally, they can and will be made in Argentina itself, aligning the PO with thoroughly right-wing forces. Those members of the PO who joined this organization out of a desire to fight for socialism had better start asking some questions: Why was Daria Mitina, a Stalinist and ally of European fascists, invited to a conference to refound the Fourth International and paraded as a comrade before the PO membership? What discussions were held with her? What are the implications of the embrace of Russian Stalinism for the national politics and practice of the PO in Argentina? What role in making this reactionary political alliance was played by the thoroughly dubious leader of the Greek EEK (Workers Revolutionary Party), Savas Michael-Matsas, who hosted Mitina at conferences in Athens in between her meetings with neo-fascists elsewhere in Europe? As we stated in our previous analysis of the Buenos Aires conference, The pretense of refounding the Fourth International in alliance with Stalinism must be taken as a warning to the working class. It represents a bid to forge new political instruments to subordinate the working class to the bourgeoisie precisely at a point where a resurgence of the class struggle is emerging on every continent. The more information that emerges about the POs Russian comrade and refounding partner, the clearer it becomes how right-wing these political instruments will be. The author also recommends: Workers Party in Argentina seeks to refound Fourth International in alliance with Stalinism [7 June 2018] Attendees at the Sydney rally to defend Julian Assange Hundreds of people attended Sundays rally in Sydney, called by the Socialist Equality Party, to demand freedom for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. As the speakers noted, there is a vast gulf between the hostility to WikiLeaks among all of the official parliamentary parties, including Labor, the Liberals, the Greens and their pseudo-left adjuncts, and the support for Assange among ordinary people. Workers and young people who spoke to the WSWS after the protest commented on the relationship between the stepped-up attacks on Assange, and the escalating drive to war, authoritarianism and internet censorship. Jasper, a university student in Sydney, stated: Its very important to organise events like this, when there is little real discourse in the media. The attacks on Assange are criminal. Its horrible to see how Australia doesnt defend one of its citizens and that no other country has, aside from Ecuador. They are going after Assange because he exposes the crimes of our government and shows the influence of power and money on our system today. Jasper The implications of the attacks on Assange are a complete silencing of free speech. The establishment media has been taken over by big business. You would think journalists would hold freedom of speech and freedom of the press as their core values because it applies directly to them. But they dont even defend it, but attack those who do, like Assange. Bruno, a travel consultant, attended the rally with his friend Nathan, a labourer. We had to come and show our support, Bruno said. Its a very important cause, but one that does not receive a lot of attention in the media. Its like theyre trying to stamp down on the issue of Assange. So we need to make people aware of it. If someone asks what I did on the weekend, I can tell them I went to a really interesting rally, and heard thought-provoking points from the speakers. Governments are carrying out what George Orwell warned about in his book 1984. They are bringing in all sorts of anti-democratic laws and trying to silence people. Ive never trusted the government. Whether it is formed by Labor or the Liberals it always represents self-serving interests. It doesnt matter whether the person at the front has a red or a blue tie. Their ideology is still going against every democratic principle that there is. Nathan and Bruno Nathan commented: Coming here was a good step up from just looking at posts and news on Facebook. It brings a different meaning to the cause, actually being here on foot. Its such an imperative cause trying to protect people like Assange because he tells you the things that the government is not going to tell you. He is trying to liberate peoples ability to seek information for themselves. Freedom of thought and expression is what this kind of rally brings. Theyre trying to make an example out of Assange to silence all of us. Leila, a retired high school teacher, said: I heard about Julian Assange's dilemma a long time ago. We have always been supporters of his quest. He is a true journalist. What they are trying to do is shoot the messenger who brings the truth. This is what they are doing in persecuting Julian Assange. He should be revered, not judged and persecuted. Umar and Leila Leilas friend Umar, a graphic designer, commented: Governments want people to feel that they are infallible and that there is nothing they can do that is wrong. But Assange has shown the opposite: that governments dont answer to the people, that they lie and that they are trying to maintain their power through repression and the perpetuation of wars everywhere. They are denouncing China and Russia and other nations by the government and the media. It is aimed at telling people that they are our enemy. Governments always want people to believe that there is someone to fear, an enemy out there. It is so people dont ask the government Why havent we got work? and other issues at home. They want people to be distracted. Daniel Daniel, a 19-year-old design student, said: Ive been a supporter of WikiLeaks since I was about 15-years-old. Ive followed all the cables and emails that theyve published. Assange has so much power just by exposing to the world how badly governments are acting. I thought I needed to come and show my support for him. More people need to stand up for his freedom. Assange and Edward Snowden represent the last real big supporters of our freedoms. Im a real supporter of internet privacy. I watched a movie about Edward Snowdens revelations and I was shocked by how big it is. The government doesnt deserve all of our information. All of the advertising and tracking online by the major companies is just wrong. Google reads our emails. They have total control over our information and now they have artificial intelligence that they are using to track what we are reading and doing online. I bet you could walk into Googles headquarters, type in someones name and they would know everything about you. Ehad with his son Ehad, originally from Egypt, is a worker who lives in Sydneys western suburbs. He said he has been following Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for a long time, about ten years. It is a really sad story. I believe the Australian government should do one of two things. It should free Assange from his persecution or stop claiming to be a representive democracy. It is really unfair. The Australian government is playing a key role in persecuting him. The government has done nothing to assist him and Labor is the same. Edgar Edgar, a retired engineer, stated: Julian Assange is the person and Wikileaks is the organisation who are telling the people the truth about these powerful people and governments. They are exposing all of their plots, their crimes, their vicious intentions. Wikileaks is showing us maybe for the first time, how the powerful people talk among themselves and how they communicate when they think that nobody is listening. You probably wouldnt imagine that there are people you consider to be in responsible positions who think this anti-democratic way. But they are there, and they are a terrible danger for humanity. Scott, a professor who attended the protest, commented: John Pilger, speaking at the rally, condemned the complicit silence, and worse, the parroting of propaganda by Vichy journalistsincluding reprehensible examples at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Guardian. In my own profession, there are Vichy academics. Why the inattention to the state crime plotted and committed against Assange in retribution for his exposure via Wikileaks of war crimes, torture, extrajudicial killings, unlawful eavesdropping on a national industrial scale, and all the rest? For instance, a conference of supposedly critical scholars in Oslo in 2013 saw fit rightly to pass a resolution condemning the treatment at the time of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and yet accepted a veto via catcalls of an addendum in defence of Assangeso convinced were naive Swedish feminists by the fitting up of Assange as a rapist. There was no excuse for the naivete. The same conference had already heard an account of Swedish complicity with a US state crime in handing over two innocent Egyptian citizens to the CIA for rendition and torture. It is high time that public intellectuals in Australia, Britain, and the rest of the west stood up for Julian Assange, as they have for Manning and Snowden, and cut through the propaganda war waged to discredit him and Wikileaks. On Saturday, World Socialist Web Site reporters spoke with students and workers in Iowa City, Iowa, about the persecution of WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange. The city is the home of the states oldest university, the University of Iowa. There was widespread support for Assange and the role he has played in exposing the crimes of American imperialism. A lot of the things that have been said about Assange have not been true, said Cali, who is 26 and works at an assisted-living facility in Muscatine, Iowa, along the Mississippi River. And its not fair. Its not right. Cali Assange has been persecuted for doing the work of a genuine journalist, she explained, I think its because hes been so vocal. He put himself out there. And thats what happens to people who do that. The media and government want to keep us silent. And he wasnt. Cali said she appreciated the information Wikileaks had revealed about government surveillance, such as the Vault 7 documents showing the CIAs tools used to spy on a multitude of consumer electronic devices. She said, Being in my generation, I do think about, Oh, is my iPhone recording me right now? Is what Im watching on TV right now going to be put in some database? You cant live like that. Patrick Patrick, who plans to study history at the University of Iowa in the fall, said he disagreed with the claims that Wikileaks and Assange broke the law by revealing evidence of war crimes and government surveillance. I think at the very least what Assange did, to give the public a greater awareness of whats going on, like with our information and how the governments filtering through that, I think that was something that needed to happen. It wasnt a criminal action like the government portrays it to be. Its something that should be out there. Referring to the propaganda used to justify war and attacks on democratic rights, he continued, They claim to be in the interests of the American people, but a lot of everyday people either dont care or dont want to be a part of those issues that the higher-ups of the government feel the need to get their hands on and manipulate. Money was being squandered on war, he added, and for things that are really not in the publics best interest when talking about where that money could be going instead, to places like education and things like that. Melissa Melissa, who works at the University of Iowa and is a student at a local community college, said she opposed the persecution of Assange because its oppressive to torture people who are trying to expose government corruption. You just see throughout history that thats never an okay thing to do. Obviously we need to know if our government is invading our privacy or going against our rights. So, I think its good that Assange is doing these things. Randall, a former high school history teacher from Wisconsin, denounced the attacks on Assange. Referring to the torture of Chelsea Manningthe US Army whistleblower who revealed evidence of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistanby the Obama administration, he said, They were monsters. That was the crime, what was done to her. What she presented was what was of interest, not a crime. And that was the right thing. How would we know otherwise? How is that different from the Pentagon Papers, or any of that? Randall also praised the rebellion by teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and elsewhere, and spoke about the growing anger over social inequality he had seen. Were reaching a tipping point. Ive traveled a lot of places and worked a lot of terrible jobs and in hard situations. There are a lot of angry poor people. And as soon as they figure out whos whipping them, somethings going to bust. Theres going to be a revolution. Hannah and Braxton Braxton, a young restaurant worker in Iowa City, spoke out against the attacks on Assange. He said, Julian Assange showed how deceitful our government can be. Weve been totally blindsided by a lot of things. A lot of things were kept hidden from us, which he helped report. He agreed that the reason Assange was being persecuted was because he exposed the war crimes of the ruling class, and the super-rich. Reporters from the WSWS explained that an anti-war, socialist movement in the working class was necessary to defend Assange. Theres no difference between a Democrat and a Republican, Braxton said. I dont think they stand for us. The money supports them. Hannah chimed in, agreeing that the defense of Julian Assange was bound up with the fight for socialism and social equality. She noted sarcastically, But we cant have that because they wont be on top anymore. I think its very important we have an equal society, but its hard to fight for equality when we are kept at the bottom. I also think education should be free and affordable. Thousands have taken to Italys streets over the last week to protest against the June 10 decision by Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right Lega, to close all ports to non-governmental organization (NGO) ships saving refugees stranded in the Mediterranean, putting at risk the lives of hundreds aboard the rescue ship Aquarius. The inhumane decree was also signed by Five Star Movement Transport Minister Danielo Toninelli. Although the Aquarius reached the Spanish port of Valencia on Sunday after a seven-day odyssey, the situation in the Mediterranean has continued to worsen. Italy has now refused entry to its ports for another two ships, the Lifeline and Sea Fox, two German ships sailing under Dutch flags which have been rescuing migrants off the Libyan coast. The order is obviously specifically directed against civilian emergency rescuers, since on June 12, the Italian Coastguard brought over 900 refugees and two bodies into the Sicilian port of Catania. Forty-one refugees and 12 bodies rescued from the sea near Libya by the US military vessel Trenton were also allowed to go ashore on June 15 at Lampedusa. By contrast, NGO rescue ships have been consistently turned away and boycotted, even though the mayors of Reggio Calabria, Messina and Palermo declared their readiness to allow the ships to dock. Salvini declared on Facebook that Italy would no longer be an accomplice in the illegal refugee business. He accused the NGOs of collaborating with smugglers. These accusations are breathtaking in their cynicism and conjured up out of thin air. In reality, the refugees are not boarding small dinghy boats because the presence of rescue ships is an attractive pull factor for them, as German media outlets also falsely claim, but because they are trying to escape Libyas torture camps. They risk the crossing knowing full well that they could drown on the way, but believe that anything is better than being raped, tortured and beaten to death in Libya. The unspeakable tragedy playing out in the Mediterranean will only be made worse by the new restrictions on rescue ships. Responding to Salvini, Sea-Watch president Johannes Bayer reminded him that the refugees rescued by NGO ships have already endured horrific conditions on the boats. They are often completely emaciated when they board a smuggling ship. Their health often worsens while they are at sea, meaning they have to be brought to a safe port as soon as possible, he noted. The fact that people who have literally been pulled from the water and had to watch as their friends drowned are not being given a safe port is unacceptable and a devastating indictment of the European Unions refugee policy. The virtual declaration of war by the Italian government against refugees and civilian emergency rescue workers has triggered passionate protests in Italy. The Five Star Movement (M5S)-Lega government has only been in power for a few days and protests are already taking place daily against its right-wing policies. Just hours after the decree from Salvini and Toninelli on June 10, protests took place in the Sicilian cities of Catania and Palermo. Open the ports! shouted thousands of Palermo residents, who organised a sit-in at the port late into the night. Borders kill, read their main banner. One slogan declared, Hands off the NGOssave the people! With calls of Vergogna! (Shame!) thousands of residents gathered in the capital, Rome, for a demonstration on the following Monday. Police initially tried to stop the protest march and prolonged clashes broke out. But they ultimately allowed the demonstration to proceed. On Tuesday, June 12, demonstrations took place in Milan, Turin, Rome, Genoa, Savona, and Catania. In Milan, over 5,000 people took part in a march and rally in front of La Scala. The handmade placards included slogans such as Open the ports! People first and No person is illegal. Many young people, especially young women, and retirees took part in the protests. Referring to the conditions in Libya, an elderly woman told a reporter, You read about slavery in the history of the 17th and 18th centuries, now its happening all over again. A reporting team asked residents in Catania who stood at the side of the street watching the protest what their opinions were. Most expressed their sympathy with the young demonstrators, with one retiree declaring, I think the ports have to stay open. This is a war against the poor. Everything is being blamed on the migrants. Throughout the rest of the week, protests and meetings took place in several cities, including Bergamo, Como, Parma and Rimini. In every city, people met in the centre after finishing work, with many bringing handmade placards reading, Open the ports! In Bergamo, a group of women carried a placard stating, The cause of this is the warsbe angry! This was a reference to the imperialist wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria, which have laid waste to entire societies. The majority of refugees come from these countries. And at the very moment protests are spreading across Italy, the war against the people of Yemen is expanding. The siege of Hodaidah is assuming the dimensions of a genocidal assault, with the Western media taking little notice of it. The protests in Italy were not organised by any political party and politicians generally stayed away. The slogans were not only directed against the current M5S-Lega coalition, but against previous Democratic Party (PD)-led governments under Matteo Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni. In Bergamo, for example, the crowd chanted, Mittini and Salviniboth assassini (murderers), making a direct comparison between former PD Interior Minister Marco Mittini and the Legas Salvini. During his time in office, Mittini negotiated a despicable deal with the Libyan coastguard. Along with the growing port protests a rally on Saturday was organised by the USB (Unione Sindacala di Base) trade union for the murdered agricultural labourer Soumaila Sacko. The 29-year-old Malian campaigned in Calabria for the rights of African day labourers and was murdered in cold blood on June 2with a farmer linked to the Mafia being accused of the killing. The first trade union-organised demonstration since the change of government turned out to be much larger than expected. Hundreds of young people and immigrants joined in, and organisers estimated the total participating at over 20,000. While protests and rallies are breaking out across Italy, and large sections of the Italian population are displaying their anger and readiness to fight the new governments racist policies, the response of top European politicians has been entirely different. In essence, they agree with Salvinis inhumane policies. German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (Christian Social Union, CSU) offered Salvini his support. At a meeting with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (Austrian Peoples Party, OVP) on Wednesday, Seehofer stated he would collaborate with Kurz and Salvini on the issues of security, terrorism and migration. Kurz demagogically called for an axis of the willing to deal with illegal migration. Kurz governs with the far-right Freedom Party and will assume the EU Council presidency for six months on July 1. Salvinis racist policy initially appeared to draw criticism from France where President Emmanuel Macron criticised Italys cynicism and irresponsibility and praised Spanish Prime Minister Sanchez, who allowed the Aquarius to dock in Valencia. Italian Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero Milanesi subsequently called the French ambassador to the Italian Foreign Ministry on Thursday. Less than a day later, Macron made sure that any disagreements were ironed out. He met with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Friday for a working dinner and both came to the conclusion that the European Union has to create more European controlled centres in the countries of origin. In the event of a sea rescue, the ships would then have to bring those rescued back to Africa. This is the same policy as German Chancellor Angela Merkel: with German support, a huge migration centre described by Merkel as a light of hope opened in Tunis last year. But hope for whom? It is the hope of the European politicians to be able to outsource the refugee problem to North Africa. The reality is that the far-right determines the European Unions refugee policy. Europe is being sealed off with military equipment. Frontex is being strengthened on the EUs borders, while the member states focus increasingly on interning and deporting refugees. The Socialist Equality Party of Australia held a rally on Sunday, June 17 in Sydney's Town Hall Square to demand the freedom of Julian Assange. The rally was attended by several hundred people who supported the demand that the Australian government act to secure the right of Assange, an Australian citizen, to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London and return to Australia with guarantees that he not be arrested or extradited to the United States. Below is the speech given to the rally by SEP National Secretary James Cogan. Todays rally is part of an international struggle to secure the freedom of Julian Assange, to defend WikiLeaks, and to fight against all forms of censorship and attacks on an independent and critical media. It is a crucial struggle for the working class, because it is part of the greater struggle for all the social and democratic rights of the vast mass of humanity. A powerful mass movement of workers is developing on a world scale. After decades in which the working class has been suppressed by the treachery of its old labour and union organisations and subjected to an endless assault by the corporate oligarchy, it is coming forward. James Cogan's speech to the SEP rally in defence of Julian Assange. [Video by Cathy Vogan and Liam Kesteven (www.facebook.com/liam.kesteven) for Politics in the Pub (www.politicsinthepub.org.au)] Powerful waves of strike action and political opposition are taking place: for decent wages, health care, education and a healthy and safe environment, in the US, Europe, India, China and internationally. Workers and youth are also becoming increasingly aware of, and concerned about, the danger of war, in these times when the American president speaks casually of using nuclear weapons and totally destroying entire countries. One cannot understand the determination of the American ruling elite to silence WikiLeaks and Assange without an understanding of its fear of the working class. The capitalist ruling classes and their representatives in the US and internationally are terrified of the power that the Internet provides to the working class, to ordinary people. It gives them access to alternative analysis and news; the ability to exchange information and opinions; and to politically organise across national borders: to unite together as an international force. Julian Assange explained this well in the statement he sent to our publication, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), endorsing the online forum the WSWS held on January 16, 2018 to oppose Internet censorship. Julian wrote: While the Internet has brought about a revolution in peoples ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomenon has shaken existing establishments to their core. Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to re-establish discourse control. The ruling class is seeking to re-establish its control over the political discourse by trying to destroy the hard-won democratic rights of the working class, impose censorship and control over the Internet, and silence and suppress oppositional voices. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are one of the principal oppositional voices. He is being persecuted by the US, British and Australian governments because they are hostile to everything WikiLeaks represents. From its establishment in 2006, the mission of WikiLeaks was to provide whistleblowers, who had knowledge of criminal conduct by governments, state agencies or corporations, with a secure and anonymous means to leak that information. WikiLeaks guaranteed that leaks would be published without vetting and, through the power of the Internet, made available to the entire world. In 2010, WikiLeaks was entrusted, by a courageous whistleblower in the US military, to let the world know the full extent of the crimes being committed by US imperialism against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. Tens of millions watched in horror and outrage the Collateral Murder video published by WikiLeaks, which showed a US helicopter gunship massacring unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. WikiLeaks was further entrusted to publish hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables, which reveal how American diplomats around the world are engaged in sordid, anti-democratic intrigues to assert both US strategic interests and the profit interests of US-based corporations. Chelsea Manning, formerly Private Bradley Manning, spent close to seven years of her life in a prison cell for these courageous leaks. In Australia, we learnt from the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks that an entire cabal within the Australian Labor Party government consisted of what the US embassy classifies as its protected sourcesthe people who keep Washington informed and do Washingtons bidding. The people identified as US operatives in the diplomatic cables were those who played the key factional role in ousting Kevin Rudd as prime minister, including current Labor leader Bill Shorten. The Obama administration wanted Rudd out, because he was not sufficiently supportive of Americas militarist stance toward China. Rudds replacement, Julia Gillard, had no hesitation about lining up with Washington. We can now look back on the momentous events of 2010 with the benefit of hindsight. It is now clear why the Labor government headed by Julia Gillard denounced the publication of the US military and diplomatic leaks by WikiLeaks as illegal activity. It is clear why Labor declared that it would assist Washington to prosecute Julian Assange. The Labor government was in the process of aligning Australia fully with US plans for an economic and military offensive to try and prevent China from emerging as a challenge to Americanand Australianstrategic and corporate dominance and influence in the Asia-Pacific region. Labor, no less than Obamas administration, was hostile to the existence of a media organisation that was fearlessly prepared to publish leaked information that exposed the military and diplomatic conspiracies and intrigues of the ruling elite, and the underlying criminal and predatory nature of the US-Australia military alliance. In November 2011, behind the backs of the population, Gillard committed the country to the US pivot to Asia, the stationing of US marines in Darwin and increased operations by US aircraft and ships from Australian bases. Her government set in motion a massive Australian military build-up, with tens of billions to be spent on jet fighters, submarines and other war-fighting assets. That is why Australian officials did nothing to assist Assange fight against manufactured allegations of sexual assault and the warrant to extradite him to Sweden, from where he could have been rapidly extradited on to the United States. Julian Assange was forced to seek political asylum with Ecuador on June 19, 2012 because he was thrown to the wolves by the Labor Party government in the country where he was born and holds citizenship. The Coalition government that replaced Labor in 2013 has continued and expanded Canberras alignment with the US. And that is why it too has supported the ongoing persecution of Assange and WikiLeaks. The Coalition refused to so much as issue a protest to Britain when the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled that Assanges confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London was a deprivation of liberty and violation of his human rights. Foreign minister Julie Bishop instead signed a document that declared Australia was unable to intervene in the due process of another countrys court proceedings or legal matters, and we have full confidence in the UK and Swedish judicial system. This was a lie. The Australian government had and still has undeniable diplomatic power and legal discretion, under international and national law, to intervene to defend an Australian citizen who is being unjustly treated by another state. In the case of Julian Assange, the issue is that the Australian government has refused to exercise that power and legal discretion. It is instead supporting Washingtons vendetta to have Assange hauled to the United States and put on a show trial on charges of espionage. At this rally, we are not asking the Turnbull government to act. We are telling it. We hold the Labor Party and the Coalition parties fully responsible for the harm and outrages committed against Julian Assange. We will hold them responsible for what happens next. They will be held to account by the working class in Australia. By making an example of Julian Assange, the aim of the Trump administration, the Democratic Party, the CIA, the FBI, and the whole American state apparatus, is to terrorise all journalists and whistleblowers into remaining silent on the crimes of the US ruling class and its allies. But it is not just the Coalition government and the Labor Party that have lined up with the US government, with the Trump administration, against Julian Assange. As the danger of a military confrontation between the US and its allies with China has grown ever more serious, virtually the entire political and media establishment in Australia has fallen into line with the drive to war. There is no criticism of the US-Australia military alliance. No criticism of the fact that Pine Gap is the base that provides the targeting information for US nuclear and cruise missiles. No criticism of the fact that Australian intelligence is part of the Five Eyes network that spies on the communications of hundreds of millions of people every day and identifies the targets for provocations and even assassinations. And there is no criticism of the open discussion in US and Australian strategic circles that they are preparing for a war with Chinaa war that could escalate into an exchange of nuclear weapons. Instead, there is total silence, from the media, from the trade unions, from the Greens, from so-called independents such as Andrew Wilkie, and from various organisations that still call themselves socialist and left-wing. It is therefore no surprise that, as they line up behind the US-Australia war preparations against China, they are also silent on the fate of Julian Assange. To defend Assange and WikiLeaks means to oppose Canberras relations with the US state. Today, within the Australian parliament and media, opposing the US alliance is regarded as tantamount to treason. While it is silent on the situation facing Assange, the Australian political and media establishment is waging a nationalist and xenophobic witch-hunt against purported Chinese interference and Chinese influence. This witch-hunt is nothing more than the ideological and now legal preparation for the criminalisation and suppression of anti-war opposition and the establishment of a police-state. The WSWS and SEP have stressed from the beginning that a movement to defend Julian Assange cannot be built by appeals to the political, trade union and media establishment that has abandoned him. It will be built by a fight to politically educate and independently mobilise the working class. What must be explained to workers and young people is that the attack on Assange and WikiLeaks is an attack on them. The persecution of Assange is a sharp expression of the campaign to censor and silence all opposition to social inequality, repression, and the militarist policies of the imperialist states. The international fight to defend democratic rights and defeat Internet censorship, and defend Assange and WikiLeaks, is inseparable from the struggle to unite the working class internationally to prevent the danger of war. Over the past three weeks, as we have promoted this rally and the vigils that are taking place on June 19, we have revealed the extent of the support for Assange and WikiLeaks that exists in the working class in Australia and internationally. The establishment has abandoned him. Millions of ordinary people have not. What governments and political parties do now, at a time when Assange faces immense danger, is not going to be forgotten. We must develop the widest discussion on the situation that faces Julian Assange in the working class, in the workplaces and factories, at the universities, TAFEs and high schools. We must answer the slanders and lies that are being told about him to try and prevent a campaign for his freedom. Julian Assange must be free to unconditionally return to Australia now if he chooses to do so, and WikiLeaks must be able to continue unhindered by state persecution. The Socialist Equality Party is committed to that cause. Below is the speech delivered by the well known journalist and documentarian John Pilger to the rally to free Julian Assange held by the Socialist Equality Party of Australia on Sunday, June 17 in Sydney's Town Hall Center. Thank you for coming for Julian and thank you to the SEP for organizing this very important rally. The persecution of Julian Assange must end. Or it will end in tragedy. The Australian government and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull have an historic opportunity to decide which it will be. They can remain silent, for which history will be unforgiving. Or they can act in the interests of justice and humanity and bring this remarkable Australian citizen home. John Pilger's speech to the SEP rally in defence of Julian Assange. [Video by Cathy Vogan and Liam Kesteven (www.facebook.com/liam.kesteven) for Politics in the Pub (www.politicsinthepub.org.au)] Assange does not ask for special treatment. The government has clear diplomatic and moral obligations to protect Australian citizens abroad from gross injustice: in Julian's case, from a gross miscarriage of justice and the extreme danger that awaits him should he walk out of the Ecuadorean embassy in London unprotected. We know from the Chelsea Manning case what he can expect if a US extradition warrant is successfula United Nations Special Rapporteur called it torture. I know Julian Assange well; I regard him as a close friend, a person of extraordinary resilience and courage. I have watched a tsunami of lies and smear engulf him, endlessly, vindictively, perfidiously; and I know why they smear him. In 2008, a plan to destroy both WikiLeaks and Assange was laid out in a top secret document dated 8 March, 2008. The authors were the Cyber Counter-intelligence Assessments Branch of the US Defence Department. They described in detail how important it was to destroy the feeling of trust that is WikiLeaks centre of gravity. This would be achieved, they wrote, with threats of exposure [and] criminal prosecution and an unrelenting assault on reputation. The aim was to silence and criminalise WikiLeaks and its editor and publisher. It was as if they planned a war on a single human being and on the very principle of freedom of speech. Their main weapon would be personal smear. Their shock troops would be enlisted in the mediathose who are meant to keep the record straight and tell us the truth. The irony is that no one told these journalists what to do. I call them Vichy journalistsafter the Vichy government that served and enabled the German occupation of wartime France. Last October, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Sarah Ferguson interviewed Hillary Clinton, over whom she fawned as the icon for your generation. This was the same Clinton who threatened to obliterate totally Iran and who, as US secretary of state in 2011, was one of the instigators of the invasion and destruction of Libya as a modern state, with the loss of 40,000 lives. Like the invasion of Iraq, it was based on lies. When the Libyan president was murdered publicly and gruesomely with a knife, Clinton was filmed whooping and cheering. Thanks largely to her, Libya became a breeding ground for ISIS and other jihadists. Thanks largely to her, tens of thousands of refugees fled in peril across the Mediterranean, and many drowned. Leaked emails published by WikiLeaks revealed that Hillary Clinton's foundationwhich she shares with her husbandreceived millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the main backers of ISIS and terrorism across the Middle East. As secretary of state, Clinton approved the biggest arms sale everworth $80 billion to Saudi Arabia, one of her foundation's principal benefactors. Today, Saudi Arabia is using these weapons to crush starving and stricken people in a genocidal assault on Yemen. Sarah Ferguson, a highly paid reporter, raised not a word of this with Hillary Clinton sitting in front of her. Instead, she invited Clinton to describe the damage Julian Assange did personally to you. In response, Clinton defamed Assange, an Australian citizen, as very clearly a tool of Russian intelligence and a nihilistic opportunist who does the bidding of a dictator. She offered no evidencenor was asked for anyto back her grave allegations. At no time was Assange offered the right of reply to this shocking interview, which Australia's publicly-funded state broadcaster had a duty to give him. As if that wasnt enough, Fergusons executive producer, Sally Neighour, followed the interview with a vicious re-tweet: Assange is Putin's bitch. We all know it! There are many other examples of Vichy journalism. The Guardian, reputedly once a great liberal newspaper, conducted a vendetta against Julian Assange. Like a spurned lover, the Guardian aimed its personal, petty, inhuman and craven attacks at a man whose work it once published and profited from. The former editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, called the WikiLeaks disclosures, which his newspaper published in 2010, one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years. Awards were lavished and celebrated as if Julian Assange did not exist. WikiLeaks revelations became part of the Guardians marketing plan to raise the papers cover price. They made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks and Assange struggled to survive. With not a penny going to WikiLeaks, a hyped Guardian book led to a lucrative Hollywood movie deal. The books authors, Luke Harding and David Leigh, gratuitously abused Assange as a damaged personality and callous. They also revealed the secret password Julian had given the Guardian in confidence, and which was designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables. With Assange now trapped in the Ecuadorean embassy, Harding, who had enriched himself on the backs of both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, stood among the police outside the embassy and gloated on his blog that Scotland Yard may get the last laugh. The question is why? Julian Assange has committed no crime. He has never been charged with a crime. The Swedish episode was bogus and farcical and he has been vindicated. Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape summed it up when they wrote, The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction... The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. This truth was lost or buried in a media witch-hunt that disgracefully associated Assange with rape and misogyny. The witch-hunt included voices who described themselves as on the left and as feminist. They willfully ignored the evidence of extreme danger should Assange be extradited to the United States. According to a document released by Edward Snowden, Assange is on a Manhunt target list. One leaked official memo says: Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. He'll be eating cat food forever. In Alexandra, Virginiathe suburban home of Americas war-making elitea secret Grand Jury, a throwback to the Middle Ageshas spent seven years trying to concoct a crime for which Assange can be prosecuted. This is not easy; the US Constitution protects publishers, journalists and whistleblowers. Assanges crime is to have broken a silence. No investigative journalism in my lifetime can equal the importance of what WikiLeaks has done in calling rapacious power to account. It is as if a one-way moral screen has been pushed back to expose the imperialism of liberal democracies: the commitment to endless warfare and the division and degradation of unworthy lives: from Grenfell Tower to Gaza. When Harold Pinter accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, he referred to a vast tapestry of lies up on which we feed. He asked why the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of the Soviet Union were well known in the West, while Americas imperial crimes never happened ... even while [they] were happening, they never happened. In its revelations of fraudulent wars (Afghanistan, Iraq) and the bald-faced lies of governments (the Chagos Islands), WikiLeaks has allowed us to glimpse how the imperial game is played in the 21st century. That is why Assange is in mortal danger. Seven years ago, in Sydney, I arranged to meet a prominent Liberal Member of the Federal Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull. I wanted to ask him to deliver a letter from Gareth Peirce, Assanges lawyer, to the government. We talked about his famous victoryin the 1980s when, as a young barrister, he had fought the British Governments attempts to suppress free speech and prevent the publication of the book Spycatcherin its way, a WikiLeaks of the time, for it revealed the crimes of state power. The prime minister of Australia was then Julia Gillard, a Labor Party politician who had declared WikiLeaks illegal and wanted to cancel Assanges passportuntil she was told she could not do this: that Assange had committed no crime: that WikiLeaks was a publisher, whose work was protected under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Australia was one of the original signatories. In abandoning Assange, an Australian citizen, and colluding in his persecution, prime ,inister Gillards outrageous behaviour forced the issue of his recognition, under international law, as a political refugee whose life was at risk. Ecuador invoked the 1951 Convention and granted Assange refuge in its embassy in London. Gillard has recently been appearing in a gig with Hillary Clinton; they are billed as pioneering feminists. If there is anything to remember Gillard by, it is a warmongering, sycophantic, embarrassing speech she made to the US Congress soon after she demanded the illegal cancellation of Julians passport. Malcolm Turnbull is now the prime minister of Australia. Julian Assanges father has written to Turnbull. It is a moving letter, in which he has appealed to the prime minister to bring his son home. He refers to the real possibility of a tragedy. I have watched Assanges health deteriorate in his years of confinement without sunlight. He has had a relentless cough, but is not even allowed safe passage to and from a hospital for an X-ray. Malcolm Turnbull can remain silent. Or he can seize this opportunity and use his governments diplomatic influence to defend the life of an Australian citizen, whose courageous public service is recognised by countless people across the world. He can bring Julian Assange home. This is an abridged version of an address by John Pilger to a rally in Sydney, Australia, to mark Julian Assanges six years confinement in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Malcolm Turnbulls Liberal-National government is continuing its punitive and inhuman treatment of refugees by refusing to provide a 63-year-old dying man with the palliative care he requires. Ali, an Afghan refugee, is dying from lung cancer in one of Australias offshore prison camps, located on the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru. The Australian Border Force (ABF) told Ali he would not be moved to Australia. It claimed that Ali had refused treatment because he declined an offer to be transferred to Taiwan to receive care. Ali told ABF he did not want to go because it is most likely there will be no translator for his language, Hazaraghi, and no one who could perform the Shia Muslim rituals before he died. The ABF also offered Ali $25,000 to return to Afghanistan, where his wife and children live. However, he is a member of the historically persecuted Hazara ethnic minority. Hazaras have been the target of killings and assaults by the government and Sunni extremist groups, such as the Taliban. Ali is currently imprisoned in the RPC 1 camp on Nauru, which cannot provide him with the necessary palliative care. Doctors on the island described the camp as dangerously inadequate, saying his prognosis is dire and his life expectancy is a matter of months. Members of the Hazara community on Nauru condemned the denial of Alis request for transfer to Australia. They told the Australian media he is very angry, he is very upset as well. He said these people do not have a human heart. Australias government is condemning Ali to an excruciating death. Dr Barri Phatarfod, speaking for Doctors for Refugees, said: In Australia, we have well-defined palliative care standards [and the ability to] deliver powerful analgesia to offset the agonising pain of cancer ... none of these are available in Nauru. Sources inside the detention centre reported that executive-level Department of Home Affairs officials decide on requests for medical transfers. When asked to comment, department officials said medical transfers are determined on a case-by-case basis. Already, two deaths in the detention camps on Nauru and Papua New Guineas Manus Island have been directly linked to the denial of medical transfers. Faysal Ishak Ahmed, a 27-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan, died in December 2016 after suffering a seizure and Hamid Kehazaei, an Iranian refugee, died in September 2014 from a treatable virus. Australias bipartisan border protection regime, maintained by Liberal-National and Labor governments alike, involves militarily turning back or forcibly imprisoning all asylum seekers who try to reach Australia by boat. Like the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy of ripping refugee children away from their parents and imprisoning them in separate tent camps, the denial of medical treatment is a deliberate measure to punish and deter people from fleeing persecution and oppression. This is coupled with a lack of health care facilities to treat a number of medical issues, including childbirth and endemic mental health problems. The conditions in Australias prison camps are so severe that detainees, including young children, are driven to harming themselves, and numbers have committed suicide. In 2016, a leading doctor who worked at the camps likened the conditions to torture. There have been at least 12 preventable deaths since the Greens-backed Labor Party government reopened the offshore detention centres in 2012. The latest victim is Fariborz K, a 26-year-old Iranian man whose body was found by his wife last Friday on Nauru. He was only recently married, and his wife and mother have been hospitalised after the incident. His 12-year-old brother has been taken into care by the camp authorities. In April, Fariborzs young brother made a video issuing a public plea for assistance. I feel helpless because there is no one to help us, he said. There is no one to see how we are suffering. My mother is very sick and my brother is totally depressed. The International Health and Medical Service, which operates the medical facilities in the camp, assessed Fariborz on April 24 as being severely traumatised due to being held captive as a 10-year-old child in Iran. Fariboz and his family have been imprisoned for more than five years on Nauru, with no options for transfer to another country. There is mounting evidence that a US-Australia refugee swap deal is deliberately excluding anyone from Iran, Somalia or other countries on the Trump administrations travel ban list. The swap deal involves heavily-vetted refugees being transferred to the US, in exchange for an undisclosed number of Central American asylum seekers. This agreement is itself reactionary, consigning refugees to opposite sides of the world, denied the right to reunite with their families. However, the agreement did offer detainees some glimmer of hope to escape their horrible conditions. For Fariboz and his family, even this limited option was not available. Faribozs death came just weeks after a Rohingya man died in an apparent suicide on Manus Island. He jumped from the window of a moving bus travelling at 60 kilometres an hour. Starting with the Labor governments mandatory detention of refugees in 1992, successive Australian governments have pioneered many of the brutal measures now being taken in Europe and the US. In 2017, US President Donald Trump praised the Australian model as the standard for the treatment of refugees and immigrants worldwide. The Australian model combines cruelty toward refugees with a points-based immigration program that discriminates in favour of wealthy applicants and those whose labour power can be most readily exploited by Australian-based employers. More than 400 workers at the Washington Post released an open letter Thursday beseeching the newspapers owner and worlds richest man, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos (net worth $140 billion), to intervene on their behalf in protracted contract negotiations. Management has been intransigent in its demands for a series of concessions, refusing to negotiate on requests for better benefits, job security, and cost of living increases made by its staff. The letters signatories are primarily employed on the business and editorial side of the company, including sales, marketing, administrative personnel, and lower-level editorial staff. The Washington Post Newspaper Guild, representing 880 business and editorial staff and affiliated with the Writers Guild of America, has been engaged in negotiations that have dragged on for more than a year without any progress. Workers at the Washington Post, which has long been considered one of the United States political papers of record, are demanding higher employer contributions to the 401(k) defined-contribution pension scheme, better pay, and stronger protections against layoffs and cutbacks. All we are asking for is fairness for each and every employee who contributed to this companys success: fair wages; fair benefits for retirement, family leave, and health care; and a fair amount of job security, the letter states. These relatively minor requests have been met with unyielding hostility on the part of the papers management, which has refused to move on any of these issues while at the same time demanding that its staff agree to a number of concessions undermining job security and legal recourse for victims of employer abuses. In effect, these changes would allow the Post to impose layoffs without having to provide severance compensation while denying laid off workers the right to bring legal action against the company regardless of circumstances. The newspaper also initially sought to eliminate annual cost of living increases in favor of a system of merit-based pay raises for a few employees who are deemed to have performed best over the preceding year, a system that has long been used as a wedge to divide workers against one another by forcing them to compete for a small number of pay increases based on arbitrary criteria imposed unilaterally by management. The Post recently agreed to an insulting $10 per week wage increase and a provision allowing review of compensation on the basis of alleged racial or gender discrimination. Since such discrimination is illegal under federal law, this imposes no additional obligations on management. Even as his representatives in management refuse to hear their demands, the letters signatories express extreme gratitude to Bezos for buying the newspaper and make impotent appeals to his supposed belief in democratic values: We, the undersigned, have been extremely grateful that you stepped in to purchase the Post at a time when the traditional media model was collapsing, and we have given our all to take advantage of the long runway you promised [The Posts unwillingness to bargain] is unfair and even shocking from someone who believes democracy dies in darkness, referring to the papers current slogan. Bezos purchased the newspaper for $250 million in 2014. Since that time, the Washington Post has seen its long and well-established track record of promoting US imperialist interests accelerate to the point where it now serves more or less openly as a mouthpiece of the military-intelligence apparatus. The paper has published a string of slanderous and outright false stories about fake news and Russian meddling based on dubious, unnamed official sources in order to justify censorship and preparations for war against Russia and China. In the last two months of 2016 alone, the paper published the PropOrNot article promoting an anonymous group that had compiled a blacklist of over 100 websites supposedly serving as conscious or unconscious purveyors of Russian disinformation, including a number of left-wing and antiwar websites, and a since-retracted article asserting that the Kremlin had hacked into Vermonts electric power grid citing anonymous US government sources. Bezos earned his fortune on the backs of Amazons army of super-exploited warehouse, factory, and delivery workers worldwide. Far from seeking to promote democracy, his purchase of the Post is intimately bound up with Amazons increasing integration into the military-intelligence apparatus. A nightmare is unfolding in Yemens Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, with civilians attempting to flee a siege mounted by US-backed forces led by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia as bombs and shells explode around them. The plight of the city, where the United Nations warned that 250,000 could lose their lives to the onslaught, is overshadowed by the threat posed to the entire country by the shutting down of the port, which is the lifeline for food, fuel, medicine and other vital supplies upon which at least two-thirds of the countrys population of 27 million depend. With 8 million already on the brink of famine and 22 million dependent upon food aid, the paralysis of Hodeidah for any length of time threatens to claim millions of lives from hunger and disease. Opening a three-week session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the head of the UNs human rights department, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, stated on Monday: I emphasize my grave worry regarding the Saudi and Emirati-led coalitions ongoing attacks in Hodeidah which could result in enormous civilian casualties and have a disastrous impact on life-saving humanitarian aid to millions of people which comes through the port. Even before the latest siege began, the UN had warned that given the existing conditions and the stranglehold imposed by the Saudi-UAE blockade, another 10 million Yemenis could be facing famine by years end. Efforts by United Nations special envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths to broker a ceasefire were scuttled Monday, after the foreign minister of the UAE, Anwar Gargash, rejected anything outside of an unconditional surrender by the Houthi rebels who hold the port and their immediate evacuation There can be no conditions in any offers to withdraw, said Gargash at a press conference in Dubai. If the rebels wanted to set conditions, they should have thought of that a year ago. Now is not the time to negotiate. The UAE ultimatum follows last weeks decision by the UN Security Council, meeting in secret session, to reject a call by Sweden, a non-permanent member of the council, for the body to demand an immediate ceasefire and a halt to the Saudi-UAE offensive. The proposal was killed by the US and Britain, both permanent members of the council with veto power, and both heavily involved in arming and supporting the Saudi-led forces. A third permanent member of the Security Council is France. The French daily Le Figaro, citing senior military sources, reported on Saturday that French special forces are deployed in Yemen along with forces from the UAE. The United States gave the green light for the offensive on the port city, despite warnings by aid organizations and the UN that the military action could lead to the starvation of millions. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a brief statement acknowledging that Washington had assured the UAE regime that it understood its security concerns, while urging it to maintain the free flow of humanitarian aid. This is rank hypocrisy, given that the strategic aim of seizing Hodeidah is to cut off supplies to the territory controlled by the Houthis in order to starve the population into submission. It has since been reported that US military personnel are working together with Saudi and UAE forces to select targets in the port city, supposedly to avoid civilian casualties. The siege has already triggered a deepening of Yemens humanitarian catastrophe, with the UN reporting that nearly 5,000 families have been displaced by the action, with many of them fleeing villages south of Hodeidah into the crowded port city of 600,000, which itself faces imminent bombardment and has little resources to support internal refugees. A local aid worker told the British daily Independent Monday: People are trying to leave with rockets and mortars over their heads. Other people are besieged in their homes. They dont know if their family members managed to escape or who survived. Its hot and there is no water and we are scared. Please stop what is happening. In the Dubai press conference, the UAE foreign minister said, Our approach is one of gradual calibrated and methodical pressure designed for unconditional withdrawal of [the] Houthis. Behind these words it is apparent that the ground force besieging Hodeidah, made up of UAE troops, Sudanese forces and Yemeni mercenaries, have made little progress in their attempt to take the city. Yemens Ansarullah movement, as the Houthi rebels are officially known, dismissed reports that Saudi-led forces had seized Hodeidahs airport and said that they were in retreat. The airport itself, however, has been completely destroyed by bombardment. A battle of attrition awaits the Saudi alliance which it cannot withstand. The Saudi coalition will not win the battle in Hodeidah, Ansarullah spokesman Mohammed Abdulsalam told the Lebanese-based al-Mayadeen TV. Given the lack of progress on the ground, the Saudi-led force can be expected to place ever greater reliance on air power, raising the threat that Hodeidah will face a similar fate as Mosul and Raqqa, which were largely reduced to rubble by US bombs, missiles and shells, killing and wounding tens of thousands of civilians. This air war against the Yemeni people would be impossible without US approval, in terms of political support, arms supplies, the mid-air refueling of Saudi and UAE warplanes and the Pentagons staffing of a joint command center in Riyadh that relays US intelligence for targeting airstrikes. The Trump administration in the US and Mays government in Britain are, together with the reactionary oil monarchies that they arm and support, guilty of massive war crimes in Yemen. For Washington, Yemen is seen as a means of countering Iranian influence in the region. US officials have claimed, without presenting any credible evidence, that the Houthis act as a proxy for Tehran and are armed and trained by Iran. In reality, both Riyadh and Washington oppose any government in Yemen that is not a servile puppet of Saudi and US interests. To press its campaign against Iran and for US hegemony in the region, US imperialism is willing to sacrifice the lives of millions. 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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 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Trilogy Heads to Xbox 360 and PS3 Next Week XXXTentacion Fatally Shot in Florida (UPDATE) Rapper XXXTentacion was reportedly shot on Monday. The 20-year-old was shopping for motorcycles in Florida when a gunman allegedly ran to his vehicle and opened fire. UPDATED 7:14 p.m. ET:The Broward County Sheriff's Department released a statement that XXX was approached by two armed men, and one of them opened fire on the rapper. Investigators believe it was a possible robbery. Anyone with information is urged to contact #BSO homicide detectives Walt Foster or John Curcio at (954) 321-4210 or @crimestoppers2, anonymously, at (954) 493-TIPS #XXTENTACION. pic.twitter.com/J97xZ9cHHz Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 A representative for the Broward Sheriff's Office confirmed to Complex that the man who was pronounced dead after being taken to the hospital was Jahseh Onfroy, a.k.a. XXXTentacion. #BreakingNews The adult male that was taken to the hospital has been pronounced dead. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 The adult male victim has been confirmed as 20 year old Jahseh Onfroy aka rapper #XXXTentacion. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 See original story below. Rapper XXXTentacion was reportedly shot on Monday according to a report from TMZ. Police dispatch audio reveals XXX was transported as a "Level 1 trauma patient" and described as "comatose." Story continues The 20-year-old, whose real name is Jahseh Onfroy, was reportedly shopping for motorcycles in Florida when a gunman ran to his vehicle and opened fire. Dispatch audio indicates the incident was possibly a drive-by, with the alleged shooter or shooters having potentially left the scene in a black Dodge Journey, Chevy Tahoe, or Jeep Grand Cherokee. "Witnesses told cops a Louis Vuitton bag was taken from XXX's vehicle," the site writes. The Broward County Fire Department told TMZ X had been rushed to a hospital; eyewitness claimed he had no pulse. Witnesses told the outlet they heard multiple shots. A source confirmed with Variety that Onfroy is in critical condition. "There was a shooting in Deerfield. Our officers are on the scene and we're gathering information," Jonathan Fishman, a Broward County Sheriff's Office spokesman, told Miami New Times. "We can't confirm anything else right now but will release more information soon." #BreakingNews#BSO is currently working an incident regarding a shooting at 3671 N. Dixie Hwy., Deerfield Beach. PIO headed to scene. Dispatchers received a call of a shooting at 3:57 p.m. An adult male victim was transported to an area hospital. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 Complex reached out to Riva Motorsports, where X was shopping, and an employee confirmed "there was an incident" at the location, but did not specify what took place. Videos circulating Twitter show Onfroy sitting in the front seat of his car seemingly unconscious. The footage shows witnesses attempting to check the rapper's pulse, but shows no obvious signs of bullet wounds or blood. XXXTentacion is currently awaiting trial for domestic violence charges against his pregnant girlfriend. Complex reached out to a rep for XXXTentacion. More from Complex Former First lady Rosalynn Carter spoke out on Monday against the Trump administrations policy of separating children from their parents at the US border and detaining them. With Carters denunciation of the policy, every single living First Lady has now publicly called out Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the entire White House for their attempt at deterring people from crossing the southern border. Removing children from their parents care at our border with Mexico is disgraceful and a shame to our country, Carter said in a statement according to ABC News. When I was first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand, I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstance beyond their control, she added. Carter joins the ranks along with Republican First Ladies Melania Trump and Laura Bush, both of whom criticized the policy over the last few days. Though Trump was as neutral as possible, saying she hates to see children separated from their families, while calling on nonpartisan immigration reform, Bush wrote a critical op-ed for The Washington Post on Sunday calling on the administration to stop their treatment of immigrants. I live in a border state, Bush explained of her home in Texas. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. Sometimes truth transcends party. https://t.co/TeFM7NmNzU Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) June 18, 2018 Michelle Obama shared her predecessors sentiments, sharing Bushs op-ed, simply tweeting, sometimes truth transcends party. Story continues While Obama rarely discusses party platforms in her public life, Hillary Clinton doesnt shy away from making her feelings known. She ripped into the policy on Monday to clarify that the law does not demand the removal of minors from their parents contrary to a statement tweeted by President Trump on June 5 in which he blamed Democrats for creating the bad law that Homeland Security must now follow. This is not happening because of the Democrats law, as the White House has claimed, Clinton clarified during remarks in New York. Separating families is not mandated by law at all. That is an outright lie. Its incumbent on all of us, journalists and citizens alike, to call it just that. (Photo via Win McNamara/Getty Images) You Might Also Like While most of the country has looked in horror as the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy has meant that children are ripped apart from their families, we have yet to hear from Ivanka Trump, special assistant to her father President Donald Trump. So where is Ivanka, so-called champion of women and children at the White House? Well, she's currently at a fundraiser for the Republican party in California. Yep, the first daughter needs to get even more coins for the GOP coffers while babies are literally being forcibly taken from their mothers' chests. Ivanka, who joined House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy for the event on Monday, was met by protesters at the Fresno Yosemite Airport. And it's not without reason. Even her press-shy stepmother, first lady Melania Trump, issued a statement about the border crisis on Sunday via her spokeswoman. (Her statement, however, was hollow.) But the first daughter has remained silent, showing not one ounce of compassion for someone who for long was thought to be a "moderating force" within the Trump White House. And it's not like she's been staying away from social media. Take a look, for example, at the beautiful family picture she posted to celebrate her husband Jared Kushner on Father's Day. You know whose family just lost their father? A family from Honduras, as the father of a three-year-old child died by suicide after being separated from his wife and son. "Ivanka Trump claims to be an advocate for families in the Trump administration, yet shes nowhere to be found while men, women, and children are suffering on the American border from this administrations inhumane family-separation policy," DNC Deputy Communications Director Sabrina Singh said in a statement provided to Refinery29. Story continues If unlike Ivanka and her father's administration you're actually interested in the wellbeing of these children who have been ripped apart from their families, go here for a guide on how to help them. Silence and inaction mean complicity. We reached out to the White House for comment and will update this story if we hear back. Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here? Inside One Attorney's Fight To Protect Undocumented Teenage Girls How This Woman Hacked Her Boyfriend's Email & Sabotaged His Music Career How To Help Migrant Parents & Children Who Are Separated At The Border Real Housewives of New York star Luann de Lesseps is reportedly moving on from the Hamptons, Town & Country reports. After years of summering in Sag Harbor at her four-bedroom, four-bathroom estate, de Lesseps has listed the waterfront home for a cool $6.25 million, or $150,000 for the month of August. Per her Instagram account, she has since found solace in the Catskills, despite kicking off the summer over Memorial Day weekend in Sag Harbor. Built in 1835, the Greek Revivalstyle home on John Street sits right on Sag Harbor Cove, boasting views of the water from the gourmet kitchen, which features top-of-the-line stainless steel appliances. Wood-burning fireplaces are peppered throughout the 19th-century home, in addition to marble countertops, French doors, wide-plank wood floors, and a massive outdoor patio. Step inside Luann de Lessepss soon-to-be-former Hamptons escape below. Next up: Inside Real Housewife Ramona Singer's Upper East Side apartment. The 416 Fire burning near Durango, Colorado, reached 34,161 acres by the evening of June 17, the Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team said in an update. More than 1,000 fire personnel were deployed to combat the fire, which was 30 percent contained. Rainfall in the region from the remnants of Hurricane Bud helped firefighters contain the blaze over the weekend. But the fire was not put out completely, and additional rain was not expected for another week, Type 1 incident management team spokesman Scot Davis told The Durango Herald. Evacuated residents in the Hermosa area were able to return home Sunday. Pre-evacuation notices for certain areas were also lifted. Evacuation and pre-evacuation orders for the Falls Creek area, however, remained in effect. Trending: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem U.S. Highway 550 was also opened to all traffic, the La Plata County Government said on Facebook. Drier and warmer weather was expected to return to the region Tuesday, the Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team said. The temperature was expected to be in the lower 80s, while humidity was likely to drop to between 15 and 20 percent. Officials predicted moderate fire behavior in the days to come. The 416 Fire began around 10 a.m. local time June 1, some 10 miles north of Durango. It was not expected to be fully contained until July 31. Don't miss: Soccer Has an Intolerance Problem? After Mexicans Yell Anti-Gay Slur, FIFA Opens Investigation At least five other fires were also burning in Colorado Monday, including the Horse Park Fire at 1,221 acres and the Burro Fire at 3,715 acres. The Horse Park Fire, southwest of Norwood, was 91 percent contained Monday. The Burro Fire, burning near Bear Creek in the San Juan National Forest, was only 12 percent contained. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper said last week that state, federal, county and municipal resources were working together to combat the multiple fires, and that public health and safety were top priorities. Story continues If you are in the fire zones, please follow safety procedures and directives, Hickenlooper said. Our state agencies are here to support you. As we have proved time and time again, Coloradans are resilient. 416 Fire Full Map InciWeb This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Good evening! Catch up on your pop-culture news with our roundup of todays top stories. 1. Heather Locklear reportedly hospitalized after threatening suicide Heather Locklear has reportedly been hospitalized after threatening to kill herself. (Photo: Amanda Edwards/Discovery via Getty Images) The Melrose Place star was taken for a psychiatric evaluation on Sunday afternoon, according to TMZ. The family member who called 911 claimed that the long-troubled actress was acting erratically and trying to find a gun. Read more>> 2. Rapper XXXTentacion fatally shot Rapper XXXTentacion poses for his mug shot after being charged in a 2016 domestic violence case on Dec. 15, 2017, in Miami. (Photo: Miami Dade County Corrections via Getty Images) The 20-year-old artist, whose real name was Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, was reportedly shot while shopping for a motorcycle in South Florida. His second album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart when it was released in March. Aside from his music, he faced some serious legal problems. Read more>> 3. Samuel L. Jackson stands by controversial tweet After some people called Jacksons tweet about President Trumps birthday homophobic, Jackson seemed to dismiss his critics. He shared a message from Twitter saying his tweet had been reviewed and not found to have violated the rules, along with a defiant caption. Read more>> 4. James Van Der Beek shares photo of new baby The Dawsons Creek alum and wife Kimberly welcomed their fifth child a baby girl named Gwendolyn over the weekend. Almost immediately, the Beek was inspired by Dwayne The Rock Johnson to share a skin-to-skin photo with his newborn. Read more>> 5. Bachelor stars Jared and Ashley I. are engaged Story continues Ashley Iaconetti and Jared Haibon attend iHeartRadios KIIS FM Wango Tango on June 2 in L.A. (Photo: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images) In a twist that Bachelor in Paradise fans never would have predicted, Ashley Iaconetti has finally stopped crying over Jared Haibon and is getting ready to marry him! Naturally, he proposed while they were filming the upcoming season of the show in Mexico. Read more>> Thanks for reading! Come back tomorrow for your a.m. pop-culture roundup. By Qadir Sediqi and Mohammad Ismail KABUL (Reuters) - Hundreds of Afghan peace marchers arrived exhausted in the capital, Kabul, on Monday after spending the fasting month of Ramadan crossing the sun-baked, war-torn country, much of it under Taliban control. The marchers, all men, including teachers, students and war victims on crutches and one in a wheelchair, were welcomed along the way by village women carrying the holy Koran, men singing and dancing or offering bread and yoghurt, some in tears. "I saw and learnt things that I had never thought of before," said Iqbal Khayber, 27, a medical student from Helmand. "We met people in areas controlled by the Taliban and in areas under government control - everyone is really tired of war." The march was triggered by a car bomb in Helmand on March 23 that killed at least 14 people and wounded dozens. No group claimed responsibility. Khayber said the marchers, varying in number from day to day, would take main roads and sometimes turn into villages, choosing dangerous areas on purpose to try to confront people's fear. "We saw people suffering huge pain from the war ... Honestly, my conscience doesn't let me calm down. It hurts me and I ask myself: why did we not start working for peace earlier?" Before Ramadan, the marchers were walking 30 to 35 km (18 to 20 miles) a day, but during the fasting month, when they could not take food or water during daylight hours, they slowed to 20 to 25 km per day. In one area of Ghazni province, they were told by the Taliban not to enter an area because it was too dangerous. "We met Taliban fighters and after an introduction, they told us we shouldn't have come here because the area is planted with bombs and they had planned an attack. "After minutes of discussion with them, they seemed tired of it all, and the war. They directed us back to the safest area." BLISTERED FEET, TEARS In Ghazni on Sunday, the Taliban took six soldiers hostage, the governor's office said on Monday. The Taliban denied the accusation and said the six had defected. An acting district governor in Nangarhar province in the east was killed on Monday. The Taliban claimed responsibility. Mohammad Yasin Omid, 24, a teacher from Zabul province, said he joined the march on its 21st day. "The group had already walked for 15 days. When I saw their bleeding and blistered feet, I could not control my tears so I decided to join them." The Taliban are fighting to expel foreign forces, defeat the U.S.-backed government and restore sharia, or Islamic law, after their ouster by U.S.-led forces in 2001. But Afghanistan has been at war for four decades, ever since the Soviet invasion in 1979. Both the government and the militants declared temporary ceasefires for the end-of-Ramadan Eid al-Fitr holiday, leading to hugs and selfies between the two sides as militants emerged from their hideouts to enter towns and cities. The Taliban ceasefire ended on Sunday. The government extended its ceasefire with the Taliban, which had been due to end on Wednesday, June 20, by 10 days. The anti-war marchers, many of whom were taken to hospital for treatment for dehydration and blisters, said they won't stop in Kabul. "We received support from the people in Kabul as we had expected," said marcher Badshah Khan. "Now we will have sit-ins in tents and continue walking to other provinces to get more support." (Writing by Nick Macfie; Editing by Robert Birsel) An American student held in Vietnam for "causing public disorder" at violent protests this month has appeared on state television to say he regrets breaking the law and will stay away from future rallies. William Nguyen was detained on June 10 in Ho Chi Minh City after attending mass demonstrations against proposed special economic zones that would grant investors 99-year leases. Video footage shows the Texas-born 32-year-old with a bleeding head wound being dragged by plainclothes men through the streets into custody. Police accuse Nguyen of "causing public disorder" and trying to damage a fence and flip over police vehicles on the main road to the airport. Nguyen, a Yale graduate, appeared on television on Monday night to say he broke the law. "I understand that my acts violated (the law)... I regret that I caused trouble for people heading to the airport. I blocked traffic and caused trouble to my family and friends," Nguyen said in Vietnamese on HTV in footage provided by city police. "I will not join any anti-state activities any more," added Nguyen, who was arrested while passing through Vietnam en route to Singapore to get his Masters degree next month. Choreographed confessions are common in Vietnam where accused criminals are paraded publicly to admit guilt -- sometimes in exchange for a softer sentence -- though rights groups have also accused the one-party state of forcibly extracting statements. Scores were detained this month after protests in several cities turned violent in some places, rare in the one-party state where demonstrations are routinely banned or broken up. Nguyen tweeted from the rallies, posting images of large crowds and saying he supported Vietnamese people "exercising their civic duty to protest injustice". Friends and family lobbying lawmakers in Washington for Nguyen's release say he did not have a political agenda. - Torture claims - At least 30 people are still in custody and security forces blanketed Ho Chi Minh City last weekend to deter further protests. Story continues Amnesty International said they had received "deeply disturbing" reports that several protesters were tortured by police in custody. "We urge the Vietnamese authorities to launch a prompt, thorough and effective investigation into the claims and to hold anyone suspected of being responsible to account," said Minar Pimple, Amnesty's senior director of global operations. Demonstrators had rallied against a draft law to grant lengthy leases in proposed special economic zones, citing fears valuable land would be handed over to China. The bill made no specific mention of China and the government has said it would consider shorter leases, but the concession did little to assuage anger. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said the government would consider public feedback but issued a warning to "bad seeds" looking to kick up unrest. "If you oppose officials on duty, vandalise state property... then you have to be strictly handled in accordance with the law," Phuc said Monday. China and Vietnam have had a fraught relationship since a brief but bloody border war in 1979 and resentment over Beijing's extensive claims in the South China Sea runs high in Vietnam. Buenos Aires (AFP) - A court in Argentina sentenced a man Monday to life imprisonment for killing a transsexual leader, the first hate crime conviction for targeting a trans woman. The court in Buenos Aires sentenced Gabriel David Marino, 25, to life imprisonment as co-author of "aggravated homicide due to gender violence and hatred of gender identity," according to the ruling broadcast live by the Judicial Information Center. The defendant, who allegedly stabbed the victim 13 times, sat stone-faced as he listened to the sentence being read. The stabbing attack occurred in October 2015 and resulted in the death of Amnacay Diana Sacayan, 40. For the prosecution and the plaintiff, it was a "historic sentence" since the judicial branch recognized that the murder of Sacayan "was a crime of hatred and prejudice" stemming from her gender identity, they said in a statement. Trans activist Lara Bernasconi said that "this conviction broke the legal rule book." As the Trump administration continues to defend its new zero tolerance policy on immigration, audio has reportedly revealed the cries of immigrant children hours after they are separated from their families at the US border. Mami! one child can be heard crying in the seven-minute audio. Papa! another screams. Well, we have an orchestra here, says a man identified as a Border Patrol agent. Whats missing is a conductor. The audio reportedly comes from inside a US Customs and Border Protection detention facility, where migrant children are held as their parents face prosecution for crossing the border illegally. Under the Trump administration's new zero tolerance policy, all adults caught crossing the border illegally are required to face criminal charges a process that inevitably separates them from any children they bring with them. Nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their parents since the zero tolerance policy began in April, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). More than 100 of them were under the age of four. The new audio captures the reactions of 10 of these children after they were separated from their families, according to ProPublica, which published the recording on Monday. The children can be heard sobbing and calling out for their parents. One girl, identified as six-year-old Alison Jimena Valenica Madrid, can be heard reciting the number of an aunt in the US and begging detention centre employees to call her. The aunt later told ProPublica that receiving the anguished call was the hardest moment in my life. Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece, said the woman, who is also applying for asylum in the US. Shes crying and begging me to go get her. She says, I promise Ill behave, but please get me out of here. Im all alone. DHS did not respond to The Independent's request for comment. The UNs top human rights official has likened the situation at the border to child abuse, and the American Association of Paediatricians has said it could cause irreparable harm. Former Republican First Lady Laura Bush decried the practice in an editorial over the weekend, comparing it to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Story continues But Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen continued to defend the zero tolerance policy at a White House press briefing on Monday. She claimed the children in DHS custody were being being well taken care of and receiving meals, medical care, and educational services. The secretary blamed Congress for the family separations, saying the administration was only enforcing existing laws that require children to be released quickly from DHS custody laws that do not apply to their parents. "This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border, she said. What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law. Congress is currently considering several immigration bills, including a Democrat-sponsored initiative that would prohibit separating families unless agents suspect abuse or child trafficking. A White House-backed bill would end the Diversity Visa Program and reduce the number of family-based immigration visas, while offering a path to citizenship for people brought to the country illegally as minors. Congress is expected to vote on the measures later this summer. In the meantime, only Mr Trump has the power to unilaterally reverse the zero tolerance policy an option Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said he would not be taking. "We want to fix the entire system, Ms Sanders said. We don't want to just tinker with it." Sydney (AFP) - Australia pledged Tuesday to provide Pacific nations with better funding to counter Chinese development money which it fears will leave some countries with massive debt burdens and undermine their sovereignty. Projects are increasingly being constructed in the region through China's signature infrastructure-building Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Canberra is worried some small nations may get trapped with unsustainable debts, handing Beijing influence. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said she wanted to ensure neighbouring countries had an alternative option to the often opaque financing from China, which Australia says can have unfavourable terms. "They are sovereign nations," she told the Sydney Morning Herald. "We want to ensure that they retain their sovereignty, that they have sustainable economies and that they are not trapped into unsustainable debt outcomes. "The trap can then be a debt-for-equity swap and they have lost their sovereignty." Such swaps have been seen elsewhere in the world including in Sri Lanka, where China took control of a large deep-sea port last year on a 99-year lease after the government was unable to make debt repayments. They have fuelled fears that China is building a network of strategic assets that could in future be converted to military facilities. In January, a senior Australian minister called some Chinese infrastructure projects in the Pacific "white elephants" which led to countries taking on debt they couldn't afford. "What we can do is offer alternative options for countries beyond BRI. BRI is not the only source of infrastructure financing available," Bishop said. She did not detail exactly what she planned and on what terms, but said she has had discussions with Britain about the possibility of cooperating on projects in the Pacific. Australia's Lowy Institute think tank said China usually offered "concessional" loans that eventually had to be repaid, while Australia and other traditional donors typically provided one-way grants that did not need to be paid back. Story continues The Institute estimates China provided US$1.78 billion in aid, including concessional loans, to Pacific nations between 2006-16. Asked whether Australian-led alternatives would be competitive or complementary to what China was doing, Bishop said: "They are both. "They are complementary in the sense that we recognise that there's a need for infrastructure investment in the Pacific and we're encouraging it, competitive in the sense that we want people to have options -- they don't have to only accept one outcome. "What we don't want is for countries to have no other options... and Australia should take a very proactive part in that." According to the International Monetary Fund, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu all face considerable debt repayment pressures, and all have significant debt to China. Curt Mills Politics, North America Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon delivers remarks during the Value Voters Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington The former White House chief strategist defended the presidents controversial moves on immigration and North Korea, in a video interview with the National Interest. Bannon: Trump Right on Migrant Separations, North Korea (Video) I think its interesting that the permanent political class that runs this city are up in arms this week about President Trumps zero-tolerance policy on the border, Steve Bannon told me Monday afternoon. If you go back to what Trump has said for years, and particularly, when came down the escalator [announcing his campaign for president]. He was seventh at the top of the escalator. That night He was number one, and never looked back. The former White House chief strategist sat down with the National Interest earlier this week at the Breitbart embassy where he once headed that publication, and plotted to bring the American right to power. Virtually every important moment, or a lot of the important moments, in the populist-nationalist movement happened in this house. This is where we had the famous dinner for [former United Kingdom Independence Party leader] Nigel Farage. Where we had [now-Attorney General] Jeff Sessions, and [now-primetime Fox host] Laura Ingraham, Bannon said, adding: Here is where Sessions, [now-Senior White House Counselor], myself and Steven Miller, back in 2013, walked through the results of the 2012 campaign, and came up with this assessment of what it was going to take to win in 2016. In our discussion, Bannon staunchly defends President Trumps policies not only at the border, but he also lends cover to Trumps trip to Singapore to meet with Kim Jong Un. On North Korea, He was dealt a terrible hand of cards, Bannon said. The central part of the Trump doctrine: Hes not going to just manage a process, Bannon said, defending his unorthodox approach to diplomacy. And for Bannon, North Korea is but an opening salvo in what he sees as the broader U.S.-China confrontation. Story continues [North] Korea is a vassal state to China. OK? Bannon said. [Kim Jong Un] gets on the armored train, he goes to China, and they release three pictures. One of those pictures, hes taking notes. Emperor Xi is talking, hes giving dictation, and [Kim] is taking notes. Curt Mills is a foreign-affairs reporter at the National Interest. Follow him on Twitter: @CurtMills. Image: Reuters Read full article The school board in Richmond, Virginia, on Monday night voted to rename an elementary school for former President Barack Obama. J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School, named after a Confederate general, will become Barack Obama Elementary School. The decision means that Richmond, the former capital of the Confederate States of America, will soon have a school honoring Americas first black president. The lone school board member who voted against the decision advocated for delaying the vote, favoring a name that would honor a local figure. This is Richmond and we are about history and we have so many great local stories to tell, said Kenya Gibson, who represents the elementary school, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Our local stories are so important to cherish. Numerous municipalities across the country have grappled with renaming or removing Confederate monuments in recent years. The issue came to a head in August, after a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting the removal of Confederate monuments. Other cities also have re-examined names and memorials honoring public figures with racist histories. School board members in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Monday night voted to change the names of two schools that had been named after controversial historical figures. The city also plans to determine a new name for its Robert E. Lee Elementary School on Aug. 6. Last fall, the school board in Jackson, Mississippi, decided to replace the name of a school named after the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, with Obamas name. Representatives for Obama did not immediately return a request for comment. Related Coverage Charlottesville Violence Prompts Other Cities To Consider Removing Confederate Monuments Baltimore Quietly Removed All 4 Of Its Confederate Statues Overnight This Is Why Another Confederate Statue Won't Come Down In Tennessee Report Says More Than 100 Confederate Symbols Removed Since 2015 Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Sanaa (AFP) - Emirati-backed Yemeni government forces seized Hodeida airport on Wednesday in a major step towards retaking the rebel-held port city after a week of fighting that has left nearly 350 people dead. The offensive to retake Hodeida from rebel fighters who have held it since 2014 has raised UN concerns for vital aid shipments and food imports through the city's docks. Here is a timeline of the battle: - Yemen forces launch offensive - The offensive is launched on June 13 after government forces -- who have been advancing on the port for months -- receive a green light from the Saudi-led coalition that provides essential air and ground support. The coalition carries out more than a dozen air strikes on Huthi positions on the outskirts of Hodeida; 22 rebels are killed while three pro-government fighters die in an ambush, medical sources say. UN envoy Martin Griffiths, leading talks to ensure the continued functioning of the vital port, urges all sides to "exercise restraint and to give peace a chance." Britain requests a UN Security Council meeting and Russia warns of "catastrophic consequences" for the entire aid-dependent country. - Heavy clashes - There is intense fighting on the second day of the offensive, with Saudi-led coalition warplanes and Apache helicopters providing "continuous" air support, although the government advance is hampered by sniper fire and mines. Medical sources tell AFP that 30 rebels and nine pro-government troops are killed in fighting near Hodeida's defunct airport, which serves as a rebel base. The UAE announces that four of its troops died on the first day of the offensive, when Huthis said they had struck a coalition ship with two missiles. Sweden calls for the UN Security Council to demand "an immediate freeze" to the assault to allow time for talks on a rebel withdrawal and avert a humanitarian disaster. But UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash insists "it is clear that for the UN-led political process to succeed, the situation on the ground must change". Story continues - Rebel leader defiant - After meeting behind closed doors, the UN Security Council does not demand a halt in the offensive but says the port must remain open. Saudi ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi warns that the Huthi rebels could "blow up part of the port" during a retreat. The Huthis will be given safe passage to the north if they withdraw from the city, the UAE ambassador says. But rebel chief Abdulmalik Al-Huthi urges his men to fight on, promising reinforcements. On June 15, government forces come under attack on the coast road south of Hodeida, leaving around 12 dead and disrupting a vital supply line. - UN envoy leaves empty-handed - The UN envoy holds four days of talks in the rebel-held capital Sanaa in a bid to avert an all-out battle for the city but flies out on Tuesday without announcing any breakthrough. The Yemeni government and its allies have insisted that the Huthis must fully withdraw from Hodeida and turn over the port to UN supervision. The rebels agree only to share control of the port with the United Nations. - Government forces seize airport - On Tuesday, government forces break through the perimeter fence of the disused airport sparking heavy fighting with its rebel garrison. At least 156 rebels and 28 soldiers are killed in the fight for the airport, according to Hodeida hospital sources, raising the death toll in the week-old battle for the city to 348. A federal judge on Monday permanently blocked Kansas from requiring people to provide proof of citizenship when they register to vote. U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson, a George W. Bush appointee, found that the law violated the National Voter Registration Act and the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The decision is a defeat for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), who championed the law requiring proof of citizenship. The ruling is significant because Robinson rejected the evidence that noncitizen voter registration is a widespread problem in Kansas. Kobach, who has advised President Donald Trump on voter fraud issues, has been a loud advocate for the idea that voter fraud is a widespread problem, despite several studies and investigations that have shown the contrary. Kobach chose to personally defend his own office at trial, and Robinson repeatedly admonished him for failing to follow proper rules of federal civil procedure to introduce evidence. In her Monday ruling, Robinson sanctioned Kobach with six hours of continuing legal education related to rules of civil procedure or evidence. Kobach has already previously been sanctioned twice in the trial for misleading the court about the contents of emails and failing to properly notify voters they were eligible to vote after Robinson initially blocked the law in 2016. The Kansas law, passed in 2011 and enacted in 2013, required Kansans to provide one of a series of pre-approved documents, like a passport or a birth certificate, to prove their citizenship when they registered to vote. If they failed to provide that proof within 90 days of registering, Kobach could cancel their registration. By March of 2016, before Robinson issued her preliminary injunction, 16,319 people had their registrations canceled in this way. Overall at that time, 31,089 were blocked from registering for failing to provide proof of citizenship. To uphold the Kansas law, Kobach had to show that substantial numbers of noncitizens were registering to vote in Kansas. Story continues Kobach offered 129 instances from 1999 of noncitizens who registered or attempted to register to vote, but offered a series of experts to back up his argument that there could actually be thousands on the rolls. The court was not convinced. Defendant insists that these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. This trial was his opportunity to produce credible evidence of that iceberg, but he failed to do so, Robinson wrote in her opinion. Instead, the Court draws the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error. This decision is a stinging rebuke of Kris Kobach, and the centerpiece of his voter suppression efforts: a show-me-your-papers law that has disenfranchised tens of thousands of Kansans, said Dale Ho, director of the ACLUs voting rights project, which represented five Kansans, who were blocked from registering, who challenged the law. That law was based on a xenophobic lie that noncitizens are engaged in rampant election fraud. The court found that there is no credible evidence for that falsehood, and correctly ruled that Kobachs documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement violates federal law and the U.S. Constitution. In addition to permanently blocking the proof of citizenship requirement, Robinson ordered Kobach to take steps to comply with her ruling. She said he needed to provide those who did not prove their citizenship with the same information that all other voters in the state receive and to make sure that those who did not provide proof of citizenship appeared in the same poll books as those who did. She also ordered Kobach to provide training materials and guidance to county election officials to make it clear that people do not need to prove their citizenship in order to register to vote and to make sure that was clear online. The ACLU had argued Kobach was not adequately educating voters and election officials on the status of the proof of citizenship requirement. Ruling in favor of Parker Bednasek, a University of Kansas student who was blocked from registering, Robinson said that the Kansas law violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment because the states interest in preventing noncitizen voter registration did not outweigh the burden the proof of citizenship law placed on voters. Kobachs office said Monday evening that Robinsons ruling was incorrect and that he would appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Milwaukee Bucks guard Sterling Brown filed suit against the city of Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Police Department in federal court on Tuesday, arguing that members of the department violated his civil rights by using a Taser on him in a wrongful arrest stemming from a parking incident in January. Mark Thomsen, Browns attorney, filed the lawsuit on Tuesday, following through on a course of action discussed last month by alleging excessive force and unlawful arrest in the incident, which took place outside a Walgreens in the early hours of Jan. 26. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the defendants named in Browns suit include the City of Milwaukee, Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales, Sgt. Sean Mahnke, Sgt. Jeffrey S. Krueger (who, according to the suit, has previously been involved with at least eight Use of Force incidents involving his Taser, including four where no charges were ever brought against the victim), and Officers Joseph J. Grams, Bojan Samardzic, James P. Collins, Cristobal Martinez Avila, Erik A. Andrade and Jason P. Jensen. The suit argues that violence by law enforcement against African American people in the United States is a national crisis, and a particularly acute issue in Wisconsin. The filing cites research indicating that unarmed African Americans are shot by police nearly 16 times more frequently than unarmed white people are, the second-highest ratio in the U.S. and more than three times the national average, and details the Milwaukee Police departments history of executing arrests, false arrests, and/or otherwise violating persons equal protection rights. Milwaukee Bucks guard Sterling Brown, seen here during an April 1 game against the Milwaukee Bucks, filed a lawsuit against the city of Milwaukee and its police department over what he argues was the use of excessive force in his unlawful arrest for a parking violation in January. (AP) Why was Sterling Brown arrested? Milwaukee police initially reported that, while conducting a business check at around 2 a.m., they encountered a vehicle parked across two disability parking spaces in the Walgreens parking lot, and that while speaking with and giving a citation to a 22-year-old male, later identified as Brown, he became combative. Story continues During the incident an electronic control device was deployed and the man was arrested, Milwaukee Police Sgt. Tim Gauerke told Yahoo Sports in a statement. The circumstances of the incident and the use of force are currently being reviewed by the Department. That review, which included the viewing of police body camera footage of the incident, revealed that Browns actions did not warrant a criminal charge for resisting arrest or obstructing an officer. That footage made its way to the desk of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who said in May four months after officers Tased Brown that he definitely [had] concerns about the behavior of the officers involved based on what he saw. Footage shows police officers acted inappropriately One day later, the department released the footage. It shows an officer initiating a verbal confrontation with Brown, at least five other backup vehicles arriving to handle a traffic citation, and officers surrounding Brown because he didnt take his hands out of his pockets immediately as ordered, taking him to the ground and eventually Tasing him. WISN-TV in Wisconsin later uncovered more footage from Browns arrest, showing an officer stepping on his ankle while he was pinned face down on the ground and handcuffed, and others expressing concern about Browns treatment only after realizing that he plays for the Bucks, meaning there would likely be a media firestorm from which theyd need to protect themselves. Additional footage released Monday by WISN showed one of the officers surrounding Brown before his Tasing briefly drawing his gun. Sterling Brown could be dead, his lawyer, Thomsen, told WISN. That gun could have gone off, and it would be a whole different story. Video of Browns arrest sparks controversy Chief Morales apologized to Brown for the incident, saying members of his department acted inappropriately and were recently disciplined. Three officers (Grams, Krueger and Mahnke) reportedly received suspensions ranging from two days to just over two weeks; eight others are reportedly undergoing remedial training in professional communications. Following the release of the multiple videos of Browns detention, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission has ordered a complete audit and review of the arrest, what precipitated it and its aftermath. The Milwaukee Police Association, the union representing rank-and-file officers, decried an alleged lack of support from civic leaders, shifting blame for what happened to Brown away from the officers involved and toward drastic understaffing. The city of Milwaukee has paid roughly $22 million in police misconduct lawsuits since 2015, according to the Journal Sentinel, with taxpayers footing the bill. What is wrong with these people, man? In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, Brown shares more details of his side of the story than appear in the videos. He recounts immediate hostility from Grams, the first officer on the scene, and said that when he asked why there were so many officers devoting so much time and attention to a parking issue, Krueger replied, Because youre bothering me, and said that Brown should be in handcuffs. According to the suit, things escalated when, after Grams returned to Browns car, the alarm went off, leading Brown to reach into his pocket to grab his keys to turn it off. After that, the officers surrounded Brown, looked into his car, and saw what appeared to be paper targets with bullet holes in them inside the car. That led them to ask whether Brown had a concealed-carry weapon permit; after he said he didnt, they shouted for him to take his hands out of his pockets and, mere seconds later, grabbed him and began to take him down to the ground. There, with a knee in his groin, pressure on his neck and six officers having him pinned on the ground, Brown heard Mahnke call out an order to Tase him; shortly thereafter, Samardzic sent thousands of volts of electricity through Browns body. It didnt end there. From the suit: 87. Shortly after Defendants threw Mr. Brown to the ground, Defendant Grams used his right foot to stomp on Mr. Browns leg. Then after the Taser was shot into Mr. Browns back, Defendant Grams proceeded to stomp on Mr. Browns leg with both feet. 88. Defendant Grams stood on Mr. Browns leg for an extended period of time while Mr. Brown remained on the ground. 89. After Mr. Brown was unlawfully tackled, tased, and cuffed over an alleged parking incident, Defendant Grams commented to Defendant Krueger, [i]f the guy hadnt been such a dick it would have been hey, have a nice day! you know? But then I thought, okay hes being an ass, hes trying to hide something. 90. At 02:11:38 AM, Defendants cuffed Mr. Brown, while he was face-down on the cold, wet pavement. 91. As he stood at the window of one of the police vehicles, Defendant Grams said to himself, what is wrong with these people, man. 92. Starting at 02:13:49 AM, and continuing until 02:16:41 AM, Defendant Collins stood on Mr. Browns left ankle for about 2 minutes, while Mr. Brown remained cuffed, laying on the cold wet pavement. 93. Minutes after being tased, Mr. Brown asked the officers, all this for what? 94. Defendant Collins responded, Because youre being stupid now. Officer jokes about doing the same thing to J.R. Smith According to the suit, after the officers learned Brown played for the Bucks, they allowed him to sit up and eventually stand up, before taking him to the hospital for evaluation and treatment of wounds to his face (where hed been forced to the ground) and back (which had been punctured by the Taser). Brown was later transferred to Milwaukee County Jail, where he was held until his release later that day; while he was in custody, Andrade, one of the officers who responded to Grams call for backup, went on Facebook and posted, Nice meeting Sterling Brown of the Milwaukee Bucks at work this morning! Lol#FearTheDeer That was far from the only objectionable thing Andrade had posted on his Facebook page related to race, NBA players, the epidemic of the black community lying on police, and African Americans and mass incarceration. Andrade also apparently made the eyebrow-raising decision to reference his role in Browns arrest and subsequent Tasing while watching Game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals, which saw Cleveland Cavaliers guard J.R. Smith commit a costly late-game error, suggesting that Smith deserved the same treatment that the MPD gave Brown: 144. On May 31, 2018, Earl Joseph J.R. Smith III, known widely as J.R. Smith, played for the Cleveland Cavaliers in Game 1 of the NBA Finals. Nearing the end of regulation, Mr. Smith rebounded a missed free throw while the game was tied, and let the clock run out to force overtime. The Cavaliers lost in overtime. 145. On information and belief, after Game 1 of the NBA Finals, Defendant Andrade once again took to Facebook to explain that he believed Mr. Smith deserved to be punished for this performance: Milwaukee police officer Erik Andrades Facebook post during Game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals. (Image via Scribd) 146. Defendant Andrades post is an admission that he and other Defendant officers are allowed to engage in unlawful attacks and arrests of African Americans without justification and then relish such events without any fear of real discipline. Sterling Brown aims to push police, politicians for accountability The Bucks called the officers actions shameful and inexcusable, and offered their public support for Brown as he shares his story and takes action to provide accountability which is why he filed suit on Tuesday. Everybody thought I was combative, thought I was being aggressive, but I get mad every time I watch it, because I was defenseless pretty much, Brown told Robin Roberts of ABCs Good Morning America last month. I couldnt do nothing, and they still did what they did. The video shows justice of what really happened. Its a body cam, its close, and you can hear my screaming or whatnot. Its tough every time I watch it, but thats why Im here doing what Im doing legally. Thats why Im speaking to you, just to draw attention to it and try to be a voice and try to help as many people as I can in that situation. More NBA coverage: Dan Devine is a writer and editor for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoosports.com or follow him on Twitter! More from Yahoo Sports: Sepp Blatter to be guest of Vladimir Putin at World Cup Mike Hoffman traded twice amid fiancees cyberbullying probe Chris Paul believes LeBron wants to be in L.A. NBA draft: Five prospects who could be the next Donovan Mitchell Ottawa (AFP) - Canada said Tuesday it was "troubled" by the US practice of separating immigrant children from parents detained after crossing the US-Mexico border, warning that it could put the US's safe haven status at risk. "I think all Canadians are troubled by images coming out of the United States," Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen told parliament. "The lives of children are very, very precious and their security and their well-being has to be foremost in our minds." He added that Ottawa is "monitoring the United States domestic asylum policy to make sure that any changes in their asylum system continue to meet their designation as a safe third country." The safe third country agreement between Canada and the United States requires refugee claimants to request asylum in the first safe country they arrive in -- for example, asylum seekers cannot transit the US and make a claim in Canada. The Trump administration, however, is facing a growing outcry at home and abroad over the separations, the product of a "zero-tolerance" policy on undocumented migrants. US officials say more than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents or guardians since early May, when the policy was announced. Lawmakers who visited minors in detention described wailing children behind chain-link fences, with no idea when they will see their parents again. Miami (AFP) - XXXTentacion, the troubled 20-year-old rapper whose grim, often suicidal rhymes propelled him to the top of the US chart just months ago, was shot dead Monday in Florida in a possible robbery, authorities said. The rapper, whose lyrics were filled with insecurity and his real life marred by violence, was gunned down in broad daylight near a motorcycle store in Deerfield Beach north of Miami, the Broward County sheriff's department said. The artist whose real name was Jahseh Onfroy was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. He becomes one of the biggest names in hip-hop to be killed in recent years after a slew of targeted slayings in the 1990s. The rapper, who was born and lived nearby, was leaving the Riva Motorsports store when two armed suspects approached him, with at least one opening fire, the sheriff's department said. The pair raced off in a dark SUV and are wanted by authorities, it said. "Investigators say it appears to be a possible robbery," the sheriffs department said in a statement. The celebrity news site TMZ, which first reported the shooting, said that the two suspects snatched a Louis Vuitton bag from the rapper's vehicle. - 'Look at Me!" - Sporting spiked-up dreadlocks and often covering his face with a black-and-white masquerade mask, XXXTentacion rose suddenly to fame more than a year after putting out the song "Look at Me!" on the sharing site SoundCloud. The rapper -- his stage-name alludes to the unknown, pornography and the Spanish word for "temptation" -- sampled alternative rock and reggaeton in his dark, often muffled style of hip-hop full of depressive lyricism. Without any traditional sort of promotion, his second album, entitled "?," debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart in March. XXXTentacion's success triggered controversy due to a past that is violent even by the standards of the rap world. Around the time of his latest album's release, he was being released from house arrest as he awaits trial on charges of beating his pregnant ex-girlfriend. Story continues But his music found a critical following. Kendrick Lamar, one of the most influential figures in hip-hop, heaped praise last year on XXXTentacion's debut album "17" in which he found a unique rawness. Kanye West mourned XXXTentacion on Twitter, writing: "I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here." "Jocelyn Flores," the best-known track off "17," described XXXTentacion's despair over the suicide of a friend. "Sad!" a more melodious but equally bleak track off his latest album, delves into his anxieties with women as he raps, "Suicide if you ever try to let go / I'm sad, I know / Yeah, I'm sad, I know." - Backlash over abuse - While winning fans, XXXTentacion faced a blacklash by critics who said that his alleged mistreatment of women should be a career-stopper in an age that the #MeToo movement is demanding higher standards from men. Spotify last month singled out XXXTentacion as part of a policy not to promote songs by artists known for "harmful or hateful" behavior, but the leading streaming service backed down after charges that it had overstepped its role. His former girlfriend, in an interview published earlier this month with the Miami New Times, said that the emerging star subjected her to a summer of abuse in 2016 that included physical attacks every three or four days, along with threats of grisly sexual violence. Shortly after a pregnancy test came out positive, the then girlfriend said that the rapper beat her for 15 minutes, injuring her so badly that she lost vision and vomited. The rapper, who was expelled from middle school for hitting a classmate and whose mother kicked him out of home, has also been implicated in other violent incidents, including stabbing his manager and brawling with audience members in concert. XXXTentacion frequently referenced his real life in his verse. The song "Revenge" appears to address his ex-girlfriend as he rapped, "I've dug two graves for us, my dear," and concluded, "In my grave, I'll rot." The Daily Beast Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photos GettyThe mainstream medias credibility took another big hit this week. Katie Couric, the former co-host of NBCs Today show, revealed in a new memoir that she chose not to air some controversial comments made to her five years ago by the sainted Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, involving RBGs criticism of NFL players like Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem.Couric says she was conflicted because she was a big RBG fan, Chrissy Teigens commitment to keeping it real just went up a notch. Having already showed off her post-childbirth mesh underwear and whipped out a breast pump in the middle of date night, the cookbook author and model shared her most intimate motherhood moment yet: treating her private parts to a aginal steam. Teigen, who also rocked a face mask and a heating pad for her mini spa moment, isnt the first celebrity to try out aginal steaming. Gwyneth Paltrow was among the first to extol the virtues of the treatment, urging her Goop readers in 2015 to experience what she called an energy release for themselves. Fans of aginal steaming a centuries-old practice currently having a renaissance thanks to some spas claim that the treatment can cleanse the uterus and help soothe a number of gynecological issues, as well as anxiety. According to New York Citys YinOva Center, which offers the treatment, hovering over a steamed blend of dried herbs, including mugwort, can help manage PMS symptoms, uterine cramping, fertility, and peri- and post-menopausal symptoms. Many spas swear by agina steaming, but health experts have said it has no benefits. (Photo: BLACKDAY/Getty Images) Having given birth to her son, Miles, in May, Teigen was presumably drawn to claims that the treatment can help new moms with scarring and other postnatal concerns. But according to Dr. Shazia Malik, a London-based consultant obstetrician and gynecologist, Teigen may be wasting her time. There is absolutely no evidence that steaming provides any benefit to the agina, never mind any other reproductive organ in the female body, Malik told Yahoo Lifestyle. Nor indeed does the concept follow any scientific theory. The female agina is a self-cleaning organ with a delicately balanced population of bacteria to keep it healthy at all stages of a womans reproductive life. Steaming can at best be relaxing, just as a warm bath might be, and at worst, be frankly dangerous especially if tried at home. Also, overheating can promote an overgrowth of unhealthy bugs and yeast infections. Story continues The agina undergoes profound changes in pregnancy to prepare for birth and also to help it heal afterwards, she added. Steaming wont change that and in no way can the steam get to your uterus or other pelvic organs! But Malik does have an all-natural alternative that might help new moms. After birth, I ask my patients to sit in a warm bath twice a day with a handful of sea salt and a few drops of tea tree oil, and also to take arnica tablets to promote healing, she shared. It works very well most of the time. Malik also cautioned that celebrities should be more careful about road-testing treatments that have been debunked by medical experts. Role models promoting such treatments might inadvertently be feeding into the notion that somehow the agina is an unclean organ that needs purifying when all it really needs is a healthy lifestyle, fresh air, and cotton underwear! she said. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. With the election of a new president Sunday, Colombia threw the future of its peace deal into uncertainty. Conservative candidate Ivan Duque has repeatedly pledged to roll back parts of the landmark 2016 peace agreement with rebels from the FARC groupa deal that formally ended more than 50 years of conflict in the South American nation. Some saw Sundays vote as a referendum on the controversial peace deal, which allowed most of the more than 7,000 rebels to avoid prison. This is the opportunity that we have been waiting forto turn the page on the politics of polarization, insults and venom, Duque told supporters Sunday night after winning by a 12 percent margin. Duque has said he wants to make it clear that a Colombia at peace is a Colombia where peace meets justice. The question of what justice means in a country where conflict killed at least 220,000 people is a complicated one. While critics of the deal, like Duque, tend to focus on the brutal actions of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), government groups and paramilitaries were also responsible for much of the violence. And throughout the war, it was women who suffered the brunt of it. Ivan Duque, Colombia's president-elect, speaks during an election event at the party's headquarters in Bogota, Colombia, on Sunday, June 17, 2018. Bodies have been turned into a battleground Conflict began in the 1960s and was fought between the government, far-right paramilitary groups, left-wing guerrillas and the drug cartelsall of whom used sexual violence against women during the conflict to achieve military objectives, marking their territory and intimidating communities. Guerrilla groups used rape and assault to recruit girls as combatants, and as payment to protect other family members. Women were also subjected to crimes by the states security forces, leaving them with no authority to turn to for justice. An Amnesty report from 2004 noted: All the armed groupsthe security forces, paramilitaries and the guerrillahave sexually abused or exploited women, both civilians or their own combatants, in the course of Colombias conflict, and sought to control the most intimate parts of their lives. By sowing terror and exploiting and manipulating women for military gain, bodies have been turned into a battleground. Story continues Although many women signed up to guerrilla groupsthey made up 40 percent of the communist group FARCgender-based violence was still a powerful weapon of war, even against those fighting in it. Female fighters were banned from getting pregnant, and no matter how far along they were, women would be subjected to forced abortions. As thousands of men were murdered during the conflict, women were left to raise children and bring in money. We couldnt do anything but go out to the streets to demand the truth, says Jessica Hoyos, 30, who founded justice group Hijos y Hijas por la Memoria y contra la Impunidad [Sons and Daughters for Memory and against Impunity] after her father was murdered in 2001 by paramilitaries. Mothers gave their children to the war. We suffered differently to men. We were the ones left behind. The group unites young people who are fighting to expose the real reasons behind their parents murderswhich were often covered up and left unsolved, without the perpetrators being brought to justice. Like many female activists, Hoyos says she has been threatened with sexual violence by people who do not want the truth to come out. Data from 2016 showed 97 percent of conflict-related cases of sexual violence against women remained unpunishedbut women in Colombia began raising their voices years ago. Repeated demonstrations and protests over the treatment of women during the conflict, as well as the countrys troubling record of domestic violence and attitude toward dealing with it, resulted in the Colombian senate introducing a landmark law in 2014 that recognized sexual violence as a crime against humanity. There are likely to be thousands such cases appearing in the tribunals because of Colombias high rates of sexual violence. (Because few women report acts of violence, it is hard to measure the scale of the problem but one 2011 survey carried out by Colombian feminist charity Casa de la Mujer estimated half a million women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted between 2000 and 2009.) Women hold pictures of people who went missing during the armed conflict, during a march for peace in Bogota, on October 20, 2016. The path to justice Rising pressure from womens rights advocates, as well as support from international parties, means that the government was finally moving toward integrating women in the conflict resolution process. In September 2014 the government and FARC jointly announced a gender sub-commission to ensure any peace agreement included gender-sensitive language and women-specific provisions. The announcement followed demands from women activist groups, such as Red Mariposas de Alas Nuevas Construyendo Futuro (Red Butterflies of New Wings Building Futures) and the National Association of Indigenous and Peasant Women of Colombia, both of which have campaigned for justice and equal rights for women. In 2015, the country established a national day to commemorate the women who suffered sexual violence at the hands of guerrilla and paramilitary groups, a sign of the governments efforts to recognize such crimes and deliver justice to women. Female judges will account for 53 percent of lawmakers presiding over war tribunals, which were due to begin in November but have been delayed by parties who oppose the transitional justice system, including Duques Democratic Center. The transitional justice system was approved by the Senate in September, and was set up to prosecute those on both sides of the conflict accused of human rights violations. Its unclear what Duques election will mean for the peace process now. Involving women in conflict resolution and the judiciary process has proved effective in other countries attempting to build peace and bring justice to female victims of sexual violence. In Rwanda, several women held key roles in uniting the country post-conflict and delivering justice, such as Domitilla Mukantaganzwa, who headed up the Gacacacourts trying genocide-related cases. In Latin America, countries are starting to take steps towards addressing violence against women. El Salvador, a country where 524 women were killed in 2016 alone, has recently appointed two female judges to preside over sexual violence courts. At the Colombia peace talks in Havana in July 2016, commission co-chair Maria Paulina Riveros said: We recognize the important role of women in conflict prevention, resolution and peace building, where their leadership and equal participation are necessary and essential. In Colombia, judges for the peace process were selected from a pool of more than 2,300 applicants and international parties have backed the appointment of women. Sweden, in particular, supported Colombia in including women in the peace agreement, advising on how to use women as actors for peace and Swedish police have collaborated with Colombian forces, providing training on how to investigate domestic violence. Hoyos believes female judges will ensure women receive fair treatment in a country where justice for sexual violence has rarely been delivered. Women have been heard during this peace process because we demanded it. Its important to have women as judges because Im sure they can put themselves in the shoes of other women more easily than a man could. They will focus on the sexual violence aspect and how it affects a woman. People march at Bogota's National Park on June 3, 2012 to reject the brutal torture, rape and murder of thirty-five-year-old Rosa Elvira Cely. A long way to go Isabelita Mercado, a 27-year-old human rights lawyer, has been working in the governments transitional justice team since 2013. When the October 2016 referendum on the proposed peace deal returned a no vote, the government was left to re-negotiate terms. Part of the issue for some voters in the strongly religious country was the perceived threat from womens rights activists. We had to sit down with Christians who thought that gender ideology was a threat in the agreement. They thought voting yes to peace meant women would take over Colombia. Politics has collided with tradition, Mercado says. The Evangelical Church argued a no vote was a defense of the traditional, patriarchal family that they felt was coming under attack from feminists and womens rights activists. Angela Anzola, Bogotas high commissioner for peace and victims, says the country is finally starting to recognize the scale of sexual violence against women. Its one of the worst things that happened to all Colombians. And we are now having to face the aftermath. I deal with so many women who are raising children born out of rape. The men left to fight for each side, so they were left on their own, up for grabs for whoever wanted them. The majority of displaced female Colombians in Bogota have been widowed by the conflict, and struggle to enter the labor market. Around 80 percent of the displaced population, which numbers more than 5 million, are women and children. The women are living on the outskirts of Bogota, no light, no electricity, explains Anzola. They just settle there because there is nowhere else to go. Not only are Colombian women demanding justice for the past, they are fighting for equality and protection for their future. The sub-commission highlighted the need for prevention of dangers that overwhelmingly affect women, such as domestic violence, rape, sexual assault and femicide. On average, a woman is killed in Colombia every two days. In 2012, the death of 35-year-old Rosa Elvira Cely, raped and tortured in a public park in the Colombian capital of Bogota, brought thousands of people onto the streets. They marched in Rosas name to protest the endemic sexual abuse of women in Colombia, carrying placards that read not one more and no more violence against women. Her death prompted a bill, eventually passed in 2015, that introduced tougher sentencing for crimes against women and defined the crime of femicide in Colombian law. Sexual violence is still happening and no-one is willing to talk about it, because it is still dangerous for women to do so, justice campaigner Hoyos says. It is so frustrating to still have to struggle to be heard in the 21st century. But you know, we are used to fighting, and in history you cant get any rights without fighting for them. Now were being listened to, its given us hope. Now we think we can build a new country where our sons and daughters can live in an inclusive society. Anzola emphasizes the importance of women taking part in the justice process. Its not good enough that we just have women in the tribunalswe need them in the truth and reconciliation commission too, she says. Sexual violenceit will not be talked about by men, even if they are victims, because of the social stigma. There are many issues that will only come to light if women are there. We will only find out the truth if women are there. Lucy Sherriff is a Colombia-based contributor to The Fuller Project for International Reporting. This report is part of an ongoing series on women, security and peacebuilding supported by Women, War & Peace II broadcast series and The Fuller Project. Beirut (AFP) - A US official has blamed Israel for a deadly strike along Syria's eastern border with Iraq, raising many questions over the target and victims of the raid. This is what we know: Where was it? Late Sunday, an air strike hit the border town of Al-Hari in eastern Syria near the frontier with Iraq, state media and a Britain-based monitor said. The raid in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor killed 55 fighters including Syrians and Iraqis, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said. Deir Ezzor is the backdrop of two separate offensives against the Islamic State jihadist group, and a de-confliction line exists to keep them from running into each other. Al-Hari lies on the western banks of the Euphrates River, where regime forces have been battling the jihadists with the help of Russian aircraft and foreign fighters. On the eastern side of the waterway, a Kurdish-led alliance supported by the US-led coalition has been pressing a campaign against IS. The jihadists declared a cross-border "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq in 2014, but have since seen their presence largely confined to a few holdouts in Deir Ezzor. Al-Hari also sits along a key route linking the Syrian-Iraqi border, and Iran beyond that, all the way west to the frontier with Lebanon. That road could be crucial for the transport of weapons, equipment, and high-value personnel across territory held by Syria's regime and its regional allies, analysts say. Who was targeted? Iraq's powerful Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force, which has fought IS in Iraq, said 22 of its fighters lost their lives in the strike. The bodies of at least three fighters of the Hezbollah Brigades, part of the Hashed, have been repatriated to southern Iraq, an AFP correspondent said. The group is among several pro-Iran groups present inside Syria including along the border with Iraq, sources within the Hashed said. These groups have fought alongside Damascus regime fighters since the start of Syria's civil war in 2011, before joining the Hashed to expel IS from Iraq in 2014. Story continues Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said Sunday's target was used as "the headquarters of the Iranian forces responsible for the operations in the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor". The deadly raid hit "as a convoy of the Hezbollah Brigades stopped nearby," he said. Who did it? Both Damascus and the Iran backed-Hashed have blamed the US-led coalition fighting IS. But the coalition and the Pentagon denied any involvement. Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said: "The strike was not conducted by the US or the coalition." Instead, a US official pointed the finger at Israel. "We have reasons to believe that it was an Israeli strike," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity on Monday. Last month, Israel launched a large-scale attack on what it said were Iranian targets in Syria, raising fears of a major confrontation. Those strikes followed a barrage of rockets that Israel said was fired towards the occupied Golan by Iranian fighters from Syria. Even before that, Israel had been blamed for a series of strikes inside Syria that killed Iranians, though it has not acknowledged them. If Sunday's strike was carried out by Israel, it would mark a significant escalation against its Iranian foe, said Phillip Smyth, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "If it were the Israelis, then they are sending a signal that we can hit you all the way out there and we can hit a pretty nasty organisation, the Hezbollah Brigades," Smyth told AFP. How did all sides react? Israel declined to comment Tuesday. But just hours before the attack, Israel's premier warned his country would act against Iranian presence in neighbouring Syria. "Iran needs to withdraw from all of Syria," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. "We will take action -- and are already taking action -- against efforts to establish a military presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria both close to the border and deep inside Syria," the prime minister said. "We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria." The Hezbollah Brigades, which lost fighters in the raid, on Tuesday denounced "an aerial strike by the American-Zionist demon" who wants to maintain "IS and its affiliates". "This heinous crime will open the way to a new confrontation with the Zionist entity and the American project, and the Hezbollah Brigades will not hesitate to go towards this confrontation." burs/ah-tgg/mjg/rsc/mm WASHINGTON Two senators who visited the U.S. border with Mexico last weekend described a chaotic and confusing situation meant, in their estimation, to deter asylum seekers from nations like Honduras and El Salvador from accessing legal ports of entry. Those asylum seekers consequently cross the border illegally, at which point they are apprehended, with children separated from parents, according to a new Trump administration policy. Wrenching images of detained children have resulted in bipartisan condemnation, even as President Trump has indicated the policy will remain in place. He has repeatedly and falsely blamed Democrats for the family separations. Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., visited several facilities on the border, where asylum seekers are processed and detained. In a press availability with journalists at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday afternoon, they accused Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen of deliberately slow walking the legal asylum process, which has all but come to a halt. The zero tolerance policy that accompanies illegal crossings, they charge, is equally capricious, intended to discourage immigrants from flocking to the southern U.S. border. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. (Photos: Andrew Harnik/AP, Zach Gibson/Bloomberg via Getty Images) It was absolutely clear we are slow walking, at the port of entry, the effort for individuals to seek asylum, said Merkley. Jeff Sessions has changed what qualifies as asylum, he added. The attorney general, an early supporter of Trumps presidential candidacy, has deemed domestic violence and gang warfare insufficient conditions for seeking asylum. Merkley described the plight of one woman who arrived at a bridge over the Rio Grande that led to a port of entry in McAllen, Texas. A native of Honduras, she had fled because of drug-related violence, and had given birth on the way north. Like most asylum seekers, she was on foot. Recognizing that the wait on the Mexican side of the bridge was likely futile, the woman entered the roadway. Pretending to be a window-washer, the woman moved toward the port of entry on the American side of the bridge a sign of her desperate desire to gain legal asylum, and of the measures she had to take to merely attain that possibility. Her fate is unclear. A staffer in Merkleys office later said the woman has likely been separated from her newborn. Story continues While family separation has received the most attention, Merkley and Van Hollen described a system where wanton cruelty is closely accompanied by what they called strategic inaction. Merkley said that in a meeting with 10 women whod been detained at the Mexico border, there was a general air of despair. Only one had had any conversations with a lawyer, he said. In a visit to a holding facility in Oregon, Merkley found that virtually none of the 123 housed there had been offered legal representation. They had no idea of how this process was going to unfold, Merkley said. The detained asylum seekers did not know whether they would get an asylum hearing, what the criminal consequences would be of having crossed the border illegally and, perhaps most importantly, when they would see their children. Adding to the confusion is the fact that adults are processed by the Department of Homeland Security, while the Department of Health and Human Services deals with children. Immigration authorities had previously used a case-management system for processing some families; the Trump administration ended that practice. Sen. Jeff Merkley speaks to the media outside the Southwest Key-Casa Padre Facility, formerly a Walmart store, in Brownsville, Texas, on June 17. (Photo: Sergio Flores/Bloomberg via Getty Images) All that added up to a grim scene, according to the two Democrats, who visited the border with some counterparts from the U.S. House of Representatives. It did confirm my worst fears about whats been reported, Van Hollen said. The two senators indicated that they were desperate to find a legislative fix that would be palatable both to conservative Republicans and the president himself. Trump has vacillated on what kind of bill he would ultimately sign. He has reportedly been fixated on receiving $25 billion from Congress to build his long-promised border wall, a project he said during the campaign that Mexico would fully fund. Yet the two Democrats also bristled at what they charged was Trump using the images from the border to pressure Congress into resolving the immigration quagmire. The notion of using these kids as leverage in the debate over immigration legislation, Van Hollen said, is despicable. Both Democrats support the Keep Families Together Act, introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein , D-Calif. So do the the rest of the Democrats in the Senate. Republicans, however, have their own proposals, including the Protect Kids and Parents Act, being pushed by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. The White House, meanwhile, has generally stood by its harsh new tactics, even as social media channels and cable news networks have published shocking accounts of families being separated. When you are prosecute the parents for coming in illegally which should happen you have to take the children away, Trump said Tuesday, while at the same time attempting to shift blame to Democrats for his own policy. Merkley said he was unwilling to wait for the November election, in which Democrats could bludgeon their rivals over the unpopular border policy. This is not something that, Oh, lets adjudicate this in November, he said. No, lets turn up the heat and end this right now. Sen. Jeff Merkley speaks to the media in Brownsville, Texas, on June 17. (Photo: Sergio Flores/Bloomberg via Getty Images) _____ Read more from Yahoo News: South Korea and the United States are expected to announce the suspension of large-scale military drills this week, with the provision that they would restart if North Korea failed to keep its promise to denuclearize, news agency Yonhap said on Sunday. The suspension follows President Donald Trump's surprise pledge to end war games after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore last week. The Korean Peninsula is one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world, and below Newsweek takes a look at the strength of the forces deployed there. Trending: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem One means of assessing the strength of the respective militaries is to compare the number of people in the armed forces of each country, and the number of the armaments they possess. GettyImages-663590246 Getty Images North Koreas armed forces outnumber its South Korean neighbors, possessing a two to one advantage when it comes to soldiers and artillery pieces. According to the 2015 report The Military Balance, published by the U.K.-based think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), North Korea has 1.19 million active duty troops to South Koreas 655,000, and 21,000 artillery pieces to South Koreas 11,000. Don't miss: Soccer Has an Intolerance Problem? After Mexicans Yell Anti-Gay Slur, FIFA Opens Investigation The reclusive state spends nearly a quarter of its GDP on its military, according to the U.S. State Department. However, experts say that comparing military strength by number of armaments and soldiers alone doesn't account for the enormous qualitative difference between weapons, with South Korea supplied with state-of-the-art equipment and weapons by its ally the U.S. "A Soviet T-62 tank of the North Korean Army from the late 1960s cannot be on an equal footing with a South Korean K2 Black Panther tank from 2013, Bonn International Center for Conversion expert Martin Bales told Deutsche Welle in 2017. Story continues On paper, Pyongyang has 563 military aircraft at its disposal, however every one spent a short time grounded in 2014 due to problems with maintenance and serviceability, and the state is reliant on obsolescent army and naval weaponry, according to the IISS. Most popular: Kirstjen Nielsen Accused of Lying For a Racist by Mika Brzezinski Over Defense of Trump Policy Separating Families The imbalance helps explain North Korea's focus on developing nuclear weapons, which grant it a key advantage over South Korea and were the focus of last week's landmark summit between Kim and Trump. North Korea keeps much of its its armory of missiles, mostly variants of the Soviet scud and some capable of bearing nuclear warheads, trained on South Korean cities, notably the capital Seoul which is only 35 miles from North Korea. South Koreas key advantage is that it falls under the protection of its U.S. ally, with a 28,500-strong military force permanently based in the country. The U.S. millitary's strength dwarfs North Korea's. The U.S. has 6,800 nuclear warheads, 4,000 of which are stockpiled and 1,800 deployed, and 2,800 retired, according to a report from the Federation of American Scientists. This compares to the 60 nuclear warheads North Korea claims to possess. The U.S. has 1.3 million soldiers in active service, and one of the largest military budgets in the world, with soldiers carrying state-of-the art equipment and undergoing intensive training. In contrast, North Korea's soldiers are poorly nourished, with defectors complaining of constant hunger while on military service. Despite recent signs of a thaw in North Korean-U.S. relations and a scale down of U.S.-South Korean military exercises, the soldiers of the three nations remain poised for combat at the first sign of aggression. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Donald Trumps homeland security chief and his Attorney General have said the administration will not apologise for the policy of splitting up migrant families at the border as the president declared the US "will not be a migrant camp". The "zero tolerance" policy at the border, with means all cases of adult illegal entry are sent for criminal prosecution, has led to the separation of parents and children and sparked a nationwide backlash. Defending the approach Mr Trump reiterated the importance of border security. The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility... not on my watch," he said. Before Mr Trump's remarks and less than 24 hours after she insisted the government did not have a policy of separating youngsters from their parents, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen backed the policy. We have to do our job. We will not apologise for doing our job, she said, speaking in New Orleans to the National Sheriffs Association. This administration has a simple message: If you cross the border illegally, we will prosecute you. Ms Nielsens doubling down on the governments policy came as Mr Trump has faced growing criticism for his a new immigration policy announced in May by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who also addressed the police officers. Mr Sessions said the government "will not encourage migrants to bring children". He said if Mr Trump was given the funding he has requested for construction of a border wall, the problem of illegal immigration would be reduced and officials would not be confronted by "terrible choices" such as splitting up families. According to Mr Sessions' policy, which was backdated to April, anybody stopped entering the country illegally would be criminally charged, even if they were seeking asylum. The criminal charging of parents means they are usually separated from their children. Mr Trump has faced a growing criticism for the new hardline approach, which was reportedly pushed by his right wing policy adviser Stephen Miller. In addition to criticism from the Democrats and social activists, Mr Trump has been condemned by a number of Republican politicians and a large number of members of the clergy. Story continues On Monday, the United Nations top human rights official added his voices to the criticism. Speaking at the opening of a Human Rights Council session in Geneva, Zeid Raad al-Hussein urged the US authorities to end the policy that has seen almost 2,000 children taken from their families in the past six weeks. The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable, said Mr Hussein As images have emerged of the youngsters in tent camps and holding facilities made up of cages, groundswell of opposition to the policy has increased. Over the weekend, Mr Trumps own wife, First Lady Melania Trump, said she hates to see children separated from their families. Meanwhile former first lady Laura Bush, whose husband sought to agree a deal on immigration reform when he was president, wrote an article for the Washington Post in which she voiced a rare public criticism of a man her family is known to be at adds with. I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart, she wrote. Mr Trump, who is due to visit Capitol Hill on Tuesday to discuss two possible immigration bills, has claimed, inaccurately, the policy was established by the previous administration and he can do nothing about it without the cooperation of Democrats to completely overhaul immigration. Critics say Mr Trump is seeking to use the children as leverage as he seeks to push legislators to provide funds to pay for a border wall. While some children were separated by their families during the administrations of Barack Obama and George Bush, last month Mr Sessions announced that officials would start prosecuting all people who tried to cross the border illegally. The new approach meant the Department of Justice would prosecute everyone crossing, even those seeking to make asylum claims. Meanwhile, as he again sought to blame the democrats for the steps being taken by his own administration, Mr Trump took time to attack Angela Merkel of Germany, who has faced dissent from members of her political coalition over her policy of welcoming migrants and asylum seekers, particularly those from countries such as Syria. The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition, he said, adding incorrectly that crime had increased in the country. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture! We dont want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us. Ms Merkels open-door migrant policy is widely blamed for the rise of the right-wing AfD, now the main opposition party in Germanys federal parliament. More than 1.6m migrants, mostly Muslims fleeing wars in the Middle East, have arrived in Germany since 2014. Yet, Reuters said contrary to Mr Trumps assertion, crime has fallen off dramatically in Germany, with the countrys internal ministry reporting last month that criminal offenses in Germany totaled 5.76m in 2017, the lowest number since 1992, leading to the lowest crime rate for the country in more than 30 years. Making America great again wasnt good enough for Donald Trump. Now hes setting his sights on the universe. On Monday, the President announced the U.S. will establish a Space Force as a way for the United States to exercise extraterrestrial dominance, according to Reuters. Our destiny beyond the Earth is not only a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security, Trump said at a White House event attended by former astronaut Buzz Aldrin as well as executives of major aerospace companies. When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space, Trump said. At one point, Trump said the Space Force would be separate but equal to the Air Force, a phrase harkening back to Americas racist past. The idea is not universally supported by members of the Trump administration. Defense Secretary James Mattis blasted the idea last year when it was first proposed by Congress, according to TechCrunch. In a letter to Ohio Representative Mike Turner, one of the leaders of the Space Force initiative in Congress, Mattis said he did not wish to add a separate service that would likely present a narrower and even parochial approach to space operations. Twitter users also had problems with the idea. It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space, SPACE DOES NOT BELONG TO US, YOU MORON! Spotts1701, Space Force Cadet (@Spotts1701) June 18, 2018 Pretty sure Trump's "Space Force" violates some UN treaty but sure whatever they're not even investigating the fact there are concentration camps full of infants so I guess he can do what he wants Kybuprofen (@kylaelena) June 18, 2018 Others thought the president had his priorities screwed up. Story continues @realDonaldTrump So you can sign an executive order to create a ridiculous space force, but you can't perform the same action to stop separating families. I DON'T BELIEVE YOU #TrumpsKidnappingChildren #TrumpConcentrationCamps erotesis (@erotesis) June 18, 2018 Some speculated what was really going on in Trumps mind. Trump: "My plan to separate children from their families is working excellent along the southern border. While I work to spread this action across the world, it is my moral duty to create the Space Force, so we may someday separate alien races from their children as well." Maple Syrup (@Vanatestas) June 18, 2018 i'm guessing somebody finally told @realdonaldtrump about the aliens so now he thinks we need a Space Force (@shoegayzing) June 18, 2018 Others imagined how future generations might react. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. "Hurry, Flash! Thank the stars President Trump created the Space Force back in the 21st Century or we would never be able to escape Ming the Merciless!" pic.twitter.com/CzUQ5Mj6jp Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) June 18, 2018 One guy is pretty sure how Trump came up with the idea. short story: - Trump watches Star Wars - Trump thinks it is a documentary - Trump is told it is not a documentary but everyone is #fakenews and he is the only one that knows the truth - Trump orders the creation of the Space Force The End William Santus (@william_santus) June 18, 2018 One woman called a spade a spade. Space Force sounds like name of a cartoon. Then again, the Trump administration is often cartoonish. Kearsten Holmdale (@vinylcoffeefood) June 18, 2018 Another guy had an idea how the president would sell the idea to the American people. We will build the #SpaceForce and Mars will pay for it! pic.twitter.com/GJGPWC0S7x Andrew Kannely (@COSportsNut) June 18, 2018 One guy insisted that blame be placed with the proper entity: Disney. #spaceforce See @ThatKevinSmith this is what happens when we have a new @starwars film every year You Dont Know (@ShitAboutFuck) June 18, 2018 Also on HuffPost The Grand Tour NASA's Voyager mission took advantage of a once-every-175-year alignment of the outer planets for a grand tour of the solar system. The twin spacecraft revealed details about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- using each planet's gravity to send them on to the next destination. Voyager set the stage for such ambitious orbiter missions as Galileo to Jupiter and Cassini to Saturn. Today both Voyager spacecraft continue to return valuable science from the far reaches of our solar system. Mars This poster imagines a future day when NASA has achieved its vision of human exploration of Mars and takes a nostalgic look back at the great imagined milestones of Mars exploration that will someday be celebrated as historic sites. Ceres Ceres is the closest dwarf planet to the Sun. It is the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, with an equatorial diameter of about 965 kilometers. After being studied with telescopes for more than two centuries, Ceres became the first dwarf planet to be explored by a spacecraft, when NASA's Dawn probe arrived in orbit in March 2015. Dawn's ongoing detailed observations are revealing intriguing insights into the nature of this mysterious world of ice and rock. Europa Astonishing geology and the potential to host the conditions for simple life make Jupiter's moon Europa a fascinating destination for future exploration. Beneath its icy surface, Europa is believed to conceal a global ocean of salty liquid water twice the volume of Earth's oceans. Tugging and flexing from Jupiter's gravity generates enough heat to keep the ocean from freezing. On Earth, wherever we find water, we find life. What will NASA's Europa mission find when it heads for this intriguing moon in the 2020s. First Exoplanet While there is much debate over which exoplanet discovery is considered the "first," one stands out from the rest. In 1995, scientists discovered 51 Pegasi b, forever changing the way we see the universe and our place in it. The exoplanet is about half the mass of Jupiter, with a seemingly impossible, star-hugging orbit of only 4.2 Earth days. Not only was it the first planet confirmed to orbit a sun-like star, it also ushered in a whole new class of planets called Hot Jupiters: hot, massive planets orbiting closer to their stars than Mercury. Today, powerful observatories like NASA's Kepler space telescope will continue the hunt of distant planets. Venus The rare science opportunity of planetary transits has long inspired bold voyages to exotic vantage points a journeys such as James Cook's trek to the South Pacific to watch Venus and Mercury cross the face of the Sun in 1769. Spacecraft now allow us the luxury to study these cosmic crossings at times of our choosing from unique locales across our solar system. Earth There's no place like home. Warm, wet and with an atmosphere that's just right, Earth is the only place we know of with life -- and lots of it. JPL's Earth science missions monitor our home planet and how it's changing so it can continue to provide a safe haven as we reach deeper into the cosmos. Enceladus The discovery of Enceladus' icy jets and their role in creating Saturn's E-ring is one of the top findings of the Cassini mission to Saturn. Further Cassini mission discoveries revealed strong evidence of a global ocean and the first signs of potential hydrothermal activity beyond Earth -- making this tiny Saturnian moon one of the leading locations in the search for possible life beyond Earth. Jupiter The Jovian cloudscape boasts the most spectacular light show in the solar system, with northern and southern lights to dazzle even the most jaded space traveler. Jupiter's auroras are hundreds of times more powerful than Earth's, and they form a glowing ring around each pole that's bigger than our home planet. Revolving outside this auroral oval are the glowing, electric footprints of Jupiter's three largest moons. NASA's Juno mission will observe Jupiter's auroras from above the polar regions, studying them in a way never before possible. Kepler-16b Like Luke Skywalker's planet "Tatooine" in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Depicted here as a terrestrial planet, Kepler-16b might also be a gas giant like Saturn. Prospects for life on this unusual world aren't good, as it has a temperature similar to that of dry ice. But the discovery indicates that the movie's iconic double-sunset is anything but science fiction. Kepler-186f Kepler-186f is the first Earth-size planet discovered in the potentially "habitable zone" around another star, where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. Its star is much cooler and redder than our Sun. If plant life does exist on a planet like Kepler-186f, its photosynthesis could have been influenced by the star's red-wavelength photons, making for a color palette that's very different than the greens on Earth. This discovery was made by Kepler, NASA's planet hunting telescope. PSO J318.5-22 Discovered in October 2013 using direct imaging, PSO J318.5-22 belongs to a special class of planets called rogue, or free-floating, planets. Wandering alone in the galaxy, they do not orbit a parent star. Not much is known about how these planets come to exist, but scientists theorize that they may be either failed stars or planets ejected from very young systems after an encounter with another planet. These rogue planets glow faintly from the heat of their formation. Once they cool down, they will be dancing in the dark. A Super Earth Twice as big in volume as the Earth, HD 40307g straddles the line between "Super-Earth" and "mini-Neptune" and scientists aren't sure if it has a rocky surface or one that's buried beneath thick layers of gas and ice. One thing is certain though: at eight time the Earth's mass, its gravitational pull is much, much stronger. Titan Frigid and alien, yet similar to our own planet billions of years ago, Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has a thick atmosphere, organic-rich chemistry and a surface shaped by rivers and lakes of liquid ethane and methane. Cold winds sculpt vast regions of hydrocarbon-rich dunes. There may even be cryovolcanoes of cold liquid water. NASA's Cassini orbiter was designed to peer through Titan's perpetual haze and unravel the mysteries of this planet-like moon. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Cairo (AFP) - Egyptian prosecutors on Tuesday ordered the detention of prominent activist Mohamed Adel for 15 days over allegations that he spread "false information and incited violence", his lawyer said. The lawyer, Gamal Eid, who heads the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, said "the prosecution did not specify the nature of the false information". Adel was one of the founding members of the April 6 protest movement that spearheaded the 2011 uprising, which forced longtime president Hosni Mubarak from power. In December 2013, he was handed a three-year prison term for violating a law on demonstrations, and was released early last year after serving out the sentence. A growing number of activists have been detained in Egypt in recent months. In May, Egyptian police arrested Hazim Abdelazim, a one-time campaigner for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi who became a critic of the former military chief. That came only days after the arrest of Egyptian blogger and journalist Wael Abbas, known for standing up against police violence. Abbas's arrest followed that of two other bloggers earlier in the same month: Sherif Gaber and Shadi Abuzeid. Since 2013, international human rights groups have criticised Sisi's government for cracking down on secular and left-wing activists. The Egyptian government has rejected the accusations. It says its priority is to reform the economy and fight "terrorism", and accuses its detractors of seeking to harm Egypt's interests. The UN rights office this month criticised "significant escalation" in an Egyptian crackdown on social dissent, saying arbitrary detention had become a "chronic problem" in the country. Spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said a long line of prominent bloggers, journalists, lawyers and activists were among those detained since Egypt's General Prosecutor in February ordered prosecutors to monitor social media sites that "spread lies and fake news". Brussels (AFP) - The EU is considering setting up "disembarkation platforms" outside the bloc to process migrants, according to draft summit conclusions seen Tuesday by AFP, as Brussels tries to solve a political crisis over immigration. European Union leaders meeting in Brussels next week will be asked to approve the creation of centres to assess migrants trying to reach the bloc and decide which are refugees in need of protection and which are economic migrants who should be returned to their home countries. Immigration looks set to dominate the June 28 and 29 gathering, after Italy's new rightwing government refused to accept a boatload of migrants rescued from the Mediterranean and hardliners in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition gave her an ultimatum to get tough on the issue. "The European Council supports the development of the concept of regional disembarkation platforms in close cooperation with UNHCR and IOM," the draft conclusions seen by AFP say, referring to the United Nations refugee agency and the International Organisation for Migration. "Such platforms should provide for rapid processing to distinguish between economic migrants and those in need of international protection, and reduce the incentive to embark on perilous journeys." The conclusions were drawn up by European Council President Donald Tusk in cooperation with Bulgaria, which holds the rotating EU presidency, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and would need unanimous approval by all 28 member states. The proposal, which may be revised before going before leaders at the summit, does not specify what form the processing centres would take or where they would be located, but an EU official indicated they would be set up in countries outside the bloc. Another European source told AFP that Tunisia was one country being considered to host the centres. Albania has also been mentioned in the past when similar ideas have been floated. Story continues EU states have been deadlocked for two years in efforts to reform asylum rules which currently require the countries where migrants first arrive in the bloc to process their asylum requests. Italy, Greece and Spain are the main entry points to Europe for the influx of migrants fleeing war and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. Rome's hardline new government has taken a tough stance, saying it will not become "Europe's refugee camp". EU cooperation deals with Turkey and Libya, the main transit countries, have helped to slow, at least for now, the flow of migrants to Europe since the peak of the crisis in 2015. Leaders will also be asked next week to approve stepping up support for the Libyan coastguard, according to the conclusions. Last week's row over the fate of more than 600 migrants on the Aquarius rescue boat has thrust the migrant issue back to the top of the EU agenda. Italy refused to let the vessel dock at its ports, prompting French President Emmanuel Macron to accuse Rome of "cynicism and irresponsibility". Luxembourg (AFP) - French far-right leader Marine Le Pen must repay nearly 300,000 euros to the European Parliament for funds paid incorrectly to an assistant, a top EU court ruled on Tuesday. The General Court of the European Union, the bloc's second-highest tribunal, rejected a bid by Le Pen to overturn a ruling that she had wrongly used parliamentary funds to pay an aide who was based at her party's headquarters in Paris. The Luxembourg-based court said in a statement that it "confirms the decision of the European Parliament to recover from Marine Le Pen MEP almost 300,000 euros ($347,000) for the employment of a parliamentary assistant, on the ground that she did not prove the effectiveness of that assistants work". Le Pen, who lost the 2016 French presidential election in a run-off with Emmanuel Macron, provided no evidence "of any activity whatsoever on the part of the parliamentary assistant that comes under parliamentary assistance, which she moreover acknowledged during the hearing," the court said. Le Pen, who served as an MEP from 2009 to 2017, swiftly announced her intention to take the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the bloc's highest court. "This ruling is based not on the substance of the case but on a procedural aspect. We are going to appeal against this decision," she told AFP. Le Pen's National Rally party -- known until a recent name change as the National Front -- criticised the court's ruling. "When you don't submit evidence the General Court says there was no parliamentary work. When you submit evidence it says it's in the wrong form. Then when you submit the evidence in the right form, it says it's too late," the party said in a statement. In December 2016, the parliament ruled that 298,500 euros had been "unduly" paid to Le Pen over a five-year period for parliamentary assistance provided by her aide Catherine Griset, who was based in Paris and not at parliament, which meets in both Brussels and Strasbourg, eastern France. Story continues The parliament began withholding part of Le Pen's allowances as an MEP to recover the money -- a move that she unsuccessfully challenged in the EU court last year. A source at the European Parliament told AFP that it managed to recover around 60,000 euros from Le Pen before she quit the assembly in 2017. Le Pen is not the only member of the former National Front to run foul of rules on payments to parliamentary aides. Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front, was ordered to repay 320,000 euros in 2016, while parliament has demanded a total of nearly 400,000 from three other MEPs. Quito (AFP) - A court in Quito on Monday ordered testimony from Ecuador's ex-president Rafael Correa, who lives in Belgium, in the investigation of an opposition figure's apparent 2012 kidnapping in Venezuela. Judge Daniella Camacho ordered Correa, who was president from 2007-2017 and now lives in his wife's home country of Belgium, appear in a Quito court every two weeks for the investigation of the kidnapping of former lawmaker Fernando Balda. Correa is believed to have been involved, prosecutors said. Correa's first appearance was ordered for July 2, prosecutors said on Twitter. Correa attorney Caupolican Ochoa said it was "unheard of" and an "abuse" to order someone living in Belgium to testify regularly in Quito. An attorney for Balda, Felipe Rodriguez, said that if Correa does not appear in court, "he'll be on the lam from justice for seven years. And then come back." Rodriguez said that Correa should be in preventive detention until he has been cleared in the case. Earlier, Correa said on Twitter "I don't know what they are linking me with, or to whom. Today they might even order my arrest." Three police intelligence agents have already been ordered arrested in the case; in addition to an ex police commander and a former top intelligence official, arrested Sunday in Spain. Correa, involved in a criminal case in Ecuador for the first time, added on Twitter: "Maybe they can get some false testimony. But they'll never prove anything, because there is nothing." When former First Lady Laura Bush denounced the border policy that has led to the separation of about 2,000 children from their families, in a Washington Post op-ed on Sunday, she drew a parallel between todays news and a hard-learned lesson from the American past. The images of children being detained in a converted Walmart and a tent city on the Texas border, she wrote, are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. Her use of the phrase now considered is worth noting. In that case, it took decades for the White House and lawmakers to admit that the U.S. government had been wrong. Its been just about 30 years since President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. That law paid out reparations of about $20,000 to every survivor of those internment camps to right a grave wrong, as he put it, which the law blamed on racial prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership. But, as noted by Mae Ngai, professor of Asian American Studies and professor of History at Columbia University, the apology and reparations came more than a generation after President Franklin Roosevelts Executive Order 9066 led to the rounding up of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, most of whom were U.S. citizens. At the time of the internment, almost nobody opposed it, says Ngai. There was widespread support for the internment because of racism and because of governments claim that Japanese-Americans were a national security threat. In early 1942, when Roosevelt signed that now-infamous order, the attack on Pearl Harbor of Dec. 7, 1941, was at the top of Americans minds. Many worried that, though actual sabotage was confined to rumor, the tens of thousands of American citizens whose families had come from Japan would turn on them. Roosevelts order allowed the military to exclude people from certain areas in the name of national security, and that translated to removing the Japanese-American population from much of the West Coast and putting them in camps for years. Story continues Some protested at the start. Sen. Robert Taft was notably, according to historian Eric Foners overview of the debate, the only person to speak out in Congress against the order. The Quaker community opposed the move too, and TIME carried a reader letter that asked rhetorically whether there were any greater atrocity in the annals of American history. But the decision generally went down well in Washington. Groups like the NAACP and the American Jewish Committee that might be assumed to have opposed the internment did not speak up, and TIME described the mood on the West Coast as a sigh of relief that Roosevelt was protecting the people. Sen. Taft eventually stopped his protest. And in 1944, in the case of Fred Korematsu, an Oakland-born steel welder who tried and failed to resist the order to relocate, the Supreme Court upheld the idea behind the internment camps. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter It was after the war ended, amid a shift in post-war relations with Japan, Ngai says, that public opinion began to change slowly. As early as the 1950s, once the Communist revolution happened in China, and the Korean War, the U.S. considered Japan its number-one ally, says Ngai. By the early 1960s, TIME referred to the internment camps as an ugly footnote to the story of the war. Even so, the public apology was still decades away; acknowledging that the camps were ugly was not the same as saying they were a bad decision. When the government settled claims for property lost during that period, it avoided passing judgment on FDRs choice. Even though [Japan] was a geopolitical ally, you had, in the 70s and 80s, a protectionist movement similar to what you see today blaming Japanese imports for loss of American jobs, people taking sledgehammers to Toyotas in parking lots and beating up Asian-Americans, like Vincent Chin, the Chinese-American bludgeoned by two auto workers in Detroit, Ngai says. The U.S. has always had a complicated relationship with Japan. It was later in the 1980s, after Congress established a Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, that the public learned the grisly details of the relocation process and life inside the camps, as internees testified at public hearings. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Japanese Americans at the Tule Lake segregation center in 1944. Tule Lake Photo essay by Carl Mydans from the Mar. 20, 1944 issue of LIFE magazine. Tule Lake Photo essay by Carl Mydans from the Mar. 20, 1944 issue of LIFE magazine. Tule Lake Photo essay by Carl Mydans from the Mar. 20, 1944 issue of LIFE magazine. Tule Lake Photo essay by Carl Mydans from the Mar. 20, 1944 issue of LIFE magazine. Tule Lake Photo essay by Carl Mydans from the Mar. 20, 1944 issue of LIFE magazine. Tule Lake Photo essay by Carl Mydans from the Mar. 20, 1944 issue of LIFE magazine. A turning point came when Peter Irons, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego, obtained key documents through a Freedom of Information Act request. The records detailed an internal investigation revealing that the federal government knew that Japanese-Americans werent actually a national security threat at all. In one document, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stated that he could find no evidence to support the War Departments contention that West Coast Japanese were signaling Japanese warships off the coast, according to TIMEs reporting back then. Those revelations formed the basis of a new case for Fred Korematsu. Nearly 40 years later after the original judgment in his case, he was able to show that the government lied to justify the evacuation. The claim that the internment of Japanese-Americans was justified by security concerns had never been based on serious threats. In November of 1983, a federal judge in California vacated his conviction. As TIME summed up the legal perspective on both sides, The Justice Department did not acknowledge any Government misconduct, but decided against fighting the case on the ground that the evacuation program was an unfortunate episode in our nations history that would best be put behind us. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel pronounced the Governments mealymouthed statement tantamount to a confession of error. She added that the Supreme Courts decision was based on unsubstantiated facts, distortions and misrepresentations.' Though the Supreme Court precedent technically still stands, Korematsu was effectively overturned. Five years later, more than four decades after one of his predecessors signed the original order, President Reagan signed the official apology. And that apology was about something bigger than one moment in time. As Congress drafted the legislation for the apology in the spring of 1988, TIME noted, The country is also apologizing to itself for trampling its own core values. Ngai notes that there are some key differences between situation today and how Japanese-Americans were detained during World War II, but she says she sees value in Bushs having drawn the connection. After all, a lesson that took 40 years to be confirmed is one that ought not be forgotten quickly. I dont think its an exact analogy, she says. In general children were not taken from their families in the camps. The families were kept together. But I think the extent to which Mrs. Bush is pointing to a racially motivated attack on peoples human rights, thats certainly valid. Good for her. Washington (AFP) - Five US states are refusing to deploy National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border amid a growing outcry over a controversial immigration policy of President Donald Trump's administration that has led to migrant children being separated from their parents. The Democratic governors of Colorado, New York and Virginia and the Republican governors of Maryland and Massachusetts all said they would not send members of their state's National Guard units for border duty. "We will not be complicit in this ongoing human tragedy," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said Tuesday. "In the face of the federal government's inhumane treatment of immigrant families, New York will not deploy National Guard to the border," Cuomo said on Twitter. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, said he will not send any National Guard resources to the border "until this policy of separating children from their families has been rescinded." Hogan said he had ordered a four-member helicopter crew which had been stationed in the border state of New Mexico to "immediately return" home. "Immigration enforcement efforts should focus on criminals, not separating innocent children from their families," Hogan said. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam said he had ordered the recall of a helicopter and four soldiers from the state National Guard from the border state of Arizona. "When Virginia deployed these resources to the border, we expected that they would play a role in preventing criminals, drug runners and other threats to our security from crossing into the United States -- not supporting a policy of arresting families and separating children from their parents," Northam said. John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor of Colorado, signed an executive order on Monday that forbids the use of state resources "for the purpose of separating any child from his or her parent or legal guardian," a practice he called "cruel and un-American." Story continues And Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, said the policy was "cruel and inhumane," and a National Guard helicopter crew which had been scheduled to go to the border later this month would not be deployed. The Trump administration is facing condemnation at home and abroad for the separations, the product of a "zero-tolerance" policy on undocumented migrants. US officials say more than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents or guardians since early May, when the "zero-tolerance" policy was announced. President Donald Trump defended the policy on Tuesday, saying it was the only effective way to fight illegal immigration. Trump announced plans in April to send thousands of National Guard troops to the border, where they could remain until his promised wall is constructed. Related Video: Governors Refuse To Send Nation Guard to Border Watch news, TV and more on Yahoo View. People in a Texas detention center. (Photo: AP) Things are getting confusing on Fox News regarding the Trump administrations severe new immigration crackdown. All of the channels opinion-ators are obliged to support Trump no matter what. But, darn it, video and now audio of shivering, crying children separated from their parents and locked up in empty, repurposed big-box stores, some of them in cages well, it makes it tricky to keep on backing Trump with Foxs usual clarity of purpose. On Monday morning on Fox & Friends, Steve Doocy began the day as Americas foremost cage-denier: While some have likened them to concentration camps or cages, Doocy said, you do see that they have those thermal blankets. Some have referred to them as cages, but they built walls out of chain-link fences. Heres an idea: Then why not put your son Peter in one of them, Steve? At noon on Monday, a brawl broke out on Foxs Outnumbered, where cracks were beginning to show in the unified front Fox News tries to maintain. While guest Jason Chaffetz defended the forced removal and imprisonment of children, the mono-named Kennedy who can usually be counted upon to toe the party line broke free, sneering sarcastically, Yeah, Im sure all these mini-rapists have bombs strapped to their chests. By Monday night, Tucker Carlson was engaging in his standard tactic, radical whataboutism, asking his audience, what about American lawbreakers who are sent to prison arent they being separated from their children? Yeah, man: America first! Sean Hannity kept his priorities straight: He led off with a hard-hitting segment about Hillary Clintons email server. Of course. But at 10 p.m., Laura Ingraham picked up the slack, insisting that the nationwide protests against the Trump policy was just faux liberal outrage. Ingraham also said the child cages are essentially summer camps [or] boarding schools. She had Attorney General Jeff Sessions on so he could refute the accusation that his kid detention centers are comparable to concentration camps. This is the best he could come up with: Well, its a big exaggeration: In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country. (UPDATE: Noting that her comment got people upset, Ingraham later doubled-down on the boarding school comment, as can be seen here, saying, The San Diego Union Tribune today described the facilities as essentially like what you would expect at a boarding school. So I will stick to there are some of them like boarding schools.) Story continues If what theyre peddling werent so appalling, you might almost feel sorry for these highly paid media stooges for child punishment: The Fox folks have to try to make sense of Trumps words, which on Monday included this illiterate gush: We have the worst immigration laws in the entire world; nobody has such sad, such bad, and actually in many cases such horrible and tough. [sic] You see about child separation, you see whats going on there. Its obvious Trump barely understands the policies he is putting in place hes following the Stephen Miller-Steve Bannon nationalist playbook without, as usual, comprehending the implications of what hes doing. There is no such excuse for Tucker Carlson and the rest of them. They know what theyre up to. Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Angle air weeknights at 8, 9, and 10 p.m., respectively, on Fox News. Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: Meseberg (Germany) (AFP) - France and Germany have agreed to set up a common budget for the eurozone, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday, announcing a key reform proposal to bolster the bloc. The sum will be a "real budget with annual revenues and spending," said French President Emmanuel Macron after talks with the German leader, adding that Paris and Berlin hoped to have it in place by 2021. Macron would not be drawn into giving a figure for the budget, saying that its size would be discussed with other members of the bloc. How it would be funded was also up for discussion with other eurozone members, said Merkel, suggesting that it could involve regular transfers made by individual countries or a tax on financial transactions. Macron had initially sought a budget of several hundred billion euros, but Merkel in a recent interview offered far less, saying that the total should be "at the lower end of the double-digit billions of euros range." JD.com (JD), Chinas second-largest online retailer, closed its 20-day annual shopping festival with record sales of 127.5 billion yuan ($20 billion) on the same day it announced a $550 million cash investment from Google (GOOGL, GOOG). Google will take a less than 1% stake in JD.com. Google and JD.com will benefit from each others technology and valuable market access into the China and U.S. markets, according to analysts. The partnership will also allow both companies to compete in the global e-commerce space, currently dominated by Amazon and Alibaba. The Amazon of China has logistics expertise Richard Liu, CEO and founder of Chinas e-commerce company JD.com. (REUTERS/Jason Lee) Founded in 1998, JD.com, with an Amazon-like business model, is a major Alibaba rival in China. JD.com owns more than half of the products sold on its platform, and uses efficient supply chain and logistics system to set itself apart. Same-day delivery has been available on the website since 2010. The company was once known for its labor-intensive last-mile delivery employees ride an electric tricycle across cities and rural areas. But it has been extensively investing in technology to change that image. JD.com has been testing drones and autonomous vehicles for last-mile delivery and operations to speed up sorting and to automate warehouses. And in November 2017, it launched an AI research initiative with Stanford University. JDs own nationwide Chinese network is a huge differentiator between them and Alibabas Tmall. I think what theyre trying to do is to take that scale and ability to deliver products to not only China, but other markets as well, said Danielle Bailey, head of Asia-Pacific research at consultancy L2. Those experiences could help Google, as the internet giant eyes the booming e-commerce business. As Amazon emerges as a major destination of product searches and eats into Googles ad revenue, Google has rolled out Google Express, a shopping hub where consumers can buy products from major retailers like Walmart and Target without a membership fee. Last week, Google teamed up with Carrefour to allow customers of the French grocery chain to shop online. Story continues Google CEO Sundar Pichai said e-commerce is an area that the company has tremendous interest in and believes it could create flywheel effects when shopping is integrated into Googles cloud and payments infrastructure. I think you will see us make a lot more progress and have a lot more announcements, said Pichai during last Octobers earnings call. And I think we are going to be relentlessly focused on making the buying experience much more seamless for users. Entering each others home market JD.com tests heavy-load drone delivery across a northern Chinese province. (JD.com) JD.com has been aggressively expanding in Southeast Asia and Europe. Last year, it became the largest shareholder of Farfetch, a London-based luxury fashion online retailer. And in April, JD.com launched its Spanish website to target 400 million Spanish-speaking users. In the populous Southeast Asia region, it expanded by investing in local players in Thailand and Vietnam. But the trade tension between Washington and Beijing is making it difficult for JD.com to enter the U.S. At the Davos Forum in January, JD.com CEO Richard Liu complained about protectionism against Chinese firms in the U.S. As part of the deal with Google, JD.com said it will select products to sell through Google Shopping in multiple regions, including the U.S. Since Googles major products and services like search are blocked by the Chinese government, investing in JD.com could be an opportunity for Google to penetrate China. A JD.com spokesperson said China is not an area theyve discussed with Google yet, but anything is possible in the future. By partnering with a local provider, Google is trying to take advantage of the growing market without actually being in the market, said Bailey of L2. And this partnership may be just the beginning. The investment in JD.com signals Google Retail 2.0 is on the way, which entails Google leveraging JD.com to provide customers with access to more products and a better last-mile delivery experience, said Brittain Ladd, a retail and supply chain consultant, adding that more investments could follow. Krystal Hu covers technology and economy for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter. Read more: ZTE, Huawei setbacks havent deterred Chinese smartphone makers from the US market Why Americans arent using their phones to make payments in stores Almost half of Amazon Prime members we surveyed say theyll drop the service, but the company will be fine Eleven U.S. governors including four Republicans have canceled agreements on sending National Guard members and equipment to the nations border with Mexico, rebukes intended to protest the Trump administrations policy of separating children from their parents when the families arrive at the southern boundary as undocumented immigrants. Govs. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), Charlie Baker (R-Mass.) and Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) issued orders Monday barring their respective states from sending resources to the border. On Tuesday, Govs. Gina Raimondo (D-R.I.), Larry Hogan (R-Md.), Chris Sununu (R-N.H.), John Carney (D-Del.), Ralph Northam (D-Va.), Roy Cooper (D-N.C.), Phil Scott (R-Vt.) and Dannel Malloy (D-Conn.) joined the growing protest. The moves nullify agreements the states had with the federal government, reached after President Donald Trump signed a proclamation in April ordering National Guard troops to help protect the border with Mexico. The Trump Administrations family separation policy is immoral, unjust and un-American, Raimondo said in a statement. Children should be with their families, not trapped in cages, sobbing and calling out for their parents. Prior to the cancellations, Massachusetts intended to send a UH-72 Lakota helicopter and flight crew to the border for duty through September, radio station WBUR reported. That accord was nixed over what Bakers communications director Lizzy Guyton characterized as the federal governments inhumane treatment of children. Maryland, which had a helicopter and four crew members already in service on the border in New Mexico, recalled the unit on Tuesday; Virginia did likewise with a similar deployment. North Carolina, which had three National Guard members deployed on the border, also recalled them on Tuesday. Carney said Delaware was asked Tuesday to send National Guard troops to the border and he declined. Under normal circumstances, we wouldnt hesitate to answer the call, he said. But given what we know about the policies currently in effect at the border, I cant in good conscience send Delawareans to help with that mission. Story continues U.S. Border Patrol agents take a father and son from Honduras into custody near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12 near Mission, Texas. The asylum seekers were then sent to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing center for possible separation. (Photo: John Moore via Getty Images) Its unclear what resources, if any, Colorado, New York, Rhode Island and New Hampshire had committed to the effort, meaning the governors gesture is mostly symbolic at this point. Hickenlooper did previously say hed consider sending troops to the border if the federal government asked for them. At a Monday afternoon press conference, Hickenlooper said he wasnt aware of any state resources being used to separate immigrant families, but his executive order is a rebuke nonetheless. I think its fair to say its a rebuke, Hickenlooper said. But its also just saying: Its not going to happen in our backyard. We are very clear that this is not something that is acceptable. Its hard for me to imagine that this is happening in the United States of America at the scale it is at any scale. In an emailed statement, Cuomos office called the Trump administrations policies a moral outrage and an affront to the values that built this state and this nation. From April 19 through May 31, border officials forcibly separated nearly 2,000 immigrant children from their parents or guardians, a policy Attorney General Jeff Sessions has defended by citing the Bible. This article has been updated with the additions of Vermont and Connecticut. Related... The Courthouse Door Is Shut To Immigrant Children Who Need Lawyers We Are All Immigrants Sarah Huckabee Sanders Cites Bible As Reason To Detain Immigrant Children Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. I thought, Not today. There was no way I was going to die, 46-year-old grandmother DeDe Phillips of Hart County, Georgia, tells the Athens-Banner Herald of her terrifying encounter with a rabid bobcat on June 7. The wild animal attack, which was unprovoked, occurred in Phillips yard around 6 p.m. The woman had walked out of the house with her cell phone, wondering why her neighbors dog was barking. She soon realized why: a bobcat, which is local to the rural area, was on the prowl. Phillips took a quick photo, and the cat took two steps and was on top of me It came for my face, she says. Fortunately for Phillips, she has a knowledge of the wild cats from her father-in-law, who was once a trapper. She knew the large feline would go for her upper body, so she protected herself by squeezing on its throat. After a frightening battle that resulted in a broken finger, many bites and claw wounds to her face, hands, arms, chest and legs, Phillips finally managed to strangle the cat. She didnt call for help because her 5-year-old granddaughter was in the house. I was scared if I screamed for help that my granddaughter would come out and I didnt want that to happen, she said. Phillips refused to let go of her grip on the cat, fearing it may not actually be dead. But she did scream for her daughter-in-law, who called 911. Her son eventually arrived and stabbed the cat multiple times before his mother would release the animals lifeless body. Once the local police and emergency services came to the scene, Phillips drove herself to the Northeast Georgia Medical Center for attention. The next day, she found out the big cat was rabid. Phillips has since begun a round of rabies shots. Though Phillips counts herself as very lucky, the rabies treatment is quite costly, around $10,000 for the first round and she expects to pay more to continue to treat her wounds. Her cousin, Amy Leann Mize, set up a Fundly.com account on behalf of her relative. Those who want to donate to this tough womans medical treatment can find more information at fundly.com/let-s-help-dede. Story continues Though the fund has already surpassed its goal, it appears that every little bit will help Phillips. On Monday, her cousin posted an update on her condition: We also wanted to tell everyone she went to the orthopedic doctor today and they are preparing to do surgery on her hands after her last round of shots Friday. I asked her was there anything she wanted me to post with this update and this was her response: Just let everyone know that Im over whelmed at everyones help and the bobcat didnt scare me, but the idea of surgery does! Now Im nervous! So please continue to keep her in your thoughts and prayers as she still has a ways to go! Thanks again!!!! Ironically, Phillips had posted a bumper sticker on her truck on the same day of the animal attack which reads: Women who behave rarely make history. She now has the wild animal battle scars to prove it. Lucas Butler, 15, holding sign, protests the separation of immigrant families at the U.S. border, in Austin, Texas. (Photo: Amanda Voisard/American-Statesmen) In response to President Trumps zero-tolerance policy for illegal immigration that is separating children from their parents, Americans are mobilizing to help, raising money for groups that provide legal support for the detainees. A couple from California started a campaign on Facebook to raise money for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES). The couple, Dave and Charlotte Willner, started their goal at $1,500 and quickly surpassed that as their page went viral. The total as of Thursday was over $15 million. These children dont know where their parents are, they wrote on the Facebook page. Their parents arent allowed to communicate with them while in custody. The government hasnt set up a system to reunite separated parents and children if one or both are ultimately released. In many cases, parents have been deported without their children sometimes, young children are deported without their parents. RAICES, based in Texas, uses the money for bail bonds, which are set at a minimum of $1,500. The organization also provides legal services for immigrants. The Texas Civil Rights Project communications director Zenen Jaimes Perez said their organization has received an outpouring of support. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set up a Facebook page on behalf of TCRP that has raised over $11,000. Weve seen an overwhelming amount of support, and for us it helps because weve been able to do so much with so little staff and resources, and this is very much a needed boost, Perez said. He said they have gone to the courthouse every day to meet the families and offer their support. On a personal level, I think its one of the most emotionally draining things Ive ever done, Perez said. Were talking to people for seven to 10 minutes, asking them for information and telling us their story. Many of them have horrific violence in their home country. TCRP made an appeal to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of five families. The commission, part of the Organization of American States, released a statement on Monday that expresses concern over migration and asylum policies and measures recently adopted in the United States. Perez said he expects to hear more from the commission this week. Story continues Every controversial immigration policy that is happening out of D.C. hits the hardest in a state like Texas, he said. Mostly because this is where most newcomers are arriving. A group called Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), raises money to provide legal representation specifically for unaccompanied children in deportation proceedings. The Young Center for Immigrant Childrens Rights recently announced a project to assign two attorneys to take on individual childrens cases and also advocate for the end of the zero-tolerance policy. Several high-profile figures have made donations. Former first lady Hillary Clinton donated through ActBlue Charities, a donor tool for progressive policies and values, which divided the donation evenly among seven different organizations, including RAICES and KIND. Clinton tweeted that it surpassed $500,000. Model Chrissy Teigen and her husband, musician John Legend, raised more than $1 million for the American Civil Liberties Union from their fans, after she asked her Twitter followers to pitch in. The appeal was made on June 14 in honor of Trumps birthday. Heres how you can help: Donate: RAICE, KIND and the ACLU take donations to help provide legal support and bail bond money to immigrants. The Texas Civil Rights Project is also working to reunite families. The Florence Project specifically helps detained immigrants in Arizona. The Young Center for Immigrant Childrens Rights provides child advocates for young immigrants. Provide supplies to the children: Baby2Baby and KIND set up a registry at Target that provides necessities such as diapers, formula, shampoo, clothing and other items. Volunteer: TCRP is looking for volunteers who have legal assistance or paralegal experience and speak Spanish, Mam, Qeqchi or Kiche. The Young Center looks for volunteers to be child advocates, who visit with the children and accompany them, in Chicago, Houston, San Antonio, Harlingen, Phoenix, New York and Washington D.C. They particularly would like volunteers who speak Spanish. _____ Read more from Yahoo News: By Sofia Menchu GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Guatemala on Sunday ended its victim search efforts in the zone that suffered most deaths and injuries from the Fuego volcano eruption, its disaster agency said. At least 110 people died and 197 are still missing after violent eruptions that began two weeks ago, according to disaster agency CONRED. "The search efforts are permanently suspended in the towns San Miguel Los Lotes and El Rodeo in the Escuintla municipality... the zone is uninhabitable and high risk," CONRED said in a statement on Sunday. The Fuego volcano, whose name means "Fire" in Spanish, is emitting four or five minor explosions daily and shooting columns of ash up to 15,420 feet (4,700 meters) above sea level, CONRED said. Escuintla is operating 12 shelters for nearly 2,800 people displaced from homes that were swallowed by ash and dirt, while more than 770 people are staying in shelters in nearby areas. Some survivors lost nearly all members of extended families after the volcano sent fast-moving currents of dust, lava and gas down its slopes in its greatest eruption in four decades. (Writing by Daina Beth Solomon; editing by Diane Craft) Brasilia (AFP) - Brazil's Supreme Court on Tuesday acquitted the head of the once-dominant leftist Workers' Party of charges of corruption and money laundering. Gleisi Hoffmann, a senator, is the latest in a long string of high-ranking politicians, including many from the Workers' Party, caught up in Brazil's sprawling "Car Wash" corruption probe. Her husband Paulo Bernardo, a former planning and communications minister, stood trial at the Supreme Court as part of the same case against Hoffmann. He, too, was found not guilty. Prosecutors accused the couple of receiving a million reais in 2010, or $568,000 at the time, embezzled from state oil company Petrobras. The money from the company was allegedly used in a campaign slush fund. Investigators have uncovered a huge web of corruption centered on Petrobras, with the company handing out inflated contracts to Brazilian companies in exchange for bribes, many of which went into politicians' pockets. Hoffmann's acquittal was a sweet win for the battered party which led Brazil between 2003 and 2016 under presidents Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. Lula, who founded the Workers' Party, was imprisoned in April after being convicted of corruption. Rousseff is out of politics, having been impeached and removed from office in 2016. Hoffmann, who took over the party leadership in June 2017, said in a statement before the verdict that she had been "unjustly accused, with no evidence." By Nelson Renteria SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - Honduras called on Monday for the United States to stop separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. border, while El Salvador warned that the policy puts children's health at risk and could cause psychosocial scars. El Salvador's foreign ministry said in a statement that the Trump administration's hardline policy of separating immigrant parents and children violated human rights and "strongly urged" for an end to the practice. "These provisions are mainly affecting migrant children and adolescents ... exposing them to extremely adverse conditions, which will surely have consequences in their physical health and long-term psychosocial development," the statement said. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has responded to an increase in immigration from Central America with a "zero tolerance" migration policy that provides for the arrest of all adults caught trying to enter the United States illegally, including those seeking asylum. Images of children and youths sitting in concrete-floored cages in U.S. detention centers have fanned outrage over the policy. Trump administration officials have defended the policy as a way to secure the border and deter illegal immigrants. Official figures indicate that from mid-April to May, U.S. authorities have divided more than 2,000 children from their families. Many are from Central America, where immigrants are fleeing poverty and widespread gang violence. El Salvador insisted parents had the right to know where their children were and asked that consular officials be "speedily" notified of where the children have been taken. Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez on Monday also called for an end to the family separations after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, echoing the call that children's rights should come first. "We can also see how many leaders, from both parties in Congress ... have also emphasized that this should not continue," he said, calling on U.S. lawmakers to take action. U.S. Democrats blasted conditions in detention centers while the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives moved toward voting later this week on two pieces of immigration-related legislation. For its part, the government of Guatemala, which has tried to show support for Trump and backed his decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, refrained from criticism. "We are respectful of foreign policy on migration issues," Guatemalan presidential spokesman Heinz Heimann told a news conference. (Additional reporting by Sofia Menchu in GUATEMALA CITY and Gustavo Palencia in TEGUCIGALPA; Editing by Simon cameron-Moore) A New York Congressman will unveil legislation tomorrow that would prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from separating families at the border and delay the prosecution process for immigrants seeking asylum. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is introducing the Keep Families Together Act on Tuesday, the lower chambers companion to a bill Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced in the Senate, which has garnered universal support from the Democrats in that chamber. Like the version in the Senate, the bill calls for prohibiting Department of Homeland Security Officials from separating children from their parents, unless parental rights have been terminated or authorities have determined that being with the parent keeps the child in danger; requires border patrol officials to undergo annual child welfare training; and mandates that DHS develop procedures to reunite parents with their children. But it goes further than the Senate bill by explicitly calling for a delay in prosecution for immigrants seeking asylum. The primary reason for the majority of these separations is zero tolerance policy Attorney General Jeff Sessions implemented last month. Under this rule, all border crossings are referred for criminal prosecution, which has resulted in the parents who are apprehended being forcibly separated from their children while they enter the legal process. By calling for a restriction on these prosecutions, Nadler and the House Democrats are hoping to circumspect this entire dynamic. What the bill says in effect is that if someone allegedly enters the country illegally, and claims asylum, the prosecution and therefore the arrest for the misdemeanor of the illegal entry cannot be pursued while the political asylum claim is being pursued, Nadler said in an interview with TIME Monday. Its the prosecution that triggers separation because the prosecution triggers your arrest which triggers your separation. Were saying you cant arrest the person until you have a negative finding on the claim for asylum. Story continues Nadler had been working on the legislation for at least two weeks. But he is introducing it just two days after he orchestrated a fathers day visit with six of his colleagues to an immigrant detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where they spent nearly an hour meeting with individuals who had been separated from their children. While the outrage about the separation of these families has reached a fever pitch in the country, it is virtually impossible, however, that this version of the bill becomes law. Nadlers bill had garnered 100 co-sponsors from Democratic lawmakers as of Monday afternoon over half the Houses caucus, including House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi. But it would need another 118 votes, which would mean Republican support, to even advance to the Senate, where its chances would be even slimmer of passing. Although all Democrats have signed on to Feinsteins legislation, this bill has stronger language, and would need 11 votes from Republican senators. If it were to pass the Senate, President Trump would need to sign it into law, and its unlikely, based on his past statements, that he would be amenable to any form of an immigration bill if it did not also include other measures like border security funding. (Reuters) - Over 2,300 children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border between May 5 and June 9 under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said on Tuesday, and immigration advocates and legal experts say there is no clear system in place to reunite them. The policy directs border officials to refer for prosecution all immigrants apprehended while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Parents who are no longer detained "are entitled to get their kids back through a documented process," U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said. When are children and parents separated? Immigrants arrested near the southwestern border are taken to processing centers where officials refer some to federal court to be prosecuted under the U.S. criminal entry statute. Parents referred for prosecution are transferred into U.S. Marshals custody and separated from their children. Immigrants charged with the misdemeanor crime of illegal entry often plead guilty in group hearings and receive a sentence of a few days in prison or "time served," at which point they are transferred back to a processing facility and quickly deported unless they claim a "credible fear" of returning to their home country. Meanwhile, their children are transferred into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), part of the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages facilities that care for minors. There are 100 sites scattered across 17 states and they can be on the other side of the country from their parents. Children get their own case in immigration court and are entitled to a full hearing by an immigration judge, a process that can take months. How can parents contact their children? U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said it has posted information in all facilities at which parents are detained for over 72 hours, advising them to call a hotline for assistance in finding their child. The agency said it will work together with ORR to locate separated children, verify the relationship and set up regular communication and removal coordination if necessary. There are two hotlines, one run by ICE and one by ORR. Advocates say the wait times on these calls can be upwards of 30 minutes and parents are required to call back when a child cannot immediately be located. How can the parents be reunited with their children? ICE said it "will make every effort to reunite the child with the parent" once the parent's case has been adjudicated. If the parent is being deported, ICE said it will work with ORR to reunite them with their child at the time of deportation and with the consulate representing their country to assist the parent with obtaining a travel document for the child. In some cases, the parent may decide they want their child to stay in the United States to pursue their own asylum claim, or the child may themselves choose to seek asylum. In other cases, children may ask to return to their home countries to be reunited with their parents. Advocates said the reunification process is ad hoc. Anthony Enriquez, director of the unaccompanied minors program for Catholic Charities Community Services in New York said there was no systematic effort in place to ensure the children and their parents are reunited. "I go to court to tell the judges this under oath," Enriquez said. "There's no process." He said reunification relies on individual government officials who go above and beyond their duties to help the families reunite or a lawyer from a non-governmental legal organization doing that work. Robert Carey, who ran the Office for Refugee Resettlement under President Barack Obama said he would be surprised if systems were in place for reunifying families as the new zero tolerance policy was put in place quickly and "it takes time to coordinate across multiple agencies." Have parents been deported without their children? Immigration attorneys say there have been many cases of parents deported without their children. The advocacy group Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) said of the 40 case referrals involving family separation they have received since July 2017 through their child migrant return and reintegration project, 32 involved parents deported before their children and 15 of those cases involved children who were five years old or younger. In some cases, parents are deported before finding their children in ORR custody, said Lisa Frydman, a KIND attorney. "We've had other cases where the child goes to ORR and they do not know where parent is, and the parent doesnt know where child is," Frydman said. Some children remain in the United States months after their parents are being deported, she said. Parents who have been deported back to countries such as Guatemala and Honduras without their children are reaching out to local organizations asking for help locating them. (Reporting by Kristina Cooke in San Francisco, Reade Levinson in New York and Yeganeh Torbati in Washington; editing by Grant McCool) ASUNCION (Reuters) - Incoming Paraguay President Mario Abdo will name his half-brother and former central bank board member Benigno Lopez as finance minister when he is sworn in on August 15, the transition team said on Tuesday. Lopez, a lawyer, ran the landlocked South American country's social security agency under the administration of current President Horacio Cartes. Major changes to Paraguay's economic policy are not expected under Abdo, who is a member of Cartes' conservative Colorado party. Abdo had previously announced that Lopez would play an important role in his government. Future interior minister Juan Ernesto Villamayor defended Abdo's decision to name a family member as finance minister, arguing in broadcast comments that Lopez was qualified for the job. Paraguay's economy has grown under Cartes thanks to a booming agricultural sector and new infrastructure investments, financed in part by the country's first international bonds. Gross domestic product grew 4.3 percent in 2017 and is expected to expand 4.5 percent this year, according to the central bank. Still, the country remains one of the poorest and most unequal in the region. (Reporting by Daniela Desantis; Writing by Luc Cohen, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien) LONDON (Reuters) - The possible withdrawal of French oil major Total from Iran's South Pars gas field has not slowed down the project, a senior Iranian official said, adding that Tehran is in talks with Russias Gazprom over the development of two other fields. U.S. President Donald Trump said in May that the United States would impose new sanctions against Iran, a major oil and gas producer, after abandoning a 2015 agreement with Tehran. Total said that it would pull out of the multi-billion dollar South Pars project if it did not receive a waiver from the United States to protect it from sanctions that Washington might impose on companies doing business with Iran. "This claim that the development of phase II of the South Pars field has been stopped because of Total is not correct and everything is going according to plan," Gholamreza Manouchehri, deputy head of the National Iranian Oil Company, was quoted as saying by state news agency IRNA on Tuesday. Manouchehri said if Total walks away from the South Pars field, Chinese state-owned energy major CNPC, which already holds a 30 percent stake in the field, will take over. He said if both leave, PetroPars, a subsidiary of the national oil company, is prepared to step in. Manouchehri also said Iran was in talks with Russia's Gazprom over the development of the Azar and Changuleh oilfields. He added that Iran plans to increase the production potential of its oilfields by 400,000 barrels per day (bpd). "By implementation of 34 projects in different fields, more than 400,000 bpd will be added to production potential of the Iranian oilfields," Manouchehri said, noting that the value of the projects was more than $6 billion. The U.S. sanctions on Irans petroleum industry will take effect after a 180-day "wind-down period" ending on Nov. 4, but many European refiners, as well as buyers in Asia, are already curbing their Iranian oil purchases. (Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; editing by Louise Heavens and Jason Neely) Senior members of the Israeli military, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), said that they do not think its a good idea to target Palestinians using flaming kites and balloons to protest Israel, according to reports. The IDF officials reportedly told Israeli politicians Sunday that targeting the protesters launching the flaming kites would lead to too many casualties and to further violence. Protesters in the Gaza Strip have been lighting kites and other floating objects on fire and launching them across the border wall that separates Gaza from Israel. The kites have started over a dozen fires and Israelis living in the area have urged the government to address the issue. Trending: David Hogg Calls For Laura Ingraham Advertising Boycott After 'Summer Camp' Comments Some Israeli media outlets dubbed the exchange of fire the "kite war." There have been no reported injuries from the fires, but Israels government says the burning objects have caused millions of dollars of damage to farmland. Instead of targeting the people launching the kites, Israels military has now opted to launch an attack on Hamas, the organization that controls Gaza. The attacks on Hamas targets began early Monday morning and allegedly targeted military compounds and facilities manufacturing weapons. 967831760 Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images Don't miss: Python Strangles Forest Officer As He Poses For Selfie With it Wrapped Around His Neck This change in tactic happened after months of violence that lead to the death of numerous Palestinians, including a 13-year-old boy who died of injuries on Monday. He had been shot in the stomach by members of Israels military during demonstrations several weeks ago, according to officials. Story continues Protests began along the border area between Gaza and Israel in March to mark Land Day, an annual day of commemoration on which Palestinians march for the right to return to their ancestral land. The protesters set up a tent city along the border between Gaza and Israel. In response, Israels military deployed snipers and pledged to shoot any Palestinians trying to cross into Israel illegally. Members of the IDF claimed that Hamas was trying to send protesters into Israel to attack civilians, and it was their duty to protect their homeland. Still, dozens of civilians died during the months of demonstrations, including a baby girl who choked on tear gas. On the bloodiest day of protests, which took place in mid-May, at least 37 Palestinians were killed and around 1,600 were wounded. Officials in Gaza have said that around 125 have been killed by Israeli troops since March. Most popular: Donald Trump Administration Can't Get Child Separation 'Policy' Messaging Straight Also on Monday, Hamas launched three rockets from Gaza into Israel. The Gaza Strip is an impoverished piece of land located between Israel and Egypt. Both countries have maintained a blockade that has kept the territorys 2 million inhabitants isolated from the outside world. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Israel has arrested former energy minister Gonen Segev on suspicion of spying for Iran, Israeli media reported Monday. Police arrested Segev last month on suspicion of assisting the enemy in a time of war, and of spying against the State of Israel following an investigation by Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency. GettyImages-3456731 Getty Images Trending: A Rare Black Hole Just Swallowed A Star The Jerusalem District Prosecutor's Office filed an indictment against Segev Friday, accusing him of aiding an enemy country, spying against Israel and passing multiple messages to an enemy. Segev served as energy and infrastructure minister from 1992 to 1995, and had been living in Nigeria. He was arrested during a visit to Equatorial Guinea in May and extradited to Israel, where he was indicted. In 2005, Segev was jailed for trying to smuggle 30,000 ecstasy tablets into Israel from the Netherlands, and forging a diplomatic passport, according to reports. He was released in 2007. Don't miss: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem Police in Equatorial Guinea had refused Segev entry to the country because of his criminal record, and handed him over to Israeli police. He was arrested on his arrival back in Israel on suspicion that he had been working as an Iranian intelligence operative. According to investigators, Segev had been initially cultivated as an asset by sources in the Iranian embassy in Nigeria. He is accused of traveling twice to Iran to meet his handlers. Most popular: Soccer Has an Intolerance Problem? After Mexicans Yell Anti-Gay Slur, FIFA Opens Investigation Segev, it said, received an encrypted communications system from Iranian agents and supplied Iran with information related to the energy sector, security sites in Israel and officials in political and security institutions." Story continues The Shin Bet said Segev, 62, put some Israelis involved in the security sector in contact with Iranian intelligence agents, introducing the Iranians as businessmen. Segevs attorneys, contacted by Reuters, declined to comment. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Ivanka Trump has been laying low during the explosive controversy over her fathers zero-tolerance immigration and family-separation policy. But a silver gown thats become a symbol to many of her disconnect on these issues has thrust her back into the spotlight. On Tuesday, Orli Matlow, a comedian and staff writer for Someecards, tweeted a photo split-screen: on one side, the first daughter wearing a $5,000 silver Carolina Herrera gown from January 2017; on the other, a detention center in McAllen, Texas, housing immigrant children separated from their families and wrapped in silver thermal blankets, lying on the floor. Who wore it better: Children detained in McAllen, Texas or Ivanka Trump pic.twitter.com/atifVrteeY Orli Matlow (@HireMeImFunny) June 18, 2018 Who wore it better: Children detained in McAllen, Texas or Ivanka Trump, wrote Matlow in the post, which has amassed more than 27,000 retweets and 67,000 likes. The tweet then inspired other jokes about the outfit, comparing it to a popcorn aluminum pan, Hersheys Kisses, and a burrito wrapped in tinfoil. She looks like a jiffy pop popcorn container. pic.twitter.com/Tb8TShEs9n I'm That Type Of Guy (@Marrrrcussss) June 18, 2018 Okay, but can can we just take a moment to acknowledge this flawless ad placement pic.twitter.com/hcrGDSpabY cool garbage (@EmmittZee) June 18, 2018 Who wore it better? pic.twitter.com/mb4kglsGxX Paul Huntley (@alltimeseastern) June 18, 2018 Ivanka, who serves as a special adviser to the president, originally wore the gown on Jan. 29, 2017, on her way to dinner with her husband, Jared Kushner, and two days after President Trump announced an executive order dubbed the Muslim ban. The policy barred people from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen from entering the United States, and was widely denounced as racist. The news sparked protests at airports around the country and blowback from the public, including judges and former President Barack Obama; a ruling on the travel ban is expected from the Supreme Court later in June. Story continues In response to the original photo, Ivanka was called insensitive for wearing a high-priced gown while many were negatively affected by her fathers ban. One day later, a source told Vanity Fair that the photo was idiotic and displayed naivete in not understanding her surroundings or circumstances. Ivanka is currently in Los Angeles to attend a GOP fundraiser, meanwhile Trump and first lady Melania are hosting the king and queen of Spain for a tea party. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. The inspector general of the Department of Justice confirmed Monday an investigation into former FBI director James Comeys apparent leak to the press of memos describing his interactions with President Donald Trump last year, as he was grilled by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Michael Horowitz, who authored the report released Thursday that gutted Comeys handling of Hillary Clintons private email server investigation, told committee members that he had received a referral from the FBI to probe Comeys leak. Trending: Man Wrestles Black Bear That Attacked and Killed His Dog Comey admitted to the very same committee last year that he intentionally leaked one of his memos to an intermediary who then relayed the information to The New York Times. In May of last year, and exactly a week after Trump fired Comey, the Times published a story citing Comeys memo, which claimed Trump had asked him to let this go in reference to the FBIs investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Comey has asserted that he believed Trump was attempting to obstruct the FBIs investigation of Flynn, and that the presidents apparent request was an example of highly improper contact between an FBI director and a president. Following Comeys dismissalwhich Trump claimed was over the handling of the Clinton investigationand his testimony before Congress, the president labeled Comey a leaker while calling for an investigation by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the rest of the justice department. Don't miss: Ann Coulter Claims Crying Immigrant Children Are 'Child Actors,' But Author She Cited Slams Her as 'Illiterate' James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired. He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH... Trump tweeted April 13. Story continues Three days after he fired Comey, Trump alluded to tapes that could have proven the longtime federal prosecutor and investigator wrong. No such proof has yet to be released by the president or anyone else. James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press! the president tweeted on May 12, 2017. Most popular: Russia 2018 World Cup: Which Country has the Best Fans? With Horowitz's confirmation of a probe into Comeys leak, the president and his allies may have even more ammunition to discredit Comey following the IG report last week. The report described the serious missteps Comey took, as well as his break from normal FBI procedures. Trump has since used the reports findings to blast Comey further, while his personal attorney claimed the revelations should be reason enough for special counsel Robert Muellers probe of Russias interference in the 2016 election to end. However, Horowitzs report stated no political bias was discovered during its investigation. "We also found that, in key moments, then-FBI director Comey clearly departed from FBI department norms, and his decisions negatively impacted the perception of the FBI and the justice department as fair administrators of justice," Horowitz also told the committee. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Attorney General Jeff Sessions rejected claims that the Justice Departments new zero-tolerance immigration policy echoed Nazi Germany because concentration camps were trying to keep Jews from leaving. Sessions spoke with Fox News Laura Ingraham on Monday and defended his agency amid a growing outcry over family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border under the new DOJ policy. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said nearly 2,000 children had been separated from their parents over a six-week period ending in May. Many of these children are being held in juvenile detention centers. Sessions said comparisons of those centers to the Nazis camps wasnt fair because the Justice Department was simply trying to deter people from crossing the border, not keep them in the U.S. Well, its a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country, Sessions said. We need to think it through, be rational and thoughtful about it. We want to allow asylum for people who qualify for it, but people who want economic migration for their personal financial benefit, and what they think is their families benefit, is not a basis for a claim of asylum. Sessions stressed that the children detained by the government were cared for and not being abused in any way. Here's video of Sessions' remarks on the Nazi Germany comparisonpic.twitter.com/IuWPkFpGw4 Brian Tashman (@briantashman) June 19, 2018 Ingraham pressed Sessions on the motivation behind the new guidelines, asking if they were meant to be a deterrent. The attorney general attempted to dodge the question, but later said deterrence was his aim. I see that the fact that no one was being prosecuted for this as a factor in a five-fold increase in four years in this kind of illegal immigration, Sessions said. So, yes, hopefully, people will get the message and come through the border at the port of entry, and not break across the border unlawfully. Story continues Several critics of the zero-tolerance immigration mandate have made the comparison to the Nazi camps, including former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who told CNN: There is a commonality there and a fear on my part that we have standards we have to live up to. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who spearheaded legislation to ban the separation of families at the border, also linked the detention policies to World War II Germany. This is the United States of America; its not Nazi Germany, Feinstein told MSNBCs Chris Hayes on Monday. We dont take children from their parents. Until now. Related... Melania Trump Criticizes Immigrant Family Separations Trump And His Allies Are Lying Through Their Teeth About Family Separations Less Than One-Third Of The Public Supports Family Separations DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen Defends Separation Of Families At The Border Also on HuffPost Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. Undocumented immigrants who turned themselves in after crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. await processing near McAllen, Texas, on April 2, 2018. Families who crossed the border near McAllen, Texas, on May 9, 2018. A U.S. Border Patrol spotlight shines on a mother and son from Honduras on June 12, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. Central Americans seeking asylum wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take them into custody on June 12, 2018, near McAllen, Texas. A Honduran mother stands with her family at the U.S.-Mexico border fence on Feb. 22, 2018, near Penitas, Texas. U.S. Border Patrol agents take a Central American family into custody on June 12, 2018 near McAllen, Texas. U.S. Border Patrol agents take a father and son from Honduras into custody near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018, near Mission, Texas. A Central American family waits to be taken into custody on June 12, 2018, near McAllen, Texas. Central American migrants wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take people into custody on June 12, 2018, near McAllen, Texas. Two women and a child who crossed the border on Feb. 22, 2018, near McAllen, Texas. A Honduran child who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with her family on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. U.S. Border Patrol agents take Central American immigrants, including this young child, into custody on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. A Honduran woman and child on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. A U.S. Border Patrol agent checks birth certificates while taking Central American immigrants into detention on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. Adults and children await processing near McAllen, Texas, on April 2, 2018. Guatemalan immigrant families turn themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol near McAllen, Texas, on May 8, 2018. U.S. Border Patrol agents take Central American immigrants into custody on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. [caption id="attachment_777" align="alignnone" width="620"] Demonstrators outside the U.S. Supreme Court on the day of arguments in Gill v. Whitford, Tuesday, October 3, 2017. (Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM)[/caption] Sidestepping the thorny issue of partisan gerrymandering, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned back a major challenge to Wisconsins redistricting plan because the plaintiffs lacked standing. In a second partisan gerrymander challenge, the unanimous court, in an unsigned opinion, rejected an attempt to change Maryland's Sixth congressional district. A group of Republican voters claimed the district had been rigged by the Democratic-controlled Maryland General Assembly to ensure the election of a Democratic member of Congress. They claimed the gerrymander was in retaliation for their political views. There were no dissenters in the Wisconsin case Gill v. Whitford, which was argued in October. "It is a case about group political interests, not individual legal rights. But this court is not responsible for vindicating generalized partisan preferences. The courts constitutionally prescribed role is to vindicate the individual rights of the people appearing before it," Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote. Roberts said the court was remanding the dispute to the trial judge "so that the plaintiffs may have an opportunity to prove concrete and particularized injuries using evidenceunlike the bulk of the evidence presented thus farthat would tend to demonstrate a burden on their individual votes." Although agreeing with the court's judgment, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, in a separate concurring opinion, said they would not give the challengers another chance to establish standing, but would have directed the district court to dismiss the case. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also concurred in the decision, but she wrote separately to describe the type of evidence that the challengers could use to establish their gerrymander claim. "Courts have a critical role to play in curbing partisan gerrymandering," Kagan wrote. "Indeed, the need for judicial review is at its most urgent in these cases, For here, politicians' incentives conflict with voters' interests, leaving citizens without any political remedy for their constitutional harms." In the Maryland case, Benisek v. Lamone, the court said the district court's denial of a motion for a preliminary injunction was not in error even assuming the challengers were likely to prevail on the merits. "The balance of equities and the public interest tilted against their request for a preliminary injunction," the court wrote. The justices cited, for example, the challengers' delay in seeking an injunction, the closeness to the next election and the tight time constraints facing the district court. Dale Ho, director of the ACLUs Voting Rights Project, said in a statement Monday: Story continues The Supreme Court missed an opportunity today to lay down a firm marker as to when partisan gerrymandering is so extreme that it violates the constitutional rights of voters. But the court permitted lawsuits against unfair maps to continue. Cases around the countryincluding our challenge to Ohios gerrymandered congressional mapwill remain ongoing to ensure that voters voices are heard. The Supreme Court's decision in the Wisconsin case stemmed from a challenge by voters from 11 state legislative districts to the Wisconsin Assembly's redistricting plan following the 2010 census. In 2012, the first election with the new map in place, Republicans won 60 of 99 Assembly seats with just 48.6 percent of the statewide vote. In the next election, in 2014, the plan resulted in Republicans winning 63 of 99 state Assembly seats with only 52 percent of the vote. The voters claimed the redistricting plan was an excessive partisan gerrymanderin violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendmentsthat locked in Republican control of the Assembly for a decade. The Republican-controlled Assembly, they argued, "cracked" and "packed" Democratic voters in order to ensure Republican dominance. A majority of justices in a 2004 partisan gerrymander challenge from Pennsylvania had concluded that these claims were "nonjusticiable" because there was no manageable test for excessive partisanship. Keenly aware of that ruling, the Wisconsin challengers offered a three-judge federal district court a three-part test. A key part of the test, known as the efficiency gap, was the product of social scientists' research. The court adopted a modified version of the test and ruled for the challengers. During high court arguments on October 3, several justices questioned the standing of voters from 11 districts to challenge the entire Assembly map. Wisconsin's attorney argued that finding standing would favor partisan gerrymander challenges over racial gerrymander claims in which the justices have found standing to challenge the district in which the voter lives. Kennedy appeared to hold the decisive vote. He seemed particularly sympathetic to the First Amendment claim that excessive partisan gerrymandering punishes voters because of their political beliefs. It was Kennedy who in the 2004 partisan gerrymander case, Vieth v. Jubelirer, kept the door open to viewing these cases thru the lens of the First Amendment. At the argument, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. worried that regardless of what the justices' rationale is in deciding whether Republicans or Democrats win these claims, "The intelligent man on the street will say, thats a bunch of baloney. That is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country. Justice Samuel Alito Jr. was skeptical of the efficiency gap test and suggested the social science was too new for the court to intervene at this point. But Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor expressed little difficulty with either the science or the ability to determine excessive partisan gerrymandering. The challengers' counsel, Paul Smith of the Campaign Legal Center, told the justices that "these claims are coming" and "You are the only institution that can solve this." Wisconsin Solicitor General Misha Tseytlin represented the state, and Kirkland & Ellis partner Erin Murphy argued on behalf of the State Senate. The case attracted a large number of amicus briefs from across the political spectrum, including political parties, campaign reform groups, civil rights organizations and state and federal lawmakers. In the Maryland case, the challengers argued their First Amendment rights were violated when the state assembly deliberately targeted and retaliated against voters because of their support for the opposition party, The Maryland case differed from the Wisconsin case in several ways. The Maryland case challenged a single congressional district; the Wisconsin case involved the entire state legislative map. Also, the Maryland challengersRepublican votersurged the justices to adopt the First Amendment as the only manageable standard for judging partisan gerrymanders. The challengers in WisconsinDemocratic votersrelied on both the First Amendment and the equal protection clause. The Maryland case came to the court in an early stageafter a three-judge district court denied the challengers motion for a preliminary injunction. The Wisconsin challengers won after a full trial before a three-judge district court. Michael Kimberly, partner in Mayer Brown, represented the Benisek challengers. Maryland Solicitor General Steven Sullivan argued for the state. Amman (AFP) - US President Donald Trump's special envoy Jason Greenblatt and adviser Jared Kushner on Tuesday met with Jordan's King Abdullah II in Amman to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. The meeting came less than a day after the Jordanian monarch hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a short but rare visit. "They discussed increasing cooperation between the United States and Jordan, regional issues, the humanitarian situation in Gaza, and the Trump administration's efforts to facilitate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians," the White House said in a statement. In his talks with Netanyahu on Monday, the king stressed the need for progress on efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict "based on the two-state solution". The US delegation's trip also includes stops in Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been stalled since 2014. Trump's controversial December decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital has made the resumption of peace efforts unlikely. The move sparked anger across the Arab world and prompted Palestinians to freeze all contacts with US officials. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, but Israel considers the entire city to be its eternal and indivisible capital. The Palestinian Authority said Saturday that US plans to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are "doomed to fail". The West Bank, including east Jerusalem, was administratively linked to Jordan before it was occupied by Israel in 1967. Israel, which signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, recognises Jordan as the custodian of the divided city's Muslim holy sites. Jake Monty, a former member of President Trumps National Hispanic Advisory Council, once argued the Latino case for supporting the billionaire moguls presidential campaign but jumped ship in the middle of the 2016 campaign when Trumps immigration proposals hardened in the mold of his nationalist advisers. Yahoo News reached out to Monty to see what he thinks now about Trumps immigration policies, particularly the internment of undocumented children. He said its troubling to see the administration let the fate of undocumented immigrants be determined by a political agenda. The brinkmanship he is playing on this issue is scary, he said. Jake Monty is no longer making the Latino case for Trump. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Jake Monty via Facebook, ACF/HHS/Handout via Reuters, U.S. Customs and Border Protections Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP, Mike Blake/Reuters) Monty, a third-generation Mexican-American whose wife was born in Mexico, has spent most of his career advocating for immigrant rights as a lawyer in Texas. He was unusual in supporting a candidate who notoriously launched his campaign with a speech calling Mexican immigrants drug smugglers and rapists. But Monty, a conservative Republican, was willing to give the businessman the benefit of the doubt over Hillary Clinton, who he said had played a cynical game with immigrant lives as senator and whose husbands crackdown on undocumented workers was draconian. In June 2016, five months before the presidential election, Monty held a fundraiser for Trump and penned an op-ed for the Daily Caller titled, A Latinos Case for Trump. But the Trump administration is separating children from their parents when they illegally cross the border into the United States. It ended the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gave temporary legal status to the children of undocumented immigrants. Central American asylum seekers, including a Honduran girl, 2, and her mother, are taken into custody near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12 in McAllen, Texas. (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images) In addition to the child-separation policy, which is mean-spirited, misguided and actually makes the problem worse, I think there are other issues that are very concerning as well, Monty told Yahoo News. The DACA problem has not been solved. This is a problem that hes made worse because hes the one who abrogated DACA. If any kids fall out of status or get deported, its going to be on his watch. Story continues Monty gave credit to Trump for condemning MS-13, which he has done consistently since becoming president, as a scourge on the immigrant community, but thinks the Trump administrations overall nativism is harmful to the Latino community. Of course, he said, Hispanic and Latino people care about issues other than immigration. But its hard to get beyond words like animals or illegals used in reference to humans. Just last month, Trump said, Were taking people out of the country. You wouldnt believe how bad these people are. These arent people. These are animals. Monty said rhetoric like this has severely damaged the Republican Partys reputation among Hispanics. At the back of your mind youre thinking, Wow, this is the same party that referred to them as animals. If I werent in a suit and $3,000 cowboy boots, would they think that Im illegal too or that Im a wetback? That is the problem, he said. Candidate Donald Trump meets with his Hispanic Advisory Council on Aug. 20, 2016. (Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP) Wetback is a slur on Mexican immigrants who entered the United States by crossing the Rio Grande. On Aug. 20, 2016, Monty attended a meeting of Trumps National Hispanic Advisory Council, made up of business, civic and religious leaders. Trump reportedly told the council hed be more moderate in office than his campaign rhetoric was signaling. Afterward, Trump held a rally in Austin where he floated the idea of letting undocumented immigrants without a criminal record and with longstanding ties to America stay in the U.S. There were reports that Trump would announce a major change to his immigration policy in a speech in Colorado, a moderate purple state. At first, Monty said, it seemed that everything the campaign had told him (and that he predicted in his op-ed piece) was coming to fruition. But that glimmer of hope faded quickly. First, the announcement was scheduled for Aug. 31 in Arizona, a red state. Then the Hispanic council wasnt invited to that speech, lo and behold, Monty said. There was nothing resembling what he talked about to us at Trump Tower in that speech. Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation, Trump declared. Monty resigned from Trumps council the next day. Central American asylum seekers wait as Border Patrol agents take them into custody on June 12 near McAllen, Texas. (Photo: John Moore/Getty Images) It was a great group of people. I know some of the people who stayed on. Others resigned, Monty said. I was proud to serve on it before the Aug. 31 speech in Phoenix. But after that speech, there was no way I could stay on. The National Hispanic Advisory Council had roughly two dozen members at the time. There were conflicting reports on just how many left alongside Monty. The RNC told BuzzFeed News at the time that only two left. Monty said the council continues to exist hosting events and conducting outreach to the Hispanic community but has struggled to find additional Hispanic advisers who want to be affiliated with the administration. Monty blames Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller for the administrations draconian measures against undocumented families at the border. He was glad to see right-wing political strategist Steve Bannon leave the White House. Nevertheless, he said Trump cannot escape responsibility for having empowered them. Monty still hopes that the more moderate Donald Trump he thought he once knew will show up again. Which Donald Trump will it be? The businessman, the dealmaker, the guy who has reached across the aisle to make deals with Democrats on budget issues? Or will it be the leader of the mob who wants to score points with his base and keep people riled up? Im certainly hoping its the former and not the latter. _____ Read more from Yahoo News: Meseberg (Germany) (AFP) - France's President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday won German Chancellor Angela Merkel's backing for reforms aimed at bolstering the eurozone against crises, including a vaunted budget for the bloc. But its size remains vague and its creation could still face resistance from other members. "We are beginning today a second step in the life of our common currency," said Macron, after talks in Germany with Merkel. The eurozone budget will have its own governance structure, and be a "real budget with annual revenues and spending", he said, adding that Paris and Berlin hoped to have it in place by 2021. It will fund investments in the bloc, and go towards helping poorer members, allowing the eurozone to "respond to the .. divergences between our economies". He would however not be drawn into giving a figure for the budget, saying that its size would be discussed with other members of the bloc. How it would be funded was also up for discussion with other eurozone members, said Merkel, suggesting that it could involve regular transfers made by individual countries, a tax on financial transactions or funds from the EU. "Let me be pragmatic. When (a proposal) is too detailed, that can be counter-productive," noted Macron. The French president, who had won power on a pro-European platform, has championed an overhaul of the bloc to reinvigorate it at a time when populist and eurosceptic sentiment is gaining ground across the continent. He had initially sought a common eurozone finance minister as well as a common budget. But ideas for a minister of the bloc had been shot down by Berlin. Mindful of Germans' fear of funding eurozone laggards, Merkel had initially appeared lukewarm to the idea of a budget for the bloc. But in a recent interview she offered a key concession, saying she could back a budget with a total sum "at the lower end of the double-digit billions of euros range." Story continues - 'Some won't be happy' - While he now has Merkel's backing in hand, Macron still has an uphill struggle to convince the other members of the 19 member eurozone to sign off on the budget. In Brussels, a high-ranking official speaking on condition of anonymity said: "Some countries won't be happy" about the plan. While the official did not cite countries, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has already previously voiced his opposition. Beyond calls for a common budget, Berlin and Paris are also seeking to expand the remit of European Stability Mechanism (ESM) -- the firefighter for eurozone countries with serious debt problems. The twin EU engines now want the ESM to become a European version of the International Monetary Fund that could provide emergency loans to countries that fall victim to crises not linked to their debt levels. Among other reform proposals detailed in a joint paper is the plan to harmonise corporate taxes within the bloc, as well as reach an EU agreement on a digital tax by the end of 2018. Ireland and Luxembourg, however, are vehemently against a digital tax that could hurt their competitiveness in attracting big tech multinationals, unless the tax is broadened to include OECD countries such as Switzerland or the United States. Caracas (AFP) - Venezuela's all-powerful Constituent Assembly on Tuesday elected Diosdado Cabello as its new president, a month after he was slapped with US sanctions. Cabello, deputy leader of the ruling Socialist Party, was elected by a show of hands of the 545-member Assembly and replaces Delcy Rodriguez, a former foreign minister who President Nicolas Maduro last week appointed as his vice-president. Rodriguez had headed the all-powerful, pro-Maduro Constituent Assembly since its inception in 2017. "I swear I will do what I have to to defend the Constitution....I swear I will accompany our beloved brother President Nicolas Maduro in constructing Bolivarian socialism," Cabello said as he was sworn-in. A former speaker of parliament, Cabello was targeted by US sanctions along with his wife and brother. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who announced the sanctions on May 18, said "figures like Diosdado Cabello....exploit their official positions to engage in narcotics trafficking, money laundering, embezzlement of state funds and other corrupt activities." The US Treasury also accused Cabello of working with other blacklisted individuals to move narcotics from Venezuela to Europe via the Dominican Republic, while moving cash back to Venezuela, as well as to Panama and the Bahamas. Swiss and EU authorities had already blacklisted Cabello earlier this year, citing grave human rights abuses. The 2017 vote to elect the Constituent Assembly was boycotted by Venezuela's opposition and not recognized by much of the international community, as it effectively usurped the powers of the opposition-dominated parliament. DAKAR (Reuters) - Mali said on Tuesday that some of its soldiers were implicated in "gross violations" after the discovery of some mass graves in its troubled central region plagued by violence between security forces and Islamist militants. The statement from the Defence Ministry followed local media reports that 25 bodies had been found in mass graves after a military crackdown on suspected jihadists and allied ethnic militia in central Mali. Human rights groups accuse the Malian military of conducting extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, torture and arbitrary arrests against suspected sympathizers of jihadist groups - charges it has promised in the past to investigate. "The Defence Ministry confirms ... the existence of mass graves implicating certain persons in FAMA (Malian armed forces) in gross violations that caused deaths in Nantaka and Kobaka in the region of Mopti," a statement posted on the Defence Ministry website on Tuesday said. It added that the defense minister instructed the public prosecutor to open an inquiry. The ministry "reiterates its determination ... to fight impunity and engage its forces in the strict respect of human rights", the statement added. In April, Amnesty International raised the alarm over reports that six people were found dead in a mass grave in the Mopti region. In February the government said it was investigating accusations that the army had abducted and executed suspected jihadist sympathizers. The military frequently reports having killed several "terrorists" in its security campaign. "The announced investigation is good news, but promises aren't enough," Human Rights Watch associate director for West Africa Corinne Dufka said in an email to Reuters. "Since 2017, I've documented over 60 alleged executions by the army of suspects who are buried in at least 7 common graves, none of which have resulted in justice for the families." The West African country has been in turmoil since Tuareg rebels and loosely allied Islamists took over its north in 2012, prompting French forces to intervene to push them back the following year. Growing violence across the country has raised doubts about whether Mali will be able to hold credible elections scheduled for the end of next month, in which President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita will seek a second term. (Reporting by Tim Cocks; Editing by Mark Heinrich) THE EVERGLADES, Fla. -- Thomas Peltier and his 11-year-old son, Connor, are taking family bonding to new heights. Father and son catches python while hunting Pair took off from Sarasota toward Key Biscayne They also captured cane toads and iguanas on the way On June 10, the duo left for a three-day invasive species hunt. They took off from Sarasota and traveled south to Naples, then traveled Alligator Alley to Key Biscayne. It was during a stop in the Everglades that they made their biggest catch yet: Connor started recording when his Dad spotted a 14- foot Burmese python. Thomas gained control of the python and put it on his back as the two walked more than a mile out of the Everglades. The two also captured cane toads and spiny tail iguanas on their trip. "He knows when summer starts we go on adventure after adventure after adventure," Peltier said. The father-son duo have done numerous trips like this one and consider it the ultimate bonding experience. "The entire trip is special because it's just him and I doing what we love," Peltier said. "I'm just very happy that I have a Dad like him," Connor said. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will not deploy their states National Guard troops to the U.S. Mexico border, citing the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy on immigration and the resulting inhumane treatment of children and parents being separated. While both states had plans in place to send troops to support immigration officers at the border, they are pulling back their offers as more information comes out about exactly how illegal crossings are being handled under Trump. The president signed an executive order in April authorizing the deployment of the National Guard to the border. Its cruel and inhumane and we told the National Guard to hold steady and to not go down to the border period, Gov. Baker, who is a Republican, said on Monday to NBC 10 Boston. We wont be supporting that initiative unless they change the policy. Earlier in June, Gov. Baker had agreed to send a helicopter and two analysts to work in tandem with the Arizona and New Mexico National Guards, but has changed his mind as the Trump administration continues to separate migrant children from their parents at the border, according to the Boston Globe. Gov. Cuomo also issued a statement on New York States website saying, In the face of this ongoing human tragedy, let me be very clear: New York will not be party to this inhumane treatment of immigrant families. We will not deploy National Guard to the border, and we will not be complicit in a political agenda that governs by fear and division. In the face of the federal governments inhumane treatment of immigrant families, New York will not deploy National Guard to the border. We will not be complicit in this ongoing human tragedy. pic.twitter.com/a2tTzjNisR Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) June 18, 2018 Other political figures have spoken out against the practice of separating children from their parents. Former first lady Laura Bush wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post decrying the practice, calling it cruel and current first lady Melania Trump issued a statement saying she hates seeing family separations occur. On Tuesday, a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, is expected to announce new legislation to stop the Trump administration from carrying out families separation of immigrants trying to cross the border into the U.S. Massachusetts and New York join a handful of other states whose governors have previously said they would not send their states own National Guard troops to the border. When President Trump signed the executive order in April, Oregon Governor Kate Brown, a Republican, said she would not dispatch troops to the border, Montana Governor Steve Bullock also said he would not dispatch any of his troops, and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper did the same. And theyre off! Though theyve only recently returned from their honeymoon, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are planning yet another getaway. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry visited Northern Ireland in March. (Photo: Chris Jackson Pool/Getty Images) On Tuesday Kensington Palace confirmed that the newlyweds or the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, if you want to get formal will travel to Dublin, Ireland on official royal business. The trip is scheduled for July 10 and 11, just two days before President Trump arrives in London. They are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and experiencing its rich culture, as well as meeting the people who are shaping the country's future. Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) June 19, 2018 The couple visited Northern Ireland in March, but this will mark their first joint trip to the Republic of Ireland, which is independent and therefore not part of the United Kingdom. Though the duchess will sadly have to leave her new favorite travel buddy grandmother-in-law Queen Elizabeth II behind, we predict hearty pints of Guinness and charming brogues in her near future. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. Meghan McCain blasted Ivanka Trump on Tuesday for remaining silent on the Trump administrations highly controversial family separation policy affecting scores of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. McCain, daughter of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and a co-host of ABCs The View, called out Trump, the elder daughter of President Donald Trump and a senior adviser to him, for failing to condemn a policy that has resulted in thousands of children being placed in shelters as their parents face prosecution for illegally crossing the border. Where is Ivanka in all of this? McCain said Tuesday. Because shes all for women and mothers, and she has a White House role... and Im sort of interested that her platform has been women and mothers and she doesnt seem to have anything to say about this. TRUMP DEFIANT ON FAMILY SEPARATIONS: Outrage continues to grow over the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy and the forced separation of immigrant parents from their children the co-hosts react to the latest. https://t.co/f8u2wc159S pic.twitter.com/q6o0t2muuE The View (@TheView) June 19, 2018 While President Trump has vehemently defended the contentious practice and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have condemned it, Ivanka Trump has remained silent. First lady Melania Trump, in a statement on Monday, issued a subtle rebuke to her husbands administration and its family separation policy. Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform, a spokeswoman for the first lady said. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. Despite Melania Trumps suggestion of responsibility on both sides of the aisle, however, the family separations are entirely the result of the Trump administrations actions. Story continues A representative for Ivanka Trump did not immediately respond to HuffPosts request for comment. Related... Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump Made $82 Million While Working In The White House Last Year Ivanka Trump Mocked By Asians Everywhere For Tweeting Chinese Proverb 2,000 Kids Separated From Parents Under Trump Border Crackdown Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. President and Melania Trump have welcomed King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain to the White House for an old-fashioned tea party during the royals three-city trip. The royals, who are in the United States for six days to celebrate 300 years of friendship between the two countries, were greeted by the Trumps Tuesday on the last leg of their trip. Before sitting down for tea in the Red Room, the foursome posed for photos outside. Mexico City (AFP) - Mexico strongly condemned US President Donald Trump's administration Tuesday for its policy of separating immigrant children and parents detained after crossing the US-Mexican border, calling it "inhuman." "In the name of the Mexican government and people, I want to express our most categorical and energetic condemnation of this cruel and inhuman policy," Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray told a press conference. "We call on the United States government, at the highest level, to reconsider this policy and give priority to the wellbeing and rights of these boys and girls, regardless of their nationality and immigration status." The Trump administration faces a growing swell of condemnation at home and abroad for the separations, the product of a "zero-tolerance" policy on undocumented migrants. The United Nations, international rights groups, Christian evangelicals, former US first ladies and prominent figures in the president's own Republican party have all criticized the policy. In a joint letter Monday, Mexico and the Vatican said that "children are the ones who are suffering the most" from forced migration and the turmoil it leads to. Guatemala expressed its "concern" Tuesday over the US policy and its effects. The human rights ombudsmen of Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras meanwhile petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington to intervene to block the "dangerous" practice of separating families. US officials say more than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents or guardians since early May, when the "zero-tolerance" policy was announced. Lawmakers who visited minors in detention in Texas and California have described crying children held in cage-like conditions behind chain-link fencing, with no idea when they will see their parents again. A defiant Trump has vowed to prevent the United States from becoming a "migrant camp" and accused the opposition Democratic party of causing the crisis by blocking immigration reform legislation. Story continues The vast majority of separated families come from Central America, where brutal gangs have made their countries among the most violent in the world. Around one percent of the detained children are Mexican, said Videgaray. US-Mexican relations have been strained since Trump won election in 2016 after a campaign laced with anti-Mexican barbs and promises to build a wall on the two countries' border and make Mexico pay for it. US tariffs on Mexican steel and aluminum, Trump's insistence on overhauling the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and his attacks on migrants have only added to the tension. Acapulco (Mexico) (AFP) - Running for office in Mexico is "practically a death sentence," says mayoral candidate Mario Alberto Chavez, who was eating dinner at a restaurant when a gunman opened fire on his table. Somehow, Chavez survived the April 18 attack that wounded three staff members. But more than 100 other politicians have been killed in the country's blood-stained electoral campaign. "I've asked (the authorities) to give me bodyguards many times, but they just keep ignoring me," says Chavez, a 35-year-old father of one, who is running for the New Alliance party in his hometown of Zumpango. New Alliance is a splinter from President Enrique Pena Nieto's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. Chavez won't speculate about who tried to kill him, saying he once considered quitting the race after receiving threatening phone calls from people who warned him they would leave dead bodies at his campaign rallies. Rather than holding rallies, he now campaigns door-to-door in the city of 25,000 people in the violent western state of Guerrero. "I decided it was worth it, to try to pull my community out of poverty and violent crime," he says. - Political violence - Violent crime is a top issue on Mexicans' minds as they prepare to elect a new president and thousands of other federal, state and local officials on July 1. Racked by violence linked to the multibillion-dollar narcotics trade, Mexico counted a record 25,339 homicides last year. It was the bloodiest in a string of very bloody years since the government deployed the army to fight drug trafficking in 2006. The unofficial war has unleashed a wave of killing that has killed more than 200,000 people -- though it's unclear how many of the cases were linked to organized crime. Another 30,000 people are missing. As the elections approach, politicians have seen more than their share of the violence. At least 114 politicians have been murdered since September, according to consulting firm Etellekt. Story continues It says at least 50 politicians' relatives have been killed and 417 attacks carried out against politicians in the same period. With more than 18,000 posts up for grabs, the violence sweeping the country was almost destined to turn political. "Mexico has had an unprecedented security problem for the past decade, and today we are holding the largest elections in our history," says National Electoral Institute chief Lorenzo Cordova. "Has that violent context burst into politics? The answer is yes, gravely so." - Campaigning in fear - Sometimes the motives for the killings seem clear. On June 8, a former mayor running for the legislature in the northern border state of Coahuila, Fernando Puron Johnston, was slain as he left a debate where he had vowed to relentlessly fight the Los Zetas cartel. In other cases, murdered candidates appeared to be involved with the cartels themselves. Such suspicions hover over the case of Juchitan, Oaxaca city council candidate Pamela Teran, who was shot dead on June 2. She was the daughter of alleged cartel capo Juan Teran. Most cases, however, remain murky -- and many candidates are campaigning in fear. In Guerrero alone, 496 have opted to quit. The authorities are supposed to provide bodyguards for candidates whose lives are at risk. But many candidates say their requests go nowhere. Of the 49 requests so far this campaign at the federal level, just 12 have been granted, five have been rejected and 32 remain pending, National Security Commission head Renato Sales said last week. - Fighting back - Some candidates take security into their own hands. Such is the case for Nestora Salgado, a controversial Senate candidate in Guerrero for Morena, the leftist party of fiery presidential frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Salgado is the former commander of a "community police" force -- vigilantes who took up arms to do the job they accused the real police of failing to do: protecting their communities from criminals. Today, dozens of such vigilantes act as her bodyguards, toting an arsenal of aging shotguns and rifles. Her request for official bodyguards was rejected, even though Salgado says she has received threats and found severed dogs' heads outside her house. "I hold the government responsible for what continues happening to us candidates," she says. In Acapulco, a Guerrero beach resort turned battleground in the cartel turf wars, mayoral candidate Joaquin Badillo, of the coalition led by the conservative National Action Party, has also brought in his own bodyguards. Badillo, who owns a security firm with some 3,000 heavily armed guards, opted to use his own employees rather than government bodyguards. "I have my family, my kids to think about," he says. "But as I've said publicly, we're not going to fear the criminals. They're the ones who should fear us." - 'Blood offerings' - Etellekt chief Ruben Salazar links the violence to the fragmentation of the cartels since the drug war began. "The new cells that emerge... are seeking support from many of these candidates. And they get rid of the ones they don't manage to strike a deal with," he says. Salazar says a "polarized" environment in which many candidates have vowed to jail their predecessors for corruption is also fueling the violence in a country where voters are exasperated to see more than 90 percent of crimes go unpunished. "That can generate revenge attacks," he adds. "In these elections, calls for justice are being turned into blood offerings to voters." Beijing (AFP) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is visiting China on Tuesday and Wednesday, state broadcaster CCTV said, a week after his unprecedented summit with US President Donald Trump. CCTV did not say whether Kim had arrived in Beijing, but security lined the freeway leading to the city's airport Tuesday morning as authorities prepared for his arrival. The trip will be Kim's third to China since March, when he made his inaugural foreign trip as leader. An AFP reporter in Pyongyang said the only scheduled international flight -- an Air Koryo plane to Beijing -- had been briefly delayed for no apparent reason, which often happens when Kim travels. Kim is seeking relief from economic sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise and is believed to be seeking support from China for that, Japan's Nikkei business daily said in a dispatch from Beijing. Following the historic US-North Korea summit in Singapore a week ago, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic punishment of its Cold War-era ally. China was not a direct player in the negotiations in Singapore but retains strong influence behind the scenes. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed to Beijing to brief Chinese President Xi Jinping and other top leaders soon after the Trump-Kim meeting. In a joint statement following the Singapore summit, Kim pledged to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." Trump hailed this as a concession but critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. In return, Trump said he would stop joint military drills with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. On Tuesday, the US and South Korean militaries confirmed they have called off upcoming joint exercises following Trump's order. Managua (AFP) - Another attempt at church- mediated talks to end a deadly political crisis in Nicaragua fell apart on Monday, a clergy statement said. With the death toll from almost daily street violence now at 180, opposition groups and Catholic bishops walked out of the discussions, accusing the government of failing to make good on a promise Friday to invite international organizations to come to Nicaragua and help probe the violence. "When the government sends us a copy of those invitations and the international organizations confirm to us they have received them", working groups and a plenary session of the government-opposition dialogue will be convened again, the Nicaraguan Bishops Conference said in a statement. Nicaragua's descent into chaos was triggered on April 18 when relatively small protests against now-scrapped social security reforms were met with a government crackdown. Those demonstrations mushroomed into a popular uprising, with anti-government protesters facing off against police and paramilitaries supporting President Daniel Ortega, whom critics accuse of acting like a dictator. Under an agreement reached Friday, the government was supposed to invite representatives of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights -- an autonomous branch of the Organization of American States -- the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the European Union. At a session Monday, Foreign Minister Denis Moncada, head of the government delegation, cited "bureaucratic" reasons for the invitations not having been issued, said Carlos Tunnerman, a member of the opposition delegation. "Go to your office, write the letters, send the invitations and a bring a copy of those letters to the plenary session on Tuesday," Tunnerman said he told the minister. That session has now been called off. Masaya (Nicaragua) (AFP) - Nicaraguan police and pro-government paramilitaries moved to reassert control over the city of Masaya by force Tuesday after residents of the opposition bastion declared themselves in rebellion against President Daniel Ortega. Bursts of gunfire resounded in three neighborhoods, including the main entrance to the city, where government forces have gained control, the head of the Nicaraguan Human Rights Association Alvaro Leiva said. Three people were killed in this unrest in Masaya, the association said. That brought the death toll in two months of nationwide violence to 186, it added. As night fell, people in Masaya set up barricades to protect against another government assault. Trucks carrying armed men rumbled through the streets. Earlier, Leiva said residents were resisting "within the scope of their possibilities" but were under "disproportionate" attack by the security forces. The pro-Ortega forces used tractors and tow trucks brought in from Managua, 30 kilometers (20 miles) away, to clear barricades from the main road leading to the city. The auxiliary bishop of Managua, Silvio Baez, appealed to the government to back off. "Stop the attack on Masaya. Respect the life of the population," he tweeted. The country's Roman Catholic bishops have attempted to mediate the crisis, which began with anti-government protests in April. But the latest attempt collapsed on Monday, with the bishops and opposition accusing the government of failing to act on a promise to allow international organizations to investigate the violence. Masaya, once a bastion of Ortega's Sandinista revolution, has been a focal point of protests aimed at forcing him out of office. A onetime leftist guerrilla, Ortega led the country from 1979 to 1990 and then returned to the presidency in 2007. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters Monday that it was offensive to imply that the administration had a policy of separating parents from children at the border even though it was the stated purpose of the controversial change in enforcement procedures put in place by the Trump administration. I find that offensive, Nielsen said when asked at Mondays White House briefing if the separation of parents from children was meant to send a message. Why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that? But that was in fact one purpose of the zero-tolerance policy announced earlier this year by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, which has separated some 2,000 migrant children from their parents since it was instituted. Nielsens predecessor in running the Department of Homeland Security, current White House chief of staff John Kelly, has stated repeatedly that separating children from their parents would work as a deterrent. Kelly first mentioned the idea in a March 2017 interview with CNN. When asked if Homeland Security officials would separate children from their parents to deter illegal immigration, Kelly replied, I am considering exactly that. Kelly reiterated this stance in a May interview with NPR: Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) NPR: Family separation stands as a pretty tough deterrent. Kelly: It could be a tough deterrent would be a tough deterrent. A much faster turnaround on asylum seekers. NPR: Even though people say thats cruel and heartless to take a mother away from her children? Kelly: I wouldnt put it quite that way. The children will be taken care of put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long. Nielsen claimed the administration is simply enforcing current immigration laws (there is no law requiring such actions), echoing the position of some but not all of her colleagues in the administration. Nielsen and others have blamed Democrats for the nonexistent law and failure of reform passing in Congress despite Republicans holding both. Story continues On Sunday, Nielsen stated that We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period. That remarkable statement seems to hinge on the definition of the word policy. Indisputably, parents and children are in fact being separated when the adults are caught crossing into the United States illegally i.e., not at an official Port of Entry. But on Monday she presented this as a byproduct of Sessionss zero-tolerance approach, rather than an intended consequence of a new policy. People whove been taken into custody at a facility in McAllen, Texas, June 17, 2018. (Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protections Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) White House press secretary Sarah Sanders and Sessions have both cited the Bible in defending the policy, a tactic that has received pushback by religious leaders. Some parents have been deported without their children, while others have said they were told their children are being taken away to bathe and then did not see them again. There are questions about whether the government has a plan to reunite the families theyve separated. Many of those attempting to cross the border are fleeing violence in their home countries, but new policies would disallow asylum seekers for the reasons of domestic abuse and gang violence. The homeland security chief also said that she had not seen photos of the children in cages or heard an audio tape of them crying while Border Patrol officers joked. Nor could she tell reporters where young girls and toddlers were being held. On Monday, Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein called on Nielsen to resign. The policy announced by Sessions was to incarcerate and charge anyone attempting to cross the border illegally. The policys goal, per a memo obtained by the Washington Post, is to deter border crossings. Since children are not allowed in jails, they are being housed in hastily constructed holding facilities in, among other places, an unused former Walmart and in tents. Nielsen echoed the presidents claims that Congress alone can solve the crisis at the border, and once again blamed Democrats for so-called loopholes in the immigration system that, she said, create a functionally open border. Of the three major loopholes listed by Nielsen, only one is actually a law: the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. Known as the TVPRA, this bipartisan piece of antitrafficking legislation was among the last laws signed by Republican President George W. Bush. In an effort to combat sex trafficking, it mandated that children from noncontiguous countries (i.e. anywhere other than Canada or Mexico) who are caught entering the United States alone must not be immediately sent back to their country of origin but first given the chance to appear at an immigration hearing. In the meantime, the law required that such kids be put in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which would then be tasked with placing them in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child and, if possible, reuniting them with family in the U.S. Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protections Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP The TVPRA appears to have contributed to the 2014 surge of unaccompanied Central American minors crossing from Mexico. However, at the time, Republicans in Congress rejected efforts to place full blame for the crisis on the law itself, acknowledging that the flood of young people over the border was an unintended consequence resulting from an unforeseen combination of circumstances. The second major loophole referenced by Nielsen was a 1997 legal settlement known as the Flores Agreement, which established legal standards for the detention of immigrant children. The ruling called for such children to generally be released without unnecessary delay and, like the TVPRA, required that, if detained, children be placed in the least restrictive setting possible. How the Flores Agreement should be applied in the case of children whove crossed the border with their parents has been the subject of debate over the years, but the previous two administrations have not interpreted its standards for the treatment of immigrant children to amount to a requirement that they be separated from their parents. Finally, Nielsen argued that the Democrats in Congress are to blame for failing to reform our nations asylum laws, repeating a claim commonly made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the current asylum system is rife with fraud and fails to assist asylum seekers who legitimately need it. While there has, indeed, been a significant increase in asylum cases within the past 10 years, experts have found no credible data to back up the assertion that a large percentage of those claims are fraudulent. White House officials have said that the separation of children from their parents could be used as leverage in negotiations with Democrats for the comprehensive immigration bill Sanders said President Trump wants, presumably including a wall on the southern border. Every Senate Democrat has signed onto a bill proposed by Feinstein that would attempt to fix the issue of border separations. It does not include money for the border wall. _____ Read more from Yahoo News: BEIJING (Reuters) - A North Korean freight plane has landed in Beijing, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported on Tuesday, amid reports that leader Kim Jong Un may soon visit China for the third time this year. The plane that landed in Beijing was used during the historic summit between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore last week, Kyodo reported. Japan's Nikkei reported earlier on Tuesday that Kim could visit China as early as Tuesday. China's foreign ministry did not respond immediately to a request for comment on whether Kim was visiting. (Reporting by Beijing Monitoring Desk; Editing by Paul Tait) Ottawa (AFP) - The opioid crisis claimed nearly 4,000 lives in Canada last year, mainly from overdoses of the powerful painkiller fentanyl, the public health agency said Tuesday, warning of a worsening situation. The death toll was 34 percent higher than the previous year, with most of the fatal overdoses involving men aged 30 to 39 who obtained fentanyl illegally from narcotics traffickers on the street. Almost 90 percent of the 3,987 deaths in 2017 were concentrated in just three provinces: Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario. "Canada continues to experience a serious and growing opioid crisis," the public health agency said in a report. Fentanyl is considered 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin and 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor said "high rates of opioid prescriptions" are also a "contributing factor in the crisis." "As minister, I am calling on industry to act now and stop their marketing activities associated with these products in Canada," she said. The health ministry explained that while prescription opioids "can help Canadians who need them to manage pain," marketing the drugs can unduly influence doctors and lead to "over-prescription." According to public health agency figures, opioid prescriptions actually fell last year for the first time since 2012, to 21.3 million. In response to the crisis, Ottawa has poured tens of millions of dollars into strengthening emergency services and distributing the overdose antidote naloxone. Pepsi (PEP) CEO Indra Nooyi, whos stepping down in October, doesnt have much free time between managing her 260,000 employees and spending time with her family. But she recently indulged in some epic binge-watching. She discovered Sex and the City on HBO a few months ago and was immediately hooked on the show, which chronicled the fictional lives of four single New York City women from 1998 to 2004. I watched all 94 episodes. I binge watched it. There were so many scenes that focus on the first word and not the other three wordsbut you can fast forward. Every episode had a lesson. The biggest takeaway was the sisterhood of these women, she said at the Forbes Womens Summit in NYC in June. The sisterhood they had was fantastic. Why dont we have a sisterhood? The more I [watched] that show I said, Man, we have to have our own safe spot where we can talk about our issues. You cant talk about it at home. No one wants to hear about work at home. We need an environment where sisterhood doesnt judge us but gives us constructive feedback. Where we can talk about Mr. Big in a comfortable way, she said on a panel with Priyanka Chopra about Breaking Barriers, Engaging Billions, referring to the elusive love interest of the shows protagonist, Carrie Bradshaw. Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi and actress Priyanka Chopra during the 2018 Forbes Womens Summit at Pier Sixty at Chelsea Piers on June 19, 2018 in New York City. After receiving her MBA from Yale School of Management, Nooyi held a variety of consulting and strategy positions before joining Pepsi in 1994. She eventually became CFO in 2001 and CEO in 2006. Reflecting on her experience as an immigrant from a conservative Indian family, Nooyi said she never fit in with her classmates or coworkers. No one gave me dressing instructions. I worried about how I was perceived. I was the only woman in the room and I already looked different, she said. She wished she could been part of a tight-knit friend group like the one Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda shared on Sex and the City. That show profoundly altered my thinking because while showing fashions, which were awesome, but it was really about what was behind the covers. The sisterhood of women. Lets put ourselves in charge. That sisterhood needs to form. And when we get there, I think theres no stopping us, she said. Story continues On Monday, PepsiCo said that Nooyi would be stepping down after 12 years as CEO. Twenty-two-year company veteran Ramon Laguarta will take over in October, and Nooyi will remain chairman of the board until early 2019. Melody Hahm is a senior writer at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, technology and real estate. Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm. Read more: Womens-only club The Wing opens its doors for a special occasion Americas 10 priciest markets are lacking these jobs 25-year-olds startup is making fast fashion even faster A shrinking middle class is transforming the housing market How people from different parts of the world spend their extra money At least three people have been killed and hundreds injured after a 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck Osaka in Western Japan. The earthquake hit the countys second biggest metropolis just before 8 a.m. local time, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. A 9-year-old girl and two men in their 80s are the first confirmed fatalities, according to the Associated Press. The girl was reportedly killed after she was struck by a falling concrete wall as she walked to school. Trending: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem The Fire and Disaster Management Agency said a total of 307 people are being treated for their injuries. The 6.1 magnitude quake, with its epicenter at a depth of around eight miles, did not trigger any tsunami warnings. The quake forced the temporally closure of many businesses and plants in the area, including Panasonic and Daihatsu Motor Co, a unit of Toyota Motor Corp. There are no reported issues from the nearby nuclear plants located in Mihama, Takahama and Ohi. Don't miss: Soccer Has an Intolerance Problem? After Mexicans Yell Anti-Gay Slur, FIFA Opens Investigation GettyImages-977567776 STR/AFP/Getty Images We were sleeping and it woke us up abruptly, said Kate Kilpatrick, a 19-year-old American who was staying in a hotel at the time of the quake, told Reuters. It was so terrifying because this is my first earthquake. I thought it was a nightmare because I was so confused. The whole world was aggressively shaking. RTX69NG7 Kyodo/via REUTERS Most popular: Kirstjen Nielsen Accused of Lying For a Racist by Mika Brzezinski Over Defense of Trump Policy Separating Families The weather agency also issued a warning against landslides in the wake of the quake, adding people should be cautious about possible aftershocks for the next few days, reports Japan Times. Story continues Osaka, which has a population of nearly 9 million people, is situated close to the city of Kobe, which was hit by massive quake in 1995, resulting in the deaths of more than 6,000 people in the region. GettyImages-977568076 STR/AFP/Getty Images GettyImages-977345584 STR / JIJI PRESS / AFP This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Republican lawmakers searching for a compromise to stop the practice of separating parents and children at the U.S.-Mexican border were just thrown for a loop when President Donald Trump demanded $25 billion for a border wall. That amount, which matches the current estimate for complete funding for the wall, is even greater than the $18 billion Trump previously requested during a failed effort to get wall funding in exchange for protection of undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, known as Dreamers. And its much higher than the $1.6 billion his own budget chief asked for to get the project started earlier this year. Speaking to small business owners on Tuesday, Trump signaled he was not open to a half-measure that protects families without delivering to Trump the rest of his immigration wish list. We have one chance to get it right. We might as well get it right or lets just keep going, Trump said, signaling he wants an all-or-nothing immigration bill. The explicit demand comes as Congress is trying to find a deal that is unrelated at least in theory to reunite children separated from their parents along the U.S-Mexican border, and it was not well received. For someone saying these children arent hostages, its tough to call them guests, said a top aide to Senate Republicans who was briefed on the Presidents demands. Were not going to fund a wall with one check. His own budget didnt even ask for that. But were not going to do it all at once. And he wants to conflate this with the kids. Its political insanity. It will kill us. Republicans in Congress have not been as supportive of the family separation policy as members of the Trump Administration. For many who will appear on the ballot this fall, the zero tolerance policy of referring everyone caught crossing the border for criminal prosecution which necessarily means their children will be kept separately risks turning off moderates and independents theyll need to win. Story continues Read More: Why President Trump Is Standing by His Family Separation Policy Two polls released Monday from CNN and Quinnipiac University backed that up, showing that two-thirds of Americans disagreed with the family separation policy. In response, lawmakers have been looking for a legislative solution. Every Senate Democrat has signed onto a proposal from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein which would overturn the family separation policy. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said he will put forward a conservative alternative. Even Rep. Mike Coffman of Colorado, who backed a hardline immigration bill earlier this year, has said he would be open to the Senate Democrats bill. One Democrat couldnt help but marvel at the bedfellows. Im actually looking forward to reading what Senator Cruz sends us, the Democratic Senator told TIME. I dont care whose ink solves this. But it remains an open question how Trump will respond. Ahead of a visit by the President to the Capitol this evening, Republican leaders were trying to guide rank-and-file lawmakers away from enflaming Trumps instincts to retreat to harsh, but familiar, rhetoric against immigration. They forget that we have constituents at home. And theyre voting this year. They need to remember that we face voters this fall, not Trump, said one senior Republican in the House. A second Republican lawmaker involved in defending the partys majority this fall said he was frustrated with the lack of guidance coming from the White House. When you call the White House, there are no answers about strategy, he said. There are these numbers numbers that sound scary but really arent was bad as they sound and talk about Donald J. Trump said this and that and so on and so forth. Theres no explanation about why this is happening and what happens to us this fall. Im not sure the President realizes that this is hurting the entirety of the Republican Party. Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, the rapper known as XXXTentacion, was shot dead in South Florida Monday afternoon, according to local law enforcement. He was 20. The Broward Sheriffs Office tweeted that law enforcement was responding to a shooting incident in Deerfield Beach, about 40 miles north of Miami. An adult male was taken to an area hospital. About an hour later, the sheriffs department said on Twitter that the man was pronounced dead and confirmed Onfroys identity shortly thereafter. Onfroy was shopping for motorcycles and was leaving the dealership, according to TMZ. Local law enforcement said he was approached by two armed individuals. One of them fired at Onfroy. Both suspects fled in a dark-colored SUV. Investigators believe it was a possible robbery. The shooting reportedly occurred just before 4:00 p.m. outside a Riva Motorsports location. #BreakingNews #BSO is currently working an incident regarding a shooting at 3671 N. Dixie Hwy., Deerfield Beach. PIO headed to scene. Dispatchers received a call of a shooting at 3:57 p.m. An adult male victim was transported to an area hospital. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 #BreakingNews The adult male that was taken to the hospital has been pronounced dead. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 BREAKING: @browardsheriff deputies investigating a shooting just outside of @RIVAMotorsports. One adult male rushed to Broward Health North. @WPLGLocal10 pic.twitter.com/enRrvvD5jW Ian Margol Local 10 (@IanMargol) June 18, 2018 The adult male victim has been confirmed as 20 year old Jahseh Onfroy aka rapper #XXXTentacion. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 The rapper grew up in Pompano Beach and Lauderhill, Florida, neighborhoods near where the shooting occurred. Story continues Onfroys rapid rise to fame was marked by controversy, as described in a timeline of his career put together by New York magazine. The rapper was involved in serious legal trouble and episodes of violence, including getting into fights with fans, and had been accused of repeated instances of domestic assault. At the time of his death, Onfroy faced criminal charges from a 2016 domestic violence case. Charges included aggravated assault of his pregnant ex-girlfriend, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment and witness tampering. The artists first album, titled 17 and released in August 2017, debuted at the No. 2 spot on the Billboard 200 chart. His second album, titled ? and released in March, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart. In May, Spotify removed XXXTentacions music from its official playlists and recommendation features, citing a new policy targeted at hate content and hateful conduct. The policy also targeted R. Kelly, who faces multiple accusations of sexual assault. After a backlash, Spotify announced it would reinstate XXXTentacions music. Following news of his death on Monday, many fans shared a video Onfroy had posted to Snapchat in which he discussed the kind of legacy he wanted to leave. Rapper Kanye West expressed his grief at Onfroys death in a tweet Monday evening. rest in peace I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing pic.twitter.com/QU7DR3Ghbw KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) June 18, 2018 Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Audio obtained by ProPublica contains voices of Central American children as anger grows over Trumps zero tolerance policy Audio obtained by the investigative news outlet ProPublica captures the heartrending cries of 10 Central American children after they were taken from their parents by immigration authorities at the border last week. The children are just 10 of about 2,000 who have been separated from their families since the Trump administration began enforcing a zero tolerance policy at the border, sending every unauthorized border crosser including asylum seekers to jail to face prosecution while their children are placed in government care. Amid growing outrage from the public and elected officials, the government has begun providing the press limited access to view the shelters and cages where the children are being held. But the audio published by ProPublica provides another dimension to the portrait of these unaccompanied minors, who have not been allowed to speak to journalists. I dont want them to stop my father, one child cries. I dont want them to deport him. The audio was recorded inside a US Customs and Border Protection detention facility, according to ProPublica. The person who recorded the audio told the publication that the children on the recording were between four and 10 years old and had been held at the detention center for less than 24 hours. One of the children, a six-year-old from El Salvador, according to ProPublica, rattles off the phone number of her aunt. Are you going to call my aunt so that when Im done eating, she can pick me up? the child asks in Spanish. Contacted by ProPublica, the aunt said: I know shes not an American citizen, but shes a human being. Shes a child. How can they treat her this way? Throughout the recording, which is nearly eight minutes long, consular workers can be heard speaking with the children. At one point, amid a chorus of cries, a male border patrol agent speaks up as well. Story continues Well, we have an orchestra here, he joked in Spanish. What were missing is a conductor. The recording was released on a day when the Trump administration struggled to articulate a justification for a policy that has been condemned by human rights and child welfare advocates, religious leaders, Democrats and a growing number of Republicans. I challenge anyone in the Trump Administration to listen to this audio and defend the child separation policy, tweeted Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Merkley helped draw attention to the plight of the migrant children when he tried and failed to tour one of the detention centers where they are being held earlier this month. I challenge anyone in the Trump Administration to listen to this audio and defend the child separation policy. https://t.co/akePrmBIZJ pic.twitter.com/SSIgGq8fPZ Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) June 18, 2018 Four former first ladies Rosalynn Carter, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton have condemned the policy, and every Democratic senator has signed on to a bill to ban family separation at the border. The secretary of homeland security, Kirstjen Nielsen, defended the administrations policy during a speech in New Orleans on Monday, saying: We will not apologize for the job we do, or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do. At a press briefing in Washington later on Monday, Nielsen claimed not to have heard the audio of the migrant children calling Mami! and Papa, though a reporter in the briefing room played the footage aloud. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) released its Global Trends report on the global refugee crisis on Tuesday, concluding that the world's forcibly displaced population was at a "record high." According to the report, a total of 68.5 million people were displaced by the end of 2017, increased by 2.9 million since 2016. During 2017 alone, 16.2 million people fled which comes out to 44,500 people becoming refugees every day of last year. This is the largest increase of refugees UNHCR has seen in a single year. SEE ALSO: 7 activist groups supporting families at the border that need your help right now To put it into perspective, it means one out of every 110 people has been forced to flee their homes, and someone is forced to leave every 2 seconds. In a press briefing, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi noted that 85 percent of the 68.5 million displaced people fled to "poor or middle income countries." He dispelled the myth that the refugee crisis is a "crisis of the rich world." "It is not," Grandi said. "It continues to be a crisis mostly of the poor world." The number of refugees is at a "record high" according to the UN. Image: united nations refugee agency Where the forcibly displaced are coming from Global Trends puts forcibly displaced people into three main categories: refugees, internally displaced people (IDP), and asylum-seekers. These people fled their homes "as a result of persecution, conflict, or generalized violence." Refugees Refugees are defined as someone who "has been forced to flee" because of "persecution, war, or violence." There were 25.4 million refugees as of 2017. Sixty eight percent of the total refugees fled from five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia. 68 percent of global refugees fled from five countries. Image: united nations refugee agency Global Trends highlights the conflict Rohingya Muslims face. They have fled Myanmar for years, but a new wave of displacement was triggered by an outbreak of violence in August 2017. Approximately 1 million Rohingya have lived in Myanmar's Rakhine State for generations, but have been barred from citizenship because Myanmar's laws grant citizenship based on ethnicity. Because they are stateless, the Rohingya have been subjected to discrimination and denied basic human rights. Story continues Internally displaced people (IDPs) By the end of 2017, an estimated 40 million people fled to different parts of their own countries because of armed conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations. Columbia had the largest population of IDP, with Syria second, and the Democratic Republic of Congo third. 40 million people were displaced in their own countries. Image: united nations refugee agency Global Trends spotlighted the Democratic Republic of Congo's IDP population, noting that the number of IDPs doubled from 2.2 million to 4.4 million in just one year. In addition to facing conflict within its own country, the DRC also hosted more than 500,000 refugees from other countries. Asylum-seekers UNHCR defines asylum-seekers as someone "whose request for sanctuary has yet to be processed." The United States took in the highest number of asylum-seekers since 2012, with 331,700 people accepted. Forty three percent of applicants were from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Germany, on the other hand, saw a sharp 73 percent decline in total applications. A majority of claims were from Syrians. Italy accepted the third largest number of claims, a majority of which were from Nigerians. Why the numbers are going up Grandi attributed the increase to lack of "significant progress in peace building," particularly in each country's leadership. He emphasized the conflict in South Sudan, where the political process seems to be at a standstill: "I don't think the leadership of South Sudan and the opposition are taking seriously the desperate situation of their own people, in spite of the pressures." Grandi also stressed the fragility and lack of stability in the home countries of many refugees. In Yemen, for example, the closure of ports has led to a strain on humanitarian efforts and trade. And in Syria, which Grandi says is politically "stuck," ISIS is still a threat. What we can do The report outlines three options for the crisis: returns, resettlement, and local integration. Returning to their home country is usually the preferred solution for many refugees. But returning in "voluntary, safe, and dignified" conditions is difficult in Nigeria, for example, 150,000 refugees returned from Cameroon but UNHCR expressed concerns over whether the people returning had done so of their own free will. The second option UNHCR offers is resettlement. According to the report, resettlement is a "tangible way to achieve enhanced solidarity and responsibility-sharing." Although an increased number of countries showed interest in establishing or maintaining resettlement programs, there was a significant decline in global resettlement opportunities in 2017. As a result, UNHCR submitted 54 percent less refugees for resettlement from 163,200 in 2016 to 75,200 in 2017. Global Trends calls quantifying local integration "challenging" because there are so many factors involved. Under local integration, a refugee would find a permanent home in their asylum country, pursue careers, and over time, potentially apply for citizenship. But it's a deeply complex process given the legal roadblocks many refugees face. Ultimately, as Grandi said, the solutions UNHCR offers are impossible without the cooperation of local governments. "In the end it's political action that has to occur for the root causes to be addressed," he said. A Republican senator who openly criticized the Trump administrations policy of separating children from their parents on the U.S. southern border privately suggested to voters it was parents fault. Senator Susan Collins lashed out at the widely criticized policy in an interview with Face the Nation on Sunday, in which she described the move as traumatizing to minors, but sent her constituents a letter that appeared to defend the policy. The border policy was explained last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who said the separation of families at the border would be enforced for those caught attempting to enter the U.S. illegally, with parents taken into custody at a federal jail, while their children are taken into custody of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS.) Trending: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem 2018-06-12T103917Z_769765556_RC155FE60E80_RTRMADP_3_NORTHKOREA-USA Reuters What the administration has decided to do is to separate children from their parents to try to send a message that if you cross the border with children, your children are going to be ripped away from you. That's traumatizing to the children who are innocent victims, and it is contrary to our values in this country," Collins said. We know from years of experience that we need to fix our immigration laws and that using children is not the answer, she added, although she explained she did support the presidents view that border security needed to be strengthened. Don't miss: Soccer Has an Intolerance Problem? After Mexicans Yell Anti-Gay Slur, FIFA Opens Investigation However, in a letter sent to her constituents, Collins appeared to change tack, suggesting parents risked their childrens safety by attempting to cross the border with them. Wow. This is the private letter @SenatorCollins is sending to her constituents rationalizing Trump's policy of separating children from their families. #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/WmY5ZQYxUQ Topher Spiro (@TopherSpiro) June 16, 2018 In May, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Department of Justice would begin prosecuting individuals who crossed the southern border illegally, which could mean that parents who are apprehended at the border could be separated from their children in some cases, Collinss letter said. Story continues Most popular: Kirstjen Nielsen Accused of Lying For a Racist by Mika Brzezinski Over Defense of Trump Policy Separating Families The safety and security of young children must always be paramount. I am concerned that some Central American families cross our southern border illegally with their children believing that they will be allowed to stay in the United States, it continued. While the desire to find a better life in our country is understandable, crossing the border illegally is highly dangerous, especially for children. The senator added that the law should be applied in a way that is humane, but she seemed to have written the letter without the same sense of injustice she appeared to demonstrate on Face the Nation. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Leading Republicans have admitted they are outraged by Donald Trumps migrant family separation policy, as the White House continues to defend a scheme which has seen 2,000 children taken from their parents and thrown in what appear to be holding cages at the Mexican border. Senator Lindsey Graham said the president could stop the misery with a phone call. Speaking on CNN, he appeared to challenge Mr Trumps moral authority: If you don't like families being separated, you can go tell DHS [Department of Homeland Security] stop doing it. Senators John McCain, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins and James Lankford also spoke out as fury continues to grow across the US. Former presidential candidate Mr McCain tweeted to say the policy was an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded. Mr Sasse was blunter. Family separation is wicked & needs to be stopped, he said in an online statement. But today, the White House appeared ready to come out fighting in defence of the zero tolerance policy. Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of homeland security, has been flown from New Orleans to Washington to face down criticism. Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of homeland security (Reuters) On Monday, she effectively blamed immigrant parents attempting to cross into the US illegally for the crisis. This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border [but] parents who entered illegally are by definition criminals, she said. By entering our country illegally, often in dangerous circumstances, illegal immigrants have put their children at risk. She added: Here is the bottom line: DHS is no longer ignoring the law. We are enforcing the laws as they exist on the books. Border Patrol Processing Center in McAllen, Texas (US Customs and Border Protection) During the West Wing briefing, she appeared to ignore a reporter who played an audio recording of Central American children, who had been separated from their parents, crying. One could be heard saying: I dont want them to stop my father, I dont want them to deport him. Story continues A border agent jokes: Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What were missing is a conductor. Some 2,000 children have been taken from their parents or guardians in just six weeks as families attempt to illegally cross into the US from Mexico. Under instruction from the White House, adults are taken for criminal prosecution, while under-18s are detained in holding facilities. Pictures of one such Texas centre emerged over the weekend showing dozens of youngsters kept in wire cages. In Mexico, it was nicknamed La Perrera the dog kennel. Flooding caused by Hurricane Irma near Fort Myers, Florida: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst Hundreds of thousands of homes in the United States could face persistent flooding as climate change pushes sea levels higher, according to a new report. Sea level rise is expected to be one of the most tangible effects of a changing climate, as accumulating greenhouse gases fuel a steady rise in global temperatures that in turn raise the level of oceans - threatening low-lying and coastal areas. A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists quantified the risk by comparing areas already known to be at high flood risk against data from the real estate website Zillow. The result: more than 300,000 homes lining Americas lengthy coastlines could face chronic flooding by 2045, which would mean 30-year mortgages issued to home-buyers today could be placing them in at-risk properties. Those structures house some 550,000 people. Even before homes are entirely submerged, the report found, plummeting property values could lead homeowners to abandon properties and potentially entire neighbourhoods that have become effectively uninhabitable, with potential reverberations throughout the national economy. With the inevitability of ever-higher seas, these are not devaluations from which damaged real estate markets will recover, the report warned. But the reports authors warn that many real estate markets do not take into account the looming cataclysm, leading more people to purchase property that could face regularly flooding. In addition to the homes at risk of inundation, the report found that some 14,000 commercial properties with a collective value of $18.5 billion lie in the danger zone. Extending the analysis to 2100, the likely consequences become even more dire: some 4.7 million people could live in homes that are vulnerable to rising waters, with Florida, New York and New Jersey holding the greatest numbers. Officials must respond with policies that seek to limit greenhouse gas emissions and help coastal communities prepare for increased flooding, the report urges. Story continues At the local level, coastal communities must no longer allow construction that cannot accommodate sea level rise, South Miami mayor Philip Stoddard told the reports authors. But Michael Berman, an expert on housing and flood risk who has advised the federal government on housing policy, warned that policymakers have been slow to recognise the threat. Short-term thinking and a simple view of the world tends to prevail in our culture, including our business and political cultures, Mr Berman said. There is almost nothing being done by policymakers in many vulnerable parts of the United States in the flood risk arena. By Radu-Sorin Marinas BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romania's lower house of parliament on Monday night approved amendments to the country's criminal procedure, which critics and the centrist opposition say would weaken prosecutors' powers to probe high level corruption. The new penal handbook designed by the ruling Social Democrats was endorsed in a 175/78 vote by legislators in a speedy procedure. Opposition groups say they plan to challenge it at the constitutional court. Under the bill, courts of appeals would be barred from convicting a person found innocent by a lower court, unless new evidence is brought by prosecutors. Wire tapping that is not connected with the criminal deed by a person under investigation will no longer be taken into account. The changes also set a maximum length for a criminal investigations to one year, which critics have said would effectively kill the country's tangled web of graft cases. Romania is one of the European Union's most corrupt states and Brussels keeps its justice system under special monitoring since its 2007 accession into the bloc. The argument over how hard to fight graft has dominated its post EU-entry politics. Anti-corruption prosecutors have secured a spate of convictions against lawmakers, ministers and mayors in recent years, exposing conflicts of interest, abuse of power, fraud and the awarding of state contracts in exchange for bribes. But leading politicians, some of whom are currently under investigation or on trial, have denied wrongdoing and accused prosecutors of using their powers for political persecution. Social Democrat leader Liviu Dragnea is barred from becoming prime minister due to a prior sentence in a vote-rigging case. At the start of 2017, attempts by Dragnea's ruling coalition to weaken anti-corruption legislation triggered the countrys biggest protests in decades. (Editing by Peter Graff) Bucharest (AFP) - Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and the public prosecutor expressed alarm Tuesday over amendments to the penal code voted through by left-wing government MPs fearing the judiciary could be damaged. "The Social Democrats (PSD) want to hobble the power of the judiciary, which is very serious," Iohannis told journalists after Monday's special evening sitting in parliament. The president hails from the centre-right and like much of the opposition accuses the government of attempting to weaken the fight against corruption in Romania, particularly in cases involving PSD strongman Liviu Dragnea, who is mired in legal troubles. "The government's MPs have voted through laws aimed at favouring Mr. Dragnea... and at stopping prosecutors' investigations," Iohannis said, adding that he would use powers available to him to "ask for modifications of this text". The public prosector expressed its "concern at the way these changes were adopted, without taking into account the suggestions put together by the Superior Council of Magistracy and magistrates' associations". Voted through by 175 votes to 78, the amendments to the penal code would limit the number of offences for which a suspect can be held in pre-trial detention and would also limit the length of investigations. According to the opposition, some of the other changes would permit Dragnea to demand a "review" of a previous conviction for vote rigging which prevented him from becoming prime minister. - 'Parallel state' - PSD MP Florin Iordache insisted the measures were necessary to "stop abuses" by some anti-corruption magistrates. Romania is one of the EU's most graft-ridden countries and prosecutors have launched a crackdown on corrupt officials in recent years. However the PSD says prosecutors have gone beyond their remit in some cases and are acting as part of a "parallel state". Story continues A particular target of the government's ire has been Laura Codruta Kovesi, head of the anti-graft office, whom it accuses of "harming Romania's image". Dragnea, one of the prosecutors' most vocal critics, is due to face a verdict later this week in a fresh fraud case linked to a fake jobs scandal. At the beginning of 2017, shortly after winning power, the PSD tried to push through legal reforms widely seen as aimed at helping Dragnea with his previous legal troubles. However, that move sparked the biggest wave of protests since the fall of communism, forcing the government to back down. Bazoule (Burkina Faso) (AFP) - Crocodiles may be one of the deadliest hunters in the animal kingdom, but in a small village in Burkina Faso it is not unusual to see someone sitting atop one of the fearsome reptiles. People in Bazoule, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the capital Ouagadougou, share their pond with more than 100 of the razor-toothed creatures. "We got used to the crocodiles when we were young, swimming in the water with them and all that," said Pierre Kabore, just a few metres (yards) away from a crocodile feasting on chicken provided by the village. "Now we can always approach them and sit on them -- and if you have the courage, you can lie on them too. There's no problem, they are sacred crocodiles. They don't do anything to anyone." According to local legend, the startling relationship with the predators dates back to at least the 15th century. The village was in the grip of an agonising drought until the crocodiles led women to a hidden pond where the population could slake their thirst. "The villagers organised a party to celebrate and thank the reptiles," Kabore said. A celebration known as Koom Lakre is still held every year during which villagers make sacrifices and ask the animals to grant their wishes of health, prosperity and a good harvest. Far from being considered a threat, the crocodiles are deemed to have a mystical connection with Bazoule. "Crocodiles are represented as the soul of our ancestors and if one of them dies, they are buried and even given a funeral as if they were human," said Kabore. "When a misfortune is about to happen in the village, they cry out. Elders are charged with interpreting the cries, and then make wishes to ward off bad luck." - Tourism attraction - The unusual contact between man and croc has drawn disbelieving tourists to the village to see for themselves. On their arrival, travellers can buy a chicken which is hung on a stick by a guide and used to entice the crocodiles out of the pond so that visitors can pose with the creatures. Story continues "It was nice to watch from a distance but sitting on one was a bit freaky," said Thomas Baspin, a young Frenchman who came to visit his grandparents in Burkina Faso. "I'm glad I did it -- but I'm also glad it's over!" he quipped. Tourism has become a big money-spinner for the impoverished villagers, but a three-year-old jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso is taking its toll. Ouagadougou has come under attack three times, most recently in March, when jihadists attacked the military headquarters and French embassy. "We could have more than 10,000 visitors per year but at the moment, there's no more than 4,000 or 5,000," said Raphael Kabore, one of the guides. Global warming is also believed to be having an impact. Rainfall levels are down each year, and the famous pond that is the crocodiles' home is shrinking. When it disappears, will the reptiles once more guide their human friends to a new watery home? Harvey Weinstein and Sandra Bullock. (Photo: Getty Images) Sandra Bullock knew about Harvey Weinsteins shady reputation but she never knew how bad he really was. In an interview with the Sunday Times of London, the Oscar-winning actress talks about how she avoided working with the disgraced producer. I heard about Harvey, and I was afraid of him, the Oceans 8 star says. I wasnt asked to be in that world. I learned early on to shut things off so those things didnt come my way. I only heard what Harvey wanted people to hear, and that made me so f***ing angry. Bullock heard whispers around Hollywood about Weinstein sleeping with actresses for parts in his films. People would say, Well, you know how she got that role? She f***ed Harvey. I would say, Shut the f*** up. You dont know that. Then, later, to find out that woman was brutally attacked, she says. They didnt sleep with Harvey. Harvey wanted you to think that. More than 80 women including actresses Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow have come forward to accuse the disgraced producer of sexual harassment, misconduct, and/or assault. Weinstein has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex and pleaded not guilty to rape charges this month. With all the brave women coming forward with Weinstein stories, Bullock was both in awe and really, really scared for those speaking up. I was like, Oh my God, this is amazing, but f***, f***, f***, what if it doesnt work? Please God, let it not swing the other way, she says. Were in such uncharted territory right now. Ive seen a lot of fear and a lot of men of a certain generation not understanding. Although Bullock never had an inappropriate encounter with Weinstein, she reveals she had a situation early on in her career. It came from a person of authority. I kept deflecting it with humor, and it didnt work, she reveals. Finally, I said, Please, just fire me. It was a lesson. After that, I tended to remove anything that could be misconstrued as sexual. I locked it down. Story continues In the #MeToo and #TimesUp era, the actress, who recently wrapped filming Blue Bird, said there was a shift on set. I saw a tremendous amount of fear from men on set. In the end, I said, I know youre scared, but I feel safe, so you can make some jokes now. But if you cross the line, I will f*** you up, she recalls. Weinsteins attorney has blasted Bullock for her assumptions about the producer. By her own admission, Harvey Weinstein never had an unpleasant interaction with Sandra Bullock. Indeed, from a review of her correspondence with Mr. Weinstein, it would appear that she had a warm pleasant relationship with him and even his daughter going back many years, a lawyer for Weinstein tells Page Six. Accordingly, with all due respect to Ms. Bullock, it is not right for her to take unproven allegations and republicize them in an effort to deprive Mr. Weinstein of due process and possibly a fair trial that every citizen in this great country is entitled to. In America, the presumption of innocence is supposed to have meaning. When piling on becomes the norm simply because it seems to be the politically correct or fashionable thing to do, we all lose, including Ms. Bullock. Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: By Mohammed Ghobari ADEN (Reuters) - Arab coalition troops stormed the airport in Yemen's main port Hodeidah on Tuesday and captured large areas of the compound in battles with Iran-aligned Houthis, a Yemeni military source, the UAE news agency and local residents said. Residents of the strategic Red Sea city said battles were also raging on the coastal road leading to the densely populated city center from the airport, with Apache helicopter gunships of the Western-backed coalition providing close air support. Wresting the airport from the Houthis would be a significant step to a takeover of Hodeidah by coalition-backed forces. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pledged a swift assault to avoid disrupting aid deliveries to Yemen through the port. "We can hear the sounds of artillery, mortars and sporadic machinegun fire. The Houthis have been using tanks," a resident close to the coastal strip told Reuters by telephone, asking not to be identified. "Water has been cut off to many of the areas near the Corniche area because the Houthis have dug trenches and closed water pipes. Many people are fleeing these neighborhoods and going deeper into the city center." The Houthis said they fired a missile targeting a facility of oil giant Saudi Aramco in Asir in southwestern Saudi Arabia, Houthi-run media reported. An Aramco official said the company's facilities were safe and operating normally. Saudi and UAE state media accused the Houthis of shelling civilian districts. Residents said the Houthi tanks were targeting coalition forces. The Arab alliance launched the onslaught on Hodeidah, the Houthis' sole port, on June 12 to try and turn the tables in a long-stalemated proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has exacerbated turmoil across the Middle East. "They have stormed the airport," an anti-Houthi Yemeni military source told Reuters earlier on Tuesday. The UAE state news agency WAM said large swathes of the airport compound had been taken by coalition forces. Houthi media said coalition warplanes had carried out more than 40 strikes on the airport since the morning. The escalation in fighting has wounded and displaced dozens of civilians and hampered humanitarian agencies trying to send vital aid to million of Yemenis via the Red Sea port. "TERRIFIED" Tuesday's battles spread panic among local inhabitants. "My children are terrified. The fighting and the sounds of explosions are everywhere and we are stuck in our house in the district of Rabsa with no running water," Iman, a 37-year-old mother of two, said tearfully. "What have we done for all of this? Mohamed Sharaf, 44, a civil servant, said he had sent his entire family to Sanaa, the Houthi-held inland capital, several days ago and he was getting ready to leave himself. "There is death and destruction everywhere in this city. The United Nations fears the offensive will worsen what is already the world's most urgent humanitarian crisis, with 22 million Yemenis dependent on aid, and an estimated 8.4 million believed to be on the verge of starvation. U.N. officials estimate that 600,000 people live in and around Hodeidah and that in a worst-case scenario the battles could cost up to 250,000 lives. A senior U.N. humanitarian official told Reuters a leading determinant in arriving at that estimate was the risk of a cholera outbreak. The war has killed more than 10,000 people in all. Hodeidah port remained open on Tuesday with the U.N. World Food Programme hastening to unload three ships containing enough food for six million people for one month, WFP spokeswoman Bettina Luescher told reporters in Geneva. The Arab states say their aim is to seize the airport and port quickly and avoid street battles in the city center. But the Houthis were well dug into Hodeidah as it constitutes the key supply line to territory they control including Sanaa. UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash told Reuters: "We are waiting for them (Houthis) to realize the sort of military and psychological blow that they got with the airport ... we are giving them some time to come and decide if they want to save the city ... and pull out." Diplomacy aimed at reducing the bloodshed appeared stalled. Martin Griffiths, U.N. peace envoy for Yemen, left Sanaa on Tuesday after talks with Houthis. He made no comment. But Senior Houthi official Dhaifullah Shami said on Twitter that Griffiths had "failed to achieve his goal and left Sanaa disappointed, without obtaining concessions." Another Houthi official, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, denied an assertion by Gargash on Monday the talks with Griffiths were about handing over Hodeidah, calling this idea "unrealistic". Bukhaiti told Reuters by telephone that Griffiths instead had discussed "a comprehensive political solution that addresses...all fronts and not only Hodeidah." Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for the U.N. Secretary-General, told reporters that Griffiths was going on to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia to meet coalition and Yemeni government officials. The coalition intervened in Yemen's war in 2015 to try and unseat the Houthis, restore the internationally recognized Yemeni government in exile and thwart what Riyadh and Abu Dhabi see as Iran's expansionism in the region. The Houthis, who control the most populated regions in the chronically unstable nation of 30 million people, deny they are puppets of Iran. They say their movement reflects a popular revolt against state corruption and foreign meddling. (Additional reporting by Dahlia Nehme, Maha El Dahan, Hadeel al Sayegh and Alexander Cornwell in Dubai, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Katie Paul in Riyadh Writing by Ghaida Ghantous, Editing by Mark Heinrich, William Maclean) Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, and FBI Director Christopher Wray. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP) WASHINGTON It was not, perhaps, the most somber moment in the history of the U.S. Senate. In the midst of reciting a list of complaints about FBI agents allegedly swayed by their own anti-Trump animus, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., stopped speaking and looked up. He had been reading from some of the messages those agents privately exchanged, and which were later uncovered by investigators. Rhymes with wangdoodle, a seemingly perturbed Kennedy said. That wasnt the word or rhyme. But the point was made. That was just one standout moment at Mondays Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. FBI Director Christopher Wray and Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice inspector general, were present on Capitol Hill for the occasion. Last week, Horowitz released a lengthy report that lambasted then FBI Director James Comey for his handling of the probe into Hillary Clintons use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state. Horowitzs report also found that high-ranking officials within the FBI bore animus toward Trump, though the report pointedly does not ascribe political motive to any actions the agency undertook in regard to Clinton or President Trump, who fired Comey last year. Both sides of the political divide have found reason to celebrate the report. Trump falsely deemed himself totally exonerated last Friday, in a seeming conflation of Horowitzs report and the work of special counsel Robert Mueller. The two investigations are unrelated. Clinton supporters, meanwhile, found evidence for their belief that Comeys Oct. 28, 2016, letter, in which he declared a reopening of the investigation into Clintons emails, robbed the Democratic candidate of momentum in the elections final lap. Mondays hearing also gave yet another endorsement to the idea that the U.S. is fated to relitigate the 2016 election until the end of days. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, seemed to indicate as much with his opening statement. The details in this report confirm what American people have suspected for a long time, he said. Hillary Clinton got the kid glove treatment. Story continues Grassley went on to suggest that Muellers probe into the Trump campaign and Russian electoral meddling was similarly tainted by political bias. Mueller himself is a Republican, but Trump has taken to calling some of his investigators 13 Angry Democrats because of their supposed affiliations. The Justice Department faces a serious credibility problem, Grassley said, because millions of Americans suspect that there is a double standard. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, left, shakes hands with FBI Director Christopher Wray. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP) Democrats had apparently read an entirely different report. Ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., focused her opening statement on Comey, who angered Democrats in 2016 for his statements about the Clinton emails. Horowitz said he found that Comeys decision to publicize the decisions not to bring criminal charges and to subsequently reopen the investigation amount to an act of insubordination. Frank Montoya Jr., a former high-ranking FBI official, told Yahoo News that the Horowitz report came in the context of a disagreement on autonomy between the Department of Justice and the FBI. DOJ has never liked the fact the FBI sees itself as independent, he said. Montoya added that while Horowitz may have been critical about Comeys actions after the email investigation, he was unequivocal that any bias (real or perceived) had zero impact on the decision of prosecutors not to charge Clinton. That says something for the integrity of the investigation itself. Despite all the outside drama, hes saying it remained intact. Running nearly 600 pages, Horowitzs report also gave both parties plenty of room for suspicion, accusation and recrimination. Feinstein wondered why there were multiple leaks to the press about the Clinton email investigation during the 2016 campaign, but none about the budding inquest into potential collusion between Trump and Russia. This unquestionably harmed candidate Clinton and helped candidate Trump, Feinstein said. She and other Democrats tried on several occasions to focus the hearing on Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who proved a feisty Trump surrogate during the campaign and now the public face of Trumps legal team pushing back against Mueller. Three days before Comey announced the reopening of the Clinton investigation, Giuliani mused on Fox News about a couple of surprises that would prove enormously effective were coming. Horowitz declined to discuss how Giuliani came across this information, though he suggested that there was an ongoing investigation. President Trump, James Comey. (Photos: left, Evan Vucci/AP, and Susan Walsh) Republicans, for their part, kept the focus on the five FBI officials whod exchanged anti-Trump messages, in particular top investigator Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page, who were romantically involved and have been pilloried by Trumps Twitter feed. Wray said the agents in question would be referred for disciplinary action, while new guidelines and training would be instituted, including about proper relations with the media. (Horowitzs report depicts some agents as too friendly with reporters). I can only imagine what else is out there, remarked Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. At the same time, Wray defended the fundamental integrity of his department, and drew a sharp line between Comeys alleged errors and the departments present-day work, specifically on the investigation of the Trump campaign. I dont believe special counsel Mueller is on a witch hunt, he said during a later round of questioning. Trumps preferred term for the investigation is WITCH HUNT! Democrats tried to ask questions that forced the FBI officials to explain in effect, to the president himself that their report did not focus on Russia and thus in no way exonerated him on that matter, as the commander in chief has repeatedly claimed. We did not look into collusion questions, Horowitz said flatly in the middle of an exchange with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Leahy crystallized Democratic sentiment when he posited: [If] the FBI were trying to throw the election to Hillary Clinton, it could not have done a worse job. Every single misstep by the FBI damaged Hillary Clinton and helped Donald Trump. Republicans answered by returning to the anti-Trump messages sent by FBI officials, a powerful if inexact refutation of the Democratic point. Kennedy, the Louisiana senator, read several of these. One, from Page to Strzok, was about a comment Trump made. It was here that the gentleman from Louisiana was forced, for proprietys sake, to resort to wangdoodle. _____ Read more from Yahoo News: Washington (AFP) - Kirstjen Nielsen, the US homeland security chief whose departure was announced by Donald Trump on Sunday, was said to be a frequent target of the president's ire despite being among the staunchest defenders of his controversial immigration policies. Last summer, as images were broadcast of wailing children being wrested from their parents under the administration's practice of separating families, she took to the White House podium to defend the "zero tolerance" approach, becoming the face of a policy that was decried the world over. She appeared to have done enough to win over her boss, who until then was reportedly close to firing her for failing to keep an adequate check on illegal border crossings, a cornerstone of Trump's election campaign. But the reprieve was to prove temporary. As Border Patrol estimates put the number of migrants passing through Mexico at over 100,000 in March -- nearly a decade high -- an increasingly irate Trump appeared to have lost patience with Nielsen, who had been without her protector John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, since he resigned last year. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summed up the position of many progressive critics, writing: "It is deeply alarming that the Trump Administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House's liking." - Lawyer, cyber-security specialist - The 46-year-old Nielsen, who would swap elegant office attire for jeans and aviator shades on her frequent visits to the border, kept a low profile when she joined the administration at its outset in January 2017. A lawyer by training, she had served previously as a cyber security specialist in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). She was brought in as assistant to Kelly, a retired marine general who set to work cracking down on illegal immigration as Trump's first DHS secretary. Story continues When Kelly moved to the White House as Trump's top aide in July 2017, Nielsen went with him as his deputy. But by October that year she was back at DHS, this time as secretary. Described as being all-business, she oversaw a sprawling department with 200,000 employees and wide-ranging responsibilities. Disaster relief, cyber security, transportation security, the Coast Guard, customs and policing the borders all fall under the department's purview. So it fell to her to carry out Trump's most fiercely held objective: stopping illegal immigration. It was a daunting, deeply controversial task in a country with an estimated 11 million people living without papers, many with families and deep roots in their communities. Under Trump, Nielsen's department embarked on sweeping roundups and tough new measures, including barrier construction on the Mexico border. - Loyalist - She will be remembered most, however, as the primary defender of the Trump administration's most widely condemned practice -- since revoked -- of separating migrant children from their parents as part of a policy of prosecuting all illegal border crossers. Nielsen faced down opposition calls to resign as condemnation pours in from the United Nations, human rights groups, and four former first ladies -- all mothers -- who have called the policy "cruel" and "immoral." She would go on to counter-attack, bristling at suggestions that the children were being mistreated, or placed into what appeared to be "cages." Instead, toeing the administration's line, she blamed Congress for passing laws that offer illegal immigrants numerous "loopholes." And in any case, the children taken from their parents after crossing the border were "well taken care of," she said. Nielsen's relationship with Trump was long said to be tenuous. But despite reports he complained constantly about her performance, she continued to loyally defend him. When participants in a White House session on immigration quoted Trump as referring to African nations as "shithole" countries, Nielsen came to the president's defense. "I did not hear that word used," she told a congressional hearing. Quizzed about Trump's statement that he would prefer immigrants from a country like Norway, Nielsen spun it as Trump's appreciation of the skills of Norwegian workers, and not their race. "Norway is a predominantly white country, isn't it?" a senator asked her. "I actually do not know that, sir, but I imagine that is the case," replied Nielsen -- herself of Scandinavian lineage. That loyalty persisted until the end: last month, she defended the president's declaration of a national emergency to secure funding for his pet project, a wall on the US-Mexico border. And her letter of resignation left little doubt Nielsen remained a true believer in Trump's crusade against undocumented migrants. "I hope that the next Secretary will have the support of Congress and the courts in fixing the laws which have impeded our ability to fully secure America's borders and which have contributed to discord in our nation's discourse," she wrote. Washington (AFP) - US Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday that US policy to separate illegal immigrant children from their families is aimed at ending "lawlessness" at the border. Defending a policy that has provoked an outcry around the country and accusations of human rights violations, Sessions said the government is trying to halt a five-fold increase in the number of families illegally crossing the border in just four years. "We do not want to separate children from their parents," he said in a speech to the National Sheriffs' Association. "We do not want adults to bring children into this country unlawfully, either, placing them at risk." Sessions said the issue was "whether we want to be a country of laws or whether we want to be a country without borders." "It is one of the reasons the American people elected President Trump -- to end the lawlessness at our southern border." In the six weeks after Sessions announced the new policy on May 7, nearly 2,000 minors were separated from their parents or adult guardians after they entered the country. Most of those parents have asked for asylum, saying they are escaping incessant violence in their homes in Central America. The Trump administration policy is to first charge them with a crime -- illegally crossing the border -- before processing their asylum claims. Meanwhile, their children are taken away to separate holding facilities, to be reunited sometime later. Sessions blamed loopholes in US immigration laws for encouraging the jump in asylum-seekers entering the country illegally. "We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws," he said. He also said that the government is already spending $1 billion a year taking care of children who entered the country illegally, with families or unaccompanied. "When we ignore our laws at the border we obviously encourage hundreds of thousands of people a year to likewise ignore our laws and illegally enter our country, creating an enormous burden on our law enforcement, our schools, our hospitals, and social programs," he said. Story continues Meanwhile Kirstjen Nielsen, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which enforces immigration policy, said many of those coming to the borders as family groups were in fact not families. She said human trafficking groups are putting children with others and training them to ask for asylum as families to skirt US immigration laws. Only about 20 percent of those seeking asylum actually merit it, she said. "Our system for asylum is broken," she said. Tesla CEO Elon Musk's latest comments on an India venture caught many Tesla watchers by surprise. In a Twitter interaction with a Tesla fan from India on May 30, Musk indicated it was the company's Indian-born chief financial officer, Deepak Ahuja, who was really calling the shots on Tesla (TSLA) entering India. That Ahuja who grew up in India but moved to the United States to pursue higher education and never returned is not known to have this particular expertise, left some industry insiders with more questions than answers. Had he really been handed the control of the eclectic carmaker's India fate or had he been in the driver's seat all along? Could Ahuja accurately calibrate the timing of Tesla's entry into the South Asian nation and the market's readiness for its products? Some Tesla and technology experts are interpreting the CEO's remark as merely being a cheeky throwaway quip consistent with his character, especially his Twitter persona. But others, including those who personally know Musk, inferred that the billionaire entrepreneur was simply thinking aloud and maybe seriously on the microblogging platform, but short of actually making anything like an official statement. Musk's tweet was completely unexpected, said Vivek Wadhwa, a distinguished fellow and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering and author of "The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future." Wadhwa said he had been interacting with Musk about India, but Ahuja's role in it never came up. "This is new. I last exchanged emails with Elon in November about going to India," Wadhwa said. "I think that Elon was just inundated and tweeted his thoughts, he wasn't making an announcement." Story continues Wadhwa, who counts Ahuja as a friend, said the latter was close enough to India to know its problems and opportunities. "Deepak [Ahuja] is a very experienced and sensible business executive who knows both the U.S. and Indian markets as well as the strengths and weaknesses of Tesla," he said. "Ahuja is Elon's trusted advisor, so it makes complete sense to leave the decision to him." "Ahuja does have a lot of international experience with Ford, but none in India that I'm aware of," said Morningstar equity analyst David Whiston. Ahuja ran Ford South Africa and also headed a Ford-Mazda international joint venture before he left the Detroit automaker for Tesla. There's a possibility, though, that Musk was referring to connections Ahuja has in India. Ahuja, who came out of retirement to rejoin the Palo Alto-based automaker last year, left India at age 22 to pursue a master's degree in materials engineering in the U.S. He comes from a family of entrepreneurs and his father has originally expected him to return to India to help run a family business after being schooled in the U.S. He did complete his undergraduate work at the India Institutes of Technology. "While I wouldn't expect a college student to be an expert in a culture, it's certainly better insight than 'left at an early age', or someone who has only visited. And having close family and friends in India may be help as well," said Tesla analyst Eric Ross at Cascend Securities, who has a sell rating on Tesla. A Tesla spokesman put it more simply, saying Ahuja has an important role in these types of strategic decisions, including whether and when Tesla expands into new markets. Wadhwa said he had urged Musk to accelerate the move to India but not to rush into selling cars. Instead, he thinks India has a sizeable need for Tesla's Powerwall home battery, and that's a more attractive business proposition for Tesla in India than its cars. "This is where the biggest opportunity is," he said. "The battery when combined with solar cells can solve one of the biggest problems that Indians face the lack of reliable power." Musk was "very interested in India" but already had far too much demand for Powerwall than he could possibly handle, Wadhwa said. Wadhwa quoted Musk verbatim from one of their email exchanges: "He [Musk] wrote: 'India is a very important market, but it will take us a year or so to get to a scale that matters." Right now it seems India couldn't be further from Musk's mind. "I don't think there are any [India] plans yet; they are working frantically on scaling production up to meet the massive demand," Wadhwa said. "Elon is focused on ramping up production of the Model 3, the 'production hell' that he has tweeted about." Wadhwa estimated Tesla could sell "a million Model 3's at the $35K price as well as several million Powerwalls in the next 12 months if they could produce them fast enough." "India requires a significant percentage of products to be manufactured in India, something TSLA doesn't have the capital nor the appetite for at this time," Ross said. India also lacks the charging infrastructure necessary for Tesla to release into a new market. "I assume given these challenges, Ahuja may put India on the back-burner for a while; I certainly would if I were in his shoes." Based on "current expectations," TSLA could release Models S and X in India no sooner than in August 2019, and Model 3 in December 2019, Ross estimates. Similar production concerns were expressed by Morningstar's Whiston, who said Tesla has to be able to bring enough product to meet demand at a pace satisfactory to consumers, and build up the charging infrastructure [in India]. "If your car runs out of electricity in one of India's famous traffic jams, you'd have a problem," the Morningstar analyst said. The current drive to reach profitability Then there's another hurdle that Musk would rather the market didn't obsess over too much: the need to raise capital. Contrary to Musk's repeated claims he wouldn't need to raise capital, Ross said the India launch is out of the question until Tesla has raised capital to the tune of several billion dollars. "We don't expect they will even announce anything until they have raised capital, which we expect in the second half of 2018, or the first half of 2019, at the latest," Ross said, adding that "TSLA will raise additional capital once they show a strong ramp of Model 3s, perhaps 5,000 units per week, and at good margins, so there is a positive story to tell investors." Tesla referred questions about its cash needs to its recent Q1 shareholder letter in which the company said that if it executes according to its plan for Model 3 production, then it will at least achieve positive net income excluding non-cash stock based compensation in Q3 and Q4 and expects to also achieve full GAAP profitability in each of these quarters. "Ultimately, the growth of Model 3 and the profit associated with it will help us accelerate the transition to sustainable energy even faster," the letter said. Last week at the Tesla annual meeting, Musk followed that up by saying, "I think it is really looking like we will have positive gap net income next quarter as well as positive cash flow in Q3 and Q4. And we, as I have said before, do not expect to need to raise any incremental debt or equity." Tesla announced a round of layoffs last week equal to 9 percent of its workforce, or roughly 3,600 employees, mostly salaried positions and with no expected impact on Model 3 production. In an email to Tesla employees explaining the job reductions, Musk wrote the move was required to reduce costs and become profitable. Ross said he didn't think Musk was lying about capital requirements, but was being too "optimistic about his production assumptions." It's unlikely Musk could ramp up production to "10,000 Model 3 cars per week, but if he did reach that level, he'd start generating real cash flow and he could then fund himself." Over the weekend, Musk sent an email to Tesla employees saying that "radical improvements" are needed to meet quarterly targets. Ross gave another reason less specific but maybe equally significant as to why India may have to wait: "Tesla has too many balls in the air, and any time they have a challenging quarter, they announce a new 'world-changing vehicle'," Ross said. "We now have a Model Y, Semi and pickup truck coming, all miraculously without requiring a capital raise." Musk may have put the India tweet in its proper place best himself when taking to his favorite online hangout last Friday to communicate about another topic: More from Global Investing Hot Spots: Tesla and China trade war: Elon Musk has tough tariff riddle to solve Why China is positioned to win A.I. war over US Elon Musk's Twitter bromance with India's auto market Addis Ababa (AFP) - South Sudan President Salva Kiir will meet with rebel leader Riek Machar in Ethiopia's capital on Wednesday in their first face-to-face in nearly two years, an Ethiopian official said Tuesday. "The two principals will meet in Addis Ababa upon the invitation extended by his excellency, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed," Meles Alem, a spokesman for Ethiopia's foreign ministry, told AFP. South Sudan's ambassador to Ethiopia, James Pitia Morgan, confirmed Kiir's planned attendance, as did Manasseh Zindo, a senior official in Machar's SPLM-IO rebel group. The two leaders, whose political rivalry triggered the start of a civil war more than four years ago have not met since Machar and his forces were chased from the capital during fighting in July 2016. Successive international efforts -- led by regional bloc IGAD -- have so far failed to impose a functioning peace deal or meaningful ceasefire. Abiy "will call upon the two leaders to narrow their gap and work for the pacification of South Sudan," Meles said. Tens of thousands have died and nearly four million South Sudanese have been driven from their homes since December 2013, while millions are going hungry amid a massive humanitarian crisis. Last month the UN Security Council gave the warring sides a month to reach a peace deal or face sanctions. Addis Ababa (AFP) - Nearly two years after fleeing South Sudan's capital amid deadly fighting, rebel leader Riek Machar will meet face-to-face on Wednesday with the country's president, Salva Kiir. The rendezvous in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa represents the latest international effort to end more than four years of civil war in the world's youngest nation. Tens of thousands have been killed and millions have been driven out of their homes and into starvation. Kiir and Machar will meet at the invitation of Ethiopia's prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, who also chairs the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) regional bloc that has taken the lead in thus-far fruitless peace negotiations. Abiy "will call upon the two leaders to narrow their gap and work for the pacification of South Sudan and relieve the burden of death and uprooting of South Sudanese people," said Meles Alem, a spokesman for Ethiopia's foreign ministry. Kiir's attendance was confirmed by South Sudan's ambassador to Ethiopia, James Pitia Morgan. Manasseh Zindo, a senior official in Machar's Sudan People's Liberation Movement-in Opposition rebel group, said Machar would attend. IGAD first proposed the meeting last month after the most recent unsuccessful round of peace talks. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir suggested hosting the two foes in Khartoum, an offer Machar rejected, while Kiir's government said it would prefer to have the meeting outside the region altogether. - Failed peace - The two men have been central to the fate of South Sudan since its 2011 separation from the north. The country descended into civil war in 2013 after Kiir accused Machar, his former deputy, of plotting a coup against him. They have not met since July 2016, when heavy fighting in the capital, Juba, signalled the collapse of a 2015 peace deal forcing Machar to flee to South Africa. The renewed violence spread across the country, spawning numerous new armed opposition groups and further complicating peace efforts. Story continues Efforts to revitalise the 2015 agreement resulted in a ceasefire in December which lasted just hours before warring parties accused each other of breaking it. Tens of thousands have died and nearly four million South Sudanese have been driven from their homes by the conflict which the United Nations ranks among the most serious humanitarian crises in the world. Forty-eight percent of the population are experiencing extreme hunger and seven million will need aid this year, according to the UN. International patience with the conflict has worn thin. Last month, the UN Security Council gave the two warring sides a month to reach a peace deal or face sanctions. The United States has also grown increasingly frustrated with Kiir's government. Washington was a critical backer of South Sudan during its separation from Sudan, and remains Juba's biggest aid donor. A top American official earlier this month threatened parties on both sides of the conflict with sanctions after a report from US foundation The Sentry said South Sudanese elites were profiting from human rights abuses. Despite the pressure, observers say Kiir has little incentive to make concessions to his rivals. His soldiers are winning militarily, while the opposition is more fractured than ever before. UPDATED with video: There is the right side of history and then there is the side of history in which the Trump administration defends its policy of separating children from their parents, Stephen Colbert said one of many late-night stars to pummel President Donald Trumps baby-snatching immigration policy. Fox News Channel argued the chain link fenced boxes in which children are being put after they are separated from their parent are not cages, theyre pens, the CBS late night host described via video. Were not treating these kids like zoo animals. Were treating them like farm animals, Colbert translated. Border patrol told CBS This Morning theyre very uncomfortable with the characterization of the boxes as cages, saying its not inaccurate its just uncomfortable-making. Its accurate; thats why theyre uncomfortable, Colbert explained. While President Donald Trump continues to blame Democrats for forcing him to snatch children from their parents, not everyone in the administration is marching in step with his policy, first announced in April by Attorney General Jeff sessions. Some members of his administration say it does not even exist, Colbert said. Including DHS Secretary and Definitely-Not-Descendent-Of-Immigrants Kirstjen Nielsen, who had tweeted one day earlier: We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period. Then why are you locking up kids at an abandoned Walmart?! Colbert asked. But, the next morning, Colbert noted, Nielsen sprang a new storyline on America: We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are, in fact, a family. Responded Colbert: Who can tell if these weeping toddlers are part of a family? They might not even be toddlers. They might be adults with shoes on their knees! Nielsen went on, saying they have to do their job and will not apologize for doing their job. Story continues RelatedDHS Secy Nielsen Insists We Are Country Of Compassion As She Touts Trumps Child Snatching Immigration Policy Nielsen is not the only member of the Trump administration defending the tactic. So Is White House Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller. He has called separating children from their parents a potent tool for stopping migrants from flooding across the border. Which is fitting because Ive always thought of Stephen Miller as a potent tool, Colbert snarked, later correcting that impotent. In a new segment, The Devils Advocate, Satan explained the children are being detained in pens like the ones in which we make Charles Manson fight Thomas Jefferson. Sorry, Tom, it was the slave stuff. By the way, Jeff Sessions: See you soon. Related stories George Takei Compares His Internment To Trump Policy: "We Were Not Pulled Screaming From Our Mothers' Arms" Laura Ingraham Concedes Detention Centers As "Summer Camps" Comparison, Sticks With "Boarding Schools" Fox News' Laura Ingraham Under Fire After Calling Detention Centers "Summer Camps" For Immigrant Children The U.S. Supreme Court took a pass on setting limits on extreme partisan gerrymandering on Monday, saying the plaintiffs in the case didnt have standing to challenge Wisconsins statewide assembly map. The decision came in a case called Gill v. Whitford, which advocates had hoped would allow the court to clarify if partisan gerrymandering could be so egregious that it violated the U.S. Constitution. The court has never said partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional, leaving lawmakers from both political parties free to draw lines to their advantage. Even though the court said the 12 plaintiffs couldnt challenge the entire statewide assembly map, it sent the case back to a lower court to evaluate their claims of standing to bring forward a gerrymandering case for their district. The decision to dismiss the case for lack of standing was unanimous. The decision to send the case back to the lower court for further consideration was 7-2, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch not joining. The courts decision establishes a new legal framework for challenging partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs cant simply challenge a statewide map, but they can challenge the boundaries of their own districts if they can show they have suffered a specific harm. The plaintiffs partisan gerrymandering claims turn on allegations that their votes have been diluted. That harm arises from the particular composition of the voters own district, which causes his votehaving been packed or crackedto carry less weight than it would carry in another, hypothetical district, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. Remedying the individual voters harm, therefore, does not necessarily require restructuring all of the States legislative districts. It requires revising only such districts as are necessary to reshape the voters districtso that the voter may be unpacked or uncracked, as the case may be. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a concurring opinion joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. That opinion offered a roadmap for how a partisan gerrymandering claim might successfully proceed in a lower court, and said plaintiffs could show they had suffered specific harm by offering an alternative electoral map that did not dilute their votes as much. The claims from voters in a partisan gerrymandering case must be district-specific, Kagan wrote, but courts can still step in to strike down a statewide map. Story continues Remedying each plaintiffs vote dilution injury requires revising only such districts as are necessary to reshape [that plaintiff s] districtso that the [plaintiff] may be unpacked or uncracked, as the case may be, Kagan wrote. But with enough plaintiffs joined togetherattacking all the packed and cracked districts in a statewide gerrymanderthose obligatory revisions could amount to a wholesale restructuring of the States districting plan. Kagan also wrote that a political party or other group might be able to bring a statewide challenge to a partisan gerrymander on the theory that it violated their First Amendment right to freedom of association. The challengers wouldnt need to show harm in specific districts because such a decision wouldnt necessarily be district-specific, she wrote. But she said the challengers in the Wisconsin case had failed to advance that claim. Gill v. Whitford, which pertains to partisan redistricting, was one of the most closely watched Supreme Court cases of this term. (Photo: diegograndi via Getty Images) The case involved a challenge to Wisconsins state assembly map. Republicans controlled the redistricting process in Wisconsin and worked in secret to draw a map to cement GOP control over the chamber. Their plan worked. They won 60 of the chambers 99 seats in 2012, even though then-President Barack Obama had won the state and Republicans only got 47 percent of the vote. The GOP won 57 percent of the assembly vote in 2014 and increased its majority in the assembly to 63 seats. In 2016, the partys share of the assembly vote dropped to 53 percent, but Republicans picked up an additional seat in the assembly. The challengers in the Wisconsin case said the state assembly map was a partisan gerrymander that treated Democrats and Republicans differently, thus violating their rights guaranteed by the First and 14th amendments. They said the election results over three federal elections offered clear evidence that Republicans had drawn a map making it nearly impossible to take control of the chamber. But Wisconsin lawyers said lawmakers hadnt done anything unconstitutional by drawing maps to their advantage. They noted that the Constitution gives state lawmakers power over redistricting, a sign that the drafters of the document anticipated partisanship to play a role in the process. Amy Hasenberg, a spokeswoman for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), said the decision was a victory for the state. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the State of Wisconsin. This allows the Governor and Legislature to continue focusing on issues that move Wisconsin forward, she said in a statement. But Paul Smith, a lawyer at Campaign Legal Center who argued the case on behalf of the Wisconsin voters at the Supreme Court, said the plaintiffs would continue to make their case in the lower court and may add plaintiffs to show harm in specific districts. This case is very much still alive, he said in a statement. We now have the opportunity to demonstrate the real and concrete harms that result from partisan gerrymandering in the lower court, the same court that struck down the Wisconsin mapping scheme to begin with. Richard Pildes, a law professor at New York University, said in an email that the courts decision would make partisan gerrymandering claims more difficult to challenge. It is certainly more difficult to litigate district by district than being able to attack a plan as a whole, he said. In the former, you have to reconstruct the reasons a specific district was drawn in the particular way it was, which involves trying to reverse engineer the final plan to figure out what choices the districters did and did not make. William Whitford, the law professor who was the lead plaintiff in the case, expressed frustration on a conference call that the case would go on even longer. He noted the case was originally filed in 2015 and that it was crucial for new maps to be in place before the 2020 election. The state lawmakers elected in 2020 will draw the states congressional map for the next decade. Redistricting is usually done once every 10 years, so an effective gerrymander can have profound political consequences for the rest of the decade. Many believe advances in technology and data analysis will make partisan gerrymandering during the next round of redistricting, in 2021, even more severe. Wisconsin Republicans werent alone in gerrymandering. During the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans targeted state races in which they had a chance to flip control of state chambers and control the redistricting process. That effort succeeded and Republicans ruthlessly gerrymandered seats to their advantage. In North Carolina, the Republican lawmakers overseeing the redistricting process talked openly about how much of an advantage their map would give Republicans. In a separate decision on Monday, the Supreme Court also declined to strike down a single congressional district in Maryland that was gerrymandered to benefit Democrats. A lower court had declined to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the map in 2017, and the Supreme Court said Monday that it would not overrule that decision. There is still a forthcoming trial in the Maryland case. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy (right) with President Donald Trump at the swearing-in ceremony for Justice Neil Gorsuch. Winning over Kennedy was seen as a crucial part of winning the case of Gill v. Whitford. (Photo: Joshua Roberts / Reuters) The challengers in the Wisconsin case pointed to a 2004 case called Vieth v. Jubelirer, in which the Supreme Court declined to strike down Pennsylvanias congressional map as an unconstitutional gerrymander. Four justices in the majority wrote that it was impossible to determine when a partisan gerrymander violated the Constitution. Justice Anthony Kennedy, however, wrote separately, saying that such a standard might exist. The challengers in Gill took up Kennedys invitation. They offered a range of standards they hoped he might like in hopes of earning his vote, which was seen as crucial in winning the case. Many of those proposed tests relied on mathematical calculations to help the justices assess how firmly a map cemented one partys power. One of the tests that got much attention in the case was called the efficiency gap. It offers a formula for calculating how many votes each party wastes in a given election in an attempt to quantify the severeness of a gerrymander. The party in power is extremely likely to maintain its majority when the efficiency gap is greater than 7 percent, experts say. During oral argument in October, Roberts was skeptical of the efficiency gap and other standards, labeling them sociological gobbledygook. He worried that getting involved in partisan gerrymandering would worsen the courts standing in the publics eye because the average American would think the justices were favoring one party over the other. The standards the challengers were offering doesnt sound like language in the Constitution, Roberts said. Related Coverage Supreme Court Set To Hear Redistricting Case That Could Remake American Politics Not Every Pennsylvania Democrat Benefited From Redistricting Ohio Voters Pass Gerrymandering Reform Measure Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. A Texas deputy has been arrested after allegedly molesting a 4-year-old relative whose undocumented mother he's accused of threatening with deportation. Authorities allege 47-year-old Jose Nunez, at 10-year veteran of the Bexar County Sheriff's Office, sexually assaulted the girl before exploiting her mother's fear of being tossed out of the country in a bid to keep her quiet when she found out, according to KENS. In spite of her fears, the mother reportedly reported Nunez at a fire station after her little girl complained of pain Saturday night. Investigators stepped in, and Nunez was arrested and charged with super aggravated sexual assault on Sunday night. At a press briefing, Sheriff Javier Salazar called the allegations quite frankly, heartbreaking, disturbing, disgusting, infuriating all at the same time." Salazar added: "When one person or persons individually demonstrate like they did in this case that they're not worthy to be part of this agency, then we're going to, quite frankly, get them out of here. Cut them out like cancer. And that's what's going to happen in this case." Nunez is on administrative leave pending the completion of an investigation. Salazar said authorities have reason to believe the abuse had been going on for months, or even years. The sheriff also said there could be other victims and urged them, or possible witnesses, to come forward. RELATED STORIES Dancing FBI Agent Charged With Assault After Gun Goes Off During Backflip Valedictorian's Mic Cut as Her Graduation Speech Addresses Sexual Assault Harvey Weinstein Pleads Not Guilty to Sexual Assault Charges in New York Court Related Articles: A Texas deputy has been arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a 4-year-old and threatening the girl's undocumented immigrant mother with deportation if she went to police. Jose Nunez, 47, a 10-year veteran of the Bexar County Sheriff's Office, faces a minimum of 25 years in jail after being charged with super aggravated sexual assault of a child Sheriff Javier Salazar said in a press conference the mother of the young victim came forward to a local fire station after the girl cried out for help. Trending: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem Police believe Nunez may have abused the girl over several months, possibly up to two years. Salazar added that Nunez utilized the fact that the girls mother was an undocumented immigrant and used this to place her in fear that she would be deported if she tried to report the abuse. Salazar described the case involving one of the departments own deputies as heartbreaking, disturbing, disgusting, and infuriating all at the same time. Don't miss: Soccer Has an Intolerance Problem? After Mexicans Yell Anti-Gay Slur, FIFA Opens Investigation He added that there may be more potential victims and urged others to come forward. 460x1240 Bexar County Sheriff's Office Folks like this are creatures of habit and opportunity, Salazar said. I dont know that he was purposely targeting the undocumented community. Certainly what was appealing was the vulnerability of that community because they are less apt to report things. Most popular: Kirstjen Nielsen Accused of Lying For a Racist by Mika Brzezinski Over Defense of Trump Policy Separating Families Salazar also urged people who may be witness to a crime to come forward, even if they are an undocumented immigrant. Just like were doing in this case, we are filling out paper with the witness in question to make sure she is given protected status pending the outcome of this case, he said. Story continues Its important that they feel comfortable enough to give us a call and report the crime. Salazar said next the next stage of the investigation will involve separating Nunez from the agency as soon as possible. "We will absolutely arrest you if you break the law and it doesn't matter if you wear a uniform, if you carry a badge, if you carry a gun. If you break the law, you are going to jail, he added. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Bangkok (AFP) - Thailand has carried out its first execution since 2009, the Department of Corrections said, killing a 26-year-old convicted murderer in a move condemned by Amnesty International as "deplorable". Theerasak Longji was executed by lethal injection on Monday, six years after his conviction. His death came as Thailand's coup leader-turned-premier Prayut Chan-O-Cha prepares to travel to the United Kingdom and France on a highly-publicised official visit. But the trip will now likely see the former army chief face awkward questions over the use of the death penalty as well as Thailand's wider human rights record since he seized power in a 2014 coup. "We still have the death sentence, we have not cancelled it yet," Tawatchai Thaikaew, deputy permanent secretary at the Justice Ministry, told AFP, adding that the execution on Monday was carried out "according to the law". Thailand's Department of Corrections, which oversees one of the world's largest prison populations, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935, the majority by firing squad. That practice ended on December 11, 2003. Between then and 2009 a further six inmates were executed by lethal injection. Monday's execution serves as a "lesson to deter those who wanted to commit serious crime or violate the law to consider this punishment," the department added in a statement. But rights groups hit out at the sudden resumption of the death penalty, which remains mandatory for a number of offences, including aggravated murder. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Amnesty International said, accusing the kingdom of "reneging" on commitments to move towards abolition of the death penalty. The country is "also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment." Theerasak stabbed his victim 24 times before stealing their mobile phone and wallet, the department said. Story continues Figures provided to Amnesty International by the Ministry of Justice show 510 people, including 94 women, were on death row at the end of last year. Nearly 200 had exhausted all final appeals -- like Theerasak. More than half are believed to have been sentenced for drug-related offences. The death penalty is still in practice in several countries in Asia, including Singapore, Indonesia and China, which remains the world's top executioner. The International Federation of Human Rights also condemned the move, calling it a "betrayal". It said that Thailand would have achieved the status of "de facto abolitionist" had it not carried out any executions before August 24 2019, 10 years after the last death penalties were carried out. Bangkok (AFP) - Thailand has carried out its first execution since 2009, putting a 26-year-old convicted murderer to death by lethal injection in a move condemned by Amnesty International as "deplorable". Theerasak Longji was executed on Monday, six years after his conviction for stabbing a 17-year-old student 24 times to steal his mobile phone and wallet. The execution came as Thailand's coup leader-turned-premier Prayut Chan-O-Cha prepares to travel to Britain and France on a highly-publicised official visit. The trip may now see the former army chief face awkward questions over the use of the death penalty as well as Thailand's wider human rights record since he seized power in a 2014 coup. Prayut, however, defended capital punishment on Tuesday, telling reporters that in order to maintain peace and order in society, executions are "still a necessity and what people want". "There are many serious cases happening today," he said. The Department of Corrections, which oversees one of the world's highest incarceration rates, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935, the majority by shooting. That practice ended on December 11, 2003. Between then and 2009 a further six were executed by lethal injection. Monday's execution serves as a "lesson to deter those who wanted to commit serious crime", the department added in a statement. But rights groups and the United Nations hit out at the sudden resumption of the death penalty, which remains mandatory for a number of offences including aggravated murder. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Amnesty International said, accusing the kingdom of reneging on commitments to move towards abolition of the death penalty. Thailand was "also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment". Figures provided to Amnesty by the Ministry of Justice show 510 people including 94 women were on death row at the end of last year. Story continues Nearly 200 had exhausted all final appeals -- like Theerasak. As a last resort they can seek a pardon from Thailand's king. The death penalty is still in force in numerous countries in Asia and China remains the world's top executioner. The International Federation of Human Rights said Thailand would have become a "de facto abolitionist" had it not carried out any executions before August 24, 2019, 10 years after the last death sentences were carried out. About 10 protesters rallied on Tuesday afternoon outside the high-security prison in Bangkok where Theerasak was executed, holding placards that read "Execute Justice, Not People" and "Choose Humanity, Not Barbarity". The UN Human Rights Office for Southeast Asia said it "deeply regrets" the resumption of executions. Thailand's justice system has been criticised for favouring the wealthy and connected and is notoriously slow and harsh for poor suspects. In 2015 two Myanmar migrant workers were sentenced to death for the 2014 murder of two British backpackers, one of whom was raped, on the dive resort island of Koh Tao after a flawed police investigation. Their lawyer told AFP on Tuesday they were awaiting a ruling on their final appeal. Stockholm (AFP) - Three people were killed and three others injured in a gang shooting in the southern Swedish city of Malmo, plagued by rival criminal gangs, police said Tuesday. While shootings that lead to multiple deaths remain rare in Sweden, the normally tranquil nation has seen a rise in violent crime in recent years, a phenomenon that has preoccupied voters ahead of a September 9 general election. Immigration, security and crime -- primarily in Sweden's disadvantaged suburbs -- are among the main themes of the election campaign. The ruling Social Democrats have seen their support in opinion polls slump in recent months, while the ratings of the populist, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats have soared. Witnesses to Monday's shooting said the victims were sprayed with around 15 to 20 bullets as they walked out of an internet cafe, not far from a police station, at around 8:00 pm (1800 GMT). At least one of the attackers fired an automatic weapon, according to witnesses cited in the media, though police refused to comment on the reports. Police said the victims were all known criminals. "The people involved are considered criminal gang members who are involved in organised crime in Malmo," the city's police chief Stefan Sinteus said at a press conference on Tuesday. The three dead were aged 19, 27 and 29, while the injured were 21, 30 and 32. Their identities have not been disclosed. No suspects have been identified or arrested yet. - 'Wild West' - The Scandinavian country has a reputation for being safe, enjoying relatively low levels of crime in general. But in the disadvantaged suburbs of the three biggest cities Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmo, violent crime has been on the rise in recent years. Authorities have attributed the increase to rival gangs fighting over control of the drug and prostitution markets, and random settling of scores between loose gangs of youths who see no prospects in life. Story continues Last year, 10 people were killed by gunfire in Malmo, a deeply segregated industrial town of 312,000 where more than 40 percent are of foreign origin. In all of Sweden, more than 40 people were killed by gunfire in 2017, and 320 acts of violence with a firearm were registered, primarily in the three biggest cities, according to police statistics. Police said Tuesday Malmo was home to three or four criminal gangs. "There are a number of gang conflicts that we consider heated and this is one of them. But we had no indication this was going to happen," Sinteus said. A Malmo resident identified only as Sanna told news agency TT she heard the gunfire from her home 500 metres (yards) away. "It sounds terrible but sometimes it feels like you don't even raise an eyebrow anymore. Welcome to Malmo -- it's the Wild West here," she said. "It's tragic, but this happens all the time nowadays. It shouldn't be like this, but you don't feel safe in Malmo anymore." - Gang violence growing - Manne Gerell, a professor of criminology at Malmo University, told AFP gang violence had "gradually increased in recent decades, but the increase has accelerated the past few years." Malmo has "bigger problems with gang violence" than other Swedish cities. "We don't really know why," Gerell said. But one hypothesis "is that Malmo has more poverty and other social problems than other big cities, and in cities with more social problems there tends to be more crime, even though poverty is not necessarily the cause of the criminality". Swedish politicians expressed frustration on Tuesday. Monday's shooting "is a terrible crime and it just reminds us that our most important job is to bust organised crime," Justice Minister Morgan Johansson told TT. The head of the opposition conservative Moderate Party, Ulf Kristersson, said Sweden needed to "do more". "This has to stop... There are shootings almost every week in Sweden now," he said. "We need longer sentences to be able to lock up criminal gang members longer, but we also need to ban ex-convicts from being allowed to return to their old environments." Homeland security secretary claims administration is simply enforcing the law as photos and audio of children fuel anger The Trump administration struggled on Monday to defend its policy of separating parents from their sons and daughters at the southern US border amid growing national outrage and the release of a shocking recording of sobbing children. As the White House scrambled to respond to the deepening political crisis, the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, flew from New Orleans to Washington to face a barrage of questions from reporters, even as Democrats demanded her resignation and the outcry reached a critical mass. Nielsen claimed that America was a country of compassion and heart but was unable to square the circle regarding whether the separations were a vindication of the administrations zero tolerance policy towards illegal immigration or an unintended consequence of a law made by the US Congress. During the West Wing briefing, she did not hear or ignored a reporter at the back of the room who played secretly recorded audio, first obtained by ProPublica, in which several Central American children, separated from their parents last week, can be heard crying for their Mami! and Papa! On the recording, one child says: I dont want them to stop my father, I dont want them to deport him. A border agent can be heard joking through the wails: Well, we have an orchestra here, right? What were missing is a conductor. Nielsen who Trump has reportedly criticised in private for failing to tackle border security told reporters she had not heard the recording. Trump has found himself at the centre of many moral storms since becoming president nearly 18 months ago but they have more often related to words than to actions. The border separations, however, appear to have crossed a new line as the audio recording emerges, as well as harrowing photos of children in tears or in fenced cages, provoking some to draw comparisons with concentration camps. Story continues The process has triggered condemnation from four former first ladies: Rosalynn Carter, Laura Bush (who called it cruel and immoral), Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, who lost the 2016 election to Trump. Even the current first lady, Melania Trump, has released a statement saying she hates to see children separated from their families. The separations followed the April announcement of the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy, under which everyone caught crossing the border illegally is to be prosecuted. Consequently, more adults are being jailed, pending trial, and their children are removed from them. Nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their families in the past six weeks. Why are children being separated from their families? In April 2018, the US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announced a zero tolerance policy under which anyone who crossed the border without legal status would be prosecuted by the justice department. This includes some, but not all, asylum seekers. Because children cant be held in adult detention facilities, they are being separated from their parents. Immigrant advocacy groups, however, say hundreds of families have been separated since at least July 2017. More than 200 child welfare groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the United Nations, said they opposed the practice. What happens to the children? They are supposed to enter the system for processing unaccompanied alien children, which exists primarily to serve children who voluntarily arrive at the border on their own. Unaccompanied alien children are placed in health department custody within 72 hours of being apprehended by border agents. They then wait in shelters for weeks or months at a time as the government searches for parents, relatives or family friends to place them with in the US. This already overstretched system has been thrown into chaos by the new influx of children. Can these children be reunited with their parents? Immigration advocacy groups and attorneys have warned that there is not a clear system in place to reunite families. In one case, attorneys in Texas said they had been given a phone number to help parents locate their children, but it ended up being the number for an immigration enforcement tip line. Advocates for children have said they do not know how to find parents, who are more likely to have important information about why the family is fleeing its home country. And if, for instance, a parent is deported, there is no clear way for them to ensure their child is deported with them. What happened to families before? When an influx of families and unaccompanied children fleeing Central America arrived at the border in 2014, Barack Obamas administration detained families. This was harshly criticized and a federal court in 2015 stopped the government from holding families for months without explanation. Instead, they were released while they waited for their immigration cases to be heard in court. Not everyone shows up for those court dates, leading the Trump administration to condemn what it calls a catch and release program. By Amanda Holpuch Read more On Monday, at a White House press briefing that started four hours later than planned, Nielsen argued that illegal immigration on the southern border had exceeded 50,000 people a month for the past three months. Since this time last year, she added, there had been a 325% increase in unaccompanied foreign children and a 435% increase in family units entering the country illegally. She denied that any children had been mistreated and argued: This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border Parents who entered illegally are by definition criminals By entering our country illegally often in dangerous circumstances, illegal immigrants have put their children at risk. The homeland security department, she continued, was merely enforcing the law in a way that past administrations had failed to do. Here is the bottom line: DHS is no longer ignoring the law. We are enforcing the laws as they exist on the books. Nielsen called on Congress to close loopholes in the law so families could stay together. Congress and the courts created this problem and Congress alone can fix it. Until then, we will enforce every law we have on the books to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States. John Kelly, the White House chief of staff and Nielsens predecessor at homeland security, told National Public Radio in May that deterrence was a big part of the policy. Asked if the situation was therefore playing out as intended, Nielsen replied: I find that offensive. Nielsen was followed at the podium by the White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, who said the White House would reject a narrow fix by Congress to address the issue and that Trumps priorities, such as funding a border wall and tightening immigration laws, must also be met. She said: We want to fix the whole thing, we dont want to tinker with just part of it. As the issue overwhelmed TV news networks and threatened to cause lasting damage to Americas reputation abroad, Trump himself weighed in at an event ostensibly promoting his National Space Council. He repeated his past attempt to deflect blame to the Democrats, whom he branded obstructionists, and urged them to find a legislative solution. The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility, the president said. It wont be. If you look at whats happening in Europe, if you look at whats happening in other places, we cant allow that to happen to the United States not on my watch. But Democrats rejected that assertion. Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, responded to Nielsens remarks by saying: This utter lack of compassion and respect for basic human dignity is grotesque. And the blind contempt his staff has shown toward anyone pointing out the truth is a vile disgrace. This is not who we are. The American people are watching. The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, and senators Kamala Harris of California and Tina Smith of Minnesota called on Nielsen to resign. Smith said: Shes denied that this is happening at all, and then said that she wouldnt apologize for whats happening to families. Kirstjen Nielsen has lost the credibility and the moral authority to lead this agency. Immigration is usually a rallying point for the Trump base but even some of his supporters have raised objections to the current action. The Rev Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump ally, said: Its disgraceful, and its terrible to see families ripped apart, and I dont support that one bit. Anthony Scaramucci, Trumps former communications director, told CNN: I hope he changes it today, frankly. This is very, very bad for the Republican party, and this is bad for the president. I want to see him win re-election. Last week, Getty photographer John Moore snapped a picture of a despondent Honduran girl sobbing as a U.S. Border Patrol agent frisked her mother near the U.S.-Mexico border. Major newspapers splashed the photo of the 2-year-old on their front pages, where it quickly became a symbol of the Trump administrations policy of systematically separating child migrants from their parents. (Its not immediately clear what happened to the unidentified child and her mother.) This is Trumps America. Whats going to happen to this 2-year-old Honduran girl? The new policy is to separate her from her mother. Shame!!! pic.twitter.com/vy6HtRupQE JORGE RAMOS (@jorgeramosnews) June 14, 2018 Wow. What a powerful and heartbreaking front page. 'A 2-year-old Honduran girl cries as her mother is detained near the Mexican border in McAllen, Texas.' pic.twitter.com/FAjDWN0FCc Nooruddean (@BeardedGenius) June 16, 2018 The young Honduran child is just one of many to cross the border in search of asylum in recent years. Many individuals and families have fled their homes in Central America due to political instability and violence. As the photos below demonstrate, this pattern of migration is nothing new. Whats changed is how the Trump administration has decided to respond to it. Last month, Trump administration officials announced a zero-tolerance policy in which they would begin prosecuting adult border-crossers for the misdemeanor crime of illegal entry while routing their children into the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Some of these kids have ended up in separate detention facilities far from their parents. Nearly 2,000 children have already been removed from their families as a result of the administrations policy, and hundreds more are being pried away each week. Story continues The photos below show families and children that have attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border since 2017. Several reportedly turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol, and their current status isnt known. As families like these continue to attempt to cross the border, often under desperate circumstances, they will face possible separation due to the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy. Undocumented immigrants who turned themselves in after crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. await processing near McAllen, Texas, on April 2, 2018. Families who crossed the border near McAllen, Texas, on May 9, 2018. A U.S. Border Patrol spotlight shines on a mother and son from Honduras on June 12, 2018, in McAllen, Texas. Central Americans seeking asylum wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take them into custody on June 12, 2018, near McAllen, Texas. A Honduran mother stands with her family at the U.S.-Mexico border fence on Feb. 22, 2018, near Penitas, Texas. U.S. Border Patrol agents take a Central American family into custody on June 12, 2018 near McAllen, Texas. U.S. Border Patrol agents take a father and son from Honduras into custody near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018, near Mission, Texas. A Central American family waits to be taken into custody on June 12, 2018, near McAllen, Texas. Central American migrants wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take people into custody on June 12, 2018, near McAllen, Texas. Two women and a child who crossed the border on Feb. 22, 2018, near McAllen, Texas. A Honduran child who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with her family on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. U.S. Border Patrol agents take Central American immigrants, including this young child, into custody on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. A Honduran woman and child on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. A U.S. Border Patrol agent checks birth certificates while taking Central American immigrants into detention on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. Adults and children await processing near McAllen, Texas, on April 2, 2018. Guatemalan immigrant families turn themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol near McAllen, Texas, on May 8, 2018. U.S. Border Patrol agents take Central American immigrants into custody on Jan. 4, 2017, near McAllen, Texas. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. President Donald Trump, once again defending his policy of separating migrant children from their parents when they cross the border illegally, pointed a finger at Germany as a horrible example of what happens without strict anti-immigration enforcement. Crime in Germany is way up, he claimed on Monday. But its not. Trumps child separation policy has received much pushback from both liberals and conservatives, leading the president to his tweet tirade. Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country, he tweeted in a stream of messages. Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country. Has anyone been looking at the Crime taking place south of the border. It is historic, with some countries the most dangerous places in the world. Not going to happen in the U.S. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 Trump pointed to Germany as an example of the kind of mistake he does not want to make. He cited Chancellor Angela Merkels open-door policy toward migrants and refugees and noted that other members of Germanys ruling coalition are trying to overturn it. Crime in Germany is way up, Trump claimed, suggesting that immigrants are violently changing the countrys culture. The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 We dont want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 Except that crime isnt up in Germany, despite the influx of immigrants. Just last month, the country recorded the lowest absolute number of criminal offenses since 1992. Story continues Interior Minister Horst Seehofer noted that the crime rate is the lowest in more than 30 years. At roughly 5.76 million, the number of criminal offenses committed in Germany is the lowest since 1992, Seehofer said. This drop in crime is even more apparent in relation to the total population: fewer than 7,000 offenses per 100,000 residents. That is the lowest rate in more than 30 years! The crime statistics, released by the Interior Ministry, also indicate that the number of non-German suspects is falling even faster than the number of German suspects. Chancellor Angela Merkel's Germany is not suffering a flood of immigrant-related crime. (Photo: NurPhoto via Getty Images) Despite this, Seehofer is leading the charge against Merkels policy and seeks to refuse entry to many migrants. The influx of migrants and refugees has been blamed for the rise in support for the far-right Alternative for Germany, now the main opposition party in the nations Parliament. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. Also on HuffPost False. Indeed, the pope said of Donald Trump earlier this year, "This man is not Christian." Big league false. This Facebook post is actually a link to the very article that disproves it. Eagle-eyed readers will notice the description itself even says it's "fake." False. This is false. Still waiting for this sex tape. Not holding our breath. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. WASHINGTON (AP) -- An unapologetic President Donald Trump defended his administration's border-protection policies in the face of rising national outrage over the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. Calling for tough action against illegal immigration, Trump declared the U.S. "will not be a migrant camp" on his watch. Images of children held in fenced cages fueled a growing chorus of condemnation from both political parties, four former first ladies and national evangelical leaders. The children are being held separately from parents who are being prosecuted under the administration's "zero-tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings. Trump on Monday falsely blamed Democrats the minority party in Washington for obstructing legislation to fix the situation. In fact, it was Trump's administration that broke with longstanding practice of processing migrant families in civil, rather than criminal, proceedings that allow families to be held together. "I say it's very strongly the Democrats' fault," Trump said Monday as his administration rejected criticism that the policy has resulted in inhuman and immoral conditions. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said, "We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do." In an appearance before the National Sheriffs' Association in New Orleans, Nielsen said: "Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards." Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new "zero-tolerance" policy that refers all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. Prior procedure had limited prosecution for many family entrants, in part because regulations prohibit detaining children with their parents since the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are. Story continues The policy change was meant to deter unlawful crossings and Sessions issued a warning last month to those entering the U.S. illegally that their children "inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions." The current holding areas have drawn widespread attention after journalists gained access to one site Sunday. At a McAllen, Texas, detention center hundreds of immigrant children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets. Audio of sobbing children calling out for their parents dominated the discussion Monday. "Papa! Papa!" one child is heard weeping in an audio file that was first reported by the nonprofit ProPublica and later provided to The Associated Press. Administration officials said they do not like the family separations either calling it the result of legal loopholes but insist migrants who arrive illegally simply won't be released or loosely kept track of. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," Trump declared. "Not on my watch." Sessions, on Monday, echoed the administration's defense of the zero tolerance policy, and called on Congress to act. "We do not want to separate parents from their children," he said. "If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won't face these terrible choices." Mindful of the national outcry, lawmakers in both parties rushed Monday to devise a targeted legislative fix. But the White House signaled it would oppose any narrow fix aimed solely at addressing the plight of children separated from their parents under the immigration crackdown. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump's priorities, like funding a border wall and tightening immigration laws, must also be fulfilled as part of any legislation. "We want to fix the whole thing," she said. "We don't want to tinker with just part of it." The national debate over the family separation policy comes as Republican lawmakers are growing ever more concerned about negative effects on their re-election campaigns this fall. Trump is to travel to Capitol Hill Tuesday for a strategy session on upcoming immigration legislation. Underscoring the sensitivity of the issue, language curbing the taking of immigrant children from parents held in custody will be added to the House's conservative immigration bill, a House GOP aide said Monday, A similar provision is already in a compromise GOP immigration measure between party conservatives and moderates, with the House expected to vote on both late this week. The administration is hoping to force Democrats to vote for the bills or bear some of the political cost in November's midterm elections. White House officials have privately embraced the border policy as a negotiating tactic to win votes for legislation to fulfill the president's pledge to build a border wall and to tighten the nation's immigration laws. Trump's commitment to the current policy showed no sign of faltering as voices of outrage and condemnation grew louder and more diverse. In Massachusetts, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker reversed a decision to send a state National Guard helicopter to the southern border, citing what he called the administration's "cruel and inhumane" policy of separating children from their parents. The Rev. Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump ally, called the policy "disgraceful." Several religious groups, including some conservative ones, have pushed to stop the practice of separating immigrant children from their parents. The Mormon church said it was "deeply troubled" by the separation of families and urged national leaders to find compassionate solutions. Former first lady Laura Bush called the policy "cruel" and "immoral," and said it was "eerily reminiscent" of the U.S. internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. On Capitol Hill, Republicans joined Democrats in calling for an end to the separations. Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton called for an immediate end to this "ugly and inhumane practice," adding, "It's never acceptable to use kids as bargaining chips in political process." Kansas GOP Sen. Pat Roberts said he is "against using parental separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration." And GOP Rep. Mike Coffman warned, "History won't remember well those who support the continuation of this policy." ___ Kevin McGill reported from New Orleans. AP writers Alan Fram, Ken Thomas, Jill Colvin and Catherine Lucey in Washington, Nick Riccardi in Denver and Nomaan Merchant in McAllen, Texas, contributed to this report. ___ See AP's complete coverage of the debate over the Trump administration's policy of family separation at the border: https://apnews.com/tag/Immigration Washington (AFP) - The US Senate defied President Donald Trump on Monday by voting to overrule his administration's deal with Chinese telecom firm ZTE and reimpose a ban on hi-tech chip sales to the company. Senators added an amendment targeting ZTE into a sweeping, must-pass national defense spending bill that cleared the chamber on an 85-10 vote. The company has been on life support since Washington said it had banned US companies from selling crucial hardware and software components to ZTE for seven years. US officials imposed the ban because of what they said were false statements by the firm over actions it claimed to have taken regarding the illegal sale of goods to Iran and North Korea. ZTE pleaded guilty to those charges in March last year and was hit with $1.2 billion in fines. Earlier this month the Trump administration gave ZTE a lifeline by easing the sanctions in exchange for a further $1.4 billion penalty. But the Senate measure nullifies that action, proposing an outright ban on the government buying products and services from ZTE and another Chinese telecoms firm, Huawei. "We're heartened that both parties made it clear that protecting American jobs and national security must come first when making deals with countries like China, which has a history of having little regard for either," a bipartisan group of senators said. Hong Kong-listed shares in ZTE plunged 25.81 percent to end at HK$9.85 on Tuesday. The company has lost nearly two-thirds of its value since it resumed trading last week after a two-month suspension that followed the initial ban. The lawmakers who introduced the amendment include top Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Marco Rubio. However, the bill -- which provides $716 billion in funding for national defense for fiscal year 2019 and gives policy guidance to the Pentagon -- is not a done deal. The House of Representatives passed its own version of the measure, and the two chambers must now hash out a compromise. Story continues "It is vital that our colleagues in the House keep this bipartisan provision in the bill as it heads towards a conference," Schumer and Rubio said. Trump's intervention to help the firm was seen at the time as part of a move to smooth over trade tensions with Beijing as they embarked on talks to avert a trade war, with the president tweeting on May 13 that too many Chinese jobs were at threat. "This is the first time Congress has really stood up to (Trump) on a trade issue, and its clear they are angry," Bill Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Bloomberg News. "There will be a lot of congressional resistance to weakening the ZTE amendment, but I would not be surprised to see a compromise." ZTE, which employs 80,000 people, said soon after the ban was imposed that its major operations had "ceased", raising the possibility of its collapse. Its fiberoptic networks depend on US components and its cheap smartphones sold en masse abroad are powered by US chips and the Android operating system. President Donald Trump claimed Monday his predecessor, Barack Obama, would have engaged in a war with North Korea resulting in the deaths of millions of people, but also said the media would have praised Obama if the 44th president had gotten along with the totalitarian regime. A week removed from his unprecedented meeting with the Norths reclusive leader, Kim Jong Un, Trump said the Fake News would have proclaimed Obama a national hero if he too had taken the initial steps that Trump made with Kim. If President Obama (who got nowhere with North Korea and would have had to go to war with many millions of people being killed) had gotten along with North Korea and made the initial steps toward a deal that I have, the Fake News would have named him a national hero! the president tweeted. Trending: A Rare Black Hole Just Swallowed A Star Its unclear what sparked Trumps outrage and the claims, but the president made similar statements Sunday on Twitter as well. Trump said the Fake News had made a coordinated effort with each other to bash his meeting with Kimthe first time a sitting U.S. president had sat down face-to-face with a North Korean leaderand that some people want to see him fail rather than give Trump a win. Don't miss: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem Funny how the Fake News, in a coordinated effort with each other, likes to say I gave sooo much to North Korea because I met. Thats because thats all they have to disparage! We got so much for peace in the world, & more is being added in finals. Even got our hostages/remains! the president tweeted. Most popular: Soccer Has an Intolerance Problem? After Mexicans Yell Anti-Gay Slur, FIFA Opens Investigation Story continues Last week, Trump also claimed that the threat of war with North Korea, and the possibility of a nuclear missile strike, was now over. He also said Obama had warned him that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. Exactly how much Trump accomplished during the meeting with Kim remains in question. The two leaders did sign a communique that outlined what each side hoped to accomplish, including denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula as well as the return of remains of U.S. soldiers who fought in the Korean War in the early 1950s. But the communique was short on specifics over precisely how and when the North would dismantle its nuclear program, leading critics of Trump to suggest the meeting was more of a photo opportunity than a substantive diplomatic negotiation. Obama did indeed warn Trump about the threat the Norths weapons programs posed as he left office, according to a New York Times report in March of last year. Three years before, Obama had ordered the Pentagon to increase its cyberattacks on the Norths programs in an effort to either curb or delay their progress. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek President Trump said on Tuesday that his administration has no choice but to separate children from parents who cross the U.S. border illegally before essentially admitting it does. When you are prosecute the parents for coming in illegally which should happen you have to take the children away, Trump said in a speech to independent business owners in Washington, D.C. Now you dont have to prosecute them, but then were not prosecuting them for coming in illegally. The president is facing bipartisan criticism for his administrations zero-tolerance illegal immigration policy that has resulted in more than 2,000 children being separated from their families since April, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Many of the children separated from their families have been held in detention centers. In one such facility, hundreds of children were seen in a series of cages made of metal fencing. Children in custody rest in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, on Sunday. (Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protections Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) Trump insisted that there are only two options for dealing with immigrants who come to the country illegally: Totally open borders or criminal prosecution. But the Bush and Obama administrations chose a third: Dealing with immigrants crossing the border with children largely as civil cases rather than criminal. (Under Obama, the Associated Press notes, parents were removed from their children if they were arrested on other charges or had an outstanding warrant. But the number of cases was minuscule compared to the number under Trump.) We want to end the border crisis by finally giving us the legal authorities and the resources to detain and remove illegal immigrant families altogether, Trump said Tuesday, and bring them back to their country. Related: Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of separating families at border, but most Republicans support it The president said he is also going to seek authorization to not give U.S. aid to countries which abuse us by sending their people up. Why the hell should we? Trump said to applause. Why should we? Story continues Trump also falsely blamed Democrats for creating crippling loopholes that have resulted laws that force family separations at the border. There is no U.S. law requiring that the children of immigrants entering the country illegally be separated from their parents. This administration unlike the previous two is treating the adults as criminals and jailing them, which requires them to be separated from their children. President Trump speaks at the National Federation of Independent Businesses 75th anniversary celebration in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) The president also complained that the crisis is causing unbelievably great taxpayer expenses. Nobody knows how much we are paying for this monstrosity thats been created over the years, he said. Legislation that nobody has any idea what they are doing. They dont even know what it means. Earlier Tuesday, the president ramped up his attacks on illegal immigrants who infest America in a pair of tweets that, again, blamed Democrats. Democrats are the problem, Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. They dont care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They cant win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters! We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally, he added. _____ Read more from Yahoo News: President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting of the National Space Council at the East Room of the White House: Alex Wong/Getty Images US President Donald Trump has threatened to place tariffs on $200bn worth of Chinese goods in a rapidly escalating trade dispute between the two countries. The Trump administration announced last week it would place a 25 per cent tariff on $50bn of Chinese goods as punishment for alleged intellectual property theft. China responded by promising its own tariffs on an equivalent amount of American products. On Monday, Mr Trump directed US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to identify $200bn worth of Chinese goods on which to impose tariffs if Beijing carried out that promise. The amount was twice the $100bn in tariffs the president had previously suggested for retaliation. He threatened to add another 10 per cent tariff on $200bn more products if China increased their tariffs again. China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology, the president said in a statement. Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong. He added: But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world. Experts have warned of a possible trade war as Mr Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping go back and forth on the issue. Many of Mr Trumps fellow Republicans have criticised the tariffs, claiming they will hurt American businesses. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, urged the administration to focus on Chinas discriminatory and market-distorting practices after the tariff announcement last week. "Ill-conceived trade actions that weaken the American economy, alienate allies, and invite retaliation against American businesses, farmers and ranchers, undermine our nation's ability to successfully confront China's unfair trade policies, Mr Hatch said in a statement. Story continues Mr Trump was met with similar criticism after announcing tariffs on steel and aluminium from the European Union, Canada and Mexico last month. The move shocked the US allies, which all said they would impose tariffs of their own on US goods. Mexico has since placed tariffs on $3bn worth of American products like pork, steel, and cheese. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced tariffs on $12.8bn worth of US goods this month, and the European Union announced tariffs on $3.4bn worth of US imports like steel, bourbon, peanut butter, cranberries, and orange juice. Most of the states hardest hit by the new tariffs are those that supported Mr Trump in the 2016 election, experts have said. By Sarah N. Lynch and Susan Cornwell WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional Republicans scrambled on Tuesday to craft legislation that would quell an outcry over the Trump administration's separation of immigrant parents and children at the U.S.-Mexico border, with an opinion poll showing most Americans oppose the policy. The family separations and detentions of children, highlighted by videos of youngsters in cages and an audiotape of wailing children, have sparked anger at home from groups ranging from clergy to influential business leaders, as well as condemnation abroad. President Donald Trump arrived at Capitol Hill for a Tuesday evening meeting with House of Representatives Republicans to discuss their immigration legislation. He is focused on winning congressional funding for a wall he has long wanted to build along America's southern border with Mexico, a plan resisted by Democrats. Trump, who has made a tough stance on immigration a centerpiece of his presidency, has staunchly defended his administration's actions. He has cast blame for the family separations on Democrats, although his fellow Republicans control both chambers in Congress and his own administration implemented the current policy of strict adherence to immigration laws. On Tuesday, the president tried again to blame Democrats for what he called "loopholes" in the law that require families detained for entering the country illegally either to be separated or released. "These are crippling loopholes that cause family separation, which we don't want," he said in remarks to the National Federation of Independent Business, adding he wanted Congress to give him the legal authority to detain and deport families together. Trump has sought to link an end to the family separations to passage of a wider bill on immigration, prompting Democrats to accuse him of using children as hostages. House Republicans were working on a revised draft of one version of an immigration overhaul that would prevent family separations in some cases for those attempting an illegal border crossing for the first time, according to a House Republican aide. The draft bill was seen just days ago as unlikely to pass, but has gained support in the House. But it was widely seen as dead on arrival in the Senate, where minority Democrats could use procedural tactics to block it and where competing but far narrower legislation may be emerging from top Republicans. 'CONTRARY TO AMERICAN VALUES' Two of the top U.S. business groups, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, decried the separation policy on Tuesday and called for its immediate cessation. "This practice is cruel and contrary to American values," Cisco Systems Inc Chief Executive Chuck Robbins, who chairs the group's immigration committee, said in a statement. Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents between mid-April and the end of May. The separations have been blasted by Democrats, some Republicans, medical professionals and rights activists. They began after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April that all immigrants apprehended while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally should be criminally prosecuted. Parents who are referred by border agents for prosecution are held in federal jails, while their children are moved into border shelter facilities under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a Department of Health and Human Services agency. A Reuters/Ipsos national opinion poll released on Tuesday showed fewer than one in three American adults supporting the policy. The June 16-19 poll found that 28 percent of people polled supported the policy, while 57 percent opposed it and the remaining 15 percent said they did not know. Republicans were much more supportive than Democrats, with 55 percent backing it versus just 12 percent of Democrats, but they appeared less enthusiastic about the policy than they were about the presidents overall record on immigration. The images that have sparked widespread condemnation, of children in wire cages, are of a border patrol processing center in McAllen, Texas. LEGISLATIVE POSSIBILITIES A number of Republican senators called on Trump on Tuesday to allow families to stay together if they had crossed the border illegally, and Senate leaders said their chamber could have legislation to address the family separations matter in a matter of days. "My hope is that this is not going to be something we're going to do over a matter of weeks and months, but something we can do in a matter of days, hopefully this week," Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn said. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell echoed the new urgency. "We hope to reach out to the Democrats and see if we can get a result, which means making a law and not just get into some kind of sparring back and forth that leads to no conclusion," he said. Top Democrats contended that Trump could change the policy with the stroke of a pen. "The president is trying set this trap in the public mind that somehow there is a law requiring him to do this and Congress can undo it," said Senator Chris Van Hollen, who visited a detention center in Brownsville, Texas, over the weekend. "We know this is a problem that was manufactured six weeks ago, and were seeing the awful results today." Decrying "internment camps," Democrats and their supporters disrupted a U.S. congressional hearing on Tuesday about an FBI probe. With the sound of a young child crying in the background, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, broke from traditional protocol and started reading from a statement, saying: "These (migrant) children are not animals." His Republican colleagues tried to shout over him: "Out of order!" (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Susan Cornwell; Additional reporting by David Morgan, Amanda Becker, Tim Ahmann, Makini Brice, Doina Chiacu and Lisa Lambert in Washington, Richard Lough in Paris and Tom Miles in Geneva; Writing by Doina Chiacu and Dan Burns; Editing by Frances Kerry and Peter Cooney) Washington (AFP) - After citing national security reasons for slapping tariffs on Canadian metals, Donald Trump escalated his attacks on America's northern neighbor Tuesday, claiming its citizens were smuggling shoes across the border. Trump has angered Canada with his protectionist rhetoric, and has threatened to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in favor of a new bilateral trade deal. "The tariffs are so massive. The tariffs to get common items back into Canada are so high that they have to smuggle them in," he said in a speech Monday. "They buy shoes, then they wear them. They scuff them up, they make them... look old," Trump continued. "Canada is not going to take advantage of the United States any longer." Canadians returning to their country from abroad receive certain duty exemptions if they have been away for more than 24 hours. As part of NAFTA renegotiations, Washington wants Ottawa to expand these waivers to encourage Canadians to spend more in the US. Such a measure would negatively impact Canadian vendors. Nearly 4.9 million Canadians traveled temporarily to the United States between January and March 2018, according to Canadian figures. As President Trump ramped up his attacks on illegal immigrants who infest America, two new polls showed overwhelming opposition to the administrations policy of separating children from parents who illegally bring them across the border. But the majority of Republicans support it. According to a Quinnipiac University survey released on Monday, 66 percent of American voters oppose the zero tolerance policy, enacted in April, that has resulted in more than 2,000 children being separated from their families. Just 27 percent of the survey respondents approve. People taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the U.S., sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, on Sunday. (Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protections Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) A CNN poll released late Monday also found 66 percent of Americans disapprove of the controversial policy, while 28 percent approve. Most Republicans, however, support the policy. The Quinnipiac survey found 55 percent of GOP voters approve of the policy, compared to 35 percent who disapprove. The CNN poll had Republican support for family separation at 58 percent, with 34 percent disapproving. Both polls were conducted between June 14 and June 17 largely before the national news media descended on detention facilities in Texas to cover the border crisis. What is happening here is testing our better angels on multiple fronts, Lester Holt said while anchoring NBC Nightly News live from McAllen, Texas, on Monday night, challenging our competing values of protecting our sovereignty and honoring our hearts. People in custody rest in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, on Sunday. (Photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protections Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) The Trump administration has struggled to defend its policy and keep its explanations straight. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters Monday that it was offensive to imply that the administration had a policy of separating parents from children at the border even though it was the stated purpose of the controversial change in enforcement procedures put in place by the Trump administration. I find that offensive, Nielsen said when asked at Mondays White House briefing whether the separation of parents and children was meant to send a message. Why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that? Story continues But on Fox News on Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions that was, in fact, one purpose of the zero-tolerance policy he announced earlier this year. Yes I hope people get the message, Sessions said. White House chief of staff John Kelly, Nielsens predecessor as head of the Department of Homeland Security, repeatedly said that separating children from their parents would work as a deterrent. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly tried to pin blame for the crisis on Democrats in an effort to gin up congressional support for his border wall plan. I say, very strongly, its the Democrats fault, Trump said Monday. The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. The president continued to ratchet up the anti-immigrant rhetoric on Twitter. Democrats are the problem, he tweeted Tuesday morning. They dont care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They cant win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters! We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally, he added. Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2000 are with their parents, many of whom have tried to enter our Country illegally on numerous occasions. Additional reporting by Christopher Wilson and Caitlin Dickson _____ Read more from Yahoo News: By Ben Blanchard BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping offered high praise to visiting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday, lauding the "positive" outcome of his historic summit with U.S. President Donald Trump and promising unwavering friendship. Meeting Kim on his third trip to China this year, and just a week after Kim met Trump in Singapore on June 12, Xi said China was willing to keep playing a positive role to promote the peace process on the Korean peninsula. Kim's visit was the latest in a flurry of diplomatic contacts, and unlike during his previous two visits to China, the government announced his presence while he was in the country rather than waiting for him to leave. Xi told Kim he was very happy to see the "positive" outcome of his meeting with Trump, and the important consensus reached on denuclearisation and setting up a lasting peace mechanism, according to Chinese state television. "No matter the changes in the international and regional situation, China's party and government's resolute position on being dedicated to consolidating and developing Sino-North Korea relations will not change," the report cited Xi as saying. "The Chinese people's friendship for the North Korean people will not change, and China's support for socialist North Korea will not change," Xi added. Kim told Xi he hoped to work with China and other parties to push the peace process, Chinese state television said. Asked about Kim's latest Beijing visit, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said, "we are watching it closely". She said Washington was in continuing communication with the North Korea government and added: "We look forward to them following through on their commitments and agreements that they made last week at the summit." At the Singapore summit, the first meeting between a serving U.S. president and a North Korean leader, Kim reaffirmed a commitment to "work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula", while Trump said he would end "provocative" joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises. Although Trump has hailed the Singapore summit as a success, skeptics have questioned whether he achieved anything new, given that Pyongyang, which has rejected unilateral nuclear disarmament, appeared to make no new concrete commitments. The United States has led an international sanctions drive to press North Korea to abandon development of nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States and Trump has expressed concern that China may be easing up on its enforcement of these steps. South Korea and the Pentagon announced they would halt the annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August. At the summit, Trump also said North Korea had agreed to return remains of U.S. soldiers missing from the 1950-53 Korean War and U.S. officials said on Tuesday that that process could start within the next few days. While not formally billed as a state visit, China gave Kim most of the trappings of one, including a welcome ceremony with honor guard in Beijing's Great Hall of the People. Xi greeted Kim warmly, in images carried on state television. The two men were accompanied by their wives. Xi said he was pleased to see North Korea's decision to promote economic reforms, adding that China's own reform and opening up process had meant the Chinese people's eyes had been open to the world. North Korean state media had not mentioned Kim's visit by early evening. A Kim trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China is North Korea's most important diplomatic and economic backer but has been angered by its nuclear and missile tests. South Korea's foreign ministry spokesman said South Korea and China shared the strategic goal of completely denuclearising the Korean peninsula. "Our government hopes China will play a constructive role in resolving this problem," ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-deok told a regular briefing. "We hope Chairman Kim Jong Un's visit will contribute to that." 'DUAL SUSPENSION' China has welcomed the warming of ties between the United States and North Korea, and offered to help. It has been particularly pleased by Trump's decision to suspend military drills with South Korea. It has long proposed a "dual suspension", whereby North Korea stops weapons tests and the United States and South Korea stop military drills, to encourage talks. "South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August," South Korea's defense ministry said in a statement. The Pentagon confirmed the suspension, adding that the secretaries of defense and state as well as Trump's national security adviser would meet on the issue this week. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops joined the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than field exercises. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. The decision to halt military exercises in South Korea has bewildered many current and former U.S. defense officials, who only learned about it when Trump announced it in Singapore, after the summit with Kim. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said there would be no changes to joint drill plans between the United States and Japan, both of which regularly practise to deter North Korea. "The United States is in a position to keep its commitment to its allied nations' defense and our understanding is there is no change to the U.S. commitment to the Japan-U.S. alliance and the structure of American troops stationed in Japan," Suga told a regular briefing. Japanese Minister of Defense Itsunori Onodera said the decision to suspend the U.S.-South Korean exercises was made to support the diplomatic effort between the United States and North Korea but added it was "important to be wary of North Korea actions". "Our view of the threat has not changed. Joint training is an important in maintaining peace and stability in the region," he said. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard in BEIJING and Christine Kim in SEOUL; Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom and Idrees Ali in WASHINGTON and Kaori Kaneko in TOKYO; Editing by Robert Birsel and James Dalgleish) LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's government will not accept a proposal from the upper house of parliament which hands lawmakers greater power over a Brexit deal, a government source said on Tuesday, setting up a showdown over plans for a "meaningful vote". The source said on condition of anonymity that Prime Minister Theresa May would stick to her offer to the lower house of parliament for a vote to accept or reject any deal she wins in Brussels to leave the European Union. (Reporting by Elizabeth Piper; editing by William James) London (AFP) - Britain on Tuesday marked the first anniversary of a deadly terror attack against a north London mosque, with Prime Minister Theresa May vowing that "vile extremism" will not divide the nation. Mourners held a minute's silence at 9.30am (0830GMT) to remember father-of-six Makram Ali, who died when Darren Osborne ploughed a hire van onto a crowded pavement close to Finsbury Park mosque, intending to kill as many Muslims as possible. The attack, on June 19 last year, also left 12 injured. Home Secretary Sajid Javid, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn Mohammed Mahmoud, all attended the event at nearby Islington Town Hall, along with the imam of the mosque, Mohammed Mahmoud. "A man ridden with racism drove a vehicle into a crowd of people and tried to divide and destroy our community," said Corbyn. "We will never allow them to destroy us. Stay united, stay together, support each other!", he added. Osborne, 48, left a note in the van, in which he said he was seeking revenge for Islamist terror attacks and a child sex scandal, and named mayor Khan as someone that he also wanted to kill. The mayor paid tribute to the response of the local community. "The way this community has responded has inspired us all," he said. "When Londoners face adversity we stand up for our values. This is our city, this is our way of life. For those who seek to divide us, the message is 'you will never succeed'." Osborne, from the Welsh capital Cardiff, was in February sentenced to life in prison with a minimum 43-year term. "Last year's cowardly attack which targeted innocent worshippers leaving Finsbury Park mosque is an attack on all of us," May said in a statement. "As with all acts of terrorism the intention was to divide us but we will not let this happen. - 'Rapidly radicalised' - "We are a country of many faiths and freedom of worship and respect for those of different faiths is fundamental to this country's values and these values will never be broken by vile extremism," she added. Story continues When passing sentence at a London court, judge Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said that Osborne had been "rapidly radicalised" and that his "mindset became one of malevolent hatred". "In short you allowed your mind to be poisoned by those who claimed to be leaders." Osborne became radicalised over a month last year after watching a television programme about a child sex ring scandal involving a gang of mainly Muslim men in northern England. Nigel Bromage, a former leader of a neo-Nazi group who later turned anti far-right campaigner, called the attack "a sobering reminder that the threat from far-right extremism is no different from the Islamist threat. "Both share a common desire to spread fear and divide society, ultimately two sides of the same coin," he added. Witnesses recalled Osborne saying: "I've done my job, you can kill me now" and "at least I had a proper go" in the immediate aftermath of the attack. The handwritten note found in the van read: "Why are their terrorists on our streets today? "Islam's ideology doesn't belong here and neither does sharia law." The Manchester suicide bombing in May 2017 and the London Bridge van attack and stabbing rampage in June that year further fuelled his obsession, the court was told. United Nations (United States) (AFP) - UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is warning that Gaza is close to the brink of war and expressed shock over the number of Palestinians killed and wounded by Israeli live fire during protests, in a report obtained by AFP on Monday. Guterres told the Security Council that he "unequivocally condemns the steps by all parties that have brought us to this dangerous and fragile place" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The report was sent to the council last week ahead of a meeting on Tuesday on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. The violence in Gaza marks the most serious escalation between Israel and Hamas since the 2014 war. "It is and should be a warning to all how close to the brink of war the situation is," said Guterres. "I am shocked by the number of deaths and injuries of Palestinians resulting from the use of live fire by Israel Defence Forces" since protests began on March 30, he said. At least 132 Palestinian have been killed. The Red Cross says more than 13,000 have been wounded including 1,400 who suffered multiple gunshot wounds, many in the legs. Israel has a responsibility to "exercise maximum restraint" and protect civilians in line with international humanitarian law, the UN chief wrote. "The killing of children, as well as of clearly identified journalists and medical staffers by security forces during a demonstration are particularly unacceptable," he added. Two Palestinian journalists were killed while covering the protests in April while a 21-year-old medic was shot dead in early June. Guterres renewed his call for an independent investigation of the shooting deaths in Gaza. Israel has rejected the appeal and argues that the use of force is justified to defend its borders. The UN chief criticized Hamas and other militant groups for attempting to put explosives near the fence and for shooting rockets at Israel on May 29 and 30. Story continues He singled out "senior Israeli government officials" for asserting that all Palestinians were affiliated with Hamas, signalling a "permissive Israeli policy towards the use of live fire against protesters". Israel's settlement activities "continue unabated," Guterres added, citing a May 30 decision by Israel to approve 3,500 housing units in the West Bank - the largest batch of new housing since June 2017. The United Nations considers the expansion of settlements on land earmarked for a future Palestinian state to be illegal. Guterres said the construction must "cease immediately and completely." United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The UN envoy for Western Sahara is planning a new round of talks in Morocco and Algeria beginning next week to push for a return to negotiations on ending the conflict, diplomats said Tuesday. Horst Koehler, a former German president and ex-director of the International Monetary Fund, is expected to hold talks in Rabat with Moroccan officials on June 28 and 29 before heading to Laayoune to visit the UN observer mission based there, a diplomat said. Another diplomat said Koehler is also expected to travel to Tindouf in western Algeria to meet with leaders of the Polisario Front, but no firm date is set for that meeting. Morocco and the Polisario Front fought for control of Western Sahara from 1975 to 1991, but diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have been deadlocked since the last round of UN-sponsored talks in 2008. The Security Council in April approved a US-drafted resolution that urged Morocco and the Polisario to prepare for talks, setting a six-month deadline for action. Morocco maintains that negotiations on a settlement should focus on its proposal for autonomy for Western Sahara and rejects the Polisario's insistence on an independence referendum. Tripoli (AFP) - UN refugee agency chief Filippo Grandi said Tuesday during a visit to Libya the key to resolving Europe's migration crisis was "cooperation" rather than disjointed efforts by individual states. "I have written yesterday to the presidency of the EU offering UNHCR's expertise in finding essential but practical new solutions to address these flows of people," said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "This problem can be solved by cooperation, not country by country," Grandi told a news conference in Tripoli. Unstable since its 2011 uprising, Libya has become a key departure point for thousands of migrants hoping to reach Europe, with hundreds drowning each year as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean. "Although I dont think that closing ports like Italy did... is a good response, I also think that Italy is right when they say they have received most of the people crossing the Mediterranean, and that there has to be a more balanced distribution," said Grandi. "We have to find the system that is accepted by all countries in the Mediterranean," said the Italian diplomat. Winding up a two-day visit to Libya, Grandi was set to travel on to Niger, where the UNHCR has established a transit centre for European countries to process the cases of migrants evacuated from Libya. Out of 40,000 places sought for refugees, the UNHCR has received pledges to host 25,000 people, he said. So far, less than 2,000 asylum seekers have been accepted by host countries, he said. Nikki Haley, pictured beside Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, announcing US withdrawal from the UN human rights council, on Tuesday in Washington DC - AFP The United States announced it was withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday, dismissing it as a "cesspool of political bias" for its anti-Israel stance. It marks the latest rejection of multilateral engagement by the Trump administration - following its exit from the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal - and comes a day after the UN's most senior human rights official condemned the US for separating children from parents at the border with Mexico. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, and Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the UN, issued the announcement, with Mrs Haley saying the Geneva-based organisation was "not worthy of its name". Mrs Haley described the council as a "protector of human rights abusers" and accused the body of "politicising and scapegoating countries with positive human rights records". She said the decision had not been taken lightly, and added: We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organisation that makes a mockery of human rights. Nikki Haley, pictured beside Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, announcing US withdrawal from the UN human rights council, on Tuesday in Washington DC Credit: AFP She said the US would have stayed if the changes they sought had been implemented, and said she did not rule out rejoining at a later date. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, said the US decision was "regrettable". "Weve made no secret of the fact that the UK wants to see reform of the human rights council, but we are committed to working to strengthen the council from within," he said. "Britains support for the human rights council remains steadfast. It is the best tool the international community has to address impunity in an imperfect world and to advance many of our international goals. "Thats why we will continue to support and champion it." Profile | Nikki Haley Mrs Haley announced last year that Washington was reviewing its membership of the 47-country body. The US is halfway through a three-year term and its departure marks the first time that a sitting member would volunteer to step aside. Story continues Libya was suspended in 2011 after a government crackdown on unarmed protesters. Under President George W Bush the US refused to join the Geneva-based forum when it was created in 2006, but did so after President Barack Obama took office in 2009. Established to promote human rights worldwide the council has passed more than 70 resolutions critical of Israel, 10 times as often as it has criticised Iran. The US move came as Donald Trump achieved his highest job rating since the first week of his presidency. For the first time since January 2017 he recorded an approval figure of 45 per cent in a weekly Gallup poll. It meant Mr Trump's popularity was exactly the same as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan at the same stage of their presidencies, while Barack Obama was at 46 per cent. The poll was conducted over the course of last week and reflected a strengthening economy, falling unemployment, and the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore. It was unclear how much the poll had been affected by a growing furore over a new "zero tolerance" policy of separating illegal immigrant parents from their children at the Mexican border. A separate Quinnipiac poll showed 66 per cent of Americans oppose the controversial policy, although 55 Per cent of Republicans support it. Donald Trump has faced fierce criticism for the so-called "zero-tolerance" policy that forcibly removes children from their parents Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci The policy means all illegal immigrants are now detained and prosecuted, and their children are removed and held in separate detention centres. The UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein criticised the policy on Monday, calling it "unconscionable." Mrs Haley hit back on Tuesday, attacking the council for its own hypocrisy. The councils current membership includes 14 countries that are ranked as not free by Freedom House: Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, China, Cuba, Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iraq, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela. "Once again, the United Nations shows its hypocrisy by calling out the United States while it ignores the reprehensible human rights records of several members of its own human rights council," she said. In the past, illegal immigrant families were "caught and released" while they awaited proceedings. Over a six-week period more than 2,000 children have been separated from their parents, and photographs have emerged of minors being held in wire mesh cages. A secretly recorded tape also emerged of Central American children at a detention centre in Texas crying and pleading for their parents as a guard joked: "We have an orchestra here". Mr Trump on Tuesday said America was being "infested" by illegal immigrants and members of the MS-13 gang, and blamed Democrats for the crisis. He wrote on Twitter: "Democrats are the problem. They dont care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our country, like MS-13. They cant win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters! We must always arrest people coming into our country illegally." People protest against the Trump administration policy of separating immigrant families Credit: REUTERS/Mike Blake Asked if Theresa May thought it was acceptable to cage children, the prime minster's spokesman said: "The welfare and safeguarding of children is at the heart of our immigration policy. We do not separate child refugees or asylum seekers from their families." Jeff Sessions, the US attorney general, dismissed comparisons to Nazi concentration camps. He told Fox News: "Well, it's a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country." There was condemnation from all four living US former first ladies, and a host of senior Republicans including Senator John McCain. Ted Cruz, the high profile conservative Republican senator from Texas, also said he was "horrified" and that "this has to stop". Mr Cruz said he was introducing a bill in Congress to allow illegal immigrant families to stay together in temporary shelters. Mr Trump was scheduled to meet with Republicans in Congress to discuss potential immigration bills on Tuesday night. A view inside a Texas detention facility shows children sleeping under foil sheets Credit: Courtesy CBP/Handout via REUTERS At a meeting for small business owners on Tuesday, he said: "We want to solve this problem. I don't want children taken away from their parents. "When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally, which should happen, you have to take the children away." He said there were only two choices - "totally open borders or criminal prosecution". Mr Trump said he was asking Congress for a "third option". Democrats accused the president of using the separation of families as a "negotiating tool" as he sought to strong-arm them into supporting funding for a border wall. Meanwhile, more than $4.8 million was raised on Facebook to help separated families with legal services. It was the social network's largest ever fundraiser and those donating included chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. United Nations (United States) (AFP) - The United States will announce on Tuesday that it is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, which it accuses of bias against Israel, UN officials said. US Ambassador Nikki Haley will make the announcement at a press conference with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington at 5:00 pm (2100 GMT). Haley has repeatedly threatened to quit the Geneva-based body, established in 2006 to promote and protect human rights worldwide. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric declined to comment ahead of the announcement, saying: "We will wait to hear the details of that decision before commenting fully." "What is clear, is that the secretary-general is a strong believer in the human rights architecture of the UN and the active participation of all member states in that architecture." UN officials privately confirmed they were expecting the US decision to quit the rights body. The withdrawal followed strong UN criticism of Trump's policy to separate migrant children from their families at the US-Mexico border. UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said Monday "the thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable." Human Rights Watch criticized the move, warning that Washington's absence at the top UN body would put the onus on other governments to address the world's most serious rights problems. "The Trump administration's withdrawal is a sad reflection of its one-dimensional human rights policy: defending Israeli abuses from criticism takes precedence above all else," said HRW's executive director Kenneth Roth. "The UN Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel." US criticism stems from the fact that Israel is the only country that has a dedicated agenda item, known as Item 7, at the rights council, meaning its treatment of the Palestinians comes under scrutiny at each of the body's three annual sessions. Story continues The United Stated refused to join the body when it was created in 2006, when George W. Bush was in the White House and his ambassador to the UN was John Bolton, Trump's current hawkish and UN-skeptic national security advisor. It was only after Barack Obama came to power that Washington joined the council in 2009. Since Trump took office, the United States has quit the UN cultural agency UNESCO, cut UN funding and announced plans to quit the UN-backed Paris climate agreement. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Washington, D.C. residents on Tuesday are voting on a proposal that would more than quadruple the minimum wage for tipped workers, including servers, bartenders and hairstylists, to $15 an hour, matching that of other workers in the U.S. capital. The measure is the latest effort to raise pay for low-income workers across the United States through the "Fight for $15" campaign, which contends that service-industry workers have been left behind economically in recent years. Voters in the District of Columbia last year approved a measure to lift the minimum wage to $15 per hour beginning in 2020, up from $12.50 currently - higher than the current minimum wage in any U.S. state. Last year's measure raised tipped workers' minimum pay to $5 from its current $3.33, though employers in the city are already legally required to pay the current $12.50 hourly wage to workers who do not receive enough in tips to reach that rate. "This is a system that basically left behind certain workers," said Brittany Alston, a policy analyst for the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, which backs the measure. Critics of the initiative, which would take effect in 2026 if it passes, say it would cause workers to make less money by reducing tips, while forcing restaurants and bars to raise prices, lay off employees or close. "We are confident that if this ballot measure passes that the overwhelming majority of tipped employees in the District will take home less pay," said Solomon Keene, the president of the Hotel Association of Washington, D.C. Keene said in a phone interview that restaurants would likely have to pass the cost of increased salaries on to diners, which would leave them with less money for gratuities. The mayor and most members of the district council have voiced their opposition to the initiative. The measure's advocates, which include a broad coalition of labor and progressive groups, say tipped workers are more likely than other workers to live in poverty within a rapidly gentrifying region. Story continues States that have raised wages for tipped workers, like Washington state and California, have not seen more restaurants close or costs become prohibitively high for diners, advocates of the measure added. If the initiative passes, it will make Washington, D.C.'s tipped workers the highest paid in the country. Tipped workers in Washington state currently earn a minimum of $11.50 per hour and a minimum of $10.50 in California. (Reporting by Makini Brice; editing by Scott Malone and G Crosse) (Newsweek) The long-term impacts on the Canadian economy if the trade war with the U.S. continues dont look good. As NAFTA talks drag on into the summer and tariffs continue to be imposed on the U.S. by Canada and vice-versa, experts are warning that the worst case scenarios for Canada are pretty dire. Further moves by the U.S. to initiate a global trade war would, unsurprisingly, be expected to tip all three countries into recessions, economists at Scotiabank Economics state in a report, referring to Mexico as well. Its not just Canada and Mexico at the mercy of the United States trade strategy, either. U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods, to which China has threatened comprehensive measures in response. No other major economy Id say is militating for higher tariffs, says Brett House, Vice President and Deputy Chief Economist at Scotiabank Economics. Its very much about the hub-and-spoke relationships between the United States at the centre and its trading relationships with the rest of the world. The good news, faint though that light at the end of the tunnel may be, is that were not at a global trade war yet. But if things escalate from where they are now, the consequences arent looking good. What defines a global trade war? While it may seem the ongoing rhetoric of the U.S. president on Twitter is a sign of an all-out trade war with Canada, we havent escalated to that point yet. PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our @G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that, US Tariffs were kind of insulting and he will not be pushed around. Very dishonest & weak. Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2018 A trade war would really be a case where relatively high tariffs are being imposed on a wide range of goods that account for a significant portion of global trade, says House. Currently the tariffs that the Trump administration has imposed on Canada are limited to steel and aluminum for now. Story continues In preparation for further measures against the country, Canada has prepared a list of goods that would carry a tariff if imported into Canada from the U.S., including a variety of steel and iron goods, as well as an assortment of household goods and foods like yogurt, strawberry jam, mustard, ballpoint pens, washing machines, mattresses, lawnmowers and dishwasher detergent. But China is much closer to a full-blown trade war with the U.S. than Canada is. When you see the U.S. post very high tariffs on its imports, and youll see other countries retaliating with tariffs, thats when youll know youre in a trade war, says Juan Manuel Herrera Betancourt, economist at Scotiabank Economics. Now you have the U.S. imposing tariffs on Chinese goods, which could escalate into a trade war between the U.S. and China. Any country that is part of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and does not have an existing trade agreement with another nation imposes tariffs based on the Most-Favored Nation clause. The MFN outlines the reasonable tariffs one country can impose on another for the import of goods. Essentially the trade war scenario means, the United States would be ignoring its WTO commitments across the board, says House. And most other countries would respond in kind. Recession looms The bleakest possible timeline would see a full-on trade war with the United States, which would likely result in a recession for Canada. Based on our projections, if the U.S. enters into a trade war with the world, that would shrink the Canadian economy by about 1.8 per cent in 2020, says Herrera Betancourt. This is compared to 1.6 per cent growth forecast that we have for that year. That recession would actually begin in the second half of 2019, although the overall growth rate projection for Canada in 2019 is still fairly positive, adds House. The second half of 2019 would see Canada sliding into recession in that scenario. Canada wouldnt be the only one to fall into a recession, although the news would still be worse for the country. What a trade war would do is it would push the U.S. economy into a recession, says Herrera Betancourt. And Canada gets hit twice, right? On the one hand because all our exports now get a 20 per cent tariff going into the U.S., but on the other hand we have about 75 per cent of our exports going to the U.S. So if the U.S. economy is doing poorly, theyll buy even fewer Canadian goods, so its not good for us. The power of the auto sector The most likely cause for a full-blown trade war would be if tariffs were introduced on automobiles. Based on Justins false statements at his news conference, and the fact that Canada is charging massive Tariffs to our U.S. farmers, workers and companies, I have instructed our U.S. Reps not to endorse the Communique as we look at Tariffs on automobiles flooding the U.S. Market! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2018 The worry right now is that a move to impose tariffs on automobiles, which would not affect just Canada if the United States moves to impose tariffs on autos on the same rationale that theyve used for steel and aluminum, they would apply to more countries than just Canadian automobile exports and that would be potentially the trigger that moves us to the all-out trade war scenario, says House. The auto sector is currently under investigation by The U.S. Department of Commerce, to see if it can be identified as a national security threat, Herrera Betancourt explains. Much like what happened with the aluminum and steel industries, if the investigation, which takes about 280 days, identifies it as a threat, tariffs could be imposed on those goods around spring 2019. [The United States] didnt take well to the fact that Canada retaliated to the steel and aluminum tariffs and maybe implied the U.S. would come back with a stronger hand, says Herrera Betancourt. You never know what this tit-for-tat tariff position will end. So if you impose tariffs on cars, that would probably eventually lead to tariffs on all goods traded. The threat of auto tariffs is bad news for businesses in Canada, too. Right now, I think Canadian enterprises of all sizes are in a worrisome spot, even large companies, with the Presidents threats to impose tariffs on the auto sector, it potentially affects companies both small and large, says Dan Kelly, CEO of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), who is in Washington this week to advocate for independent business owners in Canada. If automobiles end up hit with tariffs, not only would it likely lead to more widespread tariffs and a bad scenario for businesses, but would also result in the loss of an estimated 160,000 jobs in Canada, a report from TD states. This shock thus means there is the potential of losing nearly one in 10 of the jobs in this sector, or one in five in Ontario, Brian DePratto, senior economist at TD, says. Seeking a solution The resolution that business leaders, workers and politicians are looking for is a resolution to the outstanding NAFTA agreement. We all have strong interests in assuring we can resuscitate the NAFTA agreement, says Kelly. Were still a long way from that, and what Ive observed from the U.S. President so far is that you can shift from being his best friend to his worst enemy sometimes multiple times per week. We have to take a deep breath here, and hope the rhetoric doesnt turn into action. Benjamin Tal, Deputy Chief Economist of CIBC World Markets, says that at this point, theres no point in holding out for a perfect NAFTA agreement. The key thing is getting something put in place. The best case scenario is going back to the table and renegotiating NAFTA, says Tal. We were relatively close to some sort of an agreement two or three weeks ago, and then things changed dramatically. If we go back to this point, it would be the best case scenario. Even if, in this case, Canada would be worse off than before, but not significantly worse. Another potential outcome could be separate agreements between the United States and Canada, and the United States and Mexico. The most likely outcome although clearly, nobody knows is either we go back and re-negotiate NAFTA in different terms, or youll see separate agreements, separate trade negotiations, says Tal. Those are two possible, livable scenarios. But at this point its very difficult to predict. The economists at Scotiabank Economics say they believe the most likely scenario well see is NAFTA negotiators returning to the table and coming to some kind of conclusion as soon as possible. We would assume in our baseline scenario that the auto tariffs are not imposed, because of the threat that they would imply, setting off substantial retaliation, and that the NAFTA discussions come to what could be a constructive, but at least a benign conclusion, towards 2019, says House, adding that a ratified deal wouldnt be likely until next year, at the earliest. Wasting time The greater longer-term danger of these tit-for-tat tariffs is that they could harden the NAFTA countries negotiating stances and stretch talks beyond the next year or two, the Scotiabank report states. Although both domestic and foreign direct investment numbers in Canada and Mexico remain strong, long-running doubts about NAFTAs future could dent business investment intentions in both countries. Tal says this lack of clarity is the real cost to this ongoing trade dispute and dragged-out NAFTA negotiations. Were now frozen, nothing is happening, time is money, says Tal. It means the fog of uncertainty is not disappearing. We need some sort of closure on that, one way or another, so CEOs can make decisions. Now it seems that its going to last much longer. Tal says the worst case scenario is that these talks would last a significantly long time, as it would prevent companies from confidently investing in Canada. At end of day clearly there would be a winner which would be the U.S., Canada would be a smaller loser, and Mexico would be the biggest loser, because Mexico was the biggest winner [with NAFTA], says Tal. Thats the direction, regardless what the outcome is. But until you reach this point, youve got major uncertainty that will paralyze CEOs and corporations interested in investment. There is hope Despite all the dire outcomes that are possible, there is still real hope that there will be a satisfactory resolution at the end of the trade discussions. Even the steel and aluminum tariffs that have been levied against Canada are not set in stone forever. For perspective, its worth remembering that the George W. Bush Administration imposed tariffs on steel imports in 2002, but they were lifted after 20 months following international pushback and mounting evidence that any benefits to U.S. steel producers were outweighed by losses in downstream U.S. sectors, the Scotiabank report states, adding that even the United Steelworkers union in the U.S. opposes tariffs. Im still optimistic that NAFTA has the possibility of being improved, says Kelly. That was the Trudeau governments position in the beginning, when Trump initiated that NAFTA had to be re-negotiated. Rather than saying no no, we have to keep it exactly as it is, the Trudeau government said okay great, weve got some changes wed like to make some changes too, and I think that was the right tone to take right off the hop. It may not solve every trade deal between Canada and the U.S., but I do think the likely scenario is that we will get to an improved agreement, but it may take some time. Beyond America With 20 per cent of Canadas GDP coming from goods exported to the United States (and about 75 per cent of our exports heading there, according to Scotiabank Economics), the dent that losing the U.S. as a trading partner would leave is sizable. But the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Canadian-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) are both examples of the Canadian government seeking out new trading partners. The current tension puts further impetus on firms to maximize other trade agreements, and for the Canadian government to focus on increasing the number of trade agreements, says Kelly. Thats making sure that we are benefiting from CETA, CPTPP, that gets finalized and put in place quickly and smoothly, and the Canadian government helps build capacity for firms of all sizes to maximize the trading opportunities with other countries other than U.S. I think this reminds Canadians of the value in diverse markets, and not just putting all our eggs in the U.S. basket. Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android. Toulon (France) (AFP) - A young woman was charged Tuesday with attempted murder and advocating terrorism, after she injured two people with a boxcutter in a supermarket in southeast France at the weekend. Shouting "Allahu akbar" (God is greatest), the 24-year-old woman struck a customer waiting at the checkout, as well as a cashier who tried to intervene on Sunday morning at a supermarket in Seyne-sur-Mer, near the Mediterranean port of Toulon. Both victims were taken to hospital, but their wounds were not life-threatening. The assailant, who did not have a police record, was overpowered by other people in the supermarket and taken into custody. France has been on high alert following a string of jihadist attacks since early 2015, often by people who have become radicalised or claim to have acted in the name of the Islamic State group. According to witnesses, the woman claimed to be "Allah's fiancee". And the Toulon prosecutor's office said Tuesday that she had had trouble explaining her motive for the attack, which she had apparently decided on earlier that morning. "Several witnesses report that she had said that Allah told her to do it, that they were all non-believers and that she wanted police to kill her," the prosecutor's office said. Local prosecutor Bernard Marchal had told AFP on Sunday that "it appears to be an isolated case by a person with known psychological problems," but added that "that doesn't exclude the possibility that she may have been radicalised." The Paris prosecutor, who deals with terrorism cases, is not taking the case, Marchal said. More than 240 people have been killed in jihadist attacks since the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris in January 2015. Last month a knifeman shouting "Allahu akbar" killed one person and wounded four others during a Saturday night attack in a bustling Paris neighbourhood. Bouncing across the moons bleak, gray surface, 12 astronauts gathered hundreds of pounds of moon rock between 1969 and 1972. Sometimes, they lifted blocks as heavy as 25 pounds (in Earth weight) off the lunar surface. Other times, they raked the lunar floor to collect fine, meteorite-smashed soil. In total, NASA flew 842 pounds of extraterrestrial rock back to Earth. Most of it has since been sealed away in freezing vaults. Yet, Laura Cicco, of Tennessee, is sure she has a vial of moon dust. She's so confident, in fact, that she recently sued NASA for her right to keep this vial of purported lunar dirt before the space agency can take it away. SEE ALSO: NASA finds organic matter on Mars, but sorry, that doesn't mean it's aliens Cicco and her attorney were spooked by an event in 2011, in which a 74-year old woman attempted to sell rice grain-sized bits of moon rock to federal agents in a Denny's parking lot, during a bizarre sting operation. The woman had initially contacted NASA, seeking a buyer for her moon rocks, which then escalated to an undercover operation. Cicco maintains that astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to step foot on the moon, somehow acquired or took a vial of moon dust from the government and gifted it to her when she was a child, along with an autograph. Armstrong and Ciccos father, she said, were both members of a secret pilots club, the Quiet Birdmen. But could whatever is in that vial really be dust from the moon? Making footsteps in the lunar soil. Image: NASA/Roger Ressmeyer/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images While Cicco may have been gifted an autograph from the legendary Armstrong, its more doubtful that he actually handed over some lunar dirt. Testing the sample Cicco's attorney sent the vial to the Bruker Corporation , a lab that uses specialized equipment to analyze materials. Tom Tague, a chemist and applications manager for the lab, performed two tests, both involving X-ray analysis. One test failed to produce any useful results, either way. "It wasn't helpful," said Tague, in an interview. Story continues But the other, called X-ray diffraction spectroscopy, "was immensely helpful," said Tague, who noted he had previously tested purported lunar substances for private individuals. Specifically, Tague found the minerals were "consistent with lunar soil in the highlands of the moon." "To summarize my findings, you couldnt rule out the sample was from the moon," said Tague, who had the benefit of NASA literature outlining the mineralogy of different areas on the lunar surface. Astronaut Alan Bean collects lunar soil. Image: nasa "That's a significant find, at least in my opinion," he said. The results, showing the soil had consistencies with dirt from the lunar highlands, were presented as evidence in the lawsuit, along with the autograph and the vial. But herein lies a problem: Neil Armstrong never visited the lunar highlands. The Apollo 11 spacecraft famously landed in the Sea of Tranquility, a low-basin on the moon, blanketed in ancient lava . "That's not the most ringing endorsement of it being from the moon," said Robert Pearlman, a space historian who has closely followed this moon rock case and others, in an interview. So, what's going on here? Ciccos attorney, Christopher McHugh, has little doubt about Tague's analysis, noting that hes extremely confident in the results. Tom is world reknown, said McHugh, over email. He was involved with authentication of the lost Da Vinci painting that relatively recently sold for over $450 million. Theres little question that Tague, who has a doctorate in chemistry and is an expert is elemental analysis, soundly analyzed the material. But if this substance were truly dirt from the moon, the results would almost certainly be conclusive not just consistent with rock from a certain region of the lunar survace. When inspected closely, moon rocks and dust are quite distinct from anything on Earth. Astronaut Harrison Schmitt uses a lunar rake to collect lunar soil. Image: nasa "These differences should make it relatively easy to tell if this soil sample is indeed lunar," Walter Kiefer, senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, said in an email. For one, said Kiefer, volcanic rock on the moon, known as basalt, has "much more iron" than similar volcanic rocks on Earth. What's more, the specific rocks Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 brought back to Earth are enriched in a specific element, titanium, which then forms another specific mineral, ilmenite. Although these are strong clues, Kiefer underscored that he had no opinion about the specific samples in question, having not seen Bruker's chemical analysis. Moon rocks are unique from Earths dirt in other ways, as well. Moon dirt would show evidence of "space weathering," as the surface has been bombarded with tiny meteorites and solar wind (charged particles from the sun) for billions of years, Ralph Milliken, an assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brown University, said via email. "These types of effects would not be present in terrestrial [Earth] materials and are not easily reproduced in a laboratory setting," said Milliken. "I would think that with the right kind of measurements and people with experience in lunar materials it would be pretty straightforward to correctly identify whether or not a sample is lunar soil," Milliken added. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin deploys scientific equipment on the moon, while Neil Armstrong takes the picture. Image: NASA The substance in the vial could possibly be fake lunar dust, known broadly as lunar simulant, but this stuff is not easy to make. "Another way to think of this is that if it were easy to make fake lunar soil then there would likely be a lot of people attempting to sell such things, but it is actually very hard to make material that is identical to lunar soil," said Milliken. There are companies interested in making a soil approximating asteroid and lunar ground, however, that fake dirt is used for research purposes like preparing robots and spacecraft for future expeditions. So, does NASA own every piece of moon rock on the planet? While the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, recognized by over 100 countries including the U.S., forbids any nation from claiming any land or celestial body in space, "the taking of (presumably) small quantities of material for scientific purposes has been widely acknowledged as legitimate," Frans Von der Dunk, a space law professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, College of Law, said in an email. That's why NASA, "on behalf of the United States,' can claim ownership over the moon rocks and other small quantities of materials brought back by the various Apollo astronauts," said Van der Dunk. However, he notes "the legal question indeed becomes trickier" once the rocks get passed around in the U.S. For instance, if it was a legal gift from Armstrong, does ownership pass to another person, and if so, would a state or federal law determine the outcome? Dave Klaus, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, uses real lunar soil for research. Image: Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post via Getty Images But most of these questions are moot. NASA has never gifted a moon rock to any one person. "No president of the United States, no astronauts were presented with one [moon rock]," said Pearlman, the space historian. In fact, the U.S government has only gifted small bits of lunar material, embedded in acrylic glass balls, to 135 foreign nations and 50 U.S. states. "So if this woman's story is true, her problem is with Neil Armstrong because he would have passed off stolen goods to her," said Pearlman, who runs the website collectSPACE.com. "It's about theft, not so much about the moon although thats what makes it so interesting," he added. McHugh, however, finds it irritating that anyone would contend Armstrong took government moon rock without permission. Saying that someone took something without authority is a gutless way of saying he stole it, said McHugh. If NASA is calling Neil Armstrong a thief then it should just say that. All the evidence I have seen shows he was an American hero who was beyond reproach. Neil Armstrong practices scooping up moon rocks a few months before launching. Image: nasa There are still unaccounted for moon rocks, however, something NASA acknowledged in a somewhat damning government report in 2011. Of over 140,000 lunar samples and around 23,000 meteorite and other samples, NASA has 26,000 of these space objects out on loan for research and educational purposes. Of these, 517 have been lost or stolen though it's unclear how many are moon rocks specifically. It is possible that Cicco obtained some lost or stolen moon dust. However, it appears NASA was completely unaware of her vial for decades. This lawsuit against NASA, then, has made the space agency well aware of the vial even if it's unlikely to be moon dust. "She didnt have a problem before," said Pearlman. "Now she does." UPDATE 6:33 p.m. EDTThe Broward County Sheriffs Office confirmed on Twitter that the victim in Monday's shooting in South Florida was rapper XXXTentacion. Rest in peace, Kanye West wrote on Twitter. I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing. Trending: David Hogg Calls For Laura Ingraham Advertising Boycott After 'Summer Camp' Comments Original story: Rapper XXXTentacion was shot and killed in South Florida, Monday, TMZ reported, citing the Broward County Sheriff's Office. He was 20 years old. The rapper, real name Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, was reportedly leaving a motorcycle dealership after going shopping when the unidentified suspect ran up to his vehicle and shot him. The suspect in the shooting was apparently still at large. XXXTentacion's representatives had not yet publicly commented on reports of his death. I PRAY IT ISNT TRUE AND IF IT IS GOD BLESS THE ONES THATS CLOSE TO HIM, 2chainz wrote on Twitter. Enormous talent and limitless potential and a strong desire to be a better person. God bless his family, friends and fans, J. Cole wrote. Don't miss: Python Strangles Forest Officer As He Poses For Selfie With it Wrapped Around His Neck Newsweek reached out to the Broward County Sheriff's Office for comment but had not yet heard back. The sheriff's office confirmed on Twitter that a male involved in a shooting was pronounced dead, but did not confirm whether it was XXXTentacion or not. The controversial rapper previously made headlines for his legal battles, including allegations of domestic violence. XXXTentacion was also involved in a number of feuds with other rappers, including a high profile battle with Migos. The rappers most recent album ? was released in March. This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available. GettyImages-893687060 Miami Dade County Corrections via Getty Images Story continues SaveSave Most popular: Donald Trump Administration Can't Get Child Separation 'Policy' Messaging Straight SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave SaveSaveSaveSave SaveSave SaveSave SaveSave This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek XXXTentacion has been pronounced dead by the Broward Police Department after being shot in Florida on Monday. #BreakingNews The adult male that was taken to the hospital has been pronounced dead. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 Police dispatch audio reveals X was transported as a "level 1 trauma patient" and described as "comatose" before being pronounced dead. The 20-year-old, whose birth name is Jahseh Onfroy, was reportedly shopping for motorcycles in Florida when a gunman ran to his vehicle and opened fire. Dispatch audio indicates the incident was possibly a drive-by, with the alleged shooter or shooters having potentially left the scene in a black Dodge Journey, Chevy Tahoe, or Jeep Grand Cherokee. "Witnesses told cops a Louis Vuitton bag was taken from XXX's vehicle," TMZ reports. "According to the dispatch call the suspects were described as 2 black males wearing hoodies, and the shooter was wearing a red mask." The Broward County Fire Department told TMZ that X was rushed to a hospital and eyewitness claimed he had no pulse. Witnesses told the outlet they heard multiple shots. "There was a shooting in Deerfield. Our officers are on the scene and we're gathering information," Jonathan Fishman, a Broward County Sheriff's Office spokesman, told Miami New Times. "We can't confirm anything else right now but will release more information soon." #BreakingNews #BSO is currently working an incident regarding a shooting at 3671 N. Dixie Hwy., Deerfield Beach. PIO headed to scene. Dispatchers received a call of a shooting at 3:57 p.m. An adult male victim was transported to an area hospital. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 Videos circulating on Twitter showed Onfroy was sitting in the front seat of his car seemingly unconscious when he was found by witnesses. Story continues Continue Reading On PigeonsandPlanes More from PigeonsandPlanes Khokha (Yemen) (AFP) - UAE-backed Yemeni government forces fought their way into Hodeida airport on Tuesday, pressing an offensive that has seen some of the most intense fighting of a three-year war against Shiite Huthi rebels. The United Arab Emirates, which has US-trained troops fighting alongside the Yemeni army, said the alliance had entered the airport in Hodeida -- a Red Sea port city that is a key aid hub and the entry point for three-quarters of Yemen's imports. "With the participation and support of the Emirati armed forces, the joint Yemeni resistance (army) entered Hodeida airport," the UAE state news agency WAM tweeted. A Yemeni military source confirmed to AFP that troops had entered the rebel base at the disused airport on the southern edge of the city. Military sources also reported 33 Huthis and 19 soldiers killed in Tuesday's battle, bringing the death toll in Hodeida this week to 216 fighters. No civilian casualties have yet been confirmed. The battle for Hodeida has sparked fears of a new escalation of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, which is already teetering on the brink of famine. The United Nations has warned any attack on Hodeida port could cripple shipments of desperately needed aid to the 8.4 million Yemenis facing imminent starvation. Hodeida's residents are now bracing for what they fear will be devastating street fighting, as tanks and buses carrying uniformed troops roll through the empty streets of the once-bustling city. One resident, who asked not to be identified for fear of arrest, said civilians had been "banned from using their phones to take pictures and are questioned about their movements if they're seen in the streets". The rebels have also begun to dig trenches in the streets, he said. Fierce fighting in the Hodeida area has already driven 5,200 families from their homes as pro-government forces advanced up the Red Sea coast, according to the UN. The coalition launched a major offensive on June 13, dubbed Operation Golden Victory, to drive the rebels out of Hodeida, now the most intense battlefront in an already brutal war. Story continues - UN envoy leaves empty-handed - Since Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their regional allies intervened in Yemen in 2015, there have been multiple rounds of UN-brokered peace talks, but they have all failed to achieve any breakthrough. UN envoy Martin Griffiths has been holding talks in the rebel-held capital Sanaa since Saturday to seek concessions from Huthi leaders that might avoid all-out fighting in the streets of Hodeida. Griffiths appears to have failed to make a breakthrough. He told the UN Security Council by video-conference on Monday that he was hopeful a first round of preliminary talks could take place next month, according to two diplomats present at the closed-door session. But the UN envoy flew out of Sanaa on Tuesday without making any comment to journalists. Just hours after he left, Saudi state media said the kingdom's air defences intercepted a ballistic missile fired from rebel-held territory in Yemen -- the latest in a series of such attacks. There were no casualties, it said. Yemen's Iran-allied Huthis said via their Al-Masirah news outlet they had targeted a Saudi Aramco facility near the southwestern city of Abha. The Yemeni government and its allies have insisted that the Huthis must fully withdraw from Hodeida and turn over the port to UN supervision. The rebels have so far agreed only to share control of the port with the United Nations. The Gulf Arab states accuse their regional arch rival Iran of smuggling arms to the rebels through the port, a charge Tehran denies. The coalition held a press conference in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday to display what it said were explosives used by the Huthis in Yemen, including landmines and improvised explosive devices described by one UAE official as "a fraction of what the coalition has seized". The Yemen conflict has killed nearly 10,000 people, most of them civilians, since 2015. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their allies joined the Yemen war that year, after President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi fled into exile as the rebels overran much of the country. The coalition has helped pro-government forces to regain control of the south and much of the Red Sea coast but the rebels still control Sanaa and most of the north. Khokha (Yemen) (AFP) - Trenches, military tanks and civilians fleeing by the busload: Yemen's Hodeida, once a bustling port city, is now bracing for battles in its streets. Ahmed is one of 600,000 Yemenis who now fear war at their very doorsteps, as a fight for control of the Red Sea region rages between government forces, backed by regional titan Saudi Arabia, and Yemen's Huthi rebels. For days, Ahmed has been holed up in his living room, certain every night that the fighting would stop by morning. But after the UN's top envoy for Yemen flew out of the capital Tuesday without announcing a breakthrough in mediation, hope is dwindling for Ahmed. He, too, says he now plans to flee the only home he has ever known. "The sounds of the violence have literally not stopped," Ahmed told AFP by phone from his home near Hodeida's international airport. "There are families who have been trying to escape, but they just can't." More than 32,000 people have been driven out of their homes across Hodeida province this month, according to the UN, as fears mount of an even worse humanitarian crisis in a country already hit by war, hunger and disease. The Saudi-led coalition launched an offensive last Wednesday, dubbed Operation Golden Victory, to push Yemen's Iran-backed rebels out of Hodeida, which the insurgents have controlled since 2014. The Hodeida airport was the site of intense battles Tuesday between the rebels and the army backed by the United Arab Emirates, which has US-trained troops fighting alongside the Yemeni military. The UAE on Tuesday announced the government coalition had entered the airport in Hodeida -- a Red Sea port city that is a key aid hub and the entry point for three-quarters of Yemen's imports. Ahmed, meanwhile, said Tuesday marked "the most violent" day of his life. - 'Paralysed city' - Rebel-held Hodeida is the latest battlefront in a three-year war that has seen Yemen, long the most impoverished Arab country, pushed to the brink of famine. Story continues In 2014, the Huthi rebels seized control of the capital, Sanaa, along with much of northern Yemen and ports along the country's western coast. Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened in the Yemeni government's war with the Huthis the following year. Nearly 10,000 people have since been killed. That war is now hovering over Hodeida, home to 600,000 civilians. Many of them, like Ahmed, had been banking on UN efforts to take control of the port, through which nearly three quarters of Yemen's imports -- including much-needed aid -- flow. But those efforts failed this week, with both the coalition and rebels refusing to stand down as air raids continue to target key locations around the area. One resident, who asked not to be identified for fear of arrest, said civilians had been "banned from using their phones to take pictures and are questioned about their movements if they're seen in the streets". "The rebels have also begun to dig trenches in the streets," he said. "The city is nearly paralysed." Mohammed, a student who lives in central Hodeida, said a stream of buses and vans had been carrying panicked families from their homes to areas of relative safety over the past few days. "It's been non-stop fleeing," he told AFP. Readying to board a bus headed for Sanaa, one family placed a propane gas cannister, basic food items and a small suitcase for the driver to load into the vehicle. The United Nations has warned that an attack on the port itself could cripple shipments of desperately needed aid to the 8.4 million Yemenis facing imminent starvation. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said thousands of residents will continue to flee Hodeida in the coming days. The ICRC, along with other aid groups, has been forced to suspend many of its operations in western Yemen, leaving civilians across the country at risk. Basra (Iraq) (AFP) - From a roving cafe to scrap metal sculptures, young Iraqis unable to tap into the country's oil wealth are having to find creative ways to make a living. While their parents generally went straight into public sector jobs after graduation, the job market for Iraqi youths has become starkly different in the post-Saddam Hussein era. In the decade which followed the US invasion and the dictator's ouster in 2003, authorities continued to increase state hirings -- with a heavy dose of nepotism. But now, as 26-year-old Karrar Alaa discovered, there are no more guarantees. Three years ago, he was counting on his business degree leading to a public sector job in the southern port city of Basra. But tired of waiting, he has turned entrepreneur. After gathering up all of his savings and borrowing money from relatives, Alaa invested in a car and transformed it into a coffee shop on wheels. "It's the first of its kind in Basra. I got the idea from a video shot in Europe and posted on Facebook," he told AFP. The "Coffee 2 Go" car has a giant plastic cup mounted on the roof, while an image of a cup of cappuccino and coffee beans is emblazoned on the body. An initial investment of $20,000 has led to daily earnings of around 150,000 dinars, or $120, from cups of coffee made in a machine installed in the car boot. - Engineers driving taxis - Mashreq Jabbar earns similar sums from his little bookshop squeezed into a corridor of a Basra fashion mall. "Renting a shop costs $6,000 a month; I only pay $2,500 for my hallway," said the slim 26-year-old, as he tidied shelves of school books, romantic novels and poetry collections. The geology graduate had also hoped to get a job as a public official, confident that his degree would make him employable in the local oil industry. But even though the sector accounts for 89 percent of the state budget and 99 percent of Iraq's export revenues, it provides only one percent of jobs as the majority of posts are filled by foreigners. Story continues The lack of opportunities is nationwide; from the capital Baghdad to second city Mosul in the north, and from the agricultural east to the western desert. It is not uncommon to find engineers working as taxi drivers, or sandwich stalls manned by literature graduates in a country of avid readers. Officially, 10.8 percent of Iraqis are jobless, while youth unemployment is twice as high in a country where 60 percent of the population are aged under 24. A mushrooming number of private universities -- with Baghdad boasting around 30 -- has made the situation even worse among graduates. - 'Beautiful' scrap sculptures - The private sector which emerged after Saddam's rule has failed to fill the employment gap, with many young Iraqis holding out for the coveted public sector posts. "The common view is that there's no choice but to work in the public sector," said Ahmed Abdel Hassan, an economics professor at the University of Basra. "Young people who go to work in the private sector say it's a temporary move before getting a post in the public sector," he said. Even Basra's entrepreneurs see the benefits, with Alaa noting the social security and pension perks, while Jabbar pointed to civil servants' guaranteed salaries. Many of those holding out for a state job, however, are left unable to move out of their parents' house. Omar Abdallah, 28, had pinned his hopes on getting a teaching job at the end of his studies in fine art. Iraq once had a high-quality and free education system, but that was left in tatters following the international embargo of the 1990s after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Having failed to land a job and with no capital to start a business of his own, Abdallah began collecting scrap metal. "I could only count on myself and my talent," he said at his family home, where one room serves as both his workshop and exhibition space. Abdallah has transformed old bicycle chains into scorpions, cutlery into dragonflies and used nuts and bolts to make motorbike models. In a good month he can sell half a dozen sculptures, charging between $200 and $250 apiece. "People love my sculptures," he said proudly. "They tell me: 'How did you manage to make something so beautiful out of rubbish?'" A Q&A with Mary Frances Berry and Adam Eichen Photo credit: AgnosticPreachersKid Just won big Supreme Court decision on Voting! Great News! Thats what Donald Trump tweeted from Singapore when the Supreme Court ruled, on June 11, that Ohio could purge voting rolls of people who hadnt cast ballots in a while. This means that someone would have to register once again to vote. And the Supreme Courts ruling concluded that Ohios voter purge system does not violate federal laws. Other states plan to follow Ohios example. What are the implications of this, especially for midterm election season? Our blog editor Christian Coleman asked Mary Frances Berry, author of Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich, and Adam Eichen, co-author of Daring Democracy, to find out. Christian Coleman: So why did the Supreme Court vote in favor of allowing voter purges in Ohio? Mary Frances Berry: The Court Republican majority simply joined the effort to remove people who would likely vote for Democrats from the rolls. However, even if registered voters dont vote, there is no compelling reason to remove them from the rolls. Adam Eichen: I wont speculate on the Courts ulterior motivations in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, but this case certainly appeared to use statutory interpretation to green light discriminatory voting policy. Some context about the case: In Ohio, when someone does not vote in a federal election, that person is sent a notice in the mail to confirm that they still reside at the same address. If the individual fails to return the mailer and does not vote in subsequent two federal elections, he or she will be removed from the voter rolls. Very few people respond to these mailers. According to Justice Breyer, who dissented, only 235,000 out of 1.5 million postcards were returned in 2012. Ohios Republican Secretary of State, Jon Husted (after whom this case is named) admitted that over 2 million voters were removed from the rolls from 2011 to 2016. (Ohio is one of six states that uses failure to vote as a means of starting the purge processthe only one that does it after missing only one federal election cycle.) The Supreme Court had to decide whether this purging process violated the National Voter Registration Act (and the subsequent Help America Votes Act), which explicitly says no registrant may be removed solely by reason of a failure to vote. The Court ultimately ruled that Ohios voter purge system treats the failure to return a notice and the failure to vote as evidence that a registrant has moved, not as a ground for removal. In other words, since the purges dont take place solely on the basis of non-voting, its acceptable. As Demos Chiraag Bains retorts, This logic ignores Congresss own statement when passing the NVRA that people should not be removed due to their failure to respond to a mailing. So what does this decision mean? To put it bluntly: vulnerable communities will be purged from voter rolls at disproportionately high rates. Justice Sotomayor aptly put it in her dissent that the Courts ruling entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate. CC: Is the voter purge another form of voter suppression, and if so, are there other examples of this happening in recent history? MFB: Shades of Bush v Gore when the Supreme Court handed the 2000 election to George W. Bush by permitting widespread voter suppression, including purges in Florida. Justice Scalia explained that the court majority refused a recount just to end the dispute. He repeatedly expressed the view that people should just get over it. But there were numerous denials of the right to vote that went unremedied. The United Civil Rights Commissions 2001 report showed the right to vote was violated not just by what ballots were not counted but also that likely Democratic voters who were registered were told they were not and prevented from voting, disabled people in wheelchairs were assigned to inaccessible polling places (one had a big ditch outside). In recent years, we have examples of states enforcing strict ID laws; closing polling places on Sunday, which had been prime voting day for some black church goers; understaffing, leading to long lines that discouraged voters; moving polling places at the last minute; closing down some registrar offices all to suppress the vote, mainly of Blacks and Latinos. AE: Liberals and conservatives alike should agree: Verifying and updating voter rolls is a necessary part of our elections system. And our voter rolls are often out-of-dateafter all, people move or pass away every day. But ordinary list maintenance is different than aggressive voter purging, especially one, like Ohios, that is premised on use it or lose it. This kind of list maintenance is nothing more than voter suppression of vulnerable groups. There are many ways to assure well-maintained lists, such as implementing automatic voter registrationwhich updates a citizens registration with every eligible governmental interaction. There is no need for aggressive and wanton purging to clean up our voter rolls. Purging, though, is just one sliver of American voter suppression tactics. Since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, states are increasingly passing discriminatory election laws such as voter ID requirements, reduction of polling places, and burdensome voter registration restrictions. To put it bluntly, voter suppression is ubiquitous. CC: Republicans are arguing that theyre trying to promote ballot integrity and prevent voter fraud. Is voter fraud the real issue here? MFB: No. Voter fraud is rare, but the fraud that exists consists mainly of buying votes in exchange for favors, not ID fraud or any of the other false claims Republicans make. Vote-buying is done by campaigns in both parties, because the real voting problem is voter turnout, which remains abysmal. People who are registered and are in places where violence or economic pressure doesnt prevent them from voting dont vote because they arent interested in the candidates they are offered and think voting doesnt help them or their communities. An elderly Black woman I describe in my book, Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich, whose vote politicians routinely bought, described the process to her state voter fraud investigator. Politicians promise to do something, and they never do what they say, but she voted because at least she could count on being given a small amount of money and a sandwich and cold drink after she voted. AE: Of course not. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Period. Study after study proves as much. Again, updated voter rolls are integral, but not at the expense of purging voters. This is about increasing the oddseven if only slightlyto win elections. CC: Since midterm season is here, what can voters do to make sure they get their voices heard? MFB: Register if they havent already and help other people to register who need help with ID or travelling to the registrars office. Vote in state and local elections where the rules that lead to disfranchisement are made. Pick candidates who at least promise to do what they think is important, vote, and then remember who is elected and hold them accountable. Even if your candidate loses, hold the winner accountable. They still have a responsibility to implement the duties of the office. Its not unusual for people not to even know who their elected office-holders are. Vote based on policy, not personalities. AE: Register everyone you know to vote and then vote. Elections, for better or worse, are a moment to reshape the political landscapeto remake what is politically possible. But voting is not enough. Even if we were to elect an entirely new Congress, the same institutional pressuresthe need to raise money to run for office, lobbyists flooding politicians with corporate-sponsored white papers, a voting system that produces an unrepresentative electoratewill remain. The America that we collectively want will remain unattainable because our broken democratic system will continue to distort popular opinion. So, I urge everyone to join organizations that fight for meaningful democracy reforms (The Field Guide to Democracy Movement offers a list of relevant groups). Every state needs to do bettereven the Democratic ones. We must all demandand I truly mean demandpro-democracy policies, such as automatic voter registration, same-day registration, pre-registration for sixteen year olds, public financing of elections, independent redistricting commissions, and ranked choice voting. For these midterms, there will also be pro-democracy initiatives on the ballot in states across the country. If there is one in your state, ensure its passage. If there isnt, develop creative ways to make democracy reform central in every local, state, and federal election. A better democracy is possible if enough people demand it. About Mary Frances Berry and Adam Eichen Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former chairwoman of the US Commission on Civil Rights, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the author of twelve books, and the recipient of thirty-five honorary degrees. Dr. Berry has appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show, Tavis Smiley, PBS NewsHour, CBS Evening News, Al Jazeera America News, and various MSNBC and CNN shows. She is the author of History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times. Follow her on Twitter at @DrMFBerry and visit her website. Adam Eichen is the Communications Strategist at Equal Citizens and a Democracy Fellow at the Small Planet Institute, cofounded by Frances Moore Lappe. He is the co-author of Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamEichen. The Austrian capital, Vienna, is under consideration as the site of a potential summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, two sources familiar with the discussions said on Monday. The meeting could take place in advance of a July 11-12 NATO summit in Brussels that Trump is expected to attend, the sources said. Trump is also expected to visit London for talks with British Prime Minister Theresa May on the trip. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the postponement of the evacuation and demolition of five illegal buildings in the Palestinian village of Khirbet Susya in South Mount Hebron. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The demolition, which was scheduled for Tuesday morning, is being postponed following international pressure, Ynet has learned. This is the third time in the past few months that the evacuation is put off. Illegal construction in the Palestinian village of Kuirbet Susya (Photo: Regavim) Everything was already prepared for the evacuation. The Central Command and the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories had prepared an operation order, and hundreds of police officers and soldiers were recruited and placed on high alert. The Defense Ministry had hired civilian execution contractors and heavy equipment for the explosive demolition. But at around 10 pm Monday, an order arrived from the Prime Ministers Office to stop the evacuation. The demolition of illegal Palestinian homes in Khirbet Susya is seen as one of the symbols of the Palestinian battle in the West Bank, and Israel has been under heavy international pressuremainly in recent weeksto prevent the evacuation which would have received wide international coverage. The demolition may have also been postponed due to the upcoming visit of US President Donald Trumps envoy to the Middle East, Jason Greenblatt, and his special advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, this weekend. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Demonstrating weakness and zero action against the PAs intensive and illegal activity (Photo: Marc Israel Sellem) The timing of the demolition, which has been postponed to an unknown date, is politically sensitive too. In the past week, the security forces evacuated two Jewish outposts in the West BankNetiv Haavot in Gush Etzion and Tapuach West in Samaria. The Regavim movement, which led the High Court petition against the Palestinian outpost, offered the following comment: In the past week, Netanyahu implemented the demolition of the Netiv Haavot neighborhood and Tapuach West, but avoided demolishing the Palestinian Authoritys outpost in South Mount Hebron. Netanyahu cant just blame the High Court and the left-wing organizations, when he is essentially imposing strict enforcement against the settlements while demonstrating weakness and zero action against the Palestinian Authoritys intensive and illegal activity. Knesset Member Ayman Odeh, leader of the Arab Joint List, participated Monday in an east Jerusalem conference on behalf of two Palestinian organizations which have been defined by Israel as terror groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Several hours earlier, Jerusalem District Police Commander Maj. Gen. Yoram Halevy signed a prohibition order against the conference. Police officers arrived at the Ambassador Hotel in east Jerusalem to stop the event from going ahead. Six people were detained for questioning and one woman was arrested. The conference was supposed to focus on the issue of Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Palestine. MK Odeh's declaration as police arrive to stop east Jerusalem conference X Upon the polices arrival, Odeh said that they will be defeated, and Jerusalem will remain for its people, standing strong, winning and the capital of Palestine. Russia says conference wasnt initiated by terror groups The Russian Embassy in Israel, however, denied that the conference marking Russia Day was initiated by the two Palestinian terror organizations. The embassy said in a statement that the event was held by the Society of Palestinian-Russian Friendship. The event was attended by the Russian representative in the Palestinian Authority, Haider Aghanin, who id defined in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as the Russian ambassador to Palestine. Another participant was Alexander Sorokin, director of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Bethlehem. MK Odeh confronts police at the event, Monday evening The invitation to the conference stated: The Russian Embassy and the Society of Palestinian-Russian Friendship invite you to take part in an event marking Russia Day, on Monday, June 18, 2018, at 7 pm at the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem. Long live the Palestinian-Russian Friendship. Nevertheless, the Russian Embassy denied that it co-organized the event. Dr. Khatib Samir, head of the Israeli association of Russian university graduates, said in response: This isnt a terror-related event. Its a completely legitimate event held together with the Russian Embassy, which the police decided to shut down for political reasons only, without knowing what it was about. There is no connection to the organizations mentioned in the prohibition order. Did the Russian representatives also attend a terrorist event? Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, however, threatened to file a complaint with the Knessets Ethics Committee against MK Odeh. I watched the video showing MK Odeh participate in an event inciting terror this morning, and I felt ashamed as the Knesset speaker and as a citizen in the State of Israel, Edelstein said. Its unthinkable that a public representative, who was elected to represent the Israeli Arab public, is actually representing terror organization and inciting to violence. There is no room for inciters in the Israeli Knesset. MK Ayman Odeh (L) and Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan (Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg, Motti Kimchi) Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan slammed Odeh for participating in the event, saying that the lawmaker provided another example of his behavior as an enemy of the state and as a supporter and accomplice in the activity of terror organizations. I plan to turn to the attorney general immediately and demand a criminal investigation against him for aiding a declared terror organization, Erdan added. MK Odeh, you place isnt in the Knesset, its in prison. The district police commander decided to issue a prohibition order against the conference following intelligence information on a plan to hold an event on behalf of the terror organizations. We wont allow an event characterized and organized by groups identified as a terror organization, and we will work undauntedly to prevent and thwart events anytime and anywhere, the police said in a statement. MK Odehs office declined comment. Security forces detained Tuesday a 30-year-old Palestinian police officer from east Jerusalem after finding a Carlo submachine gun as well as ammunition in his home. The police officer will be brought before Jerusalem's Magistrate's Court for a remand extension hearing. Four American presidents protected Israels alleged nuclear arsenal for years in return for a continuation of the nuclear ambiguity policy, according to foreign reports. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The New Yorker published an investigation Monday revealing that President Donald Trump signed a secret letter last year assuring Israel that it wont be pressured to give up its nuclear weapons as long as it wont discuss its nuclear arsenal publicly. According to the investigation, senior Israeli officials visited the White House on February 13, 2017 and asked to discuss a secret letter which basically continues letters signed by previous presidents, declaring that the Americans wont intervene in Israels nuclear arsenal. Trump and Netanyahu (: MCT) Israels Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer tried to get the letter signed by Trump, but according to the New Yorker, the presidents aides felt blindsided by the Israeli request as they knew nothing about the existence of any letters and were confused by the sense of urgency coming from the Israelis. The Americans had other pressing concerns, like the resignation of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn over his links to Russia, and they didnt appreciate feeling as though the Israelis were telling them what to do. This is our f*ckin house," one of the Americans snapped, according to the report. Eventually, however, Trump signed the letter. He wasnt the first president to do so. He was preceded by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Former US President George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton (Photo: Getty Images) Avner Cohen, a nuclear historian and the author of two books on the origins of Israels nuclear program, told the New Yorker that in the fall of 1969 Israels Prime Minister Golda Meir reached an unwritten understanding with President Nixon that the Israelis would not declare, test, or threaten to use their nuclear weapons, and the Americans would not pressure the Israelis to sign a landmark international nuclear-nonproliferation treaty known as the NPT. Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan abided by Nixons deal, and the American position remained unchanged. After the Gulf War, in 1991, the Israelis first started to feel as though the unwritten Meir-Nixon arrangement was no longer sufficient, when world powers talked about the possibility of creating a zone in the Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear arms. The Dimona reactor (Photo: EPA) According to the investigation, the first iteration of the secret letter was drafted during the Clinton Administration, as part of an agreement for Israels participation in the 1998 Wye River negotiations with the Palestinians. According to former officials, President Clinton assured the Jewish state that no future American arms-control initiative would detract from Israels deterrent capabilities, an oblique but clear reference to its nuclear arsenal. George W. Bush followed Clintons lead, signing a similar letter. In 2009, when Obama took office, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was completely distrustful of him. With Obama, we were all crazy, an Israeli official told the New Yorker. That April, Obama delivered a speech in Prague, setting out Americas commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. His advisers subsequently learned, according to a former US official, how paranoid Bibi was that Obama was going to try to take away Israels nuclear weapons. Of course, that was never our intent. A month later, Obama signed an updated version of the letter. Holon's Deputy Mayor Yoel Yeshurun, who serves as the dean of the Ashkelon Academic College, published a homophobic post on his Facebook page against the Gay Pride Parade and the LGBT community last week. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Yashurun lashed out at Tel Aviv's Mayor Ron Huldai, calling him "a wiry old man," whose Judaism is questionable, and claimed the media portrays "those crazy people" as the "standard-bearers (of liberalism)," although they are people of "darkness and barbarity coming from hell." Tel Aviv Pride Parade (Photo: Reuters) Yeshurun removed his offensive post on Sunday after withstanding harsh social media criticism. "Tel Aviv has nurtured wild weeds, monsters resembling to those in the Jurassic Park movie whose small distorted minds orchestrated parades of two-legged vile repulsive animals," Yeshurun wrote. "At the top of the tower stands a wiry old man, a gourmet-lover whose Judaism is questionable. He celebrates by eating dog meat, causing the Jewish people to hurl on his plate," he said. Holon's Deputy Mayor Yoel Yeshurun (Photo: Kobi Koankes) "And the dog-eater's city? There, on Tel Aviv's streets those two-legged animals walk proudly, deeply disturbed, those who lay with men as well as ugly female animals with 'I'm a slut' tattoos!!!" he hatefully added. Yeshurun accused the media of supporting the LGBT community and portraying them as freedom, liberty, and equality fighters. "Hasn't the media understood yet it is representing only fragments of the population and most of the nation is revolted by these animal parades?" he charged. Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv (Photo: Yair Sagi) When commenting on his malicious post, Yeshurun said, "I wrote this post on my private Facebook post, and I'm not taking back what I wrote." "My words weren't aimed, not even by a hint, at the LGBT community, rather at the parades and their extraversion," he explained. "The LGBT community itself criticizes those parades and the damage they do to its own struggle (for equality)," Holon's deputy mayor added. Holon Mayor Moti Sasson said the post published on Facebook "is the deputy mayor's personal opinion, which of course doesn't reflect Holon and its mayor's perception and policy. "We can only regret the things that were said," Sasson concluded. SlutWalk March in Tel Aviv (Photo: Dana Kopel) The Ashkelon Academic College also issued a statement saying, "Yoel Yeshurun wrote his post on his private Facebook page. As a citizen in a democratic country, Mr. Yeshurun Is allowed to express his views and we don't see the need to intervene in the matter." Holon City Council Member Israel Moran said Yeshurun's post was revolting and disgusting. "He said harsh, vile, and unacceptable things." Two weeks ago, in anticipation of the Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv, a teacher employed in the secular Rafael Eitan high school in Ramat Gan asked his students to read the book of Psalms for "God to save us from the shame and the disgrace." The teacher wrote in the Students' WhatsApp group: "Unfortunately, on Friday a great blasphemy will take place in Tel Aviv. We cannot do anything to stop it, but God will salvage us." "Read a chapter of Psalms and we will be saved from the shame and disgrace," he asked his students. Syria said on Tuesday it rejected the presence of Turkish and US forces around the northern town of Manbij, a day after soldiers of the two countries began patrolling the area. Turkish and US troops on Monday began independent patrols along the line separating Turkish-controlled areas of northern Syria from the town of Manbij, which is controlled by a local militia affiliated to the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is dominated by the Kurdish YPG militia. The Lod District Court on Tuesday sentenced Ismail Abu Aram to 22 years in prison for stabbing Niv Nehamia at a supermarket in the city of Yavne and seriously wounding him in August 2017. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Abu Aram was convicted in March of attempted murder as part of a terror attack. He was also sentenced to 12 months of probation and order to pay Nehemia a NIS 200,000 fine. Nehemia said after the sentence was handed down, I would have been happier if he had received more, if the punishment had been set like in the new terror law, which is 25 years in prison at the most. They could have given him more, but its a good sentence, the highest that has been given so far. But had they given the maximum punishment, it would have created maximum deterrence. Nineteen-year-old Abu Aram from the town of Yatta near Hebron, who stabbed the 43-year-old Nehamia in the chest, neck and head in the supermarket, was inspired to commit an act of Jihad against the Jewish-Israeli occupation, according to the indictment, out of a sense of religious conviction. Terorist Ismail Abu Aram in court (Photo: Yariv Katz) As part of his increasingly religious observance, the terrorist embarked on a pilgrimage during the last month of Ramadan and remained in Saudi Arabia for twelve days, the indictment states. It was also noted that Abu Aram left his home and made his way into Israeli territory on August 2 without the required permit and chose to target a man he was already familiar with as his former employer using a knife and pepper spray. Abu Aram entered the central city of Yavne using public transport. After failing to locate his former employer at an events hall where he once worked, he decided to carry out the attack against another victim using a knife he stole from the supermarket. The indictment details how Abu Aram entered the supermarket and stole a 15cm knife which he concealed in his pants. Searching for his victim, the terrorist found the deputy manager of the supermarket Nehamia as he was stacking shelves when suddenly he produced the knife and proceeded to stab him multiple times. Niv Nehemia with his parents (Photo: Efrat Srara, Kaplan Hospital) Nehamias response to the attack was praised in the indictment. Despite his serious wounds, the victim struggled with the accused, while throwing items at him located nearby. During the violent encounter, the knife was broken fell out of the terrorists hand. At this point, he pulled out his pepper spray canisters and began spraying his victim in the face while he tried to flee his attacker. Eventually, Abu Aram managed to escape from the supermarket, leaving Nehamia in critical condition before being evacuated to hospital. Before being taken for treatment, Nehamia screamed out the word terrorist, prompting passersby to pursue Abu Aram and eventually subdue him until the arrival of security forces. During his questioning by the Shin Bet, Abu Aram detailed his desire to murder a Jew and explained the circumstances surrounding his selection of Nehamia as his target. STOCKHOLM - Hungary will proceed with a parliamentary vote this week on the government's so called "Stop Soros" bill without waiting for the opinion of a panel of law experts, the country's foreign minister said on Tuesday. The vote is scheduled for Wednesday while the Venice Commission, a panel of constitutional law experts of the human rights body Council of Europe, is due to issue its opinion on the bill only on Friday. Asked during a news conference in Stockholm whether the vote would proceed without taking the Venice Commission's view into consideration, Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said: "Yes, there will be a voting session tomorrow, and our parliamentary group will vote in favour of the proposal." The bill, which would empower the interior minister to ban non-government organisations that support migration and are seen as a national security risk, is part of the nationalist government's campaign against George Soros, a Hungarian-born US financier known for funding liberal causes. The Lod District Court ruled on Tuesday that the majority of confessions given by two alleged Jewish terrorists who are suspected of killing three members of the Dawabsheh family in the Palestinian village of Duma in 2015, are admissible, bar those which were obtained under duress or by special means. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The publication of further details on the precise meaning of special means has been subjected to a gag order but the central defendants confession and reconstruction of the attack has been deemed admissible by the court. While only one of his confessions was thrown out, the evidence against him remains robust. Amiram Ben-Uliel (L) and second unidentified suspect Matters are considered more complex for the second defendant, who is a minor. A ruse used to get him to talk will remain admissible (he confessed to charges that are unrelated to the Duma incident, such as arson of a church and membership in a terror organization). Another confession given by the minor on Duma hypotheticallywithout mentioning of names, but with a general description of the actwill also remain admissible. All of the other confessions he provided were disqualified, even if there was no force involved in their extraction. In January 2016 an indictment was submitted against Amiram Ben-Uliel, a resident of an outpost near Shila who at the time of the attack was 21 years old. An indictment was also submitted against another man from the Samaria region of the West Bank who was 17 during the time. A gag order has remained in place since on the publication of his identity. On July 31, 2015, Molotov cocktails were thrown at the Dawabsheh family's house in the village in the northern West Bank, killing an 18-month-old child, Ali, and critically wounded a four-year-old brother and both parents. The parents, Saad and Riham Dawabsheh later succumbed to their wounds. Members of the Dawabsheh family killed in the attack (Photo: EPA) Ben-Uliel stands accused of three counts of murder in the firebombing and two counts of attempted murder, arson, and conspiracy to commit a racially-motivated crime. The minor also stands accused of conspiring to commit a murder but not of the murder itself. It is currently believed that in the end, the unnamed suspect did not take part in the actual firebombing but was involved in its planning. In addition, he is charged with six counts of committing a series of arson offenses in other locations and other offenses. Both defendants have denied all charges leveled against them in court despite the fact that they provided confessions during their investigations and, as noted, Ben-Uliel even reconstructed the sequence of events. However, they later retracted their confessions and their defense attorneys urged the court to disqualify them on the grounds that they had been solicited under what were described as special investigative means by the Shin Bet. The attorneys claim that forceful methods were employed. The prosecution teams however argue that the confessions are valid and that there is no reason to strike them from the evidence compiled against the defendants, particularly since there is no correlation between the means used and the confessions that were given on the days in which special means were not used. According to the prosecution, the confessions were given on days subsequent to the use of the special means. Nullifying the confessions could influence the entire legal proceedings, they argue, since they constitute a central pillar of the case. Special investigative means are used against people suspected of carrying out terror attacks and authorized only in cases involving what is commonly known as a ticking time bomb, meaning that the perpetrators may still be able to carry out further attacks. Ben-Uliel remained silent for 17 days during his investigation, prompting the Shin Bet to change tack and employ what is known as investigation of necessity after receiving permission from the former attorney general Yehuda Weinstein. During the investigation of necessity, Ben-Uliel confessed to throwing a Molotov Cocktail into the Dawabsheh home which killed three family members. This testimony was originally stricken from the record but four days later, follow-up investigations were carried out against Ben-Uliel during which he not only confessed again, but also reconstructed the attack, sharing details about the incident that could only have been known by the perpetrator. These confessions, the judges concluded on Tuesday, were still valid and used as fundamental pieces of evidence in the case. The testimony provided by the second defendant is also valid and may serve to incriminate his co-conspirator. According to the judges presiding over the trial, special investigative means to prevent a Jewish terror attack were justified in the case of the minor. The assumption of the Shin Bet investigators that the accused belonged to a rebellious network was reasonable and anchored in evidence, a statement said. The objectives of the investigation were of a preventive nature. To thwart future plans, the investigators needed to act to understand attacks that had been carried out by members of the rebellious network, including the attack in Duma. However, the judges took issue with the methods used in the special investigative means. These means struck a severe blow to the rights of the accused to protect the body and mind. Moreover, the dignity of the accused was harmed, they added. This, they explained, justified erasing the confessions but they also noted that their conclusion was only applicable to this particular case, and had no bearing on other trials. This is a ruling that relates to this case only, they emphasized. The father of the minor said that he was pleased with the decision. We are happy that justice has come to light and that the court ruled that our son is in no way linked to Duma. The decision by the court confirms what we have been saying the entire time: Our son underwent serious abuse during his investigation, the father said, adding that the interrogation had caused his son to suffer from post trauma to the present day. We stand firm on our demand that an independent committee be immediately established to investigate the abuse and the legal authorization that was granted, he added. We demand that our son be released immediately from his harsh arrest and from his complete isolation. The lawyer representing the minor, Zion Amir, said that he believed his client would be released shortly from his arrest after two years in custody. The Shin Bet also released a statement after the court decision. Regarding the defendant Amiram Ben-Uliel, to whom the murder itself is attributed, the court ruled that his confessions are valid and were given at free will, the statement said, before turning to the minor. Regarding the minor, who stands accused of, among other things, conspiring to commit murder, the court decided that part of his confessions that were given by him may be used against him in legal proceedings. It should be emphasized that Shin Bet investigations are an important and central component of thwarting terror attacks of all kinds and of cracking serious terror attacks, it pointed out. The courtroom protocol distributed in synagogues (Photo: Jews Dont Torture Jews organization) The information that is obtained in Shin Bet investigations saves countless lives and constitutes a tremendous contribution to state security. Despite the public interest in the case, judges acceded to a request submitted by the defense counsel that the legal discussions take place behind closed doors. Recently however, 20,000 copies of confidential documents concerning the findings of the investigation were distributed in synagogues across the West Bank and Jerusalem Each of the distributed copies includes some 15 pages of courtroom protocols from the trial. According to the State Attorney's Office, the motive for the crime was the desire to avenge the murder of terror victim Malachi Rosenfeld who was shot dead in the vicinity of Binyamin Regional Council's Shvut Rachel settlement. Recently, dozens of prominent Religious Zionist rabbis called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked to halt legal proceedings against the suspects, claiming that Shin Bet investigators had tortured them. The rabbis therefore demanded that an investigative committee be created to look into the matter. US President Donald Trumps son-in-law and special advisor Jared Kushner and the US special Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt met with Jordans King Abdullah II on Tuesday to discuss the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians and a number of other regional developments. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The White House released a statement saying that the meeting in Amman centered on the much-anticipated Israel-Palestinian peace proposal which is expected to be rolled out in the near future by the Trump administration. The discussions also focused on bilateral relations between the US and the Hashemite Kingdom, on regional developments and on the humanitarian crisis currently besetting the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Jared Kushner and King Abdullah in their last meeting According to the Jordanian Petra news agency, the meeting, which was held at the Al Husseiniya Palace in the capital, also dealt with strategic ties between the two countries and coordination between them in a host of fields. His Majesty stressed the need to reach just and comprehensive peace in the region that enables the Palestinian people to fulfil their legitimate aspirations to establish an independent Palestinian state on the 4 June 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital, the Petra news agency said. The King underlined the importance of breaking the stalemate in the peace process to relaunch serious and effective Palestinian-Israeli negotiations based on the two-state solution, the Arab Peace Initiative, international law, and relevant UN resolutions, the statement continued. His Majesty also noted the important role of the United States in this regard. The King reaffirmed, it added, that the subject of Jerusalem must be settled as part of final status issues, as the holy city is key to achieving peace in the region. Jason Greenblatt (Photo: EPA) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also met with King Abdullah in Amman on Monday, in what was their first encounter since a diplomatic spat erupted following a deadly incident last year involving an Israeli security guard and two Jordanians at the Israeli embassy in the Hashemite Kingdom. On Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with King Abdullah, in what was their first encounter since a diplomatic spat erupted following a deadly incident last year involving an Israeli security guard and two Jordanians at the Israeli embassy. According to a statement from the Prime Ministers Office, the two leaders discussed regional developments, advancing the peace process and bilateral relations." The statement also said that Netanyahu "reiterated Israel's commitment to maintaining the status quo at the holy sites in Jerusalem. According to the Petra news agency, King Abdullah, stressed the need to make progress in efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the basis of the two-state solution and in accordance with international law, relevant UN resolutions, and the Arab Peace Initiative. PM Netanyahu and King Abdullah (Photo: AFP) On Saturday, Kushner and Greenblatt met with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and the US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley to discuss Washington's efforts to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace and ameliorate Gaza's humanitarian crisis, according to the White House. Kushner, Greenblatt, Haley, and Guterres also discussed recent votes taking place in the UNthe General Assembly voted Wednesday in favor of condemning Israel for "excessive use of force" against Palestinian civilians in Gaza and voted down a US proposed resolution condemning Hamas over the recent escalation of violence in Gaza. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, attacked the US plan, calling it "meaningless" and arguing it "will achieve nothing." "Without the agreement of the Palestinian people, the fate of this round of meetings will be complete failure," he added. BEIRUT - Lebanese ministers will review a security agency's decision to allow Iranians to enter at the airport without having their passports stamped, an interior ministry source said on Tuesday. The move by the General Security agency has sparked an outcry from some politicians who fear it reflects the deepening influence of Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, which emerged from a recent parliamentary vote with more sway. The staunchly anti-Hezbollah Lebanese Forces, a Christian party, described the change as an attempt to help Iran send more forces to Syria through Beirut or move money to Hezbollah despite US sanctions. The agency, which oversees airport security, has defended its decision and said entry cards will be stamped instead. Iran's state news agency IRNA, reporting on the new measure this week, said some Iranians who had travelled to Lebanon had faced difficulty obtaining European visas. Long before the arrest of Israeli former government minister Gonen Segev on charges of spying for Iran, the Islamic Republic expressed interest in Nigeria, where Segev recently resided and was recruited by Iranian intelligence services. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Iranian intelligence services have been operating in Nigeria particularly and Africa in general for more than a decade to further Tehrans interests on the continent. In 2004, an Iranian diplomat was arrested for taking photographs and monitoring the Israeli embassy in Abuja, Nigeria. In 2010, 13 containers of weapons, including 107 mm rockets, were uncovered in the Nigerian port of Lagos, having arrived from Bandar Abbas, Iran. Segev in Nigeria Apparently, the weapons were destined for the Hamas or Hezbollah terror groups. In the wake of the incident, several arrests were made including two senior Quds Force members, Azim Adhajani and Ali Akbar Tabatabaei, commander of Unit 6000 of the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, which is responsible for the African sphere and together with Hezbollah assists other Islamist groups in West Africa. The two found refuge in the local Iranian embassy. Four months later, the unit commander was smuggled out of Nigeria on the Iranian foreign ministers plane. In light of the incident, Iran was forced to replace its then ambassador, Hussein Abdullahi. The other operative, Adhajani, remained in the country and was tried in 2013 and sentenced to five years in prison. In May of that same year, members of a local Hezbollah cell were arrested after a warehouse with explosives was uncovered in the city. They apparently planned to target Israeli and western interests in Nigeria. Qasem Sulimani, commander of Iran's Quds Force During a visit by the then Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan to Israel in May, 2013, he said that Israel is assisting his country with security matters. Some of the Nigerian security activities were aimed at Iranian cells. It is possible that the Iranians viewed Segev as the key to understanding Nigerian security measures and valued his potential worth as a spy against Israel. Iran knew that Segev was involved in Nigeria on multiple fronts. He was a doctor who served Israeli and western diplomats as well as a consultant for the Israeli construction firm JDP (which is how he presented himself on his LinkedIn account). While Iran was covertly assisting Shi'ite militias in Nigeria, its embassy was occupied with matters concerning health and hospitals. Being a doctor, the Iranians found Segev useful with regards to medical projects. Ambassador connection, German passport Segev had multiple social media accounts, the main one being his Facebook page with over 1,000 friends. The Iranians seemingly used his account to gather information that could be used in a cyber attack. Segev's Facebook page When the Iranian embassy recruited Segev in Abuja, he was supposed to meet with the incoming ambassador, Saeed Koozechi, together with the vice ambassador, the military attache and the cultural attache. Those positions are often held (especially in Africa) by Iranian intelligence or Revolutionary Guard agents. Koozechi was expelled from Nigeria in 2016 after being accused of aiding local Shi'ite militias. In Nigeria, Segev met and married a German woman he met in the country, enabling him to obtain a German passport with which to travel to Iran to meet with his handlers, whom he knew to be Iranian intelligence agents. The Arab language press has expressed much interest in the story and has published reports based on Israeli media sources. Lebanons Al-Akhbar newspaper had a dig at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in its coverage. "Netanyahu did not manage to enjoy the fruits of his phony show with the Iranian files at the beginning of May which countries of the world said was nothing new. Then came the affair that shocked Israel, with the exposure of an unprecedented Iranian intelligence success," the report said. An IDF unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) crash landed Tuesday evening in the al-Khader area in southwestern Syria. The IDF announced that the incident, which is being investigated, was due to a technical failure and that no classified information was compromised. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter In July, 2017, a Skylark drone crashed in the Gaza Strip. Then as well, the IDF declared that classified information was not compromised. Skylark drone (: " ) X The Skylark, the IDFs smallest drone model, is operated by the Artillery Corps and is intended for tactical missions such as patrol and intelligence gathering. This is the fifth in a series of such drone crashes since the start of 2017 in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. Skylark model UAV (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit) In March, 2017, a Skylark drone crashed in northern Gaza during routine operational activities. A few days later, it was announced that the crash was due to human error and no classified information was compromised. Two months later, a similar drone crashed in southern Lebanon, near the Israeli border. The memorial service marking 42 years since the death of Yonatan "Yoni" NetanyahuPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's brotherwas conducted on Tuesday at the national military cemetery on Mount Herzl, with the Israeli leader remembering his "commander's qualities." Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Yoni, who was a commander of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit, was killed in action during Operation Enntebbeto rescue Israeli hostages held in Uganda in 1976. The event was attended by several MKs, ministers, current and former IDF commanders and the Netanyahu family, including prime ministers wife Sara and their two sons Yair and Avner. I am not used to talking in this positionand I believe I havent done it in 42 yearsbut I want to talk about a battle during the Yom Kuppur War when Yonis unit of 30 people was confronted by 50 Syrian commandos, and three of our soldiers were killed. The Syrian force was destroyed, despite the fact that they opened fire first. Yoni had qualities of a commander and the ability to read the battle with composure and courage, which are important to victory," said the prime minister during his remarks. Yoni was awarded a medal for his participation in the war. In June 1975 he was appointed as the commander of the Sayeret Matkal unit. A year after, during a rescue operation in Entebbe, he was shot in the chest at the terminal in Entebbe Airport and died shortly after. This afternoon well inaugurate a new wing in Jewish Legion Museum, the clear core of the IDF which was established 100 years ago, when Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor said to the British Army that Jews can be soldiers. That was a revolutionay idea. Later on, the first Jewish Legion was established, Netanyahu continued. That legion fought here, in Israel and marched with symbols, a Star of David and a flag. It excited the entire world. During their first march in London there was tremendous excitement. The commander of the legion was the British officer John Henry Patterson. He knew the Torah and was fascinated by those Jewish fighters, exclaimed the prime minister. Twenty years later, in 1938 my father, who was only 28 years old, went to London and convinced Jabotinsky that he needs to repeat his actions in America for the sake of the Jewish state," Netanyahu continued. " Shortly after arriving in the US, Jabotinsky died. My father convinced him to focus on the struggle not only for the Jewish state but for the Jewish and Hebrew army, the premier explained. One of those who had helped him in his propaganda efforts was that same officer, John Henry Patterson, who came to the US. The friendship between the two strengthened. As a result, my father and mother, during their Zionist mission in 1946, decided to call their first born son Jonathan. John in honor of John Henry Patterson, the first commander of the Jewish force in 2000 years, and Nathan in honor of my grandfather Nathan Mileikowsky, Netanyahu, he told his listners. Following the arrest of former Israeli minister Gonen Segev last month who was indicted last week for spying on the State of Israel for Iran, maintaining the secrecy surrounding his identity until the details were cleared for publication on Monday was a major challenge that preoccupied Israeli security services and demanded that he enter court proceedings in disguise. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Segev was charged with espionage, aiding an enemy in war time, as well as providing information to the enemy. Living in Nigeria in recent years where he worked as a doctor, Segev tried to enter Equatorial Guinea in May 2018, where he was refused entry because of his criminal past and consequently transferred to Israel. Gonen Segev (Photo: Yariv Katz) Once he landed and was arrested in Israel, maintaining secrecy about his identity was a top priority for Israel's security services who thought up elaborate ways to conceal him from the public eye. Segev's first egal hearing was held during the late hours of the night in the absence of cameras in the courtroom and he was required to enter the court wearing a hat and glasses to make his identity difficult to discern. It was in these shrouded circumstances that the legal hearings proceeded in court without the usual minutes being taken to ensure that investigators who were privy to the secret of the former ministers arrest were able to keep the affair under wraps. The door on Segevs cell to which he was transferred bore no name, but the guards were fully aware who he was. After receiving a list of lawyers with high security clearances for him to choose from, Segev selected Moshe Mazor and Eli Zahar to represent him. In the first nine days of his arrest, however, Segev was forbidden from meeting with his lawyers, even during the initial court hearing. Another key problem that preoccupied the security establishment and the detectives was how to maintain secrecy when the spy was brought for a hearing about the extension of his arrest. It was the Rishon LeZion Magistrates Court that considered the extension request filed by the authorities, where it was decided that only the courts highest judicial figurePresident Einat Roncould be a safe bet to handle the matter with complete secrecy. The hearings were once again scheduled to take place in the evening and the night during the quieter periods of the courts day. Prior to the discussions, security personnel coordinated with the courts administrative staff members to ensure that security cameras were switched off for fear that someone would recognize the identity of the mysterious late-night detainee. In addition, taking extra precautions to ensure that Segev was not spotted by anybody as he entered the court, he was brought to his hearing disguised, donning a hat and wearing glasses. On Tuesday, Segev was transferred to Gilboa Prison near Beit She'an in northern Israel where security prisoners are held. Segev is currently being held separately in the regular criminal wing with prisoners that police do not believe constitute a threat to him. He is receiving the same treatment as all regular suspects who have been indicted. The UN agency for Palestinian refugees is "weeks away from painful cuts" to its emergency assistance for Gaza and refugees elsewhere because of an unprecedented gap in its budget of more than $250 million, the UN Mideast envoy said Tuesday. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Nikolay Mladenov told the Security Council that in Gaza, "this would include a deferral of salaries to some of its workforce in July and the start of suspending core operations in August." The Trump administration announced in January it was withholding $65 million of a planned $125 million funding installment for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It released $60 million so UNRWA wouldn't shut down, but made clear that additional US donations would be contingent on major reforms at the agency. Agency spokesman Christopher Gunness has said the actual cut was around $300 million because the US led the agency to believe it would provide $365 million in 2018. He said UNRWA went into 2018 with a $146 million shortfall that ballooned to $446 million without the anticipated US funds. A dozen countries announced pledges of nearly $100 million in new funding for UNRWA at an emergency donor conference in Rome in March. But facing the worst funding crisis in its 68-year history, Mladenov said UNRWA still has "an unprecedented shortfall of over $250 million." He announced that another pledging conference will be held Monday at UN headquarters in New York. Nikolay Mladenov (: AP) In a report to the Security Council obtained Monday by The Associated Press, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the desperate humanitarian situation in Gaza is compounded by the potential suspension of UN programs, which are "a lifeline for Palestinians," as a result of UNRWA's precarious financial situation. The agency, the oldest and largest UN relief program in the Middle East, provides health care, education and social services to millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Israel complains that the organization grants Palestinian refugees special status by counting descendants of Palestinians who were either forced to leave or fled during the 1948 War of Independence. By using this unique categorization which no other refugee in the world is afforded, Israel says that UNRWA is responsible for exacerbating, rather than solving, the problem. The body's edcuational facilities have also been used in the past for Hamas terror purposes. Last October, it was reported that UNRWA discovered a Hamas attack tunnel underneath one of its schools in Gaza. Guterres warned that if the $250 million shortfall isn't urgently met UNRWA's services face disruption. "The additional instability caused by such a development, in a region already wracked by conflict, can, and must, be prevented if all act now to address this gap," the secretary-general said. Technology seems to be shrinking the globe. Trans-Atlantic journeys that once took weeks can now be traveled in a handful of hours. Friends who live in different countries used to need to wait weeks to get a letter from the other person. Now, an email or text is considered slow to bridge that divide if it takes more than a few seconds. One of the effects of the world getting ever smaller is that cultures and religions that were once separated by thousands of miles are now rubbing elbows. In todays world, all five world religions may exist in one neighborhood alongside adherents of any number of smaller religions. As a result of this, people are now coming into contact with ideas and beliefs that they never considered. In some cases, those unfamiliar beliefs may not be easily explained in another language. People who want to understand their neighbors end up learning about concepts that cannot be explained in their own language by a single word. Such is the case with the Buddhist concept of tsewa, or radical tenderness.Tsewa is a Tibetan word that translates roughly to tenderness and is used to describe a common Buddhist ideal. The ideal has occasionally also been translated as warmth or compassion, but such words fall short of describing tsewa, just like many other attempts at finding a one-word translations for a complex idea.As a religious concept, tsewa can be loosely defined as the state of being open hearted toward others in a way that allows people to experience and spread positive emotions such as love and compassion that are the fundamental nature of the human heart. The more open one persons heart is, the more they benefit and help others. The more that a person helps others, the happier they feel. The happier they feel the more open they become, and they are even more likely to help others. This makes them feel even happier still, and so the tsewa forms an upward spiral for everyone. The flip side of tsewa is a heart that is closed and cold. This leaves a person without an answer or escape from anxiety and discontent.From a Buddhists theoretical standpoint, tsewa is the answer to everyones problems. Buddhists recognize that in practice, however, it is not easy or simple to truly open ones heart to everyone. This is what makes tsewa one of the greatest challenges for a Buddhist. How can they exercise unconditional love and tenderness for those who hurt them or their loved ones? How can they open themselves to those who would use their kind heart to take advantage of them? When a heart is full of warmth and love, such emotions as greed, anger, confusion, anxiety or sadness cannot take hold, but those emotions are stirred in everyone on a daily basis. Often, each of those emotions is roused in someone multiple times a day.Buddhists are urged to discover for themselves how they can best practice tsewa while dealing with the complexity and confusion found in everyones daily life. Buddhists should, however, make sure that they use the sutras and teachings of the Buddha as a guide and retain trust in the teachings of the Buddha, even as they find their own way.Tsewa expresses itself in many ways. It can be felt as kindness, compassion, generosity, tolerance, courage, resilience, mental clarity and a wide variety of other positive emotions. To Buddhists, true tsewa is seen as the source of all goodness in the world. When people lose their natural connection to tsewa, they become cold-hearted, greedy, cynical and skeptical about love. This, of course, can make a person even less likely to be open hearted which causes them to fall even more out of touch with tsewa. Thankfully, one can rekindle their natural connection with tsewa and return to a state of being open hearted and happy instead of discontent, anxious, skeptical or any other unpleasant state of being.When talking about tsewa and living with an open heart, Buddhists are not speaking solely of being open hearted with ones fellow human beings. Tsewa requires practicing tenderness and extending love toward all beings, including animals. Given how modern life is structured, however, most of the time people will be practicing tsewa with regard to other human beings and with their own life. This requires them to live with an outward focus on others instead of an inward focus on how they can make things go well for themselves and themselves alone. Tsewa is about them or us not about me. According to Buddhist teachings, living with a focus on oneself will lead one to become fearful and closed hearted. Me focused thinking means that a person is forever chasing another goal or problem, but they are never really satisfied. Succeeding in one aim brings a temporary satisfaction, but then the person wants or needs something else. Living with tsewa, however, is focused on doing the most good possible for others. This does bring fulfilment to each individual, but it also improves the world around them and helps others. Their kindness then encourages others to practice tenderness as well. In this way, the whole world begins to grow and become warmer.Tsewa does not have a good English word that meshes with the concept this Tibetan phrase conveys, but everyone has experienced the feeling of tsewa at some point. It could be the warmth that stays with someone when they are having a bad day and their loved ones have expressed sympathy and support. It could be the happiness that comes after helping a child or elderly person. Tsewa may not translate well into a different verbal language, but that is because it is a concept that comes from the most universal language of all: the language of love. The administration of the Rafah Border Crossing said on Tuesday that the crossing will remain open until further notice. The move will allow the Gaza Strip residents to enter Egypt and come back without waiting. The crossing has been open since the month of Ramadan began in order to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Israelis are currently witnessing an abandonment of their fellow citizens in the south by the security establishment. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman has made a series of statements to convince Israelis that he is gearing up to tackle the lethal threat of incendiary kites and balloons that are terrorizing the souths residents. As recently as Monday, Lieberman said during a visit to an Israel Aerospace Industries factory: "If anyone thinks we can carry on with this daily routine of kites and fires, he is mistaken." Since these statements contain no indication that legitimately lethal defence force is imminent, such utterances are barely even a bark, so no military bite should be expected anytime soon. To their enormous discredit, this is precisely what the defense establishment is waiting for. Only such a fatality will galvanize them from their current state of inertia to one of long overdue action. Guided by the wholly unacceptable and irresponsible doctrine that only the loss of life justifies a meaningful retaliation, Israels leaders are paralyzing the defensive foundation upon with the Israel Defense Forces were conceived and built. Crippled as they appear to be by the prospect of international condemnation, leaders who are escorted with heavy security details seem to believe that the blood and the melted flesh of an Israeli victim is worth waiting for before authorising a lethal response, which they would then foolishly attempt to justify before a self-righteous and hostile international community that cannot hear Israel, and never will. To be sure, even if the death of an Israeli caused by the incendiary kites and balloons does by some miracle garner an international consensus about the justification of Israels actions, this still does not exonerate our leaders from partial guilt for the loss of life and it does not supersede the necessity to take action immediately. Disputes have arisen in the cabinet over what constitutes a reasonable response and they are accompanied by several questions: Is there a technological solution to this in the form of attack drones? Would hitting Hamas targets be a more effective deterrent? Will shooting to kill the kite and balloon flyers lead to a military escalation? (Photo: Amnon Ziv) The answer to the first question is quite likely yes. The IDF has already begun using kite-attacking drones but we should not deceive ourselves into believing that they will ever deter the terrorists. Moreover, billions of shekels are already spent on the military for complex challenges. To expend more resources on countering such a primitive yet lethal weapon seems, frankly, absurd. More importantly, Israelis should simply not have to live in a cat and mouse reality in which threats continue to fly inliterallyfollowed by the IDFs attempts to shoot them down. Those who believe this to be an acceptable reality should either go and live in the south themselves or ask themselves if that is the kind of Zionist dream we are aspiring to realize. It is worth noting that if drones do prove to be the solution to reducing the threat, Liebermans pledges that Israel will not accept a daily reality of burning kites are stripped of all meaning. On the contrary, a technological solution would be Israels surrender to the reality of a permanent threat of the southern region being set ablaze. Put simply, a counter solution that leaves the problem in place is not a solution at all. The answer to the second question is simple: No. Its has not and it will not. The answer to the third question is difficult to know but in any event it should not be the decisive factor in the defense establishments calculations. The same question could be asked of snipers shooting Palestinians trying to cross the border. But what is to be gained by the speculation? The terrorists have to be stopped and shooting them no doubt deters hundreds more attempted border crossings. Currently there are two ministers calling for the IDF to shoot the kite-flying terrorists: Naftali Bennett and Gilad Erdan. Their clear-sighted position should not be seen as a symptom of ultra-right indifference to the shedding of Arab blood but as an articulation of the very principle of an Israeli defensive force. Limiting the response to warning shots near the kite-flyers merely reflects a listless and inadequate modus operandi, as illustrated by the fact that several fires scorch southern Israel every day. Southern residents are often praised for their resilience and determination to stay put despite being beleaguered above, on and below ground. Worthy as they are of such praise, what choice do they really have? A close friend neatly articulated the reality for me when he said that they are held hostage to the situation which the government is allowing to fester, for they can hardly leave even if they wish to do so. Not many people in their right mind would purchase a property from them when they know that a rocket, mortar or incendiary kite could land in their homes at any moment, or a terrorist could emerge from an tunnel in their backyard or community. (Photo: Roee Idan) Without taking any particular political stance, Bennett and Erdan are currently the only voices in the cabinet representing the southern residents. The time has come to put an end to this farce of forsaking them and treating them as second class citizens, of believing that their indefatigable will and tested nerves of steel can handle it. Like all other Israelis, they are human beings and they deserve to live in peace and security. The time has come to stop with the drones, to stop pandering to the international community, to stop with the warning shots, to stop with the symbolic and lackluster strikes on Hamas outposts and, most importantly, to stop lying to the southern residents. It is time to fight fire with fire and shoot directly at the incendiary kite-flyers, come what may. Our fire will surely prevail and extinguish theirs. Expert Advice with Kate Forbes 20/06/2018 If youre keen to take the plunge and invest in real estate, you have just one thing standing in your way of success: selecting the right property asset. Perhaps surprisingly, its not as easy as youd think! Now the truly tricky part begins, because choosing a high performing investment property isnt quite as straightforward as searching for your own home. When house-hunting, you can afford to let your emotions lead the way. If youre taken with the luxe Turkish curtains, or you can imagine yourself brunching on the grass-fringed deck, then these types of details can help you decide that youve found the one. Searching for an investment property is a completely different proposition. Youre no longer looking for features and aspects that you personally desire, but instead, ones that your target renter will benefit from. But, with so many properties on the market that cater to a whole range of different budgets, lifestyles and circumstances, how do you even know where to begin? While its true that there is no one size fits all solution to finding an investment property, as we all have different needs, goals and budgets, its also true that there are some key steps we should all be taking, when searching for an investment-grade property asset. Heres a quick-start guide to picking your investment property, covering four essential criteria that should form part of every investors high-performance property search: 1. First comes research and plenty of it Research is such an important step, yet its an area that a lot of gung-ho beginners tend to skip due to over-eagerness. Dont make this mistake! Failing to properly research your investment is akin to flipping through the property classified blindfolded and pointing to a listing at random. There is a lot of information out there, and the best place to begin is with reliable, trusted property data sources such as Core Logic or the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The real estate portals also provide a lot of free data. These sources can help you identify trends and market conditions that will help your investment to prosper, such as the type of property that is currently in demand (or that is likely to be in demand soon) with tenants; areas that are under-supplied; and suburbs that have extremely low vacancy rates. You can also look up the historical performance of various areas to better gauge whether a particular suburb is known for having stronger returns than others. Furthermore, it helps to have a decent understanding of the current economic landscape, taking into account things like employment trends, demographic profiles, market cycle and consumer confidence. If research isnt your forte, dont be tempted to skip this step! You can lean on reputable professionals such as independent property advisors and buyers agents to help lead the way. Just be sure to qualify your experts, and dont take advice from any Tom, Dick or Harriet. Youre thinking about investing hundreds of thousands of dollars, not getting a haircut or trying a new restaurant, so friend and family recommendations dont quite cut it. 2. Select your strategy Theres no way youll succeed in investing if you fail to create a proper strategy - one that's known, proven and trusted. One that has helped others become wealthy through property. You may make a little money, accidentally, without a strategy but if thats the result you can achieve without putting any effort or thought into your property plans, then imagine what you can do with a clear and promising strategy? Its not enough to have just a vague idea of what you want to accomplish; to be truly successful, the savviest investors out there have a comprehensive plan that details how they plan to get from A to B and reach their investment goals. An easy way to do this is to start by thinking over your short-term goals and writing them up into a five-year plan. When developing your investment strategy, think about things like: The amount of money you have available to invest. The savings youve been able to accrue that can be dedicated to your property investment goals. How much time you have on your hands to give your property the right amount of attention. Your skills and knowledge of the industry. The wrong strategy can sabotage your wealth creation journey. Remember... if you have your ladder up against the wrong wall, every step you take gets you further from where you want to be. Again, there are plenty of people who can assist you in figuring out your property game plan, so dont be afraid to reach out to a qualified property advisor or who can lead you in the right direction and provide adequate guidance. 3. Lock in the location After you have conducted your research and you have a solid plan in place, you can begin searching for your investment property. Since the location of your property will do 80 per cent of the heavy lifting, a good place to start is those suburbs where incomes are growing higher than the average for the state. This is usually due to local jobs and economic growth. Choosing somewhere close to facilities such as public transport, good schools, shopping centres, restaurants and the central business district is also important. Remember population growth doesn't necessarily lead to price growth, especially in the outer suburbs where wages growth is minimal. 4. Consider the actual property Once youve narrowed down your location, the next thing to consider is the actual property itself. This is where you will ideally hit the pavement and start looking at properties inside and out. There are many "tricks of the trade" that real estate agents can use to make houses and units look bigger and better than they actually are - wide angle photo lenses, clever photography and omitting poor property features from the photos are just some of the tactics they can use to snare unsuspecting property buyers. Walking through the property yourself is the best way to ascertain whether it stacks up as an investment or not. Study it for signs of water damage, plumbing problems, uneven floors, walls and ceilings, formation of cracks, or gaps in brickwork. And dont forget to take into account things like room size, natural light, ventilation, storage opportunities and car parking. These are all features that your tenants may value highly. It might be beneficial to get a building and pest inspector involved, as they can cast their professional eye over the property and give you a better idea of potential issues. Remember, two of the most important things to look for when youre deciding to invest your money are strength and stability and real estate has been proven to be a strong, stable choice over the long-term. Choosing the right property is crucial to your success, so dedicate ample time to this part of the process. Investing in property can be exciting and contagious, prompting you to act fast, but this is not the time to act hastily. Invest the time and effort now, and youll reap the rewards for years to come. News Omaha, Nebraska - A Nebraska man was sentenced to six years in prison today for possessing child pornography in May 2017, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Justice Departments Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Joseph P. Kelly for the District of Nebraska. Douglas Goldsberry, 46, of Elkhorn, Nebraska, pleaded guilty on March 19 to one count of possessing child pornography. Goldsberry was sentenced by Chief U.S. District Court Judge Laurie Smith Camp of the District of Nebraska, who ordered him to serve 10 years of supervised release following his prison sentence and ordered him to pay $2,500 in restitution. Goldsberry will serve his federal sentence concurrent with a state prison sentence for pandering for which he is currently incarcerated. According to admissions made in connection with his guilty plea, in May 2017, the Douglas County Sheriffs Office arrested Goldsberry after he was suspected of ordering escorts to his neighbors home without their knowledge. Law enforcement seized Goldsberrys digital devices for evidence of pandering and discovered child pornography images on two of the seized devices. The material included images and videos from 81 known child pornography series, and also included depictions of infants and depictions involving bondage of children. The FBI Cyber Crimes Task Force is investigating this case. Trial Attorney William M. Grady of the Criminal Divisions Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) and Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael P. Norris of the District of Nebraska are prosecuting the case. This investigation is a part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys Offices and CEOS, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. - Fella Makafui has fired back at Efia Odo for accusing her of not 'working for her wine shop' - Fella Makafuis wine shop located in East Legon was allegedly shut down by her boyfriend - This led to lots of trolls for Fella on social media Ghanaian actress Fella Makafui has responded to an intended troll from Efia Odo, insisting her colleague actress may soon end up looking stupid. On Sunday news broke that Fella Makafuis wine shop at East Legon has been shut down by her angry boyfriend. According a report by Starfmonline.com, Fella Makafui fell out with her boyfriend, which led to him deciding to close the wine shop. Fella Makafui. Source: Instagram/Fella Makafui READ ALSO: Contryman Songo is all tears as he returns to the screens Hours after the news broke, Efia Odo took to Snapchat to troll the YOLO actress a move that appears to have escalated their feud. Efia Odo wrote: When you own your own sh*t no nigga can take it from you. The television presenters words have apparently not sat well with Fella Makafui, who has also decided to reply in equal measure. Efia Odo. Source: Instagram/Efia Odo READ ALSO: Moesha puts her massive front and back on display In another Snapchat post the YOLO actress said Efia Odo must not rejoice too much, warning that she may soon look stupid. Dont rejoice too much my love. You might look stupid again!!! Fella Makafui wrote. The two budding actresses have not been on good terms in recent years, and it appears their feud will not end anytime soon following their latest clash. Ghana Trends: How Anas Aremeyaw Anas aused a Stir With Latest Investigation: READ ALSO: Meet the architect behind 'tonga-shaped' stadium for 2022 World Cup Do you have amazing and critical stories for us to publish? Reach out to us on Facebook and Instagram. Source: Yen.com.gh For nearly as long as the Bible has existed, there have been biblical skeptics. As atheism continues to increase in political and social power in the modern day, it has become fashionable to claim that the Bible is false or the events described within purely metaphorical. Even as biblical skeptics attempt to spread this view, however, the men and women who have dedicated their lives to understanding the past continue to make archaeological finds that point toward the truth of the Bible. From inscriptions to figurines, the amount of evidence supporting the Bible continues to pile up with every new dig season. While each find is important, there are some that stand out both due to their biblical importance as well as the publicity they received. Age of Christs Tomb Honorable Burial of Crucified Man Seal of the Prophet Isaiah The Pool of Siloam Cylinder of Cyrus the Great Tel Dan Inscription The Church of the Holy Sepulcher sits in Jerusalems Old City and is visited by millions of Christians every year. The reason for this pilgrimage is that the site of the Holy Sepulcher has long been identified with where Jesus died and was buried. In one section of the church is the place believed to be Golgotha. In another, beneath the Edicule, is what is believed to be the tomb of Christ Himself.The location of Christs tomb has long been debated, and skeptics have claimed repeatedly that the Holy Sepulcher could not possibly be the actual location of Jesus final resting place. The main argument for this was that previous dating of the Edicule placed it as being no older than the 11th century. Given that the Holy Sepulcher had been razed and rebuilt repeatedly throughout history, most people accepted that the actual location of Christs tomb had been lost.In 2016, however, the purported tomb of Christ was opened for the first time in centuries as a part of restoring the Edicule. When samples of the actual burial bed and simple marble slab covering were dated, researchers got a surprise. The samples dated to A.D. 345, the same time as when Constantine first had the tomb of Christ officially recognized. As such, the Holy Sepulcher may well be the actual burial place of Christ.Biblical skeptics love to try and disprove the Resurrection, and one of their arguments was that crucifixion was reserved for serious criminals. As such, the unfortunate souls who so suffered and died would not have been given an honorable burial. Instead, their bodies would have fed to beasts, tossed in a shallow grave reserved for executed criminals or left to rot on the cross as a warning to all who saw them. This would mean, the argument went, that Jesus would not have been laid in a tomb, and the story of the stone rolled away was impossible. The discovery of an ancient burial chamber, however, proved this theory wrong.In order to conserve space, the bones of the ancient Jewish dead were kept in stone boxes known as ossuaries. These would be as long as the femur, tall as the skull and wide as the pelvis of the person who died. All the bones would be stored inside the ossuary. The ossuaries took up much less space than coffins or single graves and so allowed generations of families to be buried together.During an excavation of one such burial site, an ossuary was found that dated to roughly a century before Jesus birth. Among the bones in the ossuary was the heel bone of the dead mans left foot. Lodged through the bone was a seven inch nail with fragments of olive wood. The man had been executed by crucifixion, but had still been buried honorably with his family. Just as the Bible claims, crucified men could be buried in family tombs.Isaiah is one of the best known prophets in the Bible. His work, however, has long been subjected to intense scrutiny. Prevailing scholarly theories claim that the Book of Isaiah was written by at least two people, possibly three, who all used the name of the well-known prophet. Other academics, however, claim that the Book of Isaiah was written by many people and that the prophecies within it were written after the events they foretold.A 2015 discovery threw a clay monkey wrench into the theories claiming that Isaiah had never existed. Archaeologists working in Israel discovered a bulla, the clay impression of a seal, that belonged to King Hezekiah. Ten feet away was another bulla. This one bore the name Isaiah.The Isaiah of the Bible was Hezekiahs advisor in the late 8th and early 7th centuries B.C. As such, it would be no surprise to find the fate of these two men remained intertwined even in death. In an even more exciting twist, the name Isaiah was followed by the Hebrew letters nvy. A prevailing theory is that nvy would have been followed by the Hebrew letter aleph. If this were true, the seal would spell out what would translate to Isaiah the Prophet.One of the numerous miracles detailed in the Book of John describes how Jesus healed a man who was born blind. [Jesus] spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the mans eyes. Go, He told him, wash in the Pool of Siloam. So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.Biblical skeptics and critics claimed that this episode, and many other accounts of Christs miracles, was pure fiction. The discovery of the Pool of Siloam, however, made that theory hard to uphold. Engineers stumbled upon the stops of a first century ritual pool in 2004 when they were working near the mouth of Hezekiahs Tunnel. Investigators found coins in the plaster of the pool dated back to the time of Jesus life and death. By 2005, archaeologists said that this was undoubtedly the Pool of Siloam.Generally speaking, the older a claim is the harder it is to find evidence to uphold it. This has been something of the bane of archaeology focused on the Old Testament, however, the challenge of proving the Old Testament true has not stopped archaeologists from searching for answers to ancient questions. It has also not stopped them from finding said answers.Ezra and 2 Chronicles both report that Cyrus the Great of Persia allowed the exiled Jews in Babylon to return to Israel after he conquered Babylonia. This unusually tolerant policy has raised questions for decades about whether Cyrus the Great really allowed this to happen or if this was a fictitious episode. A nine inch clay cylinder from 539 B.C., however, details not only Cyrus victory over Babylon but his unexpected decision to allow Babylonia captives to return to their own ancestral homelands and rebuild their temples.Inscriptions are just about the most exciting thing than an archaeologist can find.Even as far as inscriptions go, however, a 1993 discovery at Tel Dan set the world on fire. A ninth century B.C. stone stela unearthed at Tel Dan carried the first evidence found outside the Bible for the existence of King David. The inscription was carved by an Aramean king who claimed to have defeated his two southern neighbors, the king of Israel and the king of the House of David. Biblical scholars and archaeologists, unsurprisingly, were thrilled at this discovery. The stela, unfortunately, did not manage to preserve the actual names of the kings involved in this war, but most scholars believe that the inscription refers to the defeat of Jehoram of Israel and Ahaziah of Judah by Hazael of Damascus.There have been and always will be those who believe that the Bible is fictitious, but advancements in archaeology have led men and women to excavate an ever increasing body of evidence that upholds the Bibles account of events. From small inscriptions to the discovery of entire towns, biblical archaeology has time and again unearthed evidence that the Bible is more than just a moral story. It is simple historical fact which is preserved not just on paper and ink pages but in graves, ruins and fertile soil of the Holy Land. For decades now, the Western World has been getting increasingly secular. Involvement in organized religion has decreased, many people who identify as a specific religion are adherents in name only and spiritual has come to be a far more fashionable label than religious. Shifts in values and ethics have reflected this collective move away from faith. Morality Resilience Curiosity Compassion Longevity Community There are many people who see this slow but steady exodus away from religion as a good thing. A large number of these people were against religion to begin with, so this is not surprising. They gleefully point out the dangers of organized religion, often by citing modern Islamic terrorism or the Spanish Inquisition. The fact that the atheistic Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot each individually racked up death tolls in the millions, more people than existed in the medieval Spanish Empire, is cheerfully ignored. Religion is relegated to a threat or, at best, a primitive superstition to be eradicated.The decrease in the size of the religious population is not a good thing, no matter what ardent secularists may claim. Religion has long been a source of good for individuals, communities and nations. While some have used religion as a flimsy excuse to pursue political goals, religion itself has never been the enemy. Far from causing trouble, religion has a great number of benefits for practitioners and their wider communities.Religion is still the basis for most modern day morals even in households that claim to be purely secular. The most basic tenets of morality are found in religion, and they are still taught to children raised in secular families. Parents simply pass on the moral without the surrounding religious context. For example, one of the most basic ethical principles is treat others as you would like to be treated. Some version of this is found in almost every religion on Earth.The impact of religion on morals and values also shows in how people act. Children and teens who are active practitioners of their religion are less likely to use drugs, smoke, become juvenile delinquents, drink underage or drop out of high school than children who are not religious. Similarly, adults who regularly attend religious services have been found to commit fewer crimes and are less likely to end up unemployed or on welfare. This, of course, is a boon not only to the individual but their wider community and nation as well.People who participate in religion are more likely to have a deeper reserve of inner strength and bounce back more quickly from problems such as a divorce, loss of employment or injury. Given that it is inevitable that a person will eventually be confronted with tragedy, the resilience that religion helps impart is of great value to adherents.Part of the reason for this increase in resilience is psychological. Those who believe that there is a being or force working for their benefit, even if by teaching painful lessons, can find meaning in their suffering as opposed to seeing themselves as a helpless victim of chance. Religious people are also more likely to have a stronger support network as a result of meeting people through religious services, classes and volunteer opportunities. When tragedy strikes, a religious person is not alone. Their support network comes together to help them get back on their feet quickly.Those who dislike religion tend to try and characterize religious people as sheep who blindly do what they are told and close their eyes to everything that could potentially contradict their ideals. In reality, religion often encourages curiosity. Religious people almost always want to better understand the divine. They wish to investigate that which, by its very nature, cannot be understood. Many religious people also want to understand the physical world around them. They may see it as the creation of the deity or holy in and of itself. This childlike wonder and desire to know often manifest as curiosity. This is no doubt part of why some of the most famous scientists of all have been people of faith Almost every religion on Earth places a great deal of emphasis on compassion. Most religions call for adherents to show this compassion through service and charity, and most adherents comply. Religious people give far more money to charity than those who are not religious, and religious practitioners are far more likely to volunteer than their secular counterparts.Organized religions offer special compassionate services as well. The faith may run rehab centers, adoption agencies, hospitals, foster care programs, therapy options for veterans and shelters for those who are either victims of domestic violence or are homeless. By helping those in need, religions not only assist those individuals but also shoulder a huge burden that the rest of the community or the local government would otherwise have to handle. When those religiously based services are forced to close their doors, government resources are often stretched to the breaking point.Despite the fact that religious people are often more comfortable with their mortality and inevitable death, religious adherents actually tend to live longer lives than their non-religious counterparts. On average, religious people can expect their faith to tack an extra seven years onto their life expectancy. This is in part due to the fact that people of faith tend to have stronger immune systems, lower blood pressure, less alcohol and drug use and a lower risk of depression than those who are purely secular.Organized religion naturally fosters a sense of community among its members. Strangers who share a faith know, at the very least, that they share the same basic values and worldview. This leads to a much easier time forming strong bonds. Organized religions also tend to offer more opportunities for community building. People talk before and after religious services, attend religious classes or talks together, make use of the same volunteer communities and might well have either acquaintances or friends in common. All of this helps to build a stronger sense of community which means that when one person or one locality struggles, the wider community is there to help in any way possible.For all that some people would love to see religion go the way of the dinosaurs, organized religion has a great deal to offer both its adherents and the wider world. From morality to a stronger sense of community, religion brings an abundance of benefits to the table. There is a reason, after all, faith has survived not only individual tragedies but the great test of time. There was a phrase in the 1840s that was bandied about in Europe: A special Providence watches over children, drunkards and the United States. While the comment was undoubtedly meant to be derogatory toward the then-young nation, there is no doubting that there was some truth to it. American history is littered with truly bizarre moments where the U.S. has managed the impossible. Whether because an accomplished enemy suddenly made a rookie mistake, an American got lucky or the weather itself interfered, the United States certainly has some colorful stories that cannot be read as anything less than divine intervention. Washington Dodges Bullets Sudden Surge of Fog Tornado in Washington, D.C. Unlucky Assassins Carriers Not at Home Patton's Prayer The Glorious Grey Ghost George Washington had more lives than a cat. The man survived smallpox as a child, encountered a Native American war party during one of his early surveying trips, sat in a snipers crosshairs, survived a series of campaigns that killed a third of his men and somehow survived the entire Revolutionary War despite lack of supplies and his position as arguably the most wanted man alive. Nothing, however, proves that God had a fondness for Washington more than the Battle of Monongahela. During this battle in the French and Indian War, General Edward Braddock and his troops were surrounded and attacked. Two thirds of the British forces were killed including General Braddock. Washington entered the battle with severe headaches and a running fever and had two horses shot out from under him, four bullets put through his coat and his hat shot off his head. Never say God does not have favorites.The Battle of Long Island could have been the end of the American Revolution. The British had all but defeated the Continental Army but decided to hold off on a final assault until British ships had cut off any potential American retreat across the river. While the British waited, Washington decided to attempt an evacuation. He had a single night to get 9,000 men to safety under the Redcoats noses. Boats made multiple trips across the river hauling men and horses. When the sun rose, however, a large portion of the American forces were still left in Brooklyn. The British, however, would never manage to capture those men as a heavy fog suddenly descended over the area. It lasted just long enough for Washington and his men to make their escape. In fact, the fog, for some inexplicable reason, left New York perfectly clear. In short, the fog somehow hid the Americans without touching anything else in the area.The American evacuation was not managed in complete secrecy, but another impossible coincidence saved the Continental Army. When a Loyalist sent her servant to warn the British that the Americans were escaping, the messenger was detained overnight by Hessian troops who did not speak English. As for those British ships that were supposed to cut off the Americans escape route in the first place? They did not have enough wind to reach Long Island in time.Most people do not remember much about the War of 1812 beyond the year it was begun. One of the few events that American history students remember is how Dolly Madison saved a full sized portrait of George Washington before fleeing the White House. Shortly thereafter, the British took and tried to burn Washington, D.C. --the operative word being tried.The British probably felt quite pleased with themselves when they set fire to the capitol of the young nation that had, impossibly, beaten them thirty short years ago. Apparently, however, God did not care for British plans to burn D.C. to the ground and sent a hurricane ashore. The pouring rains put out the many fires the British had set, but the downpour was apparently not content with simply thumbing its nose at the British. Instead, the already brutal storm decided to drop a tornado in the middle of the British forces. The funnel cloud ripped up trees, leveled buildings and was recorded as tossing British cannons at the terrified Redcoats. All of this despite the fact that Washington, D.C. has had a grand total of seven tornados in its entire history, three of which did not even register as an F1.Assassination is a very real threat for people in important positions, and American presidents are not immune to this danger. There have been numerous assassination attempts on various presidents, some of which have succeeded. There are also some plots that should have succeeded but failed nonetheless.Abraham Lincoln was shot at by a sniper in August 1864. The sniper knocked Lincolns hat off his head but missed the presidents skull. Georgian national Vladimir Arutyunian threw a live hand grenade wrapped in a handkerchief at President George W. Bush while he was at a rally in Tbilisi, Georgia. The handkerchief blocked the grenades safety lever and kept it from exploding. A group of tourists tackled a man who open fired on the north lawn in an attempt to kill Bill Clinton a month after Frank Eugene Corder tried to ram a single engine airplane into the White House. The plane got tangled in the branches of a magnolia tree. The gun of Lynette Squeaky Fromme of the Manson Family misfired when she tried to kill Gerald Ford. Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest on October 14, 1912, while giving a speech. Roosevelts speech was folded up in his breast pocket, and the packet of paper was so thick that it slowed the bullet. Roosevelt announced to his audience that he had just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull MooseI was going to make a long speech, and there is a bulletso I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.Then, there was the unlucky man who targeted Andrew Jackson. Richard Lawrence, an English national who believed he was King Richard III from the 15th century, attacked Jackson after the funeral of a House representative. Lawrences gun jammed. Lawrence pulled out a second gun. That one also misfired. Jackson, apparently fed up with the affair, preceded to thrash the would-be assassin with his cane.The infamous attack on Pearl Harbor was supposed to destroy the entirety of the Pacific Fleet. Japanese fighters dropped out of the sky and went after the relatively undefended naval facilities. Though the attack was devastating, Japan utterly failed at its objective. Though every battleship in Pearl Harbor sustained significant damage, only the USS Arizona and USS Utah were never successfully salvaged and repaired. The bases vital onshore facilities, including oil depots and repair shops, were left largely intact, and the surprise attack, while Japanese delegates were at the White House claiming to negotiate a peace treaty, enraged an American public that had so far been reluctant to enter the war.The most fortuitous part of the Pearl Harbor attack, however, was what was not in the harbor: the American aircraft carriers. By the 1940s, battleships were no longer the most important naval vessel. That title had been ceded to carriers. Japan, however, was unaware that the carriers were not at home. Otherwise, the attack may have been planned for another date, and the war could have gone very differently.The Battle of the Bulge was the single bloodiest battle in American history. It took place in the Belgian town of Bastogne where 12,000 American were encircled and besieged by desperate German forces. When given a very officially worded order to surrender, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe replied NUTS! to the bafflement, and later rage, of the German major. Patton, already planning to try and break the siege, reportedly stated that a man that eloquent has to be saved. Pattons plan to save the besieged American troops, however, was stymied by truly horrid weather. After swearing viciously at the clouds, Patton summoned Third Army Chaplain Colonel James ONeill and told him to draft a prayer that would break up the weather and allow Patton to rescue McAuliffe and his troops. ONeill obliged, and Patton had the prayer distributed to his men on 250,000 wallet-sized cards. ONeills prayer was apparently better received that Pattons curses, as the weather abruptly cleared and allowed the Third Army to reinforce Bastogne.When most people hear the phrase unsinkable ship, they think of the ill-fated Titanic. The ship that actually earned the title, however, was the USS Enterprise in World War II. Nicknamed the Big E by her crew, she became the most decorated U.S. ship of World War II. The Japanese, however, had a different nickname for her.The Enterprise was the ship that the Japanese simply could not seem to sink. They reported doing so on no less than three occasions, only for the Enterprise to reappear later. As such, the Japanese began to call her the Grey Ghost.Despite being one of only three carriers commissioned before World War II to survive the war, she participated in more major actions against Japan than any other American ship. The Grey Ghost also, apparently, had a guardian angel that worked overtime for her. She was absent when Pearl Harbor was attacked and sank a Japanese submarine three days later. In the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, Enterprise took three direct bomb hits but managed to return to Hawaii under her own power. At the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, the Big E was hit twice by bombs but continued to fight on anyway. When the Hornet was sunk in the same battle, Enterprise was left the only functioning carrier in the Pacific. The crew posted a sign on deck reading Enterprise vs. Japan.Enterprise would be damaged a number of other times during World War II, and she escaped sinking by the skin of her teeth more than once. She headed for the Solomons a second time while still under repairs. According to Lieutenant Commander Herschel Albert Smith, She made the open sea with her decks still shaking and echoing to air hammers, with welders' arcs still sparking, with a big bulge in her right side forward, without water tight integrity and one oil tank still leaking, and with her forward elevator still jammed as it had been since the bomb at Santa Cruz broke it in half. After the Battle of Guadalcanal, Enterprises rudder flooded and jammed in a full right turn. Trapped going in a circle, Enterprise could not even be towed to safety. When the Japanese launched another attack in the hopes of finally sinking that blasted ship, the planes headed to where Enterprise would have been with a functioning rudder and flew straight passed the crippled ship. Her crew managed to repair the rudder, and the Grey Ghost would live to fight another day.American history is filled with impossibly close shaves, bizarre happenings and strange events. Accomplished enemy commanders made rookie mistakes that allowed American troops to succeed, such as the Hessians ignoring the message that told them Washington was in the process of crossing the Delaware. U.S. troops have managed impossible success sometimes through luck and sometimes through the sheer, insane determination that marked the World War II Battle off Samar between tiny American Navy Task Force Taffy-3 and a mammoth Japanese naval force. Sometimes, the weather itself interfered and granted U.S. forces either a victory or a chance to escape. Given the sheer number and impossibility of these episodes, it is hard not to believe that there really is a special place in Gods heart for those crazy Yanks. The Greatest King You've Never Heard of Frieze depicting Assyrian royal hunts. The story of the "greatest king you've never heard" of will be told in a new exhibition that recreates an ancient civilisation whose remains were targeted by Islamic State. Assyria was governed by King Ashurbanipal whose seventh century BC capital Nineveh, in Mosul, modern-day Iraq, was the centre of an empire stretching from Egypt and Iran to Turkey. The place has been a battle field for much of the past 15 years and statues, sculptures and buildings, including a set of gates guarding the ancient city, were plundered and destroyed by militants in 2014. Curator Gareth Brereton said he hoped the British Museum exhibition would shed light on what has been "a terrible time for Iraqi cultural history".Mr Brereton said: "Sites have been bulldozed and dynamited, it has been awful." The exhibition, called I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria, features more than 200 objects including huge stone sculptures, a large collection of cuneiform documents, wall paintings and carved ivory furniture -- many of which were found on archealogical sites since ransacked by Islamic State. READ MORE A complete guide to London's best museums There will also be a recreation of the king's library which was thought lost for hundreds of years after the city was destroyed by invaders around 627BC. Mr Brereton continued: "The city was sacked after his death when the empire fell apart, and his library was burnt down. But because it was all on clay tablets, burning them actually preserved the documents so we are able to tell so much of the story." The exhibition will also highlight the work of the Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme which oversees the training of Iraqi archaeologists with the aim of saving threatened sites. Mr Brereton added: "This autumn, the British Museum will reveal the history of Ashurbanipal, the greatest king you've never heard of. "We hope many visitors will discover the stories of ancient Assyria and Ashurbanipal for the very first time, and experience the splendour of his palace at Nineveh and the impact of the Assyrian empire. "As present day Iraq looks to recover the history of damaged sites at Nineveh and Nimrud, this exhibition allows us to appreciate and relive the great achievements of an ancient world and celebrate its legacy." For Immediate Release, June 19, 2018 Contact: Paulo Lopes, (202) 849-8398, plopes@biologicaldiversity.org Senate Republicans Ignore Refugee Children Separated From Families, Push Funding for Trump's Border Wall WASHINGTON A new Senate spending bill includes $1.6 billion for more border wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. The bill, from the Senate Committee on Appropriations, would allow approximately 65 additional miles of border wall to be built without any meaningful environmental review. Its heartless for Senate Republicans to push for border wall funding while the Trump administration holds innocent refugee children hostage at the border, said Paulo Lopes of the Center for Biological Diversity. Trumps wall is a disaster for communities and the environment. As long as children remain separated from their parents, its shameful for policymakers to even discuss funding this ridiculous wall. Their first and only priority should be reuniting families. Since January 2017, Congress has authorized $2.4 billion in border enforcement, of which $1.7 billion was allocated for walls along the U.S.-Mexico border. These funds will pay for approximately 73 miles of new border wall, which are currently being constructed. The Trump administration waived dozens of environmental laws to speed border wall construction. With every dollar of wall funding, Republicans are condoning the destruction of wildlife and communities through the seizure of private property by the federal government, Lopes said. A 2017 study by the Center identified more than 90 endangered or threatened species that would be threatened by wall construction along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. The Center filed the first lawsuit against Trumps border wall in April 2017, and recently appealed a ruling in a separate lawsuit that challenges the Trump administrations waiver of dozens of environmental laws to replace border walls near San Diego. The Center also sued the Trump administration to challenge its waiver ignoring 25 laws to speed construction of a border wall in New Mexico. The Trump administration is expected to set aside these same laws to rush border wall construction in Texas. 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. The Cannes Lions Brand Experience & Activation Lions shortlist has been released. The Brand Experience & Activation Lions celebrate creative, comprehensive brand building through the next level use of experience design, activation, immersive, retail and 360 customer engagement.Rob Reilly, global creative chairman of McCann Worldgroup is the 2018 Brand Experience & Activation Lions jury president.All the winners will be announced during the Cannes Lions Experience track award ceremony from 7pm on Tuesday, 19 June. You can view the Brand Experience & Activation Lions shortlist in full. Shaka Sisulu has announced that he has acquired ROi Africa, a smart technology media monitoring and intelligence provider from Ecsponent Limited. Terence Gregory, CEO of Ecsponent and entrepreneur and businessman, Shaka Sisulu. Image supplied. Expanding the frontiers of traditional media monitoring Taking ROi to the next level The transaction is the precursor to Sisulus own media monitoring business, iKGB, merging with ROi Africa to form an entity well positioned to claim a sizeable slice of the media monitoring and trend analysis market in South Africa and the rest of the continent.The transaction furthermore sees Ecsponent acquiring a 49% share in Truth Digital, 100% owned by Sisulu. As Truth Digital owns the full shareholding of iKGB, the acquisition allows Ecsponent continued exposure to the ROi business.ROi is an exciting business that is expanding the frontiers of traditional media monitoring and trends analysis, says Sisulu. It draws on the expertise of a number of worldwide sources to build a media monitoring solution that promises to be the first of its kind in the world. Together we will ensure that South Africas marketing and PR industry can have monitoring work for them.ROi Africa is a smart technology media monitoring and intelligence provider that identifies media and monitoring trends across millions of platforms. Its reach includes almost 200 million global social networks, 60,000 global online newspapers, thousands of printed publications and 70 radio and TV stations.Widely regarded as a technological leader in the media monitoring intelligence field, ROi is owned by Ecsponent Limited, a company listed on the JSEs main board under the Financial Services Specialty Finance sector. It has multiple subsidiaries and a footprint across South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland and Zambia.Says Terence Gregory, CEO of Ecsponent about the transaction, Ecsponent invested in ROi because we believed in its commercial viability and potential to generate shareholder returns over the medium to long-term. This has not changed. Shakas expertise and industry knowledge are exactly what is needed to take ROi to the next level.Ecsponent invests in a range of listed and private equity investments that have a long-term investment horizon. It helps investee companies develop and profitably commercialise technology that has global applications and offers cost-effective market solutions.iKGB is a boutique media monitoring agency that has been successful in a niche market. Following the intended merger, the brand will be incorporated into the ROi business. Publicis, the global advertising conglomerate headquartered in Paris, France, recently announced the launch of its bespoke artificial intelligence (AI) platform, Marcel. The platform was Publicis' major focus for the best part of the year and saw it pull out of all industry awards and events until it was complete. Screengrab from Marcel: The Vision video on Publicis Groupe Youtube video No job killer "You get energy and creativity out of engagement. The app should engage people and make their jobs better so they naturally want to use. If its not doing that, then we need to get on it." Doing data right Unsurprisingly, Marcel has generated plenty of hype, but how much of it is deserved? And what does the platforms launch tell us about the role AI will play in the future of marketing?Firstly, its important to note that Marcel isnt going to automate any part of the advertising process. Instead, its designed to connect Publicis 80 000-plus employees and give them access to the knowledge and skills base of the entire network.The AI will, for instance, be able to recommend that an art director at an agency in South Africa help out with a Dutch agencys pitch to a major exporting company. Employees can also contribute to pitches of their own volition.Additionally, Marcel will have access to employee calendars and can make recommendations around availability and workload, as well as behavioural patterns, needs, desires and experience.Publicis also promises that Marcel will cut time spent on tedious tasks such as timesheets and expenses. Finally, it will serve as a repository and archive for all of Publicis work and assets, making it easy to find inspiration, historical client work, and do research.Far from being the job killer that AI systems are usually portrayed as then, Marcel may actually generate jobs.By ensuring that the best global resources are working on pitches, agencies are more likely to generate new business, allowing them to increase hires.By taking time out of some of advertisings most mundane and time-consuming tasks, such as timesheets, Marcel could free up agency employees to the jobs theyre paid to.Indeed, thats the message Publicis is putting out when it comes to Marcel."Its about engagement, versus compliance," Nick Law, chief creative officer of Publicis Groupe said in interview with Campaign Its a clear reminder then that AI doesnt have to be a bogeyman in the advertising space.One of the reasons Marcel is so promising is because it combines smart AI with relevant data.This approach does not have to be restricted to the internal organisations making ads. In fact, it could ensure that people get served ads that are relevant to their needs and wants, erasing some of the current issues with AI in advertising.Lets take programmatic advertising as an example. Outside of the ad industry, most people understand programmatic as those ads that follow you around for three months after youve bought something online.Thing is, AI is only as good as its algorithms and the data available to it. Implemented effectively, programmatic advertising is about as far from annoying, irrelevant ads as its possible to get.Instead, the AI might see that youve been looking at cars and serve you ads for car financing from your bank, perhaps even tailored to the make and model youve been looking at.Without having to appeal to the widest possible number of people, this approach opens up more creative opportunities.For the foreseeable future, thats going to require human beings coming up with creative solutions to business problems. Whether inside their own organisations or in the way they market their clients, AI can only help ad people do that.*Shaune Jordaan was an executive at Publicis while Marcel was conceived and in the early stages of its construction. Fuel prices in South Africa continue to climb on the back of a weaker Rand and higher international fuel prices, but how does the cost of petroleum in South Africa compare with the rest of the world? Let's take a look... So, how does the price of petrol in South Africa compare with the world? Petrol price Affordability Income spent At the end of October last year we thought we had seen the worst when it came to the fuel price, how wrong we were. The price of fuel in this country is now at a record high after the cost of petrol rose by 82 cents and diesel by 85 cents at the beginning of June 2018.When you examine how South Africa compares with 60 other countries around the world with regards to the price of petrol, affordability and income spent on fuel, the results are both interesting and, eye-opening...Fuel in South Africa is expensive and we spend a huge portion of our incomes to buy fuel.The latest figures from globalpetrolprices.com show that the average price of fuel around the world is 1.17 US dollar per litre (R15.37).According to Bloomberg data for the first quarter of 2018, South Africa ranks 20th alongside 60 other countries in terms of the price for 1 litre of petrol.But one needs to consider that, as a general rule, richer countries have higher prices whereas the poorer countries (and those that produce oil) have significantly lower prices. The only exception is the US which has an advanced economy, but low fuel prices. The difference in pricing is due to each countrys taxes and subsidies for fuel so basically, we all pay the same for fuel on the international market, but then decide to impose different taxes.According to globalpetrolprices.com, the country with the cheapest petrol price is Venezuela, ranked first, with a petrol cost of 13 cents per litre. Iran is second with a petrol price of R3.94 per litre. On this list, which lists 167 countries, South Africa is sitting at number 90.Hong Kong, an autonomous territory in southeastern China, is ranked second to last, with petrol costing them R27.86.Iceland has the planet's most expensive petrol at R28.12 per litre.What is aggravating to know is that many other African countries are paying far less for fuel than we do. Countries like Algeria, Nigeria, Sudan and Egypt, all pay less than R6 per litre. Other countries like Mozambique, Botswana, Ethiopia, Tunisia and even Lesotho all get their fuel cheaper, too.We are still looking better than places like Zimbabwe though who are having to fork out R18.66 per litre or petrol and if youre in Mauritius youre looking at R19.97.Unsurprisingly, South Africa ranks poorly in terms of affordability and is placed at rank 56. According to Bloomberg, South Africa has a daily income of R237.53 and consumers have to fork out 5.98% of that daily income to afford just 1 litre of fuel.India is the worst in terms of affordability with an average daily income of R70.80 and consumers spend 20.11% of that income to pay for 1 litre of petrol. Venezuela ranks first for affordability. With an average daily income of R613.83, Venezuelans spend less than 0.01% worth of wages to buy 1 litre of petrol.Yet again, and unsurprisingly, South Africa ranks even worse in terms of total income spent on fuel with a poor ranking of 60. According to Bloomberg, the average motorist in South Africa uses 202.07 litres of petrol a year, which swallows up at least 3.31% of your average salary.Mexico is the only country that is worse off. The average motorist in Mexico uses 355.48 litres of petrol per year, accounting for 3.82% of the average annual income.Venezuela ranks first with motorists there using 483.76 litres of fuel per year yet only spending 0.00% of their salaries to pay for petrol.For the full list of petrol prices, visit Bloombergs brilliant interactive graphic here This article was originally published on Cars.co.za Gone are the days of customer service consisting of treating buyers with common courtesy. Customer service has been disrupted by an expectation of a total customer experience that is dictated by the customer, not company policies. Tristan Colangelo via Unsplash.com Omni-channel Omni-hours Omni-advice Omni-cycle The disruption to the age-old practice of keeping customers happy resulted from a combination of technological advancements and societal changes. These collided into a perfect storm that is leaving companies breathless as they try to balance what customers want with what they can reasonably offer.Customers shape their own experiences by combining several methods of gathering information on a company and its products or services. Its not strange to find someone standing in front of a shelf in a retail store, checking the reviews and price of the same product online, and even purchasing the product from a competitors online platform all while in the store.Companies offering services rather than products have also not been spared in the digitisation of the customer experience. Customers expect the same offering or at least something very similar whether they interact with a brand via online platforms or in a physical space.In addition to customer service training companies now need to invest in understanding how customers use online platforms to shape their total experience.The always on nature of the omni-channel customer experience has brought with it several challenges. Companies that have traditionally been used to having some time to regroup, restock, and rest now have to create procedures that have to adapt to a customer habit of instant gratification.An auto-responder with an estimated timeline for feedback might generate some patience. Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence are however quickly rising to the rescue of brands struggling to deliver to their desired level of excellence at all hours. These tools can help to answer basic queries and might even be very effective in resolving complete matters.Customer experience is shaped by touchpoints with a brand across multiple channels and over a longer timeline than just the actual buying decision. The total experience is also shaped by what their circle of influence friends, family, and an extended online network has shared about their own experience with a brand and its products or services.Buying decisions are therefore made with much more than product specifications or service delivery promises in mind.Customer service representative these days have to be able to do more that solve product or service related issues. They also have to be able to win the trust of a customer whose mind might have been made up by a spread of user-based comments posted online.Customers shaping their own experiences with channels and inputs that are not dictated by brands have also had a significant impact on the traditional sales funnel.Instead of linear thinking that develops an opportunity into a lead and eventually into a sale, customer experience agents have to adopt a matrix thinking approach. This approach allows for fluidly moving back and forth between the phases of the customer journey based on the preferences of each customer.The age of industrialisation has allowed for the creation of many standardised policies and procedures focused on increasing profits and reducing expense by keeping customers happy. The age of information now demands that brands allow for the flexibility that is required as the customer truly becomes the king. by Kristina Knight Google Pay also showed a decline, going from 38% acceptance rate to 25%. However, PayPal acceptance rates increased from 48% to 64% (YoY). One of the more interesting findings is that merchants are seeing a drastic increase in mobile fraud attempts, with 75% noting that they feel they are seeing an increase in these attacks. Just over half of merchants (52%) are using third party systems to detect fraud and manage their risk. Nearly two-thirds (62%) are using CVV or card verification value checked and 43% are using fraud scoring. But, only about 5% are using AI/machine learning to detect fraud even though this has been shown to be a strong tool for merchants' fraud-fighting arsenal. "For the third consecutive year, merchants are showing signs of complacency and even regression in terms of managing mobile fraud risk," said Don Bush, Vice President of Marketing at Kount. "Despite the increase in mobile fraud and the evolution of tactics carried out by criminals to commit fraud in this channel, the number of merchants implementing specialized tools has decreased, demonstrating that merchants struggle to properly address fraud in the mobile channel including both apps and mobile browsers." Kount's Mobile Payments and Fraud Survey: 2018 Report was conducted between January through March 2018; researchers investigated how about 600 merchants in nearly 30 verticals were using mobile payment options. Tags: Apple Pay, Google Pay, m:commerce, mobile commerce, mobile marketing, mobile marketing trends, mobile payments 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 The Embassy of France in Botswana hosted a reception on Thursday this week to celebrate the media community in Botswana and reaffirm its constant and unwavering commitment to the freedom of expression and protection of journalists. According to Benoit Catusse, the Economic, SADC and Press Attache at the Embassy, the initial idea was to organise the reception on May 3 to coincide with the World Press Freedom Day but this could not be. Catusse said the French Government believes that Media pluralism and the freedom to share critical analysis are key to a democratic, free and fruitful debate hence the reception to improve journalism in Botswana by providing a physical platform that allows journalists to network, get to know each other, exchange contacts, or even discuss further collaborations. The reception comes at a time when the local Editors Forum is slamming political parties for their indifference towards the media on account of a controversial report codenamed Tholwane Borethe which enjoyed wide publicity last year in the local press but was dismissed as fake by some quarters. Botswana Congress Party has since asked the Police Service to investigate whether editors published contents of the report in the full knowledge that it was false or not. Diplomatic, Political and economic relations France developed a warm and cordial relationship with Botswana, since 1966 within the framework of a balanced and sustainable partnership. The relationship was strengthened by the opening of an Embassy in Gaborone in 2001. The two countries according to Ambassador of France to Botswana, His Excellency Pierre Voillery, share similar positions on most issues on the international agenda such as support of the International Criminal Court (ICC), but also hold the same attachment to democratic values. This friendship has been cemented over the recent past years by official bilateral visits between the two countries. Ian Khama, then President of Botswana visited France in June 2015 while two months later, Segolene Royal, then French Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, visited Botswana to prepare the COP21 UN climate change conference. There have also been high level visits by ministers Tshekedi Khama and Thapelo Olopeng last year to France while a delegation from the French Senate came to Botswana in May 2017 and in March 2018, the French senator Olivier Cadicalso came to Botswana for meetings with the authorities. France has also recently welcomed the decision by the government of Botswana to open a diplomatic mission in Paris within the coming months. France and Botswana also share economic ties. This was evidenced by the establishment of the France-Botswana Business Club in 2013. This club gathers French companies working in Botswana as well as local companies that are willing to network and exchange with the French business community. In May 2017, the Embassy of France to Botswana, together with BITC and De Beers, successfully organised the first France-Botswana Business Forum. This event allowed French and Botswana business communities to debate around economic and commercial links and explore further collaborations. At government level, the Ambassador of France to Botswana signed in July 2017 with the Botswana Minister of Finance and Economic Development the amendment of the France-Botswana Tax Agreement, which will take Botswana out of the list of non-cooperative states. This will ease investments between France and Botswana. In education, France and Botswana are committed to promote the French teaching in Botswana. French remains the only foreign language that is taught in Botswana public schools: almost 100 instructors teach French in more than 40 schools. Besides, other private institutions also propose French classes for their pupils. In 2008, France and Botswana signed a Memorandum of Understanding containing a section for education and promotion of the French language. The MoU was revised in 2015 in order to identify the potential ideas to improve French teaching in Botswana schools. The Alliance Francaise de Gaborone is the main institution in terms of French teaching in Botswana. It was created in 1980 and has promoted the French language and culture in Botswana for more than 35 years. Every year, several hundred people from all nationalities attend French classes at Alliance Francaise. It also hosts cultural activities which the aim of promoting exchanges between France and Botswana on a mutually beneficial basis. In collaboration with the Embassy, Alliance Francaise de Gaborone organised several cultural events during the Francophonie Week in Gaborone (18th 25th March 2018). Amongst them was a reception at the Residence of France during which the prize-giving ceremony of a writing competition proposed by Alliance Francaise to some public schools took place. The Alliance Francaise will soon have a new site, thanks to the government of Botswana which gave a plot to the association. The construction works have already began and by next year there should be a modern and beautiful French cultural center in the heart of Gaborone. Catusse says the new site will allow Alliance Francaise to grow and to work more effectively for the benefit of Batswana. The Embassy of France to Botswana develops contacts and exchanges with all spaces of the civil society in Botswana. For instance an annual reception takes place at the Residence of France on the 8th of March on the occasion of the International Womens Day. This event gathers all the actors working to eliminate gender-based violence and to promote women empowerment. Church of the Brethren Newsline June 18, 2018 I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matthew 25:35b). NEWS 1) Welcoming the stranger: A call for just immigration reform 2) Brethren are warned of email scam - 1) Welcoming the stranger: A call for just immigration reform Church of the Brethren general secretary David Steele is recommending to the Church of the Brethren a blogpost from Office of Peacebuilding and Policy associate Victoria Bateman. The post, dated Friday, June 15, reaffirms the longstanding stance of the Church of the Brethren on immigration, outlined in 1982 Annual Conference statement on Undocumented Persons and Refugees in the United States ( www.brethren.org/ac/statements/1982refugees.html ), and the biblical basis for extending welcome to refugees and immigrants. Following is the full text of the Office of Peacebuilding and Policy post (also online at https://www.brethren.org/testblog/2018/welcoming-the-stranger-a-call-for-just-immigration-reform ): The Church of the Brethren has long acknowledged the Bibles call for justice in immigration policy. Matthew 25:35 says, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, reminding us that our response to the least of these is just as important as the manner in which we would choose to treat Christ. As people of faith, it is essential that we respond to Gods call to welcome strangers, extend hospitality, and recognize the inherent dignity of each human being. Yesterday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited the Bible in an attempt to justify the separation of children from their parents at the border as they flee violence, poverty, and oppression in their home countries. Once separated from their parents, these children are held in detention centers. Over 500 children have been detained under this policy, putting them at risk for emotional trauma and abuse. This past spring, the world watched as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was rescinded, leaving hundreds of thousands of students and community members not knowing the future of their immigration statusdespite having grown up in the United States. Erick, a Church of the Brethren member, shared his own story with us here: https://www.brethren.org/testblog/2017/daca-story-erick. Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programs, which gave legal residence to people from nations facing violence or natural disaster, have also been cut. Some TPS holders have been in the country for decades, starting families and businesses, and will be forced to return to their original country if a pathway to citizenship is not created. The Haitian Church of the Brethren in Miami, Florida has been impacted by these policies, and you can read about the March for TPS they held here: https://www.brethren.org/testblog/2018/reflections-on-the-march-for-tps. The uncertainty, fear, and danger faced by immigrants impacted by these broken US immigration policies is not acceptable. Our 1982 Annual Conference statement on Undocumented Persons and Refugees in the United States ( www.brethren.org/ac/statements/1982refugees.html ) calls for the United States government to adopt legislation and policies which welcome and promote the welfare of immigrants and refugees, and to bring about a general amnesty for those people who once entered the United States as undocumented aliens but have settled peacefully among their neighbors. As people of faith, we urge the United States government to fix its broken immigration system. US policies must be compassionate and just, and recognize the importance of strong families and communities. The Bible condemns those who exploit immigrants (Ezekiel 22:7), and instead calls for us to love those who are foreigners (Deuteronomy 10:19). Immigrants continue to make valuable contributions to the country, and each human being who enters the United States deserves to be treated with compassion. Find out more about the ministry of the Office of Peacebuilding and Policy at www.brethren.org/peacebuilding . 2) Brethren are warned of email scam Scam email messages have been received by some Church of the Brethren members recently, asking for donations to help with refugee resettlement. These are scam messages and should be deleted. The Church of the Brethrens legitimate email requests for funding will invite giving online at the Church of the Brethren website www.brethren.org or via the mailing of a check to the Church of the Brethren General Offices, 1451 Dundee Ave., Elgin, IL 60120. The Office of Mission Advancement sends the eBrethren email newsletter, print letters, and occasional fundraising messages by email to encourage church members to give to Church of the Brethren ministries. These will always invite donations sent by check to the denominational offices or online giving at a secure donation site such as www.brethren.org/give (powered by GivingFuel). Please do not ever give out bank account information or personal details in response to an email message. Legitimate email messages from the Church of the Brethren will not request such information. If you receive a request listing any other ways to give, please delete it or forward it to our webmaster at cobweb@brethren.org so that the denominational staff can track down the fraudulent senders. The denominational staff appreciates the generous giving and support that is received for Church of the Brethren ministries, and encourages church members to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16b). ********** Newsline is the e-mail news service of the Church of the Brethren. Newsline stories may be reprinted if Newsline is cited as the source. Please send news tips and submissions to editor Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford, director of News Services for the Church of the Brethren, at cobnews@brethren.org . Contributors to this issue of Newsline include Tori Bateman, Jan Fischer Bachman, Traci Rabenstein, David Steele. Go to www.brethren.org/Newsline to subscribe to the Church of the Brethren Newsline free e-mail news service and receive church news every week. Dresnack heads to England, thanks to a US/UK Fulbright Scholarship I think being in one humanities discipline, one social science discipline and one hard science discipline helped me stand out as someone with a wide range of interests and the ability to connect .to a lot of different people BUFFALO, N.Y. Anna Dresnack, a rising junior majoring in English and psychology, received a scholarship to attend the 2018 Fulbright University of Sussex Summer Institute. Its the fifth year in a row that a UB student has been awarded this scholarship, which covers airfare, accommodations, tuition and fees, and a meal allowance. The four-week program focuses on British culture and allows students to study what reflects their interests, such as theatre, history, literature or art. Aside from attending classes, participants interact with students from around the world, go on field trips and explore nearby Brighton, a historic, seaside resort on the southern coast of England. Megan Stewart, fellowships and scholarships advisor at UB, says this scholarship is unique in that it is only offered to freshmen and sophomores, as many prestigious awards are reserved for juniors and seniors. She also explains why she thinks Dresnack received this prestigious award: Anna has a pretty strong sense of self, which is reflected in her essays. She was able to write about a topic (diversity in literature) that is resonant with her. It was genuine and very powerful. Here, Dresnack, a native of Brockport, New York, discusses her choice of majors, what she will study in Sussex, and her experience applying for the US/UK Fulbright award. Why English and psychology? I am also a biology minor, so this is a question I receive a lot. People view these three fields as separate. English and biology in particular are often viewed as opposites. However, each of these fields is concerned with understanding humans. Biology looks at people from the outside in. In biology, the idea of what you see, the physical stuffs that make us, is what is most important. English looks at people from the inside out: what you cant see, such as our thoughts and feelings. Psychology straddles these two concepts of what makes us human, so studying all three of these fields gives one the most complete understanding of people. Why did you apply for this particular Fulbright program? It was honestly a struggle deciding which to apply for. I was debating between three different institutes that all sounded equally as interesting. I asked for both Megan Stewarts opinion and the opinion of one of my references. I eventually decided on Sussex because I felt I could best articulate why I was interested in Britishness and British culture, as opposed to the themes of the other institutes. Which module did you choose? I am taking a module entitled The Royals: The British Monarchy through Art and Architecture, which focuses on studying the various royal art collections and residences in order to understand how the British royal family has shaped their country through patronage of the arts and architecture. I chose this module because I felt it was the best and most unique way to explore Britishness and British culture. I can read Oliver Twist in America. I cant visit multiple royal residences in America. Have you traveled outside the U.S. before? Are you traveling anywhere besides Sussex on this trip? I have never been outside the U. S. before. I do plan on exploring other cities in England during this trip, including trips to London and Stonehenge. Unfortunately, I will not even have the time to go up to Scotland, much less anywhere else in Europe! Have you won any scholarships before this one? No, not any other nationally competitive scholarships comparable to this one. But I am currently receiving the University at Buffalo Provost Scholarship, a merit scholarship that provides financial support for my four years as an undergraduate. I also received several local scholarships during high school. What do you think set your application/essay apart? I think being in one humanities discipline, one social science discipline and one hard science discipline helped me stand out as someone with a wide range of interests and the ability to connect to a lot of different people. Also, one of the essay prompts asked me to discuss a current affairs issue in the U.S. that was important to me. I was lucky that the issue I am most passionate and informed about the push for diversity in media, as best seen through the We Need Diverse Books and #ownvoices movements happened to be unique. I did my best to accurately represent who I am as a person by writing only about the topics that I am most excited about, and it seems as if my passion was present enough to make an impact. What are your academic or career goals? Im planning on earning a Master of Library Science (MLS). I am most interested in working in a college library or as an archivist. I am also planning to pursue a PhD in English literature in order to possibly become a professor. I am hoping to enjoy my last two years as an undergrad learning about the multitude of subjects that interest me, trying to decide what sort of literature I want to study, and hoping to test out my PhD plans by doing an English departmental honors thesis. What is your advice for students who want to apply for scholarships and other awards? Know yourself and know the award you are applying for. What about who you are makes you the best person to meet the goals of the award or the awarding organization? Write your essays with that thought in mind. | BY Ricki Green | +Ape Adelaide has welcomed Wayne Aistrope (left) and Josh Moore (right) to its stable of directors. Both Aistrope and Moore are from Adelaide and were extremely fortunate to apprentice under icon Ernie Clarke. Since then, Aistrope has worked on a diverse range of projects, he loves what he does and is passionate about bringing stories to life. Moore has spent his entire career on film sets, he has the perfect skill set to build dramatic narratives, capture beautiful images and cut together compelling storylines. Says Jason Byrne, founder and executive producer, +Ape: Josh and Wayne bring with them such strong knowledge, a love of collaboration and experience; as we grow they are going to be a vital part of the +Ape team. We are thrilled to have them and their can-do attitude. | BY Ricki Green | Jim Ingram (left), co-founder and creative director at Thinkerbell, is representing Australia on the Cannes Direct Lions jury. Ingram, along with most of the other Australian and NZ jurors writes exclusively for CB. Problem: Judging finished early today to determine our Direct Lions shortlist. Tomorrow we get punchy to sort the good stuff from the ordinary. Solution: Spend the afternoon on the FCB yacht thanks to our enigmatic jury prez Susan Credle. Idea: Meet an impressive collection of Australian and Kiwi adfolk to celebrate Cannes opening night and figure out how to get an even more impressive yacht for next year. Results: Profit. | BY Ricki Green | Mars Bar Australia and Clemenger BBDO Melbourne have today launched a new brand platform for the iconic chocolate bar, Enough Chocolate to Deal with Anything. Representing a shift away from positioning Mars Bar as something that provides energy, the new platform aims to showcase how the chocolate bar can provide Australians with the confidence they need to overcome even the most awkward situations. To rise above anything that may come your way, the campaign tackles some of lifes most awkward and dumbstruck encounters with tongue-in-cheek comedy, by overcoming these moments with the well-loved familiarity and boldness of the iconic Mars Bar. The launch TVC plays on a live portait drawing class which quickly takes an uncomfortable turn for one innocent artist, as he quickly realizes the naked model thats just taken her place is none other than his mother. Despite the look of terror on the sons face, he completes the drawing thanks to his Mars Bar. Says Suzanne Morrison, marketing director, Mars Chocolate Australia: The new platform helps us refresh the Mars brand and make a statement that is big and bold like the Mars bar itself, and importantly, add some of that Australian humour that we all know and love. Were looking forward to exploring where we can take Enough Chocolate to Deal with Anything and continue rolling out comms for years to come. Says Stephen de Wolf, executive creative director, Clemenger BBDO Melbourne: A Mars Bar is a big, bold chocolate bar and our new positioning, Enough Chocolate to Deal with Anything, reminds us of that, by serving it up as the solution to some of lifes more awkward moments. The platform not only provides stronger relevance to the Australian market, but also offers universal appeal. What may be the most pressing topic in the country right now was discussed Saturday as the Lee County Sheriffs Office presented A Response to Active Shooter and Mass Casualty Events. Registration for the event held at Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall at FSW hit 1,600 as residents signed up to learn about what you should do if you find yourself in an active shooter situation such as that which occurred in Parkland. Seventeen students died and 17 were injured after a former student, Nikolas Cruz, opened fire on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Undersheriff Carmine Marceno gave opening remarks, stating that the public needs to be prepared not ifbut when something happens. He said the seminar was designed to train the public to start to think outside the box. We cant be everywhere, we need the eyes and ears of the citizens, he said. If it looks suspicious, make the call. Lee County is the 33rd largest school system in the country with more than 90,000 students. This means there are more than 90,000 backpacks that everyone hopes contain just books. Marceno touched on the bolstering of officers in classrooms in Southwest Florida, saying, There is no greater gift than to protect a child. Staff Officer Scott Griffith has been in law enforcement for more than three decades including command positions in units such as SWAT, criminal investigations, training and internal affairs. He is currently working as an educator to business leaders, government officials and sworn personnel on how to respond to an active shooter scenario. Full of energy, Griffith broke down how, in some mass casualty events, the public could have been more aware that something bad was about to happen. We need to start thinking, he stated. Try to practice more what-if situations. He continued by advising people to look for characteristics of reportable behavior of a potential active shooter such as physical violence, direct or indirect threats of violence and suicide indication. Griffith broke down the best ways to keep safe if you find yourself fighting for your life. Who will be the first responders? You, he told the audience. Alerting the proper authorities, working as a team with those around you and knowing your evacuation route are some of the ways one can increase their chance of survival. The most important question of the day was: if you find yourself in an active shooter situation do you run, hide or fight? If you run, you need to contemplate if thats the safest option. Do you know your escape plan? Do you know your building? Where would you go? If you decide it is the best option for you, you need to leave all belongings behind, put your hands in the air to indicate to any law enforcement that you are not a threat and avoid escalators and elevators. If you choose to hide, you need to lock and barricade the doors with heavy furniture. Close and lock all the windows. Close the blinds, cover the windows and turn off the lights. It is important to remember to quiet all electronic devices and to remain silent. It may be smart to identify any objects around you that could be used as a weapon if you have to fight. This is your last available option, and you have to be committed to the action, Griffith advised. If others around you are willing to join you, this may increase your chances, but know your plan of action and dont hesitate. Griff then demonstrated how to use your keys, a pen, or a simple legal pad of paper for self defense. He was even seen showing people in the lobby how to use these tactics hands-on. When law enforcement arrives, it is key for victims to let them do their jobs and not mistake an innocent person for an assailant. Griffith said to try and remain calm and keep your hands elevated and fingers spread. Avoid quick movements, yelling or screaming and holding onto officers for safety. Do not stop to ask for directions, simply head in the direction the officers are coming from to evacuate. The goal of this seminar is to take what you have learned and tell others, until the 750,000 residents of Lee County practices these tactics, Lets make Lee County the safest county in Florida,' Griffith ended. I thought it was terrific, he did a really great job, kept your attention. He gave some great pointers on the run,hide and fight, said Barbara Yekel of Fort Myers who was in attendance Saturday. I think a lot of kids should have this presented to them, theyre the ones who are so young and so naive. It would really be great for them to see something like this, at least to stick it in their brain, she added. EMS Lt. Steven Winters has served as an EMT, paramedic, flight paramedic and field training officer and now serves as district supervisor for the Lee County Department of Public Safety. Winters discussed how to Stop the Bleed for bystanders attending to injured persons while waiting for emergency responders to arrive. A person can bleed to death in as little as three to five minutes and 30 to 40 percent of people die due to external bleeding following an injury, said Winters. Step one is to apply firm, steady pressure with both hands to the bleeding site. Step two is to apply dressing and continue pressure with the bandages or clothing. If necessary, step three is to apply a tourniquet. When the bleeding doesnt stop, place a tourniquet two to three inches closer to the torso from the bleeding and may be applied over clothing. Make sure it is tight enough and secure it in place, do not remove it- a medical professional will do so. Winters said the biggest failure they see is not tightening the strap all the way, despite how much it might hurt the victim. If the bleeding continues despite a tourniquet, place a second one on, closer to the torso than the first. No one should die of external hemorrhaging, he added. Identifying certain types of bleeds was touched on as well, for example, how to know if a bleed is life-threatening. If the blood is pooling, spurting, not stopping and the person is sliding into an altered mental state, you most likely need to apply a tourniquet and get immediate medical attention. Winters says to follow the ABCs. A- Alert call 911 or tell someone else to. B- Bleeding identify if its a life-threatening bleed. C- Compression apply pressure with a dressing or tourniquet. He said one misnomer about tourniquets is that you will lose a limb if applied. This is simply not the case anymore, that old mindset is out the window. When dealing with torso injuries, wound packing is the best way to stop the bleed. Stuff the dressing into the wound, not just on top of it. In some cases, a hemostatic dressing one that causes blood to clot is the appropriate method. You should not, though, use a wound pack dressing on chest and abdominal injuries, as it may cause other organs harm. Stop the Bleed kits are starting to pop up in schools, grocery stores and other facilities so that people will have the proper tools on hand to help someone before emergency responders arrive. The only thing more tragic than a death, is a death that couldve been prevented, Winters concluded. The seminar wrapped up with a question-and-answer session with a panel comprised of Griffith and Winters, along with Dr. Jose Diaz, Lee Health Trauma surgeon, Youth Services Captain Mike Miller and Lieutenant Gus Vallejo. The group fielded various questions including what you should do if you dont know where the gunshots are coming from, if Lee Health is prepared for mass casualty events and what our schools are doing to protect students. Miller currently oversees the Youth Services Division, which includes 58 certified deputies responsible for ensuring the safe environment of 15 high schools, 19 middle schools, 45 elementary schools and three special centers. Miller discussed that all of his School Resource Officers have active shooter training and that they are familiarizing themselves with schools and their layouts. The safety and security in our schools is paramount, he said. We have to morph and adjust with schools and society changing providing a safe learning environment for all kids, in all schools, is our mission. Mental health is atop the list of why these young adults are committing such terrible acts, Miller said this is something the Lee Countys Sheriffs Office and Lee County Schools are working in tandem on. We work very closely with our school counselors, our schools psychologists, unfortunately weve been involved with over 160 Baker Acts this year in the Lee County Public Schools system but we work in direct contact with our social workers and formed that team concept with them. What we also do is work with SalusCare. Were under the premise of the right to report, so, basically, if kids say something thats concerning, reference maybe self harm, we get that information and we can react and do an interview and formulate plan of action. Miller said his officers are certified in critical incident training, specific to juveniles and adolescents in schools. Breakdowns or meltdowns that can happen to students are carefully handled. Miller said they dont overreact, and say, place a student under arrest they take into account what mental illness an individual may be suffering from and act appropriately. One of our biggest hurdles is bridging the gap between law enforcement and students in schools, added Miller. Developing relationships with students and making them feel comfortable, so they feel they can go and talk to an officer without the threat of repercussion, is a focus for SROs. Weve had School Resource Officers that have been in my unit for over 17 years, develop these relationships that are carrying on until the kids are 30-40 years old, with their own families, praised Miller. These relationships are based off of day-to-day things in school, whether its mental health, bullying, criminal activity, whatever it might be, thats what the SROs job is and we are trained to address each one of these situations. Those in attendance were able to practice life-saving techniques on dummies after the presentation. It seemed the panel were all in agreement on one thing when it comes to these deadly situations. A strong will to survive can make a huge difference. Cape Coral now has the ability to regular moorings in the Bimini Basin. City Council voted 7-0 to establish a mooring field in the South Cape waterbody, an area the city hopes will attract private investment to make it one of the crown jewels of the community. For development to happen, the water needs to be clean, proponents of the ordinance said, adding poor water quality would be an impediment to future growth. The ordinance establishes rules, identifies the responsibility of tenants, amenities and services, leasing requirements, speed limits, evacuation plans, expansion plans and provides direction for the area. Noteworthy regulations include the 515 rule, which is 5 days in, one out, then five more days in within a given month; commercial activities are prohibited (with the exception of pump-out vessels and water taxis); vessels will be removed in advance of special events, and unattended vessels will be removed after 72 hours unless the harbormaster is otherwise advised. The public had two opportunities in April and May to provide input on the mooring field proposal. Many were concerned about how many boats would be allowed to anchor there, the impact the then-proposed ordinance would have on the water, noise levels, long-term users and what amenities the field would have. Representatives of the Cape Coral Sailing Club stated that although they approved of a mooring field ordinance, it was not ready for passage. They said the time limits were too restrictive and appeared to be a hodgepodge of other ordinances. Councilmember Marilyn Stouts concern was that there was no cost analysis for implementation presented. It is hard to support an ordinance when you dont have the cost and when you have stakeholders who have not been included, said Stout, who did eventually vote for the measure. We cant control Bimini Basin without an ordinance, but there must be some minimum cost to make us more comfortable we can afford this. The ordinance is a first step. Planning, design and permitting from state and federal agencies are next, followed by construction, the cost of which is not yet known. In other business: * The city council also started the process in regards to Seven Islands. Council created a Seven Islands sub-district in the citys Comprehensive Plan, which will be a mixed-use overlay and provide parameters for the site. * Unanimously approved an impact fee deferral pilot program to help provide more affordable housing for the city. The parameters would be single-family homes, with a household income less than 120 percent of the areas median income. The buyers first mortgage can not exceed 30 percent of the projected annual income for the household unless approved by the primary lender. The program is limited to non-profit housing development programs, Habitat for Humanity and Cape Coral Housing Development Corporation. Kitty Green of Habitat for Humanity of Lee and Hendry Counties said they plan to build more homes in Cape Coral in the coming year. The Lee County Board of County Commissioners unanimously approved today agreements with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and U.S. Geological Survey that will expand water monitoring efforts in the Caloosahatchee watershed. New monitoring sites will be located in the Orange River near Buckingham, Telegraph Creek and Popash Creek. They will enhance the countys understanding of water flow and basin nutrient loads in fulfillment of achieving the state-required Total Maximum Daily Load for the Caloosahatchee Estuary. The sites also will assist future flood response efforts by providing real-time flow information and calibration data for hydrologic/hydraulic modeling and analysis. The U.S. Geological Survey is paying for the installation of the three new sites at a cost of $128,880. The Florida DEP will reimburse Lee County for the operation and maintenance costs of two of the sites at a cost of $57,400 annually and the county will pay for the operation and maintenance of the third at an annual cost of $28,700. Installation is expected to happen in late summer or early fall. The expansion brings the total number of monitoring sites in the basin to 12. For more information, visit online at www.leegov.com/naturalresources/WaterQuality. Photo: Beachside Motel Yet another motel has changed hands in Penticton. The 26-room Beachside Motel, near Skaha Lake Park on Parkview Street, has been sold for $3.35M by NAI Commercial Okanagan, according to managing broker Philip Hare. The property has gone to a developer out of Vancouver, which has plans to operate the motel for the short to mid-term. It's the latest in a flurry of motel sales in Penticton the last 18 months, which also saw the Slumber Lodge Motel sell for $3.5M and the Jubilee Motel for $1.2M last year. The longtime local owners of the Beachside Motel are reportedly planning their retirement, but could not be reached for comment. Photo: Facebook A family of black bears has been relocated after wandering too close to a Courtenay elementary school. The mother bear and three cubs were spotted Monday near Arden Elementary. They were hanging out in a tree on private property. A conservation officer issued a ticket to one homeowner for insecure attractants and advised two others. The bears were corralled to a green space west of the school for relocation. School staff were advised of the incident and asked to send information home with students about human-wildlife conflicts and bear attractants. with files from CTV Vancouver Island Photo: Wayne Moore A state of local emergency expired overnight in Kelowna, as flood concerns have subsided. A similar state of emergency was also cancelled for the Regional District of Central Okanagan. All evacuation orders and alerts have also been removed. As of this morning, Okanagan Lake is at 342.57 metres above sea level. The Emergency Operations Centre has demobilized most of its flood protection measures. However, log booms off Swim Bay in Peachland and Maude-Roxby Bird Sanctuary in Kelowna will remain in place until the lake drops closer to its full pool level of 342.48 m. Residents are also advised they can consider removing flood protection on private property. Sandbags can be returned to authorized locations listed here. They will be accepted until June 28. It is illegal to empty sandbags into creeks, lakes, wetland, beaches or other watercourses. Meanwhile, boaters are encouraged to keep their distance from the shoreline and keep speeds down to reduce potential shoreline erosion by wakes and waves. Photo: Google Maps RCMP divers have recovered the body of an 18-year-old missing youth from Chilliwack Lake. The RCMP Underwater Recovery Team and members of Chilliwack Search and Rescue recovered the body on Monday, police say. The victim was last seen on June 12. He had reportedly been swimming from shore to retrieve a drifting boat and disappeared below the waters surface. The BC Coroners Service is investigating the death. Photo: The Canadian Press Ryan Hoag, his wife Wiyani Prayetno and their infant daughter in Tokyo. A Vancouver lawyer says five B.C. families are stuck in Japan, unable to return due to a bureaucratic impasse. Alex Stojicevic represents all of the families who travelled to Japan to pick up their newly adopted babies, and he says they can't come home because the federal government has refused to issue visas for the children. He says the issue appears to be a change in American policy around adoptions from Japan, which has led to the Canadian government seeking an opinion from the Japanese ministry of justice. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Ryan Hoag of Coquitlam says he spent a month in Japan with his wife and new daughter before he had to leave them behind earlier this month and return to work, placing the family in an "untenable" situation. He says the Canadian government has a moral and ethical responsibility to take care of its citizens in such situations and should issue the visas without further delay. Over the course of six years, Chattanooga States associate instructor of collision repair Tim Chastain has welcomed females into a predominantly male setting with no regrets whatsoever. In fact, his female students competing in SkillsUSA for the past five years outnumber the males, 3-2. After each winning a gold medal during statewide competition in March, Breanna Britton and Caitlin White are headed to the national SkillsUSA competition on June 25 in Kentucky to show judges just what theyre made of and they plan to win. Not really knowing what collision repair was, Ms. Britton thought she was signing up for an easy study hall when she entered her freshman year of high school in Milan, Tn. On her first day of class, she was not listening to her instructor until he noticed her drawing on her hand and stopped to ask her if she liked to paint. Unsure what he meant, Ms. Britton followed him through the schools body shop and into the paint booth while he explained its purpose. Before she knew it, he had placed a paint gun in her hand. At that point, I hadnt yet realized that refinishing was what I wanted to do with my life, said Ms. Britton. Later into freshman year, after she had a little body work experience, she found out about SkillsUSA and asked her teacher who he was taking to the competition. When he replied that she wasnt ready, she doubled down her efforts to focus on becoming ready. That opportunity came during her junior year, but she let a friendship get in the way and chose not to compete. Her friend won first place at state instead, yet chose not to attend nationals and Ms. Britton realized her mistake. I decided that I was not going to allow anybody to get between me and these opportunities again, she said determinedly. During her senior year, Ms. Brittons opportunity to compete finally came and she won second place at the state SkillsUSA competition. She then made the decision to put her passion first and sought out the advice of her shop teacher who suggested that to be the best, she needed to attend the best collision repair program in the state at Chattanooga States Tennessee College of Applied Technology. Moving more than 200 miles from home and leaving her parents and five siblings behind was not an easy decision, but with financial help from the Tennessee Promise grant and landing a full-time job as a painter at Card Monroe Company, Ms. Britton knows what she wants and how to make her dreams a reality. Breanna sets high goals and is a goal achiever 100 percent, said Mr. Chastain of his talented student, who is also a National Technical Honor Society member. Ms. Whites obsession with cars came much earlier in life thanks to her father, Raymond, who took her to car shows, drag races, and anything to do with cars, said Ms. White. By the time she was 16, her dad said he was getting her a truck, which they looked at together before she fell in love with it. It took two years for them to refinish the truck, which only further served to fan her desire to be in the automotive world. Putting her knowledge of rebuilding a car to work using her years of hands-on experience led her to investigate the world of collision repair at Chattanooga State while she was a high school junior at Whitwell High School. In 2017 Ms. White chose Chattanooga States collision repair program to do work with the cars she loves. Instructor Mr. Chastain is quick to point out that when students first enter the program, he gives them the chance to explore all the aspects within the program during their first semester so that they can find their best fit. Ms. Whites experience and personality steered her toward becoming an estimator and her recent gold medal at SkillsUSA state proves it. Caitlin greets everyone with a warm smile and she looks at everything methodically, said Mr. Chastain. As Ms. White prepares for the national SkillsUSA competition, she is most looking forward to another new experience, meeting new people, and seeing what other opportunities await. Im preparing for it as I work at Padgetts Red Bank Body Shop, said Ms. White. Owner Rick and estimators Tim, Dale and Nathan are all so helpful and just a blast to be around! For every estimate they do, I tagalong and write my own estimate while they write theirs, then we compare estimates. If its on a car parked near the body shop, we go over both estimates and I can actually see what I missed, she adds. With a total of five SkillsUSA medal winners, Mr. Chastian says it takes a lot of dedication and drive to be the best in your field. SkillsUSA builds winners for life. Winning shows that you are the best in your field and that you want to succeed in your career. It sets you apart from the rest of the applicants, he adds. Both Ms. Britton and Ms. White have not let the fact that they are women deter them from entering and excelling in the male-dominated world of cars. Ms. Britton wishes to pay it forward by staying involved in SkillsUSA and making a name for women wishing to work in the industry, while Ms. White says, Im a girl and the first Skills winner in Estimating for Tennessee. I hope moreyoung women realize they can do whatever men can do probably better! The Tennessee College of Applied Technology at Chattanooga State Community College consistently offers a high-quality education with an 18:1 student-to-teacher ratio, 96 percent job placement rate, and 98 percent licensure pass rate. For more information, visit www.chattanoogastate.edu/tcat. WTCI will broadcast Hamilton County School Board debates on Thursday, July 12, at 8 p.m. Eyewitness News anchor Greg Glover will moderate the debate presented by the Chattanooga Downtown Lions Club and WTCI, the community PBS station serving the Tennessee Valley. Candidates competing in Districts 3, 5, 6, 8 and 9 will debate in front of a live audience at the WTCI Studio at 7540 Bonnyshire Dr. and the broadcast will air on WTCI at 8 p.m. on Thursday, July 12. An encore broadcast will air on Sunday, July 15, at 1 p.m. The community has focused its attention on the link between quality education and economic prosperity and WTCI officials said it is pleased to broadcast this event on-air with these candidates. In District 3 incumbent Joe Smith will face challenger Miracle Hurley. Karitsa Mosely Jones, the District 5 incumbent and boards vice chairwoman, will debate challenger Anne Pierre and in District 6 the incumbent, Joe Galloway, is not running to keep his seat and candidates Michael Henry and Jenny Hill are competing. District 8 incumbent David Testerman will face challenger Tucker McClendon and board chairman Steve Highlander will face contender DAndre Anderson in the District 9 race. PBS is Americas largest classroom and at WTCI we take this responsibility to heart," said Paul Grove, WTCI president and CEO. "In 2016, WTCI televised Hamilton County School Board debates for the first time in our communitys history and we are honored to join the Chattanooga Downtown Lions Club in continuing this important conversation. Questions will be collected from the public via email at debate@wtciTV.org, on WTCI social media platforms and from co-presenting organizations and partners. Special thanks to the corporate sponsors and underwriters; including the Chattanooga Lions Club for their support of this broadcast. Lions Club officials said, The Chattanooga Lions Clubs and our contributing sponsors, in the spirit of promoting the principles of good government and good citizenship within the community, are pleased to help provide a forum for the open discussion of important matters of public interest, which we see as part of that goal. Two Walker County deputies have been placed on administrative leave with pay after allegations arose Saturday night that a female was assaulted by the two off-duty deputies at a Fort Oglethorpe apartment, according to Walker County Sheriff Steve Wilson. One of the men and the alleged female accuser were in a consensual relationship. The accuser has told authorities that the two men held her against her will and attempted to have sex with her. The accuser was able to leave the apartment and call law enforcement. Fort Oglethorpe Police initially responded to the call. Ft. Oglethorpe Police has requested the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to investigate the matter, Sheriff Wilson said. The men's names are not being released at this time. AkzoNobel has entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares of Fabryo Corporation S.R.L. (Fabryo), becoming the leader in the Romanian decorative paints market. The transaction includes two production facilities and six distribution centers for decorative paints, adhesives and mortars, including one of the largest decorative paints factories in the region, with capacity for further expansion. The business generated revenue of around 45 million in 2017 and is the only player with both a leading product portfolio for consumers as well as professional segments in the Romanian market, including brands Savana, APLA and InnenWeiss. Thierry Vanlancker, CEO of AkzoNobel, said: "This acquisition provides AkzoNobel with the number one position in a fast growing market and will contribute to delivering our Winning Together: 15 by 20 Strategy. Fabryo has a proven track record when it comes to growth and profitability. We are very happy to add top brands like Savana, APLA and InnenWeiss to our world class portfolio and look forward to welcoming our new colleagues to AkzoNobel." Ruud Joosten, COO of AkzoNobel, added: "We are very excited about the acquisition of Fabryo; a strong market leader for decorative paints in Romania led by an excellent team. Savana is the number one decorative paints brand among Romanian consumers. The strong sales and distribution capabilities of Fabryo will help us to further improve our business in the region, leveraging our combined resources and expertise, and strengthen our position as the leading paints and coatings company in Europe." Dragos Militaru, CEO of Fabryo, said: "We are looking forward to joining AkzoNobel. We both have passion for paint and we share the same values. Combining our efforts in Romania, building on AkzoNobel's global presence, will enable us to strengthen our leading position." The planned transaction is expected to be completed in the second half of 2018, subject to regulatory approval. CCPS, nonprofit launch winter coat fundraiser Audio Article If you see pictures of a pink flamingo wearing a scarf and a winter hat popping up around Chesterfield County, its for a good cause. The Chesterfield Education Foundation, in... For context, New York is Dunkins largest market, followed by the Boston area, said Travis, who declined to say where exactly Chicago ranks among the companys top markets. Dunkin says it has nearly 1,500 stores in the state of New York and almost 1,200 in Massachusetts. The companys restaurants are all franchised. Nuomici or snowball If youve ever had mochi, the outside of this snack has a similar texture soft, squishy, glutinous and slightly sweet. This chewy outside, rolled in coconut shavings, gives way to a smooth red-bean paste that is earthy and sugary. These also come plain or with other fillings, like peanuts, so sample other varieties to see what you like. Find it: Saint Anna Bakery, 2158 S. Archer Ave., 312-225-3168 Lasseter presented a major dilemma for Disney. He was seen as a visionary, with a keen story sense and an uncanny ability to understand what audiences craved. However, his professional behavior was a liability. Female employees told Variety that he had a reputation for touching women inappropriately in the office, including rubbing their legs and kissing them on the lips. Lasseter was also reprimanded for making out with a subordinate at an Oscar party in 2010, sources said. Disney has not commented publicly on whether or not it conducted an investigation into his behavior. Instead, it praised Lasseter's "remarkable tenure" at the company while announcing his exit. Nonetheless, Fox News has stuck with Ingraham through the controversy her nightly prime-time program The Ingraham Angle is still among the most watched on cable news. The program was carrying 15 minutes of national ad time before the boycott threat. In the weeks after the boycott, it was down to seven minutes per hour but has risen back up to 13 minutes as of last week. As the school year draws to a close, state officials are still in the process of hiring the monitor and hope to have one in place by August, said ISBE spokeswoman Jackie Matthews. In the meantime, advocates say that most of the same problems that led to the inquiry still exist and worry that a single monitor overseeing 50,000 CPS students with IEPs wont be enough to fix them. They also point out that corrective action will do little to undo the harm to students who were turned away without services for years. If this school can be shut down, what should other CPS schools aim for? What message does this send to the rest of Chicago? CPS must fix its school closings process to be equitable, transparent and fair. And until they do so, they must be held accountable. Community organizers will come together for a panel discussion about liberation. Juneteenth Celebration and Mass Liberation Conversation will take place from 5-8 p.m. Tuesday at the Ogden Park Fieldhouseat 6500 S. Racine Ave., according to an event flyer. The event will include members from anti-violence organizations such as Violence Interrupters and Give Up The Streets. He was on foot in the 4700 block of North Kimball Avenue when he argued with someone who shot him. He took himself to Swedish Covenant Hospital, but was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center where he had stabilized. Paramedics performed chest compressions on the 17-year-old as some in the crowd begged police to take the sheet off. Others spoke to the teen, encouraging him to pull through. The teen was carried into an ambulance and taken to Stroger Hospital in "very critical condition," according to police. She is entitled to the same due process as any other citizen, Greenberg said. I would think that a courts commission would be mindful of the rights of a defendant and that fact that a judgment is not final, and the fact that there is a constitutional process that has to play out. They instead are more concerned about money. In Greenbergs 38-page filing, he alleges, among other claims, that the use of hearsay testimony statements that Savio made to family members and in a written statement to police before she died, and statements Stacy Peterson made to her pastor and a divorce lawyer before her disappearance should never have been allowed. The judge overseeing Van Dykes murder case has also taken extraordinary measures to keep evidence from public view. Last month, the states highest court ruled that Judge Vincent Gaughan must end his practice of routing every court filing directly to his chambers. The order by the Illinois Supreme Court came after several news organizations, including the Chicago Tribune, accused Gaughan of patently unconstitutional conduct that has kept court filings in McDonalds shooting death under a veil of secrecy. More than 70 people attended Grantons funeral Monday morning at the Metropolitan Apostolic Community Church in Bronzeville. Some wore red or white shirts with sayings on the back such as Long Live Maurice or Fly high angel with his face printed on the front. As they walked up to his open casket decorated with a large bouquet of plastic red roses and orange flowers, some leaned in and kissed his cheek while others cried out and leaned onto one another for support. The formal complaint system is more often used for reports of misconduct against clergy, Wright said, and is based off a unifying principle of the faith, the Book of Discipline, which is essentially a code of conduct for Methodists. Wright said typically a conversation is had with the church member and sometimes the issue is elevated to mediation. In the most extreme case there could be a court trial, he said, with a member potentially having his or her membership revoked. He was ejected from the motorcycle and hit by a Chevrolet SUV that had been traveling in the middle lane northbound on the highway. Acevedo, who was on parole for a 2017 drug conviction, told officers his name was "Luis Rodriguez" and then "Angel Gonzalez." Police later determined Acevedo's true identity and his status as a parolee. He was arrested and charged with obstructing his identity and a parole violation, authorities said. I dont think you can be rehabilitated, she said. I dont think you even recognize that what you did was wrong, which makes you the most dangerous kind of predator and threat to society. I hope the judge has as much mercy on your sentence as you did on me when you raped me. "He was shot in the head and the prognosis is not good," Riccio told reporters Monday. "I do understand that paramedics looked at him, believed him to be deceased, covered him with that sheet and moved on to another individual who was nearby who was also shot. He did not have specific details of what paramedics did when they first arrived. But Chicago police 1st Deputy Superintendent Anthony Riccio said Monday that he understood paramedics looked at (Carey), believed him to be deceased, covered him with that sheet and moved on to another individual who was nearby who was also shot. In this June 12, 2018 photo, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un listens to U.S. President Donald Trump during a meeting on Sentosa Island in Singapore. (Evan Vucci / AP) To win conservative support, the budget would fast-track at least $302 billion in spending cuts over 10 years through a process that requires only 50 votes to pass the Senate, avoiding a Democratic filibuster, as long as the plan doesn't increase deficits after 10 years. The same reconciliation process was used in the failed attempt last year to repeal Obamacare and for the successful passage of the tax-code overhaul. Two conservative lawmakers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their deliberations said numerous House members are wary that the GOP compromise bill omits the E-Verify requirement and that it could give the parents of dreamers an indirect path to U.S. citizenship. Further raising doubts among conservative Republicans, the lawmakers said, is that the bill is all but dead on arrival in the Senate. The announcement came just a day after the U.N. human rights chief, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents. But Haley cited longstanding U.S. complaints that the 47-member council is biased against Israel. She had been threatening the pull-out since last year unless the council made changes advocated by the U.S. Fast-forward to April 2018. I was doing research for an article I was writing when I did a Google search for most visited websites in the world. I clicked on a link from the data-tracking website SimilarWeb that showed the top 50 most frequently visited sites worldwide. I wasnt surprised to see Google, Facebook and YouTube in the top three, but I was surprised to see an adult site in sixth place and especially surprised to see the name of that site I had encountered all those years earlier in 11th place. I clicked on the stats. It was the 11th most visited website in the world and the eighth most visited site in America. Then I saw the estimated number of visits that site receives: 2.74 billion monthly. (Contrast that to the kind of porn that was popular in my father's generation. Playboy.com currently ranks as the 32,237th most visited website in the world today a far cry from 11th place.) Economist Mark Zandi told the Journal that the U.S. economy would still grow in spite of the tariffs, just not as fast. So the president isn't exactly pushing the U.S. back into recession. Still, you have to wonder when Trump's supporters and the Republicans who represent them in Congress will start to squawk that it's costing them too much to put America First. I'm talking about provocateurs like the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. kids who've been watching with their eyes wide open while lawmakers elected by their parents and grandparents disinvested in public education, fanned the flames of climate change and facilitated the proliferation of assault weapons, all while mortgaging the country's future to give coal plant operators and opioid manufacturers bigger tax cuts. Perhaps. My father, Barney Lieberman, was the most gentle person I have ever known. Every movement was thought out and deliberate. He rushed to no conclusions, ever. He thought through every decision. Everything he did was marked by careful consideration and reflection. Trump boldly promised on the campaign trail that he would get rid of catch and release. But, as often is his practice, said nothing about such details as, what happens to the children of those who are charged and held? Thats the question that faces the nation now, as news reports broadcast gut-wrenching photos, video and recorded sounds of small children in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services crying out for their mothers and fathers. Having been immersed in clashes over race, class, and economic insecurities in recent American politics, Clarence Page writes that he is intrigued by the ways such issues have popped up on theater and at-home screens, not just here, but across the industrialized world. The city purchased the building in 1997 with plans to put it on the real estate market as part of its downtown redevelopment plans. The city did extensive exterior renovations in 2000 through the city's building facade program, which included repair of deteriorating masonry and window frames. Over the years it has been leased at below-market commercial rates for various start-ups through the city's business incubator program. What the impact will be of the July 31 closing of the Chicago Heights emergency room is difficult to fully measure at this point, but first responders and area hospitals are working to prepare for it as best they can, officials said. Inpatient care is scheduled to end around the same time as the closure of the ER, according to Franciscan Health. At about 12:30 a.m. Saturday, Matteson police responded to the 6200 block of Vollmer Road, between Central and Ridgeland avenues, for a man in the road, according to the release. As of June 13, nine rabid bats had been found in Illinois this year, according to the Illinois Department of Public Healths rabies surveillance map. The map, which is updated weekly on Wednesday, does not reflect the two rabid bats found last week in Will County, but does include a rabid bat found in Oak Lawn on June 1 one of three discovered in suburban Cook County so far this year. I had a lot of customers. Business was going well. I knew it was time, she said. I felt I had the potential to really grow. I would pass the place every day going to work. I would come to the window and look and think this could work. I would come in front, put my hand on the door and say, God, if this is for me, you will let everything go smoothly. "I don't believe it helps the gender dysphoric student by referring to them by the sex that they are not, she said at one point, when asked if not using ones gender pronoun preference is a form of bullying. I don't think that's a compassionate thing to do. And I don't consider it bullying to not join them in a denial of reality." Pueblo's 9 most haunted hangouts Pueblo is home to a diverse and complex history. It is also home to these 9 haunted houses and hangouts. A jade carving made in the Qing Dynasty (left) and a rare bronze water vessel known as Tiger Ying are believed to have been looted from Beijing's Old Summer Palace in 1860. [Photo/China Daily] Ownership, legality questions swirl around treasures looted from Old Summer Palace More than 150 years after French and British troops sacked Beijing's Old Summer Palace in 1860, relics that may have been taken from the site are showing up at foreign auction houses, prompting an outcry from China. Many other items thought to have been taken from the palace, which is also known as Yuanmingyuan, are housed in museums and private collections around the world. In recent years, Beijing has called for the return of such items and for them to be withdrawn from sale when listed by auction houses. Questions of ownership and the legality of selling items that may have been looted arose again recently when a rare bronze vessel was put up for sale at an auction house in the English city of Canterbury, Kent, in April. The provenance of the item can be traced to a Royal Marines captain, and, through documents found, it has been suggested the relic was taken during the looting of the palace. The auction had Chinese authorities crying foul and Chinese social media users venting their anger, with the nation's State Administration of Cultural Heritage issuing a statement in which it said it opposed the sale of illegally held cultural relics. It said in the statement it "strongly opposes and condemns Canterbury Auction Galleries' insistence on auctioning the suspected illegally obtained cultural artifact despite solemn protest from China and conducting commercial hype in the name of the wartime looting of cultural relics". The administration added that it would not support participation in the auction by Chinese individuals or institutions, and it called on potential bidders to boycott the sale. The destruction of the Old Summer Palace took place during the Second Opium War (1856-60). The buildings were first looted and then set ablaze under the direct orders of Lord Elgin, Britain's high commissioner to China. The looting and destruction were carried out in response to what the British claimed was the torture and, in some cases, deaths of several dozen British prisoners. French author Victor Hugo wrote about the destruction: "We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism. Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France; the other will be called England." While it is not known how many items survived the looting of the Yuanmingyuan, in 2009, the palace's then-director, Chen Mingjie, claimed that some 1.5 million objects were looted and that many are now scattered around the world. By 2016, the China Cultural Relics Academy estimated that 10 million Chinese items were overseas, including those in private collections. In the UK, items thought to have been looted are on display in several military museums, according to Louise Tythacott's paper Trophies of War: Representing Summer Palace, Loot in Military Museums in the UK. Tythacott, a lecturer at London's School of Oriental and African Studies and an anthropologist and museum curator, said, "Yuanmingyuan objects on display in military museums may be conceptualized as trophies of war, a mode of collection fundamentally characterized by power." She added, "Yuanmingyuan loot, reconfigured as trophies, thus represents a regiment's pride in a victorious campaign." Among the collections that include items from the palace are the Royal Engineers Museum's in Chatham, which Tythacott said holds the largest collection of material from the Old Summer Palace. The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology is known as a prestigious developer of carrier rockets, but in the near future, it may acquire a new tag: China's first space tourism provider. Engineers at the academy in Beijing's southern outskirts are designing a new spacecraft to send anyone willing to pay US$200,000 to US$250,000 on a suborbital journey to get a magnificent view of the stars and experience weightlessness, according to the academy, part of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp and the country's largest rocket maker. According to the plans, the reusable spacecraft, expected to enter service around 2028, will look like a fixed-wing aircraft without a vertical stabilizer-the upright fin at the tail-and be propelled by a rocket engine. It will blast off vertically like a typical carrier rocket but make a horizontal landing on a runway like an ordinary plane, according to the academy. It will operate in accordance with preset programs, with no pilot or controllers inside the spacecraft. With an inside area of more than 10 square meters, the spacecraft will be able to carry at most 20 travelers to an altitude of more than 100 kilometers, about 10 times the cruising altitude of a commercial jetliner. Passengers would stay there for over 10 minutes of sightseeing during the half-hour flight, according to the academy. They could see distant stars and Earth's contours through the windows, experience moments of weightlessness like astronauts, and perhaps even carry out scientific experiments. Zhao Jianbo, an engineer in charge of the program, said participants would need to undergo training sessions for several weeks at Chinese space establishments to get ready for the effects of gravitational acceleration and weightlessness. "They will not need to wear spacesuits during the journey because there will be oxygen and life-support instruments inside the spacecraft," he said. Project manager Han Pengxin said the spacecraft will be safe and reliable since it will employ the academy's cutting-edge technologies. Passengers would have to be between ages 18 and 65 and have neither heart disease nor hypertension, he said. Cai Qiaoyan, a senior researcher of reusable spacecraft at the academy, said maintaining the space tourism spacecraft would be easy, so it could be used for frequent flights. "After one flight, our engineers will only need to make some simple examinations of the spacecraft and refuel it, which could be done in as little as two days, and then the spacecraft could be used for a new flight," he said, adding that such a spacecraft could make some 50 flights before being retired. Globally, seven people have rocketed into space at their own expense. The trips were arranged by Space Adventures, a space tourism company in the US state of Virginia, and the tourists were passengers aboard Russian carrier rockets and spacecraft. Dennis Tito, an engineer and multimillionaire from the United States, was the world's first space tourist. Together with two Russian cosmonauts, Tito joined the Russian Soyuz TM-32 mission on April 28, 2001, and spent nearly eight days in space, orbiting Earth 128 times after receiving extensive training in Russia and reportedly paying US$20 million for his journey. He also was the first self-financed visitor to the International Space Station. In addition to the Chinese academy, several foreign space firms like the US' Blue Origin as well as Virgin Galactic of the United Kingdom have been developing reusable spacecraft for suborbital tourism, which has yet to become a reality. Wang Qi, one of China's most wanted fugitives, has returned to China and surrendered himself to the police on Sunday, according to a statement released Monday by the Communist Party of China Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. Wang, former director of the legal department of China Resources Microelectronics Ltd., is suspected of taking advantage of his position to unlawfully take possession of the money or property of his own company. He fled to Singapore in February 2013. Wang, born in 1974, is the first fugitive to give up since China released information on 50 fugitives suspected of duty-related or economic crimes on June 6, according to the statement. In April 2015, Interpol released a red notice listing 100 fugitives suspected of corruption for international arrest and Wang is one of them. Many of the fugitives are former government or state-owned enterprise employees. The past few years have witnessed a growing number of overseas Chinese returnees working as financiers or IT engineers in the nation's emerging first-tier cities, like Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province and Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, according to a report released by LinkedIn, an online global professional network, on June 14, 2018. According to the report, entitled "China's Attraction to Overseas Returnees," Chinese between the ages of 20 and 29 compose the largest sector of overseas returnees, yet their proportion has declined from 79.7 percent in 2013 to 52.2 percent in 2017. In the same period, however, the ratio of returned citizens in their 30s or 40s has risen from 16.5 percent to 30.6 percent, with the growth curve being especially pronounced since 2015, as a flock of returnees with more professional experience are being offered top-executive positions, the report revealed. According to the report, although the four top-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen remain appealing to many returnees, the cities of Hangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing and Suzhou are rising as competitive alternatives. Moreover, Beijing and Shanghai are losing their dominant position in attracting overseas returnees compared to the rapid growth reported in Hangzhou and Chengdu. The change may be attributed to China's increasingly balanced distribution of resources in urban development, suggested the report. The report also revealed that high-tech has replaced manufacturing as the second most popular sector in the job market for overseas returnees, with the number of computer science graduates doubling between 2011 and 2017. Meanwhile, finance continues to hold the top position as the most popular field for overseas returnees. Flash At least four people have been confirmed dead and 350 others have been injured after a 6.1-magnitude earthquake struck Osaka prefecture in western Japan on Monday. According to local authorities, in Takatsuki City, Osaka Prefecture, a 9-year-old girl was killed on her way to school when an outer wall at her school's swimming pool collapsed and a man in his 80s was confirmed dead after his house in the city of Osaka was leveled. Police and local district headquarters also said that another man in his 80s in the city of Ibaraki was seriously injured after being trapped under a bookshelf and was later pronounced dead after being rushed to hospital. An 81-year-old woman from Takatsuki was also confirmed dead after a cupboard collapsed on her, local media reported Monday evening. According to public broadcaster NHK, while local authorities have suggested the death toll is likely to rise, at least 350 people have been injured across multiple prefectures in western Japan as result of the quake. Japan's Disaster Management Minister Hachiro Okonogi said people were buried under the rubble of a collapsed building in Osaka while local rescue officials tried to rapidly locate them. Firefighters grappled to extinguish multiple blazes across Osaka, Hyogo, Kyoto and Mie prefectures, according to local authorities. As well as numerous outbreaks of fires and burst pipes flooding roads, at least 70 people were believed to be trapped inside elevators at one point in Osaka and nearby areas, local rescue officials said. While no tsunami warning or advisory was given as a result of the quake, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said the 6.1-magnitude quake was upwardly revised from a preliminary 5.9 temblor, which struck Osaka at 7:58 a.m. local time. According to Kansai Electric Power Co., more than 170,000 homes in Osaka and neighboring Hyogo prefectures suffered blackouts as a result of the quake, although power has since been restored. Osaka Gas Co. said it has suspended gas supply to around 108,000 households in Osaka as a precautionary measure against fires and some homes are without running water in northern Osaka, local utility firms said. Around 1,300 people have fled to emergency evacuation centers across Osaka, according to local authorities, and 1,000 public schools in Osaka, Kyoto, Hyogo and Nara prefectures called off classes and asked parents to collect their children. According to the Transport Ministry, both Shinkansen bullet train and local train services in the region were suspended with thousands of passengers left stranded, although bullet train services have resumed. Rescue officials, according to local media accounts, have been helping those stranded on trains stuck between stations to get to safety. Along with major commuter services being seriously disrupted, the three airports in the region, officials said, which were forced to temporarily suspend their services, have now reopened although a number of flights were delayed. Japanese Self-Defense Force (SDF) fighter jets and helicopters were deployed to the area to investigate the scene, government officials said. The epicenter of the quake was located at a latitude of 34.8 degrees north and a longitude of 135.6 degrees east and at a preliminary depth of 10 km, which was later revised to about 13 km, according to the weather agency. The quake logged lower 6 in some parts of Osaka prefecture and upper 5 in neighboring Kyoto prefecture on the Japanese seismic intensity scale which peaks at 7, according to the JMA. The jolt was also felt in the nearby prefectures of Hyogo, Kyoto, Shiga and Nara. Kansai Electric Power Co. said that no abnormalities were reported at the Takahama, Mihama and Oi nuclear plants in central Japan and in neighboring Fukui Prefecture. Officials said that all 15 nuclear reactors are functioning as normal. Senior government officials convened an emergency meeting at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's office to assess the situation early on Monday. Abe told a press briefing that the government will make its utmost efforts to deal with the effects of the powerful earthquake. He told reporters that government officials are operating under the instructions that saving and safeguarding peoples' lives is the priority. The Japanese premier also said he has given instructions for local officials to carry out damage assessments as quickly as possible and do their best to save and protect lives. Abe went on to say that he wanted the public to be kept informed as the disaster continues to unfold. Japan's top government spokesperson, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, meanwhile, told a press briefing that so far there have been no reports of serious infrastructural damage as a result of the quake. The JMA, for its part, has warned people in western Japan, however, to be on alert for further sizable earthquakes occurring in the next few days and for people to be vigilant for the possibility of buildings collapsing and rainy weather adding to the risk of potentially fatal mudslides henceforth. "Frequent seismic activity is continuing in the northern part of Osaka Prefecture. Strong tremors could have raised the risk of landslides or building collapse. People in such areas are advised to watch out for further seismic activity and rain," the JMA said. The high-intensity tremors of the quakewere owing to its shallow epicenter, seismologists said, with the government saying that Monday's quake would likely not trigger the "megaquake" off western Japan that many experts predicted will strike at some point in the not too distant future. A quake measuring magnitude 7.3 and the maximum 7 on Japan's seismic scale struck neighboring Hyogo Prefecture in 1995, killing more than 6,000 people. You are here: World Flash The U.S. Defense Department said on Monday that it has suspended all planning for a joint military exercise with South Korea in August. Pentagon spokesperson Dana White said that "the United States military has suspended all planning for this August's defensive 'wargame' (Freedom Guardian)." The decision was "consistent with President (Donald) Trump's commitment in concert with our Republic of Korea ally," she said in a statement. The United States will stop conducting war games with South Korea, Trump said in Singapore last week after a historic summit with Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). As for subsequent military drills, the spokesperson said, "We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent wargames have been made." There will be a meeting at Pentagon later this week on this issue attended by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, she added. Flash Britain's unelected House of Lords inflicted a major defeat Monday for Prime Minister Theresa May with a landslide vote in a debate on the government's Brexit bill. The vote came after the lords debated an amendment over the wording of what would be a meaningful vote on a final Brexit deal with the European Union (EU). May and her senior Brexit ministers were eager to avoid words in the Brexit bill that would tie their hands in their negotiations with Brussels. The House of Lords voted by 354 votes to 235 in favor of an amendment that had been worded by pro-EU Conservative MP, the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve. It will mean a new cliffhanger when MPs vote on Wednesday to decide how much of a say the British Parliament should have on a Brexit deal. Media reports in London said more than 22 Conservative peers voted against May's government in what will be seen as a massive blow for May and her government. Grieve said later the government went back on an agreement reached with May last week when he supported the government in the House of Commons during the debate on the Brexit withdrawal bill. He said the compromise reached was changed and made it unacceptable. Lord Hailsham, who led the anti-government rebellion in the Lords said he was asking members to make a decision to enable a House of Commons to vote on what Grieve believed had been agreed with the government last week. He described Brexit as a national calamity for Britain. Hailsham said the government's offer not only failed to deliver a promised meaningful vote but was worse. China Aviation Daily | Jun. 19, 2018 Powered by VariFlight incomparable aviation database,the monthly report of Airline On-time Arrival Performance provides an overview of how global airlines are performing in May , 2018. - Japan Airlines tops the global big airlines chart with an increase of 0.41 percent compared to April. - Among major airlines , China Eastern Airlines ranks 1st in mainland China and 8th in Asia-Pacific region. - Singapore Airlines has been ranked first among medium-sized airlines in the Asia-Pacific region for five consecutive months. - In May , Tianjin Airlines tops the chart among ten major airlines in mainland China , while Shanghai Airlines enjoys the most rapid YoY. - Xishuangbanna-Kunming Changshui route run by China West Air ranks first among Top 10 busiest flight routes in mainland China. Global Big Airlines JL Tops Global Big Airlines Japan Airlines tops the global big airlines chart in May with an on-time arrival rate of 97.80 percent increasing by 0.41 percent (compared to April) , which surpasses All Nippon Airways. Among the Top10 ranking list , Turkish Airlines is the only airline with over 40 , 000 flight arrivals. Source: VariFlight Figure 1: World's TOP10 best airlines for on-time arrivals (Big airlines , May , 2018) Global Medium-sized Airlines CM Tops Global Medium-sized Airlines COPA delivers the best on time performance among all medium-sized airlines worldwide with 98.04 percent punctuality increasing by 0.35 percent. UTair Aviations starts strong in May , surging to 2nd place from 9th last month. Source: VariFlight Figure 2: World's TOP10 best airlines for on-time arrivals (Medium-sized airlines , May , 2018) Asia-Pacific--Major Airlines MU Tops Asia-Pacific Major Airlines in Mainland China Japan Airlines ranks first among all major airlines in Asia-Pacific region with an on-time arrival rate of 97.80 percent. In mainland China , eight Chinese airlines are shortlisted. China Eastern Airlines , which ranks first in mainland China , moves up from 9th to 8th when compared to April. Source: VariFlight Figure 3: Best airlines in Asia-Pacific for on-time arrivals (Major airlines , May , 2018) Asia-Pacific--Medium-Sized Airlines SQ Tops the OTP Chart for Five Consecutive Months Since 2018 , Singapore Airlines has been ranked first among medium-sized airlines in the Asia-Pacific region for five consecutive months. In mainland China , Tianjin Airlines tops the list of medium-sized airlines with an on-time arrival rate of 85.81 percent , moving up from 12th place to 10th place. Source: VariFlight Figure 4: Best airlines in Asia-Pacific for on-time arrivals (Medium-sized airlines , May , 2018) Mainland China--Ten Major Airlines GS Tops the OTP Chart , FM Enjoys the Most Rapid YoY in OTP Tianjin Airlines , ranked 5th in April , reaches the number one position among ten major Chinese airlines in May , followed by China Eastern Airlines. Compared with last year , Shanghai Airlines enjoys the most rapid increase in OTP of 8.62% , followed by Shenzhen Airlines of 7.32% and Hainan Airlines of 5.35%. Source: VariFlight Figure 5: Best Chinese major airlines for on-time arrivals (May , 2018) Mainland China--Regional Airlines RY Ranks First for Three Consecutive Months , CN Enjoys the Most Rapid Increase Jiangxi Airlines ranks first for three consecutive months among all regional airlines with an on-time arrival rate of 91.90 percent. Compared with last year , Grand China Air enjoys the most rapid increase in OTP of 9.31% , followed by Juneyao Airlines of 6.51% and 9 Air of 6.43%. Source: VariFlight Figure 6: Best regional Chinese airlines for on-time arrivals (May , 2018) Mainland China--Top 10 Hot Routes Xishuangbanna-Kunming Changshui Route Run by China West Air Tops OTP Chart Among Top 10 domestic hot routes , Xishuangbanna-Kunming Changshui route has the highest OTP run by China West Air. There are three routes run by Hainan Airlines , namely Shanghai Hongqiao-Guangzhou Baiyun , Guangzhou Baiyun-Shanghai Hongqiao , Beijing Capital-Chengdu Shuangliu. Notes for editors Period: May 1- May 31 2018 Flights: Commercial passenger flights only. Cargo aircrafts , corporate jets and general aviation are excluded. Actual departure flights: Departure flights that have actual take-off time and actual departure time in VariFlight database. Canceled flights are excluded. Actual arrival flights: Arrival flights that have actual take-off time and actual departure time in VariFlight database. Canceled flights are excluded. Big Airlines: Airlines with over 400 daily actual arrival flights. Medium-sized Airlines: Airlines with 200 to 400 daily actual arrival flights. On-time departure flights: ATD-STD<30mins On-time arrival flights: ATA-STA<30mins On-time arrival rate: On-time Arrival Flights/Actual Arrival Flights * 100% On-time release rate: On-time Departure Flights/Actual Departure Flights*100% Average departure delay: Total Departure Delay/Actual Departure Flights (Departure delay of a single flight: ATD-STD. If a flight departs ahead of the scheduled time of departure , then the result is zero.) Average arrival delay: Total Arrival Delay/ Actual Arrival Flights (Arrival delay of a single flight: ATA-STA. If a flight arrives ahead of the schedule time of arrival , then the result is zero.) Contributed by VariFlight ss ss ss The ancient Chinese tradition of dragon boat racing took place at Jinji Lake in Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu province, on June 18. [photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] The ancient Chinese tradition of dragon boat racing has become a common cultural event for both paddlers from home and abroad across China. One such event took place at Jinji Lake in Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu province, on June 18. The city has hosted the annual race titled "Shared Joy in Jiangsu" for eight consecutive years on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, with enthusiastic participants and spectators alike making for a great festive atmosphere. The festival commemorates the death of Qu Yuan, a Chinese poet who drowned himself in a river following the defeat of his homeland capital in the middle of China's Warring States period. To keep the scavenging fish away from his body, villagers took to their boats, beat their drums, and splashed their paddles. Thousands of spectators flocked to the Moonlight Wharf in the early morning to watch the race, as 66 teams from home and abroad competed against each other, including ten teams made up of 220 foreign athletes. Teams of paddlers powered down the 300-meter waterway in Jinji Lake in long, narrow boats to the rhythmic beating of drums, aiming to win in three categories. The event has enjoyed a boosted profile in recent years as an increasingly international celebration of Dragon Boat Festival, as people from many different nationalities transcend their cultural differences to be part of the tradition which dates back over 2,000 years. We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form 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. CRJM anunta concurs de selectare a unei companii sau persoane fizice care sa presteze servicii de traducere scrisa Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Market Highlights: The study reveals that rugged display is trending in North America region. The latest rugged displays are widely used for military display as these display covers large display sizes with infrared touch-screen technology and rugged data storage which can be used for viewing information, maps and charts, video, images. The rugged smart displays are embedded with smartphone & portable computer, vehicle-mounted computer, laptop, tablet PC and others. The rugged displays are designed to meet the requirements of various sectors including industrial, commercial, defense and others. These sectors are looking for advanced laminated, glass improve durability, impact resistance, brightness, contrast, sunlight readability rugged display. In North America region, the rugged display market is growing due to the increasing trend of digital transformation. The latest technologies are designed to withstand tough condition. For instance, the light weight devices are designed with rugged display that are highly durable, shock absorbent, portable, can withstand with rough handling, dust and rain. In 2015, General Micro Systems Inc. (U.S.) has introduced RuggedView smart displays that covers large display. It offers high level of ruggedness, ultra-dense, super-rugged smart display, and high performance at a very low cost. Get Sample Report of Global Rugged Display Market @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4131 The global rugged display market is growing rapidly over ~5% of CAGR and is expected to reach at USD ~ 10 Billion by the end of forecast period. Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 30 market data tables and figures spread over 100 numbers of pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on The Global Rugged Display Market Research Report -Forecast to 2023. Major Key Player of Rugged Display Market: The prominent players in the global rugged display market Sparton Corporation (US), Xplore Technologies Corporation (US), Panasonic Corporation (Japan), Getac Technology Corporation (Taiwan), Samsung Group (South Korea), Zebra Technologies Corporation (U.S), Bluestone Technology Ltd (U.S), Chassis Plans (U.S), Sonim Technologies Inc. (U.S.), Kyocera Corporation (Japan) among others. Global Rugged Display Market Segmentation: The global rugged display market is bifurcated on the basis of type, operation system, ruggedness, end- users and region. The type is segmented into dot-matrix, LCD, LED and others. The operating system is segmented on the basis of iOS, windows, android and others. The ruggedness is segmented into semi-rugged, fully rugged, ultra-rugged and others. The end-users is segmented into government and defense, aerospace, hospitals, industrial, commercial and others. The region includes North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and rest of the world. Regional Analysis: The regional analysis of rugged display market is being studied for region such as Asia pacific, North America, Europe and Rest of the World. North America is one of the leading region across the world in terms of market share in rugged display market as it has huge demand in many sectors including aerospace, government, industries and others. The rugged display market in Europe region is expected to witness rapid growth in the forthcoming period. Whereas, Asia-Pacific countries like China, Japan and South Korea is an emerging market for rugged display and expected to be the highest CAGR in the coming years as the companies are taking interest in deploying the rugged display in the market. The global Rugged Display Market is expected to grow at USD ~10 Billion by 2023, at ~5% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023. Market Research Analysis: On geographic basis, global rugged display market is studied in different regions as Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of world. It has been observed that North America region is leading with largest market share growth in the rugged display market. The rugged display is gaining huge demand as it can prevent the devices from accidental damage, built in industrial docking connectors, and low cost. In this market, Europe is to be estimated to be the second largest market share for rugged display during the forecast period. Intended Audience: Rugged Display manufacturing companies Display panel manufacturers Display manufacturing equipment suppliers Display-related service providers Original equipment manufacturers Rugged Display providers Research and development companies Market research and consulting firms Solution providers Technology standards organizations Technology investors System Integrators Table of Contents 1 Market Introduction 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Scope of Study 1.2.1 Research Objective 1.2.2 Assumptions 1.2.3 Limitations 1.3 Market Structure: 1.3.1 Global Rugged Display Market: By Types 1.3.2 Global Rugged Display Market: By Operation System 1.3.3 Global Rugged Display Market: By Ruggedness Level 1.3.4 Global Rugged Display Market: By End User 1.3.5 Global Rugged Display Market: By Region 2 Research Methodology 2.1 Research 2.2 Primary Research 2.3 Secondary Research 2.4 Forecast Model Continues... Access Full Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/rugged-display-market-4131 List of Tables Table 1 Rugged Display Market, By Type Table 2 Rugged Display Market, By Operation System Table 3 Rugged Display Market, By Ruggedness Level Continues... List of Figures Figure 1 Research Methodology Figure 2 Rugged Display Market: By Type (%) Figure 3 Rugged Display Market: By Operation System (%) 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 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 Us: Market Research Future Office No. 528, Amanora Chambers Pune 411028 Maharashtra, India Phone: +91 841 198 5042 Mail: sales@marketresearchfuture.com The Chinese e-commerce firm lays out the blueprint for the strategy at a press conference in Guangzhou, China Aomygod CEO Liu Liping : Aomygod.com expects to take the lead in integrating shopping scenarios thanks to its recently rolled-out online-offline shopping model GUANGZHOU, China, June 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Aomygod.com, a China-based e-commerce platform that specializes in selling high-end imported goods, held a press conference in Guangzhou, China on June 11, at which the firm's CEO laid out its 2018 strategy. Dubbed "Integration Represents the Future Trend of E-commerce", the strategy calls for having the firm's platform, modeled on its ecosystem, work with outstanding brands worldwide during the remainder of the year, to build an integrated platform combining its online and offline businesses, with the aim of creating a better future for its users by promoting full integration of supply chain, merchandise, shopping scenarios and technology. Attendees included top management executives from Aomygod.com's partners IDC, L'Oreal, Unilever, Wyeth and Mead Johnson, several o! f China's most authoritative institutions, among them, the China Electronic Commerce Association, the School of Data and Computer Science at Sun Yat-sen University and the Computer Network Information Center (CNIC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Guangzhou, in addition to domestically influential bloggers Touzijia ("The Capitalist"), tiaoxiEC, Shenzhen Tigonglian ("Shenzhen Supply Chain"), Hua'erjie Cankao (338362.kuaizhan.com) and TMTPOST. At the event, the attendees, in concert with Aomygod.com, will be given an opportunity to glimpse at what the future portends for China's e-commerce sector. At the press conference, which opened with a mesmerizing light show and countdown, Aomygod CEO Liu Liping delivered a keynote speech, elaborating on the platform's new strategy for 2018 and beyond. She said that the platform will continue its commitment to the consumer experience which is expected to become one of the key factors behind an e-commerce business' success, as driven by the change in expectations among shoppers that is taking place across China and the response by businesses servicing those shoppers. As a result, the integration of the online and offline businesses is bound to set the direction of future trends for the e-commerce sector. Consolidating the online and offline business to create a new experience for retail customers With the growth of the Chinese economy thanks to the continued implementation of the supply-side structural reform in China, and the coming of age of the generation born after 1990 who are driving the trend that necessitated a restructuring of the industry, shoppers increasingly value quality of product and experience over price and their demands have become more diversified. Driven by the rapid growth of the e-commerce sector, the generational shift in buying habits and expectations, and the change of the demographic profile of mainstream consumers, the online-offline consumer-centric model is expected to become the standard bearer for the retail market.A A Cross-border e-commerce platforms have always been hobbled by their failure to deliver a scenario-based shopping experience. Ms. Liu emphasized Aomygod.com's plan to strongly promote the consolidated online-offline shopping model, to fashion a perfect shopping experience regardless of the scenario, and to do so through the application of advanced technology and the coordination between multiple shopping scenarios. Aomygod.com has built a new integrated online-offline system for its vast array of goods and its members that has been perfected for the four key shopping scenarios: the website, the mobile app, the store in the WeChat Mall and physical sales outlets, allowing online shoppers to have the same sense of enjoyment as they do when they make purchases at one of its brick-and-mortar stores. This system also assures online shoppers that the product, the price and the final point-of-sale experience are no different than that provided at one of the physical stores, in ad! dition to offering a full range of delivery options, including concierge service, customer pick-up, free delivery within 3 kilometers and express delivery. Aomygod.com has already enhanced the shopping experience and improved operational efficiency by virtue of its integrated solutions for members, marketing, product and data.A Aomygod.com optimized every step across the supply chain and order workflow to create a new shopping scenario The e-commerce firm has been unremitting in its efforts to improve the shopping experience. Besides the online-offline shopping model, the platform has also been hard at work on online solutions for products, technology, members and data, in a move to continuously improve the shopper's experience. Ms. Liu stated in her speech that the new shopping scenario provided by the firm not only helps to improve the experience but also assure the quality of products, giving consumers access to all the tools necessary to choose and purchase products that are most suitable for their needs. Aomygod.com has also built a comprehensive logistics system, laying a sound foundation for the integration of its online and offline businesses. Working with franchisees to create a better future At the event, a brand representative shared his insights about the brand's cooperation with Aomygod.com in the wake of Ms. Liu's speech. Aomygod.com, with a professional team having over ten years of experience in operations, an inventory of more than 100,000 SKUs, a network of over 3,000 service sites across China and a proprietary IP-based business model, is well positioned to create a unified, integrated marketing and operational approach for its franchisees, while providing premium services, including member integration, online-offline brand franchising services, a one-stop technology platform and consistent service standards, said the representative in his speech. Going forward, Aomygod.com plans to work closely with its franchisees to achieve a win-win situation and create a better future. Aomygod.com also signed agreements with franchisees across the supply chain at the press conference. Considering that integration is the defining trend of the moment for the e-commerce sector, Aomygod.com plans to continuously enhance operational efficiency and reduce costs by integrating and coordinating all segments across the supply chain, while delivering an immersive shopping experience to consumers via its online-offline shopping model. The launch of Aomygod.com's new strategy for 2018 will provide a path for the platform to be the vanguard in the new era of retail and help to achieve a win-win situation not only for the platform, but also for consumers and franchisees, enabling the three parties to create a better future together. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/706740/Aomygod_new_strategy.jpg UTRECHT, Netherlands, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Vatican has agreed to loan one of the masterpieces by the Italian painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) to Centraal Museum Utrecht. It is the first time for this work to be displayed in the Netherlands. The work can be admired for just four weeks starting on 15 December 2018, as part of the exhibition Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe.A The entombment of Christ is a monumental altarpiece measuring more than three by two meters. It is one of the most important pieces in the collection of the Vatican museums, and is therefore rarely loaned. An exception is being made for the major exhibition Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe, which will run from 15 December 2018 to 24 March 2019. Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe comprises more than sixty loans, forty-six of which have never visited the Netherlands before. These loans come from museum and private collections in the US and Europe, including the Vatican museums, the MusAe du Louvre in Paris, the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, The National Gallery of Art in London and The National Gallery of Art in Washington, as well as churches in Rome. Aside from Caravaggio's Entombment, his St Jerome in Meditation from the Monasterio de la Virgen de Montserrat will also be on display, another piece that has never been exhibited in the Netherlands b! efore. Caravaggio's EntombmentA Caravaggio painted The Entombment of Christ around 1602/04 for the family chapel of Girolamo Vittrice in the Chiesa Nuova in Rome. According to Roman painter and biographer of artists Giovanni Baglione (1566-1643), contemporaries viewed this majestic painting as Caravaggio's best work by far. Christ's body gleams against the dark background, in which the tomb's entrance is just barely visible. His torso rests on John's supporting right arm; Nicodemus bears his lower body. He grasps Christ's knees with both arms, his hands clasped together to strengthen his grip. Behind them stand three women. The Virgin Mary's tired, sorrowful gaze is cast down; the beautiful Mary Magdalene wipes away the tears issuing from her closed eyes. Mary of Cleophas, in contrast, raises her eyes to the sky, arms wide and mouth open in a desperate scream. Elevated on the stone grave cover on which ! he will b e anointed and wound in cloth, they show us, the viewers, Christ. Utrecht, Caravaggio and EuropeA In 1600, Rome was the centre of the world. Young painters from all corners of Europe travelled to the Eternal City, where - so the rumours said - Caravaggio was causing a revolution in the art of painting: a new realism, with chiaroscuro of unprecedented intensity. The Utrecht painters Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst travelled there to see it for themselves. Between 1600 and 1630, when European Caravaggism was at its prime, some 2700 artists were registered in Rome, 572 of whom were foreigners. These artists visited the same churches and collections. They conversed with each other. And they painted. The themes were the same, the sources of inspiration were the same, but the final results were all entirely unique. It is these differences between the European followers of Caravaggio that Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe examines. The thematic presentation of the pieces reveals how each artist's works remained rooted in his own cultural background. Strong partnershipA Centraal Museum organises Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe in close collaboration with the Bayerischen StaatsgemAldesammlungen in Munich. The exhibition will open in Centraal Museum Utrecht on 15 December 2018 and continue until 24 March 2019, after which it will travel to Alte Pinakothek, Munich (17 April 2019 to 21 July 2019). Please see the included video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVU5Lr1mCuw or download: https://we.tl/Nd4R1vvEJU . Public Education Privatisation is Class Warfare All major Australian political parties are pursuing educational policies which maintain and extend the privatisation of the Australian education system. This private/public model is accepted without debate because of the vested interests that such a debate would offend and threaten. Yet its a broken model which is holding back education, disadvantaging the majority of students and the progress of society as a whole. The inequitable reality created is often justified by the ideological catchcries, freedom of choice and user pays. In fact, what we are seeing is the skewing of educational policy and funding to benefit big business and to embed the profit motive as the main driver of educational decisions. From this openly partisan position the values of equality of opportunity and education as a right, have no place and the intrinsic value of education for the individual and society is denied. In recent decades the public-private seesaw has tipped even more towards privatisation and away from an ideal of free universal public education. Massive funding cuts, funding bias and the penetration of edu-business into the growing education industry, are only the tip of the iceberg which is crushing Australian public education. Gonski circumvented The constant battle over Commonwealth funding of primary and secondary education reflects this trend and its ideological underpinnings. Gonski in his first report made a number of recommendations to address the urgent need for reform in primary and secondary education and these received, on the surface, bipartisan support. Gonskis recommendations required a massive injection of funding to schools to ensure programs and resources needed to raise educational standards were available to all students at a basic resource standard, Schooling Resource Standard SRS. Gonski also tried to go some way towards redressing the private schools funding bias. The Turnbull government refused to fully fund Gonski recommendations and then came to the table with a new plan costing $19 billion less. Its revised plan ensured the bias in federal funding to private schools, which Gonski had attempted to replace with a needs based formula, was further reinforced. Late last year the Turnbull government cut a further $2.2 billion from the education budget over the next two years. Public schools will lose a massive $1.9 billion of this money despite the fact that these schools educate the majority of Australian children. This plan will mean the federal government will now fund public school children at a level of 20 percent of what Gonski said was a minimum Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), but at the same time will fund private school students at 80 percent of the minimum SRS. It is blatantly biased but made worse by the fact that the need for full resourcing of our public schools is necessary because the public system is doing the heavy lifting in education. Students with greater need or disadvantage overwhelmingly attend public schools, including students from low socioeconomic-economic backgrounds, special needs students, students with disabilities and children who speak English as a second language. TAFE The small government mantras of user-pays and private equals competition and less waste also laid the ideological ground for the dismantling of TAFE and opened the way new private educational industry in post-secondary education. This new industry exploited not only Australian students but also many desperate and vulnerable overseas students. TAFE was slowly hacked to pieces and public money was re-routed to subsidising a myriad of private colleges, institutes and shady providers. These often shonky private colleges and institutes have since been plagued by scandal and corruption involving fake enrolments, dodgy diplomas and non-existent courses. Many millions in government subsidies have disappeared down the black hole that is privatisation. Unis business model At yet another level the privatisation agenda has replaced free university education for all with the user-pays ideological model. The introduction of fees, followed closely by repeated funding cuts to universities, has pushed universities into adopting business models to meet their funding needs. Educational decisions at universities are now increasingly influenced by these business model which are usually always in contradiction with best educational practice. The dependence of university researchers on grants and sponsorship from industry often determines the direction of research undertaken, not the need or social value of this research. In teacher education, a possibly unintentional trend has begun to emerge which can be directly linked to the underfunding of universities and the fee-paying model. Data is emerging that shows universities are increasingly accepting students into teaching degrees with lower and lower ATARs. It appears teacher education may be becoming a cash cow for many universities. It appears that fees from teacher education courses can provide universities with a strong guaranteed income. Future teachers and students will be the victims of this short-sighted economic side effect of user pays in education. This is not a surprise when we refuse to plan for the future based on social values and it is no different in many other sectors of the capitalist economy including the environment, aged care, health, employment and developing a people-based economy and the list goes on. It is clear the profit motive has subsumed the greater good and led education down a dead-end path. What has not always been obvious on this one way road is the insidious reach of edu-businesses into both the resourcing of teachers and schools, and into the lucrative provision of professional support and consultancy roles in the education industry. Edu-business NAPLAN NAPLAN is a clear example. All education stakeholders agree NAPLAN is not about assessing learning of the NSW curriculum but about teaching to the test. NAPLAN underpins the insidious MY School website which gives parents the misguided impression that a schools NAPLAN ranking can help them find the best school for their child. It creates wasteful competition between students and schools and unnecessarily pressures student and distracts teachers. What many parents do not know is that the last bastion preventing the downfall of NAPLAN is not the Department of Education in NSW but the multinational edu-businesses which make huge profits from NAPLAN. The NAPLAN market produces for schools, governments and parents test resources including workbooks, practices papers, data analysis services, preparation development of tests, remedial services, management and online services to the value of hundreds of millions of dollars and is growing. Again we have to ask in whose interests is education policy being pursued? To build resistance to the recent Turnbull/LNP cuts to public education the NSW Teachers Federation has recently launched its Fair Funding Campaign which it hopes will build understanding and support for the need to vote the Coalition out of office in the coming federal elections. The ALP, the Greens and others often frame the education debate in terms of fairness but this limits the debate to the space between the Coalition Liberal Nationals and the other reforming parties who are happy to stay on the seesaw. They do not challenge or reveal the economic and political class interests that are represented by these policies. The ALP and the Greens may have a fairer policy on education but they do not fight for a single quality public education system, fully resourced and committed to planning for the future. They are happy to lurch between a bit fairer and unfair depending on an election outcome. They will not challenge vested interests by demanding free universal public education fully resourced and funded. The recent second Gonski Report was highly critical of the continuing failures of the Australian education system. It made a raft of new recommendations for improving education outcomes which the federal government again allied itself with. It did not however acknowledge or commit to the extra funding needed to realise the reports recommendations. The pressure will now be on teachers to deliver more with less. Budgeting less money for public schools is not just irresponsible or accidental, it reflects an ideological commitment to a user pay system and small government that is only in the interests of big businesses who avoid paying taxes and/or want taxes to be used for subsidies to the private sector. It is an ideological commitment to provide opportunities for the wealthier sections of society while limiting the outcomes for the majority and particularly those students who are disadvantaged economically or in other ways. Signing up for their public education campaigns like the NSW Teachers Federations Fair Funding Now campaigns is important and necessary to maintain the fight back. At the same time we must fight politically and ideologically for fully funded universal public education and for an economic and political system that represents the interests of the vast majority. Education is a right not a privilege is the catchcry of our communist ideology because it benefits every child equitably and it benefits society as a whole, not a privileged minority. * Dorothy Costa is a public school teacher and a member of the CPAs Central Committee Fight for Country Yindjibarndi Traditional Owners takes a swipe at Forrest He makes billions and billions of dollars from our murra, our country, that he destroyed, wrecked. They wrecked our sacred sites. Our country is wrecked. But you know what? It never stopped us Yindjibarndi people from fighting for our country. With these words part of her story of her peoples fight for exclusive native title Yindjibarndi woman Margaret Read summed up the conflict with one of Australias biggest iron ore miners, Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) over land in the Pilbara. Ms Read, deputy chair of the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation, was one of many Traditional Owners who spoke at the National Native Title Conference, held in Broome, Yawuru country, last week, with the theme Many laws, one country. The Yindjibarndis native title case has pitted family against family. It has seen a rich mining company, FMG, back a breakaway group, the Wirlu Murra Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation (WMYAC), and use numerous legal tactics to try and block the claims of the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation (YAC). There have been claims, overlapping claims and counter claims by other Aboriginal groups. In 2003 YACs non-exclusive rights to their traditional lands were recognised. But since that time theyve faced court case after court case to have their exclusive rights recognised. But, finally, in July last year, the Yindjibarndi people were granted exclusive native title rights to their country including the area where the Solomon iron ore mine is situated, owned by FMG, the mining company founded by billionaire Andrew Twiggy Forrest. It was the most joyous, happiest occasion for the Yindjibarndi nation, Ms Read said. Our people were so happy because it meant we could go back and live on our country again. And then we have a squatter who comes and mines on our country. This squatter gave away $457 million last year. And what did he want to pay us when we had some negotiation with him? He wanted to pay us a one-off $4 million cap. FMG appealed the YACs native title decision, with the case due to be heard later this year by a full bench of the Federal Court. He thought he could come in, conquer and divide. But he didnt conquer us Yindjibarndi people. He divided our families, Ms Read said. The division caused Yindjibarndi people against Yindjibarndi people. To this day, it causes such a rift in our community, our tribe. This squatter caused hatred among our people. We were all divided by this one person and the other people hated the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal corporation and its members for standing up and being strong. He caused fear. Some of our old people were too frightened to go out and about because they thought theyd be verbally and physically abused, which some of them were. We, as Yindjibarndi people, dont really care about money. All we really care about is getting our murra, our country, back. In the 1950s and 60s, Yindjibarndi people were forced off their land, with many people made to live in Roebourne. For our ancestors, having to go and reside in another mans country was quite difficult, Ms Read said. We are a proud, strong nation to live in exile on someone elses country was a very sad moment for us. On its website FMG, describes the Solomon hub as comprising of two iron ore mines, which together have the capacity to produce 70-75 million tonnes per annum. In 2015, Federal Court Judge Stephen Rares found FMG had provided support and resources to WMYAC, who were trying to convince Yindjibarndi people to take a $4 million deal with FMG. Fortescue had also awarded millions of dollars worth of contracts on its Solomon hub to the Eastern Guruma and Wirlu Murra Aboriginal corporations. FMG has yet to pay any money to YAC. This squatter, he continues to make billions and billions of dollars on our land but he refuses to pay any rent to us, Ms Read said. But we dont care we are people who care for our land. We are proud to be Yindjibarndi. Koori Mail We acknowledge the Sovereignty of the First Nations Peoples. Home The Guardian Current Issue PDF Archive Web Archive Subscribe Press Fund CPA About Us Why you should ... CPA introduction CPA Policies CPA statements Contact Us facebook, twitter Major Issues Indigenous Unions Health Housing Climate Change Peace Solidarity/Other What's On Resources AMR Links Shop@CPA Books, T-shirts, CDs/DVDs, Badges, Misc Change the Rules Change the System CPA Statement on the Change the Rules Campaign The Communist Party of Australia welcomes the ACTU and trade union movement campaign to Change the Rules with respect to Australias flawed industrial relations laws. The Communist Party of Australia will work with trade unions and left and progressive forces to achieve the stated demands to attain new rights for workers in Australia. Though even with these demands being met the nature of exploitation under capitalism will not be changed until capitalism can finally be replaced by a socialist society, so we also say lets not only Change the Rules but lets Change the System as well. That does not diminish our support for this campaign and struggle to achieve new and real rights for working class people, to at least be able to better defend themselves against the imposition of corporate tyranny they experience in their workplaces daily. The laws for workers are broken. The Fair Work Act however is working very well for the ruling class and employers. Workers are suffering severe attacks from employers, with their standard of living falling constantly. Unions and workers are being criminalised for taking brave and heroic actions in defence of their rights and their lives. All of these attacks on the working class must be stopped and be turned around through ongoing campaigning and struggle to cement rights that give workers the capacity to fight back and restore gains lost and to build new rights. Only a sustained mass movement will provide the basis of success for this campaign. Corporate power has never enjoyed so many rights as today in Australia. Workers have been hamstrung with anti-union laws and the removal of basic rights that allowed a semblance of a fight-back. While the capacity of workers to struggle has been removed in a bourgeois legal sense, that capacity of course still exists amongst the working class and should be fully utilised by the movement to meet the demands. The Communist Party of Australia agrees with many of the major demands that are emanating from the Change the Rules movement although some of the claims for new rights have been left somewhat vague with insufficient detail. The right to strike is an example of this vaguely described political and industrial demand. While tactical considerations can be considered in areas of campaigning, the outline and willingness to fight for the full right to strike needs to be stated. An encouraging sign from the Change the Rules campaign is a recognition that the working class disarmed itself after the election of the Rudd government. The Your Rights at Work campaign which was primarily responsible for the election of Labor and the unseating of Howard was destroyed to prevent any opposition to the incoming Labor government, a strategy which let Labor off the hook to act as they wished in the parliamentary wing of that party. Labor betrayed the unions and the working class and did not deliver promised outcomes for workers. The ALP even maintained the dreaded star chamber ABCC which continues to fine and criminalise working class action and has resulted in loss of life due to the criminalising of workers defending themselves around safety. Flowing from this, many unionists and leaders within the trade union movement have said that the movement will pursue Labor if they do not deliver for working people. We support this proposition and agree Labor must be held to account and if necessary a Labor government should bear the full brunt of working class reprisal when they choose to side with the employing class yet again. To adopt any other approach would see us again on the treadmill of betrayal and will not progress the cause of the working class. Following through on this position is vital to the integrity of the union movement as a whole. Of the many demands being put forward by the campaign, the CPA would like to highlight what we believe are the most important demands of the campaign. The CPA believes that workers must have full rights to strike. The Partys policy position is to remove any barrier to industrial action and this includes the removal of all secondary boycott provisions including actions in solidarity with workers, communities and movements locally to international struggles of workers and peoples Removal and abolition of the ABCC must be non-negotiable as is the abolition of the Registered Organisations Commission (ROC). Industry-wide and supply chain bargaining rights must be enshrined. Enterprise agreements were always a retreat and every attempt to move to broader forms of bargaining are supported by the CPA The right of a worker to be represented at any time, at any workplace by a union is vital in being able to stem the tide of union decline. The CPA believes in full rights for unions to inspect, represent, enter and be provided with all relevant employment data No limitations or restrictions on what can be bargained into agreements Direct permanent employment is CPA employment policy. Labor hire and involuntary casual and precarious work must ultimately be abolished. This is an unlikely outcome arising out of this campaign but protections are required to ensure some security of employment for workers. We support any restrictions on these forms of employment to achieve that final goal Full and equal pay for women Pay rises for workers with less capacity must be flowed on from workers that have the capacity to fight. This could include solidarity actions in terms of action flowing from the right to strike as well as legal mechanisms to ensure awards keep pace with the cost of living. Non-award agreement outcomes should flow to all workers under award coverage The CPA supports government procurement policies that directly support local manufacturing industries Penalty rates must be restored and improved to the highest social standards Strong statutory domestic violence leave to deal with the scourge of domestic violence in Australia must be a legislated right for all. The Communist Party of Australia highlights the absolute importance of every worker joining their union. The Communist Party of Australia encourages all members to be active in the Change the Rules campaign. The Communist Party of Australia is organising our members to coordinate their activity and get behind this push to win new rights for workers recognising always that we need to maintain the fight to change the very system of capitalism itself which lies at the heart of the problem for workers. Next article Aged care for-profit tax abuse Back to index page Union case against Foodora The Transport Workers Union (TWU) is already fighting sham-contracting at Foodora after taking several cases of unfair dismissal. The union also criticised Foodora over leaked internal emails which showed the company was aware it was engaging in sham-contracting. A survey of riders has shown three out of every four riders is paid below minimum rates. We welcome the Fair Work Ombudsmans legal action against Foodora, a company which has openly flouted the law by denying its workforces rights. But action must go broader than just one company and just a few riders, said TWU federal secretary Tony Sheldon. All workers deserve the rights and protections that generations have fought hard for. The on-demand economy is a tired example of old-fashioned exploitation with tech billionaires reaping the benefits at the communitys expense. The federal government is refusing to regulate rights for all workers regardless of being alleged contractors. The sham-contracting comes as no surprise to the thousands of delivery riders who are working in the on-demand economy. Food delivery companies control all aspects of the work riders do, demanding they work shifts and penalising them if they dont work where and when the companies want them to. The flexibility is all on the side of the companies with the riders bearing all of the risk. Riders have no superannuation, no guaranteed minimum rates and can work shifts for no pay at all. They can be sacked without warning and for spurious claims as the companies argue they have little or no rights. This area is crying out for regulation, he added. The TWU recently signed agreements with Coles and Airbnb to ensure fair and safe conditions for workers in the on-demand economy. Riders have protested in Melbourne and Sydney in recent months over pay and conditions. The rider survey also found: Fighting and winning Workers in Britains catering and hospitality industry have suffered decades of exploitation, including low pay and uncertain hours. Now they are fighting back. The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) is organising at fast-food chain McDonalds. Last September, strike action took place at McDonalds outlets in Cambridge and Crayford, in the first strike in the 44-year history of McDonalds in Britain. More strikes followed last month at five outlets, including two in Manchester. The workers are not asking for the impossible from McDonalds just a 10-an-hour minimum wage and the option of fixed-hours contracts. They also want an end to age-related pay, where younger workers are penalised financially by the company for simply being what they are younger workers. As things stand, the zero-hours contracts the young workers suffer leave many unable to pay their rent if theyre not given sufficient hours work in any month. A mortgage would be out of the question, so some McDonalds workers band together to share a house or a flat. Its the only way they can keep a roof over their heads. Others have been evicted for being unable to pay their rent. So far the strikes have involved small numbers of McDonalds workers, but they have had widespread support from other unions and the public and union membership is growing. In addition, the strikes are part of a struggle against McDonalds taking place on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. In the United States the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is campaigning for a $15 minimum wage. The two unions are in touch with each other. In fact, McDonalds workers from the United States joined McDonalds workers who staged a protest at the companys outlet in Whitehall in London, as did McDonalds workers from Sweden and New Zealand. The protest was part of one of several Global Days of Action staged by McDonalds workers. Such is the international nature of the workers struggle. Among the Manchester strikers on May 1 was Lauren McCourt, a 23-year-old newcomer to union activism. She is a fast learner. She told the Morning Star: Im a McStriker from Manchester and on May 1, 2018, I participated in a national strike of McDonalds workers for 10 an hour regardless of age, fixed-hours contracts and union recognition. Ive lost count of the number of times young people I work with have asked me what a union actually is. Theyve genuinely never heard of one before. Ive tried to explain it in basic terms, They protect your rights at work. Theyre there to help you if you ever get into any trouble. Theyve always said OK and shrugged because that response just doesnt excite them. No-one here ever expects themselves to get into trouble at work. Joining a union would be wasting money for something thats unlikely to happen. After the first McDonalds strike last September, things started to change in my store. Thats when people started to show interest because for the first time they were seeing people just like them fighting against the exact same issues that they have and winning. The first strike resulted in the largest pay rise at McDonalds in over a decade. I started to realise that for workers like us its not enough to have the union as an insurance policy. We need our union to be about identifying the changes we need to make in our workplaces and actively fighting together to make those changes happen. Weve grown in size since the first strike and thats because more and more young workers are seeing that, when we unite and fight in our workplaces, we can get higher wages and better contracts and better working conditions. Theyve never even thought of that before because theyve grown up post-Thatcher at a time when unions arent fighting like they used to. Thats the reason our wages are so low to begin with. We are in workplaces made up of individuals. When we stand by ourselves and not together in a union, it leaves our employer free to exploit us as much as they want. In the last couple of weeks, TGI Fridays workers have been striking against low pay and tip theft. They said they were inspired by the McStrike and theyve been copying our chants on their picket lines. We can already see what happens when you get out there and fight together, it inspires others like you to do the same. Weve grown out of the Fight For $15 campaign in the US where theyve managed not just to raise the wages of fast-food workers, but theyve doubled the legal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 in several states. Thats exactly what were fighting for. The issues we struggle against working on zero-hours contracts, low wages and youth pay rates are the same issues that millions of other people in this country face. Were fighting for all of them. This is where it begins. I hope they see what were doing and get inspired to do the same because, when we stand together and use our strength in numbers, we will always have more power than those who mistreat and exploit us. Thats when we will win when we stop accepting less than what we deserve and we stop waiting around hoping that things will get better on their own. Ronnie Draper is the BFAWU general secretary. He agrees with McCourt that the action by McDonalds workers in the United States has inspired workers here. But he says theres much more to the struggle of workers in Britain than that. The fact that we have poverty wages for young people in the fast-food industry was the other inspiration and nobody was doing anything about it, he says. Draper says that the McDonalds struggle is not just about young workers, though many have been at the heart of the strike action. McDonalds are not bothered who they exploit. All they are bothered about is what comes into their coffers. This is the second-biggest employer in the world and probably the biggest serial exploiter of workers rights in the world. It is a company that counts its profits in billions not millions. But he accepts that the trade union movement did need to be aware that young workers are vital to its survival. We need to get back into schools, Draper says. We used to do it. We used to go round colleges and schools. I encourage our people to get into colleges and schools. As a union we are affiliated to the Unions into Schools initiative in Scotland. You cannot have any organisation that only thrives on the last of the older people. Unions have got to change otherwise we only represent people from the past. We have to listen to what young people want. Going back to the McDonalds issue, he said the campaign is growing. We have young organisers out recruiting as we speak, he said. The BFAWU annual conference is taking place in Southport and the McDonalds campaign will be high on the agenda. The presentation of the unions Youth Award will also be on the agenda. It will go to McCourt and will be presented to her by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. She is nothing if not ambitious. When we start to use our collective power in our hundreds and thousands and millions we will be unstoppable, she says. Morning Star Takes two to tango If Trump stands by that commitment then it will be key to a successful resolution of the decades-old conflict, with the specific result of North Korea fulfilling its vow to scrap nuclear weapons. Trump referred to the military exercises between US and South Korean forces as provocative and inappropriate in the new context of peaceful exchange. Significantly, following his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Trump referred to the annual joint military exercises between US and South Korean forces as provocative and inappropriate in the new context of peaceful exchange. Until recently, the Trump administration like previous US administrations had refused to consider a reciprocal move over suspending its war manoeuvres on the Korean Peninsula in return for North Koreas nuclear disarmament. Trump appeared to abandon that policy in a personal and spontaneous token of goodwill to Chairman Kim when the two leaders held historic face-to-face talks on Singapores Sentosa Island this week. Even the Pentagon seemed to be caught by surprise, as were US allies Japan and South Korea. Trumps Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has followed up with visits to his South Korean and Japanese counterparts to assure them that US defence pacts are ironclad. Notably, however, Pompeo did not retreat from Trumps announcement of cancelling the joint military drills due to take place later this year. In a follow-on trip to Beijing, Pompeo accepted Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yis stated position that security guarantees to North Korea were essential for delivering on a denuclearisation process for the Korean Peninsula. What this comes down to is that the Trump administration has, in effect, adopted the formula prescribed by both China and Russia of a freeze-freeze trade-off. Over the past year, Beijing and Moscow have been consistently calling for a step-by-step process of diplomatic engagement between the US and North Korea, whereby the latters commitment to decommission its nuclear weapons is met by the Americans scaling back their military forces. In particular, the issue of annual joint military exercises has long been a big bone of contention for North Korea. Indeed, not only North Korea, but neighbouring China and Russia as well. Ever since the end of the Korean War (1950-53), the US has mobilised tens of thousands of troops, warships and warplanes every year in what it calls defence drills. The military exercises occur twice a year and are conducted with South Korean forces, as well as with Japanese. Given that the Korean War was never officially ended with a formal peace treaty, but rather only with a truce, the North Korean side has sound reason to be alarmed by these large-scale manoeuvres. The exercises include the deployment of nuclear-capable warplanes in practice bombing sorties. Even more provocatively, the US-led forces carry out rehearsals for decapitation strikes on North Korea aimed at exterminating the countries leadership. Seen from North Koreas point of view, this background of relentless threat and intimidation is the main impetus for the nation embarking on a clandestine nuclear weapons program as a matter of self-defence and survival. If the Americans take away the perceived existential threat from their massive military presence on North Koreas borders, then there is an opportunity for North Korea to seriously consider disarmament of its nukes. The US war games were cancelled before during the 1990s when the Clinton administration tried to dissuade North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. During the subsequent GW Bush administration, the Americans backtracked on certain commitments of financial and technological aid to Pyongyang, according to former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson. That was a major factor in why North Korea resumed its nuclear program, which culminated in building the bomb under present leader Kim Jong-un. It remains to be seen whether Trump will stick to his avowed cancelling of war games. A US military spokesperson in South Korea was quoted as saying they had not received any instructions to cease training exercises, and a joint drill planned for the autumn would go ahead unless they were instructed otherwise. Following Trumps surprise announcement in Singapore, it seemed that the Pentagon had not been consulted on the proposal to halt manoeuvres. It now remains to be seen if Trump has enough practical authority over Washington military planners to implement his offer to North Korea. There is also the question of US allies in the region putting pressure on Washington. Immediately after the Singapore summit, Japans Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera expressed concern, saying that the joint US drills were vital to East Asian security. South Korea has taken a more pragmatic approach. Like the Pentagon and Japan, Seoul appeared to be blindsided by Trumps cancellation plan. But President Moon Jae-ins office has since hinted that South Korea is prepared to go along with suspending military exercises in order to further dialogue. Probably the biggest obstacle to Trumps engagement with North Korea is his political enemies at home. Reaction to his meeting with Kim from Democrats and large sections of the anti-Trump news media was negative. The president was castigated for giving too many concessions to Kim and for affording North Korea a propaganda victory. One can envisage a media campaign being whipped up over the coming months for Trump to resume military exercises on the Korean Peninsula as a way to demonstrate support for our allies in the face of North Korean aggression. This underscores why Trump and Kim need to work closely together to implement a reciprocal peace deal. If North Korea delivers on its commitment to begin a measurable disarmament process and Trump reciprocates with security guarantees then the entire process can move forward with success. South Koreas President Moon Jae-in has a crucial role to play too. President Moon is dedicated to a comprehensive peace settlement between the two divided Koreas and the eventual denuclearisation of the peninsula. The South Korea leader is well aware that the North needs and deserves security guarantees. It can be expected therefore that the South Korean leadership will back Trump in his call for dropping the war games. Has realised that with regard to North Korea, it takes two to tango? RT Russia Today Creating a bogeyman Four days before the British general election of October 1924 the Daily Mail published a letter purporting to have been written by the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev. The paper claimed that the correspondence revealed a Bolshevik plot to plunge Britain into civil war, and that the Communist Party of Great Britain was manipulating the Labour government led by Ramsay MacDonald. It was a forgery created by Conservative Party supporters in British intelligence; but their ploy worked. The political middle ground collapsed, the Tories won the election, and so ended any prospect of detente with the Soviet Union. Not, of course, that this was the only act of political sabotage ever conducted by British spooks. From Pigotts forged Parnell letter to Tony Blairs infamous dossier alleging Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Englands secret services have never allowed the truth to get in the way of a reactionary political agenda. With this in mind we can consider more recent circumstances and events. The leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has defied right-wing expectations that he would self-destruct and has instead reinvigorated left-wing social democracy by challenging Blairite and Tory-manufactured austerity. Earlier this year the tabloid Sun published an article insinuating that Corbyn had a questionable connection with a Cold War Czechoslovak spy. The claim was soon rubbished, but it was planted in the stratosphere all the same. Now we have the slanderous accusations of anti-Semitism against him, something that is strongly contradicted by the man himself and the organisation Jewish Voice for Labour. Nevertheless, this baseless accusation is gleefully repeated by embittered Blairites and given headline treatment by the BBC and other media. Surpassing even these tall tales is the sensational story of an attack on MI6s Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter. While it is impossible from our standpoint to know exactly what happened in Salisbury, there is still no convincing proof that the poisoning was either carried out or sanctioned by the Russian state. Even a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, is cautious about placing blame on Moscow. In a balanced observation he said, There is no evidence it was Russia. I am not ruling out that it could be Russia ... but I want to see where the evidence lies. We have to ask, therefore, why Varadkar (Leo Eric Varadkar is Minister for Defence and Leader of Fine Gael since June 2017) so enthusiastically supported the call by Theresa May to blame and sanction Russia. Keep in mind that Varadkar is a qualified doctor, trained to make assessments based on evidence rather than highly likely assertions from dubious sources. It would be easy to suggest a servile adherence to West-Britonism from the leader of a party that has long suffered from that affliction; the reason, however, is likely to be more complex, though just as unacceptable. Fine Gael is fulfilling its basic function as the parliamentary protector of capital and the ruling class. Two recent publications offer an insight. In May the Financial Times conducted an analysis that revealed that, globally, large transnational corporations are now paying significantly lower taxes than before the 2008 financial crisis. This is a result of a decade when governments within the OECD adjusted corporate taxes to favour business, and have done so by cutting the social wage for working people a practice better known here as austerity. A few days before this article appeared, Fine Gael members of the EU Parliament published a report, called Ireland and the EU: Defending our common European home, calling for a review of this countrys position on neutrality. The document argued for (among other things) greater flexibility in how the Irish military might be deployed abroad, increasing spending on the Defence Forces to a damaging two percent of GDP, and developing an Irish arms industry. To get the full significance of this ominous report it is necessary to read the entire document, with its chilling references to central intelligence units and a national security council. At first glance the issues of low corporate taxation and ending Irelands neutrality may not appear linked. Nevertheless, there is a strong connection, in that the latter is used to distract attention from the former. The Financial Times report only confirms what is well known to people in Ireland: income inequality is growing, in spite of a so-called recovery and increasing levels of employment. The Republic has one of the worlds highest relative numbers of billionaires, coupled with very profitable transnational corporations. But what do we see? Hospital waiting-lists at crisis levels, homelessness and widespread housing shortages, overcrowded classrooms, and downgraded public services. Working people are understandably becoming increasingly disenchanted with this situation. They see an Irish government endeavouring not to collect $13 billion from Apple Inc while indigenous and transnational companies are profiting greatly from a generous corporate tax regime. And if this isnt enough, we now have the banks that caused the economic crash of 2010 selling domestic mortgages to vulture funds that are preparing to evict working families from their homes. In the face of growing discontent from within working-class communities throughout Ireland and the European Union (and the United States) we are now seeing the emergence of what can only be described as the politics of distraction. The plan is as simple as it is old-fashioned. Create a bogeyman in the East, generate hysteria against left social democrats and socialists, and sew all together behind a blind advocacy of militarism. Defence of our common European home might just as well read the defence of small nations, as all the powers of neo-liberal Europe have entered into an unholy alliance to protect their privilege. So what should we do? Firstly, lets recognise that this onslaught by the ruling elite is the result of fundamental flaws in their socio-economic system: briefly, an actual or impending crisis in capitalism coupled with concern by the powerful that they are vulnerable to working-class fight-back. Then we should do all we can to defend what remains of Irelands neutrality. This is a crucial struggle, to prevent Fine Gael and fellow-travellers in Fianna Fail chaining us to NATOs warmongers. Thereafter we must continue to build a movement among working people that is capable of resisting the savagery that is capitalism and moving forward towards constructing socialism. Socialist Voice Communist Party of Ireland Continuity of the Revolution When young Cubans led by Fidel Castro attacked Santiagos Moncada Barracks and other barracks in Bayamo on July 26, 1953, they were rebelling in part against the Batista regimes disregard of Cubas fairly progressive Constitution of 1940. In 1976, 15 years after the victory of Cubas socialist revolution, Cubans voting in a national referendum approved a new Constitution. Cubans now are about to revise their Constitution for the third time. Cuban leaders in 1992 were facing serious stresses following the defeat of socialism in the Soviet Union and other countries, the nations main arm of economic support. They responded with a bevy of constitutional revisions aimed at increasing citizen participation in politics and adjusting the practices to worsening economic difficulties. There would be, for example, direct election of deputies to national and provincial legislative assemblies. Local councils were instituted. A national referendum in 2002 approved constitutional changes declaring, however, that the socialist nature of the Cuban nation is irrevocable. Cubas government was responding to the Varela Project put forth by political dissidents who had collected thousands of names of citizens united in their call for political change in Cuba. Currently preparations are in the works for further change to Cubas Constitution. That possibility emerged in 2013 and former President Raul Castro called for constitutional change during the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 2016. On April 19, the National Assembly named Miguel Diaz-Canel as Cubas new president. In his farewell remarks then, Castro reported that the Assembly in its next regular session, in July, would be proposing a commission of deputies who would initiate the project of a new Constitution. Castro spoke too of the new post of prime minister being created and of diffusing the power concentrated now in the hands of Cubas chief of state, who is also first secretary of the Communist Party. He indicated that term limits for high offices, already approved by the Communist Party, would become part of the constitution. Rather than wait for the July session of the National Assembly, the Council of State on May 28 declared that an extraordinary session of the National Assembly would convene on June 2. The Assembly that day created a commission of deputies tasked with carrying out the process. President Diaz-Canel announced the names of the 33 deputies who, representing a range of professional backgrounds and governmental responsibilities, would be joining the commission. He designated former President Castro, still serving as first secretary of the Communist party, as the commissions facilitator. Castro followed by telling commission members they would be meeting for the first time that very afternoon. He thus signalled the projects high priority. The plan is for the commission to prepare a draft version of constitutional reforms to be presented to the Assembly for discussion and modification at its next regular session, in July. The proposals will then be submitted to the Cuban people who in community meetings and at workplaces will discuss them and propose changes. After that, the National Assembly will once more consider modifications of the proposals and approve a final version. The final step will be a national referendum. The main impetus for constitutional reform stems from new economic and societal realities in Cuba. In the words of one observer: The principal incentive for this initiative is to adjust the existing legal framework to the great economic changes taking place on the island for more than a decade. For example: the emerging private sector. In fact, the number of Cubans no longer employed by the state has risen to 10 percent of working Cubans. Planners are seeking constitutional changes that will accommodate foreign investment, private businesses, and new forms of cooperatives. Additionally, many Cubans hold citizenship in other countries, something the current Constitution prohibits. Ideas are circulating as to how the Constitution will take into account the 40,000 Cubans who emigrate every year and LBGTQ community members who are now demanding equal rights with marriage equality prominent among those demands. One commentator sees the state now having to acknowledge a small but assertive middle class and to respond to academicians interested in professionalising deputies in the National Assembly and in reducing their number. In addition to changes proposed by former President Castro relating to terms and jobs of certain officeholders, the National Assembly, in its special session proposed that the Constitution reflect the favourable results of an experiment in Artemisa and Mayabeque Provinces. In those provinces efficiency and effectiveness increased markedly once two persons, rather than one, were performing the separate jobs of president of provincial and municipal assemblies and president of administrative councils. Rene Fidel Gonzalez is a Cuban university professor and essayist. At stake, he writes, is continuity of the Revolution as a political project ... This is something that is of concern not only to the present leadership of the Revolution ... but it also relates to a sense of responsibility in terms of personal and collective coherence that members of different age groups and different generations are experiencing. On May 28, Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel spoke similarly but more concretely: We work to achieve constitutional norms that reflect the durability of a sovereign, independent, socialist, democratic, prosperous, sustainable and also inclusive nation. Its one where institutions of the revolutionary state are being strengthened and where Martis teaching still prevails, the one declaring that the first law of our republic will be cultivation by Cubans of the full dignity of humankind. Peoples World Culture & Life We wont be silent anymore On June 12, a number of Democrat representatives and senators convened a forum at the US Capitol to examine poverty in America. Panellists included the Reverend Dr William J Barber, co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign, and individuals who shared their personal stories about poverty and economic injustice. Their aim, as Barber made clear in his presentation, was not to get applause, but to make the nation weep at the crisis of poverty in one of the richest countries in the world. The panel focused on the fact that close to 140 million people living in the United States are either poor or low-income and discussed what must be done to change this. Opening the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren noted that fifty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King said America is at a crossroads ... Fifty years later Americas progress remains at a crossroads. Proclaiming that the safety net of the United States has a hole in it the size of a dump truck, Warren explained, Half of Americans dont have retirement money. We are in an economic crisis. This government works really well for the rich and the powerful. Noting that the Poor Peoples Campaign is the tip of the spear in the fight against this economic crisis, Warren said, We are here to respond to that call, in reference to the campaigns call for members of Congress and the government to listen to the organisations demands. Reverend Dr Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor Peoples Campaign, was set to speak at the hearing, but was detained the day before while praying on the US Supreme Court steps after the Husted decision, which upheld voter suppression in Ohio. She and nine other members of the Poor Peoples Campaign, including Reverend Grayland Hagler, Reverend Jimmie Hawkins, and Reverend William Lamar IV, were still in jail at the time of the forum. Theoharis sent a statement to be read in her stead. It noted that very few talk about poverty as a sin ... Jesus isnt condoning poverty, hes reminding us that God hates poverty ... For anyone who claims to be a person of faith, this is our call. By listening to us, you have become moral witnesses. Poverty is political. Barber explained that for the past four weeks, over 3,000 Americans have engaged in the Poor Peoples Campaign. This campaign is not a commemoration of what happened 50 years ago. It is a launching, he said. We really dont tell the full story of what is going on in America. Referencing the two parties of Democrats and Republicans, he noted that both have had issues even saying the word poor. Poverty, systemic racism, and militarism is not talked about morally, Barber said. We have allowed political extremists to pit Black, brown, and poor whites against each other ... Racism is not just Roseanne or words. Racism is works and policies, he proclaimed. Citing that nearly 140 million people live in poverty, including 38 million poor children, 60 percent of African Americans, and 67 million poor white people, the reverend declared, We have to mend the flaw of poverty. We wont be silent anymore. Other panellists gave their testimony of living in poverty. Pamela Sue Rush, a 48-year-old mother of two from Lowndes County, Alabama, explained how her mobile home does not have access to county sanitation services. Breaking down in tears during her speech, she stated how she and her daughter live in poverty because they cant afford better. Barber also noted that Pamela was the victim of predatory lending, and because she owed over $120,000 for a loan on a house, she couldnt afford to move to better living conditions. Vanessa Nosie, from the Apache Stronghold in Oak Flat, Arizona, whose sacred land was acquired by a mining company, spoke to how poverty and bad policies affect the Indigenous community. Christopher Olive, a formerly homeless, 27-year-old military veteran from Grays Harbor County, Washington, explained how there is a criminalisation of the poor happening where he lives, and around the country. Amy Jo Hutchinson, a single mother, and an organiser with the West Virginia Healthy Kids and Families Coalition, noted, We shouldnt have to give so much of ourselves in order to have good quality of life. Nic Smith, a Roanoke, Virginia, Waffle House worker and organiser with the Fight for $15, explained that Coal jobs disappeared and were replaced with chronic poverty and ecological devastation. Smith also noted that anti-union legislation, such as Right to Work, was harmful to workers. Barber explained that by government officials joining their political power with the people power of the campaign, change could happen, and that the campaign was currently working on a budget of what it would take to help those in poverty. Warren summarised the hearing by highlighting that the note she made during the testimonies was, Do not waste my pain, in regard to the poor who spoke on the panel. Warren proclaimed that poverty and economic justice were a moral issue first, last, and all of the in-between. Peoples World Advertisement From a tree house built for grown-ups, to a concrete block containing hidden treasures, these houses are proof that breaking away from conventional architecture can have stunning results. And as well as winning design plaudits, these four homes also had to be strong enough to contend with extreme Norwegian weather like the bitter cold and hurricane-like storms. In this week's instalment of BBC Two's The World's Most Extraordinary Homes, actress and property aficionado Caroline Quentin joins architect Piers Taylor to look at four of the most striking houses the Scandinavian country has to offer. They step inside a summer house whose architects took their passion for the nature to extremes, building around a giant cliff rock that became a prominent feature in the property's living room. The duo also experienced a very different kind of island life in a storm-proof fortress standing firm on its own private island in the North Sea. Here, FEMAIL offers a sneak peek inside each of the extraordinary homes... 1. THE SUMMER HOUSE The Summer House is described as a 'grown up tree house' and is made up of several pods built onto timber columns Architects built around a huge rock in the living room which also worked as a natural insulator in Norway's harsh winters There is also an infinity pool which offers the family breathtaking views of the stunning mountains and lakes that surround the property This sprawling summer house is tucked away in the woods in the mountain region of Valldal, and its architects were determined that the property would be at one with its natural surroundings. The stunning home is made up of several pods built on top of timber columns, with endless glass windows bringing in the light and breathtaking views. Architects were determined not to damaged any of the natural beauty, and so built around a huge rock that worked as a natural insulator in Norway's harsh winters. Caroline describes the home as a 'grown up' treehouse' thanks to the uneven levels and wooden exteriors of the property, resembling a playhouse built by children. The secluded home has no road access and so visitors have to hike to pay a visit, which also provided complications during the construction period as timber had to be flown in on 17 different helicopter flights. The property is covered in floor to ceiling glass windows that allows the family to take in the natural surroundings The home also offers a touch of luxury with its very own sauna, that also offers views of the greenery in the relaxing settings Each of the bedrooms have their own private balcony and are decorated with modern Scandinavian stylings It boasts a modern, open plan kitchen and dining room built around the rock as a the feature of the room, and upstairs are five bedrooms each with their own balcony. Upstairs is a private infinity pool with breathtaking views of the lake and surrounding mountains and there is also a luxury sauna. Architects wanted the home to look as natural as possible, while also offering a modern Scandinavian interior. One said: 'We tried as much as possible to adjhust the buildings to the sites, not the opposite way which is the usual way in architecture. 'For me and for the client, one important aspect was the memory of playing. When you were a small boy you built small houses up in the trees. It's the dream to have that extreme freedom you had to do anything up there.' 2. THE CONCRETE HOUSE The Concrete House sits by a beautiful lake looks very out of place next to the traditional Norwegian architecture that surrounds it The harsh exterior is a huge contrast to the light and bright furnishings inside the home, with white walls, surfaces and furniture The family doubled budget and tripled the length building process, and it took over five years for them to move in after deciding to build in concrete In the picturesque village of Ottestad are rows of traditional Norwegian homes overlooking the lake, so when Concrete House was built it - perhaps unsurpisingly - caused a stir among the neighbours. Owners Olaf and his wife dreamed of building a house made of concrete after falling in love with the material, though it drew comparisons to a prison from disapproving neighbours. But the material proved a stubborn one to work with, and the couple their doubled budget and tripled the lengthy building process, and it took over five years for them to move in. Concrete isn't normally used to build such larger scale structures like homes, and builders found it difficult to construct the building on sloping ground. It has several strategically placed windows that are meant to capture the view as if studying a beautiful painting of the water Neighbours weren't keen on the drab grey exterior of the building, with some comparing to a hospital and even a prison The property has high ceilings that allows visitors to look down on the rest of the house, including the open plan kitchen and living area The harsh exterior is a huge contrast to the light and bright furnishings inside the home, with white walls, surfaces and furniture creating a comfortable family living space. The building has several strategically placed windows that are meant to capture the view as if studying a beautiful painting of the water. The three bedroom house also has a hidden TV room, bundles of storage space and a guest suite with panoramic views. 3. THE WEEKEND HOUSE The Weekend House is a fortress on its own private island that has been built to protect the family from storms The home has a cozy interior with furnishings and decor a honey colour in the open plan living and dining area It resembles something of a boat and offers stunning views of the lake, as well as total privacy on its very own island The Weekend House is something of a fortress, designed to be a coastal escape for a family to the idyllic setting of Fosnavag, but it had to be strong enough to withstand the weather. The tiny hut sits on its own island which is only accessible via a 100 meter boat ride from the mainland, offering the family maximum privacy. The last home built on the land blew away in a storm, and so the new building was constructed of 70 tonnes of timber that were pieced together offshore, and then the whole home was brought to the island by barge to be fixed in to place. Builders had to wait six weeks for the weather to be calm enough to begin the process of erecting the building, but on that very night there was another storm and they had to battle through fierce rains and wind to get the job done. There is plenty of storage space in the attic in case the family are cut off from the mainland if there is a heavy storm The family opted covered the house in huge shutters that can be opened to take in the natural surroundings when the weather is clear The family opted to cover the house in huge shutters that can be opened to take in the natural surroundings when the weather is warm enough but were tough enough to keep out the storms. The home has huge storage space in the attic which gives the family the freedom to store everything they need should they get stuck on the island, which is what happened to them on the first Christmas they were there. When stepping inside from the extreme weather, visitors will instantly feel cozy thanks to the home's honey coloured wooden interiors. 'The minute you come inside you feel safe, you're out of the elements,' Caroline said. 4. THE VEGA COTTAGE Vega Cottage is meant to look like a modern day fishing hut that doesn't look out of place with the surrounding buildings The room divider in the living space works as both a cooker in the kitchen and a heater on the other side in the living room The property is a tiny 140m by packs in two double bedrooms and a children's room as well as the kitchen and dining room Vega Cottage is named after the remote island where it stands 400 miles away from Oslo, which has a population of a mere 1,200. The home is made to look like a traditional fisherman's hut and doesn't look out of place next to the other buildings which have stood there for decades. The building is made from a 4cm thick larch wood, a durable material that can withstand the island's stormy weather, which is cut curved around the rock it stands on so as not to damage it. The property is a tiny 140m by packs in two double bedrooms and a children's room, as well as an open plan kitchen and living area. The most striking feature of the interior is the room divider in the living space, which works as a cooker in the kitchen and a heater on the other side in the living room. The building offers panoramic views of the sea where the island is located, which is some 400 miles away from Oslo The home has something of a nautical theme inside, with a gangway looking over the bottom floor and a set of space saver stairs The wind on the island made it difficult to anchor the house down and so builders could only build in summer months The home has something of a nautical theme inside, with a gangway looking over the bottom floor and a set of space saver stairs that wouldn't look out of place on a boat. The wind on the island made it difficult to anchor the house down and so builders could only build in summer months, constructing concrete columns to on reinforcement bars that were drilled into bedrock for just 1.5m. Architect Erik Kolman said they wanted the home to give stunning views of the natural surroundings without damaging them in construction. He explained: 'We kind of very early on realised that we didn't want to cut down any trees, we didn't want to blow away any bedrock and we didn't want to make a house that would dominate the terrain and take over.' The World's Most Extraordinary Homes airs at 8pm on Wednesday on BBC Two From her artfully disheveled bun to her cross-body bags, the new Duchess of Sussex has quickly become known for the style hallmarks she returns to time and again for high-profile public appearances. And Meghan's latest penchant for an ultra-flattering 'boat' neckline is already influencing her legions of fashion-obsessed fans, with style search engine Lyst reporting a 52 per cent spike in searches for the term 'boat neck' over the past two months. It comes after she won plaudits for her Givenchy wedding gown by Clare Waight Keller, which had a simple silhouette and a 'bateau' neckline that revealed a glimpse of the radiant bride's shoulders and clavicle. Since then Meghan, who wore a checked jacket with a similar neckline to visit Cardiff with Prince Harry in January, chose a bespoke pink Carolina Herrera dress that exposed her shoulders and a hint of decolletage for her first Trooping the Colour. Stylist and brand consultant Alexandra Fullerton told FEMAIL Meghan is putting her own 'demure but modern' spin on the now ubiquitous Bardot neckline, which continues to dominate the high street. The new Duchess of Sussex went for a bespoke off the shoulder number by Carolina Herrera for her first Trooping the Colour last month, to officially mark the birthday of the Queen The royal bride won style plaudits for the exaggerated bateau neckline of her Givenchy wedding gown The Duchess' trick for showing off a hint of skin in a sophisticated fashion has struck a chord with shoppers, according to Lyst. 'The cutaway shoulder line is fast becoming her signature,' said Alexandra. 'The shoulder is this year's hottest erogenous zone - thanks to the Bardot - and the Duchess of Sussex's adoption of the boat neckline cements this. 'It also feels a little bit sexy as there is more skin on show than a crew neck, and slightly subversive as it looks fresher than a V-neck, and reiterates her modern royal style. 'The actual shape makes her already elegant neck look positively swan-like, and puts the focus on her face.' The then bride-to-be wore another elegant boat neck in Cardiff in January at an engagement with Prince Harry, a checked jacket by Theory The Duchess first stepped out in her now signature style back in January, when she and her then fiance Prince Harry visited Cardiff Castle. Meghan wore a smart blazer in an appropriate Prince of Wales check, which exposed a hint of shoulder thanks to its exaggerated neckline. Four months later, millions of royal fans around the world were treated to the sight of her emerging from the Queen's vintage Rolls Royce Phantom IV in a dazzling white Givenchy gown that was surprising in its simplicity - apart from its subtly exaggerated bateau neckline. At Trooping the Colour earlier this month, the Duchess turned to Carolina Herrera for her most daring take on the trend to date - a dress that exposed virtually all of the royal's shoulders - and a flash of decolletage. Lyst's report is far from the first time the actress turned Duchess has been credited with influencing the buying habits of UK shoppers. Items she's worn have sold out within hours of Prince Harry's wife being seen in them, including everything from the Self Portrait dress she wore to an Invictus Games reception to a plain black 45 jumper from Marks & Spencer. Lyst has also recorded a spike in searches for halternecks after Meghan changed into a slinky halterneck gown by Stella McCartney for her wedding reception. And after her joint engagement with the Queen in Cheshire last week - for which she once more turned to Givenchy in a custom dress with matching capelet - searches are up for 'capelet dress' and 'sheath dress', and searches for Givenchy are up 110 per cent year on year. A 12-year-old girl who lost her leg to cancer defied all odds and performed a sensational dance that saw her doing pirouettes and back bends across the stage. In 2014, Valory Newton was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, which is a form of bone cancer. Doctors told the avid dancer the only way to prevent the cancer from spreading was to amputate the limb. Valory, from Walbridge, Ohio, did not let her battle with cancer stop her from dancing. Instead, she returned to classes at 10 years old once she received scans showing no new growths with her cancer. Inspiring: Valory Newton, 12, lost her leg to bone cancer a few years ago. But the avid dancer returned to the stage and performed a breathtaking routine Stunning: Her solo to a remix of Skyscraper featured a back bend, round-off cartwheel and pirouettes Survivor: Doctors told Valory they would need to amputate her left leg in order to prevent the bone cancer from spreading to other parts of the body In a sensational video posted on the dancer's Instagram, she demonstrated her exceptional training and ability to perform on just one leg. The dance - choreographed to a remix of Skyscraper - showed off Valory's tremendous core strength as she is able to balance on one leg before doing a round-off cartwheel. Valory first started her solo with her crutches to help propel her body in beautiful pirouettes towards the back half of the stage. Once she finished turning, she placed the crutches on the ground and balanced on one leg with her arm outstretched. Breathtaking: Valory started her dance routine with her crutches before placing them on the ground to demonstrate her core strength Fighter: The tween, who is pictured with dance teacher Megan Alfonso, returned to the dance floor after she received a negative scan to confirm there were no new growths Then with tremendous strength, Valory is able to do a back bend and shoot her right leg over so she lands on her stomach. The video clip continued as Valory pulled herself up to do other stunts with the help of her crutches. Commenters praised the dancer on her video that was posted on Instagram calling her an inspiration and a beautiful dancer. Nia Sioux - a dancer who rose to fame on Dance Moms - even praised Valory by posting the video on her own Instagram account and called the young girl a 'role model' to everyone. Amazing: Valory was back in the studio less than a year after her left leg was amputated Star performer: Her love of dance inspired her to keep dancing after battling the cancer She wrote: 'Although her journey to full recovery is not yet over, she has plans for lots of dancing. 'Her passion and determination are truly moving, and I think we can all learn so much from her.' When Valory was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in November 2014, she continued to dance while battling chemotherapy and the tumor in her left leg. She kept that same spirit throughout her diagnosis and started dancing around her hospital room the day after her leg was amputated in 2015. Now three years later, Valory has shown how her fighting spirit and resilience brought her back to the competition stage to perform a contemporary solo. 'You are such an inspiration! Thank you for being fearless!' One person commented on her video. Women have about 450 periods in their lifetime but menstrual cycles vary from woman to woman. Many suffer from a range of problems associated with their period, including bloating, mood swings, and pain. But how do you know if yours is normal and when should you see a doctor? FEMAIL spoke to Dr Natasha Andreadis to find out all the things that your cycle can reveal about your body. Many suffer from a range of problems associated with their period, including bloating, mood swings, and pain (stock image) 'A regular menstrual cycle is a sign of good gynaecological health,' Dr Andreadis said. 'It allows us to see if there are any glaring issues or subtle issues. 'The most powerful thing a woman can do for herself is to be aware of her menstrual patterns.' According to Dr Andreadis, we should all be monitoring our cycle every month. 'Tracking your cycle can help you stay in tune with your body. It also helps your doctor make a diagnosis,' she said. Dr Natasha Andreadis (pictured) said it's important to track your cycle as it can reveal gynaecological conditions and help your doctor make a diagnosis 'For example, vaginal spotting around the time of ovulation is normal. However, if spotting occurs just before a period it can indicate endometriosis or luteal phase issues. 'Not existent or irregular periods can be due to over exercise, stress, ill health, under nutrition, low body weight. 'I like using my Fitbit as it helps not only log my menstrual cycle and any symptoms, but it also tracks and logs my sleep,' she added. Dr Andreadis said many women have issues with their sleep in the week before their period or around the menopause transition and through menopause. 'Often a lack of sleep can explain why we are more moody and irritable at certain times in our cycle,' she said. Pain with a period can be due to endometriosis or adenomyosis (stock image) Tracking your cycle can also reveal problems like polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), excess weight and ovarian insufficiency. What every woman should know about her menstrual cycle: Time of ovulation: Ovulation occurs 12 - 16 days before the next period starts. PMS-like symptoms: These can include bloating, fatigue, cravings, mood swings, headaches, back pain Periods and the pill: You don't get your period when you are on the pill because you are stopping your cycle Absence of periods: This is a condition known as amenorrhoea and is usually the result of hormonal disturbances Painful periods: Women suffering from severe, incapacitating pain may have a condition known as dysmenorrhoea Severe period pain: This level of pain might signal the presence of conditions such as pelvic inflammatory disease or endometriosis Advertisement 'An irregular cycle can also indicate normal physiological processes such as the menopause,' she said. 'Heavy periods (more than 80mls blood loss in a period) can be due to structural issues such as fibroids, polyps, adenomyosis, endometriosis, or normal hormonal changes such as the perimenopause. But what if you're experiencing intense pain or PMS along with your periods? Dr Andreadis said this could be because of a number of conditions. 'Pain with a period can be due to endometriosis [where cells similar to those that line the uterus the endometrium grow in locations outside the uterus] or adenomyosis [a condition in which endometrial tissue exists within and grows into the uterine wall],' she said. Dr Andreadis said if you're concerned or have any questions related to your cycle, to see your doctor. 'If your periods are painful, when you have pain with sex, pain outside of your period, heavy periods, irregular periods, see a gynaecologist. Don't hesitate,' she said. As Australia's east coast battens down the hatches against the extreme cold front pummelling coastal cities, the draw of warm, sandy shores is becoming more and more inviting. Strong, icy winds have left several eastern regions waking up to frost, while snow fell in the New South Wales Tablelands. Victoria's Bureau of Meteorology yesterday tweeted a warning about extreme lows across the state, with Victorians shivering through the coldest morning of 2018 today as temperatures dropped below zero in some areas. While south eastern Australians continue to brace themselves against the winter chill, FEMAIL have rounded up a list of the best getaways for July to put some sunshine back in your life - and you don't even have to leave the country. The Victorian Bureau of Meteorology tweeted this warning to residents in advance of the sharp drop in temperatures this morning Commuters battle through the rain in Sydney, as the Bureau of Meteorology issue a severe weather warning for parts of the eastern coast Giggling residents play in the fresh snow in the alpine village of Thredbo, NSW 1. Broome and the Kimberley, Western Australia Travel experts recommend visiting this region of Western Australia during the dry season from June to August. Sitting on the Indian Ocean, laid back holiday hub Broome offers camel rides, outdoor cinemas and 22km of seemingly endless yellow sands on Cable Beach. Broome also boasts a wide variety of eclectic bars and eateries for visitors to unwind in after a day of sun. Travellers can take cruises around the greater Kimberley region from Broome, stopping off to see world class geology, remote beaches and ochre cliffs. Instagram sensation Cleo Cohen Codrington is always chasing the sun (pictured here in Western Australia) An ocean view in always sunny Broome, Western Australia Described by Lonely Planet as Australia's 'last frontier', the Kimberley region is home to a variety of wilderness parks and the Buccaneer archipelago. The enormous area also offers some of Australia's best off-the-beaten-path attractions, including Cape Leveque, freshwater Lake Argyle and Karijini National Park. Average maximum daytime temperature for July: 28 degrees Travel addict and social influencer Cleo Cohen Codrington (left) relaxes in a waterfall pool at Karijini National Park in the Kimberley and (right) outside her van in Esperance, WA Big Brother alum and influencer Tully Smyth (pictured) escapes the eastern chill factor in Cape Leveque, the Kimberley, WA Poll Which staycation is top of YOUR bucketlist this winter? The Whitsundays Darwin The Daintree Rainforest Cairns, Queensland Broome and the Kimberley Which staycation is top of YOUR bucketlist this winter? The Whitsundays 5 votes Darwin 0 votes The Daintree Rainforest 3 votes Cairns, Queensland 0 votes Broome and the Kimberley 3 votes Now share your opinion 2. Cairns, Queensland The number one spot in Australia for international holidaymakers, Cairns is quickly becoming a favourite among domestic travellers seeking winter sun, too. Although the outpost does not have a beach, Cairns boasts world class marine life which can be enjoyed on one of the many snorkelling or diving trips on offer. Taking a ride on the Kuranda Scenic Railway, white water rafting and horse riding are just some of the activities on offer on the sunny coast of Queensland. Cairns is also a great base for visiting the Great Barrier Reef, the Daintree Rainforest and the Atherton Tablelands. Average maximum daytime temperature for July: 26 degrees Full time traveller Cleo Cohen Codrington (pictured) takes in the jaw dropping scenery of the Atherton Tablelands in tropical North Queensland An aerial shot of tropical Queensland by Instagram travel star Cleo Cohen Codrington 3. The Daintree Rainforest, Queensland With temperatures sitting in the mid twenties all winter long, the world's oldest rainforest is a must visit for sun seekers itching to escape the cold of south Australia. The Daintree is one of the most beautiful and diverse examples of nature in Queensland state - so much so that it served as inspiration for the Hollywood blockbuster Avatar. The Cape Tribulation area of the forest is one of a tiny number of places in the world where a forest touches the ocean, making it a bucket list destination for nature and geography lovers alike. Average maximum daytime temperature for July: 25 degrees A stunning falls area of the Daintree Rainforest, the oldest tropical rainforest in the world 4. Darwin, Northern Territory Resting on the shores of the Arafura Sea, Darwin enjoys a year-round tropical climate. Visit the famous Mindil Beach Markets at sunset, take a refreshing plunge in the rock pools at Top End or dine at one of the many international restaurants offering cuisines including Sri Lankan, Thai, Brazilian and Greek. During the July-August dry season, the attractions at Kakadu and Litchfield National Parks will be also be fully accessible to tourists, while Berry Springs Nature Park offers beautiful snorkelling and bird wathcing opportunities. Average maximum daytime temperature for July: 30 degrees Sunset on Darwin's famous Mindil Beach Diving in with crocodiles in a tank at Crocosaurus Cove, Darwin 5. The Whitsundays, Queensland With stinger season drawing to a close by late May, July is the perfect time to visit one of Australia's most 'Instagrammable' destinations. July is right in the middle of peak diving season in the Whitsundays, with rich marine life of more than 1,800 species including manta rays, turtles and clown fish all easily visible in the crystal clear ocean. Swim the turquoise waters, unwind on the pristine sand of Whitehaven Beach, camp under the stars, visit the mangroves and crocodiles of the Prosperine River - the list is endless in this North Queensland slice of paradise. Average maximum daytime temperature for July: 28 degrees Instagram couple Elise Cook and Domenic Palumbo on a sail boat in the paradise-like Whitsundays Spending up to 20 hours on your feet can take its toll. And yet so many flight attendants are able to maintain their picture perfect exterior so high up in the air - and with minimal retouches in the tiny bathrooms on board. So how do they do it? Virgin Australia worker Lauren Gaynor, who completes the airline's incredible Sydney to Los Angeles services, knows all too well the important of good make up and a rock solid skincare routine. Virgin Australia worker Lauren Gaynor (pictured), who completes the airline's incredible Sydney to Los Angeles services 'I've always subscribed to the theory that cleansers are only in contact with your skin for a minimal amount of time, so I prefer to keep this step relatively simple and inexpensive,' she told News.com.au. 'My favourite method of makeup removal is Face Halo. It's a microfibre pad that lasts up to 300 washes, so it's as convenient as a makeup wipe whilst being much more sustainable.' And because the system only requires water it's an easy packing option in your carry on luggage. 'I've always subscribed to the theory that cleansers are only in contact with your skin for a minimal amount of time, so I prefer to keep this step relatively simple and inexpensive,' she told News.com.au (pictured second from the right) She follows that step with Buffet serum by The Ordinary and Jurlique Moisture Replenishing Day Cream (pictured right) She follows that step with Buffet serum by The Ordinary and Jurlique Moisture Replenishing Day Cream. Throughout the flight she spritzes on South Australian brand Jurlique's Rosewater Balancing Mist. As a pre-flight ritual Lauren will slather on Frank Body's coffee scrub - but will refrain from drinking caffeine on the flight itself. To get a little more insight into the life of a flight attendant, FEMAIL previously caught up with Qantas employee, Anastasia Andreev, who lifted the lid on her business - as well as the in-flight essentials she swears by. The 22-year-old, who is from Sydney, swears by a 'versatile' wardrobe, a universal travel adaptor and Estee Lauder's Double Wear foundation - which she said 'many flight attendants wear, as it 'stays put for 24 hours'. FEMAIL caught up with Qantas employee, Anastasia Andreev (pictured), who lifted the lid on her business - as well as the in-flight essentials she swears by The 22-year-old, who is from Sydney (pictured), swears by a 'versatile' wardrobe and Estee Lauder's Double Wear foundation - which she said 'stays put for 24 hours' When it comes to packing your suitcase for a flight, Anastasia (pictured) told FEMAIL that she's learned that 'less really is more' and it pays to think of 'key pieces' like a good pair of jeans When it comes to packing, Anastasia told FEMAIL that she has learned that 'less really is more': What a flight attendant packs in her suitcase * A good pair of jeans * Shorts * Singlet * Dress * Denim jacket * Three pairs of shoes - including black Converse, nude strappy heel and bright sandal * Small day bag * Sunglasses * Swimsuit * Perfume x 2 - a fresh day frangrance and something 'muskier' for the evening * A book * Noise-cancelling headphones * Universal travel adaptor Advertisement 'The suitcase has to be packed at all times and flying between climates means our clothing needs to be versatile,' she said. However, that doesn't mean you need a whole range of outfits: 'Key pieces like a good pair of jeans, shorts, singlet, button-up shirt, a little dress and a denim jacket are the staple items,' Anastasia explained. 'These can all be dressed up or down and be worn in various climates, while still looking stylish.' The 22-year-old said she likes to take three pairs of shoes away with her - which 'should be enough to get you from day to night'. 'I always have my black Converse shoes, a nude strappy heel and a bright sandal packed for a pop of colour.' She also swears by a 'small day bag' for sight-seeing, two bottles of perfume (something 'fresh' for the day and something 'muskier' for the evening, sunglasses, a swimsuit and a good book. Anastasia (pictured) will bring three different pairs of shoes with her, and will always avoid stiletto heels, as she says it's unlikely you'll wear them The 22-year-old (pictured) likes to always travel with her universal travel adaptor, as well as her noise-cancelling headphones What to wear on a flight * According to Anastasia, you do not need to compromise style in order to be comfortable on board. * She recommends neutral colours, such as grey, navy or black - which are great for travelling 'just in case you spill anything on yourself'. * Anastasia likes to wear 'black pants, with either a dark green or white collared shirt (white for shorter flights) and a black pashmina scarf or a cardigan to keep warm throughout the flight'. She'll pair this with flat shoes and a pair of thick socks for on board. * For men, Anastasia said you should go for 'crease free materials, such as chinos'. She said you can pair these with a 'plain loose shirt and a cardigan or casual jacket to look smart, yet be comfortable and warm'. Advertisement Over her time as a flight attendant, Anastasia has also learned that it's worth leaving some items behind, as you are less likely to use them when you're away: 'From my experience, I've found you don't need to bring a hairdryer as many hotels offer them,' she said. 'You could also avoid packing high heel stilettos as they aren't very practical, will be unlikely to be worn and take up so much space. 'You're far better off bringing a pair of wedges, which can be worn with jeans or a dress.' The 22-year-old admitted the one thing she would never travel without is her 'universal travel adaptor', which she sees as the 'best travel investment you can make' - and her noise-cancelling headphones, which are a lifesaver on a long-haul flight. Her beauty regime is simple - she loves a rich moisturiser and a good night's sleep the night before, and plenty of essential oils, hand cream and face mists on board But what about how she prepares for long-haul travel, and how Anastasia looks after her hair and skin when she is on board? For the Qantas employee, it all comes down to sleep and self-care the day before: 'If I'm operating on a flight, then I definitely make sure to get a good night's sleep and moisturise well the night before and morning of my flight,' she told FEMAIL. 'I wear quite a rich moisturiser (Sukin's night cream) underneath my foundation, which acts as a barrier against the harsh elements in the air.' Anastasia will also have a 'healthy but hearty meal' beforehand - to ensure she's not 'hungry or tempted by all the chocolates and other naughties on board'. When she's travelling as a passenger, Anastasia said she prefers to 'get as little rest as possible the night before' so she can sleep with her neck pillow all flight. But, when she's working, she prefers to be rested and ready to go. Anastasia (pictured) will also have a 'healthy but hearty meal' beforehand - to ensure she's not 'hungry or tempted by all the chocolates and other naughties on board' 'Once I apply my make up for the flight, it's not coming off until I'm at the hotel,' Anastasia admitted - she loves a Bare Minerals lipstick as it's the perfect nude colour One of the things people always observe about flight attendants is their near-perfect make up, which never seems to slide, come off or worsen while a flight attendant is in the air: How to eat and drink on a long-haul flight * Firstly, Anastasia highlighted the importance of hydrating on board - as 'flying really dehydrates you'. * 'Try to drink at least one cup of water every hour, if you want to feel amazing when you land, then try one cup every half an hour,' she said - adding that if you're having a glass of wine, make sure you have some water with it. * 'Try to avoid drinking too much coffee before or during a flight that can also make you feel more dehydrated.' * When eating on board, while Anastasia believes you shouldn't deny yourself anything, she also said it's all about moderation. * 'Have one chocolate, and then substitute your next craving with a piece of fruit or some nuts.' Advertisement 'Once I apply my make up for the flight, it's not coming off until I'm at the hotel,' Anastasia admitted. She said she swears by Estee Lauder's Double Wear foundation, which 'literally stays put for 24 hours and ensures I need as few touch ups as possible through the flight'. She will also use a 'soothing face mist every couple of hours (MAC's Fix+) for an instant refresh'. Elsewhere in her regime, Anastasia extolled the benefits of hand cream: 'It's so important, as the air gets very dry,' she said. 'I also carry a peppermint essential oil on my wrists and temples, which has a calming and soothing effect on my body while invigorating the senses. 'I love my Bare Minerals Gen Nude liquid lip colour in 'Swag', as it doesn't dry your lips out, but is the perfect colour to complement the pink in our scarves. 'Never forget to touch up before touch down, that's key.' Anastasia did admit that her flying lifestyle is not as glamorous as some might think - she said she may have to clean the toilets during a flight Lastly, Anastasia touched on the things you wouldn't expect to come with her job, including the fact that it's not always as glamorous as you might think: 'We have to clean the toilets every 30 minutes,' she said. 'During a 14 hour flight, like Sydney to LA, we go down to our crew bunks for three hours, and then we swap with the other half of the crew. 'We also have to complete emergency procedures and sit exams every six months, to make sure we are qualified for all of our safety duties, otherwise we go back for more training.' However, she said she loves her job and the opportunities it offers her. 'When you're on a Qantas flight, you know you're in great and safe hands,' she said. They say friendships can last a lifetime. But what do you do if you're embroiled in a toxic friendship? Toxic friends don't seem to share your joy when you have good news or they leave you feeling utterly drained with their negativity. And most of the time, they can cause more issues than benefits. Here, Sydney's relationship expert Dr Nikki Goldstein revealed the warning signs of a toxic friendship - and when it's the right time to cut them out of your life for good. Toxic friends don't seem to share your joy when you have good news or they leave you feeling utterly drained with their negativity (stock image) Sydney's relationship expert Dr Nikki Goldstein (pictured) revealed the warning signs of a toxic friendship - and when it's the right time to cut them out of your life for good Speaking to the Today show, Dr Goldstein likened toxic friendships to romantic relationships - and revealed when to consider cutting ties. 'When we have that person who we feel is just as toxic, I feel like it's similar to dating. Let's have a look at "bread crumbing" and "ghosting",' she said. 'If it's one-sided and you're putting in all the effort and they're not calling you to catch up, only calling you when they want something or when there's drama in their life, that's where you do need to consider.' She explained how a toxic person would often make you feel 'terrible more times than you feel good' every time you have an encounter. She said, ask yourself: 'Do I put the work into that friendship or are there other people in my life where I can invest in that time and effort - and it's appreciated and rewarded?' Dr Goldstein suggested taking a step back to see how you truly feel about the person Dr Goldstein suggested taking a step back to see how you truly feel about the person. 'If you feel like you miss them once you've stepped back, and you feel like this is a relationship you want to work on, that's a really good point where you might be able to bring up things that have happened and say to them: "I feel like this friendship is one sided". 'But if you don't miss them, that's where it really says to you "maybe that is the person you should be letting go".' She explained people often remain friends because of the 'guilt' they may feel. 'It comes down to guilt, we're taught about this sisterhood that we should support each other, that we should be friends,' Dr Goldstein said. 'So I kind of find that we hang in there. We might have something where somebody is making us feel yuck about ourselves or something that's equally feels as violating. 'But yet we want to work on that friendship and we want to stay there because giving up on the friendship, we feel guilty about potentially letting somebody down.' Journalist Dilvin Yasa (pictured) weighed in on the topic, saying she realised it was time to end her 17-year friendship after her friend had a negative impact on her life Journalist Dilvin Yasa weighed in on the topic, saying she realised it was time to end her 17-year friendship after her friend had a negative impact on her life. 'When you see their name come up on your phone, and instead of being excited about speaking to your friend, you feel this dread in your heart,' she said. 'Towards the end, we drifted, I had this horrible feeling whenever we tried to get together, I was always finding ways to cancel on her. 'I felt so guilty because we had such a long friendship, but it was never a good feeling, I never walked away feeling great about having spent time with her.' The online fashion giant ASOS is to remove all traces of silk, cashmere, down and feathers from the garments it sells by the end of January 2019. Following its decision to ban mohair, ASOS is implementing further changes to its animal welfare policy that will see any animal-derived materials scrapped in the new year. The move has been welcomed by animal rights activists at PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), which said in a statement it 'applauds Asos for leading the charge for compassion in fashion'. 'Consumers are changing the face of the industry by demanding that designers and retailers ditch animal-derived materials in favour of cruelty-free alternatives that look great without causing suffering,' said PETA's director of corporate projects, Yvonne Taylor. ASOS did not issue a statement when contacted by FEMAIL, but confirmed that its animal welfare policy had been updated and that as of January 2019 it would not be stocking products containing silk, feather or down, bone, teeth or shell - including mother of pearl - cashmere, or mohair. ASOS has pledged to remove silk, cashmere, feather and down items from its platforms by January 2019 ASOS has amended its animal welfare policy to include feather, bone, shell, mohair, cashmere and silk The changes bring the e-tailer's policies for third party products - external brands sold through the website - in line with those for ASOS' own collections, which don't use feathers, bone, shell or teeth. Silk, cashmere and mohair are new additions to its policy. According to PETA, the mohair, cashmere, down and silk industries exploit goats, geese, ducks and silkworms. The organisation has previously campaigned to raise awareness of the ill treatment of angora goats reared for the mohair industry, and cashmere goats being shorn in midwinter in China and Mongolia in order to meet market demand. It has said down often comes from birds reared for the meat or foie gras industry, which PETA says have feathers yanked from their skin, while the around 6,600 silkworms are killed in the production of every kilogram of silk, according to the organisation. Products containing cashmere will also be removed from the fashion site by January Earlier this month the retailer was praised online for using unedited pictures to model its clothes on its website. Plus size blogger Callie Thorpe highlighted a shot of a model wearing an open back red maxi dress from the ASOS Curve collection, which showed rolls of flesh on her back. Thorpe said it encouraged curvier women to see their 'bodies are normal'. Hordes of other Twitter users have been sharing the image, with many declaring the model 'gorgeous'. Father's Day is usually about treating your dad and buying him something nice like aftershave, or maybe some chocolate. However, Mike Reynolds, from Ontario, Canada, decided to mark the day a little differently. The university communications officer, 39, got two brand new tattoos, with both designed by his daughters, who are aged just eight and six. The tattoos were inked on his leg and were inspired by his daughters' drawings of Wonder Woman and Star Wars character R2-D2. He had both designs inked on Father's Day, as a 'constant reminder of his daughter's love'. Mr Reynolds, the founder of company EverydayGirlDad, said that the tattoos took around two hours each to complete and cost around 200. Mike Reynolds' daughter Leah, aged eight (pictured), drew a picture of Wonder Woman that was they inked onto her father's leg His other daughter Charlotte, aged six (pictured), drew a picture of Star Wars character R2D2 He also said that he and his wife, Andrea, love the results. He told the Sun: 'I could not love them more and am already showing them off to everyone willing to look at my legs. 'I'll be getting more of these kid-drawing tattoos without a doubt.' Mr Reynolds now has around 40 tattoos on his body, with more than half designed by his daughters (pictured) Leah, eight, drew Wonder Woman while her sister Charlotte, six, drew R2-D2. The girls sent a letter to specialist skincare brand Electric Ink, who funded the tattoos. In the letter, they said they wanted to give their father an 'awesome amazing tattoo'. Initially, Electric Ink asked for votes to decide which design would become a tattoo. However, Mr Reynolds later got both inked. Initially, Electric Ink, the skincare company that funded the tattoos, set-up a poll to ask people to choose between the designs However, he said that he couldn't decide between the two designs and so ended up getting both of them The tattoos are the latest to adorn Mr Reynolds' body, joining around 40 others - more than half of which are based on drawings from his children. The father says he was inspired by drawings that Leah had made in school. He plans to build on his tattoo collection and ask his daughters to design even more. He admits that he scrutinises their drawings more now than he used to. The father also revealed he has tattoos on his arms and legs, as well as on his fingers and rib cage. He said: 'Every time I'm in public with a short sleeve shirt or shorts I have people ask if the kid-drawing ones are real tattoos and if they've been drawn by my kids.' The Duke of Cambridge has said that not enough is done to tackle suicide as he opened a new mental health centre in Liverpool. Prince William met the mother of a young man who took his own life as he opened the UK's first centre outside of a clinic or hospital for helping suicidal men. James' Place, a four-storey town house in Liverpool's Georgian quarter, is a new initiative formed by Clare Milford Haven and Nick Wentworth-Stanley, the parents of James Wentworth-Stanley, 21, who took his own life as a student in Newcastle in 2006. Earlier, the Duke was also given three handmade satchels for each of his children as he visited the International Business Festival at the Exhibition Centre on the waterfront, which is hosted every two years in Liverpool. The Duke of Cambridge speaks with centre manager Jane Boland (left) and Clare Milford Haven (centre), the mother who set-up the mental health centre During the visit to James' Place, the duke heard that both young and middle-aged men are especially at risk of suicide as they do not use medical services, sometimes through stigma or a sense of shame, when they are in crisis. Speaking to parents who also lost sons to suicide during the hour-long visit, the duke said: 'Suicide really is a quite a big problem, and we don't talk about it.' James' Place aims to offer a calm, friendly, non-hospital or clinic environment, where men can get help. The Prince joined Clare Milford Haven as they unveiled a plaque to mark the opening of the centre James Wentworth-Stanley's younger brother, Harry, and three friends rowed across the Atlantic in 2016, raising 600,000 in donations to help build the centre, which has been 10 years in the planning. James' mother, who is the Marchioness of Milford Haven, thanked the duke for 'bringing the subject out of the shadows' as he officially opened the centre. She said: 'Thank you for coming today, it means the world to us. James Wentworth-Stanley, pictured, committed suicide in 2006 at the age of 21, while he was a student at Newcastle university 'Very much spurred on by our own tragedy and our own experience of James' looking for help when he felt very anxious and suicidal in Newcastle, for him not finding that help, the help he needed anyway. 'I always felt had a place like this existed, he might still be here today. 'So that was a very compelling reason to start this project. 'I feel very much that James is here with us.' Speaking to parents who also lost sons to suicide during the duke said: 'Suicide really is a quite a big problem, and we don't talk about it' Taking referrals from local hospitals, student counselling services, police and street triage services, visitors will be offered a service of one-to-one free therapeutic support during their time of need. Visitors will have an initial appointment to find out the treatment needed and then will be offered a tailored service of one-to-one free support. James' family, who are from Hampshire and Worcestershire, have no connections to Liverpool, but set up the centre in the city as the local health authority, Mersey Care, were the most receptive to the project, they said. The Duke of Cambridge signed the guest book during his visit to James' Place, a four-storey town house in Liverpool's Georgian quarter Earlier, the duke also received several handmade gifts from some of the business leaders he met at the International Business Festival event - however, it is unclear if he kept any of them. The duke met with delegates, visited exhibitors and could be seen meeting with young entrepreneurs before giving an address to business leaders. The event is the biggest business festival in the world and the duke could be seen shaking hands with nervous school children. He shook hands with a robot hand that had been designed by a 3D printer as he took in the festival. Business leaders flocked around the Duke of Cambridge as he looked at some of the handmade bags created for him He even received three beautiful handmade satchels, emblazoned with the names of his three children - though it is unclear if he kept the gifts The Duke of Cambridge shakes a robotic hand made by a 3D printer during a visit to the International Business Festival at the Exhibition Centre Liverpool In his speech to business leaders from all over the world, William said: 'Although our backgrounds may be different, we are all united by our shared connection through trade. 'Britain has always been a champion of trade and a hub for commerce and exchange between our nations. There is perhaps nowhere in the country that embodies this more than Liverpool. 'But the festival also gives us an opportunity to look beyond the immediate term and at our collective future. The duke met with delegates, visited exhibitors and could be seen meeting with young entrepreneurs before giving an address to business leaders The International Business Festival is hosted every two years and this year's event will see a speech from the Duke 'It is only by investing in the skills of our young people in enterprise that we will be able to build the fair and prosperous society that we want our children to inherit.' Max Steinberg, chairman of the International Business Festival, said: 'The support of the duke has helped us to champion the importance of the business sector, and to inspire, connect and inform businesses from across the UK and the world. 'Making new global connections will help the small and medium businesses at the Festival to find growth and reach their potential.' Prince William could be seen greeting excited schoolchildren during his trip to the International Business Festival Queen Maxima of the Netherlands has returned to work, two weeks after her younger sister died of an apparent suicide. The Dutch royal visited a proton therapy centre in Groningen on Tuesday after a brief hiatus from public duties following the news her sister had been hanged in her home in Argentina earlier this month. Maxima, 47, appeared to be in a reflective mood as she spoke to scientists and learned about the pioneering cancer treatment they offer there. Ines Zorreguieta, 33, was found dead at her apartment in Buenos Aires, according to the Dutch Embassy in Argentina, who told La Nacion that authorities 'assume it was a case of suicide.' She is understood to have suffered from depression and mental health issues. Back to business: Queen Maxima of the Netherlands returns to work on Tuesday, two weeks after her younger sister died of an apparent suicide Queen Maxima of Holland's sister Ines Zorreguieta (pictured in a red hat at Princess Ariane's christening in 2007) was found dead in her Buenos Aires home on Wednesday night Ines' body was removed from her home in the early of hours ofJune 7 with a post-mortem examination set to take place, authorities said. Maxima's beloved sister was a psychologist who worked for an office on social policies at the president's office. Ines was also godmother to Queen Maxima's 11-year-old daughter Princess Ariane. Queen Maxima had previously cancelled all upcoming engagements and flew to Argentina to be with her family. She had been due to attend Holland Festival that week, but her appearance was subsequently cancelled, according to Hello! magazine. Public duties: The Dutch royal visited a proton therapy centre in Groningen on Tuesday after a brief hiatus from public duties following the news her sister had been hanged in her home Neutral: The Dutch royal wore muted colours, pairing a pistachio dress and skirt with a simple taupe scarf Mourning period: Maxima, 47, appeared to be in a reflective mood as she spoke to scientists and learned about the pioneering cancer treatment they offer there Sad: The news came after Queen Maxima, her husband and their three children flew to Argentina last year to attend the funeral of her father after his death from cancer She had also been set to accompany her husband, King Willem-Alexander, on their tour of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia next week. The Dutch Prime Minister said the news was 'intensely sad and heartbreaking.' 'The sudden passing away of Queen Maxima's sister comes as a great shock. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Queen and her family,' he said. 'I wish them all the strength they need to cope with this horrible loss. I trust that they will be afforded the space and privacy they need.' The sad news came just months after after Queen Maxima, her husband and their three children flew to Argentina last year to attend the funeral of her father after his death from cancer at the age of 89. Queen Maxima and her sister Ines are seen greeting each other in Buenos Aires in 2016 Ines was also godmother to Queen Maxima's 11-year-old daughter Princess Ariane. She is pictured on the day of Princess Ariane's baptism in October 2007 Ines Zorreguieta, pictured with her late father Jorge Zorreguieta last year, worked for the government in Argentina Ines was the youngest of government minister Jorge Zorreguieta and his second wife Maria del Carmen Cerruti Carricart's children. The Zorreguieta family who have been landed gentry, professionals, politicians, and statesmen for generations. Ines and Queen Maxima have two brothers as well as three half-sisters, Maria, Dolores and Angeles. Ines travelled to Holland for her sister's wedding without her parents in 2002. Their father was not permitted to attend due to his role as Argentina's Minister of Agriculture during the National Reorganization Process, the brutal military dictatorship led by General Jorge Rafael Videla that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983. Ines was also godmother to Queen Maxima's 11-year-old daughter Princess Ariane. Queen Maxima and Ines are pictured as the Dutch royal made a trip to Argentina after their father was hospitalised last year Queen Maxima (pictured in Amsterdam earlier this month) pulled out of all upcoming engagements, but this week appears to spell the end of her hiatus Queen Maxima became the first Latin American-born queen-consort of Holland when King Willem-Alexander ascended to the throne after his mother's abdication on April 30, 2013. The pair met in Seville, Spain, in 1999, but she was unaware he was a prince since he introduced himself only as 'Alexander.' They announced their engagement two years later. The news sparked controversy in Holland as her father's tenure as a minister was during the early stages of the Dirty War in Argentina - a period of state terrorism that saw up to 30,000 people killed or go missing during a seven-year military regime. Children as young as 14 are taking 'smart drugs' in a bid to pass the 'hardest GCSE exams ever', according to a TV investigation. The news was shared on ITV's This Morning and revealed how teenagers are becoming reliant on prescription drugs to cope with the pressures of tests - and risking 'serious side effects' in doing so. One student, Media Abid, admitted to taking amphetamines that she illegally bought online to help her stay up all night revising, describing the substances as 'essential', and 'like jet fuel'. Possession of commonly used 'smart' drugs like Ritalin or Modafinil is illegal without a prescription. Resident medic Dr Ranj, who warned that the stimulants belong to the same family as amphetamines, said they 'don't make you smarter, just more alert'. Speaking to presenters Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield, Media, who is now 19 and studied for her GCSEs two years ago, said: 'I had [more than] 13 plus exams. I was dependent on caffeine staying up all night revising. I was neglecting exercise and social life.' This Morning investigation has revealed that teenagers as young as 14 are taking 'smart drugs' to pass GCSE exams The revelation comes after education secretary Michael Gove made GCSEs more difficult, over fears that they were being 'dumbed down'. This summer's exams are the first year of the new syllabus, which is believed to be the toughest ever. This Morning researcher Enya Quinn-Jarvis revealed how easy the drugs were to buy illegally online, saying she found them within 30 seconds of searching. Student Media Abid, pictured left, admitted to taking amphetamines, describing the experience as 'like jet fuel' What are 'smart drugs' and are they legal? 'Smart drugs' are taken by some students to help them deal with exam stress and to improve performance. Some of the most commonly used drugs are Ritalin and Modafinil. Ritalin (methylphenidate) is a central nervous system stimulant. It affects chemicals in the brain and nerves that contribute to hyperactivity and impulse control. It is commonly used to treat attention deficit attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Ritalin is a class B drug in the UK and possession without a prescription can lead to a five-year prison sentence -while dealing could put you behind bars for 14 years. Modafinil, on the other hand, is a wakefulness-promoting drug used for treatment of disorders such as narcolepsy. While it is illegal to sell modafinil in the UK without a prescription, it is not illegal to buy. Side effects of popular smart drugs include fatigue, distraction, inability to sleep and dry mouth. Advertisement Media agreed, explaining: 'It was through a mindless Google search. I was desperate. 'I Googled any drug that makes you smart. There were forums talking about it. When I was taking the tablets, it gave me a tunnel focus. It was making me more awake and alert. It was essential like jet fuel.' Ms Quinn-Jarvis said: 'Within 30 seconds of searching online you can find these drugs... If you don't have a prescription, these drugs are illegal. 'I saw a significant amount of students talking about their struggles with their GCSEs online and in a bid to cope with the pressures and demand of the exams they were talking about using "smart drugs" and these students were as young as 14 years old.' With the problem affecting more and more teenagers, Media highlighted the downsides to the 'smart drugs'. She said: 'There are downsides. At first it was giving me a like this new found energy and focus. But I started to notice I was getting dry mouth and I had no appetite and I was getting very irritable. 'My anxiety disorders were getting worse. The biggest problem for me was that I was losing sleep. So the reason I was taking the drugs was to improve my grades but the the lack of sleep was bring them down. 'These drugs are controlled for a reason. They interfered with my health more than they benefited my grades. There are far better ways to manage your stress and manage your workload than depending on a pill a day.' This Morning viewers were left shocked by the report, with several taking to Twitter to question why the new GCSEs are so hard This summer's GCSE exams are said to be the toughest ever and are the first of a new syllabus implemented by Michael Gove The Student Room, a forum where thousands of students discuss topics, said in a statement that they try to stop the promotion of 'smart drugs' However, some took to Twitter to question whether the exams were as hard as pupils made out This Morning medic Dr Ranj agreed and urged parents to keep an eye on their children during the exam period. He said: 'There is a reason these are prescription-only medications. They belong to the stimulant family of amphetamines. 'The risk when you buy these online, you don't know what you are getting but you are exposing yourself to some serious side effects and some of them could be more disruptive than if you hadn't taken them in the first place. 'They don't make you smarter, just more alert.' Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield looked shocked as they listened to Media talk about her experience using 'smart drugs' He advised pupils struggling with exam pressures to talk to a loved one or contact Childline. The drugs are widely talked about online, especially on forums such as the Student Room. A statement from the Student Room, shared on This Morning, said: 'We see discussions on our forum about them, but we try to ensure that anything promoting the use of such drugs and how to access them is removed. 'We're seeing increasing levels of stress around exams which worries us greatly and with the use of smart study drugs this is one symptom of this stress. We feel we need to look into this further. This Morning viewers took to Twitter to share their concerns about the startling wave of 'smart drugs'. Georgia Graham wrote: 'The fact that young people are willing to take drugs to pass GCSEs it shows how much pressure they are under, how can the government make these tests harder when this is happening?' Alisha Valerie said: 'Oh my gosh, taking ''smart drugs'' are so scary. I don't understand why anyone would sacrifice their health for a good grade? These websites need to be shut down!' A grandmother who spent 16,000 on a lavish first birthday party for her grandson has been branded 'ridiculous' by This Morning viewers. Property developer Sharon Moseley, 53, from Essex, spent the eye-watering sum on a party for one-year-old Danny Smith - and joked that she'll have to do it 'until he's 21'. Appearing on This Morning, the grandmother defended her decision to splash out on her grandchild - saying she wanted to do it for her daughter Georgia 'because she's been through so much'. Sharon explained how Georgia, 26, was in a horrific car accident at the age of 17, adding that her daughter also suffers from bipolar disorder. However, This Morning viewers were left unconvinced by her decision, saying that Sharon should have donated the cash to charity instead - or put it in a trust fund. Scroll down for video Property developer Sharon Moseley, 53, defended her decision to splash out 16,000 on a birthday party for her one-year-old grandson One commented: 'Don't get me wrong, if you work hard then how you spend your earnings is entirely your prerogative... but 16000. He's one years old, it's just money wasted.' Another added: 'Spending 16K on your Grandsons 1st birthday is ridiculous. How do these people even have this much money to spend when there is so much poverty going on?' But some viewers argued that grandmother Sharon should spend her money however she wanted. One commented: 'Omg it's her money she can do whatever she wants with it.' Sharon explained how she splashed out on the party for the benefit of her daughter Georgia (above, with her son Danny), as well as Danny However, This Morning viewers were unconvinced, describing it as a 'waste of money' Another posted: 'I love this grandma, how much she loves her grandson and her family. If she can afford to give them what they want after all they have been through why shouldn't she.' On This Morning, Sharon explained how her family had been through a lot - with daughter Georgia being injured in a horrific car accident when she was just 17. 'It was for Georgia as well, because she's been through so much, since her accident,' Sharon said. 'She's missed out. At 17 having a car accident, and being in hospital for months. I nearly lost my daughter, and she could have not had a baby.' Defending her decision to splash out the cash, she added: 'We got lovely pictures, we got nice memories.' The grandmother-of-one also explained she has money set aside for Danny's future as well, before joking ''I'll have to [throw a lavish party] every year until he's 21 now' The party was on a Union Flag and soldier theme because Ms Moseley is 'proud to be British' Sharon (right) told Philip Schofield and Holly Willougby that they've got 'lovely photos and memories' from the day Some social media users defended her decision to throw the lavish party, saying it was up to her how she spent her cash More than 170 guests were treated to a no-expense-spared soldier-themed bash - complete with a four-tiered cake, glamorous decor, and an open bar at a luxury wedding venue. The soiree saw 60 young children tucking into chicken nuggets, cheeseburgers and chips on silver platters, while adults dined on fresh seafood, salmon bagels, hot pork buns and jellied eels, at a cost of 2,500. Little Danny sat in a bespoke rose gold high chair costing 650 from John Lewis that had been lined with midnight black leatherette to match the colour of the toy soldiers' busbies. The boy had his outfit changed three times at a cost of 500 and Sharon splashed out 2,500 on an open bar for all of the parents. Dessert tables were laden with cupcakes, cake lollypops and a giant cake decorated with Royal Guard soldiers, all against a specially decorated red-and-blue-background. And the glam granny spent hundreds more on a Punch and Judy show, face painting, and a magician to entertain the 60 children invited. Danny Smith sits in his golden highchair for the lavish party celebrating his first birthday Staff served marshmallows and chocolates to children on silver platters TOWIE star Cara Kilbey, second from right, gushed about it to her 365k Instagram followers A seafood buffet was laid on for the adults attending as well as an open bar available all day The event even ended with kids taking home posh party bags including a water bottle emblazoned with Danny's name. The proud grandmother, whose husband Danny runs a commercial vehicle business, said she had no regrets about spending such a lavish amount. She said: 'People who know me know that I would do it best. If you are going to do it, you have to do it properly. You only live once so why don't you enjoy it! 'Why shouldn't I celebrate the birthday of my grandson, what an amazing thing that has happened.' HOW SHE SPENT IT Golden high chair: 650 Four-tiered cake and cupcakes: 650 Cake lollypops: 300 Party planning: 6,000 Venue hire: 3,000 Food: 2,500 Drink: 2,500 Entertainment: 1,000 Baby outfits: 500 Advertisement She added: 'I would do it again. I'm proud to be British and I wanted the party to reflect that, which is why it has a soldiers theme.' In eight acre grounds, waiters and waitresses handed out bite-size portions of brownies and marshmallows for dessert afterwards. Decorations included golden balloons spelling out 'Dannyboy' across the wall, two twelve-foot balloon models of Queen's Guard soldiers and a fourteen-foot red and golden balloon wreath. He wore three different outfits worth 500 whilst well-wishers dropped off envelopes and gifts into a personalised Royal Mail postbox. Danny's mum Georgia Moseley, 26, joked: 'My birthday parties were never this big! I don't even think my wedding would be this much. 'But I didn't have a baby shower or anything so this is the first time that we're celebrating. And we're making lots of memories for the future.' The event at posh venue That Amazing Place, in Harlow, Essex, was also attended by former The Only Way is Essex star Cara Kilbey, who shared snaps of the party with her 365k Instagram followers. She gushed: 'It's incredible! What a party.' The family wanted to celebrate the milestone birthday after doctors' previously warned that mum Georgia may never have children. TOWIE star Cara Kilbey added some celebrity sparkle to the party which took place in Essex The TOWIE celebrity gushed about the party on Instagram calling it 'gorgeous' She was left fighting for her life and her pelvis was smashed in eight places when she was a passenger in a car crash in October 2008. Sharon said: 'Doctors told us to prepare for the worst.' She developed pneumonia in hospital and had to undergo a eight hour operation to repair her pelvis, and a five hour operation to save her arm. A gynaecologist warned her that she may never have children and Sharon resigned herself to not having a grandchild. And the family struggled after Georgia was then diagnosed with Bipolar disorder after the crash. But in 2016, she fell pregnant and Sharon was overjoyed by the good news. Sharon Moseley, 53, seated, says she doesn't care if people judge her for spending so much The no-expense-spared party was attended by more than 170 guests at a wedding venue She said: 'With everything that has been thrown at Georgia, we cannot believe how she has come out of it. 'So I think, there's a lot of bad stuff going on, and no one does anything nice when people come through something. You might get people who say 'oh what a waste of money', but why not? 'We've been through hell and things are going well right now.' Georgia said: 'I'm so grateful to my mum, she's amazing. I knew it was going to be a big party as we know a lot of people. 'This is how we do things, we don't cut any corners! If we're going to do it, we will do it. It was an amazing party.' Sharon said she was inspired by her dad, Terry Green, a famous interior designer for the Rothschild family, to decorate the party in such a lavish fashion. The colour-coordinated event featured an extravagant red-white-and-blue and golden theme Auntie Frankie Moseley, left, grandfather Danny Moseley, standing, Danny Moseley, one, centre, grandmother Sharon Moseley, seated centre, and mother Georgia Moseley, right In a survey of 1,000 British parents with children aged eight or under, it was revealed the average parent will spend 433.39 on parties and 100.06 on presents for other children every year. In addition, parents also revealed they will pay as much as 223.05 on party bags. According to the research, Brits spend almost 5,000 on their children's birthdays throughout their primary school years, including the cost of buying presents for their own children. Brenda Daniels, of luxury themed parties firm Ne Riba Event Styling, which styled the party, says she has seen increased demand for high-end parties for kids. She said: 'The clients I deal with are looking to have the full works. 'There is more of a demand these days. It was popular in the States and Australia but I think it's only starting to pick up a trend here now. 'It's not quite as much as the rest of the world, I think quite a lot of people are used to going to smaller parties. 'You can tell by the shock on people's faces when they walk into the room, and they see the level of detail we've gone for.' At least two clients a month will opt for the platinum package, said Brenda, which starts at 2,300. She said: 'I think the parents do it for themselves as much as the child. 'Some people's initial reaction, particularly when its a first birthday party, is to point out that they're not going to remember it. 'But what people forget is that it is parents celebrating the child, it's not the child celebrating themselves. 'If you were having a party for yourself, you would throw it a certain way, so if you're having a party to celebrate your child, then you can throw it any way you want. 'That might be simple or extravagant.' Zara and Mike Tindall have welcomed their second child, Buckingham Palace has announced. The Queen's granddaughter and her rugby player husband, who already have four-year-old daughter Mia Grace, welcomed a little girl on Monday. The new arrival, whose name has not yet been announced, was born at Stroud Maternity Unit in Gloucestershire weighing 9 lbs 3 oz, the Palace said. The youngster is believed to be the heaviest royal baby in recent years; the record was previously held by Zara's niece Savannah Phillips, who weighed 8lb 8oz when she was born in 2010. Mia weighed 7 lbs 12 oz when she was born in 2014, while all three of the Duchess of Cambridges children have weighed less than 9 lbs. Just minutes after the news was announced, a 'delighted' Princess Anne joined the Queen at Royal Ascot. Scroll down for video It's a girl! The royal and her rugby player husband (pictured at the royal wedding last month) who already have daughter Mia Grace, welcomed a little girl on Monday Growing family: Zara's grandmother the Queen and other members of the royal family are 'delighted' at the news of the couple's new arrival, Buckingham Palace said Proud grandmother: Just minutes after the news was announced, a 'delighted' Princess Anne joined the Queen at Royal Ascot in Berkshire Announcement: The royal and her rugby player husband, who already have daughter Mia Grace, welcomed a little girl on Monday The Tindalls' happy news comes just two months after the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's third child was born. The baby will be the seventh great-grandchild for the Queen, after the Royal family welcomed Prince Louis of Cambridge in April. In an official announcement this afternoon, Buckingham Palace said: 'Mrs Michael Tindall was safely delivered of a baby girl on 18th June, at Stroud Maternity Unit. 'Mr Tindall was present at the birth. The weight of the baby was 9lbs 3oz. 'The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Princess Royal, Captain Mark Phillips and Mikes parents, Mr Philip and Mrs Linda Tindall, have been informed and are delighted with the news. The babys name will be confirmed in due course. 'This baby is the second child for Zara and Mike, the fourth grandchild for The Princess Royal and the seventh great-grandchild for The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh.' How the new Tindall baby weighs up: Mia weighed 7 lbs 12 oz when she was born in 2014, while all three of the Duchess of Cambridges children have weighed less than 9 lbs Zara shows off her baby bump in Windsor in May. In an official announcement on Tuesday, Buckingham Palace said: 'Mrs Michael Tindall was safely delivered of a baby girl on 18th June, at Stroud Maternity Unit' New addition: The baby is the second child for Zara and Mike, who already have Mia Grace (pictured), and the fourth grandchild for Princess Anne Heartbreak to happiness: News of Zara's pregnancy came just over a year after the royal couple, who married in 2011, suffered the heartache of a miscarriage. Mike said Mia (pictured last year) had been their 'saving grace' A heavily pregnant Zara pictured last month. The new arrival, whose name has not yet been announced, was born at Stroud Maternity Unit, weighing 9 lbs 3 oz, the Palace said Zara and Mike Tindall, pictured on the announcement of their engagement in December 2010, have welcomed their second child The announcement of Zara's pregnancy came just over a year after the couple, who married in 2011, suffered the heartache of a miscarriage. In November 2016 the couple revealed they were expecting a brother or sister for three-year-old Mia, but just a month later, on Christmas Eve, they announced Zara tragically had lost the baby. Mike Tindall opens up about the miscarriage The couple lost their unborn baby just weeks after revealing they were expecting their second child in 2016. A royal spokeswoman made the announcement on Christmas Eve. Speaking about the tragedy last year, Mr Tindall described has described his daughter Mia as a 'saving grace' at the very difficult time. He told The Sunday Times: 'One thing you do learn is how many other people have to go through the same thing. The saving grace for us has been Mia however down we feel, she will come running up in our faces.' Advertisement It is believed she was around four months pregnant at the time. As a result, she missed the Royal Family's annual celebrations at Sandringham. Princess Anne's daughter has not spoken publicly about the tragedy but former England rugby captain Mike later said: 'One thing you do learn is how many other people have to go through the same thing. 'The saving grace for us has been Mia. However down we feel, she will come running up in our faces.' The new baby will not be given a title as both parents are keen for their children to have a 'normal' upbringing. Zara and Mike live with her mother, Princess Anne, on her Gatcombe Park estate in Gloucestershire. For a number of years Zara a former world eventing champion and Olympic silver medallist has been involved with the event which features thoroughbred sales, racing and polo matches. The Queen's granddaughter is patron of the event's Magic Millions Racing Women, an initiative promoting racehorse ownership among women. Former jailbird Michaella McCollum was spotted heading to the gym on Tuesday. The 'Peru Two' drug mule, 24, showed off her svelte post-baby body in skin-tight exercise clothes as she strolled to the studio in her hometown of Belfast. Michaella, who welcomed her sons last month, was seen carrying a phone in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. Michaella McCollum was spotted heading to the gym near her home in Belfast on Tuesday The mother-of-two looked toned in a pair of grey leggings and a white racer back t-shirt The former jailbird made sure she stayed hydrated with a bottle of water in her hand The mother-of-two looked ready for a workout in a white racerback t-shirt, grey leggings and new white trainers. She wore her long blonde hair pulled back in a practical high ponytail. The mother of twins has already posted about being able to fit back in her pre-baby wardrobe and this workout routine might be her secret. Michaella, who welcomed twin sons last month, is already back in her pre-pregnancy clothes The gym bunny kept her look simple with white and grey and added matching trainers She looked in the zone as she strode across the street towards the gym in Belfast The former drugs mule kept her long blonde hair out of her face and tied in a low ponytail She appears determine to pick up her exercise routine after welcoming her sons last month Michaella shot to notoriety in 2013 as one half of the 'Peru Two' drug mule duo The new mother has been busy taking her babies out and about and was most recently spotted taking them on a walk in the park. She was seen cooing over both babies as she held them on her lap on a bench. The new mother announced the news of their birth on Instagram last month by sharing a sweet clip with her newborns, captioned: 'My little darlings, 1 week today.' And she certainly hasn't held back when it comes to chronicling the realities of motherhood, writing on a recent post: 'Not often these days when I'm not covered in pee and spew.' She has been spotted out a number of times since the birth of her sons and was again today The multi-tasking mother was seen texting on her phone as she made her way to the gym The new mother appeared to be looking intently at the message coming through on her phone Micahaella boasts thousands of followers on Instagram, where she posts about her twins She also revealed her joy at being able to fit into her pre-pregnancy clothes, but has so far declined to share who their father is - prompting speculation that she is embarking on this next chapter alone. Michaella shot to notoriety in 2013 when she and her friend Melissa Reid were arrested in Lima for smuggling drugs and dubbed the Peru Two in the press. The pair met in Ibiza in 2013 where they were employed by a drug-dealing gang. Michaella, who has not revealed the identity of her sons' father, was later seen on the phone She appeared to be getting into a somewhat heated conversation with the person on the other end The 24-year-old continued to talk as she made her way inside the gym on Tuesday afternoon The Belfast gym appeared to be a low-key set up without too many added extras They were sentenced to spend six years and eight months inside a grim jail in Lima, after they were caught at the airport trying to smuggle 1.5M worth of cocaine. However, they were released after serving three years with Michaella returning to Northern Ireland in June 2016. Since her release from prison, Michaella has become something of a public figure, attending events and escaping the chilly British weather on a string of sun-kissed holidays last summer. McCollum, who has become something of a public figure, was the picture of determination The mother didn't display any hint of a baby bump as she made her way to the studio Michaella McCollum enjoyed some 'me' time away from the twins while she went to the gym Her bikini-clad snaps on various sunny getaways have become something of a regular fixture in the media. By contrast her former accomplice Reid, landed a charity job at Citizens Advice after she was released from jail in South America in June 2016. Michaella was also reportedly offered 250,000 for a tell-all book deal detailing her criminal exploits and time behind bars in Lima, although no details of the publication have been released. The mother-of-two looked radiant during the outing in Belfast on Tuesday afternoon Her figure-hugging clothes showed off just how little of her baby weight she has to lose Michaella kept it casual in workout gear for the trip to the gym, carrying only the essentials She appeared to make her way towards a car to head home following the gym session Michaella announced the birth of her sons in an Instagram post last month She spent the day taking in the action at Royal Ascot with the Queen. But Princess Eugenie was back on the party circuit on Tuesday evening as she joined a host of stars at the Serpentine Summer Party in London. Eugenie, 28, joined fiance Jack Brooksbank at the black tie do which was also attended by sister Princess Beatrice, Lady Kitty Spencer and Lady Amelia Windsor. The bride-to-be, who will tie the knot in October, wore a sultry one-shoulder sheer dress boasting a vibrant purple pattern. Not long now! Eugenie, 28, joined fiance Jack Brooksbank at the black tie do which was also attended by Lady Kitty Spencer and Lady Amelia Windsor Regal glamour: 29-year-old Princess Beatrice was there too. She teamed her evening look with a boxy black bag from Pop and Suki and silver stiletto heels Quick change! Just hours earlier, the two sisters were mingling with the Queen in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, Berkshire She teamed the sheer number with black skinny jeans and vertiginous heels,adding a touch of glamour with a side parting and a slick of berry lipstick. Shortly afterwards her older sister, Princess Beatrice, showed up wearing an unusual peacock print dress underneath a Wilfred Free for ARITZIA biker jacket. Sister act! The princesses both opted for vibrant cocktail attire for the star-studded bash Radiant: Princess Eugenie beamed for the cameras as she posed with her big sister Beatrice Famous friends: Princess Eugenie poses for a photo with popstar Ellie Goulding The 29-year-old teamed her evening look with a personalized boxy black bag from Pop and Suki - model Suki Waterhouse and wellness guru Poppy Jamie's brand - and silver stiletto heels. On Monday afternoon, the York sisters joined royals including the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for the first day of Royal Ascot in Berkshire. Princess Anne and Prince and Princess Michael of Kent were also in attendance. Splash of colour: Princess Beatrice's peacock print cocktail dress was the perfect choice Heading home: Princess Eugenie was spotted leaving the after party at Annabel's Edgy look: The bride-to-be wore her cocktail dress over a pair of flattering black trousers Like her cousin Harry, Eugenie will marry at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle when she ties the knot with her wine merchant boyfriend. Brooksbank is the son of an Old Etonian, accountant George Brooksbank and attended the 10,000-a-term Stowe school. It was discovered in early 2018 that Brooksbank and Princess Eugenie are distantly related, with his great-great-grandfather Viscount Thomas Coke is also the great-great-grandfather of Sarah Ferguson, Eugenies mother. On trend: Princess Eugenie accessorised with a bracelet bag, right, and point-toe booties Brooksbank didnt go to university, instead going straight into the hospitality industry. He started out as a waiter and worked at a gastropub near Sloane Square. While working, he met Piers Adam, a businessman who hired him at The Markham Inn in Chelsea. It was at The Markham Inn that Brooksbank met Prince Harry and Guy Pelly and began navigating the royal circles. Later, Brooksbank joined the operations team at Mahiki, a nightclub preferred by Prince Harry, and became a brand ambassador for George Clooneys Casamigos tequila. Not long to go! Like her cousin Harry, Eugenie will marry at St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle when she ties the knot with her wine merchant boyfriend in October Making a splash: The bride-to-be, who will tie the knot in October, wore a sultry one-shoulder sheer dress boasting a vibrant purple pattern Princess Eugenie teamed the sheer number with black skinny jeans and vertiginous heels,adding a touch of glamour with a side parting and a slick of berry lipstick The eldest daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson opted for a smoky eye and a pale lip as she joined stars at the Serpentine Summer Party on Tuesday Even modern medicine would not likely have saved Senator Robert F Kennedy from the shot to the head that killed him 50 years ago, according to a new analysis. On June 5, 1968, a 24-year-old gunman named Sirhan Sirhan fired off multiple rounds at Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Like the death of his brother, former President John F Kennedy Jr five years before, Robert's death sparked a spate of controversy over the circumstances of his death. It took 45 minutes for the ambulance to arrive to transport Kennedy to the Good Samaritan Hospital. He died 26 hours later, amid shock, confusion and unanswered questions. The bullet trauma that killed Senator Robert F Kennedy in 1968 almost certainly would have proved just as deadly today as it was then, new Duke University research confirms Duke University scientists have re-examined Kennedy's injuries and care and confirmed that everything possible to save Kennedy's life was done 50 years ago- and that even today's most cutting-edge medicine would likely have failed the Senator. As is the case with any high-profile murder, rumors and speculation immediately followed Robert F Kennedy's assassination. RFK was shot the night that he won two key victories in the 1968 presidential primaries Just five years earlier, his brother, President John F Kennedy Jr had also been shot and killed. Conspiracy theories and reexaminations still haunt the former president's death. Robert's assassination - while similarly tragic - was met with skepticism over the number of shots fired and the direction from which they had had come. The younger Kennedy was shot just following a speech he had made at the Ambassador after finding out he had had two major victories in the primaries - in South Dakota and California - giving him a shot at becoming the next Democratic presidential candidate. His campaign was gathering momentum, and many Americans saw him as a potential uniting force after a decade of unrest. But as he exited the building through the kitchen, shots rang out. Sirhan Sirhan's bullets pierced Kennedy's skull. He suffered what the new study authors call 'extensive injury to the right cerebellum and right occipital cortex.' Theirs is the first extensive medical analysis of Kennedy's injuries since his autopsy was performed, the authors say. By reviewing eyewitness reports of the shooting, fastidious logs of the care Kennedy was given en route to and at the hospital, they determined that there had been severe damage to Kennedy's brainstem and bleeding in several locations. Kennedy's brainstem, cerebellum and occipital cortex sustained 'extensive injury' (pictured) As soon as he collapsed Kennedy (center) was surrounded by onlookers desperate to help the fallen Senator. It took 45 minutes for an ambulance to arrive to transport him to a hospital Gunshot wounds of any kind, even today, are about 90 percent fatal. That rate has scarcely changed over the course of the last 100 years, the study authors write. As is often the case with such injuries, the Duke researchers found that fragments of bullet and bone that had shattered and become lodged in many places in Kennedy's brain tissue. The doctors of Kennedy's day didn't have the same imaging - such as CT scans - that might have allowed them to create a more delicate plan of attack before operating. But the open brain surgery - or craniotomy - that Kennedy's doctors performed was essentially the same one that he would have gotten in today's best hospitals. Besides advances in imaging, the primary changes to care that the study authors noted would have been minor adjustments in post-op care, and they likely wouldn't have changed Kennedy's fate. 'Despite numerous advances in imaging, anesthesia, and surgical technique over the last 50 years, damage to the brainstem and its associated blood vessels continues to be a devastating and catastrophic injury,' said study co-author Dr Shivanand Lad. Another co-author, Dr Jordan Komisarow added: 'By all accounts an aggressive and valiant effort was made to save the senator's life. Unfortunately, a similar injury would likely also be fatal, or severely debilitating, in 2018.' Smoking has hit an all-time low in the US, government figures show. Just 13.9 percent of US adults smoked in 2017, down from about 15.5 percent the year before, according to a report from the CDC released on Tuesday. Teens are smoking less than ever before as well, with rates down to just nine percent among high school students. Decades of health warnings have raised public awareness about how the addictive habit can cause many cancers - including lung, throat and stomach cancer - resulting in a declining number of smokers, experts say. Smoking has hit an all-time low in the US with just 13.9 percent of US adults puffing on cigarettes in 2017, down from about 15.5 percent the year before, a CDC report shows There hadn't been much change the previous two years, but it's been clear there's been a general decline and the new figures show it's continuing, said K Michael Cummings of the tobacco research program at Medical University of South Carolina. 'Everything is pointed in the right direction,' including falling cigarette sales and other indicators, Cummings said. The CDC report comes on the heels of a ruling on Monday requiring tobacco companies to describe their products as 'deadly' and 'addictive' on their websites. The companies, which Altria, RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Lorillard, and Philip Morris USA, had to issue corrective statements' online by June 18.. In the statements, the companies must discuss the health effects of smoking, nicotine addiction, and the health risks linked to secondhand smoke exposure. SMOKING DEATHS COULD INCREASE 33 PERCENT BY 2030, WHO WARNS Cigarettes will kill a third more people by 2030 than it does now, the World Health Organization warned in a landmark study in 2017. Currently, smoking claims six million lives annually - mostly in low-income countries. Despite a drop in tobacco sales in some countries, the new report compiled by 70 public health experts show global rates of smokers are risin. This means the figure will likely jump to eight million in little more than a decade. And they reveal the cost of tobacco deaths ($1 trillion per year) far outweighs revenues from tobacco taxes ($269 billion in 2013-2014). Advertisement Similar warnings must appear on cigarette packages by November 21. In the early 1960s, roughly 42 percent of US adults smoked. It was common nearly everywhere - in office buildings, restaurants, airplanes and even hospitals. The decline has coincided with a multitude of studies showing that smoking is linked to various cancers, heart disease, and other health problems. Anti-smoking campaigns, cigarette taxes and smoking bans are combining to bring down adult smoking rates, experts say. The launch of electronic cigarettes and their growing popularity has also likely played a role. E-cigarettes heat liquid nicotine into a vapor without the harmful by-products generated from burning tobacco. That makes them a potentially useful tool to help smokers quit, but some public health experts worry it also creates a new way for people to get addicted to nicotine. There was no new information for adult use of e-cigarettes and vaping products, but 2016 figures say about three percent of US adults use them. Vaping is more common among teens than adults. About 13 percent of high school students use e-cigarettes or other vaping devices. Scientists have hopes of developing a cure for sepsis after discovering vital clues from child survivors of the deadly disease. Sepsis dubbed the silent killer because it is so hard to spot kills at least 44,000 people a year. The condition can develop as a violent response to an infection which causes the bodys immune system to attack its own organs. The desperate need for a cure comes because sepsis is often initially mistaken for flu or a chest infection, and without fast treatment it can swiftly lead to multiple organ failure and death. The US study, led by Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, revealed the genes which may be responsible for providing this protection (stock of patient being looked after) While it is generally less harmful among children than adults, sepsis has become a national scandal because of the deaths of children such as 12-month-old William Mead, who died in 2014 after the symptoms were missed when his mother called the NHSs 111 out-of-hours helpline. Scientists examined data from 95 children who survived sepsis to determine why their immune systems were able to battle it. The US study, led by Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, revealed the genes which may be responsible for providing this protection. These enabled them to identify ten current drugs including a migraine cure and a throat medicine which appear to trigger the same genes to fight the condition. Scientists examined data from 95 children who survived sepsis to determine why their immune systems were able to battle it When tested in mice, these drugs helped more than 50 per cent of the animals survive in some cases. It is hoped a variant could be used to treat human patients within five years. The studys co-author, Dr Winston Hide, professor of computational biology at the University of Sheffield and a previous member of the Harvard team, said: Children are naturally more resistant to lots of infectious diseases. During outbreaks such as Spanish flu and ebola, we know that children survived much better than adults. By analysing the blood profiles of infected children and comparing them to adults with sepsis, we were able to identify children whose natural resilience helped them to ward off infection. By using the lessons we have learnt from the immune systems of children, scientists can now unlock how to control the disease and prevent it from occurring, as opposed to trying to fight the disease once it has manifested itself. Sepsis is triggered by an infection, such as blood poisoning, and when spotted early it can usually be controlled by antibiotics. The Daily Mails End The Sepsis Scandal campaign has been pushing for more awareness to prevent the thousands of needless deaths it causes each year. The latest study, published in the journal Molecular Systems Biology, identified the gene pathways which kicked into action in children who survived sepsis, and compared them to 167 adults who died from it or survived. It is believed the genes involved may boost the immune system, although it is not yet fully known how they work. But their discovery, even without that detail, enabled the team to find drugs which trigger the same genetic activity. These include topiramate, a migraine treatment, a cough suppressant called noscapine, and khellin, a folk cure for kidney stones taken from the plant Ammi visnaga, also known as bishops weed. Dr Jethro Herberg, a clinical senior lecturer in paediatric infectious disease at Imperial College London who was not involved in the research, said: This demonstrates an imaginative approach, in which scientists have taken data generated by groups around the world and, by comparing the response of children and adults to sepsis, have found a shortcut to working out which pathways to target with drugs. By taking their results, and running successful trials on mice, they have made an exciting first step to new drug exploration, making the most of big data which can ordinarily seem a long way from clinical translation. But the road ahead is long. People taking a controversial preventative HIV drug could give false negative results for up to seven months, new research suggests. Tests are unable to pick up the virus in those taking PrEP, a US study found. Infected people may then have unprotected sex thinking they are HIV free, the reserchers warn. PrEP is approved for people at a high risk of HIV infection, such as those with an affected partner. Critics claim it encourages sexual promiscuity, which could increase the transmission of other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). HIV tests give false negative results for up to seven months (stock) WHAT IS PrEP? THE HIV PREVENTION DRUG THAT STOPS 90 PERCENT OF TRANSMISSION This drug in particular is fixed-dose combination of two anti-retroviral drugs, tenofovir and FTC, in one pill. They work together to interfere with an enzyme which HIV uses to infect new cells, slowing down the virus's attack or preventing it altogether. The drug is designed for people that have not yet been exposed to the virus to protect themselves against it. Alternatively, people who have been exposed can take PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis), a month-long course of drugs started within 72 hours of exposure. Advertisement Why does PrEP make HIV tests less accurate? HIV infections cause people's immune systems to make proteins, known as antibodies, that fight the virus. These antibodies are what HIV tests detect. As PrEP prevents the HIV virus multiplying, it may cause antibody numbers to rise more slowly. This could mean it takes longer for a person to produce a sufficient number of antibodies for a test to detect them. PrEP users are recommended to have HIV tests every three months in case they miss a dose, however, lead author Ivana Parker, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, suggests they get tested every four weeks. The CDC is looking into developing more sensitive HIV tests that detect low antibody levels, the New Scientist reported. Tests can give false negative results for up to seven months among those taking PrEP (stock) How the research was carried out The researchers analysed the blood and saliva samples of injecting drug users. The users, from Thailand, were taking PrEP. Results suggest it takes seven months before HIV-related antibodies are detected in saliva tests and three months for blood tests. The findings were presented at an American Society for Microbiology meeting in Atlanta. Scientists edge closer to an HIV vaccine This comes after research released last April suggested scientists are edging closer to a long-term preventative HIV vaccine. A single injection protected monkeys against a version of the virus for at least 18 weeks, suggesting the jab could offer people months of immunity, a study by Rockefeller University, New York, found. Developing such a vaccine is difficult due to HIV 'hiding' from people's immune systems, however, including certain proteins in the injection cause immune cells to recognise parts of the 'envelope' that surround the virus, the research adds. According to the researchers, their findings, published in the journal Nature Medicine, 'lay the groundwork' for a preventative vaccine that could be given as little as once a year. It is unclear when it may be available. Gender dysphoria is no longer considered as a mental disorder by the World Health Organization. The UN agency yesterday released its latest edition of the International Classification of Diseases. In the document, it removed the term gender dysphoria as a mental health disorder - and renamed it as gender incongruence. Chiefs also listed video game addiction as a mental health condition for the first time in the same landmark move. Trans advocates yesterday hailed the WHO's monumental decision for people who feel they were born in the wrong body. It is estimated that one per cent of the population is affected by gender dysphoria. Caitlyn Jenner is the most famous person to have changed genders. Sally Goldner, a spokesperson for Transgender Victoria - an organization that fights for the rights of trans people, told Gay Star News: 'It is huge. Its big because a big powerful organization is sending an affirming message saying being trans is part of human diversity rather than pathologizing us.' What is gender dysphoria? Gender dysphoria is the term for when a person's emotional and psychological identity is different to their physical form. It is estimated that one per cent of the population is affected somehow. Caitlyn Jenner is the most famous person to have changed genders. HAS THE NHS OPENED THE DOOR FOR A RANGE OF MORE TRANSGENDER TREATMENTS? A health service chief opened the door for a range of more transgender treatments earlier this month. Dr James Palmer said the NHS may provide facial hair removal, breast reduction, and even reversing gender reassignment surgeries. There has been an explosion in the number of children seeking a sex swap which may accelerate if plans to expand publicly funded operations go ahead, NHS Englands medical director for specialised services said. The move came as two thirds of NHS trusts were found to be denying cataract operations to patients in desperate need of the life-changing surgery. Dr Palmer told the Westminster Social Policy Forum that referrals for gender dysphoria have increased by around 240 per cent over the last five year period. Advertisement The former Olympian and reality TV star underwent the surgery in January 2017, nearly two years after announcing she would transition to a woman. In the ICD-11, the WHO created new categories that cover trans identities under conditions that relate to sexual health. Gender dysphoria once was considered a personality or behaviour disorder. But its definition has changed as it is now called gender incongruence. It is described as 'characterised by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individuals experienced gender and the assigned sex. Video game addiction The WHO'S decision to list compulsive gaming as a disorder was welcomed by many who agree that it is easy to become addicted to the virtual world. The body has not put daily or weekly limits on what it regards as problematic gaming. It described addiction to video games as a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour, which becomes so extensive it takes precedence over other interests. And it pointed to studies that suggest that gaming disorder affects between two and three per cent of people who play video games. The updated ICD is scheduled to be presented to all WHO member states at their annual assembly in May 2019. It is aimed the new classifications will come into effect in 2022, to allow countries time to plan and prepare medics. Some people get barely any symptoms and recover rapidly. Others end up confined to bed, surrounded by used tissues. For those with compromised immune systems or respiratory conditions, it can even be life-threatening. We'd all dearly like to see a cure for the common cold, but it never quite seems to arrive. So what's the hold up and will it be over soon? Here, in a piece for The Conversation, an immunologist believes scientists will find a cure for the cold within the next 10 years. But Professor Peter Barlow, of Edinburgh Napier University, said it would be unwise to dole out the cure to everyone because the bug could mutate, such as that seen in antibiotic resistance. The most common variety of common cold is rhinovirus, which accounts for around 50 per cent of all infections The common cold is actually a catch-all term for a variety of viral infections that cause sore throats, headaches, coughs and sneezes. Men may be predisposed to suffer more from these symptoms, though the existence of 'man flu' is a subject for another day. The most common variety of common cold is rhinovirus, which accounts for around 50 per cent of all infections (it gets its name not directly from the wild animal but because 'rhino' is Greek for 'nose'). Kids are usually infected between eight and 12 times a year, adults more like two or three times. Other viruses that we also think of as the common cold include adenovirus, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza virus. But for most scientists in this field, cracking rhinovirus is the number one challenge. Shifting a rhino Rhinovirus is not just one organism. There are currently over 160 different strains, and it's extremely difficult to make a vaccine or antiviral that will cover all of them. There are only around 90 to 95 antivirals in total far fewer than our arsenal of antibiotics and none have been licensed for use against rhinovirus. A few show some activity against certain strains, but are ineffective against others. The chances of an antiviral emerging that can directly kill all strains look slim at present. A number of groups across the globe are working hard to find alternative solutions I've just co-authored a review paper that documents the latest progress. Many groups are trying to manipulate the proteins inside the cells of the host, since they are vital for virus replication. This may be an incredibly effective way to halt the virus spreading to other cells in the body. Many groups of scientists are trying to manipulate the proteins inside the cells of the host, since they are vital for virus replication (stock) One exciting prospect emerged very recently from Imperial College, London: a synthetic compound that targets enzymes in the cells that the virus infects, known as NMT1 and NMT2, and prevents them from being used during viral replication. Another team in Canada is working on compounds that can inhibit a different class of human enzymes, called PI4KB, that are also required for the virus to replicate. Several teams in the US, as well as in the Pirbright Institute in the south of England, are working on a different approach. They have been trying to halt the infection using particular antibodies, known as neutralising antibodies, which work against different proteins within the virus. Yet the number and diversity of rhinoviruses around the world has meant that a universal antibody has yet to be developed. Pep talk My research group is trying to solve the problem from yet another angle. THE FACTS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE COMMON COLD THERE ARE OVER 200 DIFFERENT STRAINS OF COLD Out of 200 different strains of cold, the rinovirus - or nose virus - is one of the most common. Viruses are microscopic - it would take 50,000 rhinoviruses lined up back to back to cover just one millimetre. Worse still, you can easily catch two different strains one after the other. THE COLD IS THE MOST COMMON DISEASE IN THE WORLD Common colds are so widespread very few humans escape infection and most will suffer from multiple colds during their life. Experts estimate there are at least 20 million colds circulating London alone every year. Most adults suffer two to five colds each year while infants and children suffer from an average of four to eight colds every year. WOMEN ARE MORE LIKELY TO CATCH COLDS THAN MEN In general, women catch more colds than men. It is thought that this is because they have more contact with young children and children tend to be the breeding ground for viruses. Another explanation is that some women - such as those trying to juggle a career with babies - lead more stressful lives than men and therefore have reduced immunity to colds. YOUR SNEEZES TRAVEL AT 90 MILES AN HOUR One of the easiest ways to catch a cold is through someone sneezing on you. Droplets produced by a sneeze can travel at 90 miles per hour and can reach people within a 30 foot radius. A sneeze tends to hit other people at face level and is breathed in by the victim. So next time you sneeze remember to cover your face! Advertisement We are working on a family of molecules known as host defence peptides or antimicrobial peptides, which are a key part of people's frontline immune response against viruses. As well as humans, they are found in many other mammals, plants and insects. We and others have shown that these peptides can kill a wide range of bacteria, fungi and viruses. For example, one of our studies showed that a peptide found in the human immune system, known as cathelicidin, was incredibly effective at killing the influenza virus at a level comparable with current anti-influenza drugs. More recently, we investigated whether this same human cathelicidin peptide could kill rhinovirus and were excited to find that it did. We found that cathelicidins from other animals such as pigs were very effective at killing this human virus, too raising the prospect that peptides from the immune systems of other mammals could be employed to fight this infection. This is just the first step in a long path, however. Now we hope to modify these peptides to make them more stable and effective, not only against rhinovirus and influenza but also against other varieties of cold virus. And so far all our work has only been at the lab bench, and against only one common strain of rhinovirus: the next step will be to progress into animal and finally human clinical trials. Each of the three described approaches is at a similar stage of development. It is very difficult to put a timeframe on these things, but they are all probably about five to ten years from potentially producing a viable treatment. Approach with caution... Yet when the day finally comes that science cracks the common cold, we will need to be extremely cautious. It is worth drawing a parallel with antibiotics: just as antibiotic resistance is an increasingly serious problem, the same thing can happen with viral treatments. It would therefore be unwise to start doling out the 'cold cure' to everyone who has a cold. Instead, I would suggest keeping for those who need it most, such as asthmatics and those with compromised immune systems. The rest of us will probably have to keep fighting off colds the slower traditional way boxes of tissues, the body's natural defences and lots of hot drinks. A three-year-old girl is currently fighting for her life in hospital after suffering a stroke during a family holiday to Portugal. Holly Alcock, from Stafford, had flown to Albufeira in the Algarve for her first ever holiday with her mother, father, brother and her grandparents. But her first trip abroad ended in her collapsing after just three days from a stroke and being airlifted to a specialist hospital in Lisbon. Speaking today for the first time about his daughter's terrifying ordeal two weeks ago, her father Mark, 37, revealed she has been left like a newborn child. Holly, who was left in a coma for five days and remains seriously ill, is unable to sit up, stand or talk. But she is slowly recovering. Holly Alcock had flown to Albufeira in the Algarve for her first ever holiday with her mother, father, brother and her grandparents (pictured before the holiday) Mr Alcock, a town and account planner, described the experience as 'every parent's worst nightmare'. He said: 'We've had to teach her everything again - everything was affected from her speech to her psychical movements. 'Holly can now hear and feel us and laugh at our daft jokes which is a great sign. Her legs are getting better and she was able to hold her arms up longer yesterday. 'She's not able to sit up or eat properly though - so it's just small steps, it a slow process to recovery. She's funny, cheeky, confident, loves dancing and singing. 'She's full of character and life but now she's like a newborn child which is sad to see. It just been our worst nightmare. We are spending 14 hours a day in hospital.' Holly had flown to Albufeira for her first ever holiday with her family on Tuesday, June 5. It is believed the family took out medical insurance for the trip before they went. But her first trip abroad ended in her collapsing after just two days from a stroke and being airlifted to a specialist hospital in Lisbon (pictured in hospital in Lisbon) Speaking today for the first time about his daughter's terrifying ordeal two weeks ago, her father Mark, 37, revealed she has been left like a newborn child (pictured before her trip) The toddler had been suffering with tonsillitis before they set off - but after a course of antibiotics she was given the go ahead to travel. She showed no signs of the illness, but her mother, Gemma, 34, took her to a local hospital on the Thursday for a check-up because she was sleepy. Mr Alcock said: 'They told us she would be fine in three days but on the Friday she woke up normal and then an hours later she collapsed. 'My wife took Holly to the hospital in Faro. It was an hour's drive from where we were staying in Albufeira. 'I took our youngest, Jacob, to my parent's villa and followed behind. It was pretty scary there was around eight or nine doctor in a small room with Holly. 'Her eyes were gone - she just looked out of it. It was heart breaking, we expected it to be dehydration but in minutes we were told it was much worse. 'The doctors had thought she had been poisoned. We were told that she had thrombosis which had reached her brain on the Friday mid-afternoon. 'On the Saturday morning she didn't wake up - they took her for an MRI scan and it revealed that she had a stroke on the Friday evening.' Holly was then flown to a specialist hospital in Lisbon. Her parents asked if they could fly with her, but doctors refused to let them. The toddler had been suffering with tonsillitis before they set off. She showed no signs of the illness in Portugal, but her mother, Gemma, 34, took her to a local hospital two days after landing for a check-up because she was sleepy (pictured with her mother before the trip) Holly is pictured with her mother Gemma, 34, father Mark, 37, and brother Jacob, 18 months, on the flight out to Portugal Holly, who was left in a coma for five days and remains seriously ill, is unable to sit up, stand or talk. But she is slowly recovering (pictured before the holiday) The family then drove 160 miles (257km) to the capital in a rented car, which Mr Alcock described as the 'worst three of my life'. He added: 'We asked the doctors if she would live or die or have brain damage and they couldn't tell us. 'She had a mask put on her and tubes everywhere - we were told we couldn't talk or touch her. 'She was in a deep coma but as the days went by she opened her eyes a couple of times but didn't have full consciousness.' Mr Alcock and the family have set up a JustGiving page to help raise money for any further treatment Holly needs. He added: 'We don't know how bad the damage to her will be or how her recovery will go. It could be used for any treatment she needs like a wheelchair or anything else. 'But we are hoping it can be used for treat for her like a trip to Disneyland - she's always wanted to go.' Anyone wishing to donate, can do so here. Scientists say people in cold climates may have shorter limbs to conserve heat People living up high mountains have shorter forearms because their bodies put more effort into growing other bones, according to research. A study of Sherpa people in the Himalayas reveals how the difficult conditions of living at altitude take their toll on body development. Men and women in the highlands have forearms which are on average 1.3cm shorter than those of similar groups living at lower altitude. The men are also not as tall and have shorter upper arms and hands, but women do not display the same effects, the research shows. Stephanie Payne, a PhD student from Cambridge University, travelled to Nepal to measure the limbs of people living in the highlands and lowlands. High altitudes mean there is less oxygen in the air and less food available because it is harder for plants to grow, so people tend to have less energy. Ms Payne says the higher people live, the shorter their forearms are because the body gives more important limbs priority when using its limited ability to grow. PhD student Stephanie Payne travelled to villages near Mount Everest in Nepal to compare the height and limb proportions of people living at altitude to those living in a lower city The research team travelled to rural villages around Namche Bazaar in the north of Nepal, about 20 miles (32km) from Mount Everest Base Camp and 3,500 metres above sea level. PEOPLE LIVING AT ALTITUDE ARE LESS LIKELY TO BE FAT People who live at higher altitude are less likely to be fat, according to research published in 2015. A study found living 456 metres (1,496 ft) or more above sea level is linked with a 13 per cent lower risk of becoming overweight or obese. This was compared with living at 124 metres (407 ft) or lower. Living at high altitude has previously been associated with lower obesity rates probably due to lower concentrations of oxygen in the air. Researchers say high altitudes suppress hunger by increasing the secretion of the hormone leptin which makes people feel full and regulating other hormones involved in appetite. If hunger is suppressed less energy is used for metabolising food, which reduces the use of oxygen. This could be an ancient adaptive mechanism to survive at high altitudes where there is not a lot of food or oxygen, scientists say. Advertisement There, they measured the height, upper arm length, lower arm length, total arm length and the width and length of 250 Sherpa people. They then travelled to Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal, which is 1,400m above sea level to compare the measurements with genetically similar lowland people. Both sexes have shorter forearms, and men are also shorter Both men and women have significantly shorter forearms the ulna bones in the highlands; women's were an average 1.2cm shorter, while men's were 1.4cm shorter. Men are also an average of 3.1cm shorter and their upper arms and hands are not as long. Even the lowland people live higher than the peak of Ben Nevis the UK's highest mountain at around 1,345m. Lower oxygen levels at altitude mean the conversion of food into energy in an individual's body is not very efficient and leads to less energy which can be used to grow. Ms Payne said: 'Our findings are really interesting as they show that the human body prioritises which segments to grow when there is limited energy available for growth, such as at high altitude. Ms Payne found people living at 3,500m above sea level have, on average, forearms which are 1.3cm shorter than those living at 1,400m 'This comes at the expense of other segments, for example the lower arm. 'The body may prioritise full growth of the hand because it is essential for manual dexterity, whilst the length of the upper arm is particularly important for strength.' The width of people's hands did not change significantly. Lower temperatures may contribute to shorter limb growth Experts are uncertain exactly why limb growth changes due to altitude, but suggest it could be due to the temperature, blood flow or supply of nutrients. Scientists think lower temperatures at high altitude it can drop down to -40C in the winter may cause limbs to grow shorter and wider to keep in as much heat as possible. Blood supply is also usually greater in the hands than in the forearms, suggesting the hands may receive a better supply of nutrients during growth, the study says. To get to the Sherpa people Ms Payne had to take the 'most dangerous flight in the world' to Lukla in Nepal, where planes land on a short runway on a mountainside, and trek for two days, which left her suffering from altitude sickness. Ms Payne had to trek for two days to get to the remote villages where she measured people in high altitude villages She added: 'We're really grateful to the Himalayan Sherpa populations who participated in the study. 'We measured and examined over 250 individuals and then compared our findings to genetically similar Tibetan groups living in the lowlands of Nepal. 'We used Namche Bazaar on the Everest Trail as our base to conduct the study with the local population. Tough journey to observe people in the mountains 'It was an incredible experience with yaks carrying our anthropometric equipment through the mountain passes. 'It is not an easy journey, but thanks to the dedicated team, including my research assistant Oliver Melvill, we were able to collect the valuable data and obtain a suitable sample size. 'Our research actually mirrors evidence previously found in Andean populations. Our study demonstrates a similar pattern of growth prioritisation across the limb segments.' The findings are published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Coffee could be the new insulin injection for diabetes sufferers, new research suggests. For the 1.25 that have type 1 diabetes, injecting insulin is an essential part of their daily routines, as it is for many of some 30 million Americans with type 2 diabetes. But Swiss researchers have retooled kidney cells to release insulin on commands delivered through caffeine. If their bioengineering experiment works as well in humans as it did in mice, a simple sip of coffee could trigger insulin production and eliminate the needles once and for all. OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE JOE: A cup of coffee before breakfast could soon replace a morning blood sugar tests and insulin shots for many diabetics thanks to engineered cells Diabetes is fifth most common chronic disease in the US. The insulin-production condition kills nearly 80,000 people a year, and drastically raises risks for other potentially fatal conditions, including heart disease. For those born with a diminished ability to produce insulin - a key hormone to the break down and use of glucose from food for energy - type 1 diabetes is manageable, but only by constantly monitoring their blood sugar levels and injecting themselves with a shot of insulin two or more times a day. The injections are an effective but far from perfect treatment for the chronic condition. Without insulin, a person with diabetes's blood sugar levels can get too high, they are liable to get a headache, feel weak and even lose consciousness. Preventing this unpleasant series of events from unfolding requires one to carry around a blood glucose monitor to keep track of their levels, insulin and syringes to inject themselves. Since glucose enters the bloodstream after the consumption of food, people with diabetes typically check in inject themselves just before breakfast lunch and dinner. But forgetting one or more of these implements is common, and so, therefore, are diabetes complications. Researchers at ETH Zurich are working on a promising, simpler solution. Led by biotechnologist Martin Fussenegger - best known for his 'mind-controlled' gene therapy research - the team engineered special kidney cells that could drastically improve the quality of life of diabetics. Insulin is typically produced in the pancreas, but the organ does not function as it should, shortchanging people with diabetes the crucial hormone. So Dr Fussenberger instead supercharged kidney cells to turn them into insulin-makers. They gave the cells a second superpower, too: caffeine receptors. This meant that the insulin-producing kidney cells would release their wares whenever caffeine was detected in the bloodstream. This would mean that just adding a cup of caffeinated tea or coffee - the latter of which, incidentally, may even have protective effects against type 2 diabetes - could trigger insulin production and cut the injection out of the equation. Next, the research team tested out the caffeine-insulin system cells in 10 diabetic mice to test it out. When the diabetic mouse drank coffee, they had just as much control over their blood sugar levels as non-diabetics did - suggesting that, someday, humans could too. What's more, the automated bio-system seemed to safely keep the mice from accidentally overdosing on insulin. 'To my knowledge there are no other significant sources of caffeine in food,' said Dr Fussenberger. 'Even very small trace amounts of caffeine will not trigger the system,' he added, though it is not clear how many cups of coffee might be too many for the diabetic mice. This time a year ago, bosses at Dixons Carphone were toasting record profits and gloating that the electricals retailer was well positioned to flourish. One year later and the tone could not be more different as the Currys, PC World and Carphone Warehouse owner prepares to report a sharp fall in earnings on Thursday. The decline is expected to be around 23 per cent, with pre-tax earnings to come in near the 382million mark for the year to the end of April. Dixons Carphone now has a new executive team following a mass exodus over the last year The retailer's nosedive can partly be attributed to weakness in its mobile phone division. It has complained over the last year or so about consumers not rushing to upgrade their phones, instead holding onto handsets for longer and even switching to sim-only contracts - a trend that is weighing on the firm's bottom line. But disappointing figures could not come at a worse time for the stricken firm, which employs around 44,000 people, and will only serve to mount pressure on new chief executive Alex Baldock, who replaced Seb James in April. Former CEO Seb James will soon take up a new post as UK boss of Boots Less than a month ago, and just eight weeks into his tenure, the former Shop Direct boss had to come clean about another anticipated profit drop in the fiscal year that has just begun. Baldock's announcement ruffled feathers and triggered a fall in the share price when, in an unprecedented kitchen sinking, he exposed holes in the business and pointed the finger at his predecessor. And, just last week, Dixons Carphone was bruised again when it emerged that a mammoth data breach had led to millions of customer details being hacked. Phone repair shops cutting upgrades The results on Thursday should lift the lid, not just on dented earnings, but on the efforts taken so far to stop the rot at Carphone Warehouse. Hard-pressed, savvy, consumers, less compelled by new handset releases with only incremental improvements, are putting off upgrading their phones until absolutely necessary. An iPhone X with 256GB of memory costs around 1,109 at Carphone Warehouse after Apple put up prices last year blaming currency fluctuations As the cost of smartphones continues to rise the latest iPhone costs over 1000 shoppers will only hold onto them for longer, aided by a proliferation of high street phone repair chains, including Dixons Carphone's very own KnowHow repair centre. The group was also stung last year by the changing regulation around mobile data use in Europe. At the interim mark, it claimed that negotiations were underway with network providers in attempt to overhaul and future proof the model. And, in December, deputy chief executive Andrew Harrison walked away from his role and the groups board to concentrate on Carphone Warehouse as chairman, and lead its revival. Baldock has already taken the issue into his own hands by pledging to shut nearly 100 Carphone Warehouse stores. But the City will be listening for more reassuring noises on this front on Thursday, or else the much flaunted merger of Dixons and Carphone Warehouse risks beginning to look like somewhat of a poisoned chalice. Can Baldock turn it around? Sales are still on the up boosted partly by strong promotions and the strength of its store portfolio. However, margins are heading south, as the retailer is challenged to meet the low prices offered by the likes of Amazon and balance rising running costs. New CEO Alex Baldock, who joined from Shop Direct, took the helm in April Baldock, who instigated a thorough review of the firm when he joined, unearthed a multitude of problem areas and has wasted no time getting started on fixing these. He immediately stripped out a layer of top-tier management to reduce silos, appointed the firms first chief customer officer and committed to spending 30million on the in-store experience. But shareholders will want more detail on how Baldock plans to reverse the firms fortunes and recover its plundering share price no mean feat given the current retail climate. Dixons Carphones market cap now stands at 2.27bn, only just above the value of the firm when it first merged. Shares are down at around the 194 mark an almighty drop from its highs of 500 in 2015 and have fallen 37 per cent in the last 12 months. According to HSBC's Andrew Porteous, Baldock is a man with a plan, but analysts remain bearish. And if Baldock has stumbled across any more skeletons in the closet, his already mammoth task may be harder than first anticipated. Thursday should at least be the final time Baldock need look over his shoulder and explain away errors made under another teams watch. The prelims, although set to be painful, should finally draw a line in the sand for the new boss and allow him to start proving his mettle as CEO of a firm that has well and truly lost its spark. When Shirley Pressler took her annuity in 2012, it was under the most difficult of circumstances. She desperately needed money to pay for the funeral of her son, Graham, who had died suddenly aged just 35 after suffering an epileptic seizure. Shirley had already drained her savings and borrowed on a credit card to help cover the cost of the ceremony but it wasn't enough. Desperate to give her son the funeral he deserved, she arranged to dip into her private pension fund and withdraw 2,485. Tragedy: Shirley Pressler with her son, Graham, who died suddenly aged just 35 after suffering an epileptic seizure It wasn't until later that Shirley, from Blackburn, Lancs, realised the consequences of this decision. Under strict rules in force at the time, savers who took a tax-free lump sum from their pension had to then use the rest of the fund to buy an annuity or income for life whether they wanted one or not. It meant that Shirley had unwittingly committed herself to receiving a pension of just 10 a month until she died. Even more frustratingly, had she been able to avoid taking the money for just another two years she would have benefited from new freedoms that allow savers to take all of their pension in cash. And Shirley is not alone in her plight. She is one of five million savers stuck with pitiful annuities that pay just a few pounds a month. Like Shirley, many of them were forced to take their pensions earlier than planned. In 2014, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, promised a lifeline to these savers and said they would be able to exchange their payouts for a cash lump sum. But in October 2016 months before the plans were due to come into force the Government did a U-turn. Now Money Mail is calling on ministers and pension companies to work together to allow savers to cash in pension pots where it is clearly in their interest to do so. Desperate measure: To give her son the funeral he deserved, Shirley arranged to dip into her private pension fund and withdraw 2,485 Our Unlock Our Pensions campaign has highlighted heart-breaking stories from savers who had hoped to be allowed to take their pension cash after George Osborne's announcement in 2014. Last week we revealed how customers trapped with tiny annuities had been left struggling to pay vital bills. Usually, savers can take out a maximum of 25 per cent tax free from their fund. However, Shirley was among an estimated 275,000 savers whose pensions contain small print that allows them to take more. So after taking 2,485, this left her with a pension pot of just 3,258. Shirley, then aged 57, was also relatively young to be receiving a pension and so received payouts of just 10 a month. Insurers reserve their highest payments for people they believe will not live for very long. The payments are so small that Shirley must wait another 22 years before she breaks even. When she dies, any remainder of her fund will be taken by Legal & General, the insurance giant that offered her the annuity. Six years after taking the annuity, Shirley, now 63, would love to have access to the remaining 3,258 of her pension fund. After Graham's death, the divorcee found it too difficult to continue in her job as a psychology lecturer. She hoped to find another job, but had to abandon her plans after being diagnosed with breast cancer. Although she has a modest pension from her teaching days, money is tight and she has no buffer against unexpected bills. Shirley has also been hit by the hike in state pension age for women, which has meant she's had to wait an extra six years for her payout. Fight: Shirley is one of five million savers stuck with pitiful annuities that pay just a few pounds a month She says: 'The 10 a month I receive from Legal & General just goes into my bank account and gets eaten up by bills. Having a few thousand pounds of savings behind me instead would make such a difference. 'There must be hundreds of thousands of people in a similar position who've had to take money from their pension fund when their finances became tight and are then stuck with annuities that are worth pennies. 'It's wrong to condemn them to receiving a tiny pension when, if they retired a few years later, they could receive their money in full. The rules seems to be designed to benefit the financial services industry, not ordinary people.' Campaigner and former pensions minister Baroness Ros Altmann says: 'Cases such as Shirley's highlight how the decision to stop people cashing in their annuities was heartless. 'People were promised they could receive a lump sum that they could use to transform their lives. At the last moment that hope was snatched away.' One insurer, Phoenix Life, has allowed savers to take small annuities of under 10,000 in cash. But others including Shirley's insurer, Legal & General have steadfastly refused. In a House of Commons debate in the aftermath of the decision in 2016, Simon Kirby, the then Economic Secretary to the Treasury, promised to help savers caught in the annuities trap. But two years later, still nothing has been done. A Legal & General spokesman says: 'We are sad to learn about the difficult circumstances this customer is facing. 'In this instance, the existing legislation does not override the terms and conditions of annuity policies that typically state an annuity cannot be cashed in once it has been set up. 'We are therefore unable to offer the customer the option to cash in their existing annuity.' r.lythe@dailymail.co.uk Forgotten Burmese WWII heroes who put their lives on the line fighting for Britain are being tracked down by a charity so they can be thanked before they die. Help For Forgotten Allies (H4FA), which was founded in 2007, brought together scores of lost veterans for a Remembrance Sunday service in Burma's former capital Yangon last year and plans to do the same in 2018. Sally McLean, founder of H4FA, said that the Burmese veterans greet her with pride. 'They put on their berets, pin on their medals, and salute as they enter the simple camp office,' she said. 'They are not looking for a handout. It is rather the sense of honour about what they did over 70 years ago. It is never too late to acknowledge this. Most of them have very few years left to go now.' A former Burmese member of the Royal Artillery, David Daniel, 93, in his old dress uniform Mr Daniel's collection of wartime mementos including a photograph of himself during the War Burmese soldiers advancing through grassland during the campaign against the Japanese Duncan Gilmour of Help For Forgotten Allies meets a Burmese veteran who fought for Britain Allied troops in action against the Japanese in Burma during the Second World War A film company is crowdfunding for a documentary called Forgotten Allies to capture their testimony before it is too late. 'This project has moved me more than I could have imagined,' said Alex Bescoby, Co-Founder of Grammar Productions. 'They are the last whispers of a story that cannot, and must not be lost.' The appeal is supported by Dame Vera Lynn, actor Griff Rhys Jones, the Royal British Legion and the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League. The former soldiers are not entitled to an Army pension but they are supposed to receive welfare grants. However, due to the difficulties of finding them and getting money into Burma many have not received any help over the years. They are not looking for a handout. It is rather the sense of honour about what they did over 70 years ago Sally McLean, founder of H4FA H4FA is trying to track down as many as possible so that they can receive the money to which they are entitled as well as other charitable support. Thousands of Burmese fought for Britain against the Japanese from 1942 to 1945. Their contribution to the Allied victory has in large part been overlooked as Burma left the Empire shortly after the war. Britain's 'Forgotten Army' as the 14th Army responsible for retaking Burma from the Japanese is known was the largest army in the world between 1943 and 1945, a force of half-a-million volunteers drawn from across the Empire. Britons who had survived the D-Day landings fought alongside soldiers from across the globe as they battled the Japanese in the mountains and jungles of Burma. Burmese troops were in the thick of the fighting. They played an integral role in the war's turning-point battles of Imphal and Kohima in 1944 and took part in daring resistance operations along the Thai-Burma border. Soldiers crossing a river on a makeshift raft during the Burma campaign against the Japanese Peter Mitchell from Help For Forgotten Allies in discussion with a Second World War veteran The town of Prome (Pye) on the southern Irrawaddy River is liberated from the Japanese Mr Daniel, 93, told charity workers of the psychological damage left by his years of service A Burmese villager shows off memorabilia from the fighting that took place there in WWII Alex Bescoby, left, producer of Forgotten Allies, on location with a veteran in Burma 'It was the most successful guerrilla campaign of the Second World War and the greatest defeat the Japanese army suffered in its entire history,' said Philip Davies, author of Lost Warriors: Seagrim and Pagani of Burma. A huge number of Burmese fighters were killed, wounded or subjected to horrific torture. 'If the Japanese caught me they'd have peeled off my skin and poured salt underneath, like they did to the others,' former army scout Liau Chang, 93, said in footage already recorded for the film. Many Burmese fought in an elite SOE unit called Operation Character, which is credited by British forces as having killed 10,964 Japanese enemy. A former Burmese member of the Royal Artillery, David Daniel, 93, who goes by a Western-sounding name, told charity workers of the psychological damage left by his years of service. I still see the fighting, the enemy around the walls. I still get the nightmares David Daniel, 93, former Burmese member of the Royal Artillery 'I still see the fighting, the enemy around the walls,' he said. 'I still get the nightmares. I get startled. Even now sometimes I shout in my sleep.' With only a handful of soldiers remaining the race is on to bring them recognition. Sally McLean and her H4FA colleagues have found veterans living in appalling poverty in a country still torn being torn apart by conflict. As young men, the Burmese veterans engaged in top-secret special forces operations against the Japanese under British officers. But many have not seen a Briton since the end of the War. One memorable case for Sally was that of Saw 'Joshua' Yoshoo. Having fought bravely for Britain against the Japanese, he was living in destitution with just one pair of clothes and no medication for his asthma. 'Aged 87, he was recruited into the British Army's Burma Rifles regiment in 1934,' Sally said. 'Still perfectly lucid, he reeled off his name, rank, number and the name of his commanding officer. 'When I asked him what he would like me to do for him, he replied that I should "inform his officers" that he was still alive. His own poverty was clearly secondary.' Mr Daniel said: 'I still see the fighting, the enemy around the walls. I still get the nightmares' General Douglas Gracey, Commander of British 20th Division, pins an MC on Captain de Souza of the 1/19th Hyderabad Regiment during the battle for Imphal Kohima, Burma Sally McLean, founder of Help For Forgotten Allies, in Burma on an expedition to find veterans A member of Help For Forgotten Heroes on his mission to find forgotten veterans in Burma A British helmet and a Japanese rifle from the Second World War held by a Burmese villager Luke Radcliff, left, and Max Jones, right, of Grammar Productions, on location in Burma A distant view of the Burmese mountains and jungle where fierce fighting took place in WWII While similar campaigns for the Gurkha regiments have gained national attention with celebrity support, the work of H4FA has long been under the radar. 'Our key objective, in the last days of these soldiers lives, is to do everything we can to give these men the feeling that they are being acknowledged for what they did, and that they're being remembered,' said Peter Mitchell, one of H4FA's trustees, whose father fought in Burma. After the Allied victory, Burma secured its independence from Britain. Unlike other former colonies, however, Burma's new government decided not to join the Commonwealth. Decades of war, dictatorship and international isolation would further sever the ties between Britain and Myanmar's ex-combatants that were preserved in the Commonwealth by the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League. 'They stood by us and fought by our side against the Japanese but at the end of the war we walked away from Burma and washed our hands,' Davies said. 'The whole Burma campaign was seen as a sort of forgotten sideshow and disappeared behind this bamboo curtain. The veterans who fought and died for the British were completely forgotten.' For more information about Help For Forgotten Allies visit h4fa.org.uk and for details of the Grammar Productions film visit grammar-productions.com The family of a Chinese college student came to Arizona to tearfully plead for harsh punishment against the woman who shot the 19-year-old to death after a minor car crash, but a judge honored a plea agreement Friday to send her to prison for 25 years. Holly Davis, 34, was initially charged with first-degree murder for killing Yue Jiang after hitting her car in suburban Phoenix in 2016 but pleaded guilty to second-degree murder under a deal with prosecutors. Jiang's family traveled from China this week to protest the plea agreement, saying it demeaned the young woman's life. Her cousin, Katherine Xu, wept in the courtroom while confronting Davis, repeatedly calling her a monster and telling her: 'You deserve death.' Yue Jiang is shown in photos at a memorial over two years after her death in Tempe, Arizona on Monday, June 11, 2018. Her family of 19-year-old Yeu Jiang traveled from China to Arizona this week to plead with a judge to reject a deal that prosecutors made with suspect Holly Davis June 15, 2018, Holly Davis (2nd R) appears with her lawyer at the Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa County in Phoenix, Arizona, the United States, June 15, 2018 She said Jiang was a hard worker who made her family proud when she got scholarships to study at Arizona State University. 'All I want to say is no matter how much you dress yourself up like a human, the inhumane acts you did with Yue's life will not disappear,' Xu said. A judge honored a plea agreement Friday to send Davis to prison for 25 years. Xu also said during a news conference last week her cousin was 'a kind, mature and responsible girl who served her family very well,' adding that the family will always be proud of her. Davis also cried and sought forgiveness from Jiang's family. 'No words can express how sorry I am,' Davis said. 'If I could bring her back, I would. If I could take her place, I would.' Her attorney said Davis had experienced a lifetime of tragedy and abuse and had been homeless and addicted to drugs. 'Her life is a prime example of what drugs do,' Alan Tavassoli said. Davis rear-ended a car Jiang, a college sophomore, was driving. Jiang's boyfriend, a passenger in the car, got out to inspect the damage when he saw Davis point a gun at him. Katherine Xu, the cousin of Yue Jiang, a student at Arizona State University who was killed in Arizona in a road rage shooting incident, speaks at a memorial on Monday, June 11, 2018 in Tempe Xu wept in the courtroom while confronting Davis, repeatedly calling her a monster and telling her: 'You deserve death' Davis then walked up to Jiang and shot her several times, authorities said. Five others suffered non-life threatening injuries after Jiang lost control of her vehicle and her car crashed into traffic. Davis fled the scene but was later caught. She denied the shooting at first but told authorities that if she had done it, it was because she was depressed and wanted police to kill her, prosecutors said. Following the deadly shooting, investigators discovered a letter previously written by the killer in which she expressed her plans to 'engage in violence,' prosecutors said in a press release. Jiang's family said the plea deal placed more value on Davis' life than on Jiang's and urged the judge to reject it. But he accepted it this week. 'I don't find you a monster, but what you did was monstrous. It was senseless, and it was cruel,' Judge Warren Granville said Friday. Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has called for a census of the Roma community in order to find and deport anyone staying in the country illegally. The leader of the far-right League party said his government ministry was looking at 'the Roma question' and wanted to see 'who, and how many' there were. 'Unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian Roma because we can't expel them,' Salvini told TV station Telelombardia. Shocking: Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League party, called for a census on the Roma community and said 'unfortunately we will have to keep the Italian Roma because we can't expel them.' His plans have been met with resistance from fellow government politicians, with Luigi Di Maio, the leader of Salvini's coalition partner the Five Star Movement, calling it 'unconstitutional'. Non-government politicians went further, with centre-left Democratic Party (PD) saying his call revived memories of 'ethnic cleansing'. 'You can work for security and respect for rules without becoming fascist,' tweeted Democratic lawmaker Ettore Rosato. 'The announced census of Roma is vulgar and demagogical.' Tens of thousands of Roma, also known as 'Romani' or 'gypsies', live across Italy, many in squalid shantytowns on the outskirts of major cities and on the fringes of society. Anger: Roma people protest as Salvini arrive in a camp on the outskirts of Rome in May Later on Monday, Salvini appeared to backtrack, and released a statement saying the government had no intention of setting up a separate archive for the Roma or taking finger prints. The statement added that the government wanted to protect Roma children who were barred from going to local schools by their parents, and to check how EU funds aimed at helping marginalised communities were being spent. This comes just a week after Salvini set off a storm in Europe last week when he refused to let a charity ship carrying more than 600 mainly African migrants dock in Italy. Spain eventually took in the boat, with Salvini saying Italy would no longer automatically take in boat migrants, who have used Libya as a springboard in recent years to seek a richer, safer life in Europe. Salvini, whose League party scored huge gains in March 4 elections on its xenophobic platform, has vowed mass expulsions of migrants. All four living former first ladies have joined First Lady Melania Trump in an unusual united political front expressing horror at children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border. Former first lady Rosalynn Carter joined Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton on Monday as she slammed the Trump administration for the 'disgraceful' policy of removing children from their parents. 'When I was first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand. I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstances beyond their control,' Carter said in a statement released on Twitter. 'The practice and policy today of removing children from their parents' care at our border with Mexico is disgraceful and a shame to our country,' the former first lady added. All four living former first ladies have joined First Lady Melania Trump in condemning the separation of immigrant families as Trump continues to blame Democrats for zero-tolerance border policy. Former first lady Rosalynn Carter and Michelle Obama have spoke out Laura Bush (left) and Hillary Clinton (right) also slammed the Trump administration over the separation of families at the US-Mexico border The four living first ladies have joined First Lady Melania Trump (left) in an unusual united political front expressing horror at children separated from their parents Carter shared this statement in which she slammed the Trump administration for the 'disgraceful' policy of removing children from their parents Carter's statement echoed the same sentiment of Bush, who just hours before said: 'I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.' Michelle and Barack Obama also shared a message of solidarity with Bush after she penned an op-ed condemning Trump's zero tolerance immigration policy. Former First Lady Michelle shared Bush's Washington Post opinion piece that critiqued the separation of migrant families saying: 'Sometimes truth transcends party.' Barack retweeted his wife's sentiment on Monday, shedding light on the thousands of children ripped from their undocumented parents and detained in isolated centers at the US-Mexico border. Melania Trump's statement appeared to break with the Trump administration's 'zero tolerance policy' on illegal immigrant children crossing into the United States with adult family members. The first lady's spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement to DailyMail.com, CNN and other outlets that 'Mrs Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform'. 'She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.' Carter's statement echoed the same sentiment of Laura Bush, who just hours before said: 'I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart' Michelle and Barack Obama shared a message of solidarity with Bush after she penned an op-ed condemning Trump's zero tolerance immigration policy Stronger together: Michelle Obama shared the piece saying,'sometimes truth transcends party' on Monday Bush's op-ed called Trump's zero tolerance policy 'cruel' and 'immoral' as she was shocked, along with millions of Americans, to see images of children torn away from their parents. 'Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso,' she wrote. She then said the detention center and tent cities are eerily reminiscent of Japanese American internment camps, which she dubbed 'one of the most shameful episodes in US history'. She urged politicians to reunite these separated families. 'If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents and to stop separating parents and children in the first place,' she said. Hillary Clinton also weighed in on the policy. She said on Monday: 'Every human being with a sense of compassion and decency should be outraged.' Bush's piece shed light on the thousands of children ripped from their undocumented parents crossing the border. Pictured above is a two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker being separated from parents US Border Patrol agents take into custody a father and son from Honduras near the US-Mexico border on June 12 near Mission, Texas Clinton told an awards luncheon for the Womens Forum of New York, that the White House's explanation is 'an absolute lie.' The news comes days after the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that 2,000 children have been separated from their parents after crossing the border illegally, according to CNN. From April 19 to May 31 in 2018 a total of 1,995 minors travelling with 1,940 adults who claimed to be the children's' guardians were separated, according to Department of Homeland Security spokesman Jonathan Hoffman. The Trump administration maintains that adults crossing the border illegally should be charged with federal crimes instead of referring migrants coming with children to immigration courts. In her article, Bush described the conditions the detained children live in where workers have been instructed to not pick up or touch the children to comfort them. 'Imagine not being able to pick up a child who is not yet out of diapers,' she wrote. Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen defended the administration in a series of tweets on Sunday, claiming that the administration does not have a policy of separating families Trump has blamed the Democrats for failing to compromise politically for family separations Heartbreaking photos released Sunday showed inside of a processing center in Texas where nearly a thousand undocumented immigrant boys are detained Children were seen lying on green mats with foil sheets intended to serve as blankets. This heartbreaking photo shows the children at a Border Patrol processing facility in McAllen, Texas She also invoked the name and memory of her mother-in-law, former first lady Barbara Bush, who died in April. In one particularly memorable moment during her tenure almost three decades ago, Barbara Bush spent time with babies who had HIV/AIDS, picking them up and holding them. 'My mother-in-law never viewed her embrace of that fragile child as courageous. She simply saw it as the right thing to do in a world that can be arbitrary, unkind and even cruel,' Bush said. 'She, who after the death of her 3-year-old daughter knew what it was to lose a child, believed that every child is deserving of human kindness, compassion and love,' she added. It's a rare public admonishment of current administration policy from Bush, who has rarely weighed in on politics since her husband left office. Police investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl 20 years ago yesterday began searching a former allotment for her body. Donna Keogh, 17, vanished in Middlesbrough in April 1998, and police believe she was murdered. They recently launched a fresh investigation into her case and the murders of two other young women in the area, which they think could be linked. Cleveland police are searching for information which could help track down the killer of 17-year-old Donna Marie Keogh from Middlesbrough who vanished in April 1998. Police recently launched a fresh investigation into her case Donna was born and grew up in Middlesbrough. She worked in a care home and wanted to join the military Officers began the job of clearing a patch of wasteland at Troon Close, Middlesbrough, in the hunt for the care home worker's body. Detectives said a review of the old inquiry had identified the site, along with several others, as a place of interest. At the time Donna vanished, the land was being used as allotments. She was last seen two miles away. Donna lived with her cousins at King House Central Mews in Middlesbrough town centre, although she was known to frequent other parts of the town Detective Chief Superintendent Jon Green of Cleveland Police said the 'painstaking' search was expected to take five days. He said it was one of a number of sites likely to be searched, but added: 'Yes, there's a possibility we might find Donna.' Detective Chief Superintendent Jon Green of Cleveland Police said the 'painstaking' search was expected to take five days. He said it was one of a number of sites likely to be searched, but added: 'Yes, there's a possibility we might find Donna.' Last year Cleveland Police secured 3.77million of funding from the Home Office for a Historic Investigations Unit to launch a fresh inquiry into Donna's unsolved murder and those of Vicky Glass, 21, and Rachel Wilson, 19, who vanished in 2000 and 2002 respectively. Unlike Donna, both their bodies were later found. All three came from the Middlesbrough area, but as yet there is no specific evidence to link their murders. A 59-year-old man has been on police bail for four years in connection with Miss Wilson's death. A police officer was forced to stand guard with a shotgun as a tour guide waded through crocodile-infested waters after people became trapped in a flooded car. The two people were attempting to cross the notorious Cahills Crossing in the Northern Territory in a red Mitsubishi Magna when they became trapped. The deadly waterway on the East Alligator River on the eastern edge of Kakadu National Park is arguably the most dangerous in the country with a man dying there last year and a recent survey finding more than 120 crocodiles within six kilometres of the crossing. The two people were trapped until a tour boat from Guluyambi arrived to pull the driver and passenger to safety. An officer is pictured standing on the back of a ute wielding a shotgun, on the look out for crocodiles during dangerous rescue operation at Cahills Crossing in the Northern Territory Police officers from Gunbalanya arrived about 40 minutes later to tow the vehicle,' the NT News reported. Spectacular images, captured by tourists on a nearby boat, show an officer wielding a shotgun as men wade through the water to tow the car. Gunbalanya officer in charge Remote Sergeant Scott Lewis was pictured standing on the tray of a ute, gun in hand, watching for crocodiles. The dangerous rescue unfolded about 3pm on May 21 and was only brought to the attention of local rescue crews thanks to the tourist boat. Jabiru local Reijo Keitaanpaa, who watched the rescue operation, said it was entirely luck the tourist boat passed when it did. A tour guide boat is seen pulling two people from the red Magna at Cahills Crossing Cahill's Crossing (pictured) in the Northern Territory is notorious for crocodile-infested waters, with more than one person losing their life to the animal at the crossing in recent years 'I'm pretty sure they were relieved the tour boat turned up as any attempt to walk out through the water would have washed them away,' he told the NT News. While the rescue operation was dangerous, Mr Keitaanpaa said the man leading the charge was experienced. 'He was in and out pretty quickly and it looked like it hadn't been the first time he'd done it because it was all done very quickly,' he said. Guluyambi Cultural Cruise tour's Nik Wheatley, responsible for the rescue operation, said the incident was not uncommon. 'This happens too often, we're talking dozens of times a year,' he said. Mr Wheatley said the red Magna was the third car since April to become stuck. Cahill's Crossing is on indigenous land to the east of the national park and is notoriously difficult to cross Seven people were rescued by park rangers after their 4X4 broke down in the middle of the river in December 2016. The group were forced to clamber on to the vehicle's roof and shout for help until finally a passer-by heard them and called the emergency services. At least 120 saltwater crocodiles call the six kilometre area south of Cahill's Crossing, in Kakadu National Park, home Cahill's Crossing is on indigenous land to the east of the national park and is notoriously difficult to cross. Seven people were rescued from the exact same spot in December 2016 after their vehicle broke down on Cahills Crossing The crossing is littered with signs instructing people not to wade through it on foot. People, often tourists, regularly get stuck at the flooded crossing after underestimating the water's depth. The number of crocodiles at Cahill's Crossing has grown so high that drivers are now warned to give way to crocodiles that are walking over the ford. Crocodile numbers in the Northern Territory have skyrocketed to an estimated 100,000 since crocodile hunting was banned in 1971. A 22-year-old father who fell down a 15-metre deep mineshaft while looking for opals is being treated in hospital. Daniel Cotter was searching for the rare gems with his cousin in the outback town of Coober Pedy late on Friday night when he fell. 'It felt like I was going down for ages, at least 10 minutes,' Mr Cotter, who said he hadn't been paying attention to where he was going, told 9 News. After realising he had survived the fall, Mr Cotter snapped a selfie of himself sitting at the bottom of the mineshaft, covered in dirt. Daniel Cotter was searching for the rare gems with his cousin in the outback town of Coober Pedy late at night Soon after, Mr Cotter was airlifted out of the mine shaft and transported to Coober Pedy hospital, where he was treated for an ankle injury 'I could've just been gone, then and there, makes me realise how lucky I am to have another chance, someone is looking over me obviously,' he said. Mr Cotter's cousin raced to raise the alarm at about 11:45pm on June 15, prompting a rescue operation. Local state emergency services and fire crews were immediately called in to assist and spent two hours rescuing the young professional chef. Soon after, Mr Cotter was airlifted out of the mine shaft and transported to Coober Pedy hospital, where he was treated for an ankle injury. He was later transferred by air to the Royal Adelaide Hospital suffering large graze wounds on his back, a crushed ankle, and a damaged knee. 'I'm very thankful for the SES, police, ambulance and everyone else that was involved,' Mr Cotter said from hospital. Mr Cotter's cousin raced to raise the alarm at about 11:45pm which prompted the rescue operation Local state emergency services and fire crew were called in for the rescue operation Daniel Cotter, 22, was hunting down opals in the area late at night, which led to his slip down the mine shaft A female police officer who was bitten on the neck by a rowdy teenager has taken sick leave as she awaits the results of a mandatory blood test. The Western Australian Police constable was transporting the 18-year-old to the charge room at Mandurah Police Station on Friday night when she was attacked by the woman, who was under arrest for allegedly trying to fight people in the street. WA Police Union president George Tilbury denounced the assault as 'absolutely disgusting, deplorable and completely out of line', WA Today reports. A Western Australian police constable (pictured) who was bitten on the neck by a rowdy teenager has taken sick leave as she awaits the results of a mandatory blood test WA Police Union president George Tilbury denounced the assault as 'absolutely disgusting, deplorable and completely out of line' 'The full force of the law must come down on this offender, as the community and our members will accept nothing less,' Mr Tilbury said. The attacker was subsequently charged with assaulting an officer, disorderly conduct in a police lock-up and obstruction in a police lock-up. She was also charged over her initial offences of disorderly conduct, refusing to move on and failing to give details when requested by officers at Mandurah's Smart Street Mall. The 18-year-old was under arrest for allegedly trying to fight people at Mandurah's Smart Street Mall when she attacked the constable at the police station (file image) The police constable was taken to Peel Health Campus for treatment, and is currently awaiting the results of a mandatory blood test. She has taken sick leave in the wake of the savage attack. The teenager appeared in the Perth Magistrates Court on June 16, and was remanded to reappear in the Mandurah Magistrates Court on July 10. Another delay to social care reform means pensioners will continue to face crippling bills. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday said a long-awaited Green Paper due to be published next month wont be out until the autumn. It means there is no end in sight to the scandal under which older Britons are forced to deny their children much of their inheritance to pay sky-high care costs. Under Englands broken care system, users are liable for the full cost of their care until their savings including wealth tied up in property are down to just 23,500. A former pensions minister last night said the delay meant millions of families will still be at risk of losing everything. Mr Hunts announcement comes seven years after a social care commission first suggested a cap on costs. David Cameron pledged to bring the cap in by 2016, which would have ensured Britons could pass on more of their hard-earned money to their children, but it has been repeatedly delayed. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday said a long-awaited Green Paper due to be published next month wont be out until the autumn Officially the Green Paper has been delayed because Mr Hunt wants to integrate his social care plans with those for the NHS, which will be announced in the autumn. But it will lead to concerns that different government departments cannot agree a way forward. Last week the Mail revealed that the Health Secretary wants the paper to make clear that pensioners will still have to use property wealth to meet social care bills. Mr Hunt is also believed to have wanted to include the option of compulsory insurance to protect against crippling care costs in old age. This idea in particular is understood to have met with resistance in other ministries. A social care Green Paper was originally planned for last summer, but was delayed until the same time this year thanks to the disastrous dementia tax policy that wrecked Tory election hopes. Under Englands broken care system, users are liable for the full cost of their care until their savings including wealth tied up in property are down to just 23,500 Mr Hunt has already said the Governments plans for social care will include a cap on contributions, allowing parents to pass on some of their wealth. Addressing MPs yesterday, he said it would now be delayed until proposals for the future of the NHS had been published. NHS and social care provision are two sides of the same coin, he said. It is not possible to have a plan for one sector without having a plan for the other indeed we have been clear with the NHS that a key plank of their plan must be the full integration of the two services. Baroness Altmann, the former pensions minister, said: This delay is so, so disappointing and there are millions of people who will still be at risk. She added: Social care is in crisis and if we dont spend more on care then the extra money for the NHS could be wasted. Health and care are interconnected and just spending more on the NHS while leaving social care underfunded will ensure the demands on the NHS keep on rising. Labours social care spokesman Barbara Keeley said: The social care system cannot afford even more delays, which is all this indecisive and weak Government is offering, ignoring the dire warnings that the care system is close to collapse. Caroline Abrahams, of charity Age UK, said: With this delay, the onus is now firmly on the Government to live up to their promises and come up with some game-changing ideas later in the year. Melbourne was officially the coldest major city on the planet this morning as temperatures plunged close to zero in the city's suburbs overnight. The freezing cold snap hit Victoria hard overnight, with Alpine regions falling to -4C and Melbourne's CBD falling to three degrees. Biting winds made temperatures of -1.9C in Mt Buller feel more like -8.7C, according to the Bureau of Meteorology. Icy temperatures struck much of Victoria overnight with the Alpine regions dropping to -4C Melbourne was officially the coldest major city in the world this morning as those in the heart of the city shivered through a frosty low of 3C As Melbourne froze through the morning, much of the New South Wales coast was drenched by a large downpour Rainfall of up to 15mml (pictured yellow) is expected to cover parts of NSW coast until about Thursday when it clears up (between seven and 10mml pictured in green) While it was 4C in Melbourne at 8am it was 13C in Alaska, 8C in Iceland, 17C in Peru, 14C in Ireland, 14C in Norway and 17C in Paris. The coldest temperature ever in Melbourne's CBD was a freezing -2.8C almost 150 years ago on July 21, 1869. The chilly weather from an intense low pressure system over the Tasman Sea has sent temperatures plunging up and down Australia's east coast, with Sydney suffering a huge downpour of rain and Adelaide plunging to a chilling 7C. As Melbourne shivered through the morning, much of the New South Wales coast was drenched by a large downpour. Temperatures across the world Melbourne, Australia - 4C Reykjavik, Iceland - 8C Anchorage, Alaska - 13C Dublin, Ireland - 14C Oslo, Norway - 14C Lima District, Peru - 17C Source: Time and Date Weather Advertisement Across the southern ranges, parts of the state including Thredbo dropped to -4C overnight as strong winds and heavy rain battered the coast. 'There were pretty chilly temperatures over the southern ranges and other elevated peaks,' Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) meteorologist Rose Barr told Daily Mail Australia. 'It was more rainy along the coast .... the current forecast for the Sydney region is between 8 and 25mml. 'We could see more isolated locations with heavier showers along the coast will see a little more rainfall, more than Richmond or Penrith.' About 25mml is expected from the low pressure system coming from the east with light rainfall predicted (in green) and heavier rainfall (in orange and red) sweeping the state Across the southern ranges in NSW, parts of the state including Thredbo dropped to -4C overnight as strong winds and heavy rain battered the coast Melbourne and Adelaide were the coldest major cities in the world Tuesday morning (pictured) While it feels freezing, the conditions are not colder than usual and are expected to warm up later in the week at 18C Wednesday and 17C Thursday. Ms Barr said Sydney could expect a 'slight warming trend in maximum temperatures' but not before waking up to 'fairly chilling temperatures' Wednesday and Thursday where rain is expected to continue. Further north, parts of Queensland woke to 3.1C with the cold weather setting in for the rest of the week. The cold blast comes after the Snowy Mountains, NSW, received 60cm of snow in 24 hours with more expected through the week. About 10-20cm of snow covered Thredbo and Charlotte Pass at the weekend when the 2018 ski season officially began. The cold blast comes with more wet weather (pictured in blue and heavier rainfall in green) expected across the country towards the west and along the east coast Brussels stirred tensions with Britain yesterday by warning that Europe-wide co-operation against crime and terrorism will end if the UK tries to drop the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Michel Barnier, the European Unions chief negotiator, said any agreement on vital security issues would be subject to a guillotine clause aimed at keeping the UK tied to the pact even though it is not governed by the EU. The move will particularly anger Theresa May who has been a vocal critic of the ECHR and has suggested that the UK could leave it one day. She has argued that the convention which is enforced by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has unfairly placed restrictions on UK courts. Michel Barnier (pictured), the EU's chief negotiator, said an agreement on security issues would be subject to a guillotine clause aimed at keeping the UK tied to the pact She grew frustrated with these during her spell as Home Secretary during her attempts which eventually took eight years to extradite hate preacher Abu Qatada to Jordan to face terrorism charges. The PM has insisted that future co-operation between the UK and the EU on issues such as crime and anti-terrorism should be unconditional, and that without it the security of the entire EU at risk. But a negotiating document released yesterday revealed that Mr Barnier will insist on the UK remaining signed up to the ECHR. The text said that binding Britain to the convention was an essential safeguard, and also raised concerns there was a potential risk of the UK lowering the standards of protection for individuals when it leaves the EU. Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is now worth $141.9billion, easily making him the richest man in the world What started as an idea for an online bookstore has made Jeff Bezos the wealthiest man in the world. The Amazon founder and CEO now has a net worth of $141.9billion, which is already $40billion more than he was worth last year. Bezos is now worth $49billion more than Bill Gates and $60billion more than Warren Buffet, who rank second and third. And as Amazon shares continue to hit record highs in the stock market, it appears Bezos' wallet is only going to become more and more stuffed. It is an incredible story that all began when a 30-year-old Bezos came across a surprising fact. Bezos learned that internet usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. It seemed like proof that his fantasy of an online book store could become a reality. 'I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast,' he told Princeton University, his alma mater, during a 2010 commencement address. 'The idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles - something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world - was very exciting to me.' But at the time Bezos was recently married and had a plush job as the vice president of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw Group in Manhattan. His wife MacKenzie told him to go for it, but his boss urged him to stick to stability. Bezos is now worth $49billion more than Bill Gates (left) and $60billion more than Warren Buffet (right), who rank second and third Bezos came up with the idea when he was 30 years old, dreaming of opening up an online bookstore filled with millions of titles. He launched Amazon in 1994 Bezos said that at the time he had a stable job at a hedge fund in New York City and was one year into his marriage to MacKenzie Bezos (pictured together). But she supported his idea As they went on a long walk in Central Park and Bezos told him of a fantasy he had that would one day become Amazon, his boss said: 'That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a job.' His boss urged Bezos to take 48 hours to think about his decision. The future CEO then realized how he would feel, decades into the future, if he didn't at least try. 'In most cases, our biggest regrets turn out to be acts of omission,' he said at the Summit LA conference in 2017. 'It's paths not taken and they haunt us. We wonder what would have happened. I knew that, when I'm 80, I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and it failing.' 'If it failed, fine. I would be very proud of the fact when I'm 80 that I tried. I also knew that it would always haunt me if I didn't try.' So Bezos decided to take the 'less safe path' and follow his passion, launching Amazon in 1994. The risk paid off. This year Amazon entered the top 10 of the Fortune 500 list for the very first time, jumping four spots to eighth place with a revenue of $177.87billion Now Bezos also serves on the American Technology Council roundtable. He is pictured here with Donald Trump and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in June 2017 The company went public three years later and has only been growing since. This year Amazon entered the top 10 of the Fortune 500 list for the very first time, jumping four spots to eighth place with a revenue of $177.87billion. It ranks only behind Walmart - who took the top spot - followed by Exxon Mobil, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Unitedhealth Group, McKesson, and CVS. But Bezos' success has come amid controversy surrounding the treatment and pay of his own employees. The median salary of the 566,000 employees at Amazon was $28,446 in 2017, according to CNN Money. And just days ago more than 400 employees from the Washington Post signed an open letter asking for better pay and benefits from Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013. The employees specifically asked for 'fair wages, fair benefits for retirement, family leave, health care, and a fair amount of job security.' But Bezos' success has come amid controversy surrounding the treatment and pay of his own employees, including the Washington Post - which he bought in 2013 More than 400 employees of the paper signed a public letter to Bezos asking him to remedy working conditions at the newspaper after more than a year of unsuccessful negotiations The employees specifically asked for 'fair wages, fair benefits for retirement, family leave, health care, and a fair amount of job security' A video featuring employees of the DC newspaper was also released with the open letter to discuss the unsuccessful negotiations they've had with upper management. 'More than one year ago, the Guild's bargaining committee entered into negotiations with the Post, hoping to achieve some of the benefits for our members and share in the success that we've had for the past year,' Freddy Kunkle, Metro reporter and co-chair of the Guild at the Washington Post, said in the video. The petition noted that within the last year, 'the Post has doubled the number of digital subscriptions and increased its online traffic by more than half', along with meeting or exceeding its advertising team's targets. But the Post's employees say they haven't reaped the benefits of this progres. 'What we've found instead is a profound unwillingness by the Post's top management to meet us halfway on a lot of the issues that are important to us,' Kunkle said. The open letter concluded by asking Bezos to 'show the world that you not only can lead the way in creating wealth, but that you also know how to share it with the people who helped you create it'. Snake hunters in the Florida Everglades helped rescue an alligator trapped in a python's death grip last weekend and managed to capture the whole thing on video. Jack Hubbard posted the footage to his Facebook page after he and professional python hunter Mike Kimmel went to Everglades Wildlife Preservation to remove the snakes as part of a pilot program initiated by the South Florida Water Management District. It was in the middle of the night that they came across a miraculous find - a young alligator literally having the life squeezed out it by a 10 foot python. The pair were even more surprised to see the alligator still struggling to survive, according to the Orlando Sentinel. That's when Kimmel, owner of Martin County Trapping and Removals, grabbed the python by its head and removed it from the water, forcing the snake drop its late night snack. Experts say that Burmese pythons of all sizes have been found in the Everglades and usually measure between six and 10 feet long and weigh as much as 100 pounds. Jack Hubbard posted the footage to his Facebook page after he and professional python hunter Mike Kimmel (pictured) went to Everglades t was in the middle of the night that they came across a miraculous find - a young alligator literally having the life squeezed out it by a 10 foot python Believing the alligator was already dead, the pair were surprised to see the quadrupedal reptile still struggling to survive A school has been shut down after two boys allegedly set fire to a classroom and vandalised a school. Horrifying images show broken windows, trashed offices, books on the floor and rubbish everywhere at John Willcock College in Geraldton, Western Australia. Police have charged two boys aged 12 and 13 with stealing, burglary, criminal damage and criminal damage by fire after being called to the school at 9pm Sunday night. Scroll down for video A school has been shut down after two boys allegedly set fire to a classroom and vandalised a school. A trashed office is pictured Geraldton Mayor Shane Van Styn described the scene as an 'absolute diabolical mess' Nine News reported. 'The amount of damage occurred in the five minutes between guards arriving and them fleeing the scene was unheralded,' he told the network. School principal Julie Campbell said there was damage to the home economics area, student services area and the science classrooms. The damage bill of the vandalism, including smashed windows (pictured) is expected to be more than $150,000 'It's devastating, it's very disappointing for our whole community,' she told the Geraldton Guardian. The school was closed and the Education Department, in a statement posted to social media, advised the school would remain shut on Tuesday due to the damage. 'Please don't send your children to school tomorrow,' the statement said. The school was closed and the Education Department while the mess (pictured) is cleaned up 'The school will re-open only when the authorities determine the area is safe and the school has been cleaned and repaired.' In a statement, police told Daily Mail Australia the damage bill is expected to be more than $150,000. Computers, photocopiers, projectors and CCTV were damaged, and police contained the fire until emergency services arrived. Opposition police spokesperson Peter Katsambanis supported parents being made accountable for their children's actions. The two boys have been charged and will appear in the Geraldton Children's Court on Tuesday June 26 'If the Government proposes that sot of change, we would definitely look at backing it because the community have had enough,' he told Nine News. The two boys will appear in the Geraldton Children's Court on Tuesday June 26. Police urged anyone with further information to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or report online at www.crimestopperswa.com.au. Kirsty Wark has revealed she would like to replace David Dimbleby as host of BBC's Question Time BBC Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark was yesterday made 2/1 favourite to take over as Question Time host after David Dimblebys decision to quit. Miss Wark, 63, would be the first female host of the BBC1 debating series if she succeeds Dimbleby, 79, who leaves in December after 25 years. Her Newsnight colleague Emily Maitlis is second favourite with bookies Ladbrokes at odds of 5/1 ahead of BBC Radio 5 Live host Emma Barnett on 10/1. Radio 4s Mishal Husain and BBC Daily Politics presenter Andrew Neil are also 10/1 shots with Ladbrokes who put early favourite Kirsty Young at 16/1 alongside Victoria Derbyshire while Evan Davis is 12/1 and Andrew Marr 33/1. It comes after Scot Miss Wark said last month that she hoped one day to front Question Time one of the most coveted jobs in television. She told Good Housekeeping magazine: I think there will be many people when David Dimbleby decides he doesnt want to do it any longer. I think I will be one of them, but Im sure lots of people will throw their hats in the ring for that. BBC News at Tens Huw Edwards pointed out on Instagram that William Hill made him 5/1 to take over. He wrote: Oh I do love those clever people at William Hill but I should point out Ive just signed a new long-term deal on BBC News at 10. Mind you that Kirsty Wark is quite superb... BBC News Channels Samira Ahmed yesterday plugged her credentials for the job on Twitter, writing: Im v well qualified to present @bbcquestiontime & Id like to be seriously considered. She added: Happy to go through a process based on equal opportunity, fairness and merit. Anti-Semitism within Labour is deterring Jewish youngsters from applying to some universities, a student leader warns. Melantha Chittenden, the national chairman of Labour Students, said the problem is widespread and pinned the blame on her own party. She has now called on leader Jeremy Corbyn to launch a crackdown. Her comments follow complaints from students that anti-Semitism has become more socially acceptable among young Labour members who sympathise with the Palestinian cause. Melantha Chittenden, the national chairman of Labour Students, has warned that anti-Semitism within Labour is deterring Jewish youngsters from applying to some universities Miss Chittenden told Radio 1s Newsbeat: Its stopping Jewish students from being able to go to the campuses they want to or even engage in activities they want to on campus. She called on Mr Corbyn to tackle the problem head-on. One Jewish sixth former in Manchester said he was scared of going to some universities because he would not feel welcome. The pupil, called Sam, said: My parents said they wouldnt feel comfortable with me going, so I didnt apply. Another youngster said: If I am involved in an anti-Semitic incident I want there to be people who can help me through it. Labour has faced anti-Semitism claims for years and the ex-president of the National Union of Students was accused of anti-Semitic rhetoric in 2016. A Labour spokesman said all complaints are taken seriously and fully investigated. The event page for Monday night's vigil in memory of rape and murder victim Eurydice Dixon has been bombarded with vile messages from online trolls. Organisers of the Reclaim Princes Park vigil, which attracted more than 10,000 mourners, said moderators were forced to monitor the page constantly. The cruel internet comments came after a floral memorial for rape and murder victim Eurydice Dixon was defaced with lewd markings on Monday morning. The event page for Monday night's vigil in memory of Eurydice Dixon (pictured) has been bombarded with vile messages from online trolls Organisers of the Reclaim Princes Park vigil (pictured), which attracted more than 10,000 mourners, said moderators were forced to monitor the page constantly The cruel internet comments came after a floral memorial for rape and murder victim Eurydice Dixon was defaced with lewd markings on Monday morning (pictured) Event organiser Megan Bridger-Darling said a whole team of people were needed to keep the trolling under control, ABC News reported. 'They clean up a lot of the stuff before I get to see it ... some are just absolutely terrible and vile,' Ms Bridger-Darling said. 'I saw one yesterday where was she was talking about "if you left $100 on your dash, in your car, and you walked away, and someone stole that that's why you need to wear a longer skirt".' Others went as far as advocating rape, while some of the comments took issue with the debate about gender equality. Event organiser Megan Bridger-Darling said a whole team of people were needed to keep the trolling under control (pictured is Ms Dixon) 'They clean up a lot of the stuff before I get to see it ... some are just absolutely terrible and vile,' Ms Bridger-Darling said (pictured is the vigil) Ms Bridger-Darling said she believed the same sentiments were behind the vandalism of a memorial for Ms Dixon on Monday morning (pictured) Ms Bridger-Darling said she believed the same sentiments were behind the vandalism of a memorial for Ms Dixon on Monday morning. At 3.50am police discovered vandals had spray-painted offensive markings 25-metres long next to where flowers had been laid in remembrance of Ms Dixon. 'When I think about the kind of person who would do this, I absolutely think it's a young man, maybe with his mates, trying to make a joke,' Ms Bridger-Darling said. At 3.50am police discovered vandals had spray-painted offensive markings 25-metres long next to where flowers had been laid in remembrance of Ms Dixon (pictured) According to Dr Evita March from Federation University said online trolls tend to fall into two categories (pictured are attendees at the vigil) According to Dr Evita March from Federation University said online trolls tend to fall into two categories. On the one hand there are pranksters with sadistic or psychopathic tendencies, while others might be just be sharing their honest beliefs. The anonymous nature of the internet has emboldened trolls, Dr March said, and allowed them to thrive without face-to-face contact with their victims. For Ian and Caroline McKay, their weekly trip to watch a film wouldnt be complete without a sweet treat from the cinemas biscuit tray. But the pensioners have been left with a sour taste after cinema bosses decided the tray of loose biscuits was a health hazard. Now, each one has to be individually wrapped in plastic to the dismay of the couple, who called it health and safety gone mad. Retired teacher Mr McKay, 70, condemned the decision as a ridiculous interference, saying: The inference was [the biscuits] could cause germs. The Odeon cinema in Basingstoke, Hampshire, (pictured) has ruled that a tray of loose biscuits was a 'health hazard' and wrapped them individually in plastic Until now, over-55s attending the weekly Silver Cinema film screening at the Odeon in Basingstoke, Hampshire, paid 3 for a ticket that entitled them to enjoy tea or coffee and pick up a couple of biscuits from a tray before watching a film. But when Mr McKay and his wife, 65, made their regular visit, they spotted each of the biscuits on offer was now wrapped in plastic. Mr McKay, from Basingstoke, said he had been told loose biscuits were a health hazard, adding: The lady behind the counter told me there would be no more unwrapped loose biscuits. She said to me they now all had to be individually wrapped. But if I want to take the risk of eating them that is up to me Let people lead their own lives. It is so stupid. We are trying to stop global plastic pollution so that makes it worse. He added: If people are happy taking biscuits off a tray then that is their choice and the sooner these health and safety people leave us to make our own choices the better. An Odeon spokesman: Our team are trialling different biscuits as part of our Silver Cinema offering and were always grateful to our guests for their feedback. A Somali-born university student charged with plotting a New Year's Eve terrorist attack failed to appear in court because there wasn't enough room for him on a prison bus. Ali Khalif Shire Ali, 21, had connections to jihadist circles when he is alleged by police to have planned a shooting spree at Melbourne's Federation Square to mark the start of 2017. The African Muslim from Werribee, in the city's west, was due to face a preliminary hearing at Melbourne Magistrates Court on Monday to decide if he should stand trial. A Somali-born university student charged with plotting a New Year's Eve terrorist attack failed to appear in court because there wasn't enough room for him on a prison bus The court was told, however, that Corrections Victoria didn't have enough room on a prison bus for him to be taken to court, the Herald Sun reported. Magistrate Simon Zebrowski described the situation as the 'most extraordinary thing'. In another logistical stuff-up, the holding cells in the courthouse were also full. 'He's not even here yet, and there's no room in the cells for him,' the magistrate said. Mr Zebrowksi told the court Mr Ali's absence meant the case could not be heard. His case was adjourned until Tuesday, but it is likely, if Mr Ali appears, to be closed to the public as undercover Australian Federal Police detectives are called as witnesses. Ali Khalif Shire Ali, 21, had connections to jihadist circles when he is alleged to have planned a shooting spree at Melbourne's Federation Square to mark the start of 2017 Suge Knight will not be allowed to leave jail and attend his mother's funeral, it has been revealed. The former music mogul had been hoping to say goodbye to his mother Maxine Chatman, who died on Sunday at a hospital in Paramount, California. Chatman, who was 77 years old, had suffered a stroke last month. Her lungs recently collapsed and she had kidney failure. But the LA County Sheriff's Department revealed it is unlikely Knight will be permitted to attend as he is currently awaiting trial for murder, according to TMZ. Suge Knight (pictured in May) will reportedly not be allowed to leave jail for a day to attend his mother's funeral His mother, Maxine Chatman (center), 77, died Sunday at a hospital in Paramount, California. Chatman had suffered a stroke last month and her health had been deteriorating ever since Although Knight could file a petition to have the decision appealed, sources said it is unlikely the court would let him attend. But last year a judge did allow the Death Row Records co-founder an opportunity to see his ailing mother. At the time Knight had been blocked from seeing family and receiving mail or phone calls while awaiting trial on murder charges. The 52-year-old pleaded not guilty to murder and attempted murder charges filed in 2015 after he ran over two men outside a burger stand in Compton, California. Last year, a judge allowed the jailed rap mogul an opportunity to see his ailing mother (left, with his father). At the time, Suge (right, in 2011), who was charged with murder, had been blocked from seeing family and receiving mail or phone calls while awaiting trial His lawyers have said Knight was acting in self-defense when he ran over Cle 'Bone' Sloan, who was punching Knight through the window of his pickup truck, and Terry Carter, who died from his injuries. Knight was a key player in the gangster rap scene that flourished in the 1990s and has been kept under tight security since he turned himself in to authorities after the fatal altercation in January 2015. The rap mogul faces potential life sentences if convicted because of prior convictions for armed robbery and assault with a gun. In April, Knight had some health problems of his own. It remains unclear why the rap mogul was admitted into the hospital for two days, but he was previously treated for blood clots in 2017. Ex-Tory leader William Hague sparked a furious row today by claiming cannabis should be legalised because the war on the drug has been 'comprehensively and irreversibly lost'. Lord Hague said expecting police to rid the streets of recreational cannabis is futile and called on Theresa May to be 'bold' and introduce a 'major change' in policy. He said the case of Billy Caldwell - an epileptic child who needs cannabis oil to treat his life-threatening seizures - showed that current laws on the drug are 'utterly out of date'. Selling cannabis in regulated shops would also bring in billions in new tax revenues and free police to concentrate on either crimes. Pressure for a shift in drugs policy has been mounting, and many MPs welcomed the extraordinary intervention from Lord Hague. Polls suggest public opinion is finely balanced, with substantial support for decriminalisation or legalisation. The latest row came as Home Secretary Sajid Javid announced an overhaul of rules on licensing medicinal cannabis. But he flatly dismissed the idea of easing restrictions on cannabis for recreational use. The PM said yesterday that there were 'very good reasons' for tough rules on the drug. Her official spokesman today confirmed that she has never smoked the drug herself. Former Tory leader William Hague said the war on marijuana had been 'comprehensively and irreversibly lost' Thereas May (pictured in Westminster today) has said there are 'very good reasons' for tough rules on cannabis Recent polling has shown that the public is deeply split over how the government should approach controlling cannabis Labour former leader Ed Miliband endorsed Lord Hague's views complaining that reform of drugs legislation was a 'no go area' Labour frontbencher Andy McDonald said he had lost a son to 'intractable epilepsy' and the government should ease the rules on cannabis oil He said the case of Billy Caldwell had provided 'one of those illuminating moments when a longstanding policy is revealed to be inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date' Canada has this year voted to legalise cannabis and recreational marijuana sales became legal in California on January 1 this year, following a number of other US states. Lord Hague broadened the raging argument about medicinal cannabis by urging the Prime Minister to be 'bold' and introduce a 'major change' in policy. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Lord Hague added: 'The idea that this can be driven off the streets and out of people's lives by the state is deluded. 'Cannabis is ubiquitous, and issuing orders to the police to defeat its use is about as up to date and relevant as asking the Army to recover the Empire. The battle is effectively over.' Cannabis and the law: What are the rules on street drugs and medical treatments? Cannabis is banned as a Class B drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Conviction for possession can attract a five year prison sentence and an unlimited fine. The penalty for production and dealing can be up to 14 years. The government does not recognise any 'medicinal or therapeutic' benefit from raw cannabis or the active ingredient, THC. But there are cannabis-based medicinal products which are currently available in the UK. They include Sativex, which can be used to treat of multiple sclerosis. Under Home Office rules, any application to administer cannabis-based medicines must be led by a senior clinician and backed by an NHS Trust. In exceptional circumstances where there is a 'medical emergency', the Home Secretary can grant a short-term licence outside of the normal process. The power had not been used until this weekend, when Sajid Javid authorised cannabis oil for Billy Caldwell. The Home Office said: 'Decisions over the length of time emergency licences are granted for are taken on a case by case basis and based on medical advice.' Ministers announced yesterday that Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davis has been asked to establish an expert panel to advise on individual applications to prescribe cannabis-based medicines. Advertisement Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said that decriminalisation of cannabis was 'an obvious step to take'. 'Large amounts of are in circulation in a very damaging form which is poisoning large numbers of young people and resulting in psychological damage,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. 'That's what we should be trying to avoid and, as Lord Hague said, the policy is failing.' Labour former leader Ed Miliband endorsed Lord Hague's views complaining that reform of drugs legislation was a 'no go area' Amid the row over medicinal cannabis, Mrs May said yesterday: 'Do we need to look at these cases and consider what we've got in place? Yes. 'But what needs to drive us in all these cases has to be what clinicians are saying about these issues. 'There's a very good reason why we've got a set of rules around cannabis and other drugs, because of the impact that they have on people's lives, and we must never forget that.' Billy Caldwell, 12, was discharged from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where doctors were bowled over by the effects of the oil, which he needs to suppress up to 100 fits a day. As her son hugged her outside the hospital yesterday, Miss Caldwell said she felt 'elated'. Billy still has to return to the hospital twice a day to receive the oil, so they are staying in a nearby flat, paid for by well-wishers. However, questions remain over what will happen with the special 35-day licence granted by Home Secretary Sajid Javid expires. Miss Caldwell, from Castlederg in County Tyrone, urged Mr Javid and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to meet her so she could make the case to have the treatment legalised for British children with epilepsy that cannot be treated conventionally. She added: 'The fact that Billy has been discharged is testimony to the effectiveness of the treatment and underlines how vital it is that every child and every single family affected should have immediate access to the very same medication. Almost all cannabis sold on the street is potent 'skunk' Almost all street cannabis in the UK is super-strength skunk, according to research. An analysis of 995 samples seized by the police suggested 94 per cent were high potency - which is linked to a higher risk of psychotic mental health episodes. The research, conducted by King's College London and released in February, said the figure for 2016 compared to 85 per cent in 2008 and 51 per cent in 2005. There are three main types of street cannabis - hash (hashish or resin), herbal cannabis (weed, grass or marijuana) and high-potency cannabis or skunk. High strength skunk contains more of the psychoactive ingredient THC than some other types of cannabis such as hash. Advertisement 'Children are dying and suffering beyond imagination.' Doctors treating Billy are said to have claimed it was a 'no-brainer' that the law The mother of Alfie Dingley wept with joy today as she was told the government is granting a licence for him to receive cannabis oil for severe epilepsy. Hannah Deacon was overcome with emotion as she heard the news that Home Mr Javid was authorising use of the medication for her six-year-old son. Wiping away tears during an interview on ITV News, Ms Deacon said: 'Thank you. Thank you to the Prime Minister.' Alfie suffers from a rare form of epilepsy which means that he can suffer more than 100 seizures a month. Earlier this morning, Ms Deacon complained that the Prime Minister had assured her three months ago that his case would be resolved speedily and on 'a compassionate basis' - but they had found 'hurdle after hurdle' in their path. Ms Deacon was appearing on the ITV Lunchtime news to talk about her son's case when presenter Nina Hossain said the Home Secretary was planning to telephone her. 'I'm also hearing that what he's going to say to you is that a licence will be issued to Alfie,' Hossain said. 'Your reaction to that please?' Labour's Wes Streeting said there was a 'strong case' for licensing cannabis for medical use, but insisted public opinion was against legalising for recreational use Another former minister, Ben Bradshaw said it was 'time for a rethink' on cannabis laws Lib Dem MP Norman Lamb said the intervention by Lord Hague meant 'things are moving' Six-year-old epileptic Alfie Dingley from Warwickshire, whose family is awaiting a Government decision on whether he can use cannabis oil medication Lord Hague said the case was 'beyond ridiculous' and the fact that the Home Office had 'backed down' was proof that the law had become 'indefensible'. He added: 'It must now be asked whether Britain should join the many other countries that permit medical-grade marijuana, or indeed join Canada in preparing for a lawful, regulated market in cannabis for recreational use as well.' Mother of Alfie Dingley weeps as minister says he can have cannabis oil treatment Wiping away tears during an interview on ITV News, Hannah Deacon said: 'Thank you. Thank you to the Prime Minister.' The mother of Alfie Dingley wept with joy today as she was told the government is granting a licence for him to receive cannabis oil for severe epilepsy. Hannah Deacon was overcome with emotion as she heard the news that Home Secretary Sajid Javid was authorising use of the medication for her six-year-old son. Wiping away tears during an interview on ITV News, Ms Deacon said: 'Thank you. Thank you to the Prime Minister.' The dramatic moment came minutes after Mr Javid had informed the House of Commons that the government is reviewing 'unsatisfactory' rules to allow cannabis to be used for medical treatments. In a statement to MPs, the Home Secretary said after a series of high-profile cases it had become clear that the current system of licensing medicines was not fit for purpose. He said a licence for cannabis oil for Alfie, who has been waiting for months, would be issued later today. But Mr Javid rejected a demand from Lord Hague for recreational cannabis to be made legal because the war on the drug had been 'comprehensively and irreversibly lost'. Advertisement He said only crime gangs benefited from 'the rise of a multi-billion-pound black market for an unregulated and increasingly potent product, creating more addiction and mental health problems but without any enforceable policy to do something about it'. He added: 'When a law has ceased to be worth enforcing to many police as well as the public, respect for the law in general is damaged. 'The battle is effectively over.' A Home Office statement said it had 'been clear that there is strong scientific and medical evidence that cannabis is a harmful drug which can be detrimental to people's mental and physical health'. 'The Government has no intention of reviewing the classification of cannabis under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and it will remain a Class B drug,' the department said. 'Any debate within government about the medicinal and therapeutic benefits of cannabis-based medicines does not extend to any review regarding the classification of cannabis and the penalties for the illicit possession, cultivation and trafficking of cannabis will remain the same.' NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens urged caution. 'I think it's very important as a country that we don't confuse this debate around specifically prescribable products for certain medical conditions with a much more generalised debate around the decriminalisation or legalisation of marijuana, without at the same time reminding ourselves that there are some genuine health risks there,' Mr Stevens told a conference in London. 'In those countries where marijuana has been decriminalised, often young people, teenagers, come to think of smoking marijuana as safe. Whereas let's be clear, actually it isn't.' He warned of the risks of addiction to cannabis and long-term psychiatric problems such as depression and psychosis, as well as possible damage to lungs. Mark Winstanley, chief executive of Rethink Mental Illness, said: 'We welcome public debate of the role and impact of cannabis. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS AND DANGERS OF CANNABIS? Cannabis is an illegal Class B drug in the UK, meaning possession could result in a five year prison sentence and those who supply the drug face up to 14 years in jail. However, the drug is still widely used for recreational purposes and can make users feel relaxed and happy. But smoking it - the most common way to consume the drug - can also lead to feelings of panic, anxiety or paranoia. Scientific studies have shown the drug can alleviate depression, anxiety and stress, but heavy use may worsen depression in the long term by reducing the brain's ability to let go of bad memories. It can also contribute to mental health problems among people who already have them, or increase users' risk of psychosis or schizophrenia, according to research. Marijuana can be prescribed for medical uses in more than half of US states, where it is used to combat anxiety, aggression and sleeping problems. Researchers are also looking into whether it could help people with autism,eczema or psoriasis. Cannabis oil containing the psychoactive chemical THC, which is illegal in the UK, is claimed to have cancer-fighting properties, and a host of patients claim to have recovered from the disease by taking the drug. Advertisement 'It's important to distinguish between cannabis for medical use and recreational cannabis. 'Where, there is clear evidence that it has a medical benefit we urge the Government to act to minimise unnecessary suffering. 'However, we urge that we approach the legalisation of recreational cannabis with caution. 'There is evidence of a link between recreational cannabis, particularly high potency forms, and psychosis and it is vital that this is a part of the debate.' Taking a deep breath and wiping her eyes, Ms Deacon said: 'That's amazing news. Thank you very much for letting me know. Thank you. Thank you to the Prime Minister.' In the Commons, Mr Javid said: 'It has become clear to me that the position we find ourselves in certainly is not satisfactory.' He said a review was being rushed through, but indicated to MPs that his 'direction of travel' was already clear. The first part of the overhaul, led by chief medical officer Sally Davies, will make recommendations on which cannabis-based medicines might offer patients real medical and therapeutic benefits. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs will consider in the second part of the review whether changes should be made to the classification of these products on an assessment of 'the balance of harms and public health needs'. 'If the review identifies significant medical benefits, then we do intend to reschedule,' Mr Javid told MPs. Should cannabis be LEGAL? Experts are split on radical drug reform Harry Sumnall, Professor in Substance Use, Liverpool John Moores University, advocated careful steps toward regulation as a public health policy FOR: Harry Sumnall, Professor in Substance Use, Liverpool John Moores University 'Cannabis is no ordinary consumer good, and as it has the potential to cause harm to users it should be carefully regulated by the state and not left in the hands of criminals. 'If the government decided it wanted to begin the process of legalisation, it could first decriminalise use - removing criminal penalties and treating possession as we would a parking ticket. 'After careful evaluation to ensure harms in vulnerable groups such as young people had not increased, full legalisation could begin. 'We must learn from past mistakes made with alcohol and tobacco. 'Promoting public health should be the priority of any model of cannabis regulation, and it is better to start off with tight restrictions that could be loosened. 'For example, there should be age limits, a ban on advertising, and strict licensing of growers and retailers, with penalties for breaking rules. 'Just because cannabis becomes legal doesnt mean that we shouldnt discourage use and help those who develop problems. Taxes raised from sales should be used to fund drug education and treatment. 'Cannabis legalisation is a radical policy. It is better to be cautious and introduce changes in stages rather than be radical and regret things later. AGAINST: Mark Winstanley, Chief Executive of Rethink Mental Illness 'We welcome public debate of the role and impact of cannabis. 'It's important to distinguish between cannabis for medical use and recreational cannabis. 'Where, there is clear evidence that it has a medical benefit we urge the Government to act to minimise unnecessary suffering. 'However, we urge that we approach the legalisation of recreational cannabis with caution. 'There is evidence of a link between recreational cannabis, particularly high potency forms, and psychosis and it is vital that this is a part of the debate. 'It can be too easy to view all cannabis as 'harmless' when there can be very serious consequences. 'We need to see more evidence from countries that have legalised cannabis on its effects on public mental health. 'Currently things are inconclusive and a greater understanding is needed before action is taken.' Rethink's Mark Winstanley called for more understanding before any action is taken Advertisement Michelle Obama and Robert F Kennedy Jr surprisingly bumped into each other on a hike in California. The pair had been hiking the Santa Monica mountains separately on Monday when they spotted one another. 'I stumbled across this amazing lady hiking the Santa Monica mountains this morning,' Kennedy wrote in the caption of their photo on Instagram. Michelle Obama and Robert F Kennedy Jr surprisingly bumped into each other on a hike in California The former first lady was sporting a black hat, a blue sweatshirt and black workout pants. She flashed a huge smile as Kennedy posed beside her for the photo. Kennedy, 64, an environmental lawyer who is the third-eldest of Robert and Ethel Kennedy's 11 children, was sporting a black t-shirt and blue jeans. Both Obama and Kennedy have been busy in the past few days. Kennedy recently called for a new probe into his father's assassination. And Obama has been speaking out against the separation of immigrant families at the US-Mexico border as she prepares for her book launch in the fall. A social media night-time curfew could be enforced to help children sleep better, it was claimed last night. Elizabeth Denham, the UK Information Commissioner, is looking to introduce a new-legally enforced code that could include making social media firms switch off technology at night. She will ask parents and children what measures they want to see introduced in the future. Details of the consultation on the code - part of the Governments new Data Protection Act - will be revealed later this week, according to the Daily Telegraph. Elizabeth Denham, the UK Information Commissioner, is looking to introduce a new-legally enforced code that could include making social media firms switch off technology at night A senior official told the newspaper: We are looking to do research directly with children and parents. We are looking to make sure its more tailored to them. Its giving children and parents a voice. The plans could see social media companies banned from sending children notifications during school hours or when they should be asleep. Other proposals being considered are high privacy settings by default for child users, not revealing their GPS location and minimal use of their data. They could be expected to abide by the new laws, or face hefty fines. It comes after a study published in the journal Child Development found last year that using smartphones late at night, specifically for social media, is directly linked to depression, poor coping skills, and reduced self-esteem in teens. In light of recent evidence that the time teens spend on their phones has negative effects on their wellbeing. One survey found that one in five teenagers admitted to regularly waking up in the middle of the night to check social media. Giving children a digital curfew - a designated time each night when all devices are turned off and kept out of reach - could prevent extensive use of applications such as Snapchat or Instagram. The new code was made possible by Baroness Kidron, the film director and crossbench peer, who led a cross-party campaign to amend the bill to protect childrens privacy and rights online. She told The Daily Telegraph: The principle behind the age-appropriate code is that a child is a child until they mature, until they are 18, not until they pick up the smart phone. Giving children a digital curfew - a designated time each night when all devices are turned off and kept out of reach - could prevent extensive use of applications such as Snapchat or Instagram (file photo) It is unacceptable to ask a child to tick a box at 13 and treat them as an adult. Its the duty of online services whether its Amazon or a newspaper to treat the child according to its status as a child. Its not the responsibility of the child to adapt to the commercial needs of these companies. The second principle is that its the responsibility of services to adapt and provide. We have to get the digital world designed better for children. It needs to anticipate the presence of children in these spaces. Earlier this month it was reported that Eton College had started to remove mobile phones from pupils in the evening to help them to sleep better. The boarding school had been expecting an angry reaction but the boys welcomed it as it gave them a break from social media. Simon Henderson, the headmaster, said that parents and schools should not be worried about standing up to the 24/7 culture of social media. He told the Girls Day School Trust conference in London that the youngest boys - aged 13 and 14 - were required to hand in their phones at night. A Bitcoin millionaire verbally abused and struggled with firefighters as they tried to tackle a major hotel fire, a court heard. Darren Murray, 46, was dishevelled and smelling of booze when he tried to push past the firefighters at the Atlantic Hotel in Newquay, Cornwall, demanding to be let into his room. The court was told he was heard to shout: 'I am a millionaire. I can do what I want!' and 'I pay all your wages. I s*** more than you earn in a year.' Murray, of Liskeard, Cornwall, pleaded guilty at magistrates on Monday June 18 to being drunk and disorderly in Newquay, on May 20 last year. Darren Murray, 46, was dishevelled and smelling of booze when he tried to push past the firefighters at the Atlantic Hotel, demanding to be let into his room Alison May, prosecuting, told Truro Magistrates' Court firefighters asked the police to intervene. The police officers then moved Murray away from the fire cordon. She said Murray also abused the Devon and Cornwall Police officers and demanded that he be let back to his room. The court heard Murray had failed to fill in his means form correctly, saying that he could pay any fine imposed by the court. Murray said he had no income, stating only that he worked as a 'block chain developer' trading in the digital currency Bitcoin. He was fined 750 and ordered to pay 85 court costs and 75 victim surcharge. A senior White House official has been linked to key backers of an alleged cult known as NXIVM that has been accused of brainwashing women into becoming sex slaves. Buzzfeed News has published an article detailing the relationship between President Trump's deputy chief of staff for operations Joe Hagin and an influential Libyan politician who is said to have spent years promoting NXIVM, which bills itself as a women's empowerment group. A consulting firm co-founded by Hagin was contracted by Igtet from 2011 to at least 2013, during which time Igtet and his wife Sarah Bronfman were fighting to keep NXIVM alive amidst an FBI investigation into allegations that it was a sex cult. The Buzzfeed article published Monday revealed that Hagin was aware of the couple's involvement in NXIVM, and claims that Igtet even tried to recruit the senior Trump official to the group. NXIVM announced that it had ceased operations last week following the arrest of its leader Keith Raniere in March, who has been charged with sex trafficking. President Trump's deputy chief of staff for operations Joe Hagin, 62, has been linked to key backers of alleged sex cult NXIVM through the consulting firm Hagin co-founded Hagin worked with Libyan politician Basit Igtet, left, and his wife Sarah Bronfman, right, from 2011 until at least 2013, during which time the couple was fighting to keep NXIVM afloat Hagin, 62, is a longtime Washington insider who's worked for every Republican president since Ronald Reagan, earning the nickname 'White House Wise Man'. During the Obama administration he co-founded Command Consulting, marketed as 'a global security and intelligence consulting firm that provides advisory services to governments, corporations, and high net worth individuals'. Buzzfeed News has reported that one of Command Consulting's biggest clients was Igtet, who hired the firm in 2011 on the eve of the Arab Spring. Sources told Buzzfeed that Hagin was originally tasked with building Igtet's influence in his home country of Libya after the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi. However, his role soon changed, focusing on a treasure hunt for the $200billion that Gaddafi had reportedly left behind, in exchange for a hefty finder's fee. At the same time that Hagin was assisting Igtet in his political goals, the affluent leader and his wife Bronfman were working to keep NXIVM afloat. Bronfman has been said to have provided the group with millions of dollars over the last several years. In a brief phone call with Buzzfeed Hagin said he was aware of Igtet and Bronfmans involvement in NXIVM while he was working with them, but that he 'stayed away from it'. A collection of at least eight sources who spoke with Buzzfeed have suggested that Hagin may have turned a blind eye to his client's involvement with the group because of the massive payout he would receive through the Libyan treasure hunt. It is unclear when Hagin's firm stopped working with Igtet, but documents confirm that the relationship lasted until at least 2013. Hagin gave up his stake in Command Consulting when he joined the Trump administration, but he has continued to earn nearly $100,000 from the firm in the last year, according to financial disclosures obtained by Buzzfeed. The leader of NXIVM, Keith Raniere, pictured, was arrested on sex trafficking charges in March One hundred war veterans will walk 100 miles from Ypres to the Cenotaph in central London to mark a century since the end of the First World War later this year. The march, named the Long Walk Home, will see veterans from Haig Housing, a charity which provides homes to former members of the armed services, walk from Belgium to Whitehall over four days. The trip will take them from Ypres, the site of three major battles, to the Belgian coast before they head to Dover, continuing towards London via Canterbury, Rochester and Dartford. They are planning to stay in a hotel on the eve of Remembrance Sunday before they march to the Cenotaph the following morning. One hundred war veterans will walk 100 miles from Ypres to the Cenotaph in central London to mark a century since the end of the First World War later this year Brigadier James Richardson, the charity's chief executive, said: 'Haig Housing Trust started its life to meet the needs of veterans returning from the Great War. 'Prime Minister Lloyd George campaigned to build homes fit for heroes and ever since Haig has striven to do just that. 'The Long Walk Home recognises the great sacrifice given by so many in that war and its pilgrimage to walk the route from Flanders to the Cenotaph to take part in the National Act of Remembrance by today's Veterans will be a poignant commemoration. 'We hope that the public and in particular the people of Kent give support and encouragement to this event.' The trip will take them from Ypres, the site of three major battles, to the Belgian coast before they head to Dover, continuing towards London via Canterbury, Rochester and Dartford Ypres was notable for being the first use of poison gas on the Western Front, in the form of chlorine expelled from 41kg canisters using prevailing winds to carry it over enemy trenches. The new weapon was so effective that thousands of Allied troops were injured or died painful deaths from inhaling the gas. The Germans made four attempts to take the strategic town with a combination of artillery bombardment and direct attacks on Allied trench lines. But during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915 they were repulsed each time with heavy casualties on both sides. The Pentagon has formally suspended a major military exercise that was planned with South Korea in August. Donald Trump first announced that he planned to suspend military exercises with South Korea during the nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. It is a decision that will no doubt please Kim, as North Korea has long denounced the exercise as a provocation and rehearsal to invade the North. The Pentagon formally suspended a major military exercise that was planned with South Korea following Donald Trump's announcement he would get rid of the drills during the nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (pictured) Trump's decision was confirmed on Monday by Dana White, a spokesman for the Defense Department. White said planning for the summer drills has stopped, but there have been no decisions made on any other military exercises with South Korea. Military exercises with other countries in the Pacific will continue, she added. Last Tuesday Trump abruptly announced that military exercises would cease with the South, calling them 'inappropriate'. Trump then claimed that suspending the drills would save the US 'a tremendous amount of money, before calling them 'provocative'. The president's announcement appeared to catch US defense officials by surprise, and his comments ran counter to long-held American arguments that the exercises are critical for effective operations with allies and are defensive in nature. Last year's Ulchi Freedom Guardian (pictured) went on for 11 days in August and involved about 17,500 US troops And, for years, the Pentagon has flatly denied North Korean assertions that the exercises are 'provocative.' But as the days went by, the US and Seoul began discussions about temporarily suspending the large Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises that usually take place in August. Seoul's Defense Ministry said Friday that Defense Minister Song Young-moo held 'deep' discussions about the drills with US Defense Secretary James Mattis in a telephone conversation Thursday evening. Trump's decision to suspend the exercises, coupled with the vague joint statement issued after his summit with Kim, have reinforced fears in South Korea that the North is attempting to take advantage of a US president who appears to care less about the traditional alliance than his predecessors. The Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills have taken place annually for more than 40 years. They went on for 11 days in August and involved about 17,500 US troops. Also participating were troops from nations that contributed forces during the 1950-53 Korean War, including Australia, Britain, Canada and Colombia. The Ulchi Freedom Guardian involves computer-simulated defensive exercises and field exercises in land, sea, and air that are designed to improve South Korea's defense. The other major US exercises with South Korea Key Resolve and Foal Eagle took place earlier this spring. In March, Kim told a visiting South Korean delegation in Pyongyang that he 'understands' the situation regarding the joint drills, according to South Korea's National Security Office head Chung Eui-yong, who had led the delegation. Emergency services personnel wearing protective clothing participate in an anti-terror and anti-chemical terror exercise as part of the 2017 Ulchi Freedom Guardian They historically include live-fire drills with tanks, aircraft, and warships and feature about 10,000 American and 200,000 Korean troops. The drills typically begin in March but were delayed because of the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February. North Korea has always reacted to the Ulchi exercises with belligerence and often its own demonstrations of military capability. During last year's Ulchi exercises, North Korea fired a powerful new intermediate-range missile over Japan in what its state media described as a 'muscle-flexing' countermeasure to the drills. Military readiness and lethality have been key priorities for Mattis, so it is still not clear what, if any, smaller exercises may be conducted in the region with South Korea or if more desktop drills may be planned to compensate for the lack of larger, more coordinated events with various ships, aircraft and thousands of troops. Defense officials are also scrambling to pull together cost estimates for the various exercises with South Korea to inform Trump's assertion that the suspension will save an enormous amount of money. Mattis' office sent out a request to military commands last Wednesday seeking information on costs, but the Pentagon has yet to provide a public answer. Sarina Dodson (pictured) was arrested Saturday in Texas on a felony charge of assisting escape Law enforcement authorities in eastern New Mexico say an officer helped three inmates escape from a county lockup. Curry County Sheriff Wesley Waller says detention officer Sarina Dodson was arrested Saturday in Texas on a felony charge of assisting escape. Waller says Dodson was working when three inmates escaped from the Curry County Detention Center in Clovis Friday. The inmates were identified as Aaron Clark, who was accused of attempted child abuse and identity fraud; Ricky Sena, who was facing charges of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and auto theft; and Victor Apodaca, who had been jailed on drug charges. New Mexico authorities are still searching for the escaped felons. Dodson is at the Lubbock County jail. Records do not list an attorney. Art Scott, who works near the jail, told KRQE that he was not shocked to hear about the circumstances of the incident. The inmates were identified as Aaron Clark (L), who was accused of attempted child abuse and identity fraud; Ricky Sena (C), who was facing charges of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and auto theft; and Victor Apodaca (R), who had been jailed on drug charges 'I hate to say this, but I wasn't really too surprise... It's happened before,' said Scott. The Eastern New Mexico News reports the jail has had multiple escapes, including eight one night in 2008. 'They're there for a reason. They need to be in there,' said Scott. The Curry County Detention Center along with the county's courthouse have been closed until further notice. Local resident Esperanza Meredith says the idea that escaped convicts may be hiding out in or near the community is chilling. 'Scared. Kind of like, wow. I didn't even know, didn't hear no sirens, didn't see nothing,' Meredith said. 'I will be cautious. I will make sure that more closely that my doors are closed. My doors are locked. That I'm safe, that my husband is safe,' she said. In 2015, 52-year-old Joyce Mitchell was sentenced to seven years in prison for helping convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat escape from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora near the Canadian border. She supervised the two inmates in the prison's tailor shop. Matt was shot dead three weeks later by searchers in woods west of the prison. Sweat was shot and captured two days later near the border. Mitchell was denied early release in February 2017 after going before the parole board at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County. New Mexico authorities are still searching for the escaped felons while Dodson is currently being held at the Lubbock County jail (pictured) Smokers are using a secret website to buy packets of cigarettes at prices up to 70 per cent lower than retail - as Australians are slugged with the highest tobacco costs in the world. The website Ciggies World lists hundreds of different tobacco products for sale at cheaper-than-usual cost. A packet of Marlboro Gold cigarettes retails for about $30 in Australia, but on the Ciggies World website a pack of 20 can be bought for $4. Although the prices are comparatively cheaper, smokers face waiting more than a month before receiving their cigarettes - with a risk they may be forced to pay unexpected taxes. The website Ciggies World lists hundreds of different tobacco products for sale at cheaper-than-usual cost A packet of Marlboro Gold cigarettes retails for about $30 in Australia, but on the Ciggies World website a pack of 20 can be bought for $4 The site also sells Chinese, clove and flavoured cigarettes - including milkshake, mojito and tiramisu (stock image) The site also sells Chinese, clove and flavoured cigarettes - including milkshake, mojito and tiramisu. Ciggies World promises to ship products across the world. The website has a Swiss domain country code but is hosted in Sydney. Shipping costs vary given the location. Shipping to Australia is either $7 or $25, for non-traceable or traceable delivery. Customers are warned they are 'choosing at their own risk' by selecting non-traceable delivery, which means they will be unable to find out how long they will have to wait for their tobacco. Traceable delivery costing $25 takes between 15-35 days and is 'very likely to get taxed'. Customers can buy a carton of cigarettes by selecting 10 packs, and payment instructions are sent once an order has been completed. Ciggies World promises to ship products across the world. The website has a Swiss domain country code, but is hosted in Sydney Australia is the most expensive place in the world to buy cigarettes, with the average cost soaring to nearly $40 a packet. Treasurer Scott Morrison announced smokers would be slugged even more for a pack of cigarettes on September 1 this year, in the second of four consecutive 12.5 per cent tobacco excise hikes. The tax hike is expected to result in aprice increase of about $3 for a typical packet. Last year, the price of 30 Winfield Blues jumped $2.70 from $32.50 to $35.20. The mayor of a Perth council was left bleeding on Monday after being struck in the head with a microphone by an angry resident during a heated town meeting. A 67-year-old man hit City of Swan mayor David Lucas with a microphone as a special electors meeting broke up at the Midland Town Hall, police say. The gathering erupted into a brawl following the attack and councillors were forced to tackle the man to the ground. Mr Lucas received a cut above his eye. 'It's entirely unwarranted what occurred, and unjustified and disgraceful that it's happened in what's meant to be a civic public discussion,' Councillor Mark Elliott told the ABC. A 67-year-old man hit City of Swan mayor David Lucas (pictured) with a microphone as a special electors meeting broke up at the Midland Town Hall, police say The meeting was held to discuss the controversial development of the Midland Oval, which has divided the community. About 150 people were in attendance. There was 'an incident involving City of Swan mayor David Lucas, councillors and a member of the public,' confirmed Swan chief executive Mike Foley. 'The city understands the community concern surrounding this incident,' he said. The 67-year-old man has since been charged with assaulting a person performing a public function and unlawful damage. It is understood he had wanted to voice his opinion during the meeting but was cut short. The Save Midland Oval Facebook page was taken down following the incident. The 23-year-old administrator said she was concerned for her safety after receiving multiple angry messages and threats. The attacker was granted bail to appear in Midland Magistrate's Court on July 10. A former CIA engineer who was charged with possession of child pornography has also been charged with leaking thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. US federal prosecutors said in a statement that Joshua Schulte allegedly leaked classified national defense information. Schulte, a New York City resident, was charged in a 13-count superseding indictment connected to alleged theft of classified information from the CIA, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York said in a joint statement with US Justice Department and FBI officials. Manhattan attorney, Geoffrey Berman, said that Schulte allegedly 'used his access at the agency to transmit classified material to an outside organization'. 'Unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence can pose a grave threat to our national security, potentially endangering the safety of Americans,' Berman added. Joshua Schulte, a former CIA engineer who was charged with possession of child pornography, has also been charged with leaking thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks US federal prosecutors said in a statement that Schulte allegedly leaked national defense information and charged him in a 13-count superseding indictment connected to alleged theft of classified information from the CIA The indictment also charged Schulte with the receipt, possession and transportation of child pornography. According to the indictment, in March and June of 2016 Schulte altered a computer system operated by the US Intelligence Agency to grant himself access to the system, enabling him to delete records of his activities and deny others access to the system. In January, a prosecutor said Schulte was the target of an ongoing investigation into the theft of tools that were used by the CIA to spy overseas. In March 2017, the FBI searched Schulte's Manhattan apartment for information linking him to the breach. The FBI said they removed NSA and CIA paperwork from Schulte's home, as well as a personal computer, tablet, phone and other electronics. Around the same time, WikiLeaks began releasing some of the CIA's hacking tools, including software exploits designed to take over iPhones and turn smart TVs into surveillance devices. The US government has all but publicly acknowledged the embarrassing leak from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence. President Donald Trump told a television host at the time: 'I just want people to know the CIA was hacked, and a lot of things taken.' The breach, known as Vault 7, was the largest loss of classified documents in the agency's history, according to The New York Times. The indictment sought the forfeiture of any property Schulte obtained directly or indirectly from any foreign government, party or military force as a result of the crimes. Schulte was arrested in August, but prosecutors had been unable to bring charges against him until now. According to the Times, FBI agents said they found images of children being molested by adults on a server Schulte created as a business in 2009 while he was a student at the University of Texas. Court documents suggest that Schulte was aware of the images and had warned one user not to 'put anything too illegal on there'. Schulte, 29, worked at the CIA (file image) as a software engineer who helped design malware used to break into the computers of terrorism suspects and other targets. He left in 2016 In September, a month after his arrest, Schulte was released on the condition he not leave New York City, where he had been living with a relative. He was thrown back in jail in December when he violated that order. Schulte has been housed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center ever since. He has denied the child pornography charges claiming that around 50 to 100 people had access to the server he created, according to the Washington Post. Schulte also said that because of 'unfortunate circumstances the FBI ultimately made the snap judgement that [he] was guilty of the leaks and targeted [him]'. According to the former CIA engineer, he had been planning a trip to Mexico with his brother around the time his apartment was searched, which may have given the appearance that he was trying to flee the country. The FBI stopped Schulte from traveling to Mexico and took his passport. Schulte worked at the agency as a software engineer who helped design malware used to break into the computers of terrorism suspects and other targets. He left the CIA in 2016 to work in the private sector. His lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, said in May that her client was 'deeply saddened' that he might face espionage-related charges. On Monday, she said: 'When all the evidence is clear, he's hardly the villain that the government tries to make him out to be.' Since he's been jailed, Schulte has created a Facebook page where he posts articles criticizing the criminal justice system. He also launched a GoFundMe to raise $50million for his legal expenses. The GoFundMe does not have any donations. Schulte faces various new charges, including illegal gathering of national defense information, illegal transmission of lawfully possessed national defense information, unauthorized access to a computer to obtain classified information, theft of government property, causing transmission of a harmful computer program, information, code or command. Included among the charges was an allegation that he engaged in criminal copyright infringement from September 2015 to last August by making publicly available on a computer network thousands of copyrighted movies, television shows and audio recordings. If convicted, he could face decades in prison. Pedestrians were left terrified when an apparently drunk man allegedly waved an imitation gun at them in a Melbourne street on Tuesday morning. Multiple people called triple zero at about 9am and police arrived on the scene in a matter of minutes, according to 3AW. A 27-year-old man was taken into custody by police for being drunk in a public place. Pedestrians were left terrified when an apparently drunk man allegedly waved an imitation gun at them in a Melbourne street on Tuesday morning The incident occoured on Malvern Road and Chapel Street in Prahran. No-one was injured during the incident. Multiple people called triple zero at about 9am and police arrived on the scene in a matter of minutes (stock picture) Chinese President Xi Jinping heaped praised on Kim Jong-un for his 'positive' summit with Donald Trump on Tuesday as the North Korean dictator visited Beijing. Xi also pledged China's unwavering support for 'socialist North Korea' and said he remains dedicated to improving relations between the two countries. The meeting marks the third time that Kim has visited China this year after his summit with Trump in Singapore last week. Kim did not travel abroad once during the first seven years of his rule. Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan, right, greeted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with his wife Ri Sol-Ju, left, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday Footage run by China's CCTV shows President Xi and Kim shaking hands during a welcome reception in Beijing President Xi offered high praise to Kim on Tuesday, lauding the 'positive' outcome of his historic summit with U.S. President Donald Trump and promising unwavering friendship Kim Jong-un has arrived in Beijing for a meeting with China's President Xi Jinping where he is likely to reveal details of his goundbreaking meeting with Donald Trump (Kim's car pictured) Security was tight on Tuesday morning as a motorcade including sedans, minibuses, motorcycles and a stretch limo with a golden emblem was seen leaving Beijing's airport Kim's previous journey to Beijing was made using an armoured train that was also used by his father, but on Tuesday he arrived by plane and was taken to meet Xi in a motorcade North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will make a two-day visit to Beijing starting Tuesday following his groundbreaking summit with President Donald Trump in Singapore last week Xi told Kim that he was very happy to see the important consensus reached on denuclearisation and setting up a lasting peace mechanism, Chinese state TV said. 'No matter the changes in the international and regional situation, China's party and government's resolute position on being dedicated to consolidating and developing Sino-North Korea relations will not change,' the report cited Xi as saying. 'The Chinese people's friendship for the North Korean people will not change, and China's support for socialist North Korea will not change,' Xi added. Kim told Xi he hoped to work with China and other parties to push the peace process forward, Chinese state television said. While not billed as a state visit, China gave Kim most of the trappings, including a welcome ceremony with honour guard in Beijing's Great Hall of the People. Xi greeted Kim warmly as the two men were accompanied by their wives. Xi said he was pleased to see North Korea's decision to promote economic reforms, adding that China's own reform and opening up process had meant the Chinese people's eyes had been open to the world. North Korean state media had not mentioned Kim's visit by early evening. In an unusual move, Chinese state media announced Kim's visit and said he would stay for two days. Previously China would only confirm Kim had visited after he had left the country. Kim has made two recent visits to China, North Korea's main ally and key source of trade and economic assistance. Jong-Un is pictured shaking hands with China's President Xi Jinping in May Chinese bikers honour guards walk at the airport's VIP gate, as North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visits Beijing Chinese motorbike outriders prepare to escort the North Korean dictator after he arrived in Beijing on Tuesday morning Kim was met by motorcycle guards at Beijing Capital International Airport before being escorted to the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse Trump agreed to work with Kim toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, committed to provide the North with security guarantees and pledged to end 'war games' with South Korea, which North Korea and China have long seen as provocative. South Korea and the Pentagon announced they would halt the annual Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August. A Kim trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China is North Korea's most important diplomatic and economic backer but has been angered by its nuclear and missile tests. South Korea's foreign ministry spokesman said South Korea and China shared the strategic goal of completely denuclearising the Korean peninsula. 'Our government hopes China will play a constructive role in resolving this problem,' ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-deok told a regular briefing. 'We hope Chairman Kim Jong Un's visit will contribute to that.' China has welcomed the warming of ties between the United States and North Korea, and offered to help. It has been particularly pleased by Trump's decision to suspend military drills with South Korea. It has long proposed a 'dual suspension', whereby North Korea stops weapons tests and the United States and South Korea stop military drills, to encourage talks. 'South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August,' South Korea's defence ministry said in a statement. Following his summit with Trump, Kim (both pictured) was expected to meet with Chinese leaders to discuss progress in halting his country's missile and nuclear weapons programs in exchange for economic incentives Chinese armed policemen guard outside the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing today Chinese policemen stand guard near the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing Police officers direct members of the public away from the state house as Kim meets Xi The Pentagon confirmed the suspension, adding in a statement there would be a meeting of the secretaries of defence and state as well as Trump's national security adviser on the issue this week. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops joined the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than field exercises. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. The decision to halt military exercises in South Korea has bewildered many current and former U.S. defence officials, who only learned about it when Trump announced it in Singapore, after the summit with Kim. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said there would be no changes to joint drill plans between the United States and Japan, both of which regularly practise to deter North Korea. 'The United States is in a position to keep its commitment to its allied nations' defence and our understanding is there is no change to the U.S. commitment to the Japan-U.S. alliance and the structure of American troops stationed in Japan,' Suga told a regular briefing. Japanese Minister of Defence Itsunori Onodera said the decision to suspend the U.S.-South Korean exercises was made to support the diplomatic effort between the United States and North Korea but added it was 'important to be wary of North Korea actions'. 'Our view of the threat has not changed. Joint training is an important in maintaining peace and stability in the region,' he said. A man sparked fears of a poisoning when he allegedly made fake alcohol in outback factories in Australia. The bootlegger avoided $30 million of taxes on 'fake spirits' after distilling ethanol in secret locations. The man fled the country, possibly to 'south-east Asia' before he was caught by police, the ABC reports. A man sparked fears of a poisoning when he allegedly made fake alcohol in outback factories in Australia (stock photos) An anonymous letter sent to the Australian Tax office revealed the man 'avoided tax' on at least $30 million in liquor sales. 'He will end up poisoning someone soon,' the letter seen by the ABC stated. 'He has never been licensed to distill or manufacture spirits of any kind.' The vodka was traced back to the outback distillery in NSW, but the bootlegger had left by the time authorities arrived (stock image) A man allegedly became unwell and his lips burnt after buying two bottles of vodka in Sydney that smelt like 'nail-polish remover'. He blew 0.05 in a breathalyser - enough to be caught drink driving - after just two swigs of the spirit, a complaint lodged to the NSW Food authority revealed. 'He felt unwell, hot flushed, when I tasted it the inside of my lips burnt,' the complaint seen by the ABC said. The vodka was traced back to the outback distillery in NSW, but the bootlegger had left by the time authorities arrived. A NSW Authority spokeswoman confirmed the Food Authority are investigating. Daily Mail Australia has contacted the Australian Tax Office and NSW Police for comment. Archbishop Philip Wilson arrived at court still wearing his clergy collar after recently being found guilty of concealing historical sexual abuse of children. The most senior Catholic official in the world to be convicted of masking a paedophile's crimes may not survive being locked up in prison as he is chronically ill. The Adelaide Archbishop was last month found guilty of failing to report to police the repeated abuse of two altar boys by paedophile priest James Fletcher in the New South Wales Hunter region during the 1970s. Archbishop Philip Wilson arrived at court still wearing his clergy collar (pictured) despite recently being found guilty of concealing historical sexual abuse of children in NSW The most senior Catholic official in the world to be convicted (pictured centre) of masking a paedophile's crimes may not survive being locked up in prison as he is chronically ill The Adelaide Archbishop (pictured centre) was last month found guilty of failing to report to police the repeated abuse of two altar boys by paedophile priest James Fletcher in 1970s Imprisonment is likely to worsen Wilson's many chronic illnesses and may put him at risk of assault from fellow inmates, defence barrister Ian Temby QC told his sentencing hearing at Newcastle Local Court on Tuesday. The 67-year-old suffers from diabetes, heart and Alzheimer's disease and depression, conditions which would further deteriorate behind bars and 'may even threaten his survival', he said. Instead, Wilson's legal team urged for a good behaviour bond for the offence that carries a maximum two-year jail term. Mr Temby noted Wilson was the first Australian Catholic bishop to introduce police checks of all clergymen, a child protection council bringing in experts from outside the church and an audit system of parishes to ensure compliance. 'The offender is not just a man... who has no prior convictions but is, in fact, a man of prior positive good character with particular reference to the general field of prevention of child sexual abuse,' he said. Wilson stood aside from the Adelaide archdiocese following the court's decision in May and said if it became necessary for him to resign, he would do so. The 67-year-old (left and right) suffers from diabetes, heart and Alzheimer's disease and depression and imprisonment is likely to worsen Wilson's chronic illnesses Victim Peter Creigh (left arriving to court) and another altar boy told the then assistant priest in 1976 that Fletcher had repeatedly abused them, but the clergyman did nothing The key witness in the landmark trial said he trusted Wilson would take action after being told of the abuse which occurred when Mr Creigh (pictured) was 10 years old in 1971 Peter Creigh and another altar boy told the then assistant priest in 1976 that Fletcher had repeatedly abused them, but the clergyman did nothing. The key witness in the landmark trial said he trusted Wilson would take action after being told of the abuse which occurred when Mr Creigh was 10 years old in 1971. Fletcher was found guilty in December 2004 of nine counts of child sexual abuse. He died in jail of a stroke in January 2006. 'I think this will now open the doors for other jurisdictions to start looking at trying to prosecute people who deliberately looked after their institution and literally threw children to the wolves,' another victim, Peter Gogarty, told reporters outside court last month. Magistrate Robert Stone rejected claims by Wilson, who is suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's, that he could not remember the children's allegations. The hearing continues with the magistrate likely to reserve his decision. J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School, in Richmond, will now be named Barack Obama Elementary School (pictured is Obama in Paris in December 2017) A Virginia school is dropping its Confederacy general name to honor the United States' first black president. J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School, in Richmond, will now be named Barack Obama Elementary School, following a 6-1 vote by the Richmond School Board on Monday night. The school, named after the pro-slavery general, was the only Confederate-named school in the former capital of the Confederacy. The name change was suggested in the wake of the deadly Charlottesville riots last summer, when white supremacist groups - protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee - clashed with counter-protesters. A white supremacist was later charged with murder after he drove his car into a crowd of people. The elementary school, which has 90 percent black students, has welcomed the change, as has the local community. Kenya Gibson represents the school on the board and was the lone dissenting vote, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. Gibson wanted the vote to be delayed and said there was a lack of local names included in the administrations rebranding recommendations. Students, parents, staff, and the local community were all asked to submit name ideas, and on Monday, the Richmond City School Board revealed the top three choices. Northside, Barack Obama and Wishtree took the majority of votes from the students, knocking aside suggestions like John Adams Elementary and Jackie Robinson Elementary. The board estimates it will cost about $26,000 to rename the school. Obama, the 44th president and first African American in the role, has had countless schools named after him during and after his two terms. The school (pictured) named after the pro-slavery general, was the only Confederate-named school in the former capital of the Confederacy But this appears to be the first time a school has been renamed from a Confederate general to Obama. The City of Petersburg also voted to rename three Confederate-named schools earlier this year, according to CBS. The news was widely applauded online, with many celebrating the fact that someone who fought for slavery had been replaced by the first black president. A former student wrote: 'This is incredible! I attended JEB Stuart Elementary School, and now this: School honoring Confederate general renamed Barack Obama Elementary.' Others wrote they were 'very happy' and 'proud' to learn of the change. 'This sends a powerful message of diversity and inclusion to the schoolchildren of Richmond and beyond!' one commenter wrote. The very few negative voices in a sea of positivity came from complaints that Obama had no ties to the area, and some who complained he was a 'polarizing' figure. WHO WAS J.E.B. STUART? The school was originally named after J.E.B. Stuart (pictured) a pro-slavery Confederate general Stuart, son of a slave owning politician, was born on a plantation in Patrick County, Virginia, near the border with North Carolina in 1833. He was pro-slavery and fought in the Bleeding Kansas conflicts - a series of violent confrontations between pro and anti-slavery groups who clashed over whether Kansas should be a free state. During the conflict, he participated in the capture of noted abolitionist John Brown. Stuart was also a veteran of multiple frontier battles with Native Americans. When his home state Virginia seceded, he joined the Confederate Army under Stonewall Jackson, and then under Robert E. Lee, participating in Peninsula Campaign, Maryland Campaign, the Battle of Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. He died at the Battle of Yellow Tavern aged 31 in 1864. Advertisement The incident occurred on Sunday when Matt Sanders (pictured) was preparing for a planned visit to see his dad on Father's Day A Georgia man was reunited with his beloved dog on Monday after a mysterious woman wearing just a bath towel sped off with his car with the pup still inside. 'That dog goes everywhere with me,' Matt Sanders from Hall County told Fox 5. 'It's just my child.' The incident occurred on Sunday when Sanders was preparing for a planned visit to see his dad on Father's Day. As he was loading his car, he placed his trusty chihuahua, 'Bear,' inside the car. With the motor still running, Sanders said he ran inside his house to grab a few more things along with his phone. But when he walked back outside, Sanders says he discovered a half-naked woman had locked herself inside the car. 'She's in a towel, and I'm just like...'What?' he said. 'Then it hits me that someone is trying to steal my dog and my car. As Sanders was loading his car, he placed his trusty chihuahua, 'Bear (Pictured),' inside the car Sanders said he begged and pleaded for the woman to let his dog go, but she ignored his cries and sped off in the vehicle. 'That's a person that I've spent my life with, and I want them back,' Sanders said. 'My life isn't complete right now. I'm torn up...torn up.' Sanders said he immediately filed a police report with local authorities, describing the woman as a middle-aged Caucasian with light colored curly hair, according to Fox News. The Braselton Police Department said that they found the woman at a Best Western hotel early the next morning. Lucky for Sanders, Bear was unharmed and was reunited with both the dog and his vehicle. The woman was taken to Northeast Georgia Medical Center for an evaluation and it remains unclear if any charges will be filed against her. Braselton Police said that they are withholding the woman's identity until her evaluation is complete. The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics has called Donald Trump's policy of separating families at the border 'government-sanctioned child abuse'. Dr Colleen Kraft didn't hold back as she explained how Trump's 'zero tolerance' policy was deeply - and permanently - traumatizing innocent children. Kraft, who toured an immigration detention center herself, revealed chilling details about a room in which almost every toddler was silent in shock. 'I can't describe to you the room I was in with the toddlers,' she told CNN. American Academy of Pediatrics President Dr Colleen Kraft has called Donald Trump's policy of separating families at the border 'government-sanctioned child abuse' Kraft, who toured an immigration detention center herself, revealed chilling details about a room in which almost every toddler was silent in shock 'Normally toddlers are rambunctious and running around. We had one child just screaming and crying, and the others were really silent.' 'This is not normal activity or brain development with these children.' Kraft explained that the children were going through a condition called 'toxic stress' in which their 'fight or flight' hormones were elevated. 'In this situation, the [hormones] remain high and it inhibits the development of their brains,' she said. 'It disrupts their brain architecture and keeps them from developing language and social and emotional bonds and gross motor skills and the development they could possibly have.' Kraft said it was not enough that these children were being given food, water, and shelter. 'All you have to do is go to the room and look at what happened to these children,' she said. 'We know, the biology, what happens when parents and children are separated and it is not falling under the definition of being well taken care of.' Kraft added that it was important that children and their parents be kept together, especially after an already traumatic trip across the border. 'These children have been traumatized in their trip up the border, and the first thing that happens is we take away the one constant in their life that helps them buffer all these horrible experiences. That's child abuse,' she said. 'Families need to be together, these young children need their parents to help them buffer this experience that they've had.' Kraft's words comes amid the release of horrifying audio that captured border agents cracking jokes while crying children called for their parents. The audio, which is believed to have been recorded at an immigration facility along the border, was released Monday afternoon by ProPublica. The recording was of six-year-old Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, who was separated from her mother last week at a US Customs and Border Protection facility. Throughout the audio Alison and other children are repeatedly heard screaming 'Mami' and 'Papa' just moments before the border agent drowns out their sobs with a joke. 'Well, we have an orchestra here,' he's heard saying. 'Whats missing is a conductor.' Kraft's words comes amid the release of horrifying audio that captured border agents cracking jokes while six-year-old Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid (right) and other children cried in an immigrationfacility Throughout the audio Alison and other children are repeatedly heard screaming 'Mami' and 'Papa' just moments before the border agent drowns out their sobs with a joke 'Well, we have an orchestra here,' the agent is heard saying. 'Whats missing is a conductor' The audio was released just a day after it was revealed that border agents have reportedly been telling illegal immigrant parents that they are taking their children 'for a bath' before separating them. Anne Chandler, the director of the Houston office of Tahirih Justice Center said she's spoken with several parents who were told their children were going to get washed, before guards informed them they would never see their kids again. She made the stunning claims as heartbreaking photos were released showing have inside of a processing center in Texas, where illegal immigrant children are taken. On Friday, it was revealed that nearly 2,000 children were separated from adults at the border between mid-April and the end of May. Those children are now living in detention centers along the US-Mexico border. 'The officers say, "I'm going to take your child to get bathed." That's one we see again and again. "Your child needs to come with me for a bath,"' Chandler told Texas Monthly. During a White House press briefing, Kirstjen Nielsen (pictured), the Secretary of Homeland Security, claimed she had not heard the audio The audio was released just a day after it was revealed border agents have been telling illegal immigrant parents that they are taking their children 'for a bath' before separating them Anne Chandler, the director of the Houston office of Tahirih Justice Center said she's spoken with several parents who said they were told their children were going to get a bath before they were separated 'The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, "Where is my five-year-old? Where's my seven-year-old? This is a long bath." And they say, "You won't be seeing your child again."' Chandler said that in some cases agents simply tell the parents that they are taking their children away. 'And when the parent asks, "When will we get them back?" they say, "We can't tell you that,"' she said. Chandler said the officers also tell the parents that they are going to 'prosecuted' or that they aren't 'welcome in this country'. In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a 'zero tolerance' policy in which all those apprehended entering the US illegally, including those seeking asylum, would be criminally charged, which generally leads to children being separated from their parents. On Friday, it was revealed that nearly 2,000 children were separated from adults at the border between mid-April and the end of May. Those children (pictured) are now living in detention centers along the US-Mexico border Children were seen sleeping side-by-side in a cell inside the McAllen detention center, where one teen says she has been changing a baby's diaper, who she doesn't know, because the baby was separated from her family The policy has drawn condemnation from medical professionals, religious leaders and immigration activists, who warn that some children could suffer lasting psychological trauma. But nonetheless, the children are separated from their parents, held in government facilities, released to adult sponsors or placed in temporary foster care. Heartbreaking photos showed the inside of the largest Border Patrol processing station in the US, which is located in McAllen, Texas. The US Border Patrol allowed reporters to briefly visit the facility on Sunday. Inside the old warehouse, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water and bags of chips. Children were seen lying on dark green mats with large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets. Other photos show children in single-file line and sitting next to one another. Other photos show children in single-file lines and sitting next to one another like 'caged-animals' The McAllen facility is reportedly where more kids are separated from their parents than anywhere else in the US Inside the old warehouse, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing About 1,100 illegal immigrants (pictured) are being held at McAllen detention center in crowded conditions, including children who have been separated from their families A beloved burlesque dancer in upstate New York was found dead in her apartment early Friday and her boyfriend was taken into custody Saturday after he suspiciously fled to Washington state. Kelly O'May, also known by her stage name Penny Scandall, 31, had not spoken to her family for more than a day and was found at her home in Rochester shortly after midnight following a welfare check. Rochester police became suspicious of her lover, Robert Norry, 32, who departed the couple's home at some point last week. His vehicle was located in Idaho after investigation by the major crimes department and U.S. marshals task force. He has been charged with second-degree murder in the homicide police initially confirmed was 'not a random act of violence.' Further investigation is underway. O'May was longtime employed as a hostess and show girl at Siren and Stilettos Cabaret in Rochester. Kelly O'May, also known by stage name Penny Scandall, 31, (seen in a photo on her GoFundme page) was found stabbed to death in her upstate apartment early Friday. She worked as a burlesque dancer at Siren and Stilettos Cabaret in Rochester O'May's boyfriend, Robert Norry, was arrested Saturday in Spokane, Washington, where he fled to. The late dancer is seen left in an August 2017 Instagram photo and Norry is seen right in a current mugshot The burgundy-haired beauty was well-liked by colleagues and those who knew her spoke about her 'quick wit and charm'. She is seen above in a March 2015 Instagram photo The pinup girl and model was widely-recognized for her sweet personality, burgundy locks and smile that could light up a room, according to WHAM. The burlesque troupe took to their social media pages over the weekend to share the devastating news. 'A bright light, extinguished too soon,' O'May's Facebook tribute read in part. 'Cabaret hostess Penny Scandal was a silver tongued princess of the Rochester Burlesque and performing arts community.' The dance club will host a gathering to celebrate her life July 1, 3pm at the Skylark Lounge. Those hosting have encouraged attendees to donate to her family's fund. O'May was found stabbed to death inside her Caroline Street home (shown) shortly after midnight following a welfare check Norry was taken into custody in Spokane, Washington Saturday after traveling roughly 2,400 miles from Rochester, where he lived with his late lover A candlelight vigil will also be held in her honor Wednesday at 8pm on 224 Caroline Street. A GoFundMe page created also to raise funds for the family reached $1,535 of its $200 goal as of late Monday night. 'Her quick wit and charm captured the hearts of everyone who met her. She was an advocate for women's rights as well as the LGBT community,' the GoFundMe page read. O'May posted this photo to her Instagram page in June 2015 during the dance group's 80's show O'May posted this photo to her Instagram page in February with a caption: 'Had a blast talking smack about the weather at our F*ck the Snow Show at the Bug Jar!' She shared this photo in July 2016 to promote Siren and Stilettos Cabaret 'She was all of these things but most importantly she was our friend and our family. We will keep her memory alive in our hearts. 'May she look down on us with glitter covered wings and may she rest in power.' Heartbroken friend and colleague to O'May, Erica Bochetto, spoke with local news station WROC-TV about the qualities she admired most about the late dancer. 'She was selfless and a friend with an ear... she would always listen and never judge you for anything,' Bochetto said. 'She would try to give you the shirt off her back.' The Democrat & Chronicle reports the deadly stabbing marks Rochester's 'ninth homicide of 2018 and the fourth homicide in the last two weeks, since the start of June.' A convicted robber has allegedly run down a police officer before driving off in a stolen car, more than two weeks after he escaped from jail. Levi James Brown, 25, has been on the loose since June 4 after he and another inmate escaped from work service in Rockhampton, central Queensland. Queensland Police said two men were arrested at the scene on Cremorne Street, North Mackay, about 11:30 on Tuesday but a third person evaded capture. A convicted robber (pictured) has allegedly run down a police officer before driving off, more than two weeks after he escaped from jail Levi James Brown (pictured), 25, has been on the loose since June 4 after he and another inmate escaped from work service in Rockhampton, central Queensland The officer, who got up and gave chase after being hit, was rushed to Mackay Hospital with non-life threatening injuries. The vehicle - a grey 2015 Toyota LandCruiser registration CAMDEE - was allegedly driven by Brown and an alleged associate, The Mackay Daily Mercury reported. Brown was serving a seven year sentence for aggravated unarmed robbery when he escaped from the Rockhampton Showgrounds with another inmate. Police said they were unable to confirm Brown (pictured) was the driver of the vehicle, as he is still on the run Both Brown and fellow convict Nelson Kepa, 21, were doing community service when they absconded from Capricornia Correctional Centre (pictured) custody Both Brown and fellow convict Nelson Kepa, 21, were doing community service when they absconded from Capricornia Correctional Centre custody. Kepa was recaptured days later. The Mackay prison escapee is 175cm tall and weighs 58kg. He is of a light build, medium complexion, and has brown eyes and black hair. He has the word 'Brown' tattooed on the right side of his neck. A violent confrontation erupted outside an Islamic-owned charcoal chicken shop as Muslim men allegedly hurled chairs at a Christian during a Liberal Party brawl. A witness, going by the name of John, claimed he saw violence on the main street of Arncliffe in Sydney's south on Monday night, where a Christian man was stomped on and an elderly woman was punched and thrown to the ground. The violence started inside a cafe and charcoal chicken shop owned by a Muslim businessman and Liberal Party councillor, Michael Nagi, and has been connected with a factional dispute within the conservative party. A Liberal branch meeting erupted into a fracas at the Naji's Cafe as the moderate faction, linked to the business owner, had tried to bring the Earlwood branch into the Bayside chapter. A war of words erupted outside an Islamic-owned charcoal chicken shop as Muslim men hurled chairs at Christians as part of a Liberal Party brawl 'Words erupted and basically from there, it turned into a religious war between Christians and Muslims,' John told radio 2GB breakfast king Alan Jones on Tuesday. He also claimed the 'Muslims attacked one Christian guy, there's about 10 of them'. 'Got him to the ground, stomped on his head, got chairs, smashed him across the head, kicking him, table on his head. 'Some of the guys from, obviously, the Islamic faith were saying f*** off Christians, f*** Coptic dogs. They were there to intimidate.' He claimed an old woman was also hit in the presence of children. A witness described the scene of violence on the main street of Arncliffe in Sydney's south on Monday night, which saw a Christian man stomped on 'There was an elderly woman that was punched, they were thrown to the ground,' he said. 'There were children there that were obviously traumatised.' The brawl started inside Naji's Cafe on Firth Street shortly before 7pm. The cafe is owned by Bayside Liberal councillor Michael Nagi, a Shiite Muslim, who hails from the party's moderate faction. It is understood the moderate faction was trying to allow the Earlwood branch to become part of the Bayside branch of the Liberal Party, Fairfax Media reported. Mr Nagi told Nine News he would '100 per cent co-operate' with the police and the Liberal Party. 'I do not accept any behaviour of violence,' he said. The violence had allegedly started inside a charcoal chicken shop owned by a Muslim businessman and Liberal Party councillor, Michael Nagi Councillor Nagi in 2012 told his local St George and Sutherland Shire Leader newspaper that he had been previously targeted by arsonists because he is Muslim. The businessman's other shop at Bankstown burnt down six years ago, which he blamed on anti-Muslim motives. 'It's because I am a Shiite Muslim. [It is] not political, not for any other reason,' he said then. A Liberal Party spokesman said he was aware of the Arncliffe brawl and was cooperating with police. The cafe is owned by Bayside Liberal councillor Michael Nagi, a Shiite Muslim, who hails from the party's moderate faction 'An internal investigation will also be undertaken and disciplinary action taken against those responsible,' he said in a statement to Australian Associated Press. 'The Liberal Party strongly condemns the kind of behaviour that is alleged to have occurred.' The brawl came ahead of Tuesday's state budget, as New South Wales Treasurer Dominic Perrottet planned to mix record infrastructure spending with tax cuts and concessions. Police from the St George area command confirmed one man, believed to be aged in his 40s, was taken to St George Hospital where he was being treated for minor injuries. Councillor Nagi in 2012 told his local St George and Sutherland Shire Leader newspaper, he had been previously targeted by arsonists because he is Muslim 'On arrival officers saw numerous people running from the location,' the NSW Police said in a statement. 'Police are now attempting to piece together exactly what happened and how many people were involved.' In November 2014, the owner of the Arncliffe charcoal chicken shop, Michael Nagi, condemned violence. 'There are many solutions to problems that don't involve violence,' he said on Facebook in praise of White Ribbon Day. A NSW Police spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia no charges had been laid as of Tuesday afternoon. Coffee enthusiasts who are eager to get their daily caffeine fix but are too busy to make it to their local cafe now have a solution. Packets of specialty instant coffee - which don't compromise flavour - have made getting the brew much easier, but it comes at a cost. Melbourne based roaster, St Ali, has paired up with Voila to create cafe quality instant brews. Coffee lovers eager to get their daily caffeine fix but are too busy to make it to the local cafe now have a solution with specialty instant coffee (pictured) Melbourne based roaster, St Ali, has paired up with Voila to create cafe quality instant brews for $3.20 a serve or $16 for a 25 gram box (pictured) Latte lovers can get their hands on the superior instant product for for $3.20 a serve, or $16 for 25 grams of the powder. The cost of one specialty instant coffee carries a similar price tag to a barista made cappuccino, with five servings included in the 25g box. St Ali founder Salvatore Malatesta told Daily Mail Australia their instant coffee was different to generic brands because the bean could be traced back to where it was grown. 'With any other instant coffee, you can't trace a specialty grade coffee to the farm,' Mr Malatesta said. 'It's this traceability combined with the way it's manufactured, more of the good stuff and much less of the bad, that clearly makes the difference. 'And that's before you get to the taste.' Despite the steeper price tag, the newest caffeine product sold out in three days, according to Broadsheet. Voila founder Kent Sheridan told Daily Mail Australia the product was released May 22 because they wanted to bring their 'love for amazing high quality coffees' to 'anyone anywhere'. Despite the steeper price tag, the newest caffeine product sold out in three days when it was first release (pictured) 'If you're looking for something like traditional instant coffee then I'm sure Viola's pricing is a shock, but so many feel like having a pour over quality coffee in your back pocket for the same price as drip from a cafe is amazing,' Mr Sheridan said. St Ali instant coffee has fresh plum, brown sugar and floral notes, replicating a cafe aroma without the lengthy wait. 'The problem with instant coffee is that it's ugly - ugly and disgusting,' St Ali founder Salvatore Malatesta told the publication. '(Our coffee) follows on the molecular movement. Chefs like Heston (Blumenthal) have been dehydrating things for years. 'We're early adopters of anything we think is new and cool.' Devastated classmates of Indie Armstrong, who was killed by an out-of-control vehicle in a car park, have penned heartwarming tributes to their beloved friend. Indie was walking with her older sister Lily, 8, and grandmother Sandy, 57, when an 86-year-old woman lost control of her car and reversed into the trio at Nambour Mill about 12pm on Sunday. Her mother, Emily Armstrong, watched the catastrophic scene unfold but escaped injury. Indie Armstrong, six, (pictured) died after an 86-year-old driver reversed into her at a shopping centre car park on Sunday Classmates of Queensland girl Indie Armstrong have penned touching tributes and left flowers at the site where she died Indie was walking with her older sister Lily, 8, and grandmother Sandy, 57, when the 86-year-old woman lost control of her car (pictured is a young girl writing a message at Nambour Mill carpark) The elderly woman hit the family at speed while in reverse at the shopping complex car park about midday on Sunday (pictured is a kind message to Indie) Taking to Facebook on Sunday night, Indie's father Jason Armstrong described her as his 'moon and back' Lily, who suffered a lower limb injury, is in a stable condition at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital. Their grandmother, Sandy, is in a critical condition in intensive care after undergoing surgery. Moving handwritten notes from Indie's young friends were left at the site of the incident on Monday. 'I will never forget you, I love you,' Aylah wrote next to drawings of flowers and a rainbow as well as a stuffed toy. 'I love you so so so so so so so so much,' another note read. Indie's mother, Emily Armstrong, watched the catastrophic scene unfold but escaped injury (pictured is members of public at the scene on Tuesday) Lily, who suffered a lower limb injury, is in a stable condition at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital (pictured is members of public at the scene on Tuesday) The girl's grandmother Sandy is in a critical condition in intensive care after undergoing surgery (pictured is a young girl writing a message on the tribute board) Indie was pinned against a pole in the incident, and then rushed to hospital (pictured is members of public at the scene on Tuesday) 'Fly free angel,' was one of the moving messages scribed on to the tribute area Her father, Jason Armstrong, posted a heartbreaking message to Facebook underneath a black and white photo of the six-year-old after she was fatally struck. Witnesses have said the car was 'going like a bullet', and it appeared the elderly driver hit the accelerator instead of the brake. Support is flooding in for the Sunshine Coast family, with a Gofundme page set up to cover funeral and medical expenses already attracting almost $38,000 in donations. Local families braved the cold on Sunday night to attend a candlelight vigil for Indie. 'I love you so so so so so so so so much,' another note read amid the heartwarming tributes The 86-year-old driver of the silver hatchback (pictured after the smash) escaped without injury. She is currently assisting the police with their investigation Emergency crews performed CPR on Indie and her sister at the scene of the incident (pictured) Her North Arm primary school principal, Kelly Edgar, paid tribute to the little girl and said the entire school was shocked and saddened by her death. 'Indie was an enthusiastic, loving, friendly young girl who will be greatly missed,' Ms Edgar said in a statement. Police, who continue to question the driver about the incident, say it's had a major affect on the first responders. 'It's such a tragic set of circumstances,' Superintendent Darryl Johnson told reporters. No charges have been laid against the 86-year-old driver of the silver hatchback (pictured), who escaped without injury 'It takes its toll on our emergency services and the police are no different; they are feeling it today,' he said. Paramedic Ryan Hansen was among the emergency services personnel on the scene, and gave a sense of the chaos. 'We saw first hand how distressing it was for the family so I'm hoping the money raised through this goes some way to providing comfort in these difficult times,' Mr Hansen wrote on the gofundme page. A family says they held the wrong baby for nearly two hours after his birth at a West Virginia hospital. The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports Crystal and Arnold 'Junior' Perry gave birth to Dawson at Logan Regional Medical Center on June 12. Grandmother Barbara Colegrove told the Gazette-Mail that she made the nine-hour drive from West Virginia to welcome her new grandson into the world on Thursday. Crystal and Arnold 'Junior' Perry gave birth to Dawson at Logan Regional Medical Center (pictured) on June 12 Following her arrival, Junior Perry went to the nursery to get the baby. 'He went to the nursery and there [Dawson's] basket was, laying in the same spot it had been. It said 'Perry' on the card, but nothing else was filled out on the card. Not the height, not the weight, it just said Perry,' Crystal Perry said. 'He noticed on the card it said number five, and our baby had been in number four ... He told the nurse, "Why is he in a baby cart that says number five?"' 'She said, "Oh that's fine, that's your baby."' Crystal Perry added: 'Junior believed her because all he saw was his blonde hair. He thought the nurse just walked over there with a Sharpie marker and crossed off [Room] 205 and wrote 204.' It was almost two hours until hospital staff realized that baby Dawson actually belonged to the family in the next hospital room (Stock photo of young female nurse holding a newborn baby in hospital) However, the brand new mother says some two hours later, after taking pictures with the new bundle of joy and sending them to family, a nurse asked her to read her armband number and then returned with Dawson. It turns out relatives had the baby of someone else with the same last name. According to the Gazette-Mail, Crystal and Junior Perrys were bestowing all their affection on Colton Perry, the newborn son of Heather Perry, of Chapmanville. Heather Perry believes her son Colton had been in the room for a moments and believes it was an honest mistake. Although relieved to have straightened out the misunderstanding, Crystal Perry says that the incident should serve as a cautionary tale for other parents. 'Weve tried to have a baby for seven years, and for something like that to almost happen? Like it was nothing,' she said. Investigators have raided eight properties belonging to accountants, lawyers and family members associated with disgraced property developer Salim Mehajer, 31. The Tuesday morning sting targeted properties across Sydney linked to the former Deputy Mayor of Auburn. Up to 10 people were involved in the raids including New South Wales Police, forensic accountants and investigators from the Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA). Investigators have raided eight properties (pictured) belonging to accountants, lawyers and family members associated with disgraced property developer Salim Mehajer The Tuesday morning sting targeted properties across Sydney linked to the former Deputy Mayor of Auburn (pictured) New South Wales Police, together with forensic accountants and investigators from the Australian Financial Security Authority (AFSA) teamed up to carry out operation (pictured) Police are seen executing a search warrant at the Lidcombe home linked to Mehajer (pictured) The raids happened at the request of Paul Weston from Pitcher Partners, Mehajer's bankruptcy trustee. The operation included the properties of an accountant and lawyer linked to Mehajer's bankruptcy and were believed to be holding records pertaining to his affairs. 'We have seized a range of documents and some property, so we have accomplished what we wanted to achieve today,' Mr Weston said on Tuesday. 'We will now sift through the files and documents we have taken into possession as the next phase of our investigation.' Under the Bankruptcy Act 1966, the registered trustee has the power to take control of the debtor's property and affairs and deal with them in the interest of creditors. New South Wales Police told Daily Mail Australia officers were simply part of the raids to keep the peace. The raids happened at the request of Pitcher Partners, Mehajer's (pictured) bankruptcy trustee Detectives were seen carrying boxes from a property during the raid Tuesday morning The sting comes three months after Mehajer was declared bankrupt by a federal court judge. The judge declared him bankrupt after one of his many companies failed to pay a $200,000 debt. Mehajer is currently on conditional bail, after spending two-months behind bars. The disgraced former businessman is currently facing 10 civil and criminal matters, including allegations that he staged a car crash to avoid a court appearance in October. At least five officials were seen at the property, many armed with large brown boxes (pictured) Investigators were seen carrying a number of cardboard boxes to a nearby car (pictured) The 31-year-old (left and right) turned up as the warrant was being executed in Sydney New South Wales Police told Daily Mail Australia officers were simply part of the raids to keep the peace (pictured Mehajer at the scene) Mehajer is also awaiting sentencing after he was found guilty of 77 counts of electoral fraud after he rigged a 2012 election which saw him elected in as the Deputy Mayor of the Auburn City Council. His sister Fatima Mehajer was also charged with 77 counts of electoral fraud. At his sentencing in a Sydney court on Thursday, the controversial businessman announced he was diagnosed with severe mental illness and was 'sorry' for committing electoral fraud. The court was told on Thursday Mehajer was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis he 'accepted'. Mehajer faces 10 years in prison for electoral fraud, but is yet to be sentenced. Mehajer (centre) is currently on conditional bail, after spending two-months behind bars Mehajer appeared to hide his face with a large iPad (right) as he walked along the street (left) A court was told on Thursday Mehajer (pictured) was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnosis he 'accepted' Mehajer is also awaiting sentencing after he was found guilty of 77 counts of electoral fraud after he rigged a 2012 election which saw him elected as Deputy Mayor of Auburn City Council At his sentencing in a Sydney court on Thursday, the controversial businessman (centre) announced he was diagnosed with the severe mental illness and was 'sorry' for committing electoral fraud A man who stabbed a French tourist in the neck at a national park has been sentenced to more than four years in prison. Antoni James Barresi, 25, pleaded guilty to aggravated causing serious harm with intent and aggravated assault over the 2017 attack in Adelaide. In the South Australian Supreme Court on Tuesday, Justice Martin Hinton jailed Barresi for four years and seven months with a non-parole period of two years and seven months. Barresi stabbed Maxime Michel during an altercation in the Belair National Park and was arrested at a nearby railway station. Maxime Michel (pictured) was stabbed during an altercation in the Belair National Park in January last year while on holiday in Australia Mr Michel, who had arrived in Adelaide the day before the incident, suffered stab wounds to his neck and hand and was taken to hospital. Barresi had originally been charged with attempted murder but prosecutors accepted his guilty plea to the lesser offence. At a sentencing hearing last week, counsel for Barresi said his mental health was 'significantly poor' and he was psychotic when the attack took place. He had been homeless and, for that reason, always carried a knife. In a victim impact statement translated from French and read in court, Mr Michel said the attack had made him fearful and ruined his hopes of becoming a professional firefighter. 'I truly believe I have been the victim of attempted murder, even if the charges against Mr Barresi do not correspond to the reality I experienced,' the statement read. Rowdy protesters have been dragged out of question time after screaming slogans at politicians and hanging banners from the public gallery. Refugee advocate activists disrupted Victoria's parliament on Tuesday, calling on the state government to sever ties with Wilson Security. The security company is linked to the operation of immigration detention centres. Rowdy protesters have been dragged out of question time after screaming slogans at politicians and hanging banners from the public gallery About a dozen protesters stood in the public gallery on Tuesday chanting: 'We call on you to cancel your contracts with Wilson's'. 'Wilson Security abuse refugees,' read some of the banners. The group said they were protesting at parliament because Wilson Security also guard parliament house. The Whistleblowers, Activists and Citizens Alliance - a refugee advocacy group - organised the protest. Reaction to the disruption was mixed with Coalition MPs calling the protesters 'bloody morons' and 'idiots', while Greens MPs approved Melbourne MP Ellen Sandell was backed by her Upper House colleague Samantha Dunn Parliamentary security marched the protesters one-by-one out of the gallery past children who were also watching question time. Most of the MPs in the lower house chamber, including Premiere Daniel Andrews, left once the protest started and question time was suspended before resuming 15 minutes later. Reaction to the disruption was mixed with Coalition MPs calling the protesters 'bloody morons' and 'idiots', while Greens MPs approved, The Australian reported. 'Protestors interrupted Victorian Question Time today calling on the Parliament to boycott Wilson Security over their horrible treatment of refugees. They have a good point,' Tweeted Melbourne MP Ellen Sandell. She was backed by her Upper House colleague Samantha Dunn, who wrote: 'Point well made in the assembly today. Go you good things!' Yet another murder probe has been launched in Lawless London after a man died a week after he was stabbed as the capital's death soars towards 80 in 2018. The 23-year-old had been brought to a south London hospital in a critical condition on June 11 after he received stab injuries during 'a fight'. Officers rushed to Bermondsey that evening and found the man in a life-threatening condition. He was pronounced dead on Monday morning. Violent crime soared by 21 per cent last year, with 1.3 million offences recorded by police. Knife crime rose by 22 per cent. The 23-year-old had been brought to a south London hospital in a critical condition on June 11 after he received stab injuries during 'a fight' in Lacey Way, Bermondsey (pictured) There have been more than 70 killings in London this year, many of them stabbings, and at one point the capital's murder rate was higher than that of New York. The man's next of kin have been told and a post-mortem examination will take place in due course, the Metropolitan Police said. The force said the man may have been fatally injured after a fight and have appealed for information. Detective Inspector Ian Titterrell said: 'At this early stage, we believe an altercation involving a group of males began outside Helen Taylor House in Linsey Street. 'The victim then took shelter at an address on Lucey Way after being attacked. 'We know there were a large number of people in the vicinity at the time of the attack and I am appealing for anyone with information to get in touch. 'Any information will be treated with the strictest of confidence.' Scotland Yard published figures last week showing that only one in ten knife robberies and fewer than a quarter of violent crimes involving a bladed weapon were solved in London last year. An array of knives collected at Bethnal Green Police Station by police officers, including an enormous blade with its handle wrapped up seemingly to improve the grip (centre) The number of knifepoint robberies resulting in anyone being punished has dropped from 20 per cent in 2015 to just 11 per cent in 2017. Last year there was a total of 80 fatal stabbings in the capital - the most in almost a decade. Official figures show that 2017 was the worst year for knife deaths among young people since at least 2002. Forty-six people aged 25 or under were stabbed to death in London, up by 21 compared with the previous year, according to police figures. Britain's knife crime epidemic has also spread to the Home Counties, with stabbings now more likely in Bedfordshire than in Merseyside. Scores of knives confiscated by Tower Hamlets Police in the last year. Many are about a foot long and have lethal-looking serrated edges Hertfordshire, Hampshire, Warwickshire, Norfolk and north Wales' rates of knife crime have all increased by more than 100 per cent in the past three years. The epidemic is being fuelled by city gangs expanding their territory and going into rural areas, forcing out local gangs with extreme violence, according to experts. Violent crime is up in 42 of 43 police force areas. Half of constabularies saw at least a 20 per cent rise in the year to last December, according to data from the Office of National Statistics. Three forces recorded surges of at least 50 per cent. Some of the largest increases were in rural areas. Madeline Bigatton (pictured) was last seen in south Sydney almost three months ago A mother who has been missing for close to three months is the wife of an international Bitcoin entrepreneur. Madeline Bigatton, 48, was last seen on March 25 getting into her black car outside her house in Sydney's south. The mother-of-two from Carss Park was captured on CCTV getting into her vehicle and driving out of her driveway. Her black Kia Sorento was found later that night parked at Cape Solander at Kurnell. Mrs Bigatton has not been seen since. On Tuesday police released a photograph of the missing woman in a desperate appeal for help. Mrs Bigatton (right) is the wife of former life coach turned Bitcoin entrepreneur, John (left) Mrs Bigatton's husband John is a former life coach, who was more recently linked to a cryptocurrency business in the United States. Soon after Mrs Bigatton's disappearance, relatives posted to social media asking for help to reunite her with her family. 'It's a very sad day in our family, my cousin has been missing for over four weeks now,' her cousin Scott posted online. 'No one knows anything (which is) so frustrating when you love someone and no one can find them.' Close relatives and friends also held 'a service in her memory' on May 1. Police are keen to speak with two men of Indian appearance who reportedly located the missing woman's keys. Anyone in the vicinity of Cape Solander at Kurnell who may have sighted her or her vehicle, to contact St George Police or Crime Stoppers. An extensive search of the area was conducted with the assistance of the Westpac Rescue Helicopter, Marine Area Command and the Dog Unit. Ms Bigatton was last seen getting into her black Kia Sorento (above) on Sunday, March 25 2018 Police and her family hold serious concerns for her welfare and are appealing for the communitys assistance. Mrs Bigatton is described as being of Caucasian appearance, about 160cm to 170cm tall, of a slim build, and with shoulder length brown hair. She was last seen in the CCTV footage wearing a khaki green singlet, three-quarter pants, and was carrying a black and white bag. Advertisement Some of the country's brightest thinkers and leaders of tomorrow let down their hair for one night as they celebrated the end of their exams during Cambridge University's famous May Ball. Students stripped off, hopped into inflatable boats and even leapt into the river after an all-night party at the Trinity Great Hall, as they wandered through the cobbled streets, champagne bottles in hand. Still clad in dinner jackets, top hats and glamorous floor-length dresses, hordes of students teetered home arm-in-arm following the lavish event and prepared to carry on the celebrations with punt rides on the River Cam. The lavish black tie ball is the biggest event of the Cambridge student social calendar and marks the end of their exams and allows stressed-out youngsters to let off some steam. The occasion is well-known for giving the young revellers a chance to frolic in the streets as they celebrate the end of their exams. Scroll down for video Some of the country's brightest thinkers and leaders of tomorrow let down their hair for one night as they celebrated the end of their exams during Cambridge University's famous May Ball A chivalrous young man sweeps his date off her feet to save her from the famous cobbled streets of Cambridge city centre A Cambridge student puffs nonchalantly on a cigar with a female companion slung over his shoulder in the early hours of Tuesday morning Two students celebrate the end of the academic year a little bit too much as they get amorous in the middle of the road following a booze-fuelled May Ball Role reversal: One young woman switches up the roles as she carries her date home after the May Ball (left), much to the surprise of other students (right) Two young women treat themselves to a couple of bottles of wine each as they let their hair down after a stressful exam period Students stripped off, hopped into inflatable boats and even leapt into the river (pictured) after an all-night party at the Trinity Great Hall, as they wandered through the cobbled streets, champagne bottles in hand One amorous couple lock lips after a long night of letting off steam, in which they celebrated finishing the exam season The beautiful River Cam is lit up in the early hours of the morning as merry students made their way home after a big night out Merry Cambridge students let loose in the early hours of Tuesday morning as the majority of those in the city were fast asleep Some of the country's brightest thinkers and the leaders of tomorrow let down their hair for one night as they celebrated the end of their exams at Cambridge University's infamous May Ball Still clad in dinner jackets, top hats and glamorous floor-length dresses, hordes of students teetered home arm-in-arm following the lavish event and prepared to carry on the celebrations with punt rides on the River Cam (shown) Three friends make their way to the next party spot following the end of festivities in the Great Hall (shown left), while one reveller makes her way home on a bicycle (right) Three young men ditch their clothes and take a dip in the River Cam as they saw off the exam season in style on Monday night A student cracks up his friends as he takes a seat atop a red post box in the early hours of Tuesday morning following a long night of drinking After a long night of drinking, two students struggle to get back into their boat following an impromptu dive into the Cam Cambridge students are pictured enjoying a punt on the River Cam this morning after the Trinity and Jesus College May Ball Many of the ladies ditched their heels to clamber home and shielded their eyes from the morning sun, while young men undone their bow ties and unbuttoned their shirts. What is the May Ball at Cambridge University? How lavish tradition dates back to 1830s The ball has been held every year apart from 1910 when King Edward VII died and between 1939 and 1945 during the Second World War. The first one was held in 1838 when 38 Trinitarians happily drank their way through 47 bottles of champagne, 12 of sherry, six of Mosel, two of Claret, six quarts of ale and 16 huge servings of punch at a post-race dinner at the Hoop Inn. The event is held on the first Monday of May Week, which, despite the month in the title, always takes place in June after exams. Advertisement The revellers decked in black tie and ball gowns posed for the time-honoured 'survivor photo' after seeing the festivities through to dawn. Last night was the turn of students from the university's Trinity and Jesus Colleges to hold their May Balls. Some of them emerged from the two events, headlined by the likes of pop bands Scouting For Girls and Jonas Blue, a little worse for wear than others. While some posed for perfectly choreographed photos outside the iconic Trinity College in the heart of the city, others fooled around as they bundled each other on Cambridge's narrow streets. In another see-it-to-believe-it snap, one male reveller smokes a cigar while nonchalantly carrying a friend over his shoulder. Two students even took a dip in the River Cam as they tumbled out of the punt on which they had been larking about. Others used their moment in front of the camera lens to embrace their bow-tied pals, as the sun rose on the city centre. The May Ball events are some of the most lavish events on the university's calendar. Budgets typically run into the hundreds of thousands of pounds, and their extravagance can stretch as far as balloon rides and artificial canals for punting. Two-person tickets to a college's end of year bash can cost as much as 410 this year, the first time standard-priced tickets for any college ball have broken the 200-per-person mark. Tender: A loved-up couple steal a kiss at the end of the night as hundreds of worst for wear youngsters made their way home Party time: A young woman can't help but smile after a long night of drinking (left), while a couple share a tender kiss in the middle of the road (right) Watch your step!A young lady and a friend hold onto each other for physical - and moral - support as they head home after a night of fun Friends opt for a punt home on the River Cam to save their feet following more than half a day of festivities and partying Following a dip in the River Cam in the early hours of Tuesday, this young poses for a photograph with a playful friend A group of friends can't help but smile after drinking and dancing the night away after a long and stressful set of exams Some of the students still swigged from bottles of champagne as they celebrated all their hard work on Monday evening Two Cambridge students entertain their friends with some impromptu moves in front of Cambridge's famous St John's College Following a long night of dancing and walking round the cobbled streets of Cambridge, this young woman opted for ditching the high heels One young man with a daring and spectacular dinner jacket on makes his way back from the lavish bash with three woman Even as the sun came up this morning, it was clear the students had no intention of calling it a night as they clattered home from the all-night bash, with some even stripping off to take a dip in the River Cam A young woman continues to quaff champagne during the walk home after a all-night party in the heart of Cambridge Two young men walk home with their bow ties undone while a female friend opted for taking off her high heels after a long night of dancing and drinking Three friends enjoy an after-party punt on the River Cam following a boozy five-course meal at the Trinity Great Hall The lavish black tie ball is the biggest event of the Cambridge student social calendar and marks the end of their exams. Guests were treated to a lavish five-course meal, followed by music and dancing The occasion is notorious for giving the young revellers a chance to frolic in the streets as they celebrate the end of their exams The occasion is notorious for giving the young revellers a chance to frolic in the streets as they celebrate the end of their exams Many of the ladies ditched their heels to clamber home and shielded their eyes from the morning sun, while young men undone their bow ties and unbuttoned their shirts Frolics: As the sun came up this morning, throngs of the young and wealthy students were still celebrating on the streets Much-anticipated event: Trinity May Ball is held on the first Monday of May Week, which, despite the month in the title, always takes place in June Best-dressed: Several glamorous pals, who were dressed to the nines, giggled as they made their way home with composure A man and his pregnant girlfriend are facing 60 burglary charges after being accused of stealing up to $90,000 worth of goods. Dylan Nikeller and Renee Hart fronted a Queensland court Tuesday after allegedly robbing a number of businesses and homes since December 2017. The couple, who share a one-year-old child with another on the way, are accused of breaking into cars, homes and businesses where they collected an extensive haul of expensive items, Gold Coast Bulletin reported. Scroll down for video Man and his pregnant girlfriend (pictured) face 60 burglary charges after being accused of stealing $90,000 of beauty products and musical instruments from homes, cars and businesses Queensland Police forced their way into the Gold Coast property after the 31-year-old woman reportedly slammed the door in their face. Police allege the couple specifically targeted cosmetic studios and beauty salons, stealing items such as professional makeup products and equipment. However, they were not discriminatory, and clocked up $90,000 worth of stolen goods, including motorbikes, children's bikes, work gear, tools and instruments. Police allege the couple specifically targeted cosmetic studios and beauty salons, stealing items such as professional makeup products and equipment Queensland Police forced their way into the Gold Coast property after the 31-year-old woman reportedly slammed the door in their face The pair were not discriminatory, and clocked up $90,000 worth of stolen goods, including motorbikes, children's bikes, work gear, tools and musical instruments The expectant mother faced Southport Magistrates Court on Tuesday, where it was heard Ms Hart was on a two year suspended sentence and had a warrant out for her arrest in the last six months. Magistrate Mark Howden refused the 29-year-old and his 31-year-old partner bail on the grounds of likelihood of re-offending. Nikeller and Hart have both had their cases adjourned until July 17. In an effort to return the stolen goods to their rightful owners, Queensland Police have taken to social media to show off the loot. Readers were told the goods could have been stolen up to a year ago, and to contact Policelink on 131 444 in the event that anything seen in the footage belonged to them. Dylan Nikeller and Renee Hart (pictured) fronted a Queensland court Tuesday after allegedly robbing a number of businesses and homes since December 2017 Hart fronted Southport Magistrates Court Tuesday where it was heard Ms Hart was on a two year suspended sentence and had a warrant out for her arrest in the last six months Magistrate Mark Howden refused the 29-year-old and his 31-year-old partner bail on the grounds of likelihood of re-offending A motorist was allegedly assaulted during a violent carjacking on Tuesday. The 28-year-old Perth man was driving his black Volkswagon Jetta when he was approached by another man at a red light, police said. The man, who pulled up next to the 28-year-old in a white Toyota Kluger, allegedly opened the motorist's door and demanded the his vehicle, before punching him and the head several times and dragging him out of the car. A motorist has been carjacked in a terrifying ordeal in which he was repeatedly punched in the head and threatened by what he believed to be a gun Another man in the Toyota reportedly pointed what looked to be a gun at the 28-year-old. The attackers then drove away, one in each of the cars. Police said they are currently searching for both of the vehicles a black Volkswagon Jetta with registration GFA299 and a white 2017 Toyota Kluger with registration GLC559. Officers have warned anyone who sees the vehicles to call police. A Russian computer geek is under investigation as a mastermind of the notorious Blue Whale suicide 'game'. Nikita Nearonov, 22, is being probed over claims he groomed ten 'underage' girls for death operating mainly from his home near Moscow. But some 40 teenagers were members of his social media group, and detectives are still trying to track down other potential victims hidden behind secrecy settings. Blue Whale involves brainwashing vulnerable teenagers over a period of 50 days and urging them to complete gruesome tasks before they are told to take their own lives. Nearonov was described as a 'very smart' computer geek who believed teenagers were 'wicked' and did 'not deserve to live', according to reports citing police. Russian computer geek Nikita Nearonov (pictured during his arrest) is under investigation as a mastermind of a notorious online suicide 'game' who 'thought teenagers were wicked and did not deserve to live' Nikita Nearonov (pictured), 22, is being probed over claims he groomed ten 'underage' girls for death operating mainly from his home near Moscow Officers believe Nearonov was a 'major and dangerous' perpetrator of the social media 'game', although Nearonov has not confessed and insists he was just being 'friendly' to the girls. In two of the ten cases for which he has been charged, girls aged 14 and 17 are known to have survived. If convicted he faces up to six years in jail relating to these alleged victims. In eight other new cases, detectives have not made clear whether suspected victims are alive or dead. He selected potential victims from vulnerable teenagers he connected to online. He was sending messages and setting tasks 'almost around the clock, from home or at work' encouraging them to activities leading to suicide, said a law enforcement source. Nearonov is from a 'good family' and had a high-flying and well-paid job in Moscow as a financial analyst, say reports. Nearonov was described as a 'very smart' computer geek who believed teenagers were 'wicked' and did 'not deserve to live', according to reports citing police Acting as a death group 'curator' was his 'hobby', said police. But he is also accused of training other masterminds in the lethal game. Operating mainly from his home near Moscow, Nearonov found victims in different Russian regions - and one in Latvia, an EU country, said police. He communicated with them using Russian social media VK and messages via Telegram. State investigator Dmitry Asharin said: 'He insists that he wished these girls only well. 'He thinks: "They were hopeless, I was only helping them".' Nearonov was detained but not named last year. He is in detention in Chelyabinsk - a city where one of his victims lived - pending investigations. Asharin said: 'Experts have proved that during his communication to a girl from Chelyabinsk region he used methods of psychiatric pressure, and as a result he inflicted a serious health damage to the victim. 'The girl developed a psychiatric failure her suicidal thoughts became stronger. 'She needed medical treatment.' He has been charged in this case with 'pushing her to suicide' and 'inflicting serious healthy damage'. Similar charges have been brought over a case in Amur region. 'The enormous amount of online material found by police leaves no doubts that this young man was involved in all this and that he did it for a purpose,' said Asharin. Overall, around two dozen Russian suicides are officially linked to the trend which has been branded 'evil' by parents and police, but politicians and the media have suggested the figure runs into the hundreds. Investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta alleged that of 130 suicides of children in Russia between November 2015 and April 2016 almost all were 'members of one group or other on the internet'. Police released two images of Nearonov's online messaging with a girl called Kristina. They claim to have far more compromising material seized from his computers and phones, and those of alleged victims. For confidential support call the Samaritans in the UK on 08457 90 90 90, visit a local Samaritans branch or click here for details. Advertisement The first anniversary of the Finsbury Park terror attack was marked with a one minute's silence today. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Home Secretary Sajid Javid, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan stood together, one year after an extremist ploughed van into crowds outside a mosque in North London and killed a father-of-six. Relatives of Mr Ali were invited to gather alongside others affected by Darren Osborne's murderous rampage, when he drove a hired van on to a crowded pavement, intending to kill as many Muslims as possible. Politicians stand behind a banner with the phrase #LondonUnited, which has been used after other terror attacks last year Home Secretary Sajid Javid (left) and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn attend the memorial event at Islington Town Hall today Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick also attended the minute's silence at 9.30am at Islington Town Hall to commemorate the death of Makram Ali, and for the dozen others who were injured on June 19 last year. Osborne named Mr Khan and Mr Corbyn during his nine-day trial at Woolwich Crown Court as people he had wanted to kill. Mr Corbyn said at the memorial today: 'I live just alongside where Makram lost his life and where this terrible event occurred, and we spent that night in the Muslim Welfare House and the mosque. 'The response from the emergency services, from the local authority and from the local community was absolutely magnificent. Magnificent in its immediate response to the crisis but also in its human element.' He added: 'The greatest answer to those that would seek to divide us by racism is to show that if we're divided, we cannot achieve anything. 'Divided communities blame each other for housing, blame each other for health, blame each other for schools, blame each other for everything else. Mr Corbyn (centre) is watched by James Brokenshire (left), Sajid Javid (second left) and Sadiq Khan (right) as he speaks Islington councillors, local faith and community leaders, and emergency services workers all attended today's event 'At the end of that whole blame game, absolutely nothing has been achieved - only division, hatred, which then goes on inter-generationally. 'Our children understand that, and I was so proud of the response of all the children in the local schools who came together to say they wanted to be part of a multi-cultural, multi-faith community.' The greatest answer to those that would seek to divide us by racism is to show that if we're divided, we cannot achieve anything Jeremy Corbyn Imam Mohammed Mahmoud, who protected Osborne from angry passers-by until police came to arrest him, was among those praised by Mr Corbyn. To warm applause, Mr Corbyn said: "Imam Mahmoud did a brilliant and wonderful job of making sure that hatred of racism did not turn into violence and anger on the streets that night. "He helped to ensure that we came together as a community because that is the only response there can ever be to the racism that seeks to divide us." There was a strong uniformed police presence in Upper Street, a usually busy shopping and business hub, which was shut to traffic for the intimate memorial. Banners which read "United Against Terror," "Turn To Love" and "London United" decorated the memorial scene which was attended by members of the community and local officials. After speaking today, Mr Corbyn tweeted: 'One year ago today, Makram Ali was killed and eight people were injured in the terrible Finsbury Park attack. Mr Corbyn speaks at Islington Town Hall in London today to mark the one-year anniversary of the Finsbury Park attack Emergency services staff treat victims after the vehicle hit pedestrians in Finsbury Park, North London, on June 19 last year 'But the response of our community was to come together in solidarity and strength. We showed that we would not be divided or defeated and we never will be. ' Islington councillors, local faith and community leaders, and emergency services workers who helped victims in the aftermath of the attack also attended today's commemorative event. Father-of-six Makram Ali died as a result of multiple injuries Ahead of the event, Prime Minister Theresa May said: 'Last year's cowardly attack which targeted innocent worshippers leaving Finsbury Park mosque is an attack on all of us. 'As with all acts of terrorism the intention was to divide us but we will not let this happen. 'We are a country of many faiths and freedom of worship and respect for those of different faiths is fundamental to this country's values and these values will never be broken by vile extremism.' Mrs May commended the 'bravery and spirit of the community that apprehended the attacker'. She added: 'As we remember the victims of this attack, Makram Ali who tragically lost his life, we should take strength that it is London's diversity and multitude of communities that makes it one of the world's great cities.' Mr Corbyn said: 'A year on from the tragic attack outside Muslim Welfare House London in Finsbury Park, when a man filled with hate drove into a crowd of people after prayers, we remember the life that was lost and those still suffering from the aftermath - and the inspiring response of our community. 'One man, Makram Ali, was killed and eight people were injured in this terrible attack that brought terror to our streets. 'But the response of our community - people of all faiths and none - was to come together in solidarity and strength. We showed that we would not be divided or defeated and we never will be. A van was driven into a group of Muslims outside two mosques at the junction of Seven Sisters Road and Whadcoat Street Ruzina Akhtar, Mr Ali's daughter, spoke on June 6 about her family's gratitude for the support they have received 'The response of the community in Finsbury Park is a model for us all: through supporting each other in solidarity, treating each other with respect and learning from each other, we can create a better, more peaceful and prosperous world.' Jobless loner Darren Osborne, who had been radicalised by far-right material, is serving at least 43 years in prison At a gathering earlier in June, Mr Ali's daughter Ruzina Akhtar spoke of her family's gratitude for the support they had received from the community since her father's death. Ms Akhtar addressed those gathered at a street Iftar on what was the one-year anniversary of the incident according to the lunar calendar observed in the Islamic faith. She said: 'We're very happy to be part of this community and to be in this country with such a loving, diverse community around us. 'And we would just like to thank everyone for their support and the love that they've shown and hope they continue to do so.' Mr Khan described it as an 'evil attack designed to divide us'. He added: 'Instead, the response from the local community, and Londoners more widely, was and remains an inspiration to us all. It proved once again that, when Londoners face adversity, we stand up for our values, we stay strong, and we remain united.' The phrase #LondonUnited, which has been used in the wake of other terror attacks last year, was due to be displayed on the Muslim Welfare House yesterday evening and into the early hours of today, around the time Osborne committed his crime. The jobless loner, who had been radicalised by far-right material, is serving a jail sentence of at least 43 years, after being found guilty in February of murder and attempted murder. A faster commute between the Sydney CBD and western Sydney is on track. In good news for thousands of workers who commute from western Sydney to the CBD the New South Wales government has unveiled a new rail line in the state's 2018-19 budget. Of the $14.4 billion allocated to public transport and infrastructure, the government will put $3 billion towards the Sydney Metro West project, the city's next underground metro railway connecting Sydney CBD and Parramatta in a journey that could take just 20 minutes. The trip on the gridlocked Western Line currently takes 30 minutes on average. Scroll down for video Of the $14.4 billion allocated to public transport and infrastructure, the New South Wales government will put $3 billion towards the Sydney Metro West project, which promises to reduce journey times between Parramatta and the Sydney CBD 'This funding, subject to the final business case, will fund project development and commencement of land acquisition, early works and tunnelling. $28.1 million in 2018-19 will fast-track the planning and final business case for this project,' the budget papers state. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian hailed the project as a legacy for generations of Sydney commuters. 'Sydney Metro West will be our city's next big underground metro railway a new, easy link between Sydney CBD and Parramatta and we're getting on with the job as quickly as possible,' Ms Berejiklian said. First announced in 2016, the Sydney Metro West will link the Sydney CBD with Parramatta and Westmead via The Bays Precinct and Sydney Olympic Park, with work underway to determine other stations on the route. Work has already started to determine the best underground route with a program of geotechnical drilling, which will continue. Parramatta will get a new underground station as part of the Sydney Metro West project The Metro West will have the capacity to move 46,000 commuters an hour, almost double the 26,000 commuters the current train line can move in the same period. Transport Minister Andrew Constance described the project as a 'super train for three million people in Western Sydney'. 'This massive investment in Sydney's future will make it faster and easier to get around our great global city,' he said. 'This project will redefine how we get around Sydney and will double rail capacity between the two city centres, a true city-shaping infrastructure investment that will serve generations to come.' Sydney Business Chamber western Sydney director David Borger described it as a vital project that will better connect Western Sydney residents to jobs. 'The Western Line is bursting at the seams and is in need of some relief,' he said. Mr Borger later tweeted: 'The western line is in crisis. Massive overcrowding. I just witnessed a bitter argument because people couldnt fit on the train. Bring on the #westmetro.' The proposed route of the Metro West project, which would go via the Bays Precinct and Sydney Olympic Park The construction of the Metro West project has a preliminary completion date of 2025. Commuters in other parts of Sydney will also benefit from the budget cash splash on transport infrastructure. Further funding includes $258 million for the first stage of the Parramatta Light Rail, $2.4 billion on Sydney Metro Northwest linking North West Sydney with Chatswood and $1.9 billion on Sydney Metro City and South West, connecting Chatswood with Bankstown and $880 million towards improving technology on Sydney Trains. Bus commuters don't miss out either with 2000 additional services. Downing Street today called off talks with Tory Remain rebels over flagship Brexit laws, setting the stage for a tense Commons showdown tomorrow. Theresa May will order MPs to back her concessions on a 'meaningful vote' on the Brexit deal tomorrow in defiance of a group of rebels threatening to defeat her. Rebel ringleader Dominic Grieve insisted this morning the PM was in 'great difficulty' over his push to ensure any future Commons vote on a 'no deal' end to Brexit talks is fully amendable by MPs. But in a signal Mrs May believes she has the votes to win the crunch clash tomorrow afternoon, her official spokesman insisted the Government plan strikes the 'right balance' between ministers and rebels. Remainer ringleader Dominic Grieve (pictured in the Commons last week) said there is still no compromise with the government on his Brexit Bill amendment Theresa May (pictured at the Royal Free Hospital yesterday) urged peers not to try to overturn the will of the people. But the House of Lords defied her warnings and backed the amendment Mrs May's spokesman said: 'We cannot accept the amendment on a meaningful vote agreed in the Lords. 'Agreeing to amendable motions would allow parliament to direct the Government's approach to exiting the EU, binding the Prime Minister's hands and making it harder to secure a good deal for the UK. 'It also does not meet the reasonable tests set out last week by the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union and any new amendment must respect the referendum result and cannot undermine the negotiations or undermine the constitutional role of Parliament and Government.' Mr Grieve has warned that Brexit could be delayed if no deal is reached - saying a gap would be a 'price worth paying' to avoid an 'extraordinary crisis' which could see planes grounded and foo shortages. What is the meaningful vote amendment and what would it do? Why do MPs and peers want a meaningful vote? Tory rebels say Parliament is sovereign and should be given a say if the negotiations fail. Dominic Grieve tabled his own amendment to the Brexit Bill enshrining this in law last week. But he was convinced to pull it at the eleventh hour after assurances by ministers that they would address his concerns. But Mr Grieve and his fellow Tory rebels accused the Government of reneging on the deal by changing the compromise amendment they had agreed - setting the stage for another parliamentary showdown. What was the compromise amendment put forward by the PM? Theresa May agreed to Mr Grieve's demands that MPs and peers are given a vote if no deal is reached by 21 January next year. But she made a crucial change - saying that the vote in January can only be 'neutral'. This would stop MPs from telling the Government what to do in the negotiations. Tory rebels said this means the vote would not be meaningful and vowed to renew their bid to change the Bill. What is the Hailsham amendment debated on Monday night? Tory rebels have worked with Tory peer Viscount Hailsham to draw up a new amendment to give Parliament a meaningful vote. It changes the Government's amendment in one key way - by deleting the stipulation that it has to be a neutral vote. This would give parliament the power to add in demands in any Brexit vote next January. What happens now? Now the House of Lords has passed the amendment, it is back in the Commons for debate today. Tory backbench Remainers - led by Dominic Grieve - are expected to mount a major rebellion. If they succeed and defeat Theresa May then they will win and the issue will be enshrined in law. It means that if no deal is reached by late January next year then a minister will have to explain the Government's strategy to Parliament. MPs can then vote on that statement and, crucially, tell ministers what they think should happen next in the talks. Advertisement He said there was an 'important' difference with ministers over whether MPs should be allowed to instruct them on what to do if the UK faced crashing out of the EU, suggesting Tory backbenchers' 'trust' in Mrs May was at stake. Mr Grieve denied he wanted to 'collapse' the government by forcing through the vote. He told the BBC radio 4 Today programme: 'That is complete nonsense. This is the end stage of the detailed consideration of a piece of legislation. 'Whichever way the vote ultimately goes, the idea that the Government is going to be endangered by this difference of view within the House of Commons which might lead to its defeat is complete nonsense.' But he was adamant that any motion put to the Commons in the case must be amendable - rather than merely allowing MPs to 'take note'. He said: 'I am very conscious the PM is in great difficulty. I have a good understanding of some of the issues she faces.' The PM's wafer thin working majority of just 13 means that if just a handful of her MPs rebel she faces a humiliating defeat. In a separate interview with Sky News, Mr Grieve said that if no deal is thrashed out with Brussels by late January next year then the UK will be on the brink of a major crisis. In the event of a no deal, the UK should consider delaying Brexit by a few weeks to get contingency plans in place, he said. Mr Grieve said: 'If we need to delay Brexit by a few weeks to enable you to take a plane to Rome...that is a proce worth paying. 'If we have no deal at all we will be in the middle of, frankly, an extraordinary crisis that would mean our food supplies would dry up. It is so bad that it couldn't possibly happen.' The House of Lords last night defied the PM's pleas to 'keep faith' with the British public and fall into line on the EU Withdrawal Bill. In a fiery debate, Viscount Hailsham branded Brexit a 'national calamity' and said he was driven to act after ministers reneged on their promise to give Parliament a say if no deal is done by late January. But he was accused of trying to 'sabotage Brexit' and of overstepping their authority by pushing through the change. Peers voted by 354 to 235 to pass the controversial amendment. In a tense and often bad-tempered debate in the Lords, Remainer peers clashed with their party colleagues who warned them they were overstepping their authority by dictating to ministers. Tory minister Baroness Evans said the Government's hand in negotiations with Brussels would be hugely weakened if Parliament was able to tell ministers what to do in negotiations. She said: 'It is not right that your lordships' house could have a veto on the deal simply by refusing to consider a motion.' She added: 'It would represent a profound and historic shift in terms of which branch of the state has the right to act in the international sphere. 'It would also be totally impractical. The Government cannot demonstrate the flexibility necessary for a successful negotiation.' But Viscount Hailsham lashed out at ministers for U-turning on assurances given to Mr Grieve and other Tory rebels that their demands would be met in a Government drafted amendment. It was this assurance that convinced Tory MPs not to rebel on the issue in the Commons last week - meaning the PM avoided what could have been a humiliating defeat. Lord Halisham said: 'The Government's amendment not only fails to deliver the promised meaningful vote. That would be an act of omission and bad enough. But this is far worse. 'The Government is seeking to make the promised meaningful vote impossible and that is an act of commission contrary to what ministers have promised.' But in the heated debate, he was accused by another Tory peer of trying to destroy Brexit. Tory peer Lord Robathan asked him: 'Is your amendment in fact about sabotaging Brexit? Because that seems to be the case.' He also accused him of plotting with Labour peers to get their backing in undoing the Government's plans. But a furious Viscount Hailsham hit back saying he would not apologise for it. He added: 'This is the high court of Parliament and we are not party hacks. 'The second point - whether I'm seeking to frustrate Brexit. 'I don't believe in Brexit - that's perfectly true. I think its a national calamity. The House of Lords (pictured last night) voted by a huge margin to back an amendment handing Parliament a say over negotiations if no deal is signed by late January next year Lord Hailsham (pictured in the Lords last night) said he thinks Brexit is a 'national calamity' but insisted he was bringing forward his amendment not to block Brexit but to give Parliament a say on the deal 'But what I believe above all is the House of Commons should have a decisive say one way or another.' He said the Government has tried to stop Parliament having a meaningful vote 'in every conceivable way' and he is determined to see it laid down in law. Mr Grieve last week brought forward an amendment to the Bill to enshrine in law that MPs must be given a 'meaningful vote' on the final Brexit deal. Faced with a potentially devastating rebellion which would have dealt a major blow to her authority, Mrs May promised to make some of the changes rebels were demanding to the Bill. But Mr Grieve said he was left shocked when, at the eleventh hour, ministers reneged on the deal and said Parliament could only have a vote in 'neutral terms' on the deal - meaning MPs could not express any opinion on it. His rebel allies accused ministers of 'sneaky' tactic and warned that the PM had shattered their trust in her. But the Government's Solicitor-General, Robert Buckland, warned Mr Grieve's demands would had the EU a 'trump card' in negotiations. A teenager has become the second victim of a Chicago shooting, dying in hospital hours after he seemingly came to life while lying on the road with a sheet covering him. Erin Carey was hit several times in the head and paramedics who initially examined his body believed he had died at the scene only for signs of breathing as well as movement in his head and arms to be spotted. Paramedics had placed the shroud over 17-year-old's body as he lay on the road believing he was was dead after suffering 'catastrophic' head injuries. But witnesses spotted signs of life and medics began treating him once more. A conversation recorded between the a police officer and a 911 dispatcher reveals signs of life were spotted in the man underneath the sheet. 'The subject is a male, male black at 1304 West 13th Street. He is responsive, he just moved on the camera, moved his head from side to side and his arms, so he's not dead,' the officer said. 'Okay you guys copy? Shows a male black at 1304 West 13th Street laying on the ground, he's just moved so he's not dead. Can we have a unit go down and check on that male.' Carey was shot around 4.45am on Monday in the area of the 1300-block of South Loomis Street and died at 1.15am on Tuesday in Stroger Hospital. Police realized the man was alive when he was spotted breathing underneath the sheet placed over him as he lay on the road A paramedic was sent to the man's aid. He is still alive despite being shot several times in the head ABC Eyewitness News said its cameras were on the scene for at least 15 minutes before the sheet was removed. 'That individual has a catastrophic injury,' said Chicago Police First Deputy Superintendent Anthony Riccio. 'He was shot in the head and the prognosis is not good. 'I do understand that paramedics looked at him, believed him to be deceased, covered him with that sheet and moved on to another individual who was nearby who was also shot. 'They saw motion, movement underneath the sheet. Officers who were present notified paramedics, this man is still alive.' The 17-year-old was taken to the Stroger Hospital in very critical condition. According to police, his prognosis is 'not good' A weapon, possibly a Mac-10 pistol, was recovered from the scene of what is believed to be a gang related shooting The incident happened in the University Village neighborhood of Chicago at 4.45am on Monday. None of the surviving victims are cooperating with investigators, police said According to Chicago Emergency Medical Services protocols, paramedics triage patients when responding to a 911 call. Fire Commissioner Jose Santiago added: 'We're looking into it right now. We're trying to piece everything together. 'We're looking at the computers where they put down all that information. Paramedics put down that information.' Carey was one of six people shot in the University Village neighborhood shooting incident that stemmed from a party. Shots were fired from one of two vehicles which had been seen driving around the block several times. The woman killed in the incident was identified as 22-year-old Shalonza E. McToy and she was pronounced dead at the scene with multiple gunshot wounds. A 21-year-old man shot in the leg and a 23-year-old man shot in the arm were both taken to Stroger Hospital in stable condition. A 25-year-old man shot multiple times in the abdomen and was transported to Mt. Sinai Hospital by his girlfriend and is in stable condition, police said. A sixth victim, a 21-year-old man, was discovered at Rush Hospital with a gunshot wound to the leg. He was treated and released. Area Central detectives are investigating and a weapon, possibly a Mac-10, was recovered from the scene. Police said none of the surviving victims are cooperating with investigators and the shooting is believed to be related to an ongoing gang dispute in the area. A model and club promoter has been spared jail after being found guilty of killing a schoolboy as he partied after his exams in Malia, Greece. Club promoter Sebastian Trabucatti, 25, of West Sussex, has been found guilty of first degree manslaughter at a court in Crete over the death of 18-year-old public schoolboy Archie Lloyd. Trabucatti punched Mr Lloyd during a row in Malia in 2015, which was later described as a '10-second fight'. Mr Lloyd had shouted 'one day you'll work for me' at Trabucatti in the moments before the punch was thrown, a previous inquest heard. That same inquest, conducted in the UK in 2016, ruled that it was 'beyond all reasonable doubt' that Mr Lloyd had been 'unlawfully killed'. The public schoolboy fell to the floor after being struck and hit his head on a curb, later dying from a brain injury. Sebastian Trabucatti arrived at a court in Crete, Greece, on Tuesday charged with manslaughter over the one-punch death of public schoolboy Archie Lloyd After being hit Mr Lloyd was tended to 'for three minutes' by medics before being given the all-clear, the inquest was told. That left Mr Lloyd's best friend Andy Hutchinson, 18, and others to take him back to their villa in the Sissi region. Mr Hutchinson said he was so concerned for his friend that he sought a second medical opinion when they got home, but the telephone number they were given did not reply. The friends put Mr Lloyd, a gifted sportsman from Micheldever in Hampshire, in the recovery position and fell asleep at about 7am. But they woke at midday and discovered him unresponsive with blood on his pillow. Trabucatti (left) punched Mr Lloyd (right) to the floor on the party island of Malia in 2015, causing him to hit his head on a curb. He later died from a brain injury Coroner Graham Short said at the time that had the attack occurred in the UK, it would have been considered manslaughter. Trabucatti, from East Grinstead, West Sussex, did not attend the inquest and said at the time that he was not responsible for Mr Lloyd's death. Mr Lloyd had allegedly told Trabucatti (pictured) 'one day you'll work for me', which sparked the '10-second fight' A previous inquest into Mr Lloyd's (left) death ruled that it was 'beyond all reasonable doubt' that Trabucatti's (right) punch had killed him Post-mortem investigations found that Mr Lloyd, who was over the drink-drive limit, suffered a swelling to the brain and a haemorrhage due to a fractured skull. Pathologist Adnan Al-Badri told the hearing there was a chance the keen sportsman would have survived if he received hospital attention in the wake of the fall because a CT scan would probably have identified the skull fracture. The leader of the far-right anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats is calling for a referendum on EU membership, hoping for a 'Swexit' result. Jimmie Akesson, 39, branded the EU 'a large web of corruption', and said Sweden should hold a referendum after the general elections this September. The Sweden Democrats is currently the second biggest party in the Scandinavian nation, boosted by the European migrant crisis which saw Sweden take in more refugees per capita than any other EU country. Swift Swexit: The leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats Jimmie Akesson - currently second in the polls - has called for a Swedish EU referendum 'The EU is a large web of corruption where no one has control over anything,' Akesson told Dagens Industri. 'We pay an enormous amount of money and get overwhelmingly little back. But the main reason is ideological: we should not be in an ideological union.' At the moment, Sweden's annual EU fees are 40million kronor (3.4million), a figure which is set to increase by 15 million kronor (1.28million) as the European Commission tries to plug the hole in the budget left by Brexit. Sweden joined the EU in 1994 after a close-call referendum saw 52.3 per cent vote 'yes' and 46.8 per cent vote 'no'. However, Swedish support for staying in the EU is stronger than ever in the wake of Brexit. Some 57 per cent of Swedes say leaving the EU would be a bad idea, and just 17 per cent say it would be a good one, according to The Local. Don't like EU: Akesson branded the EU 'a large web of corruption', and said Sweden should hold a referendum after the general elections. Pictured is the capital Stockholm In addition, Akesson's demand for an EU referendum has been slammed by other Swedish politicians. 'There is no individual decision which could be as dangerous to Sweden as this,' said Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the Moderates Party. The Sweden Democrats has been gaining on the two main parties in Sweden - the Moderates and the Social Democrats - in the run-up to the September 9 elections. A recent poll by SVT/Novus puts Akesson and Sweden Democrats at 21.9 per cent of the vote, not far behind the governing Social Democrats. Hot debate: Sweden has registered 400,000 asylum applications since 2012, the number per capita of any EU nation. Pictured is a pro-migration demonstration in Stockholm in 2015 The left-wing Social Democrats, which has lost one-fourth of its voters since the 2014 election, polled at 23.8 per cent, and the right-wing Moderates at 21.1 per cent. The Sweden Democrats, which has its roots in neo-Nazi groups and is staunchly anti-immigrant was recently found to be the biggest party among male voters, with 26 per cent of support among Swedish men. The Scandinavian country has registered 400,000 asylum applications since 2012 - or one for every 25 inhabitants, a record in Europe - with a peak of 162,000 applications in 2015. To contain the refugee influx, the government has re-established border controls and toughened conditions for granting asylum, residence permits and family reunification. The Lord Mayor of Bristol has removed a 300-year-old portrait of a slave trader from the wall above her desk. Cleo Lake said she 'simply couldn't stand' the sight of Edward Colston looking at her as she worked. The portrait dates back to 1702 and was hung in 1953 when City Hall opened - but Cllr Lake has asked for it to be installed in a museum about the abolition of slavery. It is the latest move by the city to dissociate themselves from Colston, with venues and schools having previously removed his name from their titles. Cleo Lake, the Lord Mayor of Bristol, has removed a portrait of Edward Colston from the wall of her office because of his role in the slave trade The space in her office wall in Bristol's City Hall will now be home to this picture of a lion Cllr Lake, who describes herself as of Scottish, Bristolian and Afro-Caribbean heritage, was elected in May by fellow councillors. She said: 'I'm coming to the end of my first month in office, and this is my parlour, which is a lovely space. 'I spend a lot of time here - I'm here nearly every day. I won't be comfortable sharing it with the portrait of Colston. 'Luckily, there's been a lot of support and the council has agreed to take it down and today is the day it goes into storage.' Cllr Lake said she wanted the portrait to be on public display again - but in a museum to Bristol's role in the slave trade, slavery and its abolition. Colston, a divisive figure among the people of Bristol, played a key role in the original Royal Africa Company in the mid-to-late 17th century. The portrait, which dates back to 1702 and was hung in 1953, was removed this week City's move to erase slave traders' name comes amid similar calls in Oxford There are at least 20 roads, schools, pubs, businesses and buildings named after Edward Colston, and the slave trader is still commemorated and celebrated in the city. The city's premier concert venue, Colston Hall, closed earlier this month for a major refit and will re-open in 2020 with a different name, while governors and parents at Colston Primary School in Cotham recently voted to change its name. The campaign came at the same time as students in Oxford have been protesting about a statue of Cecil Rhodes on the University's Oriel building. Students say Rhodes, a mining magnate and the founder of Rhodesia, was racist and benefited from plundering African resources. Advertisement It turned the buying of slaves in West Africa, and the shipping of them to work on plantations in the Caribbean and North America, into an industrial-scale practice. Historians estimate Colston was involved in the deaths of 20,000 people - including as many as 4,000 women and children - on board his slave ships in the late 17th century. A local man, he opened access to slave trade routes to Bristol's merchants, and profited hugely from the forced trafficking of people over a number of decades. He later investing heavily in opening up slave trade routes through Asia. A small portion of his fortune was given away to good causes in Bristol - setting up his own school and building almshouses. Bristol has at least 20 roads, schools, pubs, businesses and buildings named after Edward Colston, but authorities have been attempting to dissociate themselves with him. Concert venue Colston Hall closed earlier this month and will re-open in 2020 with a different name. Governors and parents at Colston Primary School in Cotham meanwhile voted to change its name. It is the latest attempt by authorities in Bristol to 'de-Colston-ify' the city Voters would rather impose a hard border in Ireland than stay in the EU Customs Union, a new poll reveals today. The survey, commissioned by former Tory chairman Lord Ashcroft, suggests the country is relaxed about the sticking point at the centre of the Brexit talks. Finding a way to get Britain out of the Customs Union while leaving open the contested border between the Republic and Northern Ireland has deadlocked negotiations. Voters would rather impose a hard border in Ireland than stay in the EU Customs Union, a new poll reveals today. The graph shows how sections of the country split on prioritising leaving the EU rules (red bars) and avoiding a hard border (blue bars) The survey, commissioned by former Tory chairman Lord Ashcroft (file image), suggests the country is relaxed about the sticking point at the centre of the Brexit talks Brussels insists Northern Ireland at least should stay inside EU rules to allow goods and people to move freely - putting border checks instead at Irish Sea crossings. But Westminster insists this would smash the Union, while Brexiteers warn keeping the whole UK inside EU rules would doom hopes of post-Brexit trade deals. The Ashcroft poll, for today's Daily Telegraph, reveals voters as a whole just want a Brexit deal signed - even if it means border crossings in Ireland. All voters split 41 per cent to 32 per cent in favour of leaving the Customs Union even if it means a hard border - with the divide at 66 per cent to 10 per cent among those who voted Leave in June 2016. Among all voters, 63 per cent say delivering Brexit is more important than protecting than Union, compared to 27 per cent of want keeping the UK together as the top priority. Among all voters, 63 per cent say delivering Brexit is more important than protecting than Union, compared to 27 per cent of want keeping the UK together as the top priority Lord Ashcroft said: 'Given this combination of views impatience with the process, determination for the UK to be able to operate an independent trade policy, and the suspicion that opponents of Brexit are deliberately throwing up hurdles it is not hard to imagine how Leave voters would react if told the UK would not be taking back as much control as they hoped because of the Irish border, an issue they strongly suspect is being blown out of proportion.' He added: 'There is another risk: that a question like the Irish border, which most Leave voters see as a relatively minor practical issue that could surely be resolved, should prevent the majority getting the Brexit they think they voted for.' The findings come after it emerged Boris Johnson told a private dinner the Irish border question was being overblown in the talks. He said: 'It [the Irish border] is so small and there are so few firms that actually use that border regularly, it's just beyond belief that we're allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way. 'We're allowing the whole of our agenda to be dictated by this folly.' France and Germany are pushing to return asylum seekers to the EU country where they arrived - as German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces a coalition revolt over the migrant crisis. On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron said France and Germany are seeking deals with frontline states in Europe's migration crisis to return asylum seekers to the EU country where they were first registered, usually their point of arrival. 'France and Germany will ensure that those who are registered in a Schengen zone country can be taken back as quickly as possible to the country where they have been registered,' he said, vowing to achieve this through bilateral and multinational agreements. Greece and Italy will be the hardest hit by the plans - as Greece has seen a massive influx of migrants fleeing the Syrian war while Italy has become the main gateway for African migrants through Libya. Merkel is facing a battle to cling onto power after her coalition partners threatened to start turning away migrants who have already been registered in other EU states. The EU has rallied to save Angela Merkel (pictured with French President Emmanuel Macron in Germany today) after a draft statement told members to crack down on asylum seekers moving through the bloc German Chancellor Merkel (right, with Macron today) is facing a battle to cling onto power after her coalition partners threatened to start turning away migrants already registered in other EU states The Christian Social Union (CSU) party yesterday delayed ordering the measure, instead giving Merkel two weeks to convince European powers to come up with a solution to the migrant crisis. Today, an EU draft statement emerged, apparently in response to the (CSU) ultimatum, which appeared to signal a crack down on asylum seekers moving across the continent from southern Europe. The document, seen by Reuters, says that '...secondary movements of asylum seekers between Member States put the integrity of the Asylum System severely at risk. Member States should take all necessary internal legislative and administrative measures to counter such movements and to closely cooperate amongst each other to this end.' Instructing member states to enforce the existing laws banning asylum seekers from 'secondary movement' leaving their country of arrival for another EU state would benefit Merkel as it would greatly reduce the number of migrants arriving in Germany, and help appease her coalition partners. The EU border agency Frontex says more than 90 percent of those arriving in Italy, Greece and Spain register for asylum there. But they still often go north, including to Germany. The draft statement that emerged today appears to put renewed pressure on southern European nations to prevent migrants from crossing their borders into other member states. Angela Merkel (left) and Emmanuel Macron (right) welcome European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (centre) during the German-French Ministers Meeting German and French ministers met for a one-day meeting to discuss bilateral topics, including Foreign, Defence and Security politics Meanwhile, the EU will also agree next week to look into setting up 'regional disembarkation platforms' to decide on asylum requests before the claimants actually get to Europe, a draft statement of the leaders' summit next week showed. Such centres could be set up in regions such as Northern Africa, said officials who discussed the document, which is not public but was seen by Reuters before the June 28-29 EU summit. 'Such platforms should provide for rapid processing to distinguish between economic migrants and those in need of international protection, and reduce the incentive to embark on perilous journeys,' the draft joint statement of all 28 EU leaders said, though its wording may still change. Merkel has been in talks with Macron today to discuss the migration crisis. Afterwards she said she wanted solidarity between countries on asylum seekers and that she agreed with Macron over the need to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants. Angela Merkel (left) and Emmanuel Macron (right) wait for European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker (not pictured) Macron, Juncker and Merkel prepare to pose for a family picture with members of the European Round Table of Industrialists Merkel also stressed the need to beef up staffing of Frontex - the European Border and Coast Guard Agency - and that there 'our goal remains a European response on immigration'. She and Macron, the leaders of Europe's biggest economies, were looking to thrash out a compromise between Macron's bold vision for sweeping EU change and Germany's stance that is more cautious, especially when it comes to finance. Merkel and Macron have both stressed that, as US President Donald Trump openly challenges the EU with a trade war and over security and climate policy, the bloc must learn to stand its ground on the world stage. The ministerial retreat at Meseberg castle near Berlin aims to hammer out a joint Franco-German stance ahead of a June 28-29 summit on the EU's post-Brexit future, at a time when populists and eurosceptics are rapidly gaining ground. As outspoken pro-Europeans, Merkel and Macron both face harsh opposition from nationalist and right-wing populist forces at home, and in the governments of Italy, Austria and several eastern European countries. Migrants, part of a group intercepted aboard three dinghies off the coast in the Mediterranean Sea, stand on a rescue boat upon arrival at the port of Malaga on Monday The question of how many migrants the bloc can absorb came back to the fore strongly when last week Italy and Malta both turned back a rescue vessel carrying 630 refugees, which was eventually accepted by Spain. The move sparked a clash between France and Italy as immigration also triggered a domestic crisis for Merkel, a leader already weakened by her decision in 2015 to keep open German borders to a mass influx of more than one million refugees. Merkel now faces a dangerous mutiny from her hardline Bavarian Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who has vowed to defy her and order police to shut German borders to most asylum seekers by early July if there is no EU accord. Merkel, arguing that the issue must be resolved at the EU level, has pledged to reach deals with transit and arrival countries in the narrow two-week window ending with the Brussels summit. Trump insists crime has gone up 10% in Germany 'since migrants were accepted' Donald Trump has once again waded into the row over asylum seekers in Europe by claiming crime has gone up in Germany 'since migrants were accepted'. The US President said 'Be Smart America!' as he questioned official data which suggests crime has fallen off dramatically in Germany. He tweeted this morning: 'Crime in Germany is up 10% plus (officials do not want to report these crimes) since migrants were accepted. Others countries are even worse. Be smart America!' Yesterday, Trump blamed migrants in Europe for what he inaccurately described as a rise in crime in Germany and for violently changing the culture. Donald Trump has once again waded into the row over asylum seekers in Europe by claiming crime has gone up in Germany 'since migrants were accepted' The US President also had his say on Monday over the political crisis facing Chancellor Angela Merkel declaring that the German people were 'turning against their leadership' over immigration. 'We don't want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!' he said in a pair of tweets yesterday, Trump's highly intrusive comments came as Merkel was fighting to save her coalition government amid demands by her interior minister to turn back immigrants at the border. The US President added that what was happening with immigration in Germany presented a similar threat to the United States. 'The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!' Trump, said in a tweet. Donald Trump yesterday blamed migrants in Europe for what he inaccurately described as a rise in crime in Germany and for violently changing the culture Trump's administration is facing strong criticism from rights activists, Democrats and some in his own Republican Party for separating children from their parents at the US-Mexican border, a policy aimed at deterring illegal immigration. Crime has fallen off dramatically in Germany, with the country's internal ministry reporting last month that criminal offenses in Germany totaled 5.76 million in 2017, the lowest number since 1992, leading to the lowest crime rate for the country in more than 30 years. However, despite an overall drop in crime in 2017, statistics released in May revealed Germany has seen an increase in anti-Semitic incidents. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer noted the increase in attacks on Jews, in particular by non-German perpetrators. A month earlier, Chancellor Angela Merkel called an attack on a Jewish man in Berlin by a Syrian migrant a 'new form of anti-Semitism', and Seehofer said his office is taking the issue seriously. Merkel's open-door migrant policy is widely blamed for the rise of the right-wing AfD, now the main opposition party in Germany's federal parliament. More than 1.6 million migrants, mostly Muslims fleeing wars in the Middle East, have arrived in Germany since 2014. Advertisement 'Turning away migrants at our borders at the heart of Europe will lead to negative domino effects that could hurt Germany and put into question European unity,' she warned Monday. Today, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said the CSU demands for border checks to curb migrant arrivals were 'unacceptable' to his country. Babis said the 28-country European Union still has a lot to do on migration, but it should not forget its core principles, including the freedom of movement. The Czech Republic is a member of the EU's Schengen open-border area. 'Recent disputes over migration in Germany leads to proposals of closing borders and renewal of border controls which is unacceptable for us,' Babis said at a conference on the EU in Prague. Yesterday Trump chimed into the debate with a Twitter taunt, charging that 'the people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition'. Merkel and Macron agree that overburdened Mediterranean countries need financial support or incentives, and that the EU's Frontex border force must receive more funding, while Paris also advocates the creation of asylum processing centres in Africa. WILL MIGRANTS COMING TO THE UK THROUGH CALAIS BE RETURNED? French President Emmanuel Macron's push to return asylum seekers to the EU country where they first arrived raises questions about whether the UK would be able to return migrants who arrived in the country through Calais. The French port city has long attracted migrants and refugees seeking to enter the United Kingdom by crossing the Channel Tunnel or by surreptitiously boarding lorries heading for ferries that cross the English Channel. Though the notorious 'Jungle' camp in Calais was cleared in 2016, increasing numbers of migrants have been camping along the canals in Paris in recent months, many from Afghanistan, Eritrea and Sudan. Earlier this month, police began evacuating around 1,000 migrants from two makeshift camps, five days after another 1,000 were taken to temporary lodgings. France received a record 100,000 asylum applications last year and offered refugee status to around 30,000 people, while deporting 14,900. Advertisement While migration looked to be the most urgent issue, a host of other tricky topics were on the agenda Tuesday - from eurozone finance and investment to common defence. Macron last year outlined his vision for a stronger, more united Europe as a forceful reply to the far-right and isolationist National Front he defeated at the polls. But he was long left waiting for a response from Berlin as Merkel, weakened by poor September election results, was occupied by half a year of arduous coalition talks. When she finally gave a reply several weeks ago, it fell short of many of Macron's core demands. She dashed Macron's hopes for a joint eurozone finance minister and budget, mindful of German public fears that their tax money be squandered on what voters see as fiscal irresponsibility in southern EU states. The Elysee Palace said Monday it hoped for 'a substantial agreement' with Berlin on reform of the 19-member common currency area, with a specific budget on a 'safety net' to save banks in trouble. Merkel has agreed on a common investment budget for the bloc, but says it should be worth several tens of billions of euros, not the hundreds of billions suggested by Macron. Paris and Berlin are also discussing ways to turn the European Stability Mechanism into a more potent firefighter and lender for troubled economies, akin to a European version of the International Monetary Fund. France and Germany may also strike a deal aimed at harmonising corporate taxes across the bloc, to stop multinationals from taking advantage of low-tax regimes in for example the Netherlands, Ireland or Luxembourg. On common defence, Merkel has said she is 'favourable' to Macron's demand for a rapid reaction force dubbed the European Intervention Initiative. But they differ on its make-up, and Merkel faces the restraint that the German parliament must debate and vote on any military mission abroad. Across the United States, 311,000 coastal homes with a collective market value of about $120 billion are at risk of chronic flooding by 2045, a report has found. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists study, every one of the 23 states along every coastline in the United States, except for Hawaii and Alaska, are at risk. This analysis estimates the number of homes and commercial properties throughout the coastal United States that will be put at risk from 'chronic inundation', defined as flooding that occurs 26 times per year or more. Florida's coastal real estate is among the most exposed to chronic flooding in the US due to sea level rise, the study says The report from the Union Concerned Scientists has found all of America's coastal states are at risk from flooding Florida is particularly at risk with about one million homes or more than 10 per cent of the state's residential properties are at risk by the end of the century The study's authors drew their conclusions after an in-depth study of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's sea level rise projections, combined with data from the Zillow real estate website. By century's end, if current trends continue, more than $1 trillion in commercial and private US property may be at risk. States with the most homes at risk by the end of the century are Florida, with about one million homes or more than 10 percent of the state's current residential properties followed by New Jersey with 250,000 homes, and New York with 143,000 homes. As many as 64,000 coastal residences worth $26 billion in Florida are at risk of chronic flooding in the next 30 years, the life of a typical mortgage. The Bay Area of California and Long Island in New York are also at risk from rising sea levels by 2045, the report has found In New Jersey about 250,000 homes, a The data also shows the extent to which flooding will hit the poorest communities in some states By 2045, rising seas are expected to bring an extra 1.8 feet of of water along Florida's coast, according to the UCS report. By 2100, Florida can expect an average of 6.4 extra feet of water - a large figure lot given that the state's average elevation above sea level is only about six feet, with many places three feet or below. The danger comes from flooding due to high tides - sometimes called sunny day floods, or nuisance flooding - when water washes into streets, sidewalks, storefronts and homes. The flooding could lead to an economic crisis with water-logged homes someday becoming unsafe, uninhabitable and too costly to insure. 'The impact could well be staggering,' said Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) told The Guardian. 'This level of flooding would be a tipping point where people in these communities would think it's unsustainable. A low-lying home near sea level in the Indian Beach neighborhood of Sarasota, Florida, a state where tens of thousands of coastal residences are at risk of chronic flooding, the study says Hurricane Harvey in August, 2017, dropped 51 inches of rain over Texas in 24 hours and damaged these boats in a multi-level storage facility 'Even homes along the Gulf coast that are elevated would be affected, as they'd have to drive through salt water to get to work or face their kids' school being cut off. You can imagine people walking away from mortgages, away from their homes.' Rachel Cleetus, lead economist and policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the UCS added: 'This risk is relatively near-term, well before places go underwater completely, and even in the absence of storms.' The projections use a high-end scenario for sea level rise because that is an 'appropriately conservative projection to use' when estimating risk to homes, often people's largest asset, Cleetus said. 'This is a slow-moving disaster,' she said. A leopard was saved from drowning in a 25ft deep well in western India, thanks to a troop of inquisitive monkeys, who alerted locals to the predator's plight. The monkeys were spotted incessantly chattering and jumping on the edge of a well behind a temple in Sikar, Rajasthan, early last Monday. Temple visitors were drawn to the well by the monkeys' unusual behaviour, and found the leopard swimming at the bottom. Monkeying about: Villagers who had gathered to worship at the temple in Sikar, Rajasthan, spotted the monkeys making noise around the well Down there! When the worshippers moved closer, they spotted the monkeys observing the helpless leopard at the bottom of the 25ft deep well Forest officials were called to the scene, and embarked on a rescue mission using a ladder. After several attempts the leopard was able to grip the ladder, and use it to climb out of the well. Ranger Devendra Singh Rathore said: 'We were informed about the incident at around 6am on the morning of 11 June. We immediately sent a team of rescue officials at the spot. 'The rescue operation lasted for nearly an hour. Helping hand: Forest officials were called to the scene, and lowered a ladder for the leopard Mission: The locals and forest officials used a rope to lower the ladder before retiring to a safe distance to allow the leopard to climb up Safe! Video footage shows the leopard emerging from the well and running off into the jungle 'It is possible the leopard had fallen into the well at night while following prey. We were able to rescue the wild cat using a ladder. 'As soon as it came out of the well it ran towards the jungle. It didn't attack any villager or domestic animal in the village.' Video footage show the monkeys sitting on the edge of the well and looking at the leopard, which is barely visible in the dark waters below. In another clip, a dog can be seen running for its life after its sudden encounter with the wild cat as it emerges from the well, A large group of villagers watched the dramatic moment unfold from the terrace of a nearby house and cheered as soon as it came out of the well. Britain will not be allowed to have access to the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) or EU-wide security databases after Brexit, Michel Barnier today said. Theresa May has said she wants to keep close security ties with the Brussels bloc - warning that the UK and EU face the same sort of criminal and terror threats. But the EU's chief negotiator dismissed her demand for the UK to stay in the EAW - insisting Britain would have to submit to EU judges in order to stay in. This would breach one of the PM's red lines and a key pledge made by the Brexit campaign - that the UK would free itself from the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The EAW allows EU states to arrest and extradite criminal suspects to any other country in the union. His comments are a major blow for Mrs May just as she is facing a potentially devastating backbench Commons rebellion tomorrow. Tory rebel MPs are set to revolt to try to force the Government to give Parliament a meaningful vote if no deal is thrashed out by late January next year. The EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier (pictured today at a speech in Vienna) has today piled more pressure on Theresa May - warning that Britain must show 'more realism' in Brexit talks Speaking at a security conference in Vienna today, Mr Barnier said: 'This cooperation is both unique and unprecedented. And it is made possible by the trust between Member States. 'This trust does not fall from the sky. There is no magic wand.' He added: 'As I set out in a recent speech in Lisbon in front of the International Federation of European Law, this trust is founded on an 'ecosystem' based on common rules and safeguards, shared decisions, joint supervision and implementation and a common Court of Justice. 'If you leave this 'ecosystem', you lose the benefits of this cooperation. 'You are a third country because you have decided to be so. And you need to build a new relationship. 'To negotiate an ambitious new relationship with the UK, which we all want, we need more realism on what is possible and what is not when a country is outside of the EU's area of justice, freedom and security and outside of Schengen.' He said that to stay in the EAW the UK must have to keep freedom of movement - breaching another key campaign promise of Vote Leave in 2016. Voters want to leave the EU Customs Union even if it means a hard Irish border, poll finds Voters would rather impose a hard border in Ireland than stay in the EU Customs Union, a new poll reveals today Voters would rather impose a hard border in Ireland than stay in the EU Customs Union, a new poll reveals today. The survey, commissioned by former Tory chairman Lord Ashcroft, suggests the country is relaxed about the sticking point at the centre of the Brexit talks. Finding a way to get Britain out of the Customs Union while leaving open the contested border between the Republic and Northern Ireland has deadlocked negotiations. Brussels insists Northern Ireland at least should stay inside EU rules to allow goods and people to move freely - putting border checks instead at Irish Sea crossings. But Westminster insists this would smash the Union, while Brexiteers warn keeping the whole UK inside EU rules would doom hopes of post-Brexit trade deals. The Ashcroft poll, for today's Daily Telegraph, reveals voters as a whole just want a Brexit deal signed - even if it means border crossings in Ireland. All voters split 41 per cent to 32 per cent in favour of leaving the Customs Union even if it means a hard border - with the divide at 66 per cent to 10 per cent among those who voted Leave in June 2016. Among all voters, 63 per cent say delivering Brexit is more important than protecting than Union, compared to 27 per cent of want keeping the UK together as the top priority. Advertisement He said: 'The European Arrest Warrant is linked to the free movement of people. It works well because it is based on mutual trust between Member States.' He said this trust is underpinned by the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the ECJ and free movement. He added: 'Yet today we know that the UK is not ready to accept the free movement of people, the jurisdiction of the Court and the Charter of Fundamental Rights for the Charter, this was confirmed last week by the House of Commons. 'This means that the UK cannot take part in the European Arrest Warrant.' Mr Barnier said there are still crucial issues in the Brexit talks that need to be settled - and warned the clock is ticking on negotiations. And he lashed Britain for not sticking to the EU's red lines in the talks. He said: 'They want to maintain all the benefits of the current relationship, while leaving the EU regulatory, supervision, and application framework. 'And they try to blame us for the consequences of their choice. 'Once again, we will not be drawn into this blame game. It would mean wasting time we don't have. 'In this field of internal security, it is particularly hard to speak about what will no longer be possible. But we have, I have, to speak the truth. 'The UK decided to leave the EU. We regret this decision but this is a democratic decision and we have to respect it and now we are working towards an orderly withdrawal. 'If we want to build a new relationship, we need a basis of good will and confidence. We also need more realism about what is and what is not possible.' A spokesman for the Brexit department said: 'Keeping citizens in the UK and EU safe is an absolute priority. We have set out our commitment to this and how we can continue to work together and maintain current operational capability. 'We are proposing an Internal Security Treaty to deliver this. We recognise we will be a third country, but we start from a unique position of complete alignment. 'Any drop in the breadth and quality of cooperation would have a direct impact on public safety and on our collective ability to deliver justice across Europe. 'Clearly this remains a matter for negotiation.' Diane Abbott, Labour's Shadow Home Secretary,said: 'The comments from Michel Barnier show the mess the Tories' chaotic Brexit has arrived at. They are putting our safety and security at risk if we are excluded from the European Arrest Warrant.' Ireland's foreign minister Simon Coveney has said that no one expects a deal on the thorny issue of the Irish border at next week's key Brussels summit (file pic) Meanwhile, there are fresh warnings that the thorny issue of the Irish border will not be solved soon. EU leaders are meeting in Brussels at the end of next week for the next summit. Ireland and Brussels have said they want to see progress on settling the issue of the Irish border - which could derail the entire Brexit talks. But Ireland's foreign minster Simon Coveney has poured cold water over any expectations that the issue will be settled. He told Politico: 'I don't think anyone is expecting to have a concluded agreement on what the Irish backstop looks like in terms of text by the end of June. That would be unrealistic. 'But we do need to see it taking shape because it doesn't get any easier in July, August and September. 'The absence of any progress is going to create a lot of concern that these negotiations are going to get a lot more difficult over the summer.' The Irish border issue is proving to be the most difficult of the issues which need to be settled in the Brexit talks. The Prime Minister (pictured at the Royal Free hospital yesterday with Philip Hammond and Jeremy Hunt) is facing the prospect of a major crisis in her Brexit plans as she faces a potentially devastating backbench rebellion tomorrow When Britain quits Brussels, it will be the only land border between the UK and the EU. But all sides agree that there cannot be the same strict border controls as will be put up elsewhere because any clampdown on the free movement between Northern Ireland and the Republic could threaten the peace process. The EU has proposed keeping Northern Ireland effectively in the EU's single market and customs union as a 'backstop' until a long-term deal to settle the problem can be agreed. But Mrs May has ruled this out - warning that it would effectively set up a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. She said that this is something that no British Prime Minister could countenance. Instead she has said that in the event that no deal can be reached with Brussels, all of the UK should stay closely aligned with EU rules. But Mr Barnier has dismissed this plan. A politician who caused a public uproar with a controversial 'rape prevention' post has been ordered to shut down his Twitter account. West Australian Labor MP Darren West caused outrage on social media on Saturday when he retweeted a list of 'Ten Rape Prevention Tips' that he said 'must be adhered to'. He later deleted the post and declared he was leaving Twitter. West Australian Premier Mark McGowan has since revealed he called Mr West and demanded the post be pulled and his Twitter account deleted. Scroll down for video West Australian Labor MP Darren West has since shut down his Twitter account Labor MP Darren West deleted his tweet after sharing '10 rape prevention tips' (pictured) A logo (far left) on the list of advice (pictured) suggests it may have originated from a meme on website 9GAG It was the second time since April Mr West has been in hot water with controversial tweets. 'Today was the last straw. I'm following the likes of Ed Husic, John Carey and others and deleting my Twitter account. Thanks to the genuine followers for your interest,' Mr West's final post on Saturday read. Mr McGowan claimed Mr West had made a 'mistake' and had retweeted something without reading it properly. 'That's not uncommon,' Mr McGowan told Perth radio station 6PR on Tuesday. 'A lot of people like things they shouldn't. He got caught up in the situation and he has realised he's made a mistake. A lot of people make mistakes in the online world and he's just one of them. He's an MP so he's held to a very high standard obviously.' West Australian Premier Mark McGowan (pictured) has since revealed he demanded his Labor MP shut down his Twitter account It's the second time within months Mr West, a parliamentary secretary, has posted a controversial tweet. In April, Mr West engaged in a Twitter debate about funding changes to agricultural schools across Western Australia, the ABC reported. In one of his responses, Mr West retweeted a post that referenced the number of Syrian civil war casualties and wrote: 'Our Ag College students will be fine'. The post was later deleted. Mr McGowan's office condemned Mr West's reply. 'The tweet was inappropriate and unnecessary,' a spokesperson told the ABC at the time. 'The Premier has spoken to Mr West.' During a 2015 by-election, Mr West retweeted jokes about Liberal Andrew Hastie's Afghanistan war service that were labelled distasteful. Darren West (pictured) didn't believe the didn't believe the retweeted post trivialised or mocked the 'serious issue' of rape. It's not the first time he's sparked controversy on Twitter The list of advice he retweeted on Saturday is believed to have originated from a meme on 9GAG and tells men not to rape women when they are sleeping, in an elevator and various other common scenarios. 'When you encounter a woman who is asleep, the safest course of action is not to rape her,' the post read. 'When asking a woman out on a date, don't pretend you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be raping her later. 'If you don't communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.' Social media users who saw the tweet before it was removed were quick to criticise with one person calling his post 'utterly disgraceful'. Another thought the politician was making a rape an issue to joke about, citing: 'Again and again you have shown your true character'. Mr West said he didn't believe the post trivialised or mocked the 'serious issue' of rape and deleted it to make his point in another way. 'I believe its purpose is to make those who hold the view that women are somehow responsible for rape feel uncomfortable,' he told WA Today. 'To reiterate that 100 per cent of blame for rape lies with the perpetrator and to dispel the bullsh..t argument that the victim is somehow to blame.' 'A lot of people make mistakes in the online world and he's just one of them,'Premier Mark McGowan told a radio station after he called Darren West and told him to get of Twitter Social media users who saw the tweet before it was removed were quick to criticise with one person calling his post 'utterly disgraceful' Another thought the politician was making a rape an issue to joke about, citing: 'Again and again you have shown your true character' A clearly frustrated Mr West told 9 News: 'For goodness sake! My intent was to stand up for women who are being made to feel as if they're responsible for rape. They can interpret however they like. The intent of my tweet was to put the responsibility of rape on men, not women.' His retweeted post was just four days after the horrific alleged murder and rape of Eurydice Dixon. The young woman had finished a comedy gig in Melbourne's CBD last Tuesday night before she walked through Princes Park where she texted her boyfriend she was 'almost home safe'. It's where the aspiring comedian was found dead a few hours later, less than a kilometre from her Carlton North home. Thousands of people across Australia attended vigils to honour Ms Dixon on Monday night, including 10,000 in Princes Park. A former Welsh Tory mayor is facing a jail sentence after being convicted of raping a young girl. David Boswell, who was the Conservative mayor of Pembroke, West Wales, was found guilty of raping a young girl. The 56-year-old, who is still a Pembrokeshire county councillor, was also found guilty of three indecent assaults against her and another girl by a jury at Swansea Crown Court. David Boswell, pictured outside Swansea Crown Court, was found guilty of raping a young girl The court heard Boswell raped a nine-year-old girl and indecently assaulted another youngster aged under 13 between 1990 and 1994. The Army veteran and local politician served in the Army for more than 12 years and is a marshal for the Royal British Legion. He won the Pembroke St Mary North election in May 2017 by just six votes, but was suspended by the party after being charged by police. Boswell denied the allegations, saying they were 'complete lies' and urged police to make him undergo a lie detector test. He told the court: 'I can put my hand on the bible and say I have never sexually assaulted that girl. 'If I had done something why has its taken so long for it to come out?' Boswell (pictured with his wife Denise) was also found guilty of three indecent assaults against the victim and another girl He said the allegations 'made him feel sick' and added: 'It makes no sense to me. You can give me a lie detector if you want.' But the jury at Swansea Crown Court found him guilty of four counts of indecent assault and one count of rape following a trial. Judge Keith Thomas remanded Boswell in custody and told him to expect a lengthy jail sentence. Boswell was acquitted of a further three counts of indecent assault involving the same complainants. He was ordered to return to court on July 13 for sentence. Priyamvada Gopal, 49, says she will no longer supervise students from King's College because of alleged racist behaviour by porters who call her 'madam' instead or 'Dr' The University of Cambridge have hit back at an outspoken academic who branded all white porters racist for calling her 'madam' instead of 'Dr' because she isn't white. Priyamvada Gopal, 49, said earlier today that she will no longer supervise students from King's College because of 'consistently racist profiling and aggression by porters'. Dr Gopal told her 20,000 Twitter followers she is taking the stand 'on my behalf and of other people of colour' calling the situation a 'festering sore'. She said: 'I repeatedly asked them to address me as "Dr Gopal" and repeatedly failed to get them to address me as anything other than "madam".' The academic, who teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, says that Kings' porters treat her differently because she is not white. But King's College have hit back at her claims, saying there was 'no wrongdoing or discrimination' from its staff. A King's College spokesperson said: 'We have investigated the incident and found no wrongdoing on the part of our staff. 'Every visitor was asked to show their card during the course of that day, as the College was closed to everyone except Kings members. 'Non-members such as Dr Gopal were asked to take alternatives routes, around the College. This was a matter of procedure, not discrimination. 'Kings College is a rich and diverse community, and take the wellbeing of its students and staff extremely seriously. We remain committed to being an inclusive and welcoming environment in which to work and study. 'We categorically deny that the incident referred to was in any way racist.' In an extraordinary thread on Twitter said the porters would not speak to 'white men' like they speak to her Critics on Twitter have reacted negatively to her Twitter tirade, with one saying: 'Being called madam is not disrespectful'. Another said: 'You could try to look at someone or some statement without seeing class, colour, race, ethnicity or gender'. She responded to these claims by saying: 'Any POC [person of colour] who has been referred to as 'Sir' and 'Ma'am' by a police officer in the USA when pulled over knows pefectly well that they are not being used as polite honorifics when combined with a certain tone'. In one tribute to the porters a former student said they are the 'life and soul' of Cambridge's colleges and have 'enough to cope with without being accused of racism'. But others sent the academic messages offering her 'solidarity' and supporting her stand. Dr Gopal's latest battle is part of her wider battle against alleged racism at Cambridge. Describing one incident alleged to involve a senior porter she said she told him: 'Please address me as Dr Gopal', to which he allegedly responded: 'I don't care who you are.' Dr Gopal claims the unnamed man 'then launched into a tirade about how people treat him'. She said: 'I am sorry but my brown body isn't taking the hit for that. He'd never talk like this to actual white men who behave badly'. On another occasion she claims she was targeted at a black and minority ethnic event because she was allowed a parking space, calling it 'my fave Kings porter story'. She said she was 'made to get in and out of my car THREE times to park exactly as he wanted me aligned' and said he was 'seething already with hostility when I got there at my being allowed to use a space'. She claims there have been produced hundreds of incidents. Dr Gopal says she has had supportive comments from people at Kings including one person who contacted her to 'apologise on behalf of the students of the college'. Justifying her decision not to supervise any Kings English students going forward she said: 'I apologise to any future students affected but it is more than time to address this long festering sore. Until and unless it is, I will not do any more work for Kings'. Dr Gopal says that King's College bosses' denial about her claimed is 'classic nopology' Dr Gopal, a vehement supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, is an expert in colonial and postcolonial literature who become well known for her outspoken views. She is a prolific user of Twitter, having posted more than 17,000 tweets in the past seven years. This year Cambridge academic Mary Beard posted a photograph of herself in tears on Twitter after she was accused of being a 'colonialist'. Professor Beard, 63, said she believed that disaster zones made it difficult to sustain 'civilised' behaviour after it emerged Oxfam aid workers had been using prostitutes and even carrying out sex attacks on children. But after a torrent of abuse she said she felt 'assaulted'. Dr Gopal responded by accusing her of 'patrician casual racism' She added: 'This kind of thing is the *progressive* end of the institutional culture I have to survive day in day out' and adding that 'Cambridge desperately needs a Breaking the Silence on racism. About time and beyond.' She was also involved in a high profile row with eminent Oxford don, Nigel Biggar, after he wrote an article for The Times arguing that, while British colonialism spawned several atrocities, its consequences were not exclusively bad. Dr Gopal then posted several dozen tweets and Facebook comments about his Times article, making often highly personal remarks. She also accused him of being a 'white supremacist' whose writings are 'outright racist imperial apologetics'. A tattooed Australian tour guide has been arrested for allegedly organising alcohol-fuelled yacht orgies with Thai prostitues. Stephen Allan Carpenter, 49, was arrested in Saraburi, Thailand, after he fled the nation's notorious sex capital of Pattaya and went into hiding. He previously boasted of 19-year-old women who would 'take six blokes at once' onboard luxury charter boats in Pattaya. Footage obtained from an undercover sting shows leering white men filming on their mobile phones as Asian women perform sex acts. Scroll down for video Tattooed Australian man is arrested over hosting raucous boat orgies in Thailand's notorious Pattaya resort city Footage obtained from an undercover sting shows leering white men filming on their mobile phones as Asian women perform sex acts The chubby, white men leered, groped and photographed the women, whilst listening to Rolling Stones Video taken from inside a yacht orgy shows middle-aged men watching two young Thai women performing a sex show. The chubby, white men are seen leering, groping and taking pictures of the women, whilst listening to the Rolling Stones. Other prostitutes trawl the boat, sitting on the laps of customers and engaging with the men whilst the boat is moored off the coast of Pattaya, Thailand; a notorious sex destination. The video was filmed during one of the events earlier in 2018. In December last year, Carpenter allegedly advertised his business on his Facebook account, offering arranged chartered boat trips with prostitutes for 38,000 baht, or $1,500 AUD. For the more expensive charter, the price increased, but promised a six-hour party with at least eight girls, food and alcohol. The girls were to be paid extra for their services, but he noted the desperation of the girls due to it being off peak season. A separate advertisement on Craigslist offered images of six naked Thai women surrounding a white man, promising a 'wild boat orgy'. Stephen Allan Carpenter (pictured) boasted of 19-year-old women who would 'take six blokes at once' onboard luxury charter boats in Pattaya Carpenter allegedly advertised his business on his Facebook account, offering arranged chartered boat trips with prostitutes for 38,000 baht, or $1,500aud A separate advertisement on Craigslist offered images of six naked Thai women surrounding a white man, promising a 'wild boat orgy' Explicit images used to promote the tours revealed naked young women and others performing lesbian sex shows. The tour company, named Austhai tours, has since shut down it's business page. Police discovered the illegal business through these same advertisements. Undercover police posed as potential clients and engaged with Mr Carpenter, who requested a 50% deposit to secure their position on the charter, after describing his staff as 'stunning girls' that he'd discovered in clubs and bars. Undercover police posed as potential clients and engaged with Mr Carpenter in order to secure an arrest warrant The tour company, named Austhai tours, has since shut down it's business page ''Just fill them up with grog and they do the lot'' ''You want real dirty ones,'' he added. Pol Lt Col Dulayaphat Techaphonchayasin was the leading officer in the investigation, and was able to use this information to secure an arrest warrant. 'In messages to undercover police the suspect agreed details of the parties and sent his bank details for the transfer of money,' he said. He added: 'Anything goes... the 19-year-old will suck you off, the lot.' Carpenter faced additional charges of violating the law that regulates the types of work foreigners are permitted to do in Thailand, as well as overstaying his visa. He is also accused of violating the computer crime act by posting nude images online. Carpenter refused to answer any questions, citing a language barrier. He faces anywhere between seven years and life in prison if he is found guilty of the charges. Carpenter faced additional charges of violating the law that regulates the types of work foreigners are permitted to do in Thailand, as well as overstaying his visa Princess Diana's former butler has blasted the royals today for failing to protect Thomas Markle following his bombshell interview. Paul Burrell said that the royal family has the 'biggest PR machine in the world' but still doesn't look after 'outsiders'. The 60-year-old was speaking after Meghan Markle's father spoke out for the first time since he dramatically missed his daughter's wedding with Prince Harry. Mr Burrell, who was a servant for the royal family for several years, said he nearly 'spat my Corn Flakes out' when he saw the interview on Good Morning Britain. Paul Burrell (pictured on Good Morning Britain today) said that the royal family has the 'biggest PR machine in the world' but still doesn't look after 'outsiders' Princess Diana's former butler has blasted the royals today for failing to protect Thomas Markle (pictured) following his bombshell interview 'It's another bombshell blindsiding the palace', he told Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid. 'It's extraordinary that Meghan and Harry didn't know this was going to take place. Why didn't her father tell her? Who's giving him PR advice? 'You just chucked a big rock into the royal pool, and there'll be ripples, and the ripples are coming. 'The Queen is sat at Windsor Castle in her breakfast room right now looking at the papers and thinking "what is happening out there?"' It emerged last night that Mr Markle was paid 7,500 to reveal his private chats with Prince Harry and his thoughts on the royals in an extraordinary TV interview. His decision to accept the payment comes weeks after he was exposed as posing for fake paparazzi photographs to 'improve' his public image, for which he has admitted accepting payment. Mr Burrell (pictured at ITV Studios today, left) was the royal servant to Diana, Princess of Wales (pictured together right, in Bosnia in 1997) Good Morning Britain presenters Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid with royal correspondent Emily Andrews and former royal butler Paul Burrell The resulting furore and his subsequent decision to pull out of giving his daughter away days before her wedding last month prompted an unprecedented public statement by Meghan, 36. Kensington Palace officials were deliberately kept in the dark about yesterday's TV interview so there was no opportunity to dissuade Mr Markle from taking part. The former Hollywood lighting director also confirmed he hadn't warned his daughter or her new husband in advance, but said he hoped he hadn't offended them and that the Royal Family would 'understand my feelings as well'. Mr Burrell himself has been accused of cashing in on his time spent serving the royal family after he released a book in 2003. The 60-year-old was speaking after Meghan Markle's father spoke out for the first time since he dramatically missed his daughter's wedding with Prince Harry (pictured) He added: 'The palace has the biggest PR machine in the world and they can't protect those who are outside the gates. 'There's no protocol in place, it's never been done before. They don't look after those coming into the family. 'The outsiders are the ones who are most vulnerable and that's what I saw in the interview. 'I liked him,' he added. 'I thought he was vulnerable I felt sorry for him and I know what's going to happen. 'The world press are on his doorstep and now they want more. What's next? Is Doria going to sit here talking about swapping knitting patterns with the Queen?' Makayla Hajaig (pictured) is accused of spraying ammonia in the face of Jordan Dubois in Ilford A teenage woman accused of throwing ammonia at a man leaving him with serious injuries in a 2,350 robbery has appeared in court. Makayla Hajaig, 19, is accused of robbing and spraying a 'noxious substance' at Courtney Raymond and Jordan Dubois in Ilford around 10pm on Wednesday, 13 June. Mr Dubois, in his 20s was taken to an east London hospital where he remains in a critical but stable condition. Hajiag appeared at Barkingside Magistrates' Court today after being arrested on Sunday and charged with GBH with intent, causing ABH and robbery yesterday. She was accused of robbing Courtney Raymond and Jordan Dubois of electrical equipment and a bag to the value of 2,350 in Argyle Road, Ilford. The 19-year-old (pictured) faced Barkingside Magistrates' Court this morning after being charged with robbery, ABH and GBH She was also charged with assaulting Jordan Dubois, occasioning him actual bodily harm and 'unlawfully and maliciously causing grievous bodily harm to Courtney Raymond with intent'. Prosecutor Paul Nagle said: 'We are dealing with serious matters.' Police are also searching for William Deo (pictured, right) and Gavin Okwu-Brewis (pictured, left) in connection with the incident Hajaig Chadwell Heath, east London, wore a grey prison tracksuit and with her brown hair tied in a knot did not enter any pleas during the five-minute hearing. She spoke only to confirm her name, date of birth, address and she was a British before being remanded in custody to appear at Snarebrook Crown Court in July. Presiding magistrate Sadja Shah told her: 'This case is going to be sent to Snarebrook Crown Court. You will be produced on July 18th at 9.30am for a 10 o'clock start.' Scotland Yard detectives are looking for William Deo, 20, and Gavin Okwu-Brewis, 29 in connection with this offence. Summer flight prices rise by more than 400 per person during school holidays, a study claims. It found price increases of up to 150 per cent for popular European destinations in July and August after schools break up. With parents fined for taking children on holiday during term time, those abiding by the rules face expensive flight fees. British parents looking to take their children on holiday during the allotted time periods face flight price hikes of up to 450 In many cases, the fine of 60 per child is cheaper than the price increase on flying, according to travel search engine KAYAK. Long-haul flights to Zanzibar, Tanzania, are the most costly if you wait for the school holidays, rising by nearly 450 a head in the summer. Worst school holiday flight hikes 1. Zanzibar in Tanzania, with a rise of 450 2. Lima, Peru - 367 3. Orlando, Florida - 268 4. New York, US - 200 5. Ismir, Turkey - 177 6. Dalaman, Turker - 149 7. Faro, Portgual - 64 8. Malaga, Spain - 63 9. Alicante, Spain - 60 10. Split, Croatia - 29 Advertisement The increasingly popular destination costs just 355 in the second week of June, but skyrockets to 803 per person in the first week of August. Lima, in Peru, was the second most costly destination when flying long-haul, with tickets increasing from 442 to 809 during the first three weeks of the school holidays. Flights to Orlando, US, shot up by an average of 268 in August, increasing from 396 in June to 665 in the second week of the month. For a family of four, this would mean forking out over 1000 more than if they were flying a few weeks earlier. Flights to New York, US, jump by an average of 200 for August trips but research revealed the city's hotel prices are more expensive in June. For short and mid-haul flights, costs are lower in general, but families buying their tickets for the summer holidays can still expect to see prices soar at the busiest times. Tickets for Malaga, Spain, nearly double during the summer months, starting at 81 just before the school holidays begin and increasing by 78 per cent to 144 in August. The same is true for hotel prices, which rise from 107 per night to 154 per night. During the second week of July, flights to Faro, Portugal, cost only 77, but rise by 83 per cent in August, when the average cost is 141, while hotels are 57 dearer per night. Another favourite destination for British families, Alicante, Spain, comes to just 88 a ticket in late July, but one week later costs 145, while hotel prices nearly double from 69 per night in June to 133 in the third week of August. For other short-hauls, Dalaman, Turkey, doubles from 151 to 300 on average, and Izmir, Turkey, moves from 119 to 296 - though the hotel prices stay at an affordable 43 per night. Flights to New York, US, jump by an average of 200 for August trips but research revealed the city's hotel prices are more expensive in June KAYAK also studied the destinations that dont rise quite so much, in a bid to help British families save on their holidays. Flights to Split, Croatia, only rise by 29 from 160 to 189 during the holidays - but its worth travelling in the very first week after schools break up, when tickets are only 4 more expensive. Journeys to Toronto, Canada, actually decrease in the fourth week of August to 450 per person - 36 cheaper than the average flight in July before the children break up. Other locations get cheaper toward the end of the holidays, with flights to Tivat, Montenegro, only 4 more expensive than the average 198 flights three weeks before schools finish. KAYAK travel expert Neil Cartwright said: 'Our data shows that it can be especially costly to travel during the peak summer holiday season of the school break. 'Parents complying with the rules around taking children out of school can end up with higher expenses on the trip for the family overall. 'KAYAKs Airfare Calculator allows travellers to input where they want to go and see the best month to travel in order to save the most money, without having to create dozens of different searches and compare them all. 'Even during the peak summer season, some times can be much better than others. If you have a bit of flexibility, checking it before you book is a no-brainer as it can save you hundreds.' Just seven per cent of UK construction workers are from the EU - puncturing a hole in the notion that Poles are taking all the building jobs. But the number is far higher in London where EU nationals make up nearly a third (28 per cent) of the industry, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The ONS examined how many foreign workers are in the industry amid concerns among Britons about the impact of migrant labour. Fears about undercutting of wages was a major driver in voters backing Brexit in the EU referendum two years ago. The new study estimates there are 165,000 EU nationals in a 2.2million-strong construction work force. Just seven per cent of UK construction workers are from the EU - puncturing a hole in the notion that Poles are taking all the building jobs (illustrated in the graph) Around half the EU national builders are from eastern Europe - with 49 per cent from the 'EU8' countries, including Poland. The figures also reveal that construction workers are getting older, with the number of workers aged 45 or over leaping by 13 per cent between 1991 and 2011. Builders moving to the UK from abroad tend to be younger than their British counterparts. Nearly half (47 per cent) of British construction workers are aged 45 compared to just 18 per cent of foreign workers. While 41 per cent of those working in construction were self-employed between 2014 and 2016, according to the figures. The number is far higher in London where EU nationals make up nearly a third (28 per cent) of the industry, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The findings come after years of concern in Britain about the impact of the massive increase in Eastern European migration to the UK over the past 15 years. In 2004 Tony Blair opened Britain's borders to eople from Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to work in Britain without restrictions. Britain was almost alone in the EU in not imposing transitional controls to slow the rate of migration. The decision to allow freedom of movement into Britain sparked a mass wage of migration - with around 170,000 eastern European migrants moving to the UK every year. The Labour party and trade unions have warned that Eastern European migrants have undercut wages and squeezed Britons out of the job market. And the impact on the construction industry was seen as one of the starkest. But today's figures suggest that while many construction workers in London are from the EU, in other parts of the UK the workforce remains almost wholly British. A Nazi flying saucer toy has been taken off the shelves in Germany - amid claims it suggests Hitler's scientists successfully built a space ship. The toy was presented as a Nazi-era war machine and described as 'the first object in the world capable of flying in space'. But manufacturer Revell, based in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia, has announced it will no longer be produced amid 'absolutely justified' criticism from those who pointed out such a craft never existed. A product description described the toy, which features emblems from the Third Reich, as a 'round aircraft' that can fly 'up to speeds of 6,000 km/hr'. A Nazi flying saucer toy has been taken off the shelves in Germany - amid claims it suggests Hitler's scientists successfully built a space ship The model kit for the 'Flying Saucer Haunebu II' priced at 49.99 euros is marketed as being suitable for children over 12 years. The Military History Museum (MHM) in Dresden and the German Children's Protection Association are among the critics pointing out that Revell's product's description fails to mention the aircraft never existed. This fact alone may end up giving people the impression the Nazis had advanced technology at their disposal, said historian Jens Wehner from the MHM. He told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: 'At that time it was technologically impossible to build something like this.' Manufacturer Revell, based in Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia, has announced it will no longer be produced amid 'absolutely justified' criticism from those who pointed out such a craft never existed 'Enthusiasts can use this as a strategy to cast doubt on what we know today about National Socialism,' added the historian. Revell said it agrees his assessment and that 'it is in fact a legendary, extraordinary aircraft which cannot be proven in terms of its existence,' The Local reports. 'Unfortunately, our product description does not adequately express this and we apologize for it'. A spokesman said Revell distances itself from glorification of wars and the Nazi era and is trying to work out how and why the toy was developed and made available for sale. A Syrian migrant has admitted whipping an Israeli man with his belt after he saw him wearing a kippa on the streets of Berlin. The 19-year-old, named locally as Knaan al-S., appeared in court Tuesday charged with dangerous assault and hate speech against Adam Amrish, 21. Knaan admitted the attack - which was caught on film - but said he was stoned at the time, not thinking straight, and only meant to scare Mr Amrush, not hit him. Knaan al-S., a 19-year-old Palestinian from Syria, has admitted to whipping Israeli Adam Amrish, 21, on the streets of Berlin with his belt because he was wearing a Jewish kippa Knaan told a Berlin court on Tuesday that he was stoned at the time of the attack, had not been thinking straight, and had only meant to scare Mr Amrush 'I'm sorry, it was a mistake', the defendant told a Berlin court, while claiming the victim had insulted him first, reported news agency DPA. Video of the attack sparked widespread public revulsion in Germany as it spread on social media, and later triggered large street rallies to show solidarity with Jews. The footage of the April 17 assault shows Kaan, one of a group of three, shouting 'yahudi', which means 'Jew' in Arabic, before lashing out at the two men, leaving one injured. Grievous bodily harm usually carries jail terms of three months to five years in Germany, but less under juvenile law which can be applied for defendants up to 20 years of age. Newspaper Bild, which named Knaan, said he was registered at a refugee home in Brandenburg state outside Berlin but went on to live 'out of a suitcase' in the capital. Knaan, who was living on the streets of Berlin at the time of the attack, also accused Mr Amrush of insulting him first as he appeared in court Knaan is charged with dangerous assault and hate speech and appeared in court Tuesday Mr Amrush is not Jewish but wore the kippa as part of a social experiment to see if it was safe to do so in Berlin The victim who shot the video, a 21-year-old student, later revealed that he is not Jewish but an Israeli Arab, who was walking at the time with a German-Moroccan friend aged 24. Mr Amrush told public broadcaster Deutsche Welle that they had wanted to test whether wearing a kippa was safe in the fashionable inner Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg. He said he had uploaded the video 'for the police, the German people and the world to see how terrible it is these days to walk through Berlin streets as a Jew'. The attack was the latest to raise alarm bells about renewed anti-Semitism in Germany from both the far-right and a large influx of predominantly Muslim asylum seekers since 2015. The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party, which captured nearly 13 per cent of the vote in September's general election, has broken a taboo by repeatedly challenging Germany's 'remembrance culture' and atonement for the Nazi era. Mr Amrush was walking with his German-Moroccan friend (right) when he was attacked The kippa worn by a young man when attacked in April allegedly by a 19-year-old Syrian refugee was put on display at the Jewish Museum in Berlin Party member Bjoern Hoecke has called Berlin's Holocaust memorial a 'monument of shame', and AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland described the Nazi period as a 'speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history'. News of the belt attack coincided with another public outcry, over a rap duo who made light of Nazi death camp prisoners but went on to win the music industry's sales-based Echo award, which was subsequently axed. After the street assault, the head of the Jewish community in Germany, Joseph Schuster, said that Jews should avoid wearing religious symbols in big cities due to a heightened risk of targeted attacks. The advice earned him a rebuke from the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center and the European Jewish Association, whose head Rabbi Margolin argued that to not wear the kippa 'fulfils the vision of anti-Semites in Europe'. Days after the assault, some 2,000 people rallied at a 'Berlin Wears Kippa' solidarity demonstration, matched by smaller events in Cologne, Potsdam, Magdeburg and Erfurt. Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking with Israeli television, denounced the emergence of 'another form of anti-Semitism' beyond that of right-wing extremist groups, from Muslim refugees. She reaffirmed that the security of Jews and the state of Israel was a central concern for Germany because of its 'eternal responsibility' for the Holocaust in which the Nazis murdered six million European Jews. The husband said he had not seen his wife's face before or during the ceremony because she was required to wear a veil (file image) An Indian man filed for divorce from his wife after discovering that she had a beard and spoke like a man, it has been reported. The husband said he had not seen his wife's face before their wedding day because she wore a veil. He also did not speak to her because the ceremony was arranged through his in-laws, the Times of India reports. The woman, who has not been named, also wore a veil during their wedding so he did not see her face until after they were married. The husband, who has also not been named, said: 'When I saw her for the first time, she had make-up on. 'After spending seven days with her, I went out of town for my job. After returning, I noticed she was growing a beard, and also realized that she sounds like a man.' The woman admitted growing facial hair and having a deep voice because of hormonal issues but told the court that could be fixed with treatment. Her family had paid a dowry to the man ahead of the wedding, she argued, and said that alimony would have to be paid in the event of a split. The wife claimed she was physically and mentally abused and that her husband was citing false reasons for the divorce in an attempt to evict her from their house. A judge rejected the divorce application, saying the reasons given were not sufficient for a split. The judge also noted that the husband had been absent from several court hearings along with his lawyer. Naa'imur Rahman is on trial for plotting to kill Theresa May in a knife and bomb attack on Downing Street An ISIS fanatic planned to stab Theresa May after blowing up the gates of Downing Street, a court heard today. Naa'imur Rahman, 20, plotted to detonate explosives at the security gates near Number 10 in a 'full frontal suicide mission' on 28 November last year, it is alleged. Rahman modified his coat and backpack with IEDs and was arrested by anti-terror police in Kensington just days before he intended to carry out the attack, jurors heard. The Bangladeshi-British suspect appeared at the Old Bailey today alongside bearded 22-year-old Mohammad Imran for the first day of their trial. Imran planned to join the Islamic State in Libya after saving up 3,600 and obtaining a fake passport to leave the UK, it is alleged. He is also accused of possessing a popular terrorist manual called 'How to Survive in the West: A Mujhajid's Guide', published in 2015. Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC said: 'The case against them is that their shared inspiration, which comes from a warped ideology of the group that calls itself Islamic State, led them well beyond contemplation and into making plans and taking practical steps to engage in violent acts of terrorism.' Theresa May was the target of the terrorist, who wanted to stab the Prime Minister in a suicide mission, the Old Bailey heard Both Rahman and Imran thought about going to a conflict zone such as Syria to 'lend support to the violence,' said Mr Heywood. From October 2015 Rahman was known to the Channel programme, intended for people who may be exposed to radicalisation, but had 'withdrawn from any engagement with that programme and refused any further contact or assistance' by the time of the alleged terror plot, the court heard. 'His settled conclusion was that lethal violence here, directed at the very heart of the United Kingdom government, was the only effective way to pursue his intentions,' said Mr Heywood. 'Before his arrest prevented it he was, he believed, just days away from his objective, which was no less than a suicide attack, by blade and explosion, on Downing Street and, if he could possibly achieve it, upon the Prime Minister herself - Theresa May.' Rahman is on trial alongside his friend, Mohammad Imran, who was is also accused of preparing terrorist acts The court heard his plan was uncovered by an MI5 operative, who posed as a senior ISIS official in Syria, the Old Bailey heard. The court heard Rahman in Telegram chat asked him: 'Can you put me in a sleeper cell ASAP?' When he is asked for more information, he allegedly said: 'I want to do a suicide bomb on Parliament. I want to attempt to kill Theresa May.' Jurors heard that the next day he said: 'My objective is to take out my target. Nothing less than the death of the leaders of Parliament.' The court heard Rahman went on to praise the Manchester arena bomber, saying he 'did well'. He allegedly said he thought about wearing 'a vest', driving past Parliament and 'pushing the button' to 'clear the entire block'. Jurors heard he said: 'Everyone inside, including the Prime Minister would be dead.' Rahman, of , Finchley, north London, denies preparing to commit terrorist acts, and one count of intending to assist Mohammed Imran with terrorist acts. Imran, of Birmingham, denies one count of preparing to commit acts of terrorism and one count of possession of a document likely to be useful to a person preparing an act of terrorism. The trial continues. A teenager who is the only black child in his year was reduced to tears after racist classmates scrawled 'go back to the jungle', 'n****r' and 'c**n' on his end-of-school souvenir t-shirt. The youngster - who attended Clacton County High School in Essex - took part in the traditional activity which sees pupils write good luck messages in pen on each other's tops. But instead of having a life-long keepsake the 15-year-old's polo neck t-shirt was daubed with racist words. Police are now investigating the 'malicious communication' and bosses at the 1,600-pupil school have also launched an inquiry to try to trace the culprit. The year 11 teenager's mother Juliet has hit out at the abuse and revealed her family had moved from Newham in East London to the coastal town for a new, more peaceful life, after her son's friend was murdered. The boy's mother Juliet has revealed her son's heartbreak after his leaving shirt was covered in racist language Classmates scrawled 'c**n', 'go back to the jungle' and 'n****r' (left to right) on his end-of-school souvenir t-shirt She said: 'When he came home, he came through the door and he was bouncing and was very happy that it was his last day of school. 'On the front of his t-shirt there were the usual farewell messages with students signing their names but on the back underneath the neck area it had the N-word written on it which was underlined and it had c**n written on it twice and then there was a statement that he should 'go back to the jungle'. 'That was written on the back of my son's shirt, that is what he walked all the way through the school with, that is what he walked all the way through Clacton streets with on his back. 'He had no idea that was written on his back. 'We were shocked and felt absolute horror, shock and anger. I was incredibly angry. I was incredibly upset and immediately went down to the school. 'From the family's perspective we feel like it's going back in time and it's opening old wounds. 'I faced severe racism. I went to school in Essex also - so it's effecting me in more ways than one. Racism needs to be eradicated. It's not fair. My son should not have to suffer like this'. The homeless charity CEO said her family's dream move away from the troubles of East London had 'turned to a nightmare'. 'My friend's son was murdered in London and I got fed up with the sirens going all night. 'It was a dangerous place with some bad people so I was delighted when I saw a home for sale and moved to Clacton. But the dream has turned to a nightmare.' Police are now investigating the 'malicious communication' and bosses at the 1,600-pupil school have also launched an inquiry to try to trace the culprit at Clacton County High School The graffiti was sprawled onto the teen's top last Friday when the pupils were allowed to spend time together as part of their last day of school before their GCSE exams. The school's vice principal Chris Taylor said the matter would be handed over to Essex Police once the pupil has been identified. He said: 'This brief gathering marks the end of the main GCSE exam season and is the final time that the entire year group is together. 'This happy and lively event was marred this year by the totally unacceptable actions of a student who, without thought of consequence and with total ignorance, wrote racist and hateful remarks on the back of the shirt another student. 'This was brought to my attention by the parent of the victim, who came into school to meet me that day. 'I share the disgust of the family that such a thing has happened, there is no place for racism in our school or our society. 'I am both shocked and appalled that a student would have acted in such a manner. 'Clacton County High School will not, and does not, tolerate racism or prejudice in any shape or form. 'We always act swiftly and decisively whenever any incidents that fall below our expectations are brought to our attention. This incident was immediately reported to the police by the school and we will conduct a full investigation. 'On behalf of the entire school community, I offer my sincere apologies to the victim and his family. 'I am disappointed, angry and appalled. I also apologise to the rest of Year 11, who will feel that such bigoted comments will reflect on them and taint their reputation.' Its the laughter that sickened me most. Ten children, some thought to be as young as four, can be heard repeatedly sobbing Mami and Papa in fear and desperation after being separated from their parents by U.S. immigration authorities. That harrowing noise alone would be appalling enough. But its what followed next - on an audiotape secretly recorded by ProPublica inside a Customs and Border Protection Facility that made my stomach churn with rage and revulsion. Well, chuckles a Border Patrol agent, we have an orchestra here. Whats missing is a conductor! An orchestra? Scroll down for video Agents are pictured above taking Central American asylum seekers into custody near McAllen, Texas 'Well, we have an orchestra here,' the agent is heard saying in the shocking audio. 'Whats missing is a conductor' What kind of sick, twisted mind thinks the sound of frightened, crying children snatched from their parents arms is a bloody ORCHESTRA? This is not a musical performance, you vile man. This is an obscenity that shames America. And it already has a conductor President Donald Trump. The issue of illegal immigration has bedevilled America for decades. To me, the problem is straightforward in principle, but complex in how to resolve it. When I enter the United States, I present my immigration papers. I am currently classified as an alien of extraordinary ability for my O-1 visa, which is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me. Throughout the audio Alison and other children are repeatedly heard screaming 'Mami' and 'Papa' just moments before the border agent drowns out their sobs with a joke But extraordinary or not, alien or otherwise, if those papers are not in order, then I would expect to be refused entry and put on the next plane home to London. The US immigration system obliges me, as someone who wishes to occasionally live and work in America, to endure considerable paper work, legal fees and time spent on appointments at US embassies. But I have no problem with this sufferance because I think it is right and proper that any country should know exactly whom it lets cross its borders, and approve their entry. What I do have a problem with is illegal immigration. I dont think its OK for people to just ignore the laws and sneak into a country because they dont like their own. Such behaviour, if tacitly tolerated, makes a mockery of any immigration system, and makes people like me wonder why were bothering to go through such hoops to do it legally. So in this regard, I share President Trumps overall view that illegal immigration is a bad thing and it should be prevented. This doesnt mean turning a deaf ear as Trump sadly does far too often - to genuine asylum seekers or refugees fleeing war-torn hellholes. Pulitzer prize-winning photographer John Moore captured this two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker crying while being taken into custody by federal authorities But it does mean enforcing strict border controls. If you want proof of how destabilising poor border control can be, then look no further than the chaos currently enveloping Europe where open borders have been systematically abused and led to a surging rise in illegal immigrants and reactionary right-wing populism. Trump was wrong this week to claim Germanys crime has risen because of immigration it hasnt. But he is right when he says mounting tension surrounding Chancellor Angela Merkels decision to let a million migrants into the country has inflamed German politics to such a frenzy that it now threatens to now bring down her fragile government. In Italy, a new coalition government just swept to power by exploiting anger over migration from Italian people sick and tired of tens of thousands of Africans entering illegally on boats many of whom tragically drown in the attempt. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has led a campaign to reject illegal migrants from Europe and has even built a wall across his countrys southern border. In Britain, concern about immigration was the defining reason why we recently voted to leave the European Union. 'Trump (pictured Monday) was wrong this week to claim Germanys crime has risen because of immigration it hasnt. But he is right when he says mounting tension surrounding Chancellor Angela Merkels decision to let a million migrants into the country has inflamed German politics to such a frenzy that it now threatens to now bring down her fragile government' So there is a very real problem with porous borders that is causing very real political and social upheaval, and I dont doubt Trumps sincere in his belief that this causes big problems, not least from the ongoing threat of Islamist terrorism. But where I disagree with him is on the scale of his brutal methods to combat it. To put it bluntly, Trumps new policy to separate young children from their parents and stick them in glorified cages is disgusting, inhuman and simply indefensible. Nearly 2,000 children were taken from families between mid-April and the end of May as part of a new zero tolerance policy towards anyone trying to cross the border illegally that now classifies them all as criminals. These poor kids are now living in detention centers along the US-Mexico border, joined by more and more children on a daily basis. The policy has been condemned by medical professionals, religious leaders and immigration activists, all of whom are deeply worried the children could suffer lasting psychological trauma. US Border Patrol agents take into custody a father and son from Honduras near the U.S.-Mexico border near Mission, Texas Dr Colleen Kraft, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, has even called it government-sanctioned child abuse after reviewing one of the detention centers. I cant describe to you the room I was in with the toddlers, she told CNN. Normally toddlers are rambunctious and running around. We had one child just screaming and crying, and the others were really silent. This is not normal activity or brain development with these children. No, its not. Its exactly what she says it is: abuse. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen insists: We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period. But that is a lie. They do, and thats why 2000 kids have been separated from their families in the past few weeks. She also insisted the children are not being used as bargaining pawns for the wider, more comprehensive immigration deal that Trump badly wants. But if that were true, then the issue of child separation could be dealt with separately, and it isnt. I agree with Trump that U.S. immigration laws need wholesale reform and I share his irritation at administrations kicking the can down the road. Its ridiculous that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants continue to pour over the southern border each year without anything being done to properly stop it. And Im sure hes right to suspect that some illegal immigrants are fraudulently using children to pose as family units to help themselves gain entry to the US. Its also true that his predecessor President Obama deported more illegal immigrants over 3 MILLION in eight years - than any president in U.S. history and was nicknamed the Deporter-in-Chief in Mexico as a result. The four living first ladies have joined First Lady Melania Trump (left) in an unusual united political front expressing horror at children separated from their parents Obama may not have had a formal policy of separating families, but that certainly happened a lot on his mass-deportation watch too. So as usual, theres a lot of bi-partisan hypocrisy flying around about all this. But to try to deter illegal immigrants by deliberately abusing their children through enforced separation, and quite possibly causing them irreparable harm, is not just offensive its disgraceful. It takes quite something to unite all five living First Ladies on one divisive issue, yet they stand as one on this. Rosalynn Carter, Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton have all expressed their horror at the separation policy. The practice of removing children from their parents care at our border with Mexico is disgraceful and a shame to our country, said Mrs Carter. Mrs Bush agreed: I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international borders but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel, it is immoral, and it breaks my heart. But perhaps the most powerful words came from Trumps own wife Melania, whose spokesman issued a statement saying: Mrs Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. Exactly. Theres nothing strong or impressive about abusing young children in this way. Listen to your wife, Mr President, and show some heart. The mother of Alfie Dingley wept with joy today as she was told the government is granting a licence for him to receive cannabis oil for severe epilepsy. Hannah Deacon was overcome with emotion as she heard the news that Home Secretary Sajid Javid was authorising use of the medication for her six-year-old son. Wiping away tears during an interview on ITV News, Ms Deacon said: 'Thank you. Thank you to the Prime Minister.' The dramatic moment came minutes after Mr Javid had informed the House of Commons that the government is reviewing 'unsatisfactory' rules to allow cannabis to be used for medical treatments. In a statement to MPs, the Home Secretary said after a series of high-profile cases it had become clear that the current system of licensing medicines was not fit for purpose. He said a licence for cannabis oil for Alfie, who has been waiting for months, would be issued later today. But Mr Javid rejected a demand from Lord Hague for recreational cannabis to be made legal because the war on the drug had been 'comprehensively and irreversibly lost'. Wiping away tears during an interview on ITV News, Hannah Deacon said: 'Thank you. Thank you to the Prime Minister.' In a statement to MPs, the Home Secretary said after a series of high-profile cases it had become clear that the current system of licensing medicines was not fit for purpose Six-year-old epileptic Alfie Dingley from Warwickshire has been awaiting a Government decision on whether he can use cannabis oil medication Alfie suffers from a rare form of epilepsy which means that he can suffer more than 100 seizures a month. Earlier this morning, Ms Deacon complained that the Prime Minister had assured her three months ago that his case would be resolved speedily and on 'a compassionate basis' - but they had found 'hurdle after hurdle' in their path. Ms Deacon was appearing on the ITV Lunchtime news to talk about her son's case when presenter Nina Hossain said the Home Secretary was planning to telephone her. 'I'm also hearing that what he's going to say to you is that a licence will be issued to Alfie,' Hossain said. 'Your reaction to that please?' Cannabis and the law: What are the rules on street drugs and medical treatments? Cannabis is banned as a Class B drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Conviction for possession can attract a five year prison sentence and an unlimited fine. The penalty for production and dealing can be up to 14 years. The government does not recognise any 'medicinal or therapeutic' benefit from raw cannabis or the active ingredient, THC. But there are cannabis-based medicinal products which are currently available in the UK. They include Sativex, which can be used to treat of multiple sclerosis. Under Home Office rules, any application to administer cannabis-based medicines must be led by a senior clinician and backed by an NHS Trust. In exceptional circumstances where there is a 'medical emergency', the Home Secretary can grant a short-term licence outside of the normal process. The power had not been used until this weekend, when Sajid Javid authorised cannabis oil for Billy Caldwell. The Home Office said: 'Decisions over the length of time emergency licences are granted for are taken on a case by case basis and based on medical advice.' Ministers announced yesterday that Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davis has been asked to establish an expert panel to advise on individual applications to prescribe cannabis-based medicines. Advertisement Taking a deep breath and wiping her eyes, Ms Deacon said: 'That's amazing news. Thank you very much for letting me know. Thank you. Thank you to the Prime Minister.' In the Commons, Mr Javid said: 'It has become clear to me that the position we find ourselves in certainly is not satisfactory.' He said a review was being rushed through, but indicated to MPs that his 'direction of travel' was already clear. The first part of the overhaul, led by chief medical officer Sally Davies, will make recommendations on which cannabis-based medicines might offer patients real medical and therapeutic benefits. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs will consider in the second part of the review whether changes should be made to the classification of these products on an assessment of 'the balance of harms and public health needs'. 'If the review identifies significant medical benefits, then we do intend to reschedule,' Mr Javid told MPs. 'We have seen in recent months that there is a pressing need to allow those who might benefit from cannabis-based medicines to access them.' Mr Javid said that since becoming Home Secretary in April, it had become clear to him that the current legal position on medicinal cannabis was 'not satisfactory for the parents, not satisfactory for the doctors, and not satisfactory for me'. On the subject of a wider legalisation, Mr Javid said: 'This step is in no way a first step to the legalisation of cannabis for recreational use. 'This Government has absolutely no plans to legalise cannabis and the penalties for unauthorised supply and possession will remain unchanged.' Billy Caldwell, 12, was handed an emergency licence to receive cannabis oil over the weekend - the first time the Home Secretary has used powers to sidestep laws on medicinal cannabis. Billy - an epileptic child who needs cannabis oil to treat his life-threatening seizures - has now been discharged from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Doctors were bowled over by the effects of the oil, which he needs to suppress up to 100 fits a day. However, questions remain over what will happen with the special 35-day licence granted by Mr Javid expires. Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott welcomed the announcement, telling MPs a review of the scheduling of cannabis was 'long overdue'. Ms Abbott said: 'We welcome the Home Secretary's statement that he's going to look more closely at the use of cannabis-based medication in health care in the UK. 'We agree that this is the right time, if not long overdue, to review the scheduling of cannabis and we are very glad to hear that the Policing Minister has spoke, or will speak, to Alfie Dingley's mother.' Ms Deacon said she now hoped obtaining a licence would become easier for families. 'There are lots and lots of families up and down this country who are suffering with children with severe epilepsy where medication and diet doesn't work,' she said. 'I'm not saying that it should be the first line of medication - there are other protocols to try. 'But if those protocols don't work then medical cannabis surely, for the severely ill children, should be made available. 'It is just madness to think that people should be suffering like they are when there is something that could help them.' He said the case of Billy Caldwell had provided 'one of those illuminating moments when a longstanding policy is revealed to be inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date' In the Commons today, Mr Javid dismissed calls for recreational cannabis to be legalised Recent polling has shown that the public is deeply split over how the government should approach controlling cannabis Labour frontbencher Andy McDonald said he had lost a son to 'intractable epilepsy' and the government should ease the rules on cannabis oil Until Mr Javid's statement today the Cabinet has appeared split over whether to loosen the rules on allowing medicinal cannabis use. Yesterday Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt suggested that Mr Javid had already begun a review, which was denied by the Home Office. Mr Javid then clashed with Theresa May during a Cabinet meeting, telling ministers it was essential to discuss Billy's case. Sources said the PM tried to close down the debate, insisting that the issue was not on the agenda for the meeting. But Mr Javid repeatedly asked her to reconsider. One source said Mr Javid 'would not take 'it is not on the agenda' for an answer'. Following the clash, Mrs May later suggested that the Government would look only into the operation of the current system of licences for use in individual cases, rather than reviewing the law more widely. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS AND DANGERS OF CANNABIS? Cannabis is an illegal Class B drug in the UK, meaning possession could result in a five year prison sentence and those who supply the drug face up to 14 years in jail. However, the drug is still widely used for recreational purposes and can make users feel relaxed and happy. But smoking it - the most common way to consume the drug - can also lead to feelings of panic, anxiety or paranoia. Scientific studies have shown the drug can alleviate depression, anxiety and stress, but heavy use may worsen depression in the long term by reducing the brain's ability to let go of bad memories. It can also contribute to mental health problems among people who already have them, or increase users' risk of psychosis or schizophrenia, according to research. Marijuana can be prescribed for medical uses in more than half of US states, where it is used to combat anxiety, aggression and sleeping problems. Researchers are also looking into whether it could help people with autism,eczema or psoriasis. Cannabis oil containing the psychoactive chemical THC, which is illegal in the UK, is claimed to have cancer-fighting properties, and a host of patients claim to have recovered from the disease by taking the drug. Advertisement Canada has this year voted to legalise cannabis and recreational marijuana sales became legal in California on January 1 this year, following a number of other US states. Lord Hague said expecting police to rid the streets of recreational cannabis is futile and called on Theresa May to be 'bold' and introduce a 'major change' in policy. Selling cannabis in regulated shops would also bring in billions in new tax revenues and free police to concentrate on either crimes,' he argued. Pressure for a shift in drugs policy has been mounting, and many MPs welcomed the extraordinary intervention from Lord Hague. Polls suggest public opinion is finely balanced, with substantial support for decriminalisation or legalisation. Lord Hague broadened the raging argument about medicinal cannabis by urging the Prime Minister to be 'bold' and introduce a 'major change' in policy. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Lord Hague added: 'The idea that this can be driven off the streets and out of people's lives by the state is deluded. 'Cannabis is ubiquitous, and issuing orders to the police to defeat its use is about as up to date and relevant as asking the Army to recover the Empire. The battle is effectively over.' Vince Cable, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said that decriminalisation of cannabis was 'an obvious step to take'. 'Large amounts of are in circulation in a very damaging form which is poisoning large numbers of young people and resulting in psychological damage,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. 'That's what we should be trying to avoid and, as Lord Hague said, the policy is failing.' Labour former leader Ed Miliband endorsed Lord Hague's views complaining that reform of drugs legislation was a 'no go area' Amid the row over medicinal cannabis, Mrs May said yesterday: 'Do we need to look at these cases and consider what we've got in place? Yes. 'But what needs to drive us in all these cases has to be what clinicians are saying about these issues. Former Tory leader William Hague said the war on marijuana had been 'comprehensively and irreversibly lost' Labour's Wes Streeting said there was a 'strong case' for licensing cannabis for medical use, but insisted public opinion was against legalising for recreational use 'There's a very good reason why we've got a set of rules around cannabis and other drugs, because of the impact that they have on people's lives, and we must never forget that.' As her son hugged her outside the hospital yesterday, Miss Caldwell said she felt 'elated'. Billy still has to return to the hospital twice a day to receive the oil, so they are staying in a nearby flat, paid for by well-wishers. Tory former leader Lord Hague calls for cannabis to legalised Ex-Tory leader William Hague sparked a furious row today by claiming cannabis should be legalised because the war on the drug has been 'comprehensively and irreversibly lost'. Lord Hague said expecting police to rid the streets of recreational cannabis is futile and called on Theresa May to be 'bold' and introduce a 'major change' in policy. He said the case of Billy Caldwell - an epileptic child who needs cannabis oil to treat his life-threatening seizures - showed that current laws on the drug are 'utterly out of date'. Selling cannabis in regulated shops would also bring in billions in new tax revenues and free police to concentrate on either crimes. Pressure for a shift in drugs policy has been mounting, and many MPs welcomed the extraordinary intervention from Lord Hague. Polls suggest public opinion is finely balanced, with substantial support for decriminalisation or legalisation. The latest row came as Home Secretary Sajid Javid announced an overhaul of rules on licensing medicinal cannabis. But he flatly dismissed the idea of easing restrictions on cannabis for recreational use. The PM said yesterday that there were 'very good reasons' for tough rules on the drug. Advertisement Miss Caldwell, from Castlederg in County Tyrone, urged Mr Javid and Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt to meet her so she could make the case to have the treatment legalised for British children with epilepsy that cannot be treated conventionally. She added: 'The fact that Billy has been discharged is testimony to the effectiveness of the treatment and underlines how vital it is that every child and every single family affected should have immediate access to the very same medication. 'Children are dying and suffering beyond imagination.' Doctors treating Billy are said to have claimed it was a 'no-brainer' that the law needed to be changed. Many MPs have been calling for a legislation change. Labour backbencher Tonia Antoniazzi said two children in her constituency aged six and one had a life-limiting condition and could 'benefit hugely' from medicinal cannabis. Other MPs also raised cases, including that of six-year-old epileptic Alfie Dingley from Warwickshire, whose family is awaiting a Government decision on whether he can use cannabis oil medication. Conservative former minister Sir Mike Penning said he would personally fetch medicines to treat Alfie if they had not been made available by Wednesday. Former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith told of a woman with a brain tumour who, after being given two weeks to live, used a form of the drug to get rid of the growth. He said: 'There clearly are medicinal preparations that can be used. 'In the health department, it is still not considered a good thing to investigate the medicinal properties of this drug.' But Tory MP Caroline Johnson, a consultant paediatrician, said scientific tests on animals had suggested it could cause 'significant psychological problems such as psychosis if used over a long period of time'. Advertisement Authorities have seized more than 550 guns at two Southern California homes and made one arrest after getting a tip that a convicted felon was storing an arsenal. Sixty-year-old Manuel Fernandez was arrested last week after Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies and state and federal investigators raided his Agua Dulce home. Officials Monday say the searchers found 432 rifles and handguns - some decades old - at his home on the 34700 block of Caprock Road Thursday morning. When they returned the following day, they found another 91 hidden weapons. On Thursday, authorities raided the Antelope Valley, California home of a convicted felon and found 432 rifles. Above, pictures taken of the weapons by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department When they returned the next day, they found another 91 hidden guns at the property of 60-year-old Manuel Fernandez Finally, 30 guns were seized at another home in Agua Dulce believed linked to a female associate of Fernandez, who hasn't returned to the home. Investigators also seized computers, cellphones and hard drives used to purchase the guns, Sources familiar with the investigation told the Los Angeles Times that Fernandez appeared to be more of a gun collector than a person plotting an attack. Fernandez was booked on suspicion of being a felon in possession of firearms and illegally possessing an assault rifle and large-capacity magazines Fernandez was booked on suspicion of being a felon in possession of firearms and ammunition and illegally possessing an assault rifle and large-capacity magazines. Authorities also raided the home of a female associate of Fernandez and found another 30 guns. She has not been arrested or named since she has not returned to her property since the raid He was ordered held on $35,000 bail. He posted that amount on Friday and was released from the Los Angeles County Medical Center's jail ward, where he was being held. A call to his listed phone number rang unanswered Monday. It's unclear what felony he was previously convicted of. He was sentenced to 486 days in jail in February 2017, and was released in August 2017, according to jail records. Fernandez is due back in Antelope Valley Superior Court on July 9. 'This case is a testament to the community's involvement in reducing crime and taking guns out of the hands of criminals,' Sheriff Jim McDonnell said. 'We are proud of the relationship we have built in the Antelope Valley area as we continue to build trust with the communities we serve.' 'The swift response of our Palmdale Sheriff's Station personnel and the assistance provided by our partners at the California Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,' McDonnell said in a statement, adding that the effort 'showed the positive result of our campaign, "See Something, Say Something."' The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives is helping investigators determine the history of all 553 weapons. Jeremy Corbyn today endorsed another strike on the railways despite continued chaos triggered by the timetable shambles that has been running for weeks. The Labour leader expressed 'solidarity' with RMT workers who walked-out today, worsening further chaos facing passengers on Northern rail. The strike, part of a long-running dispute over driver-only trains, is due to continue until Saturday. It has added further cancellations to the beleaguered Northern network, one of the worst hit franchises by the failed new timetable that rolled out on May 20. Jeremy Corbyn (pictured today in London) endorsed another strike on the railways despite continued chaos triggered by the timetable shambles that has been running for weeks The Labour leader expressed 'solidarity' (pictured) with RMT workers who walked-out today, worsening further chaos facing passengers on Northern rail Mr Corbyn said today: 'Solidarity with RMT Union Northern Rail workers on strike over threats to remove guards and conductors, affecting passenger safety. 'We've seen crisis after crisis in Northern Rail. 'It must be brought into public hands, and run for passengers and staff, not private profit.' Most services were running between 7am and 7pm but with many cancellations. RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: 'RMT members on Northern Rail stand rock-solid and united once again this morning in this long-running dispute which is about putting public safety and access before private profit on our railways. 'RMT is angry and frustrated that, while we are making some progress in discussions in similar safety disputes, Arriva Rail North refuse point-blank to engage with the union in any meaningful fashion. 'That is a disgrace and speaks volumes about the attitude of this company. It has added further cancellations to the beleaguered Northern network, one of the worst hit franchises by the failed new timetable that rolled out on May 20 (file image) 'Northern is an outfit that has chosen to declare war on passengers and staff alike through their profit-driven incompetence and we are proud that RMT members are standing up for safe and accessible rail travel for all in this week's action. 'It is ludicrous that we have been able to negotiate agreements in Wales and Scotland that lock in the guard guarantee but we are being stopped by German-owned Arriva from reaching the same settlement across the North of England. 'I am challenging the company today to get their heads out of the sand and get back round the table. 'RMT members at Arriva Rail North have shown extraordinary resilience and determination in the fight for rail safety and we thank the public for their continuing support and understanding.' RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: 'RMT members on Northern Rail stand rock-solid and united once again this morning' (file image) Regional director for Northern Sharon Keith said: 'On each day of the strike action we will be running fewer services and expect those services we do operate to be extremely busy. 'It is, therefore, vital that anyone thinking of travelling with Northern on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday plans their journey carefully.' The union called off a planned three-day strike from Thursday on South Western Railway after 'meaningful' talks. Hundreds of hospital patients around Britain had to given blood tests after a doctor hid his HIV infection. Gay medic Tamas Nyary went to great lengths to hide the infection because he felt he could not reveal his sexuality due to conservative views in his native Hungary. When it finally emerged he had the virus, nearly 400 of his previous patients had to be tested, Nottingham Crown Court heard. More than 200 patients from Nottingham had to be tested for HIV after a doctor lied about having the infection A judge heard 45 year-old Nyary qualified as a doctor in Hungary and worked at 24 hospitals across the UK between 2010 and 2016, carrying out operations on some patients, NottinghamshireLive reported. It is not known exactly when Nyary contracted the virus, but when applying to Nottingham University Hospitals Trust in 2013, he changed the date on a negative vaccination report from 2010 to 2012. After working as an orthopedic fellow for the trust, he moved to Birmingham Heartlands Hospital. In 2015 he is known to have taken a test at home and tested positive. He then submitted his own-blood for testing under the name of a patient in an apparent attempt to confirm the result of the home test. But blood scientists at the lab which analysed the sample became suspicious, sparking an investigation which led to Nyary. Meanwhile, the medic had moved on again, getting a job at Lincoln Hospital's A&E department in 2016 by misleading NHS recruiting firm ED Staffing. Authorities finally caught up with him and he was suspended after his HIV status became clear. Rebecca Herbert, prosecuting, said he was suspended for falsely declaring his HIV status in order for him to get work. She added: 'It is not necessarily so that someone who is HIV positive can't have clearance.' Patients he had treated in Nottingham, Chesterfield and Cornwall were then contacted and offered tests. The court heard some suffered 'days of anxiety' waiting for tests and results. Nyary admitted a number of charges when he was brought before Nottingham Crown Court After he was prosecuted, married Nyary admitted a number of offences including forgery, fraud and using a false instrument. His lawyer Richard Posner told the court: 'The way he thinks or believes people would feel about the homosexuality and the HIV infection, are something that are deep rooted in him and appear to have been a very significant contribution to him behaving in this way. It is irrational behaviour. 'As I say, he could have continued to work. He may have been able to continue doing this sort of procedure. You have seen the level of viral infection was very low indeed.' Handing Nyary a 12-month sentence, suspended for two years, Judge Stuart Rafferty QC said: 'Mr Posner was right to say that to some extent, because of your embarrassment and because of the much more draconian society from which you came, revealing your homosexuality and revealing even the risk that you might be HIV positive was a step that you simply could not contemplate taking. 'What has to be said on the other side, however, is that this was a course of dishonesty that went on for some years, beginning by you before you were certain you were HIV positive and continued afterwards.' Responding to national outrage over the Trump administration's 'zero-tolerance' policy at the border, a conservative lawmaker on Tuesday said that a faction of House Republicans would present a stand-alone immigration bill that addresses family separation. Rep. Mark Meadows said conservatives in the House had approached leadership with proposal, as well as the Trump administration. 'If one of the two bills that we're going to be discussing today later on Capitol Hill...if they don't gain the votes to get to 218 and actually have a chance of becoming law, this becomes a back-up proposal,' Meadows, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said. Meadows said his caucus worked over the weekend to come up with a bill that is 77 pages long that will be introduced on the floor this afternoon. 'We're reaching out to some of our Democrat colleagues to see if they can support us in this effort, and have it as a back up,' he said. Responding to national outrage over the Trump administration's 'zero-tolerance' policy at the border, conservatives on Tuesday said they would present a stand-alone immigration bill that addresses family separation It was not immediately clear how the stand-alone bill plans to deal with family separation. A summary provided by Meadow's office said it clarifies existing guidelines by 'ensuring that accompanied minors of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border are not separated from their parent or legal guardian' while in DHS custody. 'The bill will ensure the safe and expeditious return to the unaccompanied childs home country, unless the child has a legitimate asylum claim,' the statement said. It also 'increases multiple enforcement mechanisms' to 'better prevent those seeking to take advantage of the asylum system' and 'targets asylum fraud by adjusting the credible fear standard for enforcement officers.' Illegal immigrants will be barred from entry 'if they are found to knowingly make a false or frivolous application for asylum,' the description provided by Meadows' office states. 'This will cut down on attempts to use the asylum system to illegally enter the U.S.,' the summary says. 'Furthermore, it requires dangerous criminal aliens, subject to final orders of removal, to remain in detention until they are physically removed from the U.S.' Meadows' bill will also 'allow for alien gang members, alien gang associates, and aliens who participate in gang-related activities to be detained and removed by the DHS, cutting down on the issue of violent crime,' a top concern of the president's. The White House did not have an immediate response to Meadows' proposal or a similar one that was being introduced by GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in the U.S. Senate. 'That's hypothetical. We're looking at the legislation now. We're pleased that Congress is coming forward with solutions that we've asked for,' Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short told reporters at the White House. Pressed to say whether the president would end the zero tolerance policy without comprehensive immigration reform in the same package, Short replied, 'Im not gonna answer a hypothetical.' Short said the White House would prefer legislation that provides additional judges 'so that we can adjudicate these cases faster' and addresses a court order known as the Flores settlement so that Homeland Security has the 'ability to keep parents and children together as they wait for that adjudication.' 'Were gonna be looking at those independently,' he said of Cruz's and Meadows' legislative proposals. Meadows would not say if he was meeting with the president at the White House, or someone else, during his own conversation with reporters this morning in front of the White House. 'Really at this point, it's more a legislative action,' the lawmaker told reporters from the White House drive. 'I think the administration has said that. It's up to Congress to act on this particular thing.' A senior GOP leadership aide told DailyMail.com after the lawmaker's trip across town, 'It would be a little early to weigh in on the third option.' A Democratic lawmaker involved in the process told DailyMail.com that the minority would not support the stand-alone bill if it makes indefinite detention for families part of the process or speeds up deportations. That's the gist of a measure in a compromise bill that's being pushed in the House that also includes the president's other immigration priorities. 'They can't pass anything without them having some sort of enforcement mechanism,' the person said of Meadows' proposal. 'They've spun themselves into such a crazy narrative that they have to be very careful.' The White House position on Monday afternoon was that Democrats should join Republicans in passing legislation that restructures the entire immigration system, making permanent entry to the country merit and skills based and doing away with a lottery. Democrats will not back that agenda, the lawmaker said, in response to to charges from the administration that the opposing party is playing politics and using illegal children as pawns. 'We're not naive, and we realize that once we give into his dictatorial instincts, we realize he's only going to move the goal post,' the Democratic lawmaker fired back. This evening Trump is making a trek to Capitol Hill to deliver marching orders on immigration to Republicans in Congress. GOP leaders expect to bring two pieces of legislation - one that's lockstep with Trump's desired changes and one that's being presented as a compromise - to the floor later this week, likely on Thursday. Trump backs both, the White House said of the two legislative initiatives, and would like to see an end to family separation. The second bill, the more moderate of the two, was being designed on Monday to allow parents the option to keep their children. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders indicated Monday that the president would not support legislation narrowly-tailored to family separation. Sanders said Trump 'doesn't just want to see a Band-Aid put on this' and is 'tired of administrations claiming that they want to help the system and then just kicking the can down the road' as it pertains to border security. The White House spokeswoman said that Trump wants to resolve other pressing issues, too, like violence at the hands of illegal immigrant gangs. 'There have been a number of individuals that are permanently separated from their families due to the illegal aliens that have come across this border and murdered and killed American citizens,' she told DailyMail.com. 'Where is the outrage over that separation? 'We want to fix the whole thing. We don't want to just tinker with one part of it. This is a broken system, and we've got to quit ignoring it. Just ignoring the rule doesn't fix it, and that's what this administration is actually trying to do. ' President Trump demanded in tweets on Tuesday morning that Congress pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation. 'Now is the best opportunity ever for Congress to change the ridiculous and obsolete laws on immigration. Get it done, always keeping in mind that we must have strong border security.' In another message he laid blame at the feet of the opposing party, saying, 'Democrats are the problem. They dont care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. 'They cant win on their terrible policies,' he contended, 'so they view them as potential voters!' President Trump said Monday that he's implementing strict immigration policies because he doesn't want the United States to end up like Europe As his administration came under siege for adopting a zero tolerance position, Trump said Monday that the government is tightening the screws because he doesn't want the United States to end up like Europe. 'The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. Won't be,' he charged in fiery remarks at a White House event. 'You look at what's happening in Europe. You look at what's happening in other places. We can't allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch.' The president delved without warning into a heated argument over immigration that his administration has been waging with Democrats at a signing ceremony for his space policy initiative. 'Immigration is the fault [of Democrats], and all of the problems that we're having, 'cause we cannot get them to sign legislation. We cannot get them even to the negotiating table. And I say it's very strongly the Democrats' fault,' he said at the East Room event. 'They're obstructionists, and they are obstructing.' The president called on Democrats during the riff to work with Republicans in Congress to pass new rules to govern the nation's immigration system. 'If the Democrats would sit down, instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly - good for the children, good for the country good for the world,' he asserted. 'It could take place quickly. We could have an immigration bill. We could have child separation [ended].' Instead, the president contended, 'We're stuck with these horrible laws. They're horrible laws. What's happening is so sad. Is so sad. And it can be taken care of quickly, beautifully, and we'll have safety.' 'Nobody has such sad, such bad, and actually in many cases such horrible and tough. You see about child separation. You see what's going on there,' he said, bringing up a policy Democrats have been assailing his administration for adopting. Trump suggested the United States' could bolster its credentials as leader of the free world by passing merit-based immigration laws that put a premium on high-skilled workers and lock down America's porous borders 'The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. Won't be,' he charged later in fiery remarks at a White House event. Trump, justifying the policy, said, 'Just remember, a country without borders, is not a country at all. 'We have to take care of our people,' he added. 'You take a look at the death and the destruction that's been caused by people coming into this country without going through a process.' The president conflated the diversity visa lottery that awards entry to vetted applicants at random with people who he said 'snuck across' the border to enter the country unlawfully. 'They could be murderers and thieves and so much else,' he asserted. 'So we want a safe country, and it starts with the borders, and that's the way it is.' As the applause in the room died down, the president said, before returning to the topic at hand, that Democrats have but one choice to end the family separation: join Republicans in passing legislation that restructures the immigration system the way he's demanding. 'Everybody wants to do it. We want to do it more than they do,' he said of immigration reform. [If they come to the table, instead of playing politics, we can do it very, very quickly.' The White House spent most of Monday sparring with Democrats who have been accusing the Trump administration of exploiting migrant families. Each side condemned the other for using children as 'pawns' in a raging illegal immigration debate. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said from the White House podium that Democrats bludgeoning the administration for its 'zero tolerance' policy at the border are acting 'cowardly' and could change federal immigration law if they wanted to. Nielsen argued that DHS was just doing its job in enforcing a Trump administration policy that has led more than 2,000 children to be separated from their parents or guardians in the last six weeks. 'If an American were to commit a crime anywhere in the United States,' she told a room full of reporters, 'they would go to jail and they would be separated from their family.' Nielsen said, 'This is not a controversial idea.' The president's pitch: ''This could really be something very special. It could be something. Maybe even for the world to watch. Just like they're watching our great economy, how it's soaring, they could watch this' A view of inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention facility shows detainees inside fenced areas at Rio Grande Valley Centralized Processing Center in Rio Grande City, Texas, U.S., June 17, 2018. Picture taken on June 17, 2018 Immigrants wait to head to a Catholic Charities relief center after being dropped off at a bus station shortly after release from detention through "catch and release" immigration policy on June 17, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The man said he was separated from his son while in detention. "Catch and release" is a protocol under which people detained by US authorities as unlawful immigrants can be released while they wait for a hearing Democrats had been hammering the administration for days, charging DHS officials with everything from 'using' children as bargaining chips to accusing them of 'child abuse.' President Trump said Monday, as he attempted to gain the upper hand, that children are 'being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country.' Trump said in tweets that he'd also like to know where Democratic outrage is for American families who are being permanently separated by murderous, illegal immigrant gangsters. 'Why dont the Democrats give us the votes to fix the worlds worst immigration laws? Where is the outcry for the killings and crime being caused by gangs and thugs, including MS-13, coming into our country illegally?' he said in a Monday morning rant. A rotating cast of Trump administration officials appeared on national news networks to buttress the president's arguments and assail Democrats using family separation as a cudgel against the Republicans' in their war over illegal immigration. Hogan Gidley, a deputy spokesman for the president, appeared on Fox News on Monday and asserted that Democrats are 'playing politics with people's lives. They're doing it on the backs of children. It's absolutely grotesque.' 'All they want to do is go down and grandstand and try to use this to political gain to try and get reelected in a few years, and it's grotesque,' he told reporters as he walked back inside the White House to his office. 'We can fix it right now, we can protect our citizens, but more important protect all the children around the world who are trying to come here.' The Trump spokesman claimed that migrant families 'separate themselves a lot of times,' sending their children with coyotes promising to bring them across the border for a hefty price. 'It's a deplorable situation, we've gotta fix it. And Congress could do it tomorrow, if you close the loopholes, the situation's solved,' Gidley stated. The president delved without warning into a heated argument over immigration that his administration has been waging with Democrats at a signing ceremony for his space policy initiative White House Director of Strategic of Communications Mercede Schlapp said on Fox that Democrats are 'using children as political pawns' and are essentially 'advocating for the smugglers who are bringing these children over' the border. 'We have our hands tied and the smugglers have the advantage,' she said, insisting that MS-13 gang members are bringing over small children as leverage. Nielsen also claimed Monday that the crisis of illegal immigrant children being housed separately from the adults who bring them across the border is, in part, fueled by men and women making fraudulent asylum claims with children who aren't theirs. 'From October 2017 to this February, we have seen a staggering 315 per cent increase in illegal aliens fraudulently using children to pose as family units to gain entry into the country,' she told the annual National Association of Sheriffs meeting in New Orleans. 'This must stop. All this does is put the children at risk,' the DHS chief added. 'We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are in fact a family.' 'We have to do our job. We will not apologize for doing our job.' A DHS official told DailyMail.com that in the first five months of fiscal year 2018, DHS found 191 cases of fraud compared to 46 cases in all of fiscal year 2017. Before the administration's zero tolerance policy, the official explained, traffickers knew that by bringing over a child they were likely to be released directly into the country and began taking advantage of the system. The increase in fraudulent cases, by the government's numbers, was steep - but it counted for relatively small portion of immigrant children entering the country illegally with adults over the same time period. DHS said that the roughly 1,800 separations from guardians or parents occurred from October through February. Fraudulent cases, therefore, accounted for roughly 11 percent of those separations. The 'zero-tolerance' border security policy adopted in April by the Trump administration was at the center of a flare up on Sunday in the U.S. as Democrats took aim at Republicans celebrating Father's Day by sharing photos of their families on the Internet. Democratic lawmakers on Sunday said that they would fight the 'evil' separation of children from their parents at the border while accusing the Trump administration of 'using the grief, the tears, the pain of these kids as mortar to build their wall.' 'They call it "zero tolerance," but a better name for it is zero humanity, and there's zero logic to this policy,' Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley said during a trip to the Mexican border. Rep. Adam Schiff told NBC, 'It's an effort to extort a bill to their liking in the Congress. 'It's, I think, deeply unethical, and by the Presidents making these provable falsehoods about whats required, the party adopting that has become, the GOP has become the party of lies,' the Democratic congressman stated. The Trump administration says that 'open border' policies have led to a surge in illegal immigration that has forced the administration to treat all migrants unlawfully crossing the Untied States' southern border as criminals. 'It is a crime to enter this country illegally. So if [Democrats] dont like that law, they should change it,' Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, charged on Meet the Press on Sunday. 'Do you want the child in jail? As opposed to a facility?' Immigrants are dropped off at a bus station shortly after being released from detention through "catch and release" immigration policy on June 17, 2018 in McAllen, Texas Conway said that President Trump wants to double the number of family detention centers as part of his 70-point immigration plan that Congress has not passed, in order to keep more families together. Gidley on Monday charged, 'There is a separation that occurs because the law exists that way. It is a farce to believe you can keep them together. ... Democrats say you can't detain them. So if you can't detain them, you can't deport them, you have to release them into the interior of the country. It's a complete false choice but it can be so simply if would close these loopholes.' The White House spokesman forcefully argued that the government has a responsibility to detain undocumented immigrants in order to cut down on crime. 'And I understand the Democrats are upset about temporary separation of families who come here illegally, ' he acknowledged. 'Where is the outcry for the permanent separation when one of these people come to the country, commit a crime, kill an American citizen either with their own hand or via drugs they distribute, no one comes to their defense?' 'The permanent separation is the biggest abomination, and no Democrat's coming out decrying that at all,' Gidley charged on Fox. Democratic lawmakers touring border facilitates on Sunday said that the Trump administration was behaving immorally and unethically in order to get the president's desired changes to border security. Merkley accused Republicans of 'hurting kids to get legislative leverage is unacceptable. It is evil.' Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee said Trump 'is not telling the truth' about the law as written. 'There is no law, there is no policy that has allowed him to snatch children away from their families,' she said. 'I can assure you we'll be fighting to the end to stop this ugly, vile program that is harming children and creating massive child abuse.' Democratic Rep. David Cicilline said the policy was 'undermining the founding values of this country.' 'We saw the fear in the eyes of these children who are wondering when they will see their parent ever again. It's a disgrace, it's shameful and it's un-American,' he said. A man who raped and killed a six-year-old girl before burying her body in a bog has been sentenced to 40 years in prison. Gabriel Gaeta, from Bremerton, Washington, pleaded guilty in February to murdering his neighbor Jenise Wright, 6, in a sickening attack back in 2014. He was sentenced to 40 years to life in the Kitsap County courtroom nearly four years after her death. 'I can't put into words how bad I feel about this,' Gaeta wrote in a statement read to the judge by his lawyer. 'I wish I could make amends for it. I don't know why I did it.' Gaeta was a 17-year-old high school student at the time of the attack and lived in the house next door to Wright. Gabriel Gaeta was sentenced to 40 years to life in prison on Tuesday. He wept in court According to court documents, Jenise Wright died of blunt force trauma to the head, and there was evidence she was strangled Gaeta was a seventeen-year-old high school student at the time who lived next door to the girl The court heard that the girl was strangled, sexually assaulted and had blunt-force trauma to the head resulting in multiple skull fractures. Jenise's body was found almost entirely submerged in a muddy bog in the woods next to the mobile-home park where she lived. After a five-day search, cops found a small wood pallet over the body, and also located a nylon duffel bag on top of the pallet. They earlier discovered Jenise's underwear and shorts about 15 to 20 feet from where her body was found. Authorities say forensic evidence analyzed by the Washington state crime lab linked the clothing to the teen's DNA. Jenise's mother, Denise Wright, told the judge: 'She was the sunshine in our family, now it is gone. 'She has no life to experience and I feel that he shouldn't have one either. 'There are no words to explain our pain and loss. I will never get to see her grow up and become a beautiful woman.' Wright wept as she told the judge she will miss out on her daughters first kiss, first boyfriend, high school and college graduations and her wedding. Jenise's mother, Denise Wright, told the judge: 'She was the sunshine in our family, now it is gone' Wright wept as she told the judge she will miss out on her daughters (pictured) first kiss, first boyfriend, high school and college graduations and her wedding During the investigation, the sheriff's office collected DNA cheek swabs from dozens of nearby residents, including Gaeta. The judge concluded that Gaeta did not have a fully developed brain when he committed the crime, and that she was required by law to take into account the Miller factors which take into account the maturity level of the suspect. Those factors include a person's childhood, life experience, degree of responsibility and probability of rehabilitation. The judge accepted the plea agreement which called for 40 years to life in prison for the murder charge and 123 months for the rape charge which can be served concurrently. He apologized Monday in court, saying he wished he could make amends and that he doesn't know why he did it. Authorities say forensic evidence analyzed by the Washington state crime lab linked the clothing to the teen's DNA. He is pictured above in court on Monday Forensics teams examine homes surrounding the crime scene in Bremerton, Washington shortly after the crime Stephen Colbert slammed Trump's controversial zero tolerance immigration crackdown on Monday night with a gutting segment where he took aim at the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and her recent attempts to defend separating migrant children from their parents at the border. Nielsen was trotted out to answer questions on the subject on Monday as criticism of the policy grew and heartbreaking images of toddlers weeping as they were confronted by border agents began to spread online. Under the 'zero tolerance policy', children are taken from the adults they are found with when trying to enter the country and are placed in shelters until they can be given different homes with relatives in their native country while the adults are put in US detention centers to face prosecution or deportation. One of the many reasons Nielsen gave to justify the practice was that some of the people presenting themselves as families on the border were not in fact related. Others have since suggested that the adults carrying the kids may be gang members or criminals posing as parents to improve their chances of entry. This June 12 image shows a toddler weeping as her Honduran mother is questioned by border patrol agents at the Texan border. Not long afterwards, they would have been separated as her mother was put in custody and she was taken to a detention center. The Trump administration has claimed that there is an increase in the number of people posing as families to gain entry to the US. Since the start of the 2018 fiscal year, there have been 191 cases of this compared to 46 in the entire fiscal year of 2017 'We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are in fact a family,' she said. In 2017, 46 cases of it occurred. There have been 191 cases in the first five months of this fiscal year, the Department of Homeland Security said afterwards. Colbert tore through Nielsen's claim, sarcastically suggesting that the children may not even be children but 'adults with shoes on their knees'. He made consistent reference to them being held in 'child prisons' and accused him of orchestrating an 'all baby reboot of The Shawshank Redemption'. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was put in front of the media on Monday to answer questions about the policy. She said she and others were just 'doing their job' 'Yes who can tell if these weeping toddlers are even part of a family? They might not even be toddlers! They might be adults with shoes on their knees!' Colbert fumed. He also accused her of hypocritically turning immigrants away from the US when she was likely the daughter of migrants herself, basing his argument on her European name. 'Some say the policy doesn't even exist like Secretary of Homeland Security, and definitely not the descendant of immigrants, Kirstjen Nielsen, who tweeted yesterday: "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period." 'Then why are you locking up kids in an abandoned Walmart?!' he asked. Colbert also took aim at White House Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller who he called an 'impotent tool' and later parodied the president as the devil. 'Trump's defenders are wrong and they are bad. But it's important to give the devil his due. He's the sponsor,' he said. Nielsen was somewhat of an unknown figure in the administration until she appeared on Monday to answer reporters' questions on the subject. Colbert was furious with Nielsen's attempts to justify the policy and jokingly cheered, like a cheerleader: '2, 4, 6, 8, who do we incarcerate? Kids! Goooooooo.... to the cages!' At the end of his monologue, the comedian deemed all of Trump's disciples on the subject 'bad and wrong' Her response that the administration was merely 'doing its job' has been met with ire and fury across the aisle with many accusing her of giving an unemotional answer to a deeply emotional issue. Conservatives, however, are standing by the policy and say the media is exaggerating the conditions at the detention centers where the people found at the border are being held. Fox's Laura Ingraham sparked controversy on Monday by claiming the children's centers were more like 'summer camps' than prisons while Conservative pundit Ann Coulter argued that the children being pictured weeping are 'child actors'. President Trump has blamed the saga on the Democrats and says it is their 'cruel' legislation which forces agents to separate families. The top United Nations Human Rights official has slammed it as 'unconscionable' and even First Lady Melania Trump has spoken out to condemn the practice. The camps are in Texas where, as of Tuesday morning, more than 1,100 people were being held. The inside of a dormitory at the Tornillo facility, a shelter for children of detained migrants, is seen in this photo provided by the US Department of Health and Human Services, in Tornillo, Texas A detention center where children are being held behind cages walls and where they are sleeping on thin bed mats with foil blankets Aziz Rehman has been jailed for three years and nine months years after abusing his wife A wife kept prisoner in her own home for 16 years feared she would die at the hands of her abusive husband who imprisoned her in their home and subjected her to vicious beatings. Aziz Rehman 'ran his house like a prison' while he routinely beat and belittled Zeenit Bibi. The 36-year-old only escaped after she confided in a friend while her husband was on a ten-day break in Greece - where, she later found out, he was getting married to another woman. Shop owner Rehman, from Birmingham, denied coercive and controlling behaviour and assaulting his wife, but was found guilty by a jury last month. He was jailed for three years and nine months years at Birmingham Crown Court today, following a two-week trial. Mrs Bibi said she felt like she was trapped 'in a bubble with no exits', as Rehman cut her off from her family, including her six brothers and sisters, and friends. She was banned from having a phone and kept locked up in the family home when he was away, only allowed out for the school run, or accompanied by him or his mother. He secretly wedged twigs in the front door so he could check if his wife had left the house without his permission and beat her before apologising or buying gifts. Mrs Bibi said that 'in the last two years, he went to the next level', completely closing her off from everyone else. Zeenit Bibi escaped after she confided in a friend while her husband was on a ten-day break in Greece - where, she later found out, he was getting married to another woman The turning point came in the aftermath of a violent assault in their home, leaving her fearing she would die on May 4, 2016 - 'the last day he laid a hand on me'. 'He was very physically abusive,' she said. 'To the extent where the last time he was abusive I didn't think I was going to make it. 'I had dumbbells put on my head, I had a foldable chair hit on my knee, I wasn't walking properly. 'I was left, for those four days, I wasn't allowed to go the doctor's, I wasn't allowed to be in the hospital. 'My ribs were done in, my knees were done in, and I told people, "It's OK - I fell over the lawnmower". 'At that point I thought, "Well, this ain't happening anymore", because I physically did think I wasn't going to be there. 'It was that time when I decided I can't be doing this anymore.' Having confided in a friend, they told a teacher at the local school while police and social services supported her. Following his arrest Rehman fled to Pakistan for 10 months while on bail, but flew back to the UK via Norway, France and Scotland, then drove across the English border. Mrs Bibi discovered he had returned and notified police, before Rehman handed himself in. Speaking of her decision to leave, she said: 'That's the best thing I ever did. I couldn't shout this out any louder than what I am now. 'Speak up about it, talk to that one person, otherwise, you might not see tomorrow.' West Midlands Police said since legislation was introduced in 2015 to tackle controlling and coercive relationships, 35 people in the force area had been charged. Dramatic footage has revealed the moment police officers drag a woman through a window of a Mustang after a high speed chase. The Perth Organised Crime Squad had tried to stop the car earlier but the driver sped off so the officers gave chase. Police caught up to her after the silver Mustang she was driving collided with a Suzuki Swift on the Reid Highway. Dramatic footage shows a police officer dragging a woman out of a car (pictured) They had followed the woman, who was driving a silver Mustang till she crashed Footage shows a police officer pulling the woman out of the car and putting her on the ground before another one jumps over the crashed car to help with the arrest. Children were inside the car at the time but were uninjured. A police officer suffered minor injuries in the incident. The dramatic arrest caused chaos on the Highway with the eastbound lane closedbetween Tonkin Highway and Malaga Drive for part of the afternoon. 'Traffic is back to Reid Highway and congestion is heavy in the surrounding area. Please be patient, allow extra travel time and seek alternative routes,' Main Roads Western Australia posted over social media shortly after the event. Elon-gate: Elon Musk (above in March) accused an employee of 'making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames' on Sunday Elon Musk has accused a Tesla employee of 'extensive and damaging sabotage including making direct code changes to the companys manufacturing system under false usernames and passing highly sensitive data to unknown third parties. In a company-wide email sent a few minutes before midnight on Sunday, and obtained by CNBC, Musk wrote that the so-far-unnamed employee has admitted to his acts, and that he said he had carried out this sabotage as a form of payback after being passed over for a position. However, the Tesla and SpaceX boss added the saboteur may not have been working alone: As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die before urging his employees to be extremely vigilant. 'The full extent of his actions are not yet clear, but what he has admitted to so far is pretty bad. His stated motivation is that he wanted a promotion that he did not receive. In light of these actions, not promoting him was definitely the right move,' wrote Musk in the email obtained by CNBC. 'However, there may be considerably more to this situation than meets the eye, so the investigation will continue in depth this week. We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations.' The so-far-unnamed employee is now being investigated for corporate espionage. Scroll down for video and Musk's email in full: Little red Tesla Model 3: Just two days prior, Musk had sent a company-wide email calling for an increase in the production of Tesla Model 3 at manufacturing facilities (a Model 3 comes off the line above) Musk also took the opportunity to drive home production goals that he stated two days earlier in his correspondence with staff when he had called for an increase in production numbers. 'All parts of the Model 3 production system are now above 500 and some are almost at 700 cars already. Congratulations to all on making so much progress!' wrote Musk in the email, which was obtained by CNBC. He went on to say however that 'radical improvements' were needed in order to 'achieve sustained, 700+ per week on the body line.' 'Looking forward to having a great week with you as we charge up the super exciting ramp to 5000 Model 3 cars per week!' wrote Musk. 'Will follow this up with emails every few days describing the progress and challenges of the Model 3 ramp.' Musk previously looked into the possibility of sabotage from back in 2016, when a Space X rocket exploded just before an engine test. In that case, Musk believed that the saboteur was possibly from United Launch Alliance The Washington Post later reported, with Space X employees reporting that a concerning shadow and unidentifiable white object were seen on the company's roof during the test. Musk also tweeted at the time: 'Particularly trying to understand the quieter bang sound a few seconds before the fireball goes off. May come from rocket or something else.' ULA refused to allow SpaceX access to its roof to investigate, but an independent team from the Air Force found no evidence of any tampering or questionable actions. ELON MUSK ACCUSES 'ROGUE EMPLOYEE' OF 'SABOTAGE' To: Everybody Subject: Some concerning news June 17, 2018 11:57 p.m. I was dismayed to learn this weekend about a Tesla employee who had conducted quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations. This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties. The full extent of his actions are not yet clear, but what he has admitted to so far is pretty bad. His stated motivation is that he wanted a promotion that he did not receive. In light of these actions, not promoting him was definitely the right move. However, there may be considerably more to this situation than meets the eye, so the investigation will continue in depth this week. We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations. As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world they don't love the idea of Tesla advancing the progress of solar power & electric cars. Don't want to blow your mind, but rumor has it that those companies are sometimes not super nice. Then there are the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors. If they're willing to cheat so much about emissions, maybe they're willing to cheat in other ways? Most of the time, when there is theft of goods, leaking of confidential information, dereliction of duty or outright sabotage, the reason really is something simple like wanting to get back at someone within the company or at the company as a whole. Occasionally, it is much more serious. Please be extremely vigilant, particularly over the next few weeks as we ramp up the production rate to 5k/week. This is when outside forces have the strongest motivation to stop us. If you know of, see or suspect anything suspicious, please send a note to [email address removed for privacy] with as much info as possible. This can be done in your name, which will be kept confidential, or completely anonymously. Looking forward to having a great week with you as we charge up the super exciting ramp to 5000 Model 3 cars per week! Will follow this up with emails every few days describing the progress and challenges of the Model 3 ramp. Thanks for working so hard to make Tesla successful, Elon Source: CNBC Advertisement On Monday night, Musk confirmed on Twitter that a tent had been pitched at Tesla's facility in Freemont to house a new production line for the company's Model 3 vehicles. The company started taking pre-orders for the Model 3 in late February, and despite reports of problems Tesla has said that it expects to reach volume by September. Musk said in his email on Sunday that many are against the company: 'As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die. These include Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more. 'Then there are the oil & gas companies, the wealthiest industry in the world they don't love the idea of Tesla advancing the progress of solar power & electric cars. Don't want to blow your mind, but rumor has it that those companies are sometimes not super nice.' He continued: 'Then there are the multitude of big gas/diesel car company competitors. If they're willing to cheat so much about emissions, maybe they're willing to cheat in other ways?' Musk sent a separate email as well to employees informing them of a 'small fire' on Sunday at a company facility. That was attributed to a 'smoldering in an air filter in the welding area of the body line.' There were no injuries and 'the smoldering was extinguished in a matter of seconds,' said the company, not revealing at what facility the fire broke out. 'Please be on the alert for anything thats not in the best interests of our company,' noted Musk in that email. It is not known if the alleged saboteur is part of the nine percent of the company's workforce that was being laid off, a cut that did not impact Model # production workers. Teslas profitability is dependent of its Model 3 output, which is intended for mass production. In the wake of Musk's email being leaked, Tesla's stock price slipped 53 cents to $370.30 in after-hours trading on Monday. Lee Okrasa, 38, from Sheffield, was on a stag holiday in Benidorm when he died on Sunday, though it is not clear how A father-of-two has died while on a stag party holiday to Benidorm with his friends. Lee Okrasa, 38, from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, was killed at the Spanish resort on Sunday, though it is not yet clear how he died. Devastated partner Lindsay described Mr Okrasa as her 'forever' man and said his sudden death has left her 'broken'. Mr Okrasa did not have insurance for his trip so a family friend created a GoFundMe page in order to raise the 5,000 to have his remains repatriated. Lindsay posted on the fundraising page, thanking donors for their kind gifts. She said: 'I miss him so much and I can't express the devastation I feel but your kind words and generosity are so kind. Thank you to each and every one of you.' On her Facebook page she expressed her sadness at such a great loss. She said: 'Words cannot describe how utterly devastated we are. I am numb with pain, sorrow, guilt, loss and every other emotion I can't put into words. 'It doesn't seem real and I can't accept it. 'Please don't take your loved ones for granted and give them an extra special squeeze tonight.' Family friend Scarlett Cooper, who launched the online appeal, said: 'Lee was an amazing, genuine guy who was loved by many.' Friends posting on Facebook have also expressed their shock and heartbreak at Mr Okrasa's death. Partner Lindsay said Mr Okrasa was her 'forever' man and she has been left 'broken' by his death. Friends are raising 5,000 to have his remains repatriated to the UK Keeley Shaw Lindsay said: 'I have no words. Lee will be sadly missed.' Molly Sisson added: 'What a lovely, genuine man. Only met him a handful of times but what an absolute gentleman. What memories we have to cherish him by. 'He will be sadly missed.' Laura Diaz Ward posted: 'I'm absolutely gutted. Lee was amazing he will definitely be missed.' Gavin Carder added: 'So sad to hear - always such a nice guy when I saw him..' A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said: 'We are providing assistance to the family of a British man who died on June 17 in Benidorm.' A 16-year-old Utah girl has died after losing her footing and plummeting 100 feet from a waterfall while hiking with a friend on Monday. Kaylee Marvin was pronounced dead after suffering critical injuries to her head and leg in the fall in Santaquin Canyon. At around 10.25am on Monday, deputies with the Utah County Sheriff's Office responded to a report of an injured hiker. Scroll down for video Tragic fall: Kaylee Marvin, 16, was hiking with a friend in Utah's Santaquin Canyon on Monday when she slipped and fell 100 feet to her death The fatal accident took place at the Old Pioneer Log Chute waterfall, located about 4 miles from the entrance to the canyon The area where the incident happened in called the Old Pioneer Log Chute, located about four miles from the entrance to the canyon. According to information from the sheriffs office, Marvin was attempting to cross a log to go over a small seasonal waterfall near the top of a steep climb when she slipped. She then fell about 100 feet straight down. According to the sheriffs office, her hiking partner rushed to her aid and administered CPR, then called 911 to summon help. When a Santaquin police officer and deputies arrived on the scene, they took over CPR until paramedics responded to the canyon, along with a search and rescue crew and an AidMed helicopter. The medics spent 40 minutes attempting to revive Marvin with the aid of a defibrillator before pronouncing her dead on the scene, reported Deseret News. Marvin (pictured as a young girl, left, and in her prom dress in 2016, right), suffered critical head and leg injuries. Despite paramedics' efforts to save her, the 16-year-old passed away Parents: The girl's mother (right) works as a hair stylist and had just opened her own salon in February. Her father (left) appears to be a retired serviceman. Huge family: The 16-year-old is survived by her parents and seven brothers and sisters Fox 13 Now reported that Marvins father was also hiking in the area at the time and was present when the girl passed away. USCO Detectives continue to investigate this case but at this point there is nothing suspicious and this death appears to be a tragic accident, a press release from the sheriffs office stated. Santaquin Canyon is closed to the public until further notice. The public is being asked to stay away from the area. Utah County Sheriff's Sgt. Spencer Cannon said the girls family described Marvin as beautiful inside and out. The sheriff's office has released a trio of photos showing Marvin sitting with her dog, showing off her prom dress and posing with her large family. According to social media posts, the 16-year-old is survived by her parents and seven brothers and sisters. Her mother works as a hair stylist and had just opened her own salon in February. Her father appears to be a retired serviceman. A grieving father has paid tribute to his son who was found dead along with his mother on the cliffs at Beachy Head. Cheryl Tompsett, 42, and her son Leo who were from Maidstone in Kent, were found by emergency crews early yesterday morning. Leo's body was found on a ledge half way down the cliff near Eastbourne, East Sussex while his mother, who worked as a wellbeing and bereavement counsellor, was found on the beach. The youngster's grief-stricken father today paid an emotional tribute to his beloved son, saying his 'shining light and brightest star has had his life cut short.' Police said there was nothing to suggest Leo was disabled, despite earlier reports. The body of Leo, five, was found on ledge halfway down the cliff near Eastbourne, East Sussex Emergency services were called to Beachy Head yesterday after Leo and his mother (pictured) died Police confirmed they are investigating the incident, but are not looking for anyone else in connection with the deaths. In a statement, Leo's father said: 'With more sadness and hurt than anyone can imagine, our precious Leo who was our shining light, our brightest star has had his life cut short. 'We all miss him an amount beyond what anyone else can imagine and would request that our privacy is respected at this very difficult time.' Cheryl Tompsett worked as an emotional wellbeing specialist for Ashford-based charity CXK where she had been for 10 months before her death. Pauline Smith, chief executive of the charity said today: 'We are shocked and saddened by the news and we would like to send the family our sympathies.' Cheryl also specialised in bereavement counselling for both children and adults and worked with the mental health charity, MIND. According to her LinkedIn profile, she had a 'passion for working with clients both young and old on the Autistic spectrum'. Beachy Head where the bodies of a mother and son from Kent were found Eastbourne, East Sussex Cheryl delivered bereavement workshops for young people and recently set up her own private practice in Maidstone where she accepted referrals. Detective Inspector Simon Dunn of Sussex Police, said: 'Our investigation continues in this tragic case, however, at this time, there is nothing to suggest that anyone else was involved in their deaths. Detectives are in the process of piecing together the last moments of their lives.' Emergency crews pictured at the scene of the tragedy yesterday A coastguard helicopter at the scene yesterday morning after the bodies were recovered Lifeboats and a rescue helicopter were scrambled around 6am yesterday after reports of the woman a child going over the cliff-top. A Vauxhall Corsa, believed to have been found at the scene, is being investigated by police in connection with the deaths. A lifeboat crew, pictured at the base of the cliff yesterday morning, took part in the recovery It comes just days after three bodies were recovered from the base of the famous cliffs near Eastbourne. Emergency services were alerted last Wednesday, and with assistance from the Eastbourne RNLI inshore lifeboat recovered the body of a 58-year-old man from London. Shortly after 5pm, while this was in progress, a second, badly decomposed body, believed to be that of a woman, was found nearby. Then some 40 minutes later a third body, believed to be that of another man from London, was discovered some distance away. Police said those three deaths were not being treated as suspicious and were not linked to one another. More than 350,000 people visit the cliffs at Birling Gap and Seven Sisters each year. For confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123 or see www.samaritans.org. A lawyer for Julian Assange has urged the UN to make an official visit to see how the WikiLeaks founder has been affected by living inside the Ecuadorian embassy for the past six years. Jennifer Robinson told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that Mr Assange was unable to obtain proper medical attention and was being denied sunlight or outdoor access. A vigil will be held outside the embassy in London tonight, six years to the day since he arrived, later to be granted political asylum by the South American country. Jennifer Robinson told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that Mr Assange (pictured on the balcony of the embassy last year) was unable to obtain proper medical attention and was being denied sunlight or outdoor access Ms Robinson told the UN that the British authorities had made it clear that if Mr Assange leaves the embassy to seek medical treatment he will be arrested. The US administration has said that prosecuting him is a 'priority', said Ms Robinson. 'He cannot leave the embassy because the UK will not provide assurances against extradition to the US. 'The UK is showing deliberate disregard for his medical needs,' she said, adding that the UN should send a special rapporteur to visit the embassy. His confinement in the embassy is having a 'severe impact' on his physical and mental health, she said. He was being asked to choose between his human right to asylum and his human right to medical treatment, said Ms Robinson, adding: 'No-one should have to make that choice.' Protesters gather to support Julian Assange outside the British consulate in Melbourne, Australia, at a separate rally in the WikiLeaks founder's home country John Shipton, the father of Julian Assange attends a rally outside the British consulate in Melbourne today. A vigil in London is planned for tonight Mr Assange is wanted by the Metropolitan Police for breaching bail conditions in 2012. An international arrest warrant was issued for Mr Assange in 2010 after Swedish authorities said they wished to speak to him in connection with a rape investigation. Sweden, however, binned the probe last year. Ms Robinson reminded the council that in 2016 the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that Mr Assange was being arbitrarily detained. It called on the Swedish and British authorities to end his 'deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation'. Mr Assange's internet access was cut off in March and restrictions were placed on who can visit him after he tweeted his support for separatist movements in Catalonia in Spain. Ms Robinson visited him earlier this month, with officials from the Australian High Commission in London. Online shoppers are being warned after parcel thieves were caught stealing packages from doorsteps. A Melbourne home security footage shows a parcel dropped off by a courier being stolen minutes later. The alleged crime was captured by Abbotsford resident, Byrn Thomas's home security and said the parcel was a dress for his wife. Online shoppers are being warned after parcel thieves were caught stealing packages from doorsteps Mr Thomas said it was a feeling of disbelief which turned into anger that this was happening in his neighbourhood, 9NEWS reported. Mr Thomas said he normally gets his parcels delivered to his house and it was the first incident where someone had stolen the package. He also said, I wont be sending anything of real value to the house. Mr Thomas believes the alleged thief followed the courier. The footage has been handed over to police, but the woman still hasnt been caught. A Melbourne home security footage shows a parcel being dropped off by a courier and stolen minutes later by a woman Police say they normally dont keep data on parcel theft and its usual for thieves to steal parcels by following delivery vans. Its recommended by Australia Post that parcels should be delivered to a secure locker or the local post office. If the parcel is left behind without a signature, nothing can be done other than informing the police. A leading ejector seat manufacturer has carried out a spectacular high altitude test as it works to rebuild its reputation. Martin-Baker was fined 1.1million four months ago at Lincoln Crown Court for a breach of health and safety law that led to the death of a Red Arrows pilot. Now, dramatic photographs have shown the British company using a Gloster Meteor made famous in the Second World War for its first UK test in eight years. Ejector seat maker Martin-Baker has carried out a high altitude test in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire The test was carried out last week at Martin-Baker's facility in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire, and the firm described it as 'truly unique' and a 'huge success'. The company, which makes seats for fighter jets including the F-35 and the Eurofighter Typhoon, uses two of the oldest military planes still flying for its tests. The Gloster Meteors first took flight in 1943 and were used to intercept German V1 flying bombs, but they have been employed by Martin-Baker for testing since 1946. The plane is still in use despite its age because it is affordable and ticks most of the boxes required for seat testing. Using a newer plane would be far more expensive and would lead to little gain for the purposes of the test. The ejector seats are fitted with dummies installed in the rear cockpits of the two planes, which have completed more than 700 ejector seat tests between them. A Meteor made famous in the Second World War was used in its first UK test in eight years The test comes after Martin-Baker admitted failing to ensure the safety of non-employees in connection with the death of a Red Arrows pilot. Martin-Baker admitted a health and safety law breach in connection with the death of Red Arrows pilot Sean Cunningham in 2011 Flight Lieutenant Sean Cunningham was killed after being ejected from his Hawk T1 jet on the ground at RAF Scampton, Lincolnshire, on November 8, 2011. The parachute on the Mark 10B ejector seat did not deploy and the airman, who had been conducting pre-flight checks, fell 200ft before he later died in hospital. At Lincoln Crown Court in February, the firm was scolded for falling 'short of the appropriate standard' and causing 'an entirely preventable tragedy'. But the company, which paid 550,000 in prosecution costs, was praised by the judge and Health & Safety Executive for its track record in saving lives. Martin-Baker, based in Uxbridge, West London, has designed and made ejector seats for 73 years, in which time they have been flown by 92 air forces. The company claims its seats have saved the lives of 1,050 Royal Air Force and Royal Navy aircrew with a further 6,510 aircrew lives saved around the world. Gloster Meteor planes are pictured over London in 1946. The aircraft first took flight in 1943 and were used to intercept German V1 flying bombs Founded by Sir James Martin, the firm is now run by his sons, 75-year-old twins John and James Martin - and last year the family shared dividends of 32million. Gloster Meteor profile Engines : Two Rolls-Royce Derwent 8s Span: 37ft 2in Maximum weight: 15,700lbs Top speed: 598 mph Maximum range: 600 miles First flight: March 1943, RAF Cranwell Production: 3,875 aircraft Advertisement The Martin family was number 176 on the Sunday Times Rich List last year, with an estimated wealth of 730 million. A news release on the firm's website said yesterday: 'The Martin-Baker Meteor aircraft is back in action with its first UK test in eight years at the companys test facility in Chalgrove, Oxfordshire. 'The high altitude ejection test carried out last week was a huge success. The high altitude test capabilities at Martin-Baker are truly unique. 'We are the only ejection seat company across the globe that has the ability to carry out these remarkable tests.' The company has won 11 Queen's Awards and has more than 17,000 seats in service. Police were left dumbfounded after thieves pulled off a Mission Impossible-style robbery using wires to rappel from the cieling of a store and swipe $100k of Apple tech. Cops in Dunwoody, Georgia, said the crafty robbers broke into the Best Buy store and punched a hole in the ceiling before climbing down to where the electricals were kept on June 8. So impressed were officers attending the scene that Sgt. Robert Parsons of Dunwood Police compared the crime to a movie heist. Police said the thieves punched a hole in the ceiling of the Best Buy store before rappelling down and stealing the goods 'It's a bizarre case, it's a "Mission Impossible" style burglary,' Sgt. Parsons told WSB TV Atlanta. According to Parsons, once inside the burglars burrowed into a storage room and stole thousands in iPhones, iPads, Macbooks and more. Police said they are investigating whether there is a connection between the crime and a spate of recent electrical heists in Florida and Texas. There was said to be no CCTV footage of the daring entry to the store but police are searching for images from nearby which could give a vital clue as to the criminal's identities. 'iPhones, iPads, MacBooks all those Apple products had been removed from a secure storage area,' Parsons added. 'We're looking to see if these are related to burglaries that have occurred in Texas and Florida. There are other reports nationwide of this type of thing happening with a very similar MO.' The theft took place at a Best Buy store in the town of Dunwoody, Georgia earlier this month An ex-Oklahoma police officer is in custody after being charged with kidnapping and domestic abuse of a Florida woman he met online. James Glen Otterbine, 32, of El Reno, Oklahoma, was arrested June 12 after local authorities received a 911 call from a woman crying for help in escaping from a car she was locked inside. At the time of the incident, Otterbine and the woman, who has not been named, were said to have been in a two-month relationship which began online. James Glen Otterbine, 32, of Oklahoma, was arrested and charged with kidnapping and domestic abuse of a woman he was in a relationship with after she called 911 seeking help The woman told authorities that Otterbine had paid for a plane ticket for her to travel from her home in Miami, Florida, to Oklahoma several weeks ago so that they could 'further their relationship', the Canadian County Sheriff's Office said in a statement on Facebook. But, the victim said that after she arrived in Oklahoma, Otterbine had become increasingly physically violent towards her. Examples of his behavior, she said, included occurrences in which he had duct taped and handcuffed her to a chair during an argument, tied her up and locked her in his basement with the lights off, threatened her life multiple times and, once, even threatened murder-suicide. On June 12, police said the woman called 911 'crying and pleading to be let out of the car she was a passenger in' while on a highway heading towards El Reno. While police were en route to her location, the call was disconnected. However, police were able to use her phone number to identify her and contact her family members, who indicated that she was in Oklahoma, staying with Otterbine. On the way to Otterbine's residence, authorities received another call from the woman, who said that she had managed to escape and run away, on foot, to MidFirst Bank, two blocks away from Otterbine's home. Police said they found the woman in a state of shock at the bank and that she appeared to have been bruised and battered from her escape. Authorities then confirmed that Otterbine was the person she had fled from and that she last saw him at his home. At Otterbine's home, police placed him in investigative detention and read him his rights. Otterbine, a former police officer, agreed to speak with investigators and was taken to the Canadian County Sheriff's Office. After calling authorities, the Florida woman said she managed to escape from Otterbine and run to MidFirst Bank, two blocks away from his home, which was where police found her Otterbine gave authorities a different version of the events which led up to the woman's 911 calls. He said that the abuse and torture she told authorities about was actually part of their consensual relationship and that she enjoyed 'rough sex'. Otterbine described the woman's claims of violence as being 'spats' and said that his 10-year-old son was actually in the home during one of those incidents. Following his talk with investigators, Otterbine was booked on charges of kidnapping and domestic abuse in the presence of a child. His bond was set at $30,000. Otterbine was working as a police officer with the Geary Police Department until he was terminated from the force in early June, a department spokesperson told Tulsa World. The spokesperson said that Otterbine had not been on active duty for several months due to a medical condition and that he was in the midst of a civil suit against the city. Otterbine had previously also worked for Oklahoma's El Reno and Minco police departments, according to his LinkedIn page. An attorney who released harrowing audio of immigrants aged four to 12 wailing as they were being separated from their families at a detention center has slammed the policy for 'traumatizing and abusing' already vulnerable children. Jennifer Harbury claimed on Tuesday many of the detained children were the sons and daughters of refugees who had fled drug-related violence and threats from cartels in southern and central America. 'I'm astounded that America of all places, my father having arrived at Ellis Island also frightened out of his wits at age 11, would stoop to traumatizing and abusing children of refugees,' she told CBS. "The whistleblower did in fact make that tape recording in person and brought it to me," Civil Rights Attorney Jennifer Harbury told @GayleKing. She claims she received the audio from a client, who says it was recorded last week. pic.twitter.com/Ib2iI26pKr CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) June 19, 2018 'How have we come to this?' Harbury asked, before explaining how she received the tape from the whistleblower of 'impeccable integrity' inside a detention facility near the Mexican border. 'The whistleblower did in fact make that tape recording in person and brought it to me,' she said. Harbury said she would not release the name of the detention facility to protect the identity of the whistleblower, but provided some more details. 'The place in the facility is where children have been brought after they were separated from their parents,' she said. 'Those are the small children like age 12 down to 4 that you hear on the tape. There are also some teenagers that fled the cartels, for example, ran for their lives, and they're unaccompanied for that reason and they're also in the back of that room.' During the eight-minute tape, published on Monday by ProPublica, children are heard screaming 'Mami' and 'Papa' just moments before the border agent drowns out their sobs with a joke. 'Well, we have an orchestra here,' he's heard saying. 'What's missing is a conductor.' Harbury said ProPublica was able to identify one of the children as six-year-old Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, who was separated from her mother last week at a US Customs and Border Protection facility. The little girl was heard repeatedly asking for some to call her aunt, giving her cellphone number. When a ProPublica reporter spoke to the aunt she confirmed the child had been separated from her family and locked up. Jennifer Harbury claimed on Tuesday the Trump administration's policy was 'traumatizing' young immigrants, many of whom she said were refugees fleeing threats from cartels in south and central America On Friday, it was revealed that nearly 2,000 children were separated from adults at the border between mid-April and the end of May. Those children (pictured) are now living in detention centers along the US-Mexico border During a White House press briefing on Monday, Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, claimed she had not heard the audio. When she was asked whether or not she had seen the photos of the children in cages, Nielsen said: 'I would reference you to our standards.' DailyMail.com reached out to US Customs and Border Protection, but a request for comment was not immediately returned. Trump may discuss the policy at a meeting late Tuesday afternoon with House Republicans. The audio was released just a day after it was revealed that border agents have reportedly been telling illegal immigrant parents that they are taking their children 'for a bath' before separating them. Anne Chandler, the director of the Houston office of Tahirih Justice Center said she's spoken with several parents who were told their children were going to get washed, before guards informed them they would never see their kids again. For nearly eight minutes, children are heard crying for their parents as a callous border agent cracks jokes inside what is believed to be an immigration facility. The heartbreaking audio was of six-year-old, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid (right) and other children in the facility Throughout the audio Alison and other children are repeatedly heard screaming 'Mami' and 'Papa' just moments before the border agent drowns out their sobs with a joke 'Well, we have an orchestra here,' the agent is heard saying. 'What's missing is a conductor' She made the stunning claims as heartbreaking photos were released showing have inside of a processing center in Texas, where illegal immigrant children are taken. On Friday, it was revealed that nearly 2,000 children were separated from adults at the border between mid-April and the end of May. Those children are now living in detention centers along the US-Mexico border. 'The officers say, 'I'm going to take your child to get bathed.' That's one we see again and again. 'Your child needs to come with me for a bath,'' Chandler told Texas Monthly. 'The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, 'Where is my five-year-old? Where's my seven-year-old? This is a long bath.' And they say, 'You won't be seeing your child again.'' Chandler said that in some cases agents simply tell the parents that they are taking their children away. 'And when the parent asks, 'When will we get them back?' they say, 'We can't tell you that,'' she said. During a White House press briefing, Kirstjen Nielsen (pictured), the Secretary of Homeland Security, claimed she had not heard the audio The audio was released just a day after it was revealed that border agents have reportedly been telling illegal immigrant parents that they are taking their children 'for a bath' before separating them Anne Chandler, the director of the Houston office of Tahirih Justice Center said she's spoken with several parents who said they were told their children were going to get a bath before they were separated Chandler said the officers also tell the parents that they are going to 'prosecuted' or that they aren't 'welcome in this country'. In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a 'zero tolerance' policy in which all those apprehended entering the US illegally, including those seeking asylum, would be criminally charged, which generally leads to children being separated from their parents. The policy has drawn condemnation from medical professionals, religious leaders and immigration activists, who warn that some children could suffer lasting psychological trauma. But nonetheless, the children are separated from their parents, held in government facilities, released to adult sponsors or placed in temporary foster care. Heartbreaking photos showed the inside of the largest Border Patrol processing station in the US, which is located in McAllen, Texas. The US Border Patrol allowed reporters to briefly visit the facility on Sunday. Children were seen sleeping side-by-side in a cell inside the McAllen detention center, where one teen says she has been changing a baby's diaper, who she doesn't know, because the baby was separated from her family Inside the old warehouse, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water and bags of chips. Children were seen lying on dark green mats with large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets. Other photos show children in single-file line and sitting next to one another. One teenager told an advocate who visited that she was helping care for a young child she didn't know because the child's aunt was somewhere else in the facility. She said she had to show others in her cell how to change the girl's diaper. More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility that's divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. The cages in each wing open out into common areas to use portable restrooms. The overhead lighting in the warehouse stays on around the clock. According to the Border Patrol, close to 200 people inside the facility were minors unaccompanied by a parent. Another 500 were 'family units,' parents and children. Many adults who crossed the border without legal permission could be charged with illegal entry and placed in jail, away from their children. Other photos show children in single-file line and sitting next to one another like 'caged-animals' The McAllen facility is reportedly where more kids are separated from their parents than anywhere else in the US Inside the old warehouse, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing About 1,100 illegal immigrants (pictured) are being held at McAllen detention center in crowded conditions, including children who have been separated from their families The McAllen facility is reportedly where more kids are separated from their parents than anywhere else in the US. Administration officials have defended the tactic as necessary to secure the border and suggested it would act as a deterrent to illegal immigration, while Trump has sought to blame Democrats, saying their support for passage of a broader immigration bill would end the separations. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the head of the Department of Homeland Security even bashed the media on Sunday for 'misreporting'. 'This misreporting by Members, press & advocacy groups must stop. It is irresponsible and unproductive. As I have said many times before, if you are seeking asylum for your family, there is no reason to break the law and illegally cross between ports of entry,' she tweeted. 'We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,' Nielsen added. 'As a mother, as a Catholic, as somebody who has got a conscience. ... I will tell you that nobody likes this policy,' White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the head of the Department of Homeland Security even bashed the media on Sunday for 'misreporting' information regarding the detention centers 'You saw the president (say) on camera that he wants this to end.' Democrats have accused Trump of effectively turning the children into political hostages to secure stricter immigration measures, such as funding for a US-Mexico border wall. 'Stop lying to the American people. This is your policy,' Democratic US Representative Hakeem Jeffries said in New Jersey. Democratic Sen Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who was denied entry earlier this month to children's shelter, said: 'Those kids inside who have been separated from their parents are already being traumatized.' 'It doesn't matter whether the floor is swept and the bedsheets tucked in tight,' he added. In Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for people trying to enter the US, Border Patrol officials argue that they have to crack down on migrants and separate adults from children as a deterrent to others. 'When you exempt a group of people from the law ... that creates a draw,' said Manuel Padilla, the Border Patrol's chief agent here. 'That creates the trends right here.' Democratic lawmakers (including Reps Jerrold Nadler, center, and Carolyn Maloney, second from right) tried to gain access to an ICE facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey on Sunday where children have been detained Reps Albio Spires (left) and Bill Pascrell (right) try to gain access to the ICE detention facility Agents running the holding facility - generally known as 'Ursula' for the name of the street it's on - said everyone detained is given adequate food, access to showers and laundered clothes, and medical care. People are supposed to move through the facility quickly. Under US law, children are required to be turned over within three days to shelters funded by the Department of Health and Human Services. Padilla said agents in the Rio Grande Valley have allowed families with children under the age of five to stay together in most cases. Democratic lawmakers joined hundreds of protesters outside an immigration detention facility in New Jersey on Sunday for a Father's Day demonstration against the Trump administration's practice of separating children from their parents. 'This must not be who we are as a nation,' said Representative Jerrold Nadler, one of seven members of Congress from New York and New Jersey who met with five detainees inside the facility, including three who said they had young relatives removed from their care after seeking asylum at the border. The lawmakers in Elizabeth waited about 90 minutes to gain access to the detention facility, which is operated for the US government by a private contractor. Trump's 'zero tolerance' policy generally leads to children being separated from their parents. The image above which was released on Sunday shows a child eating at an unaccompanied alien children program shelter in Brownsville, Texas Democrats in the US House of Representatives will introduce legislation this week aimed at stopping separations, mirroring a similar Senate bill sponsored by Democrat Dianne Feinstein. Children are pictured at the detention center in Brownsville In South Texas on Sunday, several Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Jeff Merkley, toured detention facilities to call attention to the policy, while Representative Beto O'Rourke, who is running for the US Senate in Texas, said he would march with protesters to the border. 'This is inhumane,' O'Rourke told CNN. 'I'd like to say it's un-American, but it's happening right now in America.' Some moderate Republicans have also called on Trump to stop the separations. Senators Susan Collins and Jeff Flake wrote to White House officials on Saturday seeking more information on the policy. 'It is inconsistent with our American values to separate these children from their parents,' Collins said on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday. A spokeswoman for Melania Trump told CNN on Sunday that the first lady 'hates to see children separated from their families' and hopes lawmakers from both parties can agree on immigration reform, in what was a rare public statement on a policy issue from the president's wife. Her 'Be Best' platform, unveiled in May, is dedicated to children's well-being. Democrats in the US House of Representatives will introduce legislation this week aimed at stopping separations, mirroring a similar Senate bill sponsored by Democrat Dianne Feinstein. But neither bill has much hope of securing enough support in the Republican-controlled Congress, let alone surviving Trump's veto pen. A senior MP today launched a blistering attack on Facebook - accusing the social media giant of trying to dodge questions and treating Parliament with contempt. Labour MP Helen Jones gave the company a ferocious dressing down for pulling out of appearances in front of her select committee. She warned Karim Palant, Facebook's UK public policy chief, that 'you do not play games with the House of Commons'. Her furious rebuke came as the Facebook boss joined Twitter and Google chiefs in being grilled by MPs on what they are doing to tackle online abuse and extremism. Mr Karim admitted to MPs that the tech firm took down 2.5 million hate speech posts in the first three months of the year. The grilling kicked off to a tense start when Ms Jones, the chairwoman of the petitions select committee, tore into Mr Palant and his colleagues for wriggling out of committee sessions. She said: 'Your company will not be able to avoid democratic scrutiny. It is not acceptable to try to disrupt a committee inquiry. 'You do not dictate the terms of engagement - elected members do.' Scroll down for video Facebook's policy chief was joined by Google's public policy manager Katie O'Donovan and Twitter's senior strategist Nick Pickles (who appeared via Skype on a laptop) to be grilled by the petitions committee Labour MP Helen Jones (pictured left) gave Facebook box Karim Palant (pictured right) a ferocious dressing down for pulling out of appearances in front of her select committee. She added: 'You have given the impression that your company does not feel it has to be scrutinised and, frankly, that it has something to hide, and in doing so you have done them no service at all. Justin Bieber music video one of the most complained about, YouTube chief reveals One of Justin Bieber's music videos has attracted a flood of complaints to YouTube from his music critics (file pic) Justin Bieber critics are flooding YouTube's complaints service designed to flag up abuse or extremism to demand one of his music videos is taken down, it has been revealed. Katie O'Donovan told MPs that one of the US pop star's music video was one of the most complained about posts on the website. She said this is not because he uses offensive language - but because the grammy-award winning artist, 24, is very divisive. She made the revelation as she was grilled by MPs on the petitions select committee in Parliament today. She said: 'One of the most-flagged pieces of content we have on YouTube is a Justin Bieber music video. 'It is not because there is any hate speech in there or anything that breaks our community guidelines, it's just that people who aren't Justin Bieber fans tend to flag that content.' She did not reveal which of Bieber's music videos had attracted the flood of complaints. YouTube works with 'trusted flaggers' such as the Samaritans to get an expert view on which content genuinely presents a risk, she told the committee. Advertisement 'Young men in your company may play games, but you do not play games with the House of Commons.' She warned him that the committee was ready to issue summonses to Facebook representatives to ensure that they attended to answer questions at sufficient length. Mr Palant was grilled by MPs alongside Google's public policy manager Katie O'Donovan and Twitter's senior strategist Nick Pickles - who appeared via Skype. Mr Palant said Facebook used a mixture of Artificial Intelligence and human moderators to spot and take down the content. He said: 'We have removed 2.5m pieces of hate speech in the first quarter of this year. 'With something like hate speech content, human understanding is key...we don't remove a great deal of hate speech from Facebook without it being reviewed by a human.' Mr Palant defended Facebook's record on tackling abusive content and said the site felt it had a 'clear responsibility to our users' to ensure their online safety. 'We have long had very clear policies around abuse and hate speech on our platform and the abuse of individuals using language that may degrade, may dehumanise and may abuse individuals and attack them for what we describe as protected categories,' he said. The revelation comes after Theresa May last year warned tech giants to 'go further and faster' in taking down abusive and extremist content. She warned companies must put an end to the 'safe spaces' for terrorists online after Britain and other European countries were targeted by a wave of bloody attacks. The committee hearing comes as the abuse hurled at people online is coming under the spotlight in Britain. Theresa May has vowed to crack down on it amid fears that people are being driven to despair and even suicide by online bullying. Ministers have queued up to condemn social media giants for failing to do enough tackle the problem - and warned them they face new laws if they do not radically improve things. Meanwhile, Ms O'Donovan said social media firms have to wade through 'red flags' which highlight abusive or extremist content and complaints which do not require action. The revelation comes after Theresa May (pictured in Downing Street) last year warned tech giants to 'go further and faster' in taking down abusive and extremist content. She revealed that one of Justin Bieber's music videos is one of the site's most complained about post because so many music fans do not like him. She said: 'One of the most-flagged pieces of content we have on YouTube is a Justin Bieber music video. 'It is not because there is any hate speech in there or anything that breaks our community guidelines, it's just that people who aren't Justin Bieber fans tend to flag that content.' YouTube works with 'trusted flaggers' such as the Samaritans to get an expert view on which content genuinely presents a risk, she told the committee. Bizarre footage has emerged appearing to show a man holding up a commercial flight by persistently begging passengers for money. The middle-aged man held out a plastic pouch and pleaded for help on board a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Shiraz, ignoring repeated requests from staff to sit down - reports Daily Pakistan. Some passengers even gave the man money as he stood in the aisle of the plane and delayed take-off for more than a minute. The middle-aged man held out a plastic pouch and pleaded for help onboard a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Shiraz, ignoring repeated requests from staff to sit down A male passenger at one point reaches across to offer the man some cash and puts several notes in his pouch Footage filmed by a witness went viral on social media today and has been viewed more than 25,000 times. It shows the man standing in the aisle, pleading with passengers while holding the pouch. A female member of staff approaches and says: 'Sir, please have a seat. I understand you, sir, but we're about to take off.' He nods in response but remains standing and continues to stand in the aisle. A male passenger then reaches across to offer the man some cash and puts several notes in his pouch. The man has not been identified but is reported to be an Iranian national As two more staff members urge the man to take a seat, someone else calls out to him and hands over more money. The man was still stood surrounded by cabin crew when the footage cut out. He has not been identified but is reported to be an Iranian national. Social media viewers speculated as to whether he was a paying customer or had managed to sneak onboard. AJ Amit Jadhav asked: 'Who bought the ticket for him? And, best part, people are giving money too.' Larsen De Souza said: 'This is a joke. How did he manage to board the flight?' Maria Rebello said: 'One must not encourage begging either in buses, trains or anywhere else.' A one-way flight between Doha and Shiraz, sitting in the most basic seat, costs about 400 with Qatar Airways. It has since been confirmed that the man was a paying customer. Robbie Lea (pictured) was found under almost 15 ft of water A teenage boy drowned while trying to swim back from an island in a river with his friend. Robbie Lea was found under almost 15ft of water in Lee Valley Park, after he had gone swimming with school mates on a sunny day in May last year. The Duke of Cambridge piloted an air ambulance to the scene as emergency services desperately searched for the 16-year-old boy. They found Robbie an hour later, close to where he was last seen struggling in the water. He was pronounced dead at the scene in Hertfordshire. Robbie met with Kieran Cook and Jayden Baldwin, and the friends went to the River Lea on May 25, an inquest in Hatfield heard today. Giving evidence, Detective Constable Vikki Murray said: 'They all met up to spend the day and afternoon together. They just wanted to hang around and have fun.' The boys had been to the spot before, but this was the first time they went into the water. DC Murray told the court that Jayden didnt go into the water because he 'was not as confident', while Robbie and Kieran decided to swim to an island about 30 metres from the bank. 'They both got to the island and sat for about five minutes to catch their breath,' DC Murray said. 'Kieran said it was harder than he thought it would be. They decided to swim back but it seemed further away. The Duke of Cambridge (pictured at the scene) was scrambled to pilot an air ambulance to Lee Valley Park, where Robbie was pronounced dead 'Then Kieran became aware of Robbie shouting. They were about halfway across. Kieran could see Robbie struggling. Robbie grabbed at Kieran and Robbie went under the water.' The court heard that Jayden attempted to enter the water but 'realised he would not be able to help'. Kieran made it back to the bank and called 999. Police, ambulance and fire crews rushed to the river and carried out a search for the teenager, with DC Murray adding he was located about 8.26pm under 10 to 15ft of water. At about 9pm, a paramedic pronounced him dead. In an interview with Detective Constable Martin Sturgess conducted later that evening, Kieran said that Robbie had told him his 'legs were hurting' when they reached the island. The Duke of Cambridge piloted this air ambulance to the scene where Robbie was pronounced dead after an hour-long search for his body Kieran told the DC he had tried to help his friend on the way back but Robbie was 'grabbing hold of him' and he 'feared he would drown himself and swam back to shore'. A post-mortem conducted by consultant pathologist Dr Anju Agarwal found that Robbies lungs 'were filled with lots of fluid', but that there were no signs of external injury. Dr Agarwal said the lungs were 'all puffed up', which often signifies submersion. She confirmed the conclusion of the examination was 'death by drowning'. In a statement, Robbies mother Sarah Lea said she had been worried when her son started Goffs School in Cheshunt as his friends had gone to other schools. But she added: 'He met Kieran and Jayden and they became best friends. He [Robbie] started to have an air of self-worth about him, it was great to see. 'He was a good boy, caring and loving and he was a gentleman and a good big brother. He loved his friends.' Tributes were laid at the site the day after the 16-year-old's death after he swam out to an island with his friend Mrs Lea said Robbie had swimming lessons when he was younger, but that he 'was not a strong swimmer'. She said she still spoke to Kieran and Jayden, saying they were 'good boys' and that she bore 'no ill will towards them'. The mother added: 'It comforting to know he was with his best friends having fun on a sunny day.' Senior coroner Geoffrey Sullivan said his first conclusion was 'simply one of an accident'. 'Im satisfied on the balance of probabilities that Robbie died as a result of a tragic accident, that three friends went out on a sunny afternoon, went for a swim, got into trouble and sadly [Robbie] drowned,' he said. Mr Sullivan recorded the medical cause of death as 'drowning'. Lee Valley Regional Park is a 10,000-acre 26 miles long linear park which runs through the northeast of Greater London, Essex and Hertfordshire. The area includes a network of rivers, canals and lakes. Abe Martinez, 44, was shot dead on Sunday after killing his grandmother in a hostage situation in South Salt Lake, Utah Authorities in Utah say a man fatally shot by police after he killed an elderly woman and critically injured her husband was the woman's grandson. Police on Monday identified the man who held the couple hostage as 44-year-old felon Abe Martinez and his grandmother as 89-year-old Rose Martinez. The Deseret News reports Abe Martinez escaped a Salt Lake City halfway house where he was serving out the remainder of a 15-year sentence on Saturday. The following day, he showed up at his grandmother's house in South Salt Lake on Sunday and took her and her 71-year-old husband (who is Martinez's step-grandfather) hostage. Authorities learned about the situation from family members, who called to check up on the couple and grew concerned when a strange man answered the phone at the residence. Video courtesy of KUTV Martinez also left his step-grandfather with serious injuries. Above, a man is wheeled away on a gurney from the scene. It's unclear if this is Martinez or his step-grandfather Martinez escaped from a halfway home where he was finishing the rest of a 15-year drug sentence. He showed up to his grandmother's home on Sunday and held her and her husband hostage SWAT team members killed Martinez by shooting through the window of the home Someone who called 911 told dispatchers that Martinez was attacking the couple with a knife. When officers arrived at the scene, they made contact with Martinez, who refused to come out of the building. South Salt Lake City Police Chief Jack Carruth said that officers tried to negotiate with Martinez, but he 'made it very clear his intent was to harm or to kill the individuals inside the residence'. SWAT team members then ran up to the front of the home, and shot into the house - killing Martinez. When they went inside the home, they found his grandmother dead and her husband in critical condition. The husband - who has not been named - was rushed to the hospital and has since been upgraded to stable condition. Cops are hoping to speak to him to figure out why Martinez attacked the couple. Above, a view of the scene on Sunday. Family members called 911 when they called the home and a strange man answered the phone 'Why he showed up yesterday, why he had such anger directed toward his grandparents? We don't know that yet,' officer Gary Keller of the South Salt Lake Police told Good4Utah. Martinez was sent to live at a halfway house in May, after he was convicted in 2004 for drug distribution, witness tampering, assault on a federal officer and being a felon in possession of a firearm. He was up for supervised release at the end of September. He also was convicted of unlawful intercourse with a minor in 1993. Police have not said how many officers fired their weapons, but those that did have been placed on administrative leave while the shooting is investigated. A 17-year-year old mother of young daughter has been found shot dead inside in a crashed car. High school student Kayla Huerta had been shot multiple times, including in the head, before her body was found at 2.30am in San Pedro, California. Officers were initially called to reports of a traffic accident and when they arrived at the scene, they found a light-colored car crashed into a cinder block wall outside an apartment building on residential street near an intersection, KTLA reported. Kayla Huerta and her three-year-old daughter, who her family say has yet to be told what has happened to her mother Investigators are unsure whether Kayla was killed in the vehicle or if she was brought to the location, according to LAPD Capt. Giselle Espinoza. 'We don't know if it was moving prior, or we don't know at what point the shooting occurred,' Espinoza said Family members who showed up at the scene hours to hold a vigil identified the high school student as the victim. Kayla was found dead in a car at this intersection in San Pedro, Los Angelesa Her father Jason Huerta said: 'I couldn't even imagine her getting hurt like that. It hurts me.' Kayla lived with her grandmother Yolanda Gonzalez in Wilmington and she revealed the family was waiting to tell her child about her mother's death. When the toddler woke up Monday morning she asked for her mother and refused to take off her clothes because her mother had put them on, Gonzalez said. 'She sees everybody struggling and she's like, "What's going on?" But we can't tell her, she's too small,' she said. Kayla had spent the day with her family on Sunday and Gonzalez said the family have'have no idea, no clue, no nothing' about why she was killed. After graduating, she planned to go trade school to support her daughter, according to a GoFundMe campaign set up by her cousin to pay help pay funeral costs. In addition to a daughter, Kayla leaves behind a younger sister Jasmyne, and two little brothers. 'I just feel like this is a dream because me and my sister always had plans together,' said Jasmyne. 'And I just don't want her to go, but she's already gone,' she said during the vigil. 'I know that she wouldn't want me to cry right now, but I have to because I'm going to miss her a lot.' A Manhattan high school graduation was evacuated Tuesday morning after a bomb threat. Vanguard High School students and their families were gathered for the ceremony when someone called into the school and said two pipe bombs at the building would be detonated in just 35 minutes. Cops rushed to the Julia Richman Education Complex on the Upper East Side around 9.45am and promptly evacuated the building. Scroll down for video Vanguard High School was evacuated Tuesday morning, in the middle of graduation, when someone called a bomb threat into the Manhattan school The graduation ceremony was moved to a nearby church after the incident The caller said that two pipe bombs would be detonated at the school in 35 minutes Police combed the building and deemed it safe just after 11am Students were dressed in white gowns and caps for the graduation ceremony Police combed the building and deemed it safe just after 11am. The building, located at East 67th Street and Second Avenue, in the Lenox Hill section of the Upper East Side, houses five other public schools: Urban Academy High School, Talent Unlimited High School, Manhattan International High School, P226M Junior High Annex and the Ella Baker School. Each of the six schools has its own floor. Four Democratic senators say Nielsen should 'absolutely' RESIGN following tense and chaotic White House press conference because she 'lies' for Trump Sens. Jeff Merkley, Mazi Hirono, Kamala Harris, and Tina Smith eached called for Nielsen to go Nielsen held a combative press conference Monday and is the public face of Trump policy of separating parents from their children at the border Administration officials who lie 'have sold their souls' said Sen. Hirono of Hawaii Four Democratic senators are calling for Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to quit after her contentious press conference defending the administration's 'zero tolerance' policy for kids at the border. Among those calling for Nielsen to go is Hawaii Democratic Sen. Mazzie Hirono, who told MSNBC Neilsen and two other Trump aides should resign amid the crisis. 'All the people around the president who lie for him in order to keep their job, they have sold their souls. I would welcome their registrations,' she said. She was joined by Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, who said Nielsen should 'absolutely, 100 per cent resign.' Democrats are calling for Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen amid the uproar over immigrant children separated from their parents at the border Merkley told CNN's 'Erin Burnett Out Front' following Nielsen's performance: ''She's not being honest with Americans and it's so absolutely clear.' 'She's contradicting her President, she's contradicting her chief of staff, she's contradicting the attorney general and just making up these arguments as she goes,' he added. Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat who is a potential presidential candidate, issued a blistering statement. 'The government should be in the business of keeping families together, not tearing them apart,' she said, NBC reported. Sen. Mazie Hirono is among Democrats calling for Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen amid the uproar over immigrant children separated from their parents at the border Kamala Harris is among Democrats calling for Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen amid the uproar over immigrant children separated from their parents at the border 'And the government should have a commitment to transparency and accountability. Under Secretary Nielsen's tenure, the Department of Homeland Security has a track record of neither," Harris said. As a result, she must resign." Wrote Sen. Tina Smith, who succeeded Al Franken in Minnesota: 'Kirstjen Nielsen has misled the Senate, from the White House podium, and the American people about the Trump Administrations cruel policy of separating children from their parents at the border.' She sent out an online petition calling for her to step down. The public pressure, joined by House Democrats, comes after Nielsen held a defiant White House press conference defending the 'zero tolerance' policy that has led to 2,000 kids to be separated from their parents in just the last six weeks. She said Democrats were acting 'cowardly' and could change federal immigration law if they wanted to. Sen. Jeff Merkley is among Democrats calling for Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen amid the uproar over immigrant children separated from their parents at the border Sen. Tina Smith is among Democrats calling for Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen amid the uproar over immigrant children separated from their parents at the border She said DHS was just doing its job, comparing the migrants and asylum seekers to criminals who are convicted and jailed in the U.S. system. 'If an American were to commit a crime anywhere in the United States,' she told a room full of reporters, 'they would go to jail and they would be separated from their family.' Nielsen said, 'This is not a controversial idea.' When asked by reporters if the policy amounts to 'child abuse', Nielsen denied the accusation. 'We have high standards. We give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. There are videos, there are TVs. I visited the detention centers myself.' 'Parents who entered illegally are by definition criminals,' she told reporters during an early-evening briefing, amid a furor over emotional new audio that features crying children begging to be with their parents. Four alleged Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (OMCG) members have been arrested during a cross-border operation. With the combined efforts of 50 police officers from the Tweed Heads and Byron Bay Police district, Queensland Police's Taskforce Maxima, Australian Federal Police, Queensland Probation and Parole and Corrective Services NSW, the four alleged criminals were apprehended. Tuesday's operation was a result of the combined effort of the aforementioned services to target OMCG activity in the region. Bikie taskforce arrests four outlaw gang members as dozens of officers seize explosives, drugs, guns, steroids and cash Officers located ammunition, illicit substances including drugs and steroids, explosives and cash at a property in Cudgen, south of Tweed Heads In conjunction with the operation, police conducted searches for weapons, particularly firearms and ammunition at properties of members of the OMCG subject to Firearm Prohibition Orders. Officers located ammunition, illicit substances including drugs and steroids, explosives and cash at a property in Cudgen, south of Tweed Heads. A 25-year-old member of the Mongols OMCG Tweed Heads chapter was arrested at the scene. He was later released pending further inquiries. In conjunction with the operation, police conducted searches for weapons, particularly firearms and ammunition at properties of members of the OMCG subject to Firearm Prohibition Orders Another raid proved successful in the Lone Wolf Gold Coast chapter. A 47-year-old member was arrested on grounds of a warrant at a property in Carrara, Queensland. He was transported to a Southport watch house where NSW Police were granted their application for his extradition. He fronted Tweed Heads Local Court on Tuesday. Queensland Police and the NSW Police collaborated on a raid in Tugun, Gold Coast, where steroids and prescription medication were seized for forensic analysis. A 32-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman will be expected to front court in relation to the matter. Tuesday's operation was a result of the combined effort of the aforementioned services to target OMCG activity in the region Police and government agencies across the region will continue to work toward reducing the impact of OMCG activities In addition to the raids orchestrated by the police task forces, community compliance officers from Corrective Services paid visits to properties to conduct compliance checks. Drug tests were conducted on several OMCG members, and positive tests results for cannabis and methamphetamine were discovered. Tweed/Byron Police District Crime Manager, Detective Chief Inspector Brendon Cullen, said police and government agencies across the region will continue to work toward reducing the impact of OMCG activities. 'High-impact operations like this are conducted to target and disrupt the activities of outlaw motorcycle gangs and their associates.' 'The safety of the community is our priority, and we will not tolerate activities that put the public at risk,' Det Ch Insp Cullen said. Commander of Queensland Polices Strike Force Maxima, Detective Inspector Stephen Blanchard added: 'This operation highlights how important it is for us to cooperate with other law-enforcement agencies, to ensure groups who break the law face serious consequences on both sides of the border.' Owners of a Chinese restaurant which offered a generous all-you-can-eat deal have been bankrupt by their customers in less than two weeks. The restaurant reportedly ran heavy debts and had to close down after some thrifty customers stayed in the store for an entire day to eat 'several meals'. Moreover, it's said promotion-loving pensioners started queuing outside the restaurant as early as 8am in order to take full advantage of the offer. Owners of Jiamen'er restaurant (pictured) in China have been bankrupt by their customers The restaurant sells spicy Sichuan-style hot pot (file photo), which is a popular sharing dish Jiamen'er, selling popular spicy style hot pot, launched the buffet deal on June 1, inviting any customers with a membership card to eat there as much as they wanted for 120 yuan (14) a month. The restaurant is situated in Chengdu, a UNESCO City of Gastronomy and the provincial capital of China's Sichuan Province. Su Zhe, one of the restaurant's founders, said the restaurant opened last December and its business was poor. The management decided to offer the deal in hope of attracting more customers, according to a report on People's Daily Online, citing Chengdu Commercial Newspaper. Su said the promotion quickly brought more people into the 20-table restaurant, sometimes as many as 500 people a day. Waiters had to work more than 10 hours a day to serve the huge crowds. However, it quickly appeared that the business was hard to sustain because too many people were heading over. The restaurant is located in Chengdu (file photo), the provincial capital of Sichuan Province Chengdu is a UNESCO City of Gastronomy and is famous for its yummy street food (file photo) Moreover, some customers decided to lend each other the membership card so they could enjoy the deal without paying. Su said because the membership card didn't have a photo of the owner, it was impossible for the waiters to stop those with the card from demanding the offer. One of the restaurant's shareholders concluded to news site The Paper: 'The key cause of the failure was that we hadn't used the facial-recognition system.' The report said Jiamen'er ran into 500,000 yuan (58,582) debts in 11 days after selling 1,700 membership cards. Customers showing up at the restaurant early in the morning on June 13 were surprised to find that the management had decided to shut the restaurant for good. Co-owner Su, who studied marketing in university, told Chengdu Commercial Newspaper that he and his business partners would draw lessons from this failure. Su was quoted saying: 'The main problem was our low management skills. This is a heavy lesson. ' The restaurateur said he would not be frustrated by the incident and would carry on opening new restaurants. President Donald Trump is doubling down on his charge Germany faces a rise in crime as its immigrant population has increased - a move that comes as he faces an immigration crisis of his own. 'Crime in Germany is up 10% plus (officials do not want to report these crimes) since migrants were accepted. Others countries are even worse. Be smart America!,' he tweeted Tuesday morning. It was the second day in a row he blasted the situation in Germany under the reign of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been one of America's staunchest allies. Merkel is facing a migration problem that could topple her government. And Trump has come under fire from Republicans, Democrats, his wife first lady Melania Trump, former presidents and all the living former first ladies for his policy of separating children from the adults accompany them at illegal border crossings. The president has tried to shift the blame to Democrats and argue that America shouldn't face an immigration crisis such as the one in Germany. 'The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. Won't be,' he charged in fiery remarks at a White House event on Monday. 'You look at what's happening in Europe. You look at what's happening in other places. We can't allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch.' Trump attacked the immigration crisis in Germany for the second day in a row President Trump argues he doesn't want America to face a migration crisis like Europe is German Chancellor Angela Merkel is fighting to save her government amid immigration problems But Germany has actually seen a fall in its crime rate, which law enforcement officials attribute to a decline in migrants seeking asylum. In total 5.76 million crimes were recorded by police in 2017, which is a 9.6 percent drop from the number recorded in 2016. That's the largest crime drop in 25 years for Germany. Oliver Malchow, leader of the GdP police union, told newspaper Welt Am Sonntag that 'a good part' of the fall was due to a decrease in the number of asylum seekers. Germany recorded 220,000 asylum applications in 2017, which came after 280,000 applications in 2016. Both figures are significantly lower than the 890,000 applications received in 2015, when Merkel opened Germany's borders to migrants arriving in Europe. While the fall covered almost all categories of crime, the largest decreases came in burglaries and pick-pocketing, which were both down 23 percent. But there have been reports this year of rises in violent crime and criminal activity by refugees. In January, Reuters reported young male refugees in Germany were being blamed for a rise in violent crime. Violent crime rose by about 10 percent in 2015 and 2016, a study showed. It attributed more than 90 percent of that to young male refugees aged 14 to 30. And the number of suspected crimes by refugees in Germany rose to 174,438 in 2016 an increase of 52.7 percent, theTelegraph reported in April. Most of those crimes are committed by repeat offenders, and just 1 percent of migrants account for 40 percent of migrant crimes, according to the figures. Trump first attacked Germany, one of the U.S.'s closest allies, on Monday and claimed immigration acrossEU states had led to a violent change in culture. 'The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition,' he wrote in a Tweet Monday. 'Crime in Germany is way up,' he added. President Trump has been critical of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who faces a crisis that could topple her after 13 years in power Trump attacked Germany's immigration policies as Merkel struggled to maintain power at home Germany is now one of America's closest allies. Pictured: Trump faces off against the G7 leaders at the conference in Canada He continued: 'Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!' Trump's comments come as Merkel fights to save her coalition government amid demands by her interior minister to turn back immigrants at the border. Merkel was handed a two-week ultimatum by her coalition partners to secure a deal on immigrants with neighboring European countries. Her opponents are staunchly against her immigration policies, which provide entry to some 10,000 asylum seekers each month. The clash, mainly between her and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, is over what to do about the immigration rate into Germany - which has the highest number of migrants in Europe. About 700,000 people sought asylum in E.U. countries last year, according to figures from the European Asylum Support Agency, and Germany had the most asylum seekers of any European nation, with more than 200,000. Merkel opened German borders to more than a million people fleeing war, oppression and poverty in 2015 and 2016. Seehofer, a leader in the fragile government coalition, wants to turn back some of those immigrants at the German border - an action Merkel opposes without prior agreements with neighboring countries. Should he proceed anyway under his authority as interior minister, the move would almost certainly lead to the break-up of the coalition and undermine Merkel's government. Trump defended his own immigration policy of separating families at the border German Chancellor Angela Merkel faces a challenge from German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, a member of her government, on her immigration policies Her fate will hang on whether the renegades in her own party will give her the time to negotiate a deal with Germany's neighbors. Eurasia Group analyst Charles Lichfield on Monday put the chances of Merkel losing power as a result of the dust-up at 25 per cent, according to The Washington Post. 'Political obituaries for Chancellor Angela Merkel tend to be premature,' Lichfield wrote. 'But the legacy of the 2015 migration crisis could yet force her sudden demise over the next two weeks.' A photo of a smiling woman posing next to the carcass of a dead Great White shark that washed up on a California beach over the weekend has sparked widespread condemnation on social media. But according to the person who took the photo, there is much more to the 'shark selfie' than meets the eye. Giancarlo Thomae, a marine biologist from Aptos, California, tells the Sacramento Bee that he asked his colleague to lay down next to the massive dead sea creature on Sunday merely to shows it scale. Scroll down for video Toothy grin: This photo of a California marine biologist posing next to a dead Great White shark on Sunday has sparked outrage on social media The shark, a juvenile male measuring 8 feet, 9 inches in length and tipping the scales at 500lbs, washed up on the beach at Seascape Beach Resort near Aptos at around 7am on Sunday. Thomae, 30, and a colleague were called to the scene to investigate the grisly find. Thomae says that with the morning tide rushing in, he was concerned that the carcass would be washed out to sea before they got a chance to take all the measurements and examine the creature, so he asked the other scientist to get down in the sand and provide scale. The image shows the bespectacled woman smiling and laying on her stomach next to the bloodied sea beast. When the local TV station KSBW later shared Thomaes snapshot on its Facebook page, many users expressed dismay at the selfie. This could not be more messed up, one critic fumed. A dead shark is not a photo op. Another user lashed out, saying: This was once a living being and it's just ok to lay next to it smiling? Bloodied up: The five-year-old male, measuring nearly 9 feet in length and weighing 500lbs, was covered in old scars and fresh puncture wounds from its encounters with sea lions A third commenter slammed the photo as 'creepy and disrespectful.' Thomae, the photographer, emphasized that the photo was not taken to poke fun at the dead shark, but rather for purely scientific purposes. In a phone interview with DailyMail.com on Tuesday evening, Thomae said he was not surprised by the strong reactions to his photo of the dead shark. 'Of course I knew that some people are going to be upset,' he said. 'Being a scientist and being an animal lover, I do appreciate that people are concerned and saddened by the passing of this majestic animal.' Thomae, who has a degree in marine biology from University of California at Santa Cruz and has been studying Great Whites for the past four years, said he first learned of the shark's presence on the beach from his mother, who saw a post about it on Facebook and called him. He rushed to the site with his colleague and went to work trying to keep the carcass from being washed out to sea. Thomae explained that getting the scale of the shark allowed him to quickly estimate its age and weight. After registering the creatures size, Thomae and his colleagues were able to move the hulking 500lbs shark away from the water, then loaded it onto a truck and transported it to Long Marine Lab, where a necropsy was later performed. The deceased Great White was covered in old scars and fresh puncture wounds from its encounters with sea lions, but Thomae does not believe those superficial injuries caused the animal's death. He suspects that the five-year-old male shark possibly died from an infection in its brain. Thomae said that sharks are becoming increasing common in the warm waters off of California, but they rarely wash ashore: in his experience, Sunday's incident was only the second stranding in the last two years. For the first time in history the majority of Australians believe there are too many immigrants entering the country, according to social research figures. Nearly 55 per cent out of 1200 people thought the number of migrants coming to Australia was 'too high', in data collected by Social Research Centre in Melbourne. Results from surveys carried out between March 5 and 25 revealed not everyone was happy with economic and social implications migrants were having on the country. Research has revealed Australians believe there are too many immigrants entering the country (Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton pictured) They showed points for dissatisfaction were up 14 points since last year and a staggering 17 points since 2014. Figures also revealed the lowest number of people in more than three years thought the current immigration rate was 'about right'. About 10 per cent of people said it was 'too low', which was about the same amount as it was in 2014 and slightly down from about 18 per cent last year. Immigration had not met the planned amount of 190,000 for the current financial year, with numbers still hanging significantly down. Nearly 55 per cent out of 1200 people thought the number of migrants coming to Australia was 'too high' (stock photo) Debate was recently sparked by New South Wales Labor leader Luke Foley who controversially highlighted a 'white flight' trend bought about by migrant families. He was referring to low-income migrants forcing Anglo families out of affordable housing areas in Sydney's western suburbs. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton argued Labor was no longer an advocate for 'middle Australia' after it rejected a motion proposed by Conservatives senator Cory Bernardi. 'They voted to reject the notion that Australia's immigration program should operate in the interests of all Australians,' Mr Dutton told The Australian. Peter Dutton argued Labor was no longer an advocate for 'middle Australia' after it rejected a motion proposed by Conservatives senator Cory Bernardi (pictured) 'They are captured by the radical left of their party.' The motion called on the government to review migrant intake levels and to make sure it had no detrimental impacts on the economic, social or security interests of locals. A separate Lowy Institute poll also found Australians to have the lowest level of trust in the United States ever recorded, with a 28 point fall since 2011 marked by a narrow majority of 55 per cent saying they trust the country to 'act responsibly'. Nearly three quarters of Australians think the government has allowed too much investment from China, up from just 56 per cent in 2014. Hundreds of guns and more than a thousand knives have been handed in to authorities in two recent weapons amnesties - in a stark reminder of the reality of 'Wild West' Britain. One deadly arsenal was handed in to a single police force in just a three-week period as part of their latest firearms surrender. The haul of more than 100 guns include a .44 Magnum revolver, 20 shotguns, a Winchester Repeater rifle as well a Second World War flare gun. They were handed in to West Midlands Police last month as the region saw a spike in shootings and will now be forensically tested before being destroyed. Meanwhile, around 1,500 blades were amassed by anti-knives charity Only Cowards Carry from three collection points across Essex in just three months. It comes as the Government plans to ban 'Zombie' blades in a fresh crackdown launched in the wake of Britain's bloody knife crime epidemic. This terrifying haul of around 1,500 knives was deposited in three amnesty bins across Essex Hundreds of guns and thousands of knives have been handed in to authorities in two recent weapons amnesties - in a stark reminder of the reality of 'Wild West' Britain. (The ones pictured were handed in recently in the West Midlands) One deadly arsenal was handed in to a single police force - West Midlands Police - in just a three-week period as part of their latest firearms surrender The haul of more than 100 guns include a .44 Magnum revolver, 20 shotguns, a Winchester Repeater rifle as well a Second World War flare gun They were handed in to West Midlands Police last month as the region saw a spike in shootings and will now be forensically tested before being destroyed The latest surrender by the force came at a time when the West Midlands saw a surge in the number of violent crimes. West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner David Jamieson added: 'Every weapon handed in is potentially a life saved' 'We are continuing our crackdown on violent crime using Section 60 powers, which allow us to stop and search anyone we think may be involved in criminality and violence,' said Detective Inspector Rod Rose, from the force's Prevent team Recent figures from the Office of National Statistics has shown that gun violence has rocketed in Britain by 20 per cent, with 6,694 offences in the 12 months to January Among the hoard of 116 weapons in the West Midlands were six pistols - including a war-time Enfield.45, seven revolvers and 16 batches of ammunition. Detective Inspector Rod Rose, from the force's Prevent team, said: 'Coming just six months after our last firearms surrender which saw 245 weapons handed in, this is a significant result and shows that there are still firearms out there which could be lethal in the wrong hands. 'We are continuing our crackdown on violent crime using Section 60 powers, which allow us to stop and search anyone we think may be involved in criminality and violence. WHERE KNIFE CRIMES HAVE INCREASED THE MOST Norfolk - 274 per cent Warwickshire - 180 per cent North Wales - 134 per cent Hertfordshire - 150 per cent Hampshire - 102 per cent Bedfordshire - 86 per cent Essex - 86 per cent Cambridgeshire - 83 per cent Thames Valley - 50 per cent Advertisement 'And we are continuing our work with young people who may be on the cusp of becoming involved in gang culture through our "Precious Lives" project, where thousands of schoolchildren have seen a hard-hitting presentation on the dangers of carrying weapons.' West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner David Jamieson added: 'Every weapon handed in is potentially a life saved. 'The region is a safer place with these weapons no longer on the streets, as there is always the potential they could fall into the wrong hands. 'Guns ruin lives and have a devastating impact on the communities of the West Midlands. 'For everybody who decided to hand in their weapon, may I say a big thank you - you have done the right thing.' The latest surrender by the force came at a time when the West Midlands saw a surge in the number of violent crimes. Taimoor Zaheer, 22, was gunned down in his car in Handsworth, Birmingham on May 22. Anib Khan, 23, was arrested by Kent Police as he tried to board a ferry in Dover the next day and appeared before magistrates last month. The latest surrender by the force came at a time when the West Midlands saw a surge in the number of violent crimes. Taimoor Zaheer (pictured), 22, was gunned down in his car in Handsworth, Birmingham on May 22 The murder was followed by two shooting incidents and a fatal stabbing in the city within a 24-hour period the next weekend. Keelan Wilson, 15, was also killed that month after being knifed following a violent disorder between a group of youths in Wolverhampton. Recent figures from the Office of National Statistics has shown that gun violence has rocketed in Britain by 20 per cent, with 6,694 offences in the 12 months to January. 1,500 knives collected in 'relatively safe' Essex This massive haul of around 1,500 blades was amassed by anti-knives charity Only Cowards Carry from three collection points across Essex. The charity work with the Police Crime Commissioner for Suffolk, and their collections are carried out in collaboration with Essex Police. The woman who stood among the massive haul is Jo Robinson, whose brother James Attfield died four years ago in a 'frenzied' stabbing. One of the other woman involved in the collection is Caroline Shearer, who lost her 17-year-old son Jay Whiston when he was knifed to death at a private party in 2012. This haul of around 1,500 blades was amassed by anti-knives charity Only Cowards Carry from three collection points across Essex. The woman pictured is Jo Robinson, whose brother James Attfield died four years ago in a 'frenzied' stabbing The charity work with the Police Crime Commissioner for Suffolk, and their collections are carried out in collaboration with Essex Police. The charity has trained 20-30,000 school children about the dangers of carrying knives since its creation Ms Shearer set up the charity in the aftermath of her son's death to help get knives off the street, and goes into schools to teach children about the dangers of carrying knives. She said: 'I get quite agitated when people try to defend knives. There is no reason to carry a gun - it's more dangerous to carry one than not.' The charity has trained 20-30,000 school children about the dangers of carrying knives since its creation. Since Ms Shearer posted the photo on Facebook, it has received more than 1,150 shares. But she says that her popularity on social media is not the reason why she devotes herself to getting knives off the street. She said: 'I just do it because it needs doing.' For safety reasons, people depositing weapons in bins are advised to wrap the weapon or blade in newspaper, before placing it in a secure cardboard box and then transporting it to either site. Earlier this year, an Essex Police spokesman said the county was still a 'relatively safe county' with a comparatively low crime rate. 'Drug and gang-related crime is a growing problem in some areas of the county and we know the impact on our communities this has,' the force spokesman added. If someone is unsure about whether to bring in a knife they can contact Essex Police on 101 for advice. Peak hour train commuters watched on horror as a brawl allegedly erupted between youths near a train station in Melbourne's southeast on Tuesday night. A Victoria Police spokesman confirmed to Daily Mail Australia it is investigating an incident near Oakleigh train station, where a police officer was allegedly assaulted and a teenage girl was rushed to hospital in a serious condition. Police were called to Haughton Road just before 6.30pm following reports of around 15 males and females allegedly involved in an altercation. Police were called to Oakleigh train station just after 6.30pm on Tuesday night 'A young girl was screaming and crying at the same time,' one witness told The Herald Sun. 'She looked pretty bad, there was a big mess on her face, she was all red from the blood. She was screaming, "I'm 15 years old, why did you hit me?" She was bleeding heavily from the face.' It's unknown what sparked the brawl. 'A teenage girl was taken to hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries,' a spokesman told Daily Mail Australia. 'A teenage girl has been arrested in relation to assaulting a policeman during the incident. No other arrests have been made at this stage, a number of people are being interviewed and the investigation is ongoing.' The alleged incident follows tough new laws that are expected to be passed in Victorian Parliament on Wednesday. Criminals who threaten or intimidate the families of police, protective service officers and prison guards will face up to a decade behind bars under the proposed new laws, The Age reports. The bill aims to better protect law enforcement officers after it became an emerging issue for those working in law enforcement. 'This legislation sends the strongest possible message about protecting law enforcement officers from harm,' Police Minister Lisa Neville told the publication. Cowboy builders who passed around an 83-year-old woman to con her out of her home and over 100,000 have been jailed for 14 years. John OConnor, 36, convinced the pensioner to sell her 290,000 house to him for 25,000. He convinced her she was overrun with the costs of repairing her house and that she could live in the house for the rest of her life while he took care of it. Roger Knight, 44, John Keenan, 39, and Samuel Smith, 40, helped swindle her out of tens of thousands for spurious work. The defendants' relatives shouted 'scum' at the judge as he jailed the three men at Southwark Crown Court heard. John O'Connor (left) convinced the pensioner to sell her 290,000 house to him for just 25,000 and John Keenan (right) moved cash made from conning the victim into his daughter's account Prosecutor Catherine Farrelly said that the victim - who cannot be named for legal reasons - met Mr O'Connor in 2007. She lived alone at the address where she'd resided all her life and was left the house by her parents. She had asked a man to carry out some work on her property, that person was connected with the first defendant, John OConnor - that individual along with two others undertook work for 28,000,' she said. They went on to tell her she also needed rafters and that would cost 29,000. It transpired that was a complete and utter lie because a chartered surveyor from the police was of the view there was nothing at all wrong with the rafters. But she acted on the word of these other individuals and they essentially convinced her to raise that 29,000. They introduced her to Mr OConnor. No sooner had she expressed an interest in meeting OConnor, that week he came to visit at her home address. During the course of that first meeting he presented her with the proposition she could pay for the work by selling her house to him and he would then pay for the work and allow her to live there for the rest of her life. She accepted Mr OConnors offer to sell the house for 25,000 - less than a tenth of its value, 290,000. However, she felt obliged to enter into the agreement and felt bound by it, so Mr OConnor set about organising the sale of the house. Samuel Smith (left) and Roger Knight (right) were part of a con that defrauded an elderly woman out of thousands In April 2008, OConnor had a contract drawn up and the property was sold to him for the knockdown price in exchange for a 21-year lease for the victim. Knight then became involved. The victim was visited at home by a man known as Roger, not confirmed to be the defendant. But he convinced her to make out four cheques, each for 17,500, for someone to do the rafters. That total of 70,000 landed in two bank accounts belonging to the defendant, Knight. Smith joined the act in late 2009 and defrauded her out of 28,500 for underpinning work on the house. He went back for another round of imaginary work costing her 8,500 in 2011. In 2013 she was becoming increasingly desperate to get her property back after she was told by a man she knew as Mick that some of the rooms in her house were going to be let out. Mick told her to transfer 27,000 to Keenan, 10,000 of which she borrowed from an elderly friend, under the pretence that the house would belong to her again. Keenan quickly set about moving the cash into his 11-year-old daughters bank account. It later turned out this bank account had been credited with 100,000 in an 18 month period which vastly exceeded declared incomes. The victim told police she felt a build-up of pressure which caused loss of sleep, anxiety, significant loss of weight, increased blood pressure - all as a result of the stress. She described a fear of opening her own front door to people and an increased sense of suspicion, feeling vulnerable in the home she has lived in all her life. And a feeling of guilt in relation to the friends who had lent her money, as well as a complete loss of savings. Keenan was also sentenced for two further cowboy builder frauds involving elderly people in west London last year. Last summer he targeted an elderly man with Aspergers by door stepping and telling him the neighbours were not happy with the state of his gutters and roof. He would drive the old man to nearby HSBC where he had him withdraw cash on several occasions - 300, another 300, 1,200 and 2,000. Another time he brought along a card payment device, conned the victim for 8,000 and left without doing any work. His second victim was also told he had roof damage and guttering problems, which Keenan charged him 7,800 to fix. In fact, he caused 2,000 worth of damage to the gutters. Judge Peter Testar said: This kind of offending has always been regarded as of the greatest seriousness. It is disgraceful behaviour and she has been handed around from one unscrupulous fraudster to another and each has badly used her. The families of the defendants packed the public gallery and called the judge scum as he sent their relatives down to the cells. OConnor, of Sevenoaks, Kent, admitted fraud by false representation and was sentenced to four years and nine months Smith, of Reading, Berkshire, admitted two counts of fraud by false representation and was sentenced to three years. Keenan, of Luton, Bedfordshire, admitted two counts of money laundering, two counts of fraud and was sentenced to six years and three months. Knight, of Enfield, north London, admitted money laundering and was sentenced to 18 months suspended for two years. Detective Constable Rob Enderby, of the Mets Criminal Finance Team, said: This group repeatedly targeted the victim who lived alone and convinced her that she needed work done to her house, causing enormous distress. It will be a long time, if ever, that the victims faith in others is restored but I hope that the conviction and sentencing of this unscrupulous group will at least help her begin to feel safer. 'I am pleased with these sentences which demonstrate just how seriously the police and the courts take these kinds of offences. Robert Maldonado completed his prison sentence for a previous rape, when he allegedly raped a 69-year-old woman while he was on probation A Florida sex offender who was on probation and wearing an ankle monitor when he allegedly raped a 69-year-old woman will now spend the rest of his life behind bars. Robert Maldonado, 40, had completed a prison sentence stemming from a 2000 rape in West Delray. He was released on probation with an ankle bracelet which went off during the alleged rape on March 30, 2016, because he was breaking his 10pm curfew. He was handed his life sentence for breaking the terms of his probation. His trial for the 2016 charges on sexual battery, kidnapping, carjacking and burglary with assault or battery will have its first hearing August 10. 'I am here just because of the mercy of God,' the widowed victim told Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley, according to the Sun Sentinel. 'He would have killed me.' 'He's a danger to the community,' the victim testified Monday. 'He's a mean person. He needs to be locked up for the good of everybody.' Finally free from his previous rape sentence, Maldonado was handed down a life sentence for violating the terms of his probation, and is still waiting for a trial on the new rape charge Maldonado was wearing a GPS ankle monitor which started beeping in the middle of the alleged crime, which aided detectives who wanted to pinpoint his whereabouts Just six days before the rape in 2016 he posted a photo on Facebook with the caption 'single and ready'. A day later he shared a snap saying 'never take your freedom for granted'. And just four days before the vile assault he wrote" '38& SINGLE open to love&Ink'. The Assistant State Attorney said that Maldonado being fully aware he had a GPS tracking device on him, and still committing a sexual assault despite it, shows he is a serial rapist, who should not be allowed to be free again. 'Knowing that his whereabouts are monitored he's unable to control his behavior, his desires, and his impulses,' the state attorney said. 'He has shown this court what he is capable of.' While the GPS records prove he violated curfrew and a rape-test of the elderly woman showed his DNA in her, his public defender says he wasn't supposed to have an ankle monitoring bracelet on, in the terms of his probation. They argued the monitoring information is the same as an unreasonable search. However the judge said that probation officials made 'an honest mistake and not deliberate or reckless conduct.' 'The GPS evidence at issue here is reliable and trustworthy and is probative of the Defendant's guilt or innocence,' the judge wrote last year. Still, Maldonado's team will try to appeal the verdict on the GPS evidence, and try to get it thrown from the sexual assault case. The victim told detectives she heard beeping sounds during the attack, which is how they were able to track Maldonado originally after they looked at known sex-offenders in the area. He was identified through the GPS monitoring device data. Rupert Murdoch's 11.7billion bid to buy Sky outright is finally set to go ahead after Culture Secretary Matt Hancock said he would accept protections for Sky News. The 21st Century Fox bid has been bogged down with competition regulators for more than a year and will still face another consultation over 15 days. But Mr Hancock's confirmation he will endorse 'updated' and 'improved' protections for the 24 hour news channel effectively clears the final hurdle. Under the deal, Fox will sell Sky News to Disney with a promise of 15 years of funding at a rate of 100million a year. Rupert Murdoch's 11.7billion bid to buy Sky outright is finally set to go ahead after Culture Secretary Matt Hancock said he would accept protections for Sky News Matt Hancock's confirmation he will endorse 'updated' and 'improved' protections for the 24 hour news channel effectively clears the final hurdle Those terms - which assume the sale of Sky News to Disney, which is separately bidding for some of Fox's assets - include a commitment from Disney to operate and maintain the news service for 15 years, up from 10 years. It would also bar Disney from selling Sky News over that period without explicit Government approval, and extend the funding commitment from 21st Century Fox from 10 to 15 years. The news broadcaster would also see a boost in total funds to at least 100 million per year - with operating costs protected in real terms. That is on top of a formal commitment from Disney to preserve editorial independence at the news broadcaster. What has 21st Century Fox promised to gets its deal for Sky? It is expected that this deal will deal involve the sale of Sky News to Disney and require: A commitment from Disney to operate and maintain a Sky News branded news service for 15 years rather than 10 years A restriction on Disney from selling Sky News for 15 years without the consent of the Secretary of State An extension of the funding commitment from 21st Century Fox from 10 years to 15 years An increase in the total funds available to Sky News, to at least 100 million per year, with operating costs protected in real terms A formal commitment from Disney to preserve the editorial independence of Sky News Advertisement The list of improved remedies comes two weeks after Mr Hancock initially said he favoured 'divesting Sky News to a suitable third party' in order to address the media plurality concerns raised by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Mr Hancock said he will now hold a formal consultation on the undertakings - which he plans to accept - over the next 15 days. Views on whether the proposals are sufficient to address media plurality and public interest concerns raised by the potential merger will be accepted until July 4 at 5pm. Sky said it welcomes the statement from Mr Hancock and noted that UK approval was the only outstanding pre-condition needed before the 21st Century Fox offer could be put to Sky shareholders. Mr Murdoch's 21st Century Fox is attempting to buy the 61% of Sky that it does not already own, but the bid has been complicated by competition concerns, media plurality fears and rival offers. The CMA has expressed concerns over the influence that the Murdoch Family Trust would have over 'public opinion and the UK's political agenda' if Sky News came under Fox's ownership. Those terms - which assume the sale of Sky News to Disney, which is separately bidding for some of Fox's assets - include a commitment from Disney to operate and maintain the news service for 15 years, up from 10 years The offer has also been thrown into doubt amid a rival 22 billion bid for Sky by US broadcasting giant and NBCUniversal owner Comcast. Mr Hancock has already cleared Comcast's bid, which has also been given the green light by the European Commission. Comcast is now planning to publish a full offer document and has boldly claimed it expects to close the deal by year-end. The European Commission cleared 21st Century Fox's competing bid for Sky in April 2017. Sky shares were marginally higher following the Culture Secretary's announcement, up 0.07% in late afternoon trading. A Guatemalan asylum-seeker sued the Trump administration on Tuesday for 'forcibly' separating her from her seven-year-old son after they crossed the border in May. Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia was never indicted for illegally entering the country, but officials won't tell her where her son Darwin is, according to her lawsuit filed Tuesday in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C. against 6 federal agencies and 10 senior officials. Mejia-Mejia's lawsuit is believed to be the first to challenge the government's removal of a specific child from a parent in the course of upholding federal immigration law. It opens up a new legal front in what has become an all-out battle with the White House on one side and a combination of Democratic lawmakers and immigration activists on the other. Through a Spanish translator in her newly adopted hometown of Austin, Texas, Mejia-Mejia told DailyMail.com that she's not focused on the politics. Only the boy, whom she named Darwin after hearing the name on television. 'Right now my main focus is to get Darwin back in my arms,' she said. 'I am a mom, and mothers fight for their children. I hope my fight can help other moms avoid this horror in their lives.' In the lawsuit, she describes a heart-wrenching scene when uniformed agents entered her holding cell and took away the boy, who screamed for his mother. SCROLL DOWN TO READ THE ENTIRE LAWSUIT Guatemalan asylum applicant Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia is seeking asylum and has posted bond to get out of immigration jail; she sued the federal government on Tuesday for the return of her 7-year-old son Darwin, who was taken from her shortly after she entered the country and requested asylum after officials won't tell her where her son is The Trump administration is under fire from all sides for separating more than 2,000 minors from their parents after they cross into the U.S. illegally The White House has insisted that court rulings offer no flexibility, and that children can't legally be housed in immigration detention centers with the adults who bring them across the border even if they're their parents; the result has been scenes like this one, and an ear-piercing, emotional outcry from Americans across the political spectrum President Trump, pictured Tuesday, is defending his policy, with top officials saying separating kids from jailed parents is no different from what happens in ordinary criminal courts Mejia-Mejia and her son entered the U.S. near San Luis, Arizona on approximately May 19 and turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents 'with the intention of seeking asylum,' according to her attorney Mario Williams, because of spousal abuse at the hands of a violently alcoholic husband who she says threatened to kill her. She says immigration officials took the boy after they spent two days in 'la hielera' the 'cooler.' 'Men dressed in green uniforms (border agents) told Ms. M. they needed to take her son and would not tell her why. Ms. M. said no and demanded an explanation, but they would not tell her why they needed to take her seven-year-old son, and they took him anyway,' the legal complaint reads, referring to Mejia-Mejia and her son only by their initials. 'The border agents did not tell Ms. M. where they were taking her son,' who was 'screaming and crying.' 'That was the last time Ms. M. saw her son,' according to the lawsuit. She 'has not been given any paperwork to indicate where her son is or what his status or health condition is,' it alleges. Mejia-Mejia was permitted to post bond after she passed what the Justice Department calls a 'credible fear' interview, persuading immigration officials that deporting her back to her original home in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala would place her in physical danger. After her release, Mejia-Mejia was permitted a single phone call with Darwin, whom agents would only tell her was somewhere in Phoenix. 'Her son was crying and scared' during the brief call, according to the lawsuit. 'An official facilitating the call, who was with D.M., told Ms. M. that her son was fine, but Ms. M. could clearly hear her son saying Mama! Mama! Mama! in a distressed voice over and over and over again.' The Trump administration is urging asylum-seekers to enter the U.S. at official 'ports of entry.' But Mike Donovan, CEO of Libre by Nexus the Harrisonburg, Virginia firm that bailed her out for free said Tuesday that she couldn't possibly have known where to go. 'She doesn't have GPS. She didn't have Google Maps,' he said. And after a journey of more than 2,300 miles roughly the distance from Boston to Phoenix she couldn't possibly find a government-approved checkpoint. 'This woman doesn't understand where a "port of entry" is. She's navigating three countries to get here. She doesn't even know where the border is.' He called her situation, and Darwin's, 'insane, vicious and cruel' but said the normally quiet, shy mother 'is willing to go to war to protect her son.' Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia has sued the Trump administration, saying she was 'forcibly' separated from her 7-year-old son after they entered the U.S. illegally but then applied for asylum Mejia-Mejia was released from federal immigration detention center in Eloy, Arizona on June 15 after posting a $12,500 bond arranged by Donovan's company. 'We have a charitable bonding program, and that's how her bond was posted,' he said. 'So she doesn't have to pay anything. It's based on indigency.' The firm typically charges up to 20 per cent of a bond's amount, plus a monthly fee. Williams, whose law practice centers on civil rights and international human rights cases, said Donovan's parent company funds an independent law firm with between $1 million and $3 million per year to litigate cases like Mejia-Mejia's. 'She reached out for help' after the company posted her bond, Williams said. He hopes to get a court hearing before the end of the week on an emergency application for a restraining order, something that would force the Trump administration to find Darwin and reunite him with his mother. But he cautioned that there's a bigger issue in play and he's not likely to withdraw the lawsuit until it runs its full course. 'We definitely will be happy when she gets her son back, but we are going to continue litigating the situation because of the broad impact this egregious policy has had on people around the country and around the world,' Williams said. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Monday at the White House that children like Darwin are typically held in shelters by the Department of Health and Human Services for no more than 20 days. That agency's Office of Refugee Resettlement 'provides meals, medical care, and educational services to these children. They are provided temporary shelter. And HHS works hard to find a parent, relative, or foster home to care for these children,' she said. Nielsen also told reporters that parents like Mejia-Mejia 'can still communicate with their children through phone calls and video conferencing.' That doesn't appear to have happened in her case. Neither an ICE spokesperson nor the White House immediately responded to requests for comment. A Homeland Security Department spokeswoman said that 'as a matter of policy, we dont comment on pending litigation.' Mejia-Mejia can't get any answers either, said Donovan. 'I feel like we should be printing pictures on milk cartons and canvassing Arizona,' he said. 'How do we know the kid's safe? Are we supposed to take the government's word for it?' 'She's free. She's been paroled. The very government that took her child has authorized her to be here on bond. Give the child back! This isn't hard.' Mejia-Mejia says federal officials won't tell her where her son is, and only allowed her to speak with him once after she bonded out of immigration jail and heard him crying 'Mama! Mama!' President Donald Trump said Tuesday on Twitter that the U.S. has 'got to stop separation of the families,' and blamed congressional Democrats for clinging to the status quo for political reasons. 'As a result of Democrat-supported loopholes in our federal laws, most illegal immigrant families and minors from Central America who arrive unlawfully at the border cannot be detained together, or removed together. Only released,' he said. 'These are crippling loopholes that cause family separation, which we don't want. As a result of these loopholes, roughly half a million ... have been released into the United States since 2014.' The federal government, he claimed, has only two choices that don't break current law. 'We have only two policy options to respond to this massive crisis,' he said. 'We can either release all immigrant families and minors who show up at the border from Central America. Or we can arrest the adults for the federal crime of illegal entries.' 'Those are [the] only two options: totally open borders or criminal prosecution for lawbreaking.' 'We can't let people pour in,' he added. 'They've got to go through the process. And maybe it's politically correct or maybe it's not.' Attorney General Jeff Sessions approved a 'zero tolerance' immigration enforcement policy in April, directing agents in the field to spare no one from prosecution after an illegal border crossing. 'What has changed,' Nielsen said Monday, 'is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law. Everyone is subject to prosecution.' She underscored that 'if an adult enters at a port of entry and claims asylum, they will not face prosecution for illegal entry. They have not committed a crime by coming to the port of entry.' Mejia-Mejia is not facing criminal prosecution despite jumping the border in between those legal ports of entry, calling the consistency of the zero-tolerance approach into doubt. In her legal argument, she claims the Trump administration 'has separated hundreds of migrant families for no legitimate purpose.' 'Although there are no allegations that the parents are unfit or abusing their children in any way, the government has forcibly separated them from their young children and detained the children, often far away, in facilities for unaccompanied minors,' she charges. It's unclear whether Mejia-Mejia's asylum request will be granted. Trump said Tuesday during a speech that he has 'only two options' for dealing with adults who illegally bring children into the U.S. from Mexico: 'totally open borders or criminal prosecution for lawbreaking' Last week Sessions ruled that domestic violence can no longer be considered grounds for asylum unless an applicant can prove he or she was persecuted because of 'membership in a particular and socially distinct group' like race or gender. But passing the credible fear test, and bonding out of jail, suggests her case may fit into a narrow range of exceptions. In her lawsuit, Mejia-Mejia is asking a federal judge to declare separating her from her son was 'unlawful,' order the boy's return to her and forbid the government from deporting her without him. She is also seeking financial damages for the 'pain and suffering arising from the separation,' and 'punitive damages for the conscious disregard for [her] rights. The lawsuit cites the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and alleges that the Trump administration violated her and her son's rights to due process under the law. They 'have a liberty interest under the Due Process Clause in remaining together as a family,' it contends. Her argument hinges on the definition of a 'person' in the Fifth Amendment, which the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 encompasses people who, the law considers 'aliens.' The trek Mejia-Mejia took with her son covered about 2,300 miles, roughly the distance from Boston to Phoenix 'Once an alien enters the country, the legal circumstance changes, for the due process clause applies to all persons within the United States,' the justices wrote in the case Zadvydas vs. Davis. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the administration this year, challenging the policy more generally. A judge ruled June 6 that the suit can proceed forward, saying that it describes 'government conduct that arbitrarily tears at the sacred bond between parent and child.' Mejia-Mejia sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Health and Human Services and its Office of Refugee Resettlement. Individual named defendants include Nielsen, Sessions, HHS Secretary Alex Azar, Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan, Phoenix ICE Field Office Director Henry Lucero and Assistant Field Office Director Michael Zackowski, USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna, Acting CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan and his Tucson Field Director William Brooks, and Office of Refugee Resettlement Director Scott Lloyd. President Trump is not named as a defendant. The case is Mejia-Mejia v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement et al, 1:18-cv-01445. A former SAS trooper says Australian soldiers can't be held to 'Western moral standards' when fighting in Afghanistan. The anonymous veteran hit out at recent reports of a damning Defence Force inquiry accusing the special forces regiment of war crimes. Soldiers engaged in 'unsanctioned and illegal application of violence on operations', which showed a 'disregard for human life and dignity', the 2016 report alleged. Claims included the execution of numerous Afghani civilians, one who was kicked off a cliff and another whose prosthetic leg was kept as a souvenir. A former SAS trooper says Australian soldiers can't be held to 'Western moral standards' when fighting in Afghanistan (two SAS troopers pictured in Afghanistan) The trooper, who spent nine years as an infantryman and five years in the SAS, argued tough tactics were necessary when fighting insurgents. 'Our enemies don't like us and they do their best to kill us with no moral restraint and complete impunity,' he wrote for the Michael Smith News blog. 'The SAS cannot fight enemies like that by adhering to normal Western moral standards. 'If we did, it would be leveraged as a weakness by the enemy. We have to keep them guessing about our limits.' The soldier mocked the report's findings that the SAS had a 'disregard for human life and dignity' by stating that their only job was to kill. 'We are not sent out to deliver a personal dignity entitlement to our enemies. We go out to kill them,' he wrote. He said Taliban and other fighters 'don't have much use for a Human Rights Commission' and said there was 'nothing dignified' about their tactics. He did not directly address the allegations but claimed the inquiry was doing 'immense damage' to Australian troops. The anonymous veteran hit out at recent reports of a damning Defence Force inquiry accusing the special forces regiment of war crimes (Australian infantry pictured) The trooper slammed an 'idiotic' call for Afghans to dob in Australian soldiers for war crimes to contribute to the ongoing inquiry. The ADF website has a page calling for confidential tips with the line 'Notices placed in local Afghani newspapers' at the bottom. A version of the ad in Afghanistan's Dari language is also publicly available on the ADF site. 'What a propaganda gold mine; and you can be certain the enemy will be using it against us,' the trooper wrote. He then pointed out that the Russian government had done just that, citing ABC reports on the leaked 2016 report. The report 'points to Australian troops' systematic, unauthorized and groundless use of weapons, particularly against civilians,' Russia's foreign ministry said. It said ABC reports revealed 'shocking facts about cold-blooded murders committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan'. The trooper referred to this as 'total bulls**t created by our taxpayer-funded broadcaster to be used by our enemies against us'. He said the allegations were just rumours that would not be backed up with evidence as even if they did occur, troopers would never turn on each other. The trooper slammed an 'idiotic' call for Afghans to dob in Australian soldiers for war crimes, including this ad in Afghanistan's Dari language placed in the Arman Monthly in March The soldier said the SAS and ADF more broadly would be subjected to a 'bombardment of allegations' to be investigated at taxpayer expense. 'SAS unit members [will be] taken away from their duties to 'help' the investigation and for interviews with investigators,' he said. 'SAS tactics and operational security [will be] compromised by our own Government and Defence force due to a call for an open investigation.' He also predicted 'the enemy' would be handed 'bags of money' in compensation and and the SAS ranks would become even more secretive. 'There are plenty of problems in Australian society. There is definitely a problem in the ADF,' he concluded. 'But it's not the war fighters. It's our leadership and the tone they set - from the PM down.' The leaked report by defence consultant Samantha Crompvoets interviewed current and former soldiers and senior officials and reviewed classified documents. An SAS interviewee said 'horrendous' and 'disgraceful things happened in Kabul... very bad news, or just inappropriate behaviour, but it was pretty much kept under wraps'. One case detailed in the report was where an SAS trooper kicked a handcuffed Afghan shepherd named Ali Jan off a cliff to his death. The father-of-eight left his home to buy some flour in September 2012 and was arrested along with dozens of others for questioning. A junior soldier described witnessing a trooper grab one of them, walk him to the edge of a rocky 10m cliff and kick him off the edge. Another soldier told the inquiry he saw Mr Jan's body at the bottom of the cliff. Both accounts were corroborated by others. The soldier who allegedly kicked him reveled in a 'warrior ethos', encouraged an escalating enemy body count and tacked a 'kill board' to the patrol room wall. Soldiers engaged in 'unsanctioned and illegal application of violence on operations', which showed a 'disregard for human life and dignity', the 2016 report alleged (stock image of troops in Afghanistan) In another case, an Afghan man who was killed by machine-gun fire during a military mission had his leg removed and it was taken back to the SAS base in Perth. The prosthetic leg was kept as a souvenir and used as a novelty drinking vessel by soldiers, the report alleged. In a separate killing, a junior trooper on his first deployment to Afghanistan was pressured by higher-ranking soldiers to execute an elderly, unarmed detainee. Some soldiers said they overheard the Easter Sunday execution was to 'blood the rookie' - a kind of initiation into the job of killing. Others said it was just another example of 'competition killing' among some Special Forces teams. Another case described a boy being shot by a helicopter because his shepherd's crook looked like the radio antenna of a Taliban scout. Also listed were the deaths of a father and his young son in 2013 after special forces raided an Uruzgan village and claimed the man aimed a pistol in their direction. Villagers alleged the father was shot while he was asleep in bed with his son, who soldiers claimed not to know was there. Two British twin sisters have been found guilty of drunkenly assaulting a police woman in Dubai and sentenced to six months jail. Alena and Sasha Parker, 37, fiercely protested their innocence when they were arrested outside a luxury hotel in the Gulf state in August last year. But the identical pair, who had been working in the country as lawyers, were convicted of assault by the Dubai Criminal Court today. Presiding judge Shaikha Hamad said the evidence against the sisters was strong and solid and sufficient to find them guilty despite their not-guilty pleas. Alena and Sasha Parker, 37, fiercely protested their innocence when they were arrested outside a luxury hotel in the Gulf state in August last year He sentenced them to six months in prison and ordered their deportation from the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE) upon release. However, the two women, who were not in court, remain free on bail for now and have a month to decide whether to appeal their sentences. The Dubai Criminal Court heard how the twins, who work for law firm Al Safar & Partners but previously appeared in soft porn films while living in London, punched and scratched the officer before throwing her to the ground, the UAE newspaper The National reported. The incident began after paramedics tried to help Alena Parker who had hurt her hand after leaving a drinks reception at a hotel in the upmarket Al Barsha district on 4 August last year, the judge was told. One of the Parker sisters was alleged to have slammed the ambulance door on the paramedics hand. But the identical pair, who had been working in the country as lawyers, were convicted of assault by the Dubai Criminal Court today One of the Parker sisters was alleged to have slammed the ambulance door on the paramedics hand The sisters moved to London to study and Alena married Parker in January 2001. Her sister Sasha later changed her name by deed-poll to Parker The 23-year-old Emeriti police officer told the court: She [Alena Parker] was sitting inside the ambulance when we got there and the second one [Sasha Parker] was standing next to the ambulance and screaming. While the paramedic did not wish to press charges against the sisters, the police took the decision to detain them as they were drunk, the court heard. The pair then resisted arrest, the police officer told the judge. We were ordered to handcuff them and take them in, the officer said. While in the car, they both started screaming and banging on the windows, he said. When they arrived at the police station, he left the women in the car with a colleague and a policewoman, the court heard. I went to get another set of handcuffs, since the ones we used were too big, but when I returned, I found both women on top of the policewoman, assaulting her, he said. Alena and Sasha Parker, who were born in the impoverished Soviet-state of Belarus and became British citizens eight years ago, vigorously protested their innocence at an earlier hearing in April and denied resisting arrest, physical assault and making insults The identical pair who were born with the maiden name Velikanava came to the UK after meeting British television director Miles Parker while he was making a film in Russia The Emirati policewoman told prosecutors that she was caught off-guard and was thrown to the ground. It was surprising because I did nothing to them nor did I even speak to them," she testified. They threw me to the ground, injuring my head and back, sat on top of me, kicked me and hit me all over my body. An FCO spokesperson said: We are supporting two British women who were arrested in Dubai in 2017, and are in contact with the UAE authorities' One of them scratched me hard on my right arm with her long nails, the policewoman said. She told the court the women were restrained and taken to the police station where they struggled and insulted her. The policewoman was taken to hospital for treatment while the sisters were taken into custody, the court heard. Alena and Sasha Parker, who were born in the impoverished Soviet-state of Belarus and became British citizens eight years ago, vigorously protested their innocence at an earlier hearing in April and denied resisting arrest, physical assault and making insults. In April the pair insisted the court would find in their favour: Since we trust the UAE judicial system and (are) sure about our innocence we are confident that the justice will be served. MailOnline revealed how the sisters had been porn stars who made adult films while studying in London and neither had qualified in the UK in law. Alena Parker, who is an associate at the Al Safar & Partners law firm, dropped out before completing the rigorous four-year training to practice as a solicitor in the UK. Sasha, who is the firms case manager, did not even begin the process to practice law, it is understood. The identical pair who were born with the maiden name Velikanava came to the UK after meeting British television director Miles Parker while he was making a film in Russia. The sisters moved to London to study and Alena married Parker in January 2001. Her sister Sasha later changed her name by deed-poll to Parker. Alena studied law at the University of London and University of Westminster between 2002 and 2007. They then moved to Dubai. Mr Parker explained: 'Alena took my name when we got married. Sasha changed her name by deed-poll because she wanted to have the same name as Alena. The twins are inseparable. 'They have been British citizens since 2005. Alena studied law in London gained a good degree. She also has a Master's as well as qualification in Islamic banking. 'The twins moved to Dubai in 2007. They share a flat together.' An FCO spokesperson said: We are supporting two British women who were arrested in Dubai in 2017, and are in contact with the UAE authorities. An undocumented immigrant has shared the heartbreaking moment she was separated from her eight-year-old son. Blanca Orantes-Lopez fled her home in Puerto La Libertad, El Salvador, with her young son Abel in April after receiving a chilling phone call demanding $5,000 or they would take her son's life. She and her son set out on the month long journey to get to the United States where they planned on applying for asylum. But when they got to the border, they found it impossible to apply. But rather than sanctuary, Orantes found she was taken into to custody to be prosecuted, as per the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy, and her young son was taken from her. Two months later, as she sits in a federal prison south of Seattle, she says she believes her son is in custody at a children's home across the country in upstate New York. She has no idea when she might see him again. Blanca Orantes-Lopez fled her home in Puerto La Libertad, El Salvador, with her young son Abel (pictured together) At one point, Orantes - who was bumped around from different detention facilities, including in Laredo, Texas - said officials brought Abel to her to say goodbye. 'They told me, 'Say bye to him because he's being transferred.' I asked where,' she recounted. 'They just told me to say bye to him. ... He just started crying, saying, 'Don't leave me, Mom.' 'I just said, 'It'll be OK.' That's all I said.' 'I still haven't been able to talk to him,' Orantes told The Associated Press in Spanish as she wept through a telephone interview Monday from the prison. 'The most difficult is not seeing him.' Her story is emblematic of the 2,000 instances in which President Donald Trump's administration has separated minors from their migrant parents in an effort to deter illegal immigration. The practice has provoked a national uproar fueled by stories of children being torn from their mothers' arms and of parents being deported without their kids. The administration adopted a new 'zero tolerance' policy in April designed to curb a wave of Central American migrants who say they are fleeing violence at home. Homeland Security officials now refer all cases of illegal entry for prosecution. Authorities say they are required to remove the children before they can prosecute the parents, but many parents, including Orantes, have remained separated from their children long after being convicted. A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas Border Patrol agents take into custody a father and son from Honduras near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 near Mission, Texas. The asylum seekers were then sent to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processing center for possible separation 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 on Wednesday Trump has both applauded the practice and falsely blamed Democrats for it. 'We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do,' Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told the National Sheriffs' Association in New Orleans. 'Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get-out-of-jail-free cards.' The phone call that prompted Orantes' monthlong journey to the U.S. border was no idle threat, she said. About three years ago, Abel's uncle was kidnapped by extortionists and freed only after the family paid up, according to her attorney, Matt Adams, legal director of the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. 'When they don't get their money, they kill people,' said Orantes, 26. But that time, the demand was more than they could muster. And they had only a week to pay, she said. She and her son split from the boy's father in Guatemala. He remains in hiding, and Orantes said she does not know where he is. Upon reaching the border, she and Abel found it impossible to apply for asylum at a port of entry, Adams said. 'A lot of people are showing up at the border to apply for asylum and are being told, 'We don't have capacity for them,'' Adams said. 'It's not like they can just stand in a line for several days, because then the Mexican officials will grab them and deport them. So they're then forced to go through the ravine or the river.' The photo shows the Federal Detention Center where Blanca Orantes-Lopez is held away from her child Tuesday Orantes was detained on May 22 with about 20 other people near Roma, Texas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. She was convicted of the misdemeanor of unlawfully entering the U.S. and was sentenced to time served - a development she thought would reunify her with Abel. Instead, with detention centers overflowing on the border, she became one of more than 1,600 detainees transferred by ICE to federal prisons. She was sent June 6 to the Federal Detention Center at SeaTac, where she remains with more than 200 other border detainees, waiting to hear whether her asylum request will proceed. The conditions there are better than they were at the immigration jails, she said. Before Trump's policy changes, she likely would not have been prosecuted, but instead allowed to remain with her son and granted an interview to determine whether she had a credible fear of persecution or torture in her home country. If officials found that she did, she and Abel would probably have been released while their immigration case continued. It was weeks before she learned her son's whereabouts, she said. She has not spoken with him. Her attorney said she has no money and is not allowed to make collect calls to the facility in Kingston, New York, where he is held. The boy has been able to call her sister, Maria Orantes, who lives in Maryland and has petitioned for custody, without success. 'He doesn't feel well there,' Maria Orantes said in a phone interview. 'When he calls, he's crying. He doesn't want to be there.' The Department of Health and Human Services, whose Office of Refugee Resettlement oversees the placement of migrant children separated from their families, did not immediately return an email seeking comment about why the boy had not been placed with his aunt. Blanca Orantes said she had hoped to live with her sister. 'I wanted to work,' she said. 'Raise my kid. Be a good person, get ahead, have some money and not hide. I thought it would be different.' President Trump says he wants to cut off aid to Central American countries that he claimed Tuesday are 'sending' migrants to the U.S. Trump said he'd be asking for authorization to end assistance to the region that includes Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. 'We're not going to give any more aid to those countries,' he asserted during a Washington, D.C. speech to the National Federation of Independent Business. 'Why the hell should we?' The president was addressing the problem of family separation when he threatened foreign aid to the financially struggling countries that are home to most non-Mexican migrants begging for asylum at the southern border. 'I don't want children taken away from parents. And when you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally, which should happen, you have to take the children away,' he said. 'Now, we don't have to prosecute them. But then we're not prosecuting them for coming in illegally. That's not good.' Trump said that he'd be championing legislation to make sure that families that are flooding the border from Central America are not being separated as he lit into lawyers for migrants and judges he claimed are abusing the system. 'We want a great country. We want a country with heart,' Trump said. 'But when people come up, they have to know they're not going to get in. Otherwise it will never stop.' President Trump says he wants to cut off aid to Central American countries that he claimed Tuesday are sending migrants to the U.S. The president said he doesn't like that children are being separated from their legal guardians- even though it's a policy that was implemented by his administration. 'We can't let people pour in. They've gotta go through the process,' he stated. 'And maybe it's politically correct or maybe it's not - we've gotta stop separation of the families.' Standing his ground, Trump said, 'But politically correct or not, we have to be a country that needs security, that needs safety, that has to be protected.' 'And remember, these countries that we give tremendous foreign aid to in many cases, they send these people up, and they're not sending their finest,' he claimed. 'Does that sound familiar? Remember, I made that speech and I was badly criticized....Turned out I was 100 percent right. That's why I got elected.' Trump was referring to his 2015 announcement that he would be seeking the Oval Office. In the speech he referred to illegal immigrants as rapists and criminals. Revisiting the charge on Tuesday, Trump said that many immigrants who come to the U.S. illegally will never appear at their court dates. 'If they're good, that's great. And if they're bad, you'll have killings, you'll have murders, you'll have this, you'll have that, you'll have crime.' The president rejected Democratic demands that the country hire more judges to adjudicate the cases of legitimate asylum seekers faster as part of the solution. 'I don't want to try people. I don't want people coming in,' he asserted. Trump said that once a migrant puts 'one foot' on U.S. soil then 'it's essentially welcome to America. Welcome to our country. You'll never get 'em out.' The other advantage migrants have: professional lawyers. 'Some are for good. Others are do-gooders. And others are bad people, and they tell these people exactly what to say,' he stated. 'I am being harmed in my country. My country is extremely dangerous. I fear for my life. Say that, congratulations, you'll never be removed.' He added, 'And they're not all bad people...but in a way that's cheating. Because they're giving them statements. They're not coming up for that reason. They're coming up for many other reasons. And sometimes for that reason.' Trump said the ease of entry has led to a 1,700 percent increase in asylum claims. 'They game the system. They game it. It's so easy for them. They're smart. They didn't go to the Wharton School of Finance,' he said, name-checking his alma mater, 'but you know what. They're really smart.' It was not immediately clear what Trump was referring to when he said he plans to stop aiding the home nations of the migrants - his press secretary did not brief reporters and the State Department's top spokeswoman kicked the issue back to the White House. Immigrant children are led by staff in single file between tents at a detention facility next to the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas A view from Mexico of the US Customs and Boarder Protection is housing underage people caught illegally entering the United States at the Tornillo Port of Entry in Guadalupe Bravos US Border Patrol agents patrol the bed of the Rio Grand in front of where the US Customs and Boarder Protection is housing underage people Locals walk along the Mexico side of the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana The president has signaled before that he could stop the foreign assistance to Central America this spring when he was raging about an annual 2,000-person Honduran caravan. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert directed reporters to the White House for comment during a press briefing on Tuesday afternoon. 'Personally I'm not aware of that. That's why I would refer you back to the White House,' she responded. Requests for comment from DailyMail.com on the matter were not immediately returned by officials at 1600 Penn. Trump defended his administration, saying that it is 'as a result of Democratic-supported loopholes in our federal laws' that most illegal immigrant families and minors coming to the U.S. from Central America 'cannot be detained together or removed together, only released.' 'These are crippling loopholes that cause family separation, which we don't want,' he said. The so-called loopholes have led to roughly half a million family units and minors being released into the U.S. since 2014, he said. Trump said it's coming at 'unbelievably great taxpayer expense and 'nobody knows how much we've been paying for this monstrosity.' 'Legislation that nobody has idea what they're doing. They don't even know what it means,' he added. 'Child smugglers exploit the loopholes and they gain illegal entry into the Untied States, putting countless children in danger on the perilous trek to the Untied States.' Trump blasted Mexico, saying the U.S. neighbor and ally 'does nothing for us' even though 'they could solve it.' 'Try staying in Mexico for a few days. See how long that lasts,' he said in an aside. 'They do nothing for us.' Trump pounded Democrats for refusing to back his immigration agenda, which he said earlier in the day was allowing violent criminals 'to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13,' a violent illegal immigrant gang. 'They don't want to give it, because Democrats love open borders. Let the whole world come in. Let the whole world. MS-13 gang members from all over the place, come on in -- we have open borders,' he said. 'And they view that possibly intelligently, except that it's destroying our country. They view that as potential voters. Someday they're going to vote for Democrats. Because they can't win on their policies, which are horrible. They found that out in the last presidential election.' In back-to-back tweets this morning, the president ripped into the minority party and demanded that Congress pass legislation strengthening border security. 'Now is the best opportunity ever for Congress to change the ridiculous and obsolete laws on immigration. Get it done, always keeping in mind that we must have strong border security.' Trump also commented on the family separation controversy plaguing his administration. 'We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally. Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2000 are with their parents, many of whom have tried to enter our Country illegally on numerous occasions,' the president tweeted. The remark about crime-committing illegals immediately stoked controversy, with the president's detractors saying the blanket description was not only wrong but inhumane. Another incident earlier this year caused outrage when the president called gangster immigrants 'animals' in another statement his critics cast as incendiary. Yesterday, President Trump said in unscripted remarks that he's implementing strict immigration policies because he doesn't want the United States to end up like Europe. 'The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. Won't be,' he charged in fiery remarks at a White House event. 'You look at what's happening in Europe. You look at what's happening in other places. We can't allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch.' The president delved without warning into a heated argument over immigration that his administration has been waging with Democrats then at an unrelated signing ceremony for his space policy initiative. 'Immigration is the fault [of Democrats], and all of the problems that we're having, 'cause we cannot get them to sign legislation. We cannot get them even to the negotiating table. And I say it's very strongly the Democrats' fault,' he said at the East Room event. 'They're obstructionists, and they are obstructing.' The president pinned the blame for family separation on the opposing party, which he said is refusing to work with Republicans in Congress to pass new rules to govern the nation's immigration system. 'If the Democrats would sit down, instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly - good for the children, good for the country good for the world,' he asserted. 'It could take place quickly. We could have an immigration bill. We could have child separation [ended].' Instead, the president contended, 'We're stuck with these horrible laws. They're horrible laws. What's happening is so sad. Is so sad. And it can be taken care of quickly, beautifully, and we'll have safety.' Trump suggested the United States' could bolster its credentials as leader of the free world by passing merit-based immigration laws that put a premium on high-skilled workers and lock down America's porous borders 'The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. Won't be,' he charged later in fiery remarks at a White House event. The White House spent Monday and Tuesday sparring with Democrats who have been accusing the Trump administration of exploiting migrant families. Each side condemned the other for using children as 'pawns' in a raging illegal immigration debate. President Trump said Monday, as he attempted to gain the upper hand, that children are 'being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country.' Trump said in tweets that he'd also like to know where Democratic outrage is for American families who are being permanently separated by murderous, illegal immigrant gangsters. 'Why dont the Democrats give us the votes to fix the worlds worst immigration laws? Where is the outcry for the killings and crime being caused by gangs and thugs, including MS-13, coming into our country illegally?' he said in a Monday morning rant. A rotating cast of Trump administration officials appeared on national news networks to buttress the president's arguments and assail Democrats using family separation as a cudgel against the Republicans' in their war over illegal immigration. Hogan Gidley, a deputy spokesman for the president, appeared on Fox News and asserted that Democrats are 'playing politics with people's lives. They're doing it on the backs of children. It's absolutely grotesque.' 'All they want to do is go down and grandstand and try to use this to political gain to try and get reelected in a few years, and it's grotesque,' he told reporters as he walked back inside the White House to his office. 'We can fix it right now, we can protect our citizens, but more important protect all the children around the world who are trying to come here.' The Trump spokesman claimed that migrant families 'separate themselves a lot of times,' sending their children with coyotes promising to bring them across the border for a hefty price. 'It's a deplorable situation, we've gotta fix it. And Congress could do it tomorrow, if you close the loopholes, the situation's solved,' Gidley stated. The president's pitch: ''This could really be something very special. It could be something. Maybe even for the world to watch. Just like they're watching our great economy, how it's soaring, they could watch this' A view of inside U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention facility shows detainees inside fenced areas at Rio Grande Valley Centralized Processing Center in Rio Grande City, Texas, U.S., June 17, 2018. Picture taken on June 17, 2018 Immigrants wait to head to a Catholic Charities relief center after being dropped off at a bus station shortly after release from detention through "catch and release" immigration policy on June 17, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The man said he was separated from his son while in detention. "Catch and release" is a protocol under which people detained by US authorities as unlawful immigrants can be released while they wait for a hearing White House Director of Strategic of Communications Mercede Schlapp said on Fox that Democrats are 'using children as political pawns' and are essentially 'advocating for the smugglers who are bringing these children over' the border. 'We have our hands tied and the smugglers have the advantage,' she said, insisting that MS-13 gang members are bringing over small children as leverage. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen says Democrats bludgeoning the administration for its 'zero tolerance' policy at the border are acting 'cowardly' and could change federal immigration law if they wanted to. Nielsen stood at the White House podium on Monday and argued that DHS was just doing its job in enforcing a Trump administration policy that has led more than 2,000 children to be separated from their parents or guardians in the last six weeks. 'If an American were to commit a crime anywhere in the United States,' she told a room full of reporters, 'they would go to jail and they would be separated from their family.' Nielsen said, 'This is not a controversial idea.' When asked by reporters if the policy amounts to 'child abuse', Nielsen denied the accusation. 'We have high standards. We give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. There are videos, there are TVs. I visited the detention centers myself.' The president delved without warning into a heated argument over immigration that his administration has been waging with Democrats at a signing ceremony for his space policy initiative Nielsen also claimed Monday that the crisis of illegal immigrant children being housed separately from the adults who bring them across the border is, in part, fueled by men and women making fraudulent asylum claims with children who aren't theirs. 'From October 2017 to this February, we have seen a staggering 315 per cent increase in illegal aliens fraudulently using children to pose as family units to gain entry into the country,' she told the annual National Association of Sheriffs meeting in New Orleans. 'This must stop. All this does is put the children at risk,' the DHS chief added. 'We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are in fact a family.' 'We have to do our job. We will not apologize for doing our job.' Democratic lawmakers on Sunday said that they would fight the 'evil' separation of children from their parents at the border while accusing the Trump administration of 'using the grief, the tears, the pain of these kids as mortar to build their wall.' 'They call it "zero tolerance," but a better name for it is zero humanity, and there's zero logic to this policy,' Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley said during a trip to the Mexican border. Rep. Adam Schiff told NBC, 'It's an effort to extort a bill to their liking in the Congress. 'It's, I think, deeply unethical, and by the Presidents making these provable falsehoods about whats required, the party adopting that has become, the GOP has become the party of lies,' the Democratic congressman stated. The Trump administration says that 'open border' policies have led to a surge in illegal immigration that has forced the administration to treat all migrants unlawfully crossing the Untied States' southern border as criminals. 'It is a crime to enter this country illegally. So if [Democrats] dont like that law, they should change it,' Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, charged on Meet the Press on Sunday. 'Do you want the child in jail? As opposed to a facility?' Immigrants are dropped off at a bus station shortly after being released from detention through "catch and release" immigration policy on June 17, 2018 in McAllen, Texas Conway said that President Trump wants to double the number of family detention centers as part of his 70-point immigration plan that Congress has not passed, in order to keep more families together. Gidley on Monday charged, 'There is a separation that occurs because the law exists that way. It is a farce to believe you can keep them together. ... Democrats say you can't detain them. So if you can't detain them, you can't deport them, you have to release them into the interior of the country. It's a complete false choice but it can be so simply if would close these loopholes.' The White House spokesman forcefully argued that the government has a responsibility to detain undocumented immigrants in order to cut down on crime. 'And I understand the Democrats are upset about temporary separation of families who come here illegally, ' he acknowledged. 'Where is the outcry for the permanent separation when one of these people come to the country, commit a crime, kill an American citizen either with their own hand or via drugs they distribute, no one comes to their defense?' 'The permanent separation is the biggest abomination, and no Democrat's coming out decrying that at all,' Gidley charged on Fox. Democratic lawmakers touring border facilitates on Sunday said that the Trump administration was behaving immorally and unethically in order to get the president's desired changes to border security. 'It's completely unacceptable under any moral code or under any religious tradition to injure children, inflict trauma on them in order to send some political message to adults somewhere overseas,' Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkely said after stopping by a facility housing 1,500 immigrant children. Merkley accused Republicans of 'hurting kids to get legislative leverage is unacceptable. It is evil.' Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee said Trump 'is not telling the truth' about the law as written. 'There is no law, there is no policy that has allowed him to snatch children away from their families,' she said. 'I can assure you we'll be fighting to the end to stop this ugly, vile program that is harming children and creating massive child abuse.' Democratic Rep. David Cicilline said the policy was 'undermining the founding values of this country.' 'We saw the fear in the eyes of these children who are wondering when they will see their parent ever again. It's a disgrace, it's shameful and it's un-American,' he said. A gate on the US side of the US-Mexican border Republicans were planning to vote on two pieces of legislation that would overhaul immigration in the House of Representatives following a visit to Capitol Hill from president on Tuesday. Gidley indicated to reporters at the White House on Monday that a bipartisan group of lawmakers could also be invited to the White House for a conversation on illegal immigration and how to fix a system both sides say is broken. Even the president's wife entered into the political fray on Sunday. 'Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,' her spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said. 'She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.' Former First Lady Laura Bush, wife to ex-Republican president George W. Bush, also chimed in. 'I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart, ' she wrote in the Washington Post. Bill Clinton, an ex-Democratic president, hit the Trump administration, as well, in a Father's Day tweet that was seconded by his wife, 2016 Democratic nominee for president Hillary Clinton. 'These children should not be a negotiating tool. And reuniting them with their families would reaffirm America's belief in & support for all parents who love their children,' he tweeted. A man's 25-year quest for the truth about his family has led him to a small Catholic cemetery in Massachusetts, where a priest he believes was his biological father was laid to rest in 1993. That same year, Jim Graham learned from his relatives that his birth father may have been the now-deceased Father Thomas Sullivan. Graham spent the next two decades gathering dozens of pages of documents and building a case supporting the theory of Sullivan's paternity, including adoption papers, his late mother's divorce records and leaked church documents. Scroll down for video Uncanny likeness: Jim Graham, 72 (right), is convinced that the late Father Thomas Sullivan (left) was his biological father Bring up the body: On Monday, Graham had Sullivan's body exhumed from Tewksbury, Massachusetts, cemetery for the purpose of DNA testing The 72-year-old resident of South Carolina has repeatedly appealed for help to Father Sullivan's old religions order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and went all the way up to Boston Cardinal Sean OMalley, but with unsatisfactory results. Then in March of this year, Graham was shocked to receive a letter from the Oblates Washington, DC, office giving the green light to exhume Father Sullivan's body from the Tewksbury, Massachusetts, cemetery in order to obtain a DNA sample for testing, reported the station WGRZ. Graham was granted permission to dig up the priest's remains under the condition that he pay for the project himself and then return the burial plot to the it was. Armed with a permit from the City of Tewksbury and a backhoe, on Monday Graham arrived at the burial ground in the company of a forensic anthropologist tasked with collecting a sample from the deceased priest's femur. Since Sullivans body was well-preserved, anthropologist Anna Marie Mires was able to extract four different samples. Sullivans DNA matter will be camped to Graham's sample and analyzed by a lab in Virginia called Bode Cellmark Forensics. The results are expected to be available in a month. Graham said the total cost of the project, including the exhumation and the testing, will set him back more than $10,000. Building a case: Graham had spent 25 years gathering documents proving that the late cleric was his biological father. Pictured on the right: Graham's mother, Helen Graham is convinced that his mother (right) and Father Sullivan ran away to New York City to raise him together, but their plan was thrwarted Graham stressed that it was never his intention to dig up Sullivans body: all he wanted was for the Oblates to confirm and acknowledge that the late priest was his birth father. The religious order has maintained that they do not have the information that Graham has been seeking in their archives, but the man doubts the veracity of that claim, based on the reams of documents he has gathered over the years about Father Sullivan. Thomas Sullivan was born in 1908, grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts and graduated from Boston College before joining the Oblates. Jim Graham was born in the family of Helen and John Graham shortly after the end of World War II, but documents indicate that his mother's husband was not his biological father. Jim was born in Buffalo, New York, where Father Sullivan served as a priest around the same time. According to church documents that Jim obtained from a cleric friendly to his cause, there is a strong indication that Father Sullivan ran off to New York City with his mother Helen when he was a baby. During their alleged sojourn in Manhattan, Helen went to an adoption agency seeking day care services. Old record from that agency listed Jim as an out-of-wedlock child and mentioned a sympatric 'alleged father' living nearby. Seeking a confession: Graham wants Sullivan's religious order, the Oblates, to publicly acknowledge his paternity But if the documents collected by Jim Graham are to be believed, his biological parents' hope to start a new life together with their son in New York City were dashed when private detectives barged into their apartment and busted the lovers. John Graham later used the evidence gathered by the detectives to divorce Helen and gain full custody of Jim. Sullivan eventually re-joined the order of the Oblates as a penitent priest, performing menial labor and translating religious texts, according to The Boston Globe, which first reported on Jim Graham's case. After 16 years, Sullivan was rehabilitated. He eventually returned to Tewksbury, where he died of cancer in 1993. Not long after Sullivan's passing, Jim Graham began investigating his geneology and interviewing people who knew the late priest, including other clerics. He called on the leaders of the Oblates order in Rome, asking them to acknowledge Sullivan's paternity, and reached out to both Cardinal O'Malley and the head of the Oblates in the United States. His quarter-century campaign culminated with Mondays exhumation, but Graham says if the test confirm his paternity, the next step would be for church officials to publicly admit that Sullivan was his father and that he was forcibly separated from his mother. Vile human traffickers who sold women and forced them into prostitution, while advertising them as 'fresh stock' on the internet have been jailed. More than a dozen women were trafficked from Romania to five brothels in Britain by seven members of the gang. The victims who were referred to as 'rags' were either made to believe they were in a relationship with their captor, or that they were coming to the UK for legitimate work. They ended up locked away and being made to have sex for money in Blackburn, Preston, Manchester, Northampton and Luton. Officers from Lancashire Police's human trafficking and modern slavery team conducted a huge surveillance operation before they raided five properties. Six women were rescued and taken to safety and a number of items linked to the sex trade, along with cash and firearms, were seized. The gang are believed to have brought over at least 13 women. Florin Rusescu was handed a 31 month prison sentence over his role in the trafficking gang. The 44-year-old was involved in keeping women in brothels from London to Lancashire Maria Badalescu (left) and Andrei Alin Carabet (right) were both jailed for their roles in trafficking Romanian women to the UK Prosecuting, Francis McEntee argued victims knew they were coming to the United Kingdom to work as prostitutes via the gang's 'agency'. However a harrowing diary was found at one of the properties which revealed the emotional torture of one of the victims - who had come to the UK believing she was in a relationship with her captor. In it she wrote: 'I thought that the sun will eventually shine in my life but I was wrong and the mist doesn't seem to want to go away. 'I feel sad and tired, ill and fragile. I feel like I'm suffocating. I need some help to go through this and I want strength. My arms are heavy and my legs are numb, my head aches and it gets worse when I think about all the women around him.' The women were rescued under Operation Magician - an investigation into the trafficking and sexual exploitation of a large number of Romanian women into the UK. The investigation began after noise complaints were made about a home in Blackburn. Online profiles were discovered which described the women as 'fresh stock'. The gang was jailed for a total of 16 years. Florin Rusescu, 44, and Maria Badalescu, 33, of Harcourt Street, Luton were jailed for 31 months and 30 months respectively. Ionel Sandu, 33, of Carlton Road, Blackburn was jailed for 40 months while Andrei Alin Carabet, 28, of Manchester Road, Preston was sentenced to 25 months in prison. Catalin Mihalescu and Valentin Poiana each from Manchester pleaded guilty to conspiracy to arrange travel for the purposes of exploitation Mihai Nicolescu, 33, of Freehold Street, Northampton, pleaded guilty to encouraging or assisting exploitation and was jailed for nine months. Catalin Mihalescu, 44, and Valentin Poiana, 40, from Manchester, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to arrange travel for the purposes of exploitation. Mihalescu was jailed for 44 months and Poiana was put behind bars for 14 months. Sgt Stu Peall, of Lancashire Constabulary's Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery Team, said: 'This gang were part of a large human trafficking network, which operated brothels across the UK. Mihai Nicolescu pleaded guilty to encouraging or assisting exploitation and was jailed for nine months after more than a dozen women were trafficked to the UK Ionel Sandu 'They were treated as commodities, and were traded among brothel owners without any regard for their wellbeing or human rights. When they were no longer wanted they were moved to a different location, where they were put to work in the sex trade again. 'The diary we found gives a glimpse of the suffering these women endured at the hands of this criminal gang. 'Lancashire Constabulary is committed to tackling exploitation of all kinds and today's sentences are the culmination of the hard work and dedication of our officers who continue to work proactively to put an end to modern slavery.' A New York City judge slammed a faux German billionaire heiress charged with defrauding hotels, banks and friends out of hundreds of thousands of dollars on Tuesday and said she was more concerned with her alleged crimes being turned into a film than she was with any of her apparent victims. Anna Sorokin, 27, appeared in court in Manhattan on Tuesday on grand larceny charges. She was prepared to take a plea deal which would have seen her go to jail but only if it meant she would spend three years behind bars at most. A judge rejected her proposed deal of a sentence of one to three years imprisonment, offering her a deal of between three and nine years at most which she turned down. Lambasting the former fashion student and magazine intern who managed to con some of Manhattan's finest hotels and restaurants along with fooling private wealthy individuals, Justice Diane Kiesel said: 'I see no remorse. 'She seems more concerned about who is going to play her in the movie than what shes done to the people she allegedly took advantage of.' She added that a sentence of just three years behind bars would serve as a 'mere a slap on the wrist for a crime this serious.' Sorokin now faces 15 years in jail if convicted on all counts. Anna Sorokin, the faux German heiress accused of swindling banks, hotels and friends out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, appears in court in Manhattan on June 19 to turn down a plea deal which would have put her behind bars for between three and nine years. She now faces 15 years imprisonment if convicted Sorokin posed as Anna Delvey, the heiress daughter of a fictitious billionaire Russian magnate and used the persona to dupe elite circles in Manhattan from 2013 until January this year. She talked banks into lending her money to start the 'Anna Delvey Foundation' and skipped out on bills at the end of a weeks-long stays in some of New York's finest hotels. She also targeted individuals who she believed would serve her well and got them to pay for things with the promise that she would eventually give them the money back. Among them was a Vanity Fair picture researcher whom she convinced to pay $62,000 for a trip to Morocco after her own card was rejected. Sorokin denies the charges and insists she was always trying to be seen as a businesswoman. She claims the dinners, at extravagant restaurants like Le Coucou were business meetings and that it was all going towards the Anna Delvey Foundation, an arts-focused members club she planned to open and still speaks about. In an interview with New York Magazine earlier this year, she said: 'I had what I thought was a great team around me, and I was having fun.' She said that while she had done some things wrong, it 'doesnt diminish the hundred things I did right.' Prosecutors say she facilitated her lifestyle by check-kiting - a practice whereby a person deposits bad checks into a bank account then withdraws a cash amount before they bounce. Sorokin, who used the fake name Anna Delvey to dupe friends and New York's glitteratti, wore her trademark Celine glasses and a makeshift headband which appeared to have been crafted out of bandages Sorokin, 27, will return to court on June 19. She is being held at Rikers' Island which, she says, is not 'as bad as people think' In May, Sorokin spoke from Rikers' Island to say it was 'not that bad'. Sorokin is pictured in one of the many Instagram photographs she uploaded as Anna Delvey, before her arrest She said she had learned not how 'easy' it was to steal other people's identities by watching financial criminals behind bars. 'This place is not that bad at all actually. People seem to think its horrible, but I see it as like, this sociological experiment. 'There are couple of girls who are here for financial crimes as well. 'This one girl, shes been stealing other peoples identities. I didnt realize it was so easy,' she told New York Magazine. On Tuesday, Sorokin's lawyer Todd Spodek would not go into specifics of the case but said: 'Our position has always been that the people will not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Sorokin intended to defraud her friends and colleagues.' Sorokin's case received notoriety from two lengthy articles in Vanity Fair and New York Magazine. Among those who have spoken out about it are some of her alleged victims including staff at the hotel where she stayed. They told how she tipped with $100 bills and gave off an air of extreme wealth. Sorokin (far right) is pictured in September 2014 with Giudo Cacciatori, Gro Curtis and Giorgia Tordini at The Jane hotel One, who was the receptionist at 11 Howard where Sorokin stayed for a month, told how she once attended a dinner she organized for a large group at Le Coucou which included MaCaulay Culkin. Others described how restaurants began calling them after seeing pictures of them with Sorokin on Instagram and asking to be put in touch with her because she had skipped out on her bills. The truth is that she was born in Russia and grew up in Germany as the daughter of a truck driver. She left Germany in 2011 to move to London where she attended Central St. Martin's College as a fashion student. Her father told New York Magazine that they had supplemented her rent and schooling at first and that he was stunned by the news she had been arrested. 'We always paid for her accommodations, her rent, and other matters. 'She assured us these costs were the best investment. If ever she needed something more at one point or another, it didnt matter. 'The future was always bright,' her parents, who did not want to be identified, said in an email. A dispute between two political families escalated Tuesday as Donald Trump Jr. canceled plans to raise money for the eldest son of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Donald Trump Jr. decided to withdraw from a fundraiser for Texas land commissioner George P. Bush in New York City next week after Jeb Bush criticized President Donald Trump's policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. 'Children shouldn't be used as a negotiating tool,' Jeb Bush, the brother of former President George W. Bush, and a Trump opponent in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, wrote on Twitter Monday. Bush called on Trump to 'end this heartless policy.' Feud: Donald Trump Jr. canceled a New York fundraiser for George P. Bush after Jeb Bush and Laura Bush attacked the president on separating children from their parents at the border Family affair: George P. Bush will not get aid from Donald Trump Jr. after the Texas land commissioner's father Jeb and aunt Laura both attacked the president That was too much for 40-year-old Trump Jr., who had been supportive of 42-year-old George P. Bush's political aspirations, but had warned him repeatedly to get Bush's dad to back off his father. Bad blood has lingered between the two patriarchs since the 2016 campaign. In March, Jeb Bush poked Trump during an appearance at Yale University, saying Bush goes home every day to children 'who actually love me.' Trump Jr. responded publicly on Twitter: 'I love my father very much.' And privately, according to the sources, he expressed his displeasure to George P. Bush. The sons had maintained a decent relationship despite the tension between their fathers, the sources said. The younger Bush was the only member of the Bush family to endorse Trump in 2016. His aunt, former first lady Laura Bush, also lashed out at the Trump administration immigration policies on Monday. In a Washington Post op-ed, she said the Republican president's policy was 'cruel' and 'breaks my heart.' The younger Trump was scheduled to headline a fundraiser on Monday for the younger Bush, who is facing re-election this fall. Bush was elected to his first term as the commissioner of the Texas General Land Office in 2014, a statewide office that could open the door to run another state or federal office in the future. A spokesman for George P. Bush did not comment on the cancellation, which was first reported by Axios. President Donald Trump claimed Canadians are smuggling scuffed upped shoes made to look old out of the United States to avoid high tariffs and stated America can long longer be 'the stupid country' on trade issues. 'Canada is not going to take advantage of the United States any longer, and Mexico is not going to take advantage of the United States any longer,' Trump told an audience at the National Federation of Independent Business' 75th Anniversary Celebration on Tuesday afternoon. The president has waged a war of words against Canada and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ever since the Canadian leader criticized Trump's decision to increase tariffs on steel and aluminium, saying it would hurt the economy of both countries. President Trump said Canada will not take advantage of the U.S. anymore Trump and Justin Trudeau have been in a war of words since Trump raised tariffs Trump claimed that because of Canada's high tariffs, Canadians were coming into the U.S. and 'smuggling things back' to avoid the duties. 'The tariffs to get common items back into Canada are so high that they have to smuggle them in. They buy shoes, then they wear them,' he said. 'They scuff them up. They make them sound old or look old. No, we're treated horribly.' He did offer words of praise for the Canadian people. 'Canada - they like to talk. They're our great neighbor. They fought World War II with us. We appreciate it. They fought World War I with us, and we appreciate it,' he said, 'but we're protecting each other.' But then the president railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Trump said is was 'one of the worst deals ever made by this country.' He added: 'We're trying to equalize it. And it's not easy but we're getting there.' 'We can no longer be the stupid country. We want to be the smart country,' he said. Trump repeatedly has threatened to withdraw from the 25-year-old deal and said in his remarks he may pursue separate agreements with Canada and Mexico. The president announced late last month he would be impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union after initially exempting them from the levies. Leaders from all the relevant countries criticized the move, saying it cause wide spread economic damage. Trudeau has been one of the most vocal objectors and gone on American news shows to try and persuade the president to change his mind. Trump has made Trudeau the main target of his fury in return. He particularly railed against Trudeau after the Canadian leader's press conference following the G7 summit. In it, the prime minister warned that Canada would not be pushed around on tariffs - a point Trudeau had made several times before. 'He'll learn that's going to cost a lot of money for the people of Canada. He'll learn, he can't do that,' Trump said. Meanwhile, Canadian officials have stressed the two countries' extensive trading relationship and pointed out that Canada is the top export destination for 35 U.S. states and that 9 million jobs in the United States depend on trade with its northern neighbor. World Refugee Day is slated to be held very soon across the world. The event comes as the migration to Europe from Africa and the Middle East continues unabated and U.S. President Donald Trump has faced withering criticism for his decision to separate children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Disturbingly, the United Nations has just released a new report stating that a record 68.5 million individuals have now been displaced worldwide due to war, poverty, persecution and other events. Police in Rome, Italy evict Eritrean refugees from Piazza Indipendenza on August 24, 2017 Heres all you need to know about what World Refugee Day is, when it is, what the theme for 2018 will be, its history and some events and activities marking it worldwide. What is World Refugee Day? World Refugee Day is an annual day thats dedicated to raising awareness of the plight of refugees worldwide. When is World Refugee Day 2018? World Refugee Day 2018 will be held on Wednesday, June 20. World Refugee Day 2018 theme The theme for World Refugee Day 2018 will be Now More Than Ever, We Need to Stand with Refugees. The theme for World Refugee Day 2018 is "Now more than ever, we need to stand #WithRefugees https://t.co/aq2LjeXnIW UNHCR Tanzania (@UNHCRTanzania) June 19, 2018 The themes for years past are as follows: 2017: Embracing Refugees to Celebrate our Common Humanity 2016: We Stand Together with Refugees 2015: With Courage, Let Us All Combine 2014: Migrants and Refugees: Towards a Better World 2013: Take One Minute to Support a Family Forced to Flee 2012: One Family Torn Apart by War Is Too Many 2011: One Refugee without Hope Is Too Many 2010: One Refugee Forced to Flee Is Too Many 2009: Home 2008: Protection 2007: Perseverance 2006: Hope 2005: Courage 2004: Courage 2003: Refugee Youth: Building the Future 2002: Tolerance 2001: Respect History of World Refugee Day World Refugee Day was established by the United Nations on December 4, 2000 as a way to raise awareness of global refugees on an annual basis starting in 2001, which marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The day is always held on June 20 in collaboration with Africa Refugee Day, recognized in several countries on that day prior to the UNs declaration of World Refugee Day. The day also falls close to Refugee Week in the UK, marking its 20th anniversary in 2018. The event is marked in over 100 countries, with the United Nations Refugee Agency, government officials, celebrities, nonprofit aid organizations and others taking part in events to recognize the day. #WorldRefugeeDay is June 20! Take a look at our #WithRefugees solidarity map, where you can find out what's happening near you. And if you're organizing a community event, please pin it on our map. https://t.co/fV1BSSGTKo pic.twitter.com/uLdnyayfdi UNHCR United States (@UNHCRUSA) June 13, 2018 World Refugee Day events World Refugee Day is marked with a wide array of activities held by government and NGO officials across the world. Just a few events include: Melania Trump is hosting Queen Letizia of Spain for afternoon tea in the red room of the White House on Tuesday as their husbands meet in the Oval Office. The two fashionistas were a bright spot on a rainy Washington D.C. day with the queen standing out in a hot pink Michael Kors dress with pink accessories while the first lady wore an olive and white Valentino dress. Both women were in their signature stiletto heels. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump welcome Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia at the White House President Donald Trump, second from right, and first lady Melania Trump, right, welcome Spain's King Felipe VI, second from left, and Queen Letizia, left, to the Oval Office Melania Trump and Queen Letizia of Spain walk along the Rose Garden Colonnade Both women wore their signature heels. A cool mist was falling on the South Lawn as King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain arrived. They were greeted with a red carpet flanked by flags of U.S. and Spain. President Donald Trump and the first lady greeted the royal couple with handshakes. The two couples all posed for photos. The King and the president went inside first followed by their wives into the Oval Office. "It's a great honor to have the king and queen of Spain. It's a beautiful country. We were in Spain not so long ago and we love it," Trump said. "Our relationship has been outstanding over the years." King Felipe VI, speaking in English, noted that he and his wife had visited Texas and Louisiana before their Washington D.C. "This is a great end to a perfect trip. We appreciate very much our common history, our heritage," said the king, who graduated from Georgetown University. The Queen of Spain wore a dress that appeared similar to a blue version Melania Trump wore to greet Lorena Castillo Garca de Varela, first lady of Panama, in June 2017. Queen Letizia accessorized hers with a silver belt. The Queen of Spain wore a dress that appeared similar to a blue version Melania Trump wore to greet Lorena Castillo Garca de Varela, first lady of Panama, in June 2017. President Donald Trump, waves as he and first lady Melania Trump watch as Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia depart the White House While the king and the president had a 30 minute bilateral meeting, the first lady hosted Queen Letizia for tea in the red room, Melania Trump's communications director Stephanie Grisham told the DailyMail.com. This is King Felipe VI's first meeting with President Trump, but it's his sixth visit to the White House. It's his second visit since he became King in 2014. The first was in September 2015. King Felipe VI of Spain, U.S. President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Queen Letizia of Spain head into the White House President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump escort Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia into the White House President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump welcome Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia to the Oval Office He's expected to raise Spain and the EU's concern about the Trump Administration's tariffs on steel and aluminum, according to Spanish diplomatic sources. Spain is also worried about the announced tariffs on Spanish black olives, which could be of 34.7 percent. The King and Queen of Spain are wrapping up a 5 day-visit to the U.S. They also visited New Orleans and San Antonio to mark the 300 anniversary of those cities, which have a rich Spanish heritage. After their White House visit, the royal couple will head to Capitol Hill where they will meet with Senator Mitch McConnell, Congressman Paul Ryan, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. A badly decomposed body which was bundled up and dumped on the side of a major road has been identified as Wachira 'Mario' Phetmang. The 33-year-old Thai national had been living in Australia for the last 10 years, most recently at Hurstville in Sydney's south. Mr Phetmang's body was wrapped in plastic material and covered with a mattress protector. He had been seriously assaulted and died of blunt force trauma. Strike Force Sinder was established to investigate Mr Phetmang's murder, and police are appealing for fresh information from the public. Scroll down for video A badly decomposed body which was wrapped up and dumped on the side of a major road has been identified as Wachira 'Mario' Phetmang (pictured) The 33-year-old Thai national had been living in Australia for the last 10 years, most recently at Hurstville in Sydney's south (pictured is the murder victim at a service station - the last time he was seen) Mr Phetmang's body was discovered on Homebush Bay Drive at Sydney's Olympic Park by a passing truck driver at about 10.30pm on June 6. The driver reportedly pulled over in bad weather and saw the wrapped-up body, which was taken to a morgue for an autopsy and forensic tests. 'A post mortem examination revealed Mario had been seriously assaulted, and his cause of death was blunt-force trauma,' New South Wales Police said. Detectives have revealed Mr Phetmang was last seen at a service station at South Hurstville about 7.30pm on May 25. Police are making a fresh appeal for information about the murder victim's last movements (pictured is Mr Phetmang) Detectives have revealed Mr Phetmang was last seen at a service station at South Hurstville about 7.30pm on May 25 (pictured) He had been in the Sydney CBD and the Guildford area during the day, and Homicide Squad Commander, Detective Superintendent Scott Cook said police hope the release of CCTV footage from that evening will lead to a breakthrough. 'At this stage, we do not know where Mario went after leaving the service station, and we are appealing for information about his movements from then until his body was located almost two weeks later,' Det Supt Cook said. 'We are particularly appealing to motorists who have dash cameras to review their footage to see if they may have filmed the vehicle during that time. Detectives are investigating possible links to drugs and organised crime, but police have not ruled out other motives. 'He [Mr Phetmang] has no criminal history, he was a well-liked individual,' Dept Supt Cook said. Mr Phetmang was travelling in a silver 2004 Hyundai Terracan, with Victorian registration URK109 when he was last seen. The self-proclaimed love child of Bill Clinton has eviscerated the former president on Twitter for showing compassion for the immigrant children separated from their families at the border but abandoning him. Danney Williams, 32, has long claimed that his mother Bobbie Ann, a former prostitute, met Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1984 and became pregnant after one of her 13 trysts with the then-governor. Williams, a father-of-five, has repeatedly appealed to Clinton to publicly acknowledge him as his son. On Tuesday, Williams posted a picture of Bill Clinton and his statement on the immigration crisis: 'On this Father's Day I'm thinking of the thousands of children separated from their parents at the border. These children should not be a negotiating tool. And reuniting them with their families would reaffirm America's belief in & support for all parents who love their children.' Williams tweeted: 'How can @BillClinton have the compassion to care so much about the immigrant children being separated from their families but lack the compassion to care for his own son he abandoned. #BillClintonSon.' 'Deadbeat dad': Danney Williams, 32, has repeatedly appealed to former President Bill Clinton to publicly acknowledge him as his son Williams took to Twitter on Tuesday to call out the former president for showing sympathy for the migrant children at the border after he allegedly abandoned his own Williams also shared a picture of Hillary Clinton and accused her of taking 'a hand' in separating him and his father He then posted: 'The same man that is sympathetic to the immigrant children, that he mentioned, to be used as a negotiating tool, is indeed the same man that sacrificed me, his own son, as a political pawn and 'willing' separated his existence from me when he became president. #BillClintonSon.' Williams also shared a picture of Hillary Clinton and a quote from her: 'Jesus said, 'Suffer the little children unto me'. He did not say, 'Let the children suffer.' Williams wrote above the picture: '@HillaryClinton can have the 'compassion and decency to be outraged' about the immigrant children being separated from their families, but she's not outraged at the fact that she took a hand in separating me from my father. Just another political play. #BillClintonSon #Hypocrite' The Clintons have joined dozens of Democrats and Republicans alike, including all former First Ladies and Melania Trump, in denouncing Trump's immigration policy. In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a 'zero tolerance' policy, in which all those apprehended entering the U.S. illegally, including those seeking asylum, would be criminally charged. This has led to thousands of children being separated from their parents. On Friday, it was revealed that nearly 2,000 children were separated from adults at the border between mid-April and the end of May. Williams, 32, has long claimed that his mother Bobbie Ann, a former prostitute, met Clinton in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1984 and became pregnant after one of her 13 trysts with the then-governor. Williams posted a video back in October of 2016 explaining why he believed Clinton was his father, and claimed that his paternity was an open secret in Arkansas Those children are now living in detention centers along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump's policy has also drawn condemnation from medical professionals, religious leaders, and immigration activists, who warn that some children could suffer lasting psychological trauma. Williams had previously popped up on Twitter over the weekend with a Father's Day message for the former president. 'Even though you abandoned me and only took care of Chelsea, I still want to thank you for giving me life. Happy Father's Day @BillClinton,' wrote Danney Williams on Sunday. 'I'm not looking for sympathy nor welfare, I just wish you didn't forget about me @BillClinton. #BillClintonSon #ClintonKid.' Clinton has yet to respond to Williams' messages. Williams also used his series of Father's Day tweets to suggest that Chelsea Clinton was a love child as well, born as a result of Hillary's alleged affair with Webster Hubbell. Hubbell, the former Associate Attorney General and Chief Justice of SArkansas' Supreme Court, was a lawyer who worked with Hillary at the Rose Law Firm. He served 21 months in prison as well after pleading guilt to one count of wire fraud and one count of tax fraud in 1994 for his billing practices while at the firm. A DNA test allegedly proved that Clinton was not Williams father, but Williams has claimed that this is a false report Last year, Williams also used his series of Father's Day tweets to suggest that Chelsea Clinton was a love child as well, born as a result of Hillary's alleged affair with Webster Hubbell (right) Williams posted an image of Chelsea alongside Hubbell and one of himself alongside Clinton, writing: 'We can't end Father's Day without the truth.' Just before that tweet, Williams informed his followers that unfortunately he had to work on Sunday. 'I hope everyone is having a wonderful Father's Day. Unfortunately I had to work, wrote Williams, who then added: '#BillClintonSon.' Williams posted a video back in October of 2016 explaining why he believed Clinton was his father, and claimed that his paternity was an open secret in Arkansas. 'Everywhere I went, they pointed out: 'It's Bill Clinton's son right there. You look like him, don't you? The ears, the mouth, the chin, the teeth, the eyes, the nose'. I see him in me,' said Williams. 'You can see a black Bill Clinton. When I'm brushing my hair I can see Bill Clinton with waves in his hair.' Williams then explained his hurt over Clinton's refusal to acknowledge him as his child. Williams, a father of five, has previously popped up on Twitter to challenge his alleged father 'I always feel bad about him not wanting to be in my life. Was it because I was black? Was there something wrong with me? Why do you not want to be a part of me?' said Williams. 'It made me even think of sometimes suicide.' Williams said that Clinton would have a state trooper bring his mother seven $100 bills every month until he became president, allegations that have all been denied by the Clinton camp. A DNA test also proved that Clinton was not Williams father, but Williams has claimed that this is a false report. U2's Bono has joined the emotional debate over the administration's child-separation policy at the border, lobbying lawmakers to try to bring an end to a Trump policy that has blown up into a fierce policy fight. The band's frontman made the pitch to lawmakers of both parties as he was in the Capitol one behalf of his One Campaign, which seeks to maintain funding for global HIV / AIDS prevention. Guitarist The Edge, who has less of a public activist profile than his bandmate, was also spotted in the basement of the Capitol. A Statement put out by One said Bono was there urging lawmakers to 'demand an end to the Administration's family-separation policy at the southern border.' Singer Bono of U2 greets people at the U.S. Capitol on June 19, 2018. Bono is Washington to meet with lawmakers about international development and the family separation of child immigrant crisis 'I cannot think of a more un-American thing than warehousing children,' said Bono, who has spent years peppering his rock shows with activist comments. He rode the underground train which links congressional buildings as he traveled between meetings with lawmakers U2 lead singer Bono, center, walks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 19, 2018 The Edge, who pushes for cancer research, also was spotted on the Hill Political firestorm: The Trump administration is caught in a growing crisis over separated children. Tent encampments are being used to hold children at the Mexican border The band was in town for two shows. 'I cannot think of a more un-American thing than warehousing children,' said Bono, who has spent years peppering his rock shows with activist comments. Bono, who is Irish, said there were clear parallels to the Irish-American experience. Many of Ireland's poor fled to the U.S. in the wake of the famine of the 1840s and poverty which endured for decades afterwards. 'For anybody, but for Irish people, who were essentially economic refuges to this country, it's very, very upsetting,' he told the Associated Press. According to the One Campaign, he visited the Capitol to thank lawmakers for funding programs to combat HIV / AIDS and fund international development. During the Bush administration, he was a frequent presence in the Capitol urging passage of a huge aide package signed by President George W. Bush. 'Tell your lawmakers to suppsort the BUILD Act just like Bono,' One tweeted out. He met with Republican and Democratic lawmakers. U2's guitarist, The Edge, also was spotted in the Capitol basement en route to Senate meetings promoting cancer research. The Edge, also known as David Howell Evans, whose daughter was diagnosed with leukemia, issued a call for common ground, the Washington Post reported. 'Its more difficult to find the common ground, but that makes common ground more important to find,' he said. A man has been arrested over a London Underground tube explosion which left at least five people injured. Terrified commuters fled Southgate Tube station in panic after an electronic device overheated just after 7pm last night. Two people were taken to hospital while three others injured were treated at the scene, the ambulance service said. A 23-year-old man from Enfield was arrested on suspicion of doing an act likely to cause an explosion to injure or damage property, and endangering safety on the railway before being released under investigation. The cause of the blast has been confirmed by the British Transport Police as a short-circuiting power drill. Investigating: Southgate Tube station remains cordoned off tonight, three hours after an explosion happened Police initially said they were dealing with reports of a suspicious package at the station. This was later downgraded by the British Transport Police who said the blast was not terror-related. The station remained shut off to the public while enquiries continued late into the evening last night. Witnesses described seeing commuters scramble out of the exit with an elderly woman knocked to the ground in the fray. One said: 'I was on the escalator and there was a massive bang. I saw sparks and smoke and just ran out of the station. 'All I could see was flames coming from the escalator as staff yelled at us to get out.' Panic: The police say they were called to reports of an explosion just after 7pm after people were seen fleeing from the station Patrol: A specialist police officer as well as sniffer dogs have been combing the scene One man took to Twitter to describe how he had to carry a woman up the stairs as commuters were left terrified by the commotion. He said: 'Fire in Southgate Tube Station escalator. I had to carry a woman over the middle onto the stairs and then up the stairs. Flare or electrics my guess. That was a bit terrifying. 'Some poor old lady was nearly trampled over till we calmed those running down the escalator.' The panicked response from commuters shows how Londoners are on high alert after a string of terror attacks last year. Evacuated: Southgate Tube Station in Enfield, North London, has been shut down following an explosion The Met Police were investigating a suspicious package at Southgate Tube Station in Enfield, North London, tonight when an explosion rocked the station Thirty people were injured after a bomb partially exploded on a District Line train in Parsons Green last September. Teenager Ahmed Hassan was found guilty of attempted murder after a court heard how the ISIS sympathiser primed the device in a public bathroom before getting off the train at Putney Bridge. Tongith Witness Haluk Oskan, 26, described the commotion as passengers at Southgate realised there had been an explosion. He told the Daily Star: 'I was at Southgate Station when this commotion started. 'I could smell burning (like rubber) and saw multiple people hurrying for the exits. Station staff were scurrying around inside and people were rushing out of the exit.' One man told The Mirror he had to carry a woman up the stairs as commuters were left terrified by the explosion. He said: 'Fire in Southgate Tube Station escalator. I had to carry a woman over the middle onto the stairs and then up the stairs. Flare or electrics my guess. That was a bit terrifying. 'Some poor old lady was nearly trampled over till we calmed those running down the escalator..' Another witness told MailOnline: 'There's sniffer dogs everywhere, there's loads of undercover police. It's madness over here. I know people have been evacuated from their homes. I was watching.' Another man said he is still stuck inside a restaurant as police officers work to clear the scene. 'Stuck in an Indian restaurant opposite Southgate station because of a suspect bomb going off inside (the station).' He added that he saw a person being carried out of the station on a stretcher. Officers from the Met Police liaise with ambulance and fire crews At the scene: Police have shut off the entire area outside the busy Tube station 'Don't know too much except we have been told to stay inside,' he said. Darren Yarlett, a city worker, 36, was driving home in Southgate but police had taped off the roads near to the station. He told the Evening Standard: 'The police moved us on, but they said there was an explosion in the station. 'There must be around 50 or 60 police, an ambulance, fire arms and dog units.' He added: 'I didn't hear anything so don't want to jump to any conclusions but the amount of ambulances would say something has happened.' One resident tweeted: 'Got escorted out of my flat next to #Southgate tube station. All cornered off but we're not getting many answers.' Explosion: Firefighters were called to Southgate Tube Station to assist with the incident Panic: Trasnport for London workers standing close to the scene after the incident On the scene: Police have surrounded the station in North London One Twitter user posted to say: 'Stuck in an Indian restaurant opposite #Southgate station because of a suspect bomb going off inside (the station). 'Don't know too much except we have been told to stay inside. Suspet9 device found/gone off inside tube. Saw one person coming out on a stretcher.' They later added: 'Having a police escort back to #PremierInn now because there has been a device go off in the station.' British Transport Police added; 'We are currently dealing with an incident at #Southgate tube station. Officers are at the scene. More info as we get it.' A woman who lives next to the station said she had been evacuated from her flat. The woman, called Naomi, wrote on Twitter: 'Got escorted out of my flat next to Southgate tube station. 'All cornered off but we're not getting many answers. I have no bra on, one hand painted and my hair's wet.' The Tube line was reporting severe delays between Arnos Grove and Cockfosters. There are minor delays on the rest of the line. A spokesman for the British Transport Police said: 'We remain at Tube station in London following a reported minor explosion. A number of people have been treated at the scene. No serious injuries reported and enquiries continue.' More to follow Legalising cannabis risks making children believe it is safe, the head of the NHS warned yesterday. In a major intervention, Simon Stevens highlighted serious health dangers, such as addiction and psychosis. He spoke out after former Tory leader Lord Hague urged ministers to be bold and legalise cannabis for recreational use meaning it could be sold in shops with alcohol and tobacco. The peer claimed the war on the class B drug had been comprehensively and irreversibly lost. But campaigners said it would be wrong to decriminalise a narcotic linked to mental illness, organised crime, violence and road deaths. Addressing a health conference in London, Mr Stevens said: We have got to make sure we dont inadvertently introduce new risks for people. In countries where marijuana has been decriminalised, often young people, teenagers, come to think of smoking marijuana as safe. Whereas lets be clear, actually it isnt. Simon Stevens, the head of the NHS, warned of the cannabis addiction risk for children who may think of smoking marijuana is safe if it is decriminalised For around 10 per cent it will become addictive, it increases the risk of long-term psychiatric problems such as depression or psychosis. Mr Stevens said it was important not to confuse the issue of the medical use of cannabis with debate around the decriminalisation, or legalisation, of marijuana. The Government has announced a review of the rules on medicinal cannabis. Home Secretary Sajid Javid acted following a public outcry over Billy Caldwell, 12, and Alfie Dingley, six, both of whose parents had been banned from using cannabis oil to treat their violent and life-threatening epileptic seizures. In other developments: Downing Street slapped down Lord Hague, saying it had no plans to relax the laws on recreational use of cannabis; Mr Javid said 10,000 children with drug-resistant epilepsy could benefit from using cannabis-based medicines; Alfies mother Hannah Deacon wept with joy and relief when she was told the Home Office was giving her a licence to treat him with cannabis oil; Critics warned cannabis use was already being decriminalised by the back door with levels of seizures and prosecutions plummeting; Barack Obamas former drug policy adviser said selling cannabis on the open market risked a public health disaster. Lord Hague, who took a hardline stance on cannabis as Tory leader, said the Prime Minister should introduce a major change in policy by imitating Canada, which is on the verge of legalising the drug for recreational use. In an article for the Daily Telegraph, he wrote: The idea that this can be driven off the streets and out of peoples lives by the state is nothing short of deluded. Were already going soft as cases plummet Fears that cannabis is being decriminalised by stealth intensified last night as it emerged the number of seizures and prosecutions had plummeted. Cannabis was reclassified in 2009 from a Class C to a Class B drug, which meant higher jail sentences for possession. But in the decade since, the police and courts have dealt with fewer cases. The number of cannabis seizures by police fell from 182,930 in 2008-09 to 96,604 in the year to March 2017. Over the same period the number of crimes of cannabis possession halved from 167,950 to 83,591. Prosecutions for possessing cannabis have also plummeted. Figures from the Ministry of Justice show the number of young people convicted after being caught with marijuana fell 45 per cent from a peak of 27,847 in 2011 to 15,119 last year. Figures also showed that in 2009 police let off 95,000 with a warning. By 2016, this had fallen to just over 34,000. A further 6,601 received fines in 2016, compared with 11,491 seven years earlier. Despite increasing warnings over health problems linked to the drug, police chiefs in at least four forces Derbyshire, Dorset, Surrey and Durham have signalled that cannabis users and growers are no longer a priority. Advertisement Everyone sitting in a Whitehall conference room needs to recognise that, out there, cannabis is ubiquitous, and issuing orders to the police to defeat its use is about as up to date and relevant as asking the Army to recover the Empire. This battle is effectively over. He said that only criminal gangs benefitted from the drug being illegal and that many police forces had stopped worrying about it. Number 10 issued a stinging rebuke, insisting the Government had no plans to legalise or decriminalise cannabis for recreational use. A spokesman said: The evidence is very clear cannabis can cause serious harm when misused. Speaking in the Commons, Mr Javid announced a review of the medicinal use of cannabis, which could lead to patients in the UK being prescribed drugs made from the banned plant. He authorised a licence to be issued for Alfie after his mother said she had been waiting three months for Theresa May to fulfil a personal promise that he would be allowed to receive cannabis oil. He said the legal situation on medicinal cannabis was not satisfactory for the parents, not satisfactory for the doctors, and not satisfactory for me. The announcement of the review came just days after Mr Javid intervened to permit the use of cannabis oil to treat severely epileptic Billy, who had been admitted to hospital with seizures after supplies his mother had brought from Canada were confiscated at Heathrow. But Mr Javid insisted: This step is in no way a first step to the legalisation of cannabis for recreational use. This Government has absolutely no plans to legalise cannabis and the penalties for unauthorised supply and possession will remain unchanged. We will not set a dangerous precedent or weaken our ability to keep dangerous drugs off our streets. Both the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Kings College London have said that cannabis use is highly addictive and can lead to serious problems for physical and mental wellbeing. Evidence from the Governments independent advisory council on the misuse of drugs also said the use of cannabis is a significant public health issue and can unquestionably cause harm to individuals and society. Lord Hague, who took a hardline stance on cannabis as Tory leader, said the Prime Minister should introduce a major change in policy by imitating Canada, which is on the verge of legalising the drug for recreational use Many other countries, including much of the US, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, have legalised the use of medicinal cannabis, but very few have legalised recreational use. Mrs May and Mr Javid remain opposed to legalisation or decriminalisation of the drug because of the harm they say it does to individual users and communities. Words that show how Hague changed tune 'William is firmly opposed to all forms of illegal drug taking. We are opposed to the legalisation of cannabis. - Mr Hagues spokesman on calls to legalise cannabis in 1999 I think we should not take our eye away from cannabis and other soft drugs. It is very clear from talking to police that they often lead on to the hard drugs. - Mr Hague in 2000, rejecting calls for police to go softer on cannabis It is time for a stronger, firmer, harder attack on drugs than we have ever seen before. That is the common sense solution which Britain wants and will get under the next Conservative government. - Unveiling a crackdown on cannabis use outside schools in February 2000 The police have got to fight harder against drugs, not surrender. - In October 2000 after calls for a 100 fine for cannabis possession Advertisement Dr Kevin Sabet, a White House drug adviser under Mr Obama, said Lord Hague should brush up on the science on cannabis. He said: Todays cannabis is so much more awful than it used to be. In fact, in the UK, when it was downgraded to class C [in 2004] we saw an increase in things like psychosis and other negative issues. Thats why it was then upgraded. It hasnt gotten safer in the last ten years, its gotten more dangerous as the levels are much higher. Frankly, the weakest in society would be hurt, not Lord Hague and his friends. Campaigners against legalisation argue that it would normalise the use of drugs among children and lead to greater addiction and health problems. But former Lib Dem health minister Norman Lamb called on the Government to legalise cannabis completely. He said: Isnt there a dreadful hypocrisy in Government policy in drugs more generally? Probably most of the Cabinet drink alcohol, the most dangerous drug of all, probably half of the Cabinet has used cannabis. Shouldnt the Home Secretary follow the advice of Lord Hague, who makes the case for a regulated legalised market and that that is the best way to protect people from harm who buy from criminals who have no interest in their welfare at all? Psychiatrists have warned that smokers of high-potency cannabis have a high risk of spiralling into mental illness, with young people especially vulnerable. Tory MP Simon Hoare, who represents North Dorset, said he was staggered by Lord Hagues comments. He added: We have seen at first hand the devastation that cannabis causes. It is not recreational use, it steals lives and futures and we must be robust in ensuring that it stops. This drug stole my son's mind... then took his life Janie Hamilton lost her son James after he developed severe mental illness brought on by cannabis. He died of testicular cancer in 2015 after his drug-induced psychosis led him to refuse chemotherapy. His death was recorded as being partly caused by schizophrenia, which his family believe was triggered by his cannabis addiction. Janie Hamilton lost her son James (pictured at the hospice with his father) after he developed severe mental illness brought on by cannabis James, who had trouble fitting in at boarding school where his father taught, is thought to have started using cannabis at the age of 14. His personality changed dramatically after he became hooked on the drug. He was sectioned aged 20. His mother, a 65-year-old retired teacher from North Dorset, now tours schools warning young people of the risks of experimenting with a mind-altering substance. Yesterday she said she felt very cross when she heard about Lord Hagues comments. I am concerned that the dangers of cannabis are being forgotten in all this, she said. From a personal point of view, I can only speak of the impact of cannabis on my sons life and the devastation it caused to him and to our whole family. If people had witnessed what I have in mental health wards for 16 years, of teenagers and the young and old shuffling about, their lives derailed, they would not be so casual about the potential impact of cannabis on individuals. He died of testicular cancer in 2015 after his drug-induced psychosis led him to refuse chemotherapy. His mother (pictured together aged 11) now tours schools warning young people of the risks of experimenting with a mind-altering substance No 10 slaps down Hague on Cannabis ...but Javid paves the way for legalising oil as medicine Sajid Javid paved the way for the legalisation of medicinal cannabis yesterday as he granted a licence for it to be used to treat another severely ill epileptic boy. It comes after days of controversy over the confiscation of cannabis oil supplies from mother Charlotte Caldwell who brought it into the country from Canada for her 12-year-old epileptic son Billy. In his statement yesterday Mr Javid said he was also going to give permission for a second boy six-year-old Alfie Dingley to use cannabis oil. His mother, Hannah Deacon, wept with joy and relief as she was told the news. Alfie suffers from a rare form of epilepsy which means he can suffer as many as 300 violent seizures a month. In April, his family applied to the Home Office for a licence to use the cannabis-based medication, claiming his condition improved after he was treated with it in the Netherlands. While his mother appeared on ITV News to talk about her sons case, presenter Nina Hossain revealed that Mr Javid had granted a licence. In his statement yesterday Mr Javid said he was also going to give permission for a second boy six-year-old Alfie Dingley to use cannabis oil. His mother, Hannah Deacon, wept with joy and relief as she was told the news In tears, Miss Deacon said: Thats amazing news. Thank you very much for letting me know. Thank you. Thank you to the Prime Minister. It came minutes after Mr Javid revealed the Government was reviewing unsatisfactory rules to allow cannabis to be used for medical treatments. He said the move could benefit 10,000 children who have a drug-resistant form of epilepsy. He said the review would be held in two parts. The first, led by Englands chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies, will make recommendations on which cannabis-based medicines might offer real benefits to patients. In the second part, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs will consider whether changes should be made to the classification of these products after assessing the balance of harms and public health needs. Mr Javid said he had the utmost sympathy for the families of children like Billy and Alfie, who have travelled abroad to obtain cannabis-based treatments banned in the UK. As a father, I know there is nothing worse than seeing your child suffer, he said. You would do anything to take away their pain. That is why I have the utmost sympathy for Billy Caldwell, Alfie Dingley and many others like them and for their parents, who have been under unimaginable stress and strain. Billy Caldwell, an epileptic child who needs cannabis oil to treat his life-threatening seizures, was handed an emergency licence for it over the weekend the first time the Home Secretary has used powers to sidestep laws on medicinal cannabis. Janet Street-Porter says Billy Caldwell and William Hague have finally brought some sanity to the crazy war against cannabis It took the sight of a frail twelve year old boy being denied the only drug that halts his crippling seizures to prompt a right wing politician to admit what he really thinks. For a former leader of the Conservative party to say that the UK has comprensively lost the war on drugs is a milestone moment. A first in the rarified world of politics, where truth is routinely traded for evasion and morality is an elastic concept. Finally, a paid up member of Middle England- a former Tory party leader- has the guts to say the unsayable, to state the bleeding obvious. William Hague has announced (in a traditional Conservative newspaper) that the UKs drug laws are inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date. Mr Hague intervened after Charlotte Caldwell brought her autistic son Billy (whose epilepsy is life-threatening) back into the UK from Canada carrying cannabis oil, the only treament which helps alleviate his condition. In Canada - and dozens of other countries- Israel, Italy, Norway, Germany, Spain Denmark, Greece and Poland, to name a few - its legal to use cannabis oil (which has the hallucogenic properties removed) for medical purposes, generally on prescription - but not in the UK. Zealous Customs officials seized Billys medication and the poor boy subsequently suffered a devastating series of attacks. Finally, after he was admitted to hospital, the Home Secretary belatedly granted a temporary licence for the drug to be administered for just 20 days. What will happen to poor Billy after that? And the thousands of other children in similar situations whose parents are having to risk being arrested? Mr Hague intervened after Charlotte Caldwell brought her autistic son Billy (whose epilepsy is life-threatening) back into the UK from Canada carrying cannabis oil, the only treament which helps alleviate his condition Each case is being decided on merit - a completely ridiculous situation which demonstrates that no one in the government is willing to adopt a pragmatic and sensible approach to cannabis. Ironically, laboratories in the UK make about half of the all medicinal cannabis used in the world today, and it is regarded as an exciting and potentially highly lucrative investment opportunity, regularly tipped by all the financial experts. For these products to be licenced to go on sale, they have to pass strict testing, both in the USA and the EU. Forced into action by public outcry, the Home Secretary has just announced a review into medicinal cannabis, but stressed it will not lead to a relaxation in the drug laws. He stating that cannabis will remain categorised as a Class B drug, making possession even in small amounts for recreational use illegal. William Hague is not a Tory toff, he grew up in South Yorkshire in a mining community and attended the local state school, not Eton or a swanky boarding establishment. He has always been a sensible bloke, someone who must be bothered by the fact the Tories are losing all connection with working people. Cannabis use is a fact of life in every country of the world. I and many experts do not believe it leads to any other drug use, but it is sold by criminals who deal in cash and who sell wares of dubious quality. As for skunk, if the government did have the guts to licence shops which sold cannabis of regulated quality, then they would make a fortune in tax which could help fund the NHS. Because of our governments pig-headed obsession with the war on drugs, we are handing millions of pounds to gangs and criminals. According to the Home Office cannabis is harmful- but so is alcohol and so is tobacco, and they are both taxed. Why not take control of the cannabis market and ensure people know what they are buying? According to William Hague, its time to junk a policy thats not working, and replace it with new ideas that just might command respect. He says hes not advocating the use of drugs for recreational purposes- thats a step too far, even for a progressive realist - but I cant see why not. The first step must be for the UK to swiftly follow so many other countries and decriminalise the use of medicinal cannabis on prescription. The next step must be to accept that theres no point in wasting police time and resources prosecuting anyone for possessing small amounts of cannabis. Finally, a paid up member of Middle England- a former Tory party leader- has the guts to say the unsayable, to state the bleeding obvious. William Hague has announced that the UKs drug laws are inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date The number of people caught with cannabis has declined steadily over the past decade, and now only one in four of those are actually charged. The vast majority (70%) just get a police caution, which does not mean a criminal record. Most police forces have quietly given up bothering. In the USA, its legal to sell cannabis in 9 states, and its approved for medical use in another 29. Once cannabis has been legalised for medical use in the UK (which must be inevitable), then there must be a revision of our drug laws to decriminalise cannabis. How many politicians are brave enough to say theyve actually inhaled? Labour say they would legalise medical cannabis but are shy of going further. I know from experience that smoking a joint doesnt mean your life will suddenly take a downward turn. Back in 1967, I was going to put some cannabis in my wedding cake, but the dealer didnt turn up. Following a tip off, the Chelsea police (the same bunch that busted the Rolling Stones) raided my flat while I was on honeymoon and took away the uneaten layer of cake for forensic testing. Because they found nothing, and didnt have a search warrant, no charges were brought. Six months later, they came back with the right paperwork and (surprise, surprise) found a tiny crumb of dope in a closet. I was found guilty of possession and fined 5. So thats my drug history. I dont smoke dope now, but cant see anything wrong with it. I loathe the two faced hypocrisy of much of middle England and all of our ruling classes. Its time to move with the times and let anyone who wants to smoke dope light up. The Duchess of Sussex made a dazzling debut at Royal Ascot yesterday, looking every bit My Fair Lady. In a bespoke white dress by her wedding designer, Givenchy, with a black and white hat by another new favourite, Philip Treacy, Meghan gave a modern twist to a famous outfit from the Hollywood musical. In My Fair Lady, Cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle played by Audrey Hepburn wears a frilly white gown with black and white bows and matching hat as she accompanies Professor Henry Higgins to Ascot while he attempts to teach her to speak properly. Wearing a black and white hat by another new favourite, Philip Treacy, Meghan gave a modern twist to a famous outfit from the Hollywood musical In My Fair Lady, Cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle played by Audrey Hepburn (above) wears a frilly white gown with black and white bows and matching hat The Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Sophie the Countess of Wessex (centre) during day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall speak to the Duchess of Sussex (left) during day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse Former actress Meghan, 36, wore 1,350 yellow gold and diamond stud earrings by Birks, a black belt and black stilettos as she rode in the Queens carriage procession. She and husband Prince Harry received a rapturous welcome and later presented a winners trophy to jockey Frankie Dettori, who kissed her hand. Inside the winners enclosure, Meghan who pinned her royal enclosure badge to her bag rather than her dress could be seen getting on famously with Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, who was resplendent in gold Dior and another Philip Treacy hat. The Queen was dressed in yellow as her carriage led the procession down the course, alongside the Princess Royal Charles, 69, who stepped in to walk his sons bride down the aisle last month after her father pulled out, could be seen roaring with laughter with Meghan in a way he is rarely seen socially. According to one royal insider he already adores his new daughter-in-law. They have struck up a great rapport and he already has a real soft spot for her, they said. Meghan made another friend in the form of the Queens bloodstock and racing adviser, John Warren, who has known Harry since he was baby. She leaned forward and pushed his binoculars back over his shoulder when they started slipping to the ground. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (left) with the Prince of Wales (right) during day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse Meghan was cheered as she joined the Queen for one of the monarchs favourite events She and husband Prince Harry received a rapturous welcome and later presented a winners trophy to jockey Frankie Dettori, who kissed her hand, above Meghans Ascot appearance came just a day after her father Thomas Markle pocketed 7,500 for a tell-all interview with ITVs Good Morning Britain. He revealed details about his daughter, his conversations with Harry and his thoughts on the Royal Family. Nevertheless Meghan was cheered as she joined the Queen for one of the monarchs favourite events. Meghans Ascot appearance came just a day after her father Thomas Markle pocketed 7,500 for a tell-all interview with ITVs Good Morning Britain The Queen was dressed in yellow as her carriage led the procession down the course. Another landau followed carrying Charles and Camilla and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie. Harry and Meghan were in the third carriage, with the Earl and Countess of Wessex. Pablo Escobar's longtime mistress is once again hitting out at the Netflix show Narcos over how she was portrayed in the series. 'My portrayal in Narcos is as a pervert, and a criminal and corrupt journalist that in the end is tortured and killed,' Virginia Vallejo, who is still very much alive, said in an interview with the Daily Mirror. 'The purpose of the script was to defame me brutally and rape me in front of millions of people.' Vallejo, who met Escobar when she was a television journalist, had nothing but praise though for Loving Pablo, a new film about her relationship with the drug lord that stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. That film, whose release date has been pushed back multiple times, is based on her own memoir, Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar. Scroll down for video Smoking mad: 'My portrayal in Narcos is as a pervert, and a criminal and corrupt journalist that in the end is tortured and killed,' said Virginia Vallejo (above), Pablo Escobar's mistress Drop the mic: She added: 'The purpose of the script was to defame me brutally and rape me in front of millions of people' (a character based on Vallejo and Escobar in Narcos above) Big fan: Vallejo had nothing but praise though for Loving Pablo, a new film about her relationship with the drug lord that stars Penelope Cruz as the former TV anchor (Cruz and Javier Bradem in Loving Pablo) Vallejo first revealed her affair with Escobar in that book, released in 2006 and since translated into over 15 languages. In an interview last year she spoke about first meeting Escobar, stating: 'When the relationship began, he thought that he could become a political leader and I accompanied him to meetings and he told me that I was going to be his Manuelita [Simon Bolivar's lover]. 'I thought I could be the lover of a leader who had compassion for this suffering and poor people.' Vallejo said in interview, with El Mundo, that Escobar's wealth was of no interest to her at the time. 'I was not interested in luxuries because I had an elegant life as a child. My family, very aristocratic, one of the richest in Colombia, educated me like a princess, in the English style. And so beautiful, high society, obviously not dating men who were not the most powerful or most beautiful,' said Vallejo. 'Pablo gave me gifts any billionaire gives his girlfriend: a crocodile wallet, a trip. I imagine that Trump gave Melania wallets.' Twins: That film, whose release date has been pushed back multiple times, is based on her own memoir, Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar (Vallejo left, Cruz right) She later stated: 'I wanted to prove to him that I loved him for him, not for his money. That's why he respected me.' That romance was tarmished however by Narcos,with Vallejo claiming that she had no idea Escobar was even involved in the drug trade at first. She also took issue with the way his wife was depicted, and the actress who portrayed the character she claims is based on her, named Valeria Velez. 'They hired a Mexican [expletive]with a transvestite body to play my role. They presented me as a depraved, complicit in terrible kidnappings and bribing politicians,' said Vallejo. 'It has nothing to do with my life. They turned me into the villain and the wife of Escobar, into the pretty one, the peasant, the innocent, as in the soap operas. But the Tata [Pablo's wife] and her son are a dark family that is getting more and more crazy every day.' Vallejo said that her relationship with Escobar soured as he became more violent, and she eventually entered witness protection and was moved to the United States, where she now lives in Florida. Smiling Richard Branson is at the helm of Virgin which opened a health wing for private care. That company has now sued the NHS Richard Bransons healthcare firm has pocketed 2million of public money by suing the NHS. Virgin Care took High Court action after losing out on an 82million contract to provide childrens medical services in Surrey. The work was handed to a rival group of in-house NHS providers and a social enterprise firm last year. Virgin Care claimed there were serious flaws in the procurement process and secured an out-of-court settlement in November. Newly-released accounts show that six clinical commissioning groups and NHS England paid Virgin Care 1.565million. Surrey County Council handed over another 440,000 and at least 243,000 more was diverted from frontline NHS services to cover legal fees. Virgin Care won 1billion of NHS contracts in 2016/17 as 3.1billion of health services were privatised. Sir Richards company has more than 400 NHS contracts, including GP practices and sexual health clinics. Jon Ashworth, Labour Party health spokesman, said: Constant tendering, procuring and contracting out of services wastes taxpayers cash. By taking this legal action, the NHS is forced to pay out again instead of putting that money into patient care. Business entrepreneur Richard Branson's company has settled out of court with the NHS after it lost an 82m contract. The dispute affects the constituents of several Cabinet ministers, including Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt (pictured) Guildford and Waverley clinical commissioning group, which represented all eight commissioning bodies, initially denied any wrongdoing and said it was confident procurement protocols had been followed. The payout to Virgin Care has led to calls for all parties to reveal how the sum was settled upon. This information is being withheld for legal reasons and to protect commercial interests. The dispute affects the constituents of several Cabinet ministers, including Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, Chancellor Philip Hammond and Environment Secretary Michael Gove. Responding at the time to the news that Virgin had secured a payout, Mr Hunt, who is MP for South West Surrey, said: No one comes out of this episode well neither the NHS for getting itself into a position where it loses a legal case, or Virgin for taking a case to court that means money is diverted from frontline services. East Surrey commissioning group, which handed over 198,800 of the overall settlement, has been placed in special measures because of its financial position. Annual accounts reveal it ended the financial year with a deficit of 24.9million which was based on a difficult 12 months for the NHS nationally and for our CCG in particular. Jacky Davis, a consultant radiologist and co-author of NHS for Sale, said: The NHS is already starved of cash, and it is a scandal that Virgin Care is prepared to take scarce money away from frontline care. This exposes Virgin Care for what they really are a predatory company that cares more about profits than patients. Sir Richards company has more than 400 NHS contracts including GP practices. Virgin Health Care won public money after a dispute A Department of Health spokesman said: We are clear on how we expect every penny of British taxpayers money to be spent on providing world-class care to patients and we expect NHS England to ensure commissioning groups across the country are doing just that whilst abiding by the competition rules. A Guildford and Waverley spokesman said: The parties are pleased to confirm that an agreed resolution on the litigation concerning the Surrey childrens procurement has been reached to a satisfactory conclusion for all parties with detailed terms confidential to the parties. A Virgin Care spokesman said: Our stated preference throughout remained not to be paid damages but that the process be re-run properly in the interests of local families and the frontline staff. Contrary to reports, no money has been pocketed by Virgin Group or Sir Richard Branson and we continue to invest funds in the frontline NHS services we deliver. We took this action because we were concerned that there may have been serious flaws in the procurement process. Sir Richard is worth around 3.8billion thanks to his transport, media and holiday businesses. A heckler yelled 'Mr. President, f*** you' as President Donald Trump walked through the U.S. Capitol building on Tuesday evening to meet with House Republicans about immigration legislation. 'Mr. President f*** you,' is heard yelled in footage of the president entering the office of House Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump was in route to talk to members of his own party about immigration policy. Shortly thereafter U.S. Capitol Police issued a 'global look out' for a woman with 'an intern badge' with dirty blonde hair and blue-checkered pants, according to a reporter from Reuters who heard it broadcast over police radios. Many Republicans have joined Democrats in decrying Trump's policy to separate children from the adults accompanying during illegal border crossings. LISTEN: As Pres Trumps entourage entered Speaker Ryans office in the Capitol, someone on the other side of the Capitol rotunda yelled: Mr. President, Fk you!! (He entered about 15 seconds later): pic.twitter.com/KHp16LYMoF Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) June 19, 2018 President Trump in his meeting with House Republicans President Trump arrives on Capitol Hill for meeting with lawmakers Speaker Ryan escorted Trump into meeting Twelve Republican senators sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking him 'to halt family separations while Congress works on legislative fix.' Additionally, two Senate Republicans are working on legislation that would halt the separations. Democratic Senators also have legislation in the works. And House Republicans are changing their compromise immigration bill to prevent the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from separating migrant children from their families. The new bill - which is a compromise GOP bill - would require DHS to keep families together while parents are going through legal proceedings related to their detention for illegally crossing the border, The Hill reported. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, left, and White House Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short, right, arrive for a meeting with President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill Before he went into his meeting, President Trump said the immigration system was broken and needed to be fixed The compromise bill would meet most of Trump's immigration demands. It would create a path to legal residency and then citizenship for young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children. It would also fund the president's proposed border wall and end the diversity visa 'lottery' system. The second bill is more conservative and does not offer a path to citizenship for the immigrants, known as 'Dreamers.' It would more dramatically limit legal immigration. Votes are expected to happen in the House of Representatives on Thursday. Trump acknowledged those concerns and admitted his daughter Ivanka Trump talked to him about family separation at the border and that the images are not good, according to a report from a source in the meeting, as tweeted by a reporter from Politico. He started his meeting with his party members by praising their work. We are hot and we are 'winning,' he told them, according to a source in the room as tweeted by a reporter from The Hill. The president also spoke briefly to reporters after he entered the Capitol and said they are working to fix the broken immigration system. 'The system's been broken for many years. The immigration system, it's been a really bad, bad system, probably the worst anywhere in the world. And we're gonna try and see if we can fix it,' he said. Republicans are planning to vote on two pieces of legislation that would overhaul immigration later in the week. Trump said earlier in the day he wants to cut off aid to Central American countries that he claimed Tuesday are 'sending' migrants to the U.S. Trump said he'd be asking for authorization to end assistance to the region that includes Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. 'We're not going to give any more aid to those countries,' he asserted during a Washington, D.C. speech to the National Federation of Independent Business. 'Why the hell should we?' The president was addressing the problem of family separation when he threatened foreign aid to the financially struggling countries that are home to most non-Mexican migrants begging for asylum at the southern border. President Trump says he wants to cut off aid to Central American countries that he claimed Tuesday are sending migrants to the U.S. The president said he doesn't like that children are being separated from their legal guardians- even though it's a policy that was implemented by his administration. 'We can't let people pour in. They've gotta go through the process,' he stated. 'And maybe it's politically correct or maybe it's not - we've gotta stop separation of the families.' In back-to-back tweets this morning, the president ripped into the minority party and demanded that Congress pass legislation strengthening border security. 'Now is the best opportunity ever for Congress to change the ridiculous and obsolete laws on immigration. Get it done, always keeping in mind that we must have strong border security.' Trump also commented on the family separation controversy plaguing his administration. 'We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally. Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2000 are with their parents, many of whom have tried to enter our Country illegally on numerous occasions,' the president tweeted. The White House spent Monday and Tuesday sparring with Democrats who have been accusing the Trump administration of exploiting migrant families. Each side condemned the other for using children as 'pawns' in a raging illegal immigration debate. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen says Democrats bludgeoning the administration for its 'zero tolerance' policy at the border are acting 'cowardly' and could change federal immigration law if they wanted to. Nielsen stood at the White House podium on Monday and argued that DHS was just doing its job in enforcing a Trump administration policy that has led more than 2,000 children to be separated from their parents or guardians in the last six weeks. 'If an American were to commit a crime anywhere in the United States,' she told a room full of reporters, 'they would go to jail and they would be separated from their family.' Nielsen said, 'This is not a controversial idea.' When asked by reporters if the policy amounts to 'child abuse', Nielsen denied the accusation. 'We have high standards. We give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. There are videos, there are TVs. I visited the detention centers myself.' Two Chinese boy were stuck in a septic tank in China after one fell into the tank and the other was sent by villagers to save him. The pair, aged one and eight, were trapped more than 30 feet underground and the opening of the septic tank was only 20 centimetres (7.8inch) wide. Fire brigade had to send one of its skinniest firefighters through the tiny gap without any protective gear to free the children. Firefighter Wang Yulong volunteered himself to rescue the boys in a septic tank in China Officer Wang's colleagues set up equipment above the pit toilet and pass oxygen masks down Footage released by Xinhua Video has captured the dramatic rescue operation which successfully freed the one-year-old and the eight-year-old. The toddler boy had fallen unconscious when he was lifted up to the ground; and the eight-year-old was carried up by the firefighter who then passed him through the gap to his colleagues. Both children are in stable condition now. The one-year-old boy fell into the septic tank on the night of June 14, nearby residents told Ningxia Fire Brigade. The septic tank is a part of a pit toilet near a mosque by the side of Guyuan No. 2 Middle School at the south of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, the report said. The pit toilet was covered by concrete with a small opening measuring 20 centimetres (7.8inch) wide and 40 centimetres (1.3ft) long. The neighbours sent an eight-year-old boy down to rescue but only found the pair trapped under. Ningxia Fire Brigade were alerted to the scene with two fire engines and 16 firefighters. They first sent oxygen tank down to the septic tank to reduce the build-up of biogas. Firefighter Wang Yulong, who is the thinnest among the team members, volunteered to abseil down the septic tank through the narrow rectangular gap. Rescue footage shows his colleagues carefully push him through the gap. Officer Wang put a safety belt around the toddler's waist as his colleague pulled the boy up carefully. Officer Wang sends the one-year-old toddler up the as the boy appeared to be unconscious The eight-year-old boy is then lifted up to the gap as other firefighters pulled him out Officer Wang,pictured, abseiled down a 33-ft deep septic tank without any protective gear He then carried the young boy and lifted him up close to the gap so the other firefighter could drag him to the ground. Officer Wang then carefully squeezed himself through the gap. The two boys were reported to have sustained minor injuries. A grieving cat was found mourning its late owner who allegedly jumped off a building in a gas explosion in southern China. The scene has touched the hearts of the thousands as the injured mooch refused to leave the fire-torn apartment but waited for its owner to return. Volunteers took the cat to an animal shelter and treated its burn wounds before finding a new home for the feline. The loyal cat, Enong, is rescued by volunteers and taken to a veterinary clinic for treatment An injured cat in China is seen sitting on a window ledge and waiting for its owner to return The cat was first spotted wandering around the balcony of the apartment in Changgang village, Nanning, where a blast took place four days ago, according to local newspaper Nanguo Morning Post. Pictures of the cat staring at the empty apartment has been shared among Chinese social media platforms and alerted Good Samaritans to visit the cat. The shivering feline was brought to local animal rescue group Nanning Stray Cats for treatment on June 15. According to the group's social media post, the white cat, which got named 'Enong', suffered burns on its nose and four limbs. Its coat of fur was burnt to yellow as pictures showed. The white feline was injured after a gas explosion happened in its house four days ago 'Enong' was seriously dehydrated and had infections in the lung when it was brought to the clinic (left). The cat is recovering and volunteers will look for cat lovers to adopt it later (right) Enong showed symptoms of severe dehydration and lung infection as the veterinarian believed it was caused by inhaling smoke during the blast. The cat is now recovering in the shelter and will be looking for an adoption when it gets well. Enong was confirmed as the pet cat of a 21-year-old man who allegedly jumped off a building after his seventh floor apartment exploded on the early hours of June 15, stated an earlier report by Nanguo Morning Post. 16 people were injured in the explosion as the blast ripped through the building and sent broken glasses, furniture and concrete flying. Police are still investigating the incident including if the man was killed by the blast. Twenty-three thrillseekers had the shock of their lives when a carousel swing ride stalled and left them stranded mid-air at an amusement park in east China. The visitors, secured in swing chairs with a lap bar, were suspended almost 30 metres (98 feet) above ground after the ride stopped due to a mechanical fault at the Ganglong Lehui Amusement Park in Suzhou city. Emergency services arrived on scene and successfully rescued all of the passengers. No injuries were reported in the incident on Monday. wenty-three thrillseekers had the shock of their lives when a carousel swing ride stalled and left them stranded mid-air at an amusement park in Suzhou city, east China Video footage of the horrifying incident in Jiangsu Province shows the swings dangling in mid-air at about 30 metres above ground, reportedly on its way to the top when it suddenly came to a halt at about 2pm. Firefighter were seen reaching the stranded passengers - a lot of them children - one by one with a ladder truck. The video also shows a clip filmed by one of the trapped passengers - who all appear quite calm as they wait to be rescued. A large inflatable mattress was also set up at the base of the ride in case any of the passengers falls, according to a report by Jiangsu Broadcasting Network. Firefighter are seen reaching the stranded passengers one by one with a ladder truck After two hours of intense rescue, all 23 passengers were carried to safety. No one was hurt 'Slowly, slowly - careful!' the firemen were heard saying over the radio. After two hours of intense rescue, all 23 passengers were carried to safety. No one was hurt in the incident, according to the report. The ride has been closed for inspection and the incident is under investigation. The swing attraction is a variation on the carousel in which the chairs are suspended from the rotating top of the ride. Net users were shocked by the incident, saying it would be their 'worst nightmare'. 'This is why I never go on rides at amusement parks,' one said. 'This is terrifying!' The Ganglong Lehui Amusement Park first opened in January in 2016 and boasts more than 20 rides for visitors who seek a quick adrenaline rush. The fossil of an unusual large-bodied balloon-shaped sea creature that lived half a billion years ago has been discovered in China. The strange fossil belongs to an obscure and mysterious group of animals known as the chancelloriids - and scientists are unclear about where they fit in the tree of life. Researchers say they represent a lineage of spiny tube-shaped animals that arose during the Cambrian evolutionary 'explosion' but went extinct soon afterwards. In some ways they resemble sponges, a group of simple filter-feeding animals, but many scientists have dismissed the similarities as superficial. The new fossil suggests the ancient creatures are in fact close relatives of sponges, based on the creature's pattern of body growth. Scroll down for video Scientists have discovered the fossil of an unusual large-bodied 'nude' sea-creature from half a billion years ago. The species of fossil chancelloriid had a tube-like body (left and top right), 'minotaur-horn' spines (middle right), and doughnut-shaped scars (bottom right) The discovery was made by a team of scientists from the University of Leicester, the University of Oxford and Yunnan University, China. The new species, named Allonnia nuda due to its fleshy appearance, was discovered in the Chengjiang deposits of Yunnan Province, China. It was surprisingly large in life, measuring up to 20 inches (50 cm) or more, but had only a few tiny spines. Its unusual 'naked' appearance suggests that further specimens may be 'hiding in plain sight' in fossil collections, and shows that this group was more diverse than previously thought. Furthermore, the new species holds clues about the pattern of body growth, with clear links to modern sponges. It is too soon to say the mystery has been solved experts say, but the discovery highlights the central role of sponge-like fossils in the debate over earliest animal evolution. The creature belongs to an obscure and mysterious group of animals known as the chancelloriids - and scientists are unclear about where they fit in the tree of life. This fossil, found in Utah, resembles a sponge but many scientists dismiss the similarities as superficial WHAT ARE CHANCELLORIIDS? Chancelloriids are an extinct family of animal common in sediments from the Early to the Late Cambrian. They probably lived on muddy sea-floors, as their sclerites, the sections of their exoskeletons, increase in size from the bottom to the top. The chancelloriids had bag-like bodies with an orifice at the top, and show no evidence of internal organs. Different species show a variety of shapes and sizes, and classifying them can be difficult for this reason. They all had thickenings at the bases, which are regarded as anchors and they are often preserved in attachment to other organisms or shelly debris. They were very likely filter-feeders. Since their sclerites were external and non-interlocking, they could not have functioned as supporting 'struts', since the body was fixed to the sea-bed, the sclerites would not aided locomotion by increasing traction. So the only conceivable function for the sclerites appears to be defence against predators, rather similar to the spines on modern cacti. Many of these fossils consist only of spines and other fragments, and it is not certain that they belong to the same type of organism. Other specimens appear to be more complete and to represent sessile, bag-like organisms with a soft skin armoured with star-shaped calcareous sclerites from which radiate sharp spines. Classifying the chancelloriids is difficult, some paleontologists classify them as sponges, an idea which chancelloriids' sessile lifestyle and simple structure make plausible. Other proposals suggest that they were more advanced, or at least originated from more advanced ancestors; for example chancelloriids' skins appear to be much more complex than those of any sponge. It has been suggested that chancelloriids were related to the 'chain mail' armoured slug-like halkieriids, which are important in analyses of the Cambrian explosion. While the sclerites of the two groups are very similar right down to the microscopic level, and therefore unlikely to have evolved independently, the large dissimilarity in the body plans of the two groups creates a puzzle which is hard to resolve. Advertisement Dr Tom Harvey, from the University of Leicester's School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, explained: 'Fossil chancelloriids were first described around 100 years ago, but have resisted attempts to place them in the tree of life. 'We argue that their pattern of body growth supports a link to sponges, reinvigorating an old hypothesis. 'We're not suggesting that it's "case closed" for chancelloriids, but we hope our results will inspire new research into the nature of the earliest animals.' The full findings of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The new species, named Allonnia nuda, was discovered in the Chengjiang deposits of Yunnan Province, China You might think spending your days relaxing on a beach with huge amounts of wealth is the key to happiness. But according to one scientist, those looking for a happier life should move to a big city. Dr Jeanette Bicknell from York University in Toronto claims that the fast-paced life of bustling areas like London and New York drives a feeling of contentment among residents. This is because busy people feel like they are making better use of their time than those who have a more leisurely pace of life, she claims. As a result they have more life satisfaction than their country-dwelling counterparts. Their busy schedules are also seen as a 'badge of honour' by others. Independent scholar Dr Jeanette Bicknell claims that residents in bustling cities are happier because they wear busyness as a 'badge of honour' which implies they are devoted parents or successful professionals (stock image) Dr Bicknell said people's feelings about their use of time contributes to well-being as much as their wealth or wages. She wrote on science blog site Nautil: 'Among individuals in a society, busyness - or the feeling of busyness - seems to be an important factor in well-being. 'That feeling of busyness - of having a lot to do and too little time in which to do it is often associated with stress and anxiety. 'However in many contexts being 'busy' is badge of honor: Busy parents are seen as devoted to their children's well-being, the busy real estate agent must be closing lots of sales, and the busy lawyer can charge a premium hourly rate.' To support her point, Dr Bicknell, who earned her PhD in philosophy at York University, Toronto, pointed to a study that looked at the pace of life at cities in in 31 countries across the globe. Researchers measured how fast pedestrians covered a distance of 60 feet, the average time took to buy a stamp, and the accuracy of randomly selected clocks. Led by California State University psychologist Professor Robert Levine, the team found that people in larger cities move faster than those in less populated places. A quicker pace was also shown to lead to a stronger economy, with rapid urban areas like London or New York typically sporting more robust economies. Faster places had higher smoking rates and residents were less likely to help strangers in need and more likely to die of coronary heart disease. Yet Professor Levine and his colleagues found that residents in these areas reported feeling somewhat happier with their lives than those in slower places. The psychologist later said that a city's pace of life was 'significantly related' to the psychological, social and physical well-being of its inhabitants. Higher levels of happiness found in faster-paced cities may be a result of the stronger economies of these places, Dr Bicknell said. Those looking for a happier life should move to a big city, according to scientists. An expert claims the fast-paced life of bustling urban areas like London and New York drives a feeling of content among residents (stock image) But previous research has shown that the relationship between income and wellbeing is complex, she added. A famous study from University of Southern California economist Richard Easterlin showed that money only brings happiness up to a point. Once people have enough money to meet their basic needs, having more is not necessarily linked to higher rates of happiness. Dr Bicknell suggested that happiness is instead linked to busyness, which many people wear like a 'badge of honour' that shows they are high achievers. A busy life helps people to feel like more devoted parents or successful professionals, she said. WHAT IS THE 80-YEAR LONG STUDY ON HAPPINESS? Harvard researchers looked at data 268 men who went to Harvard College. The study - which is one of the longest studies on adult life - first started tracking Harvard students during the Great Depression in 1938. The men were given regular interviews and questionnaires through the course of the 80 year study. To gauge the participants' early home environment, the researchers looked at reports about their home life, interviews with the parents, and developmental histories recorded by a social worker. When the participants were 45 to 50 years old, they completed interviews in which they discussed the challenges they encountered in various aspects of their lives, including their relationships, their physical health, and their work. Using the original interview notes, the researchers then rated the participants' ability to manage emotions in response to these challenges. Finally, when participants were in their late 70s or early 80s, they completed an interview that focused on their relationship with their current partner. Eight decades later, researchers have revealed how happy we are in our relationships has a strong influence on our overall health. Close relationships are far more important than money and fame and will keep people happy into their old age, researchers revealed. Advertisement Previous research has shown that the happiest people are often the busiest in the sense they had little excess time but did not feel rushed. 'Levine's work raises the intriguing possibility that an individuals feelings about their use of time contribute as much or more to their happiness as does economics,' she said. Speaking to MailOnline, Professor Peter Kinderman, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool, said busy cities can have happier residents, but only if it has the infrastructure in place to offset the damaging effects of a hectic life. He said: 'Busy cities allow for a better connectedness with others, which helps us build relationships that are important to our wellbeing. 'It's a balance between mitigating the negative effects: Pollution, noise, transport costs and a lack of green spaces, with the vibrancy, connectedness, meaning and purpose that a busy city life can bring. 'Cities that are good for your wellbeing will have good public transport, affordable housing, green spaces, lots of opportunities for walking, and "bump spaces" - places like coffee shops where you are likely to socialise.' Billionaire Elon Musk has said cash handouts 'will be necessary' if robots take human jobs, in his latest flurry of tweets. Musk made the comment in response to a question from a Twitter user about whether he supported universal basic income (UBI) - a cash handout that could be given to people irrespective of their employment. Musk believes UBI could be a possible solution for unemployment caused by machines taking over the workforce. Scroll down for video Billionaire Elon Musk has said cash handouts 'will be necessary' if robots take human jobs, in his latest flurry of tweets A universal basic income would give a standard amount of money to every citizen to cover basic expenses like food and living costs each month. Musk first joined the growing list of tech executives supporting the payment system in 2016 when he spoke about the concept in an interview. A Twitter user asked Musk if he supported universal basic income after the SpaceX CEO wrote a scathing tweet about 'socialists'. Musk responded saying: 'Universal income will be necessary over time if AI [artificial intelligence] takes over most human jobs." Former President Barack Obama warned Congress in March last year that by 2030, as many as 50 per cent of jobs could be replaced by robots, leaving millions of people without work. As part of the latest strange outpouring, Musk, who is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, also said that most 'socialists' are 'usually depressing, have no sense of humour and attended an expensive college'. One Twitter user said he didn't think Musk had ever read Marx, to which Musk replied that he had read 'Das Kapital' when he was 14 years old, 'including checking English translation of original German', he said. He also said he had read Adam Smith, a key thinker during the Scottish enlightenment era. 'Ironically, future automation will naturally lead to greater equality of consumption', he tweeted. 'Monopolies are true enemy of people. Competing to serve is good', he said. 'By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm', he said. 'True socialism seeks greatest good for all.' Musk made the comment in response to a question from a Twitter user about whether he supported universal basic income (UBI) - a cash handout that could be given to people irrespective of their employment As part of the latest strange outpouring, Musk also said that people who call themselves 'socialists' are 'usually depressing, have no sense of humour and attended an expensive college' Musk has spoken in support of the policy for years. Speaking at a World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017, Musk told a crowd that UBI is 'going to be necessary' in the future. 'There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better,' Musk said. 'I want to be clear. These are not things I wish will happen; these are things I think probably will happen.' He added that the rise in automation could mean an increase in society's wealth. 'The output of goods and services will be extremely high. With automation, there will come abundance,' Musk said. 'Almost everything will get very cheap.' One Twitter user said he didn't think Musk had ever read Marx, to which Musk replied that he had read 'Das Kapital' when he was 14 years old, 'including checking English translation of original German', he said 'By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm', he said The new wealth could theoretically be redistributed to give people financial security, even if they're out of work. Musk did, however, voice his scepticism over the payment system - worrying that people might lose their purpose if they don't have to work. 'The much harder challenge is, how are people going to have meaning?' Musk asked. 'A lot of people derive their meaning from their employment. 'So if there's no need for your labor, what's your meaning? Do you feel useless? That's a much harder problem to deal with.' In his interview with CNBC in 2016, Musk, said certain jobs, like truck driving, may soon be lost to automated technologies. Speaking at a World Government Summit in Dubai in 2017 (pictured), Musk told a crowd that UBI is 'going to be necessary' in the future WHAT IS UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME AND HOW WOULD IT WORK? Universal Basic Income (UBI) proposals are on the rise, with many backing the system as a possible solution for unemployment caused by the rise of machines equipped with artificial intelligence taking over the workforce. They system would see governments paying every citizen of a country a base salary to cover costs including food and rent. The guaranteed sum would be paid by the state to everyone, regardless of wealth or work status. Dpending on the details of the UBI proposal, the funds could be added to existing benefits or put in place of them. Left-wing supporters of the system say that it could lower proverty rates. For the right-leaners, it's a route to a less bureaucratic wellfare system. The program would likely be funded by an increase in income taxes across all income levels. To pay every adult and child in the United States a yearly income of 8,045 ($10,000) per year, the government would likely have to cut most non-health social spending programs and raise the share of GDP collected in tax by ten per cent, according to the Economist. Another suggestion is a negative interest rate, that would take a percentage of every citizen's bank account each month. A universal basic income in the United Kingdom that would give every adult and child 12,000 ($14,900) per year requires a negative interest rate of 2.5 percent per month, according to the Centre for Welfare Reform. So, if a person were to have 5,000 ($6,600) in his or her bank account at the beginning of the month, by the end, 4,884 ($6,500) would be left because 116 ($153) would be taken by the government for a universal basic income pot. Some have suggested a sliding scale of basic income, so the higher a person's employment salary, the lower basic income check he or she would receive from the government. The left-wing French presidential candidate Benoit Hamon, backed by the star economist Thomas Piketty, has also made the basic income part of his platform. Finland is the first European country to pay its unemployed citizens an unconditional sum. The two-year pilot scheme, which started January 1, gives unemployed Finland citizens aged 25 to 58 a guaranteed sum of 560 (490/$648) that replaces existing social benefits. The funds will still be paid if they eventually find work. In Marica, Brazil, a seaside town of about 150,000 people near Rio de Janeiro, the left-wing municipal government has spent the last year finding out universal basic salaries work. In Marica - a surviving Workers' Party bastion in increasingly right-leaning Brazil - the basic income idea fits in well with the leadership's socialist fervor. However, if Finland is handing out payments of about $590 (450) a month - and only to a test group of unemployed people for now - the amount in Marica is a measly 10 reais, or about $3.20 (2.40). The new mayor hopes to raise the amount to $32 (24) in 2017. Only the town's 14,000 poorest families are currently being given the income, which is denominated in Mumbucas, a virtual currency created to pay welfare under Quaqua three years ago. The 10 reais is added to the 85 reais ($27/ 20) monthly welfare check for families whose income doesn't top three times the minimum wage. The extra money is also given to poorer people aged between 14 and 29 and pregnant women already receiving other benefits. There's another limitation: only 131 local businesses - less than 10 percent of the total - accept payment in Mumbucas, the mayor's office says. The currency, which physically exists only on specially issued red magnetic cards, is unpopular with business owners because they must wait more than a month after purchases are completed for the government to convert payments into reals. Advertisement And with machines taking over the workforce, human income would shift as well, potentially necessitating universal payments from the government. 'There is a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation,' Musk told CNBC. 'I'm not sure what else one would do with this.'I think that's what would happen.' Musk went on to explain that some people may have plans to do more 'complex' and 'more interesting' things with these capabilities in the future. This will open the door for more leisure time, he said. 'And then we have to figure out how we integrate with a world in the future with advanced AI,' Musk told CNBC, noting that this will likely be the 'toughest' part. 'Ultimately,' he said, 'it would need to be some kind of improved symbiosis with digital superintelligence.' Y Combinator President Sam Altman and Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes have also been vocal about their support of a universal basic income. Advocates for the income system say it could be cheaper to implement that people believe. 'Because a very small amount of people have an almost unimaginable amount of money at the very top, a basic income could actually decrease almost everyone else's income tax burdens except for theirs,' Scott Santens, a UBI advocate, wrote for The Huffington Post. A bug in Google's Home and Chromecast gadgets could show cyber criminals where you live. The glitch allows hackers to access the exact location of your Wi-Fi router via a malicious link that could be sent to you via email or social media. It was found by security researcher Craig Young, who said the issue allows cyber criminals to find your address or make scam messages more convincing. These include fake calls from the IRS or demands for cash from hackers making phony claims that they have webcam footage of the victim watching pornography. Google said it plans to fix the security flaw, which leaks your location with an accuracy of up to a few feet, in an update next month. Scroll down for video A bug in Google's Home (left) and Chromecast (right) gadgets could show cyber criminals where you live. The glitch allows hackers to access the exact location of your Wi-Fi router via a malicious link that could be sent to you via email The bug was first reported Monday by Mr Young, a security expert at software firm Tripwire, based in Portland, Oregon. Mr Young found he could access router location data stored on a Home or Chromecast gadget via a computer connected to the same network. 'I was actually able to use data extracted from the devices to determine their physical location with astonishing accuracy,' he wrote in a blog post. Google collects information about the precise location of your Wi-Fi router so it can pinpoint your position without a GPS signal. This allows the company to give you your location on its maps service, for instance, even when you are using a device with no GPS function, such as an old laptop. Mr Young set up a website that ran malicious software designed to remotely infect a victim's computer and extract the location data stored on nearby Google devices. A link to this website could be sent to victims in an email, through social media platforms like Twitter or via a malicious advertisement on a website. Once a victim clicks on the link, the website searches for Google devices connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the infected computer. A glitch in the Chromecast and Home software means the website can send a message requesting your router's location without requiring authenticationC In a test with his own computer, Mr Young found he could tease the exact location of his home router via his own Chromecast device. Researcher Craig Young said cyber criminals could use the technique to find out the address of their victims or to make scam messages more convincing (stock image) The hack works on both Windows and Mac computers, and could target you through either the Chrome or Firefox browser, Young found. Hackers could use the technique to make scam messages - such as fake claims they have embarassing photos of you taken through your webcam - more convincing. They could use your location 'to lend credibility to the warnings and increase their odds of success', Young said. The researcher told KrebsOnSecurity that the hack presents a danger because it can be performed remotely from almost any location. WHICH SMART HOUSEHOLD GADGETS ARE VULNERABLE TO CYBER ATTACKS? From devices that order our groceries to smart toys that speak to our children, high-tech home gadgets are no longer the stuff of science fiction. But even as they transform our lives, they put families at risk from criminal hackers taking advantage of security flaws to gain virtual access to homes. A June 2017 Which? study tested whether popular smart gadgets and appliances, including wireless cameras, a smart padlock and a children's Bluetooth toy, could stand up to a possible hack. The survey of 15 devices found that eight were vulnerable to hacking via the internet, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections. Scary: Which? said ethical hackers broke into the CloudPets toy and made it play its own voice messages. They said any stranger could use the method to speak to children from outside The test found that the Fredi Megapix home CCTV camera system operated over the internet using a default administrator account without a password, and Which? found thousands of similar cameras available for anyone to watch the live feed over the internet. The watchdog said that a hacker could even pan and tilt the cameras to monitor activity in the house. SureCloud hacked the CloudPets stuffed toy, which allows family and friends to send messages to a child via Bluetooth and made it play its own voice messages. Which? said it contacted the manufacturers of eight affected products to alert them to flaws as part of the investigation, with the majority updating their software and security. Advertisement 'An attacker can be completely remote as long as they can get the victim to open a link while connected to the same Wi-Fi or wired network as a Google Chromecast or Home device,' Young said. 'The only real limitation is that the link needs to remain open for about a minute before the attacker has a location. 'The attack content could be contained within malicious advertisements or even a tweet.' A Google spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Security is an ongoing focus for our teams, we're aware of the report and are rolling out a fix in July.' A nuclear experiment that borrows elements from existing designs to create a stable fusion reactor could make never-ending energy a reality within decades. Washington startup, Agni Energym says its 'beam-target' reactor focuses and controls the elements needed to achieve nuclear fusion more efficiently than other designs. This approach, they say, should overcome the technical hurdles faced by their competitors, who have yet to unlock the 'Holy Grail of energy production'. They believe their preliminary research shows that they will be the first to crack the process - far quicker than the 30 year time period predicted of other efforts. Scroll down for video A nuclear experiment designed to create a stable fusion reactor could make never-ending energy a reality within decades. Agni Energy says its 'beam-target' reactor focuses and controls the elements needed to achieve nuclear fusion more efficiently than other designs The reactor is the brainchild of 25-year-old Demitri Hopkins, chief scientific officer of the company, based in Olympia, Washington. Their device was first reported by Dr James Conca, an expert on energy, nuclear and dirty bombs, in Forbes. In devices that aim to achieve nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, two separate approaches have been taken. One aims to compress hot ions, electrically charged particles, heating them to extreme temperatures where fusion can occur. Another seeks to use magnetic fields to contain a hot plasma, a heated gas, which is kept stable long enough for fusion to happen. The Agni reactor is designed to overcome a number of problems with existing nuclear fusion reactor experiments. An ion beam of deuterium and helium-3 is shot into a Lithium BoroTritide target. Here atoms fuse together, releasing energy in the process Both have their drawbacks, and the Agni device seeks to incorporate the best elements of both, by focusing a beam of ions onto a solid fuel target using both electric fields and magnetic fields. The design means that the ion beam has a short path to its target and doesn't need to be controlled for long before fusion happens. The energy released, if successful, can then be used to generate electrical power. In a written statement, a spokesman for Agni Energy said: 'AGNI is expected to achieve 16 million times the efficiency of coal, 10 times the efficiency of nuclear fission, produce no waste and zero emissions. 'This is a paradigm shift in power.' When two atoms become one, they release energy that was once 'binding energy' into kinetic energy. This is emitted when the fused atom heats up and ejects a highly energised neutron, whose heat can be used to turn a turbine and generate electricity Nuclear fusion occurs when two light atoms overcome the barriers separating them to become one atom. They then release energy that was once used in binding them together into kinetic energy. This is emitted when the fused atom heats up and ejects a highly energised neutron. In the Agni Energy reactor, deuterium and helium-3 are injected into a chamber where they are ionized and accelerated into an ion beam. Magnetic focusing lenses serve to excite the ion beam and control it so it doesnt stray off course on the way to the target. They also serve to periodically increase the density to induce ionic heating through deuterium-helium-3 fusion. Fusion is the process that powers the sun (pictured) and stars, and involves light elements such as hydrogen smashing together to form heavier elements, like helium This beam is fired at a target is made of Lithium BoroTritide and has the highest density of tritium by volume. Here the excited deuterium hits the target with a large amount of kinetic energy and fuses with tritium, creating a vast surplus of energy. The product of deuterium and tritium fusion is helium-4 and a neutron. In deuterium tritium fusion, as featured in the Agni Energy reactor, the atoms come together for a single instant as helium-5, before immediately decaying into the more stable helium-4 and a neutron. That neutron is very energetic, and can be captured in a medium like water, heating it to turn a turbine and generate electrical power. Helium-4 is a rare resource, one that does not stick around earth once in the atmosphere, and one needed for scientific equipment like MRIs. The neutron is the main carrier of energy, holding 14.1 MeVs of energy, that will be used to power a steam turbine, generating electricity. Advertisement The story of the 'greatest king you've never heard of' is set to be showcased in a new exhibition at the British Museum in London. The exhibit looks at the life and legacy of King Ashurbanipal - the last great ruler of the Assyrian Empire - during his reign in seventh century BC Iraq, when the monarch became the most powerful person on earth. More than 200 artefacts will go on show including carved ivory sculptures, bronze furniture fittings, intricate wooden cravings and lavish wall paintings. Ashurbanipal's vast empire, which stretched from Egypt to modern-day Turkey, was based Nineveh, in Mosul, modern-day Iraq. Experts said they hope the exhibit helps to shed light on the importance of areas like Nineveh, whose artefacts were largely destroyed or plundered by Islamic State militants in 2014. Scroll down for video The story of the 'greatest king you've never heard of' is set to be showcased in a new exhibition at the British Museum in London. The exhibit looks at the life and legacy of King Ashurbanipal - the last great ruler of the Assyrian Empire. Pictured is a relief carving - a type of wood carving in which figures are engraved into wood - of Ashurbanipal hunting on horseback Museum Curator Gareth Brereton said he hoped the exhibition would raise awareness on what has been 'a terrible time for Iraqi cultural history.' Mr Brereton said: 'Sites have been bulldozed and dynamited, it has been awful.' King Ashurbanipal ruled over Assyria between 668 and 631 BC, a period when the empire was the largest and most powerful in the world. Ashurbanipal described himself as 'king of the world', and assembled the greatest library in existence during his reign, in-part to boast of his ability to read and write - skills that were rare among kings of the time. The monarch was known for his ruthless campaigns against all who defied his rule, including a crushing defeat dealt to his rebellious older brother. The new exhibition, called 'I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria', features more than 200 ancient artefacts, many of which were gathered from sites ransacked by Islamic State. More than 200 artefacts will go on show including carved ivory furniture, large stone sculptures, a huge collection of cuneiform documents and lavish wall paintings. Pictured is granite sphinx of Taharqo, which is part of their exhibition Ashurbanipal's vast empire, which stretched from Egypt to modern-day Turkey, was based Nineveh, in Mosul, modern-day Iraq. This image shows a bronze lion furniture fitting Experts said they hope the exhibit helps to shed light on the importance of areas like Nineveh, whose artefacts were largely destroyed or plundered by Islamic State militants in 2014. Pictured is a bronze decorated helmet Objects include a number of his stone palace sculptures, hundreds of cuneiform texts that survive from his library, and a wealth of other objects discovered by archaeologists working in the region around Nineveh. Also featured are delicately carved ivories, extravagant metalwork, cosmetic vessels and gold ornaments that show how the city's elites lived in splendour. A recreation of the King's great library, which was thought lost for hundreds of years after Nineveh was destroyed by invaders around 627BC, is a further part of the exhibit. WHAT WILL FEATURE AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM'S KING ASHURBANIPAL EXHIBIT? The story of King Ashurbanipal, who ruled over Assyria between 668 and 631 BC, is set to be showcased in a new exhibition at the British Museum in London. The exhibition features more than 200 artefacts including stone palace sculptures and hundreds of cuneiform texts that survive from his library. Massive stone sculptures, intricately carved reliefs, painted glazed bricks and rare wall paintings evoke the splendour of the cities and palaces around Ashurbanipal's capital in Nineveh, in Mosul, modern-day Iraq. Delicately carved ivories, extravagant metalwork, cosmetic vessels and gold ornaments show how the elites lived in splendour. Ornate chariot fittings and elaborate weaponry reveal how this was an age of conflict, as rival kings fought for power and glory. Ashurbanipal's prowess as a valiant warrior is recorded on a series of vividly carved reliefs in the British Museum's collection that depict the royal lion hunt. Lion hunts were drama-filled public spectacles staged within the hunting grounds at Nineveh. Many of the objects featured in the exhibition come from archaeological sites in Iraq such as Nineveh and Nimrud that have been systematically targeted and destroyed by the Islamic State. Advertisement Mr Brereton said: 'The city was sacked after his death when the empire fell apart, and his library was burnt down. 'But because it was all on clay tablets, burning them actually preserved the documents so we are able to tell so much of the story.' The exhibition will also focus on the work of the Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme which manages the training of Iraqi archaeologists with the goal of saving threatened sites. Objects include a number of his stone palace sculptures, hundreds of cuneiform texts (pictured) that survive from his library, and a wealth of other objects discovered by archaeologists working in the region around Nineveh WHO WAS KING ASHURBANIPAL, 7TH CENTURY RULER OF THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE? King Ashurbanipal ruled over Assyria between 668 and 631 BC, a period when the empire was the largest and most powerful in the world. At its peak, Ashurbanipal's empire stretched from Egypt all the way to modern day Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Ashurbanipal claimed to be unlike his predecessors for he could read, write and debate with expert scholars. Ashurbanipal described himself as 'king of the world', and assembled the greatest library in existence during his reign, in-part to boast of his ability to read and write - skills that were rare among kings of the time. Knowledge was power; this library was a practical tool that helped the king to manage his empire. The monarch was known for his ruthless campaigns against all who defied his rule, including a crushing defeat dealt to his rebellious older brother. As part of his military training, the young crown prince was taught to drive chariots, ride cavalry horses, and develop skills such as archery. He also learnt how to hunt lions. In Assyria lion hunting was a royal sport. Although this perhaps seems cruel to modern eyes, killing lions represented the kings ability to protect his nation against all that was wild and dangerous in the world. Many ancient stone sculptures depicting Ashurbanipal show him slaughtering lions. Advertisement King Ashurbanipal ruled over Assyria between 668 and 631 BC, a period when the empire was the largest and most powerful in the world. This image shows a lioness plaque which shows a lioness mauling a man As part of his military training, the young crown prince was taught to drive chariots, ride cavalry horses, and develop skills such as archery. Many ancient stone sculptures depicting Ashurbanipal show him slaughtering lions WHAT WAS THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE? The Assyrian Empire was a complex Mesopotamian civilisation dating from 2,500 BC to around 600 BC. Mesopotamia, an area of ancient Asia, was where people first gathered in large cities, created governments, and learned to write. Alongside other Mesopotamian groups like ancient Babylon and the Sumerian cities, the Assyrian Empire was one of the earliest civilisations in history. As its height, the empire stretched from Egypt up through what is now Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and into Turkey. As its height, the Assyrian Empire (red) stretched from Egypt up through what is now Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and into Turkey Turkey's Kultepe district was home to a settlement of the Old Assyrian Empire from the 21st to 18th centuries BC. Over 1,000 cuneiform tablets were found in the area in 1925, revealing a rich and complex cultural heritage. Much of our knowledge of early human societies comes from stone tablets such as these, leading some scholars to label Mesopotamia 'the place where history began'. Advertisement Mr Brereton added: 'This autumn, the British Museum will reveal the history of Ashurbanipal, the greatest king you've never heard of. 'We hope many visitors will discover the stories of ancient Assyria and Ashurbanipal for the very first time, and experience the splendour of his palace at Nineveh and the impact of the Assyrian empire. 'As present day Iraq looks to recover the history of damaged sites at Nineveh and Nimrud, this exhibition allows us to appreciate and relive the great achievements of an ancient world and celebrate its legacy.' The exhibit runs from November 8 to February 24 2019 with adult tickets priced at 17 ($22), while children under 16 go free. The exhibit runs from November 8 to February 24 2019 with adult tickets priced at 17 ($22), while children under 16 go free. Pictured are sculptures of Assyrians kings Shamash-shumu-ukin (left) and Ashurbanipal (right) Pictured s a burnt ivory figurine found in Nimrud, Iraq. Ashurbanipal described himself as 'king of the world', and assembled the greatest library in existence during his reign, in-part to boast of his ability to read and write - skills that were rare among kings of the time The Assyrian Empire was a complex Mesopotamian civilisation dating from 2,500 BC to around 600 BC. Mesopotamia, an area of ancient Asia, was where people first gathered in large cities, created governments, and learned to write. Pictured is an artist's impression of ancient Nimrud in what is now Iraq - once a key Assyrian city Advertisement Spanning the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula, the Rub al-Khali is the worlds largest contiguous sand desert, and one of the driest places on Earth. However, in May this year, Tropical Cyclone Mekunu passed over the region, dramatically changing the landscape. It created a vast series of in the lowlands between dunes - revealed for the first time in these incredible images. Scroll down for video Slide me The first image was acquired on May 13 and represents the typically dry appearance of the interdune sand flats. The second image was acquired on May 29, three days after the center of Mekunu had moved ashore over Oman. CYCLONE MEKUNU Authorities say Cyclone Mekunu killed at least 30 people when it barreled across Oman and Yemen. The storm's Category 3 hurricane-equivalent landfall was one of the strongest on record in Oman. The storm dumped more than two years' worth of rain on Oman in just 24 hours, flooding streets and trapping vehicles. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement that the majority of the fatalities happened on the Yemeni island of Socotra, where 20 were killed. The cyclone packed maximum sustained winds of 170-180 kilometers (105-111 miles) per hour with gusts of up to 200 kph (124 mph). Advertisement Salalah, a large port city in Oman about 300 kilometers (190 miles) south of this image, reportedly received 278 millimeters (11 inches) of rain over 24 hours between May 2526 - more than twice the average amount the city sees in a year. Authorities say Cyclone Mekunu killed at least 30 people when it barreled across Oman and Yemen. The storm's Category 3 hurricane-equivalent landfall was one of the strongest on record in Oman. The storm dumped more than two years' worth of rain on Oman in just 24 hours, flooding streets and trapping vehicles. The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said in a statement that the majority of the fatalities happened on the Yemeni island of Socotra, where 20 were killed. The cyclone packed maximum sustained winds of 170-180 kilometers (105-111 miles) per hour with gusts of up to 200 kph (124 mph). The amazing images were captured by Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired these false-color images of the eastern part of the desert in Saudi Arabia, near the border of Oman. False-color (bands 7-5-3) makes it easier to distinguish different rock and soil types and to detect the presence of moisture. 'Mekunu dissipated as it tracked northwest over land, but still delivered huge amounts of of water to the desert,' NASA said. 'Notice where water collected in the lowlands between sand dunes.' For comparison, the second image was acquired on May 13 and represents the typically dry appearance of the interdune sand flats. THE 'EMPTY QUARTER' The Arabian Peninsulas Empty Quarter, known as Rub al Khali, is the worlds largest sand sea, holding about half as much sand as the Sahara Desert. The Empty Quarter has distinctive dune formations and covers 250,000 square miles (650,000 square kilometres) including regions of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The desert is 620 miles (1,000 kilometres) long, and 310 miles (500 kilometres) wide. Its surface elevation varies from 800 metres (2,600 ft) in the southwest to around sea level in the northeast. The Rub' al Khali, also known as the 'Empty Quarter', is the second largest sand desert in the world. It has distinctive dune formations and covers 250,000 square miles (650,000 square kilometres) including regions of Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen Advertisement It is rare for rainwater to form lakes in this part of the desert, which is known as the Empty Quarter. Sand composing dunes of all shapes and sizes, interspersed with salt flats, make up the majority of the landscape. According to news reports, this desert received on average 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) of rain per year. It has been about 20 years since rainwater last filled the flats. The rainwater is expected to give rise to summertime vegetation. Al Arabiya reported that such vegetation will be a boon for camel owners, who expect to feed the animals on the plants for the next two years. Cyclone Mekunu, the most powerful to ever hit the area, ripped apart buildings and blew down street lights with 105-111mph winds gusting up to 124mph Six people were killed in Oman including a 12-year-old girl and two other who lost control of their car in flood waters, with at least 30 missing Microsoft is the latest tech giant to find itself in the crosshairs over a controversial government contract. In January, it was announced that Microsoft's Azure Government arm was working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to assist with 'facial recognition and identification', providing access to its deep learning AI technology. Along with that, Microsoft said it was 'proud to support' ICE - a section that was deleted and, ultimately, restored after it was made public, according to BuzzFeed. Scroll down for video In January, it was announced that Microsoft's Azure Government arm was working with ICE to assist with 'facial recognition and identification,' providing access to its deep learning AI tech That hasn't stopped many from calling on Microsoft employees to resign from the company or urge CEO Satya Nadella to speak about the firm's dealings with ICE. Microsoft has since responded that deleting the content was a 'mistake' and issued a follow up blog post further detailing the matter. 'In response to questions we want to be clear: Microsoft is not working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or U.S. Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border, and contrary to some speculation, we are not aware of Azure or Azure services being used for this purpose,' the firm wrote in a statement. 'As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border.' The firm went on to say that it urges the administration to change its stance and for Congress to pass legislation so that 'children are no longer separated from their families.' Gizmodo noted it's possible that, due to Microsoft's sheer size, many employees were unaware that the deal was in place until now. Many are now calling on Microsoft employees to resign from the company or urge CEO Satya Nadella (pictured) to speak about the firm's dealings with ICE Several have since voiced concerns about the agreement, with one employee telling Gizmodo that it's made them 'question staying' at the company. 'Ill seriously consider leaving if Im not happy with how they handle this,' another employee told Gizmodo. Larry Osterman, a Microsoft engineer, said he agreed with a tweet calling on employees to fight back against the agreement, urging Microsoft President Brad Smith to speak about the issue. '@BradSmi, how on earth does this align with our ethical stances [with respect to] family separation and our public stance on using AI for only ethical purposes,' Osterman wrote. 'This seems completely antithetical to our public stances. Not cool,' he added. Microsoft has yet to provide further details on what Azure Government tools are being used by ICE. 'The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and were proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud,' Microsoft said in the January announcement. The firm went on to say that the agreement is a 'critical next step in enabling ICE to deliver such services as cloud-based identity and access.' Microsoft is the latest tech giant to face backlash from its dealing with government agencies. Amazon faced similar pressure after it was revealed that the firm had given law enforcement access to its 'Rekognition' facial recognition technology. Nearly 20 groups of Amazon shareholders delivered a signed letter to CEO Jeff Bezos on Friday, pressuring the company to stop selling the software to law enforcement. Rekognition was first released in 2016, but has since been selling it on the cheap to several police departments around the country, with Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon and the city of Orlando, Florida among its customers. Amazon has faced similar pressure as Microsoft after it was revealed that the firm had given law enforcement access to its 'Rekognition' facial recognition technology HOW DOES FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY WORK? Facial recognition software works by matching real time images to a previous photograph of a person. Each face has approximately 80 unique nodal points across the eyes, nose, cheeks and mouth which distinguish one person from another. A digital video camera measures the distance between various points on the human face, such as the width of the nose, depth of the eye sockets, distance between the eyes and shape of the jawline. A different smart surveillance system (pictured) can scan 2 billion faces within seconds has been revealed in China. The system connects to millions of CCTV cameras and uses artificial intelligence to pick out targets. The military is working on applying a similar version of this with AI to track people across the country This produces a unique numerical code that can then be linked with a matching code gleaned from a previous photograph. A facial recognition system used by officials in China connects to millions of CCTV cameras and uses artificial intelligence to pick out targets. Experts believe that facial recognition technology will soon overtake fingerprint technology as the most effective way to identify people. Advertisement Similarly, Google employees have resigned and criticized the firm after it was revealed that it had signed a contract with the Pentagon's controversial Project Maven. Google has said its TensorFlow software would be used for 'non-offensive uses only,' namely assisting in object recognition on unclassified data. Earlier this month, the company announced that it wouldn't renew its contract with the Pentagon once it expires in 2019. Before that, nearly a dozen employees resigned from the company as a result of the contract. And more than 3,000 employees penned a letter addressed to Google, saying it shouldn't be 'in the business of war.' Holidaymakers at Spanish airports could be set to face chaos later this week after air traffic controllers in the country have threatened to strike. Staff at airports including Palma de Mallorca, Ibiza and Menorca as well as El Prat Airport in Barcelona have reportedly threatened to walk out unless their demands for a change in working hours were met. It is believed the workers are wanting more time off to spend with their families as well as a more consistent working pattern as they claim their current rota is leading them to becoming fatigued. Holidaymakers at Spanish airports could be set to face chaos later this week after air traffic controllers in the country have threatened to strike. Pictured are passengers at Mahon airport in Menorca It is also understood that the new Spanish government and ENAIRE, the Spanish air traffic control provider, are a long way off coming to an agreement on the issue. And now it is feared that if the strike goes ahead later this week, holidaymakers could be left facing long delays or even flight cancellations. Raul Tobaruela, a representative from an assembly representing workers, told The Sun: 'Our conditions are far from being normal. 'I can assure you that our working situation is the worst in the entire of Europe. 'We would not anticipate too many flights being cancelled but there could be huge delays because there will be staff shortages.' Last year almost 14 million tourists visited the Balearic Islands of Mallorca, Menorca and Ibiza, including 2.8 million Brits. Airports that could be affected by air traffic control strikes are Palma de Mallorca, pictured, Ibiza and Menorca News of the potential strike comes just days after Ryanair warned it could be a summer of travel 'meltdown' due to strikes by air traffic controllers. The Irish carrier revealed that it had to cancel 1,000 flights in May alone due to walkouts by air traffic control staff as well as shortages across Europe. The low-cost airline accuses air traffic control across the continent of using 'adverse weather conditions' as a way of dealing with staff shortages. And now the carrier, which is one of the largest in Europe, is calling for urgent action by the EU Commission and European Governments to step in and put an end to the disruption. Low-cost airline Ryanair has warned it could be a summer of travel 'meltdown' due to strikes by air traffic controllers Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary said: 'Europe's airlines are suffering thousands of ATC (air traffic control) delays/cancellations because of staff shortages especially in German and UK ATC providers. 'These disruptions are unacceptable, and we call on the UK and German Governments, and the EU Commission to take urgent and decisive action to ensure that ATC providers are fully staffed and that overflights are not affected when national strikes take place, as they repeatedly do in France.' And Mr O'Leary added that if the air traffic control situation is not brought under control soon, it will lead to travel chaos. Whoopi Goldberg is coming to the big screen alongside Tiffany Haddish and Tika Sumpter. The View host will play Tiffany, 38, and Tikas mother in Tyler Perrys upcoming film, Nobodys Fool. In the movie, Tikas character, Danica, takes in her sister Tanya, played by Tiffany, after she gets out of jail. Out of jail, free at last, free at last, Imma go out there and shake my ass, Tiffany says in the trailer. Whoopi Goldberg will appear in Tyler Perry's upcoming film, Nobody's Fool this November While living with Danica and trying to get back on her feet, Tanya learns that her sisters being catfished by a man online. It appears that Tiffany and Tika will have the biggest roles in the film, but Whoopis sure to elicit a few laughs from moviegoers. Heres what you need to know about the legendary actress. Who is Whoopi Goldberg? Whoopi Goldberg is an actress, comedian, author and TV host. She was born on November 13, 1955 in Manhattan, New York. Whoopi left the East Coast for California in the 1970s, settling in Berkeley. While living there, she worked odd jobs and eventually found herself a member of a theater troupe called the Blake Street Hawkeyes. She began teaching comedy and acting classes for a period of time before moving to Germany in 1979. Whoopi lived there until 1981 and worked on several theater productions. Her big break came when she was cast in The Color Purple, which came out in 1985. That year, Whoopi was nominated for best actress at the Oscars. Its the only Academy Award shes ever won. Over the years she has also won two Golden Globe Awards, a Tony Award, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, a BAFTA Award, a Grammy Award, Peoples Choice Awards, NAACP Image Awards She continued to act, appearing in hit films like Ghost, Gone with the Wind, Sister Act and more. In 2007, she was added as a co-host on The View, filling Rosie ODonnells spot. In her personal life, Whoopi has been married three times. In 1973 she married Alvin Martin only to divorce him after six years and one child. She was married again in 1986 to a man by the name of David Claessen. That marriage lasted two years. She then married Lyle Trachtenberg in 1994, divorcing him in 1995. Whoopi, 62, has been romantically linked to Frank Langella, Timothy Dalton and Ted Danson. She has one child, Alexandrea Martin. Whoopi Goldberg net worth According to Celebrity Net Worth, Whoopi Goldbergs net worth is $45 million (34.1m). How did Whoopi Goldberg make her money? Whoopi Goldberg has made the majority of her money in movies and TV. She landed her first big role in 1985 and went on to appear in several other major films including Ghost; Sister Act; The Little Rascals; Corrina, Corrina; The Pagemaster; How Stella Got Her Groove Back and more. She has also had a role as co-host on The View since 2007. Her salary is said to be about $5 million (3.7m) per year. Whoopi Goldberg new movie Whoopi Goldberg is due to appear in Tyler Perrys upcoming film, Nobodys Fool. Shell star alongside Tiffany Haddish and Tika Sumpter, who play her daughters Tanya and Danica. In the film Tanyas just been released from jail. She goes to live with Danica while she gets back on her feet and learns that Danica is being catfished. Together, the sisters decided to track down the man in question and find out why he deceived Danica. Nobodys Fool hits theaters everywhere November 22, 2018. Nobody's Fool trailer The first trailer for Nobody's Fool was released on Monday. It's been viewed more than 1.4 million times. The fourth season of BBC's Luther left many questions unanswered including what really happened to sociopath Alice Morgan. And the eerie first trailer for the eagerly anticipated fifth season has now been released, teasing a glimpse of Idris Elba, 45, reprising his role as detective John Luther in the cult drama. In the tense scenes, a shadowy figure slowly walks forward, before revealing a wizened-looking Luther staring into the lens. Luther season five : Fans have been warned 'this will hurt' as Idris Elba returns as the maverick detective in a dramatic teaser As he approached the end of the industrial corridor, the leading man is heard breathing heavily. 'This will hurt' flashes up onscreen over a dramatic drum beat, signalling the intensity sure to arise in the upcoming season. The end of the series four, which was aired in December 2015, left many questions unanswered following the apparent death of Ruth Wilson's Alice Morgan. Is it over? The fourth season BBC's Luther left many questions unanswered including what really happened to sociopath Alice Morgan Intense: As he approached the end of the industrial corridor, the leading man breaths small, sharp breaths, ahead of the series tagline Cliffhanger: The end of the series four, which was aired in December 2015, left many questions unanswered following the apparent death of Ruth Wilson's Alice Morgan It is unclear what lies ahead for the detective, with John having to deal with the murder of his ex-wife Zoe and partner DS Justin Ripley and seeming loss of Alice. Despite the upcoming storyline being held close to the creators' chest, Idris spilled to the Radio Times that the new season hearkens back to the original storytelling. 'We're not reinventing the wheel' the actor reassured 'It's classic Luther'. Dramatic: It is unclear what lies ahead for the detective, with John having to deal with the murder of his ex-wife Zoe and partner DS Justin Ripley and seeming loss of Alice While being rather coy about the return of sociopath Alice, Ruth did little to keep her return a secret, confirming her place in the series to The Independent. 'She is in it,' she told the publication. 'It's not what you expect. She's definitely back for a bit. [Alice is] back with a vengeance.' After series four had aired, Idris spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the show without Alice and claimed it was possible for it to continue. He said: 'The truth is, the show is called Luther. It's not called Alice, or The Bad Guys. Uncomfortable: 'This will hurt' flashes up over a dramatic drum beat, signalling the intensity sure to arise in the upcoming season Throwback: Despite the upcoming storyline being held close to the creators' chest, Idris spilled to the Radio Times that the series hearkens back to the original series 'It's about Luther and the people he comes across and the people he tries to bring down. I think that world still remains intact, but it takes on a slightly different spin.' But he was quick to add that it wasn't necessarily the last time we would see her: 'I'm not being deceptive or anything, but the truth is, John Luther isn't quite sure that she's dead!' Season five of the show will feature a four-episode story, which hasn't happened since series three. Comeback: While being rather coy about the return of sociopath Alice, Ruth did little to keep her return a secret, confirming her place in the series to The Independent Originally, series showrunner Neil Cross and Idris were looking to take the character to the big screen, but in June last year they revealed that they had decided on making a new series instead because there were so many unanswered questions. Of the new episodes Neil said in a statement: 'It's a question Idris and I get asked a lot. What happened to John Luther after we last saw him striding unbowed through the streets of his city, his blood red London? 'It can't be over, can it? There's so much we don't know. So much unfinished business. The thing is, we've been asking ourselves the same question. 'In the end, we picked up the phone to some old friends and asked if they'd like to find out what happens next. It turns out, they would. So that's what we're going to do.' It's part of being a modern celebrity - sharing copious pictures of your luxury lifestyle. And Melanie Griffith has adapted to the times, with 60-year-old sharing a snap to Instagram as she relaxed on a yacht with a pal during a sea excursion in France. But the veteran star clearly felt a little self-conscious doing so, jokingly labelling herself a 'poser'. Holiday time: On Monday, Melanie Griffith, 60, relaxed on a yacht with a pal during a sea excursion in France She wrote: '@polinakitsenko and me on the boat.... posers,' alongside a laughing emoji. While on the yacht, Melanie sported a brightly colored two-piece, layered underneath a white, floral print cover-up. The mother-of-three wore her blonde hair down and accessorized with stud earrings and red-rimmed shades. True tourist: The star's friend filmed her as she captured the beauty around her. The mother of Dakota Johnson turned around, and proceeded to wave at the camera The star's pal filmed her as she captured the beauty around her. 'Melanie,' called her friend, in order to get her attention. The mother of Dakota Johnson turned around, and proceeded to wave at the camera. 'Good morning London!': On Wednesday, Melanie shared a selfie while on board Virgin Airlines On Wednesday, Melanie shared a selfie while on board Virgin Airlines. The Graduate production star, was joined by another female friend, as they each relaxed in a first class pod. 'Good morning London! Thanks @virginatlantic 1st day of Girl Friend trip #ohboyohboy,' she wrote. Following her London trip, the woman headed off to France, where she is currently staying. Its been seven years since Jon Bernthals character Shane was killed on The Walking Dead. But now, The Punisher star will return for an appearance in the ninth season of the blockbuster AMC show, which is 44-year-old Andrew Lincolns last season, according to Deadline. Jon, 41, is also likely to appear on the yet-to-be-officially announced Walking Dead panel at Comic-Con International in Hall H at San Diego Convention Center in July. He's back: Jon Bernthal, 41, is set to return as Shane West for season nine of The Walking Dead despite being killed off at the end of season2 Jons character died when Andrew's Rick Grimes stabbed him at the end of season 2 of the post-apocalyptic zombie series. But he haunted Ricks imagination in season 3. That being said, Jon's Shane probably wont be magically resurrected or return as a walker, obviously. From what sources told the website, Jon most likely will appear in flashbacks in a sort of This Is Your Life final hurrah for Rick as it will be the character's last season. Not doing so good: Jon's Shane West was killed off at the end of season two Jon sparked return rumors when he was spotted hanging out around the Senoia, Georgia-based set of the hit AMC series earlier this month. Jon, who recently shot the second season of Netflixs The Punisher in New York, more than likely will appear at Comic-Con's The Walking Dead panel, which has yet to be announced. The panel was supposed to be moderated by Chris Hardwick, 46. Gone but not forgotten: He haunted the imagination of killer Rick Grime, played by Andrew Lincoln, in season 3 But he has stepped down in the wake of sexual assault allegations against him by ex-girlfriend Chloe Dykstra, 29. Meanwhile, Jon has six projects on the go this year. He will next by seen in crime thriller Widows due out on November 16. He also has Viena And The Fantomes, The Peanut Butter Falcon, Stingray, Ford v. Ferrar and an Untitled Accountant Sequel lined up. Love Island Australia is about to welcome two new female contestants. After Monday night's bombshell episode, Amelia Marni and Shelby Bilby are set to shake things up in the Spanish villa this week. Channel Nine released a tantalising new preview overnight that promises plenty of drama following the girls' arrival. Look out, ladies! Two new contestants, Amelia Marni (pictured) and Shelby Bilby, are set to shake up the Love Island Australia villa later this week Exotic Amelia will no doubt set pulses racing in the house, with her Instagram page revealing she is quite the exhibitionist. The female contestants will also have to keep an eye on blonde bombshell Shelby. Her social media profiles are packed full of busty bikini snaps that leave little the imagination. She's certainly not shy! Exotic Amelia will no doubt set pulses racing in the house, with her Instagram page revealing she is quite the exhibitionist Things reached boiling point on Monday when Cassidy McGill burst into tears after Dom Thomas wanted to recouple with Millie Fuller. 'I think I was fourth on Dom's list of people before me,' she wept to fellow Islander Erin Barnett. 'It's f**king like deja vu! How f**king dare she?' 'And they say I'm playing games!' she added. The boys will like her! The female contestants will also have to keep an eye on blonde bombshell Shelby Bilby Get ready, lads! Shelby's social media profiles are packed full of busty bikini snaps that leave little the imagination During the recoupling ceremony later in the episode, Cassidy threw a spanner in the works by choosing Grant Crapp, who was previously paired with Tayla Damir. After being left jilted by Dom, Cassidy stole Grant away apparently just to spite Tayla - leaving the other contestants angry and shocked. Love Island Australia continues Tuesday at 8:30pm on 9Go and 9Now The Family Farm Rating: 24 Hours In Police Custody Rating: Very belatedly, telly bosses have realised that millions of viewers really do want to see programmes about ordinary rural life. Countryfile has been one of BBC1s biggest successes for years, but theres long been an ingrained snobbery in the upper echelons of the Beeb, an automatic assumption that life outside the city can be comical or sinister, but never really normal. Recent shows have challenged that idea, though they have generally come from a city-dwellers perspective. Back To The Land focused on entrepreneurs setting up off-beat, middle-class businesses in the wilds, while the ludicrous Love In The Countryside was a dating format for lonely farmers. The Family Farm (BBC2) is a solid, entertaining investigation of life on a sheep farm in Snowdonia, albeit one that still expects that the average Briton knows nothing about working the land: I thought sheeps were females and goats were boys, pondered one puzzled teenager, gazing around the pens. The Family Farm (BBC2) is a solid, entertaining investigation of life on a sheep farm in Snowdonia, albeit one that still expects that the average Briton knows nothing about working the land The three couples and their children, tasting the hardships and rewards of an open-air lifestyle for the first time, are definitely enjoying a glamorous fantasy version. Instead of wooden settles and straw mattresses under a leaky slate roof, they have luxurious beds in fashionable yurts or circular marquees. At night, electric lights make the yurts glow like spaceships in the fields, or A-list accommodation at Glastonbury. But the labour is real enough. On the first morning, the families were up at dawn to gather the flocks, 4,000 sheep scattered across 27,000 acres of the Carneddau Mountains in North Wales. Thats a lot of land: no wonder one of the sheepdogs hitched a lift on the handlebars of farmer Gareth Wyn Joness quad bike. By lunchtime, with most of the sheep rounded up, the novices were exhausted and the work was just beginning. Every animal had to be inspected, dosed with vitamins, treated for injuries and, in some cases, marked for slaughter. Some of the newcomers loved it. Were going to cancel the gym membership and buy some sheep, declared businessman Mark, 42, from Stalybridge near Manchester. His wife Sarah, an ardent vegetarian, was less sure: her husbands callousness to the animals destined to be mutton dismayed her. The labour is real enough. On the first morning, the families were up at dawn to gather the flocks, 4,000 sheep scattered across 27,000 acres of the Carneddau Mountains in North Wales Presenter Kate Humble, a born-again farmer herself, urged Sarah to stop being so sentimental. But the edit was even-handed: Sarah and her daughter came across as kind-hearted and empathetic, not hysterical. The camera lingered on the faces of the doomed sheep, reminding us that these are living creatures, not just cutlets on the hoof. Emotions were a dangerous luxury on 24 Hours In Police Custody (C4), as detectives tried not to let their feelings muddy a horrific domestic abuse case. One copper admitted that he was suffering sleepless nights, after medics raised the alarm over a girl found unconscious with bruises, burns and a fractured skull. When she finally came round, the young woman claimed to be 19, though she looked five years younger. A local man called Ali had plied her with drink and drugs, she said, before tying her up and keeping her as a sex slave for weeks. Prosecution was impossible, however. There was simply no evidence and the girl was confused, half-believing she had consented to some kind of Fifty Shades sex game. This was an inconclusive, half-told story, which was a frustration. But it gave an insight to the pressures police face daily, when they know a suspect is guilty, and fear he will commit more crimes soon yet are powerless to act. Jackie 'O' Henderson is known as the demure offsider of her shock jock radio co-host, Kyle Sandilands. But on Tuesday, the affable blonde raised eyebrows on her own when she dropped the F-bomb while speaking to Joe Jonas and his DNCE band-mate, Cole Whittle. The 43-year-old presenter appeared to get a little worked-up while interviewing the American rockers on her KIIS FM show. Scroll down to video 'F**k you guys': Jackie 'O' Henderson, 43, shocked co-host Kyle when she swore while speaking to The Voice coach Joe Jonas and his band-mate, Cole Whittle Speaking about the band's new track 'TV In The Morning', Jackie asked the musicians about the meaning of the song. 'It's about listening to this radio station at night,' Cole explained, which caused the blonde radio personality to burst into laughing. 'Duh,' he added. 'It's about listening to this radio station at night,' Cole (above) joked that the show was the inspiration for the band's new song, 'TV In The Morning' Taking the ribbing in good humour, Jackie surprised everyone when she dropped the F=-bomb. 'f**k you guys,' she said in jest to the duo. The exchange caught the attention of co-host Kyle, who quickly protested Jackie's innocence. 'She's never said that in her life,' he said of his mild-mannered co-host, appearing flabbergasted. DNCE frontman Joe quickly replied: 'Where's the beep button?' 'By the time it gets out there it's beeped... thank goodness,' he added. Foul mouth! Jackie, roared with laughter at the response, before dropping the F-bomb Australian TV's night of nights takes place next Sunday and celebrities are already sharing glimpses of their red carpet outfits. Home and Away's Ada Nicodemou took to Instagram on Monday to showcase her Logies dress, but not all of her followers were pleased. The 41-year-old actress posted a photo of herself in a plunging frock during a fitting at a Melbourne boutique. 'You are too classy for that outfit!' Home and Away star Ada Nicodemou has sparked debate on Instagram after debuting her very revealing Logies dress... so do YOU think it's too much? In the photo, Ada wears a plunging couture dress that shows off plenty of cleavage. Before long, Ada's Instagram followers began commenting on the outfit and even speculating about her physique. 'Is it on backwards? I think it's on back to front,' wrote one social media user. Another added: 'I think it may be on backwards... be careful, your girls may fall out.' Coming soon! Australian TV's night of nights takes place on Sunday and celebrities are already sharing glimpses of their red carpet outfits. Pictured: Ada Nicodemou 'Be careful, your girls may fall out': After Ada posted the photo, her Instagram followers began commenting on the outfit and even speculating about her physique 'I guess it's meant to be extremely revealing?' asked a follower. 'They did grow a lot over the past year or so.' Another cheekily suggested: 'Looks like someone enjoys showing off her new assets.' Some believed that Ada was perhaps a little too sophisticated for the dress, with one writing: 'You are much too classy for that outfit. I don't like it at all.' Not impressed: Some believed that Ada was perhaps a little too sophisticated for the dress, with one writing: 'You are much too classy for that outfit. I don't like it at all' While many weren't in favour of the ensemble, others showered Ada with praise. 'Always ever so stunning,' commented one supporter, while another added: 'Oh my goodness! Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!' Daily Mail Australia has contacted Ada's representatives for comment. She'll be seen in the upcoming X-Men: Dark Phoenix film. And Jessica Chastain looked every inch the movie star as she arrived instyle to the Piaget launch event in Paris on Monday. The 41-year-old beauty flaunted her enviable figure in a sensational royal blue Missoni couture gown to help usher in the new jewelry collection at the Palais D'iena. Rhapsody in blue: Jessica Chastain looked every inch the movie star as she arrived instyle to the Piaget launch event in Paris on Monday Daring to impress, the ginger locked beauty showcased her bountiful bosom in the dress that boasted a plunging neckline. Her alabaster skin was highlighted gorgeously as the bright blue fabric allowed for a striking contrast. Her trademark ginger tresses were left long and loose as they cascaded over her petite shoulders. Jessica has been the face of Woman by Ralph Lauren since its launch in July 2017 band has said the fragrance 'fits in quite well with [her] entire ideology'. Beauty: The 41-year-old beauty flaunted her enviable figure in a sensational royal blue Missonu couture gown to help usher in the new jewelry collection at the Palais D'iena Flawless: Her alabaster skin was highlighted gorgeously as the bright blue fabric allowed for a striking contrast Now she is using her work with the brand to support the Lead Like A Woman campaign to encourage conversations about the gender pay gap between men and women. Speaking to PeopleStyle, she said: 'What I'm excited about is that this will focus on empowering women, and shine a light on inequality in all industries. It's OK to talk about your salary - you don't have to just be grateful that you have a job. And I would just suggest we work together to share as much as we can with our sisters. Knowledge is power.' Jessica thinks the fragrance itself is 'really special' because it 'breaks gender stereotypes' and makes her feel powerful. Hair story: Her trademark ginger tresses were left long and loose as they cascaded over her petite shoulders Glam gal: Jessica left the bash in her glamorous look Gracious: Jessica signed autographs for her adoring fans Ample: The gorgeous gown sparkled as her ample assets were on full display Having a laugh: She couldn't contain her giggles as she left the bash Fashion friends: Jessica was joined by model Coco Rocha 'The fragrance celebrates breaking stereotypes and creating new paths of fulfilment and success. Living in a time when gender boundaries are being redefined and blurred, this empowers that. 'Society has stereotyped masculine scents and feminine scents, but when I wear this [woody floral] combination, there's this feeling of not being confined to any old-fashioned history for my gender.' Although the red carpet regular had to 'use a lot of makeup' when she was a young star, she now follows a minimal approach to beauty and focuses on being 'kind and compassionate'. She explained: 'Beauty is not defined by appearance. Makeup can be fun and powerful and striking, but it is not the definition of beauty. I find that beauty is kindness and empathy, and compassion and happiness. To be truly beautiful comes from that light that's in each of us.' Model behaviour: Coco looked incredible in a black ballgown with tulle detailing They announced the birth of their first child, a son, back in February. And on Monday, rugby league star Nate Myles was seen doting on his bundle of joy during a stroll with his former Home And Away star wife Tessa James. The two lovebirds were shopping in downtown Los Angeles and were accompanied by Tessa's mother, Charis James. Daddy duty! Former rugby league star Nate Myles sucks on his baby's dummy as he steps out in LA with his Home And Away star wife Tessa James and their growing bundle of joy Happy family! The two lovebirds were shopping in downtown Los Angeles and were accompanied by Tessa's mother, Charis James Baby boy! After months of speculation, the couple's baby's gender was revealed as a boy Cutting a casual figure, Nate wore a black backwards cap and matching T-shirt. Keeping his look equally relaxed on the bottom, the star sportsman opted for grey-hued sweat shorts, long black socks and all-white kicks to match. But his most notable accessory was his baby's dummy, which he kept in his mouth during the stroll, while doting over his little one. Nate was seen pushing his baby's stroller, with the tiny bub tucked inside and kept amused by a blue-coloured toy hanging from the side of the pram. That's one way to carry it! Nate held his baby's pacifier in his mouth during the stroll Relaxed: Cutting a casual figure, the sportsman wore a black backwards cap and matching T-shirt Baby on board! Nate was seen pushing his baby's stroller, with the tiny bub tucked inside and kept amused by a blue-coloured toy hanging from the side of the pram Easy breezy! Tessa also kept her look laid-back, opting for a relaxed monochromatic ensemble Tessa also kept her look laid-back, opting for a relaxed monochromatic ensemble. The blonde-haired beauty tucked an oversized white T-shirt into a pair of black denim jeans. Completing her look, she slipped on a pair of black sandals, adding a pair of John Lennon-inspired sunglasses to mask the LA rays. Casual: The blonde-haired beauty tucked an oversized white T-shirt into a pair of black denim jeans Casual chic: Pulling her tresses away from her face, the stunner wore her hair in a sweet ponytail at the nape of her neck Pulling her tresses away from her face, the stunner wore her hair in a sweet ponytail at the nape of her neck. At one point, the trio were seen taking a break, with Nate standing with his son's pacifier in his mouth as he checked his phone. Taking a break! At one point, the trio were seen taking a break, with Nate standing with his son's pacifier in his mouth as he checked his phone Daddy duty! Later, Nate checked his phone while he kept a close eye on his tot Tessa and Nate have been seen out and about with their bub in recent months, but have not publicly revealed the baby's gender or name. And after months of speculation, the baby's gender was revealed as a boy by The Sunday Telegraph on Sunday. The Daily Telegraph also revealed that Tessa, who is now based in Los Angeles with her husband, has no immediate plans to return to Australia. It's a boy! Tessa and Nate have been seen out and about with their bub in recent months, but have not publicly revealed the baby's gender or name The former Neighbours star is said to have landed a role on a US TV series after signing with a 'top Los Angeles agency.' Tessa and Nate wed back in 2011 and announced they were expecting a baby back in August. Having undergone chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 23, Tessa was unsure she would be able to conceive having not frozen her eggs prior. Tiffany Haddish hosted the MTV Movie & Television Awards on Monday. The Girls Trip star opened the annual show with a spoof of Black Panther and parodied Cardi B's Bodak Yellow as she sung onstage. And comparing the Kardashians to a Star Wars franchise, the 38-year-old teased: 'They make a ton of money, a new ones always popping up, and theyre ruled by a bossy overlord who sleeps in a mask and she love black men.' Scroll down for video Hosting it up! Tiffany Haddish hosted the MTV Movie & Television Awards on Monday Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner were front and center in the audience and laughed at the hilarious comparison. Tiffany also called out Greatest Showman star Zendaya: 'She taught me how to model, and I taught her how to grapefruit,' the comedian joked, referencing her infamous Girls Trip scene. 'She 21 now, yall! She a grown woman. You gotta know how to do that if you want a husband,' Tiffany added. Spoof: Tiffany took to the stage to parody Cardi B's hit song and wore the same dress the rapper rocked while pregant on Saturday Night Live Hilarity: She stopped in the middle of the song to announce actor Michael B. Jordan is so attractive he can impregnate her with just a gaze The awards show started with TIffany playing a character in Black Panther from the scene by the waterfall in Wakanda. She challenged Chad Boseman's character T'Challa to a fight to become the host of the show as Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifah joined n the fun. After the quick video, Tiffany took to the stage to parody Cardi B's hit song and wore the same dress the rapper rocked while pregant on Saturday Night Live. Jokester: She compared the Kardashians to a Star Wars franchise, the 38-year-old teased: 'They make a ton of money, a new ones always popping up, and theyre ruled by a bossy overlord who sleeps in a mask and she love black men.' All in good fun: Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner were front and center in the audience and laughed at the hilarious comparison She stopped in the middle of the song to announce actor Michael B. Jordan is so attractive he can impregnate her with just a gaze. Suddenly, her stomach area began expanding as if she were carrying a child, then it deflated as she said: 'Oh my bad... it was just gas.' And she also pointed out Seth Rogen and quipped: 'He's my favorite white guy with a beard since Abraham Lincoln!' Good lookin': Tiffany joked that Michael B. Jordan was extremely attractive more than once Kyle Sandilands became emotional while discussing his late father with celebrity medium John Edward this week. Peter Sandilands died from cancer in March 2016 and, during a previous psychic reading, John made reference to a 'red Mustang'. On Tuesday's The Kyle and Jackie O Show, Kyle told John that he finally understood the significance of what he had said. 'Can you not keep putting photos of my dead father up?' Kyle Sandilands became emotional during a psychic reading with John Edward on Tuesday's The Kyle and Jackie O Show During his last interview, John said he had a vision of a 'rebuilt red Mustang' or a 'rebuilt red car' relating to Kyle's father. 'I realised what that is,' Kyle said when the pair were reunited on air on Tuesday. '[My dad] had a picture of a red Mustang in his garage. He always wanted a Mustang and he never got one.' Peter Sandilands (left) died in March 2016 and, during a previous psychic reading, John made reference to a 'red Mustang'. Kyle said on Tuesday he now understands the significance of this Kyle, who isn't known for his sentimentality, revealed he had recently purchased one of the classic American cars to restore. 'Mine is not red, but the picture of the one he had [in his garage] was red,' he said. After discussing the significance of the 'red Mustang', a KIIS FM producer began to display photographs of Kyle's father in the studio. Spiritual: Later in the reading, John appeared to reference a miscarriage one of Kyle's ex-girlfriend's (not his current partner Imogen Anthony) had experienced This appeared to make Kyle upset, and he snapped: 'Can you not keep putting photos of my dead father up?' Later in the reading, John appeared to reference a miscarriage one of Kyle's ex-girlfriend's (not his current partner Imogen Anthony) had experienced. The psychic picked up on three 'energies', explaining: 'I feel like there was a child who didn't make it here.' 'Wow, highly likely,' said Kyle. Sounding shocked, co-host Jackie 'O' Henderson said: 'That did happen, remember?' Advertisement Lance Armstrong has sold his Texas mansion after putting it on the market in March for a second time at a reduced price of $7.5 million. Carey Smith, founder and former CEO of Big Ass Fans, bought the home, but the purchase price wasn't disclosed, according to an article by the Austin American-Statesman. The five-bedroom, seven-bathroom property in the Old Enfield neighborhood was originally built in 1924, but is state-of-the-art and includes seven living areas, a climate-controlled wine cellar, an outdoor pool and poolhouse complete with its own bathroom and kitchenette. It's sold: Lance Armstrong has sold his Austin mansion after listing it at a reduced price of $7.5million in March Smith has moved to Austin for a new business venture. He and his wife Nancy plan to remodel the home and move into it within a year. Smith started his company Big Ass Solutions, better known as Big Ass Fans, in Lexington, Kentucky in 1999 and sold it in 2017 to a private equity firm. Armstrong, 46, first tried to sell the property in January 2016 with an asking price of $8.25million, but agent Laura Gottesman told BizJournal that it was never officially listed and was withdrawn after he decided not to part with it. Huge home: The 8,000sq-ft home features seven downstairs living areas, including this grand hallway with sweeping staircase The property, located in the Old West Austin Historic District, is decorated with striking artwork throughout. In this large living room is GOAT, which stands for Greatest Of All Time, a tribute book to Muhammad Ali The home was first constructed in 1924 but given a full update in 2007 to include a pool and other modern amenities. There is plenty of space for entertaining, including in this dining room on the first floor Armstrong had been living on the property with fiance Anna Hansen and his five children, but the family are now looking to downsize to something more modest This large kitchen that overlooks the garden opens on to a breakfast nook complete with a television screen Armstrong bought this home in 2013 after selling two other homes in Austin following his admission that he used banned substances throughout his cycling career Agent Laura Gottesman said the property was first offered in 2016 but it was never officially listed The master bedroom features its own seating area (right) and also has adjoining his and hers bathrooms Downstairs is a huge climate-controlled wine cellar which is also kitted out with a full dining table for entertaining guests The former cyclist was living there with his fiancee Anna Hansen and his five children. Gottesman said: '$8.2 was more of a "make me an offer" price. $7.5million is really where we can justify the valuation and it's more appropriate for today's market.' The shamed athlete purchased the home in 2013 for an undisclosed sum having been forced to sell his previous Austin mansion following his admission that he used banned substances throughout his career. He had asked $10million for his old home, which featured an upstairs media room decorated with his seven Tour de France jerseys before they were revoked, but buyer Al Koehler told the Austin American-Statesman that he 'didn't pay anything close to' that price. Amrstrong pictured in December 2016 with his now-fiance Anna Hansen and children Luke (left), twins Isabelle and Grace, (right), Max (front center) and Olivia (front right) The garden features stunning oak trees which overhang the pool and a lounging area where the new owners can sunbathe At the other end of the garden is a covered seating area for guests, and to the right is a poolhouse with its own bathroom The seating area features a gas grill for barbecues on hot evenings. The home also has a sprinkler system in order to keep the garden looking green Armstrong bought this house after selling his previous 1.7acre Austin property for far less than the $10million asking price. He is now downsizing again, according to the letting agent Next to the pool is an outbuilding which features a kitchenette and separate bathroom. On the wall is what appears to be a picture of a Tour de France yellow jersey. Armstrong won seven during his career, but was later disqualified for cheating The main house features a total of five bathrooms, including his and hers suites that are located off the master bedroom Public records show Koehler took out a loan of $3.1million for the property, though it is not clear if this was the final purchase price. Armstrong also sold his house on Lake Austin in 2013 to race car driver Bret Curtis for an undisclosed amount, according to public records. The home that he just sold was built in a Mediterranean style and updated in 2007 with a pool, spa and attached garage. The Mediterranean-style home has a high-tech alarm system, air conditioning throughout and a surround sound system The mansion has a master suite with a private sitting area and his-and-hers bathrooms, a high-tech alarm system, gated entry, central air conditioning, a sprinkler system and surround sound. In addition to the pool, the backyard features an outdoor dining area and a pool house equipped with a full bathroom and kitchenette. The historic home also has a wood-burning fireplace and an underground wine cellar with enough space for entertaining. Most stars wouldn't be caught dead repeating the same designer outfit. But Tiffany Haddish is definitely getting the bang for her buck. The 38-year-old star hosted the MTV Movie & TV Awards which aired on Monday night as she wore her $4,000 Alexander McQueen dress for the fourth time. Scroll down for video It's back! Tiffany Haddish hosted the MTV Movie & TV Awards which aired on Monday night as she wore her $4,000 Alexander McQueen dress for the fourth time Getting her money's worth! She previously explained the story behind her now famous white McQueen dress which she's dared to rewear three different times, seen above at the Girls Trip premiere last July, while hosting SNL, and more recently during the Academy Awards in March She has made several appearances in the clinging white number with a thigh-high split but perhaps this one during her hosting gig was the most epic of all. Tiffany paired the halter gown with a pair of strappy metallic silver stilettos. The stunner also made light of the outfit change as she said: 'Welcome back to my Alexander McQueen dress. Wow factor: The 38-year-old actress has made several appearances in the clinging white number with a thigh-high split but perhaps this one during her hosting gig was the most epic of all Leggy lady: Tiffany paired the halter gown with a pair of strappy metallic silver stilettos 'I feel like I should be able to wear what I want, when I want, no matter how many times I want, as long as I Febreezed it.' The Girls Trip star has no shame about sporting the dress to the premiere last July, while hosting SNL, and more recently during the Academy Awards in March. And Keanu actress, 38, finally explained the story behind her now-iconic dress, admitting she 'cried' after seeing the $4k receipt, in a new interview with W Magazine. Hilarious: The stunner also made light of the outfit change as she said: 'Welcome back to my Alexander McQueen dress' Haddish explained that 'the story of that dress' began when she enlisted the help of a stylist last year. 'I hired a stylist for Girls Trip,' the The Carmichael Show talent said, '[The stylist] said, "Girl, if you're trying to make it to the next level in your career, you're going to have to spend a little money." I said, "I'm down to look my best. Whatever it takes."' But 'whatever it takes' meant way more than the star initially guessed. Origin story: Haddish explained that 'the story of that dress' began when she enlisted the help of a stylist while working on Girls Trip (premiere above) last year Level up! Tiffany (above in Girls Trip) shelled out for the dress after her stylist suggested she needed to spend a little in order to 'make it to the next level' 'I should've known wasn't no price tag on that dress,' she continued. 'So I wear it for Girls Trip, and then they give me the receipt. When I saw the receipt, I cried. 'The dress was $4,122! So I'm wearing it multiple f***ing times. I don't care what nobody say.' Having worked her way to fame from tough times, even being homeless at one point, the New York Time Bestselling author was shocked by how much a silly, albeit fabulous, dress could cost. Pretty penny! Tiffany listed the other things you could buy with $4000 as further reason why she should wear and re-wear the frock, saying: ''That's a down payment on a car, that's a medical bill.' The star stuns at the Vanity Fair Oscars After Party back in March, above 'That's a down payment on a car, that's a medical bill. So, even though everyone says I shouldn't wear the dress in public again, I'm wearing it.' And it's possible that the little white McQueen will make an appearance once again. Tiffany will take the stage at Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, Canada this July 28, where she headlines along with Kevin Hart. Encore! It's possible that Tiffany (above during her SNL gig) will step out in the little white McQueen once again. She'll perform at Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, Canada this July 28, where she headlines along with Kevin Hart It may be freezing outside. But former Big Brother star Tully Smyth was heating things up on social media on Monday. The 30-year-old showed off her slender figure and array of tattoos as she stripped down to sexy lace lingerie and a pair of saucy stockings. Scroll down for video Racy in lace! Former Big Brother star Tully Smyth shows off her slender figure and tattoos as she strips down to lingerie and saucy stockings The blonde beauty was modelling hosiery from Sportsgirl, advising fans that 'Stocking season was well and truly upon us'. The picture was a throwback snap from her time in equally chilly Wellington, New Zealand. Globetrotter Tully recently returned to arctic Melbourne following a trip to Cape Leveque in Western Australia. Career change: Tully has become a popular social media influencer since her reality TV stint While there the TV personality treated her fans to a sizzling peek at her pins and washboard abs as she slipped into a black drawstring bikini. Tully has become a popular social media influencer since her TV stint. Despite her roots in reality, she recently took to her social media platforms to slam Channel Nine's Love Island Australia, claiming it emphasises superficial appearances. The blogger shared a snap of a post-it note, which read: 'We get so worried about being 'pretty'. Let's be pretty kind. Pretty funny. Pretty smart. Pretty strong.' Directing the less-than-subtle mantra at the reality show, she added the caption: 'Hey @loveislandau... Just a thought.' Tully was recently embroiled in drama with her ex, model and former Big Brother star Anthony Drew (who goes by his last name). Bachelor in Paradise star Leah Costa was left 'heartbroken' last week after being dumped by Drew following a very short-lived romance. She recently confirmed her blossoming new relationship with cafe owner Jaxon Manuel. But Married At First Sight star Davina Rankin left her hunky new man at home when she recently enjoyed a girls' trip to Bali for a friend's birthday. The brunette beauty released a video of her fun-filled getaway to her YouTube vlog on Monday, in which she and her gal pal Gillian Godwin are seen lapping up their luxurious surroundings. Scroll down to video When the cat's away! MAFS' Davina Rankin reveals footage of her 'girls only' Bali getaway after leaving her new boyfriend Jaxon Manuel at home during the trip In a piece-to-camera, the former reality star admits it's bikinis, sunsets and delicious banquets for the pair during the idyllic island retreat. 'We just watched the most amazing sunset - standard,' she says, adding in a second shot, 'How's this for a buffet?' In the stream-of-consciousness style vlog, the brunette beauty speaks about the pair's nights out and relaxing days poolside. 'We just watched the most amazing sunset - standard': The brunette beauty released a video of her fun-filled getaway to her YouTube vlog on Monday, in which she and her gal pal Gillian Godwin are seen lapping up their luxurious surroundings Davina and new boyfriend have been inseparable since they first announced their relationship in April. On Monday, the busty reality star told fans how loved-up she was, praising the joys of being in a committed relationship. Sharing a glammed-up selfie to Instagram, she said: 'Cheers to no more sh***y first dates.' Idyllic: In the vlog, a smiling Davina also indulges in tasty food platters 'Cheers to no more sh**ty first dates': Davina and new boyfriend Jaxon have been inseparable since they first announced their relationship in April She added: 'Totally scoping out the best places for date night with my @jaxonmanuel'. Having recently jetted to Los Angeles to pursue new opportunities, the busty starlet appears more focused on her personal life at the moment. Recently, the former TV villain told Daily Mail Australia: 'Jax and I have been friends for years but the timing now is just perfect for the both of us.' Iggy Azalea has hit back at trolls for 'celebrating' rapper XXXTentacion's death, in an impassioned Instagram post. The Australian rapper, 28, said she was 'genuinely saddened' after the 20-year-old musician was shot and killed in Miami on Monday afternoon. Iggy added that she wasn't 'overlooking' the fact that XXX was awaiting trial on charges of domestic violence against his pregnant girlfriend. Furious: Iggy Azalea (L) has hit back at trolls for 'celebrating' rapper XXXTentacion's (R) death, in an impassioned Instagram post 'I'm not overlooking any of the things women accused him of doing,' she began in a post shared to her Instagram Stories on Tuesday. 'But I'm genuinely saddened by XXXTentacion's passing because it was so unnecessary. We need to think more about the things we give value to.' She added: 'To see people celebrating his death is just another example of that 'troll' mentality that's rewarded and encouraged to our own detriment. 'The things we encourage online, period, have real consequences on other people's lives. God rest his soul.' Devastated: The Australian rapper, 28, said she was 'genuinely saddened' after the 20-year-old musician was shot and killed in Miami on Monday afternoon Iggy joins the likes of Kanye West, producer and rapper J Cole and Blink I82's Travis Barker in paying their respects to XXX. The rapper was killed in Miami, Florida, on Monday in what police believe was a 'possible robbery.' According to TMZ, XXX was shot as he left a motorcycle dealership where he'd been checking out new rides. The website said there were two male suspects wearing hoodies who left the scene in a black Dodge Journey with dark tint and black wheels. Charges: Iggy added that she wasn't 'overlooking the things women accused him of doing', amid the domestic violence allegations surrounding the rapper 'Witnesses say they heard multiple shots fired,' a source told the website. The Look at Me rapper was involved in several legal cases at the time of his death. He was awaiting trial on charges of domestic violence against his pregnant girlfriend, TMZ reported. Others: Iggy joins the likes of Kanye West, producer and rapper J Cole and Blink I82's Travis Barker in paying their respects to XXX He had been jailed in December but subsequently released so he could go out on tour, the website said. Prosecutors had also accused him of witness tampering. He had spent six months in prison for a 2015 armed home invasion charge - according to Pitchfork. The anticipated season of The Bachelor with Nick 'The Badger' Cummins will debut in the coming months with 22 female contestants ready to find love with the hunk. And it appears one suitor headed for the mansion may already be a familiar face to Channel Ten viewers as a lifeguard on Bondi Rescue. Juliana Bahr-Thomson, 30, is believed to be putting her lifesaving duties and teaching job on hold in search of reality TV love. Scroll down for video From Bondi Rescue to The Bachelor? Meet the blonde 'Mermaid' with a harrowing past who could be headed for the mansion to find love with Nick 'The Badger' Cummins Looking for love? The ladies, including Juliana Bahr-Thomson, were pictured on a hotel balcony of a Sydney 'safe house' In March before filming kicked off (pictured) The ladies, including Juliana, were pictured on a hotel balcony of a Sydney 'safe house' In March before filming kicked off. Days after the contestants were placed in 'isolation', news broke that rugby union player Nick Cummins was the official new Bachelor for 2018. Since April 12, Juliana has been silent on Instagram and is following three of her rumoured rivals from the upcoming season. As a Bondi local, she also follows former Bachelor Matthew 'Matty J' Johnson and his lady love Laura Byrne. Juliana, who hails from Newcastle, appears on Bondi Rescue as a lifeguard for the Waverley Council, teaches physical education in Sydney and is a seasoned athlete. Impressive! Juliana, who hails from Newcastle, appears on Bondi Rescue as a lifeguard for the Waverley Council, teaches physical education in Sydney and is a seasoned athlete Wow! The sportswoman made headlines in 2016 for paddling 1000km over 42 days from New South Wales' Horseshoe Beach to Queensland's Noosa Harrowing past: Juliana told Daily Mail Australia in 2016 that she spent 20 years as a victim of domestic violence, suffering physical, mental and sexual abuse at the hands of people who were close to her. She's now an advocate and ambassador for White Ribbon Day As a triathlete and paddle boarder, the impressive sportswoman made headlines in 2016 for paddling 1000km over 42 days from New South Wales' Horseshoe Beach to Queensland's Noosa. The Guinness World Record attempt was for a cause close to her heart, White Ribbon Day. Juliana told Daily Mail Australia in 2016 that she spent 20 years as a victim of domestic violence, suffering physical, mental and sexual abuse at the hands of people who were close to her. 'If you want to make a difference, you have to do something pretty big to get that impact you are after,' she said before taking on the open-water paddle, adding that sport became her 'savior' growing up. Flexible: The impressive blonde vegan is also an animal rights activist and runs 'Mermaid with a Message', which seeks to raise awareness and funds for domestic violence and ocean conservation charities The impressive blonde vegan is also an animal rights activist and runs 'Mermaid with a Message', which seeks to raise awareness and funds for domestic violence and ocean conservation charities. In a 2017 interview with the Herald Sun Juliana claimed she rarely made time for TV. 'I wouldnt even think to buy a TV. Its not a priority. I dont sit down much, but if I do Im either sketching or reading books... Id rather just not be involved with TV,' she said at the time. The Bachelor is expected to premiere on Channel Ten in July She made history as the first black women to take home an Emmy for Comedy Writing last September. And Lena Waithe was honored for her groundbreaking ways once again during Monday Night's MTV Movie Awards in Santa Monica, California where she was given the Trailblazer Awards. Taking the stage, the Master Of None writer/actor, 34, said she 'was elated' to be getting the award and used her time to thank the 'pioneers' and 'innovators' that paved the way for many. Scroll down for video Blazing trails! Lena Waithe took a second to talk 'pioneers' and 'innovators' of the LGBTQ community while accepting her Trailblazer honor at the MTV Movie Awards, which aired Monday Lena Waithe earned the award for her groundbreaking work as a writer, actor and producer as well as her role in mentoring up-and-coming artists from underrepresented communities. After telling audiences she was 'extremely grateful' she took a second to honor the people who paved the way. 'I believe the only reason why I'm even allowed to stand here is because of a few other trailblazers that some of you might not be aware of,' she said. The ones before us: 'I believe the only reason why I'm even allowed to stand here is because of a few other trailblazers that some of you might not be aware of,' she said Walk this way: 'They strutted through a brick wall so we didn't have to,' she said of the trans women, drag queens and queer people of color whose undeniable impact on culture had been muddled by time Then she highlighted some of the people from the seminal Paris Is Burning, a groundbreaking 1990 documentary about Ball Culture in Harlem NYC in the 80s, giving shout outs to film subjects Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Angie Xtravaganza, and Willi Ninja. 'Tonight, I want to share this award with them. I want to do what we as a society should have done a long time ago, and thats give them the glory and the shine they deserve.' 'Every time someone says "shade" or talks about "reading" or decides to just "serve face,"' she said, 'Please look up to the sky and give thanks.' 'Every time someone says "shade" or talks about "reading" or decides to just "serve face,"' she said, 'Please look up to the sky and give thanks' History lessons: She also honored another one of history's trailblazers with her fashion, donning a shirt with late New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's face upon it Truth to power: Chisholm (above in 1972) was the first black woman to be elected to US Congress back in 1968 and was a champion for civil rights, women and LGBTQ people long before it was part of the progressive status quo By her side: Waithe brought fiancee Alana Mayo to the affair 'They strutted through a brick wall so we didn't have to,' she said of the trans women, drag queens and queer people of color whose undeniable impact on culture had been muddled by time and power. She also honored another one of history's trailblazers with her fashion, donning a shirt with late New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's face upon it. Chisholm was the first black woman to be elected to US Congress back in 1968 and was a champion for civil rights, women and LGBTQ people long before it was part of the progressive status quo. Getting hitched: The Master Of None creative and filmmaker were engaged late last year Nice to see you! Friend Common introduced Lena before she accepted her very special golden popcorn Award winners: Lena shared a photo with Chadwick Boseman, who won not one but two honors for his part at T'Challa in Black Panther LaLa Land! Internet personality LaLa Milan caught up with the filmmaker backstage The engaged lovebirds were reunited earlier this month, with Game Of Thrones actress Sophie Turner surprising her fiance ahead of The Voice Australia finale. And Joe Jonas was seen with his wife-to-be in Sydney on Monday morning, as they prepared to head back to America. The celebrity couple were spotted at Sydney Airport with Joe's DNCE band mates ahead of their long-haul flight home. Scroll down for video Rugged up: Joe Jonas and GoT actress fiancee Sophie Turner layer up in jeans and jackets during Sydney chill as they jet back to America Rugging up for the brisk winter weather, the group layered up in jeans and warm jackets. Sophie appeared ready to get some shut-eye on the plane, placing her neck pillow around her shoulders before boarding. Joe and Sophie announced their engagement last October. The Cake By The Ocean vocalist recently opened up about the couple's wedding plans in an interview with TV Week. 'We haven't dived into planning yet. In due time, we'll get into it - and then get a lot of help! But we're very happy,' Joe said. Keeping cosy! Sophie appeared ready to get some shut-eye on the plane, placing her neck pillow on before boarding Joe headed to the airport having finished his judging role on The Voice after Sunday night's grand finale. Loop artist Sam Perry was declared the winner over 16-year-old Bella Paige, and won a recording contract with Universal Music and $100,000 prize money. Shortly after the episode went to air, the judges and contestants were spotted enjoying a well-deserved after-party in Sydney. Winner! Loop artist Sam Perry (pictured) was declared The Voice Australia winner for 2018 and was awarded a recording contract with Universal Music and $100,000 prize money On Monday, Joe told KIIS FM's Kyle And Jackie 'O' where some of his favourite haunts in Sydney were, listing Frankie's Pizza and Grandma's Bar. However, it was radio star Jackie 'O' Henderson who stole the spotlight during the interview with an unexpected outburst towards Jo and DNCE band-mate, Cole Whittle. The affable blonde raised eyebrows when she dropped the F-bomb while getting a little worked-up while interviewing the American rockers, shouting, 'f*** you' in jest. Lisa Armstrong is said to be furious with estranged husband Ant McPartlin after the troubled TV presenter demanded her jewellery be handed over and valued ahead of their divorce settlement. The 42-year old's legal team has requested that necklaces and rings bought as gifts during their 12-year marriage be assessed by an expert, according The Sun. 'Lisa refused because she fears she'll never see them again. It's causing a rift but is just one of many things,' a source explained. Outraged: Lisa Armstrong is said to be furious with estranged husband Ant McPartlin after the troubled TV presenter demanded her jewellery be handed over and valued ahead of their divorce settlement 'There have also been heated rows about money, property, all sorts of things this is just the latest thing to drive a wedge even further between them.' Lisa, 42, has allegedly vowed to take Ant, who is worth an estimated 62 million, for as much as she can after details surrounding his new relationship with their former PA, Anne-Marie Corbett, emerged over the weekend. Sharing a string of tweets, the Strictly Come Dancing and Britain's Got Talent make-up artist later revealed that she had been betrayed by Corbett, who she employed as their joint PA during Ant's battle with alcohol and substance abuse issues. Demand: The 42-year old's legal team has reportedly requested that necklaces and rings bought as gifts during their 12-year marriage be assessed by an expert Taking to Twitter on Monday evening, Lisa hit back at a follower for claiming she instigated her bitter separation from Ant. Siding the presenter, Crystal Spence wrote: 'What about ants pain wot about what he has been through she didn't want him she split up with him so it's none of her business who he see's.' To which Lisa furiously responded: 'No I didnt thank-you! x' Not happy: Taking to Twitter on Monday evening, Lisa hit back at a follower for claiming she instigated her bitter separation from Ant New love: Lisa, 42, has allegedly vowed to take Ant, who is worth an estimated 62 million, for as much as she can after details surrounding his new relationship with their former PA, Anne-Marie Corbett (pictured), emerged over the weekend Sources close to Anne-Marie have since claimed that the blonde often clashed' with Lisa, who even sacked her as the couple's PA. The insider also blasted claims she and Lisa were close friends, and revealed Anne-Marie has been angered by the make-up artist portraying the image of a 'betrayal' in their friendship. The source told The Sun: 'She hated working for Lisa and they didn't get on well at all. Furious: Lisa revealed to her 122,000 followers that she often invited Anne-Marie into their marital home as a 'friend', despite her job as their personal assistant 'They often clashed. In the end Lisa sacked her. That's hardly the actions of someone's 'best mate'.' Ant's romance with Anne-Marie emerged on Saturday, five months after he filed for divorce from his wife of twelve years Lisa. Heartbroken by the news, the make-up artist immediately took to Twitter to criticise her ex-husband's new girlfriend, and blast Ant for failing to have the 'decency' to tell her about their news. Fury: Lisa blast Ant for failing to have the 'decency' to tell her about his new relationship Lisa revealed to her 122,000 followers that she often invited Anne-Marie into their marital home as a 'friend', despite her job as their personal assistant. At 5am on Sunday morning she simply tweeted a broken heart emoji, signifying her upset, before going on to reveal she only found out about the relationship due to its coverage in the papers. When a Twitter follower asked whether or not she had been warned by Ant before it appeared in the media, she replied: 'Nope. Just how you guys did.' Old tikes: Ant and Lisa married in 2006 after dating for almost 10-years She then received a tweet of support from TV personality Nicola McLean, before replying: 'Thanks babe and to think she was MY friend!! xx' Another follower said 'so much for the girl code', to which Lisa answered: 'Exactly!' Lisa then replied to a follower to say that Anne-Marie was her friend and personal assistant to both her and Ant, adding that she let her 'into OUR home'. While Ant has remained silent on social media, the presenter's pals are thought to have rallied round him, and assure him that he is allowed to move on. A friend told The Mirror: 'It's time Ant is allowed to live his life. It's been 10 months now everyone needs to move on... there are no children involved... I am sure he will always wish Lisa well.' Sophie Monk is the host of Nine's raunchy dating series Love Island Australia. But in the show's YouTube clip on Monday, the 38-year-old complained that the villa's resident black cat gets more airtime than her. 'He's more famous than me!' the former Bardot songstress told the contestants. Scroll down for video 'He's more famous than me!' Love Island Australia host Sophie Monk, 38, complained that the villa CAT gets more airtime than her Joining the cast on the patio area of the luxurious Spanish villa, Sophie began: 'Have you seen the cat around?' The blonde beauty, who looked primped to perfection with her long locks in structured waves, continued: 'He's been in the show so much. He's more famous than me.' Sophie went on to joke: 'I'm in the show less than the cat. No, that's not a lie!' The model was referring to one of two cats that has regularly made an appearance on the set of Love Island Australia since the premiere episode. Airtime: Joining the cast on the patio area of the luxurious Spanish villa, Sophie said of the cat: 'He's been in the show so much. He's more famous than me' Since the show's debut, Sophie has received criticism for her lack of involvement. And during an interview with Nova's Fitzy & Wippa earlier this month, evicted contestant Charlie Taylor did little to quieten the talk. The 22-year-old rugby player told the radio hosts: 'I've seen her twice in the last eight to nine days - in the first and last episode, I saw her.' However Sophie later took to her Instagram account, insisting: 'It's not about me... I'm addicted to the show! But my job is to not get too involved.' Love Island Australia continues Tuesday at 8.30pm on NineGo He has gone for a spin with a string of American stars around Los Angeles. So James Corden ensured his trip to London was special when he joined legendary Paul McCartney, 76, for the upcoming segment for The Late Late Show on Thursday. The comedian, 39, giggled like an excited schoolboy as he belted out the lyrics to the British band's Drive My Car with The Beatles icon. Carpool Karaoke: Paul McCartney put on an animated performance with James Corden as they sang The Beatles song Drive My Car in hilarious segment for Thursday's The Late Late Show Casually-clad Paul put on an animated display as he sang loudly and rocked out with the funnyman in the plush vehicle. They can be heard singing: 'Yes, Im gonna be a star / Baby, you can drive my car / And maybe Ill love you.' James and Paul were in high spirits while they sang the chart-topping band's song for the hilarious segment. Hilarious: The comedian, 39, giggled like an excited schoolboy as he belted out the lyrics to the British band's Drive My Car with The Beatles icon James has returned to the second consecutive year to the UK for a week of shows but the funnyman revealed it's not officially an annual tradition yet. Chris Pratt, Damian Lewis, J.J Abrams, Ruth Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom, Niall Horan and Cher as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber will participate in UK week. The Peter Rabbit star confessed it was 'mind-blowing' to have the 'most respected musician on the planet' Paul join him for the segment. Sensational vocals: Casually-clad Paul put on an animated display as he sang loudly and rocked out with the funnyman in the plush vehicle Keep on going: He has gone for a spin with a string of American stars around Los Angeles, so James ensured his trip to London was so special Good fun: They can be heard belting out the lyrics: 'Yes, Im gonna be a star / Baby, you can drive my car / And maybe Ill love you' Quite the trip! James has returned to the second consecutive year to the UK for a week of shows but the funnyman revealed it's not officially an annual tradition yet He told USA TODAY: 'It's all memorable. It's kind of insane, if you think about it you're talking about possibly the most famous person in the world. 'He's the most respected musician on the planet, and that he would come to do a segment on our show is mind-blowing to me. 'He told me a story about how he wrote "Let It Be," which I'd never heard before. It really moved me, so I can't wait to share it with people.' Special London episodes of The Late Late Show with James Corden, will air from Tuesday 19 June - Friday 22 June on Sky One and TV streaming service, NOW TV. Busy: Chris Pratt, Damian Lewis, J.J Abrams, Ruth Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom, Niall Horan and Cher as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber will participate in UK week Pictured: James and Paul were in high spirits while they sang the chart-topping band's song for the hilarious segment Here we go: James has also been seen performing Crosswalk The Musical in London for The Late Late Show Good times: Corden performed several songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber's back catalogue, much to the amusement of bystanders in central London Comedy gold: Corden dressed as Evita while accepting roses from fans during the hilarious segment Iconic: He also sported his own version of the cape made famous by the likes of Sir Michael Crawford and Martin Smith in Phantom of the Opera Under cover: Corden played the Phantom, while Josh Gad played Christine Daae in their hilarious send-up of the legendary musical Tasty: Cats was also given a playful send-up, with Corden dressing as a feline and lapping from a bowl of milk Main man: Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber also got involved in the action as the skit played out in London Casual: James was pictured filming The Late Late Show UK in Westminster Denim days: He donned a pair of dark wash denims for the occasion She won cycle seven of Australia's Next Top Model back in 2011. And Montana Cox proved that she still has what it takes to rule the runway when she showed off her lithe figure at Amagansett Beach in The Hamptons. Taking to Instagram, the 24-year-old sported a skimpy red swimsuit and held onto an American flag. Red hot! Beach babe Montana Cox, 24, flaunted her lithe figure in a skimpy swimsuit as she held onto an American flag, at Amagansett Beach in The Hamptons on Monday Montana opted for a vibrant red one-piece that drew the eye to her slender legs and trim pins. A strategic cut-out also accentuated her tiny waist and toned back. Montana's brunette locks were swept into a sleek style at the nape of the neck, and her striking facial features were enhanced with a minimal makeup palette. Career: Since being crowned Australia's Next Top Model in 2011, the brunette has gone on to make numerous strides in the fashion industry The IMG-represented model smouldered for the camera as she stood on the sand with the American flag flailing in the breeze. Montana captioned the snap cryptically: 'American't even right now.' Since being crowned Australia's Next Top Model in 2011, Montana has gone on to make numerous strides in the fashion industry. The Melbourne native turned heads in February as she attended the Naked Heart Foundation's Fabulous Fund Fair, at London Fashion Week. Montana was the belle of the ball in a floor-length silk-ruffled dress in metallic gold and bronze. The beauty has also become part of fashion's exclusive social set, seen socialising with the likes of Jordan Barrett, Kate Waterhouse and Pip Edwards. Ant McPartlin's new lover Anne-Marie Corbett emerged on Tuesday following claims she was sacked by his ex-wife Lisa Armstrong while she was a PA to the couple. Looking glamorous, the blonde stepped out after it was alleged that she had been 'upset' by Lisa's claims, as the pair have never seen eye-to-eye - although tweets unearthed by The Sun seem to show a friendship dating back six years. The 42-year-old's relationship with Ant emerged over the weekend, with ex-wife Lisa revealing she had been friends with the personal assistant during their marriage, and slamming her for 'breaking girl code' with the romance. Heading out: Ant McPartlin's new lover Anne-Marie Corbett emerged on Tuesday following claims she was sacked by his ex-wife Lisa Armstrong while she was a PA to the couple However, a source close to Anne-Marie has now claimed this was far from the case - revealing the pair 'often clashed' and that Lisa even sacked her as the couple's PA. The insider blasted claims she and Lisa were close friends, and revealed Anne-Marie has been angered by the make-up artist portraying the image of a 'betrayal'. The source told The Sun: 'She hated working for Lisa and they didn't get on well at all. They often clashed. In the end Lisa sacked her. That's hardly the actions of someone's 'best mate'.' Infuriated by the response to Lisa's Tweets, the insider added: 'Anne-Marie's biting her tongue, but she's hurt and angry by the way this is playing out from Lisa's end.' 'Hardly the actions of a best mate': A friend of Anne-Marie's has claimed the pair 'never got on', and that Lisa even sacked her as the couple's PA (pictured with Ant McPartlin in 2015) Heading out: The 42-year-old's relationship with Ant emerged over the weekend, with ex-wife Lisa revealing she had been friends with the personal assistant during their marriage, and slamming her for 'breaking girl code' with the romance A day later, the publication unearthed images of Twitter messages exchanged by the pair dating back to 2012 - in which they appeared to display a firm friendship. In 2012, Lisa penned a message to Anne-Marie reading: 'Babe, I've missed you!!! When we gonna have a catch up?' Four years later, she wished the staff member happy birthday, writing: 'Happy birthday to my gorgeous friend @amzie33 congratulations on your 40th!! Hope you've been spoilt rotten (well I know you have)!!' Ant's romance with Anne-Marie emerged on Saturday, five months after he filed for divorce from his wife of twelve years Lisa. Heartbroken by the news, the make-up artist immediately took to Twitter to criticise her ex-husband's new girlfriend, and blast Ant for failing to have the 'decency' to tell her about their news. Deadpan: It seems Anne-Marie was remaining calm and collected in the face of the storm surrounding her boyfriend's estranged wife Legs eleven: She looked extremely glamorous as she headed out Heading out: She clutched a Balenciaga Classic City bag in a deep red, which markets for around 1000 Devastated: Ant's new relationship is believed to have rocked make-up artist Lisa, who tweeted a broken heart emoji at 5am hours after the news was first unveiled Lisa revealed to her 122,000 followers that she often invited Anne-Marie into their marital home as a 'friend', despite her job as their personal assistant. At 5am on Sunday morning she simply tweeted a broken heart emoji, signifying her upset, before going on to reveal she only found out about the relationship due to its coverage in the papers. When a Twitter follower asked whether or not she had been warned by Ant before it appeared in the media, she replied: 'Nope. Just how you guys did.' Earning her stripes: She was also holding on to a stylish striped handbag Keeping her cool: Anne-Marie is yet to speak out about her relationship with Ant yet friends have discussed Lisa's various claims about the news Former love: Anne-Marie split from her husband Scott Corbett (right) in 2017. Sources have reiterated Ant played no part in the deterioration of the marriage She then received a tweet of support from TV personality Nicola McLean, before replying: 'Thanks babe and to think she was MY friend!! xx' Another follower said 'so much for the girl code', to which Lisa answered: 'Exactly!' Lisa then replied to a follower to say that Anne-Marie was her friend and personal assistant to both her and Ant, adding that she let her 'into OUR home'. Anne-Marie split from her husband Scott Corbett in 2017. Sources have reiterated Ant played no part in the deterioration of the marriage. It has since been revealed that Lisa is allegedly livid with Ant for asking her to 'return the jewellery he bought for her', so it could be valued for their divorce settlement. Moving on: Ant's romance with Anne-Marie emerged on Saturday, five months after he filed for divorce from his wife of twelve years Lisa (pictured above on a dog walk) A source told the Sun that Ant's legal team requested that necklaces and rings bought as gifts were assessed by an expert. They added: 'Lisa refused because she fears she'll never see them again. It's causing a rift but is just one of many things. 'There have also been heated rows about money, property, all sorts of things this is just the latest thing to drive a wedge even further between them.' MailOnline has contacted Ant's representatives for comment. While Ant has remained silent on social media, the presenter's pals are thought to have rallied round him, and assure him that he is allowed to move on. A friend told The Mirror: 'It's time Ant is allowed to live his life. It's been 10 months now everyone needs to move on... There are no children involved... I am sure he will always wish Lisa well.' Since the breakdown of the couple's 18-year relationship, Ant has increasingly leaned on personal assistant Anne-Marie, who herself broke up with her husband in October. Anne-Marie was present when Ant arrived at a police station in March to answer drink driving charges, and was also at his later court hearing. A source told The Sun on Sunday: 'He's had a tough time of it, but Anne-Marie has put a smile back on his face again - she has been his rock. 'They have been living in each other's pockets, day in, day out. Knowing someone is there for him has brought him back from the brink she's put him back together again.' Furious: Lisa revealed to her 122,000 followers that she often invited Anne-Marie into their marital home as a 'friend', despite her job as their personal assistant The source added their alleged romance was 'early days' but friends close to the star are hoping he can put his woes behind him and 'find happiness again' with the separated mum. MailOnline has contacted Ant's representatives for comment. It has since been claimed that Lisa wants to take her ex-husband 'for every penny' he has, following the emergence of the romance. She has reportedly told pals 'the gloves are off' in their divorce battle, after being left heartbroken by his relationship with their long-time PA. Since entering the Love Island villa at the start of the month, Dr. Alex George has won the sympathy of viewers, thanks to his dismal track record in finding romance. And during Sunday night's episode of the racy ITV2 reality show, the handsome medic, 27, revealed during a chat with fellow contestant Josh Denzel that Love Island host Caroline Flack, 38, is in his fact his ideal kind of woman. However, the A&E doctor faced yet more polite friend-zoning after his comments were aired, as during her appearance on Love Island: Aftersun, Caroline flashed her engagement ring from fiance Andrew Brady and simply stated: 'I'm taken!' Scroll down for video Taken! Caroline Flack, left, stated that she's 'taken' during Sunday night's instalment of Love Island: Aftersun, after learning that Dr. Alex George, right, had deemed her his ideal woman During his chat with Josh, Alex was asked by the SPORTbible presenter who his ideal woman was, as they discussed his faltering search for romance. Without missing a beat, Alex responded during their chat in the communal bedroom: Physically, a girl a bit like Caroline Flack. And while Caroline acknowledged the comment during Aftersun - and joked that Alex was 'too late' - she later took to Twitter to say that she was flattered, writing: 'That was so fun thanks for tuning in.... and totally flattered by doctor Alex.' Finally! Tuesday's episode of Love Island could finally deliver a bit of luck for Alex, as it's been revealed the hunky but hapless doctor shares a kiss with one of the new girls Blushing: TV personality Caroline appeared to blush on learning that Alex had his eye on her Back in April, TV personality Caroline announced her engagement to 27-year-old Alex, who she had been dating for just three months before he popped the question. Meanwhile, it's been revealed that the hunky but hapless doctor Alex shares a kiss with one of the new girls. The huge development was let slip by Jack Fincham during a live interview on Love Island: Aftersun on Sunday night. Jack appeared video link from the villa's Beach Hut with his partner Dani Dyer, and during a catch up with host Caroline Flack, he let slip that Alex has got close to one of the new girls - Zara McDermott and Ellie Brown. Flattered: After the show's broadcast, she took to Twitter to reveal that she was 'flattered' Defensive: Caroline shocked the British showbiz world in April when she announced her engagement to beau Andrew Brady after three months of dating 'Alex has gone on a date and everythingand he's gone for a kiss!' blabbermouth Jack revealed, only for Dani to interrupt, telling him: 'Don't give away too much!' The pair then laughed before Dani waved her arms in the air and shouted: 'Nothing! Nothing!' It was not revealed who Alex gets cosy with, but both Zara and Ellie admitted they had a soft spot for the handsome medic during Sunday night's episode. Jubilant fans took to Twitter to voice their excitement at Alex's kiss, with one tweeting: 'So Alex has kissed someone, THANK YOU for that information Jack, bring on tomorrow.' Others posted ecstatic memes and gifs as they counted down to the new episode. Send help: Alex has so far failed to click with any of the girls in the villa, instead remaining coupled up with his pal Samira Mighty Shaking things up: Ellie Brown and Zara McDermott (above) caused a stir when they arrived in the villa on Sunday night, while the girls were enjoying dinner together Alex left viewers in stitches on Sunday night, after attempting to woo the new islanders with a selection of incredibly awkward chat-up lines. Fitness fanatic Ellie and government adviser Zara made an explosive entrance to the Mallorcan love nest on Sunday, while the girls were enjoying an al-fresco dinner. Keen to find love after an unsuccessful first week, the A&E doctor was quick to make a move on both girls - with huge encouragement from his male co-stars. However, things started to go awry for Alex when he attempted to woo the girls, and instead came out with some cringe-worthy chat-up lines. Possibility: Ellie, 20, caught the doctor's eye, with Alex revealing after their first chat during Sunday's episode, 'Ellie could be a bit of me' Doing his best: Alex left viewers in stitches on Sunday night, after attempting to woo the new islanders with a selection of incredibly awkward chat-up lines Upon hearing Ellie sells cars, he simply replied: 'I love cars', before she admitted to hating ironing, causing him to quip: 'You know what I'm really good at? Ironing.' Later trying his luck with Zara, he tried to relate to her governmental interests by revealing one of his favourite things to do is to stay up late and watch the General Election votes. While the chat up lines went down a storm with viewers, it seems they worked his magic over Zara, who later confessed her crush on him. She said in the Beach Hut: 'Alex I think is literally the loveliest guy I've ever met. He's so nice. I'd definitely consider pursuing things with him and seeing where things go.' However, it was 20-year-old Ellie who caught the doctor's eye, revealing after their first chat: 'Ellie could be a bit of me. She could be a bit of me. I think it takes me time to say 100 per cent But I think there's a possibility.' Schapelle Corby's critics are seeing green once more. On Tuesday, just over a year since she returned to Australia from Indonesian jail, the former Marijuana smuggler silenced haters in another fiery hip-hop track. In an Instagram video, she rapped a verse criticising her 20-year drug sentence and revealed she was searching for the MC who sent her the track while she was in jail. Straight outta Kerobokan! Former drug smuggler Schapelle Corby debuts a mysterious new hip-hop track in the hopes of reuniting with the lyricist who sent it to her IN JAIL Mysteriously, Schapelle applied an 'old man in a newsboy hat' image filter to her face and played the audio at double speed to make the lyrics hard to decipher. An observant fan claiming to have worked out exactly what she was saying offered his interpretation in a comment. 'It is: 'Abhu Bakkar Bashir, terrorist, 88, skits test not a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, Aussie, Schapelle Corby gets framed and blamed indecently for importing a bag of weed. We've got to stop this corrupt proceed!'' the fan wrote. Why? Mysteriously, Schapelle applied an 'old man in a newsboy hat' image filter to her face and played the audio at double speed to make the lyrics hard to decipher The lyrics? A fan claimed the lyrics were: 'Abhu Bakkar Bashir, terrorist, 88, skits test not a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile, Aussie, Schapelle Corby gets framed and blamed indecently for importing a bag of weed. We've got to stop this corrupt proceed!'' 'Does anyone know who made this for me?' The 40-year-old explained the verse she'd rapped appeared on a CD sent to her by a 'young #aussie #rapper' while she was in prison Schapelle explained in the caption: 'Years ago - possibly 3 years into my sentence? A young #aussie #hiphop / #rapper sent me a CD - A song he'd made about me.' The 40-year-old explained the verse she'd rapped appeared on the CD - which she would listen to behind bars on a gifted walkman. 'I've never forgotten the #lyrics. Here they are in fast forward... Who can write out the Lyrics?' Schapelle asked. She then announced her desire to reunite with the lyricist. Was it him? One fan in the comments suggested the provided information suggested the creator was popular Melbourne-based rapper 360 (real name Matthew James Colwell) 'Does anyone know who made this for me? I think his first name is Matt, but could be wrong!' One fan in the comments suggested the provided information suggested the creator was popular Melbourne-based rapper 360 (real name Matthew James Colwell). Back in November 2017, 360 admitted to communicating with Schapelle 'via Facebook' while she was in jail. 'She obviously had her phone in jail. It was just like chatting to a friend. We're not like close friends or anything like that. Just Facebook mates,' he told the Hit Network. She has been relishing the sunny weather in Fiji. And Rachael Finch, 30, was a picture of holiday bliss as she kicked back at the The Westin Denarau Island Resort & Spa on Tuesday. Taking to Instagram, the Australian TV host showcased her trim figure in an olive green bikini bralette. Flirty in Fiji! Rachael Finch showed off some serious sideboob in a microscopic mismatching bikini on family getaway, sharing snaps on social media on Tuesday 'Middle of winter in Fiji. #sameoutfitdifferentday,' she accompanied the sun-drenched picture with the cheeky caption. The model teamed her olive green bralette with a mismatching skimpy striped red and white briefs. Rachael's brunette tresses were brushed away from her face and she wore large sunglasses as well as a slick of nude lipstick. Fun in Fiji! 'Middle of winter in Fiji. #sameoutfitdifferentday,' she accompanied the sun-drenched picture with the cheeky caption The mother-of-two has been enjoying her tropical trip with her children Violet, aged four, and Dominic, aged one, as well as her husband Michael Miziner. Rachael recently detailed the struggles of balancing her duties as a mother with her high-flying career. 'A lot of people ask how I juggle being a mum-of-two with my business and career,' she wrote on Instagram in April. 'It's definitely not a walk in the park, but I love having both in my life so I make it work.' Family woman! The mother-of-two enjoyed the trip with her children Violet, aged four, and Dominic, aged one, as well as her husband Michael Miziner Earlier this year, the reporter devoted almost three weeks overseas covering the Winter Olympics. Then she committed to a two-week stint on the Gold Coast as a reporter for Channel 7's coverage of the Commonwealth Games. Proving she's a family woman at heart, she returned early from her first assignment in Korea after Dominic fell ill. 'Being a mum is a constant juggling act, and it's great to be able to open more dialogue around being a mother, and the ups and downs that come with it,' she told FEMAIL. 'You love your kids more than anything in the world, but making time for you when you can is important for both you, and to set an example for your children.' Lucy Hale made an appearance in Los Angeles on Monday afternoon, shortly after revealing she was once taken advantage of by an unnamed man while under the influence of alcohol. The Pretty Little Liars actress wore a cropped black sweater and frayed jeans as she made a subdued appearance in the Californian coastal city, during which she ventured into a local coffee shop. Lucy, 28, added to her low-key look with a pair of white running shoes, while heavily tinted sunglasses rounded things off. . Stepping out: Lucy Hale made an appearance in Los Angeles on Monday afternoon, shortly after revealing she was once taken advantage of by an unnamed man while under the influence of alcohol Accessorizing tastefully, the American star carried a smart olive handbag over one shoulder as she carried a small tray of coffee, iced fruit juices and mineral water back to her car. Lucy's appearance comes after she admitted to being taken advantage of while under the influence during a candid interview and cover shoot for the latest issue of Haute Living Los Angeles. 'I think there are a lot of people who have been intoxicated and taken advantage of. It's happened to me and people I know. It's very common,' the brunette star told the lifestyle magazine. 'Luckily, I've been unscathed; nothing's hurt me too badly.' Casual: The Pretty Little Liars actress wore a cropped black sweater as she ventured out of a local coffee shop Tasteful: Lucy added to her look with frayed jeans as she made a subdued appearance in the Californian coastal city Finishing touches: Lucy, 28, added to her low-key look with a pair of white running shoes, while heavily tinted sunglasses rounded things off. The Tennessee native added, 'I've experienced stuff on the small side, but assault is assault.' Lucy's admission came after she penned a cryptic message to her fans on social media in January regarding a sexual assault incident. 'I never understood sexual assault until tonight. I always sympathized, but never felt the pain of it until right now,' said Hale. Stylish: Accessorizing tastefully, the American star carried a smart olive handbag over one shoulder Steady on: Lucy carried a small tray of coffee, iced fruit juices and mineral water back to her car Admission: Lucy's appearance comes after she admitted to being taken advantage of while under the influence during a candid interview and cover shoot for the latest issue of Haute Living Los Angeles Lucy continued her emotional message: 'My dignity and pride was broken. I am completely at a loss of words.' The actress ended on a lighter note promising to help create change: 'I feel for anyone that has felt this pain that I feel right now. But I promise. I will not let a moment go by that I don't try to make a difference.' Lucy deleted her post moments after, but posted the same message on her Twitter account, adding: 'I deleted it from Instagram. But this needs to be heard.' She recently confirmed her blossoming new relationship with cafe owner Jaxon Manuel. But Married At First Sight star Davina Rankin has another love in her life, her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. The 27-year-old took her sweet pup for a walk in Brisbane on Tuesday. Doggy duty: Married At First Sight star Davina Rankin has another love in her life, her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel The brunette chose a pair of tights for the stroll, the black leggings clinging to her shapely form. A matching black Puma hoodie and white sneakers completed the casual look. Davina listened to music on her white headphones as her feisty dog ran ahead, dragging his lead forward. The dog-mum often shares images of her little pooch, who she has nicknamed Dorito Paws after the brand of corn chips. Relaxed: The brunette chose a pair of tights for the stroll, the black leggings clinging to her shapely form Fresh faced! Her face appeared fresh with minimal makeup, and she wore her hair down over her shoulders Her face appeared fresh with minimal makeup, and she wore her hair down over her shoulders. It comes after Davina enjoyed a girls' trip to Bali for a friend's birthday. The brunette beauty released a video of her fun-filled getaway to her YouTube vlog on Monday, in which she and her gal pal Gillian Godwin are seen lapping up their luxurious surroundings. Cute! The dog-mum often shares images of her little pooch Adorable! She nicknamed the pup Dorito Paws after the brand of corn chips. In a piece-to-camera, the former reality star admits it's bikinis, sunsets and delicious banquets for the pair during the idyllic island retreat. 'We just watched the most amazing sunset - standard,' she says, adding in a second shot, 'How's this for a buffet?' MasterChef Australia's Sashi Cheliah delighted the judges with his dish of lamb and minted peas. But viewers were left particularly disturbed by Gary Mehigan's double dipping of the sauce. The 51-year-old's enthusiastic taste testing had one sharing to Twitter: 'How many times did Gary double dip with that sauce [?!].' Scroll down for video 'How many times did Gary double dip with that sauce?!' Fans of MasterChef Australia were left DISTURBED by Mehigan's indulgent taste testing on Tuesday night's episode Unimpressed: One viewer took to Twitter to share their thoughts on Gary's taste testing Gary wasted no time in tucking into the dish's accompanying sauce, seen slurping numerous spoonfuls into his mouth. 'Wow. Mate, I might not hand the sauce back. That's sensational,' he said to fellow judge Matt Preston. 'Try that,' Gary urged judge George Calombaris, handing the spoon to his peer. Viewers were left unimpressed with one writing on Twitter: 'How many times did Gary double dip with that sauce [?!].' Hearty tasting: Gary wasted no time in tucking into the dish's accompanying sauce and told fellow judge Matt Preston: 'Wow. Mate, I might not hand the sauce back. That's sensational' Sure you want that, George? 'Try that,' Gary urged judge George Calombaris, handing the spoon to his peer Another followed suit with: 'Anyone else concerned about Gary double dipping into the sauce?!' as well as 'Gary - what's with the double dipping in the sauce?' Others were quite vocal in dissing the judge, stating: 'He just double dipped on sauce...not on!' Concerned: One viewer questioned whether anyone else was concerned by Gary's double dipping Humour: While one hilariously wrote: '75% of Gary's body is made up of SAUCE' While one hilariously wrote: '75% of Gary's body is made up of SAUCE.' With Gary's indulgent taste testing, it came as no surprise to hear of Sashi's win against guest chef Andrew Harmer of Melbourne's QT Hotel. Sashi wowed the judges with his lamb dish, and earned himself a second gold pin, making MasterChef Australia history. Baffled: One fan was left perplexed by the turn of events She's known for her show-stopping sartorial displays on the red carpet and high-fashion soirees. And Sarah Jessica Parker, 53, swapped her usual head-turning ensembles for a more low-key outfit as she stepped out in New York on Monday. The Failure To Launch actress showcased her off-duty style with aplomb around the Big Apple as she slipped into a pair of cropped skinny jeans. Head-turning: Sarah Jessica Parker, 53, swapped her usual head-turning ensembles for a more low-key outfit as she stepped out in New York on Monday The petite Hollywood star stylishly rolled up the cuffs of her lighwash jeans and shared a glimpse of her slender pins while drawing attention to her leather ankle boots. Sarah, who recently celebrated Sex And The City's 20th Anniversary, teamed the look with a loose-fitting v-neck grey jumper that teased at her cleavage. She complemented her laidback ensemble by working her ombre locks into a loose tousled style which she kept in place with her headphones. Continuing her low-key vibe, Sarah opted to go make-up free for the outing as she carried her black and neon green backpack on her back. Casual: Sarah, who recently celebrated Sex And The City's 20th Anniversary, teamed the look with a loose-fitting v-neck grey jumper that teased at her cleavage Fashion fiend: She's known for her show-stopping sartorial displays on the red carpet and high-fashion soirees (Pictured in 2016 at the MET Gala) Off-duty: Sarah usually makes a splash at a glitzy occasion (pictured left in 2013) but on Monday displayed her everyday style (R) Last month the actress said she thinks Sex and the City would be a 'different show' now following the #MeToo movement and Time's Up initiative. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything Festival in Manhattan, Parker said: 'I think [my character] Carrie Bradshaw is very much a product of her generation and I think her conversations about sexual politics and intimacy spoke to the years. 'As always, those years prior to being a young adult inform your world view. I think that she would have a lot to say about this, and I would be curious to read [her] column if she could sit back and look at it. Denim days: The Failure To Launch actress showcased her off-duty style with aplomb around the Big Apple as she slipped into a pair of cropped skinny jeans Telling it how it is: Last month the actress said she thinks Sex and the City, which is available to stream in its entirety on NOW TV, would be a 'different show' now following the #MeToo movement and Time's Up initiative Generation: Speaking at the Wall Street Journal's Future of Everything Festival in Manhattan, Parker said: 'I think [my character] Carrie Bradshaw is very much a product of her generation and I think her conversations about sexual politics and intimacy spoke to the years (Pictured in 2008) 'You know, this city has changed - that was 20 years ago this June - this city has changed an enormous amount politically and economically and socially and I think it would be a different show, honestly.' Sarah currently stars in HBO's Divorce which returned for season two on January 14. The series follows Frances, played by SJP, and Robert, played by Thomas Haden Church, as they struggle through a long, drawn out divorce. The star has been married to Matthew Broderick since 1997 and the couple have three children; son James, 15, and twins daughters Marion and Tabitha, eight. Channel 9's Love Island has just raised the bar, and a fair few eyebrows, with a very racy workout on Tuesday's episode. The islanders were challenged to a risque 'couples yoga' session that required them to twist into some very revealing poses. Designed to help the pairs 'bond,' the moves, lead by an instructor, included the couples pressing against one another's crotches and leaning back. Oh dear! Love Island has just raised the bar, and a fair few eyebrows, with a very racy workout on Tuesday's episode Called the 'trust hold' it saw the pairs balanced precariously against one another's nether regions. The poses made for some eye-popping scenes as the islanders were mostly clad in skimpy swimwear during the routine. Other poses including the couples pressing their feet together with their legs raised in the air, especially racy for the ladies in g-string swimsuits. Some of the moves were rather risque for the girls who chose very low-cut swimmers, near-wardrobe malfunctions aplenty. Eye-full: The islanders were challenged to a risque 'couples yoga' session that required them to twist into some very revealing poses Woah: The poses made for some eye-popping scenes as the islanders were mostly clad in skimpy swimwear during the routine Peekaboo! Some of the moves were rather risque for the girls who chose very low-cut swimmers, near-wardrobe malfunctions aplenty And the sexy yoga session had one of the islanders fuming, Tayla, who had to watch her man, Grant, get crotch to crotch with her arch rival Cassidy. Grant was a good sport and went ahead and did the racy workout with his enemy Cassidy, with whom he's currently paired, but Tayla was not amused to see them get up close and personal. 'The trust hold, that's when I flipped. She was like 'don't drop me!' She is lucky I wasn't holding her I would have dropped her,' Tayla complained to camera. Boo: The sexy yoga session had one of the islanders fuming, Tayla, who had to watch her man, Grant, get crotch to crotch with her arch rival Cassidy Yay! Cassidy however had a ball, saying to camera: 'I didn't think grant was going to participate but the yoga session was so much fun!' After the yoga was mercifully over, Tayla was visibly upset, even though Grant assured her it would not come between them. She complained: 'I cant say anything. I cant feel anything and share my emotions or it will blow up the whole villa'. Cassidy however had a ball, saying to camera: 'I didn't think grant was going to participate but the yoga session was so much fun!' She played two spectacular gigs over the weekend at the London Stadium alongside her husband Jay-Z for their On The Run II tour. In between her incredible performances, Beyonce enjoyed some well-deserved downtime as she partied at London's Harry's Bar until 4am on Sunday. The 36-year-old Halo songstress partied up a storm with her rapper beau, who wasn't pictured, at the exclusive private Mayfair club until the earlier hours of Sunday morning following their stellar concert. Celebrations: Beyonce enjoyed some well-deserved downtime as she partied at London's Harry's Bar until 4am on Sunday Showcasing her off-duty style, the Grammy winner swapped her head-turning stage costumes for a simple white T-shirt as she left the venue via the backdoor. The superstar relaxed in her car and displayed her slender pins as she got comfy in her seat and highlighted her strappy stilettos. The former Destiny Child's star accessorised her ensemble with a pair of red framed shades and placed her leather bag with studded detailing across her lap. Although trying to remain incognito leaving the hotspot, she kept to her glamorous ways as she styled her blonde locks into a voluminous half up, half down style. Low-key: The 36-year-old Halo songstress partied up a storm with her rapper beau, who wasn't pictured, at the exclusive private Mayfair club until the earlier hours of Sunday morning following their stellar concert Her late-night appearance comes as she and husband Jay-Z filmed their latest joint music video in famed French museum The Louvre for their latest track Apes***t. And now the museum has revealed just how the musical duo managed to gain permission to film their cinematic video in the midst of priceless masterpieces. In a statement to Vulture, the Parisian gallery - which houses Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa among many other world-famous artworks - explained the couple's connection to the museum, as well as how they kept everything under wraps. A spokesperson told the publication: 'Beyonce and Jay-Z visited the Louvre four times in the last ten years. During their last visit in May 2018, they explained their idea of filming.' Making a dash: Showcasing her off-duty style, the Grammy winner swapped her head-turning stage costumes for a simple white T-shirt as she left the venue via the backdoor Party people: The pair partied at Mayfair members' club Harry's Bar Despite their level of fame, the filming of the couple's six minute-long music video went completely unnoticed, with fans being totally surprised by the release on Saturday. Explaining why they allowed the music video to take place, the rep continued: 'The deadlines were very tight but the Louvre was quickly convinced because the synopsis showed a real attachment to the museum and its beloved artworks.' While it's not known how much the duo dropped for their secretive filming, The New York Times explained that around 500 film shoots happen at the museum each year and a private shoot around the artwork costs around $17,500 (13,206). Relaxed: The superstar relaxed in her car and displayed her slender pins as she got comfy in her seat and highlighted her strappy stilettos Performance: She played two spectacular gigs over the weekend at the London Stadium alongside her husband Jay-Z for their On The Run II tour The revelations come as Beyonce and Jay-Z have been travelling around the UK in the European leg of their worldwide tour, in the follow-up to their hugely successful 2014 On The Run tour. The tour is set to conclude in Seattle on October 4, with the UK leg finishing on Saturday. It was announced last month that R&B duo Chloe x Halle and DJ Khaled will be the opening acts for the North American leg of the tour kicking off on July 25 in Cleveland. She hit out at the paparazzi in her latest column for Now Magazine. But it appears TOWIE star Lauren Goodger is on good terms with at least some of the snappers which capture her glam lifestyle, giving a cheery smile to a photographer as she left a recent photoshoot near her Essex home. The pictures have emerged on the same day the reality star's latest column is released, in which she accuses paps at the shoot of being 'Peeping Toms'. Good to see you! Lauren Goodger gave a cheery wave to photographers as she left a fashion shoot in Essex last week In her column Lauren writes that she was shooting for fashion brand So Monroe at Kings Oak in Essex, only to be interrupted by a photographer. 'Annoyingly, a paparazzi followed me and was up a tree taking pics like a peeping Tom, which is such a shame, as it's ruined the reveal for the brand and I feel bad for them.' Lauren seemed happy and relaxed though as she left the shoot, waving at a snapper as she wheeled her suitcase to her car. Friendly: The pictures have emerged on the same day the reality star's latest column is released, in which she accuses paps at the shoot of being 'Peeping Toms' Wave: Lauren seemed happy and relaxed though as she left the shoot, waving at a snapper as she wheeled her suitcase to her car. Looking fab: The stunning star showed off her gym-honed figure in a tight crop top The stunning star showed off her gym-honed figure in a tight crop top and matching high-waisted trousers, looking glam with a full face of makeup and sleek locks. She added a pair of towering heels, tottering along as she headed out of the luxurious location. She matched her designer suitcase to her chic backpack, looking happy after a busy day of shooting with the fashion brand. Curves: She added a pair of towering heels, tottering along as she headed out of the luxurious location What a location: Lauren enjoyed the luxe surroundings of a pool as she worked in the sunshine She's in fashion: The ex TOWIE star was shooting for fashion brand So Monroe Meanwhile Lauren is reportedly planning an unconventional career for her jailbird boyfriend Joey Morrison, following his release from prison last month. Heat Magazine claim the TOWIE star plans to make the convict into the next 'Hot Felon', the moniker used by former gang member Jeremy Meeks, after the California-native soared to prominence when his smouldering mugshot went viral in 2014. Insiders told the publication that Lauren, 31, deems herself a business brain and is plotting to make her beau the next big thing following his release from jail after serving nine years of his 16-year sentence for violent offences. In shape: Lauren has been working hard on her physique this year, hitting the gym Working hard: The star has been keeping her fans up to date with her glam life via her column for Now Magazine Wow factor: The reality star loves to show off her pert posterior in tight ensembles Summer style: Lauren was showing off a golden tan and a glam full face of makeup In 2010, Joey was jailed for 16 years for possession of a firearm, kidnap, blackmail, actual bodily harm and aggravated burglary atop drug related offences following an eight-week trial in Wood Green. He was released and united with Lauren last month. Jeremy found fame in 2014 during a gang sweep called Operation Ceasefire in California, after which police posted his mug shot on Facebook, after his conviction for federal charges of grand theft and being a felon in possession of a firearm. Following his release, he signed a modelling contract with White Cross Management and also nabbed a contract with Hollywood talent agent Gina Rodriguez, before he found love with Topshop heiress Chloe Green, who he shares a baby with. It has now been reported that Lauren is determined to make Joey a 'Hot Felon', as insiders said: 'Lauren's been really inspired by Chloe and the way she got together with Jeremy. He's now a successful model... Who's who? Lauren Goodger is reportedly planning an unconventional career for her jailbird boyfriend Joey Morrison, following his release from prison last month Big ideas: Insiders told the publication that Lauren, 31, deems herself a business brain and is plotting to make her beau the next big thing following his release from jail after serving nine years of his 16-year sentence for violent offences New love? Lauren and Joey's romance was on-off during his time in prison, yet an image posted over the weekend seemingly showing the pair out for dinner - however she artfully masked his face behind an Emoji (pictured on Saturday) Jeremy Vs. Joey Jeremy Meeks, 34, California Jeremy Meeks, 34, California Jailed: 2014 Crime: Gang-related crimes as a member of the LA-based Crips, as he was locked up as part of police sweep, Operation Ceasefire Significant other: Jeremy found love with millionaire heiress Chloe Green last year and the pair welcomed their first child - a boy named Jayden - last month Joey Morrison, 32, London Joey Morrison, 32, London Jailed: 2010 Crime: Possession of a firearm, kidnap, blackmail, actual bodily harm and aggravated burglary Significant other: Joey began dating Lauren Goodger while he was incarcerated, after they met over the phone in 2016 when he was calling his sister from prison Advertisement 'She thinks she can do the same for Joey by getting him an agent and making him a pin-up... 'She loves being a businesswoman and thinks Joey's got potential... Ultimately she wants to be seen as a power couple like her and Mark Wright'. MailOnline has contacted Lauren's representatives for comment. As well as Jeremy's viral mugshot, a police handout from the time of Joey's arrest is in circulation and shows the convict appearing less sculpted than his US counterpart as he suffered a bruised eye and appeared to have his arm in a sling. At the time of Joey's sentencing, Detective Inspector Dan OSullivan, from the Southwark priority crime unit, said: 'This was a very long and complex investigation, and I am delighted that Morrison and (his accomplice) Jacobs have finally been brought to justice. 'To the victims I hope these sentences go someway in relieving the pain and suffering they experienced at the hands of these ruthless men. 'They were put through a harrowing ordeal and I commend the great courage they showed during the investigation and the trial.' Lauren and Joey's romance was on-off during his time in prison, yet an image posted over the weekend seemingly showed the pair out for dinner - however she artfully masked his face behind an Emoji. Lauren was spotted visiting Joey in the midst of his 16-year sentence last year after he was found in possession of 10,000 in cash and 60,000 worth of cocaine. The Essex resident appeared on Loose Women in September to set things straight regarding her crumbled dalliance with her ex-boyfriend Joey. 'He was meant to come out, last year, in November and things were great,' she explained to the panel, 'But where things got set back, it put strain on us. I couldn't wait no more. It was too much pressure.' However, in November, Lauren hinted at spending time with the family as she told Closer: 'Were still mates. Theres no bad blood. Im still mates with Joey and his family and I see them all the time.' Earlier this year, the TOWIE star was seen with personalised number plates adorned with her incarcerated lover's name. Tough times: Jeremy found fame in 2014 during a gang sweep called Operation Ceasefire in California, after which police posted his mug shot on Facebook, after his conviction for federal charges of grand theft and being a felon in possession of a firearm Happy days: It has now been reported that Lauren is determined to make Joey a 'Hot Felon', as insiders said: 'Lauren's been really inspired by Chloe and the way she got together with Jeremy. He's now a successful model' Just two weeks after Lauren was caught with a screen saver of his face, Lauren changed the license plate on her car to include the jailbird's name. Putting to bed rumours in their romance, Lauren seemed keen to set the record straight as she awaited his release from his lengthy prison spell. In the column, she wrote: 'Joey and I are still in touch, which I have never denied. For now, he is focused on coming out and after such a long time I was to protect him so I'm not discussing him or our situation. People have to respect that. 'The number plate thing seems like a big deal but it's not. They were ordered ages ago and not being used so I decided to put them on my new car to save him from being fined for not using them and - let's be honest - it's a wicked plate!' Candice Swanepoel has welcomed her second child with partner of 13 years, Hermann Nicoli. The 29-year-old South African model shared the news on Tuesday on her Instagram stories when she shared a photo of the baby's hand with the words, 'Blessed.' Several months ago she said she was expecting a son. The Victoria's Secret favorite and her Brazilian partner already has son Anaca Nicoli nearly two years ago. The baby is here! Candice Swanepoel has welcomed her second child with partner of 13 years, Hermann Nicoli. The 29-year-old South African model shared the news on Tuesday on her Instagram stories when she shared a photo of the baby's hand with the words, 'Blessed' Pregnant: Swanepoel, 29, put her pregnant belly on full display last week The blonde bombshell was proficient at sharing photos of her naked baby bump when expecting the second baby. Last week the catwalk queen took to Instagram to share a silhouetted snap of her burgeoning baby belly on the beach during a sunset. The star shared the sexy snap as she showed that she is reveling in her second pregnancy. Her boy: The Victoria's Secret favorite and her model mate already has son Anaca Nicoli nearly two years ago Although she looks naked in the photo, you can see a bikini top tied around her back if you look close enough. The beauty is known to frequent the beach. She was just caught enjoying a beach day with her son over the weekend. During that outing, she wore ruffled swimwear that highlighted her expectant figure. Her large bump was on display then as she relaxed and played with her kid surrounded by friends. The 5ft10in star first announced she was pregnant with her second child in December, writing Christmas came early #2, on Instagram next to a bump-highlighting snap. Second baby: Candice announced her second pregnancy by posting a sweet video of her older son kissing her growing baby bump while she and her baby daddy relaxed outside, enjoying the sun The New York-based beauty's fiance and fellow model Nicoli, 35, hails from Brazil. Candice fitted in a pre-baby getaway to Vitoria, Espirito Santo in the country, ahead of her due date. To go with the announcement, the Angel posted a sweet video of the couples older son kissing her growing baby bump while the duo relax outside, enjoying the sun. Swanepoel got engaged to her longtime love and baby daddy in 2015. Riverdale star Charles Melton has been accused of fat-shaming women in old tweets that have resurfaced. The actor, 27, allegedly tweeted a number of comments in 2012, including: 'Fat chicks need to understand that wearing yoga pants is a privilege, not a right.' But soon after the tweets went viral, he told DailyMail.com in a statement, 'I'm truly sorry for making inconsiderate comments several years ago and apologize to anyone I hurt.' Backlash: Riverdale star Charles Melton, 27, who plays Reggie Mantle on the show, has apologized after old tweets of him fat-shaming women were unearthed He added, 'What I posted and said was immature, offensive and inappropriate. I am ashamed of how I acted and there is no excuse for that behavior. 'Im striving to do better and will use this experience to grow, helping others to understand how these types of statements are completely unacceptable.' In the old tweets he said he was 'tired of all these girls talking about how skinny the VS models are.' Timeline: The Riverdale actor would have been around aged 20 or 21 at the time of allegedly writing the tweets He added the hashtags #jealousGirls and #getYourChunkyAssonTheTreadMill to that statement. The hunk also posted, 'Big boobs don't count if your fat,' and 'headed to the gym. Word of wisdom for the day...if your fat...don't look in the mirror.' The Alaskan native locked his Twitter account after these and several other mean tweets were unearthed. He would have been around aged 20 or 21 at the time of allegedly writing the tweets. He loves to be in top shape: Here the star, far left, is seen showing off his body as he digs into pizza with Camila Mendes and KJ Apa Melton did not act professionally until 2014 when he got his first role in Glee as a model. His fellow Riverdale cast members Lili Reinhart and Camila Mendes have both become known for highlighting body positivity, with the former recently calling out those believing shes pregnant. The pair also previously hit out at pictures which were Photoshopped to make their waists thinner, with Camila saying at the time: I just didnt want other people to think that was my body. Riverdale is currently streaming on Netflix. Alec Baldwin headed back to Manhattan after spending his Father's Day weekend with his family in the Hamptons. The 60-year old actor appeared happy on Monday as he walked the red carpet for the New York premiere of the new HBO documentary Believer, without wife Hilaria, 34, by his side. The SNL vet seemed to be in a jovial mood as he locked arms with producer Sheena M Joyce during a photo op with production members. Scroll down for video Solo: Alec Baldwin attended the New York premiere of the documentary Believer on Monday; Alec walked the red carpet with producer Sheena M Joyce Believer follows Mormon Dan Reynolds, frontman for the Grammy Award-winning band Imagine Dragons, as he explores how the Mormon Church treats it LGBTQ members and the rising suicide rate among teens in Utah. The solo Alec decided to dress a bit casual but still stylish for the premiere; going with an all-black ensemble made up of dress pants, a polo style short sleeve shirt and some pull-on dress shoes. He also opted to keep some stubble on his face for that five o'clock shadow look. Getting cozy: The actor was also seen with rocker Dan Reynolds and director Don Argott Under the lights: The star wore all black as his producer friend did the same While Alec was enjoying his time in front of the camera lights, his wife of nearly six years stayed at the home with their four kids. No doubt Hilaria had her hands full tending to their new arrival, four week old Romeo, and their other young children Carmen, Rafael, and Leonardo following their weekend in the Hamptons. And to the enjoyment of fans, the Baldwins have documented some very personal and touching family moments of late and posting it on social media. Like old school buddies: Baldwin was also seen in a shot with Reynolds Mama: While Alec enjoyed his time in front of the camera, as his wife Hilaria stayed at home with their four children that includes their newborn son Romeo; they have four kids together On Sunday the fitness guru shared a cute photo on Instagram of Alec enjoying his Father's Day in the Hamptons standing alongside Rafael, three, and Leonardo, 21 months. Just a couple of days before that, Alec shared a cute video of Hilaria kissing Leonardo as Romeo cradled his infant brother and gave him a kiss of his own. The 60-year-old Oscar nominee - who boasts 1.6M social media followers - captioned his clip: 'Leo is such a lover...' Weekend in the Hamptons: Hilaria shared a photo on Instagram showing Alec enjoying his Father's Day standing alongside sons Rafael and Leonardo The couple just celebrated one month since the arrival of Romeo. To make the milestone, Hilaria shared a sweet video of herself with her son taken just moments after his birth. Romeo is nestled on Mom's chest wearing a stripped cap on his head. She wrote in the caption: 'Happy 4 weeks Romeo. I was so sick with pneumonia, but the day you were born was so magical. I feel grateful that you came to be with us.' #wegotthis2018 Touching: The 60-year old actor shared an affectionate video of Hilaria kissing son Leonardo Cute: Leonardo kissed his newborn brother after mom gave him a kiss She is the first woman of colour to have a lead role in the Star Wars franchise. And as such Thandie Newton was perfectly placed to take her spot on the Diversity Session at the 65th Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity on Tuesday. The Westworld actress wowed in a chic tuxedo as she sat next to British Vogue Editor Edward Enninful. Sitting pretty: Thandie Newton took her spot on stage for the Diversity Session at the 65th Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity on Tuesday Thandie, 45, went shirtless under her plunging tuxedo which she teamed with statement heels, adorned with red bead detail. Her hair was styled into tied-back braids and she added a glam touch of makeup. Thandie joined the panel hosted by HP and Omnicom Group's Tiffany R. Warren, with Enninful, the first black male editor of Vogue. Suits you: Thandie, 45, went shirtless under her plunging tuxedo which she teamed with statement heels, adorned with red bead detail Speaking out: The Westworld actress sat next to British Vogue Editor Edward Enninful, the first black male editor of the magazine The duo were keen to discuss diversity in advertising, with Edward pointing out: 'It's not enough for me to have that one black girl in a campaign. We need to employ people behind the scenes.' 'That's when real change happens. People who can go to the boardrooms and say, no guys, let's look at this race, let's look at that race. That's when advertising will truly be diverse.' Thandie, who stars as Maeve Millay in HBO hit Westworld, added that she is frustrated when she sees 'the token black girl, the token Asian girl.' Yet the days are gone when advertisers can employ models who will say anything and brush over a company's lack of diversity. Chic: The acclaimed actress added a long pendant necklace and delicate drop earrings Close to her heart: Thandie, who has starred in big name campaigns was discussing diversity in the advertising world Passionate: Thandie, who stars as Maeve Millay in HBO hit Westworld, added that she is frustrated when she sees 'the token black girl, the token Asian girl' 'Social media is forcing people to reveal themselves. There is no longer a faceless brand,' she said. 'Brands have to reveal themselves, who's working for them, what's happening in those boardrooms.' Thandie recently spoke out on her daughter Nico, 13, following her into acting after she landed a role in Tim Burton's re imagining of Disney classic Dumbo. Discussing Nico's natural foray into acting, Thandie explained that her youngest offspring doesn't take the industry for 'granted' and proudly beamed that she's happy that the industry has changed for the better for younger women. Talented panel: Antonio Lucio, Global Chief Marketing & Communication Officer at HP Inc and Tiffany R. Warren, Chief Diversity Officer of Omnicom Group Inc. joined the panel Strong voice: The duo were keen to discuss diversity in advertising, with Edward pointing out: 'It's not enough for me to have that one black girl in a campaign' Pals: Thandie and Edward run in the same fashionable circles and no doubt had plenty to catch up on after the talk She shared: 'Having a mother and father in the industry shes been on endless sets. Its not that she takes it for granted, but its not a world that she feels shes not entitled to be in. '[Plus] she has her mum right there like a lioness checking that everything is looked after. You can't stop the industry operating the way it has unless the truth comes out. Adding: 'I feel this great relief, excitement for the women coming into this industry now.' A musical about the King of Pop is moonwalking its way to Broadway. The Michael Jackson Estate and Columbia Live Stage on Tuesday unveiled plans for a stage musical inspired by the life of Michael Jackson. They hope it will be ready for Broadway by 2020. Coming to Broadway: Michael Jackson's life is set to be turned into a musical written by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage. The King Of Pop is seen in 1993 above The story for the still-untitled musical will be written by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, using Jackson's vast catalog of songs. Tony Award winner Christopher Wheeldon will direct and choreograph. As of June casting choices were still unannounced. Behind the music: The still-untitled musical will use Jackson's vast catalog of songs with story written by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage. Michael is seen in 1988 above Her work: Nottage (above in May 2018) is the writer of Sweat, Intimate Apparel, By The Way, Meet Vera Stark and Ruined The move is the latest stage project to portray pop stars onstage with their best works, a list that includes Donna Summer, Cher, Gloria Estefan, the Go-Gos and Huey Lewis and the News. As a solo artist and with his brothers, 13-time Grammy winner Jackson sold millions of records and in 1983 became an international icon with the release of Thriller, the best-selling album of all time with such hits as Beat It and Billie Jean. He died in 2009 at the age of 50. Rest in peace: Jackson (above in 1980 during his Hollywood Walk Of Fame unveiling) passed in 2009 Nottage is the writer of Sweat, Intimate Apparel, By The Way, Meet Vera Stark and Ruined. Wheeldon, a resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet, was the director-choreographer of An American in Paris on Broadway. Jackson's music was also part of the musical Thriller Live, which has been performed on London's West End since 2009. She is most known for her role as Lady Sybil Crawley in the hit historical period drama Downton Abbey. Yet, Jessica Brown Findlay looked world's away from her former character as she stepped out in a plunging check suit as she attended the Harlots photocall during 58th Monte-Carlo International Television Festival on Tuesday. The 28-year-old actress hinted at her black bralet under her single buttoned blazer while she posed for photos on the red carpet. Check her out: Jessica Brown Findlay looked world's away from her former character as she stepped out in a plunging check suit as she attended the Harlots photocall during 58th Monte-Carlo International Television Festival on Tuesday The British beauty accentuated her slender frame even further as she donned a pair of matching suit pants which displayed her enviable legs. Adding inches to her height, she slipped on a pair of cream buckled sandals which drew attention to her vibrant green pedicure. Jessica worked her brunette locks into a natural curl and style her 'do half up, half down. The TV star accessorised her look with a pair of hooped earrings, simple necklace and a sprinkling of rings across her hands. Fashion: The 28-year-old actress hinted at her black bralet under her single buttoned blazer while she posed for photos on the red carpet Fame: She is most known for her role as Lady Sybil Crawley in the hit historical period drama Downton Abbey (Pictured with Laura Carmichael and Michelle Dockery) The actress was busy promoting ITV Encore's series Harlots which also stars Samantha Morton, Lesley Manville and Eloise Smyth, which first aired on the broadcaster in 2017. Jessica plays the role of Charlotte Wells - the city's most coveted courtesan - while Samantha will star as her mother Margaret Wells. Harlots is based in 1763 and aired for eight episodes in March 2017. The series depicted a family's struggles while owning a brothel in Georgian London. Jessica most recently starred in The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society opposite her former Downton Abbey co-star Lily James. Suit you: The British beauty accentuated her slender frame even further as she donned a pair of matching suit pants which displayed her enviable legs Mane attraction: Jessica worked her brunette locks into a natural curl and style her 'do half up, half down The film, set after the Second World War, is a book adaptation and follows the story of journalist Juliet- played by Lily. Juliet decides to document the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club formed on Guernsey Island in the English Channel during the wartime. She then receives a letter from a farmer Dawsey, and after becoming pen pals, travels to the island to meet the members and write a book about the group. The film is based on the 2008 best-selling novel of the same name by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer, which was a New York Times bestseller. Who knew Will Ferrell was a fan of Eurovision? Netflix did apparently, as Deadline reports that the streaming giant has greenlit a feature film about the long-running pan-European singing competition that will star the Anchorman actor. The film will be called Eurovision and will be written by Ferrell and Andrew Steele, a former Saturday Night Live head writer and frequent Ferrell collaborator. As well as co-writing and starring in the film, Ferrell will also produce it for Gary Sanchez Productions, with Adam McKay serving as an executive producer. Will Ferrell is working on a film about Eurovision for Netflix. He was seen at the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest, which was won by Israel Ferrell was reportedly first introduced to Eurovision back in 1999, by his wife, who is from Sweden. The Elf and Old School actor was actually in attendance at this years song contest, and the BBC reports that the actor watched multiple stages of the competition. Ferrell was also reportedly given permission by the events organisers to make the film, and actually spent time with the contestants. Israel won the Eurovision Song Contest 2018, with Netta Barzilais Toy scoring 529 points in total. Eurovision will be Ferrells second film for Netflix, having served as a producer on Ibiza, starring Gillian Jacobs and Game of Thrones alum Richard Madden, alongside Adam McKay. It is not yet clear whether Ferrell will sing or perform in the film. The actor famously sang in Step Brothers, Anchorman and even performed Whitney Houstons I Will Always Love You in his 2017 University of Southern California Commencement Speech. Eurovision would be yet another victory for the small screen cinema experience, particularly one promoted by Netflix. The streaming company has famously backed Martin Scorsese's film The Irishman, which will see Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel, and Michael Bays Ryan Reynolds-starring action film, Six Underground, which will reportedly cost $150 million. Royalty mixed with reality TV regulars as the first day of Royal Ascot got underway in the quaint Berkshire town on Tuesday afternoon. While the newly titled Meghan, Duchess of Sussex commanded the lions share of attention, an assortment of familiar faces from Made in Chelsea and Love Island jostled for attention at the annual sporting event. Attending on behalf of online retailer Lipsy, Georgia Harrison caught the eye in a striking blush dress that accentuated her slender frame. Looking good: Georgia Harrison caught the eye in a striking blush dress that accentuated her slender frame as she attended Royal Ascot on Tuesday afternoon The 22 year old, who was dumped from Love Island's Majorcan villa in 2017, added to her race-day look with a pair of starppy black heels. Making her way into the enclosure, Georgia had good company in the form of Made In Chelsea star Emily Blackwell, who ensured she was not overshadowed. Opting for a distinctive powder blue dress with sheer detailing and floral embellishments, the 21-year old proved to be engaging sight. In good company: The former Love Island star was joined by Made In Chelsea's Emily Blackwell (L) and model Elle Clancy (R) Upbeat: All three were in high spirits after attending the event on behalf of online retailer Lipsy A black floral fascinator added to her look, while strappy heels - a recurring feature amongst female attendees on the day - rounded things off. Joining the girls, model Elle Clancy, 18, opting for a striking pink variation on Emily's dress, teamed with a matching pink hair bow. The younger sister of Abbey Clancy drew attention to her features with liberallly applied make-up selected from a soft colour palette. In attendance: Survival of the Fittest star Georgie Clarke joined the three reality TV regulars at the sporting event Looking good: Elle and Emily wore variations on the same sheer lace dress on Tuesday afternoon Striking: Elle, the younger sister of Abbey Clancy drew attention to her features with liberallly applied make-up selected from a soft colour palette All three were in high spirits as they mingled with guests at the event, which also included appearances from Leonie Atlanta and Survival of the Fittest star Georgie Clarke. The willowy blonde claimed her own share of attention in a fitted pink dress with white embellishments and a daring thigh-high slash. Racegoers sipped on beer, wine and bottle of Champagne as the action got underway at the five-day meeting - the jewel in the crown of the British racing season. Don't mind me: Georgia stood out as she posed for photos with Georgie outside the enclosure Eleven months after welcoming her first child, The Hills alum Whitney Port flaunted her bikini body on Tuesday while vacationing inItaly for the first time with her husband Tim Rosenman. The 33-year-old new mother showcased her abs in a red Wanderlust $69 'Elle' underwire top and $59 'Ava' string bottom while relaxing poolside at the Palazzo Avino in Ravello. 'It's a little too quiet at the pool and I'm drunk,' the LA-born socialite - who boasts 2.7M social media followers - captioned her Insta-story. Eleven months after welcoming her first child: The Hills alum Whitney Port flaunted her bikini body on Tuesday while vacationing in Italy for the first time with her husband Tim Rosenman 'It's a little too quiet at the pool and I'm drunk': The 33-year-old new mother showcased her abs in a red Wanderlust $69 'Elle' underwire top and $59 'Ava' string bottom while relaxing poolside at the Palazzo Avino in Ravello 'Timmy keeps telling me to speak softer.' Whitney has maintained her fit 5ft10in frame with 'a lot of spinning and a little hot yoga.' 'I just don't have as much time to work out so when I do it needs to be quick,' Port told AOL.com last week 'I need a good sweat for me to feel like it was worthwhile. We also live up in the [Studio City] hills so when I can't make it to the gym, I take [my son] Sonny on long walks and I break a sweat.' 'I just don't have as much time to work out so when I do it needs to be quick': The LA-born socialite has maintained her fit 5ft10in frame with 'a lot of spinning and a little hot yoga' The Colosseum: Whitney and the former The X Factor producer - who shoots and edits his wife's vlog I Love My Baby, But... - are in Europe to attend a wedding in Prague this weekend 'Finding hidden gems': Port wrote that she 'couldn't be happier' touring historic sites such as Rome's Trevi Fountain The Bloom2Bloom co-founder and the former The X Factor producer - who shoots and edits his wife's vlog I Love My Baby, But... - are in Europe to attend a wedding in Prague this weekend. The Home & Family lifestyle expert wrote that she 'couldn't be happier' touring historic sites such as Rome's Trevi Fountain. On Saturday, Whitney was so 'nauseous' she 'missed' visiting the Vatican, but 'bounced back' in time to check out the famed Spanish Steps in the capital. By Monday, the married couple of two years made it to resort town Ravello located near the Amalfi coast, which she called the 'most beautiful place I've ever seen.' 'Go me': On Saturday, the Bloom2Bloom co-founder was so 'nauseous' she 'missed' visiting the Vatican, but 'bounced back' in time to check out the famed Spanish Steps in the capital. Nice view: By Monday,the married couple of two years made it to resort town Ravello located near the Amalfi coast, which she called the 'most beautiful place I've ever seen' 'All of a sudden I like lobster': Port and Rosenman - who head to Positano on Wednesday - also enjoyed a dinner date and rose wine at the nearby Belmond Hotel Caruso Port and Rosenman - who head to Positano on Wednesday - also enjoyed a dinner date of delicious-looking lobster salad and rose wine at the nearby Belmond Hotel Caruso. Whitney and Tim left their cherubic curly-haired son - nicknamed 'Chicken' - back in California for the holiday, but they did take him on his first road trip to San Francisco a few weeks ago. 'We don't know [how we'll celebrate Sonny's first birthday on July 27] yet!' the USC grad told AOL.com. 'We were thinking just a simple BBQ/pool party in our backyard with a small, intimate crew. But we don't have any set plans yet!' XXXTentacion was gunned down in Deerfield, Florida, on Monday afternoon in what police believe was a 'possible robbery.' After the news of his death broke, the 20-year-old rapper's music rapidly climbed the charts. On Tuesday, the recording artist's only two albums occupied the top two slots on Amazon's Movers And Shakers Digital Music list. RIP: XXXTentacion was gunned down in Deerfield, Florida, on Monday afternoon in what police believe was a 'possible robbery'; his 2017 mugshot The rapper's most recent album, ? - which dropped in March - saw a 41,306% spike as it charged to number one on the Seattle-based company's digital list. Meanwhile, his debut studio LP, 17, which was unveiled in August of 2017, was up about 9,000%. His move up the chart isn't limited to digital, as he is also receiving plenty of attention in the hard copy sales section. He holds the number two and three spots on the CDs and Vinyl category, where the vinyl LP of ? jumped 542,566% and the CD spiked 54,057%. Climbing the charts: After the news of his death broke, the 20-year-old rapper's music rapidly climbed the charts At the top: On Tuesday, the recording artist's only two albums occupied the top two slots on Amazon's Movers and Shakers Digital Music list XXXTentacion's music was also seen climbing up the iTunes charts. His single Sad! climbed to number one, while the track Changes reached number five - both songs are from his most recent LP. At the same time, his newest album rocketed to number three on the chart, while 17 moved up to number five. Thousands: His debut studio LP, 17, which was unveiled in August of 2017, was up about 9,000% The rapper was pronounced dead on Monday at a Florida hospital after being rushed there in a 'comatose' condition by paramedics following the shooting. The Broward County Sheriff's Office confirmed his death, tweeting: 'The adult male victim has been confirmed as 20 year old Jahseh Onfroy aka rapper #XXXTentacion. According to TMZ, two armed suspects approached his vehicle as he left a motorcycle dealership where he'd been checking out new models. Scene: The rapper was pronounced dead on Monday at a Florida hospital after being rushed there in a 'comatose' condition by paramedics following the shooting The website said one of the suspects, described as black males wearing hoodies, shot him before both men then left the scene in a black Dodge Journey with dark tint and black wheels. TMZ also reported that the shooter was wearing a red face mask. 'Witnesses say they heard multiple shots fired,' a source told the website. Video taken right after the shooting was circulating on social media Monday, including images of the shot rapper slumped behind the wheel of his car. In the clip, someone can be seen feeling for a pulse as XXXTentacion appears unconscious. Her ex Brooklyn Beckham has appeared to found fresh romance with model Lexy Panterra. But Chloe Moretz was joined by another man in her life, her brother Trevor, as they emerged from their hotel in Paris on Tuesday. The actress, 23, cut an effortlessly stylish figure in a mustard coloured coat atop a stylish all-black look as she headed out with her sibling. Chic: Chloe Moretz was joined by another man in her life, her brother Trevor, as they emerged from their hotel in Paris on Tuesday. Chloe cut a stylish figure in the statement coat which caught the eye and completed the look with a pair of chic boots. Enhancing her features with a striking coat of make-up, Chloe accessorised with a pair of cool shades and earrings. Her blonde locks were effortlessly tousled to one side and she toted her belongings in an across-the-body bag. Meanwhile, speculation has been rife that stunning model Lexy has been dating Chloe's ex Brooklyn since late May when the pair were first spotted hugging outside a New York photography studio. Looking good: The actress, 23, cut an effortlessly stylish figure in a mustard coloured coat atop a stylish all-black look as she headed out with her sibling Fashionista: Chloe cut a stylish figure in the statement coat which caught the eye and completed the look with a pair of chic boots Happy: Chloe looked in good spirits as she enjoyed the day out with her brother Beauty: Enhancing her features with a striking coat of make-up, Chloe accessorised with a pair of cool shades and earrings A source told Us Weekly at the time: 'Lexy and Brooklyn had a whirlwind romance last week in New York City.' The couple were also seen at Catch over that weekend, where they were not shy of showing their affection, and were then spotted enjoying McDonald's on a night out earlier this month. 'Brooklyn and Lexy were holding hands during dinner and couldn't stop laughing and touching each other,' the insider added. Mane attraction: Her blonde locks were effortlessly tousled to one side and she toted her belongings in an across-the-body bag On her own: Despite her recent break-up, Chloe looked to be loving single life Brooklyn and Chloe split in March, with the photography student spotted locking lips with Playboy model Lexi Wood the following month. He and Chloe have been on and off for a number of years, but rekindled their romance in September 2017, when Brooklyn moved to the States to study photography. Chloe previously revealed of their reunion: 'I think we chose each other... you come back and it's like no time spent away from each other at all.' Moving on: Meanwhile, speculation has been rife that model Lexy has been dating Chloe's ex Brooklyn since late May when the pair were first spotted hugging in NYC Love is in the air. Gilmore Girls alum Sean Gunn just announced that he is engaged to his girlfriend, actress Natasha Halevi. The Guardians of the Galaxy actor, 44, shared the news via Instagram on Monday. Engaged! Gilmore Girls alum Sean Gunn proposed to actress Natasha Halevi while on holiday in Kyoto, Japan 'I asked @tashalitas to marry me and she said yes. Or to be more precise she said, 'a million times,'' he captioned a pic of his bride-to-be kissing him on the cheek. She, of course, showed off her engagement ring in the shot. The Missouri native popped the big question as the couple vacationed in Kyoto, Japan. 'Wrote a long thing, but, instead. . . WE'RE ENGAGED YOU GUYS!' Halevi captioned a photo of the pair hugging. Sharing the news: The duo both went to social media shortly after he popped the question to announce to their friends, fans and family that they are officially engaged The couple began dating last year. In January, Gunn reflected about their time together. '2017 was tricky for the planet, but personally it was probably the best I've had, mostly because I met @tashalitas,' he gushed on social media at the time. He'd later call her a 'real-life wonder woman,' adding, 'She's smart and tough and funny and has great taste in cats.' It has been six years since she soared to fame after wowing on The X-Factor with girl-group, Fifth Harmony. And Camila Cabello, 21, showed off her impressive style game as she arrived at NRJ radio station in Paris, France on Tuesday. Taking inspiration from the surroundings, the Bad Things hitmaker, 21, embraced Parisian chic in a striped navy shirt-dress and matching beret. Parisian chic: Camila Cabello showed off her impressive style game as she arrived at NRJ radio station in Paris, France on Tuesday. All eyes were on Camila as she strutted along in sky-high monochrome boots while waving to adoring fans. The star showed off her lean legs in the loose-fitting garment which was a mixture of a shirt and knit. The collared number perfectly flattered her frame, while also showing off her flair for fashion. Camila's luscious brunette locks were tamed in place with the chic hat and her features were enhanced with a glamorous coat of make-up. Stylish: Taking inspiration from the surroundings, the Bad Things hitmaker, 21, embraced Parisian chic in a striped navy shirt-dress and matching beret Pins on parade: The star showed off her lean legs in the loose-fitting garment which was a mixture of a shirt and knit The beauty proved to be happy and healthy after recently being forced to pull out of the Seattle leg of Taylor Swift's Reputation tour. Camila headed straight to the hospital following her performance at the Billboard Awards last month, taking to Twitter 'So yesterday after my performance at the billboards, I was feeling really sick and ended up in hospital to get checked out,' she wrote on Twitter. Camila is a former member of The X Factor's Fifth Harmony and split from the girl group back in December 2016 in pursuit of a solo career. Striking: The collared number perfectly flattered her frame, while also showing off her flair for fashion Beauty: Camila's luscious brunette locks were tamed in place with the chic hat and her features were enhanced with a glamorous coat of make-up Back to health: The beauty proved to be happy and healthy after recently being forced to pull out of the Seattle leg of Taylor Swift's Reputation tour 'It was as painful as a breakup, a five-year breakup,' she told Rolling Stone in an interview. 'I don't think there was ever a point where I was like, 'I want to leave because I'm the breakout star." 'If we were in the same situation now, it would probably be fine for everyone to make their own music while being in the group, because I think everyone understands now that you can't limit people. That's why people break free.' She has since gone on to find international success as a solo artist. For the last few months, Big Little Lies has been filming scenes for its second season in northern California. But on Monday, Nicole Kidman was seen farther south as she shot scenes for the hit HBO series in Los Angeles. The 50-year-old actress cut an elegant figure as she joined her co-stars Reese Witherspoon, 42, and Shailene Woodley, 26, on set. Headed south: Nicole Kidman was on the LA set of Big Little Lies in LA on Monday The always stylish Far And Away star graced the set with casual sophistication as she donned a long beige coat. Her fine red tresses were styled straight and glimmered in the sun as they blew back after catching a light gust. The wife of Keith Urban added a touch of comfort with colorful trainers as she was snapped while making her way into the back seat of a black Maybach. Witherspoon and Woodley, meanwhile, couldn't stop smiling as they walked side by side along a chain-link fence. Star trio: The 50-year-old actress cut an elegant figure as she joined her co-stars Reese Witherspoon, 42, and Shailene Woodley, 26, on set Pulling it back: Woodley's long dark tresses tumbled down across her chest as she did her best to tuck a few locks behind her ears Woodley's long dark tresses tumbled down across her chest as she did her best to tuck a few locks behind her ears. Rolling back the sleeves of a dark jacket a couple of inches, the Adrift star grinned while next to her blonde castmate. Witherspoon's trademark blonde hair was parted down the middle and fell across her pink top. What a view: On Saturday, speculation arose that filming for the series had come to an end after Kidman shared an idyllic image to Instagram; she was in Monterey A black cardigan was draped across the star and she pulled up her sleeves as well in an effort to keep cool under the afternoon sun. On Saturday, speculation arose that filming for the series had come to an end after Kidman shared an idyllic image to Instagram. The Oscar-winner posted a snap of herself against a scenic backdrop, and captioned the photo: 'It's been an absolute joy to film in #Monterey. 'So sad to leave but thank you for the warmth and hospitality. #BigLittleLies.' However, it seems that the conjecture was a bit ahead of itself as the trio of stars seemed to have flocked south for a few more shots. She first burst onto the scene as tempestuous Demelza on BBC phenomenon Poldark. And Eleanor Tomlinson made sure all eyes were on her as she rocked the red carpet at the closing ceremony and Golden Nymph awards at the 58th Monte Carlo TV Festival on Tuesday. The stunning actress, 26, flaunted her sensational figure in a sparkling floral lace gown, with a plunging neckline that drew attention to her ample cleavage. Red carpet ready: Eleanor Tomlinson channels Hollywood glamour in a pastel blue lace gown as she joins Joanne Froggatt at the Monte Carlo TV Festival on Tuesday The pastel blue design boasted an array of glistening flowers that centered on her minuscule waistline. Eleanor complemented her glitzy ensemble with a chic gold box clutch, chandelier earrings and Yoko London ring. The flame-haired beauty slicked back her glossy tresses in a sleek straight style while a rosy make-up palette highlighted her natural beauty. Wow: Joanne Froggatt looked every inch the A-lister as she stepped out on the red carpet at the star-studded bash Sheer daring: The stunning actress flaunted her sensational figure in the sparkling design, with a plunging neckline that drew attention to her ample cleavage Stunning style: The pastel blue design boasted an array of glistening flowers that centred on her minuscule waistline Elenanor ensured her ensemble and incredible figure did all the legwork and went without any extra glittering jewelry, with just a diamond ring for extra sparkle. The London native has been wowing viewers week after week in her role as Demelza in Poldark, starring alongside lead Aidan Turner who was won mass fan appeal thanks to his hunky shirtless scenes. But in a recent BBC Breakfast interview, Eleanor said she doesn't understand why Aidan's torso has earned so much fan appeal. Sophisticated: Eleanor complemented her glitzy ensemble with a chic gold box clutch, chandelier earrings and Yoko London ring Beauty: The TV star's features were enhanced with a striking coat of make-up, including blush-infused cheeks and smoky eyeshadow. She said: 'Aidan would much prefer to be known for his performance four years in, but he's a very good looking man. 'It's daft it's on every cover of every paper. 'It seems a shame it keeps coming back to that. 'I've not spoken to him about it but I'm sure he's taking it in his stride like the gentleman he is.' Ultra chic: Joanne proved to be super glam in her look for the night as she wowed in the flowing black piece which boasted an asymmetrical cut-out detailing Oh-so-chic: Putting prominence on her decolletage, Joanne scraped her blonde tresses into a chic bun and accessorised with drop silver earrings Meanwhile, Downton Abbey beauty Joanne Froggatt looked every inch the A-lister as she stepped out on the red carpet at the star-studded bash. Looking undeniably regal, the actress, 37, showed off her sensational cleavage in a striking cut-out black dress. Joanne proved to be super glam in her look for the night as she wowed in the flowing black piece which boasted an asymmetrical cut-out detailing. Sizzling: Swedish model Victoria Silvstedt couldn't be missed in a striking canary yellow gown with a dangerously high thigh slit and plunging neckline to show off her eye-popping assets Regal red: Also in attendance was Joanne's Downton Abbey co-star Jessica Brown Findlay who looked ravishing in a high-neck scarlet gown Classic look: Jessica paired her dazzling display with platinum silver stilettos and glittering accessories The sleeveless number went on to cinch in her waist before skimming over the rest of her figure. Putting prominence on her decolletage, Joanne scraped her blonde tresses into a chic bun and accessorised with drop silver earrings. The TV star's features were enhanced with a striking coat of make-up, including blush-infused cheeks and smoky eye shadow. Joanne recently left viewers heartbroken after delivering a raw performance in the ITV drama Liar, where she played rape victim Laura Nielson. Decadent: Making a regal appearance was Princess Charlene of Monaco, who looked the height of sophistication in a dazzling white floor-length gown with diamond earrings And pose: Princess Charlene joined French director Charles Berling (L), Spanish actor Pedro Alonso and Thierry Fremont (R) on the red carpet Royal appearance: Princess Charlene positively glowed as she chatted to fans on the red carpet in her Grace Kelly-inspired attire The series gripped many throughout its run, and ended with Laura's accuser Andrew Earlham - played by Ioan Gruffudd - found dead in the marshes. While a second series has been confirmed, producers have not set a definitive air date, saying that it is expected to air some time in 2019. Elsewhere, Swedish model Victoria Silvstedt couldn't be missed in a striking canary yellow gown with a dangerously high thigh slit and plunging neckline to show off her eye-popping assets on the red carpet. Family affair: Prince Charles of Bourbon-two Sicilies (2L), Princess Camilla of Bourbon-two Sicilies and their children all displayed their glamorous ensembles on the red carpet Shimmering: Quebec actress Sophie Cadieux (L) opted for a skimpy blush slip dress under a matching oversized blazer, while Disney boss Anne Sweeney looked sensational in blue satin The blonde bombshell toted a sparkling silver clutch bag and sauntered down the red carpet in a pair of feathered skyscraper heels. Also in attendance was Joanne's Downton Abbey co-star Jessica Brown Findlay who looked ravishing in a high-neck scarlet gown with platinum silver stilettos. Making a regal appearance was Princess Charlene of Monaco, who looked the height of sophistication in a dazzling white floor-length gown with glamorous diamond statement earrings. Loved up: Minority Report star Neal McDonough cosied up to wife Ruve as they shared a sweet smooch in front of the cameras Cosy: Thorsten Kaye and his Bold And The Beautiful co-star Katherine Kelly Lang posed up a storm in their glamorous looks for the evening It's the reality show that has gripped the nation, with its launch night pulling in more than five million viewers. And former Love Island star Jess Shears has spilled the behind-the-scenes secrets of what goes on in the villa. The model, 25, claims contestants are offered more alcohol on first dates to 'loosen them up and be flirtatious', while series two star Scott Thomas, 29, added producers give the singletons pep talks to pursue love interests. Boozy: Former Love Island star Jess Shears has spilled the behind-the-scenes secrets of what goes on in the villa, claiming contestants are given more alcohol on first dates to 'loosen them up' Jess told Closer: 'We were rationed with alcohol - they didn't want us to be out-of-control drunk, so we'd only be allowed three small glasses of wine a night. 'On the nights where there was a celebration or new islanders, we got a few bottles of bubbly for the group. 'One-on-one dates would always have more booze though, especially a first date -they wanted to loosen you up a bit and be more flirtatious.' Sparks flying: She said: 'One-on-one dates would always have more booze though, especially a first date -they wanted to loosen you up a bit and be more flirtatious' Sensible: Jess (pictured) added: 'We were rationed with alcohol - they didn't want us to be out-of-control drunk, so we'd only be allowed three small glasses of wine a night' Meanwhile, Scott, who found love on the show with Kady McDermott before splitting in December last year, said producers 'egg you on' to go and pursue your love interest, giving individuals pep talks and 'confidence boosts'. And if contestants had a particularly good chat, the reality star revealed they would sometimes have to film it again so producers would get the right angle. He added contestants are under 'villa arrest' for the time they are in there, saying reality stars are only allowed out if they are taken on a date or if the group heads out for a day. During his time in the villa, Scott said bosses would give them a beach day every two weeks, where boys and girls spent time apart separately and away from the cameras. Pep talk: Meanwhile, ex series two islander Scott Thomas said producers 'egg you on' to go and pursue your love interest, giving individuals pep talks and 'confidence boosts' Enclosed: Scott added contestants are under 'villa arrest' for the time they are in there, as he said the reality stars are only allowed out if they are taken on a date or if the group heads out for a day Meanwhile, Jess, who is happily engaged to Dom Lever after meeting him on last year's show, added many of the contestants would have meltdowns about missing family and friends and 'wasn't surprised' about Niall Aslam leaving the villa from reports of stress and anxiety, confessing she too found the show 'really tough'. The star's revelations on the hidden antics comes after ex-islander Olivia Attwood previously suggested the Islanders get up to some wild antics behind-the-scenes. She admitted that during a day off she and some of the other girls in the villa sneaked off to a bar. Behind closed doors: Meanwhile, Jess, added many of the contestants would have meltdowns about missing family and friends Olivia said: 'Amber, Montana and I we were being chaperoned on our one day off and we ran away to a bar and started doing shots!' 'We got in so much trouble, I thought they were going to chuck us off the island! I've never seen anyone so angry. 'Two minutes of freedom and we literally did a runner. That's probably why we didn't get another day off!!' A spokesperson for Love Island said: 'Occasionally in the past, some Islanders have been taken out of the villa - for example last year all of the girls were taken out for beauty treatments. But this is at the producers discretion and it is very much done on an ad hoc basis (as opposed to a set day each week). 'The majority of the dates, which are filmed, take place away from the villa.' It can be hard to get noticed in the Big Apple. But Jonah Hill had no problem turning some heads with his new pink hair color during a casual stroll in downtown Manhattan on Tuesday. The 34-year old actor met up with a lady friend for some iced coffee in Greenwich Village. Colorful: Jonah Hill, and his new hot pink hair, met up with a lady friend for some iced coffee Tuesday afternoon in the Greenwich Village section of New York City The Wolf Of Wall Street actor appeared to be enjoying his edgy new look, as seen by the big smile he had on his face during the afternoon jaunt. Then, at one point, he broke out in laughter when his friend whisked her hands through his hair and seemed to give her take on his new hairdo. Jonah looked even more colorful wearing his go-to tie dye Grateful Dead t-shirt, along with some black gym shorts and black sneakers. His female friend opted for a less conspicuous outfit in denim jeans, a black t-shirt and sandals. Making a statement: Jonah broke out into laughter as his friend assessed his new pink hair Consistent: The actor has been photographed a slew of times wearing tie dye t-shirts since production began on his directorial debut Mid-90's last year The comedian debuted his new pink hairdo on his Instagram page on Friday, with the caption: 'Omg you guys !' His new hair color reappeared in a selfie Jonah posted on Saturday, in which viewers could see Vampire Weekend performing in the background. The Moneyball star has been going through a bit a transformation the last couple of years. He's lost about 40lbs since late 2016 by cutting out beer, and his fashion of choice has been tie-dye t-shirts since production began on his directorial debut Mid-90's. Making a change: Jonah debuted his new pink hairdo on his Instagram page on Friday, with the caption: 'Omg you guys !' The movie has been described as coming of age drama that revolves around a skateboarding teenager and his relationships with his school friends, older brother and mother. Hill also wrote the screenplay and has previously revealed that he was inspired by the films Kids and This Is England. No release date has been announced for Mid-90's, but it is expected to hit theaters sometime this year. Hill also has two other films in production that includes starring in the Gus Van Sant film Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot, which also stars Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara and Jack Black. Rockin' out: His new hair color reappeared in a selfie Jonah posted on Saturday, in which viewers could see Vampire Weekend performing in the background They have been together for almost ten years, and have welcomed two children since their 2010 wedding. But Doutzen Kroes and Sunnery James looked as besotted as ever on Tuesday, as they continued to enjoy their holiday in Ibiza. The model, 33, gave a flash of her toned midriff in a boho blouse and denim shorts as she frolicked with her husband in the sea - and playfully jumped onto his back as they wandered along the beach. Happily married: Doutzen Kroes and Sunnery James looked as besotted as ever on Tuesday, as they frolicked on the beach in Ibiza Heart-warming: The pair are enjoying a family holiday on the island with their two children - son Phyllon, seven, and daughter Myllenna, four The couple appeared completely content as they enjoyed a rock-pooling session with their two children - son Phyllon, seven, and daughter Myllenna, four. The supermodel was seen making her kids giggle, as they collected a number of rocks and shells from the cove. Only proving her playful nature further, Doutzen then leaped onto her husband's back later on - forcing him to give her a piggy back as they wandered along the shore. Exploring: The couple appeared completely content as they enjoyed a rock-pooling session with their two children Having a ball: The supermodel was seen making her kids giggle as they collected rocks and shells from the cove, and snapped photos along the way Leap of faith: Only proving her playful nature further, Doutzen then leaped onto her husband's back later on - forcing him to give her a piggy back as they wandered along the shore Refreshments: The group later stopped for an alfresco lunch by the water Sweet: Doutzen and Sunnery shared a warm embrace as they dined in the sunshine Doutzen is clearly enjoying some much-needed time off with her nearest and dearest - having been spotted going for lunch with a friend earlier that day. The mother-of-two showed off her enviable figure in the striped grey blouse, which cut off at her waist to leave her impressively toned abs on show. Known for her slender frame, the beauty then teamed the top with thigh-skimming shorts, which accentuated her slim waist with their high-rise fit. Active: The family later tried their hands at skimming Effortless: Doutzen took to the skill like a pro Impressed: Her son and husband watched on with amazement as she lobbed the stone into the sea Stunning: Doutzen is known for her athletic and gym-honed frame She kept comfortable for the outing in black flip flops, but accessorised with dark, oversized sunglasses in a more glamorous finishing touch. Leaving her hair in loose, tousled waves and opting for minimal make-up, Doutzen drew attention to her enviably glowing and sun-kissed complexion as she stepped out in the sunshine. In a recent interview with FASHION magazine, Doutzen claimed she was 'very lucky' to be born with such an incredible figure as she discussed her success in the modelling world. Stunning: Doutzen is clearly enjoying some much-needed time off with her nearest and dearest - having been spotted going for lunch with a friend earlier that day Turning heads: The model, 33, gave a flash of her toned midriff in a boho blouse and denim shorts as she stepped out in the Spanish sunshine Chic: She kept comfortable for the outing in black flip flops, but accessorised with dark, oversized sunglasses in a more glamorous finishing touch Natural beauty: Leaving her hair in loose, tousled waves and opting for minimal make-up, Doutzen drew attention to her enviably glowing and sun-kissed complexion as she stepped out She also acknowledged that the fashion world is completely different to when she first started, and that younger models are now at an advantage. 'When I started out, the [fashion] industry was more playful and not as calculated,' she explained. 'Now, because of social media, everyone knows everything - there's all these 15-year-old girls who know all the big photographers and fashion designers.' Doutzen first rose to prominence in 2005 after being chosen as Vogue.com's 'Model Of The Year', she went on to be named a Victoria Secret's Angel in 2008. She's known for her sensational fashion displays, whether that be on the catwalk or the red carpet. And Lara Stone pulled out all the stops once again as she posed up a storm at the Serpentine Gallery Summer Party on Tuesday night. The model, 34, flaunted her leggy frame in a bold print minidress, but made sure to cosy up to new beau David Grievson, 37, at the exclusive bash. Effortless chic: Lara Stone, 34, flaunted her slender pins in a bold print mini dress as she cosied up to boyfriend David Grievson, 37, at the Serpentine Gallery Summer Party on Tuesday Cute couple: Laura later walked arm-in-arm with her property developer beau as they left the swanky soiree, with David looking sharp in a tailored midnight blue suit and black dress shoes Lara showcased her endless pins in the thigh-grazing mini dress which sheathed her slender physique. Featuring layers of ruffles and a bold graphic design, the Dutch beauty opted for neutral accessories, pairing the dress with scallop nude stilettos and a sequin bag. She styled her platinum blonde locks in a low ponytail and complemented the look with black eyeliner, blush-swept pinks and a candyfloss pink lipstick. Loved up: The model met London-based Grievson through friends in January and was then seen with London-based David at Chanels Paris Fashion Week presentation in March Close: A source told The Sun : Lara and David are really in love, their relationship has moved faster than expected but they seem completely besotted' Laura later walked arm-in-arm with her property developer beau as they left the swanky soiree, with David looking sharp in a tailored midnight blue suit and black dress shoes. The model met London-based Grievson through friends in January and was then seen with London-based David at Chanels Paris Fashion Week presentation in March. A source told The Sun: Lara and David are really in love, their relationship has moved faster than expected but they seem completely besotted.' Wow factor: The stunning model flaunted her leggy frame in a bold print mini-dress as she turned up to the star-studded bash Turning heads: She styled her platinum blonde locks in a low ponytail and complemented the look with black eyeliner, blush-swept pinks and a candyfloss pink lipstick Her relationship with the businessman is thought be her first serious relationship since she divorced her husband David Walliams. Lara started dating the comedian and Britain's Got Talent judge in 2009, with the couple tying the knot in January 2010. The former flames, who share their young son Alfred, were married in a lavish ceremony at Claridges' hotel, in London, in May 2010. They went their separate ways for good in September 2015. Touch of nude: Featuring layers of ruffles and a bold graphic design, the Dutch beauty opted for neutral accessories, pairing the dress with scallop nude stilettos and a sequin bag Elsewhere, guests at the Serpentine bash enjoyed margaritas from Casamigos, founded by George Clooney, Rande Gerber and Mike Meldman. The event is aimed at launching the Serpentine Pavilion - which is a building commissioned by a different architect each year. Tickets for the fundraiser retail at an eye-watering 3999 per person, with previous hosts of the event including Tommy Hilfiger, Christopher Kane and Brioni. Each year the party takes place in and around a specially designed pavilion, which then stays open for a series of evening talks and events for the public. She excitedly announced she was expecting her first child with husband Daniel Craig in May. And Rachel Weisz displayed her pregnancy glow for all to see as she stepped out for a casual stroll around New York on Tuesday. The esteemed actress, 48, concealed her growing bump in a billowing floral patterned sun dress underneath a casual denim jacket. Out and about: Rachel Weisz, 48, exhibited her blooming baby bump in a floral dress and denim jacket as she stepped out in NYC on Tuesday Opting for comfort on her stroll, Rachel paired her casual attire with white plimsolls and toted her belongings in a maroon leather hand bag. Rachel rocked a pair of vintage-style white oval shades and kept her brunette tresses naturally straight. The Mummy star left her flawless complexion alone with only a touch of minimalist make-up as she trotted out on her own, without 007 hunk Daniel. Low key: Opting for comfort on her stroll, Rachel paired her casual attire with white plimsolls and toted her belongings in a maroon leather hand bag Rachel announced she is expecting her first child with James Bond star Daniel back in May. The beauty already shares her 11-year-old son Henry with filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, while Daniel is father to daughter Ella with actress Fiona Loudon. After revealing her pregnancy to the New York Times, Rachel gushed: 'I'll be showing soon. Daniel and I are so happy. On her way: Rachel rocked a pair of vintage-style white oval shades and kept her brunette tresses naturally straight 'We're going to have a little human. We can't wait to meet him or her. It's all such a mystery.' She later talked about raising her newborn in the UK, with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. 'Is the child going to be raised American or English,' Colbert asked the NYC resident, causing Rachel to quip: 'I suppose it will have to be bilingual!' Gina Rodriguez is trying to put that big studio money to good use. The 33-year-old actress decided to put her allotted 2018 FYC funds from CBS TV Studios toward paying for the education of an undocumented high school student. Every year in advance of the Emmy nominations, TV networks and studios shell out massive sums of money on campaigns to promote their submitted creatives and shows. Giving back: Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez, 33, has talked CBS into letting her put her 2018 Emmy campaign money towards a college scholarship for an undocumented high school student; here she is seen at the Emmys in 2017 Her hit series: Here she is seen, far right, with Andrea Navedo as Xo on and Ivonne Coll as Alba Jane The Virgin The Jane The Virgin star talked CBS into letting her not spend the money on glam for campaign events or themed swag. Rodriguez decided the money the studio was going to give her was going to go toward funding a college scholarship for an undocumented Latinx student. 'Our show has always jumped at any opportunity to help me do something for the Latinx community,' Rodriguez told Hollywood Reporter. 'So I asked my showrunner, Jennie [Snyder Urman], if we could do something different with the money this year.' No win: The beauty has never been nominated for an Emmy. She did win a Golden Globe in 2015 and received nominations in 2016 and 2017 for her work on Jane The Virgin. The show returns for its fifth and final season in 2019 Making a difference: The brunette beauty has served on the Hispanic Scholarship Funds board of directors since 2015; seen in February at the CDGA event The brunette beauty has served on the Hispanic Scholarship Funds board of directors since 2015. She worked with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles to find the perfect candidate for this award. The money will be given to an unnamed Latina high school student who will be attending Princeton University in the fall. How'd she choose the scholarship winner? She worked with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles to find the perfect candidate for this award; seen filming Someone Great in May Another job: Here Gina is pictured in a scene from Brooklyn Nine-Nine The Hollywood Reporter says the scholarship will cover all four years of her education. Rodriguez hesitated about going public with the decision at first. Jane The Virgin highlights the stories and challenges of undocumented immigrants in America over the past few years. So that means the scholarship still effectively functions as a promotion of the shows values while serving a greater purpose. The Carmen Sandiego star has never been nominated for an Emmy. She did win a Golden Globe in 2015 and received nominations in 2016 and 2017 for her work on Jane The Virgin. The show returns for its fifth and final season in 2019. Spotify is facing backlash for adding XXXTentacion's music to one of their popular rap playlists following his shocking death on Monday. The streaming service, which wiped the 20-year-old rapper's music from their platform in response to domestic violence claims against him, is being criticized for capitalizing on his death. The day after the rapper was killed, his music was topping music charts. 'I see why Beyonce said f**k Spotify, just a few weeks ago they were bashing XXXTENTACION & taking him off all the playlist now they're trying to capitalize off his passing smh [sic],' one Twitter user wrote. Spotify is under fire for promoting XXXTentacion's music in branded playlists after pulling it over abuse allegations Fans have been gathering outside the Deerfield Beach, Florida business where XXXTentacion was shot and killed Another said: 'Wait so Spotify removes #XXXTentacion from all playlists but once he's dead he's back and made the main page and has his own playlist. @Spotify all about the [money bag emoji].' In May, the streaming service announced a new policy that said Spotify would no longer use their branded playlists to promote artists associated with 'hateful conduct'. This behavior, according to the newly implemented stratagem, included domestic and/or sexual abuse and other such offenses. Spotify's Vice President told Billboard at the time they did not want the new rule to be about censorship and would only apply it to situations 'so particularly out of line with our values, egregious, in a way that it becomes something that we don't want to associate ourselves with'. XXXTentacion, accused of being physically and emotionally abusive to his pregnant ex-girlfriend and beating a gay man, was found to be in violation of the company's anti-hate policy. R. Kelly was also removed from promoted playlists for his alleged sexual crimes. Many users felt it was unfair for Spotify to single the two men out when many other artists who weren't punished, are accused of similar crimes. On June 1, 2018, the company reversed this decision, releasing the following statement: 'Across all genres, our role is not to regulate artists. Therefore, we are moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct. 'We don't aim to play judge and jury.' So @Spotify takes down @xxxtentacion music but than puts it back up when he passes away to make $$ off his music..... Sad! Andy Kella (@TheAndyKella) June 19, 2018 XXXTentacion fans have been quiet about the rapper's appearance on Spotify, or lack there of, since the streaming service announced their amended decision. On Tuesday, however, they couldn't help but notice that as reports began circulating that his music was posthumously topping the Billboard charts once again, XXXTentacion had returned to Spotify's branded playlists. Two of his songs were featured in the top two spots on their Rap Caviar Playlist. XXXTentacion dead XXXtentacion, born Jahseh Onfroy, was shot and killed outside RIVA Motorsports in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Footage from the incident appears to show the musician slumped over the wheel of his car after shots were fired. Broward County Sheriff's confirmed that the incident occurred at around 3:57pm ET. In a statement, authorities described a developing incident at the motorcycle shop. 'An adult male victim was transported to an area hospital,' the statement said. It's sad to see a company you enjoy like @Spotify absolutely sell their soul for the bottom line in the way they used and abused @xxxtentacion before and after his death. Despicable. I don't plan on using it for the time being. Gross. Peter Gackenbach (@kephasdesire) June 19, 2018 Officials later tweeted: 'The adult male that was taken to the hospital has been pronounced dead.' The police department tweeted another statement about the incident, revealing that they believed it may have been 'a possible robbery'. A Louis Vuitton bag was reportedly stolen from XXXTentacion's car. Is XXXtentacion still alive? There has been confusion online about whether XXXTentacion is actually dead due to the circulation of an old video in which the rapper says: 'Everybody got to chill the f**k out. No one said I'd died. Relax. I had to hurry up and f**king post so you didn't think I was dead. 'I don't want any of my fans killing themselves. Calm the f**k down, calm your nipples. Calm the f**k down. Chill the f**k out. Okay?' The video appears to be one he put out in 2017 after sharing a video showing him seemingly hanging himself. It was later revealed that the clip in question was part of a music video, which XXXTentacion said he was trying to preview for fans. Broward County Sheriff's Department officials confirmed that the rapper did, in fact, die on Monday shortly after he was shot. Who killed XXXTentacion? Police do not know who killed XXXtentacion. Speculation is rife online, but it does not appear law enforcement officials have any leads. Rappers Soldier Kidd and Soldier Jojo, both of whom were rumored to have played a part in XXXTentacion's death, set the record straight on Instagram. Both vehemently denied killing the recording artist and sent condolences to his family. 'I've been seeing a lot of comments, I've been seeing a lot things [SIC] going on social media saying that I had something to do with XXXTentacion's passing,' Soldier Kidd said. 'My condolences go to the man's family and whatnot. [But] I had nothing to do with it, but I'm going to keep my head up and stay positive like I always do.' Soldier Jojo said: 'We respect everybody, straight up. We ain't with none of that s**t man. I respect that man for what he is and RIP to that man.' Geneva Ayala GoFundMe XXXTentacion's ex-girlfriend Geneva Ayala's GoFundMe page, set up to help pay for medical bills stemming from the alleged assault by the rapper, saw an influx of donations in the wake of his shooting. The fundraiser was first started in October 2016 to allow Geneva to undergo surgery she needed after an 'aggressive hit' to the face damaged her eye. The Blast reported that, prior to XXXTentacion's death, Geneva's fundraiser barely met her $25,000 (19,000) goal. After, it was just over $32,000 (24,000) and growing. Geneva Ayala, the ex-girlfriend who accused XXXTentacion of abusing her while she was pregnant, is speaking out after the rapper's death. On Tuesday she took to Twitter to express her sadness after the 20-year-old was shot while leaving a Deerfield Beach, Florida motorcycle dealership. 'I know y'all don't f**k w me, but this isn't about me. Just please stop tagging me in disrespectful threads and arguments. I honestly don't care for any of the hype. I lost someone close to me. Leave me alone,' she wrote on Twitter. The ex-girlfriend of XXXTentacion, Geneva Ayala, has spoken out following his death XXXTentacion was shot dead outside a Deerfield Beach, Florida motorcycle dealership on Monday She then said: 'It's disgusting that people are speaking for me. I don't care if no one cared about me however many months ago, I didn't lose my life, he did. It's permanent. I'm still here. Like how do you think that makes me feel? Everyone expecting me to be relieved of happy?! No, i'm broken [sic].' Geneva has been relatively quiet since early June when she spoke with the Miami New Times about her contentious relationship with XXXTentacion, real name Jahseh Onfroy. In the interview, she recalled meeting the rapper, whom she accused of brutalizing her after five months of dating. its disgusting that people are speaking for me. i dont care if no one cared about me however many months ago, i didnt lose my life. he did. its permanent. im still here. like how do you think that makes me feel? everyone expecting me to be relieved or happy?! no, im broken. bloodsucca (@hisl0nelystar) June 19, 2018 She also told the outlet that after he beat her so badly she had to set up a GoFundMe campaign to cover necessary medical procedures. XXXTentacion's fans painted her as a liar and got her crowd sourcing page deleted following a review by the site. The page was reactivated and has seen an influx of donations following the rapper's passing, however. Geneva's GoFundMe had barely reached her $25,000 goal before XXXTentacion died. Less than 24 hours after his death, she was over $34,000 in donations. What else do you need to know about Geneva Ayala? Here's the scoop. Geneva Ayala baby Geneva Ayala revealed in her testimony against XXXTentacion that she was pregnant during much of the abuse she endured at her then-boyfriend's hands. The two had been trying to have a baby at the time. Before he died, XXXTentacion alleged that Geneva was unfaithful during their relationship and the child wasn't his. 'Geneva f**ked my homeboy...She tried to bribe me and my mother and my people for $3,000,' he said in a recorded phone call that was uploaded on the web. 'Stop believing the motherf**king rumors. I did not beat that b***h; she got jumped. Bye.' In another call, XXXTentacion said: 'For all you dumb f**k ass n****a that thought this stupid b***h was pregnant. I've got the paperwork signifying that she wasn't pregnant.' Geneva Ayala abuse In September 2017, Pitchfork published Geneva Ayala's testimony regarding abuse she suffered from XXXTentacion. The testimony featured a graphic account of threats, physical violence and scare tactics used against her. Per her testimony, the abuse began in May 2016. Geneva recalled XXXTentacion threatening to penetrate her with a 'barbecue cleaner'. Months later, after the pair moved to Orlando, Florida together, she said he kicked, punched, tackled and 'stomped on' her. XXXTentacion also allegedly threatened to 'cut out' her tongue because she was singing another artists song. In September of that year, while on house arrest for another crime, XXXTentacion allegedly put a knife to Geneva's throat, strangled her 'a little' and threatened to hit her with a glass bottle. They moved to Sweetwater, Florida later that month and the abuse reportedly continued. She learned she was pregnant in October 2016. On the sixth of that month, XXXTentacion reportedly threatened to kill her and her unborn child. He then allegedly elbowed, punched and kicked her. Geneva said she requested treatment and instead was taken to another apartment where she was locked in a bedroom for days. On October 8, 2016, she said she was able to escape and get in touch with police. In 2017, TMZ reported that Geneva filed paperwork asking that prosecutors drop the case against XXXTentacion. Later that month he was arrested for allegedly coercing her into signing the documents in question. Geneva Ayala GoFundMe Geneva Ayala set up a GoFundMe to pay for medical bills related to injuries she suffered after reportedly being beaten by XXXTentacion. The page received a number of donations, including $5,000 from her former boyfriend, before it was unexpectedly shut down. Geneva told the Miami New Times XXXtentacion's fans accused her of lying about the severity of her injuries and the abuse she suffered. When GoFundMe caught wind of these claims, they shut down the crowdfunding effort. In a statement to the outlet, a spokesperson for GoFundMe said: 'If a campaign is reported, our team looks into it to request sufficient information regarding the use of funds. 'In this case, the campaign was reported to us, and we reached out to the campaign organizer to collect additional information. Sufficient information was provided, and the campaign has been reactivated.' Following XXXTentacion's death, Geneva's GoFundMe has seen an increase in donations. Geneva Ayala Instagram After news of XXXTentacion's death broke, Geneva Ayala shared a tribute to the rapper on Instagram. She posted a crayon drawing of the two of them, writing: 'i want to scream at the top of my lungs until i can't keep screaming. i don't want to believe this. no one know. the s**t. i feel. for you [sic].' It seems like she's mere moments away from giving birth. But Kate Hudson didn't look like she was rushing towards anything on Tuesday in Skiathos, Greece where she was spotted soaking up the sun in a PilyQ yellow bikini. The Almost Famous actress, 39, put her blossoming belly on full display while splashing around with partner Danny Fujikawa and family. Belly up! Kate Hudson enjoyed her last vacation before the birth of her daughter, seen splashing around Skiathos, Greece wearing a tiny yellow bikini which made a prominent display of her pregnant belly The Fabletics co-founded skipped into the water for a small splash, making a fine display of her toned legs and arms. Keeping things easy going, Kate brushed her cropped dirty blonde locks back out of her face with minimal styling. She took a second to chat with beau Danny on the beach. The musician had a camera around his neck, making sure not to miss any important moments. Water's warm! The Fabletics co-founded skipped into the water for a small splash, making a fine display of her toned legs and arms She took a second to chat with beau Danny on the beach. The musician had a camera around his neck, making sure not to miss any important Later Kate was seen hanging out with mom Goldie Hawn and her partner of three-and-a-half decades Kurt Russell around the Mediterranean town. It was Kate's last trip before hunkering down to have her third offspring. Talking to People, an insider said: 'She was excited about traveling to Europe one last time before her baby girl arrives.' The source continued, saying: 'She and Danny are great.' Snapshot! She took a second to chat with beau Danny, who carried a camera around his neck so as to not miss any special moments 'Kate is bubbly with excitement every time she talks about Danny and how they are having a family together. She is crazy about Danny.' They finished by confirming that Ms. Hudson is due in August. Kate is expecting a girl, who will be younger sister to sons Ryder Robinson, 14, Bingham Hawn Bellamy, six. They've been putting on show-stopping performances during their energetic No Filter Tour. And Mick Jagger, 74, proved there's no slowing him or his Rolling Stones bandmates down as they rocked London's Twickenham Stadium for the final night of their UK tour on Tuesday. The iconic frontman pulled out his signature strut for the adoring crowd as he belted out the band's hits alongside Ronnie Wood, 71, Keith Richards, 74, and Charlie Watts, 77. Energetic: Mick Jagger, 74, rocked the stage for a high-octane performance during the Rolling Stones' London performance Proving age is just a number, Mick flaunted his trademark wild style in a flamboyant peacock-inspired bomber jacket over a sparkling cobalt blue dress shirt. The Paint It Black hitmaker paired his striking attire with classic black jeans and matching trainers as he jived and shimmied across the stage. Mick put all of his energy into the crowd-pleasing display. Rocking out! Proving age is just a number, Mick flaunted his trademark wild style in a flamboyant peacock-inspired bomber jacket over a sparkling cobalt blue dress shirt Can't stop moving: The Paint It Black hit maker paired his striking attire with classic black jeans and matching trainers as he jived and shimmied across the stage Powerful: Mick's trademark long brunette locks were loosely tousled and as he put all of his energy into the crowd-pleasing display The father-of-eight was joined by Ronnie, who rocked out in his own vibrant flame-embellished red velvet jacket over a tangerine and purple T-shirt. The infamous guitarist paraded around the stage alongside Keith, who sported his trademark scarf wrapped around his silver locks and a sharp leather jacket. Keith wowed the crowd with his notorious talent while in a peppermint green shirt and purple paisley tie attached to his blue jeans. Moves like Jagger! Mick couldn't be stopped as he pulled his famous strut around the stage Palling around: The father-of-eight was joined by Ronnie, who rocked out in his own vibrant flame-embellished red velvet jacket over a tangerine and purple T-shirt Belt it out! Mick banded about the stage with effervescence while Ronnie and Keith rocked out behind him Signature style: The infamous guitarist paraded around the stage alongside Keith, who sported his trademark scarf wrapped around his silver locks and a sharp leather jacket After saying goodbye to their home nation in style, The legendary group will then fly to Berlin, Marseille, Stuttgart, Prague and Warsaw to finish off their European tour. Ahead of the tour, Mick said: 'This part of the No Filter tour is really special for the Stones. We are looking forward to getting back on stage and playing to fans in the UK and Ireland. 'It's always exhilarating going to cities we havent played for quite a while and also some new venues for us like Old Trafford and The London Stadium.' Jet setting: After saying goodbye to their home nation in style, The legendary group will then fly to Berlin, Marseille, Stuttgart, Prague and Warsaw to finish off their European tour Still got it: Although the band haven't toured in the UK since 2006, they headlined at Glastonbury and the BST Festival five years ago Legendary: Keith (L) wowed the crowd with his notorious talent while in a peppermint green shirt and purple paisley tie attached to his blue jeans Although the band haven't toured in the UK since 2006, they headlined at Glastonbury and the BST Festival five years ago. There is nothing stopping the four-piece, who have a combined age of 293 and embarked on their first British tour in 1963. The band's manager Joyce Smyth told Music Week: 'When you want to keep going, you keep going. There is no reverse gear for this band, its onwards and upwards and pushing forwards the whole time.' Is Ali Oetjen's dramatic physical transformation the result of cosmetic surgery? A Beverly Hills plastic surgeon told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday that the new Bachelorette, 32, appears to have made several significant changes to her face. Comparing older photos of Ali with more recent footage, Dr. Urmen Desai believes the fitness blogger has undergone multiple procedures in recent years. Scroll down for video The price of beauty! Ali Oetjen's dramatic physical transformation has been explained by a top Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. Pictured left: Ali in her teens and right: Ali earlier this year 'When looking at current images of her body [compared] to those when she starred on The Bachelor in 2013, it is clear she has had breast augmentation,' said Dr. Desai. The Harvard-educated CEO of DesaiPlasticSurgery.com added that Ali 'likely went from a large A-cup size to a small D-cup size' as a result of the operation. 'With regards to her face, Ali has obviously had her upper and lower lips over-injected with fillers,' claimed Dr. Desai. Expert opinion: Comparing older photos of Ali with more recent footage, Dr. Urmen Desai believes she has undergone multiple procedures. Pictured left: Ali in 2013 and right: Ali in 2017 'In addition to this, her forehead is frozen without any motion, which points to the fact that she likely had Botox injections to her forehead. 'Finally, in order to assist with reversing the ageing process, she has likely received filler injections to her cheeks to achieve a more youthful face.' Dr. Desai is also of the opinion that Ali could have undergone rhinoplasty. Breast enlargement: The Harvard-educated surgeon claimed Ali appears to have '[gone] from a large A-cup size to a small D-cup size'. Pictured left: Ali in her youth and right: Ali in 2017 Surgery: Ali has admitted in the past to undergoing a breast enlargement, however she has 'denied having Botox and lip fillers' according to OK! magazine. Pictured: Ali in the past year 'Considering that her nose is a bit more defined than it was on The Bachelor in 2013, she may have had nose reshaping surgery in order to narrow her nasal tip as well as the bridge of her nose (nasal dorsum). 'This is highlighted in images of her taken straight on, as well as side profile views.' Ali is not a patient of Dr. Desai's and the surgeon made his professional assessment solely based upon before and after photos. Ali has admitted in the past to undergoing a breast enlargement, however she has 'denied having Botox and lip fillers' according to OK! magazine. She also told Hit105's Stav, Abbey and Matt in April that she 'hadn't even had Botox in [her] forehead before.' Plump pout: 'With regards to her face, Ali has obviously had her upper and lower lips over-injected with fillers,' Dr. Desai said. Pictured left: Ali in her youth and right: Ali in 2017 'She looks like Malibu Barbie': Rumours about Ali's possible surgery intensified during her appearance on Bachelor In Paradise earlier this year Rumours about Ali's possible surgery intensified during her appearance on Bachelor In Paradise earlier this year. Fellow contestant Florence Moerenhout claimed that she 'looks like Malibu Barbie' and observed that her 'face doesn't really move'. Ali was announced as Australia's fourth Bachelorette at the conclusion of Bachelor In Paradise in late April. Frozen in time! 'She has likely received filler injections to her cheeks to achieve a more youthful face,' Dr. Desai added. Pictured left: Ali in her youth and right: Ali in 2017 She said: 'I have had my heart broken, but I've picked myself up and I'm ready to put my heart on the line again. I'm absolutely thrilled to start this new adventure.' Network Ten's decision proved controversial, however, after Ali's ex-boyfriend Grant Kemp claimed to have 'legitimate, legal proof' she cheated on him in March. She previously rose to fame as a contestant on first season of The Bachelor in 2013. Daily Mail Australia has contacted Network Ten for comment. Controversial decision: Ali was announced as Australia's fourth Bachelorette in late April Candice Swanepoel shared the first photo of her newborn son on Tuesday. The 29-year-old South African model welcomed her second child with partner of 13 years, Hermann Nicoli, earlier in the day. And the sweet snap of Candice holding her baby boy on Instagram was captioned: 'Thank you so much for all the well wishes... Our little man was born this morning at home and he couldnt be more perfect.' Big news: Candice Swanepoel shared the first photo of her newborn son on Tuesday The stunner had shared the news of his birth on her Instagram stories when she posted a photo of the baby's hand with the words, 'Blessed.' The Victoria's Secret favorite and her Brazilian partner already has son Anaca Nicoli nearly two years ago. The new addition's name is still yet unknown. The New York-based beauty's fiance hails from Brazil and Candice fitted in a pre-baby getaway to Vitoria, Espirito Santo in the country, ahead of her due date. The baby is here! She shared the news on Tuesday on her Instagram stories when she reveled a photo of the baby's hand with the words, 'Blessed' The Victoria's Secret beauty first announced she was pregnant with her second child in December, writing 'Christmas came early #2,' on Instagram next to a bump-highlighting snap. Candice and Hermann became engaged in 2015. Previously, Candice admitted that she wants to have a 'bunch of kids' but would leave her future in the hands of fate. Wedding bells: The Victoria's Secret model got engaged to her longtime love and baby daddy Hermann Nicoli in 2015 She said: 'I don't plan too much into the future. I believe a lot in destiny and that what happens - you can try to manifest certain things, but I definitely do want to continue having a great career and building my family as well because I'm really loving that. I definitely want to have a bunch of kids.' And, although her first child is still very young, it's hardly surprising that she's decided to add to her brood as she has admitted she's enjoying every second of motherhood. She gushed: 'It's such a mixture of feelings. It's amazing though - I'm loving motherhood. I loved my pregnancy too, all the different stages.' Lisa Armstrong has already reportedly slammed her former pal Anne-Marie Corbett for 'breaking girl code' with her romance with her estranged husband, Ant McPartlin. And it has now emerged that the make-up artist 'suspected months ago' that their former PA was romantically involved with her former flame after seeing a picture of Ant carrying a packed lunch which appeared to be given to him by Anne-Marie. While the new relationship came to light on Saturday, a source told The Mirror that Lisa already had a sneaking suspicion: 'It was a niggling feeling at the back of her mind.' 'It was a niggling feeling': Lisa Armstrong reportedly 'suspected months ago' that their former PA Anne-Marie Corbett was romantically involved with her estranged husband Ant McPartlin after seeing a snap of him carrying a packed lunch in March The snap, which was taken back in March, saw Ant emerging from his flat in London carrying some food in tupperware. Anne-Marie, 42, was then seen taking the rubbish out the same day - leading Lisa to believe there was something more to the two. Lisa allegedly contacted Anne-Marie's estranged husband Scott Corbett, who she split with in 2017, to get to the bottom of the snaps. It was continued to the publication: 'When the news came out, it all clicked into place. She was heartbroken.' MailOnline has contacted representatives for Ant for further comment. Close: Anne-Marie, 42, was seen taking the rubbish out the same day as Ant was pictured with the packed lunch - leading Lisa to believe there was something more to the two 'She was heartbroken': Lisa allegedly contacted Anne-Marie's estranged husband Scott Corbett, who she split with in 2017, to get to the bottom of the snaps. Meanwhile, Ant's new lover Anne-Marie Corbett emerged on Tuesday following claims she was sacked by his ex-wife Lisa while she was a PA to the couple. Looking glamorous, the blonde stepped out after it was alleged that she had been 'upset' by Lisa's claims, as the pair have never seen eye-to-eye - although tweets unearthed by The Sun seem to show a friendship dating back six years. Her relationship with Ant emerged over the weekend, with ex-wife Lisa revealing she had been friends with the personal assistant during their marriage, and slamming her for 'breaking girl code' with the romance. Heading out: On Tuesday, Ant's new lover Anne-Marie emerged following claims she was sacked by his ex-wife Lisa while she was a PA to the couple 'Hardly the actions of a best mate': A friend of Anne-Marie's has claimed the pair 'never got on', and that Lisa even sacked her as the couple's PA (pictured with Ant McPartlin in 2015) However, a source close to Anne-Marie has now claimed this was far from the case - revealing the pair 'often clashed' and that Lisa even sacked her as the couple's PA. The insider blasted claims she and Lisa were close friends, and revealed Anne-Marie has been angered by the make-up artist portraying the image of a 'betrayal'. The source told The Sun: 'She hated working for Lisa and they didn't get on well at all. They often clashed. In the end Lisa sacked her. That's hardly the actions of someone's 'best mate'.' Infuriated by the response to Lisa's tweets, the insider added: 'Anne-Marie's biting her tongue, but she's hurt and angry by the way this is playing out from Lisa's end.' Heading out: Anne-Marie's romance with Ant emerged over the weekend, with ex-wife Lisa slamming her for 'breaking girl code' with the romance due to their friendship Deadpan: It seems Anne-Marie was remaining calm and collected in the face of the storm surrounding her boyfriend's estranged wife A day later, the publication unearthed images of Twitter messages exchanged by the pair dating back to 2012 - in which they appeared to display a firm friendship. In 2012, Lisa penned a message to Anne-Marie reading: 'Babe, I've missed you!!! When we gonna have a catch up?' Four years later, she wished the staff member happy birthday, writing: 'Happy birthday to my gorgeous friend @amzie33 congratulations on your 40th!! Hope you've been spoilt rotten (well I know you have)!!' Ant's romance with Anne-Marie emerged on Saturday, five months after he filed for divorce from his wife of twelve years Lisa. Heartbroken by the news, the brunette immediately took to Twitter to criticise her ex-husband's new girlfriend, and blast Ant for failing to have the 'decency' to tell her about their news. Legs eleven: She looked extremely glamorous as she headed out Devastated: Ant's new relationship is believed to have rocked make-up artist Lisa, who tweeted a broken heart emoji at 5am hours after the news was first unveiled Lisa revealed to her 122,000 followers that she often invited Anne-Marie into their marital home as a 'friend', despite her job as their personal assistant. At 5am on Sunday morning she simply tweeted a broken heart emoji, signifying her upset, before going on to reveal she only found out about the relationship due to its coverage in the papers. When a Twitter follower asked whether or not she had been warned by Ant before it appeared in the media, she replied: 'Nope. Just how you guys did.' Earning her stripes: She was also holding on to a stylish striped handbag Keeping her cool: Anne-Marie is yet to speak out about her relationship with Ant yet friends have discussed Lisa's various claims about the news Former love: Anne-Marie split from her husband Scott Corbett (right) in 2017. Sources have reiterated Ant played no part in the deterioration of the marriage She then received a tweet of support from TV personality Nicola McLean, before replying: 'Thanks babe and to think she was MY friend!! xx' Another follower said 'so much for the girl code', to which Lisa answered: 'Exactly!' Lisa then replied to a follower to say that Anne-Marie was her friend and personal assistant to both her and Ant, adding that she let her 'into OUR home'. Anne-Marie split from her husband Scott Corbett in 2017. Sources have reiterated Ant played no part in the deterioration of the marriage. It has since been revealed that Lisa is allegedly livid with Ant for asking her to 'return the jewellery he bought for her', so it could be valued for their divorce settlement. Moving on: Ant's romance with Anne-Marie emerged on Saturday, five months after he filed for divorce from his wife of twelve years Lisa (pictured above on a dog walk) A source told the Sun that Ant's legal team requested that necklaces and rings bought as gifts were assessed by an expert. They added: 'Lisa refused because she fears she'll never see them again. It's causing a rift but is just one of many things. 'There have also been heated rows about money, property, all sorts of things this is just the latest thing to drive a wedge even further between them.' MailOnline has contacted Ant's representatives for comment. While Ant has remained silent on social media, the presenter's pals are thought to have rallied round him, and assure him that he is allowed to move on. A friend told The Mirror: 'It's time Ant is allowed to live his life. It's been 10 months now everyone needs to move on... There are no children involved... I am sure he will always wish Lisa well.' Since the breakdown of the couple's 18-year relationship, Ant has increasingly leaned on personal assistant Anne-Marie, who herself broke up with her husband in October. Anne-Marie was present when Ant arrived at a police station in March to answer drink driving charges, and was also at his later court hearing. A source told The Sun on Sunday: 'He's had a tough time of it, but Anne-Marie has put a smile back on his face again - she has been his rock. 'They have been living in each other's pockets, day in, day out. Knowing someone is there for him has brought him back from the brink she's put him back together again.' Furious: Lisa revealed to her 122,000 followers that she often invited Anne-Marie into their marital home as a 'friend', despite her job as their personal assistant The source added their alleged romance was 'early days' but friends close to the star are hoping he can put his woes behind him and 'find happiness again' with the separated mum. MailOnline has contacted Ant's representatives for comment. It has since been claimed that Lisa wants to take her ex-husband 'for every penny' he has, following the emergence of the romance. She has reportedly told pals 'the gloves are off' in their divorce battle, after being left heartbroken by his relationship with their long-time PA. They've been together for 24 years and married for 17. And Pierce Brosnan and his wife Keely Shaye Smith looked happier than ever as they enjoyed a lunch date at E Baldi in Beverly Hills. The Bond star, 65, and presenter Keely, 54, were perfectly in sync as they headed home following their romantic tete-a-tete at the celebrity hotspot. Still smitten: Pierce Brosnan and his wife Keely Shaye Smith looked happier than ever as they enjoyed a lunch date at E Baldi in Beverly Hills Pierce was looking suave as ever in a grey checked jacket, adding a smart touch to his shirt and jeans. He placed a protective hand on wife Keely's back as the couple made their way out of the venue. The brunette beauty was dressed to impress in a simple black shift dress, adding a glamorous touch with some dazzling jewellery. The look of love: The Bond star, 65, and presenter Keely, 54, were perfectly in sync Slick: Pierce was looking suave as ever in a grey checked jacket, adding a smart touch to his shirt and jeans Dining in style: The pair were seen heading home following their romantic tete-a-tete at the celebrity hotspot Keely donned a silver chain necklace and matching earrings, and carried a black leather handbag. Pierce and Keely shared a sweet smile as they exited the restaurant. They both dote on their two sons together - IMG model Dylan, 21, and Next model Paris, 17. Smart: The brunette beauty was dressed to impress in a simple black shift dress, adding a glamorous touch with some dazzling jewellery Dazzling: Keely donned a silver chain necklace and matching earrings, and carried a black leather handbag In sync: The pair looked blissfully happy as they enjoyed some quality time together Happy couple: The Hollywood star met Keely in 1994 while on holiday in Mexico, and it was love at first sight The actor tragically lost both his first wife Cassandra Harris and daughter Charlotte to ovarian cancer. He also has sons Chris, 45, and Sean, 34, with his late wife. The Hollywood star met Keely in 1994 while on holiday in Mexico, and it was love at first sight. They tied the knot in a romantic ceremony at Ballintubber Abbey,in Ireland, in 2001. Fan favourite: Pierce was happy to take pictures with fans at the dinner table Down-to-earth: The British star was his usual polite self as he chatted to the fan Smart: The dapper star dressed up his jeans with a statement jacket Adani's blueprint to protect groundwater in the Queensland Galilee Basin from its $16.5 billion coal mine is primarily designed to protect the company from prosecution, an expert says. Former National Water Commission consultant Tom Crothers has called for the Queensland government to reject Adani's proposed groundwater dependent ecosystem management plan, claiming it is bereft of environmental protective measures. "When impacts are identified, the plan talks about the investigation, analysis, and more investigations and more analysis and it just goes on forever," Mr Crothers told AAP. Labor deputy leader Tanya Plibersek has choked back tears in response to the murder of Melbourne woman Eurydice Dixon, saying there's no question Australians want violence against women to stop. Ms Plibersek recalled the 1988 abduction and murder of Janine Balding, and the 1986 murder of Anita Cobby in an impassioned interview. "These women stay with us, they stay in our hearts because they change the behaviour of every woman and we need to get this right as a society," she told Sky News on Tuesday. "There's no question that every decent person feels disgusted by this crime, feels desperately sad for the friends and family of all of the women who have lost their lives to men's violence. "And there's no question that every decent Australian wants this to change, to stop." Thousands gathered on Monday evening to remember 22-year-old Ms Dixon on the Melbourne field where she was found after being raped and murdered, with hundreds of others joining them in solidarity across the nation. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten stood shoulder to shoulder surrounded by colleagues at a vigil held at Parliament House. "I was so heartened to see how many people turned out, because this is a shocking, it's a terrible, terrible story and it's right that people should be shocked by it," Ms Plibersek said. A Qantas plane en route to Port Macquarie on the NSW mid-north coast has returned to Sydney after being hit by lightning. Flight QF2164 returned shortly after take-off on Tuesday morning, a Qantas spokeswoman told AAP. "Aircraft are designed to withstand and fly safely when struck by lightning but it is policy that they get inspected at their arrival port after a strike. "Port Macquarie does not have the engineering support required for this inspection so the flight returned to Sydney," a statement read. "At no point was the safety of the flight compromised." Passengers were transferred onto another flight, the Qantas spokeswoman said, thanking customers for their understanding. Retailers big and small are facing fresh calls to ban single-use plastic bags as the major supermarkets prepare to make a permanent switch to re-usable bags. Woolworths will no longer supply free disposable bags to shoppers from Wednesday, with Coles following suit on July 1 in an attempt to dramatically reduce the number of plastic bags in their stores. German discount supermarket chain Aldi has never had free plastic bags in its Australian stores since launching in 2001. Jon Dee, who co-founded the National Plastic Bag Campaign in 2002 and heads the DoSomething Foundation, hopes the move by the supermarket giants will inspire other retailers to switch to re-usable bags. While many states have banned single-use plastic bags, Mr Dee says the federal government should legislate to ensure a nation-wide ban. "Now you have the big three national supermarkets in sync on plastic bags, from the DoSomething Foundation's point of view it's time for all of Australia's other retailers to follow that example," he told AAP. "So we are calling on Environment Minister Josh Frydenburg to step up to the plate and finally do something on a national basis about plastic bags and expand this ban that Woolies and Coles and Aldi have. "There's no reason now why we can't have that fully across the country." South Australia was the first state to ban single-use plastic bags in 2009, with the Northern Territory and ACT following two years later and Tasmania in 2013. Queensland and Western Australia are introducing similar bans on July 1, while Victoria has said it plans to introduce one but is yet to set a date. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has said her state doesn't need to introduce a ban because supermarkets are managing the issue. As states move to train more young people through TAFE, the education union is warning the sector is "perilously close" to collapsing. The NSW government is scrapping fees for 100,000 apprentices in Tuesday's budget, following Victoria's move to make almost 50 courses free in its May budget. But the Australian Education Union believes training for plumbers, nurses, childcare staff and others is under threat because there's not enough federal government funding. They claim enrolments have "declined alarmingly" over the last four years. "Government funding cuts have left the TAFE sector perilously close to collapse," union TAFE secretary Pat Forward says. She says TAFE is the worst-funded education sector and was hit with a 15 per cent cut in funding between 2007 and 2016. Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud has issued an impassioned plea to help communities ravaged by drought. Mr Littleproud, who is extending a welfare payment known as the farm household allowance from three to four years, argues it is not just the federal government's responsibility to support outback towns through dry spells. "I encourage every Australian, if they want to do their bit for farmers and regional and rural communities, get off your arse and get out there," the minister told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday. Cost-of-living pressures will be eased for NSW families with a suite of measures including multi-million dollar packages for new parents and childcare in the 2018/19 state budget. In handing down the budget on Tuesday, NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet said families were reaping the benefits of the government's strong financial position with cost-of-living relief a key sweetener in the coalition's final budget before the next state election in March. "The budget at its core has a strong heart - it's for the people," Mr Perrottet said. Following the success of last year's rebate for active kids, the government is introducing a creative kids rebate with parents getting a $100 voucher for each school-aged child to be used for extracurricular activities such as music, drama and coding. Mr Perrottet described the active kids' program as "hugely successful" with 390,000 vouchers issued in less than six months. Access to early childhood education will be boosted with nearly $200 million over four years to extend government subsidies to all three-year-olds in preschool. The government predicts the move, which will provide access for all children to attend two years of preschool, will save families about $825 a year. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian says the funding will ensure cost is not a barrier for parents when they are considering preschool for their youngsters. New parents will also be supported with a $156.5 million package to improve the well-being of parents and their babies, including a $7.6 million baby bundle of essential items to help with their child's early health and development. "As joyous as early days are, they can also be tough, we want to make sure the support is there," Mr Perrottet said. It will be easier for families to get savings on bills with the government spending $19 million to make Service NSW centres across the state one-stop shops to access government rebates, refunds and concessions. Mr Perrottet says the state's "rock-solid" financial foundation has made it possible for the government to put people first and help families get ahead. MUSICAL CHAIRS IN THE AUSTRALIAN SENATE * BRIAN BURSTON (One Nation to independent to United Australia Party) A spectacular falling-out with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson led to Brian Burston's bizarre switch to Clive Palmer's rebadged United Australia Party. His defection on Monday came minutes after he told the Senate he would sit as an independent. * FRASER ANNING (One Nation to independent to Katter's Australian Party) Anning made a chaotic start to life as a federal politician, with Pauline Hanson kicking him out of One Nation on the grounds he had abandoned the party. His refusal to stand aside to pave the way for Malcolm Roberts' return after he was claimed by dual citizenship saw him banished to sit as an independent. He joined Bob Katter's Australian Party earlier in the month. * STEVE MARTIN (Jacqui Lambie Network to independent to Nationals) The former Devonport mayor had a barney with his one-time leader Jacqui Lambie after he declined to give up his seat for her. Lambie's dual citizenship led to Martin's entry to parliament. He sat as an independent until joining the Nationals, bringing the party back from the dead on the Apple Isle last month. * TIM STORER (Nick Xenophon Team to independent) By the time the citizenship saga thrust Storer into the Senate in March, the South Australian had left Nick Xenophon's party. He chose to sit as an independent after being elected because he was next on the NXT's Senate ticket after Skye Kakoschke-Moore, who was ruled ineligible by the High Court. * LUCY GICHUHI (Family First to independent to Liberals) Replaced Bob Day in the Senate because she was next on Family First's ticket. But she declared she would sit as independent following Family First's merger with the Australian Conservatives. After almost seven months on the crossbench, the South Australian senator joined the Liberal Party in February. * CORY BERNARDI (Liberals to independent to Australian Conservatives) The towering South Australian was accused of betraying Liberal values when he quit the government in February 2017 to sit as an independent and then set up his own Australian Conservatives party in April of that year. The party struggled in its home-state election in March, losing both upper house MPs in SA's upper house. New Western Force recruit Jeremy Thrush says Friday night's clash with the Crusaders is winnable, but he knows it will be tough to find chinks in the champion NZ outfit. The Crusaders sit on top of the Super Rugby ladder with a 12-2 record, but the defending champions will be missing their All Blacks stars in Friday's World Series Rugby clash in Perth. The Force put up a good fight in their recent loss to the Melbourne Rebels, and the Perth-based franchise is desperate to push the Crusaders all the way. The death of 46 cattle on an Australian live export ship to China has been blamed on a respiratory virus rather than the shocking conditions which plunged the sheep industry into crisis. Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud said the livestock deaths were not related to heat stress which was behind thousands of sheep perishing on Middle East-bound voyages last year. "The initial reports that I've received only indicate that they relate to a respiratory problem," Mr Littleproud told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday. After the sheep scandal, the government imposed a raft of reforms on the industry including independent observers on all live export ships. But the changes haven't gone far enough for Labor. The opposition is attempting to amend government legislation to put harsher penalties on dodgy live exporters with a five-year phase out of live sheep exports and suspension of the northern hemisphere summer trade. Mr Littleproud said the penalties, which include 10 year jail terms and multi-million dollar fines, would cover all livestock exporters. "They've chucked an amendment about live sheep on it," he said. "This is a political stunt and it hangs around their neck." The government has parked the legislation amid concerns rogue Liberal MPs might support the Labor amendment to end live sheep exports. Mr Littleproud insists his hand is still out to the opposition, which wants the government to test the support for live sheep exports in parliament. Labor's agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon says his party is ready to support the increased penalties, despite believing they will be ineffective. "If the government is confident it has the numbers in the house and therefore we lose the amendment, then we will simply pass the bill unamended," Mr Fitzgibbon told reporters. A man who stabbed a French tourist in the neck at a national park in Adelaide has been sentenced to more than four years in prison. Antoni James Barresi, 25, pleaded guilty to aggravated causing serious harm with intent and aggravated assault over the 2017 attack. In the South Australian Supreme Court on Tuesday, Justice Martin Hinton jailed Barresi for four years and seven months with a non-parole period of two years and seven months. Barresi stabbed Maxime Michel during an altercation in the Belair National Park and was arrested at a nearby railway station. Mr Michel, who had arrived in Adelaide the day before the incident, suffered stab wounds to his neck and hand and was taken to hospital. Barresi had originally been charged with attempted murder but prosecutors accepted his guilty plea to the lesser offence. At a sentencing hearing last week, counsel for Barresi said his mental health was "significantly poor" and he was psychotic when the attack took place. He had been homeless and, for that reason, always carried a knife. In a victim impact statement translated from French and read in court, Mr Michel said the attack had made him fearful and ruined his hopes of becoming a professional firefighter. "I truly believe I have been the victim of attempted murder, even if the charges against Mr Barresi do not correspond to the reality I experienced," the statement read. A car has crashed into a retail shop shortly before another vehicle ploughed into a nearby pharmacy in Sydney's south. In the first accident, a car smashed through the front windows of Cartridge World on Queen Street in Campbelltown about 1.30pm on Tuesday. Nobody was injured but the driver was taken to Campbelltown Hospital for assessment, a NSW Police spokesman told AAP. Thirty minutes later, two people were taken to the same hospital with minor injuries after their car slammed into nearby Sefton's Pharmacy on Chamberlain Street. A man in his 70s received cuts to his legs but it is not yet known whether he was a pedestrian or in the vehicle, police said. Alex Chamaa, the owner of the next-door Totto's Take Away, said he heard a loud noise and went out to inspect the commotion. "He (the driver) went all the way through the chemist," Mr Chamaa told AAP on Tuesday. "We were in shock." A West Australian Labor MP has been ordered to delete a social media account by Premier Mark McGowan over a controversial "rape prevention" post. Darren West retweeted a list of "Ten Rape Prevention Tips" which included "when you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone". He then deleted his Twitter account. In his final post, Mr West said he was following the lead of federal Labor MP Ed Husic, who bowed out of the social media platform's "bully pulpit" last year. But Mr McGowan told 6PR radio on Tuesday: "I rang him and said he should get off". Labor has branded the NSW government's latest budget a "con", claiming households across the state have never had it so hard. Treasurer Dominic Perrottet lauded Tuesday's budget as one that "puts people first" with plenty of sweeteners ahead of the 2019 state election thanks to a $3.9 billion surplus. Opposition leader Luke Foley said it took the government eight years to discover health and education - which also received funding boosts. "But it is a con," Mr Foley told reporters in Sydney. Shadow treasurer Ryan Park said it was far from a "people's budget", citing the cost of toll roads, electricity price hikes and flat-lining wages. "There has never been a more difficult time to live in NSW than what is occurring right here, right now," he said. The NSW Greens, meanwhile, criticised the government for failing to put money towards tackling climate change. For the third year in a row, the coalition has underspent money earmarked for the climate change fund, the party's treasury spokesman Justin Field said. "Every day the NSW government delays or underinvests in action causes risk to people, communities and our environment," he said in a statement. The NSW Council of Social Service applauded the multi-million dollar package to subsidise pre-school for three-year-olds and extra money for homelessness. But chief executive Tracy McLeod Howe said there was not enough investment in social and affordable housing. "While there is positive investment in people in this year's budget, NSW needs a formal mechanism to assess the impact budgets have on people's well-being," she said in a statement. The $87 billion infrastructure spend over four years was welcomed by business, as was the 100,000 fee-free apprenticeships and payroll tax relief for more than 5000 companies. Sydney Business Chamber's Patricia Forsythe said a strong pipeline of projects will mean more jobs and a more productive economy. The Rail, Tram and Bus Union said while many of the transport announcements were welcome they "lacked substance" to genuinely improve public transport across NSW. Tasmanian Liberal Premier Will Hodgman has been forced to apologise to the state's parliament after mistaking his whereabouts during a party vote on ABC ownership. The Liberal Party Federal Council at the weekend voted in favour of privatising the public broadcaster. Asked about his position during question time on Tuesday, Mr Hodgman said he would "never" have voted for privatisation and wasn't in the room when the vote happened. Labor then tweeted a photo it claimed showed Mr Hodgman looking at his phone in the room at the time of the vote. He later corrected the record. "I inadvertently advised the house that I was not present in the debate and the vote," Mr Hodgman said. "It has come to my attention that while I was present, I did not participate in the debate nor did I vote in support of the motion. "The footage shows I was more focused on my imminent address." Labor labelled Mr Hodgman's initial comments an outright lie. "(He) obviously didn't know this evidence existed and treated the parliament with the same contempt he shows for Tasmanians," Labor MP David O'Bryne said in a statement. A man has been charged with sexually assaulting a woman in Melbourne's northwest weeks after allegedly robbing a pizza delivery driver. Police say the 36-year-old from Heidelberg Heights was arrested by detectives and charged over both incidents on Tuesday. The charges include theft, blackmail and sexual assault arising from an attack at Broadmeadows on June 8 during which he allegedly assaulted a woman and stole her phone. The man has also been charged with robbery and other offences over the incident involving the pizza delivery driver at Clifton Hill on March 17. He is due to face the Melbourne Magistrate's Court late on Tuesday. A motorist has been charged by police, accused of causing a motorcyclist's death in Melbourne's northeast. Police allege the 24-year-old, from Yallambie, was travelling with the rider, who mounted a nature strip, fell from his bike and hit a brick letter box in Doncaster last September 17. The 29-year-old, from Box Hill, died at the scene while a 53-year-old man from Doncaster was injured after being struck by the bike. The Yallambie man was charged on Tuesday with several offences, including culpable driving and driving in a manner dangerous causing death. He has been bailed to face Melbourne Magistrate's Court on June 22. A man is recovering in hospital after being shot during a western Sydney street fight. The brawl broke out before 1pm on Tuesday near the corner of Mackay and Bennett Roads in South Granville. Police say the men had fled by the time officers arrived and not long after a man attended Auburn Hospital with a gunshot wound to his arm. He remained in a stable condition on Tuesday afternoon. Police are eager to speak with three men involved in the altercation but witnesses have only been able to describe them as being of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance and wearing dark clothes. A group of workers at a car parts company that went bust were left in "complete despair" after receiving none of the money they won in a legal case over their benefits, Victoria's parliament has been told. The payout instead went to a third party who funded the case, according to a report into litigation funding and group proceedings tabled on Tuesday. The report follows a Victorian Law Reform Commission inquiry aimed at ensuring those who use litigation funders or take part in class actions aren't exposed to unfair risks or cost burdens. It comes with similar research being undertaken by the Australian Law Reform Commission, with its findings due in December. The Victorian commission said it received a number of submissions about a case in which 336 former workers of collapsed car part maker Huon Corporation took action over a shortfall in employee benefits. The Supreme Court found in favour of trustees representing the workers after a five-year dispute but they "ultimately received nothing" from more than $5 million awarded, which primarily went to a litigation funder. The National Workers Union told the Victorian inquiry the workers' experience was "one of complete despair". "It is clear to us that some form of market regulation needs to occur to prevent this result from occurring again," the union said in a submission The company which funded the case, Litigation Capital Management, submitted it did not control the costs of the proceedings. The report noted the case could not have gone ahead without a funder's backing. The Victorian commission has made several recommendations, including national regulation of litigation funding and greater transparency when litigation funders are involved in matters. It also recommended lifting a ban on lawyers charging contingency fees, which means they only receive a benefit if the group case is won. Slater and Gordon's principal lawyer Andrew Baker said the recommendations were "sensible and pragmatic". "These are a strong answer to the issues we've seen raised repeatedly from other quarters about the way they see the class actions regime operating," he said. Today's birthday, June 20: American actor and cartoonist Martin Landau (1928 - 2017) Martin Landau, best known for his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, died last year aged 89. The veteran actor often played sinister characters on screen. Landau was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. He initially worked as a staff cartoonist and illustrator at the New York Daily News and helped produce the comic strip, The Gumps. At the age of 22, Landau quit the newspaper to concentrate on theatre acting. He made his off-Broadway debut in First Love in 1951. He and Steve McQueen were the only two applicants, out of 2000 who applied, to secure a spot at New York's Actors Studio in 1955. There he studied under renowned trainers Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan, and became friends with James Dean. In 1957 he was cast in the touring production of Middle of the Night. After the tour he made his feature film debut in 1959's Pork Chop Hill. Landau's biggest breakthrough came in 1966 when he was cast as ace impersonator Rollin Hand in the television spy drama Mission: Impossible. That performance was so well-received that he was made a regular on the series and won the Golden Globe for Best Male TV Star in 1968. He quit Mission: Impossible in 1969 after three seasons. In 1975, Landau and then-wife Barbara Bain moved to England to play the leads in the science fiction series Space: 1999. But after the show ended his career began to stall, and he was reduced to taking roles in several lacklustre film projects. Landau made a career comeback in the late 1980's, receiving back-to-back Academy Award nominations for his work in Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and Crimes and Misdemeanours. He ultimately took home an Oscar in 1994 for his performance in Ed Wood. Landau continued to work steadily in film and TV and had recurring Emmy-nominated roles on Entourage and Without a Trace. He died on July 15, 2017, following a brief hospitalisation at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. He is survived by his daughters, Susan and Juliet. Donald Trump's reign has seen Australian trust in the United States drop to its lowest level in more than a decade. A new poll from the Lowy Institute found just 55 per cent of Australians trust the US to "act responsibly in the world". That figure has dived 28 points since 2011 and is the lowest number since Lowy started asking the question in 2006. The poll of 1200 adults was run in March and examined Australians' attitudes towards the world. Australians have the highest trust in the United Kingdom to act responsibly at 90 per cent, with Japan at 87 per cent and India at 59 per cent. Only China on 52 per cent, Russia on 28 per cent and North Korea on eight per cent are below the US in the eight-nation survey. President Trump is also well behind other world leaders in Australians' trust, with less than a third having "a lot" or "some" confidence he will do the right thing in world affairs. The UK's Theresa May, Japan's Shinzo Abe, Malcolm Turnbull and France's Emmanuel Macron have at least double Mr Trump's 30 per cent trust score. "There is no question that Donald Trump's presidency has eroded Australians' trust and confidence in the United States as a responsible global actor. That trust has fallen to its lowest point in the poll's history," the poll's report said. "Yet despite concerns about the current occupant of the White House, Australians' support for the US alliance has held firm." More than 75 per cent of Australians say the nation should remain close to the US and even those who don't trust Mr Trump said the US alliance was important to Australia. Two-thirds of Australians say terrorism and North Korea's nuclear program are Australia's biggest threats in the next 10 years, while climate change ranks third. Four in 10 Australians also see Mr Trump's presidency as a "critical threat" to Australia's national interest. The Australian Human Rights Commission will launch an inquiry into sexual harassment at work as the #MeToo movement reverberates throughout the world. The major inquiry will be led by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins. Minister for Women Kelly O'Dwyer said coverage of the #MeToo movement had highlighted the prevalence and impact of sexual harassment. "No person should have to suffer sexual harassment at work or in any other part of their lives," Ms O'Dwyer said. She said the inquiry would be a step towards reducing sexual harassment in Australian workplaces, while ensuring when it did occur it was dealt with appropriately. The inquiry will consider what drives workplace harassment, the use of technology including social media and existing practices to deal with the problem. It will also draw on economic modelling to establish what sexual harassment is costing individuals and businesses. "We already know that the personal and career consequences of workplace sexual harassment are very significant," Ms O'Dwyer said. More than 20 per cent of people over 15 years old in Australia have been sexually harassed, with 68 per cent of those in the workplace. The inquiry will run for a year, with the federal government contributing $500,000 to the overall $900,000 cost. Two teenagers have been charged with the alleged armed robbery of a supermarket in Brisbane's east. Police say a man armed with a knife entered the supermarket on Bennetts Road, Norman Park, about 7pm on Tuesday and demanded cash from a 17-year-old employee before fleeing. The man was seen getting into a vehicle and police tracked it to a Morningside address, where they arrested two males. A 17-year-old Carina boy has been charged with one count of armed robbery. An 18-year-old Morningside man was also charged with armed robbery and is expected to appear at Brisbane Magistrates Court on Wednesday. Shoppers are being urged to have patience with staff in Woolworths stores on Wednesday as new plastic bag bans come into force. The Queensland government mandated bans don't start until July 1, however, Woolworths has moved to phase out the bags ahead of schedule, with all its supermarkets, BWS, Metro and petrol outlets doing away with single-use plastic bags from June 20. Retail employees union SDA has launched its "Don't Bag Retail Staff" campaign to coincide with the ban. SDA National Secretary Gerard Dwyer said the ban had been widely publicised and customers needed to bear with staff during the changeover. "While we understand that some customers may be frustrated by this change, there is no excuse for abusive or violent behaviour towards retail staff," Mr Dwyer said. "Retail workers should not have to bear the brunt of any abusive behaviour, just for following the new rules." Queensland and Western Australia will enforce the bag bans from July 1, joining South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory. Recent research from Canstar Blue found one-in-five shoppers are opposed to the bag bans, predicting many would be confused by the sudden lack of plastic bags despite the publicity in the lead-up to the change. Environmentalists have welcomed the Queensland government's insistence that Adani find the source of local groundwater before it signs off on the water management plan for its $16.5 billion coal mine. The Queensland government has imposed more than 240 conditions on the Carmichael coal mine project in the Galilee Basin, with 132 of them relating to water conditions. Adani's proposed groundwater dependent ecosystem management plan has been slammed by the Australian Conservation Foundation, because it does not identify the source of the Doongmabulla Springs aquifer. Queensland Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch confirmed on Tuesday Adani would have to find the source aquifer before the government signs off on the water management plan. "Further, the Department of Environment and Science will require Adani to publish the final (report) which will identify the source aquifer," Ms Enoch said in a statement. ACF head Kelly O'Shanassy said the state government's position was a step in the right direction. "If Adani's mega-mine will in anyway threaten the Doongmabulla Springs complex, it absolutely should not proceed," Ms O'Shanassy said. Adani said in a statement the plan was a draft and just one of many measures it had put into place to "manage and monitor" groundwater impacts. The mining giant said its proposed groundwater activities had already been given Commonwealth and state government approval, and pointed to a 2015 Land Court ruling against environmentalists, finding mining leases should be granted. Single-use plastic bags will be banned in all Woolworths stores from Wednesday as the retail giant tries to dramatically reduce the amount of plastic in its stores. Woolworths and Coles last July joined a push to rid Australia of disposable plastic bags and set a deadline of June 30, 2018 for their stores to stop offering them to shoppers. Woolies, which has provided more than 3.2 billion plastic bags a year to shoppers, later brought forward that deadline to June 20. Shoppers will have to bring along re-usable bags or buy them instore. The ban will affect customers shopping at the retailer's supermarkets, BWS, Metro and petrol outlets in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. The bags were already banned under state legislation in Tasmania, South Australia, the ACT and Northern Territory. Green groups have welcomed the bans being introduced by Coles and Woolworths. Similar bans in Britain and Ireland have helped reduce plastic bag usage by up to 85 per cent. Woolworths and Coles have also recently announced plans to slash the amount of plastic wrapping on fresh fruit and vegetables in response to demand from shoppers. Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson will have to wait two weeks to learn his fate as abuse survivors call for him to be jailed for concealing child sex crimes. The 67-year-old is the most senior Catholic official in the world to be convicted of the offences after he was found guilty in May of failing to report to police the historical indecent assault of two altar boys. Wilson will be sentenced in early July, however survivor Peter Creigh says he should be locked up to send a message to religious leaders that institutional cover-ups will no longer be tolerated. Prosecutor Gareth Harrison told Newcastle Local Court on Tuesday at the root of the lies Wilson told about the abuse was an "unflinching loyalty" to the Catholic Church and "protecting it at all costs". Defence barrister Ian Temby QC said Wilson may not survive jail if his diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's and "recurrent falls" worsened amid the risk of violence from fellow inmates. Magistrate Robert Stone reserved his sentencing decision until July 3. The federal government is expecting more institutions to join the $3.8 billion national redress scheme for child sexual abuse survivors in coming weeks. Legislation to establish the scheme cleared parliament on Tuesday, with victims able to apply for redress from July 1. Every state and territory government has committed to the scheme, along with the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, the Salvation Army, the Scouts, the Uniting Church and the YMCA. "That takes coverage to over 90 per cent and I look forward to other institutions joining over the coming weeks," Social Services Minister Dan Tehan told parliament. Labor, the Greens and independent Derryn Hinch have raised concerns the maximum payment is $150,000 rather than the $200,000 recommended by the child abuse royal commission. The government argued while the cap was lower than what the commission recommended, the $76,000 average payment is $11,000 higher. Survivors will also be able to access psychological counselling services and personal apologies from institutions. Labor and the Greens raised additional concerns over the availability of counselling services and the indexation of past pay-outs. Greens senator Rachel Siewert said there was uncertainty over whether psychological services would be available to survivors for the whole of their lives. "We share concerns with survivors that the scheme is not the best it can be given there are some issues that remain unresolved," Senator Siewert said. Law Council of Australia president Morry Bailes said the scheme was important in acknowledging Australia and institutions failed to protect many children from child sexual abuse. "The scheme provides an opportunity to respond to these past wrongs and provide survivors with access to a just response," Mr Bailes said. Labor has accused the Turnbull government of blackmailing the Senate by refusing to split the personal income tax cut package. Debate in the upper house kicked off on Tuesday night, with opposition senators lining up to label the government's seven-year, multi-stage plan to reduce taxes unfair. Despite Labor's pleas for the bill to be split, the government is one vote short of securing the passage of the entire package. Labor's Senate leader Penny Wong said the government could deliver tax cuts from July 1 for low- and middle-income earners by breaking up the plan. "This is a political stunt designed to blackmail the Senate into signing up to a tax package that is both fiscally irresponsible and unfair," she told parliament. Under the package's first stage, new low- and middle-income tax offset worth up to $530 for individuals would come into effect next month. The top threshold of the 32.5 per cent tax bracket will increase from $87,000 to $90,000. Labor supports those measures but is against further reductions due in 2022 and 2024. Senator Wong argues the first stage of tax cuts will help low and middle income earners, while the other stages benefit the wealthy. "Why should tax cuts for teachers and tradies be held hostage to tax cuts for bankers in six years' time?" she said. Pauline Hanson's two One Nation votes could deliver the legislation's passage. Independent Tim Storer supports the first tranche of cuts but wants the package split and will try to amend the bill. He said the government was presenting the bill like a house of cards which would collapse if stage one was separated but nothing could be further from the truth. "The government is offering voters a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but it is a rainbow that is as much as seven years away," Senator Storer said. Liberal Democrats senator David Leyonhjelm will support the entire tax reduction plan yet believes it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. His vision of a low-taxing, small government would render thousands of Australian Taxation Office employees redundant. "For these bureaucrats, being called a mongrel bunch of bastards should be the price of taking such a well-paid but ignoble job," Senator Leyonhjelm said. "Tax collectors were rightly reviled in biblical times." The Greens will vote against any cuts but support splitting the package. A merger between the University of Adelaide and the University of South Australia must not result in job losses, axed courses or closed campuses, the Greens say. Both universities have agreed to explore if a merged institution would deliver better outcomes with a report to be delivered by the end of the year. Greens higher education spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young says funding cuts are pressuring universities to have such talks and wants the negotiations to lead to more South Australians accessing university, not less. "There are a combined 6800 people employed at these two institutions who will be nervous about what merger talks mean for them," she said. "Students will be concerned what it means for the degrees they are currently enrolled in, and if a merger was to occur, how that would be affected." But chancellors Kevin Scarce and Jim McDowell said the national and international landscapes of higher education were rapidly changing. "Now is the time to facilitate a conversation about whether uniting our universities would create a new, internationally renowned university of scale that would be well placed to anticipate and respond to this changing landscape," they said. Premier Steven Marshall said the two organisations were to be applauded for addressing a long-standing issue head-on while Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the move acknowledged that bold leaps might be required to deliver higher education. A $350,000 reward is being offered for information about the murder of NSW man Darren Royce Willis eight years ago. Mr Willis, from the New England region, was last seen leaving the Imperial Hotel at Bingara on the evening of December 10, 2010. His body has never been found and police believe he was murdered. The reward is for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone responsible for the death or disappearance of Mr Willis. NSW Police will hold a media conference in Moree at 11am on Wednesday. Dreamworld ride operators will provide their version of events regarding the October 2016 tragedy at the Gold Coast theme park to a Queensland inquest on Wednesday. Main ride operator Peter Nemeth will continue giving evidence to the inquest into the deaths of Cindy Low, Kate Goodchild, her brother Luke Dorsett and his partner Roozi Araghi when the inquest resumes at Southport. On Tuesday, Mr Nemeth told the inquest he'd noticed the raft carrying the guests on a collision course to a stricken raft following a water pump malfunction. Despite pushing a button to stop the ride's conveyor "two or three times", the attraction did not immediately shut down and the two rafts collided. The four victims were killed instantly after being thrown from the raft into the conveyor mechanism. Ms Goodchild's 12-year-old daughter and Ms Low's 10-year-old son survived the accident. Mr Nemeth, who said he was among the "top 10" operators in the theme park, was unaware the button he pressed did not bring the conveyor to an immediate halt. Instead a police investigation revealed it took up to nine seconds for the ride to stop. "I am surprised to learn that," Mr Nemeth said. "I assumed the conveyor stop button would stop the ride instantly." The ride's water pump had failed twice already on the day of the tragedy and Mr Nemeth had been informed to shut down the ride if it happened again. He said he did not know that was a park policy until that day and had been operating other rides in the past where up to six malfunctions had happened and the ride continued to take guests. "It was a regular occurrence," he said, adding he had been working on the Thunder River Rapids ride a week before the tragedy when the pump had failed. The other ride operator at the time of the tragedy, Courtney Williams, is also expected to give evidence on Wednesday. The inquest heard on Tuesday Ms Williams had only been trained on her role for the attraction on the morning of the tragedy. The inquest resumes at 10am. South Korean Marines storm a beach in the southeastern port of Pohang during joint drills in 2017 with the US military The US and South Korean militaries confirmed Tuesday they have called off upcoming joint exercises, after President Donald pledged to halt the drills in the wake of his summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. Seoul, which has tens of thousands of US troops on its soil to help protect it from its hostile northern neighbour, said the suspension would affect the large-scale Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises slated for August. "South Korea and the US plan to continue discussions for further measures," the defence ministry said in a statement, adding that "no decisions have been reached for other ensuing drills." Some 17,500 US military personnel were due to take part in the Freedom Guardian drills. "We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent war games have been made," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in confirming the suspension. "There is no impact on Pacific exercises outside of the Korean Peninsula." White said US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton would meet later this week at the Pentagon to discuss the issue. Last week, Trump said the US would halt "war games" with its South Korean security ally -- without making clear when the freeze would begin. The US leader raised eyebrows by describing the exercises as "provocative" -- a term used by the North. US and South Korean forces have been training together for years, and routinely rehearse everything from beach landings to an invasion from the North, or even "decapitation" strikes targeting the North Korean regime. Pyongyang typically reacts furiously. Following drills last year, the North fired ballistic missiles over Japan, triggering global alarm. At their landmark Singapore summit, Trump and Kim signed a joint statement in which North Korea committed to "work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." But critics have pointed to the vague wording of the non-binding document and raised fears that the summit would weaken the international coalition against the North's nuclear programme. Pompeo, who has stressed that sanctions would remain in place until North Korea's complete denuclearisation, said he plans to meet Kim for follow-up talks. South Korea said sanctions against North Korea could be eased once it takes "substantive steps towards denuclearisation," seemingly setting the bar lower than Washington for such a move. But Pompeo's office said both allies remain "committed to the goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation." China retains a strong influence in North Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is visiting China on Tuesday and Wednesday, state broadcaster CCTV said, a week after his unprecedented summit with US President Donald Trump. CCTV did not say whether Kim had arrived in Beijing, but security lined the freeway leading to the city's airport Tuesday morning as authorities prepared for his arrival. The trip will be Kim's third to China since March, when he made his inaugural foreign trip as leader. An AFP reporter in Pyongyang said the only scheduled international flight -- an Air Koryo plane to Beijing -- had been briefly delayed for no apparent reason, which often happens when Kim travels. Kim is seeking relief from economic sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise and is believed to be seeking support from China for that, Japan's Nikkei business daily said in a dispatch from Beijing. Following the historic US-North Korea summit in Singapore a week ago, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic punishment of its Cold War-era ally. China was not a direct player in the negotiations in Singapore but retains strong influence behind the scenes. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed to Beijing to brief Chinese President Xi Jinping and other top leaders soon after the Trump-Kim meeting. In a joint statement following the Singapore summit, Kim pledged to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." Trump hailed this as a concession but critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. In return, Trump said he would stop joint military drills with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. On Tuesday, the US and South Korean militaries confirmed they have called off upcoming joint exercises following Trump's order. US President Donald Trump has unveiled plans to impose tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, on top of an already announced $50 billion tranche Beijing on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of "blackmail" and warned it would retaliate in kind after the US president threatened to impose fresh tariffs on Chinese goods, pushing the world's two biggest economies closer to a trade war. Trump said on Monday he had asked the US Trade Representative to target $200 billion worth of imports for a 10 percent levy, citing China's "unacceptable" move to raise its own tariffs. He added he would identify an extra $200 billion of goods -- for a possible total of $450 billion, or most Chinese imports -- "if China increases its tariffs yet again". "Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," Trump said in a statement. Last week, he announced 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports, prompting Beijing to retaliate with matching duties on US goods. The US leader warned Friday of "additional tariffs" should Beijing hit back with tit-for-tat measures. "The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable," he said in explaining his latest decision. "I have an excellent relationship with President Xi (Jinping), and we will continue working together on many issues. But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world." No caption China's commerce ministry immediately responded by saying the US "practice of extreme pressure and blackmail departed from the consensus reached by both sides during multiple negotiations and has also greatly disappointed international society". "If the US acts irrationally and issues a list, China will have no choice but to take comprehensive measures of a corresponding number and quality and take strong, powerful countermeasures." The news hit stock markets in Asia, with Shanghai down almost four percent and Shenzhen tumbling nearly six percent, while Hong Kong fell more than two percent. Leading the fall in Hong Kong was Chinese telecom giant ZTE, plunging nearly 26 percent and shedding nearly two-thirds of its value since striking a deal with the Trump administration to lift a ban on using critical US components. But on Monday, the US Senate defied Trump by voting to overrule his administration's deal with legislation to reimpose the ban on hi-tech chip sales to the company, whose fate has figured prominently in the trade talks. Trump is moving forward with the trade measures after months of sometimes fraught shuttle diplomacy in which Chinese offers to purchase more American goods failed to assuage his grievances over a widening trade imbalance and China's aggressive industrial development policies. China had offered to ramp up purchases of American goods by $70 billion to help cut its yawning trade surplus with the United States, whereas Trump had demanded a $200 billion deficit cut. "Disregarding the consensus reached by the two countries, the US is playing fast and loose and once again stirring up a trade war," said China's foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang. "This way of doing things breaks faith with everyone," Geng said. - 'Unacceptable' - The China trade offensive is only one side of Trump's multi-front battle with the United States' economic partners as he presses ahead with his protectionist "America First" agenda. Since June 1, steel and aluminium imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico have been hit with tariffs of 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. "This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive $376 billion trade imbalance in goods," Trump said of China's retaliatory tariffs. "This is unacceptable." Two decades ago, China's economy was largely fuelled by exports, but it has made progress in rebalancing towards domestic investment and consumption since the global financial crisis erupted last decade -- limiting the damage trade tariffs could inflict on Beijing. Still, strong exports this year have lifted the economy, which is now showing signs of losing steam under the weight of Beijing's war on debt, launched to clean up financial risks and rein in borrowing-fuelled growth. Initially, 545 US products valued at $34 billion will be targeted by China, mimicking the Trump administration's tariff rollout. Beijing wants to "demonstrate that things will be done their way or not at all," said Christopher Balding, an economics professor at Shenzhen's HSBC Business School, who believes Chinese policymakers prefer demonstrations of "power and control" over "technical policy rightness." "It is a game of chicken," Balding said. So far Beijing has targeted major American exports to China such as soybeans, which brought in $14 billion in sales last year So far Beijing has targeted major American exports to China such as soybeans, which brought in $14 billion in sales last year, and are grown in states that supported Trump during the 2016 presidential election, as well as other politically sensitive products. Officials also drew up a second list of $16 billion in chemical and energy products to hit with new tariffs, though China did not announce a date for imposing them. More American targets are likely to follow as soon as the Trump administration follows through with publishing an expanded tariff list. The US Senate has voted to reimpose a ban on China's ZTE telecom firm The US Senate defied President Donald Trump on Monday by voting to overrule his administration's deal with Chinese telecom firm ZTE and reimpose a ban on hi-tech chip sales to the company. Senators added an amendment targeting ZTE into a sweeping, must-pass national defense spending bill that cleared the chamber on an 85-10 vote. The company has been on life support since Washington said it had banned US companies from selling crucial hardware and software components to ZTE for seven years. US officials imposed the ban because of what they said were false statements by the firm over actions it claimed to have taken regarding the illegal sale of goods to Iran and North Korea. ZTE pleaded guilty to those charges in March last year and was hit with $1.2 billion in fines. Earlier this month the Trump administration gave ZTE a lifeline by easing the sanctions in exchange for a further $1.4 billion penalty. But the Senate measure nullifies that action, proposing an outright ban on the government buying products and services from ZTE and another Chinese telecoms firm, Huawei. "We're heartened that both parties made it clear that protecting American jobs and national security must come first when making deals with countries like China, which has a history of having little regard for either," a bipartisan group of senators said. Hong Kong-listed shares in ZTE plunged 25.81 percent to end at HK$9.85 on Tuesday. The company has lost nearly two-thirds of its value since it resumed trading last week after a two-month suspension that followed the initial ban. The lawmakers who introduced the amendment include top Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Marco Rubio. However, the bill -- which provides $716 billion in funding for national defense for fiscal year 2019 and gives policy guidance to the Pentagon -- is not a done deal. The House of Representatives passed its own version of the measure, and the two chambers must now hash out a compromise. "It is vital that our colleagues in the House keep this bipartisan provision in the bill as it heads towards a conference," Schumer and Rubio said. Trump's intervention to help the firm was seen at the time as part of a move to smooth over trade tensions with Beijing as they embarked on talks to avert a trade war, with the president tweeting on May 13 that too many Chinese jobs were at threat. "This is the first time Congress has really stood up to (Trump) on a trade issue, and its clear they are angry," Bill Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Bloomberg News. "There will be a lot of congressional resistance to weakening the ZTE amendment, but I would not be surprised to see a compromise." ZTE, which employs 80,000 people, said soon after the ban was imposed that its major operations had "ceased", raising the possibility of its collapse. Its fiberoptic networks depend on US components and its cheap smartphones sold en masse abroad are powered by US chips and the Android operating system. Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh will be a key figure in this week's OPEC meeting as he and non-OPEC member Russia mull proposals to boost production and ease pressure on prices OPEC ministers gather in Vienna Tuesday for crunch talks on a landmark pact curbing oil output, with Saudi Arabia and Russia hoping to persuade their peers to increase production again. The upcoming June 22-23 meetings of OPEC and non-OPEC energy ministers are expected to be contentious, with several countries bristling at the thought of reversing a deal that has been in place for 18 months and helped lift oil prices to around $70 a barrel. Resistance is being led by Iran, deeply wary of any move by regional rival Saudi Arabia that could push down oil prices at a time when Tehran faces renewed sanctions following US President Donald Trump's decision to quit its international nuclear deal, which is likely to send the country's oil exports plummeting. Riyadh meanwhile, which cheered Washington's exit from the nuclear deal, is under pressure from its US ally to boost output as Trump hopes to keep pump prices low ahead of November's mid-term elections. "You're dealing with a very political situation," analyst Amrita Sen of Energy Aspects told AFP. - Geopolitical tensions - The 14-nation OPEC cartel and its 10 non-member partner nations, including Russia, together account for more than 50 percent of the world's oil supply, giving them huge sway over the global market. The so-called OPEC+ group agreed a milestone deal to trim production from January 2017 by 1.8 million barrels a day to clear a global oil glut and shore up low prices. The strategy paid off, with prices jumping from below $30 a barrel in early 2016 to around $70 in the second quarter of 2018. The pact was meant to run until the end of this year. But a collapse in oil production in crisis-hit Venezuela and the prospect of fresh Iranian sanctions have raised fears of a supply crunch, sending the price of crude spiking again. As recently as April, Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh had voiced support for the oil cut deal, saying the market had the capacity to absorb higher prices. But Trump made it clear he disagrees. "Oil prices are too high, OPEC is at it again. Not good!" he tweeted last week. Observers believe Trump is dialling up the pressure on Riyadh because he wants to offset the expected drop in Iranian production. "There's definitively pressure from the US," said Sen, adding that she believed Saudi had made a "commitment" to Washington in exchange for its abandonment of the Iran nuclear agreement. In Russia meanwhile, private oil companies are finding it increasingly difficult to justify the cutbacks to shareholders eager to cash in on the higher prices. For technical reasons, any decision to ramp up output also has to be timed not to coincide with Russia's harsh winter, meaning the next OPEC meeting in November would come too late. "They cannot as easily ramp up production during the winter," said UBS commodity analyst Giovanni Staunovo. SEB analyst Bjarne Schieldrop said Russia's stance in favour of easing production curbs should also be seen against the backdrop of Moscow's efforts to increase its geopolitical clout in the Middle East. - To raise or not to raise - Iran is not alone in its battle against output hikes, with Iraq and Venezuela also objecting. "They stand to lose if production is increased," said Schieldrop. According to the International Energy Agency, only a handful of countries in the OPEC+ alliance are realistically able to boost production in the short term. That includes top supplier Saudi Arabia, its Gulf allies Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, and Russia. For most of the others it would make more sense to stick to the restrictions and sell their limited supply at a higher price. Since OPEC operates on the principle of unanimity, analysts expect some sort of compromise agreement to be thrashed out by Saturday. "War is war, business is business," said Sen, noting that OPEC ministers have proved before that they are able to set aside geopolitical differences. Apple has been fined Aus$9 million by an Australian court for making false claims about consumer rights Apple was Tuesday fined Aus$9 million (US$6.7 million) by an Australian court for making false claims about consumer rights when refusing to fix faulty iPhones and iPads previously repaired by a third party. Customers of the US tech giant had complained to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) after an operating system update disabled their devices in a global issue known as "error 53". The users were told by Apple that they were not eligible for a remedy if the iPhone or iPad had been repaired by another company. The ACCC took Apple to the Federal Court last year over allegedly false or misleading representations to customers with faulty iPhones and iPads about their rights under the law. "If a product is faulty, customers are legally entitled to a repair or a replacement under the Australian Consumer Law, and sometimes even a refund," ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court said in a statement. "The court declared the mere fact that an iPhone or iPad had been repaired by someone other than Apple did not, and could not, result in the consumer guarantees ceasing to apply, or the consumer's right to a remedy being extinguished." Apple admitted misleading at least 275 Australian customers over the issue between February 2015 to February 2016 on its US website, by its Australian store staff and on its customer service phone calls. The consumer watchdog said Apple had also committed to providing new devices as replacements, after allegations that the company was giving customers refurbished goods instead after a device suffered a major failure. There was no immediate comment from Apple, which has previously described the error as appearing "when a device fails a security test". It has released an operating system update to fix the issue. Give me a hug: Crocodiles in Bazoule are considered sacred. Local youths often sit on them, saying the crocodiles never attack them Crocodiles may be one of the deadliest hunters in the animal kingdom, but in a small village in Burkina Faso it is not unusual to see someone sitting atop one of the fearsome reptiles. People in Bazoule, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the capital Ouagadougou, share their pond with more than 100 of the razor-toothed creatures. "We got used to the crocodiles when we were young, swimming in the water with them and all that," said Pierre Kabore, just a few metres (yards) away from a crocodile feasting on chicken provided by the village. "Now we can always approach them and sit on them -- and if you have the courage, you can lie on them too. There's no problem, they are sacred crocodiles. They don't do anything to anyone." According to local legend, the startling relationship with the predators dates back to at least the 15th century. Feeling peckish: A Bazoule crocodile tucks into a dead chicken The village was in the grip of an agonising drought until the crocodiles led women to a hidden pond where the population could slake their thirst. "The villagers organised a party to celebrate and thank the reptiles," Kabore said. A celebration known as Koom Lakre is still held every year during which villagers make sacrifices and ask the animals to grant their wishes of health, prosperity and a good harvest. Far from being considered a threat, the crocodiles are deemed to have a mystical connection with Bazoule. "Crocodiles are represented as the soul of our ancestors and if one of them dies, they are buried and even given a funeral as if they were human," said Kabore. "When a misfortune is about to happen in the village, they cry out. Elders are charged with interpreting the cries, and then make wishes to ward off bad luck." - Tourism attraction - Why did the crocodile cross the road? He was following the chicken, of course! The unusual contact between man and croc has drawn disbelieving tourists to the village to see for themselves. On their arrival, travellers can buy a chicken which is hung on a stick by a guide and used to entice the crocodiles out of the pond so that visitors can pose with the creatures. "It was nice to watch from a distance but sitting on one was a bit freaky," said Thomas Baspin, a young Frenchman who came to visit his grandparents in Burkina Faso. "I'm glad I did it -- but I'm also glad it's over!" he quipped. Tourism has become a big money-spinner for the impoverished villagers, but a three-year-old jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso is taking its toll. Ouagadougou has come under attack three times, most recently in March, when jihadists attacked the military headquarters and French embassy. "We could have more than 10,000 visitors per year but at the moment, there's no more than 4,000 or 5,000," said Raphael Kabore, one of the guides. Global warming is also believed to be having an impact. Rainfall levels are down each year, and the famous pond that is the crocodiles' home is shrinking. When it disappears, will the reptiles once more guide their human friends to a new watery home? Chinese couple Xu Mengsha (R) and Zhang Yinzhe (C) speak to Thai fertility physician Chartree Saenghiranwatana at the Piyavate Hospital in Bangkok specialising in in-vitro fertilisation The easing of China's one-child policy was a godsend to Zhang Yinzhe and his wife Xu Mengsha, who had decided they wanted to use in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to freeze an embryo in the hope of one day having a second child. But most IVF procedures are restricted in China to couples who are infertile, and surging demand at overwhelmed reproductive clinics since the policy was relaxed two years ago would anyway have meant months of waiting. So the Beijing couple flew to Thailand, part of a wave of Chinese spilling overseas into Southeast Asia, the United States, and elsewhere in a test-tube baby boom. "There is an old saying in China: a son and daughter complete the family," said Zhang, a 31-year-old airline pilot. Zhang spoke after a consultation at Bangkok's Piyavate Hospital, its walls festooned with Mandarin-language posters on IVF as other Chinese patients waited their turn. Definitive numbers on China's share of the assisted-reproduction tourism sector are unclear, but its spending was estimated by the state-linked Qianzhan Industry Research Institute to have grown 22 percent annually to $1.4 billion in 2017. Further rapid growth is expected. clinics are adding Mandarin-speaking staff, Chinese-language websites, and increasingly marketing to Chinese seeking a second or even third child Overseas clinics are adding Mandarin-speaking staff, Chinese-language websites, and increasingly marketing to Chinese seeking a second or even third child. Chinese figures estimate that 90 million women became eligible for another child once the family-planning policy was relaxed, and more second children were delivered last year than first-borns. But Chinese couples are increasing having children later, past their reproductive primes, and may require help from science. Around 12 percent of the childbearing population are unable to conceive naturally, according to Chinese studies, yet China only has about 400 licensed IVF clinics, where waiting lists can approach one year. - Fertile ground - IVF involves combining egg and sperm in a lab and implanting any viable embryos into the womb. The one-child policy caused birth rates to plummet, and China eased it to ensure a big enough future workforce to support its fast-aging population. But it still bans or restricts fertility options like egg donations, surrogate motherhood, gender selection, and freezing embryos for later use partly over fears that opening the floodgates could spark a population explosion. Only around 500,000 Chinese IVF procedures took place in 2016, health officials estimate, far short of what fertility doctors say is required. Zhang Yinzhe (L) and Xu Mengsha (R) decided they wanted to use in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to freeze an embryo in the hope of one day having a second child "There is big demand in China, but we can't handle it here," said Ri-Cheng Chian, director of reproductive medicine at Shanghais 10th People's Hospital. So Chinese are booking tickets to Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and even Russia. IVF treatments cost around 30,000 yuan ($4,700) in China, but can be several times that abroad, where many Chinese feel they can find higher-quality care. Zhang, the pilot, wants IVF partly to screen for genetic defects, something restricted at home. "That's a lot of money for a Chinese family but compared to the health of my next generation, I should spend it," he said. Chartree Saenghiranwatana, a fertility specialist at Piyavate, said the clinic has been "getting increasing demand from Chinese patients the past year or two", and is recruiting Mandarin-speaking doctors and nurses. Some Thai clinics say up to 80 percent of their customers are Chinese. - Baby bump - "A new industrial chain is forming, for reproduction, in Southeast Asia," said Wei Siang Yu, the Singaporean founder and chairman of Borderless Health Group (BHG). BHG has created a video-conferencing platform on which Chinese patients can consult fertility experts around the world, aided by Mandarin-speaking interpreters. BHG is also establishing sperm and egg banks in countries including Thailand, Australia and the United States, primarily for Chinese clients, complete with a phone app allowing them to monitor their "fertility assets" almost like a bank account. Around 12 percent of China's childbearing population are unable to conceive naturally, according to Chinese studies, yet the country only has about 400 licensed IVF clinics, where waiting lists can approach one year Yu said two years ago Chinese patients placed sixth or seventh in the ranks of foreign patients coming to Thailand for medical tourism, but will be the largest group this year. Besides infertility or the desire for a larger family, the Chinese preference for male heirs sends some couples abroad in search of clinics that will perform gender screening -- though that is technically illegal in most countries -- and Chinese LGBT couples are also packing their bags. Li Na, who is from central China, went through expensive IVF procedures in Shanghai, Hong Kong and the United States. All failed. But she and her husband hit the jackpot in Thailand, and now have twin girls through a surrogate mother there and a boy through IVF. Li, 41, has parlayed the experience into a side career as a consultant to other Chinese couples seeking the same joy she felt. "I couldnt stop crying when I flew down to Thailand to pick them up," Li said. "It was hard to believe they were mine." Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said she wanted to ensure neighbouring countries had an alternative option to the often opaque financing from China Australia pledged Tuesday to provide Pacific nations with better funding to counter Chinese development money which it fears will leave some countries with massive debt burdens and undermine their sovereignty. Projects are increasingly being constructed in the region through China's signature infrastructure-building Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Canberra is worried some small nations may get trapped with unsustainable debts, handing Beijing influence. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said she wanted to ensure neighbouring countries had an alternative option to the often opaque financing from China, which Australia says can have unfavourable terms. "They are sovereign nations," she told the Sydney Morning Herald. "We want to ensure that they retain their sovereignty, that they have sustainable economies and that they are not trapped into unsustainable debt outcomes. "The trap can then be a debt-for-equity swap and they have lost their sovereignty." Such swaps have been seen elsewhere in the world including in Sri Lanka, where China took control of a large deep-sea port last year on a 99-year lease after the government was unable to make debt repayments. They have fuelled fears that China is building a network of strategic assets that could in future be converted to military facilities. In January, a senior Australian minister called some Chinese infrastructure projects in the Pacific "white elephants" which led to countries taking on debt they couldn't afford. "What we can do is offer alternative options for countries beyond BRI. BRI is not the only source of infrastructure financing available," Bishop said. She did not detail exactly what she planned and on what terms, but said she has had discussions with Britain about the possibility of cooperating on projects in the Pacific. Australia's Lowy Institute think tank said China usually offered "concessional" loans that eventually had to be repaid, while Australia and other traditional donors typically provided one-way grants that did not need to be paid back. The Institute estimates China provided US$1.78 billion in aid, including concessional loans, to Pacific nations between 2006-16. Asked whether Australian-led alternatives would be competitive or complementary to what China was doing, Bishop said: "They are both. "They are complementary in the sense that we recognise that there's a need for infrastructure investment in the Pacific and we're encouraging it, competitive in the sense that we want people to have options -- they don't have to only accept one outcome. "What we don't want is for countries to have no other options... and Australia should take a very proactive part in that." According to the International Monetary Fund, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu all face considerable debt repayment pressures, and all have significant debt to China. Goatherds in Meme gather their flocks for a vaccination drive that has been long delayed by jihadist violence. Many animals have died from lack of veterinary care and farmers fear taking them out to pasture beyond the confines of the village Issoufa Mahama is worried. To take his livestock out into the pasture beyond the village, he explains, is to roll the dice. "We can't take the cattle out into the bush any more," he says. "It's because of Boko Haram. If you go out, they will take your herd." Mahama, like other farmers in Cameroon's far north, is one of many unseen victims of Boko Haram, whose jihad in Nigeria has spilled over into neighbouring Cameroon and other countries. According to a study conducted by Cameroon's ministry of livestock, between 2012 and 2016, Boko Haram killed at least 135 farmers, forced the closure of 21 cattle markets and stole 48,000 farm animals and around 4,000 chickens. The group inflicted direct losses of 55 billion CFA francs (83.8 million euros, $97 million), plunging many families who were already living on the edge deeper into poverty. In recent months, attacks and thefts seem to have have receded, but in many places the jihadists maintain an empire of fear. Thieving and attacks by the jihadists add to the risks of a lifestyle already complicated by the weather Many farmers in the village of Meme keep their cattle within the village boundaries for safety -- but fodder is desperately short. "The animals are hungry. They have nothing to eat," said Mahama, contemplating two scrawny cattle and a few goats chewing on a handful of millet stalks he has thrown on the ground. Before Boko Haram started its rampage, he says, he had 30 cattle. Now he has nine. Two have died in the past fortnight, probably due to lack of food and sickness, he says. - Vigilantes - Mathieu Dara, a livestock specialist at the Veterinary Zootechnical Centre in Mora, says many farm animals in areas hit by Boko Haram have had no access to medical treatment or vaccines for the past two years because of the security problems, and food is scarce. "Lots of animals have died because of a lack of (veterinary) care," he said. At the entrance to Meme village, members of a local vigilante group, armed with old guns, have taken up position filtering those those who come in. Horsemen guard the perimeter of Meme -- the village has borne the brunt of Boko Haram jihadists Three years ago, at least 19 people were killed in a twin suicide bomb attack at Meme's market. Earlier this month, in the village of Mangave Foya Djalingo about 10 kilometres (six miles) away, Boko Haram killed six civilians. In the Meme region of the same name as the village, 18,700 of the local population of 88,700 have been displaced by the violence, many of them fleeing with their livestock, according to the Lamido, as the local community chief is known. Mahama says he has 38 people to care for, if displaced people are added to relatives in his charge. Previously, everyone was able to have three meals a day, "but now, there are days when there's nothing to eat," he said. - Rainfall - Thieving and attacks by the jihadists add to the risks of a lifestyle already complicated by the weather. "It's not easy to find grass for the cattle because in this part of the world we only have rain for four months of the year," said fellow cattle farmer Boukar Maloum. The village's meagre pastures have already been stripped of green grass. At the entrance to Maloum's smallholding, two of his cattle go backwards and forwards, searching for something to eat. A member of a local vigilante group patrols as farmers gather their goats for a vaccination drive long delayed because of insecurity caused by Boko Haram attacks Water, too, is scarce -- farmers have to go "up to three kilometres" (two miles) for the precious substance, in heat that reaches 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit), said Maloum. Previously, the farmers were allowed by grain growers to cut the stalks of millet for free, using them as cheap fodder, after the cereal had been harvested. Now, though, the stalks have to be paid for, said Maloum -- adding to the pressure on poor households. Earlier this month, the Cameroonian government and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) launched a campaign to vaccinate a million sheep and goats against a contagious disease called ovine rinderpest. The immunisation has been welcomed by the farmers in Meme, although some say there are more pressing needs. "It's a good thing to vaccinate our goats and sheep, but if they've got nothing to eat, they'll die," Mahama says bluntly. Thailand's Department of Corrections, which oversees one of the world's largest prison populations, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935 Thailand has carried out its first execution since 2009, the Department of Corrections said, killing a 26-year-old convicted murderer in a move condemned by Amnesty International as "deplorable". Theerasak Longji was executed by lethal injection on Monday, six years after his conviction. His death came as Thailand's coup leader-turned-premier Prayut Chan-O-Cha prepares to travel to the United Kingdom and France on a highly-publicised official visit. But the trip will now likely see the former army chief face awkward questions over the use of the death penalty as well as Thailand's wider human rights record since he seized power in a 2014 coup. "We still have the death sentence, we have not cancelled it yet," Tawatchai Thaikaew, deputy permanent secretary at the Justice Ministry, told AFP, adding that the execution on Monday was carried out "according to the law". Thailand's Department of Corrections, which oversees one of the world's largest prison populations, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935, the majority by firing squad. That practice ended on December 11, 2003. Between then and 2009 a further six inmates were executed by lethal injection. Monday's execution serves as a "lesson to deter those who wanted to commit serious crime or violate the law to consider this punishment," the department added in a statement. But rights groups hit out at the sudden resumption of the death penalty, which remains mandatory for a number of offences, including aggravated murder. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Amnesty International said, accusing the kingdom of "reneging" on commitments to move towards abolition of the death penalty. The country is "also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment." Theerasak stabbed his victim 24 times before stealing their mobile phone and wallet, the department said. Figures provided to Amnesty International by the Ministry of Justice show 510 people, including 94 women, were on death row at the end of last year. Nearly 200 had exhausted all final appeals -- like Theerasak. More than half are believed to have been sentenced for drug-related offences. The death penalty is still in practice in several countries in Asia, including Singapore, Indonesia and China, which remains the world's top executioner. The International Federation of Human Rights also condemned the move, calling it a "betrayal". It said that Thailand would have achieved the status of "de facto abolitionist" had it not carried out any executions before August 24 2019, 10 years after the last death penalties were carried out. From left to right, actors Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, and Gaten Matarazzo of the series "Stranger Things" attend the MTV Movie & TV awards Landmark blockbuster "Black Panther" and nostalgic horror sensation "Stranger Things" shared the spoils Monday with a real-life hero at the MTV Movie and TV Awards. Marvel's "Black Panther" racked up four awards, including best movie. Its star, Chadwick Boseman, won best hero and best movie performance while his nemesis Michael B. Jordan was named best villain. Boseman, 40, got his hero statuette from presenters Olivia Munn and Zazie Beetz -- and promptly gave it to James Shaw Jr., the man who stopped a mass shooter at a Tennessee Waffle House. "Receiving an award for playing a superhero is amazing but it's even greater to acknowledge the heroes that we have in real life," Boseman said. He beckoned the 29-year-old on stage and led the crowd in a standing ovation. "If you don't know James Shaw Jr., he fought off a gunman in Antioch, Tennessee, at a Waffle House. He saved lives," he said. Shaw singlehandedly wrestled the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle from the hands of Travis Reinking as he was allegedly reloading in the middle of a shooting rampage in April. Four people were killed and two others wounded at the Waffle House restaurant in Nashville, America's country music capital. But Shaw has been credited with saving many more lives. He suffered a graze wound from a bullet and burns on his right hand from grabbing the hot barrel of the gun. He was hailed as a hero by the survivors and their family members, but has repeatedly has rejected the label, saying he acted for reasons of self-preservation. For the second year running, Netflix hit "Stranger Things" took best show and best actor in a show for Millie Bobby Brown. Noah Schnapp picked up best frightened performance. Tiffany Haddish hosted, capping her night with the award for best comedic performance for "Girls Trip" while "scene stealer" went to Madelaine Petsch as Cheryl Blossom in The CW's teen drama series "Riverdale." The MTV Movie and TV Awards have been taking a sideways look at Hollywood since 1992, honoring films and their actors with "golden popcorn" statuettes. The nominees are decided by producers and MTV executives, while the winners are chosen by the public, who vote online. As a result, the awards have historically recognized commercial favorites, in contrast to the Oscars and other events based on critical or industry acclaim. MTV reverted to pre-recording the show, filmed on Saturday in a cavernous hangar at Santa Monica Airport in southern California, after broadcasting live last year. For the second year running, the prize-giving dispensed with gender distinctions in the categories, and awarded best kiss to a same-sex embrace. Nick Robinson and Keiynan Lonsdale played two American teenagers struggling with their sexuality in "Love, Simon," which is also nominated for August's Teen Choice Awards. Here is the full list of winners: MOVIE OF THE YEAR: "Black Panther" SHOW OF THE YEAR: "Stranger Things" BEST ACTOR IN A MOVIE: Chadwick Boseman - "Black Panther" BEST ACTOR IN A SHOW: Millie Bobby Brown - "Stranger Things" BEST HERO: Chadwick Boseman (T'Challa/Black Panther) - "Black Panther" BEST VILLAIN: Michael B. Jordan (N'Jadaka/Erik Killmonger) - "Black Panther" BEST KISS: Nick Robinson (Simon) and Keiynan Lonsdale (Bram) - "Love, Simon" MOST FRIGHTENED PERFORMANCE: Noah Schnapp (Will Byers) - "Stranger Things" BEST ON-SCREEN TEAM: "It" - Finn Wolfhard (Richie), Sophia Lillis (Beverly), Jaeden Lieberher (Bill), Jack Dylan Grazer (Eddie), Wyatt Oleff (Stanley), Jeremy Ray Taylor (Ben), Chosen Jacobs (Mike) BEST COMEDIC PERFORMANCE: Tiffany Haddish - "Girls Trip" SCENE STEALER: Madelaine Petsch (Cheryl Blossom) -"Riverdale" BEST FIGHT: "Wonder Woman" - Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) vs. German soldiers BEST MUSIC DOCUMENTARY: "Gaga: Five Foot Two" BEST REALITY SERIES/FRANCHISE: "The Kardashians" A record 68.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to war, violence and persecution, notably in places like Myanmar and Syria, the UN said today. By the end of 2017, the number was nearly three million higher than the previous year and showed a 50-percent increase from the 42.7 million uprooted from their homes a decade ago, according to a report by the UN refugee agency. The current figure is equivalent to the entire population of Thailand, and the number of people forcibly displaced equates to one in every 110 persons worldwide, it said. 'We are at a watershed, where success in managing forced displacement globally requires a new and far more comprehensive approach so that countries and communities aren't left dealing with this alone,' said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. A UNHCR report showed 16.2 million people were freshly displaced last year, equating to some 44,500 people being pushed out of their homes every day - or one person every two seconds But around 70 percent of that number are people from just 10 countries, he told reporters in Geneva ahead of the report's launch. 'If there were solutions to conflicts in those 10 countries, or in some of them at least, that huge figure, instead of rising every year, could start going down,' he said, calling for more political will to halt the crises driving so many from their homes. The report showed that 16.2 million people were freshly displaced last year, and included those forced to flee for the first time as well as those who had been previously displaced. This equates to some 44,500 people being pushed out of their homes every day -- or one person every two seconds, UNHCR said. Most people flee within their own country, and are defined as internally displaced people, or IDPs. A demonstrator holds a placard reading 'Refugees welcome' during the Citizen and Solidarity March in Paris in support of migrants and refugees By the end of 2017, there were some 40 million IDPs worldwide, down slightly from previous years, with Colombia, Syria and Democratic Republic of Congo accounting for the greatest numbers. Another 25.4 million people -- more than half of them children -- were registered as refugees last year. That is nearly three million more than in 2016, and 'the highest known total to date', it said. Syria's seven-year conflict alone had, by the end of last year, pushed more than 6.3 million people out of the country, accounting for nearly one-third of the global refugee population. Another 6.2 million Syrians are internally displaced. Men wait to disembark from the Italian Coast Guard vessel 'Diciotti' following a rescue operation of migrants and refugees at sea The second largest refugee-producing country in 2017 was Afghanistan, whose refugee population grew by five percent during the year to 2.6 million people. The increase was due mainly to births and more Afghans being granted asylum in Germany, UNHCR said. South Sudan meanwhile saw the largest increase last year, with the number of refugees fleeing the world's youngest nation soaring from 1.4 million at the beginning of the year to 2.4 million at the end. Grandi said South Sudan was experiencing 'a very bad emergency' which had apparently escaped the notice of both the government and the opposition who did not appear to be 'taking seriously the desperate situation of their own people.' Refugees from Myanmar more than doubled last year to 1.2 million, as a brutal army crackdown forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to pour across the border into Bangladesh. Refugees from Myanmar more than doubled last year to 1.2 million, as a brutal army crackdown forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to pour across the border into Bangladesh Tuesday's report also highlighted large-scale displacements in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and DR Congo among others. And as Israel marks 70 years of independence, there are some 5.4 million Palestinians still living as refugees, it said. Despite the focus on migrant numbers arriving in Europe and the United States, a full 85 percent of refugees are living in low- and middle-income countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Uganda, Grandi said. Turkey was hosting by far the largest number of refugees, with 3.5 million registered there by the end of 2017, most of them Syrians. Syria Israel declined to comment on Tuesday on a weekend air strike against an Iraqi paramilitary base in eastern Syria after its US ally implicated it in the attack. The Sunday evening strike against the Al-Hari base on the Syrian side of the border with Iraq came less than 24 hours after Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would strike Iran's "proxies" anywhere in Syria. Fighters of Iraq's Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force, mainly composed of Iran-trained Shiite militia, have played a major role in the war against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group in Syria as well as Iraq. But their presence has sparked confrontations with both Washington, which has been supporting a Kurdish-led alliance that controls other parts of eastern Syria, and Israel, which fears Iranian-inspired attacks on its forces in the occupied Golan Heights. Syrian authorities and the Iraqi paramilitaries both blamed Washington for the strike, which killed at least 52 fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. But US officials denied any involvement and instead pointed the finger at Israel. "We have reasons to believe that it was an Israeli strike," one US official told AFP on condition of anonymity. The Israeli military declined to be drawn on the US claims. "We are not commenting on foreign reports," a spokeswoman said. The military has carried out previous strikes against Iranian targets in Syria, but most have been significantly closer to Israel or the Israeli-occupied Golan. Last month, Israel launched a large-scale attack on what it said were Iranian targets in Syria, raising fears of a major confrontation. Those strikes followed a barrage of rockets that Israel said was fired towards its forces in the occupied Golan by Iran from Syria. Even before that, Israel had been blamed for a series of recent strikes inside Syria that killed Iranians, though it has not acknowledged them. Speaking at a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday morning, Netanyahu reiterated his position that "Iran needs to withdraw from all of Syria". "We will take action -- and are already taking action -- against efforts to establish a military presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria both close to the border and deep inside Syria," the prime minister said. "We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria." Israeli seized a large swathe of the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community. Iran has been a close ally of the Syrian regime for some four decades and, with Russia, has been a key supporter in the civil war that broke out in 2011. Protesters shout slogans against the land lease proposal earlier this month An American student held in Vietnam for "causing public disorder" at violent protests this month has appeared on state television to say he regrets breaking the law and will stay away from future rallies. William Nguyen was detained on June 10 in Ho Chi Minh City after attending mass demonstrations against proposed special economic zones that would grant investors 99-year leases. Video footage shows the Texas-born 32-year-old with a bleeding head wound being dragged by plainclothes men through the streets into custody. Police accuse Nguyen of "causing public disorder" and trying to damage a fence and flip over police vehicles on the main road to the airport. Nguyen, a Yale graduate, appeared on television on Monday night to say he broke the law. "I understand that my acts violated (the law)... I regret that I caused trouble for people heading to the airport. I blocked traffic and caused trouble to my family and friends," Nguyen said in Vietnamese on HTV in footage provided by city police. "I will not join any anti-state activities any more," added Nguyen, who was arrested while passing through Vietnam en route to Singapore to get his Masters degree next month. William Nguyen was arrested after attending mass demonstrations in Ho Chi Minh City Choreographed confessions are common in Vietnam where accused criminals are paraded publicly to admit guilt -- sometimes in exchange for a softer sentence -- though rights groups have also accused the one-party state of forcibly extracting statements. Scores were detained this month after protests in several cities turned violent in some places, rare in the one-party state where demonstrations are routinely banned or broken up. Nguyen tweeted from the rallies, posting images of large crowds and saying he supported Vietnamese people "exercising their civic duty to protest injustice". Friends and family lobbying lawmakers in Washington for Nguyen's release say he did not have a political agenda. - Torture claims - At least 30 people are still in custody and security forces blanketed Ho Chi Minh City last weekend to deter further protests. Amnesty International said they had received "deeply disturbing" reports that several protesters were tortured by police in custody. "We urge the Vietnamese authorities to launch a prompt, thorough and effective investigation into the claims and to hold anyone suspected of being responsible to account," said Minar Pimple, Amnesty's senior director of global operations. Demonstrators had rallied against a draft law to grant lengthy leases in proposed special economic zones, citing fears valuable land would be handed over to China. The bill made no specific mention of China and the government has said it would consider shorter leases, but the concession did little to assuage anger. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said the government would consider public feedback but issued a warning to "bad seeds" looking to kick up unrest. "If you oppose officials on duty, vandalise state property... then you have to be strictly handled in accordance with the law," Phuc said Monday. China and Vietnam have had a fraught relationship since a brief but bloody border war in 1979 and resentment over Beijing's extensive claims in the South China Sea runs high in Vietnam. Japan Airlines (JAL) and All Nippon Airways (ANA) have changed "Taiwan" to "China Taiwan" on their Chinese-language websites Japan's two largest airlines have changed "Taiwan" to "China Taiwan" on their Chinese-language websites, officials said Tuesday, sparking an immediate protest from the self-ruled island. China, which claims Taiwan as its own territory, has demanded that dozens of international airlines make such a change despite US protests at what it called "Orwellian nonsense". Japan Airlines (JAL) and All Nippon Airways (ANA) said their alteration was made on June 12 and was meant to accommodate customers. The description remains "Taiwan" on their websites in Japanese and other languages. "We made the judgement (to change the name) while consulting and reporting to the transport ministry and foreign ministry," said a spokesman at Japan Airlines. "The change came on June 12 as our preparations were done by then," he said. June 12 was the date of the historic summit between North Korea and the United States, which attracted international attention. "We chose a description that is easy to understand and acceptable for users of our websites," added the JAL official. A spokesman at ANA said the change was intended to make the description "easy to understand and acceptable for customers when they use our websites". "We do not mean any particular group of customers here but mean all customers," he said without elaborating. Taiwan's foreign ministry said it was lodging protests with the two airlines and demanded a correction to the "inappropriate title". "Chinese authorities once again are unreasonably pressuring Taiwan's international space," the ministry said, adding that such moves "only increase resentment among Taiwanese people and severely harm cross-strait relations". The airlines are not the only international carriers who have made the change recently, with Australia's Qantas earlier this month defending its decision to list Taiwan as part of China. The Chinese Civil Aviation Administration sent a notice to 36 foreign airlines in April, asking them to comply with Beijing's standard of referring to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as Chinese territories. In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said it was a basic principle for companies to "abide by Chinese laws and respect its people's national sentiments" if they want to continue operating in the country. Japan's ties with China are improving after years of acrimony over historical and territorial issues. Japan has close business ties with Taiwan but has acknowledged the "One China" policy, which describes the island as an integral part of China. Asked about the change, Japan's top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Tokyo was "not in favour of government authorities demanding certain measures from private companies based on a specific political stance". burs-sah/sm Oli is seeking closer ties and energy and infrastructure investment during his visit to China Nepal's prime minister left Tuesday on his first official visit to China as the impoverished Himalayan nation seeks closer ties and much-needed energy and infrastructure investment from its powerful northern neighbour. K.P. Sharma Oli will meet President Xi Jinping during his six-day visit to China, which has flexed greater economic and diplomatic muscle in Nepal in recent years and raised hackles in traditional ally India. In an address Monday to parliament, Oli praised China's economic support for Nepal, one of the region's poorest countries and sandwiched between the two Asian giants. "Our government's agenda is to expediate development and during my visit we will focus on securing support for our work," Oli said. China is the single largest donor to Nepal's reconstruction after a devastating earthquake in 2015, and Kathmandu has signed up to Beijing's ambitious Belt and Road initiative, which New Delhi opposes. India, which has long considered Nepal part of its sphere of influence, has pledged its own major infrastructure projects to counter China's influence but Beijing still outspends it in the Himalayan nation. The Belt and Road infrastructure project will be on the agenda when the two leaders meet, Oli's office said, as will energy, power transmission and plans for a railway linking Kathmandu to the border with China. China has courted favour with Nepal in recent years, particularly through costly hydropower projects to alleviate its crippling energy shortages. In 2017 Chinese firms pledged more than $8.3 billion in investment, dwarfing Indian commitments of $317 million. As prime minister in 2015, Oli blamed India for interfering in protests in Nepal's south that saw the border blocked and energy and goods restricted as the country struggled to recover from an earthquake. Oli won strong public support as he stoked anti-India sentiment over the blockade. He used the platform again during his re-election campaign last year. But Oli chose India for his first official overseas visit in an apparent attempt to improve relations. Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned the favour a month later by inaugurating a mega-hydropower plant during a visit to Nepal. Chairman Shintaro Yamada (front 3rd L) and president Fumiaki Koizumi (front 3rd R) of Mercari, a Japanese flea market app, pose with other officers at the Tokyo Stock Exchange to celebrate their company's debut Flea market app Mercari soared Tuesday as it debuted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, a major success for a rare Japanese "unicorn" -- a start-up valued over $1 billion. The company initially priced its stock at 3,000 yen ($27.30) a share, at the top of a prospective range. But that price was quickly surpassed on Tuesday, with shares trading at around 5,300 yen at the close, valuing the firm at over 700 billion yen ($6.37 billion). "Mercari got off to a flying start" with investors impressed by its successful business model, Shinichi Yamamoto, a broker at Okasan Securities, told AFP. The online marketplace, started in 2013, allows users to buy and sell everything from clothes and electronic goods to event tickets. Payment is not validated until the purchased item is received by the buyer, which has reassured users wary of buying second-hand goods online. Mercari has attracted international attention for its steady growth. It says it has around one million products on sale on any given day and generates $100 million a month in transactions globally. "We felt it was the right moment to go public," founder Shintaro Yamada said at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. The app has tapped into a relatively new but vibrant market in Japan for second-hand goods, which has also seen success for bricks-and-mortar stores specialising in used books and electronics. Yamada has said the idea for the app came to him as he travelled abroad and saw the appetite for used goods and the power of mobile shopping. "Things that don't have value for oneself have a lot for others and our goal is to become an international marketplace," Yamada added Tuesday. "We'll feel that we succeeded when the platform is not only a success in the United States but at an global level." Mercari has already begun expanding overseas, launching in the United States in 2014 and in Britain in 2017, and is expected to plough some of the funds raised by its share offering into further international expansion. People wave Turkish flags as they hold a commemoration at the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's first president The modern state of Turkey emerged out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire to become a powerful strategic nation that borders Greece to the west and Iran to the east. It has been ruled since 2002 by the Islamic-rooted conservative party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He has overseen some of the biggest changes since modern Turkey was created in 1923. But in presidential and legislative polls on Sunday, Erdogan and his party will face the biggest test at the ballot box to their one-and-a-half-decade grip on power. Here are five facts about Turkey. - Successor to an empire - At its peak, the Ottoman Empire ruled a swathe of territory extending from the Balkans to modern Saudi Arabia, including the holy sites of Islam. But the Empire suffered centuries of decline and its end was confirmed by defeat in World War I, in which it had fought on the side of imperial Germany. After a War of Independence, Turkish military leaders including Mustafa Kemal Ataturk were able to salvage a modern state extending from Thrace to Mesopotamia, declaring the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Under Erdogan, Turkey has sought to rebuild its Ottoman-era influence in the Middle East, notably in Syria and Iraq as well as the Balkans and also Africa. - Secular, Western democracy - Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, pictured on this flag during a commemoration day at his mausoleum, made secularism one of modern Turkey's founding principles Ataturk, Turkey's first president until his death in 1938, turned the country towards the West and made secularism one of its founding principles. Multi-party democracy was introduced in 1946. Under Ataturk's successor Ismet Inonu, Turkey remained neutral in World War II. In 1952 it joined NATO along with its one-time foe Greece with the strong backing of the United States, keen to ensure Ankara never fell into the orbit of the USSR. Critics have accused Erdogan of increasing authoritarianism, presiding over a creeping Islamisation and changing Turkey's Western tilt. But the president insists he is committed to a secular republic anchored in NATO. - Scarred by coups - Turkey's powerful military ousted incumbent governments in coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980. The 1960 coup was followed by the hanging of ousted prime minister Adnan Menderes -- Erdogan's political hero -- along with two ministers. After coming to power, Erdogan clipped the wings of the military in a bid to make political interventions by the army far less likely. But in July 2016 he survived a coup attempt by a renegade army faction. Erdogan said that attempt was ordered by his one-time ally, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, who denies the charges. Erdogan then declared a state of emergency that has seen some 55,000 people arrested in an unprecedented purge. He -- and the opposition -- have vowed to lift the emergency after the elections. - Host to refugees - The country of over 80 million has sought to boost its influence, staunchly opposing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria's civil war but then working closely with his ally Russia to end the conflict. Turkey has taken in around 3.5 million Syrian refugees Turkey has taken in around 3.5 million Syrian refugees, who live mainly in the southeast and Istanbul, as well as smaller numbers from Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2016, it signed a deal to limit the flow of refugees to Europe after one million crossed the Aegean through Turkey in 2015. The deal was seen as a boost to Turkey's hopes of joining the European Union but the process has floundered ever since. Turkey has given passports to a few tens of thousands of Syrian refugees bur critics say it lacks a strategy to deal with their long-term presence. - 'Kurdish problem' - The non-Muslim minorities on the territory of modern Turkey were forced out in the 20th century and only small populations remain today. Armenians regard the killings and massacres of their ancestors as genocide, a term vehemently disputed by Turkey. Most Greeks left the country in the population exchanges of 1923. Supporters of jailed Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan demonstrate in Istanbul By far Turkey's largest ethnic minority are the Kurds. They make up a fifth of the population and have long complained of being denied their rights in what they call the "Kurdish problem". The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) took up arms in 1984 in a bloody insurgency that has left tens of thousands dead. Erdogan in the first years of his rule took unprecedented steps towards giving the Kurds greater rights and opened talks with the PKK. But a ceasefire unravelled in 2015 and violence continues, with still no peace deal in sight. Members of the LGBT community take part in a rally in front of the Supreme Court in Manila as the case is heard The Philippines' top court heard arguments on Tuesday for the legalisation of gay marriage, a historic first in the overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Two same-sex couples denied licenses to wed urged the Supreme Court to strike down a 1987 law that states marriage must be between a man and a woman. "When the right to marry, a decision so personal, so intimate and so life-changing, is denied to LGBT people, the state is not valuing their dignity," lawyer Jesus Falcis, who is also a co-plaintiff, told justices in Manila. It took three years for the Supreme Court to schedule a hearing and the case will likely move at a glacial pace. Judges will next hear from the government's lawyers, but the court does not set itself deadlines to issue rulings and cases sometimes take years to resolve. Legal experts say the case is still highly significant. "The decision will be landmark because the court has never pronounced on this," University of the Philippines law professor Antonio La Vina told AFP. "Obviously, it would be even more landmark, more historic if they say marriage is not between a man and a woman." Outside the court on Tuesday, about 20 members of Manila's LGBT community waved rainbow flags and lit multi-coloured candles in support of the petition. Danton Remoto, founder of the LBGT political party Ang Ladlad (Out of the Closet) told AFP he welcomed the Supreme Court's hearing of the case. "A space has been opened up to discuss this case legally," Remoto added. - Church v state - The Philippines -- where 80 percent of a population of over 100 million is Catholic -- is the only place outside of the Vatican where divorce is outlawed. Abortion is also illegal, largely due to church influence. However the plaintiffs may have an ally in President Rodrigo Duterte, who has expressed support for gay marriage but since backed off from a campaign trail pledge to legalise it. "I am for same-sex marriage. The problem is, we'll have to change the law. But we can change the law," Duterte told a gathering of LGBT people in his southern home city of Davao in December last year. The case comes as Duterte pushes back against the country's clergy, who are at odds with some of his key policies including a deadly drug war that has killed thousands. In May, Duterte allies in the House of Representatives passed landmark divorce legislation, though it is unlikely to become law due to lack of support in the Senate. Church leaders have fought efforts to legalise divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion, while losing a long battle against a state-funded free contraceptives law. Yemeni pro-government forces backed by United Arab Emirates troops gather on the outskirts of the rebel-held port city of Hodeida on June 18, 2018 in readiness to advance into the city's battleground airport UAE-backed Yemeni government forces fought their way into Hodeida airport on Tuesday, pressing an offensive that has seen some of the most intense fighting of a three-year war against Shiite Huthi rebels. The United Arab Emirates, which has US-trained troops fighting alongside the Yemeni army, said the alliance had entered the airport in Hodeida -- a Red Sea port city that is a key aid hub and the entry point for three-quarters of Yemen's imports. "With the participation and support of the Emirati armed forces, the joint Yemeni resistance (army) entered Hodeida airport," the UAE state news agency WAM tweeted. A Yemeni military source confirmed to AFP that troops had entered the rebel base at the disused airport on the southern edge of the city. Military sources also reported 33 Huthis and 19 soldiers killed in Tuesday's battle, bringing the death toll in Hodeida this week to 216 fighters. No civilian casualties have yet been confirmed. The battle for Hodeida has sparked fears of a new escalation of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, which is already teetering on the brink of famine. Hodeida, the key port of Yemen The United Nations has warned any attack on Hodeida port could cripple shipments of desperately needed aid to the 8.4 million Yemenis facing imminent starvation. Hodeida's residents are now bracing for what they fear will be devastating street fighting, as tanks and buses carrying uniformed troops roll through the empty streets of the once-bustling city. One resident, who asked not to be identified for fear of arrest, said civilians had been "banned from using their phones to take pictures and are questioned about their movements if they're seen in the streets". The rebels have also begun to dig trenches in the streets, he said. Fierce fighting in the Hodeida area has already driven 5,200 families from their homes as pro-government forces advanced up the Red Sea coast, according to the UN. The coalition launched a major offensive on June 13, dubbed Operation Golden Victory, to drive the rebels out of Hodeida, now the most intense battlefront in an already brutal war. - UN envoy leaves empty-handed - Since Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their regional allies intervened in Yemen in 2015, there have been multiple rounds of UN-brokered peace talks, but they have all failed to achieve any breakthrough. The UN says fierce fighting in the Hodeida area of Yemen has already driven 5,200 families from their homes as pro-government forces advanced up the Red Sea coast UN envoy Martin Griffiths has been holding talks in the rebel-held capital Sanaa since Saturday to seek concessions from Huthi leaders that might avoid all-out fighting in the streets of Hodeida. Griffiths appears to have failed to make a breakthrough. He told the UN Security Council by video-conference on Monday that he was hopeful a first round of preliminary talks could take place next month, according to two diplomats present at the closed-door session. But the UN envoy flew out of Sanaa on Tuesday without making any comment to journalists. Just hours after he left, Saudi state media said the kingdom's air defences intercepted a ballistic missile fired from rebel-held territory in Yemen -- the latest in a series of such attacks. There were no casualties, it said. Yemen's Iran-allied Huthis said via their Al-Masirah news outlet they had targeted a Saudi Aramco facility near the southwestern city of Abha. The Yemeni government and its allies have insisted that the Huthis must fully withdraw from Hodeida and turn over the port to UN supervision. The rebels have so far agreed only to share control of the port with the United Nations. The Gulf Arab states accuse their regional arch rival Iran of smuggling arms to the rebels through the port, a charge Tehran denies. The coalition held a press conference in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday to display what it said were explosives used by the Huthis in Yemen, including landmines and improvised explosive devices described by one UAE official as "a fraction of what the coalition has seized". The Saudi-led coalition puts on display some of the weapons used by the Iran-allied Huthi rebels in Yemen at a news conference in Abu Dhabi on June 19, 2018 The Yemen conflict has killed nearly 10,000 people, most of them civilians, since 2015. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their allies joined the Yemen war that year, after President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi fled into exile as the rebels overran much of the country. The coalition has helped pro-government forces to regain control of the south and much of the Red Sea coast but the rebels still control Sanaa and most of the north. File photos released in 2006 show Mongolian murder victim Altantuya Shaariibuu, right, and Malaysian political analyst Abdul Razak Baginda, who was cleared in 2008 of of abetting the murder A probe into the sensational murder of a young woman linked to Malaysia's ousted leader could be re-opened, a lawyer said Tuesday, after a meeting between the victim's father and the attorney-general. Altantuya Shaariibuu was shot dead and her body blown up with military-grade plastic explosives near Kuala Lumpur in 2006. The Mongolian's murder was the most shocking aspect in a scandal involving allegations that an associate of recently ousted premier Najib Razak arranged huge kickbacks for the purchase of French submarines in 2002. The case captivated Malaysia for years and there have long been allegations that Najib -- defence minister at the time of the deal -- and his wife Rosmah Mansor were involved. They have steadfastly denied the claims. Two government bodyguards were convicted of the killing and sentenced to death. One subsequently fled to Australia, where he is in detention, and maintains he was ordered by "important people" to carry out the murder. The shock election loss last month of scandal-plagued Najib's regime, long accused of burying the scandal, has fuelled speculation that new details about the murky case could be revealed. On Tuesday Altantuya's father Setev Shaariibuu and his lawyer met Malaysia's newly-appointed Attorney-General Tommy Thomas to discuss whether authorities could take a fresh look at the scandal. "It was a very, very positive meeting," lawyer Ramkarpal Singh told AFP, adding discussions centred on the possibility of re-opening the case or holding an official inquiry. Singh said he believed there were new leads and he was "confident" the investigation would be re-opened. At an earlier press conference, Setev said his daughter's death had "destroyed" his life as if by a tsunami. Altantuya was the mistress of Najib's associate, Abdul Razak Baginda, and was alleged to have demanded a cut in the submarine deal for translating during negotiations. Abdul Razak was cleared in 2008 of abetting the murder. The bodyguard who fled to Australia, Sirul Azhar Umar, recently said he is willing to assist any new government investigation into the case, a potential major breakthrough. Flowers were placed with a photo of Zhang Chaolin at a building in Aubervilliers, north of Paris, last August on the anniversary of his death Two French youths were jailed Tuesday over a deadly attack on a Chinese tailor that sparked mass protests by the country's Asian community. The pair, aged 17 and 19 at the time of the attack in August 2016, left Zhang Chaolin with fatal injuries when he fell while they were mugging him. The older defendant was sentenced to 10 years in jail and the younger to four years with an additional year suspended for violent robbery leading to death. The younger, who has already served two years behind bars awaiting trial, burst into tears upon hearing the verdict at a juvenile court near Paris. Prosecutors had asked that the pair be jailed for 15 years and eight years respectively. Zhang's death caused an outcry among Asians living in France, with thousands taking to the streets to protest what they called a rise in anti-Asian racism in poorer French communities. The 49-year-old and a friend were on their way to a restaurant in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers when three teenagers crossed their path. Zhang, who has two children, fell and hit his head on a wall after being kicked in the chest. He died five days later in hospital, while his friend sustained minor injuries. - Acknowledging the daily abuse - Lawyers for the victims' families welcomed the ruling. "It's important for the victims and for the other victims of similar crimes," said family lawyer Vincent Fillola. "This will be a signal for people from the Chinese community and Asians in general," he added. "The courts have acknowledged the violence that they suffer on a daily basis and saw this violence for what it was -- based on racist prejudice." Marlene Viallet, lawyer for the accused, meanwhile blasted the verdict as "a poor application of the law". The defence team had protested the lengthy jail terms demanded by the prosecution, saying there was no intention to murder and denying their clients were racist. The attack, in which the assailants came away with just a phone charger and some sweets, followed a string of robberies targeting Chinese tourists and small-business owners in France's gritty high-rise suburbs. During police questioning, one of the suspects said the gang had targeted the Chinese pair because they had heard Asians "carry a lot of cash". But Viallet said that while stereotypes about Asians were rife in low-income suburbs, "there is no hatred towards them". The attack on Zhang, she said, was purely an act of "delinquency". Around 10,000 people of Chinese origin live in Aubervilliers, Europe's biggest textile import-export hub, which has a population of 80,000. Community leaders say security has improved since Zhang's death. Syria A US official has blamed Israel for a deadly strike along Syria's eastern border with Iraq, raising many questions over the target and victims of the raid. This is what we know: Where was it? Late Sunday, an air strike hit the border town of Al-Hari in eastern Syria near the frontier with Iraq, state media and a Britain-based monitor said. The raid in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor killed 55 fighters including Syrians and Iraqis, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said. Deir Ezzor is the backdrop of two separate offensives against the Islamic State jihadist group, and a de-confliction line exists to keep them from running into each other. Al-Hari lies on the western banks of the Euphrates River, where regime forces have been battling the jihadists with the help of Russian aircraft and foreign fighters. On the eastern side of the waterway, a Kurdish-led alliance supported by the US-led coalition has been pressing a campaign against IS. The jihadists declared a cross-border "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq in 2014, but have since seen their presence largely confined to a few holdouts in Deir Ezzor. Al-Hari also sits along a key route linking the Syrian-Iraqi border, and Iran beyond that, all the way west to the frontier with Lebanon. That road could be crucial for the transport of weapons, equipment, and high-value personnel across territory held by Syria's regime and its regional allies, analysts say. Who was targeted? Iraq's powerful Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force, which has fought IS in Iraq, said 22 of its fighters lost their lives in the strike. The bodies of at least three fighters of the Hezbollah Brigades, part of the Hashed, have been repatriated to southern Iraq, an AFP correspondent said. The group is among several pro-Iran groups present inside Syria including along the border with Iraq, sources within the Hashed said. These groups have fought alongside Damascus regime fighters since the start of Syria's civil war in 2011, before joining the Hashed to expel IS from Iraq in 2014. Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said Sunday's target was used as "the headquarters of the Iranian forces responsible for the operations in the eastern countryside of Deir Ezzor". The deadly raid hit "as a convoy of the Hezbollah Brigades stopped nearby," he said. Who did it? Both Damascus and the Iran backed-Hashed have blamed the US-led coalition fighting IS. But the coalition and the Pentagon denied any involvement. Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said: "The strike was not conducted by the US or the coalition." Instead, a US official pointed the finger at Israel. "We have reasons to believe that it was an Israeli strike," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity on Monday. Last month, Israel launched a large-scale attack on what it said were Iranian targets in Syria, raising fears of a major confrontation. Those strikes followed a barrage of rockets that Israel said was fired towards the occupied Golan by Iranian fighters from Syria. Even before that, Israel had been blamed for a series of strikes inside Syria that killed Iranians, though it has not acknowledged them. If Sunday's strike was carried out by Israel, it would mark a significant escalation against its Iranian foe, said Phillip Smyth, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "If it were the Israelis, then they are sending a signal that we can hit you all the way out there and we can hit a pretty nasty organisation, the Hezbollah Brigades," Smyth told AFP. How did all sides react? Israel declined to comment Tuesday. But just hours before the attack, Israel's premier warned his country would act against Iranian presence in neighbouring Syria. "Iran needs to withdraw from all of Syria," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. "We will take action -- and are already taking action -- against efforts to establish a military presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria both close to the border and deep inside Syria," the prime minister said. "We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria." The Hezbollah Brigades, which lost fighters in the raid, on Tuesday denounced "an aerial strike by the American-Zionist demon" who wants to maintain "IS and its affiliates". "This heinous crime will open the way to a new confrontation with the Zionist entity and the American project, and the Hezbollah Brigades will not hesitate to go towards this confrontation." burs/ah-tgg/mjg/rsc/mm An Indian police paramilitary trooper fires tear gas during clashes in Srinagar on June 16 India's ruling party withdrew Tuesday from an alliance government in the disputed Kashmir region in what analysts described as an attempt to appear tough on militancy before a general election. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said it was pulling out of the governing coalition in Jammu and Kashmir state because of worsening "terrorism and violence". The Hindu nationalist party had ruled in the restive state since March 2015 when it struck an unlikely alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a local political outfit which has advocated more autonomy for Kashmir. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in Jammu and Kashmir," senior BJP leader Ram Madhav told reporters in New Delhi, referring to India's only Muslim-majority state. "Today there is an increase in terrorism and violence, radicalisation is spreading fast." Madhav said the state government had failed to curb radicalisation or guarantee civilian rights in the volatile territory disputed with Pakistan. The state's chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, who hails from the PDP, tendered her resignation after the alliance lost the majority to rule. The state's governor, a figurehead who is appointed by New Delhi, will rule Jammu and Kashmir until fresh elections are held or a new coalition is cobbled together. The move was seen as the BJP walking back its involvement in the troubled state, which has been racked by conflict for decades but which has witnessed an upsurge of violence under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This decision allows the BJP to act tough on Kashmir before a general election next year in which Modi will seek a second term in office, analysts said. "What it (BJP) will do between now and elections is increase its political rhetoric against the separatists in Kashmir," said Manoj Joshi from the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation. "It will be political rhetoric of how the BJP will save the situation in the Kashmir region of the state," he told AFP. The decision means Modi's BJP controls one less state. But it will still govern 18 of India's 29 states outright or in coalitions. The PDP, which draws its support from the mainly Muslim north of the state, has long demanded the removal of a draconian law that gives Indian forces sweeping powers to search, enter property and shoot on sight. The BJP, whose base lies in the Hindu-dominated south, said the law was needed to curb insurgents fighting for Kashmir's independence or for its merger with Pakistan. The fighting has left tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, dead. A Palestinian man stands outside the burnt-out home of a family killed in an arson attack in 2015 An Israeli court has struck down some of the confessions of two Jewish suspects in the arson attack that killed a Palestinian toddler and his parents, ruling that interrogators obtained them by duress. The decision of the court in Lod, central Israel, could cast doubt on the strength of the prosecution's case against the accused -- Amiram Ben-Uliel from the northern West Bank settlement of Shilo and a minor who cannot be named. Eighteen-month-old Ali Dawabsha was burnt to death when the family home, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was firebombed in July 2015. His parents later died of their injuries. His brother Ahmed, now six, was the sole survivor from the immediate family but was left with severe burns. Israeli security services came under heavy pressure to catch and try those responsible. Ben-Uliel was charged in January 2016 with three counts of murder and one of attempted murder, arson and conspiracy to commit a hate crime. His alleged accomplice, aged 17 at the time of the attack, was charged with being an accessory to committing a racially motivated murder. "The charge sheet accuses both of the accused of membership of a terror organisation seeking to inflame the security situation for nationalistic and inter-religious reasons," court documents seen by AFP said. The Shin Bet internal security service held suspects under administrative detention, denied some of them the right to see a lawyer part of the time and used physical force during investigations, the documents said. Supporters of the suspects -- religious extremists known as "hilltop youth" who oppose the "secular" Israeli state -- denounced those methods as torture. Shin Bet denies using any illegal methods, and has stressed the entire investigation was conducted under the supervision of the attorney general. The documents provided by the Lod court said both suspects had been grilled by Shin Bet using "'special means' including physical means". "Shortly after the use of these means began... (Ben-Uliel) admitted carrying out the attack at Duma," they said. They did not elaborate on the techniques used but Israeli daily Haaretz said they would typically have included "painful physical means such as binding hands and feet and leaning the lower back on a chair, or prolonged uncomfortable kneeling." The court heard that in subsequent, videotaped, interrogations where no physical pressure was used Ben-Uliel repeated his confession. It ruled that it would not accept the admission under duress but that the subsequent repetition of the confession was admissible. The minor, the transcript said also underwent "special means" interrogations "during which he eventually confessed to participating in the planning of the attack in Duma." That too was rejected, but an earlier admission made to undercover policemen posing as fellow-prisoners in his jail cell was deemed to be acceptable. "The trial continues," prosecuting lawyer Rachel Avissar-Abeless told reporters outside the packed courtroom. "The court accepted our argument that the witness confessions are valid." - Not torture? - The state prosecutor's office said in a statement that the use of "special means" interrogations were permissible because of the danger that the accused, and others they were in contact with, were likely to carry out more attacks unless stopped. "In addition," it said. "The court did not rule that the interrogation methods used constituted torture." "The court rejected the request of the accused for a blanket disqualification of all the confessions." Defence lawyer Tzion Amir, however, hailed Tuesday's ruling as a "great victory". The court did not comment on the legality or otherwise of the Shin Bet questioning. The dead baby's grandfather, Hussein Dawabsha said the court decision to validate crucial confessions was "the right way to go". The prosecutor's office has said from the outset that the disputed confessions were not essential for a conviction, but Haaretz was unconvinced. "Rejecting the testimony means that most of the evidence would be circumstantial, greatly weakening the case," it wrote. Combination of pictures created on June 19, 2018 shows South Sudan's President Salva Kiir (L) in Addis Ababa on January 29, 2018 and South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar in Kampala on January 26, 2016 South Sudan President Salva Kiir will meet with rebel leader Riek Machar in Ethiopia's capital on Wednesday in their first face-to-face in nearly two years, an Ethiopian official said Tuesday. "The two principals will meet in Addis Ababa upon the invitation extended by his excellency, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed," Meles Alem, a spokesman for Ethiopia's foreign ministry, told AFP. South Sudan's ambassador to Ethiopia, James Pitia Morgan, confirmed Kiir's planned attendance, as did Manasseh Zindo, a senior official in Machar's SPLM-IO rebel group. The two leaders, whose political rivalry triggered the start of a civil war more than four years ago have not met since Machar and his forces were chased from the capital during fighting in July 2016. Successive international efforts -- led by regional bloc IGAD -- have so far failed to impose a functioning peace deal or meaningful ceasefire. Abiy "will call upon the two leaders to narrow their gap and work for the pacification of South Sudan," Meles said. Tens of thousands have died and nearly four million South Sudanese have been driven from their homes since December 2013, while millions are going hungry amid a massive humanitarian crisis. Last month the UN Security Council gave the warring sides a month to reach a peace deal or face sanctions. Germans donned the kippa in solidarity demonstrations across the country after an assault on two men wearing the Jewish skullcap A Syrian migrant apologised in a German court Tuesday for lashing out with his belt at an Israeli man wearing a Jewish kippa skullcap in an assault that stoked fears of resurgent anti-Semitism. A video of the attack, filmed by the victim on his smartphone, sparked widespread public revulsion as it spread on social media, and later triggered large street rallies to show solidarity with Jews. The defendant, a 19-year-old Palestinian from Syria, is charged with dangerous assault and hate speech and could be judged under juvenile law. The footage of the assault in Berlin on April 17 shows the attacker, one of a group of three, shouting "yahudi" -- Jew in Arabic -- before lashing out at the victim, leaving him injured. "I'm sorry, it was a mistake", the defendant told the court, while insisting he had been insulted first and that the attack was not motivated by anti-Semitism. "I didn't want to hit him, I only wanted to scare him," he said in his testimony, which switched from halting German to Arabic. "I don't hate Jews or Christians or anyone else," he said, explaining the attack by confessing he "had smoked some dope, my head was tired". Bild daily has identified the belt attacker as Knaan al-S., who was registered at a refugee home near Berlin, but then went on to live "out of a suitcase" in the capital. The victim who shot the video, a 21-year-old student, later revealed that he is not Jewish, but an Israeli Arab called Adam, who was walking at the time with a German-Moroccan friend aged 24. Adam, a veterinary student, has said they had wanted to test whether wearing a kippa was safe in the fashionable inner Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg. In court, he rejected the defendant's version and said that since the unprovoked attack he felt "unsafe" in the same district. "Berlin was always a dream city for me where I could live in peace," he said, "but I don't think I'll wear a kippa again while walking alone." - 'Eternal responsibility' - The attack was the latest to raise alarm bells about renewed anti-Semitism in Germany from both the far-right and a large influx of predominantly Muslim asylum seekers since 2015. The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party, which captured nearly 13 percent of the vote in the general election in September, has broken a taboo by repeatedly challenging Germany's "remembrance culture" and atonement for the Nazi era. The kippa worn by a young man when attacked in April allegedly by a 19-year-old Syrian refugee was put on display at the Jewish Museum in Berlin Party member Bjoern Hoecke has called Berlin's Holocaust memorial a "monument of shame", and AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland described the Nazi period as a "speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history". News of the belt attack coincided with another public outcry, over a rap duo who made light of Nazi death camp prisoners but went on to win the music industry's sales-based Echo award, which was subsequently axed. After the street assault, the head of the Jewish community in Germany, Joseph Schuster, said that Jews should avoid wearing religious symbols in big cities due to a heightened risk of targeted attacks. The advice earned him a rebuke from the European Jewish Association, whose head Rabbi Margolin argued that to not wear the kippa "fulfils the vision of anti-Semites in Europe". Days after the assault, some 2,000 people rallied at a "Berlin Wears Kippa" solidarity demonstration, matched by smaller events in Cologne, Potsdam, Magdeburg and Erfurt. Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking with Israeli television, denounced the emergence of "another form of anti-Semitism" beyond that of right-wing extremist groups, from Muslim refugees. She reaffirmed that the security of Jews and the state of Israel was a central concern for Germany because of its "eternal responsibility" for the Holocaust in which the Nazis murdered six million European Jews. Ready to meet: South Sudan President Salva Kiir, left, and rebel leader Riek Machar Nearly two years after fleeing South Sudan's capital amid deadly fighting, rebel leader Riek Machar will meet face-to-face on Wednesday with the country's president, Salva Kiir. The rendezvous in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa represents the latest international effort to end more than four years of civil war in the world's youngest nation. Tens of thousands have been killed and millions have been driven out of their homes and into starvation. Kiir and Machar will meet at the invitation of Ethiopia's prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, who also chairs the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) regional bloc that has taken the lead in thus-far fruitless peace negotiations. Abiy "will call upon the two leaders to narrow their gap and work for the pacification of South Sudan and relieve the burden of death and uprooting of South Sudanese people," said Meles Alem, a spokesman for Ethiopia's foreign ministry. Kiir's attendance was confirmed by South Sudan's ambassador to Ethiopia, James Pitia Morgan. Manasseh Zindo, a senior official in Machar's Sudan People's Liberation Movement-in Opposition rebel group, said Machar would attend. IGAD first proposed the meeting last month after the most recent unsuccessful round of peace talks. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir suggested hosting the two foes in Khartoum, an offer Machar rejected, while Kiir's government said it would prefer to have the meeting outside the region altogether. - Failed peace - The two men have been central to the fate of South Sudan since its 2011 separation from the north. The country descended into civil war in 2013 after Kiir accused Machar, his former deputy, of plotting a coup against him. They have not met since July 2016, when heavy fighting in the capital, Juba, signalled the collapse of a 2015 peace deal forcing Machar to flee to South Africa. The renewed violence spread across the country, spawning numerous new armed opposition groups and further complicating peace efforts. Efforts to revitalise the 2015 agreement resulted in a ceasefire in December which lasted just hours before warring parties accused each other of breaking it. Millions of people in South Sudan have fled their homes Tens of thousands have died and nearly four million South Sudanese have been driven from their homes by the conflict which the United Nations ranks among the most serious humanitarian crises in the world. Forty-eight percent of the population are experiencing extreme hunger and seven million will need aid this year, according to the UN. International patience with the conflict has worn thin. Last month, the UN Security Council gave the two warring sides a month to reach a peace deal or face sanctions. The United States has also grown increasingly frustrated with Kiir's government. No caption Washington was a critical backer of South Sudan during its separation from Sudan, and remains Juba's biggest aid donor. A top American official earlier this month threatened parties on both sides of the conflict with sanctions after a report from US foundation The Sentry said South Sudanese elites were profiting from human rights abuses. Despite the pressure, observers say Kiir has little incentive to make concessions to his rivals. His soldiers are winning militarily, while the opposition is more fractured than ever before. US President's daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Senior White House Advisor Jared Kushner, are seen during the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, 2018 US President Donald Trump's special envoy Jason Greenblatt and adviser Jared Kushner on Tuesday met with Jordan's King Abdullah II in Amman to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. The meeting came less than a day after the Jordanian monarch hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a short but rare visit. "They discussed increasing cooperation between the United States and Jordan, regional issues, the humanitarian situation in Gaza, and the Trump administration's efforts to facilitate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians," the White House said in a statement. In his talks with Netanyahu on Monday, the king stressed the need for progress on efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict "based on the two-state solution". The US delegation's trip also includes stops in Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been stalled since 2014. Trump's controversial December decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital has made the resumption of peace efforts unlikely. The move sparked anger across the Arab world and prompted Palestinians to freeze all contacts with US officials. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, but Israel considers the entire city to be its eternal and indivisible capital. The Palestinian Authority said Saturday that US plans to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are "doomed to fail". The West Bank, including east Jerusalem, was administratively linked to Jordan before it was occupied by Israel in 1967. Israel, which signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, recognises Jordan as the custodian of the divided city's Muslim holy sites. This US Customs and Border Protection photo obtained June 18, 2018 shows intake of illegal border crossers by US Border Patrol agents at the Central Processing Center in McAllen, Texas on May 23, 2018 US Attorney General Jeff Sessions rebutted comparisons to Nazi Germany of the US policy of separating children from their immigrant parents, calling it "a real exaggeration." "In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country," he said in an interview on Fox News late Monday. "But this is a serious matter. We need to think it through, be rational and thoughtful about it. We want to allow asylum for people who qualify for it." Sessions was responding to critics who have compared the separations of children from parents entering the US illegally to what the Nazis did. "Well, its a real exaggeration, of course." Sessions said. Since May 5, some 2,300 children have been taken from their parents after they crossed the US-Mexico border. They are being housed in makeshift shelters with bare concrete floors and chain-link fence dividers, drawing comparisons to animal cages. Instituted as part of US President Donald Trump's policy of "zero tolerance" for illegal immigration, the practice has sparked widespread outrage and condemnation, even among some Republicans. Retired general Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, sparked debate over the weekend when he posted a photograph on Twitter of the portals to the Nazi concentration camp at Birkenau. Over the picture was the message: "Other governments have separated mothers and children." Palestinian school students shout slogans and hold placards in a protest against the US move to freeze funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees at the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on March 28, 2018 Facing a major funding shortfall, the UN Palestinian refugee agency is planning to defer payment of salaries and suspend some of its operations in Gaza, an official said Tuesday. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees was thrown into severe financial crisis after the United States cut $250 million from its budget. UN envoy Nickolay Mladenov told a Security Council meeting that UNRWA is "weeks away from painful cuts to its emergency assistance for Gaza and elsewhere in the region." "In Gaza, this would include a deferral of salaries to some of its workforce in July and the start of suspending core operations in August," he added. The United Nations on Monday will host a pledging conference for UNRWA in New York - the second such donors' meeting in three months. In March, it raised $100 million for UNRWA during a conference in Rome but fell short of the $446 million needed to keep the agency afloat. The United States is the biggest single donor to UNRWA, which provides schools and health clinics to 5.3 million refugees in the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The cuts to UNRWA services in Gaza come amid warnings from the United Nations that the enclave is close to the brink of war after scores of Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire during protests near the border fence with Israel. In January, President Donald Trump's administration announced that it was reducing its contribution to the agency, arguing that UNRWA was in need of reform. US Ambassador Nikki Haley has said Washington will not restore the aid until the Palestinians agree "to come back to the negotiation table" with Israel. US President Donald Trump's intrusive comments have poured fuel on the fire, as hardliners in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc gave her an ultimatum to tighten asylum rules or risk pitching Germany into a political crisis US President Donald Trump doubled down Tuesday on the false assertion that immigration is driving up crime in Germany, casting doubt on the country's official statistics. "Crime in Germany is up 10% plus (officials do not want to report these crimes) since migrants were accepted," Trump tweeted, a day after he claimed German people were "turning against their leadership" over immigration. "Be smart America!" said the president, who is under mounting pressure to end the separation of immigrant families on the southern US border. While several high-profile crimes by migrants have fuelled public anger in Germany, which has admitted more than one million asylum seekers since 2015, the country's crime rate is at its lowest since 1992, according to official figures released last month. Data from the German interior ministry does indicate that the proportion of crimes committed by foreigners has gone up in the past five years, but this cannot be attributed specifically to migrant arrivals. On Monday, Trump tweeted that crime in Germany "is way up" as he assailed what he called a "big mistake" by Europe "in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!" Trump's intrusive comments have poured fuel on the fire as hardliners in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative bloc gave her an ultimatum to tighten asylum rules or risk a political crisis that would rattle Europe. The US president himself faces intensifying pressure to end migrant family separations, which are occurring as a result of a "zero tolerance" policy requiring the arrest and prosecution of anyone who crosses the border illegally. More than 2,300 children have been taken from their parents since early May, a practice loudly decried by rights groups and US politicians from both main parties. Trump has said he wants family separations to end, but has sought to pin blame on opposition Democrats, accusing them of blocking legislation on the broader issue of illegal immigration. He once more defended the administration's stance on Tuesday, tweeting: "We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally." "If you don't have Borders, you don't have a Country!" Members of displaced Yemeni families who fled battles between government forces and Huthi fighters near the Hodeida airport stand on the balcony of a school used as temporary housing inside the city of Hodeida on June 17, 2018 Trenches, military tanks and civilians fleeing by the busload: Yemen's Hodeida, once a bustling port city, is now bracing for battles in its streets. Ahmed is one of 600,000 Yemenis who now fear war at their very doorsteps, as a fight for control of the Red Sea region rages between government forces, backed by regional titan Saudi Arabia, and Yemen's Huthi rebels. For days, Ahmed has been holed up in his living room, certain every night that the fighting would stop by morning. But after the UN's top envoy for Yemen flew out of the capital Tuesday without announcing a breakthrough in mediation, hope is dwindling for Ahmed. He, too, says he now plans to flee the only home he has ever known. "The sounds of the violence have literally not stopped," Ahmed told AFP by phone from his home near Hodeida's international airport. "There are families who have been trying to escape, but they just can't." More than 32,000 people have been driven out of their homes across Hodeida province this month, according to the UN, as fears mount of an even worse humanitarian crisis in a country already hit by war, hunger and disease. The Saudi-led coalition launched an offensive last Wednesday, dubbed Operation Golden Victory, to push Yemen's Iran-backed rebels out of Hodeida, which the insurgents have controlled since 2014. Displaced Yemenis receive food at a school in the city of Hodeida after being evacuated from a village near the airport The Hodeida airport was the site of intense battles Tuesday between the rebels and the army backed by the United Arab Emirates, which has US-trained troops fighting alongside the Yemeni military. The UAE on Tuesday announced the government coalition had entered the airport in Hodeida -- a Red Sea port city that is a key aid hub and the entry point for three-quarters of Yemen's imports. Ahmed, meanwhile, said Tuesday marked "the most violent" day of his life. - 'Paralysed city' - Rebel-held Hodeida is the latest battlefront in a three-year war that has seen Yemen, long the most impoverished Arab country, pushed to the brink of famine. In 2014, the Huthi rebels seized control of the capital, Sanaa, along with much of northern Yemen and ports along the country's western coast. Saudi Arabia and its allies intervened in the Yemeni government's war with the Huthis the following year. Nearly 10,000 people have since been killed. That war is now hovering over Hodeida, home to 600,000 civilians. Displaced Yemenis collect aid in the city of Hodeidah on June 17, 2018 Many of them, like Ahmed, had been banking on UN efforts to take control of the port, through which nearly three quarters of Yemen's imports -- including much-needed aid -- flow. But those efforts failed this week, with both the coalition and rebels refusing to stand down as air raids continue to target key locations around the area. One resident, who asked not to be identified for fear of arrest, said civilians had been "banned from using their phones to take pictures and are questioned about their movements if they're seen in the streets". "The rebels have also begun to dig trenches in the streets," he said. "The city is nearly paralysed." Mohammed, a student who lives in central Hodeida, said a stream of buses and vans had been carrying panicked families from their homes to areas of relative safety over the past few days. "It's been non-stop fleeing," he told AFP. Readying to board a bus headed for Sanaa, one family placed a propane gas cannister, basic food items and a small suitcase for the driver to load into the vehicle. The United Nations has warned that an attack on the port itself could cripple shipments of desperately needed aid to the 8.4 million Yemenis facing imminent starvation. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said thousands of residents will continue to flee Hodeida in the coming days. The ICRC, along with other aid groups, has been forced to suspend many of its operations in western Yemen, leaving civilians across the country at risk. Malian soldiers on patrol in the city of Menaka, Mali in May 2018 Mali's defence minister on Tuesday admitted soldiers were involved in killings in the country's unstable centre, after the discovery of a mass grave added to accusations of summary executions by government troops. The announcement came after an NGO called Kisal, which campaigns for the human rights of pastoral communities, said on Monday "25 bodies" had been found in three mass graves. Prior to the discovery, 25 people from the Fulani ethnic group, who are predominantly herders, had been picked up last week by the army in the localities of Kobaka and Nantaka, Kisal said. "The inspection mission sent to the area confirms the existence of mass graves implicating some armed forces personnel in serious violations causing the deaths of men in Nantaka and Kobaka," Defence Minister Tiena Coulibaly said. Coulibaly ordered military prosecutors to open an investigation. He said the authorities were "firmly resolved to fight impunity and get soldiers to strictly observe international rights and humanitarian conventions," a statement said. Central Mali is a vast area where the state is near-absent and jihadists, blamed for exacerbating the dispute, roam with little constraint. The armed forces are facing increasing accusations of arbitrary arrests and extra-judicial killings in their fight against the insurgents. On May 19, the army said three Malian soldiers and 12 "terrorists" were killed in fighting at an army camp near the border with Burkina Faso. But locals alleged the dead were all civilians and the army later put out a new statement that spoke of 12 "people" killed. A resident of Nantaka named Hama Kelly said that troops arrested every person they came across as soon as they arrived in the village. "They took their mobile phones and identity cards. Afterwards, people who were (members of the) Songhai (ethnic group) were released but all the Fulani were kept behind," Kelly said. Tensions and violence have intensified in the central Mopti area over the past three years, featuring clashes between Fulani herdsmen and sedentary farmers from other ethnic groups who accuse the pastoralists of colluding with jihadists. Islamic extremists linked to Al-Qaeda took control of the desert north of Mali in early 2012, but were largely driven out in a French-led military operation launched in January 2013. The insurgents have changed into nimbler formations operating in rural areas, sometimes winning over local populations by providing basic services and protection from bandits. US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, is expected to announce that the United States is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council The United States will announce on Tuesday that it is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, which it accuses of bias against Israel, UN officials said. US Ambassador Nikki Haley will make the announcement at a press conference with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington at 5:00 pm (2100 GMT). Haley has repeatedly threatened to quit the Geneva-based body, established in 2006 to promote and protect human rights worldwide. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric declined to comment ahead of the announcement, saying: "We will wait to hear the details of that decision before commenting fully." "What is clear, is that the secretary-general is a strong believer in the human rights architecture of the UN and the active participation of all member states in that architecture." UN officials privately confirmed they were expecting the US decision to quit the rights body. The withdrawal followed strong UN criticism of Trump's policy to separate migrant children from their families at the US-Mexico border. UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said Monday "the thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable." Human Rights Watch criticized the move, warning that Washington's absence at the top UN body would put the onus on other governments to address the world's most serious rights problems. "The Trump administration's withdrawal is a sad reflection of its one-dimensional human rights policy: defending Israeli abuses from criticism takes precedence above all else," said HRW's executive director Kenneth Roth. "The UN Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel." US criticism stems from the fact that Israel is the only country that has a dedicated agenda item, known as Item 7, at the rights council, meaning its treatment of the Palestinians comes under scrutiny at each of the body's three annual sessions. The United Stated refused to join the body when it was created in 2006, when George W. Bush was in the White House and his ambassador to the UN was John Bolton, Trump's current hawkish and UN-skeptic national security advisor. It was only after Barack Obama came to power that Washington joined the council in 2009. Since Trump took office, the United States has quit the UN cultural agency UNESCO, cut UN funding and announced plans to quit the UN-backed Paris climate agreement. A container being transferred at a port in Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong province June 8, 2018 The United States on Tuesday said it was imposing steep import duties on Chinese imports of alloy aluminum sheet valued at nearly $1 billion which Washington says have been dumped on the US market. Trade relations between the world's two top economies on Tuesday were at the brink of all-out conflict, with US President Donald Trump having threatened late Monday to place tariffs on almost all of Chinese exports to the United States. Tuesday's announcement was part of a process begun in November that marked the first time in 33 years that the US Commerce Department had self-initiated the process of imposing anti-dumping import duties by itself -- not at the behest of US manufacturers. "The Department of Commerce will do everything in its power to stop the flow of unfairly subsidized or dumped goods into US markets," US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement. The department said Tuesday it had reached a preliminary conclusion that Chinese exporters had sold the aluminum sheet in the US at 167.2 percent below fair value. As a result, US Customs and Border Protection will begin collecting cash deposits from importers based on the alleged dumping rates. A similar Commerce Department process found in February that the imports were subject to impermissible Chinese subsidies. US imports of Chinese-made common alloy aluminum sheet in 2017 were valued at about $900 million, according to the Commerce Department, up about 50 percent from 2016. A final determination is due in late 2018 and could be blocked by the independent US International Trade Commission, which has disagreed with several of the Trump administration's dumping- and subsidy-related tariff decisions. China is also subject to 10 percent US duties on primary aluminum imports announced in March but the United States imports only a marginal amount of that substance from China every year. A mother and daughter look on during a rally against the separation of immigrant minors and their parents outside the US Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington, DC on June 19, 2018 Mexico strongly condemned US President Donald Trump's administration Tuesday for its policy of separating immigrant children and parents detained after crossing the US-Mexican border, calling it "inhuman." "In the name of the Mexican government and people, I want to express our most categorical and energetic condemnation of this cruel and inhuman policy," Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray told a press conference. "We call on the United States government, at the highest level, to reconsider this policy and give priority to the wellbeing and rights of these boys and girls, regardless of their nationality and immigration status." The Trump administration faces a growing swell of condemnation at home and abroad for the separations, the product of a "zero-tolerance" policy on undocumented migrants. The United Nations, international rights groups, Christian evangelicals, former US first ladies and prominent figures in the president's own Republican party have all criticized the policy. In a joint letter Monday, Mexico and the Vatican said that "children are the ones who are suffering the most" from forced migration and the turmoil it leads to. Guatemala expressed its "concern" Tuesday over the US policy and its effects. The human rights ombudsmen of Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala and Honduras meanwhile petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington to intervene to block the "dangerous" practice of separating families. US officials say more than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents or guardians since early May, when the "zero-tolerance" policy was announced. Lawmakers who visited minors in detention in Texas and California have described crying children held in cage-like conditions behind chain-link fencing, with no idea when they will see their parents again. A defiant Trump has vowed to prevent the United States from becoming a "migrant camp" and accused the opposition Democratic party of causing the crisis by blocking immigration reform legislation. The vast majority of separated families come from Central America, where brutal gangs have made their countries among the most violent in the world. Around one percent of the detained children are Mexican, said Videgaray. US-Mexican relations have been strained since Trump won election in 2016 after a campaign laced with anti-Mexican barbs and promises to build a wall on the two countries' border and make Mexico pay for it. US tariffs on Mexican steel and aluminum, Trump's insistence on overhauling the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and his attacks on migrants have only added to the tension. The UN envoy for the disputed territory of Western Sahara, Horst Koehler (C) -- shown here visiting the Aousserd camp for Sahrawi refugees on the outskirts of Tindouf, Algeria in October 2017 -- will convene new talks next week in Algeria and Morocco The UN envoy for Western Sahara is planning a new round of talks in Morocco and Algeria beginning next week to push for a return to negotiations on ending the conflict, diplomats said Tuesday. Horst Koehler, a former German president and ex-director of the International Monetary Fund, is expected to hold talks in Rabat with Moroccan officials on June 28 and 29 before heading to Laayoune to visit the UN observer mission based there, a diplomat said. Another diplomat said Koehler is also expected to travel to Tindouf in western Algeria to meet with leaders of the Polisario Front, but no firm date is set for that meeting. Morocco and the Polisario Front fought for control of Western Sahara from 1975 to 1991, but diplomatic efforts to end the conflict have been deadlocked since the last round of UN-sponsored talks in 2008. The Security Council in April approved a US-drafted resolution that urged Morocco and the Polisario to prepare for talks, setting a six-month deadline for action. Morocco maintains that negotiations on a settlement should focus on its proposal for autonomy for Western Sahara and rejects the Polisario's insistence on an independence referendum. Shipping containers at a port in Qingdao, in China's eastern Shandong province America's new protectionist trade policies make good on President Donald Trump's campaign pledges but come at significant risks. What are the strengths and weaknesses of his trade offensive? - A longstanding trade beef - On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to put "America First" and denounced free trade pacts as job killers destroying the American industrial base. With the approach of mid-term elections in November, Trump may be seeking to reassure his political base that he has kept his promises. "Donald Trump is not constrained by the establishment," Edward Alden, a trade expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told AFP. "He continues to puzzle foreign leaders but if you look at what he said during his campaign and for many years before that none of this is a surprise. He is doing precisely what he said he is going to do." - What are its strengths? - China accounts for about half of the soaring US trade deficit in goods (last year the goods trade gap with China stood at a record $375.2 billion). This leaves China far more exposed to Trump's tariffs than vice versa. Last year, the United States exported $130.4 billion in goods to China but imported $505.6 billion. - What are the unknowns? - By announcing tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports and threatening tariffs on up to $400 billion more, Trump is testing an unprecedented, no-holds-barred strategy whose consequences remain unknown. "It will be challenging for both sides to find a way to de-escalate these tensions while saving face and before trade and investment flows between the two countries take a sizable hit," said Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy at Cornell University. Prasad says that given the damage that could occur, "there is still hope that the United States and China will pull back from the brink of an open trade war." - What are the economic risks? - The 25 percent US duties on $50 billion of Chinese goods and 10 percent on a further $200 billion -- and counter-measures announced by China -- could shave 0.3 percent of Chinese GDP growth and 0.2 percent from that of the United States between 2019-2020, according to Oxford Economics. "It will not be easy for the US to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese imports that it can levy tariffs on without hurting US companies and/or consumers, given the strong involvement of US companies in a large share of China's exports to the US," Oxford's chief Asia economist Louis Kuijs said in a research note. - Who supports this policy? - Trump faces increasingly vocal opposition from across the political spectrum and business world, including from within his own Republican Party. Texas Congressman Kevin Brady, chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, has expressed concern for industry, farmers, workers and consumers, which he says stand to be affected by Trump's trade policies. - Are there foreign policy risks? - Trump is relying on China's help to succeed in his efforts to de-nuclearize North Korea. "He wants a personal relationship with the (leader) of North Korea. He announced he's made good progress. I think he feels he doesn't really need China at this point," said Alden. Nevertheless, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un traveled Tuesday to China for the third time since March. Kim briefed Chinese President Xi Jinping on his recent talks with Trump in Singapore, underscoring China's role in the effort to unwind North Korea's nuclear program. UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi (2e D) visits a camp for the displaced near the Libyan capital Tripoli UN refugee agency chief Filippo Grandi said Tuesday during a visit to Libya the key to resolving Europe's migration crisis was "cooperation" rather than disjointed efforts by individual states. "I have written yesterday to the presidency of the EU offering UNHCR's expertise in finding essential but practical new solutions to address these flows of people," said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. "This problem can be solved by cooperation, not country by country," Grandi told a news conference in Tripoli. Unstable since its 2011 uprising, Libya has become a key departure point for thousands of migrants hoping to reach Europe, with hundreds drowning each year as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean. "Although I dont think that closing ports like Italy did... is a good response, I also think that Italy is right when they say they have received most of the people crossing the Mediterranean, and that there has to be a more balanced distribution," said Grandi. "We have to find the system that is accepted by all countries in the Mediterranean," said the Italian diplomat. Winding up a two-day visit to Libya, Grandi was set to travel on to Niger, where the UNHCR has established a transit centre for European countries to process the cases of migrants evacuated from Libya. Out of 40,000 places sought for refugees, the UNHCR has received pledges to host 25,000 people, he said. So far, less than 2,000 asylum seekers have been accepted by host countries, he said. In a statement, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said last year he began selling his stake in Navigator Holdings -- a shipping firm whose owners include Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law -- but only learnt of the shares in question later US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Tuesday he did not stand to gain last year from short selling shares in a Kremlin-tied shipping firm days before coming under media scrutiny about the investment. The transaction was first reported Monday in Forbes as part of a set of investments the magazine said constituted major ethical conflicts for Ross -- who instead says he has met the legal and ethics requirements related to his personal fortune since taking office. In a statement, Ross said last year he began selling his stake in Navigator Holdings -- a shipping firm whose owners include Russian President Vladimir Putin's son-in-law -- but did not learn of the existence of the shares in question until the autumn. "I later learned in late October that there were more shares belonging to me in an account the company had opened in electronic form at a firm acting as its agent," Ross added. Ross said that, in order to meet an ethics deadline for divestment even though he did not have "physical possession" of the shares, "I technically sold them short." Traditionally in a short sale, investors sell assets they borrow, speculating they will replace them later after prices have fallen and keep the difference as profit. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the transaction, valued at between $100,000 and $250,000, had begun three days after the newspaper questioned Ross about his stake in Navigator. The newspaper's query was part of the Panama Papers revelations from leaked financial records and Ross would have anticipated the negative coverage of his investment as he arranged for the short sale, according to The Times. Shares in Navigator fell 4.8 percent before Ross closed the transaction on November 16, 2017. But Ross said Tuesday that after the agent delivered the shares, he simply passed them on to his broker. "Therefore, it made no economic difference to me whether the shares went up or down between the sale date and the date I delivered them." Adel was one of the founding members of the April 6 protest movement that spearheaded the 2011 uprising, which unseated Hosni Mubarak, and was handed a three-year prison term in 2013 for violating a law on demosntrations Egyptian prosecutors on Tuesday ordered the detention of prominent activist Mohamed Adel for 15 days over allegations that he spread "false information and incited violence", his lawyer said. The lawyer, Gamal Eid, who heads the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, said "the prosecution did not specify the nature of the false information". Adel was one of the founding members of the April 6 protest movement that spearheaded the 2011 uprising, which forced longtime president Hosni Mubarak from power. In December 2013, he was handed a three-year prison term for violating a law on demonstrations, and was released early last year after serving out the sentence. A growing number of activists have been detained in Egypt in recent months. In May, Egyptian police arrested Hazim Abdelazim, a one-time campaigner for President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi who became a critic of the former military chief. That came only days after the arrest of Egyptian blogger and journalist Wael Abbas, known for standing up against police violence. Abbas's arrest followed that of two other bloggers earlier in the same month: Sherif Gaber and Shadi Abuzeid. Since 2013, international human rights groups have criticised Sisi's government for cracking down on secular and left-wing activists. The Egyptian government has rejected the accusations. It says its priority is to reform the economy and fight "terrorism", and accuses its detractors of seeking to harm Egypt's interests. The UN rights office this month criticised "significant escalation" in an Egyptian crackdown on social dissent, saying arbitrary detention had become a "chronic problem" in the country. Spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said a long line of prominent bloggers, journalists, lawyers and activists were among those detained since Egypt's General Prosecutor in February ordered prosecutors to monitor social media sites that "spread lies and fake news". Defending President Donald Trump's tough immigration policies: US Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen Kirstjen Nielsen, the US homeland security chief whose departure was announced by Donald Trump on Sunday, was said to be a frequent target of the president's ire despite being among the staunchest defenders of his controversial immigration policies. Last summer, as images were broadcast of wailing children being wrested from their parents under the administration's practice of separating families, she took to the White House podium to defend the "zero tolerance" approach, becoming the face of a policy that was decried the world over. She appeared to have done enough to win over her boss, who until then was reportedly close to firing her for failing to keep an adequate check on illegal border crossings, a cornerstone of Trump's election campaign. But the reprieve was to prove temporary. As Border Patrol estimates put the number of migrants passing through Mexico at over 100,000 in March -- nearly a decade high -- an increasingly irate Trump appeared to have lost patience with Nielsen, who had been without her protector John Kelly, the former White House chief of staff, since he resigned last year. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summed up the position of many progressive critics, writing: "It is deeply alarming that the Trump Administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House's liking." - Lawyer, cyber-security specialist - The 46-year-old Nielsen, who would swap elegant office attire for jeans and aviator shades on her frequent visits to the border, kept a low profile when she joined the administration at its outset in January 2017. A lawyer by training, she had served previously as a cyber security specialist in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). She was brought in as assistant to Kelly, a retired marine general who set to work cracking down on illegal immigration as Trump's first DHS secretary. When Kelly moved to the White House as Trump's top aide in July 2017, Nielsen went with him as his deputy. But by October that year she was back at DHS, this time as secretary. Migrants in McAllen, Texas, are seen as agents arrive to take them into custody -- it fell to Nielsen to carry out US President Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies Described as being all-business, she oversaw a sprawling department with 200,000 employees and wide-ranging responsibilities. Disaster relief, cyber security, transportation security, the Coast Guard, customs and policing the borders all fall under the department's purview. So it fell to her to carry out Trump's most fiercely held objective: stopping illegal immigration. It was a daunting, deeply controversial task in a country with an estimated 11 million people living without papers, many with families and deep roots in their communities. Under Trump, Nielsen's department embarked on sweeping roundups and tough new measures, including barrier construction on the Mexico border. - Loyalist - She will be remembered most, however, as the primary defender of the Trump administration's most widely condemned practice -- since revoked -- of separating migrant children from their parents as part of a policy of prosecuting all illegal border crossers. Nielsen faced down opposition calls to resign as condemnation pours in from the United Nations, human rights groups, and four former first ladies -- all mothers -- who have called the policy "cruel" and "immoral." She would go on to counter-attack, bristling at suggestions that the children were being mistreated, or placed into what appeared to be "cages." Instead, toeing the administration's line, she blamed Congress for passing laws that offer illegal immigrants numerous "loopholes." And in any case, the children taken from their parents after crossing the border were "well taken care of," she said. Nielsen's relationship with Trump was long said to be tenuous. But despite reports he complained constantly about her performance, she continued to loyally defend him. When participants in a White House session on immigration quoted Trump as referring to African nations as "shithole" countries, Nielsen came to the president's defense. "I did not hear that word used," she told a congressional hearing. Quizzed about Trump's statement that he would prefer immigrants from a country like Norway, Nielsen spun it as Trump's appreciation of the skills of Norwegian workers, and not their race. "Norway is a predominantly white country, isn't it?" a senator asked her. "I actually do not know that, sir, but I imagine that is the case," replied Nielsen -- herself of Scandinavian lineage. That loyalty persisted until the end: last month, she defended the president's declaration of a national emergency to secure funding for his pet project, a wall on the US-Mexico border. And her letter of resignation left little doubt Nielsen remained a true believer in Trump's crusade against undocumented migrants. "I hope that the next Secretary will have the support of Congress and the courts in fixing the laws which have impeded our ability to fully secure America's borders and which have contributed to discord in our nation's discourse," she wrote. A composite sketch released by the FBI and police shows a suspect known as the "DC-area Hotel Rapist" who is wanted by the authorities for a string of rapes more than a decade ago In a race against time, US federal prosecutors have taken the unusual step of indicting the DNA profile of a man suspected of carrying out a string of rapes in the Washington area more than a decade ago. The US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia announced the charges Tuesday against an unidentified serial rapist referred to only as "John Doe." Known as the "DC-area Hotel Rapist," he is linked by his DNA to six sexual assaults in the Washington area between 1998 and 2006. The man is a suspect in at least eight other incidents and was indicted by a grand jury for two rapes which took place in the US capital in May 2003. Most of his victims were housekeepers who were assaulted while they were cleaning hotel rooms. Jessie Liu, US attorney for the District of Columbia, said prosecutors secured the indictment for the 2003 attacks before the statute of limitations could expire. "DC currently has a 15-year statute of limitations for first-degree sexual abuse," Liu told a news conference attended by FBI agents and Washington's police chief. "But DC law allows us to indict an unknown offender under the pseudonym of John Doe when his identity has been established with reasonable certainty by his DNA profile," she said. "A John Doe indictment like this one... will allow us to prosecute the assailant when the case is finally solved," she said. "This means the offender will not escape justice due to the passage of time." Liu said it was the first time the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia had secured a "John Doe" indictment based on a DNA profile. Police also released a composite sketch of the suspect -- an African-American man who would now be in his 30s or 40s -- and offered a $45,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. The sketch was produced not from eyewitnesses, the FBI said, but from DNA left behind by the suspect. DNA technology has figured prominently in several recent high-profile US criminal cases. California authorities announced the arrest in April of a notorious serial rapist and murderer known as the "Golden State Killer" who was caught 40 years after his crimes by investigators who matched DNA left at crime scenes to a genealogy database. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (R) and US Ambassador to the United Nation Nikki Haley (L) said the decision to quit the top UN rights council had come after a year of trying to force it to reform The United States withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday, condemning the "hypocrisy" of its members and its alleged "unrelenting bias" against Israel. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, came to Washington to announce the decision alongside President Donald Trump's top diplomat, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Both insisted the United States would remain a leading champion of human rights but, for many, the decision will reflect Trump's general hostility to the world body and to multilateral diplomacy in general. The announcement came after the top UN human rights official criticized Washington for separating migrant children from their parents who are seeking asylum after crossing into the country from Mexico. But Haley and Pompeo stressed the decision had been made after a long year of efforts to shame the council into reform and to remove member states that themselves commit abuses. "These reforms were needed in order to make the council a serious advocate for human rights," Haley said. "For too long, the Human Rights Council has been a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias. Regrettably, it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded." The Geneva-based body was established in 2006 to promote and protect human rights worldwide, but its pronouncements and reports have often clashed with US priorities. In particular, the council's focus on Israeli behavior towards Palestinians in the territory it occupies on the West Bank and in Gaza has infuriated Washington. But, as Haley stressed, Washington also believes it comes up short on criticizing even flagrant abuses by US opponents like Venezuela and Cuba. "Countries have colluded with each other to undermine the current method of selecting members," Pompeo said. "And the council's continued and well-documented bias against Israel is unconscionable," he said. "Since its creation, the council has adopted more resolutions condemning Israel than against the rest of the world combined." Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the US move, branding the council "a biased, hostile, anti-Israel organization that has betrayed its mission of protecting human rights." Haley, who issued a warning a year ago that Washington would make good on its threat to leave the council if reforms were not carried through, used even starker language. "We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights," she said. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres regretted the US decision, adding: "The UN's human rights architecture plays a very important role in the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide." On Monday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein -- a Jordanian -- had rebuked Trump over the US practice of splitting up migrant families detained on the Mexican border. "The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable," he said. - Defending Israel - Independent watchdog Human Rights Watch criticized the move, warning Washington's absence at the council would put the onus on other governments to address the world's most serious rights problems. "The Trump administration's withdrawal is a sad reflection of its one-dimensional human rights policy: defending Israeli abuses from criticism takes precedence above all else," executive director Kenneth Roth said. "The UN Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel." US criticism stems from the fact that Israel is the only country that has a dedicated agenda item at council meetings, one defended in particular by the Arab bloc of countries. Known as "Item 7", this items means that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians comes under scrutiny at each of three annual sessions. The United States refused to join the body when it was created in 2006, when George W. Bush was in the White House and his ambassador to the UN was John Bolton -- now Trump's UN-skeptic national security advisor. After Barack Obama came to power, Washington joined the council in 2009. But when Trump took office, he adopted a hostile approach to world governance, leading Washington to quit the UN cultural agency UNESCO, cut UN funding and planning to leave the Paris climate agreement. Singer Bono of U2 met with US lawmakers on Capitol Hill to press them to urge President Donald Trump to end the practice of separating families at the US-Mexico border Irish rocker and global activist Bono met with American lawmakers Tuesday, urging them to press President Donald Trump to abandon his "completely un-American" practice of separating families at the southern border with Mexico. Fresh off concerts in the Washington area this week, the U2 frontman met with Republicans and Democrats and addressed the plight of thousands of children who have been separated from their parents as they illegally crossed into the United States. "I've been talking to lots of Republicans," Bono told AFP as he and aides navigated through the US Capitol. "They say they want to fix the situation, but it just has to stop," he added. "It's completely un-American." Trump has come under fire for a "zero tolerance" policy that requires prosecuting anyone caught crossing the border illegally, which leads to children being separated from their detained parents. Bono, who co-founded the ONE Campaign that is working to end extreme poverty and fight HIV/Aids, was on Capitol Hill to thank lawmakers for funding international development programs. The programs have saved millions of lives, particularly in Africa. RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) - A Palestinian official has condemned reported U.S. plans to secure Gulf funding for major economic projects in blockaded, impoverished Gaza. Nabil Abu Rdeneh, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, alleged Monday that such efforts aim to further separate the Gaza and the West Bank which flank Israel. Abbas runs parts of the West Bank and the Islamic militant Hamas controls Gaza. Israel, citing security, has prevented most travel between the two territories sought for a Palestinian state. President Donald Trump's adviser, son-in-law Jared Kushner, is expected to visit Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia this week to discuss the situation in Gaza and the administration's proposals for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Abbas halted contacts with the administration in December, to protest what he says are blatantly pro-Israel policies. VATICAN CITY (AP) - The Vatican and Mexico are lamenting how children "are suffering the most" from forced migration, as the Trump administration comes under increasing criticism for its policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. The Vatican on Monday released the conclusions of the second Vatican-Mexico conference on international migration, held last week at the Vatican. The statement made no explicit reference to the separation policy, though it stressed the need to "insist on the centrality of the human person in every political act ... reaffirming the inviolability of human rights and the dignity of every human being on the move." "Children are the ones who are suffering the most from forced migration. We must respond effectively to the challenges created by these flows, balancing the principles of solidarity, subsidiarity and co-responsibility," the statement said. Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new "zero-tolerance" policy that refers all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. U.S. protocol prohibits detaining children with their parents because the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are. The head of the U.S. conference of Catholic bishops' committee on migration has condemned the policy as "immoral," and the issue dominated the U.S. bishops' recent assembly in Florida. The Vatican-Mexico statement called for a global governance body for migration "to ensure a safe, ordered and regular migration that helps all those involved." WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court is rejecting an appeal from a gay death row inmate in South Dakota who says jurors were biased against him because of his sexual orientation. The justices did not comment Monday in leaving in place the death sentence for Charles Rhines. He was convicted in the stabbing death of a doughnut shop employee in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1992. Rhines tried to persuade the court to take an interest in his case after the justices last year ruled that evidence of racial bias in the jury room allows a judge to consider setting aside a verdict. Rhines said one juror said Rhines should not be sentenced to life in prison because he is gay and would be housed with other men. GOTHIC, Colo. (AP) - David Inouye is an accidental climate scientist. More than 40 years ago, the University of Maryland biologist started studying when wildflowers, birds, bees and butterflies first appeared each spring on this mountain. These days, plants and animals are arriving at Rocky Mountain Biological Lab a week or two earlier than they were 30 years ago. The robins that used to arrive in early April now show up in mid-March. Marmots end their winter slumber ever earlier. David Inouye poses for a photo in Gothic, Colo., in the Rocky Mountains area he studies on May 1, 2018. More than 40 years ago, the University of Maryland biologist started studying when wildflowers, birds, bees and butterflies first appeared each spring on this mountain. In 2018, plants and animals are arriving at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab a week or two earlier than they were 30 years ago. The robins that used to arrive in early April ago now show up in mid-March. Marmots end their winter slumber ever earlier. (AP Photo/Peter Banda) "If the climate weren't changing, we wouldn't see these kind of changes happen," Inouye said while standing on a bed of wildflowers that are popping up on the first day of May as marmots snoop around nearby. It's been 30 years since much of the world learned that global warming had arrived. On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress, explaining that heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of fossil fuels were pushing temperatures higher. But it turns out climate isn't the only thing that's changing: Nature itself is, too. That's the picture painted by interviews with more than 50 scientists and an Associated Press analysis of data on plants, animals, pollen, ice, sea level and more. You don't need a thermometer or a rain gauge to notice climate change, and you don't need to be a scientist to see it. Evidence is in the blueberry bushes in Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond, the dwindling population of polar bears of the Arctic and the dying corals worldwide. Scientists have documented 28,800 cases of plants and animals "responding consistently to temperature changes," a 2008 study in the journal Nature said. "Nature is extremely sensitive to temperature and nature is reacting to the warmer temperatures," said Boston University biologist Richard Primack. "The dramatic change is happening right in front of us." In the 1850s, Thoreau charted when Walden Pond's highbush blueberry first flowered. At the time, it happened around May 16, on average. In the past 10 years, it's averaged April 23. Primack started tracking blueberries there in the 2000s, so he can't specifically say how much of the earlier blooming was due to warming temperatures in the last 30 years, but he figures about a third of it is. In 1983, mail carrier John Latimer started keeping track of when the birds, chipmunks and butterflies emerge, when the trees and plants bloomed and when they changed colors and dropped leaves in northernmost Minnesota. Spring is coming earlier, he found. But it's not consistent; there are some really late years interspersed, creating a roller-coaster effect. Starting about 30 years ago, the growing season in general around the Northern Hemisphere "rather abruptly changed to a new normal," with earlier springs and later falls, said Mark Schwartz, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee geographer. In the Lower 48 states, 2012 was the earliest growing season on record until it was edged out by 2017, he said. In the U.S., fall's first frost is happening about nine days on average later since 30 years ago, while the last frost of spring is happening almost four days earlier, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That means the growing season in between is nearly two weeks longer. And some of the stuff that's growing is making us sneeze and suffer. High ragweed days across America swelled from 1990 to 2016, according to a study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Lewis Ziska. In Kansas City, the number of high pollen days jumped from 58 to 81. "Allergies and asthma are on the rise. Climate change isn't the only reason, but it contributes," said Dr. Howard Frumkin, former environmental health chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now at the Wellcome Trust in London. Frumkin said ragweed and poison ivy trigger more powerful allergic reactions with higher carbon dioxide levels. Some of the hardest-hit places on Earth are underwater. Coral reefs are sensitive to warmer water, and there isn't a reef on this planet that has gone unscathed by global warming, said Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's coral reef watch. "If you look at coral reefs around the world, they've suffered a great deal of damage," Eakin said. "Many of them are shadows of what they've been before 1998." There had been no global mass bleaching of coral - when they go white because of heat stress and frequently die - until 1998. Another hit in 2010 and then from 2014 to 2017 was the biggest global mass bleaching of them all, devastating the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, Eakin said. Melting ice has made polar bears the poster animal of climate change. Studies show that their survival rates, reproduction rates and body weight are going down in most parts of the Arctic, said Steven Amstrup, formerly U.S. Geological Survey's top polar bear researcher and now chief scientist at Polar Bear International. In parts of Alaska, Amstrup found a 40 percent population drop since the mid-1990s. When Amstrup first started studying polar bears in Alaska he was tracking the resurgence of the animals from widespread hunting in the 1950s and 1960s. But starting in the late 1990s they started losing their habitat and "we weren't seeing as many big old bears." Ornithologist George Divoky, on his 47th summer in Cooper Island, Alaska, to study shore birds, is another accidental climate scientist. "In 1988, things started getting strange," Divoky said. In the years that followed, seabirds like the black guillemot started arriving earlier, laying eggs earlier and not surviving as well, he said, blaming warming. In 1989, Divoky counted 220 pairs of birds. Last year, there were 85 pairs, and two-thirds of the chicks died. "I was just studying birds," Divoky said. "I don't take any pride in that I may be documenting the end of an Arctic seabird colony." Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech, has heard non-scientists accusing the government or researchers of manipulating temperature data to show warming. There's no cooking the books, she said; nature is broadcasting a clear signal about climate change. "If you don't trust the thermometers, throw them out," Hayhoe said. "All we have to do is look at what's happening in nature." ___ AP data journalist Nicky Forster contributed to this story from New York. Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears . His work can be found here . ___ 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. David Inouye inspects wildflowers in Gothic, Colo., in the Rocky Mountains area he studies on May 1, 2018. More than 40 years ago, the University of Maryland biologist started studying when wildflowers, birds, bees and butterflies first appeared each spring on this mountain. In 2018, plants and animals are arriving at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab a week or two earlier than they were 30 years ago. The robins that used to arrive in early April ago now show up in mid-March. Marmots end their winter slumber ever earlier. (AP Photo/Peter Banda) A marmot sits on a rock outside the Gothic Research Center in Gothic, Colo., on May 1, 2018. Biologist David Inouye says plants and animals in the area are arriving a week or two earlier than they were in 1988. The robins that used to arrive in early April ago now show up in mid-March. Marmots end their winter slumber ever earlier. "If the climate weren't changing, we wouldn't see these kind of changes happen," Inouye said. (AP Photo/Peter Banda) FILE - In this July 22, 2017 file photo, a polar bear climbs out of the water to walk on the ice in the Franklin Strait in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Climate scientists point to the Arctic as the place where climate change is most noticeable with dramatic sea ice loss, a melting Greenland ice sheet, receding glaciers and thawing permafrost. The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world since 1988. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File) FILE - In this Oct. 26, 2015 file photo, fish swim over a patch of bleached coral in Hawaii's Kaneohe Bay off the island of Oahu. Warmer water is repeatedly causing mass global bleaching events to Earth's fragile coral reefs. Before 1998 there had been no global mass bleaching events _ which turn the living coral white and often leads to death. But there have been three from 1998 on. (AP Photo/Caleb Jones, File) FILE - In this Dec. 10, 2010 file photo, farmer Aries Haygood shows how powdery the top layer of soil is on his freshly planted Vidalia onion farm in Lyons, Ga. The U.S.'s extreme weather _ flood-inducing downpours, extended droughts, heat waves and bitter cold and snow _ has doubled in the 30 years since 1988, according to a federal index. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File) NEW YORK (AP) - A former CIA employee was charged Monday with stealing classified national defense information from the agency that emerged publicly in March 2017, when WikiLeaks began releasing some of the CIA's hacking tools. Joshua Adam Schulte, of Manhattan, was charged in a 13-count superseding indictment returned by a grand jury. He was expected to be arraigned on the charges on Wednesday. According to the indictment, Schulte stole the classified information in 2016 in the Eastern District of Virginia and elsewhere and then transmitted it to an organization that purports to publicly distribute classified, sensitive and confidential information. The organization was not identified in court papers. The indictment also charged Schulte, 29, with the receipt, possession and transportation of child pornography. Schulte already was detained on the child pornography charges. The indictment said Schulte in March and June of 2016 altered a computer system operated by the U.S. Intelligence Agency to grant himself access to the system, enabling him to delate records of his activities and deny others access to the system. In January, a prosecutor said Schulte was the target of an ongoing investigation into the theft of tools that were used by the CIA to spy overseas. WikiLeaks began releasing some of the CIA's hacking tools in March 2017. The U.S. government has all but publicly acknowledged the embarrassing leak from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence. President Donald Trump told a television host then, "I just want people to know the CIA was hacked, and a lot of things taken." According to the indictment, Schulte took classified information that "concerned, among other things, the intelligence gathering capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Agency." From March 2017 through last November, Schulte tried to cover up his crimes by making false statements during an interview with the FBI, the indictment said. The indictment sought the forfeiture of any property Schulte obtained directly or indirectly from any foreign government, party or military force as a result of the crimes. Prosecutors said last month that they expected to bring charges by July. Schulte's lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, said in May that her client was "deeply saddened" that he might face espionage-related charges. On Monday, she said: "When all the evidence is clear, he's hardly the villain that the government tries to make him out to be." In a release, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence "can pose a grave threat to our national security, potentially endangering the safety of all Americans." William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the New York FBI office, said Schulte "utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims. As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of classified Information." The CIA referred questions about the charges to the Justice Department, which issued the release. Schulte faces various new charges, including illegal gathering of national defense information, illegal transmission of lawfully possessed national defense information, unauthorized access to a computer to obtain classified information, theft of government property, causing transmission of a harmful computer program, information, code or command. Included among the charges was an allegation that he engaged in criminal copyright infringement from September 2015 to last August by making publicly available on a computer network thousands of copyrighted movies, television shows and audio recordings. If convicted, he could face decades in prison. ___ Associated Press Writer Deb Riechmann in Washington contributed to this report. CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - China's ambassador to Australia said Tuesday that the strained diplomatic relationship between the two countries needed to move away from "bias and bigotry" and build trust. Ambassador Cheng Jingye was giving a speech in Australia's Parliament House, where the government hopes to pass laws by next week that would ban covert foreign interference in domestic politics. The government blames the legislation proposed in December for a diplomatic rift with China, Australia largest trading partner. Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Cheng Jingye, gives a speech to a business forum in Australia's Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Cheng says the strained diplomatic relationship between the two countries needs to move away from "bias and bigotry" and build trust. (AP Photo/Rod McGuirk) Cheng told almost 200 delegates at a China-Australia business forum that the two economies were highly complementary and potential for future cooperation in trade and services was huge. "There is no reason for us not to develop a better relationship with each other based in mutual benefits and mutual trust," Cheng said. "China never interferes in the internal affairs of other countries, let alone carry out the so-called infiltration of other countries." "It is my belief that in order to dispel the clouds and achieve sustained and sound development in our bilateral relations, the two countries need to have more interaction and inclusiveness with less bias and bigotry," he added. Cheng later declined to elaborate on who he was accusing of bias and bigotry. "You can come to your own conclusions," he told reporters. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the strengths of the bilateral relationship should be emphasized. "The relationship is very strong," Turnbull told the forum. "It's important not to be distracted by media and political commentary that is often designed to highlight difference and highlight friction or even possibly accentuate friction." "That's my commitment, to ensure that the relationship gets stronger and stronger - mutual respect is the key," he added. John Brumby, National President of the Australia-China Business Council, which promotes bilateral trade, told the forum that he observed last year "some early signs of fraying at the edges of the government-to-government relationship." "While the trade and investment relationship remains robust, the deterioration in the government-to-government relationship has the potential to undermine our business opportunities and certainly our future success," Brumby said. "To put it bluntly, the relationship needs reset and repair to return to a position of mutual trust and respect and friendship to the long-term benefit of both Australia and China and to be clear, this doesn't mean compromising Australia's values or interests," he added. Australian media reported last month that a classified government report commissioned by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 had found that the Chinese Communist Party had tried to influence Australian policy, compromise political parties and gain access to all levels of government for a decade. The government won't comment on the media reports. Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Cheng Jingye, talks to Australia-China Business Council National President John Brumby, right, before he gives a speech to a business forum in Australia's Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Cheng says the strained diplomatic relationship between the two countries needs to move away from "bias and bigotry" and build trust. (AP Photo/Rod McGuirk) Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gives a speech to a China-Australia business forum in Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Turnbull said the strengths of the bilateral relationship should be emphasized and its basis of mutual respect. (AP Photo/Rod McGuirk) Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull gives a speech to a China-Australia business forum in Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Turnbull said the strengths of the bilateral relationship should be emphasized and its basis of mutual respect. (AP Photo/Rod McGuirk) SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - The United States has formally suspended a major military exercise with South Korea that was scheduled for August. President Donald Trump had pledged to stop the "war games" after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The Pentagon said Monday that planning has been halted on the August drill but no decisions have been made on any other military exercises with South Korea. A brief explanation of U.S.-South Korea military exercises: ___ FILE - In this file photo Sept. 18, 2017 provided by South Korea Defense Ministry, U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber, F-35B stealth fighter jets and South Korean F-15K fighter jets fly over the Korean Peninsula during a joint drills, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (South Korea Defense Ministry via AP, File) THE DRILLS The U.S. and South Korea hold major joint exercises every spring and summer in South Korea. The spring maneuvers - actually two overlapping exercises called Key Resolve and Foal Eagle - include live-fire drills with tanks, aircraft and warships. About 10,000 American and 200,000 Korean troops usually participate. The drills were held in April this year after a temporary delay to encourage North Korean participation in the South Korean Winter Olympics. The summer exercise, Ulchi Freedom Guardian, consists mainly of computer simulations to hone joint decision-making and planning. Some 17,500 American and 50,000 South Korean troops participated last year. The drill began in the 1970s. ___ THEIR PURPOSE The exercises help ensure the two militaries, from their top commanders to troops in the field, can work together smoothly and seamlessly in a crisis. Moon Seong Mook, a former South Korean military official, calls the joint drills and the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea the core of the alliance between the two countries. He says the American military presence "wouldn't mean much if the militaries don't practice through joint drills." ___ PROVOCATIVE? Trump, after meeting with Kim on June 12, said stopping the "war games" exercise would save money, "Plus, I think it's very provocative." North Korea has always portrayed the exercises as rehearsals for invading the country, but the U.S. and South Korea have not, until Trump's words, called the exercises a provocation. The allies have insisted the drills are purely defensive, to ensure they would be ready at a moment's notice if the North were to attack the South. Certain aspects of the exercises and North Korea's responses have been especially sensitive. The U.S. has sent B-1B aircraft from Guam on bombing runs over South Korean ranges, sometimes as a show of force after North Korean missile tests. The U.S. and its allies have called those missile tests "provocations." South Korean media also reported in 2016 that the spring exercises that year would include training for a "beheading operation" aimed at removing Kim Jong Un and toppling his government in the event of war. North Korea's army said such a plan would be the "height of hostile acts" and its weapons were ready to fire. The alleged decapitation training plan was never confirmed. A photo showing U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is displayed as a member of People's Democratic Party stands to oppose military exercises between the United States and South Korea near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from Trump's nuclear summit with Kim. The signs read: " Stop Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercises and withdrawal of U.S. troops." (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) FILE - In this Dec. 10, 2015 file photo, U.S. and South Korean army soldiers pose on a floating bridge on the Hantan river after a river crossing operation, part of an annual joint military exercise between South Korea and the United States against a possible attack from North Korea, in Yeoncheon, south of the demilitarized zone that divides the two Koreas, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.(AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File) FILE - In this Aug. 29, 2017 file photo, South Korean army soldiers aim their machine guns during the annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise in Yongin, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (Hong Gi-won/Yonhap via AP, File) FILE - In this Aug. 24, 2016 file photo, South Korean army soldiers conduct an anti-terror drill as part of Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise, at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File) CINCINNATI (AP) - Otto Warmbier's legacy is still being written a year after his death. The 22-year-old U.S. college student who died in a vegetative state in a Cincinnati hospital days after his release from North Korea is being remembered prominently during a dramatic shift in U.S.-North Korean relations. President Donald Trump said the death of the "very special person" galvanized determination to deal with North Korea, leading to his history-making summit this month with Kim Jong Un. Trump said in Singapore that Warmbier "did not die in vain." FILE - In this March 16, 2016, file photo, American student Otto Warmbier, center, is escorted at the Supreme Court in Pyongyang, North Korea. Warmbier's legacy is still being written, one year after his death. The 22-year-old U.S. college student who died in a Cincinnati hospital just days after his release from North Korea in a vegetative state has been remembered prominently during a dramatic shift in U.S.-North Korean relations. (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin, File) Parents Fred and Cindy Warmbier, of suburban Cincinnati, expressed appreciation for Trump's comments and have said they hope "something positive" comes from the summit. "We are proud of Otto and miss him," their statement said. Otto's parents "are trying to take their grief and channel it into very constructive ways" to raise awareness of human rights in North Korea and of "violations that occurred there, including against their own son," U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, a Cincinnati-area Republican who has kept in touch with the family since their ordeal began, told reporters this month. North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat, Trump has said, while not offering details on how or when weapons might be eliminated or even reduced. The Warmbiers have spoken out repeatedly about North Korea's treatment of Otto during his 17-plus months of captivity and filed a wrongful death lawsuit against North Korea in April, saying its government tortured and killed their son. They have said they want to hold North Korea accountable for their "barbaric treatment" of their son. During a United Nations symposium in May, Cindy Warmbier said that the family will keep speaking out about human rights violations to publicly "rub their noses in this ." Portman said the Warmbiers are happy for the families of three American detainees North Korea freed ahead of the summit. "Of course, we all wish that Otto had been one of them ... Coming home healthy, and that he was still with us," Portman said. Warmbier, a University of Virginia student visiting with a tour group, was arrested by North Korean authorities in January 2016 on suspicion of stealing a propaganda poster and was sentenced in March that year to 15 years in prison with hard labor after making a lengthy televised confession and appeal for mercy. He disappeared from public view after that, but then was released and arrived in Cincinnati on June 13, 2017. He died on June 19. Doctors in Cincinnati said he had suffered severe brain damage, although they weren't sure what led up to it. North Korea denied torturing him, saying he fell into a coma that resulted from botulism and a sleeping pill. Fred Warmbier last year recounted to Fox News the condition Otto's parents received him in: making an "involuntary, inhuman sound," ''staring blankly into space jerking violently," and was blind and deaf, with his head shaved. Trump tweeted afterward : "Otto was tortured beyond belief by North Korea." The Warmbiers attended the president's State of the Union address, where Trump paid tribute to them as "powerful witnesses to a menace that threatens our world." Last Friday, asked by a reporter why he didn't criticize North Korea's human rights violations during the summit after having spoken so passionately about Otto, the Republican president replied: "You know why, because I don't want to see a nuclear weapon destroy you and your family ... I want to have a good relationship with North Korea." Portman has expressed caution, saying there need to be ways to verify North Korea does what it says it will. He recalled that when Otto returned home, it became clear that the "regime had lied to us about his condition. ... We have to be vigilant about the regime and the nature of the regime." But he said he supported having talks, telling reporters last week that had there been direct U.S. dialogue with North Korea after Warmbier's arrest, better communication could "perhaps even been able to save his life." ___ Follow Dan Sewell at http://www.twitter.com/dansewell MEXICO CITY (AP) - On the campaign trail, presidential front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has railed against a corrupt and "rapacious minority" of business executives who oppose him because they know they will have to "stop stealing" if he wins the July 1 election. Executives have fired back with newspaper ads charging the leftist politician, who is making his third run for the presidency, is a populist demagogue who would set Mexico back decades by returning it to a time of heavy-handed state intervention. Now the two sides, by all appearances, have sat down and talked it out. Mexico's presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the MORENA party leads a campaign rally in Ecatepec, Mexico, Sunday, June 17, 2018. Lopez Obrador has led opinion polls since the beginning of the campaign, and some recent surveys give him a 2-1 advantage over his nearest rival. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte) After more than a decade of mutual recriminations, Mexico's wealthy elite and Lopez Obrador have lately reached something resembling an uneasy truce. It's not that they have reconciled their differences, but rather it's the result of pragmatic calculation by both sides. Business leaders have come to realize they would need to work with Lopez Obrador as the final arbiter of regulations and policy-making. The candidate knows he would need investment to continue so there's no economic instability or boycotting of his projects. "I think it's increasingly inevitable to a lot of people in the business community that they are going to have to make peace with a Lopez Obrador administration, and it's becoming equally obvious to Lopez Obrador that he's going to have to govern and make deals with people that he hadn't originally reached out to," said Andrew Selee, a longtime Mexico analyst and author of "Vanishing Frontiers," a book about Mexico and the United States. "So there is a bit of a coming together. It's a detente, I think. At this point it might be a bit much to say it's a peace," Selee added. "That doesn't mean there's an alliance, but there's at least a recognition that they need to be talking with each other." Lopez Obrador has led opinion polls since the beginning of the campaign, and some recent surveys give him a 2-1 advantage over his nearest rival, conservative Ricardo Anaya, a natural ally of the country's wealthy, and an even wider lead over Jose Antonio Meade of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. While some business leaders have been in Lopez Obrador's camp for a long time, a June sit-down with members of the Mexican Business Council - the same group he called the "rapacious minority" - marked an extraordinary change of tone after the group published a two-page newspaper ad warning against unnamed politicians who would "divide" the country and cause "resentment." "The doubts were cleared up, the rough edges were sanded and a commitment was established to work together," Lopez Obrador said afterward. Juan Pablo Castanon, former president of the Mexican Employers' Confederation, an umbrella organization for more than 30,000 private businesses, described it as a "good encounter." He came out talking about issues that form the core of Lopez Obrador's platform - poverty and corruption - and suggested they could work together despite differences. "We have seen how gradually (his) positions have been migrating toward ones much more open to dialogue," the confederation's current president, Gustavo de Hoyos, said later. "All candidates who arrive in elected office, from the president of the republic to the mayor of the country's most obscure town, will need the private sector," de Hoyos said. "They can have no doubt about that." Widely popular among Mexico's poor and working classes, Lopez Obrador, who was Mexico City mayor from 2000 to 2005, has long been viewed with suspicion and fear by the many in the elite - a class that has had tight historic connections with the ruling political parties that Lopez Obrador has lambasted as corrupt. When he first ran for president in 2006 on promises to "put the poor first," opponents likened him to then-President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and launched a campaign branding him "a danger for Mexico." Fierce opposition from business groups may have cost him an election decided by a razor-thin margin. His second run in 2012 saw Lopez Obrador moderate his proposals somewhat, but once again he came in second. This time he has sought to be even more cautious, though at the beginning he did not hold back from attacking his critics. Lopez Obrador announced he would review and possibly reverse business-friendly reforms pushed by current President Enrique Pena Nieto. Those include an education overhaul to professionalize a teaching class long dominated by powerful and often corrupt union leaders and an energy reform allowing private investment in the oil industry after years of decline at state-run energy giant Pemex. "It makes me uneasy, the issues, for example, the energy reform," David Arelle, a solar energy executive, said on a recent day in the capital's tony Polanco neighborhood. "I make a living from solar energy ... and if the energy reform is ended, there could be very serious problems." Lopez Obrador also has alarmed investors by saying he would scuttle a multibillion-dollar airport project on the capital's outskirts, drawing the ire of the likes of Carlos Slim, one of the world's richest men and a partner in the construction of the new terminal. More recently, though, the candidate softened his stance, saying it's not necessary to scrap the airport and suggesting instead that it be built entirely with private capital. He has surrounded himself with economists with mainstream credentials such as Gerardo Esquivel, a Harvard PhD who has consulted for the United Nations and the World Bank. Esquivel is one of those tasked with easing fears among the entrepreneurial class. "What is being proposed is to seek a better-adjusted balance between the activities of the state and the market," Esquivel said. "What we learned in these years is that the retreat of the state from economic activity and leaving everything to the market caused mediocre economic growth and poverty." Lopez Obrador promises there will be no expropriations or nationalizations, and says reviews of contracts under the energy reform would seek only to guarantee they were not won through corruption. Prominent historian Enrique Krauze, who in 2006 wrote a scathing essay that labeled Lopez Obrador a "tropical messiah," appears resigned to a Lopez Obrador presidency and of late seems more concerned with ensuring other institutions can rein in his more radical instincts. "Let us vote for the presidential candidate who convinces us, but let us take care that the next president does not have a majority in Congress," Krauze said in a video released last week. "Congress is the principal dam of containment to limit the absolute power of a president." So far Lopez Obrador's huge lead hasn't led to a major market loss or precipitous decline of the peso, though the currency has slumped over other concerns, notably contentious trade negotiations and tariff disputes with the U.S., Mexico's chief trading partner. Alfredo Coutino, Latin America director for Moody's Analytics, said the relative stability suggests markets have already baked in the possibility of a Lopez Obrador presidency and are betting that market and institutional counterweights will check his power. "If he were seen as a real threat," Coutino said, "I think the markets would be moving very strongly and we would be seeing investment decisions postponed or withdrawn." ___ Associated Press writers Sofia Ortega and JoeBill Munoz contributed to this report. FILE - In this Sept. 17, 2002 file photo, Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador waves after delivering his state of the city address in Mexico City. Widely popular among Mexico's poor and working classes, Lopez Obrador, who was Mexico City mayor from 2000 to 2005, has long been viewed with suspicion and fear by the many in the elite. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo, File) FILE - In this June 28, 2006 file photo, presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Democratic Revolution Party, PRD, waves to supporters during his final closing campaign rally at the main plaza in Mexico City. When he first ran for president in 2006 on promises to "put the poor first," opponents likened him to then-President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and launched a campaign branding him "a danger for Mexico." (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte, File) FILE - In this June 26, 2012 file photo, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, presidential candidate of the Democratic Revolution Party, PRD, greets supporters during a campaign rally in Toluca, Mexico. His second run in 2012 saw Lopez Obrador moderate his proposals somewhat, but once again he came in second. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo, File) WASHINGTON (AP) - An unapologetic President Donald Trump defended his administration's border-protection policies in the face of rising national outrage over the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. Calling for tough action against illegal immigration, Trump declared the U.S. "will not be a migrant camp" on his watch. Images of children held in fenced cages fueled a growing chorus of condemnation from both political parties, four former first ladies and national evangelical leaders. The children are being held separately from parents who are being prosecuted under the administration's "zero-tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings. Trump on Monday falsely blamed Democrats - the minority party in Washington - for obstructing legislation to fix the situation. In fact, it was Trump's administration that broke with longstanding practice of processing migrant families in civil, rather than criminal, proceedings that allow families to be held together. In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who've been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) "I say it's very strongly the Democrats' fault," Trump said Monday as his administration rejected criticism that the policy has resulted in inhuman and immoral conditions. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said, "We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do." In an appearance before the National Sheriffs' Association in New Orleans, Nielsen said: "Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards." Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new "zero-tolerance" policy that refers all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. Prior procedure had limited prosecution for many family entrants, in part because regulations prohibit detaining children with their parents since the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are. The policy change was meant to deter unlawful crossings - and Sessions issued a warning last month to those entering the U.S. illegally that their children "inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions." The current holding areas have drawn widespread attention after journalists gained access to one site Sunday. At a McAllen, Texas, detention center hundreds of immigrant children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets. Audio of sobbing children calling out for their parents dominated the discussion Monday. "Papa! Papa!" one child is heard weeping in an audio file that was first reported by the nonprofit ProPublica and later provided to The Associated Press. Administration officials said they do not like the family separations either - calling it the result of legal loopholes - but insist migrants who arrive illegally simply won't be released or loosely kept track of. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," Trump declared. "Not on my watch." Sessions, on Monday, echoed the administration's defense of the zero tolerance policy, and called on Congress to act. "We do not want to separate parents from their children," he said. "If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won't face these terrible choices." Mindful of the national outcry, lawmakers in both parties rushed Monday to devise a targeted legislative fix. But the White House signaled it would oppose any narrow fix aimed solely at addressing the plight of children separated from their parents under the immigration crackdown. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump's priorities, like funding a border wall and tightening immigration laws, must also be fulfilled as part of any legislation. "We want to fix the whole thing," she said. "We don't want to tinker with just part of it." The national debate over the family separation policy comes as Republican lawmakers are growing ever more concerned about negative effects on their re-election campaigns this fall. Trump is to travel to Capitol Hill Tuesday for a strategy session on upcoming immigration legislation. Underscoring the sensitivity of the issue, language curbing the taking of immigrant children from parents held in custody will be added to the House's conservative immigration bill, a House GOP aide said Monday, A similar provision is already in a compromise GOP immigration measure between party conservatives and moderates, with the House expected to vote on both late this week. The administration is hoping to force Democrats to vote for the bills or bear some of the political cost in November's midterm elections. White House officials have privately embraced the border policy as a negotiating tactic to win votes for legislation to fulfill the president's pledge to build a border wall and to tighten the nation's immigration laws. Trump's commitment to the current policy showed no sign of faltering as voices of outrage and condemnation grew louder and more diverse. In Massachusetts, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker reversed a decision to send a state National Guard helicopter to the southern border, citing what he called the administration's "cruel and inhumane" policy of separating children from their parents. The Rev. Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump ally, called the policy "disgraceful." Several religious groups, including some conservative ones, have pushed to stop the practice of separating immigrant children from their parents. The Mormon church said it was "deeply troubled" by the separation of families and urged national leaders to find compassionate solutions. Former first lady Laura Bush called the policy "cruel" and "immoral," and said it was "eerily reminiscent" of the U.S. internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. On Capitol Hill, Republicans joined Democrats in calling for an end to the separations. Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton called for an immediate end to this "ugly and inhumane practice," adding, "It's never acceptable to use kids as bargaining chips in political process." Kansas GOP Sen. Pat Roberts said he is "against using parental separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration." And GOP Rep. Mike Coffman warned, "History won't remember well those who support the continuation of this policy." ___ Kevin McGill reported from New Orleans. AP writers Alan Fram, Ken Thomas, Jill Colvin and Catherine Lucey in Washington, Nick Riccardi in Denver and Nomaan Merchant in McAllen, Texas, contributed to this report. ___ See AP's complete coverage of the debate over the Trump administration's policy of family separation at the border: https://apnews.com/tag/Immigration Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen calls on a reporter during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Monday, June 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) President Donald Trump speaks at the beginning of a National Space Council meeting in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, June 18, 2018, as Vice President Mike Pence looks on. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a U.S. Border Patrol agent watches as people who've been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, stand in line at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) FILE - In this June 1, 2018, file photo, children hold signs during a demonstration in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in Miramar, Fla. The Trump administration's move to separate immigrant parents from their children on the U.S.-Mexico border has turned into a full-blown crisis in recent weeks, drawing denunciation from the United Nations, Roman Catholic bishops and countless humanitarian groups. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee, File) WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on the controversy over child and parent separations at the U.S.-Mexico border (all times local): 9:53 a.m. Democratic attorneys general are demanding the Trump administration end a "zero tolerance" policy that has resulted in children being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who've been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, rest in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) Led by New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, 21 top state prosecutors from California to Massachusetts sent a letter Tuesday to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen (KEER'-sten) Nielsen. The attorneys call the policy inhumane, saying it raises concerns about violations of children's rights and constitutional principles of due process and equal protection. Nearly 2,000 minors have been separated from their families since Sessions announced the policy where everyone caught crossing the border illegally will be prosecuted. Children can't go to jail with their parents, so they're separated. U.S. officials say the children are well cared for. ____ 7:30 a.m. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona says the Trump administration's current family separation policy is "an affront to the decency of the American people" and contrary to principles and values upon which the nation was founded. McCain tweeted Monday night that the administration has the power to rescind this policy and "should do so now." McCain is among a growing number of Republican lawmakers voicing concern over the administration's "zero tolerance" approach to illegal border crossings. Under the policy, all unlawful crossings are referred for prosecution. With adults detained and facing prosecution, any minors accompanying them are taken away. Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May. ____ 7:15 a.m. The U.N. children's agency says the Trump administration policy of separating migrant children from their families is "not right," citing "heartbreaking" cases where even some babies are taken from their parents. UNICEF says immigration enforcement and protection of children's rights is "not a zero-sum game." Henrietta Fore, an American who has headed UNICEF since earlier this year, said separation of families and detention are "traumatic experiences" for children that can leave them more vulnerable to abuse. In a statement from her read Tuesday by UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac, Fore noted the U.S. government has long supported UNICEF's efforts to help migrant children in places like Syria, South Sudan and Haiti. __ 12:15 a.m. President Donald Trump is defending without apology his administration's border-protection policies in the face of rising national outrage over the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. Calling for tough action against illegal immigration, Trump declared Monday that the U.S. "will not be a migrant camp" on his watch. Images of children held in fenced cages fueled a growing chorus of condemnation from both political parties, all four former first ladies and national evangelical leaders. The children are being held separately from parents who are being prosecuted under the administration's "zero-tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings. Trump continued to fault Democrats and pointed to more lenient policies under past administrations that had not charged all migrants who had crossed illegally. In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who've been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen calls on a reporter during the daily briefing at the White House in Washington, Monday, June 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) President Donald Trump speaks at the beginning of a National Space Council meeting in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Monday, June 18, 2018, as Vice President Mike Pence looks on. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a U.S. Border Patrol agent watches as people who've been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, stand in line at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) MADISON, Wis. (AP) - Democrats hoped a Wisconsin case would be the vehicle the U.S. Supreme Court would use to strike down highly partisan gerrymandering of electoral maps. When those hopes fizzled Monday, attention turned to North Carolina. A case challenging that battleground state's congressional districts appears to offer stronger evidence of harm. At issue is whether opponents can identify specific voters who say they have been hurt by gerrymandering - the process of a political party drawing state legislative and congressional maps to maintain or expand their hold on power. The Wisconsin case didn't do that, but the North Carolina case tries to. It includes a plaintiff from each of the state's 13 congressional districts. Allison Riggs, an attorney representing the League of Women Voters of North Carolina and other voters who sued, said the state's congressional map provides "the most crystal clear example of why a rule creating limits on partisan gerrymandering is so necessary." Like Wisconsin, North Carolina is closely divided between Democrats and Republicans, yet Republicans hold a 10-3 edge in congressional seats after the GOP-dominated Legislature created the maps. They were forced to redraw the congressional map in 2016 after federal courts determined two of the state's districts to be illegal racial gerrymanders. During the latest redrawing, Republicans said they didn't use racial data in forming the maps. Instead, they said maintaining the GOP's 10-3 seat advantage in the state's congressional delegation was one of their guiding standards. "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country," one of the mapmakers, Republican state Rep. David Lewis, said during a legislative debate to justify the criteria. Lewis and other Republican lawmakers have defended their congressional map by saying it splits fewer counties and avoids the severely contorted boundaries that were common under maps drawn since the 1990s by both Democrats and Republicans. As an example of extreme gerrymandering, the map's critics point to one boundary that splits the historically black and heavily Democratic North Carolina A&T State University campus in Greensboro into two Republican-leaning districts. The Supreme Court is expected to decide by the end of June whether to hear that case and another one from North Carolina that challenges gerrymandered state legislative boundaries. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a pair of largely procedural rulings in two other redistricting cases. It agreed that a Maryland congressional district can remain in use while Republicans pursue allegations of unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering by the Democratic governor and legislature. In the Wisconsin case, the court overturned a lower court ruling from November 2016. That ruling said the map adopted in 2011 by the Republican-led Legislature and Republican governor violated Democratic voters' rights to representation. Democrats had argued that their voters were packed into some districts and spread among others, which had the effect of diluting their voting power. The Supreme Court rejected the use of a statewide analysis used by 12 Democratic voters who brought the lawsuit. Instead, the court said plaintiffs must prove that their personal voting rights were infringed by the way challenged maps covering 99 Assembly districts were drawn. Lead attorney Paul Smith said it will take voters in about 20 or 30 districts to show they have been harmed by the current boundaries. To fix those problems will "effectively redraw the entire map," and "at that point, gerrymandering will be effectively remedied." Justice Elena Kagan provided an alternative route for the plaintiffs. She wrote in a concurrent opinion that a political party might be able to bring a statewide challenge by arguing that a partisan gerrymandered map violates its First Amendment right to freedom of association. "This case is very much still alive," Smith said while noting both options. He added: "The bottom line is, there will be plaintiffs with clear standing." Republicans - who hold a 64-35 majority in the Wisconsin Assembly and 18-15 in the Senate - stood by the maps they drew and said they expected to once again prevail in court. Smith said speed was of the essence, given that those elected in 2020 - just two years away - will be in place for the next round of redistricting. ___ Robertson reported from Raleigh, North Carolina. ___ Associated Press writer David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri, contributed to this report. Wrenching scenes of migrant children being separated from their parents at the southern border are roiling campaigns ahead of midterm elections, emboldening Democrats on the often-fraught issue of immigration while forcing an increasing number of Republicans to break from President Donald Trump on an issue important to the GOP's most ardent supporters. Kim Schrier, a Democrat running for a House seat outside of Seattle, said Trump is pushing an "absolutely unethical, inhumane" policy. "We are talking about American values, not Democratic values or Republican values, and this is something that will flip people to a Democrat in this election," Schrier said. Immigrant children play outside a former Job Corps site that now houses them, Monday, June 18, 2018, in Homestead, Fla. It is not known if the children crossed the border as unaccompanied minors or were separated from family members. Wrenching scenes of migrant children being separated from their parents at the southern border are roiling campaigns ahead of midterm elections, emboldening Democrats on the often-fraught issue of immigration (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee) That prospect was enough for House Republicans' national campaign chairman, Ohio Rep. Steve Stivers, to offer cover Monday to vulnerable GOP members. Stivers said in a statement that he's asking "the administration to stop needlessly separating children from their parents" and suggested he'd examine legislative options if Trump doesn't budge. Republican Rep. Mike Coffman, whose suburban Denver district is often a battleground, took the cover Stivers provided. He didn't mention Trump, but said the border policy "is antithetical to the America I grew up in." He said he's willing to co-sponsor a House version of a Senate proposal from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that would halt the family separations, and he echoed claims Democrats had made for days: "History won't remember well those who support the continuation of this policy." Democrat Jason Crow, a leading candidate to unseat Coffman, said the congressman can't run from his previous support for "zero-tolerance" border security. "This is what that looks like," Crow said, adding that as "an American and as a father" he finds the border situation "immoral." With control of the House - and potentially the Senate - up for grabs, the searing images coming from the border have the potential to scramble midterm politics. Though controversy has dominated Trump's presidency, the growing furor over the separations struck a deeply emotional chord in both parties that may not calm anytime soon - even in districts that don't have large immigrant or Hispanic populations. Pennsylvania's Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, another vulnerable Republican, said he plans to visit the border "to see what's going on down there with my own eyes." He called the detainees "our planet's children" and said they shouldn't be punished "for things that their parents do or don't do." The political reverberations from the separations could last well beyond the midterms. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., a potential 2020 presidential candidate, said Monday that Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen should resign. Trump along with most Republicans have long believed that they have held the upper hand on immigration. While Democrats have argued that most Americans support granting a path to citizenship for children who were brought to the U.S. illegally, the Republican base is fervently opposed to such measures - and votes accordingly. That's why some political observers say this moment is so unique. "It's been tough for Democrats to bring the issue of compassion out on a national scale" when talking about immigration, said James Aldrete, a Democratic campaign consultant in Texas. But now, Aldrete said, "Trump has done it for us." Democrats are hoping the issue will encourage more Latino voters to show up on Election Day, while also providing an opening for non-Hispanic independents in other swing districts. At the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, spokesman Tyler Law said candidates can now frame "a potent issue" by "being authentic and talking about your own families, your own children." Democrats also are buoyed by Trump drawing criticism from typically GOP friendly territory: the religious community. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which often wades into politics with its opposition to abortion rights and same-sex marriage, has decried the administration, as have mainline Protestant churches, the Mormon Church and evangelical leaders. At least one Democrat running in a conservative-leaning House district in North Carolina combined Law's advice with the words of another Republican critic: former first lady Laura Bush. "As a young parent, I can't imagine the thought of my children being taken away from me, into the hands of strangers who aren't allowed to comfort my crying toddler," Dan McCready posted on his Facebook page alongside an op-ed that Mrs. Bush penned for the Washington Post. In a Texas district that includes about a third of the southern border, Democratic candidate Gina Ortiz Jones hasn't had to be timid. She talked about immigration before family separation came to the forefront. But she said the matter allows her to highlight the priorities of the Republican administration and Congress, even as her opponent, Republican Rep. Will Hurd, also decries the Trump administration policy. "What we are seeing is a pattern of using children as political pawns," she said, referring to Republican maneuvering on health care before approving funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program and the GOP's failure to secure any kind of fix for the young "Dreamer" immigrants in the U.S. illegally. "We can't have folks doing the right thing only when they realize they are in a vulnerable seat," she said. Still, Democratic pollster Paul Maslin offered a caveat to members of his party sensing a new opening: the public's short attention span. "In Trump world, the stories change daily, if not hourly," he said. "It was North Korea just last week. Immigration this week. Next week, who knows? Round and round we go." ___ Associated Press writer Steve Peoples in New York contributed to this report. SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korea on Tuesday presented a united front with the U.S. on a decision to call off major joint military drills, one week after President Donald Trump's surprise announcement that he would suspend such exercises with the longtime Asian ally. Shortly after the U.S. and South Korean militaries formally announced the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises slated for August had been called off, Seoul's Defense Ministry said the decision was necessary to support ongoing talks both countries have with North Korea. "South Korea and the U.S. made the decision as we believe this will contribute to maintaining such momentum," said Choi Hyun-soo, the ministry's spokeswoman. A photo showing U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is displayed as a member of People's Democratic Party stands to oppose military exercises between the United States and South Korea near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from Trump's nuclear summit with Kim. The signs read: " Stop Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercises and withdrawal of U.S. troops." (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) The announcement was widely anticipated following Trump's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last week. Trump said after the summit in Singapore that he would suspend the U.S. military's "war games" with South Korea unless and until the talks on ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program break down. His statement appeared to catch both South Korea and the Pentagon by surprise, but they presented a united front in canceling the upcoming exercises. Dana White, spokeswoman for the U.S. Defense Department, said planning for the summer drills had stopped, but no decisions have been made on any other military exercises with South Korea. Joint exercises with Japan and other countries in the Pacific will continue. Choi echoed that nothing has been decided on other exercises. She was unwilling to provide a straightforward answer when asked whether there had been any discussions between the allies' militaries on suspending the drills before Trump's sudden announcement. "We consider the ongoing denuclearization negotiations with North Korea as crucial, so as long as those negotiations continue, the decision by the governments of South Korea and the United States will be maintained," she said. Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera showed understanding for the move but stressed the need for the two countries to continue their other joint drills. He called U.S.-South Korean exercises "important pillars" for maintaining regional peace and stability. Plans for U.S.-Japan exercises are unchanged, he added. In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the suspension of U.S.-South Korean drills was a "positive and constructive move." During the tensions created by North Korean weapons tests in recent years, China had called for a "dual suspension" in which the North would stop its nuclear and missile tests and Washington and Seoul would halt their military exercises to lower animosity and lead to talks. "We support this, we hope the relevant parties will move in the same direction to make greater efforts to promote the peace and denuclearization process for the peninsula," Geng said at a regular briefing. Last year's Ulchi Freedom Guardian went on for 11 days in August and involved about 17,500 U.S. and 50,000 South Korean troops. Also participating were other nations that contributed forces during the 1950-53 Korean War, including Australia, Britain, Canada and Colombia. The summertime military exercises usually coincide with a nationwide civilian defense drill in South Korea in which citizens take shelter in buildings and subway stations at the sound of air-raid sirens. Presidential spokesman Kim Eui-keum said the civilian drill could be held as planned, suspended or modified to reflect "changing circumstances." The other major U.S. military exercises with South Korea - Key Resolve and Foal Eagle - took place earlier this spring. They historically include live-fire drills with tanks, aircraft and warships and feature about 10,000 American and 200,000 Korean troops. The drills were delayed this year because of North Korean participation in the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February. ___ Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and Christopher Bodeen in Beijing contributed to this report. FILE - In this Dec. 10, 2015 file photo, U.S. and South Korean army soldiers pose on a floating bridge on the Hantan river after a river crossing operation, part of an annual joint military exercise between South Korea and the United States against a possible attack from North Korea, in Yeoncheon, south of the demilitarized zone that divides the two Koreas, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.(AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File) FILE - In this Aug. 29, 2017 file photo, South Korean army soldiers aim their machine guns during the annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise in Yongin, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (Hong Gi-won/Yonhap via AP, File) FILE - In this file photo Sept. 18, 2017 provided by South Korea Defense Ministry, U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber, F-35B stealth fighter jets and South Korean F-15K fighter jets fly over the Korean Peninsula during a joint drills, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (South Korea Defense Ministry via AP, File) FILE - In this Aug. 24, 2016 file photo, South Korean army soldiers conduct an anti-terror drill as part of Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise, at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File) FILE - In this March 12, 2016, file photo, Marines of the U.S., left, and South Korea wearing blue headbands on their helmets, take positions after landing on a beach during the joint military combined amphibious exercise, called Ssangyong, part of the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle military exercises, in Pohang, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (Kim Jun-bum/Yonhap via AP, File) KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - An Afghan official says at least four security forces were killed when Taliban fighters targeted army and local police checkpoints in northern Kunduz province. Nematullah Temori, spokesman for the provincial governor, says six other security personnel were wounded in the attack Tuesday morning in Dashti Archi district. He added that seven of the insurgents were killed and five others wounded in the battle. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Kunduz, but Taliban are active in Kunduz and have repeatedly claimed attacks against Afghan security forces there. The attack happened after the Eid holiday cease-fire. The government had offered to extend the cease-fire for another 10 days, but the Taliban announced Sunday that they would resume their attacks. COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) - Some American parents who for years have used cannabis to treat severe forms of epilepsy in their children are feeling more cautious than celebratory as U.S. regulators near a decision on whether to approve the first drug derived from the marijuana plant. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to issue a decision by the end of the month on the drug Epidiolex, made by GW Pharmaceuticals. It's a purified form of cannabidiol - a component of cannabis that doesn't get users high - to treat Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut syndromes in kids. Both forms of epilepsy are rare. Cannabidiol's effect on a variety of health conditions is frequently touted, but there is still little evidence to back up advocates' personal experiences. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has long categorized cannabis as a Schedule I drug, a category with "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." That strictly limits research on potential medical uses for cannabis or the chemicals in it, including cannabidiol, or CBD. In this Monday, April 23, 2018, photo, Lukas Inman, 19, interacts with his father in Colorado Springs, Colo. Inman suffers from a rare and severe form of epilepsy called Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome. A British pharmaceutical company is getting closer to a decision on whether the U.S government will approve the first prescription drug derived from the marijuana plant, but parents, including Lukas,' who for years have used cannabis to treat severe forms of epilepsy in their children are feeling more cautious than celebratory. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) But for years, parents desperate to find anything to help their children have turned to the marijuana-based products made legal by a growing number of states. Meagan Patrick is among the parents using CBD to treat symptoms in their children. She moved from Maine to Colorado in 2014 so she could legally get CBD for her now-5-year-old daughter, Addelyn, who was born with a brain malformation that causes seizures. "My child was dying, and we needed to do something," Patrick said. As for the potential approval of a pharmaceutical based on CBD, she said fear is her first reaction. "I want to make sure that her right to continue using what works for her is protected, first and foremost. That's my job as her mom," Patrick said. Advocates like Patrick became particularly concerned when GW Pharmaceuticals' U.S. commercial business, Greenwich Biosciences, began quietly lobbying to change states' legal definition of marijuana, beginning in 2017 with proposals in Nebraska and South Dakota. Some worried the company's attempt to ensure its product could be legally prescribed and sold by pharmacies would have a side effect: curtailing medical marijuana programs already operating in more than two dozen states. The proposals generally sought to remove CBD from states' legal definition of marijuana, allowing it to be prescribed by doctors and supplied by pharmacies. But the change only applies to products that have FDA approval. Neither Nebraska nor South Dakota allows medical use of marijuana, and activists accused the company of trying to shut down future access to products containing cannabidiol but lacking FDA approval. Britain-based GW Pharmaceuticals never intended for the changes to affect other marijuana products, but they are necessary to allow Epidiolex to be sold in pharmacies if approved, spokesman Stephen Schultz said. He would not discuss other places where the company will seek changes to state law. The Associated Press confirmed that lobbyists representing Greenwich Biosciences backed legislation in California and Colorado this year. "As a company, we understand there's a significant business building up," Schultz said. "All we want to do is make sure our product is accessible." Industry lobbyists in those states said they take company officials at their word, but they still insisted on protective language ensuring that recreational or medical marijuana, cannabidiol, hemp and other products derived from cannabis plants won't be affected by the changes sought by GW Pharmaceuticals. Patrick Goggin, an attorney who focuses on industrial hemp issues in California, said the company would run into trouble if it tried to "lock up access" to marijuana-derived products beyond FDA-approved drugs. "People need to have options and choices," he said. "That's the battle here." Legal experts say the changes are logical. Some states' laws specifically prohibit any product derived from the marijuana plant from being sold in pharmacies. The FDA has approved synthetic versions of another cannabis ingredient for medical purposes but has never approved marijuana or hemp for any medical use. A panel of FDA advisers in April unanimously recommended the agency approve Epidiolex for the treatment of severe seizures in children with epilepsy, conditions that are otherwise difficult to treat. It's not clear why CBD reduces seizures in some patients, but the panel based its recommendation on three studies showing significant reduction in children with two forms of epilepsy. Denver-based attorney Christian Sederberg, who worked on the GW Pharmaceuticals-backed legislation in Colorado on behalf of the marijuana industry, said all forms of marijuana can exist together. "The future of the industry is showing itself here," Sederberg said. "There's going to be the pharmaceutical lane, the nutraceutical (food-as-medicine) lane, the adult-use lane. This shows how that's all coming together." Alex and Jenny Inman said they won't switch to Epidiolex if it becomes available, though their son Lukas has Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. Alex, an information technology professional, and Jenny, a preschool teacher, said it took some at-home experimentation to find the right combination of doctor-prescribed medication, CBD and THC - the component that gives marijuana users a high - that seemed to help Lukas with his seizures. "What makes me a little bit nervous about this is that there's sort of a psyche amongst patients that, 'Here's this pill, and this pill will solve things,' right? It works differently for different people," Alex Inman said. The Inmans moved from Maryland to Colorado in 2015 after doctors recommended a second brain surgery for Lukas' seizures. The couple and other parents and advocates for CBD said children respond differently to a variety of strains. The Realm of Caring Foundation, an organization co-founded by Paige Figi, whose daughter Charlotte's name is attached to the CBD oil Charlotte's Web, said it maintains a registry of about 46,000 people worldwide who use CBD. For Heather Jackson, who said her son Zaki, now 15, benefited from CBD and who co-founded the foundation, Epidiolex's approval means insurers will begin paying for treatment with a cannabis-derived product. "That might be a nice option for some families who, you know, really want to receive a prescription who are going to only listen to the person in the white coat," Jackson said. ____ Banda and Foody are members of members of AP's marijuana beat team. Follow them at Twitter at http://twitter.com/psbanda and http://twitter.com/katiefoody . Find complete AP marijuana coverage here: http://apnews.com/tag/LegalMarijuana In this April 23, 2018, photo, Meagan Patrick kisses her daughter, Addelyn Patrick, 5, in the playroom at Realm of Caring in Colorado Springs, Colo. Addelyn was born with a brain malformation and suffers from multiple forms of seizures. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to decide soon whether to give its first approval to a prescription drug made from the marijuana plant. But parents, including Meagan, who have used other products containing chemicals from the plant to treat their children's severe forms of epilepsy are feeling more cautious than celebratory. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) In this April 23, 2018, photo, Addelyn Patrick, 5, sits inside a teepee in the playroom at Realm of Caring in Colorado Springs, Colo. Addelyn was born with a brain malformation and suffers from multiple forms of seizures. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to decide soon whether to give its first approval to a prescription drug made from the marijuana plant. But parents, including Addelyn's mother Meagan Patrick, who have used other products containing chemicals from the plant to treat their children's severe forms of epilepsy are feeling more cautious than celebratory. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) In this Monday, April 23, 2018, photo, Lukas Inman sits on the couch at his home in Colorado Springs, Colo. Inman suffers from a rare and severe form of epilepsy called Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome. A British pharmaceutical company is getting closer to a decision on whether the U.S government will approve the first prescription drug derived from the marijuana plant, but parents, including Lukas,' who for years have used cannabis to treat severe forms of epilepsy in their children are feeling more cautious than celebratory. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) In this Monday, April 23, 2018, photo, Alex Inman holds a bottle of THC-infused oil in Colorado Springs, Colo. Inman's teenage son, Lukas, suffers from a rare and severe form of epilepsy called Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome. A British pharmaceutical company is getting closer to a decision on whether the U.S government will approve the first prescription drug derived from the marijuana plant, but parents, including Lukas,' who for years have used cannabis to treat severe forms of epilepsy in their children are feeling more cautious than celebratory. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) In this April 23, 2018, photo, a map on the wall marks some of the places where people have sought advice from Realm of Caring Foundation in Colorado Springs, Colo. The Realm of Caring Foundation, an organization co-founded by Paige Figi said it maintains a registry of about 46,000 people worldwide who use cannabidiol, or CBD. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) In this April 23, 2018, photo, Lacie Lloyd works in the call center at the Realm of Caring Foundation in Colorado Springs, Colo. The organization fields calls from all over the world and offers advice about medical cannabis. The Realm of Caring Foundation, an organization co-founded by Paige Figi said it maintains a registry of about 46,000 people worldwide who use cannabidiol, or CBD. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert) AL-BAB, Syria (AP) - A newly paved road links the Turkish town of Elbeyli to the Syrian town of al-Bab, across the border. In al-Bab, Turkish and Syrian flags line the streets, and signs on government buildings are in Arabic and Turkish. One of the first billboards honors Turkish soldiers killed in the battle to liberate this town from Islamic State militants. Al-Bab, still scarred by war, is busy with construction. A large Turkish-funded hospital is nearly complete. A huge tree-encircled plot on the main highway will be the town's first industrial zone. A census and registration of land deeds are underway. Overseeing the beehive is a veteran Turkish provincial official, Senol Esmer, deputy governor of the Turkish city of Gaziantep, sent here to direct al-Bab's development. His office is in the local police station which swarms with Turkish security alongside construction workers building an extension. FILE - In this Jan. 27, 2018 file photo, youths wave Turkish flags as they gather in the streets of the Turkish-controlled northwestern city of Azaz, Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File) The main reason for Turkey's support "is humanity," Esmer said. "We call it 'justice of fraternity' because we have been living together with these people for 600 years, since Ottoman times. And after that, as neighbors," he said, referring to Syria's longtime place in the Ottoman Empire, which fell with World War I. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey now holds sway over more than 4,000 square kilometers (1,500 square miles) of Syrian territory. Almost a quarter of Syria's population is under Turkish control indirectly or directly - including 3.6 million refugees in Turkey, around 600,000 people living in the enclave, most of them displaced from elsewhere in Syria, and the 2 million people in Idlib, the last remaining rebel-held province, where Turkey has gained a major say. The major Turkish investment has raised speculation Ankara has ambitions to revive old imperial claims to Syrian provinces. But there are strategic goals behind its deepening hold. Fundamentally, Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. Also, Turkey, presenting itself as the protector of the Syrian opposition, is now positioned to be the main negotiator along with Russia over shaping Syria's future. Moscow may be open for that: It gave a green-light for Ankara's move into Syria. Turkey hopes its weight will lure Washington away from the alliance with the Kurds to rely on it as a bulwark against Iranian influence in Syria. The Turkish intervention is the "most important development" in the Syrian conflict since Russia threw its military might behind President Bashar Assad in 2015, said Nicholas Heras, of the Washington-based Center for New American Security. Having troops on the ground and controlling large parts of the Syrian population "definitely means no solution is possible without Turkish cooperation," said Heiko Wimmen, project director for Iraq, Syria and Lebanon with the International Crisis Group. The zone is the latest phase in the evolution of Turkey's aims in Syria's war. At first, it joined a Western and regional alliance funding and arming rebels with the aim of ousting Assad. Then it said it needed to protect its own security, fearing the growing clout of the Kurdish militia. Ankara considers the YPG a front for its own domestic Kurdish insurgency. The United States allied with the militia to fight the Islamic State group, and it now holds nearly 25 percent of Syria, including much of the border with Turkey and Syria's richest oil fields. In the summer of 2016, Turkey launched its military incursion alongside allied Syrian fighters to drive out both the Islamic State group and the YPG. It took more than three months of fighting for the Turkish-led forces to take al-Bab district, killing more than 70 Turkish soldiers. But the battle cemented the working relationship with Moscow: For the first time, the Russian air force backed Turkish forces advancing on the town. Al-Bab's strategic location allowed Turkey earlier this year to uproot the YPG from its westernmost stronghold Afrin, thwarting a contiguous Kurdish entity along the border. That secured Turkey's hold on northwest Syria, but also brought it close to Syrian government forces. Now Ankara is installing a Turkish-European style government in what it calls the Euphrates Shield area. Esmer, the Turkish official, oversaw the formation of a 21-member governing body in al-Bab, which employs nearly 150 staff, most paid by Turkey. He estimated the council will collect some $1.7 million in revenues from rents, taxes and municipal fees in 2018. "We provide the flour, but they (Syrians) process it to make bread. With a small profit, they organize the distribution," Esmer said. Most Turkish spending goes to health and education. Thousands of teachers are paid by Turkey. Schools are being rehabilitated and new ones are coming up. A new $17-million hospital financed by the Turkish Health Ministry opens this month in al-Bab. A Turkish university plans a branch in the town, and others held tests here for Syrian students wanting to enroll in Turkey. Turkey has moved its troops out of towns, positioning them mostly on nearby hills. In al-Bab, it trained some 2,000 Syrian security, including 100 women, to police checkpoints in al-Bab. New courts are overseen by Turkish judges and prosecutors but use former Syria government judges, following Syria's French-inspired code. A terrorism court opened in Azaz. Al-Bab boasts a modern correction facility. To facilitate financial transactions, Turkish post offices - which serve as banks - transfer salaries and funds to Syrian towns, in Turkish liras. Ahmed Hussein Taher, a school principal in Jarablus, said that means the 1,300 teachers in the town get salaries far more quickly and efficiently. Taher was promoted to principal by the Turkish-backed administration, a post he said he never would have had under Assad since he wasn't a ruling party loyalist. "We teach Turkish language classes to first and second graders. Hopefully in the coming years we'll offer it to all grades," he said. "Turkish language is a must. Our Turkish brothers have given us everything and we work with them." In al-Bab, engineer Zakaria Haj Hassan ordered pipes from Turkey to install in a new industrial zone that he hopes will attract Syrian investors, both here and in Turkey. Dependency on Turkey, he said, is natural and historic. "I remember our grandparents singing: 'from Aleppo to Antep'," he said, using the old Ottoman name for Gaziantep. "We still have relatives in Turkey." As for the future, he said, "Are we going to be part of Turkey? Are we going to be a small independent statelet? We don't know. Those who are nationalists would call it colonialism. Those who are religious would say we are all Muslims. We have no problem. In the old days, we were one nation from Istanbul to Yemen to Morocco." A big test for Turkey is keeping security. Thousands of Syrian fighters worked with the Turkish military to liberate these areas. Thousands more flooded in since then as the Syrian government seized rebel-held areas elsewhere. Turkish officials estimate that now up to 60,000 Syrian gunmen operate in the Turkish zone, with nowhere else to go and no other supporter but Turkey. Bloody clashes have frequently broken out among them, mostly triggered by lack of resources, competing leadership and disputes between locals and newly arrived fighters. Violence paralyses towns for days. One battle erupted in al-Bab when a gunman claimed an empty lot of land, claiming it had been IS property, and the local owner protested, prompting clashes with heavy machine guns. The newly-trained local security didn't interfere. Days later, a gunman beat a nurse in a hospital, setting off fighting that ended when his commander offered to hand him over. There have also been reports of radicalism among the militias, with some seeking to impose strict Islamic dress on women and others seizing and looting homes of Kurdish residents. A senior Turkish official blamed the Syrian government, saying it seeks to "destabilize" the Turkish zone by flooding the area with the thousands of gunmen transferred from other areas. "But we are not going to let that happen. It is part of our military planning," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations. Turkey's objective is "to get Syria back on its feet. If there is a power vacuum and social structures are weakened, it will end up back where it was." The challenge is greater in neighboring Idlib, where a "witch's brew" of more extremist organizations, including al-Qaida, are in control, said Heras. Turkey, in agreement with Russia, has set up observation posts around Idlib, protecting the area as it seeks to remodel rebels there into a more moderate force. But those posts also bring it into potential friction with Syrian troops. Mohammed ElSheikh, 25, a humanitarian worker in al-Bab, said he expects Turkey's control of northern Syria to last for a decade. He said Turkey is serving "the Syrian revolution" and that it and Moscow will work out a new system that keeps Syria together but doesn't include Assad. But ElSheikh said Turkish control can be heavy-handed as well. He said it took him months to wade through Turkish bureaucracy and security checks for approval of his organization, which supports school drop-outs. Turks, he said, "must help Syrians, not rule them. Right now, they are ruling." ___ This story has been corrected to say that the Turkish town directly across the border from al-Bab is Elbeyli, not Cobanbey. Cobanbey is the Turkish name for the Syrian border town of al-Rai, north of al-Bab. In this May 29, 2018 photo, children walk in front of war-damaged buildings on the outskirts of al-Bab, northern Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) In this May 29, 2018 photo, Syrian opposition fighters atop a machine gun-mounted pickup truck patrol al-Bab, Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) FILE - In this March 24, 2018 photo, Turkish soldiers atop a tank pose for pictures with Syrian children holding a Turkish flag, during a Turkish government-organized media tour, in the northwestern city of Afrin, Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File) In this May 30, 2018 photo, clerks arrange pay slips for public service workers in Turkish liras, at a Turkish post office -- which serves as bank-- in Jarablus, northern Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) In this May 30, 2018 photo, Syrians walk past a garment stall in Jarablus, northern Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) In this May 29, 2018 photo, Syrian security officers walk outside the police headquarters in al-Bab, Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) In this May 29, 2018 photo, a woman and child walk past a Syrian opposition fighter guarding the market area in downtown Al-Bab, Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) In this May 29, 2018 photo, a Syrian opposition fighter guards the market area in downtown al-Bab, Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) FILE - In this March 24, 2018 file photo, Syrians scuffle as they line up for food in the northwestern city of Afrin, Syria, during a Turkish government-organized media tour into northern Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File) FILE - In this March 24, 2018 file photo, Turkish soldiers secure the streets of the northwestern city of Afrin, Syria, during a Turkish government-organized media tour into northern Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File) FILE - In this Jan. 27, 2018 file photo, people gather in the streets of the northwestern city of Azaz, Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File) FILE - In this March 24, 2018 file photo, Turkish soldiers atop an armored personnel carrier secure the streets of the northwestern city of Afrin, Syria, during a Turkish government-organized media tour into northern Syria. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File) BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq condemned on Tuesday the targeting of pro-Syria paramilitary troops in eastern Syria after an airstrike killed mostly Iraqi Shiite forces deployed to fight the Islamic State group. In a statement, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry expressed "rejection and condemnation of airstrikes targeting troops deployed in areas where they are fighting Daesh, whether in Iraq or Syria." Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. Targeting these troops "is a support to Daesh to regroup and to expand," the statement added. It called for continuing coordination between the U.S.-led coalition and troops on the ground to support them in the fight. Iraqi Shiite forces and Syria accused on Monday the U.S.-led coalition of conducting the Sunday airstrikes along the Iraq-Syria border, killing at least 22 fighters and sounding 12 others. Iraqi officials in Baghdad put the death toll at 25 Shiite fighters, with 25 others wounded and three missing. U.S. military spokesman Col. Sean Ryan denied the strikes were carried out by U.S. or coalition forces, but said they were investigating. The officials said the dead were mostly members of Iraq's Hezbollah Brigades, which have been active in Syria's civil war fighting alongside government forces. Also killed were some members of the Shiite Sayyed al-Shuhada Battalions, they said. The Iraqi officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media. Also Tuesday, Iraq's Hezbollah Brigades denounced what it called a "heinous crime" that "will not go unanswered," blaming the attack on the "idiots Trump and Netanyahu." It warned it was ready to confront Israel and America without hesitation. No details were available on the strikes, but Syrian state TV said they occurred around midnight in the village of al-Hari, to the southeast of the border town of Boukamal along Iraqi border. Last week, IS launched a major offensive against Boukamal, reaching the outskirts of the town before being pushed back by government forces. The loss of the town would deal a major blow to Iran-backed forces on both sides of the border, who have established a corridor through eastern Syria to link Iran to the Mediterranean Sea. Syrian and Iraqi forces have driven IS from virtually all the territory it once held in both countries, but the militants still control some remote areas along the border. ____ Associated Press writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra contributed. MIAMI (AP) - A convicted Colombian drug cartel leader who went undercover to inform on Mexican kingpin "El Chapo" and other major traffickers has been sentenced to 31 years in prison. The Miami Herald reports that 48-year-old Henry De Jesus Lopez Londono, who was arrested in Argentina and extradited to Miami in 2016, was sentenced on Monday for drug trafficking conspiracy. U.S. District Judge Donald Graham previously rejected a plea deal that included 17 years behind bars. Lopez Londono could have received a life sentence. Officials say Lopez Londono was involved in the smuggling of some 60,000 kilograms of cocaine between 2007 and 2012. ___ Information from: The Miami Herald, http://www.herald.com PARIS (AP) - A suspect in the November 2015 extremist attacks in Paris has been released and placed under judicial supervision in Belgium, French prosecutors said Tuesday. The Paris prosecutors' office said that Ali Oulkadi, a French national living in Belgium who allegedly helped the sole survivor of the group of assailants, Salah Abdeslam, escape on the day after the attacks, was released Monday. Oulkadi must stay in Belgium, be home at set hours and regularly report to local police. He is banned from going to certain places, establishing contact with a list of individuals and possessing a weapon. Oulkady's lawyer Didier de Quevy told BFM television his client left Maubeuge jail, in northern France, on Monday afternoon. He said his client is banned from getting in contact with Islamist circles and must get back to work and normal family life. "I think he's going to comply without difficulty because he's a good guy, I am convinced he didn't do anything", de Quevy said. Oulkadi allegedly drove Abdeslam through Brussels the day after the Paris attacks, which killed 130 people on Nov. 13, 2015. He allegedly dropped Abdeslam off at a safe house that also was used as a workshop for manufacturing explosive belts. Oulkadi was handed charges of criminal terrorist association. De Quevy said Oulkadi was the best friend of Abdeslam's brother, Brahim, who died in a suicide attack in the events in Paris. He said Oulkadi agreed to drive Abdeslam through Brussels to one of his hiding places "in good faith" - without knowing he was linked to the attacks. Jean Reinhart, a lawyer for victims of the Paris attacks, said he was glad Oulkadi was under "extremely strict judicial supervision" pending trial. "This individual obviously drove Salah Abdeslam. Did he know that he (Abdeslam) just committed the attacks? ... So far this is a question," Reinhart said. Oulkadi's lawyer will request acquittal at his trial. In a joint hearing in March, Abdeslam had agreed to answer questions about Oulkadi to help clear him. BANGKOK (AP) - Thai police said Tuesday that they have arrested an Australian man for allegedly promoting sex cruises with prostitutes on a Facebook page. Police said Stephen Allan Carpenter, 49, was arrested Monday night in the central province of Saraburi. He was brought to the seaside resort town of Pattaya, where he operated his business and where an arrest warrant had been issued. Carpenter has been charged with procuring women for prostitution, posting pornographic material online, overstaying his visa, and working illegally as a tour guide. In this Monday, June 18, 2018, photo, Australian Stephen Allan Carpenter, left, is detained by police in Pattaya, Thailand. Carpenter was arrested on vice charges in a sting operation after allegedly offering a sex cruise with prostitutes via a Facebook page. (AP Photo) Carpenter's business, AUSTHAI Tours, advertised online a six-hour cruise with women at a cost of between 38,000 baht ($1,187) and 50,000 baht ($1,562), Police Lt. Col. Dullayapat Techapornyasin of the Transnational Crime Coordination Center said. Police said an officer contacted Carpenter and posed as a customer. He then wired half the money as a deposit into a bank account, as instructed by the suspect. After the money went through, the police obtained an arrest warrant. Pattaya is known for its sex industry, catering largely to foreigners. ISTANBUL (AP) - A court in Istanbul has acquitted a rap musician of the charge of inciting drug use in his song lyrics and video clips. Sercan Ipekcioglu, better-known as rapper "Ezhel," was detained by narcotics police in Istanbul last month and later charged with encouraging drug use. The state-run Anadolu Agency said the court acquitted him on Tuesday in the first hearing of the case, ruling that Ipekcioglu had not "acted with the intent of committing a crime." Dozens of Ezhel fans waiting outside the courtroom cheered and celebrated his acquittal. His arrest had led to a social media campaign by supporters, with many users calling for his release using the hashtag "FreeEzhel." BERLIN (AP) - A 19-year-old from Syria confessed to assaulting a man wearing a skullcap in the German capital as his trial opened Tuesday in a case that gave rise to concerns about rising anti-Semitism and prompted demonstrations in the streets. The April attack was caught on video by the 21-year-old victim, an Arab Israeli who said he wore the kippa in a show of solidarity with his Jewish friends. The video, which went viral, showed a young man whipping him violently with a belt while shouting "Yahudi!" - Jew in Arabic. The daytime assault was one in a string of anti-Semitic incidents, and prompted Germans of various faiths to take to the streets of Berlin wearing skullcaps in an expression of solidarity with Jewish residents and to condemn the attacks. Mike Samuel Delberg, a representative of the Jewish community in Berlin, speaks to journalist in a court in Berlin Tuesday, June 19 where a 19-years-old Syrian man is accused of attacking a Jewish man wearing a kippa. (Paul Zinken/dpa via AP) Chancellor Angela Merkel weighed in, pledging that the government would respond "with full force and resolve" against anti-Semitism in Germany. As his trial on charges of bodily harm and slander opened, the defendant, who is being tried as a juvenile and whose name was not released, admitted whipping the victim with a belt. Pleas are not entered in the German trial system and confessions are common as they tend to mitigate possible sentences. The defendant testified he hadn't seen the skullcap until after the assault, telling the court that the victim and his companion, a German-Moroccan also wearing a skullcap, had provoked the attack by insulting him, the dpa news agency reported. The defendant said, however, that he regretted the assault and apologized to the victim, who was struck 10 times with the belt and injured in the face, stomach and legs. Testifying in German and Arabic through a translator, the defendant, who came to Germany in 2015 as an asylum seeker, told the court he had smoked marijuana before the incident and his "head was tired." "I'm very sorry, it was a mistake," the defendant told the court, insisting he was not anti-Semitic. "I didn't want to hit him, I just wanted to scare him." The defendant turned himself in two days after the assault and has been in custody since. The trial was to resume next Monday with a possible verdict. LAKEWOOD RANCH, Fla. (AP) - Florida authorities are searching for two suspects after an injured alligator was dumped in a Wawa store. The Bradenton Herald quotes Manatee County Sheriff's Office spokesman Dave Bristow as saying the department was alerted to the alligator around 2:30 a.m. Friday. Bristow says the department was told two people had dropped off a three-foot (1-meter) alligator at the Lakewood Ranch convenience store. Deputies alerted the Fish and Wildlife Commission, which sent a trapper who removed the gator. ___ Information from: The Bradenton (Fla.) Herald , http://www.bradenton.com LONDON (AP) - The former Meghan Markle visited Britain's Royal Ascot for the first time Tuesday, receiving a rapturous welcome as she and Prince Harry joined Queen Elizabeth II for the opening day's carriage procession. Thousands of race-goers cheered from the stands as the royal family arrived in several horse-drawn carriages and travelled to the royal box. Harry wore a top hat and tails for the occasion, renowned for its strict dress code, while Meghan chose a white shirt dress and a matching black and white hat. The couple will present a trophy for one of the races. Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrives at the parade ring with Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, and Sophie, Countess of Wessex, in a horse drawn carriage on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Earlier Tuesday, officials said Harry and Meghan will make their first official trip abroad to Ireland next month. Kensington Palace said that the royal couple will travel to Dublin for two days starting on July 10. The palace said Harry and his wife, now formally known as the Duchess of Sussex, are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and meeting people shaping its future. The couple married in May, and has carried out several royal engagements since then. The royal couple has also announced plans to make an official trip to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga in October. Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrives at the parade ring with Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, and Sophie, Countess of Wessex, in a horse drawn carriage on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrives at the parade ring in a horse drawn carriage on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrive on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrives at the parade ring with Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, and Sophie, Countess of Wessex, in a horse drawn carriage on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the parade ring with Anne, Princess Royal, in a horse drawn carriage, on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrive on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the parade ring with Anne, Princess Royal, in a horse drawn carriage, on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrives at the parade ring with Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, and Sophie, Countess of Wessex, in a horse drawn carriage on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrives at the parade ring with Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, and Sophie, Countess of Wessex, in a horse drawn carriage on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Spectators take part on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the parade ring on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrive on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Queen Elizabeth II arrives at the parade ring with Anne, Princess Royal, in a horse drawn carriage, on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrive on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) Racegoers watch the action on the first day of the Royal Ascot horse race meeting in Ascot, England, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Tim Ireland) ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim is quoted as saying that 30,000 Syrians who acquired Turkish nationality are eligible to vote in Sunday's presidential and parliamentary elections. The Hurriyet newspaper and other media said Yildirim made the comments Tuesday in the city of Izmir. Turkey, which is hosting 3.5 million Syrian refugees, announced in 2016 that it would begin granting citizenship to Syrians. Muharrem Ince, the presidential candidate of Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party, takes a selfie pictures during a rally of his supporters in Gaziantep, eastern Turkey, Monday, June 18, 2018. Ince is seen as a strong contender to end President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's 16 year rule in presidential elections on June 24, 2018. (Ziya Koseoglu/CHP Press Service via AP, Pool) Meanwhile, voting at Turkish diplomatic missions abroad for expatriate Turks ends Tuesday, with orange sealed bags carrying votes already arriving in Turkey. Voting at border gates and airports will continue until all polls close Sunday afternoon. The country's official Anadolu news agency said 41 percent of the more than 3 million registered expatriate voters have cast their ballots so far. A supporter of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), chants slogans during a gathering in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) Muharrem Ince, the presidential candidate of Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party, is handed flowers to throw to his supporters following a speech at a rally, in Kahramanmaras, eastern Turkey, Monday, June 18, 2018. Ince is seen as a strong contender to end President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's 16 year rule in presidential elections on June 24, 2018. (Ziya Koseoglu/CHP Press Service via AP, Pool) Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has breakfast prior to a rally of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Samsun, Turkey, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency.(Presidency Press Service via AP, Pool) Supporters of Muharrem Ince, the presidential candidate of Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party, wave flags as they listen to his speech during a rally in Gaziantep, eastern Turkey, Monday, June 18, 2018. Ince is seen as a strong contender to end President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's 16 year rule in presidential elections on June 24, 2018. (Ziya Koseoglu/CHP Press Service via AP, Pool) Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, addresses supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) during an election rally for the upcoming June 24, elections, in Samsun, Turkey, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency.(Presidency Press Service via AP, Pool) Muharrem Ince, the presidential candidate of Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party, talks to supporters at a rally, in Kahramanmaras, eastern Turkey, Monday, June 18, 2018. Ince is seen as a strong contender to end President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's 16 year rule in presidential elections on June 24, 2018. (Ziya Koseoglu/CHP Press Service via AP, Pool) People walk past various political parties' election banners in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) A woman holds a banner with a picture of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during a gathering of supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, addresses supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) during an election rally for the upcoming June 24, elections, in Samsun, Turkey on Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey announced its troops began patrols on the outskirts of the key northern Syrian town of Manbij following a recent deal struck with the United States and Erdogan confirmed the patrol began in his speech. (Presidency Press Service via AP, Pool) A man holding a Turkish flag chants slogans in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, addresses supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) during an election rally for the upcoming June 24, elections, in Samsun, Turkey on Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey announced its troops began patrols on the outskirts of the key northern Syrian town of Manbij following a recent deal struck with the United States and Erdogan confirmed the patrol began in his speech. (Presidency Press Service via AP, Pool) Election banners of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, fly over a market in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) People walk past election banners in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) Women wave a banner backdropped by a picture of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during a gathering of supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) People wave a banner with a picture of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during a gathering of supporters of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) Supporters of Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) sit at the party booth decorated with a picture of Erdogan, right, and modern Turkey's founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, left, in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) Supporters of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party, (HDP) hand out leaflets at an election booth, decorated with pictures of jailed former co-chair and presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtas, in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) A supporter of Turkey's main opposition party (CHP) chants slogans during a gathering in Istanbul, Monday, June 18, 2018. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, deemed important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis) In this photo taken Sunday, June 17, 2018, a woman walks past by election posters of Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, and his main ally, nationalist leader Devlet Bahceli, right, in a street in Ankara, Turkey. Turkey holds parliamentary and presidential elections on June 24, 2018, seen as important as it will transform Turkey's governing system to an executive presidency. (AP Photo) WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Poland's prime minister says he sees a "middleman" role for his government in mending ties between President Donald Trump's administration and the European Union - despite Poland's tense relations with the bloc. Mateusz Morawiecki spoke in Berlin on Tuesday following talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that featured European and global security as well as trans-Atlantic ties that have been strained by Trump's protectionist policies. Morawiecki said that Poland "would like to serve as coordinator, a middleman between the U.S. and Europe, in the best sense" and help ease the tension. From left, German Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety Minister Svenja Schulze, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Micha Kurtyka, designated President of the 24th World Climate Conference, arrive for a preparatory meeting for a climate change conference that takes place later this year in Poland's city Katowice, in Berlin, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber) He said that Poland and Germany can be allies in "stopping the trade war spiral, the mutual aversion," with the U.S., which is Europe's main security partner. Poland is among Europe's closest allies of the Trump administration. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, right, and German Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety Minister Svenja Schulze, second from right, listen to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, left, at a meeting in Berlin, Tuesday, June 19, 2018, which prepares a climate change conference that takes place later this year in Poland's city Katowice. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, Pool) Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki delivers his speech at a meeting in Berlin, Tuesday, June 19, 2018, which prepares a climate change conference that takes place later this year in Poland's city Katowice. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, Pool) NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) - Cyprus says French energy company Total is seeking to broaden the scope of its work in an ongoing search for hydrocarbons off the east Mediterranean island nation. Energy Minister Minister Yiorgos Lakkotrypis says Total is looking to expand its activities in Cypriot waters "in a variety of ways." He didn't specify what those ways could be because talks are still in progress. Lakkotrypis was speaking Tuesday after senior Total executive Stephane Michel met with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades. Stephane Michel, a senior executive with French energy company Total arrives at the presidential palace for talks with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, in Nicosia, Cyprus, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Total is looking to expand its search for oil and gas off the coast of Cyprus and are looking to partner up with Italian energy firm Eni. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias) Anastasiades said talks with Michel focused on ways to meet the common goal of "exploiting as many energy-producing sources as possible." In April, Michel said Total had applied to carry out exploratory drilling in an area south of Cyprus where Italian company Eni is already licensed to search for gas. ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) - South Sudan's warring leaders will meet face-to-face for the first time in almost two years on Wednesday amid efforts to end a five-year civil war, the government of neighboring Ethiopia said Tuesday. South Sudan President Salva Kiir and rival Riek Machar were expected to arrive in Addis Ababa on Tuesday evening, spokesman Meles Alem with Ethiopia's foreign ministry told The Associated Press. Both sides last week welcomed the invitation by Ethiopia's prime minister to meet. South Sudan government spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny called the invitation "significant," telling the AP that "anything that brings peace in South Sudan is wanted." Machar fled South Sudan after new fighting erupted in the capital in July 2016, ending a brief attempt at peace in which Machar returned to his role as Kiir's deputy. Machar, who later was put under house arrest in South Africa, hasn't met with Kiir since then. The face-to-face meeting would be mediated by the East African regional bloc that has led several rounds of failed peace talks. The Intergovernmental Authority on Development last month called for a meeting of Kiir and Machar ahead of an African Union summit on July 1 in Mauritania, saying it would inform a "final decision" on Machar's participation in the peace process. Pressure has been growing on the warring sides to end a conflict that has killed tens of thousands and created Africa's largest refugee crisis since the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Both sides have been accused of abuses against civilians, including along ethnic lines. Early this month the U.N. Security Council adopted a United States-sponsored resolution that threatens an arms embargo on South Sudan and sanctions against six people, including the country's defense chief, if fighting doesn't stop and a political agreement reached. The resolution asks Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to report to the council on that by June 30. Regional bloc IGAD also has threatened to submit "punitive measures" against violators of December's failed cease-fire in South Sudan, though sanctions would need approval by the bloc's heads of state and government. ___ Follow Africa news at https://twitter.com/AP_Africa SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - U.S. and South Korean officials are hoping the suspension of a major joint military exercise helps advance nuclear negotiations with North Korea. It's a bold gamble that could trigger a serious security crisis if the talks falter and the allies are forced to resume the drills, infuriating North Korea, analysts say. The cancellation, abruptly decided by President Donald Trump at his summit last week with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was formally announced by the Pentagon on Monday. South Korea's Defense Ministry simultaneously confirmed the suspension of the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises, consisting largely of computer-simulated war games. In announcing his decision, Trump said suspending the "provocative" war games would "save us a tremendous amount of money." The decision, which apparently came without consultations with South Korea or the Pentagon, surprised many in South Korea and the United States who believe the training is a central pillar of their countries' seven-decade military alliance dating to the 1950-53 Korean War. FILE - In this March 12, 2016, file photo, Marines of the U.S., left, and South Korea wearing blue headbands on their helmets, take positions after landing on a beach during the joint military combined amphibious exercise, called Ssangyong, part of the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle military exercises, in Pohang, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (Kim Jun-bum/Yonhap via AP, File) South Korean military commentator Lee Illwoo described the halt as "temporarily pulling off the wheels of the alliance." Other experts agree that the suspension will weaken, at least temporarily, the allies' defense posture against North Korea and open gaps in their combined deterrence. Seoul and Washington describe the move as a temporary measure to prolong ongoing detente on the Korean Peninsula and increase the chances of successful nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. But if North Korea doesn't reciprocate by taking serious steps toward denuclearization, the allies would be compelled to resume the drills, and that would certainly draw a furious response from North Korea, which views the exercises as rehearsals for an invasion, experts say. "Suspending drills once is dangerous because it causes a hole in our national security. But resuming suspended drills would cause a bigger security crisis because more extreme resistance from North Korea would come," Lee said. The summer Ulchi exercise is one of three major annual joint exercises that the two countries have staged for decades to hone their ability to cope with potential conflicts with North Korea. The other two drills are held in the spring - one computer-simulated and the other a field exercise. South Korea and the United States have always said the drills are purely defensive. But they have been a major source of tensions on the peninsula, with North Korea putting its 1.1 million-member military on alert and staging its own weapons tests and military training in response. Experts say South Korea and the United States need to hold regular drills to prepare their commanders, who change periodically, to work together smoothly in crisis situations and respond to North Korea's evolving military threats and other factors such as changes in the deployment of U.S. strategic assets. "It's hard to deny that the security gap problem would exist and the allies must be prepared to snap the drills back on if the North doesn't make genuine steps toward denuclearization," said Yeol Soo Kim, a senior analyst from South Korea's Korea Institute for Military Affairs. To justify the suspension of the drills, the United States will need to coax North Korea to reciprocate with significant steps that push the nuclear disarmament process firmly forward, Yeol Soo Kim said. Such actions could include agreements on a disarmament timetable, verification methods and giving up a certain number of nuclear weapons and long-range missile equipment, Kim said. The drill's suspension is likely the only concession that Trump could provide to Kim at a time when the North Korean leader has remained vague about his pledge to work toward the "complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." Other rewards that North Korea wants are an easing of international sanctions, establishment of diplomatic ties with the United States, and a reduction of U.S. troops in South Korea. Those are bigger concessions that are unlikely to be granted by the U.S. without concrete steps by North Korea toward denuclearization. "Trump has not many (negotiating) cards now," said Yang Uk of the Korea Defense and Security Forum. The drill's suspension would have been unthinkable last year, when North Korea sharply raised animosity with a torrid run of nuclear and long-range missile tests that put the country closer to acquiring a nuclear arsenal capable of targeting the U.S. mainland. Still, the U.S.-initiated decision to shelve the drills isn't likely to dramatically change the psyche of South Koreans who have spent their entire lives facing North Korean threats and living through wild swings in inter-Korean relations. Even last year, few South Koreans publicly displayed security jitters, and civil defense drills were generally lax. That contrasted with 20-30 years ago, when South Koreans rushed to stores to stock up on instant noodles and other provisions when North Korea threated to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire" and ratcheted up tensions. It's not the first time that the U.S. and South Korea have halted military drills in an attempt to ease tensions with North Korea and persuade it to give up its nuclear weapons. Near the start of the North Korean nuclear crisis in the early 1990s, the allies called off their largest springtime drills, called Team Spirit, after which North Korea froze its nuclear facilities under a now-collapsed disarmament deal. Those exercises have never resumed. FILE - In this Aug. 29, 2017 file photo, South Korean army soldiers aim their machine guns during the annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise in Yongin, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (Hong Gi-won/Yonhap via AP, File) FILE - In this Aug. 24, 2016 file photo, South Korean army soldiers conduct an anti-terror drill as part of Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise, at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File) FILE - In this file photo Sept. 18, 2017 provided by South Korea Defense Ministry, U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber, F-35B stealth fighter jets and South Korean F-15K fighter jets fly over the Korean Peninsula during a joint drills, South Korea. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from President Donald Trump's nuclear summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (South Korea Defense Ministry via AP, File) A photo showing U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is displayed as a member of People's Democratic Party stands to oppose military exercises between the United States and South Korea near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. The Pentagon on Monday, June 18, 2018, formally suspended a major military exercise planned for August with South Korea, a much-anticipated move stemming from Trump's nuclear summit with Kim. The signs read: " Stop Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercises and withdrawal of U.S. troops." (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon) SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) - Macedonia's parliament on Tuesday started debating a law ratifying an agreement with neighboring Greece designed to end a decades-long dispute over Macedonia's name. Lawmakers voted 69-40 to proceed with a bill to ratify the Greek-Macedonia deal to rename the latter country North Macedonia. The ratification was later approved by two parliamentary committees. Parliament speaker Talat Xhaferi told The Associated Press that the debate in the plenary session would start Wednesday, but as the main opposition VMRO-DPMNE party is boycotting the session, the vote could even be held within the day. People protest against the deal between Greece and Macedonia on Macedonia's new name, North Macedonia, in the southern Macedonia town of Bitola on Sunday, June 17, 2018. Lawmakers voted 153-127 in the 300-member parliament against the motion brought by the conservative main opposition party over the deal to rename the former Yugoslav republic North Macedonia. (AP Photo/Boris Grdanoski) Greece had long insisted on the name change, arguing that its northern neighbor's name implies claims on a northern Greek province also called Macedonia, and on ancient Greek heritage. The former Yugoslav republic must change its constitution to formalize the deal. Opposition parties and large sections of the population in both Greece and Macedonia are against the agreement, arguing it offers too many concessions to the other country. Several hundred people protested peacefully against the deal during Tuesday's parliamentary debate in Skopje, shouting "traitors" and burning a copy of the agreement. While the left-led government, which controls 65 of parliament's 120 seats, should have little difficulty getting the bill approved, the country's conservative president, Gjorge Ivanov, has said he will not sign off on the law. That would force a repeat of the ratification debate and vote, and if it is again approved then Ivanov would be unable to block it. Last week's agreement between the two countries' prime ministers was signed Sunday. Macedonia has to hold a referendum on the constitutional amendment, and Greece's parliament has to ratify the deal as well. Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov said Tuesday that the deal must be ratified by the end of this month, to meet deadlines for the launching of Macedonia's NATO and EU membership process. People protest against the deal between Greece and Macedonia on Macedonia's new name, North Macedonia, in the southern Macedonia town of Bitola on Sunday, June 17, 2018. Lawmakers voted 153-127 in the 300-member parliament against the motion brought by the conservative main opposition party over the deal to rename the former Yugoslav republic North Macedonia. (AP Photo/Boris Grdanoski) An opponent of the deal between Greece and Macedonia on the latter country's new name _ North Macedonia _ waves a Macedonian flag during a protest at the village Bitola on Sunday, June 17, 2018. The preliminary deal signed by the two countries' foreign ministers in the Prespes Lakes area, Greece, launches a long process that will last several months. If successful, it will end a decades-long dispute between neighbors Greece and Macedonia _ which will be renamed North Macedonia. (AP Photo/Boris Grdanoski) AMMAN, Jordan (AP) - President Donald Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, kicked off a swing through the Middle East on Tuesday, meeting with Jordan's king as part of a broader effort to lay the groundwork for an expected Israeli-Palestinian peace plan. Kushner and White House envoy Jason Greenblatt held talks with Jordan's King Abdullah II, a key U.S. ally. A White House statement said the talks focused on U.S.-Jordan cooperation, the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the U.S. efforts "to "facilitate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians." U.S. officials have said their peace plan is near completion and could be released this summer. But it faces resistance from the Palestinians, who have cut off ties since Trump recognized contested Jerusalem as Israel's capital last December and moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to the holy city last month. The Palestinians, who seek Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem as their capital, accuse the U.S. of siding with Israel in the most sensitive issue of their decades-long conflict. Kushner's team also plans stops in Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No talks with the Palestinians are scheduled, though the Americans have left the door open to meeting with them. The Palestinians seek all of the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza Strip for an independent state. Israel captured the territories in the 1967 Mideast war. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and Hamas militants seized control of the territory two years later. The U.S. has been trying to rally support for projects to rescue Gaza's economy, which has been weakened by an Israeli-Egyptian blockade, while continuing to isolate Hamas. The U.S., Israel and Western allies shun Hamas as a terrorist group. Details of the plan have not been released, but Palestinians fear they will get little more than a symbolic foothold in Jerusalem. They also fear that aid to Gaza will help strengthen Hamas' control over the territory. Jordan also has a stake in east Jerusalem, serving as the custodian of major Muslim and Christian shrines there. Jerusalem's walled Old City, captured and annexed by Israel in 1967, is home to Muslim, Christian and Jewish holy sites. Abdullah has also rejected Trump's moves in Jerusalem. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to relinquish any part of the city. Netanyahu traveled to Amman on Monday for a surprise meeting with Abdullah, telling the king that Israel remains committed to the status quo of the holy sites in Jerusalem. Abdullah told Netanyahu that the fate of Jerusalem must be determined in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and that a solution should be based on establishing a Palestinian state, with east Jerusalem as its capital, on lands Israel captured in 1967. Palestinian officials fear the Trump administration plan will leave them with a mini-state in the Gaza Strip, parts of the West Bank and a foothold in Jerusalem. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has said he will reject any plan being floated by the Trump team, arguing that the U.S. has forfeited its role as mediator because of decisions seen as pro-Israel. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile have pledged to stop providing information on U.S. phone owners' locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy. The data has apparently allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners' knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known California-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly - LocationSmart and Zumigo. Verizon was the first major carrier to declare it would end sales of such data to brokers that then provide it to others. It did so in a June 15 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been probing the phone location-tracking market. AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint followed suit Tuesday after The Associated Press reported the Verizon move. FILE- In this Tuesday, May 2, 2017, file photo, Verizon corporate signage is captured on a store in Manhattan's Midtown area, in New York. Verizon is pledging to stop selling data to outsiders through middlemen that can pinpoint the location of mobile phones, the Associated Press has learned. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File) None of the carriers said they are getting out of the business of selling location data. The carriers together have more than 300 million U.S. subscribers. Verizon Chief Privacy Officer Karen Zacharia said the company would be careful not to disrupt "beneficial services" such as fraud prevention and emergency roadside assistance. In an email to the AP, AT&T spokesman Jim Greer cited similar reasons for cutting off the intermediaries "as soon as practical." Last month, Wyden revealed abuses in the lucrative but loosely regulated field involving Securus Technologies, whose contract Verizon says was approved only for the location tracking of outside mobile phones called by prison inmates. Verizon notified LocationSmart and Zumigo, both privately held, that it intends to "terminate their ability to access and use our customers' location data as soon as possible," Zacharia wrote. Location data from Verizon and other carriers makes it possible to identify the whereabouts of nearly any phone in the U.S. within seconds. Popular commercial uses for the information include keeping tabs on packages, vehicles and employees; bank fraud prevention; and targeted marketing offers. The cutoff won't affect users' ability to share locations directly with apps and other services. Rather, it deals with the practice of providing data to third parties with whom users have no direct contact. Wyden wrote all four major U.S. wireless carriers on May 8 after learning about a web portal that let law officers track Americans' locations without proper oversight. A former sheriff in Missouri has been accused of using Securus data for unauthorized surveillance of a judge, a sheriff and state highway patrol officers. Days later, a Carnegie Mellon University security researcher discovered a security flaw in LocationSmart's website that could have allowed any reasonably sophisticated hacker to secretly track almost any phone in the U.S. or Canada. Wyden asked the carriers to identify which third parties have been acquiring carrier location data and to provide details such as any third-party sharing of location data without customer consent. His office shared the companies' responses with The AP. None of the four carriers named any third parties, with two exceptions. One was Securus, which all four carriers have since cut off. The other was 3CInteractive, the reseller that supplied Securus. "Verizon did the responsible thing and promptly announced it was cutting these companies off," Wyden said in a statement, referring to the aggregators as "shady middle men." "The big concern was that this was probably the tip of the iceberg," said Laura Moy, deputy director of the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology. She said Verizon's move "indicates that it cannot actually police this process, that it doesn't have the ability." Nor can the other carriers, she said. None of the four carriers responded to questions from the AP on whether they plan to sell location data directly instead of relying on the two California companies and, if so, how. AT&T and T-Mobile, No. 2 and 3 in customers, said in letters to Wyden they only allow authorized third parties to access customer location data if the affected customers have given consent or if it is required by law - for instance, a court order. Verizon said the same. Sprint said account holders must "generally be notified" if the data is to be used so they can decide whether they consent. T-Mobile has offered to buy Sprint for $26.5 billion. The carriers left most of Wyden's questions unanswered - such as how many of their customers had been affected by location sharing they never agreed to. Gigi Sohn, a former top advisor at the Federal Communications Commission in the Obama administration, said Verizon has lately proven itself a "shining example" on privacy. "I think they understand that bad privacy practices are bad for business," she said. Moy said Verizon may have been motivated by a $1.4 million FCC fine for an earlier episode in which the company quietly tracked its wireless customers' online travels with a "supercookie" for at least 22 months beginning in December 2012. The company subsequently signed a consent order with the FCC promising to restrict that tracking to customers who affirmatively agreed to it. The case also spurred FCC rules that would have required carriers to obtain consent for selling their customers' wireless location data. But the GOP-led Congress quashed those rules last year. Analysts say it's difficult to gauge the size of the location-tracking aggregation market. On its website, LocationSmart claims it is the No. 1 "location-as-a-service" provider with data from every top tier U.S. wireless carrier and more than 200 enterprise customers. Zumigo appears oriented to the financial sector, and lists Intel, Wells Fargo and Capital One among investors. In a statement, LocationSmart said it respects user privacy, doesn't provide access to location information without user consent and doesn't warehouse data or track user location histories. The CEO of Zumigo, Chirag Bakshi, said his 7-year-old company provides location data to less than a half dozen big banks and financial institutions for fraud prevention. He said Zumigo does not let its customers resell the location data - and hopes to renegotiate with the carriers. Analyst Rich Mogull of Arizona-based Securosis said telecom providers track and sell location data as a matter of course. A wide range of other businesses such as Google also assiduously compile location datasets on consumers. "We are all tracked, all the time, primarily for marketing purposes, by such a large number of companies I'm not sure I would even know where to start the math," said Mogull. ___ Associated Press technology writers Matt O'Brien in San Francisco and Mae Anderson in New York contributed to this report. ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) - The city council of Maryland's capital has apologized for the lynchings of five African-Americans more than a century ago, a step toward accepting a historic marker for public display. The Equal Justice Initiative documented more than 4,000 lynchings in the United States between the Civil War and World War II. The initiative's National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, created markers and called on each county to install them as a public acknowledgment of their local history. The Capital newspaper reported that county officials have not commented on this request. The resolution approved Monday night notes these lynchings in Anne Arundel County and Annapolis, the county seat: John Simms in 1875, George Briscoe in 1884, Wright Smith in 1898, Henry Davis in 1906 and King Johnson in 1911. ___ Information from: The Capital, http://www.capitalgazette.com/ BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) - A human rights group on Tuesday criticized a phone tapping agreement between Romania's intelligence agency and the high court, saying it exposes ordinary citizens to potential abuse. The High Court of Cassation and Justice, prosecutors and the Romanian Intelligence Service signed a secret protocol in 2009 in which the agency promised to provide technical infrastructure for prosecutors and protect classified data obtained from legal phone and electronic tapping. The agreement was published on Monday. The Human Rights in Romania-Helsinki Committee Association criticized the deal, saying close links between the courts and intelligence agents could lead to civil rights' abuses. It noted that the court had rejected just one of 26,500 phone tapping requests made on national security grounds. Supporters of the ruling Social Democratic attend a rally outside the government headquarters in Bucharest, Romania, Saturday, June 9, 2018. More than 100,000 supporters of the Romanian government assembled Saturday in the capital dressed in white to protest alleged abuses committed by anti-corruption prosecutors.(AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda) Senior members of the ruling Social Democratic Party claim 6 million people have been tapped in recent years and say Romania is controlled by forces in the justice system and intelligence agency which are outside party control - something they call a "parallel state." The Social Democrats and their allies are currently pushing through laws which critics say would curb prosecutorial powers and make it harder to punish high-level corruption. Almost three decades after communism ended, some ordinary Romanians believe the state intelligence agency taps their phones and bugs their homes. The Securitate communist secret police kept close tabs on Romanian citizens, with an army of informers and agents who listened to phones and reported on dissent. WICHITA, Kan. (AP) - A civil rights group filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach challenging a multi-state voter registration database it claims exposed sensitive information including partial Social Security numbers from nearly a thousand state voters. The complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas alleges "reckless maintenance" of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which compares voter registration lists among participating states to look for duplicates. The program is aimed at cleaning voter records and preventing voter fraud but has drawn criticism for its high error rate and lax security. Kobach, a conservative Republican seeking his party's nomination for governor, was vice chairman of President Donald Trump's now-disbanded commission on election fraud. The ACLU claims Kobach has made the program a linchpin in his efforts to reduce citizen participation in Kansas elections. FILE - In this April 20, 2018, file photo, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach speaks during a rally in Topeka, Kan. The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday, June 19, 2018, against Kobach challenging a multi-state voter registration database it claims exposed sensitive information including partial Social Security numbers from nearly a thousand state voters. (AP Photo/Mitchell Willetts, File) "This ACLU lawsuit is yet another attack on secure and fair elections in America," Kobach said in an emailed statement. "The ACLU is attacking states that try to keep our voter rolls clean. I will fight them every step of the way." Kobach called the lawsuit baseless, citing the U.S. Supreme Court last week in an Ohio case dealing with maintenance of voter rolls. The court affirmed Ohio's practice of identifying voters for potential removal if they don't vote in a federal election. Ohio removes voters from the rolls if they don't return an address confirmation card or vote during the next four years. The program was started in 2005 and had only four participants when Kobach took office in 2011. By 2017, 30 states were participating in Crosscheck and more than 100 million voter records were added to the database, according to the lawsuit. Eight states - Florida, Alaska, Kentucky, Washington, Oregon, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts - have left the program due to security risks and data reliability concerns since Kobach began managing it. Crosscheck compares registration lists and analyzes voters' first name, surname and date of birth to determine whether a person is registered in multiple states, but the lawsuit contends most of the hits are false matches. Kobach encourages states to provide voters' partial Social Security numbers and other confidential information to narrow the list. The lawsuit alleges Kobach regularly sends voter signatures as well as the server address and passwords via unencrypted email. The ACLU's lawsuit, which seeks class action status, contends it is unknown how many voters had their information exposed but alleges that in a single communication in 2017 Florida election officials released the name, date of birth, address and partial Social Security number of 945 Kansas voters in responding to an open records request. That included the personal information for the three named Kansas plaintiffs - Scott Moore, James Long and Nancy Perry - on whose behalf the ACLU filed the suit. "This case is about a public official recklessly exposing the personal information of the state's voters - Republican, Democratic, and unaffiliated alike - and unnecessarily leaving them vulnerable to identity theft," Lauren Bonds, the group's legal director said in a news release. The lawsuit seeks to block Kobach from continuing to maintain, share and release sensitive law enforcement information, such as partial Social Security numbers, with other states in connection with the program. It also seeks to remedy past disclosures. It also asks the court for a declaratory judgment that Kobach violated the voters' Fourteenth Amendment right to privacy as well as the Kansas Public Records Act, which prohibits government disclosure of Social Security numbers. The lawsuit alleges that in addition to administering the national Crosscheck program, Kobach uploads the voter registration data of 1.3 million Kansans to its server and shares with participating states identifiable information of the more than 150,000 Kansas voters identified as possible double registrants. It is asking the court for an injunction that requires Kobach to halt transmission of personal voter data until "industry standard practices and procedures" are implemented. It also seeks unspecified civil penalties against Kobach. BERLIN (AP) - After wrongly stating a day earlier that crime in Germany is surging, U.S. President Donald Trump is singling out the European nation again to warn about the alleged danger posed by migrants. Trump tweeted Tuesday: "Crime in Germany is up 10% plus (officials do not want to report these crimes) since migrants were accepted. Others countries are even worse. Be smart America!" The claim about an overall rise in crime due to migration is false, as the latest official figures show. German Chancellor Angela Merkel uses her mobile device as she waits for the arrival of the Prime Minister of Italy Giuseppe Conte, prior to talks at the chancellery in Berlin, Monday, June 18, 2018. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber) Responding to Trump's tweets about crime in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel cited figures showing a nearly 10 percent drop in crime nationwide, bringing it to the lowest level since 1992. She said the statistics "speak for themselves." "We see somewhat positive developments there," Merkel told reporters Tuesday. "Of course, we need to do more to combat crime, but those were indeed encouraging numbers." While Trump didn't cite a source, the figure in his Tuesday tweet may draw on a widely publicized study released earlier this year that showed a 10.4 percent increase in the number of violent crimes reported in the German state of Lower Saxony from 2015 to 2016. The government-funded study concluded that 92 percent of the roughly 1,700 additional crimes recorded during the period could be attributed to the increase in refugee numbers during those two years. Yet crime numbers in Lower Saxony remain far lower than a decade earlier, before the migrant influx. The authors noted that the majority of the refugees were young males, and this population is more likely to commit crimes regardless of whether they are migrants or Germans. Experts also say crowded temporary holding facilities can lead to fights among the groups living there, which are reported as assaults. Far from being swept under the carpet, the findings of the study and a series of high-profile incidents involving refugees have fueled an ongoing debate in Germany about how to tackle migrant crime. That has already resulted in a string of measures to improve the integration of migrants and to deport serious offenders. Government officials noted that migrants with a greater chance of being able to stay in Germany are less likely to commit crimes than those who have worse prospects. They also pointed to the lack of women among Germany's refugee population as an aggravating factor, saying family reunification could alleviate the problem. "This makes it more likely for groups of young men to emerge among the refugees and they can develop a violent dynamic of their own," the authors wrote, concluding that it makes sense to allow refugees to bring over their families. Finally, they said victims of crime are twice as likely to report incidents if they are committed by people who are different from them, distorting the statistics. The study examining recorded violent crimes in Lower Saxony pointed to a year-on-year rise from 17,568 cases in 2015 to 19,267 in 2016. The latest state crime statistics show violent crime in Lower Saxony fell in 2017, to 18,454 cases - significantly less than a decade earlier, when the figure stood at 22,360 cases. ___ Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd ___ Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck NEW YORK (AP) - If meat is grown in a lab without slaughtering animals, what should it be called? That question has yet to be decided by regulators, but for the moment it's pitting animal rights advocates and others against cattle ranchers in a war of words. FILE- This Jan 9, 2018 photo shows the Impossible Burger at Stella's, in Bellevue, Neb., which is a burger is made from plant protein. What gets to be considered "meat" is a particularly touchy subject as startups push to alter American eating habits with substitutes they say are just like the real thing. Impossible Burger's plant-based patty "bleeds" like beef. (Ryan Soderlin/The World-Herald via AP, File) Supporters of the science are embracing "clean meat" to describe meat grown by replicating animal cells. Many in the conventional meat industry are irritated by the term and want to stamp it out before it takes hold. "It implies that traditional beef is dirty," says Danielle Beck, director of government affairs for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The spat shows the power of language as a new industry attempts to reshape eating habits. It's why the $49.5 billion U.S. beef, poultry, pork and lamb industry is mobilizing to claim ownership of the term "meat." Squabbles over language are erupting across the food business as established definitions for mayonnaise and milk are also challenged by the likes of vegan spreads and almond drinks. What gets to be considered "meat" is a particularly touchy subject as new companies come up with substitutes they say are just like the real thing. Impossible Burger's plant-based patty "bleeds" like beef. Companies such as Memphis Meats are growing meat by culturing animal cells, though it could be years before products are on shelves. Big meat producers like Tyson Foods and Cargill Inc. are among Memphis Meats' investors. There's some confusion over how meat grown by culturing animal cells will be regulated. The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees meat inspections, while the Food and Drug Administration oversees other aspects of food safety, including the "standards of identity" that spell out what ingredients can go into products with specific names. The FDA - which in the past has called out Kraft's use of the term "pasteurized process cheese food" - plans to hold a public meeting to discuss "cultured" meat next month. In the meantime, all sides are scrambling to frame the issue in their own words. The Good Food Institute, an advocacy and lobbying group for meat alternatives, is embracing "clean meat," which channels the positive connotations of "clean energy." Other options it tested: "Meat 2.0," ''Safe Meat" and "Pure Meat." "Green Meat" was dismissed early on. "Nobody wants to eat green meat," said Bruce Friedrich, co-founder of the Good Food Institute. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association is fighting to defend what it sees as its linguistic turf. "Our marching orders were to protect beef nomenclature," says Beck. The cattlemen's group prefers less appetizing terms such as "in vitro meat," ''synthetic meat" or even "meat byproduct" for meat grown through cultured cells. For meat alternatives more broadly, it likes "fake meat." The U.S. Cattlemen's Association, a smaller group, also petitioned the USDA in February to enforce that "beef" and "meat" only be used for animals "born, raised and harvested in the traditional manner." And in October, the former head of the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance considered a way to possibly halt the use of "clean meat" after hearing the term. "You will see that we left the conference and immediately investigated the term 'Clean Meat' from a trademark perspective," wrote Randy Krotz, then-CEO of the group, according to an email obtained through a public records request by Property of the People, which advocates for government transparency. Krotz noted that another party had already applied for the trademark, but said the alliance was able to claim the Twitter handle "@clean_meat." That account does not show any activity. Anne Curzan, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, says the term "clean meat" highlights the positive and pushes into the background aspects that may make people uncomfortable. "It is smart branding to try to keep the product from being associated with 'frankenfood'," Curzan says. It's just the latest front in the war of words in food. Last year, the dairy industry revived its quest to abolish terms like "soy milk" and "almond milk," saying that milk is defined as being obtained from a cow. That came after a vegan spread provoked the ire of the Association for Dressings and Sauces , of which Hellmann's is a member, by calling itself "Just Mayo." Even grains aren't immune from controversy. With cauliflower "rice" becoming popular with low-carb eaters, the rice industry is punching back with its own term for chopped-up vegetable substitutes: "rice pretenders ." ___ Follow Candice Choi at www.twitter.com/candicechoi UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees is "weeks away from painful cuts" to its emergency assistance for Gaza and refugees elsewhere because of an unprecedented gap in its budget of more than $250 million, the U.N. Mideast envoy said Tuesday. Nikolay Mladenov told the Security Council that in Gaza, "this would include a deferral of salaries to some of its workforce in July and the start of suspending core operations in August." The Trump administration announced in January it was withholding $65 million of a planned $125 million funding installment for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency. It released $60 million so UNRWA wouldn't shut down, but made clear that additional U.S. donations would be contingent on major reforms at the agency. Agency spokesman Christopher Gunness has said the actual cut was around $300 million because the U.S. led the agency to believe it would provide $365 million in 2018. He said UNRWA went into 2018 with a $146 million shortfall that ballooned to $446 million without the anticipated U.S. funds. A dozen countries announced pledges of nearly $100 million in new funding for UNRWA at an emergency donor conference in Rome in March. But facing the worst funding crisis in its 68-year history, Mladenov said UNRWA still has "an unprecedented shortfall of over $250 million." He announced that another pledging conference will be held Monday at U.N. headquarters in New York. In a report to the Security Council obtained Monday by The Associated Press, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the desperate humanitarian situation in Gaza is compounded by the potential suspension of U.N. programs, which are "a lifeline for Palestinians," as a result of UNRWA's precarious financial situation. The agency, the oldest and largest U.N. relief program in the Middle East, provides health care, education and social services to an estimated 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were forced from their homes during the war that led to Israel's establishment in 1948. Guterres warned that if the $250 million shortfall isn't urgently met UNRWA's services face disruption. "The additional instability caused by such a development, in a region already wracked by conflict, can, and must, be prevented if all act now to address this gap," the secretary-general said. WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump on Tuesday welcomed Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia to the White House. King Felipe described his first Oval Office meeting with the president as a "great end to a perfect visit." The royals are in the U.S. to mark the 300th anniversaries of the founding of New Orleans and San Antonio, stopping in both cities with historical ties to Spain before arriving at the White House. Trump called it "really a tremendous honor" to have the royal couple in the Oval Office. President Donald Trump, left, poses for a photo with Spain's King Felipe VI, second from left, first lady Melania Trump, third from right, and Queen Letizia, right, on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) The president also praised the "outstanding" relationship between the U.S. and Spain "over the years and, I think, especially right now. Excellent trade relationship, military relationship. Just about everything you can have. So we love Spain." Trade was expected to figure prominently in their talks. The king was expected to discuss concerns in Europe about the Trump administration's decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and U.S. tariffs on Spanish black olives. Mrs. Trump was scheduled to host Queen Letizia for tea in the Red Room. The first lady recently resumed her schedule of public appearances following surgery last month to treat a benign kidney condition. The king and queen were expected to meet with congressional leaders later Tuesday. President Donald Trump, second from right, and first lady Melania Trump, right, welcome Spain's King Felipe VI, second from left, and Queen Letizia, left, to the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) President Donald Trump, second from right, and first lady Melania Trump, right, welcome Spain's King Felipe VI, second from left, and Queen Letizia, left, to the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - Sri Lanka captain Dinesh Chandimal has been banned for one test match after he was found guilty of changing the condition of the ball during the drawn second test against West Indies. Chandimal admitted in a hearing after the second test ended at Gros Islet on Monday that he put something in his mouth during the second day's play. However, he said he couldn't recall what exactly it was before applying his saliva onto the ball on Friday. Match referee Javagal Srinath handed Chandimal the maximum punishment available under the ICC code of conduct for ball-tampering, including a fine of 100 percent of his match fee. Chandimal will miss the third and final test against West Indies, a day-night match starting at Barbados on June 23. Srinath said TV footage showed that Chandimal "took something from his pocket and put it into his mouth" before the player spit on his finger and polished the ball. West Indies won the first test by 226 runs. LOS ANGELES (AP) - "Yellowstone" has everything a worthwhile Western should, including breathtaking vistas, battles over land and Kevin Costner in the lead role. There's also something rare in the contemporary Paramount Network series debuting Wednesday: prominent Native American story lines and parts, including one filled by an actor formidable enough to stand up to Costner and his ranching baron. Gil Birmingham plays Thomas Rainwater, a tribal chief and casino owner who's ready and able to oppose those whose interests conflict with the well-being of the people he represents. This image released by Paramount Network shows, Gil Birmingham, from the series "Yellowstone" premiering Wednesday, June 20. (Emerson Miller/Paramount Network via AP) Birmingham, of Comanche ancestry on his father's side, has played his share of Native Americans and others on TV and in films including "Hell or High Water" and "Wind River," both written by Taylor Sheridan, the creator of "Yellowstone." "Through my career, a rather long career of struggling, mostly, I've been asked, 'What would be your dream character?' and this is it," Birmingham said of his role on Paramount Network's first drama series since its rebranding from Spike TV last January. Playing a fully realized, modern Indian character is an opportunity that doesn't come often enough and one that counts beyond entertainment, the actor said. "Many people don't even think that we (Native Americans) still exist, that we're just historical artifacts that once upon a time existed," he said, crediting Sheridan with a "great leap forward" in the 10-part series and on the big screen. Birmingham tips his hat as well to Costner and his 1990 Oscar-winning period drama "Dances with Wolves," which "really did open the door for people for maybe the first time ... to see the beauty and the depths of the native culture." Costner, also an executive producer on "Yellowstone," said authenticity is his goal with any project. That's particularly important in the show's portrayal of Native Americans, he said, for whom "a terrible wrong" has occurred and not been remedied. Sheridan got the balance "letter perfect," with the nuance and imperfection that characters of every ethnicity warrant, he said. The series, set in Montana, was filmed there and in Utah. Costner stars as John Dutton, a die-hard Westerner determined to keep his family's holdings intact. There are pressures from without - including land developers, oil and lumber interests and the adjacent Indian reservation and Yellowstone National Park - and from within, courtesy of his family. Dutton's offspring include Kayce (Luke Grimes), estranged and living on the reservation with his Native American wife, Monica (Kelsey Asbille); lawyer Jamie (Wes Bentley), eager to please his dad, and heir apparent Lee (Dave Annable), who's running the family operation with Dutton. The sole daughter, Beth (Kelly Reilly), more than keeps up her end, filling in for her late mother as family matriarch and doubling as a cutthroat business negotiator. The role of Thomas Rainwater was Birmingham's for the taking after he proved himself to Sheridan in "Wind River" and "Hell or High Water," which earned the filmmaker an Oscar bid for best screenplay. Birmingham couples technical proficiency with artistic expression in his work, Sheridan said, and Rainwater's character required particular deftness. "It's the ability to be cunning without it being misconstrued as evil," said Sheridan, who recalled advising Birmingham that Rainwater needed to be seen as "an equal force to people who have a real disregard for the rule of law, and yet never lose his goodness." The actor has a personal connection with his character's story. Rainwater grew up unaware of his ancestry because his adoptive parents withheld his background from him, while Birmingham's late father downplayed his native heritage. Birmingham left home at 14, ultimately attending the University of Southern California and working as a petrochemical engineer. A foray into bodybuilding served as an improbable wake-up call to embrace the arts. "I was more intrigued by the aesthetic ability to form a body like a sculpture. In my creative desire, I just knew I couldn't do the engineering anymore. It didn't speak to me, to my spirit," he said. Another unlikely step - he got a part in Diana Ross' music video "Muscles" - propelled him into acting, although the guitar had captured his imagination as a youngster and he'd hoped for a musical career. That dream has yet to be fulfilled, but Birmingham said it allowed him to make an instant connection with fellow actor-musician Jeff Bridges when they had just a few days to rehearse their roles as longtime friends in "Hell or High Water." Birmingham marvels at what's happened since he decided as a teenager he would rather be on the street in San Francisco (before becoming a ward of the court and entering a boys' home) and find his own path. "The events of my life unfolded in such a way that they placed me in places I never would have imagined. And the only way that I could move forward was to trust," Birmingham said. ___ Lynn Elber can be reached at lelber@ap.org and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lynnelber . This image released by Paramount Network shows, from left, Pete Sands, Mo Brings Plenty, Gil Birmingham, Cole Hauser, Kevin Costner and Wes Bentley from the new series, "Yellowstone," premiering Wednesday, June 20 on Paramount Network. (Emerson Miller/Paramount Network via AP) This image released by Paramount Network shows, Gil Birmingham from the series "Yellowstone" premiering Wednesday, June 20. (Emerson Miller/Paramount Network via AP) This image released by Paramount Network shows, from left, Wes Bentley, Forrie Smith, Luke Peckinpah, Kevin Costner, Dave Annable, Denim Richards and Cole Hauser from the series "Yellowstone," premiering Wednesday, June 20. (Paramount Network via AP) American Airlines is continuing to experience a massive disruption after canceling hundreds of flights on Tuesday because of computer problems at an affiliate, PSA Airlines. More than 500 PSA flights were canceled, according to tracking service FlightStats. American said in a statement that PSA, which is owned by the airliner and operates many of its Eagle flights and smaller regional jets, was experiencing a crew scheduling and tracking system issue. The airliner tweeted Tuesday that PSA stabilized its computer systems and was trying to resume a normal schedule, but warned that disruptions were likely to continue for PSA-operated flights 'over the next few days', USA Today reports. More than 500 American Airlines flights were canceled on Tuesday because of a computer issue with its affiliate, PSA Airlines Some passengers have been stuck in Charlotte, North Carolina for days and have missed work and other family events American said its affiliate, PSA Airlines, experience a computer glitch which caused the massive flight cancelations 'We understand that these cancelations have been frustrating for our customers, and teams from PSA and American have been working around the clock to get things back to normal as quickly as possible,' American said in its statement, 'We are rebooking passengers and American's Customer Relations department continues to reach out all affected customers. We encourage our customers traveling on PSA-operated flights over the next few days to check their flight status at aa.com or on the American Airlines app.' Many of the canceled or delayed flights have been in Charlotte, North Carolina, a major American Airlines hub but hubs in Philadelphia and Washington Reagan National have also experienced delays. The technical issue first surfaced last Thursday causing American to cancel more than 250 flights. Since the computer problems began, more than 1,000 flights have been canclled. American has been providing hotel accommodations and meal vouchers for affected passengers. According to the Charlotte Observer, the airliner covered the tab for about 800 hotel rooms since the glitch. American has provided affected travelers with hotel accommodations and meal vouchers, but passengers are still angry over the canceled flights American said the glitch has been resolved but said it could delays could continue 'over the next few days' Several travelers have said they missed work, family functions and other events because of the canceled flights. 'It's been horrible, just horrible. My father spent a pretty penny for me and my son to come out and visit and to be treated like this is terrible,' traveler Shelia Dugan told WSOCTV. Angela Watkins said she owns a daycare and had to shut her business down because she's been stranded at the Charlotte airport. 'We've been here since Wednesday,' she said, adding that the cancelations have caused her to miss pay. MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) - A Georgia police officer has been arrested on accusations of assaulting a woman during sex while he was off duty, authorities said Tuesday. Officer Robert Lanier New was arrested Monday night and faces a misdemeanor charge of simple battery and a felony charge of aggravated assault, news outlets report. He was placed on administrative leave without pay. New was being held without bond. It wasn't immediately clear Tuesday whether he had an attorney who could comment on the charges. Police began investigating after receiving a complaint about New, spokeswoman Officer Sarah O'Hara said in an email. Cobb County Police Chief Michael Register said at a news conference Tuesday that it appears that New met the woman online. News outlets report that an arrest warrant alleges New choked and slapped a woman during sex in March. The warrant says the woman cried but couldn't tell New to stop because his hands were around her throat. Register said the woman is an adult but a forensic interview showed she has the mental capacity of a 10- to 14-year-old girl. She was "shaking due to fear" when police interviewed her, the warrant says. New sent the woman abusive text messages saying things like, "I am in charge, I am in control," and continued to contact her even after she tried to distance herself from him, according to police. New's father told WSB-TV his son has been a police officer for 25 years. "He's helped people out and lots of people care for him," Aubrey New told the television station. "He may have made a mistake, but I don't see that as being so." HAZELWOOD, Mo. (AP) - A federal report says people who lived near or played in a contaminated St. Louis-area creek from the 1960s to the 1990s may have increased risk of developing cancer. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry released a report Monday on cancer risks from exposure to radioactive contaminants in St. Louis County's Coldwater Creek, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. The report found that exposure could raise the risk of bone cancer, lung cancer and leukemia, including a smaller risk of skin and breast cancers. Individuals who lived near the creek since 2000 are believed to have lower levels of radiation exposure, but still have the possibly higher risk of bone or lung cancer, according to the report. Nuclear waste from World War II weapon production contaminated the creek decades ago. The waste was dumped at sites near the St. Louis Lambert International Airport, next to the creek that flows to the Missouri River. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been cleaning up the creek for about 20 years. More than 140 current and former North County residents have filed federal lawsuits in the last six years alleging nuclear waste exposure has caused illness or death. The state's health officials requested federal assistance after a 2014 report indicated high rates of leukemia, breast, colon and other cancers in the areas surrounding Coldwater Creek. The toxic substances agency, which is part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, launched a study two years ago into the potential link between the creek contamination and cancer cases. Cancer clusters are difficult for scientists to investigate because of the complexity of the disease. The agency's investigators used historical data from soil testing to determine exposure level estimates. "They are acknowledging our exposure, and that's a big deal," said Kim Visintine, who leads volunteer group Coldwater Creek - Just the Facts Please. The group has tracked 6,000 former and current area residents who have cancer diagnoses, she said. She said the group will pursue federal legislation to recognize the county's residents through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which allows compensation claims for uranium workers or those living downwind from nuclear test sites in western states. ___ Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Ted Cruz has staged a dramatic about-face on the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policies, laying bare how politically damaging the issue of separating children from parents accused of crossing the border illegally is becoming for Republicans facing voters this fall. The Texas senator, who has become a frequent ally of President Donald Trump, initially blasted criticism of the White House crackdown. "When you see Democrats saying, 'Don't separate kids from their parents,' what they're really saying is don't arrest illegal aliens," he said last week FILE - In this April 3, 2018, file photo, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks to supporters as he campaigns for re-election at the National Border Patrol Council Local 3307 offices in Edinburg, Texas. (Joel Martinez/The Monitor via AP, File) But he's now softened substantially, telling reporters in Washington on Tuesday, "All of us are horrified at the images we're seeing." Cruz also said he talked with the White House about legislation he introduced to stop family separations. It is striking that a leading conservative insurgent could flip-flop in a deep-red state where hardline immigration policies are exceedingly popular. But Cruz's change of heart underscores the chorus of bipartisan politicians and civic and religious leaders across the country who've said such tactics are unacceptable - even as the Trump administration has vowed to stand by them. Cruz's push for legislation comes as Beto O'Rourke, the Democratic congressman giving up his seat to challenge the incumbent in November, has moved quickly to criticize the family separations and, in the process, raise his national profile. O'Rourke led a Father's Day march to a Texas desert tent city which federal authorities hastily erected to house immigrant children. "There's an open question right now about who we are and what we stand for and what we're going to do in the face of this injustice and this inhumanity," O'Rourke said by phone. A former punk rocker, O'Rourke has waged a high energy campaign and often outraised Cruz. He remains a longshot since Texas hasn't elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, but family separation may be proving too thorny a topic even for a Republican facing a relatively easy path to midterm re-election. "The needle that Cruz is trying to thread is he wants to end separation but also maintain rule of law," said Matt Mackowiak, a Texas GOP strategist who added, "He's recognizing that this separation issue is explosive." More than 2,300 minors were separated from their families at the border from May 5 through June 9, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That's under a policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that refers all cases of illegal entry - even those when people crossing sought asylum to remain in the U.S. - for criminal prosecution. The government previously limited prosecution for many family entrants, partly because children aren't charged with a crime and can't be detained with their parents. Texas is 39 percent Hispanic and has become the epicenter of the debate, with a former warehouse fitted with metal caging in the Rio Grande Valley housing more than 1,000 immigrant children. Roughly 750 miles to the west, near the pecan-growing town of Tornillo close to El Paso, more youngsters are being held in the tent encampment where O'Rourke led Sunday's march. O'Rourke also is offering House anti-family separation legislation, but his is similar to Democratic-led efforts in the Senate. He's long courted Trump supporters, saying he can understand their frustration with Washington's status quo. But O'Rourke says there's no room for agreement with the White House on this issue. "President Trump made the decision to take their young children from them, inflicting horrific trauma on those kids and on those parents alike and absolutely undermining our values and our idea of who we are as a country," he said. "But, at this point, it is now the United States of America that is doing this. It is now on all of us to change it." O'Rourke said the effort won't make him appear soft on crime since existing federal law already stipulates that anyone crossing the U.S. border and seeking asylum not be treated "like common criminals." "It's not a question of if you're for law and order. We all are," O'Rourke said. "It's following our own laws and also making sure that we're not torturing these families." Cruz is beginning to echo that sentiment, saying, "We can stop this" and that his bill "would prohibit separating families, would mandate that kids should stay with their parents." He said the proposal would double the number of federal immigration judges to ensure that asylum cases are heard within two weeks. "If the claim is not valid, and many of those coming here illegally don't have valid claims for asylum, then within 14 days that claim should be processed and they should be returned to their home country," Cruz said. "During that expedited process, we can and should keep families together, keep children with their moms and dads and we need to stand up temporary shelters." Neither Cruz nor O'Rourke's legislation are likely to advance as congressional Republicans continue to grapple with larger immigration packages , which some fierce conservatives are rejecting as "amnesty." Mackowiak said immigration and border crackdowns rarely are losing issues for Texas Republicans, but family separation "is very uncomfortable for a lot of us." "Separating families is dicier," he said "even here." ___ Sign up for "Politics in Focus," a weekly newsletter showcasing the AP's best political reporting from around the country leading up to the midterm elections: http://apne.ws/3Gzcraw COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France (AP) - For decades, he was known only as Unknown X-9352 at a World War II American cemetery in Belgium where he was interred. On Tuesday, Julius Heinrich Otto "Henry" Pieper, his identity recovered, was laid to rest beside his twin brother in Normandy, 74 years after the two Navy men died together when their ship shattered while trying to reach the blood-soaked D-Day beaches. Six Navy officers in crisp white uniforms carried the flag-draped metal coffin bearing the remains of Julius to its final resting place, at the side of Ludwig Julius Wilhelm "Louie" Pieper at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. In this undated photo, provided by family member Susan Lawrence on Wednesday, June 13, 2018, twin brothers Julius Pieper, left, and Ludwig Pieper in their U.S. Navy uniforms. For decades, he had a number for a name, Unknown X-9352, at a World War II American cemetery in Belgium where he was interred. On Tuesday, June 19, 2018, Julius Pieper will be reunited with his twin brother in Normandy, where the two Navy men died together when their ship shattered on an underwater mine while trying to reach the blood-soaked D-Day beaches. (Susan Lawrence via AP) The two 19-year-olds from Esmond, South Dakota, died together on June 19, 1944, when their huge flat-bottom ship hit an underwater mine as it tried to approach Utah Beach, 13 days after the D-Day landings. While Louie's body was soon found, identified and laid to rest, his brother's remains were only recovered in 1961 by French salvage divers and not identified until 2017. A lone bugler played taps as the casket was lowered in an end-of-day military ceremony attended by a half-dozen family members, closing a circle of loss. Each laid a red rose on the casket and two scattered American soil over it. The Pieper twins, both radiomen second class, are the 45th pair of brothers at the cemetery, three of them memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the cemetery. But the Piepers are the only set of twins among the more than 9,380 graves, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission. The cemetery, an immaculate field of crosses and Stars of David, overlooks the English Channel and Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the Normandy landing beaches of Operation Overlord, the first step in breaching Hitler's stranglehold on France and Europe. "They are finally together again, side by side, where they should be," said their niece, Susan Lawrence, 56, of Sacramento, California. "They were always together. They were the best of friends," Lawrence said. "Mom told me a story one time when one of the twins had gotten hurt on the job and the other twin had gotten hurt on the job, same day and almost the same time." The story of how the twins died and were being reunited reflects the daily courage of troops on a mission to save the world from the Nazis and the tenacity of today's military to ensure that no soldier goes unaccounted for. The Pieper twins, born of German immigrant parents, worked together for Burlington Railroad and enlisted together in the Navy. Both were radio operators and both were on the same unwieldy flat-bottom boat, Landing Ship Tank Number 523 (LST-523), making the Channel crossing from Falmouth, England, to Utah Beach 13 days after the June 6 D-Day landings. The LST-523 mission was to deliver supplies at the Normandy beachhead and remove the wounded. It never got there. The vessel struck an underwater mine and sank off the coast. Of the 145 Navy crew members, 117 were found perished. Survivors' accounts speak of a major storm on the Channel with pitched waves that tossed the boat mercilessly before the explosion that shattered the vessel. Louie's body was laid to rest in what now is the Normandy American Cemetery. But the remains of Julius were only recovered in 1961 by French divers who found them in the vessel's radio room. He was interred as an "Unknown" at the Ardennes American Cemetery in Neuville, Belgium, also devoted to the fallen of World War II, in the region that saw the bloody Battle of the Bulge. Julius' remains might have stayed among those of 13 other troops from the doomed LST-523 still resting unidentified at the Ardennes cemetery. But in 2017, a U.S. agency that tracks missing combatants using witness accounts and DNA testing identified him. Lawrence, the niece, said the brothers had successfully made the trip across the English Channel on D-Day itself, and "they had written my grandparents a letter saying, do not worry about us we are together." "My grandparents received that letter after they got word that they (their sons) had passed away," she said. The Pieper family asked that Louie's grave in Normandy be relocated to make room for his twin brother at his side. The last time the United States buried a soldier who fought in World War II was in 2005, at the Ardennes American Cemetery, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ___ Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report. In this undated photo, provided on Wednesday, June 13, 2018 by family member Susan Lawrence, Ludwig Pieper in his U.S. Navy uniform. For decades, he had a number for a name, Unknown X-9352, at a World War II American cemetery in Belgium where he was interred. On Tuesday, June 19, 2018, Julius Pieper will be reunited with his twin brother Ludwig in Normandy, where the two Navy men died together when their ship shattered on an underwater mine while trying to reach the blood-soaked D-Day beaches. (Susan Lawrence via AP) In this photo taken on Friday, June 15, 2018, Assistant Superintendent Vincent Joris talks by the original grave of Navy sailor Julius Pieper, at the Ardennes American Cemetery in Liege, Belgium on Friday, June 15, 2018. For decades, he had a number for a name, Unknown X-9352, at a World War II American cemetery in Belgium where he was interred. On Tuesday, June 19, 2018, Julius Pieper will be reunited with his twin brother Ludwig in Normandy, where the two Navy men died together when their ship shattered on an underwater mine while trying to reach the blood-soaked D-Day beaches. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) In this undated photo, provided by family member Susan Lawrence on Wednesday, June 13, 2018, Julius Pieper in his U.S. Navy uniform. For decades, he had a number for a name, Unknown X-9352, at a World War II American cemetery in Belgium where he was interred. On Tuesday, June 19, 2018, Julius Pieper will be reunited with his twin brother Ludwig in Normandy, where the two Navy men died together when their ship shattered on an underwater mine while trying to reach the blood-soaked D-Day beaches. (Susan Lawrence via AP) In this undated photo, provided by family member Susan Lawrence on Wednesday, June 13, 2018, the Pieper children, from left, MaryAnn, Leona, Ivona, twins Ludwig and Julius and Fred stand outside the family home in Nebraska. For decades, he had a number for a name, Unknown X-9352, at a World War II American cemetery in Belgium where he was interred. On Tuesday, June 19, 2018, Julius Pieper will be reunited with his twin brother in Normandy, where the two Navy men died together when their ship shattered on an underwater mine while trying to reach the blood-soaked D-Day beaches. (Susan Lawrence via AP) In this photo taken on Friday, June 15, 2018, school children walk by the grave of 13 men from the Navy ship LST-523 who were never identified by name and are now buried at the Ardennes American Cemetery in Neupre, Belgium on Friday, June 15, 2018. For decades, he had a number for a name, Unknown X-9352, at a World War II American cemetery in Belgium where he was interred. On Tuesday, June 19, 2018, Julius Pieper will be reunited with his twin brother in Normandy, where the two Navy men died together when their ship shattered on an underwater mine while trying to reach the blood-soaked D-Day beaches. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) U.S. Navy personnel carry the casket of WWII U.S. Navy sailor Julius Pieper during a reburial service at the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Seventy four years to the day after their ship hit a mine off the coast of Normandy and sunk, Julius Pieper was finally reunited with his twin brother Ludwig. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) A U.S. Navy sailor performs a handover ceremony of the flag from WWII U.S. Navy sailor Julius Pieper to family member Linda Suitor during a reburial service at the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Seventy four years to the day after their ship hit a mine off the coast of Normandy and sunk, Julius Pieper was finally reunited with his twin brother Ludwig. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) A U.S. Navy sailor salutes the family of WWII U.S. Navy sailor Julius Pieper during a reburial service at the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Seventy four years to the day after their ship hit a mine off the coast of Normandy and sunk, Julius Pieper was finally reunited with his twin brother Ludwig. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) Family members of WWII U.S. Navy sailor Julius Pieper, Linda Suiter, second left, and Susan Lawrence, second right, during a reburial service for their uncle at the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Seventy four years to the day after their ship hit a mine off the coast of Normandy and sunk, Julius Pieper was finally reunited with his twin brother Ludwig. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) U.S. Navy personnel carry the casket of WWII U.S. Navy sailor Julius Pieper during a reburial service at the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Seventy four years to the day after their ship hit a mine off the coast of Normandy and sunk, Julius Pieper was finally reunited with his twin brother Ludwig. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) The casket of U.S. Navy sailor Julius Pieper, right, lays next to the grave of his twin brother Ludwig, left, during a reburial service at the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Seventy four years to the day after their ship hit a mine off the coast of Normandy and sunk, Julius Pieper was finally reunited with his twin brother Ludwig. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) Family members lay flowers on the casket of WWII U.S. Navy sailor Julius Pieper during a reburial service at the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Seventy four years to the day after their ship hit a mine off the coast of Normandy and sunk, Julius Pieper was finally reunited with his twin brother Ludwig. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) U.S. Navy personnel fold the American flag over the casket of WWII U.S. Navy sailor Julius Pieper during a reburial service at the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer, France, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Seventy four years to the day after their ship hit a mine off the coast of Normandy and sunk, Julius Pieper was finally reunited with his twin brother Ludwig. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) - Three people were shot dead in the city of Masaya as security forces and allied groups tried to regain control of the area, a human rights group reported Tuesday, the two-month anniversary of political unrest that has shaken Nicaragua. Alvaro Leiva, director of the Nicaraguan Pro-Human Rights Association, said 40 people were also wounded in the clashes in Masaya that came a day after talks on finding a solution to the country's crisis were again suspended. "In the face of this excessive attack involving incomparable forces, the citizens are putting up a physical resistance within their means because they have to protect their lives," Leiva said. Opponents to the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega are forced away from their barricade as the government forces enter the city of Masaya, Nicaragua, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. As the police forced its way into Masaya, Nicaragua's Roman Catholic hierarchy has suspended on Monday, a dialogue with the government aimed at ending a two-month political crisis. (AP Photo/Oscar Duarte) Beginning early in the morning, forces allied with President Daniel Ortega's government moved to dismantle roadblocks maintained by protesters for over three weeks between Managua and Masaya, which is about 15 miles (25 kilometers) southeast of the capital. They accused the demonstrators of having "kidnapped" the city. Video images broadcast by local television showed police and allied groups shooting toward people at the roadblocks, and later barricades and tree trunks were removed by heavy machinery. More than 170 people have died since April 19 amid a heavy-handed crackdown on protests that have broadened to demand Ortega's exit. The Roman Catholic Church has tried to moderate negotiations on restoring peace, but the talks broke down again this week after the government refused to allow international observers to arrive and verify the human rights situation, as had been previously agreed. "The people of Masaya have demonstrated their heroism in the darkest pages of Nicaragua's history," Luis Almagro, secretary-general of the Organization of American States, tweeted Tuesday. He condemned "all manner of attacks" that threaten the lives and safety of the public. The latest violence coincided with the arrival in Nicaragua of Washington's ambassador to the OAS. The U.S. Embassy said in a statement that Carlos Trujillo planned to meet with Ortega and opposition representatives "to see firsthand the reality of what is happening in Nicaragua." Opponents to the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega carry a wounded comrade, as the government forces enter the city of Masaya, Nicaragua, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. As the police forced its way into Masaya, Nicaragua's Roman Catholic hierarchy has suspended on Monday, a dialogue with the government aimed at ending a two-month political crisis. (AP Photo/Oscar Duarte) An opponent to the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega fires a homemade mortar at the police from a barricade, as the government forces enter the city in Masaya, Nicaragua, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. As the police forced its way into Masaya, Nicaragua's Roman Catholic hierarchy has suspended on Monday, a dialogue with the government aimed at ending a two-month political crisis. (AP Photo/Oscar Duarte) Opponents to the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega confront government forces at a barricade as they enter the city of Masaya, Nicaragua, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. As the police forced its way into Masaya, Nicaragua's Roman Catholic hierarchy has suspended on Monday, a dialogue with the government aimed at ending a two-month political crisis. (AP Photo/Oscar Duarte) Opponents to the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega confront government forces at a barricade as the government forces enter the city of Masaya, Nicaragua, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. As the police forced its way into Masaya, Nicaragua's Roman Catholic hierarchy has suspended on Monday, a dialogue with the government aimed at ending a two-month political crisis. (AP Photo/Oscar Duarte) Opponents to the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, one of them wounded in the arm by a bullet, runs away as the government forces enter the city of Masaya, Nicaragua, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. As the police forced its way into Masaya, Nicaragua's Roman Catholic hierarchy has suspended on Monday, a dialogue with the government aimed at ending a two-month political crisis. (AP Photo/Oscar Duarte) Opponents to the government of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega stand watch behind a barricade as the government forces enter the city in Masaya, Nicaragua, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. As the police forced its way into Masaya, Nicaragua's Roman Catholic hierarchy has suspended on Monday, a dialogue with the government aimed at ending a two-month political crisis. (AP Photo/Oscar Duarte) WASHINGTON (AP) - In an unusual step, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia has issued an indictment for the DNA profile of a still-unidentified man linked to a string of rapes in area hotels dating back to 2002. Police have yet to determine the man's identity, but law enforcement agencies are hoping to break the case by making their investigation public. The FBI and multiple Washington-area police departments announced Tuesday that the man is suspected of committing at least six sexual assaults and could be responsible for many more. In a joint news conference, the FBI's Washington field office along with Washington's Metropolitan Police Department and police forces from neighboring Maryland and Virginia said that six rapes between May 2002 and June 2003 had been "definitively linked by DNA" to one individual. Most of the victims were hotel housekeepers attacked while cleaning rooms. Authorities released a composite sketch of the suspect that was based on DNA modeling rather than eyewitness descriptions. They also released images of a box cutter and a ring that were left by the attacker at different crime scenes. "DNA evidence has enabled us to push this case forward and we are hopeful that this DNA profile, and the community, can help us finally achieve justice," said U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu. "Despite the passage of time, we have never forgotten these victims." The same man is suspected of involvement in at least three other sexual assaults as recently as February 2006 and a string of attempted break-ins at area hotels. Metropolitan Police Department Chief Peter Newsham said the suspect has "preyed on members of the D.C. region for nearly a decade." ___ Anyone seeking to offer a tip on the identity of the suspect can contact the Metropolitan Police Department at (202) 727-9099, text the MPD Text Tip Line at 50411, or submit a tip with the FBI at tips.fbi.gov. WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on the U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations' main human rights body (all times EDT): 6:35 p.m. The European Union says the Trump administration's decision to pull the United States out of the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council "risks undermining the role of the U.S. as a champion and supporter of democracy on the world stage." FILE - This is a Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2008 file photo, showing a general view of the Human Rights Room (Room XX) at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Diplomats say the United States is about to quit the United Nation's main human rights body, primarily over Washington's claim that the Human Rights Council is biased against Israel. The move would be the Trump administration's latest snub of the international community. The U.S. State Department said Friday, June 15, 2018 no decision has been made to leave. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP, File) EU spokeswoman Maia Kocijancic says the 28-member bloc remains "steadfastly and reliably committed" to the 47-country Geneva body. The EU says the United States has "always been at the forefront" of protection of human rights and has been a "strong partner" of the bloc at the council. It says it shares the aim to make the council "more efficient," noting this year's 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration was championed in part by former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. ___ 6:15 p.m. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office is praising the "courageous" decision by the Trump administration to pull out of the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council. The statement came minutes after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley announced the U.S. withdrawal from the 47-member Geneva body. Echoing U.S. criticisms, the statement from Netanyahu's office said the council "has proven to be a biased, hostile, anti-Israel organization that has betrayed its mission of protecting human rights." Israel has been the subject of more council resolutions than any other country in the world by far, and it is the only country to have its rights record examined at every session of the council, which meets three times each year. ___ 5:55 p.m. The president of the U.N. Human Rights Council is acknowledging the "prerogative" of the United States to leave the 47-member body, while the U.N. human rights chief called it "disappointing, if not really surprising," that the U.S. was pulling out. Vojislav Suc of Slovenia, who holds the council annually rotating presidency, defended the council on Tuesday after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley announced the United States is quitting the Geneva body. The council opened its second of three annual sessions on Monday. On Twitter, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein - the U.N. human rights chief - said it was "Disappointing, if not really surprising, news. Given the state of #HumanRights in today's world, the US should be stepping up, not stepping back." ___ 5:10 p.m. Ambassador Nikki Haley says the United States is withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council, calling it "an organization that is not worthy of its name." Haley is President Donald Trump's envoy to the United Nations. She says a year ago she made clear the U.S. would stay in the council only if "essential reforms were achieved." She says it's clear those calls for change were not heeded. Haley is decrying the membership of countries like China, Cuba and Venezuela that are themselves accused of rights violations. She says the council also has a "chronic bias against Israel." But Haley says that if the council does reform, the United States "would be happy to rejoin." Haley is announcing the withdrawal at the State Department alongside Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. ___ 1:35 p.m. The Trump administration is set to announce Tuesday its departure from the United Nations' main human rights body in its latest withdrawal from an international institution. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will deliver the verdict on the U.N. Human Rights Council in a joint appearance at the State Department, according to four officials familiar with the matter. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly preview the decision, the specifics of which are to be laid out by Haley. Haley threatened the pull-out last year, citing longstanding U.S. complaints that the 47-member council is biased against Israel. NEW YORK (AP) - Fox News Channel faces a growing backlash among Hollywood creators that intensified Tuesday following Laura Ingraham's description of "zero tolerance" detention facilities for children separated from their parents as "essentially summer camps." "Modern Family" co-creator Steve Levitan raised the possibility of no longer working with the 20th Century Fox television studio after tweeting his disgust with Ingraham's remarks. The Fox News Channel prime-time host tried to walk back her remarks even before her show concluded Monday night, but the damage had already been done. Seth MacFarlane, creator of Fox's "Family Guy," donated $2.5 million this week to National Public Radio and Southern California Public Radio's newsgathering efforts. On Sunday, MacFarlane tweeted that he was "embarrassed to work for this company" after pointing to a remark by Fox News' Tucker Carlson that viewers should assume the opposite of what major news stations reported. FILE - In this May 3, 2017 file photo, Steve Levitan arrives at the "Modern Family" FYC Event in Los Angeles. Levitan raised the possibility of no longer working with the 20th Century Fox television studio after tweeting his disgust following comments by Laura Ingraham on Fox News Channel, and her description of "zero tolerance" detention facilities for children separated from their parents as "essentially summer camps." (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) Hollywood producer Judd Apatow challenged more Fox stars and executives to speak up and "make a huge difference in this national debate" about President Donald Trump's immigration policies. Paul Feig, a filmmaker who's done films for 20th Century Fox, posted Tuesday that he can't condone the support of Fox News "toward the immoral and abusive policies and actions taken by this current administration toward immigrant children." Fox News declined comment on the issue Tuesday. Hollywood types aren't exactly the favorite of Fox News Channel personalities or viewers, but the developments could have business implications. The ownership of the 20th Century Fox television and film studios, which are sister companies to Fox News, are currently up for grabs, the subject of a bidding war between Disney and Comcast. Ingraham made her remark while defending the Trump administration's policy of separating children from parents of families caught illegally trying to cross the border into the United States. "Since more illegal immigrants are rushing to the border, more kids are being separated from their parents and temporarily being housed in what are essentially summer camps" or facilities that look like boarding schools, she said in the opening monologue of Monday night's show. Shortly before her hour-long program ended, Ingraham had apparently gotten word that there was a social media backlash to her "summer camps" remark. In a description of one of the facilities in Texas on Sunday, the Associated Press reported that hundreds of children were waiting in a series of cages created by metal fencing. "Apparently there are a lot of people very upset because we referred to some of the detention facilities tonight as essentially like summer camps," she said. "The San Diego Union-Tribune today described the facilities as essentially like you would expect at a boarding school. So I will stick to there are some of them like boarding schools." Ingraham, who has three adopted children, including one from Central America, suggested that people concerned about Trump's policy "take care of them the right way. Open your hearts and homes to them." She wasn't immediately available for comment on Tuesday. In a statement, Fox News said that Ingraham's "very personal, on-the-ground commitment" to children in need speaks for itself, as does her belief "in a commonsense, legal immigration system, which will continue to be a focus of her show." Fox News won't "tolerate or give in to attempts to silence diverse viewpoints by agenda-driven intimidation efforts," the statement said. Levitan linked to a report about Ingraham's summer camp comment in a tweet that said, "let me officially join Seth MacFarlane in saying I'm disgusted to work at a company that has anything whatsoever to do with Fox News. This (expletive) is the opposite of what 'Modern Family' stands for." In tweets later on Tuesday, Levitan suggested he would no longer work for 20th Century Fox after the current "Modern Family" deal ends in a year. But his agent later put out a statement saying Levitan was taking a wait-and-see attitude about that. Former Fox News personality Eric Bolling said Tuesday that he "cringed a little bit" when he heard Ingraham make her initial comment. "There are statements on the left and the right that kind of fire up their base, but it doesn't really help out," he said. In many cases, it's an attention-getting device. Some Trump supporters have described children being held in detention facilities as "child actors." Meanwhile, Ingraham on her show aired quotes from Trump opponents that described the policy as "child abuse" and said Trump was essentially creating orphans. ___ AP Television Writer Lynn Elber in Los Angeles contributed to this report. LOS ANGELES (AP) - Prosecutors have declined to file charges against Scott Baio stemming from allegations by his former "Charles in Charge" co-star that he sexually assaulted her. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office decided Monday not to file charges, saying in an evaluation that the statute of limitations had expired. Baio's former co-star, Nicole Eggert, filed a police report against him in February, claiming that he sexually assaulted her while she was a teenager and working with him on the 1980s sitcom. Alexander Polinsky, another child actor on the show, has alleged that Baio assaulted and mentally tortured him. FILE - In this July 18, 2016 file photo, actor Scott Baio speaks during the opening day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Prosecutors have declined to file charges against Baio stemming from allegations by his former "Charles in Charge" co-star that he sexually assaulted her. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office decided Monday, June 18, 2018, not to file charges, saying in an evaluation that the statute of limitations had expired. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) Baio has denied all the allegations and said that he and Eggert were in a consensual relationship when she was of legal age. His attorney, Leonard Levine, didn't immediately return a request for comment Tuesday. Another of Baio's attorneys, Jennifer McGrath, characterized the claims by Polinsky and Eggert in February as "ever changing" and evidence of "continual hunger for publicity." McGrath pointed to a photo of a smiling Polinsky and Baio that she said was taken at Baio's birthday party seven years ago. Brian Glicklich, a spokesman for Baio, referenced an interview Eggert had given years ago where she said working with Baio on "Charles in Charge" was fun and that she would be happy to work with him again. Eggert pointed out on Twitter that the case against Baio wasn't dismissed because of a lack of evidence but because of the age of the case. CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuela's all-powerful National Constitutional Assembly has named as its new chief a man deemed by U.S. officials to be an international drug trafficker. Socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello took the oath as the assembly's president Tuesday. The international community condemned the Constitutional Assembly's formation last year as President Nicolas Maduro's move to rob power from the opposition-controlled National Assembly. The United States recently listed Cabello among 70 high-ranking officials accused of gutting Venezuela's democracy. U.S. officials sanctioned Cabello, calling him a drug trafficker who heads a major corruption network that siphons funds from state-run companies. While taking his oath, Cabello vowed to support Maduro. Cabello replaces Delcy Rodriguez, who Maduro recently named Venezuela's vice president The mother of a 12-year-old son with acute epilepsy who had cannabis oil used to treat his condition confiscated from her at Heathrow has demanded a meeting with the Home Secretary and the Health Secretary within 24 hours. Charlotte Caldwell had been using the banned medication which contains the psychoactive substance tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to help manage her son Billys epilepsy since 2016. But she had his latest supply taken off her when she returned to the UK from Canada on June 11. After Billy was rushed to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Friday night in a critical condition having suffered multiple seizures, Home Secretary Sajid Javid granted a 20-day emergency licence granting use of the oil. Billy was discharged from hospital early on Monday afternoon, but now Ms Caldwell, 50, wants an urgent review of the law. Speaking outside the hospital, Ms Caldwell said the Government was panicked into action by her sons admittance to hospital, and that previously they had suggested she make the application to have his medication released herself, giving no indication how long it could take. She said: The fact that Billy has been discharged is testimony to the effectiveness of the treatment and underlines how vital it is that every child and every single family affected in our country should have immediate access to the very same medication. Charlotte Caldwell with son Billy I am now calling for an urgent meeting with the Health Secretary and the Home Secretary I will share with them my experience, which no matter what anyone says, cannot possibly be imagined by anyone else. She continued: I will ask them to urgently implement a programme that provides immediate access to the meds Billy so urgently needs and now more so than ever the many other children affected by this historic development. I will also ask them to implement a review of how the Government, our government, our UK government, can make cannabis based medication available to all patients who urgently require it in our country. I will demand that the health department, not the Home Office, takes responsibility for providing access to medication for these incredibly sick children this meeting must take place within 24 hours. Children in or country are dying and suffering beyond imagination. Ms Caldwell, of Castlederg in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, was adamant that change could be implemented really quickly, adding that the team treating Billy at Chelsea and Westminster was stunned by his speedy recovery. Many other countries, including much of the US, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, have legalised the substances use medicinally. Ms Caldwell credits the oil with keeping the boys seizures at bay, saying he was seizure-free for more than 300 days while using it, but THC is restricted in the UK. She said she was slightly confused at the Home Offices intervention, saying: This is a medical issue, it is not a Home Office issue. Earlier on Monday, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt pledged his support for a review of the law, saying that it could take place within months. He told BBC Radio 4s Today Programme: I dont think anyone who followed that story could sensibly say that we are getting the law on this kind of thing right. But Theresa May later apparently put the breaks on the plans, saying laws around cannabis usage should be driven by doctors opinion in their usefulness and the potential dangers. Speaking after a speech about the NHS, she said: Do we need to look at these cases and consider what weve got in place? Yes. But what needs to drive us in all these cases has to be what clinicians are saying about these issues. Theres a very good reason why weve got a set of rules around cannabis and other drugs, because of the impact that they have on peoples lives, and we must never forget that. When asked about the Prime Ministers apparent reluctance for a review into the use of cannabis oil, Ms Caldwell replied: I am aware that this incredibly important issue is being discussed at cabinet level and Im encouraged that the Home Secretary is pushing for an urgent resolution. She repeated that she looked forward to meeting with both the Health Secretary and the Home Secretary within 24 hours. The Queen is expected to join thousands of racegoers for the start of Royal Ascot on Tuesday where the fashion stakes are just as high as the expectation on the jockeys. The event is regularly attended by the Queen and there is speculation she may have invited the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to join her in the royal box this week at the Berkshire race course. A carriage procession, with the Queen at its head, signals the start of each day of the event, and Harry and Meghan could be part of the spectacle. The Queen at last year's Royal Ascot Royal Ascot is renowned for its strict dress code and this year men must wear socks or risk being turned away from the famous race meet which is one of the highlights of the social calendar. With the UK having enjoyed good weather in the past few months the fashion for wearing shoes without socks may have crept into Royal Ascot. The weather for this week looks like it's going to be set fair for #RoyalAscot this week! Keep up-to-date with the latest forecast through @metoffice's dedicated event page: https://t.co/mmAjl31WX6 pic.twitter.com/Ec22k08okx Ascot Racecourse (@Ascot) June 18, 2018 The Royal Ascot arbiters of style aim to put a stop to the practice but anyone caught out can now visit the William Hill branch in Ascot which has 500 branded pairs of socks available. Rupert Adams from William Hill said: Ascot have tightened up the dress code for the royal meeting and many of the millennial generation might not even own socks. The good news is we have 500 special edition socks in our shop on the high street which is close enough that you should not miss any of the action. Punters traditionally have a bet on the colour of the Queens hat with blue the favourite with bookies at the moment for the first day. Jessica Bridge of Ladbrokes said: Punters reckon Her Majesty will opt for a trusty shade of blue on the opening day of the Royal meeting. Last year there was a massive gamble on the Queen wearing blue as she wore blue to the state opening of Parliament before travelling to Royal Ascot, but she changed into another coloured outfit for the race meet. William Hill also have blue as their favourite colour with odds of 5-2 blue, followed by pink 3-1, Green and yellow 4-1 and purple 8-1 Purple. A 34-year-old man has been arrested under the Terrorism Act in Northern Ireland. Detectives have this morning (Tuesday, 19 June) arrested a 34 year old man in the Coalisland area under the Terrorism Act. He is currently in custody at Musgrave assisting officers with their enquiries. Police Service NI (@PoliceServiceNI) June 19, 2018 The Police Service of Northern Ireland said the man was detained in the Coalisland area of Co Tyrone on Tuesday morning. He is currently in custody at Musgrave and helping officers with their inquiries. A 34-year-old man has been arrested using anti-terrorism powers in Northern Ireland. The Police Service of Northern Ireland said he was detained in the Coalisland area of Co Tyrone on Tuesday morning. Detectives have this morning (Tuesday, 19 June) arrested a 34 year old man in the Coalisland area under the Terrorism Act. He is currently in custody at Musgrave assisting officers with their enquiries. Police Service NI (@PoliceServiceNI) June 19, 2018 The arrest relates to the seizure of ammunition and weapons at a garage unit in the Mountjoy Road area of the town in 2011 as part of the wider investigation surrounding the murder of Northern Irish policeman Ronan Kerr. Tyrone arrest A splinter dissident republican group said it killed the 25-year-old police officer in Omagh, County Tyrone on 2 April, 2011. The garage was searched by detectives days after the killing. The suspect is in custody at Musgrave police station in Belfast and helping officers with their inquiries. Three of the six men who were injured in a drive-by shooting in the centre of Swedens third-largest city have died, authorities said. Police in Malmo said two of the men aged 18 and 29 died overnight. Hospital authorities said a third man, in his 30s, also died. None of the victims were identified, in line with Swedish practice. Three others had been injured one seriously, Region Skane, the regional health authority for southern Sweden, said. Sweden Shootings Witnesses told Swedish media that the men were shot as they left an internet cafe in the south-eastern part of the southern city on Monday evening. Police said a dozen shots were fired but no arrests have been made and they are looking for a dark vehicle. A police news conference is expected later. Feuds between criminal gangs fighting over territory have become more common in major Swedish cities in recent years. The shots caused bystanders to scream, but police quickly said there was no reason for the public to worry. A teenager has been charged with murder after a 35-year-old man was found stabbed to death near a London tube station, Scotland Yard said. Edmond Jonuzi was found with serious injuries on Greens Lane, near Turnpike Lane station, on the evening of June 9. On Tuesday, detectives charged 19-year-old Bilal Mumin from north-west London with murder, grievous bodily harm and possession of an offensive weapon, the Metropolitan Police said. Turnpike Lane stabbing Mumin is due to appear at Highbury Corner Magistrates Court. Mr Jonuzi also known as Edmond Preci was pronounced dead at the scene. Enquiries by detectives from the Homicide and Major Crime Command are ongoing, the force said. Debenhams shares plunged after the retailer issued its third profit warning for 2018, saying market weakness and competitor discounting had hit sales. The department store chain suffered 1.7% drop in like-for-like sales over the 15 weeks to June 16, and said trading was below plan in May and early June despite weak comparatives from a year earlier. The disappointing performance has forced the retailer to reassess expectations, with full-year pre-tax profits now set to come in between 35 million and 40 million, down from previous estimates of 50.3 million. It marks Debenhams third profit warning for the year, having first slashed forecasts in January on the back of painful price cuts. Another update in April noted earnings would be at the lower end of forecasts after the retailer was gouged by extreme weather brought in by the Beast from the East. The latest warning sparked by increased competitor discounting and weakness in key markets sent shares down more than 16% in early trading on Tuesday. Fellow retailers also took a hit, sending the likes of Next down 1.4%, Burberry down 2.1% and Marks and Spencer Group down 1.1% Debenhams said further cost cuts are now on the cards, with a ramped-up efficiency drive set to focus on self-help and prioritising cash generation. We also intend to conduct a strategic review of non-core assets, aiming to focus investment behind our strategy, it added. Debenhams executives said they are considering the sale of its Magasin du Nord subsidiary in Denmark, where it currently has six stores. It will also look at disposing of a small in-house printing operation called Magenta, which prints materials for Debenhams and third parties and has an annual turnover of less than 10 million. The company stopped short of announcing store closures but, as previously announced, it is still assessing whether to shutter 10 of its outlets over the next five years, a spokeswoman said. The footprint of up to 30 of its stores may also be reduced, while the leases of 25 locations may be renegotiated as they come up for renewal over the next five years. The spokeswoman said no job cuts are currently planned. Capital expenditure, however, will suffer a material reduction in 2019. Debenhams profits Chief executive Sergio Bucher said: It is well documented that these are exceptionally difficult times in UK retail and our trading performance in this quarter reflects that. We dont see these conditions changing in the near future and, because it is our priority to maintain a robust balance sheet, we are making very careful choices about how we deploy capital. However, the retail boss said he was seeing clear evidence of progress in online sales which rose 16% over the 15 weeks to June 16 while customers were responding positively to product improvements. We have also put in place a leaner operational structure and made a number of important hires so that we are well-equipped to navigate the market turbulence. Nicholas Hyett, an equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the disappointing results will be all too familiar to long-suffering Debenhams shareholders. He added: Unfortunately it all feels like Debenhams is playing catch-up with an industry thats left it behind. Debenhams reckoned it was heading for something like 750 million in annualised digital sales at the half-year, compared to total sales of 2.3 billion in 2017. Theres some way to go before good digital growth offsets the stresses elsewhere. Financial constraints are now starting to restrict Debenhams freedom of movement with capex for next year being cut to protect the balance sheet. Mr Buchers going to have his work cut out turning this ship round. A minutes silence has been held to mark a year since Makram Ali, a Muslim father-of-six, was killed and others injured in an attack near a mosque in north London. Most of the victims of the Finsbury Park terror attack had just left night-time Ramadan prayers at the nearby Muslim Welfare House when Darren Osborne, determined to kill as many Muslims as possible, drove a hired van on to a crowded pavement. Members of Mr Alis grieving family were joined by emergency service workers, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick and community leaders. Also attending the memorial were Labour leader and local Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn, and London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who stressed the hate-filled attack had failed to divide the ethnically-diverse community. One year ago today, Makram Ali was killed and eight people were injured in the terrible Finsbury Park attack. But the response of our community was to come together in solidarity and strength. We showed that we would not be divided or defeated and we never will be. pic.twitter.com/TSnxPwkqw5 Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) June 19, 2018 Speaking on the steps of Islington Town Hall, Mr Corbyn praised the absolutely magnificent immediate response from the local community and emergency services that night. Imam Mohammed Mahmoud, who protected Osborne from angry passers-by until police came to arrest him, was among those praised. Today we remember Makram Ali who was killed a year ago in a horrific terrorist attack that was deliberately designed to divide us. Instead, the response from the local community, and Londoners more widely, was and remains an inspiration to us all. https://t.co/yoaOQl2f0I pic.twitter.com/n6EHL1lu7Q Sadiq Khan (@SadiqKhan) June 19, 2018 To warm applause, Mr Corbyn said: Imam Mahmoud did a brilliant and wonderful job of making sure that hatred of racism did not turn into violence and anger on the streets that night. He helped to ensure that we came together as a community because that is the only response there can ever be to the racism that seeks to divide us. There was a strong uniformed police presence in Upper Street, a usually busy shopping and business hub, which was shut to traffic for the intimate memorial. Finsbury Park memorial Banners which read United Against Terror, Turn To Love and London United decorated the memorial scene which was attended by members of the community and local officials. Mr Ali was remembered as a much-loved husband, father, grandfather and brother by Mr Khan. He also stated that Mr Mahmouds personal actions that night give us all hope. He said: It shows our values will always be stronger than the hatred of the extremists. Stating that the Finsbury Park attack was an attack on all Londoners, Mr Khan said: Terrorism is terrorism no matter the target and regardless of what motivates the sick and twisted perpetrators who carry out these evil crimes. The way this community has responded and come together has inspired us all. Last year the community came together united against hatred, bigotry and the rhetoric of the far-right and today we stand not just as one London but as one UK, according to Mr Mahmoud. He said his thoughts were with Mr Alis family and the victims who he said had suffered horrific injuries at the hands of this cowardly attacker. He said: The family of Makram Ali and those who were injured have endured with patience over the last year. Their actions deserve respect. Their actions inspire all and command respect due to their dignity on that day. I say to them stand proudly as you do occupy the moral high ground. Jobless Osborne, who had been radicalised by far-right material, is serving a jail sentence of at least 43 years, after being found guilty in February of murder and attempted murder. The UK will not be able to take part in the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) after Brexit, Michel Barnier said as he hit out at British politicians who sought to blame Brussels for the consequences of the Leave vote. The European Unions chief negotiator said Theresa Mays red lines meant it was impossible to remain part of the EAW, which has helped bring criminals including failed 21/7 London tube bomber Hussain Osman to justice. Mr Barnier also stressed the need for the UKs future relationship with the EU to be based on a common commitment to human rights. The EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier (Niall Carson/PA) In Vienna today delivering a speech @EURightsAgency on the EUs proposal for a future partnership w/ #UK in the area of internal security. We need to cooperate strongly with the UK. But #Brexit means we will have to do so on a different basis: https://t.co/bey9sPsN3K pic.twitter.com/y9VQ8HjTQz Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) June 19, 2018 That would mean Britain remaining signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights a Council of Europe rather than EU document something which the Prime Minister has previously threatened to pull out of. In a speech in Vienna, Mr Barnier stressed that facts have consequences and the Governments approach to Brexit meant that the benefits of EU membership on security and legal co-operation could not remain exactly the same. He said the EU wanted a deal with the UK based on four pillars: Effective exchange of information: This would include sharing passenger name records (PNR) data with the UK authorities. But this would not allow access to EU-only or Schengen-only databases. Operational co-operation: The UK would be able to participate in Europol analysis projects dealing with live investigations, but would not be able to shape the strategic direction of EU agencies. Judicial co-operation in criminal matters: The EU is ready to facilitate co-operation on mutual legal assistance, but the UK cannot remain part of the EAW. Countering money-laundering and terrorist finance: This would involve transparency on identifying the true owners of firms and trusts. Explaining his position on the EAW, Mr Barnier said the Prime Ministers red lines meant the UK would not accept free movement of people, the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice or the application of the charter of fundamental rights. This means that the UK cannot take part in the European Arrest Warrant, he said, but stressed that a streamlined extradition process with time limits could be introduced in its place. He said Brussels position was a fair offer but acknowledged that some in the UK would like to go further, pointing out that the Governments paper on security, law enforcement and criminal justice expresses a desire to keep the benefits of EU membership. Mr Barnier said: They want to maintain all the benefits of the current relationship, while leaving the EU regulatory, supervision, and application framework. And they try to blame us for the consequences of their choice. Once again, we will not be drawn into this blame game. It would mean wasting time we dont have. Mr Barnier said the future relationship would need to be based on strong safeguards on fundamental rights, data protection and dispute settlement. He added: The UK has been a party to the European Convention of Human Rights since 1953 and we expect this commitment to be maintained. Before the referendum, Mrs May then home secretary had suggested abandoning the ECHR and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. The 2017 Tory manifesto committed to remaining a signatory to the ECHR for the duration of the Parliament. On data protection, the UKs standards would have to remain in line with those set by Brussels. Meanwhile, Brexit talks were continuing in Brussels on Tuesday and Wednesday, with officials discussing the Irish border and the future relationship. Mrs Mays official spokesman said: If you look at the co-operation between the EU27 and the UK in relation to the arrest and removal of foreign nationals, its a relationship which has been greatly beneficial to the European Union. The spokesman noted that Home Secretary Sajid Javid recently said he did not believe any EU27 interior minister wanted to weaken the current security relationship with the UK. A Dexeu spokesman said: Keeping citizens in the UK and EU safe is an absolute priority. We have set out our commitment to this and how we can continue to work together and maintain current operational capability. We are proposing an Internal Security Treaty to deliver this. We recognise we will be a third country, but we start from a unique position of complete alignment. Any drop in the breadth and quality of co-operation would have a direct impact on public safety and on our collective ability to deliver justice across Europe. Clearly this remains a matter for negotiation. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will visit Dublin next month in their first trip abroad on an official engagement, Kensington Palace said. The newlyweds are looking forward to learning more about Irelands history and experiencing its rich culture, as well as meeting the people who are shaping the countrys future, according to a spokesman. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will visit Dublin, Ireland on 10th & 11th July The visit is at the request of Her Majestys Government. pic.twitter.com/sb8I3iJAOI The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (@KensingtonRoyal) June 19, 2018 They are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and experiencing its rich culture, as well as meeting the people who are shaping the country's future. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (@KensingtonRoyal) June 19, 2018 The two-day trip will take place on July 10 and 11 at the request of Her Majestys Government, he added. Harry and Meghan Harry and Meghan will join the Queen at Royal Ascot for a day of racing on Tuesday afternoon the first time the couple have attended the famous sporting event. They are to present the winning trophy for the 4.20pm race, the St James Palace Stakes, said the official Royal Ascot programme. The Home Office has firmly rejected calls from former Conservative leader Lord Hague for the legalisation of cannabis. In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Lord Hague urged the Government to review Britains failed (and) unsustainable cannabis laws, license medicinal use of the drug and consider creating a legal, regulated market for recreational users. But the Home Office said the Government had no intention of reviewing the classification of cannabis, which would remain a Class B drug. I agree with William Hague. Drug legalisation is no go area for most frontline politicians but on public health grounds, we should legalise cannabis. If we care about mental health, street cannabis is much bigger danger & experience of eg Portugal suggests use unlikely to rise. https://t.co/a0YS6ip7R5 Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) June 19, 2018 And it said: Any debate within government about the medicinal and therapeutic benefits of cannabis-based medicines does not extend to any review regarding the classification of cannabis and the penalties for the illicit possession, cultivation and trafficking of cannabis will remain the same. A Downing Street spokesman confirmed the Government had no plans to legalise or decriminalise cannabis for recreational use, telling reporters: The evidence is very clear cannabis can cause serious harm when misused. The spokesman rejected claims that the war on drugs had failed, saying: More adults are being treated successfully, waiting times for support services are down, greater powers have been given to police to remove harmful substances from our communities, drug use as a whole is lower than 10 years ago and we remain absolutely committed to reducing it and the harm that it causes. Theresa May is facing increasing political pressure to review the law on cannabis amid furore surrounding children who have been denied access to products which could alleviate life-threatening epileptic seizures. Home Secretary Sajid Javid granted an emergency 20-day licence for 12-year-old Billy Caldwell to be treated with cannabis oil, after he was admitted to hospital with seizures following the confiscation of supplies his mother had brought from Canada. Medical marijuana And Home Office minister Nick Hurd on Monday announced the establishment of a new expert panel to advise ministers on the licensing of cannabis-based medicines in individual cases. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt acknowledged that the current laws on medicinal cannabis were not right, and said it was time to look for a different way. But Lord Hague went much further, arguing that Billys case had shown the law to be inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date. The Conservative peer who led the party from 1997 to 2001 and was foreign secretary from 2010 to 2014 said it was beyond ridiculous that border officials should be seizing medicines of clear benefit to patients because they contain a tiny amount of a banned product. Mr Javids decision to return the oil showed that the Home Offices position was indefensible, he said. Arguing that the ready availability of illegal cannabis on Britains streets showed that any war on the drug had been comprehensively and irreversibly lost, Lord Hague said that a major change in policy was now needed. Licensing medicinal cannabis would be a step forward, but the Government should also consider legalising the drug, as Canada is on the verge of doing, he said. Proposals being considered by the Canadian parliament would establish a legal market with licensed stores selling cannabis of regulated strength, with a strict prohibition on sales to teenagers, he said. If this works, it sounds more sensible than the current position, said Lord Hague. Can British Conservatives be as bold as Canadian Liberals? We ought to be. After all, we believe in market forces and the responsible exercise of freedom, regulated as necessary. We should prefer to provide for lawful taxes than preside over increased profits from crime. On Monday, fellow Tory Crispin Blunt, who chairs the All-Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform, urged the Home Office to clear out of the way and let the Department of Health take control of policy on medical cannabis. Cable Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable backed calls for reform, telling BBC Radio 4s Today programme that decriminalising cannabis would be a sensible step for the country to take. The second step would be to look at the various experiences of legalisation to make absolutely sure that we do not produce an epidemic, that we actually control use very considerably, he said. The objective is to prevent a situation where large amounts of this drug are in circulation in a very damaging form which is poisoning large numbers of young people and resulting in psychological damage. Billy was discharged from hospital early on Monday afternoon, but now Ms Caldwell, 50, from Co Tyrone, wants an urgent review of the law on cannabis oil, which is banned in the UK despite being available in many other countries. Ms Caldwell credits the substance with keeping the boys seizures at bay, saying he was seizure-free for more than 300 days while using it. She demanded a meeting with the Home Secretary and the Health Secretary within 24 hours. An Islamic State fanatic plotted to assassinate Prime Minister Theresa May in a suicide attack on 10 Downing Street, a court has heard. Naaimur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, allegedly thought he was just days away from inflicting lethal violence with blade and explosion before his arrest last November. But his plan was uncovered by an MI5 operative, who posed as a senior IS official in Syria, the Old Bailey heard. On September 14 last year, Rahman was allegedly snared in Telegram chat with an MI5 role player, posing as an Amir in Syria. The court heard Rahman asked him: Can you put me in a sleeper cell ASAP? He told the agent he was under investigation because of his uncle. When he is asked for more information, he allegedly said: I want to do a suicide bomb on Parliament. I want to attempt to kill Theresa May. The next day, jurors heard he said: My objective is to take out my target. Nothing less than the death of the leaders of Parliament. The court heard Rahman went on to praise the Manchester arena bomber, saying he did well. He allegedly said he thought about wearing a vest, driving past Parliament and pushing the button to clear the entire block. Jurors heard he said: Everyone inside, including the Prime Minister would be dead. Rahman is charged with preparing terrorist acts by conducting reconnaissance, recording a pledge of allegiance, and delivering a rucksack and jacket to be fitted with explosives. Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC said: His settled conclusion was that lethal violence here, directed at the very heart of the United Kingdom government, was the only effective way to pursue his intentions. Before his arrest prevented it, he was, he believed, just days away from his objective, which was no less than a suicide attack, by blade and explosion, on Downing Street and, if he could, upon the Prime Minister Theresa May herself. The defendant, of Finchley, north London, is also charged with helping his friend Mohammad Aqib Imran, 22, to prepare terrorist acts. PM attack He allegedly recorded a sponsorship video for Imran to join IS in Syria. Mr Heywood said the men knew each other well, and shared the warped ideology of IS. Rahmans uncle had joined IS in Syria and allegedly encouraged his nephew to attack the UK before he was killed in a drone strike, jurors heard. By September last year, the defendants had allegedly met someone online who they believed would provide useful contacts. Mr Heywood said Rahmans focus was on attack planning in the UK. He said: The evidence shows in detail his developing fervour as he first assembled his plan, carried out reconnaissance and perfected his ideas and then acquired the means to execute it. At the last he took back his own coat and his own rucksack both modified with improvised explosive devices, so that he could achieve his settled aim of a full frontal assault on the gates and then the door of Number 10. In this he expected to die. But he also hoped for personal reward beyond death and, in doing so, to cause death and great fear in a place and to people symbolic of the country itself. On Imrans plans, Mr Heywood said: He elected to travel and set about assembling money, acquiring a fake passport, engaging in research and otherwise equipping himself with the information and means to travel aboard for violence for terrorist purposes. Rahman has denied two counts of preparing terrorist acts. Imran, of Sparkbrook, Birmingham, has pleaded not guilty to preparing terrorist acts abroad and possessing a terrorist document on his Kindle entitled How To Survive In The West A Mujahids Guide 2015. Citigroup is renaming its Frankfurt office as the Wall Street giant prepares to turn its German operations into its post-Brexit EU headquarters. The Press Association understands that the bank is changing the name of the legal entity to Citigroup Global Markets Europe this week, replacing its previous Deutschland designation. The move helps prepare the site for a new licence yet to be approved by the German regulator that will convert the Frankfurt subsidiary into a broker-dealer and pave the way for an enlarged sales and trading operation outside of London. Citi Citigroup bankers were officially notified of the lenders plans to bulk up its Frankfurt office which currently houses 350 staff last summer. It expects to create approximately 150 new roles across the EU, though the bank stressed that in all cases London would remain both its headquarters for its European, Middle East and Asia operations and an important global hub for Citi. An internal memo detailed plans to ramp up a number of divisions including private banking, corporate and investment banking and capital markets by increasing its footprint in other EU financial hubs including Amsterdam, Dublin, Luxembourg, Madrid and Paris. Citi currently employs around 9,000 staff in the UK, 6,000 of whom are based in the City of London. Citibanks European boss Zdenek Turek said earlier this year that Citi spoke to German regulators about shifting some of its European client investment activities from London to Frankfurt, according to a Bloomberg report. He added that the Frankfurt broker-dealer was expected to be up and running by year-end. The name change comes as a number of firms confirm the approval of post-Brexit banking licences across the EU. Nomura announced just weeks ago that it had clinched a securities trading licence for its Frankfurt operations from German regulator BaFin. Under 100 staff are expected to be relocated from the UK as a result. RSA also confirmed earlier this month that it has licence approval for its new insurance subsidiary in Luxembourg from local regulator Commissariat aux Assurances. Around half a dozen of RSAs UK staff will make the initial move to Luxembourg. The news comes as Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Capital Markets confirmed it will base its EU headquarters in Frankfurt, where it expects to boost its local team by 20 to 40 staff, according to a report by German newspaper Handelsblatt. However, few staff are likely to be relocated from London, where the investment bank employs around 100 staff. Hubertus Vath, managing director of Frankfurt Main Finance, said it was a sign of further foreign bank moves on the horizon. RBC Capital Markets is the first Canadian institution to announce in favour of Frankfurt but based on talks I had on my recent trip to Toronto and Montreal, we should expect similar decisions to follow in the coming months. Chinese President Xi Jinping has welcomed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on a visit to Beijing. State broadcaster China Central Television showed Mr Kim in talks with Mr Xi at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. In a two-day visit, Mr Kim is expected to discuss his next steps with Chinese leaders after last weeks nuclear summit with US President Donald Trump. China North Korea Security was tight at Pyongyang Airport and later at Beijing Airport, where paramilitary police prevented journalists from taking photos. Roads near the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, where senior Chinese officials meet visiting leaders, were closed and the same motorcade was later seen heading into the compound. A ring of police vehicles and black saloon cars surrounded the perimeter of the guesthouse, where Mr Kim stayed on his first visit earlier this year. A similar convoy of vehicles was later seen leaving the state guesthouse in the direction of the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing. A stretch limousine arrives with motorcycle escorts at the Diaoyutai State Guest house in Beijing The visit, while expected, is one way for China to highlight its crucial role in US efforts to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme. The US has long looked to Beijing to use its influence with North Korea to bring it to negotiations, but the visit comes as ties between China and Washington are being tested by a major trade dispute. Mr Kim was diplomatically isolated for years before making his first foreign trip as leader in March to meet Mr Xi in Beijing. Kim Jong Un with Xi Jinping at an earlier meeting in Dalian, China This is his third visit to China, North Koreas main ally and key source of trade and economic assistance. After his summit with the US president, he is meeting Chinese leaders to discuss progress in halting his countrys missile and nuclear weapons programmes in exchange for economic incentives. An Islamic State fanatic plotted to assassinate Prime Minister Theresa May in a suicide attack on 10 Downing Street, a court has heard. Naaimur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, was encouraged to cause carnage in Britain by an uncle who had joined IS and died in a drone strike in Syria, jurors were told. He allegedly thought he was just days away from inflicting lethal violence with a blade and explosion before his arrest last November. Naaimur Zakariyah Rahman court case But his plan was uncovered by an MI5 agent who posed as a senior IS official in Syria, the Old Bailey heard. Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC read out Telegram chat in which Rahman was allegedly snared by the fake Amir. On September 14 last year, Rahman said: Can you put me in a sleeper cell ASAP? I want to do a suicide bomb on Parliament. I want to attempt to kill Theresa May. The next day, he said: My objective is to take out my target. Nothing less than the death of the leaders of Parliament. The court heard Rahman went on to praise the Manchester arena bomber, saying he did well. He allegedly said he thought about wearing a vest, driving past Parliament and pushing the button to clear the entire block. Jurors heard he said: Everyone inside, including the Prime Minister would be dead. Rahman talked about the MI5 building but allegedly said: Getting outside Parliament when all the leaders are there is simple, you can walk right outside. On September 23 last year, Rahman also said he had an idea based on what his uncle had told him about the IS development of poison, jurors were told. Rahman is accused of conducting reconnaissance, recording a pledge of allegiance, and delivering a rucksack and jacket to be fitted with explosives. Mr Heywood told jurors: His settled conclusion was that lethal violence here, directed at the very heart of the United Kingdom Government, was the only effective way to pursue his intentions. Before his arrest prevented it, he was, he believed, just days away from his objective, which was no less than a suicide attack, by blade and explosion, on Downing Street and, if he could, upon the Prime Minister Theresa May herself. He said Rahman planned a full frontal attack and fully expected to die. The defendant is also accused of helping his friend Mohammad Aqib Imran, 22, join IS in Syria by recording a sponsorship video. Mr Heywood said the men knew each other well and shared the same warped ideology. On Imran, he said: He elected to travel and set about assembling money, acquiring a fake passport, engaging in research and otherwise equipping himself with the information and means to travel aboard for violence for terrorist purposes. Jurors heard how both defendants were engaged in chat with MI5 role players, even though they discussed the dangers of spies. On October 23 last year, Rahman met a contact known as Abu Waleed in a Shepherds Bush shopping centre. He told the agent that he planned to use a suicide belt, drone, improvised explosive device and poison, referred to as P or curry mix. He allegedly divulged the targets of the MI5 building and Parliament. Meanwhile, Imran was asking his MI5 role-player to get him a passport quickly. On November 1, Abu Waleed introduced Rahman to another member of the network called Shaq, an undercover police officer, to help him get a blade and suicide vest. Rahman allegedly told him: If you can put a belt on me, Id actually want to do that. He said he would aim to strike when Mrs May came out of 10 Downing Street to talk to the press, jurors heard. If he could not get to her, he would kill a few guards then detonate himself to create big news, the court heard. Jurors were shown covert video footage of a meeting in Shaqs car in a PC World car park in Brixton on November 6 last year. In it, Rahman said he would get past the gate and make a 10-second sprint for the door of Number 10. He allegedly said his main objective was to take her head off. At a further meeting on November 15 last year, Rahman allegedly said: Theyre gonna shit it, especially her who is inside. Three days later, Rahman carried out reconnaissance around Whitehall, walking past the entrance to Downing Street, the court heard. Rahman, from Finchley, north London, has denied two counts of preparing terrorist acts. Imran, of Sparkbrook, Birmingham, has pleaded not guilty to preparing terrorist acts and possessing a terrorist document on his Kindle entitled How To Survive In The West A Mujahids Guide 2015. Chinese President Xi Jinping has told North Korean leader Kim Jong Un he hopes Pyongyang and Washington can fully implement the outcomes of last weeks nuclear summit. State broadcaster CCTV said Mr Xi told Mr Kim that through the concerted efforts of the relevant countries, negotiations regarding issues on the Korean peninsula are back on track and the overall situation is moving in the direction of peace and stability. The summit last week between Mr Kim and US President Donald Trump in Singapore marked an important step toward the political solution of the Korean peninsula nuclear issue, Mr Xi was quoted as saying in the meeting at the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing. Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping Mr Xi said China hopes North Korea and the US can implement well the outcomes achieved at the summit. He said China would as always play a constructive role in the process. In a joint statement at last weeks summit, Mr Kim pledged to work towards the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula in exchange for US security guarantees. Mr Trump also agreed to suspend military exercises with South Korea in what was seen as a major win for North Korea and its chief allies China and Russia. Mr Kims two-day visit to China, which began on Tuesday, had not been announced in advance but was expected as part of the communist neighbours tradition to report to each other on major developments. The visit is Mr Kims third to China since March, highlighting Beijings crucial role in efforts by the US and others to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme. The US has long looked to China to use its influence with North Korea to bring it to negotiations, but the visit comes as ties between Beijing and Washington are being tested by a major trade dispute. Mr Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, were welcomed by Mr Xi with full military honours. Mr Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, later hosted their guests at a banquet, CCTV reported. Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan with Kim Jong Un and his wife Ri Sol-Ju Chinas official Xinhua News Agency announced the North Korean leaders visit shortly after he apparently landed on Tuesday morning, dispensing with the secrecy shrouding previous trips to China by the North Korean leader and his father and predecessor, Kim Jong Il. On the younger Mr Kims first visit to China as leader, he took an armoured train as his father had. His first two trips were not announced until after he had returned to North Korea. He is probably hoping to get Chinas support for relief from punishing UN sanctions. At a regularly scheduled briefing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Beijing supported Russias calls last week for unilateral sanctions on North Korea ones that arent imposed within the United Nations framework to be cancelled immediately. China always stands against the so-called unilateral sanctions outside the Security Council framework. This position is very clear and we believe sanctions themselves are not the end, Mr Geng said. While Beijing and Moscow have supported UN restrictions, they bristle at Washington imposing sanctions on its own to pressure North Korea. Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump at the summit in Singapore Mr Trumps surprise announcement in Singapore of a US suspension of military drills with its South Korean ally fulfils a goal long pursued by North Korea and its primary backers China and Russia. That move is seen as potentially weakening defences and diplomacy among Americas Asian allies, while bolstering China and Russia. The US has stationed combat troops in South Korea since the Korean War, in which China fought on North Koreas side and which ended in 1953 with an armistice and no peace treaty. South Koreas Foreign Ministry said Mr Kims visit to China highlights the constructive role Beijing could play in disarming North Korea. Home Secretary Sajid Javid has announced a review of the medicinal use of cannabis which could lead to patients in the UK being prescribed drugs derived from the banned plant. Mr Javid announced the move in a statement to the House of Commons in the wake of a series of appeals from parents who want their children to be able to access medications which can alleviate epilepsy and other illnesses. The Home Secretary announced that he had authorised a licence to be issued on Tuesday for six-year-old Alfie Dingley, after his mother said she had been waiting three months for Prime Minister Theresa May to fulfil a personal assurance that he would be allowed to receive cannabis oil. Alfie Dingley cannabis licence Speaking to the House of Commons, Mr Javid stressed that the class B drug would remain banned for recreational use. Mr Javid told MPs that the review would be held in two parts. The first, led by chief medical officer Sally Davies, will make recommendations on which cannabis-based medicines might offer patients real medical and therapeutic benefits. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs will consider in the second part of the review whether changes should be made to the classification of these products on an assessment of the balance of harms and public health needs. If the review identifies significant medical benefits, then we do intend to reschedule, Mr Javid told MPs. We have seen in recent months that there is a pressing need to allow those who might benefit from cannabis-based medicines to access them. BREAKING NEWS: Alfie Dingley is getting a license issued today and the scheduling of medical cannabis is set to be reviewed - all thanks to #AlfieDingley and #BillyCaldwell Families4Access (@Families4Access) June 19, 2018 Mr Javid said that since becoming Home Secretary in April, it had become clear to him that the current legal position on medicinal cannabis was not satisfactory for the parents, not satisfactory for the doctors, and not satisfactory for me. But he insisted: This step is in no way a first step to the legalisation of cannabis for recreational use. This Government has absolutely no plans to legalise cannabis and the penalties for unauthorised supply and possession will remain unchanged. Alfies mother said she had been overwhelmed by the Home Secretarys announcement and voiced hope it would be easier to access to get cannabis medication in the future, saying it would be madness for sufferers to miss out. Hannah Deacon said she also wanted the Government to make it easier to do research into the medical properties of the plant, saying: Hopefully we will have a more forward thinking way of doing things in this country and medicinal cannabis will hopefully, in five or 10 years time, be the norm. That is what I would want, because I would not want any other child to go through what my son has. Really pleased @sajidjavid has announced a review of medicinal use of cannabis. Any parent would do anything to relieve their childs pain Government needs to support them in that. Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) June 19, 2018 The announcement of the review came just days after Mr Javid intervened to permit the use of cannabis oil to treat severely epileptic 12-year-old Billy Caldwell, who had been admitted to hospital with seizures after supplies his mother had brought from Canada were confiscated at Heathrow. Billys mother Charlotte described it as amazing news which she applauded. She said: Today, a few moments ago in the House of Commons, the government commissioned a full review of medicinal cannabis. While clearly largely positive, we still want to hear the detail from the mouths of the Home Secretary and the Health Secretary who was sitting next to him when he made the statement. Charlotte Caldwell At every stage of this campaign we have mentioned making history and we have mentioned it because it is commonsense. The power of the mothers and fathers of sick children has bust the political process wide open and it is on the verge of changing thousands of lives by bringing cannabis laws in line with many other countries. We are on the threshold of the next chapter of the history book. Ms Caldwell said she wanted to meet with both the Home and Health Secretaries. She said that in contrast to a week ago when she was still fighting for Billy to be treated with medicininal cannabis, a new meeting would be to thank them for seeing and hearing sense and joining us in creating history in the United Kingdom. Charlotte Caldwell and Billy Billys case provoked widespread calls for a change in the law, with former Conservative leader Lord Hague urging ministers to consider full legalisation of the drug. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the Conservative peer who led the party from 1997-2001 and was foreign secretary from 2010-14 said the war on cannabis had been comprehensively and irreversibly lost and it was time to consider legalising the substance for recreational as well as medicinal use. But he was swiftly slapped down by the Home Office, which said: Any debate within government about the medicinal and therapeutic benefits of cannabis-based medicines does not extend to any review regarding the classification of cannabis and the penalties for the illicit possession, cultivation and trafficking of cannabis will remain the same. Mr Javid told MPs he had the utmost sympathy for the families of children like Billy and Alfie, who have travelled abroad to obtain cannabis-based treatments banned in the UK. As a father, I know there is nothing worse than seeing your child suffer, he said. You would do anything to take away their pain. That is why I have the utmost sympathy for Billy Caldwell, Alfie Dingley and many others like them and for their parents, who have been under unimaginable stress and strain. I know that they are following a gut parental instinct to do whatever is in their power to try to alleviate the suffering of their child. I will do everything in my power to make sure that we have a system that works, so that these children and these parents can get access to the best possible medical treatment. In his Telegraph article, Lord Hague said the case of Billy Caldwell had shown the law around cannabis to be inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date. Licensing medicinal cannabis would be a step forward, but the Government should also consider legalising the drug, as Canada is on the verge of doing, he said. Proposals being considered by the Canadian parliament would establish a legal market with licensed stores selling cannabis of regulated strength, with a strict prohibition on sales to teenagers, he said. If this works, it sounds more sensible than the current position, said Lord Hague. But NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens urged caution. I think its very important as a country that we dont confuse this debate around specifically prescribable products for certain medical conditions with a much more generalised debate around the decriminalisation or legalisation of marijuana, without at the same time reminding ourselves that there are some genuine health risks there, Mr Stevens told a conference in London. In those countries where marijuana has been decriminalised, often young people, teenagers, come to think of smoking marijuana as safe. Whereas lets be clear, actually it isnt. He warned of the risks of addiction to cannabis and long-term psychiatric problems such as depression and psychosis, as well as possible damage to lungs. A marble bust of Queen Victoria has been saved for the nation after a UK museum matched an American museums offer of more than 1m to buy it. An undisclosed museum in New York had bought the masterpiece by Sir Alfred Gilbert at auction, but the Government intervened to prevent it from leaving the country, deeming it of national importance. While the artworks export licence was deferred by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge raised the necessary 1,077,607 to buy it. The bust was deemed to be of of national importance ((Fitzwilliam Museum/ PA) The bust was commissioned in 1887 by The Army and Navy Club, a private members club in London, to celebrate Queen Victorias Golden Jubilee. It remained in its ownership until it was bought by the American museum and then by the Fitzwilliam, where it will go on public display. The artwork, carved between 1887 and 1889, is the only surviving marble by Gilbert in the UK. Michael Ellis, minister for arts, heritage and tourism, said: This exceptional depiction of Queen Victoria belongs in the UK and I am thrilled that it has been saved for the nation. Our export bar system exists to keep nationally important works of art in this country. It is brilliant news that people will now be able to see this masterpiece for free in the Fitzwilliam Museum. Sir Alfred Gilbert is described as the most significant sculptor of the Victorian era, and was the leader of the New Sculpture movement that focused on domestic sculpture of a spiritual and symbolist nature, and architectural decoration. The Fitzwilliam Museum funded the purchase of the bust through a recent bequest, a series of gifts from individual benefactors and a grant of 267,607 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF). Sir Peter Luff, chairman of NHMF, said of the sculpture: Its loss from these shores was unthinkable and thats why the National Heritage Memorial was so pleased to be able to step in with the final piece of funding, ensuring that Gilberts bust of Queen Victoria remains in the UK for future generations to study and enjoy. It will be installed on Wednesday to coincide with the 181st anniversary of Queen Victorias accession. Zara Tindalls new baby daughter is believed to be the heaviest royal baby in recent years, weighing 9lb 3oz. The record was previously held by Savannah Phillips the daughter of Zaras brother Peter Phillips and she weighed 8lb 8oz when she was born in 2010. Trooping the Colour Heavily pregnant Zara, accompanied by husband Mike Tindall, was seen with a large bump at the Duke and Duchess of Sussexs wedding a month ago. Zara and Mike Tindall at the royal wedding Her new daughter, whose name has yet to be announced, is heavier than the Tindalls first born, Mia. Mia weighed 7lb 12oz when she was born in 2014. All three of the Duchess of Cambridges children have weighed more than 8lb, but less than 9lb. Prince Louis of Cambridge was 8lb 7oz heavier than both Prince George and Princess Charlotte, when he was born in April. Prince Louis Charlotte, at 8lb 3oz, weighed slightly less than Georges 8lb 6oz but was still above average. The average weight of a baby in the UK is around 7lb 7oz (3.5 kg). Prince William weighed 7lb 1.5oz in 1982, while the Prince of Wales weighed 7lb 6oz in 1948. Prince Harry weighed 6lb 14oz in 1984. The Queen then Princess Elizabeth was born by Caesarean section in her maternal grandparents London home in 1926 and was also third in line to the throne at the time, but her weight was not announced, as was previously the custom for royal babies. Subsequent babies are usually bigger than first-born babies and weigh in about 138g (5oz) heavier, BabyCentre.co.uk said. Petrochemical giant Ineos has lost its legal challenge to the Scottish Governments effective ban on fracking. Ineos and Aberdeen firm ReachCSG took Scottish ministers to court seeking a judicial review of their decision to convert a moratorium on the controversial gas extraction technique into an indefinite, effective ban. They had asked the Court of Session to declare that Scottish ministers acted unlawfully in doing so, arguing they exceeded their powers and lacked the legal competence to impose such a ban. However during the hearing in May, the Scottish Government lawyer suggested ministers had simply announced a preferred stance on the matter and the policy-making process on the issue should be allowed to continue. Anti-fracking groups from around Scotland have protested outside the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh (Jane Barlow/PA) In his ruling, published on Tuesday, Lord Pentland found that, as a matter of law, there is no prohibition against fracking in Scotland. He said the Ineos stance was based on a series of fundamental misunderstandings of the Scottish Governments position and refused the challenge. Lord Pentland said: The petition is predicated on the proposition that the Scottish Government has introduced an unlawful prohibition against fracking in Scotland. Whilst acknowledging that there have been a number of ministerial statements to the effect that there is an effective ban, the Lord Advocate, on behalf of the Scottish Ministers, made it clear to the court that such statements were mistaken and did not accurately reflect the legal position. The stance of the Scottish Government before the court is that there is no legally enforceable prohibition. For the reasons set out in this judgment, I consider that the Governments legal position is soundly based and that there is indeed no prohibition against fracking in force at the present time. He said at present there is an emerging and unfinalised planning policy expressing no support on the part of the Scottish Government for the development or extraction of Unconventional Oil and Gas (UOG) in Scotland. Ineos Upstream Ltd v Lord Advocate ("fracking ban" case): Petition seeking judicial review of certain acts and decisions of Scottish Government in implementation of what was purportedly an indefinite ban on fracking has been refused. Summary and Opinion https://t.co/oy2gg1vWuT Judges Scotland (@JudgesScotland) June 19, 2018 Summing up his decision, he said: I conclude that since there is no prohibition against fracking, the petitioners case is unfounded; their application for judicial review of the alleged ban must accordingly fail. The Scottish Government welcomed the courts decision. Business Minister Paul Wheelhouse said the Scottish Governments preferred position is not to support UOG in Scotland and a Strategic Environmental Assessment and Business and Regulatory Impact Assessment will be carried out and considered before any position is finalised. He said: The practical effect of the current moratorium and the policy making process which is underway to finalise our position is that no fracking can take place in Scotland at this time. Tom Pickering, Ineos Shale operations director, said: We are in the extraordinary position where a senior judge has effectively concluded that the Scottish Government did not know what it was doing. He has ruled that there is no fracking ban in Scotland. We are sure that this will be a surprise to all those who heard the First Minister and others repeatedly tell Holyrood the exact opposite. It is for MSPs to decide whether Parliament was misled deliberately or simply through incompetence. The Scottish Government caved in to demands from ill-informed environmental activists. It ignored the evidence presented by its own scientific experts. Todays judgement makes it clear the SNP Government will now have to make decisions based on facts and science rather than prejudice and political expediency. Friends of the Earth Scotland said they were delighted at the ruling while Mark Ruskell MSP, the Scottish Greens energy spokesman, said it would be welcome relief for communities throughout Scotland. The Duke of Cambridge has met the mother of a young man who took his own life as he opened the UKs first centre outside of a clinic or hospital for helping suicidal men by giving counselling and therapy. James Place, a four-storey town house in Liverpools Georgian quarter is a new initiative formed by Clare Milford Haven and Nick Wentworth-Stanley, the parents of James Wentworth-Stanley, 21, who took his own life while a student in Newcastle in 2006. James Wentworth-Stanley who took his own life (Family handout/PA) On the visit the duke heard that both young and middle-aged men are especially at risk of suicide as they do not use conventional medical services, sometimes through stigma or a sense of shame, when they are in crisis. James Place aims to offer a calm, friendly, non-hospital or clinic environment, where men can get help. James younger brother, Harry, and three friends rowed across the Atlantic in 2016, raising 600,000 in donations to help build the centre, which has been 10 years in the planning, since James death 11 years ago. James mother, who is the Marchioness of Milford Haven, thanked the duke for bringing the subject out of the shadows as he officially opened the centre. Suicide is the biggest cause of death for men under 35 @JamesPlaceUK, opened today by The Duke of Cambridge, will be the first centre of its kind in the UK to provide face-to-face support for men in their time of need. pic.twitter.com/kleXyZ0HI8 The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (@KensingtonRoyal) June 19, 2018 She said: Thank you for coming today, it means the world to us. Very much spurred on by our own tragedy and our own experience of James looking for help when he felt very anxious and suicidal in Newcastle, for him not finding that help, the help he needed anyway. I always felt had a place like this existed, he might still be here today. So that was a very compelling reason to start this project. William unveils a plaque during a visit to James' Place in Liverpool I feel very much that James is here with us. Taking referrals from local hospitals, student counselling services, police and street triage services, visitors will be offered a service of one-to-one free therapeutic support during their time of need. Visitors will have an initial appointment to find out the treatment needed and then will be offered a tailored service of one-to-one free therapeutic support. James family, who are from Hampshire and Worcestershire, have no connections to Liverpool, but set up the centre in the city as the local health authority, Mersey Care, were the most receptive to the project, they said. Speaking to parents who also lost sons to suicide during the hour-long visit, the duke said: Suicide really is a quite a big problem, and we dont talk about it. The Duke of Cambridge shakes hands with a robotic hand Earlier, the duke visited the International Business Festival in Liverpool, touring the events exhibition space, talking with delegates and meeting young entrepreneurs. The duke visited exhibitors from India and Shanghai, Liverpools twin city, before he was shown the Governments UK Innovation Hub at the event, to see cutting-edge and transformative technologies, including 3D-printed robotic limbs produced by a team based at the University of Manchester. Addressing delegates the duke said: I was impressed to learn that the Festival has delivered more than half a billion pounds of new trade and investment to date. Britain has always been a champion of trade and a hub for commerce and exchange between our nations. There is perhaps nowhere in the country that embodies this more than Liverpool. The Duke of Cambridge at a royal visit to Liverpool We know that one of the major challenges for industry is access to a skilled workforce. Its something which business and civil society must work together on. It is only by investing in the skills of our young people in enterprise that we will be able to build the fair and prosperous society that we want our children to inherit. Max Steinberg, chairman of the International Business Festival, said: The support of the duke has helped us to champion the importance of the business sector, and to inspire, connect and inform businesses from across the UK and the world. Making new global connections will help the small and medium businesses at the Festival to find growth and reach their potential. Three out of five British berry growers say it has already become more difficult to recruit seasonal workers from the EU putting them at risk of failing to meet consumer demand, according to a report. British Summer Fruits (BSF), which accounts for 95% of all UK-grown berries supplied to UK supermarkets, said 61% of growers are having trouble recruiting workers and 63% have reported a drop in applications for seasonal work. As a result of uncertainty about access to skilled agricultural workers, four out of five growers (78%) expect to produce less fruit in future, while 32% have already made the decision to reduce investment in their businesses in future. British strawberries BSF chairman Nick Marston said: British growers are dependent on seasonal agricultural workers from the EU. Without them we cannot cultivate and harvest the volumes of berries strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and blackberries currently produced in the UK and continue to meet consumer demand. Any fall in home-grown production not only increases our dependence on imported fruit, but it will inevitably lead to significant price rises, too. Last year, the Andersons Brexit & Seasonal Labour Report commissioned by BSF estimated that consumers would have to pay between 35% and 50% more for strawberries and raspberries if Britain could not secure access to seasonal workers. BSF along with the National Farmers Union has been calling for the reintroduction of a Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) to maintain production. Mr Marston said: What we need now is action and clarity on SAWS as a matter of urgency. If solid proposals are not in place before we leave the EU next March, an industry which is worth millions to the UK economy will wither on the vine and our beautiful British berries will not be available to UK consumers. A Government spokesman said: We have been clear that up until December 2020, employers in the agricultural and food processing sectors will be free to recruit EU citizens to fill vacancies and those arriving to work will be able to stay in the UK afterwards. We are determined to get the best deal for the UK in our EU negotiations, not least for our world-leading food and farming industry which is a key part of our economic success. The Government plans to accept improved remedies from Rupert Murdochs 21st Century Fox that would safeguard Sky News in the case of a successful 11.7 billion takeover of Sky. Culture Secretary Matt Hancock confirmed that it had received an updated and improved set of terms from the US media giant that would help address media plurality concerns surrounding the deal. Those terms which assume the divestment of Sky News to Disney, which is separately bidding for some of Foxs assets include a commitment from Disney to operate and maintain the news service for 15 years, up from 10 years. It would also bar Disney from selling Sky News over that period without explicit Government approval, and extend the funding commitment from 21st Century Fox from 10 to 15 years. The news broadcaster would also see a boost in total funds to at least 100 million per year with operating costs protected in real terms. That is on top of a formal commitment from Disney to preserve editorial independence at the news broadcaster. The list of improved remedies comes two weeks after Mr Hancock initially said he favoured divesting Sky News to a suitable third party in order to address the media plurality concerns raised by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Mr Hancock said he will now hold a formal consultation on the undertakings which he plans to accept over the next 15 days. Views on whether the proposals are sufficient to address media plurality and public interest concerns raised by the potential merger will be accepted until July 4 at 5pm. Sky said it welcomes the statement from Mr Hancock and noted that UK approval was the only outstanding pre-condition needed before the 21st Century Fox offer could be put to Sky shareholders. Sky takeover approach Mr Murdochs 21st Century Fox is attempting to buy the 61% of Sky that it does not already own, but the bid has been complicated by competition concerns, media plurality fears and rival offers. The CMA has expressed concerns over the influence that the Murdoch Family Trust would have over public opinion and the UKs political agenda if Sky News came under Foxs ownership. The offer has also been thrown into doubt amid a rival 22 billion bid for Sky by US broadcasting giant and NBCUniversal owner Comcast. Mr Hancock has already cleared Comcasts bid, which has also been given the green light by the European Commission. Comcast is now planning to publish a full offer document and has boldly claimed it expects to close the deal by year-end. The European Commission cleared 21st Century Foxs competing bid for Sky in April 2017. Sky shares were marginally higher following the Culture Secretarys announcement, up 0.07% in late afternoon trading. A club promoter accused of killing a public schoolboy with one punch after he said One day you will work for me in a row at a Greek party resort, felt threatened, a court heard. Harrow pupil Archie Lloyd was celebrating the end of his A-level exams with friends in Malia when he was knocked to the floor on August 6, 2015, a trial in Crete heard on Tuesday. Sebastian Trabucatti appeared at the Court of First Instance in Heraklion facing manslaughter charges after a UK coroner recorded a verdict of unlawful killing at an inquest in 2016. Sebastian Trabucatti Trabucatti punched 18-year-old Mr Lloyd and pushed over his best friend Mr Andy Hutchinson in the drunken row at 5am in the middle of a street off the towns main strip, the court heard. The group had exchanged insults which culminated in Mr Lloyd saying to Trabucatti, One day you will work for me, before walking off, jurors were told. The 25-year-old, who said in court he lived in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, was charged in 2015 and released on bail while the senior public prosecutor in Crete investigated. Trabucatti looked bewildered and cried during most of the proceedings. It is the first time he has publicly answered questions about the incident, after refusing to attend the inquest. Heraklion court Denying being responsible for the death, claiming it was a slap and not a punch, he said: I never expected anything like this to ever happen. But Mr Lloyds father James, who travelled to the island with his family to give evidence in the case, said: The only person who saw how badly Archie was hurt was the defendant. The only person who saw the fall clearly was the defendant. He was 18, he had his whole life ahead of him. Mr Lloyd, of Micheldever near Winchester, Hampshire, died on the penultimate day of his Interrail holiday after the alleged assault occurred near the Cloud Nine nightclub where Trabucatti had worked. The month-long trip around Europe with four school friends came just after he turned 18 and finished exams. He and Mr Hutchinson had been walking in the middle of the road but clashed with Trabucatti when he and two women on quad bikes hooted at them to move out of the way. They had briefly met hours earlier in a nightclub toilet where they talked about girls and their trip, the packed courtroom was told. Trabucatti pushed Mr Hutchinson to the floor and then punched Mr Lloyd in the face after telling the pair to apologise for shouting obscenities to the women, the court was told. Paramedics checked him at the scene and gave him the all clear before the group went back to a villa they had rented in nearby Sissi. Fearing he had not spoken since being hit and because he seemed drowsy, they got him into bed and tried to ring emergency services but could not get through. They woke a few hours later to find he had died. Mr Hutchinson said he felt scared during the altercation and did not see what happened after Mr Lloyds comment. Afterwards he said he heard a woman say: You deserved that, before seeing his friend lying on the ground. He said Mr Lloyd was unresponsive for about 30 seconds before he squeezed his hand indicating he was conscious, before adding: He couldnt speak. A security guard was there, he indicated with his fist, the sign of a punch, so I assumed he had been punched. Trabucatti said when the row broke out he told the pair to back off and apologise for the insults, adding: I wasnt angry, I was scared. There were two boys, they were massive. They came towards us and in our personal space. I felt threatened, threatened is probably a better word. They were shouting, swearing, coming close to us. It was kind of a wake-up slap, on the left cheek. Like to say what are you doing? I slapped him, yes. But I dont think my actions led to this. I could never have foreseen that. The three judges and four jurors will now retire to consider their verdict. England broke their own record for the highest ever score in a one-day international as they piled up 481 for six against Australia at Trent Bridge. Centuries from Jonny Bairstow and Alex Hales carried the Three Lions past the 444 for three they made against Pakistan at the same venue two summers ago. Jason Roy also smashed 82 in an opening stand of 159 with Bairstow and captain Eoin Morgan broke two records of his own in a blazing finish to the innings. Highest totals in one-day internationals It all came after England were put in by visiting captain Tim Paine, and some garish bowling figures included Andrew Tye becoming only the 12th bowler ever to concede 100 runs in an ODI innings. It was the 19th total over 400 in ODIs and only Englands third in addition to now having the top two, they also scored 408 for nine against New Zealand at Edgbaston in June 2015. Sri Lanka have the next best, their 443 for nine against Holland in July 2006 holding the record for over a decade until England went one run better, while South Africa have the next three scores on the list and six over 400 in all. India have five, Sri Lanka and Australia two apiece and New Zealand one. Captain Morgan plunders records When Morgan moved into the forties he became Englands record ODI run-scorer, passing Ian Bells mark of 5,416. Two balls later, he completed the teams fastest half-century in the format from 21 balls, one quicker than Jos Buttlers effort in 2016s record-setting total. Buttler went on to 90 not out from 51 on that occasion, when Morgan himself added 57no from 27 this time around, the skippers contribution was 67 from 30. The world record for the fastest half-century is a remarkable 16 balls, by South Africas AB de Villiers on his way to 149 against the West Indies in Johannesburg in January 2015. Twin tons Bairstow powered to a fourth century in his last six ODI innings 139 off 92 balls. The Yorkshiremans average innings during that run against New Zealand, Scotland and Australia, rounded to whole numbers, is 93 runs from 61 balls with 11 fours and four sixes. His average in 20 ODIs as an opener is 65.76, 14 runs above his career average in the format, with a stunning conversion rate six of his seven scores over 50 at the top of the order have gone on to three figures. He has also struck 29 of his 39 ODI sixes when opening. For Hales, by contrast, it was a much-needed response after making 31 runs at a strike rate of 64.6 per hundred balls in the first two games of the series. He had gone 21 ODIs without a century before this game, though he had seven fifties in that time. The family of a public schoolboy who died from a club promoters single punch while on a night out in a Greek resort said they are relieved his killer has finally been brought to justice. Harrow pupil Archie Lloyd was celebrating the end of his A-Level exams with friends in Malia when he was knocked to the ground on August 6 2015 by Sebastian Trabucatti. Three judges and four jurors took less than an hour to find the 25-year-old guilty of first degree manslaughter after a trial at the Court of First Instance in Heraklion on Tuesday. After a short deliberation, judges decided he would be spared any immediate jail time and handed him a suspended four-year prison sentence. Sebastian Trabucatti arrives at court in Heraklion, Crete (PA) Mr Lloyds parents James and Claire sat hand-in-hand as they waited for the verdict, supported by a large crowd of relatives many of whom burst into tears as it was announced. Trabucatti, of Haywards Heath, West Sussex, punched 18-year-old Mr Lloyd and pushed over his best friend Andy Hutchinson in the drunk row at 5am in the middle of a street off the towns main strip, the court heard. The group had exchanged insults which culminated in Mr Lloyd saying to Trabucatti: One day you will work for me before walking off. He was charged in 2015 and the year after a UK coroner recorded a verdict of unlawful killing at an inquest. A family statement released through lawyers said: We have been waiting almost three years for the day when Archies attacker was brought to justice and we are relieved that this moment has finally come. Sebastian Trabucatti took our wonderful son, brother and friend away from us when he attacked him, shattering many lives as a result. While nothing will bring Archie back, we are pleased that he was found guilty of the first degree criminal offence of which he was accused. Dressed in a grey suit, white shirt and a silver and blue striped tie, Trabucatti looked bewildered and cried during most of the proceedings as he sat hunched on a bench at the front of the court. It is the first time he has publicly answered questions about the incident, after refusing to attend the inquest. He ignored requests for a comment after the case ended. In court he denied being responsible for the death, claiming it was a slap and not a punch, and said: I never expected anything like this to ever happen. He and several other English witnesses gave evidence aided by an interpreter. Mr Lloyds father relayed the findings of the inquest as he answered questions on the stand, adding: The only person who saw how badly Archie was hurt was the defendant. The only person who saw the fall clearly was the defendant. Mr Lloyd, of Micheldever near Winchester, Hampshire, died on the penultimate day of his Interrail holiday after the assault occurred near the Cloud Nine nightclub where Trabucatti had worked. The month-long trip around Europe with four school friends came just after he turned 18 and finished exams. Mr Hutchinson told how the group went to a club where they briefly met Trabucatti in a toilet and then to have a lap dance, but he went outside to be sick and decided to leave. He told how Mr Lloyd caught up with him and they walked in the middle of the road to get a taxi when they clashed with Trabucatti, his girlfriend Faye Malcolm and another woman. They were all on quad bikes and were hooting at them to move out of the way on the narrow street. Trabucatti pushed Mr Hutchinson to the ground and then punched Mr Lloyd in the face after telling the pair to apologise for shouting f*** off sluts, whores to the women. Paramedics checked him at the scene and gave him the all-clear before the group went back to a villa they had rented in nearby Sissi. Concerned he had not spoken since being hit and because he seemed drowsy, they got him into bed and tried to ring emergency services but could not get through. They woke a few hours later to find Mr Lloyd had died. Mr Hutchinson said he did not see what happened after Mr Lloyds comment and afterwards heard a woman say you deserved that before seeing his friend lying on the ground. Wiping away tears, he told how Mr Lloyd was unresponsive for about 30 seconds before he squeezed his hand to indicate he was conscious, adding: He couldnt speak. A security guard was there, he indicated with his fist, the sign of a punch, so I assumed he had been punched. The familys lawyer, Kieran Mitchell of Slater and Gordon, said Mr Lloyd should have been on a harmless night out when his life was cut short. He said: One moment of madness ended the life of a young man with so much potential and left his family distraught. It has been a long battle to get justice, but I am relieved that this has finally been achieved. Directly translated from Greek, Trabucattis charge is physical injury resulting in death, punishable by up to 10 years in jail. It is referred to as manslaughter in the first degree which involves the court establishing whether there was an intention to cause injury, but not kill, lawyers in Crete said. A film about saving a Belfast elephant during the Second World War is a tale of compassion and humanity, its leading actors said. Zoo tells the story of a boys friendship with the baby animal and efforts to keep it from being killed during the Germans bombing of Belfast in the Blitz. It is based on a true story and premiered in Belfast on Tuesday. Dame Penelope Wilton played Denise Austin, who brought baby elephant Sheila home from Belfast Zoo to prevent it from being killed by bombs from German planes. She said: It is a very humane story and it is a story of resilience and it is a story of these young people, who have the bravery in a grown-up world to fight for what they thought was right. Art Parkinson In the film, a young boy, Tom, became friends with the elephant after his father, the zoos vet, went to fight in the war. He and his young friends hid the elephant with the help of Dame Penelopes character Ms Austin. Tom was played by Art Parkinson and he said it was a story of compassion and humanity with its focus on animal welfare. These days you look around and see pollution everywhere and basically disrespect for the Earth. So I think as humans we can definitely change the way we look at that. Dame Penelope said the film was about young peoples relationships with each other and how they managed being adolescents during wartime. She added: And in the end all these disparate characters come together, plus Mrs Austin, and they achieve an amazing thing by hiding this elephant and they save its life. At one stage in the film she had a menagerie of animals living with her: hedgehogs; parrots; rabbits; weasels; tiny chicks; mice and birds. You name it, I had it. Guinea pigs, everything and an elephant. She said it was a story of what happened to people who were not involved directly in warfare. It was the fall-out from that, the domestic side, how people managed when they were children, just growing up. The cost of cheap, strong alcohol is set to rise in Wales after the National Assembly passed a new law introducing a minimum price. The Public Health (Minimum Price for Alcohol) (Wales) Bill is part of the Welsh Governments wider efforts to reduce excessive drinking, recognising the impact it can have on peoples health and well-being. The new law will address longstanding and specific health concerns around the effects of excess alcohol consumption. A man drinking from a bottle (Dominic Lipinski/PA) It is estimated to lead to nearly 55,000 alcohol-related hospital admissions a year, costing the Welsh NHS more than 150 million annually. In 2016, there were 504 alcohol-related deaths in Wales. Delighted @assemblywales has approved the Public Health (Minimum Price for Alcohol) (Wales) Bill. This legislation will make an important contribution to addressing the availability of cheap, strong, readily-available alcohol. More here: https://t.co/CaYQctrIQd pic.twitter.com/Mb9IfDY1XL Welsh Government Health and Social Care (@WGHealthandCare) June 19, 2018 The legislation supports the Welsh Governments strategy to address hazardous and harmful drinking by tackling the availability and affordability of cheap, strong alcohol. Following approval by Assembly Members, the Bill will become law once it has received Royal Assent. Health Secretary Vaughan Gething said: Im very pleased the National Assembly has given its seal of approval to our landmark legislation. Last year alone, there were over 500 alcohol-related deaths and nearly 55,000 alcohol-related hospital admissions in Wales, with the direct health care costs attributable to alcohol amounting to an estimated 159 million. But even more of an issue is the devastation that lies behind these figures. Devastation for families, impacts on communities, and consequences for our NHS staff and support services as they all cope with the aftermath of alcohol-related death and disease, every day. This legislation provides us with an opportunity for a step change. It gives us a chance to do more to address alcohol-related harms. And ultimately, it gives us a chance to do more to try to save lives. This legislation takes a sensible, targeted approach to a very real and evident problem in Wales today. But it will be supported by a range of additional actions being taken forward to support those in need forming part of the Welsh Governments wider Substance Misuse Strategy. Wales, like so many other western countries, has a problem with cheap, strong, readily-available alcohol. This legislation will make an important contribution to addressing this issue. Once enacted, the new law will allow Welsh Ministers to introduce a minimum unit price for alcohol supplied in Wales. It will make it an offence for alcohol to be supplied below a minimum price made up of that minimum unit price, the strength of the alcohol and its volume, specifically targeting cheap, strong alcohol. The legislation will target and aim to reduce the amount of alcohol being consumed by hazardous and harmful drinkers, whilst minimising impacts on moderate drinkers. The level of the minimum unit price for this purpose will be specified in regulations made by the Welsh Ministers following a consultation this year. The new minimum pricing regime is currently expected to come into force in summer 2019. The Welsh Government will issue guidance and work with retailers, local authorities and trading standards to prepare for implementation. And there will be a full, ongoing evaluation of the Act once implemented and this information will be used to review the effectiveness of the policy. In Scotland, the Alcohol (Minimum Pricing) Act was passed in June 2012 and began in May this year after the supreme court ruled it did not breach European law. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump have welcomed Spains King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia to the White House. King Felipe described his first Oval Office meeting with the president as a great end to a perfect visit. Today, President Trump and the First Lady welcomed King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain to the White House. pic.twitter.com/65dEjyA1r8 The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) June 19, 2018 The royals were in the US to mark the 300th anniversaries of the founding of New Orleans and San Antonio, stopping in both cities with historical ties to Spain before arriving at the White House. Trump US Spain Mr Trump called it really a tremendous honour to have the royal couple in the Oval Office. The president also praised the outstanding relationship between the US and Spain over the years and, I think, especially right now. Excellent trade relationship, military relationship. Just about everything you can have. So we love Spain. Trade was expected to figure prominently in their talks. The first lady recently resumed her schedule of public appearances following surgery last month to treat a benign kidney condition. The United States has announced it is leaving the United Nations Human Rights Council, with Ambassador Nikki Haley calling it an organisation that is not worthy of its name. It was the latest withdrawal by the Trump administration from an international institution. Ms Haley, President Donald Trumps envoy to the UN, said the US had given the human rights body opportunity after opportunity to make changes. .@SecPompeo: The United States which leads the world in humanitarian assistance, and whose service members have sacrificed life and limb to free millions from oppression and tyranny -- will not take lectures form hypocritical bodies and institutions. pic.twitter.com/A93lHmVD4h Department of State (@StateDept) June 19, 2018 She lambasted the council for its chronic bias against Israel and lamented the fact that its membership includes accused human rights abusers such as China, Cuba, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organisation that makes a mockery of human rights, Ms Haley said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appearing alongside Ms Haley at the State Department, said there was no doubt that the council once had a noble vision. Benjamin Netanyahu visit to UK But today we need to be honest, Mr Pompeo said. The Human Rights Council is a poor defender of human rights. The announcement came just a day after the UN human rights chief, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents. But Ms Haley cited longstanding US complaints that the 47-member council is biased against Israel. She had been threatening the pull-out since last year unless the council made changes advocated by the US. Regrettably, it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded, Ms Haley said. Still, she suggested the decision need not be permanent, adding that if the council did adopt reforms, we would be happy to rejoin it. She said the withdrawal notwithstanding, the US would continue to defend human rights at the United Nations. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahus office called the US decision courageous, calling it an unequivocal statement that enough is enough. The move extends a broader Trump administration pattern of stepping back from international agreements and forums under the presidents America First policy. Although numerous officials have said repeatedly that America First does not mean America Alone, the administration has retreated from multiple multilateral accords and consensuses since it took office. Since January 2017, it has announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, left the UN educational and cultural organisation and pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. .@antonioguterres would have much preferred for the US to remain in the Human Rights Council. The UN's Human Rights architecture plays a very important role in the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide. Full text: https://t.co/alyIvdpRKL UN Spokesperson (@UN_Spokesperson) June 19, 2018 Other contentious moves have included slapping tariffs on steel and aluminium against key trading partners, recognising Jerusalem as Israels capital and moving the US Embassy there from Tel Aviv. Opposition to the decision from human rights advocates was swift. A group of 12 organisations including Save the Children, Freedom House and the United Nations Association-USA said there were legitimate concerns about the councils shortcomings but that none of them warranted a US exit. "Disappointing, if not really surprising, news. Given the state of #HumanRights in today's world, the US should be stepping up, not stepping back" -- UN Human Rights Chief #Zeid following USA decision to withdraw from U.N. Human Rights Council.#StandUp4HumanRights UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) June 19, 2018 This decision is counterproductive to American national security and foreign policy interests and will make it more difficult to advance human rights priorities and aid victims of abuse around the world, the organisations said in a joint statement. Added Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch: All Trump seems to care about is defending Israel. On Twitter, Mr al-Hussein, the UN human rights chief, said it was Disappointing, if not really surprising, news. Given the state of #HumanRights in todays world, the US should be stepping up, not stepping back. And the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank close to the Trump administration, defended the move, calling the council notably incurious about the human rights situations in some of the worlds most oppressive countries. Brett Schaefer, a senior fellow, pointed out that Mr Trump could have withdrawn immediately after taking office but instead gave the council 18 months to make changes. Ms Haley has been the driving force behind withdrawing from the human rights body, unprecedented in the 12-year history of the council. No country has ever dropped out voluntarily. Iran nuclear deal Libya was kicked out seven years ago. The move could reinforce the perception that the Trump administration is seeking to advance Israels agenda on the world stage, just as it prepares to unveil its long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan despite Palestinian outrage over the embassy relocation. Mr Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, is visiting the Middle East this week as the White House works to lay the groundwork for unveiling the plan. Israel is the only country in the world whose rights record comes up for discussion at every council session, under Item 7 on the agenda. Item 7 on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been part of the councils regular business almost as long as it has existed. One of the men wrongfully detained in the Windrush scandal has returned to Jamaica to see his 90-year-old mother for the first time in a decade after finally getting his residence permit. Anthony Bryan, from London, was held by authorities twice and told he would be deported back to the Caribbean island he left in 1965 when he was eight. The painter and decorator said he feared being denied re-entry to the UK if he visited his mother in Jamaica, having learned her health was poor around the same time he felt the impact of the Governments hostile environment towards immigrants 2015. Mr Bryan with his mother in Jamaica But the grandfather, speaking ahead of the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Windrush generation on Friday, told how he has made it to St Anns see his mother, Lucille Thompson. Mr Bryan, 61, said: I couldnt leave because I knew if I left I would have problems coming back. I was told my people had got stuck out here. You go out for a funeral or a wedding or things like that and you couldnt come back into England. I wanted to visit my mum, that was when she first came down not feeling good so imagine if she fell ill and dropped out before I came over. Its fortunate shes lasted until now. But, he said, he reached Jamaica on June 10 to an emotional scene with his mother in his first time outside the UK in 53 years. It was great. When I came she started crying, pulling on the heart strings, he said. Mr Bryan was presented on May 8 with his biometric residence permit live on Good Morning Britain, and the programme gave him plane tickets. Lucille Thompson with her son He believes he only got his proof of residence because of the publicity surrounding the scandal. Thats the only way I see it because I had all the paperwork before and they were saying I didnt have no documents, I didnt have no status, and all along I did have all the paperwork, he said. Mr Bryan plans to spend two months with his mother before returning home to Edmonton, north London. He said he has reserved his judgment on Sajid Javid, who replaced Amber Rudd as Home Secretary in the wake of the scandal, despite getting his permit. Mr Bryans case was one of many highlighted when it emerged members of the Windrush generation were being deported, detained, denied healthcare, work and housing despite having a legal right to be in the UK. Having arrived as children, many assumed their citizenship was secured automatically and have struggled to prove their right to residence under tough conditions in the so-called hostile environment created under Theresa May when she was Home Secretary. Friday marks 70 years since the generation began when around 500 Caribbean migrants stepped off the Empire Windrush in Tilbury Docks. The generation and their descendants will be celebrated for their contributions, including helping repair post-war Britain. Northern Irelands juvenile justice centre (JJC) is the envy of its neighbours in England and Wales, inspectors said. Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland praised effective management with a significant childcare ethos at the Woodlands facility in Bangor, Co Down, as well as considerable improvement over the last decade. But it expressed concern at the high proportion of Catholic boys inside and said it was still being used when no alternative accommodation was available for children with complex needs and challenging behaviour. The watchdog said that represented inappropriate use of premises which costs around 8 million per year. Chief inspector of Criminal Justice Brendan McGuigan said: The JJC is without doubt, the jewel in the crown for the Youth Justice Agency (YJA) and Department of Justice (DoJ) and is a centre which is the envy of neighbouring jurisdictions. It is a facility which has made steady progress despite funding and staffing reductions which have occurred. A motor work shop at Woodlands Juvenile Justice Centre Many of the children aged up to 18 have suffered trauma and some may have special needs or mental health difficulties. Others have self-harmed or attempted to take their own lives. Some have not been to school for years and many had no father-figure to look up to. Spending cuts at Woodlands have focused on areas like improving staffing arrangements and avoided reducing frontline staff, Youth Justice Agency chief executive Declan McGeown said. Resources have been directed towards improved health and education provision as well as earlier intervention before custody becomes an inevitability for young people, he added. Brian Ingram With the development of early intervention and diversionary programmes, fewer children are entering the criminal justice system. Only 15 were present when inspectors visited and the average is in the mid-20s. Mr McGuigan added: But for those young people who are required to be detained in a secure setting, the JJC provides an effective means of keeping them safe while delivering a progressive, child-centred regime. The inspection said the majority at the JJC were 16 to 17-year-old Catholic boys, many admitted multiple times. Mr McGuigan said: While the JJC does not have control over the children who are sent there, it was concerning that 76% of children admitted to the centre in 2016-17 were from a Catholic background an increase of 19% compared to the figures in 2013-14. Mr McGeown said it was hard to pinpoint why that was the case. A cell at the centre We are in receiving mode but when we get them they are treated fairly and equitably. The chief inspector also expressed concern at the rise in the number of children admitted on a short-term basis, despite the issue being raised by his staff before. Yet this inspection found the JJC was still being used in this way. This situation must be addressed, particularly as 50% of children admitted to custody under Police And Criminal Evidence (PACE) proceedings were released within 24 hours. Woodlands is designated by law as a place of safety for young people, and its officials said it was better than leaving a child in a police custody cell all weekend. Inspectors recommended that civil servants across departments should should work together to create closer alignment between the JJC and the neighbouring Lakewood Secure Care Centre for children. Mr McGuigan added greater alignment could lead to further improvements in the care provided to the children and create an opportunity to share costs and secure better value for money as there are significant similarities between the two facilities in population, staffing levels and high costs. He said management had introduced arrangements for effective healthcare since it was unable to transfer provision to a trust, resulting in considerable improvement but did not offer a long-term solution. By Nqobile Dludla JOHANNESBURG, June 18 (Reuters) - Insurer Liberty Holdings faced questions from South Africa's Information Regulator on Monday, a day after the company said it had become the victim of a cyber attack. The regulator said it was concerned about the data breach and wanted to meet the insurer to get more details. Liberty's shares fell 5 percent on Monday, after the company said on Sunday that an external party claimed to have seized data from the firm and demanded payment. Liberty said it made no concessions to the hackers and that there was no evidence that any of its customers had suffered any financial losses. On Monday it said its IT specialists and security personnel had worked around the clock to ensure the protection of its customers and their details. The regulator said it had written to Liberty's Chief Executive David Munro requesting information on the extent of the data breach and security measures taken by the company. "The Information Regulator has noted with concern various media reports regarding a material data breach at Liberty Holdings," Pansy Tlakula, chairwoman of the regulator, said in a statement. Shares in Liberty later pared some losses but still closed 4.03 percent lower at 119 rand, their worst daily fall since April 4. Traders said the market had not panicked over the attack. "The management did very well to come out and explain their side of the story," said Cratos Capital trader Greg Davies. "What they need to do now is assure the market that they've spent enough on their defences and that there won't be a repeat of this." Liberty's biggest shareholder Standard Bank, which has a 53 percent stake, said in an emailed response to questions it was supportive of the measures that Liberty has taken. However, in neighbouring Namibia, Marieta le Roux, a Liberty Life client since 2011, told Reuters that she had not been informed of the data breach. "I feel exposed because they have a lot of confidential information about me," she said. (Additional reporting by Nyasha Nyaungwa in Windhoek Editing by James Macharia and Susan Fenton) BUENOS AIRES, June 18 (Reuters) - Argentina awarded six road projects to five different consortia under its first wave of public-private partnerships (PPP), the Transportation Ministry said on Monday, in a plan expected to bring in $6 billion in investment in the next four years. The South American country's market-friendly government under President Mauricio Macri is banking on the new PPP program to maintain infrastructure investment. It has pledged to reduce public works spending as part of a plan to cut its fiscal deficit under a $50 billion financing deal with the International Monetary Fund. Under PPP programs, private companies finance the project and enter into a long-term contract with the state to recoup their investment. Argentina expects further waves of PPP investment in areas including railways and energy infrastructure to attract a total of $26.5 billion in investment through 2022. The government had received 32 bids from 10 consortia for the six projects to build new roads and improve existing ones. A consortium made up of Argentina's Helport SA and Spain's Obras y Servicios Copasa was awarded two of the projects, including highways from Buenos Aires to Santa Fe, in the heart of the Pampas farm belt, and from Santa Fe to Cordoba. China Construction America, a unit of China State Construction Engineering Corp, won a contract for highways between Buenos Aires and La Pampa in a consortium with Argentina's Green SA. A unit of Portugal's Mota Engil also won a contract in consortium with Argentine firms. (Reporting by Luc Cohen, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien) Police fired teargas and used water cannons to disperse the students of the Inter University Students Federation (IUSF) who were protesting against the SAITM near Parliament in Battaramulla. Pix by Kushan Pathiraja Sri Lanka Army yesterday said that they are continuing countrywide operations to arrest its absentees or deserters and warned legal action against those who would be harbouring them. Issuing a statement Sri Lanka Army Headquarters appealed all concerned in earnest to desist from aiding or abetting the army deserters or absentees, harbouring or using them for any anti-social acts since such misdeeds as the Army could not hold any responsibility for such involvements. It has been noted that sections of Army deserters or those absent without leave (AWOL), some of them still in hiding, are reportedly involved in committing criminal acts, robberies and various anti-social acts in different parts of the island. In many instances, most of those elements operate under the cover or patronage of businessmen, underworld leaders, employers and different other stakeholders and resort to such anti-social acts as per Police reports. Furthermore, some of them appear to seek refuge from some politically powerful elements and members of the clergy. It is pertinent to remind here that provision of employment or harbouring of those Army absentees or deserters amounts to breach of the countrys existing law and is an offence punishable in Court (133 of the Penal Code). Likewise, respective Police stations as well as Sri Lanka Military Policemen with the assistance of state agencies are continuing operations island-wide to arrest those elements since they have repeatedly failed to receive general amnesties for legal discharge or report back to their relevant Army formations for discharge procedures, it further said. Coca-Cola Beverages Sri Lanka Ltd. joined hands with the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society - Gampaha Branch, to conduct a community flood relief operation across areas of Yabaraluwa, Mabima, Bollagala, Thelwatta, Pattiwila and Ambaraluwa within Biyagama, which were severely affected by the recent rains and flooding. Coca-Cola and Sri Lanka Red Cross flood relief operations for the Biyagama community benefitted several hundred families across 5GramaNiladhari Divisions. The Company responded to the flood affected victims needs for drinking water, emergency medical and first aid supplies and conducted a well-cleaning initiativein order to provideclean, uncontaminated water so families could return to their normal lives without delay. Commenting on the flood relief operations, Ruwan Abeywardene - Branch Executive Officer of Sri Lanka Red Cross Gampaha said,Vulnerablecommunities in theGampaha District once againsuffered during the recent floods due to the incessant rains. We are extremely thankful to Coca-Cola for continuing to support our within 24-hour emergency relief efforts in providing disaster relief operations annually. Their volunteering efforts is something we genuinely admire and appreciate as they dedicate their time to work alongside our teams, as they have done since 2016, with the emergency distribution of bottled water and emergency medical services and first aid items. It reflects the Companys steadfast commitment to the community in which it operates. Coca-Cola urgently allocated during the first stage,thousands of 1L Kinley Water Bottles, emergency first aid and medical. These were distributed on-foot, by boat and using double-cabs to victims restricted by the floodwaters. During the second stage, an urgent and much needed well-cleaning programme was initiated soon after identifying the contaminated wells in Biyagama. 300 wells were cleaned across 5GramaNiladhari Divisions in Biyagama during the flood relief operation bringing much needed relief to 300 families and households. This programme included well cleaning, disinfecting and certifying through the technical support of the Sri Lanka Red Cross Gampaha Branch and inspection by Public Health Inspectors. Furthermore, bottled water was handed over to the GramaNiladhari of Yaburuluwa North, to be included with food aid packs to flood affected households. The recommended amount of drinking is 5 litres and hence, each family received 5 bottles of 1L Kinley water for their regular consumption. The Divisional Secretary alongside the Coca-Cola team members at the GramaNiladhariYaburuluwa North office attended this distribution. Lakshan Madurasinghe - Country Public Affairs, Communication and Sustainability Manager of Coca-Cola Beverages Sri Lanka Ltd. added, Our heart goes out to the families affected by the recent floods. Coca-Cola has always believed in inclusive and sustainable development and cares about the local community where it operates. We are glad to be of help in providing support to our community members during their times of trial and difficulty. We are also grateful to the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society Gampaha Branch, the local Public Health Inspectors of the Ministry of Health, the GramaNiladharis and the Biyagama Divisional Secretary, whose help made it possible to successfully execute these interventions to those in need. The Sri Lankan Statesman Dudley Shelton Senanayake, whose 107th Birth Anniversary falls on Tuesday, June 19, 2018 was one of the noblest sons of the soil. He was born in the village of Bo-thale, the meaning of which is the village of the Bo-Sapling, in Mirigama in the Gampaha District. Born on June 19, 1911, he was a brilliant, genuine and compassionate character. Incidentally June 19, 1911 was also a Poson Poya day, the day that the land owned by the Senanayake family was ceremonially offered to the village temple. Dudley, was the eldest son of the majestic personality Father of the Nation late D.S. Senanayake, the First Prime Minister of Ceylon and Molly Senanayake. His younger brother was late Robert Senanayake. But of the two, Dudley was lively, and much active as a schoolboy. Both of them, studied at S. Thomas College, Mount Lavinia, the leading Anglican school in Sri Lanka where his illustrious father DS Senanayake had also studied from 1882 to 1902. All three of them, played cricket for S.Thomas College, with distinction. Dudley became the Head Prefect, captained the college team at cricket at the Royal-Thomian encounter and gained colours in Hockey, Boxing, and Athletics. He then went on to Cambridge, Coerpus Christi College to read for Natural Sciences and later was admitted to Middle Temple as a Barrister. The most admirable thing was the quickness of perception and the way in which he was able to master a subject was outstanding, and unbelievable. After returning to Ceylon, Dudley was elected to the vacant seat of Dedigama as a member of the State Council while his father was Minister of Agriculture and served as a backbencher for 10 years. He succeeded his father as Minister of Agriculture in 1946 and held the post after Independence. He was still serving as agriculture minister when his father died unexpectedly. Four days later, on March 26, 1952, to the surprise of many, Dudley was chosen as Prime Minister by the Governor General Lord Soulbury over his cousin Sir John Kotelawala. He called a general election, which the UNP won. The government became unpopular a year later, in 1953, when the price of rice was raised and subsidies were cut. Though the UNP remained in power, Dudley resigned as Prime Minister during the hartal 1953 and left politics. This shows his kindness and sympathetic mentality and feeling towards issues related to ordinary public. Anyone who knew late Dudley, was aware that he was a true liberal democrat, who chose only the democratic way to gain power through free and fair elections He returned to politics in 1957 when the UNP lost elections. In March 1960, the UNP managed to form a government after elections and Dudley became the Prime Minister again, but the coalition fragmented and he resigned after only four months in office after fresh elections were held in which the UNP had won fewer seats. He became the Leader of the opposition and helped force early elections in 1965 by persuading 14 supporters of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike to defeat. The Gal-Oya scheme, the countrys first multi-purpose project for the transition to mechanized agriculture, was Dudleys brainchild. His unchallenged integrity ensured that there were absolutely no allegations of corruption leveled at him. Gal-oya flowed where it had to flow and not into private companies. One recalls his simplicity today, when even as Prime Minister, he would drive his little Triumph Herald. The scenario today, with an elephantine sized cabinet, has several vehicles and security accompanying the occupants and their families. Dudley had a great sense of vision and mission and shunned pomp and pageantry. He was never guilty of double standards in any situation. His transparent honesty of purpose and high honour was always maintained in the rich tapestry of his life. A modest man and a gentleman to his fingertips, he was an accomplished parliamentarian; his interventions in debate were always studied and polished. The great man who was elected by the people taught another great lesson to all politicians by resigning from the post of Prime Minister, the leadership of the UNP and politics altogether. Every time he came to power, his priority and commitment was to uplift Agriculture as he believed it gives fundamental development drive Dudley Senanayake served his longest term as prime minister from March 1965 to May 1970. His government originally consisted of six other parties and included both Tamil and Sinhalese nationalists. His government has been credited with restoring the Sri Lankan economy. He and his allies were defeated in the 1970 elections. He remained active in politics until his death, which occurred after a brief illness on April 13, 1973. In every time he came to power, his priority and main commitment was to uplift Agriculture as he believed that the agriculture gives fundamental development drive for a country like Sri Lanka. He was a firm believer in democratic practices, free and fair elections, freedom of expression, respect for human rights and the independence of the Judiciary etc. In terms of economic policy, he believed in growth but not at the expense of social justice. He believed that if the poor are to participate in development, they have to be strengthened first - the landless had to be given land and government assistance to become independent. Dudley was almost helpless as the main lifeline of the country the plantations were in serious decline. Then he struck upon the idea of reviving the economy by an upsurge in domestic agriculture. Agricultural colonization schemes were DS Senanayekes pet projects. The cultivators Premier Dudley revived that interest in domestic agriculture with the inauguration of the food production drive and the green revolution. He met with unexpected success in this regard and it can safely be said that Dudley Senanayakes food production drive in the late sixties was the most successful medium term economic plan ever to be implemented in this country. Rice production alone doubled in just four years. Like his father, Dudley believed that the Nations well being is linked to food security, and he travelled the length and breadth of Sri Lanka to provide the proper impetus to agriculture. Mahaweli diversion was a massive irrigation feat inaugurated during his time by laying foundation to the Polgolla reservoir. But before its completion his Government was defeated at the 1970 elections. Anyone who knew or worked with the late Dudley, was aware that he was a true liberal democrat, who would never tread any other path than that of the democratic way, through free and fair elections to gain power. He never made false promises to gain power, and was known to always speak the truth. He was a man above all others, in every sense of the term. Both he and his father, the late DS Senanayake, the father of the Nation, have always stood for an united country, where all our citizens are treated as equal citizens, irrespective of community. This is what the very name of the United National Party stands for. Sometime ago, TULF Parliamentarian V. Anandasangaree said at a meeting that the country wouldnt have faced all the problems that we had, if DS and Dudleys policies had been followed to the letter. Dudley was an avowed believer that public funds should not be utilized for the private use of a public official. Throughout his tenure as Prime Minister, he resided at his private residence and insisted that all expenses incurred in his private residence must be financed by his private funds. As Prime Minister, he once travelled to the United States and to the United Kingdom for medical reasons but that all expenses that incurred were met by him and the expenses of the doctors who accompanied him were met through his private funds Prime Ministers Secretary, Bradman Weerakoon highlighted this and it is something that is unheard today. Dudley Senanayake was a devout Buddhist, but one who believed that everyone should have the right to practise the religion of his choice in peace and absolute freedom. That is true tolerance as preached by Gautama Buddha, which seems absent today. At the time of his death, his personal bank account showed a balance of only a few hundred rupees. The great man who was elected by the people taught another great lesson to all politicians by resigning from the post of Prime Minister, the leadership of the UNP and politics altogether. When he passed away, he was neither the Prime Minister or the Leader of the Opposition, He was only a Member of Parliament representing the Dedigama electorate, the electorate he represented throughout as a parliamentarian. Having lost the general elections of 1970, he declined to accept the post of the Leader of the Opposition and decided to remain only as a Member of Parliament. His untimely demise came as a shock to the nation. Hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life started pouring into Colombo to pay their last respects to this great man. It was remarkable indeed that the people had sunk party differences to honour a great leader....Dudley Senanayake, who was arguably the foremost democratic leader this country had produced since Independence. May he attain supreme bliss of Nibbana. June 19, 2018, marks the 107th Birth Anniversary of Late Premier Dudley Shelton Senanayake. His name is carved with pride in the heart of Mother Lanka, as the Bath Dun Piya and was an illustrious democrat who held the office of the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, on four occasions. He treated everyone as his own Kith and Kin During his reign there was no religious or communal violence His food drive campaign was highly commendable His honesty, integrity and kindness remain unquestionable till this moment He was an example to all the leaders through his impeccable leadership qualities Following the footsteps of his renowned father DS, the Father of the Nation Dudley took immense pain and interest to develop Agriculture. His food drive campaign was so successful that the Country becomes almost self sufficient in Paddy Production during his time. His honesty, integrity and kindness remain unquestionable. He treated all the people as his own Kith and Kin. During his reign there was no religious or communal violence. Being a friendly leader he was the pioneer to offer an Open Invitation, to the general public to join the New Year feast at the Temple Trees. Among those who responded to the invitation was a helpless couple, trying to save the life of their sick child. Having listened to desperate parents the Prime Minister gave immediate orders to the bureaucratic officers,Break any law and to take any risk to save a human life. Which deadlock was the Blood Bank, at the time did not release blood to the private hospital where the child was critically serious. Similarly in another instance Prime Ministers Secretary, was reluctant to release an efficient officer who sought retirement from the service. One day, during the absence of the Secretary, the officer managed to place his grievances before the Prime Minister. He had also mentioned that constitutionally he was entitled for his request. Then the premier endorsed, If the Constitution allows his retirement let him retire. Being a friendly leader he was the pioneer to offer an Open Invitation, to the general public to join the New Year feast at the Temple Trees As a teenager, this writer often accompanied his father who was an ardent UNPer, and attended the functions where the Leader was present. It is worthwhile to recall a few incidents which demonstrate Dudley Senanayakes par excellent qualities. Once he participated at a religious ceremony held at the Rajasinghe Library in Kandy. At the time he was politically defeated I witnessed him arriving in his grand Pontiac car. Then he climbed up the large number of steps barefooted. Once when Dudley went to the Mahiyangana area, during the final rounds of his election campaign, then the only place available for him have his mid day meal was the Rest House, near Minipe. The so-called political Authority of Kandy District (Minipe Kotiya), at that time played a dirty trick. In order to pressurize Dudleys campaign, he booked the Rest House it in the guise of a private function on that day. During the days the communication system was very poor. The organizers immediately deployed a motor cyclist to convey a message to the well-known businessman James Appuhamy that the leader and his group would come there for lunch that day. During lunch, a confidante of the leader, Late Newton Dias, had noticed the leader was so fond of eatingPapadam. Afterwards Newton had remarked Sir, I thought your favourite curry was Moringa but now I realize you like papadam too. Then the cat came out of the bag, the leader did not know that the lunch arrangement was made in advance and he had thought to save food for the large unexpected group who had come with him. Accordingly he told Newton Dias, that when you eat Papadam the stomach gets full. Dudley Senanayake, never thought of himself but was always very concerned about the welfare of the others. This writer was beside the leader when he made his last address to the people of Kandy on February 4, 1973. It was just two months prior to his death. Addressing the historic mass rally held at the Bogambara esplanade, he requested the people to raise their hands and pledge their support to save the Democracy of this Country. Alas, today the Democracy in the land has been hijacked by the so-called trade unionists and even by Medical practitioners who are supposed to be rendering a Nobel profession. Democracy is for the people, by the people and to the people, as President Abraham Lincoln said. Therefore on an occasion as today it is high time for the Government to accelerate law and order. Especially, the President may take stern action to control saboteur mockeries in order to safeguard Democratic rights of the masses. Our constitution sanctions such emergency actions as welfare measures for the Democratic Society. May Mother Lanka, be blessed with sons of the calibre of the late Dudley Senanayake. German Ambassador Jorn Rohde, in an interview with Daily Mirror, speaks about the current status of the political situation in Sri Lanka, bilateral relations and the way forward. Excerpts: There is the pending task of constitutional reforms Germany supports Sri Lanka for economic modernization, democratic reforms and reconciliation It seems the Government itself is also doing the work of the opposition When united we win, if divided we fall How do you see the current status of German- Sri Lanka relations? We marked the 65th year of our relationship. Our relationship has been excellent most of the time. There were some irritants under the previous regime with German political foundations having to leave the country. From a trade perspective, things look very good at the moment, with a bilateral trade volume of US $ 1.5 billion last year. Four years ago, it was only half of that amount. We also see a growth in tourism. This year, we are expecting 150,000 German tourists in Sri Lanka. On March 27, Germany opened a professional trade office. This will further boost trade between the two countries. We just had a German delegation on the topic of wind energy in Sri Lanka. At the moment, a Sri Lankan delegation is in Germany. At the end of the year, the Asia Pacific Trade Conference will take place for which all German companies in the region will come together. We also look forward to a Sri Lankan trade delegation led by the Minister. Germany supports Sri Lanka in its quest for economic modernization, democratic reforms and reconciliation. Sri Lanka has the vision to become a hub in South Asia. I think the regaining of GSP Plus creates fertile ground and is a good starting point for further expansion. We support Sri Lankas path of economic modernization. I welcome the Free Trade Agreement with Singapore. Sri Lanka is on a path to further open up its economy. Singapore is extremely successful because it has opened up its economy in the last 50 years. It has a very efficient legal environment and an excellent infrastructure. If Sri Lanka continues in its path toward economic modernization, that can be achieved here as well, but, you have to do the reforms. Germany is one among the countries that welcomed the change of Government in 2015. How do you look at it in retrospect? We support Sri Lankas policy of reconciliation and democratic reforms. It is not my task as a foreign envoy to comment on specific points. Like Germany, Sri Lanka has an established democracy. In any democracy, the Government has to govern. The Opposition has to oppose. When I read your paper sometimes, it seems that the Government itself is also doing the work of the Opposition. Generally speaking, it is not a recipe for success if you are not united as the United will win, the Divided will fall, as the saying goes. The German Government and the EU continue to urge the Sri Lankan Government to implement the agenda it was voted for in 2015. It means reconciliation and democratic reforms. Democracy also needs credibility. You have laws. The laws are there to be enforced. It is as simple as that. Those involved in past and present corruption and criminal activities should be brought to book. Misdeeds need to be punished. It is important that the legal system provides timely justice. In this regard, those behind the recent communal unrest in Kandy should be brought to book. How do you look at the progress made by the Government during the past three years in the implementation of this agenda in terms of reconciliation? We see progress. You have democratic reforms. You have the Right to Information Act and the Office of Missing Persons. The enforced disappearances bill was introduced. The Reparations Bill is being prepared. Those are all steps in a positive direction. The general democratic climate has improved a lot. But, there are still things to be done. There is the pending task of a constitutional reform. That seems to have stalled a bit. The minorities who voted for the Government expected some sort of devolution. Looking at the results of the last Local Government Elections, there surely is a disappointment because of the lack of action in this regard by the Government. For example, When Sri Lanka and Germany deal with each other, interests of both sides should be taken into account. Then, it is a win-win situation. Otherwise, you create antagonism. German political organizations played a role in activities related to power devolution in the past. They were sent out by the former Government. What is their role now? German political foundations had been in the country for decades. But some unfortunate things happened under the previous regime. They are back now. If they are asked, they continue to support and give advice. Germany is not the only country. There are a lot of countries that help civil society organizations and the Government in sharing best practices for democratic reforms. I am not here to propose the German example. Every country has to find its own path. My advice for the Government is to implement the agenda on which it was elected. We are ready to support. We do support that process through various means i.e. through our development cooperation with GIZ. Also, a Sri Lankan Parliamentary delegation went to Germany in 2017 to study our Parliamentary systems both at state and Federal levels. These are all examples to show how it can be done. How you will finally do it is entirely Sri Lankas choice. How do you see Sri Lankas political environment for German investors? We see the potential of the country, otherwise, we would not have opened a trade office here. However, it is still not the great leap forward. You know Sri Lankas standing in all these ratings- the ease of doing business, corruption index. There is room for improvement. If these parameters improve, investment will flow on a much bigger scale. The current Government is working on it. Large import duties also prevent Foreign Direct Investment. Look at Singapore! They are a success because of an open economy and they encourage a competitive environment. Sri Lanka has drawn the attention of the countries such as India, Japan, China and the United States because of its strategic location. How does Germany view it? Last year the Prime Minister gave a speech proposing a code of conduct for the Indian Ocean region. That is to make it a zone of peace and to ensure freedom of navigation. Germany fully supports a rule-based world order. We support Sri Lankas efforts in that respect. Last year, the German Foreign Office conducted an ambassadors conference in Colombo on the topic Indian Ocean. On these issues, our thinking is fully in line. Do you see the Indian Ocean as not peaceful enough at the moment? There is the danger that the situation could deteriorate to one like you have in the South China Sea. The Sri Lankan Government sees that potential danger. They want to act preventively and ensure together with all littoral states that the Indian Ocean region remains conflict free within a rules-based environment. Today, almost all the developing and developed countries turn to China for investment in infrastructure development. Such development needs of these cannot be addressed by the western powers. How do you see it? As for Chinas One Belt One Road initiative, we generally support the initiative to upgrade infrastructure that contributes to sustainable growth in the region. It is very important that all partners interests need to be respected. For that to happen you need transparent rules and open tender procedures. The international banks such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank should be included. If these standards are not met, you will have a situation like the one Sri Lanka was in under the previous regime. You will have white elephant projects like Mattala Airport, from where the last commercial airline recently left the airport. That is a huge burden to the State coffers. It prevents the Government from investing money in new projects because it has to pay back loans. It is just that unnecessary projects should not be funded by international agencies. The World Bank is not a Western institution. So is ADB. Today, Japan and the European Development Bank are financing a lot of development projects in Sri Lanka. They would not finance projects that are not viable. How do you look at the Hambantota Port project? I am not an expert. The only thing I would say is that there were huge loan obligations. I think the Government was faced with a difficult choice. Faced with an enormous debt burden through loan repayments the Government in this case through a debt-equity swap- turned the loan into investment. As I said, you can avoid these mistakes if you scrutinize large infrastructure projects for their economic, social, environmental and fiscal sustainability. In short, you have to meet standards. Otherwise, there is a danger of vanity projects being implemented. These projects then generally cost the taxpayer dearly. How do you look to future political relations between Sri Lanka and Germany? Our relations are excellent at the moment. We support Sri Lankas reform process. We have a lot of similar outlooks on international issues. We are urging the Government to continue with the reform process and implement its agenda. Trade will continue to grow dynamically if reforms are carried out in Sri Lanka. We are grateful to Sri Lanka for supporting Germany to be elected as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. The United States has different worldviews under the Trump administration. How do you see the dynamics of the Western world in that context? Let me quote from a speech the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas gave last week in Berlin: Our answer to America First can only be Europe United. The EU is trying to be a voice of sustainability. Politics is the art of compromise. For example, When Sri Lanka and Germany deal with each other, interests of both sides should be taken into account. Then, it is a win-win situation. Otherwise, you create antagonism. How do you push for common goals in the West when the US is not supportive enough? We are and remain strong allies bound by common democratic values. There currently are a few irritants. If there are - as we in the EU see it- unlawful custom duties imposed by one side, there is a measured reaction announced by the EU. There is also an answer from Canada, Mexico and others. Germany and the EU continue to push and uphold an open and multilateral trade system. First lady Melania Trump on Sunday criticized the US policy of separating parents and children illegally entering the country, a topic that has been the focus of intense media scrutiny in recent weeks. Mrs Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform, her communications director, Stephanie Grisham, told CNN. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. The policy has reportedly resulted in almost 2,000 children being separated from their parents during a six-week period ending last month. US media was quick to note that Melania Trumps statement echoed the words of her husband President Donald Trump, who has wrongly blamed Democrats for the policy. The Democrats should get together with their Republican counterparts and work something out on Border Security & Safety, the president tweeted in the hours after his wifes statement. However, the policy was introduced earlier this year by the Trump administration and does not need cooperation from Democrats in Congress to be reversed. - Washington (dpa) REUTERS, 18th JUNE, 2018- Bavarias Christian Social Union (CSU) on Monday gave German Chancellor Angela Merkel two weeks to reach a European deal on migrants before they would demand immigration curbs that could fracture her governing coalition. The CSU leadership agreed on Monday to delay until after a June 28-29 European Union summit the introduction of an entry ban for refugees who have already registered in other EU countries, allowing Merkel time to reach a multilateral deal. Merkel opposes any unilateral move by German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who is also CSU chairman, that would reverse her 2015 open-door policy on migrants and undermine her authority. Mondays compromise means he can introduce immediate expulsion for one subset of migrants. We wish the chancellor much luck, Seehofer told a news conference in Munich, announcing that he would nonetheless issue orders for people who have already been expelled to be turned back at the borders. DPA, 18th JUNE, 2018- Irans President Hassan Rouhani plans to visit Switzerland and Austria in early July, both European countries announced on Monday, stressing that the trip comes as Europe tries to salvage the nuclear pact with Tehran. The aim is to find ways of preserving the progress made as a result of the agreement and of ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region despite the decision of the USA to withdraw from it, the Swiss government said in a statement. Rouhani is scheduled to stay in Switzerland on July 2-3 and have talks with his Swiss counterpart Alain Berset and members of the Swiss government in Bern. On July 4, the Iranian politician is set to meet Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen and Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in Vienna. Rouhanis first trip to Western Europe in two and a half years comes after US President Donald Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in May and moved to reinstate economic sanctions. Trump argued that the deal was far too weak to prevent Tehran from building nuclear weapons, and he complained that it did nothing to limit Irans influence in the wider region. In contrast, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that monitors Iran has been saying that the country has significantly curbed its nuclear programme, as foreseen by the deal. Tehrans leaders say they are willing to uphold the deal with the remaining five countries - Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - but only if the European Union makes sure that Iran can keep doing business with the West despite the US sanctions. Continuing its stupendous climb up corporate rankings, Samsung Electronics was ranked as the second-largest tech company in the world and 14th largest overall in the Forbes 2018 16th annual Global 2000 list. The South Korean giant raked in US$225 billion in sales, $41 billion in profit, $293 billion in assets and a market cap of $326 billion as detailed by Forbes. The Global 2000 ranking is based on a composite score from equally weighted measures of revenue, profits, assets and market value. The 2018 list features companies from 60 companies that collectively account for $39.1 trillion in sales, $3.2 trillion in profit, $189 trillion in assets and $56.8 trillion in market value. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., founded on 13th January 1969 and headquartered in Suwan, South Korea, engages in the manufacturing and selling of electronics and computer peripherals. The company operates its business through following business divisions: Consumer Electronics, Information Technology & Mobile Communications and Device Solutions. The Consumer Electronics business division provides cable television, monitor, printer, air-conditioners, refrigerators, washing machines, and medical devices. The Information Technology & Mobile Communications business division offers handheld products, communication systems, computers, and digital cameras. The Device Solutions business division comprises of memory, system large-scale integrated circuit and light emitting diode. Ones days were too brief to take the burden of anothers errors on ones shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. ~Oscar Wilde Mahinda Rajapaksa and his clan have fine-tuned that aspect of political dynamic that could be solely responsible for delivering an ailing political entity into super-action mode and achieve the results that such an action desired. This fine-tuning of the Rajapaksa-propaganda machinery did not take place yesterday when they were in the opposition. They have achieved or they thought they have years ago, that lofty goal of mass deception and political hoodwinking so that they could be in power forever. Yet, they failed. Vexing of the masses to such an intolerable extent has its own inherent disadvantages. What appears on the shallow surface does not necessarily happen to be deep enough to make the gullible masses suffer to an unending degree. Figures cannot be distorted and stats dont lie Carnage of peoples rights is not an option for a civilized nation Financial cleanliness should be a manifest characteristic of an acceptable leader Sajith and Navin should remember the sense of duty and responsibility of power Nevertheless, the current euphoria they have artificially created about a sibling of Mahinda Rajapaksa and the accompanying message that he would be the next Presidential candidate will not hold any water come the day of reckoning. Their lies and exaggerations have to be met with facts, figures and statistics. Facts are not figments of imagination of some wishful-thinking activists; figures cannot be distorted and stats dont lie. A phoney image created around a demonic political character cannot and should not last, at least for the sake of our nations staunch commitment to democracy and freewill. That phoney bubble will burst; itll shrink and disappear but it would not happen automatically. It must be made to happen by human hand. And that human hand can be provided only by the United National Party (UNP). Almost all the alleged atrocities committed by the Rajapaksa regime could be attributed to this particular member of the Rajapaksa family. Some of the alleged atrocities amount to murders in broad daylight; some to abduction and torture of journalists; some to spraying bullets on protesters whose sole demand was cleaner water; some amount to violation of fundamental human rights; all possible human right violations have been alleged against this individual and now they, the so-called Viyathmaga (path of intellectuals) are paying Pooja to this individual hallucinating about a return to chaotic rule of the Rajapaksas when all of the above outrages were deliberately committed in order for them to remain in power and ransack the countrys coffers and treasures. The carnage of the peoples rights is not an option for a civilized nation. The hallucination on the part of the now-defeated Pohottuwa politicos will continue their selfish and utterly-destructive politricks unless and until a sufficiently motivated group of counter-organizers band themselves and stop this sacrilegious wolf that comes in sheeps clothing. It is only possible; it is more of a national urgency that these leftovers of the Rajapaksa era are made politically immobile forever by all means available within the frame of democracy and human rights. Their donors must be approached; their so-called intellectuals and academics must be met at debates and present counterpoints to each and every demented point and arguments they make; their frontrunners and grassroots supporters, if any, must be converted to more humane, reasonable and sensible men and women. It is no easy task. The propaganda machine, their weapons of mass deception are much more potent and sharp than what the UNP has managed to deploy as at present. In such a dangerous scenario, the government must be objective, detached and aloof of politics. But the UNP as a political party, with its newly-resuscitated politburo with a new and charismatic National Organizer (Navin Dissanayake), should be able to launch a robust public relations campaign. If the party leader is not ready, then disregard his un-readiness; the officials of the party have inherent duties and responsibilities to take action without creating divisions within the party framework. A scrupulously defined and vigorously activated campaign of positive image-building, party-branding and professionally-crafted messaging need to be paid attention to. If a coalition candidate, Maithripala Sirisena, backed by the anti-Rajapaksa majority in the country coupled with an overwhelming bulk of minority voters against Mahinda Rajapaksa, the most difficult-to-defeat person of the Rajapaksa family, could emerge victorious, a clean and charismatic candidate from the United National Party stands more than a fighting chance to gain victory at the next Presidential elections in 2020. What is essential is a strategic view of the whole operation and excruciatingly diligent execution with the right people on ground to operate a campaign. Some of the alleged atrocities amount to murders in broad daylight; some to abduction and torture of journalists; some to spraying bullets on protesters whose sole demand was cleaner water; some amount to violation of fundamental human rights Where do you find such candidates or a candidate? Navin Dissanayake, the charismatic current national organizer and Sajith Premadasa, Deputy Leader of the UNP are qualified, experienced and transparent leaders whom the electorate would accept as alternatives to the Rajapaksa clan. There is no such second-tier leader among the siblings of the Rajapaksas. Financial cleanliness should be a manifest characteristic of an acceptable leader. In a sea of corruption, nepotism and naked corruption, it is quite hard to find one without a murmur of these ignoble traits. However, subject to future findings, both Sajith and Navin stand out as clean among the potential candidates for the prize of presidency. Could they endure a gut-wrenching and vicious vitriol of the Mahinda-led opposition? Can either of them withstand the born-again merchants of corruption who now appear before the public as saviours of the countrys treasury which they themselves pilfered when they were the switch-holders of the government machinery? These poachers of the peoples will should be stopped now. Because this government failed to do so when they had a better than good chance at the beginning of their term in 2015, the urgency of the matter is even more exaggerated and compelling. These questions will have to be answered in the coming few months. It is inevitable that more and more exigencies would emerge as a result of transparency and accountability facilitated by the current administration, as against the last one which advocated policies for a closed society as was evidenced in countries run by dictators and military personnel, and the unhindered interest shown by the social and formal media. The weight and burden of leadership is very heavy. Some leaders manage to carry it with stoicism and detachment while others stumble because of the sheer heaviness of it. Greatness dwells in those who carry it without a murmur of complaint; they have chosen to carry that weight and are prepared for the consequences; those who complain and choose to lay the blame on his or her colleagues and other bedfellows will fall by the wayside. History is filled with these charlatans who had happened to be there when the time arose whole those who succeed as great leaders are the ones who pursued to carry that weight. Human life is hard; no one will give power to you; you have to pursue it and get it. The charms of power might try to benumb you for a moment or two, yet you have to carry on regardless remembering that the power you carry on your shoulders has enormous responsibility and a strong sense of duty intrinsically residing within that. Both Sajith Premadasa and Navin Dissanayake have to show that they have not only the desire to hold power; they need to remember the sense of duty and responsibility of that power. The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com Oops....! We couldn't find that... 404 error Unfortunately the page you were looking for could not be found. It may be temporarily unavailable, moved or no longer exist. Check the URL you entered for any mistakes and try again. Alternatively, search for whatever is missing or take a look around the rest of our site. Dutch to Pull Soldiers Out of Mali Next Year 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. David Lachappelle Rocketman, the long-awaited film about the life of Elton John, finally starts filming in London this July and August. The man who'll portray Elton -- actor Taron Egerton -- says it takes a lot of preparation to play a real-life legend. Speaking to Women's Wear Daily, Egerton, who first met Elton when they both appeared in the movie Kingsman: The Golden Circle, says, "There will be lots of singing and dancing and I am spending my time with Elton John, to emulate him and capture his mannerisms." "I am watching old footage and performances from when he was between 17 and 35 -- I hope to do him justice, explains Egerton. While Egerton is playing Elton between the ages of 17 and 35, the movie still needs someone to play Elton as a kid and as an adolescent. A casting call just went out for those roles, asking for "two boys who are smart, quick-witted and talented actors" who can speak in a London accent. One boy will play 6-year-old Elton, and he'll be required, oddly, to sing "The Bitch Is Back" -- maybe because the first line of the song is "I was justified/when I was five." The second boy will play Elton from the ages of 12-14. His voice must have changed, but he can't be any taller than 5'4''. He'll be required to sing "Saturday Nights Alright for Fighting" and "I Want Love." Rocketman, directed by Dexter Fletcher -- who also co-directed the forthcoming Queen and Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody -- will arrive in theaters May 17, 2019. The script was written by Lee Hall, who collaborated with Elton on the hit musical Billy Elliot. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. The Solana Beach School District board unanimously approved the appointment of its new superintendent Jodee Brentlinger at its June 14 meeting. The board agreed to a four-year contract with an annual salary of $215,000 plus benefits, set to start on July 1, the official first day of Superintendent Terry Deckers retirement. New Solana Beach School District Superintendent Jodee Brentlinger. courtesy Brentlinger comes to Solana Beach from the Ocean View School District in Huntington Beach, where she served as the assistant superintendent for educational services. A California educator for 30 years, she began her career as an elementary and middle school teacher in the Capistrano Unified School District. She has served in various site and district level leadership roles, including elementary assistant principal and principal, director of teacher development, executive director of personnel services, assistant superintendent of personnel, and assistant superintendent of educational services. The Solana Beach School District is known for its student success, its dedicated teachers and staff, strong leadership, and its supportive parent community. This, along with many other areas of identified strength, drew me to the district, said Brentlinger via email. I am honored to be selected as superintendent and look forward to working together with all stakeholders to further the districts outstanding reputation. Brentlinger was found through a national search conducted by the firm of Hazard, Young and Attea (HYA). HYA held workshops with district parents, teachers and staff and conducted an online survey to develop a profile of the kind of leader Solana Beach was looking for. We took the leadership profile that was gathered through our search firm very, very seriously and we think we nailed it, SBSD President Debra Schade said. Twenty-nine applicants applied for the position and candidates were evaluated through a series of interviews with search consultants Suzette Lovely and Joe Farley, and the board. The last step was a visit to Brentlingers current work site in Huntington Beach on June 7. Schade and SBSD Vice President Julie Union met with several groups of people to talk about Brentlinger, including Ocean View principals and administrative staff, the superintendent and two board members, parents and community members, and a group of classified teachers, some from Ocean View and some from her previous district in Capistrano. Lou Oberman Courtesy Up until a few years ago, Lou Oberman counted himself among many in the country who are frustrated by the problems plaguing the federal government in Washington, but didn't think there was any way to change things for the better. Then the Encinitas resident discovered the Convention of States project and became a convert. The group, which claims to have three million supporters across all 50 states, is working to bring about a national convention to discuss potential amendments to the U.S Constitution, in three areas: fiscal restraint; limits on the federal government's power and jurisdiction; and term limits for federal officials, including judges. "A vast majority of people on both sides of the aisle agree there are issues that need attention and they've given up, they don't know how to do anything about it," said Oberman, 86, an ex-Marine, registered Republican and the retired former owner of a financial services firm. In 2013. said Oberman, he learned of the Convention of States project, and its goal of calling a states' convention under the terms of Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution. The group, comprised mostly of volunteers, is working to get at least 34 states to pass a resolution in favor of the convention, the constitutional threshold. The next step would be a debate by state-appointed commissioners to draft language for any proposed amendments, with 26 states needed for approval. The final step is ratification of amendments, which must be supported by 38 states in order to become part of the U.S. Constitution. Along with term limits and reining in the federal government, said Oberman, the Convention of States group also wants an amendment requiring a balanced federal budget. Oberman is a district captain for the group, representing California's 76th Assembly District. In that capacity, he has given some 70 talks to groups in Southern California, seeking support for the project. Pressed for examples of why such a dramatic step as a states' convention is needed to amend the Constitution, Oberman cites scandals going back for decades under presidents from both parties. And he contends members of Congress serve far too long in office, and are under the influence of lobbyists for unions, corporations and other special interests. "I'm doing this not for me, but for my kids and grandkids," said Oberman. "I don't like what's going on. I didn't know there was anything I could really do about it until four and a half years ago." So far, he said, 12 states have passed resolutions, including Alaska, Arizona, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Louisiana, Indiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Georgia. Efforts are underway to get California on board, he said, but he conceded, "California is going to be a tough state." Oberman said the movement is nonpartisan, and he cites Democrats who support the project. But according to the national group's website, its leaders have ties to such groups as the Tea Party Patriots and the conservative Heritage Foundation. One local supporter is Neil Campbell of Encinitas, a self-described conservative Democrat in the mold of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Campbell contends that conservative voices have been ignored or silenced as the Democratic party has swung to the "far left." "Part of the reason I'm for (the Convention of States project) as a Democrat is because there is significant corruption back in Washington, D.C. on both sides of the aisle," said Campbell, who writes a blog called "Angry Democrat." Campbell said the government should not intervene in the affairs of citizens or private businesses, such as banning smoking in restaurants or the recent case of a Colorado baker who declined to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. Instead, he said free market forces should determine which businesses succeed or fail. To Oberman, the greatest danger to American democracy isn't from an outside military threat, but rather our own scandals and internal divisions. But he remains optimistic that the Convention of States project will succeed. "I believe it will happen because people are waking up to what is going on," he said. The Solana Beach School District board held its public hearing on the proposed 2018-19 budget on June 14 as it looks ahead to approval at the next board meeting on June 28. At board President Debra Schades request, the board designated $350,000 in next years budget toward enhancing the districts mental health and guidance program, something she had hoped to be included in the past years budget. My point last year was lets develop a program that is state of the art, that can be used and modeled in California for these issues we have, Schade said, noting she would like to see funds put toward more than just hiring but training and coordinating staff to provide services to take care of kids in need. At the June 28 meeting, staff plans to present the board with four different options to look at improving staffing around guidance but the board wanted to make the funding designation now to show that student safety and well-being is a priority. The 2018-19 projected budget includes $46,193,979 in revenues and $48,574,319 in expenditures, representing a $2.7 million deficit. The projected ending reserve fund balance would be $11.9 million or 24 percent, much higher than the state required reserve level of 3 percent. Lisa Davis, assistant superintendent of business services, said the two monsters in the 18-19 budget expenditures are the districts contributions to the state retirement systems California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and CalSTRS (California State Teachers Retirement System). While the rates had held steady at about 8.25 percent since 1990, CalSTRS rates started to climb beginning in 2014 and the contribution is projected to increase gradually over the next seven years, up to 19 percent by 2020-21. The 2018-19 budget includes a 16 percent contribution to CalSTRS and an 18 percent contribution to CalPERS. The CalSTRS rate can only be set by legislation while the CalPERS rate is set by the CalPERS board each year, projected to grow to 24.6 percent in 2021-22. For the close of the 2017-18 school year, the district is projecting a $6.3 million deficit. Davis said the district is required to include all budgeted expenditures but historically they do not spend all those dollars. She said in unaudited actuals that the board wont see until the fall, she is anticipating that the $6.3 million deficit will be about $3 million less. In his last board meeting, outgoing SBSD Superintendent Terry Decker wanted to share his views about the budget challenges the district faces moving forward. I care very deeply about what happens in this district now and in the future, Decker said. We all have to take a step back and take a look at where we are from a budget standpoint and where that takes us. Stated simply: the outgo is bigger than the income and as the district continues to deficit spend, they will continue to chip away at its reserves. Decker pointed out that for the next three years out they are projecting deficits: In 2019-20 they are looking at a $3.9 million deficit and in 2020-21, they are projected to deficit spend by $3.9 million, dropping the reserves eight to nine percent every year. Using reasonable assumptions of continued revenue growth of 4 percent and expenditure growth of 3 percent, Decker projected the budget situation out another four years. By 2022-23, we see some real concerns if we post another $3 million deficit. Our standard and special reserves would be down to 9 percent, Decker said. If the district continues to deficit spend, the district could exhaust its special reserves by 2023-24. We are in good shape for a while but we have to attack and deal with it effectively, Decker said. If we start right now, we can create a trajectory to get us to where we need to be without slashing and hacking and destroying programs across the district. Decker said much of the budgets issues can be attributed to those increasing rates with the state retirement systems. The state is now pushing that responsibility out to the school districts and its costing every single school district in the entire state a tremendous amount, Decker said. We are not alone in this. For Solana Beach, with its $22 million in certificated salaries at next years STRS rate of 16 percent, that is $3.6 million going into the system. Decker said if Governor Jerry Brown came out and waved a magic wand and rolled the numbers back to the 8.25 percent rate it was at five years ago, that contribution would go down to $1.8 million. Looking at the PERS number, the contribution at the 18.6 percent level is about $1.3 million in 2018-19at the old rate of 11.44 percent five years ago, it would be about $835,000 contribution. Decker said just those raises alone account for about $2.2 millionwhen the district is projecting about $2.7 million in deficit spending, if those rates went back down, they would all but wipe out the deficit spending that theyre seeing this year. Schade remarked that what the STRS and PERS contributions is doing to other districts in the state is devastating, noting that many districts have already been forced to cut. We have breathing room, Decker said. But we know in this county there are school districts that really dont know what the next year is going to look like. Board member Richard Leib pointed out the picture Decker painted might be even less rosy as in 2011 there was a 7 percent drop in property tax revenues and expenditures could increase more than the 3 percent a year estimate he used. Decker said either way, the reality is that the district knows that those issues are out there and now is the time to plan to address them in a strategic way to be able to maintain quality programming. He advised allocating resources where students have the most need, ensuring any new programs are mission critical and keeping the financial health of the district and whats best for kids in mind. If we arent healthy as a district, we cant serve our children, Decker said. The San Dieguito Union High School District board has unanimously selected Hazard, Attea and Associates to lead the search for its next superintendent. The firm also recently placed neighboring Solana Beach School Districts new superintendent. Hiring a superintendent is the greatest responsibility of a school board, SDUHSD President Beth Hergesheimer said in a release. We take this duty seriously and are looking forward to a comprehensive search with a thorough vetting process to find a superintendent to lead this amazing district. The board selected the firm for its familiarity with the district and with searches in the state, as well as the strong search team members provided to the district. The Hazard, Attea and Associates (HYA) San Dieguito search team will include Rudy Castruita, who served as the San Diego County Office of Education superintendent for 12 years, and Dave Cash, a former superintendent of the Santa Barbara, Clovis, Claremont and Fullerton School Districts. (Castruita) was an outstanding county superintendent and it makes me feel very comfortable having the search in the hands of someone like him, SDUHSD Trustee Joyce Dalessandro said. While the firm conducts the search, the board has selected Larry Perondi to serve as interim superintendent and will look to approve his contract on June 21. Perondi retired from Oceanside Unified School District in 2014, where he served as superintendent for seven years. He began his career as a teacher at Sweetwater Union High School District and rose to deputy superintendent during his 32 years at the district prior to moving to Oceanside. Bringing in an experienced and respected superintendent like Mr. Perondi to handle the demands of that office will allow our leadership team to continue their focus on the daily activities of running the school district, Hergesheimer said in a news release. We have so many important initiatives such as transition to new science standards, professional development of teachers, increased focus on student wellness and school safety, and implementation of a new special education strategic plan that we did not want to put that work on hold by adding the superintendents responsibilities to any administrators already full plate. With the summer search timeline, trustee Mo Muir was concerned about getting necessary parent input. Castruita and Cash said they hope to meet with stakeholders as soon as possible through town hall meetings to find out the strengths and challenges of the district and the characteristics people are looking for in the next superintendent. The firm also plans to use an online survey to help develop a leadership profile to get the best possible candidate for the district. During public comment, parent Wendy Gumb provided some input on the characteristics of the next superintendent she said a lack of leadership at the administrative level has caused some angst for parents and students in the district. She said the next superintendent should champion the needs of the students who are the most vulnerable, have a proven track record of uplifting all students and a balanced approach to the complexities of running a high-performing school district. The next superintendent should do a thorough accounting to determine if the current operational budget is sustainable because the deficit gaps are not being closed at the end of the year like we have been told, Gumb said. Parent Rita Macdonald questioned, as has been pointed out in past board meetings by some parents and teachers, whether the fact that they dont always have a unified board will prevent them from finding quality candidates. Castruita said that he did not see a split board to be a stumbling block: If board members are all thinking alike, theres no thinking going on, said Castruita. Castruita said that they recently led the search for Los Angeles Unified which has seven board members that rarely agree but they all came to a consensus on the superintendent candidate that HYA brought forth. It wont be difficult finding good candidates, Cash said, adding that SDUHSD is considered the premier high school district in the state. They will want to serve this community. Subscriber content preview RICHLAND (AP) One of Washington state's most endangered historic places is located on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland. That's according to the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation. The long warehouse along the Columbia River was once owned by farmers Paul and Mary Bruggemann. . . . Subscriber content preview The administration wants to loosen ACA requirements and lower premiums for individuals and small businesses. By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR Associated Press WASHINGTON The Trump administration is close to finalizing a health insurance option for small firms and self-employed people that would cost less but could cover fewer benefits than current plans, congressional officials and business groups said Monday. The Labor Department could issue final regulations as early as Tuesday, said several people notified by administration officials. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the pending announcement. . . . Subscriber content preview EVERETT (AP) The Seattle-area public transit agency is expecting to award major construction contracts by the fall to extend the light rail to northern suburban cities. The Daily Herald reports Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff told the agency's board last month that awarding the contracts by this fall should keep the Lynnwood Link project on schedule to open in mid-2024. . . . 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Josh Newman from office in a high-profile recall election held during the June 5 primary, his self-centered stem winder on the Senate floor last week should disabuse them of any such regrets. I was left humming the chorus from a 1980s rock song: Dont go away mad, but just go away. It wasnt the classiest way to end a short and undistinguished legislative career, but at least its over. 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 Trumps detention camps in Texas Trumps immigration policy has turned into an inhumane treatment. In a refugee camp,cages are being used to hold children and adults who have ended up there after crossing the border from Mexico. As illegal migration is turning into the one of most important issues of United States, US President Donald Trump defended its controversial practice of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. An L.A. Times columnist has revealed the inhumane conditions in these camps. Authorities released images of illegal migrants inside a large cage in Texas. It is cearly seen that hundreds of children, separated from their parents and alone in an unfamiliar country, sit in spartan metal cages. Children have no books or toys are sleeping under large foil sheets. At least 1,500 boys, aged 10 to 17 are among those affected by the Trump administrations new zero tolerance policy of prosecuting every person who crosses the US-Mexico border without a proper visa, and of separating families being held. Officials said nearly 200 of those being held there were unaccompanied minors and another 500 were parents with their children. Trumps detention camps in Texas WATCH Images caused a global broad repercussion and camps were likened to between Nazi concentration camps. Former First Lady Laura Bush has compared it to the internment camps used for Japanese-Americans during World War Two. A Democratic congressman who visited the site said it was "nothing short of a prison". Trump had said on Monday that the US would not be a "migrant camp," as he blamed Democrats for not coming to the table to negotiate immigration legislation. 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. This is the story of an enthusiastic PhD student from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa who brought together palaeontologists and curators from three different continents to the ESRF to study fossils of rare crocodiles she had never even seen in real life. The goal: to see through the rock that embeds the crocs, so valuable information could shed light on the evolution of these species. Kathleen Dollman is doing her PhD on the evolution of crocodiles, and together with her supervisors, James Clark, from George Washington University, and Jonah Choiniere, from the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, decided in 2017 that the ESRF could provide them with key answers on these animals. A year later, they are spending three days on beamline BM05, with two more South African students and the curator who brought one of the samples. There are very few fossils of the earliest crocs around the world, which has made it difficult for experts to get a clear picture of their early evolution. The two specimens the team brought for synchrotron scanning, Entradasuchus and Stegomosuchus, are similar in comprising nearly complete skeletons preserved in rock matrix. These fossils are of great scientific importance: Entradasuchus is the only vertebrate body fossil known from the entire Middle Jurassic of North America; and Stegomosuchus is one of the few tetrapod skeletons known from the Early Jurassic of eastern North America. One of the two specimens comes from the collection at Amherst College, in Massachussets (US). The area where this croc was found is very bare of bones, it only has footprints. Except for this fossil, explains the curator, Hayley Singleton. The croc is embedded in a very dense rock, so CT scans are of no use, she adds. The same challenge was presented in the second fossil, which is currently kept in the University of Colorado. The moment Kathleen Dollman (left) and Cebisa Mdekazi (middle) discover one of the fossils to be studied on the beamline. On the right, Hayley Singleton, the curator who has brought the sample accross the Atlantic. When the experiment started I was very anxious, wondering whether it was going to show something or not, explains Cebisa Mdekazi, masters student at the Evolutionary Studies Institute, Witwatersrand University. For a first timer in a synchrotron like me, it is amazing to see how big all the machinery is, she adds, especially compared to our CT scanner. The crocs' team. From left to right: Kathleen Dollman, Cebisa Mdekazi, Hayley Singleton, Kimi Chapelle and Vincent Fernandez. Missing in the photo: James Clark. Three days after the beginning of the experiment, Dollman is optimistic: the first data seems very promising: we can see details that no one has ever seen before, so it is very exciting. The results, she hopes, will address the evolution of crocs anatomical structure, the variation in locomotion and the evolution of their bite, as crocs as we know them today are very different from the fossilized ones. This experiment is another proof of the long-standing collaboration between the paleontology community in South Africa and the ESRF. Vincent Fernandez, local contact for this experiment, says: South Africa becoming scientific associate of the ESRF in 2013 was a real boost for our collaboration with the paleontology community there. Together, we combine the wonderful fossils from their country, their innovative ideas, and our will to push technical boundaries further. Since 2000, the ESRF has developed unique worldwide expertise in palaeontology, designing non-invasive techniques specifically for palaeontological studies. The ESRF also benefits from a team of experts in palaeontology and houses several beamlines dedicated to X-ray imaging. With the EBS -Extremely Brilliant Source- new source, important upgrades are underway, including a brand new beamline designated for tomography. These developments promise to give even better results on much larger specimens in the future. The team of scientists of this research benefits from the support of the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences (CoE-Pal), the African Origins Platform, both in South Africa and the NSF, in the USA. Text by Montserrat Capellas Espuny ezhejiang.gov.cn Zhejiang province in East China signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Czech Railways (CD), the largest railway service provider in the Czech Republic, on June 11, to seek partnership in freight transport. According to the MOU, Lovosice, an industrial town in the northwest of the Czech Republic, is selected as a station along the "Yiwu-Xinjiang-Europe" cargo line, which departs from East China's Yiwu, the world's biggest market for small commodities, through Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, and then onwards to Europe. The station will provide China Railway Express trains traveling between China and Europe with a wide range of services, including docking, loading and unloading, storage, customs clearance and transfer. Additionally, commodities from European ports will be transferred to Lovosice station, making the town a distribution hub in Europe to further facilitate trade between China and the Czech Republic. In addition, the two countries also reached a consensus on building infrastructure together, such as freight yards in Lovosice and neighboring areas. Train X8074, the first-ever export train from the Czech Republic to China arrives in Yiwu of Zhejiang province on Aug 4, 2017 after a 16-day journey. [Photo by Lyu Bin/Xinhua] Failte Ireland meets with Irish Ambassador Daniel Mulhall to discuss ways to bring more US conventions to Ireland Failte Ireland is in Washington DC this week to target major conventions and business tourism events worth almost 20m as it promotes Ireland as a world-leading destination for conferences and meetings. The Failte Ireland team provided a special briefing on Irelands world-class capabilities as a premier convention destination to 13 international association buyers based in Washington DC, many of which represent leading science and finance associations in America. Through these buyers, Ireland could attract major association conferences with up to 12,000 delegates between 2022 and 2026, generating almost 20m for the economy. As part of its trade mission to the US, Failte Irelands Meet in Ireland and Dublin Convention Bureau teams met with Ireland's Ambassador to the USA, Daniel Mulhall, to share ideas on how to bring more American conventions and business to Ireland. Failte Ireland has already secured over 20m in meetings, incentives, conference and events from the USA for 2018 alone, with a further 5m secured for the coming years. Ciara Gallagher, Meet in Ireland Manager at Failte Ireland, said: Through this sales mission to Washington DC, Failte Ireland is directly promoting Ireland to some of the biggest and most influential science and finance associations in the US with the potential to bring 12,000 delegates and 20m worth of events to Ireland. We know that these association buyers are not only looking for world-class venues and facilities - they are seeking destinations with large clusters of aligned industries and industry leaders. Home to well over 1,000 multinationals and the brightest of minds, Ireland is well placed to deliver this as a centre of innovation, something which has big appeal for the association buyers here in Washington DC. Sam Johnston, Manager of Dublin Convention Bureau at Failte Ireland, added: Winning these conferences brings much more than upfront revenue they also leave a lasting legacy for Irish industries, in this case the finance and science sectors, as they have the opportunity to network and do business with some of the leading professionals in their field. It was a pleasure to meet with Ireland's Ambassador to the USA, Daniel Mulhall, to get his insights into the US market and how we can bring more business to Irish shores. Jump to top He will run against Democrat Tim Gannon in November By Diego Flammini Staff Writer Farms.com Iowa Republicans have selected their party representative in the race to become the states next Secretary of Agriculture. Incumbent Mike Naig, who Gov. Kim Reynolds appointed as ag secretary in March, won party support during a June 16 convention. He received 647 votes, defeating Ray Gaesser, chairman of the American Soybean Association, who received 548 votes. Its critically important that we maintain conservative leadership at the Department of Ag and in the secretarys office, and we must put our best foot forward in a very competitive race against a Democrat, Naig said during the convention. Mike Naig Naig is running on a platform focused on the future of agriculture, his campaign website says. His plans include improving water quality and stewardship, promoting careers in agriculture, and expanding markets and trade. Increased trade also means protecting Iowa farmers from tariffs. What weve been trying to do with the Trump administration is to encourage them to negotiate quickly, with some urgency, to resolve the issues that are real but in a way that prevents coming into effect, he told Local 5 news after winning the nomination. Naig will run against Tim Gannon, a former USDA administrator, in November. Gannon issued a statement congratulating Naig on his victory and looks forward to campaigning for the privilege to support Iowa producers. I am excited to continue traveling throughout Iowa to discuss the issues that matter to Iowans, his statement said, the Quad-City Times reports. Now, more than ever, we must work to advocate for Iowa farmers and others who depend on a strong agricultural economy. In a securities filing Monday, Corix Bioscience, Inc. said it terminated its CEO. The action came after the boards internal investigation found that about a dozen press releases from the company were partly inaccurate or entirely untrue. The Arizona-based cannabidiol developer said Chief Executive Officer Michael Ogburn resigned after the board terminated his employment. Corix is a penny stock that trades under the symbol CXBS. The companys website says Corix has invested millions into state of the art laboratories, grow farms and scientific research in order to find the best medical applications and treatments of cannabidiol. Corix has locations in the U.S., Africa and UK, manufacturing the best and safest CBD oils in the world, according to the website. The board conducted a review of about a dozen press releases issued by Ogburn from March 2017 through the present, Mondays filing said. Most of the press releases contained inaccurate statements, according to the review. The board warned the public not to rely on the representations in some of the press releases. In March, activist shareholder George Sharp alleged that hed uncovered a litany of fraud committed by current CEO, Michael Ogburn, and former CEO, Sean Zarinegar. Sharp cited sworn testimony that the signature of a director was forged on corporate documents filed with the SEC and that the director never gave his consent to join the board. In all the years that I have been an activist against penny stock fraud, I have never seen such brazen attempts to openly flaunt the law and defraud the public, Sharp said. In April, the SEC suspended trading in Corix stock for two weeks. The SEC said questions have been raised about the accuracy and adequacy of publicly disseminated information concerning, among other things, the companys assets and operations in Nevada. OTC Markets said in April it discontinued the display of quotes . . . for this security because it has been labeled Caveat Emptor (Buyer Beware). Caveat Emptor securities are marked with a skull and crossbones icon to inform investors that there may be reason to exercise additional caution and perform thorough due diligence before making an investment decision in that security. Corix said in Mondays filing that the Board of Directors is in the process of interviewing candidates to serve as interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer. * * * Here are excerpts from Corixs Form 8-K filed with the SEC on June 18, 2018: . . . On June 5, 2017, the Company issued a press release titled Corix Bioscience Announces Contract with Segra International, Inc, stating in pertinent part, that the Company had contracted with Segra International Inc. to plan and construct a state-of-the-art tissue culture facility in Northern Nevada, and that the Company currently has over 200 acres of industrial hemp contracted that will sold as both dry flower and refined into CBD oil this fall. As a result of its internal investigation, the Board of Directors has determined that: (1) the agreement between the Company and Segra International, Inc., did not close and was not finalized, (2) the Company has not constructed a tissue culture facility, and (3) the Company, while it intended to develop a fully integrated process of growing and manufacturing cannabinoids, did not have systems in place at the time of this press release was issued. The Board of Directors advises that the public should not rely on these representations. . . . On November 2, 2017, CFN Media issued a press release titled Corix Looks to Standardize CBD for Athletes CFN Media. The press release stated, in pertinent part, that the Company currently grows industrial hemp on a 160-acre hemp farm in Genoa, Nevada that is expected to harvest 250,000 pounds of dry flower for extraction into oil, complemented by an 11,000 sq. ft. laboratory in Carson City, NV for genetic research and tissue culture. . . . As a result of its internal investigation, the Board of Directors has determined that, at the time of this press release, the Company: (1) was not growing industrial hemp or cannabis, (2) had not purchased or began constructing the genetic research and tissue culture laboratory identified in this press release, and (3) did not hold any valid licenses to cultivate, handle, transport, process, distribute, export, or sell hemp or cannabis in Nevada or any other state in the United States. As such, the Board of Directors advises that the public should not rely on the representations in this press release. On November 17, 2017, the Company issued a press release titled Corix Bioscience to Co-Sponsor #90 NASCAR Xfinity Car with Joe DiMaggio Childrens Hospital. The press release stated, in part, that, Champ RX, a professional boxer-owned company with over 30 title belts between them has partnered with Corix and will have several Boxers and MMA Fighters on hand to tour DiMaggio Childrens Hospital the morning of the race. As a result of its internal investigation, the Board of Directors has determined that, at the time of this press release, the Company had not officially partnered with Champ RX, i.e. had entered into a definitive operating agreement or related agreement memorializing the parties relationship . . . Additionally, the Companys representation in the press release that, at the time, it was growing hemp or cannabis, or operated a laboratory and processing center in Carson City, Nevada, was not accurate. . . . On March 20, 2018, the Company issued a press release titled Corix Bioscience Announces Arrival of OG Group Personnel and Equipment in Adelanto; Installation of Custom-Made Extraction Systems Underway; Operating Team Targets Leadership Role in California Cannabis Industry. . . . As a result of its internal investigation, as stated above, the public should not rely on any representation that there is a definitive operating agreement between the Company and OG Group, even though the parties have been in ongoing negotiations, and [Corix Director Brian Werner] has met with the principals of OG Group who have confirmed their intent in entering into a definitive operating agreement this quarter. ____ Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. This article was written by and is published with kind permission of Spot Blue. Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu has confirmed Turkey is still aiming to achieve its ambitious 2023 Turkish Tourism Strategy plan that will result in 50 million tourists descending on the country every year. This will generate annual revenue of 50 billion USD, making Turkey a leading performer on the global travel scene. The country has already seen a tremendous bounce back in 2018, after a series of incidents during previous years kept foreign tourists away. With visitor stats dropping to pre-2015 levels, there was mass concern that the travel industry had been over-optimistic. However, the Turkish government has confirmed they are on track to achieve their target, and many destination and touristic hot-spots are seeing mass revivals in visitors. In 2018, more than 3 million British tourists are expected to visit Turkey, especially Aegean and Mediterranean coastal holiday resorts that have historically been proven to be favoured by Brits. The country has also cemented a growing relationship with China after it declared 2018 to be the year of tourism in Turkey. Leading officials in air travel industries of both countries are currently negotiating with an aim to increase flight schedules to cope with the growing demand. In recent years, Turkey has enjoyed growing interest from Middle Eastern nationalities who find many similarities in culture, history, cuisine and traditions and it is already a favourite holiday destination of Russian, German and other European nationalities. What is the 2023 Turkish Tourism Strategy? Published in 2007, the Turkish Tourism Strategy is an in-depth action plan to make Turkey a top visited destination of the world by 2023, which coincides with the 100-year celebration of the Turkish Republic. Breaking down into set goals, the strategy aims to market and promote every niche of travel including domestic, health, international, adventure, historical, eco, sports, city breaks and sailing. Diversification is the key theme running through the 2023 Turkish Tourism Strategy, as the country has not only concentrated on every niche but also reached out to many nationalities from the western and eastern hemispheres. However, a crucial part of the plan was branding which has been hugely successful particularly under the umbrella of Turkish Airlines and the Go Turkey Tourism organisation. Granting incentives to investors, the Turkish government has also eliminated much of the red tape and bureaucratic rules that made it hard for earlier travel businesses to work. Fast growing tourism centres such as Istanbul and Antalya have seen an overhaul of their infrastructure and transport networks to cope with increased visitors, while major touristic airports such as Dalman, Bodrum and Antalya received private funding for modernisation and upgrades. The New Istanbul Third Airport opening in 2023 will also be one of the biggest in the world and undoubtedly contribute significantly towards global tourism and air travel. For more tourism and business news coming out of Turkey, follow Spot Blue on Facebook. For more information about Spot Blue please click on the advertisement at the right of this page. Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category ezCater, a Boston, MA-based marketplace for business catering, raised $100m in Series D funding. The round, which brings total funding to $170m, was led by Wellington Management Company LLP, with participation from existing investors Icoinq Capital, Insight Venture Partners, and others. The company intends to use the funds to extend its market leadership, deepen its products, and expand internationally. Founded in 2007 by Stefania Mallett, CEO, ezCater give business people the opportunity to find local catering providers and order from them online and restaurant operators the opportunity to grow their businesses. Over the past year, the company has expanded its catering product suite for restaurants, launching: ezOrdering, which enables restaurants to take online catering orders from their own website; ezManage, which lets them manage and understand their catering orders; and ezDispatch, which connects them to vetted and reliable delivery companies. Customers include organizations of all sizes and industries, including Astra Zeneca, Redfin, Tesla, and 90 percent of the Fortune 500 while over 60,000 restaurants and caterers partner with ezCater. Partners range from local independent restaurants to national chains such as California Pizza Kitchen, Firehouse Subs, and P.F. Changs. FinSMEs 19/06/2018 Inspirit IoT, Inc., a Champaign, Illinois-based provider of smart IoT app enablement solutions, closed a late seed funding of undisclosed amount. The round was led by Senscape Technologies. Together with Senscape, a leader in machine learning and computer vision technologies, the investment and strategic alliance will accelerate design and deployment of smart vision and smart sound applications. The new funding will support the US and Asia Pacific commercialization of these technologies. Led by Dr. Deming Chen, President and Chairman, Inspirit IoT offers deep neural network (DNN) analysis and optimization tools, chip-agnostic high-level synthesis (HLS), and IoT hardware accelerator solutions to enable smart IoT applications. The company was launched following five years of research in the Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). With the support of the US Government SBIR Seed Fund, it has now expanded its novel suite of design tools to include Xcelo Compiler (an HLS tool), DNN Optimizer, and Smart Sound solutions. FinSMEs 19/06/2018 Sclak, a Milan, Italy-based Internet of Things startup, raised 3m in its first funding round. The round was led by Vertis, through Vertis Venture 2 Scaleup. The company intends to use the funds to continue to develop its digital platform, expand abroad and sign new strategic partnerships. Founded by Andrea Mastalli, Andrea Ferro and Daniele Poggi, Sclak has developed an IoT digital system to manage and control physical access to domestic, industrial and business doors and gates with an electric lock via a smartphone. Users who have been activated can use the app to open doors and gates enabled by the system. The unit has a range of 15 mt (50 feet) which can be reduced if there are any onstacles in between. When the device is on and connected to the app, the button on the dashboard will be colored and ready to be pushed to open the door. Users can customize the way they access their doors and gates through the locks setting and invite guests. The digital keys can be created via the smartphone, sent via e-mail, messages, customized and activated for limited periods, revoked or suspended. FinSMEs 19/06/2018 GoKid, a New York City-based mobility solution for schools, teams and families to coordinate kids transportation, raised $1.5M in funding. Backers included VilCap Investments, a venture capital fund affiliated with Village Capital. The company will use the funds to continue to expand operations. Founded in 2015 by Stefanie Lemcke, CEO, GoKid is a complete carpool applications that enables families to set up and manage carpools with people they know and trust. Functionality enables automated scheduling, driver selection, notifications, chat functionality, GPS, and route mapping, It is available on iOS, Android and web, and has begun integrating with select vehicle OEMs. The company, an alumnus of Techstars Mobility and backed by Fontinalis Partners, Jaguar Land Rovers InMotion Ventures, and Deutsche Bahn, has users in 650 cities in 25 countries. FinSMEs 19/06/2018 Talentry, a Munich, Germany-based SaaS social recruiting platform provider, closed its 6M Series A funding round. The round was led by Nauta Capital, with participation from Global Founders Capital and Allgeier SE and a number of business angels including all three founders of Celonis and Carsten Thoma, founder of Hybris (acquired by SAP), who will join Talentrys advisory board. The company intends to use the funds to accelerate investment in new product capabilities, grow the team, as well as enter into large international markets such as the UK and US. Led by Carl Hoffmann, CEO, Talentry provides a recruitment marketing platform for companies to find the talent they need by utilizing their employees social networks. The SaaS platform, Talentry Jobs, enables digital employee referral programs as well as employee advocacy, allowing organizations to gain access to new talent pools while strengthening their employer brand. An additional module, Talentry Stories, allows recruiters to turn employees into brand ambassadors. By sharing corporate content that is directly linked to open vacancies, they can directly support their organizations recruiting effort. The platform also integrates with existing applicant tracking systems. Talentry serves over 150 clients across all industries, including Henkel, Swiss Post, Vodafone, Axel Springer and Universal Music Group and employs more than 40 people. FinSMEs 19/06/2018 . 27 COVID-19 . - . ... Samsung is already making its own Exyons SoCs for its smartphones that are sold outside the U.S. however these CPUs ARM Mali GPUs. Now a job listing for Samsung SARC, its R&D center in Austin, Texas and ACL (Advanced Computing Lab) in San Jose reveals that Samsung is looking to make its own GPUs, starting from its budget phones, but it also plans to develop GPUs for autonomous driving, deep and machine learning. The companys own GPUs will be self-designed, including architecture, software, ISA etc. Other from Qualcomm, SoC manufacturers including MediaTek, Huawei, Spreadrum and others use either ARMs Mali or Imagination Technologies PowerVR GPUs for their processors. Samsung could eventually make its own GPUs for its high-end Exynos SoCs to compete with Apple. The listing for GPU engineer says: Our flagship GPUs will populate lower tier mobile devices while nextgen GPUs embrace evolving markets like autonomous driving and the power of machine/deep learning computations. This is Samsungs proprietary IP. We will define the ISA, the architecture, the SW, the entire solution. Not many companies can claim this We can. Source 1, 2 A Georgia police department is sending a strong message to drivers. In case you need a visual, here is a reminder of why we ask motorists to move over an extra lane when we are working on the highway, Sandy Springs police wrote on Facebook Monday. The image they shared on their page? A damaged police cruiser. Authorities explained in the post that the officer was out of the vehicle assisting another motorist when this car was struck. The collision happened early Sunday morning at 2 a.m., Sandy Springs police told Fox News. TWO CHILDREN KILLED, ONE SEVERELY INJURED IN CRASH AT GEORGIA MUD BOGGING EVENT The driver was transported but had complaints of injury, authorities said. The officer was out of the vehicle and suffered no injury. They also revealed that 30-year-old motorist Yekaterina Curry was charged with DUI, habitual violator, failure to maintain lane and violating the move over law. The Georgia Governor's Office of Highway Safety explains the state's move over law online. The Georgia Move Over Law requires drivers to move-over one lane when possible if an emergency vehicle with flashing lights is parked on the shoulder of the highway, the website says. And if traffic is too heavy to move-over safely, the law requires drivers to slow down below the posted speed limit instead AND to be prepared to stop. A clock face stolen from an abandoned Detroit train station years ago has been returned by the thief who took it, as Ford plans to renovate the historic property and turn into an innovation hub and mixed-used development. The Henry Ford museum received a mysterious phone call on Friday from someone who said they had a clock that once hung in the Michigan Central Station and that it wanted to go home, Fox 2 reported. The thief followed up with a text message instructing Ford-related entities where to find it. "I only have the clock. No other material, the thief said. I left it leaning against a burned-out building on Lawton. It is between Warren and Buchanan. The building is between the train tracks and 4470 Lawton. Please send two men and a truck immediately. It has been missing for over 20 years and is ready to go home. Thank you so much." The clock was found by two Ford employees right where the note said it was, wrapped in moving blankets and gently leaning against a decrepit building. The thief had advised them to transport it face up because the paint is very delicate. The architectural element was one of many that were from the 1913 building since it ceased operations in 1988. "This shows just how much emotion is attached to what were doing," Dave Dubensky, the CEO of the automakers property development subsidiary, Ford Land, told The Detroit Free Press. "This individual went through all this work to return the clock. We'd like to ask any others who might have a piece of history and want to return it to please call, no questions asked. We'll come get the pieces anywhere, anytime." Ford hasnt yet determined exactly where in the station the clock was from, but plans to either return it to working condition or include it in a display about the buildings history. Chadwick Boseman is dedicating his "Best Hero" award to real-life "true hero," James Shaw Jr. On Monday, Boseman won the "Best Hero" trophy at the 2018 MTV Movie & TV Awards for his starring role as king T'Challa in "Black Panther," and during his acceptance speech, the actor acknowledged Waffle House hero, James Shaw Jr. "Receiving an award for playing a superhero is amazing, but it's even greater to acknowledge the heroes we have in real life," Boseman said as he accepted the golden popcorn statue while on stage at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, Calif. He continued: "So I just want to acknowledge somebody who is here today, James Shaw. Jr." The star also took to Twitter to honor the 29-year-old. "And more THANK YOU #MTVAwards! #BlackPanther fans, youre incredible. During the show, I was honored to meet @JamesShawJr9. He saved countless lives by tackling a gunman who opened fire on people in Antioch, Tennessee in April. Hes a true hero that walks among us," Boseman captioned a picture of the two. In April, Shaw Jr. was hailed a hero after he seized the opportunity to wrestle a gun away from a shooter at a Tennessee Waffle House, saving countless lives during a rampage that left at least four people dead and several others injured. Shaw Jr. was dining at the Waffle House in Antioch, about 16 miles southeast of downtown Nashville, around 3:25 a.m. when suspect Travis Reinking allegedly opened fire outside the restaurant. Shaw said at a news conference at the time that he felt he had the opportunity to potentially stop the attack during the hail of bullets. "I was just trying to get myself out. I saw the opportunity and pretty much took it, Shaw Jr. previously told the Tennessean. While Anna Faris has been moving forward with her new relationship, her ex, Chris Pratt, may be dipping his toe into the dating pool once again as well. The star was reportedly seen out on a date with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shrivers daughter, Katherine. According to TMZ, which obtained photos of the outing, Pratt picked Katherine, 28, up at her home before they found a spot in Santa Barbara, Calif. to enjoy a nice outdoor meal. The outlet notes this is the first time Pratt has been seen out publicly on what appears to be a date since announcing his divorce from Faris in December. Although she comes from a Hollywood background, Schwarzenegger isnt in show business per se. She is a lifestyle blogger and interior designer. In the photos the duo can be seen laughing over a meal. Faris, meanwhile, is reportedly dating cinematographer Michael Barrett. According to Extra, the two were seen kissing in Portofino just last week. Despite moving forward with a new boyfriend, the actress previously mentioned on a podcast that she needed to figure out her life before she entertained the idea of marriage again. Pratt similarly said that divorce sucks. But at the end of the day, weve got a great kid whos got two parents who love him very much, he concluded. And were finding a way to navigate this while still remaining friends and still being kind to one another. Terri ODonnell instantly knew her ex-boyfriend Christopher Regan had gone missing. However, she was not prepared to discover he had been brutally murdered by his married mistress. The 55-year-old participated in a new documentary on Investigation Discovery titled Dead North, which she hopes will shed light on the man she knew not the tragic victim he became. The docuseries chronicles the investigation through shocking interviews, extensive bodycam footage and interrogation room conversations. Kelly Cochran, the alleged mistress, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in May 2017 after an Iron County, Mich., jury convicted her in the killing of Regan three years before. Then in April 2018, she was sentenced to 65 years in prison for slaying her husband Jason Cochran. Cochran, then 35, told police she delivered an overdose of heroin to her husband, 37, and proceeded to put her hands on his neck, nose and mouth until he died less than a minute later. As for the Regan murder, Michigan prosecutors maintained she lured the 53-year-old to her home, where her husband shot him. Then they both dismembered him and hid his remains in the woods. ODonnell told Fox News her last conversation with Regan still haunts her. When I talked to him the last time, he told me that weekend we were going to get together for supper, she explained. I tried getting a hold of him and he never responded. And that was very unlike Chris. He would message you right away. "And when he made plans, he didnt break them. It was so out of his personality not to respond There were rumors among our friends he had went to see this woman name Kelly who was married. And that maybe he was with her. But that didnt matter. He would have responded right away. ODonnell first met Regan in the 80s when he was in the Air Force. The two called it quits and then reconnected in December 2012. The former couple wouldnt start dating again until February 2013, but split once more in April 2014. ODonnell said she and Regan remained close until he was reported missing in October. Christopher was just wonderful, she recalled. He loved life. He loved hiking and the outdoors He was energetic and always wanted to do something new and learn more. He was continually improving himself and going to school He even went back to college just so that he could be a better manager at his job. He also enjoyed being at home and preparing a fancy dinner. He loved to sit and just converse with you. He had these beautiful blue eyes that would just make you melt. He looked at you like you were the only person that mattered. And he made you feel that. He made you feel like you were on a pedestal all the time. It was an amazing feeling. ODonnell said that they never spoke about dating other people. ODonnell claimed she didn't hear about Cochran until Regan went missing. She also insisted that, by the end of August, Regan wanted to get back together again. We were spending time together and I would tell him that we needed to take things slow and just be friends and see if things worked out or not, she explained. He would send me texts saying he loved me. I just kept telling him we gotta take our time. In September he sent me the song Marry Me by Train. He was such a romantic. On October 14, Regan was getting ready to pack up and start a new job in Asheville, North Carolina. ODonnell described him as excited to start a new chapter in his life. The pair had made plans to visit each other during Thanksgiving or Christmas. Instead, a nightmare unfolded. Michigan prosecutors alleged that the Cochrans, who married in 2002, made a pact on their wedding night that if one of them was unfaithful, theyd kill their lover. The couple moved to Michigan in January 2015. Cochran testified in court their marriage was allegedly falling apart and she had affairs with other men, including Regan. According to court records, she lured Regan to her home with the promise of sex when her husband interrupted them and shot Regan. Investigation Discovery said in a statement that Cochrans own brother, Colton Caboyan, told investigators he feared his sister was a serial killer and neighbors said they believed they were served human remains, possibly Regans, at a barbecue. One friend who participated in the documentary described eating a strange-tasting burger without realizing at the time it could have been human. ODonnell admitted the horrific details of Regans death kept her up at night. I would go kayaking at night, she said. I really just wanted to know what happened to him. But the more and more that came out, like mutilating his body I had to push it out of my head I stopped reading the newspaper. I couldnt read comments online I guess it just made it more real. The Iron County Reporter revealed police targeted Cochran because she was one of the last people to see Regan alive. However, when police searched her home in March 2015, they found nothing. Still, she and her husband moved to Indiana. But when Jason died in February 2016, evidence revealed it wasnt just caused by an apparent heroin overdose. Michigan authorities charged Cochran with Regans death and then she fled again. The U.S. Marshals Service eventually tracked her down in Kentucky, where she was arrested and taken into custody. Court documents revealed Cochran spent her time in jail turning her glasses into shanks and threatening to commit suicide, as well as bodily harm to anyone who came near her. ODonnell said she was terrified of Cochran. The first time I saw her was in the courthouse, said ODonnell. I just remember her staring at me and grinning. I took a deep breath and thought she was the scariest person I've ever seen. I was afraid. I couldnt look at her for the rest of the time I was there testifying. It was like she was laughing and saying, Look at what I did. You cant stop me. She just sat there and grinned. It was like the devil looking at you And after I testified I lost it. I totally lost it. I just remember driving, speeding, not knowing if I had crossed the border. I didnt know if I was in Wisconsin or Michigan I didnt know what to do. I just wanted to run as far away from Kelly as possible. Cochran directed Michigan authorities to a site where parts of the rifle used to shoot Regan were found, as well as a .22-caliber bullet. Human remains were also discovered, including a skull with an apparent bullet hole. A pair of eyeglasses, believed to belong to Regan, were nearby. ODonnell insisted Regans murder was not the first for the Cochrans. I do not think that Chris is the first person that they murdered, she explained. Theres just no way that the first person you choose to kill, youre going to be able to clean up the blood and get rid of the body so that FBI agents cant pull DNA off the walls To do what they did to him? I dont know how you could do that if it was the first person youve ever murdered. Shooting someone, thats one thing You can be far away, pull out your gun and its done. But to sit there, take a cut up a body and to then wrap his parts, put it in your vehicle and haul it over to the woods and bury it? Theres no possible way you could logically think through all of that I truly believe there are other people out there. The network added per the provisions in Cochrans plea, the State of Indiana can never charge her for additional murders. If she chooses, Cochran can provide locations of other victims without any penalty. She claimed to having other friends buried in Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee and Minnesota. However, the identities and specific locations of these bodies remain a mystery to this day. ODonnell said she is slowly moving on with her life and is even dating again, but still has a hard time trusting others. I question peoples motives a lot, she admitted. Im very aware of people around me Every summer since Chris murder, Ive traveled out of the country. I dont know if thats a coping method. "I remember when they were looking for Chris, during the daytime I would walk in the woods, just trying to find something. A piece of his clothing. Just anything. I dont want to do that anymore. Hes still not completely found. Hes around the county. Which is scary. "Dead North" is available for streaming on IDGO.com. It appears the worlds richest man may be stingy when it comes to providing snacks for his staff. The Washington Post employees want better pay, but are reportedly also demanding enhanced snacks such as wasabi peas, trail mix, fresh fruit and M&Ms in order to compete with rival journalists at The New York Times, according to Business Insider. President Trump frequently refers to the Post as the Amazon Washington Post, as the papers billionaire owner Jeff Bezos also runs the tech giant and has a contentious relationship with the president. Bezos is worth $141 billion and was named Forbes richest person in the world earlier this year. The Post staffers have been lobbying for increased wages, equal pay, better retirement benefits, a higher 401(k) match and improved severance pay. Last week, over 400 employees signed an open letter to Bezos outlining the staffers demands. Business Insider reported that it has obtained a memo directly from the Washington Post Guild, which serves as the papers union. While portions of the memo have emerged on social media, Business Insider reported that Post reporters also arent happy with their selection of free snacks. At the end of the memo is an afterthought, which highlights the generosity of The New York Times when it comes to free perks in the office. The implied message to Bezos and Post management was: We'd like some of the same, Business Insider reporter Isobel Asher Hamilton wrote. According to Business Insider, the memo said, The Times offers its staff free coffee and free snacks, too: fresh fruit, popcorn, M&M's, trail mix and wasabi peas, to name a few." The Washington Post declined a request for comment. Trump, who frequently mocks the news organization, has recently taken to Twitter to mock Bezos for having disgruntled employees. Washington Post employees want to go on strike because Bezos isnt paying them enough, Trump recently tweeted. I think a really long strike would be a great idea. Employees would get more money and we would get rid of Fake News for an extended period of time! Several of the papers employees have participated in a video directed at Bezos, touting the Posts recent success while expressing issues with management. The video outlines the employees demands. Meanwhile, the presidents feud with the newspaper is nothing new. The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad, Trump tweeted back in July 2017. Bezos purchased the Post in 2013 for $250 million. The Washington Post Guild reportedly told Business Insider that it has not heard from Bezos regarding the letter and that legendary Post editor Martin Baron has not gotten involved. The shooting massacre in February at a Florida high school has unleashed a plethora of what experts say are questionable statistics that stoke confusion regarding gun violence in America. One recent story by CNN, for example, states that there have been 23 school shootings so far this year where someone has been hurt or killed, and 288 since 2009. In the recent case by CNN, they made up their own numbers by using a very broad definition of school shooting, David Katz, CEO of Global Security and a former special agent with the DEA, told Fox News. In the case of all those school shootings, Katz, who says this sort of study produces a false impression through deceptive inclusion, notes CNNs report includes things such as BB guns. And its not necessarily the kind of gun violence that the headlines conjure up. According to Katz, the numbers include any shooting that just happens to be on school property after hours with no real connection to the type of shootings we are all horrified at. William B. Fairley, president of Analysis & Inference specialists in statistics and data science agrees that most of the shootings on CNNs list dont approximate to what happened in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people were murdered this year in a shooting rampage on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Fairley said that, by his count, 21 of the 23 shootings referenced by CNN bear little resemblance . . . as they arise out of a fight, robbery, jealousy, accident, domestic situation, etc. So even though the two school shootings left are two too many, the number 23 can create a misperception. In addition, theres a wider picture to take into account. For instance, historical comparisons. As Fairley notes, research has found the current rate [of gun violence] to be well below that in the 1990s. "In the recent case by CNN, they made up their own numbers by using a very broad definition of school shooting. David Katz Another important comparison: how much gun violence is there in society at large? According to Fairley, calculations indicate that gun violence in general dwarfs gun violence at schools and universities. As distressing as school shootings are, Fairley believes we should note that the injuries and deaths in the 23 incidents reported . . . add up to a tiny fraction of the annual total. David Ropeik, a consultant in risk communication and author of How Risky Is It, Really? ran the numbers. As he explained in a Washington Post editorial, taking into account the number of students attending school, the statistical likelihood of any given public school student being murdered by gun, in school, on any given day since 1999, was roughly 1 in 1 billion. He then wondered if overreacting to the problem might be more dangerous than the risk of the actual shootings. As Ropeik explained to Fox News, the piece got a lot of negative feedback . . . but no one quarreled with the numbers themselves. Ropeik gives a psychological explanation for the battling statistics on issues like gun safety. With groups like the NRA on one side and gun control advocates on the other, we subconsciously twist the facts so our view of those facts matches the view of our tribe on that issue . . . People who are selective with how they calculate their numbers, and who are less than open and honest about what went into their numbers, can feed the polarization that keeps society from considering things objectively. John Lott, President of the Crime Prevention Research Center and contributor to FoxNews.com, who has published More Guns, Less Crime, has long been in the thick of the gun debate. He goes into particulars on school shootings statistics, stating that the incidents under discussion include a school-bus window broken by a pellet gun, a gun accidentally discharged in a weapons class at a . . . community college, a gun accidentally discharged by a police officer with no one harmed, a college student using a gun [to] stop himself from being beaten. Lott thinks the reporting on school shootings isnt just misleading, but harmful. As he explains, any death is a tragedy . . . but despite the recent uptick, the number of murders from school shootings has clearly been falling over time since the beginning of the 1990s. It is hard to think of any benefit from exaggerating the risks and making people think that this is a growing problem. It terrorizes kids. Experts agree that making the public more aware of the data can help cut through any questionable use of statistics. As Katz claims, the thing an individual can do is parse through the data and see where terms are being manipulated. Ropeik adds, openness and honesty about how the numbers were compiled should be required, and any numbers that dont provide that explanation should be treated with caution. Lott thinks the press too readily gives mass news attention to reports from . . . gun control organizations and only fact-checks them weeks after the initial news stories . . . My suggestion is that reporters contact others in the field to get critical comments before they publish news stories, and in this case actually take the time to do independent news searches on these cases themselves. Fairley would also demand more from the media that reports these numbers. He notes science journals have policies for the accurate use of statistics. These are enforced by editors and reviewers to eliminate articles that fail the published standards. Would it be too much to ask that the organs that influence the conduct of our lives meet similar standards? Kristine Kotta contributed to this report. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is demanding a fact-checker for The New Yorker magazine apologize after she mistakenly accused a Marine veteran and current ICE agent of having a Nazi tattoo. Talia Lavin, a staff member of The New Yorker and contributor to The Village Voice, came under fire over the weekend after spreading misinformation and accusing Justin Gaertner a combat-wounded Marine veteran and the agencys forensic analyst of being a closeted Nazi sympathizer for a tattoo she perceived as being the Iron Cross. But the tattoo on Gaertners left elbow has nothing to do with Nazi Germany at all it is the Titan 2,' the symbol for his platoon while he fought in Afghanistan," ICE said on Monday. "The writing on his right arm is the Spartan Creed, which is about protecting family and children." Others on social media joined Lavin in criticizing the agent. Actor Ron Perlman, known for his work in Hellboy and Sons of Anarchy, also spread the falsehood on Twitter. I know Im a leftist, D List actor, so my twitter feed is probably deceiving me, but is that an iron cross tattooed on this heros arm? This is a mistake, right? Cuz the Iron Cross was a symbol of Nazi Germany. Gotta be my twitter feed is leaning left again, Perlman tweeted. CALIFORNIA MAN WHO IMPERSONATED ICE AGENT SENTENCED FOR UNREGISTERED DESTRUCTIVE DEVICE: REPORT ICE criticized the fact-checker for baselessly slandering an American hero and said her tweets were the first ones to spread the fabrication. She deleted her accusation after military veterans responded that the tattoo looked more like a Maltese cross, a symbol associated with fire fighters. The federal immigration authority then urged Lavin and the magazine to apologize. Anyone attempting to advance their personal political opinions by baselessly slandering an American hero should be issuing public apologies to Mr. Gaertner and retractions. This includes Lavin and the New Yorker. Lavin locked her Twitter account, but The New Yorker distanced itself from the fact-checker, saying she made a derogatory assumption. The magazines spokesperson told the National Review that personal social media accounts of the staff do not represent the magazine" and that the publication "in no way share[s] the viewpoint expressed in this tweet. The tweet has been deleted, and we deeply regret any harm that this may have caused Mr. Gaertner, the statement added. Perlman also issued a half-hearted apology for spreading the fabrication, although the original tweet still remains available. My apologies! I mistook the symbol on this mans arm before I actually knew the facts. So again, I apologize to the man in this picture for my mistake. Maybe it was the gusto, the relish this agency seems to project in their obsession to racially profile decent people, he wrote. Princess Dianas former butler slammed the British royal family Tuesday for not protecting Meghan Markles father against the media. Thomas Markle gave an interview to ITVs Good Morning Britain Monday in which he revealed Prince Harry told him that President Trump should be given a chance and that the prince may be a Trump supporter. He also called the staged paparazzi photos he posed for prior to the royal wedding a mistake. However, British journalist Piers Morgan told ET Tuesday that the 73-year-old was actually paid for the ITV interview as well. Paul Burrell, who served the royal family for several years, including Harrys late mother, found the interview appalling and wondered why Thomas wasnt better trained to speak with the press. The 60-year-old said he nearly spat my Corn Flakes out when he first saw the interview. Its another bombshell blindsiding the palace, said Burrell. Its extraordinary that Meghan and Harry didnt know this was going to take place. Why didnt her father tell her? Whos giving him PR advice? You just chucked a big rock into the royal pool, and therell be ripples, and the ripples are coming. The queen is at Windsor Castle in her breakfast room right now looking at the papers and thinking, What is happening out there? Thomas was allegedly paid nearly $10,000 for the televised tell-all where he spoke candidly about his private chats with Harry. The decision came just weeks after he admitted to getting paid to pose for fake paparazzi photos in an attempt to improve his public image. Just days before Thomas was set to walk his famous daughter down the aisle in front of millions, the former Suits actress announced he wouldnt attend the royal wedding on May 19 following his heart surgery. It was also revealed that Markles father was embarrassed by the backlash following the staged photo shoot. Sadly, my father will not be attending our wedding, Markle said in a statement released by Kensington Palace. I have always cared for my father and hope he can be given the space he needs to focus on his health. I would like to thank everyone who has offered generous messages of support. Please know how much Harry and I look forward to sharing our special day with you on Saturday. Kensington Palace then announced Markle would be walked down the aisle by Prince Charles, Harrys father. Burrell wondered why the palace wasnt informed about Thomas speaking to the media for pay. The palace has the biggest PR machine in the world and they cant protect those who are outside the gates. Theres no protocol in place, its never been done before. They dont look after those coming into the family. The outsiders are the ones who are most vulnerable and thats what I saw in the interview. Still, Burrell believed Thomas meant no harm in sharing his experience with the world. I like him, said Burrell. I thought he was vulnerable. I felt sorry for him and I know whats going to happen. The world press are on his doorstep and now they want more. Whats next? Is [Markles mother] Doria (Ragland) going to sit here talking about swapping knitting patterns with the queen? Thomas admitted in his interview that the paparazzi scandal was a mistake. I thought it would be a nice way of improving my look, he explained. Well, obviously that all went to hell. I feel bad about it. I apologized for it. Thomas concluded that he is proud of the new royal couple. I send my love to both of them, he said. I couldnt be more proud of those two and I think theyll do great. I couldnt be more happy to have a new son-in-law I love them both dearly. Meanwhile, Morgan insisted that Thomas was paid for the interview but said his motive wasnt money, but rather to set the record straight. It wasnt about money for him, you can tell that, he said. The real motivation was setting the record straight, having his say. Hes made some bad mistakes, my God, hes been punished for it. "As he said, it cost him, really the trip to go walk his daughter down the aisle because all the stress and pressure from his own bad behavior boiled over and he couldnt get the flight. He was very keen in the interview to be very praiseworthy of Harry. He said, I like him, hes a gentleman and he protects Meghan, and I really value that.' Back in May, Thomas debunked claims that he asked his daughter, now the Duchess of Sussex, for money just weeks before the wedding. Tabloids insisted the 73-year-old reached out to the 36-year-old former Suits stars for money on at least two occasions earlier this month and Markle refused to help. Thomas told TMZ the rumor is just plain bulls---. The former Hollywood lighting director said he has a decent retirement fund and doesnt need his daughters help for money. Thomas added that if he did ever need financial assistance, he is certain Markle would come to the rescue. Thomas also claimed money has never been a topic of discussion between the two and neither brings it up. A new deal inked between CBS Television Studios and producer Alex Kurtzman may set the stage for one of science fictions most beloved characters, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, to return to television. Kurtzman acts as the sole showrunner on the CBS All Access series Star Trek: Discovery in addition to executive producing hits for the network such as Hawaii Five-0, Scorpion and Instinct. According to The Hollywood Reporter Kurtzman renewed his overall deal with the network signing a massive five-year extension that would see him expand the Star Trek franchise by developing new series and content for the network. News of an expansion comes as Star Trek: Discovery continues to resonate with fans and rumors about Patrick Stewart potentially reprising his role as Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation gain steam. THR reports early rumblings that Kurtzman and Akiva Goldsman, who left Discovery after Season 1, are working to reboot the "Next Generation" franchise and give Stewarts fan-beloved character new life on the small screen. CBS did not immediately respond to Fox News request for comment. If negotiations are in fact ongoing with Stewart, it would be in line with something the 77-year-old star told Red Carpet News earlier in June. When asked by the outlet if hed seen Star Trek: Discovery, he responded in the negative, but hinted that he may have good cause to watch it soon. This got the rumor mill churning that Picard may be poised for a comeback in some way shape or form. For those unfamiliar, Picard hasnt appeared on screen since the critically maligned film Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002. He led the crew of the Enterprise-D many years after the adventures of Captain Kirk and the original series gang had their adventures. Its unlikely that Picard, played by Stewart, would appear in Star Trek: Discovery as that series is meant to take place several years before his character was even born. As a result, news that Kurtzman would develop new Star Trek was seen as Stewarts door to return by many. The move to return to The Next Generation makes sense as it ran longer and was, in many ways, more successful than the original series. However, since going off the air in 1994 most Star Trek properties have either returned to the original series, such as the Chris Pine-led film reboots, or been billed as prequels, such as Discovery and Star Trek: Enterprise. Early reports indicate that negotiations for a return of Picard are still ongoing and could end at any time. Piers Morgan is sharing behind-the-scenes details from his interview with Thomas Markle. ET spoke with the 53-year-old journalist in London, England, on Monday, shortly after he interviewed the Duchess of Sussex's father via satellite on Good Morning Britain with Susanna Reid. Morgan revealed to ET's Nischelle Turner that Markle was paid for the interview, though having this discussion "wasn't about the money." Meghan Markle's Dad Thomas Says He Expects His Daughter to Have a Child With Prince Harry 'Soon' "Well, it was a small amount of money, a few thousand pounds," Morgan said. "He was offered stratospherically lots more money by different media organizations. He could've made a lot more money doing what he wanted to do." "It wasn't about money for him, you can tell that," he added. "The real motivation was setting the record straight, having his say." Due to health complications, Markle unfortunately had to back out of walking his daughter down the aisle at her royal wedding to Prince Harry on May 19. Markle had a heart attack shortly after he was caught staging paparazzi photos in the weeks leading up to the nuptials. Prince Charles ended up doing the honors on wedding day, walking his now daughter-in-law down the aisle of the Quire of St. George's Chapel in Windsor, England. Meghan Markles Dad Thomas Apologizes, Talks Missing the Royal Wedding in First TV Interview "He's made some bad mistakes, my god, he's been punished for it," said Morgan, who described Markle as a "very decent, regular" guy. "As he said, it cost him, really, the trip to go walk his daughter down the aisle because all the stress and pressure from his own bad behavior boiled over and he couldn't get the flight." "He was very keen in the interview to be very praiseworthy of Harry," Morgan continued. "He said, 'I like him, he's a gentleman and he protects Meghan, and I really value that.'" Morgan also told ET that Markle revealed he has not yet had the chance to speak with Prince Charles, though he has chatted with Prince Harry. He expects that his daughter will have a child with the Duke of Sussex "soon." Why Meghan Markle's Solo Outing with Queen Elizabeth Is So Special (Exclusive) The royal family is continuing to grow. Queen Elizabeth's granddaughter Zara Tindall just welcomed her second child on Monday, Buckingham Palace confirmed on Tuesday. "Mrs. Michael Tindall was safely delivered of a baby girl on 18th June, at Stroud Maternity Unit. Mr. Tindall was present at the birth. The weight of the baby was 9lbs 3oz," the palace said. Tindall, a British equestrian and daughter of Princess Anne, immediately informed the queen, Prince Philip, Captain Mark Phillips, her mother and her husband Mike's parents, Philip and Linda, about her daughter's arrival. ZARA TINDALL MAKES HERSELF COMFORTABLE AT ROYAL WEDDING, TWITTER NOTICES HER BORED LOOK "[They] have been informed and are delighted with the news," Buckingham Palace added. "This baby is the second child for Zara and Mike, the fourth grandchild for The Princess Royal and the seventh great-grandchild for The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh." The exciting news comes more than a year after the 37-year-old royal suffered a devastating miscarriage in late December. Very sadly, Zara and Mike Tindall have lost their baby, Tindall's spokesperson told People in a statement at the time. At this difficult time, we ask that everyone respects their privacy. ROYALS TO HAVE FIRST-EVER SAME-SEX WEDDING LATER THIS SUMMER Months later, in an interview with The Times, Tindall's husband a former England rugby captain opened up about the family's painful loss, telling the British newspaper that their now 4-year-old daughter, Mia, was their "saving grace." When I was playing I hardly saw her, now we can see her grow up, Mike told the paper in May 2017. However down we feel, she will come running up in our faces. The couple first announced they were expecting their second child in late November. They will celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary on July 30. Oakland chef Charlie Hallowell is planning to return to his restaurants after being accused by 31 employees of sexual harassment. Hallowell stepped away from his three restaurants Pizzaiolo, Boot & Shoe Service and Penrose amid the allegations in December when 17 former female employees had claimed he created a demoralizing work environment. SAN FRANCISCO CHEF CHARLIE HALLOWELL ACCUSED OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT BY 17 WOMEN One employee described Hallowell as having sexual Tourettes disorder, and said he expressed an obsession with female bodies and would openly comment on their appearance. At the time Hallowell responded to the allegations, saying he was deeply ashamed and saddened by his behavior. I can see very clearly that I have participated in and allowed an uncomfortable workplace for women. For this I am deeply ashamed and so very sorry, Hallowell said. We have come to a reckoning point in the history of male bosses behaving badly, and I believe in this reckoning and I stand behind it. After the claims which have grown to 31 accusers the chef took an unpaid leave of absence from his restaurants, but refused to divest completely. Several employees quit in protest. Now Donna Insalaco, the new CEO of Hallowells restaurant group, said Hallowell is due to return to at least two of his establishments Boot & Shoe Service was sold to a former employee and her husband in April. Charlie agreed to take six months off without pay. That time is coming to a close, Insalaco said to the San Francisco Chronicle. Insalaco said the chef may start by dining at one of the restaurants with his business partner or holding off-site staff meetings. She did not rule out the possibility of Hallowell returning to the kitchen, the Chronicle reported. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS Mediation proceedings between Hallowell and five women who have accused him of sexual harassment were set to begin Monday, Eater reported. Michelle Gant contributed to this report. Miami is trying to rebuild a neighborhood that was once a vibrant center for black culture, and a celebrity chef is contributing what he does best: food. Marcus Samuelsson has bought a former pool hall in Miami's Overtown neighborhood and plans to open a restaurant there later this year. A redevelopment board is already pouring tens of millions of dollars into Overtown, but Samuelsson is the first celebrity to make a commitment there. He bought the building for $1.5 million while turning down opportunities on South Beach. Samuelsson's cuisine and philosophy is a study in cultural fusion, much like the man himself. He was born in Ethiopia and raised by white adoptive parents in Sweden. He first made a name for himself with upscale Scandinavian fare at Manhattan's chic Aquavit restaurant in the 1990s. A James Beard award winner, his celebrity grew with appearances on Food Network shows. MARCUS SAMUELSSON ON HOW HIS INSPIRATION IS A MELTING POT OF FLAVORS Then in 2010, just as Harlem started gentrifying, Samuelsson opened a restaurant there called Red Rooster. It was an immediate hit. He made an art of turning Southern soul food into hip urban fare, offered gospel brunches and organized food festivals. More recently, he opened Marcus B&P in downtown Newark, an area that is also in the early stages of a comeback. "There's a linkage between Overtown and Harlem and I want to be part of that," Samuelsson said in an interview. His Overtown eatery will hire from the community, offer internships and feature local artists on the walls. "Through art you learn a narrative about people's journey. Music does that, food does that, art does that," he said. Overtown is sandwiched between swanky downtown Miami high-rises and artsy Wynwood with its shops, bars and world-renowned street art. Despite the prime location, though, Overtown has suffered from a lack of investment and higher-than-average crime rates. In its prime, Overtown was known as a "Little Broadway" of the South. Black stars like Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr. and Billie Holiday performed at Overtown's Lyric Theater. And even when they were performing elsewhere, they stayed in Overtown's black-owned hotels because hotels in Miami's white neighborhoods would not accommodate them. In the 1960s, two expressways built through the heart of the neighborhood displaced thousands of residents, contributing to Overtown's decline. Then in 1980, three days of riots in Overtown left 18 dead, 400 injured and $100 million in damage. The protests were sparked by the acquittal of four white police officers in the fatal beating of a black insurance salesman. But the neighborhood is poised for a turnaround. "You are part of a renaissance that's going to mean the most for this neighborhood," redevelopment board Chairman Keon Hardemon told 200 people at an outdoor luncheon across the street from where Samuelsson's restaurant will be located. "We want this place to truly be the Harlem of the South." The sold-out $135-a-person preview of Samuelsson's plans attracted politicians and the owner of an MLB franchise. Trays of fried chicken and waffles with smoked maple syrup were served with short ribs, shrimp and grits, dirty rice fritters, collard greens and cornbread with tomato jam. A strolling New Orleans-style jazz band played a festive rendition of the gospel song "I'll Fly Away" as the crowd clapped and swayed. Beyond the barricades surrounding the well-heeled celebration, lifelong Overtown resident Dwayne Riggins, 50, parked his bicycle and watched. His dad owned a soul food restaurant just down the street. He points out the empty lot where a pharmacy used to be. He said he likes the new high-rises being built. "Some people might not approve, but it's time for Overtown to change. It's been down and out all our lives," Riggins said. Rudy Lorenzo, who owns a convenience store, hopes the changes will attract a better-paying clientele, but warns matter-of-factly that the locals "are going to get pushed out ... They aren't going to be able to afford the new apartments." FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS That's an issue that's played out in many cities around the country including New York as residents who lived through years of neglect get priced out when things rebound. Bubba Haynes has lived in Overtown for 55 years. He did construction years ago on buildings near the Lyric Theater. Now he's retired and helps at his son's retail store. "With growth, you take a lot of this crime out of here, but then you're going to lose a lot of the history," he said. Samuelsson hopes to reflect some of that history along with contemporary local culture when he opens his restaurant. He doesn't have a menu yet, calling that "the fun part." His Harlem menu includes cornbread and his Swedish grandmother's meatballs; his Newark restaurant infuses pasta with Ethiopian flavors in a dish called dorowat rigatoni. "I'm going to come down a lot and I'm going to learn historically what was here, what's relevant right now," he said. "I know it's going to be comfort food." A Kansas restaurant has sparked a heated debate on social media after posting a picture to its Facebook page stating, guns are welcome on our premises. On Saturday morning, Riverside Cafe in Wichita, Kans., posted a picture of a grey-and-white handgun with a green circle around it underneath the declaration that guns are welcome. The image was captioned, We fully support the 2nd amendment. DALLAS RESTAURANT'S GUN REGULATION MESSAGE SPARKS CONTROVERSY WITH NRA Since it went up on Facebook, the response has been swift with more than 550 reactions and hundreds of comments both praising and criticizing the stance. Ill be in regularly. Thanks for your public support of the 2nd amendment, one person in favor of the sign wrote. Im not in Wichita anymore. But this post is awesome, bold and worthy of recognition for the simple fact that theres a RIGHT to bear arms and you support that right! Next time Im in town, Ill be sure to Stop by and support your Business! user Danielle Welch commented. While Pat McCleave wrote, "Scratch one more place of business off my list of places I will choose to spend my money." Kansas laws allow gun-toting with no permits nor training. Often with no background check! Sorry, will no longer be a customer, another critical of the post wrote on Facebook. Owner Paul Cohlmia was unaware of the reactions on social media, telling The Wichita Eagle he has someone new managing his social media and did not know the post went up. However, once made aware of the comments, Cohlmia started responding and defending his policy. "Have been broken in to 16 times, and robbed 3 time with a knife to my face, Cohlmia wrote on Facebook. Cohlmia also pointed out that the same sign has been hanging in the front window of the cafe for the past 12 years -- and will likely remain there after his experiences with robberies. "I just don't want to be a number," he said to The Wichita Eagle. "I don't want to be in that situation ever again. It is scary, and everybody wants to give their two cents, but when it comes down to being robbed, it's a whole different story." He told the publication most of the Facebook comments have been fine, but some have been upsetting. "But some of it is just flat out telling me I'm a bigot, and they don't know me," he said. "I have all kinds of friends of all kinds of religions. I'm not going to prove that to anybody, but the proof is in the pudding. I can deal with a lot of stuff, and you can't fight everybody." FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS In Kansas, anyone 21 years and older who legally owns a firearm can conceal carry without a permit under the Kansas Personal and Family Protection Act. Though certain establishments may ban those carrying firearms from entering. You may want to grab drink before tuning into this news, beer lovers: a Pabst Blue Ribbon shortage may be on the horizon. CNBC reported this week that the iconic brew and MillerCoors are heading to court in November, as Pabst has filed a half-billion dollar lawsuit against the powerhouse brewery. According to the outlet, the two are feuding over a reported breach by MillerCoors in a "decades-old" agreement that the Keystone beer maker would brew Pabst's legacy beers, including the iconic PBR, until 2020. Though the current deal offers multiple options for renewal, MillerCoors reportedly wants out, due in part to a dwindling beer market, according to Food & Wine. 100-YEAR-OLD WOMAN SAYS GUINNESS IS KEY TO LONG LIFE If the two parted ways, Pabst would be in a tight position to find a new brewery, or build a brewery of its own, two equally difficult options that could potentially lead to a dreaded shortage of the beloved brew, the outlet claims. Though tentative negotiations are months away, fans of the iconic American brew were quick to voice their despair on social media. FORMER DISNEY STAR DYLAN SPROUSE IS NOW BREWING MEAD IN BROOKLYN The darkest time is among us, one fan lamented. Nooooooooooo!! another mourned. A heads up for all the frat boys among us, another site simply joked. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS A West Virginia family claims they spent two hours cuddling and taking photos with the wrong baby after their son wound up in the wrong nursery cart. Crystal and Arnold Junior Perry, who welcomed son Dawson at Logan Regional Medical Center on June 12, said the mistake wasnt noticed until a nurse came in and asked to check armbands. I didnt think nothing of it, and then she walked out of the room, Crystal Perry, who has three other children, told The Charleston Gazette-Mail. She came back [to our room] and there she has my baby. The Perrys had been holding Colton Perry, whose mom Heather Perry is calling the alleged swap an honest mistake. Crystal Perry said the alleged mix-up happened when Junior Perry went to the nursey to get Dawson. ER DOC CAUGHT ON VIDEO CURSING OUT PATIENT IS SUSPENDED He went to the nursery and there [Dawsons] basket was, laying in the same spot it had been, she told The Charleston Gazette-Mail. It said Perry on the card, but nothing else was filled out on the card. Not the height, not the weight, it just said Perry. He noticed on the card it said number five, and our baby had been in number four He told the nurse, Why is he in a baby cart that says number five? She said Oh thats fine, thats your baby. Perry said her husband believed the baby was theirs because he had blonde hair like their son, and that the nurse changed the room number on the ID card before sending the baby back to Crystals room. She claims her husbands suspicions were raised two hours later after he noticed that the supplies in the babys cart had been moved, but that the nurse walked in to check ID bands at that time. US SERIAL SPERM DONOR BANNED FROM DONATING IN ISRAEL Ive had three other kids. Anytime Ive been in the hospital, any single time that they bring your baby in, a nurse brings them in and they ask you to read your armband, Crystal Perry told the news outlet. Then, they check the babys armband, which is usually on their foot. That never happened one single time. Heather Perry said she believes her son was with Crystal and Junior Perry for a few seconds, not two hours, and that she hadnt heard about the photos posted to social media. Heather Perry said that she did not have Dawson while the other Perrys had Colton. A hospital spokesman told The Charleston Gazette-Mail that the hospital could not disclose or confirm any details. Meghan Markle made her Royal Ascot debut Tuesday alongside husband Prince Harry and other members of the royal family. The newlywed arrived on day one of the five-day annual horse racing event dressed in a chic white dress by the same designer who created her wedding gown, Givenchy. MCDONALD'S NEW COFFEE 'BETTER THAN ANYTHING STARBUCKS HAS EVER COME UP WITH,' ACCORDING TO TWITTER The special occasion also happened to fall on the one-month anniversary of the royal wedding. The Duchess of Sussex paired her collared shirt dress with a thin black belt, black clutch and black pumps. She topped off the look with an event-appropriate black and white hat by London-based milliner Philip Treacy. The Royal Ascot has a strict dress code, which states that ladies must wear a hat or headpiece with a solid base of four inches, and dresses and skirts should fall just above the knee or longer, according to Elle. The Royal Ascot comes just one day after Meghan and Prince Harry attended his cousin Celia McCorquodale's wedding in Lincolnshire, England. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS Meghan, who wore a blue and white printed Oscar de la Renta wrap dress for the occasion, was highly criticized for her look. Many called out the fit of the billowy style, which seemed a bit large for her. Others noted that the look was too casual for a high-society British wedding. Students arent the only ones itching for summer break, as evidenced by one North Carolina high school receptionists stunning rendition of At Last over the intercom that has gone viral. While Regina Ballard, longtime front desk receptionist at North Lincoln High School in Lincolnton, adores her job, shes ready to embrace some well-deserved time off, Fox 5 reports. I love my job, y'all, but I look forward to summers when I can spend time with my grands & family, sooo...here it is...At Last!!! the 57-year-old wrote on Facebook of the footage on June 13, on her last day in the office for the school year. DR. ERIC MUELLERS ADVICE FOR KEEPING PETS HEALTHY THIS SUMMER That's it. It's 3 o'clock, y'all. At 3:15, it's official, she croons into a corded telephone on the schools intercom system, before cranking up an instrumental version of the timeless tune on her computer. At last, summer break has come along Ballard sings, taking her own twist on Etta James 1960 hit, and hitting every note with ease. In the days since, the clip has been viewed nearly 975,000 times, with 16,000 shares and hundreds of positive comments. Ballard said she is blown away by the attention her silly stunt has received, USA Today reports. Deliberately selecting a quieter day in the office to belt out her song, Ballard reports that about half her co-workers were in the building on the optional day of school, as graduation happened last week. TODDLERS GO WILD WITH MOMS SELF-TANNER, MAKE VIRAL MESS "I was just having fun and steering us all into the summer break with a smile, Ballard later told ABC News. I just could never have expected this. My youngest daughter said, You are up to this many views. And I said, Seriously? "We don't get enough opportunities in the days to spread smiles so I'm happy about that for sure," she added. Ballard further divulged that she sings in church and has no plans at the moment for a recording contract. She said she is just looking forward to a vacation in Orlando, Fla., with her family before returning to the school she loves in August. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! Our Founders recognized that religion and religious people play a key role in strengthening our society. They feed the hungry, heal the sick, and comfort the grieving. They teach right behavior and give meaning to life. They are present at birth and at death. Thats why the Founders gave the public expression of religious belief a triple protection in our Constitution by protecting the free exercise of religionnot just worship in secretbanning an established religion, and ensuring the freedom of speech. Under President Donald Trump, the federal government is affirming these protections and the contribution that religious individuals make to this country. Since his election, President Trump has been an unwavering defender of religious liberty. He has promised that under a Trump administration, the federal government will never, ever penalize any person for their protected religious beliefs. At the Department of Justice, we are taking these fundamental principles seriously, and we are putting them into action. For example, our Solicitor General argued before the Supreme Court in support of the Colorado baker who was sued for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. Earlier this month, the Court ruled in favor of the baker, 7 to 2. Since it was enacted in 2000, RLUIPA has helped us defend many religious groups across the nation. It has enabled us to protect Orthodox Jews in New York, Muslims in Minnesota, Greek Orthodox Christians in Wisconsin, and many others. We have settled 24 civil cases with approximately 90 plaintiffs regarding the previous administrations wrongful application of the contraception mandate to objecting religious employers. Last month, a district court in Colorado issued a permanent injunction in the case involving the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of nuns who serve the elderly poor. Because this injunction is permanent, the government can never again violate the Little Sisters rights in this way. These cases should never have been necessary in the first place. Religious groups should not have to go to the courts to protect their rights. Soon after he took office, President Trump directed me to issue legal guidance for all executive agencies about how to apply the religious liberty protections in federal law. I issued that guidance in October, and it makes clear that religious exercise is not just some policy preference: it is an inalienable right. The guidance reiterates that our government may not discriminate against or between religious groups. For example, religious organizations must be on equal footing with one another and with secular organizations when it comes to government grant funding. Thats why, in January, we filed a brief in a Montana court to defend parents who claim that the state discriminated against their children by barring them from a private school scholarship program because they attend a religious school. Religious schools and other institutions must also be on equal footing with one another and with secular institutions when it comes to zoning laws. It is not enough to say people have freedom of worship but not the freedom to buy land, build a church, or expand the property they already have. For freedom of religion to be real, people need a proper space where they can worship, pray, or preach. When I was in the Senate, we passed a law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which prevents cities and towns from discriminating against religious organizations in land use and zoning decisions. RLUIPA lets the Justice Department step in when churches, synagogues, mosques, or religious schools are treated differently from other public spaces. Since it was enacted in 2000, RLUIPA has helped us defend many religious groups across the nation. It has enabled us to protect Orthodox Jews in New York, Muslims in Minnesota, Greek Orthodox Christians in Wisconsin, and many others. Last week, I announced a new initiative to help us carry out RLUIPA. Its called the Place to Worship Initiative. Under this initiative, the Department of Justice will seek to raise awareness about RLUIPA through public events across America and through better training for local officials and our federal prosecutors. These efforts will help us bring more RLUIPA casesand it will help us win them. I also hope that if more people know their rightsand if more public officials know what the law requiresmore cities and towns across America will accommodate people of faith without the involvement of the Justice Department. Our Founders reserved a space for people of faith in the first lines of the First Amendment. Under President Trumps strong leadership, this Department of Justice is ensuring that people of faith can find have a fair shot at finding space in every town and every city in America. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! The decision by the Army to discharge an officer who posed for a photo with the words Communism will win written inside his cap at his graduation from West Point, and the court-martial conviction of a Marine who joined a neo-Nazi group, illustrate an important principle. The principle should be obvious: The U.S. military is no place for anti-American extremists who do not believe in the foundational values that form the basis for our democratic government under the Constitution. I served in the U.S. Army from 1983 to 1998 and as a member of Special Forces participated in counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, diplomatic, intelligence and humanitarian operations in more than a dozen countries. Like millions of other Americans who have proudly served our country, I was honored to defend the values that make the United States the greatest nation on Earth. The first thing that I did -- and that every new member of our military does -- was to swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That certainly precludes members of the military from joining groups that are rightly considered domestic enemies like communists, neo-Nazis and supporters of radical Islamist extremism. We rely on the patriotism and fidelity of those who serve in the military to keep us all safe. Anyone who associates with extremist groups disloyal to our nation and our laws has forfeited the right to serve and deserves the maximum punishment the law and military regulations allow. Specifically, an Army regulation states that it requires military personnel to reject participation in extremist organizations and activities. Extremist organizations are ones that advocate racial, gender, or ethnic hatred or intolerance; advocate, create, or engage in illegal discrimination based on race, color, gender, religion, or national origin; advocate the use of or use force, violence or unlawful means to deprive individuals of their rights under the United States Constitution or the laws of the United States or any State by unlawful means. In cases where a service member gets involved with one these groups, charges are warranted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice to punish them. The discharged Army officer discussed above was second lieutenant named Spenser Rapone. He was given an other-than-honorable discharge for conduct unbecoming an officer and resigned from the Army on Monday. Rapone did more than pose for a picture he distributed on social media holding his service cap while at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point with the phrase Communism will win written inside. He also posed for a photo unbuttoning the jacket of his cadets uniform to reveal a T-shirt with the image of anti-American Cuban communist revolutionary Che Guevara. Rapone said he considers himself a revolutionary socialist and added: I would encourage all soldiers who have a conscience to lay down their arms and join me and so many others who are willing to stop serving the agents of imperialism and join us in a revolutionary movement. Rapone was rightly booted out of the Army for consistently showing that his allegiance was with our enemies. Now he plans to speak at a conference on socialism in July. Whats next? Can we expect Rapone to defect to Cuba to join that nations communist military, which reveres Che Guevara? Seek political office to bring a communist revolution to the U.S.? Become a commentator on MSNBC or CNN? Rapone didnt have any problem accepting four years of a free college education at West Point, funded by U.S. taxpayers. Now he may have to pay back the cost of his education. Perhaps he can turn to his friends in the Resistance or Cuban communists to help foot the bill. While nearly every member of our military is loyal and patriotic, Rapone is not the only disgraceful exception to the rule. In a case that drew less attention, Marine Lance Cpl. Vasillios Pistolis was convicted Monday in a summary court-martial for failure to obey an order or regulation and making a false official statement. Pistolis had joined a neo-Nazi organization and participated in the white supremacist march on Charlottesville, Virginia last August that erupted in violence. ProPublica reported that Pistolis boasted online: Today, cracked 3 skulls open with virtually no damage to myself. ProPublica also reported that Pistolis bragged about attacking a transgender woman and said he kept a blood-soaked flag as a memento. Pistolis was sentenced to 28 days of confinement, reduction in rank to E-1 and forfeiture of two-third pay for one month. We rely on the patriotism and fidelity of those who serve in the military to keep us all safe. Anyone who associates with extremist groups disloyal to our nation and our laws has forfeited the right to serve and deserves the maximum punishment the law and military regulations allow. We must also keep in mind that military personnel do not give up their First Amendment rights, but they do voluntarily accept restrictions like the ones described above. Determining what constitutes an extremist group is a touchy subject itself and care must be taken to ensure that partisan politics do not come into play. There has been a push to identify many groups as extremist by the political left and we must ensure that this does not infect the decision-making process for the military. It is a disgrace to all those who serve honorably in our armed forces when others who are hostile to the foundational principles of our democracy wear our uniform. Betraying your comrades on the battlefield is one of the most dishonorable things, but betraying your country by joining groups dedicated to its destruction is far worse. We must recognize free speech but also ensure the militarys need for good order and discipline. There is no place within the ranks for those who advocate damaging our country and Constitution. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! For decades, China has waged a trade wartargeting U.S. industries and stealing jobs from ordinary American workers. President Obamas weakness on tradealong with the lefts obsession with identity politicshelped put Donald Trump in the White House. Now we have a leader who puts American workers first but his factious trade team appears clueless about how to bring effective pressure to win at negotiations or if necessary unilaterally reorder our trade with China to be fair. To prevail in any international confrontationwhethr it is disarming North Korea, stifling Russian aggression or fixing trade aggressionthe president needs to know the enemy, cultivate allies to bring pressure that compliments U.S. actions and implement a strategy that makes retaliation difficult. Mr. Trumps hawksAmbassador Robert Lighthizer and Trade Director Peter Navarroconfuse trade with the world with trade with China. The WTO isnt busted and our allies are not trade criminals. Europe has its dysfunctionsmost significantly Germany s obsession with trade surpluses that victimized southern EU members and the United Statesbut slapping tariffs on Europe and Canada does not solve Americas number one trade problem. The United States has a $515 billion trade deficit$374 billion is with China and oil accounts for most of the rest. Contrary to President Trumps claims we have a modest trade surplus with Canada. Our allies increasingly recognize Chinas mercantilism and its goal to dominate artificial intelligence and other critical technologies by 2025 is a big threat. They could be engaged to help put pressure on China but slapping tariffs on those allies pushes them into Beijings corner. In 2001, China was admitted to the WTO on the premise that its economic policies would evolve toward western norms. Instead, it got rich exploiting its developing country status on tariffs and to target and obtain critical technologies by applying coercive tactics and outright theft. WTO rules are intended to boost trade and investment among western market economies and its dispute settlement mechanism is designed to adjudicate the venial sins of overly-aggressive, western industrial policiesfor example, state subsidies to Airbus. In 2001, China was admitted on the premise that its economic policies would evolve toward western norms. Instead, it got rich exploiting its developing country status in the WTOthat permits, for example, Chinese tariffs of 25 percent on cars as compared to the U.S. levy of 2.5 percentand to target and obtain critical technologies by applying coercive tactics and outright theft. Its notorious industrial targetingopaque administrative barriers to imports that supplement high tariffs, extravagant production and export subsidies and criminal acquisition of western technology through compulsory joint ventures and outright piracyis virtually impossible to police through WTO dispute settlement. It would be like prosecuting tens of thousands of white collar criminals on Wall Street each yearthose are terribly difficult cases for government lawyers to win, even one at a time. America and our allies need a new deal with China. If Beijing wants to rig trade, then it must be managed to bring about balance. Otherwise, China accumulates hundreds of billions of dollars it can use to buy influence through its Silk Road initiative and acquire western technology companies. And relying on targeted tariffs is dumb. China can quickly counter duties on $50 billion, $100 billion or even $200 billion of its exports by targeting with tariffs U.S. farmers and other industries in Republican districts vulnerable to Democratic challenges, and disrupting the operations of U.S. firms operating in China. Instead, Mr. Trump should impose an across-the-board measure similar to the 1971 import surcharge imposed by Richard Nixon. Specifically, limit U.S. imports from China to what we sell in China. Grant to U.S. exporters resalable quotas to import from China in proportion to sales there. The more China buys from America, the more America buys from China. Conversely, if it penalizes U.S. agricultural products and other exports, it sells less here. The scheme would eliminate the special pleading of U.S. businesses for exemptions from proposed tariffs on Chinese goodsthose that value imports more would bid the most to purchase import licenses. Our allies are worried about undermining the WTO and China diverting its subsidized stuff to their markets but our answer should be simple. Keep trading with China as we are and there will be no WTO worth havingBeijing will soon dictate the rules. Chinas privateers are stealing European and Canadian intellectual property and jobs too. They can join the battle by imposing a similar regime, instead of harping, whining and criticizing as they are wont to do whenever a Republican occupies the White House. The door should be open to our allies but America should not put up with a WTO regime that puts China in charge. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! 2018 is proving to be the year tech finally lost its innocence. Ubers self-driving cars hit people; Amazons Echo listens in on your private conversations; and Facebook has had more scandals than we can track. The tech industrys problems are out of control. Earlier this year, Congress actually worked together in a bipartisan fashion and passed a bill that addressed the ease with which humans were bought and sold online like modern day slaves. The days of hiding your head in the sand and failing to acknowledge how your services are being used are over. Now, companies must ensure that they are not allowing or facilitating this behavior on their platforms. This legislation was the first of many wake-up calls for tech. In most boardrooms, plans would quickly be put in place to protect their companies from liability. In Silicon Valley, they like to hit the snooze button; because despite all of their problems, Washington has not given them a reason to be concerned. Once the House Energy & Commerce Committee announced that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg would be appearing before our panel, constituents began flooding our offices with calls and emails. Many Tennesseans recalled the incident where I was subjected to censorship on Twitter. For the first time, they finally had an opportunity to speak up once there was an opportunity to hold a tech company accountable for their actions. Big Tech has gone from silencing us by blocking and censoring our content; to telling others what to think of us. We are left defenseless once they step into our shoes and speak for us. In Mr. Zuckerbergs testimony before the Senate, he acknowledged that Facebook needs to take a broader view of their responsibility including the outcome, and how people use those tools. I agree with that sentiment, and I think every CEO in the tech industry should as well. It is abundantly clear that this behavior is not limited to Facebook. If these companies truly believe in a free and open internet, they should allow an honest and open public discussion even when that means views they disagree with in flyover country are highlighted. For example, my Tennessee constituents have expressed concern over having their Christian movie trailers taken off YouTube, or their Facebook accounts being disabled, or their posts on Twitter being censored. As I said, I had a personal experience with the latter this last fall, and it was deeply troubling. I understand how these people felt. It started with confusion and ended with outrage. If these companies truly believe in a free and open internet, they should allow an honest and open public discussion even when that means views they disagree with in flyover country are highlighted. If they dont believe in that level of neutrality, perhaps we should heed Mr. Zuckerbergs advice and consider holding them to a higher standard that acknowledges their responsibility. What is the value of platforms that care more about inserting their biases than in providing a neutral place for people to discuss their ideas? This doesnt just apply to the words we choose to use to express ourselves, but also the way in which they classify us before the public. Recently, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy brought to our attention the fact that the California Republican Party was deemed a Nazi organization on the front page of Googles search results. Perhaps this was a genuine error in the way the knowledge panel functioned. But that brings us to another point. All of these mistakes only seem to flow in one direction; against conservatives. I, along with several other members of the committee, brought this to Mr. Zuckerbergs attention during our hearing earlier this year. Facebook thinks they can innovate their way out of this problem. For years the mantra of the left has been regulate ISPs, but dont regulate tech because there is so much competition. This doesnt just apply to net neutrality, it applies to privacy, to antitrust, and even to new telecommunications networks that they create. From where I sit, this looks like an outdated way of thinking. When it comes to search, Google has nearly 90 percent of the global market share. In other words, they monopolize the search function. With that growth, Google has grown accustomed to some of the benefits of incumbency that many dominant players in the market enjoy. At their core, their parent company (Alphabet) is an advertising business, and their products reflect that fact. Their search engine now priorotizes Googles content over others; and Yelp has learned this the hard way. When a consumer is searching for local goods or services, Googles own community search results now appear in a box above the traditional search results. If Google is unfairly using their competitive advantage to stifle their competitors hopes of attracting new customers, it may be appropriate for regulators to take a closer look at this practice. At the end of the day, Im here to remind Silicon Valley that no one gets a free pass in Congress. This is not a call for regulation, rather, a call for reflection. We must ensure a fair and competitive environment that will allow the free market to determine winners and losers. With so much changing in our internet ecosystem, Big Tech should take time to remember that although this light touch regulatory environment allowed them to flourish, they do not have a blank check. Anyone who thinks they are too big to regulate might want to put a call into Microsoft headquarters before its too late. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! The Trump administrations announcement Tuesday that the U.S. is leaving the notorious United Nations Human Rights Council has been characterized as an example of administrations deep-seated hostility to the international community. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the U.S. seems to be the only government that seriously worked to get the U.N. Human Rights Council to promote universal respect and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms in a fair and equal manner. The 12-year-old council is deeply flawed, inconsistent, heavily biased against Israel, and plagued by a membership list that includes some of the worlds worst human rights violators and dictatorships. None of these facts are in dispute. Over the past year, the U.S. has tried again and again to make the Human Rights Council work. Led by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and strongly supported by U.S. diplomats in Geneva, New York, Washington and around the world America has engaged bilaterally and multilaterally to promote reforms to address anti-Israel bias, membership quality, and other reforms to streamline the work and improve the efficiency of the Human Rights Council. These American efforts have been met with disinterest and hostility. Even European governments and human rights groups have opposed the U.S. reform effort out of fear that countries hostile to human rights would seize the opportunity to weaken the Human Rights Council further if that was even possible. This is a self-fulfilling prophesy that condemns the Human Rights Council to its gravely disappointing, biased and inefficient status quo. Worse, as long as this fear exists, any future reform effort will be stillborn. From the beginning, the Human Rights Council exhibited blatant bias against Israel, included human rights abusers among its membership, and was unable to confront serious human rights abuses in powerful or influential states the very same flaws that discredited its predecessor, the U.N. Human Rights Commission. The George W. Bush administration refused to join the Human Rights Council in 2006. But despite the councils record, the Obama administration joined it in 2009, arguing that the U.S. could improve the council by working from within. Admittedly, there was a reduction in the ratio of Human Rights Council resolutions focused on Israel after 2009. But did this make a difference for Israel? New countries were condemned, but the annual ritual of Israel condemnations continued unabated. According to the watchdog group U.N. Watch, as of the end of last month the Human Rights Council had adopted 80 condemnatory resolutions against Israel out of 169 overall against countries deemed human rights abusers 47 percent of the total. The Human Rights Council also has convened 28 special sessions devoted to human rights and other abuses, with eight (29 percent) focused on Israel. Next was Syria, the focus of five special sessions. Then came Burma, with two. That Israel should be the focus of nearly half of the Human Rights Councils condemnatory resolutions is absurd. That the council spends exponentially more time on Israel than on North Korea or Syria only underscores how its agenda has fallen victim to politicization and bias. Indeed, alone among the worlds countries, Israel is subject to a separate human rights item, known as Agenda Item 7, titled Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories. Every other country is examined under Item 4, Human rights situations that require the Councils attention. In addition, the non-Israel condemnations tend toward the low-hanging fruit. A widely lauded Human Rights Council resolution establishing a Commission of Inquiry for North Korea passed without a vote in 2013. Likewise, Syria has few friends willing to vote for it in the Human Rights Council these days. These resolutions are welcome, but the presence of the U.S. is not necessary for their adoption. By contrast, Human Rights Council is notably unable to condemn human rights violations in powerful or influential countries like China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe despite, respectively, terrible records of religious persecution, punishment of political dissent, hostility to freedom of the press, unequal rights for women, and use of force against civil society and government opponents. In fact, China and Cuba are among the 14 current members of the Human Rights Council ranked not free by Freedom House. Unfortunately, most governments either prefer a weak, biased Human Rights Council or are unwilling to undertake the effort necessary to reform it. This is not a recent development in response to the Trump administration. The Obama administration met similar resistance when it proposed reforms at a mandatory 2011 review of the council. The Trump administration was right to question why the U.S. should expend so much time, effort, and influence in trying to make U.N. Human Rights Council resolutions and actions slightly less harmful and biased oftentimes unsuccessfully when the other member states are unwilling to invest similar time and effort in actually improving the council itself. Leaving the Human Rights Council does not mean that the U.S. is abandoning its support for human rights. The U.S. could focus its efforts on passing stronger resolutions in another committee of the U.N. General Assembly that annually condemns a handful of states and adopts resolutions on other human rights issues. Ambassador Haley has called for the U.S. to use its foreign assistance to support priorities at the United Nations. Promoting human rights resolutions could be among them. Indeed, the U.S. could more prominently support human rights in its overall foreign aid programs. According to the Congressional Research Service, America allocated four times as much assistance to environmental issues as to issues involving the rule of law and human rights in the 2016 fiscal year. Likewise, the U.S. could expand its engagement and support for international bodies like Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and domestic institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute that monitor elections and promote human rights. Those dismissing the decision to withdraw from the Human Rights Council as an example of the Trump administrations rejection of multilateral engagement miss the target. The Trump administration recognized, rightly, that staying in the Human Rights Council would at best ensure continued bias, selectivity and disappointment. Worse, it would implicitly endorse those outcomes. Those condemning the U.S. for leaving should instead target their ire at the governments that refused to support U.S. efforts to fix the U.N. Human Rights Councils manifest flaws that, like the U.N. Commission on Human Rights before it, cast an ugly shadow on the reputation of the United Nations. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! While the focus in Washington, D.C. remains centered on the Mueller Russia probe, we cannot lose sight of another ongoing investigation on Capitol Hill. At the center of this developing scandal are the nefarious actions of a former Democratic congressional IT aide indicted last year on bank fraud charges, who at the time was being paid by a high-profile member of Congress although he was barred from the House computer systems. While the case has not received a lot of mainstream media attention, the details are sordid. Not only does the case raise serious national security and obstruction of justice concerns, it also suggests a blatant cover-up on the part of the lawmakers involved. Our story begins in the early 2000s when an IT contractor named Imran Awan began doing work for a number of House Members. He was later joined in this work by seven other family members who had almost little or no computer technology expertise, including his wife and two brothers. One of Awans brothers at 20 years old was earning the same amount as a member of Congress. After being fired from one office for incompetence the other congressional offices continued to pay him. In February of 2016 the House Office of Inspector General revealed that $120,000 in office equipment belonging to the office of Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., went missing. At the time, Imrans brother Abid Awan worked for Representative Clarke in an IT capacity and was believed to be involved in the equipments disappearance. Later that year the House Office of Inspector General informed both House leadership, and the Committee on Administration, that the Awans had gained unauthorized access into the servers of 15 House members who did not employ them! Additionally, it came to light that from October 2015 to April 2016, the Awans made excessive log ons, to the tune of 27 times per day, to a server belonging to the House Democratic Caucus. Not only does the case raise serious national security and obstruction of justice concerns, it also suggests a blatant cover-up on the part of the lawmakers involved. In January of 2017, a Democratic Caucus server was reported stolen. Shortly after the Awans were barred from accessing the House computer systems in February of 2017, many of the 44 House Members all Democrats -- who gave the Awans access to their constituent and other office data, fired them. One high profile member, however, continued to employ Imran Awan. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., employed Imran Awan from 2005 until he was arrested on bank fraud charges while attempting to flee the United States to Pakistan on July 25, 2017. Although Awan was barred from the House computer systems in February of that same year and unable to perform IT work for her office, Wasserman Schultz refused to remove Awan from house payroll and continued to pay him at the same rate. She compensated Awan with taxpayer funds for several months, all while he was under indictment for bank fraud charges. Since Wasserman Schultz failed to answer even basic questions about the nature of Awans employment in her office, last July my organization asked the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate her for blatantly disregarding House Ethics rules, as members of Congress are directly responsible for ensuring their staff are only paid for official public work. What makes this situation even more bizarre and troubling is in April of 2017, during the time Wasserman Schultz kept Awan employed, he left a laptop belonging to her in an abandoned public phone booth in the House Rayburn Office Building, along with a Pakistani ID card, copies of Awans drivers license and congressional ID badge, and letters to the U.S. attorney. After this incident, Wasserman Schultz went on a public attack against the United States Capitol Police demanding they return her laptop, even publicly threatening Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa with consequences if it wasnt returned. Then a few months later she denied it was her laptop saying I have never seen that laptop. I dont know whats on the laptop. The laptops username was RepDWS. These are only some of the bizarre facts of this case. The victims have been described as 44 members of Congress, but are they? Taxpayer funds were used to purchase equipment and pay salaries. The data likely included private citizens information and government information. The members of Congress were entrusted with, and expected to keep secure, our government property and our datathe citizens are the true victims here. Its interesting that members of Congress always hold businesses publicly accountable when there is a high-profile breach of customer data, but in this case they have failed to take action. To date, the Awans have not been charged with a single crime related to illegally accessing and stealing congressional computer servers as part of a sophisticated criminal enterprise. Given whats at stake here in terms of national security and the security of our citizens, our government must demand accountability, even in investigation-saturated and -weary Washington. The ex-CIA software engineer suspected of leaking a massive, highly secret trove of U.S. hacking tools and source code to WikiLeaks has been charged in federal court with a series of Espionage Act violations. Joshua Schulte, 29, allegedly disclosed thousands of top-secret files outlining the extent of the CIAs cyberwarfare capabilities in an unprecedented breach that triggered an intensive investigation even before WikiLeaks published the information in March 2017. In March and June 2016, Schulte modified a computer run by the U.S. Intelligence Agency to delet[e] records of his activities and den[y] others access to the system, prosecutors charge in a superseding indictment unveiled Monday. The former CIA engineer was accused formally in the indictment of lying to federal investigators, illegally gathering and transmitting national security information, theft of government property, and other offenses. As alleged, Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims, assistant New York FBI field director William F. Sweeney, Jr., said in a statement. As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of Classified Information. Schulte was charged last year with knowingly receiving and possessing child pornography, and those charges are also listed in the latest federal grand jury indictment. WIKILEAKS RELEASES THE ENTIRE HACKING CAPACITY OF THE CIA Prosecutors signposted the new charges weeks ago, even as his defense team accuses the U.S. of scapegoating. As the evidence is flushed out, it will become clear that Mr. Schulte is hardly the villain the government makes him out to be, Sabrina P. Shroff, Schultes public defender, said in a statement Monday. A CIA spokesperson said in a statement: "We are grateful to the Department of Justice, and others throughout the government, who worked diligently to bring this indictment in connection with a grave breech of national security." In a strange twist, while he was still working with the CIA, Schulte reportedly tweeted that WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning should be killed for her disclosures. Kill the prick, he reportedly said on Twitter in response to a story about Manning. Last March, WikiLeaks touted its stunning 8,000-plus page disclosure as the full hacking capacity of the CIA, saying it was the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency. The 8,761 documents and files released as Vault 7 Part 1, and titled Year Zero were obtained from an isolated, high-security network at the CIAs Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Va., WikiLeaks claimed. Prosecutors charge that Schulte committed the crimes in Virginia, where the CIA is headquartered. Fox News Cody Derespina contributed to this report. Congressional lawmakers met with men, women and children detained at the international boundary in several immigration detention facilities, where Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi called President Trumps zero tolerance immigration policy an utter atrocity that debases Americas values and our legacy as a beacon of hope, opportunity and freedom. Stop this inhumane, barbaric policy, rescind your actions, take responsibility for it, Pelosi said in San Diego, according to KABC. This is not about immigration. This is about humanity. Its about family. Its about who we are as a country. Pelosi said Republicans have a moral and legal responsibility to end new policies separating migrant children from their parents after entering the United States from Mexico. Blame for every mistreated child, heartbroken mother and father and broken family rests squarely on the president, and only he can end the trauma, said Pelosi, who was joined at the podium with Rep. Juan Vargas, D-Calif., and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Amid the international outcry, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Monday that the growing crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border is not new. We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does for doing the job that the American people expect us to do, Nielsen told the National Sheriffs Association during a speech in New Orleans. Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards. The separation of immigrant children from their parents at the border has drawn a barrage of criticism, targeting the policy instituted last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. That policy says that any adult who enters the U.S. illegally is to be prosecuted criminally. U.S. protocol does not allow children to be detained with their parents because they, unlike their moms and dads, arent charged with a crime. Fox News' Samuel Chamberlain and The Associated Press contributed to this report. The Pentagon confirmed Monday that major U.S. military exercises this summer in South Korea would be suspended, following President Trumps decision. Dana White, the Pentagons chief spokeswoman, said in a late afternoon statement: Consistent with President Trumps commitment and in concert with our Republic of Korea ally, the United States military has suspended all planning for this Augusts defensive wargame (Freedom Guardian). The U.S. and South Korea regularly have held major joint exercises with South Korea. The summer exercise, Ulchi Freedom Guardian, consisted mainly of computer simulations to hone joint decision-making and planning. Some 17,500 American and 50,000 South Korean troops participated last year. The drill, held since the 1970s, usually took place in August. White added: We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent wargames have been made. Appearing to catch both South Korea and the Pentagon by surprise, last week Trump promised to end war games with South Korea, after meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. We will be stopping the war games, which will save us a tremendous amount of money, unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should, Trump told reporters after his meeting last Tuesday with Kim in Singapore. But well be saving a tremendous amount of money. Plus, I think its very provocative. The president has suggested strongly that the meeting with Kim ensured that North Korea was no longer a threat. Kim has labeled the exercises practice for an invasion of North Korea. Holding back the war games during the negotiations was my request because they are VERY EXPENSIVE and set a bad light during a good faith negotiation, Trump tweeted Sunday. Also, quite provocative. Can start up immediately if talks break down, which I hope will not happen! Military.com reported that later this week a Pentagon meeting with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton would discuss future defensive cooperation with South Korea under the countries alliance. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Minnesota Senate hopeful Richard Painters campaign is lit. The outspoken Trump critic and former White House chief ethics counsel during President George W. Bushs administration has produced one of the most bizarre, yet memorable, ads of the 2018 cycle -- showing him standing in front of a literal dumpster fire. Some people see a dumpster fire and do nothing but watch the spectacle, a stern Painter says of the inferno, apparently meant to symbolize the Trump administration and Washington. Some are too scared to face the danger, or they think it will benefit them if they let it keep on burning. Painter announced earlier this year that he was switching parties to run as a Democrat to replace disgraced former Sen. Al Franken. His dumpster fire ad is a play on one of the most overused metaphors on Twitter. Painter, though, embraces the meme. Some of them shrug and say, 'Oh, all this talk about dumpster fire, its just fake news, Painter, who is currently a law professor at the University of Minnesota, says in the ad. There is an inferno raging in Washington. But here in the 'Land of 10,000 Lakes,' we know how to put out a fire, Painter says. In the ad's dramatic climax, a gush of water douses the fire and the threat is extinguished. Painter has made regular appearances on cable outlets slamming Trump. On Twitter, he asked supporters to contribute, but added: no PACs, no dark money, and no rubles. Painter is running in the Democratic primary against Sen. Tina Smith, who was appointed to fill Frankens seat by Gov. Mark Dayton after Franken resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct. A Democratic U.S. House hopeful from Kentucky compared the election of President Donald Trump to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. Amy McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot who won last month's Democratic primary for the state's 6th Congressional District, was caught making the controversial remarks back in November 2017 during a Meet the Candidates Series" event, the Washington Free Beacon reported. "And then, of course, the results of the election, we have a new commander-in-chief. And that morning I woke up like somebody had sucker punched me. I mean, I felt like, what has just happened to my country?" McGrath said in the recently revealed footage from the event. "The only feeling I can describe that's any close to it was the feeling I had after 9/11. What just happened, where are we going from here,' and it was that just sinking feeling of sadness, and I didn't know what to do." The 9/11 terror attack was the deadliest attack on the U.S. soil in the countrys history. Around 3,000 people died, including many officials from the Pentagon and first responders. The Republicans quickly jumped on McGraths remarks, calling her to apologize for the comments she made last year. "In her own words, Amy McGrath woke up the morning after President Donald Trumps election feeling the same way she felt after a terrorist attack where 2,977 Americans were killed," NRCC press secretary Maddie Anderson told The Beacon. "Her rhetoric is deeply insensitive, divisive, and disappointing. She should apologize immediately for saying that our Presidents election caused her to experience the same emotions as the families of 9/11 victims. McGrath, who is heavily backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committees (DCCC) effort to flip Republican districts, will face incumbent Republican Rep. Andy Barr in the upcoming midterm elections. In 2016, Barr won the race by over 20 points against his Democratic challenger. A Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate scolded his own party for its embrace of identity politics and victimology, in a striking appeal to do away with subgroups and come together. Matt Flynn is one of 10 candidates in a crowded Democratic primary field, seeking the nomination to compete against Republican Gov. Scott Walker in November. Flynn, who previously was state Democratic Party chairman, complained about the culture in an interview last week with WHBYs Fresh Take with Josh Dukelow. Our party right now, and Im probably the only one who says this, is pickled in identity politics and victimology, Flynn said. When I was at the convention recently, in Oshkosh, there were multiple caucuses of, there were all these subgroups, and there is no assimilation of the party anymore. According to the Democratic Party of Wisconsins website, the party has the American Indian Caucus, the Black Caucus, the Labor Caucus, the Latino Caucus, the LGBT Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, the Rural Caucus, the Veterans Caucus and the Womens Caucus. When I was the chairman, there were no caucuses, Flynn said. When asked how he stood out from other primary candidates, Flynn noted that he was the only veteran, but also said he wants to get rid of these types of caucuses. A lot of these other people. They are very, very nice people, but they scurry around with all of these various identities and so on, and I think that sets me apart as well, Flynn said. So my own belief is that we should get rid of the caucuses in the Democratic Party and come together again. He added: There were no caucuses under Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and John F. Kennedy, and there wont be under Matt Flynn if hes the governor. CLARENCE THOMAS 'WORN DOWN' WITH VICTIMHOOD CULTURE Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking from the other end of the political spectrum, made similar remarks in February. In a rare public appearance, Thomas said he was exhausted with how everyone seems to consider themselves a victim these days. At some point, were going to be fatigued with everybody being the victim, Thomas, the second African-American to serve on the Supreme Court, said during an on-stage interview at the Library of Congress in Washington. Thomas, a conservative appointed to the bench in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, recalled speaking with a young black woman in Kansas who told him, Im really tired of having to play the role of being black. I just want to go to school. I just get worn down, Thomas said. Peter Strzok, the FBI agent under fire over a series of anti-Trump text messages, was "escorted" from the FBI building, his lawyer confirmed to Fox News on Tuesday. Strzok's lawyer, Aitan Goelman, argued that even though his client has "played by the rules," he has been targeted by "unfounded personal attacks, political games and inappropriate information leaks." "All of this seriously calls into question the impartiality of the disciplinary process, which now appears tainted by political influence," a statement from Goelman said. He said that Strzok "has complied with every FBI procedure, including being escorted from the building as part of the ongoing internal proceedings." The attorney did not say exactly when Strzok was escorted out. "Instead of publicly calling for a long-serving FBI agent to be summarily fired, politicians should allow the disciplinary process to play out free from political pressure," Goelman said. "Our leaders and the public should be very concerned with how readily such influence has been allowed to undermine due process and the legal protections owed to someone who has served his country for so long. Pete Strzok and the American people deserve better." The FBI had no comment when contacted by Fox News. News of Strzok's removal came after Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed during a Congressional hearing earlier Tuesday that his office was looking into whether Strzok's anti-Trump bias played a role in the launch of the bureau's Russia probe. Horowitz's report on the Clinton email investigation, which was released last week, revealed a text sent by Strzok to his then-colleague and lover Lisa Page. The IG report said Page texted Strzok in August 2016, prior to then-candidate Donald Trump's election night win, saying "[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!" "No. No he won't. We'll stop it," Strzok responded. Roughly 50,000 text messages were sent between the pair over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign and Trump's first year in the White House. Among them included comments that focused on special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, while others bashed the president. Others also showed an allegience to former FBI Director James Comey in the wake of his firing. When asked to comment about the FBI official being escorted from the agency, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) told Fox News that "it's way past time for Peter Strzok to hopefully start to find a different career and restore some credibility to the FBI that most of us love and admire and certainly lady justice has to be someone who wears a blindfold and with Peter Strzok it was obvious with his text messages that that was not the case." Fox Business' Bruce Becker and Fox News' Bill Mears, Brooke Singman, Alex Pappas and Jason Donner contributed to this report. The House moved last week to push through dozens of bills aimed at curtailing the nationwide opioid epidemic and lawmakers said theyre not done yet. In what Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., called a suite of opioid-related legislation, the House passed through 38 bills last week that tackled addiction and recovery efforts, research on non-addictive pain medications and other modalities of treatment. This week, they have 21 more on the calendar. Its just one story after another of crisis and death and addiction. Its swept across the country, Walden, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Fox News. People didnt really get its depth and scope and breadth until it was too late. Most of the already passed bills are modest and bipartisan. Some tackle research and studies, including one that would give the National Institutes of Health (NIH) more ability to conduct research into non-addictive pain medications. Other bills would provide incentives, such as establishing a loan repayment program of up to $250,000 for professionals who work in the substance use disorder treatment field in particularly severe areas. Another bill would have HHS establish an electronic dashboard linking to all of the nationwide efforts and strategies to combat the opioid crisis. Jessies Law, too, was passed by the House. The law seeks to make sure medical professionals are aware of a patients medical history, including with substance abuse disorders, before making decisions based on prescription treatment options. Its just one story after another of crisis and death and addiction. Its swept across the country. Rep. Greg Walden The bill is named after Jessica Grubb, a 30-year-old Ann Arbor, Michigan, woman who had overcome a heroin addiction, according to the Detroit News. When she needed hip surgery, the discharging doctor was never made aware of her past addictions and gave her Oxycodone. Grubb overdosed and died that night, the Detroit News reported. This bill would only give the patient the right to inform medical professionals about his or her history; it would not give someone else, including a family member, the ability to divulge private information, a House Energy and Commerce Committee spokeswoman told Fox News. But this is not a one-and-done, Walden said. This will take a committed, multi-year effort to dramatically change the prescribing behaviors, the treatment modalities, when it comes to pain management. On the calendar this week are 21 additional bills pertaining to the opioid epidemic. Once theyre out of the House, Walden said they will bundle them in way that will be more manageable for the Senate. Theres going to be a lot of back-and-forth with the Senate, with the administration, to perfect what weve done and balance what theyve done and get it on the presidents desk," he added. Despite the volume of bills Walden has pushed through, not everyone is happy with the efforts. Collectively, these bills do not go far enough in providing the resources necessary for an epidemic of this magnitude, New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told Roll Call. While these bills are well-intentioned, Republicans ongoing efforts to repeal [ObamaCare], gut Medicaid and take away critical protections or people with pre-existing conditions would have a devastating impact on people who suffer from opioid substance abuse. Walden dismissed the criticism, calling it factually uninformed and pointing to the bipartisan nature of the majority of the bills. A handful of measures that passed the House are considered to be a bit contentious, including one that would create new criminal penalties for making or trafficking certain synthetic drugs containing fentanyl. Democrats complain the legislation would give the government unfettered power to decide which drugs would be banned, without scientific input. Walden said in combatting the opioid epidemic, lawmakers are trying to ensure they dont overreact and deny the legitimate prescribing of pain medications for people who suffer chronic pain, including cancer patients. He also said lawmakers are being cautious with certain proposals that could incidentally sweep up researchers and make them felons. Unlike the Senate, Walden said the suite of House bills didnt include any that dictate the number of days pain medicine can be prescribed. He said he recognized in more rural areas, a person might have to travel quite far to a pharmacy to pick up medication and wouldnt be able to make that trip frequently. Nearly 64,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016, including around two-thirds whose deaths involved opioids, according to the most recent figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An estimated 11.8 people misused opioids that year, mostly by abusing prescription pain relievers. Opioids are natural or synthetic drugs that can be prescribed for pain relief, but they can also be made illicitly or legally provided prescriptions can be abused. West Virginia had the highest death rate from drug overdoses in 2016, with Ohio, New Hampshire, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania following close behind. The death toll has more than tripled since 2000 when about 17,000 people died from drug abuse. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed publicly Monday that his office is investigating James Comey for his handling of classified information as part of memos he shared documenting discussions with President Trump. The inspector generals comments confirmed reports dating back to April that the ex-FBI director was facing scrutiny, amid revelations that at least two of the memos he shared with his friend, Columbia University Professor Daniel Richman, contained information now deemed classified. The confirmation came during Monday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray testified on the findings in the IGs report on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe. We received a referral on that from the FBI, Horowitz said, in response to questioning from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, about the Comey memos. We are handling that referral and we will issue a report when the matter is complete and consistent with the law and rules. Comey, back in April, confirmed to Fox News' Bret Baier that the IG's office had interviewed him with regard to the memos, but downplayed the questions over classified information as "frivolous" -- saying the real issue was whether he complied with internal policies. Grassley, though, told Horowitz on Monday, "I don't happen to think that is frivolous." Comey, in testimony before Congress last year, acknowledged he shared the memos with the intention of leaking to the press and spurring the appointment of a special counsel. In April, Fox News initially learned that Horowitz was looking into whether classified information was given to unauthorized sources as part of a broader review of Comeys communications outside the bureauincluding media contact. Comey, whom Trump fired in May 2017, denied that sharing the memos with his legal team constituted a leak of classified information. Instead, he compared the process to keeping a diary. I didnt consider it part of an FBI file, Comey said. It was my personal aide-memoireI always thought of it as mine. In his testimony last year before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey said he made the decision to document the interactions in a way that would not trigger security classification. But in seven Comey memos handed over to Congress in April, eight of the 15 pages had redactions under classified exceptions. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed Tuesday that he is investigating whether FBI official Peter Strzoks anti-Trump bias factored into the launch of the bureaus Russia probe. During a joint hearing before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees, Horowitz testified that his office was reviewing Strzoks anti-Trump text messages as part of a separate probe related to the Russia investigation. It clearly shows a biased state of mind, Horowitz said, referring to text messages written as the FBI probe of Hillary Clinton's private email use was wrapping up and the Russia probe was getting underway. The most infamous text, revealed in last week's IG report on the Clinton email case, showed Strzok responding "We'll stop it" when his colleague and lover Lisa Page sought assurances that Trump would not become president. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., questioned Horowitz on whether that apparent bias influenced the initiation of the investigation into Russia interference in the 2016 campaign and potential collusion with Trump's team. Thats a matter weve got under review and are looking at right now, Horowitz said. It was revealed earlier this year that Horowitzs office was investigating allegations of government surveillance abuse tied to the start of the Russia probe. But Horowitzs testimony, meant to answer questions about the conclusion of the Clinton case review, revealed some of the specifics involved in the ongoing Russia case review, including the Strzok texts. Goodlatte pressed Horowitz over the politically charged text messages -- which the report described as hostile -- and noted how several were sent near the start of the Russia probe. Correct, Horowitz said. In fact, there were these other text messages in roughly the same time period. The exchange came minutes after House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., also outlined the curious timing of a string of texts between Strzok and Page, just as the Russia probe, which Strzok was involved in, was beginning. Gowdy laid out a timelinebeginning July 5, 2016 when Comey recommended no criminal charges against Clinton, to July 28, 2016, when the FBI initiated a counterintelligence investigation into the Russia issue. Three weeks after Clinton is exonerated by Comey, Strzok is leading the investigation into Russia and coordination with the Trump campaign, Gowdy said Tuesday. And damn this feels momentous. Because this matters. The other one did, too, but that was to ensure we didnt F something up. This matters because this MATTERS, Strzok texted just days after the Russia probe began in July 2016. It almost sounds like they were going through the motions with the Clinton investigationbut boy they sure were excited about the Russia one, Gowdy said. Gowdy noted that on Aug. 6, 2016, Page texted Strzok, who was leading the FBIs Russia investigation, telling him that he was meant to protect the country from that menace. But a new text revealed in Horowitzs report last week, from Aug. 8, 2016, revealing Strzok vowing to stop Trump from becoming president. According to the report, Page texted Strzok in August 2016 and said: [Trumps] not ever going to become president, right? Right?! No. No he wont. Well stop it, Strzok responded. Gowdy said that text message was evidence that Strzok had already prejudged the outcome, noting that Strzok already determined Trump should not be president of the United States just days into the investigation. By August 15, 2016, Strzok and Page texted about an insurance policy should Trump become president. I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andys office - that theres no way he gets elected - but Im afraid we cant take that risk, Strzok texted on Aug. 15, 2016. Its like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before youre 40. Horowitz testified, in response to Gowdys timeline and the texts between Strzok and Page, that the bias found here was extremely serious. I cant imagine FBI agents even suggesting that they would use their powers to investigate any candidate for office, Horowitz said. I thought this was completely antithetical to the core values of the department and extremely serious. The office of the inspector general, though, found no evidence that the bias found impacted prosecutorial decisions in the Clinton email probe. Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is being held in "solitary confinement" after his bail was revoked, in an "outrageous violation" of his civil liberties, former Trump lawyer John Dowd told Fox News on Tuesday. "Paul is in solitary confinement for his own safety from the general prison population," Dowd said. "The warden is concerned that someone would violently attack Paul just for street cred. "They make all prisoners return to their cells whenever Paul needs to leave his cell," Dowd, who said he is a friend of Manafort's attorney, told Fox News. Dowd did not say exactly where Manafort, 69, was being held. A call to the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Virginia indicated Manafort was being held there; he was sent to the jail on Friday after U.S District Judge Amy Berman Jackson revoked his $10 million bail, citing new witness tampering charges brought by the special counsel probing Russia election meddling, Robert Mueller. "You have abused the trust placed in you six months ago," Jackson told Manafort, rejecting his attorney's arguments that it was unclear whom Manafort could contact while on bail. Over the weekend, news outlets including The Washington Post reported Manafort was booked into the "VIP" section of the jail, keeping him separate from other inmates to an extent. WATCH: JUDGE REVOKES MANAFORT'S BAIL, SENDS HIM TO JAIL The onetime Trump campaign manager was indicted in October on charges that included conspiring to launder money and working as an unregistered foreign agent. He was initially placed under house arrest. "This is harsh pretrial punishment and an outrageous violation of Pauls civil liberties." Former Trump attorney John Dowd Dowd, who resigned in March as Trump's lead outside counsel on the ongoing Russia probe, characterized Jackson's punishment as unduly "harsh" and implied that Jackson, who was nominated to her post by President Barack Obama in 2010, may have been politically motivated. "Pauls counsel are filing an expedited appeal,' Dowd told Fox News. "This is harsh pretrial punishment and an outrageous violation of Pauls civil liberties at the hands of an Obama appointee." Reached for comment on Dowd's statements, Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni told Fox News, "I don't have anything to add." Manafort's trial before Jackson in Washington, D.C., is expected to begin in September. He has an additional federal case pending in Virginia, and analysts say the bail revocation may complicate his ability to coordinate with his attorneys on both cases. A parade of candidates of are angling to replace Texas Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi, whose seat has been vacant for months. Farenthold was dogged by sexual harassment allegations and ethics scandals when he abruptly resigned in April. That set off a scramble to fill his seat with nine candidates entering the race to try and fill it. The high interest in the race comes even though the term will likely be for three months. In two weeks, voters will head to the polls for the special election, but its highly likely there will be a second round. The top vote-getter has to capture more than 50 percent of the votes on June 30 to win the race outright. But the term ends Jan. 3, so there will be another race for the seat in November. Only three candidates are vying for the seat in the general election. There are three Republicans, three Democrats two independents and one libertarian in the running for the special election. Republicans are fighting to keep the seat theyve held for eight years but Democrats believe they have a shot at reclaiming the district, which is predominantly Republican and Hispanic. Republican Michael Cloud is the partys front-runner. People in our district understand how important the principles in our Constitution are and the principles our founders gave us, he said. And, Im sure that theyre going to support those same principles in this election. Eric Holguin, a 30-year-old Democrat, is hoping his youth will resonate with those looking for a fresh face. Cloud, Daniel Tinus, a libertarian, and Holguin are the only ones in the large pack on the November ballot. The others only plan to hold the seat for a few months. It would be ideal if one of the three candidates on the November ballot won the special [election] as it would promote a degree of continuity, Tinus said. So, I question the motives of those who are not on the November ballot in relation to the needs of the district. The last thing these counties need right now is the additional cost of holding a runoff election in the fall following the upcoming special election, Bruun said in an e-mail. I am solely focused on my own, Cutright said. I welcome a challenge and am happy to see so many individuals willing to serve their community and country. The Trump administration is facing mounting pressure from fellow Republicans and other allies to end the practice of separating children from parents caught illegally crossing the border, as backlash over the enforcement policy quickly escalates into a political crisis. Some GOP lawmakers want the administration to stop the policy on its own, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and others are proposing emergency legislation. Senate Majority Whip Cornyn, R-Texas, said Tuesday he thinks Congress might be able to act on the issue this week. We need to fix it, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell added. House Republicans reportedly are working on their own plan to allow children to be detained for extended periods with their parents, loosening rules that now limit the amount of time minors can be held to 20 days. Meanwhile, GOP governors are pulling their state's National Guard troops from the border in protest. All this comes as President Trump and top Cabinet officials put the blame on Congress, in the run-up to a meeting late Tuesday between the president and House Republicans -- where discussion of the family-separation backlash will likely dominate. On Twitter, Trump has not backed down. "Democrats are the problem. They dont care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They cant win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!" he tweeted Tuesday morning. He also said, "We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally," noting most of those detained at the border journeyed without their parents. He again called on Congress to change the laws. Speaking at a business event Tuesday in Washington, Trump added that child smugglers are exploiting loopholes and, "All we need is good legislation and we can have it taken care of." While legislation is being discussed, the family separations stem from the Justice Department's zero tolerance policy, which calls for all illegal border crossers to be prosecuted. Because a 1997 legal agreement and related policies say children cannot be jailed with adults for extended periods, the administration is separating the families. But the administration is facing bipartisan calls to change its approach. Cruzs bill would double the number of immigration judges to 750 and mandate that illegal immigrant families be kept together, unless there has been "aggravated criminal conduct" or the threat of harm to the children, according to Cruz's office. The new legislation would also authorize new temporary shelters for immigrant families, and provide for expedited resolution of asylum claims within 14 days. SEN. TED CRUZ INTRODUCES 'EMERGENCY' BILL TO KEEP IMMIGRANT FAMILIES TOGETHER "All Americans are rightly horrified by the images we are seeing on the news, children in tears pulled away from their mothers and fathers," Cruz said. "This must stop. Now." The controversy has extended across Capitol Hill. During a hearing Tuesday meant to examine the Justice Department inspector general's report on the Hillary Clinton email probe, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., used his opening statement to call on Republicans to stand up to the president and say no to child internment camps. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has called the current situation cruel. "The time is now for the White House to end the cruel, tragic separations of families," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said. Figures ranging from religious conservative leaders to the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have condemned the policy. At the state level, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, both Republicans, announced that they would reverse decisions to send National Guard troops to the border, citing the separation of families. "Until this policy of separating children from their families has been rescinded, Maryland will not deploy any National Guard resources to the border. Earlier this morning, I ordered our 4 crewmembers & helicopter to immediately return from where they were stationed in New Mexico," Hogan tweeted Tuesday. Trump and members of his administration have said that it is Congress that needs to act, as they are just enforcing the laws on the books. Now is the best opportunity ever for Congress to change the ridiculous and obsolete laws on immigration, Trump said on Twitter Tuesday. "Fundamentally, we are enforcing the law," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said on The Ingraham Angle on Monday night. "Hopefully people will get the message ... and not break across the border unlawfully." Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, in the face of tough questioning from the White House press corps, defended the policy at a heated press briefing on Monday. Specifically, Nielsen called for Congress to overturn the Flores Settlement Agreement and expansions of it which do not allow families to be housed together, and accused critics of wanting only open borders, which she said would benefit child smugglers. Those who criticize the enforcement of our laws have offered only one countermeasure: open borders, the quick release of all illegal alien families and the decision not to enforce our laws, she said. This policy would be disastrous. She said there has been a 314 percent increase in adults and children arriving at the border fraudulently in the last five months. Nielsen also blasted Congress for demanding the administration not enforce the laws that Congress itself has passed. Surely it is the beginning of the unraveling of democracy when the body who makes the laws, instead of changing them, tells the enforcement body not to enforce the law. Yet other Republicans are now putting pressure on the administration to change course. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel, former first lady Laura Bush said in an op-ed for The Washington Post. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart." The administrations current family separation policy is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded, Arizona senator and longtime Trump foe John McCain said in a statement. The administration has the power to rescind this policy. It should do so now. While some of those voices are establishment GOP voices who have often grimaced at Trumps hardline immigration policies and rhetoric, even some on the right flank of the party are demanding immediate action. A number of immigration bills are under consideration in Congress, addressing the family separations to various degrees. A bill supported by Republican leaders, which would end the diversity lottery visa and fund Trumps border wall, would also end the separations by housing children with adults. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said on Fox & Friends that a more conservative bill being introduced Tuesday afternoon would also address the issue while keeping a narrower focus and keeping out more controversial topics. What it does it deals with this issue we're having at the border with separation of children from their parents, he said. It also deals with some of the asylum issues at the border, but it also takes out some of the more controversial issues like sanctuary cities, the wall, [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], and it keeps it very narrow, he said. Fox News Gregg Re and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Attorney General Jeff Sessions forcefully rebuked critics who fault the Trump administration for the separation of illegal immigrant families at the border, saying that the Obama administration's policies are partially to blame. Speaking to Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" Monday night, Sessions said illegal immigrants have taken advantage of the U.S. "We have watched what happened with the Obama policies, and over years, we went from 15,000 illegal entries to 75,000 -- this is a huge loophole in our system that's attracting more and more people, as more and more people understand that, under previous policies, if they enter the country unlawfully, that nothing will happen," Sessions said. The attorney general denied that children are being abused or kept in inhumane conditions, saying that the Department of Health and Human Services spent approximately a billion dollars last year taking care of children caught crossing the border. "We are taking care of these children; they are not being abused," Sessions added. "We've had a big surge of families bringing children or some adults bringing children with them." In response to critics who have compared immigrant detention centers to Nazi Germany, Sessions said "we need to be rational and thoughtful" about the situation. "In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country," Sessions said, drawing a contrast that was criticized on Twitter as being tone deaf. Asked whether children are being separated as part of an intentional deterrence policy to discourage illegal immigration, Sessions suggested fewer border crossings could be a positive result of the administration's zero-tolerance stance. "Fundamentally, we are enforcing the law," Sessions said. "Hopefully people will get the message ... and not break across the border unlawfully." Sessions had touted the possible deterrent effect of separating children in announcing the administration's new zero-tolerance policy, saying adults should not bring children across the border from Mexico. Concerning complaints from top House GOP members that the DOJ and FBI have been slow to produce documents concerning political bias in their investigations, Sessions also said that "we have a responsibility to respond to Congress" and vowed to be responsive to their subpoenas. DHS HEAD CALLS ON CONGRESS TO ACT, SAYS BORDER SEPARATIONS ARE 'NOT NEW' Earlier Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas announced a plan to introduce comprehensive "emergency legislation" designed to end unnecessary separations of illegal immigrant children from their parents. The bill, an answer to President Trump's call for a congressional solution to the situation, would double the number of immigration judges to 750 and mandate that illegal immigrant families be kept together, unless there has been "aggravated criminal conduct" or threat of harm to the children, according to Cruz's office. Cruz's bill would also authorize new temporary shelters for immigrant families, and provide for expedited resolution of asylum claims within 14 days. On Monday, all 49 Senate Democrats announced their support for the Keep Families Together Act. That bill has a different, even higher standard for separating kids at the border, and calls for an accountability report on asylum claims. It does not contain an equivalent to Cruz's provisions to accelerate the asylum application process or to deploy more judges. SEN. TED CRUZ ANNOUNCES LEGISLATIVE SOLUTION TO KEEPING FAMILIES TOGETHER AT THE BORDER Under current law, adults can be separated from their families as soon as criminal proceedings against them are commenced. The Trump administration's new "zero-tolerance" policy had led to an increase in these prosecutions. But the administration has consistently said that the so-called Flores consent decree -- crafted during former President Bill Clinton's administration -- is what prohibits them from keeping parents and children together during these prosecutions, by limiting how long children can remain in federal custody. The Trump administration is expected to announce Tuesday that the U.S. will withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council. A U.S. official confirmed the decision to Fox News. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley will use a joint statement in Washington at 5p.m. to announce and explain the departure from the 47-member council. Speaking to Fox News, a senior official said that the UNHRC protects human rights abusers, allows them to serve on the council and shows bias in rendering decisions. The official claimed that countries like China, Egypt and Russia worked to undermine U.S. reform efforts and that the council has passed more resolutions this year condemning Israel than Iran, Syria and North Korea combined. Trump has long been critical of the UNHRC, which he has accused of showing a bias against Israel. Haley last year slammed the body for its relentless, pathological campaign against Israel. Trumps National Security Adviser John Bolton opposed the creation of the body when he served as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under President George W. Bush. The UNHRC, meanwhile, opened its session on Monday with a blistering attack by Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, on Trumps immigration policy calling the policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S. southern border unconscionable. Trump is facing intense criticism both domestically and on the international stage over that policy. The move to exit the UNHRC extends a broader Trump administration pattern of stepping back from international agreements and forums under the president's "America First" policy. Since taking office, the administration has announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the U.N. educational and cultural organization and the Iran nuclear deal. Other contentious moves have included slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum against key trading partners, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the U.S. Embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv. Haley has been the driving force behind the latest move, which would be unprecedented in the 12-year history of the council. No country has ever dropped out voluntarily. Libya was kicked out seven years ago. The move could reinforce the perception that the Trump administration is seeking to advance Israel's agenda on the world stage, just as it prepares to unveil its long-awaited peace plan despite Palestinian outrage over the embassy relocation. Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, is visiting the Middle East this week as the White House works to lay the groundwork for unveiling the plan. Fox News' Rich Edson, Ben Evansky and the Associated Press contributed to this report. A Republican president has a problem when he's lost the New York Post. And religious leaders who have backed him on just about everything he's done. And the last Republican first lady. And his own wife feels compelled to speak out. That's where Donald Trump is right now on the practice that has separated nearly 2,000 children from their parents at the border, warehousing them in converted stores and buildings. In the face of a tsunami of critical media coverage, some of Trump's own allies are breaking with him on this one. And here's why. The immigration debate is fraught with complexity, with arguments about border security, chain migration and building a wall on one side and about protecting the "Dreamers" brought here as kids on the other. But there is nothing complicated about the heart-rending images of children, some of them babies and toddlers, being seized from their parents. The pictures are searing, and they are offensive to a great many Americans. Even the president says he hates seeing the kids taken away. He said yesterday the family separations are "so sad" and again called on the Democrats to make a deal. But that leads to the second reason why this sad spectacle is so politically damaging for him. Trump keeps insisting that he has no choice, that his administration is following the law, and that it's the Democrats' fault for not reaching an immigration compromise. The great majority of journalists, fact-checkers and independent experts who have looked at the situation say that's not true. The practice is based on a policy that Trump could change today. Reporters are out-and-out accusing him of lying. There is video of Jeff Sessions, a few months ago, announcing the new "zero tolerance" policy, and explicitly warning that children may be taken from their parents. White House adviser Stephen Miller called it "a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period" in a New York Times interview last week. The president says he's not using the separation of children as leverage to get a better deal on immigration legislation. But the appearance is very different. Such pressure tactics are common in legislative horse trading, but the family separations are now widely viewed as beyond the pale. Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen isn't getting much traction for accusing the press of "irresponsible and unproductive" misreporting. CBS's Gayle King said the Border Patrol objected to the terminology that the kids are being kept in "cages" but said the word isn't inaccurate. And Fox's Judge Andrew Napolitano yesterday ripped the policy as "child abuse." Some Trump supporters defend the practice as a deterrent, meaning that illegal immigrants would be less likely to try to cross the border, or apply for asylum, if they know they might lose their children. That may well be true. But the pictures of crying kids have proven toxic. In a rare policy statement, Melania Trump said she "hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together," and "believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with a heart." Laura Bush, in a column for The Washington Post, wrote: I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart." And there were these strong words in an editorial in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post: "It's not just that this looks terrible in the eyes of the world. It is terrible: at least 2,000 children ripped from their parents' arms, sometimes literally, in just the first six weeks." Anthony Scaramucci, the Trump loyalist and former communications director, told CNN about his former boss: "He's got to step in there and end this thing because I think it's an atrocious policy, it's inhumane, it's offensive to the average American. It does not represent American values." The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has denounced the policy, and the Rev. Franklin Graham, a Trump supporter who called the Stormy Daniels allegations "nobody's business, said the family separations are "disgraceful." I have deliberately focused here on the outcry among those who are usually strong supporters of the 45th president. Democrats and other detractors have gone even further in their language, some even using Nazi analogies. But it is far more unusual for Republicans and Trump acolytes to turn on their man. The president is entitled to fight for his immigration stance, which he spelled out during the campaign. But the situation involving children seems to be a major miscalculation. And it's hard to imagine that the policy will last much longer without some kind of face-saving deal. The United Nations is publishing two reports criticizing Israel for its alleged mistreatment of Palestinians, just as U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley is trying to curb any anti-Israel bias at the U.N. Fox News obtained a copy of a report by Secretary General Antonio Guterres which was presented to the Security Council Tuesday by UN special coordinator Nickolay Mladenov. The report was a response to a controversial resolution criticizing Israeli settlements that the Trump transition team unsuccessfully tried to stop in December 2016. The outgoing Obama administration declined to veto the resolution. A Security Council diplomat told Fox News that there were several council members, including France and Sweden, that pushed for a written report, a common practice. Axios, which first reported on the report, said that Haley had prevented the report from being published for 17 months and put pressure on Guterres not to publish a report. It was clear that certain members of the Security Council took advantage of the situation in Gaza to collect signatures for the letter organized by the French and Swedes, a separate source in the U.N. told Fox News. Once presented with such a letter, the Secretary General had little choice but to issue a written report. The report paints a dire picture of the situation in Gaza and accuses Israel of undermining the hopes and the practical prospects for establishing a viable Palestinian state. In particular, it names the decision to build an additional 3,500 housing units in the West Bank as yet another obstacles to a two-state solution and says that settlement activity in occupied Palestinian territory constitutes a flagrant violation under international law. It also says that 135 Palestinians, including 16 children, were shot by the Israeli Defense Force between March and June during violent protests. "Israel has a responsibility to exercise maximum restraint in the use of live fire, and to not use lethal force, except as a last resort against imminent threat of death or serious injury. It must protect its citizens, but it must do so with due respect of international humanitarian law, the report says. But Guterres, who has often tried to adopt a more moderate tone toward Israel than other hardliners within the United Nations, also criticizes Hamas particularly for its incitement of protesters, and for urging them to breach barriers and to seek out martyrdom. The actions of Hamas and other militant groups put at risk not only the lives of Israelis and Palestinians, but also the efforts to restore dignity and the prospects of a liveable future for Palestinians in Gaza. Another report, which was also obtained by Fox News, produced by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) and transmitted by Guterres in response to a General Assembly resolution, criticizes the impact of Israeli policies on Palestinian living conditions. ESCWA is one of the U.N.s more notoriously anti-Israel bodies, and its previous head had to resign last year after coming under fire from Guterres and the U.S. for describing Israel as an apartheid state. But while this report uses no such inflammatory language, it is still scathing about Israeli practices, from the demolition of Palestinian housing and what it says is inherently discriminatory application of different legal standards against Palestinians. It also cites healthcare shortages, a high infant mortality rate, an energy crisis in Gaza that undermines basic services as well as severely overcrowded schools and refugee camps. The report claims that Israels barrier on the West Bank is leading to a deteriorating health situation as access to Israel is sometimes denied and points the finger at Israel's policies. The impact of the prolonged occupation and the policies and practices of Israel on the Palestinian people, society and economy is multilayered and has accumulated negative effects over the years, the report says. It also notes a funding crisis affecting the U.N.s body for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), which the Trump administration froze funding for in January over that bodys anti-Israel stance. The report says that that lack of funding only exacerbates the conditions of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who already live in harsh conditions. The Israeli mission said that it had not yet seen that report to the GA but pointed to a constant anti-Israel bias at the U.N. The anti-Israel bias at the U.N. is widespread and permeates into almost every U.N. body. Over the past weeks, we have seen that this automatic majority against Israel is not set in stone and can be eroded, Ambassador Danny Danon said in a statement to Fox News. We call on all U.N. officials and agencies to focus on the real crises plaguing the world and not to seek ways to illegitimately disparage the State of Israel. The slew of reports focusing on Israel is likely to only further deteriorate the relationship between the Trump administration and the U.N. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley has repeatedly and vociferously called out what she sees as anti-Israel bias in the bodys many different departments. AFTER VOTE FAILS TO CONDEMN HAMAS, HALEY CALLS UN AN UNSERIOUS FORCE FOR MIDDLE EAST PEACE The Associated Press reported last week that the Trump administration is preparing to pull out of the Human Rights Council over its alleged anti-Israel bias, as well as restricting funding to the U.N.s body for Palestinian refugees over the groups anti-Israel bias -- and has repeatedly called out what she sees as bias from members of the U.N. and the Security Council. Tuesday's report comes shortly after Haley slammed the U.N. General Assembly last week as shameful for failing to approve a U.S. amendment to a Palestinian-backed draft resolution that would condemned Hamas. It is no wonder that no one takes the U.N. seriously as a force for Middle East peace, she said, although she hailed the number of supporters for the amendment as a sign that the common practice of turning a blind eye to the U.N.s anti-Israel bias is changing. Fox News Ben Evansky contributed to this report. The Trump administration announced Tuesday it was withdrawing the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, with U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley calling the 47-member council a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias. Haley noted the move came after a year where we did not see any progress. Haley threatened the pullout last year, citing longstanding U.S. complaints that the council showed a chronic bias against Israel. Calling it an organization that is not worthy of its name, Haley decried the membership of countries like China, Cuba and Venezuela which also have been slammed for human-rights violations. The announcement, though, also came just a day after the U.N. human rights chief denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents. I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from our human rights commitments. On the contrary. We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights, Haley said. We did not make this decision lightly. When this administration began 17 months ago, we were well aware of the enormous flaws in the Human Rights Council. We could have withdrawn immediately. We did not do that. Instead, we made a good faith effort to resolve the problems. Haley said that if the council does reform, the United States would be happy to rejoin. The Human Rights Council has long been the foe of those who truly care about human rights around the world. The United States has proven, yet again, its commitment to truth and justice and their unwillingness to allow the blind hatred of Israel in international institutions to stand unchallenged, Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon reacted. We thank President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador Nikki Haley for their leadership and call on the moral majority at the UN to hold all of its institutions accountable. Trump long has been critical of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which he has accused of showing a bias against Israel. Haley last year slammed the body for its relentless, pathological campaign against Israel. Trumps National Security Adviser John Bolton opposed the creation of the body when he served as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under President George W. Bush. Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, spoke for the greater U.N.: The Secretary-General would have much preferred for the United States to remain in the Human Rights Council. The U.N.s Human Rights architecture plays a very important role in the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide. The U.N. Human Rights Council is headed up by some of the worst human rights violators in the world. They are actually in the leadership of the Council year after year after year, Republican Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford said. They are anti-Israel, over and over again. That is their constant drumbeat. So, I get it, we can try to be there, so we can try to be a participant in it. But when you are there, we vote no every time, and it just becomes a problem every time as well. So it doesnt seem to make a difference whether we are there or not there. A senior official added that the U.S. gave the United Nations Human Rights Council a year to reform, and said it had failed to do so. The council, according to the official, protects human rights abusers and shows bias in rendering decisions. The official claimed countries like China, Egypt and Russia worked to undermine U.S. reform efforts, and that the council has passed more resolutions this year condemning Israel than Iran, Syria and North Korea combined. The official says the Trump administration believes staying in the council lends it credibility, and only will rejoin if it reforms. The move extends a broader Trump administration pattern of stepping back from international agreements and forums under the presidents America First policy. Although numerous officials have said repeatedly that America First does not mean America Alone, the administration has retreated from multiple multilateral accords and consensuses since it took office. Since taking office, the administration has announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the U.N. educational and cultural organization and the Iran nuclear deal. Other contentious moves have included slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum against key trading partners, recognizing Jerusalem as Israels capital and moving the U.S. Embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv. Haley has been the driving force behind the latest move, which would be unprecedented in the 12-year history of the council. No country has ever dropped out voluntarily. Libya was kicked out seven years ago. The move could reinforce the perception that the Trump administration is seeking to advance Israels agenda on the world stage, just as it prepares to unveil its long-awaited peace plan despite Palestinian outrage over the embassy relocation. Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, is visiting the Middle East this week as the White House works to lay the groundwork for unveiling the plan. Fox News Andrew OReilly, Rich Edson, Ben Evansky and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Massive public outcry has built over children being separated from their parents as they attempt to cross into the U.S. illegally. After Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a zero-tolerance policy in dealing with migrants who cross into the U.S. illegally, nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families during a six-week period in April and May. Read on for a look at whats happening to children at the border and what the law actually says. What does the law say? There is no law that dictates children must be separated from their parents when caught crossing into the country illegally, and there was a time when ICE policy didnt call for detaining all families. There are, however, laws against entering the U.S. illegally, and a decree regarding how long children can be held in immigration detention. A 2008 anti-trafficking statute dictates that certain minors must be taken out of immigration detention within 72 hours. ICE is, by law, prohibited from detaining unaccompanied children, DHS says. Once a parent or guardian has been apprehended and charged for illegally entering the U.S., the children are then transported to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which is responsible for their care and is required by law to place unaccompanied minors in the least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child. This generally means the child can be placed in the care of a relative already in the U.S.; however, a minor can also be put into foster care or a temporary detention center. According to DHS, children in HHS ORR care are given medical and mental health attention, if needed, as well as educational programs. They are normally held in a temporary shelter or hosted by an appropriate family, DHS said. While in custody, according to DHS, officials look for a sponsor for the minor. Sponsors can include a relative that meets criteria for the safety of the child and continuation of any immigration proceedings. Parents, too, can ask to sponsor his or her child after being released. Minors are only allowed to be detained for 20 days, thanks to the 1997 Flores settlement agreement. The White House said this agreement has hampered the governments ability to detain and promptly remove any Unaccompanied Alien Children and family unites. Is there a difference between what Trump is doing compared to previous presidents? The Trump administration isnt the first to separate adults and children at the border but it did up the ante with the zero-tolerance policy, what the Justice Department called a new plan to curtail illegal immigration in April. 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 in May. According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, families were rarely detained before the early 2000s. Instead, they were released and given an immigration court hearing they were required to attend. Former President George W. Bush, too, had a zero-tolerance policy for illegal immigration but under his administration, officials generally exempted family units and minors from the Operation Streamline process where migrants were quickly prosecuted and deported, according to The New York Times. In 2008, Bush signed a law unanimously passed by Congress that called unaccompanied minors to be released into the least restrictive setting. Under the Obama administration, families were often detained together in administrative ICE custody, The Times reported. However, in 2013, the Obama administration was criticized as ICE deported more than 72,000 parents who had at least one U.S.-born child, according to HuffPost. Some of those children were able to remain in the U.S. with relatives, while others were put in foster care, HuffPost reported. Whats the difference between an unaccompanied minor and family unit? Children under 18 who arrive at the border alone are considered to be an unaccompanied alien child, or unaccompanied minor. However, children with a parent or guardian are considered to be part of a family unit. According to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the number of people attempting to cross the southern border illegally has increased to more than 50,000 people per month. She said in June there has been a 325 percent increase in unaccompanied children coming to the border since the previous year, and a 435 percent increase in families entering the U.S. illegally. The White House has suggested the influx of unaccompanied minors coming across the U.S. border is being used by gangs, such as MS-13, to recruit new members. According to the White House, more than one-third of already arrested MS-13 members and associates came into the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor. What has the response been to the separation of children and parents? The separation of children from their parents at the border has brought widespread and bipartisan condemnation of the act, from politicians to activists and from celebrities to parents. All of the living first ladies, including Melania Trump, have expressed opposition to the policy. In a rare public statement, Mrs. Trump said she hates to see families separated at the border. Her spokeswoman said the first lady believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. Hillary Clinton, also a former secretary of state and presidential nominee, said the policy is a moral humanitarian crisis. In a tweet, she said, Every parent who has ever held a child in their arms, every human being with a sense of compassion and decency, should be outraged. I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel, Laura Bush said. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. Multiple governors, including Republicans, have announced they will not send National Guard troops to the border until the separation policy is stopped. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said he ordered the four troops already deployed to return home, and Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker reportedly canceled the deployment of his states National Guard troops. The Trump administration has attempted to distance itself from the policy, with the president falsely repeatedly blaming Democrats, claiming they are the problem and dont care about crime. "#CHANGETHELAWS Now is the best opportunity ever for Congress to change the ridiculous and obsolete laws on immigration. Get it done, always keeping in mind that we must have strong border security," Trump said in a June 19 tweet. But Democrats have similarly pointed fingers at Trump, saying he has the power to change things. "Stop using the suffering of these little children as some barbaric bargaining chip. You started this and can end it right now. #FamiliesBelongTogether," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., replied to Trump's tweet. The Associated Press contributed to this report. An odd-looking fish that lives on the ocean floor shocked Texas park rangers when it washed up on Padre Island National Seashore in Corpus Christi last week. Photographer Edie Bresler was scanning the beach for hidden treasures when he spotted the big-eyed fish. With its bumpy skin and wide mouth, Bresler wasn't exactly sure what he was looking at. So, he quickly took out his camera and started snapping. "I have been beach combing all my life so to come across something strange like this was totally exciting," Bresler explained in a Facebook post on Thursday. "It got even better when I took the photographs to the park rangers and they were equally baffled." Bresler sent his photos to officials at Padre Island National Seashore. After carefully studying the creature and comparing images of the fish to various science books, they determined it was a thick-tailed batfish. "These fish come from 600-1200 feet (180-365 meters) deep, where ocean life gets WEIRD," the park posted on Facebook, including two photographs taken by Bresler. "Batfish use their pectoral, or side-fins, as 'legs' to 'crawl' on the seafloor to feed on worms, and small crustaceans and fish. They live their lives in complete darkness, where large eyes probably come in handy to avoid lanternfish or other possible predators." The rare find tickled "the science nerd that lives happily inside me," said Bresler, adding that the fish reminded him of a creature from "the black lagoon." Unfortunately, he added, it was too late to rescue the fish. Padre Island National Seashore is a national park that protects "70 miles of coastline, dunes, prairies," according to its website. The cause of a mysterious rock formation on Mars that NASA deemed "an enigmatic pile of eroding sediments" and UFO hunters strongly believe is an extraterrestrial spacecraft was likely caused by volcanic activity on the planet billions of years ago, researchers say. The Medusae Fossae Formation (MFF) was first observed in the 1960s via the Mariner spacecraft, but NASA scientists could not explain what caused it. Now, a group of researchers have published a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research that suggests it was formed by volcanic eruptions more than 3 billion years ago. This is a massive deposit, not only on a Martian scale, but also in terms of the solar system, because we do not know of any other deposit that is like this, said Lujendra Ojha, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a statement. NASA IS WATCHING A DUST STORM ON MARS THE SIZE OF NORTH AMERICA AND RUSSIA COMBINED The scale of the Medusae Fossae Formation is enormous, at roughly one-fifth the size of the U.S. It's also 100 times more massive than the largest explosive volcanic deposit on Earth, which would make it the largest known explosive volcanic deposit in the solar system. The study's abstract notes that the MFF is a "a relatively porous unit" and thought its origin is uncertain, "several processes including volcanic, eolian, and icerelated mechanisms have been proposed in its formation." The researchers were able to use data from various Mars orbiter spacecraft in order to measure the Medusae Fossaes density for the first time, calling out its porous nature (it's approximately two-thirds as dense as the rest of the Martian crust) and theorized that it was caused by "explosive volcanic eruptions." "The eruptions that created the deposit could have spewed massive amounts of climate-altering gases into Marss atmosphere and ejected enough water to cover Mars in a global ocean more than 9 centimeters (4 inches) thick," Ojha said. MASSIVE MARS DISCOVERY: ORGANIC MOLECULES 'FUNDAMENTAL TO OUR SEARCH FOR LIFE' FOUND BY NASA ROVER Because of the high levels of carbon dioxide and water that have been released from the MFF, the MFF has "substantially contributed to the Martian atmosphere and hydrosphere," the study's abstract added. Follow Chris Ciaccia on Twitter @Chris_Ciaccia Google has developed an artificial intelligence algorithm that could predict when youll die with up to 95 percent accuracy, according to the tech giants researchers. The research, which tackles a range of clinical issues among hospital patients, was recently published in the journal Nature. Google applied artificial intelligence to a vast amount of data from more than 216,000 adult patients hospitalized for at least 24 hours each in two medical centers. The research tapped into data from Electronic Health Records. HOW HACKERS CAN USE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AGAINST US We were interested in understanding whether deep learning could produce valid predictions across wide range of clinical problems and outcomes, researchers explain, in the journal. We therefore selected outcomes from divergent domains, including an important clinical outcome (death), a standard measure of quality of care (readmissions), a measure of resource utilization (length of stay), and a measure of understanding of a patients problems (diagnoses). The proof-of-concept study found that the algorithm could accurately predict risk of mortality, hospital readmission, prolonged hospital stay and discharge diagnosis. In all cases, the method proved more accurate than previously published models, it said. The AI was 95 percent accurate at predicting patient mortality based on data from the University of California, San Francisco health system and 93 percent accurate using data from the University of Chicago Medicine system, according to the research. DOOMSDAY AI MACHINES COULD LEAD TO NUCLEAR WAR, THINK TANK PAPER WARNS This was significantly more accurate than the traditional predictive model, the augmented Early Warning Score, which uses a number of factors to help physicians determine how ill a patient is. This method was 85 percent accurate at the University of California, San Francisco system and 83 percent accurate at the University of Chicago Medicine system, the study says. The Google research comes at a time when the potential benefits and risks of applying artificial intelligence are being hotly debated. From cybersecurity risks and so-called doomsday machines that could wreak devastation to the technologys potential to drive economic growth, experts are weighing the possible long-term impact of AI. Healthcare, which relies on a bewildering array of information, is increasingly being touted as a good fit for utilizing AI. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, for example, discussed the promise of AI in a speech delivered earlier this year. WHO'S AFRAID OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE? IT COULD SOLVE MANY OF OUR NATION'S MOST DIFFICULT ISSUES The technology, however, also poses major challenges. Speaking on Fox and Friends Tuesday, Family Medicine Physician Dr. Mikhail Varshavski said that, while connecting vast quantities of health information could be beneficial for patients, data privacy is key. The thing that is worrying for me is what happens with this data and who owns this data? he said. I hope, as a doctor, that these companies use the data to benefit the patients, not the companies themselves. Machines make mistakes and sometimes they make mistakes based on faulty data, Varshavski added. There needs to be oversight of what these things do. GOOGLE SET TO END CONTROVERSIAL PROJECT MAVEN MILITARY AI PROGRAM, REPORT SAYS Even within Google, the application of AI has proved controversial. The search giant recently ended its involvement in Project Maven, a controversial military program that uses AI to improve drone targeting. Project Maven has been a source of tension within Google. In April, over 3,100 Google workers signed a letter addressed to the companys CEO, Sundar Pichai, asking him to pull the tech giant out of the project. Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers Google is bringing Messages to the web so you can send and receive texts from your computer. The highly requested feature is rolling out now; to try it out, open the Android Messages app on your phone, tap the more options menu () select "Messages for web," and follow the on-screen instructions. You'll need to open Messages for web on your computer, then scan the QR code there with your phone. "On Messages for web, you can send stickers, emoji, and attach images in addition to sending text," Google Product Management Director Sanaz Ahari wrote in a blog post. In this support document, Google notes that Messages for web "sends SMS messages using a connection from your computer to your phone, so carrier fees will apply, just like on the mobile app." To avoid getting charged for data while using this feature, be sure to connect your phone to Wi-Fi. The web client works with Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Edge, but not Internet Explorer. Google says "your latest conversation threads, contacts, and other settings will be encrypted and cached on your browser." Google also today announced several other features headed to the Messages app over the next week, including GIF search, Smart Reply, preview links within your conversations, and the ability to copy one-time passwords with one tap for quicker authentication. To access the new GIF search feature, just tap the + button on the left side of the compose bar. Smart Reply uses machine learning to craft possible responses to your messages. This article originally appeared on PCMag.com. An Ohio sheriffs office says it used a specific tool as part of its efforts to track down a missing ATV on Sunday: a drone. Patrol responded to a report of a stolen ATV this morning, the Franklin County Sheriffs Office explained in a Faceook post. The owner stated that his sons new ATV was taken. Deputies said they used a drone to survey the surrounding area, following tire tracks left behind that led officers to an abandoned house. The sheriffs office told Fox News on Tuesday it took approximately 10 minutes to recover the ATV. "Ground units then located the ATV covered with brush. End result, one happy kid! the sheriff's office said. Authorities shared a photo of the youngster after he was reunited with his ATV. FORMIDABLE 'JAGUAR' RECON VEHICLE REVEALED, TOUTS POWERFUL CANON AND ANTI-TANK MISSILES The Facebook post received a handful of comments, several of which congratulated the sheriffs office. Good job. What is the policy on drone usage and the preservation of privacy? one user asked. A lot to explain here but in short, we have a policy in place that addresses those issues and the 4th Amendment is our guide in protecting the privacy of those we serve, the sheriffs office replied. No one has been charged at this time, police said Tuesday. Executives from across Silicon Valley have weighed in on the border policy of separating children from their parents, with some calling it "heartless" and "cruel" and likening it to a "war crime." In a statement obtained by Fox News, Airbnb's co-founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk condemned the acts being taken by the Department of Homeland Security. "Ripping children from the arms of their parents is heartless, cruel, immoral and counter to the American values of belonging," Chesky, Gebbia and Blecharczyk said. They continued: "The U.S. government needs to stop this injustice and reunite these families. We are a better country than this." TECH EXECS SLAM TRUMP ADMINISTRATION'S DECISION TO END DACA Other companies in Silicon Valley weighed in as well, with Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson writing an editorial that suggested these actions are "war crimes." "No matter what excuses are made, lets call this what it is: collective punishment," Lawson wrote. "The practice of punishing family members is not just morally offensive, its also a war crime under the Geneva Accord. We are punishing children for the possibility that their parents have committed a minor crime (a misdemeanor actually), or no crime at all in the case of amnesty seekers." Microsoft, which has come under fire for a contract it has with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), also expressed dismay at the policy. "As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border," Microsoft's President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith wrote in a statement posted to Twitter. "Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since the end of World War II." Smith continued: "We need to continue to build on this noble tradition rather than change course now. We urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families." Microsoft has come under fire for signing a deal with ICE to let the government agency use its Azure cloud service "for facial recognition and identification" purposes, PCMag reported. Box CEO Aaron Levie tweeted the policy is "inhumane and un-American." "The act of separating families at the border is inhumane and un-American," Levie wrote on Twitter. "We cannot let this continue. We need our government to address immigration in a compassionate and scalable way *now*." TECH EXECS SLAM TRUMP'S TRANSGENDER MILITARY BAN Under the policy, all unlawful crossings are referred for prosecution a process that moves adults to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and sends many children to facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Under the previous administration, such families were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, not requiring separation. Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May. At a White House briefing Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen declared, "Congress alone can fix it." That line has been echoed by others in the administration, including President Donald Trump, who has falsely blamed a law passed by Democrats for the "zero tolerance" approach to prosecutions of families crossing the border. The policy has come under fire from both sides of the aisle, including former First Lady of the United States Laura Bush, who said the zero-tolerance policy is "cruel," "immoral" and it "breaks [her] heart." Former governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate Mitt Romney also weighed in, saying the country needs "a more compassionate answer." Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton called for an immediate end to the "ugly and inhumane practice," adding, "It's never acceptable to use kids as bargaining chips in political process." Kansas GOP Sen. Pat Roberts said he is "against using parental separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration." "The time is now for the White House to end the cruel, tragic separations of families," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press. The Trump administration insists the family separations are required under the law. But after signaling Monday that it would oppose any fix aimed solely at addressing the plight of children separated from their parents under the crackdown, the White House said Tuesday that it is reviewing emergency legislation being introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to keep migrant families together. There are also two immigration bills being debated in the House, but conservatives say the compromise legislation that GOP leaders helped negotiate with moderates is inadequate. This story has been updated to include comments from Twilio's Lawson. The Associated Press contributed to this story. Follow Chris Ciaccia on Twitter @Chris_Ciaccia Following a number of flights disrupted due to alcohol-related incidents, Ryanair is calling for stricter regulations on alcohol sales at airports in Ireland. The most recent instance happened on a Ryanair flight from Dublin to Ibiza on June 16, which had to be diverted to Paris after three passengers became disruptive. They were removed from the flight and detained by French police, a spokesperson for the airline told Fox News. We will not tolerate unruly or disruptive behavior at any time and the safety and comfort of our customers, crew and aircraft is our number one priority, the spokesperson said. UNITED CEO OSCAR MUNOZ SAYS EMPLOYEE WAS MORE CONCERNED WITH PLANES SCHEDULE THAN PASSENGERS HEART ATTACK In April, a passenger pleaded guilty to assaulting Ryanair crew members and grabbing a flight attendants butt while drunk aboard a flight from Latvia to England. Robertas Bajalis, who reportedly drank half a bottle of vodka and four ciders before boarding, began causing a disturbance about an hour into the flight from Riga to Manchester, first by drinking from a bottle of rum he brought on board. Bajalis was given a two-year suspended sentence of eight months in prison for two counts of sexual assault and one count of common assault. RYANAIR PASSENGER FILMED GIVING IN-FLIGHT LAPDANCE AFTER REPORTEDLY DRINKING AT AIRPORT BAR This is exactly why we are calling for significant changes to prohibit the sale of alcohol [before 10 a.m.] at airports, the Ryanair spokesperson said. The airline is calling for a two-drink limit per passenger and no alcohol sales before 10 a.m. Its incumbent on the airports to introduce these preventative measures to curb excessive drinking and the problems it creates, rather than allowing passengers to drink to excess before their flights," the spokesperson said. But airport officials dont agree with Ryanairs proposal. A Dublin Airport spokesperson told RTE that drink restrictions are "highly draconian" and would "affect all passengers because of the behavior of a very, very small minority of airline travelers." While the airport spokesperson admitted that the behavior of the unruly Ryanair passengers was clearly unacceptable, they will remind license holders in airport bars and restaurants of their responsibility. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS The spokesperson also noted that the airport has worked with airlines, including Ryanair, the police and the Irish Aviation Authority on an education campaign to stress that such disruptive drunken behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. A family says they held the wrong baby for nearly two hours days after his birth at a West Virginia hospital. The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports Crystal and Arnold "Junior" Perry gave birth to Dawson at Logan Regional Medical Center on June 12. Grandmother Barbara Colegrove says on Thursday Junior Perry went to the nursery to get the baby. Crystal Perry says Dawson's basket was in the same spot, and it said Perry on the ID card. She says a nurse said it was their baby. However, Crystal Perry says a nurse asked her to read her armband number and then returned with Dawson. Relatives had the baby of someone else with the same last name. Heather Perry believes her son Colton had been in the room for seconds and says it was an honest mistake. ___ Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, http://wvgazettemail.com. A Chicago Public Schools principal suddenly retired after she outraged parents by inviting an anti-police extremist to talk to students on Career Day. Mary Beth Cunat personally invited the anti-police activist, Ethan Ethos, to speak to sixth through eighth-grade students at Wildwood Elementary School. Ethos is a self-described radical who routinely posts violent anti-police rhetoric online. After a Chicago police commander was shot and killed execution-style in February, Ethos posted online, F HIM [and] HIS FAMILY. Ethos also posts the term CPDK which apparently stands for Chicago Police Department Killer. The extremist referred to cops as pigs and once posted about killing rich people. Ethos apparently has shown hatred for police because he claimed a Chicago police officer murdered his friend with a stun gun. In an apology letter to parents, Cunat wrote that she brought in Ethos to talk to students about his poetry and civic work, but things went off the rails. He told them all the police are bad and all the police wanted to kill people, said Linda Ricciardi, who had three children listen to Ethos on career day. I was very disappointed that someone would come into this school and preach hate about the police. Or, even if he was talking about someone else, I would still be upset. Mary Beth Cunat wrote a letter of apology before retiring, writing in part, I was present when his narrative took a negative turn about policing, at which point I immediately intervened... I care about your children and would never intentionally expose them to or endorse this type of negativity. Some parents including Ricciardi disputed that Cunat immediately intervened, saying Ethos spoke to a few classrooms without interruption. Some of the parents also said Cunat brought in Ethos because she recently had been pressured to introduce anti-police philosophies to students. Nearly every parent who talked to Fox News said the principal was doing an excellent job at the school, which is one of Chicagos top-performing, but she made a grave mistake. One Chicago police officer, Fernando Flores, who lives nearby and had children who went to the school, said Ethos speaking to students was part of a broader indoctrination. Insulted. Angry. I can't believe she didn't vet him properly. Look on his Facebook account, Flores said. Some of the things on his account are absolutely horrible. Ethan Ethos declined Fox News request for an interview. The Chicago School District wrote in an email that it did not know of or approve Ethos speaking to students. Cunat said in a brief phone conversation that she did not resign, but retired. Her letter to parents said in part that she was retiring to spend time with family. Charred skeletal remains found at a Texas ranch are believed to belong to a man, woman and their 5-year-old son -- all of whom have been missing for a week, police said. Robert Satterfield, 36, was charged with murder in connection to their deaths, the Wharton County Sheriffs Office said. Police received tips regarding the missing family of three before meeting with Satterfield. Satterfield, who already was in custody in neighboring Fort Bend County, led officials to the site where authorities said someone tried to burn the bodies. Police said the charges could be upgraded to capital murder. Police did not immediately say why Satterfield was already in custody. TEXAS OFFICER ARRESTED FOR ALLEGEDLY SEXUALLY ASSAULTING 4-YEAR-OLD GIRL, THREATENING MOM WITH DEPORTATION It is believed these remains to be the same of (Rayshawn) Hudson, (Maya) Rivera and their child, police said in a press release. The remains are, at this point, unidentifiable as there had been an attempt to dispose of the bodies by burning them. Satterfield was discovered on Thursday driving a car belonging to Maya Rivera, 24, who was missing and last seen on June 10. She, and her boyfriend Rayshawn Hudson, 28, and their son Rayshawn Jr., 5, were reported missing last week. The family lived in Angleton, just south of Houston. Riveras mother reported the family missing on June 10 after they did not show up for Rayshawns birthday party at a park near their home, the Houston Chronicle reported. AT LEAST 5 DEAD AFTER SUV CARRYING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS CRASHES, SHERIFF SAYS "My heart hurts so deep. But I can find some sense of peace knowing all 3 of them together now are with God," Rivera wrote on her Facebook page. "I ask myself why? If only they had. ... but that doesn't do any good. It will not change anything." Satterfield remained held in the Fort Bend County jail on a $305,000 bond. It was not immediately clear if he has an attorney. Authorities have not released a possible motive. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Chicago police are asking for help in identifying the thug who punched a priest in the face during a church burglary. Father Matthew Compton suffered facial cuts when St. Thomas More Roman Catholic Church on the Southwest Side was burglarized Friday. Police on Monday released surveillance video showing Compton trying to stop the burglar from leaving the church, WBBM-TV reported. I asked who are you, and what are you doing here, and thats when he punched me in the side of the head, the priest said. The station reported that the punch was not caught on video. The burglar took Comptons wallet, which contained credit cards that were used within an hour of the crime, according to the station. Compton said he bears no grudge against the man who punched him. Despite this, I forgive him, he said. Hell hopefully have a long life in front of him and will use it for good. Hes a son of God, and God wants good for himI hope he realizes that. Law enforcement agencies on the hunt Wednesday for a man dubbed the "D.C.-area Hotel Rapist," who is believed to have violently raped at least six women in the nations capital over a seven-year span, are now offering a combined $45,000 reward for information leading to his capture. The identity of the suspect in unknown but it is the first time the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia has indicted a John Doe profile based on DNA evidence, according to Fox 5 DC. "The survivors in this case are going to live with this for the rest of their lives, and this person needs to be held accountable," Peter Newsham, the Metropolitan Police Department's chief of police, said Tuesday during a news conference announcing the indictment, which was made because the 15-year statute of limitations deadline on the case was fast approaching. Investigators say the attacks happened between Aug. 22, 1998, and Feb. 6, 2006 in Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia, involving six to nine women, most of whom were hotel housekeepers. DNA evidence recovered from six of the incidents has been tracked back to one person. During the attacks, the suspect would inconspicuously enter hotel rooms and target housekeepers as they were doing their work, officials said. A box cutter, necktie and a cord were used in several of the incidents to threaten or harm victims, they added. One case took place on Dec. 1, 2002, in a hotel room at the Hilton on Colesville Road in Silver Spring, Md., where officials say they found a box cutter with the name "Debbie" written on it that was used by the suspect in his attack. Then, in an investigation of a sexual assault on May 11, 2003 at the Renaissance Hotel in Northwest D.C., police say they obtained a ring that belonged to the suspect. Police say they also were able to obtain DNA linked to the suspect from sexual assaults on May 23, 2003 at the Jefferson Hotel in Northwest D.C.; June 6, 2003 at the Holiday Inn Hotel in Arlington, Va.; and June 9, 2003, at the Courtyard by Marriot Hotel in Greenbelt, Md. The suspect was described by authorities as an African-American male, between 5 feet-7 inches and 5-feet-10-inches tall with a medium to stocky build, brown eyes, black hair, and a medium to dark complexion. At the time of the assaults, he was believed to be in his 20s to 30s, but now officials said they believe he would be in his late 30s to late 40s. In a new indictment from the U.S. Attorneys Office in Washington, officials were able to obtain the DNA profile of the unknown suspect on charges stemming from the two attacks that took place in the District. Investigators say they also identified several instances of suspicious activity or assaults at area hotels. Three of the possibly related instances occurred in hotel rooms, including one in Arlington in 1998, one in Takoma Park in 2005 and one in Alexandria in 2006, according to police. The FBI and the police departments of D.C., Montgomery County (Md.), Prince Georges County (Md.), Greenbelt (Md.) and Arlington County (Va.) are offering a combined reward of up to $45,000 for information leading to the arrest and indictment of the suspect. Fox 5 DC contributed to this report. Here are excerpts from recent editorials in Oklahoma newspapers: The Oklahoman. June 19, 2018. Naturalization ceremony: A reminder of this country's allure The partisan sniping and the over-the-top rhetoric so prevalent in our nation's politics (and elsewhere in society) can produce cynicism and malaise. A nice pick-me-up is provided by naturalization ceremonies such as the one held Friday in Oklahoma City. In a large third-floor courtroom of the federal courthouse, 79 people raised their right hand and pledged their allegiance to the United States, the final step in becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. They were greeted with whoops and rousing applause from friends and family. This newest group of Americans came from 29 countries places like Trinidad and Tobago, Bangladesh, Egypt, Mexico, China, Burma and the Marshall Islands. They're among the 700,000 to 750,000 who become naturalized citizens each year, according to the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services. Applicants for citizenship must be 18 or older, and lawful permanent residents (green card holders) who have lived in the United States for at least five years. New citizens must be "of good moral character," be able to read, speak, write and understand English, and, as the citizen and immigration agency notes on its website "have knowledge of U.S. government and history." That knowledge is gleaned from learning the answers to 100 civics questions, some of which might stump many of us born and bred in the United States. In short, those who become U.S. citizens earn it and they find the work well worth it. Carlos Villegas, a native of Mexico who lives in Oklahoma City, said he was excited to be able to join his wife as a U.S. citizen after three years pursuing the honor. "Just happy and proud," Villegas said. "Proud to stand for America." Tsevelmaa Yadmaa of Mongolia, a general surgeon who lives in Oklahoma City, had spent more than five years on the process. "I'm happy because I've waited long," she said. "I'm excited freedom for me and a lot of opportunity." Her husband, Wusthu, had previously become a citizen. "I'm excited that we both became naturalized," he said. "We've been working together for a while" to get to that point. The group heard District Judge Joe Heaton, who presided, encourage them to stay informed about public affairs and take an active role. "I suspect there is no country in the world where the status of 'citizen' is as important as it is here," Heaton said. U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma City, told the group that the gathering was a reminder "of what a great joy it is to be an American. . There is no country on the planet like the United States of America." That sentiment was found in comments from one of the newly minted citizens, Tony Barton, of Enid by way of Essex County, England. He has been in the United States more than 13 years and said he has grown to love this country and its varied culture. "It's amazing the amount of diversity under one roof," Barton said. "I wanted to be part of it." These ceremonies provide a vivid reminder that, despite its problems, this country remains a beacon to the rest of the world. May it always be so. ___ Tulsa World. June 19, 2018. After a few skids and bumps, Tulsa may be on track to becoming the BMX capital of the world The road was a little bumpy at times and there were some near spills such is the nature of life in the world of big-time dirt-track bike racing but the city has concluded a deal to bring the headquarters, museum, hall of fame and indoor arena for USA BMX to an empty industrial site on the north side of downtown. The world's largest BMX racing organization and the city of Tulsa have signed a 30-year agreement with the potential for two 10-year extensions to turn the former Evans-Fintube site into the group's home base and turn the city of Tulsa into what we'll presumptuously suggest will become the BMX capital of the world. Construction on the site is expected to begin this fall and be completed by the end of 2019. The new facility will bring the BMX headquarters from Gilbert, Arizona, and its museum and hall of fame from Chula Vista, California. An Olympic-quality track and five-day-a-week racing are part of the deal. Expo Square has been the home of USA BMX Grand Nationals for 20 years and will continue to host the high-profile event. When Tulsa voters helped underwrite the headquarters move with $15 million in the 2016 Vision renewal program, the fairgrounds was initially eyed as the site; but that plan skidded out last year, leading to the downtown location. Being the national focal point for an Olympic sport raises Tulsa's profile, but there are also real economic benefits to converting the empty industrial site into a working asset again. The facility will host more than 100 local, state and national events in the first five years, generating nearly $11 million in economic activity. There's still a lot of work to be done, but the contract gives the city's BMX plan a solid basis in reality. We haven't crossed that finish line yet, but we can see the checkered flag from here, and we're ready to tear up some dirt. ___ Muskogee Phoenix. June 19, 2018. Action must follow news Muskogee received great news on two fronts late last week, but it's what the city does with that information that will determine success. United States Sen. Jim Inhofe said Friday that he will halt an Oklahoma Department of Transportation proposal that could have moved U.S. 69 west of Muskogee. That same morning, officials from Bacone College announced a sale of properties that could have the college back up and running this summer. Both are excellent news. There were many people opposed to the U.S. 69 bypass of Muskogee. Business owners, lawmakers and residents largely agreed the proposed bypass could harm economic development. With the bypass option off the table, city and county officials must do all they can to make a positive business environment available to spur economic growth. Keeping traffic running through town will open the opportunity to continue expansion along the highway particularly at the intersection of 69 and Shawnee Bypass. Residents and business owners took a stand and apparently succeeded in removing one obstacle to economic growth. But now residents must see the fruits of that stance. Bacone College officials, who suspended operations earlier in the spring, apparently have found funding through the sale of real estate properties. Now Bacone officials must do all they can to keep the doors open. A second suspension of operations would erode confidence in the college that might not be able to be fixed in the future. Bacone College needs the support of the community at large and its alumni base to keep the doors open for good. Muskogee residents, civic leaders and lawmakers must see Friday's developments as opportunities to grow our city. Otherwise, Friday's good news will be for naught. A young girl in western New York went out of her way for a police officer to make sure he'll never be alone while on patrol. The Blasdell Police Department said in a Facebook post last Tuesday that a three-year-old girl named Gabby stopped by to drop off thin blue and red line flags to police and fire officials. "Blasdell Police and Fire Departments thank Gabby, a 3 year old village resident who gave the thin blue and red line flags and Elmo to the departments," the post read. "We thank Gabby and her family for the support and nice gesture." FATHER'S DAY INSPIRES WASHINGTON OFFICER TO RECREATE POLICE PHOTO WITH SON 20 YEARS LATER The department posted photos of the two with Elmo before the doll set on duty. Gabby's mother, Eileen ORourk Yesis, posted about the experience on Facebook. Yesis told LoveWhatMatters.com that her daughter wanted to give the officer Elmo because he "works all alone. He needs a friend." "We found the police officer and asked if we could have a moment of his time," she told the website. "Gabby looked at him and raised her arms to give him the Elmo and said, I want you to have my Elmo so you dont work alone." She later explained on Facebook that both Rob Hefner, the mayor of the village located south of Buffalo, and the polic officer, came by to inform them that Elmo had completed Police Academy and was "now in full uniform". "The Officer explained Elmo wanted to come home to keep Gabby safe and watch over her. Thank you Officers for all you do. Stay safe," she wrote. Elmo is now back in Gabby's room and the girl says she wants to be a police officer when she grows up. Two of Facebooks top executives have donated to a charity started by former workers at the tech giant that intends on uniting immigrant families separated at the border. Politico, citing a company spokesperson, reported Monday that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg both donated to the fundraiser for the Texas-based Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. The Facebook page reported that the campaign raised $3.7 million of its $5 million goal. It is unclear how much the two billionaires donated. Attorney General Jeff Sessions forcefully rebuked critics who fault the Trump administration for the separation of illegal immigrant families at the border, saying that the Obama administration's policies are partially to blame. Speaking to Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" Monday night, Sessions said illegal immigrants have taken advantage of the U.S. "We have watched what happened with the Obama policies, and over years, we went from 15,000 illegal entries to 75,000 -- this is a huge loophole in our system that's attracting more and more people, as more and more people understand that, under previous policies, if they enter the country unlawfully, that nothing will happen," Sessions said. The attorney general denied that children are being abused or kept in inhumane conditions, saying that the Department of Health and Human Services spent approximately a billion dollars last year taking care of children caught crossing the border. Fox News' Gregg Re contributed to this report More than 800 survivors of Hawaiis Kilauea volcano are seeking help from the federal government following five weeks of unprecedented turmoil and destruction with no end in sight. "Everybody's got a different story but I think a lot of people are just unsure because the fissure just keeps going," Thomas Mason, who evacuated from his home in Leilani Estates with his wife, told Hawaii News Now on Monday. Mason, who waited in the FEMA line for three hours on Friday, was told to prepare for rejection and be ready to appeal. He and his wife moved from Maui in November. They were in the middle of building their retirement home on the Big Island when Kilauea erupted on May 3. Like so many others, they were forced to flee. But unlike most, getting money to rebuild their unfinished retirement home will be complicated. "You don't get house insurance until you have a house. We got three quarters of a house," he said. For Mason, if FEMA doesnt come through with money, there is no plan B. HAWAII VOLCANO ERUPTION: HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE KILLED BY VOLCANOES? Last week, President Trump approved federal emergency housing aid for victims of the volcano. The approval came a day after Hawaii Governor David Ige formally requested federal assistance for the roughly 2,800 residents on the Big Island who have lost their homes. However, there was no specific dollar figure sought by Ige or attached to the package Trump approved, though The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that eligible homeowners and renters could get $34,000 each. In addition to money for housing assistance, Trump green-lighted relief from other FEMA programs to help those affected by Kilauea. They include crisis counseling, unemployment benefits and legal aid. GREEN GEMS SHOOTING FROM KILAUEA VOLCANO IN HAWAII AS LAVA FORMS NEW PENINSULA Kilaueas recent volcanic eruption is the most destructive in the U.S. since the 1980 explosion of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. Lava from Kilauea has been spewing for more than a month. The thick, gooey, molten magma has shifted into a wider, hotter flowing river of lava traveling about 200 yards per hour. On Monday, volcanologists said magma under the surface of fissure 8 is hotter and less crystalized than they thought. The whole lower east rift zone has a plumbing system two mules below surface and it is delivering hotter magma at fissure 8, which is giving runnier lava thats flowing to the ocean, Charles Mandeville, program coordinator for volcano hazards program at the U.S. Geological Survey, said. The geological phenomenon has piqued the curiosity of many visitors and residents of the Big Island. Since the eruptions started, about 40 people have been arrested for loitering in lava zones, according to state officials. Authorities say those caught face steep fines and up to a year in jail. An illegal immigrant has been charged with killing two Miami prostitutes and dumping their bodies on the street, according to reports. Juan Carols Hernandez-Caseres, a 37-year-old roofer, was arrested Saturday for the murders months apart of Ann Farrin, 41, and Neidy Roche, 39, the Miami Herald reported. He is being held without bail. The 39-year-old is also being held on an immigration detainer. Their bodies were found where they had been dumped by a man in a car, according to the paper and WTVJ. A surveillance camera captured each dumping, the two news outlets reported. Cops found Farrins body June 13. The arrest report released by police says Hernandez-Caseres admitted punching Farrin in the throat and neck when they got into an argument in his car during sex. 10 ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE FOUND HIDING IN SQUALID ARIZONA HOME Regardless of the lifestyle she chose she didnt deserve that and (we) hope he is put away so he cannot harm anyone else, a statement from Farrins family read in part, the Herald reported. Roches body was found March 2. She had been choked to death, WTVJ reported. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman told the Herald that Hernandez-Caseres was an illegally present Honduran national. The family of an Iowa woman who was holding her toddler when she was fatally shot to death by a police officer will reportedly receive $2 million as part of a wrongful death settlement. Autumn Steele, 34, was accidentally shot and killed in 2015 by officer Jesse Hill, who was responding to a domestic abuse call. Hill claimed he fired his weapon after a German shepherd attacked him. The bullet struck Steele in the chest and the arm, according to The Gazette. Hill also hit the familys dog, who ultimately survived the injury, the paper reported. Dave OBrien, the familys attorney, revealed news about the settlement Monday morning, which he underscored as vindication for the Steele familys claim that Hill acted wrongfully in causing Autumns death. However, everyone should know that cities and their insurance carriers do not pay $2 million to settle a claim unless they have concluded the claim has significant merit, OBrein said in a statement according to the Des Moines Register. The family claimed in a 2016 suit that Hill shot his weapon in unreasonable, unnecessary and reckless manner, The Gazette reported. Steeles mother, Gina Colbert, said the $2 million settlement was recognition by both the city of Hill that he acted in a wrongful and unjustified manner in shooting and killing my beautiful daughter, according to the Gazette. Only a 12-second clip of the incident from Hills body camera has been publicly released, despite repeated efforts from the Steele family and a local newspaper to make the full video public, according to the Register. OBrien, who has viewed the full video, said the footage doesnt support Hills claim that he was bitten by the dog prior to discharging his weapon. Amy Beavers, the Des Moines county attorney, cleared Hill of all criminal wrongdoing a month after the incident. Beavers cited the body camera video as one of the reasons for clearing Hill. In a report, she said the officer was bitten by the dog, prompting him to pull his weapon. She said pictures were taken of Hills injury, but the Register noted that state and city officials have yet to disclose the photos. Hill continues to serve as an officer for the Burlington Police Department, the paper reported. An Ohio man who police say tried to lure an underage boy with Sprite and a popular chicken dish was sentenced Monday after pleading guilty. Albert Maruna, now 23, will serve seven days in the Mahoning County jail, WFMJ reported. He was arrested in December after the 15-year-old boy he planned to meet turned out to be an undercover cop. Maruna will also spend 120 days on house arrest after his week in jail, and will be on probation for three years. He must also register as a Tier 1 sex offender, according to the news station. Maruna had traveled to Austintown after meeting who he thought was the teenager on a dating app. The police officer told the then-22-year-old he was 15, to which Maruna reportedly replied he didn't believe in age. Police, according to WKBN, said Maruna began to develop feelings for the teen and reportedly told the undercover officer, "You are my one and only," and said he wanted to be his husband one day. Investigators said Maruna sent naked photos of himself to the teen, and ahead of their meet-up agreed to bring lubricant, a chicken Alfredo dish and Sprite. He reportedly requested the teen wear a jock strap during the time they had planned together. When Maruna, who reportedly admitted to police he hoped to have sex with the teenage boy, was arrested, police discovered he was carrying an iPhone, a MacBook and three zip drives in addition to a bottle of Astroglide lubrication, Vaseline lotion, two bottles of Sprite, and chicken Alfredo in a Tupperware container. A Michigan woman who lied about being raped on her college campus was sentenced to jail time on Monday. Mary Zolkowski, 21, was sentenced to 45 days in jail after pleading guilty to fabricating a story about being sexually assaulted in a parking lot at Delta College in Bay County, MLive.com reported. Judge Joseph Sheeran, who also ordered the woman receive a mental health assessment, did not give Zolwolski credit for previous time served. Sheeran deferred the woman to an additional 220 days in jail, which she'll only have to serve if she violates probation, according to the news outlet. She will be on probation for two years after her jail term. Zolwolski will also have to be tested for drugs and alcohol and partake in substance abuse counseling. MICHIGAN WOMAN, 21, CHARGED FOR FALSE RAPE CLAIM AT COLLEGE In March, Zolwolski reportedly admitted to making up the alleged rape, telling the judge: "I called Delta College and falsely reported the rape on their campus. My mother made the initial call and I took the phone and continued to report." The woman told her mother she had been raped in a back parking lot but never named any suspects. She said that she was "assaulted previously, not at Delta's campus," and "was ashamed of the circumstances of that." Zolkowski initially gave contradicting accounts of what she claimed happened at the school. She reportedly told police she was walking to her car when a man grabbed her from behind and raped her without a condom while holding her face and throat, and said she only saw the mans hands and he fled in a car before she could see his face. Zolkowski refused a physical exam after the alleged incident, the news outlet reported in August 2017. When investigators met with her a second time, Zolkowski reportedly said the suspect was an acquaintance and she had been raped at an apartment. The student at the time apologized for her confusion, adding she didn't want to press charges. In a third interview with police, Zolkowski reportedly changed her story again telling police she wanted to tell the suspect to stop during sex, but it ended before she was able to do so. Zolkowski, who pleaded guilty to making a false report of a felony, faced up to four years in prison and a $2,000 fine. A university in Boston is distancing itself from a feminist professor who wrote a controversial column earlier this month that some are calling hate speech. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Suzanna Danuta Walters, sociology professor and womens, gender, and sexuality studies program director at Northeastern University, said women have every right to hate men. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy, she wrote. The university in Boston immediately distanced itself from the oped, saying hate has no place at the university. The university has more than 1,000 faculty members whose viewpoints span the entire political spectrum, university spokesperson Shannon Nargi told Fox News in a statement. Consistent with our unwavering commitment to academic freedom, the opinions of an individual professor do not reflect the views of the university or its leadership. Northeastern is committed to fostering an environment in which controversial ideas can be discussed, debated and challenged. PROFESSOR BANNED FROM RESTAURANT FOR PROFANITY-LACED RANT AGAINST WHITE CHILDREN, UNIVERSITY INVESTIGATING Walters wrote that men should just cede their power and responsibility to women So men, the feminist activist writes, If youwould like us to not hate youpledge to vote for feminist women only. Dont run for office. Dont be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. Walters admits even before President Trump, her edge had been crossed, and urges feminists, instead of taking the high road, maybe its time for us to go all Thelma and Louise and Foxy Brown on their collective butts. In a response to Walters column, Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic that her argument is a perversion of feminism, but he believes that even her most bigoted ideological commitments dont affect how she treats her students. Group hate, Friedersdorf writes, tends to make those who harbor it less able to see clearly, less likely to acknowledge nuance, and less able to improve the world, even as their wrongheaded ideas risk leading others into destructive errors. PROFESSOR REQUIRED STUDENTS TO PRAISE ALLAH, REMOVE SHOES BEFORE ENTERING OFFICE This wasnt the first time Walters has attacked a group of people based on their identity. The College Fix pointed out that, while Walters demands people elect women for public office, she told the campus newspaper it shouldnt endorse a Republican woman. Having a Carly Fiorina or a, heaven forbid, Sarah Palin in the White House would set all women back of course, because their agendas are firmly and unequivocally anti-feminist, she said. A teenage boy in Chicago died nearly a day after he was reportedly shot in the head at a party, then presumed dead and covered with a white sheet for at least an hour until bystanders saw the 17-year-old move and began shouting at paramedics to help him. Erin Carey suffered a catastrophic wound after gunfire broke out at a party in Chicagos University Village neighborhood just before 5 a.m. Monday. Carey was among six people shot that night, FOX32 Chicago reported. "He was shot in the head and the prognosis is not good," Chicago police First Deputy Superintendent Anthony Riccio told reporters on Monday. "I do understand that paramedics looked at him, believed him to be deceased, covered him with that sheet and moved on to another individual who was nearby who was also shot." But at least an hour later, people at the scene began seeing Careys arms and legs move. He aint dead, a woman shouted, according to the Chicago Tribune. CHICAGO PARAMEDICS MISTAKENLY PLACE WHITE SHEET OVER SHOOTING VICTIM WHO WAS STILL ALIVE: REPORT Paramedics rushed to Careys side and began performing chest compressions before putting him in an ambulance. He was listed in very critical condition and was on full life support at the hospital before he was pronounced dead around 1:15 a.m. Tuesday. Fire officials told the Chicago Tribune authorities are looking at the paramedics response to the scene. Riccio said officials saw movement under the white sheet and notified the paramedics on scene. Another woman, Shalonza E. McToy, 22, was also pronounced dead at the scene, after suffering from gunshot wounds to the head, chest, left arm and ear. Authorities reportedly believe Mondays shooting to be gang-related. The victims who survived their injuries are refusing to cooperate with the investigation, according to the station. The U.S. Air Force says it will resume B-1 bomber flights this week, following a fleet-wide grounding of the supersonic bomber earlier this month due to an issue with the ejection seat system. Air Force Global Strike Command, based at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, announced the resumption of operations in a statement, but said the issue with the egress system remains under investigation and made no mention of the problem being fixed although it said the threat to the crew was now reduced. We have high confidence that the fleets egress systems are capable and the fleet is ready to return to normal flight operations, said Maj. Gen. Thomas Bussiere, 8th Air Force Commander, who heads the Air Force bomber force. The grounding of the B-1 fleet occurred weeks after a B-1B Lancer made an emergency landing at a civilian airport in Midland, Texas. The four crew members onboard the aircraft were not injured. US AIR FORCE B-1 BOMBER FLEET GROUNDED AFTER ISSUE WITH EJECTION SEATS, OFFICIALS SAY "During the safety investigation process following an emergency landing of a B-1B in Midland, an issue with ejection seat components was discovered that necessitated the stand-down," Air Force Global Strike officials said at the time. Images surfaced at the time on Facebook purporting to show a burnt-out engine from the incident, according to Military.com. The photos showed the B-1B was missing a ceiling hatch, which led to speculation of an in-flight ejection, according to the website. The back ceiling hatch, which hovers over either the offensive or defensive weapons systems officer was open, but all four crew members were shown sitting on the Midland flightline in photos, according to Military.com. Unidentified individuals told the popular Facebook group Air Force Amn/Nco/Snco that the offensive weapons system officer attempted a manual ejection, but the ACES II seat did not blow. The grounding of the bomber fleet affected deployed forces as well. In April, a pair of B-1 bombers deployed to Qatar were used to fire 19 missiles into Syria to destroy a research center used for President Bashar al-Assads chemical weapons program. AIR FORCE MAPS TWO-FOLD FUTURE PLAN FOR THE B-1 BOMBER B-1s were also used last year to fly show of force missions near the Korean Peninsula as tensions ramped up with North Korea. A 16-year-old girl in Utah died Monday after she fell about 100 feet at a waterfall during a hike with a friend, The Deseret News reported. Kaylee Marvin reportedly lost her footing in Santaquin Canyon and sustained serious head and leg injuries in the fall, authorities said, according to the paper. Authorities said Marvins friends alerted authorities and performed CPR until police arrived. Police continued CPR for another 40 minutes. Authorities told the paper that there appears to be nothing suspicious and categorized it as a tragic accident. Obviously this is a huge loss. A beautiful young lady now has tragically passed away from an unfortunate accident, Lt. Tom Hodgson with the Utah County Sheriffs Office told Fox 13 Salt Lake. She took a miss step she basically slipped while she was trying to navigate across a log, said Hodgson. With the water up there and the slick rocks the way they are, she just unfortunately didnt put her feet in the right locations and slipped off the edge." The West Point graduate, who last year posed in a picture holding a cap that had Communism will win written inside, is officially out of the U.S. Army with an other-than-honorable discharge. Spenser Rapone rocked the military community last year after his social media posts were revealed, showing him wearing a Che Guevara shirt underneath his military uniform. He is no longer part of the U.S. military after top brass at Fort Drums 10th Mountain Division accepted his resignation Monday after an earlier warning for conduct unbecoming of an officer. Hes leaving the military with an other-than-honorable discharge. Army officials condemned the cadet last year and opened an investigation into his social media activity. Second Lieutenant Rapones actions in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Army, an Army statement read. His open advocacy of communism attracted the criticism from Florida Sen. Marco Rubio who then urged the U.S. military to dismiss Rapone for supporting the countrys enemies. The now-former cadet said the probe found him advocating for socialist revolution online and disparaging high-ranking officers and U.S. officials. The Army said it took appropriate action in dealing with the situation. But Rapone remains unabashed, posting a picture on Monday showing him the middle finger at a sign at the entrance to Fort Drum, captioned with One final salute. He also remains committed to the far-left causes, saying he considers himself a revolutionary socialist and urged others to join him in his revolution, I would encourage all soldiers who have a conscience to lay down their arms and join me and so many others who are willing to stop serving the agents of imperialism and join us in a revolutionary movement, he said. Rubio cheered the departure of Rapone. While in uniform, Spenser Rapone advocated for communism and political violence, and expressed support and sympathy for enemies of the United States, the Senator said on Monday. Im glad to see that they have given him an other-than-honorable discharge. While in uniform, Spenser Rapone advocated for communism and political violence, and expressed support and sympathy for enemies of the United States. Im glad to see that they have given him an other-than-honorable discharge. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio Military experts say its rare for an officer out of West Point to receive an other-than-honorable discharge. Greg Rinckey, an attorney specializing in military law, claimed that this opens an opportunity for the military to seek money back from Rapone for the education he received as he didnt fulfil the five-year service obligation for all the graduates. I knew there could be repercussions, said Rapone, whos becoming a prominent far-left advocate and will be speaking at a conference for socialism next month. Of course my military career is dead in the water. On the other hand, many people reached out and showed me support. There are a lot of veterans both active duty and not that feel like I do. The Associated Press contributed to this report. A suspected theft of American flags from a cemetery in western Massachusetts turned out to be the work of a four-legged vandal, according to officials. Residents in Adams, Mass. initially believed a person was behind the vandalism at Bellevue Cemetery. However, investigators have discovered a hole near the origin of the flags, indicating woodchucks are involved. Of all the things that go on in todays world, we have a woodchuck problem in our cemetery stealing flags, Adams Police Chief Richard Tarsa told the Boston Globe. There is an active woodchuck burrow up there, and if you look around in the dirt there are pieces of fabric and pieces of a wooden stake. Right now, there is every indication that its quite possible a woodchuck is using the flags in its burrow. A total of 12 to 18 flags have been vandalized at the cemetery, according to officials. This is not the first time woodchucks have been caught taking American flags. In 2012, woodchucks were suspected of stealing up to 75 flags from Cedar Park Cemetery in Hudson, New York. Police have not ruled out the involvement of humans and are continuing to monitor Bellevue Cemetery. Hundreds of migrants who were turned away from seeking refuge in Italy arrived in Spain on Sunday, where the government recently unveiled a series of measures to "put the people's rights first." The Aquarius, a rescue ship with 630 migrants aboard, completed a 930-mile trip from Sicily when it arrived in Valencia, Spanish newspaper Il Globo reported, citing the American Red Cross. The migrants were rejected by Italy and Malta in the Mediterranean and were diverted to Spain after the Socialist government of new Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez stepped up and offered the Aquarius safe harbor. Spain's Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo said Monday that half of the more than 600 migrants who arrived at the port have requested asylum in France. The standoff over the Aquarius appeared to be a tactic by Italy's new government to force Europe's hand at the upcoming summit of E.U. leaders in Brussels in late June. Italy for years has complained that it has been left largely alone to manage Europe's migrant crisis, but the new government says its tactics have finally gotten the point across. Tens of thousands of people from Africa, the Mideast or Asian countries have tried to escape war, terror or extreme poverty each year by attempting dangerous journeys to Europe in smugglers' dinghies across the Mediterranean. The Associated Press contributed to this report. next Image 1 of 2 prev Image 2 of 2 Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says the escalation of violence in Gaza is "a warning to all how close to the brink of war the situation is," and he is urging Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers to recommit to the cease-fire that ended their 2014 war. The U.N. chief said in a report to the Security Council obtained Monday by The Associated Press that he is "shocked" by the Israeli Defense Forces' use of live fire since border protests began in Gaza on March 30. He said its military has "a responsibility to exercise maximum restraint" except as a last resort. "The killing of children, as well as of clearly identified journalists and medical staffers by security forces during a demonstration are particularly unacceptable," Guterres said. "They must be allowed to perform their duties without fear of death or injury." Guterres also warned that actions by Hamas and other militant groups not only risk Palestinian and Israeli lives but "efforts to restore dignity and the prospects of a livable future for Palestinians in Gaza." He cited rockets fired at Israel and attempts to breach the Gaza-Israel fence by some protesters. "I unequivocally condemn the steps by all parties that have brought us to this dangerous and fragile situation," the secretary-general said. Since near-weekly mass protests began along the Israel-Gaza border, more than 120 Palestinians have been killed and over 3,800 wounded by Israeli army fire. The overwhelming majority of the dead and wounded have been unarmed, according to Gaza health officials. Israel says Hamas has used the protests as cover for attacks on the border fence. The marchers have pressed demands for a "right of return" for descendants of Palestinian refugees to ancestral homes in what is now Israel. More than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in the 1948 Mideast war over Israel's creation. Two-thirds of Gaza's 2 million residents are descendants of refugees. Guterres reiterated that "there is no viable alternative to the two-state solution," with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace and with Jerusalem as the capital of both states. But he said that "only by changing the reality on the ground by recognizing and addressing the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, ensuring that all sides recommit to the 2014 cease-fire understandings, and supporting Egyptian-led efforts to restore control of the legitimate Palestinian government in Gaza can we preserve the possibility of a viable, independent and fully representative Palestinian state and avert another disastrous, lethal conflict." The secretary-general was reporting on implementation of a December 2016 Security Council resolution demanding a halt to all Israeli settlement activity and said Israel was not complying with it. "Israel's settlement activities continue unabated and undermine the hopes and the practical prospects for establishing a viable Palestinian state," he said. Guterres said Israel's May 30 decision to advance, approve and issue tenders for some 3,500 housing units in the occupied West Bank was "the largest batch of advancements at one time since June 2017." And he said it creates "yet more obstacles" to a two-state solution. next Image 1 of 2 prev Image 2 of 2 On the campaign trail, presidential front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has railed against a corrupt and "rapacious minority" of business executives who oppose him because they know they will have to "stop stealing" if he wins the July 1 election. Executives have fired back with newspaper ads charging the leftist politician, who is making his third run for the presidency, is a populist demagogue who would set Mexico back decades by returning it to a time of heavy-handed state intervention. Now the two sides, by all appearances, have sat down and talked it out. After more than a decade of mutual recriminations, Mexico's wealthy elite and Lopez Obrador have lately reached something resembling an uneasy truce. It's not that they have reconciled their differences, but rather it's the result of pragmatic calculation by both sides. Business leaders have come to realize they would need to work with Lopez Obrador as the final arbiter of regulations and policy-making. The candidate knows he would need investment to continue so there's no economic instability or boycotting of his projects. "I think it's increasingly inevitable to a lot of people in the business community that they are going to have to make peace with a Lopez Obrador administration, and it's becoming equally obvious to Lopez Obrador that he's going to have to govern and make deals with people that he hadn't originally reached out to," said Andrew Selee, a longtime Mexico analyst and author of "Vanishing Frontiers," a book about Mexico and the United States. "So there is a bit of a coming together. It's a detente, I think. At this point it might be a bit much to say it's a peace," Selee added. "That doesn't mean there's an alliance, but there's at least a recognition that they need to be talking with each other." Lopez Obrador has led opinion polls since the beginning of the campaign, and some recent surveys give him a 2-1 advantage over his nearest rival, conservative Ricardo Anaya, a natural ally of the country's wealthy, and an even wider lead over Jose Antonio Meade of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. While some business leaders have been in Lopez Obrador's camp for a long time, a June sit-down with members of the Mexican Business Council the same group he called the "rapacious minority" marked an extraordinary change of tone after the group published a two-page newspaper ad warning against unnamed politicians who would "divide" the country and cause "resentment." "The doubts were cleared up, the rough edges were sanded and a commitment was established to work together," Lopez Obrador said afterward. Juan Pablo Castanon, former president of the Mexican Employers' Confederation, an umbrella organization for more than 30,000 private businesses, described it as a "good encounter." He came out talking about issues that form the core of Lopez Obrador's platform poverty and corruption and suggested they could work together despite differences. "We have seen how gradually (his) positions have been migrating toward ones much more open to dialogue," the confederation's current president, Gustavo de Hoyos, said later. "All candidates who arrive in elected office, from the president of the republic to the mayor of the country's most obscure town, will need the private sector," de Hoyos said. "They can have no doubt about that." Widely popular among Mexico's poor and working classes, Lopez Obrador, who was Mexico City mayor from 2000 to 2005, has long been viewed with suspicion and fear by the many in the elite a class that has had tight historic connections with the ruling political parties that Lopez Obrador has lambasted as corrupt. When he first ran for president in 2006 on promises to "put the poor first," opponents likened him to then-President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and launched a campaign branding him "a danger for Mexico." Fierce opposition from business groups may have cost him an election decided by a razor-thin margin. His second run in 2012 saw Lopez Obrador moderate his proposals somewhat, but once again he came in second. This time he has sought to be even more cautious, though at the beginning he did not hold back from attacking his critics. Lopez Obrador announced he would review and possibly reverse business-friendly reforms pushed by current President Enrique Pena Nieto. Those include an education overhaul to professionalize a teaching class long dominated by powerful and often corrupt union leaders and an energy reform allowing private investment in the oil industry after years of decline at state-run energy giant Pemex. "It makes me uneasy, the issues, for example, the energy reform," David Arelle, a solar energy executive, said on a recent day in the capital's tony Polanco neighborhood. "I make a living from solar energy ... and if the energy reform is ended, there could be very serious problems." Lopez Obrador also has alarmed investors by saying he would scuttle a multibillion-dollar airport project on the capital's outskirts, drawing the ire of the likes of Carlos Slim, one of the world's richest men and a partner in the construction of the new terminal. More recently, though, the candidate softened his stance, saying it's not necessary to scrap the airport and suggesting instead that it be built entirely with private capital. He has surrounded himself with economists with mainstream credentials such as Gerardo Esquivel, a Harvard PhD who has consulted for the United Nations and the World Bank. Esquivel is one of those tasked with easing fears among the entrepreneurial class. "What is being proposed is to seek a better-adjusted balance between the activities of the state and the market," Esquivel said. "What we learned in these years is that the retreat of the state from economic activity and leaving everything to the market caused mediocre economic growth and poverty." Lopez Obrador promises there will be no expropriations or nationalizations, and says reviews of contracts under the energy reform would seek only to guarantee they were not won through corruption. Prominent historian Enrique Krauze, who in 2006 wrote a scathing essay that labeled Lopez Obrador a "tropical messiah," appears resigned to a Lopez Obrador presidency and of late seems more concerned with ensuring other institutions can rein in his more radical instincts. "Let us vote for the presidential candidate who convinces us, but let us take care that the next president does not have a majority in Congress," Krauze said in a video released last week. "Congress is the principal dam of containment to limit the absolute power of a president." So far Lopez Obrador's huge lead hasn't led to a major market loss or precipitous decline of the peso, though the currency has slumped over other concerns, notably contentious trade negotiations and tariff disputes with the U.S., Mexico's chief trading partner. Alfredo Coutino, Latin America director for Moody's Analytics, said the relative stability suggests markets have already baked in the possibility of a Lopez Obrador presidency and are betting that market and institutional counterweights will check his power. "If he were seen as a real threat," Coutino said, "I think the markets would be moving very strongly and we would be seeing investment decisions postponed or withdrawn." ___ Associated Press writers Sofia Ortega and JoeBill Munoz contributed to this report. Don't call him by his name. French President Emmanuel Macron gave a teenager a lesson on etiquette after the youngster used a nickname to address him. Macron was in the middle of taking selfies and shaking hands with people in Paris on Monday when a teenager stopped him in his tracks, Sky News reported. Hows it going, Manu? the teenager asked the French president, using a familiar nickname for "Emmanuel." However, Macron scolded the teenager, who was with a group of friends. HAMAS TERROR KITES AND ARSON BALLOONS LATEST DESTRUCTIVE WEAPONS IN WAR AGAINST ISRAEL No, you cant do that, no, no, no, no, Macron told the teenager. The teenager apologized to Macron and referred to him as Mr. President. However, Macron was not finished explaining the importance of good manners. Youre here, at an official ceremony and you should behave," Macron said. "You can act like a clown, but today, it is the 'Marseillaise,' and the 'Partisans Song,' you call me 'Mr President of the Republic' or 'mister.' NORTH KOREAS KIM JONG UN MEETS WITH CHINAS XI JINPING IN BEIJING The teenager started to sing The International, a Soviet anthem, as Macron continued to lecture. The day you want to start a revolution you study first in order to obtain a degree and feed yourself, ok? And then you can lecture others, Macron continued. The tense exchange was captured on video and shared on social media. Macron tweeted later Monday that "respect is the minimum in the Republic - especially on June 18, especially in the presence of the Companions of the liberation. But this does not prevent a relaxed conversation." An Indonesian man died on Friday after a coffin carrying the body of his mother fell from a stilt tower and crushed him to death, police said. Samen Kondorura, 40, was killed after the coffin fell off the funeral tower during the service for his mother Berta Kondurara on the island of Sulawesi, The Guardian reported. Kondorura was serving as a pallbearer for his mothers funeral when the other pallbearers carried it up a ladder to place on to a lakkian, an ornately carved tower where the deceased is placed before elaborate traditional funeral rites. DOZENS MISSING AFTER FERRY SINKING AT INDONESIAS LAKE TOBA WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS DISTURBING CONTENT However, the staircase crumbled underneath the group's feet and the coffin fell off the lakkian as it was being raised on to the elevated tower, video showed. The coffin dropped about 10 feet and hit Kondorura. As the mothers coffin was being raised to the lakkian, suddenly the ladder shifted and collapsed, the coffin fell and hit the victim, Julianto Sirait, the chief police commissioner in the North Toraja district said. Bystanders attempted to help the man but Kondorura died on his way to the hospital, NDTV reported. INDONESIAN WOMAN DIES AFTER BEING SWALLOWED WHOLE BY A PYTHON Sirait said the ladder was not properly reinforced but the family has decided not to press charges against the manufacturer. Kondoruras body now rests beside his mothers, Sirait said. When an ethnic Torajan dies, some families spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on funerals. The funerals can go on for days and include feasts, dancing, and animal sacrifice. Up to 200 sets of remains belonging to American servicemen are expected to be transferred from North Korea to the U.N. command in South Korea in the next few days, two U.S. defense officials confirmed to Fox News. The officials say the returned remains will be shipped to Hawaii, where they will be examined by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency for identification purposes. The number of remains expected to be transferred was first reported by CNN. Word of the transfer comes one day after the Pentagon announced it was suspending joint military exercises with South Korea before the next major war game, Ulchi Freedom Guardian involving some 17,500 American troops and 50,000 South Korean forces scheduled for August. Last week, President Trump told Fox News that North Korea will begin turning over remains to the U.S. following his summit meeting with dictator Kim Jong Un. "They are already starting to produce the remains of these great young soldiers who were left in North Korea," Trump told "Fox & Friends" Friday morning. "We're getting the remains, and nobody thought that was possible." More than 7,800 Americans have been unaccounted for since the Korean War, which technically never has ended. According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's website, North Korea has returned the remains of at least 3,200 Americans since the signing of the armistice suspending hostilities in 1953. Most recently, joint U.S.-North Korea military search teams conducted 33 joint recovery operations between 1996 and 2005 and recovered 229 sets of American remains. Washington officially broke off the program because it claimed the safety of its searchers was not guaranteed. Critics of the program also argued the North was using the deal to squeeze cash out of Washington, calling it "bones for bucks." The total cost to the U.S. to carry out the joint missions was $19.5 million. The Associated Press contributed to this report. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sat down with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday, the third visit between the two neighboring countries and a week after the despot met with President Trump in a historic Singapore summit. Kim was seen on video sitting at the Great Hall of the People in Chinese capital after Xi welcomed the North Korean leader for a two-day trip. State broadcaster CCTV said Xi told Kim that through the "concerted efforts of the relevant countries" negotiations regarding issues on the Korean Peninsula are back on track and the overall situation is moving in the direction of peace and stability. Xi was quoted saying the meeting between Kim and Trump was an important step toward the political solution of the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue. He added that China hopes North Korea and the U.S. can "implement well the outcomes achieved at the summit and that China would always play a constructive role in the process. TRUMP SAYS HE HAS 'GOOD CHEMISTRY' WITH KIM JONG UN, AMID SCRUTINY FOR SALUTING NORTH KOREAN MILITARY OFFICER The trip was Kims third trip to China since March, which was the North Korean leaders first trip abroad since he took office in 2011. Kim and Trump met in Singapore last week for a historic summit where the despot pledged to denuclearization in exchange for U.S. security guarantees. Despite the seemingly friendly attitude between Kim and Trump, relations between China and the U.S. have been strained. China on Tuesday threatened comprehensive measures in response to Trumps order for new tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods. Chinas Commerce Ministry called the U.S. presidents threat blackmail and said Beijing is prepared to defend the interests of the Chinese people and enterprises. TRUMP RAISES TARIFFS ON $50 BILLION DOLLARS IN GOODS With North Korea, however, analysts believe China is trying to normalize visits with Kim. The despot's trip on Tuesday to North Korea differed from the past two meetings because Chinas state media announced the trip before Kim arrived in Beijing for the meeting. Previous trips have been confirmed after Kim left the country. The March meeting was announced days after Kim had met with Xi for an unofficial visit accompanied by his wife, Ri Sol Ju. Rumors about Kims trip began to swirl when a mysterious train appeared in the Chinese capital. In May, Kim met secretly with Xi in the Chinese port city of Dalian, where the two leaders had an all-around in-depth exchange of views on China-[North Korea] relations and major issues of common concern, the Chinese news agency reported. Kim took a plane to the meeting. The Associated Press contributed to this report. next Image 1 of 2 prev Image 2 of 2 For decades, he was known only as Unknown X-9352 at a World War II American cemetery in Belgium where he was interred. On Tuesday, Julius Heinrich Otto "Henry" Pieper, his identity recovered, was laid to rest beside his twin brother in Normandy, 74 years after the two Navy men died together when their ship shattered while trying to reach the blood-soaked D-Day beaches. Six Navy officers in crisp white uniforms carried the flag-draped metal coffin bearing the remains of Julius to its final resting place, at the side of Ludwig Julius Wilhelm "Louie" Pieper at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. The two 19-year-olds from Esmond, South Dakota, died together on June 19, 1944, when their huge flat-bottom ship hit an underwater mine as it tried to approach Utah Beach, 13 days after the D-Day landings. While Louie's body was soon found, identified and laid to rest, his brother's remains were only recovered in 1961 by French salvage divers and not identified until 2017. A lone bugler played taps as the casket was lowered in an end-of-day military ceremony attended by a half-dozen family members, closing a circle of loss. Each laid a red rose on the casket and two scattered American soil over it. The Pieper twins, both radiomen second class, are the 45th pair of brothers at the cemetery, three of them memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the cemetery. But the Piepers are the only set of twins among the more than 9,380 graves, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission. The cemetery, an immaculate field of crosses and Stars of David, overlooks the English Channel and Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the Normandy landing beaches of Operation Overlord, the first step in breaching Hitler's stranglehold on France and Europe. "They are finally together again, side by side, where they should be," said their niece, Susan Lawrence, 56, of Sacramento, California. "They were always together. They were the best of friends," Lawrence said. "Mom told me a story one time when one of the twins had gotten hurt on the job and the other twin had gotten hurt on the job, same day and almost the same time." The story of how the twins died and were being reunited reflects the daily courage of troops on a mission to save the world from the Nazis and the tenacity of today's military to ensure that no soldier goes unaccounted for. The Pieper twins, born of German immigrant parents, worked together for Burlington Railroad and enlisted together in the Navy. Both were radio operators and both were on the same unwieldy flat-bottom boat, Landing Ship Tank Number 523 (LST-523), making the Channel crossing from Falmouth, England, to Utah Beach 13 days after the June 6 D-Day landings. The LST-523 mission was to deliver supplies at the Normandy beachhead and remove the wounded. It never got there. The vessel struck an underwater mine and sank off the coast. Of the 145 Navy crew members, 117 were found perished. Survivors' accounts speak of a major storm on the Channel with pitched waves that tossed the boat mercilessly before the explosion that shattered the vessel. Louie's body was laid to rest in what now is the Normandy American Cemetery. But the remains of Julius were only recovered in 1961 by French divers who found them in the vessel's radio room. He was interred as an "Unknown" at the Ardennes American Cemetery in Neuville, Belgium, also devoted to the fallen of World War II, in the region that saw the bloody Battle of the Bulge. Julius' remains might have stayed among those of 13 other troops from the doomed LST-523 still resting unidentified at the Ardennes cemetery. But in 2017, a U.S. agency that tracks missing combatants using witness accounts and DNA testing identified him. Lawrence, the niece, said the brothers had successfully made the trip across the English Channel on D-Day itself, and "they had written my grandparents a letter saying, do not worry about us we are together." "My grandparents received that letter after they got word that they (their sons) had passed away," she said. The Pieper family asked that Louie's grave in Normandy be relocated to make room for his twin brother at his side. The last time the United States buried a soldier who fought in World War II was in 2005, at the Ardennes American Cemetery, according to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ___ Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report. Free Freightnet Membership List your company in the Freightnet directory. It's Free, it's Easy and your company can be displayed in front of potential freight buyers within 24 hours. Hey Long Beach, in case you missed it, the Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden is now open after being closed for over a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Opened in 1981, the garden has been a unique part of... nametalkam at 19-06-2018 06:20 AM (3 years ago) (m) Rapper XXXTentacion has been shot in South Florida, with an eyewitness telling TMZ that he was found with no pulse. XXXTentacion had reportedly been shopping for motorcycles and was leaving the motorcycle dealer when a gunman ran to him and shot him. Rapper XXXTentacion has been shot in South Florida, with an eyewitness telling TMZ that he was found with no pulse.XXXTentacion had reportedly been shopping for motorcycles and was leaving the motorcycle dealer when a gunman ran to him and shot him. Eyewitnesses have shared on social media videos and photos of the 20-year-old rapper lifeless in his car, with a gunshot wound. Reports later confirmed that the rapper is dead. XXXTentacion was involved in legal issues, and he was awaiting trial for domestic violence against his pregnant girlfriend. Eyewitnesses have shared on social media videos and photos of the 20-year-old rapper lifeless in his car, with a gunshot wound.Reports later confirmed that the rapper is dead.XXXTentacion was involved in legal issues, and he was awaiting trial for domestic violence against his pregnant girlfriend. Post Reply I specialize in investigative reportage across several subject matter and sectors but mainly focus on metro events and investigation. Do leave your thoughts and opinion on my reports to let me know what you think about them. Thank you Posted: at 19-06-2018 06:20 AM (3 years ago) | Hero kacylee at 19-06-2018 09:49 AM (3 years ago) (f) The notorious kidnapper who together with his gang abducted a Delta lawmaker, Hon Onose Onakpoma on March 31, 2018 and hid him in a forest in Okurekpo, Ethiope East Local government area of Delta state before shooting him to death inside the hideout has been arrested. The notorious kidnapper who together with his gang abducted a Delta lawmaker, Hon Onose Onakpoma on March 31, 2018 and hid him in a forest in Okurekpo, Ethiope East Local government area of Delta state before shooting him to death inside the hideout has been arrested. According to National Helm, the notorious gang leader identified as Omote Eboh has been on the run despite the arrest and detention of his wife after leading a team to the scene in the thick forest to recover the remains of Hon Onokpoma on May 11, 2018. Most of the perpetrators of the heinous crime have been apprehended including those who aided the escape of the leader, Omote Eboh The team led by the Vigilantes Group of Nigeria, Okpara Inland trailed Mr. Omote Eboh yesterday to the village in Benin, Edo state where he has been hiding and was captured like a goat. Hon Onakpomas remains are in the Eku Baptist Government Hospital morgue while officials are preparing legal documents to release the body to the family. The robbery| kidnap gang had carried out their robbery operation at Okorore near Eku on 31st March 2018 were they robbed over 15 people including a couple who were rushing their 8 years seriously sick son to the hospital at about 5.30am and despite the couple appeal to the robbers| Kidnappers to have mercy and compassion on them to release them to enable them rush their sick son to the Eku Baptist Government Hospital, the heartless gang refused and held them for over an hour until their son died there. The Police Anti Kidnapping squad had to step up operations against the gang and worked tirelessly with Hon Evance Ivwurie, a the member representing Ethiope East State Constituency in the Delta State House of Assembly who provided the courageous leadership. According to National Helm, the notorious gang leader identified as Omote Eboh has been on the run despite the arrest and detention of his wife after leading a team to the scene in the thick forest to recover the remains of Hon Onokpoma on May 11, 2018.Most of the perpetrators of the heinous crime have been apprehended including those who aided the escape of the leader, Omote EbohThe team led by the Vigilantes Group of Nigeria, Okpara Inland trailed Mr. Omote Eboh yesterday to the village in Benin, Edo state where he has been hiding and was captured like a goat.Hon Onakpomas remains are in the Eku Baptist Government Hospital morgue while officials are preparing legal documents to release the body to the family.The robbery| kidnap gang had carried out their robbery operation at Okorore near Eku on 31st March 2018 were they robbed over 15 people including a couple who were rushing their 8 years seriously sick son to the hospital at about 5.30am and despite the couple appeal to the robbers| Kidnappers to have mercy and compassion on them to release them to enable them rush their sick son to the Eku Baptist Government Hospital, the heartless gang refused and held them for over an hour until their son died there.The Police Anti Kidnapping squad had to step up operations against the gang and worked tirelessly with Hon Evance Ivwurie, a the member representing Ethiope East State Constituency in the Delta State House of Assembly who provided the courageous leadership. Post Reply I have been reporting for several years now and I am very interested in visual news reportage with strong inclusion of photos and video multimedia. Posted: at 19-06-2018 09:49 AM (3 years ago) | Addicted Hero Nigerian artiste, Olamide Adedeji has got people talking on social media with a post he made on Instagram. Olamide shared a photo with a questionable caption, Oyinbo say Selfishness is the beginning of sledgehammer. A cheerful giver cannot have akojor. If not dangote go done share all him money give us to solve Nigeria problem, but human needs are endless. Taink You! I de go hustle my own bah . I done goWhen one of his fans commented with, Quote Remember we rise by lifting others Olamide replied Quote Arise o compatriot! My garri never rise finish abeg i go join that club later when i hammer. See the screenshot below..... News release from Vestas Asia Pacific Singapore, 19 June 2018 Vestas has received an order for the 228 MW Lal Lal Wind Farm, located in Victoria, Australia, which is owned by a partnership comprising InfraRed Capital Partners, Macquarie Capital and Northleaf Capital. The Lal Lal Wind Farm is the first project Vestas has worked on with the project partners in Australia and includes a 30-year Active Output Management 5000 (AOM 5000) service agreement. For the project, Vestas will supply, commission and service 60 V136-3.6 MW turbines, delivered in 3.8 MW power optimised mode and a hub height of 93 meters, as well as source towers locally to generate renewable jobs in Victoria. The project is expected to create approximately 160 local jobs in Victoria during construction and operations, supporting the state governments ambitious renewable targets. Macquarie Capital has extensive experience in the renewable energy sector globally and assisting them and their partners in this Australian project demonstrates Vestas ability to develop solutions that meet our customers different needs, said Vestas Asia Pacific President Clive Turton, in such a competitive and dynamic market, we must continue to provide our expertise across the entire value chain to achieve the lowest cost of energy. Vestas will source 80 tower sections for the project from Victorian-based renewable energy components producer, Keppel Prince Engineering. Through Keppel Prince, Vestas will source towers from a Victorian company, underlining our commitment to supporting local job creation, the governments ambitious renewable target, and Australias clean energy future, continued Clive Turton. The project will also feature Australias first radar-activated aviation lights, InteliLight. Optimised specifically for wind power plant application, InteliLight delivers reliable activation of the aviation lights when needed, while avoiding unnecessary continuous lighting. Turbine delivery is expected to commence in the 4th quarter of 2018 while commissioning is expected by third quarter of 2019. For more information, please contact: Australia & New Zealand Rebecca Zhang rezwe@vestas.com +61386987339 Asia Pacific Adeline Teo adteo@vestas.com +6597308005 About Vestas Vestas is the energy industrys global partner on sustainable energy solutions. We design, manufacture, install, and service wind turbines across the globe, and with 92 GW of wind turbines in 79 countries, we have installed more wind power than anyone else. Through our industry-leading smart data capabilities and unparalleled 78 GW of wind turbines under service, we use data to interpret, forecast, and exploit wind resources and deliver best-in-class wind power solutions. Together with our customers, Vestas more than 23,000 employees are bringing the world sustainable energy solutions to power a bright future. For updated Vestas photographs and videos, please visit our media images page on: https://www.vestas.com/en/media/images We invite you to learn more about Vestas by visiting our website at www.vestas.com and following us on our social media channels: Attachment SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:SWX), through its subsidiaries, engages in the business of purchasing, distributing, and transporting natural gas, and providing construction services across North America. Southwest Gas Corporation (Southwest), a wholly owned subsidiary, safely and reliably delivers natural gas to more than two million commercial and residential customers in Arizona, California, and Nevada. Centuri Construction Group, Inc. (Centuri), a wholly-owned subsidiary, provides construction and maintenance services throughout the United States and Canada. Dividend growth of approximately 9.5% for the last five years ended March 31, 2018 Total annualized shareholder return of 12.4% for the 10-year period ended March 31, 2018 1.6% customer growth for the 12-month period ended March 31, 2018 (Southwest) More than two million customers served (Southwest) 20182020 capital expenditures estimated at $2 billion (Southwest) Projecting 12% annual rate base growth over the period 2018 to 2020 (Southwest) One of North Americas largest providers of utility and energy construction services (Centuri) Continued growing trend with record financial results in 2017 (Centuri) Click here to view the SWX Corporate Investor Presentation Advisor Access spoke with President and CEO John P. Hester about Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc.s growth story. Advisor Access: Can you provide us with a little background on the Company? John P. Hester: Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc. has two business segments, Southwest and Centuri. Southwest was incorporated in March 1931 under the laws of the state of California and now provides regulated natural gas delivery services to customers in Arizona, California, and Nevada. In 1996, we added NPL Construction Co. (now Centuri). Centuri is a comprehensive construction service enterprise dedicated to meeting the growing demand of North American utility, energy and industrial markets. We have built an enviable reputation as a trusted leader in natural gas distribution and construction services AA: What is the economic outlook for Southwests service territories and how is that impacting growth? JPH: Our utility service territories are in some of the fastest growing states in the country. Both Arizona and Nevada currently enjoy robust population growth, low unemployment rates, and a surge of activity in the housing and real estate markets. This environment has led to significant customer growth. In fact, we reached an important milestone in November 2017 when we celebrated service to two million natural gas customers across our three-state territory AA: What can you tell investors about the Companys dividend policy? JPH: Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc. had a 9.52% average compounded annual growth rate per share over the last five yearsand we expect to increase future dividends inline with our long-term sustainable earnings growth. AA: What is Southwests view of sustainability, and financial and community stewardship? JPH: We are committed to stewarding our natural resources with care. This means offering programs that help our customers save energy and reduce their environmental footprints. Similarly, we are also doing our part to reduce our impact on the environment. We are striving to achieve a 20% reduction in Southwests greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fleet and building facilities by 2025, using 2015 emissions as the baseline AA: So John, what should investors take away from our discussion? JPH: Over the past year Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc. has celebrated important milestones in both its natural gas and construction services businesses. The achievements we mark today set a solid path forward as we look toward tomorrows opportunities AA: Thank you, John. Read the complete answers to these questions others along with the full interview with Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc., HERE. About Advisor Access: Advisor-Access LLC brings compelling investment ideas to investors in the form of in-depth interviews with company management and the latest fact sheets and corporate presentations. DISCLOSURE: Southwest Gas Holdings, Inc. has paid Advisor Access a fee to distribute this email. John P. Hester had final approval of the content and is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements and opinions. Vikki Consiglio wants amenities. To be precise, the Georgia woman wants fine dining, a Whole Foods and an upscale hotel. And she and many of her neighbors are willing to form a new city to get it.Consiglio is the head of the Eagle's Landing Educational Research Committee, a group that's pushing to form a new city out of the unincorporated portion of Henry County, Ga.That on its own isn't especially controversial. But to form a city with a high median household income, Consiglio and supporters of the Eagle's Landing incorporation want to bite off a chunk of the city of Stockbridge in the process. A referendum on whether or not to secede will be on the ballot in November.Consiglio lives in Henry Country. But she is surrounded by the tentacles of Stockbridge, a city 21 miles south of Atlanta, that through successive incorporations over the years has taken on the shape of an amoeba. That irregular configuration is just one of the arguments Consiglio and her supporters are using to drive their effort to form Eagle's Landing, a new town carved out of the south end of Stockbridge and other unincorporated fingerlings of Henry County.Their other argument is money. Consiglio wants to incorporate Eagle's Landing by combining the most affluent sections of the city and the county. Doing so, she says, will entice new high-end restaurants, retail and hotels to locate there.When we drive out of our neighborhood, we see dollar stores and Walmarts. We know we can do better and have a Whole Foods. We asked why, and the answer is we dont have high enough household incomes, Consiglio says. In order to control our destiny and control our economic development, we [have] to create our city.The appetite for a more upscale community -- and the desire to redraw jurisdictional lines to get it -- is nothing new, says Emory University political scientist Michael Leo Owens.People behind these movements often dont believe they are receiving their value for their tax dollars, Owens says. There is often this idea that these affluent areas are getting cheated, that they are not getting what they are paying for.Some of those sentiments are fueling an enthusiasm for redrawing state lines in California.A citizen proposal to split California into three separate states last week was approved to appear on voters' ballots this November. The sponsor of the initiative, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, who previously has championed efforts to divide California into as many as six different states, has said that splitting up "will get us better infrastructure, better education and lower taxes."Separately, a proposal for California to secede from the United States altogether -- the so-called "Calexit" vote -- is a perennial topic of conversation, perhaps as a ballot initiative for 2020. (Those longshot measures are, as thehas noted, only the latest of more than 200 attempts to split up or secede since California joined the Union in 1850.)At the municipal level, secession or "de-annexation" (which refers to efforts by a municipality to cast off neighborhoods far from the city's core) are often fueled by political resentment, the feeling that City Hall is overlooking certain areas or failing to deliver proper services.The San Fernando Valley, with its 1.3 million residents, tried to secede from the city of Los Angeles in 2002 when residents felt they were being neglected by city leaders. In 2015, the well-to-do, largely white neighborhoods on the southern side of Baton Rouge, La., attempted to carve out a new city and a new school district for themselves; that effort may be back for another vote this year. In Memphis, Tenn., a sprawling jurisdiction that has struggled to deliver services like public transportation and adequate law enforcement, Mayor Jim Strickland has introduced two bills that would shrink the city through de-annexation.In many ways, a secession is like a divorce. And just as in an acrimonious divorce, the biggest question is who gets what.In the case of Eagle's Landing, in Georgia, the newly formed town would take $8 million dollars from Stockbridges general fund and leave that city with $13 million in municipal bond debt. Almost all of the 70 census tracts in what could become Eagles Landing would have a median family income of more than $74,000, while the remaining 253 census tracts in Stockbridge would have a median family income of less than $56,000, according to Moodys.Unlike a divorce, however, only one party gets any say -- at least in that Atlanta suburb. Gov. Nathan Deal recently signed legislation that allows residents in an area marked for secession to vote in November on whether or not to form a new city. Stockbridge residents who don't live in that part of town don't get a vote.Stockbridge city officials filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction to stop the vote, claiming the secession is unconstituional. The matter goes to court next month.As in Baton Rouge, secession proponents have been accused of racism. Currently, African-Americans outnumber whites 2-to-1 in Stockbridge, and last year the city elected its first black mayor and first all-black city council. The Eagle's Landing secession movement gained steam in the wake of that election; the new town would be less than half African-American.I don't think [the proposal] is racially neutral at all, says Dan Immergluck, professor of urban studies at Georgia State University. This is an issue of the power shifting in Henry County. I think there is a political fear of who's rising into power.Georgia state Sen. Emmanuel Jones, who represents a large section of Stockbridge, said the deal would set a dangerous precedent and would undermine the existence of cities.After signing the new law that could make it easier for Eagle's Landing to break away from Stockbridge, Gov. Deal said state lawmakers should create a more consistent framework for the process going forward.I call on the General Assembly to take up de-annexation reform in the next session so as to ensure a comprehensive, detailed and uniform process in the future, Deal told the financial publicationThe notion of seceeding and forming a new government can seem to some residents like an attractive way to create a new community. But in general, splintering an existing municipality can make it harder for government to deliver services equitably, says Owens, the Emory political scientist.Its people picking who the winners and losers are going to be." Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, 74, announced Monday morning that he has Parkinson's disease, but that his symptoms have stabilized with aggressive treatment."The reason I'm going public today, I want to send a message" to people with symptoms, he said during a news conference at Pennsylvania Hospital. "Get in to see a doctor, get a diagnosis, and get treatment. Parkinson's disease is not a death sentence."Although Rendell appeared to have some difficulty rising from his chair and a slight shuffle as he walked to the microphone, he blamed his arthritic knees.Rendell said he had begun having symptoms including a slight tremor three and a half years ago, and sought medical attention at the urging of his family. He went to see Matthew Stern, director emeritus of the Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Stern appeared with him on Monday, along with Penn president Amy Gutmann and other Penn officials."I was stunned because I'd always viewed myself as indestructible," said Rendell, an alumnus of Penn and Villanova Law School.Initially, he feared he would deteriorate quickly like his mother, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's at age 76 and struggled with it for the last 13 years of her life, winding up in a wheelchair. "I saw what it did to my mother," Rendell said.In addition to taking Parkinsons' medication, Rendell began rigorous physical therapy with Heather Cianci, a specialist at the Parkinson's Rehabilitation Center at Pennsylvania Hospital. He also works out two times a week with a trainer at the Sporting Club at the Bellvue."I'm convinced this has worked to significantly slow the progression of the disease," the former governor said.Stern, his physician, echoed that sentiment."I wanted the governor to do this for some time," Stern said of the public announcement. "One of the key messages the governor brings today is that .... with the right combination of medication and therapy, you can live a full and active life. The governor is an inspiring example of what Parkinson's disease looks like today."Rendell was governor of Pennsylvania from 2003 to 2011, and mayor of Philadelphia from 1992 to 2000. He became the city's youngest-ever district attorney when he was elected to the post in 1977 at age 33.In 2012, Rendell received an award from the Bala Cynwyd-based Parkinson Council for his advocacy work.He said then that he was inspired by his mother's battle with the progressive neurodegenerative disorder, which mostly affects the dopamine-producing neurons in the brain. The cause remains largely unknown. The disease causes tremors, walking and balance problems, and muscle rigidity. These symptoms may be accompanied by thinking and behavior changes and, in late stages, dementia.Gov. Tom Wolf and his wife Frances issued a statement soon after Rendell's announcement."Pennsylvania has seen few leaders as tough as Ed and we have full confidence that neither has Parkinson's disease. Ed should know that the entire Commonwealth is standing behind him and hoping for the continued success of his treatment and therapy. As he always has, he is putting others first by going public with his diagnosis so others can also get the help they need."Rendell said he takes Levodopa, a cornerstone of drug therapy because it replenishes the brain's dopamine supply, and a drug called Rasagiline, which inhibits the breakdown of dopamine in the brain.As mayor and governor, Rendell was famous for his ability to keep a grueling schedule on four hours of sleep a night. He said he has barely slowed down, traveling 15 days last month to speak and champion his causes, which include alternative energy and government efficiency.Although Parkinson's is incurable, Stern said there is "tantalizing data" from studies that suggests physical therapy has a beneficial effect on the course of the disease.During an interview after the press conference, Rendell added that mental attitude is an important part of coping with the disease."When I work out, I feel better. I feel like I'm making progress," he said.Rendell's announcement reverberated around the Capitol, where everyone from his biggest supporters to his former rivals paused to recall their best Rendell story and wish him well.Steve Crawford, Rendell's onetime chief of staff who now heads the Wojdak Government Relations lobbying firm, called his former boss "an eternal optimist" with a "work ethic that is almost unmatched" -- traits that will help him going forward."He is literally the hardest working person I have ever encountered," Crawford said. "You never, ever count him out. And I think that I'd be the last person to count him out on this fight."Chuck Ardo, once Rendell's spokesperson in the Capitol, said Rendell is not someone who would easily share his health challenges because he would not want people to feel sorry for him."But one of Ed Rendell's great strengths as a political figure was his enormous courage -- and I think that he will face this next chapter of his life with that same courage and determination."Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman (R., Centre) said in a tweet that Parkinson's "could not have a more formidable adversary."Staff writer Angela Couloumbis contributed to this story. A federal judge has struck down a Kansas voter citizenship law that Secretary of State Kris Kobach had personally defended.Judge Julie Robinson also ordered Kobach, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, to take more hours of continuing legal education after he was found in contempt and was frequently chided during the trial over missteps.In an 118-page ruling Monday, Robinson ordered a halt to the state's requirement that people provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The decision holds the potential to make registration easier as the August and November elections approach.Robinson's ruling amounted to a takedown of the law that Kobach had championed and lawmakers approved several years ago. She found that it "disproportionately impacts duly qualified registration applicants, while only nominally preventing noncitizen voter registration.""If eligible Kansans' votes are not counted despite believing they are registered to vote, it erodes confidence in the electoral system," Robinson wrote.She ordered Kobach not to enforce the proof of citizenship law and its accompanying regulations.Kobach didn't immediately comment. He previously said he wasn't confident Robinson would rule in his favor but was more optimistic about his chances on appeal.At trial, Kobach said the law was working. Since 2000, 129 non-citizens have either registered or attempted to register. Many of them were blocked from registering by the proof of citizenship law, he said."The 129 is just the tip of the iceberg...we know the iceberg is much larger," he said.The ruling is the culmination of a federal lawsuit filed in 2016. At a bench trial earlier this year, the American Civil Liberties Union and attorney Mark Johnson represented voters who said they had been impeded from registering by the law."This decision is a stinging rebuke of Kris Kobach, and the centerpiece of his voter suppression efforts: a show-me-your-papers law that has disenfranchised tens of thousands of Kansans. That law was based on a xenophobic lie that noncitizens are engaged in rampant elections fraud," said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project.Sen. Steve Fitzgerald, the vice-chairman of the Senate's election committee, defended the proof of citizenship requirement. The Leavenworth Republican is running for Congress in the 2nd Congressional District."I think that it is clear that certain members of the press and the judiciary are absolutely opposed to Secretary Kobach's attempt to defend the integrity of our elections," Fitzgerald said.Under the ruling, Kobach must instruct all state and county election officers that voter registration applicants do not need to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. Registrants who have not provided proof of citizenship must be listed the same as all other registrants.Robinson rejected Kobach's argument that the law was needed to prohibit voter fraud. She said of the tens of thousands of people whose voter registrations have been canceled or suspended because of a lack of proof of citizenship, less than 1 percent have been confirmed to be non-citizens.Instead of helping to block voter fraud, the law "acted as a deterrent to registration and voting for substantially more eligible Kansans than it has prevented ineligible voters from registering to vote," she wrote.The ruling was also a slap against Kobach as an attorney. Robinson wrote Kobach had a "well-documented history of avoiding this Court's orders." She repeatedly criticized Kobach's conduct in court, noting that at least once he tried to introduce evidence despite Robinson having excluded it.She also wrote that Kobach failed to disclose documents, and she faulted misleading testimony by one of his witnesses.Kobach was previously fined $1,000 in the case and held in contempt."I have a very difficult understanding why someone with Kris Kobach's educational pedigree can make such poor judgments repeatedly," Rep. John Carmichael, D-Wichita, said after Monday's ruling.Rep. Jack Thimesch, R-Spivey, defended Kobach in the wake of the ruling, citing his familiarity with Kobach from his time sitting on the House elections committee. He also supports the proof of citizenship requirement."It needs to be there," he said of the proof of citizenship requirement.Robinson concluded her ruling by ordering Kobach to take six additional hours of continuing legal education in addition to any other hours required for a law license."The additional CLE must pertain to federal or Kansas civil rules of procedure or evidence," Robinson wrote. Governments around the nation are working to design the best vaccine policies that keep both their employees and their residents safe. Although the latest data shows a variety of polarizing perspectives, there are clear emerging best practices that leading governments are following to put trust first: creating policies that are flexible and provide a range of options, and being in tune with the needs and sentiments of their employees so that they are able to be dynamic and accommodate the rapidly changing situation. Most New Yorkers caught smoking marijuana will face criminal summonses instead of being arrested, under a new city policy announced by the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio Tuesday.The policy change, meant to address the discrepancy between the number of arrests of people of color for marijuana use compared to the arrests of white people for the same offense, will be in effect by Sept. 1, de Blasio said. It has several exceptions, and police officers will "have discretion on how to exercise their enforcement powers," the mayor's office said in a news release.For example, people could still be arrested for smoking pot if:* they are on parole or probation* they have existing criminal warrants* they don't have identification* they have a recent documented history of violence* their smoking poses a public safety risk, such as while driving a car.Smoking pot in a park around kids or while operating heavy machinery could also warrant arrest, at the discretion of the officer, Chief Rodney Harrison said at a news conference announcing the policy."There's a host of different reasons" an officer can use discretion, he said.There were nearly 52,000 complaints from the public about marijuana use in 2017, the city said. A majority of New Yorkers consider smoking pot a "public nuisance that should be curtailed," but they favor summonses over arrest if public safety and quality of life are not affected, according to the NYPD task force convened in May to review the department's enforcement."The bottom line is" the NYPD doesn't want to arrest people for marijuana when it doesn't have an impact on public safety, Commissioner James O'Neill said. "We know it's not productive.""Every time there's one less arrest it's one life affected in a different way," de Blasio said.Some critics, however, said there shouldn't be arrests for pot use at all."No one should be arrested for smoking marijuana, period," Councilman Rory Lancman said in a statement. "The mayor's policy does not attempt to reduce criminal summonses at all, still allows arrests in circumstances that cannot be justified by public safety, will likely make marijuana policing even more discriminatory toward people of color, continues to expose noncitizens to deportation, and takes no steps to eliminate the collateral consequences which are in the city's control."The plan comes a day after the state health department said a forthcoming report will support the legalization of marijuana. The mayor is "not there yet," he said, but his office has created another task force that will make recommendations for regulating pot use in preparation for the possibility of state legalization. A report will be released in 2019, the office said. Description GIS 19 June 2018: One of the pathways on the countrys transformative journey announced in Budget 2018-2019 is the enhancement of the role and participation of women in the countrys development and strengthening support to the elderly. Measures announced with regards to gender equality comprise the introduction of a Gender Equality Bill to set a strong and comprehensive legal framework for gender mainstreaming, , a study to be carried out on the introduction of gender-based budgeting, and a chapter on gender mainstreaming in the 3 Year Rolling Strategic Plan. Ministries and public-sector institutions will also be required to publish a Gender Policy Statement in their annual report. The Budget further makes provision for the training of some 250 government officials across all ministries and departments to deal with gender issues as well as the allocation of Rs 200,000 to each Ministry to promote sensitisation and awareness programmes, and implement activities on gender mainstreaming. Each Ministry will also be required to have a Gender Cell that will encourage greater gender balance in the decision-making process and serve as a platform for dialogue on gender equality issues. Furthermore, the Employment Rights Act will be amended to allow payment of a remuneration for those mothers reckoning less than 12 months service during their 14 weeks of maternity leave. The current one-off grant under the Creche Scheme has been increased from Rs 200,000 to Rs 500,000 so as to promote investment in creches and companies that invest in a creche will benefit from a double deduction under corporate tax. This budget measure has been announced in a view to enable more women to join the workforce. Support to the Elderly With regards to support to the elderly, Budget 2018-2019 makes provision for two elderly day care centres at Bambous and Chemin Grenier and specialised training for a first batch of 50 carers with the collaboration of the Mauritius Institute of Training and Development. It also provides for the increase of the monthly grant from Rs 6,071 to Rs 8,500 for employees of residential care homes and institutions that are caring mostly for the elders with disabilities. It is also recalled that between December 2014 and December 2017, the monthly Basic Retirement Pension (BRP) has been increased from Rs 3,500 to Rs 5,450. In January 2018, it has further been increased to Rs 5,810. Since December 2014 to date the BRP has thus gone up by more than 65 percent. Description GIS 19 June 2018: The foremost difficulty is not bringing women to the world of politics but maintaining women in this arena. Government is thus fully committed to encouraging women to affirm their significant roles in governance institutions, participating equally with men in public dialogue and influencing decision-making at all levels. The Minister of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare, Mrs. Roubina Jadoo-Jaunbocus, made this statement yesterday at the opening of a dialogue on Promoting Womens participation in Politics by the Consultant in International Governance, Dr Lex Paulson, at the Labourdonnais Waterfront Hotel, Port Louis. The Vice-Prime Minister and Minister of Local Government and Outer Islands, Mrs. Fazila Jeewa-Daureeawoo, the Charge DAffaires of the United States (US) Embassy, Dr Melanie Zimmerman, and other eminent personalities were present. Minister Jadoo-Jaunbocus underlined that the Constitution of the Republic of Mauritius upholds the fundamental rights of each and every citizen, regardless of his or her gender, to contribute equally in socio-economic development of the country. The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women spells out the right of women to hold public office and perform all public functions at all levels of government, she underpinned. The Minister pointed out that amendments have been made to the Local Government Act to make more space for women in politics. The Act stipulates that at least 1 of the 3 candidates to be fielded for the local elections should be of the opposite sex. However, she grieved that women are still under-represented in the parliament and continuous efforts should be done to address persistent disparities in the political sphere to attain gender equality. She also highlighted that women in politics through their dedication, love for their country and political talent have emerged as sources of inspiration for many generations. In Rwanda and Liberia, she pointed out, women parliamentarians account for more than 50% and are engaged in pushing for legislations and measures favourable to womens economic empowerment and their combat against domestic violence. On this score, Minister Jadoo-Jaunbocus called for the transformation of politics whereby women would be required to better engage in parliamentary, societal and economic domains. She insisted that women should be treated according to their merits and that they should brave challenges to do away with any kind of discrimination and stereotypes. For her part, the Charge DAffaires of the United States Embassy, Dr Melanie Zimmerman, highlighted the importance of capacity building programmes for women acceding to the sphere of politics. Mauritius, as a democratic country, should be more engaged in ensuring the rightful place of women both in politics and civil societies. She called upon the women to becoming agents of the change that they wish for in the future and not to remain a silent observer to the cross-cutting issues of the society. The Consultant, Professor Lex Paulson, spoke of the various aspects of Advocacy Strategy vital for the evolution of women in a democratic world during the dialogue, a joint initiative of the Ministry of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare and of the US Embassy. He will be in Mauritius till 23 June 2018 and will animate various workshops during his stay. Meet the Edgars Mining for ones and zeroes (TNS) On the evening of May 29, the power was out in the two front rooms of Stanley Edgar's Rockwall home, where he lives with his 32-year-old son Brandon, Brandon's girlfriend and the couple's children.Brandon's girlfriend had plugged in a vacuum cleaner, overloading the circuit breaker. This wouldn't happen in most houses.But the Edgar house is different. It soaks up nearly four times the electricity consumed by a typical Texas home. Most of that goes into heavy-duty computing hardware that the Edgars use to "mine" for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin.They are part of a growing community of Dallas-Fort Worth cryptocurrency miners who are spending tens of thousands of dollars to tap into the capricious world of cryptocurrencies digital, decentralized currencies that represent more than $270 billion in wealth.The beating heart of the cryptocurrency ecosystem is often made up of die-hard "miners" like the Edgars."It's kind of like buying penny stocks," said Brandon. "You hope it hits the moon."Miners use the high-powered computing hardware to verify and tally up the "blocks" in a blockchain logs in a online ledger that keeps track of digital currency transactions. In return, miners are rewarded with cryptocurrency, each unit of which can sometimes be worth up to thousands of dollars.The local community is small but well-connected, said Jacob Stewart, a 29-year-old from Dallas who helps run an investment platform for cryptocurrencies in addition to his full-time tech support job. He said he sees the same faces at all sorts of cryptocurrency-related groups and meetups.Cryptocurrency is hot. Hot like the Edgars' 100-degree storage space filled with high-powered computing equipment and even higher-powered fans.The greater the miner's computing power, the more digital currency they can earn in a given amount of time, improving their return on investment.This is why the Edgars have tens of thousands of dollars worth of computing equipment, fans (including one from an old AC unit) and a 3-D printer in their garage. A savvy miner needs high-end graphics cards, sometimes several, with powerful RAM chips and a power source that can keep things moving not to mention the ability to pay a hefty electricity bill.In April, the Edgars consumed 6,500 kilowatt-hours of power.Early miners used regular computer CPUs. But along the way miners realized that the process by which graphic processing units decode visual inputs was similar to the mechanism needed to solve the challenging algorithms in blockchains, Edgar said. Miners have been after graphics cards since.Stanley and Brandon only got into cryptocurrencies six months ago, when the younger Edgar posted a graphics card he used for gaming on Letgo , a classifieds mobile app. He was surprised at the prices people were willing to pay, and began investigating the growing crypto market.At a Goodwill Computer Works in late May, employee John Michael said the supply of high-end graphics cards has been picked over for months, either by miners themselves or gamers looking to secure cards before the miners got to them. At the retail level, Fry's Electronics has a two-per-household limit on some mining-ready cards.That said, the Edgars, who have seven rigs running 35 graphics cards the "horsepower" of mining and $7,500 worth of coins in their portfolio, said that the demand for graphics cards has now cooled off and supply has caught up.In March, Edgar started his own mining pool , which allows miners to combine their computing power and speed up the mining process.Brandon is the tech-savvy brains of the operation, but Stanley has the business know-how. He secured an investment from an associate named Ronald Lang, 59, an executive at Progistics Distribution, for the Edgar mining endeavor. Over time, the Edgars are counting on generating enough digital cash to put some actual money in Lang's pocket."Another friend said he was going to make a lot of money with cryptocurrencies," Lang said. "It's not a get-rich-quick scheme, but I'm OK with that."Crypto is hot. Hot like a sweltering North Dallas warehouse packed with hobbyists and IT professionals drinking room-temperature soda, analyzing bitcoin's market capitalization.While Dallas isn't a tech hub like Denver or San Francisco, the blockchain community here is active. Meetups serve as an online host for dozens of regional blockchain, bitcoin and cryptocurrency groups. The city's largest bitcoin meetup has almost 2,000 members.The D-FW mining community's most dedicated minds gathered on June 6 in a warehouse attached to an office space owned by Lang's company. It was the inaugural Dallas Cryptomining Meetup , hosted by Edgar and targeting other cryptocurrency miners in D-FW. The group has more than 60 members online.A half-dozen showed up, sitting on folding chairs in a steamy room Lang said jokingly that he wanted to recreate the environment of the Edgars' garage as Edgar described the mining process and the intricacies of running a mining pool.In attendance was a cross section of the crypto ecosystem, including a developer creating his own digital currency called CryptoRescue."It's an interesting concept to me. Anonymity is a big plus, and I like to take risks," said Grant Pellett, a 19-year-old from Plano who helped develop CryptoRescue's Web presence.Part of the reason that it's hard to gauge the size of Dallas' cryptomining community is that it is, by nature, mostly anonymous and decentralized. Pellett doesn't know where the other CryptoRescue developers live, and he met them on Discord, an online chat service popular in the blockchain community.He said blockchain tech is on the way to greater public acceptance but that established businesses gets nervous when things go wrong like when the value of a coin drops, for example.Until it reaches the point where miners make millions and consumers can buy a pack of gum and a ham-and-cheese sandwich with CryptoRescue, the community will live in places like the Edgar garage or on Meetup. But reaching that point may not take long."I think I got a lot of information across," Brandon Edgar said. "But it's just the tip of the iceberg." (TNS) - Aggie Jensen was born 70 years ago on the same land where she lives now, and she has never seen the Nemadji River like this."Never, ever, ever," Jensen said as the river lapped within 2 feet of her home's foundation Monday afternoon in a rural area south of Superior, Wis.And no wonder the home where Aggie and Gordon Jensen live is at least 1,000 feet from the Nemadji's banks. The normally placid river, which typically runs about 4 to 5 feet deep, reached a record depth of more than 30 feet in the wake of the weekend's torrential rains, spilling over its banks and inundating roads throughout southwest Douglas County.The damage extended into Minnesota, especially Carlton County south of Duluth, where several roads were washed out.Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday declared a state of emergency in Douglas, Ashland, Bayfield, Burnett and Iron counties after thunderstorms beginning Saturday night dumped as much as 10 inches of rain on already saturated ground in western Wisconsin.The storms and flooding left a large, muddy swath of destruction. Two men died in Wisconsin, damage was estimated in the millions and numerous roads and bridges were washed out."Much of the damage is still underwater, and it's too dangerous to put people out there," said Keith Kesler, director of emergency management for Douglas County. "It's been a long couple of days, and we've got a couple more ahead of us."Damages are expected to be in the millions, mainly for rebuilding washed-out roads and bridges, he said. But the final tally will be awhile in coming, he added.One man died in Ashland County after his pickup truck went into a ditch on flooded County Road E near White River, authorities said. Thomas L. Koeper, 75, of Mason, Wis., was found dead 60 feet from his truck. Several other motorists in Wisconsin and Minnesota were rescued from vehicles with no injuries.James M. Pluff, 55, of Redwood Falls, Minn., died early Sunday when a tree fell on his camper during a severe thunderstorm in Wisconsin, according to the Sawyer County Record. A woman and two children were injured but not critically.Pluff was on the east side of Lake Chetac.Meanwhile, an earthen dam holding back water on the Tamarack River failed Monday afternoon. The Radigan Flowage Dam west of Dairyland gave way, leading to flash flooding downstream in southern Douglas and northern Burnett counties in Wisconsin, and in far eastern Pine and Carlton counties in Minnesota, the National Weather Service said.Authorities said few people live in the affected area and they didn't expect to order any evacuations.Barriers and "Road Closed" signs were common on the rural byways crisscrossing the valleys of the Nemadji and Black rivers. Scores of roads in the larger disaster area were closed after floodwaters buckled and eroded them.Janine Dunlap and her son stood alongside County Road A outside Superior on Monday afternoon, peering at the gushing ditch that has trapped their family at home for going on three days.Runoff from the weekend rains carved a jagged, 10-foot-wide chasm across the end of Dunlap's driveway, a gap too wide and deep to be crossed by any ordinary vehicle. Their basement and garage flooded."We never expected this," Dunlap said. "I think it just smacked everything in general."Not far from Dunlap's home, a major bridge on State Hwy. 35 over the Black River was partly washed out, closing the highway near the entrance to Pattison State Park.Back at the Jensen residence, Gordon Jensen said he lost nearly $10,000 worth of power tools and generators when the Nemadji flooded his garage.The Nemadji set a new record of 30.3 feet, according to the National Weather Service, more than 3 feet higher than the previous record set in 2012, when Duluth sustained massive damage from flash flooding after another 10-inch rainstorm.Jensen said he was pretty calm as he watched it rise, "but I started getting nervous when it went around the house."In the city of Superior, things were back to normal Monday afternoon after major traffic tie-ups caused by flooding on Hwy. 53. The Nemadji briefly spilled over the highway, said Mayor Jim Paine, but the city's recent investment in stormwater infrastructure took care of the flooding quickly.It's a different story out in the county, Paine said."This is a rough one for Douglas County," he said. "They're going to be working on this for a long time."Nonetheless, the floods coming on the heels of a refinery fire six weeks ago that prompted the evacuation of thousands from their homes have emergency workers and Superior residents looking for a break."We're hoping for a nice, long, mild summer," Paine said.2018 the Star Tribune (Minneapolis)Visit the Star Tribune (Minneapolis) at www.startribune.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. (TNS) Once a rare sight, electronic billboards that flash new ads every few seconds have sprouted up by the hundreds along California freeways in recent years, much to the alarm of environmentalists and traffic-safety experts.In the nearly eight years since Jerry Brown was elected governor, his administration has nearly tripled the number of commercial digital signs permitted along highways, from 125 to 366, records show.Now the Brown administration thinks California can make a profit, sending lawmakers a report that says it is feasible to allow commercial ads on state-operated electronic message signs along freeways in a test program that it estimates would bring in millions of dollars.If successful, the pilot program could lead to ads for commercial products on many of the 904 state-operated message signs that currently are limited to flashing traffic information, road hazard warnings and Amber alerts on abducted children, according to a feasibility study sent by the California Department of Transportation.The study led to the introduction last week of legislation to authorize a five-year pilot program pushed by lobbyists for the influential billboard companies that would benefit from the change. Meanwhile, cities and counties have launched efforts to kill the measure, fearing it would take away their power to control signage.The bill by Democratic Assemblymen Kevin Mullin of South San Francisco and Rob Bonta of Alameda would exempt 25 digital billboards from the current state ban on such signs in public rights-of-way along freeways.This pilot project will provide the traveling public with clear, easy to understand messaging including public safety alerts and disaster alerts as compared to current electronic signs, Mullin said, adding he wants to make sure that we are taking full advantage of evolving technology and reaping the potential benefits of revenue that is generated in the process.Opponents fear the expansion will be one of the governors last actions before he leaves office in January, though Brown has not stated a position on the bill.Patrick Frank, a Los Angeles resident who is president of the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight, is among those alarmed by the spike in electronic billboards and the potential for more to come.Its the worlds worst idea, Frank said. Its crazy. Its out of control. Its not financially necessary. We dont need advertising on our freeways.The test program would generate $10.2 million in revenue for the state over the first four years, according to the Caltrans analysis. But Frank notes the state is already projecting a large surplus next year, with almost $14 billion in its rainy day budget fund.He said the new digital billboards would be an eyesore.Were completely against it for aesthetic reasons, among others, Frank said.The proposal is also opposed by Jerry Wachtel, a traffic safety expert who has done research for Caltrans and the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, and who believes the digital signs would make California freeways more dangerous.Its a horrible idea, Wachtel said. There is no doubt that it would add to distracted driving. It takes the drivers eyes off the road. And depending upon how effective the beer ad is, it may take the drivers mind off the road as well.Billboard firms and their trade group spent $2 million lobbying in Sacramento during the last decade. They also contributed $4.52 million to political campaigns during that period. The contributions include a combined $100,000 to Browns campaigns for governor from Foster Interstate Media Inc., Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS Outdoor, now Outfront Media.Clear Channel and CBS also contributed billboard advertising worth a combined $193,000 to Browns campaign for Proposition 30, the governors 2012 ballot measure that temporarily raised taxes on the wealthy.Mullin and Bonta have received a combined $13,500 in contributions from the Foster firm for their reelection campaigns this year and in 2016.Supporters of the bill to launch the pilot program include digital sign firms Outfront Media and Intelligent Sign Network LLC, which has ties to Foster Interstate Media, the donor to Brown, Mullin and Bonta.Brown declined to comment on the latest proposals through a spokesman, who referred calls to transportation agency officials.Caltrans spokesman Mark Dinger said traffic safety issues would be paramount for the agency if a test program is tried.Although the pilot would be intended to assess revenue-generating possibilities from the advertising, Caltrans primary concern would be any potential for a safety impact on the motoring public, Dinger said. Any such impact would cause the immediate and permanent discontinuation of the program.The legislation has already drawn opposition from the League of California Cities.The bill is purported to be a five-year pilot measure, when in fact it is a secretly negotiated deal between a large billboard company and the Legislature, said Bellflower City Manager Jeffrey L. Stewart, who declined to identify the firm he thinks will benefit. He added that the measure would serve to strip all local control and revenue from animated signs near freeways.Of the 366 digital billboards already permitted by Caltrans near freeways, 103 are in Los Angeles County, up from 66 allowed in the county in 2013, according to state data.Caltrans officials say their policy is to approve permits for digital billboards on private property as long as the structures comply with state standards.The program outlined in the Brown administration report would put commercial ads on 25 digital billboards that would replace message signs operated by the state in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento, according to the Caltrans study delivered to legislators last month.The three urban areas were picked as the highest three revenue markets in the State, the Caltrans report says.The agencys 160-page report says a successful test could result in commercial ads being extended to more of the 904 changeable message signs operated by the state.Los Angeles County has, by far, the most state-operated digital signs of any county in the state, with 126. Beyond the issue of distracting drivers, Wachtel said research indicates that putting commercial ads on the signs lessen their effectiveness in warning motorists of traffic hazards and other government information.The problem, as has been discovered in some studies, is that when official traffic signs convey advertising, motorists tend to begin to dismiss them, he said.The Caltrans report says that there are significant challenges to setting up a test program, including the need to change state law and to get the federal government to waive a ban on electronic signs in freeway rights-of-way.The Mullin-Bonta bill, which is scheduled for a hearing Tuesday in the Senate transportation committee, would remove an obstacle in state law.Supporters say the system can be designed in a way that might get approval from officials in Washington, D.C., although the Federal Highway Administration rejected a proposal last year to put ads on state-operated freeway traffic signs in Texas.Frank, the L.A. based activist, is not just concerned about any expansion. The proliferation of digital signs along freeways in recent years has also affected his opinion of Brown.Im really disappointed because I like Jerry Brown in a lot of respects, and the fact that this is happening on his watch doesnt speak well, Frank said. Portland, Ore., will be closely monitoring car, foot and bike traffic on several busy roads to gain insight into how the throughways can be managed for safety and efficiency.Approximately 200 Internet of Things (IoT) sensors will be attached to streetlights on Hawthorne, Division and 122nd streets as part of the Traffic Safety Sensor Project , an 18-month pilot launched June 18, 2018, to give the city a close look at activity on three of the citys busiest streets.As part of the citys Vision Zero mission to reduce pedestrian, cyclist and motor accidents and fatalities, the city of Portland is piloting the use of sensors that use real-time video analysis to collect vehicle, bicycle and pedestrian data, said Sophia June, a spokeswoman with the Portland Mayors Office, in an email.The sensors help us get accurate data about pedestrian movements, about vehicle movements, parking data and also environmental data extraction, said Austin Ashe, general manager of Intelligent Cities at Current by GE, the private-sector partner in the project.By extracting all of these data sets from each of these sensors around the city, we can literally put our finger on the pulse of this city, explained Ashe. And with that data we can start uncovering really valuable insights that lead to optimized traffic flow, better understanding of parking occupancy, decreased number of traffic accidents, better understanding of micro-climates in Portland. So its those kind of things.All of the data collected will be anonymous. Its just the meta-data, said Ashe. So were not getting any personal identifying information like license plates, or the color of people or gender, none of that.The pilot is part of Portlands Smart City PDX initiative, which also includes other projects like air-quality monitoring, infrastructure monitoring and the Smart Autonomous Vehicle Initiative, which will develop best practices for testing self-driving cars on Portlands streets. The Traffic Safety Sensor Project is part of the Portland Urban Data Lake (PUDL) pilot, which will gather, store, integrate and analyze data from numerous sources, according to June.The traffic sensor pilot, which places sensors in streetlights, is similar to an approach in San Diego, where some 3,200 streetlights are being outfitted with a sensor network that will cover about half of the city. Even small cities, like Farmers Branch, Texas, near Dallas, are looking to the technology, and have deployed the same system, known as Current by GEs CityIQ.One of the beautiful things about the CityIQ platform is that its flexible enough, that any city can adopt it, said Ashe.Its just like a smartphone on a pole, he added. When you think about what a smartphone really is even though we call it a phone its actually a computer with about 14 different sensors in it. Thats exactly what these nodes are. Theyre an Intel computer inside with about 35 different sensors in it.The CityIQ platform can be customized to meet each citys needs, similar to the way users can customize their smartphones with apps that fit their needs. Its a little cliche to say, but you cant map what you cant measure, said Ashe. But theres so much truth to that.The sensors do not need to be installed in each streetlamp, but only every several hundred feet. Portlands pilot project cost just over $1 million and was funded through transportation funds, private-sector partners and other sources.Portland is leading the country in this important data effort, said Mayor Ted Wheeler, in a statement. We are at the forefront of using advanced technology to make our cities safer for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers, helping people more easily get around, save time and reduce the possibility of crashes. This pilot is a significant step in acquiring and utilizing data to make critical decisions. The passwordless future provides us a new hope to secure our systems. For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers. (TNS) The American Civil Liberties Union is staking out a new battleground in a war of voter rights with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, filing a class action lawsuit Tuesday to challenge his use of a multistate data comparison program.Kobach's maintenance of the Crosscheck system recklessly exposes private voter data, the ACLU argues, pointing to the 945 Kansans whose partial Social Security numbers were transferred in an unsecured email to Florida officials. The lawsuit asks for unspecified civil penalties, plus attorney fees and court costs."Kobach is so obsessed with ways to prop up his failed experiment in reducing citizen participation in elections that he's chosen not to follow the most basic procedures for protecting the privacy of Kansas citizens," said Micah Kubic, executive director for ACLU of Kansas. "So much of Kobach's agenda, from voting to immigration to education funding, is based on false narratives and threats that do not really exist. What does really exist is the horrifying invasion of privacy that Kobach has unnecessarily created."The lawsuit follows Monday's ruling by a federal court judge in a fight between the ACLU and Kobach over the state's proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration. U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson rejected Kobach's claims of widespread voter fraud, determining the testimony of his witnesses to be unreliable, flawed and invalid.Although there are only 11 instances since 1999 of noncitizens voting in Kansas, Kobach appeals to constituents by championing his efforts to secure elections. He is seeking the Republican nomination in this year's race for governor, telling his base he knows he is doing the right thing if the ACLU is opposed."You have to be a U.S. citizen to vote, and you have to be who you say you are," Kobach said during a recent podcast with The Topeka Capital-Journal . "One way to put it concisely is in Kansas we've made it easy to vote but hard to cheat."Kansas has used the Crosscheck system since 2005 to analyze the first name, surname and date of birth for voters in multiple states. Before Kobach took office in 2011, only Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska joined Kansas in using the program.Kobach followed through on his pledge to expand Crosscheck, adding 26 states with 100 million voter records by 2016. However, eight states stopped using the program over concerns sensitive information could be exposed.Additionally, researchers discovered the system produced false positives 99 percent of the time. The lead plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit, Scott Moore, had the same name and age as a man in Naples, Fla."Simply being born on the wrong day could land you in Kobach's crosshairs," said Lauren Bonds, legal director for ACLU of Kansas. "Our plaintiffs shared a name and birth date with people in Florida, and that was enough for Kobach to place them on a list suspected double registrants."Efforts to determine if people like the two Moores were really the same person led to the security breach of 945 Kansas voters. The state informed those affected by sending them a postcard and offering a year of service through an identity theft protection company. Fernando Alonso says tackling the Indy 500 yet again is now a "high priority". When the Spaniard announced he was going to contest last year's fabled US-based oval race, he said he was really targeting the unofficial 'triple crown'. Comprised of the Monaco GP, Le Mans and the Indy 500, only Graham Hill has actually won it. But Alonso took another step last weekend by winning Le Mans with Toyota. Juan Pablo Montoya is the other driver with two of the three crowns, as he has won the Indy 500. So when asked what his next goal is, Alonso said after winning at Le Mans: "I will think about what I will do next summer after this summer. "But after winning here, Indy comes back into play with high priority," he is quoted by APA news agency. The 36-year-old, linked with a full-time McLaren effort in the Indycar series for 2019, admits that his future in formula one is therefore in doubt. "We'll see if it happens next year and what the future of formula one looks like," Alonso said. (GMM) Red Bull has decided to switch from Renault to Honda power for 2019. After lengthy delays and high tension between the energy drink-owned outfit and its existing supplier, L'Equipe reports that the decision has now been made in Honda's favour. The authoritative French publication cited "sources" who said the news will be announced by Red Bull as soon as Tuesday. Red Bull will therefore join its junior team Toro Rosso in sharing Honda power from 2019, and leave Renault with only its works team and new customer McLaren. (GMM) The US Department of Energy (DOE) will award nearly $64 million to 89 projects for advanced nuclear energy technology to DOE national laboratories, industry, and 39 US universities in 29 states. The awards are dispersed under three DOE nuclear energy programs: the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP), the Nuclear Energy Enabling Technologies (NEET) program, and the Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) program. Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). DOE is awarding $47 million through NEUP to support 63 US university-led nuclear energy research and development projects in 29 states. An additional $5 million is being awarded under NEUP to support 18 university-led projects for research reactor and infrastructure improvements. These projects will provide important safety, performance, and educational upgrades to a portion of the nations 25 university research reactors. Nuclear Energy Enabling Technologies (NEET). DOE is awarding $5 million under the NEET program for five research and development projects led by DOE national laboratories, industry, and universities. Together, they will conduct research to address crosscutting nuclear energy challenges that will help to develop advanced sensors and instrumentation, advanced manufacturing methods, and materials for multiple nuclear reactor plant and fuel applications. Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF). Under its NSUF program, DOE has selected one industry-led and two university-led projects to investigate important nuclear fuel and material applications. These projects will receive $6.6 million in total for research, facility access costs, and expertise in the following topics: experimental neutron and ion irradiation testing, post-irradiation examination facilities, synchrotron beamline capabilities, and technical assistance for design and analysis of experiments through the NSUF program. When J. Dharma Windham was a teenager, he was diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder and labeled, at the time, a manic depressive. Windham is now 60, and through the years hes tried different treatment for his mental disorder while avoiding triggers like stress and anxiety. Recently, he turned to neurofeedback therapy, which involves monitoring brain waves in real time to see which parts of the brain are malfunctioning. During the neurofeedback, they would put a program on to watch it was tied to the treatment itself, Windham says. The shows I enjoyed the most were the Anthony Bourdain ones. He adds: I loved how he portrayed the cultures in the countries that he visited. He was very respectful and very sympathetic to them. As the outpouring of grief in recent weeks has proven, Bourdain, who would have turned 62 later this month, managed to touch fans of every age, race, and gender, but he struck a particular chord with men who were close in age to himself. Nearly 600,000 Americans over the age of 54 watched Bourdains show each week including my 63-year-old father. I watched his show every Sunday, he told me, recently. The guy ate everything! Ive seen him in the Bronx eating Jamaican food. Ive seen him in Costa Rica. Ive seen him in Africa. Ive been living my life vicariously through him and I looked up to him. And Im not somebody who worships anybody. To his fans, Bourdain was a truth-telling globe-trotter who reveled in other cultures and experienced the world with a profound joie de vivre. Now, the disparity between the Bourdain of Parts Unknown and the man who committed suicide in a hotel room in France has stunned the world, including the men who most closely identified with him. When Windham, a novelist who lives in Laguna Beach, heard about Bourdains suicide, he says he was in shock and grief. He helped me get through a crisis, Windham says, and he saw many parallels between himself and the TV star: a penchant for travel and food, a long-kicked drug habit (Bourdain, heroin; Windham, cocaine), relationship issues, and bouts of suicidal thinking. (In his memoir, Medium Raw, Bourdain writes that he was regularly suicidal after the end of his first marriage.) When I looked at him, I thought to myself, This is a guy whos completely comfortable in his skin, says Jack Harrison, a 57-year-old Department of Defense employee and Air Force veteran. Hes unafraid to put his point of view into the mix, and at the same time he did that, I thought, in a very gentle and respectful way. But as someone whos had members of his family nearly lose their lives to suicide, Harrison says, Bourdains death is a reminder that we just dont know what people are going through unless we ask them. Older men tend to be more pushed to the margins and seem to be viewed as less relevant, says Dan Bilsker, a clinical psychologist and University of British Columbia clinical assistant professor. For instance, if a man in that group loses a job, theres a high probability he wont find another one because hes seen as irrelevant and not getting it. At present, men account for 80 percent of all suicides. According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, while suicide rates have gone down overall, middle-aged white men are still at the greatest risk of taking their own lives. In 2000, men and women between the age of 55 and 64 accounted for more than 12 percent of all suicides. By 2016, that number had risen to 18.7 percent, an increase of nearly 55 percent, and a rate of suicide just behind those 45-54 and those 85 and older. Bilsker has dubbed this woefully under-researched and under-reported trend the silent epidemic of male suicide. Theres more funding on research into womens mental health and the suicidality of women and in young people, Bilsker continues. Those are the focus of funding and policymaking, and men are still more or less left out of the picture or given a very small priority. Everyone has a different reason for enjoying Bourdains shows, and its impossible to say for certain that Parts Unknown definitively provided some kind of outlet for people struggling with mental illness, but Windham says Bourdains openness about his past struggles and the fact that he rallied against meathead culture nevertheless helped him feel more connected to the food-world figure: Were conditioned from the time were little boys to hold it all in, to not show anything that can be perceived as weakness, he says. You know, this goes back to the whole mythology of the Old West, of the silent, strong type, the rugged individual. And, of course, that was all complete bullshit. Bilsker explains that these feelings of attachment are very real, and can have a very strong pull on people. We all have our gods in the world, people we see as embodying something super and extraordinary, he says. They have so much power in helping people create identities for themselves that the story really needs to be told in a powerful and healing way. Short of providing societal and institutional changes that address the reasons older men can feel so isolated, Bilsker suggests reframing the circumstances of Bourdains life and death in a way that focuses on the positive virtues that he embodied. Reflect on what you learned from him and dont make the mistake of thinking that the fact that he came to a tragic end undermines the rest of his life or the values he represented, he says. The life he lived was powerful and meaningful. In the U.S., the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Doritos and so much more. Photo: Melissa Hom Imagine the most over-the-top snack youd actually want to eat. Now, meet Mexicos Dorilocos, a junk-food fever dream. Nacho Cheese Doritos are enhanced with a slew of ingredients: pickled pork rinds, jicama, cucumber, carrots, Japanese peanuts, lime juice, chili powder, a hot sauce like Valentina, the sweet and sour pickled fruit sauce chamoy, and, uh, gummy bears. What at first seems to be too much contains a lot of what makes Mexican snack food so difficult to put down. Its a carnival of flavors thats alternately spicy, salty, and sour, with some crunch and real, live, actual vegetables. The origins of Dorilocos are about as confused as your palate after downing a bag: Tijuana is a top guess, but Sonora and rougher neighborhoods in Mexico City have also been named. A snack cousin of the similarly junk-food-based Tostilocos, it only dates back to early last decade. Youre not likely to find them while seeking out tacos de canasta in Jackson Heights. One place you will find a version of them: Madre Taqueria (formerly known as El Atoradero Taqueria) at Gowanus bar Parklife. Called Madrelocos, theyre available out of the bag ($6) or in a larger tray ($10). (Get the large, youll just order another if you go small.) Theyre made with a party mix of chips: Nacho Cheese Doritos, Cheese Puffs, Flamin Hot Cheetos, and, in an artisanal divergence, Madres own blue corn tortillas. Most of the ingredients are, otherwise, the same, but not entirely. Jiggly cueritos are subbed out for crunchy, deep-fried chicharrones. Theres no Tajin chili powder, and instead mango-lime puree, and, to go with the usual vegetables, diced onion and cilantro. But there are chewy, faintly-sweet gummy bears, which work confoundingly well in this non-sundae setting. For something thats essentially junk-food-on-steroids, what really makes the snack work are the vegetables: Theyre a fresh relief from the salt bomb of condiments and processed foods. I think it reaches that weird balance wheres theres enough fresh ingredients, if it was just chips and salsa and gummy bears, it wouldnt really work, says Noah Arenstein, one of Madres owners. It kind of balances it out in such a way where youre like, I know this is really gross on some level, but it also has lots of different textures and flavors. In Mexico, theyre really popular the most watched Dorilocos YouTube videos have millions of views and also as contentious as junk food gets. The Mexican food rag HojaSanta called them both an example of everything that is wrong with industrial, globalized food systems and thoroughly Mexican. In other words, a very 21st-century food. Works equally well with leftovers. Photo: The Ellaphant In The Room Thank the food gods for Chinese takeout. Many hangovers have been helped along by Seamless, and Styrofoam clamshells filled with sweet, tangy General Tsos chicken. Sometimes, of course, the craving strikes when youre otherwise feeling fine, which means you might want some wine to go with that delivery. Weve got you covered. Most folks would likely reach for some Riesling. When we think sweet and spicy food, we take the easy beeline, and theres nothing wrong with that Ill join you anytime. But there are other ways to go, especially if you want to go red. One of the best choices would be some natural wine from Beaujolais. Beaujolais is a subregion located in the southernmost stretch of Burgundy. Most Burgundy is based on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, but the grape used in Beaujolais is Gamay. Gamays good name got dragged through the mud due to the overcommercialization of the regions Nouveau style of wine in the 1980s and 90s, but all thats changed now thanks to a massive shift in mind-set and philosophy in wine-making. In fact, Beaujolais an area once known for producing wine so massive in its bulk capacity that the Japanese created spas where you could bathe in it is now helping to lead the charge in the conversation about natural wine. We wont go too deep into what, exactly, that means, but, suffice to say natural means at the bare minimum that the vineyard isnt farmed with any pesticides, fertilizers, or other chemicals, and the winemaker is as minimally invasive as possible in the winery. Time to get a little geeky: This approach to wine-making is largely a throwback to a traditional way that wine was made in the area before modern technology, using a technique called carbonic maceration. This technique creates the conditions needed for fermentation to happen naturally by packing the grape clusters on top of each other in a vessel without oxygen. The high concentration of CO2 starts the fermentation inside the berry, so there is little to no tannin (as the fermentation happens without the juice in contact with the grape skins). Grape clusters in the bottom of the vessel are crushed lightly due to the weight of the clusters above them, so they provide the little bit of color and tannin needed to make the wine red. Heres why it works: This wine-making technique produces a style that is light in body, similar to Pinot Noir, with a lot more fruitiness. This means that sweet and spicy sauce will have a light juiciness to move in tandem with the heat, and lighthearted red fruit flavors to marry with the sweetness. The underpinning of the fried chicken will spar just fine with the fresh, high acidity of wines from Beaujolais. Gamay from Beaujolais tends to have a hint of earthiness, too, so it will work well with the more gamy aspect of the cuts of dark-meat chicken typically associated with this deep-fried delivery of heaven. Here are three bottles to get you started. Stock up now so that you have them in your apartment the next time you need some Seamless in your life. Domaine Dupeuble Beaujolais ($13) This Domaine is almost 500 years old, so they kinda know what theyre doing at this point. The wine was fermented through carbonic maceration, so it will have the aforementioned characteristics. Joubert Cuvee a lAncienne Beaujolais ($18) This will be a light, juicy style coming from a serious producer based in the Cru of Brouilly. They were making wines with a natural philosophy decades before the fad came around. Marcel Lapierre Julienas ($38) A member of The Gang of Four, which are the producers that first pushed Beaujolais to return to their regions traditional way of naturally producing wines. Julienas is a Cru of Beaujolais that has a bold style that will elevate your General Tsos to an entirely new level. Blood Bank Department At Wau Teaching Hospital Facing Multiple Challenges The Director at the department of blood donation in Wau teaching hospital says that the department is being faced with numerous challenges. By James Deng Dimo WAU, 18 June, 2018 [Gurtong] -Speaking to Gurtong during an occasion held to mark the World Blood Donor day on Thursday Dr. Achu Dominic Batista outlined many challenges including lack of power and lack of funds to carry out public donation awareness. There is no constant power and the second thing, we have the challenge of budget, lack of a budget to go for blood donation campaign out to churches, to markets, to schools. We have no budget for that, she said. President Salva Kiir inaugurated a ward that contains a laboratory, a digital X-ray machine and blood transfusion facility, provided with the support of the Canadian ministry of health at Wau teaching hospital in 2014. During the ceremony, Kiir urged the public to voluntarily turn out for blood donations. Haiti - FLASH : Inter route agreement Sunrise Airways and Inselair The Haitian airline Sunrise Airways and Inselair, based in Haiti, will begin cooperation on their mutual routes. Sunrise Airways, a growing airline https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-24704-haiti-flash-sunrise-airways-a-haitian-success-story.html which operates flights from Port au Prince in Haiti to Curacao, Cuba (Havana, Santiago de Cuba and Camaguey) and Santo Domingo. These flights are operated on Airbus A320 with economical cabins and business class. In addition, Sunrise operates domestic flights between Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitien. The cooperation will be implemented in two phases. During the first phase, starting today, the two airlines will also sell tickets on flights from the other airline. The second phase, in about two months, will begin when airline reservation systems are merged. From this point on, passengers will only need one ticket to travel to the destinations served by these two airlines. Tickets for Sunrise destinations can be purchased at InselAir ticket offices. See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-24704-haiti-flash-sunrise-airways-a-haitian-success-story.html SL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Education : 144,760 candidates expected at the 2018 Baccalaureate exams In the context of the Mondays of Press Pierre Josue Agenor Cadet, the Minister of National Education gave himself a great satisfecit for the smooth running, last week, of the exams of the 9th fundamental year. The Minister indicated that the course was now on the completion of the official exams for students of philo that will take place from Monday 25 to Thursday, June 28, 2018. He informed that about 144,760 candidates (regular and failed) from the ten departments, will take part in these exams and assured that all arrangements have already been made to facilitate the smooth running of these tests, which cost the Treasury in general approximately 600 million gourdes. He reminded that "Cell phones are formally prohibited in Exam Centers for candidates, supervisors, except for those in charge, if necessary" adding "Any candidate for the Baccalaureate exams (Regular and failed) surprised in the act of fraud or misconduct will have its copy canceled, will be expelled and excluded from examinations for a minimum of 2 years." Cadet has promised that the exams will be clear and precise and that the correction and proclamation of the results of all State examinations will be carried out within a reasonable time. He announced that experts will be available to correctors to supervise their work so that copies of candidates are processed in the best conditions. Minister Cadet also confirmed that provisions had been adopted to withdraw licenses from 34 non-compliant schools. See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-24702-haiti-education-d-7-baccalaureate-51-657-candidates-already-validated.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-24679-haiti-education-reminder-on-the-dates-of-bac-2018-and-instructions.html HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - NOTICE : Call for proposals for projects (CFLI 2018-2019) For more than 30 years, Canada has been funding modest development assistance projects through the Canada Local Initiatives Fund (CFLI). The CFLI is a program that supports small projects proposed and implemented by local NGOs and other community organizations. It enables Canada to respond to local needs by working at the community level, strengthening relationships with civil society and local communities, and building networks of contacts around the world. From June 14 to July 4, 2018, the Canadian Embassy is accepting project proposals worth between C $ 15,000 and C $ 40,000 (approximately 745,000 to 1.9 million gourdes), around the following theme: Inclusive governance, including diversity, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. Recipient Country Partners : Local non-governmental, community and not-for-profit organizations, local academic institutions working on local projects, International, intergovernmental, multilateral and regional institutions, organizations and agencies working on local development activities, Municipal, regional or national government institutions or agencies of the recipient in country working on local projects, and Canadian non-governmental and not-for-profit organizations that are working on local development activities. Note: Eligible organizations must be properly constituted, have a legal status granted by the competent authority and have a bank account opened in the name of the institution. Those who do not meet these requirements may submit their project through through an organization that sponsors the project to act as an intermediary and take charge of the implementation of the initiative. Selection criteria : Submitted projects will be reviewed by the Embassy's CFLI Evaluation Committee. Projects with one or more of the following aspects will be avantaged : The projects objectives and outcomes must clearly align with the CFLIs thematic priority. The sustainability of the development activity proposed by the project. The products, services, benefits and impacts generated by the project should last beyond the period being financed by the CFLI. The project has more than one source of financing, whether it be in cash, in kind or through volunteer or paid work by the organization itself or a partner. Precision and clarity in the identification and description of the problem the project is trying to solve. The project proposal has a realistic and coherent budget, clearly demonstrating that the funds being requested will be used efficiently. The project integrates the principles of good governance, equality between men and women and respect for the environment. Note: Project proposals that do not meet the selection criteria or that do not correspond to the thematic priority will not be considered. Only project proposals received before 11:59 AM (local time) on Wednesday, July 4, 2018 will be reviewed and if a project is retained we will contact you for the necessary follow up. Please note that applications that do not comply with the procedures detailed in this notice will not be considered and only organizations selected for funding will be contacted ! The application form is available on request only by writing to : CanadaFundHaiti-FondsCanadienHaiti@international.gc.ca For more information visit : https://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/haiti/development-developpement/CFLI-FCIL.aspx?lang=eng HL/ HaitiLibre You cannot help but smile when you drive by "Hanks Pumpkintown" on Route 27 in Southampton, especially in October. Even while driving you cant help but marvel at all the pumpkins in the field along the road. Big ones, small... Halewood adds Russias Beluga vodka to portfolio By Lisa Riley Halewood Wines & Spirits has signed a deal as the exclusive distributor of premium Russian vodka brand Beluga in the UK and Republic of Ireland. The deal, which takes place from 1 July, will see Halewood take over distribution of the vodka collection, which includes Beluga Noble, Transatlantic, Allure, Gold Line and Hunting variants, across both the on and off-trade. Taking over from current distributor Cellar Trends, Halewood said in addition to the additional routes to market Beluga would also benefit from additional marketing and promotional support as part of the new deal. Beluga has built a worldwide reputation for producing high quality vodka and for that reason its an excellent extension of Halewoods existing range of innovative and artisanal spirits. We see tremendous opportunity to take the brand on to even greater success, said Halewood group CEO Stewart Hainsworth. Thanks to Halewoods superb marketing and distribution expertise, the company had build a proven track record for taking brilliant brands further, said Sergey Mikhaylov, export manager for Western Europe, Beluga Group Were confident the business can deliver significant growth for us in the UK, which remains one of the worlds largest luxury vodka markets, he added. Beluga, which hails from Siberia, will join Halewoods current handcrafted premium vodka portfolio, including J.J. Whitley Potato and Rhubarb Vodkas, Whitley Neill Blood Orange and Rye Vodkas, Liverpool Vodka and Glasgow Distillerys G52 Urban Craft Vodka, on shelf. The deal forms part of Halewoods renewed vision, revealed in May this year, to become an international specialist in artisanal spirits and craft beers. Hakkarainen was issued a fine equivalent to 45 days pay on Monday by the District Court of Helsinki, according to YLE and Helsingin Sanomat . Teuvo Hakkarainen (PS), a second-term Member of Parliament from Central Finland, has been found guilty of assaulting and sexually harassing one of his female colleagues, Veera Ruoho (NCP), in the Parliament House in December 2017. The incident occurred in the canteen of the Parliament House last December. Hakkarainen, who was intoxicated after participating in the pikkujoulu party of the Finns Party, grabbed Ruoho by the neck tried to kiss her forcibly until he was stopped by Kari Tolvanen (NCP), according to Helsingin Sanomat. Hakkarainen did not challenge the accounts of Ruoho and Tolvanen but stressed that it was not his intention to hurt Ruoho. He was also ordered to cover the legal fees of and pay 1,400 euros in compensation to the victim. The prosecution was demanding that he be sentenced to a suspended prison term of 60 days. Prosecutor Eija Velitski on Tuesday told Helsingin Sanomat that she intends to file an appeal against the ruling to the Helsinki Court of Appeal. You simply cant make amends for violence to the head area by paying a fine, he stated to the newspaper. Aleksi Teivainen HT Photo: Emmi Korhonen Lehtikuva Source: Uusi Suomi (JNS)-With city lights dotting the night behind her, Dr. Dee Gaines, a neuropsychologist, sat for good reason-she's very pregnant. But when Capt. Elgen Long, the last surviving member of a commercial flight crew that saved nearly 2,000 Jewish refugees stranded in Yemen almost 70 years ago, finished his speech, she felt compelled to stand. Her voice shook with emotion behind a microphone handed to her. "My great-grandmother and my grandmother were on those planes. In Yemen, they couldn't read. They couldn't receive an education. Now, here I am, a doctor who has pursued higher education. And, because of you," she said, rubbing her belly, "a fifth generation lives on." Snow-haired and perpetually misty-eyed, Long, who turns 91 in August, bowed his head graciously in reply from a podium. Nearly 100 guests seated at tables applauded roundly in the backyard of a private home in Beverly Hills, Calif. The event organized by the nonprofit, pro-Israel education group StandWithUs for its prominent donors took place on May 30 and honored Long, who, thought not Jewish, was introduced as a "hero of Israel and the Jewish people." Long, a native of Oregon, told guests that returning to the City of Angels-a place he knows well from his past-was a privilege. After serving as a U.S. naval officer during the Second World War, Long attended the University of California, Los Angeles, on the G.I. bill. While in school, his part-time job was delivering telegrams door-to-door, often to movie stars, in the Beverly Hills area. "Now, to be back here more than 70 years later is incredible. It feels like my life has come full circle," he said. "I can't believe I'm here as an honored guest." 'We just kept going' Long's brush with fate happened while working as a commercial-flight navigator for Alaska Airlines in the late 1940s. During a stop in Shanghai in January of 1949, his crew received a telegram from company heads issuing instructions to make for a British Royal Air Force base in Aden, a port city in Yemen. There, his crew took part in a daring rescue mission that would come to be known as "On Eagle's Wings"-a reference to Exodus 19:4-to help airlift tens of thousands of Yemenite Jews facing persecution and death out of Yemen and into Israel, a nation less than a year old at the time. "For us, it was a job," Long told JNS. "But, in the end, it turned out to be much more important than we thought it would be." During his remarks, Long outlined the details of how his crew saved 1,800 refugees-a prospect that seemed dim when their DC-4 aircraft touched down in Aden. With only 48 seats on board and thousands of starving Yemenite Jews camped out on and around the base, Long's crew got creative in the face of a "life and death situation." "One of our mechanics suggested taking out the seats on the aircraft," he said. "If we did that, he told us, we could fit about 150 people on the plane sitting on the floor. We originated that idea, I'm fairly certain." After receiving permission from the head rabbi of Yemen to take off on the Sabbath, Long and his crew began making runs to Israel delivering batches of refugees. Their route, which called for a 20-hour flight day, was complicated by the inability to access air space over Arab lands. Upon landing in Tel Aviv, they turned right around, completing seven days of nonstop back-and-forth transport. "We slept very little, taking shifts and stealing naps when we could," he told JNS. "Eventually, we didn't look or smell too good from the experience. But we just kept going." Finally, they rested for one day. After a decent night of sleep, they made five more runs, clocking 12 trips in total. While unloading passengers in Tel Aviv, Long still remembers the reception his crew received from Israeli military personnel. "I'll always recall one young Israeli officer who came on board, looked at us and told us, 'You've done a great thing,' " recalled Long. "I can still see him, still hear him saying those words to us when I close my eyes and think real hard." "On Eagle's Wings," which also goes by the name "Operation Magic Carpet," saved nearly 50,000 Yemenite Jews who have more than 750,000 descendants, including Gaines and her family. 'The mystery of the man' Another one of those descendants, Shahar Azani, a 41-year-old StandWithUs employee whose grandparents escaped Yemen, came across Long's story while visiting an exhibit at a Jewish museum in Anchorage, Alaska, showcasing the role of Long's flight crew in the rescue. Azani came across a copy of On Eagles Wings: The Untold Story of the Magic Carpet, a book Long wrote on his experience. "I knew then and there that I had to meet this man," he said. When Azani first tried to get in contact with Long several years ago to arrange a meeting and begin the process of honoring him, Long's family members informed Azani that the 90-year-old was "out at sea." He was on a crew searching for the remains of Amelia Earhart, which Azani told guests "added to the mystery of the man." Last fall, Azani and StandWithUs organized a trip for Long to return to Israel and tour the country he hadn't seen since 1949. Over the course of a 10-day trip, Long told JNS that he marveled at the innovative nation that "he could barely recognize" from nearly seven decades ago. "I remember when there was just an airfield," he said. "Now it's Ben-Gurion International Airport, where millions of people come through. And everywhere we went, there was so much being built. Israel is an amazing place." Azani said that in Israel, trip organizers offered Long meetings with high-ranking politicians, awards and appreciation ceremonies. But he had only one thing on his mind. "He just wanted to see how the Yemenites he helped save were doing," he said. "He kept asking, 'How are they doing? How are their lives here? How are their children?' I'm so happy I got to be with him when we made that happen. They don't make them like him anymore." Reuniting with members of the Yemenite-Israeli community that he helped rescue was a joyous occasion for Long, but one in which he couldn't help but think of his fellow crew members who didn't live to see it. "That was one of the best moments of my life," Long told JNS. "But everything that happened to me, I can't take credit for. It was my entire crew and me, and I wish they could've been there. There's a certain serendipity to it all-that a guy from a small town on the Oregon coast experienced all of this." For decades, Rabbi Yotav Eliach, esteemed principal of Rambam Mesivta High School in Long Island, has accumulated his teachings, writings, and those of many other scholars and rabbinical authorities, tracking the history of Israel. His mission was not just to chronicle the dispossession and repossession of a people, as Walter Laqueur did in "A History of Zionism," but to go beyond. Rabbi Eliach completes the circle and ties in the religious component-spiritual Judaism itself. The result is a massive and incisive tome, "Judaism, Zionism and the Land of Israel." It is designed to bridge the intellectual space between Israel's cultural, political, intellectual, diplomatic, juridical, and historical pillars. Skillfully and doggedly, Rabbi Eliach weaves in the biblical and talmudic quintessence that laces it all together. The work spans the millennia between Abraham's covenant with God right through the fiery twentieth century and into the modern, post-Oslo Accords era. In this compilation, God is an acknowledged factor as much as turning-point wars, crumbling international agreements, and fractious diplomacy. On an early page, Rabbi Eliach writes, "The Israelites' relationship to Hashem was based on a covenant binding God and Israel through a series of obligations." God is written about as a real and all permeating force, an ipso facto that functions as the alpha and omega of the story-dwelling above all events. The Divine is a part of the Israel equation that many modern commentators do not emphasize. But Rabbi Eliach magnifies the role of the Lord, intertwined with those of skillful diplomats and brave warriors, from the perspective of a believer, as one who walks in the aura of understanding that too many analysts in the secular world circumvent. Many, regardless of religious rigor-myself included-assisted Rabbi Eliach in the pursuit of his literary quest-admittedly in a world and an era where such books may not be welcome. For example, the estate and publishers of the late, great historian Martin Gilbert have allowed Rabbi Eliach to republish many of Gilbert's treasured and classic maps in this volume. Alan Dershowitz, who famously argued for the Jewish State in "The Case for Israel," endorsed Rabbi Eliach's book with a back cover blurb: "The case for Israel must be made anew in every generation and to every audience," wrote Dershowitz, adding, "Rabbi Eliach has been making the case to generations of high school students. Now he brings his insights and experience to a general public that is desperately in need of history and current realities." Prize-winning journalist Yossi Klein Halevi, whose works, such as "We Were Like Dreamers," set forth the religious, political, and cultural perspective of Israel also blurbed the book: "With passion, clarity, eloquence and most of all love," he wrote, "Yotav Eliach lays out the story of Zionism and the case for Israel. At a time when that story is under growing and systematic attack, Rabbi Eliach has given the Jewish people an indispensable gift." Four of Long Island's most distinguished rabbis agreed to assemble at Rambam Mesivta on May 7 for the book launch. They are Rabbi Heshie Billet and Rabbi Shalom Axelrod of Young Israel of Woodmere, Rabbi Kenneth Hain of Congregation Beth Sholom, and Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum of Young Israel of Lawrence Cedarhurst. The revered Rabbi Elie Abadie, a leader of the Sephardic Jewish community, opened up his Manhattan East Synagogue for the book's Manhattan launch. StandWithUs added its name to the endeavor and gave logistical support for his book launches. Rabbi Yotav Eliach What began on a typewriter in the 1980s was finally completed on a computer only earlier this year. In an unusual publishing move, the book has been released simultaneously in 17 countries. At a time when Jewish and Israeli history is being battered by revisionist theories and alternate narratives amplified by hate groups, "Judaism, Zionism and the Land of Israel" cements the centuries together in one binding that will be a compelling fundamental resource for Jews, Christians and anyone seeking a factual platform to gather atop, from where they can peer far back and far forward. Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of "IBM and the Holocaust." He can be found at http://www.edwinblack.com. NEW YORK-Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has taken his own life, according to the television network CNN for which Bourdain took viewers around the world for the "Parts Unknown" series. He was 61. CNN said Bourdain was in Strasbourg filming an upcoming segment in the series. It said that Bourdain was found unresponsive Friday morning by friend and chef Eric Ripert. It called his death a suicide. "It is with extraordinary sadness we can confirm the death of our friend and colleague, Anthony Bourdain," the network said in a statement early Friday about the longtime food critic, who revealed his Jewish heritage during a 2013 visit to Israel. "His love of great adventure, new friends, fine food and drink, and the remarkable stories of the world made him a unique storyteller. His talents never ceased to amaze us and we will miss him very much. Our thoughts and prayers are with his daughter and family at this incredibly difficult time." Chefs, fans and US President Donald Trump were among those stunned and saddened by the news. "I want to extend to his family my heartfelt condolences," Trump said. Bourdain's death drew new attention to celebrity suicides. It came three days after fashion designer Kate Spade died of apparent suicide in her Park Avenue apartment in New York. Spade's husband and business partner said the 55-year-old business mogul had suffered from depression and anxiety for many years. On the network, anchors struggled to hold back tears as they recalled their late colleague in heartfelt recollections and urged people faced with despair, or who know people who are struggling with depression, to call a suicide hotline. Bourdain was Jewish. His mother Gladys (nee Sacksman) was an editor at The New York Times. His father was Catholic, and Bourdain said he did not have a religious upbringing. In a 2013 episode of his show, Bourdain took viewers to Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. Focusing on what he called "the most contentious piece of real estate in the world," Bourdain used the episode to reveal his own Jewish heritage: "I've never been in a synagogue. I don't believe in a higher power," he told viewers. "But that doesn't make me any less Jewish, I don't think." During the show, Bourdain puts on tefillin by the Western Wall, takes a walking tour of the Old City with famed international chef Yotam Ottolenghi, eats a meal with an American-born settler, chats with members of the first all-Palestinian race car team in Ramallah, and eats fire-roasted watermelon and other Palestinian foods in Gaza. Anthony Bourdain at the Western Wall. Bourdain notes at the episode's onset that he "doesn't know what to think" of Israel. "It is incredibly beautiful here," Bourdain observes at one point. "I don't know why I didn't expect that." Although Bourdain had never been to Israel prior to making that episode, he was no stranger to the Middle East, or to politically rocky terrain. When he went to Lebanon in July 2006 to film an episode of his previous show, the Travel Channel's "No Reservations," he found himself in the middle of a regional conflict-the Second Lebanon War-as the Jewish state retaliated against a Hezbollah attack in northern Israel. Bourdain watched from his hotel balcony as Israel destroyed the Beirut airport-in part to prevent the delivery of arms-which left him stranded in a war zone. Jamila Humphries (l) and Emily Schorr Lesnick are an interfaith couple that is taking part in an aufruf ceremony in a Conservative synagogue. NEW YORK (JTA)-Emily Schorr Lesnick and Jamila Humphrie always knew that Judaism would play a part in the life they wanted to build together. But experiences with Conservative Jewish institutions had made the couple feel less than welcome. Schorr Lesnick, 28, remembers encountering homophobia at her Jewish Conservative summer camp. Humphrie, 29, who was raised Christian but does not identify with a religion, felt singled out as a non-Jewish and biracial person when she accompanied Schorr Lesnick to synagogue. The experiences "made us feel very unwelcomed and very uninterested in participating in anything in Conservative Jewish spaces, specifically," Humphrie told JTA. The two women, who live in Harlem, got married in a civil ceremony on New Years Eve in 2016. At the time they did not consider having a religious ceremony. But at the insistence of Schorr Lesnick's father, they agreed last year to meet with the rabbi of her family's longtime synagogue, Shaarei Tikvah, a Conservative congregation in Scarsdale, New York. The Conservative movement bans its rabbis from performing interfaith marriages, so Rabbi Adam Baldachin suggested performing an aufruf for the couple, a ceremony usually done ahead of a Jewish wedding in which the couple is called up to the Torah for a blessing. Baldachin and his synagogue's ritual committee had recently decided to offer aufruf ceremonies to interfaith couples as an alternative way to celebrate their unions. Schorr Lesnick and Humphrie say that planning the aufruf, which will take place in June, has made them more open to exploring Jewish rituals and religious practices. "I do think that it turned on a light switch that 'it's not all the same, and we can make our own spaces, we can make a choice about this,'" Humphrie said. The Conservative movement has long urged outreach to interfaith families, on the theory that a welcoming atmosphere will encourage them to engage with Jewish life and raise their children with a Jewish identity. But many rabbis say the intermarriage ban presents a hurdle. As a result, some are trying to find creative ways to honor and welcome couples, who might otherwise steer clear of their synagogues and perhaps find spiritual homes elsewhere. "The Conservative movement in some ways has created a barrier for many rabbis with the policies that are constantly reinforced and talked about," said Rabbi Jesse Olitzky of Congregation Beth El in South Orange, New Jersey. "Families are making the assumption that because of said policies there is no place to ritually welcome an interfaith couple or an interfaith family." In October, the movement doubled down on its intermarriage ban, after a number of rabbis performed or said they would perform marriages between a Jew and a non-Jew. Marrying a non-Jewish partner is common among non-Orthodox Jews: A 2013 study by the Pew Research Center's 2013 study of American Jewry found that more than 70 percent have done so since 2000. While the Reform movement allows its rabbis to perform intermarriages, the Conservative movement, like the Orthodox, prohibits them. Olitzky has performed aufruf ceremonies for a handful of interfaith couples. "My job and my goal is to make sure that all members of the Jewish home feel a part of every life cycle event," he said. "I think the aufruf is a good example of how we can do that in welcoming the couple's commitment to building that home." Rabbi Steven Abraham of Beth El Synagogue in Omaha, Nebraska, observes but does not support his movement's ban on intermarriage. "The irony of the aufruf for an interfaith couple is that most likely, unless the rabbi made some decision on his or her own, they're not going to be performing the wedding," he said. "So this is as close as you're going to get to a public ritual where you're pronouncing fact that they're going to be married." In performing an aufruf for an interfaith couple, Abraham wants to send the message to others that interfaith marriage "isn't a capital crime." "I would be able to very easily tell that young person who's sitting in the service, 'Listen, I would much prefer that you probably marry a Jew, but if you don't marry a Jew I don't want you to think that you don't belong here,'" he said. Rabbi Dahlia Bernstein at Congregation Beth Or in Bellmore, New York, said that many interfaith couples think they are not welcome in her community. "A lot of people assume that just because you're a Conservative congregation you will not be welcoming of interfaith families, and my synagogue is not like that, it is radically welcoming," she said. Though the issue of interfaith aufruf has not come up in her community, Bernstein said she is happy to offer her congratulations to interfaith couples on their marriage. "I generally personally reach out and say mazal tov, and check in with them, and give them space to talk and kvell if they want to and listen," Bernstein said. "I think that a lot of Jewish communities try to use shame as a way of 'maybe if we are secretive about it then no one will know, and it's not going to promote intermarriage,' and it's not the right approach." Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Ansche Chesed in New York City supports the Conservative movement's ban on intermarriage, but says he is open to performing an aufruf for an interfaith couple. "We want to say that it's possible to have a welcoming face to community and still have in-marriage norm," he said. "We want to say it's possible to say to intermarried couple and the children of that intermarried couple, 'we still value your relationship, we still value your lives, we want to support you in your journeys and your lives.' "I don't think there's a reason to say 'tsk-tsk' and not have the Jewish spouse have a celebratory aufruf before the wedding," he added. In 2017, the umbrella body for Conservative synagogues approved a resolution to allow individual congregations to decide whether to grant membership to non-Jews. Some Conservative Jews have qualms about allowing non-Jews to participate in certain Jewish rituals. Glen Rock Jewish Center in Glen Rock, New Jersey, allows non-Jewish partners to accompany their spouses on the bimah, or ritual stage, for an aliyah honor on their child's bar or bat mitzvah, participate when a child is given his or her first prayer shawl, and read certain prayers in English. Still, some members remain skeptical about non-Jews' ritual participation, said Rabbi Jennifer Schlosberg. "There are community members for one reason or another who feel uncomfortable with their involvement, even if it is permissible. One of the challenges for me is trying to educate the other community members to help them become more comfortable with these things while also recognizing their own voice," Schlosberg said. During their aufruf at Shaarei Tikvah in Scarsdale, Humphrie and Schorr Lesnick will go up together to the bimah. Schorr Lesnick will recite the blessings before and after a portion is read from the Torah. Rabbi Baldachin and the synagogue's cantor, Gerald Cohen, will recite a blessing for the couple in Hebrew and English. It will be Baldachin's first time performing an aufruf for an interfaith couple. "This just seemed an easy way for me to be in relationship with interfaith families without the ability to perform their wedding," Baldachin said. Prior to allowing aufrufs for interfaith couples, Shaarei Tikvah's ritual committee spent time studying the issue. The synagogue already allowed non-Jewish partners to participate in other ways in the service, such as being invited on the bimah during their child's bar or bat mitzvah ceremony and opening the Torah ark. Before allowing an interfaith couple to take part in an aufruf, Baldachin will ask how they plan to maintain a Jewish home. For Baldachin the difference between marriage and an aufruf comes down to Jewish law. The blessing "for an aufruf in general is not a ritual that changes anyone's status," he said. By contrast, a ritual that changes a couple's status from single to married is seen as binding. For Schorr Lesnick being able to celebrate her marriage in her childhood synagogue holds a large significance. "It's exciting to think about being able to have an opportunity where we can imagine what Jewishness could mean for us," she said.v In the June 2018 issue of Orlando Magazine, 23 women are named as the magazine's 2018 Women of the Year. The magazine asked for nominees of women who are making a positive impact on the community, and readers responded with a plethora of recommendations. Former Jewish Pavilion Marketing Director Julie Dorsey Capps and Pavilion CFO Penny D'Agostino immediately sent in their nomination of Nancy Ludin, executive director of The Jewish Pavilion. Both women told Ludin about the nomination, so she knew about the award when she was invited to the photo shoot by Kristin Merrick, associate publisher of Orlando Magazine. "Whether it is recruiting volunteers or sponsors, networking at community events to find additional service providers, or personally making in-room visits to residents, Ludin has made it her life's mission to ensure that the residents of Central Florida senior living communities routinely have the opportunity to connect back to their Jewish community with the observance of important holidays and traditions," one nomination read. "I am very excited about being selected by the Orlando Magazine as one of their Women of the Year," Ludin told the Heritage. "I am very passionate about the wonderful work we do at the Jewish Pavilion and the Orlando Senior Help Desk to enhance the lives of seniors, of all faiths, in elder care communities. I am proud of the assistance we provide older adults and their family members with issues pertaining to aging through the Orlando Senior Help Desk. One of the silent benefits of the Jewish Pavilion is that we are educating the entire community about Jewish culture and traditions. The staff in senior communities now comprehend our holidays like Chanukah and Passover and even use our Jewish Pavilion cookbook to prepare for Shabbat and other festivities. We also share our culture through participation in numerous networking groups. In the last two years, the Jewish Pavilion has hosted two breakfasts at the Maitland Chamber of commerce-one for Israel Independence Day and one for Purim. We just signed up to host a breakfast for the high holidays. We are know for fabulous food and fun holiday parties." Not only is Ludin the CEO overseeing 400 volunteers, she counts herself as one of those volunteers, and she is currently the senior resource specialist of the Pavilion's Orlando Senior Help Desk. If there is a need that must be met, she will fill that need whether is it fund raising, marketing and event planning. "It takes Nancy Ludin's patience, caring and passion to make sure that the mission is fulfilled," another nomination shared with Orlando Magazine. In celebration of the award, The Orlando Magazine has invited all the ladies (and two guests) to a brunch at the Alfond Inn on June 21. JERUSALEM (JTA)-Of the more than 60 deaths that occurred during the recent clashes between Israel and Palestinians at the Gaza border, none was as divisive as that of Layla Ghandour. Ghandour, an 8-month-old girl, died after an uncle, himself only 12, brought her to the edge of the protest zone, where she was reported to have inhaled Israeli tear gas. Palestinians immediately raised Ghandour as a symbol of Israeli oppression, elevating the infant to the status of martyr and blaming the Israeli army for her death. Many Israelis, meanwhile, countered in angry social media posts that it was irresponsible to allow a child into what essentially was a war zone. Both Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces issued statements, even as reports filtered out that the child had suffered from a preexisting heart ailment that may have contributed to her untimely death. Prominent newspapers such as the Los Angeles and New York Times ran long features on Ghandour, probing the circumstances surrounding her death, describing how she had become a symbol and laying out the arguments of both sides. Others, especially tabloid papers such as Great Britain's Daily Express and The Sun, didn't hesitate to take sides, publishing headlines such as "Drones drop lethal canisters" and describing Israeli tear gas agents as "toxic gas." Ghandour became a pawn in a by-now-familiar game played whenever Israel and the Palestinians clash. Flareups follow a pattern in which initial impressions, and condemnations, are replaced by a more nuanced understanding of events as more information becomes available. Next come bitter partisan battles over what actually happened. Finally, among pundits, media critics, spokespeople and social media users, the discussion shifts from what happened to the credibility of the press itself. "I wouldn't say that the dispute over facts disappears from the conversation after a while," said Christian Baden, senior lecturer at Hebrew University's Department of Communication and Journalism, "but it becomes subordinate because the main story then is about how do we need to interpret and how do we need to react to events." Baden added: "It shouldn't really be that difficult to determine what is happening and ... it shouldn't be that difficult to determine what is objectively the news, but it turns out that it is actually quite complex." This month's clashes were a case study in split-screen journalism-literally. On May 14, cable news channels around the world juxtaposed footage of happy, smiling Israelis celebrating the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem with images of Palestinians running away from Israeli gunfire through the clouds of smoke. According to Baden, such events follow a general pattern in which one or two days of confusion are followed by three to five days of interpretation, after which the "meta-debate kicks in" and "the question of what really happens on the ground becomes secondary because we are no longer debating facts, we are debating stories." After every development here, pro-Israel media watchdog organizations are usually among the first to wade into the debate. This wave of media criticism usually comes in response to the "knee jerk reaction" of "hold[ing] Israel responsible for whatever happens," said Simon Plosker, managing editor of HonestReporting, whose stated mission is "defending Israel from media bias." Plosker blames what he sees as skewed coverage on a mix of bias, parachute journalism by inexperienced or under informed reporters and editors abroad who approach the conflict with "a certain level of preconceived framing" already in mind. Plosker said the narrative presenting the Gaza protesters as peaceful "was skewed from the very start." Experts on media ethics, however, have a slightly different take. Alan Abbey, a former journalist and adjunct professor of journalism at National University of San Diego, said real-time coverage of conflicts, even by the best reporters, is "incomplete at best, simply because details are continuing to emerge, outcomes are unclear, sources have agendas and a complete picture of a complicated situation is impossible to obtain. The coverage of the violence at the Gaza border was no different." Abbey, who lives in Jerusalem, said media watchdogs, on the left and right, are usually quick to "assign blame, generalize and ascribe baked-in, conspiratorial bias where none may exist." He added that a "laser-like focus on individual headlines or even stories misses the sweep and breadth of a news organization's ongoing coverage of people, places and events," which taken together give a more accurate picture of an outlet's approach. "Such groups don't really understand how news organizations work," Abbey said. "Media operations are more haphazard, sloppy and improvisatory than self-proclaimed watchdogs understand or believe." Baden agreed, noting that there is a "perceptual bias" in how we read the news. Dubbed the "hostile media phenomenon" by researchers, this bias manifests itself in how news consumers view reportage of divergent viewpoints. Baden explained that people tend to equate reporting of their opponents' positions with an endorsement of those positions. One foreign correspondent who covered the clashes from the Gaza side of the fence and asked to remain anonymous agreed, telling JTA that he thought that many people follow news coverage in search of reinforcement of their preconceived viewpoints. His role, as he sees it, is to do his "best to be a witness on the ground, to explain what I see, to explain what I don't see, to try to present the different perspectives." "I'll often see parts of my reporting weaponized by different sides, taken out of context, or parts of a story will be quoted to support a narrative or to make an accusation of bias," this correspondent said. "I can't help that, but I really try to keep the white noise in the background. "It's not about my opinion. I see my role as trying to gather as many reports and facts and people's sentiments and present them, and I think my audience is smart enough to read it and draw their own conclusions." While Hamas did want journalists to tell the story of a tragic clash between peaceful protesters and trigger-happy soldiers, the reality on the ground was more complicated than that simple narrative, the correspondent said, noting that participants had a range of motivations for joining the protests. "The situation is always more complicated... and that's the value of having someone on the ground," he said. "I'd like people to know that journalists in Gaza are working their asses off. It doesn't just come to you. It takes many hours and interviews and double checking. I'm always thinking 'how can I explain about this with all its complexity to people who just want to know and aren't just trying to seek confirmation of their own opinions?' I've been very impressed with my colleagues' coverage. You can find a lot of important nuance." Following the Gaza clashes, reporters asked why thousands of mostly unarmed people had been hit by live fire and if it was necessary or disproportionate. At times the IDF provided reporters with detailed breakdowns of casualties, listing their affiliations and the actions that led to their deaths, but other times reporters were brushed off. However, the foreign correspondent said, he and many of his colleagues also were careful to cover Israel's security concerns. "You talk to all sides who have an interest and who are involved," he said. "Of course, I would talk to an Israeli and also talk to a Palestinian about a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which is elementary." One flashpoint in the media war was the death of Gazan photojournalist Yaser Murtaja, who was shot while wearing a flak jacket marked "press" while photographing the clashes. The Foreign Press Association, which represents the international media in Israel, immediately issued a statement urging the IDF to "show restraint in areas where journalists are operating and to conduct a fast and open investigation into this incident." It warned its members to exercise caution. Palestinians claimed that the photographer had been intentionally targeted. Israel took several days to respond, when Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman told reporters that Murtaja, who sold photos to numerous international outlets, was also a member of Hamas who was using his media business as cover to obtain drone footage of IDF positions. The Washington Post, meanwhile, said that Murtaja had recently been vetted and approved for a U.S. government grant. According to Baden, the fight over media coverage isn't new, but the participation of the broader public in what was once an elite discourse certainly is. One of the consequences of this shift is that the views of journalists have come under increasing scrutiny, especially by those posting on social platforms such as Twitter. One correspondent, an American based in Lebanon who likewise asked to remain anonymous, was pilloried by Israelis after a series of tweets expressing her displeasure with the death toll in Gaza. These posts, she told JTA, were held up as an example of a more generalized media bias, which she found ironic given that she is also regularly dubbed a "a Mossad spy and an Israeli stooge almost daily" for her coverage of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Spencer Platt/Getty Images Palestinians protest at the border fence with Israel in Gaza City, May 14, 2018. "I firmly believe that good journalists should be able to put aside their opinions when they work, and I try my best to do so-with success, I believe. I follow all the rules I learned at Columbia Journalism School. I make sure to include a variety of perspectives in my stories and present them as objectively as possible," this correspondent said. "But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not my beat, therefore I felt comfortable tweeting personal opinions on the events in Gaza knowing they would not color my coverage." Meanwhile, the debate over the infant Layla Ghandour goes on. Last week, Gaza's Hamas-run Health Ministry said she had been taken off a list of Palestinians killed in the Gaza border clashes, saying they are awaiting results of a pathologist's report. The June 2014 abduction of three Israeli yeshiva teens in Judea and Samaria sparked rallies in Jewish communities worldwide calling for their safe return. JERUSALEM-It's easy to spot Iris Yifrach as she walks through the crowds in a packed shopping mall in central Israel. And it's not just because she's wearing a bright yellow blouse and matching headscarf. Yifrach has been a public figure since June 2014, when her 19-year-old son, Eyal, was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas terrorists in the West Bank. For 18 days that month, Israel and Jewish communities worldwide were gripped by his June 12 disappearance along with two Jewish 16-year-olds, Naftali Fraenkel and Gil-ad Shaer, who went missing one Thursday night while hitchhiking home from their West Bank yeshiva. Israeli security forces and volunteers searched exhaustively for the three boys, and Jews around the world organized prayer rallies for them under the slogan #BringBackOurBoys. Ultimately, the teens' bodies were found on June 30, 2014. They had been shot and killed the day they went missing, within minutes of entering their abductors' car. During the search, the families were interviewed exhaustively. The mothers flew to Geneva, Switzerland, to make an appeal to the UN Human Rights Council Racheli Fraenkel, the only one among them who was fluent in English, became the face of the "Bring Our Boys Home" campaign in the international media. Almost overnight, the three families went from leading anonymous and private lives to being household names. Their sons' joint funeral was televised live, and their shivas were public affairs. Four years later, the pain and loss endures. But the boys' family members also have established a new normal. It's not that they have left behind their trauma; they've been shaped by it. One parent wrote a best-selling memoir about mourning her son. Another found solace in video therapy. The sister of one of the boys went to the United States on a therapeutic bat mitzvah trip, thanks to an organization that assists Israeli victims of terrorism, OneFamily. Another sibling received support from that organization to attend a Jewish sleepaway camp in Canada and escape the tumult at home. For Iris Yifrach, traveling abroad-something she had never really done before her son's murder-has been extremely therapeutic. Her family has taken several trips to Europe and America in the past four years. "Spending time together has been very important. It's like we're finally getting to know one another," she said. "At first OneFamily gave us these trips, and now we are taking them on our own because we feel they are so important. And we feel like we've gotten a big hug from American Jews." Israel has no shortage of families struggling to overcome the loss of loved ones to terrorism. But the healing process for the Yifrachs, Shaers and Fraenkels has been complicated by the high-profile nature of the killings, making it difficult for them to retreat from the spotlight. "It was overwhelming in the beginning. People came into our home immediately-the army, the police, relatives, friends and neighbors," Yifrach recalled. "At first it was good to have people with us all the time, but then I couldn't get any private space. I couldn't even cry privately." A month after the funeral, the Yifrachs finally found themselves alone in their home in Elad, in central Israel. "I saw his empty place at the Shabbat table, and that's when it hit me," Yifrach said. "I realized that we needed to do something to pick up the pieces." The family began psychotherapy. Yifrach, 47, and her husband, Uri, 49, continue to attend weekly couples therapy sessions. Yifrach says it has strengthened their marital bond. In addition, counseling has helped their six surviving children, now aged 7 to 24. "I came to understand that I was subconsciously looking for Eyal in the other kids. That isn't OK, and I work hard not to do that now," Yifrach said. "Each of the kids has worked hard on defining their own identity separate from Eyal." Ofir Shaer also struggled with parenting issues as he mourned his son Gil-ad. After the murder, he suddenly had new responsibilities in addition to trying to focus on his surviving five daughters. He spent a lot of time on the Memorial Foundation for the Three Boys, which the families established to advance the national and global Jewish unity that had been galvanized by the search for the teens. "People want to hear and see these people, and this puts demands on their time with their family," said Chantal Belzberg, co-founder of OneFamily "It's hard enough to be a high profile person-just imagine adding bereavement onto that." Shaer discovered he needed time for his own healing. Amid work, family and speaking engagements, he enrolled in a video therapy course for bereaved parents. Together with other fathers who lost sons to terror or in combat, Shaer said in interviews, he worked through his feelings about balancing his grief for Gil-ad with trying to be present for his daughters. His wife, Bat-Galim, found writing therapeutic. Last fall, she published a memoir of her first year of mourning that would become a best-seller. It included pages from her late son's diary, which had been recovered from the terrorists' burned car and returned to the family 10 months after the murder. Meanwhile, the siblings of the murdered teens joined support networks like the youth division of OneFamily, which organizes outings, support groups, weekends and overnight camps for family members of terror victims. The organization also helped some of the parents with private English tutoring, which came in helpful on trips overseas. For Racheli Fraenkel, healing came on the bat mitzvah trip that she and her daughter took to the U.S. in 2015. One of Yifrach's daughters said the same of her experience at the Jewish sleepaway camp in Ontario. Gershon Elinson/Flash90 Bat-Galim and Ofir Shaer, left, the parents of slain Israeli teenager Gil-ad Shaer, plant trees in memory of their son at a Judea and Samaria kibbutz with kids who were named after him, Feb. 2, 2018. Belzberg said it's important to listen to the needs of bereaved families rather than offer one-size-fits-all therapy. OneFamily, which she founded along with her husband, Marc, in 2001 following a terrorist attack at a Sbarro pizza shop in Jerusalem, offers terror victims and their families services ranging from individual counseling, support groups, youth programs and camps to financial, legal and bureaucratic assistance. The group paid for some of the overseas trips by the three families because OneFamily considered the vacations essential to the healing process. Bereaved families need support even years after their initial trauma, Belzberg said. "We are currently looking after 2,800 families, each consisting of four to five people," she said. "We want families to eventually stand on their own two feet, but we never say goodbye to them. We are with them as long as they need us." Yifrach says the most important thing she has learned since Eyal's murder is that suffering is not itself a virtue. "If we suffer, it won't bring him back," she said. "We've decided to choose life." This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with OneFamily, the leading organization rebuilding, rehabilitating and reintegrating the lives of Israel's victims of war and terrorism. This article was produced by JTA's native content team. The Jewish Pavilion Gala committee is in full swing, planning a festive and memorable celebration to mark the organization's 18th-Chai-anniversary. Since chai means "life" in Hebrew, the slogan for the Oct. 28 gala is "To Life!" It will be a celebration of the spark of Jewish life and culture that the Jewish Pavilion brings to hundreds of seniors living in elder care and independent living facilities in Central Florida. It all started 18 years ago when Sheryl and Julian Meitin, with aging family members in town, became concerned that Orlando's Jewish seniors were not having their needs fully met by the local facilities. Sheryl's friend Claire Chepenik was active in the Kinneret Council on Aging, and they decided to work together to secure a place where Jewish seniors in need of care could feel at home. At first, the focus was on finding a place where Jewish residents could live together, and Meitin and Chepenik were able to secure a wing in Westminster Presbyterian Home in Orlando, housing 20 Jewish seniors. There they worked with the staff to ensure kosher-style meals and, with a committed group of volunteers, saw to it that there was appropriate programming and care. The Jewish Pavilion became a reality. But when the Westminster home wanted to reclaim the wing about two years later, Meitin and Chepenik and a team from Kinneret decided that if Jewish seniors couldn't come to live in The Jewish Pavilion, The Jewish Pavilion would come to them wherever they lived. "We started with three facilities where we knew there were Jewish residents and they would appreciate us coming to them," recalled Chepenik. Soon, at their temporary office within Julian Meitin's business offices, people began calling them to request visits to their family members in other facilities. At that point, Meitin said, "We realized that the Jewish people were really spread out all over the community-north, east, south and west. We started sending volunteers to spend time with them, doing services, having musical programs, whatever we could do to make them feel that they weren't forgotten." And it is this model of reaching Jewish seniors where they live that has been a key factor in the Pavilion's success. Instead of reaching 20 or even 40 or 50 seniors in a single place, the Jewish Pavilion is able to reach ALL of the local Jewish seniors-now numbering several hundred residents in more than 70 facilities throughout Central Florida. Equally important, Meitin said, are the many people who have found an outlet for volunteering in the Jewish community, including a number who may not have been very involved before. "These were people who care about the elderly," she said, "and The Jewish Pavilion was the vehicle that helped them to put their care into action." "They have become the backbone of the organization, because just about everything we do is done by volunteers," Chepenik added. "And there's a place for anyone who wants to volunteer." Seeing the growth and continued thriving of the organization they started 18 years ago is very rewarding for both Meitin and Chepenik. "I am totally awed," said Chepenik. "I am humbled, I am grateful. As a Jewish community in Orlando, we do care about our elders." Meitin compares it to watching a child grow and come of age. "It's incredible to think that we created something that so many people care about and put years of service into. We've touched so many lives of families as well as the elderly." At the Jewish Pavilion, volunteers are central to the mission and the seniors it serves are a source of strength and purpose. That's why, over the next few months, the Pavilion will be telling the stories of some of the volunteers who have served since its early days, as well as the stories of some of the seniors whose lives it has enriched for many years. Mark your calendars for the Oct. 28th Gems and Jeans 2018, to be held at Hilton Orlando North in Altamonte Springs, and stay tuned for more information-and for heartwarming stories. To Life! Jack Phillips, owner of the Masterpiece Cakeshop, celebrates in his Colorado store after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 7-2 in his favor in a dispute with a gay couple, June 4, 2018. (JTA)-Seven Supreme Court justices sided with a Colorado baker in his legal fight with a gay couple. And seven major Jewish groups weighed in on the decision. Six of the Jewish groups disagreed with the decision. But one Jewish organization, the Orthodox Union, dissented from the rest, calling the ruling a victory for religious freedom. "Too many pundits and politicians have lately engaged in rhetoric that seeks to paint religious liberty in a negative light, especially as they seek to advance policies to which some have sincere dissent," Nathan Diament, the O.U.'s executive director for public policy, said in a statement. "Today, the United States Supreme Court sent a clear message: that the demonization of religious beliefs-especially in policymaking-is constitutionally unacceptable." The O.U. stance is significant because Jewish groups across the spectrum have long based their policy positions on a robust defense of religious freedom. For decades, that meant keeping religion out of the public square and promoting so-called "public accommodation" laws that require places open to the public to grant customers full and equal treatment. This was partly due to a fear that allowing religious exemptions would amount to a tacit government endorsement of Christianity. But in recent years the O.U. has supported a number of efforts to allow more public religious expression, contending that expanding those rights would benefit religious Jews. In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court ruled that a Colorado baker was allowed to refuse to bake a cake celebrating a same-sex marriage. The decision, published Monday, was relatively narrow: The baker was within his rights, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, because a member of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had made comments hostile to his faith while initially ruling on the incident. "[T]hese disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market," Kennedy wrote. Conservative groups had hoped the ruling would be broader, allowing private businesses to refuse service to LGBT couples based on their religious beliefs. Liberal groups, likewise, hoped the court would ban such actions as illegal discrimination. Liberal justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, who are Jewish, sided with the majority. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, with Ginsberg saying that the majority opinion did not take fully into account the baker's unwillingness to serve customers because of who they are. The six Jewish groups opposing the decision, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Reform movement, were largely liberal. Their arguments all said the decision either effectively endorsed anti-LGBT discrimination or missed an opportunity to prohibit it. "As Americans and as Jews, we affirm that discrimination is not 'religious freedom,' and pretending otherwise is an insult to those who have suffered religious persecution," read a statement by Stosh Cotler, CEO of Bend the Arc, a liberal Jewish activist group. "We are relieved this decision was not the sweeping negative ruling it could have been." But the O.U., employing similar ideas, reached the opposite conclusion: That the ruling strikes a blow against discrimination. Codifying the notion that the government cannot disparage religious groups, Diament told JTA, will be helpful to Jewish groups in the future. "It's crucial for Jews and for other minority communities that religious freedoms be given the strongest and widest scope," he said in an interview Tuesday. "The intent of the policymakers is going to be taken into consideration when they're evaluating a policy." Diament said the ruling could aid Jewish groups, for example, if a government body tries to pass a bill outlawing Jewish practices like circumcision or ritual slaughter. In a case like that, the bill could be unconstitutional if its sponsors make comments disparaging Judaism or Islam. "Those are things that are based in religion that some people view as politically incorrect and want to have restricted," Diament said. "Religious liberty jurisprudence is what's going to be essential to preserving those practices for the Jewish community in the United States." Diament also appreciated a passage in Kennedy's opinion stating that "a member of the clergy who objects to gay marriage on moral and religious grounds could not be compelled to perform the ceremony without denial of his or her right to the free exercise of religion." He said that sentence will protect Orthodox synagogues that decline to celebrate Jewish same-sex marriages. Orthodoxy is the only major Jewish denomination that opposes same-sex marriage. The O.U. was one of the few Jewish groups that criticized the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing such unions. The OU generally favors public policies that allow for broader practice of religion. It supports government aid to private religious schools, as well as federal vouchers for private education. It likewise supported a bill this year providing federal security grants to religious nonprofits. (JTA)-A Ugandan rabbi called on Israel to recognize his community after the government ruled against allowing members to move to the Jewish state. Rabbi Gershom Sizomu confirmed a report in Haaretz last week that the Israeli Interior Ministry had denied a community member's immigration application. The Interior Ministry, according to Sizomu, said the decision represented its stance on the Ugandan Jewish community, not just the applicant, Kibita Yosef. Sizomu, who leads the community of approximately 2,000, urged Israel to give Ugandan Jews the same rights afforded to Jews worldwide. "We as a Jewish community need to be treated like any other Jewish community in the Diaspora," he told JTA from Kampala, where he serves as a member of the Ugandan parliament. Israel's Law of Return gives anyone who has at least one Jewish grandparent, is married to a Jew or has converted to Judaism the right to move there. Yosef, who is staying at a kibbutz in southern Israel, is the first Ugandan Jew to try to immigrate to Israel, according to Sizomu. Sizomu emphasized that his community was not looking to immigrate to Israel en masse and that the decision would not change their practices. "We are not Jewish for purposes of immigration," he said. "We are Jewish because that is who we are, and we will never change that, whether they recognize us or not." The Ugandan community, also called the Abayudaya, traces its roots to the early 20th century, when a former leader read the Bible and embraced Judaism. Most members were converted under the auspices of U.S. Conservative rabbis in the early 2000s and thus are not recognized as Jewish by Israel's mostly haredi Orthodox Chief Rabbinate. In 2016, the Jewish Agency for Israel recognized the community for the purposes of the Law of Return, seemingly opening a path for its members to immigrate to Israel. However, the Abayudaya have struggled to obtain government recognition to do so. In December, Israel denied a visa application by another member of the community to study at a yeshiva in Israel, leading to accusations of racism. Today the community, which is based in the rural town of Mbale, has seven synagogues-including a 7,000-square-foot center that opened in 2016-a mikvah and two Jewish schools. "We feel like we have an established Jewish community that deserves to be recognized by Israel," Sizomu said. On Friday, Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, who leads the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly, called the Israeli decision "unlawful." "This is completely inconsistent with more than two decades of Israeli practice of Conservative converts-who are by the way halachically converted to Judaism under our auspices-who had been recognized as Jewish for the purposes of the Law of Return," she told JTA, using a phrase meaning that something was done in accordance with Jewish law, or halachah. Schonfeld said that the movement and its allies were planning "to use all means at our disposal to see that this is reversed." Sizomu said that despite the latest decision, he remained hopeful about his community gaining status in Israel. In August, 40 young Ugandan Jews will travel to the Jewish state on a trip organized by Birthright, an organization that provides free trips to Israel to young Jews around the world. It is the first time that Ugandan Jews will participate in such a trip. US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said Monday that the media should either figure out a better way to deal with the border protests or stop its negative coverage of the Jewish state. Addressing a media conference in Jerusalem, Friedman said that news outlets have been unfair in their coverage of the deadly protests on the Gaza border over the past few months. He advised reporters to keep your mouths shut unless they know better than Israel how to deal with the demonstrations. Some criticism of Israel may be legitimate, Friedman allowed, although journalists should have worked harder to find alternatives to Israels use of lethal force, which has left scores of Palestinians dead, before accusing the state of wrongdoing. Nine out of ten articles written about the Gaza conflict are critical of Israel, Friedman pointed out. Youd think that some journalists would take the time and go and meet with experts and try to understand what could have been done differently or better before they criticize. And I just havent seen it, he stressed. Friedman said he spent a great deal of time speaking to military experts in the US, Israel and other countries about the proper rules of engagementwhich, he added, reporters should have doneand found that the accusations against Israel were, for the most part, unfounded. Friedman hinted that that his criticism was mainly geared towards The New York Times. Slanted accounts, he said, fit a narrative. They fit an opinion. They fit an agenda. But its not reporting, because its not based on hard, factual analysis. (JNS)To the editor: Do you want to know why most American Jews dont believe what you publish about Israel? An article in The Washington Post this week explains it all. It had to do with a Palestinian Arab rock-thrower murdering an Israeli man. The facts of what happened are beyond dispute. On May 24, Israeli soldiers entered al-Amari, a neighborhood near the Palestinian Authority capital city of Ramallah, in pursuit of terrorists. Residents took to their rooftops and began hurling objects at the soldiers. A chunk of concrete thrown by a Palestinian from the third floor of a building struck 20-year-old Ronen Lubarsky, shattering his helmet and inflicting severe injuries. Three days later, he died of his wounds. This episode is especially newsworthy because it runs so counter to the narrative that is typically presented by the American news media. Mobs of Palestinian Arabs throwing rocks at Israelis are portrayed as peaceful protesters. Rocks are not considered potentially lethal weapons, even though 16 Israelis have been murdered by rock-throwers. So here we have an important man-bites-dog story. Maybe that explains why The Washington Post buried itbecause it contradicts so much of what the Post tells its readers about the Palestinians. The news about the murder-by-rock of Lubarsky was confined to the Posts news briefs section. And it was near the end of the briefsbelow much longer ones about Ebola vaccinations in the Congo and plans for a right-wing march in Germany. Not only was the story buried, it was miniscule. The murder of a young man by terrorist merited just a single paragraph. A grand total of 60 words. And, incredibly, the word Palestinian never appeared in the article. Not once. The headline read: Israeli Soldier Wounded in Action Dies. They could have written Palestinian Kills Israeli Soldier. But, no. He just dies, in the passive tense. A reader might think he suffered his injuries in a traffic mishap, or a friendly-fire accident. The article began: The Israeli military says (note the word says, as if there is a doubt), a soldier who was seriously wounded in action last week has died. He was wounded in action. By whom? The Post wouldnt say. The article continued: The soldier was mortally wounded Thursday when, during an arrest near Ramallaha city name which most readers would not recognize as Palestiniana large marble block was dropped on his head from the top of a building. Thrown by whom? Why? Have they done these sorts of things before? The Post wouldnt say. Acknowledging that rocks can kill reminds readers that many Palestinian protesters are would-be murderers. Acknowledging that Palestinians have murdered 16 Israelis in rock-throwing incidents reminds readers of the dangers Israelis face. Giving such a story prominence would only create sympathy for Israel. All of which impedes the campaign to create a Palestinian state in Israels backyard. And its clear that is why the Post handled the story the way it did. The motives of the editors are transparently obvious. This isnt journalism. Its blatant political advocacy. The Washington Post is not the only newspaper that does this. Almost every major American daily newspaper, wire service and television news program incorporates a similar bias when it comes to Israel. Thats why Im addressing this letter to all of you. Because youve all given American Jewry a mountain of reasons to distrust what you publish about the Jewish state and its citizens. Sincerely, Stephen M. Flatow Stephen M. Flatow, a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, is an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. I have never been able to understand why Jews are so wedded to the Democratic Party. First, FDR and his anti-Semitic Congress refused to allow the S.S. St. Louis to land at Key West, thereby relegating hundreds of Hungarian Jews to the concentration camps. Now we see that not one Democrat attended the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalemnot Chuck Schumer, not Bernie Sanders, not Dianne Feinstein. Furthermore, it would appear that the progressive liberals, who seem to have taken over the party, care less and less about Israel. I can only hope my Democratic friends will learn, sooner than later, that they are riding the wrong horse. Richard H. Gleick Maitland With the recent passage of the Taylor Force Act, Congress called on the Palestinian Authority to stop payments for acts of terrorism (...) and to repeal the laws authorizing such payments. In response, the Palestinian Authority reaffirmed its national right to financially support terrorists and has even increased its budget to do so. This is a blatant disregard of U.S. policy, and its time for the Treasury Department to target the administrators of the Pay to Slay practice for sanctions. United States Executive Order 13224 gives the Treasury Department a powerful tool to combat terrorism. It focuses not only on the obvious villainsthose who pull the trigger or smuggle explosivesbut those who assist terrorists, often behind the scenes. The legislation specifically targets those who provide banking services to terrorist groups and funding for terrorist attacks. This Executive Order can also be applied to those who provide material assistance for acts of terror. One such person is Issa Qaraqe. He must be designated for what he isa facilitator and sponsor of terrorism. Qaraqe is the director of the PLO Commission of Prisoners and Released Prisoners Affairs. He heads a department committed solely to providing financial remuneration and other support for Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israel. The Commissions website states that Palestinians who commit acts of terror deserve the legal and legitimate title of warrior. Qaraqes ministry provides monthly stipends to prisoners and released prisoners who, as defined under Palestinian law, are anyone incarcerated in the occupations prisons for his participation in the struggle against the occupation. That is anyone who has aided or carried out a terrorist attack against Israel. The list of recipients is a whos who of cold-blooded killers, including Mohammed Abdel Basset al-Kharoub, who murdered American teen Ezra Schwartz and two others. Also featured on the ministrys pay list is Bilal Abu Ghanem, the killer of Richard Lakin, an elderly Israeli-American. In 2017, the Commission of Prisoners and Released Prisoners Affairs had a budget of $161 million, all spent to incentivize terrorism and support terrorists. The Executive Order allows the designation of persons determined by the Secretary of the Treasury... to assist in, sponsor, or provide financial, material, or technological support for, or financial or other services to or in support of... acts of terrorism. Qaraqe clearly fits this definition as he is the director of a ministry whose sole purpose is to provide financial support to terrorists. Indeed, his unambiguous and enthusiastic support for terrorism is evident in his comments following the erection of a monument honoring Abu Sakkar. The Palestinian terrorist planted a bomb in Jerusalem in 1975 that took 15 innocent lives, including an American and her husband. Qaraqe stated that Ahmad Abu Sukkar is a real man, a fighter, and a man who left his impression on everyone and who was a school for giving, resolve, and courage. We are proud of him as one of the symbols of the Palestinian national struggle. Qaraqes designation could help efforts to reform the Palestinian Authority by sending a message that the U.S. government will not allow a Palestinian exemption for terror financing. Concerning Qaraqe himself, this designation will bar him from U.S. travel, prohibit him from conducting business with U.S. companies, and freeze his assets in the U.S. Designating specific individuals has been used against Iranian officials, such as the recent designation of the head of the Iranian central bank, and now it is time for Treasury to employ this measure against Palestinian terror leaders as well. With the Trump administrations clear commitment to eradicating terrorism, and in the immediate aftermath of the March 2018 enactment of the Taylor Force Act, the Treasury Department must act. It is time for the end of the Palestinian exemption, and for Treasurys anti-terror powers to apply equally to anyone who sponsors these abhorrent acts. Designating Palestinian officials would send a powerful message that the U.S. will take action against terrorists and their sponsors, whether they are ISIS members in Syria, Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or Palestinian officials wearing business suits in Ramallah. Hanna Gerber is a contributing author at The Tower, a publication of The Israel Project. I return to the continuing one-man battle that I have been trying to wage in recent years. As a tour guide, I have visited Yad Vashem many hundreds of times, both the former and the current version. Many structural and technical innovations have upgraded the visiting experience. However, one very glaring content change has caught my eye now for a while and it leaves me no rest. I am asking for yet another attempt to draw the attention to the whitewashing of our history. I will not be silenced by the forces of political correctness, especially in the hallowed ground of our Yad Vashem. The following is a letter I sent to Mr. Avner Shalev, the current chairman of Yad Vashem. (avnr.shalev@yadveshem.org.il) If I am joined by other caring people, the powers that be will take note and truth may prevail. I urge you to make your thoughts known to him. Dear Mr. Shalev, My name is Shalom Pollack, veteran tour guide. I have visited Yad Vashem hundreds of times during my almost 40 years of guiding tourists in Israel. In the old Yad Vashem, there was a floor to ceiling photograph of the infamous meeting between Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin El Husseini, leader of the Arabs (Palestinians). Opposite it was an equally large photo of Jewish volunteer soldiers of the Jewish Brigade. It was an excellent study in contrasts and historic roles and was greatly appreciated by my guests. In the new Yad Vashem, this is gone. In its place is a tiny photo of the Mufti with Himmler. Hitler is gone. Today far fewer visitors at Yad Vashem even learn of the Arab (Palestinian) role in the Holocaust. In the past when I raised this question with Yad Vashem, I was told that the new museum concentrates on the victims rather than the perpetrators, and therefore does not offer much space to them. However, there is indeed a full wall of very large photos of German perpetrators just a few steps from the small Himmler - Mufti one. I assume that it was decided to tone down and hide the Arab (Palestinian) role due to the post Oslo attitude and policies of building bridges with our new peace partners. There are rumors that our popular peace partner, Faisal Hussaini himself insisted that his uncles photo be removed from the museum. In any case, it is deeply disturbing and a national tragedy that a new generation of visitors, Jew and non-Jew, are not educated to a very basic and significant part of the Holocaust. I insist, in the name of all those misled and denied the facts, that this is rectified immediately. Thank you, Shalom Pollack (JNS)When it comes to the Palestinian original sin theory of Israels creation, there are two key milestones: the flight of approximately 750,000 Arab refugees during the 1948 War of Independence and the 1967 conquest of eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War. The events of 1948 are known in Arabic as the nakba (catastrophe) and the events of 1967 are called the naksa (setback). This week, with the 51st anniversary of the Six-Day War upon us, Palestinians will mark Naksa Day on June 5 with protests and demonstrationsand it will be interesting to see whether any new wave of protests fizzles out in much the same way as those on Israel-Gaza border in recent weeks that were presented as a commemoration of the events of 1948. It will also be interesting to see whether Hamas, Islamic Jihad and allied Islamist groups will use the occasion to fire another barrage of missiles at Israel. Its increasingly clear to everyone that neither of these strategies is working for the Palestinians. Compare the international reaction to Gaza in 2018 to that of summer 2014, when Israel took military action to end the daily missile launches from Gaza, and which the Palestinians similarly depicted as a total war designed to deliberately kill and maim civilians. Four years on, especially among European governments, there is much greater recognition that Hamas uses Gazans as human shields and far less lecturing of Israeli leaders about the moral perils of a disproportionate response. As for the expected convulsion of international protests, there really hasnt been one so far. Instead, the Palestinians are confronted with a region that no longer places them front and center, as well as an impatient international community, less willing to indulge Palestinian tales of Israels inherent brutality. In her speech to the U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on the Palestinian missile attacks on Israelcalled by the United StatesU.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley openly declared that the time had come for the Palestinians to consider alternative leadership that can deliver a peace strategy. Haley, significantly to my mind, made no distinction between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Hamas rulers of Gaza, puncturing yet another prevailing myth that the former is dramatically more moderate than the latter. This is where the question of the naksa and its associated nakba comes into sharp focus. Both concepts are built around the logic that Israel is the eternal enemy. That is why Israels creation was a catastrophe. But what precisely was the setback? According to the Institute of Palestine Studies, it was a misfortune that pointed up the need for a new strategy for confronting Israel and redeeming Palestine. The immediate source of this misfortune was identified the Arab states, which had submerged the Palestinian plight into the snake-oil diplomacy of the Arab League and its front organization, the original version of the PLO. Sure enough, after Israels overwhelming victory in 1967, Yasser Arafat and his Fatah comrades, including Mahmoud Abbas, set about Palestinianizing the struggle against Israel, winning the hearts of the international left and establishing themselves as allies of the Soviet bloc. But just as the Arab League never recognized Israels legitimacy, nor did the PLO, which was transformed into an independent organization after the war. The setback, then, was principally that Israel continued existing, even flourishing, after the Arab attempt in 1967 to eliminate it. So perhaps the time has come to go even further than Ambassador Haley and suggest to the Palestinians that, for the sake of the generation that will mark the centenary of Israels birth in 2048, they abandon the discourse of the nakba and naksa altogether. This does not mean, of course, that the Palestinians have to become Zionists, or that they should overlook those disputes with Israel where they can maximize material or territorial gains for themselvesas opposed to chipping away at Israels status as a member of international society. Its tempting, particularly as we watch Abbas emerge from yet another extended stay in hospital, to dismiss Haleys plea for new Palestinian leadership as hopelessly unrealistic. Some might contend that a Palestinian civil war after Abbas departs the scene is more likely that the emergence of a secular-minded, pro-Western peace party. Much also depends on the regional environmentwhether Iran is rolled back in Syria; whether Saudi Arabia leads the Arab states in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel; whether Arab states assume full operational responsibility for stability in the region in concert with the United States and Russia. At the moment, the most likely scenario is more of the same, even if everything else in the region shifts: namely, the collective insistence of the Palestinian leadership that Israel must be brought to its knees to atone for the events of 1948 and then 1967. Ben Cohen writes a weekly column for JNS on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Commentary, the New York Post, Haaretz, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. (JNS)There was a time when defending religious freedom was at the top of the Jewish agenda. Jews understood that as a religious minority, our rights could only be defended when those of other religious faiths are also respected. Though anti-Semitism is on the rise elsewhere, American Jews dont worry anymore about their government seeking to restrict their rights to practice their religion. Nor should they. Arguments about reasonable accommodation for Jewish religious observances are no longer a matter of much dispute. The widespread acceptance of Jews, including those who are proud to practice their faith in public, in every aspect of American society is an accomplished fact. Such success shouldnt cause us to stop caring about the principle of religious liberty. Yet that seems to be the case for many Jews, including some organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, which are tasked with the job of defending our rights. Thats the only way to interpret the dismay those groups expressed at the U.S. Supreme Courts decision in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission that was handed down on Monday. The high court affirmed that the Colorado commission was wrong to hold Jack Phillips, a conservative Christian baker, liable for refusing to create a special cake celebrating a gay wedding. A decisive 7-2 majority argued that the commissions open contempt for the bakers religious faith compromised its ability to rule fairly on the issue. While the narrow ruling was far short of a sweeping defense of religious expression that some conservatives hoped for, it still represented a reaffirmation of the applicability of the free exercise clause of the First Amendments protections of religious freedom. As such, it made clear that the constitution protects the rights of believers to express their faith in the public square rather than just the ability to worship freely in private. Yet most Jewish groups were unhappy with the ruling because they perceived it as a slight to the rights of gay Americans. As in any issue in which the rights of groups are weighed against each other, this is a complicated debate. As Justice Anthony Kennedy noted in the majority decision, the dignity of gays needs to be upheld, but the same applies to those whose religious faith causes them to oppose gay marriage. At issue here was not the right of gays or any other group of people to equal service at a public accommodation like a bakery. The baker made clear he would sell his wares to anyone who wanted them, but to ask him to design and create a special cake for a ceremony that offends his religious principles violated his rights. Many of us may think his beliefs are wrong or simply foolish. But the principle here is not abstract. As the court noted, the same Colorado commission that ruled against Phillips for his refusal to bake the wedding cake upheld the rights of bakers to refuse to create cakes with explicitly anti-gay messages. Why then have liberal Jewish groups joined with those seeking to punish the baker, and drive him and others who have made similar stands not merely out of business, but out of the American public square? Public opinion about gay rights has undergone a radical shift in the United States. A little more than over a decade ago, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton ran for president while affirming that marriage was only between a man and a woman. But within a few years, not only would their positions change but also a majority of the Supreme Court would rule (in a decision also written by Kennedy) that a right to gay marriage was the law of the land. While issues like abortion still bitterly divide us, polls show that the majority of Americans seem to have little problem with this shift in the culture and the law. That is particularly true for Jews, who are overwhelmingly liberal in their politics. Yet that doesnt mean that those who disagree must be driven underground, particularly if their disagreement is rooted in their religious faith, which is explicitly protected by the constitution. The problem here is that for all too many of us, a willingness to defend such rights seems to extend only to those who think or believe as we do. That Jews, who have far more contact and sympathy for their gay friends and neighbors than with Christian conservatives theyve never metand whose beliefs are somehow seen as threateningis unsurprising. But rights are not supposed to be just for our friends and us. They must apply to everyone, or theyre meaningless. If a Jewish baker refused to create a Nazi-themed cake or an African-American wouldnt design one for the Ku Klux Klan, then we would regard any effort to compel them to do so as absurd and deeply wrong. While gays are not to be compared to those groups, the right of the Christian baker not to be dragooned into something that offended him is no less sacred and shouldnt be characterized as a form of discrimination. Yet so great is our disdain for this bakerand those who think like himthat Jewish groups that are supposed to care about religious freedom were willing not only to disregard Phillipss rights, but also the open contempt for religious faith that permeated the proceeding that condemned him. The same goes for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgthe idol of liberal Jewswho cast one of the two dissenting votes. Religious freedom for me but not for thee may feel right to those who wish to avoid any offense to a gay community, whose dignity and rights deserve to be defended. But it is not one that is consistent with the constitution or the long-term interest of Jews, who shouldnt forget that the defense of their rights is still linked to those whose faith may be unpopular. Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNSJewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin. From the beginning the Civil War created a demand for hospitals that neither the North nor the South could meet. Even before seeing combat, newly enlisted men often contracted contagious diseases in camp. Once fighting occurred, the wounded would strain already sparse health care resources: limited doctors and ambulances; untrained nurses; lack of medical supplies; not even appropriate places for the afflicted to lay their heads while recovering. Temporary hospital spaces were usually needed after battles, so medical departments resorted to using hotels, barns, farmhouses, tobacco warehouses, even the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. As the war went on, it became clear that more permanent hospital spaces were essential, and the surgeons general for both governments soon determined that the pavilion-style hospital blueprintalready in use throughout Europe, especially France and Englandwas the best. This design featured long narrow wards or units that incorporated multiple windows located in opposing pairs for cross-ventilation. Additional features addressed other types of supplemental ventilation; specified heat sources; bed placement and square-foot requirements for windows to take advantage of sunlight; cubic foot requirements per patient (ideally 8001,200 cubic feet instead of the earlier accepted 500600 cubic feet); nonporous building materials; building length-to-width ratios; placement of doors; location of support rooms; and number of stories. Eye on Design: In this undated photo, Union wounded recover in a well-lit, well-aired ward at the McClellan U.S. Army Hospital in Philadelphia. (Library of Congress) The location of the sewers was also crucial (for more, see www.civilwarmed.org/sewers). Water, preferably both hot and cold, was needed for drinking, bathing, and wound care, but it was also vital for collecting and disposing of bodily wastes. Dr. William Hammond, then surgeon general of the Union Army, set forth the basic principles of sanitation in 1863. He recommended one bathtub for every 26 patients, one water-closet (or toilet) for every 10, and one wash basin for every 10. Ventilation of the toilet area was deemed vital, and, if water was available, it was to be used to carry off fecal material immediately. Many hospitals came close to or fully achieved these ideal suggested conditions. In some cases, however, the water supply was insufficient to permit continuous flow through the toilets, so they were only flushed every few hours or so. Similarly, some hospitals collected waste in outdoor pits or boxes that had to be emptied periodically. Great care was taken to ventilate the water-closets adequately. Death rates were much lower in some hospitals than in others, but the reasons why were not always obvious. The famed Florence Nightingale led an augmented research effort into that by studying the design and survivability of hospitals used during the Crimean War. She later widened her study to include other European hospitals, and even included statistics in her findings. Nightingale was among those to conclude that the pavilion design typically offered the best outcomes for patients. Improved ventilation was a particularly important factor, as were sanitation and the prevention of the spread of disease. In an age many consider to be medically archaic, professionals and epidemiologists were making connections between good ventilation, cleanliness, and health (for an example, see Dr. Hammonds 1863 A Treatise on Hygiene). Today, the connection of greater cleanliness and ventilation to better health seems obvious, but in the Civil War era the discovery was significant. The first pavilion-style hospital constructed during the war was Chimborazo in Richmond. Built in October 1861, it included 150 pavilions and 4,000 beds. It would remain the Souths largest hospital during the war. In the North, West Philadelphia U.S. General Hospital (better known as Satterlee) opened in June 1862a pet project of Hammonds. It had 36 pavilions containing more than 3,500 beds, and 150 other tents were placed around the buildings in event of an emergency or nearby engagement. Several other pavilion-style hospitals of comparable size quickly followed above the Mason-Dixon Line. Due to the rapid increase in the number of sick and wounded, many pavilion hospitals were fast-tracked. Satterlee had been quickly built, and various flaws were discovered as the war progressed, which fortunately led to improvements for future construction projects. Some pavilion hospitals were not constructed from the ground up. Instead, existing structures were converted to the pavilion style. Campbell Hospital in Washington, D.C., for example, had been built and used as a cavalry barracks. As such, it too was plagued by design flaws when it opened in September 1862 with 11 pavilions and 900 beds. The pavilion design would continue to be used throughout the Civil War, especially by the Union, and it became the premier hospital design, both military and civilian, in the decades following the conflict. Today, though, the design is considered obsolete and outdated. Most hospitals now favor private patient rooms, yet many of the design innovations, such as good ventilation and lighting, are still considered important. William T. Campbell, Ed.D., RN, is an associate professor of nursing at Salisbury (Md.) University. He has been a student of the Civil War for more than 50 years, his interest first sparked as a youth in southern Delaware thanks to frequent trips with his aunt to Civil War battlefields. This blog first appeared in the National Museum of Civil War Medicines blog on February 20, 2018. I dont think there was ever in our war a hotter, harder, sharper artillery afternoon than this. So Colonel Edward Porter Alexander, commander of Lt. Gen. James Longstreets First Corps artillery, described the shellfire that raged on July 2, 1863, the second day of the monstrous Battle of Gettysburg. Thats quite a statement, considering the iron hail that also flew on July 1 and 3. The armies brought 653 cannons to the Pennsylvania crossroads, 372 in the Army of the Potomac, and 281 in the Army of Northern Virginia. Its impossible to mention here all the interesting artillery stories of Gettysburg. Take for example the hand-to-hand fighting that occurred among the Union guns on Cemetery Hill, or the Confederate Whitworth cannons, breechloaders imported from England, on Oak Ridge that fired the signal to begin the massive artillery bombardment that presaged Picketts Charge. But the sites described on these pages have always piqued my interest and present a nice mix of both obscure and frequently visited artillery battlefield locations. And you might be surprised at the tender age of those who led their batteries into the Pennsylvania tempest. The setting sun mimics a shellburst over Benners Hill, east of Gettysburg. (Photo by Noel Kline) Seminary Ridge (Photo by Noel Kline) Dead at his Guns As Confederate soldiers surged toward the famous Angle in the stone wall on Cemetary Ridge at the height of Picketts Charge, the cannons of Battery A, 4th U.S. Light Artillery stood in their path. The injured battery commander 1st Lt. Alonzo Cushing was holding his entrails with his hands when a bullet hit him in the head and killed him as he gave his final commands. The 22-year-old West Pointer received a posthumous promotion to lieutenant colonel, and after decades of delay, the Medal of Honor in 2014 for his redoubtable courage at Gettysburg. Barlows Knoll (Photo by Noel Kline) Lost Battalion Head north on the Old Harrisburg Road, and east of the road, across from the Gettysburg High School, youll see a bronze tablet marking the location of the narrow NPS road that threads through a housing development to the guns of Lt. Col. H.P. Jones four-battery artillery battalion, one of the battlefields least visited sites. Shellfire from Jones Battalion swept across Barlows Knoll on July 1. Jones Battalion (Photo by Noel Kline) Youthful Fortitude A shell from Jones Battalion nearly tore off Lieutenant Bayard Wilkesons right leg as he commanded Battery G, 4th U.S. Artillery, on Barlows Knoll. The 19-year-old amputated the limb with his own pocketknife, but soon died. His father, Samuel, reported for The New York Times and accompanied the Army of the Potomac. He found his son and wrote an article detailing the awful circumstances. Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh [sic] have baptized with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied!, read one line. President Lincoln posthumously promoted Wilkeson to captain. Fake Guns In the 1890s, a cannon shortage hampered the battlefields interpretation, and the War Department ordered the Gilbert Foundry of Gettysburg to cast non-firing replicas of 12-pounder Parrot and 3-inch Ordnance Rifles between 1895 and 1913. Many of those tubes, indicated by the casting seam that runs down both sides of their barrels, remain on display. There are about 370 cannons on the battlefield today. Little Round Top was a terrible place to deploy cannons. Nonetheless, 1st Lt. Charles Hazlett somehow managed to hoist and wrestle the guns of his Battery D, 5th U.S. Artillery to the narrow ridgetop to help secure the hill. A Rebel bullet struck the 24-year-old battery commander in the head and killed him as he was trying to assist mortally wounded Brig. Gen. Stephen H. Weed. (Photo by Noel Kline) The sound of my guns will be encouraging to our troops. First Lieutenant Charles E. Hazlett, as he observed the Gettysburg battlefield from the summit of Little Round Top, July 2, 1863 Benners HIll Youthful courage was also on display on this narrow ridge east of Gettysburg. On July 2, Union shells fired from Culps Hill, Cemetery Hill, and Stevens Knoll devastated Major Joseph Latimers Confederate artillery battalion. A fragment tore off the right arm of Latimer, a 19-year-old Virginia Military Institute graduate, as he was attempting to withdraw his cannons from the cauldron. The esteemed Boy Major died of the wound on August 1, 1863, and is buried in Harrisonburg, Va. Accidental Artillery The 3rd Pennsylvania Heavy Artillery monument on the north side of the Hanover Road, about 1.5 miles east of Rte. 15, exemplifies the role fate plays in battles. The heavies had been assigned fieldpieces and easy duty near Frederick, Md., when they had to flee J.E.B. Stuarts notorious pre-battle raid. The gunners ran into Union cavalrymen and went with them to Gettysburg despite the fact they were not formally part of the Army of the Potomac. From the position of their monument, the 3rd fired on Brinkerhoffs Ridge to the west, which helped prevent the famous Stonewall Brigade from participating in the July 2 evening attacks on Culps Hill. Powers Hill (Photo by Noel Kline) Hidden HQ Powers Hill is just east of the Baltimore Pike off of Granite Schoolhouse Lane. Its worth the short hike to see the three Union battery monuments on the summit. Their guns fired to the northeast and shredded the left flank of Confederate attacks on Culps Hill on the morning of July 3. And Maj. Gen. George Meade used Powers Hill as his temporary HQ when the Confederate artillery made his Leister House HQ untenable before Picketts Charge. Bloody Debut At 4 p.m. on July 2, 22-year-old Captain John Bigelow took his 9th Massachusetts Battery, 110 men, 88 horses, and six cannons, into its first battle at a position between the Peach Orchard and the Wheatfield. Before long, a Confederate attack slammed into the battery. Bigelows men conducted a desperate fighting retreat for 400 yards back to the Trostle House, and continued to fire blasts until they were surrounded. The battery lost four cannons, 80 horses, and 27 casualties, including Bigelow, who was shot twice. The stand of the gritty Bay Staters, however, stopped the Rebel onslaught long enough for a critical reserve Union line to form. Gunner Extraordinaire Anywhere from 150-170 cannons took part in the pre-Picketts Charge bombardment on July 3, and the shellfire lasted from one to two hours. The final numbers for both may always remain elusive, but without question, Colonel Edward P. Alexander, the 28-year-old artillery commander of General Robert E. Lees First Corps, did a masterful job deploying his guns and coordinating their fire. His published memoir, Fighting for the Confederacy, remains the best primary account of the Army of Northern Virginias artillery actions at Gettysburg. (Photo by Melissa A. Winn) Local Color Check out the pocked south face of the gray-painted brick Gettysburg home at 407 S. Washington St., known as the Jacob Stock House during the battle. Some historians believe that Minie balls made the more than 70 very evident holes in the bricks, but others think Union canister rounds fired from cannons on Cemetery Hill caused some of the damage as the gunners tried to silence Confederate sharpshooters. Please observe from a respectful distance, and be mindful of the property owners privacy. 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. 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. Town Moderator Myra Wilk leads the annual town meeting at Hoosac Valley Elementary School on Monday. Adams Town Meeting Opts For Higher Administrator Salary Range The 104 town meeting members who attended go through the articles fairly quickly, stopping only to debate the town administrator salary and the annual contribution to the Aggie Fair. ADAMS, Mass. Town meeting passed a $14.7 million operations budget and approved a higher town administrator salary range of $85,000 to $95,000. During Monday's annual town meeting, the 104 present members out 150 passed the bulk of the 25 articles in the first few minutes of the meeting that lasted just over an hour. However, they pumped the brakes on Article 6, the town administrator salary, which narrowly passed with 17 votes. "The Selectmen feel that with the job market the way it is today getting people to move into Berkshire County ... they want a certain salary range and it is not $80,000," Selectman John Duval said. "I just feel that the Board of Selectmen should have the opportunity to negotiate with a range based on experience." The $170,162 personal budget listed on the article is for the town administrator's office and includes the administrative assistant's salary, benefits as well as the town administrator's salary range of $85,000 to $95,000. The Finance Committee had voted to not recommend the article 7-2 and Finance Committee member John Cowie approached the microphone and said if they have a range, the new administrator would go for the higher salary. "It was the starting salary what we are objecting to ... when we have someone new coming in, why do they always have to start at the higher salary?" Cowie asked. He made a motion to knock this total amount down to $155,162, which would cap the salary range at $85,000. Although this motion failed with a 35-65 vote, other town meeting members continued to rail against the higher salary. Selectman Joseph Nowak said he thought $85,000 was an adequate salary, especially with such a low cost of living in Adams and Finance Committee member Paul Demastrie said he thought this was one of the rare opportunities where the town could save some money. Town meeting member Bill Wilson said he would rather start with a lower salary and have the new administrator work for the higher amount. "I would rather see it start at the $85,000 or $80,000 mark and give the person the incentive," he said. "We can say it is performance based ... and go from there." The town recently underwent a town administrator search process but was unable to find three qualified candidates that met the Board of Selectmen's criteria. Selectwoman Christine Hoyt said she believed part of the reason for this was the salary and capping it so low will not help the second time around. "We are the largest town and we pay the least amount for our town administrator. They have more responsibilities and they get less pay," she said. "We are in tough competition other communities in the county and one of our neighbors just hired a new administrator for $85,000 and they are a smaller community." Before the vote, town meeting member Donald Sommer said he thought the town was quibbling over such a small amount of money. "We are talking about $15,000 and that extra range could bring in the right man or woman," he said. "If they get here they could save us $100,000. That amount could bring in a higher caliber person and I don't think we should tie the board's hands." Town meeting was voting on the Finance Committee's recommendation and a no vote was actually in favor of the higher amount. The vote was 42-49. The only other article that met resistance was Article 8, which contained the yearly $5,000 the town gives to the Agricultural Fair. Town meeting member Corey Bishop asked why the town handed over this money every year and felt there were more immediate needs on some of the other town fields. "People from all over the county and outside come and they look at our fields and they are highly embarrassing," he said. "Our fields are disastrous, and girls are going to get hurt. When are we going to take some action and help out the youth in our town." Town Accountant Mary Beverly said the $5,000 request has come to town meeting in the past in the form of a citizen's petition and town meeting has historically approved it. She said the town has recently placed the amount in the budget, so it can ask for receipts and make sure the money is actually going toward Bowe Field. Most spoke in favor of the article and felt the Agricultural Fair benefited the town. Nowak, who is a co-founder of the fair, said there are far less agricultural fairs these days and that the Aggie Fair provides an important connection to the town's agricultural roots. "I vehemently go against what is being said about the Aggie Fair and $5,000 is a drop in the bucket for what we are getting," he said. Before the article overwhelmingly passed, interim Town Administrator Donna Cesan did say the town still plans to go forward with a complete overhaul of Russell Field, and when the project is ready it will likely come before town meeting. Berkshire Mayors Call for Action on Border Separation of Families PITTSFIELD, Mass. The mayors of Pittsfield and North Adams are adding their voices to calls to rescind a "zero-tolerance" policy decision by the U.S. Department of Justice that has resulted in the separation of children from families attempting to cross the border illegally or requesting asylum. "As the mayors of the cities of Pittsfield and North Adams in Western Massachusetts, we write to express our shared opposition to the Trump administration's policy of separating children from parents at the U.S. border. We stand with civic, community, and spiritual leaders across the nation in decrying a policy that has evoked unnecessary fear and confusion," write Pittsfield Mayor Linda Tyer and North Adams Mayor Thomas Bernard. "We cannot remain silent in the face of this atrocious situation. As leaders of the two cities in Berkshire County, we firmly believe that our communities are strongest when we model our highest ideals and most cherished values." The joint communique to U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey and U.S. Rep. Richard Neal asks them to "support legislation that will bring a swift end to this inhumane practice." The policy was enacted in April to vigorously prosecute "attempted illegal entry and illegal entry into the United States by an alien," resulting in the removal of some 2,000 children from their parents or adult family members in April and May, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Previously, the priority had been focused on those suspected of felonies or gang affiliation; families had often been detained together or released for future processing. How these families are being separated and how the government is caring for the affected children has caused an outcry from numerous quarters. Four former first ladies have spoken out against the practice, including Laura Bush, who wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post. Gov. Charlie Baker has refused to allow the Massachusetts National Guard to work along the border with Mexican because of the " inhumane treatment of children ." The Guard was going to send a helicopter and two analysts. Since then, the governors of Maryland and North Carolina have followed suit. Markey has asked the Government Accountability Office to determine if the policy for "zero tolerance" is subject to a congressional vote of disapproval. His letter can be found here. "Beyond the psychological and emotional trauma that comes with being separated from one's parents, children are subjected to additional indignities. Media reports have presented us with disturbing images of children living in prison-like conditions, sleeping in cage-like rooms, and only being allowed to go outside for two hours at a time each day," the mayors wrote. "During their incarceration, these children have no contact with their parents or their families. This is unacceptable." Joint Letter of Opposition to Detention Policy by iBerkshires.com on Scribd 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 The European Parliament recently passed a new regulation on securitisation, which is part of the capital markets union action plan. Regulation (EU) 2017/2402 of the European Parliament and Council, of December 12 2017 (the Securitisation Regulation), establishes a general framework for securitisation and creates a specific framework for simple, transparent and standardised securitisation. Its aim is to promote a safe and liquid market for securitisation. An amendment was also implemented relating to the regulation on capital requirements. Its purpose is to make the capital treatment of securitisations for banks and investment firms more risk-sensitive and to reflect the specific features of simple, transparent and standardised securitisations. According to the European Banking Authority, these rules aim to re-establish a safe market in Europe by distinguishing between simple, transparent and standardised securitisation products, and more opaque and complex ones. Although the Securitisation Regulation requires further development in terms of regulatory technical standards, it outlines a general framework for all securitisations within the EU, even though some securitisations may or may not be considered simple, transparent or standardised. The new regulation, which applies to all securitisations, will impose additional obligations on originators, sponsors, original lenders and institutional investors investing in securitisation positions. Before acquiring a securitisation position, investors should perform due diligence and must verify several specific issues related to the origination procedures of the loans and the underlying loans. Originators, sponsors or original lenders must retain an economic risk in the securitisation throughout all stages of the transaction. Several transparency obligations have also been imposed on originators, sponsors and original lenders, as they must make specific information available to (i) holders of securitisation positions; (ii) the competent authorities; and, (iii) potential investors. The regulation has also created a specific framework for simple, transparent and standardised securitisations, the so-called STS securitisations. To be considered STS securitisations, certain requirements under the regulation must be met. The Securitisation Regulation establishes a more risk-sensitive and prudential framework for STS securitisations (that is, true sale securitisations that meet a number of requirements), provided the originator, the sponsors or the special purpose entity has notified the investors, the competent authorities and the European Securities and Markets Authority of the STS securitisation designation. Under the new regulation, originators, sponsors and original lenders must apply to securitised exposures the same well-defined criteria for credit granting that they apply to non-securitised exposures. The Securitisation Regulation will apply to securitisations issued on or after January 1 2019. Although European regulations are directly applicable to European member states, in the case of Spanish securitisation legislation, it is likely that Act 5/2015 will need to be amended to bring it in line with European regulation. We will soon be able to determine the effect of the new regulation on future transactions and whether securitisations issued after January 1 2019, will be considered STS securitisations. In my opinion, the investors will decide on whether to request for a securitisation to be considered STS, and this decision will depend on the impact their investment will have on their capital treatment. A different approach would apply to investors that were not considered institutional investors under the regulation, as they are not subject to prudential supervision. In such transactions, there would be no incentive for investors of the securitisation to be considered STS. Jaime de la Torre 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 Ashutosh Rana has been working in the southern film industry for the past few years. Now he has seven big Bollywood releases in a span of the next two years. (IANS photo) Anupam Kher has released a video on YouTube encouraging people to overcome depression and not shy away from coming out in the open about the issue. (IANS photo) Harvard University is being sued by the conservative-leaning nonprofit organization, Students for Fair Admissions, after a study revealed that the university routinely gave Asian American applicants who include Indian Americans the lowest score of any racial group on subjective traits such as positive personality, likeability and kindness. Above is a photo of Austin Hall at Harvard. (Wikimedia commons photo) An Indian American Muslim couple who wished to purchase a home (pictured) in the upscale Davis Island neighborhood of Tampa, Florida, faced racism and threats of arson from a prospective neighbor on the day they tried to close the deal. We have never been so scared. For a few months, we would worry every day about stepping out of our house, Kaderbhai Ali Asgar, the prospective buyer, told India-West. The Asgars ultimately cancelled the deal and have not looked for another home since. (Zillow photo) A Congress Party supporter touches a cutout of billionaire jeweler Nirav Modi during a protest in New Delhi Feb. 16. Modi, who is accused of cheating state-owned Punjab National Bank of Rs. 2.8 billion ($43.8 million), was able to travel to five different countries on a revoked passport, despite an Interpol notice. (Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images) BJP Mahila Morcha workers stage a demonstration in New Delhi to demand justice for the Ghazipur rape victim. Four men were arrested in Bihar after raping a mother and her teenage daughter. (IANS photo) Chiles National Economic Prosecutor's Office (FNE) is investigating the sale of a 24% stake in SQM, the countrys largest lithium producer, to Chinese miner Tianqi. The deal comes at a time when lithium prices have soared thanks to increased demand from the electric vehicle sector, which requires lithium... June 18, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - With the United Nations warning that millions of civilians could die from violence or starvation from the ongoing military siege of the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, there is no other way to describe what is happening except as genocide. The more than three-year war on Yemen waged by a Western-backed Saudi coalition has been arguably genocidal from the outset, with up to eight million people facing imminent starvation due to the years-long blockade on the Arabian country, as well as from indiscriminate air strikes. But the latest offensive on the Red Sea city of Hodeida threatens to turn the worlds already worst humanitarian disaster into a mass extermination. Hodeida is the entry point for 90 per cent of all food and medical aid into Yemen. If the citys port stops functioning from the military offensive as UN aid agencies are warning then an entire country population of more than 20 million will, as a result, be on the brink of death. The Saudi coalition which includes Emirati forces and foreign mercenaries as well as remnants from the previous regime (which the Western media mendaciously refer to as government forces) is fully backed by the US, Britain and France. This coalition says that by taking Hodeida it will hasten the defeat of Houthi rebels. But to use the cutting off of food and other vital aid to civilian populations as a weapon is a blatant war crime. It is absolutely inexcusable. This past week an emergency session at the UN Security Council made the lily-livered call for the port city to remain open. But it stopped short of demanding an end to the offensive being led by Saudi and Emirati forces against Hodeida, which is the second biggest stronghold for Houthi rebels after the capital Sanaa. The port citys population of 600,000 is at risk from the heavy fighting underway, including air strikes and naval bombardment, even before food, water and medicines supply is halted. Since the Security Council meeting was a closed-door session, media reports did not indicate which members of the council voted down the Swedish call for an immediate end to hostilities. However, given that three permanent members of the council, the US, Britain and France, are militarily supporting the Saudi-led offensive on Hodeida, one can assume that these states blocked the call for a cessation. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter As the horror of Hodeida unfolds, Western media are reporting with a strained effort to whitewash the criminal role of the American, British and French governments in supporting the offensive. Western media confine their focus narrowly on the humanitarian plight of Hodeidas inhabitants and the wider Yemeni population. But the media are careful to omit the relevant context, which is that the offensive on Hodeida would not be possible without the crucial military support of Western governments. If the Western public were properly informed, the uproar would be an embarrassing problem for Western governments and their servile news media. What is notable in the Western media reportage is the ubiquitous descriptor when referring to the Houthi rebels. Invariably, they are described as Iran-backed. That label is used to implicitly justify the Saudi and Emirati siege of Hodeida because the operation is said to be part of a proxy war against Iran. The BBC, France 24, CNN, Deutsche Welle, New York Times and Washington Post are among media outlets habitually practicing this misinformation on Yemen. Both Iran and the Houthis have said that there is no military linkage. Granted, Iran politically and diplomatically supports the Houthis, and the Yemeni population generally, suffering from the war. The Houthis share a common Shia Muslim faith as Iran, but that is a far cry from military involvement. There is no evidence of Iran being militarily involved in Yemen. The claim of a linkage relies heavily on assertion by the Saudis and Emiratis which is peddled uncritically by Western media. Even the US government has shied away from making forthright accusations against Iran supporting the Houthis militarily. Washingtons diffidence is a tacit admission that the allegations are threadbare. Besides, how could a country which is subjected to an illegal Saudi blockade of its land, sea and air routes conceivably receive weapons supplied from Iran? By contrast, while the Western media repeatedly refer to the Houthis as Iran-backed, what the same media repeatedly omit is the descriptor of American-backed or British and French-backed when referring to the Saudi and Emirati forces that have been pounding Yemen for over three years. Unlike the breathless claims of Iranian linkage to the Houthis, the Western military connection is verified by massive weapons exports, and indeed coy admissions by Western governments, when they are put to it, that they are supplying fuel and logistics to aid and abet the Saudi and Emirati war effort in Yemen. Last week, the New York Times affected to lament the infernal conditions in Yemen as a complex war, as if the conflict is an unfathomable, unstoppable mystery. Why doesnt the New York Times publish bold editorials bluntly calling for an end to US government complicity in Yemen? Or perhaps that is too complex for the Times editorial board? The Washington Post also wrung its hands last week, saying: The worlds most dire humanitarian crisis may get even worse. Emirati-led [and Saudi] offensive underway against port city of Hodeida, which is controlled by Iran-backed [sic] Houthi rebels. In its report, the Post did not mention the fact that air strikes by Saudi and Emirati forces are carried out with American F-15 fighter jets, British Typhoons and French Dassault warplanes. Incongruously, the Post cites US officials claiming that their forces are not directly involved in the offensive on the port city. How is that credible when air strikes are being conducted day after day? The Washington Post doesnt bother to ask further. In a BBC report last week also lamenting the humanitarian crisis in Hodeida, there was the usual evidence-free casual labelling of Houthi rebels as Iran-backed. But, incredibly, in the entire article (at least in early editions) there was not a single mention of the verifiable fact that the Saudi and Emirati military are supplied with billions-of-dollars-worth of British, American and French weapons. In the final paragraph of its early edition of the report, the BBC editorializes: In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and eight other mainly Sunni Muslim Arab states launched a military campaign to restore [exiled president] Hadis government after becoming alarmed by the rise of the Houthi group which they see as an Iranian Shia Muslim proxy. Note the BBCs lame and unconvincing implication of Iran. This is a stupendous distortion of the Yemeni conflict by the British state-owned broadcaster which, astoundingly, or perhaps that should be audaciously, completely airbrushes out any mention of how Western governments have fueled the genocidal war on Yemen. At the end of 2014, the American and Saudi puppet self-styled president Mansour Hadi was kicked out by a Yemeni popular revolt led by the Houthis, but not exclusive to these rebels. The Yemeni uprising involved Shia and Sunni. To portray Iran as sponsoring a Shia proxy is a vile distortion which the Saudis and their Western backers have used in order to justify attacking Yemen for the objective of re-installing their puppet, who has been living in exile in the Saudi capital Riyadh. In short, covering up a criminal war of aggression with lies. In reality, the Yemen war is about Western powers and their Arab despot client regimes trying to reverse a successful popular revolt that aspired to bring a considerably more democratic government to the Arab regions poorest country, overcoming the decades it languished as a Western, Saudi client kleptocracy. For over three years, Saudi and Emirati forces, supported with Western warplanes, bombs, missiles, attack helicopters, naval power, and air refueling, as well as targeting logistics, have waged a non-stop bombing campaign on Yemeni civilians. Nothing has been off-limits. Hospitals, schools, markets, mosques, funerals, wedding halls, family homes, farms, water-treatment plants and power utilities, all have been mercilessly obliterated. Even graveyards have been bombed. Even during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Saudi-led coalition the supposed custodian of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina has continued to massacre innocents from the air. Elsewhere in the region, Western politicians and media have mounted hysterical protests against the Syrian government and its Russian ally when they have liberated cities from Western-backed terrorists, accusing Syria and Russia of war crimes and inhuman sieges. None of these hyperbolic Western media campaigns concerning Syria has ever been substantiated. Recall Aleppo? East Ghouta? The Syrian people have gladly returned to rebuild their lives now in peace under Syrian government protection after the Western terror proxies were routed. Western media claims about Syria have transpired to be outrageous lies, which have been hastily buried by the media as if they were never told in the first place. Yet in Yemen there is an ongoing, veritable genocidal war fully supported by Western governments. The latest barbarity is the siege of Hodeida with the callous, murderous objective of finally starving a whole population into submitting to the Western, Saudi, Emirati writ for dominating the country. This is Nuremberg-standard capital crimes. With no exaggeration, Western news media are a Goebbels-like propaganda ministry par excellence whose duty is to whitewash genocide conducted by their governments. The barefaced lies and sly omissions being told about Yemen is one more reason among many reasons why the Western media have forfeited any vestige of credibility. They are serving as they usually do Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria among others as accomplices in an epic war crime against Yemen. The Trump experience has plunged corporate ideology and war rationales into disarray. June 18, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Donald Trump, the arch racist usurper of the Republican Party, is tearing the ruling class consensus to shreds, inflicting bigger shocks to the imperial system by accident, impulse and ignorance than any conceivable progressive elected U.S. president could achieve on purpose. In the space of a few weeks, Trump has 1) threatened to disrupt corporate global supply chains through his in-out stance on NAFTA; 2) forced Washingtons European junior imperial partners to reconsider their subservience to U.S. foreign policy and their vulnerability to U.S.-controlled financial institutions in the wake of Trumps rejection of the Iran deal and his tirades at the G7 summit in Canada; and 3) discarded 70 years of Uncle Sams Comply or Die dictum towards North Korea, thus consigning the whole axis of evil designation to the dustbin. Trump is not causing chaos in the imperial Big House because he wants to hasten the demise of U.S. imperialism. He is an intellectually and emotionally retarded spawn of super-privilege trying to stamp his orange imprint on history -- Trump did this, and it was the greatest thing ever! -- like the big T on the those buildings he doesnt actually own. The man, literally, knows not what he does -- and, therefore, cannot be counted on to repeat himself, or to follow through on any action with logic and consistency, for good or ill. However, the net effect of Trumps crazed foreign policy has been to raise urgent questions, among foreign elites and general populations alike, of U.S. fitness for global hegemony. Trumps behavior could deliver a coup de grace to an already severely frayed global capitalist consensus on U.S. world leadership, significantly weakening the potency of U.S. imperialism -- even as Trump aligns more closely with the Israeli apartheid state and the Gulf monarchies and conspires to force regime change in Venezuela. The net effect of Trumps crazed foreign policy has been to raise urgent questions of U.S. fitness for global hegemony. Domestically, the Trump experience has plunged corporate ideology and war rationales into disarray, even as his administration (with Democratic help) has delivered the biggest corporate tax windfalls and military budgets ever. Contradictions abound -- but, of course, the accumulation of contradictions is what ultimately erodes the whole edifice. Donald Trump, incapable of perceiving beyond surface appearances, thinks a strong foreign policy means blood-curdling threats. So he threatens North Korea with fire and fury. When Kim Jong-un comes to the table with his South Korean partner, as they collaborated to do, Trump believes his threat has worked, and that the U.S. acted from strength. And then he agrees to leave the past behind and to enter what will become years-long negotiations on denuclearization, with security guarantees for the North, while immediately halting U.S.-South Korean military exercises that Trump called provocative. Trump looks forward to an eventual withdrawal of troops from the South. "At some point I hope it will be, but it's not right now." Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter If the leader of North Korea -- the original pariah state demonized and placed beyond the pale of U.S.-decreed legitimacy -- is now just another negotiating partner, and U.S. troop withdrawal from the South is a principled goal, then the axis of evil era is over and the rationale for U.S. troops and bases virtually everywhere in the world collapses -- as is well understood by U.S. imperial strategists, who are in deep distress. Trumps behavior could deliver a coup de grace to an already severely frayed global capitalist consensus on U.S. world leadership. So are the Democrats. Since Trump won the GOP nomination, they have become overt partisans of the War Party. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, a former co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, sounded like some cracker mistress in the Big House, carping that Trump had elevated North Korea to the level of the United States while preserving the regimes status quo. Pelosi showed her racist, imperialist inner core, recoiling at the very idea of equality among nations and peoples, and condemning Trump for appearing to abandon the goal of regime change in the North. (See Ajamu Baraka , The Democrats Out-Right the Right on North Korean Summit .) Pelosi and her House minions have long voted to fund Republican and Democratic wars, while pretending to be peaceniks. Trumps capture of the GOP presidential nomination drew them out of the closet, in full armored gear, screaming Russia, Russia, Russia like banshees -- a clear indication of crisis among the Democrats ruling class masters. If the leader of North Korea is now just another negotiating partner, and U.S. troop withdrawal from the South is a principled goal, then the axis of evil era is over. Trump campaigned in 2016 for normal relations with Russia, an end to the U.S. regime change offensive, and opposition to so-called free trade, thus uniting most of the ruling class against him. It turned out that Trumps wholly unexpected appeal for peaceful relations with Russia did not deter huge majorities of Republicans from voting for him in the primaries and the general election. The political conclusion was inescapable: If white Republicans were not wedded to the permanent war agenda -- or cared more about maintaining white supremacy at home than funding endless hostilities abroad -- then where was the mass constituency for the bipartisan War Party? If Trumps deplorables werent wedded to the War Party, then who was? Trumps surprise election threw the bulk of the elite, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex, and the spooks of the intelligence agencies, into panic, as they confronted a crisis of legitimacy for the Warfare State. Now firmly aligned with Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, their response was to pre-empt Trumps threatened rapprochement with Russia with a massive anti-Putin campaign. The elites realized they had to recreate -- on the fly, with no factual basis -- a war fervor that no longer existed among the masses of people, through Russiagate. In the chaotic process, they have further delegitimized virtually every U.S. institution, all the while putting the onus for the damage on the Vladimir Putin. If Trumps deplorables werent wedded to the War Party, then who was? (They have even made the term oligarchs a household word -- one that can just as easily be applied to the U.S. ruling class as to Putins rich friends in Russia. In the long term, this is not a good thing for rich capitalists, as a class.) Trump has vacillated on free trade, speaking out of whichever side of his mouth works quicker. But his ambivalence and profound ignorance have put the NAFTA negotiations in total disarray. According the New York Times , Trump sent a 24-year-old deputy to meet with a delegation that was expected to include representatives from more than 50 of the largest American companies and organizations, including Walmart, U.P.S., the Walt Disney Company, General Electric, General Motors, Caterpillar and Boeing -- the titans of industry to whom both corporate parties pay homage, but whom Trump is disrespecting, big time. Corporate supply chains affecting trillions of dollars and millions of (mostly Global South, super-exploitive) jobs hang in the balance. The National Association of Manufactures, whose pronouncements were gospel to Republicans and most Democrats in previous eras, cant make a NAFTA wheel turn in Trumps administration. Much more crucially, the advent of Trump has revealed the stark reality that there is no mass base for free trade-- a euphemism for allowing the ruling class to do whatever they want with their money and everyones jobs. Support for free trade is an illusion conjured by the two corporate parties, who are writhing in a crisis of legitimacy. The National Association of Manufactures cant make a NAFTA wheel turn in Trumps administration. But such crises dont bring down the system, on their own. Only a peoples movement can do that. The real crisis for the War Party arrives when masses of people show up in the streets to demand an end to the Permanent Warfare State. The real crisis for the Black Mass Incarceration State arrives when the targeted population no longer recognizes the legitimacy of the police, and moves to resist and replace the cops with their own security forces. The real crisis for the Lords of Capital arrives when the people demand nationalization of the banks and the permanent dethroning of finance capital, the actual ruling class. Trump, of course, wants none of that. But, under his presidency, the contradictions of late stage imperial capitalism are becoming both much more intense, and more obvious to folks on the ground. And thats scaring the hell out of the ruling class -- which will make them a lot meaner. BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com June 18, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Dan Canon is running for Congress in Indianas ninth district this year. A career civil-rights lawyer, Canon filed one of the cases against gay-marriage bans that eventually became the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges, and he proudly wore a Notorious RBG shirt under his suit to the Supreme Court. He is currently representing individuals suing Donald Trump for inciting violence at his rallies. Canon has also defended clients swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and fought a Kafkaesque deportation system that, at one point, wouldnt even disclose the location of his client. Now Canon believes ICE should be abolished entirely. I dont think a lot of people have any kind of direct experience with ICE, so they dont really know what they do or what theyre about. If they did, theyd be appalled, Canon told me. ICE as it presently exists is an agency devoted almost solely to cruelly and wantonly breaking up families. The agency talks about, and treats, human beings like theyre animals. They scoop up people in their apartments or their workplaces and take them miles away from their spouses and children. The idea of defunding ICE has gained traction among immigrant-rights groups horrified by the speed at which, under President Donald Trump, the agency has ramped up an already brutal deportation process. Mary Small, policy director at Detention Watch Network, said, Responsible policymakers need to be honest about the fact that the core of the agency is broken. Her group led the charge to defund ICE with its #DefundHate campaign last year. ZERO TOLERANCE IMMIGRATION POLICY Groups like Indivisible Project and the Center for Popular Democracy have also called for defunding ICE. Brand New Congress, a progressive PAC, has the proposal in its immigration platform. ICE is terrorizing American communities right now, said Angel Padilla, policy director of the Indivisible Project. Theyre going into schools, entering hospitals, conducting massive raids, and separating children from parents every day. We are funding those activities, and we need to use all the leverage we have to stop it. Are You Tired Of The Lies And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter Though ICE abolition is spreading on the left, it quickly meets extreme skepticism elsewhere. In part, this is because the mainstream political discourse has a huge blind spot for the agencys increasingly brutal policies. While elites have generally become concerned with rising authoritarianism, they have mainly ignored the purges ICE is conducting in immigrant communities. For example, in their recent book, How Democracies Die, Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky do not mention ICE at all. Centrist pundits like Jonathan Chait have dedicated thousands of words to the threat of PC culture on college campuses, but havent found time to question whether an opaque and racist deportation force might pose a larger threat to democracy than campus editorial pages. Others tend to dismiss ICE abolition as more of a troll than a serious policy demand. Josh Barro, a senior editor at Business Insider, argued that progressives have not paired the proposal with a plan to do the function without the hated agency. But the goal of abolishing the agency is to abolish the function. ICE has become a genuine threat to democracy, and it is destroying thousands of lives. Moreover, abolishing it would only take us back to 2003, when the agency was first formed. ICE was a direct product of the postSeptember 11 panic culture, and was created in the legislation Congress passed in the wake of the attacks. From the start, the agency was paired with the brand-new Department of Homeland Securitys increased surveillance of communities of color and immigrant communities. By putting ICE under the scope of DHS, the government framed immigration as a national security issue rather than an issue of community development, diversity or human rights. Thats not to say Americas deportation policies only got bad in 2003, nor that it hasnt been a bipartisan project. When he was a senior advisor to then-President Bill Clinton, Rahm Emanuel wrote that Clinton should work to claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens. When Republicans gave Clinton the chance to do this with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, he jumped at it. IIRIRA set up the legal infrastructure for mass deportations and expanded the number of crimes considered deportable. Clintons blessing also harshened the political atmosphere around immigration. As recently as 2006, Democrats still explicitly used anti-immigrant sentiment as a campaign tactic. During his failed Tennessee Senate run, Harold Ford Jr. ran ads warning that Every day almost 2,000 people enter America illegally. Every day hundreds of employers look the other way, handing out jobs that keep illegals coming. And every day the rest of us pay the price. Even Barack Obama, while he made pains to distinguish between good and bad immigrants, presided over aggressive deportation tactics in his first term in order to build support for a path to citizenship that never came. The central assumption of ICE in 2018 is that any undocumented immigrant is inherently a threat. In that way, ICEs tactics are philosophically aligned with racist thinkers like Richard Spencer and the writers at the white-supremacist journal VDare. ICEs modus operandi under Trump bears a striking resemblance to the strategy proposed by white supremacist Jared Taylor in 2015: The key, however, would be a few well publicized raids on non-criminal illegals. Television images of Mexican families dropped over the border with no more than they could carry would be very powerful. The vast majority of illegals would quickly decide to get their affairs in order and choose their own day of departure rather than wait for ICE to choose it for them. The main thing would be to convince illegals that ICE was serious about kicking them out. Ironically, the more ICE was prepared to do, the less it would have to do. This is a near-perfect summary of ICE under acting director Thomas Homan, who has repeatedly made clear that all undocumented residents should be afraid of his agents. You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried, he boasted in his congressional testimony last year. Homan does not apply any light touch when expressing his authoritarian tendencies. He has threatened to jail and prosecute local officials in so-called sanctuary cities that do not fully comply with ICE mandates. The agency has also clearly been targeting political opponents for deportations and has worked to deport individuals for speaking to media about ICE. Homans authoritarian saber rattling has essentially been ignored in the mainstream political dialogue, but the candidates and activists I spoke with hear it loud and clear. So do the communities they represent. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is challenging Joe Crowley in New Yorks 14th Congressional District, which covers part of the Bronx and Queens, told me she believes that After a long and protracted history of sexual assault and uninvestigated deaths in ICEs detention facilities, as well as the corrosive impact ICE has had on our schools, courts, and communities, its time to reset course. New Yorks 14th district is among the most diverse and immigrant-heavy in the country. Ocasio-Cortez not only supports defunding ICE, but also wants a full congressional inquiry into ICE enforcement and detention practices. She further argues for a a truth and reconciliation process for victims of any potential sexual assault, neglect, and misconduct discovered as a result. Subscribe to The Nation for $2 a month. Get unlimited digital access to the best independent news and analysis. Kaniela Ing, a member of the Hawaii State Legislature currently running for the House in the states first district, has also endorsed defunding ICE, tweeting this week that When they say defund Planned Parenthood (and destroy millions of lives), we say defund ICE (and save millions of lives). Suraj Patel, a child of immigrants, is running a well-funded insurgent campaign against Democratic incumbent Representative Carolyn Maloney in New Yorks 12th Congressional District. He would vote to defund ICE if he makes it to Congress. ICE has crossed a red line under this president by harassing, pursuing, and terrorizing immigrants and activists all over this country with impunity. These mass deportations are forcing immigrants to live in fear, while making the rest of us less safe, he said. Defunding ICE and returning it to be a passport-patrol and customs-enforcement agency rather than an above-the-law deportation squad is a critical step to protecting all Americans and our civil liberties. Granted, this position might not fly everywhere in the country. But Hillary Clinton won the 12th district with 83 percent of the vote, and candidates like Patel are trying to shift the Overton window. We miss an incredible opportunity when we allow districts like ours to be safe havens for the status quo, Patel said. There is increasing support for limiting or even ending cooperation with ICE at the state level, too. Abdul El-Sayed, a gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, told me that he will not waste a dime of state taxpayer money to enforce laws that would tear apart familiesand tear apart our economy. Jessica Ramos, who is running for a New York State Senate seat in Queens, has also endorsed defunding ICE. Instead of making our communities safer, ICE has taught immigrants to fear and distrust law enforcement, she said. Its absolutely time to defund the agency and start working on real, common-sense immigration reform. Ramoss opponent in the primary, Jose Peralta, joined the Independent Democratic Caucus in the statehouse last year, which is a group of politicians who were elected as Democrats formed a power-sharing agreement with Republicans. He claimed this would position him to bring tuition benefits and protections to undocumented immigrants, but those benefits have not materialized, though he has gotten a nice pay raise thanks to the GOP. The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating. Though the party has moved left on core issues from reproductive rights to single-payer health care, its time for progressives to put forward a demand that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of authoritarianism. White supremacy can no longer be the center of the immigration debate. Democrats have voted to fully fund ICE with limited fanfare, because in the American immigration discussion, the right-wing position is the center and the left has no voice. There has been disturbing word fatigue around mass deportation, and the threat of deportation is so often taken lightly that many have lost the ability to conceptualize what it means. Next to death, being stripped from your home, family, and community is the worst fate that can be inflicted on a human, as many societies practicing banishment have recognized. Its time to rein in the greatest threat we face: an unaccountable strike force executing a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Sean McElwee is a researcher and writer based in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMcElwee. The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. Well, we have an orchestra here, he jokes. Whats missing is a conductor. Then a distraught but determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleads repeatedly for someone to call her aunt. Just one call, she begs anyone who will listen. She says shes memorized the phone number, and at one point, rattles it off to a consular representative. My mommy says that Ill go with my aunt, she whimpers, and that shell come to pick me up there as quickly as possible. An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children. More than 2,300 of them have been separated from their parents since April, when the Trump administration launched its zero tolerance immigration policy, which calls for prosecuting all people who attempt to illegally enter the country and taking away the children they brought with them. More than 100 of those children are under the age of 4. The children are initially held in warehouses, tents or big box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities. Condemnations of the policy have been swift and sharp, including from some of the administrations most reliable supporters. It has united religious conservatives and immigrant rights activists, who have said that zero tolerance amounts to zero humanity. Democratic and Republican members of Congress spoke out against the administrations enforcement efforts over the weekend. Former first lady Laura Bush called the administrations practices cruel and immoral, and likened images of immigrant children being held in kennels to those that came out of Japanese internment camps during World War II. And the American Association of Pediatricians has said the practice of separating children from their parents can cause the children irreparable harm. Still, the administration had stood by it. President Trump blames Democrats and says his administration is only enforcing laws already on the books, although thats not true. There are no laws that require children to be separated from their parents, or that call for criminal prosecutions of all undocumented border crossers. Those practices were established by the Trump administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has cited passages from the Bible in an attempt to establish religious justification. On Monday, he defended it again saying it was a matter of rule of law, We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws. A Border Patrol spokesman echoed that thought in a written statement. In recent days, authorities on the border have begun allowing tightly controlled tours of the facilities that are meant to put a humane face on the policy. But cameras are heavily restricted. And the children being held are not allowed to speak to journalists. The audio obtained by ProPublica breaks that silence. It was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who heard the childrens weeping and crying, and was devastated by it. The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable. The child who stood out the most was the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl with a phone number stuck in her head. At the end of the audio, a consular official offers to call the girls aunt. ProPublica dialed the number she recited in the audio, and spoke with the aunt about the call. It was the hardest moment in my life, she said. Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. Shes crying and begging me to go get her. She says, I promise Ill behave, but please get me out of here. Im all alone. The aunt said what made the call even more painful was that there was nothing she could do. She and her 9-year-old daughter are seeking asylum in the United States after immigrating here two years ago for the exact same reasons and on the exact same route as her sister and her niece. They are from a small town called Armenia, about an hours drive northwest of the Salvadoran capital, but well within reach of its crippling crime waves. She said gangs were everywhere in El Salvador: Theyre on the buses. Theyre in the banks. Theyre in schools. Theyre in the police. Theres nowhere for normal people to feel safe. She said her niece and sister set out for the United States over a month ago. They paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide them through Guatemala, and Mexico and across the border into the United States. Now, she said, all the risk and investment seem lost. The aunt said she worried that any attempt to intervene in her nieces situation would put hers and her daughters asylum case at risk, particularly since the Trump administration overturned asylum protections for victims of gang and domestic violence. She said shes managed to speak to her sister, who has been moved to an immigration detention facility near Port Isabel, Texas. And she keeps in touch with her niece, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, by telephone. Mother and daughter, however, have not been able to speak to one another. The aunt said that Alison has been moved out of the Border Patrol facility to a shelter where she has a real bed. But she said that authorities at the shelter have warned the girl that her mother, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, might be deported without her. I know shes not an American citizen, the aunt said of her niece. But shes a human being. Shes a child. How can they treat her this way? Has your family been separated at the U.S., Mexico border? Are you a worker at a detention center or do you aid families who have been affected? Tell us more at border@propublica.org or 347-244-2134. This article was originally published by "ProPublica" - Following a Yola High Court judgement on June 11, 2018 to sentence five men to death by hanging, the Supreme Council of Bishops, also known as World Council of Bishops, has written President Muhammadu Buhari. The men from Kodomun in Demsa council area of the state, according to the Judge, would face the hangman for murdering a herder in retaliation to the several killings in the area. The letter, dated June 13, 2018 from the World Episcopal Headquarters in Texas, U.S., was titled Special request for presidential pardon: Killing by hanging of five young men, and signed by founding Primate, Abuja, Nigeria, Archbishop (Dr.) P. Sunday; Ecclesiastical Prelate Administrator, Houston, Texas, United State, Archbishop (Dr.) H. Parker; Apostolic Nuncio and Prelate to Africa, Lagos, Nigeria, Bishop (Dr.) J. Onyegbulem; and Ecclesiastical Prelate to West Africa, Niamey, Niger Republic, Bishop (Dr.) J. Hussein. The bishops said till date no adequate justice had been meted out on them commensurate to the lives and property lost. It therefore totally condemns and disapproves vehemently the death sentence passed on the five young men on Monday, June 11, 2018 by a court of competent jurisdiction in Yola, Adamawa State, Nigeria accused and charged for killing a herdsman. They added what our nation Nigeria sues for now in our nascent democracy is peace and tranquility, and not otherwise. Controversial crossdresser, Bobrisky is again in the news, and this time, hes shared photos of himself rocking Bikini thongs. Risky has argued multiple times about how feminine he wants to be, and has times without number caused controversy about his gender on social media. See the photos he shared below: Risky, also known as Idris Okuneye, was also slammed by actor Uche Madugwu over his sexuality. Uche also revealed that Bobrisky would be handed over to the police over an alleged threat to his life. The actor who claims to be a prophet said, God created Adam and eve not Adam and Bobrisky. In an Instagram post recently, Madagwu said, In the beginning God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Bobrisky , So when did we get to this point in Nigeria that we now accept this LUNACY and foolery?. Bobrisky your THREAT on my person is now before The Nigerian police Force, so you can only Run but you cant hide Im not your mate in any level. When youre ARRESTED by the Nigerian police over the THREAT you made via your social media handle, you ll also provide that evening class TEACHER who helped you compose that wonderful threat post, because I know youre an extraordinary illiterate, who cant even write Original copy received by me without proper guidance. Some people often say,its his/her life let him be, but before we know it, thousands of innocent youths in Nigeria will start this abnormal behaviour, where boys would start wearing bra and pant and kissing their fellow boys in the open . Im sure some people would say God forbid, my dear, how can God forbid such when right now, so many people are supporting Bobrisky over his nonsense lifestyle, this is how it all starts, before you know it our kids will start making Bobrisky their role model, and thats it, we ruin an entire generation. Is the BIBLE or HOLY Quran in support of this nonsense attitude from Bobrisky So why are we supporting and giving him HOPE? Leave a Comment comments Ovation International Ceo,Dele Momodu was criticised by some followers on Instagram after he showed off his newspaper vendor friend of 20 years. Dele Momodu shared the photo and wrote: Im always happy to visit my dear friend of two decades MR OLUSOLA ADU a very dutiful newspaper vendor in Ibadan Our love is deep However, many were of the opinion that he should have elevated his friend from being just a roadside newspaper vendor. https://twitter.com/DeleMomodu/status/1008700332711579648/photo/1 See the reactions below: Leave a Comment comments A young Nigerian man has died of internal bleeding after hitting his chest on an iron gate allegedly while fleeing from SARS operatives. The deceased, whose name was given as Emmanuel Sunday Opeyemi a.k.a Awilo, met his untimely demise following the chase by SARS operatives at Tarmac, Abeokuta, in Ogun State. According to online reports, Awilo and some other citizens were around the overhead bridge at Tarmac where a military officer mistaken for a yahoo boy was harassed last week. The SARS operatives returned to the venue days later and when Awilo and others sighted them, they fled to avoid further harassment but, while running, he hit his chest against an iron gate and it pierced his ribs. He later died of internal bleeding. Leave a Comment comments Essien Ayi, a senior Pastor at Peniel Church of God in Cross River State, has given one million Naira to the Muslim community in the state capital for completion of its central mosque. Mr Ayi who is also a lawmaker representing Akpabuyo/Bakassi/Calabar-South Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives, while speaking at the event, said Nigerians should be their brothers keepers, irrespective of religion. Ayi, who made the cash donation at Gbogobiri, an Hausa settlement in Calabar, said; A lesbian couple was kicked out of their Uber ride by the driver because the girls were kissing each other in the back seat. Now the driver has been banned by Uber for being homophobic. Alex Iovine and her girlfriend, Emma Pichl, were riding with the car service on Saturday evening, when they started smooching and snuggling in the back seat. The driver pulled over and told the girls to get out of the car, saying they were being disrespectful. The girls recorded the incident and released a video that shows the drivers name and license plate. During the argument, the couple threatened to call the police and have the driver fired. Uber has removed the drivers access to its app, saying it does not tolerate discrimination. Blonde-haired lesbian Alex Iovine and her brunette lover, Emma Pichl, were riding in an Uber from a friends birthday party to another party in Manhattan on Saturday night. While in the back seat of the car, the girls leaned in and started kissing each other. The driver, identified as Ahmad El Boutari, pulled the car over and told the kissing lesbians to get out of his car. You cant do this in the car, El Boutari said. Its inappropriate. Ubers terms of use prohibit riders from engaging in sexual conduct during rides. The amorous girls, Alex Iovine and Emma Pichl, say they are aware of the policy, but claim that the driver is homophobic. Reports state that the lesbians locked lips in the back seat after a night of partying. The female lovers also may have been handling each other in a sexual manner. El Boutari says that he took offense to more than just the kissing. I did what I believe is my freedom, he said. He says the lesbians were acting crude in his cab. One forced the other to smell her armpit, one put her feet on his seat, they were playing loud music, and then the girls started making out, El Boutari says. Its my own car. I didnt feel comfortable with them, he said. The driver said he asked the girls to stop kissing, but they refused. At this point, El Boutari kicked the lesbians out of his car. According to Uber Community Guidelines, passengers agree to the following upon entering the vehicle: Dont touch or flirt with other people in the car. As a reminder, Uber has a no-sex rule. Thats no sexual conduct between riders, no matter what. The female same-sex couple admit they kissed in the back seat of the car, but claim it was merely a peck. Moreover, they accuse El Boutari of being homophobic. According to LinkedIn, Alex Iovine attended Manhattan College and works in advertising. Her girlfriend, Emma Pichl, studied at Fairfield University and went to Notre Dame School, and works as a recruiter. Ahmad El Boutari, meanwhile, is now unemployed. Uber revoked his ability to drive for the ride-sharing app, and the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has suspended the drivers taxi license, pending an investigation. Source: Dailymail.co.uk Leave a Comment comments Reno Omokri has said he is so disappointed in Senator Ibn Naallah who begged President Buhari to tolerate us (the Senate) as your children. According the former Media aide of ex-president Goodluck Jonathan, the statement reads nothing short of democratic illiteracy. Speaking via his twitter handle, he stressed that, the Nigerian Senate is meant to coordinate the government with the executive, but not to be SUBORDINATE to them. See his tweet below I am so disappointed in Senator Ibn Naallah who begged President Buhari to tolerate us (the Senate) as your children. What nonsense! What democratic illiteracy! The @NgrSenate is meant to COORDINATE the government with the executive. It is not meant to be SUBORDINATE to them! Reno Omokri (@renoomokri) June 19, 2018 Many of his followers on the platform agreed with him on this stance as they all lambasted the senators for only being interested in their allowance and nothing else. What their reactions were like Most of those sleeping senators dont even know there reason for being there. Theyre just interested in the allowances Nothing to offer. MRMAN (@mrmanodili) June 19, 2018 Checks and balances have been thrown to the dogs, because of all those illiterates youth collected 2k and voted in on the day of elections. Muazu Arafat (@ArafatMuazu) June 19, 2018 He truly doesnt understand what Senate means, I proffer he starts reading one secondary school textbook called #authority in government. Amaechi Jeff (@Jeffjoga) June 19, 2018 Nawao! He seize to be called a distinguish that moment he made the pronouncements. GamboTsaku (@TSAKU84) June 19, 2018 HEADS UP GUYS, A Beautiful South African Woman has penned some loving words about Nigerian men, and says her wish is to end up marrying one! Read her tweets below: When It Comes To Women, Nigerian Men Are The Kings Of Africa Despite the hatred and distrust by many South Africans on Nigerians living in South Africa,Nigerian men are greatest men Ive ever had a relationship with. would love to get married to one if she can find one. Ive been scared of what people will say. But funny enough, I love them and would like to marry one. Nigerians men are better than South African men. Nigerian guys spend money on them because apparently, their South African guys are not that I have seen a case where you give a South African girls money that is not that much but shes like so surprised and so happy. Nigerian guys ball out and spend so much money on us, and take us shoppingI mean they like us. South African men should forget about the scare tactic of lying about narcotics regarding Nigerians, we ladies discovered its a blanket lie. Nigerian men know how to treat women; spending money on them instead of writing poems. Nigerian Men aint got time for poems, they give you cash , Love and a good time. South Africa has one of the worlds highest rates of rape and murder of women. More than 40,000 cases of rape are reported every year, figures which are thought to only represent a fraction of actual attacks. I am so obsessed with naija guys but i dont know why. i really dont like guys from my country South Africa or Botswana. More women are murdered , wounded , battered by South African men than in any other country. This means if you are in relationship with a South African man, you are more likely to be abused or killed. I wont mind moving to Nigeria or bringing a Nigerian man down to SA , I will take go care of you.. I love Nigerian men Pls retweet so my Nigerian king can find Me. Leave a Comment comments Deputy Senate Leader, Alhaji Bala ibn NaAllah pledged loyalty and commitment to President Muhammadu Buhari, when representatives of residents of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) paid Buhari Sallah homage . r, Alhaji Bala ibn NaAllah, representing Senate President Bukola Saraki, said Mr. President, I have the authority of each and every member of the Senate and the House of Representatives to wish you a blessed Eid-el-Fitr in 2018 which we are celebrating. And I have the authority of each and every one of us to equally pledge our loyalty and commitment to work with you for the betterment of this country and to wish you more strength; to wish you more health, and most importantly, Mr. President, to add additional degree of tolerance for you so that you tolerate us as your children. Reacting to the statement, Peoples Democratic Party, PDP Cheiftain, Femi Fani Kayode threw serious jabs at Sen. Ibn NaAllah. He said senators are meant to act as a check and balance to the Pres. and not behave like his houseboys. He took to his Twitter handle to make his point, calling the senators statement shameless and debasing. See what he wrote; "Tolerate us (Senate) as ur children- Sen. Ibn NaAllah to @MBuhari When a Senator reduces and debases himself to this level of shameless, grovelling subservience it is pitiful. Senators are meant to act as a check and balance to the Pres. and not behave like his houseboys Femi Fani-Kayode (@realFFK) June 19, 2018 See how Nigerian Twitter users responded to Fani Kayodes statement Hello senate president @bukolasaraki and the entire senators of the federal republic of Nigeriadid senator Sen. ibn NaAllah say those words to @MBuhari on behalf of the whole senate house? If NO then pls let the needful be done, he doesnt know why he is thereOTHERWISE Tunde Go (@GoTunde) June 19, 2018 I have said it elsewhere & I reiterate here that I don't like the over idolization of @MBuhari . For crying out loud, he's a public servant & answerable to d people of Nigeria. A situation where a privilege few & sycophants high praise PMB make the hue & cry of populace unheard Oleghibe-Moore (@moore_oleghibe) June 19, 2018 Well it simply means the country yet to have real professionals as Senators. People who should know what they're there for. Vigilante (@osarah793) June 19, 2018 He's clearly 1 of those Northern sen, govs & leaders who doesn't know their roles, functions & powers in a democracy. Wachu honestly xpect 4rm people that grew up under feudalism & Wahhabism? The principles of rule of law, separation of Powers, Checks & Balances are strange 2 'em Quintessential Realist (@jimdave2012) June 19, 2018 Hampshire, UK - June 19, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) 19th June 2018: Juniper Research has revealed the top 10 technologies set to disrupt the fintech industry in 2018 and 2019. Juniper's 3 Disruptive Technologies to Watch in 2018: For more insights, download the free whitepaper: 3 Disruptive Technologies to Watch in 2018 https://www.juniperresearch.com/document-library/white-papers/top-3-disruptive-fintech-to-watch-in-1 The new research, Top 10 Disruptive Technologies in Fintech: 2018, found a wealth of positive changes stemming from emerging technologies in the fintech space: 1. Data Mining Whilst the introduction of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the EU poses the risk of substantial fines for those in contravention, Juniper believes the changes provide significant opportunity to companies offering data that has been sourced honestly and in a transparent manner, an opt-in model allowing for data collection and resale. Businesses such as ShareRoot, a specialist in data protection, will benefit. The research also praises Microsoft, which announced plans to impose GDPR restrictions across all operations worldwide, not just for EU customers, and argues that this approach should see replication by other global businesses. 2. Decentralised Apps The coming year will see a significant expansion in the deployment of Decentralised Apps (Dapps). Utilising blockchain as their underlying technology, these will create an innovative open-source software ecosystem, both secure and easy to develop for. Research author Lauren Foye explained: "Dapps will pool resources across numerous machines globally, harnessing the power of thousands of idle computers. The results are applications which do not belong to a sole entity; rather are community driven". Whilst the requirement to use crypto-based tokens as payment could be seen as a barrier, the desire for a secure, recorded series of processes will drive adoption, with users willing to spend for the benefit and peace of mind. 3. Quantum Computing Juniper believes 2018 will see quantum supremacy, a quantum computer that can carry out tasks that are not possible or practical with a traditional computer. Implications include the rapid solving of complex algorithms, redefining areas such as fintech, logistics, and research & development. Whilst mainstream use is unlikely until 2023 at the earliest, industry players should plan accordingly, to avoid falling behind rivals. Juniper Research provides research and analytical services to the global hi-tech communications sector, providing consultancy, analyst reports and industry commentary. For further details please contact Sam Smith, Press Relations T: +44(0)1256 830002 E: sam.smith@juniperresearch.com 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 MARKHAM, ON - June 19, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) With Canada ironing out cannabis commerce regulations, the International Cannabis Business Conference (ICBC) is returning to Vancouver, British Columbia, this June 24th-25th, the perfect time to provide the latest information on the upcoming rules, as well as important networking opportunities for entrepreneurs, investors, and advocates. With the ICBC hosting a Canopy Rivers/Canopy Growth million-dollar "pitch day" for aspiring entrepreneurs, the Vancouver ICBC is THE must-attend cannabis event of the year. The International Cannabis Business Conference, with its trademark blend of politics, business, and culture, has vaulted itself to become the world-leading cannabis business conference. Fresh off the heels of a sold-out event in Berlin, the timing is great for the ICBC to return to cannabis-friendly Vancouver. "Canada has helped bring cannabis into the mainstream more than any country, first by implementing sensible medical laws, and now by ending prohibition for all adults," says Alex Rogers Executive Producer of the ICBC. "We are proud to educate the attendees about the latest developments in the host country, as well as around the world. In addition to our top-notch program, we hold world-class networking events that can really help entrepreneurs take their businesses to the next level." The Vancouver ICBC already includes speakers such as Canopy Growth's Hillary Black; Anna Serin from the Canadian Securities Exchange; Groundworks Consulting's Jamie Shaw; Bhang's Scott Van Rixel; Cannacord Ingenuity's Yasmin Gordon; Prohibited Media's Drake Sutton-Shearer; MMJ Canada's Clint Younge; attorneys Kirk Tousaw and Robert Laurie, and many more experts across the cannabis space. American activist and rock icon Henry Rollins will deliver a keynote address, bringing his unique message and passion to Vancouver. Additionally, Canopy Rivers, in collaboration with Canopy Growth, will be offering up to $1,000,000 of seed capital to aspiring entrepreneurs. Visit canopyrivers.com/pitch-day/ for more information on the pitch event. Conference topics will include medical and recreational regulations, raising capital, mergers and acquisition, branding, marketing, investment opportunities, the Canopy Rivers/Canopy Growth million dollar pitch event, and more. If you are in the cannabis industry, or thinking of joining, this is the cannabis event for you. For more information and to purchase conference only "early bird" tickets for $349 or all-inclusive "early bird" passes for $499, visit www.internationalcbc.com or call ( 888) 920-6076 . These prices end at midnight tonight (June 6th). The event is expected to sell out. 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 New York - June 19, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) The legal cannabis era is here. As the 'green rush' to capitalize on it builds momentum in North America, innovation research and advisory company Stylus highlights five emerging trends shaping the future of cannabis culture and consumption. 1. Cannabis Versus Cocktails Cannabis has the potential to match alcohol as the recreational product of choice in the US. Use among US college students is already climbing, while drinking is declining. It plays a similar role to alcohol, lending itself to party-goers, parents and others looking to unwind even serving as a host gift in lieu of wine. It's especially appealing to those eager to avoid hangovers or alcohol's calorie count. 2. 'Canna-Curious' Hubs Commercialized cannabis is maturing into an opportunity expected to be worth $57bn globally by 2027, according to Arcview Group. Catering to an influx of newly intrigued consumers, brands are demystifying cannabis via strategies such as subscription boxes, cannabis socials for product sampling, and even Tinder-like apps. The next stage in educating consumers and cultivating fans will be cannabis tourism. California-based Flow Kana is turning a defunct winery into an experience center that will offer educational tours of its cannabis farm, along with tastings. 3. Female Focus A 'by and for' women's sector is booming in the industry. Women are among the fastest-growing cohorts of cannabis consumers spending by females on cannabis deliver app Eaze increased by 20% in 2017, and increasingly prolific as cannabis entrepreneurs. As a result, products that skew towards feminine tastes from menstrual-relief products to sleek pipes and jewelry that doubles as a sophisticated roach clip are proliferating. Women are defining the future of cannabis. 4. Medical-Grade Marijuana Cannabis hasn't yet been widely integrated into the mainstream medical community, but that will change. We'll see an upswing in education available for healthcare providers and patients, and an evolution of products geared to patient use enabling users to more precisely control dosing, for instance. Legalization is bringing more biotech and other start-ups into the space, all likely to advance understanding of how cannabis can aid patients and help adapt it to clinical use. 5. New Pet Essential As several key medical benefits of cannabidiol (CBD, the non-psychoactive compound of cannabis) including relief from anxiety and joint pain appear to help animals as much as humans, CBD-infused products for pets are booming. The potential here is enormous, given that Americans now spend nearly $70bn annually on their pets, and younger owners in particular are embracing alternative remedies to ensure optimal animal health. About Stylus Stylus is a global innovation research and advisory company that identifies and connects the most important global and cross-industry trends. Our insights are used by more than 500 of the world's leading consumer brands, businesses and agencies to understand the attitudes and behaviors of their consumers, the products and services they're using, and how they engage with the world around them. Our team of 150 industry experts work across five continents, analyzing more than 20 consumer-facing industries. We operate out of New York, Miami, London, Sao Paulo, Melbourne, Singapore, Tokyo and South Korea. www.stylus.com. Natasha Fish PR Manager, Stylus London, USA, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Singapore, Korea T +44 20 3892 7544 | +44 7446 082106 | @Tasha_Fish 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 BRITISH COLUMBIA - June 19, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Today BC's Wine Industry reflects on the extraordinary success of BC Wine Month, with BC Wine sales reaching an all-time high in April. BRITISH COLUMBIA - Today BC's Wine Industry reflects on the extraordinary success of BC Wine Month, with BC Wine sales reaching an all-time high in April. On March 13, the government proclaimed April as British Columbia's official province-wide wine month encouraging British Columbians to discover, share and choose 100 per cent BC wines. The BC Wine Institute reports BC VQA Wine sales were up eight per cent over this time last year, reaching an all-time high of 18.3 per cent in total provincial market share for the rolling twelve-month period ended April. "It's tremendous to see the local support we have. These results far exceeded our expectations." said Mile Prodan, President & CEO of the BC Wine Institute. "Really, it's about enjoying what's in the glass, and that represents 100 per cent BC." Through a partnership between the BC Wine Institute, Ministry of Agriculture and Destination BC, BC Wine Month offered an opportunity for British Columbians to show their local support and experience the quality and diversity of BC's world-class wine products during a month-long celebration of wine events, tastings and learning. "BC Wine Month was a great success in introducing and reminding British Columbians of the diverse and rewarding local options available, and how well they pair with BC food," said Minister of Agriculture Lana Popham. "I encourage all wine appreciators to keep the momentum growing, and continue to enjoy and support the excellent vineyards and winemakers we have in our province. Nothing tastes better than when you Buy BC!" As covered on Global TV, highlights from BC Wine Month included iconic BC winemakers and chefs teaming up for unique events throughout the month, including a sold-out Chef Meets BC Grape event in Vancouver with proceeds going to the BC Hospitality Foundation; multi-course BC wine-paired dinners at the wineries; and sommelier-led BC wine and food pairing events in 17 Save-On-Foods BC VQA Wine store locations across the province. The Wines of British Columbia digital campaign drew 19,000 contest entrants and 31 winners to discover BC Wine Country, with traffic to WineBC.com up 260 per cent over last year. In addition, 12 BC Wine Ambassador education sessions were held throughout the province reaching more than 500 trade and industry participants, and 120 BC Liquor Stores featured exclusive BC VQA Wines on their shelves. "The support from industry and trade has been extraordinary," added Prodan. On April 24, Ministers, MLAs and members of the Press Gallery gathered to celebrate BC Wine Month and vote on the first annual Speakers Choice wine in the categories of BC red table wine and BC white table wine. The 2013 Invictus from Perseus Winery was the winning red wine and Upper Bench Winery Riesling won the white wine category. These two wines will become the first BC Speakers Choice wines for 2018. While the province-wide official BC Wine Month may be over, the 2018 wine touring season is well on its way, with reports indicating the hottest May on record in Summerland and Osoyoos. 253 wineries are now open to the public offering unique winery experiences, including dinners in the vineyards, winery picnics, yoga on the terrace, farm-to-table wine and food tastings, ATV tours, concert series and more. "I'm so glad to hear British Columbians and visitors engaged in BC Wine Month and made it such a big success," said Lisa Beare, Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture. "The quality and popularity of BC wines are putting our province on the destination lists of culinary tourism enthusiasts around the world - and this is great news for all BC tourism operators and the people who work for them. I'd like to toast everyone involved in BC Wine Month - from Destination BC to the hard-working people who staff the vineyards - well done." Winery goers can now plan their trips to BC Wine Country using the online Wines of British Columbia Trip Planner and app, that lets you plan personalized itineraries to explore the character of all BC wine regions. Start planning your visit to BC Wine Country - where every month is BC Wine Month! Visit the online Wines of British Columbia Trip Planner or download the app by searching "BC Wine" in either the App Store or Google Play store or click the links directly for: Android or iPhone. Quick facts about the BC Wine Industry: BC is home to 929 vineyards, including more than 350 licensed wineries There are more than 10,200 acres (4,130 hectares) of wine grapes planted in British Columbia BC's grape wine industry has grown from just 17 grape wineries in 1990 to more than 275 today BC's wine industry employs about 12,000 people and has an economic impact of $2.8 billion annually Each year, BC's wineries welcome more than 1,000,000 visitors Wines of British Columbia online Trip Planner and app lets you plan personalized itineraries to explore the character of all BC wine regions About the British Columbia Wine Institute: Since 1990, the BCWI has played a pivotal role in taking BC's wine industry from a vision to an internationally recognized niche region producing premium wines and providing exceptional wine tourism experiences. The BCWI markets the wine and regions of BC; delivers quality trade, media and consumer tastings; and acts as the voice of BC's wine industry by advocating to government on behalf of industry that contributes $2.8 billion in provincial economic growth annually. The BCWI represents all wineries in British Columbia to grow the premium market share for the Wines of British Columbia, while driving awareness of our world-class wines and tourism product - currently drawing 1,000,000 visitors with $600 million in tourism and tourism employment related economic impact every year. For more information about BC Wine Institute's programs and services, please visit WineBC.com. For details on the Wines of British Columbia, go to WineBC.com, like the Wines of British Columbia Facebook page and follow @WineBCdotcom on Twitter and Instagram. MEDIA CONTACT: Laura Kittmer Media Relations Manager British Columbia Wine Institute T: 250.762.9744 ext.108 LKittmer@WineBC.com www.WineBC.com BeverageStocks.com - investing ideas in food and beverage stocks including wine and beer stocks Like Beverage Stocks? View our Beverage Stocks Directory More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp This collection features the arguments in favor of and against the renaming of Catt Hall on Iowa State's campus, which was named in The United States and President Donald Trump are currently embroiled in a trade war with China which has seen both countries hike the tariff for the respective items they import. However, President Donald Trump has reassured Apples CEO Tim Cook that the U.S. government would not levy tariffs on iPhones assembled in China. The report from New York Times claims that Cook traveled to the White House last month to meet Trump and inform him of the adverse effect that the presidents trade policies could have on Apples position in China. Back in March, during a major summit, Cook called for calmer heads to prevail between the two countries. Despite Trump reassuring Cook that the United States would not impose tariffs on iPhones assembled in China, Apple is worried that China could respond in ways that could end up hampering its business. Apple fears the Chinese-bureaucracy machine is going to kick in, meaning the Chinese government could cause delays in its supply chain and increase scrutiny of its products under the guise of national-security concerns, according to one person close to the company. To prevent this, Apple executives and lobbyists in Bejing and Washington are working on a project called Red Apple where they have been fostering close ties with the Chinese administration and the leader Xi Jinping. The report also outlines how Apples CEO Tim Cook has been attending key Chinese conferences and meeting key administrators in China to help build close ties with the country thereby ensuring Apples operations are not affected in any way. [Via NY Times Kenya Moore has had enough of all the recent rumors going around about her allegedly being fired and demoted fromThe mommy to be took to Instagram to set the record straight about her future on the Bravo hit reality series. Moore claimed that she is the the only cast member who brings in the highest ratings each episode."#FAKERHOANEWS .No one has EVER asked me to be a friend to show... .fact: I am THE housewife that has had THE highest rated episodes the past 3 seasons... even last year having missed 3 episodes. .#Fact: the Barcelona Lineup didn't work... ratings slipped. The fans have spoken. I've never been called boring .#Fact love me or hate me I may not be the "fan favorite" (my sister @kandi is and well deserved) but thank you for being invested in my life and continuing to contribute to the success of #RHOA and my success in my career on all levels," she wrote.Then, the former Miss USA ended her rant by addressing her fans who show interest in seeing her journey to motherhood."Don't worry #teamtwirl you will get to see #babytwirl and all that I'm experiencing as a new wife and mother-to-be one way or another .You will see my raw truth... the good the bad and the ugly one way or another .Fact# I am good effing TV! .Fact# I will be a HW or nothing at all. Fact# I don't discuss business but know that I know my value"She added the hashtags: "#queen # #kenyamoore #truth #shadequeen #shadeassassin #blameitonmyhormones #letaBishknow"Read her post, in full, below:Source/Photo Credit: Bravo Support Local Journalism Now, more than ever, the world needs trustworthy reportingbut good journalism isnt free. Please support us by subscribing or making a contribution. Subscribe or contribute Who doesnt want to look fit and perfect, right? I mean, almost all of us have been running in this... 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. JURIST Guest Columnist Louis Rene Beres of Purdue University discusses the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict considering the involvement of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein... Nullum crimen sine poena, No crime without a punishment. Nuremberg Tribunal, Final Judgment, 1946 Whether formally codified or merely personal, memory must always lie at the heart of justice. Today, however, almost no one remembers the myriad threats and actual missile attacks once launched at Israel from Iraq. Indeed, virtually no one even remembers Saddam Hussein, or has any recollection of the Iraqi dictators subsequent trial and punishment. Significantly, though not even a minor factor in his indictment after capture by U.S. forces on December 13, 2003, Saddams multiple and overlapping crimes had included 39 rocket attacks on Israeli cities. Earlier, perhaps as a long-forgotten precursor (premonition?) of Syrias Bashar al-Assad, Saddam used devastating chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds and others with de facto impunity. In any event, Israel was kept entirely out of the prosecutorial loop. More precisely, the Jewish State was never offered any marginal voice in the specially created Iraqi Special Tribunal. Instead, all prosecutorial authority over Saddam was quickly and firmly vested in an ad hoc municipal institution, a newly-synthesized court of justice from which Israel had intentionally and very specifically been excluded. At the time, the U.S. decided not to try Saddam in an American military tribunal, for fear of eliciting further Arab terrorism, and because Washington did not want to give the Iraqi dictator a viable pretext for claiming Head of State immunity. The Iraqi Special Tribunal began its proceedings on October 19, 2005. At the end, of course, taking a conclusive page from the precedent-setting Nuremberg judgments rendered after World War II, Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging. The gallows date was set for December 30, 2006. Still missing from Saddams criminal prosecution was even a single count for Iraqs manifold 1991 aggression against Israel. Nonetheless, Jerusalem had a peremptory or incontestable right to participate in this important post-Nuremberg Tribunal. By any reasonable measure, Israels deliberate exclusion from the IST proceedings effectively violated one of the worlds most elementary legal principles of judicial jurisdiction. After all, the substantial crimes committed against Israel had taken place with that state as the only selected target, and on Israels own lands. Here, therefore, was no need for Jerusalem to make any conspicuous case for universal jurisdiction, a case it had made earlier for Adolf Eichmann. Nullum crimen sine poena or No crime without a punishment stems from at least three separate passages of the Torah (in their sequence of probable antiquity, they are Exod. 21:22-25; Deut. 19: 19-21; and Lev. 24: 17-21), the Lex Talionis or law of exact retaliation was integral to the Nuremberg Trial and its various specialized successor tribunals. In 1946, when the Special Military Tribunal justified a portion of its sentencing on long-standing arguments for retributive justice, it strongly reaffirmed this binding principle. Its exact words were: Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore, and liable to punishment. When facing the Iraqi Special Tribunal, Saddam was charged with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, but not with aggression against Israel. Yet, aggression is plainly codified in several fully authoritative legal sources, and as an especially serious crime that must never be accepted without a punishment. The Tribunals exact words were: So far from it being unjust to punish him, it would be unjust if his wrongs were allowed to go unpunished. Whatever the practical arguments at the time might have been for excluding Israel, and there were certainly more than a few of those, there could never have been any correct legal justification for totally ignoring Iraqs Gulf War missile attacks upon innocent Israeli civilian populations. In compliance with both U.S. and allied geopolitical expectations, Israel never fired back. Needless to say, the right to launch an Israeli retaliation in self-defense subject, of course, to usual limitations of humanitarian international law, namely discrimination (sometimes called distinction), proportionality, and military necessity would have been beyond all legal question. Iraqs thirty-nine Scuds killed only one Israeli directly. Twelve additional deaths were the indirect result of these missile attacks. Nearly two-hundred persons were injured; 4393 buildings were damaged. This included 3991 apartments and residential buildings; 331 public institutions; 17 educational institutions; and 54 businesses. Yes, it could have been much worse. But the obvious tactical failures of Iraqs primitive weapons did not, in themselves, provide an exculpatory legal argument for Saddam. In all such critical legal matters, guilt or criminal responsibility is established primarily by criminal intent and not narrowly by operational outcome. Although Saddam Husseins own personal responsibility for aggression against Israel was limited to the 1991 attacks, Iraq had previously amassed a long history of unpunished crimes against the beleaguered country, including barbarous public executions of leaders of the Iraqi Jewish community. These barbarous hangings were then justified by Baghdad on the basis of fully concocted charges that, seemingly by definition, all Iraqi Jews were spies for Israel. Also worth noting is that Iraq had sent expeditionary forces against Israel during the 1948 War of Independence, the Six Day War (1967), and even the Yom Kippur War (1973). During the 1948 conflict, which all of the Arab armies had openly regarded and proclaimed as a purifying war of annihilation, Iraqi forces entered Transjordan, thereby engaging greatly outnumbered Israeli forces in Western Samaria. After the 1967 war, Iraqi forces, deployed in Jordan, remained purposely pre-positioned for several years. During the 1973 war, Iraq committed an entire one-third of its then 95,000 man armed forces to assist Hafez al-Assads Syria, in its campaign of violence against Israel, on the Golan Heights. Since then, as is well-known today, Bashar, the son, has gone beyond both his father and Saddam in the willful gassing of his own countrymen. International law is not a suicide pact, not then and not now. Accordingly, every state maintains an inherent right of self-defense. Participating in the prosecution of Saddam Hussein for prior aggression against Israel would have represented a manifestly authoritative expression of that basic right. In the absence of such participation, the stage was set for yet another Arab jurisprudential assault upon Israel this time, in the form of yet another enemy state. This new enemy state would be called Palestine. There is more. According to Emmerich de Vattels classic 1758 work on The Law of Nations, a text that influenced the legal thinking of Thomas Jefferson in America, The right to punish injustice is derived from the right of self-protection. The core right of self-defense in international law is itself drawn from Natural Law or Higher Law, and can never be subordinated to any man-made international agreements, or to any extra-legal considerations of power politics. All things considered, not only did Israel have an unquestioned right to join in the trial of Saddam Hussein, there had also been a corresponding obligation of all other cooperating states to actively ensure such participation. As Blackstone observed, international law exists to provide for the eternal and immutable laws of good and evil. Each state, Blackstone had then warned, is bound to aid and enforce the law of nations, as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon offenses against the universal law. Natural Law, which is the indisputable basis of all consequent international law, stems originally from the Decalogue (Ten Commandments), and from the Covenant Code of Israel. This Natural Law is expressed not only in the Declaration of Independence, but also in the Bill of Rights. The Ninth Amendment, in stipulating that the enumeration of certain rights in this Constitution shall not prejudice other rights not so enumerated, reflects an utterly immutable belief in a Higher Law, one that is always superior to the inherently flawed will of human governance. Looking back, following fully appropriate legal procedure, Israel ought to have been encouraged to prepare a formal criminal complaint against Saddam Hussein for pertinent crimes, and then to file relevant documents with the Iraqi Special Tribunal. Jerusalems next step should have been in the United Nations. There, in the General Assembly, Israel could have usefully called upon that body to promptly request an Advisory Opinion on the relevant Israeli charges from the International Court of Justice. This retrospective point of justice is important today, not because anything is left to do with regard to earlier Iraqi crimes against Israel, but because of what it implies concerning still-impending Palestinian crimes against the Jewish State. In this connection, the most evident expected crime has to do with Palestinian plans for a One State Solution, plans that are unambiguously expressed in the official maps of all major Palestinian insurgent organizations. On all of these maps, the State of Israel is identified as Occupied Palestine. Taken together with the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964, three years before there were any Occupied Territories, this identification makes very clear that the Palestinian side in any peace process is seeking much more than coexistence. It is seeking replacement. In essence, in spite of still-popular rhetoric calling for a Two State Solution, there is literally nothing in the charters or derivative codes of Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad that could allow for a surviving Jewish state anywhere in the Dar al-Islam. In essence, these charters and maps already call for at least a cartographic genocide. In the earlier matter of Israel and Saddam Hussein, an Advisory Opinion could have been requested by the United States in the Security Council. This American action to render pertinent assistance to Israel would have derived not only from the Constitutional incorporation of international law into United States law, especially Article 6 of the US Constitution (the Supremacy Clause), but also from the indisputably Natural Law foundations of U.S. law. In a now irreversibly lost opportunity, any U.S. initiative to punish Saddam Husseins crime of aggression against Israel would have represented essential support for both international criminal law and for Americas own most durably sacred principles of international justice. Now, at another perilous moment when Israels basic rights under international law are being expressly disregarded, and once again in the United Nations (which several years ago declared the Palestinian Authority a nonmember observer state), it is sobering to remember that Jerusalem has been down this road before. This time, however, even with very explicit guidance from the so-called Road Map or whatever the most current iteration of a Middle East Peace Process, the consequences of global legal indifference could become substantially more serious. This time, especially if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas should bring his claim to sovereign statehood for U.N. endorsement, a potentially-annihilationist One State Solution could eventually be the outcome. This could be the case, moreover, even though Palestine would still not have met any of the core expectations for sovereignty expressly identified in the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, sometimes called the Montevideo Convention (1934). It would be in the alleged interests of self-determination, in principle, always a respectable and peremptory legal objective, that any new Arab state be required to coexist with Israel. Almost certainly, however, this 23rd Arab state, plausibly infused with various encouraging memories of Iraqs earlier unpunished Nuremberg-category crimes against Israel, would diligently plan to remove and replace the pre-existing Jewish State. In any such expectedly proposed final solution for Arab-Israeli conflict, the immutable obligations of memory to justice would once again have been trampled upon or ignored. None of this is meant to suggest that the fundamental human rights of any Palestinian populations should be purposely overlooked or disregarded, but only that these rights must necessarily stop short of Israels corresponding or reciprocal extinction. To be sure, any such suggestion of genuine coexistence is altogether reasonable and beyond legal question. Louis Rene Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth book, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israels Nuclear Strategy, was published in 2016. His other writings have been published in Harvard National Security Journal; Yale Global Online; World Politics; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Israel Defense; Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College; Special Warfare; Oxford University Press; The Jerusalem Post; Infinity Journal; BESA Perspectives; US News & World Report; The Hill; and The Atlantic. Suggested citation:Louis Rene Beres, Unexplored Connections: The Crimes of Saddam Hussein and Israeli-Palestinian Relations, JURIST Academic Commentary, Jun. 18, 2018, http://jurist.org/forum/2018/05/louis-beres-saddam-israel.php This article was prepared for publication by Kelly Cullen, the Managing Editor for JURIST Commentary. Please direct any questions or comments to him at commentary@jurist.org The US Supreme Court [official website] granted certiorari [order list, PDF] in five cases Monday, including a major antitrust case against computer giant Apple. In Apple, Inc. v. Pepper [docket; cert. petition, PDF] the court will decide [w]hether consumers may sue for antitrust damages anyone who delivers goods to them, even where they seek damages based on prices set by third parties who would be the immediate victims of the alleged offense. In this case, consumers who purchased iPhones and apps allege that Apple monopolized the app market by requiring developers to sell their apps exclusively through the App Store. The district court had ruled in favor of Apple, but the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed [opinion, PDF], allowing the claims to proceed [JURIST report]. In Timbs v. Indiana [docket; cert. petition, PDF] the court will decide [w]hether the Eighth Amendments Excessive Fines Clause is incorporated against the States under the Fourteenth Amendment. Tyson Timbs pleaded guilty to drug charges and was sentenced to one year in home detention and five years of probation. Timbs was also ordered to forfeit his 2012 Land Rover, which he had used to transport drugs. Timbs claimed that the forefeiture was unconstitutional because it was grossly disproportionate to his offense, and a state appeals court agreed. The Indiana Supreme Court reversed [opinion, PDF], noting that the US Supreme Court has never specifically ruled that the excessive fines clause applies to the states. In Sturgeon v. Frost [docket; cert. petition, PDF] the court will determine [w]hether the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) [text] prohibits the National Park Service from exercising regulatory control over State, Native Corporation, and private land physically located within the boundaries of the National Park System in Alaska. The case involves Alaskan hovercraft hunter Jim Sturgeon. The Supreme Court ruled [JURIST report] in 2016 that Sturgeon could use his hovercraft in a federal preserve, holding that the Ninth Circuits interpretation of the [ANILCA] is inconsistent with both the text and context. However, the court did not address the question at issue in the present case. In Garza v. Idaho [docket; cert. petition, PDF] the court will decide whether the presumption of prejudice recognized in Roe v. Flores-Ortega [opinion] appl[ies] where a criminal defendant instructs his trial counsel to file a notice of appeal but trial counsel decides not to do so because the defendants plea agreement included an appeal waiver. The court must determine whether Gilberto Garza was prejudiced by his lawyers failure to appeal or whether Garza has to show that he was prejudiced by indicating what issues he would have raised had he appealed. The Supreme Court of Idaho agreed with the lower courts [opinion, PDF] that Garzas counsel was not ineffective in failing to appeal. In Lorenzo v. Securities and Exchange Commission [docket; cert. petition, PDF] the court will decide whether a misstatement claim that does not meet the elements set forth in Janus can be repackaged and pursued as a fraudulent scheme claim. The Supreme Court ruled [JURIST report] in 2011 in Janus Capital Group v. First Derivative Traders [opinion] that only the maker of a fraudulent statement may be held liable for that misstatement under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and SEC Rule 10b-5(b) [text]. Francis Lorenzo is an investment banker who was charged with securities fraud after he sent potential investors emails containing false statements. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled [opinion, PDF] that Lorenzo had not violated Rule 10b-5(b) because his boss, not he, had actually made the misleading statements but that Lorenzo had violated Rule 10b-5(a) by engaging in a fraudulent scheme. Also Monday the court denied review in Kaczmar v. Florida [docket; cert. petition, PDF], a death penalty case, over the dissent [text, PDF] of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Leo Louis Kaczmar had argued that the jury instructions in his case impermissibly diminished the jurors sense of responsibility as to the ultimate determination of death. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein [official profile] criticized [statement] the US policy of separating immigrant children from their parents in a statement made on Monday. The commissioner cited the American Association of Pediatrics [professional organization], which called the policy government-sanctioned child abuse. The thought that any State would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable, said Zeid. The commissioner said that the US needs to immediately end forced separation of children and ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child [treaty]. Zeid said that ratification of the treaty will ensure that the fundamental rights of all children, whatever their administrative status, will be at the centre of all domestic laws and policies. Earlier this month a spokesperson for the commissioner urged [JURIST report] the US to halt child separation. Also in June a federal judge ruled [JURIST report] that the child separation policy may violate due process. Last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered [JURIST report] judges to stop granting asylum to victims of domestic or gang violence. Washington wants to extend tariffs to 284 more Chinese product types. Beijing is set to respond with counter duties worth USD 50 billion. Google inks deal to invest US$ 550 million in Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com. Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) The trade war between China and the United States continues. Last Friday the Trump administration drew up a second list of 284 Chinese product types on which to impose import levies worth US$ 16 billion, which will undergo further review in a public notice and comment process. In April the administration proposed a list of more than 1,300 Chinese product types that could be subject to new import tariffs. But this was whittled down to 818 following a review process, worth USD 34 billion in additional duty starting 6 July. The two lists will cover mostly high-tech products from industries like aviation, advanced rail systems, new energy vehicles and other high-tech areas like communications and robotics. Some products, such as televisions and their components, mobile phones, pharmaceuticals and price-sensitive products were taken off the list. Reacting to the US move, Chinas Commerce Ministry said tariffs on about US$ 34 billion of imports from the US will start 6 July, covering 545 product lines, including agricultural products, automobiles and seafood goods. An additional US$ 16 billion in tariffs on of US product lines, including chemicals, medical equipment and energy products, will be announced at a later date. These new duties will be applied only if the United States imposes duties on the second list of Chinese product types. US duties focus on industrial goods that contribute to or benefit from Beijings Made in China 2025 industrial policy. These include industries such as aerospace, information and communications technology, robotics, industrial machinery, new materials, and automobiles. Chinese companies in the list receive government funding, tax breaks, low-interest loans and other state subsidies. According to Washington this represents unfair competition. Meanwhile, whilst the trade war escalates, some US high-tech companies are looking for business deals in Asia. Internet giant Google announced plans to invest US$ 550 million in Chinese e-commerce powerhouse JD.com, in an effort to increase its presence in fast-growing Asian markets and battle rivals, including Amazon.com. The new partnership will include the promotion of JD.com products on Googles shopping service. This could help the latter expand beyond its base in China and Southeast Asia and establish a meaningful presence in US and European markets. Google officials said the deal would not involve any major new Google initiatives in the Peoples Republic, where the companys main services are blocked over its refusal to censor search results in line with local laws. For JD.com, the agreement with Google is first step towards a new global alliance to compete with Chinese e-commerce arch-rival Alibaba Group Holding. Maronite bishops call for a safe and dignified return of refugees. But the bases for peace and security are still missing. Lebanon risks economic and social collapse. For the UN, a repatriation plan is still premature. Fr Karam wants the international community to promote a peace process in Syria that respects everyone involved. Beirut (AsiaNews) Lebanon "can no longer bear the burden of welcoming" Syrian refugees fleeing the war, said Fr Paul Karam, director of Caritas Lebanon, speaking to AsiaNews. Involved in the humanitarian crisis for more than seven years, he explains that the Lebanese are "becoming increasingly impoverished" in their small compacted country. Unlike Jordan and Turkey, it has suffered "major losses in economic and social terms, so much so that that the whole system could collapse." To solve the emergency and guarantee a future to the country and the entire region, "it is necessary for the international community to promote a real peace process", one that is "dignified and sincere" because those who always pay are the weak. We must work responsibly for peace, respecting everyone." In January, a Lebanese minister said that the number of Syrian refugees in Lebanon had declined to under a million. However, according to UN data, the situation is more complicated than that, and today refugees are "more vulnerable than ever". Three quarters live with less than four dollars a day, and money is not enough to buy the basics, like food and medicine. Nine refugees out of ten have borrowed money and are now overwhelmed with debt. Each household spends on average US a month, US on food. According to UN figures, 84 per cent of the worlds refugees are in poor countries, such as Turkey (2.9 million), Pakistan (1.4 million), Lebanon (over one million in a country of four million), Iran (979,400 migrants), Uganda (940,800) and Ethiopia (761,600). At the end of the annual Synod in Bkerke (11-15 June), the Maronite Church called for a "safe and dignified" return of Syrian refugees from Lebanon. The bishops hope for an "unequivocal position" and that the matter not be used by various political factions against each other. Likewise, the international community must not use the weapon of "fear" to block a plan to return to areas deemed safe. Still, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees recently noted that any talk of a return of Syrian refugees is premature. Many of the latter also fear the violence they might encounter once they go home. What everyone wants is a political solution to the war in syria as a precondition to repatriation. "We too hear stories of refugees who want to return to Syria, said Fr Paul, but we have no definite data on how many have actually returned. From personal observation, we can see the same number in the country. A few hundreds might leave, but they are replaced by more number coming in. and the needs remain the same. For this reason, the international community must make an effort to guarantee that the return takes place in security, peace and the possibility of rebuilding a life, a home. For Lebanon, the refugee problem has led to the economic and social weakening of the country, which is already on the brink of collapse. In the past few years, the country has done a lot to protect, promote and integrate the refugees as Pope Francis advocates in his Message on the occasion of the 2018 World Day of Migrants and Refugees. "Lebanon responded to the pontiffs appeal but now the whole system is at risk, explains the Caritas director. Reports suggest that 80 per cent of Syrian territory is stable, but there are still no serious plans for return. This is why we once again encourage the peace process [in Syria] as the only way to solve the problem. by Bernardo Cervellera Italys demographic situation is grim. Its population shrunk by 3.2 per cent in a year. Those over 65 are now 22.3 per cent. China too has 158.31 million people over 65 (11.4 per cent). Aging undermines the workforce and pushes up social costs, undermining innovation, creativity, consumption, perspectives and hope. Beijing is thinking of removing all limits to the number of children. Demographers suggest a 10,000-yuan annual bonus for each new born. The goal is to avoid stagnation. Rome (AsiaNews) The steady aging of Italys population should alarm the countrys politicians and businesses. It should push them to take a look at what happens in other places and learn from them, even from China, which until a few years ago had the most radical population control policy. The latest data released by Italys statistical institute (ISTAT) are grim. In 2017 the Italian population decreased by 3.2 per cent. Only 458,000 births were recorded (15,000 less than in 2016) against 650,000 deaths (34,000 more than the previous year). This represents a drop of more than 100,000 people. People over 65 now represent 22.3 per cent. China is also experiencing a demographic crunch as its population ages. In 2017 there were fewer births than the previous year: 17,23 million instead of 17.86 million (in 2016). According to Chinas National Statistics Bureau, in 2017 the population over 65 stood at 158.31 million, or 11.4 per cent. Ten years before it was 7 per cent. At the same time, the workforce those aged between 16 and 59 shrunk by more than 5 million. This situation is the consequence of decades of the ruthless and methodical application of the one-child policy that prevented the birth of 400 million children, this according to the data from the Office of Population Control. It is well known that the law has led to violations of human rights, high fines, forced sterilisations and abortions and a male-to-female imbalance as parents resorted to selective abortions of female foetuses. In Italy, population decline is due to the large number of abortions and the use of abortion as a method of population control. The ever-increasing pace of work, a consumerist mind-set and poverty have also contributed to the trend. Recently the Chinese government granted couples the right to have two children, and yet people still opt for one or no children because having and raising a child requires a lot in time and money. According to the World Health Organisation, a society begins to age when those over 65 exceed 7 per cent of the population. China and Italy have already far exceeded that threshold. An aging population means higher public spending on health and pensions. It also means fewer young people, i.e. the ones who bring innovation, creativity, consumption, perspectives and hopes. In China, many are worried about the trend. Activists and demographers are pressing to remove every barrier to the number of children a couple can have and a commission of the State Council is studying what to do. Entrepreneur and scholar James Liang is one of those who would like to see restrictions lifted. In his latest book, The Demographics of Innovation, he notes that the aging of the population influences the capacity for inventiveness, creativity and economic development. For this reason, he wants the government to end limits on the number of children a couple can have as well as pay for the expenses of each new born with bonuses of 10,000 yuan per year (about US$ 1,560) to families. For Liang, without some action the risk for China is that it will stop. In his view, the current economic crisis in Japan is due precisely to demographic trends, namely the aging of the population. Italy too runs the risk of stopping. To prevent this, entrepreneurs and politicians should support mothers, both culturally and economically, not on "pro-life" grounds - which are fundamental - but for pragmatic reasons, to sustain development and innovation. by Melani Manel Perera Roshen Chanaka was hit in 2011 during a protest in at Free Trade Zone. His family received almost US$ 19,000 in compensation. Inquiry found that those responsible should go to trail, but so far no has been indicted. Colombo (AsiaNews) Mary Swarnakanthi, mother of Roshen Chanaka, a young Catholic worker murdered in 2011 by law enforcement wants justice for all victims of police in Lanka. "Other young people were permanently disabled, suffered wounds and injuries and lost their jobs due to police attacks, said the mother of the young man, 21, who was hit during a protest by workers at the Free Trade Zone (FTZ) in Katunayaka. No one has obtained justice. We will be satisfied only when it is granted." On 30 May 2011, thousands of workers in the Free Trade Zone staged a protest against a new pension scheme, which eventually got out of hand. As a result of clashes between protesters and police, Roshen Chanaka was killed whilst another 260 people were wounded and inured. Following the incident, many workers lost their job because they had to spend too much time in the hospital. Only a few received financial help. Two of them, Dhammica and Lasantha, lost the use of their legs. On 1 June, Ms Swarnakanthi, with the help of some activists, delivered a petition to the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission (HRCS), calling for an independent inquiry, adequate compensation and penalties for those responsible. "For the broken life of my son, my family received three million rupees (almost US$ 19,000] from the president, the Board of Investments and the Police Department. But this sum will not console our pain for the loss. His brothers and sisters miss him every day." For years, she carried out a silent protest outside the main entrance to the FTZ where her son was killed. Thanks to her efforts and the support of many friends and activists, the family was able to get the government of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa to name retired Judge Mahanama Thilakaratne to investigate the incidents of 2011. His report concluded that the victims must be compensated and the police must stand trial, whatever their rank". "So far though, no one has been brought before the law and the victims are still waiting for justice to be done". Marchers walked under the scorching sun whilst fasting for Ramadan. Of all ages, they share the pain of the violence they witnessed and a desire for peace. The Taliban refuse to extent the truce and announce new attacks. The Islamic State group never stopped the attacks. Kabul (AsiaNews/Agencies) After more than 700 km and almost 40 days under the scorching sun of Afghanistan, the Peace Convoy has arrived in Kabul with a clear message to the government and the Taliban: end the war. The convoy started in May in Helmand province, following a suicide attack in March that claimed tens lives. At the beginning eight people set off on foot. This morning, 90 people arrived in Kabul, recognisable by the blue bands worn on the chest. They range in age from 17 to 65, and all fasted during Ramadan. All of them were united by the violence they have seen and by a desperate desire for peace, their demand made in a strong voice amid crying and visible emotion. Some left their jobs to join the march, appealing to people and young people to speak out for peace. "We are calling on the Taliban to stop the bloodshed, one of them told Tolo News. We want peace and even if we lose our lives, we will continue this movement." The youngest marcher, 17-year-old Mohammed Tahir, usually led the file, pushing a stroller packed with emergency necessities a pair of crutches, umbrellas, a plastic rug, some spare sandals and a solar panel to charge their phones. Another marcher, Bahlul Patyal, is a pharmacist who joined the caravan in Lashkar Gah (south of Afghanistan, more than 600 km from Kabul). Every time they stopped for break at a mosque, he treated wounds and stomach aches with gauze, pharmaceuticals (see picture 3, left) and good humour. You know, he said, my wife told me that I shouldnt even dare coming back through the door if I dont lose weight on this march. The members of the convoy pushed their demand for peace during Eid celebrations (15-17 June), marked by an historic truce between the government and the Taliban. The unprecedented three-day break is now at an end. The Islamist rebel group rejected the appeal by the marchers and the Afghan government, to extend the truce. After sharing selfies and celebrating the end of Islams holy month with Afghan soldiers, the group announced that it will soon go back to fight. For Afghans, caught between the Taliban and the Islamic State group (which did not observe any truce), peace remains a far away goal. On 16 and 17 June, during the Eid celebrations, suicide bombers hit Jalalabad, killing 36 and 19 people respectively. The victims include Taliban, government troops and civilians. The Islamic State claimed responsibility only the first attack and is suspected in the second as well. Earlier, prime minister Peter O'Neill said those behind last week's destruction would be arrested and prosecuted. But Commander Kauke said police hadn't made arrests yet because the situation was highly charged. "This is not a normal law and order situation. It is political differences and politically manipulated issues that are causing all the destructions," he said. While Mendi had quietened down by Monday, Mendi police commander Gideon Kauke said the potential for unrest remained acute. However, subsequently supporters of the suspended government and Mr Powi have been mobilising around the province with high-powered weapons, threatening violence. As part of the ensuing state of emergency provisions, Papua New Guineas government has ordered the deployment of armed forces to restore order and has suspended the provincial government. WELLINGTON - Last week's court ruling upholding Southern Highlands governor William Powi's 2017 election win sparked the rampage by supporters of a losing candidate who had challenged the result. "We will not immediately take action, but we will try and form a team of investigators, and they will look into this one," Kauke said. "Those who are responsible in causing destructions and the burning down of buildings, they'll be investigated, arrested and charged." A former top policeman, Thomas Eluh, has been placed in charge of the nine-month emergency operations. Eluh was appointed as acting provincial administrator in Southern Highlands late last year as the national government sought to restore order to a dysfunctional public service amid lingering lawlessness and election-related violence. He continued in the role through February's magnitude 7.5 earthquake which caused widespread destruction and death in both Southern Highlands and Hela provinces. However Eluh, from Manus, was seen as having disrupted the interests of some Southern Highlands political power brokers and was sidelined in April. Well aware of the type of political ructions linked to the latest unrest in Mendi, Eluh said he still had strong support on the ground in the province and would be available to listen to grievances. But he cautioned he would not play politics. "There are a few factions here and there, particularly aligned to certain politicians," he said, "and of course the current acting administrator (Joseph Cajetan) would want to maybe protest or do these sort of things. But we will not allow it because of the state of emergency." Eluh said his approach would include encouraging talks between the opposing political factions. Rather than using brute force, he said bringing the community onside was one of the first things he would be doing. "It's not a police issue alone. This needs a collective effort from everybody," he explained. "I've done that before, during my time as an administrator, for the first time. I was given military and the police to - in a way - use force. But that's not how I operate. How I operate is getting everyone onside: churches, youths, leaders at all levels." Eluh admitted that it would be difficult to placate the mobs involved in political violence. "The province is ever divided. People have taken sides, and it's extremely difficult to try and convince them. But what I have been banking on is consistent awareness and dialogue with the people." O'Neill held a press conference with other elected leaders from Southern Highlands province in Port Moresby on Monday. "We want to apologise to PNG for some of the events that has taken place, mainly out of frustration that they have not been given the opportunity to engage in the court proceedings which resulted in a decision that they were not accepting," he said. O'Neill alluded to the rampage as being the actions of a "few individuals", and said the leaders had agreed that the rule of law must be followed. Alongside O'Neill at the press conference was the losing candidate whose supporters were behind Thursday's rampage, Joseph Kobol, as well as Powi whose election Kobol has alleged was the result of a rigged electoral process. Kobol apologised for what his supporters had done. He admitted the destruction of an Air Niugini Dash-8 aircraft was uncalled for, saying he was willing to let the election challenge be handled by the court system. "The state of emergency that's been in place during the (earthquake) disaster will be extended, and now it will take carriage over all the other law and order issues in the country as well," the prime minister added. "They will conduct their own investigations without any political interference whatsoever from the leaders and we will allow the agencies of government including police and defence and the courts to deal with some of the law and order issues in the province." However PNG's parliamentary opposition has demanded that the prime minister, who is a Southern Highlands MP, resign over the unrest, describing it as an indication that the people of the province had rejected his leadership The opposition leader Patrick Pruaitch said elected leaders of the province must go to Southern Highlands to resolve the situation "We need to have Southern Highlands getting down to Mendi and getting the leadership there to resolve the issue," Pruaitch said. According to Pruaitch, the unrest was bad publicity for PNG particularly as it prepared to host the APEC leaders summit in November. Meanwhile, there are fears that the Southern Highlands' unrest could spread to neighbouring Hela Province, itself recently hampered by deadly tribal fighting. At the weekend a police mobile squad team was held up and had its vehicles and guns taken by angry supporters of the suspended provincial government in Nipa near the provincial border. The build-up of weapons among tribal and political groups in the Highlands is of particular concern. A former PNG Defence Force commander, Jerry Singirok, has warned that police and military deployed to the region to quell the latest unrest could face superior firepower. Look at the members of the delegation that has gone to China. Is the prime minister in China to sell off our petroleum, gas, fisheries and forestry resources, Ok Tedi, and Bank South Pacific? It is used for projects for ONeills own glorification like tearing up good roads in Port Moresby for the Chinese and his friends to rebuild so APEC motorcades can ride on them for one day. Mr ONeill is now begging and selling the country into Chinas lap. This weeks visit to China is a glaring example of begging. And begging is not for the good of the nation. PORT MORESBY - The prime ministers mismanagement of the economy and public finances has turned Papua New Guinea into a state of hunting and gathering, living daily from hand to mouth. It has been reported that the trip will cost almost K7 million at a time when hospitals and health centres are short of medicine, schools (even in Port Moresby) are closing, small Papua New Guinean businesses are waiting to be paid their bills by the government, and retired public servants are waiting for their superannuation entitlements, some dying before they have been paid. This prime minister has no sense of responsibility or fairness. The trip also comes at a time when the prime ministers own province, and its neighbour Hela, are in turmoil. For the first time in the nations history an aeroplane has been hijacked and burned - and civil unrest continues. The prime minister is happy to send soldiers and police to face his people who are up in arms, yet he runs away. As a respected Papua New Guinean academic aptly commented: People in plight; leaders on flight! ONeill should take personal responsibility for the chaos in the Southern Highlands, which stems from the chaos of last years national election. The anomalies in voting and counting in all the seats in his province are the underlying cause of the current problem. Put together the ongoing landowner issues stemming from his government not paying monies due from the LNG project, his governments refusal to deal with the proliferation of weapons throughout the country, the recent earthquake and election issues, and you have a situation packed with dynamite. The prime minister inflamed the situation in the province by announcing he had suspended the provincial government. He announced he had appointed an acting administrator and that he would personally oversee the operations of the suspended government on behalf of the national executive council. He has now woken up to the fact that neither he nor the NEC has the power to suspend the provincial government and he is blaming the media for misreporting him. But the media reports came from an official statement from his own office. Why blame the media? Take responsibility yourself for mismanaging the problem and your province, PM. Instead of facing the problems in his own backyard and dealing with the causes of the problems, the prime minister runs to China on the biggest begging trip ever 93 people in the delegation, including 50 Chinese, according to the official list. What on earth are they all going for? To negotiate our becoming a colony of China? Is ONeill leading a delegation of Papua New Guineans or a delegation of Chinese? We have signs of Chinese domination already, in the conduct of public finance and structure of the economy, and with Chinese doing the jobs of Papua New Guineans, driving trucks, bulldozers, tractors, sweeping roads, opening trade stores in every corner of the country. What is next? Papua New Guinea is rich in natural resources. Our problem is that we seem to be unable to manage prosperity or to distribute the real benefits equitably amongst people and regions. Our problem is the prime minister. The longer he stays the further he undermines the inherent strength that natural resources provide. I urge all the members of parliament in government to think about the nation and the people and eventually themselves and their children. The oppositions message that the prime minister must resign is one hundred percent the answer. By KEITH RIDLER , Associated Press BOISE, Idaho (AP) Hundreds of citizen scientists have begun buzzing through locations across the Pacific Northwest seeking a better understanding about nearly 30 bumblebee species. Bumblebees, experts say, are important pollinators for both wild and agricultural plants, but some species have disappeared from places where they were once common, possibly because of the same factors that have been killing honeybees. "It's really important for us as humans to study these species systems for animals that are the little guys that make the world go around," said Ann Potter of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, one of the entities in three states Oregon and Idaho are the others participating in the three-year Pacific Northwest Bumble Bee Atlas project. Researchers hope to accumulate enough information to recommend ways to conserve bumblebees and their habitat. "There's more and more interest in restoring habitat for pollinators," said Rich Hatfield of the conservation group, the Xerces Society. Citizen scientists are being dispatched to selected 2.5-acre (1-hectare) sites with insect nets, plant and bee guides, and an app for smartphones so findings can be recorded, photographed, mapped and sent to a central database. Researchers say just more than 200 have signed on to visit 400 sites through the end of August. More volunteers are needed, Hatfield said, especially to work in more remote areas. Bees are captured and put in a chilled cooler so they go into a state of lethargy. Diagnostic photos are taken, and the bees are released unharmed when they warm up. Bumblebees, unlike honeybees, don't overwinter in a hive. Bumblebees build nests, typically in holes in the ground, and generally only number a few hundred individuals by the time fall arrives. Any honey they produce they consume. With the arrival of winter, all bumblebees die except a few fertilized queen bees that in the spring head out alone to start a new nest and produce worker bees, beginning the cycle over. "Here's a species that spends a big part of its life as a vulnerable queen," said Andony Melathopoulos of Oregon State University. Bumblebees have "this really fascinating solitary phase." Honeybees are imports from Europe brought in as agricultural workers to pollinate crops. Native bumblebees also help pollinate crops. But when it comes to native North American plants and some crops, the more robust bumblebee with its ability to "buzz" pollinate by grabbing onto an entire flower and shaking the pollen loose is for some plant species the only insect up to the task. The Western bumblebee, once considered common and widespread, has disappeared from much of its former range. Clues as to why Western bumblebee populations have plummeted are being sought in the current study. "We really don't know a lot about them," said Ross Winton of Idaho Fish and Game. "The more we learn, the more concerned we get." The Pacific Northwest Bumble Bee Atlas could ultimately be an example for other states interested in learning more about how bumblebees are doing. "It is a model for other states," Melathopoulos said. "I think everyone is looking at the Pacific Northwest and this initiative as a test case." The study is being paid for by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Idaho and Washington, and in Oregon by another government entity called the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research. Collaborators include the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Idaho Fish and Game, Oregon State University, The Oregon Bee Project, the Oregon Department of Agriculture and the Xerces Society, an environmental group that works to conserve invertebrates. MEDFORD, Ore. Today Grants Pass City Council approved a 15-year tax abatement for Dutch Bros. The abatement is a part of the Rogue Enterprise Zone which freezes their current property taxes for the 15-year period. Dutch Bros. will still be required to pay the property tax on the existing structure on Town Center Plaza and the land they own but will not have to pay anything additional for the new structures they build during the abatement period. The City Council discussed the abatement for nearly three hours. Their main concerns surrounded the parking spaces that would be lost during the construction period and how the lack of space could affect surrounding businesses. Those businesses operate on a thin margin, said council member Tyler Flaming, Its possible that a project like this could reduce the amount of customers for some of these businesses downtown to the point of where they may have to close. Dutch Bros. said that it is too early in their planning to have a parking solution but that they would be willing and open to working out a parking solution farther down the road. Were in the initial planning phases, said Dutch Bros. attorney, we havent spent a lot of money on architects and we havent spent a lot of money trying to really get a sense of what this will look like. The application deadline for the abatement is June 30 so council members had to make a decision today. In a vote of 5 to 1, the abatement passed with the condition that Dutch Bros. work with the city of Grants Pass and Josephine County to mitigate the parking problems downtown, which could include monetary contributions from Dutch Bros. By NOMAAN MERCHANT , Associated Press MCALLEN, Texas (AP) Politicians and advocates flocked to the Mexican border to visit U.S. immigration detention centers and turn up the pressure on the Trump administration amid a growing uproar Monday over its policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. A group of congressional lawmakers on Sunday visited an old warehouse in South Texas where hundreds of children are being held in cages created by metal fencing. One cage held 20 youngsters. "Those kids inside who have been separated from their parents are already being traumatized," said Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon. "It doesn't matter whether the floor is swept and the bedsheets tucked in tight." Nearly 2,000 children were taken from their parents over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a "zero tolerance" policy when it comes to prosecuting those arrested for illegally entering the country. Church groups and human rights advocates have sharply criticized the policy, calling it inhumane. The policy has divided Republicans, with former first lady Laura Bush saying in a guest column in Sunday's Washington Post that the practice of separating immigrant parents and children along the nation's southern border is "cruel" and "immoral" and "breaks my heart." Bush likened the policy to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker cited the administration's "cruel and inhuman" policy separating children from their parents in reversing a decision to send a National Guard helicopter from his state to the Mexican border. Migrant advocates announced they would rally outside the federal courthouse in Phoenix on Monday afternoon to protest the policy. President Donald Trump emphatically defended his administration's policy Monday, again falsely blaming Democrats. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," he declared. "Not on my watch." In San Diego, Rep. Juan Vargas and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus were leading members of Congress on a visit Monday to several immigration detention facilities. Vargas, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and other U.S. lawmakers hoped to meet with men, women and children detained at the international boundary. Inside the South Texas warehouse, hundreds of immigration children waited inside chain-link enclosures. Scattered about were bottles of water, bags of chips and blankets that looked like large sheets of metal foil. It was the same facility the U.S. Border Patrol allowed reporters to briefly visit on Sunday. Agents did not allow reporters to interview detainees or take photos. More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility, which is divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. The cages in each wing open out into common areas so that detainees can use portable restrooms. The overhead lighting in the warehouse stays on around the clock. At the federal courthouse in McAllen on Monday, some among the estimated 80 immigrants preparing to plead guilty on immigration charges asked the judge questions such as, "What's going to happen to my daughter?" and "What will happen to my son?" Attorneys at the hearings said the immigrants had brought several dozen boys and girls with them to the U.S., and the judge replied that he didn't know what would happen to their children. Typically, parents are sent to court, while children go to government facilities as the Trump administration carries out the new "zero tolerance" policy. There have been stories of children being torn from their parents' arms and parents not being able to locate their sons and daughters. In Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for people trying to enter the U.S., Border Patrol officials argue that they have to crack down on migrants and separate adults from children as a deterrent to others trying to get into the U.S. illegally. "When you exempt a group of people from the law ... that creates a draw," said Manuel Padilla, the Border Patrol's chief agent here. ___ Associated Press writers Anita Snow in Phoenix, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Mike Melia in Boston contributed to this report. ASHLAND, Ore. -- The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is helping the community celebrate Juneteenth. That's the celebration of slavery ending in the United States. OSF is shaking it up this year. It usually celebrates Juneteenth with a variety show full of dance, music and art. This year, it went a step further. It's the first year the company is dedicating an entire day to celebrating the day all slaves knew they were free. "It just helps to enrich the day more than just a one off. It helps conversation to continue throughout the day and hopefully on to tomorrow," said OSF actor and Juneteenth Curator/Director Christiana Clark. The day started with a round-table discussion about standing up to racial injustices. Leading this discussion, Black Joy and Pain having allies in the world just increases the amount of freedom that I'm able to have walking around in America and walking around specifically in this town. This discussion is really important to me," added the discussions leader and OSFs Associate Director of Leadership Engagement Kamilah Long. It continued with a reading of a play called PLANATION!---a comedy about reparations. There's conversations that are being had but also its showing that actions need to be taken. We can talk about things all day but we know the issue. We know that we need to start talking about ways that we can really do something," said playwright Kevin Douglas. All the events center around this year's theme, Activate: A Roll Call and Response. It asks everyone to think and talk about how the community and the rest of the country can improve on race issues. "It also reminds me that the reality of what that freedom looks like is something that we collectively need to be working towards because I would say we have come a long way since the days of enslavement but there is still much more to go before there is true freedom and equality her," Clark added. Juneteenth organizers hope these discussions on race will continue beyond this celebration. FILE - In this May 3, 2017 file photo, Steve Levitan arrives at the "Modern Family" FYC Event in Los Angeles. Levitan raised the possibility of no longer working with the 20th Century Fox television studio after tweeting his disgust following comments by Laura Ingraham on Fox News Channel, and her description of "zero tolerance" detention facilities for children separated from their parents as "essentially summer camps." (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File) Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. Peter Khill, charged with second-degree murder, leaves court in Hamilton on June 12, 2018. A Hamilton-area homeowner accused of gunning down a suspected car thief in the dark plans to testify in his own defence. In his opening statement, the lawyer for Peter Khill said the accused wants to tell jurors his story. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Colin Perkel The concrete wall lies down after a 9-year-old girl was killed when it fell down in an earthquake, in Takatsuki, Osaka, western Japan, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Japan's government has ordered an inspection of schools walls across the country after two of the four deaths in Monday's earthquake in Osaka were caused by falling concrete walls. (Shohei Miyano/Kyodo News via AP) FILE- In this Tuesday, May 2, 2017, file photo, Verizon corporate signage is captured on a store in Manhattan's Midtown area, in New York. Verizon is pledging to stop selling data to outsiders through middlemen that can pinpoint the location of mobile phones, the Associated Press has learned. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File) Swoop Airline employees pose for photos next to a Boeing 737 during a media event ahead of their first day of service, Tuesday, June 19, 2018 at John C. Munro International Airport in Hamilton, Ont. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Tara Walton Birthday wishes Call 281-422-8302 or email david.bloom@baytownsun.com to wish someone a happy birthday. We will print your birthday wish on Page 2 of The Sun. Happy Birthday Wishes EUGENE, Ore. -- The Eugene Hilton, an iconic downtown hotel, has sold for close to $80 million, according to the Eugene Area Chamber of Commerce. Brittany Quick-Warner of the chamber said the sale finalized last week, and Chicago based A.J. Capital Partners plans to renovate the hotel to give it a unique look and feel. They plan to rename the 275-room hotel The Graduate Eugene as part of their Graduate hotel series. Quick-warner says A.J. Capital Partners has been buying up hotels in college towns all over the country and redesigning them based on local culture and icons. Quick-Warner said the high price tag shows the city is moving in the right direction. It's encouraging because it shows that folks really want to invest in Eugene, Quick-Warner said. They see the future that we have that we are trying to build right now. The hotel will continue to operate as a Hilton until the end of the year. Renovations are set to begin soon after and are expected to be done by summer of 2019. DOUGLAS COUNTY, Ore. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has announced a drought emergency for Douglas County. This is due to low snowpack, rain and streamflow, as well as warming temperatures. The declaration makes sure limited water supplies are used efficiently and allows state agencies to expedite water management tools. Douglas County commissioners requested Brown make the drought emergency official earlier in May. The county is the first west of the Cascades to receive a drought declaration. Drought emergencies have been declared in Baker, Klamath, Grant, Harney and Lake counties. SALEM, Ore. (AP) -- Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum is asking state residents to tell her office if they know about children being brought to Oregon after being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border. In a letter posted on social media Tuesday, Rosenblum appealed to Oregonians to speak up if they had relatives who had been separated, or if they knew of immigrant children being brought to the state after such a separation. Over 100 asylum-seekers are thought to be held at a federal prison facility in Sheridan, Oregon. The request came amid widespread uproar over the U.S. Department of Justice's new "zero tolerance" immigration policy. Figures obtained by The Associated Press last week showed nearly 2,000 children had been separated from their families since the crackdown began in early May. Washington Attorney General Rob Ferguson made a similar request Tuesday. EUGENE, Ore. -- Plans to make Eugene a certified "Bee City USA" are moving forward. Area pollinator groups including Beyond Toxics have been working on the resolution with Eugene Parks and Open Spaces and Eugene's legal team. The Bee City USA program endorses a set of commitments for creating sustainable habitats for pollinators. The ten pesticide-free parks in Eugene are: Awbrey Park Berkeley Park Brewer Park Friendly Park Gilbert Park Milton Park Rosetta Park Scobert Gardens Park Shadow Wood Park Washington Park One commitment is pesticide-free maintenance as well as pesticide-free design. Currently, the City of Eugene has 10 pesticide-free neighborhood parks located throughout the city's park system. According to statistics from Bee City USA, one in three bites of food we eat is courtesy of insect pollination and 90% of the world's wild plants depend on pollinators to reproduce. KEZI 9 News has learned the Bee City USA resolution has been written and approved by the city's legal team. The next step is for Councilman Mike Clark, the sponsor of the resolution, to introduce it during a city council meeting for an official vote. To date, 70 cites are Bee City USA certified and that includes five cities in Oregon -- Ashland, Gold Hill, Phoenix, Talent and Wilsonville. SPRINGFIELD, Ore. - Two students who just graduated from the Springfield School District got some extra help before they start college in fall. Employers throughout Western Oregon are losing qualified employees to retirement and struggling to find skilled replacements. That's why KEZI 9 News is partnering with industry leaders in the "Skilled to Work" campaign. Students Dustin Molder and Cyrus Ullman thought they were just going out for breakfast with their teacher. When they got to the Springfield High School Auto Shop they found gifts waiting for them to help jump-start their careers, new toolboxes, and tools. "It's been a long road," said Molder. "I've always loved working on cars because of my dad." Molder said he hopes to one day open his own auto repair shop. Ullman said he one day hopes to work on machines for Knife River, a construction company. "I really appreciate everything they have done for me," said Ullman. "I hope in the future I can make them happy by showing them I'm successful." EUGENE, Ore. -- Suicide is a big issue across the country and in Oregon, and one woman has been working to change that. Last week, Sara Scofield, a field ambassador with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, was in Washington, D.C., advocating for more suicide prevention programs and resources. Along with other AFSP representatives across the country, she urged lawmakers to vote for $150 million in funding for many suicide prevention resources across the country that already exist. She said the funding would help improve programs and help them reach more people. She said many Oregon legislators are already on board and are working toward addressing many mental health issues. The funding can also help save lives in Oregon, where according to the AFSP, someone dies from suicide in Oregon every 11 hours. Its a statistic that hit close to home for her. Scofields father took his life when she was nine years old. Her brother died from suicide in 2011. She said she has struggled with bipolar disorder and even attempted suicide herself. After suffering for years, Scofield said she first realized there was hope when she went to the annual Out of the Darkness Walk, hosted by the AFSP. She said it was then that she no longer felt alone. Now, she is speaking up to help break the stigma and to create change. "My mission is to be the voice for people who don't have a voice, Scofield said. Those who are struggling and those who are in grief and are afraid to come out of the darkness and speak about it. I'm here to try, and by example say, it's okay, you can do it." She said she also wants community members to know there are resources available to help them. If you or someone you know needs help, you can call the suicide prevention lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. You can reach out to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Oregon Chapter or the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Lane County. You can also reach out to CAHOOTS, which is a mobile crisis intervention team thats part of the White Bird Clinic. CorroMetrics Services, Inc. headquartered in downtown Mobile, Alabama announces as a new IMPACT PLUS Program/Navigator. IMPACT PLUS is an innovative new corrosion management tool developed by the NACE International Institute. It is designed to advance corrosion management performance across all industry sectors. The platform simplifies a business management process and enables industries to upgrade the processes to extend the lifespan of valuable assets and infrastructure. "Regardless if you purchase a Rolls-Royce or Ford, it should be built and maintained properly so that it does not rust and require early replacement," according to Harrietta Eaton, Vice President of CorroMetrics. That expectation can be applied to large industries such as oil companies, huge public infrastructure projects for roads and bridges, and other smaller companies as well. They do not want their facilities to have corrosion or rust problems that cost them millions of dollars to correct. That is where IMPACT PLUS and certified Navigators create "Impact." The 2016 IMPACT Study revealed that the worldwide cost of corrosion is estimated to be $2.5 trillion dollars. The estimated savings to address and prevent such corrosion is between 15% and 35% with proper corrosion control technologies and practices in place. CorroMetrics is one of only 3 companies in the world that has become a licensee to provide the IMPACT PLUS customized corrosion management process and program to various industries. It is a valuable tool to extend the service life span of assets. Eaton described it best as a method to build that sustainable bridge or purchase a car that when properly maintained will provide the expected service life or beyond. "Corrosion can be controlled," said Eaton. Terry Greenfield, Principal Consultant at CorroMetrics Services, Inc. has been certified as an Impact Plus(r) Navigator by the NACE International Institute to be one of the few people worldwide that can visit a company and help develop a successful corrosion management system using IMPACT PLUS as the tool. This will enable companies to extend the service life of their facilities and properly maintain them in the area of corrosion control. Greenfield has an extensive background in this area and has worked in the corrosion industry for over 35 years. He was recently named the Vice President of NACE International during Corrosion 2018 held in Phoenix, Arizona. NACE International is the world's largest corrosion industry organization with over 35,000 members worldwide. Greenfield will transition into the role of President following Corrosion 2019 that will be held in Nashville, Tennessee. CorroMetrics' expertise in the corrosion field is recognized by its ability to become only 1 of 3 companies in the world licensed to provide the IMPACT PLUS(r) program. Established in 2006, CorroMetrics is known globally for providing client focused solutions to corrosion issues. While headquartered in Mobile, AL, the company has other offices in Hong Kong, Beijing, Houston and the Middle East. For information about the IMPACT PLUS program, please visit www.nace-impact.org. If you have questions or require additional information, contact Harrietta Eaton at 251-445-1560 or via email at harrietta.eaton@corrometrics.com. Ernie Fischer is from North Dakota, but he has family living in Cheyenne. He said there are two economies in Cheyenne, and many people here are suffering. Fischer hosts the nations largest bison auction at his North Dakota ranch every year. He wanted to help the less fortunate in Cheyenne, especially kids, so he turned to his time-tested approach. An auction. In November, Fischer will put a young female bison on the auction block, and all the proceeds will go to local charities. But this isnt just any bison. Her name is Doughnut. Fischer and his family have bottle-fed her since she was delivered by C-section, and she doesnt seem to know shes not a dog. She takes rides in my ATV with me, and sleeps on my front porch. Fischer said, Shes something special. Fischer said he hopes to attract buyers to the auction who will pay for Doughnut to live out her life in peace. With so much human contact in her early days, Fischer said Doughnut isnt fit for the wild, ranch-life anymore. But beyond providing Doughnut a good home, Fischer said the real intent of the auction is to help Cheyenne by bringing together potential buyers (donors) and charities. Fischer is asking the business community in Cheyenne to match the proceeds from the auction dollar-for-dollar. Fischer said, "When you feel strong enough about [helping the less fortunate], youre going to do something about it. You got to give back sometime. You cant just take, take, take. So, this is just our way of giving back." The auction for Doughnut will take place in November. Fischer chose Terry Bison Ranch in Cheyenne to house Doughnut until that time, so she can acclimate to the higher elevation. Stay tuned to KGWN NewsChannel 5 for more on Doughnut as the auction approaches. OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- A federal court judge on Tuesday dismissed Mississippi Rising's lawsuit against the City of Ocean Springs over the display of the Mississippi state flag. U.S. District Court Judge Louis Guirola Jr. granted the City's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, noting in his ruling that the plaintiffs -- which included Mississippi Rising Coalition, its president Lea Campbell, Jackson County NAACP president Curley Clark and Ocean Springs residents Ronald Vincent and Pamela Blackwell, lacked the standing to file suit under the provisions of the federal Fair Housing Act. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs alleged the City -- in adopting a resolution requiring the state flag be flown at all City properties -- violated provisions of the FHA and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Guirola, however, noted that while the plaintiffs claimed to have been "harmed" by the City's decision, they failed to produce any evidence of such harm as it relates to the FHA or the Equal Protection Clause. Guirola also cited a previous Mississippi state flag case, brought by attorney Carlos Moore, in which the court ruled that "exposure to a discriminatory message, without a corresponding denial of equal treatment, is insufficient to plead injury in an equal protection case." "...none of the plaintiffs here have alleged or articulated any facts tantamount to denial of equal treatment... they allege only harm related to exposure to the Mississippi flag. Thus, they have failed to allege an injury in fact sufficient to confer standing." Guirola, in addressing the plaintiffs' claims of the City violating the FHA, again wrote in his ruling that they had failed to provide evidence of discriminatory housing practices. Because the plaintiffs failed to provide actual evidence to support their claims of a violation of the FHA or Equal Protection Clause, Guirola ruled that the case is not a federal one and thus not within the jurisdiction of U.S. District Court. Reactions on both sides were as expected. Neither Ocean Springs Mayor Shea Dobson or Campbell were aware of the decision until contacted by The Mississippi Press. "Expected, but still good news," said Dobson when told of the court's decision. "It's good that common sense prevailed. "There's been a lot of individuals who have attacked the City and a lot of people who have been cheerleaders for those efforts. It's a shame that what is in reality a political attack brought taxpayers into it by putting them on the hook for the legal fees. I'm glad the judge had the common sense to see through this political stunt." Campbell acknowledged she knew the lawsuit could be an uphill battle, but was nevertheless disappointed. "It's disappointing. We had hoped we would be able to argue the case in court," she said. "We knew when we filed it it may not succeed. So, obviously I'm disappointed, but we will move forward from here." ROCHESTER, Minn. Charges are possible after a 19-year-old female and her mother were allegedly assaulted Sunday afternoon. Authorities say the incident happened in the 3700 block of 8th St. NW when a group of girls showed up at the residence and the mother refused to let them in. The mother was assaulted, authorities said, before the group began assaulting the teenager. A phone was broken during the incident and the victim was allegedly assaulted the night before by the same group of girls at a party. That incident was not reported to police. The victim is dating a man who has a child with one of the girls who showed up to the residence. MITCHELL COUNTY, Iowa- The Mitchell County Board of Supervisors got heated Tuesday with around a dozen residents expressing outrage over what they say are non-answered questions. The meeting started out with questions about the Port Authority, which is a commission including Cerro Gordo County, Mitchell County and Worth County. Many expressed an interest in increasing the number of supervisors to five as a way to have more representation. They also discussed an email which was sent out by Supervisor Stan Walk to former House Rep. Josh Brynes, where Walk stated that Brynes was meddling in the Port Authoritys projects and then threatened him. Those in the community say they want more transparency out of their elected officials. It sounds pretty suspicious to me, said Russ Brandau, of Osage. When Stan was asked more about the project he didnt give any answers that we wanted to hear. I feel like they are divulging information. There is much more to this story that we are working on. KIMT News 3s Brian Tabick will have more as it develops. SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas A woman who met Lois Riess while she was on the run in Texas thought she made a new friend and even allowed the alleged killer to stay overnight in her guest room. That information comes from new documents from the Florida state attorney's office, which detail Riess movements before her arrest in Texas after allegedly killing Pamela Hutchinson in Fort Myers, Florida, after fleeing Minnesota after her husband, David, was killed in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. Riess has been charged with first-degree murder in Florida. Charges are pending against Riess for murder in Dodge County, Minnesota. According to the case report, a woman named Bernadette was eating alone at a restaurant in South Padre when she and Riess - who went by the name Donna - struck up a conversation on April 14. Related links: Video of Lois Riess arrest Authorities react to arrest of Lois Riess Riess captured after nationwide manhunt ends Authorities: Details on alleged murders, hours before and after Bernadette dropped Riess off at a Motel 6 that night before arranging dinner plans for the following day. While meeting for dinner, Bernadette was informed by the bartender that she seemed out of it after one or two drinks. Bernadette said she does not remember why she allowed the suspect to come back to her residence with her, but the two of them ended up there and spent time in the community hot tub. Afterwards, Bernadette retired to her room and the suspect stayed in the guest bedroom, the document states. The two had breakfast together the next morning before Bernadette dropped Riess off at Motel 6. The two were set to have dinner together on April 20, but while at the restaurant Bernadette was informed by the bartender that the suspect had been arrested. The suspect appeared completely normal, calm and friendly, Bernadette told investigators. Other notes of interest - Lois Riess allegedly used the name Stormy Liberty, which was linked to a cell phone account. - The body of Pamela Hutchinson was found on April 9 at 9:01 p.m. after an employee of Marina Villige at Snug Harbor in Fort Myers, Florida, responded for an unknown plumbing issue. - A search warrant at a Motel 6 in South Padre Island, Texas, resulted in the finding of two handguns a 9 mm and a .22 caliber - along with clothing which Riess was seen wearing in surveillance videos. Located next to the firearms was a black bag that included bullets, a holster, duct tape, rubber gloves, a checkbook belonging to Hutchinson along with four credit cards and a trophy. - Before Riess was read her Miranda warning, she requested an attorney and no statement was given. - From the time Riess checked into the Motel 6 to seeing her the next time, a motel employee stated she appeared to be a completely different woman. She was said to be dressed more provocatively. ROCHESTER, Minn. Poison may be to blame for the falcon chicks who died in their nest on top of the Mayo Building. Four chicks died on May 11 and their remains were sent to a wildlife diagnostic lab in Wisconsin. Mayo Clinic says lab results indicate poison could have been the cause of death, but test results on whether a viral infection is responsible are still pending. Mayo says it does not use poisons for pest control on its Rochester campus and the source of any potential toxin is unknown at this time. "Although the loss is hard to watch, death occurs frequently in nature," says Jacquelyn Fallon, Midwest Peregrine Society. "With toxicity as a suspected cause of death, it is a reminder how poisons are an indiscriminate killer and, if used, the wide range of effect they can have on species in the area." The parent falcons, named Orton and Hattie, have been seen flying in the area since the death of their chicks. ROCHESTER, Minn.-ROCHESTER, Minn.- Che Lopez is the lead organizer for C.U.R.E. or Communities United for Rochester Empowerment. He tells KIMT hes headed to Texas today to fully understand what is going on with immigrants and their families. In Texas, Lopez said he hopes to join in protests to demonstrate how inhumane President Trumps Zero Tolerance border policy is. This is cruel, separating families and putting them in concentration camps, said Lopez. So far Republicans like Texas Senator Ted Cruz are giving their statements on the Policy. All Americans are rightly horrified by the images we are seeing on the news, children in tears pulled away from their mothers and fathers. This must stop. Now, The Senator released in a statement. He is introducing emergency legislation that will keep families together. ROCHESTER, Minn. A woman arrested in Waterloo, Iowa, with what authorities called a vulnerable 17-year-old is pleading not guilty. Jill Susan Charnesky, 62 of Rochester, is charged with a custody violation for taking a minor in violation of a court order. Law enforcement says Charneskys rights to the 17-year-old were terminated in April 2017. She is accused of taking the minor, who was getting dropped off by a transportation service, on April 13, 2018 and leaving the area. Investigators say they tracked Charnesky to Waterloo and arrested her on April 18. According to court documents, the 17-year-old told authorities the plan was to leave Minnesota for either Illinois or Texas. Charnesky is now set to stand trial on November 13. GARNER, Iowa Three people have been arrested during drug investigations in Hancock County. Carol Ann Hugo, 50 of Woden, has been charged with a controlled substance violation, five counts of possession of pseudoephedrine, and failure to use a drug tax stamp. Law enforcement describes Hugo as playing a large role in creating and distributing meth in Hancock County. She is described as one of several individuals who purchased pseudoephedrine pills in order to make the drug, as well as being the one who recruited others into buying such pills. Clark Erdahl Clark Erdahl Bradley Rotert Bradley Rotert Authorities say a search of Hugos home on January 31, 2017, discovered multiple pieces of lab equipment. Criminal complaints were filed against Hugo on June 6 and she was arrested in Ventura on June 9. Law enforcement says it also learned that a Crystal Lake apartment used by Clark Michael Erdahl, 31 of Lake Mills, and Bradley Keith Rotert, 24 of Mason City, was used as a place to distribute meth and marijuana and where people would meet to use drugs. Authorities say a search of the apartment on October 21, 2017, found meth, marijuana, and drug paraphernalia. Erdahl has been charged with gathering where controlled substances are used and two counts of possession of a controlled substance-third or subsequent offense. Rotert is charged with gathering where controlled substances are used, possession of methamphetamine, and possession of marijuana. Authorities say Erdahl has four previous drug convictions. Criminal complaints against both men were filed on June 12 and there were arrested in Crystal Lake on Tuesday. Javier Reyes, Core Gold Shareholder, speaks on the company's unique operations and exploration upside. Core Gold (CVE: CGLD) is a gold mining company based in Canada with all operations in southern Ecuador. The company counts with three world-class assets including the Dynasty District copper-gold belt, the Zaruma Mine & Mill, and the Jerusalem project on trend with Fruta del Norte. The company was reorganized under a new board and management in September 2016 and is currently the largest gold producer in Ecuador. Natasha Frakes: Hi, I'm Natasha Frakes, and you're watching Market One Minute. Joining us is Javier Reyes from Core Gold. Now you and your bank are the biggest investors in Core Gold, so can you tell us about what you think of the progress that's been made? Javier Reyes: We're very happy with the progress that the management has accomplished. They've been able to bring the mine back into production after just four months. So, now we're very pleased with the progress, and we're going to be focused on optimizing the production at Dynasty Goldfield. Natasha Frakes: Tell us more about Dynasty Goldfield and what's so special about it. Javier Reyes: What is wonderful about Dynasty Goldfield is not just that it's the only and first open pit mining operation in Ecuador, but it's pretty high-grade and low cost. So, I think that's what is amazing about, and it has a lot of exploration upside. Natasha Frakes: Ecuador has had a bit of a spotty reputation with mining investors, so what's been your experience there? Javier Reyes: Since we bought back in September 2016, our experience has been a pretty good one. It's been a very pro-mining country and very pro-business, and actually considering our experience in Mexico, it's easier to do mining in Ecuador than in Mexico. And I think that's what makes a mining operation sustainable into the future. Natasha Frakes: So, what are you looking forward to over the next year with Core Gold? Javier Reyes: So, we'll be focused on optimizing the production, increasing the plant capacity, and testing our new targets for Dynasty Goldfield sits. So far, we have two million ounces, and we expect to increase Dynasty Goldfield as well as test the new targets, which is Copper Duke and Linderos. Natasha Frakes: Sounds like there's a lot of exciting things to look forward to. Thank you so much for being here, Javier. Javier Reyes: Thank you, Natasha. BERLIN (Reuters) - Greece will likely get up to 15 billion euros ($17.33 billion) from its euro zone allies for stabilization after its third bailout program ends in August, a senior German government official said on Tuesday. Euro zone finance ministers will discuss debt relief for Greece on Thursday to ensure the country can return to market financing after eight years of loans from euro zone governments and to enable sustained economic growth. The euro zone is also considering leaving Greece with enough cash so that it does not have to borrow from the market for the next 18 to 24 months. How long such a cash send-off would last in practice will depend on debt relief steps, such as the potential replacement of more expensive loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) with cheaper euro zone credit. The German government official said the additional cash for Greece would be taken from unused funds made available in its third bailout. The official said all parties in Chancellor Angela Merkels governing coalition had agreed that a financial contribution of 1.6 billion euros from the IMF was no longer being viewed as compulsory. The additional measures for Greece must be approved by the budget committee of Germanys Bundestag, the official said, adding a vote by all lawmakers of the lower house of parliament could not be ruled out. Such a vote could turn out to be risky for Merkel who faced a record rebellion among her conservatives in 2015 when the Bundestag approved the third bailout for Greece but 63 lawmakers from her CDU/CSU bloc rejected the deal. The German official did not comment on the issue of debt relief measures for Greece. The euro zone is considering extending the maturities and grace periods, though only on loans granted to Greece under the second bailout, by up to 15 years. The average loan maturity now is 32.5 years. This would mean the re-profiling of 130 billion euros, or about 40 percent of Greeces debt, and would smooth out some debt servicing peaks after 2030, giving Athens a better chance to issue bonds of 10 years and more in the coming years. BEIJING/SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, where he will likely brief Chinese President Xi Jinping on his summit with U.S. President Donald Trump last week, as Washington and Seoul agreed to suspend a major joint military exercise. This is Kims third trip to China this year, coming a week after he met Trump in Singapore for historic talks. Trump agreed to work with Kim toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, committed to provide the North with security guarantees and pledged to end war games with South Korea, which North Korea and China have long seen as provocative. South Korea and the Pentagon announced they would halt the annual Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August. In an unusual move, Chinese state media announced Kims visit and said he would stay for two days. Previously China would only confirm Kim had visited after he had left the country. We hope this visit can help to further deepen China-North Korea relations, strengthen strategic communication between both countries on important issues and promote regional peace and stability, Chinas foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a regular briefing. He did not elaborate. A Kim trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China is North Koreas most important diplomatic and economic backer but has been angered by its nuclear and missile tests. Police tightened security along Beijings main Changan Avenue, which leads to the Great Hall of the People where Chinese leaders usually meet visiting heads of state, and also outside the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where Kim stayed with his wife during a visit in March. Outside the east gate of the Great Hall, where foreign leaders are officially welcomed, authorities had erected a screen running the full length of the road, cutting off the view. South Koreas foreign ministry spokesman said South Korea and China shared the strategic goal of completely denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. Our government hopes China will play a constructive role in resolving this problem, ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-deok told a regular briefing. We hope Chairman Kim Jong Uns visit will contribute to that. DUAL SUSPENSION China has welcomed the warming of ties between the United States and North Korea, and offered to help. China has been particularly pleased by Trumps decision to suspend military drills with South Korea. China has long proposed a dual suspension, whereby North Korea stops weapons tests and the United States and South Korea stop military drills, to encourage talks. South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August, South Koreas defense ministry said in a statement. The Pentagon confirmed the suspension, adding in a statement there would be a meeting of the secretaries of defense and state as well as Trumps national security adviser on the issue this week. Chinese spokesman Geng welcomed the announcement as a positive, constructive move. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops joined the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than field exercises. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. The decision to halt military exercises in South Korea has bewildered many current and former U.S. defense officials, who only learned about it when Trump announced it in Singapore, after the summit with Kim. Japans Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said there would be no changes to joint drill plans between the United States and Japan, both of which regularly practise to deter North Korea. The United States is in a position to keep its commitment to its allied nations defense and our understanding is there is no change to the U.S. commitment to the Japan-U.S. alliance and the structure of American troops stationed in Japan, Suga told a regular briefing. Japanese Minister of Defense Itsunori Onodera said the decision to suspend the U.S.-South Korean exercises was made from the view point of supporting diplomatic efforts between the U.S. and North Korea, but added it was important to be wary of North Korea actions. Our view of the threat has not changed. Joint training is an important in maintaining peace and stability in the region, he said. COST OF DRILLS? The Pentagon has yet to publicly release the cost of previous and future joint military exercises with South Korea, a week after Trump cited their tremendously expensive cost as a reason for halting them. Spending data for previous military exercises in Korea and elsewhere, however, suggest that the cost of a single exercise would be in the low or perhaps tens of millions of dollars in a U.S. military budget this year of nearly $700 billion. In response to repeated requests for cost data, Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Logan, said: We are currently evaluating the costs of the exercises. Calculating the cost of military exercises is a complicated process, often requiring data from different branches of the military and spread over several budgets over different years. Troops who would have been involved in the exercises would still require training and certification, which would cost money, said Abraham Denmark, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia under President Barack Obama. To me, the idea of this as a cost saving measure doesnt really make much sense, Denmark said. (This version of the story adds full name of Japan defense minister in paragraph 24) MOSS POINT, Miss. -- After pictures of a malnourished looking dog in Moss Point was shared more than 400 times on Facebook, the owners surrendered the dog to the Jackson County Animal Shelter. Facebook user Kay Davis Brazzell posted a status in the Lost Pets Ocean Springs, Pascagoula, Gulfport group where she had pictures of a poorly taken care of dog behind a fence in Moss Point. According to her account, her daughter and a friend found the dog, but did not approach the owners and to inquire about the condition of the animal. Brazzell's post garnered the attention of many as most of the people on the post had said they called the Moss Point Police Department and many made calls to the mayor's office. After the numerous calls, the owners turned the dog, named Annie in to the Jackson County Animal Shelter in Gautier. Annie, the dog from Moss Point has been surrendered to Jackson County Animal Shelter in Gautier, MS. The owners were very cooperative and asked for our help. Thank you for your concern. Posted by Jackson County Animal Shelter Gautier, MS on Tuesday, June 19, 2018 The condition of Annie, according to the animal shelter is improving, however she is being treated for worms. The Mississippi Press reached out to Chief Brandon Ashley to see if the owner would be investigated, but our calls were not returned. Washington States are flouting the Every Student Succeeds Acts protections for vulnerable groups of children, and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos letting them get away with it, leading civil groups said at an event here Tuesday. We have a landscape of plans that do not meet standards [for subgroups of students] and we still have to work towards equity, said Marc Morial, the president and CEO of the National Urban League. What I would like the department of education to do is to do what a teacher does [when they] get a paper from a student that doesnt meet the standard. They send the paper back to the student for a do-over. ... [The plans] ought to be sent back to the states with red ink because its time for a do-over. So far DeVos, has approved nearly every states plan. Just four are outstanding; California, Florida, Oklahoma, and Utah. Speakers at the event, which was sponsored by the Urban League, the Education Trust, and UnidosUS, did not get into specifics on which parts of the law states and DeVos are flouting. But civil rights groups and ESSAs Democratic authors have raised big questions about how states are factoring the performance of subgroups of students into their school rating systems.And these critics say states are ignoring requirements in the law to identify and intervene in any school where any subgroup of students is consistently underperforming. DeVos, though, says her actions have been consistent with ESSA. We unpacked the legal arguments on both sides of the debate here . When ESSA passed in 2015, it got big bipartisan support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and the Obama administration. Most civil rights groups supported the law, which got a milquetoast endorsemen t from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella organization. Advocates saw the need to compromise but were nervous about handing so much power back to the states. They assumed the U.S. Department of Education would do its best to look out for vulnerable groups. That hasnt happened under DeVos, said John B. King Jr., who served as secretary of education under President Barack Obama, and is now the president of the Education Trust. What we see in ESSA is a responsibility for states to protect students. It is a civil rights law with the obligation for states to protect students educational interests and their safety and well-being. And the question for states is, Will their implementation of ESSA make it better? King said. Because the reality today is that kids who need the most, low-income students and students of color, English-language learners, get less. Less access to quality pre-K, less access to quality teachers, less access to advanced coursework, less access to a well-rounded education, less access to counselors. To me the measure of the laws implementation will be, Do states take action [to fix that]? And I think youve heard so far this morning is [that] the landscape is not promising. What we see from states is a failure to lead, a failure to put students civil rights first. Advocates have also raised concerns about a lack of detail in state plans when it comes to strategies for improving low-performing schools, ensuring low-income and minority students have access to effective educators, and making sure that low-income students have access to the same resources as their wealthy peers. To be sure, the federal Education Department didnt ask for those specifics. But Bob Wise, the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, said he wishes states had taken the opportunity of ESSA to better spell out how they would meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population. He urged states to go beyond the bounds of their plans in implementation, especially when it comes to fixing low-performing schools and those where subgroups of students are struggling. I challenged a number of state leaders back when the plans were being written, I said youve got a choice between vague and valor. And I remember one person whom I respect, a state board president actually, looking off into the air and saying I think Im going to opt for vague. Because if I go vague, I cant be held accountable and they cant sue me, Wise said. You can go from vague to valor in your implementation. ... OK, I got it, you put down vague, but when it comes to the implementation of that school plan you can be valorous. The three groups unveiled a list of principles they want states to adopt to guide their implementation of the law, including ensuring that vulnerable populations are given the resources they need to get ready for college and the workforce; making sure schools that serve low-income students get their fair share of funding; attracting a diverse teaching force; and involving families and communities in school improvement. So are civil rights groups sorry now that they supported ESSA in the first place? No, Wise said, noting that a Republican Congress and the Trump administration would have been in the drivers seat on the rewrite. If we had waited, Id have real buyers remorse, he said. How would you like to be negotiating an ESSA today? Image: Getty Images Want to learn more about the Every Student Succeeds Act? Heres some useful information: Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 . The school board in Richmond, Va., will change the name of a school that commemorates a Confederate general to honor the nations first black president. The district will rename J.E.B. Stuart Elementary as Barack Obama Elementary School. Members of the schools community submitted ideas for a new name for the 390-student school and Obama was the top choice. Like many of the schools named for Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, most of the students at Stuart Elementary are black. At Obama-named schools across the nation, more than 90 percent of students who attend the namesake schools are black and Latino. Fewer than 4 percent are white. The Richmond school wasnt the first to drop the name of a Confederate hero in favor of Obama. Last fall, a Jackson, Miss., magnet school named for Jefferson Davis , the president of the Confederacy, was renamed for the nations 44th president. Despite a wave of recent campaigns to remove the names of Confederate leaders from public schools, roughly 140 buildings in K-12 school districts still honor figures from that foregone era, an Education Week Research Center analysis of federal education data from the 2015-16 school year found. The analysis found that the Confederate-named schools are located in 15 states, but two-thirds are located in just five states, Texas, Virginia, Florida, Georgia, and Louisiana. That total number of Confederate-named schools has dropped in recent years, as district leaders have moved to change the names of dozens since June 2015. Thats when a white supremacist shot and killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. That mass murder, along with the death and injuries at a 2017 white supremacist rally and counter-protest in Charlottesville, Va., sparked public debate about honoring men who waged war to maintain slavery. Related Stories Schools Named for Confederate Leaders: The Renaming Debated, Explained Mississippi School Named for Confederate President to be Renamed for Obama 19 Schools Are Named for the Obamas. Most of Them Are Segregated Photo Credit: President Barack Obama speaks before signing the Every Student Succeeds Act, on Dec. 10, 2015, in Washington. --Susan Walsh/AP Sarah Sheppeard takes office as TBA president-elect NASHVILLE, TN Knoxville attorney Sarah Y. Sheppeard took office as president-elect of the Tennessee Bar Association (TBA) at the groups annual convention last week in Memphis. After serving a year as president-elect, Sheppeard will lead the association as president beginning in 2019. Sarah Y. Sheppeard, new president-elect of TBA - Image courtesy of www.lewisthomason.com I hopped into an Uber while jabbering into my phone. I was talking to some reporter or other for a wrap-up story on this springs teacher walkouts. The driver mustve been listening a bit because, when I hung up, she abruptly asked, What did you think about those teacher strikes? I said, Im sympathetic. Teachers dont make a lot of money, and thats especially true in the states where they walked out. And Id like to see them paid more. But it seems like we should pay attention to the cost of their benefits and make sure the money is well spent. So Im a little mixed. Well, Ill tell you what I think, she said. I think working stiffs deserve better, and Im all for paying teachers more. Kids can be a trial, and Im thankful for what teachers do. But thats why I think they need to do the job theyre paid to do. I cant believe all those teachers just walked away from their jobs. Ive got three kids in school. If teachers had done that here, and I had to stay home to watch my babies, it wouldve cost me money I cant afford to lose. But youve got to remember, I said, that these teachers had been asking for raises for years and werent getting them. And these werent really strikesmost of the schools were closed by the superintendents, to keep things orderly and avoid having kids show up with no teachers around. She gave me a look through the rearview mirror. Thats a whole lot of nonsense, she said. How would all those teachers like it if their baby was in a car accident and needed an ambulance, but no one came because the ambulance workers said, Were on a strike? Or if their apartment was on fire and the firemen didnt come because they were on strike? I dont think theyd like it one bit. But" I said. And they wouldnt like it any better, she said, if the hospital told them, Were canceling ambulance service today, instead of the ambulance workers just not showing up. Either way, the job isnt getting done. She went on. It sure seems to me like teachers get treated with kid gloveslike theyre fragile little angels wholl break if you say the wrong thing to them. Heres an example: I heard this thing on the radio the other day that teachers were angry that they spend money out-of-pocket on the job. They do, I said. The news was reporting that teachers spend close to $500 a year out of their pockets. Though, I conceded, thats probably an exaggeration . This is what Im saying, she said. If you heard about this on the radio, like I did, youd think teachers were the only workers who go into their own pockets to pay for things. First off, Im not sure I believe all those teachers are really spending $500 every year. I want to see some receipts. She paused and gave me a wink. Second, I dont suppose that radio reporter ever talked to construction workers, nurses, driverslots of people shell out real money for work. But nobody plays sad songs for the rest of us. I said, You obviously dont spend much time around education, or else youd know that what youre saying is pretty tone-deaf. Teachers work hard at an important job. Quibbling about whether other people buy work supplies too, or precisely how much teachers spend, seems to be disrespectful. You know, it misses the larger point. This time she just laughed and shook her head at me. Youve got to be kidding me, she said. I mean, you cant complain about spending a lot of money out-of-pocket for your job, and then get huffy if someone points out that youre spending less than you said. And you sure cant play like its such a big deal to dig into your pocket, and then say it doesnt matter if lots of other folks do the same thing. Whoa! It sounds like you really dont like teachers, I said. She chuckled. My husbands a teacher, and so is my mom. I like them just fine. But I think teachers get treated with kid gloves a lot, and theyve kind of gotten used to it. When you respect someone, you dont treat them that way. She looked up. Were here, she said. I sat still for a moment. What about? I said. Sorry, no time. I need to get rolling, she said, tapping the clock in the car. Ive got to drive six more hours tonight to help pay for my daughters tutor. But go find my husband, hes on summer vacationhes got some time on his hands. And with that, she was off. Kristen Amundson, who has led the National Association of State Boards of Education for the last five years, will step down from her position as president and CEO at the end of this year. Amundson, a former kindergarten classroom volunteer, teacher, and Virginia state legislator, has led the organization amid dramatic education policy and governance changes in the states. She has positioned NASBE as state board members go-to source for training, advocacy, and learning how other states are addressing education policy dilemnas. In 2015, NASBE worked with the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association to push for states to have more flexibility under the Every Student Succeeds Act to shape their states accountability systems. This is clearly the moment for states and state boards of education to step up and do all the things we promised we would do when we talked to people on [Capitol Hill] about the importance of passing ESSA, Amundson said in an interview with Education Week last week. But along with the flexibility that ESSA brings, legislatures in some states have questioned the role their state boards have over education policy in their states. Amundson has been one of the most vocal advocates of state boards role. They have become much more integral to the work of improving public education, Amundson said. State boards are truly the citizens voice of education. NASBEs board announced that Robert Hull, the organizations executive vice president will take over the organization in January of 2019. Dont miss another State EdWatch post. Sign up here to get news alerts in your email inbox. And make sure to follow @StateEdWatch on Twitter for the latest news from state K-12 policy and politics. FTC Chairman Kim Sang-jo By Yoon Ja-young Minority shareholders of Samsung SDS are taking action against Fair Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Kim Sang-jo as his comment pulled down prices of company shares. "Please dismiss FTC Chairman Kim Sang-jo who is transcending laws," they requested on the web bulletin board of Cheong Wa Dae. The group of small shareholders said Monday they will take any legal measure possible unless the problem is dealt with properly. "Samsung SDS shares plunged following the comment by the FTC chairman, incurring huge losses on small shareholders," they said in an announcement. The FTC chief said in a meeting with reporters last Thursday that owner families of large business groups should sell their stakes in non-core affiliates that rely on inter-subsidiary trading, citing system integration, logistics, real estate management and advertising firms as such. The comment is based on criticism that conglomerate owner families are fattening their own wallets by setting up such companies, winning orders from group subsidiaries and later using the easy profit to inherit managerial control of the whole group. The pressure from FTC chief had an immediate impact on the market, pulling down shares of the companies targeted. The former economics professor, dubbed "chaebol sniper" for his lifelong dedication to "chaebol reform," joined the Moon administration a year ago amid much attention. Samsung SDS, which is in charge of Samsung Group's SI, dropped 14 percent to 196,500 won ($178) the next day, losing 2.3 trillion won in market cap. It continued to fall by 0.51 percent on Monday. Shinsegae Group's Shinsegae I&C fell 13.7 percent, while Hyundai Motor Group's ad company Innocean lost 7.2 percent and Samsung Group's Cheil Worldwide dropped 4.1 percent on Friday. The small shareholders of Samsung SDS requested the FTC to answer their questions: what are the criteria to distinguish a core business from non-core businesses of a chaebol, what are the legal grounds for requesting the conglomerates sell off non-core affiliates, and how small shareholders can cope with the losses. They said they would take legal action if they fail to get proper answers. Most of the conglomerates have their own system integration companies, such as Hyundai Motor Group's Hyundai AutoEver, SK Group's SK C&C and LG Group's LG CNS. According to the FTC's survey of 27 large business groups that have over 10 trillion won assets, inter-subsidiary trading took 69.8 percent of total trading by system integration companies. However, conglomerates claim they need their own system integration companies as they deal with confidential group business information which should not be leaked to competitors. They also point out there already exists a regulation to block owner families from profiteering through internal trading. Companies listed on the bourse where owner families have over a 30 percent stake as well as non-listed companies where they hold over a 20 percent stake are subject to the regulation. In the case of Samsung SDS, the owner family, including Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong, holds a 17.01 percent stake. "Following stronger regulation by the government, these companies cannot expect full support from the business group as they did in the past," said Yoon Tae-ho, an analyst at Korea Investment and Securities. Naju Image Theme Park in South Jeolla Province / Courtesy of Robert Neff By Robert Neff This past Saturday, 38 members (foreign and Korean) of the Korea Heritage Society traveled into the past when they visited the city of Naju which is often called "Little Seoul." Located in South Jeolla Province, this city is steeped with antiquity and culture and is one of those hidden gems foreign visitors rarely encounter. Naju City Tours guide Kim Jung-sook energetically told tales and anecdotes from the past in Korean, which was entertainingly translated into English by Korea Heritage Society President Choi Ha-kyung, who grew up in the area and added his own personal insights. One of the first places visited was Bulhoe Temple which is claimed by some to be the first Buddhist temple built in Korea. The temple is surrounded by a lush forest of immense trees and it is hard to believe most of the original temple was destroyed in by a forest fire in 1790. Two members of the Korea Heritage Society visit Bulhoe Temple. / Courtesy of Robert Neff Guarding the temple's approach are two stone jangseung (village guardian). Legend has it that if you place your fingers in the nostrils of the male jangseung you will soon find love. Considering most of the group was made up of married couples, no one seemed openly eager to verify the legend. A stone jangseung (village guardian) guards Bulhoe Temple. / Courtesy of Robert Neff This was not the only legend associated with the temple. According to one of the monks, a rich nobleman's daughter went missing and a tiger this region was infamous for tigers came upon her and brought her safely to this spot. In gratitude, the father donated a large sum of money for the construction of the temple. This image depicts the legendary origin of Bulhoe Temple, in which a tiger returns a missing girl to her father. / Courtesy of Robert Neff But legends of wealth and power are not confined just to the temples. Visitors can rent a room for the night in the former Joseon governor's private residence. It is said if you stay the night with your children they will be successful in government. The most popular and expensive room is named after Governor Yu Seoul-jeung. Kim Jung-sook, a guide from Naju City Tours, stands in front of the former Joseon governor's private residence. / Courtesy of Robert Neff There is plenty in the city to eat. Naju is famous for its pears and its gomtang (beef soup) is very popular and probably more to the liking of foreign guests than the notoriously evil-smelling Yeongsanpo fermented skate. According to our guides, in the past it took about two weeks to transport skate from Mokpo to Naju, during which time the fish was allowed to ferment and give off a very strong ammonia-like smell. It is from this practice that the phrase "hongeo mul" (skate water) implying one should move out of the way quickly originates. An hour was spent lazily cruising the Yeongsan River aboard a hwangpo sailboat while listening to traditional music from a small orchestra provided graciously by the Naju City government. Members of the Korea Heritage Society ride a boat on the Yeongsan River in South Jeolla Province. / Courtesy of Robert Neff The final stop on the itinerary was the Naju Image Theme Park which is basically the largest permanent movie set in Korea. It is easy to step back into time while walking through its streets especially when there are no other guests around. Naju Image Theme Park is Korea's largest permanent movie set. / Courtesy of Robert Neff In this image taken from video footage run by China's CCTV on June 19, 2018, via AP Video, Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. / AP In this image taken from a video footage run by China's CCTV on June 19, 2018, via AP Video, Chinese President Xi Jinping with his wife Peng Liyuan at right and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with his wife Ri Sol-Ju at left during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. / AP Chinese President Xi Jinping has voiced his strong support for North Korea's commitment to denuclearization and promised to keep playing a constructive role in the process, North Korean state media reported Wednesday. In his summit with Xi in Beijing on Tuesday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expressed gratitude for China's support for his historic meeting with U.S. president Donald Trump last week and vowed to further consolidate bilateral ties with China, according to the Korean Central News Agency. The KCNA provided an extensive report on the summit, a day after Kim and Xi met in Beijing in their third meeting in three months. Kim is on a two-day trip to Beijing from Tuesday. The meeting came a week after Kim met with Trump in a historic summit in Singapore on June 12, in which Kim affirmed his commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and they agreed to build "new" bilateral relations. "Xi expressed strong support for our stance and determination for denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, saying that China will continue to play a constructive role," it added. "The talks were held in a cordial, open-minded and friendly mood." The KCNA said that Kim appreciated China for providing strong support for making his summit with Trump a success, while reiterating the recently strengthened strategic cooperative ties between the two countries and vowing to advance such close and friendly ties going forward. Kim said that North Korea will closely cooperate with China "in the process of opening a new future on the Korean Peninsula and in the region" and do his best to protect a "genuine peace" going forward. By Kim Jae-kyoung Following the historic Singapore summit, U.S. President Donald Trump has come under criticism for failing to secure details, such as including complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization (CVID) in the joint statement. Trump defended himself saying that details will be discussed at follow-up negotiations between U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his North Korea counterpart Kim Yong-chol. Troy Stangarone By Kim Rahn Following the decision to suspend the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercise, attention is on what the United States and South Korea can offer North Korea next, if the North's denuclearization process is seen to progress. Expectations are that the allies may seek to transform the Korean War (1950-53) armistice into a peace treaty, and the North may also show reciprocity by disposing some of its nuclear weapons. The South Korean and U.S. militaries announced Tuesday they would suspend UFG, slated for August, to keep denuclearization negotiations alive. The decision came a week after U.S. President Donald Trump said he would suspend joint military exercises, which he called "war games," as long as the negotiations were ongoing, after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore, June 12, adding the exercises were "provocative" and "expensive." North Korea has claimed it would have no reason to have nuclear weapons if military threats from the U.S. were removed and its regime security guaranteed. The UFG suspension is a part of measures to provide regime security, so the decision is expected to help build trust between Washington and Pyongyang before the two sides launch follow-up talks. Presidential spokesman Kim Eui-kyeom said the North had taken pre-emptive measures for denuclearization by shutting down its nuclear testing site in Punggye-ri. "The allies are suspending the exercises on condition that Pyongyang keeps up such practical activities and negotiations continue," he said. As a next stage concession, the U.S. and South Korea may decide to suspend other joint exercises, as the military authorities said they were discussing additional measures. The Key Resolve and Foul Eagle exercises, which are held in spring, could be the next drills affected. This spring, they were delayed until after the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympics were over. Trump is also apparently seeking to change the armistice into a peace treaty to fulfill efforts to build "a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula," agreed to during the Trump-Kim summit. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an economic event in Detroit that Trump "has committed to making sure that we alter the armistice agreement and provide the security assurances that Chairman Kim needs," in exchange for Pyongyang's denuclearization. He did not elaborate on how the armistice would be altered, but experts say the U.S. will move to change it into a peace treaty as a step toward normalizing relations between the two countries. Pompeo also indicated he would visit Pyongyang soon for follow-up talks on denuclearization details. To make progress in negotiations, North Korea also needs to take corresponding actions. The first may be to shut down the missile engine testing site in Dongchang-ri, which Kim Jong-un promised Trump he would do during their summit. This may relieve Washington's concerns over a possible attack on the U.S. mainland. Pyongyang could also report its nuclear test facilities to international organizations and accept international experts' inspection of them. South Korea expressed hope Tuesday that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's ongoing visit to China will help facilitate the denuclearization process, saying Seoul and Beijing share that strategic goal. "Our government expects China to play a constructive role in order to resolve the issue," Noh Kyu-duk, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said at a press briefing. China is expected to make a contribution to the denuclearization of the North through Kim's trip there, he added. Kim arrived in China earlier in the day, apparently by plane, making his third known visit to the communist ally since March. China's state media reported he will stay in Beijing for two days in an unusually quick confirmation of the North Korean leader's itinerary. It came as Pyongyang and Washington have been preparing for high-level talks to follow up on the four-point accord between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump from their summit meeting in Singapore last week. The "comprehensive" summit deal calls for a new relationship between the Korean War foes, efforts for lasting peace, the North's "complete" denuclearization and repatriation of the remains of American troops killed in the 1950-53 conflict. Earlier Tuesday, Seoul and Washington announced a decision to suspend plans for their annual joint military exercise, called the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG), which had been slated for August. China has long suggested a simultaneous halt to the North's nuclear and missile provocation and the allies' massive combined drills. Kim will likely brief President Xi Jinping in detail on the results of the Singapore summit. Pastor Lee Young-hoon congratulates Israel on the 70th anniversary of establishment of its government and talks about his hope for unification of two Koreas at Orient Hotel in Jerusalem, June 6. Yoido Full Gospel Church By Grace Lee Pastor Lee, right, and the Israeli President Reuben Rivlin during the reception at Orient Hotel. Yoido Full Gospel Church As the Trump administrations policy of separating parents from children at the border has sparked outrage across the country, teachers are speaking out and joining nationwide protests. Under the administrations new zero-tolerance policy, in which all cases of illegal entry are referred for criminal prosecution, 2,342 children have been separated from their parents and detained in holding centers since early May, the Department of Homeland Security told reporters today . News reports from the detention centers describe teenagers and young children, some under the age of 5, held in what the AP has described as cages built from chain-link fencing. As a teacher, as a parent, as a Texan, Im horrified by whats happening to immigrant children. Please join me in signing a petition to stop the separation of children from their parents: https://t.co/Q34W7LwXR7 Shanna Peeples (@ShannaPeeples) June 18, 2018 Research has shown that separating children from their caregivers, especially at a very early age, causes toxic stress that can have lasting effects on the body and the brain . Over the past few weeks, the American Academy of Pediatrics , the American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association have all issued statements opposing the policy, saying that family separation causes permanent and serious harm to childrens health. A petition organized by psychiatrists, social workers, and other counselors had more than 15,000 signatures as of Tuesday. The authors of the petition, who know through research and clinical experience the developmental consequences of traumatic stress, wrote that they feel a responsibility to alert the public and appeal to the Trump administration. On Twitter, some educators are saying the same. One teacher wrote that she has worked with students who have experienced trauma, and she knows the challenges that children who have been through these circumstances will face. this past year the children i taught havent been from immigrant families, by and large. different demographics in Central Va. but ive learned about trauma and children here. Tess Krovetz (@tesskrovetz) June 19, 2018 those childrens brains are in CONSTANT fight-or-flight mode, which (according to a seminar i took on anxiety this year) means they basically cant learn as much as they are capable of. Tess Krovetz (@tesskrovetz) June 19, 2018 theyre also (anecdotally speaking) sleep-deprived, struggling with separation anxiety (and not i miss my mom, but i recently saw a relative GET SHOT AND DIE, will that happen again?)... Tess Krovetz (@tesskrovetz) June 19, 2018 ...and it seems much more challenging for students who have experienced trauma to form healthy relationships with teachers or peers. the trust they should have in the world is shattered. Tess Krovetz (@tesskrovetz) June 19, 2018 Others have said that the family separations and the conditions inside the detention centers qualify as child abuse. Teachers are mandated reporters, and are required to report suspected abuse of children in their care to the appropriate authoritiessome teachers said these conditions constituted violations they would have to report in any other situation. Im a teacher. Im a mandatory reporter. If I saw or heard of this in my daily world, it would be reported. E.V. Reed (@fromthepidgin) June 18, 2018 @KamalaHarris @SenFeinstein @RepBarbaraLee the Republican Party is participating in child abuse. I am a mandated reporter because I am a teacher. There are child abuse laws in Texas and mandated reporters. Can the children be released under this law? Wanda-San (@jensax) June 19, 2018 Im an art teacher and therefore a mandated reporter of child abuse @realDonaldTrump end this now #impeachtrumpNow #StopSeparatingFamilies https://t.co/sSDib68vsz Sarah Duffy (@maguireduffy) June 19, 2018 Teachers have also been among the thousands who have taken to the streets in protest of these policies. At the Families Belong Together Rally in Los Angeles, one of almost two dozen protests that took place around the country on June 14, many protesters were teachers in the Los Angeles public school system, the New York Times reported . They cant focus on school or the future if we just take out the welcome mat, Elizabeth Kenoff, a special education teacher, told the Times at the rally. Another California teacher, Elizabeth Osborne, drove more than 200 miles to protest for the day on Monday outside of a detention center in El Cajonthe same facility that Rep. Nancy Pelosi had toured earlier that day. She told local news station KEYT that current policies remind her of historical events shes taught, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. I just dont think we should repeat that, she said. Other educators have said the new border policy is reminiscent of other state-sanctioned family separations throughout American history. On Twitter, Django Paris, an associate professor of language and literacy in the college of education at Michigan State University, noted the similarities to the federal governments Native American boarding schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These schools separated parents from their children, often against their will, and attempted to force students to abandon their cultural heritage. Colonial nation-state schooling has always been about separating Native children, Black children, children of color from their families, sending them away from family and community, sending them to a place that devalues their languages, knowledges, lifeways... Django Paris (@django_paris) June 19, 2018 Photo: In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people whove been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, on June 17. U.S. Customs and Border Protections Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP Glen Matlock, former bassist of the Sex Pistols / Courtesy of Glen Matlock By Jon Dunbar Several types of firearms are restricted in the DMZ, but Korea's indie music community is bringing a different kind of weapon the signatories of the 1953 Armistice never would have imagined: a Sex Pistol. Glen Matlock, the founding bassist of legendary U.K. punk band Sex Pistols, will perform on Sunday at DMZ Peace Train Music Festival in Cheorwon County, Gangwon Province. "I don't know too much about the whole thing but I thought it would be good to come and see for myself," Matlock told The Korea Times. "You get all these second-hand reports in the paper and everyone has these vested interests, and it would be nice to see what's going on on the ground _ and lend my voice and name to the quest for world peace and rock out a little bit." Now a solo musician, he is also expected to collaborate with Korea's own first-generation punks, including Crying Nut and Cha-Cha of No Brain. "Exactly what I'm gonna do I've got a couple ideas," Matlock said. "I'll just get together with the lads and see what happens, really." The festival was co-founded by his fellow countryman, Martin Elbourne, main booker of Glastonbury Festival and co-founder of The Great Escape. Elbourne, described as the "77th most powerful person in the music industry," came to Korea last October for Zandari Festa. Zandari organizers Dalse Kong Yoon-young and Lee Dong-yeon brought him up to the DMZ, where the open space gave him the idea for a music festival. He returned to Korea in January to meet with Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon, Gangwon Governor Choi Moon-soon and Culture Minister Do Jong-hwan, who agreed to fund the festival. Then all that was left to do was scramble to prepare a new international music from scratch, inside the world's most heavily fortified border region. "For our first year we wanted to invite many great international musicians but we lack money," said Lee, also a professor and vice president at Korea National University of Arts. "We gave up on that, not just because of money but time. And in the middle of planning, the great news came one of the members of Sex Pistols wanted to get involved. Glen Matlock is symbolic of how the festival is going forward in the future. Even great famous musicians will want spontaneously to join without asking for much money." Matlock has only asked festival organizers to cover his airfare. "I like to get involved with things that hopefully have more consequences these days," Matlock said. "I'm on a fact-finding mission." Other international acts represent Taiwan, France, Togo, Japan, Thailand and Palestine. There are also 23 great Korean acts, including Jambinai, Say Sue Me and Kiha & the Faces. Earlier in planning, there was talk of inviting North Korean musicians, but Lee said they lacked time. "Maybe next year, two years later," he said. "The political situation makes it very hard to get harmonized politically, economically and culturally." The event begins Thursday and Friday with seminars in Seoul's Platform Changdong 61, which will include roundtables with Elbourne and Matlock. On Saturday and Sunday, the festival takes place at three stages located at Woljeong-ri Station, the Communist Party Headquarters ruins and Goseokjeong Land. Although the festival has been reported to North Korea, Lee said it's unlikely the sound will travel that far, as the louder bands will be playing at the locations further south. Festival entry is free, but transport may not be and could pose problems, as Lee says 12,000 people have RSVPed. The organizers have arranged shuttle buses but many have been booked up. Lee recommends attendees make their own travel arrangements. Visit or for more information. By Park Si-soo Hundreds of police and citizens are searching for a teenage girl who went missing in Gangjin, South Jeolla Province, four days ago. The girl, whose name was withheld, vanished after leaving her home about 2 p.m. Saturday, according to police. Her mobile phone switched off at 4:30 p.m. after sending a message: "I'm moving to Haenam to meet a friend of my father who will give me part-time work." Police said the switch-off happened at a mountain in Doan-myeon, Gangjin. They said her father's friend was found dead at a construction site near the mountain early Sunday. The father's friend left his home in Gangjin about 6 p.m. Saturday after driving from work, police said. The car's dash cam was not operating. And there were no text exchanges between the missing girl and her father's friend, investigators said. Police are working with the National Forensic Service to collect mobile data and other evidence for their investigation. South Korean Navy's 1.500-ton convoy ship Masan By Park Si-soo A Navy officer was killed in an explosion on a vessel participating in a drill off the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula, Tuesday. The accident happened about 12:20 p.m. on the 1,500-ton convoy ship Masan about 25 nautical miles south of an island off the southern coastal city of Tongyeong, about 380 kilometers south of Seoul. The officer sustained a serious head injury. A helicopter took him to hospital, but he was later declared dead, the Navy said. The explosion reportedly happened while he was removing ammunition from a gun. An investigation is under way to find the exact cause of the accident. By Kang Aa-young Audio that allegedly captures Korean Air heiress Heather Cho ranting against a worker has been revealed. Internet outlet Money Today released the tape on YouTube Monday and it went viral. But Korean Air told The Korea Times that "it is hard to confirm" if the recorded voice is hers. The posting attracted more than 420,000 hits as of Tuesday morning. Tens of thousands of comments criticized her behavior. In the tape, a woman yells, accusing a man of lying to her. The man keeps apologizing. Meanwhile, Lee Myung-hee, wife of Hanjin Group Chairman Cho Yang-ho and mother of Cho, was questioned on June 11 over the alleged illegal hiring of 20 maids from the Philippines over the past decade. By Grace Lee Elementary students from Gwangju were surprised when they recently received a letter from Korean President Moon Jae-in. After learning about the inter-Korean summits, fifth-grade students sent handwritten letters to President Moon. It started when the class teacher added to the syllabus the topic "Peace: New beginning," regarding the April 27 summit. On May 25, when U.S. President Donald Trump wrote a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un canceling the North Korea-U.S. summit, the students wrote encouraging letters to Moon. The summit was resurrected and took place as scheduled. Moon sent a letter to students on the day of the summit, June 12. He wrote: "Thank you all for your precious letter. When Grandpa President (I) was young, an angel-like nun shared her sweet candy with me and I still remember how sweet it was sharing the candy with my friends. So share what you have with others. I will try to make this country one where you can have dreams and visions." Grace Lee is an intern. By Kim Bo-eun South Korean officials visited the Gaeseong Industrial Complex in the North, Tuesday, for preparations to open a joint contact office there. Opening the liaison office is one of the agreements in the Panmunjeom Declaration reached at the inter-Korean summit on April 27, as a means to facilitate communication and exchanges between the North and South. Up until now, contact between the Koreas has been made through a liaison office at the truce village of Panmunjeom. When established, the joint contact office will be the first inter-Korean organization, where officials from the North and South will work in the same building. The Koreas agreed in a high-level meeting on June 1 to open the office within the joint industrial complex in Gaeseong, which was shut down in February 2016 in response to the North's nuclear tests. South Korean government officials and corporate staff are conducting repairs on a support center and an inter-Korean exchange cooperation office, as well as lodging facilities for staff members within the complex. The group of 17 officials and staff members of Hyundai Asan and the Gaeseong Industrial District Foundation, who returned to Seoul on Tuesday, will visit the complex again on Wednesday. They first visited the complex on June 8 to examine the site which needed repairing after being abandoned for over two years. The basement floors of the inter-Korean exchange cooperation office and lodging facilities had been flooded. South Korea is aiming to open the liaison office within this month. A temporary office may be opened at the support center first. The government said opening the contact office is unrelated to reopening the industrial complex. This is because economic cooperation between the Koreas cannot be resumed until sanctions on the North are lifted. The Gaeseong complex was opened as part of agreements reached at the first inter-Korean summit in 2000. The ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) is seeking to create a special committee on inter-Korean affairs, to provide legislative assistance in economic cooperation. "The core of inter-Korean economic cooperation is establishing transport infrastructure," DPK floor leader Hong Young-pyo said in a meeting on the matter at the National Assembly on Tuesday. "Concrete achievements need to be made in connecting railways, roads and gas pipes between the North and South within President Moon Jae-in's term." Hong added the committee will have the right to propose bills as well as manage budget affairs. Asylum seekers stand in line for medical help from the Korean Red Cross on Jeju Island, Monday. Korea Times 250,000 Koreans urge gov't to deport asylum seekers from Jeju By Jung Min-ho N. Korea expected to respond reciprocally to ease tension By Lee Min-hyung South Korea and the United States announced the suspension of a joint military exercise slated for August, Tuesday. North Korea is also expected to take action to ease tensions in line with its pledge to give up its nuclear weapons According to the Ministry of National Defense, Seoul and Washington agreed to suspend the annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercise, while also reviewing additional measures to ease military tension. "We have decided to suspend all the scheduled military activities surrounding the UFG exercise in August," the defense ministry said in a statement Tuesday morning. "But nothing has been decided on suspending other joint exercises." Ministry spokeswoman Choi Hyun-soo also said South Korea and the U.S. will review suspending exercises as long as the North continues its ongoing dialogue with Seoul and Washington. The suspension of the joint exercise comes after U.S. President Donald Trump hinted at the possibility following a landmark summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore, June 12. Trump expressed disapproval of Seoul and Washington holding such regular "war games," which he called "provocative" and "very expensive." "The UFG suspension will help keep the ongoing peace momentum on the peninsula moving forward," Choi said in a media briefing, without elaborating on the details behind the decision. UFG is one of the largest-scale joint military drills here along with springtime Foal Eagle and Key Resolve exercises. More than 17,000 U.S. troops participated in last year's UFG drill. This is the first time since 1990 the two countries have suspended the exercise. For this reason, Seoul and Washington expect Pyongyang to take appropriate measures regarding its nuclear and missile disarmament in response. After the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore, defense chiefs from Seoul and Washington discussed suspending UFG. "The South Korean military has had detailed negotiations with its U.S. counterpart after the two defense ministers held a telephone conversation on Thursday," the defense spokeswoman said. Given the North's ongoing peace gestures, chances are the North may dismantle missile launch and engine test facilities in return. But if the regime shifts its stance and displays an insincere attitude toward denuclearization, the joint drills will resume, according to the defense ministry. The regular military exercises here have always drawn a fierce backlash from Pyongyang, with it threatening to retaliate. This May, the Max Thunder joint air force drills between Seoul and Washington sparked strong condemnation from Pyongyang. In an apparent show of anger, the North canceled planned high-level inter-Korean dialogue in May and threatened not to participate in the first-ever Washington-Pyongyang summit. But with the North regaining its peace momentum after the Trump-Kim summit, the two Koreas resumed their long-suspended military dialogue last week to ease any possible inter-Korean military conflicts. They agreed to speed up the implementation of the April 27 Panmunjeom Declaration signed by leaders of the two Koreas by easing inter-Korean military tension at major disputed areas. Kim Ye-lim (left) and Cho Yu-na (second from left), who are featured in a documentary film on North Korean defectors living around the world, titled "Children on the Border," are on stage after a screening held in a meeting room at the National Assembly, together with an expert panel. Korea Times photo By Jung Da-min By Jung Da-min A documentary film on children of North Korean defectors born outside their homeland, titled "Children on the Border," was screened at the National Assembly, Tuesday. Save North and New Korea (Save NK), a nonprofit corporation that has been helping North Korean refugees since 1999 with headquarters based in Seoul, produced the film and hosted the screening. Rep. Shim Jae-cheol of the main opposition Liberty Party of Korea arranged the event. "People don't really know much about the difficulties and troubles of children born in third countries yet," Shim said in a speech, calling for more attention to the dire situation of human rights in North Korea and those who have fled the country. The children were not born in North or South Korea. Their parents are North Korean defectors who were mostly "sold" to Chinese farms by human trafficking brokers in late 1990s or early 2000s. The massive defection of North Koreans followed a great famine in the North, labeled the "Arduous March" in the 1990s. According to the Ministry of Unification, the number of third-country-born children of North Korean defectors currently enrolled in South Korean schools outnumbers young North Korean defectors. Of 2,598 children of N. Korean defectors enrolled in South Korean schools, 1,437, or 57 percent, were born outside Korea as of 2017. Born and raised in China, many of the third-country born children have been confused about their identity after they came to South Korea. They are not categorized as "multicultural" or "international" young people who came from China. Rather, they are called "defector children" although they actually have never been to the North. In the film "Children on the Border," two of third-country-born children Kim Ye-lim and Cho Yu-na, both 21, share what they have been going through since they came to South Korea, following their mothers. Save NK is now planning to submit the documentary to an international human rights film festival. The poster for the screening of "Children on the Border" at the National Assembly. Courtesy of Save North and New Korea. Fired KTX train attendants march from Seoul Station to Cheong Wa Dae, Monday, demanding their reinstatement and calling on President Moon Jae-in to resolve their management-labor problem. / Yonhap Ruling influenced by dirty politics, union leader says By Lee Suh-yoon Korea Train Express (KTX) attendants, who were fired, fought and lost a legal battle against Korea Railroad Corp. (KORAIL), have returned to fight again this time, against the Supreme Court's 2015 ruling. They are demanding justice following allegations the top court's former chief justice used the court case to curry favor with the former Park Geun-hye administration. They marched from Seoul Station to Cheong Wa Dae on Monday, calling on President Moon Jae-in to step in to resolve the problem, as he promised in his presidential campaign last year. Former Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae sought to establish another general court of appeals allegedly in exchange for overruling the lower courts' decision to have KORAIL compensate the fired attendants. "I knew from the beginning it was a politically influenced verdict," Kim Seung-ha, 39, union leader of the fired KTX train attendants, told The Korea Times recently. On May 29, Kim and her colleagues, wearing blue union vests, rallied inside the Supreme Court calling for face-to-face talks with incumbent Chief Justice Kim Myeong-su. "We fought against employment fraud. And exhausted by the fight, we left it for the court to decide," Kim shouted in tears, standing in the middle of the Supreme Court hall. "But the Supreme Court colluded with the former administration and trampled on female workers' dreams." According to an investigative report released last month, the Supreme Court, under former Chief Justice Yang, drafted an internal document with information detailing ways to use high-profile cases including the KTX attendants versus KORAIL as a possible bargaining chip with Cheong Wa Dae. Incumbent Chief Justice Kim said he will cooperate with external investigations into the Supreme Court. "I am worried an excessive probe into the judiciary body may affect its independence. But the judiciary cannot be exempt from investigations under the law," the chief justice said in a press statement. In January 2004, 350 young women were hired as attendants for the bullet train. They were promised permanent public servant status after fulfilling their temporary one-year employment contracts. Over the next two years, KORAIL directly managed their tasks and wages, but the attendants were given contracts that designated them as temporary workers of a KORAIL subsidiary. In December 2005, the attendants fought back, demanding KORAIL hire them directly as regular workers. A few months later, 280 of the attendants were fired while on strike. Kim Seung-ha, then 25 years old, was one of them. Fired KTX train attendants in blue union vests rally inside the Supreme Court, May 29. / Courtesy of Kim Seung-ha Could not establish database connection. DB: bostonimc and SQL: --> The administrator has been notified and will resolve the problem ASAP. By Jhoo Dong-chan Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) is facing an increasingly uncertain outlook for its expanding business deals with Iranian companies amid the renewed U.S. sanctions against the Middle Eastern nation. The world's largest shipyard was supposed to deliver ordered container ships to an Iranian shipping company starting April, but has yet to deliver a single vessel. In December 2016, HHI signed a deal with Iran's state-owned Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL) to build four 14,500 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containerships and six 49,000-ton tankers for petrochemical products. The contract was worth 820 billion won ($700 million). It was the first shipbuilding order from Iran since economic sanctions against the country were lifted in January 2016. Under the deal, HHI built the four container ships while its affiliate Hyundai Mipo Dockyard built the tankers. The vessels were supposed to be delivered from the second quarter of this year. "All we can do now is take a wait-and-see approach," said an HHI official. "Not a single ship has been delivered to IRISL. It is impossible for us to deliver the ships with U.S. sanctions back in position." This isn't the first time for HHI to experience difficulties in delivering ordered vessels to IRISIL. In 2008, Hyundai Mipo Dockyard signed a deal with the Iranian shipping firm to build 10 tankers and 7 bulk carriers. IRISL completed the payment for its order, but Hyundai Mipo Dockyard managed to build and deliver only one ship due to the sanctions against Iran over the country's nuclear enrichment program. HHI reportedly reflected the payment of the remaining 16 ships in the December deal. "Expectations were high since the nation's shipbuilding industry has long experienced difficulties due to an 'order cliff,'" said an industry insider. "Iran is one of the largest countries in the Middle East. The industry expected the country's demand would help boost sales. Now with the U.S. sanctions, however, it will be difficult to do business with the country." South Korea's Defense Ministry on Tuesday (June 19) said that they expect a response from North Korea as they agreed to suspend a joint military exercise in August with the United States. Defence Ministry spokeswoman Choi Hyun-soo, added that South Korea and the U.S. will continue to discuss additional measures but the decisions on other subsequent drills have not been made yet. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops participated in the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than live field exercises that use weapons, tanks or aircraft. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. (Reuters) By Lee Sun-ho The Singapore summit between U.S. President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on June 12, 2018, reminds me of some happenings regarding North Korea I experienced in Singapore 47 years ago. When I worked for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) headquartered in Manila, I was assigned to the assistant proceedings officer for the 4th Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the ADB convened at the International Convention Centre of Singapore during April 15 to 17, 1971. I arrived in Singapore for the first time, a couple of days ahead of the opening day for a gala function. At that time, average Singaporeans understood Korea as the north and the south. A taxi driver, on the way to my destination, told me, "This is your consular office. Would you like to drop by?" I was astonished that the driver indicated the North Korean Consulate Office where an exceptionally-large portrait of head Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un's grandfather was posted on the whole upper side of the building. The ROK's diplomatic status was then just a trade mission, much inferior to the consulate level. Another happening was more hilarious. Singapore authorities officially published the host country's information guidebook for all participants from the 42 member countries and other international entities at the annual meeting. One day ahead of the opening day when those booklets would be distributed to a thousand of meeting delegates, observers and guests, I happened to find a critical mistake on the page listing all addresses and telephone numbers of member country diplomatic corps stationed in Singapore. Local information on the ROK's trade mission was misguided as that of the Consulate of DPRK, which was not a member country of the ADB. As a reconnaissance officer of an international financial institution, I confirmed the wrong numbers by calling the DPRK's Consulate. Then, I confidently asked the Singapore government officials to correct this misprinting. They embarrassingly acknowledged their mistakes. However, there was no time to publish the guidebook again. As an alternative, I suggested they reprint the wrong portion only, cut it into the same size, and paste it on each of the pre-published booklets. Quite a group of Singaporean officials were mobilized for this printing-cutting-pasting works overnight. The following-day distribution of the misprinted booklets was dramatically avoided by my own fact finding on site. During the bygone 47 years, Singapore, the symbol of a neat and clean city, has been constantly evolving. After the unprecedented summit, Singapore's MICE (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) tourism has been flourishing. I hope the stepping-stone summit of the 21st century at Capella Hotel on Sentosa Island truly works as "the prelude to peace." Lee Sun-ho (kexim2@unitel.co.kr) is an ombudsman columnist for The Korea Times in Seoul. By John J. Metzler By Mitchell A. Orenstein PHILADELPHIA Scholars and journalists have tirelessly covered the rise of populist nationalism in Europe, and especially the hard-line governments in Hungary and Poland. With a few hours and a lot of googling, one can learn much about how both countries' governments have commandeered public media, cracked down on privately owned TV stations and newspapers, weakened constitutional courts, attacked immigrants, promoted hate speech against Jews, Muslims, and other minority groups, and unleashed online trolls. But one would still be unable to answer the fundamental question: Why are these governments so popular? The answer is one that most analysts have overlooked: these governments are not only nationalist; they are also socialist. Consider Poland, where the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party won 38 percent of the vote in the October 2015 parliamentary election. In April 2018, despite mounting authoritarianism and official complaints from the European Union, opinion polls put support for the far-right PiS at 40 percent. The PiS does not owe its rising popularity to its anti-immigrant stance alone. In fact, the Catholic nationalist right has won around 30 percent of the vote in Polish elections since 1989 with consistently anti-Semitic, anti-EU, anti-immigrant, and anti-Russian appeals. What is new about this PiS government is its more moderate face. PiS is led, at least superficially, by younger politicians, including President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who succeeded Beata Szydlow (also a relatively new face in Polish politics). Each was focus-grouped for broader public appeal. The strategy worked. In 2015, PiS won its usual base, plus an additional 5-10 percent of more moderate voters. And, having lured these moderates, PiS has kept them, by offering what previous governments have rejected. Although the Civic Platform, which governed until 2015, grew out of the Solidarity movement of the 1980s, it betrayed its working-class base by pursuing radical neoliberal economic policies that increased economic inequality. The former communist party, having embraced social democracy in the 1990s, betrayed its roots in the same way. By contrast, PiS has established the most significant addition to the Polish social safety net since 1989: the Family 500+ program. Launched in 2016, Family 500+ embodies the nationalism, traditional family values, and social consciousness that the PiS seeks to promote. The program pays families 500 zloty ($144) per month to provide care for a second or subsequent child. Families apply each September, when children go back to school. Except for poor families, a family with only one child receives nothing, while families with two children qualify for the monthly benefit. Families with three children get 1,000 zloty, and 500 zloty for each additional child. The program has been enormously popular. Some 2.4 million families took advantage of it in the first two years. The benefit, equivalent to 40 percent of the minimum wage, has almost wiped out extreme poverty for children in Poland, reducing it by an estimated 70-80 percent. Liberal pro-European politicians and policymakers are not convinced. They complain that such a generous family benefit will weaken work incentives and blow up the government budget. But initial evidence suggests that Family 500+ has actually increased economic activity. It has also reversed the post-communist decline in fertility, increased wages (particularly for women), and enabled families to buy school materials, take vacations, buy more clothes for their kids, and rely less on high-priced credit for basic household needs. And, thanks to rapid economic growth, the government deficit has steadily fallen, not grown. No wonder liberals have trouble gaining traction with the electorate. Many Poles see a government that finally does something for ordinary people, and all liberals can do is complain, ironically, that it is anti-democratic. The truth is that Family 500+ is working. Poland's fertility rate which had fallen after 1989 to among the lowest in Europe has risen since 2016 from 1.29 to 1.42 births per female. In its first year, Family 500+ provided a significant stimulus to the economy, as poor families spend nearly all of the benefit on consumer items. One footwear chain's revenues grew by 44 percent. Sales of family holidays increased by 14 percent. Instead of borrowing to pay for the expensive "school sets" students are required to wear, Poles used their 500+ benefits instead. And while women's employment rates decreased as women left minimum-wage jobs, salaries, particularly for store clerks, rose sharply. Given the dramatic success of the program, other countries are following suit. Lithuania introduced a less generous version of Family 500+ in 2018. Those who care about democracy in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere in Europe and beyond should acknowledge that many voters are buying into the nationalist right's vision of a social state that advances national priorities, cares for the poor, and supports families. Liberal democrats cannot out-xenophobe the nationalist right. But they can and should slip their own ideological blinders and learn a thing or two from their adversaries about policies that work for the people. Mitchell A. Orenstein is professor and chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, with Hilary Appel, of "From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic Reforms in Postcommunist Countries." Copyright belongs to Project Syndicate ( www.project-syndicate.org ). By Trudy Rubin "We have developed a very special bond," President Donald Trump said of Kim Jong-un at the end of the Singapore summit. The effusive compliments Trump showered on Kim were endless: "He's got a great personality. He's a funny guy, a tough guy, he's very smart, he's a great negotiator. He loves his people." "He trusts me and I trust him." And thus was born the latest Trump bromance with a foreign strongman he wooed at a summit. First there was Xi Jinping, now Kim, next, probably Vladimir Putin. In Singapore, summitry made sense if it was meant to halt the rhetorical war between Trump and Kim and to advance the dismantling of North Korea's nuclear program. But the nauseating flattery Trump lavished on this mass murderer did little to promote those interests. Instead, it displayed how Trump's eager embrace of dictators plays into their hands. "A personal relationship can lead to progress in formal negotiations, but it is a means to an end, not an end in itself," says the Heritage Foundation's Bruce Klingner, a former senior intelligence analyst on Korea. Yet Trump's fervent embrace of Kim became the leitmotif of the summit; the president seemed convinced that it would persuade the despot to "denuclearize." How else to explain Trump's repeated efforts to slough off one of the worst human-rights records on the planet. Kim's father starved to death over a million people, while Kim executes opponents and maintains gulags containing 120,000 political prisoners. When asked by Fox News about Kim's human-rights record, Trump answered dismissively: "A lot of people (elsewhere) have done bad things." Asked if he had a message for the North Korean people, Trump told Voice of America: "I think you have somebody that has a great feeling for them. He wants to do right by them and we got along really well. We had a great chemistry." Note how the president segued from whitewashing Kim to bragging about his own personal chemistry. No wonder Trump makes the astonishing claim that he trusts Kim. Yet the paltry results of the Singapore summit prove such trust is foolish. "Yes, it was historic to have the two of them in a room," Klingner says. "But this by itself didn't achieve anything." The summit was supposed, at the barest minimum, to produce a joint statement that committed North Korea to get rid of its nukes and long-range missiles _ and to accept verification. Without this, there is no agreed basis for future negotiations. Instead, the statement used old, boilerplate language _ "commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" _ a phrase that is interpreted entirely differently by Pyongyang and Washington. This means the two sides don't even have an agreed basis on which to begin talks. The North Koreans insist the United States must withdraw its troops and nuclear protection from South Korea and Japan before Pyongyang begins to divest its weapons. As for "complete" denuclearization, Klingner says: "They mean they will go down to zero as part of a global arms control regime when the U.S. goes down to zero." It gets worse. Kim finagled Trump into accepting a concept that Pyongyang and Beijing have long demanded but U.S. officials firmly rejected only a few months ago. Known as "freeze for freeze," it requires the U.S. to halt joint military exercises with South Korea in exchange for Pyongyang's freezing missile and nuclear tests. This reduces Seoul's defensive capacity without reducing North Korea's arsenal, and without requiring the North to stop its own massive military exercises. Trump announced in Singapore that he'd freeze the joint exercises, but Kim has made only an informal offer to freeze the tests. South Korea's leading newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, editorialized, "Kim got everything he wanted." "In Singapore we accepted our half of a bad deal with no codification of the North Korean freeze in exchange," says Klingner, who has watched North Korea renege on several previous deals. "You have to have it on paper; otherwise they will say they are not bound." We'll see where U.S.-North Korean talks go. But Trump's conviction that he can rely on personal chemistry and Kim's good intentions is foolish. Despite the presidential tweet that "There is no longer a Nuclear threat from North Korea," Kim still retains his arsenal. "'Intentions' are an intangible," Klingner says. "North Korea is an unchanged threat." That reality isn't likely to dissuade Trump from believing that summitry with despots will reap huge rewards. He wined and dined Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in hopes that Xi would solve the North Korea conundrum and reduce the trade deficit. No results yet. The trade gap with China remains unresolved, while Trump has made big trade concessions to Beijing in the vain hope that the Chinese would deliver North Korea. After tightening sanctions on Pyongyang, China has already announced they will loosen them after the Singapore summit. Kim and Xi can only rejoice that the great American dealmaker is willing to give them so much for free. Clearly, Putin has paid notice to Trump's delusions. The Kremlin has made clear its eagerness to accept Trump's offer of a summit. It's easy to imagine what concessions Trump could make to Putin without even noticing. The only leaders Trump appears unwilling to flatter are our longtime democratic allies _ notably Canada, France, Germany, and Britain _ which he treated so shabbily at the G7 summit in Quebec this month. Who needs allies when Trump is so certain he can win over adversaries by bonding with strongmen? Any progress with North Korea will require a big dose of realism and a determination to "distrust but verify." Unlikely, as long as Trump keeps fooling himself and his base. Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her commentary was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Exchanges should go all-out to protect users None of Korea's cryptocurrency exchanges have acquired Information Security Management System (ISMS) certification, a report said recently. Not just small and midsize exchanges but large ones are just bent on getting commissions while doing little to enhance security. It would be astonishing if they do not become targets of hackers. Last December, the Ministry of Science and ICT told major virtual currency exchanges to win ISMS certification within this year to prove their information protection systems were secure. Companies with annual transactions of 10 billion won ($9.3 million) or more and daily online visitors of 1 million or more were subject to the rule. ISMS is a protection and management system installed by businesses to prevent losses resulting from information leakage. The system cannot, of course, prevent cyberattacks 100 percent, but is perceived as the minimal safety device to protect investors. Large cryptocurrency exchanges are required to have security systems equal to those of financial companies but here they are lacking in the most basic security steps, becoming easy prey to cyber criminals. Cryptocurrency exchanges are not entirely ignoring the importance of security, however. The Korea Blockchain Association has vowed to come up with a security system comparable to those of banks and stock brokerages. The industry group, for instance, makes it a rule to allocate 5 percent of the workforce to the IT sector, and 5 percent of the IT workforce to the security area. The regulation, however, has no binding force, ending up as just a PR ploy, at least thus far. Virtual currency exchanges throughout the world are suffering massive losses caused by cyberattacks. Affected exchanges are highly likely to face bankruptcy. The final victims are investors, however. Already, some exchanges in Japan have filed for bankruptcy protection, imposing burdens on the government. The situation is not much different here. Investors are sure to reject exchanges that cannot protect users. The time has long past for local virtual currency exchanges to arm themselves with minimal security systems at the least. In the foreseeable future, the keyword for cryptocurrency exchanges should not be "convenience" but "security." NK should respond to restraint on military exercises After the June 12 U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore, U.S. President Donald Trump unexpectedly raised the issue of stopping joint exercises with South Korea while denuclearization talks were underway with Pyongyang. The North views the drills as a rehearsal for an invasion. Trump's controversial comment turned into reality as the allies announced Tuesday their decision to suspend the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercise scheduled for August. The U.S. Defense Department said the decision was "consistent with President Trump's commitment in concert with our Republic of Korea ally." But Trump hinted at the possibility of resuming them, if the June 12 agreement on realizing "complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" signed by him and the North Korean leader does not proceed in the right direction. "Holding back the war games during the negotiations was my request because they are very expensive and set a bad light during a good faith negotiation," Trump tweeted. "Also, quite provocative. Can start up immediately if talks break down, which I hope will not happen!" It is noteworthy that the allies' decision was announced on the same day Kim made yet another visit to Beijing to discuss post-summit measures. China's state media confirmed Kim's arrival on Tuesday. The visit confirms Kim is communicating closely with Chinese President Xi Jinping regarding strategies for denuclearization talks with the U.S. China has supported the "suspension for suspension" initiative. The Chinese foreign ministry said Pyongyang's suspension of nuclear tests and Korea-U.S. restraint on joint military drills "amount to the de facto suspension for suspension" proposed by China. It remains to be seen whether North Korea will respond to the Korea-U.S. move by making its own concessions. It is time to create the right conditions for the U.S.-North Korea talks to move forward and the suspension of joint drills can be viewed as a necessary step. However, some may see the move as premature when Pyongyang still has a long way to go in the denuclearization process. The Ministry of National Defense explained the allies' decision was to promote the peaceful mood for inter-Korean dialogue and talks between Pyongyang and Washington. While those reasons are conducive for President Moon's peace drive, they will lose their justification if they ultimately end up undermining Korea-U.S. defense posture, which is the backbone of our national security. By Choi Sung-jin Now that the postmortem on the summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un is almost over, it is time to talk about what should come next. Still, I hope readers will not mind much a few additional comments. Foreign policy experts say there cannot be a failed summit. Top leaders would not meet in the first place until and unless their diplomats iron out most of the differences beforehand. Even so, the Trump-Kim meeting last Tuesday was worthy of a historic event sitting heads of state of the United States and North Korea met one on one for the first time since the communist state was born 70 years ago. For many Koreans, their handshake might have come as somewhat surreal. Except that, the overall grading of the June 12 summit was far from generous. Critics took issue with the bland statement, which merely reiterated the two countries' intention to try to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, with no action plans or timetables. Particularly notable for its absence was the now famous term: "CVID" (complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization). Despite their president's brisk self-praise, a majority of Americans judged the young North Korean leader a winner. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, about 55 percent of respondents, even including pro-Trump Republicans, were less than willing to describe the meeting as a success for the U.S., saying it was too early to tell. Far more people saw that it mainly benefited North Korea than the other way around. Such a reaction was not incomprehensible, given how most U.S. media outlets have demonized what they called the rogue regime for decades. Trump's meeting with Kim itself was a special dispensation, legitimizing the brutal dictator and his state, they say. Some U.S. bloggers even said it was an insult for the Stars and Stripes to be arranged next to the North Korean flags. For South Koreans who support the reconciliation, however, the two national flags could not be more harmonious with each other in both colors and shapes. The U.S. mainstream diplomatic and media communities say the ongoing process will end as repetition of the abortive agreements in 1994 and 2005. North Korea will pretend to disarm and make minimal concessions while maximizing economic benefits from the U.S. However, the two failed accords were not due to the lack of CVID but due to the absence of mutual trust. Past fiascos show CVID without trust was an empty slogan only good to hear. If the two leaders established a personal rapport or trust with each other, that would prove to be better than 100 CVIDs. President Trump may hardly be the ideal leader. Or, he may be, as the London-based Economist recently put it, a "fully-formed rascal" who was elected to the highest post in one of the oldest diplomacies in the world. I do not know what is pushing him to normalize relations with one of the most shunned nations on this planet by helping to open it up to outside world. Maybe it is Trump's political ambition to win in the midterm elections and/or get another four years in the White House, or his financial greed through creating a real estate boom in the North, or his desire for the honor of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, or just his inexplicable liking of strongmen. One thing seems certain, however: Trump is going in the right direction when it comes to attaining peace in this part of the world, despite or rather because of his straying from the main pack. President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo say they will denuclearize and "normalize" North Korea and help it get along well with the rest of the world within the next two-and-a-half years. If only they could pull this off, most Koreans will remember Trump as their favorite American, who resolved all contradictions on this peninsula, which started 113 years ago when the U.S. acquiesced to Japan's colonial rule of Korea under the so-called Katsura-Taft agreement. His feat will not be limited to Korea and this period but expand to the rest of the world for the eon. The normalization process of this peninsula has only begun, however. Few can tell for sure what will come ahead. Assuming the North's Kim is sincere about opening up his country for economic rebuilding, the biggest variable in all this is the changes of political power in South Korea and the U.S., as seen by what conservatives have done on both sides of the Pacific over the last few decades or so. President Moon Jae-in will have to be a much more skilled driver of the car named Korean Peace. Considering the fickle nature of the other two players Trump and Kim and internal opposition from their respective hard-liners, South Korea should go all-out to fix the ongoing process as an irreversible process, by winning support from other neighbors, such as China and Japan. The recent landslide in local elections here reflects the South Koreans' near-unanimous support for the ongoing detente with the North. For them, the CVID should be complete, verifiable and irreversible "detente." President Trump once said he could talk with Kim over a hamburger. South Koreans will be crossing their fingers hoping it will become a reality at a McDonald's in Pyongyang soon. According to the "McPeace theory," no country with a McDonald's outlet has ever gone to war with another. What and how Koreans do over next the next 30 months or so will determine their and their descendants' fate for the next century and more. Choi Sung-jin is a Korea Times columnist. Contact him at choisj1955@naver.com. Lee Ho-young, a professor at Seoul National University's College of Pharmacy, receives the top prize of the 2018 L'Oreal Korea-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science from L'Oreal Korea CEO Yann Le Bourdon during a ceremony at the university, Tuesday. The professor has been recognized for her contributions to lung disease treatments. / Courtesy of L'Oreal Korea J. L. BELL is a Massachusetts writer who specializes in (among other things) the start of the American Revolution in and around Boston. He is particularly interested in the experiences of children in 1765-75. He has published scholarly papers and popular articles for both children and adults. He was consultant for an episode of History Detectives, and contributed to a display at Minute Man National Historic Park. By Jun Ji-hye SK Telecom (SKT), KT and LG Uplus are now speeding up efforts to construct infrastructure for fifth-generation (5G) networks after securing bandwidth during a national frequency auction that ended Monday. To begin the world's first commercial 5G services in March 2019, the three firms are set to start work to select network equipment companies they will work with at the end of this month at the earliest. The firms need to select equipment partners by August at the latest, given that it is expected to take about four to five months to construct nationwide networks. The mobile carriers have already sent requests for proposals (RFP) to companies dedicated to developing commercial equipment, such as Samsung Electronics, Huawei Technology, Nokia and Ericsson. Generally, mobile carriers conduct quality and efficiency tests on network equipment after the RFPs are sent, and then begin the bidding process to select partners. Attention is high on the competition between Samsung Electronics and Huawei to win orders for 5G network infrastructure. Samsung has about a 40 percent market share in the nation's network equipment market. Huawei is cited as a formidable rival as its equipment is known to be 20 to 30 percent less expensive. The firm displayed advanced technology for the 5G 3.5 gigahertz frequency band with its chipset Balong 5G01 during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2018 in Barcelona in February. This poses a major dilemma for the mobile carriers as network equipment produced by the Chinese smartphone and telecom equipment maker is subject to security concerns. The United States, Korea's major ally, has openly held the Chinese equipment in check, calling on U.S. mobile carrier AT&T to cut off business relations with the firm. A U.S. congressional report stated in 2012 that the Chinese equipment could be used for espionage. In December 2016, three Republican members of Congress also urged the Pentagon to check on security risks to U.S. facilities and the 28,500 troops stationed in Korea posed by Huawei's role in 5G networks, according to U.S. media reports. The U.S. position is influencing Korean telecom companies although the Chinese firm claims its products have no security issues. According to Radio France Internationale, Tuesday, the Australian government is also moving to exclude Huawei from the country's 5G network construction. "Though Samsung Electronics does not fall behind Huawei in technology, the reason mobile carriers choose Huawei equipment would be its price competitiveness," an industry official said. Another official said, "Mobile carriers are expected to ponder until the last minute whether to adopt Huawei equipment." By Nam Hyun-woo POSCO does not use Posco-Vietnam to bolster steel exports to the United States, the company said Tuesday. Korea's largest steelmaker is dismissing the claim by its U.S. rivals that the company increased shipments, bound for the United States, from Posco-Vietnam, while reducing exports from Korea to the world's largest economy, as made-in-Korea steel is subject to countervailing duties. Six U.S. steelmakers, including United State Steel and Nucor, have filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Commerce, claiming Korean cold rolled steel was shipped to the U.S. through Vietnam to avoid hefty anti-dumping and countervailing duties. In their complaints, they pinpointed POSCO, citing its foundry in Vietnam as the main site receiving hot rolled products from Korea and processing it into cold rolled steel. POSCO flatly denied the allegation that it is circumventing products to the U.S. through Vietnam. "POSCO Vietnam was established as POSCO's main base for the Southeast Asian market and has been importing hot rolled materials from POSCO for the past 10 years," a POSCO official said. "After importing hot rolled steel, it is processed into cold rolled steel plates and distributed through the Vietnam market and other countries. This process has been continuing for more than 10 years, so how can this be a trick to avoid the duties which took effect since 2016?" The U.S. Department of Commerce has been slapping a 58.36 percent duty on POSCO's cold rolled plates and a 34.33 percent duty on that of Hyundai Steel since July 2016. The U.S. companies cited the changes in the inbound volume of cold rolled plates coming from Korea and Vietnam as their ground. After the hefty tariff, the U.S. became Korea's 19th largest cold rolled steel importer last year, slipping from No. 8 in 2014. According to the Korea International Trade Association, the U.S. imported 239,000 tons of cold rolled steel by the end of 2016 down from 306,000 tons in 2015. During the same period, U.S. imports from Vietnam surged from 68,000 tons to 468,000 tons. However, industry officials say the surge in Vietnamese cold rolled steel is also attributable to the tariff war between the U.S. and China, in which China's steelmakers resorted to Vietnam to evade hefty duties. "Domestic steelmakers virtually gave up shipping cold rolled steel to the U.S. after the duties were imposed," an industry official said. "What is irking companies is that the alleged volume does not account for much in their overall cold rolled steel volume. It seems that U.S. steelmakers are making unfair claims." U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo looks on as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nation Nikki Haley speaks at the U.S. Department of State in Washington DC on Tuesday (local time). The United States announced that it is withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council. AFP The United States announced Tuesday it was leaving the United Nations' Human Rights Council, with Ambassador Nikki Haley calling it ''an organization that is not worthy of its name.'' It was the latest withdrawal by the Trump administration from an international institution. Haley, Trump's envoy to the U.N., said the U.S. had given the human rights body ''opportunity after opportunity'' to make changes. She lambasted the council for ''its chronic bias against Israel'' and lamented the fact that its membership includes accused human rights abusers such as China, Cuba, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo. ''We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights,'' Haley said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appearing alongside Haley at the State Department, said there was no doubt that the council once had a ''noble vision.'' But today we need to be honest,'' Pompeo said. ''The Human Rights Council is a poor defender of human rights.'' The announcement came just a day after the U.N. human rights chief, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents. But Haley cited longstanding U.S. complaints that the 47-member council is biased against Israel. She had been threatening the pull-out since last year unless the council made changes advocated by the U.S. ''Regrettably, it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded,'' Haley said. Still, she suggested the decision need not be permanent, adding that if the council did adopt reforms, ''we would be happy to rejoin it.'' She said the withdrawal notwithstanding, the U.S. would continue to defend human rights at the United Nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office called the U.S. decision ''courageous,'' calling it ''an unequivocal statement that enough is enough.'' The move extends a broader Trump administration pattern of stepping back from international agreements and forums under the president's ''America First'' policy. Although numerous officials have said repeatedly that ''America First does not mean America Alone,'' the administration has retreated from multiple multilateral accords and consensuses since it took office. Since January 2017, it has announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, left the U.N. educational and cultural organization and pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. Other contentious moves have included slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum against key trading partners, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close 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. 190618THREE HIGH COMMISSIONERS VISITING BOUGAINVILLE New Dawn FM News The High Commissioner for New Zealand to PNG, MS SUE MACKWELL, the High Commissioner for FIJI to PNG, MR ISALA TELENI and High Commissioner for Solomon Islands, MR. BARNABAS ANGA are in Bougainville this week to get first hand greater understanding of the current Bougainville situation. They arrived in Buka yesterday and have been meeting with government officials in Buka and left for Arawa this afternoon. According to their program, they will tour Arawa and visit schools tomorrow before departing to BUIN tomorrow afternoon. They will meet with the member for South Bougainville and deputy Opposition leader, TIMOTHY MASIU in Buin on Thursday morning. Friday they will visit schools before driving to Arawa ready for returning to Port Moresby on Saturday. The Solomon Islands High Commissioner is very interested in visiting BUIN and observing the traditional border crossing there. New Dawn FM understands the Solomon Islanders cross over to sell their fish at the Buin market every Thursdays and Saturdays. Ends Living Gospel Equality Now: Loving in the Heart of God: Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests Tennessee Vols fans hit a new low at the end of the UTK vs Ole Miss last evening. Maybe Lane Kiffin did us wrong when he left Knoxville for his dream team back in 2009, however, the crass and repulsive behavior of a large number of Tennessee fans didnt reflect on Kiffin, it reflected on the great state of Tennessee. Has society really reduced itself to believing that reducing ... (click for more) This may be a bit personal but Im not going to apologize. Some of my best buddies are going through the fire right now and, while I dare not give examples or share names, this gives me the avenue to forward this column along. Hey, heres a piece I wrote for Sunday that you might enjoy. I do that every now and again, when I write something I think is funny or when I write something ... (click for more) A Tesla employee who committed extensive and damaging sabotage by breaking into software systems at Teslas auto plant could be part of a larger plot by enemies bent on the companys destruction, Chief Executive Elon Musk told employees via email Sunday. As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want the company to die, Musk said in the note, sent out Sunday at 11:57 p.m. and reported by CNBC. He listed short sellers, the oil and gas industry, and car companies as possible culprits. In a different email to employees Monday morning, Musk hinted that a small assembly line fire a day earlier might be part of a plot and told workers to remain alert. Could be just a random event, but as Andy Grove said, Only the paranoid survive. It was another reminder of the turmoil sweeping Tesla these days as it scrambles to ramp up production of the new Model 3 sedan and produce a profit. The company recently took just three weeks to get a third Model 3 assembly line up and running under a large tent-like structure at its Fremont, Calif., factory. At the same time, it has laid off 9% of its workers, the biggest layoff in its 15-year history. Advertisement Tesla stock sank nearly 5%, to $352.55, Tuesday but analysts attributed that more to the Trump administrations trade war with China, which could hamper Tesla plans to build a factory there. Steve Man, a senior autos analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence in Hong Kong, said protectionist U.S. levies could derail automakers plans to open new manufacturing and export bases in China. Tesla is racing to reach agreement in China before that happens, said Michael Dunne of ZoZo Go, an investment advisory company specializing in China. Without a doubt, trade tensions will accelerate Teslas plans to produce in China. Musk recently tweeted that short sellers who bet that a stock will decline and who have made Tesla one of the most shorted stocks on Wall Street have about three weeks before their short position explodes. Thats about when Musk has said to expect a China-related announcement, which some analysts believe could include new equity investors. Musks invocation of Grove, the late Intel co-founder and one of Silicon Valleys most revered pioneers, comes as Tesla faces increasing pressure to fix severe production problems stalling its electric Model 3 sedan, to start making money and to bring in enough cash to keep the company afloat. Grove, who died in 2016 at age 79, employed a hyper-competitive management style to turn chipmaker Intel from a scrappy startup into an international mega-corporation. His 1996 book, Only the Paranoid Survive, is practically required reading for students of Silicon Valley. What prompted Musks paranoia, he said in the Sunday night email, was learning over the weekend about employee sabotage. A worker upset at being passed over for a promotion, he said in the Sunday email, made direct code changes to Teslas manufacturing operating system under false usernames and exported large amounts of highly sensitive data to unknown third parties. A manufacturing operating system, put simply, connects robots and other computerized equipment on a factorys assembly lines. Tesla has pushed aggressively into factory automation but has suffered fundamental breakdowns on parts of the Model 3 assembly line, which had to be disassembled and replaced with redesigned systems. The employee is being investigated, Musk said in his memo, adding: We need to figure out if he was acting alone or with others at Tesla and if he was working with any outside organizations. Wall Street short-sellers have already lost billions of dollars and stand to lose a lot more, he said. Oil and gas companies are sometimes not super nice and dont love the idea of Tesla advancing the progress of solar power & electric cars. And if car companies are willing to cheat on emissions, maybe theyre willing to cheat in other ways? Musk offered no evidence that any short seller or company was involved in sabotage. The level of damage inflicted on the manufacturing operating system was not addressed. Asked for elucidation, a Tesla spokesman said no comment. The small, quickly extinguished fire on the Model 3 assembly line further aroused Musks suspicion. He asked employees to be on the alert for anything thats not in the best interests of this company. Teslas Fremont plant, had a history of labor strife when it was run by General Motors, with a renegade workforce that was known to sabotage cars by, for example, putting cola bottles behind door panels to rattle car buyers. General Motors later brought in Toyota as a partner at the plant, but the partnership dissolved and the factory was sold to Tesla. Although United Auto Workers has embarked on a thus-far unsuccessful attempt to unionize workers at Tesla, no one has publicly accused the union of sabotage. Musks reference to Grove and use of the term paranoid struck some management experts as off-key. What Andy Grove meant by paranoid is missing the next strategic inflection point in business, said Ratmir Timashev, co-founder of data management company Veeam and a longtime Grove fan. What Grove was focused on was fighting complacency, said Barry Nalebuff, a professor at the Yale School of Management. He was afraid [his employees] would rest on their laurels and not feel as if they were to be taken out by competitors at any moment. Fearing that, say, rival Advanced Micro Devices might set a fire in an Intel semiconductor fabrication plant is certainly not the Grove sense of paranoia, he said. Bloomberg contributed to this report. RELATED: Tesla builds another production line to make Model 3 cars more quickly russ.mitchell@latimes.com Twitter: @russ1mitchell UPDATES: 1:50 p.m.: This article was updated with Los Angeles Times staff reporting. This article was originally published at 5:55 a.m. Civil war has broken out at 21st Century Fox. The Murdoch family-controlled media conglomerate that has long thrived as a big tent that includes subversive entertainment shows such as Family Guy and conservative viewpoints of news commentators such as Sean Hannity is being pulled apart by partisan politics in the age of President Trump. Modern Family co-creator Steve Levitan shook the entertainment industry Tuesday with an announcement on Twitter that he would leave Foxs TV studio, citing his personal disgust with Fox News as the reason. He quickly revised his statement, saying he would make his decision after 21st Century Fox completes the pending sale of its movie and TV studio assets to either Walt Disney Co. or Comcast, which are now in a bidding war for them. But Levitans decision to toss a social media grenade at his longtime employer demonstrates how anger over the rightward tilt of Fox News has been bubbling over among liberals on the studio side. Levitan said on Twitter that Fox News 23-hour-a day support for the NRA, conspiracy theories and Trumps lies gets harder to swallow every day as I drive onto that lot to make a show about inclusion. Advertisement Levitan joined other Fox studio talent director Paul Feig and Family Guy creator and star Seth MacFarlane in openly expressing disdain for Fox News, an extraordinary rebuke. Though shows such as The Simpsons occasionally lampoon Fox News, high-profile creative producers within the company have rarely publicly criticized the news operation so harshly. Levitan and others were responding to how the channels hosts and commentators defended the Trump administrations decision to separate and detain children who cross the border illegally with their parents a policy widely deplored by both Republicans and Democrats. Fox News host Laura Ingraham described the detention centers for children along the Mexican border as summer camps a comparison she later walked back. The Hollywood creative community in general has been barely tolerant of the Fox News channel, particularly over the last couple of years, said Sandy Grushow, who was a Fox entertainment executive for 20 years. Representatives of Fox News and 21st Century Fox declined to comment on the remarks from Levitan, MacFarlane and Feig. The issue of immigration enforcement at the border has brought the discontent to a boiling point. I have made two films for 20th Century Fox and love the people in the movie and TV divisions. But I too cannot condone the support their news division promotes toward the immoral and abusive policies and actions taken by this current administration toward immigrant children, Feig wrote on Twitter. Feig directed the movies The Heat and Spy for Fox. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for the Yale School of Management, said creative types at Fox studios probably are speaking out now because they see a sale coming and are eager not to be associated with the news division going forward. They cant wait to be liberated, Sonnenfeld said. Among the people Ive talked to there is equal enthusiasm for Comcast or Disney. They want it to happen now. They want to free themselves from the branding and the identity and move into either of the parent operations. Sonnenfeld said the Fox brand has lost its cachet among many in the politically left-leaning entertainment industry. Foxs broadcasting company which was born in 1986 during the era when the Big Three networks ABC, CBS, and NBC dominated once represented edgy, irreverent programming such as The Simpsons. But the prominence of Fox News the most-watched cable news network since 2002 and the favored outlet of Trump dislodged that identity years ago. Even when the Fox broadcast network had the No. 1 prime-time show in TV with American Idol, internal studies found that most viewers associated the Fox name with news. Historically, the makers of Fox entertainment assets have never had to cede to Rupert Murdochs conservative political views. For example, while Fox News commentators have frequently criticized the Washington Post, its movie studio was a distributor for The Post, the 2017 Steven Spielberg film that glorified the papers history and past owner, Katharine Graham. One former Fox executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the relationship between the entertainment and news divisions was always collegial. But Murdoch never had a passion for Hollywood, longtime associates say, preferring news and politics. He made his preferences known when he agreed to sell the studio assets. Going forward, his company known as the new Fox will include Fox News Channel, the Fox Business Network and its owned and operated TV stations. The profitability of Fox News is also appealing to Murdoch, especially as scripted programming gets more expensive because of competition from streaming services such as Netflix. Fox News is expected have a cash flow of $1.7 billion with a profit margin of 60% in fiscal 2018, according to Kagan, a unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Fox News coverage carries divergent points of view during its daytime hours. Anchors such as Shepard Smith and Neil Cavuto have been highly critical of the Trump White House and the presidents behavior. But the channels high-rated morning programs and prime-time hosts, who frequently account for the most-watched hours on cable, deliver a steady stream of pro-Trump viewpoints and intense criticism of other media outlets that do not cover the president favorably. MacFarlane was disturbed in particular by Fox News host Tucker Carlsons assertions that viewers should ignore what they hear from other news sources. MacFarlane, whose programs have earned hundreds of millions of dollars for 21st Century Fox, said he was embarrassed to work for the company. He backed up his response to Carlson with a $2-million donation to NPR and gave an additional $500,000 to its Los Angeles member station, KPCC. stephen.battaglio@latimes.com Twitter: @SteveBattaglio UPDATES: 6:30 p.m.: This article was updated with reaction to the rift in Fox. 3:05 p.m.: This article was updated with Levitans statement that he has put off his decision on whether to leave Foxs TV studio. June 20, 11:45 a.m.: This article was updated to note that Fox News host Laura Ingraham walked back her remark that compared immigrant child detention facilities to a summer camp. This article was originally published June 19 at 12:30 p.m. Television advertising is caught in the crossfire of the countrys political battles. When TV stars such as Roseanne Barr, Samantha Bee and Laura Ingraham get into trouble, advertisers retreat rather than risk having their brand names become collateral damage in the highly charged partisan atmosphere enveloping the media landscape. By the time a comedian or commentator is forced to apologize for a tweet or joke that goes too far, many sponsors want their commercials out before they can become the target of angry social media protests. Such advertiser fallout recently hit Bee, who used a vulgar term to describe President Trumps daughter Ivanka on the May 30 edition of her TBS show Full Frontal. Commercial time on the show has dropped 75% since the controversy, according to data from Kantar Media. Advertisement The loss of Roseanne is lowering the ABC television networks expectations for its ad revenue for next season by more than $30 million, according to a person who is familiar with the data but was not authorized to disclose it. Although networks have been able to mitigate the loss of ad dollars, the stakes are high for them. The TV industry is loath to lose any revenue at a time of declining viewership and rising competition for ad dollars from streaming services. Most clients have chosen to stay away from controversial topics and shift their money elsewhere, said Carrie Drinkwater, executive director, investments for Mediahub, the ad-buying arm of Boston-based agency MullenLowe. If the content is questionable or if the persons behavior is reprehensible, you cant put money into that content because you will [alienate] many people who you want to be your consumers. Threats of TV advertiser boycotts are not new. In the 1980s and 90s, religious conservative groups such as the American Family Assn. used letter-writing campaigns to pressure companies to stay away from network programs they deemed too racy or unfit for family viewing. But social media now makes advertiser boycott threats fast-moving, highly public situations that require an immediate response, often prompting skittish companies to abandon offending programs. Most clients are not inherently courageous, said one executive at a major media buying firm who was not authorized to comment publicly. They dont want to do anything to make things more challenging for themselves. Calls for advertiser pullouts have escalated amid rising passions over the policies and behavior of the Trump White House and the growing willingness by activists on the left and the right to use new tools to assert their influence. Weve become hyper-partisan in this country, said David Cadden, professor emeritus of entrepreneurship and strategy at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. Both sides are looking for every mechanism possible to weaponize any venue for them to inflict pain on the other side. Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, the liberal watchdog group that has organized protests against right-wing media outlets over the years, said pressuring advertisers is a quick way to deliver a political message in an age when citizens feel they can no longer depend on elected officials to respond to their issues. If you asked people how to exercise power 10 or 15 years ago, the answer would be call your member of Congress, he said. The problem in the current landscape is everybody has thrown up their hands. They either dont have confidence or trust in the process, or dont think what they do will make a bit of difference. Carusone cited how gun control advocates who could not get their representatives to act after the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., successfully pressured companies to drop discounts given to National Rifle Assn. members. Last year, Media Matters lobbied advertisers to drop former Fox News host Bill OReilly after reports that he and the cable network had paid out $13 million to settle sexual harassment claims made against him. Sponsor support disappeared and OReilly was fired in April 2017, though Fox News advertisers returned to the time period after Tucker Carlson took over. In most cases, networks will ride out controversies and boycott calls, as political hosts and comedians are hired to be provocative and advertisers skittishness comes with the territory. TBS declined to comment, but people familiar with the advertising situation at Full Frontal said they expect advertisers to gradually return. Commercial time per half-hour episode has fallen to 1 minutes, down from 6 minutes before the miscue, according to Kantar Media. But in the case of Barr, who posted a racist tweet in which she compared former President Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett to an ape, ABC acted fast before a protest could take hold and cause real financial damage. The tweet by Barr, who had already caused a stir by spreading right-wing conspiracy theories online, surfaced just as Disney ABC was ready to negotiate with advertisers on the sale of $2 billion in advance ad time for the companys 2018-19 program slate. A prolonged controversy over the fate of Roseanne, its most-watched program, could have stalled deal-making at a crucial time. Few shows could deliver a larger audience the series averaged about 22 million viewers last spring. ABC is in talks about a Roseanne spinoff without its star, but it would not be expected to draw the ratings of the original. Networks have some flexibility. They are typically able to accommodate advertisers who want to move their dollars out of a show, rather than risk being subjected to the ire of activists and special interest groups. There are so many options you dont feel youre in a sink-or-swim situation by removing dollars from one program and putting them on another, Drinkwater said. Advertisers fled Fox News Channel host Laura Ingrahams show in late March after she delivered a tweet taunting Parkland, Fla., school shooting survivor David Hogg over his college application rejections. Even though Ingraham apologized to him on Twitter, Hogg quickly disseminated a list of the networks advertisers, many of whom abandoned her program and moved their commercials to other time slots on the network where they are likely to reach the same viewers. Nonetheless, Fox News has stuck with Ingraham through the controversy her nightly prime-time program The Ingraham Angle is still among the most watched on cable news. The program was carrying 15 minutes of national ad time before the boycott threat. In the weeks after the boycott, it was down to seven minutes per hour but has risen back up to 13 minutes as of last week. Some of the loss has been offset by a higher ad rate for Ingrahams program. Standard Media Index said the average cost for a 30-second spot on the Fox News show during the week of April 14 was $14,877, up from its first-quarter average of $9,943. Media Matters, which led the charge against OReilly, has also targeted Fox News star Sean Hannity, most recently after he publicly endorsed Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama who faced sexual misconduct allegations involving women and minors. While there have been occasional advertiser defections over the last year, none have put the most-watched show in cable news in jeopardy. Hannity has fought back against boycott efforts, calling them attacks on free speech, and has argued against targeting liberal commentators and comedians as well. Marianne Gambelli, president of ad sales for Fox News, acknowledged some sponsors avoided the cable news networks opinion programs when they came under fire but said others have come in to pick up the slack. There has been zero impact on our business, Gambelli said in a statement. Many advertisers have returned to our programming, with new advertisers opting in for our powerful lineup. The pressure being applied to outspoken Fox News hosts is what prompted Brian Maloney and several other former radio hosts with conservative views to form the Media Equality Project last year with the aim of targeting advertisers who support liberal hosts. Maloney said the organizations goal is to hold them accountable in the same way. With those battle lines drawn, Quinnipiacs Cadden does not see the pressure on advertisers abating anytime soon. Its going to get worse, he said. Once people see that they have had some success, or others have had success, they will start engaging in this behavior. stephen.battaglio@latimes.com Twitter: @SteveBattaglio President Trump, moving to amp up pressure on China to make trade concessions, threatened late Monday to impose tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese imports and to double that amount if Beijing retaliates with countermeasures. Trumps announcement marks the latest escalation of a brewing trade conflict with China. It comes after the White House on Friday detailed plans to slap 25% tariffs on $50 billion in goods imported from China, most of that to take effect July 6. The news sparked widespread fears that the two largest economies were heading inexorably to a trade war that would have damaging ripple effects across the globe. Stocks plunged overnight in Asia, with indexes in Shanghai falling almost 4% and in Hong Kong dropping nearly 3%. U.S. stock futures were pointing to a sharply lower opening. The reaction from Beijing was swift. Chinas Ministry of Commerce said that preparing tariffs on $200 billion more of the countrys exports to the United States was tantamount to extreme pressure and blackmail. Advertisement If the U.S. side becomes irrational and issues [tariff] lists, China will have to adopt comprehensive measures both in proper quantity and quality to make a strong counter-measure, a ministry spokesperson said. Beijing had similarly responded quickly Friday to the administrations announcement of the initial round of tariffs, by saying it would match them dollar-for-dollar by applying similar duties on American farm products, cars and other merchandise, also starting July 6. So far, Trumps trade battle with China has been mostly threats, and businesses and other parties have been hoping that the two sides will return to the negotiating table. But three bargaining sessions have not yielded a deal to quell tensions. With no word on future talks and both sides not wanting to appear weak, worries are rising that a hardening of positions could lead to a full-blown trade war. Chinese and American analysts closely following the trade dispute said they now expect the initial tariffs and counter-tariffs on July 6 to take effect. We have many reasons to be pessimistic about a trade war, said Wang Yong, deputy director at Peking Universitys Center for New Structural Economics. Trump, in his statement Monday, said that Beijings earlier threat to retaliate, rather than change trade practices to which the United States has objected, showed that China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive $376 billion trade imbalance in goods. This is unacceptable. The president said that he had directed his trade advisors to identify an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to be assessed tariffs of 10%. These would be implemented if China refuses to change its practices, Trump said, warning that if Beijing responds by upping duties on additional U.S. imports, he would pursue tariffs on another $200 billion in Chinese products. The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable, Trump said. Even before Beijing responded on what was Tuesday morning in China, its official news agency posted a commentary Monday accusing Washington of reneging on an understanding between the two sides that the U.S. would hold off on tariffs after China pledged to buy more American goods. China does not want to fight a trade war, the commentary said. However, in the face of the short-sighted behavior from the United States, China has to give a strong comeback, firmly defend the interests of the country and the people, and resolutely safeguard economic globalization and the multilateral trading system. Trump had previously threatened to increase tariffs to as much as $150 billion in Chinese goods. By tripling the amount to potentially $450 billion, he would hit about 90% of all Chinese imports to the U.S. China last year exported almost $506 billion of goods to the United States, and imported about $130 billion from America, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Trumps initial tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods were in response to U.S. allegations of Chinas theft of intellectual property and its policies forcing American companies to hand over technology in return for access to Chinas vast market a longstanding complaint through multiple administrations. Trump said Monday that China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology. The first tranche of tariffs are set to take effect July 6 on 818 types of Chinese goods valued at about $34 billion. The U.S. Trade Representative office is compiling a list of an additional $16 billion worth of products that would be assessed 25% duties at a later date. Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods, and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States, Trump said. The products slated for U.S. tariffs include a variety of tech-related products and parts, and are meant to slow Chinas advancement in cutting-edge technologies and industries. The U.S. goods that China has targeted for duties include many farm goods such as soybeans, hitting farm states that are home to many Trump supporters. Trumps latest tariffs statement will likely be met with apprehension from Republicans in Congress and U.S. business interests, who have cautioned the administration about the potential harm to American consumers, farmers and companies. The National Retail Federations president, Matthew Shay, called the presidents latest tariff threat a reckless escalation and urged Congress to exert authority on trade policy. Derek Scissors, a China expert at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he wasnt surprised by Trumps action to up the ante. When Beijing said it was going to match the $50 billion in tariffs, he said, it can only be seen as treating the Trump administration as weak. President Trump has to show that hes trying to reduce the trade deficit, Scissors said, alluding to Trumps repeated promises to his supporters that he would clamp down on Chinas trade and slash the deficit. China imports only one-fourth as much as it sends to the U.S. in goods, so Beijing would not be able to keep retaliating dollar for dollar. However, American businesses have invested far more in China than China has in the United States, and Beijing could retaliate against U.S. firms operating in China by delaying business transactions, for example, increasing inspections on imports, or applying domestic laws more strictly. The latest from Washington More stories from Don Lee don.lee@latimes.com Follow me at @dleelatimes UPDATES: 4:35 a.m.: This article was updated with additional reaction, including from markets, and analysis. 8:40 p.m.: This article was updated with reaction from China and U.S. groups and interests. This article was originally published at 7:45 p.m. Verizon and AT&T have pledged to stop providing information on phone owners locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy. The data has apparently allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without the device owners knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known California-based brokers that Verizon supplies directly: LocationSmart and Zumigo. Verizon became the first major carrier to declare it would end sales of such data to brokers that provide it to others. It did so in a Friday letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been probing the phone location-tracking market. AT&T followed suit Tuesday after the Associated Press reported the Verizon move. Neither company said it is getting out of the business of selling location data. Verizon and AT&T are the two largest U.S. mobile carriers in terms of subscribers. Advertisement Verizons chief privacy officer, Karen Zacharia, said her company would be careful not to disrupt beneficial services such as fraud prevention and emergency roadside assistance. AT&T spokesman Jim Greer cited similar reasons for cutting off the intermediaries as soon as practical. Last month, Wyden revealed abuses in the lucrative but loosely regulated field involving Securus Technologies and its affiliate 3C Interactive. Verizon says its contract was approved only for the location tracking of outside mobile phones called by prison inmates. Verizon notified LocationSmart and Zumigo privately held companies that are based in Carlsbad and San Jose, respectively that it intends to terminate their ability to access and use our customers location data as soon as possible, Zacharia wrote. Location data from Verizon and other carriers make it possible to identify the whereabouts of nearly any phone in the United States within seconds. Popular commercial uses for so-called geolocation tracking include emergency roadside assistance; keeping tabs on packages, vehicles and employees; bank fraud prevention; and targeted marketing offers. The cutoff wont affect users ability to share locations directly with apps and other services. Rather, it deals with the practice of selling data to third parties with which users have no direct contact. Wyden wrote to all four major U.S. wireless carriers May 8 after learning about a web portal that let law officers track Americans locations without proper oversight. A former sheriff in Missouri has been accused of using Securus data for unauthorized surveillance of a judge, a sheriff and state highway patrol officers. Days later, a Carnegie Mellon University security researcher discovered a security flaw in LocationSmarts website that could have allowed any reasonably sophisticated hacker to secretly track almost any phone in the U.S. or Canada. Wyden asked the carriers to identify which third parties have been acquiring carrier location data and to provide details such as any third-party sharing of location data without customer consent. His office shared the companies responses with the Associated Press. None of the four carriers named any third parties, with two exceptions. One was Securus, which all four carriers have since cut off. The other was 3CInteractive, the reseller that supplied Securus. Verizon did the responsible thing and promptly announced it was cutting these companies off, Wyden said in a statement, referring to the aggregators as shady middle men. Wyden has complained that peoples physical security could be endangered if the information falls into the wrong hands. The big concern was that this was probably the tip of the iceberg, said Laura Moy, deputy director of the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology. She said Verizons move indicates that it cannot actually police this process, that it doesnt have the ability. Nor can the other carriers, she said. Verizon and AT&T did not respond to questions from the AP on whether and how they plan to sell location data directly to companies or individuals instead of relying on the two California companies. Sprint and T-Mobile did not immediately respond Tuesday to emailed requests for comment. AT&T and T-Mobile, No. 2 and 3, respectively, in number of customers, said in letters to Wyden that they allow authorized third parties to access customer location data only if the affected customers have given consent or if it is required by law for instance, a court order. Verizon said the same. Sprint said account holders must generally be notified if the information is to be used so they can decide whether they consent. T-Mobile has offered to buy Sprint for $26.5 billion. The carriers left most of Wydens questions unanswered such as how many of their customers had been affected by location sharing to which they never agreed. Gigi Sohn, who was a top advisor at the Federal Communications Commission in the Obama administration, said Verizon has lately proved itself a shining example on privacy. I think they understand that bad privacy practices are bad for business, she said. Moy said Verizon may have been motivated by a $1.4-million FCC fine for an earlier episode in which the company surreptitiously tracked its wireless customers online travels with a supercookie for at least 22 months beginning in December 2012. Verizon subsequently signed a consent order with the FCC promising to restrict that tracking to customers who affirmatively agreed to it. The case also spurred FCC rules that would have required carriers to obtain consent for selling their customers wireless location data. But the GOP-led Congress quashed those rules last year. Analysts say its difficult to gauge the size of the location-tracking aggregation market. On its website, LocationSmart claims it is the No. 1 location as a service provider with data from every top-tier U.S. wireless carrier and more than 200 enterprise customers. Zumigo appears oriented to the financial sector, and it lists Intel, Wells Fargo and Capital One among investors. Rich Mogull, an analyst with Arizona-based Securosis LLC, said telecom providers track and sell location data as a matter of course, with a wide variety of businesses including Google extensively attempting to compile location datasets on consumers. We are all tracked, all the time, primarily for marketing purposes, by such a large number of companies Im not sure I would even know where to start the math, Mogull said. UPDATES: 11:55 a.m.: This article was updated with AT&T joining Verizon in announcing the cutoff and with comments from AT&T spokesman Jim Greer and analyst Rich Mogull. This article was originally published at 8:55 a.m. If you want to understand the Russia of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and who doesnt? it doesnt hurt to pay some attention to the tsar Boris Fyodorovich Godunov, in particular the opera about him by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky. The middle names matter. The Russian people convey personality in the use of first and middle names. Thats part of the soul of Russia, and for better and too often worse, no leaders obsess over the national soul quite like they do in Russia. The people proved the edifying essence of the San Francisco Symphonys semi-staged Boris Godunov, led by Michael Tilson Thomas last weekend. Yes, this great opera centers on the tortured soul (that word again) of Boris, who was tsar from 1598 until his death in 1605, after which the country descended into what became known as the Time of Troubles. The troubles began, though, with Boris, who may have (and probably did) order the assassination of Dimitri, Ivan the Terribles son, after that tsars death. Boris was politically savvy enough to refuse the throne unless the people demanded it. He was politically savvy enough to make a show of providing for the people to win their favor. He was Russian enough, at least in Mussorgskys opera, to have a conscience. He stood for something, and his operatic death is historic tragedy. Advertisement Tilson Thomas idea was not to overtly update Boris, as opera productions often cannot resist doing these days. Instead, he and his production team director James Darrah, video designer Adam Larsen and the scenic and costume design team of Emily Anne MacDonald and Cameron Jaye Mock turned for inspiration to Andrei Tarovskys celebrated 1966 film, Andrei Rublev. The epic is about the Russian painter, who lived a century before Boris, and how his life and the religious icons he painted reflected the eternal political and artistic Russian soul. Davies Symphony Hall was therefore transformed into a kind of decaying Russian cathedral, with the orchestra in the center. History was represented as layers. The stage was scattered with Russian flyers and books at the start, and they all went up in flames on video projections at the end. Costumes ageless monks robes, ornate ceremonial court dress, boxy Soviet suits, modern down jackets suited the centuries. The opera allows for assembly. Mussorgskys 1869 first version is a spare, two-hour work that was shockingly pointed politically, a portrait of a tsar for whom the thrall of power cannot overcome the buffeting by a fickle public, court intrigue and his own guilt. Mussorgskys score was grand but grating. There was grandeur but not grandiosity. It portrayed mens work, with little room for women. When the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and the government censors rejected it, Mussorgsky came back three years later with an expanded grand opera, edges softened, women and romance included, and that became the foundation for Russian opera. Still, over the years, new orchestrations by Rimsky-Korsakov and by Shostakovich came along to change the musical character to harmonize with the times. These days, you make your own version. As many now do, Tilson Thomas stuck with Mussorgskys original, although he removed a crucial scene in the fourth act in front of the Cathedral of St. Basil in which the people turn on Boris, who takes surprising counsel from a simpleton. Tilson Thomas did, however, end with the final versions forest scene, in which the violent crowd sides with an imposter claiming to be Dimitri, and the last word is given to the simpleton prophesizing a future of sorrow for the Russian people. Tilson Thomas approach of putting the orchestra in the center of his staged productions has its advantages and disadvantages. The chorus was placed on seats above the stage, seen through a cutout of the backdrop, with a small troop of actors and dancers onstage representing the people. The stage itself included space in front of the orchestra as well as a platform in the back. Acoustically and dramatically this could be a problem with continual changes in sound and intimacy. But the musical prominence of the orchestra and chorus added a sonic spectacle, especially in the grand crowd scenes. The large cast was largely Russian, and many largely did their traditional Mariinsky or Bolshoi thing. Stanislav Trofimov, the stunning Boris, has starred lately at the Mariinsky, where the house production for the last three decades has remained the gripping one that director Tarovsky made himself. Boris political foe, the Boyar Prince Shuisky, was the powerful tenor Yevgeny Akimov, who has graduated from singing the Simpleton when Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted a concert performance of Boris at the Hollywood Bowl in 2007. Still, it was Tilson Thomas vision that dominated. He took a stately approach. Bells and orchestral brilliance brightened the hall when needed. Mainly, though, an understated melancholy from the orchestra pervaded the atmosphere as the monk Pimen (the sonorous bass Maxim Kuzmin-Karavaev) gave a perspective on Russian history or as Boris attempted to groom his son Fyodor (the ardently expressive mezzo-soprano Eliza Bonet) to become a wise leader. All of this made Boris death almost unbearably painful, the life leaving him representing the life leaving the country. In the final scene, Darrah put the public violence on graphic display, but not Tilson Thomas. The orchestra kept its distance from the drama. A weariness had set it, setting the stage for four centuries of Russian struggle to hold together a country ever in search of its soul. So what does this tell us about Vladimir Vladimirovich priorities? We should not forget that he has been an avid supporter of the Mariinsky ever since his days as a vice mayor of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s. He knows his Russian people and his Russian opera. mark.swed@latimes.com An investigation by Special Agents with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has resulted in the arrest of a Chattanooga teenager, who is charged with the abuse and murder of a South Pittsburg toddler.At the request of 12th District Attorney General J. Michael Taylor, on September 19, 2016, TBI Special Agents joined investigators with the South Pittsburg Police Department in investigating injuries sustained by 2-year-old Zayne Harper. Those injuries later resulted in the boys death.During the course of the joint investigation, agents developed information that indicated that the mothers boyfriend at the time of the incident was responsible for the injuries resulting in the death of Zayne.On Monday, juvenile petitions were served on the teen, charging him with one count of first degree murder and one count of aggravated child abuse. Because the male was a juvenile at the time of the incident, his name is not being released. He was booked into the Marion County Jail, where he is being held on an open court bond. For Jared Harris, star of AMCs The Terror, horror doesnt have to involve a serial killer or supernatural beings. The 10-episode limited series, which follows the crews of two Royal Navy ships that become stuck in the ice while looking for the Northwest Passage, reflects a different sort of fear. Its about human horror, Harris says. The scariest monsters are human beings and what we will do to each other. The monster in this show is a catalyst in a way, destroying whatever false ideas of civility and society these people are trying to hang on to as the predicament gets worse and worse. Speaking of civility, it is only right to alert readers that even though the series has ended there are huge plot spoilers from here on in. The dynamic of the men on the two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, shifts over the course of the story, which is based on Dan Simmons 2007 novel (as well as historical fact). The crew is up against the natural elements, as well as a large bear-like creature that begins to attack them. But ultimately its about the lengths someone will go to in order to not die. The first episode unfolds very slowly, a tonal choice that struck Harris immediately. Advertisement Jared Harris as Francis Crozier in The Terror. (Aidan Monaghan / AMC ) WATCH: Video Q&As from this seasons hottest contenders I got sent the script and read it and loved it, he says. The questions I had were about the subtlety and restraint of the first episode. There are 10 does this just become a story of people screaming and running from a monster or does it stay like this? And [the showrunners] said, No, the monster is only an element of it, and its more of a metaphor. Were interested in this dynamic of people and how they screw up each others chances of survival. The story takes place over several years, with large time jumps between some episodes, and Harris Francis Crozier transforms into a reluctant leader over the course of the series, battling self-doubt and alcoholism along the way. Harris was careful to portray Croziers choices in a way that would make sense down the line, constantly asking questions about the characters motives and decisions. In the end, hes the sole survivor, but its a bittersweet conclusion. Why doesnt he go towards full resolution once hes survived? the actor asks. Why does he stay with [the native people]? Well, my answer was He didnt save anybody. He fails to save any of them. It would shame him to show up and just say, I made it, but no one else did. Croziers journey is somebody whos felt the cards were stacked against him and who was overlooked. At the end of the story, theres no recognition for him, theres no redemption for him. The challenges of the role included learning to speak Inuit, which Harris had to do extensively, and pulling off the intense finale episode, which involved feigning cannibalism and fighting a CGI bear while attached to an actual chain. The series, shot over six months, was also filmed in Budapest and Croatia with no real ice in sight. The arctic landscape, a major player in the story line, was created on sound stages and with digital effects later. Still, the focus on realism was essential in allowing the actors to create the mood. Each script told you what the outside temperature was because that would determine how long you could stay out on deck before you froze to death, Harris recounts. And then how far apart the ships are at that point. It was really helpful to know those things. Harris, who is currently shooting Chernobyl, a five-part limited series for HBO, has found a niche in prestige television dramas in recent years, from Mad Men to The Crown. These days he particularly enjoys limited-run shows that allow him to play a character trajectory in full without lingering too long, as with Crozier. He hasnt necessarily planned his career this way beyond simply trying not to play the same role over and over again. After Mad Men I got offered various types of uptight Englishmen, which I wasnt interested in doing, Harris says. I didnt want to repeat myself. Its like what they say about life being a conspiracy theory: When you look backwards, you can see how it seems like everything happened for a reason. But that only makes sense looking back. calendar@latimes.com XXXTentacions rise was as quick as it was controversial. In the past year the rappers homespun brand of hip-hop pushed him to the front of a pack of young emcees looking to disrupt the genre with a new sound. Yet trouble and controversy were never far from XXXTentacion, who was killed in South Florida on Monday afternoon just three months after hitting the top of the charts with his latest album. The Broward County Sheriffs Office confirmed the rapper, born Jahseh Onfroy, was shot outside of Riva Motorsports in Pompano Beach, Fla., by an unidentified gunman who fled the scene after an apparent robbery. Onfroy was rushed to a local hospital, where he was later pronounced dead. He was 20. Advertisement Everyone at Caroline is shocked to learn of the tragic death of Jahseh Onfroy, professionally known as XXXTentacion, said a statement from the label that distributed his music. We extend our heartfelt condolences to his family and loved ones. This time last year, Onfroys burgeoning career was reaching a new peak. Although the Florida native had already amassed a fervent cult following and the attention of major labels over his blistering, lo-fi anthem Look at Me it hit the top 40 of the U.S. pop charts due largely to millions of streams from Spotify and SoundCloud a spat with superstar Drake, who was accused of co-opting its rhythm, put the song and the rapper on mainstream radars. Soon, XXXTentacion (thats X -X -X -Ten-Tah-See-Ohn ") found himself as the face of a movement of SoundCloud rappers upending hip-hop tradition. But as he was becoming a name, Onfroy was sitting behind bars in a Broward County jail, charged with multiple felonies for allegedly beating and strangling his then-pregnant ex-girlfriend in 2016. Onfroy was also accused of false imprisonment and witness tampering and faced up to 30 years in prison. He had pleaded not guilty to the crimes. I looked at him, and Im seeing someone who literally got dealt a bad hand in life, Onfroys manager, Solomon Sobande, told The Times of the first time he met the artist, the two separated by a thick glass partition. Knowing he had all this potential, I was sad for the kid, Sobande continued. Hes got his own issues, but its safe to say he didnt get the fairest hand. Onfroys ascent in music was fierce. He collaborated with Diplo and Noah Cyrus and sold out shows across the country, with fans eager to get close to the enigmatic performer who rarely gave interviews. Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and A$AP Rocky were among his fans, and his debut album, 17, reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200. His music had amassed a billion streams on Spotify; he was selected for XXLs highly coveted Freshman List last year, following the likes of Lamar, J. Cole and Chance the Rapper; and Onfroy scored a distribution agreement to the tune of a reported $6 million between his own imprint and Caroline Records (part of Capitol Music Group). But his soaring success was a case study in separating art from artist as listeners, critics and some of his fans grappled with the real-life troubles he sang about. Born in Plantation, Fla., with a melting pot, as hes put it, of Jamaican, Syrian and Italian heritage, Onfroy had a rough upbringing. His mother struggled to care for him and as a child he was shuttled around to various caregivers. He was always living with other people for years, said half-sister Ariana Onfroy, in a video she posted online. He claims to have fended off a man attacking his mom by biting and slicing him with a glass shard as a 6-year-old. He was expelled from middle school for fighting and tossed out of several more schools before he landed in juvenile detention over a gun charge. When I was younger, it was hard on my mom, because she didnt have my father around or her mother around to even remotely help her, the rapper said in press notes for 17. When she would sing, I saw how her mood changed. During work, she used to leave me with people to take care of me. I felt alone, so I would use records as my company. Ive found that music can silence the brain altogether and alter your thought process to where you reach a meditative state. I really connected with artists that displayed real emotion. It didnt take long for Onfroy to turn to music himself as an emotional outlet. He joined his school choir and discovered genres like nu-metal, rock and rap by listening to Papa Roach, Eminem, Nirvana and the Fray. By the time he was 16, he was recording and posting his grungy confessionals to SoundCloud. Music saved me as an individual because I was literally haunted by myself, he said. As a person, I was lost. [Music] gave me a purpose. Within that purpose, I became able to display my pain for others. He channeled the pain and trauma he experienced in his life into his music, tackling heavy subjects like his struggles with mental illness, abuse, suicide and incarceration (he was charged with committing home invasion, robbery and aggravated battery with a firearm in 2015, according to court records). If death is what it seems, why is it so vividly portrayed within my dreams, he wonders on Vice City, an early SoundCloud offering. On 17, a track is dedicated to a 16-year-old girl who committed suicide during a trip to model for him. To make a point about racism, he showed a white child being hanged in a music video. An outlaw attitude paired with a wild, stark appearance the words Numb and Alone were tattooed on his face, along with a broken heart and other scrawlings, and his dreadlocks were evenly split between blond and black fueled his hard image. In fact, his label famously used his mug shot as publicity stills, a move that was part gimmick and part necessity. Despite his mounting troubles, Onfroys career showed no signs of slowing down. Though he was briefly jailed last year after being slapped with 15 felony counts of witness tampering and harassment in connection with the 2016 domestic violence case, he resumed his career after being on house arrest. In March he released what would be his last album, ? It went straight to No. 1, a first for the rapper, due largely in part to his massive following on streaming services which came under fire recently when he was one of two controversial acts targeted by Spotifys Hate Content and Hateful Conduct public policy, a poorly received initiative that saw him and R. Kelly pulled from playlists and algorithmic recommendations. The policy was quickly reversed. On a recent dispatch to fans via Instagram, Onfroy was thinking about how he wanted to be remembered. In a chilling bit of irony, he could be seen waxing poetically about his death while behind the wheel, the place he was later targeted by assailants. Worst thing comes to worst, I die a tragic death or some and Im not able to see out my dreams, I at least want to know that the kids perceived my message and were able to make something of themselves and able to take my message and use it and turn it into something positive, and at least have a good life, he said. If Im gonna die or ever be a sacrifice, I want to make sure that my life made at least 5 million kids happy. gerrick.kennedy@latimes.com For more music news follow me on Twitter:@GerrickKennedy Love Is_, premiering Tuesday on the OWN network, is let us get this straight right away not a television adaptation of that strange, strangely long-lived single-panel comic in which a naked man and woman, drawn like children, illustrate completed thoughts along the lines of Love is being there or Love is getting flowers and its not even your birthday. Horrible to contemplate. Rather, and fortunately for the culture, it is the creation of Mara Brock Akil, earlier the creator of Girlfriends and Being Mary Jane, and her husband, Salim Akil, the showrunner on Black Lightning, based on their own story of falling in love in the late 1990s. Handsomely mounted with a cast combining fresh faces and old pros, it is a mix of more and less successful ideas and effects. Admittedly, some of what works less well for me the instant romance at the storys heart, the heartfelt musings on the course of life, the talk of dreams and realizing them is just what will draw other viewers in. Advertisement The story is framed within a documentary set a decade hence, as future Nuri (Wendy Davis) and Yasir (Clarke Peters) look back three decades to how they met, fell in love and got together. These scenes, addressed to the camera against a blue background, have something of the flavor of a jewelry-store commercial, the eminence of the actors notwithstanding. Michele Weaver plays Nuri, a young television writer based on Mara Brock Akil, co-creator of the OWN romantic drama Love Is__. (Michael Desmont Photography/Warner Bros./OWN ) The story itself begins in 1996, in Hollywood, at the real-life Insomnia Cafe locals will note a preponderance of locations in the Beverly Boulevard/Melrose Avenue area as Nuri (Michele Weaver) and Yasir (Will Catlett) briefly meet. A year later, they will meet again, and within what seems like minutes but is actually hours they will be declaring their love. Nuri is a staff writer on a black sitcom called Marvin, on a network resembling the late UPN with perhaps a touch of the WB home in the 90s to Moesha, on which Brock Ali was a writer, Malcolm & Eddie, The Hughleys and Homeboys in Outer Space, and eventually to Girlfriends. Yasir has ambitions to write and direct but no practical advantage over any of the hundreds of other Hollywood hopefuls with a script in hand, or any professional contacts at all. Oddly, he and Nuri dont discuss movies at all. In the usual way of such stories, whether done as comedy or drama or somewhere in between, each has a best friend, more skeptical, cynical and funny and less conventionally attractive than themselves. (To be fair, the Akils do have movie-star looks.) His is Sean (Tyrone Brown, played by Tim Reid in the future scenes), happily aimless, aimlessly happy. Hers is Angela (the winning Idara Victor, later Vanessa Bell Calloway), a fellow staff writer further along in her career. The scenes with their friends tend to be livelier and lighter and more ordinarily lifelike than those that Nuri and Yasir have together. They keep Love Is_ from sinking under the weight of its own ardent sincerity. As the showrunner on Nuris series, Kadeem Hardison, whose own 90s black sitcom roots are in A Different World, provides similar relief from the repeated declarations of love. (Though, refreshingly, there is little in the way of sex this is a show about delayed gratification, with an unusual sense of modesty.) Will Catlett plays Yasir, a young man with dreams of directing, based on Salim Akil, co-creator of the OWN network series Love Is__. (Michael Desmond Photography/Warner Bros./OWN ) Also traditional to the genre are other romantic involvements to be put aside. Nuri already has three men on the hook a TV takeout chill guy, a church first communion brunch guy, a whirlwind weekend until hes my hubby guy. (Mostly, she loves her work.) Yasir, for his part, is still living with a longtime, recently ex-girlfriend, Ruby (Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing), sleeping on her couch and contributing little to their household. That Ruby is less than impressed that he has worked out the ending to his third script at first seems cold. But as time goes on, it gets easier to see her point; yet as Love Is_ moves on, their relationship can seem more solid and affecting than the one at the series heart. They have a history, and the show is at its best at its most particular. The old formula of Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl here runs more something like Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, with further instructions to randomly repeat. Eventually, we see from the start, boy will get girl, and girl will get boy, though knowing how it all ends 30 years later with none of the fatal diseases, traffic accidents or going off to fulfill a promise greater than the love between two people does take a little off the edge of the drama. Maybe thats a good thing so much edge around these days! Love Is_ Where: OWN When: 10 p.m. Tuesday Rating: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14) ALSO Being Mary Jane will end its run on BET with a two-hour movie in 2018 Black Lightning delivers a jolt of reality to CWs superhero lineup `Girlfriends feels left out of the clique robert.lloyd@latimes.com Follow me on Twitter at @LATimesTVLloyd From an update on a West Adams restaurant from chef Daniel Patterson to Roy Chois current status in Koreatown, heres whats happening in our food and drink world. Alta update Chef Daniel Patterson is getting closer to opening his West Adams restaurant called Alta Adams The chef, known for his three-Michelin star San Francisco restaurant Coi, and for opening the Locol restaurants and food trucks with Roy Choi, plans to open Alta Adams sometime between mid-July and August, on West Adams between Hauser and South Redondo boulevards. Alta Adams will highlight a menu of healthful soul food. Patterson tapped chef Keith Corbin, who was part of the team that helped open Locol in Watts, to helm the kitchen. Corbin will be making dishes such as oxtails and rice; and grilled, spiced okra over succotash. Beverage director Aaron Paul is putting together a selection of cocktails, wine and beer for the restaurant. And next to Alta Adams will be Adams Coffee Shop, a shop designed in collaboration with West Adams resident David Irvin, that will be outfitted with pieces from local artists. Adams Coffee Shop will serve drip coffee and espresso drinks from Coffee Manufactory, the coffee company started by Chad Robertson (chef-owner of the Bay Areas Tartine Bakery and Tartine Manufactory) and Chris Jordan (recently chief executive for Verve Coffee Roasters). There will also be pastries, breakfast and lunch items. Adams Coffee Shop, 5359 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles | Alta Adams, 5357 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, www.dpgrp.co. Bigmistas closing Long Beach is about to lose some serious BBQ. Neil Strawder and his wife Phyllis announced they would close Bigmistas Barbecue & Sammich Shop in a cryptic post on the Bigmistas website. The restaurants last day of service is July 1. Strawder, who started barbecuing as a hobby, then joined the competition circuit and sold his barbecue at farmers markets, opened his first bricks-and-mortar restaurant in Long Beach in 2014. He opened a second restaurant, Big Mistas Morning Wood, in 2015, but closed that location earlier this year. In the post, Phyllis writes that she and Neil are moving out of state. You can still get your BBQ fix from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sundays, until the end of the month. Heres to hoping wherever the Strawders land, there will be BBQ. 3444 N. Los Coyotes Diagonal, Long Beach, (562) 452-6565, www.bigmista.com. Koreatown shuffle Roy Choi, the chef who brought you the Kogi BBQ trucks, recently announced that he was leaving his two restaurants at the Line Hotel in Koreatown by the end of July. The hotel, at the corner of Normandie Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard, is home to Chois Pot Lobby Bar (a bar in the lobby), Pot Cafe (a casual cafe that serves coffee and pizza) and Commissary (Chois vegetable-focused poolside restaurant). Weve reached out to his team for comment, but no word yet on what will happen to the restaurants once he leaves. Choi is refocusing his ties with the Sydell Group, the company that owns the Line Hotel, to solely concentrate on plans for a 9,000 square-foot restaurant at the Park MGM in Las Vegas. 3515 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles,(213) 381-7411, www.thelinehotel.com. Barbara Jeans return Jason Fullilove, the chef behind the Barbara Jean LA brunch-only pop-up restaurant at Vinoteque on Melrose Avenue, and some of the best biscuits in Los Angeles, is on the move again. After opening and closing what was meant to be a permanent location for Barbara Jean behind the Melrose Umbrella Co. last year, he transitioned to a brunch-only pop-up at Vinoteque. And now, Fullilove has opened a Barbara Jean restaurant in Culver City, in a former Pei Wei space on Sepulveda Boulevard. While the brunch pop-up is still happening, the new Barbara Jean in Culver CIty is open daily for breakfast and lunch, and will start dinner service tomorrow.You can expect all the top-selling things were known for but were playing around with some new items too, said Fullilove. Its nice to not have to clean up your stuff and leave every two days. We can settle in and do more. While Fullilove doesnt have his dinner menu set quite yet, he said you can expect it to be highly seasonal soul food. 4114 Sepulveda Blvd., Unit E, Culver City, barbarajeanla.com. Hanks in the Palisades Developer and mall owner Rick Caruso, whose company Caruso owns the Grove, the Americana at Brand and the Commons at Calabasas, is opening a retail and restaurant complex in the Pacific Palisades this summer called Palisades Village. Restaurateurs, chefs and brothers Bruce and Eric Bromberg, the duo behind Blue Ribbon Restaurants, plan to open Hanks restaurant at the Village in September. The burger-centric restaurant is meant to be a tribute to Caruso founder Rick Carusos late father, Hank. The all-day restaurant will serve up dishes such as wild mushroom burgers, Blue Ribbons fried chicken and matzo ball soup. Why matzo ball soup and burgers? Bobbie Farberow, who is the wife of Mort Farberow, who opened the now-closed Morts Deli in the Palisades in 1972, is working with the Bromberg brothers to bring some of the delis classic dishes to Hanks. The restaurant, designed by Asfour Guzy Architects, will feature a soda fountain counter. Caruso plans to hold the official grand opening for Palisades Village on Sept. 22; other restaurants planned for the center include McConnells Fine Ice Creams, SunLife Organics, Sweet Laurel Bakery and Porta Via. 1030 Swarthmore Ave., Pacific Palisades, www.palisadesvillageCA.com. Downtown Cal Mex The Artisanal Brewers Collective (the Tony Yanow-founded beer-centric group behind Spring St. Bar, Beelmans and Brennans) has closed its Sixth St. Tavern bar and restaurant in downtown L.A. and turned it into Corner Cantina restaurant. The group is dubbing the restaurant Cal Mex with a menu by chefs Trevor Faris and Josh Pressman that includes quesadillas, tacos and nacho platters. The tacos are served on heirloom corn tortillas from Masienda, and the nachos are made with Rancho Gordo Beans (Mexican heirloom beans). The restaurant is also serving the Impossible Foods meat substitute and vegan cheese. (Translation: vegan tacos.) Being an ABC restaurant, you can expect an extensive beer selection. Bar manager Vance Daniels is behind a rotating list of seasonal beers, and the bar will also feature a liquor lineup thats heavy on the tequila and mezcal. The 1,000-square-foot restaurant was redesigned by Melissa Ritchie and now highlights the colors of serape blankets, the traditionally brightly colored blankets and shawls made in Mexico. 630 W. 6th St., Los Angeles, (213) 614-1900, www.cornercantinala.com. jenn.harris@latimes.com Instagram: @Jenn_Harris_ Without warning, she dropped her head and began to cry. Jessica, whose young son played nearby at a South Los Angeles health clinic, put her hands over her face to cover her tears. When I asked what was wrong, she told me her husband had been ordered by Guatemalan gangsters to pay a protection tax or every member of his family would be killed. So they managed to get tourist visas and head north, but now they were in limbo. Theyre too afraid to go back home when their visas expire. But theyre frightened about what might come of them in the United States if they cant get political asylum and choose to overstay their visas, and its easy to understand why. Advertisement For uprooted families crossing the border illegally, rattled by family separation and whatever horrors they may have experienced at home, the current Trump administration policy is to add one more crushing blow in the presidents campaign to make America great again. About 2,000 children have been separated from their parents, and there have been stories of children in cages and toddlers crying. You risk everything to get to the promised land only to find out its just another prison. Child abuse by feds? Thats child abuse, Colleen Kraft, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said Monday. On the day I met Jessica at St. Johns Well Child and Family Center, I also met pediatrician David Bolour, who told me many of his patients from Central America have physical problems caused by the psychological and emotional damage theyve suffered. I had a 6-year-old who witnessed his grandfathers hands being chopped off right in front of his eyes, Bolour said. Were causing twice the trauma to both the parents and their children, said Hilda Cruz of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity. Can you imagine this? These children have gone through so much violence in their hometowns, and then they get to a place that doesnt recognize them as human beings. Jessica, her husband and son live in one small room of a house shared with four other people. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times ) Even some Republican leaders suggested Trump stop separating families. But as of Monday, the president was still barking like a bulldog. The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility, Trump said defiantly. Not on my watch. A real tough guy, huh? Lets make the kids cry. We get it already, Mr. President. Good job on the sweeps. Keep talking about the wall. Lets stoke fear and division whenever and wherever possible. We know who you are by now. But this is different. These are children, not political pawns. And by separating them from their parents, youre separating us from our values. Those who argue that the United States cant be expected to solve all the worlds problems, or provide shelter and comfort to everyone who chooses to cross the border illegally because of corruption and violence in their own countries, have a point. We cant do all that. But what kind of country, richer than any other, tells destitute victims of rape, domestic abuse and gang violence that not only are they unwelcome here, but well punish them and their children by locking them up separately before shipping them back to the nightmare they fled? A lack of compassion The threats are real, and you can see it in the physical trauma people have suffered, Cruz said. Especially when people retell their stories, you can see it in the pain they carry. Im really saddened by the lack of compassion were showing. Four years go, Cruz and I met with a 30-year-old refugee from El Salvador who was being hosted by an aunt and assisted by the Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino while she awaited a deportation hearing. She wore an ankle monitor, had her 6-year-old son with her, and told us about paying thousands of dollars in extortion to gang members for the privilege of running a small store. She told me and Cruz she had witnessed the slaughter of a neighboring family that refused to pay extortion, and four of her relatives had been murdered. Her aunt in Los Angeles sent her $3,500 for coyotes, who then locked the woman and her son in a warehouse in Mexico and threatened to torture them unless the aunt sent another $3,500, which she did. Theyre fleeing for their lives, Jessica Dominguez, an immigration attorney in the San Fernando Valley, told me of some of her clients. She introduced me, on the phone, to a young Salvadoran man named Armando. He ran for his life three years ago, when he was 15, and settled in Miami. I asked Armando why he left home. Because gang members had recruited him and two cousins to extort business owners, he said. My family didnt want me to participate, he said, so he refused. So did his two cousins, both of whom were tortured. One of them had his fingernails removed, according to Armando, and the other had a metal shard driven through his mouth and into his skull. Both were murdered. Armando headed north. Dominguez said that for Armando and others, telling their stories wont win them legal protection here. Every asylum case is based on credibility, she said. You have to get a report from the country youre coming from, and you have to have evidence to back it up. But its not easy to get that. Wouldnt you do the same thing? Dominguez told me that in the case of Jessica, the woman from the health clinic, she has an angle she might be able to work on an asylum case. Jessicas husband said he suffered burns in a bomb attack on a bus and believes he was targeted for not bowing to the extortionists. Dominguez told him to see if he can dig up a report on the crime. Like I said, you cant open the door to everyone with a problem in another country, especially when weve got plenty of our own issues to deal with. Its not fair to those who wait years for legal passage, theres a cost borne by taxpayers, and theres an impact on wages in some industries. But this country has no room to lecture the world on greatness, virtue or morality as long as were the ugly, heartless barbarians who turn our backs to humanitarian crises and tear traumatized children from the arms of their parents. Instead of making their lives more miserable when they arrive, decent people might instead ask what we would have done in their situation. Get more of Steve Lopezs work and follow him on Twitter @LATstevelopez A prominent architect known for designing movie theaters and sound studios for some of the biggest names in Hollywood has been arrested and charged with multiple counts of child molestation involving two girls. Jeffrey Cooper, 66, was arrested by L.A. County Special Victims Unit detectives Monday on eight charges of child molestation, court records show. Among the charges, Cooper has been accused of oral copulation with a minor and penetration of a child under the age of 10, Los Angeles County Sheriffs records show. For the record: An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect number to contact sheriffs detectives. The correct number is (877) 710-5273. Nicole Nishida, a sheriffs spokeswoman, said that the arrest came after detectives conducted an investigation into allegations that Cooper committed lewd acts with a minor between 2006 and 2016 in Calabasas. Nishida said the victims are two girls. Cooper is accused of committing lewd acts upon one of the girls between November 2006 and November 2007 and then assaulting the second girl on several occasions between January 2012 and July 31, 2016. Advertisement Cooper was taken into custody early Monday morning and held at the Lost Hills sheriffs station, Nishida said. The architect appeared briefly in Superior Court in Van Nuys on Tuesday and entered a not-guilty plea to the charges. A judge set his bail at $5 million and set a hearing for July 5. Booking records show Coopers address as that of the address for Jeff Cooper Architects Inc. His website lists a slew of studios and big Hollywood names as clients, including George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Coopers firm has designed such prominent venues as an Academy of Television Arts and Sciences theater and 17 of the mixing studios that produced Academy Award nominees for sound, according to his firms prospectus on its website. In 2002, Cooper became a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contributions to acoustics and theater design. Cooper remained in custody Tuesday. Sheriffs detectives are on Tuesday asking that anyone with further information concerning Cooper contact them at (877) 710-5273. richard.winton@latimes.com Twitter: @lacrimes UPDATES: 6:14 p.m : This article was updated with details of Coopers arraignment. This article was first published at 1:05 p.m. A search of a felons home in Agua Dulce led Los Angeles County sheriffs investigators to a stash of more than 500 firearms, marking one of the largest seizures from a person forbidden by law from possessing guns. Investigators raided the home of Manuel Fernandez after getting a tip that he had an arsenal of firearms. After entering the property early Thursday, they found a staggering number of weapons, including rifles, shotguns and handguns, some decades old. Fernandez, 60, was arrested after the raid, during which investigators found 432 guns. A search the next day uncovered 91 firearms concealed in the house. Investigators also seized electronics used to purchase the weapons. The investigation led detectives to a woman linked to the firearms purchases. While she was not home, detectives recovered 30 guns from her home, officials said. Advertisement The case is a testament to the communitys involvement in reducing crime and taking guns out of the hands of criminals, Sheriff Jim McDonnell said, citing it as a positive example of the departments see something, say something campaign. Fernandez was arrested on suspicion of being a felon in possession of firearms, a felon in possession of ammunition and possession of large-capacity magazines. His bail was set at $35,000, and he bonded out of jail on Friday. The Sheriffs Department and the California Department of Justice found so many guns that they asked the Bureau Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives for assistance. Investigators spent days checking the weapons to try to determine their history. Sources familiar with the investigation said the owner seems to be a firearms collector as opposed to someone about to use the guns for violence. Sheriffs detectives plan to present a case to the district attorneys office for prosecution, officials said. richard.winton@latimes.com Twitter: @LAcrimes A former Los Angeles police officer who was running a hash oil lab out of a house in Lake Elsinore was sentenced Monday to five years in prison, officials said. Authorities began investigating Joseph Jay Spadafore, 64, after an explosion at the makeshift lab revealed that hed been extracting tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, from marijuana plants using butane, a highly flammable gas, in a volatile process to make hash oil, according to the U.S. attorneys office. Neighbors reported the explosion just before midnight on Nov. 3, and firefighters found the garage engulfed in flames. Spadafore who was an LAPD officer from 1976 to 1991 was the only one living there, though the homeowner thought the place had been rented to someone else, officials said. Spadafore told a fire captain that the blaze may have ignited because hed been draining gas from his motorcycle in the garage, according to a sentencing memo filed by prosecutors. Advertisement But inside the home, firefighters found potentially hazardous lab equipment and flammable chemicals in almost every room. Authorities found between $300,000 and $500,000 worth of drugs. Authorities seized at least 22 propane tanks, dozens of soda kegs and other large containers filled with extracted THC, jars of THC powder and trash bags filled with marijuana, officials said. They found more than 28 liters of hash oil in the home, which authorities said had been converted almost entirely into a drug lab. Two guns were also found: one, loaded, under Spadafores pillow and another between the mattress and the box spring, prosecutors said in the filing. In March, a jury convicted Spadafore of one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises. The jury found him not guilty of possessing firearms in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, and there was a mistrial on two other counts: possession with intent to distribute hashish oil and endangering human lives while manufacturing controlled substances. Prosecutors had argued that a 6 -year sentence was appropriate because of the risk the lab posed to the neighborhood. They said it was necessary to deter others from manufacturing drugs, especially in residential neighborhoods. They also cited Spadafores conduct when firefighters arrived, saying the former cop did nothing to warn them of the dangers inside the home. At the sentencing, Judge John F. Walter indicated that Spadafores lack of remorse for not warning first responders about the hazards played into the sentence, the U.S. attorneys office said. Walter also rejected Spadafores argument that he was crashing at the house because he needed a place to sleep, finding that the defendant was involved in the drug manufacturing and kept the guns to protect himself and the drugs, officials said. alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com Twitter: @AleneTchek Authorities have identified a girl shot and killed in her car Monday morning as 17-year-old Kayla Yolanda Huerta, of Wilmington. Her family told reporters at a vigil Monday night that Kayla had a 3-year-old daughter and wanted to pursue higher education after high school. She wanted to show her daughter better in life. She goes, Im going to go to school and Im going to accomplish something, Yolanda Gonzales, Kaylas grandmother, told CBSLA. Kayla was found dead in her car around 2:30 a.m. Monday on the 700 block of West Sepulveda Street in San Pedro, police said. Police first said the victim was a 25-year-old woman, but coroners officials identified her Tuesday morning as a 17-year-old, who would have come of age in August. Advertisement Who killed 17 year old Kayla Huerta? The single mother was shot & killed in a San Pedro neighborhood. The latest on KCAL at 10 and @CBSLA at 11. pic.twitter.com/kkCupkXAPD Chris Holmstrom (@ChrisVHolmstrom) June 19, 2018 Police are still searching for the shooter, said Sgt. Bradley Hearn of the LAPD Harbor division. Turn yourself in, Gonzales said Monday night on CBSLA, crying, in a plea to the killer. You took something precious away from us and her daughter. Thats all we have now, is her little girl. Anyone with information can call Harbor area detectives at (310) 726-7900. Reach Sonali Kohli at Sonali.Kohli@latimes.com or on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli. Detectives are investigating a fatal shooting in Long Beach early Tuesday, police said. Authorities responded to a shooting call on the 1700 block of Daisy Avenue around 2:45 a.m. and found a man on the sidewalk with gunshot wounds to his upper body, said Long Beach police Lt. Poe Siavii. The man was pronounced dead at the scene, Siavii said. Anyone with information can call Long Beach police at (562) 435-6711. Reach Sonali Kohli at Sonali.Kohli@latimes.com or on Twitter @Sonali_Kohli. Park rangers have found four furry cougar kittens living with their mother in the Simi Hills the first den authorities have found in a small patch of terrain between the Santa Susana and Santa Monica mountain ranges, officials said. The female blue-eyed kittens, now known as P-66, P-67, P-68 and P-69, were found on June 11 while their mother, P-62, was away from her den, the National Park Service announced Tuesday. Wildlife researchers had been tracking P-62 since they first tagged her with a GPS tracker in January and eventually suspected she may be denning as her movements changed. Scientists had to wait until she was sufficiently away from her kittens so they could move in, find them and quickly assess their age, size and other characteristics. The kittens were estimated to be four and a half weeks old and weigh four to five pounds. Advertisement 1 / 5 National Park Service researchers recently discovered a litter of four mountain lion kittens in the Simi Hills, a small area of habitat wedged between the larger Santa Monica and Santa Susana mountain ranges. All four kittens are females and are now known as P-66, P-67, P-68, and P-69. (National Park Service) 2 / 5 National Park Service researchers recently discovered a litter of four mountain lion kittens in the Simi Hills, a small area of habitat wedged between the larger Santa Monica and Santa Susana mountain ranges. All four kittens are females and are now known as P-66, P-67, P-68, and P-69. (National Park Service) 3 / 5 National Park Service researchers recently discovered a litter of four mountain lion kittens in the Simi Hills, a small area of habitat wedged between the larger Santa Monica and Santa Susana mountain ranges. All four kittens are females and are now known as P-66, P-67, P-68, and P-69. (National Park Service) 4 / 5 National Park Service researchers recently discovered a litter of four mountain lion kittens in the Simi Hills, a small area of habitat wedged between the larger Santa Monica and Santa Susana mountain ranges. All four kittens are females and are now known as P-66, P-67, P-68, and P-69. (National Park Service) 5 / 5 National Park Service researchers recently discovered a litter of four mountain lion kittens in the Simi Hills, a small area of habitat wedged between the larger Santa Monica and Santa Susana mountain ranges. All four kittens are females and are now known as P-66, P-67, P-68, and P-69. (National Park Service) This is the first litter we have marked at the den in the Simi Hills, which happens to be a critical habitat linkage between the Santa Monica Mountains and larger natural areas to the north, Jeff Sikich, biologist for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, said in a statement. We are very interested to learn about how they will navigate the fragmented landscape and whether they will remain in the Simi Hills or eventually cross one or more freeways to the north or south. Researchers have been concerned about the Santa Monica Mountains puma population for years and recent studies have shown just how isolated that particular group is. Theres the possibility that if more mountain lions arent introduced into the range in the years to come, that group could become extinct. A similar plight faces the pumas living in the Santa Ana Mountains along the I-15 corridor in Orange County. To help boost each groups chance of survival, the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy have worked with outside groups to plan wildlife crossings lined with vegetation, grass and sound barriers that would span the 101 and 5 freeways, respectively. The 101 crossing in Agoura Hills would provide the first permanent, protected structure that pumas could traverse between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Simi Hills. The Simi Hills, meanwhile, generally serve as a transitory landscape for wildlife moving north into the Santa Susana Mountains if they can cross the 118 Freeway, and sometimes even farther into Los Padres National Forest in Santa Barbara County. Mountain lions have been documented moving south into the Santa Monica Mountains, but those efforts are rare and often deadly. joseph.serna@latimes.com For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter. Testifying before legislators at the state Capitol on Monday, an attorney for USC defended its response to misconduct reports against a campus gynecologist, saying the universitys decision to force the physician out through a secret internal process worked efficiently. The doctor was suspended and removed from the patient setting, said Keith Carlson, an outside lawyer for USC. He added that from the time the university launched the investigation in June 2016 that led to Dr. George Tyndalls departure, he never saw another USC student. The lawyers statements to a committee looking into how the medical profession deals with sexual misconduct complaints struck a different tone than previous messages in which university officials have expressed regret about their handling of Tyndall. Administrators have said that while USC did not have a legal duty to report Tyndall to the state medical board, the agency that protects the public from problem doctors, they should have done so anyway. Advertisement Since The Times revealed the long history of complaints against Tyndall, more than 400 people have contacted a hotline for former patients to report misconduct. The Los Angeles Police Department said it has been in contact with 135 women about Tyndall and served search warrants at the doctors home last week. In lawsuits and interviews, women have alleged mistreatment by Tyndall dating to the late 1980s, with many saying they had thought their experiences were isolated until reading The Times report. Tyndall has denied any misconduct and said the care he provided was thorough but appropriate. In his testimony in Sacramento to a committee chaired by state Sen. Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo), Carlson suggested that dealing with Tyndall quietly as a human resources matter was far more efficient than pursuing the sort of peer review and investigation that often results in a report to the medical board. He said that Tyndall alleged during the investigation that he was being retaliated against as a whistleblower, raising the prospect in the universitys eyes that he might sue to get his job back. USC offered Tyndall a monetary settlement to resign and he accepted. The terms are confidential. The university chose to enter into a settlement agreement [with Tyndall] to eliminate the chance of him ever being reinstated by a court, Carlson said. At the time, he said, no patients had alleged actual sexual misconduct and Tyndall, then 70, told administrators he planned to retire. Another USC representative briefly addressed the committee and offered apologies to Tyndalls patients. Martha Escutia, vice president of government relations, said, We have made significant changes in leadership, policies and procedures at the student health center and are confident this will not happen again. The lawyers testimony came in for heavy criticism by other committee witnesses. John Manly, an attorney who represents more than 100 former patients, ridiculed his description of the process as efficient. It was efficient in hiding systemic molestation and abuse of women, Manly said. It was not efficient in helping my clients or the victims. Lucy Chi, a 2014 graduate who was treated by Tyndall and is now suing the university, said administrators should have gone to the police about the gynecologist when complaints first surfaced in the 1980s. USC was complicit in putting tens of thousands of women in danger of sexual abuse by George Tyndall, Chi said. Of Carlsons contention that the university investigation in 2016 turned up no patient complaints of sexual misconduct, she said, I wonder what questions they were asking and who they were asking. The scandal over how USC handled complaints against the physician has roiled the campus and led to the departure of the schools president, C.L. Max Nikias. USC hired the law firm OMelveny & Myers to investigate Tyndall and reporting failures at the campus clinic. The U.S. Department of Education announced earlier this month that it has launched an investigation into how USC handled the misconduct complaints and rebuked the university for what it alleged was improper withholding of information about Tyndall during a previous federal investigation. harriet.ryan@latimes.com @latimesharriet At a town hall Monday, Congresswoman Nanette Diaz Barragan alleged that people were paid to pose as residents to speak out in support of an embattled water district, marking a strange twist in the ongoing controversy over discolored water pouring out of taps in Compton and Willowbrook. The Sativa Los Angeles County Water District serves about 1,600 ratepayers in a half-mile area of Compton and Willowbrook. Residents have been complaining about brown-colored water with a foul odor. Last week, local officials began the process of dissolving the water district. But the district and L.A. County officials insist the water is safe to drink. Before taking questions about water quality at Mondays meeting, Barragan (D-San Pedro) showed a Craigslist ad offering jobs in political advocacy to African Americans and Latinos, with pay up to $40 and an additional bonus. The ad did not mention posing as residents of the areas served by Sativa. Advertisement Did anyone come because of this? she said looking around, her arm raised. Compton resident Maria Villarreal holds up a bottle containing brown water that she said came from the tap in her home. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times ) The crowd of more than 50 people gasped and looked around. Most turned to a small group of six people holding signs defending the water district. One seated man waved a sign at the cameras. It read: No Compton take over. Other signs read: Bad water myth created, sue for millions and No dissolution, no higher rates. Barragan told the crowd it was a shameful tactic that people were paid to come to a meeting intended to address real concerns. If youre paid to be here tonight and you do not live in the Sativa district, I ask that you to sit quietly and do not participate in the Q & A part, she said. Sativa General Manager Maria Garza denied knowing about people being paid to attend the meeting or that a Craigslist ad existed. She said Barragan did not ask her about the ad. I dont know anything about it, Garza said. I have no idea what that is about, but Ill check with my district staff. Most residents came to express concerns over the quality of the water. Some said brown and yellow-brown water has been coming out of faucets for about two years but worsened earlier this year. Others wanted to know what the water district was doing to fix the issue. When it was Maria Villarreals turn to speak, she pulled out a water bottle with dark brown water and complained the district wasnt doing enough to address the water problems in the city. She said she had complained to the water district many times. Im tired and they dont do anything, she said, before storming away. Villarreal said she was disturbed that people were paid to attend the meeting. She said people have real issues and felt the tactic was taking the spotlight away from the real issue: water quality. Sitting next to her was Patsy Williams, who said she was upset to hear about the Craigslist ad. She said the water district doesnt do enough and this is just their tactic to keep people from talking about the problem. Im very upset. Eddie Lewis, 72, said he wasnt surprised by the ad and believes that the water district paid people to pose as residents at the meeting in support of the district. They think were fools but were not, he said. Theyre spending money on having people come to the meeting rather than spending it on fixing our pipes. He said the water district is trying to make it seem as if residents are the problem. Were not the troublemakers, Lewis said. ruben.vives@latimes.com For more Southern California news, follow @latvives on Twitter. In the early weeks of January 1942, relying on an old Worlds Fair guidebook to find his way, Reinhard Hardegen brought his German U-boat near the mouth of New York Harbor. A kapitanleutnant at the time, the equivalent rank of a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, he was close enough to shore that, standing on his submarines bridge in the dark of night, he could watch the Ferris wheel turn above Coney Island, spot the headlights of cars and see the distant glow of skyscrapers in Manhattan. I cannot describe the feeling with words, he wrote in a memoir, but it was unbelievably beautiful and great. We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked out upon the coast of the USA. That same night by then, the morning of Jan. 15, 1942 Hardegen and his crew fired torpedoes at the Coimbra, a British tanker carrying oil off Long Island. Thirty-six crew members were killed as the ship sank, its bow pointing out of the water like a buoy that, Hardegen declared, marked the way to New York City. Advertisement In two patrols along the East Coast, Hardegen who went on to achieve the rank of lieutenant commander sank about two dozen merchant ships, part of a German military campaign to sever the supply chain between the United States and Britain. He became a hero in Germany, where Adolf Hitler awarded him the countrys highest military honor. But he later disavowed any support for the Nazi party, became involved in German state politics and returned to the United States to speak with veterans groups and meet with the families of his wartime victims. He was 105, and considered the last surviving captain of a U-boat, when he died June 9, apparently in Germany. Christian Weber, president of the Bremen State Parliament in Germany, confirmed the death but did not provide additional information. A onetime navy aviator, Hardegen joined the German submarine division after a plane crash left him with a shortened leg and chronically bleeding stomach. He had to conceal his injuries to enter the U-boat force, according to a 2009 account in the Virginian-Pilot, but soon rose to command a submarine that sank several vessels off western Africa. In December 1941, days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States and began its U-boat campaign, dubbed Operation Drumbeat. Hardegen was given command of U-123, and on Jan. 12, 1942, about three weeks after departing from the German base in France, his submarine sank the British freighter Cyclops near Nova Scotia, killing 99 crew members. It was the first of nearly 400 Allied ships sunk during the campaign, according to historian Michael Gannons book Operation Drumbeat. The loss of supplies constituted a greater strategic setback for the Allied war effort than did the defeat at Pearl Harbor, he wrote. By Gannons count, about 5,000 people were killed by the U-boat attacks. Hardegen was credited by Gannon with sinking or crippling 19 ships; other sources credit him with downing about two dozen. In the absence of mandatory blackouts, Hardegen was able to spend weeks at sea targeting tankers and freighters illuminated by the glow of city lights. He later told the Charlotte Observer that he was very surprised at the lack of maritime defenses no blackouts, no dimming, nothing and was among several German naval commanders to describe Americas Atlantic coast as a shooting gallery. The waters off Cape Hatteras, in North Carolina, became known as Torpedo Junction for the U-boats that preyed there, and sailors bodies regularly washed ashore. Hardegen, however, said he did his best to mitigate losses and assist survivors. In accounts that Gannon corroborated, Hardegen said he approached one lifeboat to give the survivors buckets of food, along with a knife; on another occasion, he stopped a neutral Swiss ship and ordered it to pick up survivors from a sunken merchant vessel. Everyone stood at the railing, waved and wished us a good homecoming, Hardegen wrote in his captains log. Lets hope that they tell this at home and effectively dampen the atrocity propaganda about us. Though most U-boat attacks occurred miles from shore, Hardegen terrorized the Florida coast on April 10, 1942, when he fired a torpedo into the SS Gulfamerica in shallow waters off Jacksonville Beach. Within minutes, flames erupted from the tanker and residents ran to the beach. Hardegen was close enough to see their faces, according to a subsequent account in the Orlando Sentinel, and positioned his submarine between the beach and the crippled ship to fire shells from his deck cannon, sinking the Gulfamerica. Nineteen crew members were killed, and civilians clambered aboard rowboats to rescue the survivors. Hardegen recalled nearly being sunk by a destroyer near St. Augustine, Fla., but returned to Europe to fanfare from Hitler, who awarded him the Knights Cross with oak leaves and invited him to a private dinner. The son of a high school teacher who wrote biographies of naval heroes, Hardegen was born in Bremen on March 8, 1913. He entered the Navy in 1933 and became a submarine instructor in late 1942, after his meeting with Hitler. He later became chief of U-boat training and was transferred to command of an infantry unit near the close of the war. Hardegen spent one year in British captivity during peacetime, apparently because of a mix-up with an SS officer who shared his last name, and eventually founded an oil company in Bremen. For two decades, he also served in the Bremen State Parliament as a member of the Christian Democratic Union party. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Hardegen made a well-publicized return to the U.S. after the publication of Operation Drumbeat, saying he wanted to show Americans that the enemies of yesterday are friends of today. His car he reportedly drove until he was 100 bore a license tag reading U-123, but he said he had otherwise moved far past military life. Now I sink putts, he told the Journal-Constitution. Not ships. Ever since the Texas legislature last year passed one of the countrys most aggressive anti-sanctuary city laws, some enclaves have fought officials over the extent to which police can ignore federal immigration law. The state regulation known as Senate Bill 4 has been described by opponents as the show your papers law for allowing officers to ask about the immigration status of anybody arrested or detained. For the record: An earlier version of this article said the freedom city movement gained support on the City Council in Houston. It should have said Dallas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the law in May 2017, and Austin was among the first cities to challenge it in federal court. The law is currently in effect while a case against it proceeds. The Trump administration, in the midst of legal battles against some states and cities for their sanctuary policies, has cheered Texas even as officers in cities such as Houston and Austin have rarely used the law to ask immigration questions. Some cities have indeed followed a part of the Texas law that calls for police to hold detainees believed to be in the country illegally. Advertisement The White House has said dozens of sanctuary cities and counties in the country are breaking federal law for not fully cooperating with immigration authorities and has threatened to withhold public safety grants from them. The Texas governor has shared a similar argument, and echoed Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions in his belief that sanctuary cities promote crime. Amid the controversy over sanctuary cities, Austin this month took its fight against strict immigration law enforcement a step further by declaring itself to be the first freedom city in Texas. City Council members unanimously passed two resolutions last week that will restrict police attempts to question immigrants about their status and curtail arrests for nonviolent crimes. One of the new city resolutions requires officers who question immigrants about status to also say that their questions about immigration need not be answered. The other resolution directs police to avoid arrests for misdemeanors, including those for smoking marijuana, having drug paraphernalia, and taking part in petty theft crimes that city data shows frequently end in arrests of black and Latino residents. While Austin is among the countrys first so-called freedom cities, its part of a wider movement around decriminalizing low-level offenses and decreasing arrests. According to Local Progress, a national network of progressive city officials, some council members in El Paso and Dallas are also considering freedom city proposals. Poor people of color in our city are over-punished and over-incarcerated, said Greg Casar, an Austin City Councilman who pushed for the resolutions. If people are being arrested less, we can also prevent people from being put in the deportation pipeline. We found that black and Latino residents comprised 75% of discretionary arrests for driving with licenses invalid in the city even though they are 45% of the population of the city, Casar said. Black residents are seven times more likely to be arrested for low-level marijuana violations despite having comparable rates of usage of marijuana to white residents. Casar said the new rules could prevent up to 1,000 low-level arrests each year. Austin police arrest around 30,000 people a year. Austins new rules passed Friday after more than 100 residents spoke about them at a City Council meeting. While support was wide, groups differed on the need for the freedom city title, and what effect it will have. Ken Casady, the Austin Police Assn. president, said that although the police union supported reducing arrests, misleading data were cited to garner support for the resolutions. We do arrest more blacks and Hispanics but the problem we have is that people do not want to look at the reasons why, said Casady. He said he thought marijuana usage in public was higher among among black and Latino residents. That, he believed, leads to disproportionate arrests even if overall usage by white residents was comparable. We will not tolerate being called racists, Casady said. He added that officers do not regularly ask for immigration information when making arrests or writing tickets. To us, this is a symbolic move, he said of the freedom city vote. Nelson Linder, president of the Austin chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said the new moniker largely amounted to city branding. We appreciate the gesture and the idea, said Linder. This city has a history of symbolic overtures, but has been inconsistent in providing the kind of leadership that will implement its own resolutions. While the vote has been applauded, the Austin NAACP will continue to work toward more meaningful and substantial changes, he said. The group has focused on combating segregation and gentrification in the city, as well as boosting education and employment for African Americans in the city and Travis County. The region is still also recovering from a series of mail bombings this year that initially seemed to target black and Latino families. In March, a suspect in the bombings blew himself up as he was being chased by police. Many city activists celebrated the councils decision. These policies will protect the constitutional rights of immigrants and make sure that Austin is a safe place to live for everyone regardless of race or immigration status, Jose Garza, director of the local nonprofit Workers Defense Project, said in a statement. Grassroots Leadership, an Austin nonprofit that pushed the initiative, said in a statement that the councils move was an important first step. This is a long-term struggle and we are in part one of what is actually a decathlon, said Rebecca Sanchez, a representative of Grassroots Leadership. Were committed to fighting for a city where we redefine safety for ourselves and not through badges, and where we determine how our communities thrive. jaweed.kaleem@latimes.com More national headlines Images, stories and now recordings of children yanked from their mamis and papis at the U.S.-Mexico border, then placed in tent cities and former Walmarts, have gone viral. They have shown the world the cruelty of the Trump administration, and an America that nowadays takes the worlds huddled masses yearning to be free and holds them inside cages indefinitely. But this isnt a new story to us in California. Activists here have protested such separations for years; they dont just happen at the border, after all. Such separations were at the heart of the outrage that led the state Legislature to turn us into a sanctuary state at the beginning of 2018. Sacramento understood what the Trump administration doesnt: Splitting up families is not just inhumane and immoral, it devastates communities and hearkens back to some of Americas darkest moments. Politicians nationwide, including Georgia Congressman John Lewis and Texas senatorial candidate Beto ORourke, have slapped back at President Trump and U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, who claim theyre just doing what the majority of Americans want them to do, a sentiment emphasized whenever the government does something ghastly, whether it was slavery or Japanese internment. So its time for California to show further leadership on the issue of protecting people who are in the county illegally from the feds. Our sanctuary state law only solved half the problem. We must do something even more drastic: Deport la migra from California. This isnt as wild a proposal as it appears. Advertisement La migra, for my purposes here, is a term that encompasses the separate agencies of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, because theyre just two sides of the same ugly coin. Just by the raw numbers, their work has been a colossal failure in California. They let transnational cartels drown us in drugs to the point that we had to legalize marijuana to get a handle on the craziness. International sex trafficking rings remain an epidemic; invasive species and pests keep trickling in from across the globe. We have the resources to make migra irrelevant. And immigrants crossing the border illegally? La migra historically has been as successful at stopping them as Clayton Kershaw has been at shutting down opponents during the playoffs. La migra has succeeded at only one thing: terrorizing millions of Californians for nearly a century. Their first job was to keep out the Chinese who were fleeing massacres during the Mexican Revolution. In the 1930s, migra shipped off families some of them American citizens back to Mexico in railroad cars; in one notorious case, they deported en masse a community of over 400 Mexicans who lived on the former Bastanchury Ranch in Fullerton. Agents rounded up immigrants as if they were cattle for Operation Wetback during the 1950s. They persecuted religious activists who offered sanctuary to Central American refugees in houses of worship during the 1980s. And now they arrest parents at schools and homes, in front of their children, with impunity. Fear of them is so hardwired into the California Latino mind that a popular schoolyard game is called La Migra. Teams split into agents and immigrants, someone shouts La migra! at the top of their lungs, and agents chase the immigrants. Its a game I played nearly 35 years ago, and that my friends children still play. Knowing its under attack by California, but has the blessings of the president, la migra is now ratcheting up its actions in the state. In March, two undocumented immigrants died in a car crash in Delano because they were trying to evade migra agents who were looking for someone else. This paper recently reported that federal immigration authorities are breaking longstanding protocols by deporting people with a warrant out for their arrest instead of turning them over to law enforcement for criminal prosecution. (Go ask Central America how cavalierly deporting gang members worked out there.) Thats why California should act now. We have the resources to make migra irrelevant. The California National Guard can check out anyone who wants to come in. Police and sheriffs deputies can go after people who commit actual crimes in our communities without harassing people who dont have papers. Other California government entities have already shown its surprisingly easy to undermine migra. Last year, California Labor Commissioner Julie Su told her staff to keep them out of her departments office because they kept showing up to intimidate people who had filed claims against bad bosses. The Santa Ana City Council also terminated its contract to house their detainees for ICE in the city jail after multiple complaints from residents. In addition to the sanctuary state bill, Gov. Jerry Brown also signed into law rules that severely restrict migra from entering schools and that set aside $10 million so that unaccompanied minors can lawyer up. And lets not forget the courageous example of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who put out the alarm when ICE was preparing raids across her city in February. But we need more. This includes migra agents, many of whom are Latino. To them, I say this: You are the people who hear the screams of children, who see the tears of parents. Join the rest of California in resisting your immoral bosses. Resist migra. Resist, migra. Resist. mexicanwithglasses@gmail.com Twitter: @GustavoArellano To the editor: I have a crazy idea for curbing CEO pay. My idea is to do what has worked in the past. From 1933-81, the United States top marginal tax rates were very high (more than 90% in the 1950s). As op-ed article writer Dean Baker notes, during that time, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 20 or 30 to 1. Also during that time working-class incomes went up, the poverty rate dropped and the workweek was set at 40 hours. Almost all working-class income gains for the last 100 years happened when taxes were high. The effective income cap prevented the rich from taking a disproportionate share of the national income like they do when taxes are low. The great American middle class was created and thrived when taxes were high. Advertisement If we want to reverse soaring income inequality, we need to restore the high tax rates that existed before Reaganomics, which was invented by the rich to serve the rich. Jeff Christie, Woodland Hills .. To the editor: Not since the robber barons of the so-called Gilded Age has the gap between the rich and the poor been so wide. I believe in capitalism; however, when the typical CEO makes 127 times what his or her workers earn, the system is exploitative and unfair. As Baker points out, some CEOs are collecting as much as 3,000 times what their employees make. Profit-making companies should be required to direct a certain percentage of their income to their employees. In that manner, the workers would share in the profits based on the sweat of their efforts. Lets have a true trickle-down economic system, where tax revenues would increase and our country would develop the economy it deserves. William E. Farris, Santa Ana Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook To the editor: Can a Muslim be a real American? The crescent-marked headstones at Arlington National Cemetery answer that question in full. (Islam Is an American religion too, Mr. President, Opinion, June 14) However, those fallen patriots tell us nothing about Islam as a global force. Look at parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and you see tension and conflict in places where Muslims share space with non-Muslims. You see modernity despised. You see martyrdom honored as a service to God. To the extent that Muslims depart from the more barbaric teachings of radical Islam, they can indeed be as American as anyone else. Beyond our shores, the more pertinent question is whether Islam can find peace with the 21st century. Michael Smith, Cynthiana, Ky. Advertisement .. To the editor: Op-ed article writer Salam Al-Marayati outlines a troubling situation that really needs to be addressed. I have a friend who is convinced that all Muslims have a wish to take over the Western world. He quotes from the Koran to prove his point that Islam demands that all non-believers must die. Yet we have a mutual friend, a very good friend, who is a Muslim from Iran. Others in our group of friends agree he is a great guy and as loyal an American citizen as anyone. I maintain that there are fanatics in every society, and that no ethnic or religious group is 100% of like minds. Every society has its share of haters; ours is no exception. Robert J. Evans, Los Angeles Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook In a bid to revive the Republican effort to roll back the Affordable Care Act, a group of leading conservative healthcare advocates is proposing a new strategy to overhaul the law. The plan -- which is outlined in a seven-page blueprint unveiled Tuesday faces long odds on Capitol Hill, where GOP leaders remain wary of reopening the healthcare debate after last years failed repeal efforts embarrassed the party and fueled a broad public backlash. But the new call for a repeal push underscores how committed many Republicans remain to scrapping the 2010 law, often called Obamacare. And the plans recommendations may serve as a guidepost for GOP lawmakers next year, should the party retain control of the House and Senate after this falls midterm elections. Advertisement Its time that Congress provided relief from Obamacares higher costs and reduced choices, notes the report, titled The Health Care Choices Proposal. The reports authors, from the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks, said they hope GOP lawmakers will pass legislation before the election. Rallying anti-Obamacare sentiments has long been an effective GOP campaign slogan and some conservatives are eager to show supporters that they have not given up on repealing the law. The core of the new plan is a proposal to shift hundreds of billions of dollars provided by the healthcare law to expand coverage into block grants to states. A similar concept was rejected by Congress last year. The new approach would scrap many of the current laws insurance protections, including its system of guaranteeing coverage to low-income Americans through either Medicaid or subsidized commercial insurance. The proposal would repeal the individual entitlement to premium and cost-sharing reduction subsidies and Medicaid expansion, note the authors. With the block grant of federal funds, states could craft their own systems for providing coverage, though with several requirements. These include a mandate that at least half of the money be used to help low-income people and that half be used for commercial health insurance, rather than a government program. These two pots of money overlap. This kind of block grant concept had long been popular with conservatives. And this proposal will likely earn praise from many on the right. This week, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant and Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, both conservative Republicans, will be discussing the plan at a gathering in Washington. But Republicans risk a major backlash if they restart their repeal push, as polls show Americans are increasingly supportive of the healthcare laws protections. Democrats and many healthcare activists are already stepping up efforts to make the GOP efforts to roll back the healthcare laws protections a major campaign issue this fall. And on Tuesday, Protect Our Care, an advocacy organization formed to defend the law, announced a new campaign the group said would warn Americans about escalating Republican attacks on Affordable Care Act-guaranteed protections for over 130 million Americans with preexisting [medical] conditions. This new conservative proposal leaves out crucial details about how such a proposal would work, including how the formula for allocating money to states would be structured. Authors of the report said they would let lawmakers on Capitol Hill work that out. The new blueprint sidesteps at least one major issue that helped bring down the GOP repeal campaign last year. Many of the repeal proposals envisioned not only rolling back the current law but restricting federal funding for the entire Medicaid program, which covers more than 70 million low-income Americans. This proposal would only restructure the additional Medicaid funding made available through the 2010 law, leaving the rest of the half-century-old program alone. 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 Senate Republicans mobilized on Tuesday to end the administrations policy of separating children from their migrant parents and the mounting political backlash as President Trump publicly held firm, warning that those illegally crossing the border infest our Country. Yet cracks appeared in the White Houses hard line as well, as outrage against the policy grew amid continued media coverage of bedraggled children penned in austere government detention centers. An administration official suggested the president might sign a narrow bill to address the issue, despite his public demands that any measure include $25 billion for his promised border wall and new limits on legal immigration. The president wants a comprehensive fix, the official stressed, adding, but he is willing to strongly consider legislation that would address the separation issue. Advertisement Late in the day Trump met at the Capitol with House Republicans about their proposals for a comprehensive immigration bill. After rambling remarks, including familiar recollections about his 2016 victory, he spoke little of the controversy over separating families or immigration policy generally, and left without giving party leaders the full endorsement they sought for their bill, according to accounts from those in the room. Hours earlier, in a partisan speech to a friendly small-business organization, Trump stuck to his demand that Congress address the crisis as part of a wide-ranging immigration bill that includes money for a border wall. He ignored calls, including from Republicans, that he could end his own six-week-old policy simply with a word. Faced with the presidents resistance to act, however, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters at the Capitol that Senate Republicans would devise a plan that keeps families together. The plan seems likely to accomplish that by detaining families as a whole, not by allowing them to be free pending a deportation hearing, as was typically the case until last month. McConnells deputy, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), said the Senate could act in a matter of days, hopefully this week. More than a dozen Senate Republicans signed a letter to Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions urging him to suspend family separations until a legislative fix can be signed into law. I dont think anyone has the patience to let him hold children hostage for a wall, one senior Republican aide in the Senate said. He can get that funding the old-fashioned way, through a budget request. It remained unclear, however, whether House Republicans would go along. And Senate Democrats, believing they have the upper hand politically, are resisting giving Republicans help to fix the issue. Legislation is not the way to go here, when its so easy for the president to sign it, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer told reporters. More Republicans echoed that sentiment, even as they searched for legislative fixes. The White House could change it in five minutes, and they should. Its a mistake. Its a change in policy by this administration, said Sen. Lamar Alexander, a senior Republican from Tennessee. Senators in both parties have proposed limited legislation to end the family separations, which have put more than 2,000 children in detention centers since the Trump administration announced its zero tolerance policy six weeks ago. Many parents now face criminal as well as civil prosecution, and because children cant be jailed with their parents, they are detained separately. All Senate Democrats have endorsed a bill by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, while Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican facing reelection in Texas, where much of the crisis is playing out, has proposed a separate measure. The proposals take different tacks to prevent the Department of Homeland Security from separating children from their parents at the border. Backlash builds against Trumps policy splitting families at border, as he falsely blames Democrats Trump, in his earlier remarks to the National Federation of Independent Business, reiterated that he doesnt want families split, yet defended the policy as putting a stop to thousands of child smugglers crossing the border. The president assailed proposals like Cruzs to provide more immigration judges to expedite the backlog of asylum cases at the border. His Justice Department recently announced it was sending 18 additional judges to the border region, however. Cruzs bill calls for hundreds more. I dont want judges. I want border security, Trump said in an extraordinary attack on the longstanding immigration courts system. We have to have a real border. Not judges. Thousands and thousands of judges they want to hire. Who are these people? The president riffed for nearly 20 minutes at the business luncheon on the topic of immigration, veering from scripted lines demonizing child smugglers and Democrats to an aside blaming Mexico for allowing smugglers and drug traffickers to reach the border. Mexico, they do nothing for us, Trump said. Try staying in Mexico a couple days see how long that lasts. The president asserted that the administrations choice on family separations was a hard but necessary one: We can either release all immigrant families and minors who show up at the border from Central America, he said. Or we can arrest the adults for the federal crime of illegal entries. He added: Those are the only two options: Totally open borders or criminal prosecution for lawbreaking. Trump attacked the news media for its reporting on the border crisis. Since late last week, the near-blanket television coverage and published reports from the border with images of young children alone inside detention centers and an audio recording of wailing toddlers has spawned one of the largest backlashes of the tumultuous Trump administration. They are fake, he said of the news media, drawing applause. They are helping these traffickers and these smugglers like nobody would believe. They know it. As he has throughout the controversy, Trump attempted to blame Democrats even though it was his administration that formally announced the policy in May, after considering it since the early days of his presidency. The administration opted to shift to a zero tolerance approach with asylum seekers, believing that the separation of immigrant parents and children would serve as a deterrent to illegal immigration. Bridging the differences among Republicans in control of the White House and Congress is essential to getting any immigration legislation into law, and that didnt seem any closer after Tuesdays events. A bigger problem thus far than any policy in particular is the inability to explain it, said Josh Holmes, a Republican consultant and former chief of staff to McConnell. A failure to have a consistent message about what youre trying to accomplish yields the reality to the pictures that youre seeing on TV, and the pictures that people are seeing are horrifying. As the border crisis showed no sign of ending, only worsening, the question was whether Trump could resist the public pressure to reverse his policy while holding out for legislation. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, whose restrictionist views on immigration often align with the administrations, suggested that Trump, despite his preference for a broad bill that includes border wall funding and limits on legal as well as illegal immigration, would likely accept a narrower measure like the Cruz proposal. I dont see Trump vetoing that if they pass that, Krikorian said. Follow the latest news of the Trump administration on Essential Washington noah.bierman@latimes.com | Twitter: @noahbierman UPDATES: 4:45 p.m.: This article was updated with new details on Senate Republicans and Trumps meeting with House Republicans. This article was originally published at 12:40 p.m. Foes and supporters of the states increased gas tax clashed at the Capitol on Monday, with Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox saying he wants to repeal the new charge because it has become a burden on working Californians straining to fuel their cars. Cox said opponents of the gas tax were not invited to provide their position at a public hearing on the repeal initiative held late Monday by the Senate and Assembly transportation committees, whose chairpersons are Democrats. Clearly the politicians didnt want that here, Cox said during a news conference on the Capitol steps. This gas tax is just one element of how the politicians are doing the bidding of the donors and the special interests, and are ignoring the needs of working Californians. Cox originally planned to testify during the public comment portion of the committee meeting but left after the hearing was delayed by three hours. The comments period was dominated by a large number of supporters of the gas tax. Advertisement Assemblyman Jim Frazier (D-Oakley), chairman of the Assembly panel, said the gas tax and vehicle fees are necessary and he thinks they have voters support. Is it perfect? No, he said during the hearing. But there is a tens-of-billions-of-dollars backlog in repairs that we are not acknowledging. The hearing was called a one-sided railroading of the public initiative process by Republican Carl DeMaio, a leader of the repeal campaign. DeMaio, who heads the group Reform California, testified at the hearing that he opposes the new levy in part because previous gas tax money was not used exclusively to fix roads and bridges. We need to reject the tax increase, DeMaio told the legislators. You should have done [the repairs] by now. Coverage of California politics He noted state Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) was recently recalled from office for voting for the gas-tax increase, and he warned the Democrats at the hearing that some of them may be next to lose their jobs. State legislative analysts and city and county officials said that repeal of last years increase in the gas tax and vehicle fees would cost the state billions of dollars and force the delay of thousands of road and bridge construction projects and mass transit improvements. Hundreds of highway bridges would not receive repair or replacement, said Brian Annis, secretary of the California State Transportation Agency. The bottom line is if the repeal were to occur, pavement would get worse not better. Officials from Merced, Solano and Nevada counties and the cities of Lakewood and Thousand Oaks were among the many local officials who testified that they are already working on fixing their local streets with SB 1 money, and they would be hard-pressed to address deteriorating roads without the gas tax funds. Michael Turner, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said repeal would put many of its projects at risk, including fixing potholes in every Los Angeles County city. DeMaio also charged Monday that state and local government officials are misusing taxpayer resources by erecting signs along many California roadways, including some not currently undergoing construction, touting the law for providing funds to repair streets and bridges. These signs are paid for out of your gas tax dollars, DeMaio said at the news conference with Cox. The only thing that is at work here in our gas tax dollars is a slick deceptive PR campaign designed to keep this tax in place. Caltrans has spent about $33,000 to post about 48 signs on roads and bridges getting makeovers with SB 1 money, said Melissa Figueroa, a state transportation agency spokeswoman. Federal, state and local governments have been posting highway construction signs like this for decades, and its rather ironic that those who claim to represent taxpayers interests now no longer want Californians to know how their tax dollars are being spent, Figueroa said. patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com Twitter: @mcgreevy99 One man has died and another is expected to survive in what authorities say was a random and unprovoked knife attack inside a Burbank fast food restaurant. The incident happened just after 11 a.m. at the Burger King on 545. N. Victory Blvd. when a man armed with a knife entered the restaurant and began stabbing a customer seated inside. Sgt. Derek Green, a spokesman with the Burbank Police Department, said its unknown what prompted the attack as the customer, described as elderly, was with a pair of acquaintances at the time. As the attack was happening, another customer in the restaurant attempted to stop it and got into a struggle with the armed man. Green said the attacker sustained several knife wounds during the struggle that were considered life-threatening. Both men were transported to a hospital for treatment of their injuries while the customer who helped stop the attack was not hospitalized. The suspect in the attack, identified as James Rey Richard Kagaoan, 36, later died from his injuries. Authorities described him as a transient whose last-reported address was in Sun Valley. The investigation into the incident is ongoing and anyone with information on the incident can contact Burbank police at (818) 238-3210. andy.nguyen@latimes.com Twitter: @Andy_Truc UPDATES: 8:05 p.m.: This article was updated to reflect that the suspect died on Tuesday. 2:05 p.m.: This article was updated with more information from Burbank police. This article was originally published at 12:05 p.m. A man accused of attempting to kill a woman he used to date and two other people on Friday was reportedly involved in a domestic-violence incident with her several days earlier, Burbank police say. Authorities said 50-year-old Gilberto Siose reportedly tried to strangle the woman at a home in Glendale on June 12. He is accused of going to the womans home, where he also used to live, in the 1500 block of North Niagara Street in Burbank several days later and trying to kill her. Sgt. Derek Green, a spokesman for Burbank police, said during a press conference that Siose was armed with a handgun when he forced his way inside the home in Burbank. The woman and two of her relatives were in the house at the time. Once inside, he fired several gunshots and deliberately set fire to the combustible items in the home, he said. Officers responded to the home around 10:25 p.m. for a reported restraining-order violation and heard gunshots as they arrived. Its unknown if any shots were fired at the officers. The growing fire could be seen from the street, and the officers entered the home, rescuing the woman along with her relatives. According to Green, Siose was seen fleeing from the burning property. A search for Siose ensued and a perimeter was set up in the area. Officers from the Glendale and Pasadena police departments were called in to help in the search, Green said. While the search was ongoing, the Burbank Fire Department arrived on scene to extinguish the fire, but they were unable to reach the flames. Burbank Police Lt. Claudio Losacco said firefighters were held back from the home because Siose was still on the loose and considered armed. Firefighters were able to partially extinguish the fire, but it soon reignited and fully engulfed the structure. [Firefighters] were able to get close enough to put some water on the fire, and we were able to keep it from spreading to nearby homes, Losacco said. The home itself, where the fire started, was a complete loss. After several hours, officers were able to locate Siose one block away. The suspect did not comply with the directions given by the officers, so a K-9 was deployed to assist with taking the man into custody, Green said. A gun was recovered, and the suspect was treated for injuries he sustained as a result of the K-9 apprehension. Siose was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder and arson of an inhabited dwelling. He also had an outstanding arrest warrant for driving under the influence. He remains in custody in lieu of bail set at more than $6 million. A GoFundMe campaign reportedly started by a neighbor said the womans sisters were trying to get her to leave an abusive relationship. The donated money will be given to the woman and her family for immediate clothing and food expenses, according to the campaigns description. Attempts to reach the campaigns organizer were not returned by press time. As of Tuesday afternoon, it raised $3,160, exceeding the initial $1,000 goal. andy.nguyen@latimes.com Twitter: @Andy_Truc My name is Michelle Figueredo-Wilson. I am a businesswoman, wife and Costa Mesa homeowner on the Westside. Born to a Mexican immigrant father and Angeleno mother, I am a first-generation American. Working within the family business since the age of 15, it has been my mission to help others achieve the American dream and improve their quality of life. I am running for Costa Mesa City Council, District 4, so that the Westside has a seat at the decision-making table. For far too long, the Westside has been a dumping ground for trash and crime. Using my bachelors degree in criminal justice, and my masters degree in public policy-urban affairs from the University of La Verne, accompanied by a keen business sense, I will ensure the Westside is once again a safe and clean place to raise families. There is even the perception that our district is a suitable place for dangerous social experiments, such as drug needle distribution programs and portable toilets for transients. Many of our local businesses and community members have expressed that they no longer feel safe and wish to have the same quality of life as the rest of Costa Mesa. We need a mature leader with life experience who understands our community and will put Costa Mesans first. Together, we can responsibly bring safety and revitalization to our district without returning to the days of overspending and misaligned priorities. This is where we call home. We want to protect the Westside so we have something to leave future generations Westside Costa Mesa resident MICHELLE FIGUEREDO-WILSON is running for City Council in the 4th District. In early 2016, the Orange County Needle Exchange Program began providing free syringes to drug users in Santa Ana under a permit issued by the California Department of Public Health. Since OCNEP ran its program from a table in the Orange County Civic Center outside Santa Ana City Hall, the city also had jurisdiction over the program. The stated goal was to help control the spread of AIDS, hepatitis and other diseases by reducing reuse of hypodermic needles. If a user turned in one needle, he or she would receive 21 clean ones. The more needles turned in, the more needles distributed. What could possibly go wrong? Under California law, any needle-exchange program must provide for the safe recovery and disposal of used syringes and sharps waste from all of its participants. How did this work out? By late 2017, the Santa Ana Civic Center was infested with discarded needles. Needles on the sidewalks. Needles in the planters. Needles in the public bathrooms. There were even needles left in library books. Public employees and other members of the public were pricked due to the profusion of discarded needles. Citing the numerous problems, Santa Ana revoked permission for OCNEP to operate in the Civic Center. Meanwhile, oblivious to local problems, the state renewed OCNEPs permission to operate. Now OCNEP wants to operate a mobile needle exchange, avoiding local land use authority. The needle exchange would operate in Santa Ana, Orange and in Costa Mesa between 16th and 18th streets, from Monrovia west to the Costa Mesa city limit. An OCNEP board member was quoted as saying the area chosen is light industrial and away from residential areas. Has anyone from OCNEP even driven the area? Did they even take five minutes to look at a Google aerial? If they had, they would have seen an area with numerous single-family homes, apartments and several mobile home parks, largely occupied by seniors. They would have seen Whittier Elementary School, just north of 18th. I obtained a copy of OCNEPs application from CDPH under a Public Records Act request. OCNEP ignored any of these sensitive uses in their application to operate. Where asked to list any homeowner or neighborhood groups in the area, OCNEP listed only one association in Newport Beach! They failed to identify any association for California Seabreeze, the new Lighthouse development or any association of mobile home owners. In their application, OCNEP states, Positive community relationships are a key component of our program. Yet, they failed to even contact Costa Mesa City Hall, let alone reach out to any residents in the area. We learned of this application from an article in TimesOC. If OCNEP has made so little effort to learn about Costa Mesa, if OCNEP has made so little effort to reach out to Costa Mesa residents, how can it be trusted to run a good program without detriment to our community? The fact is, it cant. OCNEP claims to have incorporated suggestions and concerns of community members. But it doesnt acknowledge that Costa Mesa community members exist. How can we share our suggestions and concerns if OCNEP fails to contact us? Please share your concerns by contacting the California Department of Public Health at SEPApplication@cdph.ca.gov. All comments on this application must be received by 11:59 p.m. June 25. SANDRA L. GENIS is the mayor of Costa Mesa. The Orange County Board of Supervisors passed a budget item June 12 that allows for a $741,094 expenditure to investigate and prosecute the growing scourge of fraudulent group homes. Just as I have fervently fought for residents who dont want to live near a homeless shelter, I have also struggled to keep criminals and sex offenders from congregating in these homes, which are often in close proximity to children, the elderly and decent, hard-working families. For the record: An earlier version of this commentary incorrectly stated that the California Department of Social Services has the final approval of overseeing group homes. Sober living and residential group homes are not under the purview of the department. This dates to 2005, when I was in the state Assembly and authored a bill that would have created a sex offender management board. This would have regulated the placement and group housing of some 100,000 released sex offenders. Although I obtained bipartisan support for Assembly Bill 632, it did not pass. Since then, I have constantly advocated to have the state allow for local control to police these group homes, which often attract crime, drug abuse and fraud. Our tone deaf Legislature has not allowed this to happen. Admittedly, not every group home resident has a rap sheet. Some are victims themselves, trying to get help. This is where another criminal element has taken hold: fraudulent operators who run these businesses as a mill, getting rich off various government subsidies and insurance payouts. One option where we can make a difference is to vigorously prosecute mill operators with fraud. Here in Orange County, six people were charged last year in a $22 million fraud scheme that sadly resulted in the death of a young patient. When state officials were confronted with their tragic lack of oversight, they shrugged. This is all the more reason to tighten the screws. If the state isnt going to do its job, we will find a way step in and do it for it. Regardless of whether the operators or the clients are committing crimes, the message is clear: these businesses need oversight. The Board of Supervisors approval of six new employees dedicated to this industry is a start. This allows the district attorneys office to ramp up enforcement of a problem that has existed for decades. It must stop. Orange County Supervisor TODD SPITZER is a candidate for district attorney. The Huntington Beach Police Department received the City Councils unanimous approval Monday night for a one-year pilot program to learn how two drones can be used to enhance public safety. The program will include joint training and testing exercises with the Fire Department and Marine Safety Division, according to Police Chief Robert Handy. Drones are used in crime scene and traffic accident photography, SWAT deployments, shark detection, missing-person searches and assessing structure fires and other emergencies, Handy said. For the past three years, Handy said, a lieutenant was sent to a drone conference to learn more about the technology and how it could be applied to local government. We want to try those for a year in a reactive way or proactive way, Handy said. Its not a surveillance program. Were not looking into peoples backyards unless were reacting to a specific tactical event. Councilman Patrick Brenden said he was happy to hear about that approach. I think some people are sensitive to the drone technology so its good to hear that, he said. A commercial drone with entry-level equipment is estimated to cost $2,500 to $3,500, Handy said, and there may be additional costs to train personnel. The next step, he said, is to buy the drones through a competitive bidding process. The specific type of drone hasnt been decided. All drone use will be documented. At the end of the yearlong period, the police and fire chiefs will report to the City Council on the programs pros and cons. Building inspection services In other business Monday, the council awarded a $562,500, three-year contact to Orange-based CSG Consultants Inc. to help city staff with building inspection services. The city previously approved a three-year contract with CSG in 2015. Huntington Beachs Building Division had 12 inspectors before the number was reduced to nine in 2008. According to a staff report, the division decided to contract for inspectors instead of hiring, based on the economy and the volume of work since 2010. Crossing guard services The City Council also approved a three-year contract, with a possible two-year extension, with Santa Fe Springs-based crossing guard company All City Management Services. According to a staff report, the contract includes an hourly rate for 2018-20 of $18.87 at 3.5 hours per guard and $20.17 at 3.5 hours per guard for the possible extension years. All City currently provides service at 31 locations in Huntington Beach. Priscella.Vega@latimes.com Twitter: @vegapriscella Planned New Kinpo IPO to Generate Funds for Expansion in Philippines Published: 19 June 2018 by Mike Buetow by Mike Buetow TAIPEI -- New Kinpo Group is considering an initial public offering in the Philippines to generate funds for new investments in manufacturing and local marketing of its branded products. The company, the parent of top EMS/ODM Cal-Comp, plans some $250 million in new investments over the next three years in the Philippines, company executives told reporters. The company also plans to market its line of OEM products there. What is more important is our reputation in the Philippines, we consider the domestic market a big potential for us so while we grow the exports market we also try to grow in the domestic market, CEO Simon Shen was quoted as saying. NKG has plans to increase its total number of domestic factories to eight by the third quarter next year, and will increase its local investments by $150 million once the IPO has been issued. Register now for PCB WEST, the largest trade show for the printed circuit and electronics industry in the Silicon Valley! Coming Sept. 11-13 to the Santa Clara Convention Center. After 46 years at Laguna Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Jerry Tankersley is retiring. The senior pastor will give his last sermon Sunday and officially retire June 30. He said he didnt plan to stay with the Laguna Beach church as long as he did. But it has been a wonderful place to be, he said. I have never gotten tired of the creativity of the people involved here, said Tankersley, 81. However, it seemed to me that this was a good time to retire, he added. The church is healthy. I feel like Ive accomplished what my years have allowed for me to do. Tankersley joined Laguna Presbyterian in 1972 after serving in other church positions in Los Angeles and La Canada. He received a bachelors degree from Westmont College and a bachelors of divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary, followed by a masters of theology from Princeton Theological Seminary and doctorate degrees from Claremont Graduate University and its theology school. Among the highlights of his long tenure at Laguna Presbyterian, he pointed to the restoration of the churchs Forest Avenue campus in the early 1970s, when he first started. People came together with a new sense of hope and vision, he said. Laguna Presbyterian celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2017, a doubly momentous year because the church was able to pay off its mortgage, Tankersley said. The Rev. Jerry Tankersley says one of the highlights of his long tenure at Laguna Presbyterian Church was the restoration of its Forest Avenue campus in the early 1970s. (Don Leach / Staff Photographer ) Tankersley said he also enjoyed overseas mission work, including rebuilding an orphanage in Romania in the 1990s. Of particular note was a project to rebuild houses near the Richardson Leprosy Hospital in India in 1993, he said. It was his first experience with people with leprosy. I got to know some of them. I preached to them and we shared food with them, he said. They were very poor but wonderful people. There is a strong Christian church there, and their faith grew. Lorna Cohen, a member of Laguna Presbyterian since 1995, said Tankersley has managed to keep a flock of 700 congregants of every stripe together in good times and bad, inspired us all to deeper faith journeys through discipleship programs, Bible studies and spiritual formation. He is always there for others for his flock, for his family, for the city and the world, she said. He leaves a thriving church in the center of downtown, beloved by his flock and the entire community. We will miss him beyond words. Over the decades, the conflicts, debates and crises of American society and the Western world didnt escape Laguna, Tankersley noted. He pointed to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, when Laguna Presbyterian worked to help the afflicted and educate the community. Our people have always decided to work together, to be one people, unified in the spirit of Christ, Tankersley said. Weve been learning to love each other, even in our disagreements. He called his time at the church a great honor, but the greatest honor that [the church] could give me is to accept, love and honor the new pastoral leadership that will come in the next couple of years. The church has named Gareth Weldon Icenogle as its interim pastor after Tankersley retires. Icenogle will start in September after finishing another assignment in Dallas. Before then, Icenogle, who also has been a pastor at La Canada Presbyterian Church, will speak at the Laguna churchs July 8 services. Tankersley said he and his wife, Kay, will continue living in their longtime Laguna Beach home. Theyll also keep attending services at Laguna Presbyterian. After June 30, Tankersley plans to help other area pastors and write books based on material hes developed through the decades. Its been an exciting ride, he said. Ive been blessed in every way. BRADLEY ZINT is a contributor to Times Community News. Fundraising and fun-raising were the order of the day last Thursday at the Victorian fashion show and luncheon put on by the Womens Council at USC Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale. Already having raised over $3 million to benefit the hospital, the council ponied up with another $20,000 for the hospitals new neonatal intensive-care unit. For the record: The caption for the third photo in this posting was updated with additional names. Keith Hobbs, the hospitals chief executive, accepted the giant mock-up of the $20,000 check presented to him by the councils incoming president, Purnima Panchal, and outgoing president, Tiffany Ajaryan. Hobbs introduced himself to his audience of some 70 council members and supporters by announcing that USC has put $30 million into the hospital, part of which will go toward enhancing labor and delivery services. Hobbs described the nicview cameras that will be set up in each of six private rooms on the eighth-floor neonatal intensive-care unit. Through the use of their iPhones and iPads, grandparents and family members will be able to watch their little ones off-site. However, let the fashion show begin. Dressed in Victorian fashion, the events commentator and former hospital staff member Esther Hanna reminded her audience that before the 1851 introduction of the sewing machine, all clothing was handmade. Womens clothing was made up of voluminous layers, all to protect feminine modesty during the Victorian era in England. The intricacies of dressing the fashionable Victorian woman were demonstrated by three models. Each one came out in her muslin underwear, fully covering all but her arms and lower limbs. The models then put on thick, white stockings. Next, each had to help the other tie heavy corsets worn around their waists. Then came the lattice-like hoops, put on over each others heads. Model Eileen An modestly puts on her Victorian stockings with the help of Womens Council member Ruth McNevin, also dressed in Victorian style. (Ruth Sowby Rands / Glendale News-Press ) Only now could the Victorian-style dresses be donned, replete with big bustles in back and puffy sleeves at the shoulders. Feathered hats and parasols completed the ensemble. Commentator Hanna described the difficultly in sitting dressed as such. Each Victorian lady had to relearn how to sit down by not revealing skin if her hoop popped up. Council member and real estate mogul Ruth McNevin, resplendent in a blue Victorian dress and hat, helped change the models. She was also recognized for her 6,600 hours of volunteer service to the hospital since 1987. As the councils publicity chair, McNevin organized the paparazzi that shot photo after photo of the models at each stage of dress. Alas, the afternoon came to a close, too early for many. Proceeds came to about $3,000, earmarked for more equipment for the neonatal intensive-care unit. Another group of energetic, giving women in Glendale was also recognized. Phoencia restaurant was the setting on June 7 for the gathering of 65 former Women Achievers, sponsored by Business Life magazine. Altogether, 480 Women Achievers have graced the magazines covers. Ready for a reunion are Glendale Soroptimist Women Achievers, from left, Sandy Moreno, Margo Bottcher, Seda Khojayan, Jacqueline Hawley (Soroptimist president), Jory Potts, Edith Fuentes, Stella Fejtek. Kathy Lefkovits and Liz Mirzaian.. (Ruth Sowby Rands / Glendale News-Press ) This year marks the 29th publication of Women Achievers. The next group will be revealed to the public and honored in October. But the reunion mixer this month was strictly for the alums. Hugging and chatting took the place of formal introductions as old friends were welcomed and new friendships were made. Greg Krikorian, president and chief executive of Business Life, and emcee Sandy Moreno recognized past Women Achievers, including former Glendale Mayor and current Glendale City Councilwoman Paula Devine, a Woman Achiever in 2010. Devine offered greetings from the city. Also recognized was former Burbank Mayor Marsha Ramos, named lifetime Woman Achiever in 2017. Lynn White-Shelby was honored as the most longstanding Achiever present, having won the designation in the early 90s. The late John and Elsie Krikorian were the founders and editors of Business Life. It was John Krikorians idea to publish a special issue in 1989 to showcase women. Son, Greg, is now president and chief executive of the magazine. The other hat he wears is as president of the Glendale Unified school board. It was his love of education and his parents passing that inspired Greg Krikorian to create two scholarships in his parents names to recognize deserving female students pursuing careers in journalism, marketing or business management. Devine ended the program with words of advice to the Achievers: Keep on doing what youre doing. Youre fabulous. RUTH SOWBY RANDS may be reached at ruthasowby@gmail.com. The Pinwheel demonstration at the San Fernando Valley Airport now the Van Nuys Airport was reported in the April 16, 1957, Los Angeles Times: The pinwheel performed like a hissing yo-yo yesterday a rocket-powered strap-on-the-back helicopter that skittered Test Pilot Dick Whitehead around San Fernando Valley Airport with startling speed and controllability. Several flights of the unique craft, said to be the smallest, lightest, simplest helicopter yet flown, were made during the first public demonstration of the tiny craft, disclosed by The Times last Feb. 28. Designed and built by Rotor-Craft Corp., Glendale, the 170-pound ship is the culmination of seven years of development and is scheduled for immediate Navy flight evaluation tests. Advertisement It is lifted by a thin, 17-foot rotor blade that whirls just above the pilots head under the power of hydrogen peroxide fuel broken down by catalytic action into steam that is ejected at high speed from the rotor tips. Ultrasimple, it has no pistons, no electrical system, no lubrication or cooling system, no clutch, transmission or starter. In yesterdays demonstrations, Whitehead, an ex-marine combat pilot (Korea) appeared to be wearing the Pinwheel rather that flying it. He jumped off the ground with ease, soared to perhaps 150 feet, flew backward and sideways, hovered over trees and tables, then took off around the airport like a giant dragonfly. A followup story in the Nov. 5, 1957, Los Angeles Times reported that Whitehead suffered a broken leg and other injuries after the Buck Rogers-type craft went out of control and fell about 50 feet. This three-photo combo by staff photographer Larry Sharkey was published in the April 16, 1957, Los Angeles Times. This post was originally published on March 12, 2014. See more from the Los Angeles Times archives here A video of French President Emmanuel Macron admonishing a teenager who called him by a nickname went viral on social media Tuesday. The video shows Macron shaking hands in a crowd, when the teenager using a diminutive for Macrons first name asks him: Hows it going, Manu? Macron stops and responds: Call me Mr. President of the republic, or monsieur. He then adds: The day you want to start a revolution, get a degree and learn to feed yourself, OK? You can start lecturing others then. Advertisement The exchange occurred Monday at a ceremony commemorating Charles De Gaulles historic appeal for armed resistance against Nazi tyranny. Macron tweeted a video of the discussion, prompting a flood of comments Tuesday. Some applauded the French leaders demand for respect, while others criticized what they saw as his arrogance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Jordans King Abdullah II that he is committed to the status quo at holy sites in contested Jerusalem, trying to reassure the monarch in a rare meeting after months of strained relations. They held talks in Jordan ahead of a visit to the region this week by two senior Trump administration officials who are trying to promote a plan for an Israeli-Palestinian deal on partitioning the Holy Land, including Jerusalem. Details of the plan have not been released, but Palestinians fear they will get little more than a symbolic foothold in the holy city, after President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israels capital late last year. The Palestinians, who seek Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem as a future capital, have shunned contacts with U.S. officials since Trumps policy shift on Jerusalem, a change that has also been rejected by Abdullah. Netanyahu refuses to relinquish any part of Jerusalem. Advertisement Jordan also has a stake in East Jerusalem, serving as the custodian of major Muslim and Christian shrines there. Jerusalems walled Old City, captured and annexed by Israel in 1967, is home to Muslim, Christian and Jewish holy sites. Netanyahus office said the prime minister told Abdullah on Monday that Israel remains committed to the status quo of the holy sites in Jerusalem. Abdullah told Netanyahu that the fate of Jerusalem must be determined in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and that a solution should be based on establishing a Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on lands Israel captured in 1967. Palestinian officials fear the Trump administration plan will leave them with a mini-state in the Gaza Strip, parts of the West Bank and a foothold in Jerusalem. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said he will reject any plan being floated by the Trump team, arguing that the United States has forfeited its role as mediator because of decisions seen as pro-Israel. Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and envoy Jason Greenblatt are visiting Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia this week to discuss the plan. The Netanyahu-Abdullah meeting came after almost a year of strained relations. Last July, an Israeli guard at the Israeli embassy in Amman shot and killed two Jordanians, saying one, a teenager, had tried to attack him with a screwdriver and that a second person was hit in the crossfire. Netanyahu arranged a heros welcome for the guard, angering the Jordanians. Abdullah lashed out at Netanyahu at the time, saying everyone in the kingdom was infuriated by what he called unacceptable and provocative behavior, presumably by Netanyahu. Diplomatic relations were repaired only gradually, with a new Israeli ambassador recently moving into the embassy in Amman. Decades ago, former Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung described his countrys relationship with North Korea as one of lips and teeth a loosely defined metaphor from an imperial era Mao used to define a close, yet different, relationship. It perhaps remains an apt description of their relationship now. North Korean leader Kim Jong Uns visit Tuesday with Chinese President Xi Jinping was his third in as many months and highlights that the countries remain tightly allied, albeit for different reasons, analysts said. They have mutual influence over each other, said Stephen R. Nagy, a distinguished fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada. Thats really quite a substantial part of the puzzle. Advertisement Chinese and North Korean officials did not announce the agenda for Kims two-day visit to Beijing, but analysts say it surely will focus on Pyongyangs recent overtures to Washington and Seoul. North Korea, as it seeks warmer relations with the United States and South Korea, needs Chinas cooperation to improve its tiny economy. Beijing, an economic powerhouse, has been frustrated with North Koreas nuclear development and lack of coordination on foreign affairs in recent years. China wants to make sure North Korea doesnt drift too far from its historical ties and Pyongyang seems determined to send a positive message to Beijing, a critical partner. The North Korean leader understands that China is concerned, therefore he paid special attention to reassure China, said Tong Zhao, a fellow with the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing. The meeting of Kim and Xi, which played out amid unusually open publicity from Chinas state-controlled media, occurred months after a surprising burst of diplomacy sparked by the Norths participation in the Winter Olympics in democratic South Korea. The North and the South, which have deep cultural and ethnic roots, remain separated and technically at war after more than six decades. The official New China News Agency, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, reported that Xi and Kim agreed to safeguard, consolidate and develop China-DPRK relations, and jointly push forward the sound momentum of peace and stability of the Korean peninsula to make a positive contribution to safeguarding world and regional peace, stability, prosperity and development. Kims latest Beijing trip followed two summits in recent months with South Koreas president, Moon Jae-in, in which the leaders made historic overtures to the other side and signed an agreement offering the hope of peace and denuclearization. It also comes after the June 12 meeting with President Trump in Singapore, which may already have benefited China because Kim made no binding commitments on denuclearization, while Trump said he would suspend military exercises with South Korea. The Pentagon and South Korean officials on Monday formally announced the suspension of some exercises. This weeks trip by Kim was also another jarring example of the North Korean leaders recent travels abroad and meetings with world leaders situations that seemed impossible amid rising tensions with the West last year. Kim had not left his country since taking power in 2011 after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il. He took an armored train to China in late March for his first face-to-face meeting with Xi. That was widely regarded as a rapprochement between the two leaders and was followed by another meeting in May in the Chinese port city of Dalian as Xi made clear that he intended to assert Beijings influence ahead of the summit with Trump in Singapore. They built a relationship in the first two meetings, said Cheng Xiaohe, an international studies professor and North Korea expert at Peoples University of China. This time around, Cheng said, he expected the two leaders to discuss specifics on future negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington and other issues critical to the Norths goals. Kim probably will be seeking Xis support to help North Koreas already underdeveloped economy, which has been further hurt by sanctions over its repeated nuclear and ballistic missile tests in violation of United Nations resolutions. There is also an awful lot for the two leaders to discuss when it comes to economic cooperation, said Adam Cathcart, a lecturer of Chinese history at the University of Leeds. The Chinese Communist Party has both near-term connectivity and a long-term ability to help move the North Korean economy forward. For Chinas part, Xi may suggest strategies and a timeline for how a denuclearization process might someday take place. The two leaders also might discuss how to reduce the U.S. military presence in South Korea, where it has more than 28,000 troops and weapons systems designed to counter the Norths threats, Cheng and other analysts said. Kim arrived in Beijing amid intensifying trade tensions that have strained U.S.-China relations and could affect how the difficult U.S.-North Korea talks on denuclearization play out in the coming months. This weeks visit also gives Kim another chance to portray himself as a more typical and respected world leader who is willing to negotiate, a fact that reduces the threat of military intervention by the United States if denuclearization talks stall. The invite from Xi and the surrounding publicity also enhances Kims ability to show that hes involved in diplomacy and promoting diplomacy and interested in engagement, Nagy said. This gives them a bargaining chip with the United States. The latest from Washington More stories from Don Lee Times staff writer Lee reported from Beijing and special correspondent Stiles from Seoul. don.lee@latimes.com Follow me at @dleelatimes The Mexican government on Tuesday condemned as cruel and inhuman the Trump administration policy of separating immigrant families detained on U.S. soil. Only 1% of all cases of children separated from their families 21 cases involve Mexican nationals, said Luis Videgaray, Mexicos foreign secretary, in the countrys first formal comments on the controversial policy. The vast majority of cases, Videgaray said, involve children from three Central American nations Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Central Americans seeking to enter the United States typically travel through Mexico to arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border. Among the cases involving Mexican nationals, Videgaray said, is that of a 10-year-old Mexican girl with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother and sent to a detention center in Texas. Advertisement In his comments, Videgaray said Mexico City recognized the sovereignty of the United States and its right to set its own migratory policy. He denied that the Mexican government promoted illegal immigration, a charge often leveled by U.S. activists seeking a more restrictive immigration policy. Nonetheless, Videgaray said in a statement, we cannot be indifferent to something that clearly represents a violation of human rights and puts minor children, including some with disabilities, in a situation of vulnerability. In the case of the 10-year-old with Down syndrome, she and her brother, also 10, were separated from their mother last week. The girl was now in a shelter in McAllen, Texas, said Videgaray, who did not specify the brothers whereabouts. Her father, a legal U.S. resident, was seeking that the girl be reunited with him, the foreign secretary said. Mexican officials have been in touch with their U.S. counterparts at the highest level about this case, Videgaray said. In another case, Videgaray said, 12 Mexican children from various families were separated last week from their parents. The mothers and fathers were sent to a detention center in Seattle, he said. Seven of the 12 children, who were initially dispatched to various shelters, have since been sent back to Mexico, and the government is working to reunite the remaining five with their families, Videgaray said. Mexican authorities were working to achieve the reunification of all of the families involved. Of the 21 cases of family separation involving Mexican nationals, the foreign secretary said, most detained children have already been repatriated to Mexico, while seven remained in shelters in the United States. President Trump and administration officials have repeatedly said that federal law compels them to separate families, but Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers have pointed out thats simply not true. The administrations zero tolerance policy of pursing criminal, rather than civil, cases against immigrants results in separating parents from children. On Tuesday, Trump once again tried to blame Democrats for the family separation crisis and took a swipe at Mexico as well. In remarks before a business organization, he said Mexico allows smugglers of drugs and people to reach the U.S. border. Mexico, they do nothing for us, Trump said. The family separation issue also triggered comments from Mexican presidential candidates. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador front-runner in the July 1 election charged that U.S. authorities were expelling the children in inhumane conditions. The candidate of the National Regeneration Movement asked that President Enrique Pena Nieto deliver a note of protest to the White House and that a team of experts be dispatched to the U.S.-Mexico border to assist repatriated children and their families. He also asked for a United Nations investigation of a policy that, Lopez Obrador said, goes against the most fundamental human rights. The current Mexican presidential campaign has elicited comments in support of Mexican immigrants in the United States from all the major candidates. All have assailed what is widely viewed in Mexico as Trumps anti-Mexico and anti-immigrant posture. patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com Twitter: @PmcdonnellLAT Cecilia Sanchez of The Times Mexico City bureau contributed to this report. Iranian authorities executed a member of a Sufi order Monday who was accused of ramming a bus into three policemen and killing them during a protest in February in Tehran, drawing criticism from observers who said he received unfair treatment. Mohammad Salas, 51, was hanged Monday morning in Rajai Shahr Prison in Karaj, west of Tehran, according the official website of Irans judiciary. He was later buried in his hometown of Borujerd, Lorestan province, according to a Tweet by his lawyer, Zeynab Taheri. The State Department called for Iran to release about 300 Sufis who were detained during Februarys clashes and said Salas execution was brutal and unjust. Advertisement Mr. Salas rushed execution is the latest example of the Iranian regimes disregard for the human rights of its citizens, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said. Reports indicate the Iranian regime has continued to crack down on Sufis on account of their faith throughout the country since that time, including disturbing allegations of deaths in custody or from beatings at the hands of security forces, Nauert said. Sufism is a mystical branch of Islam that draws on ancient and traditions and rituals. The Gonabadi Dervish followers are Shiite, and while its not illegal to practice Sufism, rights groups accuse the Iranian government of harassing and persecuting its followers. Salas, a member of the Sufi Gonabadi Dervish group, was arrested Feb. 19 after violent clashes between security forces and supporters of the Sufi order broke out in Tehran. The Sufi protesters were demonstrating against the arrests of members of their sect. There were rumors that their leader, Nourali Tabandeh, had been among those detained. Salas, a father of two and a bus driver, was convicted and sentenced to death in March for using the bus to ram into three policemen, killing them. He pleaded not guilty during court hearings. I got into the bus to drive it toward the police station. I drove slowly so that police could move over, he said during the trial according to Irans Fars News. In an audio file Taheri released on Twitter in May, Salas said he was innocent and that he was not the driver of the bus that killed the three policemen. I cannot even kill an ant, Salas is heard saying in the audio file. The police have fabricated all of this. Salas also accused Iranian officials of torturing him, according to local media in Iran. In Iran, activists took to Twitter on Tuesday to criticize Salas execution and persecution of Irans religious minorities. Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former political prisoner, criticized Irans judiciary on Twitter, and urged Irans reformists to speak out against the execution. Taheri, Zalas lawyer, wrote on Twitter that her clients execution was an example of the crushing of peoples rights. Philip Luther, Amnesty Internationals Research and Advocacy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement that Salas trial was grossly unfair, and that Salas was not allowed access to his chosen lawyer before or during his trial. Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of Center for Human Rights in Iran, a New York based nonprofit, said many Sufis in Iran have been driven underground. Irans state intelligence and judiciary have decided that they should be completely denied any freedom of religion, Ghaemi said. melissa.etehad@latimes.com Follow me on Twitter @melissaetehad Uh-oh! It could be you, or it could be us, but there's no page here. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 19) Now that Maria Lourdes Sereno is out as Chief Justice, she promises to take on a different task: to hold the Duterte government accountable for its actions. "I stand before you now, stripped of my authority and position by an unjust decision. But I do not have to be Chief Justice to defend our laws and institutions," Sereno said before her supporters at the University of the Philippines Diliman Tuesday, shortly after the Supreme Court ousted her with finality. It was her most combative speech against President Rodrigo Duterte so far, even calling him a "blasphemous, self-styled savior who is willing to kill." More than 4,000 suspects have been killed in Duterte's bloody war on drugs, government data show, but Malacanang has repeatedly said there are no state-sanctioned killings. Human rights watchdogs have cited numbers of up to 13,000 dead. A month into the presidency, Duterte warned Sereno of a constitutional crisis after she expressed concern over his drug war. Possible Senate run Sereno on Tuesday told CNN Philippines she did not mean to sound like a politician when she slammed Duterte's public announcement of alleged drug personalities, including seven judges, in August 2016. "We have a unique president who did not hesitate to attack the institutions... It was a matter of necessity for me to answer him and rebut his proposition," Sereno said. She revealed some supporters have been urging her to run for public office, but said she has not made up her mind yet. "The focus of my effort right now is to unify all the voices that have said there is something terribly wrong in our country," she said. She said she will eventually announce her decision, adding that she understands the filing of candidacy for the 2019 senatorial polls starts in October. Calling Duterte to task In her earlier speech, Sereno deplored the Duterte administration's supposed attacks against independent bodies tasked with upholding justice and ensuring government officials' accountability: the judiciary, Office of the Ombudsman, and the Commission on Human Rights. Duterte lashed out at the heads of the three bodies, including Sereno, after they voiced disagreements with some of his policies, including the drug war. "The responsibility for the weakening of rule of law is his," Sereno said, referring to Duterte. She said Duterte's actions demonstrate his disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law. Sereno demanded that Duterte answer "nagging questions" about his controversial policies, including the country's economic future amid rising prices brought by the tax reform, his plans to alleviate the suffering of drivers who cannot afford modernized jeepneys, and the filing of charges against corrupt officials he fired but reassigned to other government posts. Sereno also questioned Duterte's plan to amend the Constitution and his friendly relations towards China despite the long-standing dispute in the South China Sea. "The unity we have forged these last months will be the foundation of a genuine people's movement that will hold the government accountable for its actions," Sereno said. Sereno out as Chief Justice The government's top lawyer, Solicitor General Jose Calida, filed the quo warranto petition against Sereno last March. This petition, a legal proceeding challenging one's right to hold office, was granted by the Supreme Court on May 11, making Sereno the first top magistrate to be ousted by the High Court. In junking Sereno's motion for reconsideration on Tuesday, the Supreme Court also ordered the Judicial and Bar Council to start the 90-day selection for Sereno's replacement. Duterte gets to appoint the next Chief Justice. Duterte had declared himself an enemy of Sereno, apparently irked by her insistence about his possible involvement in her ouster petition. While Sereno's camp maintained impeachment is the only way to oust a Chief Justice, it accepted that the legal fight is over when the High Court ruled on Sereno's ouster with finality on Tuesday. Jojo Lacanilao, Sereno's spokesperson told CNN Philippines Sereno will "continue to be the voice of the people." Vice President Leni Robredo, herself an opposition figure, joined several lawmakers in criticizing the Supreme Court's "unjust" decision and called for the public to defend the country's democracy. "In our rage and grief, we cannot give in to despair, for this is but one of the many battles that we must fight for our democracy, and for the people it is intended to serve," Robredo said in a statement. House leaders, meanwhile, welcomed the High Court's ruling and said this makes the impeachment process moot and academic. Stock Market News FTSE 250 movers: Capita rallies, McCarthy & Stone tumbles on profit warning 19-06-2018 13:14 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 Infrastrata appoints WSP as owner's engineer at Islandmagee project 19-06-2018 15:54 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News UK 'to be locked out' of EU security partnerships after Brexit, Barnier says 19-06-2018 13:20 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 Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 19) A lawyer who petitioned the Supreme Court to allow same-sex marriage in the country said the 1987 Constitution does not limit marriage between a man and a woman. "Nothing in Article XV or other provisions of the Constitution limits the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman," Atty. Jesus Falcis said on Tuesday during his opening statement at the SC oral arguments on his petition filed in 2015. "But something in the Constitution commands that marriage under the Family Code be extended to lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) couples," he added. Falcis' petition asked the High Court to declare as unconstitutional Articles 1 and 2 of the 31-year-old Family Code which limit marriage to that between a man and a woman. By excluding same-sex couples, Falcis said the Family Code is unconstitutional because it "deprives the petitioners of the right to marry without substantive due process; It denies the petitioners of the equal protection of the laws, and; It violates the religious freedom of petitioners." "The text of the Constitution is clear - marriage, as an inviolable social institution, is the foundation of the family," Falcis added. He cited the case of his co-petitioners Crescencio Agbayani and Marlon Felipe who have been partners for 12 years. Falcis said Agbayani and Felipe, under the law, are still "strangers to each other." Falcis also argued the couple is growing old, worrying about a lot of things. "Legal recognition of same-sex marriage allows them to access numerous rights, for example, right to make medical decisions, GSIS (Government Service Insurance System), PhilHealth (Philippine Health Insurance Corporation) benefits," he said. The petitioners also said same-sex couples can and do establish a conjugal and family life, just like heterosexual couples. Associate Justice Marvic Leonen warned the petitioners about the danger of the case, adding it is an issue which will require an intimate reading of the provisions of the Constitution. Associate Justice Estela Perlas-Bernabe, meanwhile, asked Falcis why not leave the issue up to Congress. "Fundamental rights cannot be subject to political whims," Falcis responded. Falcis closed his statement saying no group of people should ever be treated as 2nd class citizens in their own land. "We are different. But we are still also human beings who love and are loved. Like other Filipinos, LGBT couples are families too," he said. The oral arguments will resume on June 26, with justices set to interpellate Solicitor General Jose Calida. CNN Philippines' Anjo Alimario contributed to this report. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 19) A lawmaker expressed the opposition's plan to file impeachment complaints against eight Supreme Court justices for voting for the ouster of former Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno. Akbayan Representative Tom Villarin on Tuesday said they are planning to file impeachment complaints against Justices Teresita Leonardo-De Castro, Diosdado Peralta, Lucas Bersamin, Francis Jardeleza, Samuel Martires, Noel Tijam, Andres Reyes Jr., and Alexander Gesmundo, who voted to grant the quo warranto petition. The Supreme Court on Tuesday denied with finality the ouster appeal of Sereno, which means she is permanently removed as Chief Justice. Related: Sereno permanently removed as Chief Justice Villarin said they will file complaints to protect the independence of the institution. "This fight is all about the independence of the judiciary and this complaint will highlight the issues that justices should not betray public trust merely because they have a personal vendetta against one the justices," he told CNN Philippines. Sereno's camp earlier claimed the bulk of the eight justices had prejudged her case, as evidenced by statements they made in the impeachment hearings of the House Committee on Justice and the ouster hearing at the Supreme Court. The lawmaker also said he hopes the impeachment complaints will deter the public from resorting to filing quo warranto petitions to oust an official who can only be removed through an impeachment process, as dictated by the Constitution. "In the future, we need to prevent this seemingly routinary removal of impeachable officials through a quo warranto petition," Villarin said. Meanwhile, Vice President Leni Robredo said the junking of Sereno's ouster appeal should encourage the public to speak up against those who violate the Constitution. "Our vigilance must now extend to other impending assaults on our Constitution and laws, as well as the freedoms they were enacted to protect... We must draw the line and do our utmost to defend it... We will remember today. And in that remembrance, we will find the strength to fight on," she said in a statement. Kochi: The Kerala police on Tuesday detained a man who allegedly threatened to kill Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. UAE native Krishnakumar, claiming to be a former RSS activist had mocked and threatened to murder CM Vijayan in a Face book live. He later deleted the video and came with an apology stating that he was in inebriated condition at that time. The police have filed a case against him which costed Krishnakumar his job. He later confessed that he was wrong and BJP and RSS workers refused to help him in the case. Though Mr Krishnakumar tried to avoid an arrest by travelling via Delhi airport, the Delhi police detained and handed him over to the Kerala Police. Kochi: The Ernakulam Principal Sessions Court on last day turned down the actress assault case victim's demand for a woman judge to preside the case. The court made the decision since there are no female judges available in the Sessions, Additional Sessions of Ernakulam district court. The top court had earlier directed the principal sessions court to run the trial. Meanwhile, the court had partially accepted the actress's demand for a special prosecutor and the court also allowed the defense lawyer to inspect the controversial videos in presence of Judge and public prosecutor. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 19) The Supreme Court (SC) junked the government's bid to collect damages against the estate of former President Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies for lack of documentary evidence on how their supposed ill-gotten wealth was amassed. In a 28-page decision penned by SC Associate Justice Noel Tijam, the high court's First Division affirmed a 2010 Sandiganbayan ruling dismissing the complaint filed by the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) for reconveyance, reversion, restitution and damages. "Juxtaposing the specific allegations in the complaint with the Republic's documentary and testimonial evidence and as against the respondents' documentary and testimonial evidence," the ruling reads, "the Court agrees with the Sandiganbayan that the weight of evidence fails to preponderate in the Republic's favor." The PCGG filed the complaint on July 24, 1987, which accused Marcos and his cronies of taking part in "schemes, devices and strategems" to acquire wealth through behest loans. Among the respondents are former First Lady Imelda Marcos, construction magnate Rodolfo M. Cuenca and his son Roberto Cuenca, former Philippine National Bank President Panfilo Domingo, former Trade Minister Roberto Ongpin, former Development Bank of the Philippines officer Don Ferry, and 11 others. Cuenca was primarily accused of conniving with the Marcoses by creating the Construction and Development Corporation of the Philippines (CDCP) what is now the Philippine National Construction Corporation and other corporations to use for collecting ill-gotten wealth. The complaint said Cuenca won contracts amounting to billions of pesos from then-called the Department of Public Works, the National Irrigation Administration, the Light Railway Transit (LRT) Project, among others "under terms and conditions manifestly disadvantageous to... the Filipino people." Apart from construction contracts, the PCGG said the CDCP secured a "favored rescue arrangement" of funds from government financial institutions, without enough collateral. Cuenca was also accused of organizing the Universal Holding Corporation a holding company for the CDCP, Sta. Ines Medale and Resort Hotels with the participation of the other defendants which served as a "conduit of deposit" of illegally-obtained funds and properties. But the Sandiganbayan on August 5, 2010 dismissed the PCGG's complaint, citing documentary evidence used in PCGG's complaint that consisted of executive issuances of then-President Marcos and of court decisions. The anti-graft court said these issuances aren't illegal per se, considering public officials are entitled to presumption of good faith in the discharge of official duties. The PCGG appealed the ruling to the high court, claiming the Sandiganbayan erred in dismissing the complaint after it established having a prima facie case against the respondents. But the high court said it cannot rule on PCGG's claim. "In order to determine the veracity of the Republic's main contention that it has established a prima facie case against respondents through its documentary and testimonial evidence, a reassessment and reexamination of the evidence is necessary," the ruling read. "Unfortunately, the limited and discretionary judicial review allowed under Rule 45 does not envision a re-evaluation of the sufficiency of the evidence upon which respondent court's action was predicated." The SC also affimed the Sandiganbayan's decision to exclude PCGG's other evidence for being photocopies. It referenced the best evidence rule the presentation of the original document in cases related to the recovery of ill-gotten wealth. "The Republic failed to prove that the respondents by themselves or in unlawful concert with one another, accumulated or participated in the accumulation of ill-gotten wealth insofar as the specific allegations in the subject complaint are concerned," the ruling said. But the PCGG, in a statement, said they will continue to lobby government interest. "Although the complaint was filed by the PCGG more than 31 years ago, and the Supreme Court decision was a mere affirmation of the Sandiganbayan ruling 8 years ago, the present officials of PCGG will still exhaust all possible legal remedies to pursue the case and to protect government interest," it said. Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office General Manager Alexander Balutan on Tuesday said 37,186 patients were recipients of benefits from the agencys flagship project called Individual Medical Assistance Program (IMAP). This translates to P727.5 million of expenses for the month of May, based on the data provided to me by the Charity Assistance Department, Balutan said in a statement. The P727.5 million is (a) 21.07 percent increase in spending and 26.14 percent increase in the beneficiaries compared with the same period last year, he added. According to Dr. Larry Cedro, assistant general manager for Charity Sector, the top three nature of requests included hospital confinement with 13,376 beneficiaries at P290.8 million; medicines with 12,132 beneficiaries at P149.9 million; and chemotherapy with 4,305 beneficiaries at P179.2 million. Compared with the same period last year, chemotherapy had the highest increase this month in terms of cases at 24.60 percent and amount spent at 30.35 percent; followed by request for medicines at 14.96 percent in cases and 15.63 percent in amount; and confinement at 15.71 percent in cases and 12.24 percent in amount, Cedro said. Balutan said close to P4 billion has been spent for the IMAP benefiting 190,000 of mostly poor patients. Meanwhile, in a Globocan data prepared by the Philippine Cancer Society, there are estimated 11,000 new cancer cases in 2015. Leading the new cancer cases from both sexes are breast, lung, colorectal, liver and cervical cancers. In terms of new cancer deaths, the top is lung, liver and breast.Breakthrough cancer treatments such as immunotherapy and targeted therapies could be seen as a new lease on life for patients suffering from cancer and they are increasingly becoming cancer treatment options. Targeted therapy, as the name indicates, target specific cancer cells. It alters the inner workings of the cell focusing on the part of the cancer cell that makes it different from the normal, healthy cell. Immunotherapy, on the other hand, uses the bodys immune system to fight cancer cells. It stimulates the immune system and may be used with other types of treatment or by itself. While chemotherapy, as a general rule, targets the cells that are rapidly growing, however, it cannot differentiate between cancerous and healthy cells. Cells such as those in gastrointestinal tract have fast-growing cells, and the side effect is they could get affected. DEFIANT. Ousted Supreme Court Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno gather Tuesday with her supporters at the Solidarity Movement at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City after the Supreme Court denied her motion for reconsideration. Sereno delivered a speech announcing she will continue fighting against the Duterte administration. Manny Palmero The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld with finality its May 11 decision to oust Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno as the top magistrate. Voting 8-6, the SC denied Serenos motion for reconsideration seeking her reinstatement for lack of merit.The Court ruled that the denial of Serenos appeal was final and that no further pleadings shall be entertained as it ordered entry of judgment in the case. With the ruling, the 15-member bench ordered the Judicial and Bar Council to now start the search for the next chief justice. Under the Constitution, the President would have to appoint Serenos replacement within 90 days from June 19. The eight magistrates who voted to sustain the May 11 decision were Associate Justices Teresita Leonardo-de Castro, Diosdado Peralta, Lucas Bersamin, Francis Jardeleza, Noel Tijam, Samuel Martires, Andres Reyes Jr. and Alexander Gesmundo. The majority bloc held that Sereno failed to raise new arguments in her 205-page motion filed May 30. The Court also affirmed its finding that Serenos appointment in 2012 was invalid because she was not qualified for lack of proven integrity due to her failure to file all her Statements of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth when she was still teaching law in the University of the Philippines. In sum, respondent has not presented any convincing ground that would merit a modification or reversal of our May 11, 2018 decision. At the risk of being repetitive, respondent, at the time of her application, lacked proof of integrity on account of her failure to file a substantial number of SALNs and also, her failure to submit the required SALNs to the JBC during her application to the position, read the 25-page resolution written by Tijam. The Court disagreed with the argument of the ousted chief justice in her appeal that failure to file of SALN cannot be considered as gauge of her integrity. Respondents argument dangerously disregards that the filing of SALN is not only a requirement under the law, but a positive duty required from every public officer or employee, first and foremost by the Constitution. The SALN laws were passed in aid of the enforcement of the constitutional duty to submit a declaration under oath of ones assets, liabilities and net worth, the ruling said. This positive constitutional duty of filing ones SALN is so sensitive and important that it even shares the same category as the constitutional duty imposed upon public officers and employees to owe allegiance to the State and Constitution. As such, offenses against the SALN laws are not ordinary offenses but violations of a duty which every public officer and employee owes to the State and the Constitution. In other words, violation of SALN laws, by itself, defeats any claim of integrity as it is inherently immoral to violate the will of the legislature and the to violate the Constitution, the Court said. The Court also reiterated its ruling that Sereno may be removed through quo warranto proceedings since it is separate and distinct from impeachment. Aside from ordering Sereno to vacate her post, the Court also initiated an administrative case against her for alleged violations of the Code of Professional Responsibility and Code of Judicial Conduct for transgressing the sub judice rule and for casting aspersions and ill motives on the members of the Supreme Court. Apparently not satisfied with her answers as to why she attacked the justices in her media and public appearances, the Court initiated the administrative proceedings that could lead to her disbarment. Acting Chief Justice Antonio Carpio and Associate Justices Presbitero Velasco Jr., Mariano Del Castillo, Estela Bernabe, Marvic Leonen and Alfredo Benjamin Caguioa voted to grant Serenos motion for reconsideration. Sereno vowed to defend the Constitution and rule of law despite the Supreme Courts decision upholding her removal from office. I stand before you now stripped of my authority and position. I do not have to be chief justice to defend our laws and Constitution. I live the law as do all Filipinos who uphold the dignity of every fellow Filipino, Sereno said at an event in Quezon City. We will continue to live the law and fight for our democracy and the institutions to safeguard it. At the same occasion, she scored President Rodrigo Duterte for his alleged complete disregard of the Constitution and the rule of law. The responsibility for the weakening of the rule of law is his. He has admitted that sowing intrigue and planting evidence have been part of his practice, Sereno said. Sereno also said the House of Representatives had threatened to hold the judiciary budget hostage to the demands of the impeachment complainant, lawyer Lorenzo Gadon, that the Supreme Court turn over all the documents he required to bolster his case against her. She said Court spokesman Theodore Te revealed to her that Ilocos Norte Rep. Rodolfo Farinas, House majority leader, had told Associate Justice Diosdado Peralta that Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez had ordered the suspension of the deliberations of the budget of the judiciary unless all the documents that the complainant requested from the Supreme Court would be released. The message was clear. The House leadership was going to hold hostage the judiciarys budget unless the Supreme Court cooperated fully with its plan to remove me, she said. Sereno said she was unfazed by her removal. My ouster is a call to action for all of us, she told her supporters. This woman does not back away from a fight. A Palace spokesman said President Duterte respected the decision of the Supreme Court to uphold Serenos ouster. Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque also urged the public to respect the ruling as final and executory. So like it or hate it, we have to succumb to the decision of the Supreme Court. That is now a final and executory decision, Roque said in press briefing in Cotabato City. He said the President will implement the order since it is the duty of the President to enforce laws and the decisions of the Supreme Court.The Palace official also asked Filipinos to unite following the ruling. Its the end for Chief Justice Lourdes Sereno. We wish her good luck in her everyday life as a private citizen, Roque added. But Vice President Leni Robredo, from the opposition, called on the Filipino people to fight for democracy after a dark moment for the country. She appealed to the public to stay vigilant in the face of impending assaults on the 1987 Constitution and freedom. We must commit ourselves to defend what remains of our democracy, and to rebuild what has been cast down, she said. Liberal Party secretary general Erin Tanada said he was not expecting anything different from the Supreme Court. Their first decision showed that they were willing to destroy the institution and violate our Constitution, Tanada said, adding that the Supreme Court was now beyond redemption. Another member of the opposition, Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, said Duterte succeeded in destroying another bulwark of the countrys fragile democracy, the Supreme Court. Now, only half of the Senate stands in his way from completely installing his ruthless and corrupt authoritarian regime, he said. Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon said his colleagues may no longer push for the adoption of the Senate resolution calling for the Supreme Court to review its decision. As a practical matter, the majority in the Senate can assert that the issue is now academic and would, therefore, be reluctant to debate on the quo warranto resolution. As for me, its already futile although personally I still believe that there is nothing wrong with expressing an opinion on the decision of the SC, the majority may feel that we can express our individual beliefs on the quo warranto but not the Senate as an institution, he said. Senator JV Ejercito said that while he believed impeachment is the only way to remove a chief justice, the Senate should not pursue its resolution. [We] cannot correct a mistake with another mistake. Rather than interfere with the affairs of the judiciary, we are duty-bound to respect its decision, he said. He expressed hope that in the future, the SC can revisit this 8-6 ruling and rectify the decision, which effectively encroached upon the prerogative of the legislative department. In the meantime, it is my hope that the next chief justice will start the process of internal healing and begin restoring the publics faith in our Supreme Court, which has been severely undermined by this sad episode in our history, he said. In the House, pro-administration lawmakers led by Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez hailed the Supreme Court ruling. Opposition lawmakers, however, said they would file impeachment complaints against the eight Supreme Court justices who voted for the quo warranto petition against Sereno. The Supreme Court has spoken. It has affirmed its ruling on the quo warranto petition declaring as void the appointment of former Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, Alvarez said. The Constitution mandates the Supreme Court to be the final arbiter of legal and constitutional questions. Let us respect its decision, no matter what our persuasions are, he said. Alvarez added that the SC ruling has also rendered moot the impeachment proceedings against Sereno at the House of Representatives. As a consequence, we would now have to consign such proceedings to our archives, Alvarez said. Oriental Mindoro Rep. Reynaldo Umali, chairman of the House committee on justice, said the ruling was expected. Reps. Tom Villarin of Akbayan and Gary Alejano of Magdalo Party-list said the eight justices who voted for the quo warranto committed an impeachable act. Gadon, who had filed the impeachment complaint against Sereno, slammed former President Benigno Aquino III, saying he abused his power by appointing her to the post. In 2011, Aquino could have chosen other nominees who were a hundredfold more qualified than Sereno in all aspects. Sereno is a closed chapter in the history of the judiciary, Gadon said. It is grossly unfair and misleading for Sereno to keep on using President Duterte as a face-saving excuse for her removal as chief justice, he added. 20 years ago, a regime that seemed unmoveable, that had ruled for decades, while standing on the bones of millions of people massacred between 1965-66 and with its police and soldiers present at every corner, collapsed in the blink of an eye. On 21 May 1998, all over Indonesia, on TV and radio, a voice familiar to the ears of 200 million people proclaimed: I have decided to declare that I have ceased to be the president of the Republic of Indonesia. The people cheered and a new chapter in the modern history of Indonesia opened. The fall of the New Order regime was truly a revolution, even though the movement was called Reformation (Reformasi). People that had long been in a deep slumber or more correctly forced into that state exploded onto a political arena that was barricaded by the armys bayonets. The toiling masses demanded their rightful place in history. Their determination and will to sacrifice for it meant that no force on earth that could stop them. The gates of democracy that had been kicked down by the people permitted a large wave of mobilization to develop, with hundreds or even thousands of workers, peasants, fishermen, urban poor, and youth organizations being formed. Every single group that was once oppressed found its voice and began fighting back. There was a boisterous carnival of democracy following the fall of Suharto. 20 years since the fall of New Order, many things have changed. But at the same time many things remain the same. The butcher Suharto was overthrown, but the whole economic and political system that formed the foundation of his bloody regime is still intact, and therefore the same oppression against working people continues. After three decades in power, the brutal Suharto regime ultimately collapsed / Image: public domain The movement is faced with one question that has shadowed it since the fall of Suharto: Where are we going after Reformasi 1998? This question becomes ever louder today, 20 years after that revolutionary event and 10 years after the 2008 financial crisis and the organic crisis of capitalism. There is a sense of desperation amongst those in the movement, who feel that they are walking on the spot, moving from one campaign to another, from one advocacy case to another, again and again without any end in sight. Like the Sisyphus myth, it is as though they are condemned to push a boulder to the top of the mountain only to see it roll back again. All kinds of coalitions and fronts come and go, unable to become a permanent point of reference for the proletarian movement. There was one glimmer of light in October 2012, with the first nationwide general strike in Indonesia since 1965. However this massive wave of workers struggle subsided in few years, and its retreat was marked by the passing of Law No. 78 in 2015 that robbed workers of their right to negotiate minimum wages. With this retreat, the regime became more confident in launching assaults against the working people in the form of business-friendly investment policies, land grabs, evictions of the urban poor evictions and so on. The movements retreat also gave room for reactionary elements such as the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) to become bolder in spreading racial, religious and ethnic prejudices amongst the people. 20 years since we won some democratic freedom from the dictatorship (which, despite its limitations has given us opportunity to build workers organizations) it is necessary to draw the lessons from the experiences of the past, and answer the burning question: which way forward? People ready to struggle We have to first draw the single most important conclusion from the Reformasi 1998 movement and the experience of the past 20 years, which is the capacity of the masses for revolution. Time and again, the masses have shown their elan, creativity, and courage. We are not just referring to the mass revolutionary action in 1998, but also decades before that in 1926-27, 1945-49 and 1955-1965. Even after being crushed in 1965-66 in the most brutal manner, destroyed not just physically but also ideologically, even though they had to wait more than 30 years, the toiling masses arose again. And when the working people move, there is no fortress that can hold them back. But again and again, this revolutionary capacity evaporated into thin air and the revolutionary movement stopped halfway, and sometimes suffered bloody defeat as it had in 1965. This was not because the masses were not ready to struggle, but because of the lack of a leadership to put forward correct and timely slogans and a programme of action that could lead the movement to its final goal. But we often hear the lefts blaming the people for the defeat: peoples consciousness is low, they dont understand revolution, and many other excuses. Pessimism toward the revolutionary capacity of the toiling masses transforms itself into a vicious cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Asian economic crisis in 1997-98 was an earth-shattering event / Image: Jonathan McIntosh Following the ebb of a revolutionary wave, like the Reformasi 1998, or in a smaller scale the National General Strike in 2012, we often face a longer period of retreat and deep apathy. The masses cannot constantly be in the white heat of struggle. After entering the arena of struggle on a mass scale and attempting to transform their fate, their energy will be drained when their goal is not attained. Peoples will to struggle is not a bottomless well that can be reached into anytime one wishes. But when the masses take a step back, they also contemplate what has just transpired, and they will be more careful when they re-enter the arena of struggle in the future. Here the tasks of revolutionaries become very important. Instead of being pessimistic and demoralized, we must draw the necessary lessons, retreat in good order, save the best elements from demoralization, and if necessary launch a ruthless ideological battle to cut off old elements that have become a deadweight to the movement. The latter is very important, because it is far too often that old activists, demoralized because of past defeats, turn themselves into the biggest obstacle for the revival of the movement. We do not lack such 1998-generation activists. We only need to see the fate of PRD today. PRD in the 1990s was a party that united in its ranks the most advanced, radical and militant youth. Today it has been transformed into a nationalist party, that openly collaborates with bourgeois parties like Gerindra. The fate of many ex-members of PRD is no better, with many carving out comfortable and successful careers in various NGOs, and others joining the government and bourgeois political parties. All is not lost. There is a new generation of youth, who with difficulty but resolved determination seek to learn the lessons of Reformasi 1998, its gains and failures, its strengths and weaknesses. This is the new layer that we have to win today. There is no room for pessimism and doubt. Thus, before one can learn from the experiences of Reformasi 1998, we have to first expunge those who are pessimistic, doubtful and vacillating. The 1998 Asian economic crisis and the 2008 global financial crisis The Asian economic crisis in 1997-98 was an earth-shattering event. Not a decade has passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, where all strategists of capital announced the end of history, believing they had solved the capitalist contradiction of boom-and-bust. But the Asian crisis of 1997-98 dispelled all their wishful thinking. With the end of Cold War in 1991, the capitalists proclaimed the absolute victory of the free market economy. With the abandon of madmen they furiously engaged in speculative investments to gain as much profit as possible. The capitalists of those days thought the victory of capitalism meant the only remaining truth was that of profit. Highly speculative investments, especially in real estate, flooded developing countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. Between 1990 and 1995, levels of investment increased by 16.3 percent per year in Indonesia, 16 percent per year in Malaysia and 15.3 percent per year in Thailand. While in the United States, in the same period it increased only by 4.1 percent per year, and 0.8 percent per year in the most advanced countries. Cheap and easy credit flowed readily to Asia and led to a credit bubble. This bubble eventually burst in 1997, which in the final analysis was caused by overproduction. Before this crisis, countries like Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea were collectively referred to as Asian Tigers. Economists of all sorts showered these countries with adulation as successful models of capitalism. Of course these same people conveniently forgot that in Indonesia this model of capitalism was built by a brutal military dictatorship upon mass graves of millions of workers and peasants. Thailand has witnessed one military coup after another since the 1930s, with the ever-present military junta ruling the people with an iron fist. These Asian Tigers were proven to be made of paper, and were shredded into pieces by the Asian crisis of 1997. However, it would be wrong to think that the fall of the New Order regime was solely due to the Asian crisis. A number of factors had prepared for the fall of this brutal military regime. First, a military dictatorship has always been an unstable regime. A regime cannot constantly oppress the people with bayonets and open threat of violence. Without a channel for the people to express their anger and discontentment, these moods quietly accumulate beneath the surface, and then explode like a volcano. This explosion can prove uncontrollable, and destroy the whole system of oppression. After 32 years of military violence, the New Order could no longer be tolerated by the masses / Image: Office of the Vice President That is why, in general, the ruling class prefers to use the illusion of democracy to rule over the people. With a democratic parliament, people are given some sort of medium to express their discontent every few years through elections. This is a safe channel that in reality doesnt result in any fundamental change. Of course there is always a whole apparatus of violence standing behind the parliament, with their batons and pistols ready to strike the head of the masses who are considered too eager or too bold in demanding their freedom. In the end, after 32 years of military violence, the New Order could no longer be tolerated by the masses. The second factor was the rapid growth of the proletarian battalion, starting in the late 1980s. From 1986 to 1993, manufacturing jobs grew quickly, at around nine percent per year, especially in garment, textile and shoes factories. With the growth of the proletariat, we saw also the sharpening of class struggle. This was reflected in the increasing number of recorded strikes, from 61 in 1990 to 300 by 1994. Under a climate of brutal repression, as exemplified by the brutal murder of Marsinah in 1993 [a trade union activist who was killed after leading a strike movement in the factory where she worked], the strikes reflected the spirit of rebellion, showing the workers no longer feared the army boots that had for so long pressed them into the dirt. The third factor, which is no less important, was the practice of corruption, collusion, and nepotism of the Cendana family [Cendana is the name of the street where Suharto and his family lived] and the people around them, who had become deeply vulgar. Suharto and his good friend, Liem Sioe Liong, the richest man in Indonesia, practically divided Indonesia as loot amongst their family members and closest associates. The widening gap between the rich and the poor became intolerable. All these factors combined into a perfect storm. A revolution exploded in a country with the fourth largest population in the world. From the point of view of the ruling class, Reformasi 1998 was a chaotic disaster. But from the point of view of the oppressed people, it freed them from the shackles that had long bound them. Today we are entering a similar period of turbulence, of far greater depth and extent. After the 1998 crisis, all capitalists swore that they had learned their lesson and would no longer repeat their mistake. They admitted that they momentarily lost their composure in their profit-seeking measures, and now they will act with more calm, patience, responsibility and wisdom in running their businesses. But in a very short time, they repeated their mistakes, this time on a global scale. In 2008 the world was struck with the global financial crisis, precipitated by the bursting housing bubble in the US. The capitalists never learned anything. The inherent contradictions of capitalism will always bring about the same economic crises. The boom-and-bust cycle can never be separated from the capitalist economic system, as Karl Marx explained more than 150 years ago: It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial, each time more threateningly In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. But there is something qualitatively different in the 2008 crisis. The 1998 crisis was limited to Asia and the economy quickly recovered in one or two years, this time we have yet to witness any meaningful recovery, 10 years after the fact. The 2008 financial crisis spread to the whole world, hitting one country after another. Every attempt by governments to restore the economic equilibrium only results in the disturbance of the political equilibrium. We are truly entering a new period in the history of capitalism, a period of revolution and counter-revolution, a period where the whole validity of the system is being questioned, a period of sharp polarization to the left and also to the right, with violent, sudden and sharp swings of public opinion. All earth-shattering political events since 2008 to name a few of them: the Arab Revolution; the Occupy movement; Brexit referendum; Corbyn in the UK, Melenchon in France, and Sanders in the US; to certain extent the election of Donald Trump; Black Lives Matter; the rise, and fall, of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain; the national movement of Catalonia; the national referendum in Scotland; and many more are clear indications that we are entering into a stormy period. And this is just the beginning. Bigger political events are being prepared. There is not one stable regime to be found. Capitalism in crisis In short, capitalism is entering its deepest crisis, economically, socially and politically. Workers, peasants, urban poor, and the youth are launching an ever-intensifying struggle against this crumbling system. To be sure, the movement does not proceed in a straight line, always in ascendancy until we reach a revolution. The road that has to be trod by the toiling masses to reach the final conclusion of revolution is winding, surrounded with swamps, steep ridges and deep abysses. In the absence of a revolutionary leadership, this journey will even be longer. The task of a revolutionary leadership is to guide the masses through this obstacle-ridden journey. But what is clear today is that capitalism in its crisis are pushing the masses to the road of struggle. Today the Indonesian working class is in a much better position than they were back in 1998 / Image: Jonathan McIntosh That is why all talk about the so-called strengthening of the right, of fundamentalism, of militarism, of neoliberalism, is truly misplaced and wrong. It reflects the pessimism of the left, especially amongst the liberals and the reformists and some of those who claim to be socialists or Marxists who have given up. They only see what they want to see, to validate their old prejudices that revolution is utopian and impossible, that we have to be realistic and pragmatic, and therefore limit ourselves to the kind of struggle that can provide immediate results. If the movement is to escape from this abyss, it must first have a correct perspective on the period we are entering. Today we see symptoms similar to those that unfolded before the 1998 revolution: a chronic economic impasse, a crisis of legitimacy for political and economic elites and a widening chasm between the rich and the poor that is making the latter more and more disgusted. Today these symptoms are deeper and farther reaching, and thus a bigger explosion is being prepared. There might be a smart Alec who feels like he has the right to interject: That was before. Today is completely different. Yes, that is entirely correct. What is this difference? Today the Indonesian working class is in a much better position than they were back in 1998. More workers are organized in trade unions, and they have accumulated many experiences in organizing mass actions and strikes even a national general strike of millions of workers. The composition of the working class has also improved quantitatively and qualitatively, with more workers employed in giant and capital-intensive factories. The peasants are also organized in various organizations, and so are the urban poor. In other words, today the objective conditions present no obstacle. The only obstacle is that of subjective factor, of revolutionary leadership. Building a revolutionary leadership Leadership is key in a movement, and 1000 times more in a moment of revolution. In a decisive moment, the victory or the defeat of a revolution can be decided by a small group of people small relative to the size of the masses who are standing at the front of the movement. PRD was too small to be a decisive force during the moment of revolution / Image: Office of the Vice President PRD (Peoples Democratic Party) in the 1990s was not a mass party. It was a small party, but its small size was compensated for by the fact that in its ranks were gathered the best youth and workers: the most courageous and class conscious. PRD played a role much bigger than its size, and this was made possible because it put forward the most advanced idea at that time, which was socialism. Even though what these PRD members understood about socialism was incomplete (here is not the place to analyze their theoretical shortcomings) their politics clearly gave them an advantage over other groups in the struggle against the New Order regime. However PRD was too small to be a decisive force during the moment of revolution in 1998. When the wider masses started to move, PRD was swept to the side, thrown hither-and-thither, and finally smashed to pieces in one protracted process of death agony. What is the lesson that we need to draw from this? We have to prepare a revolutionary party long before a revolution breaks out. It also has to be built on the correct ideas, programme, methods and tradition, which is scientific socialism, enriched with the 150 years experience of proletariat struggle. There is no shortcut to building this revolutionary leadership, but its construction has to start now. Struggle for socialism The end result of Reformasi 1998 showed that it was not enough to overthrow Suharto and the New Order regime. This largely cosmetic change did not touch any fundamental problems, and the experience of the past 20 years has been a living witness to this fact. The same group of people are still ruling, albeit in a different manner and with a different colouring; and the same people as well, the workers, peasants and urban poor, are still oppressed. Reformasi has failed, and whats needed is revolution. Capitalism can no longer advance humanity, and has in fact become an obstacle that threatens to drag the toiling masses back to barbarism. It is not enough to resist capitalism. It needs to be overthrown in a revolutionary manner. An economic system based on the private ownership of means of production by a handful of people and the so-called free market must be replaced by collective ownership of the means of production, and democratic economic planning by the working class. This is our historical task. The only class that can lead the toiling masses in fulfilling this historical task is the working class, because it holds the main economic levers in its hands. The working class, in alliance with other layers of the working people: peasants, fishermen, and urban poor, will provide the necessary leadership to upturn capitalism and establish socialism. The working-class struggle therefore cannot be limited to that of trade union struggle and economic gains alone. It has to encompass political struggle. However, this political struggle cannot be done through joining a party of capital. This was done numerous times by many trade union leaders, and most recently by Said Iqbal leader of the metal workers union federation (FSPMI) who is ready to support a bourgeois party in the upcoming 2019 election if he can secure the position of Minister of Labour. The importance of class independence is one of the main lessons of Reformasi 1998. The majority of the left at that time supported collaboration with the bourgeois opposition camp (Amien Rais, Megawati and Gus Dur) with an excuse that at the moment the priority was to overthrow Suharto. The Reformasi 1998 was eventually betrayed by these reformist leaders, who negotiated a peaceful transition of power that left the whole oppressive system intact. The lefts who threw their weight behind supporting Jokowi in the 2014 presidential election have learned nothing / Image: Pemerintah Provinsi DKI Jakarta Woe to those lefts who never learn anything, for once again in 2014 they threw their weight behind supporting Jokowi in the presidential election with the same excuse: the priority was to defeat the New Order candidate, Prabowo. Class independence was auctioned off for a song, and what is peddled cheaply can never bring the desired result. The Jokowi regime was a disappointment and did not bring any fundamental change to peoples daily lives. Low wages (through Law No. 78), land grab against the peasants, forced evictions, oppression against the Papuans all these are active policies of Jokowis government. The 20 years experience after Reformasi 1998 should strengthen our conviction that the only banner that must be adopted by the movement today is that of socialism. This banner must be help up high proudly, clean and clear, so that it can be seen by the working masses who are looking for a way out of this madness we call capitalism. Without this banner, there is no future for the movement or the working class. 1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war. 2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war. 3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength. 4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war. 5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites. 6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination. 7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N. 8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N. 9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress. 10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N. 11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.) 12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party. 13. Do away with all loyalty oaths. 14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office. 15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States. 16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights. 17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks. 18. Gain control of all student newspapers. 19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack. 20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions. 21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures. 22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms." 23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art." 24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press. 25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV. 26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy." 27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch." 28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state." 29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis. 30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man." 31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over. 32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc. 33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus. 34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities. 35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI. 36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions. 37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business. 38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand. 39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals. 40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce. 41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents. 42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems. 43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government. 44. Internationalize the Panama Canal. 45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike. Montana State University deans, administrators, faculty and student leaders will visit the northeastern corner of the state as part of the seventh annual MSU Bus Tour on June 19-21. This years tour will include stops in Fort Peck, Froid, Glasgow, Jordan, Lewistown, Malta, Plentywood, Poplar, Sand Springs and Scobey. http://www.montana.edu/news/17806 "Someone who is big and strong and intimidates and insults everyone is not necessarily an alpha male," de Waal says. Watch now: https://mailchi.mp/ted/8z6hd8k26m?e=d3135666a2 Politics, eminent domain, weeds, grasshoppers, economic depression, and drought were no match for these Montana women. In her debut memoir, Montana Women, From the Ground Up: Passionate Voices in Agriculture and Land Conservation, freelance writer Kristin Ellis creates portraits of pioneering women who share their experiences of successes, growth and failures in farming and ranching Montanas vast landscape. With their forward thinking, nurturing abilities and "gumption" to "make hay out of thistles," these women persevered and thrived in Montana agriculture, while creating a better landscape for the next generation. Growing up on the family ranch, Linda fought hard to gain respect as a ranch hand, while Arlene learned to ride a horse and drive machinery at a very young age. Ellis recognizes the contributions these women have made to shape Montanas agriculture industry and the conservation movement. A womans role on a farm is everchanging, from cow nurse and parts manager to crew chef and bookkeeper. Ellis weaves anecdotes with discussions of differing views of agriculture, the meaning and practice of conservation, as well as advice for moving forward in todays agricultural world. Montana Women, From the Ground Up, a 144-page book with narrative and beautiful black and white photography, can be purchased at community establishments , local bookstores or online at https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467137232 Many thanks to Gloria O. for sharing. A rebound in Montanas state tax revenue could lead to undoing $46 million in state budget cuts later this year, a legislative report says although lawmakers Monday said the final budget picture wont be clear until next month. Still, a leading Republican lawmaker told MTN News Monday that if the revenue forecasts come through, the offsets to earlier budget cuts would be significant. "The money would go back in the same proportions that it was taken out during the (November) special session," said Rep. Nancy Balance, R-Hamilton, who chairs the Legislative Finance Committee. "So, its huge. This could have a very big effect on some of the cuts were seeing." By Mike Dennison MTN News http://www.kbzk.com/story/38451807/state-revenue-rebound-could-lead-to-undoing-budget-cuts-this-year A contentious proposal to link oversight of Californias electric grid with other western states faces a crucial test Tuesday in a state Senate committee. Supporters say regionalizing the grid would make it easier and cheaper to deploy renewable energy across the western United States. But critics, including some environmentalists and consumer advocates, say California would jeopardize its efforts to require the expansion of renewables. Jonathan J. Cooper, Associated Press https://www.sfgate.com/business/technology/article/California-lawmakers-debate-creating-regional-13005906.php Womens Rugby is the fastest growing sport in Mauritius and on Rugby Africa. In three years, the federation recorded a growth of 177% going from 119 to 211 female licensees. The Mauritius2024 Olympic program as a booster for womens rugby. In 2018, the Federation launched the Mauritius2024 Olympic program with the aim of qualifying a female team for the Paris Olympics in 2024. A colossal work with schoolchildren and young people is underway in order to hatch an Olympic generation. In 2019, 3 junior clubs were created and were able to participate for the first time in a domestic competition in Mauritius. The Olympic program impacts development by creating clubs in different areas of Mauritius, in order to effectively crisscross all of Mauritius. Womens rugby in Rodrigues is important, 47% of licensees are women. A 100% feminine club One of Mauritius clubs, Port Louis Sailors is essentially female, the focus has been on womens rugby by emphasizing work on the school and the younger generations. Young girls who discovered rugby less than 3 years ago who are currently competing against the best teams. Mauritius, a model of female governance All the management committees of Mauritian clubs and federations have a consistent integration of women in their board. A percentage above the average which makes it possible to implement the female sports policy of the federation. An Olympic Academy in 2020 to prepare for the Youth Games in 2020. On the High Performance side,Mauritius is arming herself by preparing the new generation 2004 and 2005 for the Youth Games. Supervision work was carried out in the schools in order to detect the elites of tomorrow of Mauritian rugby. The goal is to create a High Performance environment for these young athletes. International events as a training marker. The Federation hosted the largest womens rugby tournament in Mauritius in 2019, the Scott7s. A huge success that brought together hundreds of young girls from the Indian Ocean. 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Contact Details: Website: www.hodusoft.com E-mail: sales@hodusoft.com USA:+1 (707) 708 4639 India: +91-8866728362 As a community-building service, TMCnet allows user submitted content which is not always proofed by TMCnet editors. If you feel this entry is of inferior quality or wish to report it for some reason, please forward the URL to "webedit [AT] tmcnet [DOT] com" with your comments. [ Back To Conferencing Zone's Homepage ] Every year when the Triple Crown is concluded, we evaluate the stars who competed in the three races and try to determine which ones will be the horses to watch in the summer, mainly in the Haskell Invitational and Travers. Our thoughts also turn to the second wave of 3-year-olds, who were late developing and appear to be coming into their own, and should be peaking in August. This is where we find the Arrogates and the West Coasts and the V.E. Days. This year looks pretty cut and dry. It will be Justify against the world, as those he conquered in the Triple Crown will be trying to turn the tables on the strapping chestnut, as unlikely as it may seem right now, considering Justify should actually be reaching his peak about then. But what of the late developers; those having made significant improvement who could develop into major stars by the time the Travers is run? One such horse is King Zachary, who looks to have all the qualities of a top-class horse and whose scintillating victory in Saturdays grade 3 Matt Winn Stakes might have gotten a bit lost among all the top-quality stakes run that night, as well as a the pageantry and excitement surrounding Justifys return to Churchill Downs. But lets go back to the April 3 Derby Dozen when King Zachary first caught our attention after breaking his maiden by 7 3/4 lengths at Gulfstream. These were our first impressions of the son of Curlin, out of the Giants Causeway mare On My Way: This is the year of the lightly raced upstarts trying to buck history by going into the Kentucky Derby with only three or four career starts. They include Justify, Magnum Moon, Noble Indy, and Hofburg. Well, there is another you might want to pay attention to and he runs in Saturdays Wood Memorial. His name is KING ZACHARY, yet another from the barn of Dale Romans. This good-looking son of Curlin broke his maiden impressively at Gulfstream March 18 in his third career start and first start around two turns. Stalking the pace, he drew off without being touched with the whip to win by almost eight lengths. His mechanics are as good as any young horse Ive seen this year. He carries his legs under him perfectly and he kept a perfectly straight course down the stretch. He is light on his feet, with no wasted action. Whether he is ready to take on a big field of proven graded stakes horses well soon find out. Its asking a lot for him to finish first or second in order to assure a spot in the Derby, but from what I saw in his maiden win, he has all the tools. And his pedigree top and bottom is inundated with class and stamina. The colts 80-year-old owner, Tom Conway, had been fired up about King Zachary ever since trainer Dale Romans told him he was a freak. The colts second start actually was a sensational performance, as he had to check sharply after appearing to clip heels on the backstretch, nearly going down, but still rallied to finish third, beaten only 1 1/2 lengths. Conway was no stranger to the Derby trail, having upset the 2010 Blue Grass Stakes with 40-1 shot Stately Victor, owned in partnership with his son Jack, the Attorney General of Kentucky at the time. Unfortunately, King Zachary was unable to follow in the footsteps of Justify and Hofburg or live up to his trainers hype, as he could do no better than a sixth-place finish in the Wood Memorial. He did, however, make a strong move down the backstretch to reach contention, only to run up on a horses heels and dropped back, losing about three or four lengths. He never could get back in the race after that. Romans brought him back a month later in a 1 1/16-mile allowance optional claimer at Churchill Downs. King Zachary didnt seem that comfortable on the sloppy track, but kept digging in down the stretch trying to chase a longshot on the lead and seemed to get more competitive when the favorite, Determinant, charged up on his outside and looked like he was going to blow right by him. King Zachary found another gear and kept coming, getting up to win by a half-length. In the Matt Winn, he was up against Bob Bafferts highly regarded Ax Man, runaway winner of the Sir Barton Stakes whose three career victories by won by an average margin of 8 3/4 lengths. Also in the field were the impressive Pat Day Stakes winner Funny Duck; Combatant, a major presence on the Derby trail at Oaklawn Park, placing in several stakes; the grade 2-placed Tiz Mischief; and Home Base, winner of his last two starts. King Zachary settled in third, just behind Ax Man and Tiz Mischief. Approaching the head of the stretch, all eyes were on Ax Man, who was expected to put his opponents away and draw off as usual. But when Robby Albarado asked King Zachary, he pounced on the leaders in flash and blew right past Ax Man and Tiz Mischief. He increased his lead with every stride, drawing off to win by 4 3/4 lengths, with runner-up Tiz Mischief finishing eight lengths ahead of Ax Man in third. As he did in his maiden race, he was so smooth down the stretch, showing those same mechanics and fluid stride, while doing everything on his own. Although in his first five career starts his Beyer speed figures were all in the 70s, he catapulted up to an impressive 98 Beyer in the Man Winn, just three points slower than Pavels 101 in the Stephen Foster. So, now we have to ask ourselves, just how good is King Zachary and what is his ceiling as he continues to show tremendous improvement with each race, with more improvement expected in the upcoming months? King Zacharys name is derived from the two Zacharys in Tom Conways life. Zachary Thompson is the 16-year-old son of a dear friend of his who suffered a hypoxia related injury at birth, and has been represented by Conway as the family attorney ever since. Zachary Boone is one of Conways eight grandchildren. Conway was excited when Albarado told him early on that King Zachary is just like his sire, who Albarado rode to back-to-back Horse of the Year titles, only smarter. King Zachary was bred and raised in Union County, Kentucky at Waymore LLC, a partnership with a good friend of Conways, Charlie Moore. Conway had 10 mares that needed some place to stay and Waymore was a convenient location for him. Charlie had a beautiful farm in my home county, near Ellis Park, Conway said. We bred King Zachary, and raised him in Western Kentucky. We put him in the Keeneland sale and I bought him back for $550,000. I owned half of him, so I was bidding 50 cent dollars. This colt has that indescribable something, often called class. I know it when I see it. As a yearling he went to Mickey Preger in Camden, South Carolina to begin training. Mickeys father, Mitchell Preger, was an assistant to Horatio Luro and worked for Frank Whiteley. Mickey breaks 25 head, or so, yearlings and starts them in training. King Zachary came to Dale Romans around the first of May last year. Dale brought him along slowly and he bucked his shins in August. In November, he made his first start, and ran third to a more mature 2-year-old of Steve Asmussens, named Principe Guillerme. We scoped him and discovered he had an entrapped epiglottis, and he underwent minor surgery, which corrected the problem. In December, he went to Florida, where he made his second start in February. In that race he was assaulted and mugged. You have to see it to believe it. He went to his knees and came running at the end to finish third, beaten 1 1/2 lengths for all of it. He came back in March and broke his maiden by 7 1/2 lengths, and it could have been 15 lengths. Conway has had numerous dreams that he won the Kentucky Derby, and those dreams came fast and furious leading up to the Wood Memorial. But it was not to be. Now, with two straight wins by King Zachary, he looks ahead toward the Travers, and you know people are going to remember that Dale Romans has already upset a Triple Crown winner in the Midsummer Derby. King Zachary has all the attributes of a top-class colt, and as mentioned earlier, his mechanics and fluidity of stride are second to none. How he will stack up against Justify is anyones guess. But now is the time to start taking notice of this colt. He is getting awfully good. Videos Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos. Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald/TNS via Getty ImagesKanye West, Diddy, Big Sean, J. Cole and Questlove are among those mourning rapper XXTentacion. Born Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, XXXTentacion was shot Monday afternoon at a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida and died at 5:39 pm ET. He was 20 years old. Kanye West tweeted a photo of Onfroy with the comment, rest in peace I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing. Diddy posted a photo of himself and Onfroy with the comment, One of the most interesting people Ive ever met. Lets love each other while were alive. REST IN PEACE YOUNG KING. My heart dropped when I heard about @xxxtentacion," Big Sean tweeted. "I feel like we only got to see a glimpse of his artistry. I didnt know him personally but I respect how passionate he was about his music and message. Nobody deserves this kind of ending. gone too soon, damn! RIP." Some other responses: J. Cole: This got me f***ed up. RIP X. Enormous talent and limitless potential and a strong desire to be a better person. God bless his family, friends and fans. Questlove: America Eats Its Young. #RIPxxx T-Pain: Man, damn X. you JUST turned it around brother. Senseless bro. No reason. We gotta do better man. Juicy J: Prayers up for @xxxtentacion. Lil Flip: "Thoughts and Prayers go out to the Family and Fans of @xxxtentacion #RIP" Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Privacy Overview This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful. Italy refused to allow a ship carrying more than 600 refugees to dock in any of its ports on June 10. This decision returned the European refugee crisis to the limelight. France quickly denounced Italy for closing its ports to the migrants. The ship, the Aquarius, remained in limbo for several days as Europe squabbled over who should take responsibility for the refugees. The situation highlighted the disunity in the European Unionand Europes growing desire for strong leadership. According to EU law, refugees must apply for asylum in the first European country they enter. This law applies pressure to Italy and Greece, where most migrants land. These countries economies are already struggling. Even with help from other nations, they do not have the resources to deal with the incoming refugees. Around 120,000 refugees entered Italy via the Mediterranean last year. The Italian government estimated that the cost of rescuing and caring for these refugees was 4.2 billion (us$4.9 billion). Others put the cost far higher. Italy is only refusing entry to refugees brought in by nongovernment organizations (ngos). During the Aquarius dispute, an Italian Navy ship brought 970 migrants into Italy. Italy says that it will continue to refuse ngo ships access to its ports. Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italys Lega party and the governments new interior minister, wants the government to take even stronger action against migrants. He said last week that Italy cannot be Europes refugee camp. It is not circular reasoning in any way on my part. I am simply stating facts. Something that you and the other leftists are avoiding. If they want to claim asylum they check in before they enter the nation. Sounds reasonable to me. If that is unreasonable feel free to demonstrate why. These laws predate the trump administration. The photos that went around social media on memorial day were taken during the OBAMA administration so your outrage is created as a political weapon and you are foolish enough to fall for this. It is not the job of the POTUS to write and/or make laws. That is up to Congress. None of this has anything to do w/ trump. Want the laws changed contact your Congress person. But you wont do that. All you want is another reason to attack the trump administration and don't actually care about the issues. I have stated on here a number of times what i would do if it were up to me, how i would propose an immigration solution but i will post it again. End entitlement programs and minimum wage. This solves the problem. In what was treated as a historic day for the city of Detroit, Ford confirmed plans to add 2,500 employees to the long-vacant, once-doomed Michigan Central Station in the Corktown neighborhood by 2022. Ford executives and Michigan politicians, while standing in front of the iconic train station, said it would serve as the future "centerpiece" for a new Detroit-based campus. A lot has changed since the Michigan Central Station was closed in 1988, and slated for demolition over the course of the last decade. The automaker purchased the train depot, built in 1913, from the Moroun family who has owned it since the early 1990s shortly after it closed. Alongside the train station, Ford has purchased the adjacent Detroit Public Schools Book Depository building, a former brass factory, along with two acres of vacant land. "What Rouge was to Ford in the industrial age, Corktown can be for Ford in the information age," Ford President and CEO Jim Hackett said on Tuesday, June 19. "It will be the proving ground where Ford and our partners design and test the services and solutions for the way people are going to live and get around tomorrow, creating a Southeast Michigan mobility corridor that spans west from Dearborn to Ann Arbor, and east to Detroit." The likes of Big Sean, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, Wayne County Executive Warren Evans, and Ford's Bill Ford and Hackett spoke with the historic train station standing tall in the background. See below for video coverage from Tuesday's remarks before members of the media were allowed to walk through Michigan Central Station: Ford Michigan Central Station Purchase Ford Motor Company announces its plans for the historic Michigan Central Station in Detroit: Posted by MLive.com on Tuesday, June 19, 2018 -- As for what's next for the Michigan Central Station that has stood idle for 30 years and was once slated for demolition, the automaker says it will spend the next three to four years redeveloping the dilapidated space. Redevelopment will focus on making the space a "magnet for high-tech talent and a regional destination with modern workspaces, retail, restaurants, residential living and more." The announcement that Ford would purchase, restore and soon house employees in the long-vacant landmark comes during the same calendar year that the automaker moved a staff back into Detroit proper for the first time in years. Back in May, Ford started moving more than 200 autonomous and electric vehicle business and strategy teams employees into The Factory, also in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood. Those teams are now stationed in the neighborhood, and Ford says they will help speed up the development of its hybrid F-150, Mustang, Explorer, Escape and Bronco models. The year 2022 will serve as a busy one for the automaker, as it plans to begin introducing 40 new battery-electric vehicles in 2020, with 16 models full battery-electric ones to be introduced by 2022. -- -- Ford previously said it hoped to cut $11 billion in operating costs and $5 billion in capital expenditures between 2019 and 2022. The slashing across the entire company will include cuts in engineering, sales and marketing, according to the automaker. "Returning to Detroit is particularly meaningful because it is where my great-grandfather originally set out to pursue his passion and where we have always called our home," Bill Ford said in a statement about moving back into Detroit in May. "We are planting a special piece of our company's future in one of the city's great neighborhoods, because we believe in Detroit, its people and what we can build together." Ford has not disclosed the cost of the Michigan Central Station, or how much of an investment it will take to restore and ready it for employees. The previous move to Corktown in The Factory location was said to be part of an $11.1 billion investment in global electric vehicles. The automaker echoed the remarks it made when it announced its first move back into Detroit earlier this year, when it touted focusing on "mobility challenges and solutions in an urban setting." Ford and Hackett confirmed plans to have at least 1.2 million square feet of space in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood, and that 2,500 employees from "partners and other businesses" would also call the train station home. "This will be the kind of campus where the emerging economy thrives - a collaborative ecosystem of companies, educators, investors, and innovators," Hackett said in a statement. "This is where part of our team will live and work as a part of this community, alongside the customers and neighbors whose lives we're trying to make better." As for the other 300,000 square feet of space, the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker says it will be reserved for the aforementioned community, retail and residential spaces. Check out a video of our self-guided tour through Michigan Central Station below: Michigan Central Station Tour A tour of the historic Michigan Central Station after Ford outlined its plans for the Corktown location: Posted by MLive.com on Tuesday, June 19, 2018 -- Cedar Crest Dairy, a local business since 1928, has been granted a tax abatement from the City of Hudsonville under the provisions of Michigan PA 198 (Industrial Facilities Exemption Certificate). The Hudsonville City Commission voted unanimously on June 11 to approve a 50-percent abatement for six years on the $2,785,387 value of personal property in the 14,536-square-foot addition at the Cedar Crest freezer warehouse, 5850 Balsam Drive. The company hosted a ribbon-cutting for the addition on May 24. The Cedar Crest dairy operation started about 1928 on a dairy farm on Bauer Road near 24th Avenue in Jenison. Robert Becker and his brother, Rick, brought in the delivery operation in 1978 and soon located at the Balsam Drive depot in Hudsonville. "It was a one-truck operation," Rob Becker said. "The market had switched from home delivery to grocery store purchasing. The federal hot lunch program started about that time and that gave us a boost. From that, we just grew the business. It has evolved over time to a lot different business." Cedar Crest does not produce any products. The company distributes for other producers, including Country Dairy, Nestle brand foods and ice cream, and Hudsonville Ice Cream. They recently opened a 10-route branch in Detroit. About five years ago, Cedar Crest bought Suburban Propane just north of the main Cedar Crest location, keeping five acres east of the building and leasing the front back to Suburban Propane. The eastern property is now used for parking. They also purchased the Carter Lumber property to the south, which has been developed for retail uses. The new freezer addition allows the company to expand to more markets. They have already added about 22 new employees. KENTWOOD - The city will celebrate Independence Day with a full slate of activities this year, beginning with a pancake breakfast at the Kentwood branch of the Kent District Library. Breakfast will be served from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. at the library, located at 4950 Breton Road SE, and will cost $5 per person. The NM Mobile Solutions 5K Race & Fun Walk is set to get underway at 8:30 a.m., with racers beginning and finishing in front of City Hall and Kentwood Fire Station #1, 4775 Walma Ave. SE. The cost is $30 per person. Further information and online registration can be found at https://bit.ly/2JYC1wS. The annual Independence Day parade is slated for 9:30 a.m. Starting at Crestwood Middle School, the parade route will travel south on Walma Avenue to Breton Road, turn west onto 52nd Street and end at Challenger Elementary. Finally, the evening celebration, featuring carnival rides, games, giant inflatables, food trucks, community booths and live music from Sweet J Band, will take place from 6 to 10 p.m. at Crestwood Middle School, 2674 44th St. SE. Fireworks will begin at dusk. Additional parking and viewing will be available at City Hall. ANN ARBOR, MI - As legal negotiations continue in the quest to come up with a new plan of attack for the Gelman dioxane plume, Ann Arbor is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal fees. The City Council voted unanimously Monday night, June 18, to approve another $150,000 increase to the contract with Bodman PLC, the Detroit-based law firm helping the city in its legal fight against Gelman Sciences Inc. Gelman is the former filter manufacturer responsible for heavily polluting the area's groundwater with the toxic chemical 1,4-dioxane, a problem the community is still trying to resolve decades later. This is the third amendment to the Bodman contract since 2016, when the city took legal action against the polluter in Washtenaw County Circuit Court to try to push for a better cleanup and more monitoring. It now pushes the total contract amount up to $445,000. City Attorney Stephen Postema said the city attorney's office is actively involved in the case, working with the outside counsel from his former law firm, and the city's in-house legal staff has put a significant amount of time into it. Postema was a partner at Bodman before becoming Ann Arbor's city attorney in 2003. The city took action to intervene in the longstanding litigation between the state and Gelman Sciences after Michigan implemented new emergency rules for dioxane in October 2016, declaring the previous exposure criteria was outdated and not protective of public health. The goal is to amend the Circuit Court consent judgment that effectively governs management of the plume. "Like all of us, I am frustrated with where we are today on 1,4-dioxane," Mayor Christopher Taylor said in a statement, noting it took the city years just to obtain a stronger state limit on dioxane in residential drinking water, going from 85 parts per billion to 7.2 ppb. "We achieved that result, finally. Given our context, I'm glad that we're in court, now, working with Scio Township, the county, and importantly, the Huron River Watershed Council to force the polluter to accelerate cleanup and expand monitoring. That's our goal. We need to make sure that our homes, shallow groundwater, and drinking water are safe. Of course, too, we're working now also with the EPA as they review the plume and progress. I'm glad that they're involved." Judge Tim Connors last year allowed Ann Arbor, Scio Township, Washtenaw County and the Huron River Watershed Council to intervene in the litigation against Gelman, becoming co-plaintiffs alongside the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. After the local parties were granted intervention, Gelman turned to the Michigan Court of Appeals in April 2017, seeking to get them removed from the case so the company would have to negotiate only with the DEQ. Gelman has complained about the county's "cleanup or bust" attitude and has suggested the local parties want a better cleanup of the pollution than is reasonable. After the Court of Appeals rejected the polluter's request to throw out the local plaintiffs in July 2017, Gelman turned to the Michigan Supreme Court with the same request and was rejected in January 2018. That leaves the matter in Circuit Court, where confidential legal negotiations between the various parties are ongoing. If the parties can't agree on terms of a new strategy, the case could go to trial in Connors' courtroom in Ann Arbor. In a complaint filed in Circuit Court in the 2016, the city asked the judge to hold Gelman Sciences responsible for payment of all costs, including attorney fees, incurred by the city in conjunction with the litigation. So, there's a chance the city could recoup its legal costs if it prevails. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, after reviewing the current status of efforts to address the Gelman plume, decided last November to hold off on designating it as a federal Superfund site, though the EPA is now taking a more active role in working with the Michigan DEQ to watch over the spread of the toxic plume. At Monday night's meeting, Council Member Anne Bannister, D-1st Ward, said some residents are hoping the city will put its resources toward pursuing a federal Superfund cleanup and getting the EPA more involved, since there are limits to what the DEQ can do. Some are concerned the state's environmental laws don't provide a mechanism for the type of aggressive cleanup many in the community want to see, instead allowing the pollution to spread as long as the risk of human exposure is managed within acceptable levels. Gelman is continuing to do limited pump-and-treat remediation, but some are concerned that the plume continues to spread through neighborhood areas and city parks toward the Huron River. Dioxane is classified by the EPA as likely to be carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure. It also can cause kidney and liver damage, and respiratory problems. Short-term exposure to high levels of dioxane in the air can cause eye, nose and throat irritation. Just a few parts per billion in drinking water, with long-term exposure, poses a 1 in 100,000 cancer risk, according to the EPA. The expanding Gelman plume already has poisoned many area wells and trace amounts of dioxane were detected in shallow groundwater by Waterworks Park on Ann Arbor's west side in 2016. There now are concerns about the potential risk of toxic vapors intruding into homes. A DEQ report in January indicated dioxane at 4.4 ppb was found in a branch of the Allen Creek in West Park in December 2017. There still are homes on well water in Scio Township on the edge of the plume where low levels of dioxane have been detected in the water. A family with young children was living in a house on Jackson Road where the water in recent years had dioxane levels that ranged anywhere from 13 to 54 ppb. Because that was below the state's outdated 85-ppb standard at the time, the polluter -- under the DEQ's oversight -- sent the family reports saying the water was safe. Gelman Sciences was acquired in 1997 by Pall Corp., which was acquired in 2015 by Danaher Corp., a multibillion-dollar corporation that some local officials and residents argue has the financial resources to do a better cleanup. The city's legal services contract with Bodman includes $20,000 for the city's share of expert services in the case. Council Member Julie Grand, D-3rd Ward, said the Gelman plume issue is something a lot of residents ask her about. "And if there is an expense that seems to be popular with the folks that I'm speaking with, it is spending money on experts to help us in this effort," she said. "I appreciate the work that our legal team is doing in seeking out those with expertise in this area. I appreciate the work of our community partners at the county, with the township, with the watershed council, and do believe that we have a great opportunity to renegotiate. And as problematic as our state DEQ is, I will take them over (EPA administrator) Scott Pruitt any day of the week." The DEQ oversees Gelman's efforts to manage the plume under a Circuit Court consent judgment that aims to keep the plume from poisoning more wells in neighboring Scio Township and Ann Arbor's main drinking water source at Barton Pond. Council Member Jack Eaton, D-4th Ward, thanked Bannister for mentioning the limitations of what can be done under state law. "The MDEQ doesn't have the authority to order a cleanup," he said. "They can only work to try to keep people and poison separate from each other. And as we have seen, the plume continues to progress toward the river, and nothing that we accomplish in state court will change that. ... We're really not going to resolve this problem without including the EPA in the process, and I'm happy that the Sierra Club and some of the other communities in this region have petitioned the EPA ... because they actually have the statutory authority to order a cleanup of a responsible party." Eaton said it's easy to blame the federal government for not being as vigorous on such issues as the city would like, but he believes the EPA staff continues to do good work in this particular area and he agrees the city should be seeking the EPA's help. Council Member Zachary Ackerman, D-3rd Ward, said whether the city should seek Superfund status for the plume is a debate for another time, but he noted the EPA has been involved in discussions. "So, I wouldn't want to give the impression that the EPA isn't involved," he said. "But the debate over the effectiveness of becoming a Superfund site is something we can hash out at a later date." Before the extra $150,000 was approved Monday night, up to $295,000 had been approved under the city's contract with Bodman. "The cost of the firm's legal services through March 2018 is within $5,000.00 of the amount in the contract for legal services, as already amended," Chief Assistant City Attorney Abigail Elias wrote in a memo to council. Although the amount of time and cost of legal services going forward can't be predicted with certainty, she said, to continue the negotiations and related work, Bodman calculated $150,000 to be a reasonable estimate. The Ann Arbor News has requested information from the county and the township about their legal costs in the case. ANN ARBOR, MI - The average single-family household in Ann Arbor will pay about $77 more per year in water and sewer fees starting July 1, assuming usage is unchanged from last year. That's a roughly 11 percent increase for the average household using nearly 54,000 gallons of water per year. The City Council voted 7-4 Monday night, June 18, to approve a new rate structure that a majority of council members argue is more equitable and moves away from having apartment dwellers subsidize water services for homeowners. However, some think the new structure is unfair to single-family households that will pay more per gallon for their water now, with increasingly higher rates for using larger amounts. The city's staff recommended the new structure to council following an analysis of the city's costs for services that looked at what it takes to deliver water to different classifications of customers. City officials say the data showed single-family homeowners should be paying more and those in multi-family housing should be paying less. Commercial users will continue to pay about the same. Mayor Christopher Taylor and his allies approved the new rate structure, which was opposed by Council Members Anne Bannister, Jack Eaton, Sumi Kailasapathy and Jane Lumm. Lumm, an independent from the 2nd Ward, said she's concerned that, while the overall restructuring is intended to be revenue neutral, it still shifts about $2 million in annual costs for service to single-family customers. She argues that's too severe an impact on them. Other council members said they don't want to raise people's water rates, but it's the responsible thing to do. Council Member Julie Grand, D-3rd Ward, described it as righting a past wrong and in keeping with the community's values. Council Member Chuck Warpehoski, D-5th Ward, said he didn't see a way to justify not having each class of water customers pay their fair share for what it takes to serve them. He said it would be legally questionable to stick with the current structure where one class of users is subsidizing another, now that the city has data to show that's what's been happening. The city bills water customers on a per-unit basis, with a unit equal to 100 cubic feet of water or 748 gallons. The current residential per-unit price is $1.55 for the first seven units, $3.37 for units 8-28, and $5.89 for more than 45 units. Under the new structure, a fourth tier is being added, so the cost per unit will be $1.77 for the first nine units, $2.83 for units 10-18, $6.57 for units 19-36, and $14.08 for more than 36 units. Non-residential customers, including businesses and the University of Michigan, will pay a flat rate of $3.83 per unit, while multi-family residential customers, such as apartment renters, will pay $2.13. There are different rates for water-only meters. Andy Burnham, a financial management consultant with Stantec Consulting Services, helped the city with its cost-of-service analysis that resulted in the new rate structure. He said the weighted average rate across residential tiers, or the "effective residential rate," will be $3.64 per unit, which is still less than what commercial users will pay but more than what apartment dwellers will pay. It amounts to less than half a penny per gallon. Under the city's current rate structure, there are three sub-classifications for commercial users, but 98 percent end up paying $3.81 per unit, Burnham said. That's going up two pennies. Lumm questioned the different pricing and suggested a gallon of water should be a gallon of water no matter who's buying it. Council Member Zachary Ackerman, D-3rd Ward, rejected that premise, saying water customers are paying for more than just the actual water -- they're paying for what it takes to deliver the water, and more infrastructure is involved in getting water to single-family households than to apartment buildings. City officials note excess system capacity is needed for summertime peak usage when people are watering their lawns. A June 15 report from Stantec Consulting shows the multi-family residential class of water customers displays little seasonal demand changes, making it unique compared to other users. "The absence of large seasonal demand fluctuations is important, as many of the investments that the utility's made are to serve peak demands," the report states. Lumm said commercial water usage also peaks in the summer along with residential usage, so she questioned why there will be tiered rates for single-family customers but not commercial users. Craig Hupy, the city's public services administrator, said the different rates are designed to recover the costs of providing water service to the different classifications of customers and commercial users will be paying their fair share for peaking costs. Even though it's a flat rate, he said, that's still built into the commercial rate. Hupy emphasized that residents are not paying for excess system capacity to accommodate new growth and development. He said that's a misconception, and new developments pay for the infrastructure needed to serve them. He said the rates residents will pay are to maintain the existing system and deliver existing services. According to the city, fairness and cost recovery are the goals of the new rate structure, and incentivizing residents to conserve water is a byproduct of the tiers but not a primary goal. The question of whether the city should create a tiered structure for commercial users came up, but Hupy said that's not appropriate and the city doesn't have enough data to do that at this time. He said it would require tremendous effort with little reward, as the city already is capturing the costs of service for the commercial class. Burnham said it's challenging to implement tiered commercial rates so most cities have uniform rates for commercial users. Noting it was 15 years ago that the city last took a close look at its rate structure, multiple council members expressed hopes that the city will do so again sooner than 15 years to ensure rates are equitable. Eaton, D-4th Ward, still questioned the fairness of the new rates, arguing they will penalize larger families and people who grow their own food. He also questioned whether they might cause residents to reduce water consumption, which would reduce revenue to the city, and Hupy acknowledged that's a potential outcome. Bannister, D-1st Ward, questioned whether the savings landlords realize on their water bills will trickle down to apartment tenants. Kailasapathy, D-1st Ward, suggested students who live in luxury apartments might be incentivized to leave their faucets running if they know they're paying a lower water rate. Council Member Chip Smith, D-5th Ward, said the new rates are going to hit his family harder than he'd like and he's not thrilled to support them, but he believes the data shows that the rates for single-family households have been artificially low and not covering costs. Taylor echoed Smith's remarks about the lack of desirability in raising rates but agreed it's the right thing to do. He said the city has an obligation to match rates to costs of service. The ordinance the council approved Monday night also increases stormwater rates by 14 percent starting July 1. The city intends to continually increase water and sewer rates in the coming years. Ann Arbor water rates are scheduled to go up 6 percent in January 2019, 6 percent in July 2019, 6 percent in July 2020, and 6 percent in July 2021, which is when a major water treatment plant reconstruction project is expected to begin. Ann Arbor's sewer rates are scheduled to go up 7 percent in January 2019, 7 percent in July 2019, 7 percent in July 2020, and 7 percent in July 2021. Stormwater rates, which went up 28 percent this past year, are scheduled to go up 14 percent this year, 13 percent next year, and 11 percent the year after that. City officials say the money is needed to cover costs of maintaining and upgrading the utility systems. ANN ARBOR, MI - Investigators believe the person or persons who killed a retired University of Michigan professor in his home last week were injured in the incident. Police investigating the death of retired chemistry professor Robert Sharp, 77, believe the killer may have suffered injuries to the face and hands, Ann Arbor Police Det. Sgt. Earle Fox said. Sharp's body was found Monday morning, June 11 in the basement of his townhouse in the 3200 block of Alpine Drive. Police said they found evidence of foul play at the scene, but have not elaborated as to the apparent cause of Sharp's death. Police were called to the home that evening to conduct a welfare check on Sharp after he failed to show up to a meeting at the condominium complex where he lived, neighbors said. Investigators believe Sharp died sometime between the night of June 10 and the morning hours of June 11. Police have declined to release any details on how Sharp died. The Ann Arbor Police Department is now offering a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for Sharp's death. Anyone with information about Sharp's death can call the Ann Arbor Police Department tip line at 734-794-6939, Detective William Stanford at 734-323-2628 or send an e-mail to tips@a2gov.org Sharp began teaching chemistry at the University of Michigan in 1969 and served on the faculty for 39 years before his retirement in 2008. His wife Maria Sharp recently died of cancer on April 20. YPSILANTI, MI - Statia Hamilton and Jakara Ventour were exercising near Perry Early Learning Center in Ypsilanti when they spotted the yellow tents and T-shirts. The next thing they knew, the two friends were wearing the shirts themselves - impromptu additions to the Interrupters, a Washtenaw County Sheriff-backed program to curb violence and bridge gaps between the community and law enforcement. It was an easy choice for them to join the group, the two women said. They are both mothers who hope to set a good example for their children, three of whom trotted along with them Saturday, June 16 as they knocked on doors in their neighborhood of the Hamilton Crossing apartment complex. "Everybody is attached to somebody in these small communities," said Ventour, 27. "And if we care about ... our children's well-being, then we have to care about our community." Ventour's 7-year-old Elijah Foster and Hamilton's 4-year-old twins Kaden and Jeremiah Hamilton also jumped in to pass out or leave behind bags with information on education, county resources, and free or low-cost summer programs for children and teenagers. Around them, hordes of children played outside. A few chatted with Hamilton and Ventour, offering up where their parents were so the moms could hand them bags directly. A few residents expressed thanks for the door-to door service as busy parents who may not know where to look, others briefly cracked the door to take the bag. The hope is to get ahead of possible youth summer violence and empower community members, instead of law enforcement, to make that happen, Washtenaw County Sheriff's outreach worker Jeannette Hadden said. If they don't, Hadden said, "we will be burying children and we will be visiting children in prison." The Interrupters started knocking on doors about three years ago after gang-related shootings and deaths rocked the area for a few summers. In the summer of 2015, one body - that of 20-year-old Keandre Duff - landed outside Hadden's door. The event Saturday, unfortunately, was timely. Though details of the incident had not been released, police confirmed a homicide had taken place on the city's north side the previous evening, leaving a 19-year-old dead. Hamilton, for her part, said news of the homicide investigation, like the gang-related incidents of recent years, invigorate her efforts to spread word of the Interrupter mission. She has young children and said she doesn't want them to think violence is OK. "We raise these kids up - we can't be having them see that violence every single day," she said. "... We have to figure out something to pick everyone back up, get everyone on the same track, the same page, and try to put this to an end." Since 2015, the Interrupters have conducted a number of similar events to the one on Saturday, with door-to-door sweeps of what organizers said are crime-heavy areas. However, the gathering took a new approach this weekend, with a focus on being a trauma-informed community. Trauma awareness has become a county-wide initiative based on the idea of "adverse childhood experiences." Officials have previously pointed to the 1995-1997 CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, which showed that the more adverse experiences a child endures - abuse, neglect or circumstance - the higher the likelihood a child will have mental, physical or employment struggles later in life. The study has been turned into a points system to evaluate childhood stress, and Washtenaw County ranked higher than the statewide average for Adverse Childhood Experiences in 2013 for adult respondents, according to data from Washtenaw County Public Health, provided on the Washtenaw ISD's Handle with Care website. Handle With Care, which alerts schools when children may have been exposed to traumatic incidents, is one program that's come out of the county-wide effort. And, indeed, two University of Michigan-Dearborn professors tagged along Saturday to see how the Washtenaw County Sheriff's programs work in action. They've been speaking with police behind the scenes, comparing the work to other programs. The county's focus on trauma is a positive step forward, said Ventour, noting that she believes violence often stems from mental health problems. At the end of the day, she said she and other adults need to step up to be leaders for their community and children. "We can be proud of the community where we come from," she said. "Even though there are a lot of negative things, that (has) pushed us to be more positive or to reach those that hasn't gotten the whole picture yet on what it means to come together as a community." LANSING, MI - The state House of Representatives recently took a step toward making solar energy systems tax exempt and clearing up confusion about how Michigan communities should tax alternative energy. On June 12, the House passed by wide margins two bills that would revise the General Property Tax Act to generally make alternative energy systems tax exempt, whether they're classified as commercial, industrial or residential. Both bills - 5143 and 5680 - were introduced by Rep. Tom Barrett, R-Potterville, and now head to the Senate for consideration. The House Fiscal Agency cited a recent Tax Tribunal case involving the city of Ann Arbor and local homeowners as one reason to support legislative action to clarify how solar energy systems should be taxed. In that case, Judge Steven Lasher issued a final opinion in March that said solar energy systems do not fit the definition of the types of personal property exempt from taxation. Some Michigan cities do not tax residential solar energy systems, but the city of Ann Arbor's assessor said the systems should be taxed because state law does not specifically allow for an exemption. Mark Clevey, who filed the Tax Tribunal case against the city of Ann Arbor in May 2017, initially said he would appeal the tribunal's decision on residential systems. He later changed his mind, saying he feared the Michigan Court of Appeals might reverse a previous court decision allowing for tax exemptions on commercial solar installations. Michigan Environmental Council, a nonprofit coalition of more than 60 organizations, commended the House vote. The current property taxation system creates "confusion and uncertainty" and burdens residents with tax increases if they install an alternative energy system, said Charlotte Jameson, Michigan Environmental Council director of energy policy and legislative affairs. "By supporting bills that make necessary reforms to Michigan's solar property taxation system, the Michigan House took a critical step to ensure that residents and businesses aren't penalized for investing in clean, renewable energy," Jameson said in a statement. Michigan Environmental Council joined Alliance for Solar Choice, Michigan Farm Bureau, Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council and Michigan Agribusiness Association in testifying in support of the House bills. The Michigan Department of Treasury testified in support of House Bill 5680, which relates to residential alternative energy systems; and against House Bill 5143, which relates to the commercial and industrial use of alternative energy systems. BAY CITY, MI -- A 20-year-old Auburn man accused of trafficking in child pornography has accepted a plea deal. Ronald A. Willig on Thursday, June 14, appeared before Bay County Circuit Judge Harry P. Gill and pleaded guilty to one count of distributing or promoting child sexually abusive activity. The charge is a seven-year felony. In exchange, the prosecution agreed to dismiss two counts of using a computer to commit a crime and one count of possessing child sexually abusive material. Willig's trial was to begin the following week on Tuesday, June 19. Willig's charges stem from Michigan State Police troopers having executed a search warrant on his home in the 400 block of South Kelly Drive on Nov. 28. Willig was not there when police entered, but arrived shortly thereafter and was interviewed. Willig told investigators he had gotten into child porn as "regular porn seemed fake." He began looking at the illicit material about two years prior, he said. "One day he came across that 'type of stuff' and he knew it was wrong but it was different," police reports state. Willig went on to say that he stored child porn on his Dropbox account and used KIK, an online messenger service, to trade images. He denied having had any direct sexual contact with a juvenile, court records state. He added he was sorry for having engaged in such activity and would no longer do so. Police seized two cellphones and a Dell hard drive. On searching them, they found 15 still images and six videos depicting a variety of sex acts between adults of both sexes with minors of both sexes. Some of the material involved minors as young as infants. Investigators found three instances of Willig receiving and sending child porn via KIK, court records state. Court records do not elaborate on how the police's investigation of Willig began or what led them to seek a warrant. Willig was arraigned on criminal charges on Feb. 2. He is free on bond pending sentencing, which is set for 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 2. BAY CITY, MI -- Despite previously indicating he wouldn't do so, a Bay County judge sent a woman to jail for making up a story about being raped in a Delta College parking lot. Bay County Circuit Judge Joseph K. Sheeran on Monday, June 18, sentenced 21-year-old Mary T. Zolkowski to 45 days in jail, with no credit for any time served. Once Zolkowski serves her term, she'll be on probation for two years, during which she is to be tested for drugs and alcohol and participate in substance abuse counseling. The judge also ordered Zolkowski receive a mental health assessment. Sheeran deferred an additional 220 days in jail, meaning Zolkowski will only have to serve them if she violates probation. Zolkowski's sentencing guidelines ranged from zero to six months. In a Cobbs hearing held in March, Sheeran indicated he would not impose jail time. A Cobbs hearing sees a judge outline the likely penalty a defendant will face if convicted. Though Sheeran indicated Monday he intended to withdraw from the Cobbs indication, Zolkowski opted against withdrawing her plea of guilty to false report of a felony. She pleaded to the four-year felony -- the lone charge she faced -- in March. In pleading, Zolkowski said she committed her crime Feb. 22. "I called Delta College and falsely reported the rape on their campus," Zolkowski told the judge in March. "My mother made the initial call and I took the phone and continued to report." Sheeran asked Zolkowski why her mom called the college in the first place. "She was concerned for me," Zolkowski replied. "Had you told her something that made her call?" the judge asked. "Yes, I told her I was raped," Zolkowski said. "I told them it happened in the back parking lot. I didn't say who by." "Did you ever name or accuse any individual?" "No." "Why did you do that?" the judge continued. "I was assaulted previously, not at Delta's campus," Zolkowski said. "And because I was ashamed of circumstances of that, when my mother called, I vented through Delta, which was very wrong of me. I should have been truthful from the very beginning, and I used Delta." Zolkowski's attorney, James F. Piazza, said in the same March hearing that his client has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, conditions for which she is receiving treatment. Case background When Zolkowski first spoke with police over the phone on the night of Feb. 22, she said that about 5:50 p.m. that day she had been walking to her vehicle on the campus at 1961 Delta Road in Frankenlust Township, fumbling with her keys, when a man grabbed her from behind. She said he grabbed her face and throat and proceeded to rape her, without wearing a condom. When it was over, the assailant jumped into the passenger seat of a vehicle and took off. Zolkowski could not provide a description of the vehicle, adding she "kind of blacked out," court records show. She only described her attacker as a black man. Police began a lengthy investigation, despite Zolkowski expressing unwillingness to participate or submit to a physical examination. During it, investigators learned a parolee with sexual assault convictions was on campus at the time of the alleged attack. He denied any knowledge of the incident and passed a polygraph test. At one point, Zolkowski told investigators she dropped her classes at Delta due to the attack, but police learned she had in fact dropped her classes prior to Feb. 22. After failing to turn up any evidence that the sexual assault had occurred, police again spoke with Zolkowski, who changed her story to say she had been raped by an acquaintance earlier on Feb. 22 at his Saginaw Township apartment. She did not want this man prosecuted, she told police. Police interviewed the man Zolkowski named as her assailant. He said he had been with Zolkowski on Feb. 22 and that they had engaged in consensual sexual intercourse. He provided investigators with text messages they had exchanged, in which Zolkowski claims to have been raped by a stranger at Walmart after they had separated. In another message, Zolkowski asks the man not to participate in the police investigation, court records show. DETROIT -- Thousands showed up to celebrate Ford Motor Company's move to the iconic Michigan Central Station in Detroit's Corktown on Tuesday morning. Ford executives and elected officials called the Dearborn automaker's purchase of the iconic, long-vacant building a historic moment for the city and for the Corktown neighborhood. "It's time to remake the station into a place of possibility again," said Ford Chairman Bill Ford. "Today, the Michigan Central Station has a new owner: Ford Motor Company." He said Ford Field, built in 2002, served as an "anchor" for Downtown Detroit's resurgence when the Lions moved back into the city, and he hopes Ford's new Corktown presence will do the same. "When the Rouge (Complex) fell into disrepair, some senior executives said we should write it off and build a new plant somewhere else. We rolled up our sleeves and built it better than ever," Ford said. "When it looked at times like we might lose everything, we looked out for each other." The company is bringing its mobility team to the train station when it reopens in 2022 after renovations. Ford said it took six months to plan and negotiate the move. He began feeling confident in the plan only two months ago, he said. "We want the community actively involved in making our Corktown campus the next great anchor for Detroit's comeback. We want this station ... to be a beacon of development," Ford said, adding it will be "a signal to the world that Detroit is open for business for good." Plans for the 18-story building include renovating the grand hall for a "majestic" appeal, along with a modern workspace in the tower above. The company plans to have 1.2 million square feet of space in Corktown. About 2,500 Ford employees are expected to move to Corktown by 2022, with plans to eventually add 2,500 more workers from different companies. They'll occupy about three-quarters of the campus, with remaining space open for community, retail and residential space, Ford announced. Ford also recently moved 220 of its self-driving and electric vehicle employees to The Factory in Corktown. "I can't think of a better investment for our future in terms of branding, our talent creation and also the kind of testing we have to do for our EVs in this corridor we're creating," Ford said. The project is the second planned redevelopment of a major eyesore to be announced in Detroit this month. The failed Wayne County jail project on Gratiot Avenue downtown was acquired by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert earlier this month, with plans for redevelopment into a $1-billion mixed-use site. "I can't think of a year where two of the biggest albatrosses or anvils around our necks are being fixed in the same year," said Wayne County Executive Warren Evans. The train depot was nearly torn down a decade ago. On April 7, 2009, Detroit City Council voted to demolish the Michigan Central Station, Mayor Mike Duggan said, adding that international media presented a single message: "The train station is dead, and Detroit is dead." "Who would've imagined that within 10 years, this site would be the center of 5,000 new employees coming back to the city and being the center of Ford's strategic direction on mobility," Duggan said. "The single best phone call I've gotten in my time as mayor was on Christmas Eve ... It was Matt Moroun saying 'My family and I have talked it over and we decided we're going to do what's good for the city.' He said 'I'm going to get this deal done and sell the train station to Ford.'" Moroun, son of trucking magnate Manuel "Matty" Moroun, announced the sale for an undisclosed price on Monday, June 11. "It's a great investment, but that's not the reason we did it. It helps us fast-track our transformation ... It's in the kind of neighborhood that we know attracts and retains highly skilled and innovative dreamers, makers, creators ... Those are the people we want working in this building," Ford CEO Jim Hackett said. "This isn't Ford coming and taking over. We live with you. This will be the kind of campus where the emerging economy thrives." Detroit's Latin mottos, as inscribed on the city's flag, have been projected onto Michigan Central Station over the last week: "Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus," meaning "We hope for better things; It will rise from the ashes." The giant message on the facade of one Detroit's most iconic buildings began appearing after Ford Motor Company purchased the long-vacant behemoth, with big plans for the structure that once stood windowless and blighted, a long a symbol of abandonment. The Dearborn automaker plans to announce its intentions for the building and the surrounding area in a Tuesday celebration. "Michigan Central Station is a powerful symbol of Detroit's struggles and now its resurgence, but Ford's investment in Corktown is far from symbolic," said Ford Motor Company Executive Chairman Bill Ford in a release. "We aren't just making a bet on Detroit. We are making a big bet on the future for Ford and the future of transportation. It's exciting to imagine what's possible as we build tomorrow, together." Ford and CEO Jim Hackett will outline the company's vision for its massive new Corktown facility. Corktown campus Ford plans to restore the 1913-built train depot, which was purchased for an undisclosed amount from the Moroun family, who owned it since the 1990s. Early conceptual renderings show the main lobby open as a community gathering spot with local retail and restaurant offerings, while a European-style market with food and retail vendors would occupy the atrium space. Alongside the train station, Ford has purchased the adjacent Detroit Public Schools Book Depository building, a former brass factory, along with two acres of vacant land. In May, 200 Ford autonomous and EV employees moved into "The Factory" at 1907 Michigan Ave., the first step in Ford's expanding presence in the historic Corktown neighborhood. The new Detroit campus will include approximately 1.2 million square feet of property in Corktown, including mixed-use spaces, office space, retail space and even residential housing. Soon, 2,500 Ford workers who focus on mobility could move to the neighborhood by 2022, with enough space for an additional 2,500 workers from other companies, Ford says. Corktown Celebration Public registration to attend Tuesday's celebration is now closed. The event is expected to take place primarily outdoors, with limited seating, but Ford encouraged visitors to bring mats or picnic blankets. Parking is available at Detroit PAL, 1680 Michigan Ave., starting at 9:45 a.m. Shuttles will be available starting 9:45 a.m from the Ford Resource and Engagement Center at 2826 Bagley Avenue, and from downtown, at WeWork Campus Martius, 1001 Woodward Ave. The site is also accessible via DDOT busses 18, 37, 49, and 89. Detroit rapper Big Sean, according to a report from the Detroit News, was expected to perform and offer remarks at the event. Community Open House hours at the Michigan Central Station will be held later this week, from Friday, June 22 - Sunday, June 24. Further details on how to register for the open house will be posted here. FLINT, MI -- Not a single teacher or member of the public spoke in favor of the proposed changes to Michigan's social studies curriculum at the June 18 listening session hosted by the Michigan Department of Education. Those in attendance were outraged at the possibility of removing some mentions of Islam, civil rights efforts of minorities and the word 'democratic' from the civics adage 'core democratic values.' The session held at the Genesee Intermediate School District's Erwin L. Davis Education Center and moderated by Daniel J. Quinn, a Michigan education and public policy researcher, who said that these changes are being proposed now due to the outdated nature of the current standards, to increase student outcomes and to reflect the state's desire for deeper student learning. "Two major presidential changes have happened since that time," Quinn said of the current standards, which were enacted in 2007. Panelists included Jim Cameron and Scott Koening, both social studies assessment consultants for the MDE and Linda Forward of MDE's senior executive policy adviser. The first major topic discussed was the removal of 'democratic' from 'core democratic values,' a change pushed by Sen. Patrick Colbeck, who is currently campaigning for governor. Colbeck was not at Monday's meeting, but later addressed his reasoning behind his push for the removal of 'democratic.' "There was an extensive debate as whether we should use core democratic values or simply core values, there was significant opinion ... and some disagreements, but the bottom line was that one of the members of the feedback panel decided that 'democratic,' is too close to 'Democrats,' and did not want Democrats or democratic. The compromise was to call it 'core values,'" Cameron said. Cameron chose not to name Colbeck here, but Forward later clarified that Cameron was speaking of Colbeck. "I think that was more spurred by the fact that there's some people making the false assertion that we're a democracy rather than a constitutional republic. If people understand that we're a constitutional republic, why are we using the term core democratic values," Colbeck said in a Wednesday phone interview. Colbeck said that he wasn't pushing for 'core republican values,' either, and simply wants shared values discussed in a "politically neutral way." "It was a term that seemed to be just promoting the Democratic Party as opposed to highlight what values we all have in common as Americans," Colbeck said. "Too many times, some of this bias out there has been unchecked. All I'm asking for is that we have a balanced perspective." The moderator tried to pull the focus away from this, insisting that the audience was focused on politics not process, which was rebuked by many in the audience. "This is political. All of this is political, history is political," Nancy Presnell said to the group. Presnell, a retired teacher who taught in the Detroit Public Schools system for 34 years, was one of the more vocal members of the audience. But Cameron suggested that the educational relevance is "a matter of opinion," and that a panel of others worked on the proposed standards, in addition to Colbeck. Other audience questions focused on how the decision to remove certain civil rights historical actions, such as cutting mentions of the Ku Klux Klan from two to one, bringing five mentions of the NAACP down to one, along with other cut references to struggles experienced by minority groups such as the disabled, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. "Again, all of these were discussed by the focus group, which took all of the ideas under consideration. This was the second-most debated issue, what civil rights to include and what civil rights to exclude," Cameron said. Colbeck asserted that he was not for the removal of any matter relating to historical civil rights actions or LGBTQ rights, and that if any references were removed, then someone else involved did not want balance. "If you're going to have a discussion on LGBT rights, then you sure as heck better have a discussion over the rights of religious conscious, it's in Article 1 Section 4 of the Michigan constitution, and obviously it's a First Amendment right in our US Constitution," Colbeck said. Colbeck did advocate for the removal of references to climate change, as feels it is already mentioned enough in the Michigan science standards he worked on two years ago. The proposed social studies standards include a section for teachers to write in additional information because they, Cameron said, are the ones that teach the curriculum. But some teachers expressed concern that more conservative districts could ban instruction on certain topics if they aren't in explicitly in state standards. Aaron Wiens, a sixth and seventh-grade teacher from Linden, was one of the teachers concerned about Islam, which in the proposed standards has been shifted from the world religion category to a location focused on geopolitical expansion. In the Ann Arbor Public Schools district, where Wiens teaches, there will be no issue with teaching about Islam. "My superintendent will say go for it, we know that these standards are ridiculous, so teach as you see fit, and be equitable to the 1.6 billion people on the planet. The bigger concern is the districts I've worked in before at the local level, would be perfectly fine not teaching about Islam at all," Wiens said. Those who do choose to teach on these subjects in conservative districts, may risk being fired for doing so, said Wiens. "Just monumental disappointment in what we heard tonight," Presnell said after the conclusion of the listening session. "I don't think they're going to change any of this. I don't think any of what we said tonight made any difference or we wouldn't have ended up like this." In her years teaching in Detroit, Presnell, now retired, worked hard to teach her minority students that what they see in history books isn't always the whole truth, but regardless, that they matter. Taking away the few mentions of them, Presnell said, diminishes this effort. All panelists continuously emphasized that the public leave their feedback on the online comment form, that is available here until June 30. All comments will be synthesized and presented to the Michigan Department of Education. On August 14th, another public session will be held by the State Board of Education for further discussion. Additionally, a change.org petition against these changes has circulated, with over 4,000 signatures. VIENNA TWP, MI -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations Michigan chapter is offering a reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction of those responsible for painting a racial slur and swastikas on a vehicle in Genesee County. A $1,000 reward is being offered by the organization after Vienna Township resident Hubert Roberts found the items Tuesday morning in white spray paint on his Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck outside his family's home. Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR-MI, called on "anyone who has knowledge of this heinous act of intimidation to immediately contact Genesee County Sheriff office or the FBI." Roberts, who is black, told MLive-The Flint Journal that he was "disappointed with us as a community" after finding the damage that included the graffiti and four slashed tires. The 62-year-old said he's lived there for 15 years and have never had anything like this happen before. He was working on his motorcycle until 2 a.m. and then went to bed. The neighbor woke Roberts up around 7 a.m. when they spotted the damage and he called the police. He also asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the incident as a hate crime. "It's of concern," said Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickell. "I've assigned a detective to investigate." Roberts said he has protested and carried signs, including against President Donald Trump. He also had the words "Black Lives Matter" and "Black Panthers" on his truck. "I am exercising a mindset to help start a conversation," he said. "I do a lot of protesting." But for people to come onto his property and commit such a hateful act is taking things a step too far, Roberts said. "I'm very hurt," Roberts said. "For them to take the steps to this is very bold." Walid called the incident "especially troubling given that it took place on Juneteenth, a day in which African Americans celebrate emancipation from chattel slavery," he said." Juneteenth is often celebrated on and around June 19 and commemorates the day when the last enslaved African-Americans were notified of their freedom. UPDATE: Muslim group offers reward after racial slur, swastikas found on vehicle VIENNA TWP, MI -- A racial slur, swastikas and "wite pride" were spray-painted on a black man's pickup in northern Genesee County early Tuesday morning. A neighbor driving along West Farrand Road knocked on Hubert Roberts' door and told him of the vandalism, which also included four slashed tires. "I'm black," Roberts said. "I'm in a predominantly white community. I'm very angry. I'm disappointed with us as a community." Roberts, 62, said they've lived there for 15 years and have never had anything like this happen before. He was working on his motorcycle until 2 a.m. and then went to bed. The neighbor woke Roberts up around 7 a.m. and he called the police. He also asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the incident as a hate crime. "It's of concern," said Genesee County Sheriff Robert Pickell. "I've assigned a detective to investigate." Numerous vehicles driving by and their drivers stopped and apologized to Roberts, hugging him and telling him that's not what the neighborhood stands for. Roberts said he has protested and carried signs, including against President Donald Trump. A Michigan State University professor in 2016 released a documentary about Roberts detailing his rise from ex-con to mentor and black history educator in the film "Hubert: His Story," according to the university. Roberts also had the words "Black Lives Matter" and "Black Panthers" on his truck. "I am exercising a mindset to help start a conversation," he said. "I do a lot of protesting." But for people to come onto his property and commit such a hateful act is taking things a step too far, Roberts said. "I'm very hurt," Roberts said. "For them to take the steps to this is very bold." Clio schools Superintendent Fletcher Spears is a neighbor to Roberts. "It's reprehensible," he said. "Our neighbors are absolutely wonderful people." Spears put the school district's high school principal on alert about the incident in case any students were involved. "We certainly hope that no one in Clio is involved," he said. "We need to find out who did this and they certainly need to be held accountable for their actions." Roberts said he is not scared for his safety but does have a message for the perpetrators. "I'm committed to dying for what's right," he said. "I would ask them, let's talk to one another. You don't have to be a coward and do something like this to my home." The tires cost $1,000 and the chrome work alone cost $1,500, according to Roberts. He said he doesn't know how much it will cost to repaint his 2011 Chevrolet Silverado. "I don't want to sound like a victim," Roberts said. "I would really hope this could be picked up by the national media because this is another example of hatred toward a person for nothing more than being black." GENESEE TWP, MI -- A 25-year-old Richfield Township man died following an industrial accident at a Genesee Township electric plant. Officers with the Genesee Township Police Department were called out around 8:30 a.m. June 14 to the Genesee Power Station, 5310 N. Dort Hwy., for an accident. Genesee Township police Chief John Mullaly said an employee, identified as Travis Wilson, was working on a 10-inch pipe with a metal cap connected to a water line. "As he was unbolting it, the end cap struck him in the head," said Mullaly. Wilson was pronounced dead at the scene. The energy plant that began commercial operations in 1995 is owned by CMS Energy, the parent company of Consumers Energy, and burns biomass material such as construction debris and spools. Electricity generated at the plant is sold to Consumers Energy and is enough to power approximately 40,000 homes, according to figures provided by CMS Energy on its website. Roger Morgenstern, senior public information officer for Consumers Energy, said grief counselors are being provided for those at the plant who worked alongside Wilson. "On behalf of our colleagues at Genesee Power Station and CMS Energy, we are deeply saddened by June 14's fatal incident involving a power station co-worker," he commented. "Our hearts and deepest sympathies go out to the employee's family and friends." The Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been contacted to investigate the incident, which is typical protocol in case of an industrial accident, Morgenstern said. Mullaly expects no criminal charges as there appears to be no criminal intent or criminal negligence. The incident remains under investigation. ADA, MI -- The first things you'll notice when pulling up to the house are the four flags hanging in between the front porch pillars, each one representing a different branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. It's how you'll know you're at the Lees' house, where a set of quadruplets -- and a fifth sibling -- will all be in various branches of the military come this fall. "I think what everybody's finding so unique is that five kids from the same family all wanted to go in at the same time," mom Lyvonne said. "And this is the first time they've ever had quadruplets join the military all at the same time." One of the Lees' quadruplets is already in or joining the U.S. Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Air National Guard. The large family consists of 12 children, including seven who graduated from high school this year. Nevin, who graduated early, is already in the Marine Corps in South Carolina. The other quadruplets are: Mason, who is headed to the Air National Guard; Bryce, planning to join the Navy; and Rose, who is going into the Air Force. Yoel, who joined the family through adoption and graduated this year, will soon also be in the Marine Corps. They graduated from Forest Hills Northern High School. Lyvonne said all five kids joining the armed forces was more of a fluke than anything. While all five joined to serve, travel, meet new people and get an education, each had different reasons for joining. "I was kind of the last one to hop on the military bandwagon," Mason said. "I'm joining the Air National Guard down in Tennessee for aerospace propulsion, hopefully." Mason was once interested in going to college to become a mechanic, but later changed his mind and became interested in the military. "I realized, 'Hey, free education and it's something I want to do,'" he said. "And that's when I found aerospace propulsion, because it was also transferable over to the private sector. That's kind of how I jumped in there." Yoel said he initially became interested in the armed forces after talking with recruiters and seeing the different options for education. It's the culture and brotherhood of the Marines that interested him the most, he said. "I know I'm going to be making lifelong friends," Yoel said. "With our brother-in-law, he always talks about how he's made such great friends all around the world. He could literally go anywhere and he would have a place to stay and has friends there. And I think that's what it's all about." Lyvonne said there's no real military influence from her or her husband's families. However, one of their daughters is married to a pilot in the armed forces, Matt. He's had a big influence on the quadruplets and their siblings, she said. Rose cites Matt as her inspiration for going into the Air Force. "I have actually always wanted to serve," she said. "I originally wanted to go into the Navy, but changed my mind because the Air Force, I felt, was better for what I wanted to do." She wants to be an emergency medicine physician with the goal of eventually doing Doctors Without Borders. Rose said she views the armed forces as a way to continue her passion for service and volunteer work. Rose will attend Eastern Michigan University and commute to the University of Michigan for Air Force training. If she passes the classes and does well, she'll be an officer in four years. "And then they will pay her to go to medical school," Lyvonne said. "So instead of her $450,000 we calculated out that she was going to be in debt, they're going to pay her a couple hundred thousand to go to school. It's a great program." Lyvonne, who is in finance, said she thinks more and more people should take advantage of joining the military as a pathway for higher education. "Almost daily, I have to turn couples down because of their student loans. It's a crisis in this country," she said. Bryce's decision to join the Navy, where he'll be an electrician, stems from his love for being outdoors and the idea that getting an education from a traditional four-year college wouldn't be the right fit for him. "I was planning on going to college a year and a half ago, but something just didn't catch in my head," he said. "I wanted to travel and have fun." Bryce said he thinks there's a misconception about what the armed forces are and what it's like to join. He said a lot of people think it's a scary and dangerous decision to join. "I think there's a bad impression that it's like the movies. You go in, you come out messed up or you come out with PTSD or it's always about all the sad parts," he said. "But they never really touch details on all the fun parts. You meet new people, lifelong friends, you get to travel the world, you help other countries." And for the four who haven't started yet, Nevin, who is in South Carolina now as a Marine, is able to give his siblings a glimpse into what joining the military is really like. "Grenade launchers are much more realistic in real life than video games," Bryce said, reading a text message from Nevin, and then laughed. Nevin graduated early from high school so he could complete his training in the spring, rather than the hotter summer. After his basic training, he was promoted to squad leader and then to private first class when he finished, Lyvonne said. Nevin's instructors have been calling him "Hollywood Boy," Bryce said, because of the recent occasion when he called in to join his siblings on "The Today Show." Even though Mason, Yoel, Rose and Bryce are excited to get started, there's just one thing they're not looking forward to: "Boot camp." Kris Kobach is one of the poster children for voter disenfranchisement and xenophobia . He's currently Kansas secretary of state running for governor. According to the, a federal judge struck down his discriminatory voter law and has ordered him to take legal/civics classes Judge Julie Robinson, in an 118-page ruling Monday, ordered a halt to the states requirement that people provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The decision will probably mae it easier to register for the August primaries. Judge Julie Robinson also ordered Kobach, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, to take more hours of continuing legal education after he was found in contempt and was frequently chided during the trial over missteps. In an 118-page ruling Monday, Robinson ordered a halt to the states requirement that people provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The decision holds the potential to make registration easier as the August and November elections approach. Robinsons ruling amounted to a takedown of the law that Kobach had championed and lawmakers approved several years ago. She found that it disproportionately impacts duly qualified registration applicants, while only nominally preventing noncitizen voter registration. If eligible Kansans votes are not counted despite believing they are registered to vote, it erodes confidence in the electoral system, Robinson wrote. She ordered Kobach not to enforce the proof of citizenship law and its accompanying regulations. Kobach's office said he will appeal the ruling. "Judge Robinson is the first judge in the country to come to the extreme conclusion that requiring a voter to prove his citizenship is unconstitutional. Her conclusion is incorrect, and it is inconsistent with precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court," his office said in a statement. At trial, Kobach said the law was working. Since 2000, 129 non-citizens have either registered or attempted to register. Many of them were blocked from registering by the proof of citizenship law, he said. "The 129 is just the tip of the icebergwe know the iceberg is much larger," he said. The ruling is the culmination of a federal lawsuit filed in 2016. At a bench trial earlier this year, the American Civil Liberties Union and attorney Mark Johnson represented voters who said they had been impeded from registering by the law. This decision is a stinging rebuke of Kris Kobach, and the centerpiece of his voter suppression efforts: a show-me-your-papers law that has disenfranchised tens of thousands of Kansans. That law was based on a xenophobic lie that noncitizens are engaged in rampant elections fraud," said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU's Voting Rights Project. ...Under the ruling, Kobach must instruct all state and county election officers that voter registration applicants do not need to provide proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. Registrants who have not provided proof of citizenship must be listed the same as all other registrants. Robinson rejected Kobachs argument that the law was needed to prohibit voter fraud. She said of the tens of thousands of people whose voter registrations have been canceled or suspended because of a lack of proof of citizenship, less than 1 percent have been confirmed to be non-citizens. Instead of helping to block voter fraud, the law acted as a deterrent to registration and voting for substantially more eligible Kansans than it has prevented ineligible voters from registering to vote, she wrote. The ruling was also a slap against Kobach as an attorney. Robinson wrote Kobach had a well-documented history of avoiding this Courts orders. She repeatedly criticized Kobachs conduct in court, noting that at least once he tried to introduce evidence despite Robinson having excluded it. She also wrote that Kobach failed to disclose documents, and she faulted misleading testimony by one of his witnesses. Kobach was previously fined $1,000 in the case and held in contempt. I have a very difficult understanding why someone with Kris Kobachs educational pedigree can make such poor judgments repeatedly, Rep. John Carmichael, D-Wichita, said after Mondays ruling. ...Robinson concluded her ruling by ordering Kobach to take six additional hours of continuing legal education in addition to any other hours required for a law license. GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- China, not Russia, is the biggest threat to the United States in the decades to come, according to the former secretary of defense who served the previous two U.S. presidents. "We are engaged at this point in a rivalry that has the potential to last as long as the Cold War, but in my view, frankly, against a much more capable adversary than the USSR," former statesman and CIA director Robert Gates said. "We're dealing with a country that is not just militarily powerful, as was the Soviet Union, but economically powerful and has a message that they can get things done." While Gates told a crowd of movers and shakers at the Economic Club of Grand Rapids 31st annual dinner Monday evening, June 18, that he doesn't believe another arms race will arise, he said China will soon surpass the United States in terms wealth and most areas of technology, making them the go-to world leader. "Sadly, in the eyes of the rest of the world China is seen as dynamic, moving forward, aggressive, a lot of money to spend, a lot of money to invest," he said. "The United States is seen as paralyzed politically, withdrawing from global leadership and is in decline." The way to overcome China's threat to world leadership, Gates said, is citizens and politicians must "get past our differences" and "tackle our many problems with American ingenuity, with confidence and with renewed understanding that we're all in this together; Americans will sink or swim together." He said Russia, though trying to divide European and U.S. populations through election meddling and fostering schisms, is not the long-term rival it once was. Throughout his keynote speech and follow-up question-and-answer session with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, the 74-year-old former secretary of defense under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama repeatedly warned against China's ever-growing development and influence and the need for the United States to maintain a strong relationship with its allies. He called the possibility of trade war from President Donald Trump's recent tariffs on goods from the world's largest communist government "not an easy war to win." Gates gave a stark picture of China and the failings of previous U.S. policy in dealing with the country. He said prior belief was that economic prosperity would make the country more open. Instead, the opposite happened. "China is on a path to establishing the most effective authoritarian government the world has ever seen using artificial technology and a variety of other tools at their beck and call," he said. Gates' keynote speech focused on four countries -- Russia, China, North Korea and Iran -- and the problems they pose to the United States. On the subject of North Korea, Gates lauded Trump for accepting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's invitation to talks. "The president came into office facing the situation in which three of his predecessors had tried and failed to get control of North Korea's ballistic missiles and their nuclear weapons program," he said. "I think it was actually the right thing for him to do. We needed to be doing something different than we had been doing in the past." Gates said the danger of war is "dramatically less" than it was a year ago due to the talks. The Economic Club also honored Rick Breon, president and CEO of Spectrum Health, as its Business Person of the Year. Dave and Linda Mehney also were honored with the Skykehouse Community Leadership Award. GRAND RAPIDS, MI - A man awaiting trial in a 2013 killing has been charged with killing a witness to that crime. Cameron Davon Wright, 26, accused in the August 2013 shooting death of Andre Davis, 20, is now charged in the killing of a witness, Curtis Swift Jr., 26. Swift's body was found Jan. 19 in his home in the 200 block of Straight Avenue NW after he had been shot. Grand Rapids police found Swift's body on the same day Wright was arrested in Davis' killing. He has a hearing Tuesday, Jan. 19, in Grand Rapids District, charged with open murder and felony firearms in Swift's death. Last week, another man, Derek Banks, 26, who pleaded guilty to perjury in the Swift homicide investigation, was sentenced to 16 to 80 years in prison. Wright awaits a September trial in Davis' killing. In an earlier hearing, two witnesses testified they were in the car with Wright when Davis was killed. Swift would've been the third. Witnesses testified earlier this year that a fight broke out at a gathering at Latvian Hall on the night that Davis was killed. Gunfire rang out, with a woman being shot in the arm. Additional shots were fired in the parking lot. Curtis Swift Jr., 26, with his children, Curtis Swift Jr., 8, and Journey Holloway, 3. Later that night, Wright talked about getting jumped at Latvian Hall, and said he was getting a gun, testimony showed. Wright was in the passenger seat of a car when another vehicle pulled up on South Division Avenue near Sycamore Street. Wright allegedly fired into the vehicle, hitting Davis, who police say was not the intended target. Davis died the next day. In the days before Swift was killed, Wright allegedly told a witness he wanted to talk to Swift about being subpoenaed to testify in the earlier homicide. GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- A man was arrested and charged with assault with intent to murder related to a stabbing in downtown Grand Rapids. The Grand Rapids Police Department issued an update on Twitter about the June 4 stabbing with a butcher knife at Rosa Parks Circle that left a victim with a serious cut to the neck. Reginald Van Perry was arrested on June 14 and charged with assault with intent to murder, police said on June 18. Update on June 4th, 2018 Rosa Parks Circle stabbing...suspect in custody and charged with Assault With Intent to Murder. 51 yo Reginald Van Perry of Grand Rapids was arrested 6/14/18 and is currently held at KCCF.https://t.co/jgqZAejyp1 pic.twitter.com/fuKapWkzdU Grand Rapids Police (@GrandRapidsPD) June 18, 2018 Court records show Perry was arraigned by video on the charge on June 15 and indicate the case will proceed to a preliminary examination. The victim, 28, was sitting when he was approached from behind and stabbed, police have said. The victim underwent surgery, police said. Officials did not provide an update on the victim's condition on June 18. A 911 caller reported the stabbing. When officers got to the scene, the suspect and victim were gone. The victim showed up at a hospital with a serious cut to his neck, police said. Police found the weapon at the scene and interviewed people who were in the park during the incident. Police asked anyone with information to call Major Case Team Detective Pat Needham at 456-4483, Grand Rapids police at 456-3400 or Silent Observer at 774-2345. Silent Observer can also be reached at www.silentobserver.org. GRAND RAPIDS, MI - More than 250 teachers, counselors, social workers and K-12 administrators are attending a School Mental Health conference, hosted by the Kent ISD and Mental Health Foundation of West Michigan. The two-day event that kicked off Tuesday, June 19, is aimed at addressing safety in schools. The conference, which is filled to capacity, is at the Kent ISD Educational Service Center, 2930 Knapp St. NE. "Adults who work with youth are learning to inform themselves better about risk factors that young people might have and how to create a learning environment that will support them,'' said Cat Lanting, program coordinator of the Mental Health Foundation of West Michigan. Lanting said there are multiple breakout sessions aimed at different areas of youth mental health. She said there was a student panel on Tuesday and a parent panel is scheduled for Wednesday, June 20. For example, there is a breakout session with school building and central office administrators on creating a culture of safety to decrease mass shootings, violence and crises within our schools. Bob VandePol, executive director of Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services' Employee Assistance Program, is the keynote speaker and will lead that session. "Kent ISD, through the Project Aware grant, is taking a strong role in advancing mental health and safety in our schools", said Kerry Muller, project manager for Project Aware at Kent ISD. Kent County is part of a federal initiative. In 2014, Michigan was among 20 states to receive a five-year Project AWARE Grant and the School Climate Transformation Grant for nearly $13 million. Pilot programs are in Kent, Jackson and Oakland counties. The grant promotes Mental Health First Aid Training among other things. Employees are learning how to identify, understand and respond to signs of mental illness for referrals or to help someone in crisis such as contemplating suicide. Twenty percent of children living in the United States - 1 out of 5 children - experience a mental disorder in a given year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some other breakout sessions on the conference agenda include, transformative school design, developing a supportive culture, trauma informed schools as well as sessions on mandated reporter training and the Mental Health Foundation's "Be Nice'' program. The Trauma Informed Schools session will provide participants with an overview about trauma, specifically Adverse Childhood Experiences. Participants will learn about how trauma impacts brain development and a child's ability to participate in the learning environment. It will include strategies that participants can implement in their classrooms, school buildings, and personal lives. "I think people will walk away understanding better why there is such a need in our schools for multiple levels of support to ensure kids are successful,'' said Christy Buck, executive director of the Mental Health Foundation of West Michigan. "We have to change the culture of understanding about mental health.'' The conference is intended to for school staff to learn how to support the whole child by promoting a a positive school climate through increased awareness and education of mental health and surrounding topics, officials say. "Every Michigan student deserves the opportunity for a quality education in a safe and healthy environment,'' according to conference literature. Assistant Kent ISD Superintendent Ron Koehler recently acknowledged lawmakers for setting aside more than $60 million for mental health and school safety in the $56.8 billion 2019 budget. "All districts are identifying a greater need for resources to deal with social and emotional issues for their student population and the mental health components of this package are a great start on bringing to schools and students the assistance they need,'' he said. Criticizing John Engler's "abhorrent behavior," more than 120 victims of Larry Nassar have signed a letter Tuesday urging the Michigan State University Board of Trustees to replace the interim president. The 126 "sister survivors" -- who include Olympian Aly Raisman, and Rachael Denhollander, the first Nassar victim to publicly accuse him of sexual abuse -- are joining two MSU trustees as well numerous Republican and Democratic lawmakers in calling for Engler's ouster. "While our hope had been that President Engler would bring accountability, transparency, and change to MSU, it is clear to us that he cannot," said the four-page letter. "President Engler's statements and behavior are subtle threats against anyone who dares to speak up against their abuser and the environment that enabled their predatory conduct, lest they be ridiculed, lied about, and shamelessly mocked by a person of immense power," the letter continued. The MSU board is scheduled to meet Friday morning. Engler has been under fire since an email became public last week in which he accused Denhollander of taking a "kickback" from plaintiff attorney John Manly. The April 15, 2018, email from Engler to MSU Vice President and Special Counsel to the President Carol Viventi was obtained by the Chronicle of Higher Education through an open records request. Engler wrote: "The survivors now are being manipulated by trial lawyers who in the end will each get millions of dollars more than any of individual survivors with the exception of Denhollander who is likely to get kickback from Manley for her role in the trial lawyer manipulation." In their letter, the women wrote, "The most recent public disclosure of emails only further reveals the damaging mindset he has towards sexual abuse survivors who come forward. President Engler clearly views sexual abuse survivors as either manipulators out to use people for personal gain (having the same mindset as our abuser), or as themselves manipulated into being used by someone for personal gain (victims yet again). "To President Engler, board members who support him, and other leaders at MSU who agree with his position, we say 'no,' " the letter said. "We have not become like our abuser - manipulating for self-gain. We chose to speak up at great personal cost because it was right. Because we care about those still silenced. Because we stand to protect those who are still at risk. Future and current survivors who have not yet spoken up need to know that they will not be attacked and assigned the same motivations as their abuser when they demand justice." MSU trustees Brian Mosallam and Dianne Byrum were among those calling on Engler to resign. Mossallam released a statement Tuesday saying: "I applaud the sister survivors' statement this morning calling on the MSU board of trustees to fire interim president John Engler. As I stated last week, it is clear to me that MSU will not be able to heal until John Engler is gone from our campus. Bluster may work in Lansing, but this is East Lansing, and in this town, we treat each other with respect and dignity. Especially survivors of sexual abuse. I hope my colleagues, each of whom have a daughter of their own, take accountability for Engler's failure to lead us out of this crisis, and join me and Dianne Byrum in telling John that his time is up." Nassar, now serving a 60-year prison sentence in federal prison, is a former MSU doctor who pleaded guilty to molesting patients under the guise of medical treatment. More than 300 women have alleged abuse, including Olympic gold-medal gymnasts who were abused while Nassar was serving as the Olympic gymnastics team doctor. Multiple victims said they expressed concerns to various MSU officials over the years about Nassar's treatments, only to have those concerns dismissed. MSU has tentatively agreed to pay $500 million to the 332 plaintiffs who have filed lawsuits against MSU in connection with Nassar. The settlement also covers future plaintiffs. EMPIRE, MI -- For many people, the Dune Climb at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is synonymous with freewheeling summer days. But this weekend, this iconic spot is the place to be to explore the magic of Michigan's summer nights. On Saturday, June 23, the Dune Climb will be the site of a Sleeping Bear Dunes summer star party, hosted by park rangers as well as astronomers from the Grand Traverse Astronomical Society. Visitors need only purchase a park entrance pass; the party itself is free and open to the public, giving people several opportunities to celebrate the night sky over the course of the evening. From 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., visitors will be invited to use a solar telescope to view the Earth's closest star: the sun. Then, from 9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., the focus will be the waxing moon, the evening planets of Venus and Jupiter, and other celestial bodies. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is regarded as one of Michigan's most excellent spots for stargazing; the lack of light pollution and the absence of trees or buildings along the shoreline provide wide-open, unobstructed views of the dark night sky. Visitors are encouraged to bring flashlights, binoculars, water, bug spray, beach chairs, and blankets for a more comfortable experience. The event may be cancelled if the weather does not cooperate. Visitors can find more information at the Philip A. Hart Visitors Center in Empire or online at this page. In 1968, when Pat Thompson opened Trans-Matic in Holland, the deep draw metal stamping business had just one other employee and was housed in small warehouse that was once used to store candy. "It was a very humble beginning," he said. "We struggled for 10 years to get this thing on the map. My wife and I went 18 months without a paycheck when we first started." Five decades later, the company now has more than 500 employees spread among two U.S. factories - its headquarters in Holland and another facility in Mesa, Arizona - and sites in Monterrey, Mexico and Suzhou, China. The components created at those facilities are sold throughout the world and are used to build products ranging from power tools and door locks to automotive breaking and exhaust systems. "I'm amazed at how the business has grown," said Thompson, whose son, P.J., now serves as president and chief operating officer of Trans-Matic. "It is far beyond my mission and far beyond my ambition. We've just followed the opportunities wherever they led us, and we kept making investments in our people and in our machinery and equipment." On Monday, the company celebrated its 50th anniversary at its headquarters in Holland, 300 E. 48th Street. The event featured remarks by U.S. Congressman Fred Upton, Holland Mayor Nancy DeBoer and Michigan Economic Development Corporation Chief Executive Officer Jeff Mason. There was also a panel discussion, led by Grand Valley State University history professor Craig Benjamin, on the deep draw metal stamping industry and its prominence in the Holland-area. He said the region is home to three of the top 10 deep draw metal stamping companies in the world - Trans-Matic, ITW Drawform and Metal Flow Corporation. Thompson said when he first launched his business, "We were out here by ourselves as lone wolfs." He said he frequently encountered potential customers who said they would only buy deep draw metal stamping components from businesses located in Connecticut, which he characterized as the focal point of the deep draw industry. But that changed with the help of ITW Drawform and Metal Flow Corporation. "As we had built an industry here, the center of excellence of expertise in that technology shifted to western Michigan," Thompson said. "Today, we are recognized as a group of companies that form an industry that possibly are in the top five in the world." Thompson's son, P.J, took over as president of the company in 2002. Since then, the company expanded to China in 2005 and Mexico in 2015, moves that better positioned the company to serve its top customers, P.J. Thompson said. "Most of our customers are large, multi-national companies who have operations in Asia, namely China, operations in Mexico," he said. "Our ability to produce parts in close proximity to where our parts are used really elevates our company." But the deep draw metal stamping industry isn't without its challenges. One of the most pressing concerns is a 25 percent tariff - imposed by the Trump administration - on imported steel that took effect in June, P.J. Thompson said. Because his company often purchases steel from companies outside the U.S. - one example is Finland - the tariffs could make his components more expensive to manufacture. "It creates a difficult situation if you're a steel consuming company like ours," he said. Another challenge is employee retention. P.J. Thompson said he's proud of his workers because they've helped make Trans-Matic what it is today. But a "shortage of skilled workers" in the labor force has "created a lot of opportunities in other places" for employees to seek work, he said. "Right now, we're in a position where turnover is quite high relative to previous years at Trans-Matic," P.J. Thompson said. He didn't immediately have the company's latest employee turnover rate on hand Monday afternoon, but he said it has reached "double digits." Despite those obstacles, Thompson says he's optimistic about what lies ahead for Trans-Matic. "We're building for the future," he said, adding that the company has 13 apprentices - six of whom are graduating from their program this week - and has invested in $4 million in new equipment that's expected to be delivered in the "near" future. "We continue to build the business in just the same way year after year." JACKSON, MI - Last week, Andrew Frounfelker resigned from his position on the Jackson City Council. Now, he's been put on unpaid leave at his day job, with Consumers Energy. Frounfelker, 41, was charged May 23 with assault with intent to do great bodily harm or assault by strangulation. Consumers put Frounfelker on paid leave from his position as director of investment recovery the following day. Consumers officials won't say exactly when or why Frounfelker's leave status changed, but did confirm the change is in response to the felony charges against him. "We can't disclose the reasons for why that has changed," Brian Wheeler, Consumers spokesman, said. "But I can tell you that he is on unpaid leave through his judicial proceedings." Kristin Willcut, a friend of the woman allegedly assaulted by Frounfelker, said last week she was frustrated he was still getting paid by Consumers. "It disgusts me that he is being allowed to maintain his position at Consumers Energy on paid leave," Willcut said last week. "He is essentially on paid vacation while his victim is accruing medical bills, lost wages, pain and suffering and emotional trauma due to his actions." When Willcut learned Consumers has stopped paying Frounfelker, she said she sees it as a compromise. "At least it shows they are taking this seriously," Willcut said. Frounfelker couldn't be reached for comment and has not spoken publicly since the alleged incident. He maintained his innocence in his City Council resignation letter, adding "recent publicity has drawn attention away from all the positive things that are happening within the city, and I do not want to distract from my colleagues' ability to continue the progress we have begun." A pre-trial hearing for the case is set for June 26 with Jackson County Circuit Judge Susan Jordan. MLive reporter Danielle Salisbury contributed to this story. JACKSON, MI - Drevier Gallegos-Langston was almost done with school. He was working at a party store and helping his mother. He just got a driver's license. "He was trying so hard to do everything right," his grandmother Diane Grubbs said Monday, June 18. A day earlier, Grubbs had wished to ignore 5 a.m. phone calls. Because she knew, whatever the news, it would not be good. Gallegos-Langston, an 18-year-old student at Jackon's T.A. Wilson Academy, died Sunday, June 17, at Henry Ford Allegiance Health. He had been involved in a reported fight at a raucous field party on rural Fishville Road in Grass Lake Township. "It's unbearable," Gallegos-Langston's mother, Kristie Gallegos, said, speaking briefly outside her Jackson home, where wax from a Sunday night vigil spotted the sidewalk. Tealights, somewhat shifted in the hours since, seemed to spell RIP. Gallegos-Langston was the victim of a stabbing, according to the Jackson County Sheriff's Office, which has not announced any arrests or released many details of the crime. One witness said she saw a guy running and people chasing him. She heard shouting, to stop the music, that someone was dead. Of a scene she cannot now forget, she said she saw the teen, unfamiliar to her, on the ground as people worked to revive him. He had wounds to his stomach and his neck, she said, calling the scene chaotic and frightening. She was terrified, and remains shaken. People began running in various directions, trying to escape the area, she said. About 500 or more people had gathered for the party, organized by a Romulus rapper who goes by the name B Pat. It involved dancing, music, and drinking. On Monday, liquor bottles, beer cans and debris still littered the grassy space. Gallegos-Langston did not go to parties, his grandmother said. "That's why I can't believe this happened." She said he went with a cousin home from college. "I don't understand it." Mohammad Samara, owner of Jackson's Stop One party store on Francis Street, where Gallegos-Langston worked part-time, said the teen was always smiling. He didn't argue with anyone. A coworker called him quiet. "That's the last one that is going to go like this," Samara said as he stood at the cash register, serving a steady line of customers looking to buy fried chicken or to cash checks. Gallegos-Langston didn't say no. He listened, Samara said. "Very good kid." Grubbs said her grandson came to her home for his lunch breaks. He was right there when his mother pulled up with groceries. He would take out the trash and made sure to share some of his earnings. "I don't care if it's his last $10." He helped, too, with his brother, an 8-year-old born with down syndrome. He dressed him and took him to school, an aunt, Patty Rogers, said. He could handle him when others could not, Grubbs said. "Drevier can talk to him and he kind of knows," she said and wondered what the boy would do without him. She and Rogers, her sister, said Gallegos-Langston was good with the many kids in his close family. He paid attention to them, and they would be excited to see him, calling out his name. Rogers picked up her phone and found pictures of her great-nephew posing for pictures and playing with his 1- and 2-year-old cousins. They are among the most recent Gallegos-Langston posted on Facebook, where there are now memorials, condolences, and lamentations dotted with broken heart emojis - "Fly high my baby" and "I can't even cope with this," some of them read. Scroll further and Gallegos-Langston is seen this spring in a trendy suit, bow tie and braids, standing with a prom date in white. Once a Jackson High School student, he was taking night classes at the alternative high school, his grandmother said, and would have soon been done. "He had so much going for him," she said. "He had a lot further to go." Gallegos-Langston's cousin started a GoFundMe account to help with funeral costs, which his mother, a woman without great means, was concerned about managing to pay. By Tuesday, it had raised about $1,570. ONONDAGA, MI - Upgrades are coming to the Onondaga campus of a Michigan human services organization serving children and families. Highfields, Inc. has received a $750,000 grant from the Dart Foundation to improve its Onondaga campus, with $600,000 going toward a new facility. The remaining $150,000 will go toward upgrades to the existing kitchen and dining hall. The new William and Claire Dart Family Treatment and Education Center on the Onondaga campus, 5123 Old Plank Road, will house up to 24 people, according to a news release. The facility will include a multi-purpose common area and offers a new space for youth and families during family treatment weekends. Highfields will replace its "aging and inadequate" cabins for family stays with this new facility, according to the release. Officials also envision using the building for banquets, treatment groups, dinners, ceremonies and holiday celebrations. Highfields plans to begin construction on the new facility later this summer with completion slated for spring 2019. Highfields President and CEO Brian Philson said the organization is finalizing talks with the architect for the facility, which he anticipates being about 4,200 square feet. "The new facility is really going to enhance our work with families and children," Philson said. "It's going to be a real shot in the arm for our program." Highfields' new building will be located near the main entrance to the campus, Philson said. The current kitchen and dining hall was gutted earlier this month, Philson said. Crews are working on the upgrades and a target date of July 12 has been set. Philson added the upgraded kitchen and dining hall will improve Highfields' ability to serve larger groups on campus. "We're always looking at what our needs are, prioritizing them and how best to go about getting those things done," Philson said. Founded in 1962, Highfields is a multipurpose human services organization for children and families with offices in Lansing, Jackson, Howell and Hillsdale. The organization provides resources to 8,300 people each year and serves 13 Michigan counties: Clare, Isabella, Gratiot, Clinton, Eaton, Ingham, Livingston, Calhoun, Jackson, Washtenaw, Branch, Hillsdale and Lenawee. The project is part of a $1 million campaign to make improvements to the Onondaga campus. Philson said the organization is close to achieving that goal, with more than $900,000 in funds secured. Claire Dart, part of the new building's namesake, was a Highfields volunteer, Philson said. The Dart Foundation, a private family foundation established in 1984, has previously provided more than $2 million in grants to Highfields. "Highfields and I are humbled to work with individuals and donors that love our mission so much that support us at the level they do," Philson said. An almost centurian's vehicle to expound at nonspecific intervals on his opinions regarding politics-local to international, health care, life,society,and perhaps religion plus periodic vignettes about Plainfield N.J. In addition to "blowing off",I enjoyed my second career as an amateur public advocate. KALAMAZOO, MI -- A city-owned downtown surface parking lot was sold to make room for 135 apartment units, offices and retail space in Kalamazoo. Monday, the City Commission approved an agreement to sell Lot 2 for $1.1 million to developers 400 Rose, LLC and Park@Cedar II, LLC. The entities are owned by The Hinman Company and AVB Inc., which plan to build a $24.2 million, four-story mixed-use development on 2.16 acres at the corner of Rose and Lovell streets. On May 17, the Brownfield Redevelopment Authority agreed to sell two segments of property on the lot. The authority also approved a brownfield plan to capture $3.6 million in future tax revenue to reimburse the developer for remediation efforts at the site. The third piece of the lot was owned by the city of Kalamazoo, which completed the agreement Monday. Deputy City Manager Jeff Chamberlain said the city has been trying to sell the site to a developer for a long time. Kalamazoo officials met with multiple developers in the last seven years to find a private use for Lot 2, but none came to fruition. The site is behind City Hall, across from the AT&T building, St. Luke's Episcopal Church and near cozy commercial retail business in the Vine neighborhood. Chamberlain said the biggest obstacle development projects face is pulling together the financial resources. It takes years for developers to secure large loans and financial incentives from banks and units of government, Chamberlain said. "It's almost like putting a puzzle together to make the pieces to align just right when the market is right as well," Chamberlain said. "I think finally all those pieces came together." The deal was contingent on approval of a neighborhood enterprise zone approved June 4. The city agreed to cooperate with developers in obtaining a 12-year, 50 percent tax abatement, according to the sale agreement. A brownfield plan guarantees $3.68 million in site remediation expenses will be reimbursed to the developers over 21 years. Plans presented to the city call for a four-story, 158,824-square-foot building. Approximately 8,400 square feet will be available for commercial use on the first floor. A single-level underground parking structure will be created to accommodate 77 vehicles. A total of 85 surface parking spaces is included. The sales agreement guarantees 14 units, 10 percent of the total, are affordable for people making 80 to 120 percent of the area median income. Rates are based on workforce housing figures published by the Michigan State Housing Development Authority. According to rates published in April: Monthly rent for five units must be $866 for one-person room and $990 for a two-person room. Monthly rent for five units must be $1,082 for one-person room and $1,237 for a two-person room. Monthly rent for four units must be $1,299 for one-person room and $1,485 for a two-person room. The workforce housing requirement will expire after 21 years. Developers are required to prove in writing each year that rental rates for the units remain reduced until then. Commissioner Shannon Sykes Nehring supported the project but said there is a need for more housing that is affordable for low-income families. She said she is worried that the development will raise rents in the area and displace people living nearby. "I want to reiterate my hope and expectation that as we move forward with this project that city staff work with developers to see what ways they can support our community needs," she said. A site plan showed included a bike lane on Rose Street and new on-street parking spaces on Cedar and Rose streets. A snowmelt system will be installed under public sidewalks. Future tenants can relax on a roof patio, or on private balconies. There will be a fitness room and space to store bicycles. The project is expected to create five full-time jobs. Construction could begin in the fall and finish next year, with some impact to vehicle and pedestrian traffic. Developers agreed to work with Urban Alliance to hire locally for construction and site related work. They are also required to follow the city's anti-discrimination policy regarding ex-offenders. The Downtown Development Authority will receive $687,628 of the purchase price to support the city's parking system. The remaining $412,372 will go to the brownfield redevelopment authority. Of the three parcels, 418 S. Rose is the only one on Lot 2 that is not tax-exempt. Once the project is completed, the city estimates its assessed value will increase from $39,700 to $3.8 million. Lot 2's sale is part of larger efforts to develop surface parking lots. "The bottom line is, for a downtown city, it's much better to have a building than a surface parking lot," Chamberlain said. "Realistically, we need to build parking into the development. It's a higher and best use to have some kind of building on a lot downtown than a surface parking lot." In 2015, a Blue Ribbon Revenue Panel assembled to look at the city's options for generating revenue recommended selling assets in the city's parking system. A few deals have emerged since. The most prominent is The Exchange Building, being built on a former parking lot at the southeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Rose Street. The 15-story building at the center of downtown Kalamazoo is under construction. Last year, the City Commission approved an agreement to sell Arcadia Parking Ramp No. 4 to PlazaCorp for $3 million. It was sold so PlazaCorp had parking options for a large-scale hotel development in the northwest section of the city's downtown. Kalamazoo officials are still working on a deal to sell a portion of Lot 9 across from the Arcadia Creek Festival Site to Catalyst Development Co., LLC. The company expects to break ground this summer on a $70 million, seven-story mixed-use building. Catalyst Development Company is planning a 290,000-square-foot building with offices, housing and parking. "As a land-owner, we are open to selling these properties for a better use," Chamberlain said. Bill Johnston is chairman of Greenleaf Companies, which includes Catalyst Development Company, LLC. Johnston is one of two donors who pledged $70.3 million to the city of Kalamazoo to create the Foundation for Excellence. PORTAGE, MI -- The mother of infant twins faces charges of the murder of one and the abuse of the other. The Portage Department of Public Safety responded to a residence in the 10000 block of Woodlawn Drive on Jan. 31 on a report of a 5-month-old boy having a seizure. In a medical evaluation of the baby at Bronson Methodist Hospital, doctors noticed suspicious injuries and trauma, Portage Public Safety officials said in a press release. The child died due to his injuries Feb. 13, and an autopsy performed by the Kalamazoo County Medical Examiner's Office listed injuries of the head and neck as the baby's cause of death. His death was ruled a homicide. In an investigation, detectives determined the infant had a twin brother who showed similar injuries and trauma. The sibling was removed from his mother's custody and was placed into protective care. The 22-year-old Holland woman was arrested Tuesday, June 19. She faces one count of felony murder and two counts of first-degree child abuse. She is expected to be arraigned in Kalamazoo County District Court. PORTAGE, MI -- A mother accused of abusing her infant twins, killing one, admitted that she had hit her children, according to family court records. Charges were authorized against the mother in Kalamazoo County Tuesday, June 19. She faces one charge of felony murder and two charges of first-degree child abuse. Authorities allege the 22-year-old Holland woman injured her 5-month-old twins, causing one of them to die. The Portage Department of Public Safety responded to a residence in the 10000 block of Woodlawn Drive on Jan. 31 on a report of a 5-month-old boy having a seizure. In a medical evaluation of the baby at Bronson Methodist Hospital, doctors noticed suspicious injuries and trauma, Portage Public Safety officials said in a press release. The child died due to his injuries Feb. 13, and an autopsy performed by the Kalamazoo County Medical Examiner's Office listed injuries of the head and neck as the baby's cause of death. His death was ruled a homicide. In a petition filed in the family division of Kalamazoo County Circuit Court to terminate the mother's parental rights, an employee of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services wrote the boy who died was found unresponsive by the mother around 4 a.m. Jan. 31. The mother attempted to wake the boy unsuccessfully, then put him back in his bassinet to tend to her other child. The woman then contacted other residents of the home in the 10000 block of Woodlawn and said she had some concerns because the boy "didn't look right." The other family members then called an ambulance. When the boy was admitted to Bronson Methodist Hospital at 7:43 a.m., he was having seizure activity. He had bleeding on the brain, likely retinal hemorrhaging and unexplained bruising on his left forehead and right cheekbone, according to family court records. The boy had a subdural hematoma and significant whiplash trauma. Medical professionals who assessed the boy said the injuries were from "non-accidental trauma." On Jan. 31, the mother "confessed to hitting both children with an open hand, striking the minor child ... in the head with an eyeglass container, as well as to dropping both minor children into the bassinette portion of their pack and plays," the family court petition reads. A judge ordered both children to be removed from the mother's care, saying in court records the mother having custody presented a "substantial risk of harm to the children's life, physical health and mental well-being." The sibling was removed from his mother's custody and was placed into protective care. The woman was arrested Tuesday, June 19. She faces one count of felony murder and two counts of first-degree child abuse. She is expected to be arraigned Wednesday in Kalamazoo County District Court. Neighbors to the house where the abuse is alleged to have occurred said they were surprised to hear the news. "It's certainly out of the norm for a Portage community," Austin Nesseth said. "It's usually pretty quiet around here." Nesseth lives several houses down the street from the home on Austin Lake. The surrounding community is also normally quiet, he said. "It's a bit of a shock," he said. Reporter Brad Devereaux contributed to this report. MUSKEGON, MI - A Father's Day outing in Muskegon became an important lesson in doing the right thing for a Rockford father and his 5-year-old daughter. On Sunday, Chris Zoladz and daughter Nora stumbled upon a giant swastika fashioned from branches and logs while on an annual hike along Muskegon State Park's vast dunes in an area known locally as the Sugar Bowl. The sighting sparked a frank conversation between Zoladz, 36, and his daughter about the nature of hate, but it also moved the father-daughter duo to toil for about 30 minutes during a heatwave to dismantle it. In its place, Zoladz said, the pair spelled out the name of the family's latest addition, 5-week-old Ari. The father of three said finding the hate symbol was shocking, but served as "a teachable moment, in the moment" for both him and Nora. "It was a lesson on the spot ... and it felt like the right thing to do," Zoladz told MLive.com in an interview. "It was in a big open space that had special meaning for my daughter and me. The easy thing would have been to ignore it and act like we didn't see it. It was hot, we were tired, and we weren't planning on doing it. "But the right thing isn't always the easiest thing to do." Zoladz documented the moment with photos and a few brief words on a blog used to capture special days shared with Nora. Sunday was meant to be one of those days. Zoladz, along with his wife Emily, Nora, and two sons, Isaac and Ari, said his family spent Father's Day at Muskegon State Park trying to beat the heat. The trip also gave Zoladz and Nora a chance to take their annual hike through the Sugar Bowl, a tradition founded nearly a year ago on Nora's fifth birthday. That year, Nora spelled her name using branches and logs, and she hoped to do it again on Father's Day. They climbed to the top, Zoladz said, and Nora wondered if her name would still be there. It was a long shot, but Zoladz surveyed the dune anyway. First, he saw a wooden cross but his gaze sharpened when he saw the swastika just a few feet away. "I was shocked that someone took the time to create something hateful out in the open for other people to see," Zoladz said. "It felt like a slap in the face. We're not Jewish and we haven't been persecuted for our religion, but it still felt like an assault on our sacred daddy-daughter spot." Before he could say something, Zoladz said Nora had already caught on. "Then it was an internal question that I think a lot of parents have," Zoladz said. "'What do I do with this? Do I bring It up and not mention it or brush it off?' So I explained that it was a hateful symbol called a swastika. When I said swastika, she knew." "Like the Nazis?" Nora asked, as she recalled the Nazi imagery from the classic musical "The Sound of Music." "I was surprised that she made the correlation, and then I had remembered that just last week we had watched "The Sound of Music," and the Nazis are the bad guys in that film," Zoladz said. "So we had just had an age appropriate conversation about World War II, the Holocaust and who the Nazis were." So the two talked some more about intolerance. They talked about standing up for those who can't stand up for themselves. Zoladz floated the idea of taking apart the swastika and spelling Ari's name, and Nora happily obliged. It wasn't until later that Zoladz realized that the Nazi party symbol had been replaced with a Hebrew name. "The beautiful irony of that was an afterthought," Zoladz said. "Taking it down felt like we were reclaiming the space. I said, 'in real life, you'll have situations like this where you'll see people being teased at your school because they look different ... than other people.' "In that situation, that's what we were doing. We don't know who left it, but that's a hate symbol so it's our job to take it down. That was the lesson." Rash of hate-filled graffiti, symbols appear across Michigan LUDINGTON, MI - Divers recovered the body of a drowning victim in Pere Marquette Lake. The body of Jay Phillip Cutter, 38, of Manistee County, was recovered Monday night, June 18. He had jumped from a boat Sunday to retrieve a tube that was blown into the water. Others threw him a flotation device as he struggled but it blew away. The operator turned the boat around but could not find the man after he went under. Rescuers were on scene within minutes but also could not find him. Rescuers searched until the early morning, then resumed the search hours later. Around 8 p.m. Monday, rescuers, using side-scan sonar and a remotely operated vehicle, found his body, which was then recovered by divers. An autopsy is expected today. Cutter was on the boat with two other adults and three children. Ludington police and firefighters were assisted by Mason County Sheriff's Department, state police and U.S. Coast Guard in the recovery effort. The victim's body was found in 20 feet of water between Ludington Boat Club and Ludington Yacht Club. SAGINAW, MI -- Almost two weeks after her son was involved in an altercation with a teacher, Robbin Collins wants to know where the investigation stands. Sometime after 9 a.m. on June 7, at Saginaw High School, Collins alleges her son was in an altercation with his teacher that left him injured after the teacher struck her son in the face with a cell phone charger cord. That day, the district issued a statement saying they were aware of an incident and were investigating it. Saginaw Police officials said they turned their investigation over to the Saginaw County's Prosecutor's Office the following day. Collins said she hasn't heard anything from the district or law enforcement since the incident took place. She said a school official called her the day of the incident to apologize for what happened. The teacher, who is not being named pending completion of the investigation, has since resigned from the district, said Interim Superintendent Ramont Roberts. Under advisement from attorneys, the teacher declined to comment. Collins said the attack left welts on her son's face that swelled and turned red. "I want her to be punished for her actions," Collins said. "She beat my son in his face with his cell phone charger. She snatched it out his hand." Robbin Collins said her son suffered bruising to his face after a teacher struck him with a cellphone cord. According to Collins, her tenth-grade son was talking while another student was giving a presentation. She alleges that the teacher asked her son to leave the classroom and used vulgar language toward him. "I guess he was walking too slow because she got up and put her hands on his back and pushed him out of the classroom," she said. "I feel as if she should not have put her hands on my son." Collins said at some point, her son called the teacher a (expletive) and she challenged him to do so again. "He called her a (expletive) again and she snatched the cord out his hand and beat him across his face," Collins said. "His hand hit her arm while he was blocking her from hitting him." Collins said her son sometimes has a "smart mouth," but it was no reason for him to be attacked. Assistant Prosecutor Mark Gaertner said that his office needs more time before deciding on the incident. "There needs to be further investigation on it before any decision is made," Gaertner said. "We are going to be interviewing additional witnesses." NASA says its all-electric X-57 plane could make its first flight in 2019, and that it hopes it will reduce noise, improve efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of air travel in the long run. The technical lead of the X-57 "Maxwell" program with the U.S. space agency tells Popular Mechanics that the plane's first flight "will likely occur sometime in 2019." The plane itself has 14 electric motors that turn its propellers, that are integrated into its "uniquely-designed wing." Nick Borer reportedly told the outlet that the X-57 Maxwell's batteries had already been tested and delivered for integration. He said the lithium-ion module was evaluated under flight conditions and put through a recent "thermal runaway test" while they also ramped up testing of the electric motors. "Like any flight program with first-of-its-kind hardware, we've been experiencing some delays," Borer told the outlet. "At this point it appears that Mod II (the final approved and first all-electric version of the plane) won't fly until 2019. We're working where we can to claw back some schedule." NASA touts the X-57 Maxwell as a way to demonstrate that the electric propulsion method for planes could "make planes quieter, more efficient and more environmentally friendly." "Energy efficiency at cruise altitude using X-57 technology could benefit travelers by reducing flight times, fuel usage, as well as reducing overall operational costs for small aircraft by as much as 40 percent," NASA reports in a previous fact sheet. "Typically, to get the best fuel efficiency an airplane has to fly slower than it is able. Electric propulsion essentially eliminates the penalty for cruising at higher speeds." The main goal of the X-57 Maxwell is to demonstrate a 500 percent increase in high-speed cruise efficiency, eliminate carbon emissions and to make air travel quieter for those on the ground. The aircraft weighs in at about 3,000 pounds, can hit an altitude of 9,000 feet, maintain a speed of 172 mph and hit a takeoff speed of 67 mph. This X-plane differs from NASA's Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator, which will set out to reduce sonic booms for commercial travel. The space agency will use F/A-18 jets to perform a specific supersonic dives to create a "soft thump" comparable to that of a sonic boom during tests set for the Galveston, Texas area this November. Supersonic flights are typically not allowed over land, so results from these tests will recommend new standards to replace existing restrictions. As for what these tests could lead to that matters to the general public, NASA says that the goal of this demonstration and research "is to eventually accommodate jets that can fly from New York to Los Angeles in two hours." NASA says these tests with F-18s will provide any recommendations to support the growth and possibility of any future Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator flights. The space agency says future community response LBFD flights will start as early as 2022. In the Trump administration's budget for fiscal year 2019, the White House fully-funded an "experimental supersonic airplane" while increasing "hypersonics research funding." This included the full funding of the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator, or "X-plane, set for launch in 2021. Back in April of this year, NASA awarded Lockheed Martin a $247.5 million contract to build its Supersonic X-Plane. The Cedar Springs Board of Education has selected Scott Smith as its new superintendent. Smith, assistant superintendent for Hudsonville Public Schools, participated in a final interview with the board on Monday, June 18. During the interview, Smith presented his 90-day transition plan, which included a series of steps he would take in the first 90 days if he were offered the job, and was asked further questions by both board and community members. Smith has served in his current position with Hudsonville Public Schools for seven years. Prior to that, he worked as the middle school principal for Hamilton Community Schools and as a middle school science teacher for Holland Public Schools. Smith received a specialist degree in educational leadership from Grand Valley State University, a bachelor's degree in mathematics and earth science and a master's degree in educational leadership, all from Western Michigan University. Smith was among two other candidates - Karl Heidrich, superintendent of Stockbridge Community Schools, and John VanLoon, superintendent of Ravenna Public Schools - who were invited to initial interviews on Friday, June 8. Following the interview, most board members felt they were ready to make a decision instead of scheduling a site visit next week and voted unanimously in favor of hiring Smith. "We have tremendous feedback from staff, students, parents and community members during the process," Board President Heidi Reed said. "Scott had overwhelming support and was clearly a great fit for the candidate profile." Teachers, parents and community members present at the meeting said they are excited to welcome Smith to the district. "(I'm) very hopeful. I actually had the privilege of meeting with him today with a small group of teachers, union representatives and we had an excellent conversation," said Libby Metiva, a seventh-grade teacher at Cedar Springs Middle School. "I'm excited; I'm very excited." Parent Rebecca Casavant, who also had the chance to meet Smith in a community forum, said she feels positive about his hiring. "He was very direct and enthusiastic and was just hopeful," Casavant said. The board has been seeking a successor for Laura VanDuyn since April, after she resigned from the position on March 26. VanDuyn's resignation came after an effort led by community members, staff and teachers to oust her, which included holding a town hall meeting, creating a petition urging her firing and wearing red shirts and holding signs that read "#ResignVanDuyn." The petition claimed that since VanDuyn had been hired, the atmosphere in the school district has become one of "bullying, intimidation and pitting people against one another." The board was assisted by Gary Rider, a search consultant from the Michigan Leadership Institute, a Michigan-based consulting business. The firm's primary commitment is to help provide leadership services to K-12 school districts and public institutions such as community colleges, hospitals and municipalities. Rider has helped facilitate the search since it started in April, holding forums with teachers, students and community members in addition to assisting the board in creating a profile, and guiding them through the interview process. "We are all excited to get started with Scott on the important work of moving our district forward," Reed said. [June 18, 2018] Great Western Bancorp, Inc. Names Karlyn Knieriem Chief Risk Officer & Executive Vice President Great Western Bancorp, Inc. (NYSE:GWB), the parent company of Great Western Bank (www.greatwesternbank.com), today announced that Karlyn Knieriem has been promoted to Chief Risk Officer & Executive Vice President, effective immediately. Knieriem will have responsibility for the overall direction and operations of the risk department, including Enterprise Risk Management, Bank Secrecy Act, and Compliance and Risk Asset Review. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180618006069/en/ Great Western Bancorp, Inc. Names Karlyn Knieriem Chief Risk Officer & Executive Vice President (Photo: usiness Wire). "Karlyn's strategic leadership and extensive experience in risk management are exemplary," said Chairman, President & CEO Ken Karels. "We are pleased to have Karlyn lead us in this critical role. I know that she will make valuable contributions as a vital member of our executive leadership team." Knieriem joined Great Western Bank in 2016 and most recently held the position of Head of Enterprise Risk Management. During her tenure at Great Western Bank, she has helped to design and implement an Enterprise Risk Management program. Karlyn has 20 years of banking experience, including previous roles at First National Bank of Omaha where she designed and implemented several risk management programs including an Internal Capital Adequacy Program inclusive of Stress Testing, Model Risk Management policy, Counter Party Risk Management and Wholesale Funding Program. Knieriem earned her B.S. in Accounting from the University of Nebraska - Omaha. She will report directly to Karels and be based at corporate headquarters in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. About Great Western Bancorp, Inc. Great Western Bancorp, Inc. is the holding company for Great Western Bank, a full-service regional bank focused on relationship-based business and agribusiness banking. Great Western Bank offers small and mid-sized businesses a focused suite of financial products and a range of deposit and loan products to retail customers through several channels, including the branch network, online banking system, mobile banking applications and customer care centers. The bank services its customers through more than 170 branches in nine states: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. To learn more about Great Western Bank visit www.greatwesternbank.com. Forward Looking Statements The materials posted may contain forward-looking statements, including guidance, involving significant risks and uncertainties, which will be identified by words such as "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "estimate," "should," "is likely," "will," "going forward" and other expressions that indicate future events and trends and may be followed by or reference cautionary statements. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking information. These factors are outlined in our most recent earnings press release and in more detail in our most current 10-Q and 10-K filings. Great Western Bancorp, Inc. disclaims any obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements that are made from time to time to reflect future events or developments or changes in expectations. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180618006069/en/ [ Back To www.mobilitytechzone.com\LTE's Homepage ] This is guest post from Nina Hall, an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS (tweets @ninawth) and Sarah von Billerbeck is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading (tweets @SvBillerbeck). The authors would like to thank the other Pressing Politics panel co-organizers: Christine Cheng (@cheng_christine), J. Andrew Grant (@jandrewgrant), and John Karlsrud (@johnkarlsrud). We hope to host another Pressing Politics panel at the 2019 annual convention on a topic ISA members deem most pressing. This is the first post in a series on #metooacademia. How an ISA Pressing Politics Panel Tackled #Metoo The International Studies Association (ISA) annual convention is one of the largest academic conferences for International Relations scholars, it attracts approximately 6,000 attendees from all over the world each year. This year the ISA conference decided that the most pressing politics issue to discuss was the #metoo movement in academia. In an innovative roundtable, six panelists from India, Sweden, the US, Canada, and the UK, discussed how the #metoo movement affected them and the academics institutions to which they belong. This panel was the first of its kind at ISA: a small group of us had worked with ISA to establish a Pressing Politics panel for which the topic was held open until approximately a month before the convention, after which members voted for the topic in an online poll. Our aim was for ISA members to select a pressing, recent, issue that had come up since participants had submitted their conference proposals. We wanted an issue that would not be discussed otherwise at ISA, but that needed academic attention. Our inspiration for the panel came from the 2017 ISA annual convention, which took place in the aftermath of US President Donald Trumps travel ban on individuals from several Muslim-majority countries. Numerous scholars were prevented from attending the ISA annual convention, which provoked outrage and some ended up boycotting the conference. For those who did attend, discussions in hotel lobbies and hallways and at receptions and post-panel happy hours focused heavily on the ban. This is hardly surprising among a group of individuals who dedicate themselves to better understanding how the international system works, where and when cooperation happens, and why relations between states are good or bad. However, because the deadline for submitting paper and panel proposals is approximately 10 months before the actual conference, there were no formal panels or other fora available to assess, analyze, and debate this late-breaking event, something that many found frustrating. We wanted to establish the tradition of at least one Pressing Politics panel at ISA, to ensure we as the academic community debate and engage with the major issues of our times. In Spring 2018, there were several topics that could be characterized as pressing, ranging from the Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh to nuclear developments on the Korean Peninsula. However, the clear frontrunner in our poll was the #metoo movement in academia. The overwhelming preference for a topic that is not about international politics per se, but instead about ourselves and our professional community is, we think, telling, and suggests a moment of introspection, self-reflection, and change within academia. The input of our panelists was wide-ranging, something we explicitly sought to encourage by inviting people from a variety of backgrounds, nationalities, and career stages. Four common issues arose from the panel debate, which we summarize below. These will be further elaborated over the next week in daily blog posts by some of our panelists and other academics, which we invite you to read. Defining #metoo The first common issue is definitional. What is #metoo? Who is it for? While the hashtag itself was originally used to demonstrate the magnitude of sexism and gender-based violence against women, the phrase has subsequently been used to cover an incoherent range of phenomena, ranging from egregious crimes like rape, to professional discrimination that sees women in more junior and greater numbers of service roles, to everyday sexism, in which crude jokes, diminutive speech, and paternalistic actions, whether intentional or not, have belittled or diminished women in academia. Addressing issues from rape to unconscious bias in citations and student evaluations within a single panel was, of course, challenging. While we ultimately encouraged panelists to choose how they would like to focus their own contributions, it was clear that the movements definitional ambiguity makes it difficult to both discuss #metoo, understand what it means for changing social norms, and develop recommendations for ways forward. Data on sexual harassment A second key issue that arose is the paucity of good data on the various phenomena that fall under the #metoo umbrella. There have been numerous studies that attempt to rectify this, shedding light on the gender ratios within departments, uneven citations (see also this and this), and bias in student evaluations (see also this), but when it comes to the more serious crimes against women, such as rape and assault, we have little reliable data. In addition, the data we do have may be biased, depending on how it is collected and the definitions of those collecting it, and under-reporting is likely (see the forthcoming blog post in this series by Katherine Wright on sexual harassment statistics in the UK). Accessibility of the #metoo movement A third issue and one that is closely related to the first two, is how accessible the #metoo movement is. Is it simply the purview of relatively wealthy and highly educated individuals, who can access social media and take part in public discussion? Is it open to all women everywhere, equally? Clearly, if at least one of the aims of #metoo is to highlight the prevalence of sexism, discrimination, and violence against women, then ensuring that all voices are heard is critical. Adjudicating #metoo claims A fourth issue is the difficulty of adjudicating which actions, words, and behaviors are inappropriate. There is a spectrum: from actions that are clearly wrong (and illegal), such as rape and sexual abuse (e.g Harvey Weinstein) to actions that are entirely fine, such as consensual sex between adults or flirting at a bar. Between these two extremes, there are many actions that women are now holding up and that are questioning whether they are in fact ok. These could include wolf whistling, bad or inappropriate jokes, inappropriate comments about someones appearance, unsolicited attempts at flirtation, and unwanted physical contact. The tricky question which the #metoo movement raises is: who decides what is appropriate behavior and how? This is a complicated question because social norms vary across cultural contexts, and there has been a strong backlash against the #metoo movement from those who see it as going too far and persecuting men over minor issues. For instance, many Italians and French see the #metoo movement as an Anglo-Saxon attempt to police and patrol sexuality. As Catherine Deneuve and more than 100 other Frenchwomen wrote in a high-profile letter in January this year: Rape is a crime. But insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression. Defenders of the #metoo movement have responded strongly against the claims in the letter and criticized its authors. So how can and should society and academic institutions make decisions about what behavior is acceptable, and what is not? Should it be in the eyes of the perpetrator, the survivor, or a larger audience (such as the public)? The #metoo movement claims it is correcting for centuries of sexual abuse and harassment where men made the call on what was appropriate for men to do with womens bodies. The proliferation of anonymous surveys and lists of perpetrators (such as in India for academics or in the UK for politicians) has given greater voice to women and other survivors of sexual abuse. But who will then arbitrate these claims and ensure justice? These questions are highly relevant for universities and the academic world. Universities and professional associations of academics are self-governing institutions that often have perverse incentives to protect their reputations and hush up negative stories (as in the case of Terry Karl at Harvard). Furthermore, regular perpetrators of sexual harassment often groom their colleagues to ensure theyre seen as a nice guy. When allegations emerge, colleagues may then be prone to side with the perpetrator. The contributors to this blog series offer global perspectives on the #metoo movement from Sweden to India to the UK. They examine how institutions of higher education and the IR and political science discipline have responded. Some also share deeply personal perspectives, and have a number of recommendations including that academic institutions develop the policies to ensure survivors have their cases heard, and there is due process. Some point out that survivors may or may not want to share their stories publicly, given the costs of doing so, and should be supported by their peers either way. Over the next week we will share a post per day and invite you to comment and engage in this debate. [June 19, 2018] 21st Century Connectivity and the 31st Human Right Brought to West Africa by Partners Hu-manity.co and Imcon International Hu-manity.co, a blockchain company designed to create decentralized human rights has partnered with Imcon International, Inc., the immediate connectivity services provider behind the Internet Backpack to expand connectivity and human rights in West Africa. As indicated in the Joint Letter of Intent recently signed by the Republic of Liberia, Imcon International and Hu-manity.co, the goal is to "design, install, test and run a next generation Digital Operating Model which includes next generation hardware, software, connectivity, and a blockchain-built citizen policy framework starting with the 31st Human Right for the citizens of the Republic of Liberia." The Joint Letter of Intent resulted from recent face-to-face meetings in Monrovia between executives and several high-ranking officials of the Government of Liberia including the Minister of Education, the Minister of Post and Telecommunications, and the Deputy Minister of Health Services for the Ministry of Health. The officials agreed that Liberia would achieve a special place of honor by being the first nation in West Africa to take part in this unique joint initiative. Dr. Francis N. Kateh, Chief Medical Officer Deputy Health Minister for Health Services, Republic of Liberia highlighted "the benefits that the digital model will provide to the country's healthcare sector." The next wave of digital citizens in West Africa will have an unprecedented experience and the citizens of Liberia will be the first beneficiaries. Agreements with other nations in the region, including Kenya, Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Gambia, Sao Tome/ Principe, Benin, and Cote d'Iviore (Ivory Coast), are expected to follow. Representing approximately 290 million individuals, these countries have an average Internet penetration rate of 4-8%. Imcon International plans to increase the number of internet users to 40% of the population within three years. Imcon's Internet Backpack allows users to connect to the Internet from over 90% of planet and utilizin various radio frequency internal to create internal networks over large spaces. Users also enjoy a streamlined experience via Imcon's proprietary narrow-bandwidth utilities which do not rely on the presence of large telephone and Internet carriers. The next hundred-million new digital citizens connected by the Imcon Internet Backpack will have a unique advantage among the billions online today: they will have control over their blockchain-enabled human rights from day one of their digital life, via Hu-manity.co. First of these rights is "legal ownership of their inherent human data as property" defined by Hu-manity.co as the 31st human right, an addition to the existing 30 rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 and bestowed to every human at birth. Richie Etwaru, Founder and CEO of Hu-manity.co states: "Through this first private-public partnership we make sure all citizens, not only the developed world, have ownership of their inherent human data as property. This new population is unique, as they would join the Internet with the 31st Human Right already built in." In Liberia alone, legal ownership of inherent human data as property has the potential to increase GDP by 3%. "This is an enormous opportunity to expand connectivity and human rights throughout Liberia and West Africa," said Dr. Dale Meyerrose, Chairman of the Board, Imcon International, Inc. "Furthermore, we believe we are uniquely positioned to change the GDP of these countries and improve education and healthcare through this increased connectivity and Human Right #31. We are proud to be a partner in this incredibly worthy humanitarian project." About Hu-manity.co Hu-manity.co is the world's first and only organization developing human rights and corollary sovereign laws in a decentralized manner on blockchains. The company has headquarters in New Jersey, USA and operates in multiple countries. The leadership team includes over two dozen senior executives from Fortune 500 companies, academic scholars, and senior policy advisors from North America, Europe, Australia and Africa. The vision of Hu-manity.co is a world where the next generation of human rights and policies emerge from a balance of centralized power and decentralized technologically empowered communities. The mission is to create the 31st human right in a decentralized manner as an example for other organizations and visionaries to follow. For more information please visit hu-manity.co. About Imcon International Inc. Imcon International, Inc., is an immediate connectivity solutions provider. Imcon is developing edgeware services and device solutions, such as the Internet Backpack, which conform to the Open Specifications Model for the Internet of Things v0.5. The Internet Backpack is a remote connectivity solution utilizing narrow-bandwidth utilities which allows users to be able to communicate from almost every location on the planet. The Internet Backpack also allows users to create internal wireless networks with large coverage areas utilizing various radio frequencies. For more information, please visit imconintl.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005562/en/ [ Back To www.mobilitytechzone.com\LTE's Homepage ] Give us your email and we will give you our weekly online magazine. Pennridge School District contracting with family to drive student to and from school June 19, 2018 Syria - Ready To Start The Daraa Campaign There are signs that the long expected liberation of the Daraa region in southwest Syria is about to begin. After a month of negotiations between Russia, Israel, Jordan and the U.S. no peaceful solution has been found. The various terrorist forces in the (green) area, including al-Qaeda aligned HTS and groups loyal to the Islamic State, have rejected all negotiations. For over a month Russian negotiators tried to convince locals to give up and to reconcile with the government. But the hardliners under the rebels have killed anyone who talked with the Russians. The U.S. government has warned against a Daraa operation and threatened to intervene. First airstrikes were launched by the Syrian government today against villages in the eastern part of the Deraa area. Some local fighting is ongoing. This is not yet the expected all out attack on the 'rebel' held areas but the testing of enemy forces. The Syrian army has assembled a large force to liberate the southwest. It includes ten thousands of soldiers, more than 100 tanks and lots of artillery. Short range air defenses have been moved into the area to protect the Syrian troops. A well coordinated attack on several front and multiple axes should allow for a quick victory. Israel, with U.S. backing, might intervene in such an operation even if it makes little sense to do so. The current state can not continue indefinitely. Any intervention might well lead to a war for which Israel is unprepared. The Syrian army is willing and able to hit back into Israel. After seven years of war it is not afraid of a fight. The Russian military is warning of a false-flag "chemical incident" in Deir Ezzor governorate. The Syrian Observatory reports that Islamic State remnants in the southeastern desert and in the Rukban camp, both under cover of the U.S. occupied zone around al-Tanf, prepare for a large attack on Syrian government forces. It claims that such an attack is an attempt to occupy the zone between al-Tanf and Albu Kamal at the Euphrates. Both operation would be planned diversions intended to draw Syrian forces away from Deraa and could provide excuses for U.S. intervention on the opposition side. Late Sunday an airstrike destroyed a building in the Harri area near Albu Kamal directly on the Syrian-Iraqi border. The building was used as a headquarter for the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMU) who are securing the border in coordination with the Syrian army in the fight against the Islamic State. More than 20 fighters were killed and more than 10 were wounded. This may have been in preparation for the reportedly planned large ISIS attack. The strike makes otherwise little military sense. The PMU are nominally under command of the Iraqi government. They used a house on the Syrian side, some 200 meters from the border, as there was no adequate space on the Iraqi side. While they may have Iranian support and may help the Syrian army in some of its operations they are neither Iranian troops nor do they belong to the Lebanese Hezbullah. The Syrian government accused the U.S. of having attacked the building. One U.S. source claims to CNN that the Israeli air-force attacked the site. I doubt that this is true. The U.S. has previously attacked Syrian government aligned forces in the area. It obviously continues to use ISIS to disrupt Syrian army operations. But as the U.S. needs Iraq it can not admit that it hit Iraqi forces. That would practically guarantee that the incoming Iraqi government would tell it to leave. It might have asked Israel to provide a cover for the strike. Technically Israel could have done the attack. It would have needed tanker support and Jordanian compliance for overflight. Over the weekend Netanyahoo announced that Israel would hit Iranian forces all over Syria. But even CNN notes that the strike is untypical for Israel and does not make any sense. Whoever committed the strike did so in an airspace that is controlled by the U.S. military. The leaders of the PMU in Iraq will use it to rally their forces against any U.S. bases in the country. In north Syria Turkey is continuing its colonization of Syrian towns and regions. Turkish post offices, Turkish teachers, policemen and imans are pushing the population to adopt Turkish culture. It will more difficult to dislodge than the few thousand 'rebels' in the Deraa region. Posted by b on June 19, 2018 at 18:00 UTC | Permalink Comments next page Morgan Hill school officials want to scrap their plans to place an education parcel tax on the Nov. 6 ballot, according to the recently released June 19 school board agenda. The board will hear from district staff on the matter at the June 19 meeting inside the 15600 Concord Circle boardroom. Closed session is scheduled to begin at 4pm with public session (when the parcel tax will be discussed) immediately following at about 6pm. The surprise move comes a little more than a month after MHUSDs Board of Trustees voted 5-2 in favor of including two local charter schools in the funds generated from the measure. Since the boards vote approving the ballot measure, staff has reviewed the resolution and conditions set forth by the board with respect to the legal implications of the measure, legal challenges in process for implementing the tax measure if it passes, and predictable opposition that will create additional costs to assure the effective administration or oversight of the measure, the G6 agenda item states. The board surprised district staff at the May 15 meeting when, in a last minute maneuver, added language to the five-year, $75-per-parcel tax resolution to allow a percentage of the revenues to go to Charter School of Morgan Hill and Voices College-Bound Language Academy. That percentage would be based on student enrollment. Staff generated many questions after the review such that the District staff needs to address these questions prior to ordering such a measure on a ballot, according to the staff report. The withdrawal of the resolution will enable staff to craft a legally defendable ballot measure which will support the boards interest as stated during the May 15, 2018 discussion and direction. The deadline to submit resolutions to the County Registrar Office is July 5. Citing inconsistent language, verification of eligible students and determination of allocation of funds, district staff is requesting the board not place the parcel tax measure on the Nov. 6 ballot. Based on these three risks, and consultation with other Districts, staff is concerned that legal arbitration cost may exceed any benefits of the measure if passed as stated, according to staff. At the May 15 meeting, Board President Tom Arnett, Vice President Mary Patterson and trustees David Gerard, Gino Borgioli and Teresa Murillo voted to include the two charter schools to give the measure a more likely chance of passing in the November election. Trustees Donna Ruebusch and Ron Woolf were against the revised resolution, since it came late in the process. The districts final version was crafted by a special committee and consultants after months of planning that included a pair of community surveys. It was exclusively for district-run schools. It did, however, have a clause that addressed charter schools, promising their inclusion in future parcel taxes, but not the one headed to a Nov. 6 vote. If successful, the property tax was estimated to generate $1.5 million annually over the next five years. Other general business items to be discussed June 19 include: Presentation from the Food Services Department by Michael Jochner, Director of Food Services. Request for approval of the districts Local Control Accountability Plan. Request for approval of the districts 2018-19 budget, which has $93,195,350 in revenues, $91,168,368 in expenditures and $13,489,621 in reserves. Presentation on Multi-year financial projections. Request for approval of Single Plan for Student Achievement (SPSA) for 13 school sites. 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. A New CFPB Director? Perhaps That's Not the Intention The White House announced on Monday the nomination of Kathy Kraninger as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to replace acting director Mick Mulvaney. The appointment caught many in Washington by surprise as Kraninger is not widely known and has not previously been active in the consumer arena according to many reports. Kraninger has been an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which Mulvaney also serves as director, for about a year. At OMB she oversees $250 billion in funding for seven cabinet departments and 30 agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security. Her previous role was as a staff member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. She has also worked for the Department of Transportation. Looking beyond her qualifications, Market Watch reports that Mulvaney would have had to leave his post as acting director by June 22 if no permanent nominee had been named. He was appointed to replace the agency's first director, Richard Cordray, who resigned last fall to run for the office of Ohio governor. Under obscure Washington rules Mulvaney can now stay on until a replacement is confirmed by the Senate, a process that could take months. Also, according to MarketWatch, that confirmation process is likely to be a contentious one. Critics are already going public. The LA Times quoted Bartlett Naylor, a financial policy advocate at Public Citizen who said, "Kraninger ... has neither experience as a regulator nor expertise in consumer financial issues. The nation's leading consumer financial regulator is not an entry-level job." J.W. Verret, an assistant professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School and an expert on financial regulation said he was shocked at the appointment and is organizing opposition to the nomination among conservative and consumer credit legal scholars. A White House spokesman defended the pick, saying Kraninger "will bring a fresh perspective and much-needed management experience" to the consumer bureau and Jeb Hensarling, House Financial Services Committee Chairman and a staunch critic of CFPB, commended the nomination. The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) issued a statement expressing pleasure at the announcement. "Based on her background and experience, we look forward to hearing her views about how to improve the Bureau's oversight and operations, and how she will leverage the information gathered from the ongoing RFI process to protect consumers from unscrupulous practices while also ensuring they enjoy access to safe, sustainable loan products." Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with brokerage and investment bank Cowen & Co., wrote in a research note Monday that, not only will the nomination allow Mulvaney to continue his ramping down of the agency's regulatory activities and lobbying for a change in the Bureau's structure, but Kraninger has the advantage of being able to remain in her OMB job during the confirmation process. If she were employed in the private sector, Seiberg said, tradition would mandate she resign immediately because of potential conflicts of interest with work related to the bureau's oversight. "We see the nomination of Kathy Kraninger as a way to keep OMB Director Mick Mulvaney in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for years to come without the need to ever get someone confirmed," Seiberg wrote. UCOM has officially launched the sale of IPHONE 13 Six servicemen were wounded by the attack of the Azerbaijani armed forces in Artsakh, two of them in critical condition S&P Improved the Outlook on Ameriabank to Positive Ararat Mirzoyan to visit to Minsk Foreign Minister of India visits the Memorial of Armenian Genocide 1217 new cases 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 Google Ad Governments preventing publication of Haykakan Zhamanak newspaper during state of emergency UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland Karen Vardanyan has allocated 105 million AMD to rescue the Yerevan Botanical Garden. "The Power of One Dram" to overcome childhood cancer Generation A 13 your chance to be the change President of the Artsakh Republic Arayik Harutyunyan met with Russian Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Igor Khovayev "uDays" special offer at Ucom: discounts for all smartphones and accessories for 2 days only For more than 3 hours, 50 or more Azerbaijani servicemen have blocked the interstate road Call on the international community for an adequate response against azerbaijani aggresssion Transformation and trust are important for success in modern banking. Artak Hanesyan UCOMS LEVEL UP 1700 REGIONAL TARIFF PLAN USERS TO RECEIVE MORE THAN THOSE IN YEREVAN Joint statement But there is another, lesser known, but equally significant, celebration of American independence that takes place ahead of the pomp and circumstance of July 4. Juneteenth is an annual celebration on June 19th that marks the date in 1865 when word reached Texas, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that slavery had been abolished and those enslaved were free. In the more than 150 years since this seminal moment in American history, African-American communities have marked the occasion of Juneteenth with picnics, festivals and church services. Anthony Greene, Associate Professor of African American Studies and sociology, says Juneteenth celebrations are uplifting, but that the annual holiday carries the weight of history within its cultural significance. Although it marks a day of family, food, and fun, its also critically important that Juneteenth is a tribute to the legacy and power of a people who endured and overcame the most unimaginable conditions, says Greene. The College Today posed five questions to Greene about the history of Juneteenth, the significance of the annual celebration, and why its important to recognize Juneteenth within the larger context of American culture. What are the historical origins of Juneteenth? As America prepares to celebrate its independence, many African Americans conjure up a little known, and often omitted, significant fact during this time upon gaining its independence, black people remained enslaved (see Frederick Douglasss essay What Does the 4th of July Mean to Negroes). As such, independence, as it is celebrated, has two distinct historical meanings. To commemorate when enslavement was abolished, Americans inaccurately highlight the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln, which took effect on Jan. 1, 1863. However, Lincolns proclamation was issued only to Confederate states in areas that were liberated by the Union Army. It was not for the intent and purpose to abolish slavery as an institution. Slavery remained legal until 1865 when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. Despite its abolishment, the 250,000 enslaved Africans in Texas did not immediately learn of their freedom. Several accounts have been put forth to explain why there was a two-and-a-half-year delay in the news of emancipation to Slaves in the Lone Star State: A messenger was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. The news was purposely withheld by slave masters to maintain a labor force. Slave owners wanted to generate one last cotton harvest. The announcement of freedom to the enslaved population in Texas has become known as Juneteenth (also known as the Black 4th of July). It is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. This African-American holiday observes June 19, 1865, as the official day of independence and freedom for blacks in America. It is noted that June 19th is not the exact day blacks were freed, rather its the day they were told they were free. Traditionally, how has Juneteenth been observed within African-American communities? Early Juneteenth celebrations were marred by outward resistance among many southern whites. As Jim Crow laws started to emerge, black communities were unable to use public venues, such as parks, for celebrations, thus turning to church grounds and rural areas, often near rivers and creeks for activities such as fishing. Festivities would include barbecues, fishing and horseback riding. As blacks became landowners, land often would be donated for Juneteenth celebrations. In the early decades of the celebration, Juneteenth flourished. Across the state of Texas, and in the south overall, Juneteenth celebrations became a boastful annual tradition. Has the cultural awareness of Juneteenth changed in recent decades? Why? In the early 20th century, there was a small decline in its celebration in large part due to how formal educational curriculums put emphasis on President Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation as the sole act to abolish slavery. Little to no formal acknowledgment of June 19th and its historical significance was taught in schools. Although celebrations did not completely cease, the large-scale celebrations did begin to decline. Not until the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and early 1970s was there a resurgence of Juneteenth. The black power movement, in particular, with its emphasis on pride, culture, identity, and re-claiming history, helped spark a renewed interest in Juneteenth. Additionally, as Black Studies (African American Studies) programs have developed on college campuses, accurate black historical narratives have emerged, also helping to generate more interest in celebrations such as Juneteenth. How is Juneteenth celebrated today? Today, Juneteenth is observed by communities around the country. People celebrate black culture, commemorate black history, and uplift and honor the black freedom struggle. With its significant place in the annals of black history, Charleston is a noteworthy locale for its Juneteenth (and Memorial Day) celebrations. Just three years ago, four days before Charlestons Juneteenth holiday, Dylann Roof took the lives of nine members of Emmanuel A.M.E. Church, home of the freedom fighter Denmark Vesey. The remembrances of those lives lost, the legacy of enslavement, the contributions of all those who fought to improve the lived experiences of Black Charlestonians would embody the 2018 Juneteenth celebration. Why is it important to continue to recognize and observe the Juneteenth holiday? American society has a unique, often detached, relationship regarding African-American holidays and observances. From Black History Month to Kwanzaa to Juneteenth, some Americans routinely question the need for these specialized celebrations. This questioning does not exist when Americans collectively embrace St. Patricks Day or Cinco de Mayo. Juneteenth is American history, a history that happens to reflect the cultural and historical existence of African-Americans. Outside of the holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., American society does not collectively acknowledge Juneteenth as a critical moment in American history, despite in 2014 President Barack Obama declaring June 19th as a National Day of Observance. American history continues to present the single-story narrative which often highlights and embraces dominant group culture. It has never recognized, embraced, nor honored the histories and culture of racialized minority groups. Consequently, these groups ( African- Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanics, Asians) have fought for their histories and cultures to be acknowledged and appreciated. For America to truly be inclusive, American history, and its celebratory traditions, must be re-written. Until that moment occurs, African-Americans will continue to proudly and boldly embrace the rich cultural heritage of Juneteenth. This story originally ran in the COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON MAGAZINE and was authored by Amanda Kerr. EF Hutton, Inc., headquartered in Springfield, Ohio, has announced open registration for the first in an ongoing series of professional conferences focused on a broad spectrum of national issues. The EF Hutton Talks Conference Series inaugural event will cover issues surrounding the rights of users in social networking. Slated for June 25, 2018, 8 am to 5 pm, the primary site will be at the Courtyard by Marriott, in Springfield, Ohio, with simultaneous satellite locations to be announced. The fallout from the Facebook Cambridge Analytics data breach left even Congress scratching their collective heads about how to better regulate the industry to protect users. Additionally, massive social networking companies are capitalizing on user data and providing nothing in return. This conference will address the issues of data privacy, individual user compensation and more. The EF Hutton Talks Conference Series is designed to shed a national spotlight on specific issues in a wide range of topics affecting Americans. The overall goal is to bring together thought leaders and business executives from industries like social networking, data security and personal finance to define and discuss problems and potential solutions to issues like user rights, privacy, the U.S. savings crisis, and more. Each conference will address topics through panel discussions, keynote speakers and breakout sessions. The featured speaker will be the son of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., human rights activist, Martin Luther King III. Mr. King will be speaking on the value of the individual in a world where consumers are used for their digital information, go uncompensated and left vulnerable. As an industry, we have a responsibility to the public to address issues of privacy and user rights, not because we are compelled to do so by congressional subpoena, but because its the right thing to do, said Gery Deer, EF Hutton Vice President of Communications and Public Relations. This conference series is designed to help begin an industry-wide dialogue to explore ways financial technology companies can help defend the rights of all internet users. Assessment, cleanup and repairs are moving forward at Michigan Technological University in the aftermath of devastating flash floods in the western Upper Peninsula produced by torrential rains over the weekend. The National Weather Service reports as much as seven inches of rain fell in the Copper Country between 11 p.m. Saturday and 8 a.m. Sunday, with the majority of rainfall occurring from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. Sunday. Roadways throughout the area washed out; homes and businesses were severely damaged or destroyed by mudslides, flooding and cave-ins. University property and grounds were damaged, but there are no reported injuries on campus. Michigan Tech President Glenn Mroz expressed his admiration and appreciation for the Michigan Tech community and the people of Houghton County. The outpouring of support, resources and offers to help has been humbling and comforting, Mroz says. It reminds us of what this community is made ofgrit, determination and heart. Mroz says while the photos and video footage of the damage are unsettling, the University and community are on the mend. We are transitioning from recovery to restoration, he says, noting that University personnelincluding the Incident Command Team (ICT), Facilities, and Information Technology, and many othersare working around the clock to ensure campus safety. Because many roadways in the area remain closed or compromised, University officials advise employees who feel unsafe traveling to campus to use their best judgment when determining whether to return to work. The Houghton County Office of Emergency Measures is offering local road closure updates via local media. Responding to the Storm and Aftermath Staff who work in the Administration Building gather in the Van Pelt and Opie Library for an update on building assessment progress. As the rain was still falling early Sunday morning, the ICT mobilized to coordinate response efforts. Campus was closed Sunday and Monday, re-opening today. While classes have resumed, the Administration Building, which took the brunt of flooding, remains closed for assessment. The flooding also forced cancellation of the first week of Michigan Techs Summer Youth Program, which was set to begin Sunday afternoon. Plans concerning program resumption will be announced when available. The nearly 150 University employees who work in the Administration Building met with University officials today to plan alternative work arrangements while the building remains closed. University-wide updates will be posted on mtu.edu/alert. Ways to Help, and Be Helped Huskies around the Copper Country are picking up shovels and making donations. Huskies around the nation are reaching out to ask how they can help with disaster relief efforts. If youd like to make a monetary donation, two area non-profits, Keweenaw Community Foundation and Portage Health Foundation have activated flood relief funds. The Betty Chavis Fund is a means to specifically help Michigan Tech students affected by the disaster. Donate via the Michigan Tech Giving page by selecting give now, other, and typing in "Betty Chavis Emergency Fund." The City of Houghton and Houghton County are organizing volunteer work crews. To volunteer, call 906-233-6621 or visit the Copper Country Strong 2018 volunteer information page on Facebook. Helping hands and hot showers Businesses across the area are accepting donations and providing food and beverages to aid in the recovery. One case in point: The Student Development Complex has opened locker rooms 109 and 110 to storm-displaced community members looking for free, clean, hot showers. Check in at the ID desk by the multipurpose room during current building hours to get towels and directions. No pass or ID required, although the number of folks using the facilities will be tracked. Current building hours are: - MondayFriday, 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. - Saturday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. - Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Michigan Technological University is a public research university founded in 1885 in Houghton, Michigan, and is home to more than 7,000 students from 55 countries around the world. Consistently ranked among the best universities in the country for return on investment, the University offers more than 125 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, computing, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, social sciences, and the arts. The rural campus is situated just miles from Lake Superior in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, offering year-round opportunities for outdoor adventure. Vous etes confrontes a une infestation par la puce, la punaise de lit ? Voici plusieurs actions qui sont a mettre en uvre pour faire [] Naira Zohrabyan: It is very surprising that for many years this animal has taken hostage all Etchmiadzin (video) Naira Zohrabyan, a member of the Tsarukyan faction, addressed a question to the Prosecutor General during the questionnaire at the National Assembly. "It was not one day crime, where were you when Manvel Grigoryan stole a soldier's bread for years?" In response to the question, the Prosecutor General mentioned that he learned about all this on June 5, 2018. "It's very surprising that for many years this animal has taken hostage all Etchmiadzin," Naira Zohrabyan replied. Later, the MP delivered a speech from the podium. According to Naira Zohrabyan, Manvel Grigoryan and his followers should be punished. Referring to Manvel Grigoryan's letter, which stated that his goodwill will be restored, Naira Zohrabyan mentioned that there is only one way for that: "If he has courage, I think you've understood what I meant." 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Sign up now> UCOM has officially launched the sale of IPHONE 13 Six servicemen were wounded by the attack of the Azerbaijani armed forces in Artsakh, two of them in critical condition S&P Improved the Outlook on Ameriabank to Positive Ararat Mirzoyan to visit to Minsk Google Ad Foreign Minister of India visits the Memorial of Armenian Genocide 1217 new cases 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 Google Ad Governments preventing publication of Haykakan Zhamanak newspaper during state of emergency UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland Karen Vardanyan has allocated 105 million AMD to rescue the Yerevan Botanical Garden. "The Power of One Dram" to overcome childhood cancer Generation A 13 your chance to be the change President of the Artsakh Republic Arayik Harutyunyan met with Russian Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Igor Khovayev "uDays" special offer at Ucom: discounts for all smartphones and accessories for 2 days only For more than 3 hours, 50 or more Azerbaijani servicemen have blocked the interstate road Call on the international community for an adequate response against azerbaijani aggresssion Transformation and trust are important for success in modern banking. Artak Hanesyan UCOMS LEVEL UP 1700 REGIONAL TARIFF PLAN USERS TO RECEIVE MORE THAN THOSE IN YEREVAN Joint statement By UNI WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump has made claims that immigration was out of control in Europe in order to justify his ultra-firm border controls, which has led to some 2,000 migrant children being separated from their parents and held in a converted warehouse. In a tweet, he said that migrants in Europe were responsible for a rise in crime in Germany and for violently changing the culture. The Tweet read: "The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!" Trump, said in a tweet. The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 18 June 2018 After the tweet, the president defended his stance during a press conference and repeated his claims. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and will not be a refugee holding facility," he said. We dont want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) 18 June 2018 "You look at what is happening in Europe, you look at what is happening in other places, we can not allow that to happen to the United States, not on my watch." But Trump's position has received strong criticism from the United Nations. Stephane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, said: "As a matter of principle, the Secretary-General believes that refugees and migrants should always be treated with respect and dignity, and in accordance with existing international law. Children must not be traumatised by being separated from their parents. Family unity must be preserved." Under the zero-tolerance policy adults face criminal prosecution but their children, who aren't charged, are taken to separate facilities. My Step Foundation founded by PMs wife Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyans wife Anna Hakobyan had a meeting today with spouses of foreign Ambassadors in Armenia and women ambassadors. Hakobyan expressed gratitude for accepting the invitation and noted that the purpose is to get acquainted, as well as present the latest developments in Armenia. It is extremely important that the people are standing behind this all, and the pillar of further activities will also be the people, and no other factor, she said. Hakobyan said she is open for any discussion and implementation of joint projects. As a possible sector for joint activities, many of the guests pointed out encouraging and advancing womens rights in Armenia. The guests attached importance to the role of full participation of women in the development of the country and presented the experience of their countries in this area. Anna Hakobyan said that womens and childrens issues will be the key targets of her future activities. Speaking on the format of activities, Mrs. Hakobyan mentioned that she has already founded the My Step Foundation, and its presentation will take place soon. The women envoys included the UK Ambassador, the Greek Ambassador, Bulgarian Ambassador, Lebanese Ambassador and the Special Representative of the Council of Europe. Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg and Grand Duchess Maria Teresa of Luxembourg attended the opening of 'Kaddish' Monument built in memory of Holocaust victims of Luxembourg. The monument built by French-Israeli sculptor Shelomo Selinger who survived death camps has been erected at the square near the old Hagia Sophia building in Roosevelt Boulevard. The Grand Ducal Couple then attended the opening of a plaque that tells 75th anniversary of departure of the last train for deportation of Jews from Luxembourg. Before the war, there were nearly 3.500 Jews in Luxembourg and it is known that only 36 of them survived Nazi violence. Eight Kenyan police officials were killed in the eastern part of the country on Sunday after their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device planted by Somalia's al-Shabaab militant group, police said. Eight Kenyan police officials have been killed when their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device planted by Somalia's al-Shabab militant group, police say. The terrorist outfit took eight weapons six AK47 assault rifles and two G3 battle rifles and 510 rounds of ammunition from the eight officers killed on Sunday in the east of the country, a police report said. The al-Qaeda-aligned al-Shabab is fighting to topple Somalia's government, establish their own rule and drive out of the country peacekeepers deployed by the African Union. The group frequently launches attacks in neighboring Kenya to pressure it to withdraw its troops which form part of the peacekeeping force. Charles Owino, Kenya's police spokesman, told Reuters that the five administration police and three reservists were killed while protecting the country's borders. Abdiasis Abu Musab, al-Shabab's military operations spokesman, said the group killed 10 Kenyan soldiers in the attack. Earlier this month, five Kenyan police officers were killed in a similar attack in the same region. One of Editor & Publishers 10 That Do It Right 2021 The Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) is reporting that its jailed President Nabeel Rajab had his personal belongings confiscated on Monday by guards at Bahrains Jaw Prison. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - The Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) is reporting that its jailed President Nabeel Rajab had his personal belongings confiscated on Monday by guards at Bahrains Jaw Prison. During a telephone call, Rajab revealed that hundreds of dollars worth of foodstuffs were among the items confiscated. According to the BCHR, the prominent human rights defender had has cell raided in retaliation to the City Council of Paris awarding him with the Honorary Citizenship of France. Among those attending the award ceremony in Paris on Monday was Bahraini Shiite cleric and activist Sheikh Maytham al-Salman. Sheikh Salman told attendees that the award comes at a time of great symbolism for the people of Bahrain, noting that civil society in the kingdom had been silenced and suppressed. Rajab shares the award with many champions of democracy and human rights including South Africas Nelson Mandela. /129 The Bahraini regime has resorted to using Jordanian forces in the clampdown on the peaceful protests in the Persian Gulf country, a local report said. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - The Bahraini regime has resorted to using Jordanian forces in the clampdown on the peaceful protests in the Persian Gulf country, a local report said. The crimes of Bahrains King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and Interior Minister Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa in cracking down on the Bahraini people, who demand freedom and dignity by a peaceful revolution, have reached a point that they have pleaded with Jordanian forces to assist in repressing the people, the Arabic-language Manama Post reported. There is some new information that proves Jordanian forces have received special training to crack down on the people, according to the report. The confession about the presence of the Jordanian forces was made first in April 2014 by former Bahraini information minister Samira Rajab, who was later dismissed, the report said. When asked to comment on the major scandal, Rajab confirmed the presence of Jordanian forces and said it is based on a security cooperation agreement between Manama and Amman. Thousands of anti-regime protesters have held demonstrations in Bahrain on an almost daily basis ever since a popular uprising began in the country in mid-February 2011. They are demanding that the Al Khalifa dynasty relinquish power and allow a just system representing all Bahrainis to be established. Manama has gone to great lengths to clamp down on any sign of dissent. On March 14, 2011, troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were deployed to assist Bahrain in its crackdown. Scores of people have lost their lives and hundreds of others sustained injuries or got arrested as a result of the Al Khalifa regimes crackdown. /129 ZANU-PF Central Committee member Cde Elifasi Mashaba has called for the arrest of former Cabinet Minister, Mr Saviour Kasukuwere, accusing him of duping Bulawayo residents over stands at Umvutshwa on the outskirts of the city. In 2016 the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, which was headed by Mr Kasukuwere, set aside 3 300 hectares of land in Umvutshwa to allocate to the youths. Bulawayo youths were told to pay $50 monthly instalments to the Urban Development Corporation (Udcorp) so that they could be allocated the stands. However, it later emerged that the land Mr Kasukuwere had earmarked for youths was actually private land. Speaking during an outreach meeting with Government departments organised by the Bulawayo Provincial Affairs Minister, Cde Angelina Masuku at Nketa 8 Hall on Sunday, Cde Mashaba said Mr Kasukuwere should be arrested. There is another burning issue that I thought residents would bring up during this discussion. There are criminals who came here and promised to offer housing stands to Bulawayo residents. Scores of residents were made to pay $50 to Udcorp so that they could be allocated stands in Umvutshwa, said Cde Mashaba. One of the criminals who had escaped but has since returned still a criminal is Kasukuwere. We want Kasukuwere to be arrested over Umvutshwa stands. We have people who lost money to Udcorp. Some lost between $50 and $500 even here in Nketa and Emganwini suburbs. Mr Kasukuwere escaped into self-imposed exile last year in November during the Zimbabwe Defence Forces Operation Restore Legacy which led to the resignation of former President Mr Robert Mugabe. The former Zanu-PF National Political Commissar and member of the G40 cabal only returned into the country last month, vowing to stay out of politics. Last year, Zanu-PF youths raised the red flag over Mr Kasukuweres failure to deliver the stands. The youths demanded that he comes clean over the stands issue and wanted reimbursement of their funds. Chronicle As the clock ticks towards next months elections, main opposition leader Nelson Chamisa has sensationally claimed that rivals were pulling everything out of their bags of tricks to deny his MDC Alliance victory at the forthcoming polls, including attempts on his life. The MDC Alliance presidential candidate made the claims while addressing party supporters in the resort town of Victoria Falls at the weekend. Chamisa claimed to have gathered intelligence to the effect that President Emmerson Mnangagwas administration has put together a team of security agents to snoop on him ahead of the crunch elections slated for July 30 and could not rule out that their brief included taking his life. I hear they have set up teams that are following me but they wont succeed in their mission because I have an angelic ark that is around me, so these earthly attempts will fail even if they want to kill me, said the 40-year-old presidential hopeful. The former ICT minister said he will not be afraid to travel around the country on his own, adding that even if he becomes president of the republic he will surround himself with a few bodyguards. The president should not be guarded by soldiers at all; so I will not be crowded by soldiers because a leader must be accessible to the people not to move around with soldiers and a huge motorcade, said Chamisa. The motorcade must be reasonably small with the leader guarded by a few people who travel with him like what other leaders in the region do such as (Ian) Khama of Botswana and the late (Nelson) Mandela (of South Africa). Why do people need such motorcades as if they will take that into their graves? he asked. Mnangagwas administration dismissed his claims yesterday, saying Chamisas assertions were unfounded and out of step with Mnangagwas repeated calls for free and fair elections. The fears being expressed are unfounded especially when one considers the fact that the president has opened up political space and Chamisa is having a free rein, campaigning anywhere, anytime, Home Affairs minister Obert Mpofu told the Daily News yesterday. There is really no reason why we should be asking security services to pry on opposition parties and their leaders because they are not a national security threat, he added. Despite Mpofu pouring cold water on Chamisas claims, the MDC Alliance leaders spokesperson, Nkululeko Sibanda, insisted yesterday that his boss fears were genuine. It is irresponsible to think that the fears are not genuine given that MDC leaders including the (partys) president have been harmed before by the State hence there cannot be delusion over the possibility of being harmed. The fears are existential; there is no second guessing so we care about his security on account of precedence so anything is possible , Sibanda said. Since the formation of the MDC in 1999, its leader, including the partys late founding president, Morgan Tsvangirai, have always complained that State security agents, particularly from the Central Intelligence Organisation, routinely target them. Tsvangirai and Chamisa were among opposition leaders who were physically assaulted by suspected State security agents at the behest of kingpins in former president Robert Mugabes regime. While Tsvangirai was assaulted by police in 2007 after a prayer meeting in Harare, Chamisa was left for dead after suspected State security agents pounced on him at the Robert Mugabe International Airport then the Harare International Airport as he prepared to leave for Belgium. Mugabes regime was also notorious for fabricating criminal allegations against key members of the opposition to distract them from campaigning. Last year, there were report about government agents prying into the movements of Tsvangirais wife, Elizabeth, in a bid to extract dirt they could use to side track her husbands campaign. Of particular interests to spy agents was Elizabeths trip to Sydney, Australia. It was suspected at the time that Elizabeth could have abandoned Tsvangirai who was receiving treatment in South Africa and that the mother of two was still seeing one of her ex-husbands. Tsvangirai wed Elizabeth (nee Macheka) in September 2012. Before her marriage to the former prime minister, Elizabeth bore two daughters from her previous marriages Rumbidzaishe Sharon Guma and Tashinga Ngirazi. Daily News The Game Was Almost Over. Then, Over the PA: 'Protect Yourselves' (Newser) Actress Heather Locklear has reportedly been hospitalized after threatening to shoot herself. Per TMZ, the 56-year-old Melrose Place star was "agitated" at her Southern California home when her parents arrived to check on her. At some point, the report says Locklear attempted to strangle her mother and hit her father, after which 911 was called. As Fox News notes, the caller told dispatchers Locklear was trying to find a gun in order to kill herself but that the actress has no access to weapons. Authorities responded from the Ventura County Fire Department and Locklear was transported to a hospital for a psych evaluation. Locklear was last in the headlines in February, when she was arrested in a domestic incident in which she was accused of assaulting her boyfriend and three police officers. (Read more Heather Locklear stories.) (Newser) Never a dull moment for Elon Musk: The Tesla CEO warned all employees Monday that a saboteur inside the company had caused "quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations," reports Reuters. "This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties," wrote Musk, adding: "The full extent of his actions are not yet clear, but what he has admitted to so far is pretty bad." The CEO, who warned that there may be "considerably more to this situation than meets the eye," said they still need to determine whether the saboteur was working alone, with other Tesla employees, or with outside organizations. story continues below The saboteur's "stated motivation is that he wanted a promotion that he did not receive," Musk wrote. "In light of these actions, not promoting him was definitely the right move." Tesla is ramping up production to meet its target of producing 5,000 Model 3s weekly by the end of this month, CNBC reports. In his email to staff, Musk warned that there is "a long list of organizations," including oil companies and Wall Street short-sellers, that "want Tesla to die." The next few weeks will be "when outside forces have the strongest motivation to stop us," wrote Musk, urging employees to be "extremely vigilant." In an email earlier Monday, Musk said there had been a "small fire" Sunday at a Tesla facility and told workers to be "on the alert for anything thats not in the best interests of our company." (Last week, Musk announced a major round of layoffs.) (Newser) Two firefighters in Ohio have been suspended for allegedly making pornographic videos at a firehouse. Akron officials say Arthur Dean and Deann Eller were both placed on administrative leave Monday while the city launched an investigation, the AP reports. Fire Chief Clarence Tucker says someone told a firefighter last week about the acts possibly being performed on city property. The firefighter reported it to his supervisor, who then told the chief. Per Cleveland.com, Eller, 42, who joined the Akron Fire Department in 2000, had recently been promoted to lieutenant. Dean, 49, also joined the department in 2000. story continues below Tucker and Mayor Dan Horrigan said in a joint statement that Dean and Eller didn't work at the same fire station, but they were known to be in a long-term relationship. "As leaders of this city and this department, we find these allegations shocking and distressing, to say the least," the statement said. "These allegations bring unwelcome dishonor and embarrassment to [the] Akron Fire Department and the City of Akron and unfairly discredit the reputation of other Akron Fire officers." Officials haven't identified the firehouse where the videos took place, and an investigation is ongoing; police won't be investigating the allegations as a crime. A spokesman for the local firefighters' union says Eller and Dean have no comment. (Note: This story originally featured a stock photo of San Francisco Fire Department fire engines, which are not associated with this story. It has been removed.) Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB), the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD), and the European Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (ECDHR) condemned to the upmost degree the ongoing prosecution of Bahrains opposition leader Sheikh Ali Salman. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain (ADHRB), the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD), and the European Centre for Democracy and Human Rights (ECDHR) condemned to the upmost degree the ongoing prosecution of Bahrains opposition leader Sheikh Ali Salman. In a joint statement released on Monday, the rights groups called on Manama to immediately and unconditionally release Sheikh Salman. A Manama court is expected to issue a final verdict in an espionage case against the opposition leader on June 21. Sheikh Salman, who is already serving a 4-year prison term, was allegedly charged with spying for the state of Qatar last November. The charges stem from a mediation attempt between the Bahraini regime and opposition during the kingdoms popular uprising in 2011. The initiative was well documented and had the support of Gulf states, the U.S. and the Bahraini monarch. According to the rights groups, Sheikh Salmans trial is an example of Manamas assault on independent political and civil society ahead of this years legislative elections. The courts decision to target Sheikh Ali Salman with charges that were clearly drudged up in order to undermine the voice of the opposition prior to the elections is absolutely egregious, said ADHRBs Executive Director Husain Abdulla. The rights groups also urged Manamas allies to pressure the regime into halting its oppressive and systematic human rights violations and crackdown on civil and political society. /129 (Newser) A 17-year-old male shot multiple times in the head began moving under a sheet in Chicago, triggering a failed attempt to save him. Paramedics had arrived early Monday on the scene of a shooting after two vehicles were seen circling a party at a housing complex near the University of Illinois-Chicago campus around 4:45am, per CBS News. A 22-year-old woman identified as Shalonza E. McToy was one of what was initially thought to be two deceased victims, per WLS. But teenager Erin Carey, covered with a sheet for at least an hour as paramedics moved on to other victims, suddenly began moving his arms and legs, reports the Chicago Tribune. Following CPR, he was taken to a hospital on full life support, but he died shortly after 1am Tuesday, reports WGN. story continues below Four males ages 21 to 25 were also injured in the shooting, which helped make up Chicago's most violent weekend so far this year, reports the Tribune. At least 56 people had been shot by Monday morning, at least nine of whom died. The Tribune reports 13 victims were in their teens. It's "unacceptable and frustrating," says Chicago Police First Deputy Supt. Anthony Riccio. "There's too many illegal guns on the street. They're too easy to get." Pointing to ongoing gang conflict in the area of Monday's shooting in University Village, Riccio adds "at least four of the victims are known to the Chicago Police Department," but no survivors are cooperating with investigators, per the Chicago Sun-Times. (Read more Chicago stories.) (Newser) A former CIA employee was charged Monday with stealing classified national defense information from the agency that emerged publicly in March 2017, when WikiLeaks began releasing some of the CIA's hacking tools. Joshua Adam Schulte of Manhattan was charged in a 13-count superseding indictment returned by a grand jury, the AP reports. He was expected to be arraigned on the charges Wednesday. According to the indictment, Schulte stole the classified information in 2016 in the Eastern District of Virginia and elsewhere and then transmitted it to an organization that purports to publicly distribute classified, sensitive, and confidential information. The organization wasn't identified in court papers. The indictment also charged Schulte, 29, with the receipt, possession, and transportation of child pornography. Schulte already was detained on the child porn charges. story continues below The indictment said Schulte in March and June of 2016 altered a computer system operated by the US Intelligence Agency to grant himself access to the system, enabling him to delete records of his activities and deny others access to the system. In January, a prosecutor said Schulte was the target of an ongoing investigation into the theft of tools used by the CIA to spy overseas. William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the New York FBI office, says Schulte "utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims." Prosecutors said last month they expected to bring charges by July. Schulte faces various new charges, including illegal gathering of national defense information, illegal transmission of lawfully possessed national defense information, theft of government property, and unauthorized access to a computer to obtain classified information. If convicted, he could face decades in prison. (Read more CIA stories.) (Newser) Kim Jong Un is making a two-day visit to Beijing starting Tuesday in which he's expected to discuss with Chinese leaders his next steps after his nuclear summit with President Trump last week. The North Korean leader's visit to Beijing, while expected, is one way for China to highlight its crucial role in US efforts to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear program, the AP reports. The US has long looked to China to use its influence with North Korea to bring it to negotiations, but the visit comes as ties between Beijing and Washington are being tested by a major trade dispute. Chinese President Xi Jinping "is exerting a lot of influence from behind the scenes," says Bonnie Glaser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. story continues below Glaser says it was predictable Xi would want to be briefed by Kim directly about the North Korean leader's talks with Trump. "I expect they will talk about the path going forward and where priorities should lie," Glaser said. Those priorities, from China's perspective, would be to ensure that Beijing is included in any peace treaty talks and in creating an environment on the Korean Peninsula that will make it unnecessary for US troops to remain. China's foreign ministry refused to provide details on Kim's visit other than to say that Beijing hopes it will help deepen relations between the countries. (A major announcement from the US and South Korea could be coming this week.) (Newser) Police in Florida's Broward County continue to investigate Monday's fatal shooting of 20-year-old rapper XXXTentacion, but they have no suspects at the moment, reports the AP. Two armed men approached the rapper, real name Jahseh Onfroy, in his vehicle as he left a motorcycle dealership, and at least one opened fire. One theory is that it was a deadly robbery, given that the gunmen took a Louis Vuitton bag from the rapper's BMW, reports TMZ. In the meantime, plenty is being written about Onfroy's brief and violent life: The music: He "was known for his experimental, punk-infused and indie rock-influenced subgenre of hip hop called SoundCloud rap," reports the South Florida Sun Sentinel. The name came from the online streaming service where it was originally posted. One of his big musical influences was Kurt Cobain. He "was known for his experimental, punk-infused and indie rock-influenced subgenre of hip hop called SoundCloud rap," reports the South Florida Sun Sentinel. The name came from the online streaming service where it was originally posted. One of his big musical influences was Kurt Cobain. Breakout song: It was called "Look at Me!" Watch the video, which is NSFW, here. story continues below Definitive profile: Miami New Times profiled XXXTentacion earlier this month, and former girlfriend Geneva Ayala provided graphic details of his alleged abuse, both physical and verbal. "His favorite thing was to just backhand my mouth," Ayala says. "That always left welts inside my lips." XXXTentacion was awaiting trial on a slew of charges, including aggravated battery of a pregnant girlfriend. Miami New Times profiled XXXTentacion earlier this month, and former girlfriend Geneva Ayala provided graphic details of his alleged abuse, both physical and verbal. "His favorite thing was to just backhand my mouth," Ayala says. "That always left welts inside my lips." XXXTentacion was awaiting trial on a slew of charges, including aggravated battery of a pregnant girlfriend. Early violence: XXXTentacion once said in an interview that he used to beat other kids in school "just to hear my mom yell at me or talk to me," reports the Washington Post. He spent time in a group home and would later boast of savagely beating a gay roommate. In recent years, in addition to the alleged abuse of his pregnant girlfriend, XXXTentacion also was charged with home invasion robbery and witness tampering. XXXTentacion once said in an interview that he used to beat other kids in school "just to hear my mom yell at me or talk to me," reports the Washington Post. He spent time in a group home and would later boast of savagely beating a gay roommate. In recent years, in addition to the alleged abuse of his pregnant girlfriend, XXXTentacion also was charged with home invasion robbery and witness tampering. Another take: "His music, a combination of hip-hop and emo that was depressive, and at times devastating, reflected a life lived with disregard for humanity, both other peoples and his own," writes Sam Wolfson at the Guardian. "His music, a combination of hip-hop and emo that was depressive, and at times devastating, reflected a life lived with disregard for humanity, both other peoples and his own," writes Sam Wolfson at the Guardian. Kanye a fan: "rest in peace," tweeted Kanye West. "I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing" "rest in peace," tweeted Kanye West. "I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing" Drake was not: XXXTentacion was in a nasty public feud with Drake because he thought the older musician had borrowed too heavily from "Look at Me!", notes People. Other rappers sided with Drake, including 600Breezy, who warned that he had "a couple n------ that will knock you off in your own city." XXXTentacion was in a nasty public feud with Drake because he thought the older musician had borrowed too heavily from "Look at Me!", notes People. Other rappers sided with Drake, including 600Breezy, who warned that he had "a couple n------ that will knock you off in your own city." Success: XXXTentacion had made it big, thanks in large part to his sophomore album, ?, and TMZ reports that he was having a mansion constructed in Parkland, Fla., at the time of his death. XXXTentacion had made it big, thanks in large part to his sophomore album, ?, and TMZ reports that he was having a mansion constructed in Parkland, Fla., at the time of his death. On his own death: If Im going to die or ever be a sacrifice, I want to make sure that my life made at least five million kids happy or they found some sort of answers or resolve in my life regardless of the negative around my name, regardless of the bad things people say to me, he once wrote on Instagram. (Read more xxxtentacion stories.) (Newser) "How's it going, Manu?" That's how a French teen greeted French President Emmanuel Macron at a WWII remembrance event on Monday, using a common nickname. Big mistake. "No, you can't do that, no, no, no, no," said Macron, who stopped to issue a scolding that has since made the rounds on French social media. It surely did not help the teen's case that he also sang a few lines from a famous Socialist anthem in an apparent dig at Macron's pro-business policies, reports AFP. You can watch the exchange here. "You're here, at an official ceremony and you should behave," Macron told the teen, who quickly apologized. "You can play the fool but today it's the Marseillaise, the Chant des Partisans (French Resistance song), so you call me 'Mister President' or 'Sir'. OK?" story continues below Macron wasn't through, however. "The day you want to start a revolution you study first in order to obtain a degree and feed yourself, OK? And then you can lecture others." A post at DW.com can't help but point out that the 40-year-old French leader has gotten into hot water himself with comments seen as insensitive, such as when a factory worker suggested he was an out-of-touch man in a suit, and Macron responded that the "best way to pay for a suit is to get a job." And last week, a video emerged in which Macron complained that the French were spending a "crazy amount of dough" on social welfare. (Read more Emmanuel Macron stories.) (Newser) St. Clement was said to have been put to death by being tied to a boat anchor and drowned. Just shy of 2,000 years later, what's believed to be a piece of one of his bones has been presented to Westminster Cathedral. The path from there to here is filled with legend, crime, and a Google search. Clement, one of the Catholic Church's first popes, was killed on the orders of the Roman emperor Trajan around AD99, and his watery death led to him becoming a patron saint of mariners, reports the Guardian. The BBC reports something miraculous was said to have followed: The sea receded, revealing his bones, a fragment of which reportedly came to be kept in a wax-sealed case that shows the words "EX OSS S. CLEMENTIS PM." story continues below It was recently stolen from the car of the unnamed person who owned it and ended up in London's trash. It might have stayed there were it not for Enviro Waste owner James Rubin, whose staff set aside the case while pulling items that could be recycled or refurbished from the waste it collected. A Google search of those Latin words led Rubin to believe it was a saint's bone, and he blogged about the find, asking for advice on what to do. Some 650 suggestions later, he settled on giving it to Westminster Cathedral, and the owner, who also emerged, agreed to hand it over on permanent loan. A ceremony was held to transfer the relic on Tuesday. (A thief stole what was left of a saint's brain.) (Newser) Until Tuesday, American graduate student Will Nguyen had last been seen June 10 in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City, his bloodied face hidden by a bag as police dragged him away shoeless. His appearance Tuesday on state television, where he admitted to taking part in an anti-China protest, did little to assuage his worried family members back home in Houston, reports the New York Times. While four US lawmakers have called for Nguyen's release from custody, "there is no sense of urgency among [the State Department]" to seek the 32-year-old's safe return following a protest against the leasing of state land to Chinese investors, his sister tells the Washington Post. "He believed this protest would be a peaceful demonstration of civic participation, and for this misconception, he was beaten, dragged and arrested," his family says in a statement. story continues below "I will not join any anti-state activities anymore," the Yale graduate studying at the National University of Singapore said on state TV on Tuesday. "I regret that I caused trouble for people heading to the airport. I blocked traffic and caused trouble to my family and friends." Citing a head injury suffered during his arrest, relatives are especially concerned that Nguyen had yet to see a doctor when a consular officer visited him Friday, per the Post. Noting it's "deeply concerned" by reports about Nguyen's treatment, the State Department says "his safety and the safety of all US citizens is of the utmost concern," and "we will continue to push for continued and regular access by consular officers," per the Times and BuzzFeed. (Read more Vietnam stories.) (Newser) One of the more controversial views in the border separations saga was voiced by conservative pundit Ann Coulter, who argued on Fox News that kids seen crying on TV are "child actors." In response, the author of an article she cited to back up her theory says she's completely off base to draw that conclusion from it. Coulter, however, isn't backing down, suggesting Tuesday that even newly surfaced audiotapes of kids crying at detention facilities were orchestrated. The details: How it started: As Newsweek recounts, Coulter generated headlines with her theory during a Sunday appearance on The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton. "These child actors weeping and crying on all the other networks 24/7 right nowdo not fall for it, Mr. President," Coulter said. She cited a magazine article to buttress her claim, adding: "These kids are being coached. They're given scripts to read by liberals, according to the New Yorker. Don't fall for the actor children." story continues below The magazine article: Pressed later for details, Coulter tweeted a link to a 2011 story in the New Yorker by Suketu Mehta that tells the tale of an African woman seeking asylum in the US, reports BuzzFeed. In the article, the woman is encouraged to lie about being raped to help her case, and Mehta says he was trying to illustrate a "broken asylum system that demands a certain kind of narrative." Pressed later for details, Coulter tweeted a link to a 2011 story in the New Yorker by Suketu Mehta that tells the tale of an African woman seeking asylum in the US, reports BuzzFeed. In the article, the woman is encouraged to lie about being raped to help her case, and Mehta says he was trying to illustrate a "broken asylum system that demands a certain kind of narrative." Author fires back: Mehta tells BuzzFeed he is incredulous that Coulter would use his story to buttress her case. "She clearly hasn't read my New Yorker article," he said, noting that his piece "has no child actors, no liberals toting scripts to be read by child actors." He adds: "Either she lied or she's truly illiterate." Mehta tells BuzzFeed he is incredulous that Coulter would use his story to buttress her case. "She clearly hasn't read my New Yorker article," he said, noting that his piece "has no child actors, no liberals toting scripts to be read by child actors." He adds: "Either she lied or she's truly illiterate." 2 tweets: In a tweet, Coulter responded to a critic accusing her of venturing into "Alex Jones territory": "If you had 3 functioning brain cells ... you'd be able to find 1 article on how phony aslyum cases are," she wrote, linking to Mehta's story. Mehta took notice, tweeting: "If you had 3 functioning brain cells, you wouldn't be mentioning my New Yorker article about asylum to support your racist positions." In a tweet, Coulter responded to a critic accusing her of venturing into "Alex Jones territory": "If you had 3 functioning brain cells ... you'd be able to find 1 article on how phony aslyum cases are," she wrote, linking to Mehta's story. Mehta took notice, tweeting: "If you had 3 functioning brain cells, you wouldn't be mentioning my New Yorker article about asylum to support your racist positions." Doubling down: In a quick interview with TMZ, Coulter reiterated that this is all a "political stunt," and she cast suspicion on the audiotapes of children crying for their parents. "They're weird," she says, asserting that the kids are speaking in English and saying "Mommy" and "Daddy." (The AP has them saying, "Mami" and "Papi.") "I think they need to improve their scripts," says Coulter, sarcastically suggesting they be in Spanish next time. As for the notion of children being separated from their parents, she quickly responded, "They're being separated from coyotes and drug mules." In a quick interview with TMZ, Coulter reiterated that this is all a "political stunt," and she cast suspicion on the audiotapes of children crying for their parents. "They're weird," she says, asserting that the kids are speaking in English and saying "Mommy" and "Daddy." (The AP has them saying, "Mami" and "Papi.") "I think they need to improve their scripts," says Coulter, sarcastically suggesting they be in Spanish next time. As for the notion of children being separated from their parents, she quickly responded, "They're being separated from coyotes and drug mules." Hilton stays out: In a statement via a Fox spokesperson, Fox host Hilton says, "I do not endorse her comments or anything else said by anyone other than myself," per the Washington Post. (Read more Ann Coulter stories.) (Newser) The images Spenser Rapone posted on Twitter from his West Point graduation were intentionally shocking: In one, the cadet opens his dress uniform to expose a T-shirt with a blood-red image of socialist icon Che Guevara. In another, he raises his fist and flips his cap to reveal the message: "Communism will win." Less than a year after Rapone's images drew a firestorm of vitriol and even death threats, the second lieutenant who became known as the "commie cadet" is officially out of the US Army with an other-than-honorable discharge, the AP reports. The Army accepted Rapone's resignation Monday after an earlier reprimand for "conduct unbecoming of an officer." Rapone said an investigation found he went online to advocate for a socialist revolution and disparage officers. Officially, the Army said only that "appropriate action was taken." story continues below An unrepentant Rapone summed up the fallout in yet another tweet Monday that showed him extending a middle finger at a sign at the entrance to Fort Drum, accompanied by the words, "One final salute." "I consider myself a revolutionary socialist," the 26-year-old Rapone told the AP. "I would encourage all soldiers who have a conscience to lay down their arms and join me and so many others who are willing to stop serving the agents of imperialism and join us in a revolutionary movement." Rapone said his journey to communism grew out of his experiences as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan ("We were bullies in one of the poorest countries on Earth") before he was accepted into the US Military Academy. And those views only hardened during his studies of history as one of the academy's "Long Gray Line." (Read more West Point stories.) (Newser) The thousands of migrant children separated from their parents at the US border and held in old warehouses and Walmarts is a situation many have compared to the internment camps where thousands of Japanese-Americans were sent during World War II. But "at least during the internment"words that actor George Takei, who was sent to a camp at age 5, never thought he'd sayparents and their children remained together, Takei writes in an essay for Foreign Policy. He and his family lived in a horse stall for several weeks before arriving at a camp, "but at least we had each other. At least during the internment, my parents were able to place themselves between the horror of what we were facing and my own childish understanding of our circumstances." story continues below As a result, he didn't understand until later just how grim their situation had been, which is the only thing that kept "the scars of our unjust imprisonment from deepening on my soul." And that's why today's situation with migrants and their children is, at least in "one core, horrifying way," worse than the internment camps of the 1940s. As Takei points out, it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat, who approved the creation of the internment camps, proving that "the United States flirtation with authoritarianism is not tied to any political party. Even people of good heart and conscience can be swept up in the frenzy," not realizing how wrong their actions are. It's not too late to learn from those past mistakes and "ensure history does not repeat itself in full," but doing so requires both politicians and the public to stand up and speak out. Click for his full essay. (Read more George Takei stories.) A prominent Afghan Quran experts lauded the Islamic Republic of Iran for organizing an international Quran contest for the visually-impaired. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - A prominent Afghan Quran experts lauded the Islamic Republic of Iran for organizing an international Quran contest for the visually-impaired. Barakatallah Salim who served as a member of the panel of judges in Irans 35th International Holy Quran Competition earlier this year, said if visually-impaired Quran activists are given the opportunity and have qualified teachers, they can improve their Quranic skills and get even more successful than those without disabilities. He added that the participants in the international competition for the visually-impaired, which was held in Tehran in May, concurrent with the 35th International Quran Competition of the Islamic Republic of Iran, had the opportunity to show their talents in the Quranic event. Elsewhere, Salim underlined the role of international Quran competition in enhancing unity among Muslims since followers of all Islamic schools of thought adhere to the teachings of the same Divine Book. He noted that his home country, Afghanistan, does not hold international Quran contests, but national and local Quranic events are organized in the country regularly. Salim began learning the Quran in his teenage years and mastered the 7 styles of Quran recitation at the age of 19. He has won 12 international Quranic awards so far. The Quranic figure has also authored several books on Quran interpretation and Tajweed recitation of the Quran. /129 (Newser) The United States announced Tuesday it was leaving the United Nations' Human Rights Council, with Ambassador Nikki Haley calling it "an organization that is not worthy of its name." It was the latest withdrawal by the Trump administration from an international institution. Haley, Trump's envoy to the UN, said the US had given the human rights body "opportunity after opportunity" to make changes, the AP reports. She lambasted the council for "its chronic bias against Israel" and lamented the fact that its membership includes accused human rights abusers such as China, Cuba, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo. "We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights," Haley said. story continues below Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appearing alongside Haley at the State Department, said there was no doubt that the council once had a "noble vision." "But today we need to be honest," Pompeo said. "The Human Rights Council is a poor defender of human rights." Haley had been threatening the pull-out since last year unless the council made changes advocated by the US. "Regrettably, it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded," Haley said. Still, she suggested the decision need not be permanent, adding that if the council did adopt reforms, "we would be happy to rejoin it." She said the withdrawal notwithstanding, the US would continue to defend human rights at the United Nations. The move extends a broader Trump administration pattern of stepping back from international agreements and forums under the president's "America First" policy. Since January 2017, it has announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, left the UN educational and cultural organization, and pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. (Read more United Nations Human Rights Council stories.) Bodies of a number of Pakistanis have been brought to Pakistan for burial from Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who were said to have died on the Saudi border with Yemen. They are believed to have lost lives due to Saudi Kingdoms imposed war on Yemen. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Bodies of a number of Pakistanis have been brought to Pakistan for burial from Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who were said to have died on the Saudi border with Yemen. They are believed to have lost lives due to Saudi Kingdoms imposed war on Yemen. Reports had it funeral prayers of such Pakistanis have been held at their native villages. They were laid to rest and Pakistani nation has been told that they died naturally but Pakistanis believe they were taken to Saudi kingdom to fight as proxy for Saudi Kingdom. It is relevant to add here that Saudis, UAE and other allied forces, abetted by US, French and Israeli forces have launched new phase of their ongoing war on Yemen by targeting Hodeida with a view to occupy this port city. Lunatic Pakistanis were duped into the sanctity of so-called sanctity of Custodians of Holy Places (ruling monarchy of House of Saud) and they were taken to Saudi Kingdom in the name of sacred defence of Makkah and Medina, the holiest cities of Islam that are situated far away from borders with Yemen where these Pakistanis lost their lives. There is no threat to Makkah and Medina from Yemen or Yemenis Ansarullah Movement of Houthis. /129 New Delhi: Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan, who was recently diagnosed with a high-grade neuroendocrine cancer, has shared his dreadful experience of battling with a life-threatening disease. Sharing a news article on his Twitter that carries his letter from the hospital, Irrfan said the sudden diagnosis of a rare cancer made him release the magical side of life and the realisation made him surrender himself irrespective of the outcome. As I was entering the hospital, drained, exhausted, listless, I hardly realised my hospital was on the opposite side of Lords, the stadium. The Mecca of my childhood dream. The suddenness made me realise how you are just a cork floating in the ocean with UNPREDICTABLE currents! And you are desperately trying to control it, Irffan said in a letter to the Times of India. This realisation made me submit, surrender and trust, irrespective of the outcome, irrespective of where this takes me, eight months from now, or four months from now, or two years, he wrote. The Life of Pi actor said that the high-grade neuroendocrine cancer, which he was diagnosed with, was a very rare cancer and the results of the treatment were unpredictable as it was a trial-and-error game. Its been quite some time now since I have been diagnosed with a high-grade neuroendocrine cancer. This new name in my vocabulary, I got to know, was rare, and due to fewer study cases, and less information comparatively, the unpredictability of the treatment was more. I was part of a trial-and-error game, the Bollywood star wrote. This was the second update on Irrfans health. Earlier in May, film director Shoojit Sircar said that Irrfan was doing fine and will be part of his new biopic Udhan Singh. For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Los Angeles: Black Panther roared at this years MTV Movie and TV Awards as the film went on to bag top honours, including Best Movie, while Stranger Things was adjudged the Best Show at the ceremony. The Ryan Coogler-directed film also won three other big awards - including Best Performance in a Movie and Best Hero for Chadwick Bosemans performance as TChalla/ Black Panther. Micheal B Jordans portrayal as Erik Killmonger in the film won him the title of Best Villain. The Best Movie award was presented by Lady Gaga, who made a surprise appearance at the show. She then announced the award would go to Black Panther. Boseman, Jordan and Winston Duke (MBaku) came on to the stage to accept the award. Thank you all for investing in not just a beautiful story, but investing in a continued conversation in what this industry and what this culture could achieve - and what we all can aspire to be, Duke said. Boseman dedicated his Best Hero award to real-life true hero, James Shaw Jr, an American man known for disarming a gunman during the Nashville Waffle House shooting in Antioch, Tennessee and saving lives. With three trophies, Stranger Things emerged second biggest winner. Actor Millie Bobby Brown from the Netflix series won the award for Best Performance in a Show. Her co-star Noah Schnapp scored the win for the Most Frightened Performance. Brown, who could not attend the show due to a broken kneecap, addressed the audience through a pretaped video message in which she made a powerful speech against bullying. I was taught, if you dont have anything nice to say, just dont say it. There should be no space in this world for bullying, and Im not going to tolerate it and neither should any you. If you need a reminder of how well you are and to rise above the hate, message me on Instagram, she said. The actors remarks come days after she quit social media due to online bullying. For a second consecutive year, both categories were gender-neutral. The Best Fight win was scored by Wonder Woman for the scene in which Gal Gadots Wonder Woman faces off against German soldiers in the battlefield. Lady Gagas Gaga: Five Foot Two won the laurel for the Best Music Documentary. I love you little monsters so much! And, Happy Pride Month! I just have one problem, I recently found out that I am actually five-foot-three and three quarters ? I am so, so sorry, but thank you so much, she said in her acceptance speech. Master of None co-writer-actor Lena Waithe accepted the Trailblazer Award, who dedicated the honour to the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning that introduced her to trailblazers such as Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Angie Xtravaganza and Willi Ninja. Avengers: Infinity War star Chris Pratt received the Generation Award and spoke to the next generation as their elder and then went on to offer his Nine Rules from Chris Pratt, Generation Award Winner. For all the Latest Entertainment News, Hollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: It seems that we may not see the Congress-Samajwadi party alliance, stitched by Akhilesh Yadav and Rahul Gandhi during the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls, in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. If the reports are to be believed, the Samajwadi Party (SP) is not keen to join hands with the Congress in next years general elections and has hinted that they will offer only two seats Rai Bareli and Amethi to the grand old party. "As a tradition, SP has not fielded any candidates against Rahul Gandhi in Amethi and Sonia Gandhi in Rae Bareli so far. There is no reason why we will break this tradition, TOI quoted Udaiveer Singh, SP MLC and a close aide of Akhilesh as saying. The SP forged an alliance with Congress in 2017 for Assembly elections and gave the party 110 seats but it could win only seven. While Akhilesh is keen to join hands with Mayawatis BSP, he will tread warily for a tie-up with the Congress in 2019, sources said. The rift in the Akhilesh-Rahul bonhomie was also seen recently when no SP leader attended the Iftar party hosted by the Congress in New Delhi last week. The SP chief had already announced that his party will contest on all 230 seats in the upcoming Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections. The party has not made it clear that it will contest on all five Lok Sabha seats in Uttarakhand in the upcoming general elections. This comes a day after Mayawatis BSP denied reports of any pre-poll alliance with the Congress in Madhya Pradesh, where elections were slated to be held in November or December 2018. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: With the PDP-BJP coalition falling apart in Jammu and Kashmir, the top PDP leaders in the state put their heads together to discuss the reasons behind this major political turn of event. The BJP-PDP alliance was at risk over a range of issues with the BJP accusing Mufti of taking unilateral decisions and complaining against her style of functioning in the state. Earlier on Tuesday, the Bharatiya Janata Party, in a big blow to the PDP, called off its alliance with the Mehbooba Mufti government. "We have taken a decision, it is untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with PDP in Jammu & Kashmir, hence we are withdrawing," BJP National General Secretary RAM Madhav said in a press conference in Delhi. The decision was taken in a BJP party meeting, convened by president Amit Shah on Tuesday. BJP state chief Ravinder Raina and party general secretary in charge of organisation Ashok Kaul were also present in the meeting, that took place in New Delhi. The move came days after the Centre on Sunday decided not to extend the ceasefire in the militancy-hit state post the month of Ramzan. According to reports, Mufti was not happy with Modi-government's decision to not extend the "unilateral" ceasefire beyond Eid. Meanwhile, here we bring you the key reasons behind this BJP-PDP break up in the state. BJP felt cornered and ignored in Jammu and Kashmir: The BJP government had long complained that under Mehbooba Mufti, Kashmir Valley was pampered at the cost of other regions of the state. During her tenure, the BJP has failed to establish a strong presence in Jammu and Kashmir while the regions of its influence were being allegedly ignored. The BJP felt cornered in the state, which happened to be one of the major strongholds of the party across India. The rise in terror attacks and infiltration: "The situation in Kashmir Valley has deteriorated...radicalisation is on the rise," Ram Madhav, the BJP general secretary and in-charge of Jammu and Kashmir, said on Tuesday during a press conference in New Delhi. With the Centre approving Mehbooba Mufti's proposal to impose a ceasefire in the militancy-hit state, there was an increase in incidents of terror attacks and infiltrations during the month of Ramzan. Mehbooba Mufti's demand to extend the ceasefire in Kashmir Valley beyond Eid was one of the key reasons behind this BJP-PDP break up in the state. During the month-long halting of operations along LoC, noted journalist Shujaat Bukhari and several army jawans were killed by the terrorists in the Valley. Kathua rape and murder: The rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua was a big blow for the BJP-PDP coalition in Jammu and Kashmir. The BJP was hugely criticised by the ruling PDP for going soft on the party members, who were allegedly the part of the conspiracy. While the local BJP leaders wanted a CBI inquiry into the incident, Mufti preferred probe by the Jammu and Kashmir Police. Unilateral decisions by Mehbooba Mufti The BJP leaders in Jammu and Kashmir had long accused Mehbooba Mufti of not giving importance to the saffron party in the state and taking all the unilateral decisions in the matter of governance on her own. The PDP under the leadership of Mufti decided to release stone pelters, not to relocate Bakkarwalas from the government's land and doling out land grants to religious outfit Ahle Hadees. On the other hand, the BJP could not secure any relief for those named in cases filed in incidents related to Amarnath land movement. 2019 Lok Sabha Elections: With the general elections approaching, the BJP was conscious that the electorate across the country would hold the situation in Kashmir against the party for failure to control terror and violence. It was felt that Governors rule could retrieve the situation somewhat for the party. Resolving the Kashmir issue, was one of the major poll promises, the BJP made during its 2014 Lok Sabha campaign. However, with Modi government coming to the power, the situation along LoC has worsened in the past four years. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday pulled out of an alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir. The BJPs decision to end the three-year-long partnership with Mehbooba Mufti prompted sharp reactions from political opponents. While some called the alliance anti-national, others said that the saffron partys move was to control the damage the alliance has done to its pro-Hindutva image. Here are how political parties reacted to the BJPs decision to break alliance with the PDP: PDP: We tried our best to run the government with BJP. This had to happen. This came as a surprise for us because we did not have any indication about their decision. Congress: Whatever has happened is good. People of J&K will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined Kashmir & have now pulled out, a maximum number of civilian & army men died during these 3 years. Shiv Sena: This alliance was anti-national & unnatural. Our party chief had said, this alliance won't work out. Had they continued with it they would have had to answer in 2019 Lok Sabha election National Conference: Former Jammu and Kashmir CM Omar Abdullah tweeted, And so it has come to pass........(sic). Later in a press conference, he demanded early elections in the state. Shatrughan Sinha: The PDP-BJP government in Kashmir was formed amid the contradictions inside the party. Whatever happened in Kashmir is a matter of concern. If this has to happen, why did the BJP tie-up with the PDP? Today, the unrest in Kashmir is unprecedented. I hope whatever happens next in Jammu and Kashmir, should be in favour of the people. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: In a major political turn of events ahead of 2019 general elections, the Jammu and Kashmir government crashed on Tuesday after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called off its alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). "We have taken a decision, it is untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with PDP in Jammu & Kashmir, hence we are withdrawing," BJP National General Secretary RAM Madhav said in a press conference in Delhi. Holding Mehbooba Mufti responsible for the current unrest in the Valley, Madhav accused her of non-cooperation and demanded Governor's rule in the state. "Keeping in mind larger interest of India's security and integrity, fact is that J&K is an integral part of India, in order to bring control over the situation prevailing in the state we have decided that the reigns of power in the state be handed over to the Governor," he said. Asked why the saffron party entered into an alliance with the PDP if this had to be its fate, the BJP national general secretary said, "We had to respect the mandate of the people. If we would not have formed govt at that time, Governor's rule or Presidential rule would have been imposed in the Valley. We had an alliance with them just for the mandate that was given by people". Read | Mehbooba Mufti submits resignation to Governor; 'this had to happen,' says PDP The decision to break alliance with PDP comes days after the Centre revoked unilateral Ramzan ceasefire in the Valley. Sources said that Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti was not happy with Centre's decision to resume anti-terror operations in the Valley. Reacting to the development, former state chief minister and National Conference chief Omar Abdullah tweeted, "And so it has come to pass........(sic)." Another disgruntled BJP ally Shiv Sena said that the saffron party's alliance with the PDP was "anti-national" and its chief had predicted this a long ago. "This alliance was anti-national & unnatural. Our party chief had said, this alliance won't work out. Had they continued with it they would have had to answer in 2019 Lok Sabha election," ANI quoted Sanjay Raut as saying. Earlier, BJP chief Amit Shah, who was scheduled to visit Srinagar on June 23, had called an urgent meeting of state BJP leaders and ministers, including state party president Ravinder Raina and party general secretary (organisation) Ashok Kaul. Watch: Full press conference of BJP on the issue For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. A look at the American policies over the long years of occupation of Afghanistan indicates that Washington has taken a contradictory approach in dealing with the nations challenges. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - On the weekend, Taliban militants entered the Afghan capital Kabul unarmed under a ceasefire announced by the government for the first three days of Eid al-Fitr, that marks the end of holy month of Ramadan. Pictures from the capital unprecedentedly showed no scenes of explosion and violence this time. Instead, there were hugs and selfies by the militant fighters and security forces. Afghanistans President Ashraf Ghani said he extended the truce, a move drew a statement from the US Department of State which said Washington is ready to join Taliban-Kabul peace negotiations. The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said any talks should have international participation. The NATO, on the other side, published a statement, saying it welcomes ceasefire extension and is ready to contribute to a sustainable cessation of fire. Afghanistan is still occupied However, Taliban has responded to the Ghanis decision negatively. Shortly after the presidential statement, Zabihullah Mujahid, the spokesman to the Taliban said the militant group does not intend to extend the truce. Afghanistan is still under occupation. The ceasefire ended after the first three days of Eid. We have no intention to extend it, he was reported as saying. The spokesman referred to 18 years of US-led military coalition presence in Afghanistan which Taliban argued is a huge roadblock ahead of peace in the war-torn country. Over the past years, Taliban demanded the US and NATO forces withdrawal as a precondition for going to the negotiating table with the central government. This largely makes it clear that Taliban preconditions have not changed and White House support for the peace and ceasefire while keeping troops on the ground does not comply with Afghanistans realities. Washingtons contradictory Afghanistan approach A look at the American policies over the long years of occupation of Afghanistan indicates that Washington has taken a contradictory approach in dealing with the nations challenges. The US waged its war against Afghanistan in 2001 under President George W. Bush. Barack Obama criticized his predecessors policy in Afghanistan but continued his course and deployed some 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. However, Obama at his last months in office admitted that troops' buildup was not helpful and began cutting their number. Obamas successor appears to be going the same path. Contrary to his campaign-time speeches in which he promised American troops will return to their country, Donald Trump in his new strategy for Afghanistan war declared he wants to dispatch more forces to the central Asian nation. The analysts argue that he is testing an already-tested and failed policy. In fact, the three contemporary-to-Afghanistan-war US presidents have gone a fully conflicting way in dealing with Afghanistan issues, some time insisting on troops increase, and some time saying that reinforcement was not a solution. Over the past 18 years, none of them, however, managed to find a settlement for the longest US regional war. Mike Pompeo and NATO commander in Afghanistan have offered backing for truce and dialogue with Taliban while the armed group still sticks to its foreign forces pullout as a precondition for negotiating with the national unity government. But Washington does not seem to want to comply as it seeks to enlarge the number of its forces on Afghanistan soil, hence setting up a serious obstacle ahead of a final solution to the crisis. Pulling out or staying? The US has voiced readiness to talk to Taliban, but the new Trump strategy, unveiled in August 2017, does not have free space for Taliban negotiations and prefers troops increase. In January, Trump rejected peace talks with Taliban. I dont see any talking taking place. I dont think were prepared to talk right now, Trump said on February 29 during a lunch with the United Nations Security Council members. However, after less than four months Pompeo said Washington wants to join the possible peace talks between the government and Taliban. Does that mean the Americans have backed down and are ready for Afghanistan stability? While American leaders are paying lip service to the peace notion, unconfirmed reports have been emerged about US role expansion of ISIS terrorist group in the war torn country. Iran, Afghanistan's western neighbor, holds the US accountable for relocation ISIS terrorists from Syria and Ira to Afghanistan. Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Baqeri said on 6 February 2018, the US is relocating ISIS remnants from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan after the terrorist group has lost its strongholds in the west Asian Arab states. "After witnessing ISIS and other organized terrorist groups losing their ground in Iraq and Syria, they are now relocating them to Afghanistan," which has become the scene of fresh explosions, assassinations and crimes, Baqeri said. On 30 January 2018, also Leader of Islamic Republic of Iran Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei said the US has been relocating the terror group from the West Asia to the South Asian country to justify its military presence in the region. Lutfullah Baba, Senator of Afghanistan's Nangarhar province, has repeatedly asserted that a US military base in Bati Kot district in the east of the province sends arms to ISIS fighters in Haska Meyna and Khogyani districts in the south of Nangarhar. Member of Parliament Shakiba Hashemi maintained that the US relocated ISIS from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan to destabilize Central Asia and thus threaten Russia. Regarding such claims about the US contribution to the ISIS expansion across Afghanistan, many may consider Pompeo's pro-peace remarks as a propagandistic policy which ostensibly favors peace but in practice chooses war. Many analysts believe that peace in Afghanistan would be attainable only after US pullout from the country. Very likely, the US leaders are aware of that. That is why they choose war perpetuation as a way to justify their presence. The ceasefire and Taliban's show of will to talk to the central government jeopardized the foreign forces presence justification. At this exact time, ISIS carried out bomb attacks against the pro-reconciliation figures and so helped a foreign agenda to destroy chances of peace. This gives rise to the idea that the root cause of instability in Afghanistan is the presence of the West which pursues strategic interests through confronting Russia and China power gain in South, West, and Central Asia. In the Wests eyes, any sustainable peace in Afghanistan will pose a challenge to the Western interests and hegemony. /129 New Delhi: Following the Centres decision to revoke the unilateral Ramzan ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir, the cracks have once again started showing in the BJP-PDP alliance government in the state. BJP chief Amit Shah, who is scheduled to visit Srinagar on June 23, has called an urgent meeting of state BJP leaders and ministers, including state party president Ravinder Raina and party general secretary (organisation) Ashok Kaul on Tuesday. All the BJP ministers have been called to New Delhi for a meeting, a senior leader of Jammu and Kashmir BJP told PTI without elaborating the agenda of the meeting. Suggested Read | BJP breaks alliance with PDP in Jammu and Kashmir According to reports, Mehbooba Mufti's Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) wants the Centre to reach out to the separatists. However, the Centre said that the separatists lost an opportunity when it decided unilateral ceasefire during the holy month of Ramzan. The data on violence and killings during the month Ramzan shows that such incidents increased two-fold, therefore, the Centres peace initiative failed. Announcing the resumption of anti-terror operations in the Valley, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Sunday said that while security forces displayed exemplary restraint during the Ramzan ceasefire, the terrorists continued to attack civilians and security forces. It was expected that everyone will cooperate in ensuring the success of this initiative. While the Security Forces have displayed exemplary restraint during this period, the terrorists have continued with their attacks, on civilians and SFs, resulting in deaths and injuries, Singh had said. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: India-Pakistan relations are purely bilateral in nature and there was no scope for the involvement of a third country, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said on Monday, reacting to Chinese ambassador Luo Zhaohui's suggestion of a trilateral cooperation between India, Pakistan and China. "Matters related to India-Pakistan relations are purely bilateral in nature and have no scope for an involvement of any third country," Kumar said, terming Luos remarks as his personal opinion. During a keynote address on 'Beyond Wuhan: How Far and Fast can China-India Relations Go' in New Delhi, the Chinese ambassador had suggested a trilateral cooperation comprising India, China and Pakistan on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). "Security cooperation is one of the three pillars of the SCO. Some Indian friends suggested that China, India and Pakistan may have some kind of trilateral cooperation under the SCO," he had said. Also Read | Encounter in Kashmir's Bandipora, four terrorists gunned down Reacting sharply to the Chinese envoys remarks, Indias Opposition Congress party had dismissed the suggestion saying that India-Pakistan issues should be resolved bilaterally. We hope the government of India will also condemn his statement. Our stand has been that issues between India and Pakistan be solved bilaterally, Congress leader Manish Tiwari had said. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Amid high-pitched political drama between ruling PDP and the BJP in Jammu and Kashmir, an encounter broke out between security forces and terrorists in Hayuna Tral area of Pulwama in the militancy-hit state. "Encounter between security forces & terrorists breaks out in Pulwama's Hayuna Tral,' the news agency ANI reported. In a separate encounter on Monday, four terrorists were gunned down by the security forces in Bandipora district. Notably, the encounter came a day after Home Minister Rajnath Singh announced that there would be no extension to the unilateral ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir beyond Eid. Here are the LIVE updates: # 10:13 PM: Body of the third terrorist recovered in Pulwama's Tral. Three terrorists have been killed and one CRPF personnel injured in an exchange of fire between terrorists and security forces in the area. Body of third terrorist recovered in Pulwama's Tral. Three terrorists have been killed & one CRPF personnel injured in an exchange of fire between terrorists & security forces in the area. #JammuAndKashmir pic.twitter.com/SiM2MC48Za ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 # 09:32 PM: "Firing stopped, all neutralised. Two bodies of terrorists recovered, third being searched," tweets Jammu and Kashmir DGP SP Vaid. Firing stopped, all neutralised, two bodies recovered, third being searched. Good job Army / CRPF/J&K Police. Shesh Paul Vaid (@spvaid) June 19, 2018 # 07:57 PM: 2 terrorists killed in an encounter with security forces in Pulwama's Tral. 1 CRPF personnel injured & has been evacuated to 92 Base Hospital. Operation underway. #JammuAndKashmir (Visuals deferred by unspecified time) pic.twitter.com/Iz1qrotuNa ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 # 07:24 PM: 2 terrorists killed in an encounter with security forces in Pulwama's Tral. 1 CRPF personnel injured and has been evacuated to 92 Base Hospital. Operation underway. # 06:09 PM: Encounter between security forces and terrorists breaks out in Pulwama's Hayuna Tral. More details awaited. Encounter between security forces & terrorists underway in Pulwama's Hayuna Tral. More details awaited. #JammuAndKashmir pic.twitter.com/Ljgl0GcEPE ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 Read | BJP-PDP Alliance Over: Muscular security policy will not work in J-K, says Mehbooba Mufti Earlier on May 16, the Centre approved Mehbooba Mufti's proposal to impose a ceasefire in Kashmir valley keeping in mind the holy month of Ramzan. Following the month-long halting of operations along LoC, Jammu and Kashmir have witnessed a huge spurt in terror attacks. The bullet-ridden body of abducted Army man, identified as Aurangzeb, a rifleman with the 44 Rashtriya Rifles was found after an extensive search operation on Thursday. Shujaat Bukhari, the editor of Rising Kashmir newspaper, was killed in Srinagar just before the Centre's Ramzan ceasefire ended. The assassination of the senior journalist evoked strong condemnations from across the media industry, triggering a debate on Centre's decision to impose a ceasefire in the terror affected state. Read | Mehbooba Mufti resigns as Jammu and Kashmir CM; 'this had to happen,' says PDP A total of eleven BSF troops have been killed in cross-border firing incidents along the International Border in Jammu and Kashmir in 2018. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: With the PDP-BJP coalition falling apart in Jammu and Kashmir, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Tuesday submitted her resignation to NN Vohra, the Governor of the militancy-hit state. "We will talk in detail at 5 pm, meanwhile Mehbooba Mufti has submitted her resignation to the Governor," PDPs Naeem Akhtar was quoted by ANI as saying. Talking about the latest development in the state, PDP spokesperson Rafi Ahmad Mir said, "We tried our best to run the govt with BJP. This had to happen. This is a surprise for us because we did not have any indication about their decision". On being asked about the reasons why BJP pulled out of the alliance, Ahmad stated, "We can only put our heads together and discuss in the party meeting at 4 pm." We will talk in detail at 5pm, meanwhile she (Mehbooba Mufti) has submitted her resignation (as J&K CM) to the Governor: Naeem Akhtar, PDP pic.twitter.com/w8vNI6XeRw ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 Read | Cracks in PDP-BJP alliance! Amit Shah calls top J&K leaders for urgent meet in Delhi In the wake of this major political turn of event, Jammu and Kashmir might come under governor's rule, which will be for the fourth time in the last 10 years. Governor's rule was imposed in July 2008 following the resignation of then chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. The decision came after the PDP pulled out of the coalition government with the Congress over the Amarnath land row. The state was under governor's rule in December 2014, following the hung verdict in the Assembly polls that year. Governor's rule was again imposed in the state in January 2016 following the death of then chief minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, as his daughter, Mehbooba Mufti had shown reluctance to continue the alliance with the BJP. Read | Jammu and Kashmir government falls as BJP quits alliance with PDP For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti on Tuesday said "muscular security policy" will not work in Jammu and Kashmir and "reconciliation is key", moments after she submitted her resignation to Governor NN Vohra following the break up in the alliance with the BJP. Mufti resigned as Chief Minister after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called off its alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the terror-affected state. "We had always said muscular security policy will not work in J-K, reconciliation is key. We will continue to strive for dialogue and reconciliation in J-K, alliance with BJP was not for power," Mufti said at a hurriedly called press conference in Srinagar. "This alliance had a bigger motive- unilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of cases against 11,000 youth," Mufti said. "I submitted my resignation (as J&K CM) to the Governor and told him that we are not looking to explore any other alliance," she added. Read | Mehbooba Mufti resigns as Jammu and Kashmir CM; 'this had to happen,' says PDP Earlier in the day, BJP National General Secretary RAM Madhav addressed the media in the national capital and said, "We have taken a decision, it is untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with PDP in Jammu & Kashmir, hence we are withdrawing". The decision to break alliance with PDP comes days after the Centre revoked unilateral Ramzan ceasefire in the Valley. Sources said that Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti was not happy with Centre's decision to resume anti-terror operations in the Valley. Read | Jammu and Kashmir government falls as BJP quits alliance with PDP For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: The Former aide of veteran BJP leader LK Advani and Union Minister Nitin Gadkaris former advisor Sudheendra Kulkarni on Monday threw his weight behind Rahul Gandhi as the Prime Minister of India. Speaking at a panel discussion in Mumbai, Kulkarni said India needs a leader who can help get rid of big problems such as the Kashmir issue and therefore he would like to see Congress president Rahul Gandhi as the future prime minister. We must state what is required for solving the problem with Pakistan. And which is why I made a suggestion that I would like to see Rahul Gandhi as the future prime minister, he said at the event organised by All India Professionals Congress. Kulkarni showered praises at the Congress president and called him a leader with good heart. (Rahul Gandhi) is young and he is idealist. He is a man with compassion. No political leader in recent times had spoken the language of love, affection and compassion, he said. Listing disputes with Pakistan and China, the former aide of Advani said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has failed to solve the big problems of the country. Like Rajiv Gandhi did when he was in the opposition... He went to Afghanistan. Similarly, Rahul ji should go to Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and emerge as a leader with new ideas on how to solve big problems that Modi ji has failed to solve, Kulkarni said. The remarks of Kulkarni came amid questions being raised on Gandhis leadership quality by the ruling BJP ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha elections. (With PTI Inputs) For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Designer Kate Spades funeral will be held on June 21 in Kansas City, according to reports. Fifty-five-year-old Kate, who was reportedly struggling with depression, hanged herself in her Park Avenue apartment on June 5. According to E! News, the late fashion business magnate will be laid to rest on Thursday afternoon in Kansas City. Her Kansas City Star obituary confirmed that she will be honoured with a Christian mass and burial. Kates near and dear ones can honour her devotion to animals by donating to the ASPCA or to Wayside Waifs, in lieu of flowers. Reports hinted at her 24-year-old troubled marriage with Andy Spade as the result of her death. But her husband denied the rumours in a statement, saying, the fashion designer was struggling with depression and anxiety for many years and even though they were living separately for 10 months, the couple never discussed divorce. (With inputs from agencies) New: Toothpaste is one of the most important grooming products. But do you know that it can be beneficial for your health? Besides giving you white and sparkling teeth, fresh breath and healthy gums, toothpaste can help combat lungs problems, a study claim. A study by researchers at Michigan State University in the US found that a common antibacterial substance found in toothpaste may combat life-threatening diseases such as cystic fibrosis, when combined with an already approved drug. How can toothpaste boost your health? According to the study, when triclosan, a substance that reduces or prevents bacteria from growing, is combined with antibiotic tobramycin, it kills the cells that protect the cystic fibrosis (CF) bacteria, known as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, by up to 99.9 per cent. Biofilm that allows the disease to thrive even when treated with antibiotics protects the CF bacteria making it difficult to kill them. Professor at Michigan State University Chris Waters said there are many common biofilm-related infections that people get such as ear infections and swollen, painful gums caused by gingivitis. However, more serious, potentially fatal diseases join the ranks of CF, including endocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, as well as infections from artificial hip and pacemaker implants. How safe is the use of toothpaste? Researchers said that use of Tobramycin in toothpaste is safe and highly effective in fighting gingivitis, and it is still approved for use. Although Tobramycin is currently the most widely used treatment for CF, it typically does not clear the lungs of infection, Waters said. The study was published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. New Delhi: The inevitable has happened. There was scarcely a doubt that the PDP-BJP alliance in Jammu and Kashmir would collapse someday under the weight of its contradictions and the burden of its huge stockpile of failures on key fronts but who would pull the rug from under the others feet was a subject of speculation. With general elections less than a year away, the BJP has withdrawn support to the Mehbooba Mufti government, leading to its collapse and the chief minister has formally submitted her resignation to Governor NN Vohra, paving the way for Governors rule. An experiment that brought two diametrically opposing parties in a coalition has ended for now, arguably leaving Kashmir in a worse mess than there was when the coalition took charge a little over three years ago. In all fairness to the BJP, the unnatural alliance was dictated by the nature of the election results. While the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) won the largest number of seats at 28 in the 87-member Assembly, the BJP which won all its 25 seats from the Jammu region was a close second. The National Conference won 15 while the Congress got 12 seats. The only way a viable government could have been formed was by the PDP and BJP coming together. In this manner, the Hindus who won seats in Jammu were represented in the government by the BJP which drew a blank in the Muslim-majority valley. Read | Jammu and Kashmir government falls as BJP quits alliance with PDP Right from the word go, the BJP complained that the valley was being pampered at the cost of Jammu and the Ladakh regions. It complained that the Mehbooba Mufti government failed to contain militancy and radicalisation of youth in the Kashmir Valley. Mehbooba was soft on the youth who pelted stones at the security forces, even giving them amnesty when many of them were jailed. The BJP decision to withdraw from the government came a day after suspension of the ceasefire in Kashmir Valley which was ordered at the behest of Mehbooba Mufti. Mufti is understood to have demanded an extension of the ceasefire. That escalated the row between the parties and led to the final parting of ways. However, terror activities continued in the Valley despite the unilateral ceasefire. Rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua was a big dampener for the BJP-PDP alliance. The PDP was critical of the BJP being soft on the alleged party supporters of the accused. The local BJP leaders wanted a CBI inquiry into the incident while Mufti preferred probe by the Jammu and Kashmir Police. Read | BJP-PDP Alliance Over: Muscular security policy will not work in J-K, says Mehbooba Mufti The BJP leaders of Jammu and Kashmir are believed to have complained to the central leadership that Mufti was taking unilateral decisions in the matter of governance and the saffron party was not being given due importance. The PDP and the BJP did not see eye to eye over the Centre's decision to end its Ramzan ceasefire with terrorists. The month-long ceasefire in the valley witnessed a spurt in terror strikes in the region. Noted journalist Shujaat Bukhari and Army jawan Aurangzeb were killed in separate attacks on the eve of Eid. With the general elections approaching, the BJP was conscious that the electorate across the country would hold the situation in Kashmir against the party for failure to control terror and violence. It was felt that Governors rule could retrieve the situation somewhat for the party. Governor Vohra was to lay down office on June 28 but in the circumstances, an extension for him may become imperative. It would now be vital to improve law and order and to pump in more Central money to win over the hearts of the people. Read | Mehbooba Mufti resigns as Jammu and Kashmir CM; 'this had to happen,' says PDP All-out efforts would be required to tackle militancy with a heavy hand while giving succour to the common Kashmiri. It would indeed be a hard grind, given the alienation of the people from the authorities. But it will have to be done. New Delhi: The Donald Trump administration on Tuesday decided to announce its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council, accusing it of hypocrisy and partiality against Israel, according to sources. As per the latest reports, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley are all set to announce the withdrawal later on Tuesday. However, the discussion between Pompeo and Haley has not been made public yet. The United States had long threatened the Geneva-based body to quit if it does not reform the 47-member body eliminating a "chronic anti-Israel bias. There were also reports that the talks between the United States and the UNHRC on 'reform' had failed to meet Washington's demands. Moreover, in its latest session on Monday, the 47-nation council criticised President Donald Trumps immigration policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegally "unconscionable." "The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable," said Zeid Raad al-Hussein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights told during the meet. Meanwhile, Washington's withdrawal from the UNHRC would be the third US rejection of multilateral engagement afresh. Earlier, it had pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. The United Nations Human Rights Council, set up on March 15, 2006, has a permanent standing agenda item on alleged violations by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories, which Washington wanted to remove from the body. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Several months after the defeat of ISIS and other terrorist groups across Syria and particularly Damascus outskirts in sweeping operations led by the Syrian government forces and backed by the Iran-led Axis of Resistance and Russia, now Syria is ready to see the return of peace and stability to the war-hit regions. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Several months after the defeat of ISIS and other terrorist groups across Syria and particularly Damascus outskirts in sweeping operations led by the Syrian government forces and backed by the Iran-led Axis of Resistance and Russia, now Syria is ready to see the return of peace and stability to the war-hit regions. But, on the other side, efforts are underway by the US and the allied parties such as Saudi Arabia and the Israeli regime to see the perpetuation of the crisis, now in its eighth year. Over the past months, Tel Aviv and US-led military coalition launched several airstrikes targeting the Syrian governments positions across the country. And in the latest development, on June 18, the coalitions fighter jets bombed the Syrian Arab Armys positions in Al-Hari town in Abu Kamal near the border with Iraq. According to the news reports, the attack left considerable casualties. Reuters quoted a Syrian government forces commander as saying that the attack was "probably" launched by US drones which were targeting positions of Iraqi factions between Albu Kamal and Tanf and Syrian military positions. The strike reportedly targeted Syrian army and the allied Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in the region which is located between Abu Kamal and Al-Tanf. On the heels of the attack, the Pentagon Spokesman Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway issued a statement denying that the attack was by the so-called international anti-ISIS coalition, formed in 2014. But such a drone attack close to a military base where the American forces are stationed strengthens the theory that Washington was behind the bombing. But why does the US strike the Syrian army and PMF base Cutting Resistance fronts links on Syria-Iraq border The key drive behind the coalitions raid in the border city of Abu Kamal is weakening and if possible cutting off the Resistance camps links on the two sides of the border. Abu Kamal is one of the largest cities of Deir ez-Zor province with majority of its territory being desert. A route linking Baghdad to Damascus through Abu Kamal and Al-Qaim border cities provides the key connection line for the Resistance forces moving between Syria and Iraq. Moreover, the region is a key border hub for security, military, and trade exchanges between the two neighbors. Al-Qaim city in Iraqs Al-Anbar province was the first Iraqi point to fall to the advancing ISIS fighters in 2014. Abu Kamal, on the other side of the border, was the last region of the major ISIS concentration in Syria liberated by the syrian army in 2017. Following Al-Qaim and Abu Kamal recapture, the Baghdad-Al-Qaim-Abu Kamal-Damascus route served as a key supply and transportation line for the Resistance forces moving between the two terror-hit countries. The ISIS defeat opened the door for PMF to deploy forces to the border areas, something represented a source of concern for the Americans who feared the anti-terror camps power gain. That is why many analysts hold Washington accountable for the attack, arguing that it is a failed move to sever the Resistances contact lines on the two sides of the border. Empowering ISIS remnants for continued crisis Over the past few months, ISIS empowerment has been a key strategy the US was pursuing in Syria and particularly in Deir ez-Zor. According to the latest report published by the Russian ministry of defense, the US-controlled areas in the east of the Euphrates River have been safe haven for ISIS remnants. The attack comes only three days after the Syrian army reclaimed 40-kilometer Haql Al-Ward-Faydha Ibn Mowayne highway in Deir ez-Zors Mayadin District and cleared the roadside mines planted by the ISIS forces. Americans very likely seek to check more Syrian military advances and give ISIS an upper hand in the area. The ongoing crisis in Syrias east automatically gives the US the excuse to keep forces on the Syrian soil. On March 30, the US President Donald Trump said American forces will leave Syria very soon. But over the past few months, Washingtons actions on the Syrian fronts signaled that they are engaged in hard efforts to pave the way for long-term presence in Syria. Compensating decline to back Syrian Kurds The US relations with the Syrian Kurds is not unconnected to the June 18 air raid. The past few months developments put these relations on a shaky ground. The US made no move to support the Kurds when the Turkish army earlier this year launched a military campaign to seize the Kurdish-controlled Afrin city in northern Syria. Moreover, Americans recently sealed a deal with Ankara to remove the predominantly-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) from Manbij, also in the north, moving the Syrian Kurds to believe that Washington is unreliable. Feeling double-crossed, last week the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a predominantly- Kurdish militia backed by the US, in a bold move declared it was ready to talk unconditionally to the Syrian government. The offer by the US ally was seen as marking an end to Washingtons last base in Syria. Since 2015, the SDF, a coalition of Kurdish militias accompanied by a small number of Arab fighters, played a key role as a US ally, with many analysts calling them Washingtons infantry on the front lines and a power basis for it in Syrian equations. Now, the SDF are turning leaving the US without a major ally in a multi-front, multi-player conflict. A possible central government-Kurds agreement to return Damascus rule to the north and east will be a showcase of US decline to take serious actions to defend its base. So, the US wants to appease the Kurds by telling them that the east Euphrates is a red line and they will continuously have the coalitions backing. But the US should be so lucky to bring back the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) leaders on the track of former cooperation now that they feel betrayed. /129 Many Bahraini women here are brimmed with enthusiasm as they would be able to cross the King Fahad Causeway, driving their cars for the first time. Many Bahrainis love shopping in Dammam since goods are comparatively cheap in the neighboring Kingdom. Saudi Ambassador Abdulla bin Abdulmalik Al Sheikh has said that many women would be able to enter Saudi driving their cars beginning the tenth of Shawwal, on June 24. Speaking to Tribune, Bahraini Yasmine Ahmed said, I am thrilled to go to Saudi driving my car. Now we women can go and shop with friends and family members. We wont be bothering men anymore to go to Saudi, she said. Noura Al Bastaki said driving in Saudi wont be as easy as driving in the Kingdom. The streets there are very big and it is easy to get lost. So Bahraini women who plans to drive in Saudi should be very careful. Meanwhile, Noura Ali said there are some differences in the traffic laws of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. In Bahrain, the red signal wont allow to go left through a dedicated lane, while in Saudi Arabia the vehicles can go right without waiting for the green signal. Dr Alwan said it would be better for Bahraini women to travel along with men. In case the car needs a repair, you will find it difficult to handle the situation without a man. Many charitable societies are allegedly running a successful second-hand garments business and their capital is the generous minds of citizens and residents in the Kingdom. Sources say once the boxes kept in the neighbourhoods get filled with used clothes donated by generous individuals, they are shipped to Africa and Levant countries hosting refugees before being sold in the local markets. Speaking to Tribune, Ahmed Ali, who worked for a society, said, The clothes donated by good people are sold to traders here who export it to countries having high levels of low-income population. In the second-hand dress market, a big box full of clothes, for instance about 100 kilograms, could fetch something near BD30. He said different charities follow different methods when it comes to selling second-hand garments. Some sell per kilogram while some calculate prices on the number of boxes and there are also a few who would sell each and every cloth for 200 or 300 fils. These traders who buy these garments from societies make huge money by shipping them to Africa, Jordan and Lebanon. The traders buy a second-hand abaya here for 200 fils and sell them in Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey for BD5. The profit they make is enormous. Tribune spoke to Abu Saud, one of the traders who buy clothes from these charities and export them to Jordan. I buy second-hand clothes from charities and they charge me per kilo. I sort them in my house before shipping them to Jordan. The profits arent really high. We buy 100 kilo clothes for about BD30 and the cost of shipping them is BD5. Add BD10 to it, which is the import duty in Jordan. This means we would have spent BD45 to sent our clothes to the distributor in Jordan. He sells them for BD70 and takes his profit as well. Mr Saud is said whatever he does is very much legal. There is nothing illegal in this. I do business without violating the laws of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The occupancy rates at five and four star hotels are all set to exceed 80 per cent during Eid holidays, according to industry leaders. This reflects the Kingdoms position as a most sought after tourist destination by Arab nationals as well as other foreigners, they say. The Bahrain Tourism and Exhibitions Authority has also been successful in promoting the Kingdom as a major tourist destination. Speaking to Tribune, industry veteran Akram Miknas said the tourism movement in the Kingdom is gradually gaining momentum. The Eid holidays are going to be really good for the hospitality sector. Tourists are flocking to hotels, restaurants, cafes, water parks and beaches. Praising the tourism authority for its efforts, he said many events organised by the authority have attracted large number of Arab families. Golden Tulip Hotel general manager Abdulrahim Al Sayed said the occupancy rates at his hotel exceeded 80 per cent. Bookings began well in advance for these five Eid holidays and on the second day we had maximum customers. GCC nationals make up the largest share of customers and within that Saudis come first followed by foreigners residing in the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, he explained. He added that the tourists were getting benefited by the competition in the industry in the form of promotions and offers. Three minors were yesterday detained at a correctional facility for juveniles for brutally attacking another child in Hamad Town few weeks ago. As reported by Tribune yesterday, the parents of the three boys were summoned by the Northern Governorate Police Directorate on Sunday. The directorates statement confirmed that the case was referred to the Family and Child Prosecution. This came after the attackers were seen in a video bullying and beating the victim after school hours. The victim was seen helplessly crying and groaning with pain, as the three boys punched him, kicked him and even stomped on him. Family and Child Prosecution Chief Prosecutor Ahmed Al Ghatam explained in a statement released yesterday that the prosecution was notified about the incident by Hamad Town Southern Police Station on Sunday evening. Mr Al Ghatam revealed that the notification mentioned that the three children physically assaulted the victim after school hours, while a fourth companion filmed the incident and spread it online. According to Mr Al Ghatams statement, the victims father lodged a complaint against the attackers after seeing his son being assaulted in the footage which went viral on local social media networks. The prosecution immediately launched an investigation into the incident, summoned the children and questioned them. They confessed to their crime in the interrogation and they were referred to the Juveniles Court Judge. The judge ordered to refer them to the Juveniles Care Centre and tasked the Social Care Unit at the Centre to issue reports on their social status, Mr Al Ghatam added, without unveiling more details However, the Education Ministry didnt comment on the incident. The ministry had denied that any bullying cases were reported in Bahrain schools in a statement issued last year. A local daily quoting the ministry last July affirmed that the ministry has implemented special programmes for students and teachers to combat bullying and curb such occurrences in schools. Many companies in the Kinki western Japan region suspended operations Monday to check for possible damage and confirm the safety of their employees after a strong earthquake rocked the region in the morning. Daihatsu Motor Co. halted operations at a plant in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, and another in Oyamazaki, Kyoto Prefecture, neighboring Osaka. Both plants produce small vehicles. Kracie Holdings Ltd. suspended the production of Chinese herbal medicines and other products at two plants in the Osaka city of Takatsuki due to damage from the quake. Panasonic Corp. <6752> stopped operations at a welding machine factory in Toyonaka, also in Osaka, after production machines were moved from their fixed positions due to the quake. The company also suspended production bases in Takatsuki and Kadoma, another Osaka city. Operations at agricultural and construction machinery maker Kubota Corp.'s <6326> Hirakata plant in the prefecture were halted. Swedish police said Tuesday that a shooting in the southern city of Malmo has resulted in the death of two people who sustained critical injures during the incident. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Two people were killed and four injured in a shooting in the southern Swedish city of Malmo on Monday evening. The 18-year-old and 29-year-old died of their injuries shortly after they arrived at a local hospital, according to local media. A police spokesman told the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper that the shooter could have fired from within a car on the group, which was standing outside an internet cafe in Malmo's downtown Drottninggatan area. One witness told the Aftonbladet newspaper that he heard 15-20 shots near the internet cafe. Police have urged the public to remain calm and established a perimeter in Drottninggatan. They said they had no information on who the shooter or shooters might be and had no reason to think the incident was terrorism-related. "It is probably a shooting between criminals," police spokesman Fredrik Bratt said. The Sydsvenskan newspaper reported that victims were known to police. /129 The British government is complicit in the violence suffered by the Palestinians because it continues to support arms sales to Israel, a UK-based anti-poverty charity has said. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - A London-based charity has said the British government is complicit in the violence perpetrated against Palestinians as it continues to provide arms to Israel. British charity War on Want made the comment in an interview with The Independent on Monday, denouncing a recent move by the UK government to abstain from a United Nations vote on Israeli violence in the besieged Gaza Strip. The vote condemned Israels use of any excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate force against peaceful Palestinian protesters. In abstaining from this vote, the UK government has yet again refused to commit to the protection of Palestinians human rights as they are targeted with the brutal and unlawful use of force by the Israeli military, Ryvka Barnard, senior campaigns officer for War on Want, told the British newspaper. But make no mistake, the UK is not sitting aside and remaining neutral. While the world calls for violent attacks on Palestinians to end, the UK government continues to approve arms exports to Israel, making it complicit in the violence, she added. The UN General Assembly adopted the resolution last month with 120 votes in favor, eight against and 45 abstentions, including Britain, Switzerland and Germany. The resolution condemned the use of live ammunition against civilian protesters, including children, as well as medical personnel and journalists and underscored its grave concern at the loss of innocent lives. The UN convened a special meeting after more than 100 Gazans were killed by Israeli snipers in six weeks of protests dubbed the "Great March of Return," which began on March 30 and climaxed on May 15, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of Nakba Day (Day of Catastrophe), when Israel was created. The UK said it "could not support a resolution that was partial and imbalanced. Such investigations heightened the risk on both sides," calling on Israel to conduct its own independent inquiry into the atrocities instead. Tens of thousands of people have been protesting along the border between the besieged Gaza Strip and Israeli-occupied territories, calling for Palestinian refugees and their descendants to be allowed to return to their homes now inside Israel. Israeli forces killed at least 62 Gazans in a single day of protests that coincided with the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem al-Quds on May 14. Stressing that the use of lethal force may constitute war crimes, Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Wednesday that the overwhelming majority of those killed and wounded in the Gaza protests were unarmed. The New York-based rights group said eyewitnesses reported seeing Palestinians shot from a great distance from border fences without posing any immediate threat to Israeli troops. Britain has sold record amounts of weapons to Israel over the past year, new data shows, prompting backlash from human rights groups amid the Tel Aviv regimes ongoing crackdown of Palestinian protesters. Last year, the government of Prime Minister Theresa May granted 221 million worth of arms licenses to military contractors exporting to Israel, the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) revealed Saturday. That is almost 3 times the previous years figure of 86 million and a significant increase from the 20 million in arms licenses in 2015. The UK has also ignored international calls to halt its weapons sales to Saudi Arabia over the course of its deadly war against Yemen, which began in 2015 and has put the poverty-stricken country on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. London views arms deals with Israel and Middle Eastern countries as one of the main pillars of its economy after it quits the European Union in 2019. /129 Former Abia State Governor, Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu has faulted former President Olusegun Obasanjo over the letter he wrote to Buhari advising him not to seek re-election in 2019.Orji Kalu, who made the declaration over the weekend in Dutse while on a state visit to Jigawa, told the governor, Alhaji Muhammed Badaru Abubakar that he is touring the country to sensitize Nigerians on the need to allow President Muhammadu Buhari to become president again come 2019.His words: People seem to have forgotten when former President Obasanjo was literally absent for about three years, travelling all over the world when he was president and then nobody told him not seek re-election.According to the former governor, OBJ does not have the moral right to decide for Nigerians who becomes president even though when he was president, no one wrote letters advising him against seeking re-election. Why should he do so now?Kalu said Nigerians have the moral obligation to choose their leaders through the democratic process, advising them to go ahead and vote for President Buhari for another term while also voting for Muhammed Badaru as Jigawa state governor.He said voting for other people other than Buhari is giving an opening for the continued looting of the countrys treasury.Said he: There wont be any presidential candidate I would support in 2019 other than President Muhammadu Buhari.Although Alhaji Sule Lamido happens to be my bosson friend and an aspirant for Nigerias president in the PDP , I have told him that I wont vote for him against President Muhammadu Buhari.The Jigawa Governor, Alhaji Muhammed Badaru who expressed his excitement over the visit by the former Abia governor said his choice to project the re election of President Muhammadu Buhari is unprecedented.Muhammed Badaru said although President Muhammadu Buhari has constantly won elections in Jigawa, there is further need to re-educate and re- energize the people to see reason why they should give Buhari another chance to run for president.Badaru who went down memory lane on how the APC government met a battered economy by the PDP said, Jigawa people are better informed and educated on how we met the state treasury and economy and that is why no one can disillusion them at this moment, he said. The deadly weekend attacks by suspected Boko Haram jihadists using young girls as suicide bombers killed 43 people in northeastern Nigeri... The deadly weekend attacks by suspected Boko Haram jihadists using young girls as suicide bombers killed 43 people in northeastern Nigeria, officials said Monday, updating the toll.Blasts ripped through the town of Damboa in Borno state on Saturday evening targeting people returning from celebrating the Eid al-Fitr holiday, in an attack bearing all the hallmarks of Boko Haram.About 43 lost their lives, 12 individuals who are desperately injured are being flown by helicopter to the Maiduguri with help from the ICRC, local official Kaumi Wakil told AFP, referring to the capital of Borno and the birthplace of Boko Haram.Wakil said 35 others were injured and were in the process of referral to the ICRC clinic in Biu. Another local official confirmed the new death toll, which had initially been reported as 31.Following the suicide bombings, the jihadists fired rocket-propelled grenades into the crowds that had gathered at the scene of the attacks, driving the number of casualties higher.Civilians consistently bear the brunt of the conflict and over 200 women, children and men have now been killed in indiscriminate attacks in the north-east since the beginning of the year, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Nigeria Myrta Kaulard said.I urge the government of Nigeria to further step up protection of people.Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari came into power in 2015 vowing to stamp out Boko Haram, but the jihadists continue to stage frequent attacks, targeting both civilians and security forces.The deadly violence, which has claimed more than 20,000 lives in nine years, has put Buhari under pressure as elections approach in February next year.AFP The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) says it has started printing ballot papers, with which a referendum would be conducted for the peop... The Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) says it has started printing ballot papers, with which a referendum would be conducted for the people of the South East to vote if to remain in Nigeria or secede. The group said it plans to hold the referendum latter this year, and that it was determined to ensure that the exercise took place without violence. A press release by the Media and Publicity Secretary of the group, Mr Emma powerful called on the people of the area to ignore rumours by sponsored individuals who have equated referendum to call for war, saying that both were different. He said, Efforts geared towards this first referendum is gathering unstoppable momentum with dates for the exercise to be announced soon. 40 million ballot papers are being printed and readied for distribution to every clan and village in Biafraland for all adults over the age of 18 to express their preference. For those that set out to mislead the populace by equating IPOBs call for referendum as a call for war, in order to mask their betrayal of the people, will no doubt find another reason or excuse to object to this upcoming plebiscite. The group reminded that it would not be the first time a referendum was going to be held in the country, as it has been held previously, and did not amount to war either. It is worth reminding that on the 11th February 1961, Nigeria conducted a referendum for the people of Southern Cameroon to determine whether they wish to be part of Nigeria or merge with the Francophone northern Cameroon. This referendum resulted in the peaceful secession of the then NCNC controlled Anglophone Cameroon from Nigeria. In other words, they voted to leave Nigeria for good. That was democracy in action not war. No war was fought and no ethnic group was threatened with annihilation. If those parading themselves as leaders, with their much touted academic accomplishments, are not aware of this relatively modern history, then the pervading ignorance in Nigeria, occasioned by the spectacular collapse of the education system, is more generational than earlier thought. If those that claim to be the elite in the society cannot reference Southern Cameroons as a case where referendum resolved an intractable issue, then their supposed elitism is founded on pure fantasy. Again, on the 13th of July 1963, Nigeria conducted another referendum which led to the creation of the defunct Mid-west from the supposedly Yoruba dominated Western region. The old Mid-Western region comprised of parts of todays Delta and Edo states. No war was fought, no ethnic group was threatened with extinction. Those that canvassed for a referendum then were not labeled war mongers. It speaks of the magnitude of prevailing ignorance in Nigeria that people are in this age unaware of the fact that referendum has been used in Nigeria before to resolve a seemingly intractable issue. The group, therefore, alerted that plans were at advanced stages in preparation for the first in its three-stage referendum process towards the peaceful, non-violent restoration of the nation of Biafra. It said, Our decision to hold the first of the three plebiscite later this year has vindicated IPOBs resilience in sticking to the principles of non-violent agitation for Biafra, in the face of government brutality and treachery from enemies within. Senator Shehu Sani on Tuesday described the move by the Federal Government to close Nigerias border with an unidentified country due to rice smuggling as wrong.The Kaduna senator shared his point of view on his Twitter handle, he wrote; Its wrong to shut down the land borders because of rice smuggling.Our layers of security operatives should be able to combat or prevent smuggling without suffocating legitimate businesses and stifling border communities, Sani added.See his tweet below:Its wrong to shut down the land borders because of rice smuggling.Our layers of security operatives should be able to combat or prevent smuggling without suffocating legitimate businesses and stifling border communities. Senator Shehu Sani (@ShehuSani) June 19, 2018On Monday, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh announced that the government was closing the nations border, in order to curb rice smuggling.Ogbeh who did not mention the particular country and border, said that shutting the borders had become necessary to encourage local production and sustain the economy of the country.The minister said that a neighbouring country was bent on destroying the economy of the country and discouraging local production of rice, hence the need to shut down the border. A Federal High Court in Lagos on Tuesday fixed July 6 to deliver ruling on a no case submission filed by Waripamo-Owei Dudafa, a former presidential aide facing N5.1bn fraud charge.Justice Mohammed Idris reserved ruling after counsel representing parties had respectively adopted their written submissions before the court.The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission arraigned Owei-Dudafa, a former aide to former President Goodluck Jonathan, alongside one Joseph Iwejuo, on 23 counts bordering on conspiracy and concealment of crime proceeds.Also charged are some companies namely Seagate Property Development; Investment Ltd, Avalon Global Property Development Company Ltd, Pluto Property Ltd, Investment Company Ltd, and Rotate Interlink Services Ltd.Others are LIbejige Services Ltd, De Jakes Fast Food Restaurant Nigeria Ltd and Ebiwise Resources.The accused had pleaded not guilty to the charges and were granted bail.The News Agency of Nigeria reports that after EFCC closed the case for the prosecution, the defence had informed the court of a no-case submission filed on behalf of the accused.According to the defence team, no prima facie case had been established against the accused.When the case was called on Tuesday, Mr. Nnemeka Omenwa appeared for the EFCC while Messrs Gboyega Oyewole (SAN) and Ige Ashemudara appeared for the defence.The defence adopted its no case submissions, urging the court to hold that the prosecution had not made out any case against the accused.Defence brought its application pursuant to the provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015, as well as the 1999 Constitution as amended.Adopting his submissions, Omewa on the other hand argued that based on evidences adduced by the prosecution, the EFCC had effectively discharged its burden of proof.He argued that based on available evidences, the accused had cases to answer and urged the court to call on the accused to enter their defence.After listening to the arguments Justice Mohammed Idris fixed July 6 for ruling.The offences for which the accused are being tried contravened the provisions of sections 17(a), 18 (c), and 27 (3) (c) of the EFCC Establishment Act 2004. Federal Government has issued stern warning against consumption of Thailand rice saying it is poisonous. Federal Government has issued stern warning against consumption of Thailand rice saying it is poisonous.Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh disclosed this when he interacted with youths during The Guardians of the Nations International (GOTNI) leadership clinic held on Monday in Abuja.He disclosed that the land borders will soon be totally shut, in order to prevent smuggling of foreign rice and other toxic materials into the country.His words: Our other problem is smuggling. As we speak, a neighbor of ours is importing more rice than China is importing. They do not eat parboiled rice, they eat white rice, they use their ports to try and damage our economy.I am telling you now because in a few days, you will hear the border has been shut, we are going to shut it to protect you, us and protect our economy. You will start seeing all sorts of negative things on the internet. Let me tell you why we need to shut the border, I grow rice, I was the first Nigerian to mill rice free of stones, if you plant rice in certain parcels of land, some poisonous materials gets into the rice.Ogbeh lamented that the friendly relationship that existed between Nigeria and her neighbouring African countries was adversely affecting the nations economy, hence the decision to shut the borders.According to the Minister, the federal government in past two years had succeeded in reducing rice importation by 95 percent and increased the number of rice farmers from five to 30 million.He noted that states like Anambra, Ebonyi, Kebbi, Kano, Jigawa have taken advantage of the Anchor Borrower Programme (ABP) of the Federal government to upscale rice production, and such achievements will not be allowed to fizzle away through smuggling activities.There are three kinds of water in their natural state; there is fresh water from the river, salt water from the sea, blackish water. If you go to the Delta in many countries, in South East Asia where they grow the rice, if you plant rice in the same place like four to six years continuously, the quantum of arsenic begins to increase and arsenic causes cancer and that is what they are dumping for us.Some people say they prefer Thai rice because they are very sophisticated, welcome to poison. We just have to handwork you to prosperity otherwise, this country will not grow. My wish for you is to have a better time than we had, he added. There are strong indications that candidates contesting 43 positions in the National Working Committee of the All Progressives Congress are panicking ahead of Saturdays convention.It was learnt on Monday that the source of their fear was the alleged existence of a list of candidates called unity list, which was said to enjoy the support of the APC leaders especially governors.A chieftain of the APC said the list contained names of candidates, who were being supported by the leadership of the party and its governors.However, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, the Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Diaspora Matters, told newsmen, No unity list, theres room for affirmation, consensus; there is no unity list but what you can say is APC list. Anywhere you see any such list it is fake. There are 20 unopposed positions and 42 to be contested, thats about the summary.It was however gathered that the candidates from the South-East are not at ease as other APC governors appeared to be backing the Imo State Governor, Rochas Okorocha.Okorocha, who heads the APCs Convention Appeals Sub-Committee, has been at loggerheads with other stakeholders from the South-East.The governor has kicked against the plan of the partys national officers from the zone, especially the National Organising Secretary, Senator Osita Izunaso, to seek re-election. Izunaso hails from Imo State.A party leader from the zone, who spoke in confidence so as not to worsen an already bad situation said, I think those who truly love the President should let him know that the situation in the South-East is different from the rest of the country.We understand that there is a unity list being put together, and party leaders especially governors are having their way as usual, but let it be known that the leadership of Owelle Rochas Okoracha, lacks the capacity to negotiate anything on our behalf.However, the Director General of the Voice of Nigeria, Mr. Osita Okechukwu, told one of our correspondents that there was no need for anyone, especially loyal party members from the South-East to panic because the delegates who were duly elected would vote at the convention.Okechukwu said, We had successful congresses from the ward to the state levels which produced delegates and these delegates are the people who will vote as this convention. When you look at Article 20 of our constitution it states this clearly.Even when you reach a consensus on a candidate or candidates there must be an election to ratify such a consensus.Article 20 which stipulates how elections and appointments can be made in the party reads (i) All Party posts prescribed or implied by this constitution shall be filled by democratically conducted elections at the respective National Convention or Congress subject, where possible, to consensus for an elective position, a vote of yes or no should be called for to ensure that it is not an imposition which can breed discontent and crisis.Meanwhile, there was a fresh controversy on the tenure of the outgoing NWC led by Chief Odigie-Oyegun on Monday.It was gathered that some members argued that the tenure of the NWC expired yesterday (Monday, June 18) while others insisted that it would end on July 10.The outgoing National Chairman of the APC, John Odigie-Oyegun, while announcing his decision not to seek re-election, had told journalists, I do not intend to be part of the problem for the APC to solve. It is for this reason that I hereby declare that I will not be seeking re-election as the national chairman.I will continue to perform my functions as the national chairman of the party, till my tenure officially ends on Monday, June 25 when a new set of party executives will be inaugurated.However, the outgoing National Vice-Chairman (South-South), Hilliard Eta, said, The tenure ends today (Monday 18th).When contacted, the partys National Legal Adviser, Muiz Banire, (SAN), in response to a question on when the tenure of the current NWC would end, said, July 10th, that was the day of swearing-in (inauguration).He stated, Elected officials tenure does not start until they are sworn in. Just like the tenure of the President or governor-elect does not start until swearing-in.Also, a socio-cultural organisation, Benin National Council, has accused the Peoples Democratic Party of complicity in a smear campaign launched against the chairmanship aspiration of a former governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole.The group made this known in Benin on Monday. It was reacting to a suit filed before a Federal High Court by one Bishop Osadolor Ochei seeking an order to compel the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission to probe Oshiomhole.It said that the PDP was jittery that his expected emergence as the next national chairman of the APC would ruin the chances of the opposition party in the 2019 general elections.The PDP denied these allegations. The state Publicity Secretary of the party, Chris Nehikhare, said, Oshiomhole should go and clear his name. What Ochei is saying is not new. Are they saying that the house in Iyamho does not exist? Why should we sponsor him? We did not sponsor the man. The Federal Government has given an insight into how it gets the assistance of the United Kingdom to seize properties and other assets l... The Federal Government has given an insight into how it gets the assistance of the United Kingdom to seize properties and other assets linked to funds allegedly stolen from the Nigerian treasury.It said under the existing mutual legal assistance agreement and treaties, the UK also helps us to prosecute suspects who commit crimes against Nigeria.Nigeria also offered such legal assistance to the UK when faced with such request, the Federal Government stated in a court paper filed before the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory in Abuja.Properties linked to the immediate-past Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke in the UK have been seized by the foreign countrys court under the existing mutual assistance laws.Diezani has, since 2015, been under criminal investigation in the UK for alleged offences including money laundering which she was accused of committing while in office as a Nigerian minister.The Federal Government detailed how the mutual legal agreement laws worked in its response to an application raised by an alleged Diezanis ally, Benedict Peters, challenging the seizure of some foreign and Nigerian-based properties linked to the ex-minister.The orders for interim forfeiture of the properties on the account of the ongoing investigation of Diezani were made on April 13 and 29, 2016 by the Federal High Court in Abuja and on October 19, 2017, by the Crown Court in Southwark, UK.The interim forfeiture orders prohibited the disposal of the assets in Nigeria and in the UK pending the conclusion of ongoing investigations into allegations against the ex-minister, on whose behalf investigators believed Peters and his companies acted.But Peters and three of his companies Collinwood Limited, Rosewood Investment Limited and Walworth Properties had, on December 29, 2017, filed the suit marked, FCT/HC/CV/0536/17, seeking to set aside the orders of interim forfeiture in respect to some of the seized properties.The plaintiffs, in urging the FCT High Court to set aside the interim orders of forfeiture, claimed that some of the properties seized by the Nigerian and UK courts belonged to them and not Diezani.Chief Mike Ozekhome (SAN), who filed the suit for the plaintiffs, listed the AGF, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Crown Prosecution Service, UK; Helen Hughes (an official of CPS); The National Crime Agency, UK; Stacey Boniface and John Bavister (both investigators for NCA) as 3rd to the 7th defendants.At the commencement of the hearing in the case, lawyers from the office of the Attorney General of the Federation, Mr. Abubakar Malami, announced appearances for the AGF and the UK agencies and agents, a development the plaintiffs opposed.They argued that the Nigerian governments lawyers could not represent the UK officials and agencies sued in Nigeria.But the AGF office said in response that only the UK government could challenge its appearance for the foreign government and its agencies.The AGF office added that its appearance for the UK in the case was covered under the Treaty Series No.18(1994) and the Agreement between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria concerning the Investigation and Prosecution of Crime and the Confiscation of the Proceeds of Crime.It also cited the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters within the Commonwealth (Enact and Enforcement) Act to back its appearance for the UK government.The AGFs lawyer, Mr. Tijani Gazali, argued, Thus the Federal Government of Nigeria has the power under this Act to consult the government of the United Kingdom for legal assistance as regards identifying and locating criminal offenders, examination of witnesses, search and seizure of assets, etc in relation to identifying and obtaining proceeds of crime.We further submit that it was within the duties of the United Kingdom authorities and their agents, including but not limited to the 3rd to the 7th defendants to act as requested and provide necessary evidence, witnesses and even prosecute the matter in as much as they have the authority to do so from the Federal Government of Nigeria.Gazali added that failure of the AGF office to protect the interest of the United Kingdom and its agents will be disregarding the mutual agreement laws set in place to promote cooperation to fight crime in both countries.Justice Olukayode Adeniyi of the FCT High Court in Apo, Abuja, had in a ruling on June 11, 2018, upheld the argument of the AGF office and dismissed the plaintiffs objection to the appearance of the offices appearance for the UK agencies and agents.Justice Adeniyi fixed June 22 for further hearing. Israels internal security service has indicted one of the countrys former cabinet minister on suspicion of spying for Iran. Israels internal security service has indicted one of the countrys former cabinet minister on suspicion of spying for Iran. In a statement on Monday, the Shin Bet security service said Gonen Segev, energy minister from 1995 to 1996, was recruited by Iranian intelligence and served as an agent. According to Reuters, the security service said Segev had been living in Nigeria and was discovered to have made contact with officials at the Iranian embassy in Nigeria in 2012. Segev, who was jailed in Israel in 2004 after being convicted of attempting to smuggle Ecstasy pills, left the country in 2007. The former minister, who visited Iran twice for meetings with his handlers, reportedly received an encrypted communications system from Iranian agents. He was said to have supplied Iran with information related to the energy sector, security sites in Israel and officials in political and security institutions. The Shin Bet added that the former Israeli minister linked some Israelis involved in the countrys security sector with Iranian intelligence agents, introducing the Iranians as businessmen. However, Segevs attorneys were quoted as saying in a statement that most of the information regarding the indictment remained a secret, as requested by the state. The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) has asked the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to either endorse or disown This is Nigeria video... The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) has asked the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to either endorse or disown This is Nigeria video by Folarin Falana, aka Falz the Bahd Guy. The Muslim body had announced that it will no longer approach the court to seek a ban on the video. In a statement on Tuesday, its Director, Prof Ishaq Akintola, urged CAN to declare its position on the matter. We have no other option than to openly ask the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) if it is behind this move. Is CAN leadership aware of this segregational campaign? Did CAN initiate it or did it just endorse it? Should we also believe rumours of CANs surreptitious meetings with high ranking foreign diplomats in unholy hours of the day? Is CAN aware of the security implications of such meetings? Is CAN with Nigeria or against Nigeria? Et tu CAN? It had better not be. What kind of people are we that we continue to drag ourselves backwards while the rest of the world is going forward? Election campaign should be issue-based. Religion is not given any room in politics in other climes. Why should we be looking at the faith of a candidate and not his pedigree, his integrity and his antecedence? It is a pity that CAN still pushes primordial sentiment like religion to the front burner when advanced countries only consider credibility and ability to deliver. Why is it that CAN cannot tolerate Muslim leadership after Muslims have tolerated Christian leadership for so long? He asked. The Islamic human rights outfit also wondered why Muslims should not be allowed to rule for the same long period that Christians had been in office. It is on record that of the 16 wasted years of PDP rule, a Muslim (former President Umaru Yaradua) only ruled for two years and he died in office. Christians ruled for 14 years (ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo: 8 years and Goodluck Jonathan: 6 years). So why cant you live and let live? Even as divisive and destructive as it is, the idea of Christians voting for Christians only still remains naive and utopia. Who told CAN that it can install a Christian president with an all-Christian vote? It is a mirage. CAN is day-dreaming. What if Muslims also ask their fellow Muslims not to vote for any Christian candidate? What do you think will happen? But we will not descend so low. We will not ask Muslims not to vote for Christian candidates. Whoever is behind this video and the anti-Muslim campaign in general is promoting anarchy, it added. The organization argued that Nigeria is a heterogeneous, multi-religious and multi-cultural project which belongs to nobody and it is bigger than any section. For any progress to be made, Muslims and Christians as well as all ethnic groups, it said, have to sink their differences. We all have to work together. Nigeria is a wrong candidate for possessing your possession slogans. Akintola admitted that Nigeria was blessed with good Christian candidates and credible Muslim candidates. He urged Nigerians to create an enabling environment for the emergence of such good candidates. Narrowing the search to any particular religion or ethnic group, he argued, is not only self-defeating but also counter-productive. Iranian president Hassan Rouhani told Qatars ruler on Monday that a military approach in Yemen would fail, Iranian state TV reported, (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says a military approach will fail to resolve the Yemeni crisis, stressing the importance of restoring stability and security to the war-ravaged country and the entire Middle East through political channels. In a telephone conversation with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani on Monday, Rouhani warned that the recent unprecedented attacks by a Saudi-led military coalition and militia loyal to the former Yemeni government on the western province of Hudaydah would lead to a humanitarian crisis in the impoverished country. "The continuation of these conflicts has put the poor Yemeni people under intolerable pressure and we are all duty-bound to help this oppressed nation," the Iranian president pointed out. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched a major assault on June 13 to take Hudaydah, a densely-populated city and the war-torn country's most vital port. The Houthi movement, which has been of significant help to the Yemeni army in defending the country against the invading forces, has been running state affairs in the absence of an effective administration during the past three years. The invasion of Hudaydah has already triggered fears of a fresh humanitarian crisis in a country where more than 22 million people are in need of aid, including 8.4 million who are at risk of starvation. Yemens Navy and Coast Defense Command said on June 14 that it is "fully prepared" to destroy any invading warships belonging to the Saudi-led coalition with missiles. In a statement carried by Yemen's Arabic-language al-Masirah television network, the command further said that the countrys forces, including those of the Navy, would fulfill their national and religious duty to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Yemen against the enemy. Elsewhere in his remarks, the Iranian president emphasized that the Islamic Republic's policy is based on interaction and dialogue with regional countries with the purpose of putting an end to the ongoing conflicts, adding that the establishment of stability and security across the region would be beneficial to all regional nations. "We regard as incorrect the adventurous policies of certain regional countries and believe that the continuation of this process will undoubtedly intensify the existing problems in the region, including in Palestine, Syria and Yemen," Rouhani said. Only dialogue can solve disputes: Qatari Emir The Qatari Emir, for his part, said all regional conflicts can be solved only through dialogue, adding that no country can impose its stance on others. He emphasized that his country would continue to support the Palestinian people and their resistance against the Israeli regime. The Supreme Council of Bishops, otherwise known as World Council of Bishops, has written President Muhammadu Buhari, pleading for pardon f... The Supreme Council of Bishops, otherwise known as World Council of Bishops, has written President Muhammadu Buhari, pleading for pardon for five young men sentenced to death by a court in Adamawa for the killing of a herdsman. Recall that a Yola High Court had on June 11, 2018, sentenced the five men from Kodomun in Demsa council area of the state to death by hanging for murdering a herder in retaliation to the several killings in the area. However, in the letter, the bishops noted that Nigeria has suffered untold bloodshed from killings, maiming, traumatisation of innocent citizens around the north eastern, north central and Middle Belt states, as a result of the frequent attacks by the militia herdsmen times without number. The correspondence, titled, Special request for presidential pardon: Killing by hanging of five young men, was signed by founding Primate, Abuja, Nigeria, Archbishop (Dr.) P. Sunday; Ecclesiastical Prelate Administrator, Houston, Texas, United State, Archbishop (Dr.) H. Parker; Apostolic Nuncio and Prelate to Africa, Lagos, Nigeria, Bishop (Dr.) J. Onyegbulem; and Ecclesiastical Prelate to West Africa, Niamey, Niger Republic, Bishop (Dr.) J. Hussein. The clerics regretted that till date no adequate justice had been meted out on them commensurate to the lives and property lost. It therefore totally condemns and disapproves vehemently the death sentence passed on the five young men on Monday, June 11, 2018 by a court of competent jurisdiction in Yola, Adamawa State, Nigeria accused and charged for killing a herdsman. The letter, dated June 13, 2018 from the World Episcopal Headquarters in Texas, U.S., was routed through the Africa Episcopal Headquarters, Lagos and copied the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo; Senate President, Bukola Saraki; Chief Justice of the Federation, Walter Samuel Onnoghen; Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara; Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha; as well as Governor Mohammed Jibrilla and the states Attorney General, Silas Bala Sanga. Belligerent Crowd triggers Multi Jurisdictional Police Response On Sunday June 17, 2018 at approximately 3:55pm Pleasantville Patrol Units responded to Kings Food Market at 141 North Main Street for the report of a disturbance with a male down possibly having a seizure. Patrol units responded, arrived on location and requested EMS respond within 28 seconds of the initial police dispatch. Patrol immediately made contact with the victim and ascertained that he had a seizure and was bleeding from the mouth. Patrolman Ledden began to interact and assess the victim placing him in the recovery position to await EMS. Pleasantville Communications acknowledged this information and subsequently, within approximately 1 minute and 15 seconds, advised that Absecon EMS and AtlantiCare Paramedics were responding. Upon the officers arrival a group of 8 adults, 7 males and 1 female were surrounding the victim with some attempting to render aid and others clearly distraught. At that time the officers requested that bystanders step back to allow them to attend to the victim and the majority of the bystanders complied. Several males did not comply and immediately became belligerent toward the officers and were ordered from the area with the assistance of K-9 Sergeant Brandon Stocks and his K9 partner. At that time Sgt. Stocks requested additional Pleasantville units respond to the scene. The initial non-compliant males moved to the north side of the parking lot and continued to verbally berate the officers and incite other bystanders to join the crowd. At this point the crowd had grown on both sides of the scene, continued to become more agitated and the Pleasantville officers, of which there were only 6 working, were quickly outnumbered 2 to 1 by the crowd. A request for additional officers was made by Pleasantville Communications and units from Absecon and Egg Harbor Township responded to the scene to assist with crowd control and scene safety. At one point during the incident several additional male subjects and a female approached the area of the victim and also began to verbally berate the officers with a male at one point attempting to physically interfere with care of the victim. Sergeant Stocks requested the ETA of EMS several times during the incident and requested an expedited response. The crowd throughout the incident is verbally belligerent to all of the officers and continuously attempts to taunt the officers into a confrontation coming within inches of several officers. All of the officers exercised professionalism and restraint. Minimal force was used including the presence of the K9, minimal physical contact and an indirect burst of Oleoresin Capsicum spray used to back up the group interfering with the care of the patient. In addition, though several violations occurred which clearly rose to the level that exposed the actors to arrest, officers exercised discretion to avoid worsening the situation. The ambulance arrived approximately 13 minutes into the incident and the officers then carried the victim to the ambulance to expedite and secure his removal from the scene. The Pleasantville Police Department wishes to thank the Egg Harbor Township and Absecon Police Departments for their assistance. See below quote from Chief Sean Riggin: We, the officers and staff of the Pleasantville Police Department, take our duty to protect and serve our community as a sacred trust. We will not allow our officers to ignore this trust, ever. And, on June 17, Fathers Day, our officers did exactly what we expect them to do and upheld that trust. They kept an angry group at bay, without arresting or fighting an unnecessarily hostile crowd, and then disregarded their own safety to carry the patient to the ambulance while a hostile stood by and berated police without cause. In the coming days we will work with the Citys EMS provided to review and evaluate the contract and ensure Pleasantvilles residents are afforded the care they deserve. But today, I stand proudly behind my officers who were confronted by a crowd who seemed eager to engage in a confrontation with police over an issue the officers cannot control, ambulance response time. Im disappointed that all the hard work of these officers to engage in our community is thrown aside by a few reckless individuals who seemed determined to fight police or start a riot. The officers did a professional job in spite of the actions of several who sought to create a dangerous and chaotic environment and I am proud of them. Rutgers University will take over management and operations of the Bergen County Medical Examiner's Office, a move expected to open pipeline of talent to one of the most understaffed professions in the state and country. Under a new five-year contract, Rutgers University Medical School will staff the office with at least two board-certified pathologists, one of whom will be the chief medical examiner for the county. In addition, the office will serve as training grounds for the school's Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. The partnership is the first of its kind in New Jersey. "Our physicians will serve Bergen County, families mourning the untimely loss of loved ones, and victims of violent crime with professionalism, compassion, and excellent skill in forensic pathology," said Robert L. Johnson, dean of the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. "In addition, the benefit of a teaching site for our residency program will enhance our ability to produce highly-skilled physician graduates." The partnership is the latest change to the state medical examiner system following an 18-month NJ Advance Media investigation. The investigation, published in December, revealed that more than 40 years of neglect had turned a critical function of state government into a national disgrace, detailing cases of mishandled bodies, bungled criminal cases and families left grieving without answers. As a result of the investigation, the state system is on the brink of massive reform. The state Legislature is working through the final details of the overhaul, which Gov. Phil Murphy has promised to sign on passage. Bergen County, the state's most populous, has long had one of the most admired medical examiner offices in the state. The partnership with Rutgers is likely to further that reputation. Experts say partnerships with university systems are generally coveted, and serve as the backbone for some of the best medical examiner systems in the country. "This exciting new partnership will not only enhance (our) services but also provide vital research that will greatly improve overall population health management," said County Executive James J. Tedesco III in a statement. Stephen Stirling may be reached at sstirling@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @sstirling. Find him on Facebook. Bayonne and The Jersey Journal are back in court. After the yearlong fight over access to a settlement agreement in a police brutality lawsuit, the newspaper is asking that $112,000 in legal fees be awarded and that a civil penalty be imposed because of the city's "intentional violation'' of the state Open Public Records Act. "It is well settled that a municipality's settlement agreement is absolutely subject to disclosure under OPRA and that municipalities cannot as a matter of law keep such records secret through non-disclosure agreements,'' Justin Quinn, a partner in the Robinson Miller firm and counsel for The Jersey Journal, wrote in papers submitted to Superior Court Judge Daniel D'Alessandro. "As a result, this case should not have been litigated in every state and federal court in New Jersey. But it was. And not because of The Jersey Journal, but because Bayonne continued to raise meritless appeals and other litigation roadblocks to stymie The Jersey Journal's efforts for prompt access.'' The Open Public Records Act says prevailing parties in OPRA disputes shall be entitled to reasonable attorney fees, but Bayonne argued in court on Friday that there is no prevailing party here. Yes, The Jersey Journal ultimately received a copy of the settlement agreement it sought through OPRA but because the document contained limited redactions, no one can be considered the prevailing party, Bayonne's attorney, Daniel M. Santarsiero, argued. "The request was for the entire settlement agreement," Santarsiero said. "The Jersey Journal did not obtain exactly what they asked for." Judge D'Alessandro summarized the numerous state and federal court actions that took place before Bayonne finally released the settlement agreement on March 16 and noted that The Jersey Journal is the party that asserted the public's right to know under OPRA. "But for The Jersey Journal, the settlement would not have been released," the judge told Santarsiero. "If they weren't the prevailing party, who was?" "It's a stalemate," Santarsiero said, prompting the judge to look up the definition of "stalemate,'' which, he said, means "a draw.'' "It doesn't sound like a draw,'' D'Alessandro said. The $1.5 million-plus settlement agreement ended a federal lawsuit between Bayonne and members of the Walsh family, who said that when police arrested Brandon Walsh at their home in 2013 they beat him with a flashlight and pepper-sprayed members of the family. The Jersey Journal filed an OPRA request for the document in March 2017, a request Bayonne denied. For the next year, both sides appeared in state and federal courtrooms as Bayonne and attorneys for the city's insurer, the New Jersey Intergovernmental Insurance Fund, argued that the document was exempt from the state's public-records law. Bayonne finally released the settlement agreement on March 16. Quinn noted to D'Alessandro that Bayonne lost at every court level, including when the New Jersey Supreme Court decided not to hear the city's appeal. "I do not understand how we could not be a prevailing party," Quinn said. "In addition to receiving precisely what we requested in both our pre-litigation letter and verified complaint, we succeeded in having each of Bayonne's numerous appeals denied." Asked by the judge to provide case law bolstering his argument, Santarsiero was unable to do so. Santarsiero also argued that the legal fees submitted by the newspaper are not reasonable. The Jersey Journal said it worked 298 hours on the case. About 13 of those, Santarsiero argued, represent either duplicative work or work done by multiple legal partners that could have been handled by one, but he was unable to find in his notes exactly how many hours he wanted to dispute. D'Alessandro asked Santarsiero to submit a letter by Wednesday listing all the hours Bayonne believes are unreasonable. The Jersey Journal will then have until Monday to respond and D'Alessandro indicated he would rule shortly after that. Walter Luers, an attorney who has filed hundreds of lawsuits regarding OPRA matters, told The Jersey Journal it's a "common tactic" for public agencies to attempt to withhold payment of legal fees by arguing there is no prevailing party. Luers has examined all of the court records in the case of the Walsh settlement and critiqued Santarsiero's argument. "That's not a draw. That's not a stalemate," he said. "The Jersey Journal won. ... I don't even think it's a close case." JERSEY CITY Snoop Dogg is getting a cool $100,000 at least for headlining Jersey City's Fourth of July fireworks festival. The six-figure sum that lured the "Gin and Juice" rapper to Jersey City is being footed by the Exchange Place Alliance, a business group funded with a special tax on about 150 businesses in and near Exchange Place. That's where the free, all-day festival will be held. The Jersey Journal learned the financial terms of the deal after filing a public-records request with the Exchange Place Alliance. Mike DeMarco, president of the SID and CEO of real-estate firm Mack-Cali, told The Jersey Journal that Snoop Dogg's performance will make this year's festival "a great time." "I look forward to having an inclusive, excellent time," DeMarco said. Snoop Dogg, who co-hosts a variety show with Jersey City native Martha Stewart, is receiving quite a bit more for his Fourth of July appearance than the city has paid previous headliners. The Village People, who performed in 2016, received $20,000. Kool & The Gang, last year's star act, got $17,400. Michael Satsky, of booking agent Provocateur Global Holdings, told The Record Snoop Dogg would treat the performance as a charitable donation. "Essentially, Snoop is doing this for the people" Satsky said. It's not clear what the city's total costs for the festival will be. The City Council has approved giving the Exchange Place Alliance $39,900 to rent carnival rides and New York-based Grucci $135,000 for fireworks. The Exchange Place Alliance has a roughly $3 million budget. Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. BAYONNE -- You may have noticed some new residents of Broadway. Some are reading, while others enjoy a conversation on a bench. All of the newcomers look a bit stiff, however. "I did a double take -- I thought 'Is that real?'" said Cynthia Christensen, a West Sixth Street resident who, like others, has noticed the new bronze statues the city has installed along Broadway, the city's main shopping district. "They're interesting; (the city's) doing something nice, I like it," she said. The 10 statues, designed by the Randolph Rose Collection of Yonkers, New York, are dispersed throughout the city's main shopping district. They were paid for through Bayonne UEZ funds, and Broadway's Special Improvement District. Five are in the SID from 17th Street to 30th Street, while others are positioned at various locations -- in front of the Eighth Street Bergen Point Post Office, the 26th Street Post Office and the Horace Mann School near 39th Street, for example. But the statues aren't the only additions meant to beautify the roughly 3-mile long thoroughfare. They bronze figures are part of a broad attempt to spruce up the city's once-treasured shopping hub and bring it back to its former glory. Utility boxes have been painted, banners are flown, flower boxes have been made, and the street has hosted a number of different fairs including the Hometown Fair, the Bayonne Hispanic Parade and festival and the National Night Out fair. And the city says it hopes to do a second phase of art installations on Broadway in the future. "The goal of this program is to make Broadway a more attractive, fun place for shopping and dining," Mayor Jimmy Davis said. "Promoting Broadway as an interesting destination for consumers is good for our local small businesses." Resident seem to agree. "Maybe it attracts some visitors from other places, but it's a local attraction," said Rolando Calza, 28, of East Fifth Street. Calza recently moved from Jersey City with his wife and in-laws. "We heard Bayonne's a very nice place," he said. Walk along Broadway on a sunny day, though, and it's clear who the biggest fans of the statues are. "People like to come see them, but I think it's the kids that are really into them -- especially the little kids," said Mary Ellen Murphy, a lifelong resident. Corey W. McDonald may be reached at cmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @coreymacc. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. JERSEY CITY -- Police are investigating a pair of shootings that left two men injured in Jersey City over the last three days, authorities said. Neither victim suffered life-threatening injuries but both were taken to Jersey City Medical Center for treatment, city spokeswoman Kimberly Wallace-Scalcione said. The first incident occurred Saturday at around 1:45 a.m. on Myrtle Avenue between Martin Luther King Drive and Bergen Avenue. The 33-year-old was brought to JCMC and remains in stable condition, Wallace-Scalcione said. A short time later, police arrested Donell Leak in connection to the shooting, which Wallace-Scalcione said appears to have been the result of a "previous altercation." He was charged with weapons offenses and attempted murder. The victim's wife was present when her husband was shot in the chest and leg and was able to identify Leak as the shooter, according to a criminal complaint. Then early Tuesday morning, police were called to Jewett Avenue on reports of shots fired. About an hour later a victim notified police he was shot in the toe. He was brought to the hospital for treatment, Wallace-Scalcione said. Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. JERSEY CITY -- Jersey City police executing a search warrant on Forrest Street say a woman flushed much of the contraband they were seeking down the toilet last week, officials said. Carolina Mercado, 49, of West 24th Street in Bayonne, was charged with tampering with evidence, possession of drug paraphernalia consistent with that used to package drugs, and one gram of cocaine wrapped in a dollar bill, according to a criminal complaint. Officers from the Jersey City Police Department Street Crimes Unit said when they executed the warrant on the 300 block of Forrest Street on June 12 Mercado flushed drugs down the toilet to "tamper/destroy" evidence, the complaint reads. Inside the apartment police found glass vials, Ziploc bags, razor blades, baking soda, a measuring cup, and a mirror with suspected drug residue on it, the complaint says. Mercado made her first appearance on the charges Friday in Criminal Justice Reform Court in Jersey City via video link from Hudson County jail in Kearny. At the hearing, she was ordered released with conditions of supervision pending trial but she was also notified that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has lodged a detainer against her, which will keep her behind bars. An 18-year-old North Bergen man is facing assault and weapons charges after an altercation in Union City earlier this month in which another person was stabbed, authorities said. Angelo Jimenez-Vargas is charged with aggravated assault, unlawful possession of a weapon, and conspiracy in connection to the June 8 incident, according to a criminal complaint. Jimenez-Vargas got into a physical fight with the alleged victim before an unknown male approached the victim from behind and stabbed him in the abdomen with a knife, the complaint states. The two assailants left the scene on a bicycle before Jimenez-Vargas gave the other male his sweater. At that point, they fled in separate directions, the complaint states. It's unclear if the other suspect was arrested. Police reported that the victim was transported to a medical facility for a puncture wound to the abdomen, which required surgery. Jimenez-Vargas made his first appearance on the charges in the Criminal Justice Reform Court on June 12 and was ordered detained. His case will be sent to the grand jury. The Lebanon Borough 4th of July Parade Committee is proud to invite the residents of Hunterdon County to our 71st annual 4th of July Parade celebration when we carry out this year's parade theme of: "PARADE OF STARS." We have heard dozens of stories from many residents who have fond memories going back to the earliest July 4th celebrations. Grandparents who remember seeing the parade as children now creating new memories for their own children and grandchildren. Lebanon's July 4th Celebration is one of our local traditions that began in 1948 and is now in its 71st year. This tradition has been kept alive by the dedication and hard work of the all the past and current members of the Lebanon 4th of July Celebration Committee, the many volunteers on the day of the parade, the support of local businesses, and all of the generous donations given by residents and visitors alike. It's a wonderful day to celebrate America with family and friends. Come and join us! PLEASE NOTE: Main Street (between Cherry and Myrtle) will close at 8:00 AM and other roads will be closed at 9:00 AM for the safety of all participants and spectators. Festivities will begin with the CHILDREN'S PARADE. Registration commences at 8:00AM and is open to all children from birth to 10 years old. Children may participate riding on a decorated bicycle or float - NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES! Be as creative and unique as you want! Judging takes place at 9:00AM - so please arrive early! The CHILDREN'S PARADE commences at 9:30AM at Sutton Place (across from Police Headquarters), with a short procession up Main Street for about 1/2 a block. There will be Awards for - Most Patriotic Best Theme Representation PET PARADE New this year will be a 4th of July PET PARADE. Dress your favorite four-legged friend in their best patriotic costume. The pet parade will be in the park following the main parade. Registration and line-up will be near the ball field after the flag raising. For more info, email Krissy Watts at krissykristars@gmail.com. Residents of Lebanon Borough are urged to decorate their homes for inclusion in the HOUSE DECORATING CONTEST. 1st and 2nd Place awards will be presented for the best Patriotic or theme related decor. The PRESENTATION OF LEBANON BOROUGH SCHOOL SAFETY PATROL will commence at 9:50AM on Main Street in front of the Fox and Hound Tavern. The PARADE LINE UP will commence between 8:30AM and 9:30AM. Please enter Main Street from Route 22 at the East end of town (By Stewart's Root Beer Stand), no later than 9:00AM , as the ROADS WILL BE CLOSED AT THAT TIME . There will be numerous Celebration Committee members to assist you in finding your place in the parade line-up. Registration is required for all parade participants in order to place you and your group accordingly in the parade line-up. All participants can REGISTER HERE. If there are any issues with signing up for the parade, please email us at info@lebanonboro4thofjulyparade.com. BOY AND GIRL SCOUTS AND INDIAN GUIDES: Muster with their troops at the Old Brick Post Office Building at 123 Main Street. The MAIN PARADE will step off promptly at 10:00AM and follow West along Main Street, down Myrtle Avenue and then down Brunswick Avenue. FESTIVITIES IN THE PARK: Join us at Holjes-Sheppard Park following the parade, for festivities including singing of "The Star Spangled Banner", the flag raising ceremony, presentation of awards, refreshments, games & friendly competition for folks of all ages! GENERAL PARADE TROPHIES: Judging takes place during the parade, with winners awarded in the park. Best Theme Float/Unit Best Children's Float/Unit Most Patriotic Float/Unit Most Original Float/Unit VEHICLE PARTICIPATION: The Lebanon NJ 4th of July Parade Committee is inviting all antique and classic cars (pre-1980) to participate in our annual parade! The first 50 antique/classic cars (no tractors or street rods) to arrive by 9:00 AM at Lynwood Drive will receive a participation award. Car owners will have a chance to join our celebration and share their special vehicles with the community on this historic holiday. Any questions you may have can be sent to lebanonparadeantiquecars@gmail.com. FIRE, RESCUE and EMERGENCY SERVICES: We invite all FIRE, RESCUE and EMERGENCY SERVICE personnel to join us at this year's parade. We want to thank ALL Emergency Service personnel for their years of volunteer service protecting the communities at large, and their dedicated support and participation in the Lebanon Borough Fourth of July Parade and Celebration. Please Note: For safety's sake, there will be This parade is a self-supporting event. Donations are our only means of support. Please consider making a donation All Roads into Lebanon Borough Thank you for your enthusiasm! It is you who make this parade so much fun. If you have any questions about participating in the parade, email us at info@lebanonboro4thofjulyparade.com. Iran's foreign minister has decried Israels nukes as a real threat to the Middle East region and the rest of the world, calling for a new focus on the occupying regimes nuclear arsenal. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Iran's foreign minister has decried Israels nukes as a real threat to the Middle East region and the rest of the world, calling for a new focus on the occupying regimes nuclear arsenal. In a new post on his official Twitter account on Monday, Mohammad Javad Zarif said although Iran had no nuclear weapons, Israel, which is the sole Middle Eastern country to possess such weapons, continued to howl about fabricated Iranian ambitions. There are at least 80 nuclear warheads stationed in the Middle East. None are in #Iran; rather, they're at the fingertips of a warmonger who howls incessantly about fabricated Iranian ambitions the top Iranian diplomat said. He also urged the world to start paying more attention to Israels nukes by starting an overdue debate on the real threat to the region & beyond. Israel is estimated to have 200 to 400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal. The regime, however, refuses to either accept or deny having the weapons. It has also evaded signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) amid staunch endeavor by the United States and other Western states on international levels in favor of its non-commitment to the accord. Iranian Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Reza Najafi in September 2017 denounced the Wests double standard approaches on the possession and development of atomic technology, urging a complete end to any nuclear cooperation with the Israeli regime. Addressing a quarterly meeting of the IAEAs 35-member Board of Governors in Vienna, Najafi warned that the Israeli regimes nuclear program is negatively impacting security of the Middle East. /129 The Jets on Monday announced their training camp schedule ... sort of. They didn't release the full schedule, but they did announce their publicly open practices. And there aren't many of them -- just three fully open practices in Florham Park, plus the annual Green and White scrimmage/practice, which will be held at Rutgers this year. Construction around the Jets' training facility in Florham Park has cut down on the amount of available parking. Plus, the Jets are holding three joint camp practices with Washington in Richmond, Va., so the Jets won't have as many practices in Florham Park as usual. The Jets report to training camp July 26, but will not practice that day. They typically practice the day after report day. Here are the Jets' publicly open practices: Saturday July 28, 1:30 p.m. -- for Jets Club and PSL season ticket holders only Sunday July 29, 1:30 p.m. -- public practice with valid ticket Saturday Aug. 4, 7 p.m. -- Green and White scrimmage at Rutgers (click here for more info) Sunday Aug. 12, TBA -- joint practice with Washington in Richmond Monday Aug. 13, TBA -- joint practice with Washington in Richmond Tuesday Aug. 14, TBA -- joint practice with Washington in Richmond Saturday Aug. 18, 1:30 p.m. -- public practice with valid ticket Sunday Aug. 19, 1:30 p.m. -- public practice with valid ticket The Jets break training camp Aug. 22. The practices with Washington in Richmond will occupy almost a week of training camp -- a large chunk of possible publicly open practices in Florham Park. The Jets are expected to leave for Richmond on Aug. 11 (the day after their preseason opener) and return to New Jersey late on Aug. 16 (after their second preseason game, on a Thursday night, at Washington.) Construction and resulting parking restrictions around the Jets' training facility make it difficult to have large-scale publicly open practices during the week this year. Because construction won't be happening on the weekends, the Jets opted to have the publicly open practices then. And more fans are able to attend on the weekends anyway. Plus, for weekend open practices, the Jets can use the parking lots of neighboring office buildings. The Jets aren't having their Green and White scrimmage at MetLife Stadium this year, because of Jay-Z and Beyonce concerts happening there from Aug. 2-3. The Jets typically prefer to have the scrimmage at the stadium. The Jets looked into doing the Green and White scrimmage at Hofstra, but the New York Lizards lacrosse team has a home game there on Aug. 4. So Rutgers got the scrimmage. In the past, the Jets have held a family night practice at Hofstra, but that won't happen this year, because scheduling didn't work out, partly due to the practices in Richmond. So there will be no Jets training camp practice or scrimmage on Long Island this year. The Jets have, in recent years, held a town hall meeting for season ticket holders at Hofstra -- a nod to their Long Island fanbase. It is unclear if they will do that this year. Here are the Jets' preseason games: Friday Aug. 10 vs. Falcons, 7:30 p.m. Thursday Aug. 16 at Washington, 8 p.m. Friday Aug. 24 vs. Giants, 7:30 p.m. Thursday Aug. 30 at Eagles, 7 p.m. Admission and parking are free for all open Jets camp practices, but tickets are required. Starting now, fans can register and download tickets at newyorkjets.com/camp. The Jets are going with mobile tickets only this year. No printed tickets are available. The Jets are also going with mobile-only tickets for all games at MetLife Stadium this year. For the Jets' practices in Richmond, online registration will open in late June and is required for entry to the practices. Click here for more information on Washington's camp in Richmond. Admission is free. For the Jets' publicly open practices in Florham Park, gates open at 1:30 p.m. and parking lot shuttles begin at 1 p.m. For the Green and White scrimmage, gates open at 6 p.m. Darryl Slater may be reached at dslater@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DarrylSlater. Find NJ.com Jets on Facebook. 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 long-awaited report on marijuana will recommend that New York legalizes the drug, the state's top health official said Monday. While the report has not yet been finalized, Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said its authors reached their conclusion after a thorough review of the legal, medical and social implications of legalization. "We looked at the pros, we looked at the cons," Zucker told reporters at an appearance in Brooklyn. "When we were done we realized that the pros outweighed the cons." Zucker's boss, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, has long expressed concerns about legalization, last year calling marijuana a "gateway drug." He has since softened his stance and ordered the legalization study earlier this year amid pressure from legalization supporters, including his Democratic primary opponent, "Sex and the City" star Cynthia Nixon. Do not count on legal weed in the Big Apple just yet, however. Lawmakers are scheduled to adjourn for the year this week, suggesting it will be 2019 at the earliest before legalization is considered in Albany. The growing list of states that have moved to legalize recreational marijuana use includes California, Colorado and two of New York's neighbors, Vermont and Massachusetts. Meantime, New Jersey lawmakers are weighing a bill that would bring recreational marijuana to the state while expanding the medical marijuana program. Several Democrats including Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Nixon have said any legalization effort in New York must be accompanied by proposals to expunge the criminal records of thousands of people arrested for possessing small amounts of the drug dating back decades. Individuals on all sides of the marijuana debate said they wanted to hear more about what Cuomo's administration plans to propose. John Coppola, the executive director of the New York Association of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Providers said legalization must incorporate efforts to prevent underage abuse and educate the public about the risks of addiction and misuse. "Their plan must incorporate all of the public health implications of legalization and how negative implications might be mitigated," he said. Cuomo's political opponents dismissed the announcement as a diversion. Zucker's remarks, announced shortly before his appearance, came on the same day as the start of a federal corruption trial of a former Cuomo economic development insider and that former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner announced she would challenge Cuomo as an independent in November. "There are serious questions to be answered about marijuana; they should be answered by serious people without a political agenda," said Katy Delgado, the spokeswoman for Republican gubernatorial candidate Marc Molinaro. "The only thing this governor cares about is his political career." New York has a medical marijuana program allowing patients with certain qualifying conditions to use non-smokable forms of pot. On Monday, Zucker said health officials were planning to expand the program to include anyone who has received a prescription for opioids. A day after a shootout left 17 people shot at a 24-hour arts festival in Trenton, New Jersey's capital city was feeling aftershocks from the stunning gunplay. Among the institutions affected by the shooting at Art All Night were the city's public schools, some of which opted to push back pre-K and kindergarten "move-up" ceremonies that had been scheduled for Monday. A spokeswoman for Trenton Public Schools said the schools elected to reschedule the ceremonies "in light of recent events." "This is not based on any schools being identified for any reason," the spokeswoman, Alexandrea Robinson-Rogers, said. Graduation ceremonies for the district's high schools were still scheduled for next week as of Monday afternoon. Investigators said three people exchanged gunfire inside the historic Roebling Wire Works just before 3 a.m. Sunday as the 24-hour festival was in full swing. One of the men, a 32-year-old reputed Bloods gang member named Tahaij Wells, was shot and killed by police. The two others implicated in the shooting have been hospitalized with injuries of their own, and the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office has yet to announce formal criminal charges. Overall, 17 of the 22 people injured suffered gunshot wounds, authorities said. In a letter to parents and staff on Sunday, Superintendent Fred McDowell said everyone except students and staff would be barred from school buildings "until further notice" under a shelter-in-place safety protocol. "We will continue to take all necessary measures to provide a safe and secure learning environment," he said. Far beyond the doors of the city's classrooms, the art community that fostered the event is still taking stock of what needs to be done to move forward. James Peeples, a former board member of Artworks, which produces Art All Night, said he had been in contact with current board members and described their past few days as nothing short of a nightmare. "I spoke with them to see if they were planning on making any kind of statement to the media and (they) said, 'We can't breathe right now,'" Peeples told NJ Advance Media. Peeples said organizers now face numerous logistical challenges as they try to return the approximately 1,500 pieces of art from the Wire Works, a historic building that is now a crime scene. Artists had come from as far away as South Carolina to have their work featured in the show, he said. "The creative community wants to see this happen again next year," Peeples said. "We want to change the narrative about what Art All Night is. "We want to change the visual and the spoken message about what this city is about, and the beautiful community. We believe the arts and the humanities and the creative community is what is going to bring Trenton back. Music and art and culture and restaurant and alternative things to do are what will revitalize this community." Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Alexis Johnson may be reached at ajohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @alexisjreports. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips Federal authorities seized 51 pounds of methamphetamine and 20 pounds of heroin in a bust Sunday in the Hamilton Marketplace shopping center in Mercer County after receiving a tip from a source about a large drug deal, authorities said. Gabriel Acosta Villa, 29, of Lake Forest, California, and Oscar Perez Jr., 23, a commercial truck driver from Santa Ana, California, appeared in federal court on Monday on multiple drug and conspiracy charges. A judge ordered both men detained. The arrests resulted from a Department of Homeland Security investigation that led to information from a source about the drug deal in the Mercer County area involving a commercial truck driver and an accomplice on Sunday, according to a complaint filed in federal court. Federal agents set up surveillance at the Hamilton Marketplace, a sprawling complex of big box retailers and chain restaurants less than 2 miles from the NJ Turnpike in Hamilton Township, authorities said. Villa was seen walking through the parking lot of the McDonald's at the front of the complex just before midnight Sunday carrying two large bags, authorities said. He got into a minivan parked in the lot and the minivan then drove to another parking area in the complex for a hardware store, according to the complaint. Authorities surrounded the vehicle and found 51.31 pounds of methamphetamine packaged in 1-pound amounts, officials said. Villa was arrested and a search of the area led authorities to Perez, who was walking alone in the nearby loading docks for the hardware store, authorities said. Perez's tractor-trailer was idling at the loading docks and authorities found an additional 20 pounds of heroin in the truck's cab, authorities said. The driver of the minivan involved in the alleged drug deal was not identified by authorities. If convicted, Acosta and Perez face up to life in prison and a mandatory minimum of 10 years. The State Police and Drug Enforcement Administration assisted in the investigation, authorities said. In a second-floor room of Friendship Baptist Church Tuesday morning, surrounded by the state's top law enforcement officials, clergy leaders and Trenton residents, Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri announced that a second man has been officially charged in the Art All Night shooting that left one dead and up to 29 injured. Davone White, 26, of Trenton Davone White, 26, of Trenton, faces multiple weapons offenses, including being in the possession of a large-capacity magazine. He is still being treated for injuries from the shooting, Onofri said. Amir Armstrong, charged on Sunday, is now officially facing one count of possession of a weapon. The prosecutor's office has not detailed White's, Armstrong's, or Tahaij Wells' exact roles or affiliations in regards to the shooting. Wells was shot and killed by police in the exchange of gunfire. Pastor John Taylor invited Onofri and other officials to join the Capital City Community Coalition to discuss recent episodes of violence in Trenton and how to move forward. Onofri identified neighborhood tension and disputes as a major motive in the shooting. "We don't get over this in one instance," Taylor told the residents and community leaders. "No mother births a child for them to become a gang member." Onofri said it's unfortunate that residents are using guns to settle disputes, and that he understands the effects gun violence has on families in Trenton. "It's a hurt and a pain that never goes away, and I know all of you are hurting because of it every day," Onofri said. Onofri also addressed concerns about a Facebook post that warned Art All Night festival-goers about a shooting. He said the message had been posted by a teacher in Hamilton Township about 14 hours before the shooting occurred. He added that the prosecutor's office is attempting to get a formal statement from her, as she is currently in North Carolina. Onofri urged others to call the police if they have inside information, instead of posting on social media. Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said that lax gun laws in other states are to blame for weapons getting into New Jersey and being used in criminal acts. We are going to "name and shame" these other states with loose gun laws, Grewal said. He also discussed targeting violent criminal gangs and aggressively prosecuting them to deter this type of crime. All law enforcement officers who spoke reiterated that the city shouldn't back down from hosting Art All Night and other opportunities for Trenton residents and visitors to come together. Officials and organizers have talked of increased security, but Onofri promised it wouldn't be "a militarized state." Gusciora said there were only four Trenton Police officers at the event because it was a peaceful event that relied on a lot of volunteers for support. "This is a post-Parkland discussion," Gusciora told NJ Advance Media after the press conference. Moving forward, he said, the city will have to work with community church leaders and non-profits and increase the city's recreation budget to give young people options outside of getting involved in violent activities. Onofri added that the artists and organizers waiting to retrieve their work from the scene may be able to do so at some point Tuesday, if the investigation can be wrapped up. Artworks Executive Director Lauren Ortis said all artists should contact Artworks with any questions on when to pick up their work. Ortis told NJ Advance Media Tuesday afternoon that he'd hope to have the artwork out of the Roebling Wire Works building and transfer the pieces to the Artworks building by Wednesday morning, where workers will try to organize pickup times. "We will not accept our city being turned upside down," Pastor Taylor said. Paige Gross may be reached at pgross@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her at @By_paigegross Find NJ.com on Facebook. Gianluca D'Elia may be reached at gdelia@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @gianluca_delia. Find NJ.com on Facebook. For months, her parents say, Mallory Grossman was tormented by texts, Instagram posts and Snapchat messages from classmates. "When are you going to kill yourself," bullies allegedly asked the 12-year-old. On June 14, 2017, she did. Just over a year after their daughter's suicide, Grossman's parents on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Rockaway Township Board of Education and the township itself, alleging Copeland Middle School failed to take any significant action regarding the bullying despite the family's repeated complaints. The lawsuit, which names a variety of school personnel as individual defendants, also alleges the township failed in its responsibility to ensure the safety of children in local schools. Mallory Grossman Messages left with the school district's offices Tuesday, including for Superintendent Greg McGann -- named as an individual defendant in the lawsuit -- were not immediately returned. Rockaway's township attorney, John Iaciofano, on Wednesday told NJ Advance Media the township had not yet been served with the complaint. Iaciofano, who said he believed the township "is in a considerably different position than the school district," indicated the matter would be forwarded to Rockaway's insurance carrier. Dianne and Seth Grossman are represented by attorney Bruce Nagel, of Nagel Rice in Roseland, a high-profile civil litigator well-known for securing multimillion dollar jury awards and settlements. Addressing reporters at his office Tuesday afternoon, flanked by the Grossmans, Nagel said he believed the lawsuit was the first filed in response to a cyber-bullying suicide in New Jersey. Nagel said Mallory Grossman took her life "after the repeated pleas of her parents went unheeded." The family alleges the school failed to implement policies to comply with the state's anti-bullying statute, and that officials advised them not to file a formal complaint under the law. Instead, the complaint states, school officials suggested Mallory eat lunch in a guidance office instead of the lunchroom to avoid her harassers, whom she was forced to hug in an apparent attempt at reconciliation. "The school had a very basic obligation: to keep (its) young students safe," Nagel said. The Grossmans' first announced their intent to sue the school district in July 2017. Under state law, notice of a civil claim against a public entity must be given at least six months before the actual complaint is filed. "At this stage, we have not brought a lawsuit against the four families whose children bullied Mallory," Nagel said, adding that those families have nonetheless been put on notice for possible legal action. In the year since her daughter's death, Dianne Grossman has become a devoted anti-bullying advocate, leading a group called "Mallory's Army." Dianne and Seth Grossman Speaking to reporters, she said it was impossible to recover from experience of losing a child to suicide. "It changes your DNA," she said. "The good news," Grossman said, "is we have an amazing amount of community support." The township's Board of Education has previously called the Grossmans' allegations "categorically false," but declined to elaborate Tuesday, citing an ongoing investigation by the Morris County Prosecutor's Office. Nagel on Tuesday said the family has not received notice as to the status of that investigation. In the wake of the controversy over Mallory Grossman's death, McGann in January announced he would resign from his position on July 1, a day after his three-year contract with the district expires. The complaint, filed in state Superior Court in Morris County, seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages to be determined by the court. Note: This story has been updated with comment from Rockaway's township attorney. Alex Napoliello contributed to this report. For more information on suicide prevention, visit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's website or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Thomas Moriarty may be reached at tmoriarty@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ThomasDMoriarty. Have a tip? Tell us: nj.com/tips. An unapologetic President Donald Trump defended his administration's border-protection policies Monday in the face of rising national outrage over the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. Calling for tough action against illegal immigration, Trump declared the U.S. "will not be a migrant camp" on his watch. Images of children held in fenced cages fueled a growing chorus of condemnation from both political parties, four former first ladies and national evangelical leaders. The children are being held separately from parents who are being prosecuted under the administration's "zero-tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings. "I say it's very strongly the Democrats' fault," Trump said Monday as his administration rejected criticism that the policy has resulted in inhuman and immoral conditions. Trump pointed to more lenient policies under past administrations that had not charged all migrants who had crossed illegally. "We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do," Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in an appearance before the National Sheriffs' Association in New Orleans. "Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards." Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new "zero-tolerance" policy that refers all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. Prior procedure had limited prosecution for many family entrants, in part because regulations prohibit detaining children with their parents since the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are. The policy change was meant to deter unlawful crossings -- and Sessions issued a warning last month to those entering the U.S. illegally that their children "inevitably for a period of time might be in different conditions." The current holding areas have drawn widespread attention after journalists gained access to one site Sunday. At a McAllen, Texas, detention center hundreds of immigrant children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets. Administration officials said they do not like the family separations either -- calling it the result of legal loopholes -- but insist migrants who arrive illegally simply won't be released or loosely kept track of. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," Trump declared. "Not on my watch." Sessions, on Monday, echoed the administration's defense of the zero tolerance policy, and called on Congress to act. "We do not want to separate parents from their children," he said. "If we build the wall, if we pass legislation to end the lawlessness, we won't face these terrible choices." Mindful of the national outcry, lawmakers in both parties rushed Monday to devise a targeted legislative fix. GOP senators, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine, said they were considering legislation that would keep migrant families together; provide additional judges so detained families would face shorter waiting periods; and provide facilities for the families to stay. Graham said he talked Mondayto about 40 senators, including Democrats, but not Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "It's a concept it seems everybody is jumping on board," he said. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she had the backing of the Democratic caucus for a bill would that prohibit the separation of migrant children from their parents, with exceptions for findings of child abuse or trafficking. But the White House signaled it would oppose any narrow fix aimed solely at addressing the plight of children separated from their parents under the immigration crackdown. Press secretary Sarah Sanders said Trump's priorities, like funding a border wall and tightening immigration laws, must also be fulfilled as part of any legislation. "We want to fix the whole thing," she said. "We don't want to tinker with just part of it." The national debate over the family separation policy comes as Republican lawmakers are growing ever more concerned about negative effects on their re-election campaigns this fall. Trump is to travel to Capitol Hill Tuesday for a strategy session on upcoming immigration legislation. Underscoring the sensitivity of the issue, language curbing the taking of immigrant children from parents held in custody will be added to the House's conservative immigration bill, a House GOP aide said Monday, A similar provision is already in a compromise GOP immigration measure between party conservatives and moderates, with the House expected to vote on both late this week. The administration is hoping to force Democrats to vote for the bills or bear some of the political cost in November's midterm elections. White House officials have privately embraced the border policy as a negotiating tactic to win votes for legislation to fulfill the president's pledge to build a border wall and to tighten the nation's immigration laws. Trump's commitment to the current policy showed no sign of faltering as voices of outrage and condemnation grew louder and more diverse. In Massachusetts, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker reversed a decision to send a state National Guard helicopter to the southern border, citing what he called the administration's "cruel and inhumane" policy of separating children from their parents. The Rev. Franklin Graham, a longtime Trump ally, called the policy "disgraceful." Several religious groups, including some conservative ones, have pushed to stop the practice of separating immigrant children from their parents. The Mormon church said it was "deeply troubled" by the separation of families and urged national leaders to find compassionate solutions. Former first lady Laura Bush called the policy "cruel" and "immoral," and said it was "eerily reminiscent" of the U.S. internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. On Capitol Hill, Republicans joined Democrats in calling for an end to the separations. Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton called for an immediate end to this "ugly and inhumane practice," adding, "It's never acceptable to use kids as bargaining chips in political process." Kansas GOP Sen. Pat Roberts said he is "against using parental separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration." And GOP Rep. Mike Coffman warned, "History won't remember well those who support the continuation of this policy." The familiar smile was gone when Gov. Phil Murphy marched to the podium Monday to declare political war on the legislative leaders of his own party. This was a new Phil Murphy, one we didn't see during his relentlessly upbeat campaign. On Monday, he acted like a guy who had just been slapped in the face and was not about to put up with it. "I'm not going to certify a budget based on gimmicks," he said, promising a veto. "When you build a financial house of cards year after year, and see it fall year after year, at some point you have to realize the same old way of doing business in Trenton isn't working." This week, Murphy faces his first big test. Until now, he's scored mostly easy points on Democratic touchstones, like gun control and Planned Parenthood. Now, it's about money -- and the Legislature is pushing back hard. If they can't agree, the state government will shut down on July 1, which only raises the stakes on all sides. The core problem is that the Legislature is refusing the governor's request for a modest bump in the millionaire's tax, and a mini-bump in the sales tax of less than one-half of 1 percent. Instead, they are giving him a magic budget, full of fake spending cuts that they promise will cause no pain for anyone. How fake is this budget? The Legislature wants to spend about the same amount as Murphy proposed, according to Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, D-Middlesex, and Senate President Steve Sweeney D-Gloucester. They just won't impose the taxes needed to cover the cost, even on millionaires. Voila! Magic! That math can't work, of course. So, legislators listed hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, mostly based on audits that have yet to be completed. That's sort of like enjoying a fancy dinner based on faith that you will eventually find a way to pay for it. Murphy, who grew up in the business world, was incredulous. "I can't put that in the bank," he said. "Count me in for audits. But I can't certify that, based on an audit that is yet to be done." I found myself feeling sorry for the man on Monday. Yes, he's made a ton of rookie mistakes that point to his background in the business world, where a leader can give orders that are obeyed. He's made little effort to show respect to Democratic leaders, to solicit their advice, or to give them half of what they want. When he was asked to name a single concession he offered to Sweeney and Coughlin during their failed negotiations in recent weeks, he could not do so. Democratic legislators are furious about that, and even the Republican leader, Assemblyman Jon Bramnick, R-Union, couldn't resist piling on. "He's not negotiating with Democratic leadership, and he's not talking to Republican leadership," he said. "This is not a dictatorship." But on the substance, Murphy is the adult in the room this time. Murphy's tax hikes are modest, about one-third as large as Gov. Jim Florio's notorious 1990 hikes, which led to a decade of Republican control in Trenton. And Murphy, again unlike Florio, aimed his taxes mostly at the wealthy, and told us during the campaign that he intended to hike taxes by $1.4 billion, close to the sum he proposed. Sweeney and Coughlin are not opposing all tax hikes. They would replace the millionaire's tax with a bump in the corporate tax rate, a move that would make New Jersey's top rate the highest in the country. But they would make it temporary, for just two years, as if they want the state to stay in the red forever. The tougher standoff is on the sales tax, which Murphy relies on to raise just under $600 million. The rate was 7 percent until Gov. Chris Christie cut it by 3/8 of a penny in return for his support of a hike in the gas tax, and now Murphy wants to put it back where it was. That's right. The nub of this fight is over less than a half penny of sales tax. Democratic legislators are sabotaging the agenda of their own governor, and threatening to shut down government, just to save Christie's meaningless cut in the sales tax of less than one-half a percent. That is the head-slapper at the center of all this. The ball now is with the Legislature, which intends to approve its budget by Thursday, even though it won't be introduced until Tuesday. So, we can be pretty sure that most legislators will be blindly following the orders of the bosses. And, of course, the public will have no chance whatsoever to stand up and challenge the magic budget. That's by design. "This is another example of small-room decision making," says Gordon MacInnes, a former state senator who runs New Jersey Policy Perspective, a respected liberal think-tank. "They're coming up with a plan and ramming it through the Legislature without time to consider it. This is why we're in a hole." I suspect these guys will make a deal before the state shuts down. But thanks to the Legislature, it's bound to be a lousy budget that does nothing to dig us out of our hole. Because for better or worse, this is not a dictatorship. 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. One of the most amusing aspects of Donald Trump's endlessly amusing 2016 presidential campaign was his penchant for ending his speeches to the tune of the Rolling Stone's song "You Can't Always Get What you Want." I never quite figured out how that applied to Trump. But it sure does seem to apply to Phil Murphy. The governor came to Trenton earlier this year bearing a long list of things he expected his fellow Democrats in the Legislature to do. They gave him some of the simpler requests, such as pay equity and stricter gun laws. But when it came to the big, shiny hood ornaments he wanted for some future campaign bus, his fellow Dems didn't budge. He biggest and shiniest was an increase in the so-called "millionaires tax." That was first adopted in 2004 under Gov. McGreevey and is still in effect at 8.97 percent for incomes over $500,000 annually. The keystone of Murphy's budget is a millionaires tax with a top rate of 10.75 percent kicking in at a million bucks a year. Sweeney originally supported that increase. But then the Trump tax plan came along and ended deductibility of state income taxes against federal taxes. Sweeney then took the tax out of the budget for Fiscal 2019, which begins July 1 and replaced it with a hike in the corporate tax. That and a lot of other changes in the Murphy's proposed budget led to a pair of dueling press conferences on Monday. Murphy went first. He told reporters, "I will not sign any budget based on numbers that I believe are not sound and sustainable." He made it clear that the budget in question is the one Sweene said and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin say they will put on the governor's desk after passage by both houses Thursday. That led to a press conference later in the day at which Sweeney and Coughlin ripped into fellow Democrat Murphy for what Sweeney said was unprecedented intransigence. "This is the ninth budget I've worked on and I've never been told to pass the budget without any changes," Sweeney said. For anyone who didn't get the point, Sweeney said of Murphy that at a meeting last week "He said, 'I like my budget. Pass my budget,' almost in those words." That's when I found myself singing that old Stones song in my head. Sweeney ended his formal education at Pennsauken High School. Murphy ended his with an MBA from the Wharton School after his undergrad days at Harvard. One might assume that those credentials would give the Wharton grad a big advantage over the Pennsauken grad in a fight. But Sweeney knows his turf, which is the state constitution. It gives the Senate and Assembly leaders great powers over the governor in these fights. The governor can't sign what they don't put in front of him. That's what led to that government shutdown last year that ended when Chris Christie got photographed sunning himself with friends and family at an Island Beach State Park that was closed to the public. Note to Gov. Murphy: If you decide to shut the government down on July 1, stay away from Island Beach State Park. I suspect that's why Sweeney and Coughlin intend to pass this budget nine days before the deadline. That puts the ball in Murphy's court. And it's a real curveball - if I may mix my metaphors the way Murphy likes to. If he were a bit craftier, Murphy might simply sit on that budget and urge his fellow Democrats to send a better one by the end of next week. But the minute he vetoes the budget, any shutdown is on him. And then there's that pesky constitution. It permits the Legislature to override vetoes with a two-thirds vote. Republican minority leaders Tom Kean Jr. and Jon Bramnick, of the Senate and Assembly respectively, would have great fun pondering ways they could ride to the rescue after a few days of shut-down beaches and parks. After Murphy's spiel, Bramnick was quoted as saying "They may need votes for an override, and in that case, we may need a new budget completely." That would be a budget much less to Murphy's liking than the one he'll see on Thursday. If I were the governor, I'd dig up a copy of that old Stones hit and listen to the lyrics. As Mick Jagger said, you can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need. BELOW: The wrap-up to Donald Trump's rally in Hershey, Pa., in 2016: New Jersey's attorney general on Monday ordered all state troopers and state and county prosecutors undergo anti-discrimination training as part of a sweeping directive aimed at improving diversity in law enforcement. The move comes as the attorney general's own office is fighting a lawsuit filed by three deputy attorneys alleging widespread discrimination and the State Police continues to struggle to diversify its ranks. In a memo to division leaders at the state Department of Law and Public Safety, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal outlined eight diversity initiatives, including a "redoubling" of efforts to recruit more minority troopers, more training to prevent "implicit bias" and new human resources programs. "One of New Jersey's greatest strengths is the diversity of its residents," Grewal wrote, adding that "we have a special responsibility to reflect and promote that diversity." According to state employment data, about 79 percent of troopers are white and more than 95 percent are male. In an ongoing civil suit filed last year, three current and former deputy attorneys general alleged that while leadership within the Attorney General's Office included women and people of color, only about 44 of its more than 700 deputy attorneys general were African American. Grewal outlined the new initiatives at a meeting of the attorney general's diversity council, which includes two of the deputies who filed suit, Diane Scott and Phillip Dowdell. An attorney for the deputies, Linda Niedweske, applauded the attorney general's announcement, but said his office had refused to back down in the discrimination suit, which alleges the civil and criminal divisions had "systematically discriminated against" their black employees. Just issued a Department-wide memo to promote diversity. Mandatory implicit bias training, new efforts to recruit and retain talented @NJSP troopers, and a greater focus on diversity when we hire outside law firms for the states legal work. Read more here: pic.twitter.com/ug4kaLL8EM AG Gurbir Grewal (@NewJerseyOAG) June 18, 2018 Grewal, the nation's first Sikh attorney general, was named to the post in January by Gov. Phil Murphy, who came to office touting the diversity of his cabinet. Yet Niedweske said she was "continuing to receive calls from individuals employed by the state under the Attorney General's Office claiming discriminatory behavior." "Whatever initiatives from the new administration have not filtered down yet, so people are still facing the consequences" of discrimination, she said. A spokesman for the office declined to comment on the suit, which is ongoing in Superior Court in Essex County. The State Police has for decades faced allegations of racial profiling and discrimination among its ranks, and earlier this year paid $1.4 million to settle a lawsuit from a former black trooper who claimed he received unfavorable assignments for raising the alarm about racial bias in internal affairs practices. In a statement, Col. Patrick Callahan, the acting head of the State Police, said he was "in lock step" with the attorney general's push for diversity. Representatives of the largest state troopers' union did not respond to a message seeking comment. S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook. The message of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps' missile attack on a Daesh (ISIS) stronghold in Syria's Deir ez-Zor last year, was promising for friends and disappointing for enemies, said Iran's military attache in Damascus. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - The message of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps' missile attack on a Daesh (ISIS) stronghold in Syria's Deir ez-Zor last year, was promising for friends and disappointing for enemies, said Iran's military attache in Damascus. Abolqassem Alinejad made the remarks on the anniversary of IRGC's attack against Daesh in the eastern Syrian city. Iran missile attack on Daesh headquarters came few days after the terrorist group launched two separate attacks in the Iranian capital killing 18 and wounding 56 others. Alinejad said that IRGC's missile attack was a warning for all the regional and extra-regional supporters of Daesh. The terrorists and their supporters should know that they will receive a firm response if they repeat their illicit acts, he said. Noting that targeting Daesh centers in Deir ez-Zor demonstrated the strength of Iran to the world, the diplomat said that the Zionist regime has got to know that if a little is added to the range of the Iranian missiles, they will be able to hit target in the Occupied Lands. The missiles used in Deir ez-Zor operation were of medium-range type, he said, while noting that the IRGC also possesses many long-range missiles. /129 A familiar figure resurfaced Monday amid heated state budget negotiations: former Gov. Chris Christie The administration of new Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, latched onto a report Monday saying Christie, his Republican predecessor, is advising New Jersey's Democratic state Senate president in a budget standoff with Murphy. Murphy spokesman Dan Bryan said Christie's "fingerprints" are "all over" the budget proposal that state Senate President Stephen Sweeney is pushing as a rival to Murphy's first state budget plan. "It's no surprise that Chris Christie supports this budget and has his fingerprints all over it," Bryan said in a statement. "The Legislature's budget relies on the same failed, short-term strategies that got us into this mess in the first place, jeopardizing long-term investments in NJ Transit, public schools, and property tax relief." Even though Murphy and Sweeney -- the state's highest-ranking elected officials -- are both Democrats, the two are in a fierce battle over the state budget with less than two weeks to go before one must be enacted by June 30. As Murphy and Sweeney presided over dueling news conference in Trenton to push their respective plans, political website New Jersey Globe published a story saying an anonymous source overhead Christie on a train to Washington on Monday boasting of helping Sweeney with his message. The source claimed Christie -- who finished his tenure with the lowest approval ratings any New Jersey governor in history -- said he is "coordinating" with Sweeney. New Jersey Globe is run by David Wildstein, the admitted mastermind behind the political retribution scheme known as Bridgegate, which plagued Christie's final term. Wildstein pleaded guilty to federal crimes in the George Washington Bridge lane closings after striking a deal with prosecutors to testify against other Christie administration officials. Despite hailing from opposite parties, Christie and Sweeney often struck deals over the last eight years. Sweeney and Murphy, meanwhile, have feuded over the first few months of the new governor's tenure. Sweeney was asked during his news conference Monday whether he's "had any conversations with the former governor in recent times, in the last number of days, or today." "No," Sweeney responded."No, I haven't talked to him today." "Listen, I don't need the governor to help me with this, OK?" he added, referring to Christie. Shortly thereafter, Murphy's office emailed a copy of the Globe story to reporters. Murphy, who succeeded Christie in January after campaigning as the anti-Christie, is pushing a $37.4 billion budget plan that proposes more than $1.5 billion in tax hikes -- including a millionaires tax and a bump in the state sales tax -- to pay for increases in funding for transportation, education, and more. But his fellow Democrats in the Legislature have been opposed to those tax hikes and plan to unveil a budget proposal of their own. Their plan is expected to be anchored by a two-year tax hike on corporations instead. Murphy on Monday morning vowed to veto that plan if it comes to his desk, raising the possibility of a second state government shutdown in two years. "As I said before, the people of New Jersey did not send us here to keep practicing Chris Christie's broken politics," Murphy told reporters. "The last eight years hollowed out our middle class. ... We were sent here to fix Trenton." The governor and lawmakers have until June 30 to enact a balanced budget. Otherwise, the state government could shut down again. Christie famously was governor during the last shutdown, last July. Sweeney and state Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin, D-Middlesex, said Monday afternoon they are pushing forward with their budget despite Murphy's veto threat. Sweeney said lawmakers will not be "bullied into doing the wrong thing." The source in the Globe report claimed Christie is encouraging Sweeney to call Murphy's bluff on the veto threat because Democrats who control the state Legislature might have enough votes to override Murphy. The source added that Christie was also calling some Republican state senators to feel out if they would support a veto override if there was a new bill without tax hikes. It's unlikely Christie would support the corporate business tax in the lawmakers' budget plan. Assembly Minority Leader Jon Bramnick, the top Republican in the Legislature's lower house and a longtime Christie ally, suggested Monday he would be open to joining with Democrats on a veto override -- but only if there's a new budget. NJ Advance Media staff writer Matt Arco contributed to this report. Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. Gov. Phil Murphy on Tuesday sharply criticized President Donald Trump's "inhumane and cruel policy" of separating families of undocumented immigrants and putting "children in cages" and said New Jersey won't have anything to do with it. Murphy, a Democrat, also announced plans to sign an executive order that would "prevent any state resources from being used to help federal authorities separate families." His announcement comes amid furor over Trump's policies that have come under intense scrutiny following reports of the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. "New Jersey will not be a party to this utterly inhumane policy," Murphy, a frequent critic of the Republican president, said at a news conference in Trenton on a separate subject. "This is a matter of human rights, human dignity and basic humanity," he added. "Housing children in cages should send chills down the spine of any right-thinking American." Under the current policy, all unlawful crossings are referred for prosecution -- a process that moves adults to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and sends many children to facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Images of children held in fenced cages fueled a growing chorus of condemnation from both political parties, four former first ladies and national evangelical leaders. The children are being held separately from parents who are being prosecuted under the administration's "zero-tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings. "This is America," Murphy said. "We know better and we can do better." The order will also ensure New Jersey National Guard resources aren't used to support the Trump administration policy. Under the administration of former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, such families were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, not requiring separation. Trump on Monday again falsely blamed Democrats -- the minority party in Washington -- for obstructing legislation to fix the situation. "Let's be perfectly clear, our federal law mandates no such action," Murphy said. "This is an appalling policy choice implemented by President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and White House advisor Stephen Miller -- and them alone," he said. Murphy's latest executive order comes the same day New Jersey's attorney general, Gurbir Grewal, sent a letter to Sessions that demanded the nation's top prosecutor immediately halt the practice of separating families. "As a career prosecutor, I've seen that law enforcement works best when it has the trust of local communities, and the heartlessness of the administration's family separation policy is undermining the trust we've worked so hard to build," Grewal said in a statement. Grewal joined 21 other state attorney generals who sent letters to Sessions to oppose the policy. In response, a Department of Justice spokesman, Devin O'Malley, said the administration has no choice but to enforce laws enacted by Congress. "This is not an option for this administration," O'Malley said in a statement. "Failure to enforce the law on our Southwest Border has only led to predictable results--heroin and fentanyl pushed by Mexican cartels plague our communities, a surge in MS-13 gang members, and an increase in the number of human trafficking prosecutions, and we are determined to combat them first by fully enforcing the laws that Congress gave us." The text of Murphy's executive order wasn't immediately available at the time the governor announced he'd sign the order. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewArco or Facebook. In one case, a man addicted to heroin stole manhole covers and brought them to scrap yards, earning 10 cents a pound, which fed his habit. In another, a young woman led a crew that shoplifted more than $100,000 in merchandise from retail chains and returned it for gift cards, which she pawned for 50 cents on the dollar to fend off dope sickness. "I was nervous going into the scrap yard with that stuff, because I thought they are going to see what this is, plain and simple, and call the cops, you know?" the man told state investigators. But, he said a friend assured him, "No, watch how easy it is." The State Commission of Investigation, an independent watchdog created by the state Legislature to investigate public corruption and organized crime, released a 108-page report on Tuesday detailing the illicit trade between scrap yards and pawn shops and the drug addicts who fund their addiction by selling stolen goods and materials for cash. The commission found that poorly regulated pawn shops, scrap yards and cash-for-gold stores had exchanged tens of millions of dollars for pilfered building materials, stolen goods and public utility property brought in by those in the grip of addiction. The sale of ill-gotten goods and raw materials for fast money is nothing new, but commission investigators found the practice was booming apace with the addiction crisis, turning these businesses into "de facto cash machines for addicts." The report found employees at such businesses in some cases directed regular customers to steal "in-demand items" they could resell at a profit. "The enormous cost of the illicit bargain between thieves and unscrupulous owners are borne by all New Jersey residents: the ratepayers who see higher bills for cell service and electricity; the consumers who pay more for goods at retail stores; the taxpayers ultimately responsible for replacing infrastructure that has vanished in the night," the report states. In Gloucester County, more than a third of those who died from drug overdoses in 2016 appeared in a database of transactions at resale shops -- in some cases dozens of times. Four in 10 victims from Ocean County treated with the overdose-reversing medication Narcan appeared in the system, the report found. Shop employees and customers testified to the commission that some businesses routinely flouted what little oversight currently exists, including requirements that operators check IDs and report suspicious activity to police. The money was good, investigators found. Richard Santaniello, whom the commission identified as "a crooked scrap metal dealer" who had multiple men with mob ties on the payroll, owned a half-million dollar vacation home and a 32-foot boat named "No Hassle." Investigators found more than $165 million moved in and out of a scrap yard business account subpoenaed by the commission over the course of three and a half years. Santaniello, who could not be reached for comment, invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination more than 100 times when he was called to testify in front of the commission. Other pawn shop and scrap yard operators accused of wrongdoing in the report responded in writing to the commission, arguing they ran reputable businesses and were being maligned by disgruntled former employees and customers trying to cover up for their own crimes. The commission noted it was "mindful" that most companies doing business in those industries provide valuable services. Still, it found, lack of oversight had created a "shadowy underground economy" that had been "exploited for profit across the state by convicted felons and elements of organized crime." "In business after business, commission investigators identified owners and employees with extensive criminal histories, including convictions for fraud, burglary, receiving stolen property, assault, firearms violations, narcotics distribution and racketeering," the report noted. "The SCI found evidence of drug-dealing directly from the counter at one shop, the illegal sale of handguns at another and links to a mob-related loansharking scheme at a third." The report included recommendations for reforms, including putting the State Police in charge of licensing scrap yards and secondhand stores and requiring criminal background checks for owners and employees. It also advised monthly caps on cash payments to sellers and creating a more robust database of sales accessible by law enforcement. In Maryland, such a database helped authorities recover nearly $44 million in stolen property between 2010 and 2017. State Sen. Joseph Vitale, D-Middlesex, told NJ Advance Media it was no surprise that those suffering from addiction would turn to theft, but said the state should do more to prevent those who would enable them. "It's worth taking a look at what Maryland's done and see if we should be doing something more here," he said. The findings were sent to the state Attorney General's Office and the state Legislature for review. A spokesman for Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said his office "will be reviewing the report." A spokesman for Gov. Phil Murphy did not return messages seeking comment. S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook. WASHINGTON -- Two-thirds of Americans oppose President Donald Trump's policy of separating children from parents seeking to enter the U.S. without permission, according to two polls released Monday. The Trump administration policy was opposed by 66 percent of U.S. voters in the Quinnipiac University Poll, with just 27 percent in support. In a CBS News survey of American adults, 67 percent said it was unacceptable, with 17 percent approving. "When does public opinion become a demand that politicians just can't ignore?" said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll. "Two-thirds of American voters oppose the family separation policy at our borders. Neither quotes from the Bible nor get-tough talk can soften the images of crying children nor reverse the pain so many Americans feel." Attorney General Jeff Sessions had justified the policy by quoting a passage from the Christian New Testament that in the past was used to support slavery. "I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order," Sessions said Thursday in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Several Democratic representatives from New Jersey and New York visited the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Elizabeth Sunday to criticize a policy in which children are taken away even from refugees who cross the border and then request asylum from American authorities. They are being held in terrible conditions. They dont know where their children have been taken. They dont know when they will see them again. Congress can no longer act like this isnt happening. We must put an end to these inhumane practices. #FamiliesBelongTogether Albio Sires (@RepSires) June 17, 2018 U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. said Monday that those fleeing to the U.S. are worried that their families will be killed if they don't. "Asylum, which is been part of the United States law since I can remember it - even before - is an opportunity to make that claim and let the United States know that you have a legitimate fear of your life or liberty at stake," said Menendez, D-N.J., at a press conference in Springfield. "Believe me, these mothers wouldn't be taking their children on a dangerous journey, thousands of miles, if they had some other choice." Trump, meanwhile, continued to blame Democrats for the failure of the Republican-controlled Congress to pass any immigration legislation, which would end the administration's practice of separating children from their parents. "If the Democrats would sit down instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly, good for the children, good for country, good for the world," Trump said Monday at a meeting of the National Space Council. Gov. Phil Murphy said Monday that the blame lay with the president. "Let's be perfectly clear - the choice to implement this appalling policy is a choice President Trump, and no one else, made," Murphy said. "It has no basis in law or scripture. The ability to do the right thing rests on his shoulders, and his alone." Trump rejected earlier bipartisan efforts to find a compromise on immigration, saying he did not want people from "shithole countries" to come to the U.S. It is the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime. Tell them to start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration. Change the laws! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country. Has anyone been looking at the Crime taking place south of the border. It is historic, with some countries the most dangerous places in the world. Not going to happen in the U.S. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 And House Republicans excluded Democrats from drafting immigration legislation they may bring to the floor this week. A petition to force consideration of a bipartisan measure fell two signatures short. One GOP-drafted bill would provide a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, known as dreamers, who now face deportation because Trump rescinded President Barack Obama's policy allowing them to remain in the country. About 17,400 dreamers lived in New Jersey as of Sept. 4, 2017, ninth highest among the 50 states. That measure also would fully fund the border wall Trump said Mexico would pay for and make other changes to restrict legal immigration. Rep. Tom MacArthur, who criticized Trump's decision to revoke the protections for dreamers, said he would support the GOP measure. "The separation of children from their fathers and mothers must stop immediately," said MacArthur, R-3rd Dist. "I believe that we have finally reached a compromise solution in Congress that protects our borders, gives dreamers a legal path forward without letting them jump the line, and stops the administration from separating families." Voters supported allowing the dreamers to stay and eventually become citizens, 79 percent to 15 percent, while opposing Trump's wall, 58 percent to 39 percent, in the Quinnipiac poll. The dreamers were supported by 85 percent of Americans in the CBS poll, with 12 percent opposing letting them stay. A majority of Americans, 52 percent, said they supported letting the dreamers stay in exchange for building a wall along the U.S southern border, while 39 percent opposed such a deal. The Quinnipiac poll of 905 voters was conducted June 14-17 and had a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points. The CBS News poll of 1,100 adults was conducted June 14-17 and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points. Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook. By Taylor Tiamoyo Harris | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com The Bronx has Jenny from the block, Toronto has Drake's View from the 6 and Somerville has Skinny from the 9. Skinny and his posse are being called out, however, for their possibly criminal behavior. A recent video shows the 22-year-old rapper and his crew stomping another rapper named "Loon G" on the floor Saturday morning outside a local 7-Eleven. One resident, who asked for anonymity for fear of being attacked, said this isn't the first time the rapper has spent his free time causing havoc around town. And a man named Mike, who returned a reporter's call to the rapper, whose legal name is David Villegas, and identified himself as the rapper's representative but wouldn't give his last name, acknowledged that Skinny knows there have been complaints. "It's just been happening a lot lately where other people from the neighborhood try to build their careers off of having some kind of incident with the artist because it helps propel them into the spotlight," Mike said. Don't Edit It was self defense, the rapper's rep says Addressing the fight, Mike said the video, obtained by NJ Advance Media, does not tell the full story. He said the rapper's actions as seen on the video clip were in self-defense. According to the police report, the incident was classified as a simple assault. Police arrived on the scene about 20 minutes after the incident, and by then both parties had left and police had to rely on witnesses, who gave them an account of the incident. Police found the rapper's bodyguards who told them they acted in self-defense. The alleged victim who police found in the emergency room at a hospital later that morning denied being at the 7-Eleven. No charges have been filed against Villegas at the time. Don't Edit Skinnyfromthe9 continues to drop some out-of-this-world visuals https://t.co/JBundQdVFu XXL Magazine (@XXL) June 5, 2018 So who is this guy? Not to be confused with "Skinny, a hip hop artist born in Saudi Arabia, Villegas is a YouTube rapper whose rap name stems from his 908 area code. According to XXL, he was born poor, often homeless and parentless. After his dad went to prison, he worked scams and identity fraud hustles with his mom and stepfather. Then his step-dad went to prison, too. He moved to Somerville to be with his dad, and it's there that he began chasing his dream to be a popular rapper. Back in January, the rapper joined fellow Paterson rapper Fetty Wap's tour in January. One of his most popular singles "Love Blast," has had more than 3.5 million streams on SoundCloud. And several his YouTube video, "Back when I was broke" has more than 2 million views. Don't Edit And the crowd goes wild! Mike said Skinny has been going around town, giving out money to students because he wants to "give back" to the community. This, he said, has sparked a lot of jealously. Don't Edit Skinny's a success, his friends say "He's actually been doing really well in his career and doesn't have any reason to go around causing problems," said Mike. The video views on his music have garnered anywhere between a few thousand to more than 2 million. Don't Edit Don't Edit File photo A few problems with the police Somerville police would not say if there were complaints about Skinny, aka David Villegas. But records show he has had some previous issues with police. According to court records, Villegas has had a number of minor incidents in the past four years ranging from shoplifting and public nuisance, to reckless driving and harassment. But eight minor charges were all disposed and two warrents were dismissed. Don't Edit Back When I Was Broke music video out now going crazy! New music video when its hits 1 Million! youtu.be/wLn2Mx_j0Hw Posted by Skinnyfromthe9 on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 So is he a criminal? The resident said they're not afraid of Skinny himself and his brothers, who are also thin, but do fear members of his posse, "because the money they pay thugs to beat people badly." Still, Skinny's camp says those casting the artist as a gangster are indeed wrong. "He's not roaming around fighting people on video because that's not what he's about," Mike said. "He's with his dad and brothers helping people. If you consider that a gang, you're out of your mind." Don't Edit Taylor Tiamoyo Harris may be reached at tharris@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @ladytiamoyo. Find NJ.com on Facebook Don't Edit Other stories you may like Meet the rapper whose Star-Ledger song landed him a tour with Fetty Wap She was an escort and an inmate. Now, this N.J. rapper has her own documentary Rapper Juelz Santana busted for leaving loaded gun at Newark Airport WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Clint Frazier was informed Sunday at 6 p.m. that he was being called up by the Yankees, who are finishing a suspended game and making up a rained-out game Monday at Nationals Park. The outfielder figured he was returning to the big leagues to be the Yankees' 26th man again for Monday's second game against the Washington Nationals as he traveled with the Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders by bus back to Scranton on Sunday night. Frazier still thought that was the plan Monday morning when he traveled from Scranton to D.C. via car service to meet up with the Yankees, and he still thought that as of Monday afternoon when he talked to reporters at Nationals Park. "I'm going for 26th man of the year," joked Frazier, who recently was called up to be the Yankees' extra player for a makeup doubleheader in Detroit only to be optioned right back to Triple-A after the two games. Wrong. Turns out reliever Giovanny Gallegos was summoned in from Triple-A to be the Yankees' 26th man for Monday's regular game - MLB isn't permitting them to have a 26th player for the suspended game - and Frazier is sticking around at least for a few days. Frazier was in the clubhouse dining room eating a pre-game meal Monday when the Yankees released surprising news that he was called up as a replacement for utility infielder Ronald Torreyes, who was farmed out for the second time in 24 days. Why sent down Torreyes again? Left fielder Brett Gardner has been dealing with a sore right knee, and even though he was feeling better by Monday and could be starting within a couple of days, the Yankees wanted to bring in Frazier to give them four healthy outfielders. "Basically it comes down to Gardy to a degree being a little questionable although he's doing a lot better and we don't think it's a DL situation," Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. "So we just felt like we needed to be covered with an extra outfielder, so that forced us to make the swap out there. "So obviously another difficult (roster) decision, but one we felt like covers us and makes the most sense for us right now." Boone said Torreyes took the news well. Torreyes rejoined the Yankees on June 9 after being optioned on May 26 with a .339 average, but appeared in just two games during his second big-league stint and was 0 for 3. "We were trying to work out something to where we didn't have to do it," Boone said. "He took the news like a pro and he wanted to know where Scranton was right away so he could get going." As for Gardner, he was encouraged after waking up Monday morning feeling much better. "I woke up in the middle of the night Saturday night and Sunday morning (sore)," he said. "I never had any leg issues or knee issues before, so it was kind of alarming for me. So I went to get an MRI to get a good look at it to see what we're dealing with. Gardner was relieved after getting a precautionary MRI on Monday that just showed just inflammation. Gardner is unlikely to play at all Monday - he pinch-hit in the first part of the suspended game on May 15 and he's not starting the regular game - and he'll probably be rested again Tuesday when the Yankees open a three-game series at home against the Seattle Mariners. "I feel like I'll be able to play within the next day or two hopefully," Gardner said. Boone isn't ruling that out. "I feel like there's a chance he's playing games in the Seattle series, but Clint, I think, even in that scenario for the short term will be a part of that," the manager said. Frazier returned with a .375 average in eight at-bats with the Yankees in two previous short stints and a .312 average with seven homers in 38 Triple-A games. The best guess is that Torreyes spends 10 days in Triple-A and then replaces Frazier. By rule that is the quickest the Yankees can bring Torreyes back without another player going on the DL. "I told (Torreyes) I want him back here, and hopefully that's sooner rather than later," Boone said. Randy Miller may be reached at rmiller@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @RandyJMiller. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said Tue. that the Saudi-led coalition war against Yemen is turning in favor of victory for the Yemenis. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said Tue. that the Saudi-led coalition war against Yemen is turning in favor of victory for the Yemenis. Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari made the remark on Tuesday, referring to the recent clashes in Hudaidah, Yemens principal port on the Red Sea, between Yemeni forces and the big coalition of Americans and Europeans formed with reactionary states in region. The UAE, as part of the Saudi-led coalition waging war on Yemen since 2015, launched the Hudaida assault on Wednesday, which culminated in clashes that, according to a Yemeni military source, left 50 Saudi-backed forces dead and destroyed 13 of their armored vehicles. Yemeni forces also confiscated a French ship off Hudaidas coast, according to Mohammad al-Bakhiti, a member of political bureau of Ansarullah movement. Elsewhere, the IRGC commander censured the US for its lack of commitment to the nuclear deal, and leveled criticism at those inside Iran who were calling for negotations between Iran and US president Trump. He said the North Korean leader is a communist revolutionary that would accept compromises in the face of US pressure, but Irans policy is based on an Islamic revolutionary spirit that does not allow any room for compromises. He further maintained that Iran has the capability to boost its missile range to more than 2,000km, but the measure is currently not on the countrys agenda, as the enemies strategic targets all fall within the 2,000km distance of Iran. /129 The United Arab Emirates Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash has expressed remarks on Monday indicating his anger at the telephone conversation between the President of Iran and the Emir of Qatar. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - The United Arab Emirates Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash has expressed remarks on Monday indicating his anger at the telephone conversation between the President of Iran and the Emir of Qatar. I do not think that Qatari citizens are satisfied with their government's support for Houthis or close ties with Tehran, nor are they happy with normalization of ties with Israel or relations with Hezbollah. The secret policies of Qatari leaders are the cause of current isolation of Doha, he claimed in a tweet published on Monday. His remarks indicate Anwar Gargash and Qatari officials' anger at strengthening the ties between Tehran and Doha. In a telephone conversation on Monday, President Hassan Rouhani told Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani that Iran will stand beside Doha in difficult days. /129 Israeli authorities indict former energy minister for allegedly acting as an agent on behalf of Iranian intelligence. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - A former Israeli cabinet minister, once imprisoned for trying to smuggle ecstasy pills, has been charged with spying for Iran, according to security officials in Israel. Gonen Segev, who had been living in Nigeria, was arrested during a visit to Equatorial Guinea and extradited to Israel in May on suspicion of "committing offenses of assisting the enemy in war and spying against the Israel", the Shin Bet security agency said on Monday. It added that Segev, an Israeli energy minister in mid-1990s, acted as an agent for Iranian intelligence and relayed information "connected to the energy market and security sites in Israel including buildings and officials in political and security organisations." The Shin Bet said Segev, 62, put some Israelis involved in the security sector in contact with Iranian intelligence agents, introducing the Iranians as businessmen. /129 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Jordans King Abdullah in Amman on Monday to discuss the so-called ways to advance regional peace, Netanyahus office said in a statement. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has met Jordan's King Abdullah II during a surprise visit to Amman. According to a statement released by the Jordanian royal court on Monday, Netanyahu and Abdullah discussed the so-called peace between Israel and the Palestinians. "The king and the prime minister discussed regional developments as well as advancing the peace process and bilateral relations," said Netanyahu's official spokesman. "Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated Israel's commitment to maintaining the status quo at the holy sites in Jerusalem (al-Quds)," he added. The meeting comes ahead of visit by US President Donald Trump's envoys Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, the presidents special envoy to the Middle East peace process, who are expected to arrive in the region later in the week. Netanyahu's last visit to Jordan was in 2014. Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has expressed dismay over the number of Palestinians killed and injured by Israeli live fire during protests. "I am shocked by the number of deaths and injuries of Palestinians resulting from the use of live fire" since protests began on March 30, he said in a report viewed by AFP. More than 130 Palestinians, including 14 children, have so far been killed by Israeli troops since the Great March of Return rallies commenced in the blockaded sliver on March 30. Some 13,300 Palestinians also sustained wounds, of them 300 are currently in a critical condition. "The killing of children, as well as of clearly identified journalists and medical staffers by security forces during a demonstration are particularly unacceptable," he added. The Tel Aviv regime must "exercise maximum restraint" and protect civilians in accordance with international humanitarian law. He further reiterated his call for an independent investigation of the shooting deaths in Gaza. /129 More than 20 fighters from an Iraqi paramilitary force key to the battle against the ISIS group were killed in an eastern Syria air raid the United States linked to Israel. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Israel was behind the bombing raid on the Syrian town of al-Hari where over 22 members of Iraqs Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) were killed, claims a US official. "We have reasons to believe that it was an Israeli strike," an unnamed US official was quoted by AFP as saying on Monday. Before the announcement, Iraq's Foreign Ministry released a statement expressing "rejection and condemnation of any air operations targeting forces in areas where they are fighting Daesh, whether in Iraq or Syria or any other area where there is a battlefield against this enemy that threatens humanity." It went on to call on all countries to cooperate to deal with these "extremist groups," and also called for an international coalition to coordinate regularly and accurately with the forces all forces engaged in battling terrorism. Earlier in the day, the PMUs better known by the Arabic name Hashd al-Shaabi, said a US airstrike on the Iraqi border with war-torn Syria has claimed the lives of nearly two dozen of its fighters and wounded a dozen others. Hashd al-Shaabi is an Iraqi state-sponsored umbrella organization composed of some 40 groups, which are mainly Shia Muslims. The force reportedly numbers more than 100,000 fighters. Iraqi authorities say there are between 25,000 and 30,000 Sunni tribal fighters within its ranks in addition to Kurdish Izadi and Christian units. At 10 p.m. [local time] last night a US aircraft hit a standing headquarters of the brigades 45 and 46 of the Hashd al-Shaabi forces defending the border strip with Syria using two guided missiles which led to the martyrdom of 22 fighters and the injuries of 12 others, the paramilitary forces said in a statement on Monday. The fighters have played a major role in the liberation of Daesh-held areas to the south, northeast and north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, ever since the Takfiri terrorist group launched an offensive in the country in June 2014. /129 At the end of 2015, Joy Kihuguru, the pastor of online ministry Soaring With Eagles, introduced Noah Kayondo Musanje to her parents Joyce and George Kihuguru. Joy posted pictures of the function to her social media forums, where the news was broken to her that Kayondo was already one Chicago-based Aisha Katalemas husband. Tabloid media went crazy with the story of her snatching another womans husband, as the once-divorced pastor kept her silence. She broke that silence in an interview last Thursday with Pastor Mugisha Mondo on online channel, SuperNatural TV. The Observer brings you exerpts: Joy Kihuguru and Noah Kayondo Musanje during the introduction ceremony Straight to the point; who is Joy? Joy Kihuguru is a minister of God. I went into full ministry in 2014. I have been an online ministerI have been ministering a lot to people. I have a handsome boy called Joshua. A few days ago I saw a testimony that moved me. I asked, why cant I bring Joy here and enlighten us? Tell us how you met Noah. I have a Facebook pagethere are people God has sent to [me to minister on] social media. This is a gentleman who reached out to me. He used to follow me. He wanted me to pray for him. One day he decided to come. He said I am in Uganda. I would like to meet you, like many others do. So many people call and ask to meet me and beautiful relationships have developed. I agreed to see him. He said he had issues with his land. I went and prayed for the land on Entebbe road and then he seemed to be interested in me. He claims I was the one interested in him, but I wouldnt have any reason why I would be the one on his case. There was nothing really that important. He told me he was not married. He was interested in settling down with somebody I have paid very heavily for [bringing him into my inner circle] because naturally I am a very reserved person. I dont just allow anybody into my private space. I allowed this gentleman in, believing what he said. And another mistake I made was not to ask anybody, do you know this man? He took advantage of that because he realised, she is a very quiet person, she keeps to herself, she wont ask anybody about me. We even got to that place where he met my parents. My dad and mum are respectable people in this country; he met them and said he was interested in marrying their daughter. My dad asked him, when are you interested in doing this wedding? He said he wanted to do it in a few months time. I remember him showing my dad his passport; it was a huge asset, trying to show my dad, I am an American citizen. My dad looked at it and said, You call yourself Musanje, but in your passport you are Kayondo. He said, You know, we recently found out we are Balangira He claims his father hid the fact that they were Balangira. My dad was a bit sceptical but he was like, So, you like the guyfine! We organised a function for December. Now, Noah, towards the first function (Banyankore have three functions), I noticed he had not bought a ticket. He seemed to be complaining about how much money he had to pay for his daughters school feesof course a function involves money. Now, this is so sad that I have to [say this openly]. The First Lady was the one who came to my function when I was ordained as a pastor you [Mondo] were there. She became my spiritual mother. When I was going to have this function with Noah, I wrote her a letter and said, I met a man that I love. He is going to marry me and we have a first function on this day. Mama Janet gave a contribution of Shs 5m. That is evidence from Irene Kawuma who is the personal assistant of the First Lady. I am sorry I have to say these things on air. Irene knows that this man was having problems with his flight. She sent me to a travel agent who helped us pay for the ticket. It was about Shs 8m. Shs 5m of that was from the First Lady. Mama was like, Joy, I am so sorry. Right now I am so busy I cannot come for this function, but I wish you the very best. Noah flies in the day before the function, after we have sent him the ticket. I am the one who bought everything for that function, because Noah kept saying he didnt have money. He came with his brothers and sisters in tow for that function. About six brothers, two sisters and an uncle. There was a reverend that officiated that function, called Medard Birungi Bya Yesu. He is not a simple man. He is renowned all over the world. He cannot just lie. For Noah to stand up and say he simply stood in for someone else in the UK and it was not his function, is very sad. Anyway, we are going to bring the reverend on this show some days from now. We will find out the truth. I spent three years quiet, because it was painful. I felt betrayed. This man was married; he lied to me he was not married. He had said he had a wife, but broke up with her. That he had moved on and lived in his own apartment. Just like I got married many years ago and things didnt work. It happens. Otherwise, I Joy Kihuguru, a whole pastor, why would I have a function with a married man? I kept quiet, I ran to God in prayer. I cried Mondo: Did you kiss this man? No. Im glad we didnt. Because after the function, all hell broke loose. When I put the pictures on Facebook, everybody started telling me, this man is married. Every time we met, it was: Are you telling me the truth? [He would say] Yes, Im telling you the truth. Because I knew as a Christian that sex is for marriage, I wasnt going to sleep with him, anyway; thank God. Mondo: Why come out now, after three years? I had a heart surgery about three months ago and when I came out, the Lord showed me how He had saved my life. And I said to myself, if I had died, what would people say about me? The last people saw on Facebook is that I had got engaged. For two and a half years I have been alone; wont people create stories about me? And I owe my followers an explanation. I have healed, I am stronger and I want to help someone else. I want to tell them be careful; see what happened to me. If that could happen to Joy, what about you young girl out there on social media? It is very dangerous. You can actually find love online, but I thank God that Noah admitted he had never kissed or had sex with me.I dont know why he said it; maybe the Holy Spirit made him say it, but it is to my benefit. All that woke me up and I said, Joy you also had a part you played. Why didnt you ask people? The enemy wants you to remain silent when something traumatic happens to you. I believe this was the time to speak out and I am not done. For those of you who do not believe me, I am not here to get everybody on my side. I am here to say the truth. The reverend who officiated needs to come and tell the world the truth. He is not a small man; I am not from a small family; so, even the reverend we invited was not a small man. If they dont believe Joy, let them hear from the reverend. I am not here to defend myself, but I will not stand to be lied about. I didnt come out three years ago because the pain was too much. I was in shock. I did not believe that was the man I had brought into my inner circle. It is very important to have a relationship with Jesus Christ. Because of my relationship with Jesus, I ran to God. I had my parents who were there for me If it has happened to me, be careful. It can happen to someone else. Talk to people before you make certain decisions. Noah responds I know Joy Kihuguru and we met on Facebook. I was supporting her ministry, sending Shs 200,000 monthly and we became friends. I was due to visit Uganda; I stayed with my younger brother who escorted me to her home as she directed. I had told her about my plots; some were being targeted by land grabbers. We took her to my plots in Najjanankumbi where she prayed and anointed the plots. That day, I gave her Shs 300,000 as a thank you token. She said, Thank you, Mulangira, because I am not employed; my followers like you support me. We became good friends. One day she asked, Is it possible for a prince to marry a princess? My brother quickly answered: If they dont belong to the same kingdom. She started asking me questions that clearly showed she was interested in a relationship, yet there was a level of respect I accorded her. I could not even woo her, although I was indeed searching. She asked me what kind of woman I wanted, and I told her I wanted a young woman, because I still want kids. I told her I had two children already. Then she said, But I too can still have children. She quoted for me scripture about a woman in the Bible who had kids in her old age. I eventually went back to the USA and we kept in touch. When I was about to return to Uganda, she told me, I have a function, but I would love for you to help me, because my fiance is in London. Instead of a photograph, can you do me a favour and stand in for me? I said, No problem. I arrived on like the 22nd when the function was the following day, and she was panicking. In fact I was very tired in those photos she posted knowing well I was married. The next day the photos were posted and I told her, Joy, those photos are going to bring me problems. Although we are having problems with my wife, I have not yet divorced her officially. She seemed to understand it and indeed pulled the post down as I had asked her to. She told me, I can take you to a lawyer to help with your divorce. She took me to a lawyer called Joyce Nalunga she now heads the Law Council. Getting there, the lawyer knew a different story from mine. She had told the lawyer I was going to marry her, but we needed the divorceI said, I am not ready for marriage yet. The lawyer told her to slow down; Joy wanted to make me do things at a terrific speed and she was offering to pay for it all. Even the function she talks about I did not put a coin in it. And she has never given me a single dollar let her present evidence I was the one supporting her ministry. After the saga she even sent me messages apologising and I have them. I also have a reputation to protect; otherwise, I would have shared her messages with the media, because they asked me for them. She says I changed names is it the first time she is meeting someone who grew up in one family and was then switched to another? If I left the Ngabi clan and joined the Balangira clan, did I have to first announce it? For someone to just blurt thingsmaybe she has bills, or the surgery has messed up her head, being as she is a psycho When I decided I would not have a relationship with her, the reason I did not come out immediately, these things included using the First Lady Janet Musevenis name to intimidate me, saying Janet is her relative. I have ever hosted Janet Museveni in Chicago and I have pictures. In fact when PGB soldiers saw the story, they contacted me and warned me not to have a relationship with Joy Kihuguru. They shared her story. I am glad I never slept with her or even kissed her. She invited me several times to go sleep in her home and I declined. She asked me about my businesses and asked me for addresses of my workplace That was a red flag. When I was leaving Uganda, I never even said goodbye. She says I am impoverishedone cannot live in the USA for 27 years, with citizenship and have nothing to his name. I travel all over the world on my hard-earned cash. I work two jobs, sleep four hours. She needs to know I have the messages, audios, even the video she sent dancing for me. Should I post them too? She is lucky I believe two wrongs dont make a right. These things are for teenagers. I blocked her everywhere; she had become a problem. This is the last recording I will make on this matter. I am not repeating this circus; I am a very busy man. Ask the people of Chicago who Noah Kayondo Musanje is; how can I con someone who does not even work and just begs for a living? newseditor@observer.ug Ministry of Health and Mulago hospital management has distanced itself from charges levied by the Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI) on patients seeking treatment at the facility. Patients are now asked to pay between Shs 50,000-300,000 for radiotherapy treatment. Prossy Namagembe one of the patients, says that she was told to pay Shs 130,000 for scan and consultation fees at Mulago hospital and at the Uganda Cancer Institute. The executive director Uganda Cancer Institute, Dr Jackson Orem says that the fees being charged are part of a pilot study to determine how much money the institute can charge patients in a bid to raise revenue for operations of the institute. "Were supposed to generate some revenue from source and spend at source. We have been working on how best we can collect that monthly revenue so we can know how much revenue is generated from the institute." said Orem. He however added that patients who cannot afford to pay for the services will be treated at a free cost. "Patients who cannot afford to pay for the services should inform us and they will receive treatment free of any charges," Orem says. Orem says that the institute is also yet to determine how much patients should pay and what the institute will use the funds for. The Cancer Institute is one of several medical facilities that receive funding from the Ministry of Health. In the next financial year, the institute was allocated Shs 91 billion. Dr Diana Atwine, the permanent secretary ministry of Health, says that the ministry is not aware that the institute charges patients for services. "We really need to hear from them. We have never authorised charging. So if they are doing it, they are doing it on their own." she said Dr Baterana Byarugaba, executive director Mulago hospital, says that it is illegal for health workers to solicit money from patients seeking health services. "Those people paying at Mulago and other regional referral hospitals and other government health facilities that is not in the private wing. Those payments are done by errant health workers. These are really thieves Some of them are masqueraders and may not be health workers in that health facility but we want people to help us catch these thieves so that we eliminate them from our health facilities. Those are thieves, catch them." said Byarugaba. It is estimated that there are over 400,000 people receiving cancer treatment at UCI from Uganda and neighbouring countries. The most common cancers in Uganda are; cervical, prostate, breast, Kaposi sarcoma, Burkitt lymphoma, lung, skin, bone, cancer of the eye, colon, and blood. The Luvable Dog Rescue is a canine shelter unlike any other. Located in the idyllic woods of Oregon and featuring cozy, colorful cabins complete with miniature furniture, instead of the usual kennels, this place looks more like a fairy-tale village than a shelter for rescued pit bulls. The 55-acre wooded sanctuary, near Eugene, in Oregon, currently consists of six beautifully-decorate cottages, each featuring two separate rooms and all the amenities youd expect to find in a regular home, including furniture, lighting fixtures, artworks and even a TV. It hardly sounds like the perfect place for pit bulls to live in unsupervised, but theres actually a good reason that these cottages look so much like actual human homes. Photo: Luvable Dog Rescue It lets us see how the pit bulls will be in a home, Luvable Dog Rescue founder and executive director, Liesl Wilhardt, told Inside Edition. A dog in a concrete run is going to behave very differently than a dog with a house, with furniture, televisions, and people coming and going. As much as we can learn about our dogs, the more successful the adoption will be. The Pit Bull Village is home to around 10 pit bulls at a time, with no more than 2 living in the same cottage, each with their own separate room. And when theyre not lounging on their very own recliners or snuggling with the caring staff at the shelter, the rescued pit bulls go on long hikes on the the many trails crossing the property, where they come into contact with other animals, like chickens, goats or horses. Photo: Luvable Dog Rescue The Luvable Dog Rescue is also home to around 30 small breed dogs, but they all live in a large kennel. And while that may sound a bit unfair, Wilhardt claims that pit bulls actually need the special type of accommodation. A lot of dogs go downhill once theyre in a shelter. Its a very stressful environment, the shelter founder said. We wanted to give them an environment that was as cozy and homelike as possible. Photo: Luvable Dog Rescue Plus, whereas most other dog breeds at Luvable Dog Rescue tend to get adopted within a few weeks, there is a stigma surrounding pit bulls, and people are less inclined to take them into their homes. So Wilhardt decided to invest in comfortable accommodation that would make their extended stay as comfortable as possible. Each cottage costs between $20,000 and $30,000, but the dogs love them, so they are worth it. The healing power of this place has done miracles for some of the dogs, Liesl Wilhardt told Pup Journal. Its something special about the place, but also about dogs knowing theyre in a good place and telling the new dogs. Luvable Dog Rescue continues to grow, and, having recently inaugurated a pit bull palace a much larger building for pit bulls Wilhardt and her team now home to secure funding for a maternity ward for pit bull mothers and their puppies. If you want to help their cause, visit the Luvable Dog Rescue website and its official Facebook page. A Chicago investment group is raising money to bankroll the purchase of the venerable Chicago Tribune from tronc. Inc. Led by Sargent McCormick, a relative of Robert McCormick, former Tribune publisher, the group is seeking funds from Illinois-based companies, such as Boeing and Caterpillar, and civic groups, according to Bloomberg. The investors may either make a bid for the 171-year-old Tribune or take a big stake in tronc. McCormick said the group wants Chicago to have a "really strong independent newspaper." Tronc completed the sale of the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Times-Union to billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong on June 17. It owns the New York Daily News, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, Morning Call (Allentown), Orlando Sentinel and Virginia-Pilot. Glover Park Group has signed on as DC representative for Memphis Meats, the Berkeley-based company involved in producing "clean" meats made from animal cells in a lab. CEO Uma Valeti, a cardiologist by training, expects to begin marketing his company's meat harvested from cells by 2021. The company's environmentally friendly production process requires less land, water, energy and food inputs (e.g., livestock consume eight percent of the world's harvested grain) than traditional farming methods. The clean meat process has the potential of eliminating 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions that are produced by animals raised for meat. Launched in 2015, Memphis Meats produced the world's first clean meatball in 2016 and chicken strip in 2017. It has attracted investments from Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Cargill and Tyson Foods. Glover Park Group handles lobbying related to the appropriations and farm bills, along with general agricultural issues. Joel Leftwich, former majority staff director on the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry and aide to Republican Senator Pat Roberts, and Grant Leslie, ex-aide to former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, handle the account. WPP owns Glover Park Group. Michael B. Jordan Confirms What We Already Knew: Chadwick Boseman is Sick of Your Wakanda Forever Salutes Dimas Sanfiorenzo Dimas Sanfiorenzo is the Managing Editor for Okayplayer. He specializes Wakandamaybe not Forever? Chadwick is tired of your Wakanda forever salutes. This wont be surprising to anyone, but Marvels Black Panther was the big winner at the 2018 MTV Movie & TV Awards. The movie took home four awards, including Best Movie, Best Performance and Best Hero, which Chadwick Boseman won, and Best Villian, which Michael B. Jordan took home. The speeches were all great. When Jordan won the award for Best Villain, the actor snuck in a dig at Roseanne Barr, and then said something we all already knew. Jordan confirmed that Boseman, who played Black Panther, is sick and tired of people telling him Wakanda Forever: It took long enough, but Michael B Jordan letting the world know on behalf of Chadwick Boseman that you leave him alone with all the Wakanda Forever stuff . Hang it up #MTVAwards pic.twitter.com/Vv2I6tQ9kU UrbanNoize2 (@UrbanNoize2) June 19, 2018 Shout out to Jordan for being a real friend. During Bosemans speeches, the actor made little mention of the salute. In fact, he used his stage time to honor a real hero. When winning the Best Hero award, Boseman gave James Shaw Jr., who helped stopped the Tennessee Waffle House shooter in April, the award. UPDATE: Florida Rapper XXXTentacion Shot Dead Ivie Ani Ivie is a Nigerian-American, native New Yorker, and journalist covering UPDATE: Broward Co. Sheriffs Dept. says XXXTentacion has been pronounced dead. According to a report in TMZ, witnesses told authorities that a Louis Vuitton bag was taken from XXXs vehicle. An additional dispatch audio reveals the rapper was transported as a Level 1 trauma patient and he was described as comatose. According to the audio, the incident may have been a drive-by shooting. Dispatchers named a black Dodge Journey, Chevy Tahoe and a Jeep Grand Cherokee as possible getaway vehicles ORIGINAL REPORT: Rapper XXXTentacion was reportedly shot Monday afternoon in Miami, Florida. According to a report in TMZ, which contains a video of the incident, eyewitnesses on the scene say the 20-year-old Plantation, Florida native appeared lifeless and without a pulse. READ: XXXTentacions Fans Are Reportedly Harassing His Ex-Girlfriend The rapper was reportedly shopping for motorcycles in Miami and when leaving the dealer, a gunman approached his vehicle and shot him. XXX has been awaiting trial for domestic violence against a pregnant woman. He is facing more than a dozen felony charges and was recently released from house arrest by a judge so he could tour. Click read more to watch video from the scene of the shooting. WARNING: Graphic content after the jump 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. Photo: vov The beauty pageant aimed to honour the grace and beauty of the traditional long dress (Ao Dai) of Vietnam and promote the Vietnamese culture to local people. In addition, it also encouraged the young Vietnamese generation in foreign countries to know and love Ao Dai and look toward the homeland. The event attracted the participation of 90 Vietnamese women from European countries. At the final night, the first prizes of the beauty pageant were presented to Dang Thi Bich Lan from Germany in the age group of over 51, and Tran Hoang Mai Anh from Poland in the age group of 35-50. Along with the first prizes, the organising board also announced three second and four third prizes, and several extra prizes. Mr. Lucas Kaucky, former Deputy Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic and Head of the Prague Council for Ethnic Minorities, said he was impressed by the event and added that the event was an outstanding example to deepen the relations between Czech people and Vietnamese people through the promotion of Vietnamese culture. The second beauty pageant will be organized in Dresden (Germany) in 2020./. China had 231,564 press-card holding journalists at the end of 2017, according to a report released by the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA) Tuesday. Of these journalists, 84,761 worked for newspapers, 6,324 for periodicals, 2,849 for news agencies, 136,224 for radio, TV stations or production firms, and 1,406 were employed by news websites. This was the fourth time ACJA has released an annual report on journalism development in China. The report noted that "Media convergence remains the theme for media development in China in 2017," with accelerated and upgraded integration of traditional and new media, as well as deepening integrated development of content, platforms, channels, technologies and management. The Communist Party of China and the central government have attached great importance to the development of the press, the report said. The Party and government organs and media associations introduced a series of policies last year to support the development of the media industry, encourage news outlets to adopt new technologies and applications, and boost innovation and reform. Noting the booming media market, the report said the flow of online information has been safe and orderly, netizens have been expressing their opinions in a more rational way and the influence of positive energy has been expanding. Managing the online environment has transitioned from the traditional unitary administration of the government to a more diversified and interactive way of comprehensive management, it added. The report was compiled by departments including ACJA, the State Administration of Radio and Television as well as the Cyberspace Administration of China. [ Editor: Xueying ] Ahlstrom-Munksjo Investing EUR 28 Million in Its Filtration Business June 19, 2018 - Ahlstrom-Munksjo announced that it will invest about EUR 28 million to increase manufacturing capacity of its filtration business. The investment primarily targets the company's filtration production facility in Turin, Italy. This investment will enable us to create additional capacity in Turin, Italy, and will allow us to support growing demand for high-end filtration materials, said Fulvio Capussotti, Executive Vice President of Business Area Filtration and Performance. Turin is already Ahlstrom-Munksjo's largest plant globally and this investment will further consolidate our position as one of the leading global platforms for high-performance filtration material development and production. This investment also includes rebuilding and modification of our existing plants in Malmedy, Belgium and in Stalldalen, Sweden. We see an opportunity to use the remaining capacity of these two plants to develop unique filtration solutions for industrial applications, without affecting our ability to serve and support our existing customers at these plants, Capussotti added. The project will start in 2018 and is expected to be completed during the first half of 2020. Ahlstrom-Munksjo's Filtration and Performance business area develops and produces filtration materials for transportation as well as industrial applications. It also produces glass fiber for flooring products and wind turbine blades and makes nonwoven materials for automotive, construction, textile and hygiene applications and wallcover materials. Ahlstrom-Munksjo is a global leader in fiber-based materials. The company's offerings include decor paper, filter media, release liners, abrasive backings, nonwovens, electrotechnical paper, glass fiber materials, food packaging and labeling, tape, medical fiber materials and solutions for diagnostics. To learn more, please visit: www.ahlstrom-munksjo.com . SOURCE: Ahlstrom-Munksjo R&B mastermind and Odd Future alum Frank Ocean graced us with some of the greatest albums in recent history with his breakout Channel Orange as well as 2016's Blonde. It was just a matter of time before he became incorporated into of the academic canon, too. Now, UC Berkeley student Preya Gill has tweeted that a course on Ocean that she proposed along with fellow sophomore Deborah Chang has been approved. The two students, who were roommates last year, share a love of his music, and were excited when they learned students can propose and teach classes. The class will be named "Brain Like Berkeley," after the Channel Orange song "Novacane." The course, which will explore Ocean's lyrics, music, and visuals as cultural texts, will explicate his "artistic history, upbringing, background, musical influences, artistic identity, and the way he challenges dominant social concepts such as toxic-masculinity and gender politics." Related | Frank Ocean Might Be a Movie Star Now Even better, the course has gotten approval from Ocean's mom and brother. It will be taught by Gill and Chang next fall, and will hopefully be live streamed or put online for those of us living far away from California but still playing Channel Orange on repeat at every party, Tinder date, and family event. Photo via Getty Miuccia Prada introduced her Spring 2019 menswear line at Milan Fashion Week that featured a sexy twist. It all came together in a dimly lit industrial space behind the brand's headquarters in Milan. The minimal decor, pink lights and translucent sheet coated walls and floor created a futuristic, sci-fi friendly atmosphere. Attendees sat on remakes of Verner Panton's iconic 60s cubes to watch models tread the catwalk wearing top-heavy silhouettes, nylon trapper hats, and thigh-grazing short shorts. Prada explained that she was seeking to create a look that was "elegant in a new and young way," and she did just that. Steering clear of the baggy sportswear and streetwear trend that we have seen circulating fashion houses worldwide, Prada veered towards what she described backstage as "lean, clean and elegant" pieces. "I've put a lot of different pieces togetherserious ones, fun ones, all sortsbut the goal was to construct and define a youthful, contemporary elegance. They're simple pieces, and I wanted them to make sense," she told WWD. As a creative and a feminist, Miuccia has paved a way for fashion to become an influential factor in changing gender and social norms, from her early designs in the 90s to her "ugly chic" approach, to presenting men's and womenswear together on the runway. It came as really no surprise then when the models came down the runway mid-show in what Prada described backstage to i-D as "the equivalent of a mini skirt for men." The Prada boy is a "sexy boy," she told The Guardian backstage. "It's sexy on boys, no? I've never pronounced that word in my life. Now I like to use simple, banal words. People in fashion and politics invent so many beautiful words, but I'm fixated on giving things the right word, even if it's low, so as not to be conceptually pretentious but honest." The men bared their legs while sporting bright hued turtlenecks, synthetic sheen zip-front jackets with either retro nylon runners a nineties loafer. Stonewashed denim, shoulder bags, and long trench coats also ruled the runway. Safe to say that Prada's new collection is perfect for the everyday sexy millennial man. See looks from the collection below: Photos via Prada and Getty Fashion photographer Sebastian Faena debuted his first short film Fernando at the Cannes Film Festival. The film is a haunting mediation starring model Miles McMillan. It was shot in the countryside near Faena's hometown of Buenos Aires and was inspired by Faena's older brother who drowned as a child before Faena was born. PAPER caught up with the filmmaker after he returned from Cannes. You told me the film is inspired by your brother? The film is about something that happened to him, but also it's about how this incident shaped other people's lives. Is it almost like a ghost story since it's inspired by someone you never really knew? Yes, only in this short film we are there by the pool at the same time perpetually. Miles McMillan in 'Fernando' What made you decide on that topic for your first film? I don't really know. I can't tell. It was what I needed to talk about then. How did you choose Miles to star in it? He's my best friend. We were in Buenos Aires and something electric happened between him and the Argentine country side. It's the first time he had ever acted and he does it all perfectly with such elegance and effortlessness. He does it the smart way, He does not force anything and is very honest in the approach to the work. What was your experience at Cannes like? All my friends were there and it was such a joyous week, screening the film for the first time next to them at the Palais des Festivals gave me a comforting sense of validation. How is making a film different than shooting fashion or portraits? In every possible sense it's the absolute opposite. Fashion photography is about content, films are about context (it should be at least). Do you want to make more films? Yes, I'm writing a script right now. I hope to make films the rest of my life. It's what I started doing, maybe too young and needed a decade of a job that was less demanding, but now I don't think I could be happy doing anything else. So this is what I'm doing. News and commentary on organized crime, street crime, white collar crime, cyber crime, sex crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism. French firms 'won't be able to stay' in Iran: France's Finance Minister 06/19/18 Source: Press TV France's Finance Minister says Europe has to build independent financial institutions immunized from US penalties which are making business in Iran impossible for European companies. Most French companies interested in maintaining business in Iran "won't be able to stay because they need to be paid for the products they deliver to or build in Iran," Bruno Le Maire said Tuesday. "And they cannot be paid because there is no sovereign and autonomous European financial institution" capable of shielding them, he told BFM television. President Donald Trump's decision in May to withdraw the US from an international nuclear deal with Iran left the Europeans scrambling to save the agreement, pledging to protect companies dealing with the Islamic Republic. However, some major firms such as French oil group Total and carmaker PSA have already been winding down activities in the Middle Eastern country. International companies dealing with Iran face a 180-day deadline to dismantle their operations in the country before new US sanctions kick in. Le Maire rebuked the United States, saying it "should not be the planet's economic policeman." Many European companies have major businesses in the US, which make them vulnerable to the "extraterritorial" US measures because leading banks are linked to the US financial system due to their dollar-denominated transactions. Earlier this month, the European Investment Bank (EIB) balked at an EU proposal to do business in Iran after reportedly coming under pressure from the United States. European Commission, the EU's executive arm, had reportedly asked the EIB to support investments by European businesses in Iran but Washington called on the bank "in back channels" to object to the plan. "The United States is pushing pressure on the bank not to go ahead and invest in Iran, warning of the consequences," an EU official was quoted as saying. The bank was reportedly unhappy with the European Commission's proposal because the lender raised most funds on US markets. Le Maire said on Tuesday, "Our priority is to build independent, sovereign European financial institutions which would allow financing channels between French, Italian, German, Spanish and any other countries on the planet." "It's up to us Europeans to choose freely and with sovereign power who we want to do business with," he added. French automaker Renault has said it will remain in Iran despite the sanctions because it does not sell cars in the United States. Alhaji Ali Muhammad Katu, General Manager of Ghana Agricultural Insurance Pool (GAIP), on Monday called on the government to take steps to urgently institute a Ghana Agriculture Insurance Policy to protect the investment of farmers and build confidence in the sector. He explained that such a policy would transform the sector, motivate financial institutions to lend loans to farmers and attract more people to go into the agricultural sector. One of the challenges of small holder farmers is the lack of access to credit and If there is an insurance, it will encourage banks to grant loans to farmers to go into production because the risk of a farmer not servicing a loan due to drought, will be less because of the insurance. Such a move will build strong resilient to absorb shocks, ensure food security, transform agriculture, attract young graduate into agriculture. A study has already revealed that majority of the people in the sector were old and this trend should be reversed, he noted. Alhaji Katu made the call at a brief ceremony to present a cheque of GH640,052.69 to officials of Premium Foods Limited (PFL) as claim settlement for its farmers in the Northern and Ashanti regions whose farms of about 540 hectares were affected by drought, bush fires and fall army worm. The Manager said the money was expected to be used to compensate the losses of over 600 soybean, maize and cowpea farmers, adding that, those farmers were supposed to re-pay inputs they received from the PFL in crop yield but due to drought, bushfires and Fall Army Worm, they lost a majority of their yields. Alhaji Katu said the payout was under the Drought Index Insurance Product, a risk-mitigating mechanism, aimed at protecting farmers, agro-processors, rural and financial institutions, input dealers among others, in the event of crop failure due to extreme weather conditions like droughts. He noted the agriculture sector although touted as the backbone of the economy, was perceived to be a high-risk area of which mainstream insurance companies do not operate. Madam Gladys Simpson, General Manger of PFL, said the insurance had been a relief to the company and had encouraged them to increase their acreage this season. Before enrolling on this insurance, we were battling with challenges including drought and default over the past five years under the Go Farming Project, but this insurance has helped us to minimize the risk. The project was originally meant to benefit 25,000 farmers but it had to be scaled down due to the high risk. Last two years, we were working with of 11,500 farmers and as a result of default; we had to scale down to 600 farmers. The insurance has been very beneficial to us. Without insurance it would have been a big blow to us, she said. Agric insurance is formed by 17 of the registered insurance companies in Ghana, which served as the insurance industrys contribution toward the countrys food security. The premier agric insurance programme was experimented with and started in 2011, with a Drought Policy initially targeting farmers in the three regions in North who were most affected by drought. It then moved on to develop and introduce the Multi-Peril Policy, which insures commercial farmers against fire, drought, windstorm, uncontrollable pests and diseases, among others. These products are expected to help aggregated smallholder farmers, seek insurance cover for their farming activities, which could also serve as an assurance for credit providers to offer them loans for expansion and other requirements 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 Addressing the working session with the leaders of Quang Tri province on June 17, the NA vice Chairwoman appreciated the efforts made by the local Party, government and people towards bringing about positive changes in both rural and urban areas. She praised the province for coming up with innovations and initiatives in terms of directing and promoting the work of Party building, improving the investment environment, and expanding its diplomatic relations with Laos. She asked the province to focus on implementing the Resolution of the 12th National Party Congress, as well as the targets set at the provincial 16th Party congress, striving to achieve the average economic growth compared to the countrys level by 2020. Despite numerous difficulties and challenges, Quang Tri has many favourable conditions that can facilitate development, she said, noting that people from all strata should uphold traditions and be determined to make the province stronger and more developed. On the same day, NA Standing vice Chairwoman, Tong Thi Phong, attended an arts and exchange programme in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Khe Sanh victory and the liberation of Huong Hoa district (1968 - 2018). Previously, the NA Standing vice Chairwoman and a delegation of the NA paid homage to the martyrs at the Ancient Citadel of Quang Tri. President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has announced plans for a comprehensive strategy to tackle the threat of illegal mining to the nations economy and the environment. This, he said was going to address the vexed issue of the lifting of the ban on small-scale mining. It would involve the reclamation and reforestation of mined-out areas, restoration of impacted water bodies and strict supervision of the processes of awarding mining licenses and associated permits. Additionally, the road map would incorporate the establishment of a mercury pollution abatement project, the implementation of alternative livelihood projects, systematic control of the engagement of excavators and other ancillary contraptions in mining areas as well as the continued formalisation and regulation of the small-scale mining sector. President Akufo-Addo made this known when he addressed a sensitisation workshop for traditional and religious leaders and stakeholders on the elimination of illegal mining in Ghana. He indicated that when the ban on small scale mining was lifted, traditional rulers and opinion leaders will have the responsibility, as was successfully discharged in the days of our forefathers, to continue to help preserve our lands, water bodies and environment. We all have a duty to say no to galamsey (illegal gold mining) for our own common survival and the survival of those who are to come. If we allow it, we are jeopardising both our present and our future. This cannot be over-emphasised. The President said because of the difficulties the nation had gone through in recent years, some persons had decided to find unorthodox means, including galamsey, of keeping body and soul together. Thus, government as part of the fight against galamsey, set up at the level of the Cabinet, an Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining, which recommended an initial six-month ban on small scale mining activities. It, (Government) directed the Committee to carry out certain activities to bring sanity into the artisanal gold mining sector, including the launching of Operation Vanguard, the training of small-scale miners in sustainable mining methods at the George Grant University of Mines and Technology, Tarkwa. The Committee was also encouraged to have regular interactions with the Small-Scale Miners Association to craft a Code of Practice for small scale mining operations, and The formation of District Mining Committees against illegal mining with clearly defined terms of reference, and the deployment of satellite imagery and drone technology to monitor the mining activities of illegal miners, had been undertaken by the Committee. These had led to marked improvement in the vegetation and the quality of water bodies. 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 Dr Ebenezer M. Ashley, a Financial Consultant, has called on government to ensure that loans collected were used productively, saying loans must be used for its intended purposes. According to him, there should be proper accountability for loans contracted, judicious and diligent disbursement of contracted funds to ensure equitable socio-institutional developments. Dr Ashley made the call on Monday, in Accra, at a press briefing on the countrys growing debts and its implication on the economy. He said debt sustainability must be defined to include governments ability to use contracted loans for the purposes it was intended for, to accelerate economic development and growth to ease repayment at the due dates. He said the countrys total debt for 2017 was GHc 142.5 billion (US$ 32.5 billion) while the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was GH204.16 billion (US$46.56 billion) representing 69.8 per cent. Dr Ashley said between 2016 and 2017, the countrys domestic debt increased by GH13.3 billion, representing about 24.91 per cent increase while the external debt increased by GH6.6 billion, representing about 9.54 per cent increase during the same period. Comparing the debts to some African countries, Dr Ashley said Zimbabwe and Mauritania recorded respective GDP of US$17.5 billion and US$5.1 billion during the same period. He urged government to create more fiscal space and less financial openings for borrowing, and that, creating more fiscal space should not necessarily whet the nations financial appetite for borrowing. Dr Ashley stressed that government must make conscientious efforts to shift from the old paradigm of borrowing short to pay short, to borrowing long to pay short. Diligent and economic borrowing means carefully considering pool of financial alternatives and settling for one that offered the best coupon rate and payment terms for the economy, he added. He asked government to fully implement the principle of a succession plan that would enable current and successive governments to diligently review projects started under previous administrations and carry them through to a logical conclusion to avoid needless additions to the national debt. He said governments must ensure relative stability of the Cedi against major currencies such as the British Pound Sterling, Euro and the American Dollar to avert the possibility of issuing more Cedi to settle the same outstanding debts at maturity dates. Dr Ashley urged government to put measures in place to make the country more attractive to foreign investors and international financial institutions. 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 Upon a careful scrutiny of The National Identity Register (Amendment) Act, 2017 (Act 950), I am totally baffled by the entrenched position of the N.I.A that the Ghanaian Voter's ID card is inadmissible as proof of citizenship in the ongoing Ghana Card registration exercise. The suggestion that the law excludes Voter's ID cards from the Ghana Card registration criteria is completely unfounded, as a holistic reading of Section 3(a) of Act 950 proves otherwise. For the avoidance of doubt, Section 3 of Act 950 which provides for the Requirements for Registration, states as follows: Section 8 of the principal enactment is amended: (a) by the substitution of subsection (1), of "(1) The Authority shall require an individual who applies for an entry to be made in the register to submit any of the following identity documents: (a) a birth certificate (b) a valid passport (c) a valid residence permit (d) a valid certificate of acquired citizenship; and (e) any other information as may be required by the Authority" I submit that even though this section doesn't specifically capture Voter's ID cards as one of the requirements for registration, the omnibus clause; "any other information as may be required by the Authority" as per subsection 1(e), undoubtedly makes room for other identification documents/materials to be used as part of the Ghana Card registration criteria. I therefore request the N.I.A to give us details of what constitutes "any other information as may be required by the Authority" as provided by subsection 1(e) Supra.* Clearly, this provision vests discretionary power in the N.I.A to admit other identification materials as part of the requirements for registration, and this must of necessity include Voter ID cards in my view. It is important to state that, per article 296 of the 1992 Constitution, there is a constitutional implied duty on the N.IA to exercise this discretionary power in a fair and candid manner and not in an arbitrary, whimsical or capricious manner. It is my considered view, that a true and proper interpretation of this omnibus provision will include Ghanaian Voter's ID cards in the registration criteria. I am fortified in this view by article 42 of the 1992 Constitution which provides that: "Every *citizen* of Ghana of eighteen years of age or above and of sound mind has the right to vote and is entitled to be registered as a voter for the purposes of public elections and referenda". Evidently, article 42 of the 1992 Constitution raises a presumption of citizenship for all Ghanaian Voter ID card holders, as was held in the Abu Ramadan case. The presumption of citizenship that article 42 raises cannot be rebutted by the whims and caprices of the N.I.A, and any attempt to do so will be in violation of article 296 of the 1992 Constitution. This presumption can only be successfully rebutted by probative evidence being adduced to show that a particular Voter ID card was procured unlawfully. Until that is done, every holder of a Ghanaian Voter's ID card is legally presumed to be a citizen of Ghana and entitled to be registered as such. On this basis, the phrase *"any other information as may be required by the Authority"* must to all intents and purposes, be interpreted by the N.I.A to include Ghanaian Voter's ID cards. This point is further reinforced by the fact that only seven (7) million Ghanaians have a birth certificate and/or a valid passport according to the N.I.A's own statistics and the fact that, the other registration requirements available under the Law for the remaining twenty three (23) million Ghanaians are too onerous, expensive and arithmetically impracticable for the ordinary Ghanaian to bear. Therefore, the exclusion of the Ghanaian Voter's ID card from the Ghana card registration criteria will deny millions of Ghanaians their right to be registered as Ghanaians under Act 950 and deprive them of the economic and other rights which will flow from it. From the foregoing, it is glaringly clear that holders of Ghanaian Voter ID cards are entitled to be registered under the Ghana Card program, without amending the Law per se. It will be totally untenable and an abuse of discretionary power for the N.IA to exclude Voter's ID cards from the Ghana Card registration criteria. Any such attempt will be unlawful, unjust and a recipe for chaos. I have confidence in the Justice delivery system of the country and I believe that in the final analysis, the position that Voter's ID cards be accepted as part of the Ghana Card registration criteria, will be vindicated and validated by the Supreme Court. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video An Accra-based lawyer, Samuel Tay, has been assessed to pay to a fine of GH12,000 by an Accra Magistrate Court for defrauding a client to the tune of GH10,500. He has also been ordered by the court to refund an amount of GH10,500 to the complainant. The presiding judge, Patricia Quansah, who delivered her judgement on June 13, 2018, told the court that the accused, who initially plead not guilty, had been found culpable by the court. He collected GH10,500 from the complainant, Naa Otua Swaye, to represent her in a suit. The prosecutor Superintendent Ernest Acheampong, told the court that the complainant, Naa Otua Swaye, is a novelist and resident of Osu, while the accused person is a lawyer and resident of Abofu Achimota. Between May and June last year, the complainant engaged the services of the accused person to represent her in a case pending at the Human Rights Court. The complainant paid GH10,500 to the accused as legal, filing and transportation fees. When the case was called, the defendants lawyer told the presiding judge that the accused did not have a licence to practise and on that basis, the case was thrown out of court. The complainant gave the accused an amount of GH1,000 to renew his licence but he took the money and failed to do so. A complaint was subsequently lodged with the police leading to the arrest of the accused. He added that investigations conducted at the Ghana Legal Council also showed that the accused person was not in good standing to practise as a lawyer. He was therefore charged with the offences and put before court. 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 Mauritius is offering foreigners the chance to obtain Mauritian citizenship in exchange for a non-refundable contribution of $1m (757,400) to the national sovereign wealth fund. Applicants' spouses and dependents are also eligible with an additional contribution of $100,000 per family member. The announcement was made by the prime minister and finance minister in the country's 2018 budget. The move has been condemned by opposition politicians. Leader of the populist Rezistans ek Alternativ party, Ashok Subron, said: The notion of nationality of a country is not a product. It has no price and is in no way a commodity." The Economic Development Board (EDB) is to manage the scheme, and applicants will have to satisfy defined criteria subject to relevant due diligence. Another scheme will offer Mauritian passports in exchange for the lesser sum of $500,000 paid to the Mauritius Sovereign Fund, and $50,000 per passport for family members. Source: BBC Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Mr Carlos Kingsley Ahenkorah, Member of Parliament for Tema West, has urged fathers to live exemplary lives worthy of emulation by the youth in order to leave behind a generation that could better the lot of society. He said if fathers failed in their responsibilities to the family, the children were likely to be wayward as they would be forced to look for other means to satisfy their needs. Mr Ahenkorah was speaking at the Fathers Day celebration with his constituents at Sakumono Estates, near Tema on Sunday. He said the moral decadence and social vices that the society was bedevilled with could be linked to men who had failed to play their fatherly roles and responsibilities. This is because, children do not have the opportunity to imbibe good values from their fathers, Mr Ahenkorah said. Mr Ahenkorah who is also the Deputy Minister for Trade and Industry noted that real men were those who took good care of the family and taught the children the values and the norms of society such that they would not deviate from those values. The Member of Parliament said education was one of the best legacies responsible fathers could bequeath their children to ensure their welfare in future. It is important for men to be truthful and transparent to their wives in all aspects of life so as to earn the trust of the family, which is the ideal way to consolidate family bond and solidarity, he added. Mr Ahenkorah said it was a divine duty for fathers to be Gods symbol for the family by providing physical protection and support for all members. The Member of Parliament urged Christians to uphold religious values such as love, trustworthiness and honesty because those were in tune with Gods Commandments. In a Cooking Competition, Mr Ahenkorah emerged champion by defeating Nana Boakye, the Constituency Chairman and the combined team of the Co-ordinators of the Constituency. 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 Four persons have submitted a petition to the office of the Special Prosecutor to invoke section 3(1)(b) of the Office of the Special Prosecutor Act, 2017(Act 959) to have former President John Dramani investigated for alleged diversion of $13m meant for the development of Western Region from the E.O group of company as part of their corporate social responsibilities. According to the petitioners, the basis upon which this petition is brought is as a result of an article published on Ghanaweb.com on the 2nd December, 2016 by the longest serving Deputy Attorney General of the Republic of Ghana in the person of Hon. Martin Alamisi Amidu who has been elected as the Special Prosecutor. The petitioners believe the allegation, being a "criminal" one, must be "considered in the interest" of the Republic of Ghana. "The said article alleged that, former President John Dramani diverted $13M to private pockets when he served as Vice President. We do consider the allegation against him as criminal and for that matter, we humbly beseech your office to have this matter investigated to get those monies retrieved back to the public purse," they said. Read the full petition below 18th June, 2018 TO: THE SPECIAL PROSECUTOR REPUBLIC OF GHANA OUR.Ref.NO.......................... Dear Sir, A PETITION FOR A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OF JOHN DRAMANI MAHAMA FOR ALLEGED DIVERSION OF $13M INTO PRIVATE POCKETS MEANT FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN REGION FROM THE E.O GROUP OF COMPANY. We submit before your office this petition to invoke section 3(1)(b) of the Office of the Special Prosecutor Act,2017(Act 959) to have former President John Dramani investigated for alleged diversion of $13M meant for the development of Western Region from the E.O group of company as part of their corporate social responsibilities. The petitioners are citizens of the Republic of Ghana with the constitutional right to expose and combat crime in the interest of the good people of Ghana. The basis upon which this petition is brought to your office is as a result of an article published on Ghanaweb.com on the 2nd December, 2016 by the longest serving Deputy Attorney General of the Republic of Ghana in the person of Hon. Martin Alamisi Amidu. The said article alleged that, former President John Dramani diverted $13M to private pockets when he served as Vice President. We do consider the allegation against him as criminal and for that matter, we humbly beseech your office to have this matter investigated to get those monies retrieved back to the public purse. It is our conviction that, the issue be considered in the interest of the Republic of Ghana. Attached to this petition is a copy of the said article and marked Exibit E1 Thank You Yours Faithfully .......Signed............ (PETITIONERS) Mr. Emmanuel Owusu Tel:0266334733/0206722751 Eric Dumenu Akatsi Tel:0240687802 Peprah Kyei Baffour Tel:0549450000 Dawda Eric Tel:0541695811 Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video A Policy Analyst, Richard Ahiagbah, has launched a campaign to contest the position of National General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Ho with a call on delegates to elect visionary leaders for the partys victory in 2020. The election must not be based on popularity or appearance, but delegates must consider those who served outside the limelight. Choose visionary leaders over claims of popularity and achievement. Its the only way we can galvanize our people for common victory, Mr. Ahiagbah said. Victory at 2016 was a collective effort, yet there is some noise and despair within the partys grassroots. The party must be made to care for its people, and all barriers to unity must be eliminated to pave way for them to be well organised, he added. He explained that his aim is to rejuvenate grassroots in Volta and Northern parts of the country to secure new strongholds for the party. Mr. Ahiagbah said the 2016 general elections testified to the political diversity of the Volta Region, and said, we need to end the political stigma once and for all, therefore Voltarians must support a true son of the land to help the region occupy the right place in the history of Ghana. My dream of becoming a General Secretary is not for personal gain, but deeply rooted in ideology. The ground is ripe and the party is ready to embrace a full vote from Volta. I am determined to put a strong foot forward, and willing to make full sacrifices and contribute towards making the party a household one. 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 Deputy National Youth Organizer of the New Patriotic Party, Dominic Eduah has been mandated by the National Youth Organizer, Sammi Awuku to lead a three-member delegation to the United States of America to meet leaders of the Young Republican National Federation (YRNF). The trip is at the invitation of the chairman of the YRNF Jason Frederick Emert The meeting is expected to inure mutually to the benefit of the youth wing of the New Patriotic Party and the YRNF which is the youth wing of the Republican Party in America. While in America, the Ghana team would learn from their American counterparts how to develop new ways of empowering the youth at the grass-root level in order to strengthen the youth wing at the local and regional levels The YRNF has very strong state chapters and the Ghana team would want to explore the possibility of replicating the same at the regional level in Ghana for the benefit of the youth wing of the New Patriotic Party Both the NPP youth wing and the YRNF are members of the International Young Democrat Union and share similarities in several aspects of political life The meetings would run from the 18th through to the 20th of June 2018. Mr. Eduah and his team are expected back in the country at the close of the meetings. 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 Western Regional Minister and Member of Paliament for Sefwi Wiawso, Hon. Dr. Kwaku Afiryie, has urged the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources to revoke lincenses for small-scale miners. He says this will enable them regulate the activities of small-scale miners when the ban is eventually lifted. Passionately speaking about the dire effects of small-scale mining on Okay FM's Ade Akye Abia programme, Dr Afriyie explained that the small-scale miners are using their licenses as a bargaining chip against the government in curbing the galamsey fight. "They are applying what is known as the subterfuge method and playing with the emotions of Ghanaians and those affected by the galamsey ban. When you allow them to do that, the fight against the menace becomes difficult because you have families whose livelihood have been affected by the ban," he said. Dr Afriyie further noted that there is no law that forbids the Minister for Lands and Natural Resources from revoking those licenses, adding that he owes them even no explanation if he decides to do so. Touching on the worrying issue of the importation of excavators into the system, which he believes has contributed to the vast degradation of forest reserves and water bodies, the former health minister called on government to introduce a policy on the use of the equipment in the country. "When you go to these mining areas there are plenty excavators, sometimes I can count as many as five hundred. What are they doing there? They should be set ablaze by the government when they are arrested by the government task force because the destruction these machines can cause, you have no idea," he added. Meanwhile, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has given the assurance that his government will soon put out a statement setting out a comprehensive roadmap, including the lifting of the ban on small-scale mining. This he said is to deal with, on a permanent basis, the grave threat of galamsey to the present and future health of Ghana. The comprehensive roadmap, according to the President, will involve the reclaiming and re-afforestation of mined-out areas; the restoration of impacted water bodies; and strict supervision of the processes of awarding mining licenses and associated permits. 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 The delegation also offered incense to the heroic martyrs at the Truong Bon historical relic site in Do Luong district. The NA Standing vice Chairwoman presented 13 gifts to relatives of heroic martyrs and revolutionary veteran Tran Thi Thong from heroic Company 317. On this occasion, she also presented funds to implement 10 social houses worth VND50 million each, which had been raised by the Office of the National Assembly, to families living with difficult circumstances in two districts of Nam Dan and Do Luong. Policy Advisor of the Progressive Peoples Party, Kofi Asamoah Siaw has chided minority in Parliament for actions they describe as attempts to bastardize the registration process of the National Identification card. The National Identification Authority on 28th May, 2018 announced the commencement of registration of the public to acquire the Ghana Card but eventually begun the process first week in June. Having made the announcement, the authority indicated that the only identity documents that would be required for the purpose of registering for and obtaining the Ghana Card were a birth certificate, a valid passport, a valid residence permit and a valid certificate of acquired citizenship. But minority in Parliament boycotted the procedure, registering their displeasure at the National Identification Authority not accepting the Voters ID as a proof of national identity. They argued that over 20 million Ghanaians will be disenfranchised because of the limitations on the proof of citizenship. The Progressive Peoples Partys Kofi Asamoah Siaw at a press conference, however reading some quotes from the Hansard of Parliament noted that Parliament received a unanimous acceptance from both sides of the house on the criteria for registration of the card. He was therefore surprised that the NDC would come back to make claims and allegations about the National Identification card process. In the committees report under proof of citizenship, the chairman reported to the house that the bill seeks to do away with the use of voters identity card, drivers license and baptismal certificates. It maintained the use of birth certificates and passports only and introduced residence permit and other documents evidencing acquired citizenship. In fact, the NDC supported the report and to quote Alhaji Inusah Abdulai B. Fuseini (MP, Tamale Central) he stated. Ghana Card: Stop raising non-existent issues with registration process - PPP to NDC Mr. Speaker, there is no controversy in the amendments. It seeks to expand the field of information that would be required, and bring the information up to date with modern trends. As I joked in the meeting, they are trying to make it impossible for anybody to hide in this country or outside the country. Mr. Speaker, the second one was that in the parent bill, challenging somebodys request to be put on the register was limited only to officers of the National Identification Authority. They now want to expand the remit. An individual could walk to the station and challenge the registration officer for registering somebody who has come to present himself for registration. We believe this is in accord with democratic tenancy; empowering the citizens to challenge the form. He quoted Ghana Card: Minority case needless litigation - Mercer The NDC party cannot be allowed to continue their disservice to Ghana even in opposition when they blatantly refused to implement the Ghana Card policy for the eight years they were in power. Mr. Asamoah Siaw added Source: ghanaweb.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 National Democratic Congress (NDC) Ho West Member of Parliament (MP), Mr Emmanuel Kwasi Bedzrah has rescinded his decision to resign as a parliamentarian. The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) lawmaker had written to Speaker of Parliament Prof Mike Oquaye about his intention to resign following a disagreement he had with the national leadership of his party over the suspension of polls in his constituency. It was gathered that the Ranking Member of the Government Assurance Committee later withdrew his intention after General Secretary of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, intervened to resolve the issue around the suspension of the polls in Ho West. Mr Nketia later confirmed in a radio interview with Accra based Class FM that the MP has decided to remain in office. The NDC is holding its nationwide constituency polls on Saturday, 23 June 2018 but 17 constituencies, according to a statement earlier released by the leadership of the party, have been suspended from the polls. Ho West was among the list of suspended constituencies but sources say the concerns by the MP over the suspension of the polls in his constituency, have been resolved. 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 Director of Communication for the Zylofon Arts Fund, Frank Kwabena Owusu has revealed that an approximate amount of GhS 1,700,000.00 from the fund has been invested into the Ghanaian movie industry. Speaking at the launch of the maiden edition of Ghana International Film Week, Mr Frank Kwabena Owusu popularly known as Franky 5 elaborated that the Zylofon Arts Fund is a Non-Governmental Organization which mobilizes funding for the creative arts industry as part of its operations. He further mentioned that for the past three months their attention has been driven towards the Film industry which has inspired them to sponsor the Ghana Film Week with Gh25,000.00 worth of gold coins yearly, which will be given to veterans in the film industry. "We believe this will go a long way to put an insurable mark in the minds of our veteran actors and actresses who are out of business now because of their age and health issues in order to let them feel a sense belonging towards the industry". The Director of Communication also added that Zylofon Arts Fund will add a citation to the Gold coin in memory of their commitment and service to the nation as a symbol for generations to come. In a separate chat with the organizers of The Ghana Film Week, they confirmed to attractivemustapha.com that the Zylofon Arts Fund sponsorship package is intended to last for five years. Watch the video below: Source: Attractivemustapha.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 Thousands of people rallied outside City Hall in 2015 to protest the proposed lease of Skaha Lake Park, which was thought to be protected by a referendum staged in 2002. Scattered debris is shown at the scene of an explosion in Mount Pearl, N.L., on Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Three people have been taken to hospital after an explosion at a business in an industrial area of Mount Pearl, N.L. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Holly McKenzie-Sutter Vietnamese Ambassador Duong Chi Dung, head of the Vietnam Permanent Mission to the UN, the WTO and other international organisations in Geneva, is leading the Vietnamese delegation to the session. The event, which runs through July 6, draws representatives from 47 member countries and more than 100 observer countries, as well as international and non-governmental organisations. Alongside a dialogue with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, participants will discuss a wide range of issues including womens rights, rights to health and education services, human trafficking, and migration. They will consider 65 reports from UN institutions on human rights, while holding thematic discussions. Participants are scheduled to approve the final Universal Periodic Review reports of 14 countries. More than 30 draft resolutions on diverse matters related to human rights will be introduced by member states for consideration, debate and approval. The Human Rights Council is an inter-governmental body of the UN system made up of 47 member states responsible for the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe. The "Justice For Our Stolen Children" camp is seen near the Saskatchewan Legislature Building in Regina on Tuesday, June 12, 2018. Police have arrested protesters who remained at a camp on the lawn outside the Saskatchewan legislature, but said they would allow a sacred fire to burn down before removing a teepee from the site. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Taylor A family, claiming to be from Columbia, is arrested by RCMP officers as they cross the border into Canada from the United States as asylum seekers on April 18, 2018 near Champlain, NY. A new report from the United Nations Refugee Agency shows 2017 broke global records for displaced persons and saw Canada become the ninth largest recipient of asylum seekers in the world. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees annual Global Trends report was released this morning and shows 68.5 million people fled their home countries due to wars, violence and persecution in 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh speaks to reporters in the in the Foyer of the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, June 19, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang People bicycle past a giant TV screen broadcasting the meeting of visiting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Chinese President Xi Jinping during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Tuesday, June 19, 2018. Kim is making a two-day visit to Beijing starting Tuesday and is expected to discuss with Chinese leaders his next steps after his nuclear summit with U.S. President Donald Trump last week. (AP Photo/Andy Wong) On behalf of the municipal leaders, Liem highly appreciated the guests working trip to Vietnam, expressing his hopes that the visiting delegation would gain further useful insights into the Southeast Asian country and its localities, including HCM City. The municipal official emphasised that the Vietnamese government and people always favour peace and are fully aware that it requires the joint efforts of the regional and the international community in order to ensure a stable, peaceful and favourable environment for the development of each nation. Talking about HCM Citys socio-economic situation, Liem hailed the southern metropolis as an economic locomotive and an economic, financial, scientific and technological hub of Vietnam. Annually, the city receives many foreign military ships on their friendly visits, which helps to further the understanding and interaction between local citizens and other countries, in addition to building and maintaining a peaceful and stable environment in the region. For his part, Colonel Ton That Tuan spoke highly of HCM Citys vibrant development as well as its important position in Vietnams socio-economic development. He voiced his belief that the foreign military attaches in Vietnam share a common desire to develop fine relations and cooperation between their respective nations and Vietnam. The working visit is expected to help foreign military attaches to get a better insight into Vietnam and its people, so that they might provide constructive advice for the leaders of their countries in launching appropriate activities to boost their ties with Vietnam, Tuan said. FILE - In this Friday, April 20, 2018, file photo, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach speaks during a rally at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan. A federal judge has ruled Kansas cannot require documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote, a setback for Kobach in a case with national implications for voting rights. (AP Photo/Mitchell Willetts, File) Perryville takes down Saxony in possible district preview It was a game that Saxony Lutheran boys soccer coach Chris Crawford said had a postseason feel to it.If that was how a possible district tournament matchup between Perryville and Saxony Lancers goal line stand downs Indians Two yards or six feet. Either way you look at it, that was all that was standing between St. Vincent and certain victory.However, St. Pius had other plans. The Lancers held off the Indians on the Guyana's local entrepreneurs lack faith in Govt.'s ability to manage oil industry By Abena Rockcliffe-Campbell GEORGETOWN Petroleumworld 06 19 2018 Much attention has been given to the lopsided contract that the Government of Guyana signed with ExxonMobil. The focus has been on the fact that Guyana's share seems disadvantageous. However, businessmen appear more concerned with the fact that the contract does not provide adequately for local content, and that the government does not seem ready to handle an oil industry. A few businessmen recently spoke to this newspaper on the grounds of anonymity. This is following a recent forum hosted by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce (GCCI) where some entrepreneurs openly expressed worry over some issues directly linked to the oil industryincluding the delayed establishment of a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF). The forum was hosted at Duke Lodge, and Charles Ramson Jr. was the featured speaker. At that forum, one businessman even highlighted the fact that the public, under successive governments, hardly ever knows the state of the Lotto Fund. He then posited the likelihood of similar situation occurring with the SWF. Since then, this newspaper spoke to several business owners who have differing views about Guyana's preparedness for first oil in 2020 and the government's ability to overlook the process there. One very prominent businessman said, I think it is time we move away from the contract. Yes, we could have gotten a better deal. But the government has already said that it would not be renegotiating. There is no sense flogging a dead horse. What we have to fight for now is our local content. We also have to hold our government accountable The businessman said that there is much to be done and the government is moving at a very slow pace. I find it hard to believe that we will be remotely ready by 2020. He then pointed out that the issues that need to be fixed in Guyana for businesses to thrive, go beyond the issues directly tied to the oil sector. The fact that I feel the need to speak to you off-the-record tells a story. I am not confident that my comments will just be viewed as constructive criticism and that I wouldn't be victimized. The businessman said that politicians in general, both government and opposition, need to become more mature they also need to work together to secure a better future and the time is now. Another businessman said, The fact that our Government seems to be a walkover does not help us to put much confidence in it. They allowed ExxonMobil to have its way with the contract and they are allowing Exxon to do what it wants and call it local content. Other businessmen expressed similar sentiments, while a few others are convinced, the government is doing its best under the circumstances. The argument supporting that stance is that this is still a very young government with mostly fairly new politicians. Then these politicians are faced with building a sector that is completely new to not only them, but Guyana. Immediately following a recent press conference hosted by Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo, he told Kaieteur News that most businessmen are complaining about the state of affairs in various sectors. They are all complaining; few of them have anything good to say. They all think this government is failing them, the former President emphasised. Also, former opposition Member of Parliament, Charles Ramson Jr., recently called on the government to consider legislative protection for Guyanese seeking to benefit from the local content obligations of oil companies. He too said that he spoke to several businessmen who complained of not being given contracts from ExxonMobil. Ramson said, Our businessmen are being overlooked while ExxonMobil gives out catering, meet and greet and brokerage contracts to companies that are not owned by Guyanese. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Story by from Kaieter News kaieteurnewsonline.com 06 19 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 Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia, Patrick Murphy, and Chief of Protocol of the State Department, Sean Lawler, alongside representatives from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries in Washington, joined the event. Both Murphy and Lawler said that during Vinhs over three years long tenure, the Vietnam-US comprehensive partnership witnessed notable developments across various fields, as reflected through the high-level visits by the two countries leaders. They cited the visits to the US by General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee, Nguyen Phu Trong, in July 2015 and Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc in May 2017, in addition to the Vietnam visits by President Barack Obama in May 2016 and President Donald Trump in November 2017. The bilateral ties in economy, trade, national defence and security, and regional cooperation have also been enhanced, they said. The officials highlighted the USs removal of its ban on the sale of lethal weapons to Vietnam, the first-ever visit to Vietnam by a US aircraft carrier in March 2018, the opening of Fulbright University in Vietnam, and projects on cooperation in settling the war consequences. They thanked Ambassador Vinh for his active contributions to the achievements. For his part, Vinh said he attaches significant importance to the Vietnam-US comprehensive partnership and expressed his hope that the bilateral relationship would continue to prosper in the future. Border case at ICJ Guyana to ask court to rule in its favour , Venezuela refuse to participate By Kaieter News GEORGETOWN Petroleumworld 06 19 2018 The Government of Guyana, in light of in the current court case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), says it intends to ask the court to rule in its favour, even if that neighbouring country is absent from proceedings. This mechanism is part of the statute of the Netherlands-based court, the judicial arm of the United Nations. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs last evening, Guyana observes that under Article 53 of the Statute of the Court, whenever one of the parties does not appear before the Court, or fails to defend its case, the other party may call upon the Court to decide in favour of its claim. The Foreign Affairs statement would come hours after Venezuela issued a statement (See story on Page 15) indicating that it will not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICJ, as it did not agree to the case which was filed by Guyana in late March. Venezuela, instead, said it prefers to activate a two-decade old mediation Good Offices Process which centres on talks between the two countries instead of the ICJ. The Full Statement: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana wishes to advise that Vice President and Minister of Foreign Affairs Honourable Carl Greenidge and Guyana's Legal Counsel attended the meeting convened by the Honourable Abdulqawi Abdul Yusuf, President of the International Court of Justice on Monday June 18, 2018 to discuss with Guyana and Venezuela the scheduling of written pleadings in the case the Arbitral Award of 3 October 1899 (Guyana v. Venezuela). Subsequent to this meeting, Guyana noted the issuance of a press release by Venezuela stating that it would not be participating in the case. Guyana observes that under Article 53 of the Statute of the Court, whenever one of the parties does not appear before the Court, or fails to defend its case, the other Party may call upon the Court to decide in favour of its claim. Guyana intends to proceed in accordance with the said Article. Guyana is fully committed to the rule of law in international relations, including the peaceful resolution of disputes in conformity with international law. It trusts that the International Court of Justice, the judicial organ of the United Nations, will resolve the controversy with Venezuela in accordance with the law in a manner that is fair and equitable. It hopes that, in due course, Venezuela will reconsider its position and decide to appear in Court and defend its case. The Court's rules allow for that. At the same time, if Venezuela persists in its refusal to participate, the rules provide for the Court to proceed, after a full hearing of the case, to a final judgment that is legally binding on both the participating and nonparticipating parties. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs wishes to reiterate that Guyana fully respects the decision of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to choose the International Court of Justice as the means of settlement of the controversy and is confident that the Court is fully empowered to decide the case. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Story by from Kaieter News kaieteurnewsonline.com 06 19 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 Venezuelans plan to sue state over Trinidad & Tobago asylum policy By TT Guardian PORT SPAIN Petroleumworld 06 19 2018 Lawyers representing a pair of asylum seekers from Venezuela are threatening to sue the State over its failure to make its official national policy for refugees transparent. In a pre-action protocol letter sent to National Security Minister Edmund Dillon and acting Chief Immigration Officer Charmaine Gandhi-Andrews yesterday morning, lawyers for Carlos Jose Perez Arias and Maria Carolina Olivares Sahad sought clarification on the policy and its applicability to them. According to their lawyer Darrell Allahar, the policy, which seeks to address the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees and how the State would determine their status, was passed by Cabinet in June 2014. Allahar pointed out that it was mentioned by Dillon's predecessor John Sandy at a meeting of the Council of the International Organisation on Migration in November that year, and by Gandhi-Andrews at a meeting of the executive committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in October 2016. He noted that while both officials announced the policy to their international counterparts, only a draft document on the phased establishment of it was published. It is assumed in the absence of any other publicly available material that this policy statement (draft) represents the policy which had been approved by the Cabinet in June 2014 and adopted by the Government of T&T, Allahar said. He noted that the letter arose out of concerns from his clients over the Government's role in repatriating 82 of their compatriots in April and conflicting and evasive statements from Government officials over whether some of the group were registered asylum seekers. Having regard to the Government's recent statements and actions as alluded above, my clients are now fearful that this country has and/or intends to deny and/or frustrate and/or undermine my clients' legitimate expectations as set out above, as well as those of all other registered asylum seekers, Allahar said. He requested that both Dillon and Gandhi-Andrews give written undertakings that his clients would be placed on orders of supervision and would not be deported while the UNHCR was mulling over the final decision on their refugee status. Allahar is also seeking assurances that the Government would not impose penalties against them for illegal entry until the determination of their applications and would only consider detention as a last resort. In addition to the applicability of the draft policy, Allahar is seeking the disclosure of the Government's standing operating procedures related to asylum seekers. At present, the liberty of my clients and indeed all registered asylum seekers is restricted by executive decisions, therefore, the policy and the decisions taken under it need to be transparent and clearly stated, Allahar said. In the event that both Dillon and Gandhi-Andrews fail to respond to the letter within 14 days, Allahar will file the lawsuit on his clients' behalf. He also noted that they would consider converting the claim into a class action lawsuit in which they will represent all other asylum seekers in T&T, who would then be bound by the final judgement in the case. The letter was also sent to the UNHCR, which is based in Washington, DC and the Living Waters Community, a local Roman Catholic social services NGO which coordinates asylum applications on behalf of the UNHCR. Arias and Sahad are also being represented by Douglas Mendes, SC, Chase Pegus, Ajay Baball and Edisha Greene. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Trinidad & Tobago war on labor By Yvonne Webb PORT SPAIN Petroleumworld 06 19 2018 FORMER Minister in the Ministry of Labour Rudranath Indarsingh said with 35,000 people being fired since September 2015 and more jobs threatened at Petrotrin, the Board of Inland Revenue (BIR), Customs and Excise, WASA and T&TEC, there is nothing to celebrate this Labour Day. Indarsingh said Labour Day is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of workers and allows them to reflect on their current status, celebrate their progress and to regroup and recommit to protecting their collective condition and improving their quality of life and standard of living. However, he said there is nothing for the working class to celebrate in 2018, as under Dr Keith Rowley's PNM administration they have been burdened with the highest level of joblessness in several years, increased cost of living and declining purchasing power of their earnings. He charged the government with punishing the poor and vulnerable through sustained taxation. What is there for workers to celebrate in our country when every sector national security (crime), the economy, education, industrial relations and collective bargaining and health care has literally collapsed under the Rowley-led PNM administration? He said in addition to these hardships, government has signalled its intention to increase water and electricity rates. Since September 2015, over 35,000 persons have lost their jobs and they have no prospects of gaining re-employment despite continued promises that the Government will be introducing amendments to the Retrenchment and Severance Benefits Act and the Industrial Relations Act in Parliament. He also took aim at Labour Minister Jennifer Baptiste-Primus, questioning the reason for her delay in delivering on her promised ten-point plan to help retrenched workers, matching their skills with vacancies. In response, Baptiste-Primus said, I will not be side-tracked by the likes of Mr Rudy Indarsingh. On the issue of the ten-point plan, he has brought me before the Parliament time and time again to give and update on it. And each time an update was given that the plan is in place. All unemployed persons have to do is to contact the ministry and the various mechanisms will kick in. I do not know what else Rudy Indarsingh wants from me. What I would like him to do, is to point to one achievement he can talk about when he was minister in the Ministry of Labour. Baptiste-Primus, former head of the Public Services Association, said she will not be attending any of the Labour Day celebrations planned by the two main umbrella bodies, the Joint Trade Union Movement (JTUM) in Fyzabad, or the one organised by the National Trade Union Centre (NATUC) in Tobago. ________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Colombia's Duque, president-elect vows to unite nation, alter peace deal By Helen Murphy and Steven Grattan - play video from Reuters - BOGOTA Petroleumworld 06 19 2018 Colombia's President-elect Ivan Duque, who swept aside leftist Gustavo Petro in Sunday's election, pledged to unite his South American nation after a divisive campaign but insisted he would change a landmark peace accord with leftist rebels. Duque's decisive victory in Sunday's poll, with 54 percent of votes to Petro's 42 percent, is likely to reassure investors in Latin America's fourth-largest economy who were alarmed by the leftist candidate's promise to overturn Colombia's orthodox economic model. Yet, in the first presidential election since the 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Duque worried Colombians with a promise to overhaul the accord that ended a five-decade conflict which killed more than 220,000 people and displaced millions. He has promised to impose tougher punishments on rebels for war crimes. Surrounded by friends and family, Duque thanked voters for handing him the biggest electoral victory in Colombia's history based on number of votes received. He struck a conciliatory tone, calling for the nation of more than 50 million people to unite behind him after a polarizing campaign. With humility and honour, I tell the Colombian people that I will give all my energies to unite our country. No more divisions, Duque told a crowd of cheering supporters in Bogota. I will not govern with hatred. Duque, 41, the business friendly protege of hardline former President Alvaro Uribe, has promised to toughen the peace deal while keeping Colombia's business friendly economic policies intact. By contrast, former guerrilla Petro had pledged to take on political elites, redistribute land to the poor and gradually eliminate the need for oil and coal in Latin America's fourth-largest economy. His positions prompted critics to compare him to Venezuela's former socialist President Hugo Chavez. Although Petro won a majority in only eight of 32 provinces, and the capital Bogota, the fact that a leftist advanced to the presidential runoff is historic in Colombia, where traditionally conservative politicians have held sway. Petro won 8 million votes versus 10.3 million for Duque. Petro, 58, had called on supporters to take to the streets if he felt there was widespread manipulation of the tally, but he accepted the outcome of Sunday's election. We accept Duque's triumph. He is the president of the Republic of Colombia... Today we are the opposition to his government, Petro, he will return to the Senate, told cheering supporters in Bogota. FRACTURED LEFT Duque will face significant challenges when he takes office in August. The economy remains weak; drug trafficking gangs have moved into areas once controlled by the FARC and more than half a million Venezuelan migrants have crossed into Colombia, looking for food and work. His plans to change the peace deal will face considerable opposition in Congress and from Colombia's Constitutional Court. On Sunday, he said he would make necessary corrections to the accord so victims' rights receive greater priority and justice and reparations are respected. Peace is something all Colombians yearn for, and peace means that we turn the page on the fractures that have divided us into friends and enemies of peace, he said, as confetti rained down and supporters danced and honked horns. Today, we're all friends to build that peace and it must be a peace that above all allows the guerrilla base its demobilization, its disarmament and its effective reinsertion. FARC leader Rodrigo Londono, known as Timochenko, congratulated Duque on Twitter, calling for reconciliation and saying he respected Colombians' decision. Duque has also promised to bolster the $324 billion economy, keep investors happy by cutting business taxes, support the oil and coal sectors - top exports - and help manufacturing. It is a result that's very in line with what the market had been expecting and it guarantees that Colombia's reputation - political and economic stability - is still valid, Felipe Campos, head economist at Alianza brokerage, said. Duque is the candidate for the Democratic Centre Party, a movement started in 2013 by Uribe, seen as the power behind the throne. A one-term senator, Duque worked at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington until 2014, when Uribe asked him to return to Colombia and take a seat in Congress. Duque's running mate, Marta Lucia Ramirez, will be Colombia's first female vice president. Our hope has arrived, said 52-year-old publicist Carlos Cortes, a Duque supporter. Now, with more respect for private enterprise, more jobs will be generated and we'll move forward as a country. For decades, Colombia's fractured left has failed to come close to winning the presidency or exercising control in Congress, overshadowed by right-wing contenders who have promised strong security policies. Yet the 2016 deal with the FARC clearly shifted priorities for many voters in the Andean country of nearly 50 million people. Despite Petro's loss, voter interest in tackling inequality, corruption and inadequate social services looks set to create opportunities for the left in future, possibly as soon as 2022. _________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Protesters, democrats, activists rally against Trump's family separation policy By Joseph Ax - play video from CNBC - ELIZABETH, N.J. Petroleumworld 06 19 2018 Democratic lawmakers joined protesters outside immigration detention facilities in New Jersey and Texas on Sunday for Father's Day demonstrations against the Trump administration's practice of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. This must not be who we are as a nation, said Representative Jerrold Nadler, one of seven members of Congress from New York and New Jersey who met with five detainees inside a facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, including three who said they had young relatives removed from their care after seeking asylum at the border. The events came as news stories highlighting the family separations intensified political pressure on the White House, even from some of President Donald Trump's fellow Republicans. U.S. officials said on Friday that nearly 2,000 children were separated from adults at the border between mid-April and the end of May. In May, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a zero tolerance policy in which all those apprehended entering the United States illegally, including those seeking asylum, would be criminally charged, which generally leads to children being separated from their parents. Administration officials have defended the tactic as necessary to secure the border and suggested it would act as a deterrent to illegal immigration. But the policy has drawn condemnation from medical professionals, religious leaders and immigration activists, who warn that some children could suffer lasting psychological trauma. The children are held in government facilities, released to adult sponsors or placed in temporary foster care. In South Texas on Sunday, several Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Jeff Merkley, visited a Border Patrol Processing Center in McAllen to call attention to the policy, while Representative Beto O'Rourke, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Texas, led a protest march to a temporary detention facility for immigrant children set up near El Paso. O'Rourke told the demonstrators they had to bear the burden of what we now know to be happening. I want that burden to be so uncomfortable for so many of us that it forces us to act, it places the public pressure on those in positions of public trust and power to do the right thing for our country, O'Rourke, who is seeking to unseat Republican Senator Ted Cruz, said to applause. Some moderate Republicans have also called on Trump to stop the separations. Senators Susan Collins and Jeff Flake wrote to White House officials on Saturday seeking more information on the policy. It is inconsistent with our American values to separate these children from their parents, Collins said on CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday. STOP LYING' Trump has sought to blame Democrats, saying their support for passage of a broader immigration bill would end the separations. White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday: As a mother, as a Catholic, as somebody who has got a conscience. ... I will tell you that nobody likes this policy. You saw the president (say) on camera that he wants this to end, she added. A spokeswoman for Melania Trump told CNN on Sunday that the first lady hates to see children separated from their families and hopes lawmakers from both parties can agree on immigration reform. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, former first lady Laura Bush, wife of the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, said she lives in a border state and appreciates the need to enforce and protect the U.S. borders. But this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart, Bush wrote, adding the images were eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. Democrats have accused the president of effectively turning the children into political hostages to secure stricter immigration measures, such as funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall. Stop lying to the American people. This is your policy, Democratic U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries said in New Jersey. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives will introduce legislation this week aimed at stopping separations, mirroring a similar Senate bill sponsored by Democrat Dianne Feinstein. But neither bill has much hope of securing enough support in the Republican-controlled Congress, let alone surviving Trump's veto pen. Roy Garcia, 43, attended the New Jersey protest with his wife, Linda, and their sons, 8-year-old Julian and 11-year-old Sebastian. It's hard for me to enjoy Father's Day knowing what's happening to other children and families, he said. It's heartbreaking. _________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld 1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Norway's Equinor hands $3.7 billion service deals to Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes By Reuters OSLO Petroleumworld 06 19 2018 Norwegian oil and gas firm Equinor has awarded drilling and well service contracts worth 30 billion Norwegian crowns ($3.68 billion) to Schlumberger , Halliburton and Baker Hughes, it said on Monday. The contracts cover integrated well services, such as directional drilling, drill bits, fluids and cementing, for an initial four years, and can be extended for up to 10 years. The purpose of integrated drilling and well services is to clarify roles and responsibilities, Equinor, formerly known as Statoil, said in a statement. This results in less interfaces and more clearly defined responsibilities, facilitating more seamless planning and implementation of the operations between the various contributors, it added. Last November, oil firm Aker BP signed a five-year integrated well service alliances with Halliburton, Odfjell Drilling and Maersk Drilling. $1 = 8.1563 Norwegian crowns _________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld 1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us China's import tariffs on U.S. oil would disrupt $1 billion monthly business By Henning Gloystein SINGAPORE Petroleumworld 06 19 2018 China's threat to impose duties on U.S. oil imports will hit a business that has soared in the last two years, and which is now worth almost $1 billion per month. In an escalating spat over the United States' trade deficit with most of its major trading partners, including China, U.S. President Donald Trump said last week he was pushing ahead with hefty tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports, starting on July 6. China said Friday it would retaliate by slapping duties on several American commodities, including oil. Investors expect the spat to come at the expense of U.S. oil firms, pulling down the share prices of ExxonMobil and Chevron by 1 to 2 percent since Friday, while U.S. crude oil prices fell by around 5 percent. This escalation of the trade war is dangerous for oil prices, said Stephen Innes, head of trading for Asia/Pacific at futures brokerage OANDA in Singapore. Let's hope cooler heads prevail, but I'm not overly optimistic, he added. The dispute between the United States and China comes at a pivotal time for oil markets. Following a year and a half of voluntary supply cuts led by the Middle East-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), as well as the non-OPEC producer Russia, oil markets have tightened, pushing up prices. The potential drop-off in American oil exports to China would benefit other producers, especially from OPEC and Russia. The OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia and Russia indicated on Friday they would loosen their supply restraint and were starting to raise exports. A cut in Chinese purchases of U.S. oil may also benefit Iran's sales, which Washington is trying to curb with new sanctions it announced in May. The Chinese may just replace some of the American oil with Iranian crude, said John Driscoll, director of consultancy JTD Energy Services. China isn't intimidated by the threat of U.S. sanctions. They haven't been in the past. So in this diplomatic spat they might just replace U.S. crude with Iranian oil. That would obviously infuriate Trump, he said. BOOMING BUSINESS China's aggressive riposte to Trump took some in the industry by surprise. U.S. crude exports to China have been rising sharply, thanks to a production surge in the past three years that was a welcome alternative to make up for the cut in supplies from OPEC and Russia. We're caught by surprise that crude oil is on the list, said an official with a Chinese state oil major, asking not to be named as he was not authorized to speak to media. We were actually preparing to raise imports according to an earlier government line, he added, referring to a Beijing policy enacted earlier this year to help reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China. U.S. oil exports, which have been surging thanks to a sharp increase in production in the past three years, were seen as a viable alternative to make up for the cut in supplies from OPEC and Russia. Shipping data in Thomson Reuters Eikon shows that U.S. crude oil shipments to China have soared in value recently, jumping from just $100 million per month in early 2017 to almost $1 billion per month currently. The threatened tariff would make U.S. oil more expensive versus supplies from other regions, including the Middle East and Russia, and likely disrupt a business that has soared recently. With Trump's politics, we're in a world of re-aligning alliances. China will not just swallow U.S. tariffs, said Driscoll. This is tit-for-tat petroleum diplomacy, he added. The OPEC/non-OPEC cartel is the big beneficiary of all this oil diplomacy, as it will squeeze global spare oil capacity and likely push up crude prices. _________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld 1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Venezuela's near collapse takes toll on oil industry - FACTBOX By Jeff Mower NEW YORK Petroleumworld 06 19 2018 Venezuela's near economic collapse has taken a toll on the country's oil production, causing shifts in oil flows as buyers look to secure alternative supplies. As workers have fled the country, state-owned oil company PDVSA has had a difficult time maintaining crude output, let alone boosting production. PDVSA's refining sector has also deteriorated on a lack of funds and manpower. PDVSA has had difficulty pulling crude from storage because its supplies are subject to seizure by creditors. Most notably, on April 26 the International Trade Court ordered PDVSA to pay $2.04 billion to ConocoPhillips for the 2007 expropriation of ConocoPhillips' 50.1% interest in its Petrozuata joint venture in PDVSA, and its 40% stake in the Hamaca project, both of which were heavy oil installations in the Orinoco Belt of eastern Venezuela. And US has sanctioned individuals in Venezuela, including President Nicolas Maduro, prohibited the purchase and sale of any Venezuelan government debt, including any bonds issued by PDVSA, and banned the use of the Venezuela-issued digital currency known as the petro. Below are some key takeaways from the current situation. CRUDE OUTPUT, EXPORTS FALLING * Venezuela crude production could be on the verge of sinking to 1 million b/d, and a drop in crude exports is causing a shift in trade flows. * Venezuela's crude output averaged 1.36 million b/d in May, down from 1.41 million b/d in April, and 1.9 million b/d in May 2017, according to S&P Global Platts. The International Energy Agency said it could fall to 800,000 b/d or even lower next year. * S&P Global Platts Analytics sees Venezuelan production remaining above 1 million b/d during 2019. "They have a certain amount of production that they can keep going although the heavier grades would get impacted if they can no longer buy diluents," said Chris Midgley, head of Platts Analytics. * In early June, PDVSA notified 11 international customers that it would not be able to meet its crude supply commitments in full, a PDVSA official said. It is contractually obliged to supply 1.495 million b/d to these customers in June, but only has 694,000 b/d available. The customers either would not comment, or could not be reached for comment. * Venezuela's rig count has fallen to 28 in May from 36 in April, and 49 in January, according to Baker Hughes International Rig Counts. * PDVSA has experienced similar drops in the past. In the 1980s, the number of rigs fell to less than 30, causing crude production to fall to 1.3 million b/d. * Production has slowed largely because of a lack of maintenance and as skilled employees have fled the country. For instance, PDVSA Friday was operating its 202,000 b/d Petrocedeno extra heavy crude upgrader at just 39.6% of capacity, due to delayed maintenance, lack of spare parts, and electrical failures, according to an operator at the facility. * PDVSA's three other upgraders -- the 120,000 b/d Petrosanfelix, 120,000 b/d Petromonagas and 190,000 b/d Petropiar upgraders -- are expected to be operating below capacity in June. * PDVSA planned to build a 200,000 b/d upgrader at an estimated cost of $5 billion-$6 billion in the PetroCarabobo project. However, India's ONGC Videsh has put on hold plans to invest in the upgrader until it has received full payment for its equity oil sales. SHIFTING CRUDE FLOWS * US Gulf Coast refiners have been increasing their imports of Canadian and Iraqi crude, likely making up for the Venezuelan shortage. * US Gulf Coast imports of Venezuelan heavy sour crude have averaged roughly 249,100 b/d so far this year, down from nearly 529,760 b/d in the same period in 2017 and 658,600 b/d in 2016. * Iraq, which had long blended its heavier sour crude with medium grades, exported 301,600 b/d of heavy crude to the US Gulf Coast in March, according to the latest EIA data. It was the highest average since January 2017, when about 341,650 b/d of Iraqi heavy sour crude was shipped to the Gulf Coast, an all-time high, according to the EIA data. * Through May, roughly 35.5 million barrels of Basrah Heavy crude had been imported by US Gulf Coast refiners, up about 1 million barrels compared with the first five months of 2017, but more than double imports in the same time period in 2016, according to the latest US Customs and Border Protection data. * Canadian crude producers are of late stepping up supplies to the US Gulf Coast, with the bulk of the increase being shipped on rail cars. * Crude exports to the USGC are currently around 530,000 b/d, said Dinara Millington, vice president of research with the Canadian Energy Research Institute said Thursday in Calgary. That's up from 443,000 b/d in March, and 336,000 b/d in January 2017, according to EIA data. * Canadian crude is competitive because of deep price discounts. The Western Canadian Select coking margin on the USGC has averaged $21.29/b so far in June, compared to a $5.94/b margin for Mexican Maya. The bulk of that WCS advantage comes from the deep spot price discounts for the grade. * China's independent refiners are looking for alternative sources of heavy crude, with Mexican Maya, Colombia's Castilla and Canadian Cold Lake Blend options being considered. * Independent refiners are major buyers of Venezuelan crudes, taking around 69% of the Latin American shipment to China, mainly through CNPC, which is the solo buyer under the oil-for-loan deal between the countries. China imported 4.7 million mt crude from Venezuela in Q1, out of which 3.22 million mt was taken by the independent refiners, data from the General Administration of Customs and S&P Global Platts showed. * Venezuelan crudes are mainly used for asphalt production in China, the demand for which peaks over September-November. * A CNPC source said it is difficult to find good alternatives for Venezuelan Merey crude, which with an API of 16 degrees and 2.46% sulfur content is a good feedstock for asphalt production. Some heavy crudes, like Maya from Mexico, can be used as an alternate to produce asphalt, a source with independent Wonfull Petrochemical said. But no crudes have been imported from Mexico by independent refineries since 2016. REFINED PRODUCTS IMPORTS * Venezuela's imports of oil products have been rising as output from its refineries has been declining due to lack of crude feedstock, accidents, unscheduled shutdowns, and delays in maintenance of various facilities. * PDVSA will process just 499,000 b/d of crude at its domestic refineries in June, accounting for just 31% of its 1.6 million b/d of refining capacity. This would be 144,000 b/d lower from the same month in 2017. * PDVSA's system is comprised of five refineries: Amuay, Cardon, El Palito, Puerto La Cruz, and Isla, which it operated in an agreement with the Curacao government. The government of Curacao is open to a third party operating the PDVSA-run Isla refinery. * PDVSA plans to import 9.735 million barrels of oil products in June, up from 6.188 million barrels in May, and the highest since 2016, according to an internal PDVSA report seen by S&P Global Platts. * PDVSA sources its imports from Russia's Rosneft, India's Reliance Industries Ltd., and Citgo, PDVSA's US-based refining arm. * The decline in refinery utilization has also forced PDVSA to suspend oil product exports to eight countries in the Caribbean as part of its long standing Petrocaribe agreement. PDVSA has indefinitely suspended delivery of 38,000 b/d of oil products to Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Dominica, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, San Vicente and St Kitts. _________________________ Twitter: @petroleumworld 1 Petroleumworld.com Hit your target - Advertise with Us Story by Jeff Mower; Edited by Richard Rubin from Platts. platts.com 06 18 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 DO YOU ENJOY 'PHANTOMS & MONSTERS?' 'Phantoms & Monsters' has always been a free access blog and newsletter. It is one of the very few paranormal / cryptozoology sites that offers first-hand information on breaking incidents and investigations. The site survives solely on donations. If you would like to support the newsletter, blog and my work, you can use one of the donation buttons on the blog or newsletter, or go to Paypal.com and use my email lonstrickler@phantomsandmonsters.com as the payee. Thanks again. 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Please Note: On this day, November 27, 2014, in accord with 15 U.S. Code Chapter 107 - Protection of Intellectual Property Rights, I declare that my rights are attached to all personal data, voice recordings, photos, art, text, titles, etc. published or reproduced at any media source. For commercial and/or recreational use of the foregoing my written consent is required at all times. By this release, I tell all unauthorized person and/or parties that it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, broadcast, or to take any other action against me on the basis of its contents. The actions mentioned above apply equally to employees, students, agents and/or other staff under the direction of the offending parties. The contents of my profile include private information. The violation of my privacy is punished by the law (UCC 1 1-308 - 308 1 -103 and the Rome Statute) NOTE: Any use of witness information, which includes any attempt to contact a witness or persons involved in an event, is strictly prohibited without the written consent of Phantoms & Monsters. 2005-2018 Phantoms & Monsters - All Rights Reserved I work at a sheriff's office. We have a ghost, who is said to be the last person to be hanged in the county before the state took over executions. He was hanged outside the old jail, which is connected to the new building. The area he was hanged is now the recreation yard for the present jail. We'll hear water dripping behind a wall where there are no pipes, but there were in a building that was torn down. We'll hear pipes rattle. The elevator goes off at all hours. Inmates have reported feeling like someone brushing a hand across their forwards like a mother would do to a child while they're in bed asleep. They've also reported feeling someone sit down on the edge of their bunk when they had a single cell and they were locked down. We've heard footsteps in the jail corridor when all the inmates are locked down.If something bad is happening in the office, his activities are seriously increased. For instance, there was a break-in to the evidence room once. Around the time it's believed to have happened, he was in overdrive in his noise making. Some people believe that he was trying to alert the staff that something was amiss. Once, a coworker said he didn't believe in ghosts. Suddenly, a clipboard went flying off a counter that no one was within feet of. Some people have seen him. I never have.Once, I was working late in the basement doing some filing. I heard some rattling and just had a feeling the door was going to close. I said, "Roy, don't even think about it. I'm not afraid of you." He's never again tried to scare me and I suspect there was one incident when he protected me. We've also had experiences in the control room that some believe are the activities of a dispatcher who passed away several years ago. Following that theory, when the control panel was going berserk one day, someone called out his name and told him to cut it out. It stopped." - MT Mikmaq**********Bazoule (Burkina Faso) (AFP) - Crocodiles may be one of the deadliest hunters in the animal kingdom, but in a small village in Burkina Faso it is not unusual to see someone sitting atop one of the fearsome reptiles.People in Bazoule, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the capital Ouagadougou, share their pond with more than 100 of the razor-toothed creatures."We got used to the crocodiles when we were young, swimming in the water with them and all that," said Pierre Kabore, just a few metres (yards) away from a crocodile feasting on chicken provided by the village."Now we can always approach them and sit on them -- and if you have the courage, you can lie on them too. There's no problem, they are sacred crocodiles. They don't do anything to anyone."**********The canine creature shot in Montana a month ago that captured the curiosity of the nation is actually a gray wolf.DNA from the animal, which was shot legally by a rancher near Denton on May 16, was tested at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service forensic laboratory in Ashland, Ore. The lab compared the animals DNA with thousands of other DNA samples from wolves, coyotes and dogs. The conclusion was clear this animal is a gray wolf from the northern Rocky Mountains.Confusion about the animal might be due to the condition of the animal and the photos, which seemed to show short legs and big ears. Inspection of the animal at the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks wildlife health lab in Bozeman revealed a relatively normal looking, dark brown wolf.Physical variations arent unusual for animals, said Mary Curtis, geneticist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.Within species there can be variability thats not surprising at all, Curtis said.**************************************** At the talks after the official welcome ceremony for Vice President Dang Thi Ngoc Thinh, Lao Vice President Phankham Viphavanh highlighted the visits significance to the two countries relations, noting that the Party, State and people of Laos always keep in mind the enormous assistance Vietnam has given to them throughout history. Vice President Thinh, who is on her first official visit to Laos from June 19 to 22, reiterated that the Party, State and people of Vietnam always treasure the sincere friendship and mutual support with Laos. The two sides briefed each other about their respective countries security, political and socio-economic situation, stressing that amid numerous challenges in the world and the region, Vietnam and Laos should further intensify their time-tested friendship, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation, which are the priceless asset that needs to be maintained and passed down to future generations. The vice presidents noted with satisfaction the flourishing cooperation in all aspects, including politics, security, defence, economy, trade, investment, education, culture, and people-to-people exchange. They said the frequent mutual visits by leaders of the countries Parties, States, Governments and National Assemblies are a vivid demonstration of the pure, faithful and trustworthy connections between Vietnam and Laos. Phankham Viphavanh asked for both sides coordination to soon build a park named after Vietnams late President Ho Chi Minh in the north of Vientiane capital city so as to help educate young people on the great friendship of the countries. At the talks, they agreed to step up mutual visits at all levels with a focus on their effectiveness along with people-to-people exchange, especially among young people, to reinforce the two nations connectivity and create a solid foundation for future generations to foster the traditional relations. They agreed to bolster security-defence cooperation, including in fighting trans-national crimes and ensuring security and development in the countries shared border areas. They also urged better coordination to manage the borderline, reduce irregular migration, and carry out the agreement on the settlement of irregular migrants and undocumented marriages signed by the two Governments in 2013. The Lao Vice President thanked the Vietnamese Government for creating conditions for the Lao-Vietnam International Port Joint Stock Company to build Vung Ang No. 1, 2 and 3 wharves, which are important gateways for the economic development of the northeast of Laos. He also appreciated the Vietnamese sides promotion of trade and investment partnership, transport connectivity, investment cooperation projects, and removal of business obstacles. Valuing the Vietnamese Governments scholarships for Laos, he asked the two sides to improve collaboration in education-training to meet each countrys human resource demand while strengthening ties in culture, sports, communications, science and technology. Phankham Viphavanh affirmed that the Lao Government always supports Vietnamese people to settle in the country under Laos law. The two sides should coordinate closely to manage and create favourable conditions for Vietnamese to work in conformity with Laos law. The two officials said their countries will continue working closely together and support each other at international and regional forums like the United Nations, ASEAN and the Mekong regions cooperation mechanisms. Also on June 19, the Vietnamese Vice President paid courtesy calls to General Secretary of the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party and President Bounnhang Vorachith and Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith. The Lao leaders emphasised that the Party and Government of Laos always attach importance to the enhancement of the countries special ties, agreeing to solidify the comprehensive cooperation between the two Parties and Governments. Vanguard Group bought more than $2.2 billion worth of data-tower stocks and $1.2 billion of construction-timber stocks from January through last month, and plans to buy more shares of the handful of real estate investment trusts (REITs) in each sector, according to a report. The Malvern-based investment firm, which manages about $5 trillion in assets, is adding those stocks to its real estate index funds for the first time, writes a team of analysts headed by Ric Prentiss in a report to clients of brokerage firm Raymond James & Associates this morning. The move makes Vanguard a major owner of American Tower Corp. and Crown Castle International Corp., which own towers that connect the nation's smartphones and data centers; and of Weyerhaeuser Co., Rayonier Inc., and PotlachDeltic Corp., among other companies that make American construction timber and other wood products. Vanguard owns at least 6 percent of most of the companies listed on the S&P 500, and 14 percent or more of the major REIT stocks, a tax-sheltered, high-dividend (but not always price-appreciating) way to invest in offices, stores, towers, timber, and other real estate. For example, Vanguard owns 14 percent of Simon Property Group (which owns King of Prussia Mall and big shopping centers), and 16 percent or more of Comcast landlord Liberty Property Trust; Center City, University City, and Radnor office redeveloper Brandywine Realty Trust; and Philadelphia Fashion Center co-owner Pennsylvania REIT, among others. This move to add timber and tower stocks follows Vanguard's decision last year to broaden its REIT holdings by including sectors it had previously avoided, after Vanguard's popular REIT index funds became a dominant owner of commercial real estate REITs. Prentiss reported that "we would expect additional buying demand" by Vanguard for timber and tower REITs, until Vanguard's Real Estate Index Fund Investor Shares (VGSIX), Real Estate Fund Admiral Shares (VGSLX), and Real Estate ETF (VNQ), which now total around $50 billion in assets, reach their targets, as allocated by the benchmark MSCI U.S. IMI Real Estate 25/50 Index. With its recent purchases, Vanguard is more than halfway to those targets. Weyerhaeuser and American Tower, the largest timber and tower stocks, respectively, post investor yields below that of the Vanguard real estate funds that now include them. The company's buying spree could contribute in the months ahead to "fluctuations" in timber and tower share prices, Prentiss concluded. During their talks on June 14, the two ministers applauded the two countries fruitful cooperation in health over the last 25 years, especially Frances help in training over 3,000 Vietnamese doctors in France and 1,500 postgraduate doctors in Vietnam. Preventive medicine and public health are also the outstanding cooperation fields between the two sides with exchange programmes of Vietnams Pasteur institutes and those of France in preventing infectious diseases such as SARS, H5N1, H1N1, measles, dengue and hand-foot and mouth disease. The officials discussed prospects for bilateral health cooperation in the coming time. They also focused on sharing experiences in the field as Vietnam is looking to improve the quality of health examinations and treatment and reform the hospital system, while France is also enhancing the management of public expenditure in its health sector, improving medical benefits for low-income people. On the occasion, the ministers signed a letter of intent on cooperation, stating that two sides agree to strengthen their partnership in the training of medical staff for Vietnam, preventing infectious diseases, improving public health and preventive medicine, and building policies and legal frameworks for transfusion and transplant activities. Minister Tien attended the France-Vietnam health workshop in Sorbonne, worked with representatives from the French Medical Council, and visited the French National Blood Service (EFS), Pasteur Paris Institute, Pitie-Salpetriere. The Vietnamese official witnessed the signing of a letter of intent for cooperation between Vietnams National Institute of Haematology and Blood Transfusion and French National Blood Service (EFS), and the cooperation agreement between Hanoi Medical University and Paris 13 University for training, research and student exchange. (Left to right:) Melanye Finister, Patrese D. McClain, Brian Marable, and Joshua E. Nelson in "Skeleton Crew," through July 15 at People's Light in Ambler. Read more The workplace can give rise to unlikely friendships bonds that may prove resilient, or not. As with any other kind of family, it's hard to know until they're tested. That testing is the essence of Skeleton Crew, Dominique Morisseau's (often brilliantly) talky two-act play about a Detroit auto plant on the verge of an angst-provoking shutdown. It's playing through July 15 at People's Light in Malvern. Set during the great recession, "somewhere around 2008," the work is the final installment in Morisseau's trilogy titled The Detroit Project. The People's Light production, directed by Steve H. Broadnax III with keen attention to the poetry of its language, is engrossing and finally explosive. Skeleton Crew is part of a nascent body of work commenting on America's deindustrialization. Next season, both People's Light and the Philadelphia Theatre Company will stage Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Sweat, inspired by the plight of steel workers in Reading. The title Skeleton Crew refers to the bare-bones staffing of a factory, just sufficient to keep it operating. But it hints, too, at a metaphorical meaning the stripping away of both material comforts and humanity by bosses who blithely refer to a veteran employee as "dead weight." The play's four characters, all African American, interact in the break room of a sheet-metal stamping plant, where they rag one another and defy plant regulations by smoking, gambling, and hiding contraband. Tony Cisek's super-realistic set, with its distressed couch, beat-up lockers, bulletin board, table, and kitchenette, puts us firmly in the world of the play. Curtis Craig's sound design, evoking the hum and clatter of the factory floor, and Jeromy Hopgood's video projections of the surrounding city, vistas of both ruin and regeneration, summon up the larger worlds in which these men and women move. The play's central conflict is a matter of clashing loyalties. Reggie (Brian Marable), a proudly white-collar foreman, exhorts union rep Faye (Melanye Finister, sympathetic in her growing despair) to keep a little secret: This plant will be closing, and its workers will soon be out on the street. Reggie, who knows just how thin a line separates him from his blue-collar colleagues, promises to fight for a fair severance package. Meanwhile, the company wants production to continue with maximum efficiency. The middle-aged Faye, close to Reggie's late mother, helped the young supervisor get his start. Now, she feels torn between their quasi-filial bond and her duty to warn her fellow union members. Complicating the situation, someone is stealing from the plant. The prickly, disgruntled Dez (Joshua E. Nelson, likable beneath his aggression) is a suspect. When he isn't dreaming of escape into entrepreneurship, he's either flirting with or harassing, depending on your perspective Shanita (Patrese D. McClain), who is pregnant by an unnamed man. Faye has problems of her own: a distant son, medical bills, and itches for gambling and nicotine. The People's Light ensemble is altogether fine, but the standouts are two actors who have performed this much-produced play elsewhere. McClain's Shanita is delightfully self-aware a little bit tough, a little bit soft, stylish (in Marla Jurglanis' 2018 cold-shoulder and flared-sleeve fashions), and very funny. Marable is superb as Reggie, a man on the precipice who falls but lands on his feet. Not much actually happens in Skeleton Crew beyond the baring of souls and the subtle shifting of relationships. That may be enough. ESPN 'Around the Host' Tony Reali opened up about the loss of his unborn son during his return to the show Monday. Read more An emotional Tony Reali returned to his ESPN show Around the Horn Monday, a day after revealing he both gained a son and lost one. On Father's Day, Reali revealed that he and his wife, Samiya, had been expecting twin sons. One of the sons, Amadeo, died in the moments leading up to childbirth. The other, Enzo, was delivered weeks early and was finally released from the hospital last week. "The duality of all this the anguish and the joy is impossible to grasp," Reali wrote in a lengthy Twitter thread on Sunday. "But it's one we know we must navigate. For me that means two things: giving voice to our feelings, and allowing others to lift us when we can't shoulder the load of those feelings." Following Monday's Around the Horn, Reali's ESPN colleague Israel Gutierrez ceded the final moments of the show to let the host open up about his loss. Reali, choking back tears, said it's OK not to be OK, and opened up about the heartbreaking loss he and his wife are grappling with. "Grief is part of humanity. Grief is proof of humanity," Reali said. "Don't bury your heart keep it on the outside and look to other people. Because humanity can lift us. That has been my experience." Reali's thoughts quickly turned to the situation at the Mexican border and the growing outrage over the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy, which has led to the forced separation of families and the detainment of thousands of minors in facilities throughout the South. >> READ MORE: Bill O'Reilly, Laura Bush and other conservatives bash Trump admin's 'zero-tolerance' border policy "Today my thoughts are with children in cages. That's parents experiencing loss too. Humanity needs to be better," Reali said. "Amadeo, I'll love you forever. You're named for God's love. May we all be craving it. May we all be giving it to each other. May we all be compassionate enough to give it to all." >> READ MORE: Pat Toomey on border separations: Problem has been 'exaggerated significantly Watch: Back in June, following Roseanne Barr's racist tweet about former Obama administration official Valerie Jarrett, ESPN reportedly warned its talent about weighing in on controversial, non-sports matters on social media. The warning appears to have worked, as most ESPN personalities (including the politically outspoken Keith Olbermann) appear to have avoided the situation at the border, despite the situation dominating news coverage on Monday. Jemele Hill, a columnist at ESPN's Undefeated and one-time Inquirer intern, shared a Gallup poll from 1942 that showed a majority of Americans supported internment camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, a comparison to Trump's border policy also made by former First Lady Laura Bush in a column that blasted the separation of children from their parents as "immoral" and "cruel." According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday, a majority of Republicans support the administration's no-tolerance policy of separating parents who crossed the border illegally from their children (though overall, 66 percent of voters told Quinnipiac they opposed the policy). Driving while distracted can make it difficult to react to a potential crash, especially for inexperienced teen drivers. Talking, texting, or using social media while driving takes their eyes and brains off the task of driving. I recently spoke with my colleague Catherine C. McDonald, PhD, RN, who is conducting studies at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn School of Nursing to encourage focused driving in teens. What her research shows may be surprising: Even though teens recognize that talking or texting on a cell phone or using social media apps while driving is unsafe, they often engage in these behaviors anyway. Why the disconnect? It could be due to technology addiction. A survey from Common Sense Media found that half of teens felt addicted to their devices, and 78 percent checked their devices at least hourly. Making matters worse: 72 percent of teens felt pressured to respond immediately to texts, notifications, and social media messaging. Unfortunately, they feel this need even while driving, and teen drivers receive the most calls from their parents, more than general calling patterns would suggest. Parents should provide their teens with safe alternatives to cell phone use while driving instead of being the cause of their distraction: Complete any call or text before starting the car. Get directions and try to visualize the destination before turning the key. Check in with friends or parents only after arrival. Because technology will change and new distractions will be introduced, parents need to make sure teens understand the value of engaged driving, where the driver is continuously attentive and focused. Here are more tips for parents to help their teen drivers: Avoid calling while your teen is driving. Ask your teen to call you before leaving one place and after arrival at the next destination. Your teen may feel compelled to answer your call if receiving it while driving. Discuss this safety concern. Talk with your teen about how distracted driving is especially deadly for newly licensed drivers. Explain that motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for teens in the U.S. and that being distracted from something inside or outside the vehicle can lead to a serious crash. Peer passengers, changing the radio, eating, or applying makeup are all dangerous distractions, along with cell phones whether hand-held or hands-free. Set the default "Do not disturb" setting on your teen's phone. With recent upgrades in iOS, Apple created an option to avoid distraction while driving. When the phone detects driving, it sends automated messages and does not alert the driver. Visit this link to learn how to set it up. Include managing distractions in practice driving. The "TeenDrivingPlan Practice Guide," developed by teen-driving experts at CHOP, includes a lesson on this topic, along with other additional challenges, such as driving at night and in inclement weather. Model safe behavior. Do not call, text, check Facebook and other social media, or do a Google search while driving, even at stoplights. Let your teen know that you have driven while distracted in the past and that you are changing your behavior to be safe. Set and enforce house rules. These rules should include no cell phone use while driving and limiting the number of peer passengers your teen may drive. Families can find tips on how to set house rules at TeenDriverSource.org, a website created by teen-driving experts at CHOP. Know the law. Graduated drivers licensing provisions include restrictions to help prevent distracted driving for newly licensed teens, and research shows most teens do comply with GDL. The provisions include limiting peer passengers and banning texting while driving. Encourage safe passenger behavior. Your teen should respect the responsibility the friend is taking as driver and not be distracting. Keep the music down. Do not pressure the driver to speed. Do not act wild. Respect the driver by following the rules. The Teen Driver Safety Research team at CHOP is also testing different interventions aimed at reducing distracted driving, including a web-based educational tool and ways to implement technological solutions, such as automated blocking of cell phone use and silencing of notifications while the vehicle is in motion. These interventions have the potential to help teen drivers manage distractions and stay engaged. We'll keep you posted! The death certificate for 10-year-old Jayden Auyeung, whose family went to court last month to challenge Children's Hospital of Philadelphia over its efforts to take him off life support, lists the day he died as May 15, when physicians found that he was brain dead. Yet his grieving family says his heart did not stop beating until Saturday. "They put down May 15 when they pronounced him brain dead, when it should be June 16, 2018," said Linda Pham, the boy's aunt. "That does not make sense to us." The family had hoped to move the boy from CHOP to a long-term care facility or even take him back home to New Jersey, but was not able to find another place for him. The official cause of death was hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, cardiopulmonary arrest, and respiratory failure, the boy's aunt said. "He fought until Saturday and then he could not do it anymore," said Pham, of Edison, N.J. On May 4, Jayden, who suffered from a genetic motor neuron disease, couldn't breathe after a mucus plug developed in his throat while he was at home. He was initially taken to Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J., where he was placed on life support. Two days later he was transferred to CHOP, which had treated him for years. Physicians there declared the boy brain dead and asked the family to remove all life support on May 16, the child's 10th birthday. Pennsylvania allows a physician to declare a patient legally dead if either heart or brain function has completely and irreversibly stopped. Lawmakers in New Jersey have enacted a religious exemption. If a patient's faith dictates that life persists so long as the heart is beating, then brain death alone is not sufficient for a legal declaration of death. Jayden's mother, Anna, is Buddhist and his father, Jonathan, is Catholic. CHOP declined to comment, citing patient privacy laws. Pham said that in the last few weeks Jayden had begun to move in response to his father's voice, though doctors told the family what they were seeing was involuntary movement. A viewing will be held on Friday at St. Helena Roman Catholic Church in Edison, with the funeral on Saturday, Pham said. Jayden's parents are taking it "day by day," she said. Jayden's blood pressure had been falling for about five days before his heart gave out and there was blood in his stool. A neurologist the family brought in from out of state said he needed a blood transfusion and fluids but the hospital did not provide those for Jayden, Pham said. Arthur Caplan, a New York University bioethicist, said CHOP's decision on the death certificate is understandable. "There is judgment involved, however for legal reasons when a hospital believed the person is dead, that is the date that goes on the certificate," Caplan said. There can be some discretion such as when a family is on the way to say goodbye, but that is usually a matter of hours, not weeks. It can sometimes be psychologically easier for a family to see a loved one in the hospital rather than the morgue, and doctors and nurses are sensitive to that, he said. "Brain death is death," he said. "Even though there can be fights once death has occurred, it does not change the fact doctors believe the person to be dead." CHOP physicians have also declared Areen Chakrabarti, 14, brain dead after he suffered severe brain damage from smoke inhalation on April 14, when the family's Bordentown home caught fire. Areen, who is on the autism spectrum, became confused and ran upstairs rather than outside. He has been on a ventilator since the fire. Areen's case is still pending in court. On Monday the Superior Court issued an order that could have made it possible to remove Areen from the life-extending technologies at 5 p.m. on Wednesday. But the family filed an emergency stay with the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, and it was granted on Tuesday afternoon, said Christopher F. Bagnato, lawyer for both families. "The fight goes on," he said. "I don't know how long. I tell the family, you take it one day at a time." Long-term care facilities will not accept Areen without a tracheostomy, a surgery that would create an air passage in the neck, but CHOP will not perform it, according to Bagnato. "Areen has lost 22 pounds in 21 days," said Rumpa Banerjee, the boy's mother. She, like Jayden's aunt, complained that CHOP hasn't done enough to actively treat her son. Areen's family is attempting to find a facility abroad possibly Costa Rica, Italy or Guatemala that will take him and perform the tracheotomy, she said, though he would have to go by ship since he cannot fly. All of the family's paperwork including passports and birth certificates were lost in the fire, so she is getting new travel documents. "I will try to deal with the impossible to keep him safe," she said. "God will help me, too." Lucca Petrecca, 11, of Princeton reads the comic book "Ricanstruction," which author Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez just signed at Taller Puertorriqueno in Phila., Pa. on June 16, 2018. Read more Yanez Perez remembers the moment a year ago when she first saw a copy of La Borinquena, a comic book with an Afro Latina Puerto Rican woman as its superhero: "I freaked out. I screamed. I cried. For the first time, I could actually relate to a character who is being idolized." Perez, of Philadelphia, was eager to meet Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez, the New York creator of La Borinquena, who came to Taller Puertorriqueno last weekend to talk about Ricanstruction: Reminiscing & Rebuilding Puerto Rico, an anthology his company Somos Arte published last month, with proceeds going to support relief efforts on the island after Hurricane Maria hit in September. "The whole purpose of this project is not only to raise money and awareness, but to give the people on the island hope," he said at the North Philadelphia arts center known as El Corazon Cultural del Barrio. Though much of the electric power has been restored, the hurricane's severe impact on Puerto Rico's infrastructure is still felt almost a year later on an island with a poverty rate near 50 percent. And last month, only days after Ricanstruction debuted, a Harvard study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated as many as 4,645 deaths could be linked to Maria and its aftermath. As hurricane season starts again, island residents live in fear of another storm, said Taller executive director Carmen Febo San Miguel, whose three sisters are on the island. In Ricanstruction on which Miranda-Rodriguez worked with more than 100 other comic book artists and celebrities, including Rosario Dawson, Ruben Blades, Reginald Hudlin, and Greg Pak La Borinquena, the heroine created in 2016, is joined by Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, and Green Lantern in the 67 stories that focus on the past, present, and future of Puerto Rico. One story has the bold, glasses-wearing mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, who sparred with President Trump, as the first Latina president of the United States. (The anthology is a collaboration with DC Comics, which gave Somos Arte permission to use the its characters.) Though the anthology's mission is to raise money, it became clear at the Philadelphia gathering of about 100 that La Borinquena's cultural and historical impact couldn't be underestimated. It was not just the idea that a Puerto Rican woman was a superhero but that Miranda-Rodriguez, who grew up in New York, had woven into his stories the history, politics, and ancient lore of the island. In the first La Borinquena, readers follow along as Marisol, a 20-year-old environmental studies major from Columbia University, travels to Puerto Rico for a semester. She explores the caves on the island and finds five crystals that later give her superhero powers. In that first book, Marisol, fortuitously as it turns out it was released nine months before Maria hit has to deal with a major hurricane. Another La Borinquena came out last week, and all three comic books deal with the island's history and how its residents still feel like second-class citizens 120 years after the U.S. took over. Federal laws such as the Jones Act, which requires all supplies to Puerto Rico to be delivered on American ships, inevitably means very expensive imports: Cars, for example, cost 40 percent more in Puerto Rico than in the States, CNN has reported. For Perez, Miranda-Rodriguez's work offers an opportunity to talk about all this. "He's opened up a platform to speak about everything that's going on in Puerto Rico," she said, noting that Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia have long been associated with poverty, and never with uplifting images. "People forget that Puerto Rico means "Rich Port." It was a huge asset to the economic wealth of America." But it's the character of La Borinquena, whose costume is Puerto Rico's original flag, with a white star and light-blue background, that Perez first fell in love with. "Growing up, we had Barbie dolls," Perez said. "There were black dolls and white dolls. But I never had a doll with tan skin and curly hair. I never had a doll that looked like me. For the first time someone of importance was being highlighted who resembled me or resembled people I knew." Melvina King of Plymouth Meeting, who identifies as West African because her parents were born in Liberia, wanted to know why Marisol is Afro Latina. "I wanted her to be Afro Latina because quite often mainstream media perpetuates an image that Latinos are all homogeneous," Miranda-Rodriguez said. "We are an ethnic group, not a race, and we can also be of African and Asian heritage . When I looked at my own family, my own family is very diverse, from very white to very black. That's just organic to who we are as a family." Thomas Delfi, who last year brought to Philly the first Nerdtino Expo, a Latin comic book festival, said Latin American history is ripe for storytelling, which Miranda-Rodriguez cultivates in La Borinquena. The myths of the Aztecs and Mayans, he said, "make Lord of the Rings pale in comparison." As for Puerto Rico's current crisis, "It's a terrible time to be alive, but a great time to create," Delfi said. "We are in a terrible situation as a culture, but it's a great time to stop and build something really bigger than yourself." On Tuesday, as we commemorated Juneteenth, the day that enslaved Africans in Texas learned that the Emancipation Proclamation had freed them, I was struck by the fact that Texas remains the center of America's war on children of color. On a day when I should have been reflecting on freedom, I was instead seeing images of caged brown children crying out for their parents from a Texas holding facility. I was listening to government officials such as U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions trying to justify this cruelty with biblical and legal references. I was witnessing a replay of the suffering of black children who were snatched from their parents with the blessing of America's government. On this day, when I should have been celebrating freedom for my people, I was instead left to ponder America's unchanging posture toward people of color. That's because the Trump administration's zero tolerance immigration policy which has resulted in nearly 2,000 immigrant children being separated from their parents over six weeks in April and May seeks to dehumanize brown undocumented families in the same way slavery devalued the families of the enslaved. The Trump administration says the policy is grounded in current immigration law and court rulings that force authorities to separate parents from children at the border. Numerous media outlets and immigration experts have said the policy is not driven by the law, but is instead driven by the Trump administration choosing to take children from their parents as a means of discouraging illegal immigration. >> READ MORE: Two-thirds of Americans oppose Trump's family-separation policy | Poll This does so much more than discourage border crossings, however. It devalues humanity in the same way slavery did. Looking at the images of children being held in cages is like looking at a physical manifestation of experiences I've only read about in slave narratives. One such story is included in the Maryland State Archives, in the slave narrative of Charles Ball, a man who lived 40 years as a slave in Maryland, South Carolina, and Georgia. He told of how he was snatched from his mother as a child. "But my poor mother, when she saw me leaving her for the last time, ran after me, took me down from the horse, clasped me in her arms, and wept loudly and bitterly over me. My master seemed to pity her, and endeavored to soothe her distress by telling her that he would be a good master to me, and that I should not want any thing. She then, still holding me in her arms, walked along the road beside the horse as he moved slowly, and earnestly and imploringly besought my master to buy her and the rest of her children, and not permit them to be carried away by the Negro buyers. "But whilst thus entreating him to save her and her family, the slave-driver, who had first bought her, came running in pursuit of her with a raw hide in his hand. When he overtook us he told her he was her master now, and ordered her to give that little Negro to its owner, and come back with him. My mother then turned to him and cried, "Oh, master, do not take me from my child!" Without making any reply, he gave her two or three heavy blows on the shoulders with his raw hide, snatched me from her arms, handed me to my master, and seizing her by one arm, dragged her back towards the place of sale." This is what I see when I watch children being taken from their parents as part of a government policy. I see America once again treating brown children as objects to be used and manipulated, and I am appalled. Not because I see what is happening to other people, but because I am watching a repetition of what happened to my own. >> READ MORE: In America's moral civil war, whose side is God on, anyway? | Will Bunch For some, this is a political discussion that will drive voter choices during the upcoming midterm elections. For others, it is a legal discussion that could very well be settled in the courts as various state attorneys general prepare to sue. For me, however, this is a living, breathing portrait of what life must have been like for my ancestors in a country where their children could be taken at the slaveholder's whim. All of us, no matter our background, must refuse to allow our government to repeat the dehumanization of children that took place during slavery. That's why, moving forward, Juneteenth must be far more than a celebration of freedoms past. It must also be a demand for today's children to be treated with human dignity. Solomon Jones is the author of 10 books. Listen to him weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon on Praise 107.9 FM. sj@solomonjones.com, @solomonjones1 Debbie Africa, smiles next to Alia Africa, (granddaughter) and Mike Africa, son, during her first public appearance at the Faith Immanuel Lutheran Church, in East Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. Tuesday, June 19, 2018. The first MOVE member was granted parole, after 38 years in prison. Read more It was a strange sendoff for Debbie Africa, as Janine and Janet Africa helped her pack, talked about the future, and quietly tried to make sense of their diverging fates. On Saturday, Debbie Africa left the State Correctional Institution Cambridge Springs and, after 38 years, became the first of the MOVE Nine to be released on parole. She also said goodbye to two women she's been incarcerated with for four decades. Both were denied parole last week, for reasons Debbie Africa can't understand. "Although I felt excited and overwhelmed and happy," Debbie Africa said, "I still felt incomplete, because I left prison and my sisters Janine and Janet didn't. We came in on the same charges. We had the same everything. But when it came time to get out of prison, they didn't do that the same. It's a bittersweet victory for me." With an electronic monitor around her ankle and her son, Michael Jr., born while she was at the House of Correction, at her side, Africa, 62, made her first public appearance Tuesday at a news conference in the basement of the Faith Immanuel Lutheran Church in East Lansdowne. Along with eight other members of MOVE, often described as a radical back-to-nature group, she was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 to 100 years in prison after a 1978 standoff at its Powelton Village compound, where Philadelphia Police Officer James J. Ramp was killed and 18 police officers and firefighters were injured. At the trial and since, MOVE members have maintained that they did not fire any shots. None of the three women were found to have possessed weapons. That incident came seven years before the infamous bombing of the MOVE compound on Osage Avenue that left 11 dead. Debbie Africa heard about that event in her prison cell. "None of us believed it," she said. "When the officers came to tell us, we actually said, 'Get away from our door, because it's not true.' It was devastating." But nothing, she said, was worse than giving up her son just three days after he was born. She also has a daughter, Michelle, who was just 2 years old at the time. "That was the hardest thing I've ever had to do and then feeling that emptiness," she said. She said her constant belief in MOVE's values had kept her strong. Michael Jr. was raised by MOVE members, and continues to believe in what he describes as a prescient environmental ideology. His father, Michael Africa, is incarcerated at Graterford Prison, and will be considered for parole in September. Michael Jr. said having his mother stay with him in his home outside Philadelphia has started to make him realize just how much he missed. "I saw her feet. I noticed this was the first time I ever seen her feet before," he said. "A friend of mine said to me, 'You are learning at almost 40 what babies learn about their parents.'" Debbie Africa, now a grandmother of nine, said she had sought parole nine times since 2008. This time, she had help from a group of legal advocates including Brad Thomson, a Chicago-based lawyer with the People's Law Office. He submitted thick packets for each woman with dozens of letters of recommendation, certificates of achievement, "exemplary" conduct reports and other supporting materials, including a review of their records by Martin Horn, a former Pennsylvania corrections secretary. The parole board's decision to release Debbie Africa, whose legal name is Debbie Sims, cited her positive adjustment and a recommendation from the District Attorney's Office. The decisions for Janet (Holloway) and Janine (Phillips), however, cite negative recommendations from the prosecutor. A spokesperson for District Attorney Larry Krasner said Krasner had provided positive recommendations for all three women. A representative for the parole board declined to provide clarification, noting that communications to the parole board are confidential. Two members of the group have died in prison. The others, ages 58 to 72, remain eligible for parole. "They all have similar stories in terms of being mentors, deescalating conflict within the prison," Thomson said. Robert Holbrook, a juvenile lifer who was released four months ago, worked on the case as a paralegal with the Abolitionist Law Center. He's hoping Debbie's husband, Michael Africa Sr., will be the next to come home. "He was a mentor to a lot of us young guys coming through," he said. "He would help us navigate prison culture and maintain a positive outlook, as we unfortunately grew up in prison." The couple have communicated only in letters for 40 years. Michael Jr. said he hopes the peaceful life his family longed for will be possible at last. "We're on the path now to make our family whole." Kathy Faul feels a alabaster stone, outside the Stone Room in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts School on Saturday, June 9, 2018. Faul is a blind sculptor and a PAFA continuing education student. Faul is currently hoping to make an Egyptian cat for her daughter. The project can take two-years. Read more Kathy Faul's first sculpture class required her and her fellow students to create a terra-cotta statue based on a live male model. She called the model over. "I said, 'Can I touch you?' and he said, 'Oh, sure,' " Faul, 72, said. "Then the professor walked in and screamed, 'Nooooooo!' " It is through touch that Faul sees the world. She is blind, having lost her sight in a serious car accident when she was 21. Yet even with that challenge, she is an accomplished sculptor, currently crafting works in stone at home and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with associate professor Steven Nocella. In March, her sculpture of a mother elephant with child won an honorable mention in the continuing education programs annual student exhibition. "I'm always impressed by what she does," said Nocella, who has worked with Faul for 18 years. "Her works are necessarily simplified in terms of the form but at the same time she is able to find the complexity in it. I'm amazed at her diligence and how she challenges herself." Faul, who lives in Swarthmore, doesn't think of herself as handicapped. When an art scholarship application form asked her to list her special needs, she wrote that she had none. "I thought they meant do I need a lift or something like that," she said. "I didn't realize it was the politically correct way of saying, 'What is your handicap?' Or, 'What is your disability?'" Faul wasn't always at peace with her blindness. She was a senior at Beaver College now Arcadia University on Halloween night in 1966. She was the passenger in a car that hit a small tree. Her face smashed into the dashboard. She was in and out of consciousness for three weeks. "In the beginning, I wished I'd died in the accident," she said. "I lost my eyesight and I lost my face. I don't even know what I look like." But Faul was a strong woman from a long line of strong women her great-grandmother was 5 when she traveled alone on a ship from Sweden to the United States; a sign around her neck bore the New York address where her mother and sister were living. "My mother was so essential in getting me to stand up on my own," Faul said. "She said that if I wanted breakfast or lunch, I had to make it myself." Faul learned braille and got a Seeing Eye dog. She went back to college, listening to her textbooks read by volunteers on a reel-to-reel audio player. After graduating, Faul went to a computer programming school in Pittsburgh. There, she met her future husband, who died in 2011. They married and settled in Swarthmore. Faul took a job as a computer programmer at a bank, printing her programs in braille. "People said, 'You can't have children' and I said, 'Why not?' I thought I could do it," she said. Son Bradley was born in 1974. Daughter Kimberly followed about four years later. Kim Faul said she never realized her mother couldn't see until she was about 5 and her mother missed the ball Kim had tossed to her. "I grew up in very similar fashion as parents who could see," Kim Faul said. "My mother just had this way of being able to figure out her world without the use of sight." As a child, Kim Faul wore shoes with small bells attached so her mother could track her movements. One day, Kim took a tumble down the basement stairs. Kathy Faul, who was already downstairs, heard it happening. "She rushed over and by the grace of God caught me before I hit the concrete," said Kim Faul, 39. "She says a guardian angel guided me to her arms, but it was her." Kathy Faul began dabbling with pottery in 1984 as a way to deal with grief after the death of her mother. In 1993, Faul was diagnosed with breast cancer and she again turned to art to cope. She began sculpting, first in terra-cotta and then in stone. She remembers her first class with Nocella and how he guided her to her stone and placed her fingers carefully on the hammer and chisel. "Stone carving is probably the best medium for someone who can't see because it lends itself to tactility and touch," Nocella said. "Kathy's teaching me to see things differently." To create her forms, she finds models that are already done and feels her way into creating her own work. On a recent Saturday morning, Faul ran her hand over a chunk of alabaster she was beginning to rough out. Patch, her dog, lay at her feet. Faul was carving an Egyptian-style cat, a piece she predicts will take at least a year. For four weeks, she's been chipping the cat's arched back. The cat is for Kim. Stone sculpture, Faul said, is a way to "inner peace." "With each contact with the chisel, a small piece of stone about the size of a grain of rice falls away," Faul said. "Weeks go by, one chip after another, until, voila! The piece of sculpture that you have been looking for is there, inside a ragged facade of stone." And it all began with that first terra-cotta sculpture class and the model who allowed the budding artist to feel the hills and valleys of his body. Was he dressed? "I didn't feel that far," she said with a giggle. "But I did touch his hip and it didn't have anything on it." LaShanda Anderson, left, was killed by police after a shoplifting incident. Chanel Barnes, right, of Philadelphia was charged with shoplifting after the incident. Read more Gloucester County on Monday released dramatic 911 and police radio recordings of the fatal police shooting of a shoplifter at a Deptford Township strip mall that revealed how the situation escalated from a minor property crime to a deadly confrontation. Police Sgt. Kevin Clements, who was identified for the first time Monday, shot LaShanda Anderson, 36, of Philadelphia, who was driving a rented Nissan Armada and allegedly attempting to flee from a Marshalls store where she and two others tried to steal $3,443 in merchandise stuffed into a suitcase. Anderson, who authorities said tried to run down Clements, a 17-year veteran of the force, and another police officer in the Marshalls parking lot, was pronounced dead at the scene. Chanel Barnes, 38, of Philadelphia, who was in the passenger seat, was arrested at the scene. Raoul Gadsen, 43, also of Philadelphia, eluded capture until last Wednesday, when he was apprehended in Philadelphia. All three had extensive criminal records. The county released seven audio recordings related to the June 9 events, including police radio communications and a call from the Marshalls loss-prevention officer who told a county 911 operator that one of the suspects was wanted for manslaughter. That turned out to be inaccurate, said Bernie Weisenfeld, a spokesman for the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office. The recordings were made public in response to an open-records request made by Philly.com and the Inquirer and Daily News. The loss prevention officer's claim seemed to escalate the situation, according to the audio recordings. Listen below: "I'm gonna need assistance stopping them," the Marshalls employee said in his 911 call to report the shoplifters. "Oh, we don't stop them, sir. You have to stop them. We don't stop them," the operator responded. "Ma'am, you can send them. I know you can send them. One of them has a warrant for manslaughter. I'm gonna need help stopping them," said the employee, whose name was not released. "OK, where are they now," the operator replied. "They're in the store," the employee said. Authorities previously said the loss-prevention employee recognized one of the suspects from a state police bulletin about a retail theft ring targeting the store. It was not immediately known Monday what information was provided on the bulletin and whether there was mention of a warrant. On the 911 call, the employee provided a limited description of the two female suspects while possibly following them through the store, sometimes in a hushed voice. "How do you know they're wanted for homicide?" the operator asked, but the employee seemed distracted, repeatedly saying, "Hold on." The operator then relayed the claim to a supervisor or police officer: "He's advising me the [suspect is] wanted for homicide, but he's not cooperating with me." The operator continued trying to get information from the Marshalls employee, who apparently began to run after the suspects. "Sir, you need to communicate with me. I have two officers there. Where are you?" the operator asked. Then a disturbance erupted and multiple voices are heard. "He's apparently scuffling and screaming," the operator relayed. A police officer is heard at the end of the 911 call: "Yeah, I see them. I'm pulling up." More of the disturbance is audible, then at least one or two pops are heard before the nearly three-minute call ends. The recording of nearly 40 minutes' worth of police communication starts with the operator dispatching police to the Marshalls, adding that loss-prevention officer was claiming that one of the suspects has a warrant. After the officers arrived at the scene, 1800 Clements Bridge Rd., there was some unintelligible communication and then one officer shouts: "Struck my arm with the vehicle." Within a few seconds, an officer shouts: "Shots fired! Shots fired!" Then an officer, presumably Clements, reports: "She charged me with the vehicle." No weapons were found in the vehicle, authorities said. The officer-involved shooting has come under intense criticism from Anderson's family and from civil-rights leaders in New Jersey. The NAACP has called for the state Attorney General's Office to take over the investigation from the Gloucester County Prosecutor's Office. The civil rights group said it plans to conduct its own probe. Gloucester County Prosecutor Charles A. Fiore said in a statement that his investigation "is being conducted in accordance with stringent guidelines promulgated by the N.J. Attorney General's Office. This office will release its findings to the public at the appropriate time, but not, obviously, before the completion of its investigation, which involves additional witness interviews and the analysis of forensic evidence. I can assure you that our review will be thorough, impartial and consistent with the Attorney General's guidelines." Ethan Schiller (left), 4, and his brother Lukas, 2-1/2, look over the dozens of shoes representing children who were separated from their parents by immigration officials, part of a protest at Rittenhouse Square on Tuesday, near the hotel hosting a GOP fundraiser with Vice President Pence. Read more Hundreds of protesters at Rittenhouse Square on Tuesday evening chanted their disapproval of Vice President Pence, who was attending a nearby fund-raiser, but it may have been small stitched samples of canvas and rubber that spoke the loudest: Rows of children's shoes, set on the sidewalk as a silent shout against the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the county's southern border. Images of children in chain-link pens, or crying for missing mothers and fathers, have provoked national outcry and discussion of the administration's "zero tolerance" enforcement tactics. "I'm so angry," said Stephanie Hagan, 35, who was at Rittenhouse Square. "I'm so fed up." >> READ MORE: Why I protested: 10 stories from Philly's rally against family separation Hagan, who is 7 months pregnant with her first child, sat beside her husband, Sam Bryant, 35, who held a sign covered in biblical passages that preached generosity. Pence was appearing at the Rittenhouse Hotel with Scott Wagner, the GOP nominee for Pennsylvania governor, during a fund-raiser for the Republican Governors Association. The event was closed to reporters. Demonstrators holding signs that read, "What if they were your children?" and, "End family separation now," crowded the southwest end of the square. Over a sound system came the 1971 song by Marvin Gaye, "What's Going On?" "Today they're locking up asylum seekers, and calling them criminals, and separating children from their family which is beyond the pale," said Gary Kopp, 56, of Philadelphia. "What's it going to be in three months? Is it going to be people of Islamic faith? Is it going to be the gay community? Is it going to be people who speak out against them? It's a slippery slope that we are starting on." The square wasn't close to packed. People playing with dogs or setting out blankets had plenty of room. But more than a thousand turned out, and a steady stream of people was coming to the square as the work day ended. "I thought there would be a much better showing," said Janet Campbell-Taylor, 84, of Philadelphia. "It's not like the old days. Like Vietnam. Everyone is on their phone." Police said that one man was given a citation for disorderly conduct after he jumped onto the back of a vehicle driven by a Secret Service agent. The protest was organized by groups including Refuse Fascism Philly and Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates. Demonstrators here and across the country used the hashtag #KeepFamiliesTogether, which was near the top of Twitter's U.S. trending, second only to the Trump administration's decision to withdraw from the U.N. Human Rights Council. "I have grown kids," said Ina Shea, a retiree from Springfield, Delaware County, who came to the protest. "I have friends who are immigrants. I have friends whose status is a little bit of a gray area." The use of children's imagery has become a regular component of the demonstrations against the administration's policy. Earlier this month in Philadelphia, protesters left a row of children's toys stuffed bears, baby rattles, and soap bubbles outside the Center City offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to symbolize children who were missing from their families. "There have to be some regulations, maybe some standards, but you can't criminalize it," said Frances Castoriano, 58, of Philadelphia, who emigrated from Peru when she was 14. "As a teacher, I had a lot of kids who were from Mexico and Central America, very hardworking kids with beautiful families, and you can't break up families, it's just appalling to me." Despite an uproar over the administration's separation policy, President Trump has refused to back down. He tweeted that "Democrats are the problem," that "they don't care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13." Wagner, a former state senator, is running against Gov. Wolf, a Democrat seeking a second term. Republican donors were being asked for up to $50,000 at Tuesday night's fund-raiser, a GOP source told the Inquirer and Daily News last week. Under the decision, the KVA will operate in accordance with Cambodias Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organisations and relevant legal documents, and the associations charter archived at the ministry. The charter says the KVA aims to gather Khmer people of Vietnamese origin, and Vietnamese in Cambodia together, providing them with spiritual and material support. The association works to popularise Khmer traditions and Cambodias laws, and join hands with the Cambodian Government to push humanitarian work and illiteracy eradication in the country. The KVA, based in the Cambodians capital city of Phnom Penh, has chapters in 25 cities and provinces of the country. On June 16, KVA leaders held a ceremony to present the associations new stamp to its boards and chapters. KVA President Chau Van Chi said the association seeks no profits, says no to racial and religious discrimination and only serves the interests of its members. Vietnamese Ambassador to Cambodia Vu Quang Minh expressed his hope that with the recognition, the association will launch more useful activities, thus contributing to enhancing the traditional friendship between the two countries. Kevin Madden, left, and Brian Zidek were the first Democrats elected to the Delaware County Council in four decades. Read more Kevin Madden knew he was going to win a seat on the Delaware County Council during a campaign-trail stop straight out of the election playbook. "I was at a train station, talking to commuters," Madden said recently, "and a woman looked both ways to make sure no one was around, leaned in and whispered, 'I'm a Republican, but you have my vote.'" At the time, the clandestine confession amused the tech entrepreneur, one of two Democrats to be elected to the county's executive board for the first time in four decades. But in the seven months since he and Brian Zidek clinched those seats, they say, they've realized the seriousness of their feat. And their three colleagues on the other side of the aisle, a few heated meetings notwithstanding, so far seem to welcome having another party to contend with. "I ran to be a threat to the status quo, and I expected a degree of concern from those who've profited from the status quo," said Zidek, a medical reinsurance executive. "People elected me and Kevin because they know we ran for the right reasons." Victory in November seemed improbable at the outset. They were two wealthy businessmen throwing their hats into a county whose ruling party has long been propped up by organized labor and patronage jobs. Against that backdrop, they scored a tight victory against an incumbent who's spent decades as a union steamfitter and his running mate, a retired district judge. "On the campaign trail, I said, if you don't like what's happening in D.C., clean up your backyard," said Zidek, who said he, like Madden, took an interest in local politics after President Trump's election. "The concerns that we ran on are about good governance, not electing the next Supreme Court justice. It's not a universally Democratic or Republican issue." But for those paying close attention, Madden and Zidek's success shouldn't have been too surprising. Twenty years ago, Republican voters had a 2-1 ratio in the county. Now, Democrats lead by about 21,000 votes, buoyed, party officials say, by a surge of expats arriving from Philadelphia. "If you only have one party, questions about best practices just don't get asked," David Landau, the chairman emeritus of the county Democratic Party, said. "People want to know what their government does, and they don't know. Now that you have another viewpoint out there, at least people are asking these questions." Longtime county watchdogs say council meetings held at 10 a.m. every other Wednesday used to be lightly attended and quick to end, with nary a "no" vote. Now, the meetings stretch sometimes upward of an hour, with discussion and debate common. But Council Chairman John McBlain doesn't see that as a sign of dissension or divisiveness. He said he welcomes the new perspective. "I hope that one of the surprises they found was that they were told one thing and found something different about way the county is run," McBlain said. "That's the talking points that they were assigned I guess the Democrats felt it was needed to win an election. "Except for a handful of appointments of a partisan nature, and the back and forth on the study of the pipeline, all of the votes on practical purpose have been unanimous," he added. "And I think that's a credit to both parties." One of the flare-ups McBlain alluded to came up at the council meeting two weeks ago: a risk-analysis study of Sunoco's Mariner East II pipeline that Zidek and Madden have been pushing for since February. The proposal has been deadlocked at 2-2 for months, partially because McBlain, a Republican, has abstained ever since Zidek publicly raised concerns about the business his law firm has done for the utility giant. "I think above and beyond anything else, they're here to do a job for county residents," Colleen Morrone, the council's vice chair, said of Zidek and Madden. "I think we're getting the same work done now that we got before the election. To me, when you get in there, it shouldn't be about a political party. It's about what you're supposed to be doing." Michael Culp, the third Republican rounding out the council, took a similar stance to Morrone in regard to his new colleagues. "They have brought new ideas and suggestions to council, some of which I have agreed with and some I have not," Culp said. "While we have had disagreements on issues, we still have been able to work together; disagreements on council are not new a new thing, and are not necessarily partisan in nature." Still, accusations of the parties' role in the council's business remain. In February, the two Democrats fumed when their Republican counterparts threw them a curve ball, voting Joseph Possenti to the county board of elections. Delaware County's home rule charter stipulates that the seats go to the party with the highest vote total in the most recent county council election. Zidek accused the GOP of playing "partisan games," given that Possenti became a Democrat just 10 years ago. "We might have a particularly contentious meeting, but the reality is that we're building muscles as a governing body that haven't been used before," Madden said. "Just because we disagree doesn't mean we cant work together. Realistically, at the end of the day, we're just two votes, and we have to work together at making change." That public back-and-forth, along with every other meeting-bound discussion since February, reached a wider audience. One of the Democrats' first suggestions was to have all of the council's meetings recorded and uploaded to the county website, along with the agendas of each meeting, for posterity. "It's not so much those measures will change things overnight, but they're emblematic of a system that didn't employ commonsense best practices," Madden said. "We ran on the idea that single party rule prevents transparency, and this is a time to make structural changes." Andy Reilly, the head of the GOP in Delaware County and the council's former chairman, bristled at the notion that his party's dominance bred corruption. "Most Republicans knew that that was all a myth, or, I hesitate to say, fake news," Reilly said. "This theory that they campaigned on, that, 'Hey, it's a one-party rule and we need diversity.' Well, there is diversity: diversity of thought and diversity of ideas. Just because we're all Republican doesn't mean we fall in lockstep." Reilly, who took potshots at Madden on the campaign trail as a venture capitalist with no record of community service, says he sees the two as "genuine people" and hasn't heard many complaints from the Republicans on the council about their presence. "They'll say that they're making a difference, and they probably are making a difference, but they don't need to be creating stark contrasts that don't exist to justify their presence," Reilly said. "They won the popular vote, they deserve to sit there and be elected and decide what they think is best for all people." Zidek said he and Madden are committed to making lasting change, for as long as they hold their unprecedented positions. "We think our best reelection campaign is doing a good job," he said. "If we show we're protecting tax dollars without supporting our own interests, I hope that's a solid message for reelection. "And if not, that's what we'll do anyway." In Newburgh, N.Y., where water was contaminated with the same chemicals found in Montgomery and Bucks County drinking water, New York health officials offered blood tests to the town's 28,000 residents. This Thursday, Nov. 3, 2016, photo shows water intakes at Lake Washington in Newburgh. Read more More than 600 Bucks and Montgomery Counties residents have agreed to participate in a state study to determine the health impact after drinking water that was possibly tainted for years by chemicals leaching off former military bases. The study, testing the blood of people who live in neighborhoods surrounding the old Naval Air Warfare Center Warminster and Naval Air Station Willow Grove, had been delayed last month because of a lack of participation. But after receiving more responses 625 in all the Pennsylvania Department of Health said last week it won't need to send out any more invitations. As of Tuesday, 509 adults and 116 children all from households randomly selected for the study had said they would participate. But they must follow through by returning a form and getting tested and only 22 had made appointments and 11 had given samples as of Tuesday. Also, 140 have returned the form necessary to schedule a blood test. Officials have not imposed a deadline for responses, though that could change based on how long it takes blood tests to be completed. They hope to test about 500 people. "We are waiting to hear from as many people as we can," said spokesperson Nate Wardle. The tests are part of a pilot program to study the effects of drinking water that was contaminated by chemicals that for years leached off the now-closed bases into water supplies in Horsham, Warminster, and Warrington Townships. The same water contamination had been found in more than 550 public or private drinking water systems in communities near military bases nationwide as of August, according to a recent military report. The pilot study, supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, is a unique opportunity for some residents to find out what levels of the chemicals known as per- or polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, and used on the bases mainly in firefighting foam are in their blood. The agencies hope to use the data gathered in Pennsylvania to create a federal blood-testing program for PFAS. The state could not accept volunteers for the testing and was required for scientific integrity to randomly select participants. Volunteers can skew study results because they often come from similar groups. A random sample of all types of residents in the area was required to represent the entire population, health officials said. Clinics in Bucks and Montgomery Counties are conducting blood tests for the study. By the end of May, before the agency sent out more invitations to participate in the study, only 355 people had indicated interest and 50 had turned in the necessary form. In total, 550 households received letters asking them whether they'd be interested in taking part. In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, people who've been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP) Read more Delaware Gov. John Carney tweeted Tuesday that he would refuse to send National Guard troops to the nation's Southwest border until the Trump administration ends its policy of separating immigrant families from children. Carney, a Democrat, called the policy "inhumane" and said Congress and President Trump need to "fix the mess that our immigration system has become." In Massachusetts, Republican Gov. Charlie Baker has also refused to send troops to the border, citing the "cruel and inhumane" separation of families. Another GOP governor, Larry Hogan of Maryland, refused as well, tweeting: "Immigration enforcement efforts should focus on criminals, not separating innocent children from their families." New Jersey Gov. Murphy vowed to prevent "state resources from being used to help federal authorities separate families," while Pennsylvania Gov. Wolf criticized the policy. Both are Democrats. Later Tuesday, Wolf expanded on his earlier tweet. More than 2,000 minors have been separated from adults in the six weeks following Attorney General Jeff Sessions' announcement of the zero-tolerance approach to illegal border crossings. Some children have been kept in large cages, while others have been placed in a tent city. Health experts have said children can suffer lifelong physical and psychological challenges when they are forcibly separated from a parent. On Monday, ProPublica released audio of children at a border facility wailing and screaming "Mami" and "Papa." Trump and other administration officials have falsely and repeatedly claimed that Democrats and existing laws are to blame for the separation of families. As the Washington Post reports, that's simply not true: Immigrant families are being separated at the border not because of Democrats and not because some law forces this result, as Trump insists. They're being separated because the Trump administration, under its zero-tolerance policy, is choosing to prosecute border-crossing adults for any offenses. The administration could end the policy at any time. All four living former first ladies have criticized the policy. Laura Bush wrote in The Post: "I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart." Two-thirds of the country, 66 percent, opposes Trump's policy, according to a poll from Quinnipiac University. That includes six in 10 men and seven in 10 women. As is often the case, though, there's a wide split by party. A majority of Republicans approve of the policy, while six in 10 independents and nine in 10 Democrats oppose it. This article contains information from the Washington Post and the Associated Press. People taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States are shown at a facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018. Read more The controversy surrounding family separations at the U.S. Southern border has prompted outrage, opinions and finger-pointing. It has also raised a number of questions, including from our readers. "Are there really children being separated from their parents at the border and being kept in cages?" one reader asked. We answer that and other questions here. Background In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a "zero-tolerance policy" regarding illegal immigration at the Southwest border. That was followed by a reported May directive by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen instructing her department to refer all unauthorized immigrants who cross the U.S. border to federal prosecutors for criminal prosecution. Such prosecution has resulted in the separation of parents and children who were apprehended illegally entering the country. As we've explained before, parents are sent to federal court under the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and then placed in a detention center, according to Homeland Security. In turn, their children minors who cannot be housed in detention centers for adults are transferred to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for placement in a juvenile facility or foster care if they can't be placed with another adult relative in the U.S. Those children, as well as those who cross without adults, are considered "unaccompanied" and become the responsibility of HHS' Office of Refugee Resettlement. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told NPR last month that family separation "could be a tough deterrent" for others considering immigrating illegally. The criminal prosecution and subsequent separations do not apply to those who seek asylum at a legal port of entry, administration officials have said. But Nielsen has acknowledged "limited resources" at the border that have resulted in the U.S. telling some who arrive at the ports that they have to "come back." Some immigrant advocates told the Arizona Republic that the backlog could exacerbate illegal crossings. How many children are currently being detained? Since the implementation of the zero-tolerance policy, between April 19 and the end of May, 1,995 minors were separated from adults at the border, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to FactCheck.org. And, as of June 15, there were 11,517 minors in the "Unaccompanied Children's Program," according to the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families. (That figure doesn't distinguish between those who crossed the border with their parents and those who did so alone.) Health and Human Services uses about 100 shelters in 14 states. In congressional testimony in May, Steven Wagner, acting assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, told a Senate subcommittee that children have spent an average of 57 days in custody during fiscal year 2018. After that, minors are placed with a sponsor, who could be a parent, another relative, or a non-family member. Does the U.S. use cages to detain children? The government has rejected the idea that it uses "cages" in its facilities. But that's the term used by activists and others who oppose the administration's immigration policy. Also, news organizations have used that term, including the Associated Press, which used the word to refer to the fencing enclosures at one Texas facility. We have included pictures of that facility with this story, so readers can make their own determinations on what to call the enclosures. The issue was highlighted earlier this month when Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon visited the central processing facility in McAllen, Texas, where those trying to enter the United States are separated. "Unaccompanied" minors, except in select cases, are to be transferred from the processing facility to a juvenile facility or other care under Health and Human Services within 72 hours. "Yesterday morning at the McAllen Border Station, at the processing center, they have big cages made out of fencing and wire and nets stretched across the top of them so people can't climb out of them," he told CNN on June 4. "Every time I probed yesterday on the circumstances (of why they were held this way) the response was just basically a generic, 'That is what's required for security, this is what is required for control.'" (Merkley also likened the enclosures to a "dog kennel.") The Department of Justice disputed Merkley's characterization of the structures. "Before being transferred to HHS custody, DHS houses unaccompanied minors in short-term facilities," it said in a June 4 statement. "These short-term facilities do not employ the use of 'cages' to house UACs, but portions of the facility makes use of barriers in order to separate minors of different genders and age groups. This is for the safety and security of all minors in the custody of the United States government." Much of the media coverage of Merkley focused on his attempt to visit a shelter in Brownsville, Texas, that houses immigrant children after they're processed. He was rebuffed (though in recent days he did visit the facility). News outlets got a glimpse of life inside that shelter, called Casa Padre, during a tour last week. There were no reports of cages being used. NBC News described the conditions at the nonprofit shelter as "more like incarceration than temporary shelter." The report detailed "dorm-style rooms" that were designed to sleep four but accommodate five because of overcrowding. The former Walmart houses almost 1,500 boys, ages 10 to 17, for an average of 52 days. According to the New York Times, whose reporter visited the shelter, it offers classroom instruction, recreational activities and other services. The minors are allowed outside two hours per day. So what about that image of a young boy in a cage? The photo in question depicts a boy in distress as he looks out of a cage he is grasping with his hands. It has been turned into a meme that asks, "Are you Trump fans really OK with this?" Journalist and activist Jose Antonio Vargas included the photo in a June 11 tweet that said: "This is what happens when a government believes people are 'illegal.' Kids in cages." (Vargas openly discusses his own status as an immigrant living in the country illegally.) In a subsequent tweet, Vargas acknowledged he wasn't sure where the photo originated, but many others also shared the image, including the actor Ron Perlman. But the image was actually taken during a June 10 rally in Dallas, Texas. Leroy Pena, the prime minister of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Brown Berets of Cemanahuac, said he took the photo during the demonstration. The pro-Mexican American group's rally was meant to call attention to the conditions where young immigrants are kept, he said. Pena added that the young boy in the photograph, the son of a friend, had wandered into the cage where older children were demonstrating and became upset when he saw his mother on the other side of the structure. The child was promptly taken out of the cage, he said. "I posted it to my personal page I wasn't trying to deceive anybody," Pena told FactCheck.org in an interview. "I think people just started sharing the picture without the narrative that I added. It wasn't done intentionally but it brought a lot of attention with what's really going on." Debra Mendoza, national prime minister of the Brown Berets of Cemanahuac, confirmed Pena's account to us. She decried photos of facilities using fencing similar to "cages," and said the structures were reminiscent of a "jail." Mendoza also mentioned the recently resurfaced images from a 2014 Arizona Republic report on an immigrant holding facility for juveniles in Nogales, Ariz. Those 2014 pictures, taken by the Associated Press, were shared by some online as if they were current including by Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama. The 2014 story was about the surge in children from Central America largely from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala trying to cross the border illegally on their own. The mistake became fodder for Trump's Twitter feed. Is the government using military camps to hold the minors? Health and Human Services is indeed eyeing several military bases "for potential use as temporary shelters for unaccompanied alien children at some point in the future," the Administration for Children and Families confirmed for us. On June 13, McClatchy reported that Fort Bliss in Texas could be used as a "tent city to hold between 1,000 and 5,000 children." In addition to Fort Bliss, officials are evaluating Dyess Air Force Base and Goodfellow Air Force Base, which are also in Texas. If that happens, it wouldn't be the first time military bases were used to accommodate immigrants. Under the Obama administration, bases served as such facilities, including in 2014 during the influx of unaccompanied children illegally entering the country. In his testimony last month, Wagner said the last "temporary" facility at a Department of Defense site closed in February 2017. * The US State Department said on June 18 that Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation Christopher Ford will lead a delegation to Seoul and Tokyo to convey the US Iran policy. * UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres believes that children must not be traumatized by being separated from their parents, his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said on June 18. * The Security Council on June 18 condemned the two "heinous and cowardly" terrorist attacks in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar over the weekend that led to dozens of deaths. * Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is to pay an official visit to Switzerland on July 2-3, the Swiss government said on June 18. Switzerland's foreign ministry says that Iran is an important partner for Switzerland both politically and economically. * The White House said on June 18 that US President Donald Trump will welcome Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to the White House on July 2 to discuss bilateral ties. * Iranian president said on June 18 that there is no limit for development of ties between Tehran and Doha, Qatar, official IRNA news agency reported. * Five illegal immigrants were drowned on June 18, and 191 others rescued off the western coast of Libya, Libyan navy spokesperson said. * UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on June 18 the world would need a stronger and "more intervening" European Union. * Britain's unelected House of Lords inflicted a major defeat on June 18 for Prime Minister Theresa May with a landslide vote in a debate on the government's Brexit bill. * Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Jordan's King Abdullah II in Amman on June 18, the Israel Prime Minister's Office said in a statement. * A two-day international conference opened on June 18 in the Moroccan capital Rabat to discuss challenges in peacekeeping operations on the African continent. * Turkish and US armies have started a patrol mission in the northern Syrian town of Manbij, Turkish leadership announced on June 18. * Botswana is working towards finalizing the modalities aimed at eradicating the use of plastic bags across the country, according to a top official of the Botswana's environment ministry. * Police have arrested 104 organized crime suspects, including a prominent member of an anti-mafia group, in a vast operation spanning several cities in the southern Puglia region in the heel of Italy's boot, local media reported June 18. Vice President Mike Pence is attending a fundraiser in Philadelphia this evening. Read more Vice President Pence's visit Tuesday evening to Philadelphia, where he participated in a fundraiser with the Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial nominee, led to protests in Rittenhouse Square over the Trump administration's policy of separating undocumented minors from their parents upon their entry to the U.S. The fundraiser for the Republican Governors Association featuring Pence and Scott Wagner, the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor was held at the Rittenhouse Hotel. The fundraiser was closed to the news media. More than 1,500 people said on Facebook they had planned to attend the protest, which groups such as Refuse Fascism Philly and Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates organized. The Facebook event is titled: "Pence in PHL: Stop Separating Families! Trump/Pence Must Go!" "In the name of humanity, no more tearing immigrant children from their parents and keeping children in hellish detention camps," the organizers wrote. Activists called on people to bring pairs of children's shoes to be set down and organized as a silent protest against the separation of families at the nation's Southwest border. "Any way they can be donated afterwards?" one woman asked on Facebook. "I don't want them to be left on the street and then tossed." The use of children's imagery has become a main component of the demonstrations against the administration's policy of taking children from migrant parents. Earlier this month in Philadelphia, protesters left a row of children's toys stuffed bears, baby rattles and soap bubbles outside the Center City offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to symbolize children who were missing from their families. Despite an uproar across the political spectrum over the administration's separation policy, President Trump has refused to back down. Councilwoman Helen Gym wrote on Twitter Monday that she'll be protesting. "There is no other place to be," she wrote. Trump came to Philadelphia in January 2017 for his first trip outside Washington since taking office, attending a GOP strategy retreat at the Loews hotel in Center City. Protesters clogged the streets during Trump's two-hour visit. Wagner, a former state senator, is running against Gov. Wolf, a Democrat seeking a second term. Republican donors are being asked for up to $50,000 at tonight's fundraiser, a GOP source told the Inquirer and Daily News last week. Staff writer Michael Boren contributed to this article. According to The Diplomat, DPRK leader Kim Jong-un is expected to arrive in China on June 19 for his third trip to the country since March this year. Kim first traveled to China to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in March in Beijing and again in May in Dalian. Kim said that he believes his second meeting with Xi will deepen mutual trust and push the friendly and cooperative DPRK-China relationship to achieve an even closer and comprehensive development in line with the demands of the new era. Kims trip to Beijing comes exactly one week after his historic summit meeting with US President Donald Trump in Singapore. Kims visit to China comes also as the United States and the Republic of Korea (RoK) announced that they would be cancelling the 2018 Ulchi-Freedom Guardian military exercises, scheduled originally for August. China had proposed a so-called freeze-for-freeze last year, whereby DPRK would cease all nuclear testing and ballistic missile launches in exchange for the US-RoK alliance modifying or cancelling their military exercises. After the conclusion of the June 12 summit deliberations, Trump announced that he had decided to end joint exercises with RoK, which he described as provocative. About 300 footprints discovered in hilly Shandong village Over 300 dinosaur footprints from seven species, including the same species of the dinosaur named "Blue" in the film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, were found in a village in East China's Shandong Province. The dinosaur tracks, which include around 70 footprints of dromaeosaurid, a two-legged feathered dinosaur, confirms for the first time that the species lived in groups, Xing Lida, a dinosaur footprints expert at Beijing-based China University of Geosciences, told the Global Times on Monday. "The diversity in the site is also remarkable. Footprints of birds and seven dinosaur species, including animal- and plant-eating ones, were spotted together," said Xing, who first investigated the site in April last year. "Normally only one or three dinosaur species could be found at a site," he added. The site, which sits in a mountainous area in Shandong's Tancheng county, is in well-preserved, though the site has no protection at all, Tang Yonggang, a well-known "dinosaur hunter" and a visiting professor at Linyi University in Shandong, told the Global Times after visiting the site on Monday. The four trackways, each footprint about 8 centimeters long, suggest the dinosaurs traveled together, a typical sign that they lived in groups, Xing said. Feathered dinosaurs or dromaeosaurids range in length from 0.7 meters to over 6 meters. They first appeared in the mid-Jurassic Period (167 million years ago) and survived until the end of the Cretaceous (65.5 million years ago) period, according to online database Encyclopedia of Life. "Although the film's depictions of dinosaurs - that they are highly intelligent and capable of showing empathy - are imaginary, the species are indeed agile and smart. They could be at the top of the food chain if they acted in groups," Xing said. Footprint clues Footprints and fossilized bones are the two major sources of dinosaur study, scientists said. "Footprints can tell the dinosaur's movements, such as whether it is running or walking and at what speed. They can suggest geographical conditions, such as whether a place is wet or dry, in mountainous areas or along waterways, and help the study of the species' evolution and migration by comparing them to footprints found elsewhere," Xing added. "They can also reveal the dinosaurs' social activities, such as whether they were swimming, from the shape, shade and arrangement of the footprints," Tang said. Scientists said that although China has found dinosaur footprints in over 100 places, many are not well-preserved due to lack of funding or natural conditions. Dinosaur footprints are normally protected on site and require ventilation and drainage, Xing said. Another preferred manner is to build a digital model of the footprints, which means the footprints could be printed using 3D printers even after being damaged, Xing told the Global Times on Monday. Tang said since a dinosaur's footprint could be as large as 80 centimeters in diameter and the footprints could stretch miles, it is quite challenging to preserve the tracks because of weather conditions and landslides. Businessmen also target the footprints and fossils. A nine meter-long skeleton of an unidentified type of dinosaur was sold at an auction in Paris for more than $2.3 million on June 4, Reuters reported. For dinosaur tracks, the online price for one piece ranges from around $50 to over $1,000. China has pioneered in the study of dinosaurs, including samples and scientific research, but it also needs to better preserve fossils and footprints, especially in rural areas, Tang said. Experts from China and Greece started joint preservation work on more than 170 dinosaur footprints discovered in a Beijing suburb, the Xinhua News Agency reported in May. The footprints were believed to have been left by dinosaurs that lived 140 to 150 million years ago in the late Jurassic Period. KAMPALA As the country awaits the appearance of Gen Kale Kayihura in court, the Opposition Forum for Democratic Change party (FDC) have called on government to set up a court process that will see the former IGP account for his entire 13 years in office. While addressing journalists on Monday, June 18, FDC party spokesperson, also Kiira Municipality MP, Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda, said the High Court should appoint a panel of three judges to try the general and his accomplices. Sacked on March 4, 2018, the former IGP was arrested last week on June 13, and has since been held at Makindye Military Police Headquarters where the army said he was being questioned on a number of issues. On Monday, media reports indicated that the 4-star general was set to appear before the General Court Martial in Makindye. However a communication later the same day, signed by Ms Angella Kayihura, refuted the claims that her husband was set to be tried. To date neither Gen Kayihura, nor any member of his family have instructed any lawyer to file any application in any court, for any purpose. Statements to that effect are false and should be ignored, Kayihuras wife, Angella said. Mr Nganda on Monday said Gen Kayihura should answer for all the crimes he is liable for during his 13 years as IGP and not just those crimes which President Museveni feels he should be tried for. The High Court must be allowed to appoint a panel of three judges to try Kayihura and his accomplices of the crimes he committed during his reign, Mr Nganda told journalists, adding: Kayihuras 13 years in office should be investigated so he is charged with the crimes he committed not just those Mr Museveni wants. The MP also recommended a judicial commission of inquiry to probe the 13 years of police led by Gen Kayihura. He argued that many crimes were committed that needed investigation. He also called on President Museveni to take responsibility for Kayihura since the President always praised Kayihura even as he committed what the MP called atrocities against government critics. Ms Kayihuras statement issued Monday disaccosiated her husband and family from lawyers Evans Ochieng and Caleb Alaska who were earlier indicated to represent the troubled general. Ms Kayihura clarified that her husband would be represented by Kampala Associated Advocates. This is to inform the general public that neither General Kale Kayihura nor any member of his family has met, talked to or instructed Mr. Evans Ochieng or Caleb Alaka or their law firms to represent General Kayihura, as prior alleged, Ms Kayihuras statement reads in part. The arrest and pending trial of Gen Kayihura, a hitherto blue eyed boy of President Museveni, comes as one of his close allies, Boda Boda 2010 boss Abdallah Kitatas, trial commenced recently. Kitata faces a number of crimes including illegal possession of a gun and military ware. Kitata and his bandit group of boda boda riders were notoriously known for helping police carry out what could well be stated to be crimes against members of the public especially those in Opposition during rallies and demonstrations. Pundits have also associated the former IGP Kayihura with the gruesome killing of former police spokesperson AIGP Andrew Felix Kaweesi in 2017. Related VATICAN Pope Francis has met the Uganda Episcopal Conference, the Assembly of Catholic Bishops in Uganda, the Vatican announced on Wednesday. The catholic bishops of Uganda, are on their ad Limina Apostolorum visit to Rome, an every 5-year ritual by bishops of different countries where they meet the Pope and discussion one-on-one, the different issues in their dioceses. The Ugandan bishops headed by Gulu Archbishop John Baptist Odama, are also accompanied to the meeting by their Secretary General Msgr. John Baptist Kauta, who heads the executive division of the church in Uganda. The Vatican did not disclose the details of the meeting of the bishops with the Church but it is understood that they did present a report that highlights the current status of Catholic church in Uganda the church state relations. Earlier this year, the Archbishop of Kampala Cyprian Kizito Lwanga accused state agents of recruiting priests to spy on the Catholic Church and also hatching a plot to hurt him. However, the matter cooled down after the Archbishop met President Museveni and discussed the issues privately. It is understood that such a matter could have come up at the bishops meeting with the Pope. Related NAKAWA Lecturers at Makerere University Business School (MUBS) on Monday said their strike, which started a week ago, will continue unless the school Council makes a formal commitment to enhance their salaries and pay their arrears. Under their umbrella body, Makerere University Business School Academic Staff Association (MUBASA), they are demanding about Shs45b that accrued from governments failure to honour partial salary enhancement and accumulation of unpaid salaries for assistant lecturers. However, in a meeting held on Monday, they said since they wrote to the principal, Prof Wasswa Balunywa on May 22 and June 6, seeking redress of their grievances, he has not shown any commitment to pay their money. The MUBASA chairperson, Dr Isaac Magoola, demanded that Prof Wasswa Balunywa, should secure a confirmation letter of the schools wage requirements from the Ministry of Public Service to enable the Ministry of Finance to act. The strike is on. We are waiting for an official communication. Council resolved that the principal should secure the aforementioned letter of confirmation, he said. He added that they were tired of empty promises from their managers and unless government responds, they will not supervise their students who are already on field attachments. Last week, Prof Balunywa advised the striking lecturers to address their concerns to the right government authorities as the university management had completed negotiations with the different stakeholders. We have about 200 lecturers whose salaries have never been enhanced and that is not within our control, he said. The Ministry of Finance awaits a letter from the Ministry of Public Service and we were urged to see that the letter goes and money will come, Prof Balunywa said. Related China will build a new university dedicated to nuclear power research, amid a severe shortage of qualified people. China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), the country's leading nuclear power developer and nuclear power plant operator, has signed a contract with the government of Tianjin Municipality to invest in a nuclear technology university in Tianjin, local media reported on Saturday. The university would be built as a national level institution and would function as a base for skill straining, Master's and PhD programs, and core technology research and development, the report said. China has a comparatively intact nuclear industrial system. However, few nuclear related fields such as nuclear fusion, uranium enrichment and post-processing "differ widely from each other, and the existing nuclear related majors in universities and colleges cannot satisfy the demand for talent," Science and Technology Daily reported, citing Wan Gang, director of the China Institute of Atomic Energy. Wan said only 20.29 percent of 2,300 graduates CNNC has hired majored in nuclear-related courses. A CNNC development report says that colleges and universities can only satisfy less than half of the company's demand for talent for the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20). Wang Yinan, a researcher at the State Council's Development Research Center, stressed the importance of cultivating talent for nuclear power security. "China has many nuclear power projects and will continue to develop, which has led to a severe shortage of nuclear talent in power plant design, engineering construction, operations and security control," Wang told the Global Times. If something goes wrong, the front-line operators should "immediately recognize the fault and solve it," Wang said. "Not enough qualified personnel is threatens nuclear power security." Thirty-one nuclear power units were operating in China as of June 2016, with 23 more under construction. The China Electricity Council said in 2016 that China will have the second most nuclear power plants in the world. Many Chinese universities offer nuclear technology-related programs, including Tsinghua University, Peking University and Xi'an Jiaotong University. The 24-hour Art All Night Trenton 2018 arts festival in Trenton, New Jersey turned violent just before three in the morning on Sunday when gunfire suddenly erupted. At least two gunmen opened fire, injuring 22 people, including a 13-year-old boy, according to the Washington Post. A responding police officer fatally shot one of the suspects the other gunman was arrested. The shooting is believed to be gang-related. We believe it was a dispute between two neighborhoods that led to violence at the event. In no way was the event the target, it just happened to be the forum for the shooting, Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri told ABC News. An SUV packed with undocumented immigrants crashed Sunday during a high-speed chase about 100 miles southwest of San Antonio, Texas, according to the Washington Post. Five people died and several others were injured in the incident. According to Dimmit County Sheriff Marion Boyd, a total of 14 people were in the vehicle at the time. Sheriff Boyd said that the vehicle was moving at more than 100 miles per hour when it left the roadway, caught gravel and then tried to recorrect, causing a rollover crash that ejected multiple victims from the vehicle. The driver was not ejected in the crash, and was taken into custody. The crash is under investigation by the Border Patrol, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other federal agencies. Our deepest sympathies go out to the families of those who died in the crash, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in its statement. Three men are accused of pretending to be police officers during a shooting in Hialeah, FL, according to WPLG-TV News. Police said that a victim of the shooting identified 27-year-old Yasmani Morgado, 34-year-old Ceaser Miranda-Vega, and 49-year-old Rene Del Toro as the men who shouted "Police!" and "Get on the ground!" before opening fire with a short-barreled shotgun. One man was wounded and taken to a nearby hospital. The suspects face numerous charges, including impersonating a police officer in the commission of a felony, attempted murder, burglary, kidnapping and aggravated assault with a firearm. Miguel Acevedo who Chicago Police say has a long criminal history was able to get a loaded .22-caliber handgun into a police station lockup over the weekend. (Image Courtesy of Chicago PD) Miguel Acevedo who Chicago Police say has a long criminal history was able to get a loaded .22-caliber handgun into a police station lockup over the weekend, according to the Chicago Tribune. The gun was discovered by a maintenance employee who was cleaning a holding cell. In a statement to the Tribune, a spokesman for police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said the department has opened an internal investigation into how three officers and a civilian aide apparently missed the gun. They could face suspension. A Burnet (TX) police officer responding to a call of a dog attack on a bicyclist ended up herself coming under attack by three dogs, sustaining bites to both of her arms. The officer, identified as Corporal Alex Fidler, was taking a statement from the bicyclist when the dogs attacked her. Fidler shot two of the dogs one fatally and the third animal ran away. Of the three dogs, one appeared to be a mastiff-pit bull mixed breed, another possibly a boxer-pit bull mix; and the third had characteristics of a Labrador and other breeds, according a report by DailyTrib.com. Officials sent the head of the dead dog to a state lab for rabies testing. WASHINGTON, June 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Defense Department said on Monday that it has suspended all planning for a joint military exercise with South Korea in August. Pentagon spokesperson Dana White said that "the United States military has suspended all planning for this August's defensive 'wargame' (Freedom Guardian)." The decision was "consistent with President (Donald) Trump's commitment in concert with our Republic of Korea ally," she said in a statement. The United States will stop conducting war games with South Korea, Trump said in Singapore last week after a historic summit with Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). As for subsequent military drills, the spokesperson said, "We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent wargames have been made." There will be a meeting at Pentagon later this week on this issue attended by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, she added. In a remarkable display of unity, the nations news media have suspended coverage of the FBI scandal, our booming economy, progress on North Korea, etc., to focus single-mindedly on the plight of children who are temporarily separated from their parents as a consequence of their illegal entry into the U.S. I personally have no problem with enforcing the immigration laws, as the President is sworn to do. But the Democrats evidently believe they have struck the mother lode in their ceaseless quest for political advantage. Politico sends out a daily email called the Morning Score. This mornings Score is triumphant: NATIONAL OUTRAGE OVER THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATIONS POLICY on separating children from parents at the border has reached a boiling point, drawing rebukes from across the political spectrum including from the Republicans charged with keeping the House, both at the NRCC and in numerous battleground districts. Heartbreaking images of children held in what are functionally cages have been released by the government, and ProPublica published gut-wrenching audio of a young girl pleading to be reunited with her family while other children cry in the background. The pushback from Democrats came swiftly. Every single Democrat in the Senate including red-state incumbents in reelection battles like Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) signed onto a bill that would prevent minors from being taken away from their parents. House Democrats also roundly criticized the move. But resistance also came from the Republican Party. NRCC chair Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio) placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration. In a statement, Stivers said he will ask the Administration to stop needlessly separating children from their parents and that if the policy is not changed, I will support other means to stop unnecessary separation of children from their parents. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-08) called the policy heartless and inhumane and said this extreme measure must end, while border-district Rep. Will Hurd (TX-23) told CNN that it is something that as Americans we shouldnt be doing and said that this is clearly something that the administration can change. Rep. Kevin Yoder s (KS-03) statement to the Kansas City Star spoke to the lasting, and sometimes even irreversible toll on the childs well being from separation from their parents, and he urged the administration to change its policy. The White Houses policy is also widely unpopular among Americans. A poll of adults from CNN/SSRS found that just 28 percent of Americans approve of the Trump administrations decision (58 percent of Republicans support it, while just 27 percent of independents and 5 percent of Democrats do). The Daily Beast/Ipsos poll of adults found similar numbers 27 percent said they agree with the statement that it is appropriate to separate undocumented immigrant parents from their children when they cross the border in order to discourage others from crossing the border illegally, with a plurality of Republicans agreeing at 46 percent but just 29 percent of Independents and 14 percent of Democrats saying the same. But the White House is seemingly standing behind the policy, which could further open a rift between the president and those Republicans who have criticized family separation. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen repeatedly lied from the podium at Mondays White House press briefing, incorrectly blaming the separation on a loophole within the countrys immigration system and not instead on a deliberate policy choice from the Trump administration. The president has taken to Twitter to try to blame Democrats and not his own administrations policies for the move. For what its worth, I doubt that a lot of votes will turn on this issue. The ones doing the howling are the same ones who have tried to frustrate the president every step of the way, and I dont for a moment think their crocodile tears are sincere. When have the Democrats lost any sleep over the fact that a far greater number of American children are separated from their parents for a far longer time, because those parents committed crimes and were sentenced to prison? The Democrats dont care about children, they care about political opportunity. The reality, which most voters understand, is that Republicans are opposed to illegal immigration, while Democrats are in favor of it. It really is that simple, and nothing has happened to change the fact that the Republican position is more popular. Now someone just needs to tell our more timid Republicans that the sky isnt falling. Starvation or prison: that was the question. Choose the former, uncounted families could shuffle off their mortal coils within days; pick the latter, guileless peasants would face the calamity of eternal imprisonment. As harsh as it sounds, this dilemma, which was posed 40 years ago in a small village in China, raised the curtain on one of the largest rural reform campaigns in human history. In light of such a tough choice, 18 peasants from Xiaogang Village in Anhui Province made a historic decision. By signing a secret oath to subdivide the land owned by the Peoples Commune into family plots in 1978, the villagers defied Chinas then collective orthodoxy, embarking on an illegal experiment in what was later called the household contract responsibility system. It doesnt matter if I was put in jail or not, as long as we could produce more grain to feed the villagers, 77-year-old Yan Junchang, one of the original 18 villagers who signed the contract, told Xinhua. Their valor paid off. After the reform, Xiaogang embraced a harvest that was larger than the previous five years combined, while the villagers fear of being punished was dismissed, for their bold initiative was recognized by the government, guiding villages across China to eradicate poverty. Xiaogang Village has then been hailed as the "Cradle of China's Rural Reform." The household contract responsibility system entrusts the management and production of public owned farmland to individual households through long-term contracts, liberating and raising the productivity of rural areas. The courageous innovation also marked the beginning of Chinas four-decade rural reform, leading to an unprecedented poverty alleviation crusade. According to Chinas government report, from 1981 to 2012, more than 790 million Chinese have been lifted above the poverty line, which accounts for 71.82 percent of the worlds total, while the countrys extreme poverty is set to be eliminated by 2020. Living in large cities, people tend to forget that poverty and hardship strikes the countryside. Its very important that [innovative] ways are found to reinvigorate life in rural areas, where its residents should have a real stake in the land they work, said Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain. All roads lead to prosperity The entrance of Xiaogang Village. The region has been known as the "Cradle of China's Rural Reform" since 1978 when villagers risked to adopt a household contract responsibility system, which entrusted the management and production of public owned farmland to individual households through long-term contracts. Forty years on, the once deviant initiative is now dubbed the spirit of the all-round contract system, with its core value of adventure and innovation inspiring penurious rural areas like Xiaogang village to explore their own path of poverty alleviation. Located 325 kilometers from Xiaogang village, Huaxi Village in Jiangsu Province has acted in a diametrically opposite way towards poverty alleviation. Unlike the former which broke the shackles of collectiveness, Huaxi Village still preserves integration regarding the collective goals and income distribution system, while villagers can invest their money into a collective pool and share in the profits from any local businesses they contributed to. Unlike Xiaogang which featured agricultural economy, Huaxi experienced an industrial boost after the reform. This cooperative and collective mode is more effective to adjust the villages economic structure, helping us to move up the development ladder, Wu Xieen, secretary of Huaxi Village, told China Radio International. Sailing through controversies, Huaxi has shed doubts over its socialist-style collective ownership by accumulating wealth through the development of industries ranging from new energy and computer games to banking and marine transport. According to Xinhuas report, the villages current annual per capita income is over 15,000 U.S dollars, with each family having a villa and private cars. Villagers also enjoy subsidized health care, and the village welcomes over 2 million tourists every year. With a large population living in poverty and different situation of rural areas, China has appropriately opened up space for diversity in rural reform, which is better for the countrys poverty alleviation, said Su Wei, a professor at the Party School of the CPC Chongqing Municipal Committee. The memorial hall of the household contract responsibility system in Xiaogang Village. Diversity and innovation serve as the key words for Chinas rural reform. In Zhejiangs Tengtou village, industry and agriculture are perfectly combined. Possessing neither resource endowment nor industrial advantage, Tengtou shifted its focus to decorative flowers and plants, as well as environmental protection technologies. In 1993, the United Nations granted the Global 500 Award for Environmental Achievement to the village, generating a frenzy of eco-tourism in the region. Green economy has benefited the Tengtou greatly. According to statistics, Tengtou conducted business worth 30 million RMB in 2008 by providing plants and flowers for the Beijing Olympic Games, while in 2010, it provided 100,000 tree seedlings for the Shanghai Expo. The villages well-protected environment has also attracted visitors worldwide, making it the first village in China to sell tickets to visitors since 1999, with its annual tourism income now reaching 119 million RMB. The approach of openness and multiple forms of property are very important for developing countries to achieve modernization, and China has provided very important experience for their [future development], said John Batchtell, National Chair of the Communist Party USA. More than poverty alleviation Xiaogang Village. Despite Chinese authorities progress in poverty alleviation and the countrys ambition to eradicate extreme poverty by 2020, experts noted that more efforts should be made to tackle relative poverty, as well as improving living and working conditions in rural areas. Serving as the archetype of Chinas rural reform, Xiaogang Village has long since been lifted out of poverty, but the villagers have yet to taste the joy of being rich. According to statistics, the villagers annual income reached 16,169 RMB in 2016, which is way lower than in comparable villages such as Huaxi. To upgrade its economy, Xiaogang has utilized its fame to earn extra income. The village has established farmhouse restaurants and archives to attract tourists, arranging grape and cherry-picking tours to boost local agritainment. In addition to upgrading economic structure, Chinese authorities have also harnessed the power of advanced technologies and better infrastructure to eradicate poverty in villages like Xiaogang. According to Chinas Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 90 percent of the countries poverty-stricken regions will have internet access by the end of 2018, while over 40 billion RMB has already been invested in the construction of broadband networks in the countries rural regions over the past two years, covering more than 130,000 administrative villages in 27 provinces and regions. The Communist Party of China (CPC) has also pledged to win the battle against poverty with the Targeted-Poverty-Alleviation strategy. In 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Shibadong village in Hunan Province, where he proposed to take targeted measures in poverty alleviation for the first time. Xi stressed the importance of precision in the battle against poverty, saying that poverty alleviation should focus on targeted people and industries, and use the right tools to produce results. Poverty plagues so much of this world of ours, including the U.S., where there are people living in abject poverty. The fact that China is on the verge of solving it is really a tremendous achievement, the elimination of poverty is one of the most important details of Chinas opening and reform, said Batchtell. Chinese President Xi Jinping visits people in Liangjiahe village, Wen'anyi township of Yanchuan county, Yan'an, Northwest China's Shaanxi province, Feb 13, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua] Thousands of students at Shaanxi Normal University have drawn inspiration from President Xi Jinping's seven years as an "educated youth" in the small village of Liangjiahe in Shaanxi province. The university opened a compulsory course in September on Xi's seven years of service in Liangjiahe to help students learn how the young Xi Jinping grew up in adversity. From 1969 to 1975, Xi lived and worked in the village as part of a campaign launched by Chairman Mao Zedong that called on urban youth to gain life experience by working in rural areas. The university enrolls more than 2,000 government-funded normal students every year. Almost 90 percent of the students are from impoverished central and western regions of China. They do not need to pay tuition, but are required to teach at local primary and secondary schools after graduation. Students have attended group discussions in class and do practical research after class. They have written more than 1,000 voluntary reviews. Cheng Guangxu, the university's Party secretary, said the course aims to offer guidance to the students to help them become more qualified teachers. Ren Xiaowei, dean of the university's School of Marxism, said the school has established a stable teaching team, with senior experts as lecturers for the course. Teachers should comprehensively grasp the essence of the young Xi Jinping's thought, so that the course can combine theory and practicality, he said. The university plans to compile the teaching materials of the course into a book, which will be published soon. Song Jiling, associate professor at the School of Marxism, said the course can help students understand how the Party has always put the people first and has been determined to eradicate extreme poverty and improve people's livelihoods. Tian Shuning, a student at the School of Life Sciences, said the noble character of Xi will serve as the guiding light as she becomes a teacher after graduation. "I will be committed to my job and treat my students kindly," she said. Li Yahui, a senior student majoring in political education, said students should emulate the young Xi Jinping's attitude of hard work and self-cultivation amid adversity. "Xi's perseverance and dedication to work have inspired me to hold myself to a higher standard and contribute to the great national rejuvenation," Li said. Sun Shiwen, a second-year student at the School of Geography and Tourism, said the examples and stories teachers provided in class offer a vivid image of history. Recently, the rescue vessel Aquarius with 629 migrants on board was denied port entry by Italian and Maltese government officials. The majority of those on board were from North Africa and in need of serious aid. The issue has triggered a rift inside the European Union (EU). Member nations have been hotly debating who should take responsibility for new arrivals and whether Europe should implement a migrant quota system. It seemed a solution had been reached after Spain allowed the ship to dock in Valencia. Spanish government officials provided health care services to the migrants even though none of them had resident permits. But the effort was an act of kindness and a one-off gesture that many European nations cannot routinely afford. European countries are scrambling to fix the ongoing migrant crisis in the North African border region. Ever since Libyas Muhammar Gaddafi regime collapsed, government authority has remained in a vacuum. Since 2014, more than 400,000 migrants and refugees from Libya have crossed the Mediterranean headed for the Italian border. A network of migrant smuggling from the top of North Africa and stretching as far south as Niger and Sudan. Migrant smuggling is a lucrative business, and cities have found a way to get rich off of Africas primary migrant routes. In Niger, the organizations responsible for policing migration activities have come to rely on the bribe revenue provided by the smugglers. In Libya, militias often hold migrants hostage until a ransom is paid before releasing them. This black market business is fueled by political instability and unrest throughout the African continent. Today, at least 1 million sub-Saharan Africans are living in Libya as slaves or hostages, according to a report for the UNs High Commissioner for Refugees. By taking large risks, sometimes with their own lives, many still try to get out. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey that polled six African nations, the thing everyone had in common had to do with migrating elsewhere. In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron tried to set up hot spots in Chad and Niger where refugees could apply for asylum without having to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean. But the plan was with opposition from other nations who argued that the designated areas would attract more migrants. When Macron first proposed his idea, Chad was already home to some 500,000 refugees. For European countries like Malta and Italy, the migrant crisis extends beyond the rescue vessels and the people on board. It is a manifestation of political chaos created far from African soil. Poverty and turmoil continue to plague African countries, while conservatism and populism divide European states. In recent years, rising European policy has shifted from improving humanitarian aid for those seeking refuge inside Europe, to stemming irregular migration traffic regardless of expense. European leaders need to find a balance between their national interests and humanitarian relief efforts for the African countries in question. Failure to develop a fair, pan-European system based on resettlement quotas and a mutually funded receiving network will push EU allies further away from one another. The result could see representatives of far-right parties emerging within each nations ruling cabinet. Overall, it is merely a counter-productive initiative. However, there is one thing to be sure of, and its that the migrant crisis will not see an end if European leaders continue this inhumane race to the bottom. MUMBAI, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- From clothes to fine jewellery, now everything is available for shopping online. However, shoppers are still far behind when it comes to being comfortable with shopping online for fine jewellery, especially rings. While it is comparatively easier for buyers to imagine themselves in a piece of clothing, for a ring, it becomes quite tough to understand if it will look nice on their fingers, will suit their complexion, size of the solitaire, etc. That is why Candere has introduced its new feature - Virtual Try On, to aid those who want a more realistic experience of online shopping. Virtual Try On enables the user to visualize on their phone screen how a solitaire ring will look on their hand without the hassle of imagining, measuring solitaire sizes and venturing out to retail stores in the hope of finding a similar looking ring for a try on. At Candere, in order to try on a solitaire ring virtually, customers can head over to the Diamond Solitaire Ring section from their mobile or tablet, choose a ring of their choice and tap 'Try On'. Take a picture of their hand and the ring appears on the screen. Place it on any finger virtually. Buyers may also change the colour of Gold, i.e. White Gold or Yellow Gold. The biggest advantage of shopping online for rings is the access to the huge catalogue which is not available at stores, along with variety of solitaire sizes, metal colors and purity, as well as diamond quality and grades. In the words of CEO, Rupesh Jain, "People in India are still not comfortable with online shopping, especially rings. We have introduced Virtual Try On at Candere to give our buyers an idea of how the ring will look on their finger. We believe in solving problems and hopefully we will come up with many such features that will enable our users to have a flawless retail like experience." To try out this feature, visit https://www.candere.com/jewellery/womens-solitaire-diamond-rings.html from mobile or tablet. About Candere.com: Candere.com is one of India's growing e-commerce companies dealing majorly in diamond jewellery. Being Kalyan Jewellers only online partner, Candere commenced business with a vision of bringing the offline diamond industry to the online market making it available to the Indian masses. Today with a catalogue of more than 6,000 products and multiple features, Candere has come much closer to their dream of making online shopping the inevitable future for buyers. To visit the website click on link https://www.candere.com/. Media Contact: Naushaba Ara [email protected] +91-2261066202 Content Head Enovate Lifestyles Pvt. Ltd. SOURCE Candere.com BENGALURU, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Doodhwala is Bengaluru's largest subscription based e-grocer Doodhwala, a subscription based, early morning delivery platform for fresh milk and other perishable groceries, announced today its expansion to Hyderabad. A household name across Bengaluru and Pune, Doodhwala currently supplies 30,000 litres of milk daily, along with other fresh products sourced directly from local farms and dairies. (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/707713/Doodhwala_Founders.jpg ) "Hyderabad is a milestone victory. We have proved our model in Bangalore and Pune by reaching 4 million orders till date. Our success in both these cities has helped us develop a great playbook for geographic expansion. By pairing our lean operating model with low inventory dependency and a rock bottom Rs. 3.3 last mile delivery cost, we are poised to dominate the fresh grocery space," said Ebrahim Akbari, Doodhwala's Co-Founder. Doodhwala will initially offer Hyderabad customers a huge variety of fresh milk and dairy products, and over time will add a selection of fresh grocery items including eggs, fruits, vegetables, juices, and breads. In Bangalore, the company has partnered with over 50 milk brands including organic and A2 dairy farms, to cater to the diverse needs of Doodhwala customers. "The convenience of ordering milk and daily essentials on a subscription basis guarantees stickiness and reduces customer acquisition costs. Doodhwala has become a beloved part of the morning schedule for its rapidly growing customer base. Doodhwala is expected to expand across 15 cities in the next two years. By 2021, over 10 million households will subscribe to Dooodhwala," said Aakash Agrawal, Doodhwala's Co-Founder. Commenting on the expansion, Mark Kahn, Founding Partner, Omnivore, said, "Doodhwala has the leanest e-grocer model in the industry and is well positioned for massive pan-India growth." In February 2018, Doodhwala received 2.2 million in Seed funding from Omnivore, a venture fund focused on food and agriculture startups. Back in 2017, the company received angel funding from Thomas Varkey, a partner at Stonehill Capital. About Doodhwala: Doodhwala is a subscription based, early morning delivery platform for fresh milk and other perishable groceries sourced directly from local farms and dairies. Doodhwala offers customers a variety of fresh milk and dairy products, as well as eggs, fruit, fresh juice, vegetables, meat, and other daily essentials. Doodhwala customers use the company's app to set their subscription schedule and receive their groceries for the day promptly before 7 am. Founded in 2015 by Aakash Agrawal and Ebrahim Akbari, Doodhwala, is present in Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad. For more details, please visit http://www.doodhwala.com About Omnivore: Omnivore is an impact venture fund that invests in Indian startups developing breakthrough technologies for food, agriculture, and the rural economy. For further information on Omnivore, please visit: http://www.omnivore.vc Media Contacts: Nazneen Daud [email protected] +91-7838742138 Manager - Marketing and Communications Doodhwala Priya Bhat [email protected] +91-9986651579 SOURCE Doodhwala AHMEDABAD, India, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- GTPL Hathway Limited (GTPL), India's leading Digital Cable TV and Broadband Service provider, today announced appointment of Mr. Viren Thakkar as the new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) effective from Monday, July 2, 2018. He has replaced Jayanta Kumar Pani, who is leaving GTPL at the end of this month to explore other career opportunities. (Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/598543/GTPL_Hathway_Logo.jpg ) Viren has 27 years of experience in corporate finance, cost control, budgeting, internal control & audit and corporate planning. Previously, Viren was the Chief Financial Officer for India, Middle East and Africa Region at Roquette Riddhi Siddhi Private Limited; a part of Roquette Freres Group of France, having operation in 42 countries with an annual turnover of 3.20 Billion Euro. Prior to that, between 2007 and 2012, Viren was General Manager - Finance at Torrent Power Limited, a part of Ahmedabad-based Torrent Group. Viren is a chartered accountant and a cost accountant. Commenting on the appointment, Anirudhasinhji Jadeja, Managing Director, GTPL Hathway, said, "I warmly welcome Viren to GTPL family. Viren brings wealth of experience in managing finance & accounts function at reputed companies. As GTPL continues to increase market share in digital cable TV and invest in technologically superior high-speed, low cost broadband services, the company will benefit immensely from Viren's deep knowledge and global experience across finance & accounts domain." Mr. Jadeja added, "On behalf of GTPL board, I would like to thank Jayanta for his substantial contribution to GTPL. In past one decade, Jayanta has built a solid foundation for GTPL and played a key role in taking the company public. I wish him great success in his future endeavours." Commenting on the new role, Viren Thakkar, said, "I am excited to join GTPL Hathway, one of the few profitable companies in digital cable and broadband space. I look forward to focus on future investment in technology, prudent capital allocation, margin expansion and value creation for all the stakeholders." About GTPL Hathway Limited GTPL Hathway Limited is one of India's leading Digital Cable TV and Broadband service providers. We are the number 1. Cable TV Provider in Gujarat with 67% market share. Our digital cable television services reached 500 plus towns across India, including towns in Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Bihar, Assam, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. As on March 31, 2018, we have seeded approximately 8.7 million STBs and had approximately 7.4 million active digital cable subscribers and 0.28 million Broadband Subscribers with a home pass of about 1.3 million. For media queries, please contact: Piyush Pankaj Chief Corporate Affairs Officer [email protected] +91-98113-21102 Mehul Mehta President - Dickenson Financial PR [email protected] +91-98202-80325 SOURCE GTPL Hathway Limited Chinese e-commerce shopping site JD.com announced Monday it has secured investment worth $550 million from Google. Experts find the strategic partnership a win-win deal. The companies said that both sides will roll out a series of cooperation programs, including developing retail solutions in multiple regions such as Southeast Asia, the United States and Europe. Experts find the deal will help JD.com expand globally and help Google ease the pressure from Amazons recent growth. As partners, both companies will focus on building next-generation retail infrastructure solutions to provide consumers with a better shopping experience. JD.com becomes global business The overall strategy of JD.com in 2018 shows the companys ambition to become a global business. Experts note JD.com has enhanced its capability to compete. JD.com has undoubtedly built a strong supply chain system. This is JD.coms core competitiveness, Cao Lei, director of the Hangzhou-based China e-Business Research Center, told the Peoples Daily on Monday. This supply chain covers end-to-end circulation that includes commodity selection using big data, procurement, operations, warehousing, distribution, technical support, financial systems and after-sales services, Cao added. JD.com is shaping up to be an integrated supply chain that also offers third-party services. After building up its supply chain internally, the platform is now attracting Internet giants such as Google, Cao noted. Before the long weekend holiday celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival, Liu Qiangdong, founder of JD.com, said that the company will provide Ayeyawady-Chao Phraya-Mekong Economic Cooperation Strategy (ACMECS) countries with e-commerce, logistics, and financial services in the next two years. Under the Belt and Road initiative, JD.com will contribute to the growth of the digital economy in Southeast Asian countries, and improve local peoples quality of life, Liu continued. JD.com is planning to deploy cross-border retailing, so its partnership with Google might help. Googles buffer Both Google and Amazon are two giants in the global Internet business. Google has been growing stronger than Amazon in terms of market value. However, the market landscape has been disrupted this year. In the past year, Amazons stock price has risen by around 75 percent. From e-commerce to cloud computing, it has been growing through developing new business in new regions. Google might have started to follow suit this year. By inking a partnership with Carrefour, Google has moved into French retail and potentially come across a new anti-Amazon strategy. Carrefour is the first retailer partnering with Google in France to offer a new grocery shopping experience, which will be available in early 2019 through the Google Assistant, and connected speakers like Google Home. Starting in 2019, Carrefour will sell products through Google's products and services, including Google Home smart speakers and Google Assistant voice assistants. This cooperation marks the first time that French retail companies have sold groceries through Google's services. Analysts predict that Amazon will develop a retail search tool and win over Google in this area. As time goes by, consumers might become accustomed to using Amazon as a retail search engine instead of Google. Google aims to increase its market share by selling JD.coms products through Google shopping. Chances are JD.com might adopt a strategy similar to the partnership of Carrefour with Google, completing the sale of JD.com products through Google's connected speakers. Google is strong with its technical capabilities and massive user base. When these two companies work together, they can create better online and offline user experience, this is exactly the model for cross-border retail that JD.com is seeking, Cao said. Meanwhile, the user scenario for Google has been enriched, increasing the rate for sales and creating more revenue. JD.com will stride into the global market with a lower marketing cost, Cao concluded. BANGALORE, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Built on the Force.com Platform and Salesforce1 of Salesforce, SandD brings in field-force automation in the sales organization Marlabs, Inc., a digital innovation firm that specializes in providing 360-degree digital transformation frameworks, today announced the launch of SandD - a mobile-focused, flexible and versatile cloud-based app to drive efficiencies in the sales and distribution chain. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/707608/Marlabs_Logo.jpg ) SandD is built on Salesforce as a ready-to-use application for businesses of any size. Unlike other apps in the marketplace, SandD is a multi-dimensional tool, designed to automate the field force organization, and enhance visibility, control, and mobility across the sales organization of any industry. Siby Vadakekkara, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Marlabs, said, "SandD is a special product for us. It is the outcome of our technology and IP council initiatives to drive non-linear growth accelerators. SandD is poised to address a wide range of challenges agnostic of industries. With its ability to be customized, I am confident that SandD will revolutionize the way the sales cycle is currently managed." SandD has three main parts that enable the sales team while using the app: Planning/Execution, Order-taking, and Fulfillment. Right from the head of the organization through the bottom level executive, SandD connects everyone in the sales and distribution chain. The app has been specially designed to plan activities, execute, take action on real-time data, and get a 360-degree view of the customers and their transactions. For more information and an exclusive preview of SandD, write to [email protected]. About Marlabs Marlabs is a digital innovation company providing specialized Digital 360 frameworks to global enterprises. Headquartered in Piscataway, New Jersey, Marlabs employs over 2,300 employees across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and India. Media Contact: Shyam Ananthnarayan [email protected] +91-48972472 VP - Marketing, Marlabs, Inc. SOURCE Marlabs, Inc. DELHI, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Running into its 5th edition, Heimtextil India and Ambiente India will open doors this month from 27 - 29th June at Pragati Maidan, New Delhi. Hon'ble Textile Minister Smriti Irani will inaugurate and address at this important gathering where the industry's new and leading brands will showcase their latest collections. Heimtextil and Ambiente are the world's largest trade fair brands for home textiles and consumer goods sector which sets the trend barometer globally. In India, the sister fairs Heimtextil India and Ambiente India, present first-look of the new season's collections for the Indian market offering inspiring product designs, live design sessions and experience zones. Now in its 5th edition, the organisers have tied up with the Council of Handicrafts Development Corporations (COHANDS) to display India's heritage art and crafts. The specially curated COHANDS Pavilion will bring together Padma Shri and National Awardee Shri Jai Prakash Lakhwal, National Awardees Shri Vivekananda Bagchi, Ms. Sneh Gangal, Shri Devendra Kumar Jha and Shri Kamlesh Jangid & Shilp Guru Awardees Shri Har Krishan, Mohd Matloob and Shri Brahmdeo Ram Pandit just to name a few who will be showcasing their strengths in traditional Indian handicrafts. Together, the awardees will highlight traditionally crafted products with a contemporary touch in miniature painting, terracotta, cane & bamboo arts, wood carving & wood inlay, bidri craft, mithila painting, wood carving, brass engraving and pottery. Creating the perfect combination of Indian and international designs, the platform will also host companies from China, Indonesia, Switzerland and Thailand and international speakers from France and Finland to throw light on the lifestyle trends through co-relation with Indian design due to the growing influence of India through emergence of successful Indian designers and brands internationally. Among the countries participating this year, the strongest participation is seen from Thailand where the Office of Small and Medium Enterprises Promotion and Federation of Thai Industries are looking at strengthening bilateral ties in the Indian home fashion space given the strong culture of design co-relation in both countries. Altogether, over 150 leading companies will present their stunning collections in dining, living, giving and home furnishing segments at this three-day fair in New Delhi. A sneak-peek at all the highlights include: New Product Launches : First-look and season's new collections launched by leading brands such as D'decor, Reliance, Aditya Birla, GHCL Ltd, R. R International, Manorama to name a few. : First-look and season's new collections launched by leading brands such as D'decor, Reliance, Aditya Birla, GHCL Ltd, R. R International, Manorama to name a few. Indian Art & Crafts : Presenting the best of heritage art and crafts of India at the Council of Handicrafts Development Corporations (COHANDS) Pavilion. : Presenting the best of heritage art and crafts of India at the Council of Handicrafts Development Corporations (COHANDS) Pavilion. ILA Experience Zone : Innovative concepts in interior spaces showcased at this special zone through a design face-off on the theme of " My Heritage , My New Age India " between product and textile designers. : Innovative concepts in interior spaces showcased at this special zone through a design face-off on the theme of " , " between product and textile designers. Special Skills Zone : Live demonstrations of different art forms by underprivileged and a chance to showcase their talent and finished products to India's top visitors, buyers, designers etc. : Live demonstrations of different art forms by underprivileged and a chance to showcase their talent and finished products to India's top visitors, buyers, designers etc. Hospitality, Interior Designers, Retail Day : Renowned interior designers, retailers and hotel purchase managers to be hosted at the fair over the three days which marks the Hospitality, Interior Designers & Retail Day. : Renowned interior designers, retailers and hotel purchase managers to be hosted at the fair over the three days which marks the Hospitality, Interior Designers & Retail Day. International trend sessions: Renowned international speakers - French Designer David Landart and Finnish designer Susanna Bjorklund - come to India to host sessions on lifestyle trends and the art of window dressing. Organised by Messe Frankfurt Trade Fairs India Pvt Ltd, this leading home fashion business event will open its doors on 27 June in New Delhi. Press information and photographic material: http://www.ambiente-india.in ; http://www.heimtextil-india.in Links to websites: https://www.facebook.com/HeimtextilIndia/ https://www.facebook.com/ambienteindia/ https://twitter.com/HeimtextilIndia ; https://twitter.com/AmbienteIndia http://www.linkedin.com/in/ambienteindia https://www.instagram.com/heimtextilindia/ https://www.instagram.com/ambienteindia/?hl=en Background information on Messe Frankfurt Messe Frankfurt is the world's largest trade fair, congress and event organiser with its own exhibition grounds. With more than 2,500* employees at some 30 locations, the company generates annual sales of around 661* million. Thanks to its far-reaching ties with the relevant sectors and to its international sales network, the Group looks after the business interests of its customers effectively. A comprehensive range of services - both onsite and online - ensures that customers worldwide enjoy consistently high quality and flexibility when planning, organising and running their events. The wide range of services includes renting exhibition grounds, trade fair construction and marketing, personnel and food services. With its headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, the company is owned by the City of Frankfurt (60 percent) and the State of Hesse (40 percent). * Preliminary numbers 2017 For more information, please visit our website at: http://www.messefrankfurt.com | http://www.congressfrankfurt.de | http://www.festhalle.de Media Contact : Ruhi Shaikh [email protected] +91-22-6144-5914, Manager - PR & Corporate Communications Messe Frankfurt Trade Fairs India Pvt. Ltd. SOURCE Messe Frankfurt Trade Fairs India Pvt Ltd MUMBAI, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Datamatics Global Services Limited announced that Mr. Rahul Kanodia has been appointed as the Chairman of the Western Region Council of the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) for 2018-19. Rahul will take on the new role with immediate effect. He succeeds Mr. Ashank Desai, Founder & Former Chairman, Mastek Ltd. Rahul has been a member of NASSCOM's Region Council and also serves as the Chairman for the Western Region of ESC (Electronics and Computer Software Export Promotion Council). (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/707677/Rahul_Kanodia_CEO_Datamatics.jpg ) The NASSCOM Western Regional Council has over 550 members representing diverse categories including IT Services, BPM, Product Start-ups, and Financial Services across Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Indore and emerging cities of Vadodara, Nashik, Goa, and Raipur. The regional council is a platform to promote the IT-BPM community and build a conducive business environment in the region. Speaking on the occasion, Rahul Kanodia said, "I am honoured to be the Chairman of the NASSCOM Western Regional Council and take the baton from Ashank, who has successfully led the council to this stage. Along with my other colleagues on the board, I look forward to further strengthening the western region by promoting regional competitiveness and aligning to NASSCOM's national and regional agenda." Dr. Chetan Samant, Director, NASSCOM India said, "Rahul has been an active member of the NASSCOM Western Regional Council and his contributions to the IT-BPM industry over the last two decades has been commendable. We are confident that he will do a good job in leading the council to greater heights." About Datamatics Global Services Datamatics is a global technology company offering information technology, data management, business process management and consulting services to several Fortune 500 companies. The company caters to over 450 customers globally across banking, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom and logistics through a wide array of intelligent solutions and over 10 proprietary products & frameworks in robotics, artificial intelligence, mobility, document & workflow management, business intelligence and advanced analytics. Datamatics has adopted the highest standards of service quality and operational excellence through its customized offerings, enabling customers to improve productivity and accuracy, take intelligent decisions, speed up go-to-market and enhance customer experience to stay ahead in the connected world. Headquartered in Mumbai, the company has an employee base of over 10,000 with a presence in Americas, Australia, Asia, and Europe, with 8 delivery centres across 4 continents. Click here to know more - http://www.datamatics.com About NASSCOM NASSCOM is the premier trade body and the chamber of commerce of the technology and services industry in India. NASSCOM is a global trade body with more than 2500 members, which include both Indian and multinational companies that have a presence in India. NASSCOM's member companies are broadly in the business of IT services, software products, BPM, internet and e-commerce, engineering services and start-ups. NASSCOM's membership base constitutes over 95% of the industry revenues in India and employs over 4 million professionals. Safe Harbour Some of the statements in this update that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include our financial and growth projections as well as statements concerning our plans, strategies, intentions and beliefs concerning our business and the markets in which we operate. These statements are based on information currently available to us, and we assume no obligation to update these statements as circumstances change. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. These risks include, but are not limited to, the level of market demand for our services, the highly-competitive market for the types of services that we offer, market conditions that could cause our customers to reduce their spending for our services, our ability to create, acquire and build new businesses and to grow our existing businesses, our ability to attract and retain qualified personnel, currency fluctuations and market conditions in India and elsewhere around the world, and other risks not specifically mentioned herein but those that are common to industry. Media Contact : Nikita Suratwala AGM - Marketing & Corporate Communications [email protected] +91-9820707434 Mehul Mehta [email protected] +91-9820280325 President - Dickenson Financial PR Dickenson Financial PR SOURCE Datamatics Global Services Ltd. UTRECHT, Netherlands, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Vatican has agreed to loan one of the masterpieces by the Italian painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) to Centraal Museum Utrecht. It is the first time for this work to be displayed in the Netherlands. The work can be admired for just four weeks starting on 15 December 2018, as part of the exhibition Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe. The entombment of Christ is a monumental altarpiece measuring more than three by two meters. It is one of the most important pieces in the collection of the Vatican museums, and is therefore rarely loaned. An exception is being made for the major exhibition Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe, which will run from 15 December 2018 to 24 March 2019. Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe comprises more than sixty loans, forty-six of which have never visited the Netherlands before. These loans come from museum and private collections in the US and Europe, including the Vatican museums, the Musee du Louvre in Paris, the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, The National Gallery of Art in London and The National Gallery of Art in Washington, as well as churches in Rome. Aside from Caravaggio's Entombment, his St Jerome in Meditation from the Monasterio de la Virgen de Montserrat will also be on display, another piece that has never been exhibited in the Netherlands before. Caravaggio's Entombment Caravaggio painted The Entombment of Christ around 1602/04 for the family chapel of Girolamo Vittrice in the Chiesa Nuova in Rome. According to Roman painter and biographer of artists Giovanni Baglione (1566-1643), contemporaries viewed this majestic painting as Caravaggio's best work by far. Christ's body gleams against the dark background, in which the tomb's entrance is just barely visible. His torso rests on John's supporting right arm; Nicodemus bears his lower body. He grasps Christ's knees with both arms, his hands clasped together to strengthen his grip. Behind them stand three women. The Virgin Mary's tired, sorrowful gaze is cast down; the beautiful Mary Magdalene wipes away the tears issuing from her closed eyes. Mary of Cleophas, in contrast, raises her eyes to the sky, arms wide and mouth open in a desperate scream. Elevated on the stone grave cover on which he will be anointed and wound in cloth, they show us, the viewers, Christ. Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe In 1600, Rome was the centre of the world. Young painters from all corners of Europe travelled to the Eternal City, where - so the rumours said - Caravaggio was causing a revolution in the art of painting: a new realism, with chiaroscuro of unprecedented intensity. The Utrecht painters Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst travelled there to see it for themselves. Between 1600 and 1630, when European Caravaggism was at its prime, some 2700 artists were registered in Rome, 572 of whom were foreigners. These artists visited the same churches and collections. They conversed with each other. And they painted. The themes were the same, the sources of inspiration were the same, but the final results were all entirely unique. It is these differences between the European followers of Caravaggio that Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe examines. The thematic presentation of the pieces reveals how each artist's works remained rooted in his own cultural background. Strong partnership Centraal Museum organises Utrecht, Caravaggio and Europe in close collaboration with the Bayerischen Staatsgemaldesammlungen in Munich. The exhibition will open in Centraal Museum Utrecht on 15 December 2018 and continue until 24 March 2019, after which it will travel to Alte Pinakothek, Munich (17 April 2019 to 21 July 2019). Please see the included video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVU5Lr1mCuw or download: https://we.tl/Nd4R1vvEJU . SOURCE Centraal Museum Utrecht WASHINGTON, June 18 -- Mars will look bigger and brighter in the coming weeks than it has appeared in the last 15 years, according to NASA. The planet Mars showing showing Terra Meridiani is seen in an undated NASA image. NASA will announce a major science finding from the agency's ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing September 28 in Washington. [Photo/Agencies] On July 31, Mars will travel to the closest point in its orbit to Earth, about 57.6 million km from our planet. This is the shortest Earth-Mars distance since 2003. When Mars and Earth are close to each other, Mars appears very bright in our sky. It also makes it easier to see with telescope or the naked eye. Mars only comes close enough to allow this kind of view once or twice every 15 or 17 years. The most recent one happened in 2003, when the distance was only 55.7 million km away, the closest in nearly 60,000 years. Dean Regas, an astronomer at the Cincinatti Observatory, told Mother Nature Network that this year's event would be almost as good as that viewing. "Mars will be visible to the naked eye," he said. "In fact, you will be hard pressed to miss it. It will look like a glowing orange beacon of light rising in the southeast after sunset. It'll be much brighter than any star, brighter than Jupiter, nearly as bright as Venus. And you'll see it every night for the next several months." However, Mars will look fainter by mid-August as the red planet and Earth will travel farther away from each other in their orbits around the Sun. Will Bitcoin Dive Below $6000? The worlds first cryptocurrency, as well as the rest of the crypto market, ended the past trading week in the red zone. Bitcoin some 4% over the reporting period. In particular, Bitfinex traders could saw it plunge down to 6125 USD/BTC the lowest level since February 8th, 2018. According to CoinMarketCap, this week started with a further decline. However, the price has managed to recover a little bit since then, the question is whether the market is going to continue its way down to new local lows. Indeed, the current market situation may puzzle even the smartest guy out there. On the one hand, the news background is negative. For example, last week, the international community was discussing the hacker attack on Coinrail, a South Korean crypto exchange, even though this is only the 90th biggest crypto exchange out there. Still this led to the fact that the crypto market cap shrank by as much as $50 billion or 14% in a matter of 24 hours, which is quite a lot. This confirms the idea that international crypto investors are still worried about security and safety of their funds, NordFX reports. Another bad news release of the past week was the news that Western Union, which is a major global money transfer system, had refused to work with digital currencies. This came as a shock to many of those closely watching the situation around the global crypto market. The thing is that back in February, they reported about testing a Ripple-based money transfer system. On the other hand, there was a portion of good news as well. For example, the SEC announced that they dont see cryptocurrency as securities, which means crypto exchanges and their traders and investors wont be suspected of illegal financial transactions. The market has made another step out of the shade. At the same time, Bittrex is now offering new pairs Bitcoin, Tether, and TrueUSD paired with the U.S. Dollar. For now, its available for a selected range of American clients. After the product has proven their consistency, they will become available for everyone. Most of the experts interviewed by PRIME assume that Bitcoin is going to spend this trading week moving up and down within the scope of the $6,1-6,7 range. Market uncertainty is expected to be the key reason for this market behavior. You are free to discuss this article here: forum for traders and investors 16-18 October 2018, Berlin A very useful time, open exchange of ideas and information. Excellent real-world presentations This years agenda assesses new approaches to achieving multi-vendor multi-edition interoperability within the substation whilst identifying new ways to drive deployment of the standard across the wider smart grid. IEC 61850 has reached a tipping point, it is now fully accepted and on the investment agenda of the vast majority of European utilities says Mandana White, Director at Phoenix Forums, organisers of IEC 61850 Global 2018. Whats been interesting this year is to see how fast utilities outside of Europe, particularly in the US and Canada, are starting to embrace it. As a result, this years programme reflects a more global participation, both on the speaker line-up and in the audience. With all global stakeholders convening in one place to review standardisation activity, share implementation experiences, identify new product development opportunities, and create new partnerships, take-up of the standard globally is set to speed up exponentially, creating economies of scale that will lead to more cost-effective deployments across the wider smart grid. The event begins on Tuesday 16th October with a Fundamentals of IEC 61850 workshop led by Christoph Brunner, Convenor of the IEC working group TC 57 WG10. This is an ideal opportunity for all participants to get to grips with the essential building blocks of the standard, update on its revisions and new editions, and to influence the direction of new standardisation activity. The main conference takes place on Wednesday 17th and Thursday 18th October and involves an intensive programme of utility case-studies, new system and tool development panel discussions, a series of end-user focused round table discussions, two live demo labs of the latest tools and technologies, a display of the latest 61850-enabled products and services, and an evening networking reception open to all participants. Discussions will deep dive into actual experiences of implementation issues surrounding specification, design, installation, testing, operation and maintenance. Optimisation of key features such as GOOSE and R-GOOSE will be addressed, as well as integration with other standards such as CIM, and building system resilience through 61850-specific cyber security. New approaches to driving IEC 61850 to the grid edge and enabling effective integration of DER and EVs will be discussed. Updates from ENTSO-E and EDSO will reveal how TSO and DSO interest groups are supporting the development of the standard to support large-scale cost-effective deployment worldwide. IEC 61850 Global 2018 is the only truly end-user driven forum for the 61850 community says Mandana White. It was launched to give voice to the utility community, to enable in-depth and honest discussions that would lead to new solutions and partnerships and ultimately faster deployments globally. We believe these objectives are being well met and we look forward to facilitating discussions and partnerships that will lead to the deployment of the standard across the wider smart grid. A very useful time, open exchange of ideas and information. Excellent real-world presentations. Allan Wales, Distribution Systems Specialist SP Energy Networks Excellent opportunity to network in PACS related subject. Very close to implementation sharing of ideas that can contribute to the improvement of the standard, procedures, tools and equipment. Very useful to be updated with the latest TC57 WG10 developments and to refresh concepts through the workshop. Bruno Miguel Soares, Researcher, Substation of the Future - R&D Nester Perfect event for meeting colleagues in the IEC 61850 world: vendors for IEDs, tools, test-sets, TSOs, DSOs, engineering companies and IEC group members. It was interesting to see and hear what others are working with and where the standard is moving. I hope to be able to participate again. Anders Dahl Johnsen, Protection Engineer Siemens Discussions topics include: IEC 61850 standards update: outlining the updates to Edition 2.1 of IEC 61850-6 to address the challenges of interoperability and make efficient engineering in a multi-vendor, multi edition system a reality Tendering and specification process: developing a new tendering and specification process to address the challenges of ensuring interoperability for multi-edition systems Edition 1 to Edition 2 transition: determining the optimum transition strategy from Edition 1 to Edition 2 depending on your current substation implementations Engineering configuration tools: addressing current tool limitations and developing methodologies for configuring and testing different features of IEC 61850 functionality Maintenance testing: successfully implementing testing tools to ensure effective operation and maintenance in a multi-vendor multi-edition system Cyber security: ensuring cyber security in the implementation of feature rich multi-vendor multi-edition IEC 61850 that include GOOSE, MMS and other messaging GOOSE messaging: IEC 61850 for GOOSE and R-GOOSE for messaging in the LAN and WAN Beyond the substation: integrating IEC 61850 with data management systems and the CIM and extending its application to the control centre IEC 61850 for DER: making the business case for using IEC 61850 as the communication protocol to effectively integrate DER into the power grid Speakers confirmed include: Christoph Brunner, President of it4power & Convenor - IEC TC 57 WG10 Alex Apostolov, Principal Engineer at OMICRON & Editor-in-Chief - PAC World Magazine Roberto Zangrandi, Secretary General - EDSO for Smart Grid Gregory Huon, Head of Engineering Governance at Elia & Group IEC 61850 Convenor - ENTSO-E Peter Rumenapp, Team Leader, Control & Automation Technology Amprion Rannveig Loken, Senior Specialist Control and Protection Statnett Priyanka Mohapatra, Senior Project Manager - SP Energy Networks David MacDonald, System Monitoring Lead Engineer Iberdrola Zigor Ojinaga, Industrialisation Project Leader Iberdrola Nicholas Etherden, Senior R&D Engineer - Vattenfall Distribution Nordic Anders Johnsson, Power System Specialist - Vattenfall Distribution Nordic Ronald Poosen, Team Leader, Distribution Protection and Substation Automation Fluvius Rene Troost, Specialist AM Network Intelligence Stedin Anne van der Molen, Technology Officer Stedin Sander Jansen, Data Architect Alliander Paul Hayes, Smart Networks Engineer - ESB Networks Nikolay Ignatovski, Automation Engineer - Electricity System Operator Bulgaria Mohd Iqbal Ridwan, Principal Researcher, Utility Automation - TNB Research Sdn Bhd Byung Tae Jang, Principal Researcher KEPCO Abhinav Sadu, Research Associate - E.ON Energy Research Centre Charles Newton, President - Newton-Evans Research Company Sebastian Krause, Group Leader Security Audits - GAI NetConsult Gerardo Rebollar, Executive Product Line Leader - GE Energy Leandro Henrique Monaco, Global Product Manager, Electrical Control Systems - ABB Sponsors & Exhibitors confirmed include: Gold Sponsor: OMICRON Silver Sponsors: RTDS Technologies, Triangle MicroWorks, Efacec, Subnet Solutions, COPADATA, Arteche Group Live Demo Lab Sponsors: Klakitech, OMICRON Exhibitors: JPEmbedded, SAE-IT Systems, OPAL-RT Event dates and location: Conference: IEC 61850 Global 2018 Workshop: Fundamentals of IEC 61850 Location: Leonardo Royal Hotel Berlin Alexanderplatz, Germany Event website: http://www.iec61850-global.com For more information, interview and media accreditation: Mandana White, Director, Phoenix Forums Ltd Tel: +44 (0)20 8349 6360 Email: mandana@phoenix-forums.com Phoenix Forums is an independent conference producer specialised in the smart grid sector. We work hand in hand with engineering professionals to create innovative event concepts and high-quality programmes that inform technical decision makers and enable them to deliver exceptional results. Our approach is entirely market led. We stay exceptionally close to industry developments. Through our regular, rigorous and unbiased process of depth research with TSOs, DSOs, power generators, engineering consultancies, and technology innovators, we stay one step ahead of industry developments and provide live events that act as a catalyst for new ideas, new directions, and new approaches to achieving future energy security. Phoenix Forums Ltd Central House 1 Ballards Lane London, N3 1LQ. United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0)20 8349 6360 Email: registration@phoenix-forums.com Datometry Finalist in Microsoft Data Estate Modernization Partner of the Year Award 2018 Being named a Finalist by Microsoft in their global partner ecosystem is a tremendous honor. Datometry today announced it has been named a Finalist in the 2018 Microsoft Data Estate Modernization Partner of the Year Award. The company was honored among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. Datometry virtualization technology makes databases and applications truly inter-operable which means Global 2000 enterprises can replatform to cloud databases in weeks, not years, and without rewriting applications. For enterprises looking to adopt modern cloud data warehouses, Datometry technology makes the conventional approach of rewriting applications unnecessary, protects long-standing investments in mission-critical business logic, and enables enterprises to realize BI savings swiftly. Being named a Finalist by Microsoft in their global partner ecosystem is a tremendous honor. It is strong testament to the value we bring to Microsoft. Datometry solves one of the most pressing problems the industry faces today. says Mike Waas, Founder & CEO of Datometry. Our ecosystem of partners is crucial to delivering transformative solutions, and this years winners have proven to be some of the finest among their peers, said Gavriella Schuster corporate vice president, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft Corp. We are pleased to recognize Datometry for being selected as Finalist of the 2018 Microsoft Data Estate Modernization Partner of the Year Award. Awards were presented in several categories, with winners chosen from a set of more than 2,600 entrants from 115 countries worldwide. The Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards recognize Microsoft partners that have developed and delivered exceptional Microsoft-based solutions during the past year. About Datometry Datometry is empowering global enterprises to gain competitive advantage by up-leveling their data management to become cloud-native quickly and effectively. With the companys suite of SaaS solutions, enterprises can replatform existing data warehouses to the cloud at up to 80% savings of replatforming time, cost, and risk, and without application rewrite. Powered by Datometry Adaptive Data Virtualization technology, the companys SaaS offerings include: Datometry Hyper-Q, the flagship product enabling replatforming of existing applications on any cloud database in real-time; Datometry qInsight, the only product in the market to provide unprecedented insights into data warehouse workloads; and, Datometry qShift automating the generation of optimized destination data warehouse schema. Datometry is headquartered in San Francisco, California Datometry and associated marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Datometry, Inc. BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- China has completed the revision of new negative list for market access of foreign investment and will make it public soon, China Securities Journal reported on Tuesday. Restrictions on energy, resources, infrastructure, transportation, commerce circulation, and professional services will be removed or loosened in the upcoming list, according to the report. The country has already announced measures to further liberalize the finance and automobile sectors. The new negative list will have two sections, one for nationwide implementation and one for pilot free trade zones, it reported. Besides opening-up measures in 2018, the new negative list will unveil further measures for the next few years and there will be a transitional period for some industries. The State Council decided at an executive meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang on May 31 that the negative list on the market access of foreign investors will be revised and released before July 1. China has rolled out an array of measures to significantly broaden market access since the beginning of 2018, a year that marks the 40th anniversary of the country's reform and opening-up policy. Foreign investment in China hit a new high of 877.56 billion yuan (about 136.72 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017, up by 7.9 percent year on year. City of Coopersville Joins the MITN Purchasing Group It will allow us to receive project bids from a wider variety of vendors more efficiently and increase transparency. The City of Coopersville announced its joining of the MITN Purchasing Group which connects nearly 200 existing participating agencies from across Michigan to a large vendor pool for bid distribution and management. BidNets MITN Purchasing Group provides notification to registered vendors of new relevant solicitations, and any addenda and award information from its participating agencies. The City of Coopersville invites all potential vendors to register online with the MITN Purchasing Group to access its upcoming solicitations by visiting https://www.bidnetdirect.com/mitn. The City of Coopersville joined the purchasing group in June. In joining, the City of Coopersville hopes to utilize the system to streamline their purchasing process. The MITN Purchasing Group is a single, online location for managing sourcing information and activities and provides local Michigan government agencies the tools needed to minimize costs and time delays associated with their procurement process. The City of Coopersville was distributing bids and managing their procurement process manually before joining the system. In joining, the City of Coopersville looks to save time, reach out to more vendors automatically and achieve cost savings over the traditional paper-based bid process. The City of Coopersville has access to the MITN Purchasing Groups vendor pool which will enhance competition without increasing distribution costs. In addition to the existing vendors on the MITN Purchasing Group, all vendors looking to do business with the City of Coopersville can register online at https://www.bidnetdirect.com/mitn. The City of Coopersville invites all current vendors not already registered on the purchasing group to do so today. Coopersvilles Assistant City Manager, Jonathan Seyferth, said Coopersville is excited to be joining this network. It will allow us to receive project bids from a wider variety of vendors more efficiently and increase transparency. Its another tool to ensure the city is wisely using tax dollars. Registered vendors can access all open bids, related documents and files, and additional addendum and award information. In addition, the MITN Purchasing Group offers a value-added service to notify vendors of new bids targeted to their industry, all addenda and advance notification of expiring term contracts. A robust NIGP code category list allows vendors registering to find the correct codes in order to receive matched bid information. Vendors may register on the MITN Purchasing Group by visiting https://www.bidnetdirect.com/mitn. BidNets vendor support team is available to answer any questions regarding the registration process or the bid system at 800-835-4603 option 2. Other local Michigan government agencies looking to switch from a manual bid process, please contact the MITN Purchasing Group for a demonstration of the no-cost sourcing solution. About the MITN Purchasing Group: The MITN 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 Through this strategic partnership, Fort Hays virtual and physical stores will collaborate to share connection points such as cross promotion and general support to optimize and enhance the user experience for students, faculty and administrators - John Squires, CEO, Akademos Fort Hays State University (FHSU) has announced a partnership with Akademos, to provide a full-service, virtual course materials store and indiCo, to provide the institution with a best-in-class on campus store for all general merchandise such as FHSU clothing and gifts, school supplies, tech accessories and more. The hybrid partnership will dramatically lower textbook prices and provide an innovative and customized retail environment on campus. With over 15,000 students and certificate and degree programs at the associate, bachelors and masters level, Fort Hays State attracts goal-oriented students who want premier learning opportunities inside and outside of the classroom. The institution, located in Kansas, will launch its new bookstore model for Fall Term 2018. Via Akademos, a wide selection of course material format options, including new, used, rental, marketplace and eBooks, will provide students with access to over 100 million unique titles at deeply discounted prices. Additionally, students will have the freedom to use financial aid on all textbook purchases, including marketplace items, which offer savings on average of 60% off publisher list prices. Seamless integration between the Universitys 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 five minutes. Using a unique collaborative approach, indiCo, a subsidiary of the National Association of College Stores, will manage all general merchandise for the Tiger Spirit Shop, the Universitys on-campus store and its online ecommerce site. Fort Hays State will benefit from the companys expertise in retail management, product and apparel sourcing, store design, merchandising, and staffing as well as the organizations customized approach that will emphasize the culture and brand of the university. Were so pleased to be partnering with Akademos and indiCo to launch such an innovative bookstore solution, said Vice President for Student Affairs, Dr. Joey Linn. This decision contributes to our overall strategy to provide our students with all of the tools they need to succeed, by expanding our offering of course material formats, lowering the costs associated with them, and providing our students with general merchandise and fan shop items that contribute to a complete and successful college experience. Akademos virtual course materials store will support the Universitys 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. Real-time reporting and analytics will also enable faculty, academic leadership and administration to track critical bookstore utilization data (in aggregate for the entire institution and down to the individual class level) that can be easily merged with the institutions student success database. Through this strategic partnership, Fort Hays States virtual and physical stores will collaborate to share connection points such as cross promotion and general support to optimize and enhance the user experience for students, faculty and administrators, said John Squires, CEO, Akademos. Were pleased to help Fort Hays State University address textbook affordability, service and selection through an innovative new hybrid model. Every campus store is different, which is why we take a customized approach, said Ed Schlichenmayer, president of indiCo. Our team will partner with the store and the administration to ensure that the Tiger Spirit Shop reflects the campus culture and meets the needs of its students, faculty, alumni, and campus community. ___________________________________________________________________________________ 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 indiCo indiCo is a collaborative business model for operating campus stores that lowers the cost of higher education and improves student success. We offer campus administrators and store directors an alternative to leasing or self-operating their campus bookstores. indiCo combines the efficiency, buying power, and guidance promised by corporate lease operators with the flexibility and brand autonomy of an institutionally operated university store. Backed by its parent company, The National Association of College Stores (NACS), indiCo is a trusted partner with deep knowledge of campus stores and an established network of the industrys leading vendors. This is a prime commercial development lot because it is on one of the busiest roundabouts on the Leeward Highway. There couldnt be a better area in Turks and Caicos for a commercial development. RE/MAX Real Estate Group Turks & Caicos Islands is pleased to announce that another one of its property listings, a .58 acre commercial development lot on Leeward Highway, is being featured on Viviun.com, an international real estate website. The asking price for this property is USD $295,000. This is a prime commercial development lot because it is on one of the busiest roundabouts on the Leeward Highway, says Blair MacPherson, broker and co-owner of RE/MAX Real Estate Group Turks & Caicos and a member of the Turks and Caicos Real Estate Association (TCREA). Its location is on the well-known Susy Turn entry to the Turtle Cove Marina and the beginning of the famous Lower Bight Road in Grace Bay. There couldnt be a better area in Turks and Caicos for a commercial development. For further information about this lot, please visit https://www.remax-realestategroup-tci.com/contact-us/. To schedule a time to see the property, contact MacPherson by phone at 1-800-941-0465 or 1-649-432-5677, or by email at blair(at)blairmacpherson.com. About RE/MAX Real Estate Group Turks & Caicos Islands: The RE/MAX Real Estate Group Turks & Caicos offers unique, luxury real estate opportunities on the islands that are home to Grace Bay Beach, which has been named one of the world's best beaches numerous times. With breathtaking views, world-class spas and resorts, fine dining, local culture, and the awe-inspiring coral reefs, the Turks and Caicos Islands offer unique investment opportunities in that they are located in a tax-free jurisdiction. For more information, please visit http://www.remax-realestategroup-tci.com. To win the award, Pacific Office Automation sold more Pitney Bowes equipment and software solutions than any other dealer in the country. Earlier this year, Pacific Office Automation was named Dealer of the Year at the 2018 Pitney Bowes Dealer Kick Off Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. Pitney Bowes, a leading shipping and mailing solutions provider recognized a few other dealers for excellence in sales before presenting the main award of the event. To win the award, Pacific Office Automation sold more Pitney Bowes equipment and software solutions than any other dealer in the country. Scott Brenton, Director of Mailing Services at POA, traveled to San Antonio to accept the honor on behalf of the companys team of field sales managers and sales professionals. Brenton, an office equipment expert, has specialized in mailing for 9 of his 16 years in the industry. He also lends his time as the Co-Chair of the Greater Portland Postal Customer Council, an organization led by volunteers of industry and postal leaders to drive and promote postal education. While the mailing equipment marketplace continues to grow and evolve, Brenton looks forward to continued success in pairing Pitney Bowes leading products with POAs innovative office solutions. We are taking one of the most well-known mailing equipment manufacturers and pairing it with our best-in-class field service and customer support, he said. That cant be matched. Pacific Office Automation President Doug Pitassi sees great value in the partnership as well. We see great opportunity in the shipping & mailing business, he said. Were excited about our partnership with Pitney Bowes and the great solutions it brings to our customers. Pacific Office Automation continues to refine its workflow solutions through robust shipping and mailing services. Each of its locations on the West Coast can proudly say, Problem Solved every time another customer walks away with new office equipment. About Pacific Office Automation Pacific Office Automation (https://www.pacificoffice.com) is a leader in managed printing solutions and document management software. Since 1976, POA has grown to become the industrys largest independent dealership with 24 locations throughout Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho and Colorado. The company is also one of the largest independent distributors, carrying brands such as Sharp, Konica Minolta, Ricoh, Lexmark, Xerox, Muratec, Canon and HP copiers, printers, faxes and multifunctional devices. POA believes in providing custom print solutions that are fast, efficient and secure so customers can confidently say, Problem Solved. We are humbled our team has been recognized as a Top Company to Work for in Arizona, stated Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Managing Partner. AZCentral.com and Republic Media (The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com) announced today that AZPerio has earned a spot on the list of 2018 azcentral.com Top Companies to Work for in Arizona for the fourth time. AZPerio was ranked ninth of mid-size companies and achieved the #1 ranking for all healthcare organizations. This highly selective list is the result of anonymous and comprehensive employee surveys measuring culture, work environment, leadership, and employee pride and satisfaction, combined with rigorous evaluations of workplace practices, policies, perks and demographics. We are humbled our team has been recognized as a Top Company to Work for in Arizona, stated Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Managing Partner. Added Jeff Mazzarella, CEO, We strive to create a supportive, caring environment to create raving fans among our team members to help us attract and retain the very best talent. If we continually work to improve in this area of our strategic plan, we are confident our team members will take excellent care of our clients in support of our patient care objectives. The 100 Top Companies" were honored at an awards breakfast reception on June 7, 2018, at the Scottsdale Fairmont Princess and published in a special supplement in the June 10, 2018 issue of The Arizona Republic, as well as online at topcompanies.azcentral.com and http://www.BestCompaniesAZ.com. About AZPerio: The specialists of AZPerio are specialty-trained and board-certified in periodontics. They and their team members are dedicated to improving the quality of life of each of their patients through the compassionate treatment of a variety of complex dental conditions. Offering a comprehensive spectrum of therapeutic and minimally invasive options, AZPerio is one of the nations premier providers of periodontal services; a practice nationally-recognized for its commitment to the highest standards of patient care, serving patients and their referring practices throughout the greater Phoenix metropolitan area for more than 30 years. For more information, please visit http://www.AZPerio.com ActX is one of the few laboratories to receive zero deficiencies on initial CAP inspection. Our team was very diligent in meeting CAP standards The Accreditation Committee of the College of American Pathologists (CAP) has awarded accreditation to ActX of Seattle, Washington based on results of a recent on-site inspection as part of the CAPs Accreditation Programs. The facilitys director, Charles Sailey, MD, was advised of this national recognition and congratulated for the excellence of the services being provided. ActX is one of more than 8,000 CAP-accredited facilities worldwide. ActX is one of the few laboratories to receive zero deficiencies on initial CAP inspection. Our team was very diligent in meeting CAP standards." said Charles Sailey, MD, Laboratory Director. CAP is the largest laboratory quality assurance association in the world. The CAP Quality Assurance Program is the most respected and recognized laboratory accreditation program in the world and is often referred to as the Gold Standard. Andrew Ury, MD, CEO of ActX, said: We are proud to have earned Laboratory accreditation from the College of American Pathologists. Our CAP policies ensure our laboratory is operating according to the highest standards, to the benefit of the patients and physicians that we serve." The U.S. federal government recognizes the CAP Laboratory Accreditation Program, begun in the early 1960s, as being equal-to or more-stringent-than the governments own inspection program. During the CAP accreditation process, designed to ensure the highest standard of care for all laboratory patients, inspectors examine the laboratorys records and quality control of procedures for the preceding two years. CAP inspectors also examine laboratory staff qualifications, equipment, facilities, safety program and record, and overall management. About the College of American Pathologists As the worlds largest organization of board-certified pathologists and leading provider of laboratory accreditation and proficiency testing programs, the College of American Pathologists (CAP) serves patients, pathologists, and the public by fostering and advocating excellence in the practice of pathology and laboratory medicine worldwide. For more information, read the CAP Annual Report at http://www.cap.org. About ActX ActX helps physicians make better decisions about medical treatment, using patients genetic information. Integrated into the physicians software tools and workflow, ActX analyzes the patients genetic information in real time and alerts physicians about drug-genome interactions, actionable hereditary risks and carrier status. For more information, visit http://www.actx.com, email info@actx.com or call (888) 998-2289. Contact Information: Joe Sichel Marketing Specialist ActX joe.sichel@actx.com 888-998-2289 Prevailion helps public and private entities to proactively anticipate and defend against cyberattacks and other external risks Prevailion's technology brings intelligence agency capabilities to detecting breaches, using unique sensors that sit outside of an organizations network, said Dave DeWalt, former CEO of McAfee and FireEye, Managing Director of Allegis Cyber, and Partner at DataTribe Prevailion, the predictive platform for advanced cyberdefense and third-party risk, today announced that it has closed a $1.7 million round of seed funding led by DataTribe, the countrys leading startup-studio for cybersecurity and data science startups. Prevailion will use the funds to accelerate product and business development for its compromise detection sensor technology, which helps public and private entities to proactively anticipate and defend against cyberattacks, and minimize third-party risks. Prevailion will fundamentally change the way that organizations large and small approach cybersecurity and evaluate business risk, said Karim Hijazi, Founder and CEO, Prevailion. Instead of racing to apply stop-gap measures in reaction to nation-state attacks and other instances of data exfiltration, we are utilizing machine learning to proactively analyze relationships and examine whats happening around the periphery. Our platform delivers unparalleled compromise detection, proactive defense, and actionable attribution to help minimize risk and address potential issues before they arise. Prevailion offers a unique, first-of-its kind technology that can detect compromised data within an organization and its supply chain without touching the organizations network. It can also determine who was responsible for the compromise, and show when and how it took place. In addition, Prevailion can also accurately predict when a compromised organization will experience an information breach, and suggest how to defend against it. Prevailion is the recipient of DataTribes 2018 Inaugural DataTribe Challenge competition announced in March 2018. We immediately recognized that Prevailions technology represented a very unique and innovative approach to addressing the growing problem of data exfiltration - answering the essential questions of Who, What, How and Where to - of a data breach, especially in situations where third party contractors and vendors are involved, said Bob Ackerman, Founder and Managing Director, AllegisCyber. Karim Hijazi, a successful two-time CEO, has assembled a team comprised of top-tier NSA offensive talent and experienced cyber industry executives; giving Prevailion a unique set of skills to deliver a platform that addresses the markets unmet needs. Prior to founding Prevailion in 2017, Hijazi founded Quantomic, a software development and marketing insights firm that helps brands and other organizations with decision support through the creation of high fidelity intelligence, and Unveillance, the first cloud-based data leak intelligence cybersecurity firm that was acquired by Mandiant (FireEye) in 2012. Karim is also a highly regarded expert resource for cybersecurity media outlets, and Unveillances well-documented battle with Anonymous was profiled in Parmy Olsons book, We are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LuzSec. Before devoting his work fulltime to defense and intelligence product development, Karim served as Founder and CEO at Demiurge Consulting, a counterintelligence and countermeasure consultancy whose clients and collaborations included Coca-Cola, McKesson, MIT, Berkeley and Stanford Universities. Prevailion has developed a new technology breakthrough that brings intelligence agency capabilities to detecting breaches, using unique sensors that sit outside of an organizations network, said Dave DeWalt, former CEO of McAfee and Fireye, Managing Director of Allegis Cyber, and Partner at DataTribe. The predictive nature of this technology has massive implications that go beyond cybersecurity, as it touches financial, supply chain and 3rd party risk information for boards and management teams. Its exciting to see big leaps in technology like this. Prevailions technology is a completely new category of security and business intelligence, unlike anything in the known cyber security universe, said Mike Janke, Co-founder of DataTribe. It is the stuff of novels and movies to have the technical ability to see a compromise before it even gets to your organization. This technology is three generations ahead of anything that today addresses the challenge that exist around data exfiltration and sinkholes. Were excited about Prevailions unique technology, and believe that the companys blend of intelligence agency engineers with an experienced management team will help take it to the next level. For more information about Prevailion, please visit http://prevailion.com/. About Prevailion Headquartered in Fulton, MD, Prevailion offers a proactive platform for advanced cyberdefense and third-party risk management. The companys compromise detection sensor technology helps public and private entities to proactively anticipate and defend against cyberattacks and minimize third-party risks. Prevailions platform delivers unparalleled compromise detection, proactive defense, and actionable attribution to help minimize risk and address potential issues before they arise. With an experienced management team and advisors including industry leaders from Dragos, Mindbridge ai and AllegisCyber, Prevailion is changing the way organizations large and small approach cybersecurity and evaluate business risk. For more information, please visit: http://prevailion.com/. About DataTribe DataTribe is a cybersecurity and data science startup studio that invests and co-builds next generational commercial software. The firm draws upon experienced technology and entrepreneurial teams from the world's most prestigious, high-stakes environments, including the international intelligence community and National Labs from U.S, Canada, UK and Australia. DataTribe is headquartered in Fulton, MD with offices in San Francisco, CA. For more information, please visit: https://datatribe.com/ Author J. Lamar Hatchett examines why people divide themselves into racial categories, shining a new light of understanding on how people view race today in his new social book, The Black Deception: As We Are Many Wonderful Shades of Brown, Why Do We Paint Ourselves with a Black Face? (published by LifeRich Publishing). The book is available for purchase at: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Deception-Wonderful-Shades-Ourselves-ebook/dp/B07D94JWLN. Described as a healing manual for Americas great racial divide, the book offers a look into the origins and history of racism and the trouble that it causes. It also supplies practical steps to ending racism that any enlightened human being can take. Hatchett argues that there should not be any racial categories because they were invented by evil men, for evil purposes. Race is a vial of poison spilled into the well of life that all humanity drinks from. This book is the antidote, Hatchett explains. All readers should understand what race is (an evil misconception) and they should also learn how to keep it from infecting their lives, and the lives of their children. The Black Deception By J. Lamar Hatchett Softcover | 6 x 9 in | 66 pages | ISBN 9781489717054 E-Book | 66 pages | ISBN 9781489717061 Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble About the Author J. Lamar Hatchett is a speaker and mentor. Throughout his career spanning more than three decades, he has counseled and mentored men, women, boys and girls from all backgrounds. Hatchett, a lifelong student of human behavior, examines who we are and the ways we are categorized and characterized in The Black Deception. He currently lives in Destrahan, Louisiana, with his wife Crystal. LifeRich Publishing, the strategic publishing partnership of Readers Digest and Author Solutions, LLC, was created to provide all writers a platform for sharing their stories, recipes, advice and more. LifeRich authors will benefit from a wealth of editorial design, marketing and education resources, specially created by Readers Digest editors for the enrichment of these LifeSmart individuals. Books can be published in print, ebook or audio formats, with additional distribution to up to 25 million Readers Digest customers through its online properties. Follow @LifeRichPub on Twitter or Like us at facebook.com/LifeRichPublishing for the latest updates. TravelPirates The new app showcases a feed with the latest travel deals curated in real time by the companys team of internationally renowned deal hunters. Eight nights in Bali from $573 with flights and a hotel. Round-trip flights from the U.S. to Chile for $171. These are just a few of the deals you could find when you download a new free app from TravelPirates, the Boston-based travel portal powered by a team of expert deal hunters who work day and night to hunt down the best value-for-money travel offers. In a market cluttered with travel planning apps, TravelPirates stands out by using a combination of smart travel search technology and the human touch to provide users with unbeatable low prices for destinations previously considered unreachable on a budget from luxurious tropical getaways to quick domestic city trips and trendy experiences like glamping, treehouse hotels and affordable private islands. The new app, available on iOS and Android, showcases a feed with the latest travel deals curated in real time by the companys team of internationally renowned deal hunters. The apps sleek user interface and intuitive easy-to-navigate platform allow users to customize the deals displayed according to their own travel preferences, with features such as: filters allowing users to sort by departure location, destination, and travel period push notifications delivering tailored deals straight to a mobile device as soon as a relevant offer becomes available. Users can find a video demonstrating the app on YouTube. In addition to curated deals, the apps Booking page features transparent flight and hotel price comparisons as well as a vacation booking engine, which allows users to secure deeply-discounted rates when booking a hotel bundled with a flight. Since the company launched in the U.S. in 2016, TravelPirates has made a name for itself by finding deals users could not find themselves, including error fares pricing mistakes airlines and hotels make by accident. As the travel industry moves away from physical travel agencies to a predominantly online presence, TravelPirates is leading the way with its innovative approach. About TravelPirates TravelPirates is a free-to-use travel search platform and app powered by a team of expert deal hunters who provide users with the best value-for-money deals on flights, hotels, vacation packages and more. The company is based in Boston, Massachusetts and was founded in 2016 as the U.S. division of HolidayPirates Group, one of Europes fastest-growing travel companies and the biggest online travel community in the world. This New Construction Pilot expands C-PACE into an untapped market in the state by offering innovative financing to developers who can more affordably build to higher energy standards. The Connecticut Green Bank is proud to announce a pilot program that will make Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) financing available for new construction in Connecticut. The C-PACE New Construction Pilot will provide property developers and owners with long-term, affordable and non-recourse financing to help them design and construct buildings that achieve a higher level of energy performance and reduced operating costs. C-PACE New Construction can fill gaps in the capital stack needed for a new construction project, lower the overall cost of financing, or both. New commercial and industrial buildings designed and built to exceed what is required by Connecticut building and energy codes will be eligible to receive C-PACE financing for a portion of their overall eligible construction cost. C-PACE New Construction can be applied for a wide range of property types, including major redevelopment of existing and historic sites. Connecticuts C-PACE program has already been very successful, providing more than 200 projects with $114 million in financing, said David Gabrielson, Executive Director of PACENation, an industry group promoting Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing, This New Construction Pilot expands C-PACE into an untapped market in the state by offering innovative financing to developers who can more affordably build to higher energy standards. When applying for C-PACE financing in the C-PACE New Construction Pilot, applicants will use whole building energy modeling to demonstrate that their projects energy performance will exceed a code-compliant baseline. An eligible finance amount will be determined based on the performance beyond the baseline up to a maximum 20 percent of the total eligible construction cost. C-PACE for new construction opens many new opportunities in Connecticut, said Mackey Dykes, Vice President of Commercial, Industrial, and Institutional Programs at the Green Bank. By expanding the reach of C-PACE beyond building retrofits, C-PACE New Construction provides another financing option for developers. Other lenders view C-PACE more like equity than debt, which can help developers with overall project financing. New buildings in Connecticut will serve our residents for 50 years or more, and we want to help get them right from the start. Financing through the C-PACE New Construction Pilot will be able to include costs directly related to the buildings design and construction, for example: Engineering and design expenses; Energy modeling expenses; Building core and shell; Energy consuming equipment and energy saving measures (HVAC, lighting, elevators, controls, windows, green or cool roofs, meters, etc.); and Clean energy generation. Applicants seeking funding through the C-PACE New Construction Pilot should discuss and review their projects with the Green Bank before submitting a financing application. This engagement ahead of application submission will help ensure that projects meet the requirements of the C-PACE New Construction Pilot. Connecticut Green Bank will be hosting a launch event for the C-PACE New Construction Pilot on Wednesday, June 20 from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM at the Energize CT Center, 122 Universal Drive N, North Haven, CT. For more information and to register to attend the event, please visit ctgreenbank.com/event/c-pace-new-construction-launch-event/ Learn more about the Pilot at http://www.cpace.com/newconstruction. US President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he is ordering the creation of a sixth branch of the US military: Space Force. According to Space Policy Directive-3, the United States wants to ensure unfettered access to the space domain. Given the significance of space activities, the United States considers the continued unfettered access to and freedom to operate in space of vital interest to advance the security, economic prosperity, and scientific knowledge of the Nation, the directive read. But US President Donald Trump made it clear in his remarks that the goal of the space force is to make sure that the United States dominates the space domain. When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, Trump said on Monday. We must have American dominance in space. Trump also said that the United States cannot let either China or Russia lead in space. We dont want China and Russia and other countries leading us, Trump added. Were going to be the leader by far. Naturally, the proposal to create a space force was met with laughs on social media. Twitter users had a field day with the news, with some comparing the proposal to sci-fi favorites such as Star Wars. Cobra Commander, the archenemy of G.I. Joe in the animated television series of the same name from the mid-1980s about a fearless American hero and an evil organization bent on world domination, announced on Twitter that the Cobras are ready for the new space force. The Space Force will make the Galaxy Great Again! One user teased, referring to Trumps Make America Great Again slogan. But American domination in space is far from guaranteed, at least according to one user who could only think about the movie Spaceballs, a 1987 comedy film created in the style of the original Star Wars trilogy. If this is the future of the space force, the American dream of domination is doomed. Although there are many hurdles to overcome before the new space force becomes reality, at least one major issue has already been solved. One Twitter user has posted an exclusive first look at the new space force uniforms. All jokes aside, there are a lot of issues with the proposal to create a space force. For example, US lawmakers will need to approve the new force and the US government will need to figure out how to pay for it. A lot of structural and financial barriers must be overcome in order to create a sixth branch of the US military; and for now, at least, it is unlikely that the proposal will ever become reality. However, it does shed light on US intentions: dominate all domains. The proposal to create the worlds first space force is troubling for many reasons. Establishing a space force will increase competition between major countries, upset the military balance, and weaken the security of other countries. In short, the US move to militarize space is not conducive to lasting peace and security. The proposal shows that the United States is hell-bent on trying to dominate all domains, despite the fact that the United States is one of 105 parties to sign an international treaty banning the militarization of space. Humor can be found in Trumps proposal to create a space force. But the goal to have American dominance in space is a threat to world peace. As a powerful country with a tremendous amount of resources, the current US administration should do more to enhance cooperation in all domains rather than increase the likelihood of a conflict between the great powers. CiCompass v2.0 streamlines High School College Advising with free tools for counselors to more easily guide and monitor students on their path to college Ci is a platform that can improve outcomes across the board. For students, parents, and our school counselors, this is the wave of the future in managing the college search and selection process. College Interactive, the next generation mobile college search and student recruitment platform, announced it has released CiCompass v2.0. The CiCompass platform provides free college advising tools for high school counselors to enable them to more easily guide and monitor their students progress on the college prep and selection process. Serving a community of over 4,000 students, Brockton High School, in Brockton Massachusetts, is an early adopter of the platform. Catherine Leger, Brockton High Schools Director of Guidance, praised College Interactive as, A platform that can improve outcomes across the board. For students, parents, and our school counselors, this is the wave of the future in managing the college search and selection process. The CiCompass platform is available to high schools free of charge to help school counselors oversee and manage their students path to College. It reduces counselor workload and improves student outcomes with an easy-to-use, web-accessible dashboard that allows them to track student goals, progress and accomplishments. CiCompass provides direct communication and visibility for each counselor on student progress throughout their entire college prep and selection journey. Combined with a free mobile college search app for students, CiCompass provides tools for high schools to modernize and streamline the college advising process. The v2.0 release of the CiCompass platform includes the following new features for ease of implementation and improved student monitoring: Enables High Schools to upload student lists to the Ci platform and deploy an automated welcome letter to speed the student adoption process. Includes templates for school profiles and student checklists to make the set-up process faster and easier. Includes an in-app chat capability for counselors to communicate with students one-to-one, by groups or by Class. Provides the ability to create custom mobile checklists for students, reporting the completion status back to counselors so they can track progress against goals. Gives counselors access to self-contributed student profiles to help students optimize their visibility to colleges Sends automated reminders through the mobile app to help students keep on track with their goals and tasks. Todays high school counselors manage an overwhelming number of students, making it difficult to deliver the same quality of guidance to all. CiCompass provides the tools high schools need to modernize and streamline the college counseling process and empower students for free, said Rob Feldman, CEO, College Interactive. The overall Ci mission is to broaden the universe of colleges and candidates that both students and admissions teams have access to with bi-directional visibility and communication for more successful outcomes, said Feldman. About College Interactive College Interactive (Ci) revolutionizes the college selection and enrollment process by connecting applicants with colleges through mobile technology. Cis innovative mobile App enables higher education institutions to market, recruit and enroll applicants from a community of over a million college bound students from all over the world who use the App to navigate the college choice process. For colleges, universities and learning enrichment providers, the Ci mobile recruitment platform provides a new and effective way to directly connect, engage, and interact with todays mobile-focused applicants. For more information visit http://www.collegeinteractive.com or follow @CiMobileApp. Buying a home care franchise is a chance to establish a foothold in a rapidly growing industry while serving a genuine need for your local community, said Larry Kraska, Interim HealthCare Inc. CEO and President. With more than 10,000 baby boomers across the country turning 65 every day, a home care franchise may be the right opportunity for entrepreneurs looking for not only a smart investment, but one that directly gives back to local communities. Nearly 90 percent of people over 65 want to stay at home if they can, according to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures and the AARP Public Policy Institute. The influx of senior citizens seeking in-home care and care management, with dignity, is rapidly rising and there are no signs of slowing down. Buying a home care franchise is a chance to establish a foothold in a rapidly growing industry while serving a genuine need for your local community, said Larry Kraska, Interim HealthCare Inc. CEO and President. The preference to age in place, compounded by the fact that people are now living longer than ever before, will undeniably increase the demand for dependable, high-quality home care services. According to Interim HealthCare, here are the top five reasons to consider purchasing a home care franchise: 1. A silver tsunami is coming. By the year 2030, one-fifth of the population will be 65 or older. Surveys clearly indicate that most people close to 90 percent want to age in place, at home, so the demand for home health will only rise along with the number of seniors. 2. Home health spending is growing. Home health is the fastest-growing segment of the healthcare industry, says Tom Threlkeld, deputy director for policy and communications at the National Association for Homecare & Hospice. According to Threlkeld, growth will be driven by a 7.8 percent average increase in Medicare spending from 2020 through 2025. 3. Its a low investment that can yield high returns. Home care franchises offer a low cost of entry barrier compared with many other types of franchises. A home care franchise can be established with an initial investment as low as the $100,000s, potentially generate more than $1 million in annual revenue and many show positive five-year growth rates. 4. The industry is made up of dedicated, caring professionals. The people who commit to serving home care clients are special. They want to contribute to the health of their communities, go the extra mile for their clients and often become like family members to those they take care of. 5. A business support team is already in place. When an entrepreneur purchases a franchise, he or she is not in it alone as an unknown entity, but rather, buying into a trusted brand name. Franchises come with marketing, advertising, training and operational support in place. For more information on Interim HealthCare Inc.s home care and hospice franchise opportunities, visit: https://www.interimfranchising.com. About Interim HealthCare Inc. Interim HealthCare Inc., founded in 1966, is a leading national franchisor of home care, hospice and healthcare staffing. It is part of Caring Brands International which also includes UK-based Bluebird Care and Australia-based Just Better Care, both well-known franchise brands in their countries. With more than 530 franchise locations in seven countries Caring Brands International is a global health care leader. Interim HealthCare in the United States is unique in combining the commitment of local ownership with the support of a national organization that develops innovative programs and quality standards that improve the delivery of service. Franchisees employ nurses, therapists, aides, companions and other healthcare professionals who provide 25 million hours of home care service to 190,000 people each year, meeting a variety of home health, senior care, hospice, palliative care, pediatric care and healthcare staffing needs. For more information or to locate an Interim HealthCare office, visit http://www.interimhealthcare.com. 2018 Snow Industry Benchmark Report Weve designed the Benchmark Report to help businesses grow and improve. HindSite Software, a leading provider of field service software to the snow industry, today released their Snow Industry Benchmark Report, which found that the typical snow business experienced more snow events in the 2017-18 snow season and, as a result, snow revenue increased. Profits were also strong, with more than 20% of respondents experiencing margins in excess of 40% in the past snow season. Not surprisingly, those who leverage more event-based and time and material billing experienced relatively higher profit margins. The Snow Industry Benchmark Report details the results of a two-month-long surveying effort that reflects the opinions of nearly 175 snow industry business owners and managers who provide services including snow plowing, snow shoveling, deicing and snow hauling. This is the fourth year HindSite Software has released a Snow Industry Benchmark Report. The Snow Industry Benchmark Report is the only report of its kind, explained HindSites Marketing Manager, Chad Reinholz. The typical snow industry business owner is on an island. He doesnt communicate much with other snow business owners. With 40 pages of results and analysis and more than 50 graphs, the Snow Industry Benchmark Report helps snow industry businesses understand how their peers are operating. Among the key findings: Just 10% of respondents saw their snow revenue decline. Sales and marketing was cited most frequently, by 19% of respondents, as the area of their business most in need of improvement. 52% of respondents bill their customers within 2 days of a snow event. Contract diversity is the key to maintaining revenue given the unpredictability of snow, which is why 60% of respondents use event-based pricing, and 50% use seasonal pricing. Leveraging subcontractors is a way to meet customer commitments and limit liability, so its not surprising that more than half of respondents of between 6 and 20 employees use subs, and more than 75% of those with more than 20 employees use them. Shockingly, just 40% of snow businesses say they use their website to generate leads, though nearly as many - about 30% - use social media. 51% of respondents didnt attend any educational events in the past year, though 30% attended two or more. SIMA is the most popular snow association with 25% of respondents reporting that they are members. GPS tracking devices are more popular among snow businesses than field service software, though those that do use software cite efficiency as the #1 benefit. In addition to data about the practices and results for a typical snow business, the report includes advice from experienced snow contractors and an extended interview with a snow removal business owner, explains Reinholz. Weve designed the Benchmark Report to help businesses grow and improve. The Snow Industry Benchmark Report is available to download free at http://info.hindsitesoftware.com/2018-snow-industry-benchmark-report. About HindSite Software HindSite Software has helped snow industry contractors better manage and grow their businesses with field service management software since 2001. HindSite today sells two software solutions. The HindSite Solution is designed for field service businesses while FieldCentral is lawn maintenance software. Both solutions help businesses market, sell, schedule, route, manage their field employees and invoice. To learn more, visit http://www.hindsitesoftware.com. Dermatology Associates of Atlanta For over 40 years, Dermatology Associates of Atlanta has earned a reputation as one of the most advanced and innovative dermatology practices in Georgia. In 2018, theyre thrilled to continue this endeavor by adding three new innovations in skin care technology: LaseMD facial rejuvenation, EMSculpt nonsurgical fat reduction and muscle toning, and new Vbeam lasers for vein and redness reduction. LaseMD Facial Rejuvenation Laser treatments have become a popular way to reduce signs of aging, and LaseMD facial rejuvenation is among the newest innovations in this category. As a non-ablative laser (which offers significantly less recovery time), LaseMD treats age spots, sun damage, fine lines, and wrinkles. As effective as the treatment is for the face, neck, and decolletage, it also boasts minimal recovery time and convenient treatments that take just 5-20 minutes. To help their patients learn about the new procedure, Dermatology Associates of Atlanta (DAA) is also hosting a Lunch & Learn on July 11th, 2018 from 12pm 2pm. Interested patients can RSVP to 404-256-4457. EMSculpt Nonsurgical Fat Reduction and Muscle Toning Nonsurgical fat reduction has been booming over the past few years, but EMSculpt is truly unique because its the first fat reduction treatment to also tone muscle. As Dermatology Associates of Atlanta founder Dr. Edmond Griffin explains, We already offer several methods of nonsurgical fat reduction, but EMSculpt muscle toning and fat reduction is a game-changer because it actually builds muscle in the area too. In other words, you can reduce belly fat and build your abs at the same time. The technology is expected to be released in late summer, but DAA already has a waiting list so interested patients should call to schedule a consultation. New Vbeam Lasers for Vein and Redness Reduction For aging patients as well as their younger counterparts, facial veins and persistent facial redness are common cosmetic concerns. Vbeam lasers have been used at DAA and other practices for years and are specifically designed to target and break down unwanted vessels, giving patients a smoother complexion. I use Vbeam lasers to reduce skin redness in many of my patients with rosacea, but it also does a great job for patients who dont have rosacea and who just want to get rid of some excessive redness or facial spider veins, says board-certified dermatologist and partner at DAA Dr. D. Scott Karempelis. While DAA has long been offering this treatment, this summer theyre stepping up with two of the newest, more advanced models of the laser, called the Vbeam Prima. The treatments above are just a few of DAAs most recent additions, along with NeoStrata ProSystem Retinol Chemical Peel, Omni growth factors, and Biopelle skin care products. Staying on the cutting edge of skin care allows DAA to maintain their reputation as one of the best and most awarded dermatology practices in the entire metro Atlanta area. To learn more about these and the dozens of other procedures offered at Dermatology Associates of Atlanta, patients can visit dermatlanta.com or call 404-256-4457 with their questions. ABOUT DERMATOLOGY ASSOCIATES OF ATLANTA Dermatology Associates of Atlanta (DAA) is an all-encompassing dermatological practice founded in 1978 by Dr. Edmond I. Griffin. Joined by partners Drs. D. Scott Karempelis, Joseph R. Payne, and Ashley R. Curtis, and an exceptional team of providers, the practice continues to serve the Atlanta, Georgia area for over 40 years. The medical providers at Dermatology Associates of Atlanta have over 150 years of combined experience in their fields. In addition to providing general and cosmetic dermatology services and Mohs surgery for skin cancer removal, Dermatology Associates of Atlanta has ten in-house specialty centers, including our on-site Surgical Suite, The Laser Institute of Georgia, Skin Medics Medical Spa, The Psoriasis Treatment Center, The Griffin Center of Hair Restoration & Research, The Eczema Center, and more. Dr. Gene Migliaccio I am excited to join the Team at Lakeview Health to provide help, hope, and healing to individuals who are suffering from substance abuse disorders, said Dr. Migliaccio. Lakeview Health, a nationally recognized addiction treatment facility, announced the addition of Gene Migliaccio, Dr.P.H., as Senior Vice President of Government Services effective June 18, 2018. We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Gene Migliaccio to Lakeview Health, said Bob Bunker, Lakeview Healths president and CEO. His experience and passion for helping others perfectly fits into our companys mission and focus on public health. We look forward to a bright future with Gene. In his new role at Lakeview Health, Dr. Migliaccio, who is board-certified in health care management, will be responsible for a mixture of advocacy, collaboration/partnership, and government business development. He will represent Lakeview Health on government committees and task forces, oversee collaborations with government and non-governmental organizations, and work closely with key leaders and organizations in the addiction treatment industry. This role continues a distinguished career comprised of many positions serving in executive leadership for organizations including Executive Director for Delivery Operations, Veterans Health Administration, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; Director of Federal Occupational Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and Chief of Staff for the U.S. Surgeon General. During his retirement ceremony on June 7, 2018, President Donald Trumps office presented Dr. Migliaccio with special recognition for serving 35 years in the Federal Government. I am excited to join the Team at Lakeview Health to provide help, hope, and healing to individuals who are suffering from substance abuse disorders, said Dr. Migliaccio. Science tells us that one in seven people in the United States is expected to develop a substance abuse disorder at some point in their lives. We need to make sure effective treatment is available and Lakeview Health is the place where individuals will be able to receive it. I am honored to be on the Team and serve. Dr. Migliaccio holds a Doctorate of Public Health (Dr.P.H.) from Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, a Master of Public Health (M.P.H.) from the University of Hawaii School of Public Health, and a Bachelor of Arts from Marquette University. After earning his doctoral degree, he served in the U.S. Air Force (USAF) Medical Service Corps as a health services administrator until joining the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) Commissioned Corps. In 2007, he was appointed as a member of the federal governments Senior Executive Service (SES). He is a highly decorated career officer who has received numerous PHS, military, and private sector awards. Additionally, he received recognition for attaining meritorious national distinction in the field of public health by Delta Omega, the honorary society for graduate studies in public health. About Lakeview Health Founded in 2001, Lakeview Health serves individuals with addiction and psychiatric disorders. The company takes an integrative health approach that addresses the medical, psychological, physical and spiritual aspects of recovery. Lakeview offers gender-responsive detox and inpatient services at the flagship location in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2018, the company opened a second facility in The Woodlands, Texas offering intensive outpatient treatment and partial hospitalization programs. Their continuum of care at both facilities allows patients to move successfully toward a life in recovery. To learn more, visit https://www.LakeviewHealth.com. We are humbled, appreciative and eager to further improve our support for affiliate partners. In the course of four straight months, after reaching the number one position on ShareASale, NECTAR The Most Comfortable Bed has reinforced its status as the leading affiliate marketing program on the world's largest affiliate network. Surpassing more than 5,000 other programs run on ShareASale (including Wayfair, Fanatics, Cricut, Reebok, IdealShape, to name but a few), NECTAR has proven to be the top monetization method not only in the home-related niches, but across the affiliate marketing landscape. "We bring a better quality mattress to consumers at a better price, and surround Nectar with the longest trial period and warranty. This best in class approach, coupled with a service focus has helped Nectar become the strongest affiliate brand in the world," commented Craig Schmeizer, NECTAR's Co-founder, "We are humbled, appreciative and eager to further improve our support for affiliate partners." NECTAR's affiliates enjoy a spectacular conversion rate which exceeds 5%, 180-days cookie life, and an EPC of $670.00 per on every 100 clicks referred to NECTAR. The program also tracks affiliate-referred conversions both on desktop computers, and on mobile devices. AM Navigator is NECTAR's exclusive affiliate agency partner whose dedicated team takes care of NECTAR's affiliate marketing needs on a daily basis. Geno Prussakov, CEO of AM Navigator, says: "It is exciting to see the success that our affiliate partners are enjoying while making NECTAR successful. I am confident that with the new opportunities we're unveiling today, everyone will be able to grow even more, facilitating happier and healthier sleep. My whole family sleeps on NECTAR's mattresses. So, I'm saying this not as NECTAR's marketing partner; but as a happy consumer and advocate of the brand." On top of its already-legendary memory foam mattresses, NECTAR Sleep now sells adjustable mattress frames a marketing opportunity which allows its affiliates to earn additional $120 (on every frame sold). And, for everyone who is not yet active with this affiliate program, NECTAR offers a great activation incentive: refers your first sale to NECTAR within the 10 days of this press releases publication, and you will receive triple the standard commission for 100 days from activation. To learn more about this affiliate program or to join, visit http://shareasale.com/join/Nectar About NECTAR: Rated #1 by reviewers and called "perhaps the best mattress money can buy", NECTAR "The Most Comfortable Mattress", is a better bed at the best price. NECTAR was developed for every type of sleeper and arrives backed by NECTARs Full Comfort Guarantee and Forever Warranty. NECTARs super-premium materials and construction hold exclusive Certi-PUR US and Oeko-Tek certification. Over a hundred thousand sleepers and more than 20 mattress review sites think NECTAR is truly, "The Most Comfortable Mattress." To learn more about NECTAR and their products, visit their website at http://nectarsleep.com/ About AM Navigator: Founded and led by Geno Prussakov an acclaimed affiliate marketing thought leader AM Navigator is one of the world's leading affiliate marketing agencies. In more than 15 years in business, the company has contributed to the online marketing successes of such top brands as Forbes, Nokia, Hallmark, Warner Music, Skype, and hundreds of small businesses. In 2017 Rakuten Marketing acknowledged AM Navigator as the Agency of the Year. To learn more about the company and about their online marketing services, visit their website at http://www.amnavigator.com DocLinks full integration with Microsoft Dynamics increases workplace efficiencies by providing companies with secure and easy access to their information. Altec, a leader in enterprise document management and process automation solutions, is sponsoring SSi Consultings Annual 2018 Customer Summits today in Virginia and tomorrow in Maryland. Each one-day conference is focused towards SSis Microsoft Dynamics GP and SL users will have the opportunity to learn valuable tips and tricks, more about upcoming Microsoft releases, and the latest technology. Laura Lechien, Mid-Atlantic Sales Director for Altec will be presenting, Go Digital with DocLink: Day in the Life of the Paperless Office at the conference. Altec will also be showcasing its industry-leading document management solution, DocLink. Enabling users to digitally transform their operations, DocLink allows companies to connect their people, processes and data for competitive advantage. Lechien comments, Im looking forward to supporting SSi Consulting at their annual Customer Summit as it provides an excellent opportunity for us to interact with their customers and share with them the immense value that DocLink can provide. DocLinks full integration with Microsoft Dynamics increases workplace efficiencies by providing companies with secure and easy access to their information. DocLink connects processes and links data beyond AP, and can automate processes including purchase orders, invoices, credit/debit memos, human resources, contracts, expense reports, etc. There is no limit to the processes that DocLink can streamline and automate, or the departments that DocLink can impact, and we look forward to sharing this during the event. About Altec Altec is a leading provider of integrated document management and process automation solutions. Its flagship product, DocLink, helps companies connect people, processes and data providing them with the ability to store, search, retrieve and send any document securely. DocLink effectively eliminates the need for paper while automating processes that improve organizational efficiency and reduce costs associated with human errors. With thousands of customers globally, Altec enjoys collaborative partnerships with Sage, Microsoft, Acumatica, Intacct, Key2Act, SAP B1, AmTech, and Epicor that deliver flexible, comprehensive solutions to adapt to an ever-changing global market. Learn more at http://www.altec-inc.com. # # # Allied Telecom Holds First Annual Technology Summit. I wanted to design an event that created curiosity and inspiration around a wide scope of technology. On June 7th, leading business Internet, Data, Voice and Unified Communications services provider Allied Telecom held the companys first annual Technology Summit at its headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia. The theme of the event was Build It Well: When Craftsmanship Meets Technology and consisted of a series of speakers, workshops, breakout sessions, demonstrations, and social activities for Allied employees. The Summit was conceptualized and organized by the company's Chief Information Officer, Trey Webb. I wanted to design an event that created curiosity and inspiration around a wide scope of technology; to not just dive deep on telecom-related tech but to learn about and experience technologies that can be used in our daily professional and personal lives, said Webb. The day kicked off with a breakfast hosted by Broadsoft/Cisco. Breakout sessions and workshops throughout the day covered topics including introductory programming, embedded programming, fiber optic cabling, Evernote mobile app, Salesforce Lightning, AllCloud Collaboration, Office 365, and Microsoft Surface Hub training. A Women in Technology roundtable discussion facilitated by Allied Provisioning Engineer Martha Jameson was an especially popular session. The highlight of the day for me was the Women in Technology roundtable, said Allied Implementation Engineer, Jenna Villaflor. It was really refreshing to be able to talk about a topic that youre not often encouraged to discuss in the workplace. Another highlight was the keynote speech by CIO Trey Webb which encouraged everyone in the company to apply the concept of craftsmanship to their daily work in the tech industry. A tech fair during a lunch sponsored by Broadsoft/Cisco showcased live demos of a Maker Select 3D printer, home automation featuring Alexa by Amazon, and the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. The day concluded with a happy hour sponsored by Integration Partners. Allieds Chief Operating Officer Ron Pyles closed the event with a speech about the importance of tech innovation, saying, The extent to which we stay on top of technology and that we have innovation embedded in our culture and our thoughts, thats what keeps us ahead of the curve. ABOUT ALLIED: Allied Telecom is a highly regarded network service provider to businesses across the MidAtlantic and Northeast regions. Known best as a trusted technology partner, Allied has been delivering its reliable, responsive business Internet, data transport, voice, Unified Communications, and cloud connectivity solutions, backed by award-winning support, for more than 20 years. For more information, visit http://www.alliedtelecom.net. Hobsons, the education technology leader and company behind Naviance, and AASA, The School Superintendents Association, are pleased to announce the Redefining Ready! National Scholarship winners. Hobsons, the education technology leader and company behind Naviance, and AASA, The School Superintendents Association, are pleased to announce the Redefining Ready! National Scholarship winners. The 15 student honorees were selected after submitting a 30-second social media video telling the world why they are college, career, and life ready. Announced in February at AASAs National Conference on Education, the social-media based competition was created to provide students with the opportunity to share how they are college, career, and life ready beyond a single test score. Students were asked to post a 30-second video on YouTube and share it on Twitter by using the hashtag #RedefiningReady and tagging @AASAHQ and @Hobsons. Students used phones, iPads, or video cameras to film the videos and were judged on compelling content. The winners are listed below and their video submissions can be viewed here. Regional winners are based on areas of the country representing AASAs Governing Board. National First Place Winner ($5,000) - Daniel Zhang, Herbert Henry Dow High School, Midland, Mich. National Runner-Up ($2,500) - Kathleen Oku, Buffalo Grove High School, Arlington Heights, Ill. Region 1 Winner ($2,000) - Savannah Foster, South Kipsap High School, Port Orchard, Wash. Region 1 Runner-Up ($1,000) - Travis Beckt, Stanwood High School, Camano Island, Wash. Region 2 Winner ($2,000) - John Donaldson, Garland High School, Rowlett, Texas Region 2 Runner-Up ($1,000) - Maggie Mouton, Nederland High School, Port Arthur, Texas Region 3 Winner ($2,000) - Enzo Marshall, Oak Creek High School, Oak Creek, Wis. Region 3 Runner-Up ($1,000) - Terry McDonald, Portage Central High School, Schoolcraft, Mich. Region 4 Winner ($2,000) - Jessica Talken, Wheeling High School, Wheeling, Ill. Region 4 Runner-Up ($1,000) - Zoe Blomquist, Elk Grove High School, Elk Grove Village, Ill. Region 5 Winner ($2,000) - Katherine Du, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Vienna, Va. Region 5 Runner-Up ($1,000) - Olivia Lu, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, McLean, Va. Region 6 Winner ($2,000) - Paul Ciccone, Atholton High School, Clarksville, Md. Region 6 Runner-Up ($1,000) - Crystal Boateng, Academy for Health Sciences at Prince Georges Community College, Beltsville, Md. Region 7 Winner ($2,000) - Michelle Woo, Greenwich High School, Riverside, Conn. Region 7 Runner-Up ($1,000) - Myia Tyler, Gouverneur High School, Gouverneur, N.Y. It was a pleasure viewing the many stories from students who used cutting-edge technology to tell what they expect life to be beyond high school. I was very much impressed by their creative minds, said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director, AASA. We congratulate our honorees, but we also applaud all of the students who submitted entries in our competition. We wish these individuals well as they work to create pathways to make outstanding contributions to society. We are pleased to partner with AASA on the Redefining Ready! National Scholarship competition, said Monica Morrell, General Manager of Naviance by Hobsons. Our mission is to enable students and families with the resources and information necessary to establish the best plan for each student to achieve their goals, whether they go on to college, the military, or the workforce. Redefining Ready! uses various metrics, including success in Advanced Placement or dual credit classes, completion of internships or industry certifications and co-curricular participation, to better assess students' potential for postsecondary success. For more information, visit https://www.redefiningready.org/national-scholarship/. About AASA AASA, The School Superintendents Association, founded in 1865, is the professional organization for more than 13,000 educational leaders in the United States and throughout the world. AASAs mission is to support and develop effective school system leaders who are dedicated to the highest quality public education for all children. About Hobsons A global leader in education technology, Hobsons helps students to identify their strengths, explore careers, match to best-fit educational opportunities, create academic plans, and reach their education and life goals. More than 13,000 K-12 and higher education institutions partner with Hobsons and leverage our expertise and our solutions -- Naviance, Intersect, and Starfish -- to improve college and career readiness, college recruiting and admissions, and higher education student success to support millions of students around the world. Attorney Loren Dickstein Southfield, Michigan, attorney Loren Dickstein is a senior partner at Lewis & Dickstein, P.L.L.C., and is known as one of Michigans top and most aggressive criminal defense lawyers. He has had success defending clients against felony and misdemeanor charges in state and federal courts. Attorney Loren Dickstein, of Lewis & Dickstein, P.L.L.C., has been honored with a 2018 Elite Lawyer Award for the area of criminal defense. The Elite Lawyer rating service recognizes attorneys who display a high level of competence in their practice and receive acknowledgment from their peers, community, bar and committees. Southfield, Michigan, attorney Loren Dickstein is a senior partner at Lewis & Dickstein, P.L.L.C., and is known as one of Michigans top and most aggressive criminal defense lawyers. He has had success defending clients against felony and misdemeanor charges in state and federal courts. Dickstein has received numerous awards from professional organizations, including being named the Top Attorney in Michigan by Crains Detroit Business. He has also received the Top Attorney Award from the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys and the Expertise Award from the Best Criminal Defense Attorneys in Detroit. He has been named to America's Top 100 Criminal Defense Attorneys and is a Nationally Ranked Superior DUI Attorney by the National Advocacy for DUI Defense. Dicksteins professional memberships have included the State Bar of Michigan, Criminal Law Section, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan. Designed to assist potential clients in finding an experienced legal professional to address specific legal needs, the Elite Lawyer tools and resources provide information on distinguished attorneys throughout the United States. The Elite Lawyer Award assures that each attorney selected to the directory has received a nomination from their peers for displaying excellence and a high level of skill with the law. Awarded only to those who have met or exceeded the criteria of a rigorous, multi-phased selection process, the Award recognizes top-rated attorneys for their excellence and outstanding service in their specific area or areas of practice. Only the most outstanding and experienced attorneys receive the Elite Lawyer Award. A prestigious nomination and presented only to legal professionals who are able to meet or exceed its demanding criteria, it sets these exceptional attorneys apart from their peers when consumers use the directory to search for a top-notch attorney in their area. The Elite Lawyer Award speaks highly of how well each nominated attorney is perceived by their legal community. For more information about Elite Lawyer, or to become a member of the esteemed directory, visit http://www.elitelawyer.com. About Lewis & Dickstein, P.L.L.C.: Lewis & Dickstein, P.L.L.C., is a premier Michigan criminal defense law firm that handles cases in Oakland County, Macomb County, Wayne County, Washtenaw County, Livingston County and throughout Michigan. The attorneys at the firm are passionate about defending clients against criminal charges they did not commit or being overcharged. To schedule a free consultation, call 248-263-6800 or visit https://www.notafraidtowin.com. TOKYO, June 19 -- Osaka Prefecture in western Japan continues to be rattled by tremors in the wake of a 6.1-magnitude quake that struck the region a day earlier killing four and injuring hundreds of others, local officials said Tuesday. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), dozens of aftershocks have continued through Tuesday with a significant tremor hitting again in the early hours of Tuesday morning and jolting the entire region again. The aftershocks made for an unimaginably uncomfortable night for the some 1,700 people who were forced to spend the night in emergency evacuation centers, local Osaka government officials said. Due to the continued seismic activity and heavy rainfall expected to hit the affected region through Wednesday, the JMA has deployed its emergency task-force to Osaka and nearby areas to help with recovery efforts and help prevent secondary damage. "Frequent seismic activity is continuing in the northern part of Osaka Prefecture. Strong tremors could have raised the risk of landslides or building collapse. People in such areas are advised to watch out for further seismic activity and rain," the JMA said in an earlier statement on the issue. Around 112,000 homes in the quake-hit region remain without gas, according to Osaka Gas Co., who said that gas supply will remain suspended until next Monday, while in some parts of the hard-hit cities of Takatsuki and Minoo hundreds of homes remain without water. Local authorities have dispatched water trucks to help with the water shortage in these areas, local authorities said. More than 370 people have been injured as a result of the powerful temblor and 334 houses have been damaged by the quake, the government said Tuesday. One of the lives lost in the quake was that of nine-year-old girl who was on her way to school when the quake struck at 7:58 a.m. local time on Monday (2258GMT Sunday). Due to the quake's shallow origin the intensity was violent enough to bring down the outer wall of her school's swimming pool and crush the young girl to death. A police investigation has been launched into the girl's death as there are suspicions that the wall did not meet safety standards meaning the girl's death could have been a result of negligence. An education ministry official said after investigating the scene of the fatal accident that the concrete wall may have contained reinforced steel that was too short to properly connect the concrete-block wall to its foundations. Dr. Howard Abrahams Uses Dental Microscope for Lasting Dental Implants in Miami Beach, FL Medical surgeons use microscopes all the time, why not dental! It's the next generation in dental care. New patients in need of dental care can now visit experienced prosthodontist, Dr. Howard Abrahams, at Dental Implants Miami Beach to experience the precision of advanced dental microscope technology. Dental microscopes give an enhanced view of the tooth and oral structure for improved treatment and results. Dr. Abrahams, a specialist in the restoration of teeth, often uses this technology when performing restorations and placing dental implants in Miami Beach, FL. "I use the microscope in order to improve my vision of the tooth or the area I am working on by 15 times, says Dr. Abrahams about his use of dental microscopes. Medical surgeons use microscopes all the time, why not dental! It's the next generation in dental care." Dental microscopes are important for dentists to use as they improve visualization during any procedure. Additionally, it allows the identification of micro-fractures or irregularities, which would normally not be caught by the naked eye. As a prosthodontist, Dr. Abrahams specializes in creating attractive and functional restorations for patients. The increased magnification of a microscope allows him to create more attractive and lifelike restorations for dental implants, crowns and bridges, or when placing cosmetic veneers. Regular use of a dental microscope for visualization provides many benefits: Improved efficiency and awareness Improved quality of treatment Increased productivity of care Minimal damage to surrounding structures Shorter recovery time for patients Dr. Abrahams believes that advanced technology is key to improved dentistry and an enhanced cosmetic result. Along with the state-of-the-art dental microscope, his practice features a 3D cone beam CT scanner, in-house dental lab and an intraoral camera. When combined, these technologies increase patient satisfaction and set Dental Implants Miami Beach as a leading location for convenient advanced care. Those seeking dental implants in Miami Beach, FL, from a skilled prosthodontist can contact Dr. Abrahams office at 305-921-0082 or by visiting the website at http://www.dentalimplantsmiamibeach.com. About the Doctor Dr. Howard Abrahams is an esteemed prosthodontist who specializes in a wide variety of dental concerns, from simple to the most complex. He has completed a three-year specialty program in advanced prosthodontics with a focus on dental implant and cosmetic rehabilitation. Dr. Abrahams is a member of the American College of Prosthodontists, The Academy of Osseointegration, American Academy of Maxillofacial Prosthetics, South Florida District Dental Association and American Dental Association. To learn more about Dr. Abrahams or the services he offers, please visit his website at http://www.dentalimplantsmiamibeach.com or call 305-921-0082 to schedule an appointment. "The unparalleled traction weve generated in the Americas with the Canto cloud offering has paved the way to growth and opportunity in Europe." -- Thomas Mockenhaupt, Canto Chief Sales Officer and General Manager Canto, a leading provider of Digital Asset Management (DAM) software, today announced the European launch of its Canto software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Following a successful debut in the Americas, with more than 400 SaaS customers to date, the company has expanded its sales and marketing operations in Berlin and Frankfurt to accelerate the adoption of Canto throughout Europe. The unparalleled traction weve generated in the Americas with the Canto cloud offering has paved the way to growth and opportunity in Europe, said Thomas Mockenhaupt, Canto Chief Sales Officer and General Manager. Were excited to offer European marketing teams a new generation of DAM features that will enable them to achieve a competitive edge through a simplified and visual approach to managing high-volume, fast-growing image and video files. Early signs of European market interest for the SaaS solution are very positive, with new clients already signing up, including CEVA Sante Animale based in Libourne France. In the Americas, leading brands using Canto for cloud-based DAM include Godiva Chocolatier, Seattle Aquarium, Mitsubishi Electric Cooling & Heating, United Airlines and POPSUGAR. Simplified and Optimized for Fast-Growing Digital Assets The Canto SaaS solution is designed to allow marketers to increase business efficiency, agility and profitability through better management of digital assets. It supports dispersed teams as well as their partner organizations and ensures protection against copyright infringement through built-in Digital Rights Management capabilities. "The appeal of SaaS-powered DAM is catching on in Europe and were seeing interest skyrocket in the German-speaking region in particular, said Mockenhaupt. More companies are looking for standardized solutions that empower professional use of digital assets along with fast, hassle-free activation. Canto is entering the market at just the right time with a proven, powerful SaaS offering. Cantos SaaS solution enables simple activation and immediate use across countries and departments without a complex implementation process. It is also easily integrated with marketing tools and messaging services such as InDesign, Mailchimp, Slack and WordPress. In addition, Canto offers features such as metadata maintenance, automated tagging, and the ability to securely share assets with external partners and service providers. Built-in artificial intelligence makes it possible to use keywords to retrieve content quickly and automatically. European Server and Storage, Multiple Languages For European customers, Canto offers a Dublin, Ireland Amazon S3 data storage location as well as an Ireland-based server location for the Canto app to drive faster upload/download speeds for European clients, while also supporting those companies who want to keep their data in close proximity. Individual users may select their preferred UI language including English, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, Japanese and Dutch. U.S.-based customers connect to their library with a company.canto.com URL, while European customers receive a company.canto.global URL. Interested parties can sign up for a free trial. For more information on Canto features and customer use cases, visit canto.com. About Canto Canto is a leader in digital asset management (DAM) software, with customers that include many of todays top brands. Canto gives marketing teams a simple, visual way to centralize, organize and share all their digital brand assets, empowering them to save valuable time and gain a competitive edge. Cantos corporate headquarters is in San Francisco, with offices in Berlin and Frankfurt, Germany. For more information, visit canto.com. Best SEO Agencies 10 Best SEO has just announced the most recent winners of its June 2018 award for Best SEO agency. Straight North, Ignite Visibility and Boostability are the top three winners for this month. To be honored in this category, an agency must have a proven track record of helping clients improve visibility in Google and other major search engines. Excellence in search engine optimization also encompasses the field of marketing, and these award-winning agencies are specialists at helping online marketers increase their conversions and sales. Straight North is a top SEO firm that has generated more than 800,000 leads for its clients. Straight North, which claimed the No. 1 spot on this months winners list, is based in Chicago and has been in business for many years. The agency employs individuals with many years of experience in SEO. All methods used by this agency are designed to produce lasting results. Leading SEO agency Ignite Visibility ranked second on the June list of award winners. The CEO of this firm, John Lincoln, has been recognized as one of the top search marketers in the industry. Ignite Visibility places an emphasis on search engine marketing. The agency's goal is to help clients reach more potential customers with a number of proven SEO strategies. The methods used by this agency are ethical in nature and comply with best SEO practices. Boostability has long been regarded as one of the best SEO agencies in the United States. The agency, which took the No. 3 position on the list of winners, offers all new clients a free consultation to address their SEO needs. Boostability is skilled at performing SEO audits which reveal areas in which websites can be improved. The agency does keyword research, linking, and content marketing in addition to a large number of other services. Ongoing service is also offered to clients who wish to maintain their improved search engine ranking. This new monthly award from 10 Best SEO was created to recognize agencies that consistently produce outstanding results in the field of search engine optimization. All agencies that are considered for a Top SEO Agency award must satisfy stringent requirements. Among the factors considered is a firm's overall success rate at improving a client's Google ranking. For more information about the best SEO firms for June, visit http://www.10bestseo.com. Drs. Marianne Urbanski and Gregory Toback Offer Laser Crown Lengthening in New London, CT Using leading-edge crown lengthening techniques and equipment, both doctors have the ability to revitalize the way an individuals mouth looks and feels, while preventing potential oral health and systemic problems related to excess gum tissue. The highly regarded periodontal team of Drs. Gregory Toback and Marianne Urbanski at Shoreline Periodontics are proud to welcome new patients interested in addressing the cosmetic and functional problems of a gummy smile in New London, CT and Westerly, RI areas. Using leading-edge crown lengthening techniques and equipment, both doctors have the ability to revitalize the way an individuals mouth looks and feels, while preventing potential oral health and systemic problems related to excess gum tissue. Crown lengthening enables a trained, credentialed periodontist to expertly trim away gum tissue, or gingiva, that has grown and covers a significant portion of the tooth. Drs. Toback and Urbanski utilize laser-based equipment to precisely remove soft tissue without damaging the surrounding area and offering reduced recovery times. The results of crown lengthening are both immediate and permanent. Although excessive gum tissue is frequently a cosmetic concern among adults seeking to rid themselves of a gummy smile in New London and surrounding areas, the situation can become functionally problematic if the gums become inflamed or diseased. In cases where the patient already has issues such as gum disease, a gummy smile could exacerbate the problem by making it difficult to keep the periodontal pockets and teeth free from bacteria, plaque and tartar. In addition to offering crown lengthening as both a cosmetic and functional option for new and existing Shoreline Periodontics patients, Drs. Toback and Urbanski offer a variety of specialty services including gum disease treatment, dental implants and sedation dentistry. In order to stay up-to-date on the latest advancements in dentistry and ensure their community does the same, they consistently attend continuing education courses and lead study clubs among their peers. Those interested in meeting with either of the periodontists about a gummy smile in New London, CT, are encouraged to call the Shoreline Periodontics practice at 860-443-2428 or call 401-596-0000 for their Westerly, RI location. About the Practice Shoreline Periodontics is a periodontal practice offering personalized dental care for patients since 1998 and is located in New London, CT and Westerly, RI. Leading board-certified periodontist, Dr. Gregory A. Toback, received his B.A. from St. Johns University and his Doctorate of Dental Medicine from the University of Connecticut. He also received advanced training in periodontics and dental implants at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. Dr. Toback focuses on minimally invasive surgeries, offering LANAP and belongs to a small group of dental professionals currently providing the Chao Pinhole Surgical Technique for treatment of gum recession. Dr. Marianne Urbanski has been voted one of Connecticuts top dentists for more than seven years by Connecticut Magazine. Dr. Urbanski graduated cum laude from the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts where she earned a Bachelors degree in Biology. She also received her Doctor of Dental Medicine degree and her Masters of Dental Science degree from the University of Connecticut Dental School. Dr. Urbanski prides herself on offering caring, professional treatment to each patient. To learn more about Shoreline Periodontics and their dental services visit their website at http://www.shorelineperio.com or call 860-443-2428 for the New London, CT location, or 401-596-0000 for the Westerly, RI office. With existing operations in southern and northern California, we embraced the opportunity to expand our footprint in the beautiful city of West Hollywood Prime Harvest, LLC, a science-driven, vertically integrated cannabis company with operations throughout California, announced today that the company applied for five cannabis use and business licenses in West Hollywood, California. West Hollywood is located in Los Angeles County, the most populous in the U.S., and is among one of the first cities in the country to introduce licenses that allow for cannabis consumption lounges. The cannabis application period ended on May 31, 2018. The legal U.S. cannabis market could generate as much as $75 billion in gross annual sales by 2030, according to investment bank Cowen & Co. In California, state and local tax revenue could exceed $1 billion a year by the mid-2020s, Bloomberg reported citing nonpartisan Legislative Analysts Office. Prime Harvest presented five concepts with unique business models in its applications, each borrowing from West Hollywoods history and vivacious present, all while displaying Prime Harvests emphasis on quality and excellence. Specifically, the company created concepts around the name Sherman, paying homage to when West Hollywood was founded in 1896 as the town of Sherman. Prime Harvest submitted applications for five license types using the aforementioned concept: Shermans Union: an on-site consumption area for cannabis-infused edibles only; Shermans Social Club: an on-site consumption area for smoking, vaping and ingestion; Shermans Depot: an adult-use retail business; Shermans Med Spa: a medical dispensary; ERBL WeHo Mobile Delivery App: a delivery service. In its description of Shermans Social Club, the company states that it promises to be a West Hollywood landmark with an emphasis on quality, sophistication and creativity. In an ambiance that balances glamour and comfort, it will provide an exceptional menu of cannabis and cannabis-infused products and efficient and friendly service. The Sherman brand is inspired by the well-established characteristics of this creative citys interurban communities, eclectic culture, upscale lifestyle and contemporary classic fusion of architecture and 21st century tones, said E. Duane Alexander, CEO and Founder of Prime Harvest, LLC. With existing operations in southern and northern California, we embraced the opportunity to expand our footprint in the beautiful city of West Hollywood. The application submissions follow Prime Harvests announcement that it signed a letter of intent with ME Resource Corp. (CSE: MEC) in January as their first step toward bringing the company public. West Hollywood will select the top eight applicants in each category. If chosen, Prime Harvest will then require the approval of a Zone Clearance followed by approval of a business license by the citys Business License Commission. To visit the Prime Harvest, LLC website, click here. To receive a copy of the companys investor deck contact Chand Jagpal at chand(at)primeharvestinc.com. About Prime Harvest, LLC Prime Harvest, LLC is a San Diego-based cannabis company with operations throughout California. Prime Harvest has been on the frontlines of the North American medical movement with over 30 years of sophisticated operating combined experience in legal cannabis markets. Prime Harvest manages the entire cannabis development pipeline, from tissue culture science, cultivation, extraction and formulation to production, manufacturing and retail sales. Prime Harvest brings the rigor of biotechnology to the emerging cannabis industry, focusing on science-based research and development, value-added products and vertical integration. HICHI HICHI is a cannabis-derived product line that comes in various delivery methods and formulations including vaporizers, topicals, tinctures, transdermal delivery systems, sublingual sprays, RSO, premium pre-rolls and cannabidiol (CBD) pet treats. HICHI is Prime Harvest's flagship luxury brand. Visit http://www.gethichi.com to learn more. Prime Harvest Retail State-of-the-art licensed establishments and other retail sources offer high quality products in Southern California, including the company's flagship luxury brand HICHI. Prime Harvest sources the highest quality, lab tested cannabis products to ensure safety and efficacy. Prime Harvest Wholesale Prime Harvest optimizes the entire life cycle and supply chain of cannabis, tissue culture science, cultivation, extraction, formulation to production, manufacturing and retail sales. The company has licensed nursery and outdoor cultivation space for the development of proprietary cannabidiol (CBD)-dominant strains. Additionally, Prime Harvest has a 10,000 square-foot manufacturing facility for scalable extraction, distillation and formulation. National Growers Alliance The National Growers Alliance (NGA) offers an opportunity for cannabis cultivators to partner with Prime Harvest. Prime Harvest supplies NGA members with high-quality starter plants, or plantlets, that utilize Prime Harvest's proprietary micropropagation process that ensures vigorous, uniform, pathogen-free cannabis plantlets. The company also provides NGA members with services including, licensing application and acquisition, facility design, nutrient formulations, staff training, plant extraction/processing, and branding/manufacturing services. Visit http://www.nationalgrowersalliance.org to learn more. Community Alliance Program Community Alliance Program (CAP) is a nonprofit dedicated to improving lives by meeting communities' most critical needs and investing in cannabinoid research and educational programs. Sponsored by Prime Harvest, CAP forges alliances locally, nationally and internationally to mobilize resources and foster resilient and sustainable support systems for local communities and encourage access to natural medicine. Visit http://www.communityallianceprogram.com to learn more. Public Relations Contact: Cassandra Dowell PR Account Manager CMW Media P. 888-829-0070 Cassandra(at)cmwmedia.com http://www.cmwmedia.com Monster Energys Trey Wood Takes Second Place at X Games Skate Park Qualifiers in Boise Monster Energy congratulates team rider Trey Wood for a strong second place finish at the X Games Skate Park Qualifiers at Rhodes Skate Park in Boise, Idaho today. In front of a high-energy crowd and thousands of viewers tuned in via live stream, the 17-year-old from Queen Creek, Arizona, landed a perfect run for a ticket to the 2018 X Games Minneapolis on July 19. Todays invite-only event was part of the Road to X Park Qualifier series, providing skateboarders from around the world a chance to earn invites to this summers X Games. The weekends three park riding events Skateboard Park Men, Skateboard Park Women, and BMX Park Men each offered six X Games qualifying spots to competitors. The crowd was treated to world-class park skateboarding at the Rhodes Skate Park bowl course underneath an I-184 Interstate bridge in downtown Boise. The concrete park with its broad selection of pool corners, wall rides, and banks was renovated two years ago and is fully accessible to the public year-round at no charge. The finals unfolded in a session-like atmosphere with Tristan Rennie setting the bar high by posting an 85.33-point score. After stepping off his board on his first two attempts, it all came down to Woods third and final run. No stranger to high-pressure situations, Trey secured his qualification for this summers X Games by landing a perfect run. Standouts included a frontside nosebone over the hip, ollie up to frontside Smith grind in the pool corner, frontside noseblunt on the bank, backside disaster in the deep end, frontside nose bonk on the wallride, heelflip stalefish air and alley-oop frontside air over the hip, and a huge backside 540 in the pool corner for 83.00 points and second place. Wood started his 2018 season by winning the Converse Concrete Jam bowl competition during the 24th Tampa Pro skateboard contest in March. The 17-year-old rookie pro, known for his appearances in Big Air events at the X Games from a young age, is emerging as a top competitor on the global park riding circuit. Recently relocated from his native Queen Creek, Arizona to San Diego, Trey has been fine-tuning his moves at Southern Californias concrete skate parks and is one to watch as he makes his sixth X Games appearance this summer. Download photos for editorial use. Also look forward to Wood, Tom Schaar, Lizzie Armanto, and the rest of Monster Energy team competing in the next stop of the global Vans Skatepark Series in Vancouver, Canada, on July 13. Visit http://www.monsterenergy.com and follow Monster Energy on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter for exclusive updates. ### About Monster Energy Based in Corona, California, Monster Energy is the leading marketer and distributor of energy drinks and alternative beverages. Refusing to acknowledge the traditional, Monster Energy supports the scene and sport. Whether motocross, off-road, NASCAR, MMA, BMX, surf, snowboard, ski, skateboard, or the rock and roll lifestyle, Monster Energy is a brand that believes in authenticity and the core of what its sports, athletes and musicians represent. More than a drink, its the way of life lived by athletes, sports, bands, believers and fans. See more about Monster Energy including all of its drinks at http://www.monsterenergy.com. Swanson Elementary School students and teachers were excited with the results of their canned drinking water fundraiser from CW4K. Most items used as fundraisers are able to raise money, but few have the ability to raise money and give back to society like CW4K canned drinking water. Most items used as fundraisers are able to raise money, but few have the ability to raise money and give back to society. Swanson Elementary School just completed its fundraiser with the sale of one of those special items canned drinking water from CannedWater4kids (CW4K). Each sale provided funds for school activities that included, a 5th grade graduation party, a 5th grade gift back to the school and t-shirts for every graduate. Each sale also provided support for clean drinking water projects worldwide. Our kids were excited to learn that every can they sold not only earned the school money, but also helped provide clean drinking water to children worldwide who have none, said Kori Hartman, Principal of Swanson Elementary. This fundraiser mirrored our school values in promoting peace, empathy and compassion. Water Wednesdays as it was called, became a weekly fundraising event where the school sold CW4K canned drinking water during lunch on Wednesdays during the second half of the school year. When used as a fundraiser, we see our canned drinking water sales as kids helping kids, said Greg Stromberg, CW4K Founder & CEO. CW4K is more than just another fundraising item. Every sale also helps fund projects that bring clean, safe drinking water to children worldwide. CW4K canned drinking water is the perfect alternative for those tired of the usual candy bar and cookie fundraisers, said Peter Gorman, CW4K Board Member and CMO. We introduced our fundraising program in January of 2018. The quick response and early success of Swanson Elementary has us excited about the potential of CW4K in the fundraising space. CW4K canned drinking water could be the fundraising program that so many clubs and organizations have been waiting for. Call CannedWater4kids today at 262-246-8480 and see what CW4K can do for you. About Swanson Elementary Swanson Elementary is located in Brookfield, WI and is part of the Elmbrook School District. The school follows a "PEACE" model promoting peace, empathy, and compassion everywhere with the goal of creating an overall climate that is comfortable, happy, safe and productive for all learners. Staff members are known for their providing of individual support to each student based on their unique skills and needs. Specialized programs & services offered include: Math & Reading Learning Support, English Language Learners Program, Physical & Occupational Therapy, Special Education Services as well as a Gifted & Talented Program. Visit Swanson Elementary online: https://www.elmbrookschools.org/swanson-elementary-school About CannedWater4Kids CannedWater4Kids is a 501c3 charity based in Sussex, WI. The organizations purpose is to ensure all children have access to clean, safe drinking water. CW4K funds its initiatives with cash donations, grants and through the sale of their premium drinking water in aluminum cans and bottles. 95 cents of every dollar collected goes to support clean water programs. Projects include assisting the University of Wisconsin Milwaukees Engineers Without Borders in bringing sustainable water purification solutions to the highlands of Guatemala, and support for well/water tank and Bio Sand Filter projects in Zambia, Kenya, and Tanzania, Africa. Recent disaster and hurricane relief efforts include the sending of truckloads of canned drinking water to Michigan, Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. To learn more, visit http://www.cannedwater4kids.org/howtohelp. L.L.Bean x Flowfold Crossbody Tote alongside L.L.Bean Boots. The two Maine outdoor brands have collaborated on a new collection of bags made in the USA. Our product teams have had such fun bringing together our expertise and our shared love of the outdoors, and it shows in the detail, design, and performance of these bags. Internationally recognized outdoor retailer L.L.Bean, best known for its Maine-made L.L.Bean Boots and world-class customer service, has partnered with Maine outdoor gear startup Flowfold on a new collection of backpacks, totes, and gear bags. The collaboration pairs L.L.Beans experience of over a century of quality outdoor product development and customer satisfaction with Flowfolds cutting edge fabrics and design. Were excited to launch this unique and innovative collaboration, said Tom Armstrong, chief merchandising officer for L.L.Bean. Our product teams have had such fun bringing together our expertise and our shared love of the outdoors, and it shows in the detail, design, and performance of these bags. L.L.Bean was a Maine startup itself in 1912 when Leon Leonwood Bean began with a single innovative product, the Maine Hunting Shoe, better known today as the L.L.Bean Boot, and made in Maine. Today L.L.Bean sells thousands of outdoor products through its global e-commerce and retail business, including backpacks known for their durability. Flowfold began in 2010 on Peaks Island, Maine, with college friends making wallets from recycled, high-tech materials. In less than a decade, Flowfold has expanded its USA manufacturing to lightweight, minimalist gear for all kinds of outdoor adventures. L.L.Bean has carried Flowfold products online and in retail stores since 2016, but this is the first time the two companies have designed and developed products together. We wanted to create something special with L.L.Bean, and we believe weve done that with this co-lab collection, said Charles Friedman, co-founder of Flowfold. Making our products here in the USA allows a speed and agility in bringing these designs to market. Twelve months ago we had sketches on napkins and now we have a growing collection thatd Id put up against any other assortment in the industry. Were darn proud of that. We created this line of products together, said Curt Nichols, corporate merchandise manager for L.L.Bean. We want our customers to see both our labels on the products and know that they are getting the very best of both brands. The collaborative collection includes a center-zip backpack, a crossbody tote bag, utility organizer, and wrist pouch, each in three colors, all made from ultralight, water-resistant X-Pac fabric. Prices range from $39 for the wrist pouch to $149 for the backpack. The collection can be found exclusively at L.L.Bean retail stores and online at http://www.llbean.com/flowfold. About L.L.Bean, Inc. L.L.Bean, Inc. is a leading multichannel merchant of quality outdoor gear and apparel. Founded in 1912 by Leon Leonwood Bean, the company began as a one-room operation selling a single product, the Maine Hunting Shoe. Still family owned, Shawn Gorman, great grandson of Leon Leonwood Bean, was named Chairman of the Board of Directors in 2013. While its business has grown over the years, L.L.Bean continues to uphold the values of its founder, including his dedication to quality, customer service and a love of the outdoors. In the past five years, L.L.Bean has donated over $6 million toward conservation and land stewardship. L.L.Bean currently operates 39 stores in 17 states across the United States, along with 25 stores in Japan. The 220,000-sq. ft. L.L.Bean retail store campus in Freeport, ME, is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and welcomes more than 3 million visitors every year. L.L.Bean can be found worldwide at http://www.llbean.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. About Flowfold Flowfold builds minimalist gear for everyday adventures. No bells, no whistles, just high quality, Made in America products outdoor adventurers can use every single day. Flowfold was founded in 2010 on Peaks Island Maine and built on a legacy of Maine craftsmanship. Flowfold pairs carefully refined techniques with innovative materials and designs with values focused on reducing their overall impact on the environment. Every year Flowfold recycles thousands of yards of non-biodegradable material creating outdoor inspired lifestyle gear that won't let their customers or the planet down. Every item is handmade in the USA using some of the worlds strongest and lightest fabrics and comes with a lifetime warranty. Flowfold can be found at http://www.flowfold.com, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. U.S. Chamber Foundation Reception: Building the Workforce of the Future Ironistic is excited to announce the launch of forwardontalent.org, a site commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and engineered to highlight the partnerships between the nations employers and educators to strengthen communities. The mission of the Chamber Foundations website is to feature employers that are leading initiatives to solve for some of our toughest education and workforce challenges across four phases of the talent pipeline. The hope is that the successful engagement and partnership models outlined on the website will inspire more employers of all sizes, across all industries, to find a way to better support the workforce of today, and invest in the workforce of tomorrow. Ironistic designed and developed forwardontalent.org for the Chamber Foundation, a partner we are honored to work with. Aware of the goals and potential impact of this website, we built a visually-engaging platform that would educate and encourage action. It features high-impact stories, an interactive map with pop-up features, social media integration, and an easy avenue for new businesses to submit their stories. The Chamber Foundations initiative targets four core need areas in our nations pipeline of talent development: Entry Point to School Readiness, Preparing Students for Success, Bridging Classroom to Career, and Investing in Talent for Tomorrow. Organizations like IBM, Microsoft, ExxonMobile, Home Depot, and others have all developed programs that increase practical, goal-oriented education and workforce-ready skills for preschool, K-12, college and post-grad students and workers. The programs they lead provide education, training, internships and mentorships that offer real opportunity for successful, 21st-century careers. The interactive map fuses the sites featured organizations and their stories with their respective states. For instance, a trip to Wisconsin will introduce you to Wyoming Machine, Inc. or you can travel south to Texas to learn about UpSkill Houston. Ironistic also implemented unique filters outside of the interactive map like searching via tag or education focus to help guide employers to the type of model that might be right for them to emulate. Because we fully expect forwardontalent.org to grow and evolve, Ironistic engineered a dynamic backend so that the Chamber Foundation can easily manage their site by including functionality for creating forms and building out stories. Forwardontalent.org is a testament to the positive impact of the Chamber Foundations initiative, the forward-thinking leadership of participating businesses, and the commitment from both to enable a robust American economy. As this initiative progresses, Ironistic looks forward to continuing our rewarding collaboration with the Chamber Foundation teams. About Ironistic Ironistic (http://www.ironistic.com) is a full-service, online development and marketing firm. Founded in 2012, but with industry experience going back to 1996, Ironistic delivers innovative website development services and effective marketing solutions to companies of all sizes and across all industries. From small brochure websites to custom portals, Ironistic services include strategy and consulting, website/app design and development, online marketing and search engine optimization, and web hosting and maintenance. Contact Ironistic via our website or by calling (703) 829-0809. About the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation is a grant-funded nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening Americas long-term competitiveness. The Chamber Foundations Center for Education and Workforce engages with and empowers business to lead the way as we tackle the most pressing education and workforce issues facing our country. By partnering with Labster, high school students learning with zSpace now have access to innovative, high quality STEM learning content. Today, zSpace and Labster announced a partnership that will give high school students access to Labsters award winning, game-based virtual simulations on zSpaces augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) learning platform. The simulations are set to be rolled out to hundreds of thousands of high school science students across the world this fall. Labster provides an easily accessible way for students from all over the world to explore lab experiments in biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and general sciences at their own pace in a true to life laboratory experience. The simulations can be accessed anytime, and from anywhere. Now using a zSpace AR/VR computer, high school students can interact with virtual objects using a stylus and 3D tracking glasses. Labsters content has been specifically designed to complement its STEM curriculum and, together with zSpace, helps students gain a deeper understanding of complex scientific concepts. Unlike other virtual reality solutions, such as head-mounted displays, zSpace enables interaction and group collaboration. Best of all, zSpace empowers students to learn by doing in an environment where it is easy to undo mistakes, make changes, and not worry about material costs or clean up. Partnering with zSpace is another big leap towards our mission of making science come to life anytime, anywhere, said Mads Bonde, CEO, Labster. The initial launch of content will include six simulations on zSpace, and we are looking forward to adding additional simulations over time. Using elements from computer gaming combined with the psychology of learning, Labsters simulations are proven to increase both learning and student motivation. By partnering with Labster, high school students learning with zSpace now have access to innovative, high quality STEM learning content, said Paul Kellenberger, CEO, zSpace. And because these simulations are fun, we hope this encourages students pursue careers in STEM fields. Labster and zSpace will demonstrate the integration at ISTE 2018, June 25-27, in Chicago, at the zSpace booth #2643. About Labster Labster is a company dedicated to developing fully interactive advanced lab simulations that are designed to stimulate students natural curiosity and highlight the connection between science and the real world. Founded in 2012 by Mads Bonde and Michael Bodekaer, the company has already received more than $20 million in grant funding and investments. The company has customers at over 150 institutions in 25 countries, including ETH in Zurich, MIT and Imperial College. http://www.labster.com About zSpace zSpace combines elements of AR and VR to create lifelike experiences that inspire curiosity, create engagement and deepen understanding. Among its numerous awards and accolades, zSpace was named Cool Vendor by Gartner, Inc., Best in Show at ISTE by Tech & Learning Magazine for three consecutive years and was ranked two years in a row on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies. zSpace is a privately held, venture-backed company located in Sunnyvale, California, and has been granted more than 40 patents for its innovative technologies. For more information, visit http://www.zspace.com, or follow on Twitter @zSpace. China had 231,564 journalists at the end of 2017 BEIJING, June 19 -- China had 231,564 press-card holding journalists at the end of 2017, according to a report released by the All-China Journalists Association (ACJA) Tuesday. Of these journalists, 84,761 worked for newspapers, 6,324 for periodicals, 2,849 for news agencies, 136,224 for radio, TV stations or production firms, and 1,406 were employed by news websites. This was the fourth time ACJA has released an annual report on journalism development in China. The report noted that "Media convergence remains the theme for media development in China in 2017," with accelerated and upgraded integration of traditional and new media, as well as deepening integrated development of content, platforms, channels, technologies and management. The Communist Party of China and the central government have attached great importance to the development of the press, the report said. The Party and government organs and media associations introduced a series of policies last year to support the development of the media industry, encourage news outlets to adopt new technologies and applications, and boost innovation and reform. Noting the booming media market, the report said the flow of online information has been safe and orderly, netizens have been expressing their opinions in a more rational way and the influence of positive energy has been expanding. Managing the online environment has transitioned from the traditional unitary administration of the government to a more diversified and interactive way of comprehensive management, it added. The report was compiled by departments including ACJA, the State Administration of Radio and Television as well as the Cyberspace Administration of China. "Regulation is still top of mind for the companies that are looking to operate beyond Part 107. We have a long way to go when it comes to future rulemakings that enable expanded operations, but theres a lot that can be done right now, which we look forward to discussing during this webinar." On Wednesday, June 27, Commercial UAV Expo will offer an opportunity for commercial drone operators to tune in and learn how regulatory considerations are impacting industries across the United States. Industry thought leaders Lisa Ellman, Co-Executive Director of Commercial Drone Alliance and Partner at Hogan Lovells, and Gretchen West, Co-Executive Director of Commercial Drone Alliance and Senior Advisor at Hogan Lovells, will join Jeremiah Karpowicz, Executive Editor for Commercial UAV News, to discuss and detail what businesses need to be thinking about in the present and consider for the future when it comes to how theyre adopting drone technology. The free webinar will be taking place from 4:00 5:00 pm ET. For more information about this webinar and to register, click here. Lisa Ellman chairs the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) practice group at the global law firm Hogan Lovells, a group dedicated to helping businesses succeed in the dynamic drone marketplace. She co-founded and co-leads the Commercial Drone Alliance, an independent 501c6 non-profit lead by key figures of the commercial drone industry. Lisa is widely recognized as one of the worlds foremost authorities on drone and law. Throughout her career her focus has been on expanding the commercial drone industry. Gretchen West has served the unmanned systems industry for more than a decade and is an industry-leading advocate for commercial robotics. She is currently a Senior Advisor with the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) practice group for Hogan Lovells, a global law firm, where she focuses on innovation and technology to help clients navigate business and market entry strategies, find value-added capabilities to ensure successful operations, and understand the regulatory environment and associated challenges. She is also the Co-Executive Director of the Commercial Drone Alliance. Both Lisa and Gretchen are founding members of Women of Commercial Drones, which is dedicated to supporting women interested in careers in drones and technology and fostering younger generations of women and girls to become active in STEM. Regulation is still top of mind for the companies that are looking to operate beyond Part 107, said Lisa Ellman. "We have a long way to go when it comes to future rulemakings that enable expanded operations, but theres a lot that can be done right now, which we look forward to discussing during this webinar." Gretchen West added, "In certain industries, Part 107 enabled the types of operations that are needed, but there are other industries where they really need to operate at night or fly over people or BVLOS, and those operations are restricted by Part 107. Thats why making people aware of these topics early so they can adapt their own business models to accommodate the future of this technology is really important." The Commercial Drone Alliance has cemented a position of leadership in the drone industry with their efforts to enact changes to Section 336, but their practical and proactive work on the Tracking ARC and Remote ID has been just as critical. Im really looking forward to hearing what Gretchen and Lisa have to say about these topics, especially in the context of how these issues will continue to evolve in the lead-up to the Commercial UAV Expo, said Jeremiah Karpowicz, Executive Editor for Commercial UAV News and moderator of the webinar. Full info on this free webinar and registration is available here. Commercial UAV Expo will take place October 1-3 at the Westgate Hotel in Las Vegas. During the three-day event, attendees will hear from Lisa Ellman and Gretchen West as well as Keynote Speakers FAAs Daniel Elwell and DJIs Michael Perry. Other industry expert speakers will represent CNN, California Department of Transportation, North Carolina Department of Transportation, Los Angeles Fire Department, US Bureau of Reclamation US Department of the Interior, San Diego Homeland Security, AT&T, Menlo Park Fire District, Queens University, Renton Police Department and many more. Commercial UAV Expo will also offer multiple keynote presentations, six plenary sessions, eight deep dive vertical industry workshops and Exhibitor Education Theaters as well as robust exhibit hall and several networking events. For a preliminary list of speakers and a program overview, visit https://www.expouav.com/conference-information/. Full event information can be found at http://www.expouav.com. Registration is open for the 4th Annual Commercial UAV Expo at https://xpressreg.net/register/uava1018/attendee/reginfo.asp?sc=206539 . About Commercial UAV Expo Americas Commercial UAV Expo Americas, presented by Commercial UAV News, is a conference and exhibition exclusively focused on the commercial drone market covering industries including Surveying & Mapping; Civil Infrastructure; Aggregates & Mining; Construction; Process, Power & Utilities; Precision Agriculture; Law Enforcement, Emergency Response and Search & Rescue (SAR). The fourth annual Americas event is taking place October 1-3, 2018 in Las Vegas. Commercial UAV Expo Europe in will take place in Amsterdam 8-10 April 2019. For more information, visit http://www.expouav.com and http://www.expouav.com/europe or email info@expouav.com. The events are organized Diversified Communications, a leading organizer of conferences, trade shows and online media with 15 years in the geospatial arena, including Commercial UAV Expo Americas, Commercial UAV Europe, Commercial UAV News, SPAR 3D Expo & Conference, SPAR3D.com, AECNext Technology Expo & Conference, AEC Next News and International LiDAR Mapping Forum. http://www.divcom.com With the recent close of the Ziegler LinkAge Fund II, L.P.,...the timing is perfect for our inaugural symposium...The limited partners will have the opportunity to review our investments, network with fellow limited partners, and meet with the fund's management team. Ziegler, a national specialty investment bank, and LinkAge Ventures, Inc. (LinkAge), a venture firm focused on investing in leading companies that provide products, services and technology to the aging marketplace, announced today the inaugural Ziegler LinkAge Fund Symposium on Wednesday, July 25, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Zieglers brand new corporate headquarters, located at One North Wacker in Chicago. This event is exclusive to limited partners in the Ziegler LinkAge Fund family who will have the opportunity to hear the latest updates about the Ziegler LinkAge Funds, which target companies that are improving the aging experience through innovative products and services, and to network both amongst themselves and with representatives from companies in the portfolio. John Hopper, Chief Investment Officer, stated, With the recent close of the Ziegler LinkAge Fund II, L.P., the second fund in the Ziegler LinkAge fund family, the timing is perfect for our inaugural symposium. Hopper continued, The limited partners will have the opportunity to review our investments, network with fellow limited partners, and meet with the fund's management team. Neil Borg, Senior Managing Director of Ziegler, stated, Aggregating the expertise and resources of the limited partners and the funds management team, will enable us to collectively push forward innovative healthcare strategies for the aging population. Borg continued, Between the engaging agenda, expert speakers and transformative companies, this symposium will foster a day of learning and growing for everyone involved. The opening session sets the stage for a robust day of thought leadership, attendee networking and fostering connections to introduce companies with targeted solutions to address provider challenges. During the general session, fund advisors and representatives from both LinkAge and Ziegler will provide updates on the performance of the two funds, investments to-date, and key observations from the field. Attendees can then participate in multiple breakout sessions, including, but not limited to: Navigating Managed Care Consumer-Facing Technologies for Older Adults Telemedicine in Senior Living & Post-Acute Settings Utilizing Technology to Address Labor & Workforce Challenges Technology-Enabled Solutions to Improve Care Coordination & Engagement We are thrilled to host our first Annual Ziegler LinkAge Fund One-Day Symposium, at our new corporate headquarters. Our symposium will not only share information about our investments to-date, but spark discussions on how to bring new services and solutions to seniors as well as improve the overall aging and healthcare experience, said Dan Hermann, President & CEO at Ziegler. Hermann continued, The national breadth and magnitude of the limited partners supporting this fund as well as our team of experts, creates a truly unique conglomerate in the healthcare and senior living space. For more information about Ziegler and the First Annual Ziegler LinkAge Fund Symposium, please visit us at http://www.ziegler.com. About Ziegler: Ziegler is a privately held investment bank, capital markets and proprietary investments firm. Specializing in the healthcare, senior living and education sectors, as well as general municipal and structured finance, enables Ziegler to generate a positive impact on the clients and communities it serves. Headquartered in Chicago with regional and branch offices throughout the United States, Ziegler provides its clients with capital raising, strategic advisory services, equity and fixed income sales & trading and research. To learn more, visit http://www.ziegler.com. About LinkAge Ventures: LinkAge Ventures leverages deep consumer insights to identify and invest in the aging services of tomorrowproviding you the foresight required to ignite future growth in a competitive marketplace. Our team provides resources, expertise and relationships that seek to deliver above-average investment returns, and help establish a differentiated position for long-term success. To learn more visit http://www.LinkageConnect.com Certain comments in this news release represent forward-looking statements made pursuant to the provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. This clients experience may not be representative of the experience of other clients, nor is it indicative of future performance or success. The forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, in particular, the overall financial health of the securities industry, the strength of the healthcare sector of the U.S. economy and the municipal securities marketplace, the ability of the Company to underwrite and distribute securities, the outcome of pending litigation and the ability to attract and retain qualified employees. # # # Welcome Guest! You Are Here: Former Deputy Finance Minister, Cassiel Ato Forson has reacted to Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia over his take on depreciation of Ghanas Cedi. On Sunday, June 17, 2018 Dr Bawumia had said former President John Mahamas recent taunts of the Akufo-Addo government as far as the strength of the cedi is concerned sadly demonstrates his lack of understanding on key aspects of the economy. These are the 3 things we learnt from Forsons response 1. Forson says Ghanas VP poorly handled Cedis exchange rate In his statement, Forson says Vice President Bawumia merely sought to defend his poor handling of the exchange rate of the cedi leading to a free fall of the local currency. The Vice-President cuts the figure of a man who talks more than he delivers and who when found out chooses bluster over sobriety and reflection. His claims to better fundamentals expose his lack of candour." Only pedestrian propaganda could have informed the vice-presidents decision to compare 15 months of the government he is part of and 8 years of previous governments. Suffice it to say that at least since the early 2000s Dr Bawumia had part of the Bank of Ghana team whose duty it was to ensure stability in the currency. 2. Forson schools Bawumia on currency appreciation Attacking the VPs comments on the Cedi appreciation and depreciation, Forson takes a swipe at the second man in Ghana. To determine the accurate rate of depreciation or appreciation, the current rate is subtracted from the previous rate and the answer divided by the current rate which is the multiplied by 100 [(Previous Rate-Current Rate)/Current Rate] x 100. If Dr Bawumia was minded to do an accurate and honest calculation, the respective percentage of depreciation would have been 41.6 percent under President Kufour; 71.4% under Mills/Mahama; and 6.6% for the 15 months of the Akufo Addo/Bawumia government. These figures are significantly lower than the 72%, 247% and 7% quoted by Dr Bawumia in his statement. 3. Ghanas forex depends on exogenous and endogenous factors Forson also said it is worthy that all Ghanaians understand what Ghanas forex depends on and why it escaped from plunging into recession when President Akufo-Addo took over reins of the country. We wish to remind the self-styled astute economist that, unlike some major SSA countries, Ghana was able to avoid a recession, giving the current administration a head-start. It is obvious from the foregoing that it is rather Dr. Bawumia who has shown a lack of understanding about the factors that cause volatility in the forex markets. Otherwise, he would not have made the statement that he had arrested the cedi in the inchoate stages of this government. It is universally known that forex market stability in Ghana to a large extent depends on exogenous factors (and of course other endogenous factors) such as commodity price shocks, uncertainty in the financial markets, global financing conditions, energy shocks and its impact on crude oil imports, as well as other fiscal pressures. Thus, in years such as 2008, 2013, and 2014 when such exogenous factors were pronounced, the forex market became volatile and unstable. The solution therefore is to work on our resilience to such shocks and to build the necessary buffers to absorb such shocks (as we did with substantive measures that he opposed), not through borrowing or through issuance of sovereign bonds that are channeled into consumption, not investments! Presbyterian Boys, Legon will clash with arch rivals, Mfantsipim School and KNUST SHS in the first quarterfinal contest on Thursday, June 28, 2018. This contest is regarded as one between the Greater Accra, Central and Ashanti Regions of Ghana. KNUST SHS sealed their qualification just by a point ahead of their closest contender in a nerve-wracking one-eighth competition. In 2016, they ousted Presec, Legon, five-time NSMQ record holders in the one-eighth stage and will be looking forward to replicating same performance at the quarterfinals this year. Mfantsipim School, two-time champions, will also want to win their next contest and progress to the semis all in the hope of increasing their tally of trophies. They last won it 2014 after beating GSTS and St. Francis Xavier Junior Seminary at the grand finale. Last year, their campaign was cut short by reigning champions, Prempeh College at the semifinals. Presec, Legon on the other hand, is the most successful school at the National Science & Maths Quiz with an impressive five (5) trophies to their credit. As they prepare to commemorate their 80 anniversary, they will be yearning to lifting it once more to spice up their celebrations and to end their nine years trophy-drought. The stakes are high and the 27 quarterfinalists will not only be looking forward to beating their competitors but with higher scores to increase their cash prize from Ghana Commercial Bank, Sponsors of the Money Zone. The YOLO actress has been in the news in recent times after her alleged breakup with her boyfriend. Fella Makafui began to trend even more after a leaked sex tape began circulating on social media with certain quarters alleging she was the lady in the video. However, in a strong-worded statement through her management, the actress denied being the lady in the leaked sex tape. The Lady in the said video has a tattoo at the back of her waist. Which obviously doesnt make her FELLA MAKAFUI who has no tattoo at the back of her waist. The Lady In the Video has no face and an indeed alleged angry boyfriend would have released a sex tape with FELLA MAKAFUIs Face to achieve his aim of destroying her rather than this faceless young lady who they might have thought have her back and shape like FELLA MAKAFUI but tried as much as possible to cover the ladys tattoo with their logo in the video, sections of the statement read. The statement added: The Man In the video who is Alleged to be the Ex-boyfriend of FELLA MAKAFUI indeed clearly shows the calculated efforts of evil-minded persons to just destroy the hard-won reputation of her because as a matter of records FELLA MAKAFUI has not had any relationship with any man who looked like the man in the video. And Close Friends Of Actress FELLA MAKAFUI can bear true witness to this fact. We are very much informed on the efforts made by some people to run down the personality of hardworking FELLA MAKAFUI and that they will do anything to destroy her brand. First it was her Angry boyfriend closing her shop, then it came to Angry sugar daddy [sponsor] closing her shop and now a fake sex tape. Deputy Regional Commander Jacob Mtevesi confirmed the prison break to the media, saying: We received information from the prison head in Malindi that two prisoners had escaped mysteriously as they were taking their working duties in the farms. I am also shocked how the two managed to escape from the tight security that was guarding them in the daylight, its still not clear to me. The prison boss said his outfit is relying on collaboration from the public to rearrest the prisoners whose sentences are reported to have almost elapsed and were expected to be released soon. READ MORE: Drinking bar operator in prison for excessive noise making Jacob Mtevesi said: As we carry out our investigations, we want to call upon the public coming across this information to assist us with any information of the whereabouts of these two prisoners, they are a threat to the community. Meanwhile, as the prison authority makes efforts to trace the whereabouts of the two criminals, Tuko.co.ke claimed to have received a text message from them which sought to give explanation for their escape. They alleged that mistreatment at the hands of prison officers compelled them to run away. The text reads: Juzi kuna wenzetu waligoma wakenda kuwatoa nguo uchi wa mnyama wakawapiga sana baada ya kujua kua waliambia wanahabari, (few days ago our colleagues went on strike, the (officers) went and undressed them and begun beating them after they discovered that information had already leaked to the media)" The escaped prisoners have been identified as Jacob Tembo Deche from Kaloleni who was serving 15 years and Karisa Kahindi Katanan who was also serving a 10 year prison. A subway train decorated with beautiful ancient Chinese cultural elements debuted in Xian, west Chinas Shaanxi province on June 18, according to local media. The interior of the carriages are decorated with poems and Chinese paintings created in the Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.) carrying the rich historical and cultural atmosphere of Xian (previously Changan), the ancient capital of the Tang dynasty. A total of six carriages are decorated, showing various splendid aspects of the ancient Changan, including prosperity and poetry. At the invitation of the subway operator, a great number of people participated in the launching ceremony by dressing in traditional costumes of the Tang dynasty. Within two hours of the launch, videos of the special train had been viewed over 10 million times. The phone of the CEO of Obengfo Hospital was also seized. Her Worship Efua Sackey before the court hearing the case of the Republic vs Dominic Obeng Andoh ordered the Court Warrant Officer (CWO) to seize the phones of all journalists before she will hear the case. READ MORE: CEO of Obengfo Hospital charged with murder The phones of court correspondents of Accra-based FM's Ama Brako Ampofo, Ghanaian Times reporter Malik Suleiman, Publisher newspaper Jeffrey De-Graft Johnson, and reporter of EIB Network, Wilberforce Asare were detained by the CWO for an hour. After the court sitting, the journalists expressed their disgust about her orders. It said the former NDC leader never squandered such an amount purported to have come from the EO Group. The statement also impugned the integrity of President Akufo-Addo by saying: Former President Mahama, unlike President Nana Akufo-Addo, is incorruptible. He, therefore, welcomes the said petition and expects the Special Prosecutor who the petitioners claim is the originator and source of the false and dubious claims, to expeditiously commence its work. Yesterday, the former President was cited in a petition to investigate the use of the funds by a civil society group to the Special Prosecutor Martin Amidu. Speaking on Accra-based Adom FM, Mr Agbodza explained that this is because the Akufo-Addo-led government has channeled all its resources into the Free SHS policy thereby relegating all other developmental projects to the background. His comment follows the flooding which occurred in some parts of Accra after a heavy downpour on Monday night that has caused havoc the homes of many. Already, low-lying areas in Accra and the Central Region have witnessed devastating flooding as many residents are displaced with properties destroyed. Meanwhile, meteorologists are warning of more rains accompanied by strong winds in the next couple of weeks and have warned those living in flood-prone areas to move out. Some believe that the government is doing its best to avert this seasonal situation. READ ALSO: NDC MP to resign from Parliament However, Mr Agbodza insists that the government is to blame for the flooding in Accra. He stated that the government has allocated GH1.2 billion for free SHS and only allocated GH600,000 to the Works and Housing Ministry to tackle drainage problems in the country. Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected! In March, at a major summit in Beijing, he called for calmer heads to prevail between the worlds two most powerful countries. In a trade and technology showdown between the United States and China, Apple and Cook have a lot to lose. With 41 stores and hundreds of millions of iPhones sold in the country, there is arguably no U.S. company in China as successful, as high-profile and with as big a target on its back. Since he took over Apple from its co-founder, Steve Jobs, in 2011, questions about whether Cook, 57, could re-create the magic that led to the iPod and iPhone have persisted. For Cook, the analogous breakthrough and potentially his legacy as the heir to Jobs has come not from a gadget, but from a geography: China. Under Cooks leadership, Apples business in China grew from a fledgling success to an empire with annual revenues of around $50 billion just a bit under a quarter of what the company takes in worldwide. He did this while China was tightening internet controls and shutting out other U.S. tech giants. Now, with the Trump administration saying Friday that it would move ahead with tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese products, and China having threatened retaliation, Apple is stuck in the middle. The Trump administration has told Cook that it would not place tariffs on iPhones, which are assembled in China, according to a person familiar with the talks who declined to speak on the record for fear of upsetting negotiations. But Apple is worried China will retaliate in ways that hamstring its business, according to three people close to Apple who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Apple fears the Chinese-bureaucracy machine is going to kick in, meaning the Chinese government could cause delays in its supply chain and increase scrutiny of its products under the guise of national-security concerns, according to one person close to the company. Apple has faced such retaliation before, another person said, and Reuters reported Ford vehicles are already facing delays at Chinese ports. There is also concern that Apple could face reprisals for legal and regulatory efforts in Washington that have made it difficult for the Chinese tech giant Huawei to sell its phones and telecom equipment in the United States. Apple executives and lobbyists in Beijing and Washington, led by Cook, have been trying to work both sides. They have fostered close ties to the administration of the countrys leader, Xi Jinping, an effort called Red Apple by employees at Apples manufacturing partner Foxconn, after the official color of the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, Cook has been pleading with the Trump White House to understand that a trade war is bad for the economy and bad for Apple. Cook, who knows a bit of Mandarin, has attended Chinas most important political events in a critical year for Xi. Days after a Chinese Communist Party congress wrote Xis ideas and name into the constitution, elevating him to the same status as Mao Zedong, Cook joined a small group of U.S. and Chinese executives for a meeting where Xi lectured about innovation and reform. Later, Cook attended Chinas World Internet Conference, an effort by Beijing to create a Davos-like conference for technology. There he met Wang Huning, a new member of Chinas standing committee the partys top leadership group and an ideological force behind Chinas deepening authoritarianism. In March, just after an annual meeting of Chinas rubber-stamp Parliament formally abolished presidential term limits, Cook attended a major summit that brings together Chinese policymakers and corporate leaders. Cook has long defended Apples presence in China as a way to help change the country from the inside. Each country in the world decides their laws and their regulations. And so your choice is: Do you participate, or do you stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be? he said at a Fortune event in China in December. You get in the arena, because nothing ever changes from the sideline. Cook has also put in time in the halls of power in Washington. Last month, he visited the White House to meet with Trump and his top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow. Cook began by applauding new corporate-tax rules and reminded Trump that Apple said it would contribute $350 billion to the U.S. economy over the next five years, according to two people familiar with what Cook said. Then Cook switched to explaining why he thought a trade war would reverse the new tax laws progress, the people said. Cook told the president that tariffs were effectively a tax on consumers and that the trade deficit with China is inflated because of flaws in how it is calculated, one of the people said. He was very helpful in making some suggestions, and I might also add he loves the tax cut and tax reform, Kudlow said on CNBC shortly after the meeting. He says Apple is going to be building plants, campuses, adding jobs, lots of business investment. That was the first point he made to President Trump. Trump has also told crowds this year that Apple planned to build multiple factories in the United States. Apple has no plans to do so and has not publicly corrected him. Cook has found Cabinet members more accessible in the Trump administration than the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the talks, and he has seen eye to eye with Kudlow, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and, on some issues, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. He has met with Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, but they tend to disagree on trade issues, this person said, and he has avoided engaging with perhaps the administrations most hawkish member on trade, Peter Navarro, a top adviser to the president. Cook still sees an opening to engage on the trade issue because of disagreement inside the White House, and he doubts that a trade war or Chinese retaliation against Apple ultimately will happen, this person said. Hes willing to put a brave face on and work with the Trump administration because they probably have more at stake than any other tech company when it comes to China and the tariffs, said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst and partner at the investment firm Loup Ventures. The specter of Chinese retaliation against Apple has increased since the administration targeted the Chinese tech company ZTE for breaking U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea. But the administration backed away from stiffer penalties this month and said it would fine ZTE $1 billion and install a compliance team picked by the United States. Other measures targeting Chinas larger telecom champion, Huawei, could lead to new strains. Indeed, congressional pressure this year appeared to quash a deal in which AT&T would sell Huawei phones in America. Apple, meanwhile, has a deal with Chinas biggest telecom company, China Mobile, giving it a direct channel to nearly 900 million subscribers in China. The competition to sell smartphones in the country has become increasingly intense, with a number of other Chinese companies also offering high-end but usually lower-priced phones. Cooks frequent visits to China are part of Apples increased efforts to court Chinas leadership, started in 2016 after the country suddenly removed Apples iTunes Movies and iBooks Store there. Apple set up two research-and-development centers in China, made a $1 billion investment in the Chinese ride-sharing company Didi Chuxing, and created a new position, head of China, that reports directly to Cook. The company appointed Isabel Ge Mahe, who was born in China, to the role. Apple also complied with Chinese orders to store its data on Chinese-run servers and to pull certain apps from its App Store, including The New York Times app and many that allowed Chinese users to get around censorship that blocks sites like Facebook and Twitter. The company has reason to fear retaliation. In 2014, the Obama administration indicted five Chinese military hackers, stoking tensions already high from leaks about U.S. surveillance from the former government contractor Edward Snowden. Months later, Chinese regulators delayed approvals of the iPhone 6 for additional security reviews. Apple executives perceived the moves as retaliation, said people familiar with the matter, which has not been previously reported. Apples primary leverage with the Chinese government is Chinese consumers love for Apple products, said Dean Garfield, head of the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group that represents Apple and other tech companies. However, Garfield added, Chinese consumers would also love Facebook and Google, two products blocked in China. There are limits, he said. Xi and the National Party will do whats in their interest. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. He is one of the well-known Nigerian billionaires across Africa and the world. As at 2015 record, he had an estimated net worth of $700 million and one of the Nigerian billionaires in the financial institutions, according to Forbes magazine. Also READ: 6 things Tony Elumelu told Linkedin CEO and World Bank President on Digital Economy Business Insider Sub-Saharan African looks at how he makes and spends his money: How he makes his billionaires 1. United Bank for Africa with subsidiaries in over 20 African nations and in the United States and the United Kingdom 2. Transcorp - Transnational Corporation of Nigeria Plc, a diversified conglomerate in the country. 3. Heirs Holdings is the African proprietary investment company with interests in financial services, power, oil & gas, real estate, hospitality and healthcare. 4. Stake in Nigeria's largest telecommunication network, MTN Nigeria and other assets and investments. How he spends his money Humanitarian work He provides million dollars in seed grant to thousands of proto-entrepreneurs every year through his foundation. Since the launch in 2010, the Tony Elumelu Foundation Entrepreneurship Programme has become one of the largest African philanthropic initiative devoted to entrepreneurship with about $100 million commitment, to identify and empower 10,000 African entrepreneurs, create a million jobs, and add $10 billion in revenues to Africas economy. He was part of the Presidential Committee on Flood Relief and Rehabilitation for the 2012 flood victims in Nigeria. In 2017, he donated $250,000 on behalf of the Tony Elumelu Foundation and another $250,000 on behalf of the staff, management and Directors of United Bank for Africa (UBA) as emergency aid grants for victims of the mudslides in Sierra Leone. He also disclosed via his official social media account same year that he already donated N1 billion to help victims of the Boko Haram insurgency in the North-east, Nigeria. Lifestyle He attends shows, events and travel across African countries, teaching his philosophy if Africapitalism to entrepreneurs, business leaders and policymakers. Africa's richest man, Aliko Dangote has called on Nigerians to support worthy cause to help ameliorate the pains and sufferings of people affected by unrest in the North-Eastern, Nigeria. This is coming as the Aliko Dangote Foundation on Monday, June 18, 2018, inaugurated a village (Dangote Village) built for the Internally Displaced Persons in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital. In a statement released on Monday, June 18, 2018. The Foundation said the Dangote Village is a self-sufficient set of 200 housing units worth N2 billion, with school, hospital, irrigation farms and poultry farms, among others, to enable the occupants to eke out a livelihood. The statement added that Dangote also gave each of the beneficiaries N100,000 to start a new life. Aliko Dangote, speaking during the inauguration, said about N7 billion had been donated by the foundation to support displaced persons affected by the Boko Haram crisis in the North-East. On his Twitter account, Dangote called on other well-meaning Nigerians to support this worthy cause and help ameliorate the pains and sufferings of people affected by unrest in the North-East. He said, It gives me great joy to commission 200 housing units built by Aliko Dangote Foundation for IDPs; each unit specially built to house a family and with the provision of tools by Borno State Govt. to sustain their livelihood, I am positive we are on the right path towards achieving our goal. We have consistently supported state governments in improving lives of IDPs affected by unrest across the North-East and we are committed to sustaining our effort until they are properly re-integrated into the society and are able to resume their normal productive lives. Aside from the N100,000 given to each of the IDP beneficiaries, Dangote also pledged that the foundation would take care of teachers emolument for five years and share in the burden of the ongoing educational revolution launched by the Borno State Governor, Kashim Shettima. He commended the governor for running the state efficiently and paying workers salaries despite the security challenges in the state. In his words, Governor Shettima said the intervention by the Aliko Dangote Foundation was unprecedented and gargantuan by a single organisation, describing the foundation as the fourth arm of government in the state. The governor described the Dangote Group as the single largest employer of labour outside the government in Nigeria. Last month, the Aliko Dangote Foundation flagged off its one-off and unconditional micro-grants programme in Niger State with 25,000 disadvantaged women as beneficiaries bringing the total number of women beneficiaries to 256,500 across seven states of the federation. Brian Gitta, a 24-year-old Ugandan software engineer has won 25,000 (124 million Ugandan shillings) in the fourth Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation. Gitta is the first Ugandan to win the prestigious Africa Prize and the youngest winner to date. Gitta and his team developed Matibabu, a device which tests for malaria without drawing blood. Matibabu, which means medical centre in Swahili, is a low-cost, reusable device that clips onto a patients finger, requiring no specialist expertise to operate. The results are available within one minute on a mobile phone that is linked to the device. At an awards ceremony in Nairobi, Kenya, last week, four finalists from across sub-Saharan Africa delivered presentations, before Africa Prize judges and a live audience voted for the most promising engineering innovation. Rebecca Enonchong, Africa Prize judge, said; We are very proud of this years winner. Its a perfect example of how engineering can unlock development in this case by improving healthcare. Matibabu is simply a game changer, she said. Apart from Gitta, the three runners-up selected winning 10,000 each were Ifediora Ugochukwu from Nigeria for iMeter, an intelligent metering system that gives Nigerian users transparency and control over their electricity supply. Collins Saguru, a Zimbabwean working in South Africa, for AltMet, a low-cost, environmentally friendly method for recovering precious metals from car parts and Michael Asante-Afrifa, from Ghana for Science Set, a mini science lab that contains specially developed materials for experiments. Gitta commented: We are incredibly honoured to win the Africa Prize its such a big achievement for us because it means that we can better manage production in order to scale clinical trials and prove ourselves to regulators. The recognition will help us open up partnership opportunities which is what we need most at the moment. In 2017, 27-year-old Nigerian systems engineer, Godwin Benson, who designed Tuteria, an online platform that links students to qualified tutors in their area and within their budget, won the third edition of the Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation. The Vice-Chancellor of the university, Prof. Victor Peretomode in an interview cited inadequate funding and lack of lecturers as two major reasons the institution may stop to exist anytime soon. Peretomode regretted that the university was far from attaining standard infrastructure, including adequate lecturers. According to Daily Post, there is an acute shortage of lecturers in the Department of Medicine and Surgery, Nursing, Engineering, Pharmacy, English and Foundations of Education. The VC, therefore, pleaded with the state Governor, Ifeanyi Okowa to approve the universitys request for more funding by boosting the financial allocation accruing to the institution. ALSO READ: FG finally scraps HND certificate in Polytechnics Funding has remained the universitys biggest challenges. It affects everything, including adequate staffing. We dont have lecturers; we need more lecturers. The university might go into extinction if there are no measure to address the infrastructural decay. The university needs a lot for a befitting standard, hence we appealed to Governor Okowa to come to our aid, he said. The Vice-Chancellor of the University said DELSU would have emerged as one of the best and sought-after universities in Nigeria but for its current situation. Six DELSU lecturers dismissed Recall that in 2016, the University Governing Council at its 97th regular meeting recommended the dismissal of six lecturers from the institution for sexual harassment of female students. The deceased Thanyamas Thanamsri, 26, was reportedly murdered alongside her father on Friday, June 15, 2018. According to Metro UK News, the pair were killed during a visit to the hospital on the day. Her husband, 31-year-old Chaiyaporn, reportedly committed suicide with the murder weapon leaving the health facility in a state of chaos. Death is closer than we expect, so, take care of the people you love, reads the caption of a picture posted by Thanyamas Thanamsri. Metro UK confirmed that she had a surgery for kidney, heart and lung failure two weeks before her death. ALSO READ: Lagos lawyer planned alleged husband murder like a movie Husband killed wife and father due to a lack of job An argument between Chaiyaporn and his wife's father, Samphan Thanamsri had reportedly led to the murders. They were at the Nakhon Pathom Hospital when the father-in-law criticised him for not having a job. Two patients were reportedly injured by stray bullets fired by Chaiyaporn. The damaging effect of a 38 pistol caused a flow of blood on the floor of the medical center. There was blood on the floor and a .38 pistol. Two people were dead and another was seriously injured and sent for surgery. Forensic police are gathering all the evidence from the scene and we will review CCTV of the area to discover exactly what happened, says a police rep Lieutenant Colonel Wuttisit Kongsarawat in a report published by Metro UK. ALSO READ: Lady murdered in Abuja home a week after sacking security guard Both physics and history exam papers were leaked on Tuesday to a number of Facebook page specifically designed to share answers for thanawaya amma (high school) final exams, whose results decide the students university courses. This is the latest in a series of exam leaks over the past few weeks. At least four Facebook pages shared the questions and answers of the physics and history examinations online, less than half an hour after the exam began. An education ministry source told Ahram Gate Arabic news website that the two students, both from the Qena governorate, who shared the exam paper online are being reprimanded. All of the officials who were responsible for the students exam room are to be punished for failing to prevent him from having a mobile phone with him during the course of the exam. This is the latest in a string of online leaks since the thanaweya amma exams, which are standardized across the country, started two weeks ago. The questions and answers of the French, English, Arabic language, algebra and solid geometry exams have all been leaked online during the exam, allowing students who managed to smuggle their mobile phones into exam rooms to copy the answers. More than 650,000 students are sitting this year's tests. Over recent years, exam questions and answers for several thanaweya amma subjects have been leaked online, prompting officials to cancel, void or postpone some exams and investigate possible leaks from within the education ministry. Egypt's Parliament approved amendments last year to a law toughening penalties for academic cheating and other exam violations, including publishing exam questions and papers and possessing mobile phones and others wireless devices in examination rooms. Penalties for aiding in exam leaks include hefty fines of EGP 100,000-200,000 and jail terms between two and seven years. Search Keywords: Short link: Instablog9ja reports that the wife and children of one Tochukwu Okwueze were found dead in their home at Akpata Street in Egor local government area of Edo State by neighbours on Tuesday, June 19, 2018. ALSO READ: Pastor killed by generator fume 2 years after fire kill wife, kids Okwueze who also inhaled the fumes has been hospitalised and is reportedly fighting for his life. According to the reports, the family turned on their generator and kept it in their kitchen all through the night. The bodies of the deceased have reportedly been deposited at the morgue while Okwueze has been hospitalised in a private hospital. May the soul of the deceased rest in peace. Widow, 3 children die from generator fume in Lagos It was a sad scene after the body of a 50-year-old widow, Aishat Mohammed Idris and her three children, Gaddafi, 22, Usalaman, 16 and eight-year-old Yusuf, were found dead in their apartment at 4, Adeigbe Street, Igbogbo, Ikorodu, Lagos State. The Nation reports that the victims who were from Kura Local Government Area of Kano State were allegedly killed while sleeping in their apartment by generator fumes on Saturday, May 6, 2017. A family member said that the corpses of the deceased were discovered by one of the widows cousins who visited the family in the morning. "The family just came to Lagos last month. Their father died a few years ago. So, the womans mother who lives abroad, sent money to her nephew in Lagos to rent a house and bring them down. The nephew got the house in Ikorodu, went to Kano and brought Aishat and her three children. They usually exchanged visits. Sometimes they go to his house on Lagos Island, other times he visits them at Igbogbo. So, that Saturday was his turn to visit and he got there in the morning with a teacher for the youngest child. After knocking so many times without response, he started calling the womans phone. It was ringing inside the house but no one was picking. He then went to the back and opened one of the windows. It was when he peeped through that he saw all of them, lying lifeless. He screamed and people started coming out. At first, he wanted to break the door but we told him to go to the police and make a report. So, policemen followed him to the house and they broke the door. Everyone entered inside to see things for themselves. People were crying. There were white substances on their nostrils like foam. Policemen took the photographs of the bodies and the house before they took them away, the relative said. The cousin who found the victims also narrated what happened thus: Its a painful loss for us. It was generator fume that killed them. They put on a generator inside one of the rooms and all of them slept in the parlour. Everywhere was locked and so, they must have inhaled the fume from the generator. I just dont know why they put the generator inside the room. When I got there, I didnt hear generator sound. But when police opened the door, they checked the generator and the fuel in it had finished. It seems the generator went off by itself. But the whole place was smelling of generator fume. I have called my aunt and she said an autopsy should be conducted on the bodies. The police took them to Ikorodu General Hospital mortuary. ALSO READ: Mother, Her 4 Sons Found Dead In Lagos According to the reports, the pair, Adebisi Oriade aka Oh Dollar and his girlfriend, Juliana, were last seen going on a date in late May, and have been missing since then. ALSO READ: Missing woman found dead in well Oriade's car was reportedly found later on with its car doors open but the couple was nowhere to be found. However, the decomposing bodies of Oriade and Juliana were discovered today, June 19, 2018, inside a bush at Oru in Ijebu. Friends have now taken to social media to mourn their loss. May their souls rest in peace. Choir member found dead after leaving home with boyfriend News reports have revealed that a member of the Catholic Biblical Movement of Nigeria (CBMN), has been found dead along the Adikpo expressway in Benue State. The lady identified only as Caroline was reportedly meant to lead the psalm on Palm Sunday, during the Easter celebrations before her untimely death. ALSO READ: Missing student found dead without vital organs Instablog9ja reports that the deceased was found dead after reportedly leaving home with her boyfriend on Wednesday, March 21, 2018. According to the reports, the yet-to-be-identified man is said to have returned to her home to ask if she had arrived. However, the police arrested him after the body of the deceased was found by the roadside, yesterday morning, Friday 23, 2018. Late Caroline was reportedly meant to sing Psalms on Palm Sunday at the St. Francis Catholic Church, Adikpo. According to a statement signed by the Deputy Director of Public Relations, Theatre Command Operation Lafiya Dole, Colonel Onyema Nwachukwu, the IDPs commenced movement to return to their homes on Tuesday, June 19, 2018. The IDPs make up 378 households and are the first batch of IDPs who willingly expressed the desire to return to their communities to resettle and resume their traditional occupation of farming and fishing, as well as other socio-economic activities. While speaking during the flag off of the movement at the IDP Camp, the Theatre Commander Operation Lafiya Dole, Major General Rogers Nicholas, said the desire of the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, has been to ensure that IDPs who are willing to return home are able to, He said that the Theatre Command worked jointly with the Borno State government and the local authorities of Guzamala to ensure that the IDPs could return to a peaceful region, so that they can begin normal lives. He gave an assurance to the returning IDPs that the government will provide adequate protection to ensure that they resettle peacefully into the homes they left behind. He said the Army's Operation Last Hold has been inaugurated to operationally cover the locality and other communities. He further encouraged non-governmental organisations (NGO) and other well-meaning Nigerians to support the returning IDPs with farming implements and other relief materials to enable them settle back quickly into their respective communities. The IDPs are some of the millions of victims who have been displaced by the activities of terrorist group, Boko Haram. Boko Haram menace Since the insurgency of the terrorist group escalated after a 2009 crackdown by the military, Boko Haram, chiefly under Abubakar Shekau'sleadership, has been responsible for the death of over 20,000 people and the displacement of more than 2.5 million scattered across Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps across the country and its neighbours. In Ogbehs words: Our other problem is smuggling. As we speak, They do not eat parboiled rice, they eat white rice, they use their ports to try and damage our economy. I am telling you now because in a few days, you will hear the border has been shut, we are going to shut it to protect you, us and protect our economy. You will start seeing all sorts of negative things on the internet. Ogbeh also said imported rice is poisonous. Some people say they prefer Thai rice because they are very sophisticated, welcome to poison, Ogbeh said. Yet again, the federal governments solution to an age-long problem is simplistic, bizarre and utterly ridiculous. But no one should be in the least bit surprised. I was among the audience at a hotel in Lagos in 2014--days after then candidate Buhari won the APC presidential ticket. During the question and answer session with the APC flagbearer which was moderated by Tolu Ogunlesi, of how he closed the nations land border in the 80s as military leader and ordered the nations central bank to print new currency notes, in order to stop looters from returning home with their loot. If the rice/land border prescription for an economic problem has a de javu ring to it, thats because it is de javu. The illicit business that is smuggling will only receive a shot in the arm if you barricade what is apparently a porous border manned by corrupt Customs and immigration officials. Thats only commonsense. According to the Director General of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI),Mr. Muda Lawal, to stop smuggling of rice, the government only has to ramp up local production of the staple because the problem is a demand and supply one. Sometimes, you solve a problem not just by physically blocking the road and borders but through policies. If you are going to close the border entirely for a product that is just about 2% of the nations GDP, what happens to 98% of the GDP? Lawal asked. Lawal adds that; We have to be more strategic when dealing with economic issues. This is a very simplistic way of dealing with the challenge of smuggling. Smuggling is a symptom of a problem and when you begin to fight a symptom, you cannot solve the problem. You need to identify the cause of the problem. Although, there have been some efforts (by the federal government) to support the production of rice, we are still very far from what the demand is. Theres a demand gap of close to 2.5 to 3 million metric tonnes of rice locally". Command and Control economics never solved a problem. It's like the old joke about the carpenter for whom every problem can be solved with a hammer. Once again, we are putting the cart before the horse. The problem before us is simply driven by market forces. If the federal government claims Nigeria has achieved 95 percent rice sufficiency it doesnt need to worry about imported rice because locally produced, cheaper rice will flood every market in the nation and make imported rice undesirable. The problem is that local rice is still a luxury in Nigeria, it isnt found in every stall and is more expensive than its imported variety. I am a fan of local rice, especially as I hail from a family of rice farmers. All we ate back then in rural Cross River was locally produced rice with its stones and sands. In Lagos, I cant find my beloved pebbled rice to buy and have to wait till December when someone makes the journey to the village. Locally produced rice is tastier and more nutritious, but it isnt sold in the neighbourhood market. Why wont I purchase the imported variety when I feel like a meal of rice and stew or jollof? Buhari's spokesman, Femi Adesina, had told journalists last week that the President will sign the budget this week. The report said the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting this Wednesday may not hold due to the budget signing and Public holidays of Friday and Monday. The Presidency received the appropriation bill from the National Assembly on May 25 after it was signed by the lawmakers. Buhari presented the budget proposal of N8.612 trillion to the lawmakers earlier in 2017 but the National Assembly increased it by N508billion bringing it to N9.12 trillion. ALSO READ: Obasanjo cries out, says Buhari is trying to hang a crime on him While speaking at a media briefing on the federal government's National Livestock Transformation Plan (2018-2027) on Tuesday, June 19, 2018, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh, said the government will now switch to ranching as the most viable option to put an end to the clashes. He is quoted as saying, "Open grazing is no longer viable, that's why we're switching to ranching. We will do everything needed to stop clashes between farmers and herdsmen." He further said, "Marching cattle around is no longer viable. We have to resolve to ranching and ranching in clusters is difficult. We want to assure Nigerians that we want to bring this crisis to an end. These wanton killings have to come to an end." The National Livestock Transformation Plan (NLTP) is a multifaceted intervention plan which, according to the government, will modernise livestock management in the country and help to achieve improved productivity and security. It covers everything from economic investment to humanitarian interventions, conflict resolution, and strengthening of law and order. According to the government, all stakeholders have agreed that ranching is the way forward for the management of livestock in country to help it derive maximum economic benefit and prevent conflicts. A Public Private Partnership (PPP) approach will be deployed in the funding of the ranching plan. Herders/farmers conflict Herders and farmers have clashed for years over the battle for resources as roaming herdsmen tend to graze their cattle on farmlands, leading to tension and sometimes violence that leads to deaths of people on both sides. Ever since herdsmen were blamed for the death of 73 people in attacks launched in Guma and Logo local government areas of Benue State in the opening days of January 2018, hundreds of people have been killed in similar attacks with Taraba and Benue bearing most of the brunt. The federal government has largely blamed the recent escalation of the conflict on the anti-open grazing laws of both states and the Minister of Defence, Mansur Dan Ali, recently called for a suspension of the implementation of the laws to reduce tension. According to a report by Vanguard, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, led officials, including Nigeria's High Commissioner to the UK, Justice George Oguntade, to the meeting which took place in London on Monday, June 18, 2018. Malami said the MoU will be signed by all concerned parties at a final meeting set to take place in July. The AGF told Vanguard, "At our meeting in London today, we reviewed the MoU to be signed by Nigeria, US, UK and Jersey and made collective input into it so that at our next and final meeting in July we can sign the document and agree on the final draw down of the money. "Indeed, Nigeria has made tremendous progress regarding the repatriation of the cash. Right now, the case filed by a Nigerian lawyer claiming to be entitled to a huge percentage of the amount from the Abacha loot has been dismissed by the Appeal Court but he can still appeal if he wants to. "But our strong conviction is that the money will be drawn down for the benefit of the country and we are working hard to ensure that it is done as soon as possible by taking the necessary legal and diplomatic steps to deal with it." Malami holds separate meeting over another Abacha loot Vanguard also reported that the AGF left London after the meeting to meet with the Swiss government to discuss the repatriation of another unspecified sum looted by Abacha. This follows the recent repatriation made by the Swiss government to the Nigerian government which the AGF finally confirmed. He said some of the inmates are repatriated to Nigeria upon the completion of their jail terms. The envoy disclosed this in an interview with journalists in Abuja. Pontesilli said, "In Italy we have about 1500 Nigerians in jail for various offences. It is a big number. "We sometimes send them back to Nigeria once they finished their terms because they have not behaved well." But the ambassador refuted the reports that Italy sometimes send Nigerian migrants from Italy to Libya. "Never, we never sent anyone not even one single person to Libya. Some Nigerians are stuck in Libya because they were never able to cross over to Italy, but all those who went to Italy no one, not even one was ever sent back," he said. "All Nigerians who have reached Italy and are behaving well have no problem. Not one of them not even one has heard of being sent back to Libya. "Thank God the government is doing a lot to repatriate them through chattered flights. Thanks for the help from the European Union and the International Organisation for Migrations that are slowly repatriating them back to Nigeria." ALSO READ: Why are Nigerians overseas involved in scams? Pontesilli noted that the relationship between Italy and Nigeria remains stronger, stronger than ever. adding that Italy had a lot in trying to help Nigeria maintain security and stability. He said, "This to Italy is very important, the stability and the security of Nigeria is our foremost consideration. "We think that without a stable secure country there cannot be development. So thats why we stand strongly behind President Muhammadu Buhari trying to establish a strong, safe and stable Nigeria. "This to us is the number one priority of the country, we are doing all we can to support this". According to a statement by AVM Olatokunbo Adesanya, NAFs Director of Public Relations and Information,the deployment of the artillery EC-135 helicopter is part of efforts aimed at intensifying the fight against armed banditry in Zamfara and environs. The helicopter will operate from the recently constructed helipads at 207 QRG Gusau thereby, enhancing overall operational effectiveness, Adesanya said. Accordingly, the NAF will be better positioned to provide the needed air support to the additional surface forces just deployed by the Defence Headquarters to tackle the security challenges in the State. Other NAF air assets, however, remain available on nearby alternate airfields to add impetus to air operations in the State as might be necessary, he said. He said that AVM Ismaila Kaita, the Air Officer Commanding Special Operations Command of the NAF, also undertook an operational visit to the Unit to obtain firsthand information on the situation and address any possible challenges. The first delegation of Italian tourists arriving in Egypt to retrace the journey of the holy family were received in Egypt on Tuesday by Pope Tawadros II, as a part of the international Christian pilgrimage to the country. "The lands of Egypt were blessed by the journey of the holy family and the presence of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt since the first century," the Pope said, stressing the significance of the countrys role in the history of humanity and describing the Egyptian Orthodox Church as an extension of Pharoanic civilization. According to the Bible, Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt with the infant Jesus to escape King Herods persecution. The pilgrimage route in Egypt includes 25 sites, from Sinai in the east to Upper Egypt's Assiut in the south. Egypt's Ministry of Tourism says eight locations have been developed as key stops in the pilgrimage tour, including the tree of the Virgin Mary in Cairo's Matariya suburb, the churches of Coptic Cairo, and the Monastery of Saint Pishoy in Wadi El Natrun in the desert northwest of Cairo. The Pope wished the Italian delegation of pilgrims a happy and comfortable stay in Egypt, the land of peace and love, hoping they obtain blessings from its sacred sites. The visit of the Italian delegation to retrace the journey of the holy family in Egypt is set to continue until 21 June. Last October, Vatican Pope Francis blessed an icon depicting the Holy Family in Egypt, to revive pilgrimage to the country from the international Christian community. The accreditation of the pilgrimage route in Egypt is expected to aid efforts to revive Egyptian tourism, a main pillar of the country's economy and a key source of hard currency, which has been hard hit by years of political turmoil since the 2011 revolution. Pope Francis visited Egypt in April 2017, the first Roman Catholic pontiff to do so since Pope John Paul II in 2000. Search Keywords: Short link: In a statement signed by the command's Public Relations Officer, DSP Edet Okon, he noted that the terrorists had tried to enter the town heavily armed in 11 gun trucks before they were fought off. He said, "Police personnel deployed to the area alongside troops of the Nigerian Military engaged the terrorists and promptly repelled the attack. There was no casualty on the side of the police. "Meanwhile, reinforcement has been mobilised and deployed to the town. Further development will be communicated to the press in due course." The army is yet to issue a statement on the failed attack by the terrorist group. Boko Haram kills 43 during Eid celebrations The group has been notorious for its numerous attacks over the past few months and has been blamed for the death of 43 people in a twin suicide bomb attack that ripped through the town of Damboa in Borno State on Saturday, June 16. The victims were reported to be returning from celebrating the Eid el-Fitrholiday when two suicide bombers detonated their explosives in Shuwari and nearby Abachari neighbourhoods in the town around 10:45 pm. The Presidents Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Malam Garba Shehu, in a statement in Abuja on Monday, said President Buharis condolence was delivered through Gov. Mohammed Abubakar of Bauchi State. He also extended sympathies to the victims and families of devastating windstorm and the fire incidents. Nigerians stand in solidarity with their fellow countrymen in this difficult time as they face the devastation with courage and fortitude. As a fellow human being, I understand your pains and inconveniences as you struggle to pick up the pieces and rebuild your lost houses, schools, markets and places of worship. This is not something you bargained and we are powerless against the fury of nature. On behalf of myself and my administration, my heart goes out to the victims of this disaster and I pray to God to replenish their losses. How did the nPDP become a thing in the politics of Nigeria? The beginning of nPDP On August 31, 2013, seven governors belonging to the PDP, walked out of the special delegates convention of the party in Abuja, in a fit of rage. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar led the seven governors out of the PDP gathering to the Yar'adua center for a press briefing. The governors who staged a walkout on the day were joined by a former chairman of the PDP, Alhaji Abubakar Kawu Baraje and some senators. Senate President Bukola Saraki was among the disenchanted senators. The angry politicians would become known as the new PDP or nPDP. Soon after their walkout, the nPDP members joined the APC and collapsed their respective structures into the political party that would go on to unseat the PDP from the center in 2015. The nPDP is being led today by Baraje and from the look of things, the splinter PDP group didn't fully assimilate into the APC. nPDP cries of marginalisation On April 27, 2018, the nPDP wrote a letter threatening the APC and the presidency. In the letter, the nPDP threatened to pull out of the APC if its grievances arent met. President Buhari was copied in the letter. In the letter, the nPDP said it had been marginalised in the APC and wasnt getting its fair share of federal appointments. Harassment, intimidation and persecution of former new PDP leaders by the government is still an ongoing affair. We do not want to overstate the obvious by cataloguing names of former new PDP stalwarts that are targets of this political pogrom. There is inadequate reflection of programme and policy contributions of members of the former new PDP bloc in the running of the government, their letter read in parts. Osinbajo holds meeting with nPDP On May 28, 2018, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo invited aggrieved members of the nPDP bloc to Aso Rock for peace talks. Those who attended this meeting were Senate President Bukola Saraki, Speaker of the House of Representatives Yakubu Dogara and other chieftains of the party. On Monday, June 4, 2018, the nPDP pulled out of a scheduled second meeting with Osinbajo after the police invited Saraki over for an alleged involvement in the Offa robbery in Kwara which led to the loss of over 33 lives. The nPDP bloc saw the whole Saraki link with the Offa robbery incident, as another attempt by the main APC bloc to humiliate its members. Again, the nPDP threatened to pull out of the governing party. In a statement, the nPDP frowned at latest developments since its meeting with Osinbajo and said it was clear that its previous meeting with the presidency achieved little. While we are truly and earnestly committed to achieving reconciliation, harmony, truce and cohesion in the APC as we approach the 2019 general elections, it appears that the presidency is not interested in the talks and that they may have been negotiating in bad faith, the statement read. APC convention in the midst of crisis The last thing the APC wants at the moment is to head into its national convention of Saturday, June 23, a divided house. The debate in political circles has been over whether President Buhari will engage in one last bout of peace talks with the nPDP faction of the party he leads before he faces a major re-election battle in 2019. But a presidential source told reporters that the president has vowed never to sit down for talks with aggrieved nPDP members of his party. According to the source, the president made his stance known to governors elected on the platform of the APC after a recent meeting. The president told the governors as well as national leaders of the party pointedly to resolve the issues, the source said. The source quoted Buhari as saying: I am not ready to sit down with any faction. If they have problems, they should go to the party. I will not interfere. Governors as party leaders in the states should deal with all issues. Where there is need, the party leadership can come in. I will not get involved. Buhari was said to have commended an earlier meeting between Vice-President Osinbajo and the aggrieved nPDP members and gave his nod that the discussion should continue. The source added that the governors had different takes on the nPDP issue. Some hardline governors asked the president to ignore the nPDP while the majority felt the party and the VP should continue to talk to them, the source said. Shittu had declared his intention to run for governor in the state in 2019 and has accused Ajimobi of being desperate to stop him. But Ajimobi said he has nothing against the minister. He, however, insisted that Shittu does not have the qualities to be a governor. Both Ajimobi and Shiitu are members of the All Progressives Congress (APC). The Governor made the statement while speaking in an interview with Channels Television on Monday, June 18. "He (Shittu) doesnt have what it takes to be a governor. I have been a governor now for seven years. I know the qualities of someone who should be a governor; he doesnt have it. His temperament cannot be that of a governor", Ajimobi said. According to him, a governor must have some sense of decorum and should have proven his expertise in his chosen field. "I was an oil and gas man. I rose to the peak of my career as a managing director," he said, stressing that he did not work for just any company but rose through the ranks to become MD of a subsidiary of Shell Petroleum. "Not only in Nigeria but outside Nigeria. I was chief executive of Shell (Petroleum) companies outside Nigeria," he added. The governor said he does not have anything personal against Shittu, adding that his stance about the minister's incapability to be a governor is just the facts. "If you behave unconventionally and I say you behave unconventionally, is that derogatory? I have nothing against him, to be honest. I just like people to have decorum, I like people with style," he said. When asked if he thought President Muhammadu Buhari would have appointed Shiitu as a minister if he truly lacks leadership qualities, he said the APC in Oyo was against the appointment. "The party didnt support the nomination," he said. ALSO READ: 7 amazing facts you didn't know about Adebayo Shittu The report said Segev was indicted on suspicion of spying for Iran. A statement issued on Monday, June 18, by the Shin Bet security service said Segev, who was Israel's energy minister from 1995 to 1996, "was recruited by Iranian intelligence and served as an agent". According to Reuters, the security service said it discovered that Segev made contact with officials at the Iranian embassy in Nigeria in 2012. Segev was said to have been jailed in Israel in 2004 after being convicted of attempting to smuggle Ecstasy pills. He reportedly left the country in 2007. The former minister, who "visited Iran twice for meetings with his handlers", reportedly received an encrypted communications system from Iranian agents. He was accused of supplying Iran with "information related to the energy sector, security sites in Israel and officials in political and security institutions." ALSO READ: Killings of Palestinians in Gaza spark widespread condemnation of Israel The Shin Bet security service also said that the former Israeli minister introduced some stakeholders in Israel's security sector to Iranian intelligence agents, as businessmen. A video of the attack, filmed by one of the victims on his smartphone, sparked widespread public revulsion as it spread on social media, triggering large street rallies to show solidarity with Jews. The defendant, a 19-year-old Palestinian from Syria, is charged with dangerous assault and hate speech in the trial that was to hear eight witnesses and could reach a verdict the same day. The footage of the April 17 assault shows the attacker, one of a group of three, shouting "yahudi", Jew in Arabic, before lashing out at the two men, leaving one injured. Bild daily identified the belt attacker as Knaan S., who was registered at a refugee home in Brandenburg state outside Berlin but went on to live "out of a suitcase" in the capital. The victim who shot the video, a 21-year-old student, later revealed that he is not Jewish but an Israeli Arab called Adam, who was walking at the time with a German-Moroccan friend aged 24. Adam told public broadcaster Deutsche Welle that they had wanted to test whether wearing a kippa was safe in the fashionable inner Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg. He said he had uploaded the video "for the police, the German people and the world to see how terrible it is these days to walk through Berlin streets as a Jew". 'Eternal responsibility' The attack was the latest to raise alarm bells about renewed anti-Semitism in Germany from both the far-right and a large influx of predominantly Muslim asylum seekers since 2015. The Alternative for Germany party, which captured nearly 13 percent of the vote in September's general election, has broken a taboo by repeatedly challenging Germany's "remembrance culture" and atonement for the Nazi era. Party member Bjoern Hoecke has called Berlin's Holocaust memorial a "monument of shame", and AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland described the Nazi period as little more than a "speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history". The belt attack coincided with another public outcry, over a rap duo who made light of Nazi death camp prisoners but went on to win the music industry's sales-based Echo award, which was subsequently axed. After the belt attack, the head of the Jewish community in Germany, Joseph Schuster, said that Jews should avoid wearing religious symbols in big cities due to a heightened risk of targeted attacks. The advice earned him a rebuke from the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center and the European Jewish Association, whose head Rabbi Margolin argued that to not wear the kippa "fulfils the vision of anti-Semites in Europe". Days after the assault, some 2,000 people rallied at a "Berlin Wears Kippa" solidarity demonstration, matched by smaller events in Cologne, Potsdam, Magdeburg and Erfurt. Chancellor Angela Merkel, in an interview with Israeli television, denounced the emergence of "another form of anti-Semitism" beyond that of right-wing extremist groups, from Muslim refugees. "It is difficult to predict what the next move might be, but the spell has been broken," Afghan political analyst Ghulam Sakhi Ehsani told AFP. "From all the photos and videos, it seems the foot soldiers from both sides are tired of war." In scenes unimaginable only a few days ago, Taliban fighters and security forces long locked in a seemingly intractable conflict were seen hugging and taking selfies together around the country. Civilians, who have borne the brunt of the bloody war, also flocked to greet the insurgents as they entered urban areas that they usually visit only to attack, including the capital Kabul. Fighters on both sides of the conflict expressed hopes for the unprecedented ceasefire to continue. "We have held the ceasefire well so far," Taliban commander Baba told AFP during celebrations in the eastern province of Nangarhar on Saturday. "Everyone is tired of war and if our leaders order us to continue the ceasefire, we will hold it forever," he said. But the sight of its fighters openly mingling with security forces and civilians appeared to alarm the Taliban's leaders, who ordered their men back to their posts. Michael Kugelman, an analyst at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, said the Taliban leadership may have feared that "more days without fighting could convince the rank and file that peace is better than a war". "A little bit of freedom is good but too much, why go to paradise," a Western diplomat told AFP, referring to the virgin angels the Muslim holy book, the Koran, says await good Muslims, especially martyrs, when they die. 'Building block' Two suicide attacks in Nangarhar, both claimed by the Islamic State group -- which was not part of the ceasefire -- marred the otherwise peaceful Eid holiday that follows the holy month of Ramadan. But the fact that the truce held and was welcomed on both sides suggested the "dynamics of this conflict may have changed", Afghanistan Analysts Network co-director Kate Clark told AFP. "Once there's a recognition of common humanity, that everyone is Muslim, that people in the cities were celebrating Eid as in the villages, that it's really nice to have an ice cream with someone, hopefully it becomes more difficult to kill them," she said. Kugelman said the ceasefire had provided "a major building block" for the government's efforts to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban, which have so far failed. "While reconciliation still feels like a remote prospect, it now feels at least a bit more of a possibility," he said. Initial euphoria over the ceasefire quickly turned to disappointment and anger among many Afghans when the Taliban resumed fighting on Monday. While analysts had expected the Taliban to return to the battlefield, some people saw it as a betrayal. "Death to the Taliban and their backers. Once again they have shown that they love shedding the blood of innocent Afghans," Madena Momad posted on Facebook. Hopes for dialogue What comes next in the long conflict is unclear. There has long been secret back-channel dialogue between interlocutors on both sides of the war, and direct talks between Kabul and the Taliban were held in Pakistan in July 2015, but were quickly derailed. Analysts say even if the Taliban could be convinced to give formal talks another try -- they now refuse to negotiate with the Afghan government, which they see as illegitimate -- it could still take years to reach and then implement an agreement. There is no roadmap and neither side appears to be clear on what a post-conflict Afghanistan would actually look like or has identified their "red lines" in talks. President Ashraf Ghani announced over the weekend that the government's eight-day ceasefire, due to expire on Tuesday, would be prolonged for another 10 days. But while Taliban leaders hailed the three-day truce a success and a demonstration of their "full control" over their fighters, they refused Ghani's request for an extension. The government's move may buy the president more time to work out how to keep the momentum going. "Ghani's only option is to keep trying for peace," Kugelman said. "The war can't be won militarily so he'll need to make any and all possible efforts to secure some type of negotiated end to the war." Ghani's February offer of peace talks with the Taliban, considered to be one of the most comprehensive plans ever offered by an Afghan government, was ignored by the militants, which went on to launch their annual spring offensive. The insurgents have repeatedly demanded direct dialogue with the United States, which Washington has refused, and the withdrawal of foreign troops. But last month the Pentagon said that senior Taliban officials have been secretly negotiating with Afghan officials on a possible ceasefire. His death came as Thailand's coup leader-turned-premier Prayut Chan-O-Cha prepares to travel to the United Kingdom and France on a highly-publicised official visit. But the trip will now likely see the former army chief face awkward questions over the use of the death penalty as well as Thailand's wider human rights record since he seized power in a 2014 coup. "We still have the death sentence, we have not cancelled it yet," Tawatchai Thaikaew, deputy permanent secretary at the Justice Ministry, told AFP, adding that the execution on Monday was carried out "according to the law". Thailand's Department of Corrections, which oversees one of the world's largest prison populations, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935, the majority by firing squad. That practice ended on December 11, 2003. Between then and 2009 a further six inmates were executed by lethal injection. Monday's execution serves as a "lesson to deter those who wanted to commit serious crime or violate the law to consider this punishment," the department added in a statement. But rights groups hit out at the sudden resumption of the death penalty, which remains mandatory for a number of offences, including aggravated murder. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Amnesty International said, accusing the kingdom of "reneging" on commitments to move towards abolition of the death penalty. The country is "also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment." Theerasak stabbed his victim 24 times before stealing their mobile phone and wallet, the department said. Figures provided to Amnesty International by the Ministry of Justice show 510 people, including 94 women, were on death row at the end of last year. Nearly 200 had exhausted all final appeals -- like Theerasak. More than half are believed to have been sentenced for drug-related offences. The death penalty is still in practice in several countries in Asia, including Singapore, Indonesia and China, which remains the world's top executioner. The International Federation of Human Rights also condemned the move, calling it a "betrayal". Pumpkin Month At Queens Farm! October is Pumpkin Month at Queens Farm and there were pumpkins as far as the eye could see at the Queens County Farm Museums Pumpkin... 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,... Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi met on Tuesday with the country's newly appointed Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly, Defence Minister Mohamed Zaki and Minister of Transportation Hesham Arafat to discuss a number of domestic issues. Egypt's presidential spokesperson Bassam Rady said the president received a report from Transportation Minister Arafat on the progress of the national roads project, as well as the ongoing efforts to develop road and bridge networks across the country. The minister briefed El-Sisi about developments in Egypt's railway project and the first phase of Cairo's fourth metro line, which is set to extend 42 kilometres from 6 October City in Giza to El-Rehab City on the Cairo-Suez road. Last week, a new cabinet, headed by the PM Madbouly, were sworn in before President El-Sisi. The new cabinet includes 12 new ministers out of a total of 32, including for the ministries of interior and defence, as well as some service ministries. Arafat remained in his post as transportation minister, while Mohamed Zaki replaced Sedqy Sobhi as minister of defence. Search Keywords: Short link: The New Zealand Government is looking to fill a vacancy described as Chief Technology Officer, which boasts a salary of $500,000 per year. Communications Minister Clare Curran rejected more than 60 candidates in the initial search, but said sdhe hopes to fill the role by August. The role would provide advice to the Government on digital issues - this being in addition to the existing Digital Officer. Louis Houlbrooke, spokesperson for the Taxpayers Union, told RadioLIVE that the open position could be just an "expensive tokenism" replica of a current role. Mr Houlbrooke argued that it would be far cheaper to consult with the sector directly and avoid the risk of narrowing the information source down to one person. According to Mr Houlbrooke, it is in the tech sectors best interest to consult with the Government on these issues. The Government has failed to find anyone up to scratch in New Zealand and now need to look overseas. Anyone qualified to earn this type of money in the tech sector is probably simply doing far more exciting things than whatever the New Zealand Government can cook up, Mr Houlbrooke added. Mr Houlbrooke told RadioLIVE that opening a role like such is just done for the sake of appearances. Listen to the full interview with Louis Houlbrooke above. First@Five with James Coleman, 5am - 6am Monday To Friday, on RadioLIVE and streaming live to the rova app on Android and iPhone. RadioLIVE. Maori and Pasifika heads of primary schools are facing racism at work, according to new survey. NZEI Te Rui Roas survey revealed that almost 26 pecent Maori and Pasifika principals, with nearly one-third of them confirming that discrimination is a significant stressor for them. The surveys respondents noted a range of discrimination from micro-aggressions, overtly racist statements about themselves or other Maori through to institutional and systemic racism. What Id like to see is a country where every person spoke te reo Maori. Myles Ferris, Te Akatea (New Zealand Maori Principals Association) president, gave a shocking example where a board member told a new Maori principal we dont go to marae because theyre full of paedophiles. These are some of the things weve identified as whats happening, Mr Ferris told RadioLIVE. While Mr Ferris agreed there should be programmes informing school employees of appropriate communication, he believes the solution will come from education on Maori culture. Every teacher effectively looks after 98 percent of the children in this country. If every teacher took it upon themselves to teach cultural responsiveness, sensitivity, cultural growth and sustainability around te reo Maori, around Maori. Within that generation we could effectively be free of this. This education, according to Mr Ferris, would allow New Zealanders of all races to understand the true nature of Maori. We could have a far better society for all, he told RadioLIVE. NZEI Te Rui Roa has recommended numerous steps to address discrimination including requiring all school Boards of Trustees, school leaders and Ministry of Education and ERO staff to complete a course on racial equality or cultural competency. We look forward to working with the NZEI on addressing issues of discrimination in the education workforce, Iona Holsted, Ministry of Education secretary said in a statement. Nevertheless, Mr Ferris wants to see New Zealand teach its children how to speak te reo Maori, which he explained will help educate everyone on Maori culture and allow non-Maori to take pride in their countrys heritage. What Id like to see is a country where every person spoke te reo Maori. I absolutely believe Maori and non-Maori can get along a whole lot better if that happened. Listen to the full interview with Myles Ferris above. The Long Lunch with Trudi Nelson in for Wendyl Nissen, 12pm - 3pm on RadioLIVE and streaming live to the rova app on Android and iPhone. RadioLIVE. Tonight on Night talk, Mitch Harris throws out some hot new topics, and we hear your views. First up tonight, Mitch looks at public proposals and asks whether or not they are a prime example of virtue signalling. Mitch also takes a look at the current state of the refugee crisis, and discusses the cruelty of separating immigrant children from their parents. He also takes a look at a variety of topics, inlcuding a look at the man Mitch lovingly refers to as "Trumpy". Hitler had some good ideas too. Mitch asks the question "is this Trump's Katrina moment?". The Government has loosened the rules around its proposed overseas buyers' ban on New Zealand property. Some multi-storey apartment buildings are now exempt, and buyers from Singapore and Australia will still be able to buy property. One Property Council expert applauded the move, remarking that the new rules will get more houses and developments built. Changes to the Bill mean foreigners can buy apartments, or in some case buildings off the plans, and keep them. Initially, they were going to have to sell them once they were built. The move means foreign developers can build residential properties of 20 dwellings and rent them out, meaning there will now be the possibility for foreign landlords. Property Council head of advocacy Matt Paterson told The AM Show the changes to the Bill mean more housing will be built. "New Zealand needs more houses and with lower restrictions on development we're actually going to get more houses," he said. Large scale apartment schemes have been having trouble getting off the ground over the past few years and Mr Paterson said this was because selling off the plan was proving difficult. But with the new provisions in the Bill it will now be easier. "It's true that some big housing developments and apartments mostly were struggling to be economically viable and part of that viability is getting presales for the bank to even lend them money to start construction," he said. "There were news headlines over the past year about a number of those apartment buildings not going ahead, this was a real problem." Mr Paterson was thankful for the Government's changes to the Bill and said it was due to realising during the select committee process that the previous provisions were too tight. "This all happened really really quickly, it got tied up in the politics of a hundred days and the whole purpose of select committee is to test out these provisions and work out what the real life situation is," he said. Egypt and Spain concluded on Tuesday joint naval exercises that were held for several days in Egyptian territorial waters in the Mediterranean and Red seas, the Egyptian Armed Forces said in a statement. Several Egyptian naval units including modern naval vessels participated in the exercises, including Mistral helicopter carrier Anwar El-Sadat, an S41 submarine, the Al-Zafer frigate as well as the El-Suez and El-Fateh corvettes. Spain participated with aircraft carrier Juan Carlos I and missile frigate Blas de Lezo. The exercises included drills with live ammunition as well as helicopter support in naval combat. The exercises were concluded with a visit by Spanish naval commander Teodoro Calderon to the Egyptian naval headquarters in Alexandria. Search Keywords: Short link: Health Minister David Clark says the Government has reached its limit for nurses' pay, despite Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters saying the Government could do better. "We've put everything we can on the table," Mr Clark told The AM Show on Tuesday. Nurses voted to discard the latest $500 million pay offer from New Zealand's District Health Boards (DHBs) on Monday, rejecting an offer of a nine percent pay increase over 15 months, and a $2000 one-off lump sum. We've put everything we can on the table. Salary limits would increase for registered nurses with more than five years' experience, meaning some could get increases of about 16 percent. But the union says while the latest offer was a substantial improvement on pay, variability over pay increases has created uncertainty. "We are disappointed that the nurses have voted against this offer. It's the biggest offer in more than a decade - half a billion dollars," said Mr Clark, detailing the Government's plan to continue talks with nurses to see if a better deal for them can be made. "We're a fiscally responsible Government and we've got to allow for the fact that we have things like Mycoplasma bovis coming up, or natural disasters like earthquakes, and we want to make sure that when those events arrive we do have the books in good shape," Mr Clark said. "We've put out what we consider to be a generous offer. The Government came to the table with an additional quarter of a billion dollars after the nurses rejected the first offer which was already more generous than the average offer under the previous Government." Mr Clark blamed underfunding by the previous National Government for building up "frustration" among New Zealand nurses. He said the only way through the current dilemma is to "continue to talk" to the nurses and put a different package together, even though Mr Peters suggested the Government could improve its offer when he told The AM Show on Tuesday: "Could we do better? Possibly." But Mr Clark defended Mr Peters' statement, saying "better doesn't necessarily mean more money, but it may mean that things are shaped differently in that package." "He and I have been talking closely," Mr Clark said of his relationship with Mr Peters. He said the Government has made an effort to meet the concerns of New Zealand nurses, including improving working conditions by increasing the workforce by 10 percent. This was an issue that came out of the independent panel process, he said. "The DHBs and the nurses have both indicated that they want to come to the table and talk through whether there are changes that could be made. We need to hear from the nurses about what would make the offer more acceptable," Mr Clark said. "Nobody's saying that the nurses shouldn't have more money and that's why this is the most generous offer in more than a decade, but we can't fix nine years of underfunding in one pay round and we have made sure that there are things on safety and security." Last week Mr Clark came under fire after Newshub obtained a voicemail which suggested he was trying to gag senior staff talking publicly about the state of embattled Middlemore Hospital. Several buildings at the hospital, located in south Auckland, have serious rot and mould problems, posing health risks to staff and patients. In one voicemail Mr Clark appeared to promise District Health Board member Rabin Rabindran, who he'd sacked, another job if he shut up. But Mr Clark defended the voicemail on The AM Show, saying there was no malice in the phone message and that he didn't stop anyone from speaking publicly on concerns about the hospital. "Mr Rabindran was concerned about his reputation after being moved on when he hadn't been in the job a terribly long time, and I wanted to help make sure that his reputation was preserved," said Mr Clark. "I heard his concerns and one of the suggestions we discussed was whether there was an opportunity for him to go to other roles." "I don't think the public care about the 'he said, she said' - they just want us to get on with fixing the hospital and I see this as something of a distraction from that." Listen to the full interview with Dr David Clark above. The AM Show with Duncan Garner, Amanda Gillies and Mark Richardson, weekdays 6-9am on RadioLIVE and streaming live to the rova app on Android and iPhone. Newshub. This bioreactor in Gifford is scheduled to go online soon. The bioreactor will remove nitrates from the villages wastewater stream. It will be the first municipal-operated one in the state. The quad dormitories on Borman Drive on the former Chanute Air Force Base that are owned by Amerinvest are overgrown with trees and brush. Stairwells on the property have filled with water which has recently been pumped out prompting health concerns. The condition of the property was addressed at last weeks Rantoul Village Board meeting. Articles Sorry, there are no recent results for popular articles. Two Russian brothers get 8 years in prison for $172,000 cyber fraud flickr.com/Surian Soosay 10:59 19/06/2018 MOSCOW, June 19 (RAPSI) Moscows Savelovsky District Court has sentenced brothers Dmitry and Evgeny Popelysh to 8 years in prison each for the 11-million-ruble cyber fraud ($172,000), the courts spokesperson Maria Mikhailova has told RAPSI. The brothers have been found guilty of creating and distributing malicious computer programs, hacking and computer fraud. In addition to prison sentence the men have been fined 900,000 rubles ($14,000 at the current exchange rate). Three other defendants in the case have received prison terms ranging from 4.5 to 6 years and fines of up to 700,000 rubles ($11,000). One more defendant was given a 3-year suspended sentence and released from punishment under the amnesty, Mikhailova said. Defense in turn claimed that the defendants guilt was not proven, and case papers were falsified. As previously reported, the brothers were arrested in St. Petersburg on May 20, 2015. According to law enforcement authorities, they stole bank clients identification data, received access to their accounts and embezzled money. Thus, investigators claim that Dmitry and Evgeny Popelysh along with their accomplices stole about 11 million rubles ($172,000) from 7,000 bank customers accounts. The Popelysh brothers have been earlier convicted of similar crimes. In September 2012, Moscows Chertanovsky District Court gave them a 6-year suspended sentence with a 5-year probation period and fined each brother 450,000 rubles. Investigators maintained that in 2010 the brothers aided and abetted by Alexander Sarbin, as well as some other unidentified individuals, used the QHost computer virus to obtain access to the client information from VTB 24 bank. As a result, 142 bank clients lost around 13 million rubles ($443,000 at then exchange rate). Russian court refuses to recover $21,800 from notorious Yadrovo landfill TASS, Stanislav Krasilnikov 13:59 19/06/2018 MOSCOW, June 19 (RAPSI) The Volokolamsk City Court of the Moscow Region has dismissed a lawsuit filed by residents of the area, who asked to recover 1.4 million rubles ($21,800) in compensation from a company behind notorious Yadrovo landfill, RAPSI correspondent reports from the courtroom. The plaintiffs asked to compensate their moral damages, stop collection and transportation of waste by the company and organize redevelopment measures at the landfill. According to the plaintiffs, the company failed to meet its obligations regarding management of the site and violated their Constitutional right to live in beneficial environment and caused deterioration to the health of local residents. The defendants said that there was no cause and consequence effect between gas emissions and health problems of the plaintiffs, asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit. Local authorities also supported that motion. Earlier, the court dismissed several other lawsuits against the landfill. In March, the Volokalamsk districts authorities initiated emergency protocol and announced measures to liquidate the consequences of ecological violations during exploitation of the landfill. Yadrovo company was fined 150,000 rubles ($2,300) by the Volokolamsk City Court. Egypt's prosecutor-general has announced that the Italian prosecution in Salerno, Italy has agreed to return to Egypt a collection of ancient Egyptian artefacts that were seized by Italian authorities in May as they were being smuggled into the European country. According to a statement by the Egyptian Prosecutor-General Nabil Sadek, a representative of the Egyptian prosecution will travel to Italy to supervise the procedures to return the artefacts. Egypt's Minister of Antiquities Khaled El-Anani has also been tasked by the Supreme Council of Antiquities with travelling to Italy to supervise the delivery of the ancient Egyptian artefacts. In May, Italian authorities seized in Naples a huge collection of artefacts from several countries, including from Egypt. According to officials in Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities, the objects were stolen from illegal excavation sites, as there are no records of the artefacts in Egyptian museums. The artefacts include a collection of pottery from different ancient Egyptian eras, as well as parts of sarcophagi and coins. Also among the artefacts were objects from Islamic Egypt. Search Keywords: Short link: Russian prison guard sentenced to 4 years for beating inmate RIA Novosti, Andrey Stenin 16:15 19/06/2018 MOSCOW, June 19 (RAPSI) The Elista City Court has sentenced a penal colony employee Alexey Mutulov to 4 years in prison for beating an inmate, lawyer Vitaly Zubenko has told RAPSI. The defendant has been also prohibited from serving in penitentiary services for 2.5 years. According to the lawyer, in November 2016, Mutulov, a junior inspector of the penal colonys security department started for no reason beating and strangling a 23-year old inmate. Zubenko reminded that in 2017 the Supreme Court of Kalmykia Republic upheld sentences for 7 employees of the same penal colony, who tortured inmates in 2012 and 2015. One of the victims died in the process. Moscow court upholds detention of alleged gang leader Pichugin RIA Novosti, Vitaly Belousov 17:49 19/06/2018 MOSCOW, June 19 (RAPSI) The Moscow City Court has upheld extended detention for the alleged leader of an organized criminal group Yury Pichugin charged with creation of a gang and weapon trafficking until August 18, the press-service of the court has told RAPSI. In February, Russias Investigative Committee reported that it managed to disrupt activity of an organized criminal group operating in the Komi Republic. According to investigators, in 1994, Pichugin organized a gang, which included athletes, former law enforcement officers and military servicemen. The crime syndicate was involved in racket, large scale embezzlement, robbery, real estate fraud and other crimes, including management of funds transferred to and from prison inmates. Human Rights Council seeks for health protection steps toward Crimean terrorism convict RIA Novosti, Artem Zhitinev 15:35 19/06/2018 MOSCOW, June 19 (RAPSI) - Chairman of the Presidential Council for Human Rights Mikhail Fedotov has requested the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) to take prompt health protection actions toward Ukrainian activist Alexander Kolchenko sentenced to 10 years in Russian prison for plotting terrorist attacks in Crimea, the statement published on the advisory bodys website reads. Fedotov also asked the Chelyabinsk Regions ombudsman Margarita Pavlova to check Kolchenkos confinement conditions, according to the statement. Earlier, Ukraines human rights commissioner Lyudmila Denisova appealed to Fedotov for taking steps necessary to respect Kolchenkos rights. On June 8, Kolchenko decided to end his 7-day hunger strike. After finishing the hunger strike he was placed in a medical unit. His health state was not alarming, according to Pavlova. In August 2015, the North Caucasus District Military Court sentenced Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov to 20 years in prison for organizing a terrorist group in Crimea. His accomplice Kolchenko received 10 years in prison. Two other defendants, Aleksey Cherniy and Gennady Afanasyev were given 7 years in prison each. Investigators found that Sentsov started a terrorist group in Crimea, a branch of the Right Sector movement that is banned in Russia. He was allegedly promoting Crimeas secession from Russia. The Investigative Committee claims that between April and May 2014, the defendants set Crimean NGO, Russian Community, offices on fire in Simferopol and were charged with doing the same at the local United Russia office. The defendants were also charged with attempting to blowup a statue of Lenin in Simferopol on May 9, 2014. According to the Prosecutor Generals Office, Russias Federal Security Service prevented the terrorist group from committing other alleged terrorist activity in May 2014. Two other defendants in this case, Alexei Chirny and Gennady Afanasyev, have been sentenced to seven years each in prison. Sentsov denied all charges against him. He said he had never been a member of the Right Sector and that the investigators had no evidence against him. 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 South Sudan President Salva Kiir will meet with rebel leader Riek Machar in Ethiopia's capital on Wednesday in their first face-to-face in nearly two years, an Ethiopian official said Tuesday. "The two principals will meet in Addis Ababa upon the invitation extended by his excellency, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed," Meles Alem, a spokesman for Ethiopia's foreign ministry, told AFP. South Sudan's ambassador to Ethiopia, James Pitia Morgan, confirmed Kiir's planned attendance, as did Manasseh Zindo, a senior official in Machar's SPLM-IO rebel group. The two leaders, whose political rivalry triggered the start of a civil war more than four years ago have not met since Machar and his forces were chased from the capital during fighting in July 2016. Successive international efforts -- led by regional bloc IGAD -- have so far failed to impose a functioning peace deal or meaningful ceasefire. Abiy "will call upon the two leaders to narrow their gap and work for the pacification of South Sudan," Meles said. Tens of thousands have died and nearly four million South Sudanese have been driven from their homes since December 2013, while millions are going hungry amid a massive humanitarian crisis. Last month the UN Security Council gave the warring sides a month to reach a peace deal or face sanctions. Search Keywords: Short link: The objective behind the move is to retain the membership of PF subscribers and to address the social security needs at the time of unemployment. Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com You may be able to partially withdraw your Provident Fund (PF) savings even after losing your job, with the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) proposing a move to create a social security cover for formal sector workers. Concerned with the high level of PF withdrawals, the EPFO has proposed that its subscribers - working in the private sector and counted as formal workers - be allowed to withdraw 60 per cent of their total savings, according to the proposal. However, legal experts believe the proposal may be embroiled in litigation. In fact, in some cases, employees may be able to withdraw PF savings equivalent to three months of their salary earned with the previous employer. Employees will be able to draw this advance money after remaining unemployed for at least a month. The remaining sum, along with the interest earned on it, will be credited to the workers bank accounts at the time of retirement. The objective behind the move is to retain the membership of PF subscribers and to address the social security needs at the time of unemployment. At present, subscribers are allowed to withdraw their full PF savings after two months of quitting their jobs. Subscribers are also allowed to withdraw part of their PF savings in the case of factory closure, marriage, higher education of children or for medical needs. It has been observed that large numbers of final withdrawal claims are filed by the members even before attaining the age of retirement. Such withdrawal ends the membership of the person early on and thus, affects the social security of the member and his family, the EPFO said in its proposal, reviewed by Business Standard. The labour and employment ministry will have to make changes in the EPF Scheme, 1952, through a formal notification to implement the changes. According to an EPFO official, around 80 per cent of the withdrawal claims belong to premature PF withdrawals. The EPFO noted that the present rules do not have a provision for an advance to workers after they become unemployed as it only allows for a full and final settlement. This situation compels members to withdraw the entire amount at the cost of their social security. Such early closure of membership also goes against the objective of providing social security to the members and the family. Therefore, there is urgent need to provide a social security cover during the period of non-employment, the EPFO said. However, in case a person remains unemployed for more than three months, he/she may be able to withdraw 80 per cent of his/her savings, along with the interest earned on it, or an amount equal to his/her two months' salary drawn from the previous employer. There are two sides to it. If a worker is getting a new job in some time, then he/she may like to get the PF money transferred to a new account. However, if the worker is fully unemployed and has no source of income, he/she may require the full PF savings to take care of her needs, A K Padmanabhan, vice-president at Centre of Indian Trade Unions and a member of the EPFOs Central Board of Trustees, said. Legal experts said the move, if approved, may be challenged by employees in court. The intention of the government is to provide social security to workers at the time of retirement. However, it should be left to the workers to decide if they want the money at the time of quitting their jobs or when they retire. "Workers can potentially move court saying the money is a contribution made from their salary and they are fully entitled to it, said labour law advocate Ramapriya Gopalakrishnan. The governments previous efforts to curb the complete withdrawal of PF savings in 2016 had failed spectacularly, sparking off violent protests from garment sector workers in Bengaluru. At that time, the government had notified new rules under which employees were permitted to withdraw their own share (12 per cent of the wages). The employers share, 3.67 per cent of the wages, would be allowed to be withdrawn at the time of retirement. However, the notification, which was issued in February 2016, was withdrawn by the government in April 2016, following protests from workers in various parts of the country. He will also have to move swiftly to control any damage that may have been caused to the banks image and investor confidence due to the loan controversy For Sandeep Bakhshi, the going will be tough in his new role as the chief operating officer (COO) of ICICI Bank. Fall in profits, rising non-performing assets (NPA) or bad loans and ambitious targets for the upcoming years are some of the challenges Bakhshi will have to deal with on the business front. In addition, he will have to move swiftly to control any damage that may have been caused to the bank's image as well as investor confidence due to the ongoing controversy of alleged conflict of interest with respect to its managing director and chief executive Chanda Kochhar. This controversy is the key reason for the numerous changes at the ICICI Bank management, including the appointment of Bakhshi as the COO. Controversy trigger While the banks succession plans are being debated, the outcome of the external inquiry set up by ICICI Bank as well as probes by numerous regulatory authorities into Kochhar looms as a dark cloud over the lender's reputation. Last week, rating agency Fitch Ratings, in its review, flagged of gaps in risk control at ICICI Bank. An ongoing investigation at ICICI on extending a loan with a potential conflict of interest has also focused the authorities attention on the bank's governance. Adverse findings could create reputational risk, particularly if they point at broader weaknesses in the management, said the report. The country's third largest bank, in terms of assets, is mired in controversy surrounding a whistle-blowers revelations that there were alleged quid-pro-quo transactions between Videocon Industries, Chanda Kochhar and her husband Deepak Kochhar's company NuPower Renewables. Kochar has been accused of not disclosing her conflict of interest when she sat on the banks' credit committee which extended a Rs 3,250 crore loan to Videocon Industries. The controversy arises as Venugopal Dhoot, Videocon's promoter and chairman and managing director, was also a director in Nupower Renewables, a company owned by Deepak Kochhar. ICICI Bank's board and chairman have denied any wrongdoing and have stated that the loan was disbursed in accordance with the bank's credit standards and was part of a consortium involving over 20 banks. Last week, the bank informed its stakeholders that it will appoint an investigator to conduct an independent inquiry. ICICI Bank had maintained that Chanda Kochhar is on annual leave. Kochhars leave has stretched beyond the timeline of two to three weeks, specified earlier by the banks spokesperson. On Monday, the bank said that Chanda will remain on leave till the inquiry is over. The allegations against ICICI Bank and its chief executive have resurfaced recently and investigations by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Enforcement Directorate (ED) are now underway. The bank did not provide any timeframe for the Srikrishna Committee or any other details, which suggests that the process may be a long-drawn affair. Financials, a weak spot The banks March 2018 quarter (Q4) net profit stood at Rs1,020 crore, its lowest in the last eight quarters. The bank has seen a consistent drop in net profit over the quarters, as Q3FY18 profit stood at Rs1,650 crore, while the previous years Q4 and Q3 profits stood at Rs 2,020 crore and Rs 2440 crore, respectively. These profits have been aided by gains arising from sale of stake in its subsidiaries. The bank sold seven per cent in ICICI Lombard General Insurance in an initial public offer (IPO) for Rs 2,099 crore. The sale resulted in a gain of Rs 1,711 crore in the consolidated financial results for 2017-18. Besides, the bank also sold 20.78 per cent in its investment banking arm, ICICI Securities, in an IPO for Rs 3,480 crore. The bank had cashed in on its subsidiary in 2016-17 too, when it listed ICICI Prudential life Insurance. Without these, the profits would have been much lower. ICICI has not raised fresh capital in several years but has the capacity to do so. "It has profitably been selling stakes in subsidiaries and repatriating excess capital from foreign subsidiaries to counter earnings pressure, said Fitch. The bank also said that it will sell three per cent stake in its life insurance subsidiary, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, which would be a total sale of 43 million shares by the parent bank, which currently holds 54.88 per cent. Asset quality woes The bigger battle is on the assets quality front as gross NPA ratio rose to 8.84 per cent in Q4FY18 from 7.89 per cent in the year-ago quarter. Gross NPA additions had declined sequentially during the first three quarters of fiscal 2018. However, during Q4 of 2018, gross additions were elevated at Rs 15,737 crore, said N S Kannan, executive director, ICICI Bank, in a post results meeting. The bank has also set ambitious targets for itself that Kochhars successor will have to tackle. We will focus on recoveries and resolutions. By March 2020, we target to bring down the net NPA ratio to below 1.5 per cent. "We will increase our provision coverage ratio (PCR) to over 70 per cent by March 2020, Kochhar had said while announcing the Q4 results. As on March 2018, the banks net NPA ratio stood at 4.77 per cent while PCR stood at 60.5 per cent. With industrial and commercial credit growing at a slow pace, banks and other financial institutions are looking at retail, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and agriculture for growth. ICICI Bank has set a target that by March 2020, retail loans as a proportion of total loans would be over 60 per cent and the proportion of the overseas loan portfolio in total loans would reduce to below 10 per cent. The banks retail share stood at 56.6 per cent as on March 2018 and the bank will need to face a stiff competition to expand the portfolio. The announcement came after market hours, though the Street had an indication of the changes in the works. The banks stock closed at Rs 292.5 on BSE, up by 3.61 per cent from previous close. However, the challenge for Bakhshi will also include restoration of investor confidence, which has taken a beating recently. The ICICI Bank stock has been a visible underperformer since the start of 2018, down almost 10 per cent as compared to a five per cent rise in the BSE Sensex. 1984: Chanda joined ICICI (dev. financial institution) 1993: Part of team setting up ICICI as corporate bank 1996: Headed Infrastructure Industry Group 1998: Promoted to general manager, for major clientele 2000: Set up corporate banking division, head of retail business 2001: Executive director 2006: Deputy managing director 2007: Chief financial officer and joint managing director 2009: Managing director Photograph: Courtesy, icicifoundation.org However, truckers have spared other vegetables, fruits, fuel and milk from the strike. Supplies of essential commodities were partly disrupted at most of mandis across the country on Monday, due to an indefinite, nationwide transporters' strike in protest of a sharp rise in diesel prices and insurance premiums. Data compiled by the National Horticultural Research & Development Foundation (NHRDF) showed onion supply in the benchmark Lasalgaon mandi at 1,400 tonnes on Monday, down from 1,717 tonnes on Friday. Supply in Pimpalgaon mandi also declined to 1,980 tonnes on Monday from 2,510.5 tonnes on Friday. The decline in onion supply has resulted into an increase in the vegetable's price in both Lasalgaon and Pimpalgaon mandis. Model onion prices surged 55 per cent on Monday to trade at Rs 8.50 a kg on Monday in Asia's largest onion selling market yard in Lasalgaon, from Rs 5.50 a kg on Friday. The spike in price was marginal in Pimpalgaon, closing at Rs 9 a kg on Monday from Rs 8.40 on Friday. "Onion supply was disrupted on Monday at Lasalgaon and Pimpalgaon mandis in the Nashik district of Maharashtra due to a fewer number of trucks plying between farmland and marketyard. We would have to see how the strike pans out in coming days and impacts prices of essential commodities," said Atul Shah, director, Pimpalgaon mandi. Meanwhile, truckers have spared other vegetables, fruits, fuel and milk from the strike. Consequently, their supply to mandis wasn't as impacted. Also, the premier transporters' body, All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC), which has a huge presence in western and southern India, has decided not to support the ongoing strike convened by ACOGOA. "We went on strike om Monday morning. Since most of the trucks had already uploaded goods a day before and transported for offloading in mandis across the country that day, the impact of the strike was limited. "Still, supply of goods was disrupted in Maharashtra, West Bengal, Delhi and other agrarian states. We are expecting the impact to become severe on the second and third day of the strike," said R S Bhasin, National Secretary, All India Confederation of Goods Vehicle Owners Association (ACOGOA). Bhasin claims most transport vehicles have started staying off the road in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh borders. "The government procures nearly 85 per cent of crude oil on long-term contract basis with a fixed price for at least three months. "However, it revises diesel prices daily. For example, in the second half of May diesel prices surged by Rs 3.40 a litre with the rise in crude oil prices. "But, its price declines by a few paise with decline in crude oil prices globally. "While upward price revision is immediately passed on to consumers, downward revision either lags or does not happen at all. "This system of price revision results in a massive loss to truck owners. We therefore, want the government to revise diesel prices on quarterly basis for a long-term and sustainable business plan for truck owners," said Bhasin. Apart from daily diesel price revision, truckers want the Rs 8-per-litre cess to be abolished, and a reduction in toll charges and premiums on third party insurance. Through diesel price hike alone, the government is getting at least Rs one billion per day, Bhasin said. ACOGOA claims that a third of India's total fleet size of nearly nine million commercial vehicles has stopped loading goods. Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters Weakness in the broader markets, along with expensive valuations that these companies had commanded during their IPOs, has led to this fall Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com Several newly listed companies have seen a steep fall in their share prices in the last two months. Shares of 57 per cent of the companies listed in 2018 are currently trading below their issue price. Further, 14 of the 33 companies that listed last year, too, are trading at a discount to their initial public offering (IPO) price. Weakness in the broader markets, along with expensive valuations that these companies had commanded during their IPOs, has led to this fall, say experts. The BSE MidCap index has fallen nearly 10 per cent in 2018 so far, while the large-cap Sensex is down 2 per cent. The Indian primary markets have been buoyant for the last two years, thanks to the bull-run in the secondary markets. There was also a strong demand for fresh paper in the markets since both institutional and retail investors went on a buying spree. This heavy demand prompted several companies to seek premium valuations for the IPOs. However, the scenario has reversed in the last two months, with investors pulling out money from mid- and small-cap stocks due to valuation concerns. Investors lapped up several IPOs without paying much heed to the business models. A majority of the IPOs that have come out in the last two years were oversubscribed several times. "However, with fresh inflows drying up, the stocks have come under pressure. If the trend continues to play out for another two months, investor appetite for new IPOs could be dented, said a banker at a foreign investment bank. Delhi-based CL Educate, which launched its IPO in 2017, has seen its shares fall 65 per cent from issue price - the highest for any newly listed firm. Shares of Apollo Micro Systems, ICICI Securities, and Shalby Hospitals have all fallen over 30 per cent from their IPO price. Shares of state-owned insurers General Insurance Corporation and New India Assurance have fallen 20 per cent from their issue price, while defence companies Hindustan Aeronautics and Bharat Dynamics are trading 22 per cent lower and 8 per cent lower, respectively, from their issue price. Even the better-performing issuances such as Cochin Shipyard have given single-digit returns. Investment bankers say the Indian IPO market will continue to witness traction in the near to medium term. However, investors will be more selective and show interest only in companies which have strong business models and a track record of profitability. While there is some uncertainty currently, the activity should pick up in the next month or two. "Equities will continue to attract retail investors as there are no alternative asset classes for them. "Firms should rationalise their valuations and leave more money on the table for investors to receive better response from investors, said S Venkatraghavan, managing director, equity capital markets, IDFC Bank. More than half a dozen companies are planning to launch their IPOs in the next three months. Investment bankers are still expecting 2018 to be a positive year for IPOs, with fundraising to the tune of Rs 50,000 crore. Around Rs 20,000 crore has already been raised so far in 2018. Political uncertainty seems to be the biggest headwind for IPO markets as India goes to elections next year. Bankers say any steep correction in the secondary markets in the next few months could spoil the party for IPOs. US President Donald Trump's special envoy Jason Greenblatt and adviser Jared Kushner on Tuesday met with Jordan's King Abdullah II in Amman to discuss the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. The meeting came less than a day after the Jordanian monarch hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a short but rare visit. "They discussed increasing cooperation between the United States and Jordan, regional issues, the humanitarian situation in Gaza, and the Trump administration's efforts to facilitate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians," the White House said in a statement. In his talks with Netanyahu on Monday, the king stressed the need for progress on efforts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict "based on the two-state solution". The US delegation's trip also includes stops in Israel, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been stalled since 2014. Trump's controversial December decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital has made the resumption of peace efforts unlikely. The move sparked anger across the Arab world and prompted Palestinians to freeze all contacts with US officials. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, but Israel considers the entire city to be its eternal and indivisible capital. The Palestinian Authority said Saturday that US plans to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are "doomed to fail". The West Bank, including east Jerusalem, was administratively linked to Jordan before it was occupied by Israel in 1967. Israel, which signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, recognises Jordan as the custodian of the divided city's Muslim holy sites. Search Keywords: Short link: 'It's still very early. I have just been handed over the matter and therefore I haven't formed any views on it as yet,' Justice B N Srikrishna tells Pavan Lall. Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com Once again, Bellur Narayanaswamy Srikrishna, the 77-year-old retired judge who hails from Matunga in Mumbai, will have the arc lights on him. That's because his latest assignment involves being an independent investigator for the ongoing allegations of financial impropriety against ICICI Bank's boss Chanda Kochhar. She faces charges of colluding with industrialists to engage in quid pro quo relationships that involved her husband Deepak Kochhar. Asked what he makes prima facie of the ICICI-Kochhar issue so far, Justice Srikrishna says, "It's still very early as I have just been handed over the matter and therefore I haven't formed any views on it as yet." Justice Srikrishna adds that the committee on data protection and privacy framework, which he is heading, will complete its mandate in a week or two, after which he will take up the ICICI matter. The outcome of the data protection matter could have a huge impact on citizens' privacy, on firms such as Facebook as well as Google and how they do business in India. Why is he taking on the ICICI Bank-Kochhar issue? Justice Srikrishna says he is driven by any problem that is put up in front of him and that he is willing to take on anything that makes sense to him. Despite the professed detachment to work that comes his way, Justice Srikrishna acknowledged that the ICICI Bank issue is "significantly important", but declined to speculate on how long the inquiry would take to complete. "Your guess is as good as mine," is the retort from the straight-talking former Supreme Court judge, who other lawyers accurately describe as "salt of the earth." Justice Srikrishna, who hails from a Kannadiga family, is a second generation lawyer. Before starting out predominantly as a labour litigation lawyer in the Bombay high court, he built on his legacy. That was followed by his elevation in 1991 as a judge in the Bombay high court when he retained his residence in Matunga, north central Mumbai, opting not to shift to official residences reserved for judges in south Mumbai. Even as Justice Srikrishna's ICICI-related appointment was closely guarded until recently, it doesn't come as a surprise. Nikhil Sakhardande, a Mumbai-based lawyer, who knows Justice Srikrishna, says, "He is grounded, astute and everyone has only good things to say about him." His popularity aside, a lawyer specialising in corporate law said one of the key reasons for his selection is because his position as chairman of the Financial Sector Legislative Reform Committee in 2013. The FSLRC had suggested a major overhaul in the finance sector's regulatory architecture that included establishing an Indian Financial Code to replace most existing laws. It also called for creating one regulator for equity, pension, insurance and commodities markets. It suggested reviewing the Reserve Bank of India's regulatory structure. In 2017, Justice Srikrishna led a 10-member committee which submitted recommendations to the Union law ministry calling for promoting institutional arbitration for both domestic and international cases. This was suggested for speedy resolution of commercial disputes and to make India an international hub for arbitration. Justice Srikrishna has to his credit key path-breaking judgments that involved the double taxation Mauritius treaty and the 1991 case of Minoo Balsara vs The Union of India and others on the matter of residents of government premises enjoying the protection of rent control Acts. It also included a judgment against Maharashtra's then urban development minister Manohar Joshi for illegal construction that his son-in-law undertook in Pune. There have also been several committees on hot-button issues of national significance that he steered. An investigative commission formed under Justice Srikrishna oversaw an inquiry into the Bombay riots which saw large-scale unrest in late 1992 and early 1993 between Hindus and Muslims as a result of demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. However, the recommendations of the inquiry were not enacted. Later in 2010, the committee for consultations headed by Justice Srikrishna assessed the demand for a separate state of Telangana. As a linguist who is conversant with Tamil, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Telugu, Marathi and his mother tongue Kannada, Justice Srikrishna is also familiar with Bengali. "How many languages you speak doesn't really matter. What is important is that what you say is understood," Justice Srikrishna quips. 'The BJP is thinking of advancing the polls before the situation deteriorates further in Kashmir.' IN HAPPIER TIMES: A file photograph of Prime Minister Narendra D Modi with Mehbooba Mufti who resigned as Jammu and Kashmir chief minister on Tuesday, June 19, after the Bharatiya Janata Party withdrew support to the People's Democratic Party-BJP coalition government. Photograph: PTI Photo Tariq Hameed Karra resigned from as the Lok Sabha member from Srinagar and from the People's Democratic Party, of which he was a founding member, in September 2016 in protest against the PDP-Bharatiya Janata Party government's failure to curb the 'repression and oppression' of Kashmiris and the central government's 'failure to find a solution' to the Kashmir problem. While resigning his seat -- which he had won in 2014 after defeating the National Conference's Dr Farooq Abdullah -- Karra said it was not acceptable to him to see the PDP joining hands with the BJP as the latter was pursuing the RSS's agenda in the Kashmir valley. After resigning from the PDP, he joined the Congress party where he remains to this day. "This withdrawal was a pre-emptive measure. The BJP did it today, maybe PDP would have done it tomorrow," Karra tells Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf. Your first reaction to the BJP withdrawing support to the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir? This had to happen. On both sides, the intention was to grab power. Two divergent agendas could not have gone together. The only meeting point for both of them was to grab the chair. They had no moral authority to form the government because both the parties fought against each other and sought votes. People never accepted this government and they said it was an unholy alliance of two divergent ideologies. As the late Muftisaab (PDP founder Mufti Mohammed Sayeed) said, it was like the North Pole and the South Pole coming together, but in our belief (Islam), that happens only on the Day of Judgement. Earlier governments were successful in moving forward to create a peaceful environment, but this unholy government wasted everything. Why did the BJP withdraw from the alliance at this point in time? When the BJP wants to go in for general elections, I feel they cannot carry the PDP along with them all over India. Today's decision indicates that Prime Minister Narendra D Modi will advance the general elections, that is why he got rid of the PDP. Modi's graph is going down across India and the Modi wave is no longer going to be repeated. The BJP is thinking of advancing the polls before the situation deteriorates further in Kashmir. They cannot face general elections with this kind of situation in Kashmir when they are in a government with the PDP. People will question the BJP throughout India. For four years they enjoyed power and did Constitutional degradation in which the PDP became a facilitator to implement the RSS's agenda in Kashmir. What about the Ramzan ceasefire which the PDP wanted extended, but the BJP did not? Is that why they withdrew support? Which ceasefire are you talking about? It was only melodrama. Sitting in an air-conditioned office and announcing a ceasefire does not mean there was a ceasefire on the ground. Every day there was killing on both sides, militants as well as security agencies. The BJP helped Pakistan as things which Pakistan could not do, the BJP helped them in doing in Kashmir. The BJP is a nationalist party, even you cannot deny that. They are teaching Pakistan a lesson in Kashmir, so your statement doesn't stand scrutiny. Which nationalism you are talking about? You need to review the nationalism concept of yours. The BJP misgoverned Kashmir and they did everything wrong because of their agenda. Kashmir is slipping away. The BJP is considered to be anti-Kashmir and anti-Kashmiris. They are against the Constitutional guarantees of J&K which had acceded to India under certain conditions and guarantees. Kashmir is just a vote bank for BJP. They are withdrawing now and will go around India to gain votes in the name of J&K. if I am not mistaken, journalist Shujaat Bukhari's murder was mentioned as one of the reasons by BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav while announcing the withdrawal of support to the PDP. These murders happened earlier too. This withdrawal was a pre-emptive measure. The BJP did it today, maybe the PDP would have done it tomorrow. Do you think not extending the Ramzan ceasefire was the reason for the withdrawal of support? The BJP has given a slap on the face of the PDP. They have put the PDP in a tight corner. The PDP was selling the Ramzan ceasefire among the people of Kashmir and the BJP was waiting for its timing. I had predicted one year ago that this government will not last beyond June. What will happen in Kashmir now? Kashmir is burning and slipping out of hand. The situation is like you are holding sand tightly in your fist. The sand is the Kashmiri people who are slipping out and the fist is the security forces. Superficially, you will see that Kashmir is in your fist, but as your fist gets fatigued, the sand will slip out. This is the situation of Kashmir today. What was the common agenda of both parties when they entered into an alliance? It was a loosely-knit agenda without head or tail. It was an unsigned document which nobody understands, that was released on the day of the oath-taking of the government. They arrived at a common minimum programme, but never made it public and never signed on it. It is just a booklet. On the contrary, when the PDP and Congress had an alliance they made a common minimum programme which was signed by both the parties. Ask the BJP and PDP where is the signature? This alliance was a sham as they cheated the people of J&K. Muftisaab must have thought it through before agreeing to this alliance. The BJP-PDP alliance was like mixing oil and water. Can you mix them? Why did you resign as the PDP's Lok Sabha member from Srinagar? I felt the PDP cheated the people of Kashmir as they asked for votes against the BJP and then went on to form a government with them. Read my resignation letter. Even Nazi forces will feel ashamed to see what is happening in Kashmir. But they must have done something good for Kashmir in the last four years. They only looted. The BJP looted for its own good and the PDP did the same. Ask the common man of Kashmir and find out what good they did to Kashmir. What happens to Mehbooba Mufti now politically? By tying up with the BJP she committed political suicide. Now it is up to the people of J&K to decide her fate. Do you think fresh elections will be held soon? I feel the BJP will advance the elections to Parliament as well as J&K together. I have also said that Atal Bihari Vajpayeeji and Modiji's politics are different. Vajpayee believed in hand-holding and Modi believes in arm-twisting. What is the message that goes on the ground in Kashmir from this political drama? The people will be more than happy. They never wanted this unholy alliance in power. I've always said the day this government falls, things will improve. Can we say that whatever Delhi wants, only that happens in Kashmir? Delhi wished to do many things in Kashmir, but whatever the people of Kashmir want, only that will happen in Kashmir. By oppression and repression you are losing Kashmir. Oppressive and repressive measures will never be accepted here. The mighty Emperor Akbar was defeated thrice by Kashmiris. It was only by deceit he could come over here and rule. You read Rajatarangini (the history of Kashmir in Sanskrit). It says if you treat the Kashmiri with love they will be your slaves, but the moment you act tough he will never (bow). You speak to him with love and compassion, it can never be handled by oppression and suppression. Vajpayee showed that, Dr Manmohan Singh showed it too, and Sonia Gandhi too did. 'Kejriwal wants to evade the real problems of Delhi, so he is doing all this drama.' IMAGE: AAP rebel MLA Kapil Mishra says there is no national role for Arvind Kejriwal in the 2019 general election. Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images Kapil Mishra was one of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's closest aides. In May 2017, Mishra accused Kejriwal of corruption, a claim the AAP promptly denied. Mishra has since become the most prominent AAP rebel. In the face of the days-long sit-in by Kejriwal, Deputy Chier Minister Manish Sisodia and Ministers Satyendar Jain and Gopal Rai at Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal's office, Mishra tells Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf that this is the first time in history that "a sitting chief minister of a state in India has kidnapped himself." What is the fundamental problem behind this latest crisis in Delhi? I have been with Arvind Kejriwal since 2004. We worked together against the corruption that took place during the Commonwealth Games in 2010. I always felt that we were fighting corruption, but now the principles have changed. Earlier, we used to say that if any person is accused of being corrupt, he must resign and then be investigated -- that was our basic principle. Now that principle has changed. Earlier, we use to talk of transparency and public participation, but all these things have changed. Public hearing has stopped. Arvind Kejriwal now wants to become like Lalu Yadav or Mulayam Singh Yadav. He wants to copy that model. Earlier, the public used to be with us and political parties were against us. Now it is reversed. People are not with us, but political parties are with us. Is it a case of 'power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely'? Arvind Kejriwal's ambition, ego and greed have changed him. There is no solution to greed. Delhi was a stepping stone for him to be in national politics. He failed in Punjab and frustration has set in, as he wanted to control the police and the state. So he could use or misuse it. After losing the Punjab elections, he stopped coming to the Delhi office and stopped doing work too. I have a record of his attendance and found out that in the last 115 days he attended office only for 15 days. He is on strike after the loss in Punjab, and so started the blame game. For dirty water in Delhi, he blames Haryana and for dirty games he blames Modi. He only blames everyone. Now he has come to such a low level that he states that the white-washing of Delhi schools is not being done because Modi does not want to do it. If that was the case, why do we see his (Kejriwal's) photos on hoardings across Delhi? There should be Modi's photo in his place if that was the case. IMAGE: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and Ministers Satyendar Jain and Gopal Rai have been on their sit-in protest at the LG's office since June 10, 2018. Photograph: PTI Photo But if IAS officers do not come to work and don't co-operate with Kejriwal, how can he run a government? IAS officers not attending meetings is a lie. An IAS officer was called in for a meeting at 12 in the night and he was beaten up. This has never happened in India's history. The IAS officers still did not go on strike, but only protested for five minutes during lunch time by keeping silent. On Sunday, IAS officers exposed Kejriwal by giving details of every file. For example, the health minister never called a meeting for dengue, so how can an IAS officer go for the meeting? Just see how Kejriwal has changed his tone after the IAS officers held a press conference. He was saying IAS officers are not working because of Modi. Now he is saying let them come to work and he will provide security to them. Kejriwal is acknowledging that the issue was of security. He should have acknowledged this matter four months ago. How can Delhi be run by two governments -- the Centre as well as the state? Should the chief minister not be given full responsibility to run Delhi? Delhi must not become a state. I am firm on that. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar was a visionary and he thought out this issue thoroughly. I never understood earlier, but now I understand that if a man like Kejriwal comes to rule Delhi, then he can stop the Indian government from functioning. Delhi does not need statehood, but needs water. The chairman of the Delhi Jal Board is Arvind Kejriwal and he does not need anyone's permission to run this. Right now, under his nose, Delhi is facing the worst water crisis. Three people were murdered because of a water fight. Whom will you blame for this? Aam Aadmi Party MP Sanjay Singh told us that water is being distributed freely in Delhi. They are not giving water, so what will they distribute freely? There is no water and people are dying. Complaints of water contamination are pouring in from everywhere. The water mafia has sprung up again. As of March 8, 2017, the Delhi Jal Board had made a profit of Rs 178 crore (Rs 1.78 billion) and the same was stated in the Delhi assembly by Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia. Now they are saying the Delhi Jal Board is facing a loss of Rs 800 crore (Rs 8 billion). This is one organisation run by Kejriwal for the last one year. So whom do you blame? Former finance minister Yashwant Sinha wrote an article that in May 2015 the Modi government altered the Constitution to snatch away all the powers from the Kejriwal government. So much so that the Kejriwal government can't even transfer officers. How far is that true? Then go to court. But you cannot let the government not function if there is an order against you. The moot point is: What is the reason for Kejriwal's dharna? If the IAS officers are boycotting meetings, then fight on that issue. If ration supply is an issue, then fight on that issue. What Kejriwal is doing is creating confusion. He is not speaking on one issue as he does not want things to be taken to a logical end. People do not know what is happening in Delhi. Arvind Kejriwal has kidnapped himself. This is the first time in history that a sitting chief minister of a state in India has kidnapped himself. He is sitting there outside the LG's office and saying he cannot meet anyone. IMAGE: AAP MP Sanjay Singh with party workers march from Mandi House to the prime minister's residence in support of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's dharna at the LG's office in New Delhi, June 17, 2018. Photograph: Kamal Kishore/PTI Photo Mrs Kejriwal was not allowed to meet him. Chief ministers like Mamata Banerjee were not allowed to meet him. Nobody has stopped Arvind Kejriwal from coming out. He is not in prison. If I come to your house and stay there and then later say my wife will come too and my friends too will come, will you allow that? The chief minister of Delhi wants to meet the LG, so what is the problem? Kejriwal is not sitting outside the LG's office, but sitting inside his office. And how he is sitting? He took an appointment with the LG and after meeting him he says he will not move out of the office. Now his wife too wants to come and sit there. Next you know his mother-in-law too will want to sit at the LG's office. Kejriwal's credibility is over. He has lied. He met the LG and refused to leave, which is an illegal activity. Has the AAP become a dharna party? They are only doing drama. Government never sits on dharna, Opposition parties do dharna. Governments sign projects, sign files, do development work. If the government sits on a dharna, what is going to happen? Who will clean the city and ensure that people get food in ration shops? Kejriwal says he is not going to do anything, let Modi do the work. At least go to your office and meet people. Another important thing is that the IAS officers are not going for meetings where they feel threatened. They aren't boycotting work. What will the AAP gain by doing all this? Alliance. Kejriwal wants to marry the Congress in Delhi. He is talking to Mamata Banerjee. Delhi-ites do not want Mamata, but Mongolpuri. He is talking to Kumaraswamy. Delhi-ites do not want Kumarswamy, but Kashmiri Gate. Delhi-ites never allowed these regional parties to enter Delhi politics. Kejriwal is trying to bring them into Delhi politics. The Congress is not supporting Kejriwal. Since the Congress is not supporting him, he is getting desperate. He wants an alliance with them. Since morning, Kejriwal has changed stance and is not talking about ration problems as his lie has been caught. Now he wants to finish off the strike, but does not know how to finish it. He got Mamata Banerjee and Chandrababu Naidu to Delhi in his support and also did a public rally. Delhi had come to a halt as the chief minister has been busy on Twitter and done nothing. He has been unavailable to the public. Do you feel Kejriwal is unfit to rule? He is a quitter. He quit the (civil) services. He then quit social service. He then quit the Delhi chief minister's post. He went to Varanasi and then quit (UP politics). And you never know. There are rumours in Delhi that he can go back and again contest the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat. Do you think he wants a larger role in national politics? It is not possible as there are only seven seats in Delhi. In Punjab, no one is voting for the AAP. There is no national role for Arvind Kejriwal in the 2019 elections. But yes, he wants to evade the real problems of Delhi, so he is doing all this drama. When did you start getting disillusioned with Kejriwal? I was a strong supporter of Kejriwal since 2004. I played a key role in getting Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav thrown out of the AAP and I regret that. I strongly regret it. I was one among the many who felt that the country is changing and a revolution is taking place. I quit my job when I was working with Amnesty International to join him. There are many people like me. Everyone is shocked and people feel cheated. Kejriwal has made the people's movement impossible for the next 25 years. People will not believe anyone now. 'I hope the honourable PM and Mr Shah take steps to ensure that the NDA doesn't split.' After the recent by-election losses in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, another member of the National Democratic Alliance has expressed discontent against the Bharatiya Janata Party. Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha's Rashtriya Lok Samata Party is demanding 'better co-ordination' among National Democratic Alliance constituents and 'proper representation' within the alliance. In the aftermath of the NDA losing the Jokihat assembly by-poll in Bihar, the RSLP issued a strongly worded statement, saying, 'It is no secret that discontent has been brewing among some sections of the NDA for quite some time.' 'Mostly, it has been because of the big brotherly attitude shown by the BJP,' the RSLP revealed. Meanwhile, the Janata Dal-United insisted that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar be made the NDA's face in the state and all upcoming elections -- Lok Sabha and assembly -- be fought under his leadership. This did not go down well with the RLSP. Soon after that, Kushwaha skipped an NDA dinner in Patna on June 7. His party cited the minister's preoccupations in New Delhi as a reason for his absence. "If Mr Nitish Kumar, who represents 1 per cent of his community, can be CM seven times, why can't Upendra Kushwahaji, who has a support base of a community which is more than 8 to 9 per cent of Bihar's population?" Madhaw Anand, RLSP national general secretary and spokesperson, asks Rediff.com's Utkarsh Mishra. Your party has accused the BJP of a 'big brotherly' attitude, you seek 'better co-ordination' among NDA members. What do you mean by that? We are a part of the NDA since 2014. (Our party chief) Upendra Kushwahaji is also a Union minister. The JD-U recently announced -- without consulting other alliance partners -- that Chief Minister Nitish Kumar will be the 'face of the NDA' in Bihar in the next Lok Sabha and state assembly elections. When there's an alliance, all members should sit together and decide the election strategy; they decide the face of the election and also who will be the next chief minister. But here, there was no meeting of NDA constituents. It isn't proper that without any meeting or consensus you stake a claim on the chief minister's post. So our demand from the BJP is simple: That they should call a 'coordination meeting' of all NDA members from Bihar: Upendra Kushwahaji, Ram Vilas Paswanji, the JD-U and others. And in that meeting, everything should be discussed; from seat-sharing to the election agenda to a common minimum programme. And also decide who will be the face of the Lok Sabha elections and who will be the face of Bihar assembly elections. Without such a meeting, someone making any announcement isn't appropriate. So we request the BJP that, as an elder member of the alliance, it should immediately call such a meeting of all the allies where everything can be decided and later announcements can be made about who will fight on how many seats, who will be the face of the election and what will be the agenda. What's the BJP's reaction to your position? They have to think over it. Today, Upendra Kushwahaji represents the Kushwaha community, which is 8 to 9 per cent of Bihar's population. It's difficult for any party -- be it the BJP or the RJD (Rashtriya Janata Dal) -- to form a government in Bihar, or get good numbers at the Centre, without the support of the Kushwaha community. Both the BJP and RJD know they can't ignore the Kushwaha community. Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha is the undisputed leader of this community. He doesn't only have support of the entire Kushwaha community, but also commands the support and respect from all sections of society, be it the upper castes, the OBCs, the Dalits or Muslims. He is one of the tallest leaders in Bihar as well as in the country. He is a professor and thus no one has any doubt about his capable leadership. You also tweeted that if Mr Kushwaha is made the CM candidate in Bihar, it would lead the NDA to an 'unprecedented victory'. Why can't it happen? If Mr Nitish Kumar, who represents 1 per cent of his community, can be CM seven times, why can't Upendra Kushwahaji, who has a support base of a community which is more than 8 to 9 per cent of Bihar's population? Besides, the way our party has grown in the recent years, everyone knows they can't form a government without his support. So I can also say that he's the face of the NDA. Like Nitishji is the tallest leader of the JD-U, Sushil Modiji is the tallest leader of the BJP (in Bihar), Upendra Kushwahaji is the tallest leader of the RLSP. What's the problem in saying that (he should be the next CM)? That's what we're asking -- that there should be a meeting of all the NDA constituents where there is a consensus on issues. Till then it is not fair for the JD-U or anyone else to make any such statements. It is against alliance dharma. The widespread belief that the BJP's rise to glory is mostly due to the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra D Modi and party president Amit A Shah could be a reason for its apathy towards its allies. Despite their popularity, the BJP and NDA lost most of recent by-elections (to a united Opposition): From Gorakhpur, Phulpur, Kairana (all three Lok Sabha constituencies in Uttar Pradesh) to Araria (in Bihar). When you are in power, you also have to deal with anti-incumbency. Added to anti-incumbency are the (perils of) not taking your allies along. You see, every party has a definite, strong, vote base. So if there is no coordination or consensus between ruling allies, the Opposition will keep gaining ground. I hope the BJP will consolidate the NDA, and keep all alliance partners in the flock and proceed with a common minimum programme in Bihar, UP and all other states. This way, the NDA will be successful in the 2019 election and Shri Narendra D Modi will again become the prime minister. It could be the BJP's perception that allies like the RLSP can be ignored. But we are a party with a mandate and we do not lack options. However, we want to remain in the NDA and we still believe in Modiji's leadership. But the BJP also needs to walk an extra mile (to retain that support). It is said that by-elections are fought on very local issues and a united Opposition will not be able to challenge the prime minister at the national level. I don't think it is fair to say that by-elections are fought only on local issues. For that matter, the BJP fell short of a majority in Karnataka. They couldn't form the government. And a person with 36 MLAs is now the chief minister. So there were also some loopholes in the management and lack of co-ordination. I firmly believe that Modiji will become the PM again in 2019. But for that the BJP also should introspect and ensure that it takes along all NDA partners, especially the RLSP. The JD-U blamed by-poll losses on rising petrol prices. Do you agree? It's not like petrol prices are rising for the first time. It keeps rising and falling according to the ups and downs in the international market and crude oil price. It could be one factor, but I will not say that it was the only factor. You see the margin; the RJD won by more than 50,000 votes. It can't be all due to rising petrol prices. So the JD-U needs to introspect. Dismissing the loss as incurred only due to rising petrol prices is not right. How do you respond to the government's attitude towards the agitation of Dalits and depressed classes? Do you have differences with the government on those issues? If you are talking about the Supreme Court's order amending the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, then yes we believe the government should bring an ordinance to undo the changes. There has been a negative impact of the Supreme Court ruling on the Dalit community. They thought that their pride has been hijacked. Upendra Kushwahaji wrote to the PM requesting him to file a review petition and also bring an ordinance to nullify the ruling. The government has filed a review petition. However the Supreme Court refused an urgent hearing of the petition and also refused to stay its order. That also sent a wrong message to the Dalit community. So we demand an ordinance to nullify the amendments in the Act. An iftar hosted by the RLSP in Patna, where Mr Kushwaha was present, was not attended by other NDA leaders. Were they not invited? The iftar was organised by the minority wing of the party and they sent a common invitation to every NDA partner. Kushwahaji did not invite or call anyone individually. According to the practice of our party, where every section does its own job, it was all done by the minority wing and a common invitation was sent. Nityanand Raiji (of the BJP) attended the iftar. The BJP is like an elder brother in our alliance, it was represented by Nityanand Raiji on the occasion. As for the others, they know better why they did not attend. Was that a reaction to Mr Kushwaha skipping the NDA meet in Patna? I have said this earlier and I repeat it that the NDA dinner meeting that was held in Patna's Gyan Bhavan on June 7 was attended by senior officials and members of our party. As regards the absence of Kushwahaji, he is a Union minister and he had prior engagements in New Delhi due to which he could not come. He had informed Nityanand Raiji in advance that he will not be able to attend the get-together. All other senior office-bearers of our party attended the event. There was nothing like a 'boycott' of the meeting. We are with the NDA. And we demand that we are recognised and given proper representation so that we continue to be its part. Many other BJP allies voice their concern about the party's attitude towards them. The Telugu Desam Party left the NDA. The Shiv Sena keeps criticising the BJP on every issue. Om Prakash Rajbhar of the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party is often critical of the UP government in which he is a minister. Only the JD-U looks to be complacent, saying there is no trouble in the alliance. In such a scenario, could the JD-U create a gap between the RLSP and the BJP and increase its proximity to the latter? The JD-U is the reason for fissures in the NDA (in Bihar). They only announced first, without consulting other partners, that the Lok Sabha and state elections in Bihar will be fought under Nitishji's leadership. So, somewhere, the JD-U is responsible for these disagreements and conflict within the fold. They are a big party in Bihar and Nitishji is a tall leader, we all support him. But they should not have issued such a statement without reaching an understanding with other NDA partners in the state. Such announcements can be made only when all NDA partners sit to decide and reach an understanding. The JD-U has been on the back foot ever since. They have realised that they took a wrong step. They realised they should not have issued such statements without consulting other allies. Besides, it is a battle for survival for the JD-U. They broke the Mahagathbandan to re-join the NDA. It changed the public opinion about them. So it is an existential battle for the JD-U, not for us. We have been and are with the BJP. And we want to remain with the BJP if it gives us proper representation. But it is different with the JD-U. They were heading the Mahagathbandan. They hurriedly snapped it and came back to the NDA. The people do not seem to approve of this step. But it is the JD-U's internal matter. Are you planning to meet Amit Shah with your demands? Seeing the kind of reports coming in the media, one doesn't think that such a big party as the BJP would be unaware of what's happening. We hope that the honourable PM and Mr Shah both are reading and following everything. They should take cognisance of the matter and take steps to ensure that the NDA doesn't split. We hope they will call a meeting as soon as possible. The BJP general secretary said it was untenable for them to continue in the alliance. The three-year-old Jammu and Kashmir government, wracked by bitter political feuds and worsening security challenges, collapsed on Tuesday with the Bharatiya Janata Party pulling out of its alliance with the People's Democratic Party, setting the stage for yet another round of governor's rule. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the surprise announcement after the party high command summoned its Jammu and Kashmir ministers for emergency consultations in New Delhi. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor N N Vohra amid a swirl of political activity in Srinagar and New Delhi. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in the state," Madhav told reporters at a hurriedly called press conference in the national capital. Presenting her point of view, Mehbooba said in Srinagar that the PDP has always maintained that a muscular security policy would not work in the state and reconciliation was key. "We will continue to strive for dialogue and reconciliation in Jammu and Kashmir," the PDP leader said after submitting her resignation as chief minister and added that the alliance with the BJP was not for power. The Governor's rule in Jammu and Kashmir is now imminent. The Union Home Ministry has received a report from Governor N N Vohra and necessary action is being taken on it, according to a ministry spokesperson. Vohra forwarded his report to President Ram Nath Kovind for imposition of Governor's rule in Jammu and Kashmir after the BJP pulled out of the coalition government and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti tendered her resignation, a Raj Bhawan spokesperson said in Srinagar. Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh held a high-level meeting at his residence with Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba, and senior officials of the Intelligence Bureau and his ministry to assess the ground situation in the sensitive state. In all states of India, the state government's failure results in President's rule. The process is slightly more nuanced in Jammu and Kashmir where not the President's but Governor's rule is imposed. Under the provision of Section 92 of the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution, Governor's rule is imposed for six months, but only after the consent of the President of India. The Constitution of India grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir among Indian states, and it is the only state in India to have a separate Constitution and regulations specific to it. The President's rule in other states of India is imposed under Article 356 of the Constitution of India. National Conference leader Omar Abdullah, whose party is the third biggest in the assembly, captured the drama with one sentence, "I wish Mehbooba Mufti had resigned herself... instead of having the rug pulled from under her feet." The BJP won 25 seats and the PDP 28 in the 87-member assembly and came together in alliance, two months after the December 2014 elections. The NC has 15 seats, the Congress 12 and others seven. Although the BJP and the PDP had campaigned vigorously against each other, they came together with an Agenda of Alliance in the hope of pulling the state out of the cycle of violence. But the Alliance never took hold and the two parties disagreed on most issues even as the security situation continued to deteriorate. Both Omar and the Congress said they will not form an alliance with any party to form government in the state. Mehbooba also said she had told the governor that her party would not go into any other alliance. The BJP said it favours governor's rule. Madhav said the decision to withdraw was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah. Immediately after his news conference, senior PDP minister and the party's chief spokesperson Naeem Akhthar told reporters in Srinagar that the BJP's decision had caught the party by surprise. The BJP blamed the PDP for failing to improve the security conditions in the Kashmir Valley. Madhav cited last week's killing of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar in the highly secured area of Press Enclave by unidentified gunmen. The same day -- two days before Eid -- an Army jawan was abducted while going on Eid leave and killed. "Keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and in order to control the prevailing situation in the state, we have decided that the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor," Madhav added. Terrorism, violence and radicalism have risen and the fundamental rights of citizens, including right to life and free speech, are in danger, the BJP leader said. In Srinagar, Mehbooba countered the allegations and listed her government's achievements. "We have been able to withdraw 11,000 cases against the stone pelters, given an offer of talks with all shades of opinion by none other than Union Home Minister (Rajnath Singh) and brought about a unilateral ceasefire," she said. BJP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Kavinder Gupta told reporters in Delhi that he and his ministerial colleagues have submitted their resignations to the governor as well as to the chief minister. "Centre did everything for the Valley. We've tried to put a full-stop to the ceasefire violations by Pakistan. PDP has not been successful in fulfilling its promises. Our leaders have been facing a lot of difficulties from PDP in developmental works in Jammu and Ladakh," Madhav said. "We are not questioning the intentions of PDP but they have failed in improving the condition of life in Kashmir," he added. National Conference leader Omar said the timing of the BJP's decision had taken him by surprise. Asserting that his party favours governor's rule and early elections, he said, "We did not have the mandate in 2014 and we do not have the mandate in 2018." Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said the BJP had committed a "Himalayan blunder" by forming a government with the PDP. He said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. "The regional parties should have been allowed to form an alliance among themselves," he told reporters. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping to chalk out his next course of action after his historic summit with United States President Donald Trump where it was agreed to denuclearise the Korean peninsula. IMAGE: Unlike Kim's two visits which were shrouded in secrecy until their completion, China announced the visit just as the North Korean dictator landed in Beijing. Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters The visit, Kims third since March, is taking place amid sharp escalation rhetoric between Beijing and Washington over tariffs almost spiralling into a trade war. Kim, who visited Beijing twice earlier before his Singapore summit with Trump, arrived by air to meet the top Chinese leadership. Unlike his two visits which were shrouded in secrecy until their completion, China announced the visit just as the North Korean dictator landed in Beijing. Kim Jong-un, chairman of the Workers Party of Korea and Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea visits China from June 19 to 20, a brief announcement by state-run Xinhua news agency said. For his part, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang parried several questions on Kims visit and its purpose saying details will be released in a timely manner. Kim is visiting China and there is a reason for this, he said. As to why news of the visit was released at this point, he said relevant information will be released according to the specific situation. Geng was not forthcoming when asked whether China will join Russia in calling for lifting of United Nations sanctions against North Korea in the light of the Singapore summit. China stands against the unilateral sanctions outside the UNSC. This position is very clear. We believe that sanctions itself is not an end and all parties should support and coordinate with the current diplomatic efforts and dialogue to work hard for denuclearisation and political settlement of the Korean peninsula issue, he said. The UN Security Council imposed a series of economic sanctions against North Korea after it conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, crippling Pyongyang. Since he took over, Trump piled pressure on China to stringently implement the UN sanctions which many believe led to Kim agreeing to scale down his nuclear programme leading up to the summit with Trump. While announcing the halt of South Korean and US military exercises, Trump has been maintaining that the sanctions will remain. Despite reports of differences, China remains a close ally of North Korea. Besides visiting Beijing twice before he met, Kim travelled by an Air China flight to Singapore for the summit with Trump signifying close ties between Beijing and Pyongyang. Officials say his visit was expected to crystallise the next course of action by him to announce the denuclearisation process and further steps on the Korean peninsula. Trump in the past has said Kim has changed his mind after his talks with Xi. Kims visit this time here is taking place amid escalating trade tensions between the US and China with the two countries already announcing tariffs up to $50 billion each while Trump is threatening more sanctions. For its part, China has been warning of strong retaliation. Sue Mi Terry, a Korea expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Kims recent engagement in diplomacy with frequent visits to China and meetings with Xi, rather than phone calls, made sense. China was also briefed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the Singapore summit during his recent visit here. After his talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Pompeo stressed the importance of China being a constructive participant in the next steps after the Trump-Kim summit. There remains hard work and difficult days in denuclearisation negotiations with North Korea, Pompeo had said. During a joint press conference with Pompeo, Wang said China would like the US and North Korea to see the summit as a new starting point from which they can maintain a momentum of dialogue and consultation, accommodate each others legitimate concerns, and work with other parties to advance the process of denuclearisation and the political settlement of the peninsula issue. China will continue to play a positive role in this process, Wang added. IMAGE: BJP in-charge for Jammu and Kashmir Ram Madhav with the state Dy Chief Minister Kavinder Gupta, left, at a press conference, in New Delhi on Tuesday. Photograph: Shahbaz Khan/PTI Photo The Peoples Democratic Party-Bharatiya Janata Party alliance in Jammu and Kashmir was described by late PDP founder Mufti Mohammed Sayeed in 2015 as meeting of the north pole and south pole but the BJP's exit three years later sparked a blame game and led opposition parties to call it opportunistic politics. Congress president Rahul Gandhi said that the 'opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance' set fire to Jammu and Kashmir, killing many innocent civilians and brave soldiers, and that the damage would continue even if the state was put under central rule. Hours after the BJP pulled out of the alliance government, the Congress leader said, 'Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails (sic).' Under the alliance government in the strategically important state, several innocent people and brave soldiers were killed. 'It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPA's hard work. The damage will continue under President's rule (sic),' he tweeted. Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said the BJP had committed a Himalayan blunder by forming a government with the PDP. He said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. "The regional parties should have been allowed to form an alliance among themselves," he told reporters in Delhi. The Congress leader hit out at the BJP, saying it ruined Kashmir as much as it could in three years. He also ruled out any tie-up with the PDP. This alliance has devastated the state, be it economically or socially, and has left the Jammu and Kashmir in ruins, Azad told reporters in New Delhi. Terming this fallout between the BJP and the PDP as good for the people of Kashmir, he said, "The BJP did its damage and ruined Kashmir as much as it could in three years and has pulled out now. In the last three years, civilian killings and army deaths have risen sharply." Replying to a question, Azad said, "...There is no question of forming any government with the PDP. The question does not arise." He claimed that he had cautioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on the floor of the house, that they had done a Himalayan blunder by having a coalition government with a regional party in Jammu and Kashmir. Echoing similar sentiments, his party colleague and Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala attacked Modi over the fall out, saying the prime minister has left Jammu and Kashmir in deep turmoil and is now finding an 'exit route' from this self-created tumult. In a series of tweets, Surjewala blamed BJP, its conniving alliance and lust for power for pushing the state into an unending cycle of violence and terror and said that radicalisation at its peak and peace is biggest casualty, adding that that in four years of the alliance government, 373 jawans and 239 civilians lost their lives. Is this how PM's promise of Jamhooriyat, Insaniyat and Kashmiriyat' fulfilled, or was this also another Jumla'," Surjewala questioned. Azad also said that this fallout is a total failure on the part of government. "The BJP should be squarely held responsible. It and the central government cannot shy away from the responsibility," he added. The Left parties said the coming together of the BJP and the PDP, after the assembly polls in 2014 to form a government, was itself opportunistic. "Such coalition should not have happened. These two parties have no similarities. They coming together was an opportunistic move to be in power," Communist Party of India-Marxist General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said. The BJP unit in Jammu and Kashmir said the decision of the BJP to pull out of the government was a well thought decision. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal slammed the BJP for pulling out of its alliance with the PDP and alleged that the party had ruined the state. Communist Party of India-Marxist leader and MLA M Y Tarigami said the leadership of both the PDP and the BJP are answerable before the people of Jammu and Kashmir and rest of the country for their unprincipled alliance which ended today but not before sending the state in deep crisis. The Nationalist Congress Party said the saffron party took the decision in a bid to save itself from the governance failures of the last three years. "The four-year-old BJP rule at the Centre and the three-year-old coalition of the BJP and PDP in J&K has been an utter failure. The BJP's decision to pull out (of the coalition government in J&K) is a bid to save itself from the governance failures of the last three years," alleged NCP national spokesman Nawab Malik. Maharashtra Congress president and former chief minister Ashok Chavan tweeted, BJP is trying to run away from responsibility by withdrawing support to PDP in J&K. Both parties together have ruined the chances of resorting peace and tranquility in the valley and in the state as a whole. However, ally Shiv Sena lauded the BJP for walking out of the government in Jammu and Kashmir, but questioned why it took three years and sacrifices of 600 soldiers for the Amit Shah-led party to realise that the coalition with PDP was useless. The Sena, second largest constituent of the National Democratic Alliance, also wondered if the BJP's decision to pull out of the state government was taken to avoid uneasy questions over violence against soldiers ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. "I congratulate the BJP for their decision," Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray said while addressing party workers at the party's 52nd anniversary celebrations in Mumbai. Thackeray, who has often criticised the BJP over joining hands with the PDP, said, "Did it take three years and sacrifice of 600 soldiers for you (the BJP) to realise that this (Jammu and Kashmir) government is useless?" Earlier, senior Sena leader Sanjay Raut dubbed the BJP's decision to snap ties with the PDP as a political move and said the coming together of the two parties to form the government had been unnatural and unholy. The Rajya Sabha member said Thackeray had opposed the tie-up, calling it an anti-national alliance. Raut alleged that the BJP and PDP had cut a deal to gain power in the state, adding Indian soldiers had to pay a big price for it as many of them attained martyrdom after the two parties formed the government in 2015. Pakistan continues to be ahead of India when it comes to possessing nuclear warheads, with China having double the quantity, according to a report by a leading Swedish think-tank. Pakistan is believed to have 140-150 nuclear warheads this year, 10 more than last year. In contrast, India is said to have 130-140 nuclear warheads, according to the annual nuclear forces data by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. India and Pakistan are both expanding their nuclear weapon stockpiles as well as developing new land, sea-and air-based missile delivery systems, it said. China continues to modernise its nuclear weapon delivery systems and is slowly increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal, SIPRI said. Russia and the United States hold over 92 per cent of the total warheads, it said. SIPRI said nine countries -- the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea -- had 14,465 nuclear warheads at the beginning of 2018, of which 3,750 were actually deployed. At the start of 2017, the total number of nuclear warheads was 14,935, it said. Countries possessing nuclear weapons as in 2018 Countries Number of warheads USA 6450 Russia 6850 UK 215 France 300 China 280 India 130-140 Pakistan 140-150 Israel 80 North Korea 10-20 Total 14465 The reduction is largely due to the arms control commitments by the US and Russia in the 2010 Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, the Stockholm-based organisation said. It said that France with 300 warheads, China 280, Britain 215, Pakistan 140-150, India 130-140, Israel 80 and North Korea 10-20, were all either deploying or planning to deploy new nuclear weapons system. Despite making limited reductions to their nuclear forces, both Russia and the USA have long-term programmes under way to replace and modernise their nuclear warheads, missile and aircraft delivery systems, and nuclear weapon production facilities, it said. SIPRI warned that modernisation of nuclear weapons continues despite a decline in the total number of nuclear warheads. ... the modernisation programmes underway in the nuclear weapon-possessing states indicate that genuine progress towards nuclear disarmament will remain a distant goal, says Shannon Kile, Senior Researcher with the SIPRI Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-proliferation Programme. Photographer John Moore, who took the picture that has come to symbolise the horror of the new family-separation policy in the United States, reveals what happened that night. All photographs: John Moore/Getty Images A two-year-old girl in a bright pink shirt is crying. Its the middle of the night, and shes only visible thanks to bright lights, likely from cars and cameras. Shes sobbing, her head tilted back in fear as she looks up at a strange man touching her mother. But nobody can soothe her. This image of a Honduran girl crying as United States Border Patrol agents search her mother has come to represent the heartbreak being experienced by illegal immigrants separated from their children. Pulitzer prize-winning photographer John Moore has been documenting the immigrant experience for a decade, riding along with both Border Patrol agents and immigrant trains in order to get the story. Speaking of the image, he speaks about the June 12 ride-along that resulted in the emblematic picture -- not to mention the other heartbreaking photos he captured of this mother and child. That fateful night On June 12, after seeking access, he accompanied Border Patrol agents to the banks of the Rio GrandeRiver on the outskirts of McAllen, Texas. Waiting with the guards for hours, he finally heard rafts coming across the river. They waited a little longer and then suddenly moved in to see nearly dozen of them mostly women and children. Describing that moment itself, Moore says, Most of these families were scared, to various degrees. I doubt any of them had ever done anything like this before -- flee their home countries with their children, travelling thousands of miles through dangerous conditions to seek political asylum in the United States, many arriving in the dead of night. While the agents were trying to get the families into buses, he finally spoke to one woman who identified herself as a Honduran. She was travelling with her two-year-old. The mother told me they had been travelling for a full month and were exhausted, says Moore, who speaks Spanish. They were taken into custody with a group of about 20 immigrants, mostly women and children, at about 11 pm, he was quoted as saying to Getty Images FOTO. Describing what happened next, Moore says, Before transporting them to a processing center, transportation officers body searched everyone and the mother was one of the last. She was told to set the child down, while she was searched. The little girl immediately started crying. While its not uncommon for toddlers to feel separation anxiety, this would have been stressful for any child. I took only a few photographs and was almost overcome with emotion myself. Then very quickly, they were in the van, and I stopped to take a few deep breaths. Moore says he doesnt know what became of the 2-year-old Honduran girl, adding that the asylum seekers he photographed likely had no idea of the new zero tolerance policy that has led to families being separated from their children, since they had been travelling for a month under harsh circumstances. IMAGE: South Korea military soldiers take part in the South Korea and U.S. joint military exercise at the Seungjin firing drill ground. Photograph: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images The United States and Korean militaries on Monday suspended their joint military drill that was scheduled to take place in August. This comes after US President Donald Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un held a historic summit in Singapore. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White on Monday said the Pentagon has suspended all planning for the August joint military exercises with South Korea and several allies in the region. Consistent with President Trumps commitment and in concert with our Republic of Korea ally, the United States military has suspended all planning for this Augusts defensive wargame. We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent wargames have been made, CNN quoted White as saying. US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton are to meet later this week to discuss the issue, White informed. US President Donald Trump on June 12, after his summit with the North Korean leader, had said that the US would halt war games with South Korea. South Korea and the US have been conducting combined routine training for years to prepare for a possible attack from the North. Trump and Kim, on June 12 signed a joint agreement, according to which Kim committed to complete denuclearisation of Korean Peninsula while Trump pledged security guarantees to the North. Chinese President Xi Jinping offered high praise to visiting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday, lauding the "positive" outcome of his historic summit with U.S. President Donald Trump and promising unwavering friendship. Meeting Kim on his third trip to China this year, and just a week after Kim met Trump in Singapore, Xi said China was willing to keep playing a positive role to promote the peace process on the Korean peninsula. Kim's visit was the latest in a flurry of diplomatic contacts, and unlike during his previous two visits to China, the government announced his presence while he was in the country rather than waiting for him to leave. Xi told Kim that he was very happy to see the "positive" outcome of his meeting with Trump, and the important consensus reached on denuclearisation and setting up a lasting peace mechanism, according to Chinese state television. "No matter the changes in the international and regional situation, China's party and government's resolute position on being dedicated to consolidating and developing Sino-North Korea relations will not change," the report cited Xi as saying. "The Chinese people's friendship for the North Korean people will not change, and China's support for socialist North Korea will not change," Xi added. Kim told Xi he hoped to work with China and other parties to push the peace process, Chinese state television said. While not formally billed as a state visit, China gave Kim most of the trappings of one, including a welcome ceremony with honour guard in Beijing's Great Hall of the People. Xi greeted Kim warmly, in images carried on state television. The two men were accompanied by their wives. Xi said he was pleased to see North Korea's decision to promote economic reforms, adding that China's own reform and opening up process had meant the Chinese people's eyes had been open to the world. North Korean state media had not mentioned Kim's visit by early evening. Trump agreed to work with Kim toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, committed to provide the North with security guarantees and pledged to end "war games" with South Korea, which North Korea and China have long seen as provocative. South Korea and the Pentagon announced they would halt the annual Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August. A Kim trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China is North Korea's most important diplomatic and economic backer but has been angered by its nuclear and missile tests. South Korea's foreign ministry spokesman said South Korea and China shared the strategic goal of completely denuclearising the Korean peninsula. "Our government hopes China will play a constructive role in resolving this problem," ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-deok told a regular briefing. "We hope Chairman Kim Jong Un's visit will contribute to that." 'DUAL SUSPENSION' China has welcomed the warming of ties between the United States and North Korea, and offered to help. It has been particularly pleased by Trump's decision to suspend military drills with South Korea. It has long proposed a "dual suspension", whereby North Korea stops weapons tests and the United States and South Korea stop military drills, to encourage talks. "South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August," South Korea's defence ministry said in a statement. The Pentagon confirmed the suspension, adding in a statement there would be a meeting of the secretaries of defence and state as well as Trump's national security adviser on the issue this week. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops joined the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than field exercises. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. The decision to halt military exercises in South Korea has bewildered many current and former U.S. defence officials, who only learned about it when Trump announced it in Singapore, after the summit with Kim. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said there would be no changes to joint drill plans between the United States and Japan, both of which regularly practise to deter North Korea. "The United States is in a position to keep its commitment to its allied nations' defence and our understanding is there is no change to the U.S. commitment to the Japan-U.S. alliance and the structure of American troops stationed in Japan," Suga told a regular briefing. Japanese Minister of Defence Itsunori Onodera said the decision to suspend the U.S.-South Korean exercises was made to support the diplomatic effort between the United States and North Korea but added it was "important to be wary of North Korea actions". "Our view of the threat has not changed. Joint training is an important in maintaining peace and stability in the region," he said. Search Keywords: Short link: Shyamvar Pinturam Rai and Pradeep Waghmare. Both erstwhile employees of Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. In the witness stand on Monday, Waghmare came across as a cheerful, straightforward man who is attempting to clamber his way towards prosperity. In the witness stand on Friday, Rai shed his customary jauntiness and broke down weeping, begging forgiveness from CBI Special Judge Jayendra Chandrasen Jagdale. Vaihayasi Pande Daniel reports from the Sheena Bora murder trial. Illustration: Uttam Ghosh /Rediff.com Two friends took the witness stand in CBI Special Courtroom 51 at the Mumbai city civil and sessions court, south Mumbai, back to back, at successive hearings in the Sheena Bora murder trial, between Friday, June 15 and Monday, June 18. They could not have been more different. Nor their lives. One, who hails from Danwa, Madhya Pradesh, was a driver and an odd jobs man, who confessed to murder and has been languishing in jail for the past three years in Thane, outside Mumbai. The second, who hails from Pune, Maharashtra, was a cleaner and also an odd jobs man, who became a poultry farmer, now makes cheese popcorn for a living, in Badlapur, outside Mumbai, in Thane district. Their life paths intersected and ran parallel for a good ten years till 2015 and then rapidly and wildly diverged 180 degrees after that. Shyamvar Pinturam Rai and Pradeep Waghmare. Both erstwhile employees of Peter and Indrani Mukerjea, who once ran INX Media Services Pvt Ltd. In the witness stand on Monday, like earlier hearings, Waghmare came across as a cheerful, straightforward man who is attempting to clamber his way towards prosperity. In the witness stand on Friday, unlike earlier hearings, Rai, whose future is unknown, shed his customary jauntiness momentarily and broke down weeping, begging forgiveness from CBI Special Judge Jayendra Chandrasen Jagdale. On Friday morning Rai was brought from Thane jail dot on time at 11.30. Judge Jagdale had asked for him to be produced after he filed a request for bail already 70 days ago. Wearing a grey shirt, khaki pants and sandals, Rai was waiting in the corridor outside Courtroom 51, with three policemen, as a lengthy Punjab National Bank scam bail hearing laboriously progressed. Special CBI Prosecutors Kavita Patil and Bharat Badami had also not arrived, The corridor was reasonably quiet. The smell of mildly stale hot oil, used for frying pakodas or wadas too many times over, courtesy the court canteen, hung in the air. On this clammy, hot day, in spite of the recent but stuttering, sputtering arrival of the southwest monsoon, nothing was more gladdening or precious than that occasional waft of cool breeze, that somehow wound its way into the corridors, reminding one how very simple the pleasures of life can be. The stillness was periodically broken by the drill and hammer of the renovation construction workers. By the dull, unstoppable drone of the lawyer for the PNB accused. By the voices of two squabbling lawyers. By the grumble of prison trucks arriving below. By the shuffle and drag of passing feet. By the racket of the lift's artificial voice ordering each of its charges to 'Please close the door!' And by the occasional mumble of conversation between policemen or lawyers or relatives as they drifted past. Then the sweet sound of a young child's voice could be heard far off and it grew closer. Rai's wife Sharda, son Ashish, 3 and daughter Shraddha, about 11, came trotting down the corridor from the far end, waving at him, and sat down on a bench, ten feet away from the former driver. Both children craned their necks to look at "Papa" and he looked at them longingly. Finally, with his police escort trailing him, Rai could not hold himself back any longer, and came to talk, standing across the corridor from them, speaking stiltedly initially. His wife, dressed in a green kurta-salwar and a pink chunni, sat wooden-faced, not speaking to him. She, who had been recently bereaved, said she had nothing to speak to him about. After a bit Rai went back to his earlier seat in the corridor, closer to the judge's chamber. Ashish and Shraddha, both remarkably well-behaved children, kept eyeing their father. Every so often, Ashish, an adorable-looking child, with slanted upturned coal black eyes, clad in a blue checked shirt, shorts and sandals, would rocket down the corridor, on little pattering feet, to his dad, spend a few precious minutes with Rai, and rocket back to his mom. He repeated his wee journey four or five times. His sister, in a blue frock, serious, and mature for her age, watched the tableaux intently. Briefly, those dark, dank corridors were bathed in the eternal sunshine of spotless little minds, making it a better place. Rai was not summoned into the courtroom till after lunch. During the lunch break Sharda and children came across to sit with Rai. She had no meal for him as she had not been allowed to bring the food she made in by the guards strangely. Finally, she went down and got some pav and snacks. The driver was called in past 3 pm. Sharda and the kids filed hopefully into the rear of the courtroom. Rai took the stand, barefoot, his face crumpling, he immediately began to sob, tears bathing his cheeks: "Humara parivar mushkil mein hai. Koi madad karne ke liye nahin hai. Ghar kiraya ka hai (My family is in trouble. There is no one to help them. The house is on rent)." He went on mournfully that there was no one to support his family adequately and his wife was finding it increasingly difficult to cope. Sharda watched him, from her seat, dry-eyed, her face stiff. His daughter Shradda listened somberly too. Ashish, who seemed not to notice that his father was crying, had turned around in his seat and was facing backwards. The judge gently told Rai: "Ha yeh case mein gavai diya hai. Influential log hai. Aapka jaan khatra mein hai (Yes, you have given your testimony. They are influential people. Your life is in danger)." Rai said he would stay at home and not leave the house. "Bahar nahin nikloonga (I won't go out)." Judge Jagdale: "Phir bojh aapki patni ko aayega (Then the burden will remain with your wife)." Rai went on, weeping and speaking frantically, "Kamayenge. Naukri karenge. Bachhe ko palenge. Bachhe ko sadhan nahin hai padhai ke liye. Sasur mar gaye. Patni ko takleef hai (I will earn. Do a job. Take care of my children. They have no means to study. My father-in-law has died. My wife is a great deal of difficulty)." Folding his hands in front of his face, in desperation, tears streaming, he begged: "Kshama mangta hoon (I ask for forgiveness)." Rai also complained, holding his hand over his left ear: "Jail mein, kaan mein sooo-sooo aavaz aa raha hai. Aakh mein takleef hai. Dikhay nahin de raha hai (In jail, I keep hearing a sooo-sooo sound in my ear. I have a problem with my eyes. I am not being able to see properly)." The judge assured Rai that he would pass an order to have his medical issues investigated. He looked to Patil for her take. Patil promised to check on the legal aspects of granting an approver bail while the trial was still in process. And if there were any exceptions possible. "I will check the legal position," Patil concluded. The CBI lawyer also agreed to reply to his bail application as soon as possible although she attributed no reason to the delay. The yawning gap in the room between Rai's hopes and expectations and the actual reality of his plight presented itself awkwardly and uneasily. He felt, for some misguided reason, his act of turning approver and giving testimony against the rest of the accused had magically set things right and wiped his slate clean. No one wanted to set him right on that score or disappoint him. Rai and family left. Judge Jagdale took off his glasses and mopped his face with a handkerchief, looking, it seemed, a trifle sad or momentarily worn out. The judge, ever since he took on this case, one has noticed, more than others on the case, reserves his gentlest tones in the courtroom, for the most deprived. Rai stood downstairs in the courtyard speaking to his wife for a long time, then he left for prison, without a backward glance or wave. Sharda, with her children, trudged away. Monday was the final day for Waghmare's cross examination. He had worked as a cleaner in both the INX Thane office and the Mukerjeas' home, Marlow, Worli, south central Mumbai. Niranjan Mundargi, lawyer for Accused No 2 and Indrani's former husband Sanjeev Khanna, had sent word that he had no requirement to separately cross examine Waghmare. Shrikant Shivade, Peter Mukherjea's trial lawyer who has represented actor Salman Khan, editor Tarun Tejpal and other notables, began his cross examination after 12.30 pm and continued post-lunch. Waghmare was wearing, on Monday, a bright blue, white and pink checked shirt, grey pants, a new haircut and his usual candour. The judge asked curiously and kindly if he had come alone. He said he had not and that his wife was there. Rohini Waghmare, in black and white, was sitting in the second row of the court. After the last hearing, the monsoon had truly begun and on Monday the court building was cool and breezy. But summer had not yet left Courtroom 51, which was still suffocating because of the closed windows and the still heated-up metal rows of trunks. Shivade first made some enquiries about Waghmare's finances and ambitions, carefully building up a motive for the Mukerjeas' long-time help to have turned against them. Waghmare, as established earlier, had been working for the Mukerjeas for many years. So had his wife Rohini, on weekdays, from 9 am to 6 pm. The couple had nurtured dreams of starting a business. Waghmare calculated he would need Rs 600,000 or Rs 700,000 to invest in a poultry farm. He said he had not asked anyone for such funding. He had asked Indrani for a loan of Rs 20,000 for his children's education and not received it. He has a seven-year-old son and a 13-year-old daughter who he admitted in private schools. He left the Mukerjeas' employ in 2015 not, he categorically denied, as Shivade suggested, because he was "enraged" at not receiving the loan of Rs 20,000. After leaving his job with the Mukerjeas, he said he took a loan of Rs 1.2 million (Rs 12 lakhs) from a bank to start a poultry farm, which he began in 2017. He spoke in Marathi to the court as did Shivade. The farm, Waghmare explained later to me, was located near Pune and had 5,000 chickens. But it was no longer operational and instead he and his wife made popcorn in a machine they had at home, packaged it and despatched it to the Mumbai market. After news of Indrani's arrest broke in 2015, Waghmare told the court he had received a call to come to the police station. "I was called to the police station on the same day they recorded my statement. I had no idea why I was being called." "I was scared," he recalled. "I reached the police station at about 11 am. There were 3 or 4 people there." "I asked the police why they had called me. They asked if I was aware of Sheena Bora's murder. I came to know that Sheena Bora had been killed by her mother on the news." Shivade probed what facts Waghmare felt obliged to tell the police and if the police had asked why he had left the Mukerjeas' employment. And if Waghmare had read his statement to the police carefully, word by word, before signing it. Waghmare confirmed he had. Shivade emphasised: "Then why did you say in your statement to the police that you had left the job with the Mukerjeas because you got angry when Indrani did not give you a loan of Rs 20,000." His 2015 statement was shown to him by the clerks and the portion where it gave his reason for leaving was pointed out. Waghmare appeared confused and baffled. "The statement was written as per what I told the police. The portion marked C is wrongly written. My statement was read back to me. But it was not explained to me." Shivade followed up with a set of questions to Waghmare about his calls to Rai and his location on various days in April 2012. Exaggeratedly soft-spoken and neat, exact in his style of questioning, Shivade has a particularly calculated, meticulous approach, often moving his elegant hands delicately, his fingers drawing tiny circles on his palms before travelling off into the air gracefully. There is nothing messy or by the seat of the pants about Shivade either in his demeanour or appearance. One feels like one is sitting in a mathematics/geometry lecture rather than a court room. The lawyer then asked about the location of the land-line phones in the Mukerjea home, their colour and their construct and gradually inched towards the most crucial query of his cross examination: The phone call Waghmare received from Peter on April 25, the day after Sheena's alleged murder. Shivade: "Was it a push button phone or a rotary dial one?" Waghmare: "Push button." Judge Jagdale laughing: "Rotary phones are now in the archives!" Shivade: "Did you have a conversation with Peter Sir on the landline?" Waghmare: "Ho (Yes)." Shivade: "Did you call him?" Waghmare: "Nahi (No)." Shivade: "Whatever conversation you had with Peter, which you deposed in court, did you record word for word, in your statement to the police?" Waghmare nodded. Shivade: "Did they read the statement back to you?" Wagmare agreed. Shivade: But (this sentence that Peter said to you that day) "Madam ne Sheena ko Rahul se chhura diya. Jaane do. Koi baat nahin (Madam has freed Sheena from Rahul's clutches. Let it be. No matter)" is not in your statement to the police?" Patil insisted: "The words are there." Shivade reprimanding Patil, regally: "Don't explain to the witness. Gives a totally different meaning." Judge Jagdale offered, smiling: "At this juncture the judge cannot decide..." Patil: "The wording is slightly different." Ignoring Patil, Shivade questioned Waghmare why the wording was different. Waghmare: "I have read my statement and it says the same thing." Shivade snarled suddenly: "Chhuraya shabd dikh raha hai? (Is the word freed showing there?)" Badami, shocked, emitted a strange expression of appeasement and astonishment: "Hurooo, hurooo, hurooo, hurooo!" Judge Jagdale ordered: "Advocate Shivade calm down. These people are from the lower strata of society and cannot understand. You cannot treat them in this shabby manner." An argument ensued about the legalities of the differences between these parts of Waghmare's statement in court and his statement to the police and if those stand-out sentences were an omission, contradiction or an improvement. Shivade moved the argument into a much more rarefied legal province and the fine points of law were in debate between him and the judge. In his initial statement to the police Waghmare worded the contents of the call from Peter differently. He said Peter said: "Madam Rahul ko Sheena se alag karvaya. Rahul gussa mein hai (Madam has separated Rahul from Sheena. Rahul is angry)." The difference in the use of words between both statements was mild. The implications were much larger, and beyond Waghmare's understanding. "Chhuraya" suggested that Indrani was keen to free Sheena from Rahul. While "alag karaya" was a more democratic interpretation of separating the couple. Shivade might have been seen to be splitting hairs. But it was actually probably an elaborate exercise in showing up the lack of reliability of the witness and helping his client. At this high-adrenaline point in the cross examination, Shivade suddenly excused himself and said he would be back because he had to check in on another matter happening at the high court, one block away. He promised to be back in half an hour, by 4 pm. Shivade was not back at 4. Or even at 5 as promised by his colleagues. He was delayed by a hearing in the Lieutenant Colonel Shrikant Purohit case relating to the 2008 Malegaon blasts. Judge Jagdale started getting restive and irritable. He asked Shivade's colleagues for updates. Badami stood up to ask if Shivade's abrupt disappearance from the court was irresponsible: "Is it justifiable is the million dollar question?! My witness is a very poor person. He cannot keep coming!" Judge Jagdale assured him: "Today is the last time he (Waghmare) has to come." Anup Pandey, Shivade's associate, promised again that Shivade would be back at 5 to close the matter. Judge Jagdale vowed, half serious, half joking: "Otherwise, I am going to close the matter for him." Shivade returned closer to 5.20 and apologised elaborately, with the grace of a royal courtier to the judge and to Badami. After once again rehashing Waghmare's narration of Peter's call to him, he closed the matter asking a few queries about why Waghmare had not gone to clean the Mukerjea residence between April 23 and 25, 2012. Shivade contended that Waghmare in his statement to the CBI had said Flat 19 in Marlow, where the Mukerjeas lived, was on rent, when actually Flat 18 was on rent. Indrani, wearing a white shirt and brown slacks on Monday, who had been in deep consultation with Peter for a large part of the hearing, perked up at this point, standing up to listen attentively. Sanjeev, who is mostly barely visible these days, because of the stacks of trunks, was lost in his own world. Badami said firmly: "Human error." Shivade insisted. "Why did you tell the CBI that Flat 19 was on rent?" Waghmare said he didn't know why he said that. Shivade: "Could it be that Kajal Sharma (Indrani's former secretary) told you not to go to clean on April 23 and 24th because the flat was on rent?" Waghmare: "She didn't tell me that." In conclusion, Shivade declared to Waghmare: "You never went to Marlow building on April 25. You never had a call from Peter that day. You are stating falsely that you received a call from Peter. You were under pressure from the CBI and the police. They detained you prior to recording your statement." June 25 was scheduled as the date for the next hearing in the case and for the appearance of the new witness. Two witnesses actually. Joint commissioner, law and order, Deven Bharti and his junior colleague Nitin Alaknure, of Khar police station, announced Badami dramatically. Badami and Patil organised for Waghmare, whose stint in the witness box, had come to a close, and his wife, to be dropped to the VT station by a CBI Tata Sumo. Departures were not so pleasant upstairs when the senior police officer among the party of a dozen odd cops escorting the three accused, lost his temper with Peter, for delaying his departure by a few minutes. "Bahut ho gaya natak (Enough of your nonsense)," he yelled in the courtroom, raising eyebrows all around because shouting or rude behaviour is not permitted in courtrooms. Peter meekly picked up his papers and left. Disclaimer This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States. "This is the summary of my journey: the Aragouz who became a diplomat!" he laughs, explaining how honored he is to re-ify the folk art of puppetry, or aragouz, on an international level. Speaking to Al-Ahram Online is Nabil Baghat professor of theatre at Helwan University, the founder of WAMDA troupe for Aragouz and Shadow Puppets, the former head of Beit El-Sehemi, and the former Egyptian Cultural Attache to Kuwait. Born in 1975, In Abu Kebir, village, Sharkia, Bahgat's perception of folklore was quite different. "To me it's more of my perception of life or how I take a stand on life. I always notice that we live a certain life style while television, portrays a totally different style so I never believed it. You see in Beheira, I grew up watching folk rituals alive in the march of the prophet's mulid, daily rituals, baking cookies during Eid, Ramadan rituals," he told Al-Ahram Online. Such an authentic Egyptian background had a great impact on Bahgat as a young boy. He gathered that certain of his grandfathers proverbs and sayings reflected much more than mere words. Eish takhod ya Bardisi min taflisy? (What will you gain, Bardisi, from making me stone broke?) was one his grandfather repeated. As it turned out, Bardisi ruled Egypt after the French invasion, and as people strained under the immense taxes he imposed, so Egyptians revolted against him. "This is what makes me believe more in the social history and collective memory contained in these words I side with the oral history, the one that comes from the people, and not the official version. I believe that history is not made by rulers, it is made by the marginalized, rulers only write it not make it. And this is the destiny of history: that its true but unfair, because it overlooks the thousands of real people who made it. Take the high dam for example, and how it is said that Abdel Nasser is the one who built it, what about the builders? History here is not telling all the truth. Thats how I see it," he notes. Bahgat's revelations continued to unfold, as he pursued his studies in Arabic poetry and theatre. He attained his masters degree specializing in the theatre plays of cultural icon Badia Khairy. His PHD was focused on the work of playwright Abu El-Seoud El-Ebiary. Before long he was assistant professor of theatre in Helwan University. "I published my masters degree in a book, a few years ago. But Badia Khairy opened up a gateway to other worlds, other questions. I always wondered, what makes Egyptians responsive to certain art forms? My own answer lay in the reception of these art forms. Like how come all Egyptians like certain plays for example, or certain of Om Kalthoums songs?" But the theatre I watched did not represent me, Bahgat admits to how he felt after becoming assistant professor of theatre. Shakespeare is great but does not represent me, nor does Oedipus. "I asked myself a question, why didnt my dad ever take my mother to the theatre? Because it does not represent them. The way the theatre was designed in the form of a box was mainly to protect people from immensely cold weather in Europe. Our theatres are open air yards." Such reflections on people, modern culture and modern theatrical performances triggered a further question, why are there numerous constraints when it comes Egypts renaissance? The answer is that we do not believe in the people: we start where our predecessor started and not where they ended," he notes. Haunted by the cultural identity of Egypt, Bahgat saw the sign that inspired him to go back to the roots and dig deeper. "I was walking in downtown Cairo and I read a big sign reading 'Shahrazad featuring a blond with blue eyes in her bikini." As alienating as it was, the sign lead him to a treasure. "I decided to start by searching for the first theatre I ever witnessed, which was the aragouz. Unlike the Turkish Qara Qoz, (Black eyes), the wooden puppet dressed in Red is an Egyptian invention mobile puppet theatre, that criticized the political and social status quo. It is said that the name aragouz, rhymes with Qaraqoush, Egypt's most vicious vizier, who was doomed to a legacy of mockery. The aragouz was a popular and successful form of street art, roaming mulids and street carnivals, and over the years winding up as the favourite puppet show of children's birthday parties. Bahgat's quest in search of aragouz art started off by asking university professors where he should look. "When they told me that it died out a long time ago, I realized the gap between academics and people, so I started my own search in mulids and came across the ensemble I am working with now." By 2003 Bahget founded the Wamda (spark of light) troupe for folk arts, which revived the art of aragouz as well as shadow puppets. With the masters of the trade on board, from Amm Saber, the oldest aragouz puppeteer in Egypt, to the late Hassan Khanoufa, the last shadow puppet master, Wamda managed to revive and renovate Egypt's oldest folk arts. Since 2004 and up to this moment, Wamda troupe gives a weekly workshop for young children as well as a performance of aragouz and shadow puppetry every Friday at Beit El-Sehemi, El-Moez street. "I've created the first archive for aragouz art including all the acts, on CDs and in a published book; then I wanted to create a new generation of aragouz players and managed to get the state to recruit the aragouz and shadow puppeteers in Beit El-Sehemi," From 2007 to 2017 every Friday is self-production. Now seven artists and their seven families are gaining their monthly wage from the art of aragouz. Its a great success to work in arts, to revive the artform and sustain a living. Folk arts can be of economic value. "The greatest thing that Ive ever done is the fact that I succeeded in conveying my ideas to the artists that worked with me." Through Wamda troupe, Amm Saber Egypt's oldest aragouz puppeteer was acknowledged and honored at the closing ceremony of the Arab Forum for Puppet Art and Shadow Puppets in its third round in Cairo 2015. Bahget currently has an application to the Immediate Preservation Committee of UNESCO, to create a school to preserve the art of aragouz. "I've always wanted to produce differently, without funds, for one can produce a show then sell it to the state. And this is what I did, and so without any funding we can create beautiful art. And it worked just fine." Thanks to Bahget's efforts, replicas of Egyptian aragouz puppets are showcased in international museums in the United States and all over Europe. As for Egypt, Bahget launched the annual seminar of the folk doll from (2006-2012) as well as a permanent exhibition of folk dolls including the authentic original wooden molds at Beit El-Sehemi "Before I started working with the aragouz and shadow puppetry artforms, there wasnt a single Youtube clip of them on the internet. Not even one picture. We ran over 100 workshops to create aragouz and shadow puppets. We wrote 36 performances, in addition to reiterating old performances." Four years ago, he was chosen as the Egyptian Cultural attache in Kuwait. And during that time, Bahget created over 500 Egyptian cultural events, as well as enhancing the capacity of the Egyptian cultural office in Kuwait. "I wanted to show people that something like al aragouz can make you into a diplomat. Working with the aragouz made my resume very impressive, and brought me lots of publicity. It made me represent Egypt in over 36 countries of the world. True I revived aragouz, but he carried my name as well, as he is the one who truly presented me to the people." "I used to tell them I am the aragouz that became a diplomat and this is what I really meant. If you work on the local it will take you to the international. Search Keywords: Short link: The Egyptian film recently premiered at Cannes to compete for the Palme Dor award Cairos Photopia is to host a talk with filmmaker Abu Bakr Shawky, the filmmaker behind Cannes-nominated film Yommedine, on 27 June. The Egyptian film recently premiered at Cannes to compete for the Palme DOr award. The event will feature the screening of selected scenes from the film, which has not yet been released in Egypt. A moderated discussion with Shawky will be held, as well as a Q&A session with the audience. Yomeddine follows a leper named Beshay who leaves the confines of the Abu Zaabal leper colony for the first time, embarking on a journey across Egypt. In the company of his orphaned apprentice Shika, he goes in search of what remains of his family. The film is the feature debut of Egyptian-Austrian filmmaker Shawky, who was born in Cairo in 1985, studied Political Science and Filmmaking in Cairo, and graduated from NYU Tisch School of the Arts graduate film programme. The feature length Yommedine comes after several shorts: The Colony; Things I Heard on Wednesdays, and Martyr Friday have screened at festivals around the world. Yommedine is the first Egyptian directorial debut to be screened in Cannes official competition, and was hailed as a triumph by standing ovation, when it screened at the festival. Programme: Wednesday, 27 June at 7pm Photopia, 15 El-Somal St. Korba, Heliopolis, Cairo For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture Search Keywords: Short link: Iconic Egyptian actress Amal Farid died in a hospital in Cairo on Tuesday morning. Farid was born on 12 February 1938 in Cairo's Abbassiya district, and was a graduate of sociology. Farids career was launched at the hands of Baba Sharo (Mohamed Mahmoud Shaaban) in the early 1950s, when she was hired to work on his children's radio show. Farid tried her luck in acting through a competition organised by Al-Geel (The Generation) magazine in the early 1950s. She was recommended by writers Mostafa Amin and Anis Mansour to appear in her first movie Mawed Maa El-Saada (A Date with Happiness), with mega star Faten Hamama in 1954. This was followed by many iconic roles in cinema alongside huge names including Abdel-Halim Hafez and Ahmed Ramzi. Over her nearly two-decade career, Farid appeared in over 30 films including Layali El-Hob with Abdel-Halim. Her role was that of a romantic aristocratic girl, which fit her beautiful features and style. The starlets for whom Abdel-Halim sang in movies were very few. Amal was among them, however, and she was envied by almost every girl in the Arab world for decades after Abdel-Halim sang Kefaya Norak Alaya in the film, where he and Farid danced in an iconic romantic scene. Farid said in interviews that it was Abdel-Halim who asked for her by name to star alongside him in the movie. Farid, who was known for her elegant and convincing acting style, worked most frequently alongside Ahmed Ramzy and the famous comedian Ismail Yassin. She was fortunate to find directors who were able to utilise her talent in various roles. Such directors include Fateen Abdel-Wahab, Salah Abou Seif, Kamal El-Sheikh and Hussein Helmy El-Mohandes. Farid was not always the main starlet in movies, but her presence was always felt and she always made her mark with her convincing performance. Director Henry Barakat brought Farid out of the pure girl role in Banat El-Yom, where she embodied the personality of a spoiled, selfish girl. In the film, she provokes the hatred of the audience when she tries to spoil her sister's love affair a nobleman played by Abdel-Halim, whom she accuses of trying to rape her out of jealousy. The role was a surprise when the movie came out in 1957, but critics appreciated her performance and recognised the talented, capable and credible actress. Farids filmography includes Banat El-Yom (1957), Seraa Maal Hayat (1957), Min Agl Emraa (1959), Ismail Yassin Fil Tayaran (1959), Banat Bahri (1961), Zekrayat El-Talmaza (1965), and Geziret El-Oshak (1968). Farid gave up on her acting career in the late 1960s and moved to live with her husband in Moscow. She returned to Egypt a decade later and received a number of smaller roles, but her film career never picked up with the same strength. Farid spent her final years in a home for the elderly in Cairo, and went through surgery earlier this year. Despite a reported improvement in health, her condition began to deteriorate over the past weeks and she passed away early on Tuesday in a Cairo hospital. For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture Search Keywords: Short link: Lewisville, TX -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/19/2018 --Metro Dent is a famous full-service body shop which has been serving the car owners all through Fort Worth, Dallas and a variety of surrounding areas for more than twenty-five years. Their staff members comprise of experienced technicians who are professionals in the art of exact color matching and can make every car look brand new. Metro Dent offers many collision restoration services along with auto body repair and auto painting in Frisco and Denton Texas, which includes complete mechanical work, auto detailing, in addition to automotive glass replacement services. The devoted technicians of Metro Dent have all the required devices and apparatus to restore the look of a vehicle to its pre-accident condition. 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One can right away call on 214-735-8365 to avail paintless dent repair, collision repair, auto painting and body shop services from Metro Dent. The customer care representatives of the company are also available on their toll-free number, which is 877-916-4245. About Metro Dent Metro Dent is a family owned full service body shop which specializes in paintless dent removal and auto painting services. Lewisville, TX -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/19/2018 --Metro dent is a one-stop solution when it comes to auto dents. It is a full-service body shop that specializes in paintless auto dent removal as well as hail repair in Carrollton and Denton Texas. This family-owned company has been offering dent removal services for more than 25 years now all through Dallas, Fort Worth and other nearby areas. In case the car has suffered from any damages due to hail and snow, one can get their car here as the technicians here can get the problem fixed in no time. At Metro Dent, one can avail reasonably priced repair services for auto dents. The technicians use specialized tools to repair a vehicle, without causing any harm to its outer paint coating. At Metro Dent, the staff members working on the paintless auto dent removal consist of qualified technicians who have several years of experience in this field. They have complete expertise in PDR technique which makes them competent enough to carry out repairs on any vehicle. The main aim of Metro Dent is to bring back the vehicles to its original condition. Apart from offering paintless dent repair services, they also offer premium glass replacement services, auto detailing services, as well as auto painting in Frisco and Denton Texas services. There are a lot of advantages opting for services from this company. Apart from auto painting and dent repair, they also offer concierge service, free car rentals and a lifetime warranty. To get free quotes from the company or to set up an appointment with the customer care representatives here, one can right away place a call on 877-916-4245. As of now, the company serves the residents of Dallas, Lewisville, Fort Worth, TX, and the Surrounding Areas. About Metro Dent Metro Dent is a well-known full service body shop who has more than 25 years of experience in the field of auto repairs. Khan's withdrawal came after The Young Fathers' show was cancelled for their support of the BDS campaign Renowned Egyptian artist Hassan Khan is one of a number of artists who chose to cancel their gigs at the German Ruhrtriennale festival after it cancelled an August show by The Young Fathers over their support for the BDS campaign, which calls for the boycott of Israel over its occupation of Palestinian territories. In its statement on the website, the festival explained that it had asked The Young Fathers to distance itself from the campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). The Ruhrtriennale distances itself in all forms from the BDS movement and wishes to have absolutely no connection with the campaign, and as such has decided to cancel the concert when the band regrettably did not distance itself from the campaign upon request. On his personal Facebook page, Khan said that he and other artists will not be participating in the Ruhrtriennale. We urge the festival to reconsider its actions. Unfortunately, under the present conditions, we will be unable to perform with a clear conscience when our colleagues have been publicly punished for exercising their rights in expressing a political position peacefully, the statement read. The Egyptian artist, musician and author described the festivals decision as punitive proscriptive and revealing of a deep misunderstanding of the contemporary world and our place as responsible citizens in it. Khans statement was co-signed by other festival performers Tony Elieh, Mazen Kerbaj, Sharif Shenaoui, and Raed Yassin. Khan was set to premiere his electronic music piece titled Live Ammunition! on 12 September at the Engine House, during the 6th week of the festival. The Ruhrtriennale is an arts festival of music, dance, theatre, performance and fine arts, taking place in former industrial buildings in the Ruhr Area in Bochum, Germany, between 9 August and 23 September. For more arts and culture news and updates, follow Ahram Online Arts and Culture on Twitter at @AhramOnlineArts and on Facebook at Ahram Online: Arts & Culture Search Keywords: Short link: A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind. POLICE investigating a burglary in Wincobank have released this CCTV of a man they wish to trace. Electrical items and bank cards were stolen after a property on Hyacinth Road was broken into. Later the same day the cards were used to buy items at a newsagents in Shiregreen, Sheffield. A police spokesman said: An investigation is currently ongoing and officers are now trying to identify the man pictured as it is thought he can assist with enquiries. The burglary happened around noon on May 2. Call 101 quoting incident 461 of that date or ring Crimestoppers via 0800 555111. A MAN has been convicted for his part in a failed operation to take 500,000 from a bank by kidnapping staff and forcing them to open a safe. Michael Dunphy (45, pictured), of HMP Doncaster, was found guilty of four counts of kidnap and two counts of attempted robbery at Sheffield Crown Court today (Tuesday). A jury of seven men and five women returned unanimous verdicts on all counts after deliberating for around three-and-a-half hours. Dunphy was part of a gang of robbers who tried to take 500,000 from a branch of Barclays at Stag roundabout in November. Three of them followed a bank employee from her home in a stolen Audi and kidnapped her, her seven-year-old daughter, and her colleagues Zoe Copley and Jo Blakey. They forced two of the employees to open a safe before fleeing empty-handed minutes before police arrived. Dunphys case was that he was facilitating the attempted robbery under duress and he had no knowledge of the kidnapping. Judge Robert Bartfield directed the jury to return a not guilty verdict on a count of attempting to rob the seven-year-old who was kidnapped as part of the operation. CLAIMS by a suspected bank robber that he was forced to take part in a kidnapping and daylight raid have been described as like something straight out of a low-budget gangster movie. Judge Robert Bartfield was summarising the evidence for the jury in the trial at Sheffield Crown Court of 45-year-old Michael Dunphy. Dunphy, of HMP Doncaster, denies four counts of kidnap and three counts of attempted robbery. He is accused of being one of a gang who tried to take 500,000 from a branch of Barclays at Stag roundabout in November. Three of the would-be robbers are said to have followed a Barclays employee from her home in a stolen Audi and kidnapped her, her seven-year-old daughter, and her colleagues Zoe Copley and Jo Blakey. They are said to have forced two of the bank's employees to open a safe before fleeing the scene empty-handed minutes before police officers arrived. Dunphys case is that he was facilitating the attempted robbery under duress and he had no knowledge of the kidnapping. Judge Robert Bartfield told the jury while summing up the evidence: The prosecution say his [Dunphys] defence of duress is like something straight out of a low-budget gangster movie. Dunphy claims to have been kidnapped in the weeks leading up to the attempted robbery and told to come up with 500,000 while being shown a shallow grave at gunpoint. The prosecution say that Dunphy was the man who led the staff into the bank disguised as a police officer while wearing a wig a person referred to in the trial as man number one. Judge Bartfield said: The prosecution say that the evidence that he is man number one is overwhelming. Summing up the defence case, Judge Bartfield told jurors that Dunphy claimed to have come from a world far removed from them gangland Manchester. He added: There's always somebody above your level to whom you are subordinate or are in fear of. Dunphys case was that he had offended a gang leader connected to Paul Brady the man he was convicted of kidnapping and killing in 2009, Judge Bartfield said. Brady was an operative of the gang leader, who was referred to in the trial as Mr Big, and Dunphy was always going to be a target later on. Dunphys case was that because Brady had been killed, he was being held responsible for the disappearance of cocaine worth 500,000, Judge Bartfield told the court. In any event [says Dunphy], why would somebody who is in a good, strong relationship and good employment want to be involved in something like this? he said. Dunphy claims to have been kidnapped in October last year by some men in an underground car park, Judge Bartfield told the court. A hood was put over his head and he was told to get on the floor. Judge Bartfield told the court said Dunphys case was he was thrown into a van, he was afraid, and he thought he was going to die. The van drove down the motorway and eventually on to some grass by the motorway. The doors opened and he was dragged onto his knees. The bag was pulled off. Dunphy saw a man holding a rifle and another man holding a handgun, neither of whom Dunphy recognised, Judge Bartfield told the court. He was shown a shallow grave and one of the men was wearing a balaclava. Dunphy claimed that Mr Big told him over the phone that he wanted 500,000 from him which he took to be a reference to the 500,000-worth of cocaine lost in the Brady kidnapping. He later suggested targeting Barclays at Stag roundabout to Mr Big as a potential way of recouping the 500,000 and that he would supply the premises and the vehicle. The jury in the case retired to consider its verdict yesterday afternoon and resumed deliberations today. (jckonline.com) - Martin Rapaport has made a number of fiery denunciations about lab-grown diamonds, so when I heard that he spent his annual JCK Las Vegas breakfast speech lambasting De Beers, I thought he had taken the company to task for Lightbox. But no, he only touched on that topicand hailed De Beers approach as brilliantand was angry about a different, if still important, issue: De Beers reluctance to let retailers and manufacturers identify the source of De Beersmined goods as from the company. (The speech can be watched here and is also embedded at the end of the post.) ALROSA to implement free screening health programs for employees in August 19 june 2018 News ALROSA, the worlds largest diamond mining company, will launch new programs for free medical screenings in different areas for employees starting in August. The financing of these activities will also increase in comparison with the previous year. The company first introduced the screening practice in 2017. In October-December, about 5,500 employees of the company checked their health under the programs "Men's Health" and "Prevention, and early diagnosis of diseases of the digestive system". Specially invited professionals of the international medical center "SOGAZ" conducted the examination in Udachny, Aikhal, Mirny and Lensk. ALROSA spent about RUB 30 million for these events. Considering the high interest of the employees to the program, ALROSA continues the practice of early diagnosis and preventive measures. In a period from August 2 to November 30, 2018, new programs will be conducted "Cardio-screening" and "Women's Health", as well as a program to diagnose diseases of the digestive system. The total financing of screening programs in 2018 will be about RUB 77 million. About 10,500 people are expected to get the examination. "Last year's screening program gave a very good result and helped many people to get a real picture of their health and make timely preventive treatment. A large number of participants of the program shows that people understand the importance of early diagnosis. It is important for ALROSA to provide employees with this opportunity, especially given the fact that most of the employees work in areas far from major cities. Healthcare of the employees is an essential part of the company's social programs," Yulia Kulakova, Director of ALROSA Medical Center, said. The World Diamond Council (WDC), an industry group focused on preventing conflict diamonds from entering the legitimate global supply chain and protecting the value of natural diamonds, reaffirmed its commitment to driving ongoing positive change through reform at the 2018 KP Intersessional meeting being held in Antwerp, Belgium June 18-22. This is stated in a press release distributed by the World Diamond Council this morning. The Intersessional is an annual forum where members gather to discuss the technical aspects of the various working groups that comprise the Kimberley Process. Individual members of the WDC currently serve on a range of KP working groups that include Monitoring, CAR Monitoring Team, Statistics, Rules and Procedures, Participation and Chairmanship, Alluvial and Artisanal Production and Diamond Experts. In a speech planned for later today, Stephane Fischler, Acting President of the WDC, is expected to reiterate the need for KP review and reform in the areas of scope of conflict diamonds, KPCS minimum standards, and long-term implementation of KPCS directives via a Permanent Secretariat. He is also expected to appeal to alluvial diamond producing countries in particular to embrace the opportunities for progress and improving lives in their own communities made possible with the KP. In a press conference call preceding the KP Intersessional Meeting, Stephane Fischler described the KP reform and review pattern, saying that this process is organised in four streams. One stream is looking at the core document, one is looking at the peer review mechanism, one stream is looking at the multi donor stakeholder fund and one is looking at a permanent secretariat, he said. All streams received a lead that assembles all input provided. The various streams are making good progress, we hope to have meaningful proposals on the table be the end of the year. During this KP Intersessional we will have multiple sessions to continue the discussions and progress regarding each stream. Touching upon the long-felt need for a KP permanent secretariat, Stephane Fischler said, Discussions on the establishment of a permanent secretariat are certainly included during this KP Intersessional. We believe it is essential to strengthen the administrative support for the KP as we believe there should be a reinforcement of the standards. During review visits recommendations are sometimes made, but through lack of capacity its difficult to see them implemented. The KP Chair also changes every year. A permanent secretariat will give the Chair the necessary assistance as well. It can help to create an institutional memory, dedicated staffing, technical and administrative support of the daily work of the KP and its bodies. A Secretariat will also provide a group of experts. Experts that can provide meaningful capacity building on the ground, to manage and effectively implement KP decisions and restrictions and restoration of KPCS implementation in sanctioned counties. The WDC created profound proposals for a permanent secretariat, we hope its need will further grow throughout the KP Reform Process with other participants as well. Speaking about artisanal diamond mining, he said that we shouldnt put all the artisanal mining in the same bucket, as today there is artisanal mining that operates up to the required level. The Diamond Development Initiative (DDI) is a key driver in the alluvial mining industry, they take many actions to support the sector to become more traceable and transparent. Already 200,000 miners in the DRC are formalised, registered 110,000 in diamond mining, 90,000 in gold mining. This work is ongoing. Standards, like the Maendeleo standards of the DDI, are being put in place. In support of it, interesting initiatives were launched, one of them is GemFair of DeBeers. This initiative supports the formalisation of artisanal and small-scale diamond mining and trading with the aim of purchasing rough diamonds from approved locations while helping improve working conditions and livelihoods for those working in the alluvial diamond sector. The development is ongoing and as the WDC, we support it fully. The current minority of traceable alluvial mining will hopefully become a majority over time. The statement released by the World Diamond Council says that in addition to encouraging the KP reform, the WDC continues to advocate for positive change from within. This month the WDC System of Warranties (SoW) entered a public review period following the completion of an industry review. The WDC SoW extends the assurances provided by the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) by requiring all diamond suppliers and diamond jewelry manufacturers to pass on a conflict free warranty statement each time diamond goods (rough or polished) change hands. It also asks SoW statement users to ensure that trading activities maintain strict adherence of universally accepted principles on human and labor rights, anticorruption and anti-money laundering in support of the obligatory implementation. The WDC is also taking an active role throughout the year in encouraging reform by meeting directly with organizations and governments that can effect change in areas where the issues of conflict diamonds are most acute. Last month, executives from the WDC traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and met with the chair of the Working Group on Artisanal and Alluvial Production (WGAAP); the Minister of Mines; the Center for Evaluation, Expertise and Certification (CEEC) chair; deputy chair and team; the Diamond Development Initiative (DDI); and DRC civil society members. In April 2018, the WDC pledged its support to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) due diligence guidance (DDG) for responsible supply chains of minerals from conflict-affected and high-risk areas. Together through the KP, civil society, government and industry are making important progress toward long-term solutions that address the modern challenges of diamond communities around the world, said Mr. Fischler. But that is not enough. We must also look within ourselves to encourage dialogue, listen to concerns and drive meaningful and ongoing progress from within. By constructively challenging policies and procedures, together we will create a better path forward and uphold the duty of care we owe to the people and communities where diamonds are produced. WDC members such as ALROSA, Arslanian Group NV, AWDC, De Beers Group, Diarough, Dominion Diamond Mines ULC, Grib Diamonds, IDI, Jewelers of America, Malca Amit, Rubel & Menasche, Signet Jewelers Ltd. and the WFDB are present during this years KP Intersessional in Antwerp. Image credit: mingeoforum.ru At the 9th international MinGeo Siberia forum, held on May 23rd and 24th in Krasnoyarsk, the first digital blockchain platform for developing junior mining projects was presented to the assembled mining community to create an ecosystem to attract investment into the mining industry and connect investors, miners and experts around the world.By the end of 2020, the platform will host more than a thousand projects, complete with expert evaluation and access to the international investment market.For more than 15 years, the international mining community has been declaring the necessity of creating a unified platform that would allow miners to access investment for their projects without intermediary parties. The creation of such a platform has become possible thanks to the advent of blockchain technology. Currently being developed on the basis of this technology, Terra Prospect is a unified platform which will connect the interests of mining companies and investors. - said Igor Svintitskiy, director and coordinator of the MinGeo 2018 forum.He went on to say that the blockchain will allow users of the platform to keep track of transactions, expert evaluations, as well as the history and ongoing status of any project from anywhere in the world at any time.We plan to begin project registration before the end of June. The first registered users will then have access to geological, legal and financial express evaluation of their mining projects. Participating in this evaluation will be experts from the Committee for Mineral Reserves International Reporting Standards ( http://www.crirsco.com/ ), Russian Society on Subsoil Use ( http://oern.expert/ ), EurAsian Union of Experts in Subsoil in Subsurface Management ( http://eues.ru/ ), specialists from high-profile institutions in the geological sector such as the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Mineral Raw Materials ( http://vims-geo.ru/ ), Central Research Institute of Geological Prospecting for Base and Precious Metals ( http://en.tsnigri.ru/index.php ), Institute of Minerology, Geochemistry and Crystallochemistry of Rare Elements ( https://www.imgre.ru ) as well as Moscow State Univerity ( https://www.msu.ru/en/ ), Russian State Geological Survey University Sergo Ordzhonikidze ( http://mgri-rggru.ru/ ), and Siberian Federal University ( http://www.sfu-kras.ru/en) The platform will feature ratings of the experts based on the results of their work, as well as ratings of projects on the basis of geological analysis. Image credit: ALROSA Diamond giant, Alrosa of Russia, said it is considering investment opportunities in the diamond exploration and mining in Zimbabwe.Company chief executive Sergey Ivanov, who met with the Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa last April, was quoted by the Sunday Mail as saying that pre-work was underway to identify possible areas for co-operation.On April 21, 2018, we met with the President of Zimbabwe, Emmerson Mnangagwa. During the meeting, we noted a significant potential for enhancing the interaction with Zimbabwean partners, he said.The focus was on consideration of investment opportunities in the exploration and diamond mining in Zimbabwe."Ivanov said Alrosa was working to identify promising areas for further co-operation, including investments.Apart from East Europe, Alrosa had mining operations in Angola and was currently prospecting for diamonds in Botswana through a joint venture with Botswana Diamonds. The Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC), together with its research center the Scientific and Technological Research Center for Diamonds (WTOCD) on Monday presented a revolutionary technology that fully automates and accelerates the diamond polishing process."This revolutionary technology is fundamentally changing the process of diamond polishing. The process of polishing the stone will now take about one and a half hour, instead of a whole day when processed manually. This is an acceleration of 10-20 times, " AWDC CEO Ari Epstein said.The development of a new technology and creation by WTOCD of a polishing device called FENIX took more than ten years.Actually diamond polishing in Antwerp is made by hand and is an expensive work. Several Antwerp-based diamond companies are currently testing the technology, which is scheduled to be available to the public in September. Crude oil futures continued to fall Tuesday, part of a global sell-off sparked by trade tensions with the U.S. and most partners. Oil has also suffered from speculation that OPEC will ramp up production after this week's meeting in Vienna. Russian output is also expected to increase after a prolonged supply quota. WTI light sweet oil was down $1 to $64.83 a barrel, nearing the lowest since April. Prices have tumbled from a recent 4-year peak near $75. U.S. crude oil inventories will be eyed over the next two days. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Market Analysis China's central bank added more funds into the financial system on Tuesday after the US President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 10 percent tariff on an additional $200 billion of Chinese imports. The People's Bank of China added CNY 200 billion via medium-term lending facility on concerns over liquidity as well as negative impact from trade conflicts. After the US threatening, China's Ministry of Commerce called the action "blackmail." China cautioned that it will take comprehensive and powerful measures to protect its interest. The ministry said the US action deviates from the consensus reached by both sides on multiple occasions and disappointed international society. If the tariffs did lead to a fall in US imports from China, this would have knock-on effects for those countries in Asia which export intermediate goods to China, which are then assembled before being shipped off to their final destination, Gareth Leather, an economist at Capital Economics, said. Last week, the PBoC had maintained its key borrowing costs after the U.S. Federal Reserve decided to hike its rate for the second time this year. The bank left the 7-day reverse repo unchanged at 2.55 percent and the rate on 14-day tenor at 2.70 percent. The benchmark one-year lending rate has been unchanged since October 2015. For comments and feedback contact: 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. Bitcoin and its peers managed to sustain the upward momentum they gained over the past few hours and are firmly in the green Tuesday morning. The cryptomarket capitalization recovered strongly on Monday and is at $293.41 billion around 9.15 am ET. Here is a wrap of the main news from the cryptocurrency and blockchain world over the past 24 hours. Rich Increasingly Interested In Cryptocurrencies, But Cautious, Report Finds High net worth individuals, or HNWIs, are increasingly interested in cryptocurrencies as an investment and a store of value, but they remain cautious and are seeking wisdom from wealth management firms, results of a report, released Tuesday, showed. The findings are part of the 22nd annual edition of the Wold Wealth Report, compiled by the professional services firm, Capgemini, that defined HNWIs as those having investable assets of US$1 million or more, excluding primary residence, collectibles, consumables and consumer durables. Read more... UBS CEO Says Blockchain Almost A Must For Business UBS Group AG Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti said blockchain is almost a must for . In an interview with CNBC, the head of the Swiss banking giant said he believes the technology is definitely an opportunity in the long term. Ermotti, who has expressed his dislike for bitcoin earlier calling it a speculative bubble, said that blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, can help companies become more efficient, and thus reducing costs for certain operations. Read more... Crypto Fund AG Wins Swiss FINMA License For Fund Distribution Crypto Fund AG, a firm focused on crypto investments, received a license to distribute funds in Switzerland from FINMA, the country's financial market watchdog. The Zug, Switzerland-based firm announced on Monday that it won a FINMA license as a distributor of collective investment schemes and gained the opportunity to distribute funds to qualified investors. Read more... Indian State to implement Blockchain in Food Supply, Distribution The Government of Kerala, the southernmost state of India, has launched a project to use the Blockchain technology to make food supply and distribution network more efficient. The new project, which will be implemented through the Kerala Development and Innovation Strategic Council or K-DISC, will also use blockchain for its crop insurance scheme. The technology is expected to ensure quick processing and settlement of crop losses claims to farmers. Read more... South Korea Mulls 'Crypto Beach' South Korea is looking to develop a dedicated cryptocurrency and blockchain zone to be called "Crypto Beach" similar to "Crypto Valley" Zug in Switzerland, according to local media outlet Edaily. The East Asian country aims to build a cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem for enterprises to incubate startup companies and projects working in the sector. The Crypto Beach is expected to come up at Haeundae beach in Busan city. Read more... Japanese Municipality Plans ICO For the first time in Japan, a municipality has announced plans to launch an initial coin offering (ICO) in order to secure funds to develop a sustainable community. Named after the village, its tokens will be known as Nishiawakura Coin (NAC). The coin will reportedly be Ethereum-based. Read more... Current Prices As of 9.23 am ET on Tuesday, Bitcoin was up 5.54 percent at $6,778.01 and Ethereum was higher by 9.33 percent at $540.40 on Coinbase. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News The U.S. Office of Government Ethics (OGE) has issued a legal advisory urging employees of the executive branch of the U.S. government to disclose their cryptocurrency holdings. OGE advised that filers must report their holdings in a virtual currency if its value exceeded $1,000 at the end of the reporting period or if the income produced by the virtual currency holding exceeded $200. Filers are required to identify the name of the virtual currency and the exchange or platform on which it is held. OGE made it clear that virtual currency is "property held for investment or the production of income" for purposes of public and confidential financial disclosure, and that it does not consider virtual currency a "real" currency or legal tender. Executive branch employees are therefore required to report their holdings of virtual currency on their public or confidential financial disclosure report, OGE said in the legal advisory dated June 18. The new order makes it mandatory for US officials working for the White House as well as a number of federal agencies to reveal their assets in cryptocurrency. Also, the reporting and conflict of interest principles set forth in the legal advisory makes it applicable to other digital assets such as "coins" or "tokens" received in connection with initial coin offerings or through distributed ledger or blockchain . OGE said it issued the legal advisory as employees who hold virtual currencies are increasingly seeking guidance from their ethics officials concerning their financial disclosure reporting obligations. The executive branch watchdog added that it may issue further guidance "as the nature of virtual currency becomes better defined". The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) treats virtual currency as property, and not as real currency, for U.S. federal tax purposes. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) views certain virtual currency as a commodity and involving a commodity derivative contract in specific situations. Officials at both the CFTC and the SEC recently noted that many digital assets, including virtual currencies, are being promoted as investment assets. For comments and feedback contact: 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. Canada is a step closer to becoming the first G-7 nation to legalize marijuana nationwide after the House of Commons voted to allow recreational use. The bill will now go back to the country's Senate, which had already approved a version of the bill. On Monday, the House of Commons voted 205 to 82 in favor of the Bill C-45, known as the Cannabis Act. Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said that while the government has accepted more than two dozen changes to Bill C-45 made by the Senate last week, it disagrees with more than a dozen amendments to the bill. The Senate will now discuss the amendments and decide whether to accept the proposed changes to the bill. After reconciliation of the House and Senate bills, it will receive royal assent by the governor general, before becoming law. However, the Senate can only delay the bill, not block it. Legalizing marijuana was a campaign promise of Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. An initial July 1 target was set for ending the cannabis prohibition that dates back to 1923. In April 2017, Bill C-45 was introduced to the Canadian Parliament as a means to legalize access to cannabis for non-medical purposes. It would legally allow for individuals aged 18 and over to purchase marijuana for personal use. The bill will also control and regulate how cannabis is grown, sold and distributed. Canada legalized medical cannabis way back in 2001 and is home to many of the largest cannabis companies in the world. The federal government has announced plans to legalize adult use later this year, which would make Canada the first G-7 country to federally legalize adult use. Canada's marijuana industry has evolved a lot more than many other countries and is not hampered by restrictions across state lines, as in the U.S. Based on 2017's consumption data, Statistics Canada estimates that the cannabis market will be worth C$5.7 billion. In the U.S., nine states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana. Medical marijuana is legal in 29 states. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com The United States and North Korea have agreed to halt joint military drills scheduled for August. This was one of the key assurances given by U.S. President Donald Trump to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a historic summit in Singapore a week ago. In the biggest ever breakthrough for peace on the Korean peninsula as well as restoration of bilateral ties, the United States and North Korea agreed on June 12 to halt two major defense deterrents that posed the biggest threat to each other. North Korea committed to work towards "the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula." In return, the U.S. gave assurance to North Korea that it is ready to stop "provocative and expensive" war games with South Korea. Trump added that he wanted to see U.S. troops withdraw from the South. The Pentagon announced on Monday,"Consistent with President Donald J. Trump's commitment to North Korea and in concert with South Korea, the United States military has suspended all planning for Ulchi Freedom Guardian, this August's defensive war game." "We are still coordinating additional actions," Dana W. White, chief Pentagon spokesperson, said in a statement. "No decisions on subsequent war games have been made," she added. There will be a meeting on this issue at the Pentagon later this week with the defense secretary, secretary of state and the national security advisor. "There is no impact on Pacific exercises outside of the Korean Peninsula." South Korea's defense ministry confirmed the suspension of the war games. It said both the governments "plan to continue discussions for further measures." Ulchi Freedom Guardian is an annual U.S.-South Korean command and control exercise that began in 1976 and is designed to "enhance readiness, protect the region and maintain stability on the Korean Peninsula," according to Pentagon. Last year, about 17,500 U.S. service members, as well as participants from Australia, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, took part in the massive military drills. The U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises were a major irritant in the relationship between the United States and North Korea, with Pyongyang criticizing the war games as a rehearsal for invasion. U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) is stationed in South Korea to help protect its ally from its hostile northern neighbor. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Political News (Agencia CMA Latam) - President Michel Temer said Monday that the Brazilian government should await the decision of the South American country's Supreme Court (STF) on the minimum freight price table for road transport. Temer added that the government would obey the decision of the Supreme Court and considered that the contrary position of country's antitrust watchdog (Cade) to the tabulation would not hinder the solution of the issue. His statements were made at a press conference in Paraguay after lunch with representatives of Mercosur in Asuncion. While Cade said no to the tabulation, the Brazilian Land Transport Agency (ANTT) defended the measure. The divergent positions were sent by both federal agencies to the STF, which examines the constitutionality of the measure. Cade is under the umbrella of the Ministry of Justice, while ANTT is attached to the Ministry of Transport. Cade argued that freight tariffs limit competition, harming society and creating a kind of cartel in the industry. The table was set in an agreement between the government and truck drivers' representatives during the talks to end an 11-day strike that affected supplies across the country, hampering various sectors of the . The tabulation, however, was contested in the STF by agricultural and industry entities. 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. Canadian stocks fell Tuesday, hurt by slumping commodities and concerns about U.S. trade squabbles. The world is focused on the trade war between the U.S. and China, but President Trump continued to assail Canadian trade practices today. Dairy producer Saputo (SAP.TO) made headlines by agreeing with the U.S. on milk pricing issues. The TSX Composite Index was down 67 points to 16,316.50. Crude oil futures tumbled as OPEC geared up for a contentious meeting in Vienna. Saudi Arabia is expected to press for increased output but will face strong opposition from Iran. July WTI oil settled at $65.07/bbl, down 78 cents, or 1.2%. Oil is down almost 10% over the past month. RBC's Greg Mills, global head of equities, will depart at end of July. The bank named co-heads to replace Mills. It's part of a broader re-organization. Shares were down fractionally. Bombardier rose after a Goldman Sachs analyst upgraded the stock to a "buy" on signs of a turnaround. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Market Analysis By SA Commercial Prop News Protech Khuthele CEO Antony Page said the implementation of the groups strategic turnaround is progressing well and we are beginning to see the fruits of everyones efforts. Civil engineering and construction-related services group Protech Khuthele (PKH) boosted its order book with the past three months been awarded three contracts in roads construction and waterworks totalling R350 million. The largest contract worth R285m has been awarded by the Gauteng roads and transport department. It involves the construction of a new section of the R82 road between Walkerville and Eikenhof south of Johannesburg. The implementation of the groups strategic turnaround is progressing well and we are beginning to see the fruits of everyones efforts CEO Antony Page said. He said the groups order book now amounted to R1 billion. Exxaro Resources awarded Protech Khuthele two waterworks contracts worth R65m a stormwater channel and a waste-water treatment works at Exxaros Grootegeluk coal mine in Lephalale. Protech Khuthele will build the reservoir for the waste-water treatment works and project-manage specialist subcontractors for the installation of mechanical electrical and instrumentation equipment. The waste-water treatment project marks the entry of Protech Khuthele into the civils and concrete sector Page said. We anticipate that the stormwater channel which commenced in June 2013 as well as the waste-water treatment project will both be completed by March 2014. The stormwater channel project entails a 700m concrete-lined channel as well as a 750m precast culvert. BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav The BJP on Tuesday ended its alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and pulled out of the PDP-led Jammu and Kashmir government, saying it had become "untenable" to continue in the coalition. "Three years ago BJP formed a government in Jammu and Kashmir with the PDP with some goals. But now it has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government," Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) General Secretary Ram Madhav told the media here. He said the decision was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah. "Keeping in mind the larger national interest of India's integrity and security... in order to bring in control the situation prevailing in the state. It is time that the reins of power in state be handed over to the Governor (N.N. Vohra)," the BJP leader said. He added that terrorism and radicalization had increased in Kashmir. "Fundamental rights of people in Kashmir are under threat. Even press freedom and freedom of speech is at risk," Ram Madhav said. Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday turned 48 and several senior Congress leaders reached his mother Sonia Gandhi's residence at 10 Janpath to greet him on his birthday while Prime Minister Narendra Modi and political leaders across the country also wished him. Former President Pranab Mukherjee, in a tweet to wish Gandhi, said that he had "an unparalleled legacy of nation building behind you and an outstanding responsibility in the future". Thanking Mukherjee, Gandhi said: "Thank you Pranab Da for your wishes and kind words. I appreciate them." West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee also wished Gandhi in a tweet. Party supporters and workers got into a celebratory mood, dancing to the beat of drums in the morning outside the Congress office on Akbar Road here. There were similar vibes outside 10 Janpath, where Youth Congress members led the celebrations. They also went inside to meet Rahul Gandhi. Among the leaders visiting Sonia Gandhi's residence were former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Randeep Surjewala, P.C. Chacko, Ajay Maken, Sushmita Dev and most of the steering committee members including A.K. Antony, Ambika Soni, Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ashok Gehlot, Motilal Vora, Mukul Wasnik, Sushilkumar Shinde and others. This is Rahul Gandhi's first birthday after becoming the party President. Greeting him, Modi tweeted: "Birthday greetings to Congress President Rahul Gandhi. I pray for his long and healthy life." National Conference leader Omar Abdullah said: "Here's wishing Rahul Gandhi a very happy 48th birthday. May the almighty bless you with good health, much success & many more years in the service of the nation." RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav tweeted: "Wishing a very Happy Birthday to Rahul Gandhiji. You have exhibited remarkable vision and exemplary leadership. On your birthday, I wish you peace, good health, success and happiness. Congratulations and Happy Birthday." DMK Working President M.K. Stalin also wished Rahul Gandhi, wishing him "many more years of service to the nation". Former Janata Dal-United leader Sharad Yadav also wished him. Gandhi later thanked everyone for the wishes and said: "I am overwhelmed by the birthday wishes that I have received from all corners of our country and abroad." "Your greetings, blessings and prayers are my strength. I want to thank each and every one of you for remembering me today. May God bless you all," he added. Liverpool forward Sadio Mane has hailed the extraordinary work rate of Roberto Firmino, acknowledging that many of his goals are due in no small part to the Brazilians movement. Hes a hard worker and an incredible player, the Senegalese says on Liverpools official 2017-18 end-of-season DVD. He can see in his eye and what hes doing all the time on the pitch, working for the team like a defender and hes a striker! This is special for him and it makes him a very, very, very important player for us. Mane also says he and Firmino enjoy a good off the field relationship. Roberto is someone who likes dancing all the time and he always forces me to dance with him! I try my best but Im not as good as him! He was talking to me, saying why dont you dance like we said all the time?! and I said: Hey Bobby, Im shy, I cant dance like you! He said come on my friend, we have to do it! and we enjoy each one, so why not! The Elders of the Congregational Christian Church of Samoa (C.C.C.S.) are urging Prime Minister Tuilaepa Dr. Sailele Malielegaoi and his administration to reconsider the law to tax the alofa received by Church Ministers. This is the gist of a letter from the Church to Prime Minister Tuilaepa, dated 15 June 2018. The 11-page letter, written in Samoan, highlights the churchs position on the issue. It was submitted to Tuilaepa prior to their much-anticipated meeting yesterday morning. Held at the Prime Ministers office, Church officials were silent about the outcome of the meeting. The Church delegation was led by the Chairman, Reverend Elder Tautiaga Senara. He was accompanied by Reverend Elders and Deacons from Upolu and Savaii. In the letter to Prime Minister Tuilaepa, the Church argues that: The tax law is not in line with Biblical principles The tax law contradicts the E.F.K.Ss core beliefs The tax law will impact the work of the church The tax law does not take into account the churchs contribution to the development of the Government and Samoa The need for separation between the church and state It is the belief of the E.F.K.S. that our customs, traditions and Christianity beliefs are the pillars of the Constitution of the Independent State of Samoa, reads a translation of the letter. Samoa is founded on God. It means any law that contradicts our customs, traditions and Christianity beliefs, should not be implemented at all. There is no doubt that the law in question violates the fundamental religious beliefs and the core beliefs of the E.F.K.S. Church. This is why the Fonotele (E.F.K.Ss General Assembly) rejected this law in 2017 and again in 2018. It was not possible to get a comment from Prime Minister Tuilaepa yesterday. The letter to Tuilaepa followed the decision by the Church to unanimously reject the law during their Annual General conference. The decision from the Fonotele remains the same as in 2017 and that is to reject the law requiring Church Ministers to pay taxes, said the C.C.C.S. General Secretary, Reverend Vavatau Taufao. Keep in mind that in the C.C.C.S., there is no such thing as ones discretion. That is why I have pride in my church because we practice the true meaning of democracy. We are a democratic church, the decision was not decided by one person, rather the entire church." Rev. Vavatau said about 90 per cent of the church leaders reject the law. But Prime Minister Tuilaepa has repeatedly said that any Church Minister, including the C.C.C.S., who refuses to pay their taxes will face the full force of the law. This law is the same as the law governing murder, Tuilaepa said. Once you violate that law, you alone will be criminally charged. And if you conspire with someone else to murder another person, youll be charged as well. Tuilaepa has insisted that the Government will not change its mind and that there is only one supreme law making body which is Parliament. Prime Minister Tuilaepa Dr. Sailele Malielegaoi should have taken more care to check his facts before he leapt to name two members of the public as suspects in the Governments search for the Ole Palemia (O.L.P.) blogger. So said Vui Seigafolava Sione Masinamua, one of two people identified by Prime Minister Tuilaepa as O.L.P. during an interview with Talamua Media last week. The second person is Namualuulu Albert Ainuu, who is based in the United States of America. Both men have strongly denied the allegation. Whereas Namulauulu told the Samoa Observer that Prime Minister Tuilaepas claims are wrong and defamatory. Vui, who is based in Sydney Australia, told Eddie Taualapinis ET Live programme that Tuilaepas allegations would eventually be tested in Court. He strongly rejected the claim. These claims are false and there is absolutely no evidence to support them, Vui said. I am not O.L.P. and that is the truth. I have nothing to hide. As someone holding such high profile public position, Vui said he would have expected Prime Minister Tuilaepa to be a lot more careful, especially with claims that damage peoples reputations. Asked for a comment on being labeled O.L.P., Vui said nothing could be further from the truth. He explained that he is one of O.L.Ps critics because of the language he/she sometimes uses against the Prime Minister. Vui said Tuilaepa as a person might not necessarily be his favourite, but he remains the Prime Minister of the Independent state of Samoa and as such, he should be accorded the respect he deserves. He added that he does not appreciate the foul language and words often used by O.L.P. against Prime Minister Tuilaepa. But he went on to call on Prime Minister Tuilaepa to lead by example when it comes to his public comments. Many times, Vui said, Prime Minister Tuilaepa is extremely reckless with words he uses in public. Some of his choices of words are extremely disrespectful and arrogant. Talamua immediately retracted its story, apologising to Namulauulu and Vui. The story has also been pulled from the website. But Vui told ET Live the damage has already been done and that he has had to call for calm from his family members who are not happy with what Prime Minister Tuilaepa has done. When reports surfaced online about Prime Minister Tuilaepas revelation, the Samoa Observer contacted Attorney General, Lemalu Hermann Retzlaff for a comment. I've just seen that PM Tuilaepa has named Vui and Albert Ainuu as part of the O.L.P. group, the email from the Samoa Observer to Lemalu reads. Was this uncovered by the Government's investigation?" "Does the government have proof that these people are indeed behind O.L.P?" And now that they have been found and identified publicly by P.M. Tuilaepa, what is the next course of action? Will your office move to take legal action against them? The questions were referred to Acting Attorney General, Constance Tafua Rivers, who responded: Talofa Mataafa, I acknowledge receipt of your email. However, please note that your queries have been referred by the Attorney General in his absence from the Office to Nanai Laveitiga Tuiletufuga to address. As of last night, no response has been received. Vui and Namulauulu are not the first members of the public Prime Minister Tuilaepa has associated with O.L.P. since his Government started a manhunt to find out the bloggers identity. Earlier this year, Tuilaepa used Parliamentary privileges to accuse lone Opposition member, Olo Fiti Vaai, of being O.L.P. The issue surfaced during the debate of the Tobacco Control Amendment Bill 2018. Prime Minister Tuilaepa was speaking about mankinds free will to choose between good and evil when he suddenly ventured into the issue of O.L.P. Thats when he accused Levaopolo, which is Olos other matai title, of being "O.L.P.. All of you, including Levaopolo, stop it right now, Tuilaepa said. I am telling all of you now, we all know who you are, who are denigrating the Government. I have already directed the Attorney Generals Office and the Police Commissioner (to act). Olo Fiti objected noting it is not the first time the Prime Minister has made the allegation. I am thankful that I will be taken to Court so we can clear the air on this matter once and for all, he said. This is not the first time I have been accused of being the anonymous blogger." The allegations may sound comical, but it is not funny. It is not something my constituency and I will take lightly because these are hefty allegations. So I will wait for the Government to take me to Court, given the substantial allegations. During the weekend, Namualuulu confirmed he is considering taking legal action against the Prime Minister. The recent announcement from Talamua Media published Tuesday 12 June 2018, titled O Le Palemia Ghost Writers Identities Revealed by Lagi Keresoma has exposed some desperate smear campaign with unfounded evidence from the Prime Minister Tuilaepa Malielegaoi, Namulauulu said. The allegations are untrue and unfounded, in addition, the public announcement by the Prime Minister is in serious breach of his own Criminal Libel Act passed this year, for defaming others without substantial evidence. These allegations could find himself in Tafaigata prison for defamation. A culture night was held at the University of the South Pacifics (U.S.P.) Alafua Campus on Friday to mark the closing of the universitys 50th year anniversary. Eight pacific countries performed on the night, showcasing various cultural dances. They were from Tonga, Vanuatu, Tahiti, Fiji, Samoa, Tokelau, Cook Islands and Solomon Islands. There were two outside performers invited to kick start the night of performances. Samoa Performing Arts and Creative Excellence (S.P.A.C.E.) from Fugalei performed first followed by fire dancing from Siva Afi. There was also a poetry reading by a member of the alumni, Jenny Bennet. Coordinator of the culture night, Ronna Lee shared the significance of the culture night for the celebration. The main point is that U.S.P. is a regional university and Alafua Campus has students from all around the region." The culture night highlighted this with an array of items by students from various Pacific countries who all study in Alafua Campus. It was a night which brought together all the Pacific students as one people." I also worked together with the U.S.P. Student Association president and country representatives to put together the evening of cultural performances to conclude the week activities." It celebrated U.S.P. as a diverse and quality higher education provider for the Pacific, as one ocean, one people. The President for the Samoan Student Association, Howard Paulo said it was a night of fun. We were preparing right around the time when we had exams and our schedules were very tight, but at least we put in so much effort in preparing and it came out as the best celebration, even though it was limited time but our sacrificed time was all worth it, he said. The second year student majoring in Agriculture studies also highlighted the importance of the event to him as a student. To me as a student of U.S.P., it has great distinction from local universities. It all comes down to the quality of education and the benefits it greatly has on assisting the lives of the students." Another advantage is the chance to associate with other sisters and brothers from other Pacific countries." In this whole week celebration, we learnt how our ancestors started the university with all their experiences and stories of how it was like in those days. Lastly, he said he really appreciates the performances from other countries especially their culture displayed through their dances and their traditional wear. It was just brilliant, quite colorful too but we also promoted our Samoan culture to them and so that was really worth all the efforts and preparations." I truly believe that each Pacific country has a unique culture and we should all be proud of our own heritage as Pacific Islanders." As a leader I tried my best to budget the times and schedules and lead in organizing these events, he said. The culture night is an annual event hosted by U.S.P. as part of their open day. Charges against former National University of Samoa (N.U.S.) lecturer, Christopher Gounder, were dismissed and withdrawn yesterday. The decision was handed down by His Honour, Chief Justice Patu Tiavasue Falefatu Sapolu during the criminal mention hearing. Prosecution Rexona Titi from the Attorney General's Office tendered a death certificate to Court as proof that Mr. Gounder had passed away. Chief Justice Patu then made a decision. "The Court received proof that the defendant has passed away," he said. "Therefore all charges against the defendant is withdrawn and dismissed." Last year, Mr. Gounder revealed his plan to set up a third university in Samoa with the aim to promote quality education. Mr. Gounder is Indo-Fijian. In the meantime, the Samoa Police Service urges the public who are in similar situations to seek help through the N.G.O. Faataua le Ola on Telephone 30609. We want to advice members of the public or individuals who are in similar situations that you are not alone, says the statement. If you are feeling depressed and is contemplating suicide, please call for help. Seek help from your friends, church ministers or family member. Forty-seven-year-old Lufo Ioane is in need of assistance. Ms. Ioane suffers from colorectal cancer (C.R.C.), also known as bowel cancer or colon cancer, which is the development of cancer from the colon or rectum (parts of the large intestine). Yesterday, her and her husband, Patolo Faasavalu, spoke to the Samoa Observer about their need for assistance in paying her husbands fair to India to assist in her operation. Ms. Ioane said she had an operation last year to remove the part that was affected. That surgery the doctors had to remove the part that was affected its called ileostomy surgery, where the damaged part is removed from the ileum and the cut end diverted to an artificial opening in the abdominal wall, therefore an opening formed by an ileostomy. At the moment there is a hole on my belly where if I want to go the bathroom thats how I use the bathroom, so that is why I need to go to India because the doctors cant do it here to do a what is called a ileostomy reverse. Its a reversal of the colostomy process by which the colon is reattached to the rectum or anus, providing for the return of flow of waste through the digestive tract. So that is why I need to go to India, which the Government fully covered her financial needs. Ms. Ioane said she needs her husband to assist her, but the problem is they dont have the money. Mr. Faasavalu added he cannot afford the fare to India, hence why he is seeking help. My wife is scheduled to leave Samoa this Saturday, he said. The air fare to India is $6,000 return ticket but that does not count the accommodation and everything that we have to pay for. I was told that from here to Fiji we have to spend a night there and we have to pay for that stop, then we stop over at Singapore and we also spend one night there. Mr. Faasavalu added the whole cost of the trip is $10,000. When we arrive in India, we will go straight to the hospital and we are not sure whether the operation will be done on that day, he said. However, when the operation is done, my wife needs to remain at the hospital just in case the unexpected occurred, so she will be at the Intensive Unit Care, but as for me, I have to find a place to stay or book a room at a hotel because only the patient is allowed at the hospital. I have to find an accommodation and I have to pay for it so this is why we are seeking for help. I went to the Gambling Control Authority of Samoa for help however it wasnt successful because they can only sponsor the patient or a child. We even sought help from the Samoa Victim Support Group, but we were told of the same thing that they can only sponsor a patient or a child. This is our only hope to put our story in the paper with the hope that someone out there will be able to help us. Ms. Ioane said she needs her husband with her to care for her. I need him there because I would definitely need help after the surgery, she said. However, if the day I am scheduled to leave comes and my husband does not have an air fare, then I will have to go by myself. My husband does work, but the money he earns is not enough to cover for his air fare and all the accommodation. We also have children of our own who attend school. For now we are desperately looking for someone to help us in paying for his fare and thats why we are seeking help through the Samoa Observer. If you want to help Ms. Ioane and her husband, contact them on 7281260, 7231609 or 7793440. One of Samoas most wanted men has been captured. The Police has confirmed that Pati Chong Nee, who was wanted by the Police as a suspect in a series of criminal activities, was caught this morning. The Samoa Police Service (S.P.S.) wishes to inform the public that PATI CHONG NEE who was wanted by police has been captured this morning as a result of the information relay by the public to police, a statement said. S.P.S. acknowledges members of the public for their ongoing support in relation to this matter. Working together for a safer Samoa. Chong Nee, 24, is a suspect in an alleged crime spree where he broke into several houses at Ululoloa last week. The Samoa Observer understands that one of the houses he burgled was the Newton familys house. It is not the first time the Newtons have been affected by criminals. The other house he broke into, he took some guns and fine mats, the Police told the Samoa Observer. As you know Mr. Chong Nee was in prison before for burglary and theft, so this is his criminal history. He also escaped several times while in prison. It hasnt been a year since he came out and now he has reoffended. The Israeli Government is looking at playing a more active role in the Pacific region. It is seriously considering a role in the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum meeting to be held in Nauru in September. This is according to the Deputy Director General of the Israel Cooperation Center, Gil Haskel. He told the Samoa Observer they have met the President of Nauru on the matter. Nauru will host the 49th Pacific Islands Forum and related meetings from 3rd -6th September 2018. The Government of Nauru has chosen Building a strong Pacific: Our Islands, Our People, Our Will as the theme for this years gathering. Haskel said for the P.I.F.S., the Israeli Government is trying to craft some sort of Israeli Pacific Initiative at its initial stage but we are working on it and the issues that we can assist such as food security and water. And we also intend to address the long distance between Israel and the Pacific Islands. We are also waiting for an invitation to the P.I.F.S, said Haskel. We asked that they craft together some sort of year multi country programme basically on food security, but on a two way street. We also have to hear from different forums in addressing the challenges and we can finalise how we can help base on Israelis abilities, said Haskel. He also pointed out that annually the Israeli Government funds between 2,000-2,500 trainings for Pacific Islands. And also go out to the field and train in the different countries, targeting issues such as agriculture, water, health, education. Haskel then shared Israelis manmade technologies in green houses. The only way to grow more is food technology and smart technology and to depend less on the climate rather to depend on the manmade artificial green houses. If you have drought or a heat wave or humid, you can control the climate in the greenhouse and you can produce food the way you need to produce food in your country, said Haskel. Regarding the Israeli Pacific Development, Haskel said its quite challenging because of its location. Challenging in ways that traveling here takes a few days; we do the same coming to your country. It is also challenging to bring trainers to the Pacific or bring the Pacific Islanders to be trained in Israel. But we try to address these challenges though a lot of engagements with your Government and we only are the only region in the world that funds for professionals to come to the Pacific Islands. And we do like to see many more professionals come in the future to the islands to conduct rather necessary trainings to assist. According to Haskel, the Israeli Government has programmes with Pacific Islands in the field of emergency preparedness. It doesnt matter if it is an earthquake, flood, typhoon, cyclone or war, but the approach of how to build in going forth and how to tackle emergencies, which is something that Israel has too much experience in and I am very happy to share it with all of you and of course the issue of food security, said Haskel. He further stated that two weeks ago they had two women representatives here for women conference. Two women from Nauru came to attend the meeting compliments of the Israeli Government. Samoa and the Pacific should do more to benefit from the Israeli governments US$480 million (T$1.2 billion) international aid for food security, water and other basic utilities. This is according to Israels General Director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Yuval Rotem during an interview with the Samoa Observer. Its not just Samoa, but the Pacific Islands. I think Samoa has a great potential. I think the Pacific Islands need to seize the moment, he said. The world has a vested interest in the Pacific, and its all about Samoa getting a little more active about knocking on the doors of others because if youre going to wait for assistance to knock on your door, that day will never come. I think you need to seize the moment of opportunity and enjoy the growing interest of two worlds in the Pacific and getting more active and staying more engaged in the world stage. Unlike before, the Pacific Islands are a little bit more on the worlds radar, and I think that it is something that should be taken as an advantage. And there should be more about in the end, you are a block of 14 countries and its not something that can be overlooked so easily. I think that youe involvement with the world is vital, said Mr. Rotem. Furthermore, he noted the Pacific Islands need to form a coalition and come with one voice to world level. And do that with some activism, you will take this interest that you see from different places in the world, and youll find yourself more under the radar. Deputy Director General of the Israel Cooperation Center, Gil Haskel, explained in order for assistance to be rendered, the approach has to be made as in anything. We are a Government agency and initially we work on a Government to Government level. We will never impose development corporation on any Government and we will never condition on any political issue because we believe that assistance needs to go down to the grassroots level. We definitely address requests that come out of the Community level and regional level. It has to be in someway coordinated with the local Government, said Mr. Haskel. Meet Peleitala Saleifi from Saanapu. She is in need of a proper shelter. The unemployed mother of eight shared her main concern is the welfare of her children. There are more than four of them living together. Their house can only cater for all of them when its good weather otherwise when it rains, they would find it hard to find a dry spot inside their home. For more than 10 years she has been dealing with the rusty iron roofing of her house. Time gets really hard for them during rainy seasons. We are in need of a proper shelter. This house leaks everywhere and it has been here for a very long time. We leave our buckets where it leaks so that it would not damage some of our belongings, she told the Village Voice team. It is hard when there are young children under your care and the house is not safe for them to sleep in. That is one of the daily challenges that we encounter. This house has been here for a long time, most of my children have got their own families and they live with their spouses. I cannot ask for help when they have their own children to look after, said the 61-year-old. They do not have a proper kitchen. They live in an open Samoan house, but she is thankful that there is water supply and also a water tank that is very helpful to them. There are so many things that we want to complete, but there is always something that has got to happen. Nowadays everything that we would want would require money. Most people live on a budget so that there would be some money left for the next day. Every day is a struggle and we have to work our way through it. Having this water tank helps us save cash on spending it on the water bill. Nobody in their household works, her son is a carpenter but only gets a job when his skills are needed. At the moment we rely on my other son who lives in American Samoa. He is the one who financially supports us with everything that we need at home. We have many commitments and the same goes for everyone else out there. The cost of living is just too much for my family. For anyone who is willing to help Mrs. Saleifi, contact 7777869. With a few months left for Samoa to host the Pacific Games 2019, expectations are high. In the lead up to the regions biggest sporting event, the Pacific Games logo was unveiled on Friday evening. Our reporter, Adel Fruean asked the views of the Samoan people on the new Pacific Games logo, which people responded to. Ata Laban, 37, Alamagoto I think that the logo looks good but just a little adjustment in terms of additional touches on it. I only want two Samoan designs to be added in it and they should be from the Samoan traditional tattoos. Another thing that is missing is the original look of the kava bowl, meaning they did not depict the entire design of the kava bowl. Lagi Felise, 50, Falelauniu-tai In my own opinion, the new logo is very nice but there needs to be a small improvement. I think that if they added some Samoan designs to the kava bowl to make it more Samoan like, that would be complete in terms of our Samoan culture. We are not the only country that uses the kava bowl in the Pacific, there are Fiji and Tonga. But overall I like it. Katalina Tuasivi, 62, Matautu-uta I support our new logo but something caught my eye from its distinctive design. In my own viewpoint, I wanted them to specifically create the exact design and color of the kava bowl and maybe add a few other significant traditional items that are of great value to our culture in this logo. I only say that because it is evident that the kava bowl is also significant to other Pacific Island cultures. But then I do like our logo and applaud their creative skills for that particular design. Tasiaeafe Tomasi, 19, Mulifanua I truly approve the Pacific Games logo, which will be used as great symbol as we host all these countries coming over next year. As I look at the new logo it had the name of our country Samoa on it and to me that says it to other countries that we welcome them all to our beautiful country. It is very colorful and not only that it has great meaning behind it in terms of all these colors used. I really appreciate the work put in for this new logo, its different and original in terms of creativity. Unapo Tuimauga, 72, Faleasiu In my own perspective, I commend these artists for their hard work. I am really proud of our new logo that will be used for the Pacific Games next year. I admire the creative design of this logo. It is unique and has great symbol and meaning behind it as stated in the article from Sunday Samoan. Prime Minister Tuilaepas obsession with O.L.P. hit a new level last week when he reportedly named two members of the public as people behind the infamous blog. He apparently coughed up the names during his weekly programme with Talamua Media, which immediately posted a story on its website. Given the heightened interest the Government-driven manhunt for O.L.P. has generated thanks largely to Prime Minister Tuilaepas continuing obsession about the blog and the blogger/s identity the story naturally drew a lot of clicks and attention. But it was immediately retracted and removed with Talamua Media apologizing to the two gentlemen implicated. One of them, Namulauulu Albert Ainuu, resides in the United States while the second one is Vui Sione Masinamua Vui, who is based in Sydney, Australia. Both men strongly reject the allegation and are threatening to take legal action against the Prime Minister and possibly the source of the story. The recent announcement from Talamua Media published Tuesday 12 June 2018, titled O Le Palemia Ghost Writers Identities Revealed by Lagi Keresoma has exposed some desperate smear campaign with unfounded evidence from the Prime Minister Tuilaepa Malielegaoi, Namulauulu told the Samoa Observer. The allegations are untrue and unfounded, in addition, the public announcement by the Prime Minister is in serious breach of his own Criminal Libel Act passed this year, for defaming others without substantial evidence. These allegations could find himself in Tafaigata prison for defamation. Vui on the other hand said Prime Minister Tuilaepa should have taken more care to check his facts before he leapt with his claims. These claims are false and there is absolutely no evidence to support them, Vui said. I am not O.L.P. and that is the truth. I have nothing to hide. Vui went on to say that he would have expected someone like Prime Minister Tuilaepa to be a lot more careful, especially with claims that destroy peoples reputations. He added that for years, Tuilaepa has abused the position hes holding to level many ridiculous and unfounded allegations against members of the public including Samoans residing overseas. This, Vui said, must stop. We couldnt agree more. The Prime Minister says some of the most outrageous things on air every time and gets away with it. Will he get away with defaming these members of the public too? If this was someone else making these claims, would they have gotten away with it? Surely Prime Minister Tuilaepa must have a reason for coughing out of these names. If he does, he should tell us. Keep in mind that since this issue with O.L.P. surfaced, Namulauulu and Vui have not been the only members of the public implicated by Tuilaepa. The lone Opposition Member of Parliament, Olo Fiti Vaai, was openly accused of being O.L.P. in Parliament. He denied the allegation. Elsewhere, Tuilaepa has repeatedly accused Samoans based overseas and lawyers of being behind the blog. Does he have evidence to prove it? That has got to be the most important question at this point. You see, he cannot continue to go on and openly accuse innocent members of the public without any solid evidence. There will come a time when someone is bound to take what he is saying very, very seriously and we dont want to see the carnage this could potentially cause. For sometime now, Tuilaepa has been threatening that he has asked the Attorney General to lay charges against the suspects. Last week when the this latest development surfaced, we contacted Attorney General, Lemalu Hermann Retzlaff, for a comment. Ive just seen that PM Tuilaepa has named Vui and Albert Ainuu as part of the O.L.P. group, we asked. Was this uncovered by the Governments investigation? Does the government have proof that these people are indeed behind O.L.P? And now that they have been found and identified publicly by P.M. Tuilaepa, what is the next course of action? Will your office move to take legal action against them? An automated response from Lemalu referred queries to Acting Attorney General, Constance Tafua Rivers, who wrote: Talofa Mataafa, I acknowledge receipt of your email. However, please note that your queries have been referred by the Attorney General in his absence from the Office to Nanai Laveitiga Tuiletufuga to address. A response from Nanai, who is in Israel by the way, has not been received. Keep in mind that this was last week. Attorney General Lemalu surely should be back at work by now. And we believe he should enlighten us a bit more about what is going on here. If the Government has a case against these people, they should tell us. If not, Prime Minister Tuilaepa should stop abusing the office he is holding by continuing to recklessly cough up these peoples names. He should even take the next step and apologise to them publically. What do you think? Have a wonderful Wednesday, Samoa! Dear Editor, Re: An open letter to E.F.K.S. Ministers A.Ss open letter to Church Ministers of E.F.K.S. about tax is sadly a letter about dishonoring of God, Gods commandments and Gods law. It is just about more productions of factoids and assumptions produced from the Minister of Revenues mistake. They have made the big mistake of creating an assumption that the taxation of Church Ministers is the right thing to do. Accordingly, I say, the accusations that A.S. made against the Ministers of E.F.K.S. are absolutely wrong. Apart from that, the application of faith, love, God and Paul by A.S. about the taxation of Church Minister is also wrong. The breakdown as explain below can confirm the wrong application of Scripture and wrong accusations that A.S made against Church Ministers of E.F.K.S. Firstly, Pauls message of encouragement as quoted by A.S in his letter does not mean that Paul was saying that when we have faithful and loving relationship with God spiritually then (1) God can change His laws and commandments according to our preferences or (2) we can change Gods laws and commandments according to our preferences. Paul was not speaking from any position in a civil government, NO. Paul was speaking from his position as an apostle, as a minster and as a ruler in the Church under all sorts of difficulties and pressures while spreading the Word of God. Pauls message of encouragement is for other servants and followers of God who have been facing and enduring the same difficulties and pressures in other branches of the work of God. The Bible is very clear; God already laid the foundation of His plan to guide us towards Him. Therefore whatever relationship we have with God spiritually, it will never change any laws or any commandments of God that God already planned for our guidance. To put it in other words, God did not allow any one to change His commandments and His law. Christ puts it perfectly this way according to the following quoted Scriptures. (Matthew 5:18) For assuredly, I say to you; till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one title will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. (Matthew 5: 17) Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. Heaven and earth still exist. We are still living on earth or under heaven and the Churches and servants of God are still serving the work of God by following the law of God to do the will of God. Even the servants of God, they cant change the law of God. It is consistent with what the Founding Fathers declared on the preamble of the Constitution. WHEREAS sovereignty over the Universe belongs to the Omnipresent God alone, and the authority to be exercised by the people of Western Samoa within the limits prescribed by His commandments is a sacred heritage Secondly, I understand that faith is important with A.S. about his relationship with Christ and that is fine with me. However, what is not okay is the using of that relationship with Christ by A.S. to accuse Church Ministers and the Church. When you say that you were having a loving relationship with Christ through faith and then you also accuse Church Ministers at the same time with wrong accusations based on that relationship then that means you are contradicting yourself about faith and your loving relationship with Christ. That confirms A.S. did not understand about what he was talking about in his letter. He does not have any real understandings about faiths role between us and Christ as well as the Churchs mission for Christs work. So what A.S. did using his faith and loving relationship with Christ through faith to accuse Church Ministers in unnecessary. For that reason, I am providing the following important informations that might be useful for A.S. It is impossible to have a relationship with Christ without faith. We have to have faith first in order to believe that Christ does exist before we have any relationship with Christ spiritually. You believe in Christ like you believe your wife or your husband but the difference between the two is bodily appearance and time. Here is the important point about that situation. There is no human being can bring back in real life the events of the ancient times about Christ so that we can have Christ back in human form to tell us the truth. But by faith we believe that Christ is real and we can feel His presence in us everyday if we trust Him wholeheartedly. But how did we know about Christ in the first place? The two things that are still survived nowadays from the time of Christ are the faith of believers such as disciples, apostles and other servants of God and the work of God call Church but not civil government. Church was responsible and is still responsible for the spreading of the work of God around the world. The servants of God conquered all powerful nations who ruled the world in the past because of faith. Without the faith of servants of God and Churchs misson, we wont be here today having these conversation about Christ, faith and loving relationship with Christ. Third, A.Ss concern about the government of Samoa and the development of Samoa is very important. A.Ss faith and love is also very important. However, what is more important according to the Bible is putting God first by serving the will of God with the commandments and the law of God but not our preferences. That is truth about Gods righteousness from obedience and honesty. Our faith and love can be labeled as unrighteousness if we use our own ways and preferences to serve the will of God instead of using the commandments and the law of God. Using of our own ways and preferences to serve the will of God is dishonoring of God. As said before, God already laid the foundation of His plan for our guidance and that is our only guidance. Another great example for that situation is (Matthew 22:37-39). Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Notice that Christ did not say that the first and great commandment is You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Also, Christ did not say - You shall love the Lord your God with all your works, with all your monies, with all your powers and with your preferences. You can always put God first and put your neighbor and yourself second if you follow the commandments and the law of God to love your neighbor instead of following your own commandments and your own law to love your neighbor. Its about Gods righteousness from obedience and honesty. To rephrase that, if you were the Minister of Revenue, you can always put God first and put your people and yourself second if you follow the commandments and the law of God to love your people instead of following your own commandments and your own law to love your people. Fourth, it is very important to understand that according to the Bible and the history of Christianity about God and Satan, human beings were not saved from Satan because of the works of human beings. Thats another big NO. We were saved by the work of God call Gods grace. Gods grace is about the commandments and the law of God and the fulfillment of the law of God in Christ through Christs death and resurrection. (Ephesians 2:8-9) For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. Therefore we should not be boasting about our actions and works. Our actions, works and new developments such as new prison, new airport, new hospital, new roads and more from our strengths and wisdom are all debt. (Romans 4:4) Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckon of grace, but of debt. If I bring in right here the denial act by the Minister of Revenue of not considering the teachings of the Bible when making the decision to tax Church Ministers then we can clearly look straight at the mark of the beast and the anti-Christ. He interfered with the sufficiency of Gods grace and the work of God with his own works. He tried to build his own righteousness with his own laws from his own belief. Thats the fallen nature of Satan and that is the damage that has been already done to the work of God and the people of this country. We should be concerned about this. The more we talk about the accusations against Church Ministers and E.F.K.S, the less we talk about the real problem; the Minister of Revenues misconduct. Here is a quick reminding for A.S and the people of our country. Its a fact. Just few days ago, the Minister of Revenue Tialavea Tionisio Hunt made a shocking revelation on the Media that he did not consider the teachings of the Bible when making the decision to move forward with the taxation of Church Ministers. Minister issues final warning to church (Samoa Observer 10 June 2018) I initiated the taxing of Church Ministers because it is the right thing to do. And in doing so, I did not consider the teachings of the Bible when making the decision to move forward with the taxation of Church Ministers. It is a criminal act and it is indisputable. He was talking about his denial of Gods sovereignty in the Constitution, Gods commandments in the Constitution, Christian principles in the Constitution, the foundation of Samoa in the Constitution and the whole Supreme law; the Constitution of the Independent State of Samoa. The Minister of Revenue is a Member of Parliament. As a Member of Parliament, he should follow (Section 2) and (Section 43) of the Constitution. He also abused and violated his responsibility as a Member of Parliament to protect the Constitution according to the Code of Parliamentary Ethics in the Standing Orders for Parliament. Right now in our government, the Minister of Revenue already placed his denial mark in our Cabinet, in our Parliament and in our government. As a result, we have in our Parliament an un-Constitutional law about taxation of Church Ministers and our Ministry of Revenue is ready with its own un-Constitutional law to tax Church Ministers and to prosecute Church Ministers if they dont register according to the new un-Constitutional tax law. It is a disgusting misconduct taking place at the highest level of our Government in our Parliament and our Cabinet but the Parliament is not doing any thing about it, the Attorney General is not responding and the Judiciary is not responding as well. But its okay, E.F.K.S is uniquely equipped by the Lord and E.F.K.S is ready to receive and endure suffering from evil for the truth, for the Gospel and for the Church in order to save our beloved Samoa from evil. Fifth, this is another reminder for A.S and for the people of our country about the mistake and the assumption of taxing Church Ministers inheritances. Decide between the truth and untruth. 1. Priesthood and tithing (offerings) are commandments (law) of God (Hebrews 7:5) 2. That law was started from Levites (priests) in the (OT) (Deuteronomy 18:1-2) 3. Tithes is not referring to just money. Tithe is referring to different tithing offerings such as produces, monies and other forms of earnings. Nowadays people use only monies as one form for all tithes and call it offerings. God SET APART tithes as INHERITANCES for priests. 4. Christ did not destroy the law (Matthew 5:17) 5. There is no one can change the law of God (Matthew 5:18) 6. It says in our Constitution the authority to be exercised by the people of Western Samoa within the limits prescribed by His commandments is a sacred heritage 7. Also, it says in our Constitution WHEREAS the Leaders of Western Samoa have declared that Western Samoa should be an Independent State based on Christian principles and Samoan custom and tradition 8. Also, it says in our Constitution, the Constitution is the Supreme law of Samoa. 9. Also, it says in our Constitution Any existing law and any law passed after the date of coming into force of this Constitution which is inconsistent with this Constitution shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be void. Sixth, considering all the informations (facts and truth) provided in this letter, therefore the rejection of the new tax law by the E.F.K.S is not bully and also, it is not a wish of the E.F.K.S. It is the law of God and it is the Supreme law of Samoa according to the wish of the Founding Fathers and the whole country of Samoa. [E matautia le mamao tele lava ma le loloto o le tofa ma le utaga poto a Tuaa ma Tamalii na fausiaina le Faavae o Samoa] If there is nothing in the Bible prohibits the taxing of pastors according to the government, and if the Bible is not saying that the government cant tax the priests according to followers of the government then why did the government tax pastors if there is nothing in the Bible prohibits the taxing of pastors and the Bible is not saying that the government cant tax the priests? To put what they have been saying in other words to get the real meaning of what they said is just the opposite of what they said. This is the opposite of what they said. There is nothing in the Bible allows the national government of Samoa to tax pastors and the Bible is not saying that the national government of Samoa can tax priests. Therefore the Bible is not saying anything about having Church Ministers to get registered for tax and getting Church Ministers prosecuted if they dont pay tax. Apart from that, the Bible is not saying anything about the Parliament, the Cabinet and the Ministry of Revenue. [Le Malo e o Samoa faamolemole, tuu ia le tou fiapopoto i le Atua ae faalogo. Fai le mataga lea ua iai nei i nei fai fai le tou tulafono faavalevalea lea ua faia i faifeau ae tupu mai nisi pefea mataga ona sili atu loa o le mataga ma tauvalea atu ai le atunuu i le lalolagi atoa ona o outou] If they are denying (Matthew 5:17-18) but the Bible is silent about what they have been saying then the right thing that our national government and its followers should do is do nothing and say nothing to the Church Ministers and Church about taxation of Church Ministers inheritances. Lastly, some of the followers of the government who have supported the new tax law, they challenged members of the E.F.K.S and Church Ministers of the E.F.K.S to take their case to Court in order to prove their argument. They challenged the E.F.K.S Church about the Court because they believe that the E.F.K.S Church is wrong. For their information, the reason why they have engaged in this debate about taxation of Church Ministers is because they do have a case in their own hands to be proved. If they believe that E.F.K.S is wrong and they are right then why not take their own case to prove at the Court instead of pointing the finger to E.F.K.S. We all know the location of the Court and the way to that location. Also, we are still waiting for the governments services according to their responsibility for the country because they are servants. The truth is clear; it is the Governments fault so it is about common sense. The Minister of Revenue allowed his privileges in Cabinet and Parliament to go to his head. Look what is happening now because of that head? Accordingly, the Parliament, the Justice (Judiciary) and the Attorney General; they must make the first and the right move of resolving the problem themselves because it is not a fault of the E.F.K.S and the people of this country. Ma le faaaloalo tele lava i lau Susuga i le Faatonu, Nanai Malonuu Lealaiauloto Nofoaiga A hearing of an appeal against the Courts decision to acquit the President of Land and Titles Court, Fepuleai Atilla Ropati, of charges against him, has been re-set for Monday morning. The matter was brought before the Chief Justice, His Honour Patu Tiavaasue Falefatu Sapolu. The appeal by the Attorney General follows a decision by District Court Judge Alalatoa Rosella Papalii to discharge Fepuleai without conviction for assaulting a security guard last year. In Court, lawyer Rexona Titi, of the Attorney Generals Office, asked for an adjournemnt. Your Honour, as of date, the Court registrar has yet to provide written documents for the appeal case to be heard despite numerous follow ups from the prosecution, said Ms. Titi. We need those two documents, it has not been released to us and without it we cannot proceed with the appeal. The documents, according to Ms. Titi, are the sentencing decision by Judge Alalatoa and transcript of the hearing period. Chief Justice Patu granted the application and adjourned the matter for mention next week Monday. This matter is adjourned to next week for the appellant to obtain written decision and transcript of sentence hearing, prepare and file to the respondent, he said. For the respondent, there is no need for you to appear in Court unless you want to because you are aquitted of the charges. Last month, Alalatoa discharged Fepuleai without conviction. According to a press release issued by the Attorney General immediately after, he confirmed that he will be appealing the decision. The gravity of this offending was in our respectful view, far too serious for the defendant to be granted this result by the District Court." The sentence imposed needs to be revisited and I have instructed my assistant Attorney General, Ms. Rexona Titi to file the appeal. The matter will be heard on Monday at 9.30 in the morning. Older adults report that a diagnosis of Alzheimers disease is the thing they most fear about their future. Alzheimers is a progressive brain disease characterized by increasing forgetfulness and confusion, eventually resulting in loss of independence and, ultimately, loss of self. Patients with advanced Alzheimers disease are often unable to recognize even their spouse or children. There is an urgent scientific effort underway to solve the mystery of Alzheimers, but many are still unclear on its fundamentals. Here are some common myths. Myth No. 1 The first detectable marker of Alzheimers is memory loss. Advertisement Popular coverage of Alzheimers tends to fixate on memory loss as the first tell. A 2017 article from Womens Health, for example, cites regularly being forgetful with routine tasks like cooking dinner, along with other memory-related symptoms such as missing appointments and repeating conversations, as key indicators. Readers Digest similarly points to worrying about your memory and spotty recollection of recent important events as early signs of Alzheimers. There is growing evidence, however, that Alzheimers disease begins its attack on the brain many years before such symptoms appear, leading researchers to suggest that there is a syndrome called preclinical Alzheimers disease. By repeatedly imaging the same individuals over time, scientists have learned that the amyloid protein is one of the earliest markers of the disorder. In fact, 20 to 30 percent of healthy adults over age 65 with no memory symptoms show evidence of amyloid deposits, indicating that the disease can be identified well before its most notorious symptoms set in. Reisa Sperling, a leading Alzheimers researcher at Harvard Medical School, has proposed that there may be markers of Alzheimers present in the brain as early as middle age. The Harvard Aging Brain Study , started in 2010 and led by Sperling, and the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study , led by me and initiated in 2008, are capturing the slow transition from a healthy brain to Alzheimers by studying the same normal middle-aged and older adults for years. We hope to isolate an early neural and behavioral footprint of Alzheimers disease in middle-aged adults, as well as determine the characteristics of adults whose brains remain healthy and cognitively resilient. Myth No. 2 Early diagnosis makes Alzheimers easier to treat. Research is leading to earlier and earlier identification of the disease, but can that help patients? Early Detection Could Be Key to Effective Alzheimers Treatment, said a 2017 headline on Healthline. Todays Caregiver magazine, likewise, claims, An early diagnosis is crucial because that is when the most can be done to slow the progression of symptoms. At present, however, there are no effective treatments to prevent or slow Alzheimers disease and hence, no clinical advantage to an early diagnosis. Clinical trials have found that by the time Alzheimers is diagnosed, it is too late to intervene with anti-amyloid agents. A recent large clinical trial that focused on adults in an early phase of the disease showed no benefit from anti-amyloid drugs. This has led to a debate as to whether amyloid is even a cause of Alzheimers. Perhaps it is merely a marker of the disease just like gray hair is a marker of old age, not a cause. Myth No. 3 Alzheimers is an undiscriminating tormentor. Alzheimers affects everybody. Its an equal opportunity killer, author Niki Kapsambelis told Salon last year. Some take that premise even further: According to Alzheimer Europe, There is no conclusive evidence to suggest that any particular group of people is more or less likely to develop Alzheimers disease. Race, profession, geographical and socio-economic situation are not determinants of the disease. It turns out, however, that a life of privilege (financial security, higher social class and high levels of education) appears to confer some limited protection from Alzheimers. For example, Yaakov Stern of Columbia University studied 593 older adults who lived in Manhattan and found that over time, those who were less educated and held lower-status jobs were diagnosed with the disease at younger ages compared with those who were more privileged. The initial advantage faded, however, as highly educated individuals declined at a faster rate once they were diagnosed with Alzheimers disease. Other studies have reported similar findings. Stern has proposed that high levels of education and a lifetime of intellectual work associated with higher-status jobs create a type of reserve that can be drawn upon to protect performance as an individual becomes cognitively frail or develops early Alzheimers. Myth No. 4 You can prevent Alzheimers disease by brain training. The idea that exercises and discipline can ward off the worst is understandably seductive. Brain training can reduce dementia risk, declared a 2017 Cognitive Vitality headline. SeniorLiving.org also proposes that such games can prevent dementia and help avert the onset of cognitive impairments among older adults. But there is no credible scientific evidence indicating that commercially available brain training programs will slow the minds march toward Alzheimers. Practice on a specific game might help an older person achieve the performance of a younger person on that game, but this will not reverse brain aging. There is, nevertheless, a fierce debate among cognitive neuroscientists as to whether various forms of brain training result in limited benefits to general memory function or improved performance in everyday life. On balance, an exhaustive review of the evidence by a group of scientists led by Dan Simon at the University of Illinois concluded that for the overall public, the benefits of mass-marketed brain training are nonexistent or small. Myth No. 5 Smelling peanut butter can help diagnose Alzheimers. Creamy or crunchy and oh, so spreadable peanut butter is . . . a possible game-changer in Alzheimers disease research, began a 2015 post on the Cleveland Clinic website. That claim, based on a small study conducted at the University of Florida, was circulated widely by many highly credible sources after the initial research was published in 2013. Promoting the premise, a writer for alternative health entrepreneur David Wolfes website claimed that the studys results would help predict and address the disease before it becomes completely overwhelming for those diagnosed. Further research did not support this finding. Although the research team responsibly acknowledged this, it can be very difficult to correct misconceptions once they are established, as my own work on false medical claims has shown. The definitive diagnosis of Alzheimers disease requires that there be an overabundance in the brain of two proteins: beta amyloid plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles. This diagnosis occurs when a pathologist examines slices of brain tissue obtained after an autopsy and sees the sticky amyloid deposits and remnant tau tangles associated with Alzheimers. Recently, however, researchers have developed tools to identify these amyloid deposits in living people via PET scans. Spinal fluid also provides a measure of amyloid burden. These biomarkers of Alzheimers disease are the frontier of much new research. If a PET scan is negative for amyloid, Alzheimers can definitively be ruled out. If it is positive, and neuropsychological tests show abnormal memory and cognitive function, an Alzheimers diagnosis is almost certain. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This story was published June 15 in The Washington Post Denise C. Park is professor of behavioral and brain Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas and director of research at the Center for Vital Longevity where she leads the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study. National City Councilman Jerry Cano has corrected a dozen building code violations at his home, which were first issued by the city five years ago. Building inspectors went to Canos house and determined it was up to code on May 22, according to records and City Attorney Angil Morris-Jones. Cano, who avoided fines for the string of violations over the years, was pushed by Morris-Jones in March to comply with building codes in light of news reports about the violations. At Morris-Jones request, Cano submitted plans on April 3 to correct the violations, which stemmed from outdoor renovations made at his Mary Lane home without proper permits. Three weeks later, the city approved the plans, issued Cano a building permit and imposed a 30-day deadline to complete the work to correct the violations. Advertisement Records show Cano paid the city $1,798 in fees related to the violations, including $473 for the final inspection of his home. The sum also includes $472 for building permits to correct the violations, plus a penalty fee of an equal amount. Now that Canos property is up to code, the city has submitted paperwork to rescind a recordation that was issued against Cano in 2015. The recordation, a legal document that limits a property owners ability to sell or refinance, was the only form of enforcement the city took against Cano in response to the violations. Canos case, which dates back to June 2013, is under review by an independent law firm to determine whether he received special treatment by avoiding fines for the violations over the years. Luis Sainz, the head of the citys Building Department, told The San Diego Union-Tribune in April that he wrote out the first violation notices and delivered them in person rather than on city letterhead and via certified mail, as is protocol, at the request of his boss. Frank Para, director of emergency services, denied telling Sainz to show Cano special treatment. Two follow-up notices were typed on pages with National Citys letterhead and sent to Cano via certified mail in June 2014. The city typically issues a first and final notice, then moves onto administrative citations if violations arent corrected. Lozano Smith Law Firm, which was hired by the city in late April, also is investigating allegations that Councilwoman Mona Rios inappropriately touched Cano at a City Council meeting on April 3. Cano made the accusations near the end of the meeting, after Rios called for an investigation into Canos violations. Rios has denied the allegations. Under the contract with the law firm, the costs for the two investigations is not to exceed a combined $50,000. The City Council voted 3-1 to approve an outside investigation on April 17. Mayor Ron Morrison cast the dissenting vote. Cano did not respond to requests for comment. Email: david.hernandez@sduniontribune.com Phone: (619) 293-1876 Twitter: @D4VIDHernandez In an effort to better understand the needs of undocumented immigrants in National City, the city has partnered with a nonprofit that manages a resource center to collect and review data on immigration-related services sought by residents. The partnership between the city and South Bay Community Services is part of a one-year pilot program. It was an idea put forward last month by a group of city staff who explored ways to better assist residents with immigration-related needs. With a population of about 61,000 residents, National City is home to almost 25,000 immigrants, according to the latest U.S. Census data. Almost 14,000 residents are not U.S. citizens. South Bay Community Services, which recently took over the National City Collaborative Family Resource Center, will track data on referrals for immigration-related services the center does not offer, such as legal aid. Advertisement Were trying to track those services, those referrals, to see if theres any gaps and ... see where we can complement the services provided by (the resource center), said Acting Deputy City Manager Alfredo Ybarra, who was part of the city staff group that considered other ideas as well. The discussion over ways to better support undocumented residents began last year as city leaders considered a resolution to proclaim itself a welcoming city, a response to President Donald Trumps strict crackdown on illegal immigration. In June 2017, the city settled on the label compassionate community under the final resolution, which declares, in part, that residents can access city services regardless of their immigration status. City Manager Leslie Deese said the data that will be collected by South Bay Community Services will help the city determine what services to invest resources in to better assist the citys immigrant population. We dont ever want to duplicate efforts, because thats a waste of resources, she said. But not knowing where the gap is or not knowing what services our community needs was, I think, what the working group struggled with because we never had done a study on it. The ad hoc group, which was formed by Deese in November at the request of the City Council, also recommended that the city increase awareness of the rights of undocumented immigrants and services available to them. The plan is to set up information kiosks in city facilities, with pamphlets, brochures and fliers that contain the information. Not every idea the ad hoc group toyed with is moving forward. One notable idea supported by immigration advocates to create a human relations commission, an advisory board similar to others established by city leaders in San Diego and Chula Vista was abandoned. City staff in National City did not recommend it, citing limited funding and staffing resources. The roles of the commissions in National Citys neighboring cities vary. In San Diego, the 17-member board investigates and mediates discrimination-related complaints in regards to housing, employment and other aspects. While the board does not have enforcement authority, it may refer cases to other agencies that do. In Chula Vista, the 11-member board serves as a liaison with other community groups concerned with protection of civil liberties of all people, resolution of conflict, and interracial and intercultural understanding, according to its website. The board also is meant to provide a forum for discussion as a means of resolving community relationship problems. The Chula Vista boards first tasks was to lead the efforts to designate the city a so-called welcoming city. The label, which was the subject of a resolution approved by the City Council in April of last year, means the city broadly encourages the assimilation of immigrants and refugees into the community. Immigration advocates and some National City council members expressed their disappointment over the citys decision to cast aside the idea of a human relations commission. A similar commission in National City similarly directed to concern itself with the immigration population would go a long way in not only voicing concerns but putting in place protective measures for vulnerable community members, said Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committees U.S.-Mexico border program. Councilwoman Alejandra Sotelo-Solis said the board could be a tool to grow the citys resources and truly go beyond immigration to address other issues, such as hate crimes against the LGBTQ community. Email: david.hernandez@sduniontribune.com Phone: (619) 293-1876 Twitter: @D4VIDHernandez Cafe Japengos nearly 30 years in business can be likened to a typical restaurant meal: a flashy starter, a solid main course and a finale thats bittersweet. After dinner service on Friday, Cafe Japengo the once see-and-be-seen hotspot that evolved into a venerable dining destination for creative Asian fare will close its doors at the Aventine complex, an apparent casualty of rising rents and the booming culinary scene in the UTC area. A notice to customers at Cafe Japengo is a sign of the times after nearly 30 years, the popular restaurant is closing after dinner service Firday. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune ) Theres so much activity in this area the condos, the university, businesses, the new hospital building and the mall, what you see going on at UTC is remarkable, said Allan Farwell, general manager of the Hyatt Regency La Jolla, which owns Japengo. Advertisement Farwell said increased competition spurred by the expanded Westfield UTCs focus on higher-end eateries coupled with a significant rent increase, prompted Hyatt to walk away from the venture, rather than let it sink into failure. The Aventine complex is owned and managed by Rockpoint Group, a Boston-based real estate private equity firm. Farwell declined to specify what the new rent would have been had the lease been re-upped, but said there had been a 70 percent to 80 percent rent appreciation since the restaurant last renewed its lease around 2001. Its a real shame because were still busy, weve always been busy, Farwell said, adding that Cafe Japengo will be replaced with a fitness gym. Nine new restaurants (at the mall) doesnt help your legacy restaurants. Its just hard for a restaurant to sign a new lease here. This was just the time, unfortunately, to say we want to move ahead in a positive way. Sushi chefs Pae Randall (left) and Von Puyaoan meticulously create the innovate sushi rolls that Cafe Japengo became known. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune ) With Hyatts help, many of Cafe Japengos 40 or so employees have already found new jobs at other upscale hotels under the Hyatt brand, including the Manchester Grand Hyatt and Andaz San Diego, both in downtown San Diego, and the Park Hyatt Aviara in Carlsbad, said Japengo manager Philip Nicholson. Weve had a terrific crew thats been with us for a long time and Hyatt has been really great in helping them out, Nicholson said. While the dining room was bustling with hotel guests, families and area office workers one afternoon last week, Nicholson said theres been a perceptible decline in customers during the day. Just in the last year, with all the new restaurants at the mall up the street, Ive seen a decline in lunch business, he said. The younger, hipper clientele of Japengos heyday the kind that can create buzz and generate more business has long since moved on. The lunchtime crowd at Cafe Japengo last week. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune ) When the Michael Graves-designed Hyatt Regency La Jolla opened in 1990, there were four restaurants in the hotel complex known as Aventine. Of those original eateries, only Cafe Japengo, which launched in 1989, still exists. During the 1990s, Japengo, perhaps more than any other restaurant in San Diego, attracted a stylish crowd from around the county. Its popularity was fueled as much by the club-like scene especially on Thursday nights as the restaurants critically acclaimed sushi and innovative Pacific Rim cuisine. The 4,000-square-foot space, with its then-unheard-of exposed duct work and collection of authentic Asian art pieces, gave it a chic, gallery-like, industrial feel. It had a different vibe when it opened in 1989. It was the place to be, said Lee Evans, who has worked as a server at Japengo for 22 years. We were always at capacity, especially on Thursday nights. If you didnt have a reservation, forget it. On Friday and Saturday nights, there were two-hour waits. Evans said in recent years, the restaurant became more popular with families, with longtime customers bringing their grown children in. Its (Japengo) grown up, people have grown up. One of Cafe Japengos most popular and enduring dishes is the curry-dusted calamari. Thats something wed never take off the menu, said longtime Japengo server Lee Evans. I dare you to make a better calamari. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune ) The UTC area has grown up as well. Mike Spilky, president of Location Matters, a San Diego real estate brokerage firm that specializes in restaurants, said while UTC has always had a dense concentration of Class A office buildings, it has struggled to fill restaurants at night, after business hours. I would speculate that a lot of the residents of those apartments are (UC San Diego) students and with the high rents, I imagine that doesnt leave a lot of disposable income to eat at fancy restaurants. But UTCs current bustling construction activity marks a key period of transition, he said. With the trolley coming in, more hotels in the pipeline, more condos and the caliber of restaurants coming in at the mall, it will start drawing from outside the area, Spilky said. It will kind of be a downtown for North County. Thatll be the only way it will be successful. In todays market, the coming closure of Cafe Japengo is a symbol of over-saturation, according to Spilkey. Sushi chef Pae Randall plates a Special Albacore Roll (right) and a (meatless) Carne Asada Roll at the sushi bar at Cafe Japengo. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune ) Too many restaurants, too many options is not a good thing, he said. Its not a bad thing for the area to lose a restaurant; itll actually help the other restaurants in the area. Dont tell that to Japengos loyal, longtime customers, many of whom have been coming in since the restaurant announced its closure to order such time-tested dishes as the curry-dusted calamari, Japengo fried rice with vegetables, char-siu duck salad and the special albacore sushi roll. The Japengo Fried Rice at Cafe Japengo is a classic. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune ) People are really disappointed, said Nicholson, the manager, adding that some feel so connected to the restaurant, they want to literally bring home a piece of it home with them. Ive had at least 20 of our regular customers offer to buy it, he said, pointing to the carved mask of the long-nosed, mythical Japanese creature Tengu that hangs over the once jam-packed bar. Before it, or other pieces in Cafe Japengos Asian art collection, can be sold, they need to be appraised for sale. Like UTC, Tengu is likely worth more than it used to be. Someone offered $3,000 for Tengu, Nicholson said, but weve heard it could be worth $15,000 to $20,000. Among the original artwork at Cafe Japengo that will be appraised for sale are three handpainted Japanese kites hanging near the bar. (Eduardo Contreras / San Diego Union-Tribune ) michele.parente@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @sdeditgirl Sounding the main theme of his presidential campaign a vow to eliminate corruption in Mexico front-runner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador made a final push for votes in Baja California on Monday. Less than two weeks before Mexicos July 1 election, the 64-year-old leftist candidate vowed before some 4,000 supporters in Mexicali that his presidency would bring the country a profound transformation that has not been seen in 100 years. Front-running Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador made a final push for votes in Baja California on Monday. Lopez Obrador is a veteran politician making his third presidential bid, and this time he holds the undisputed lead, maintaining a double-digit advantage in national polls over his closest opponents Ricardo Anaya of Mexicos National Party (PAN) and Jose Antonio Meade of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). A fourth candidate, political independent Jaime Rodriguez Calderon, has been lagging a distant fourth. Advertisement Here at the California border, in a state that has been a bastion of the PAN, Lopez Obradors message has been winning support, according to a recent survey by a Baja California polling group, Plural.mx, whose results earlier this month put Lopez Obrador in the lead statewide. As he addressed a near-capacity crowd at the state auditorium, Lopez Obrador said his presidency would signal a fourth transformation for Mexico. We are fortunate in that we will achieve this transformation without bloodshed, he said. This will be a peaceful, moderate revolution, but a profound one. He vowed a range of measures that include slashing the salaries and perks of high-ranking government officials, eliminating pensions for former presidents, raising benefits for retirees and students, offering subsidies to small farmers and lowering the costs of gasoline and electricity. If elected, he said he would move out of the Mexican presidential residence, Los Pinos, and cut his own salary in half. Lopez Obradors coalition, Together We Will Make History, includes his own party, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) as well as the smaller leftist Workers Party, and the Social Encounter Party, a group linked to evangelical Christians. Lopez Obrador is an economic nationalist, who won high approval ratings as mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005. He has been a fierce critic of President Enrique Pena Nietos energy reforms that have opened the sector to foreign private investment. But he has also said that he supports continuing the North American Free Trade Agreement. For the countrys northern border, Lopez Obradors economic plans include the creation of a special economic zone, stimulating growth with measures such as doubling the minimum wage, lowering the sales and income taxes, and pegging the price of gasoline and other fuels to those in nearby U.S. communities. On the campaign trail, he has spoken frequently about the mafia of power that he says has robbed ordinary Mexicans of what is rightfully theirs. The problem is not that there is a lack of resources, its that theyve stolen the resources, he told his cheering supporters on Monday. Some statements have struck fear in the countrys business sector, and raised questions as to just how far he will take the reforms if he is elected. But Lopez Obrador has successfully tapped into feelings of anger among Mexicans who have seen little progress in their daily lives, and found their communities besieged by unprecedented violence, much of it in areas of high drug consumption. Like many others at the Mexicali rally, Angel Norzagaray, a 56-year-old playwright and theater director, was preparing to cast his third presidential vote for Lopez Obrador. The fight against corruption is essential, said Norzagaray, a former state cultural official and until recently vice-rector at the Mexicali campus of the Autonomous University of Baja California. This discourages people from making an effort, because they think a corrupt official will just take it away from them. Some fear that if elected, Lopez Obrador will not be as stringent in fighting corruption among his supporters. Political analyst Jesus Silva-Herzog Marquez raised the question in a column on Monday in the Mexico City newspaper, Reforma. Lopez Obradors fight against corruption, he wrote, would also have to be a fight against many of his allies. But in Mexicali on Monday morning, supporters eager for change offered only enthusiastic support. The candidates arrival lit up members of the crowd, many of them retirees who shouted pre-si-den-te in unison. Waving a large flag near the front of the was Lily Arguello, 61, a former Spanish-language teacher who has dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship and lives in San Diegos Golden Hill neighborhood. Ive voted for the PAN and the PRI, but they dont fulfill their promises, Arguello said. She was hardly the only member of the crowd with U.S. ties. Juan Manuel Sanchez, 62, a retired Mexicali school teacher, said he spent more than two decades working as a cook at a restaurant in Holtville in Imperial County. Ive always voted for the PRI, but not anymore, Sanchez said. sandra.dibble@sduniontribune.com @sandradibble The discovery of a panga-style boat that may have been used to smuggle immigrants onto an Orange County beach triggered the temporary lockdown of an elementary school as authorities searched the area for the vessels occupants Tuesday morning. The boat came ashore on Moro Beach, in Crystal Cove State Park, about 6:25 a.m. with people on board, said California State Parks spokesman Jorge Moreno. El Morro Elementary School in Laguna Beach was placed on lockdown for roughly two hours, starting at 7:30 a.m., as Laguna Beach and Newport Beach police, along with U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, combed the area around Crystal Cove. At least four people were located by 7:40 a.m., according to authorities. Panga boat which landed on Crystal Cove State Beach. @CAStateParks is the lead agency with @LagunaBeachPD assisting along with @OCSD helicopter. pic.twitter.com/IguqnVpDDU Laguna Beach Police (@LagunaBeachPD) June 19, 2018 Advertisement Units are assisting Border Patrol in the Crystal Cove State Park in reference a panga boat landing. @OCSD helicopter is assisting in the search. Total of 4 subjects have been located. Laguna Beach Police (@LagunaBeachPD) June 19, 2018 An Orange County Sheriffs Department helicopter crew and a Laguna Beach police drone equipped with infrared technology helped with the search. It remains unclear where the vessel came from. During the search, Laguna Beach Unified School District officials tweeted that El Morro Elementary is safe, but currently on lockdown. The lockdown was lifted by 9:35 a.m. This is the second time this month that a panga-style boat was found beached in the Crystal Cove State Park area. An abandoned boat that may have been used for human smuggling was discovered June 11 on the beach near Reef Point. No one was aboard when authorities arrived. Authorities believed about 12 people entered the country illegally on that boat. Pangas are Mexican-style fishing boats, often powered by outboard motors, used to smuggle drugs and people into the country, said U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Theron Francisco. They tend to be about 20 feet in length, though the size and the number of people or items on board vary, he said. In the 2017 fiscal year there were 129 maritime events along the California coast, most of which involved boats like these, though people also use jet skis and family boats to blend in more, Francisco said. From October 2017 to May of this year there were 63 such events, he said. In fiscal year 2017, U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 347 people trying to enter the country along the California coast by water, Francisco said. People apprehended may be deported to their country of origin or face additional charges in the U.S., he said. Francisco did not know how many were seeking asylum in the country. Most of the people being smuggled through the maritime scene are not the ones claiming asylum or refugee status, Francisco said. Fry writes for Times Community News. UPDATES: 10:45 a.m.: This post was updated with information from California State Parks spokesman Jorge Moreno, information on the school lockdown, and comments from U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Theron Francisco. This story was originally published at 8:40 a.m. The state Board of Equalization election is still too close to call in Southern California, but the third-place candidates campaign manager has filed a complaint against Michael Mike Schaefer, now in second place. Linda Naylor, who heads John F. Kellys campaign to represent District 4 on the five-member statewide tax board, has asked the Secretary of State to investigate Schaefer. As of Monday morning, Schaefer, of San Diego, led Kelly, of Orange County, by 5,631 votes (16.9 percent to 16.5 percent) for a berth in the run-off election against state Sen. Joel Anderson, with 31.7 percent. Michael Mike Schaefer was unaware Monday that the campaign manager of his Board of Equalization race opponent, John F. Kent, filed an election complaint with the Secretary of State. (AP / Las Vegas Sun / Steve Marcus ) Over the years, Schaefer, a former attorney, has filed numerous lawsuits to resolve personal disputes and those of family and friends. He has been convicted of misdemeanors, jailed and placed under a restraining order. Nevada disbarred him from practicing law there in 2001, and California took reciprocal action in 2005. Advertisement In her complaint, Naylor contends that disbarment doesnt allow a board member to conduct business in a quasi-judicial setting, which the Board of Equalization encompasses and requires of its office holders. She also questions Schaefers residency, noting that he leased a condo in San Diego last December, about three months before the election filing deadline. Schaefers campaign history, resembling a political game of musical chairs, has seen him run for election in Palm Springs, Nevada, Maryland and Los Angeles in recent years. California Secretary of State Alex Padillas spokesman said Monday he cant comment on an investigation or even confirm the existence of one. Press Secretary Sam Mahood added that he would look into quasi-judicial characterization of the Board of Equalization. State election residency qualifications stipulate only that a board candidate must be a registered voter and otherwise qualified to vote for that office at the time that nomination papers are issued. Schaefer, 80, said Monday he was not aware that a complaint had been filed but defended his resident status. California disbarred him routinely as a result of the Nevada action, he said, and he did not challenge it because I closed my California law office back in 1993. Ever since the Ocean Beach mermaid disappeared from atop Ross Rock last week, people have speculated as to her whereabouts and various Photoshopped pictures have surfaced. In this doctored photo, Marina the mermaid, joined a homeless veteran at the waters edge in Ocean Beach. (Jim Grant photo ) Mermaid musings: The creator of the Ocean Beach mermaid stepped forward under the cloak of anonymity to say the sudden appearance of the turquoise-haired mermaid atop Ross Rock was about a year in the planning. An acquaintance of the pop-up art maker told me the OB resident and some buddies had made detailed plans for her creation and attachment to the rock using existing hooks and holes from previous cliff-top installations. They had planned to remove her in August with possible future surprise visits. That scenario was dashed Wednesday when some OB surfers stealthily removed the mannequin, antagonizing fans who condemned the kidnapping in online posts. A member of the Sunset Cliffs crew, who claim to have taken her down, told me Thursday she was on a friends sofa a beer in one hand and a bong in the other. Theyre jerks, announced Dan Plante, a KUSI news reporter who has been following the mermaids story. These guys took something special away. Plante tracked down the artist who had crafted Marina and interviewed him. It was a happy diversion from a lot of things that happen in life, he told Plante. It was a very positive thing. But somebody didnt think so. The mermaids maker wrote a goodbye letter from Marina that was printed in the community newspaper explaining her arrival: I came to OB upon the tides of the full moon in hopes of catching a glimpse of those who might still believe in the ancient legends. She wrote that perhaps she will return one day. However, at last report, Marina the mermaid was not in great shape having a detached tail and a missing arm. diane.bell@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1518 Twitter: @dianebellSD Facebook: dianebell.news A group of congressional Democrats lead by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi denounced President Trump on Monday after visiting a facility in San Diego County where immigrant children separated from their parents are held. Its a heartbreaking, barbaric issue that could be changed in a moment by the President of the United States rescinding his action, Pelosi said at a press event. It so challenges the conscience of our country that it must be changed, and it must be changed immediately. The visit was part of an expanding campaign by Democrats to attack the presidents policy of splitting up families caught entering the country illegally, with lawmakers on Sunday joining protests at detention facilities in New Jersey and Texas. San Diego representatives Juan Vargas and Susan Davis, as well as roughly another dozen lawmakers, joined Pelosi in touring Casa San Diego, an El Cajon facility for unaccompanied children who arrive at the southern border. Advertisement Rep. Juan Vargas responds to Jeff Sessions statement that seperating children from their families who cross the border illegally is a temporary detergent. I saw a child who looked like me, Vargas said. I looked at him and thought, That could have been me when I was four years old, and what would I have thought if they ripped me away from my mom and dad. Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents in April and May, according to federal authorities. Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administrations strategy on Monday in New Orleans at the annual conference of the National Sheriffs Association. Theres an important conversation happening in this country about whether we want to be a country of laws or a country without borders, Sessions said. It is one of the reasons the America people elected Donald Trump, and that was to end the lawlessness at our southern border. In May, Sessions announced a zero-tolerance policy for those apprehended at the border. The new rules send parents to criminal court while their children go into facilities run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Once the parents move to immigration custody, it can be difficult to reunite with their children as they await immigration hearings. Sessions called the policy of previous administrations that allowed many migrant parents to remain with their children a loophole that encouraged families to make dangerous trips through the desert along the border with Mexico. We do not want to separate children from their parents, he said. We do not want adults to bring children into this country unlawfully either, placing those children at risk. Immigrant rights advocates say that the Trump administrations main goal is not the safety of children but significantly limiting immigration, as evidenced by a recent policy change that denies asylum to people fleeing domestic and gang violence. Under the revised policy, immigrants must be fleeing state persecution to qualify for asylum status. Pelosi, Democrats demand access to immigration holding facilities following child separations Democratic congress members in San Diego on Monday flatly rejected the administrations logic. Its just not true, Vargas said. The reality is that were using cruelty here, not to prevent people from coming but just to be cruel. I dont think it does anything frankly to stop people from coming. Youve heard the conditions theyre living under. Rep. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana, echoed that sentiment: When these kids are growing up in Central America theyre given a choice. At a certain age, you either join a gang, MS-13 that the President talks about, or you die. They pick a third, which is go north in search of possibly a survival alternative. The Trump administration has said the new policy is also a way to prevent people from fleeing authorities while awaiting their court dates. Between 2012 and 2016, about 140,000 people failed to show up for immigration hearing hearings, about 20 percent of all cases. So many immigrants are now being detained that asylum seekers are being placed in federal prisons rather than Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, which are not designed to hold people as punishment. For example, about 1,000 immigrants are being transferred to a medium-security prison in Victorville, California. House Republicans are now making tweaks to a so-called compromise bill on immigration reform that would allow many immigrant children to be detained with their parents. The legislation would also narrow asylum standards, do away with the diversity visa lottery and eliminate some types of family-based immigration. Democrats have vowed to oppose the bill. Twitter: @jemersmith Phone: (619) 293-2234 Email: joshua.smith@sduniontribune.com The Trump administration announced Tuesday it is withdrawing from the U.N. body that oversees human rights around the globe, saying the 47-nation council has shown an unconscionable bias against Israel and a blind willingness to ignore abuse elsewhere. The decision to leave the U.N. Human Rights Council was the latest multinational institution or accord that the administration has abandoned, sometimes upending years of U.S. policy. Critics were quick to cite the withdrawal as further evidence that under President Trump, the United States is retreating from its position as the leading international advocate for human rights. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made the announcement at the State Department. It wasnt immediately clear if U.S. diplomats would stop all cooperation with the council or would continue to observe its sessions or engage in some investigations. We have no doubt there was once a noble vision for this council, [but] today it is a poor defender of human rights, Pompeo said, adding that the council shields and enables some of the worlds most corrupt and abusive countries. Advertisement Haley assailed what she called the councils disproportionate, politically motivated focus on Israel and a membership that includes governments with egregious human rights records, including China and Venezuela. The U.S. withdrawal deprives the council of a major voice in fighting for human rights and eliminates the strongest defender of Israel on the body. Many human rights advocates agreed the council is badly in need of reform and is biased against Israel, but said quitting wont fix those problems. By withdrawing from the council, we lose our leverage and allow the councils bad actors to follow their worst impulses unchecked, said Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), including running roughshod over Israel. The council has focused heavily on Israel, rebuking it for its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The situation in Israel is a permanent item No. 7 on the council agenda for its regular meetings. U.S. diplomats have served as a counterweight in those debates. From the year the council was formed in 2006 until the United States joined in 2009, half of all country-specific condemnations issued involved Israel. Since then, however, only one-fifth of such rebukes targeted Israel, according to a study by the independent United Nations Foundation. There were six special sessions dedicated to criticizing Israel between 2006 and 2009, and only one since. American leadership has fundamentally changed the work of the council, and for the better, said Peter Yeo, senior vice president of the foundation, which works to support the United Nations and to improve U.S.-U.N. relations. While agreeing with calls for reform, Yeo cited some of the councils successes, including what he called a groundbreaking 2015 report condemning human rights abuses in North Korea, and work on behalf of the global gay community, whose members in some countries face prison or death. Haley acknowledged that the council will lose what she called its last shred of credibility with the U.S. departure. But she said that was all the more reason to act. Under Trump, the administration has shown favoritism toward Israel and rarely criticizes any of its actions, such as its role in deadly violence in Gaza, that other countries condemn. The decision came a day after a senior U.N. official sharply criticized the Trump administration for separating several thousand children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Hussein, called the border action unconscionable and said it amounted to child abuse. But any direct connection was unlikely. The Trump administration has considered quitting the council since soon after Trump took office last year. Haley said Tuesday that the decision to withdraw will be revisited if the council undergoes a transformation something activists say is even less likely now. You dont get reform by throwing up your hands and walking away, said Sarah Margon, Washington director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com For more on international affairs, follow @TracyKWilkinson on Twitter. UPDATES: 5 p.m.: This article was updated with additional information about the United States withdrawal from the U.N. Human Rights Council. This article was originally published at 2:45 p.m. A Florida man rescued an alligator from a pythons death grip in the Everglades this past weekend, and it was all caught on video. Jack Hubbard of Lakeland posted the gator-python video on his Facebook page. He said he went to Everglades Wildlife Management Area 3A this past weekend to meet up with python hunter Mike Kimmel. And what an adventure they had. Hubbard and Kimmel, a licensed snake hunter and the owner/operator or Martin County Trapping and Removals, were looking for pythons at night when they came across a large one about 10 feet long that was trying to make a meal out of a small gator. Advertisement I think thats little gators done, Hubbard can be heard saying on the video. A good size snake, too. But as Kimmel took a closer look at the python, he got a surprise. The gators still alive, he said. Thats when Kimmel grabbed the python by its head and removed it from the water. I got you buddy. Hold on, Kimmel told the little gator, which looked to be about 4-feet in length. A minute later, the python released the gator. The snake was not so lucky as Kimmel kept his grip. As Kimmel prepared to hand off the python to Hubbard so he could go retrieve a sack to store the snake, thats when the Lakeland man made a confession. You know Im afraid of snakes, right? Hubbard told Kimmel. Hubbard confronted his fear and took over holding the 10-foot python, which promptly coiled around his arm. That is a weird feeling, he explained. The python-gator struggle shows the impact the invasive snakes are having on Floridas environment. Wildlife officials have said many smaller mammal species have virtually disappeared from the Everglades due to the growing python population. Alligators are considered apex predators, but now even they arent safe with pythons around especially smaller gators like the one that Kimmel and Hubbard helped free. In January, a Florida man found a python and alligator battling on a Naples golf course. In that encounter, the alligator appeared to get the upper hand in the battle. Kimmel told Tampa TV station WTSP that this was the third gator he rescued from a python in less than a year. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Burmese pythons of all sizes have been found in the Everglades. The largest snake was over 16 feet long and weighed over 100 pounds. Most Burmese pythons are between 6 and 10 feet long, and are larger than almost all native snakes. In their native range, Burmese pythons commonly reach 18 feet, and the largest specimens exceed 20 feet. Roger Simmons, Content Director for Audience Engagement, is a member of the Orlando Sentinel Community Conversations Team. He can be reached at rsimmons@orlandosentinel.com A petition drive for a ballot measure that forces races for county offices into a November runoff has run into turbulence after the Registrar of Voters Office determined that nearly 100,000 more signatures are needed than previously thought. The union-backed San Diegans for Full Voter Participation political committee had believed it needed to collect a mere 67,837 signatures to get its ballot measure before San Diego County voters this fall. But on Friday the registrars office said the 103,328 signatures the committee had turned in on May 30 were rejected, and cited a recent change in state law that raised the bar to 165,984 signatures. As a result, this petition is determined to have an insufficient number of signatures to qualify for the ballot, a letter from the Registrar of Voters to the committee says. Registrar of Voters Michael Vu said he previously believed and stated inaccurately that only 67,837 signatures were needed, but just last week saw a budget trailer bill in Sacramento that drew his attention to the higher threshold. Advertisement There was a presumption on my part that it followed all other county-wide petitions, Vu said over the phone. There werent any others that I was aware of that followed a different process. After six months of gathering signatures and spending $230,000, the registrars rejection has effectively derailed the committees work on the signature drive. But the state budget trailer that alerted Vu to the higher threshold might also put the petition drive back on track. It says that the number of signatures needed is equivalent to 10 percent of the votes cast for all candidates for governor in the last election, a formula that adds up to 67,837 signatures. The legislation, which is headed to the governor after passing in the Senate Monday afternoon, applies retroactively and also requires the Registrar of Voters to re-examine the signatures previously submitted. The bill is expected to become law but the timing of the process could mean that the San Diego County Registrar of Voters wont verify the 103,000 signatures the committee has collected in time for the Board of Supervisors to put it on the Nov. 6 ballot, pushing the matter back to 2020. The delay would have the most impact on two Board of Supervisor seats that will be vacated in 2020 because of term limits, as well as Supervisor Kristin Gaspars re-election campaign. Service Employees International Union Local 221, a group that represents about 10,000 of county governments 17,000 employees, championed the signature drive. If the unions efforts are successful then elections for races for supervisor, district attorney, sheriff, treasurer/tax collector, assessor-recorder-county clerk, and the board of education will all be decided in a November runoff even if a candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary. The union and its supporters argue that democracies work best when politicians are elected when voter turnout is highest. David Lagstein, the political director at Local 221, said he hopes the matter is soon resolved in Sacramento and, in the meantime, wants the registrar to start evaluating the 103,000 signatures to meet a July 12 deadline to put the measure on this falls ballot. Were optimistic that this bill will be passed and signed by the governor, Lagstein said over the phone. Because of that, we hope and believe that Mr. Vu will honor the 103,000 voters that signed this petition, and he will move forward in an expedited manner so that the voters can vote on this in November. He noted that the Registrars Office has already spent 15 days counting the signatures before rejecting them, so it shouldnt take as long as usual to count a sample of the 103,000 in order to determine if at least 67,837 are valid. He has done half the work already, which is the raw count of the signatures. Now he just has to finish the job, which is to do the complete sample count. And theres no reason why that cant be done expeditiously for voters to consider it in the 2018 election except for politics, Lagstein said. Vu said that if the bill soon becomes law there is a high chance that his staff will be able to scrutinize the signatures ahead of the July 12 deadline. He added that they will not have to start from the beginning of the process and re-count all 103,000 of the signatures, but said they are currently operating under the higher threshold and are at a dead stop. So, painting some scenarios here, lets say it gets passed and the governor signs it today. I would say its more than likely that we would get through the verification of it, but if it goes further, it would create greater risk, he said. Wires started to cross with a bill by Assemblyman Todd Gloria, D-San Diego, that was signed into law last year. The legislation, which was opposed by the countys five supervisors all are Republicans made it possible to amend the countys charter to force races for county offices in a November runoff. The change would likely help Democrats since that partys turnout is significantly higher in general elections compared to primaries. A spokesman for Gloria said the assemblyman never intended to increase the number of signatures required, but language that raised the threshold from 10 percent of the people who voted in the last gubernatorial election to the much-higher 10 percent of registered voters was inadvertently included during drafting process. Legislative analyses of the bill make no references to the higher standard. We werent seeking to create this whole new process and I think that this is something that the registrar knows, Glorias spokesman, Nick Serrano, said over the phone. Forcing races to a runoff would benefit Democrats since that partys turnout historically skyrockets in November, particularly in presidential elections. While data on the two major parties voter participation wasnt immediately available, overall turnout increased by 96 percent between 2016 presidential primary and general election. In the 2014 gubernatorial election, 65 percent more votes were cast in the general compared to the primary. Had the unions charter amendment already been in place, this months races for district attorney, sheriff, assessor and two board of education districts would have all been held in November rather than decided in the June 5 primary. Each race had only two candidates running, and one candidate in each of those races all Republicans received more than half the vote. County Treasurer/Tax Collector Dan McAllister ran unopposed and, had the charter amendment been in place, he would appear on the ballot in November. The charter amendment is based on the city of San Diegos Measure K, an initiative that pushed all city races to a November runoff. It passed in 2016 with support from 59 percent of voters. Twitter: @jptstewart joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1841 A Beverly Hills radiologist was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison Monday for his role in a massive fraud scheme that doled out kickbacks for patient referrals for bogus tests at a network of clinics he owned across the state including San Diego and Imperial counties. Dr. Ronald Grusd was convicted in December by a federal jury in San Diego of 39 charges, including conspiracy, honest services wire and mail fraud and health care fraud. Prosecutors said Grusds companies, California Imaging Network Medical Group and Willows Consulting Co., paid more than $100,000 in bribes to physicians and others for referrals of patients with workers compensation claims to his clinics. There they would receive various services, such as MRIs, ultrasounds, toxicology tests and prescription pain medications, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney in San Diego. He would then seek reimbursement from insurance companies, omitting the salient fact of the kickbacks, prosecutors said. Advertisement At trial, prosecutors presented evidence of bribes to get billings for hundreds of patients, with the bribes paid out based on either a per-patient or per body-part formula, the release said. The kickbacks were funneled through Willows Consulting Co. Both that company and California Imaging Network were ordered to pay a $500,000 fine each by U.S. District Court Judge Cynthia Bashant. The case was part of a large crackdown on medical insurance fraud dubbed Operation Backlash announced in November 2015. Nearly 40 people and corporations have been charged with crimes in federal and state court, including doctors, attorneys, medical service providers and marketers as a result of the investigation. Twitter: @gregmoran greg.moran@sduniontribune.com A woman jogging on Torrey Pines State Beach Monday was injured when she was struck by a boulder that rolled off a cliff, according to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department. The incident occurred at 6 p.m. when the 28-year-old woman contacted the department asking for help, spokeswoman Monica Munoz said in an email. She initially reported her location as three-quarters of a mile south of the state beach parking lot, but it turned out she was in a slightly different place farther south, about 100 yards south of a location called Flat Rock. She told lifeguards when they arrived that she was running on the beach when a boulder rolled down a nearby cliff and hit her. She was transported to a nearby hospital, conscious the entire way, for treatment of unspecified injuries. Advertisement Twitter: @gregmoran greg.moran@sduniontribune.com The 25-year-old daughter of District Attorney Summer Stephan pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor drunken driving charge and was placed on probation Monday for a term of five years. Kimberly Sabraw admitted to a charge of driving with a blood-alcohol level greater than 0.08 percent during a Feb. 25 incident in San Diego County. She also admitted an allegation that her blood-alcohol was 0.15 percent. Sabraw, who is also the daughter of U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw, was initially charged with three other misdemeanor charges including driving under the influence, reckless driving and wrong-way driving, but those were dismissed in light of her plea. In addition to probation, she was fined $2,133. Advertisement The complaint filed in El Cajon Superior Court did not include information about the circumstances that led to her February arrest, including where it happened or at what time of day. The Attorney Generals Office, which prosecuted the case, said later that the incident happened about 3 a.m. somewhere on Interstate 8, but they did not specify the location. District Attorney Summer Stephan had previously said that the incident was a family matter. My daughter is an amazing young woman, and while Im disappointed in this event, we will deal with it as a family, and my office is recused from any involvement, Stephan said in April. Contacted outside the courtroom Monday, the prosecutor who handled the case referred follow-up questions to the agency in Sacramento. The Attorney Generals Office did not respond with answers to those questions by press time. A defense attorney declined to comment on the matter. Twitter: @LAWinkley (619) 293-1546 lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.com In the final days of the budget year, San Diego County supervisors are poised to award more than $2.3 million in grants to local charities and government agencies the latest donations under a program that has been criticized for years as a political slush fund. Four of the five members of the Board of Supervisors are proposing so-called Neighborhood Reinvestment Program grants at the Tuesday board meeting. All four supervisors are termed out and will not have to face voters again. Supervisors Bill Horn and Dianne Jacob earmarked the most public funds this time, with Horn proposing 33 different grants worth just under $800,000 and Jacob recommending 12 awards worth just over $672,000. Supervisor Ron Roberts proposed 17 grants totaling $522,245 and Supervisor Greg Cox proposed seven grants worth just over $335,000. Supervisor Kristin Gaspar is not recommending any grants this week. Advertisement The 69 grants are worth $2,327,550 almost one-quarter of the annual $10 million allocation under the Neighborhood Reinvestment Program. The program began in the 1990s as a way to allow officials to support causes within their districts without too much red tape. The awards, which range from a few thousand dollars to well into six figures, are required to go to federally recognized charities or to government agencies. Before rules about grant recipients were tightened up nearly 10 years ago amid a wave of negative stories in The San Diego Union-Tribune and other news publications, the supervisors could direct public funds to religious organizations or other groups without tax-exempt status. The largest grants this week were recommended by Jacob, who requested $217,195 for the Grossmont Union High School District to partially fund an all-weather running track, scoreboard and other amenities at Grossmont High School. Jacob also recommended $186,271 be granted to the city of Santee, which would spend the money renovating Mast Park. The grants typically are approved on whats known as the consent calendar, meaning there is generally no public discussion ahead of the vote. The county fiscal year ends June 30. Last week, the Board of Supervisors was presented a 2018-19 budget that outlines almost $6.3 billion in public spending. Supervisors are scheduled to vote on the budget proposal after a hearing next Tuesday. 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 Re Scripps scientist worries how Antarctic climate change may affect San Diego (June 13): Dr. Helen Fricker of the Scripps Institution says that the rapidly melting Antarctic ice sheet holds enough water to raise sea levels by 180 feet. Holy moly! Thats a scary figure considering nowhere in Pacific Beach is half that high. If any significant fraction of that ice ends up melted, our neighborhood is sunk. Were taking an awful risk by being late to the ball game on climate change. Im not just talking about San Diego because its us as a nation running these risks with no insurance policy. Thats irresponsible. We need strong, national policies to manage our greenhouse gas emissions policies like a carbon fee and dividend and we need them pronto. Will Bowman Pacific Beach Advertisement Thank you for Cliff Kaponos recent article, a conversation with Scripps Institution of Oceanography Professor Helen Fricker about the threat of rising seas due to climate change on San Diegos coastline. Scripps leads the world in climate research, so its great to see the Union-Tribune take advantage of this community asset. Professor Fricker concludes that the political actions of ordinary citizens in the next few years will be crucial in determining the extent of climate change and its resulting damage to our society. She encourages political involvement by each of us, without going into specifics. Lets start by telling Congress to put a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels. A revenue-neutral rising price on carbon, with all proceeds rebated to the public, would be a fair and effective first step. Call or write your Congresspersons today. Carl Yaeckel San Diego Letters and commentary policy The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy. You can email letters@sduniontribune.com or leave a comment below. Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook. Fox News host Laura Ingraham drew ire on social media on Monday when she called detention centers for immigrant children summer camps in reference to the facilities where minors are temporarily held after being separated from their parents as part of a Trump administration policy thats prompted protests nationwide and efforts by Congress to change its laws. During her Monday evening show, Ingraham mischaracterized a story in The San Diego Union-Tribune, quoting only from its opening paragraph that described one facility for immigrant children as having many elements that seem like what one would expect from a boarding school. So since more illegal immigrants are rushing the border, more kids are being separated from their parents. And temporarily housed at what are essentially summer camps, or as The San Diego Union-Tribune described them today as looking like basically boarding schools, Ingraham said on air. Later that same hour, Ingraham acknowledged the blowback to her reference to summer camps and instead described some of the facilities like boarding schools. "The San Diego Union-Tribune today described the facilities as essentially like what you would expect at a boarding school. So I will stick to there are some of them like boarding schools," she added later. What Ingraham did not acknowledge were key parts of the Union-Tribune story that looks at how the Department of Health and Human Services handles immigrant families: On closer inspection, details about the California-licensed child care facility run by Southwest Key Programs reflect the situation of the children it serves. Its surrounded by fencing that is backed by privacy netting, and a sign at the gate warns visitors that its under video surveillance 24 hours per day. If someone opens the front door of the facility without first swiping a badge, an alarm blares through the hallway, warning of a potential escape. According to staff there, about 10 percent of the children held in Casa San Diego were separated from their parents at the border an issue that has led to massive protests across the country. The rest appeared on their own. Ingrahams words came amid an emotional national reaction to a so-called zero tolerance policy that has led to the criminal prosecution of unauthorized immigrants entering the U.S., including those seeking asylum, and ending in a process that removes accompanying children from adults as they go through proceedings. Much of the uproar has focused on the practice of separating families, sometimes without warning, and sending children to facilities across the country. In one facility in Texas, the Associated Press described hundreds of children placed in cages. Critics admonished Ingraham for using summer camps to describe places where infants have reportedly endured traumatic experiences. The tense debate over the Trump administration policy intensified Monday when ProPublica published audio from inside one of these facilities where children can be heard crying for their parents. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, played that audio in a tweet to Ingraham. On Tuesday, Republicans in Congress began looking for legislative options to stop the practice of separating immigrant families at the border. President Donald Trump has insisted that the policy is in Congress hands. As of early Tuesday afternoon, members of Congress had not yet agreed with a solution. Update: Late Tuesday evening, Stephen Colbert slammed Ingraham in his show over her use of summer camps to describe the detention centers. Wait, summer camps? Colbert shouted at a screen showing Ingraham and a photo of children covered in foil blankets sprawled inside a shelter cage. Look at the picture over your own shoulder. Where did you go to summer camp? It's a game of morality limbo as Kirstjen Nielsen, Jeff Sessions and Laura Ingraham see if they can go as low as Donald Trump. Subscribe To "The Late Show" Channel HERE: https://bi ... Colbert then added, Oh and that like a boarding school quote thats not what The San Diego Union-Tribune said. They said, the baby jail seems like what one would expect from a boarding school on closer inspection its surrounded by fencing and a sign at the gate warns visitors that its under video surveillance 24 hours per day. If someone opens the front door of the facility without first swiping a badge, an alarm blares through the hallway, warning of a potential escape. So boarding school. We all remember the thrilling young adult novel, Harry Potter and The Sniper in The Guard Tower, Colbert joked. The point is, you cant hide from the horror. Email: luis.gomez@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @RunGomez Read The Conversation on Flipboard. From James Bonds shaken not stirred ethos to the electric pink Cosmopolitans of the Sex and the City ladies, the martini has enjoyed a continued success in the cocktail world, thanks to its chic appearance, sophistication and (lets be honest) stiff character. Its no wonder theres a saying, one martini, two martini, three martini, floor. Whether you are channeling 007, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, Charlotte, or your own martini personality, dress the part and go out for this years National Martini Day on Tuesday, June 19. PACIFIC has rounded up some of the most delicious options for the festivities. Just keep your eye on the moving floor. The Westgate Hotel Celebrate the holiday in old-fashioned style with a cocktail bar cart that shakes and stirs its way through the Grand Lobby from 3-6 p.m. After a martini (or two), head over to the Plaza Bar for appetizers and entrees. 1055 Second Ave., downtown, 619.238.1818, westgatehotel.com Prep Kitchen An Espresso Martini from PrepKitchen. (Jim Sullivan) With a spanking new martini menu that includes five full time offerings, Prep Kitchen speaks to every taste bud this holiday. Grab some friends and try the Bond Martini, with vodka, gin, orange bitters and French Sauternes; the decadent and dessert-y Espresso Martini, with vodka, Kahlua, Frangelico, vanilla, chocolate; and espresso; or the Always a Cosmo, with house infused Mandarin vodka, blood orange and fresh citrus. The martini menu is available at each of Prep Kitchens. Little Italy: 1660 India St., 619.398.8383; 1201 Camino Del Mar, 858.792.7737; La Jolla: 7556 Fay Ave., 858.875.7737; San Marcos: 250 N. City Dr., 760.798.8778, prepkitchenlittleitaly.com Cafe 21 A Cotton Candy Cosmo from Cafe 21 in the Gaslamp. (Courtesy photo) A clever and adorable twist on the standard Cosmopolitan, Cafe 21s version uses vodka, lemon, simple syrup, fresh fruit puree and is topped with... cotton candy. If these had been served to the Sex & the City gals, it would have been a national sensation. Available at the downtown location only. 802 Fifth Ave., Gaslamp, 619.795.0721, cafe-21.com Mortons The Steakhouse A group of Mortinis from Mortons Steakhouse. (Courtesy photo) In this impressive tribute to the classic cocktail, Martini lovers choose from seven different types of gin or 20 different types of vodka to create a signature Mortini. Each cocktail comes with a homemade blue cheese-stuffed olive to munch on. Head there for Power Hour from 5-6:30 p.m. for a special $9 Mortini and $6-7 bar bites. 285 J St., Gaslamp, 619.696.3369, mortons.com Meze Greek Fusion Go Greek this holiday with the Martini ala Greca, made with olive oil-washed vodka, secco vermouth, basil, saline and garnished with a feta cheese stuffed olive. 345 Sixth Ave., Gaslamp, 619.550.1600, gaslampmeze.com Bleu Boheme A Basil Martini from Bleu Boheme. (Courtesy photo) Say Oui, sil vous plait to Bleu Bohemes signature basil martini, made with French vodka, basil and citrus or their French martini with vodka, pineapple juice and creme de cassis. 4090 Adams Ave., Kensington, 619.255.4167, bleuboheme.com La Valencia A Pink Lady martini from La Valencia. (Courtesy photo) Fans of Rizzo and the Pink Ladies of Grease will be singing movie tunes while sipping their signature martini, The Pink Lady. Crafted with Belvedere vodka, basil, watermelon, sugar and lemon juice, this refreshing treat will be offered at all of the property bars, La Sala Lounge, poolside bar, THE MED and Cafe La Rue. 1132 Prospect St., La Jolla, 858.454.0771, lavalencia.com Nautilus Tavern Its Noon Somewhere from Nautilus Tavern. (Courtesy photo) Head to La Jolla for this perfectly San Diegan cocktail: Its Noon Somewhere. Crafted with vodka, elderflower liqueur, ruby red grapefruit juice, fresh lime juice, housemade habanero syrup and a dash of rhubarb bitters, this martini provides a delicious excuse to keep the holiday spicy. 6830 La Jolla Blvd., La Jolla, 858.750.2056, nautilustavern.com Herb & Wood Inspired by Audrey Saunders Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini, bartender Meghan Balser created the Vodka & Lavender crafted with local You & Yours vodka, Gin Mare, lavender-infused Aperitivo Bianco and a touch of Japanese Whiskey. 2210 Kettner Blvd., Little Italy, 619.955.8495, herbandwood.com Greystone Prime Steakhouse & Seafood This historic steakhouse locale offers a twist on the traditional with the Caper Martini, made with Ketel One vodka, salty caper brine and caper berries. 658 Fifth Ave., downtown, 619.232.0225, greystonesteakhouse.com A Watermelon Basil Martini at Del Sur Mexican Cantina. (Courtesy photo) Del Sur Mexican Cantina Nothing says summer like a Watermelon Basil Martini, a refreshing combination of 1800 reposado tequila, watermelon juice, lime and basil syrup. 2310 30th St., South Park, 619.501.0643, delsurmexicancantina.com Madison on Park Bar Manager Danny Kuehner takes on the martini with his floral and refreshing Belle Epoque, with local Cutwater Hibiscus Vodka, pomegranate nectar, lemon and Prosecco. 4622 Park Blvd., University Heights, 619.269.6566, madisononpark.com Primavera Ristorante Head across the bridge to Coronado for the Primavera martini, made with Ketel One vodka, lime juice, muddled basil, cucumber and mint or the Lavender Kiss martini, with Stoli vodka, fresh lemon, lavender-infused simple syrup and mint. 932 Orange Ave., Coronado, 619.435.0454, primavera1st.com Oceanaire Celebrate the holiday with a variety of martinis during the Admirals Hour from 5-6 p.m. and again from 9 p.m. to close. Try the signature Oceanaire 2.0 made with Havana Club Anejo Blanco rum, Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur, fresh lime juice, banana syrup, and Senior & Co. Genuine Blue Curacao; the Camarita made with Camarena Silver Tequila, Patron Citronge and fresh lime juice; or the James Bond Martini, a combination of New Amsterdam Gin and Vodka with a half-measure of Lillet Blanc (all $8 during Admirals Hour). 400 J St., Gaslamp, 619.858.2277, theoceanaire.com A young mother with extensive experience in county government was unanimously selected Monday night to fill the vacant seat on the Poway City Council. Caylin Frank, who moved to Poway in March with her husband and infant daughter, will be sworn in Wednesday and will be seated at the July 17 council meeting. She will attend Tuesday nights council meeting as a spectator. Frank, 32, lives on Pepper Tree Lane in the southern portion of Poway. She is a senior policy adviser for county Supervisor Bill Horn and is his principal adviser on public safety issues. It is a post she has held since 2009. She graduated from the University of San Diego in 2008 with a bachelors degree in political science. While in college, she interned for Rep. Brian Bilbray. Horn, who represents District 5 on the county board, will retire in November. Frank said she plans to make being a council member her only job and will run in November for the remainder of former Councilman Jim Cunninghams term, which ends in November 2020. Cunningham retired from the council on June 6 after 10 years. In 2020, voters in south Poway, placed in District 4 in a map approved by the council, will elect a council member to represent the district. Frank lives in the district. Frank said she and her husband, an attorney with the state Labor Commission, picked Poway to live after looking at other communities around the county. After moving here, she said, she approached Mayor Steve Vaus during a San Diego Association of Governments meeting she was attending with her boss. After introducing herself as a new Poway resident, Frank said Vaus told her about Cunningham stepping down. Frank said that led her to consider putting her name in for the position, thinking that she had the government background to quickly get up to speed on city business. Politics runs in Franks family. Her mother, Christy Guerin, served as Encinitas mayor and councilwoman between 1998 and 2006. She was Bilbrays district director from 2006 and 2012 and holds seats on the boards the Olivenhein Municipal Water District and San Diego County Water Authority. On Monday night, 15 of the 16 city residents who applied for the position each got two minutes to sell themselves to the four council members. Candidate Kenneth Donnelly did not attend and another hopeful, Peter Neild, withdrew after listening to the others speak. After a five-minute break, the four council members ranked their top choices. Frank was the only choice advanced by Vaus and Councilman Barry Leonard. She and Robert Polston were the only two picks of Councilman John Mullin. Councilman Dave Grosch listed three favorites: Julie Bendinelli, Peter Babich and Amy Romaker. With Frank on three of the four lists, she was selected on a unanimous vote. The entire process, from interview to vote, took about 90 minutes. The candidate list grew from seven to 16 between last Wednesday and noon Monday. Frank, Babich and Romaker were among the early applicants, along with Donnelly, Christopher Olps, Torrey Powers and Jonathan Ryan. They were joined by Bendinelli, Neild, Polston, Derrick Benson, Brian Edmonston, Charles Ellison, Jocelyn Scott, Ryan Trotter and Dr. Randall Young. Email: editor@pomeradonews.com UPDATES: 3:30 p.m. June 19 More details added. The young adult dreamers didnt do it for him. Maybe the little kids will. President Donald Trumps threat to deport DACA immigrants didnt get him funding for his border wall, limits on legal immigration or other measures. Now hes separating immigrant children from their parents in hopes of leveraging those same goals. The administration itself has said as much. The Trump administrations zero tolerance illegal immigration policy and the resulting increase in separate detentions for thousands of children has triggered widespread outrage. All living former first ladies Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Rosalynn Carter have condemned the practice. Advertisement Even first lady Melania Trump weighed in saying, according to a spokeswoman, that she hates to see children separated from their families. She added that a bipartisan immigration solution is needed. Religious leaders have joined in, including Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and usually a Trump supporter, who called the family separations disgraceful. Trumps contention that hes required to enforce a policy created by Democrats and that only Congress can fix it has been widely rejected as simply not true even by some Republican leaders. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Trump could stop this with one phone call. So it will be an interesting meeting Tuesday when Trump sits down with Republicans to discuss pending GOP legislation that would spend billions for his proposed border wall, curb legal immigration and include other measures he wants. One of the Republican bills also would allow families to be detained together. The child separations have created a media storm, and Republicans are feeling the heat. One story had a baby being pulled out of her mothers arms while breastfeeding, but the administration denied the account. Another had a teenage detainee caring for a baby she didnt know and teaching others how to change the girls diaper. Democratic lawmakers have been holding high-profile visits to detention centers across the country, including one here Monday by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and more than a dozen others including San Diego Democrats Reps. Juan Vargas and Susan Davis. They seem to be winning the PR battle, but the policy and political struggle continues. A CNN poll released Monday showed that two-thirds of Americans oppose separating immigrant families, though 58 percent of Republicans support it. Only 5 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents approve, according to the poll. But polls show even stronger opposition to ending the DACA program, yet the future of immigrants who benefit from it remains uncertain. Trump last year announced he was ending the Obama administrations Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that allows some immigrants brought here illegally as children to stay, at least temporarily. Despite widespread, bipartisan support for the program, legislative efforts to save it have gone nowhere. Trumps move caused a lot of panic among hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients, often called dreamers. That subsided somewhat after the courts issued injunctions blocking Trumps order. DACA recipients can stay for now but the program is in limbo. The idea of trading DACA reinstatement for border wall funding actually gained some traction earlier this year among some liberal media and immigrant activists. But the administration started adding other conditions, such as legal immigration limits. Inserting children in such a gamble would seem a high-stakes play. But Republicans generally are reluctant to oppose Trump, who has exacted political revenge on those who do. Maybe seeing that their base is holding with Trump on this matter will encourage them to gut it out. Clearly, theyd rather not have this kind of controversy in an already challenging election year. Videos of children under foil-like thermal blankets in warehouses, separated in basically large chain-link boxes, are tough to watch. The Border Patrol has objected to media reports calling the accommodations cages. An audio obtained by ProPublica of children at a detention facility crying for their parents is even tougher to listen to, even without the Border Patrol agent making a joke about it. Judging by their recent comments, Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen sound like theyre not budging. The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility, Trump said Monday. Not on my watch. He could easily undo the separation policy, declare victory and blame others even though it was a controversy of his own making. Hed only be undermining top advisers, which he does all the time. But then hed be giving up a bargaining chip, which is something he is loathe to do. Besides, Trump is given to creating chaos and crisis, apparently in the belief that it works to his advantage Sometimes it does. 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 Nuclear physicist Ralph Lapp helped to develop the atomic bomb before petitioning against its use in 1945. Lapp toured the country in the 1950s and 60s lecturing about nuclear radiation and civil defense, but in 1968 he penned the Post editorial The Weapons Industry Is a Menace, taking acute aim at the so-called military-industrial complex. Lapp decries the burgeoning defense socialism in the U.S., claiming Eisenhowers famous 1961 warning had come to bear in a nation whose welfare was permanently tied to the continued growth of military technology and the continued stockpiling of military hardware. Lapps rebuke of defense spending during the Cold War highlights the problems with weapons excess that are still debated 50 years later. The Weapons Industry Is a Menace by Ralph E. Lapp (June 15, 1968) The United States is becoming a weapons culture. The health of our entire economy has come to depend on the making of arms. The machinery of defense, lubricated by politics and technology, has become a juggernaut in our society. Pressures exerted by the giant corporations that compose our military-industrial apparatus are felt in the Pentagon, in the White House and in Congress. Congressmen are re-elected depending on their success in winning defense contracts for their constituencies; government funds support vast military research projects on campuses across the country; the scientific community has been largely corrupted or silenced by military domination. Subscribe and get unlimited access to our online magazine archive. Subscribe Today President Eisenhower warned of this ominous trend in his farewell address back in 1961: In the councils of Government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. That warning has become the present reality. Since the end of World War II, and especially since Korea, the manufacture of arms has ceased to be an emergency measure whereby private firms do their bit for Uncle Sam. Instead. many U.S. corporations have become primarily arms makers. Their business and their profits depend on winning more and bigger contracts from the Department of Defense. Some companies, like North American Rockwell, General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas, exist almost entirely on government arms contracts. Without this money many of them would go bankrupt. and places like Southern California or the state of Washington would become economic disaster areas. Consider, for example, a single company Lockheed Aircraft. In the past seven years this California-based concern has won a total of $10.6 billion in defense contracts. Uncle Sam provides 86 cents of every dollar of its corporate sales. Lockheed is not just an isolated example. During these same seven years 38 companies each have done more than one billion dollars of business with the Pentagon. No nation can devote so much of its ingenuity, manpower and resources to the works of war without being deeply changed in the process. Our commitment to weapons making has distorted the free enterprise system of our economy into a kind of defense socialism. a system in which the welfare of the country is permanently tied to the continued growth of military technology and the continued stockpiling of military hardware. This massive peacetime commitment to arms is new to the American experience. When one looks back and surveys the postwar years. one startling fact emerges: During these years the United States has devoted one trillion dollars to its national security! And half of this vast expenditure occurred during the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations. These billions of dollars have meant jobs for many Americans for electronics specialists in Bostons Route 128 necklace of defense plants; for rocket men in factories spread out over Utahs broad valleys; for aircraft workers in Southern California. Texas. Georgia, Washington. Kansas and Missouri. President Eisenhower omitted any reference to political influence in his indicting phrase, the military-industrial complex. but it is the crux of the matter. Powerful members of Congress champion defense systems out of self-interest. Georgias defense bounty may be traced, for example, to the power of its Senator Richard B. Russell. who is chairman of the potent Armed Services Committee. Our senators and representatives approve the appropriations that control the fate of many a defense plant. It takes a brave legislator to vote against funds that mean jobs for some of his constituents. He becomes vulnerable not just to the unemployed defense worker but to campaign charges that he failed to support the national security program. The power of the military-industrial complex has been greatly aided by advanced technology. Science has become the key to modern arms. Todays weapons systems, especially those involved in hurling nuclear warheads at intercontinental range, are incredibly complex. Nuclear research has fashioned compact packages carrying the explosive power of a million tons of TNT. Chemical and electronic ingenuity have combined to perfect rockets like Minuteman and Poseidon that can carry from 3 to 10 warheads, each dispatched to a separate target. More and more our great national decisions involve complex technology and secret data about weapons. Consider, for example, the recent decision to build a thin Sentinel system to defend against ICBMs fired by Red China. This $5 billion project may escalate to $40 billion. Yet the public had precious little to say in this momentous decision. In a sense, even a democracy as modern as ours is dictated to by technology. When a weapons system becomes ripe, then it dominates its makers. In the case of ballistic-missile defense, the United States spent $4 billion in research and development, so before the decision to deploy it was made, powerful forces urged its production. Robert S. McNamara, who recently resigned as head of the Pentagon, put it bluntly: There is a kind of mad momentum intrinsic to the development of all new nuclear weaponry. If a weapons system works and works well there is strong pressure from many directions to procure and deploy it out of all proportion to the prudent level required. One way to pressure the American people into supporting larger defense outlays is to sound the alarm about Soviet strength. Thus in the 1950s it was alleged that there was a bomber gap, and public support was whipped up for mass production of B-47s and B-52s. Even before the bomber gap vanished into thin air, a missile gap was born. John F. Kennedy hammered away at the missile-gap issue in his 1960 campaign, decrying Eisenhowers years in office as years the locusts have eaten. Yet when Kennedy became President and had time to study the available information about Soviet missiles, he discovered that the missile gap was in our favor. Nonetheless, Kennedy pressed Congress for authorization of more Minuteman and Polaris missiles. Now a new gap is in the making a megaton gap. A megaton means a million tons of TNT, or 75 times more power than the A-bomb that eviscerated Hiroshima. At some time in the future the Soviet Union may be able to hurl more megatons at the United States than we can fire back in return. This does not and cannot alter the fact that a small fraction of the present United States nuclear firepower can knock the Soviet Union out of the 20th century. Having excess kill power overkill is not militarily meaningful. The heart of our strategic policy is our capability to inflict unacceptable losses on the enemys homeland. Its damage, not megatons, that counts. I have calculated that as few as 45 ballistic missiles can strike at 60 million Russians living in 200 Soviet cities. No, my arithmetic is not nutty each missile can be armed with from 3 to 10 nuclear warheads targeted on individual cities. The total megatonnage in this hypothetical attack amounts to only 21 megatons roughly one thousandth of that once carried by our SAC bombers. But 21 megatons is the equivalent of 21 million tons of TNT, or 620 times the explosiveness of the combined power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. If my figure of 45 missiles seems too low, then lets triple it. That figure would amount to less than a tenth of the actual number of missiles in our strategic strike force. Adding more ICBMs to the U.S. arsenal, or magnifying the megatonnage, does not really alter the nuclear balance of power. But the very concept of enoughness in military power is a punishing blow to the solar plexus of the military-industrial-political complex. Defense affluence is based on open-endedness on there never being enough of anything, even megatons. The United States has already stockpiled over 50,000 nuclear weapons and has a capacity to double this number rather quickly. The man in the street is not supposed to question matters of national security. But whose judgment is he to trust? The politicians are themselves deeply implicated in the military-industrial complex; the generals traditionally dont know what the word enough means, and industrialists covet contracts. There is sound reason for gloomy forecasts about defense socialism. The United States cannot afford to lay down its nuclear arms until it is safe to do so and that day is far from dawning. Force of arms still rules, and the United States has no choice but to maintain its armed vigilance. Moreover, it cannot become complacent about its power to deter war by depending on the status quo. For this reason, military research and development should never cease. But the need for weapons improvement should not be viewed as a carte blanche for defense industry. Rational determination of force levels is of paramount importance to the nations security. Excessive weapons deployment may not only be wasteful, it may provoke competitors to unplanned arms increases, and thus escalate the arms race with no real gain in our national security. But how much is enough is the perplexing question that this country has avoided facing squarely. I admit that precise definition of enoughness is impossible. No single person or computer can be relied on to spell out how much is enough. There must always be an insurance factor a margin for error, but not for irrational excess. Even if by some magical process we could find a neat answer to how much military power is enough, we lack the mechanism in our democracy for a techno-military consensus. Our democracy depends on a system of checks and balances, but such restraints are lacking for the military industrial complex. Our Congress is ever ready to vote for larger defense appropriations; not once since Hiroshima has the Congress failed to fund a weapons system. It has even pushed some that the Defense Department did not want. Under congressional insistence the U.S. spent about $1.5 billion on a nuclear-powered airplane against the best advice of scientists. When the project was finally abandoned, the money turned out to be a complete loss. Both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy were pressured by Congress to deploy a ballistic-missile defense system. Had they yielded and authorized the system in the late 50s or early 60s, the resulting radars, computers and missiles would have had to be scrapped as useless. Yet when more advanced systems gave some hope of a thin defense shield, and the Sentinel system was authorized, what did members of Congress do? They immediately demanded a thick system one which Defense Secretary McNamara was careful to point out would he worthless against a massive Soviet attack. Furthermore, McNamara warned it would encourage the Soviets to accelerate their ICBM program, and thus add a new spiral to the arms race. Twenty-three years of the postwar era have failed to educate the Congress in the realities of nuclear power. We should be considering arms cutbacks, not increases, but this prospect frightens Congress and terrifies the aerospace industry, which is becoming a kind of national industrial welfare program. There is no easy panacea for correcting Americas techno-military ills. But we must begin by recognizing the inherent dangers to our society if we do not control our arms industries. Public exposure of the problem is essential. The Congress must provide itself with authoritative independent advice on techno-military problems. To this end I would urge the creation of a National Analysis Council to study and report on many of the problems that Congress is now handling in a horse-and-buggy manner. For example, the Congress may soon be asked to fund a new Advanced Manned Strategic Bomber. I would urge that it subject this proposal to a concentrated and objective analysis by a National Analysis Council. so that its full significance and value can be determined for the benefit of all members of Congress. I would urge that the growth of defense socialism be curtailed by applying geographic and contract controls to all new prime military awards. For example, it might be feasible to limit a corporations involvement with defense work by prohibiting the awarding of new contracts when a company already does more than half of its business with the Defense Department. These are, I admit, inadequate approaches to the overall problem. We cannot treat a cancerous condition so superficially, but we must begin somewhere and soon. If we perpetuate our weapons culture, we will turn ourselves into a veritable Fortress America, questing for evanescent security and, in the words of John F. Kennedy, forever racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankinds final war. Jennica MaeLauv's breakthrough hit "I Like Me Better" has just completed a very long road to the top. After 35 weeks on Billboard's Pop Songs chart, it's finally reached the top 10 -- the longest climb to that region in the history of that chart. "I Like Me Better," which has also gone platinum and racked up over a billion streams worldwide, is actually Lauv's second top 10 on that chart. His first was the Cheat Codes/Demi Lovato hit "No Promises," which he co-wrote under his birth name, Ari Leff. You might think that "Ari Leff" is enough of a distinctive name that he wouldn't have to have a stage name, but he's got a good reason for going by the name "Lauv." "I mean the stage name -- I always wanted it to be something that has meaning to me," he tells ABC Radio. "So 'Lauv' means 'lion' in Latvian. My mom's side of the family's from Latvia and I would go there every summer growing up. And 'Ari' means lion [in Hebrew] [and] I'm a Leo." "I didn't want the name to be random, but yeah...I kinda just wanted something that was like short and sweet that still felt connected to my identity," he adds. While Lauv thinks it's "awesome" that he has family all over Latvia, and he chose a Latvian word for his stage name, he admits that he still can't speak the language. "At some point in my life, I gotta learn," he tells ABC Radio. "My two older sisters, they learned, so I definitely feel kinda like the dumb little brother that doesn't even know but, at some point, [I will], yeah." This fall, Lauv will alternate alternate headlining dates with stints opening for Ed Sheeran on his North American stadium tour. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Highbridge, England -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/19/2018 -- On The Footsteps Of The Prince is an upcoming feature documentary film about the beautiful sights in Romania. The film reveals why HRH Prince Charles chose Romania for his holiday home and follows the majestic Romanian landscapes in his footsteps. Moreover, this documentary film is going to be a special treat for those who are planning a trip to Romania. In addition, seasoned UK based artist and filmmaker Nono Pirvu Lucian is the creator of this inspiring project and he has recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds and support for this feature documentary film. In a recently launched Kickstarter campaign, his goal is to raise a sum of GBP 20,000. In a nutshell, this documentary film will basically cover the 'other side' of Romania, which is more tranquil and more beautiful than what is visible. "This documentary film will be projected at cultural events in London, Paris, Milan and Madrid for promoting the reaches of Romanian culture and an online version of this movie will be shared on social networks and tourism websites." Said Nono Pirvu Lucian, while introducing this project to the Kickstarter community. The filmmaker is welcoming everyone to generously support this campaign on Kickstarter and help him in reaching his campaign goal for this project. The Kickstarter Campaign is located on the web at: www.kickstarter.com/projects/nonopirvu/on-the-footsteps-of-the-prince-feature-documentary and supporters from around the world can back this project by making generous pledges and donations. The project offers several exciting rewards and supporters can find out more about this project on the Kickstarter campaign page. About On The Footsteps Of The Prince On The Footsteps Of The Prince is an inspiring documentary feature film about Romania. The documentary film will follow the footsteps of His Royal Highness Prince Charles, as he first visited Romania in 1997 and decided to choose it as his holiday home. The documentary will show the other side of Romania, which is peaceful, serene and more beautiful than anyone has ever imagined. Contact: Contact Person: Nono Pirvu Lucian Company: On The Footsteps Of The Prince City: Highbridge State: Somerset Country: United Kingdom Phone: 07804523139 Email: lucian@pirvu.eu Website: www.tripinro.com Hyderabad, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/19/2018 -- Canadian card payments channel expected to grow due to increasing popularity of contactless payments and consumer-shift from cash to non-cash payments. The Canada Cards and Payments Market has shown positive growth potential during the forecast period both in terms of value and volume. The market was primarily driven by the transactions using debit cards, closely followed by the credit cards segment. The increasing demand for credit and prepaid cards among the consumers in the country has also contributed in a substantial way to the growth in the number of transactions. Further, other trends in the market include the shift of consumers away from cash transactions, increase in consumer spending, and the increased adoption of card payment facilities by retailers across the country, According to the research report published by Market Data Forecast on Canada Cards and Payments Market. Browse details of the report @ https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/canada-cards-and-payments-market-6892/ Consumers are increasingly shifting away from using cash as their primary mode of payments and are increasingly adopting alternative payment methods such as electronic fund transfer and cards. In spite of cash continuing to remain a major part of the payments market, there is a significant shift towards the use of card transactions. This is an attractive opportunity for banks and issuers and they are focusing on capitalizing on the same by using smart marketing strategies to encourage customers to use cards for payments. Rewards, promotional offers, discounts, and insurance are some of the benefits offered by banks and issuers. Canada Cards and Payments Market Growth Potential The major banks and issuers have been promoting their cards in a robust manner through the promotion of contactless payment technology for increasing the ease and efficiency of payments. This technology also has the benefits of improvised security and aids in controlling fraud. Interac Flash, payWave, and PayPass, are the major contactless technology payments widely used in Canada. All of the above use contactless payment technology but through different media. Interac Flash by Interac uses a chip embedded in the Interac debit cards which can be used to make contactless payments. Visa's payWave enables customers to make contactless payments through their smartphones using the NFC technology. PayPass by MasterCard using a similar technology and allows customers to pay in a contactless manner, wherein the mobile directly connects with the payment gateway at POS, when it is scanned at the payment terminal. Request Sample of the report @ https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/canada-cards-and-payments-market-6892/request-sample Geographical Segmentation The Canada Cards and Payments Market is analysed geographically under the region of North America. Canada accounts for one of the largest shares of the North America Cards and Payments 2017, and is also showing robust growth in the market. The specific targeting of customer segments by banks and increasing adoption of contactless payments of the card payments channel are expected to keep the market outlook stable in the coming future. Inquire more @ https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/canada-cards-and-payments-market-6892/inquire About MarketDataForecast Market Data Forecast is a market research firm offering syndicated research, consults and industry newsletters across various domains & verticals. With a well-established in-house team of experts from diverse fields and outsource research network across 100+ countries, we are the sole research providers for the majority of Fortune 500 companies. Along with the standards of reports being on par excellence, our unique services like free customization, analyst support for the period of six months post to the purchase will be the flag bearers and differentiates us from the rest. Our experience and in-depth understanding of various business environments will be a support to you and your organization in making well-informed decisions. Contact Information: Name: Mr. Abhishek Shukla Email: abhishek@marketdataforecast.com Organization: MarketDataForecast Address: 2nd Floor, Lakeview Plaza, Kavuri Hills, Hyderabad, Telangana 500033, India. Phone: +1-888-702-9626 Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/18/2018 -- Canada home healthcare market represents a wide range of home medical devices and services to support patients with chronic disease conditions. The risk and prevalence of chronic and lifestyle related diseases are constantly increasing in Canada which would drive the acceptance of home medical devices and services, consequently leading to the growth of the market. Request A Sample- https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=4898 Moreover, changing demographics in Canada further supports the growth of Canada home healthcare market. Statistics Canada projected that around 5 million people in Canada were aged over 60 65 years in 2011 and the number is expected to double in the next 25 years (10.4 million). Such change in demographics will shift a substantial portion of population to the higher risk level for illnesses that demand continuous medical intervention. Thus, this factor would in turn increase the utilization of home healthcare devices and services hence driving the market growth. Moreover, advancement in technologies, increasing sedentary lifestyle and growing preference for alternatives to hospital based long-term care also supports the Canada home healthcare market growth. However, high costs coupled with strict regulatory environment restraints the market growth. The Canada home healthcare market is estimated to be USD 10,449.1 million in 2013 and is expected to reach USD 18,939.9 million by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 8.9% from 2014 to 2020. The Canada home healthcare market has been studied from three perspectives: by device types, by services and by provinces. Based on device types, the market has been segmented into four categories: diagnostic and monitoring devices, therapeutic home healthcare devices, home mobility assist devices and medical supplies. Among these, diagnostics and monitoring devices are accounted for the largest market, capturing over 30% of the total Canada home medical devices market in 2013. Efforts of the Canadian government to increase awareness about hypertension, diabetes and sleep apnea management through home monitoring drives the growth of diagnostics and monitoring devices segment. Moreover, home mobility assist devices market segment recorded the lowest revenue in 2013 owing to the low cost of market constituents such as cranes and crutches, walkers and rollators and others. Request Brochure- https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=4898 Based on services, the Canada home healthcare market is categorized into rehabilitation, telehealth and telemedicine, respiratory therapy, infusion therapy and unskilled home healthcare services. In 2013, unskilled home healthcare services market accounted for the largest market and is expected to dominate the market in future. Growing geriatric population coupled with increasing uptake of nonprofessional home care services in Canada helps this segment to grow consistently during the forecast period. Moreover, telehealth and telemedicine services only accounted for 2% revenue of the total home healthcare services market in 2013 but is expected to grow with the highest CAGR of around 11% during the forecast period from 2014 to 2020. Fundamental benefits availed from these services such as high cost-effectiveness, quality health care and access to health care services throughout rural and urban areas supports the growth of the market in Canada. In terms of geographic distribution, the Canada home healthcare market has been segmented into four provinces i.e. Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and Rest of Canada. The Ontario home healthcare market in 2013 accounted for the largest market share due to high demand for home healthcare devices and services. Moreover, consistent rise in geriatric population and favorable government policies propels the growth of home healthcare market in Ontario. Followed by Ontario, Rest of Canada turned out to be the second largest market due to increasing number of obese population over the last few years. The Canada home healthcare market in Quebec is expected to grow at the highest CAGR of 9.2% from 2014 to 2020. The growth of this province is mainly attributed to the large population base and increasing incidence rate of chronic diseases. View Report- https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/canada-home-healthcare-market.html The Canada home healthcare market is fragmented in nature, having presence of large number of small scale and large scale home medical device and services providers. Some of the prominent home healthcare devices and service providers in the Canada home healthcare market are Johnson & Johnson, Omron Healthcare, 3M Healthcare, GM Healthcare, We Care Health Services, The Canadian Home Care Association, Home Care Ontario and others. About Transparency Market Research Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S.-based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMR's global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations. Contact us: Transparency Market Research 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:www.transparencymarketresearch.com Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/19/2018 -- Escalated demands from marine industry, coupled with evolving needs in decorative products have contributed reasonably towards growth of general industrial coating market in France. Market Research Hub (MRH) has recently added a new market study report titled, 'General Industrial Coatings France' to its repository to understand the impact of recent developments on the growth of general industrial coating market in France. Request For Sample Report: https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1820197 Fire Protection Coating to Trigger Growth in General Industrial Coatings Market in France Manufacturers in general industrial coatings market in France are entering into new business ventures to upgrade their position in the market. Also, leading players, in their effort to improve product line, are concentrating amply on research and development activities to augment new technologies that can contribute towards product innovation. These initiatives are expected to have a lasting effect on the holistic growth of general industrial coatings market in France. To effectively address slime on vessels, AkzoNobel inaugurated Intersleek 1100SR in the recent past. Owing to its efficacy in treating slime, shipping giant Nakilat has sealed a two year deal with AkzoNobel to supply Intersleek. Besides this renewed deal, the companies have a trailing history of successful business transactions. This deal is expected to aid AkzoNobel in strengthening its position in general industrial coatings market in France. As part of business development, Hempel, a leading supplier of industrial coatings has recently announced its acquisition of 65% of J.W. Ostendorf, known for its superior decorative paints. With this acquisition, Hempel has widened its business presence in decorative and secured a profitable position in general industrial coatings market in France. The decorative vertical is significantly a new venture for Hempel in contrast to its strong foothold in marine and protective verticals. However, with J.W. Ostendorf introduced to its family, Hempel foresees new opportunities in general industrial coatings market in France. Further, to coincide with transforming industry needs, Hempel has disclosed about its mega investment in life-saving fire protection coatings. The company is all set to inaugurate a new research and development center in Barcelona in the end of this year. With this development, the company is aligning with its objective of elaborate R&D initiatives. This is in complete cohesion with the company's need to innovate new products and harbor its growth in general industrial coatings market in France. Browse Full Report with TOC- https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/general-industrial-coatings-france-report.html Detailed research findings encapsulated in the report enlightens the readers about the various segments that are present in general industrial coatings market in France. Based on current market status, this section of the report outlines two core segments in general industrial coatings market in France, which are, type and application. Based on type, the general industrial coatings market in France is segmented as resin and process. Based on application, the market is fragmented as radiation-cured, powder, water-based, solvent-based. On the basis of perspectives on segmentation provided in the report, readers can identify the segment that produces maximum revenue in general industrial coatings market in France. Competitive Landscape, General Industrial Coatings Market Based on the insights presented in the report on general industrial coatings market in France, new market players as well as existing ones can analyze the marketing tactics applied by leading players to achieve growth and profit. Readers can understand the impact of these tactics on the purchase preferences of end-users and their evolving purchase decisions. Market players can invest time and resources to leverage complete analysis of these tactics. Inferences gathered can aid market players to develop effective investment policies that incur high revenues. Enquire about this Report- https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=enquiry&repid=1820197 About Market Research Hub Market Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports and analysis. MRH's expansive collection of market research reports has been carefully curated to help key personnel and decision makers across industry verticals to clearly visualize their operating environment and take strategic steps. MRH functions as an integrated platform for the following products and services: Objective and sound market forecasts, qualitative and quantitative analysis, incisive insight into defining industry trends, and market share estimates. Our reputation lies in delivering value and world-class capabilities to our clients. Contact Us 90 State Street, Albany, NY 12207, United States Toll Free : 800-998-4852 (US-Canada) Email : press@marketresearchhub.com Website : https://www.marketresearchhub.com/ Read Industry News at - https://www.industrynewsanalysis.com/ New York, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/19/2018 -- The global lingerie market is estimated to rise at a CAGR of 6.4% during the forecast period of 2016 and 2024 due to various growth drivers that have been carefully studied in this research report. Global Lingerie Market: Overview Lingerie market has occupied a significant position in the apparel industry in recent years as it not only serves its functional benefits but also is considered as an basic necessity to every woman. The global lingerie market has been bifurcated on the basis of product types into bras, knickers and panties, lounge wear, shape wear and others which includes baby doll, corsets, chemises and chemisoles among others. Bra as an essential necessity and also a fashion accessory to every women and it has captured the largest market share in 2015. Knickers and panties also occupied a significant position in the same year, thus contributing significantly to the overall market size of the lingerie industry. The market is further segmented on the basis of distribution channel into online stores and storefront. Online stores captured the largest market in 2015 due to high penetration of internet services and rapid advancements in the field of technology, thus creating a strong platform for the manufacturers of lingerie Further, the e-commerce giants are engaged in strong promotional activities due to which they provide with continuous discount options and various other offers which attract both consumers and manufacturers to avail this platform. Get the sample copy of this report: https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1010317 Global Lingerie Market: Drivers and Trends Females in the developing countries are experiencing latest trends towards carrying themselves in public. They are changing their outlook towards accepting innerwear as a casual affair and take time to choose and make a purchase. The outerwear of women has undergone a dramatic change and due to this women prefer selecting inner wear, especially bras that can match with their attire. They try to purchase lingerie depending on the occasion or event, such as there are special sport wear bras for gymnasium purpose. It can be demonstrated from the product differentiation brought by the lingerie manufacturers over online and retail stores. Thus this is a key factor complementing the growth of the global lingerie market. Lingerie has witnessed a rapid acceptance in the fashion industry. Women from all backgrounds want to try out the latest trends in the inner wear segment. Most of the large brands have exclusive stores in shopping malls or independent stores. In developing countries like India and China, brands like Jockey try to reach out to customers through small roadside innerwear shops. Additionally, lingerie is available at stores as well as online. Brands like Victoria Secret have country specific websites for easier transactions and shipment. Global Lingerie Market: Restraints However, the lingerie wear maintains high cost for advertisement and other marketing promotions. This is due to the cost of celebrities or models that are hired for being featured in the photo shoots. Moreover, the destination or location cost of the photo shoot depends and therefore larger brands do not compromise in keeping high cost for their lingerie wear. Therefore, this factor is majorly hindering the growth of the market and the impact of the same is likely to reduce by the end of the forecast period. Explore full report TOC: https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1010317/lingerie-global-industry-analysis-market-research-reports/toc Global Lingerie Market: Opportunities Moreover, the global lingerie market is experiencing moderate growth in the apparel segment as nowadays individuals are more inclined towards branded items, most of which are usually priced on the higher end. People from all backgrounds and income group want to avail a comfortable and lasting inner wear that can be fashionable as well as skin-friendly. There are many local brands or companies that manufacture cheap quality products to cater to the wide population in the under developed or developing countries. Mergers and acquisitions are a strategic way of entering the market and understanding the current needs and preferences of the population. Through this, the large companies will benefit in capturing the market and at the same time, will enable the small companies to fight for a better position in the market. Global Lingerie Market: Regional Outlook Moreover, in this report the study provides different countries included in different regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa. North America includes U.S. and Rest of North America. Europe includes U.K., Germany, France, Russia, Italy and Rest of Europe. Asia Pacific includes countries such as India, China, Japan and Rest of Asia Pacific. In addition, Middle East and Africa includes country such as UAE, South Africa and Rest of Middle East and Africa. Latin America comprise of countries such as Brazil and Rest of Latin America Asia Pacific is anticipated to witness the fastest growth during the forecast period. Transition in the lifestyle of the consumers which is backed by rapid urbanization and increasing purchasing power is a major factor behind the high growth of this market in Asia Pacific. Further, consumer exposure to the same by way of advertisements through televisions, and print media among others is another key factor responsible for the growth of the Lingerie Market in this region. Explore more related reports: https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/category/149 Key Players Mentioned in this Report: Some of the major key players operating in the global lingerie market are, Jockey International Inc. (Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S.), Hanes (North Carolina U.S.), Groupe Chantelle (Cachan, France), LVMH (Boise U.S.), L Brands Inc. (Columbus, Ohio), MAS Holdings Limited (Colombo, Sri Lanka), Ann Summers (London, U.K.), Marks and Spencer (London U.K.), PV H Corporation (New York, U.S.) among others. The report analyzes the factors that are driving and restraining the growth of the lingerie market. This report will help manufacturers, distributors and suppliers to understand the present and future trends in this market and formulate strategies accordingly. The global lingerie market can be segmented as follows:- Global Lingerie Market, by Type Bra Knickers and Panties Lounge wear Shape wear Others Global Lingerie Market, by Distribution Channel Online Stores Store Front Global Lingerie Market, by Geography North America U.S. Rest of North America Europe U.K. Germany France Italy Rest of Europe Asia Pacific China Japan India Rest of Asia Pacific Latin America Brazil Rest of Latin America Middle East and Africa UAE South Africa Rest of Middle East & Africa Pune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/19/2018 -- Logistics Market Highlights Logistics is a supply chain management part with a detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. It includes the movement of goods and information between the provider and the receiver. Moreover, logistics is the management of the flow of things between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet requirements of customers or corporations. Increasing global trade activities in the developing economies and trade-related agreements are the major factors driving the growth of the market. However, high inventory cost & less space for warehousing are the factors restraining the market growth. The global logistics market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.2% during the forecast period. Get Sample Report Of Global Logistics Market Research - Forecast 2023 @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5076 Transportation and logistics infrastructure is a constantly recurring priority in every new government policies. Economic reforms and government initiatives in terms of strengthening the manufacturing sector are expected to attract private investment. The development of transportation and logistics-related infrastructures, such as dedicated freight corridors, logistics parks, free trade warehousing zones, and container freight stations will help to improve efficiency. The government's plan is likely to make the economy competitive by reducing logistics costs, bring down pollution levels by reducing congestion on roads, give a boost to the industry and create employment. The prominent players in the global Logistics market include - H. Robinson Worldwide Inc. (U.S.) - Ceva Holdings LLC (U.K.) - FedEx Corp. (U.S.) - XPO Logistics Inc. (U.S.) - Expeditors International of Washington Inc. (U.S.) - DHL International GmbH (Germany) - DSV Global Transports and Logistics (Denmark) - P. Moller Maersk (Denmark) - Schenker AG (Germany) - GEODIS (France) - DTDC Express Limited (India) Regional Analysis Geographically, the global logistics market has been divided into four major regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. The Asia Pacific is accounted for the largest share of the global market in 2016, followed by North America and Europe. Asia Pacific is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Increased adoption of outsourced logistics services in the region is driving the growth of the market. Increasing imports and exports along with a huge demand for logistics services due to the economic growth and urbanization are driving the manufacturers to trade across the globe. China, Japan, India, Australia, and Indonesia are the major markets in Asia Pacific region. China is the largest logistics market in the region due to a huge population in the country and the presence of a large manufacturing base. North America is the second largest region in the market. Increasing trade activities between the Americas and Europe are driving the growth of the market in this region. Rising demand for foreign goods in Indonesia, Thailand, and India has strengthened the trade relations with the U.S. Europe is another major region in the market. Germany, the U.K., and France are the major logistics markets. Browse Complete Report Global Logistics Market Research - Forecast 2023 @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/logistics-market-5076 Scope of the Report This study provides an overview of the global Logistics market, tracking two market segments across four geographic regions. The report studies key players, providing a five-year annual trend analysis that highlights market size, volume, and share for North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC) and Rest of the World (ROW). The report also provides a forecast, focusing on the market opportunities for the next six years for each region. The scope of the study segments the global Logistics market by its type, by application, and region. By Transportation Type - Airways - Waterways - Railways - Roadways By Logistic Type - First Party - Second Party - Third Party By End Use - Industrial and Manufacturing - Retail - Healthcare - Oil and Gas - Others By Region - North America - Asia-Pacific - Europe - Rest of the World Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 85 market data tables and figures spread in 140 numbers of pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on "Global Logistics Market Information from 2017 to 2023" Press Release Available For Global Logistics Market Research - Forecast 2023 @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/press-release/logistics-market Ask for your specific company profile and country level customization on reports. About Market Research Future At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services. MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions. In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members. Pune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/19/2018 -- Paper Dry Strength Agents Market Overview The development of the Paper Industry has also set off growth not only in the sector alone but also in its related markets like that of Dry Strength Agents. Market Research Future which deals in specialized market reports related to the chemicals and materials sector amongst others, lately published a report on this industry. The industry is projected to reach revenues worth USD 90,549 million in 2023 while growing with an approximate CAGR of 3.50 per cent in the forecast period. In dry mill setups, their utility in increasing the strength per unit or bonded area between the fibers of a sheet of paper is one of its main indications. This is also one of the primary reasons that has been instrumental to the expansion of this particular industry. Increase in the number of paper making facilities has been driving the growth trend of the market consequently. Industry Segments The segmentation of Dry Strength Agent Market internationally is majorly based on region and types. Based on types this market includes polyacrylamide, glyoxylted polyacrylamide, amphoteric polymers, aminestarch based polymers and others. The Polyvinylamine controls the market with a 28% share which is subsequently followed by Glyoxylted polyacrylamide and Polyacrlamide. The market is regionally categorized into North America, Europe, APAC, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. Get Sample of Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2932 Detailed Regional Analysis The Dry Strength Agents Market industry while being assessed on the basis of Geography, has Asia Pacific region as the third major market of dry strength agent because of the demand from this region in several applications such as writing and printing paper and also the tissue industry. Thus, in this region it has been observed that China region is followed by India and Japan. The increasing demand for Paper Industry due to expanding population in countries such as Indonesia, India, Taiwan, and South Korea has made Asia Pacific biggest consumer of the global dry strength agent market. The second largest market of Dry Strength Agent is the European region due to the increasing consumption of Paper Dry Strength Agent segment in this region. Despite this however, the consumption of dry strength agent is relatively less in the Middle East & Africa and Latin America. North America is one of the main market for dry strength agent because of increased demand due to printing and writing papers typically found in school or offices such as computer printouts, copier paper and notepads which incidentally also comprise the largest category of paper product consumption, due to these factors the market for paper dry strength is developing at tremendous growth rate. Industry Updates: June 2017 Kemira which is a Finland based chemical industry group have recently acquired a liquid based fingerprinting technology for quantitative and qualitative liquid analyses from a company named Aqsens which is a start-up based out of Helsinki. Kemira anticipates that this acquisition will better its competencies for providing a chemical monitoring smart tools for its clients. The technology employs the enhanced time resolved fluorescence method, which allows for monitoring of high-sensitivity and selectivity on many liquid samples. Jan 2018 BASF has decided on revising their prices to a higher levels due to persistent rise in prices of transportation, raw materials and energy for chemicals for wet-end paper in the European, Middle Eastern and African region by 4 - 12 per cent approximately. These prices will be effective from February 1, 2018 or as their existing contracts allow. Get Complete Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/paper-dry-strength-agents-market-2932 Source: en.freshnewsasia.com Phnom Penh (FN), June 18 During a courtesy call on Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on Monday at Peace Palace, Phnom Penh, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe said that through his visit to Cambodia, agreements that Cambodian Premier and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed in the past will be timely implemented, and that Chinese-Cambodian military ties strengthened. Prime Minister Hun Sen welcomed the visit and urged to accelerate the implementation of the agreements signed in the past. Chinese defense minister highly commended the current development of Cambodia, which is different from the last six years when he first came to Cambodia. Speaking after a meeting with Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe on Sunday at the Council of Ministers, Cambodian Defense Minister Tea Banh said that Cambodia and China will jointly conduct Golden Dragon Military Exercise in 2019 to deepen ties and mutual understanding of defense of the two countries. Meanwhile, the Chinese side continued to grant approximately $6 million for Cambodia military sector and offered free health treatment for Cambodian unfortunate people. Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe led a delegation for an official visit to Cambodia from 16-20 June 2018. Ms Pilides attended a busy round of meetings, interviews and receptions, meeting amongst others European Commissioner of Transport Ms Violeta Bulc as well as the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Greek Minister of Shipping Panagiotis Kouroumplis. Discussions with the Greek Ministers centred how the two nations would work together to constructively contribute to the EU and IMOs efforts for a common regulatory approach for the maritime industry. On Tuesday evening the Deputy Minister addressed an official reception hosted by Cyprus at the Athenaeum Intercontinental Athens Hotel (pictured), and on Wednesday afternoon she and the DMS (Deputy Ministry of Shipping) team welcomed friends and colleagues to their exhibition stand for a cocktail reception. Separately, the Cyprus Shipping Chamber (CSC) also exhibited at Posidonia as part of the Cyprus pavilion. In response to increasing concerns by its Members and shipping industry in general, CSC marked the event by issuing updated cyber security documents available on its website in the form of case studies to raise awareness of cyber threats and provide guidance to on how these can best be avoided. By Zhang Qian and Li Ronggui SALALAH, June 19 (ChinaMil) -- The guided-missile frigate Xuzhou (Hull 530) of the 29th Chinese naval escort taskforce arrived at the Port of Salalah Port on June 16 for a five-day in-port rest and replenishment. It was the second round of in-port replenishment for the frigate since performing its escorting missions. The frigate Xuzhou arrived at the Port of Salalah at about 9 a.m. in the morning and berthed at Dock No. 35 where it was replenished with supplies including fuel, fresh water, vegetables and fruits. In addition to logistic replenishment and equipment maintenance, sailors and crew aboard the ship would take turns to have a rest before continuing their mission. Moreover, they would visit local scenery as well as cultural and historical sites. Since it was deployed to waters off Somalia in the Gulf of Aden to conduct escorting missions, the 29th Chinese naval escort taskforce had escorted and ensured the safety of 17 merchant ships in 10 batches. The New Zealand Superannuation Fund's board has appointed Matt Whineray as chief executive, a role he has been acting in since March after Adrian Orr left the job. Whineray, who was previously the fund's chief investment officer, first joined the organisation in 2008. His appointment will be effective from July 1. The fund said it had undergone a global, publicly-advertised search process for a new CEO, and Whineray was "the stand-out candidate amongst a high-quality field of international applicants." "He has been instrumental in the Guardians successes over the last decade and is recognised globally as a leader in institutional investment. The board has the utmost confidence in his leadership ability, intelligence and integrity," said chair Catherine Savage. "The board looks forward to seeing the NZ Super Fund continue to exemplify investment best practice and create value for taxpayers." Whineray will oversee the $37.9 billion fund, which has had a 10.5 percent average annual rate of return since inception, before tax and after costs and a workforce of approximately 140 people, including 55 investment professionals. While 86 percent of the fund is invested globally, it has $5 billion invested in New Zealand. (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: 18th October 2021 Morning Report T&G Global Limited (NZX: TGG) FY21 Earnings Guidance Update Arvida Group Limited (NZX: ARV) Successful Completion of $155m Placement FreshLeaf: Cannabis on course to be 'medicine of the masses' Arvida Group Limited (NZX: ARV) to Acquire Arena Living Retirement Living Portfolio My Food Bag Group Limited (NZX: MFB) Market Update and HY Results Announcement Date Harmoney Corp Limited (NZX: HMY) Delivers Record September Quarter Vital Healthcare Property Trust (NZX: VHP) Announces Successful Completion of $115m Placement 14th October 2021 Morning Report General Capital Limited (NZX: GEN) Completes Greenfern Listing Nelson-based aquaculture firm New Zealand King Salmon Investments believes fish-farming in Cook Strait, using newly emerging submersible technology being developed in Norway, is the route to realising its ambitions for expansion. Speaking in Norway last week, NZKS managing director Grant Rosewarne told BusinessDesk that accelerating advances in undersea fish-farming technology were a potentially game-changing development for the company, which has struggled with permissions both to expand and relocate its current operations in the Marlborough Sounds. "I think we're on the cusp, for the first time, of having the prospect of realising a massively valuable industry," said Rosewarne, who believes farming of the high-value, Pacific King salmon variety could become as valuable as the dairy industry in New Zealand over the next 30 years, but at a fraction of the environmental cost and area required by dairying. "What would be the capacity there? At least 100,000 tonnes," he said of Cook Strait's potential to host NZKS's future operations, which currently produce around 8,000 tonnes annually of the fish, which it sells locally and for export using nine sites in the Marlborough Sounds, covering a total of 17 'surface hectares' for total revenues in the last financial year of $136 million. While its current sites could support 12,000 tonnes a year by 2032, Rosewarne's focus is on a much larger expansion, based in part on the example of Norway, which is seeking to make aquaculture and conventional fishing the country's largest industry as it starts the transition away from the oil and gas production which has made the Nordic country one of the richest in the world. "Every (Cook Strait-based fish-farming) pen can produce a thousand tonnes, so could we fit 100 pens in there?" he said. "Every pen is about half a surface hectare, so you'd need probably 400 surface hectares - the size of a reasonable-sized land farm. "But the value that would be produced would be exponentially greater." Deployment of the first such pens was perhaps up to five years away and would require extensive testing first, he said. Norwegian innovations with submersible, offshore fish-farming are developing more quickly than expected, based on presentations to a large New Zealand contingent that attended last week's biennial global aquaculture conference, Aquavision, in the coastal Norwegian city of Stavanger. "We'd probably start by putting a pen out there (in Cook Strait) and see what happens, not even put any fish in it, see if we can make it go up and down, see how we go with storms," Rosewarne said. The company would need to find sites in the often rough waters of the strait between the two main islands of New Zealand that offered some shelter, was deep enough to ride out the biggest waves while submerged, and in areas where cold currents were prevalent. The offshore farming concept gained cautious early endorsement from the head of the Environmental Defence Society's environmental policy group, Raewyn Peart, who also travelled to Norway for the presentations. "If we're going to expand salmon farming, or fin-fish farming of that kind, I think the only option is to go offshore," she said in an interview with BusinessDesk. "Marlborough Sounds is full, pretty much. So if we want to expand this industry, and it is certainly in global terms pretty small in New Zealand, we need to look at going offshore. "It clearly deals with the issues of water flow, dispersion (of uneaten food and waste) and benthic (sea-floor) impacts if you're in essentially deep, fast-flowing areas. Of course, we have migratory whale species and resident whale and dolphin species, so there would need to be careful investigation of appropriate sites. "If we can remove any conflicts out there, there will be far less landscape conflicts because they will be out to sea and presumably you won't be able to see them from shore." NZKS is particularly focusing on emerging technologies that would allow fish-farms to be submerged, although how the fish would be fed and gain occasional access to oxygen, which salmon require, is still being developed. Large, offshore structures such as ship-sized barges or oil platform-style farms, which were also displayed at last week's conference, are not being pursued for offshore fish-farming in New Zealand by NZKS. That is because the company has been at the centre of one of the most significant Resource Management Act decisions of recent years, with the Supreme Court's 2014 ruling that protection of 'outstanding landscapes' trumped questions of economic benefit in resource consent applications. The so-called 'King Salmon decision' saw the company granted just three of nine additional sites it had sought in the Marlborough Sounds. It is now waiting on decisions, stalled under the previous government and now sitting with Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash, on applications to move several of its current installations to deeper locations in the Sounds with stronger water flows. Peart welcomed statements from Rosewarne that NZKS had no interest in attempting to farm salmon in Fiordland, where Southland local government interests are examining the potential for the industry. "We have no aspirations or plans around Fiordland," Rosewarne said. The Ministry for Primary Industries primary industries outlook, published last week, identified aquaculture as the fastest-growing element in a forecast for annual seafood exports rising from $1.8 billion this year to $2.1 billion by 2022, with aquaculture export earnings forecast to reach $430 million this year and nearly $600 million in 2022. Pattrick Smellie travelled to Norway as a guest of Aquaculture NZ. (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: 18th October 2021 Morning Report T&G Global Limited (NZX: TGG) FY21 Earnings Guidance Update Arvida Group Limited (NZX: ARV) Successful Completion of $155m Placement FreshLeaf: Cannabis on course to be 'medicine of the masses' Arvida Group Limited (NZX: ARV) to Acquire Arena Living Retirement Living Portfolio My Food Bag Group Limited (NZX: MFB) Market Update and HY Results Announcement Date Harmoney Corp Limited (NZX: HMY) Delivers Record September Quarter Vital Healthcare Property Trust (NZX: VHP) Announces Successful Completion of $115m Placement 14th October 2021 Morning Report General Capital Limited (NZX: GEN) Completes Greenfern Listing Retirement village operators are disappointed that the select committee considering the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill did not exempt them from having to get approval before buying sensitive or residential land to build new villages. In March, the chief executives of listed retirement village operators Metlifecare and Ryman Healthcare, and representatives from the retirement village sector appeared before the finance and expenditure select committee to lobby for an exemption from the bill, to prevent them having to get Overseas Investment Office approval. The retirement villages are based in New Zealand and operate here, but are considered foreign entities due to more than 25 percent of their shares being held by overseas investors or institutions. The select committee's report, released earlier this week, recommended some significant changes to the legislation but didn't include the exemption the retirement village representatives were looking for. Glen Sowry, chief executive of Metlifecare, said the company is very disappointed with the outcome, and "somewhat perplexed that argument was not accepted". "We believe the case we put forward to select committee was sound, and the key premise was we understand what the government is trying to achieve through this new legislation but we remain of the view that retirement village developers and operators are part of the solution the government is trying to achieve, not part of the problem they're trying to solve," Sowry said. Metlifecare had to go through the OIO to get approval to buy land in Hobsonville, a decision it granted in April, and Sowry said that decision took a substantial amount of time. "In some cases, where we are seeking to acquire land, not surprisingly it's close to amenities that people find attractive - a coastal location, near a waterway or a reserve - which triggers the sensitive land definition. In all of those cases going forward, we'll be required to make a decision under the OIO legislation, which naturally slows the process and in some cases may make us uncompetitive in trying to acquire that land, notwithstanding the fact we're largely owned and operated by New Zealanders exclusively for New Zealanders." Ryman Healthcare's chief executive Gordon MacLeod said it was disappointing to miss a chance to streamline the approval process, though "the reality is the position is no different to what it was previously. None of this stops us from buying land through the OIO process in the future." (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. 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(mod.gov.cn/Li Xiaowei) PHNOM PENH, June 19 (ChinaMil) -- Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen met with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia on the afternoon of June 18. Wei conveyed Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiangs greetings to Hun Sen. The Cambodian Prime Minister expressed his gratitude and asked Gen. Wei to convey his greetings and best wishes to President Xi and Premier Li in return. Viewing China as a good and true friend, Hun Sen said the friendship between Cambodia and China has withstood the test of time and grown even stronger. He thanks the Chinese side for its powerful support to the social-economic development and military and defense construction of Cambodia. Cambodia highly appreciates tremendous achievements China has made under President Xi Jinpings leadership, and firmly supports the important cooperative proposals on building a community with shared future for mankind and the Belt and Road Initiative put forward by Chinese President Xi Jinping, Hun Sen said. By taking the opportunity of the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the diplomatic relations between the two countries, Cambodia is willing to work with China to promote the Cambodia-China comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership to a higher level, Hun Sen said. Wei said that China and Cambodia are traditional friendly neighbors and "iron friends". The comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership between the two countries has been further developed under the guidance of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen. Wei stressed that China firmly supports Cambodia in choosing its own development path according to its national conditions, the Chinese military is ready to work with Cambodian side to implement the consensus reached by leaders of the two countries and deepen pragmatic cooperation, making positive contributions to the development of bilateral relations. General Wei Fenghe also held talks with Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense Tea Banh on the morning of June 17. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (R) meets with the visiting Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe (L) in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia on June 18, 2018. (mod.gov.cn/Li Xiaowei) The bank, in a statement to the Bombay Stock exchange clarified, "In line with the highest levels of governance and corporate standards, Chanda Kochhar has decided to go on leave till the completion of the enquiry as announced on May 30, 2018." One among India's leading private banks- ICICI Bank, has informed the exchange houses that Chanda Kochhar, it's CEO has planned to go on leave until the enquiry in the Videocon-ICICI- Kochhar case gets completed. The bank on May 30 announced that its Board has decided to institute a "comprehensive enquiry" to look into an anonymous whistleblower's complaint alleging that Kochhar had not adhered to provisions relating to "code of conduct" of the bank. Confirming speculative media reports, the bank clarified to the exchange houses that the top management had indeed been reshuffled. Sandeep Bakshi who was previously associated as the CEO of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has been appointed as the bank's new Chief Operating Officer. The ICICI Bank board recommended to the Board at ICICI Prudential to appoint NS Kannan as the MD & CEO subject to regulatory and other approvals. A Mechanical Engineer and a post-graduate in management, Bakhshi will responsible for handling all the businesses and corporate centre functions at the bank. Bakshi in his career with the bank and its group of companies had served as the Deputy Managing Director of ICICI Bank, and is well versed with banking operations. "Mr. Bakhshi has extensive experience of leading both corporate and retail businesses across ICICI Group. He started his career with ICICI Ltd. in 1986. He looked after the corporate clients for the Northern and Eastern regions of ICICI Limited before joining ICICI Lombard in 2002. His work responsibilities included business development, project appraisals, project monitoring and business re-structuring," read a note from the bank. The period of Kochhar's leave has not been communicated yet. Kochhar has been accused of misusing her position in the company after she allegedly provided a Rs. 3,250 crore loan to the Videocon group on quid pro quo basis in 2012. A whistleblower accused Venugopal Dhoot , the Chairman of Videocon Group, of having business links with Kochhar's husband Deepak Kochhar. Deepak is the husband of Chanda Kochhar. The allegations have so far caused a flutter in the bank, which until recently has been rated as one among the leading private banks in the country. The allegations led the Income-tax department to send a notice to Deepak Kochhar's company NuPower Renewables, in the first week of April. Thereafter, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) called in a number of officials for questioning in the aforementioned case, including Umanath Venkat Naik, the director of NuPower Renewables, the former director of NuPower Renewables, Mahesh Pugalia, and Rajeev Kochhar, brother-in-law of Chanda Kochhar. The whistle-blower in a conversation with news-agency ANI said, "ICICI bank looks like a one-person show. Out of the nine committees they have, Chanda Kochhar is present on six of them. Their work culture needs to be examined." During Kochhar's leave, the inquiry is expected to cover all connected matters and bring the matter to a final close. Many speculated that this may be the end of Chanda Kochhar's tenure with the bank. Media reports speculated that this may be a shunting out of Ms. Kochhar by the bank's board. Meanwhile, a few minutes after half-day, the ICICI Bank scrip on the BSE counter was trading lower by 1.23% or Rs 3.60 at Rs 288.90. Here are some thought-provoking twitter reactions: #ChandaKochhar Two countries Jermany n India. Jerman Automaker Audi's CEO sent jail for emission scam and in India ICICI CEO Chanda Kochhar sent on leave without terminating frm post. This shows the difference between their law and order as law is supreme but not in India. Mayank Bajpai (@mayank1166) June 18, 2018 On any other country #ChandaKochhar would have been in jail. But here she goes on 'leave' that too in all probability paid. God save us. markvision (@markvision9) June 18, 2018 #ChandaKochhar should have step aside at the time of controversy started only. Corporate-ethics comes first from family-value. However it took 83 days for her which dented her image. pic.twitter.com/uH2RGr97DE Neetu Garg (@NeetuGarg6) June 19, 2018 Now #ChandaKochhar is also on 'leave'. I believe she too is headed for London... Mohan... (@iamnavamohan) June 11, 2018 @ICICIBank , #ChandaKochhar saga once again proves crony capitalism still works no matter whoever in power be. Even the govt whom media terms as most powerful cudnot remove her or initiate probe by CBI. She is most powerful lady in India now Nirav Vakharia (@niravresearch) June 19, 2018 By YUAN Shuai, ZHANG Yuan PORT of KIEL, GERMANY, June 19 (ChinaMil) -- The guided-missile frigate Binzhou (Hull 515) of the 29th Chinese naval escort taskforce arrived at a naval port in Kiel, Germany on June 15 for a friendly visit and participation of the Kiel Week activities. During the "Kiel Week", the Chinese frigate Binzhou will also be open for pubic visit and hold deck receptions. Chinese naval officers and soldiers will participate in an international competition of maritime comprehensive skills, interactions between young military officers and other exchange activities. This is the second time that the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy has taken part in this event. The Chinese guided-missile frigate Xiangtan went to Germany for the Kiel Week in 2016. The frigate Binzhou is the commanding ship of the 29th Chinese naval escort taskforce. The Type-054A frigate is 135 meters long and 16 meters wide, with a full loaded displacement of 4,000 tons. The Type-054A frigates, independently designed and built by China, have become the main battle ships of the PLA Navy. The frigate of this type is capable of attacking surface vessels or submarines either independently or by coordinating with other naval forces, and has powerful long-range early warning and air-defense capabilities. Reports suggest that the couple ran the high-end prostitution ring by advertising actresses for sex at Indian conferences and cultural events across the country. Recently, the US authorities busted an international sex racket run by an Indian-origin couple who worked as production managers in the Telugu film industry. According to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago, the couple charged clients upto 3000 USD for each sexual encounter. The charges allege that these actresses were brought to the US on temporary visas and were housed in dingy apartment buildings waiting for their next encounter. The accused duo was arrested in April and they have not been able to procure bail. Their children have been shifted to a child welfare centre. Telugucinema.com reported that actress Mehreen Pirzada was questioned by the authorities when the young actress was travelling from Canada to the US. When she revealed that she was a Tollywood actress, the US Department of Homeland & Immigration felt that she should be interrogated further. The actress was detained for 30 mins. After the sex racket was busted, the authorities in the US have increased their security protocols. Mehreen became the first victim of this overdrive. : Minutes after BJP announced that it is pulling out of Jammu and Kashmir government, politicos reaced on Twitter. In a short message, Omar Abdullah said, " 'So it has come to pass". Omar Abdullah in the past have been extremely critical of PDP-BJP alliance and have highlighted how two parties with completely different alliances are clinging to the power. Hence after BJP announced divorce from the alliance, Omar's reaction was on fairly expected lines. Mehbooba Mufti has also resigned after news of BJP pulling out of the government trickling in. The Joint Resistance Leadership, an amalgamation of separatist groups, said in a statement today that there had been a sudden spike in civilian killings since the eve of Eid. It also demanded an international probe into Bukhari's killing. : Separatist leaders have called for a complete shutdown in Kashmir tomorrow against the killings of journalist Shujaat Bukhari and civilians, gunned down by security forces in the past few days. "Joint Resistance Leadership has called for a complete strike tomorrow against the continued civilian killings in the valley, which has witnessed a sudden spike since the eve of Eid... three young boys have been brutally gunned down by the Indian forces while the fourth is struggling for life at SKIMS," the statement said. He said the strike will also be observed against the brutal killing of Bukhari, who was shot dead along with his two personal guards outside his office on June 14 by unknown gunmen. "JRL demands an international probe into this gruesome murder," a JRL spokesperson said in the statement. He said cordon and search operations had returned with a vengeance to the villages as people were being severely beaten and harassed and used as human shields. ADEN, Yemen, June 19 (Xinhua) -- A wide-scale military operation supported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was launched Tuesday to kick Houthi rebels out of Hodeidah's airport in western Yemen, a military official told Xinhua. The forces began an assault aimed at reclaiming both the civilian and military buildings in Hodeidah's airport, the military source said on condition of anonymity. UAE helicopters heavily participated in the operation and supported the Yemeni ground troops to advance further inside the large area of the airport, the military source said. The Houthi rebels showed stiff resistance and retaliated with heavy mortar shelling, tank and gunfire exchanges with the Yemeni troops. An anti-Houthi army commander told Xinhua by phone that "Houthis were granted a chance to withdraw from the airport and other areas without fighting but they refused and the deadline ended hours ago." After days of stagnant, residents told Xinhua that "huge explosions rocked the city and fighting intensified everywhere in Hodeidah." Black smoke plumes could be seen rising from the Hodeidah International Airport following the airstrikes, residents said. International humanitarian agencies have warned that an assault on Hodeidah would be a major disaster to the densely populated port city and would block aid supplies to more than 20 million people. Hodeidah is the only lifeline route of supplying imports and humanitarian aid to the northern Yemeni provinces. The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015. The war has killed over 10,000 people, mostly civilians, and forced 3 million others out of their homes. Illustration: Liu Rui/GT By Wang Peng US President Donald Trump announced on June 12 that he intended to end US military drills with South Korea, calling them "inappropriate" and "provocative." He also said he wants "at some point" to withdraw US troops currently stationed in South Korea. A public clamor resulted as this was seen to be another of Trump's whimsical decisions. Criticized by US politicians, Trump's shocking declaration left Seoul at a loss and made South Korean troops nervous. Japan is more nervous than South Korea. After all, while South Korea has been endeavoring to improve ties with the US, North Korea and China, Japan faces an unfavorable geopolitical environment given its soured relations with countries in the region. Tokyo needs to make sure that US troops in Japan will not be influenced by Washington's plan to pull troops out of South Korea, otherwise Japan would have to reshuffle its defense arrangement. Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said on June 13 that "the drills and the US military stationed in South Korea play a vital role in East Asia's security" and that Japan would continue joint military exercises with the US and stick to plans to bolster its defenses against a possible ballistic missile strike by North Korea. According to the reaction of US politicians and the international society, Trump's announcement is more likely to be his personal declaration. This seems to be a negotiation strategy by Trump. US alliances with Japan and South Korea are cornerstones of the US' military and political influence in the Asia-Pacific region, to which US troops in the two countries are vital. One and a half years in office, Trump has been through great upheavals and is no longer an outsider to politics. Instead, he combines the sagacity of a businessman with Washington's political wisdom. Although unfair and shunned by the international society, his method did benefit the US from the point of view of Machiavelli's empiricism. His announcement in Singapore can be viewed from this perspective. Trump wants to show some kindness to North Korea. He is good at coupling threats with promises. His pledge to end the joint military drills can help prolong the detente after the Singapore summit. Even if North Korea takes a tough stance later for some reason, Trump has already made a mark globally. The US president, who likes to get even with other countries, also wants to bargain with South Korea. In his opinion, the US has been squeezed out of its great national strength since the George W. Bush administration, shouldering too much global burden without commensurate returns. Trump stands firm on the expenditure incurred on US troops in South Korea and Japan. It could be that his sudden and unilateral announcement is a way of forcing Seoul and Tokyo to make concessions and bear more of the military expenditure. Another problem is who is going to pay the huge compensation once North Korea starts denuclearization. Obviously, Trump will not pay a penny, and China and Russia are not obliged to do so, which means that Trump has to mount pressure on South Korea and Japan to foot the bill. It seems to go well: Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the day after Trump's announcement that Japan is prepared to help shoulder some of the initial costs of North Korea's denuclearization only after the International Atomic Energy Agency restarts inspections. If Trump's pledges to halt US-South Korea joint military drills and withdraw US troops from South Korea are considered a diplomatic strategy, then the US might have three main policies for Northeast Asia. Washington will continue strengthening its alliance with Japan and South Korea, and will force the two allies to take more economic responsibilities. Besides, the US-South Korea joint military drills may be scaled down and the number of US troops in South Korea reduced so as to pacify Pyongyang and save costs. However, military drills will be used again to threaten Pyongyang once it doesn't proceed with the denuclearization as Washington wants. Trump will also face obstacles from the establishment over the details of reducing US troops. Moreover, despite his praise of China, Trump won't stop pressuring Beijing over security and trade issues and will try to rope in Tokyo and Seoul. How Japan and South Korea will respond depends on their assessment of China and the US' influence in East Asia and positioning of themselves. The author is associate research fellow of Chongyang Institute of Renmin University and the Charhar Institute. Prosecution witnesses Ghanshyam, Heera Lal Ahari and Khum Singh deposed before special CBI judge S J Sharma. Of them, Ghanshyam and Ahari turned hostile. : Two more prosecution witnesses in the Sohrabuddin Shaikh and Tulsiram Prajapati alleged fake encounter cases on Monday turned hostile before a special Central Bureau of Investigation court in Mumbai, taking the total number of such witnesses to 68. Ghanshyam was then assistant train driver and Ahari a guard of the Udaipur Mail by which Prajapati, escorted by a police team, travelled on December 27, 2006. In his statement to the Central Bureau of Investigation, Ghanshyam had said the train left for Udaipur on December 27, 2006 at 2.10 am and suddenly came to a halt at 3.00 am. When Ahari asked over a walkie-talkie why the train stopped, he told Ahari that somebody had pulled the chain in the rear waggon, Ghanshyam told the CBI. When Ghanshyam reached the rear waggon, Ahari told him that a prisoner had escaped from the custody of the Udaipur police after throwing chili powder in the eyes of one of the cops. However, he did not see any traces of chili powder on the face of the police officer or on his dress, Ghanshyam had told the CBI. The CBI's case is that the story of escape by Prajapati was a concocted one, and in reality he was killed in a fake encounter. In the court on Monday, Ghanshyam gave a slightly different version. He had seen the policeman rubbing his eyes due to the chili powder, he told the court. The CBI lawyer then declared him hostile. Ahari was also declared hostile as he too said that he saw chili powder on the policeman's face, contradicting his earlier statement to the agency. Besides, in his statement to the CBI, Ahari had said they had not recovered any mobile phone from the spot where Prajapati had allegedly escaped. However, in the court he said he did find a mobile phone which he handed over to the police. Shaikh, a suspected gangster, was killed in an alleged fake encounter by the Gujarat Police in November 2005. His wife Kausar Bi was also allegedly killed. Tulsi Prajapati, an aide of Shaikh who was said to be a witness to the encounter, was allegedly killed by police at Chapri village in Gujarat's Banaskantha district in December 2006. Of the 38 people charged by the CBI for the alleged fake encounters, 15 have been discharged by the trial court. Trump also claimed that criminals are using children to enter the country. : The United States will not become a "camp" for migrants, President Donald Trump said as he defended his controversial immigration policy of separating children from their parents who illegally enter the US that has triggered widespread outrage. "The US will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility, Trump said at the White House during a meeting for his space council. "You look at what's happening in Europe, you look at what's happening in other places, we can't allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch," he said. Nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in the six week following the administration's announcement of a "zero-tolerance policy" against illegal border crossings. The separations have triggered a nationwide outcry from Republicans and Democrats who say it is inhumane. Trump earlier tweeted that he does not want America to have the same experience as that of Europe. "We don't want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us," he said. "The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!" Trump tweeted. Trump blamed Democrats for the problem. "I say it's very strongly the Democrats fault," he said. Trump also urged the Democrats to help changing the laws. "Why don't the Democrats give us the votes to fix the world's worst immigration laws? Where is the outcry for the killings and crime being caused by gangs and thugs, including MS-13, coming into our country illegally?" he asked. "Change the laws," Trump demanded in another tweet. "Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country. Has anyone been looking at the Crime taking place south of the border. It is historic, with some countries the most dangerous places in the world. Not going to happen in the US," Trump said. Trump escalates China trade war with extra tariffs Washington, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 US President Donald Trump escalated a growing trade war with China by unveiling plans Monday to impose 10 percent tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. With the world's two largest economies already engaged in a confrontation long feared by markets and industry, Trump said he was pushing forward with fresh punitive measures over Beijing's "unacceptable" move to raise its own tariffs. "Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," Trump said in a statement. The US leader warned that after the new measures are in place -- on top of existing 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports -- tariffs on another $200 billion of Chinese goods would go forward "if China increases its tariffs yet again." "The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable," the president said in explaining his decision. "I have an excellent relationship with President Xi (Jinping), and we will continue working together on many issues. But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world." Trump had already warned last week of "additional tariffs" should Beijing hit back with tit-for-tat duties on American goods. Then China followed suit, unveiling 25 percent duties on $50 billion in US imports -- matching the US rates. Trump moved forward with measures after months of sometimes fraught shuttle diplomacy in which Chinese offers to purchase more American goods failed to assuage his grievances over the soaring trade imbalance and China's aggressive industrial development policies. And the China trade offensive is only one side of Trump's multi-front battle with all major US economic partners. "China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology," Trump said in a statement. "Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong." Trump escalates China trade spat with extra tariffs threat Washington, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 President Donald Trump inched closer to an all-out trade war by unveiling plans Monday to impose 10 percent tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods if Beijing doesn't bend to US demands. With the world's two largest economies on the brink of a full-fledged confrontation, spooking markets and worrying business leaders, Trump said he was pushing forward with fresh punitive measures over Beijing's "unacceptable" move to raise its own tariffs. "Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," Trump said in a statement. The US leader warned he would go even further, with punitive measures on an extra $200 billion of Chinese goods -- for a possible total of $450 billion of goods, or most Chinese imports -- "if China increases its tariffs yet again." Last week, Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports, prompting Beijing to follow suit with matching duties on American imported goods. Trump had already warned at the time of "additional tariffs" should Beijing hit back with tit-for-tat duties on American goods. "The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable," the president said in explaining his decision. "I have an excellent relationship with President Xi (Jinping), and we will continue working together on many issues. But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world." Trump moved forward with measures after months of sometimes fraught shuttle diplomacy in which Chinese offers to purchase more American goods failed to assuage his grievances over the soaring trade imbalance and China's aggressive industrial development policies. China had offered to ramp up purchases of American goods by only $70 billion to help cut the yawning trade imbalance with the United States, whereas Trump had demanded a $200 billion deficit cut. - 'Unacceptable' - And the China trade offensive is only one side of Trump's multi-front battle with all major US economic partners. Since June 1, steel and aluminum imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico have been hit with tariffs of 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. "This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive $376 billion trade imbalance in goods," Trump said about China's retaliatory tariffs. "This is unacceptable." Two decades ago, China's economy was largely fueled by exports, but it has made progress in rebalancing towards domestic investment and consumption since the global financial crisis erupted last decade -- limiting the damage trade tariffs could inflict on Beijing. Still, strong exports this year have lifted the economy, which is now showing signs of losing steam under the weight of Beijing's war on debt, launched to clean up financial risks and rein in borrowing-fueled growth. "China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology," Trump said in a statement. "Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers and farmers who have done nothing wrong." Initially, 545 US products valued at $34 billion will be targeted by China, mimicking the Trump administration's tariff rollout. These include major American exports to China such as soybeans, which brought in $14 billion in sales last year, and are grown in states that supported Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Politically important exports like other agricultural products and automobiles also made the list. Beijing also drew up a second list of $16 billion in chemical and energy products to hit with new tariffs, though it did not announce a date for imposing them. China accuses Trump of 'blackmail' after new tariffs threat Beijing, United States, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 Beijing on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of "blackmail" and warned it would retaliate in kind after the US president threatened to impose fresh tariffs on Chinese goods, pushing the world's two biggest economies closer to a trade war. Trump said on Monday he had asked the US Trade Representative to target $200 billion worth of imports for a 10 percent levy, citing China's "unacceptable" move to raise its own tariffs. He added he would identify an extra $200 billion of goods -- for a possible total of $450 billion, or most Chinese imports -- "if China increases its tariffs yet again". "Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," Trump said in a statement. Last week, he announced 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports, prompting Beijing to retaliate with matching duties on US goods. The US leader warned Friday of "additional tariffs" should Beijing hit back with tit-for-tat measures. "The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable," he said in explaining his latest decision. "I have an excellent relationship with President Xi (Jinping), and we will continue working together on many issues. But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world." China's commerce ministry immediately responded by saying the US "practice of extreme pressure and blackmail departed from the consensus reached by both sides during multiple negotiations and has also greatly disappointed international society". "If the US acts irrationally and issues a list, China will have no choice but to take comprehensive measures of a corresponding number and quality and take strong, powerful countermeasures." The news hit stock markets in Asia, where Shanghai shed three percent in the morning, Hong Kong lost more than two percent and Tokyo was one percent lower. Trump is moving forward with the measures after months of sometimes fraught shuttle diplomacy in which Chinese offers to purchase more American goods failed to assuage his grievances over a widening trade imbalance and China's aggressive industrial development policies. China had offered to ramp up purchases of American goods by $70 billion to help cut its yawning trade surplus with the United States, whereas Trump had demanded a $200 billion deficit cut. - 'Unacceptable' - The China trade offensive is only one side of Trump's multi-front battle with the United States' economic partners as he presses ahead with his protectionist "America First" agenda. Since June 1, steel and aluminium imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico have been hit with tariffs of 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. "This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive $376 billion trade imbalance in goods," Trump said of China's retaliatory tariffs. "This is unacceptable." Two decades ago, China's economy was largely fuelled by exports, but it has made progress in rebalancing towards domestic investment and consumption since the global financial crisis erupted last decade -- limiting the damage trade tariffs could inflict on Beijing. Still, strong exports this year have lifted the economy, which is now showing signs of losing steam under the weight of Beijing's war on debt, launched to clean up financial risks and rein in borrowing-fuelled growth. "China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology," Trump said in a statement. "Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers and farmers who have done nothing wrong." Initially, 545 US products valued at $34 billion will be targeted by China, mimicking the Trump administration's tariff rollout. These include major American exports to China such as soybeans, which brought in $14 billion in sales last year, and are grown in states that supported Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Politically important exports like other agricultural products and automobiles also made the list. Beijing also drew up a second list of $16 billion in chemical and energy products to hit with new tariffs, though it did not announce a date for imposing them. US Senate votes to reimpose ban on China's ZTE, shares plunge Washington, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 The US Senate defied President Donald Trump on Monday by voting to overrule his administration's deal with Chinese telecom firm ZTE and reimpose a ban on hi-tech chip sales to the company. Senators added an amendment targeting ZTE into a sweeping, must-pass national defense spending bill that cleared the chamber on an 85-10 vote. The company has been on life support since Washington said it had banned US companies from selling crucial hardware and software components to ZTE for seven years. US officials imposed the ban because of what they said were false statements by the firm over actions it claimed to have taken regarding the illegal sale of goods to Iran and North Korea. ZTE pleaded guilty to those charges in March last year and was hit with $1.2 billion in fines. Earlier this month the Trump administration gave ZTE a lifeline by easing the sanctions in exchange for a further $1.4 billion penalty. But the Senate measure nullifies that action, proposing an outright ban on the government buying products and services from ZTE and another Chinese telecoms firm, Huawei. "We're heartened that both parties made it clear that protecting American jobs and national security must come first when making deals with countries like China, which has a history of having little regard for either," a bipartisan group of senators said. Hong Kong-listed shares in ZTE plunged around 25 percent on Tuesday. The company has lost nearly two-thirds of its value since it resumed trading last week after a two-month suspension that followed the initial ban. The lawmakers who introduced the amendment include top Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Marco Rubio. However, the bill -- which provides $716 billion in funding for national defense for fiscal year 2019 and gives policy guidance to the Pentagon -- is not a done deal. The House of Representatives passed its own version of the measure, and the two chambers must now hash out a compromise. "It is vital that our colleagues in the House keep this bipartisan provision in the bill as it heads towards a conference," Schumer and Rubio said. Trump's intervention to help the firm was seen at the time as part of a move to smooth over trade tensions with Beijing as they embarked on talks to avert a trade war, with the president tweeting on May 13 that too many Chinese jobs were at threat. "This is the first time Congress has really stood up to (Trump) on a trade issue, and it's clear they are angry," Bill Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told Bloomberg News. "There will be a lot of congressional resistance to weakening the ZTE amendment, but I would not be surprised to see a compromise." ZTE, which employs 80,000 people, said soon after the ban was imposed that its major operations had "ceased", raising the possibility of its collapse. Its fiberoptic networks depend on US components and its cheap smartphones sold en masse abroad are powered by US chips and the Android operating system. North Korea's Kim briefs China's Xi on Trump summit Beijing, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 North Korean leader Kim Jong Un briefed Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday about his historic summit with US President Donald Trump, a visit that underscores Beijing's efforts to remain at the centre of fast-moving nuclear diplomacy. Xi urged the US and North Korea to implement the agreements reached at the June 12 summit in Singapore, while Kim thanked Xi for his role in the diplomatic efforts, according to Chinese state media. Kim's third trip to China since March comes as Beijing tries to strengthen its role as a mediator between the US and the North, where it claims compelling security and economic interests. The North's leader, who is believed to have landed in the Chinese capital Tuesday morning, was greeted with a military honour guard at the ornate Great Hall of the People, as the Cold War-era allies repair ties that worsened when Pyongyang tested nuclear weapons and Beijing backed UN sanctions. Kim "felt thanks for and highly praised China's promotion of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula and its important role in protecting the peninsula's peace and stability," state broadcaster CCTV said. North Korea "hopes to work with China and other concerned parties to promote and establish a solid, long-lasting peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula and make joint efforts to achieve a lasting peace on the peninsula." For his part, Xi told Kim he "wants North Korea and the US to carry out the results of their leadership summit", the report said. Trump and Kim pledged in a joint summit statement to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula". In return, Trump made the shock announcement that he would stop joint military drills with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. The US and South Korean militaries confirmed Tuesday they have called off a major joint exercise. Kim told Xi his summit with Trump "achieved results that are in line with the interests of all parties and the expectations of the international communities," according to CCTV. "If the two parties can solidly implement the summit's consensus step by step, it will open a new, important phase of the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." The United States relies on China to enforce UN economic sanctions against the North, giving Beijing potential leverage in its looming trade war with Washington. "I think that North Korea can be another card Beijing can play to win leverage in negotiations with Washington," Yang Moo-jin, professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies, told AFP. Following the Singapore summit, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic restrictions. Wang Dong, an international relations expert at Peking University, said he expected Kim to ask China for help in easing the sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise. "The Chinese and North Korean leaders are carrying out consultations on how to jointly move the Korean nuclear issue forward," Wang said. China may not have been at the table in Singapore but it retains strong influence behind the scenes, Wang said. Tuesday's visit shows that "China is indispensable to the entire Korean nuclear issue," he said. - 'Differences ahead' - Trump had hailed Kim's denuclearisation pledge as a concession. But critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. It was urgent for Xi and Kim to discuss how North Korea would work towards meeting US demands, said Beijing-based international relations commentator Hua Po. "There may be differences ahead between the DPRK (North Korea) and the US in regards to denuclearisation, because the US wants irreversible and verifiable denuclearisation. It may be difficult for Kim Jong Un to accept," Hua told AFP. "Therefore, both China and the DPRK want to strengthen communication and form an overall strategy to deal with the United States going forward," Hua added. Analysts saw the summit outcome as a sign of China's influence. Beijing has repeatedly called for a "suspension for suspension" approach, under which the North would stop its nuclear and missile tests in exchange for the US and South Korea halting military exercises. Washington had previously rebuffed the proposal. Kim will be in Beijing through Wednesday, state media reported. His two previous trips to China, including his maiden official voyage abroad in March, had been kept secret until he returned home. "I think that China convinced North Korea that high-profile trips like this can no longer be kept secret for so long," said Yang, the Seoul analyst. "Also Kim Jong Un is seeking to establish this image as a normal leader of a normal country in the international community." jch-mis-ric-rld-dly-lth/sm White House: China has 'much more to lose' in trade dispute Washington, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 China has more to lose than the United States in the two nations' burgeoning trade dispute but Washington remains open to dialogue with its largest trading partner, a senior White House advisor said Tuesday. Trade brinkmanship between Washington and Beijing continued late Monday when President Donald Trump threatened to put fresh duties on between $200 billion and $400 billion in Chinese imports. The possible new duties, which could cover the lion's share of all of China's exports to the United States, were a response to retaliatory Chinese levies on up to $50 billion in US goods announced Friday. With Wall Street sliding further into the red on Tuesday and nerves on edge among lawmakers in Trump's Republican Party, senior White House economic aide Peter Navarro defended the new trade policy. "It's clear that China does have much more to lose," he told reporters, noting that China exported more than $500 billion to the US last year, far more than the $130 billion it imported from the United States. Navarro reiterated Washington's accusations that China had used string of unfair practices -- cyber-theft, state-sponsored corporate acquisitions, forced technology transfers and export restrictions -- to target global dominance in advanced new industrial sectors. "It is important to note here that the actions President Trump has taken are purely defensive in nature," Navarro said. "They are designed to defend the crown jewels of American technology from China's aggressive behavior." These included aerospace, advanced rail and shipping, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, biotechnology, new energy vehicles, precision farming and robotics, said Navarro. "These are the future of the world and of America and China cannot have 70 percent of production of these industries by 2025," he added, referring to a Chinese industrial development plan denounced by Washington. Navarro said US officials planned to cushion against the blows to American industries and workers in the United States and present in China but declined to elaborate on any plans to help the US farming sector. "President Trump will have the backs of all Americans who may be targeted by Chinese actions and with respect to the farmers in Iowa or any other state," Navarro said. Efforts to convince Beijing to change its ways had so far failed despite several rounds of transpacific diplomacy, he added. "Our phone lines are open. They have always been open," said Navarro. "The fundamental reality is talk is cheap. Delay is expensive." The affection Japanese people feel for Koreans and Chinese is at an all-time low but their appreciation of Americans has grown apace. Their dislike of their Asian neighbors is apparently linked to recently rekindled territorial issues. The Japanese Interior Ministry surveyed 1,838 people from Sept. 27 to Oct. 7 to gauge their feelings about foreign countries. Only 39.2 percent said they like Korea, a massive plunge from 62.2 percent last year. It was the first time since 1999 that a majority said they do not like Korea. The affection Japanese felt toward Koreans had surged over the last few years due to the popularity of Korean music and TV dramas in Japan. But anti-Korean sentiment, triggered by President Lee Myung-baks visit to Dokdo and call for an apology by the Japanese emperor for colonial atrocities, caused sentiment to chill to levels last seen a decade ago. In fact, 78.8 percent of the respondents said Korea-Japan relations were not good compared to only 42.8 percent of the respondents last year. The affinity Japanese felt toward China also fell to the lowest since 1978. A mere 18 percent said they like China, down 8.3 percentage points from last year. A whopping 92.8 percent of respondents said China-Japan relations are not good, a 16.5 percentage point increase since last year. But affection toward the U.S. inched up 2.5 percentage points to 84.5 percent. Japan has seen a proliferation of books sowing fear of a Chinese invasion or that Korea could attempt to "steal" its own Dokdo islets from Japan, which lays a flimsy claim to them. Some popular books forecast the impending collapse of the Korean and Chinese economies. With a majority of Japanese educated with school textbooks that whitewash Japan's World War II atrocities, a growing number of people feel that Seoul and Beijing are being unreasonable in demanding apologies from Tokyo for the country's dark past. 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And for the second year in a row, Pets In Need of Greater Cincinnati has received a grant from the Ohio Pet Fund for spay/neuter assistance. The $3,000 grant will subsidize the cost of spay and neuter surgeries for approximately 50 cats and 30 dogs through the PIN Clinic. The nonprofit, the only of its kind in Greater Cincinnati, exclusively serves those clients who are living at or below 150 percent of the federal poverty limit. Were not a rescue, were not a shelter, we dont house animals, Executive Director of PIN Ann Hill said. Were there just to serve those people who are having a hard time affording their pets. PIN helps pets and the people next to them. They assist in pet care for homeless individuals and elderly who often times have pets that mean the world to them. While some people believe that you shouldnt have a pet if you cant take care of it, PIN operates under the belief that everyone should have a pet and have access to the tools and resources needed to take care of that pet as well. Currently, PIN sees clients and their pets from several counties in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. In 2017, the organization conducted 5,442 vet exams and provided 535 spay or neuter vouchers. Clients using these and other services provided by PIN must apply with the organization first. The application process begins with an in-person conversation between the interested client and the Pets in Need staff. The customer must also provide proof that their income qualifies for the service. If approved, the customer will be issued a one-year PIN ID card, allowing them to make appointments with the nonprofits vets when needed. PIN provide services including treatment for minor health issues, vaccinations, vouchers for spay and neutering procedures and recommendations for other providers should the pets require more than what the organization itself can provide. Run by paid staff and volunteers alike, the organization boasted over 4,000 pets enrolled with the organization in 2015 and looks to expand both the clinic and their practice reach in the future. The organization is celebrating another major milestone in 2018. Pets In Need is celebrating five years of serving the Cincinnati region. The 2nd annual Ice Cream Social at the Pets In Need Clinic, located on W. Wyoming Avenue in Cincinnati, will be held on Sunday July 15th from noon to 3 p.m. A free community event, the social will offer pizza, ice cream, games, music and more. To register for the event, click here. To learn more about Pets In Need or to see if you qualify for their services, please visit here. The Japanese government has demanded that Korea halt military drills to boost the defense of its easternmost islets of Dokdo that began on Monday. The Defense Ministry is holding the two-day exercise involving the Navy, Marines, Maritime Police and Air Force twice a year, mobilizing six naval vessels and seven aircraft. But Japan insists on a flimsy colonial claim to the islets and says the drills are "totally unacceptable." Kenji Kanasugi at the Japanese Foreign Ministry telephoned Lee Hee-sup, a minister at the Korean Embassy in Tokyo. And Koichi Mizushima, a minister at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, also protested to the Korean Foreign Ministry. The Korean government brushed off the demands. Defense Ministry spokesman Choi Hyun-soo said, "The Dokdo defense drills are regular military exercises designed to thwart a foreign invasion of our sovereign territory." South Koreans' impressions of Japanese are steadily improving, but their growing affection is not reciprocated. The two countries also differ in their outlook for the North Korean nuclear crisis, with most Japanese pessimistic about the future. The East Asia Institute, Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies and the Japanese non-profit think tank Genron announced the results of a survey of mutual attitudes on Monday. The poll has been conducted annually since 2013 and the latest one covered 2,014 adults in both countries. The proportion of South Koreans with favorable views of the Japanese rose from 21.3 percent in 2016 to 28.3 percent this year, but in Japan the proportion with positive views of South Koreans fell from 29.1 percent in 2016 to 22.9 percent this year. Some 73.5 percent of South Koreans cited kindness and punctuality as the reason they have favorable views on Japanese people, while 50.7 percent of Japanese said they find Korea interesting due to the popularity of Korean pop culture. Sohn Yul at the East Asia Institute said, "This is the result of improving perceptions of Japan after a large number of Koreans in their 20s and 30s visited Japan and got to know them better." Yasushi Kudo, head of Genron NPO, said, "Japanese people do not dislike Koreans, but their interest in Korea has waned because they feel bilateral relations are perpetually troubled due to historical disputes." But while some 54.8 percent of South Koreans think bilateral relations are bad, but that view is only shared by 40.6 percent of Japanese, down 10.8 percentage points and 17.1 percentage points from last year. When it comes to issues that need to be resolved, 82.1 percent of South Koreans and 38.7 percent of Japanese cited the Dokdo islets, to which Japan maintains a flimsy colonial-era claim, while 78.1 percent of South Koreans and 54.7 percent of Japanese cited disagreements on other aspects of shared history, and 73.5 percent of South Koreans and 42.2 percent of Japanese cited the question of compensating women mobilized as sex slaves by imperial Japan. South Korean delegates to cross-border military talks last Thursday made no mention of North Koreas 2010 torpedo attack on the Navy corvette Cheonan. Past administrations insisted that North Korea must first apologize for sinking the Cheonan before exchanges can resume, and the Defense Ministry was minded to stick to that, but Cheong Wa Dae and the Unification Ministry prevailed on it to let the matter rest. "The talks were held to sound out each other's opinions on the issue of turning the area near the Northern Limit Line in the West Sea into a maritime peace zone," a military source said Monday. "South Korean delegates did not mention the Cheonan sinking nor the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island [in November the same year], because they were not on the agenda." A Defense Ministry official said the South Korean delegates complained about North Korea's provocations "in general" but did not touch on specific incidents. Prior to the talks, the Defense Ministry reportedly agonized over how to bring the matter up. There was a tug of war about whether to mention the matter or not, as there were some worries about ruining peaceful atmosphere. "The ministry finally decided not to mention it after consultations with Cheong Wa Dae and the Unification Ministry," a government source said. But some senior military officers worry that this has effectively buried the matter since it will become increasingly difficult to bring up in future talks. A retired Army general said, "It's nonsense to discuss turning the area near the NLL in the West into a maritime peace zone unless North Korea apologizes for sinking the Cheonan in those waters or pledges to prevent recurrence of such incidents." The ministry official said the matter will be brought up in future talks. Jilted Fujifilm sues Xerox for $1bn after aborted merger Tokyo, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 Japanese technology giant Fujifilm said Tuesday it was suing US firm Xerox, seeking more than $1 billion in damages after a merger between the two firms was scrapped last month. Fujifilm slammed what it said was a "unilateral decision to terminate without legitimate cause" the planned merger announced in January. The merger was shelved after a lawsuit by powerful shareholders Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, who together own more than 15 percent of Xerox and had vigorously opposed the tie-up. The pair secured an injunction in April to halt the deal after a New York judge agreed the merger prioritised the interests of the Xerox CEO over the firm's shareholders. Fujifilm also announced a challenge to that ruling, saying it was "inconsistent with shareholder democracy to allow Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason... to dictate the fate of Xerox." When scrapping the merger, Xerox cited "material deviations" in the audited accounts of an existing joint venture known as Fuji Xerox controlled by Fujifilm. And the Japanese firm said it continued to believe that the tie-up between Xerox and Fuji Xerox was "the only correct solution to provide shareholders of both companies with exceptional short and long-term value". Xerox issued a robust statement in response, saying it would "vigorously defend its decision and pursue any and all remedies available to Xerox arising from Fujifilm's mismanagement and misconduct". Calling off the merger was seen as a victory for Icahn, a battle-tested billionaire who has aggressively challenged companies since the 1980s. It came after activist fund Elliott won a weeks-long power struggle with Vivendi over Telecom Italia by wresting control of the company's board in early May. anb/ric/sah/mtp XEROX FUJIFILM HOLDINGS TELECOM ITALIA Germany, France and eurozone reform ideas Berlin, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 France's President Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel are battling to thrash out a common position on EU reforms ahead of a crunch end-June summit that could determine the future of the bloc. While there is large agreement on the questions of immigration and defence, the two are still at odds over eurozone issues. Here's an outline of the various reform proposals for a post-Brexit Europe. - Migration - A record influx of migrants, many fleeing war in Syria and Iraq, has become a defining issue for politics in many EU nations. Merkel is facing down a domestic rebellion over her liberal policy that led to the arrival of more than a million asylum seekers since 2015, while Italy last week sparked an outcry by refusing aid ships carrying rescued migrants to dock in its ports. Paris and Berlin agree that there must be standard rules on asylum seekers across the bloc. They also subscribe to the idea of creating an European office on immigration, as well as a European border force. A plan to reform the so-called Dublin rules, which require the country where migrants first arrive to deal with their asylum requests, is still being fine-tuned. Merkel and Macron both agree that the current rules put disproportionate pressure on countries on the southern fringes of the EU, like Italy and Greece. The German leader had initially championed a quota system to distribute migrants across the bloc, but this has been torpedoed by several central European nations. She is now seeking to win support with the idea of a "flexible solidarity system, where countries contribute in different ways and means. Macron's approach is a monetary incentive system encouraging countries to take in migrants. - Eurozone - Macron's ambitious ideas for a eurozone finance minister or parliament have been shot down by Berlin. But Merkel has offered a concession in the form of an investment budget for the bloc, even though the amount she is willing to stump up is far less than what France is seeking. For Merkel, the total sum should be "at the lower end of the double-digit billions of euros range", but Macron wants several hundred billion. Macron has suggested that this could be financed by a tax on financial transactions. Beyond that, in order to better cope with future crises, a deal is being drawn up on expanding the remit of the current European Stability Mechanism (ESM). While it is currently the firefighter for eurozone countries with serious debt problems, there are visions for the ESM to evolve into a European version of the International Monetary Fund. This could include expanding its powers to provide loans to countries that are victims of crises not linked to their debt levels. The idea of naming it the European Monetary Fund has however been dropped at the request of France which did not want it to overshadow the IMF, according to Spiegel weekly. Paris also wants to complete banking union with a system of guarantees for deposits in the eurozone in case of a financial crisis. But Germany believes that it should be up to the banks to clean up their balance sheets instead of leaning on a state guarantee. - Common defence - In the face of US President Donald Trump's "America First" policy, a traditionally pacifist and atlanticist post-war Germany has drawn closer to France's call for a sovereign Europe, including in the military aspect. Merkel backs Macron's idea for an European intervention initiative, with armies to collaborate before eventually forming a common force. But France wants this force outside the framework of the EU, to allow Britain to join in even after it leaves the bloc. Germany prefers it to remain within the EU. - European bureaucracy - Germany and France are in agreement about reducing the size of the European Commission, even if that means temporarily giving up on the idea of a rotating system for various commissioners. Merkel has made a gesture towards Macron by agreeing to create a transnational list for European elections, on which there could be candidates for leading jobs at the European executive. The World Health Organization is pushing to categorize video-game addiction as a mental disorder under the international classification of diseases. The decision is based on analysis of years of data that point to the highly addictive nature of video games. The ICD is used by countries all over the world as a core reference for diseases and their impact on human health. There are concerns that classifying video-game addiction as a disease would lead to stringent regulations that could kill the industry. CNN reported Monday that the global health body plans to pass the proposal at a plenary session next year. The WHO describes game addiction as a condition in where gaming takes over addicts' existence and they continue to play even when it becomes clear that it is having negative effects on their life. It recommended that addicts are monitored and treated for at least one year. China pledges $100 million in military aid to Cambodia Phnom Penh, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 China has pledged around $100 million to help modernise Cambodia's military, the government said Tuesday, the latest largesse showered on the country amid a crackdown on dissent before national elections. The pledge came from visiting Defence Minister Wei Fenghe, who arrived on Saturday for talks with his Cambodian counterpart and Prime Minister Hun Sen, said defence ministry spokesman General Chhum Socheat. Wei, who leaves Wednesday, "promised to support, to train, and to help reform our military to be modernised like others", he said, adding that the two countries would next year hold their third series of joint military exercises known as "Golden Dragon". The aid pledge comes at a time of worsening relations between the United States and Cambodia, which scrapped joint military exercises last year. Hun Sen also accused the US of assisting in a plot by the opposition to topple his government, claims dismissed by the current ambassador as "absurd". Hun Sen is looking to extend his 33-year grip on power in the vote next month after the main opposition party was dissolved last year and one of its leaders arrested. Analysts say unwavering support from China in the form of loans and investment has allowed him to hammer away at threats to his rule without fear of consequences. The US has withdrawn financial support for Cambodia's elections and this month sanctioned the head of Hun Sen's bodyguard unit for his alleged role in human rights abuses. In a separate case, dozens of Cambodians who formerly worked at the US embassy in Phnom Penh protested outside it on Tuesday after being fired from their jobs in March, when allegations of sharing sexually explicit material and child pornography surfaced. Carrying posters of Hun Sen and US President Donald Trump, they called on the embassy to provide evidence and asked for compensation. "We were sacked from the jobs unjustly," said one former employee Chuon Im. An embassy spokesman said it takes incidents involving child pornography and child exploitation "very seriously" but would not comment on internal personnel issues. South Sudan's Kiir, Machar to meet on Wednesday in Addis Ababa Addis Ababa, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 South Sudan President Salva Kiir will meet with rebel leader Riek Machar in Ethiopia's capital on Wednesday in their first face-to-face in nearly two years, an Ethiopian official said Tuesday. "The two principals will meet in Addis Ababa upon the invitation extended by his excellency, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed," Meles Alem, a spokesman for Ethiopia's foreign ministry, told AFP. South Sudan's ambassador to Ethiopia, James Pitia Morgan, confirmed Kiir's planned attendance, as did Manasseh Zindo, a senior official in Machar's SPLM-IO rebel group. The two leaders, whose political rivalry triggered the start of a civil war more than four years ago have not met since Machar and his forces were chased from the capital during fighting in July 2016. Successive international efforts -- led by regional bloc IGAD -- have so far failed to impose a functioning peace deal or meaningful ceasefire. Abiy "will call upon the two leaders to narrow their gap and work for the pacification of South Sudan," Meles said. Tens of thousands have died and nearly four million South Sudanese have been driven from their homes since December 2013, while millions are going hungry amid a massive humanitarian crisis. Last month the UN Security Council gave the warring sides a month to reach a peace deal or face sanctions. 7 shepherds killed as IS 'danger' grips Iraqi desert Baghdad, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 Seven shepherds and farmers have been found murdered after the Islamic State jihadist group kidnapped dozens of people in the desert region of central Iraq, a local official said Tuesday. In a renewed threat to the region, IS attacked several remote villages and seized 30 locals from their homes, Ali al-Nawaf, a municipal council chief, told AFP. "The bodies of seven of them have been found and security forces are searching for the others," he said. The victims, in pictures posted on social media, were discovered with their hands tied behind their backs and eyes bound with red-and-white keffiyeh headscarves. "This area used to be quite well-populated but it has emptied because it's become very dangerous for residents, who live off agriculture or as shepherds," said Nawaf. He said residents could not defend themselves because their weapons had been confiscated, first by US-led forces which invaded Iraq in 2003, by IS from 2014 and then again by Iraqi security forces and their paramilitary allies. The Shammar tribe to which the local residents belong was targeted by IS for having sided with the government in its battle with the jihadists, who were expelled from their last urban strongholds last year. Despite the government's declaration last December of victory over IS, the jihadists have continued to carry out attacks in remote desert areas. "There are sleeper cells in the Hatra region and the thousands of square kilometres of Jazira," the vast desert stretching from the west of Baghdad right up to the Syrian border, said Haytham al-Shammar, a tribal leader. He said the jihadists were also infiltrating from Albu Kamal, a Syrian border town which the Damascus regime recaptured from IS earlier this month. According to Nawaf, the jihadists have become emboldened in recent weeks, operating in daytime, not only at night, and travelling in larger road convoys. "Now there are incidents every day," he said. On Monday, IS killed three truck drivers in an attack on the highway linking Baghdad to oil-rich Kirkuk in the north, security sources said. Iraq's Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force which has played a key role in fighting IS said 22 of its fighters were killed on Sunday night in an air strike near Albu Kamal just inside Syria. Israel has declined to comment after its ally the United States implicated it in the attack which Baghdad and Damascus had blamed on Washington. Four US states refuse to deploy National Guard to border amid outcry Washington, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 Four US states are refusing to deploy National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border, amid a growing outcry over the controversial decision by President Donald Trump's administration to separate the children of illegal migrants from their parents. The Democratic governors of Colorado and New York and the Republican governors of Maryland and Massachusetts all said they would not send members of their state's National Guard units for border duty. "We will not be complicit in this ongoing human tragedy," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said Tuesday. "In the face of the federal government's inhumane treatment of immigrant families, New York will not deploy National Guard to the border," Cuomo said on Twitter. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, said he will not send any National Guard resources to the border "until this policy of separating children from their families has been rescinded." Hogan said he had ordered a four-member helicopter crew which had been stationed in the border state of New Mexico to "immediately return" home. "Immigration enforcement efforts should focus on criminals, not separating innocent children from their families," Hogan said. John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor of Colorado, signed an executive order on Monday that forbids the use of state resources "for the purpose of separating any child from his or her parent or legal guardian," a practice he called "cruel and un-American." Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, said the policy was "cruel and inhumane," and a National Guard helicopter crew which had been scheduled to go to the border later this month would not be deployed. "They're not going to the border," Baker told reporters. The Trump administration is facing condemnation at home and abroad for the separations, the product of a "zero-tolerance" policy on undocumented migrants. US officials say more than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents or guardians since early May, when the "zero-tolerance" policy was announced. President Donald Trump has accused Democrats of causing the crisis by blocking immigration reform legislation. "If you don't have Borders, you don't have a Country!" the Republican president tweeted on Tuesday. Trump announced plans in April to send thousands of National Guard troops to the border, where they could remain until his promised wall is constructed. Germany, France and eurozone reform ideas Berlin, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2018 France's President Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel Tuesday announced common plans on a plethora of EU reforms ahead of a crunch end-June summit that could determine the future of the bloc. Here's an outline of Europe's two biggest economies' proposals for a post-Brexit Europe: - Migration - A record influx of migrants, many fleeing war in Syria and Iraq, has become a defining issue for politics in many EU nations. Merkel is facing down a domestic rebellion over her liberal policy that led to the arrival of more than a million asylum seekers since 2015, while Italy last week sparked an outcry by refusing aid ships carrying rescued migrants to dock in its ports. Coming to Merkel's aid, Macron said that Paris and Berlin had agreed that EU countries must be able to turn back at their borders all asylum seekers who previously registered in another member country -- usually their Mediterranean first port of call. Merkel, asked earlier what Berlin can offer other EU countries in return for such cooperation, cited the EU-Turkey deal in which the bloc paid Ankara for housing and schooling refugees. They are also calling for a European Asylum Office that harmonises practices across the bloc, and which will be responsible for "asylum procedures at external borders". Meanwhile, Paris and Berlin also vowed steps to better protect the EU's outside borders by boosting the Frontex agency, to fight human traffickers and create a fairer system of burden-sharing within the bloc. The German leader had initially championed a quota system to distribute migrants across the bloc, but this has been torpedoed by several central European nations. - Economy - Macron's ambitious ideas for a eurozone finance minister or parliament have been shot down by Berlin. But the French leader won Merkel's backing for a eurozone budget which will be used to finance things like projects on innovation and education in poorer EU countries. The eurozone budget will have its own governance structure, and be a "real budget with annual revenues and spending", said Macron, adding that Paris and Berlin hoped to have it in place by 2021. He would however not be drawn into giving a figure for the budget, saying that its size would be discussed with other members of the bloc. How it would be funded was also up for discussion with other eurozone members, said Merkel, suggesting that it could involve regular transfers made by individual countries or a tax on financial transactions. Macron had previously called for a budget of several hundred billion, while Merkel has spoken of some tens of billions of euros. Beyond that, in order to better cope with future crises, the two leaders agreed to expand the remit of the current European Stability Mechanism (ESM). The twin EU engines now want the ESM to become a European version of the International Monetary Fund that could provide emergency loans to countries that fall victim to crises not linked to their debt levels. - Defence - In the face of US President Donald Trump's "America First" policy, a traditionally pacifist and Atlanticist post-war Germany has drawn closer to France's call for a sovereign Europe, including in the military aspect. Merkel backs Macron's idea for an European intervention initiative, with armies to collaborate before eventually forming a common force. But France wants this force outside the framework of the EU, to allow Britain to join in even after it leaves the bloc. Germany prefers it to remain within the EU. As a compromise, both sides agreed for the force to be "linked as closely as possible" with the EU's framework. 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. Migration Headache Inside the Coalition Battle That Could Topple Merkel With elections approaching in Bavaria, Angela Merkel's rival Horst Seehofer is seeking to pressure the chancellor into reversing her stance on migration. The conflict could fracture the coalition in Berlin and cost Merkel her job. By DER SPIEGEL Staff China has virtually lifted a ban on travel to North Korea as ties strengthened with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's two recent visits. Chinese online travel agencies have resumed selling package tours to the North, and direct charter flights connect Chinese provincial towns with Pyongyang. The travel ban was not mandated by the UN, but China took the initiative late last year under pressure from the U.S. Qunar, a leading Chinese online travel agency, is promoting packages that take tourists on a tour of Pyongyang, Kaesong, Mt. Myohyang and Mt. Kumgang after arriving in Pyongyang on an Air Koryo flight or by a train. They cost between 3,180 and 9,999 yuan. Signs that China would lift the ban were already detected in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, where a dozen travel agencies began selling group tour programs to North Korea around the time of Kim's second visit to China in May. Air Koryo will launch two charter flights a week between Chengdu and Pyongyang on June 28. Diabetes diagnosis leads to life changes for teenager FARR WEST During a trip to Hawaii this past Spring, Amber Wykstra noticed her 15 year-old son, Cooper, was drinking a lot of water. I mean a lot, she said. He was also using the bathroom more than usual and, even though he was exercising, Wykstra said she had noticed her son was losing weight a bit faster than normal. Wykstra's husband was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 12, so she started seeing red flags. When we arrived home from our red-eye flight, my husband did a blood test and found that his (Cooper's) sugar was critically high, she said. We ... LS Cable and System will establish a joint venture with Indonesia's Artha Graha Group to make inroads into the Indonesian cable market. LS Cable on Monday said it signed an agreement at the Indonesian Embassy in Seoul. Established in 1973, AG Group is one of the leading companies in Indonesia and posts annual sales of W20 trillion with banks, hotels and construction firms (US$1=W1,105). The two companies plan to invest US$40 million to build a cable factory on a 64,000 sq.m site near Jakarta. Construction will begin in July and is expected to be completed by the end of the next year. LS Cable aims at sales of $100 million by 2025 from the factory, which will produce overhead wires for infrastructure and low- and medium-voltage cables for construction. With the new plant, the Korean company will have a total of seven production factories in Asia including LS Cable and System Asia, the No. 1 cable company in Vietnam. Bigunj, June 19 The government is planning to build 1200 hospitals around the country in the near future, says health minister Upendra Yadav. Tjhe government is also planning to roll out a new health policy, said the minister at a programme in Birgunj on Tuesday. The 1200 hospitals will be of different sizes, said Yadav adding that the establishment of the facilities will be guided by the new policy. Minister Yadav, who inspected Narayani Sub-regional hospital, told local officials that the facility will be develped into a leading health service provider in Province 2. Narayani hospital is one of the oldest hospitals in Nepal. There was a time when the hospital was the best hospital in the region. But it could not move ahead with the times, said the Minister. Yadav said that his government will also upgrade the infrastructure of the hospital. Kathmandu, June 19 Local residents of Kathmandu along with heritage activists have gifted the Kathmandu Metropolitan City grass that they plucked from Ranipokhari this morning. They did so highlighting that the local government has turned a blind eye to the reconstruction of the historic monument. The grass was delivered to the Deputy Mayor Hari Prabha Khadgis office along with a memorandum which has asked the KMC to rebuild the monument in Malla-era form which has been recommended by heritage experts. Heritage activists claim that the KMC does not care about Rani Pokhari and have not shown any rush to complete the project; hence they had to gift grass to KMC. The activists cleaned the Ranipokhari area along with Nepal Police and the locals, also today. The KMC has hardly done anything since draining the water from the pond which has the locals concerned. It had planned to build a concrete wall which was strongly opposed by the locals after which the KMC decided to remove it. But the contractors have gone to court mentioning that theyve faced a considerable loss due to the removal of the concrete wall. KMC is now planning to give the project to a different contractor. But after three years and a total cost of over Rs 25 million, the locals say unless they intervene nothing is going to happen. That is why heritage experts and locals have decided to visit the place every Saturday to clean the area. Home Just In Immediately after General Chhetris India trip, top Pakistani military official in Nepal Kathmandu, May 19 Pakistan Armed Forces highest ranking official, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC), Zubair Mahmood Hayat, is has arrived in Nepal on a five-day visit to Nepal on Monday. Hayat is visiting the country upon an invitation from Nepal Army Chief, General Rajendra Chhetri, according to the national military organisation. The visit immediately follows General Chhetris official visit to India, Pakistans arch rival. It has been learned that the Pakistani official will visit Pokhara along with his wife. The couple will also visit multiple cultural heritage sites of Nepal. He will also hold meetings with President Bidya Devi Bhandari, Acting Prime Minister and Defence Minister Ishwar Pokharel and Chief of Army Staff Rajendra Chhetri. Major General Gaurab Tandul welcomed the guest at the Tribhuvan International Airport yesterday. The Nepal Army claims the visit will strengthen the military ties between two countries. Ending his visit, General Hayat will return home on Friday. 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Prime Minister and CPN Chair Oli has embarked on a six-day official visit to China on Tuesday whereas Dahal has left for Singapore along with his wife for her health checkup on Monday. This is the first time Nepal has taken the responsibility of party chief since 2008 when he resigned from the position of then CPN-UML General Secretary following the partys defeat in parliamentary polls. Meanwhile, NCP General Secretary Bishnu Poudel informs that three leaders have been given separate responsibilities of Oli in his absence. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence Ishwor Pokharel has taken the responsibility of acting Prime Minister in Olis absence as he is the senior-most Cabinet member. Likewise, Subas Chandra Nembang will lead the party in Parliament. DGAP-News: Mogo Finance S.A. / Schlagwort(e): Anleiheemission/Anleihe Mogo Finance S.A. opens books for initial bond offering 19.06.2018 / 16:47 Fur den Inhalt der Mitteilung ist der Emittent / Herausgeber verantwortlich. Mogo Finance S.A. opens books for initial bond offering Issue amount up to EUR 50 million Riga, Latvia, 19 June 2018. Mogo Finance S.A. announces the start of the subscription period for its corporate bonds (XS1831877755). The Company expects gross proceeds of up to EUR 50 million. At a semi-annual interest payment frequency, the maturity of the bonds is four years. The actual price indication of the senior secured bonds is between 9.25% and 9.75%. The minimum subscription volume is EUR 100,000, and the bonds are denominated at EUR 1,000. The proceeds of the bond issue will be used to refinance existing indebtedness and general business purposes. Upon the settlement day, the bonds are to be traded on the Open Market of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Four months after the issue date the bonds are to be included in the Regulated Market. Mogo Finance with a successful track record in issuing bonds has extensive experience in raising funds at the stock exchange. For more information, please contact: Mogo Finance (CFO) Email: maris.kreics@mogofinance.com Maris Kreics +371 (26) 128020 Aalto Capital Email:manfred.steinbeisser@aaltocapital.com Manfred Steinbeisser +49 89 89867770 Helmut Stichlmair Notes to Editors: Mogo Finance is one of largest and fastest growing secured used car financing companies in Europe. Recognizing the niche in used car financing underserved by traditional lenders, Mogo Finance has expanded its operations to 10 countries issuing over EUR 300 million up to date and running a net loan portfolio over EUR 120 million. Mogo offers secured loans up to EUR 10 000 with maximum tenor of 72 months making used car financing process convenient, both for its customers and partners. Wide geographical presence makes Mogo unique over its rivals and diversifies revenue streams thus providing extra security. Mogo Finance operates through its own branch network, more than 2 000 partner locations and strong online presence. Physical footprint makes Mogo Finance top of mind brand in used car financing. Established in 2012, headquartered in Riga, Latvia and operates in: Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Albania, Belarus. www.mogofinance.com. IMPORTANT INFORMATION The information contained herein is not for release, publication or distribution, in whole or in part, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa or any other countries or otherwise in such circumstances in which the release, publication or distribution would be unlawful. The information contained herein does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of, the bonds in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration, exemption from registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. Persons into whose possession this announcement may come are required to inform themselves of and observe all such restrictions. None of Mogo Finance, KNG Securities LLP, RP Martin Stockholm AB, Bankhaus Scheich Wertpapierspezialist AG or their respective representatives accept any legal responsibility for any violation by any person, whether or not the persons contemplating investing in or divesting Mogo's securities, including the bonds, are aware of such restrictions. This announcement does not constitute an offer of securities for sale in the United States. The bonds have not been and will not be registered under the Securities Act or under the applicable securities laws of any state of the United States and may not be offered or sold, directly or indirectly, within the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, U.S. persons except pursuant to an applicable exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act. This announcement constitutes advertising material and is meant as preliminary information about an upcoming securities offering by the Issuer for sounding general investor interest. This document in particular does not constitute a prospectus for the purposes of Directive 2003/71/EC, as amended (the "Prospectus Directive") and does not constitute a public offer of securities in any member state of the European Economic Area (the "EEA"). This announcement does not constitute an offer of bonds to the public in the United Kingdom. No prospectus has been or will be approved in the United Kingdom in respect of the bonds. Accordingly, this announcement is not being distributed to, and must not be passed on to, the general public in the United Kingdom. The communication of this announcement as a financial promotion may only be distributed to and is only directed at (i) persons who are outside the United Kingdom or (ii) investment professionals falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (the "Order") or (iii) high net worth companies, and other persons to whom it may lawfully be communicated, falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) of the Order (all such persons in (i), (ii) and (iii) above together being referred to as "Relevant Persons"). Any invitation, offer or agreement to subscribe, purchase or otherwise acquire such securities will be engaged in only with, Relevant Persons. Any person who is not a Relevant Person should not act or rely on this announcement or any of its contents. PROFESSIONAL INVESTORS ONLY - Manufacturer target market (MIFID II product governance) is eligible counterparties and professional clients only (all distribution channels). No PRIIPs key information document (KID) has been prepared as the bonds do not constitute packaged products and will be offered to eligible counterparties and professional clients only. The challenges The African continent is dominated by drylands, characterized by scarce and unreliable rainfall, extremely high potential evaporation, and poor abilities of the soil to retain water. The majority of the year is marked by the unproductive dry season. When rain eventually falls, much of it evaporates before even reaching a river. Crop yields in these parts are low, and they seem stuck in a loop of poverty and hunger. With climate change, the rain seasons become increasingly unreliable, and much harvest is lost due to prolonged dry spells. More regular rainfall is mainly concentrated to local mountains, which due to their elevated position works as water towers, channelling the water into some a few major transnational rivers corridors. Because of this, the presence of blue water (i.e. liquid fresh water found in reservoirs such as streams, lakes, and groundwater) is very local in the drylands. The already difficult situation with trying to feed the population will be much exacerbated by the current population explosion. Projections are that the population size will be increased fourfold before the end of this century, largely due to growing life expectancy. Urbanisation rates are among the highest in the world, indicating that most of this increase will populate large cities. This will put an enormous pressure on the currently unsecured raw water supplies for the megacities. The path forward Clearly, models fitted for a more humid climate is not going to do the trick in these parts. Instead, the hydroclimatic reality of the region needs to be incorporated into the management policies and practices in order to meet the challenges. Because of the local nature of blue water, Falkenmark argues that these sources are best suited for securing raw water supplies for cities. This requires international collaboration and water management since the larger rivers are transnational. Since the blue water is except for local wells - out of reach for most farmers, food production is basically reliant on green water (i.e. water in precipitation, evaporation, and retained in soil). Today, up some 70 % of the rainwater is lost through evaporation, runoff and drainage. The key here, Falkenmark argues, is to start viewing these huge water losses as a resource. By preparing the soil for increased water infiltration, surface runoff could be reduced, and local harvest of rain and runoff water, could allow for supplementary irrigation to prevent lost yield during dry spells. Sub-Saharan Africa faces complex challenges related to water and population size, but with the right mind-set, a lot can be done to meet them. But this requires close attention by decision makers. As Falkenmark puts it: And there exists, in fact, encouraging experience in other water short regions of the world, where water shortage challenges have been possible to overcome. Of fundamental importance for success is, however, that politicians become rapidly aware of Africas Achilles heel, the great vulnerability that it involves, and the extreme urgency of adequate action, both as regards water supply of rapidly growing cities, and safe and rapid smallholder agricultural development. Click here to read more about the book Assessing Global Water Megatrends Butwal, June 19 The main opposition Nepali Congress has agreed to let the Province 5 Assembly resume its business after a day of obstruction. Earlier, the party had boycotted the legislative activity yesterday expressing its dissatisfaction over the budget announced by the provincial government. Following that, Provincial Speaker Purna Bahadur Gharti had postponed the meeting. In a bid to solve the problem, Chief Minister Shankar Pokhrel held a meeting with Congress leaders in Butwal today. During the meeting, the Chief Minister agreed to address genuine demands of the party, hence it agreed to join the House, according to Congress parliamentary leader Baladev Sharma Pokharel. The next Assembly meeting has been scheduled for 1 pm today. 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. Pilots and maintainers from the 124th Fighter Wing at Gowen Field in Boise, Idaho prepare for Red Flag Alaska, June 8, 2018 at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. Red Flag Alaska provides a unique opportunity for Airmen to train with some soldiers and Airmen from around the world. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Airman 1st Class Mercedee Schwartz) X 0 20 Help Keep Us Soaring We need your help! Our subscription base has slowly been dwindling. We need your help in reversing that trend. We would like to add 20 new subscribers this month. Each month we count on your subscriptions or contributions. You can support us in the following ways: Lip Service (far right, hidden) jumps the final fence in the Racing Uk Free For a Month Handicap Chase. Photo: David Pratt COTSWOLD trainer Fergal OBrien was in sparkling form at Stratford on Tuesday afternoon, landing a double with Grageelagh Girl and Lip Service to move his score for the current season to eight, writes David Hucker. Cheltenham winner Stylish Dancer was a short price to take the first division of the racinguk.com/freetrial Mares Novices Hurdle for Dan and Harry Skelton and, having shaken off the attentions of outsider Blazing Gold after the second flight, made the rest of the running until being joined by second-favourite Sue Be It as they turned for home with one hurdle left to take. The jump at the last proved to be crucial, as Stylish Dancer put in an extra stride and landed awkwardly, whilst Sue Be It was foot-perfect and flew up the run-in to follow up her Towcester win under Brian Hughes. On known form, the second division looked to lie between the two previous scorers, Grageelagh Girl, winner of a maiden hurdle at Newton Abbot two weeks ago, and Tillythetank, winner of a similar race at Exeter last month. They dominated the betting market with Grageelagh Girl sent off the 4-9 favourite and finished as the betting suggested, separated by five lengths. In an incident-packed race which saw three depart on the first circuit, including Darlyn who demolished the wing of the fourth hurdle, outsider Fifty Peach Way took the field along until leaving the back straight where the big two took control. With the damaged hurdle not repaired, that was the end of the jumping and Grageelagh Girl strode away for an impressive success. Johnny Og was reluctant to line up for the 12,200 Racing UK Free For A Month Handicap Chase over two and three-quarter miles, but got off with the rest of the field, tracking early leaders Adam DuBreteau and Ravished before dropping back. Ravished maintained his position, still leading as the runners headed for the last fence, but it was the veteran course and distance winner Fear Glic who looked to be travelling best of all and about to break his losing spell going back two years. However, none could resist the finishing kick of Lip Service, who found another gear on the run-in with conditional jockey Richard Patrick to come home two and a quarter lengths ahead of Fear Glic, with Ravished the same distance away in third. Highlight of the meeting was the fourth, the Class 3 Racing UK Free Trial Sky 426 Handicap Hurdle over two miles with Wells De Lune, who had been plying his trade in hunter chases until returning to hurdles recently, making the running at a good pace. The challengers were stacking up behind him as they hit the turn for home and it was 20-1 outsider Romanor, only fourth going to the final obstacle, who showed the best turn of foot to scoot away approaching the winning post. There was a competitive-looking field of eleven for the 10,000 Bet At racinguk.com Novices Handicap Chase and hat-trick seeking Just A Feeling, who had shown improved form since a wind operation, was the one that punters wanted to know, shortening from 2-1 to 7-4 before the off. She was struggling almost from the off, being pulled up by Harry Skelton after the ninth fence, as the race was turned into a procession by Isle Road, who took advantage of a bad blunder by Diplomatico at the third-last to make the rest of the running and beat 33-1 shot Admiral Kid by six lengths. Uttoxeter winner Mick Maestro was a pretty short price to follow up at Warwick, but pulled too hard for his own good, finishing third to 33-1 outsider Telegraph Place. Trainer Tom George fitted a hood for his run in the Visit The All New racinguk.com Novices Hurdle, but he was only third in the betting behind Fakenham scorer Yensir, trained, like Telegraph Place, by Olly Murphy at Wilmcote, and Dan Skeltons Hatcher, a faller at the last flight at Huntingdon on his previous run. The market got it right, as Yensir and Hatcher fought out the finish, with the former finding plenty on the run-in to score by two and a half lengths with champion jockey Richard Johnson. Course winner Iniesta had to give weight to his 13 rivals in the concluding Racing UK Conditional Jockeys Handicap Hurdle over two and a quarter miles and, after being prominent throughout, he battled back to lead going to the last flight to deny Anton Dolin and Elysian Prince. World War II veteran Sidney Walton made his first visit to Sidney Thursday on his "No Regrets Tour." The 50-state tour is hosted by his son Paul. He said the intent is to see people who may not have had the opportunity to meet a World War II veteran. Nearly every person can think of a time or event that has lingered as an "if only I had..." memory. The change to do something daring or to take a chance with a career opportunity or a relationship. Sidney Walton and his son Paul decided to address the regrets in life as part of a bucket list tour. Sidney Walton has the honor of being a surviving World War II veteran, one of a constantly decreasing few. With the number of veterans diminishing, they decided to tour the United States. It is a bucket list tour because the tour is scheduled for them to return home in time for Sidney's century celebration. He stopped at Dude's in Sidney Thursday, one of his stops in Nebraska. Sidney met Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts June 13, then beginning a four-day tour of the state. "We're doing this 'No Regrets Tour' because dad, when he was 20 years old, missed an opportunity to meet Civil War veterans," Paul said. He said it was an opportunity of a lifetime. Missing the chance to meet the veterans is a regret he has carried with him his entire life. Paul added when his dad turned 99, they decided to do a 50-state tour with the goal of meeting the "common people" of each state. "I'm very happy, meeting with these people," Sidney Walton said Thursday. Sidney was born Feb. 11, 1919 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1941 in response to Hitler's rise to power, only a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was married in 1960 in San Diego, Calif. His wife lost her battle with cancer at the age of 56. The tour has included eight states so far, with 42 to go. The family has visited the states of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, New York (including Central Park and a private meeting with Gov. Andrew Cuomo), New Jersey. They have also former Presidents George W. and George H.W. Bush, Gov. Phil Murphy and First Lady Tammy Murphy, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb in a private meeting and public ceremony on Memorial Day, and recently meeting Gov. Ricketts when the rest of the Nebraska tour was announced. In addition to a tour of no regrets, the 50-state event is an opportunity for "common people" to meet a World War II veteran, and to encourage families to spend more time with their elderly parents. Paul said he hopes the tour is an inspiration for families with elderly parents to take them from assisted living centers and on bucket list adventures. They're next stop is planned for Grand Island, noon Eastern Time, followed by Columbus and Norfolk. This was a milestone year for the Sweet Home Charter School as the first students to start first grade there graduated this year. The school completed its 12th year this summer after opening in 2006 in rented space at the Church at 18th and Long. Out of the Class of 2018, five out of 18 seniors who attended the Sweet Home Charter School were in the National Honor Society, said Sherrie Ingram, a parent and board member, last week in a informational meeting between the school and the Sweet Home School Board. Five of the 22 students who received honors diplomas attended the Charter School. Two out of the 13 graduates in the top 10 percent were from the Charter School, she said, and 12 of the 18 seniors who attended the school have plans to attend college. The top scholarship in the Sweet Home School District, worth $180,000, went to a student, Ricky Yunke, who attended first through sixth grade at the Charter School, Ingram said. He received a U.S. Marine Corps. ROTC scholarship to Oregon State University. Among 2018 graduates, three students spent the entirety of their elementary years at the Charter school. They are Yunke, Justin Kurtz and Ingram's daughter, Tori Ingram. People Involved in Education, which operates the Charter School along with Sand Ridge Charter School in the Lebanon Community School District, sees many of its students go on to be in the top 10 percent at their high schools, become valedictorians and join the National Honor Society, said Mary Northern, director of operations for PIE. Joining in August 2006, Ingram has been a board member since PIE opened Sweet Home Charter School. PIE also operates Sand Ridge Charter School in the Lebanon School District. Yunke, Kurtz and Tori Ingram all attended kindergarten there. "It was so hard to get the school, and then 12 years, this is awesome," said Sherrie Ingram. "We were approved six weeks before school started. We had to hire everybody. We had to get everything ADA-approved in the church." The school offered kindergarten through third grade its first year and then began adding grades. After three years, PIE purchased the old Liberty School campus from East Linn Christian Academy. The Charter School had to cut sixth grade temporarily for property repairs, but it is steaming ahead today with kindergarten through sixth grades. Its agreement with the School District allows the school to offer through the eighth grade, but the PIE board hasn't discussed expanding into junior high at this point. PIE, parents and staff have done a lot of work to the Liberty building over the years. "There's amazing murals when you first walk in," Ingram said. They've upgraded security with a locking entrance and a camera surveillance system. Ingram kept her three children, Tori, Addi and Jacob, in the Charter School until junior high. Because of his proficiency, Jacob has been able to skip a grade in math and will be taking pre-calculus as a freshman at Sweet Home High School. "It just provides a choice for parents and for the students," Ingram said. Northern said the Charter School is "different." "We're just a choice. People have to look at what we offer and decide if it's for them. Why do we need to come into a distract if we're going to do the same things? (It's) basically an option for parents if they can't afford private school." When parents are working three jobs to make ends meet and unable to pay for options beyond their local district school, "we're the option, and we set out like that," Northern said. One choice the school provides small class sizes, Ingram said. The most the Charter School has had is "maybe 22 students," and each classroom has a full-time teacher and a full-time assistant, she said. The other key is the level of parent involvement, Ingram said. Parents must drive their children to school each day, so they're at the school at least once per day. "Parent involvement is crucial," Northern said. Sometimes, the Charter School gets students who have had a hard time in another school, Ingram said, and in some cases, it can make a difference for those students it's just another choice. "We're more structured," Northern said. The schools require a uniform, so students are viewed the same way. When the time comes, the students "are well-prepared to return to the district," Ingram said. According to Oregon Department of Education School Report cards, in the third through the fifth grade the Sweet Home School District had 36 percent of its students meet or exceed state language arts standards and 33.4 percent meet or exceed math standards in 2016-17. The Charter School had 52.2 percent meet or exceed language arts standards and 47.8 percent meet or exceed math standards. Statewide, 50.4 percent met or exceeded standards in language arts and 47.8 percent met or exceeded math standards. Among "like schools," counting various demographics and socioeconomic conditions, 40.4 percent met or exceeded standards in language arts, while just 33.1 percent met or exceeded math standards. Ingram said a rumor seems to persist that tuition is required, but it's just not true. The Charter School is a public school. The school receives 80 percent of the state's school funding, Northern said. That's not 80 percent of the overall funding compared to regular public schools not federal funding and not property taxes. It's 80 percent of one source of funding, the state school fund. That's a lot tighter than district budgets, but PIE owns its three school buildings and has reserves built up. "Yeah, it's pretty amazing that we're where we are (after 12 years)," Northern said. Ask her how, and she responds with her own question: "Why can't they do it? Why do they struggle? Why does the public system struggle?" The question is not "How do we do it?" she said. The charter schools put at least two people in every classroom all the time with an internal cap of 20 students per class, Northern said. PIE teachers start at more than $34,000, and staff receive 3-percent wage increases. Northern said that more money would improve charter schools. For example, districts are reimbursed 70 percent of their transportation costs by the state. Although charter schools do provide some limited transportation among buildings, they receive no funding for transportation, leaving parents to take children to school. They have to meet all of the state's requirements, Northern said, and the school sees the same inspections by the state. They deal with the same challenges, such as homeless students; but they don't get a dime extra for it. Northern said she hadn't really had a chance to think about the milestone Sweet Home Charter School just reached. She's busy thinking about "how we're going to do the next thing." "I'm just delighted," she said. "For me, personally, the reward I get is when I see the kids do so well academically and be able to go to other schools and flourish the way they have." The Sweet Home School Board has appointed Jenny Daniels to a vacancy left by Ben Emmert. Emmert is moving to Nebraska where his wife, Amanda, is serving her residency as a psychiatrist. She just graduated from COMP-Northwest in Lebanon. He had worked for Cascade Timber Consulting. Emmert succeeded Daniels representing the Liberty area after she declined to run for office again. He did not file but entered the race late as a write-in candidate, winning the office in May 2017. He took office July 1. Daniels will serve until June 30, 2019. The district will hold an election in May to complete the final two years of the term. The winner of that election takes office on July 1, 2019. When she left the board, "I wasn't ready to step down, per se, but I wasn't ready to commit for four years," Daniels said. Working at CTC, where board Chairman Mike Reynolds also is employed, she was aware that Emmert was interested in running for the seat. She decided not to run. At this point, she is looking at a one-year commitment, she said, adding that at this point, she doesn't plan to file for election next year. She said she enjoyed serving on the board, and she might have gone ahead and filed for office if it were for a two-year term. "My plan is to get people in the Liberty area interested and find a good, solid replacement," Daniels said. She noted that the area has a relatively small area to draw from, and it doesn't have a large number of smaller children. "Some go to the Charter School (located in the old Liberty School), but it does seem like new families are moving in," Daniels said. When she decided to leave the board, the district was not in the middle of anything controversial, Daniels said. Things were running smoothly, and she was comfortable that the district was in good hands. She was involved in hiring Supt. Tom Yahraes, and she supported returning the district to a five-day school week. All of that decision-making was complete by the time she left office last year. The four-day week was never intended to be permanent, Daniels said. The switch to that schedule was an economic decision, and she thinks the return to a five-day week is going to contribute to academic improvement in the district, she said. "We can already see that attendance has been improving," Daniels said. It's hard to say if it's correlated, "but it's definitely a move in the right direction. I just want to continue to see improvements. Last year looked like it's moving the right direction. I'll be excited to see what the test scores will be in the next couple of years." Daniels said she's optimistic that improvements will happen.. Daniels ran for office and was elected in May 2009 after Police Chief Jeff Lynn chose not to run again. She served two terms. By Dr. John Sparks At the U.S. Supreme Court on June 4, Justice Anthony Kennedy delivered a long-awaited opinion concerning Jack Phillips, the Christian baker who owns Masterpiece Cakeshop located in Lakewood, Colorado, west of Denver. Kennedy and the court ruled in favor of Phillips, 7-2. In July 2012, Phillips, who had provided cakes and other confections for 22 years, refused to bake a wedding cake for two gay men. In keeping with his religious convictions that marriage should be between a man and a woman, he maintained that he could not lend his artistic ability to the designing of a... 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 ... Samsung will be rolling out a version of the upcoming Galaxy Note 9 with internal storage of 512 GB, as confirmed by some brochures, but there will be a catch. The Galaxy Note 9 has been filling up the rumor mill, as Samsung fans look forward to the company's next flagship smartphone. While the Galaxy Note 9 512 GB version rumor has now been confirmed, there are still many more details about the smartphone that remains unclear. Galaxy Note 9 512 GB Version Confirmed: Here's The Catch Samsung will launch a version of the Galaxy Note 9 with a whopping 512 GB of internal storage, despite a lesser need for such a feature with the option to use microSD cards for additional space. The Galaxy Note 9 variant was spotted in brochures from South Korea. There is no need for translations, as it is easy to see "512G" as an option for the Galaxy Note. One of the brochures also confirmed that the models will be 64 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB. The Galaxy Note 9 will also be offering a microSD card slot, which makes the massive internal storage a bit redundant. However, in this age, some users will need all the space that they can get. In addition, data stored in core flash storage will result in much faster performance, compared to data stored in microSD cards. Prolific leaker Ice Universe confirmed the truth behind a 512 GB Galaxy Note 9, but also revealed the catch. Sorry, Samsung fans in the United States: the 512 GB model of the smartphone will only be available in South Korea and China. There remains the possibility that Samsung will change its mind and sell the 512 GB Galaxy Note 9 in the United States. Fans might not have to wait long to find out. Galaxy Note 9 Rumors The 512 GB Galaxy Note 9 was tipped alongside 8 GB of RAM in May, after rumors that Samsung will not be able to include the in-display fingerprint sensor in the upcoming smartphone. Instead, the Galaxy Note 9 will reportedly come with the new and improved Bixby 2.0. Samsung might not be making its fans wait too long for the Galaxy Note 9. A Bloomberg report claimed that Samsung will announce the smartphone on Aug. 9, with the Galaxy Note 9 release date planned before the end of August. If this is true, users looking forward to the next flagship Samsung smartphone will soon find out everything there is to know about it. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Health Foundation states that millennials are on track to have worse health problems than their parents. The foundation also notes that people in their 20's and 30's are at a higher risk for certain lifestyle illnesses including diabetes, cancers, and heart disease in the next 30 years. Young Adults Are At Risk The report showed that young adults face greater long-term depression, stress, and anxiety because of the rise of insecure work arrangements. The report continues that young adults in their 20s have to manage their relationships and friendships digitally and in person. The report continued that despite a decline in alcohol and smoking among young adults, they are still "losing ground" on important social and environmental factors. The Office for National Statistics revealed earlier this year that millennials were more prone to suffer from loneliness than any other age group. This new study shows similarities between the rise in poor health among young adults may be due to certain trends including zero-hour contracts and college graduates working "non-graduate" jobs. The study continues that a secure home is the "building block" for good health in the future, however, out of the participants who took part in the study, only 31 percent claimed to have strong support systems while growing up. Less than half of the participants claimed to have financial support and family support, and 49 percent stated that they received emotional support from their family. The Lost Generation The study also found that 80 percent of the participants feel that social media "pressures" them to act a certain way. The participants of the study were between the ages of 22-26-years-old. "There are already signs that the gains made in improving the health of previous generations may well be eroded by the precariousness and instability of the lives many young people are facing," the foundation's policy director, Jo Bibby stated. Michael Marmot, a professor at University College London, agreed with Bibby's statement by elaborating that in addition to mental illnesses, crime, or anything else that could be happening right now, society may be "storing up" more problems for young adults in the future. In 2017, the health insurance provider, Cigna, conducted a study that showed adults that were 18-years-old and up felt lonely and lacked "companionship." The study also revealed that majority of the young adults who participated in it felt that no one understands them or the relationships they had weren't "meaningful." 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Apple announced a new feature that is coming to iPhones with the launch of iOS 12. When U.S. based iPhone users call 911, their phone will automatically share their location so that first responders know where to go. Apple will be joining companies like Uber and Google who already incorporate this feature. Automatically Shares Location With 911 Apple said that it would be using RapidSOS's Internet protocol to securely share location data with 911 call centers for better response times. In 2015, Apple started the Hybridized Emergency Location (HELO). Using the person's GPS and Wi-FI Access points, it is able to determine the caller's location while they are making the call. Using RapiDSOS, they are able to use existing software already available at 911 call centers. In its announcement, Apple cites that the figure that around 80 percent of 911 calls come from cell phones. It also says that the Federal Communications Commission will be requiring operators to located callers within 50 meters at least 80 percent of the time starting in 2021. Apple also announced that the feature would ensure that user's privacy is protected. It stressed that the location data that is being shared with 911 operators could not be shared during non-emergency situations. Apple also said that only 911 operators will have access to the caller's location during the call. How The System Works iPhones with iOS 12 will now send their exact location to a RapidSOS dispatcher, which will then share the locations with local emergency response centers. This would allow for emergency responders to reduce the amount of time that it would normally take to respond. The FCC estimates that this change to response times could save 10,000 lives per year. Current 911 systems were made during times when landlines were the norm. This allowed operators to be able to determine the caller's location immediately. Now that people use mobile phones this is more difficult. Carriers do share location data with 911 operators but their estimates can be off by a few hundred yards. RapidSOS has also worked with car manufacturers to be able to send data such as the make, model, and the number of people involved in a crash to emergency responders. It is a free system but it is only being utilized by less than half of emergency response centers in the country. It hopes to increase participation to a majority of centers by the end of 2018. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. U.S. President Donald Trump has officially ordered the Department of Defense and Pentagon to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the country's armed forces. Trump issued the order in a National Space Council meeting, where he shared his vision of U.S. dominance in space. Trump Orders Creation Of Space Force USA In the meeting, Trump made the surprise announcement regarding the creation of a Space Force. "It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space," Trump said. The meeting was supposed to focus on the unveiling of the first comprehensive policy on space traffic management. "The whole point of today's meeting was not about this at all, it was about the space traffic management policy decision," said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning for NGO Secure World Foundation, which is focused on space policy. "We are going to have the Air Force and we're going to have the Space Force, separate but equal. It is going to be something so important," said Trump. The "separate but equal" phrase raised eyebrows, as it was a term from a now-overturned 1896 Supreme Court ruling that served as the legal precedent for segregation. This is not the first time that Trump mentioned the idea of a Space Force. He first said it in March during a speech at the Marines Corps Air Station Miramar, where he described space as just another domain of war like land, sea, and air. Military officers have been critical of the idea, as a restructuring of the armed forces to accommodate the addition of a Space Force may do more harm than good. The sixth branch, according to the officers, will be expensive and unnecessary. The Congress, which will have to give approval for the Space Force to come to fruition, is also divided on the proposal. In addition, the United States is a member of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bans the placement of weapons of mass destruction in space, only allowing the moon and other celestial bodies to be used for peaceful purposes. Trump's Space Initiatives In addition to the creation of a Space Force, the Trump administration has launched two high-profile space initiatives that have drawn critical attention. In a renewed space race, Trump said that he wants NASA to send astronauts back to the moon, followed by a mission to send the first crewed mission to Mars. The Trump administration is also looking to turn over the International Space Station to the private sector, as it looks to end direct deferral support for the ISS. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Osmosis used to be considered the primary method of transporting water into the brain, but researchers believe that they have identified the real cause of it. What Did Scientists Discover About Water In The Brain? Scientists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark have just discovered that NKCC1, an ion transporter, is responsible for moving half of the cerebrospinal fluid into the brain. The role of this clear and colorless fluid is to provide protection for the brain. The findings were published in a study in the journal Nature Communications on June 4. Nearly half a liter of water moves from the blood to the brain on a daily basis. Although scientists previously knew that osmosis and the choroid plexus, a brain tissue, played a role in this process, it was clear that there had to be a primary driver. This research is the first of its kind to focus on the process of how water is transported into the brain. How Did Scientists Find This Link? To reach this conclusion, researchers examined mice as part of an experiment. They first ruled out osmosis as the primary driver by inhibiting water transporters in the brains of mice. Once they eliminated osmosis, the researchers carefully studied more about the NKCC1 co-transporter. Since mice were used in the experiment, there is some concern that the findings may not be as relevant for humans. Future Implications Of The NKCC-1 Discovery If these findings do hold up for humans, then this could be a major medical breakthrough. Scientists hope that the information can be used to treat brain disorders, such as blood clots, hydrocephalus, and brain hemorrhages. Typically, doctors would have to resort to treating certain brain dysfunctions by drilling holes so that fluid can drain out. With this knowledge, doctors might be able to control the water system of the brain without having to resort to an invasive procedure. "It would be ground-breaking if we were able to use this mechanism as a target for medical treatment and turn down the inflow of water to the brain to reduce intracranial pressure," said neuroscientist Nanna MacAulay. "At worst, the patient may suffer permanent damage and even die as a result of increased pressure." The next step for researchers is to target the mechanism of water transport into the brain with medicine. If the results look promising, it could revolutionize how certain patients receive treatment for brain-related diseases. There many issues related to water in the brain and this has been the first major research into potentially solving that. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. As rumored recently, Android Messages is finally coming to the web, letting users send text messages from the comfort of their web browser instead of reaching out for their phone. Users are also able to view any messages sent to their Android smartphone. Android Messages for the web is starting to roll out to users and should reach everyone by next week, according to Google. Just like the mobile app, the web client supports texts, images, stickers, and more. How To Use The Android Messages Web Client To start using Android Messages for the web, open the Android Messages app on your Android smartphone. Then visit the Android Messages website, which should display a huge QR code. Tap the "More" options menu on the app, indicated by a vertical ellipsis, and select "Messages for web." Afterward, scan the QR code to pair the web client and app together. Google recommends users connect to Wi-Fi while using the web client, but it should still work even when using mobile data. Unfortunately, the feature isn't live on the app yet at the time of writing, but as mentioned, Google ensures it's slowly rolling out to all users and should be widely available pretty soon. Rich Communication Services Putting Android Messages on the web is one of the first significant steps in Google's push toward Chat, the company's integration of the Rich Communication Services platform, or RCS, inside Android Messages. By launching a web client, Google is signaling its willingness to compete with iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and many other feature-rich messaging clients. Allo, released in 2016, served as Google's respectable first attempt toward that goal but that didn't really catch on despite having many knockout features, including built-in Assistant implementation. Android Messages, as The Verge notes, is Google's next best chance at success in the messaging race. Many carriers have pledged to support Chat and integrate RCS-related benefits, including reading receipts, typing indicators, high-resolution content, and more dynamic group texts. The only disadvantage of RCS is the fact that none of those aforementioned features are facilitated with end-to-end encryption, unlike WhatsApp and Signal. If it's not already installed on your smartphone, Android Messages is available to download from the Play Store. Thoughts about Android Messages coming to the web? Do you think Google has a shot at competing with other companies in the mobile messaging landscape, which seems to be currently dominated by Facebook and Apple? 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. In the coming weeks, Google Chromecast and Google Home devices around the world will be quietly updated to address a serious security bug, which reveals a user's location data. Security reporter Brian Krebs publicly reported the vulnerability, which was first disclosed by Tripwire security researcher Craig Young. The issue stems from the fact that Chromecast and Home devices don't require authentication for commands facilitated within a local network. The attack exploits DNS rebinding to communicate with the aforementioned devices, appearing as harmless local requests. This way, the attacker acquires a list of nearby Wi-Fi networks. Then taking advantage of Google's location services, the attacker can triangulate a user's precise location. How An Attacker Can Get Your Location Data Via Chromecast Or Google Home Below, Krebs explains how Google's geolocation data lends an attacker the opportunity to seize a user's location: "It is common for websites to keep a record of the numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address of all visitors, and those addresses can be used in combination with online geolocation tools to glean information about each visitor's hometown or region." However, this kind of location data is typically imprecise, he says, to the point where IP geolocation can only offer a generalized idea of where an IP address may be located. That, however, isn't the case with Google's own geolocation data, which includes sophisticated maps of wireless networks globally, associating Wi-Fi networks to physical locations. "Armed with this data, Google can very often determine a user's location to within a few feet (particularly in densely populated areas), by triangulating the user between several nearby mapped Wi-Fi access points." When Is The Fix Coming? When Young reported the vulnerability to Google in May, a developer closed the report without a fix, marking it as "intended behavior." When Krebs reached out to Google and said he intends to write a report about it, the company agreed to work on a patch. The fix will arrive sometime in the middle of July. So far, there's been no evidence suggesting this attack is being used in the wild. Even still, Young says internet-of-things devices should be under a separate network from one's computer. "The implications of this are quite broad including the possibility for more effective blackmail or extortion campaigns," says Young. "Threats to release compromising photos or expose some secret to friends and family could use this to lend credibility to the warnings and increase their odds of success." 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. A new artificial intelligence-powered system created by Google is able to predict, with amazing accuracy, if a patient will die within 24 hours from the time of admission into a hospital. Google is one of the world's pioneers in AI research, with its DeepMind subsidiary recently able to create a computer that can generate 3D models by looking at 2D images. The latest artificial intelligence project by Google, however, is focused on the technology's applications on healthcare. Google AI Predicts Death At 95 Percent Accuracy The research that was published by Google in May included an anecdote of a woman suffering from late-stage breast cancer who went to a hospital with her lungs flooded by fluids. After seeing two doctors and undergoing a radiology scan, the hospital's computers estimated a 9.3 percent chance that she would die during her stay. A new Google artificial intelligence algorithm, meanwhile, took a look at nearly 176,000 data points of the woman, and released an assessment of a 19.9 percent risk of death. The woman died in a matter of days. The research, highlighted the potential of artificial intelligence in healthcare, particularly neural networks which are adept at automatically learning and improving from data. Google used this form of AI to create a tool that forecasts the outcomes for patients, including how long they might stay confined in a hospital, the chances of readmission, and their death risk. The accuracy of the Google AI in predicting whether a patient will die within 24 hours after admission is as high as 95 percent, which is 10 percent more accurate than models that the healthcare industry is currently using. The AI is able to analyze previously out of reach data, such as notes scribbled on charts or buried in PDFs. The neural network had no trouble digesting all the information to make the best predictions possible, which came faster and more accurate compared to traditional methods. AI In Healthcare Artificial intelligence technology has seen its fair share of applications in the healthcare industry. For example, the United Kingdom's National Health Service is considering the use of AI-powered robot medics, named carebots, which can be deployed to both private homes and hospitals. Stigma still surrounds artificial intelligence, due to the technology's portrayal in science fiction movies and recent developments such as the creation of the world's first psychopath AI. However, artificial intelligence has a lot to offer to the healthcare industry, with the potential to save thousands of lives in the future. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Researchers have dug up the remains of a 22,000-year-old fossil that belongs to a long-lost bear believed to be the cousin of the giant panda. The ancient remains were unearthed in Guangxi province in southern China. Following a sequencing of the fossil's mitochondrial genome, the researchers have concluded that the ancient animal was not a direct ancestor of the modern-day panda but a relative that belonged to a parallel lineage that split away thousands of years ago. Unearthing An Ancient Panda In a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, a team of anthropologists at Beijing's Chinese Academy of Sciences describes the challenges they encountered in extracting the mitochondrial DNA required to establish the fossil's origin. The 22,000-year-old jaw was actually discovered back in 2014 by paleoanthropologist Yingqi Zhang. Back then, Zhang was absorbed in looking for the remains of the Gigantopithecus, believed to be the biggest primate that ever lived. Descending into a sinkhole in Cizhutuo Cave, Zhang failed to find traces of the Gigantopithecus. He did, however, found an ancient jaw that looked, to the naked eye, exactly like that of a giant panda. Because Zhang was so focused on the quest to find the largest primate, the panda jaw remained untouched, wrapped in tissue paper in a box on one of the shelves in his office, until one of his colleagues, who had been trying and failing to extract panda DNA from ancient remains, caught wind of Zhang's discovery. Mapping The Ancient Panda's DNA For anthropologist Qiaomei Fu, the challenge of sequencing the genome of the ancient panda almost proved futile. For one thing, the fossil was located in the subtropical province of Guangxi, where the delicate strands of DNA can easily break down due to the high heat and humidity. Fu's first attempt at extracting DNA from the fossil was, in fact, unsuccessful. However, after performing a CT scan to look for the cochlea, a spiral-shaped cavity in the inner ear known to be excellent at preserving DNA in humans, Fu and her team were able to extract nearly 150,000 fragments of mitochondrial DNA from the fossil. The researchers then aligned the ancient panda's fragmented mitochondrial DNA with that of modern-day pandas to retrieve the missing pieces from the ancient animal's genome. This led to the discovery of an ancient lineage of the beloved bear that split away from the main branch of pandas 183,000 years ago. They also found 18 genetic mutations that changed the structure of proteins in six of the ancient panda's mitochondrial genes. The researchers believe the mutations may have been the animal's natural response to the subtropical climate of its habitat. The use of mitochondrial DNA, however, provides an incomplete picture. Mitochondrial DNA is DNA found in the mitochondria of cells. Compared to nuclear DNA, which only has two copies in the nucleus, (mt)DNA is far easier to extract because it has 1,000 copies. However, (mt)DNA only contains genetic information passed on from the maternal side. Fu says they are planning to look into the fossil's nuclear DNA to help them find more information about the ancient animal, including if it had the same black-and-white coat of the modern-day beloved bear. "This really highlights that we need to sequence more DNA from ancient pandas to really capture how their genetic diversity has changed through time and how that relates to their current, much more restricted and fragmented habitat," Fu says. Pandas More Diverse Than Previously Thought The finding provides new evidence that giant pandas, one of the eight bear species in the world, are more diverse than previously thought. Modern-day pandas are situated only in three provinces in China: Gansu, Sichuan, and Shaanxi. Only 2,500 of this vulnerable species remain in conservation areas, making it difficult for researchers to create a comprehensive view of the panda's genetic history. However, the latest find was unearthed in Guangxi, where no giant pandas exist today. Earlier fossil discoveries have shown that pandas lived in various places in China, Myanmar, Vietnam, and even as far as Spain and Hungary. One fossil dating back to 8,000 years ago suggests that it belonged to another relative of the modern panda, an animal that branched off some 62,000 years ago. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Nearly 2,000 migrant children have been separated from their parents at the border thanks to the Trump administration's controversial policy on illegal border crossings. Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the administration would follow a "zero tolerance" policy, under which people who are caught entering the country illegally will face criminal prosecution and will be separated from their children. When the parents are prosecuted, and put in jail, children are taken away from their parents and placed into foster care or government custody. At least 1,995 children have been separated from 1,940 adults between April 18 and May 31. Because of this, many people are looking for ways to help the families. Here's what you can do to help them: Support Advocacy Organizations There are a number of organizations that support migrant parents who have been separated from their children. For example, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services is a Texas-based non-profit that offers free and affordable legal services to immigrant children and families. The primary focus of California-based Border Angels is to tackle issues related to the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project supports more than 1,000 unaccompanied children in detention centers across the state of South Texas. One can either donate to these organizations or personally get involved and sign up as a volunteer. Some of the other organizations are the American Civil Liberties Union, Young Center For Immigrant Children's Rights, Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, Kids In Need of Defense, and so on. Contact Your Elected Officials If you are looking to help the migrant families, pressurizing nearest elected representatives could also have a big impact. There are a number of bills and resolutions being promoted by senators to prevent family separations at the border, including the Senate Democrats' Keep Families Together Act, and the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act. Protest Against The Policy You can also become the voice of the thousands of migrant parents and children by protesting against the current immigration policies and government actions at the border by attending a vigil or rally. Families Belong Together organizes rallies and vigils in cities across the country to protest against the Trump administration's "tearing apart" of migrant families. By attending one of these events, you can raise awareness about what happens when children are taken away from their parents at the border. RAICES also allows you to sign up for an online toolkit to help spread the word about family separation. It details how one can organize and attend community events and raise awareness. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Post house UNIT has hired post producer Kirsty Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe began her career at animation house Passion Pictures before moving to The Mill London. Whilst at The Mill she produced the Halifax TV commercials featuring the Hanna-Barbera characters Top Cat and The Flintstones which involved 2D flash animation. She has worked on large scale VFX projects including the latest instalment for SSE directed by Academy directing duo Conkerco, which involved designing and modelling a new hero character. She has also worked with top ad directors including Martin De Thurah, Frederic Planchon, Dom & Nic and CANADA and with London ad agencies including Lucky Generals and adam&eveDDB. Most recently Ratcliffe co-produced for Nexus Studios, a 2.5minute CG packed, opening film for Googles 2018 Annual IO Developer Conference directed by FX Goby which involved a team of over 50 artists. On joining UNIT Ratcliffe said, I couldnt be more excited to have joined UNIT. The management team have an incredibly strong vision with great things happening now and on the horizon. Its also incredibly refreshing to work with a team that really empower women in advertising. UNIT Managing Director Daniel Sapiano said, I had the pleasure of working with Kirsty at The Mill and she is genuinely one of the best producers Ive worked with. Her knowledge, attitude and commitment is incredible and she is without doubt one of the nicest people you will meet. Kirsty is another great hire for Unit and I feel very proud that we are attracting people of her calibre because they share our vision. Share this story Louisiana district attorneys are illegally padding their budgets by using off-duty police officers to write profit-driven traffic tickets that can be dismissed for a fee, a legal watchdog said in an ethics complaint filed Tuesday. The Southern Poverty Law Center is asking the state's ethics board to investigate and order district attorneys to return millions of dollars they have generated through "diversion" traffic tickets. Standard tickets written by on-duty officers don't give drivers the option to "buy their way out of prosecution," the group's complaint says. "The State deserves more from its elected district attorneys than this unethical scheme to generate profits through the threat of prosecution," it says. +6 4 State Police troopers accused of claiming bogus hours, writing fraudulent tickets The Louisiana State Police on Monday arrested four troopers two current and two former following a major payroll-fraud investigation, accu The Alabama-based law center is accusing District Attorney Richard Ward's office of abusing its prosecutorial powers to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from drivers who pay $175 to get a ticket dismissed and avoid having it reported to the state Office of Motor Vehicles. The state's ethics code prohibits district attorneys from profiting off the threat of prosecution, the group says. "Ward is not alone," the complaint says. "District attorneys across the State openly violate Louisiana's ethics law by using their charging authority as a cudgel to extract millions of dollars each year from residents." Ward, whose jurisdiction includes West Baton Rouge Parish, didn't immediately respond to an email and phone call seeking comment. The law center named three other district attorneys as targets of its complaint: Joel Chaisson II, of St. Charles Parish; Gary Evans, of DeSoto Parish; and John DeRosier, Calcasieu Parish. The complaint says district attorneys collect far more than they spend on the program. For example, Chaisson's office spent about $30,000 on administrative expenses in 2017 and raised just over $1 million in program revenue last year, the report notes. 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 State trooper denies committing payroll fraud in rambling speech, calls his arrest 'crazy' A state trooper accused of claiming overtime for hours he spent at home offered an impassioned defense Thursday of his career in law enforceme Chaisson, however, described the complaint as "reckless and poorly researched" and denies his office profits off the ticket-writing program. "It's riddled with errors and has factually incorrect statements," he added. Chaisson said the law center failed to note that his office spent nearly $600,000 to compensate police officers for their work on the program. Although the program had a $408,000 surplus last year, Chaisson said his office is keeping that money in the bank to cover fluctuations in expenses. The law center says the program generates a "staggering" and increasing amount of money for district attorneys. The state legislative auditor has estimated that approximately 30 percent of district attorneys' budgets come from statewide pretrial diversion and other "charges for services," such as fines, fees and court costs, according to the complaint. "Sometimes prosecutors use their authority responsibly to divert low-level defendants out of the criminal justice system and into community-based treatment," the complaint says. "But, too often, Louisiana's district attorneys have been motivated by their desire to generate revenue rather than the attainment of justice." Kathleen Allen, the ethics board's administrator, said it can't comment on complaints unless it results in charges being filed. A team led by HNTB has been selected to plan and design two railroad stations that would be part of a passenger service linking Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The East Baton Rouge Parish Redevelopment Authority selected the engineering firm, which is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, and has an office in Baton Rouge. It has been involved in a number of local projects, including the proposed tram line that would connect downtown and LSU, a drainage master plan for the parish and a reorganization of the Department of Public Works. The company will lead a team made up of Fregonese Associates of Portland, Oregon, an urban planning firm that developed the FuturEBR land use plan; Manning Architects of New Orleans; Franklin Associates of Baton Rouge, a consulting company that handles community outreach; Stantec, a consulting firm with offices in Baton Rouge that handles transportation and urban design issues; and CNT, a Chicago firm that deals with housing issues. HNTB was one of four firms to propose handling the rail station planning and was the overwhelming choice of the selection committee, said Tara Titone, RDA director. The company will evaluate locations and develop a master plan for a terminus station downtown, near the former Entergy site at 1509 Government St., and in the health district in the Perkins-Essen-Bluebonnet corridor. The final report is due in December 2018. 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 Part of the request calls for consultants to come up with a way to pay for building and operating the terminals, including identifying opportunities for public-private partnerships. We will not put pen to paper until we meet with the community, said James Frye, project manager for HNTB. The RDA has budgeted $450,000 for HNTBs work from federal and local sources. The Southern Rail Commission awarded the city-parish $250,000 in federal funds in December, part of a $2.5 million distribution to local governments in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama earmarked for designing, building and improving train stations. The East Baton Rouge Parish Metro Council in August 2016 voted to invest $250,000 for a downtown rail station. Once consultants start sending in their plans, authorities will have a better idea how much the new station will cost. Estimates have placed the overall project to New Orleans, including improvements to bridges and crossings, at slightly more than $260 million. Weve got a great team, were going to turn over every sofa cushion and look for funding everywhere we can legally find it federal, state, local, Frye said. The proposed Baton Rouge to New Orleans rail line would include several other rail terminals, including one at Louis Armstrong International Airport, and locations in Gonzales and LaPlace. Four teenage inmates escaped from the state juvenile prison in Monroe over the weekend in a jailbreak so violent one guard was airlifted to Shreveport for medical treatment, state officials said Monday. The escape late Friday marked the second in a week and at least the fourth in 2018 from the Swanson Center for Youth, an understaffed facility that has become a cauldron of violence and dysfunction. The state Office of Juvenile Justice scrambled to bolster security at the prison's porous perimeter, which youths have repeatedly breached by overpowering guards and using dormitory mattresses to scale the exterior razor-wire fences. The agency said in a statement that those "enhancements" will be complete within the next two weeks, adding officials also are boosting mental and behavioral health programs to deter "criminogenic and violent behavior" among incarcerated teens. The injured employee, whose name was not released, remained in stable condition Monday, and all four of the escaped youths had been captured by Saturday morning, said Beth Touchet-Morgan, OJJ's deputy assistant secretary. But the latest escape raised new questions about the state's ability to secure its juvenile prisons troubled facilities that have seen alarming rates of turnover and staffing levels that at times have run afoul of federal laws intended to protect inmates from jailhouse assault. Swanson also was the site of an inmate riot less than a year ago in which inmates reportedly escaped from their dormitory, flipped a security desk and began punching guards in their faces. +3 New Orleans teen on lam after trio used trash can, mattress to escape juvenile detention center A New Orleans teen convicted of manslaughter remained on the loose Thursday, the subject of an intensifying search three days after he escaped from a Monroe facility during what authorities say was a premeditated jailbreak in which three youths used a trash can and a mattress to scale a razor-wire fence. The escape, which happened Monday night at the Swanson Center for Youth, came as the latest embarrassment for the state's Office of Juvenile Justice ... The repeated jailbreaks have concerned residents in the area surrounding Swanson, a 124-bed facility that sits along the Ouachita River on Monroe's south side. "People in the community are concerned," said John Sanders, a prosecutor in the 4th Judicial District Juvenile Court. "We've had good luck in getting (the inmates) back, but that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in the community." The situation at Swanson also has drawn the attention of state lawmakers, including Rep. Katrina Jackson, who said she intends to meet with juvenile justice officials "before it spirals out of control any further." "Nothing is perfect when you're housing juveniles," Jackson, D-Monroe, said in an interview. "But it's a concern of mine, and I believe it's the responsibility of OJJ to take all necessary steps to ensure this does not happen again." Violence, 'frequent fighters' spiking in Louisiana's understaffed juvenile lockups, audit finds The prevalence of violence has increased inside Louisiana's juvenile prisons in recent years, even as the number of teens behind bars has fall Touchet-Morgan, the OJJ official, declined to discuss the particulars of the Friday night escape, citing an ongoing State Police investigation and "the confidential nature of juvenile records." She said the state deployed a "Critical Incident Stress Debriefing" team over the weekend that remained on the prison's campus Monday. The investigation has not yet resulted in any criminal charges. 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 "Additional physical security changes have been implemented to assure that the campus is secure," Touchet-Morgan said. "Staff are essential to security within the facility, so as always we are continually hiring and training staff, particularly on the proper levels of supervision needed on campus and basic operating procedures concerning safety." A state law enforcement official said three of the escapees were 16 and one was 15. The official was not authorized to discuss the investigation and spoke on the condition of anonymity. Victoria Anderson said one of the 16-year-olds who escaped Swanson on Friday was her son, Latrell Anderson, who grew up in Shreveport. She said she did not know her son was on the loose until she called the prison on Saturday asking to speak with him. "My heart dropped," she said. "I wanted to say happy birthday to him." Victoria Anderson said she eventually spoke with a prison official who told her the escape involved four teens who assaulted a guard and took his keys. That description closely resembles an escape from Swanson earlier this month that also involved four youths. State records obtained by The Advocate show the June 9 escape happened after an assault in which four youths "assaulted staff, took the keys and took mattresses from the dormitory to be able to scale the fence and jump over." "Swanson is understaffed because no one wants to work there," the state law enforcement official said. "It's just not worth it to come to work everyday and be assaulted by these kids." A legislative audit release last week found that staffing levels at Swanson have been frequently out of compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, a 2003 law that requires a 1 to 8 staff to youth ratio during waking hours and a 1 to 16 staff to youth ratio during sleeping hours. The audit also cited a 53 percent increase in "fights per youth" in Louisiana's juvenile prisons between 2013 and 2017 a spike that has come even as the state has drastically reduced the number of juvenile offenders it houses behind bars. Juvenile justice officials have blamed budget cuts for their perennial lack of resources, a funding shortfall that also has prevented the Office of Juvenile Justice from opening a brand-new 72-bed youth prison that is sitting vacant in Avoyelles Parish. Another legislative audit released Monday warned that OJJ will have spent more than $900,000 "to maintain an empty building" if that facility has not opened by fiscal year 2022. The agency is facing a further proposed budget cut of $11 million that would cause OJJ to shutter five regional offices and eliminate 114 positions. Those proposed cuts come as the Louisiana's juvenile system prepares to absorb an influx of 17-year-old offenders who will no longer be tried as adults the result of the 2016 "raise the age" law. WASHINGTON Louisiana Republicans in Congress largely stand behind President Donald Trumps zero-tolerance immigration enforcement policy, even as a growing chorus of critics attack the White Houses prosecution decisions that have led to the separation of thousands of migrant families along the U.S.-Mexico border. Most of the Louisiana Republicans contacted Monday expressed regret over splitting up immigrant families a move triggered by the Trump administrations decision to criminally charge in federal courts all asylum-seeking adult parents caught entering the country illegally but the delegation largely backed the presidents crackdown on illegal immigration at the border. The growing number of children being taken from families, some of who are being housed in makeshift detention facilities or camps along the border, has created a crisis for the Trump administration. Democrats have railed against the policy as deeply immoral and even some usual Trump allies, including some evangelical Christian leaders, have denounced it. Family separation at our borders is cruel and goes against our values as a country, tweeted Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans. IT MUST STOP! The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to prosecute every person illegally coming across the border, a move thats broken with policies under former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush that handled many asylum-seeking families in civil courts. Because children cant be sent to federal jails when their parents are charged and because federal law and previous court decisions place strict limits on how long children and families can be held in immigration detention the Trump administrations no-exceptions approach means parents crossing into the country illegally to claim asylum will be split from their children. Immigrants can apply for asylum by appearing at an American port-of-entry, something that would avoid breaking federal law and should not result in family separations. But agents are also turning asylum-seekers away at some border crossings, citing a backlog of cases, according to multiple media reports. Most immigrants charged with first-time illegal entry to the U.S. a misdemeanor have their cases resolved within weeks and rarely receive additional jail time. Some are promptly deported but many file claims for asylum, arguing they face a genuine threat of violence in their home countries. +6 President Trump digs in amid growing outrage over immigration policy separating children, parents WASHINGTON (AP) Facing rising outrage from some Republicans as well as Democrats over the forced separation of migrant children and parents That prompts a lengthy review process, during which the Trump administration appears to insist on holding the asylum-seekers in immigration detention facilities rather than releasing them into the interior of the U.S. to be reunited with their children. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, R-Jefferson, in a speech Monday to the National Sheriffs Associations annual conference in New Orleans, voiced broad support for Trumps immigration policies. Scalise supports keeping families together by holding children with their parents in immigration detention centers, Lauren Fine, a Scalise spokeswoman, told The Advocate. Federal law and federal court decisions currently prohibit doing so for more than 20 days. Fine said Scalise will be meeting with Trump on Tuesday to discuss immigration policies and is working to pass legislation to change these broken laws. I support the zero-tolerance policy, said Sen. John Kennedy, R-Louisiana. I believe if you try to cross our border illegally, you should be prosecuted. Kennedy, though, said hed prefer to see the Trump administration lock up families together in immigration detention facilities as their asylum claims wind their way through the overloaded system of immigration courts, a process that can take months or even years. Kennedy acknowledged detaining families together might violate a 1997 consent decree known as the Flores settlement that forbids the government from holding children in immigration detention for more than 20 days, as well as a more recent federal court decision that extended the 20-day rule to families. 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 If somebody challenges us, then well litigate it, Kennedy said. Let the kids stay in the detention center (with their parents) until somebody challenges it. Fellow Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy called the situation on the border complicated and noted that federal officials and Border Patrol agents need to determine if children crossing the border with adults are safe and whether those claiming to be their parents are so in fact. Cassidy did not directly address whether he backs the Trump administrations decision to criminally prosecute every illegal border-crosser, the step thats triggered the growing number of family separations. But the senator said moving immigration cases much more quickly would obviate the need for prolonged detention. The solution is to quickly process families as a unit, Cassidy said. Ideally, this is done together with securing the border so that immigration laws can be better enforced. Rep. Ralph Abraham, R-Alto, said families shouldnt be separated including American families who have been torn apart by violent crimes perpetrated by illegal immigrants. If a family illegally enters this country together, they should be deported together; but providing tough border security measures like a wall will discourage people from facing the consequences of breaking our laws, said Abraham, adding that he hopes Congress this week will pass legislation to strengthen border protections and end some legal immigration programs, such as scaling back or ending the family reunification immigration program. Rep. Clay Higgins, a first-term Port Barre Republican whos made a hard-edged approach to illegal immigration a cornerstone of his political rhetoric, made no apologies for the separation of families coming into the U.S. and praised Trump for enforcing the law. Anyone subject to arrest is responsible for the collateral damage that their own family will necessarily endure, Higgins said in a statement. Illegal immigrants are by definition criminals. If an American citizen commits a crime, they will be separated from their children. There are more than 750,000 incarcerated Americans that are separated from their children. This is no different. Higgins also attempted to draw parallels between Trump's "zero tolerance" crackdown and former President Barack Obama's response to a wave of unaccompanied minors mostly teenagers who poured across the border in 2014 and 2015, triggering a crisis. Rep. Mike Johnson, R-Bossier, said reform of the countrys immigration system is "long overdue" and added that he hoped for bipartisan consensus something thats been elusive for years on immigration issues in Congress to overhaul the system. Johnson didnt answer whether he embraced Trumps "zero tolerance criminal prosecutions of all those caught entering the country illegally but expressed alarm about the worsening situation on the border and the mounting challenge of protecting arriving children from human traffickers. Every parent understands the heartbreak of what is happening at our Southern border, and this highlights the many reasons we must enforce our immigration statutes and uphold the rule of law, Johnson said. We are facing a growing crisis, with a lack of adequate resources and facilities to house the masses of illegal immigrants coming through the border. Spokespeople for U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, didnt respond to an email Monday seeking comment on the policy. In a video posted to his Facebook page last week, Graves endorsed tough prosecutions of those entering the country illegally and tighter rules for asylum-seekers but didnt address the issue of family separations. We need to enforce the law, Graves said. If people are coming here illegally, they need to be sent back, they need to be held accountable. We need to disincentivize illegal immigration. Louisiana taxpayers ponied up nearly $10 million to replace a system that was delivering lead-laden drinking water in the antebellum town of St. Joseph. The water systems responsibility ends at delivering sparkling clean drinking water to a customers house. Its up to the homeowners to ensure that the water remains clean from meter to tap. But thats proving problematic for many of the elderly and low-income residents living in the towns 500 structures, most of which were built before the 1970s when lead pipes and lead solder were commonly used. 'Most distressed' drinking water systems? Governor's panel identifies 10 to start overhaul Out of the hundreds of Louisianas dysfunctional drinking water systems, the governors kitchen cabinet has found the 10 worst on which they p When state tests found dangerous levels of lead, which causes brain damage, and copper in 2016, Gov. John Bel Edwards shutdown the 90-year-old water system serving the small northeast Louisiana town. It took a little over a year and millions of dollars to replace the distribution pipes, pumps and filters. During that time the thousand residents drank almost as much bottled water as the people displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The new system opened in March, but many of St. Josephs homeowners are still getting dangerous water inside their homes because of their structures corroded pipes. The state doesnt pay for those repairs and many homeowners cant pay for it themselves, said Janie Jones, president of the Council on Policy & Social Impact, based in Washington, D.C. St. Joseph has an unemployment rate hovering around 12 percent roughly three times higher than the state average and median family income of about $29,000 more than 40 percent below the states. +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 We suspect that about 10 percent cant afford it on their own, and will need help of some kind, Jones said. St. Joseph is in the recovery phase. We need get in and help get the clean water into the homes. She was crisis manager in Ferguson, Mo., coordinating meetings between the U.S. Justice Department, city hall and the family of the young man killed by police. The shooting launched weeks of riots and protests. She also worked in Flint, Michigan, where the discovery of lead in the drinking water began a national dialogue on problems with aging infrastructure. Jones became involved with St. Joseph because her mother lives in nearby Waterproof. She knew of the towns decades-old problems with a water system frequently stressed by leaks and lack of adequate pressure. 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 Generally, public dollars cant be used to help private homeowners purchase new appliances and replace their corroded pipes. +3 Rural water systems in Louisiana struggle to keep the taps flowing When temperatures in south Louisiana hit the teens in January, it caused water pressure nightmares and boil advisories for dozens of small wat Of the states 1,300 drinking water systems, about half operate infrastructure that is more than a half century old. Jones said St. Josephs should offer a chance to develop procedures that can be used in the future. The first step is to count how many homes, schools and businesses still have dangerous water and how many can afford to make the necessary repairs. The St. Joseph Disaster Relief & Research Task Force, of which Jones is a part, is systemically taking water samples from bathrooms and kitchens to send to Virginia Tech for analysis. The Virginia Tech team is headed by Marc Edwards, the environmental engineer who first identified lead in the water systems in Flint. The group has been holding town hall meetings in St. Joseph, asking home and business owners to detail on a three-page form the age of the structure and its plumbing, the types of damages noticed, any past repairs, insurance available and ability to pay. U.S. Army Lt. General (Ret.) Russel Honore, another member of relief task force, says one indicator is the 45 requests for new hot water heaters to replace those that were damaged from the corrosive water. After a Rotary Club speech in Baton Rouge last week, a member of the audience volunteered to pay the roughly $400 for a new water heater. That leaves me with 44 more to find, Honore said. Hes relying on donations from businesses, the religious community, and individuals. The bigger issue is getting the water heaters installed in a town without plumbers. Hes talking with unions in hopes finding volunteer plumbers. At one point the group looked at seeking a declaration that would open the government grants and loans used to help homeowners recover from natural disasters, he said. But St. Joseph and the other troubled water systems are manmade disasters caused by a failure of local officials to follow regulations and of state officials to enforce those regulations. Its a manmade disaster, no question, but that doesnt fall under the guidelines that releases aid for hurricanes and floods, Honore said. Without question, we are going to need legislation, regular annual audits, and regular testing. Protestors clash with law enforcement outside the Ernest Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, La. Monday, June 18, 2018 after U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III spoke at the National Sheriffs' Association Opening Session. Protestors were against the detainment and separation of immigrant children from the parents on the U.S. Border. The National Sheriffs' Association (NSA) is a trade organization of law enforcement professionals representing more than 3,000 elected sheriffs across the nation. The organization also lobbies before the United States Congress, the White House, and the various federal agencies about political issues and for funding law enforcement. Marty Chabert, center, asks a question Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2017, of a consultant assisting in the search by the Louisiana Board of Regents for a commissioner of higher education to replace Joseph Rallo, who is retiring. At right is Robert Levy, chairman of the regents' search committee and, at left, Darren Mire, who like Chabert is on the six-member search panel, and Rallo. Gov. John Bel Edwards opened the latest special legislative session the third this year and seventh since he took office in 2016 by promising to be brief, because, really, what more is there to say? And indeed, he largely skipped over the numbers that everyone involved knows well by now. But Edwards still issued a not-so-brief plea to lawmakers to finally put aside their political differences and come up with a plan to account for temporary tax revenue that disappears at the end of the month, in a Monday afternoon speech that focused indirectly but distinctly on what he and many others see as political gamesmanship from his adversaries. There wasnt much he hasnt said before, although he did choose a few different points of emphasis. +11 Legislature begins third special session of 2018 with one more shot at preventing cuts to state services The Louisiana Legislature has begun its third special session of the year a last-ditch attempt to address the $650 million budget gap the st Edwards urged lawmakers to turn a deaf ear to out of state interest groups even as green-shirted supporters of the Koch Brothers-backed Americans For Prosperity crowded the Capitol. AFP has been pressuring conservative lawmakers to hold the line on taxes, although most of them have indicated theyd support retaining part of the expiring penny sales tax. He sought to counter the widespread notion backed up by some House Republicans who are willing to deal in good faith and frustrated with their own leadership that keeping the Democratic governor from getting the full amount money hes seeking would amount to a win. If politics prevails and this session collapses the way the last couple of sessions have, Edwards argued, I wont be the winner. Speaker (Taylor) Barras will not win. President (John) Alario will not win. The House wont win. The Senate wont win. Republicans wont win. Nor will Democrats. And he appealed not just to lawmakers sense of obligation, but the reality of burnout. I understand that everyone is tired and ready to go home, Edwards said. After meeting with so many of you individually, and in small groups over the past couple of weeks, I appreciate the fact that you are ready to see your families, return to your businesses and tend to your personal obligations." More important, he suggested, is their constituents fatigue with the never-ending debate. But friends, lets not fool ourselves - if you think were frustrated, just think about how frustrated the people of Louisiana are by now. For two years, they have been waiting for solutions, waiting for the Legislature to act, Edwards said. Would even Edwards harshest critics disagree with that? #Daejang-dong Key figure in land development corruption scandal heads home from U.S. for probe A key figure at the center of an escalating land development corruption scandal was to arrive in South Korea this week for questioning over his suspected role in bribing influentia... #football Pohang Steelers reach AFC Champions League semifinals Pohang Steelers reached the semifinals of the top Asian club football tournament with a 3-0 victory over Nagoya Grampus on Sunday. Lim Sang-hyub grabbed a brace and Lee Seung-mo... Monday 05 September, 2016 Reliable information reaching Biafra writers desk has it that the life of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Indi... President Trump may be on the wrong side politically and emotionally of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents. But on the mega-issuethe Third World invasion of the Westhe is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future It is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart, says former first lady Laura Bush of the Trump administration policy of zero tolerance, under which the children of illegal migrants are being detained apart from their parents. Disgraceful, adds Dr. Franklin Graham. We need to be a country that governs with a heart, says first lady Melania Trump. No one likes this policy, says White House aide Kellyanne Conway, even the president wants this to end. And so it shallgiven the universal denunciations and photos of sobbing children being pulled from parents. Yet striking down the policy will leave Americas immigration crisis still unresolved. Consider. Since 2016, some 110,000 children have entered the U.S. illegally and been released, along with 200,000 Central American families caught sneaking across the border. Reflecting its frustration, the White House press office declared: We cant deport them, we cant separate them, we cant detain them, we cant prosecute them. What (the Democrats) want is a radical open-border policy that lets everyone out into the interior of this country with virtually no documentation whatsoever. Where many Americans see illegal intruders, Democrats see future voters. And with 11,000 kids of illegal immigrants in custody and 250 more arriving every day, we could have 30,000 in custody by summers end. The existential question, however, thus remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization? The U.S. Hispanic population, already estimated at nearly 60 million, is predicted to exceed 100 million by 2050, just 32 years away. And Europes southern border is more imperiled than ours. A week ago, the new populist regime in Rome refused to allow a boat full of migrants from Libya to land in Sicily. Malta also turned them away. After a voyage of almost a week and 1,000 miles, 630 migrants were landed in Valencia, Spain. Why did Italy reject them? Under EU law, migrants apply for asylum in the country where they first enter Europe. This burdens Italy and Greece where the asylum-seekers have been arriving for years. Of the landing in Spain, Italys interior minister Matteo Salvini, a leader of the populist League party, chortled: I thank the Spanish government. I hope they take in the other 66,629 refugees (inside Italy). We will not be offended if the French follow the Spanish, the Portuguese and Maltese, we will be the happiest people on earth. If the migrants boats of the Med are redirected to Spanish ports, one suspects that the Spanish people will soon become as unwelcoming as many other peoples in Europe. And President Trump is not backing down. Monday he tweeted: The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture! Whatever European leaders may think of him, many Europeans are moving in President Trumps direction, toward more restrictions on immigration. In Germany, a political crisis is percolating. The Bavarian-based CSU, longtime coalition partner of Chancellor Angela Merkels CDU, is now talking divorce if Chancellor Merkel does not toughen German policy. Chancellor Merkel has never fully recovered from the nationalist backlash against the million migrants she allowed in from Syrias civil war. A New Years Eve rampage in Cologne, featuring wilding attacks on German girls by Arabs and Muslims, cost her dearly. Among the reasons Bavarians are pulling away from Berlin is that, being in the south of Germany, Bavaria is a primary point of entry. Virtually every one of the populist parties of Europe, especially of the right, have arisen to contest or to seize power by riding the issue of mass migration from Africa and the Middle East. Yet the progressives adamantly refuse to act, apparently paralyzed by a belief that restricting the free movement of peoples from foreign lands violates one of the great commandments of liberal democracy. We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western suicide. If Europe does not act, its future is predictable. The population of Africa, right across the Med, is anticipated to climb to 2.5 billion by midcentury. And by 2100, Africa will be home half of all the people of the planet. If but a tiny fraction of the African and Middle Eastern population decides to cross the Mediterranean to occupy the emptying towns and villages of an aging and dying continent, who and what will stop them? President Trump may be on the wrong side politically and emotionally of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents. But on the mega-issuethe Third World invasion of the Westhe is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future. Republished with gracious permission from Mr. Buchanan (June 2018). The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politicswe approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Editorial Board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, June 19, 2018 08:05 1216 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e9a14b5 4 Editorial #Editorial,airline-safety,aviation,flight,safety,European-Union Free The decision of the European Commission and the chair of the European Unions Air Safety Committee last week to remove all Indonesian carriers from a decade-long EU airline blacklist is a high commendation for the capabilities of domestic aviation regulators in providing adequate safety oversight and surveillance over domestic airlines. The ban on Indonesian airlines flying to Europe was lifted after the European Aviation Safety Agency thoroughly assessed late last month the countrys air safety standards against global safety standards, notably those promulgated by the International Civil Aviation Organization. The assessment explicitly acknowledged the competence of our civil aviation regulatory body, especially its Air Safety Certification Directorate, which is in charge of issuing pilot licenses, aircraft operation certificates for new airlines and safety approvals, a mechanism that can make or break an airline. We should magnanimously admit that deeply rooted in past issues of our air safety standards had been the integrity and technical competence of the Air Safety Certification Directorate, as shown by the investigation into the string of airplane accidents that revealed great failings in maintenance, operational, certification and administrative standards. The impressive improvements in aviation safety standards should also be attributed to domestic airlines that have consistently put safety, not competitiveness, first and foremost in their business operations. Certainly, the EUs move would not immediately mean bigger business opportunities for our national carriers to enter the European market, where competition is fierce between all major international airlines. The immediate and greatest benefit would rather be in the lower rates for insurance premiums for domestic airplanes and opportunities for carriers to join operational alliances with five-star airlines in other countries. Yet more meaningful will be the positive impact on tourism because tourists covered by European insurance companies will be allowed to use Indonesian airlines both overseas and within the country. The international recognition of our air safety standards should be a great boon to the domestic airline industry and allow it to grow faster. Most analysts predict that the country will grow steadily to become one of the worlds 10 largest aviation markets within the next decade in terms of flights per day across the vast archipelago. With a population of over 260 million and a rising middle class, Indonesians are becoming more eager than ever to fly. As an archipelago of 17,000 islands, 5,200 kilometers across from east to west and nearly 2,000 km from north to south, this is a country that was really made for air transportation. Aviation is big business in Indonesia today. But the potential is much bigger. Tony Tyler, chief of the International Air Transport Association, said during an aviation day celebration in Jakarta in March 2015, that by 2034 Indonesia is expected to be the sixth-largest market for air travel. By then some 270 million passengers are expected to fly to, from and within the country. That will be more than three times the size of the 2015 market. The artist Christo on Monday unveiled 7,506 coloured barrels floating on a lake in central London, a puzzling installation designed to stimulate debate as much as the senses. "The London Mastaba" on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, a trapezium-shaped work weighing 600 tonnes, was launched with an air of mystery by the Bulgarian-born US artist. Twenty meters high, 30 meters wide and 40 meters long, some may see the metal barrels and wonder if there is an environmental message, thinking of barrels of oil in the heart of one of London's green lungs. Visible from several hundred metres away, others will see a prism, giant pixels, or a simple geometric creation. However, the work is open to all interpretations and comes with no message attached, said its 83-year-old creator. "There are no messages: there is something in it to discover yourself. I cannot direct you. You should develop your senses," he said. Christo is known for his contemporary artworks including "The Pont Neuf Wrapped" (1985), which involved wrapping the oldest bridge in Paris in polyamide fabric, and "Wrapped Reichstag" (1995), a similar project on the parliament in Berlin. "It's created an enormous invitation, like a stairway to the sky," said the artist, on the banks of the lake popular with swans, ducks and tourists on pedalos. Christo's first major open-air art installation in Britain is in the shape of a mastaba, a type of ancient Egyptian tomb. The floating platform is held in place with anchors. Red with a white candy stripe on the sides, and blue, mauve and red on the ends, the barrels are a striking contrast with the lakeside surroundings. "The colors will transform with the changes in the light and its reflection on the Serpentine lake will be like an abstract painting," said Christo. Read also: Artist buried for three days under busy Australian road - 'What in the world does it mean?' - The artist has long appreciated the low cost and aesthetic appeal of working with barrels. In 1962, having fled communist Bulgaria, he blocked off a Paris street with a wall of them, in response to the Berlin Wall. More recently, he created a wall of 13,000 barrels in Oberhausen in Germany. Construction on "The London Mastaba", financed by the artist himself, started on April 3. It will stay in place until September 23, when it will be taken down and recycled. The artwork is already drawing astonished reactions in Hyde Park. "It's very modern, but this place is nature and historical. I don't like it here," said Turkish tourist Yasmin Koc Ozcengel, 46. Another onlooker, Anna Andronova, said: "It's good because if it was less brave in its shape and volume it would be less stunning." Sheila Steffenson, 58, an American living in London, said: "I'm sitting here pondering what in the world does it mean... if it means anything. "I'm just not really sure how I feel about it. Maybe it's a message about pollution. Who knows?" The easing of China's one-child policy was a godsend to Zhang Yinzhe and his wife Xu Mengsha, who had decided they wanted to use in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to freeze an embryo in the hope of one day having a second child. But most IVF procedures are restricted in China to couples who are infertile, and surging demand at overwhelmed reproductive clinics since the policy was relaxed two years ago would anyway have meant months of waiting. So the Beijing couple flew to Thailand, part of a wave of Chinese spilling overseas into Southeast Asia, the United States, and elsewhere in a test-tube baby boom. "There is an old saying in China: a son and daughter complete the family," said Zhang, a 31-year-old airline pilot. Zhang spoke after a consultation at Bangkok's Piyavate Hospital, its walls festooned with Mandarin-language posters on IVF as other Chinese patients waited their turn. Definitive numbers on China's share of the assisted-reproduction tourism sector are unclear, but its spending was estimated by the state-linked Qianzhan Industry Research Institute to have grown 22 percent annually to $1.4 billion in 2017. Further rapid growth is expected. Overseas clinics are adding Mandarin-speaking staff, Chinese-language websites, and increasingly marketing to Chinese seeking a second or even third child. Chinese figures estimate that 90 million women became eligible for another child once the family-planning policy was relaxed, and more second children were delivered last year than first-borns. But Chinese couples are increasing having children later, past their reproductive primes, and may require help from science. Around 12 percent of the childbearing population are unable to conceive naturally, according to Chinese studies, yet China only has about 400 licensed IVF clinics, where waiting lists can approach one year. Read also: Poor diet delays pregnancy, curbs fertility: Study - Fertile ground - IVF involves combining egg and sperm in a lab and implanting any viable embryos into the womb. The one-child policy caused birth rates to plummet, and China eased it to ensure a big enough future workforce to support its fast-aging population. But it still bans or restricts fertility options like egg donations, surrogate motherhood, gender selection, and freezing embryos for later use partly over fears that opening the floodgates could spark a population explosion. Only around 500,000 Chinese IVF procedures took place in 2016, health officials estimate, far short of what fertility doctors say is required. "There is big demand in China, but we can't handle it here," said Ri-Cheng Chian, director of reproductive medicine at Shanghais 10th People's Hospital. So Chinese are booking tickets to Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and even Russia. IVF treatments cost around 30,000 yuan ($4,700) in China, but can be several times that abroad, where many Chinese feel they can find higher-quality care. Zhang, the pilot, wants IVF partly to screen for genetic defects, something restricted at home. "That's a lot of money for a Chinese family but compared to the health of my next generation, I should spend it," he said. Chartree Saenghiranwatana, a fertility specialist at Piyavate, said the clinic has been "getting increasing demand from Chinese patients the past year or two", and is recruiting Mandarin-speaking doctors and nurses. Some Thai clinics say up to 80 percent of their customers are Chinese. Read also: Chinese baby born four years after parents' death in car crash - Baby bump - "A new industrial chain is forming, for reproduction, in Southeast Asia," said Wei Siang Yu, the Singaporean founder and chairman of Borderless Health Group (BHG). BHG has created a video-conferencing platform on which Chinese patients can consult fertility experts around the world, aided by Mandarin-speaking interpreters. BHG is also establishing sperm and egg banks in countries including Thailand, Australia and the United States, primarily for Chinese clients, complete with a phone app allowing them to monitor their "fertility assets" almost like a bank account. Yu said two years ago Chinese patients placed sixth or seventh in the ranks of foreign patients coming to Thailand for medical tourism, but will be the largest group this year. Besides infertility or the desire for a larger family, the Chinese preference for male heirs sends some couples abroad in search of clinics that will perform gender screening -- though that is technically illegal in most countries -- and Chinese LGBT couples are also packing their bags. Li Na, who is from central China, went through expensive IVF procedures in Shanghai, Hong Kong and the United States. All failed. But she and her husband hit the jackpot in Thailand, and now have twin girls through a surrogate mother there and a boy through IVF. Li, 41, has parlayed the experience into a side career as a consultant to other Chinese couples seeking the same joy she felt. "I couldnt stop crying when I flew down to Thailand to pick them up," Li said. "It was hard to believe they were mine." A two-cornered military dress hat thought to have belonged to Napoleon went for 350,000 euros ($406,000) at auction on Monday, the latest sale to highlight the boundless appetite for all things associated with the emperor. The final price far exceeded the expected 30,000 to 40,000 euros for the distinctive "bicorne" hat, which Napoleon wore sideways -- rather than with points at the front and back -- so he could easily be spotted on the battlefield. The identify of the buyer was not disclosed. "There's a sort of craze going on with historical souvenirs, in particular those from Napoleon," Etienne De Baecque, the auctioneer leading the sale in the eastern city of Lyon, told AFP. Yet despite details that suggest the hat is one of about 120 the "Little Corsican" went through during his 15 years in power, there is no conclusive proof it belonged to him. Most of them were made by the French hatmakers Poupard in black felted beaver fur, though only a handful of confirmed examples still exist. "There are some distinctive elements: Napoleon hated the internal band so he always had it removed," as is the case with the model sold Monday, De Baecque said. Read also: Is it Napoleon's? Battlefield hat for sale in France It has long been attributed to the emperor, with records confirming its ownership since a Dutch captain took it as a war trophy after the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The auction house said the hat was sold with the box used for its display at the World Expo in Brussels in 1897. It had passed down through the captain's family until the end of the last century, when it was sold to a French collector. Monday's sale still fell short of the 1.9 million euros paid for a Napoleon bicorne four years ago -- part of a prestigious collection auctioned off by Monaco's royal family -- to the owner of the South Korean food and agriculture giant Harim. Demand for all things Napoleon has often sent prices spiralling well above estimates. Last November a fragile gold laurel leaf from the crown made for Napoleon's coronation in 1804, weighing just 10 grams, was sold for 625,000 euros. Social Creature, a debut by Tara Isabella Burton, depicts the lives of social media-dwelling, career climbing/aspiring millennials. Set in New York and involving a murder, the book might seem like a hybrid of Gossip Girl and Gone Girl at a glance, but Burton makes the story work in many layers. A writer with a doctorate degree in theology, Burton has authored several short stories and various pieces on religion and culture. The Jakarta Post talks with Tara Isabella Burton about the inspiration and meaning behind the story and its characters. What drove you to write Social Creature? I wanted to explore the myriad and diverse ways that we create our own identities, and, in particular, the way in which women's relationships with other women reflect the complicated dynamic of self-creation. Do we want to be someone else, to become someone else, to define ourselves in opposition to someone else? Social Creature is very much a female response-text to Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, one that centers the toxic and mutually obsessive relationship of the lead characters. I didn't want to make it too straightforward -- whether Louise or Lavinia was the "villain". They're both deeply flawed human beings looking for their own identity in one another. Do you feel that we are too immersed in social media? I don't, actually! I think as human beings we're inherently social creatures (sorry!), and that we try to create our own identities in a variety of ways -- from the books we tell people we read to the clothes we wear to how we do our hair. Social media is just one way among many that we create our personae, and to me it's a very fascinating and rich method. But I don't think the internet has changed us as human beings. Fundamentally, we are performers and storytellers. The internet just lets us do that more effectively, and without being grounded in our physical bodies or (as Louise shows us) actual physical reality. Lavinia undoubtedly has her own gravitas, with respect to other characters. What inspired you to write her? Is it bad if I say Lavinia is something of a self-portrait? I mean -- she's awful, but I find her worst qualities to be ones I relate to. I, too, am often very insecure, and cover it up by adopting this highly performative, highly "bohemian" persona -- certainly, I dress a lot like Lavinia does in real life. I wanted to contend with my own flaws, very sincerely, and write the worst of myself into a character as a way of taking a long, hard, look at myself. Lavinia is selfish, sure, and self-obsessed, and a narcissist, but ultimately she's not a malignant person. She's governed by fear -- fear of losing love -- and I think (or hope) that makes her very relatable. She draws people like Mimi and Louise into her orbit because she is so desperate for approval of others -- she's like a kid saying, "Look at me! I can slide down the slide without hands!" And ultimately she pushes them away because she punishes them for loving her: she doesn't love herself, and so she doesn't trust anyone who shows her affection. What is one takeaway from the book that is most personal to you? There's that one line -- we cannot be known and loved at the same time. That's what I wanted to get at with this book. The fear that people who come to truly know us will no longer love us, and the "impostor" syndrome that comes along with that. For Louise, that struggle and that ordeal is very literal: the more she does to preserve the love and the affection of those around us, the more, and darker, secrets she ends up having to keep. She is an extreme example but for me the book is always about that fear: and about the impostor syndrome that lives within us all Which authors did you look up to when writing this book? So of course Patricia Highsmith and Daphne Du Maurier are the obvious models here -- I wanted to write a Gothic, toxic, lush thriller. But I was also very consciously inspired by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment -- another story about how a terrible crime proves spiritually corrosive from within. Of course Raskolnikov's suffering and guilt was a direct model on Louise's. And I'm also deeply influenced by the subtle psychological novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton -- two great chronicles of New York and the literati of another age. How people subtly maneuver and manipulate and attack one another. Also, Lawrence Durrell, in his Alexandria Novels, has such a great sense of place -- creating an oppressive presence. I wanted to do that for New York. And, for poems, I love how Walt Whitman used language to create a distinctively "American" voice. When I was trying to figure out how to combine the lyricism of the books I loved with the facts of social media and incorporating modern text-speak into a novel, I looked for Whitman for inspiration in how to blend the modern and the poetic. Youve written short fiction. What were the challenges of writing a novel? How was it different? I much prefer writing novels. I like to spend extended periods of time with characters, really get to know them inside out, and short fiction doesn't necessarily allow me to do that -- although I do have a short story coming out in Granta this August that I'm very excited about. But in general, I need to get to know characters well, and novels gives the time and space with which to do that. You studied theology and in a 2013 piece for The Atlantic, you encouraged people to study it too to understand history 'from within'. What about personal relationships? And how did your studies influence your writing? I did my doctorate in theology, yes. I'm interested in people's search for meaning, and people's hunger for some kind of spiritual order in their lives. And my faith -- I'm an Episcopalian Christian -- does absolutely inform my writing. Much of the second half of the book is about Louise dealing with the absence of that -- she's compromised herself morally, and no lightning bolt has come down from heaven to strike her down, and she has to deal, psychologically, with what that means. What does that mean to live in a world where moral justice isn't automatically forthcoming, when you *can* get away with doing some unspeakable things? Louise's sense of guilt and emptiness is, I believe, what causes her to act erratically -- she wants to get caught, because the idea of living in a world where there's nobody there to catch you is even more terrifying than being "found out". (wng) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Winny Tang (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, June 19 2018 State-owned company Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) is eyeing more collaboration with homegrown ride-hailing app Go-Jek, as it sees big potential to disburse microloans for the latters food merchants. BRI institutional relations director Sis Apik Wijayanto said the lender aimed to reach its target for the governments microcredit program (KUR) disbursement of Rp 79.7 trillion (US$5.6 billion) this year. The lender was optimistic that it would achieve its target, partly by partnering with Go-Jek. As of the first quarter of this year, the countrys largest micro lender has disbursed KUR totaling Rp 22.3 trillion to 1.1 million debtors, or equal to 28.1 percent of this years target. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Nina Larson (Agence France-Presse) Geneva Tue, June 19, 2018 11:22 1216 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e9ac024 2 World Vatican,Pope-Francis,religion,Catholicism,Christians,Protestant-Reformation,peace Free Pope Francis's visit to Geneva, a center of Protestantism, expresses "Christian unity", the World Council of Churches chief told AFP, insisting the pontiff's message of love and inclusion speaks across denominations. The 81-year-old Argentine will visit the City of Calvin on Thursday at the invitation of the global inter-church organisation, which represents some 350 Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican churches with around 500 million believers among them. "It is a very important decision he made when he accepted the invitation. (It) says that the Roman Catholic Church has the same agenda as these other churches," said WCC chief Olav Fykse Tveit, a Norwegian Lutheran pastor. "It is Christian unity in practice," he added, in an interview ahead of the pope's visit to help celebrate the WCC's 70th anniversary. The trip, he said, was "a sign of hope that even quite deep conflicts and divisions can be overcome through dialogue, through taking one and other seriously." Historically, divisions between the Catholic Church and the Protestant confessions have indeed run deep. The dissenting movement launched by Martin Luther more than 500 years ago and its strict interpretation engrained in Geneva by John Calvin in the mid-16th century launched centuries of often bloody divisions in Europe. - 'More united' - Over the WCC's 70 years, "we definitely see a lot of changes towards openness," Fykse Tveit said, hailing that the time of wars between Christians appears to be over. He acknowledged though that "it is not difficult to find issues that are still dividing Christians," pointing to attitudes towards "human sexuality and family life". But he said "there is a kind of momentum for being more united, and the pope's visit is a sign of that". All Christians shared a common identity as believers, and should be able to rally around the pope's messages of love, tolerance, justice and peace, he said. "I think that many Christians, whether they are Catholics or not, see him as a strong voice for what we want to say as Christians today." "We want to ask for justice, work for peace, and give a message of the love of God, of inclusiveness, of giving hope to those who need it." "In that sense, he speaks for all Christians," he said. Asked about Catholic doctrine that continues to refer to Protestant denominations as "religious communities" rather than "churches", Fykse Tveit insisted that "in practice, we work together as churches". While there is generally a growing respect and understanding among Christians, the Lutheran pastor warned that a rival trend was also apparent. "There is some momentum for being more divided," he said, pointing to disagreements over hot-button issues such as homosexuality and abortion, but also lamenting a growing tendency to mix politics and religion. - Struggle for Christianity's soul - "There is a kind of struggle for the soul of Christianity," he said. He pointed in particular to the politicisation of Christianity in the United States, where faith has "become a dividing issue", with disagreements over which political camp Christians should choose. While the WCC does not give Christians guidance on political affiliation, the organisation does insist on the obligation to adhere to true Christian values, Fykse Tveit said. In the US, the organisation stresses that "all human beings are created equal in the image of God," he said, insisting that all racism is therefore "a basic threat to our Christian faith". Peacemaking in global crises has been one of WCC's main missions for the past 70 years. The group has helped counter apartheid in South Africa, pushed for openness in Eastern Europe under Communism, and backed inter-faith dialogue in places like Iraq. The organisation is currently promoting dialogue through churches in North Korea, and a delegation from the country is due in Geneva for the pope's visit. Religion today is increasingly on the global agenda, Fykse Tveit said, lamenting though that it is mainly discussed as a problem. The WCC, he said, had an important role to play in "proving that religion can contribute to positive developments towards peace, justice and human dignity". Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Tue, June 19, 2018 15:15 1216 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e9b6d04 1 City attack,South-Tangerang,teenagers,arrest Free Three teenagers reportedly attacked 19-year-old Randi Saptianto in Ciputat, South Tangerang, Banten, on Saturday night for glaring at them. South Tangerang Police officers arrested the teenagers, who also allegedly damaged the victims motorcycle. The victim met with two of the suspects. They glared at each other and started to verbally taunt each other, South Tangerang Police criminal investigation director Adj. Comr. Alexander Yurikho said on Tuesday, as reported by kompas.com. He said the victim was attacked while waiting for his girlfriend at a fast-food restaurant. After taunting each other, one of the suspects, VR, 18, left while his friend, AR, 16, stayed with the victim. VR then reportedly returned with the third suspect, IS, 19, and the three suspects attacked the victim, wounding him. One of the suspects brought a clurit [small sickle] and stabbed the victim and punched him. The victim sustained wounds on the back of his head and on his left hip, he said. He said the police were still reconstructing the incident. The suspects have been charged under Article 170 of the Criminal Code on mob violence, which could see them sent to prison for up to five years. (ami) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Agnes Anya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Wed, June 20 2018 Establishing good communications with religious leaders is important for peacekeeping, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said at a recent United Nations meeting. Retno and her Finnish counterpart Timo Soini served as co-hosts of a meeting of the UN Secretary-Generals High-Level Advisory Board on Mediation (HLAB-M) in Helsinki on Monday. In her opening speech, Retno said conflicts could be prevented and peace could be created or maintained by involving religious leaders in the regions in question. It is important to improve communication with the people and their religious leaders to maintain the value of tolerance, she said according to a ministry statement released on Tuesday. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Reuters) Washington Tue, June 19, 2018 08:13 1216 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e9a17d9 2 World CIA,US,secrecy-policy,child-pornography,crime Free U.S. federal prosecutors on Monday charged a former CIA employee with leaking classified national defense information to an unnamed organization that publicly disseminates such data, as well as with child pornography offenses. Joshua Schulte, a New York City resident, was charged in a 13-count superseding indictment connected to alleged theft of classified information from the CIA, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York said in a statement with U.S. Justice Department and FBI officials. The charges, which carry combined maximum prison sentences of 130 years, also include criminal copyright infringement, the statement said. Schulte, 29, was arrested in August 2017 on charges relating to his possession of some 10,000 images and videos of child pornography, after the FBI searched his personal computer, the statement said. "As alleged, Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims. As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of classified information," FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge William Sweeney Jr. said in the statement. The charging documents say Schulte is accused of sending the classified data to "an organization that purports to publicly disseminate classified, sensitive and confidential information," referred to as "Organization-1." WikiLeaks has published large amounts of secret information, including U.S. State Department diplomatic cables and emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, campaign manager for 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. There was no immediate response from WikiLeaks to a request for comment. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Hanoi Tue, June 19, 2018 14:48 1216 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e9b53be 2 SE Asia Vietnam,America,Tourist,violation,demonstration Free An American student held in Vietnam for "causing public disorder" at violent protests this month has appeared on state television to say he regrets breaking the law and will stay away from future rallies. William Nguyen was detained on June 10 in Ho Chi Minh City after attending mass demonstrations against proposed special economic zones that would grant investors 99-year leases. Video footage shows the Texas-born 32-year-old with a bleeding head wound being dragged by plainclothes men through the streets before being taken into custody. Police have launched an investigation into Nguyen for "causing public disorder" and have accused him of trying to damage a fence and flip over police vehicles on the main road to the airport. Nguyen, a Yale graduate, appeared on television on Monday night to say he broke the law. "I understand that my acts violated (the law)... I regret that I caused trouble for people heading to the airport. I blocked traffic and caused trouble to my family and friends," Nguyen said in Vietnamese on HTV in footage provided by city police. "I will not join any anti-state activities any more," added Nguyen, who was arrested while passing through Vietnam en route to Singapore where he was set to receive a master's degree next month. Major protests in several cities turned violent in some places and scores were detained after the gatherings, rare in the one-party state where demonstrations are routinely banned or broken up. Nguyen tweeted from the rallies, posting images of large crowds and saying he supported Vietnamese people "exercising their civic duty to protest injustice". Friends and family lobbying lawmakers in Washington for Nguyen's release say he did not have a political agenda. At least 30 people are still in custody and security forces blanketed Ho Chi Minh City last weekend to deter further protests. Demonstrators have rallied against a draft law to grant lengthy leases in proposed special economic zones, citing fears valuable land would be handed over to China. The bill made no specific mention of China and the government has said it would consider shorter leases, but the concession did little to assuage anger. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said the government would consider public feedback but issued a warning to protesters. "If you oppose officials on duty, vandalise state property... then you have to be strictly handled in accordance with the law," Phuc said Monday. China and Vietnam have had a fraught relationship since a brief but bloody border war in 1979 and resentment over Beijing's extensive claims in the South China Sea runs high in Vietnam. The long-simmering dispute boiled over in 2014 when Beijing moved an oil rig into waters claimed by Vietnam, prompting protests across the country that left several Chinese nationals dead. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Reuters) Phnom Penh Tue, June 19, 2018 14:59 1216 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e9b5ce7 2 SE Asia China,military-collaboration,Cambodia,defense,democracy Free China has granted over $100 million in military aid to Cambodia, Cambodia's Defense Ministry said on Tuesday, highlighting the strong ties between Beijing and a government that critics accuse of destroying democracy ahead of an election next month. Prime Minister Hun Sen's ruling party is expected to easily win the general election on July 29 as the Supreme Court dissolved the main opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) last November at the government's request. The military aid was offered by China's defense minister Wei Fenghe, who is currently in Phnom Penh to attend a China-Cambodia military exhibition, during a visit that began on June 16 and will end on Wednesday. Defense Ministry spokesman Chhum Sucheat said Wei "pledged more than $100 million grant" to be used for whatever Cambodia required, and that the Chinese and Cambodian armies would conduct joint exercises, dubbed "Dragon Gold", again next year . "He didn't specify what we can buy, just for use for any necessary need," the spokesman told Reuters. China is Cambodia's biggest aid donor and its backing has bolstered Hun Sen, who has ruled the country for 33 years. The ban on Cambodia's opposition was condemned by the United States, the European Union and other countries. Hun Sen has accused the United States of supporting the CNRP of staging a "color revolution" to overthrow his government. Cambodia suspended joint military exercises with the United States indefinitely, but has held joint military drills with China twice since 2016. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Bangkok Tue, June 19, 2018 10:29 1216 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9e9aa14f 2 SE Asia Thailand,execution,Bangkok,death-penalty Free Thailand has carried out its first execution since 2009, the Department of Corrections said, killing a 26-year-old convicted murderer in a move condemned by Amnesty International as "deplorable". Theerasak Longji, 26, was killed by lethal injection, six years after he was convicted of murder in Trang province. His death came with Thailand's coup leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha set to travel abroad to the United Kingdom and France. "We still have the death sentence, we have not cancelled it yet," Tawatchai Thaikaew, deputy permanent secretary at the Justice Ministry, told AFP, adding that the execution on Monday was carried out "according to the law". The Corrections Department, which oversees one of the world's largest prison populations, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935, the majority by firing squad. That practice ended on December 11, 2003. Between then and 2009 a further six inmates were executed by lethal injection, the department added. Rights groups hit out at the sudden resumption of the death penalty, which is frequently handed down by the courts for serious crimes. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Amnesty International said, accusing the kingdom of "reneging" on commitments to move towards abolition of the death penalty. The country is "also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment." Japan's two largest airlines have changed "Taiwan" to "China Taiwan" on their Chinese-language websites, officials said Tuesday, a move likely to please Beijing but anger the self-ruled island. The change was made on June 12 and is meant to accommodate customers, Japan Airlines (JAL) and All Nippon Airways (ANA) said. The description remains "Taiwan" on their websites in Japanese and other languages. Both carriers said they had not received any protest from Taiwan so far, though Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported Taiwan's foreign ministry would lodge a complaint with the airlines through Japan's de-facto diplomatic mission in Taipei. "We made the judgement (to change the name) while consulting and reporting to the transport ministry and foreign ministry," a spokesman at Japan Airlines said. "The change came on June 12 as our preparations were done by then," he said. June 12 was the date of the historic summit between North Korea and the United States, which attracted international attention. "We chose a description that is easy to understand and acceptable for users of our websites," added the JAL official, who declined to be named. Read also: Taiwan protests move by Singapore Airlines, Scoot to name island as part of China A spokesman at ANA said the change was intended to make the description "easy to understand and acceptable for customers when they use our websites." "We do not mean any particular group of customers here but mean all customers," he said without elaborating further. The airlines are not the only international carriers who have made the change recently, with Australia's Qantas earlier this month defending its decision to list Taiwan as part of China. The Chinese Civil Aviation Administration sent a notice to 36 foreign airlines in April, asking them to comply with Beijing's standard of referring to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as Chinese territories. Japan's ties with China are improving after years of acrimony over historical and territorial issues. Japan has close business ties with Taiwan but has acknowledged the "One China" policy, which describes Taiwan as an integral part of China. Asked about the change, Japan's top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Tokyo was "not in favour of government authorities demanding certain measures from private companies based on a specific political stance." "The government has expressed Japan's interest in this issue on the Chinese side," he added. Not only will Californians head to the polls in November to elect new congresspeople, but they will also vote on a proposition aiming to split the state into 3 parts: Northern California, California and Sothern California. The question of whether California should be split into three parts is set to be put to the vote thanks to a petition created by Timothy Draper, a venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley. Despite initially receiving upwards of 600,000 signatures in all Californian counties, a random sampling suggested that only 76% of the signatures were genuine, leaving the total at 402,468. The Californian Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, confirmed that the proposition will be featured in Novembers' ballot, which will also see voters elect new congresspeople and senators to serve in the federal government. If approved, Drapers proposition would see the Californian state legislature split into three smaller state governments. The smaller state governments would supposedly allow for state politicians to better serve regular Californians. Northern California would have 40 counties whereas central California would only have 6, including Los Angeles and Southern California would also have six counties.In his letter to the California Attorney General, Draper said that the smaller state governments would [preserve] the historical boundaries of the various counties, cities and towns. Draper has made numerous attempts over the years to split the Californian state legislature into smaller governing bodies, yet none of his attempts has amounted to anything. The current proposal appears to be a dulled down version of his 2014 attempt which aimed to create 6 state legislatures. If the current proposal to separate the Californian government is voted in November, the state legislature would have a year from January 2019 to implement the change. Draper hopes that the current proposal would break down monopolies in the current system, allowing the state to eradicate poor services provided to regular Californians. He also went on to suggest that in a competitive environment, people get good service and they pay fair prices,' an environment that would supposedly be created by separating the state legislature. However, Draper also claimed that three state governments would not be enough as there would be the same kind of environment, where youd end up with two monopolies or three monopolies. This, therefore, suggests that this current proposal is merely testing the waters of Californians appetite for change, and perhaps even a stepping stone to even smaller state governments in years to come. This is a travel writer 2018 competition entry "Face din rahat bici". Elena's frown thawed into a warm grin at my confusion. "It means 'to make whip from poo' - to make little go long way. We Romanians are good at this, we had no choice". She thrust a greasy mici into my numb hands. The balmy roll of minced meat was a perfect remedy for the Transylvanian winter which slowly dissolved into darkness outside. The train coiled through the valley, away from Rasnov where Elena found me, cold and lost. The medieval town of Rasnov, before the snow storm arrived * A grey, leaden haze was heading straight for Rasnov. Dense clouds tumbled over the Carpathians, swallowing the peaks ino obscurity. Rasnov fortress, perched on a rocky cliff above the medieval town, was the first to be sucked into its dreary depths. The town's Hollywood-style 'Rasnov' sign, which hangs beneath the fort, became a flickering apparition from within the mist. The lonesome crunch of my steps in the snow broke the deserted silence, reminding me I was alone. No one else was mad enough to wander the town now; it was like an apocalyptic movie set. Rick Grimes could have easily leapt from any shadow. The inky sky promised a barrage of snowflakes. They began falling like fluffy lead pellets, eventually suffocating the cobblestone streets; pulling Rasnov's pastel-tinted buildings into a chalky murk. The bus shelter provided meagre refuge. Slowly, the haze consumed what remained of the town. The clock tower chimed from somewhere within the fog's recesses... another hour had passed. Still - no bus. The 18 kilometers back to Brasov felt increasingly impossible with every snowy bullet that fell. The mist begins to roll over the Carpathians * "Autobuzul nu vine acum", a voice barked from the mist. Its hoarse tone broke the silence. Elena's silhouette emerged from the shadow, briskly swiping snow from her black leather jacket. She quickly decided I must be a tourist, instinctively switching to English. "Brasov bus. Not coming". Her frosty stare pierced colder than the breeze. Snow settled atop her meticulously combed hair. Her powdered face was white as the snow; her scarlet lipstick conspicuous like blood on lace. Something about her commanding presence placed her in a Soviet military uniform in my head. "Come, we go to gara. Train... to Brasov". Waving me over, her arms flapped in a confused frenzy. Her gold rings shone from her fingers like beacons. Something compelled me. Ws it her insistence, the bitter twilight or sheer curiosity? Perhaps all three. Suddenly, I felt my legs struggling to keep up with Elena's march. Her thick black boots stamped crater-sized footprints in the snow as we headed for the 'gara'. Elena stomped through the fog, swinging her bag with authority. Something about this starnger intrigued me. Who is she? What is her story? Whoever she was, I was trusting her to get us back to Brasov. "German?" Her head snapped in my direction awaiting a response. "No, British. From England", I replied. Elena's mouth grew into a thin smirk. "Ah, Queen and tea". With a half-suppressed chuckle, Elena pushed on through the snow towards the train station. The faint outline of a train track unfolded through the haze. A tiny single-carriage train sat upon the track. Its matchbox size and rickety wheels conjured up cliched images of Soviet Eastern Europe. Elena carved her own path across the tracks and leapt up onto the train. With a military-like wave, she summoned me to follow. * The train squeaked and rattled its way towards Brasov and Elena's rigid gaze melted into the warmth. The track unfurled through the valley like a runaway ribbon. From the train's refuge, the wintry Transylvania which had seemed so threatening earlier began to adopt a savage beauty. Petrified tress shivered in the wind, their bare branches twisted like contorted limbs. Sugar-dusted peaks popped in and out of view, velied by the rolling mist. The Romanian flag is swallowed by the impending snow storm Elena gently unwrapped another mici from its foil. I insisted that she kept ir for herself but with the affection of a nurturing grandma, she clasped my fingeres around it. Her lips spread into a genial smile. "If Ceausescu taught Romanians one thing, it's how to share. No matter how little". As the Romania I'd become pleasantly fond of sank into darkness outside, Elena pulled me into the old Romania, a country plagued by its former Communist dictator. "We waited in long line for hours, all day for food. Sometimes bread was all we had, for whole family. We made that little go long way". I'd learned about Ceausescu's Romania during my A-Level history. He had grand plans for his country. But who were the only people that seemed to benefit? The Ceausescus themselves, of course. He destroyed countless homes and displaced many families to build his ironically named 'Palace of the People' in the capital, Bucharest. The vulgar lump of concrete still stands today as the world's second largest building (after the USA's Pentagon). "Sometimes we had no water running in our homes. Every night, electricity was cut. There was not enough for everyone", Elena continued. I remembered reading a fact about Ceausescu's palace, that ironically it uses the same amount of electricity annually as a small city. "But we managed. We must. We are still here - Ceausescu is not. He did teach us how to share and how to make the most. For that, we should be thankful". Her mouth spread into the same warm smile again. Suddenly, I realised that the half-eaten mici was still in my hand. I looked at it intently. It was no longer a greasy roll of meat. It became a testament to Romanian tenacity and above all, the kindness of its stoic people. Elena found me at that cold bus stop; she took me under her wing and shared what she had with me, a stranger. I'm thankful that the bus never arrived. When Romania's cold front melts away you see a nation which has survived the toughest times by uniting as one. Elena showed me how you can triumph through challenges by putting your faith and trust in others, emerging all the richer. As Romanians say, you can indeed 'make a whip from poo'. Lost in Elena's words, I nearly missed the train jolt into Brasov. But that didn't seem to matter. Calm after the storm: safely back in Brasov after the snow had passed In order to provide no entrant with an unfair advantage, Student Travel Writer 2018 competition entries are edited for grammar only - stylistic choices and headlines are solely the work of the writer in question and not of The National Student's editorial staff. 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 Constantine's original look was based on Sumner's. Source: DC Comics DC Comics has asked musician Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner to write the foreword to the CONSTANTINE, HELLBLAZER: 30TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION collection. Sumner's foreword will appear as the Golden Boy, Constantine's alternate-universe twin, touching on his relationship with the occult detective over the years. In a video announcing the team-up, Sumner donned Constantine's trench coat, echoing the fact that Hellblazer's look was originally based on his own. The commemorative collection will explore the complete history of the series with four one-page essays written by HELLBLAZER author Rich Handley. It will also include a comprehensive timeline of Constantine's life and three one-page stories featured in JOHN CONSTANTINE: HELLBLAZER issues #1, 2 and 4. Memorable stories from Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Brian Azzarello, Paul Jenkins, Jamie Delano and others reflect the best of the long-lasting series, including HELLBLAZER issues #11, 27, 41, 63, 120, 146, 229 and 240 and SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #37, where the character was officially introduced. Constantine, Hellblazer: 30th Anniversary Celebration is set to release October 30. Meanwhile, Sumner's tour with Shaggy starts June 19. I wish I was joking. Bernthal was last seen as a force ghost in season three. Source: Entertainment Weekly Jon Bernthal will make another appearance as a possible force ghost on The Walking Dead's Season Nine. Bernthal played Shane on the show until Season Two when he was killed by Rick, coming back to life as a walker and being killed again by Carl. Bernthal made an appearance in a Season Three cameo during a vision Rick had at Woodbury. Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick, is leaving the show following the ninth season, so it is presumed Bernthal will once again appear as a force ghost, but this time as Rick meets his overdue end. The Walking Dead's ninth season is set to release this fall. Darylanna Durkee has been named the new executive director of the Rugby Chamber of Commerce and the Convention and Visitors Bureau. She will report to the boards of both organizations. Durkees hire date was June 4, and her offices are located in the Prairie View Museums building at 102 Hwy 2 SE, Rugby, N.D. I am so excited to have this position, Durkee said, and I think I can be of great service to the community of Rugby. The energy and positiveness of Rugby is amazing, and the downtown offers so much shopping and great lunches at Rockin Relics. I love to come to Rugby and check out the Brown Lantern and have lunch downtown. Durkee, originally from Denver, Colorado, lives outside Willow City on a farm, came to North Dakota six years ago to visit her sister, and never left. She has been working in accounting for the past four years in Bottineau. When her friends recently told her about Rugby, she came to visit and decided to pursue a position here. She then went back to Bottineau, gave notice and within a month had a new job and a new career. Everything just fell into place. I am so happy to be in Rugby and look forward to life here, Durkee said. Its all feathers and hubris when he drops down on his knees and begins to violently swing h Posted Tuesday, June 19, 2018 2:53 am The Ridgefield Business Association is no more. Long live the Ridgefield Chamber of Commerce. The newly-formed group had an official launch party at Windy Hills Winery June 13 welcoming members both current and prospective to meet and celebrate the formation of a more structured business advocacy group for the city. We have been working on this for about a year and a half now, Ridgefield Chamber of Commerce President April Salsbury said. Like many involved with the new entity, she had previously been part of the Ridgefield Business Association, a group initially started as a way for businesses to meet regularly, she said. Over time, as membership swelled, the relatively fluid structure wasnt feasible to meet the needs of those doing business in the city. Ridgefield is growing. These businesses need support. They need assistance. They need education, Salsbury said. They need the tools to do a really great job. Salsbury, herself the CEO of a business consulting firm, has worked with the Washington State Chamber of Commerce to implement a structure to the group in order for it to be successful, ultimately pushing that success onto its members. Some of the Ridgefield Business Associations events like evening networking will continue under the chambers direction, though the chamber will add a lunchtime iteration in order to cater to different types of businesses at the different times. Another addition are quarterly workshops, events lasting three to four hours with a focus on specific skills business owners need for success. The first workshop, for instance, will be a deep dive into accounting and tax preparation; another event will look at marketing. The goal of the workshops is providing things that are important to the business that they can leave and they can put into effect right away and make something happen, Salsbury said. Developing local businesses was one of three goals the chamber had right from the start, with others being connection, getting businesses looking for solutions together and getting the business name out there. A lot of people dont have time to promote their business out here or they dont know the most effective way to do it, Salsbury said. She added that even before the kickoff the nascent chamber has been able to associate with other organizations and businesses regionally, making Ridgefields impact greater than the city limits. Now we have people making connections and doing business in areas they never thought they would do business in just because they came to one of our events and met someone, Salsbury remarked. The event at Windy Hills successfully increased total chamber membership by a third, growing from 61 to 83 members, Salsbury wrote in an email following the event. On top of a structural change, the decision to become an official chamber also has benefits. When people come to Ridgefield, theyre not looking for a business association, they are looking for a chamber of commerce, Salsbury said. Both her and Ridgefield City Manager Steve Stuart spoke about how a new moniker would make the group more impactful. There is a broader recognition of chambers of commerce that I think lends gravitas to what they do, Stuart said. He said that the business association was an asset for the city when it existed, but noted that a more functioning system under a chamber was only an improvement for Ridgefield. The people who have been working hard with the Ridgefield Business Association, they continue, Stuart said. I think the structure gives it more strength. Salsbury agreed that the new structure would lead to success. Were organized. Were all very passionate about what we are doing, Salsbury remarked. Posted Monday, June 18, 2018 7:28 am Ill admit, I was sad and a little annoyed when I found out around 60 acres of forest will be clear-cut along the Moulton Falls Trail. That equates to around 6,000 trees, according to a really rough estimate by officials. My wife and I are are fairly avid hikers and Moulton Falls quickly became one of our failsafe destinations when I first started working in Battle Ground. Its well-kept, offers a great combination of forest scenery and riverside architecture and, of course, there are always plenty of dogs who want to stop and say hello. Needless to say, I share the concerns weve heard from locals about what impact the clear-cut will have on one of our favorite playgrounds. But, although Im sure Ill still be a little sad when I first see the clear-cut, Ive decided to be optimistic. Its important to remember that the two parties responsible for the coming clear-cut, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and Clark County Parks and Lands, are also responsible for the trail even existing. Although I doubt their superiors would be too happy if what they told a newspaper suggested anything otherwise, officials The Reflector spoke with from both parties were optimistic about the trails health going forward. And although the impacts will be noticable, it wont be, as DNR Pacific Cascade District Manager Brian Poehlein described it, like walking through some sort of moonscape when theyre done. When you think of the effects the cut will have, dont imagine a page from The Lorax that doesnt seem be the case. Poehlein said many of the trees being harvested are quite old and others pose a threat to hikers. I cant help but balk at the idea that a tree leaning over the trail is a true threat, but again, Im choosing to be optimistic. Plus, if I scoffed in a newspaper op-ed at the idea of being struck down by a falling alder tree during an afternoon jog, I fear it would only increase the likelihood of that happening; Im certain trees appreciate a little poetic justice as much as anyone. What makes me most optimistic is that within a matter of weeks younger trees will be planted in the area, which Poehlein said will be around five-feet tall in four or five years. Theres no doubt it will be a shock for myself and other frequent hikers of the trail when we first see the gaps in scenery, but my optimistic mindset is telling me that watching the young trees bring their own, new beauty to the area is a fair consolation. Over the weekend, (in the final weeks that protesting abortion, outside clinics is legal in NSW, Australia) a tradie pulled up near a reproductive health clinic in Surry Hills, saw a group of prostestors, decided "screw those guys", then started blasting Drowning Pool, effectively drowning the bastards out. Legend. Alright. We don't want to get too political here, so let us just say this; everyone's entitled to an opinion, but nobody wants someone else's opinion shoved down their throats. Pro-life protestors are pretty much the cockroaches of the universe when it come to that. Too political? Suck it. If you're not sure what we're talking about when we say pro life, esentially "pro life" or "anti-abortion" protestors lobby outside abortions clinics, making chicks who are likely going through one of the toughest decisions and experiences of their life, feel even more traumatised, worse yet - harassed. The protestors started singing Silent Night, and he was like fuck that, so he turned up the stereo in his car, Outrageously, this form of protest is still allowed here in NZ, but Australia is cracking down (hats off to ya Aussies). Earlier this month, the state of NSW passed a new law, creating a 150m safe zone outside of clinics - while freedom of speech is important to any democratic society, the Aussie's reckon you can have that freedom of speech 150m away from women you do not know, and have no right to gaslight or shame. Footage of the man in hi-vis cranking Drowning Pool out of his car stereo and trolling the prostetors was captured by Madeleine Ward - a woman who was on site at Surry Hills, volunteering to help escort the patients into the clinic, past the shaming prostestors. Check it out below. The new EU law enforcement landscape takes shape Today, lawmakers in Brussels took an important step towards improving Eurojust's role in serving justice across borders for a safer Europe. They reached a provisional agreement on a new legal framework for Eurojust that will enhance the Agency's operational capabilities and strengthen the cooperation with prosecution authorities of the Member States and partners in the area of Justice and Home Affairs cooperation, such as FRONTEX and Europol, in the fight against serious organised crime and terrorism. Mr Ladislav Hamran, President of Eurojust, said: 'I congratulate the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council, the European Parliament and the Commission on the successful political agreement they have reached today on the new Eurojust Regulation. The new Regulation will make Eurojust fit for the future and increases Eurojust's capabilities to support the national authorities in their fight against serious cross-border crime. The new landscape of law enforcement on EU level takes shape. With the new legal frameworks for Europol, the EPPO and now for Eurojust, the European Union steps up its pace to fight crime that is not limited by borders and takes yet another step in making the EU a safer place for our citizens. I hope that Member States will implement the new Regulation quickly.' The new Regulation sets the objective to increase information exchange between Eurojust and Member States while ensuring an adequate level of data protection. It also brings governance reforms, including the creation of a new Executive Board, which will further improve Eurojust's efficiency and management structure. Democratic oversight will be guaranteed through regular reporting to the European Parliament and national parliaments. The Regulation also establishes institutional, operational and administrative relations with the new European Public Prosecutor's Office to ensure complementarity and synergies. Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, Vera Jourova, also welcomed the agreement and stressed the importance of the agreement and the role of Eurojust: 'Every year, Eurojust helps facilitate cooperation between national authorities in their investigations and prosecutions. In 2017 alone, Eurojust delivered concrete support in 4 500 investigations in all Member States and in cases which matter most to our citizens: terrorism, illegal migration and cybercrime, to name just a few.' The provisional agreement reached today must now be formally approved by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU. Following approval, the Regulation will be published in the EU's Official Journal and enter into force 20 days later. For more information about Eurojust, see www.eurojust.europa.eu or contact Eurojust's Corporate Communications Unit at media@eurojust.europa.eu, phone +31 70 412 5000 For all Eurojust press releases, please see www.eurojust.europa.eu (Press centre) If you would like to have Eurojust press releases delivered electronically to your inbox, please complete and submit this subscription form. Buy-to-let landlords squeezed by recent tax changes may find better returns by targeting towns with strong student populations, research suggests. University towns and cities where housing is cheap, such as Liverpool and Middlesbrough, provide rental yields up to seven times higher than in London, a study by credit specialists Totally Money found. Its report compared average rents to house prices to highlight the most profitable places for buy-to-let and named a pair of postcodes close to two of Liverpools three universities as a hotspot for property investment - with rental yields of almost 12 per cent. The top ten buy-to-let hotspots for rental returns compared to house prices were revealed in the TotallyMoney report The Liverpool postcodes L7 and L6 took first and second place, with average rental yields of 11.79 per cent and 11.59 per cent, respectively. Average rents in the two postcodes were 1,162 and 1,046, according to the research, whereas house prices were 118,225 and 109,940, respectively. Middlesbroughs TS1 town centre postcode, home to Teeside University, took third place, with an average rental yield of 10.94 per cent. The area has average rents of 595 per month but an an average asking house price of just over 65,000, making it one of the most affordable spots to buy into. Landlords whose hearts are set on a buy-to-let investment in the capital should look to east London for the best returns. East Ham, Plaistow, Manor Park, Chingford, Stratford, and Poplar all rank in the top 10 London postcodes for rental profits. At the other end of the spectrum, the worst performing area outside of London was Bournemouths BH14, which has average rental yields of 1.68 per cent. Crewes CW12 comes next, with 1.74 per cent. All postcodes in the 25 lowest yielding areas have average house prices of more than 300,000, suggesting that more affordable house prices generate better rental yields than hoping that costly properties will rent for more. The effect of the 3 per cent stamp duty surcharge is also mitigated by buying cheaper property. Click image to read the full story (via TotallyMoney ). TOP TEN BUY-TO-LET POSTCODES FOR RENTAL RETURNS Rank Postcode Postcode Town Properties for Rent Average Monthly Rental Value Properties for Sale Average Asking Price Yield 1 L7 Liverpool 276 1,162 64 118,225 11.79% 2 L6 Liverpool 287 1,046 131 108,940 11.52% 3 TS1 Middlesbrough 234 595 102 65,238 10.94% 4 EH8 Edinburgh 52 1,962 33 221,640 10.62% 5 M14 Manchester 787 1,636 72 194,733 10.08% 6 NE6 Newcastle upon Tyne 883 883 237 111,767 9.48% 7 L1 Liverpool 217 953 411 122,152 9.36% 8 PR1 Preston 675 903 586 125,341 8.65% 9 M19 Manchester 75 1,331 67 185,645 8.60% 10 FY8 Blackpool 80 1,490 252 209,556 8.53% Source: TotallyMoney June 2018 Liverpool, with a student population of 70,000, provides average rental yields of 11.79 per cent Totally Moneys Joe Gardiner said: With students flocking to university cities year after year and looking for a place to live, its no surprise the student market is a dependable one for landlords. Since so many students are looking for accommodation, landlords may use this as an opportunity to drum up competition between them. Nick Morrey of mortgage broker John Charcol agreed that students can be worth targeting but said there are tougher rules for prospective landlords. He said: We have known for a while that renting a property to students can be significantly more profitable for landlords, especially if they can convert a living room to a bedroom.' Morrey added that the difficulty brokers face is finding a lender who will allow a valuer to give a rental assessment based on students renting a property rather than a single 'family unit'. 'However, the more demand they see in this market the more lenders are likely to change their criteria, he added. A number of tax and regulatory changes have hit landlords profits in recent months, including the limiting of landlords mortgage interest tax relief from April 2017 and the introduction of a 3 per cent stamp duty surcharge in April 2016. It means it is now much more expensive to both buy and run buy-to-let properties than it was two years ago. Postcodes in the 25 lowest yielding areas have average house prices of more than 300,000 Last month, it was reported that landlords are offloading 3,800 buy-to-let properties a month, marking the end of a rise in the volume of rental dwelling stock that had been ongoing for nearly two decades. Andy Golding, chief executive of OneSavings Bank, said: 'Landlords were left reeling after the introduction of tighter regulation and higher taxes, while the spectre of Brexit is already weighing on the housing market. 'Political opinion may be set against the private rented sector, but without it, the housing crisis would be deeper still. 'A housing market with dwindling supply of rental accommodation yet growing demand would, without a significant rise in affordable housing, provide the worst of all worlds for tenants: higher rents, with less choice and security, hampering their ability to save to buy a home.' The Government has acted swiftly to head off the purchase of County Durham-based precision engineer Northern Aerospace by a Chinese-owned rival Gardner Aerospace. Both companies are minnows compared to GKN, now owned by avaricious Melrose Industries. But anyone taking a look at the Gardner website could not but see the scale of Chinese ambition in aerospace. The goal of Gardners ultimate owners in China is to gain access to aero-engine technology where Britain, through Rolls-Royce and its network of parts suppliers across the UK, is a world leader. The last thing the UK needs is for vital aerospace technology, an area of manufacturing where Britain is a global leader, to escape to Beijing It is to the credit of hyperactive defence secretary Gavin Williamson that he advised his colleague Greg Clark at Business to send the transaction to the Competition & Markets Authority. The last thing the UK needs is for vital aerospace technology, an area of manufacturing where Britain is a global leader, to escape to Beijing. What is far more disturbing was Whitehall and governance connivance in the sale of Britains world class chipmaker ARM to Japans Softbank. Japan has been among the best inward investors in the UK, pioneering the return of car making at Nissan in Sunderland and Honda in Swindon. Fujitsu is an important player in computing. But Softbank boss Masayoshi Son is a dealmaker not a builder of enterprises. The way in which he has ceded control of ARMs smart-chip technology to a joint venture with China is disgraceful and turns it into a pawn in the bigger fight between Washington and Beijing over semi-conductors. The value of the Chinese networks firm ZTE plummeted by over 1bn in latest trading in Hong Kong. This followed a vote by the US Senate to overturn a deal under which the Trump administration allowed American suppliers to sell equipment to the Shenzhen-based enterprise. The tug of war over ZTE illustrates how toxic technology transfer is now regarded by US politicians. Britain is finally waking up to the threat. But it is seemingly helpless or unwilling to do anything to keep ARM safe from marauders. Lloyds legacy The leaked Lloyds staff report into an alleged cover-up by HBOS of the criminality at the banks Reading branch is horrendous. If the claims are substantiated by official probes being conducted by Dame Linda Dobbs and the National Crime Agency one would have to question whether former chief executive Andy Hornby, now holding a senior job at GVC-owned Ladbrokes Coral, should be anywhere near a public company. The central claim is that HBOS was well aware of the fraud at Reading and the 800million black hole in the accounts when it sold itself to Lloyds at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, but failed to disclose the risk. If it had, there is severe doubt as to whether Lloyds would have proceeded with the offer, even though it was brokered by then prime minister Gordon Brown. What is just as shocking in many ways is that the new owners, when made aware of the systematic fraud and the immense harm done to clients, never felt any responsibility to reveal details to shareholders. As is sometimes the case, the cover-up is almost as shocking as the criminality which took place under the eyes of the HBOS executives. Everyone suffered as a result of the deceit, including Lloyds investors who saw their shares diluted and dividends axed. As frustrating is that it has taken a decade for all this to emerge and it has only gone public because the campaigner for banking justice, Neil Mitchell, had the courage to go public. There were many shameful episodes in the banking crisis but this trumps the rest. Debs despair Even by the recent standards of department stores, Debenhams looks to be a car crash. Decades of under-investment (including a period in private equity ownership), slow migration online, rising business rates and sinking consumer confidence all contributed to bringing the brand down. It is trying to stay alive by jettisoning assets such as the Danish chain Magasin du Nord. Debs has the right person in charge in the shape of former Amazon and Inditex executive Sergio Bucher, and the blessing of Mike Ashley as a cornerstone investor with a near 30 per cent stake. The goal is to focus on beauty products, a staple of department stores, and something mystically called better curated fashion. The fat lady is not singing just yet. Having my consumer rights denied sends me into a blind rage. Every company makes mistakes and that's OK. But when you've been wronged, there is nothing more frustrating than knowing you are entitled to a refund or compensation and then being told you can't have it. It is particularly irritating when the reason for the rejection is that staff are unable to override a tick-box computer system. Fight back: When you've been wronged, there is nothing more frustrating than knowing you are entitled to a refund or compensation and then being told you can't have it It's no less amusing when it's because they just don't know the rules or, worse yet, because they assume you don't know the rules and think they can fob you off. What's so infuriating is that if you persevere by quoting the correct piece of legislation or just demanding that your complaint is escalated to the right team you often win. But that can involve weeks of calling the same number every day, furiously typing out narky emails and generally annoying everyone, including yourself. Sometimes, it seems as though firms look for loopholes to avoid paying out on genuine claims. My washing machine started leaking last week, just 18 months after I'd bought it. I assumed I'd be entitled to a repair or replacement. But no. The machine had been bought by my builder from Howdens Joinery when I'd had my whole kitchen refitted. When I called Howdens, I was told that, unless I had proof of purchase, I have no consumer rights, because it's a trade- only business. Foolishly, I hadn't thought to request an invoice from my builder at the time, so now I'm stuck. I can only imagine how the Currys PC World customers feel, after first being flogged insurance they didn't want and then refused a refund because they can't prove they tried to cancel their cover or there is no record of what the salesperson told them. It's customer service at its worst. The High Street giant has now promised to investigate, but the trust has already gone. Death notice On a more positive note, last week we revealed the launch of a Death Notification Service that allows bereaved families to notify all major banks of a loved one's death by completing just one form. It is a brilliant step forward, but the key now is making sure that people hear about it. One reader suggested putting up posters in GP surgeries and pharmacies. Even better, banks could also work with councils, so that when people register a death which everyone has to do after a bereavement they are given details on it. These could also be distributed to hospitals, Macmillan cancer centres and even funeral homes. Meter stitch-up Energy giants have been totally stitched up by the Government. Ministers are demanding that every home in Britain be offered a smart meter by 2020. Following a series of delays to vital technology, it is a completely unrealistic target. And yet they refuse to shift the time frame. Firms that fail to meet targets are fined hundreds of thousands of pounds as EDF Energy was last week. No wonder our postbag is full of letters from readers complaining about feeling pressured into having a smart meter fitted. Suppliers are getting desperate. It's no excuse for bully-boy tactics, but I almost feel sorry for them. Well, I might, if they stopped hiking our bills to line their coffers. Phone moan After months of nagging my partner, he finally headed to our local High Street to upgrade his mobile phone. Two hours later, he returned all in a fluster. Along with a new iPhone, he'd been flogged insurance, a new case and God knows what else. Friends say they, too, have felt pressured into taking out pricey contracts they didn't need. If you've been into a mobile phone store recently, tell us of your experience. Write to us at moneymail.co.uk or Money Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT. I tried to deposit 100 into my Santander account via a cash machine outside the bank. After I had inserted the final note, a message appeared on the screen, telling me it couldn't process the transaction. A member of staff had to open the machine to retrieve my card. I completed a form and was told that someone would phone me by 1pm the next day and the money would be credited to my account. No one called me, so I contacted customer services, who told me that all they could do was ring or email the branch to ask them to phone me. Money grabber: One reader lost 100 she was trying to pay in to her account through a Santander cash machine I then visited the branch, where I was told my money had not been found. An employee said that it might be jammed somewhere in the machine, but admitted they hadn't actually looked. She was very unhelpful, but said the complaint had been escalated to the manager. I was told the only way I could speak to them was by phoning the customer services number. Yet, on the two previous occasions I had phoned customer services, they tried to connect me to my local branch only to tell me they were not answering the telephone! R. J., London. There's only one way to describe your situation: you were given the runaround by sloppy staff who couldn't be bothered to help. Fancy branch staff telling you to call a central customer services number so they could contact that same branch. What a waste of everyone's time! The clear impression is they just don't care about the reputation of the business or for you as a customer. If an organisation promises to call a customer back, they should do so, rather than expect the customer to call them. Checks were finally made two days after you reported the incident and the branch manager did then contact you to confirm the 100 had been credited to your account. So, if you had been the victim of fraud, you would have lost two days, thanks to this branch's lackadaisical attitude. Santander has now offered a rather measly 30 to apologise for the inconvenience. You have YOUR say Every week, Money Mail receives hundreds of your letters and emails about our stories. Here are some on how bereaved families can now inform all major banks of a loved one's death in a single step, thanks to a pioneering Money Mail campaign... I'd like to thank deputy editor Victoria Bischoff and Money Mail for the success of the Looking After Your Legacy campaign. Reading her story painfully reminded me of the experience I had when my mother died. As Victoria put it, no one seemed to realise how painful it was. This will hopefully make it easier for my daughters one day. S. P., by email. One of my parents passed away 25 years ago, but their utility company just won't accept it, no matter how many times you tell it or how much paperwork you send in as proof. It's a nightmare when they ring up, asking to speak to the deceased relative. W. K., Slough, Berks. My mum died many years ago and my brother (then the only one of us old enough) tried to close her savings account. After getting several letters addressed to 'Mrs Deceased', asking her to sign to give permission for my brother to close the account, we decided not to bother with it. As far as I know, 32 years later, it is still open, with 3 in it. L. V., Sheffield. I had one bank employee demand to speak to my mother or provide her forwarding address, even though we had already notified them of her death and were still getting bombarded with letters addressed to her, rather than the estate. I. C., Galloway. Despite having a 'bereavement' department, the service we got from the bank after my father's death was appalling. One blunder after another, reducing my already grieving mother to tears. T. S., London. I own a rental property, which was vacant for 11 days in June last year, with no gas used. I provided Scottish Power with the departure date and meter reading for the outgoing tenant on June 5. I also provided the name, date of arrival and meter reading for the incoming tenant on June 16. Despite this, Scottish Power issued me with an invoice, based on estimated readings, for 97.73, covering the period June 5 to July 23. I told the energy company about the error, but it referred the matter to a debt collector which eventually referred it back to Scottish Power. I then received a demand letter from another debt collector dated March 21, for payment of the bill plus an administrative fee of 20.03. Mrs C. T., Rugby, Warks. Scottish Power apologises for not correctly closing your account and billing your tenants. It says it has now calculated the new bill based on your readings. This shows a small balance of 3.01, presumably for the standing charge. It has written this off and issued a 50 goodwill payment. Straight To The Point My wife and I share a joint bank account, which we can each use independently. If one of us were to pass away, would the other still be able to access the account? T. P., Tattershall, Lincs. Yes. If you are both named account holders, then the surviving partner should be able to access the money as normal and regular payments, such as direct debits, should continue to go out. After the surviving spouse reported the death to the bank, the account would be transferred into their sole name and remain open. *** I am an expat living in France, but have held an account with Barclays since the late Eighties. I was recently sent a form to fill in by the bank's 'Team 57', based on the Isle of Man. It requested personal details, such as my employer's information. I sent it back but, two weeks later, got a nasty reminder, threatening to close my account. I sent it again by recorded delivery, but I'm confused. What is 'Team 57'? C. S., Esbly, France. Barclays says that it contacted you as part of its routine anti-money laundering checks to verify the source of funds in your accounts, which it does with all customers. Team 57 is just the department tasked with processing these forms. The bank apologises if the letter caused you any upset and has agreed to refund your postage costs. A spokesman adds that it takes the security of its clients' data very seriously and it is important to keep its records up-to-date when identity fraud is on the rise. *** I received a suspicious letter from Orange about it updating its privacy policy. It referred to me as 'Miss' (I'm a man) and said it had already contacted me by SMS or email, which I never received. I'm worried this could be a scam. I. A., Worcester, West Mids. EE confirms both communications were genuine and were being sent to customers to explain how their personal information would be used in light of the new data protection laws introduced on May 25. The mistake with your title was as a result of an admin error when you registered your account and this has now been corrected. I was forcibly removed from a Ryanair flight after being cleared to travel by two-stage airport security checks. My innocent mistake not known to me until after the incident was to print my outward boarding pass twice, rather than one inward and one outward. The airport security's mistake was to accept my outward pass as valid for the return flight and clear me for boarding. Ryanair's mistake was to treat me, elderly and infirm, as a criminal in front of my fellow passengers, insist that I leave the plane at a speed and manner inappropriate to my dignity and disability and have the police waiting for me at the bottom of the steps, leaving me stranded, confused and angry late in the evening at Memmingen Airport, in Germany. I managed to get an alternative flight home. I have since received an empty, no-responsibility apology from the airport authorities and, from Ryanair, a deafening silence. Mrs C. M., Malaga, Spain. Most of us accept Ryanair is a no-frills airline: you pays your money and you takes your chance. But, if this incident took place as you describe, then the conduct of Ryanair staff is shameful. I took your complaint to the airline and, as expected, received the verbal equivalent of a shrug of the shoulders. Its statement was as follows: 'It is each customer's individual responsibility to ensure that he/she is travelling with the correct boarding pass. There was no 'deafening silence' from Ryanair we responded to this customer's complaint on November 24 and again on May 12. 'Since this matter relates to a security breach at Memmingen Airport, it's a matter for Memmingen Airport Security.' It is a reminder to all readers that when a Ryanair flight works well, it is perfectly acceptable but if things go wrong, you might as well complain to the Tooth Fairy for all the help you'll get. On a general note, as holiday season gets under way, check and double-check all your documents before heading to the airport. The FTSE 100 closed down 27.48 points at 7603.85 as trade war worries sparked a market sell-off. The US Dow Jones, German DAX and French CAC 40 all shed 1% of their value as President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on 200billion worth of Chinese imports. Debenhams issued its third profit warning of the year and saw its shares tumble 11% in today's session. Shares in retirement housebuilder McCarthy & Stone plummeted 17 per cent in early trading after it issued a profit warning because of disappointing spring sales and weaker property prices. The company is now forecasting operating profits of 65million to 85m, down from 96m a year earlier and below analyst expectations of 105.5m. Shares also fell across the wider housebuilding sector after McCarthy's alert, with Charles Church group Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt Developments and Berkeley all in the red. Share slump: Shares in retirement housebuilder McCarthy & Stone hit a record low, plummeting 17 per cent in early trading after it issued a profit warning McCarthy & Stone also announced the retirement of chief executive Clive Fenton on August 31 and confirmed it has started the search for his successor. Fenton said that he was stepping down as the company embarked on 'a new strategy to carry it safely through the next five years and beyond' as it grapples with a proposed ban on ground rents and tough market conditions. He added: 'Having reached the age of 60, it is right that I now stand aside at the end of our financial year to enable a new chief executive to be responsible for this journey.' McCarthy & Stone said there had been a 'noticeable decline' in reservation rates since the first quarter with potential buyers exercising 'more caution due to ongoing economic uncertainty, a slower secondary market and a softening of pricing, particularly in the South East' amid economic uncertainty caused by Brexit. It expects to sell between 2,100 and 2,300 homes this year, falling by up to nine per cent on its 2017 total of 2,302. The Bournemouth based group's forward order book, including legal completions, stands at 706m, up from 639m the previous year, but lower than it expected. Chairman Paul Lester launched a strategy review in April and plans to update investors on the findings by September. Plans so far include cost-cutting and aims to rein in rising build costs, with the group also slowing down house completions to focus on profit margins and improving its return on capital already deployed. Building decline: The group expects to sell between 2,100 and 2,300 homes this year, falling by up to 9% on its 2017 total of 2,302 McCarthy & Stone's stock price took a hefty blow last year; dropping eight per cent on December 21 after warning over a potential hit from a Government crackdown on unnecessary leaseholds and ground rent charges. The stock has since remained under pressure. Fellow housebuilder Crest Nicholson's share price last month saw its share price tumble by over 12 per cent as property prices stall and rising costs continued to hamper margins. The Chertsey-based housebuilding group admitted it was finding it 'difficult' to sell its most expensive homes, having already edged out of the inner London market to focus on increasingly popular, and sometimes cheaper, locations on the outskirts. Following suit: Shares also fell across the wider housebuilding sector after McCarthy's alert, with Persimmon , Taylor Wimpey , Barratt Developments and Berkeley all in the red Building on fears concerning the state of Britain's housing market, Crest Nicholson said that while it saw average selling prices increase by five per cent to 439,000 in the last six months, this marked a 'peak level for the business.' However, rival Persimmon reported 'robust' figures for the first three months of the year, with demand for new homes soaring. The FTSE 100 firm reported total forward sales revenue, which includes completions, of 2.76billion up eight per cent year-on-year. Room service: A version of Amazons Alexa voice assistant aimed at hotels has been unveiled HOTEL VOICE A version of Amazons Alexa voice assistant aimed at hotels has been unveiled. Alexa for Hospitality can provide guests with information, such as check-out time, and will be used at a number of hotel groups including Marriott Hotels and St Regis Hotels & Resorts from this summer. TECH REPRIEVE Donald Trump has told Apple it will not be hit by trade sanctions set to be levelled on China, according to reports. China is a big market for Apple and the company assembles iPhones in the country. SCANDAL HITS The chairman of JP Morgans Australian arm has stood down from two high-profile jobs amid a market-fixing scandal. Robert Priestley quit the boards of the Australian Security Exchange and the nations sovereign wealth fund, although he will stay on at JP Morgan. It comes two weeks before a cartel case involving Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and ANZ Bank goes before a criminal court. Neither JP Morgan nor Priestley have been charged but he said his presence on the two boards could become a distraction. TOWER DEAL A City skyscraper has been bought by Singaporean buyers for 650million. Ropemaker Place, a 21-storey building which houses investment banks, was bought by a subsidiary of Ho Bee Land. SHELVES SLASHED The UKs biggest supermarkets are slashing the number of product ranges they stock by 10 per cent in a fight back against discounter rivals Aldi and Lidl, according to supply chain and logistics consultancy Scala. BOSS NETTED Luxury fashion brand Victoria Beckham, owned by the former Spice Girl, has named Paolo Riva, the ex-boss of Diane Von Furstenberg, as chief executive. DADS DELIVER Sales at Waitrose slowed by 0.1 per cent last week despite shoppers snapping up presents for Fathers Day. In contrast, purchases at John Lewis jumped 5.7 per cent, boosted by menswear sales which grew 19.7 per cent. Socks were the most popular gift for Fathers Day up 34 per cent. HIVED OFF Hedge fund Winton is splitting off its data analysis division as demand surges for high-tech number crunching. T he Hivemind unit will be 25 per cent owned by staff, with Winton holding the rest of the stock initially. The sale of a British aeroplane-parts maker to China has been delayed by the Government on national security grounds. Business secretary Greg Clark has asked the markets watchdog to conduct a probe into Northern Aerospace's sale to Gardner Aerospace over fears crucial UK products could fall into Chinese hands. Gardner is based in Derby but is owned by Chinese miner and aerospace company Shaanxi Ligeance Mineral Resources (SLMR). Critics said the decision to refer the 44million takeover of Northern Aerospace to the Competition & Markets Authority risked deterring investment from China at a time when the Government is keen to boost trading ties between the two countries. Business secretary Greg Clark has asked the markets watchdog to conduct a probe into Northern Aerospace's sale to Gardner Aerospace But former defence minister Sir Gerald Howarth, who has long raised concerns about communist China's takeovers in the UK, said: 'I am delighted. I think we need to be crystal clear that one thing we really do have in this country is a flair for innovation and manufacturing. The Chinese are desperate to conquer our technology and we just need to be very conscious of that. It does not mean to say we don't trade with China. We need to protect our British national interest so I warmly welcome this.' Exactly why the Government has chosen to intervene is not clear. One source said it had almost stepped in when private equity group Better Capital, led by venture capitalist Jon Moulton, sold Gardner to Shaanxi last year. Officials made a last minute request for information after another manufacturer raised concerns over a part made by a Gardner subsidiary. But the inquiries did not lead to formal intervention. Deals that raised eyebrows 2005 Italy's Finmeccanica bought BAE's comms and avionics business for 364million 2005 America's Lockheed Martin bought UK military comms firm Insys 2007 US firm General Electric's purchase of UK's Smiths Aerospace for 2.5billion 2009 Atlas Electronic UK bought UK defence firm Qinetiq's underwater systems division for 23.5million 2017 Chinese firm Hytera bought Sepura, the UK firm that makes walkie talkies for the emergency services, for 74million Gardner employs more than 1,500 staff around the world and customers include Rolls-Royce and GKN. It makes parts for Airbus's A400M military plane. Northern Aerospace, also owned by Better Capital, employs about 600 in the UK and Poland, and uses high-tech software to make parts for plane makers including Airbus and Boeing. It made sales of 71million last year. Shaanxi is worth around 1.1billion on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in China. Bosses are thought to have ties with the Chinese government. Shaanxi's main activity is mining, with a grip on rhenium, used for airplane engine parts, through its rhenium mine in China's Shaanxi province. Its aerospace vice-president Lizhi Wang said last year of its plans to 'consolidate the global aerospace supply chain'. After the Gardner deal, he said he had plans to buy more foreign companies to cash in on the booming aviation sector. Jason Steen, partner at M&A advisory firm Steen Associates, who advised SLMR in its purchase of Gardner, said: 'Shaanxi are extremely good investors in British business. So for us to suddenly turn around as a nation and suggest Chinese investment in aerospace is not welcome I think would be bad deal and may call into question further investment in the sector.' Better Capital said it was only made aware of the Government's intervention late on Monday night and was surprised. Moulton did not respond to requests for comment. Two of Britain's biggest building societies are cutting rates for loyal savers in order to keep costs down for borrowers. Nationwide, the largest society, with assets of more than 200 billion, will pare the rates of its Instant Isa Saver, Instant Access Saver and Smart Saver for children from June 28. And Coventry, which ranks at No 2 in the UK, with assets of 42.5 billion, is lowering rates on 20 accounts at the start of next month. Nationwide will pare the rates of its Instant Isa Saver, Instant Access Saver and Smart Saver for children from June 28 Experts warn other building societies could follow suit. The cuts are set to penalise loyal savers in older accounts that are closed to new business. Both societies blame booming competition in the mortgage market. They say they have to offer lower rates to borrowers to attract them, so savers must earn less. Nationwide which came under fire last week for paying its four top bosses a huge 6.5 million in wages last year says its income from borrowers has fallen in the past 12 months as a result of fierce competition. Now, it will cut savings rates on old accounts, snatching back the increase it gave following the rise in the Bank of England base rate from 0.25 per cent to 0.5 per cent last November. Nationwide Instant Isa Saver will fall from 0.75 per cent to 0.5 per cent; its Instant Access Saver from either 0.35 per cent or 0.5 per cent to 0.1 per cent; and its Smart Saver from 1.6 per cent to 1 per cent. A spokesman says: 'Most savings rates are unchanged and our rates remain competitive.' Coventry whose chief executive Mark Parsons earned 877,000 last year, compared with the 2.3 million Joe Garner got for doing the same job at Nationwide also blames competition in the mortgage market. A spokesman for the Coventry says: 'The income we receive from mortgages is what we use to pay savers. 'Since the beginning of the year, the mortgage market has remained very competitive. Rates are very low and this affects the income we have available to pay savers.' The good news is that Coventry BS rates remain competitive even though savers in old accounts will see their rates fall by as much as 0.35 percentage points. Its easy-access Privilege Isa and Privilege Saver rates will both fall from 1.65 per cent to 1.30 per cent, while its Poppy Isa and Easy Access Isa rates will drop 0.25 points to 1.15 per cent. Last week, Coventry launched a Limited Access account paying a top 1.3 per cent, available online or by phone. You can make only three withdrawals a year or face a charge equal to 50 days' interest. The rate includes a 0.3 percentage point bonus for the first year. Big banks continue to pay a pittance. HSBC offers just 0.05 per cent on its easy-access Flexible Saver, Lloyds Standard Saver and Halifax Instant Saver pay 0.2 per cent, NatWest pays 0.1 per cent on its Instant Saver on anything up to 25,000 and Barclays 0.2 per cent on its Everyday Saver. sy.morris@dailymail.co.uk Sir, Kindly allow me space in your widely read publication to voice out my humble concern regarding the high rate of dumping in our beautiful country. The heavens have blessed us and we are receiving the much needed rains in most parts of the Kingdom of Eswatini. The rains have brought so much relief to our drought-stricken country. Everybody knows that water is life but that it can be deadly if we do not act responsibly. That is why I am encouraging all citizens of our country to learn to keep our rivers clean and clear to ensure that the water flows freely and is healthy enough to be used. Using our rivers and streams as dumping sites leads to flooding as rubbish blocks the natural flow and forces the water to find alternative courses. Flooding is a disaster because roads and homes are then destroyed. The rubbish in our rivers and streams also leads to the blockade of canals and bridges which leads to the destruction of infrastructure. This is because the bridges and roads are destroyed by the resulting floods. Floods sweep away anything in the path of the water, including people, animals, trees, infrastructure and private property. Keeping our rivers clean and free from pollution has healthy benefits as it prevents the outbreak of waterborne diseases. As the rain falls, the rivers come back to life and flow again, taking everything in their path. It is crucial that we do not dump any waste in our rivers and streams. We recently lost some precious lives due to floods after the rubbish blocked canals and then the water forced its own way over the bridges and roads.So my beautiful EmaSwati, let us keep our water resources as clean as possible to avoid unnecessary disasters. Dlamini Manzini KAMKHWELI Trouble is brewing again at volatile KaMkhweli Chiefdom as the deposed chief is reportedly set to return. The area, which is known for the infamous mass evictions in the early 2000s, had enjoyed relative peace for the past decade but that tranquillity seems to have come to an end. Supporters of former Chief Mtfuso Dlamini, who was deposed in the year 2000 and later evicted, are rehabilitating his old residence, which used to serve as the Royal Kraal (umphakatsi). They are preparing for his return from exile in neighbouring South Africa but his exact return date has been kept secret. However, their actions have provoked the ire of the substantive traditional authorities in the area. The chiefdom is currently under the authority of Chief Mshengu, who is a son of the late Prince Maguga, who took over the reins following the eviction of Chief Mtfuso. Since last week, Siphofaneni police have been keeping a close watch on Mtfusos supporters, who have been frequenting the old umphakatsi in numbers. Last Thursday, police prevented Mtfusos supporters from carrying out renovations and clearing the yard of the old umphakatsi. Police told us that they were maintaining peace. However, they did not explain why they were preventing us from cleaning the old umphakatsi because we had not attacked anyone, said one of the supporters of the deposed chief. Leaders of the faction that supports the deposed chief sought an audience with Lubombo Regional Administrator (RA), Sylvia Mthethwa last Thursday but she was reportedly not in her office. As such, they resolved to continue with renovations of the old umphakatsi. Yesterday morning, they convened at the old umphakatsi and began clearing the yard under the watchful eye of the police. One of the leaders explained their intentions: We are preparing for his (Chief Mtfuso) return, which is imminent. When he returns, we will have a brief chat with him before taking him to His Majesty the King. The reason we are renovating his old residence is that we want him to sleep here on the night before he travels to meet the countrys authorities. Authorities He alleged that traditional authorities of the country had agreed to meet the deposed chief hence, as his supporters, they were confident that he would be reinstated to his position. It would be an understatement to say we do not recognise the current chief, we dont know him. To us, he doesnt exist, said one supporter of Mtfuso. When sough for comment, acting Ludzidzini Governor, Chief Lusendvo Fakudze said they were not aware of Mtfusos imminent return to KaMkhweli. MANZINI A land dispute between the late businessman Boy Motsas son and a popular apostle had led to a road blockade that inconvenienced some Lwandle and Ngwane Park residents on Saturday. Residents of Lwandle, near Ngwane Park, where the late businessmans blockyard is situated, found a truck, a tipper parked in the middle of the roadway and could not access the nearby public roads on the day. It was later gathered that the truck had been allegedly parked by the businessmans son, Sakhiwo, who is currently involved in a land dispute with the apostle. Apostle Fred Msimango of Jesus for the World Ministry Church and his construction team have already dug up the foundation near the block yard and are preparing to begin the construction of their new church. Church members alleged that Sakhiwo had allegedly stopped the construction and revealed that the church building would not take off as the land belonged to his late father. When we started the construction and poured quarry, he allegedly instructed his employees at the block-yard to vandalise. On Saturday, when he saw trucks going to the place to deliver more quarry and sand, he blocked the public road and alleged it was part of his land, one of the church members alleged on Sunday. Another member alleged that the land dispute had been ongoing for a while now and as a church, they were worried and feared the worst. On the day, motorists who resided nearby had to allegedly seek the services of a neighbour who had a grader, which cleared another section of the land where their vehicles eventually managed to go through. We were inconvenienced the whole day and could not go anywhere in vehicles as the road had been blocked by the truck. We also feared to contact the police as we did not want to be implicated in any way or get assaulted. We were fortunate enough as there was a resident who managed to use his grader and clear the forest for a temporary drive-through, a resident, who also preferred anonymity, alleged When Apostle Msimango was sought for comment, he confirmed the current land dispute. The man of God, however, said he was allegedly allocated the piece of land situated near the Motsa blockyard by the Lwandle Umphakatsi, under Chief Nkamane Mkhatjwa. The land belongs to the church and we got it legally from the umphakatsi and the inner council at Eticancweni is also aware of the matter. The land we are currently utilising does not belong to the late Boy Motsa. There was an appeal after Motsas land was extended and Chief Nkamane rejected everything at the time, hence we are continuing with the construction. We are Christians and we will not fight over such minor issues, Msimango alleged. LOBAMBA If there is something that former Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Senator Sibusiso Shongwe hates the most, it is the custodial sentence for businesspeople. Asserting his firm beliefs during the tabling of the Dairy (Amendment) Bill of 1968, Shongwe said it was high time for senators to change the mentality that imposing custodial sentences to businesspeople had a positive impact. According to Shongwe, businesspeople deserved financial liability as opposed to custodial sentences. We should consider that when a businessperson gets a custodial sentence, the business and the employees suffer. We should rather increase the fines to deter offenders and those who might be tempted to commit similar offences, as opposed to sending these people to jail, Shongwe said. Shongwe was selling his idea to the senators after it appeared that Section 31 of the amended Bill provided that offenders who breached the Dairy laws should be sentenced to 20 years imprisonment with the option to pay a E100 000 fine or both. Under the 1968 law, offenders were fined only E100. Shongwe felt that the fine should be increased from E100 000 to deter offenders as opposed to sending them to jail. Another amended part of the Bill was Section 16 (4), which dwelt much on dairy standards. When tabling the report, the Minister of Agriculture, Moses Vilakati, revealed that the outdated law opened the flood gates for farmers who produced and sold substandard products to the nation. Vilakati made an example that some farmers were adding unauthorised products such as beans and water to pure milk in order to make profits. He said a research has shown that some of the products were a hazard to human health. He said some developed countries were able to deal with the illegal activities because they had laws in place. He said the illegal activities which were taking place in the absence of the law had resulted in investors shunning the country. Senator Moi Moi Vuka Masilela, pleaded with the Ministry of Agriculture to act swiftly if experts diagnosed something that was a threat to human health. If this is true, it means that emaSwati have been exposed to danger for the past 50 years. Why was the ministry quiet about this? asked Masilela. Senator Ndumiso Mdluli pleaded with the senators to approve the Bill, which was aimed at saving the lives of the nation. The Bill will be among the four Bills that will be dealt with by the whole House today. The other Bills are the Swaziland National Agriculture Research Authority and the adoption of the Persons with Disability Bill 19 of 2015. The Bills were passed to the whole House after the unanimous decision from the senators. MBABANE The application by FSRA to be allowed to continue with its investigations into the affairs of Public Service Pension Fund (PSPF) has been withdrawn. FSRA is the acronym of Financial Service Regulatory Authority. The withdrawal of the application by FSRA comes after an alleged instruction from Cabinet. The application was withdrawn by FSRA lawyers yesterday. the Minister of Public Service Owen Nxumalo, whose portfolio the PSPF falls under, when interviewed yesterday confirmed that he had reported the latest developments to Cabinet. He said he could, however, not go into detail about what transpired, but said he had also informed the Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) Paul Dlamini about the matter. Yes, the matter was discussed at Cabinet and that is all I can say, said Nxumalo. PSPF is one of the government parastatals which falls under the Ministry of Public Service. FSRA lawyer Nkosinathi Manzini only confirmed that the application has been withdrawn and a correspondence to that effect has been sent to PSPF legal representatives. Meanwhile, the DPM said the matter was under Nxumalos portfolio and he was the minister who was in the best position to go into detail about it. He did, however; acknowledge that he was aware of the matter. FSRA ran to court after PSPF allegedly adopted an obstructive stance by instructing its officers not to cooperate with its investigating team. According to FSRA, its team of investigators was allegedly met with resistance from PSPF officers. FSRA, as a regulator for retirement funds and financial services providers, is responsible for ensuring that all retirement funds, fund administrators, investment managers and anyone associated with them, conduct the business in accordance with the law and principle governing the industry. So far, the investigations, according to FSRA, had unearthed that huge loans were granted to entities without any loan agreements and supporting documents. It was also allegedly discovered that PSPF appointed an auditor without the approval of the Board at the tabling of the entitys financial statement, which according to FSRA, was in contravention of principles of corporate governance. The team of investigators from FSRA further found that PSPF allegedly took major investment decisions in relation to certain major acquisitions without the involvement of its Investment Committee. The respondent (PSPF) disinvested large sums of funds from local financial institutions to offshore destinations, reads one of the findings made by FSRA. FSRA Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sandile Dlamini, in his affidavit, stated that the preliminary findings that had been already made, suggested that there was a need for more intensive investigations into certain other areas, not discounting the inspection that had been carried out. LOBAMBA Like a boomerang, the Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence (SODV) Bill is back in Parliament. This follows that the Bill was passed by both Houses and awaited Royal Assent. Just as gender activists and other interested parties were celebrating the important milestone, the Deputy Prime Minister (DPM), Paul Dlamini, yesterday tabled amendments made to the Bill. This was said to be a message from Senate. It could not be ascertained why the Bill was returned to Parliament. However, one of the issues raised by the DPM was the age of consent which had been changed from 16 to 18. There were also reports that Senate did not agree with all clauses of the Bill. Before it was tabled for amendments, Deputy Speaker Esther Dlamini, who was the Presiding Officer yesterday, asked members of the media and others who were not members of the Legislature, to leave the House as they had to have a private meeting. What the Deputy Speaker said would be a five-minute discussion turned into a 45-minute private deliberation led by the DPM. From the Parliament canteen TV which was, however, on mute, the DPM was seen making different hand gestures as he addressed MPs who were listening attentively. He was seen pointing in all directions, putting his hands together and at one point, he lifted his foot about knee high while stressing a point. Some MPs were seen with their hands covering their mouths while others held their heads as though the discussion was very serious. Although it could not be comprehended what they were saying, MPs Marwick Khumalo and Mthokozisi Kunene stood up to make submissions. As the discussions proceeded, Deputy Speaker Esther did not occupy the seat of Speaker but was sitting between two clerks. After the private discussions, MPs took a five-minute break then proceeded with the debate. Consent The DPM stated that according to the Bill, the age of consent was 16 while it should be 18 years. He said the law did not allow that children under the age of 18 years consent. He explained that to his knowledge, in western cultures, a person below the age of 16 years could not consent without his or her parents. However, those over 16 years were able to marry without the consent of their parents. DPM Dlamini further explained that there was also the protection of the girl child which was an international statute given to countries. He said it addressed the issue of the girl childs future, in particular that should she be married before the age of 16, what would happen to her education. MPs, who included Lobamba Lomdzala MP Khumalo, said the Bill had an international flair and therefore legislators had to consider what international laws said about the matter. He questioned how the age of 16 years was set as the age of consent. Nkwene MP Sikhumbuzo Dlamini submitted that before changes to the age of consent could be made, they ought to consider other existing legislations as well as international laws regarding the matter. MP Sikhumbuzo argued that they could not make amendments that would be against existing ones. Bright Pattern Expands Cloud Communications Presence By Maurice Nagle - Web Editor The cloud is a global technology, enabling a new day in technology, touching all points of industry. For customer service, the cloud is transformative, to say the least. Business VoIP and virtual PBX providers are padding portfolios with cloud contact center solutions to support growing adoption and an increased focus on customer service operations. Bright Pattern announced an expanded presence in Ireland and the U.K. in order to improve voice quality and adhere to regional compliance. This translates to accelerated deployments, exceptional voice quality as well as the benefits of Bright Patterns direct upgrades. "Our cloud contact center software is cloud-agnostic, making it easy to deploy and maintain across the globe," said Konstantin Kishinsky, CTO and Founder of Bright Pattern. "Creating a local point of presence in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland took a minimal amount of effort and will greatly improve the customer service provided by our customers located and/or serving customers in these areas." By leveraging local phone numbers, and local storage, companies are able to meet rigid compliance regulations, while simultaneously improve the quality of service provided. Kishinsky continued, "In the past, follow-the-sun support was only feasible for large global companies. With Bright Pattern, local companies can create a global workflow in which issues can be resolved and passed between offices in different time zones to reduce delays." Bright Pattern is aiding businesses in the omnichannel journey with its virtual contact center solution. In customer service, cloud communications are taking center stage, with robust feature sets and the promise of improved operations. Whats in your contact center? Please enable JavaScript to view the Edited by Maurice Nagle Family, friends of two men shot and killed by Kansas City police downtown on June 15, 2018, remember the slain men - one a barber from Tulsa, Okla., and the other struggling with mental illness. Police are continuing the internal investigations. "Two African-American Women 1st-time candidates are seeking a seat on the Jackson County Legislature in the "Year of the Woman" but they did NOT garner the Freedom, Inc. endorsement." Reader suggested links and an interesting fact as our blog community touts greater diversity even in communities of color . . .Accordingly, insiders lament . . .Developing . . . The brutal murder of Wyandotte County Deputies Theresa King, 44, and Patrick Rohrer, 35 by suspected killer Antoine Fielder has been subject to wide speculation whilst authorities fear that releasing more deets may assail the reputation of the female deputy and demoralize women in law enforcement. GENDER IDENTITY POLITICS THREATEN TO KEEP INFO ABOUT THE SHOOTING AWAY FROM THE PUBLIC!!! Determining if the problem was procedural or a slip-up, could save the next transport officer. To have to be critical of somebody or something within the system after two law enforcement officers died is anathema for law enforcement, retired FBI agent and police officer Michael Tabman. But it has to be done, because it has to be a learning moment. We have to be able to teach and train everyone else to know what went wrong and how to avoid that in the future. Here's an open secret that every "journalist" and politico in the metro is too afraid to mention . . .Moreover . . .There's no reason police wouldn't have already publicized deets shooting and. Even worse, social justice warriors, former newspaper dudes and a litany of lady politicos are already working the Internets in an attempt to direct any blame or suspicion of fault away from the female deputy. Meanwhile, it's clear that the public wants more transparency from authorities while MSM is helping to direct attention to saccharine memorial tribute coverage.Shout out to KMBC who offer some insight into the struggles confronting law enforcement in the aftermath of this tragedy:Check the links:Developing . . . Shawn Borich, Welders campaign spokesman, apologized Monday for what he described as a mistake. Over the weekend, our campaign made a mistake by sending out a petition email that linked signers to a donation page after they had signed our petition. We apologize for this error, particularly to the families of the two sheriff deputies killed, Borich said in an email to The Star. Moving forward, Brent has directed the senior members of the campaign to review our email policy to ensure that a mistake like this never happens again. And weve committed to donate all of the funds raised from the petition email to the families of our two fallen heroes. Borich later said in a phone call that the campaign received seven donations totaling $104 from the email. He said the campaign would donate $250 to the families. Our blogand now theon our scraps and reacts to TKC first reporting . . .Here's the aftermath:Do you forgive him.You decide . . . Entrance to the performance will be free of charge, with the presentation of named coupons that will be available from Monday, June 18 until Monday, June 25 at the offices of the Chania Antiquities Ephorate The Ancient Theatre of Aptera in Chania, Crete will once again "come alive" after 17 centuries of thespian silence. Following its restoration, this unique monument of Crete will on Friday, June 29 host a dramatised narration of a rhapsody from Homer's "Odyssey", performed by actors Sofia Hill and Antonis Myriagos accompanied by Giorgos Kaloudis on the lyre and Ruth Hill on the qanun (kanonaki in Greek), ANA reports. The event is scheduled to begin at 20:30, while the doors to the site will open from 19:45 until 20:15. RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Wikifreund License: CC-BY-SA Several theories as to why it remained unfinished A giant ancient statue has been lying on its back for centuries on a hill at the Greek island of Naxos. The Kouros of Apollonas, also called the Colossus of Dionysus, is a 10.7 metre tall (35 feet) unfinished statue of light grey Naxian marble with a weight of nearly 80 tonnes. It has never been stood erect as it were and it was left unfinished where it lies. Dated between the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. it is situated in the northern part of Naxos, in the picturesque fishing village of Apollonas. It has a frontal construction with the hands stuck on the ribs and the elbows bent. Furthermore, the left leg is longer than the other. In most cases, kouros statues depict naked young men with their arms at their sides. It is clear nevertheless that the Kouros of Apollonas was to be a depiction of an older man with a beard and that its right arm would have been stretched out in front of it. Archaic kouroi as depictions of god Apollo The archaic kouroi have usually been interpreted as depictions of god Apollo. On account of its beard, the Kouros of Apollonas has instead been interpreted as the Greek god Dionysus. Scientists believe that the ancient sculptors got no further in their plans to transport this kouros, since a route for the further transport of the statue was never carved into the stone. Most assume that it was too heavy to transport while other reasons for the statue remaining unfinished are mentioned in tourist guidebooks and websites. There is a claim that it was realized late in the production process that the statue had several cracks, or it is assumed that the ancient sculptors thought it might break during the process of cutting it out of the ground, or simply that the sculpture was not paid for. Read more at: greekreporter/Tasos Kokkinidis The archive of Greek poet and lyricist Nikos Gatsos has found a permanent home at Harvard Library. The acquisition is a key addition to the Librarys collections in Greek literature and civilization and will be made available to students and scholars around the globe. Nikos Gatsos (1911-1992) had a grave influence on the post-war generation of Greek poets. Writing of both loss and hope, Gatsoss unique blend of surrealism, symbolism and folk song created intense admiration and assured his place alongside his friends, Nobel laureates Odysseas Elytis and George Seferis, as one of the great twentieth-century Greek poets. Panagiotis Roilos, George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, urged the Library to acquire the archive. Nikos Gatsos was one of the most prominent figures of the European avant-garde. His long poem Amorgos, which was published in 1943, during the occupation of Greece by the Germans and their allies, was almost instantly hailed by both critics and poets as an emblematic work of Greek surrealism. Roilos added, The Gatsos archive will be a major addition to Harvards archives on European modernism and of course to its unique collection on Greek literature and culture. I cannot stress enough the potential educational and research value of the archive for several scholarly areas, including Greek and broader European cultural history, comparative literature, Greek world literature and translation studies. Gatsoss poems and lyrics have been translated into English, French, Danish, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Korean, Swedish, Turkish, and Finnish. In 1987, he won the Athens City Prize for his life achievements and in 1991 he was recognized as Deputy Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona for his contribution to the promotion of Spanish literature in Greece. The Gatsos archive includes a rich collection of manuscripts, typescripts, notebooks, correspondence, books, photographs, and musical recordings. Users will find: eighteen letters from Odysseas Elytis (ranging from three to twenty-five pages) fifty years of postcards from his good friend and popular singer Nana Mouskouri record albums signed by composers cassette tapes labeled songs in progress the script of Elia Kazans America (with annotations by Kazan) annotated typescripts by George Seferis, Archibald MacLeish, Desmond OGrady, and Charles Haldeman Source: Harvard Library Read more at greekreporter.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: Wikimedia Commons EASTCHESTER, NY The 4th Annual Loukoumi Dance Party and Make A Difference Awards took place on June 15 at Mulinos at Lake Isle Country Club, 600 White Plains Road in Eastchester. The Very Rev. Fr. Nicholas Anctil, presiding priest of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in New Rochelle, NY was honored with the Loukoumi Foundation Inspiration Award at the well-attended event. Loukoumi Make A Difference Awards were presented to: Anne Hutchinson School Student Council; Georges Angels (Eileen and Gary Franklin); The Greek American Institute; The Greenvale School; The Smile of A Child Project (presented to the Colombos, Pappas, and Tsiamtsiouris families); St. Stephen/St. Edward School in Orange County; St. Clare School on Staten Island; and Katia Barker, Karl Kilb, Austin Lawless, Elaina Poulos, Daniel Rentel, and Will Tinson. The winner of the Dream Day Contest, George Rebokos, was also announced live at the event. The contest gives kids the opportunity to spend a day in their dream day careers. Loukoumi Foundation President Nick Katsoris gave the welcoming remarks at the event, noting that it was 13 years ago that the first Loukoumi book was published, and that the national effort in which children drew cards and sold them for $1 has raised $25,000 so far for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital. The plan is to raise $150,000 for a Loukoumi reading room/literacy room at the hospital for the children undergoing treatment. Katsoris thanked all the schools that participated and added that the Loukoumi Foundation will be the featured charity on September 9 at Citi Field when the Mets take on the Phillies. In partnership with the New York Catholic Archdiocese, Katsoris pointed out that the Loukoumi books are now in over 150 schools of the New York Archdiocese. He told The National Herald there are plans to expand the foundations efforts nationally and bring the Loukoumi books to Greek Sunday schools across the country as well. Dream Day Contest For the tenth anniversary of the Dream Day Contest, a video presentation highlighted the winners from years past and how the experience has affected their lives. The video entries by some of the finalists in the contest were also screened at the event before the announcement of this years winner, who had entered the contest five years in a row, each time with a different career he would like to pursue. Katsoris told the winner, Rebokos, that well have to discuss which career he will ultimately choose for his Dream Day. Katsoris presented the Inspiration Award to Fr. Anctil, noting that there are people you meet who can inspire you forever, and thats Fr. Nick. He met Fr. Nick over 30 years ago and he presided over some of the best moments of my life, Katsoris wedding to his wife Voula, and the baptisms of their children, and when they served as godparents. At an event years ago, when the priest scheduled to perform the invocation couldnt make it, Fr. Anctil stepped in at the last minute without hesitation. Fr. Nick and his wife, Presvytera Cyndi, have always been like family, Katsoris said, adding that through a twist of fate, we learned 4 years ago that we actually are family, as I am the third cousin of his daughter Kellys father-in-law. This foundation is all about teaching kids to do the right thing, to make a difference in the lives of others, believe in yourself and follow your dreams, and to treat others with kindness and respect, Katsoris said, noting that the inspiration that propels these kids to new heights has to come from somewhere, from role models and there is no better role model than Fr. Nick. Loukoumi Make A Difference Foundation In his acceptance speech, Fr. Anctil thanked Katsoris and the foundation, and addressed the many children present, joking that he knew Thomas Edison, referring to the quote about inspiration, Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration, in my case its different, success is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, adding that when you do good deeds you do them for everyone. Among those at the event were actress Elena Kampouris- best known for her role as Paris in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, who presented some of the awards, Chef Maria Loi, and Yahoo Finance correspondent Alexis Christoforous. The Loukoumi Make A Difference Foundation is a 501c3 nonprofit organization formed with the consent of the New York State Department of Education to teach children to make a difference in their lives and the lives of others. Loukoumi, a fluffy little lamb, is the main character from the Loukoumi book series that wants to make the world a better place. The Loukoumi Make A Difference Foundation seeks to teach children to follow Loukoumis lead and to make a positive difference. More information on the Foundation is available online: www.LoukoumiFoundation.org. The Make A Difference Day with Loukoumi Program is the recipient of Tegnas 2017 Make A Difference Day All-Star Award and recently the Loukoumi Foundation received the Point of Light Award. Read more at thenationalherald.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 On the issue of visas in 2017 there was a 22.6 percent increase in comparison with 2016 The prospect of strenthening the flow of tourists from India to Greece is very high as 22 million Indians travel abroad each year and 75 million have a passport and are consequently potential visitors, according to speakers at the Greek-India business forum in Athens on Tuesday, ANA reports. Greek Tourism Minister Kountoura met in April with newly-appointed Indian Ambassador to Greece Shamma Jain and discussed the increase in the flow of tourists from India and ways to attract Bollywood movie producers to shoot on location in Greece. Kountoura also visited Mumbai and the International Tourism Exhibition OTM in February 2017, in which the Greek National Tourism Organisation participated for the first time with its own pavilion. 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 Tranio.com published in a recent report the top-5 countries with the highest demand for Greek golden visas. According to the real estate experts, Greece's residence-for-investment programme is one of the most attractive in Europe. To acquire residency, one only needs to spend 250,000 on property purchases, or buy a hotel or tourist furnished apartments in a timeshare contract. The main applicants spouse, their parents and children under 21 years of age are also eligible for residence. Based on state investment agency Enterprise Greece data, the country granted investors 2,300 golden visas (5,700 visas, including those issued to family members) between 2013 and 2017. Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Iraqi and Lebanese nationals received the most residence permits about 80% of all the visas issued. 1. China China has been actively expanding its presence in Greece over the past few years. In 2016, Chinese port operator COSCO, one of the largest in the world, acquired 51% of the Piraeus Port Authority for 280.5 million, and in June 2017, State Grid Corp. purchased a 24% stake in state-owned power grid operator ADMIE for 320 million. The active expansion of China into Greek infrastructure can be explained by the affordability of Greek assets and the countrys favourable geographical location that makes it is an important trading partner and transportation gateway for the New Silk Road between Europe and the Middle East. The Chinese also received the most Greek golden visas. According to Enterprise Greece, between 2013 and 2017, golden visas were issued to 1,011 Chinese investors (2,525, including family members). According to the Chinese Investment in Greece and Big Picture of Sino-Greek Relations reports published by the Institute of International Economics Relations in 2017, Chinese golden visa applicants spend an average of 550,000 to 600,000 on real estate, which is double the minimum investment required for residency. According to Greek Guru, in Greece, Chinese nationals prefer buying newly built residential real estate located near beaches, shops, public transport stops and international schools. 2. Russia According to Enterprise Greece, the country granted Russian nationals 395 golden visas (907, including those issued to family members) between 2013 and 2017. Notably, most investors only included one family member in their residence applications on average. Russian nationals account for 16% of all golden visa applicants. According to Tranio statistics, Russian-speaking applicants for Greek golden visas are mainly interested in residential property in Thessaloniki and Athens in particular, the suburbs located 3040 minutes from central Athens (Faliro, Glyfada, Varkiza, Voula, Vouliagmeni) are also popular. According to Tranio, the average budget of Russian-speaking property buyers who want a residence permit in Greece is 250,000. They also often consider Spain, Cyprus and Portugal, which have similar residence-for-investment programmes. 3. Turkey According to Enterprise Greece, in 2017, Greek golden visas were granted to 222 Turkish nationals (547, including family members). According to Turkish media outlet Hurriyet Daily News, almost none of the Turks holding Greek golden visas actually relocate to the country. Many of them want Greek residency "for future use" in case of instability in their home country. According to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, traffic to Turkish-language versions of Greek property websites grew almost tenfold after the Turkish referendum on expanding presidential powers on April 16, 2017. The Turks who buy property in Athens usually rent out the apartments or use them as holiday homes. According to Turkish online media outlet Daily Sabah, the most popular types of real estate among Turkish buyers are prime and resort properties, shops, hotels, land plots and even parking lots. Many investors have properties in high-end Athenian neighbourhoods: Kolonaki, Psychiko, Glyfada, Voula and Vouliagmeni. According to Greek web portal Ekathimerini, Turkish nationals are among the most dynamic groups of Greek property buyers today, along with the citizens of the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy. Most of them are university-educated, middle-class or affluent natives of Western Turkey, the Aegean coast and Istanbul. 4. Iraq By late 2017, Iraqi nationals had obtained 266 golden visas under the Greek residency-for-investment programme, from which only 69 were issued to the main applicants. According to Enterprise Greece, Iraqis obtain residence permits for their whole families more often than other applicants. on average, each investor applies for residence with three family members. The number of main applicants from Iraq is lower than Egypt, Lebanon and Ukraine. According to the 2018 Henley Passport Index, the Iraqi passport is the least attractive in the world, with visa-free entrance to only 30 countries. As such, Greek residency, which allows visa-free access to the Schengen Area, is popular among Iraqi nationals. 5. Lebanon Lebanese nationals obtained 91 Greek golden visas (260 including family members) between 2013 and 2017, or about 5% of the total number of golden visas issued. Like the Iraqis, Lebanese investors also secure residency for an average of three family members each. The population of Lebanon is approximately 6 million, of which 1.1 million are Syrian migrants and about 500,000 are Palestinian migrants, and about 1 million Lebanese nationals live abroad (according to some estimates, this figure is between 4 million and 13 million). The main reason why Lebanese nationals want foreign residency is the political and economic instability in their home country. According to the Bank of Greece, the volume of transactions closed by foreign nationals in the Greek real estate market in 2017 exceeded the 2016 figure by 87%. In January 2018, this figure was 205% higher than the year before. The opportunity to travel across the Schengen Area is not the only driver of demand for the Greek golden visa programme. The Greek property market is starting to recover. According to the Bank of Greece, property prices fell by only 1% in 2017 from the year before, compared to an annual decline of 6.5% for the past eight years. The decline in property prices has already stopped quarter-on-quarter: between Q2 and Q4 2017, property prices remained stable in Athens and even grew in other cities. Tranio analysts expect property prices in Athens to grow by 30% in 2 to 3 years. Read more at tranio.com/Yulia Kozhevnikova 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 Bank ABC, a leading player in the regions banking industry, said it has obtained approval from the Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB) to appoint a market maker for enhancing the liquidity of its share trading on the Bahrain Bourse. This arrangement was also approved by the shareholders during Bank ABC's Ordinary General Assembly meeting held in March, said a statement from the bank. To achieve this goal, the Bahrain-based bank has appointed as of June 20 the Securities and Investment Company (Sico) as the designated market maker with respect to the banks ordinary shares listed on the Bahrain Bourse. As per the market making arrangement, Sico has sole discretion to buy and sell a percentage of Bank ABC shares not exceeding 1 per cent of the total issued share capital, on ABCs behalf, thereby creating a more dynamic two-way market that will enhance the liquidity of the banks shares for market participants. The market making programme with Sico will be in effect for an initial 12-month period following its establishment, so as to enable Bank ABC to gauge the success of the arrangement, but it may be extended thereafter if the Board of Directors considers it appropriate. Group CEO Dr Khaled Kawan said it has had a longstanding issue in that the intrinsic value of the bank is not fully reflected in its Bahrain Bourse share price. "A number of factors have contributed to this, including the low trading volume of Bank ABCs ordinary shares on the Bahrain Bourse. The market making mechanism is designed to contribute to tackling this issue," noted Dr Kawan. Bank ABC is a leading player in the regions banking industry and provides innovative wholesale financial products and services that include corporate banking, trade finance, project and structured finance, syndications, treasury products and Islamic banking. It also provides retail banking services through its network of retail banks in Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, he added.-TradeArabia News Service Imagine travelling to Abu Dhabi for work and coming back to visit your family in Bahrain in less than an hour; or going to Paris and returning to Barcelona in an hour. These are just a few examples of the potential of hyperloop globally. 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TravPR.com are not the issuers of this press release and are not responsible for the accuracy of the content. Share Release : CONTACT INFORMATION Name: Seminar Room Company: klseminarroom.com Phone: +6(03)2280 0409 Email: semirooms@reliable-mail.com Web: PRESS RELEASE TAGS editorial@tribune.com Vijay C Roy Tribune News Service Chandigarh, June 19 In order to involve the future generation in the finalisation of the states agriculture policy, the Punjab State Farmers and Farm Workers Commission has decided to rope in schools, colleges and university students. The Commission, which has sought comments and suggestions on its recently unveiled draft Punjab State Farmers Policy from farmers and experts, wants to create awareness about several critical issues such as over-exploitation of groundwater and over-dependence on wheat and paddy. We plan to write to schools, colleges and universities for students participation in the planning process. The students will also be rewarded for their suggestions. An announcement to this effect will be made soon, Punjab State Farmers and Farm Workers Commission Chairman Ajay Vir Jakhar told The Tribune. Jhakhar said, the Commission is open to all kinds of suggestions from every section of society and often students come out with some brilliant ideas. We dont want to restrict ourselves. We want involvement of the existing farmers as well as their next generation, he said. Any student can submit his/her suggestions online, he said. All they have to do is to upload their identity cards, he added. The Commission will also use social media to tap views and ideas of younger generation, he said. This is a must for the first-ever policy for a state that has been in the forefront of agriculture for several decades, he said. Besides students, the commission is also reaching out to farmer organisations, bureaucrats, agriculture experts, academicians and elected representatives (MLA and MPs). The fact that there was no such policy earlier in the state has made our task more challenging. This will also give us an opportunity to create state-wide awareness about problems and prospects of the farming sector, he said. Jakhar said the wider consultation on the draft policy has been started and the exercise is expected to be completed soon. We will modify draft policy as per suggestions of all stakeholders and then finalise it by July, he said. This is an attempt to make a pragmatic policy with a long-term perspective. It will not be a rigid document. It can be modified as per the future requirements, he said. The suggested policy interventions in the draft policy document are not exhaustive, he said. The purpose of the policy is to make Punjabs agriculture sustainable, he added. Jakhar explained that the objective of the policy is to improve prosperity and quality of life of farmers, particularly the small, marginal and landless farmers. The draft policy has identified four key objectives achieving acceptable level of standard of living for all; conserving natural resources; combating disguised unemployment and improving governance and delivery of services to farmers. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Our Correspondent Kharar, June 19 In a daring incident, members of the sand mining mafia attacked Block Forest Range Officer Devinder Singh and forest guard Karnail Singh near Seonk village in Kharar subdivision on the periphery of Chandigarh on Monday night, leaving them seriously injured before fleeing from the spot. Both injured forest officials were admitted to the PGI, where Devinders condition is stated to be very critical. He has suffered multiple fractures in the skull and was operated upon, said doctors, adding that he had been kept under observation for the next 72 hours. A naka was laid by Devinder Singh along with other employees of the Forest Department near Seonk village on Monday night to check sand mining. Around 10.30 pm, they stopped a tractor-trailer coming from Seonk village. A car was following the tractor-trailer in which some armed persons were sitting. They suddenly attacked the forest employees at the naka and inflicted serious injuries on them before fleeing. The Mohali Deputy Commissioner, the District Forest Officer, the Kharar DSP and other senior officers of the Forest Department visited both injured at the PGI. Kharar DSP Deep Kamal said a case under Sections 353, 186, 332, 148 and 149 of the IPC had been registered against unknown persons at the Mullanpur Garibdas police station. He said some persons had been rounded up in this connection and the police would arrest the accused soon. AAP MLA from Kharar Kanwar Sandhu has demanded strict action against the sand mining mafia responsible for the attack on the forest officials. Illegal mining is taking place in the river bed at Jayanti Majri, Masol, Bhagindi, Nada, Perchh and the Seonk area, he said. Sandhu, who visited the Seonk area and the river bed on Tuesday, in a press note issued to the media, demanded that forest and mining officials be provided with armed guards when they go on raids and set up nakas to check the illegal activity. The officials who were attacked in Seonk on Monday night were unarmed. Sandhu has also written to the Mohali DC and the SSP as well as the Punjab Home Secretary on the issue. The MLA also met Mullanpur SHO Bikramjit Singh at Seonk, who said they had identified the culprits and had also questioned certain people in connection with the attack. No efforts should be spared in catching the mafia goons, the MLA told the SHO. Why is a former Congress minister silent on the illegal mining issue, which has been going on for the past 15 years in the area, asked Sandhu. Courageous officer Block Forest Range Officer Devinder Singh is known as a courageous officer. He was also attacked near Nadda village in Kharar subdivision on the outskirts of Chandigarh in 2009-10 by the land mafia and then also he had suffered serious injuries. Harbans Singh Mahalwee Harbans Singh Mahalwee General Secretary, Muzaffarbad PoK Refugees Welfare Society, Punjab One is compelled to ponder over a question posed by former Secretary-General of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres: What would you do if you were forced to leave your home? Today, more than 68 million people around the world are refugees or internally displaced as a result of conflict or persecution. That is equivalent to the population of the world's 20th largest country. Last year, someone was displaced every two seconds, mostly in poorer countries. Today, on World Refugee Day, we must think about what more we can do to help them. It begins with unity and solidarity. It is deeply disconcerting to see the increasing number of situations where refugees are not receiving the protection they need and to which they are entitled. As long as there are wars and persecution, there will be refugees. Particularly pathetic is the plight of displaced persons of Pak-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (POJK DPs) of 1947 in Jammu and Kashmir. They are suffering even after the passage of almost 70 years of displacement from their native land. They deserve immediate remedial measures. To solve the problems being faced by refugees and displaced persons in J&K, Report No. 183 of the Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs was placed in both Houses of Parliament on December 22, 2014. In Para 1.3.1 under the head POJK DPs 1947 of this report, the Ministry of Home Affairs apprised the committee that in the wake of Pakistani aggression in Jammu and Kashmir in 1947, a mass exodus of population from Pak-occupied area of Kashmir (POK) took place. The ministry also stated that as per the available records, 31,619 families were registered with the Rehabilitation Organisation, Jammu, of which 26,319 families opted to settle down within the state of J&K and 5,300 families settled outside (Delhi 1,901 families, Maharashtra 123 families, Rajasthan 495 families and most of the 2,781 families in other states are in Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh). Out of the 26,319 families, around 22,719 opted to settle in rural areas, and 3,600 in urban areas. However, no claims for compensation in lieu of the properties left behind by these displaced persons were invited by the Government of India as POJK was treated as an integral part of India. The Displaced Persons (Compensation and Rehabilitation) Act, 1954 and the Administration of Evacuee Property Act, 1950 are not applicable to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. As per Para 1.3.2 of this report, in order to mitigate the hardship of these families, the Government of India decided to provide ex gratia/rehabilitation assistance. Further, it has been described in Para 3.2.19.3 of the report that though all may not be treated on a par, their problems need to be addressed properly and a suitable solution should be found and equal treatment to all displaced persons (DPs) be given. The West Pakistani refugees have also been placed on a par with other displaced persons in the same financial package, ie Rs 5.5 lakh per family after 70 years. Para 1.2.2 says that the West Pakistani refugees settled in Jammu and Kashmir are very much citizens of India. They have the right to vote in the parliamentary elections but they do not enjoy voting rights to the state Assembly and local body elections. There is no provision of a separate citizenship for the state. However, they are not permanent residents of the state in terms of the J&K Constitution. So, these families could not be provided the benefits which had been provided to POJK refugees. While the decision of the government to facilitate the West Pakistani refugee community waiting for justice since 1947 is creditable, it is not easy to understand the dual policies of the Indian government. In the package of Rs 80,000 crore announced by Central government on November 7, 2015 for J&K, Rs 5,263 crore under the Head Security and Welfare of Displaced People has been earmarked which includes Rs 2,000 crore for the DPs of POJK 1947 and DPs of 1965-71. The financial package announced by the Prime Minister in 2015 was to mitigate the hardships of all DPs of POJK of 1947 and the 1965 and 1971 wars. These displaced families of 1947 had already been identified by the government and some benefits had been provided to them. The 5,300 families who were not allowed to stay at Jammu after being displaced from Muzaffarabad, Kotli and Mirpur districts of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir due to short resources of the state were shifted to different transit camps like Chakrata, Yol and Kurukshetra. These camps were controlled by the government and from these camps the DPs were shifted to different states according to the availability of agricultural land or residential quarters. An ex gratia amount of Rs 3,500 per family was distributed through the PRO, Jammu, from 1962 to 1965. Out of this ex gratia, the cost of land or quarter was deducted along with interest. This is all that the 5,300 families have received from the government in 70 years whose family members were brutally massacred by the herds of tribes and Pakistan Army. These families opted to live in J&K state to save their religion, children and young girls. The representatives of POJK DPs 1947 had been approaching each government to solve the genuine problem of getting some compensation for their properties (movable and immovable) which was finally recommended by the previous J&K government as one-time settlement .The total amount was only Rs 9,096 crore, ie Rs 25 lakh per family. This amount was increased to Rs 30 lakh per family by the Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs in 2014. Although the process of distribution of Rs 5.5 lakh per family has been started for J&K residents, the inclusion of 5,300 families settled in the other states is still awaited. A profound sense of loss and loneliness prevails in the hearts and minds of these 5,300 displaced people of POJK. The insensitive attitude of the authorities towards them acts as a wet blanket to their woes. Their rehabilitation should be taken up seriously by the government. The pain and trauma becomes more acute and adds to the miseries when there is lack of understanding on the part of the authorities. The DPs of POJK-1947 settled outside J&K await justice from the Central and J&K governments as they have been deprived of all benefits announced by the governments. editorial@tribune.com Sushil Manav Tribune News Service Chandigarh, June 19 With parliamentary elections less than a year away and the BJP already on the job for its Mission-2019 with a target to win 300 seats, party president Amit Shah will meet top leaders from the state on June 22 at Haryana Bhawan in Delhi. The Tribune has learnt that during the meeting, Shah will not only discuss the partys plans for the seats that the BJP lost in 2014, but will also review the performance of the sitting MPs. Sources said besides Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar, national organising secretary of the party Ram Lal, Haryana affairs incharge Anil Jain, state BJP president Subhash Barala, state organising secretary Suresh Bhatt, three Central ministers from the state Birender Singh, Rao Inderjit Singh and Krishan Pal Gurjar, state Cabinet ministers Ram Bilas Sharma, Capt Abhimanyu, OP Dhankar and Anil Vij and national secretary of the party Sudha Yadav would attend the meeting. Earlier, Shah had taken feedback from BJP organisation leaders during a two-day meeting held at Surajkund in Faridabad on June 15 and 16. Sources said the feedback Shah got about some of the sitting MPs was no encouraging. The party leaders are likely to discuss various options available to them on these seats during the June 22 meeting. BJP sources said fielding new faces on at least half of the Lok Sabha seats was not ruled out. In 2014, the BJP had contested eight seats and left Hisar and Sirsa to its alliance partner at that time Haryana Janhit Congress (HJC) of Kuldeep Bishnoi. While the HJC lost both seats to the INLD, the BJP won seven seats, losing the Rohtak seat to Deepender Hooda of the Congress. The BJP MP from Kurukshetra, Raj Kumar Saini, has already stated several times that he would float his own political outfit and contest the next elections on its ticket. Bhiwani MP Dharamvir Singh has expressed his unwillingness to contest the parliamentary poll while Karnal MP Ashwani Chopra has also been showing signs of dissent. Since Dhankar was the BJPs candidate from Rohtak in the last parliamentary elections, the party sources said it was unlikely that he would be asked to contest the seat this time, as he is a senior minister in the state Cabinet. Sources said while the party leaders would mull options for Hisar, Sirsa, Kurukshetra, Bhiwani, Karnal and Rohtak seats, change of candidates on one or two more seats could not be ruled out. State BJP chief Subhash Barala said the meeting was aimed at holding discussions on the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Our partys president will discuss the strategy as well as the performance of MPs on the 10 Lok Sabha seats from the state in detail. However, it is too early to say whether new faces could be fielded on some seats as decisions on tickets are taken only at the time of elections, Barala said. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Solan, June 19 The 10-day Sanawar Leadership Programme, which is being held in collaboration with Aspire, kick-started at The Lawrence School, Sanawar, on Tuesday. Over 20 girls and boys in the 10-14 year age group from across the country are participating in this residential summer camp. It seeks to develop leadership skills and qualities through discussion-based case studies, adventure activities, community service, communications and various other important life skills. Amit Bhatia, chief executive officer and founder of Aspire, informed the participants about various activities offered in the programme and encouraged the young participants to take maximum advantage of this unique opportunity. The participants were engaged in thought provoking Socratic dialogue titled Kungfu Panda on the first day of the camp. Inaugurating the second edition of TSLP, Deeya Bajaj, the guest of honour on the occasion and an avid mountaineer said a true leader must always be humble and positive. She created history about a month ago by becoming the first Indian father-daughter duo to scale Mount Everest. In his welcome address, Vinay Pande, Headmaster, Lawrence School, said, We must train ourselves adequately to face adversity in life if we want to become a true leader. The other dignitaries who graced the occasion were Brigadier Vikram Sharma and Captain AJ Singh, IPSC chairman and director, Pine Grove School. editorial@tribune.com Aditi Tandon Tribune News Service New Delhi, June 19 Moments after the BJP pulled out of its coalition with the PDP, the Congress distanced itself from the latter saying there was no question of any alliance with the PDP and said Governors Rule will only exacerbate the situation. Former J&K Chief Minister and veteran Congress man Ghulam Nabi Azad was the first to articulate his partys stand on the developments. He claimed vindication as the BJP-PDP bond broke. In 2015 while speaking on the floor of Parliament I had warned PM Narendra Modi that his partys alliance with the PDP in J&K was a Himalayan blunder. My words have come true. Our partys stand has been vindicated. The PM had shrugged me off then, Azad said. Congress president Rahul Gandhi too reacted, saying: The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people, including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically and destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Governors Rule. Incompetence, arrogance and hatred always fails. Politically, Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Azad indicated that the Congress will play hard to get as far as shaking hands with PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti goes. He recalled past betrayals to stress the question of an alliance with the PDP does not arise. Azad was referring to the Congress offer of a grand alliance to keep the BJP out of power in J&K. We are happy at least the people of the Valley will now be spared further troubles, Azad said. monicakchauhan@gmail.com Vibha Sharma and Majid Jahangir Tribune News Service New Delhi, June 19 The BJP on Tuesday ended its three-year-old alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and pulled out of the PDP-led Jammu and Kashmir government, setting the stage for yet another round of Governors rule. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the surprise announcement after the party high command summoned its Jammu and Kashmir ministers for emergency consultations in New Delhi. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor N N Vohra amid a swirl of political activity in Srinagar and New Delhi. Madhav said: It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in Jammu and Kashmir. Under such circumstances, the BJP was left with no other option, but to pull out of the alliance, he said at a press conference. "Keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and in order to control the prevailing situation in the state, we have decided that the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor," Madhav said. Madhav said there was a growing sense of discrimination within the other two regions of the state. He said the decision was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. He also denied that the decision was taken because the BJP was losing ground. We are doing a lot of good work in the state, he said. In a press statement released on Tuesday evening, the BJP accused the state government of showing little interest in improving the state's law and order condition. "The state government has not been effective in addressing the core issues of the state. The security scenario has deteriorated causing serious concern about the protection of basic fundamental rights of life, free speech etc. Daylight murder of a respected editor like Shujat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar city is an indicator to the deterioration of the situation and the extent of radicalisation, the statement said. BJP president Amit Shah held an urgent meeting of Jammu and Kashmir BJP ministers and some top leaders in the national capital on Tuesday. The BJP central leadership deliberated on the party's strategy in the state ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and also took stock of the political situation in Jammu and Kashmir, sources said. "All the BJP ministers had been called to New Delhi for a meeting," said a senior Jammu and Kashmir BJP leader. Muscular security policy will not work in state: Mufti In her first reaction after BJPs pullout, PDPs Mehobboba Mufti said she was not shocked at the development. She also said she was "not looking to explore any other alliance. I am not shocked. We didn't do this alliance for power. This alliance had a bigger motiveunilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of 11,000 cases against stone-pelters, etc., she said. She claimed the PDP's alliance with the BJP hurt her party. Presenting her point of view, Mehbooba said the PDP has always maintained that a muscular security policy would not work in J&K. We need reconciliation, she said, adding that the PDP wanted a healing touch, which she said what lead to the Ramzan ceasefire. BJP's press statement Here we reproduce BJPs press statement in full. Respecting the mandate of the people of J&K, the BJP had joined hands with the PDP to form the coalition government in early 2015. In the last three years the BJP has tried its best to work towards the states objective of the coalition governmentpeace, development and progress in all the three important regions of the state, Jammu, Ladakh and Kashmir. The Union Government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has extended full support to our coalition government in all respects. A major developmental package of Rs 80,000 crores has been announced a significant part of it has already been disbursed. Towards maintaining Law & Order situation in the state the Union Home Minister and the Ministry have proactively supported the state machinery as and when required. With a view to finding amicable solution to the aggrieved sections of the State, the Union Government has appointed former DIB as the interlocutor with a mandate to engage with different sections of the society. In spite of all these measures, we find that the state government has not been effective in addressing the core issues of the state. The security scenario has deteriorated causing serious concern about the protection of basic fundamental rights of life, free speech etc. Daylight murder of a respected editor like Shujat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar city is an indicator to the deterioration of the situation and the extent of radicalisation. While the security forces have done a fabulous job in the last few years in containing the situation, the primary responsibility of maintaining Law & Order, which is managed by the state government, showed severe shortcomings. Ruling political dispensation in the Valley has shown least interest in improving the situation. For the BJP, J&K is a matter of great national importance also. There is a grave concern in the country over the deteriorating security situation in the state. National integration is paramount for the BJP and it cant compromise on that question. On the other hand, resentment in Jammu and Ladakh regions has been growing over lack of proper development and progress and also a perceptible sense of discrimination. The BJP members in the government have strived their best to serve the people in the state including those in the regions of Jammu and Ladakh. Yet they faced a situation where the government as a whole has been less responsive and lacklustre to the needs of the people of these regions. In such a scenario, the BJP thought it untenable to continue in the government and hence withdrew support from the PDP-BJP coalition government in the state. With agencies editorial@tribune.com Dinesh Manhotra Tribune News Service Jammu, June 19 Defending his decision to snap ties with the PDP for not taking effective steps to contain militancy in J&K, BJP national president Amit Shah told state party leaders at Tuesday's meeting that continuing with the coalition would prove disastrous for the party at the national level. He admitted that the coalition experiment with the PDP had proven to be wrong. A senior BJP leader from J&K, who attended the crucial meeting with Amit Shah at New Delhi, told The Tribune that the national president first asked state leaders to highlight the three-year achievements of the coalition with the PDP. As the visiting leaders from J&K failed to highlight any noticeable achievement, Shah suggested that instead of continuing with the coalition it was in the interest of the party and the people to come out of the government, he said. Shah was of the view that the PDP leadership had failed to take peace initiatives in J&K despite all support from the Union government, he said. At the meeting, Shah talked about the failure of the PDP leadership in reciprocating the support from the Centre. Partys national general secretary (organisation) Ram Lal and Avinash Rai Khanna, incharge of the J&K BJP were also present. State party president Ravinder Raina, former Deputy Chief Minister Kavinder Gupta, four general secretaries of the state BJP unit along with all former ministers attended the meeting but only Gupta spoke. All state leaders unanimously supported the decision of the high command to come out of the coalition. A former BJP minister, who wished not to be quoted, told The Tribune that Shah, while discussing the pros and cons of continuing with the coalition, said the party had taken bold initiatives such as the announcement of unilateral ceasefire in the month of Ramzan but these measures were not properly reciprocated by the PDP. Sources said the issue of registration of FIRs against security personnel dealing with stone pelters was also discussed and those present in the meeting observed that such steps had demoralised the security forces. Sources said it was mentioned in the meeting that the PDP was pursuing soft separatism to strengthen its constituency and this policy had created discontent among residents of the Jammu region against the BJP. PDP failed to reciprocate At the crucial meeting of BJP national president Amit Shah with state party leaders in Delhi on Tuesday, the former said the PDP leadership had failed to take peace initiatives in J&K despite all support from the Union government, said a source. editorial@tribune.com Sumit Hakhoo Tribune News Service Jammu, June 19 As the BJP central leadership decided to pull out from the coalition government with the PDP, displaced Pandits on Tuesday said the step was long overdue keeping in view the situation in the state. Representative groups of 3.50 lakh Pandits, who are living as refugees in camps of Jammu, said the BJP-led government in New Delhi and the PDP-BJP coalition in J&K had sidelined the community and delinked it from peace initiatives. It is a welcome step. Under the coalitions term, the administrative apparatus was used to strengthen the separatist cause in the past three years. The ruling parties turned the plight of Pandits into a non-issue. There was a total neglect of the nationalist constituency in J&K, said Ajay Chrangoo, chairman, Panun Kashmir, one of the frontal organisations of the Pandits. In 2015, when the BJP formed its first-ever coalition government in the state, there was much enthusiasm among displaced people that their issues would be resolved. They also felt that the employment and rehabilitation package announced in 2008 would be implemented properly. However, there were several U-turns, starting with abandoning of the project to construct a composite township in the Valley under the pressure of separatists and threats from militant groups. The BJP didnt anticipate how the coalition would be run in J&K. It is also failed to come up with a concrete policy to deal with the complexities of the situation in the state, said Sanjay Tikku, president, Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, a group of non-migrant Pandits living in the Valley. editorial@tribune.com Majid Jahangir Tribune News Service Srinagar, June 19 Shortly after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulled out of the J&K coalition government, which came as a surprise to its alliance partner PDP, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor NN Vohra. After her exit, Mehbooba said she was not "shocked" by the BJP decision and made it clear that the Peoples Democratic Party was not looking to explore any fresh alliance. I am not shocked by the decision of the BJP to pull out of the alliance, Mehbooba said at a press briefing after an emergency meeting of the PDP top leadership at her Gupkar residence this afternoon. She said her party had not formed the coalition with the BJP for power. We had not done it for power. Had we done that, there were numbers with the NC (National Conference) and the Congress but we did it for some objective, she said, adding that we tried our best to continue in the alliance. Mehbooba, who had taken over as the first woman Chief Minister of the Muslim-majority J&K in April, 2016, further said that the PDP had entered into an alliance with BJP after much thought. We had gone for this alliance after much thought and with the thought that the big party will help bridge the gap between the two regions. Our alliance was not liked by people but the ideas, for which it was made, were bigger. These included talks with Pakistan, ceasefire, reconciliation and confidence-building measures, she added. Mehbooba said they had defended the special status, Articles 370 and 35A and withdrawn cases against 11,000 youth. The Prime Minister visited Pakistan for talks but the initiative could not be taken forward. Even the ceasefire was not positively responded to, she said. Mehbooba stressed that mascular policy would not work in Kashmir. This was the reason we went for the unilateral ceasefire. We dealt with the Kathua rape-murder case and we tried our best, she said, adding that one cant treat Jammu and Kashmir as an enemy territory. Taken by surprise The news about the BJP pulling out of the alliance came as a complete surprise to Mehbooba Mufti and her party leaders. She was at the civil secretariat when the news started making the rounds of the possible BJP pullout. She returned to her Gupkar residence around 2 pm. The Chief Minister later headed to the secretariat. After the news about the BJP decision became public, she called her senior party leaders and ministers at her residence and discussed the partys immediate response. Mehbooba sent her resignation letter to the Governor through a party leader. What Chief Minister said One cant treat Jammu and Kashmir as an enemy territory We had gone for this alliance after much thought and with the thought that the big party will help bridge the gap between the two regions Our alliance was not liked by people, but the ideas, for which it was made, were bigger. These included talks with Pakistan, ceasefire, reconciliation and confidence-building measures We defended the special status, Articles 370 and 35A and withdrew cases against 11,000 youth 806 days of Mehbooba govt December 29, 2014: Five-phase polls end; PDP wins 28 seats, BJP 25 in Kashmir and Jammu divisions, respectively; no party gets clear majority March 1, 2015: PDP-BJP Agenda of Alliance comes into effect; PDPs Mufti Mohammad Sayeed takes oath as CM of PDP-BJP coalition government January 7, 2016: Mufti Sayeed passes away; Mehbooba refuses to take over; Governors Rule imposed April 4: Mehbooba takes over as CM, carries on with Agenda of Alliance; Governors Rule ends June 19: By-polls to Mufti Sayeeds Anantnag Assembly seat held June 25: Mehbooba wins seat; resigns from Anantnag Lok Sabha seat July 8: Hizb commander Burhan Wani killed in Anantnag encounter, triggers six-month-long Kashmir unrest May 16, 2018: Centre announces suspension of anti-militant operations during Ramzan June 17: A day after Eid-ul-Fitr, Centre announces revocation of Ramzan ceasefire June 19: BJP central leadership decides to pull out of coalition govt with PDP Seven times under Guvs rule monicakchauhan@gmail.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, June 19 The Congress on Tuesday accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of ruining the situation in Kashmir and then pulling out of the alliance government at its convenience. It also ruled out the possibility of an alliance with the Mehbooba Mufti-led People's Democratic Party (PDP). "The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails," Congress president Rahul Gandhi said in a tweet on Tuesday evening. "Whatever has happened is good. People of Jammu and Kashmir will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined Kashmir and have now pulled out," said senior Congress leader and former J&K Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. He stressed that the question of Congress forming an alliance with PDP "does not arise". Congress spokesman Randeep Singh Surjewala pointed out that in the last four years, 373 security personnel and 239 civilians have been killed in Jammu and Kashmir due to heightened militancy. "BJP's hunger for power has plunged Jammu and Kashmir into the fire of militancy. In the last four years, 373 jawans and 239 civilians killed. What did the nation get out of this?" Surjewala said in a tweet. "What's the use if you came to senses after the house is ransacked? You yourself set the house on fire and then became an onlooker. The BJP put on a new mask to play a new game," he added. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal pointed out that the Narendra Modi government had claimed that demonetisation in 2016 had broken the back of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir but that did not seem true. "Didn't BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened?" he said. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) criticised the BJPs for its timing, saying its decision to pull out of the government would push the state deeper into instability. The BJP, which was an equal partner in all the decisions of the state government during these three years, can not absolve of itself of blames by pulling out of the government, a communiqe of the party said. It was the responsibility of the BJP in power at the Centre to take the initiative of controlling the situation in J&K. The BJP failed to redeem its promise to take confidence- building measures, and to hold dialogue with all stakeholders for a durable solution to the state's problem. It claimed that the BJPs pullout was a manifestation of the partys inconsistent and faulty policy on J&K. Earlier, it took a unilateral decision for ceasefire, and later called it off abruptly, the statement said. With IANS harinder@tribunemail.com Vibha Sharma & Ehsan Fazili Tribune News Service New Delhi/Srinagar, June 19 The awkward political alliance in Jammu and Kashmir came unstuck on Tuesday with the BJP, citing the PDPs inability to address core issues and improve law and order in the restive state that took a turn for the worse last week following the chilling murder of journalist Shujaat Bukhari and the killing of an Indian Army soldier around the same time, suddenly withdrew support to its partner of three years. Frenemies at the best of times, the saffron party let go of Chief Minister Mehbooba Muftis hand and said it had become untenable to go with her any further in Jammu and Kashmir. The announcement, made by BJP general secretary Ram Madhav in New Delhi, set the stage for Governors Rule if imposed, it will be the fourth time since 2008 and the eighth since 1977 and triggered frenetic talk of early elections in the state. In Srinagar, Mehbooba, who claimed she was not shocked by the BJPs decision to pull the plug on her tentative administration, gave one back and declared from her Gupkar residence after an emergency meeting with the top PDP leadership that her party has always maintained that a muscular security policy would not work in the state and that reconciliation was the way out. One cant treat Jammu and Kashmir as an enemy territory, she said, adding they had gone for the alliance after much thought and with the hope that the big party will help bridge the gap between the two regions. Our alliance was not liked by people, but the ideas, for which it was made, were bigger. These included talks with Pakistan, ceasefire, reconciliation and confidence-building measures, she said soon after submitting her resignation as Chief Minister to Governor NN Vohra. The two partners had campaigned hard against each other in the run-up to Assembly polls in which the BJP won 25 seats and the PDP 28 in the 87-member House. The NC snapped up 15 seats and the Congress 12. Other parties won seven. But soon after results were out, the bitterness during campaigning was forgotten and an alliance forged two months after the December 2014 elections. They had then said that behind the agenda of alliance was the dream that the state would be pulled out of the unending cycle of violence. It's a different matter that the partnership was uncomfortable since the start, with the ideologically divergent parties differing, often loudly, on a host of issues and tactics even as the security situation refused to improve. editorial@tribune.com Dinesh Manhotra Tribune News Service Jammu, June 19 The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) played a key role in convincing the BJP to dump the PDP ahead of the 2019 parliamentary elections to ensure the victory of the party. Although the BJP had taken approval from the Sangh Parivar to enter into an alliance with the PDP in J&K, the RSS leadership was opposing the continuation of the coalition due to some controversial decisions taken by the J&K Government over the past two years. A top RSS leader, requesting anonymity, told The Tribune that J&K situation was thoroughly discussed at a meeting which was held in May at Pune. The Sangh Parivar leadership was unanimous that continuing alliance with the PDP, which was pursuing soft separatism to nourish its core constituency in the Kashmir valley, will demoralise the party cadre throughout the country, he said, adding that the BJP leadership was conveyed about the concern of the Sangh Parivar about the deteriorating situation in the Valley. The RSS cadre across the country in general and in the Jammu region in particular was not giving any encouraging reports about the performance of the PDP-BJP government, he said, adding amnesty to stone-pelters and other pro-separatist steps initiated by the PDP leaders had not gone down well among a section of the Sangh Parivar. Not just the RSS, other offshoots of the Sangh Parivar, including the ABVP, had recently conveyed their concern over the discriminatory policies of the PDP-BJP coalition regime, sources said. With the appointment of hardcore RSS man Ravinder Raina as the state BJP chief on May 13, the countdown of the regime had started because he was assigned the task to aggressively take up contentious issues to embarrass the PDP, said sources. Raina, a former parcharak, was asked to adopt an aggressive posture to take on the coalition partner. The Sangh Parivar leadership was also facing criticism for adopting double standards on sensitive issues like abrogation of Article 35A. While the RSS leadership is openly supporting abrogation of the Article, the BJP, due to coalition compulsions, had failed to take a stand on this issue in the court. monicakchauhan@gmail.com Srinagar, June 19 Separatist leaders have called for a complete shutdown in Kashmir on Wednesday against the killings of journalist Shujaat Bukhari and civilians, gunned down by security forces in the past few days. The Joint Resistance Leadership, an amalgamation of separatist groups, said in a statement today that there had been a sudden spike in civilian killings since the eve of Eid. It also demanded an international probe into Bukhari's killing. "Joint Resistance Leadership has called for a complete strike tomorrow against the continued civilian killings in the valley, which has witnessed a sudden spike since the eve of Eid... three young boys have been brutally gunned down by the Indian forces while the fourth is struggling for life at SKIMS," the statement said. He said the strike will also be observed against the brutal killing of Bukhari, who was shot dead along with his two personal guards outside his office on June 14 by unknown gunmen. "JRL demands an international probe into this gruesome murder," a JRL spokesperson said in the statement. He said cordon and search operations had returned with a vengeance to the villages as people were being severely beaten and harassed and used as human shields. PTI editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, June 19 UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein has expressed his extreme sadness at the killing of senior Kashmir journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Rising Kashmir Shujaat Bukhari last week in Srinagar. Delivering the opening statement at the 38th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Zeid said: I am tremendously saddened by the assassination last week of Shujaat Bukhari, a courageous human rights defender actively working for peace, including through his participation in the Track Two diplomacy seeking to help both India and Pakistan put an end to the violence. Under Zeids chairmanship, the OHCHR published its first-ever 49-page report just a day ahead of Bukharis killing, pulling up India and Pakistan for gross human rights violations on both sides of Kashmir. The report asked Indian security forces to exercise maximum restraint, repeal AFSA and advocated self-determination rights of Kashmiris among others. The report complains about permission being denied for unfettered access to the UN watchdog on both sides of the Line of Control in the past two years. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM The Real Estate Management Institute (REMI), New Delhi, is offering a certified course in Real Estate Finance for non-finance. This course provides a comprehensive understanding of the financial aspects of the real estate industry designed specially for professionals who come from a finance and non-finance background, students interested in real estate finance, business development and land acquisition professionals working with developers. The programme focuses on enhancing the candidates financial skills through the different modules such asbasic financial terms and terminologies, accounting methods, financial statements, housing finance, balance sheet of a real estate company, real estate funding, valuation of real estate assets, etc. The programme also includes financial modelling workshop that focuses on basics of financial modelling using excel sheet and preparation of cash flows. It also involves industry workshops, live projects and group assignments as a part of the course. Ms. Shubika Bilkha - Director, The Real Estate Management Institute (REMI) said, The dynamic real estate business demands a holistic perspective at different levels. While traditionally the real estate industry had been bifurcated in silos led by specialists, in the new regime a sound basic financial understanding of real estate finance has almost become mandatory across job roles. This has thrown up a huge requirement for professionals who understand the foundational concepts and have clarity on the various financial components of the business. For those more entrenched in the business, there is a requirement to understand Financial Feasibility and Fundraising. To meet this requirement, REMI has launched a 3-part Real Estate Finance Certification series that offers participants the foundational knowledge required and an in-depth understanding of advanced real estate finance concepts. The program has been designed to clarify, inform and empower those individuals who would like to take advantage of the emerging opportunities for growth. Programme details Start date: June 19, 2018 Duration: One month, 30 hours Lecture timings: Tuesdays & Thursday,6:30pm to 8:30pm Who should take this course: Non financial professionals, Students interested in finance and Business development / Land acquisition professionals working with developers. Check out: www.remi.edu.in shalender@tribune.com Art and artistes exist beyond religion, politics and boundaries, says veteran actor and politician Paresh Rawal, who believes the audience must also watch the performance of an artiste in an apolitical manner. In an era when artistes are attacked because of their political ideology, how must the audience respond to an artiste? The BJP MP (Lok Sabha/Ahmedabad East) said in an interview: I think the audience should watch the performance of artistes keeping their political opinion aside because art is apolitical. Our film industry is the most secular and apolitical place. Art should not have any boundaries and we should keep it beyond political ideologies. I think there are only a few narrow-minded people who create such fuss. In our film industry, when we work together, we are not bothered about who is coming from which religious and political background... So as an audience, why would they bother, questioned the actor. The acclaimed film and theatre actor, who has decades of work behind him and a filmography that goes beyond 200, will next be seen in Sanju, a Rajkumar Hirani directorial which is a biopic on actor Sanjay Dutt's life. He will also play National Security Advisor Ajit Doval in Uri, and he is also gearing up for a biopic on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. IANS editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Ludhiana June 19 A man alleging fraud of Rs17 lakh has filed a complaint with the Police Commissioner. Complainant Surinder Kumar of New Shakti Nagar alleged that an agent promised to send his son to America, but instead dumped him at Costa Rica, where he had to be admitted to a hospital due to mental trauma. He revealed that the accused, who is also the resident of his locality, had promised to send his 24-year-old son Nanak to America with all genuine means. The complainant said: The accused struck a deal of Rs25 lakh and Rs15 lakh was to be given in advance, while the remaining Rs10 lakh was to be given once my son reached America. I gave Rs10 lakh to the accused in March and Rs7 lakh was handed over to him in April. On April 7, the accused boarded my son in a flight from Delhi airport. Later, when I tried to inquire from the agent about my sons expected date of reaching America, the accused did not give any satisfactory reply. On April 16, I got a call from Costa Rica and the person who called, informed me that my son was admitted to Nacional Psiquiatrico hospital. Due to the agents negligence, my son strayed in the forest of the country for several days and later landed in the hospital, the complainant revealed. BJP leader Parminder Mehta, who accompanied the complainant, said the CP has marked an inquiry to ADCP Surendra Lamba. editorial@tribune.com Harshraj Singh Tribune News Service Ludhiana, June 18 About a month after the collapse of retaining wall under the Gill Chowk flyover, the inquiry report by the four-member committee has blamed rats for the damage. A portion of the retaining wall collapsed on the night of May 13. While the damaged side of the flyover has been closed to traffic, repair work is still going on. The inquiry has been conducted by the committee comprising ADC (Development) Shena Aggarwal, MC Executive Engineer Rahul Gagneja, PWD Executive Engineer Rakesh Garg and GLADA Executive Engineer Ranbir Singh. The committee is of the opinion that the cause of failure of RE (reinforced earth) wall is weakening of reinforcing geogrid net, which is laid during the construction of the bridge, by rats. During inspection, it was observed that the reinforcing geogrid was eaten by rats at many places and there were big holes in it. The RE wall panels are held in position by the geogrid net only. After the net was cut by rats, it lost strength required for holding the RE wall panels. This led to the failure of RE wall, the report reads. The committee also observed: The earth retaining wall is a reinforced earth (RE) wall. Concrete panels supporting the earth are tied with geogrid net. The concrete panels of the abutment side wall had fallen off and the geogrid was torn off. The approach slab was intact but the lean concrete below approach slab has settled. Many rat burrows were found in the earth under the bridge portion and all around the RE wall. The span adjoining the collapsed wall was being used as a garbage dump, which had been cleared." When the retaining wall collapsed, MC officials had also put the entire blame on rats. However, private engineers had accused the contractor concerned of using substandard material, which lead to the collapse of retaining wall. The Council of Engineers (a private organisation) had also alleged poor workmanship in the construction of retaining wall. Ravneet Singh Bittu, MP, visited the site on May 14 and ordered an inquiry. The panel has submitted its report to him, said Deputy Commissioner Pradeep Kumar Agrawal. Meanwhile, MC Superintending Engineer Dharam Singh said repair work would be completed this week What report says During inspection, it was observed that the reinforcing geogrid was eaten by rats at many places and there were big holes in it. The RE wall panels are held in position by the geogrid net only. After the net was cut by rats, it lost strength required for holding the RE wall panels. This led to the failure of RE wall Suggestions by the committee rchopra@tribunemail.com Patna, June 19 Six children were killed on Tuesday in Ararriya of Bihar after a car in which they were travelling in fell into a pond. The incident took place near Tarabadi area. One child was rescued before drowning and rushed to the hospital. More details are awaited. ANI editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Lucknow, June 19 A major fire broke out at two hotels in the busy area of the city early on Tuesday morning, killing at least six people and critically injuring half a dozen. The fire broke out at a hotel in the Charbagh area near the railway station here at around 5 am and spread to an adjacent hotel. Expressing grief at the loss of lives, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announced ex gratia of Rs2 lakh for the families of the deceased and Rs50,000 for the injured. The Lucknow Zone ADG would conduct an inquiry into the fire that reportedly started due to short-circuit in an air conditioner in the basement of SSJ International and spread to Virat International. The injured guests were admitted to the Trauma Centre of the King George Medical University Hospital and Civil Hospital. At least a dozen fire tenders pressed into service had taken six hours to control the flames. Cabinet Minister for Tourism Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who visited the accident site, said both the hotels were full due to various competitive examinations. Over 55 persons trapped inside the hotels were successfully rescued, she said. Guests who managed to escape said they woke up from sleep due to suffocation and when they opened the door all they could see was smoke in the corridors. Many climbed down from their balcony. pardeepdhull@gmail.com Yash Goyal Our Correspondent Jaipur/New Delhi, June 19 A choreographer was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly making a hoax bomb call after missing a Jaipur-Mumbai Indigo flight, an official said. Mohit Kumar Tank (25), a choreographer with a dance reality show, made the call to Indigos call centre in Gurgaon claiming that a bomb has been planted on Indigo flight 6E218, CISF commandant at Jaipur International Airport Y P Singh said. He said the flights departure time was 5 am but it took off at 4.52 am. Since Tank could not reach the airport on time, he made a call to the Indigo call centre at 5.30 am. We traced the accused and handed over him to Sanganer police, the official said. The accused has been booked under various Acts of the IPC, Civil Aviation and Separation of Aircraft Act by the Sanganer Police (Jaipur), DCP East Kunwar Rashtradeep told The Tribune. By the time Tank made the hoax bomb call, the flight was about to land in Mumbai. Upon landing, security agencies took about three hours to clear the aircraft for further schedule operations. IndiGo also issued a statement confirming the incident. The IndiGo call centre received a call at around 5:30 am from an unidentified person mentioning a bomb threat to 6E 218 operating a Jaipur-Mumbai flight. We immediately reported the matter to Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) and followed all laid down security protocols, it said. The authorities concerned carried out the investigation and declared the call as specific bomb threat. Following the clearance by the authorities, operations will be resumed as normal, the statement said. With PTI uttara@tribuneindia.com Tribune News Service New Delhi, June 19 President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday delivered his first major foreign policy speech highlighting the challenges of terrorism and multilateralism at a leading Greek think-tank in Athens. Addressing the Hellenic Foundation for Europe and Foreign Policy on India and Europe in a Changing World, President Kovind advocated robust, rules-based, multilateral institutions and connectivity projects that are viable, sustainable, respect the sovereignty and territory of nations. The Presidents address comes just weeks after Modi spoke strongly in favour of international laws and commitments at the Shangri La dialogue in Singapore. India and Europe must work together to ensure that the multilateral mechanism remains resilient and serves future generations as well as accommodates new actors with a merit-based claim for a seat at the table, President Kovind said. As a responsible power, India seeks to be a rule framer and rule custodian, he added. The President also underlined radicalisation and terrorism as global concerns with India and EU facing pockets of instability and extremism to the west and east, respectively. Promotion of terrorism by state and non-state actors; extremism in a variety of forms and rooted in senseless hate; the proliferation of sensitive weapons; the use of regular communication and financial channels by terror groups these pose a challenge to not one nation or the other but to all humanity, he said. He urged India and EU to persuade the world to not distinguish between so-called good and bad terrorists and to shame and sanction state sponsors of terrorism. Earlier, the President, who is on a state visit to the Hellenic Republic, laid wreaths at the Phaleron Indian Cremation Memorial. Remains of 74 soldiers of undivided India who had sacrificed their lives in the campaign in Greece during World War II were laid to rest here. rchopra@tribunemail.com Shiv Kumar Tribune News Service Mumbai, June 19 Three children lost their lives and more than 70 others were hospitalised in a suspected case of food poisoning on Monday night in Maharashtras Raigad district, according to police. District police officials from Mahad village in Raigad said all the victims had consumed biryani at a house-warming ceremony of one Subhash Mane on Monday night. Around 500 people had been invited for dinner on Monday evening. While the children and a few adults ate first, the remaining were to be served later in the night. However, the younger children who had just finished dinner began to vomit and were rushed to hospital, a police official from Mahad village told this reporter. The victims were first rushed to the small Parvati Hospital at Khopoli nearby and later shifted to bigger hospitals like the Gandhi Hospital at Panvel and MGM and DY Patil hospitals at Navi Mumbai as their condition worsened. The three children who died have been identified as Pragati Shinde (13), Rishikesh Shinde (12) and Kalyani Shingote (7). Five other persons are in various hospitals in a critical condition. Police suspect that some insecticides used in the fields nearby may have been mixed with the food when it was being cooked at the village temple. The police have filed a case of accidental death. However, more sections are likely to be added as investigations were continuing, police officials said. rchopra@tribunemail.com London, June 19 The first-ever UK-India Week was launched here on Tuesday with the message that a post-Brexit bilateral trade partnership has the potential to shape the global economy. Britains Secretary of State for international trade Liam Fox, who is set to visit India later this year for the next UK-India Joint Economic Trade Committee (JETCO), described India as foremost among the UKs allies and trading partners and hailed reforms initiated by the Indian government. We are here to look to the future and lay out our ambitions for a trading partnership that has the potential to shape the global economy, said the senior Conservative party leader. In particular, as we leave the European Union (EU), there is the opportunity for both countries to enhance this partnershipopening up new sectors for business and minimising barriers to trade, said the minister in charge of the UKs Department for International Trade (DIT). The launch event at Taj Hotel in London was marked by the release of the second edition of the 100 Most Influential in UK-India Relationscovering leading figures across business, politics, arts and culture who are seen as making a significant contribution towards enhancing the UK-India relationship. Collectively, these change-makers help to build a Living Bridge between the UK and Indiasomething Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi has long championed and encouraged, said Manoj Ladwa, Founder & CEO of India Incthe organisers behind the UK-India Week. Matt Hancock, UK Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Indian minister of communication Manoj Sinha and the Indian High Commissioner to the UK, YK Sinha, were among the other prominent guests at the event. It is important that India and the UK ensure that the true potential of this relationship is tapped. As the UK leaves the EU and as India grows steadily, yet surely, there is a definite match between the two countries, said Sinha. The week-long set of events is aimed at bringing together senior figures in the UK with their counterparts from India for high-level talks. It will include a two-day UK-India Leadership Conclave on Wednesday and Thursday, when ministers and business leaders from both countries will descend upon Latimer Estate in the English countryside in Buckinghamshire to address the prospects of post-Brexit partnership opportunities. UK-India Week celebrates the strong partnership between the UK and India and is a catalyst for promoting opportunities for future collaboration, Ladwa said. There is a huge opportunity for these two great countriesnow equals on the world stageto harness their shared values, trade, technology and talent to enhance prosperity at home and around the world, he said. The conclave, backed by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) as well as leading Indian companies like Infosys, Ola Cabs, and Hero Future Energies, will include a Global Investors Forum and Young Leaders Forum as well as spin-out sessions on smart cities, soft power, energy and climate change. Alongside hard-hitting political and economic debate, the conclavenow in its fifth yearwill celebrate the cultural ties between the UK and India, including an early-morning yoga session in celebration of International Day of Yoga on Thursday. UK-India Week will culminate with the second annual UK-India Awards in London on Friday, to honour high-achievers within the bilateral space. PTI ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Dinesh Manhotra Tribune News Service Jammu, June 18 Amid reports of serious differences between the PDP and BJP over the Centres decision not to extend the unilateral Ramzan truce, the saffron partys central leadership has summoned its ministers and senior leaders from Jammu and Kashmir to Delhi to take a final call on the future of the coalition. The decision will be taken at a meeting in the National Capital on Tuesday. All party ministers have been asked to reach Delhi for an important meeting with the central leadership on Tuesday, Deputy CM Kavinder Gupta told The Tribune from Delhi. Feigning ignorance about the agenda, he said: Let us wait for Tuesday afternoon because everything would become clear at the meeting, he said. Of course, the prevailing situation in the state would be discussed. Another BJP minister said he was directed by the central leadership to reach Delhi by first flight from Jammu. Tuesdays meeting is significant as BJP national president Amit Shah is scheduled to visit Jammu on June 23. On Sunday, the Home Ministry had announced its decision not to extend the suspension of anti-terror operations in the state. Sources said the decision had led to a rift in the coalition as the PDP leadership, facing criticism in the Valley, was not happy with the end to ceasefire. A top RSS leader told The Tribune that unilateral ceasefire in the holy month of Ramzan had backfired as the BJP was facing criticism across the country for allegedly appeasing anti-national elements in Kashmir Valley. The future of the PDP-BJP coalition largely depends on Tuesdays meeting, he said, adding the majority viewpoint in the Sangh is to come out of the coalition to face the General Election. Besides party ministers, state president Ravinder Raina, general secretaries Ashok Koul, Narinder Singh, Pawan Khajuria and Harinder Gupta have also been asked to reach Delhi. rchopra@tribunemail.com Satya Prakash Tribune News Service New Delhi, June 19 The controversy surrounding the AAP governments tussle with the National Capital Territorys Lieutenant Governor on Tuesday reached the Supreme Court with a petition seeking to declare Arvind Kejriwal Cabinets sit-in protest illegal and unconstitutional. Contending that a constitutional crisis had been created due to the unconstitutional and illegal protest by Chief Minister Kejriwal and his ministers inside the LG Anil Baijals office, petitioner Hari Nath Ram wanted urgent intervention of the top court. However, a Vacation Bench headed by Justice S Abdul Nazeer declined to take it up immediately and posted it for hearing after summer vacation. The tussle for power between the AAP Government and LG as the Centres representative is mainly because of Delhis unique position as a Union Territory with an elected government which doesnt enjoy much power over important agencies and has hardly any say on important issues. A Five-Judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misrawhich reserved its verdict in December 2017 on issues relating to tussle for power between the elected government and the LG in Delhiis expected to pronounce it in July. The latest round of the tussle started on June 11 when Kejriwal and his ministers entered the LGs office and began a sit-in protest to press for their demands, including a direction to IAS officers to end their strike and action against those who went on strike. Both LGs office and IAS officers Association have denied that officers were on strike. Citizens are left high and dry, petitioners counsel Shashank Sudhi told the Bench, which also included Justice Indu Malhotra. The Delhi High Court had heard petitions on the issue on Monday and posted them for further hearing on June 22, Sudhi said, contending Delhi was facing an emergency situation as citizens were confronting severe water crisis. Disapproving of the sit-in by Delhi ministers in the LGs office, the high court had sought to know who authorised such a protest. As the petitioners counsel insisted on urgent hearing, the Bench simply said, We will list it on reopening of the court. The petitioner also demanded perjury proceedings against either the Chief Minister or the office of the LG, alleging one of them was lying. editorial@tribune.com Aparna Banerji Tribune News Service Jalandhar, June 19 Even as officials of the Health Department have begun hectic drives to check food adulteration under the Tandarust Punjab Mission, they are facing hurdles in penalising wholesalers and vendors, who are using harmful chemicals to ripen fruit. No action has been taken against any major wholesalers or trader and the drive is primarily targeted against vendors, a majority of whom do not have licences. Even the vendors have not been penalised either for selling artificially ripened fruit or for operating without licences even though it is a punishable offence. Reason: There is no concrete policy in this regard. When questioned, the district health authorities said so far no report of large-scale illegal ripening had been received. They said calcium carbide was being used by traders in other states from where fruits were sourced. The day two of the drive saw a full blown protest by vendors against the Health Department, following which the police had to intervene. A majority of fruit and vegetables are laden with calcium carbide, a harmful chemical. The acetylene gas in calcium carbide evaporates when it comes in contact with moisture. Thus the samples often fail to show the presence of chemicals in fruit. In Jalandhar, the department has so far taken 42 samples and destroyed 2 quintals of papaya and a truckload of mangoes, ever since the Tandarust Punjab Mission drive started on June 5. However, the department cannot penalise the vendors without getting the report of samples. An official said: Unless found in a large amount, calcium carbide is not visible in samples because it releases water and carbon dioxide after coming in contact with moisture. There is no provision of initiating action before getting test report. Due to the nature of the gas, the probability of penalisation in small samples is low. While there are 12 government-approved ripening chambers in the district where ripening takes place in three days and the output is low, vendors use calcium carbide to ripen fruits, which is cost-effective. Dr Balwinder Singh, District Health Officer, said: We are carrying regular drives and have destroyed a truckload of mangoes and two quintals of papaya. The vendors in mandi have assured us to opt for approved ripening method. We are carrying out hectic sampling and awareness drives to ensure that large-scale use of calcium carbide is stopped. As far as action is concerned, it can only be taken after we get sample reports, which will take three months. In Fazilka, the Health Department impounded a truck loaded with artificially ripened mangoes. Deputy Commissioner Isha Kalia said a team, led by District Health Officer (DHO) Dr Rajesh Khunger, stopped the truck for checking on the Ferozepur road. On search, 267 boxes of mangoes ripened with calcium carbide were found. Khunger said the truck was coming from Haridwar and the mangoes were to be sold in Fazilka. He said the fruit had been destroyed on the Sania road. OC editorial@tribune.com Tribune reporters Amritsar/new delhi, June 19 Hope rekindled for the Jodhpur jail detainees following the SADs move to approach Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who assured the party that the affected persons would get their due. On Tuesday, SAD spokesperson Virsa Singh Valtoha said a SAD delegation comprising Union Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal, parliamentarians Balwinder Singh Bhoondarh and Naresh Kumar Gujral, DSGMC president Manjit Singh GK and SGPCs executive member advocate Bhagwant Singh Sialka took up various Sikh issues with the Home Minister and got a positive response. Valtoha, who himself was among the 325 Sikhs who were arrested from the Golden Temple complex during Operation Bluestar and kept under illegal detention, said, The Home Minister has assured us to revoke the appeal filed by the CBI on behalf of the Central Government in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, challenging the Amritsar courts verdict to compensate the Jodhpur detainees. Since, it will be a legal process, I hope it will be done before July 2, he said. In May 2017, the Amritsar court had directed both the Central and the state governments to shell out Rs 4 lakh as compensation to the detainees, along with interest at the rate of 6 per cent per annum from the date of filing the suit. The order for compensation covered both the periods illegal detention and alleged delay in trial. Another affected person, advocate Jasbir Singh Ghuman, who fought and won the legal battle for compensation in the Amritsar court, hoped that the SAD must have been successful in persuading the Home Minister to withdraw the writ. Our fight for the detainees and their families will continue. It was our 27-year-long legal battle following which the local court had ordered both governments to grant us a compensation which was questioned by the Centre, he said. Ghuman said: If the Centre fails to fulfil its assurance, we stand by our revolt and will oppose BJP candidates in the 2019 elections, he said. editorial@tribune.com GS Paul Tribune News Service Amritsar, June 19 Seven months after two Pakistan sisters were released, the plea of their accomplice in a drugs case Nasreen Akhtar (65) has been heard. She was freed from Amritsar Central Jail on Tuesday. Nasreen and another Pakistani prisoner Aftab, who was arrested under the Passport Act, were repatriated. Both were handed over to Pakistani authorities by the BSF at Attari-Wagah joint check post on Monday. Nasreen was arrested along with Fatima and Mumtaz and their mother Rashida Bibi at Attari railway station in May 2006, for carrying drugs. They were sentenced to 10-year imprisonment with a fine of Rs 4 lakh each. Fatima, who was pregnant then, gave birth to Heena while in jail the same year. Rashida Bibi died in 2008. On November 1 last year, two sisters Fatima and Mumtaz and Fatimas daughter were repatriated. On her release, Nasreen said: I am happy to return as my 90-year old ailing mother is waiting eagerly for me. Nasreen was paid around Rs 50,000 as remuneration for the works she did during her jail term. editorial@tribune.com Amarjit Thind Tribune News Service Chandigarh, June 19 The government steps to make farmers plant early maturing and less water-consuming paddy varieties, either forcefully or by creating awareness, stand exposed as transplantation officially begins on Wednesday. It seems another year has been lost on saving groundwater, as a majority of farmers across the state have already transplanted water-guzzling varieties of paddy. This year, Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) had recommended PR 127, a medium maturing high-yield variety. To make a complete switch from traditional varieties at least 61,000 tonnes of seed was needed to sow 30.69 lakh hectares, as per figures tabulated by the university. This year, 2,600 quintals of PR 127 was sold for Rs 50 a kg at kisan melas, regional research stations, Krishi Vigyan Kendras, seed farms located at Ladhowal, Naraingarh, Faridkot and Kapurthala, and Farmer Advisory Service Centres of PAU. Dr TS Dhillon, Director (Seeds), PAU, said PR 127 was a high yield paddy variety with medium maturity period and was disease resistant. It resists attack of 10 prevalent pathotypes of bacterial blight pathogen present in Punjab, which makes it the best option as compared to traditional varieties. The average yield of this variety is 30 quintals per acre. It is a better genetic product and the farmers should go for it in a big way, he said. Farmers, on the other hand, have been on the warpath over the government order banning paddy sowing before June 20. They are also demanding uninterrupted power supply and withdrawal of cases registered against farmers who sowed paddy early. The farmers allege that the recommendations are released often late and no department bothers to disseminate information about new developments. As such, only a handful of progressive farmers keep track of the latest developments and benefit from them. Sukhdev Singh Kokri Kalan, general secretary of the BKU Ekta Ugrahan, said the farmers were soft targets and everything that went wrong was blamed on them. The advisory on seed should have been issued immediately after wheat is harvested giving farmers time to procure the seed, he added. Our experience has shown that delay in sowing paddy always means yield loss and despite what the experts claim, sowing paddy after June 20 will entail a loss of 3-5 quintals per acre. Who will compensate us for this shortfall? he questioned. Another problem pertains to moisture which is higher in all late maturing varieties. Will there be some relaxation on this count at the time of procurement? he asked. Moreover, the available quantity of new seed was an indication of the seriousness of the government in providing alternatives to water-guzzling varieties, he pointed out. Unplanned move, say farmers At least 61,000 tonnes of seed of late or medium maturing paddy was needed, but only 2,600 quintals was sold. Recommendations are released often late. Delay in sowing paddy would have resulted in a loss of 3-5 quintals per acre. No government word on relief. Moisture is higher in late maturing varieties. Inputs by Manav Mander pardeepdhull@gmail.com Rachna Khaira Tribune News Service Jalandhar, June 19 Bhai Ranjit Singh (82), who fought a legal battle against the French Government to keep intact his identity as a turbaned Sikh, has returned to India with pain in his heart. He rues that neither any Sikh outfit nor the Indian Government helped him in his two-decade-long fight. Ranjit, who was born in Shahpur village of Ambala, Haryana, had left for France in 1991. Then, he was issued an ID with the turban and it was due for renewal in 2001. To get the ID renewed, the French authorities asked Ranjit to get himself photographed, this time without the turban. He, however, refused to comply and, after a couple of years, the French government stopped his social security allowance. He took on the French Government and on June 12, 2012, the UN Human Rights Committee concluded that France had violated the religious freedom of Ranjit. But the French Government refused to extend social security allowance. Refused to abandon his turban, Ranjit finally returned to India in May this year. In an exclusive interview with the Tribune, Ranjit spoke about his 18-year-long struggle on the turban ban, his final journey back home, his live without any permanent job and substantial benefits, and the planning of his life here in Punjab. Ranjit said while many Sikhs in France upheld the view that turban is more of a cultural than religious identity; the French government should lift the ban on wearing turbans in public schools. How can we connect our future generations with our religious beliefs when we do not wear a turban at all? It is like parting away with your religion as well, said Ranjit. Ranjit, who was trolled by over hundreds of critics after the Tribune published a report on his journey back home last month, said the comments posted by his critics on the report has only strengthen his beliefs and his war against the turban ban. My family members, including my daughter-in-law, also wear turban (Amritdhari Sikhs) and we have never abandon it to avail any social benefit in any of the foreign countries. Like many others, I have also met unscrupulous agents but never availed citizenship at the cost of my turban despite being offered by the French government. My critics should be proud of me for this, said Ranjit. While his close friends in India and France had tried to convince him to remove his turban for the ID card purpose only, Singh refused to do so. What is the fun of removing turban just for an ID card? I had to remove it every time I need to show my identity documents anywhere. And, why should I remove it at all? I am a Singh and I am not a terrorist, signs off Ranjit Singh. ROBINSINGH@TRIBUNE.COM Aman Sood Tribune News Service Patiala, June 18 Three robbers on a bike shot dead two persons at a petrol station on the Patiala-Rajpura highway late Sunday night and decamped with Rs 11,000. The victims were identified as canter driver and part-time employee Kuldeep Singh and Devinder Singh of Alampur village, who was having dinner at a nearby dhaba. He was shot as he tried to stop the fleeing robbers. Even though the incident was captured on CCTV cameras, the police are yet to trace the robbers. Two of them, armed with a pistol and a country-made revolver, fled towards Rajpura, crossing a toll plaza. Sources said two of the three entered Patiala via the nearby toll plaza, as seen in the camera. This means the third attacker may have joined them just before the crime. Curiously, one of the robbers visited the petrol station an hour before the crime. The bike (Bullet) used in the crime may have been stolen from outside Punjabi University. Having collected Rs 6,000 from fellow workers, Kuldeep Singh was on his cellphone when he was approached by the robbers, who probably mistook him for the cash manager. They asked him to hand over the money. Not realising he was being robbed, he resisted. One of the robbers fired at him, and took out the cash from his pocket. Terrified, the other employees also handed over Rs 5,000 that they had with them. As the robbers were fleeing, Devinder Singh ran towards them and raised an alarm. He too was shot, said an official who is part of the investigating team. Both victims were declared brought dead by doctors. We are closely monitoring the case, Patiala SP (Investigation) Harwinder Virk said. Rising crime graph harinder@tribunemail.com UNITED NATIONS, June 19, (PTI)-The UN Secretary-General, U Thant, yesterday predicted that the Paris talks on Viet Nam would be "deadlocked for a long time to come," because of the assumption by both sides that a military victory is possible. A brief report appeared yesterday. Speaking at a luncheon, given by the UN correspondents' association, he emphasised his view that a military victory or defeat was not possible. Neither could the United States be dislodged from Viet Nam by military means nor could the Viet Cong or the National Liberation Front be subdued by the United States. He reiterated his three-point formula for peace-cessation by the US bombings of North Viet Nam and all other acts of all parties in South Viet Nam. harinder@tribunemail.com From Our Special Correspondent NEW DELHI, June 19-The protest note to China today marks a new level of deterioration in Sino-Indian relations. It is for the first time that India has accused China of "stirring lawlessness against the legally constituted authority in India". It is also the first time that India has declared unequivocally that "there has been growing evidence of the Chinese Government's hand in promoting subversion". All these days Indian had confined itself to criticising China for interfering in its affairs through the radio or the Press. But at no time did India say that it had evidence of their (Chinese) supplying arms or giving guidance for subversion. Nagaland is far beyond the Indian territory claimed by the Chinese. It is not certain why the Chinese have adopted this new technique. It is contrary to the requirements of internationally accepted code of conduct between neighbours. It also goes against the Communist doctrine. sanjiv@tribunemail.com Tribune News Service Dehradun, June 19 Uttarakhand High Court on Monday issued bailable warrants against Garhwal Commissioner Dilip Jawalkar for failing to appear before the court in a matter pertaining to the alleged misuse of government funds. Pukhraj, a resident of Rajasthan, had filed a writ petition stating that the stairs constructed at Hari-ki-Pauri in Haridwar during the Ardh Kumbh Mela that connected Sanjay bridge and Ravi Das temple, had damaged the temple. The petitioner had also alleged that the stairs caused inconvenience to the public and prevented them from visiting the temple. The petitioner said temple stairs were constructed during the Ardh Kumbh Mela, but an order was passed again for the construction of stairs at the cost of Rs 42 lakh. He alleged that the construction was damaging the temple and termed the entire exercise as wasteful and that it should be stopped immediately. After hearing the case on June 15, the division Bench of Justices Rajiv Sharma and Lok Pal Singh had directed the Commissioner of Garhwal to appear personally on June 18. But, Jawalkar failed to turn up at the court resultant to which bailable warrants was issued against him on Monday. sanjiv@tribunemail.com Dehradun, June 19 Uttarakhand BJP has begun preparations for the proposed visit of BJP national president Amit Shah on June 24 to Dehradun. Shah is likely to take stock of the party's delivery on various campaigns that were assigned by him. He will hold meetings with the office-bearers of various units and the core group. It will be Shah's second visit to the state after the BJP came to power in September last year. During his two-day visit last year, Shah had assigned several tasks to the party workers. The BJP leaders claimed that all the tasks had been completed and a report had also been submitted to the Central leadership of the party. Ajay Bhatt, state BJP chief, said the party was awaiting a formal approval of his visit. "Though we have begun preparations for his visit, but a formal approval is still awaited," said Bhatt. TNS sanjiv@tribunemail.com Tribune News Service Dehradun, June 19 Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat has called upon the youth to seriously pursue home stay business as the hill state was witnessing the arrival of a large number of tourists. Rawat was addressing a gathering in the Ghat region of Chamoli district. This was the Chief Ministers first visit to the region after the BJP won the Tharali bypoll in Chamoli. He said starting home stay schemes could be the key source of employment. He also held that the state government was making constant efforts to ensuring better facilities to the tourists arriving in the state. Referring to other livelihood opportunities in the region, the Chief Minister said villagers could now use pine needles for power generation. The state government had committed itself to purchase all power generated through pine needles. He also laid emphasis on rose farming in the region taking into account ideal environment conditions for the rose cultivation in the region. The Chief Minister also made several announcements for the Ghat region that included installing machines for solid waste disposal, commencing bus service between Ghat and Dehradun, improving approach road to Nanda Devi temple and beautifying Baraskund temple. He also held that a degree college would be opened shortly in Narayanbagar. He also announced Rs 5 lakh for the renovation of Mahamrityunjay Mahadev Temple. He also thanked the people for ensuring victory for the BJP in the Tharali bypoll. Later at a multipurpose camp, he heard the grievances of the residents and gave orders for on-the-spot redressal for many. He also directed officers to ensure timely redressal of their problems. He also visited various stalls put up to highlight government schemes on self-employment opportunities. Higher Education and Co-operatives Minister Dr Dhan Singh Rawat and newly elected Tharali MLA Munni Devi Shah, Chamoli District Magistrate Ashish Joshi and other senior officials were present on the occasion. shalender@tribune.com London, June 19 Pakistan continues to be ahead of India when it comes to possessing nuclear warheads, with China having double the quantity, according to a report by a leading Swedish think-tank. Pakistan is believed to have 140-150 nuclear warheads this year, 10 more than last year. In contrast, India is said to have 130-140 nuclear warheads, according to the annual nuclear forces data by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Russia and the US hold over 92 per cent of the total warheads, it said. SIPRI said nine countries the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea had 14,465 nuclear warheads at the beginning of 2018, of which 3,750 were actually deployed. At start of 2017, the total nuclear warhead count was 14,935, it said. The reduction is largely due to arms control commitments by the US and Russia in 2010 Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. PTI monicakchauhan@gmail.com Geneva, June 19 A record 68.5 million people have been forced flee their homes due to war, violence and persecution, notably in places like Myanmar and Syria, the UN said on Tuesday. By the end of 2017, the number was nearly three million higher than the previous year and showed a 50-per-cent increase from the 42.7 million uprooted from their homes a decade ago, according to a report by the UN refugee agency. The current figure is equivalent to the entire population of Thailand, and the number of people forcibly displaced equates to one in every 110 persons worldwide, it said. "We are at a watershed, where success in managing forced displacement globally requires a new and far more comprehensive approach so that countries and communities aren't left dealing with this alone," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. But around 70 per cent of that number are people from just 10 countries, he told reporters in Geneva ahead of the report's launch. "If there were solutions to conflicts in those 10 countries, or in some of them at least, that huge figure, instead of rising every year, could start going down," he said, calling for more political will to halt the crises driving so many from their homes. The report showed that 16.2 million people were freshly displaced last year, and included those forced to flee for the first time as well as those who had been previously displaced. This equates to some 44,500 people being pushed out of their homes every day -- or one person every two seconds, UNHCR said. Most people flee within their own country, and are defined as internally displaced people, or IDPs. By the end of 2017, there were some 40 million IDPs worldwide, down slightly from previous years, with Colombia, Syria and Democratic Republic of Congo accounting for the greatest numbers. Another 25.4 million people -- more than half of them children -- were registered as refugees last year. That is nearly three million more than in 2016, and "the highest known total to date", it said. Syria's seven-year conflict alone had, by the end of last year, pushed more than 6.3 million people out of the country, accounting for nearly one-third of the global refugee population. Another 6.2 million Syrians are internally displaced. The second largest refugee-producing country in 2017 was Afghanistan, whose refugee population grew by five per cent during the year to 2.6 million people. The increase was due mainly to births and more Afghans being granted asylum in Germany, UNHCR said. South Sudan, meanwhile, saw the largest increase last year, with the number of refugees fleeing the world's youngest nation soaring from 1.4 million at the beginning of the year to 2.4 million at the end. Grandi said South Sudan was experiencing "a very bad emergency" which had apparently escaped the notice of both the government and the opposition who did not appear to be "taking seriously the desperate situation of their own people." Refugees from Myanmar more than doubled last year to 1.2 million, as a brutal army crackdown forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to pour across the border into Bangladesh. Today's report also highlighted large-scale displacements in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and DR Congo among others. And as Israel marks 70 years of independence, there are some 5.4 million Palestinians still living as refugees, it said. Despite the focus on migrant numbers arriving in Europe and the United States, a full 85 per cent of refugees are living in low- and middle-income countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Uganda, Grandi said. Turkey was hosting by far the largest number of refugees, with 3.5 million registered there by the end of 2017, most of them Syrians. AFP rchopra@tribunemail.com Kabul, June 19 An Afghan official says at least four security forces were killed when Taliban fighters targeted army and local police checkpoints in northern Kunduz province. Nematullah Temori, spokesman for the provincial governor, says six other security personnel were wounded in the attack on Tuesday morning in Dashti Archi district. He added that seven of the insurgents were killed and five others wounded in the battle. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Kunduz, but Taliban are active in Kunduz and have repeatedly claimed attacks against Afghan security forces there. The attack happened after the Eid holiday ceasefire. The government had offered to extend the ceasefire for another 10 days, but the Taliban announced on Sunday that they would resume their attacks. AFP shalender@tribune.com Geneva, June 19 The UN refugee agency on Tuesday reported that nearly 69 million people who have fled war, violence and persecution were forcibly displaced last year, a record for the fifth straight year. Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said the continued crises in places like South Sudan and Congo, as well as the exodus of Muslim Rohingya from Myanmar that started last year, raised the overall figure of forced displacements in 2017 to 68.5 million. Of that, 16.2 million were newly displaced last year an average of more than 44,000 people per day. Most have been displaced for longer than that, some forced to flee multiple times. The global figure has gone up again by a couple of million, the Commissioner said, adding, This is because of protracted conflicts and lack of solutions for those conflicts that continue pressure on civilians and pushed them to leave their homes. AFP | By Patricia Fanning The University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) was the host as a group of new citizens took the oath of allegiance during a naturalization ceremony held at Westminster Hall by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a part of the Department of Homeland Security. The ceremony was held on June 18 in advance of the international observance of World Refugee Day on June 20. This is a very special day in the story of your lives, Luke Hall, section chief of USCIS Baltimore, told 49 applicants hailing from 26 countries. (View a photo gallery on Flickr.) New U.S. citizen Endam Josephine Fombe, center, is greeted by, right to left, Luke Hall, section chief of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Baltimore office; Conrad J. Zaragoza, field office director, USCIS Baltimore, and UMB President Jay A. Perman, MD, at the conclusion of a naturalization ceremony at Westminster Hall. The individuals were greeted by the applause of family members and friends as officials read aloud names and nations, going from Bhutan to Ukraine. It was fitting that one of the countries was Ukraine, the homeland that President Jay A. Perman, MD, said his parents had fled in the 1930s because of religious persecution. They had yet to meet each other and left separately as tens of thousands of Jews were being brutally massacred killed in massive pogroms intended to rid the country of my people, he said. They found each other years later in Chicago. (The wedding photo of Rose and Max Perman can be viewed on Flickr.) They also found a close and loving community there, a community of their own, filled with people who sought refuge from tyranny and death in Eastern Europe, Perman told the new citizens. My father ran a hand laundry. My mother was a seamstress. We didnt have much money. But what we did have what I had was the American Dream. It was always within my reach. I had an education. I had opportunity. I had a vision of a better future, and I had the means to make it real, said Perman, who with the help of a scholarship attended college and earned a medical degree. He is a pediatric gastroenterologist and continues to practice in a weekly clinic. Perman acknowledged the struggles of many other immigrants then and now and gave the new citizens a special charge. I know that there are people in immigrant and refugee communities across the U.S. who have a very different story to tell. And so now that you are citizens of this country I ask that you be a loving and welcoming community to those who will come after you. He told the group that in addition to immense opportunity there is tremendous need in this nation, asking that they add care and compassion to the price of their citizenship. I ask that you strive to make those around you as happy and as proud and as hopeful as you are right now in this very moment. Given that Westminster Hall was brimming over with a palpable sense of pride and optimism, Perman was exhorting the group to a high level of commitment. Similarly, the other speakers sought to draw out the best in the women and men who had prepared for this day. Conrad J. Zaragoza, field office director, USCIS Baltimore, praised their courage and urged them to hold tight to the heritage of homes left behind while at the same time embracing America. I encourage you to immerse yourself in this nations political life. Use that voice, he said. The ceremony featured the presentation of colors by the Cryptologic Warfare Group Six Honors Color Guard; the national anthem performed by Taylor Sutton, immigration services officer, USCIS Baltimore; and the Pledge of Allegiance led by one of the newly naturalized citizens, Endam Josephine Fombe. In their oath, each renounced any foreign allegiance and promised among other things to support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to serve in the military when required by law. A video message from President Donald J. Trump was followed by the presentation of naturalization certificates by Christine Klobus, supervisory immigration services officer, USCIS Baltimore. As the new citizens approached the podium, Perman was among those offering congratulations and a handshake. Soon after, friends and families offered hugs, bouquets, and smartphone photos with spouses, children, and multiple generations that included elders, school-age children, and infants. One new citizen was a retiree from Sharpsburg, Md., who was accompanied by an entourage of nine well-wishers. As a British citizen, journalist Simon Barber had gotten a green card in 1979. Nearly four decades later, he decided it was time to become a U.S. citizen, according to his son, Stephen Barber, a videographer with tripod in tow. Besides the United Kingdom, Bhutan, and Ukraine, countries represented in the ceremony were: Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burma, Cameroon, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guyana, India, Iran, Iraq, Liberia, Mongolia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Togo, and Turkey. According to federal figures, 703,000 aliens were naturalized in Fiscal Year 2017, down from 753,000 in FY16. Just over 40 percent of those naturalized were from Mexico, India, Philippines, China, Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In Fiscal Year 2017, the United States admitted 54,000 refugees, down from 85,000 refugees in FY16. Last year, 63 percent of refugees were from five countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Burma. Ukraine and Bhutan were the sixth- and seventh-leading countries for refugees. Since 2001, the United Nations and more than 100 countries have observed World Refugee Day annually on June 20. A record number of people are displaced by violent conflict and disasters around the world. By the end of 2017, there were 68.5 million people forced to move from their homes to locations within or outside their borders. More than 25 million of them, sometimes our neighbors, friends, relatives or acquaintances, are refugees. Eighty-four percent of these refugees live in developing countries. Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Uganda, Ethiopia, Jordan, DR Congo and Kenya have all committed, along with all Member States, in the New York Declaration of September 2016, to a more equitable sharing of the burden and responsibility for hosting and supporting the worlds refugees, while taking account of existing contributions and the differing capacities and resources among States. So, other Member States surely need to do more too... The centrality of international cooperation and partnership on burden-and responsibility-sharing for the refugee protection regime cannot be under-estimated. Both the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) that is currently being piloted in 14 countries, and the draft Global Compact for Refugees (GCM) are welcome instruments raising the bar of support to refugees and host communities. Predictable and stronger partnership is obviously required for their implementation, in line with host country leadership and ownership. We should cultivate partnerships with the private sector, research institutions and faith based organizations and, above all, with refugees themselves and their host communities. But partnership must also go beyond host, countries of origin and third country resettlements. We have talked and written a lot about humanitarian and development partnership now is the time to walk the talk and demonstrate that the new way of working can focus on creating solutions for refugees and collective outcomes. With 31 people newly displaced every minute as a result of conflict or persecution, the work of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) is more important than ever before. Our strong bond with UNHCR, working together in more than 20 countries in support of refugees, other displaced populations and host communities, is helping member states address the root causes of forced displacement, be it through conflict prevention, good governance, climate change adaptation or improved access to economic opportunities. In addition, we are supporting refugees and other vulnerable communities to cope, recover and sustain development gains in the short to long term. For example, together with UNHCR, other UN agencies and Civil Society Organizations: By the end of 2017, UNDP Turkey helped 2,000 Syrian refugees and host community members establish an organic olive oil processing facility. Over 8,500 Syrian men and women in host communities benefited from empowerment and social cohesion activities in 13 different multi-purpose community centers; and close to 5,500 Syrians, 45% of them women, attended vocational training courses in more than 20 different occupations, basic life skills and Turkish language trainings. helped 2,000 Syrian refugees and host community members establish an organic olive oil processing facility. Over 8,500 Syrian men and women in host communities benefited from empowerment and social cohesion activities in 13 different multi-purpose community centers; and close to 5,500 Syrians, 45% of them women, attended vocational training courses in more than 20 different occupations, basic life skills and Turkish language trainings. In Zambia , UNDP and UN partner agencies are working with the Government to strengthen the resilience of refugees and host communities and bring about social, cultural and economic integration. Through the programme, Angolan and Rwandan refugees receive permanent residency in Zambia, allowing allocation of land, greater freedom of movement and the opportunity to work alongside the host communities. , UNDP and UN partner agencies are working with the Government to strengthen the resilience of refugees and host communities and bring about social, cultural and economic integration. Through the programme, Angolan and Rwandan refugees receive permanent residency in Zambia, allowing allocation of land, greater freedom of movement and the opportunity to work alongside the host communities. In Iraq, UNDP has implemented over 25 infrastructure rehabilitation or construction projects, such as electricity, water or sanitation, roads and health clinics in both refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) camps and host communities, to meet increased demand. Support to access basic services has benefitted over 72,000 refugees, IDPs and host community members. Partnerships with the local government have enhanced ownership of the infrastructure and ensured sustained maintenance. Today, as we celebrate World Refugee Day, lets commit to address the root causes forcing people to move out of their countries of origin, and wherever they have moved, offer them protection. Lets commit to strong, results-based, partnerships and collaboration in support of refugees everywhere. Together we can do more and better. There is no doubt that I would not be where I am today if it were not for the support relatives, friends, strangers and UNHCR. I remember UNHCR field staff on the ground in Sudan, providing basic needs to those of us seeking aid. To this day, the sight of UNHCRs blue logo still invokes in me a sense of comfort, of safe-keeping. About Alek Supermodel Alek Wek has actively supported UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency since 2011 and was appointed UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador in 2013. As a former refugee from what is now South Sudan, Alek knows what it is like to be forced to flee her home. She now travels across the globe using her voice, her platform and her story to advocate on behalf of refugees and to support the life-saving work of UNHCR. Alek was only nine when civil war broke out in Sudan. Life as we knew it came to a devastating end," she remembers. "Our parents tried to shield us from the conflict but the sounds of gunfire and the vibrations of explosions filled us with dread. Dead bodies filled the landscape. Alek and her family fled their village and survived in the bush, foraging for food and taking shelter in abandoned huts until they managed to escape to Khartoum, from where Aleks mother sent her and one of her sisters to London. I knew with all my heart that she was doing what was best for us, but that didnt ease the pain. Having lost so much, education became the only thing that mattered to Alek and she was fiercely devoted to learning, despite arriving in the UK without her family intact and unable to speak English. Soon after being discovered by a model scout, Alek embarked on a successful international career in the world of high fashion. In a matter of years, I went from a faceless refugee statistic to one of the most recognizable faces in the world. In addition to visiting refugees and witnessing UNHCR's frontline work, Alek has helped amplify the refugee cause through many different projects. For World Refugee Day 2016 Alek joined refugees, UNHCR staff and other high profile supporters in our video message of solidarity with forcibly displaced persons around the globe. Alek later spoke in the UN General Assembly Hall at the handing in of UNHCRs #WithRefugees petition, the largest-ever petition for refugees, to the UN Secretary General, ahead of the historic UN Summit on Refugees & Migrants in September 2016. In December of that same year, Alek served as the face of H&Ms holiday campaign which raised $3 million for UNHCR and supported the education of refugee children. Alek has honoured the work and staff of UNHCR by attending multiple events, including the 2016 Arab American Institute Gala where she presented the Khalil Gibran Award to our Deputy High Commissioner, Kelly Clements, who accepted on behalf of UNHCR and the 2015 German Sustainability Awards where she presented an Honorary Fellowship to then High Commissioner, Antonio Guterres. Alek also helped launch the Sustainable Development Goals at the 2015 Social Good Summit in New York. Alek has spoken passionately about her work with UNHCR in numerous publications across many territories, including The Guardian, Marie Claire and NPR. Recent support and field visits United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi throws a bouquet of flowers into the sea at Abu Setta in Libya before leading a moment of silence to commemorate the thousands of refugees and migrants who have perished at sea trying to reach Europe. UNHCR/Jehad Nga TRIPOLI, Libya UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi boarded a chartered flight today (Tuesday, June 19) bound for Niger with 122 refugees, mostly women and children, on board. The refugees, who had been held in detention in the Libyan capital, were identified by UNHCR as "extremely vulnerable" and qualifying for evacuation and resettlement under a new international programme. After further processing in Niger, the refugees will be transferred to participating third countries offering asylum. Earlier in the day, Grandi visited the group of evacuees as they were preparing to leave the Triq Al Sika Detention Centre in Tripoli, where they had spent months in overcrowded spaces. Women remaining behind waved and sobbed. There he witnessed the refugees board buses with a suitcase each of their belongings, many clutching young babies, some the result of the sexual attacks they experienced on their journeys. Eritrean women in one of the buses expressed relief to be departing, breaking into a song of prayer. Women remaining behind waved and sobbed as the buses pulled away, worried they would not have the same chance and remain indefinitely detained. UNHCR chief accompanies refugees evacuated from Libya Grandi thanked the Libyan authorities for allowing UNHCR access to 6,000 people held in government-run detention facilities. This access allows UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, to identify and evacuate persons in need of international protection and improve conditions, which he said had gotten better since his last visit over one year ago but were still appalling. He noted UNHCR and the Libyan Ministry of Interior will soon open a new Gathering and Departure Centre, which will accommodate up to 1,000 vulnerable refugees in a dignified environment while their cases are processed for evacuations or direct resettlement to third countries. Grandi reiterated his call on the international community to make 40,000 places available for refugees in Libya and from 14 other countries along the Central Mediterranean route. He commended countries for committing 25,000 places, but expressed his disappointment that less than 2,000 refugees have been resettled so far. "Implementation of these offers is very slow. Unfortunately, implementation of these offers is very slow, Grandi said, appealing to resettlement countries to accelerate their procedures directly from Libya and from the transit facility in Niger. Meanwhile, desperate refugees and migrants continue to pay ruthless smugglers for dangerous boat trips to Europe. Many have fallen victim to torture, rape or human slavery by criminal gangs along the route. The rubber dinghies or unseaworthy wooden boats they are forced to board are notoriously overcrowded and many capsize. Flying tonight from Libya to Niger with 122 refugees freed from detention centers in Tripoli. Hopefully they will be resettled to third countries soon. This programme is crucial: it provides safe, orderly alternatives to people smuggling and exploitation. pic.twitter.com/T6YwLFln6K Filippo Grandi (@RefugeesChief) June 19, 2018 On a visit to the disembarkation pier where rescued or intercepted refugees and migrants are returned by the Libyan Coast Guard, Grandi tossed a bouquet of flowers into the water to honour the memory of the lives lost at sea. Theres a lot of talk about numbers, he said. People arriving in Libya, crossing through Libya, people trying to cross the sea from this coastline. Its always numbers. People arriving in Europe. People being disembarked. Its always, always numbers. And I think its not about numbers, its about people." "These are women. These are men. These are children. Desperate people who are risking their lives, and often losing their lives, to go to a better future. And for many of them, the end is tragic, and I think its particularly those that have lost their lives that we want to remember here and now on this jetty, he added. Filippo Grandi, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, meets displaced families at Triq Al Matar settlement in Tripoli, Libya. Families there have been internally displaced since 2011. UNHCR/Jehad Nga During the visit, the High Commissioner also met with members of the 370 internally displaced Libyan families from the city of Tawergha who found refuge in the Triq Al Matar settlement on the outskirts of Tripoli seven years ago. We are also providing support to Libyan people who have been and continue to be displaced by tensions in the country, Mr. Grandi said, appealing for more support for Libyan displaced people. They should not be forgotten. Grandi was speaking on the day a new report from UNHCR revealed that wars, violence and persecution had uprooted record numbers of men, women and children worldwide last year, making a new global deal on refugees more critical than ever. Young Rohingya refugees look out over Palong Khali refugee camp, a sprawling site located on a hilly area near the Myanmar border in south-east Bangladesh. UNHCR/Andrew McConnell Wars, other violence and persecution drove worldwide forced displacement to a new high in 2017 for the fifth year in a row, led by the crisis in Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudans war, and the flight into Bangladesh from Myanmar of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees. Overwhelmingly it is developing countries that are most affected. In its annual Global Trends report, released today, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency said 68.5 million people were displaced as of the end of 2017. Among them were 16.2 million people who became displaced during 2017 itself, either for the first time or repeatedly indicating a huge number of people on the move and equivalent to 44,500 people being displaced each day, or a person becoming displaced every two seconds. Refugees who have fled their countries to escape conflict and persecution accounted for 25.4 million of the 68.5 million. This is 2.9 million more than in 2016, also the biggest increase UNHCR has seen in a single year. Asylum-seekers, who were still awaiting the outcome of their claims to refugee status as of 31 December 2017, meanwhile rose by around 300,000 to 3.1 million. People displaced inside their own country accounted for 40 million of the total, slightly fewer than the 40.3 million in 2016. In short, the world had almost as many forcibly displaced people in 2017 as the population of Thailand. Across all countries, one in every 110 persons is someone displaced. We are at a watershed, where success in managing forced displacement globally requires a new and far more comprehensive approach so that countries and communities arent left dealing with this alone, said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. But there is reason for some hope. Fourteen countries are already pioneering a new blueprint for responding to refugee situations and in a matter of months a new Global Compact on Refugees will be ready for adoption by the United Nations General Assembly. Today, on the eve of World Refugee Day, my message to member states is please support this. No one becomes a refugee by choice; but the rest of us can have a choice about how we help. UNHCRs Global Trends report is released worldwide each year ahead of World Refugee Day (20th June) and tracks forced displacement based on data gathered by UNHCR, governments, and other partners. It does not examine the global asylum environment, which UNHCR reports on separately and which continued in 2017 to see incidents of forced returns, politicization and scapegoating of refugees, refugees being jailed or denied possibility to work, and several countries objecting even to use of the word refugee. Nonetheless, the Global Trends report offers several insights, including in some instances into perceived versus actual realities of forced displacement and how these can sometimes be at odds. Among these is the notion that the worlds displaced are mainly in countries of the Global North. The data shows the opposite to be true with fully 85 per cent of refugees in developing countries, many of which are desperately poor and receive little support to care for these populations. Four out of five refugees remain in countries next door to their own. Large-scale displacement across borders is also less common than the 68 million global displacement figure suggests. Almost two thirds of those forced to flee are internally displaced people who have not left their own countries. Of the 25.4 million refugees, just over a fifth are Palestinians under the care of UNRWA. Of the remainder, for whom UNHCR is responsible, two thirds come from just five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar and Somalia. An end to conflict in any one of these has potential to significantly influence the wider global displacement picture. Two other insights from Global Trends are that most refugees live in urban areas (58 per cent) not in camps or rural areas; and that the global displaced population is young 53 per cent are children, including many who are unaccompanied or separated from their families. As with the number of countries producing large-scale displacement, the number of countries hosting large numbers was also comparatively few: Turkey remained the worlds leading refugee hosting country in terms of absolute numbers with a population of 3.5 million refugees, mainly Syrians. Lebanon meanwhile hosted the largest number of refugees relative to its national population. In all, 63 per cent of all refugees under UNHCRs responsibility were in just 10 countries. Sadly, solutions for all this remained in short supply. Wars and conflict continued to be the major drivers with little visible progress towards peace. Around five million people were able to return to their homes in 2017 with the vast majority returning from internal displacement, but among these were people returning under duress or to fragile contexts. Due to a drop in the number of resettlement places on offer, the number of resettled refugees was down by over 40 per cent at around 100,000 people. Additional Information UNHCRs Global Trends report and an accompanying package of multi-media assets are available on our media page. The report is subject to a worldwide embargo of no use before 0500 GMT on 19th June 2018. Reporting Forced Displacement Key Definitions UNHCR does not use the term migrant to describe people who are forced to flee. Marion (left) opened her home in Les Lilas, Paris, to Shir Bahadar (right), a 26-year-old refugee from Afghanistan. Marion met Shir at the Jungle, the notorious Calais camp. UNHCR/Aubrey Wade LES LILAS, France There is plenty of room for everyone on the three sofas arranged in a semi-circle in Marions welcoming living room. The apartment is perfect for receiving guests. Shir Bahadar, 26, from Afghanistan, and his 16-year-old brother Abdurrahman are sitting next to each other on one of the seats and Marion is handing them a plate of biscuits. She starts the conversation. Shir Bahadar, tell them how we met. In Calais and afterwards you and I came to Paris by car, he replies, his French grammar still rudimentary but good enough to make himself understood. I had been going to the 'Jungle' for a couple of months to help out, said Marion. I did a bit of everything peeling onions, handing out clothes, teaching French. One day, a member of one of the organizations asked me if I could give a young guy a lift to Paris for an appointment at OPFRA (the Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons). I was just about to go back to Paris. Shir Bahadar came with me and stayed over at my place. Since I live alone and didnt know him, I asked if someone from the organization could stay, too. "I could see he was nice guy, so I told him he could come back." It was a couple who were also going home via Paris. I think they lived in Avignon or somewhere like that. So they all slept here on the first night and the next day the volunteers left. Shir Bahadar went to his appointment at the OPFRA and I could see he was nice guy, so I told him he could come back. Over the next few months, the young man made several trips between the Jungle and Marions apartment in the Paris suburbs. I went back to Calais because it was my postal address, as well as my official residence, and my belongings were there. But there were problems. There were constant fights and I hate fighting. So, I decided Id had enough of Calais. I phoned Marion and asked, can I come back? and she said come". The house share has continued for almost a year and a strong bond has developed between the host and her guest. About six months ago, the Les Lilas household received news that turned their lives upside down: Shir Bahadars young brother Abdurrahman, whom everyone thought dead, traced his older brother via the internet. Actually, he was in Germany, says Shir Bahadar. We left Afghanistan together and were separated by the police in Bulgaria. I told them hes my brother and I want to stay with him but they said no. So, we were separated. We didnt have phones and lost contact for six or seven months or so. He was injured and several people told me he had died. Everyone was in tears. My parents were in tears. Thats how it was. But a voice in my head said perhaps he isnt dead Abdurrahman, the miracle boy, joined his brother in France, where he was taken into care by the child welfare services. They have done a great job, says Marion. When he turned up, they took him in right away, otherwise I would have put him up, of course. He was given a place in a hostel but he comes over here often, about every other day. He is welcome to come whenever he wants. Shir Bahadar says he is very happy to have his little brother with him in France, and also my sister, he adds, putting his hand on Marions shoulder. This story is part of the French chapter of No Stranger Place, developed and photographed by Aubrey Wade in partnership with UNHCR, profiling refugees and their hosts across Europe. The exhibition will go on display at Ground Control in Paris, on 20 June 2018. Catherine and Jean-Pierre host Assadik (left), a refugee from Sudan, in Saint-Josse. Assadik spent months in the Jungle, the notorious Calais camp, before being welcomed by the French couple. UNHCR/Aubrey Wade SAINT-JOSSE, France The generosity of retired couple Catherine Jean-Pierre Pocheron knows no bounds. Twenty years ago, they took in two girls from Chernobyl and ever since they have given shelter or donated their time to others who have had the good fortune to cross their path. Catherine is at a loss to explain why. Its just the way we are. Its in our blood. It was natural for them to offer their spare room to put up refugees, through the French Christian organization Secours Catholique. We are not believers, but we are on the side of those who get things done, thats all. A few days later, 27-year-old Sudanese Assadik walked through the door. I arrived in France two years ago, Assadik recalls. I spent one night in Paris then I went to Calais, hoping to get to England. He spent four or five months in the Jungle, the notorious makeshift camp for migrants and asylum-seekers, before Secours Catholique, concerned about his psychological wellbeing, decided to intervene on his behalf. When he came to us, he had been depressed in the Jungle, says Catherine. The organization asked us to put him up for a week, to give him time to recharge his batteries. He ended up staying for a year-and-a-half! "We go with our feelings, our heart." For Catherine and Jean-Pierre there was no question of letting him return to life on the moors around Calais. It was horrific up there, so we decided to ask him if he wanted to stay. He agreed, and still agrees. Eh, Assadik? We go with our feelings, our heart, so we didnt ask questions, but at first our children were not keen. You hear so many things, so at the beginning we were careful, says Catherine knowingly. Now I wonder how I could be so wrong! These days there is complete trust among all those living at the house. You have seen for yourself that he is part of the family, she adds, giving him an affectionate nudge on the cheek. For him, to be able to go to bed and sleep through the night without fear, without being afraid for his safety, is something new. In Sudan, Assadik worked on his parents farm until war forced him to flee the country. I travelled alone and it took me a year-and-a-half to get from Sudan to France. I went through Chad, Libya, Italy, then France. After all the hardships, the Pocherons simple and warm welcome was a great relief. Here I have my own room. Its nice and comfortable. Catherine and Jean-Pierre are very kind. Its great for now, but I would like to move to the city later on, perhaps to Paris. I didnt go to school in Sudan but here I would like to study and get a good job. This story is part of the French chapter of No Stranger Place, developed and photographed by Aubrey Wade in partnership with UNHCR, profiling refugees and their hosts across Europe. The exhibition will go on display at Ground Control in Paris, on 20 June 2018. June 19 2018 Grahams Dairy has expressed its disappointment at a decision by the minister for local government and housing to dismiss its planning appeal to erect 600 homes, a primary school and park at Airthrey Kerse, Stirling The development was judged to contravene the Local Development Plan, sealing its fate at the hands of the minister and prompting the dairy business to lash out at the contradictory message given by the Scottish government. Grahams managing director Robert Graham said: For a Government that talks of its commitment to growing the Scottish economy, prioritising the rural and food and drink sectors as well as tackling the housing shortfall in Scotland, this decision by the Planning Minister sends a clearly contradictory message. Mactaggart & Mickel group director Andrew Mickel said: This is a huge disappointment and a surprising decision by the Scottish Government which has publicly stated that economic prosperity is at the heart of its vision for Scotland. "The government says all the right things about tackling the housing crisis, but this decision suggests they are unwilling to actually take the steps required to bring about real improvements. If granted the scheme would have delivered 15,000sq/ft of retail, new foot and cycle paths and a flood alleviation scheme. Anybody would have done the same thing, I'm sure, but yeah I don't know what would have happened. She probably wouldn't have made it I guess, because nobody saw it and nobody was there, says Fargo Resident, Ken Fletcher. A Fargo man is being called a hero, after he helped a deputy pull a woman out of her car that was submerged in water. It all happened Saturday night in the channel of Lake Lakota, near Alexandria. Days later, Ken Fletcher says it still doesn't seem real. "I'm still shaking at times talking about it. The adrenaline was pretty pumped up for a while," says Fletcher. Ken Fletcher and his wife, are still trying to unwind after experiencing something, most of us hope to never see. The two of them were heading to Minneapolis and made it just southwest of Alexandria when they saw something strange. "We saw a car driving alongside us in the construction area and it wasn't right. But we thought it must be a construction guy that's checking things out," says Fletcher. But Ken says, they didn't see any other construction workers, so they kept an eye on that car. "Got closer and closer to the bridge, and there was no bridge there," says Fletcher. That's when they saw the unthinkable. "I saw a brake light for a second, it went up in the air and took a nose dive and disappeared," says Fletcher. Ken tells us, they pulled over right away and his wife called 911. "My first thought was pull-over and help," says Fletcher. He says, it was only a matter of minutes before a deputy arrived on the scene. "He started taking everything off, his gun, all his electrical equipment, like his phone. He put a rope around his waist and asked me to hold onto the other end so I did," says Fletcher. Ken tells us, that's when the deputy jumped in to rescue the woman. "He said, go ahead and pull so I pulled them up to shore and they laid there for a minute and I helped them pull them up to my spot," says Fletcher. Ken says, the woman who was in the car seemed confused about the construction zone. Valley News Live: "So you really saved this woman's life." "I'm guessing so, they tell us that now. My wife talked with the state police today and that's what they said, over and over," says Fletcher. Now, he and his wife have a simple message they want you to know. "I just hope other people do the same thing if they see something like this happen. It happened so quick," says Fletcher. The woman who was in the car has been identified as 76-year-old Beverly Toso of Hoffman. Ken says, she was hospitalized overnight but wasn't injured. He tells us, the deputy who jumped in the water is also to thank for saving the woman's live. Deputy Ben Jarvi is with the Douglas County Sheriffs Department. We tried getting in contact with Jarvi but he was not available. 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> DPM Pham Binh Minh cutting the ribbon to inaugurate an exihition on climate change Today the ASEAN-Europe Meeting (ASEM)s Conference on Climate Action to Achieving Sustainable Development Goals Ways Forward has been organised in Can Tho city by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) in collaboration with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the Ministry of Planning and Investment, and Can Tho Peoples Committee. Around 200 representatives hailing from 53 ASEM country members and international organisations attended the conference. Pham Binh Minh, member of the Politburo, Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Foreign Affairs chaired the conference. This is one of the most important inter-regional events on climate change and the only event that Vietnam hosts in the framework of ASEM Conference 2018. This is also the first initiative of ASEM in the third decade of co-operating on climate action along with sustainable development. The conference aims to facilitate 13 cities and provinces in the Mekong River Delta and ministries, agencies, and institutes to connect and expand international co-operation with the worlds leading experts on climate change. The conference will concentrate on: Development in the context of climate changelinkages between climate actions and sustainable development goals; Building capacity to cope with climate changepractices and lessons learnt in Asia and Europe; Roles of climate actions and the participation of relevant parties; Orientation for futurestrengthening Asia-Europe climate partnership for sustainable development. DPM Pham Binh Minh addressing the conference At the conference, DPM Minh said that the ASEM group is fully capable and should pioneer climate change commitments for sustainable development. Vietnam is one of the five countries impacted the most by climate change and the rising sea level. The Mekong River Delta region, including Can Tho city, the major agricultural production area of Vietnam, is one of the three most vulnerable deltas on the world. In 2016, the area suffered the most severe drought and saltwater intrusion over the last 100 years, seriously threatening the livelihoods of millions of people. Unless solutions are found to cope with these challenges, the development achievements of people will be affected significantly. DPM Minh asked the conference to discuss new co-operation orientations. First, a holistic approach is needed to raise awareness of the need of coping with climate change along with sustainable development. ASEMs initiatives and cooperation projects on water resources management, disaster response and mitigation, energy, food safety, gender equality, and poverty reduction should be more closely linked to set out comprehensive solutions for sustainable development. Second, it is necessary to promote multi-partnership on climate change and sustainable development, as well as establish a network to share information among policy makers, researchers, and businesses. This would be the foundation of a strong community, with people and firms as the centre, that could respond to the abnormalities of climate change and transform challenges into opportunities. The delegates taking part at the conference Third, developed members of ASEM should provide financial assistance, strengthen technology transfer, and improve the coping ability of developing members who face challenges from climate change. Fourth, at the recent G7 Summit, Vietnam proposed establishing a global co-operation mechanism on reducing plastic waste in the ocean, which G7 countries agreed with. Thereby, DPM Minh requested ASEM countries to collaborate and consider putting this content into the co-operation plan of the conference. The conclusions of the conference will be submitted to the 12th ASEM Summit in Brussels this October. Audi CEO Rupert Stadler. Source: Christof Stache / AFP In the morning of June 18, Audis parent companyVolkswagenofficially announced that CEO Audi Rupert Stadler was arrested by the German authorities. The presumption of innocence remains in place for Mr. Stadler, wgntv.com cited Volkswagens representative as saying. Stadler was detained because investigators worried that he might seek to suppress evidence in connection with the investigation, Munich prosecutors said. His home was searched last week. The arrest occurred several days after the German authorities fined Volkswagen for EUR1 billion ($1.16 billion) for its global emission fraud. The information also drove down Volkswagens stock price by 2.5 per cent yesterday afternoon. Newswire nbcnews.com stated that in addition to Stadler, 20 more people are under suspicion in the Audi probe, which focuses on cars sold in Europe that are believed to be equipped with illegal software to manipulate diesel emissions during regular driving. The 55-year-old Stadler joined Volkswagen in the early 1990s and has been Audis CEO since 2007 and a member of Volkswagens management board since 2010. He is the highest level leader of Volkswagen arrested in relation to the emissions scandal that exploded in 2015. Accordingly, Volkswagen was found to have purposely programmed its turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines to activate emission controls only during laboratory emissions testing, which lowered the vehicles NOx (a generic term for the nitrogen oxides that are most relevant for air pollution, namely nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2)) output to meet US standards during regulatory testing, while during normal driving the car emitted up to 40 times more NOx. After the violation came to light, the German automaker had to pay a fine of $18 billion in the US and spent $8 billion to recall vehicles equipped with the software. Volkswagen may come to an end Source: Julian Stratenschulte / AFP Nbcnews.com stated that in 2017, the US federal court ordered Volkswagen to pay a $2.8 billion criminal penalty negotiated as part of a settlement with the US Justice Department. In total, Volkswagen has incurred more than $30 billion in charges over the scandala figure that includes the price of buying back almost 500,000 vehicles sold in the US. In addition, Volkswagen was rolling EUR20 billion ($21.1 billion) of debts from 13 banks, which has been exerting considerable pressure on the manufacturer. To deal with these loans, the German car maker planned to issue bonds. In addition, newswire Reuters quoted an unofficial source that Volkswagen could sell its luxury car brands like Lamborghini, Bentley, and Ducati if it could not repay its debts. In late 2016, the German car manufacturer also cut 30,000 jobs to save EUR3.7 billion ($3.92 billion) per year until 2020. Emission violations were uncovered not only at Volkswagen, but Mercedes-Benz and BMW as well. In an announcement on July 22 last year, the European Commission (EC) confirmed to the German Der Spiegel magazine that the institution has been investigating frequent meetings among the car brands representatives to agree on technical specifications on grips, engines, and emission systems. The magazine also stated that there has been an unspoken agreement between the sides since 1990. Japanese prosecutors have called for the death penalty for Yasumasa Shibuya, a Japanese man who is accused of murdering a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl in Chiba prefecture on March 24 last year.- Photo Kyodo On the final day of the trial yesterday, prosecutors asserted that Shibuya, 47, committed a cold-blooded, heinous and cruel crime, and demanded the highest penalty for him. However, defence lawyers argued the defendant was innocent and the evidence was not strong enough to charge him. The Chiba Court announced it will issue a ruling on July 6. Shibuya is accused of murdering Le Thi Nhat Linh, a third grader living in Matsudo town. Linh disappeared shortly after leaving her home on foot for her school on March 24, 2017. Her body was found two days later in Abiko, Chiba. She is thought to have been choked to death, based on marks found on her neck. Shibuya was arrested on April 14, 2017 on suspicion of dumping Linhs body. The same day, Japanese police served a new arrest warrant on the man, charging the suspect with murder and abandonment of the victims body, after tests results showed that DNA taken from Shibuya matched those of samples found on the victims body. Shibuya was head of the parents association at the elementary school in Matsudo where the victim attended. He lives about 300 metres from the victims home. Vingroup is gathering heavy support by developing electronics and cars that Vietnamese people can call their own Vingroup started to study the project to manufacture mobile phones under the Vsmart brand months ago. It has also worked with consultancy firms to build the manufacturing plans as well as models. Besides, the group has negotiated with partners to buy design copyrights, manufacturing lines, and components for Vsmart products. Nguyen Viet Quang, vice president cum CEO of Vingroup, shared that Vsmart products will target the mid-price segment. Vingroup will try to increase the localisation rate for Vsmart products via co-operating with both foreign and local partners to manufacture common components and accessories in the country. Vingroup will buy key components which are not produced by local manufacturers and the worlds leading mobile phone manufacturers also have to import. Quang also added that Vsmart products will be present in smart phone retail channels across the country, even Vinmart + stores will have booths to sell Vsmart products. Vsmart products will be present in smart phone retail channels across the country, even Vinmart + stores will have booths to sell Vsmart products. Manufacturing smart phones under the Vsmart brand is part of Vingroups strategy to manufacture smart electronic devices. Accordingly, the company will establish VinSmart Co. with the registered capital of VND3 trillion ($133 million), which will mainly produce smart electronic devices, initially smart phones under the Vsmart brand, and research the application of artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and new-generation materials. The Vsmart manufacturing plant will be built following international standards at the companys existing Vinfast car manufacturing complex located at Dinh Vu-Cat Hai Economic Zone in the northern port city of Haiphong. The plans to produce smart phones drew the attention the public. Nguyen Dung commented on Vnexpress that he would be willing to buy Vsmart products if they had a competitive price, up-to-date technology, and good design. He and other Vietnamese customers promised to contribute their part to take the Made in Vietnam smart phone abroad. Linh Manh commented that Vingroup should launch smart phones in the medium segment (VND4-10 million, $175.18-437.95), the segment seeing the highest demand in Vietnam. Chairman Chung worked with the leader of Sumitomo Corporation Nguyen Duc Chung, Chairman of the Hanoi People's Committee, has worked with the leader of Sumitomo Corporationthe investor of the $4.1 billion smart city project in Dong Anh districton the sidelines of the Hanoi 2018-Investment and Development Cooperation conference, which opened on June 17. Sumitomo Corporation is one of the corporations from Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, among others, who made strong moves to cash in on Vietnamese cities' ambitious smart city development plans. Bosch Vietnam has invested $450,000 in a new centre to study new solutions to build smart cities and Industry 4.0-ready equipment. "We plan to develop Ho Chi Minh City into one of the centres to supply Internet of Thing (IoT) solutions for Bosch in Southeast Asia in the long term," said Guru Mallikarjuna, general director of Bosch Vietnam. In similar moves, Dutch firms are working on specific smart city plans for the southern province of Binh Duong. In particular, Philips will install smart lightening equipment. Some others, including FabMax and NXP, are planning to build front-end chip plants in Ho Chi Minh City and back-end chip plants in Binh Duong. Since the end of 2016, when the southern province of Binh Duong began its smart city development scheme, many other leading domestic and foreign firms have joined, including Cisco, NIT, VNPT, Viettel, and FPT. Seeing the huge potential, ABB, Volvo Buses, Roxtec, and Axis Communications recently participated in forums in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Danang to seek business opportunities in smart transport projects in the three cities. With the ambitious plans to develop into smart cities with smart transport systems as a vital part, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, and Danang are now on the radars of not only Swedish firms, but also those from Japan, South Korea, the US, and EU countries, who have recently shown strong interest in co-operating with Vietnam to develop smart transport projects related to urban planning as well as transport infrastructure and equipment, software applications, and urban management. Hanoi is a prime example for the huge business potential. In the master plan on road transport vehicle management in 2017-2020, with a vision towards 2030, the development of the public transport system and technology applications for smart city development are among the main solutions. "In addition to the two metro lines currently under construction, the city is preparing to develop four more. Thus, it wants to co-operate with international firms that have expertise in this field to provide solutions and to co-operate in carrying out the development plans," said Nguyen Doan Toan, Deputy Chairman of the Hanoi People's Committee. Public safety is cited as the main reason for the delay in handling the second phase of demolition at 8B Le Truc.-VNA/VNS Photo The second phase of handling violations at 8B Le Truc building has faced new problems, which need to be resolved thoroughly. According to the Phuong Bac Group Joint Stock Company - the unit which completed the first phase of the demolition, the breakdown of the unallowed area will undoubtedly affect the structure, safety and sustainability of the building. The building was licensed for 18 stories, but the investor illegally built the 19th floor. Phuong Bac company has completed demolishing the 19th floor in the first phase. However, the investor also adjusted the height of the floors so the authorities have to continue the second phase. Due to the complexity of the architecture and structure of the building, the demolition in the second phase will require the removal of most of the pillars and beams of the building. Therefore, the company has suggested the city authorities assign the task of the second phase of demolition to the buildings design unit because only the design unit fully understands the core structure of the building. If the second phases dismantlement project is assessed as absolutely safe, then Phuong Bac company will have enough grounds to complete dismantlement measures to submit to relevant agencies for approval. But nearly two years since the demolition began, the design unit has still not come up with the second phases plan to ensure safety. Phuong Bac company said that the second phases dismantling has a high risk level, while destroying the whole building will waste social resources. At present, there is no legal document that allows the authorities to demolish the whole building. On the other hand, most of the areas from the 18th floor and below have been purchased. The second stage of dismantling will therefore face opposition from the people who have deposited on the apartments. For the above reasons, the Phuong Bac company has requested to thoroughly handle the illegally-constructed 8B Le Truc building to save money and ensure the interests of people involved. If the work doesnt affect security and national defence, the company has proposed investors to buy back the whole area that should not have been built but already been sold to customers and the money collected should be put it into the State budget instead of dismantling. The second phases dismantling wastes social assets and causes risks to peoples safety, including construction workers, residents living around the building, and road users. In addition, the company requires investors to pay the full cost of the first phases demolition and fund the maintenance of tower cranes, cage hoists and other equipment used since the end of first phase. During the rainy season, the storage of tower cranes and hoists causes risks, the company proposed to dismantle the tower cranes and cage hoists for maintenance. On the above recommendations, Vice Chairman of the Hanoi Peoples Committee Nguyen The Hung has assigned the Department of Construction to co-ordinate with Ba inh District to re-check the process of handling violations. The 8B Le Truc buildings developer was Le Truc Garment Joint Stock Company. Fujifilm is seeking more than US$1 billion in damages. (Photo: AFP/Kazuhiro Nogi) Fujifilm slammed what it said was a "unilateral decision to terminate without legitimate cause" the planned merger announced in January. The merger was shelved after a lawsuit by powerful shareholders Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, who together own more than 15 per cent of Xerox and had vigorously opposed the tie-up. The pair secured an injunction in April to halt the deal after a New York judge agreed the merger prioritised the interests of the Xerox CEO over the firm's shareholders. Fujifilm also announced a challenge to that ruling, saying it was "inconsistent with shareholder democracy to allow Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason ... to dictate the fate of Xerox." When scrapping the merger, Xerox cited "material deviations" in the audited accounts of an existing joint venture known as Fuji Xerox controlled by Fujifilm. And the Japanese firm said it continued to believe that the tie-up between Xerox and Fuji Xerox was "the only correct solution to provide shareholders of both companies with exceptional short and long-term value". Xerox issued a robust statement in response, saying it would "vigorously defend its decision and pursue any and all remedies available to Xerox arising from Fujifilm's mismanagement and misconduct". Calling off the merger was seen as a victory for Icahn, a battle-tested billionaire who has aggressively challenged companies since the 1980s. It came after activist fund Elliott won a weeks-long power struggle with Vivendi over Telecom Italia by wresting control of the company's board in early May. Korean companies see fresh demand in Vietnamese beauty market Dominic OH, general director of Korea International Exhibition Centre, said that, Vietnam is becoming an attractive destination for Korean beauty companies. In 2017, around 100 Korean companies visited Vietnam to explore the market. This year, a delegation of 150 Korean companies continues to showcase products and services in the Mekong Beauty Show from June 14 to 16 in Ho Chi Minh City, he noted. According to OH, the Korean beauty industry continues to be among the most important drivers of the beauty event as they are looking for potential distributors and retailers to penetrate the lucrative market. Nguyen Van Minh, vice chairman of the Vietnam Essential Oils, Aromatherapy and Cosmetics Association, said that Vietnam is an emerging market for beauty and personal care products with an annual growth rate of 30 per cent in the past few years. According to International Monetary Fund, the four countries of the Mekong River system will achieve a combined GDP of $441 billion in 2020. Vietnamese consumers spent $6 billion on beauty products in 2017. "Vietnam is also leading the growth in the region. It is the fastest growing market for consumer goods in Southeast Asia. Thus, several beauty companies are looking for opportunities to extend their presence in Vietnam, including those from Korea," he said. Korean beauty companies have also taken the spotlight at Mekong Beauty Show 2018 with more than 400 brands. In the exhibition, Korean companies also present a wide range of Organic K-beauty products and beauty trends for Vietnamese consumers. Mekong Beauty Show 2018 also hosted other exhibitors from Europe, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and many other countries to present Vietnamese industry professionals with new technology and innovation. More than 150 buyers from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar have visited the show to source products and seek for new partnerships, opening up new opportunities for the market. Phuong Nam pulp mill has been failing to arouse investors' interest The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) has been waiting for the approval of the PM to reduce the selling price of Phuong Nam pulp mill managed by state-run Vietnam Paper Corporation in the southern province of Long An, after being ignored by investors at the past three sales. Previously, MoIT asked Vietnam Paper Corporation, in collaboration with a consultancy firm to continue to build other auction plans as well as plans to deal with the assets that could not be auctioned off, according to regulations. However, MoIT admitted that there has been no official document providing guidance on the adjustment of the starting price for subsequent auctions in case the first failed. MoIT expects to receive the approval from the PM and complete the sale of Phuong Nam pulp mill this year. As a result, MoIT proposed the PM to issue a resolution on specific mechanisms for auctioning Phuong Nam pulp mill, with similar mechanisms as those outlined in Decree No. 61/2017/ND-CP, which stipulates the assessment of the reserve price of bad debts and assets put up as collateral for bad debts. Notably, after the first failed auction, the firm will be permitted to discount the selling price by 10 per cent at the next auctions. The discount cannot be applied more than twice. In case the project is still unmarketable after two auctions at the discounted price, the owner of the project will appraise each asset and then continue to organise auctions for these assets. MoIT expects to receive the approval from the PM and complete the sale of Phuong Nam pulp mill this year. The mills construction was kicked off in March 2006 with the initial investment capital of VND1.487 trillion ($66.3 million) by Transport and Communication Development Investment Company (Tradico). The mill was expected to produce the best quality pulp in Vietnam, reaching European standards. At the time, the province encouraged farmers to grow on nearly 9,000 hectares in Thanh Hoa, Moc Hoa, and Tan Thanh districts to supply materials for the mill. In 2007 the mill entered its test run and in November Tradico decided to increase the total investment capital to VND2.286 trillion ($102.5 million). However, the test run was suspended due to machinery breakdown. In 2009, Tradico was licensed to transfer the pulp mill to Vietnam Paper Corporation. The expected cost of the project increased to VND3.4 trillion ($148.9 million). However, after Vietnam Paper Corporation took over the mill, it was upgraded and started operation again, but the malfunctions remained. Nguyen Kim wants to raise its ownership rate to 51.14 per cent rate in Ladophar. Photo: nhipcaudautu.vn Nguyen Kim Investment and Development JSC in early June registered buying 2.12 million LDP stocks (equalling 27.14 per cent), aiming to raise its ownership rate from the current 24 to 51.14 per cent and seizing control over Ladophar. The transaction is forecasted to be carried out from June 4 to July 24. Nguyen Kim has been planning to take control of Ladophar, but currently, the technology retailer is co-operating with the pharma firm in the form of a joint venture company. If the transaction is completed, Ladophar will become Nguyen Kims subsidiary and continue to do business in the pharmaceutical industry. This promising market has many retail chains, such as Mobile World (1,065 stores), FPT (519 stores), and Nguyen Kim (58). These technology retailers may apply their store chain management format for pharmaceutical business, which is expected to help them take large market shares. Currently, LDR is listed on the Hanoi Stock Exchange (HNX) with the average price of the 60 latest sessions of VND26,600 ($1.17). Thus, to seize the controlling rights, Nguyen Kim has to pay VND56 billion ($2.46 million) at least. Nguyen Kim made its first investment into Ladophar in late 2014 by spending dozens of billions of VND to buy 10 per cent of the firms capital. Afterwards, the technology retailer raised its ownership to 24 per cent. In addition to Ladophar, Nguyen Kim also poured dozens of billions of VND into FT Pharma. Not only Nguyen Kim, but other technology retailers like Mobile World, FPT, Digiworld, and even giant Vingroup are seeking opportunities in pharmaceuticals. zing.vn quoted many experts as saying that the pharmaceutical distribution system in Vietnam mainly lays in the hands of private drugstores, but none of them occupies over 20 per cent of the market. At FPT's annual general shareholders meeting on March 28, Nguyen Bach Diep, chairman of FPT Retail, announced the plan to increase the Long Chau pharmaceutical chain to 400 units by 2022 with an annual average of 100 drugstore openings. In early 2018, electronics retailer Digiworld mapped out its road to conquer Vietnams healthcare product market. Accordingly, Digiworld JSC plans to boost its presence in the healthcare and consumer goods industries this year. The goal is to earn at least VND200 billion ($8.78 million) in gross revenue from these two sectors this year. China retains a strong influence in North Korea AFP/KCNA VIA KNS Kim is expected to fly into Beijing and security preparations are already underway, Japan's Nikkei business daily quoted sources familiar with the matter as saying. If confirmed, it would mark the third time Kim has visited China since March, when he made his inaugural foreign visit as leader. Citing diplomatic sources, Japanese news agency Kyodo said a "high-ranking North Korean official, possibly Kim" was due to visit Beijing by air. Kim is seeking relief from economic sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise and is believed to seek support from China for that, the Nikkei said in a dispatch from Beijing. Following the historic US-North Korea summit in Singapore exactly a week ago, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic punishment of its Cold War-era ally. China was not a direct player in the negotiations in Singapore but retains a strong influence behind the scenes. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed to the Chinese capital to brief Xi and other top leaders soon after the Trump-Kim meeting. In a joint statement following the Singapore meeting, Kim pledged to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula". Trump hailed this as a concession but critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. In return, Trump said he would stop joint war games with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. On Tuesday, the US and South Korean militaries confirmed they have called off upcoming joint exercises following Trump's order. Police cordon off an area after five people were shot and injured in central Malmo, Sweden. (AFP/Johan NILSSON) "An 18-year-old man has died in hospital," Malmo police said in a statement, adding that four others were hospitalised. A police spokesman told AFP that the possibility of a terrorist link to the attack had been discounted. According to the Aftonbladet daily, the victims were attacked as they left an internet cafe in the middle of the town. Witness were quoted as saying that at least one attacker was armed with an automatic weapon. The police refused to comment on the identity of the possible attacker or attackers. They also declined to give any detail of the victims although reports said several of them were well known to the police. While Sweden has relatively low levels of crime, neighbourhoods in Malmo, Stockholm and Gothenburg have seen a rise in violence attributed to gangs fighting over drug trafficking and prostitution. An investor monitors the security index in Ha Noi. - VNS Photo Thai Ha The benchmark VN Index on the HCM Stock Exchange dropped sharply 2.87 per cent to close at 987.34 points, breaking the 1000-point threshold. It had inched up 0.08 per cent on Friday. The HNX Index on the Ha Noi Stock Exchange lost 2.46 per cent to end at 113.05 points, reversing from its gain of 0.86 per cent on Friday. More than 222.8 million shares were traded on the two local exchanges, worth VND5.3 trillion (US$234 million). The market breadth was negative as declining stocks outnumbered gaining ones by 312 to 140 while 288 other stocks remained unchanged. Massive sell-offs drowned 16 of the 20 sectors on the stock market. Key industries that saw share prices drop included banking-financial, energy, construction material and retail, data on vietstock.vn showed. Large-cap stocks were hit strongly by profit-taking pressure. The large-cap VN30 Index fell 3.45 per cent to 970.35 points with 27 of the 30 largest stocks by market capitalisation suffering. Bank stocks slumped with all nine listed banks losing value. The three largest lenders Vietcombank (VCB), Vietinbank (CTG), BIDV (BID) slipped 4.2 per cent, 4.9 per cent and 5.9 per cent, respectively. Other banks on the Ha Noi bourse fell between 1.3-3.6 per cent each. Among the worst-performing stocks in the energy sector were PetroVietnam Gas JSC (GAS), PetroVietnam Drilling & Well Services Corporation (PVD), PetroVietnam Technical Services Corporation (PVS) and Viet Nam National Petroleum Group (PLX). Many large-caps in the real estate sector also face strong selling pressure, including Development Investment Construction JSC (DIG), Nam Long Investment Corporation (NLG), Vingroup Joint Stock Company (VIC) and Khang Dien House Trading and Investment JSC (KDH). Another factor that dampened market sentiment was foreign investors continuing to net-sell local assets, posting VND547.75 billion worth of net sell value on the HOSE, focusing on VIC (VND531 billion), HPG (VND47.1 billion) and HSG (VND42.49 billion). Moreover they also net sold VND41.68 billion on the HNX. According to Bao Viet Securities Company (BVSC), the bearish session on Monday pushed VN-Index to the support zone around 980. We forecast that the market will rebound in this zone, but this might not be a sustainable recovery, BVSC said in its daily report. Meanwhile, BIDV Securities Company (BSC) said in its report that the market had not confirmed the return of cash flow, investors can disburse portfolios, avoid the use of margin. The State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV) has decided to push ahead with restructuring the banking system, applying stricter measures to effectively prevent cross-ownership at commercial banks. The SBV recently announced it is drafting a circular in a move to discourage cross-ownership among banks and encourage transparency in the capital contribution sources of shareholders. Under the draft circular, a revision of Circular No 06/2015/TT-NHNN, banks must bring their ownership thresholds in line with limitations stipulated in Article 55 of the Law on Credit Institutions before June 30 next year. Under the law, individuals are not allowed to own more than 5 per cent of the charter capital of a bank, while the permitted ratio for an institutional shareholder should not be more than 15 per cent, save for some cases such as ownership in distressed or equitised banks and ownership by a strategic foreign investor. The central bank will impose harsh penalties on banks that fail to meet the deadline. Penalties include disapproval of the banks proposals regarding top positions, such as members of the board of directors and supervisory board and the CEO. Non-compliant shareholders will also have their dividend rights and right to serve on the board of directors suspended, in addition to being prohibited from increasing their stake in their respective banks. Besides the cross-ownership among banks, the Government has also take measures to prevent cross-ownership between banks and subsidiaries. Under the Law on Credit Institutions, which was passed by the National Assembly and came into effect on January 15 this year, bank leaders are prohibited from taking up senior positions in other businesses. The revised law has so far contributed in reducing cross-ownership between banks and subsidiaries as many banks have recently reshuffled their leadership at their respective 2018 annual general meetings of shareholders to comply with the new central bank regulation. Banking expert Can Van Luc said many bank leaders had to resign from their positions as chair of the board of directors or CEO of business firms to continue managing banks. A number of business owners also had to give up chairmanship positions at banks to comply with the new law. They were the most obvious examples of the decrease in cross-ownership, Luc said. He said cross-ownership in banks has also been put under control as a result of their listing in stock markets. Stock market listing means information, especially those related to internal management and the ownership rate of shareholders, must be made public and subjected to close monitoring by the State Securities Commission. However, experts suggested that a close supervision is still needed as some individuals can take advantage of loopholes in the law. Finance and banking expert Nguyen Tri Hieu said that while the new law had a good impact on transparency in the area of ownership, State agencies must still monitor activities closely as some individuals who do not take leadership positions in banks may still have governing powers. Colour-coated steel produced at the Hoang Ha Group Joint Stock Company in the northern province of Quang Ninh.-VNA/VNS Photo Dinh Manh Tu Recently, Indonesia officially announced the application of anti-dumping duties on colour-coated steel imports from Viet Nam, from 12.01 per cent to 28.49 per cent in five years. Concerns have been raised that this tax imposition will cause difficulties for Vietnamese enterprises, and may cause them to lose the market. However, the VSA said that with large demand in this market, domestic producers will still be able to compete with rivals. According to VSA, 60 per cent of made-in-Viet Nam colour-coated steel products are exported to Southeast Asian markets including Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar. The Indonesian Anti-Dumping Committee (KADI) said that from July 2015 to June 2016, Indonesia imported more than 224,000 tonnes of colour-coated steel, of which about 196,000 tonnes came from Viet Nam and China, accounting for 87.5 per cent of the countrys total steel imports. VSA Chairman Ho Nghia Dung said that the taxed enterprises are Nam Kim, Hoa Sen and Ton Dong A. He attributed the anti-dumping measure to Indonesian suspicion that Vietnamese steel enterprises imported raw materials from China for production. He said "With tariffs ranging from 12 per cent to more than 28 per cent, exports will be more difficult. It is likely that businesses will have to reduce exports to the market. However, it is not likely that they will lose this market, because it has a huge demand for galvanised steel sheets," Dung said. "Businesses have expanded market to include Europe and the United States, and promoted exports to Southeast Asian countries, he added. However, the VSA Chairman also urged domestic enterprises to improve their competitiveness, especially in the context of integration and application of safeguard measures as much as today. In recent years, steel production has been one of the industries most subjected to trade lawsuits. By the end of 2017, out of a total of 124 trade defence cases against Vietnamese exports, there were up to 30 steel-related cases, mainly focusing on anti-dumping investigations. Therefore, the steel industry needs to create a closed production chain from local input supply to finished products and invest in advanced production technology to reduce production costs and help businesses develop in a stable and sustainable fashion, Dung said. In particular, to prevent traditional markets from being narrowed, VSA said that businesses need to invest in overseas markets where there is a shortage of local steel producers like Africa, South America, Cambodia, Laos and Malaysia. It is forecast that demand for steel in Indonesia and the Philippines will increase. Countries in ASEAN-6 (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei) are expected to post a positive growth rate in steel consumption to reach over 90 million tonnes by 2019. This is a good sign for Vietnamese steel enterprises if they continue to promote exports to these markets According to Ton Dong A Joint Stock Company, tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers are challenging for exporters, especially in the steel industry. By 2018, Ton Dong A targets to export 800,000 tonnes of steel products, so the company must ensure the quality of products is in accordance with international standards by using high quality raw materials from Tier 1 suppliers. Vu Nhom and Tran Phuong Binh caused billions of VND in damages to Dong A Bank Yesterday (June 18), the Ministry of Public Securitys investigation agency concluded the case of deliberately acting against state regulations on economic management, causing serious consequences at Dong A Bank, which caused thousands of billions of Vietnamese dong in damages, according to vietnamnet.vn. The agency has sent the documents to the Supreme Peoples Procuracy prosecuting Phan Van Anh Vu (also known as Vu Nhom, former chairman of Bac Nam Construction 79 JSC), Tran Phuong Binh (former general director and vice chairman of Dong A Bank), and 22 other defendants on four charges. Vu Nhom has been prosecuted for the charge of abuse of powers or position for appropriation of property (Article 355 of the 2015 Criminal Code). He forged documents claiming to have paid VND200 billion ($8.8 million) to acquire DAB shares. This damage drew VND3.2 billion ($0.14 million) of interest since then. The investigation agency suggests that he should be made to take responsibility for these amounts and return $13.4 million to Tran Phuong Binh. In addition to these 24 defendants, the investigation agency has issued an arrest warrant for Nguyen Huynh Dang (former head of DABs Business Department), who has yet to be found. Dong A Bank was established in 1992 with VND5 trillion ($220 million) in charter capital. Tran Phuong Binh and his family members hold 10.24 per cent, and Phu Nhuan Jewelry JSC (PNJ) chaired by Binhs wife holds another 7.7 per cent in the company. In 2015, the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) issued the decision on taking Dong A Bank under special supervision after discovering violations. SBV detected that the treasury of DABs headquarters was missing VND2.1 trillion ($92.5 million) and more than 62,000 taels of gold. In 2016, MoPS investigation agency prosecuted and arrested Tran Phuong Binh and Nguyen Thi Ngoc Van (former deputy general director of DAB) for the charges of deliberately acting against state regulations on economic management, causing serious consequences and breaching regulations on loan provision in the operations of credit institutions (Article 179 of the 1999 Penal Code). Tran Phuong Binh was prosecuted for the additional charge of abuse of trust to appropriate property. He directed the spending of VND1.16 trillion ($51.1 million) to acquire 74.2 million DAB shares, VND500 billion to be exchanged into $13.9 million, and ordered Vu Nhom to buy DAB shares, and took VND349.6 billion ($15.4 million) for himself. He appropriated over VND2 trillion ($88 million) from DAB. Regarding the charge of deliberately acting against state regulations, Binh caused an additional damage of VND1.56 trillion ($69 million) to pay under-the-table interest, loans, gold, and foreign currency transactions. Moreover, while Dong A Bank was in the red in 2013, Binh proposed to rise the banks charter capital from VND5 trillion ($220.3 million) to VND6 trillion ($264.3 million). At the end of 2013, Binh and Vu Nhom agreed that Vu would buy 60 million DAB shares with the total value of VND600 billion ($26.4 million). Vu Nhom mortgaged his land holding in Danang city to collect VND400 billion ($17.6 million) from Dong A Bank, then used this amount to purchase DAB stocks. The remaining amount was paid by the bank as per Binhs instructions, after which Vu signed fake documents showing that he had already paid the VND200 billion ($8.8 million) to Dong A Bank. Due to the unsuccessful raising of charter capital, in April 2014, Binh directed the bank to return the VND600 billion ($26.4 million) to Vu Nhom. Vu said that he would pay back the VND200 billion ($8.8 million) acquired by falsified documents to Dong A Bank when he sold the land in Danang. Then Vu Nhom bought 50 million DAB shares from four shareholders at the price of VND500 billion ($220 million). In August 2015, Vu continued to purchase an additional 13 million DAB shares at the price of VND136 billion ($6 million), but he only paid VND46 billion ($2 million) of this. The additional conclusion noted that the VND200 billion ($8.8 million) Vu Nhom claims to have paid Dong A Bank was fake, but the VND200 billion ($8.8 million) DAB sent to the account of Bac Nam Construction 79 JSC was real. This money was transferred illegally from DAB to Vu Nhoms company, causing VND200 billion ($8.8 million) in damage to DAB (plus the VND3.2 billion ($0.14 million) of interest). During the US Presidential electoral campaign, we demonstrated that the rivalry between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump did not concern their style so much as their culture [1]. The outsider challenged the Puritan domination over the USA, and demanded a return to the original compromise of 1789 the Bill of Rights between the revolutionaries who were fighting King George, and the major land-owners of the 13 colonies. Not as amateur in politics as people thought, he had already displayed his opposition to the system on the very day of the attacks of 9/11 [2], then, later, with the controversy he maintained concerning President Obamas birthplace. We did not interpret Donald Trumps fortune as a clear signal that he would be taking action in service of the rich, but as proof that he would defend productive capitalism against speculative capitalism. We pointed out that on foreign policy, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had chosen the option of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, implementing the strategy of Admiral Cebrowski to destroy the state structures of all the States in the Greater Middle East [3] ; while on the interior, they suspended the Bill of Rights - all of which led to the depreciation and pauperisation of the poor white elements of US society. On the contrary, Donald Trump continually denounced the American Empire, and announced the return to Republican principles. He espoused the ideas of Andrew Jackson (1829-37) [4], and was adopted by the ex-collaborators of Richard Nixon (1969-74) [5]. He synthesised his ideas in interior politics with the slogan Make America Great Again ! , in other words, no longer the pursuit of the imperial mirage, but a return to the American dream of personal enrichment. As for his exterior politics, he used the slogan America First ! , which we interpreted not in the sense it was given during the Second World War, but the meaning it had originally. Therefore we did not see him as a neo-Nazi, but as a politician who refused to engage his country in the service of transnational elites. More surprisingly, we thought it would be impossible for him to reach a cultural agreement with the Mexican minority, and we forecast that he would finally facilitate a friendly separation for the independence of California (CalExit) [6]. Our analysis of the objectives and methods of Donald Trump nonetheless left open the question of the capacity of a US President to modify the military strategy of his country [7]. Writing for two years, and expressing ideas which were completely opposite to all other commentators, we were wrongly classified as partisans of Donald Trump. This is an incorrect interpretation of our work. We are not United States electors, and as as result, we do not support any candidate to the White House. We are political analysts, and we attempt only to understand the facts and to anticipate their consequences. Where are we today? We must concentrate on the facts and eliminate all President Trumps public relations statements from our analysis. We must distinguish the effects for which Donald Trump is directly responsible from those which are the continuity of his predecessors and the effects due to ambient world evolution. The interior Donald Trump gave his support to a demonstration of white supremacists in Charlottesville, and also to the movement for the right to carry arms, including after the slaughter at Parkland. These positions were interpreted as support for far-right ideas and violence. On the contrary, however, it was for him a promotion of Human Rights, US version, as they were defined in the first two amendments to the Bill of Rights. We may, of course, criticise the US definition of Human Rights as strongly as we like and in the tradition of Thomas Paine [8], we do not hesitate to criticise it but that is another question. Lacking means, the completion of the Wall at the Mexican border, which had been built by his predecessors, is a long way from being finished. It is still too soon to draw conclusions. The confrontation with those Hispanic immigrants who refuse to speak English and to integrate the compromise of 1789 still has not happened. Donald Trump went no further than taking the Spanish service off the White House communication system. Concerning the question of climate change, Donald Trump rejected the Paris agreement, not because he is indifferent to ecology, but because it imposes financial regulations which will only benefit those who control carbon trading [9]. As far the economy is concerned, Donald Trump has not yet managed to impose his revolution exonerating exports and taxing imports. However, he withdrew his country from the free-exchange treaties which had not yet been ratified, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While his Border Adjustment Tax was rejected by Congress, he is trying today to dodge the parliamentarians and to create prohibitive taxes on the import of certain products, a move which flabbergasted his countrys allies and provoked the anger of China [10]. Similarly, Donald Trump is slow to launch his Rooseveltian programme for the building of infrastructures, for which he has so far found only 15 % of the necessary finance. And he has not yet launched his programme soliciting foreign specialists to help improve US industry, although this was announced in his National Security Strategy [11]. But finally, the little he has already achieved has been enough to kick-start production and employment in his country. The exterior In order to liquidate the American Empire, Donald Trump had announced his intention to cease support for the jihadists, to dissolve NATO, to abandon the Cebrowski strategy, and to repatriate the occupation troops. It is obviously much more difficult to reform the primary federal administration, the armed forces, than to change the economic and financial regulations by decree. In priority, President Trump placed trustworthy people at the head of the Department of Defense and the CIA in order to avoid all attempts at rebellion. He reformed the National Security Council by diminishing the role of the Pentagon and the CIA [12]. He immediately put an end to the colour revolutions and other coups detat which had characterised the previous administrations. Then he convinced the Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, to cease their support for the jihadists [13]. The consequences of this decision quickly became apparent with the fall of Daesh in Iraq and in Syria. Simultaneously, Donald Trump postponed the dissolution of NATO, to which he simply added an anti-terrorist function [14]. Meanwhile, in the context of the British campaign against Moscow, the Alliance is actively developing its anti-Russian plan of action [15]. Donald Trump only kept NATO in order to control the vassals of the United States. He deliberately discredited the G7, forcing his baffled allies to assume their own responsibilities. To interrupt the Cebrowski strategy in the Greater Middle East , Donald Trump is preparing a reorganisation of that zone around his withdrawal from the agreements with Iran (JCPoA and secret bilateral agreement) and from his plan for the solution of the Palestinian question. While this project, which both France and the United Kingdom are attempting to sabotage, has little chance of managing to install regional peace, it enables him to paralyse the initiatives by the Pentagon. However, the superior officers are preparing to apply the Cebrowski strategy in the Caribbean basin . The initiative for the solution of the Korean conflict, the last vestige of the Cold War, ought to enable him to call into question the validity of NATO. The allies only engaged in this organisation to prevent a European version of a situation like that of the Korean war. In the end, the US armed forces should no longer be used to crush small countries, but exclusively to isolate Russia, even to prevent China from developing its Silk Roads . MEMORANDUM FOR THE VICE PRESIDENT THE SECRETARY OF STATE THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE THE SECRETARY OF COMMERCE THE SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION THE SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE THE DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET THE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS THE ADMINISTRATOR OF THE NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION THE DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY THE DEPUTY ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR HOMELAND SECURITY AND COUNTERTERRORISM THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF SUBJECT: National Space Traffic Management Policy Section 1. Policy. For decades, the United States has effectively reaped the benefits of operating in space to enhance our national security, civil, and commercial sectors. Our society now depends on space technologies and space-based capabilities for communications, navigation, weather forecasting, and much more. Given the significance of space activities, the United States considers the continued unfettered access to and freedom to operate in space of vital interest to advance the security, economic prosperity, and scientific knowledge of the Nation. Today, space is becoming increasingly congested and contested, and that trend presents challenges for the safety, stability, and sustainability of U.S. space operations. Already, the Department of Defense (DoD) tracks over 20,000 objects in space, and that number will increase dramatically as new, more capable sensors come online and are able to detect smaller objects. DoD publishes a catalog of space objects and makes notifications of potential conjunctions (that is, two or more objects coming together at the same or nearly the same point in time and space). As the number of space objects increases, however, this limited traffic management activity and architecture will become inadequate. At the same time, the contested nature of space is increasing the demand for DoD focus on protecting and defending U.S. space assets and interests. The future space operating environment will also be shaped by a significant increase in the volume and diversity of commercial activity in space. Emerging commercial ventures such as satellite servicing, debris removal, in-space manufacturing, and tourism, as well as new technologies enabling small satellites and very large constellations of satellites, are increasingly outpacing efforts to develop and implement government policies and processes to address these new activities. To maintain U.S. leadership in space, we must develop a new approach to space traffic management (STM) that addresses current and future operational risks. This new approach must set priorities for space situational awareness (SSA) and STM innovation in science and technology (S&T), incorporate national security considerations, encourage growth of the U.S. commercial space sector, establish an updated STM architecture, and promote space safety standards and best practices across the international community. The United States recognizes that spaceflight safety is a global challenge and will continue to encourage safe and responsible behavior in space while emphasizing the need for international transparency and STM data sharing. Through this national policy for STM and other national space strategies and policies, the United States will enhance safety and ensure continued leadership, preeminence, and freedom of action in space. Sec. 2. Definitions. For the purposes of this memorandum, the following definitions shall apply: (a) Space Situational Awareness shall mean the knowledge and characterization of space objects and their operational environment to support safe, stable, and sustainable space activities. (b) Space Traffic Management shall mean the planning, coordination, and on-orbit synchronization of activities to enhance the safety, stability, and sustainability of operations in the space environment. (c) Orbital debris, or space debris, shall mean any human-made space object orbiting Earth that no longer serves any useful purpose. Sec. 3. Principles. The United States recognizes, and encourages other nations to recognize, the following principles: (a) Safety, stability, and operational sustainability are foundational to space activities, including commercial, civil, and national security activities. It is a shared interest and responsibility of all spacefaring nations to create the conditions for a safe, stable, and operationally sustainable space environment. (b) Timely and actionable SSA data and STM services are essential to space activities. Consistent with national security constraints, basic U.S. Government-derived SSA data and basic STM services should be available free of direct user fees. (c) Orbital debris presents a growing threat to space operations. Debris mitigation guidelines, standards, and policies should be revised periodically, enforced domestically, and adopted internationally to mitigate the operational effects of orbital debris. (d) A STM framework consisting of best practices, technical guidelines, safety standards, behavioral norms, pre-launch risk assessments, and on-orbit collision avoidance services is essential to preserve the space operational environment. Sec. 4. Goals. Consistent with the principles listed in section 3 of this memorandum, the United States should continue to lead the world in creating the conditions for a safe, stable, and operationally sustainable space environment. Toward this end, executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall pursue the following goals as required in section 6 of this memorandum: (a) Advance SSA and STM Science and Technology. The United States should continue to engage in and enable S&T research and development to support the practical applications of SSA and STM. These activities include improving fundamental knowledge of the space environment, such as the characterization of small debris, advancing the S&T of critical SSA inputs such as observational data, algorithms, and models necessary to improve SSA capabilities, and developing new hardware and software to support data processing and observations. (b) Mitigate the effect of orbital debris on space activities. The volume and location of orbital debris are growing threats to space activities. It is in the interest of all to minimize new debris and mitigate effects of existing debris. This fact, along with increasing numbers of active satellites, highlights the need to update existing orbital debris mitigation guidelines and practices to enable more efficient and effective compliance, and establish standards that can be adopted internationally. These trends also highlight the need to establish satellite safety design guidelines and best practices. (c) Encourage and facilitate U.S. commercial leadership in S&T, SSA, and STM. Fostering continued growth and innovation in the U.S. commercial space sector, which includes S&T, SSA, and STM activities, is in the national interest of the United States. To achieve this goal, the U.S. Government should streamline processes and reduce regulatory burdens that could inhibit commercial sector growth and innovation, enabling the U.S. commercial sector to continue to lead the world in STM-related technologies, goods, data, and services on the international market. (d) Provide U.S. Government-supported basic SSA data and basic STM services to the public. The United States should continue to make available basic SSA data and basic STM services (including conjunction and reentry notifications) free of direct user fees while supporting new opportunities for U.S. commercial and non-profit SSA data and STM services. (e) Improve SSA data interoperability and enable greater SSA data sharing. SSA data must be timely and accurate. It is in the national interest of the United States to improve SSA data interoperability and enable greater SSA data sharing among all space operators, consistent with national security constraints. The United States should seek to lead the world in the development of improved SSA data standards and information sharing. (f) Develop STM standards and best practices. As the leader in space, the United States supports the development of operational standards and best practices to promote safe and responsible behavior in space. A critical first step in carrying out that goal is to develop U.S.-led minimum safety standards and best practices to coordinate space traffic. U.S. regulatory agencies should, as appropriate, adopt these standards and best practices in domestic regulatory frameworks and use them to inform and help shape international consensus practices and standards. (g) Prevent unintentional radio frequency (RF) interference. Growing orbital congestion is increasing the risk to U.S. space assets from unintentional RF interference. The United States should continue to improve policies, processes, and technologies for spectrum use (including allocations and licensing) to address these challenges and ensure appropriate spectrum use for current and future operations. (h) Improve the U.S. domestic space object registry. Transparency and data sharing are essential to safe, stable, and sustainable space operations. Consistent with national security constraints, the United States should streamline the interagency process to ensure accurate and timely registration submissions to the United Nations (UN), in accordance with our international obligations under the Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space. (i) Develop policies and regulations for future U.S. orbital operations. Increasing congestion in key orbits and maneuver-based missions such as servicing, survey, and assembly will drive the need for policy development for national security, civil, and commercial sector space activities. Consistent with U.S. law and international obligations, the United States should regularly assess existing guidelines for non-government orbital activities, and maintain a timely and responsive regulatory environment for licensing these activities. Sec. 5. Guidelines. In pursuit of the principles and goals of this policy, agencies should observe the following guidelines: (a) Managing the Integrity of the Space Operating Environment. (i) Improving SSA coverage and accuracy. Timely, accurate, and actionable data are essential for effective SSA and STM. The United States should seek to minimize deficiencies in SSA capability, particularly coverage in regions with limited sensor availability and sensitivity in detection of small debris, through SSA data sharing, the purchase of SSA data, or the provision of new sensors. New U.S. sensors are expected to reveal a substantially greater volume of debris and improve our understanding of space object size distributions in various regions of space. However, very small debris may not be sufficiently tracked to enable or justify actionable collision avoidance decisions. As a result, close conjunctions and even collisions with unknown objects are possible, and satellite operators often lack sufficient insight to assess their level of risk when making maneuvering decisions. The United States should develop better tracking capabilities, and new means to catalog such debris, and establish a quality threshold for actionable collision avoidance warning to minimize false alarms. Through both Government and commercial sector S&T investment, the United States should advance concepts and capabilities to improve SSA in support of debris mitigation and collision avoidance decisions. (ii) Establishing an Open Architecture SSA Data Repository. Accurate and timely tracking of objects orbiting Earth is essential to preserving the safety of space activities for all. Consistent with section 2274 of title 10, United States Code, a basic level of SSA data in the form of the publicly releasable portion of the DoD catalog is and should continue to be provided free of direct user fees. As additional sources of space tracking data become available, the United States has the opportunity to incorporate civil, commercial, international, and other available data to allow users to enhance and refine this service. To facilitate greater data sharing with satellite operators and enable the commercial development of enhanced space safety services, the United States must develop the standards and protocols for creation of an open architecture data repository. The essential features of this repository would include: Data integrity measures to ensure data accuracy and availability; Data standards to ensure sufficient quality from diverse sources; Measures to safeguard proprietary or sensitive data, including national security information; The inclusion of satellite owner-operator ephemerides to inform orbital location and planned maneuvers; and Standardized formats to enable development of applications to leverage the data. To facilitate this enhanced data sharing, and in recognition of the need for DoD to focus on maintaining access to and freedom of action in space, a civil agency should, consistent with applicable law, be responsible for the publicly releasable portion of the DoD catalog and for administering an open architecture data repository. The Department of Commerce should be that civil agency. (iii) Mitigating Orbital Debris. It is in the interest of all space operators to minimize the creation of new orbital debris. Rapid international expansion of space operations and greater diversity of missions have rendered the current U.S. Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices (ODMSP) inadequate to control the growth of orbital debris. These standard practices should be updated to address current and future space operating environments. The United States should develop a new protocol of standard practices to set broader expectations of safe space operations in the 21st century. This protocol should begin with updated ODMSP, but also incorporate sections to address operating practices for large constellations, rendezvous and proximity operations, small satellites, and other classes of space operations. These overarching practices will provide an avenue to promote efficient and effective space safety practices with U.S. industry and internationally. The United States should pursue active debris removal as a necessary long-term approach to ensure the safety of flight operations in key orbital regimes. This effort should not detract from continuing to advance international protocols for debris mitigation associated with current programs. (b) Operating in a Congested Space Environment. (i) Minimum Safety Standards and Best Practices. The creation of minimum standards for safe operation and debris mitigation derived in part from the U.S. Government ODMSP, but incorporating other standards and best practices, will best ensure the safe operation of U.S. space activities. These safety guidelines should consider maneuverability, tracking, reliability, and disposal. The United States should eventually incorporate appropriate standards and best practices into Federal law and regulation through appropriate rulemaking or licensing actions. These guidelines should encompass protocols for all stages of satellite operation from design through end-of-life. Satellite and constellation owners should participate in a pre-launch certification process that should, at a minimum, consider the following factors: Coordination of orbit utilization to prevent conjunctions; Constellation owner-operators management of self-conjunctions; Owner-operator notification of planned maneuvers and sharing of satellite orbital location data; On-orbit tracking aids, including beacons or sensing enhancements, if such systems are needed; Encryption of satellite command and control links and data protection measures for ground site operations; Appropriate minimum reliability based on type of mission and phase of operations; Effect on the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States, or international obligations; and Self-disposal upon the conclusion of operational lifetime, or owner-operator provision for disposal using active debris removal methods. (ii) On-Orbit Collision Avoidance Support Service. Timely warning of potential collisions is essential to preserving the safety of space activities for all. Basic collision avoidance information services are and should continue to be provided free of direct user fees. The imminent activation of more sensitive tracking sensors is expected to reveal a significantly greater population of the existing orbital debris background as well as provide an improved ability to track currently catalogued objects. Current and future satellites, including large constellations of satellites, will operate in a debris environment much denser than presently tracked. Preventing on-orbit collisions in this environment requires an information service that shares catalog data, predicts close approaches, and provides actionable warnings to satellite operators. The service should provide data to allow operators to assess proposed maneuvers to reduce risk. To provide on-orbit collision avoidance, the United States should: Provide services based on a continuously updated catalog of satellite tracking data; Utilize automated processes for collision avoidance; Provide actionable and timely conjunction assessments; and Provide data to operators to enable assessment of maneuver plans. To ensure safe coordination of space traffic in this future operating environment, and in recognition of the need for DoD to focus on maintaining access to and freedom of action in space, a civil agency should be the focal point for this collision avoidance support service. The Department of Commerce should be that civil agency. (c) Strategies for Space Traffic Management in a Global Context. (i) Protocols to Prevent Orbital Conjunctions. As increased satellite operations make lower Earth orbits more congested, the United States should develop a set of standard techniques for mitigating the collision risk of increasingly congested orbits, particularly for large constellations. Appropriate methods, which may include licensing assigned volumes for constellation operation and establishing processes for satellites passing through the volumes, are needed. The United States should explore strategies that will lead to the establishment of common global best practices, including: A common process addressing the volume of space used by a large constellation, particularly in close proximity to an existing constellation; A common process by which individual spacecraft may transit volumes used by existing satellites or constellations; and A set of best practices for the owner-operators of utilized volumes to minimize the long-term effects of constellation operations on the space environment (including the proper disposal of satellites, reliability standards, and effective collision avoidance). (ii) Radio Frequency Spectrum and Interference Protection. Space traffic and RF spectrum use have traditionally been independently managed processes. Increased congestion in key orbital regimes creates a need for improved and increasingly dynamic methods to coordinate activities in both the physical and spectral domains, and may introduce new interdependencies. U.S. Government efforts in STM should address the following spectrum management considerations: Where appropriate, verify consistency between policy and existing national and international regulations and goals regarding global access to, and operation in, the RF spectrum for space services; Investigate the advantages of addressing spectrum in conjunction with the development of STM systems, standards, and best practices; Promote flexible spectrum use and investigate emerging technologies for potential use by space systems; and Ensure spectrum-dependent STM components, such as inter-satellite safety communications and active debris removal systems, can successfully access the required spectrum necessary to their missions. (iii) Global Engagement. In its role as a major spacefaring nation, the United States should continue to develop and promote a range of norms of behavior, best practices, and standards for safe operations in space to minimize the space debris environment and promote data sharing and coordination of space activities. It is essential that other spacefaring nations also adopt best practices for the common good of all spacefaring states. The United States should encourage the adoption of new norms of behavior and best practices for space operations by the international community through bilateral and multilateral discussions with other spacefaring nations, and through U.S. participation in various organizations such as the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, International Standards Organization, Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, and UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Sec. 6. Roles and Responsibilities. In furtherance of the goals described in section 4 and the guidelines described in section 5 of this memorandum, agencies shall carry out the following roles and responsibilities: (a) Advance SSA and STM S&T. Members of the National Space Council, or their delegees, shall coordinate, prioritize, and advocate for S&T, SSA, and STM, as appropriate, as it relates to their respective missions. They should seek opportunities to engage with the commercial sector and academia in pursuit of this goal. (b) Mitigate the Effect of Orbital Debris on Space Activities. (i) The Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA Administrator), in coordination with the Secretaries of State, Defense, Commerce, and Transportation, and the Director of National Intelligence, and in consultation with the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), shall lead efforts to update the U.S. Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices and establish new guidelines for satellite design and operation, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law. (ii) The Secretaries of Commerce and Transportation, in consultation with the Chairman of the FCC, will assess the suitability of incorporating these updated standards and best practices into their respective licensing processes, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law. (c) Encourage and Facilitate U.S. Commercial Leadership in S&T, SSA, and STM. The Secretary of Commerce, in coordination with the Secretaries of Defense and Transportation, and the NASA Administrator, shall lead efforts to encourage and facilitate continued U.S. commercial leadership in SSA, STM, and related S&T. (d) Provide U.S. Government-Derived Basic SSA Data and Basic STM Services to the Public. (i) The Secretaries of Defense and Commerce, in coordination with the Secretaries of State and Transportation, the NASA Administrator, and the Director of National Intelligence, should cooperatively develop a plan for providing basic SSA data and basic STM services either directly or through a partnership with industry or academia, consistent with the guidelines of sections 5(a)(ii) and 5(b)(ii) of this memorandum. (ii) The Secretary of Defense shall maintain the authoritative catalog of space objects. (iii) The Secretaries of Defense and Commerce shall assess whether statutory and regulatory changes are necessary to effect the plan developed under subsection (d)(i) of this section, and shall pursue such changes, along with any other needed changes, as appropriate. (e) Improve SSA Data Interoperability and Enable Greater SSA Data Sharing. (i) The Secretary of Commerce, in coordination with the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Transportation, the NASA Administrator, and the Director of National Intelligence, shall develop standards and protocols for creation of an open architecture data repository to improve SSA data interoperability and enable greater SSA data sharing. (ii) The Secretary of Commerce shall develop options, either in-house or through partnerships with industry or academia, assessing both the technical and economic feasibility of establishing such a repository. (iii) The Secretary of Defense shall ensure that release of data regarding national security activities to any person or entity with access to the repository is consistent with national security interests. (f) Develop Space Traffic Standards and Best Practices. The Secretaries of Defense, Commerce, and Transportation, in coordination with the Secretary of State, the NASA Administrator, and the Director of National Intelligence, and in consultation with the Chairman of the FCC, shall develop space traffic standards and best practices, including technical guidelines, minimum safety standards, behavioral norms, and orbital conjunction prevention protocols related to pre-launch risk assessment and on-orbit collision avoidance support services. (g) Prevent Unintentional Radio Frequency Interference. The Secretaries of Commerce and Transportation, in coordination with the Secretaries of State and Defense, the NASA Administrator, and the Director of National Intelligence, and in consultation with the Chairman of the FCC, shall coordinate to mitigate the risk of harmful interference and promptly address any harmful interference that may occur. (h) Improve the U.S. Domestic Space Object Registry. The Secretary of State, in coordination with the Secretaries of Defense, Commerce, and Transportation, the NASA Administrator, and the Director of National Intelligence, and in consultation with the Chairman of the FCC, shall lead U.S. Government efforts on international engagement related to international transparency and space object registry on SSA and STM issues. (i) Develop Policies and Regulations for Future U.S. Orbital Operations. The Secretaries of Defense, Commerce, and Transportation, in coordination with the Secretary of State, the NASA Administrator, and the Director of National Intelligence, shall regularly evaluate emerging trends in space missions to recommend revisions, as appropriate and necessary, to existing SSA and STM policies and regulations. Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this memorandum shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect: (i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or (ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals. (b) This memorandum shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations. (c) This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person. (d) The Secretary of Commerce is authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register. Photo: xxxtentacion/Youtube Over the past two years, the late rapper XXXTentacion (real name Jahseh Onfroy) had experienced a tumultuous but relatively rapid rise to success, punctuated by serious legal issues and disturbing acts of violence. He signed a record deal rumored to be worth a whopping $6 million despite a video that surfaced showing XXX hitting a fan in the head with a microphone at the Rolling Loud Festival in Mountain View, California. At the time of his murder in June 2018, he was also awaiting trial for a 2016 domestic-abuse case, in which he was charged with aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness tampering. Taking in the full scope of these events is difficult and overwhelming, so weve compiled a timeline to try to make sense of the situation. Pre-2014 19982011: XXXTentacion grew up in Pompano Beach and Lauderhill in South Florida. He lived with his mother, who he said had it hard, and sometimes with his grandmother. My mom was just in situations where she couldnt take care of me, he said in an interview on the No Jumper podcast. From a very young age, he got involved in violent situations. Ive been fighting since I was a kid, he said. When he was 6, he tried to stab a man who was messing with his mother. He was also expelled from his first middle school for fighting. In his early teenage years, he developed a passion for music. He was drawn to nu-metal and hard rock as well as rap, and tried to teach himself how to play the guitar and the piano. In middle school, he said his aunt and mother tried to encourage this interest by signing him up for chorus, but he eventually got kicked out of the program for punching a classmate. 20122014: XXXTentacion attends high school at Piper High School in Sunrise, Florida, before dropping out in the tenth grade. Around this time, he says, he recorded and released a song, but there is no record of it online. Sometime in 20132014, XXXTtentacion spends around nine months to a year in a juvenile-detention center for a gun possession charge. During this time he meets fellow rapper Ski Mask the Slump God. After being released, the two go on to collaborate on several projects. 201415 March 2014: XXXTentacion uploads his first song to SoundCloud. The track is called Vice City. February 3, 2015: He releases another EP called Heartbreak Hotel on SoundCloud. Late 2014: XXXTentacion independently releases two EPs called The Fall and Ice House online. He later deletes them from SoundCloud. April 20, 2015: XXXTentacion and Ski Mask the Slump God release a joint EP called Members Only Vol. 1 October 23, 2015: XXXTentacion and Ski Mask release another EP, Members Only Vol. 2 November 16, 2015: XXXTentacion is charged for committing home invasion, robbery, and aggravated battery, according to court documents. December 31, 2015: Look at Me, XXXTentacions first big single, appears on SoundCloud. 2016 January 29: Look at Me gets an official release as a digital download. While its SoundCloud numbers continue to grow, the single doesnt enter the Billboard charts for another ten-and-a-half months. April 24: XXXTentacion does his first long-form interview on the hip-hop podcast No Jumper (which Jon Caramanica of the New York Times has described as The Paris Review for the face-tattoo set). He discusses his troubled past and time in juvenile detention. He includes a very graphic story about beating up a cellmate, whom he refers to as a faggot, describing every violent act in gruesome detail. After mentioning that he wiped the mans blood on his face, Adam22, (full name Adam Grandmaison), the BMX rider and hip-hop podcast host, contributes an equally disturbing response Warpaint. Thats tight, he says. Mid-May: According to a testimony obtained by Pitchfork in September of this year, XXXTentacion and his (former) girlfriend (and alleged domestic-abuse victim) first met. Late May: The first instance of domestic violence allegedly takes place. According to his ex-girlfriends testimony, XXXTentacion threatened to penetrate her vagina with a barbecue cleaner or a barbecue fork. July: XXXTentacion and his then-girlfriend move to Orlando. Mid-July (approximately): The second incident of alleged domestic violence occurs. XXXTentation allegedly kicked, punched, tackled, and stomped on his ex-girlfriend, because he heard her singing another artists song, the testimony in Pitchfork states. He also threatened to cut out, her tongue, the victim said. August 9: XXXTentacion is arrested for his 2015 robbery and assault charges. He is held at Broward Regional Detention Center in Fort Lauderdale. September 16: XXXTentacion agrees to house arrest, and is released from jail. Soon after, he allegedly assaults his ex-girlfriend again after she confesses to sleeping with another man. According to her testimony, he put a knife to her throat, strangled her a little bit, and threatened to hit her with a glass bottle. Late September: XXXTentacion and his then-girlfriend move to Sweetwater, Florida. XXXTentacion is accused of strangling her on two occasions around this time, the testimony in Pitchfork states. Early October: XXXTentactions ex-girlfriend finds out that she is pregnant with his child. October 68: Over the course of two days, several instances of domestic violence allegedly take place. According to XXXTentacions ex-girlfriends testimony, he threatened to kill her and her unborn child before elbowing, punching, and kicking her. When she asked other residents of the pairs apartment to take her to the hospital, XXXTentacion refused to let her leave. She recalls him saying that she needed to wait until her face (which was severely beaten) had healed. XXXTentacion and his housemates then drive her to another apartment, where they leave her in a bedroom and confiscate her phone. She is trapped there for two days until, on October 8, she manages to escape and contact the police. October 8: XXXTencacion is arrested in Miami-Dade County, and charged with aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness tampering. He pleads not guilty, but is detained by Broward County for violating his house arrest agreement. A trial for the domestic-abuse charges is set for May 1 (this trial later gets pushed back to October 5, and then December 11). 2017 January 1: Adam22 announces that he is managing XXXTentacion. xxx is out in a couple weeks and im managing him, he tweets. Over the next few months, while XXXTentacion is in jail, Adam22 uses his own Twitter account to update fans on XXXTentacions status and well-being. January 17: A$AP Rocky shares his support for XXXTentacion on Instagram live. Free my n***a X, I cant wait til you come home, he says. January 28: Drake previews KMT at a show in Amsterdam. Fans compare it to Look at Me on social media. Pigeons and Planes posts a snippet of the two songs side by side. Preview of Drake's new song vs. XXXTENTACION's "Look At Me" pic.twitter.com/Z4rhcwIw1b Pigeons & Planes (@PigsAndPlans) January 29, 2017 February 1: Danny Brown quotes lyrics from XXXTentacion and Ski Mask the Slump Gods RIP Roach on Twitter. Cocaine for my breakfast, hold that pistol ambidextrous Danny Brown (@xdannyxbrownx) February 1, 2017 February 14: Look at Me enters the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 95. February 18: In an interview with DJ Semtex aired on OVO Sound radio, Drake denies copying Look at Me. The other day, I dropped this song with Giggs and Im seeing all this shit on my IG under some random picture of people being like, Fuck you, you took this kids flow or whatever. Im like, Whats happening to me right now? So Im trying to read and figure out who theyre talking about. March 26: XXXTentacion pleads no contest to the charges of armed home-invasion robbery and battery, and is released from jail on probation. March 29: In an interview on Miamis 103.5 The Beat, XXXTentacion accuses Drake of stealing his flow. He is not a man. I think hes a bitch, thats a bitch move, he tells the interviewer. April 7: XXXTentacion hosts a surprise show in Miami, which turns into a riot. Police intervene, shut down the show, and escort XXXTentacion out of the building. April 22: Look at Me peaks at No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100. May 12: XXXTentacion releases a song called Looking for a Star, which is produced by Diplo. May 17: XXXTentacion releases his debut mixtape, Revenge, via Empire Distribution. It consists of eight songs which he had previously released on SoundCloud, and doesnt garner much press coverage on its own. Reviews by XXL, VIBE, and Revolt, present it as a collection of highlights rather than a new body of work. It peaks at No. 44 on the Billboard 200. June 7: XXXTentacion is knocked out onstage at a show in San Diego. In the brawl that ensues, someone gets stabbed. Fans blame rapper Rob Stone for the incident. June 13: XXXTentacion appears on XXLs 2017 Freshman Class cover as the 10th Spot winner the only spot on the list that is fan-selected. According to XXL, His fans blew up our voting page, pushing him to the top slot by thousands of votes. In light of his domestic-violence charges, the decision to feature him on the list is met with significant resistance from XXL readers and other music publications. June 14: XXXTentacion punches a fan at a show in Salt Lake City. June 26: XXXTentacion and Ski Mask the Slump God release their Members Only Vol. 3 EP. Early August: Look at Me is certified platinum. In a now-deleted Instagram post, XXXTentacion posts a picture of the RIAA certification with a caption saying: say what you want, but you will always be forced to accept that Im out here living my own life. August 25: 17, XXXTentacions first album is released via Empire Distribution. It debuts at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart. One blog, DJ Booth (which is part of the Complex Network), refuses to review the album and posts an official statement, saying, We felt we could no longer stand on the sidelines, watching raps ugly embrace of sexual assault. Meaghan Garvey writes about the album for Pitchfork, and gives it a mixed review, attempting to articulate its merits and understand XXXTentacions fan base, while also acknowledging his troubling personal history. The reasons it is difficult to listen to can overshadow the need to listen to it, she says. Kendrick Lamar cosigns the album on Twitter. Listen to this album if you feel anything, he writes. Raw thoughts. https://t.co/ovjuQN8weO listen to this album if you feel anything. raw thoughts. https://t.co/ovjuQN8weO Kendrick Lamar (@kendricklamar) August 26, 2017 September 2: XXXTencacions free show in Tampa gets canceled due to an overcrowding risk (2,000 people showed up to a 750 capacity venue, XXL reported). The crowd riots and chases XXXTentacions car. Police intervene. September 8: Pitchfork releases excerpts from XXXTentacions ex-girlfriends testimony. September 17: The Look at Me video is released. It includes a shot of XXXTentacion hanging from a noose. September 28: XXXTentations October 5 domestic-abuse trial gets postponed. October 5: A new trial date is set for December 11. October 19: XXXTentacion signs a deal with Caroline, a subsidiary of Capitol Records, Billboard reports. One source says that the deal is worth $6 million. October 20: XXXTentacion announces, via Instagram story, that he will donate over a 100 thousand dollars to domestic-violence-prevention programs. October 21: During a his performance at the Rolling Loud festival in the Bay Area, XXXTentacion gets into another fight with a fan. A video of the incident shows XXXTentacion hitting the crowd member in the head with his microphone. In a video released on Twitter later that night, XXXTentacion argues that he was punched first and acted in self-defense. October 26: XXXTentacion posts a message on his Instagram story stating that he is no longer signed to Capitol Records. Terminating my deal with capitol records, he writes in one message, followed by another saying If you can match my alleged previous contract, and add free international travel & free international stay I would be happy to be in business with you, I am currently a free agent, well, I always was. Soon after, a rep from XXXTentacions camp denies the claim, saying that XXXTentacion is signed to Caroline/Capitol Music Group. October 27: In another Instagram story, XXXTentacion says that he will not be making or releasing any music. I am tired of being mentally abused for trying to help people, Im tired of the hate, Im done, he writes. October 29: XXXTentacion says, via Instagram story, that he will return to music if Ski Mask The Slump God agrees to be his friend again. Tell Ski Mask to be my friend again and I will make music. Tell him to be my friend again, he said in the (now deleted) post. A couple days later, in a video, responded, I will always love that alien-looking n***a named XXX, but I have to distance myself because nobody would see me as an individual, and On top of that, that n***a crazy as hell. Then, he wrote on an Instagram story: This is a person who has before threaten[ed] my family, told me I was supposed to be sacrificed on some crazy shit, November 2: XXXTentacion posts a snippet of a new song on Instagram, with a caption reading: said I was going to stop making music but I dont consider this music. November 26: XXXTentacion announces that he plans to host an anti-rape event at this years Art Basel in Miami. December 1: XXXtentacion and his lawyers submit a document, allegedly signed by his ex-girlfriend, to the DAs office in hopes of getting his domestic-assault case dropped. Accoring to TMZ, the document states that XXXtentacions accuser is refusing to cooperate with prosecutors and wants to drop the case. December 15: XXXTentacion is jailed ahead of his abuse trial, with seven new charges added, including different degrees of witness tampering and witness harassment. According to TMZ, prosecutors believe the rapper coerced his ex-girlfriend into signing the previously submitted documents that claimed she wanted the charges dropped. His bail is denied. He now reportedly faces decades in prison, at minimum, if convicted. December 20: TMZ reports that XXXTentacion will be released from jail and serve house arrest for two months ahead of his trial. His attorney David Bogenschutz told the site that the judge will allow the rapper to visit a local recording studio to fulfill his contractual obligations during this time. January 10: According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, several anonymous sources with knowledge of XXXTentacions signing to Capitol Records in October, suggested that many staffers at the label opposed the deal. However, two of the Times sources said that in a staff meeting, Capitol president Steve Barnett told executives that Onfroys surging popularity would help the company have a bigger market share in hip-hop and acknowledged the controversy around the artist, encouraging those with concerns to voice them. March 16: XXXtentacion releases his second studio album, ?, via his label Bad Vibes Forever. The album is distributed by Caroline Distribution, which is part of Capitol Records. It debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, selling the equivalent of 131,000 units in its first week. March 21: XXXtentacion is released from house arrest, so that he can go on tour, TMZ reports. According to the article, XXXs legal team argued that he would need touring income to stay afloat, because his earnings from record sales werent sufficient. March 25: XXXTentacions sophomore album, ?, debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard charts, giving SoundCloud rap its first No. 1 album. March 26: Sad, one of the two singles from ?, reaches No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming XXXtentacions first top-ten song. May 10: Spotify removes XXXTentacions music from its playlists in accordance with a new Hate Content and Hateful Conduct policy. His reps issue a statement listing other artists accused of abuse, asking if they will also be penalized. June 1: Spotify scraps its hate content policy following complaints from industry insiders. XXXTentacions music is reinstated on its playlists. June 5: XXXTentacion is the subject of an extensive profile in the Miami New Times detailing his alleged abuse, including interviews with his accuser. In it, XXXTentacion dismisses feminism, saying Women may see or feel that theyre belittled, but youre only belittled if you want to be belittled. He uses Hillary Clinton as an example: She ran [for president] and she wasnt killed for it. That says everything. He says that, in the post-#MeToo era, allegations can go off hearsay and women are almost more powerful than men. June 18: XXXTentacion, 20, is reported dead following an alleged drive-by shooting outside of a motorcycle shop in Deerfield Beach, Florida. He was awaiting trial at the time of the shooting. This post has been updated throughout. Photo: Netflix A year and a half ago, Hannah Gadsby started work on a show that she thought would seal me off into the margins both as a human and as a performer. In the show, titled Nanette, she announces she is quitting comedy, rails against the structures of the genre, and unravels stories about her life that involve sexual violence and homophobia the kind she endured for years growing up in Tasmania, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997. Given that anger, and that specificity, Gadsby never thought the show would become popular, and yet it has, taking her from Australia and the U.K., where she already has more of a following, to New York, where Gadsby will continue to perform at the SoHo Playhouse until June 30, and to Netflix, which releases a taped version of her special today. So instead of confirming my isolation, its like, whats that thing? With a debutante? Gadsby muses over tea in New York. A coming-out party? It wasnt supposed to happen. I didnt dress up! Those who know Gadsby from her work in the Australian comedy scene, or her appearances on the Australian comedy Please Like Me, might recognize the genial, witty, self-deprecating patter that begins Nanette. The title, she explains, comes from a woman she thought would be interesting enough to build an hour of comedy around, until she realized that woman was terribly boring. Shes at odds with a few lesbian fans, who humorlessly give her feedback about her lack of lesbian content. But soon, Gadsby peels the skin back on those kinds of jokes, revealing their gory interior. She talks about how the need to self-deprecate leaves scars upon people at the margins, how condensing a painful story into a set-up and punch line can stop you from metabolizing trauma, and how the excuse of artistic genius allows men to get away with abuse. At times, she abandons jokes, then unleashes fury. Nanette is prickly, uncomfortable material, and yet Gadsby has found an audience that relates to the queer narrative, the gender not-normal narrative, the woman narrative, the isolated small-town narrative. During our interview, a barista recognizes her, gushes over Please Like Me, and offers to send her coffee for her show. The only people I dont reach on a very personal level are straight white men, Gadsby says. They dont really need another entertainer dedicated for them exclusively, so theyre fine. It must be disorienting. You start the show talking about quitting comedy, and yet it is the show that blows up. Theres several lives that the quitting [part of the set] has had. First it was in the writing process. I was trying to work out ultimately whether some of my stories could be told onstage and made funny. I concluded early in the writing process that they could not be made funny, if told properly, so I decided to then tell them properly and see what that does to a comedy show. I think we found out: It breaks comedy. I had in the back of my mind that condescending thing a lot of female performers get, which is a one-woman show. Blokes always get stand-up. It doesnt matter what blokes do, but as soon as a woman breaks genre, it becomes a monologue. I make it about deconstructing comedy and quitting it, so it cant be a monologue. Im talking about comedy. And Ive got a stool with water on it. Thats comedy! The specials quite funny now, but at the start, at the beginning of last year, it was more furious: Well, Im quitting! Its like throwing a grenade, so it became that. Whenever I really sold it, it went better than if it was just a throwaway line. So I completely sold it, and I sold it to myself. Over the course of my first three weeks of performing it, I really liked the idea of quitting. It felt really freeing. You can say Im fully free of restraints, because this is it. Yeah, I made the decision that I was gonna be happy to get a job in my brothers fruit and vegetable shop, and I could live with that. I honestly didnt think this show would do so well. I knew it was gonna be great, for me, but I did not expect it to be received as it was. Were the first audience reactions surprising to you? In the first runs of it I really put the audience in shock. I take much better care of the audience these days. But really, I was just going, throwing grenades into the audience, and they were stunned and theyd leave. I used to get heckled really, really horrific heckles, from obviously all men who would just get defensive, angry, whatever, really challenge me. Which really helped reform the show until it was airtight. The quitting itself went from subversion to tongue-in-cheek to really meaning it to I cant mean it. In Australia and the U.K. markets where I already have an existing profile and fan base, it meant a lot more to just really say it and mean it. Whereas here, it seems like no one knows or gives a shit. So it was more of a playful attitude in it. In the set, you talk about moving away from the structure of set-up and punch line to a three-part structure of a story. Is it hard to work in that format where you dont immediately relax the audience with a joke? Whats interesting about this is that my prior one-hour efforts have all been more storytelling, whereas this is fairly joke-heavy. But whats hardest for me is not breaking the tension. That is my instinct to just do throwaway punch lines, and it actually feels really counterintuitive up there when Im just holding people in silence. That was one of the harder things for me to do, as a performer. The stories youre telling are about homophobia, assault, and other traumatic experiences. You discuss how its damaging to compartmentalize that kind of trauma and turn it into jokes, but I imagine its also very hard to go back into that history in full. I am basically reliving trauma, quite significant trauma, every night. Ive had psychiatrists and psychologists reach out to me over the course of the 18 months Ive been touring, saying Nobodys done this, we dont know what youre possibly doing to yourself. Its like an extreme form of CBT, or neurobiological rewiring, or something like that. Its never easy to perform. It has not gotten easier on the stage. Ive really upset audiences, and I can feel that. That affects me in turn. I believe thats just called empathy. But it has, over the course, gotten easier for me to leave it there. In the first 12 months, I was going home and, you know, rocking myself to sleep. I felt very vulnerable, I felt very unsafe. It felt like a risk every time I stood onstage. That part has gotten easier, and that comes from, just basically, audiences caring. I have had a less and less hostile audience. I feel like I suddenly connected to the world, and I didnt understand just how disconnected and isolated I was. The show hints at that finding myself more and more connected to so many different people and their stories, or who have connected to mine. Its made me realize just how isolated I felt. Towards the end of Nanette, after detailing this traumatic experience, you say something thats essentially Thats my story, now Ive shared it with you, and you all have to sit in it. How did you arrive at that idea? The end of the show has evolved constantly. The Netflix special is different to the one that I have here. It gets to a certain point in the show and Im hitting a stride, and I dont necessarily know what Ill say. Theres a line in the show where mum says Ive raised five kids to be adults with minds of their own so thats what Im going for with the audience. I just want you to be individuals with minds of your own. My peers are quite lewd. Comedians Ive loved and respect and whatnot, do sexual assault [material] too. And just here, what is this laugh? And Im just like I just dont think [the people in the audience] know that theyre laughing. I just dont think theyre thinking. Because the comedians are delivering lines shaped liked jokes? Its got the right rhythm. Also, laughters infectious. I myself have been there in the audience. At one of Jim Jefferiess shows at the Edinburgh Fringe. Hes just hating lesbians just really, really hating. Im sitting there, I just felt so unsafe. But I found myself laughing because I was scared. So I wanted to re-create that for straight white men in the crowds. When you talk about Monica Lewinsky, you say that if comedians had done their job she wouldnt have been the punch line, Clinton would have. Do you see a responsibility for comedians to figure out who the most deserving target is for a joke ? The most deserving people are the powerful, and theyre all straight white men. The laughter can really drop out of the room sometimes when Im doing that set around straight white men. When Im doing jokes that I do at the start of the show about lesbians, everyone laughs. Its fine, its fun. I do exactly the same to men, and its not. Thats less to do with the men, but also the cultural practice. Theyre not used to it. Thats the way comedy is. Comedy is a mans art form. It pretty much came from a time, postWorld War II really the 1950s are not really known for the subtle expressions of feminine life. Theres a lot of dick-swinging going on in that time, sort of like destroying modernism and bringing in postmodernism. Stand-up comedys come out of that era. Its born from stand-ups doing jokes between burlesque shows. Then roasts, you know, which are basically misogyny and homophobia all wrapped up in yo mama jokes. The whole art form is centered around jerking off, so its no surprise that the endgame is Louis C.K. A joke is a wank. Set-up [does a jerk-off motion] punch line. Then youve got what Im trying, storytelling. If the only reason to be on stage communicating with people is to tell them a joke and make them laugh, that seems thin for me. That has a place I dont think it should stop happening but for me, I dont know. I just dont. You talk about how for people who arent straight white men, people expect a lot of deprecation, joking about yourself, to make everyone comfortable with your presence and difference. My whole stand-up career, Ive been explaining myself. I have to justify my weight, I have to justify my gender, I have to justify my incorrect gender expression, I have to justify my sexuality, and I have to justify my small inbred convict colony island, which is all fine. But when you just use jokes, youve gotta do so much work to just get to the start. That was getting really infuriating for me, because I have lots of thoughts. Its as if youre trained to accommodate everyone else. I think thats the queer experience, to be honest. Self-deprecation runs right through queer culture. It was seen as a badge of honor. I started to feel like perhaps it was destructive as well. Theres a lot of internalized homophobia, particularly from gays from regional isolated places. Its that double life, that fear of being found out. I dont think its easy. I dont think just saying youre proud undoes the shame. Its a really complicated and destructive thing that a lot of gay people still are undoing. Youll have a few performance dates after Nanette comes out on Netflix. What will come after that? Ive only got a few more shows after Netflix comes out. Im looking forward to not doing anything more. It feels good to have it sealed off in a, you know, a time capsule. Because it is a constantly evolving show. Its taken its toll. I dont recognize my life anymore in both good and bad ways. Im a different person. I feel differently in the world. I think its gonna take a very long time for me to understand what Ive done, but I have to stop doing the show in order to understand that. I mean that both from a career, and also in my psychological, um, journey. The stories about Harvey Weinstein and other men came out as you were performing Nanette I wrote this show before #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein. Thats less to do with me being any kind of Its because Im living in the real world as an artist. Not so much in the future. I wrote something because I suddenly felt the world was unsafe again for me with the gay marriage debate in Australia, with the election, both in Australia and in the U.S. I felt like hatred was coming at me in a way that I hadnt felt in about ten years. I felt that, as just a little guy. Thats what I was responding to. That sudden feeling of I dont feel so safe when Donald Trump was elected. I thought, Im gonna have to learn how to shoot a gun for the apocalypse. Are you nervous about the show going online? If youre in the room you can manage the reaction and energy, but when its outside of you, thats different. I had to let it go. Anger and hatred are gonna come my way. Thats fine, I think, having had the 18 months of live performance to sort of give me that buffer of I dont have to take that onboard. I know what the show is. Its bigger than me. Its taken on a life of its own. I know that Ive done something really constructive with it, which is not something I think is so easily known when youre an artist of any description. I feel very privileged to be able to say, writing a purely selfish show, Ive accidentally really done something really constructive. Its interesting you say constructive, because the show positions itself as so destructive you say youre quitting and anti-comedy and breaking apart this thing. But it feels like it arrives at a synthesis of some sort at the end. Does it feel like you found a new path? Im also writing a book at the moment. I think this is as much about me drawing a line under quite a traumatic start to life. I feel like thats it on a personal level. Im not sure what it means, career-wise, but the shadow of my childhood is really long. I think what this show has done has meant Ive reached the limit of it. Thats both frightening and wonderful. But thats life. One thing I have experienced a great deal of during this tour is grief sometimes on stage, sometimes after. And I think its because Ive lived life in such isolation, and at times devastating isolation, I dont have nostalgia. I do within my family, when I was very young, but then theres just 20 years of darkness and disconnect. If you hear people say when I was young and silly its just like [groans] When I was invisible and dying! When I was homeless, ha! Part of this [experience of doing the show] has been grief about that understanding the damage that was done, and it wasnt right, and theres not much you can do about it. I dont feel the weight of that. I feel sadness and grief, but it doesnt define me. From the Public Theaters Othello, at the Delacorte. Photo: Joan Marcus Editors note: Sara Holdren, New York and Vultures regular theater critic, is on vacation. I am not what I am. This almost-koan, spoken by Iago, comes a mere 64 lines into Othello. More than three hours later, with the wreckage of his life all around him, Othello calls himself he that was Othello. In between, as Iago manipulates and deceives Othello into believing his wife has cuckolded him with his lieutenant Cassio and must die for it, Shakespeare suggests again and again that there is no such thing as a fixed identity. The characters in Othello live and die by their reputations, which Cassio calls the immortal part of myself without which what remains is bestial. But reputations, of course, can change. Iago knows this, and preys upon the unknowability of the other, and, ultimately, of the self. That guy everyone thinks is so honest? Turns out hes a serial liar. The dashing gentleman youve just made your right-hand man? Hes a drunk and a fool. The upright, loyal woman you love? Well, she lied to her father when she was dating you, so how can you trust her? If nothing around you is reliable, how can you trust yourself? In Othello, everything becomes increasingly unstable. Iago attacks the audiences certainties around motivation, evidence, the reliability of the senses, and even language. This exploration of the yawning chasm between what we assume and what might actually be is what makes Othello both one of the great works of Western literature, and, despite its low body count, Shakespeares most terrifying play. Yet this aspect of its greatness is nearly impossible to stage effectively. Actors cannot play being a mystery, and a directors entire job is to make interpretational choices. Perhaps this is why director Ruben Santiago-Hudson and the cast of his quite fine, if quite conservative, production of Othello for Shakespeare in the Park have largely chosen to sidestep these mysteries, giving us a satisfying and somewhat safe domestic tragedy rather than an epistemological nightmare. If what you want from your Shakespeare is a firm directorial hand that tugs on unexpected threads to reveal new angles into the text that youd never seen before, this is not the Othello for you. Unlike Sam Golds starry and heavily conceptualized Othello at New York Theater Workshop in 2016 or Oskar Eustiss staging of Julius Caesar, which caused such a kerfuffle in the press last summer there are very few overt directorial gestures or explicit politics to be found in this production. Theres a concrete practicality to nearly every choice, with the result that theres little here to surprise you, but a lot to keep you entertained. Thus, we get an Othello in period dress (the richly detailed Jacobean costumes are by Toni-Leslie James) with a nearly bare stage (designed by Jessica Paz), save for two rows of arches, which can be manipulated by the company to give some sense of motion. There are sword duels with actual swords, and Santiago-Hudsons staging is clean and elegant, particularly in its use of the Delacortes depth. Perhaps most importantly, many roles in Othello are played by actors of color, including the Duke of Venice (Peter Jay Fernandez), Cassio (Babak Tafti), Cassios mistress Bianca (Flor De Liz Perez), and Desdemonas suitor Roderigo (Motell Foster), deemphasizing the plays themes of racism and otherness. Santiago-Hudson has said in interviews that he thinks of Othello primarily as a play about love, and he has crafted a tragedy of intimacy, a powerful examination of the loss of boundaries that can be a part of loves power, and how this can lead swiftly to a kind of madness. Not for nothing does Othello kill Desdemona in this version by hoisting her in an airborne embrace and then crushing her diaphragm until she asphyxiates. The semi-permeable membrane between love and madness also answers rather neatly one of the plays major questions: Why Othello turns on his wife so swiftly, moving from Iagos first accusation to murdering her in roughly 36 hours. As played by Chukwudi Iwuji, this compressed timeline results from Othello tumbling into insanity, a journey charted in his body. When Iwuji first appears he struts with confidence, prowling the stage with the lithe grace of a young Mick Jagger. Even when threatened, he smiles with bemusement, seemingly invulnerable. As his suspicions grow he doubles over as if wracked with pain, and rarely stands up straight in the play again. But this shift in the character occurs offstage, during a break of some 40 lines, and is so severe it leaves little room for nuance in Iwujis performance over the second half of the play. Othellos other major question, of course, is why Iago decides to destroy Othello in the first place. Here, the productions resolute practically bares wonderful fruit in Corey Stolls performance as Iago. The character often comes burdened with Samuel Taylor Coleridges idea that Iagos speeches to the audience are the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity, that Iago is essentially a psychopath and exercising power is his true goal. Stoll instead takes Iagos justifications seriously. In his remarkable performance, Iago is a disgruntled middle-aged white man, furious at being passed over for promotion by his black boss, and suspicious that that same boss has slept with his wife. This choice opens up both inventive line readings and a rich vein of humanity in the character, without making him any less monstrous or more sympathetic. Stolls Iago is a revelation. He cannot be written off as a demon, you must instead reckon with the evil in him because it finds a distant echo in the petty jealousies of your own heart. Hes also quite funny, without leaning on any of the cheap indications that actors of Shakespeare sometimes deploy to get laughs. As Desdemona, Othellos doomed wife, Heather Lind finds both the childlike naivete and playful sexuality of the character (full disclosure: weve worked together in the past). Her Desdemona is a teenager just starting to come into her own as an adult, able to figure out how to escape her fathers house and elope with the man she loves, but outmatched by the forcefulness of his jealousy and Iagos wit. Alison Wright, best known as Martha from The Americans, so fully inhabits Emilia that this often-forgotten character takes over Othellos finale, becoming something akin to the voice of the play itself. That voice wryly jokes to Desdemona that men are all but stomachs, and women all but food / To eat us hungerly, and when they are full / They belch us. It turns out to be a warning, of course. In this production, Othellos hunger for Desdemona is bottomless, and its this hunger, rather than his outsider status, or toxic masculinity, or the mystery of the human condition, that will cost them both their lives. That makes this version of Othello down to earth but, thanks to the skill of all involved, hardly earthbound. Othello is at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park through June 24. Photo: Courtesy of SHOWTIME The Showtime documentary The Fourth Estate does an uncannily great job of replicating the experience of being inside the New York Times during the first year of the Trump administration. Over four episodes, the last of which aired Sunday, it follows several familiar figures from the papers Washington bureau, particularly those focused on chasing down connections between Trump and Russia. Through a toolbox of familiar but remarkably effective documentary devices, The Fourth Estate is fantastic at giving its audience the same sense of adrenaline that pumps through the Times newsrooms, the sense of anxiety and breathlessness, of standing in what used to be a steady river of news and feeling like the river has turned into an unending tsunami. Its extremely watchable. The fourth episode, though, is also a demonstration of the potential flaws of its framing. Thats when the documentarys yearlong focus on the Trump beat gets dragged into different territory: The #MeToo movement suddenly bursts into visibility with the allegations of improper conduct toward women by Times Washington reporter Glenn Thrush. Despite The Fourth Estates painstaking, careful effort to present the lives of these Times figures with an unbiased, invisible eye an attempt to be a fly on the wall, an observer that presents and does not comment on the furious debates from inside the Times the documentary nevertheless reproduces an unfortunate narrative about Thrush and his behavior. It re-creates the sense that Thrushs bad behavior is, indeed, bad, but mostly because it harms the Times and his colleagues. For its first three episodes, The Fourth Estate focuses almost solely on the reporters and editors who cover Trumps White House. Theres extensive footage of Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush huddled together, piecing together a mood inside the White House report, and theres even more attention paid to the Times Russia investigation team. The default narrative, set by the first hour-long episode and threaded through the entire documentary, is that the most important story of the year is Trumps potential criminality. And the most important focus is the debate about the best way to cover it all. None of that is wrong! The most powerful moments of The Fourth Estate are those that point directly at how much of the Times coverage is a debate, and how much of its framing is defined by people making choices, and not by some unassailable Platonic truth about The News. Theres an especially effective moment in the first episode, when Washington bureau chief Elisabeth Bumiller edits the coverage of Trumps first presidential address to Congress. She decides that the storys lede should be Trumps comments on immigration policy. She then learns that her bosses have decided the lede shouldnt focus on his immigration comments, but rather his universally palatable calls for an end to trivial fights. Bumiller is insistent: The lede should be about immigration policy, and she has someone else in the Washington office take a call from the New York office while she rewrites the opening paragraphs. (Fuck them, she mutters, as she watches the words on her screen change. They can fire me!) The shot ends with Bumillers stubborn demand that the story be framed by Trumps immigration stance. Then the scene cuts to an establishing shot of a New York subway car roaring through a station, and a close-up shot of a woman reading the Times the next morning. The headline on the front page reads, Before Congress, Trump Urges End to Trivial Fights. The hard cut between Bumiller frantically typing out her version of the story, and the resulting image of the front page with its sanctimoniously even-handed headline, is fantastic documentary storytelling. It does so much to demonstrate how much the news is a product of individual voices and personal decisions. But that same attention to the importance of individual reporters and the general sense that Trump and the Russia investigation are the most valuable stories of the year instantly positions the documentary to present any non-Trump stories as less important or as distractions. And that flaw is most fraught when The Fourth Estate finally catches up with the Thrush story. The first three episodes present Thrush as a familiar reporter trope: He is flustered and harried, he is unwilling to bow to institutional pressures that try to soften his rhetoric, he is uninterested in modulating his distinct voice so that it will appear less biased, and he has a hard time stopping himself from tweeting out opinionated responses to current events. He is straight out of an Aaron Sorkin story, weird hat affectation and all. The conflicts between the Times effort to appear unbiased and for Thrush to call it like it is are generally presented as sympathetic toward him. Should he tweet less? Sure. But hes the one whos pushing for stronger language in the coverage of Trumps White House, and he and Maggie Haberman are there on the front lines, driving the narrative of the White House as a chaotic and dysfunctional mess. Hes a bad boy, The Fourth Estate suggests, but his work is so important. Meanwhile, the Times groundbreaking coverage of Bill OReilly and Harvey Weinstein lurks in the background, and The Fourth Estate points to it as an aside to the Trump coverage. (By the way, there are some huge stories happening about sexual assault and harassment at this newsroom too!) The documentary does not hide how stubbornly it sticks to its larger frame: While it includes talking heads with reporters discussing the Weinstein reporting, it then swiftly shifts to Jim Rutenbergs reframing of #MeToo as a Trump story. The Fourth Estate is a documentary about the New York Times covering Trump; it is seemingly loath to consider different topics. The problem is when the time comes to announce that Glenn Thrush is also the subject of an investigation when, as Bumiller and others explain, the #MeToo moment comes home to the Times newsroom The Fourth Estate cannot help but create the impression that Thrushs behavior is mostly a problem for the reputation of the paper, rather than his behavior being a problem because it damaged womens careers. Theres an interview with executive editor Dean Baquet, talking about how theyre suspending Thrush because his behavior has clearly damaged the Times as a brand. He has to take into account how the women feel too, he says, but how Thrush may have harmed women is unmistakably a too. It is one small part of the discussion, not the lede. We see interviews with Thrushs colleagues, admitting they feel betrayed and hurt. Baquet has a conference call with several of Thrushs bosses and co-workers, asking whether they think his decision not to fire him was the right call. It is unsurprising when they all agree with their boss. And then, because it is a documentary about the Times and Trump and not about #MeToo, Thrush disappears. The celebratory closing gestures are about the Times winning Pulitzers, and about the continuing story of Trump and Don Jr.s lies. Thrush, who played such a large role in the first three-and-a-half episodes, is just wiped away. I dont know how The Fourth Estate couldve escaped this conundrum. Its a series about the Times and Trump, and its understandable that Thrushs behavior would feel like a noteworthy but ultimately subordinate part of the story. His disappearance in the documentary probably reflects the way it actually felt in the newsroom: He was there, in the middle of it, and then he was gone, suspended and sidelined to another beat. But purposely or not, The Fourth Estate still reproduces the narrative that Thrushs behavior is mostly a problem because it interrupted the coverage of Donald Trump. It simply hurt the Times. Its not presented as a problem because Thrush reportedly got drunk and tried to kiss women without their consent, and then damaged their careers by gossiping about them afterwards. It simply hurt the Times. Even after its final episode, The Fourth Estate stands as a terrific look inside the Times, and as a fantastic piece of documentary storytelling. But thats what also makes its treatment of Thrush so frustrating: It is so firmly trapped inside the viewpoint of an institution, it reproduces the institutions views. Photo: Showtime The eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return was so daring, so horrifyingly beautiful, that were still not totally sure how David Lynch and Mark Frost convinced Showtime to air it. (To be a fly in the room during that executive table read, truly.) Shot in black-and-white, the episode depicts the birth of the shows antagonist, BOB, culminating with a frog-like creature slithering into the mouth of a young girl in New Mexico a girl who is later revealed as none other than Sarah Palmer. To say this creature is terrifyingly grotesque would be the understatement of the century. It has wings. It jiggles. It flies. Its gross. It crawls into Sarah Palmers mouth! And like many other creations in the Lynchian universe, its tailor-made with a very poignant backstory. As Lynch recounts in his new memoir, Room to Dream, he was inspired to create the frog-moth creature as a tribute to the late Jack Nance who portrayed Pete Martell in Twin Peaks original run and appears in archival footage during The Return after an experience the duo had in Yugoslavia. Because of where I grew up and what my father did, nature was a big part of Twin Peaks and the woods are really important, Lynch wrote. Thats a huge part of the thing. The journey he and Nance had together, which Lynch writes about with concision, sounds hauntingly beautiful: When Jack and I were in Europe, we caught the Orient Express in Athens to take us back to Paris, so were going through Yugoslavia and its really, really dark. At a certain point the train came to a stop and there was no station but we could see people getting off the train. They were going over to these canvas stalls with dim little lights, where they had these colored drinks purple, green, yellow, blue, red but it was just sugar water. When I got off the train I stepped into this soft dust that was like eight inches deep and it was blowing, and out of the earth these huge moths, like frogs, were leaping up, and theyd fly and flip and go back down again. So that was the frog-moths things just sort of show up in the world of Twin Peaks. Knowing what we know now, perhaps we can finally look at the frog-moth and not be entirely totally creeped out. Jeffrey Willis has been sentenced to life in prison for abducting and killing convenience store clerk Jessica Heeringa in 2013. Judge William Marrietti delivered the sentence Monday morning. In a 13-minute statement, Willis addressed the court Monday: he maintained his innocence and made claims that police botched the investigation and manipulated the evidence against him. He maintained that he was trying to help the teen MJN in April 2016, when he was arrested after trying to abduct her. "Due to a lack of funding, a careless disregard for truth, the desire to reach a rash and attentive conclusion to an unproven crime, or just plain falsifying evidence, not only has this promise [of justice] been murdered, but also left to rot at the feet of lady justice," said Willis reading his statement. Willis is still awaiting trial on that abduction, but Muskegon County Prosecutor D.J. Hilson says he has to speak with people, including victims, about whether to continue to pursue or drop these pending charges. After his arrest in 2016, investigators tied a gun found in Willis' van to the bullets used to kill Rebekah Bletsch while she was jogging in June 2014. They also found other evidence that tied Willis to Heeringa's disappearance in April 2013. Hilson addressed the court and says he is very proud of the police work done in Muskegon County, thanked the Bletsch family for their help and support, then said he expects to sleep better knowing that Jeffrey Willis is behind bars for life. "[Willis] just doesn't see his culpability in all of this apparently," said Hilson after sentencing. "[Willis] would have continued to haunt and stalk women who were isolated or in isolated areas, and his killing would have continued; I have no doubt in my mind of that. The fact that this man will never see the light of day again, I'm pretty happy with that." Despite Willis calling his trial rigged, his defense attorney, Muskegon County Chief Public Defender Fred Johnson told FOX 17 this trial was "remarkably fair." "This was the man who was vilified from the very press conference before he even went to the preliminary examination," said Johnson. "So under those circumstances and given the complications, the County of Muskegon put on a terrific defense for this man. And we're very proud of the effort we made for him." On May 16, jurors deliberated for less than two hours before finding Willis guilty of first-degree murder and kidnapping in the April 2013 kidnapping and death of Heeringa, a clerk at the former Exxon Mobil gas station in Norton Shores. Her body has not been found. No one from Heeringa's family addressed the court, while family members of Rebekah Bletsch sat in attendance. Many of Jessica's family maintain that because her body hasn't been found, her murder is still not conclusive. Willis is already serving a life sentence for the 2014 murder of Bletsch. The effort to impeach President Donald Trump came to Sacramento Monday night. California billionaire Tom Steyer made his case before a large crowd at Beatnick Studios on S Street. He has spent more than $40 million in his efforts that launched in October 2017. "It is a momentous task, it is something that is historic and we're not kidding," Steyer told the crowd. Steyer has been drumming up support, demanding Congress remove the president. However, retired Republican Sacramento County Sheriff John McGinness doesn't think it'll happen. "According to the Constitution, you have to be able to find evidence of treason, bribery, high crimes or misdemeanors. Simply being a person that Tom Steyer or anybody else finds to be unlikable is certainly not sufficient cause to impeach the President of the United States," McGinness said. During Monday's town hall, Steyer addressed topics like the U.S. elections. "We're worried about voter intimidation, voter suppression, we're worried about cheating up and down the line," he said. The conversation comes amid widespread concerns over the Trump administration's immigration policies. McGinness said congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle should work toward a solution. "I have personally, in the course of my career, separated children from their parents when the parents are going to jail, and that's an unpleasant thing to have to do, but it's part of the requirement based upon the conduct on the parent," McGinness said. Most in attendance seemed to support Steyer's mission, but nearing the end of the town hall there was commotion from a heckler. Monday's event was the 19th of the 30 town hall events Steyer is planning across the country. He's scheduled to be in Omaha on Thursday, followed by Salt Lake City next week. KCRA 3 contacted the Sacramento County Republican Party. Chairwoman Betsy Mahan sent this statement: "Steyer is wasting his fortune on this endeavor. The voters have decided, and it's time Democrats accept their decision." A Scottsboro man on death row for killing three of his family members had his appeal denied. James Ben Brownfield, 43, was sentenced to death in 2004 for the 2001 murders of his sister, Brenda McCutchin, her husband Latham McCutchin, and Brenda's 3-year-old grandson, Joshua Hodges. Brownfield was convicted of killing all three with a claw hammer the night of Dec. 23, 2001. Prosecutors said Brownfield was angry with his sister over drugs and money when he beat her and her grandson to death while they were in bed. He then tried to burn the house down and drove across town to Latham McCutchin's home, where he beat McCutchin with the hammer, stabbed him in the heart and cut his throat, prosecutors said. Brownfield's attorneys have argued in the past that he had ineffective counsel that could have kept him off death row. The Alabama Supreme Court denied Brownfield's most recent petition to overturn his convictions on Friday. Brownfield is on death row at the William E. Donaldson Correctional Facility near Bessemer. A Florence woman who was attacked by two pit bulls in Florence on Friday is still in the hospital. Rose Holt's family said she was watering plants in the front yard of her Bayless Avenue home in Florence when she was mauled by her neighbor's pit bulls. She was rushed to Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital with severe bite marks. A person passing by who saw Holt and tried to help her also was bitten and taken to the hospital. Animal control officers said after the dog attack someone came by and shot the female dog that was involved. Animal control officers said they have the female pit bull in custody, and the male pit bull is being housed at a kennel in Madison County. Neighbors in the Bayless and Sherrod Avenue areas told WAAY 31 they do not want the owners to get the dogs back. Brittany Jones told WAAY 31 her husband owns both of the dogs accused of attacking Rose Holt. She said the dogs have never been violent before. "That's the first time they have jumped on someone before," said Jones. Jones said she and her husband have had problems keeping the dogs in the fence. Animal control said they have picked up the dogs before, roaming around the neighborhood. "Everytime we go somewhere and then come back home, they are always out. They always find places to get out," said Jones. Jay Darby lives down the road from Rose Holt. He said the neighborhood has a lot of kids, and he does not want to see the dogs returned to their owners. "I have a ten year old there are two kids that live across the street. It's terrifying really," said Darby. "Once a dog goes bad, there is nothing you can do with it. It attacked once they will attack again and there is no way to stop them. They need to be put down." Florence police said at this time they do not have any new information on the case. Under a new Alabama law called Emily's Law, owners of dogs who attack and seriously injure or kill a person can be charged with felonies. Holt's family tells us she will be in the hospital for the next few days. Right now, it's unclear what will happen to the dogs. Stephanie Jass won big during her seven-day winning streak on Jeopardy back in 2012, but her luck appears to have run out. The Associated Press reported Jass pleaded guilty in Michigan to a charge of unauthorized computer access. Her sentencing is July 20th. Jass illegally accessed the e-mail accounts of colleagues while she worked as a professor at Adrian College. The school ultimately fired her after the co-worker discovered the hack and turned her in to administration. Her 2012 streak was the longest in show history at the time. Council Member Devyn Keith and the City of Huntsvilles Operation Green Team is asking the community to join them for the annual North Alabama clean up. The event will began on Saturday, June 23 from 9 am-12 pm at Jemison High School, 5000 Pulaski Pike. The event was originally scheduled for April, but was postponed because of severe weather. The Solid Waste Disposal Authority of Huntsville will be on site collecting household hazardous waste. The items that are collected include old paint, computers, televisions, car batteries, used motor oil, lawn care chemicals and household cleaning chemicals. Cleanup supplies such as gloves, pick up sticks and trash bag will be provided for pickup at Jemison High Schools parking lot You can also get the day started with donuts and coffee from 9am-11am and enjoy hot dogs starting at Noon. This Page Is Under Construction - Coming Soon! Why am I seeing this 'Under Construction' page? Visit, vote for best scene in Crittenden County Bale Trail 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. Paving Project Begins Thursday in Commerce Park Advertisement By West Kentucky Star Staff Jun. 19, 2018 | PADUCAH By West Kentucky Star Staff Jun. 19, 2018 | 10:51 AM | PADUCAH A contractor will begin a milling and paving project on Thursday in Information Age Park, also known as Paducah Commerce Park. The work is expected to be completed by July 1, weather-permitting. Paducah Public Information Officer Pam Spencer says McCracken Boulevard between Old Highway 60 and U.S. Highway 62 (Blandville Road) will be milled and then paved. This street rehabilitation project also includes some of the side streets off McCracken Boulevard including Carlisle, Fulton, Calloway, and Marshall Courts and part of Ballard Circle. During the street resurfacing work, Spencer says crews expect to keep one lane of traffic open and maintain access to businesses. However, for the safety of the crews, drivers are urged to find an alternate route. Please use caution, and watch for the work crews and traffic control devices. During this construction period, drivers are asked to avoid parking curbside on any of the streets scheduled for rehabilitation. This street rehabilitation project is part of the City of Paducahs annual street improvement plan. Part of the funding is provided through the Kentucky Transportation Cabinets Municipal Aid Program (MAP). MAP funds are collected from the State gas tax and are allocated for maintenance, reconstruction, or construction of city streets. We were warned. On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasnt approaching it had already arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was the opening salvo of the age of climate change. Thirty years later, its clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small some obvious, others less conspicuous. Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage. Over 30 years the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations the worlds annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more nearly 1.6 degrees. The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that were no longer thinking just about the future, said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Climate change is here, its now and its hitting us hard from all sides. Pull Quote Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage. Warming hasnt been just global, its been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined. The effects have been felt in cities from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the yearly average temperature rose 2.9 degrees in the past 30 years, to Yakima, Washington, where the thermometer jumped a tad more. In the middle, Des Moines, Iowa, warmed by 3.3 degrees since 1988. Melting polar ice So much Arctic ice is melting that the Arctic Ocean has become navigable in the summer. South central Colorado, the climate division just outside Salida, has warmed 2.3 degrees on average since 1988, among the warmest divisions in the contiguous United States. When she was a little girl 30 years ago, winery marketing chief Jessica Shook used to cross country ski from her Salida doorstep in winter. It was that cold and there was that much snow. Now, she has to drive about 50 miles for snow thats not on mountain tops, she said. T-shirt weather in January, that never used to happen when I was a child, Shook said. When Buel Mattix bought his heating and cooling system company 15 years ago in Salida, he had maybe four air conditioning jobs a year. Now hes got a waiting list of 10 to 15 air conditioning jobs long and may not get to all of them. And then theres the effect on wildfires. Veteran Salida firefighter Mike Sugaski used to think a fire of 10,000 acres was big. Now he fights fires 10 times as large. You kind of keep saying How can they get much worse? But they do, said Sugaski, who was riding his mountain bike on what usually are ski trails in January this year. In fact, wildfires in the United States now consume more than twice the acreage they did 30 years ago. The statistics tracking climate change since 1988 are almost numbing. North America and Europe have warmed 1.89 degrees more than any other continent. The Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern, the land faster than the ocean. Across the United States, temperature increases were most evident at night and in summer and fall. Heat rose at a higher rate in the North than the South. Pull Quote Warming hasnt been just global, its been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined. Since 1988, daily heat records have been broken more than 2.3 million times at weather stations across the nation, half a million times more than cold records were broken. Doreen Pollack fled Chicago cold for Phoenix more than two decades ago, but in the past 30 years night time summer heat has increased almost 3.3 degrees there. She said when the power goes out, it gets unbearable, adding: Be careful what you ask for. The AP interviewed more than 50 scientists who confirmed the depth and spread of warming. Clara Deser, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that when dealing with 30-year time periods in smaller regions than continents or the globe as a whole, it would be unwise to say all the warming is man-made. Her studies show that in some places in North American local though not most natural weather variability could account for as much as half of warming. But when you look at the globe as a whole, especially since 1970, nearly all the warming is man-made, said Zeke Hausfather of the independent science group Berkeley Earth. Without extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, he said, the Earth would be slightly cooling from a weakening sun. Numerous scientific studies and government reports calculate that greenhouse gases in the big picture account for more than 90 percent of post-industrial Earths warming. It would take centuries to a millennium to accomplish that kind of change with natural causes. This, in that context, is a dizzying pace, said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. About 100 people gathered at the Minnesota capitol and marched to downtown St. Paul to kick off the Block (Line 3) Party. The event is 24 hours of music and food outside the Public Utilities Commission which will decide in June whether or not to approve the construction of the Enbridge Line 3 oil pipeline. WiGBits Headline News Would you like to receive our WiGBits? Signup today! WiG Entertainment News Would you like to receive our WiG Entertainment News? Signup today! Digital Issue Would you like to receive our Digital Issue? Signup today! Close Get email notifications on Lisa Neff daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. Whenever Lisa Neff posts new content, you'll get an email delivered to your inbox with a link. Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. A Florida Highway Patrol trooper arrested a Clearwater man for driving nearly three times the legal speed limit early Sunday morning. According to the arrest report, the trooper spotted 28-year-old Deon Hendricks driving on U.S. 19 at a extremely high rate of speed around 3:00 a.m. The trooper wrote Hendricks was going in excess of 140 mph before slowing to approximately 70 mph and then accelerating multiple times up to 100 mph. The trooper eventually pulled over Hendricks near the intersection of U.S. 19 and Roosevelt Boulevard. Hendricks was arrested on a misdemeanor Reckless Driving charge for driving "a motor vehicle upon the highways of the State of Florida in a willful or wanton disregard for the safety of persons or property." The speed limit on the section of U.S. 19 where Hendricks is accused of driving 140 mph is only 55 mph. The trooper noted in the arrest report there was a moderate to light amount of traffic on the highway at the time of night. Hendricks was released from jail Sunday morning on his own recognizance. Deputies apprehended a prisoner Tuesday after he attempted to escape by jumping into the Ohio River. Derek Cope, 32, escaped custody during a court transport. Sheriff Richard K. Jones said deputies were returning inmates after their court appearances when Cope fled. "Jumping in the river is never a good idea and I think he got lucky. Maybe he was trying to cool off from this heat but he is back in custody where he belongs," Jones said. Cope is being held for burglary and theft, failure to comply with a court order and contempt of court out of the city of Fairfield. Officials said additional charges are possible after his escape Tuesday. UPDATE: The teen whose body was found in Canadarago Lake Tuesday morning has been identified as 19-year-old Dustin Groat of Jordanville. New York State Police say troopers responded at approximately 9:44 p.m. Monday and learned that two teens on separate kayaks had both capsized and one was missing in the water. Police say Groat and the other teen got into their kayaks at the Canadarago Lake Boat Launch around 7:30 p.m. Monday and paddled to Deowongo Island. As the storm approached, the teens began to paddle back to the boat launch but Groats kayak capsized, and he was not wearing a floatation device. Police say the other teen was unable to find Groat but he was able to get back to shore and call for help. State police and the Otsego County Sheriffs Office were assisted by the Shuyler Lake Fire Department with their airboat, along with the Richfield Springs, West Exeter, Exeter and Hartwick fire departments. Police say that due to the storm and choppy lake conditions, the State Police Underwater Recovery Team couldnt start their recovery efforts until 1 a.m. Groats body was recovered around 4:25 a.m. Tuesday in about 23 feet of water. Police say their investigation into the incident continues. _______________________________ (Previous coverage) RICHFIELD SPRINGS The body of a missing teen was recovered in Canadarago Lake in Richfield Springs on Tuesday morning, according to New York State Police. Around 8-9 p.m. Monday, troopers responded to a report of a missing person in Canadarago Lake. State police and the Otsego County Sheriffs Office conducted the search, and on Tuesday morning the body of a missing teen was found in the lake, near the 2100 block of County Route 22/East Lake Road in Richfield Springs. Police say theyre considering it to be a kayaking accident, but theyre continuing to investigate. Police have not yet identified the teen. We will provide more information as it becomes available. ILION, NY Ilion voters will head to the polls Tuesday to elect a new village mayor. Current mayor Terry Leonard decided not to seek re-election. The two candidates running for the position are Democrat Bridget Trevor-McKinley and Republican Brian Lamica. Trevor-McKinley is a nurse practitioner and currently serves on the village board as a trustee. Lamica is a retired Ilion police officer and is currently employed with the Rome City School District. Both candidates say problems with the villages water supply is a big concern. Everything from the treatment plant needs work, to the water mains going to our homes that are over a hundred years in most areas, says Lamica. Its affecting the quality of water in the village, and thats priority number one. During my time as trustee, we have contracted with an engineering firm and we are putting together a comprehensive plan, says Trevor-Mckinley. Presently we are seeking grants to reline our sewer, so we are moving in that direction to look at our major water issues. Polls are located at the Village Municipal Building on Morgan Street, and the Moose Lodge on Barringer Road. Polls are open from 12 pm to 9 pm. UTICA Temporary Utica Fire Chief John Kelly will resign from his position at the end of the month, Mayor Robert Palmieri announced Monday afternoon. Last week, the City of Utica released a statement regarding an investigation and subsequent disciplinary action against a member of the fire department. The city did not name the firefighter in question, but they said the city had been made aware of allegations against a member of the department and the Utica Police Department immediately conducted an investigation. The investigation determined no criminal conduct had taken place, the city said, but one member of the fire department was disciplined. A local media outlet published several reports last week that included text logs that allegedly occurred between a potential firefighter recruit and a chief within the department. NEWSChannel 2 had been contacted by the potential recruits father, who serves as a deputy chief within the department, but we could not verify the authenticity of the text messages. On Monday it was announced Kelly will step down from the temporary fire chief position effective July 1, but he will remain a member of the Utica Fire Department. Palmieri said he offered his resignation on Friday, June 15. RELATED: City Hall largely silent on UFD disciplinary issue Kelly, who has been a member of the department for more than 22 years, was appointed temporary fire chief in July 2017 after Chief Russell Brooks was put on administrative leave in May 2017. Palmieri said he is requesting that the citys Municipal Civil Service Commission begin the process of making the exam for the next Utica fire chief open competitive so the city can expand its search and find the most qualified candidate. I am also exploring the feasibility of appointing a new Temporary Fire Chief during the transition period until a permanent Fire Chief can be appointed, Palmieri said in the statement. To read the City of Utica's full statement from June 12, click here. To read Mayor Robert Palmieri's full statement from June 18, click here. (CNN) -- President Donald Trump used a term from US segregationist history to describe the relationship between the Air Force and his newest military branch, the Space Force, calling it "separate but equal." "We must have American dominance in space. Very importantly, I'm hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish the Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. That's a big step," he said in the White House East Room during a meeting of his National Space Council Monday. "We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force: separate but equal, it is going to be something so important," he said. The term "separate but equal" became a legal precedent following an 1896 Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson that said the use of racially separate facilities, if equal, was not discrimination. That legal rationale was deemed unconstitutional through a series of Supreme Court decisions, ending with 1954's Brown v. Board of Education. In addition to calling for the Space Force, Trump signed Space Policy Directive -- 3 Monday, part of his administration's push to lead in the space space. Trump previously floated the idea of adding a "Space Force" branch to the US military -- a concept that has received some support on Capitol Hill but drawn skepticism from the Pentagon. Space Policy Directive -- 3 is primarily focused on satellite traffic management and mitigating debris in space. The policy, executive secretary of the National Space Council Scott Pace told reporters, "seeks to address the challenges of a congested space environment." "If we're going to expand the economy in space, we need to make sure it's done in a sustainable way," Pace said. For the private sector's space activity, the primary effect of the policy is "more rapid and more accurate information on where they can launch," as well as "flexibility in launch windows," and satellites having "more time to put toward revenue-generating activities rather than maneuvering" to avoid collision risks, Pace said. (The-CNN-Wire & 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.) 'ASIAN' = MUSLIM 99% OF THE TIME The politically correct term 'Asian' is used by the leftist UK media as a way to cast suspicion on a wider group of people and take some of the negative attention away from the group usually responsible for committing the heinous acts. A perfect example would be the Muslim grooming gang epidemic which are constantly referred to by the press and authorities as 'Asian' grooming gangs. It isn't people from China, Japan or any Far Eastern Asian place. Nor is it Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists,Christians Etc.... They are Muslims!!!! INDIANAPOLIS (AP) A state contractor is developing a plan that could clear the way for more tolling on Indiana's interstates. The state has signed a $9.6 million contract with HNTB Indiana Inc. The company will study the impact of tolling and provide project planning if the state chooses to move forward with the idea. Stephanie Wilson, a spokeswoman for Gov. Eric Holcomb, says the Republican hasn't made a final decision on tolling. But his administration is required to study it under the 2017 road-funding plan, which raised gas taxes. Holcomb has previously said that he is open to the idea of tolling roadways in five or six years, which would fall at the end of his second term if he is re-elected. LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) Some people living on the north end of Lafayette said they feel sort of famous. The faces of 19 residents of the neighborhood can be seen on the side of the new Northend Community Center in a vibrant mural. The artist, Rahmaan Statik Barnes said his past wasn't as pretty as the pictures he now paints. When he heard a community wanted his help on a project related to bringing people together, he had to jump on it. Barnes loves to make dark places colorful, and he's been doing it for a while. "Since 1997 so average of maybe 20 or 30 a year," said Barnes. He estimates he's painted nearly 600 murals, nationwide. Barnes didn't always get paid for his work though. "I started off doing vandalism, graffiti and then it became a job," said Barnes. A job he says he could only get after he realized all he could lose when he was arrested for vandalism in Chicago. "That changed my life man having my daughter, as a matter of fact I feel guilty about missing father's day that's why I'm leaving here early today," Barnes shared. Barnes was born, raised and still lives on the south side of Chicago. Director of Development at Faith Ministries Arvid Olson said that's where he found him. "Would you be willing to come down to Lafayette and the more we explained about the mural, the more we talked about the concept, the more excited he got," Olson explained. Barnes fell in love with the Mural's message. On it are the words "Better Together," and vibrant images of 19 people ages 3 to 90 who live on the north end of town. "My daughter went mom I think you're behind the car, just look and I went 'is that me?!" asked Florence Hubbard. Hubbard said she doesn't know why they picked her. "I've been wondering myself, why me." After speaking with her, the reason became pretty clear. "To me color has never meant anything," said Hubbard. She embodies diversity, and to others in the neighborhood she's known as someone who loves to help children. That's why her face is next to 13 year old Demetrius Scott's. "It will be there forever," said Scott. He's pretty excited about that. Barnes on the other hand, hopes kids like Scott will grow up to see the bigger picture. "I want people to see this and feel inspired and feel better about themselves," said Barnes. WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) - West Lafayette police are warning drivers about an intersection near the restaurant, Triple XXX. Police have been issuing warnings to drivers who have been turning left on a right turn only. At the intersection of Salisbury and State streets, it's now a right turn only. However, it's a rule many drivers have been violating. West Lafayette police have been issuing warnings, hoping drivers will stop turning left. "I think one of them even tried to climb that hill," said Howard Higley, a Tippecanoe County resident. "There's no place for it to go." While News 18 was at the intersection Monday, News 18 spotted four cars that turned left in just under 30 minutes. Chief of Police Jason Dombkowski said his traffic unit has been monitoring the intersection. He said he's noticed drivers have been turning left more often to try and avoid construction in the area. Higley said he's glad to hear that the area is part of the daily patrol. "If they don't do it, they're not really doing their job, they're not really enforcing the law," said Higley. WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) The city of West Lafayette has a new parks and recreation superintendent. The position has been open since March of this year. After a nationwide search, West Lafayette Mayor John Dennis said new superintendent Kathryn Lozano starts at the end of June. She is originally from Delphi. "It really is a challenge trying to make sure that we keep the high standards that we've always had here in West Lafayette," said Mayor Dennis. "Our presumption is that Kathryn is going to be able to continue with the success that is our rec program and even grow it to where it's going to be." Her previous experience includes running large recreation centers in Cincinnati and Boston. Dennis said the city will have a new recreation center here in the next few years and Lozano will bring a great deal of experience to running the new facility. "It has to be self-supporting so with the rentable space, with the pool that's going to be in there," said Dennis. "It needs to generate a positive cash flow so it can basically pay for itself." LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) The Tippecanoe County Health Department is hosting its third annual Lunch in the Park. With more than 100 free prizes, water guns and water balloons, it's sure to be a good time for the kids. The event is meant to raise awareness about the importance of vaccinations, not just for children but adults too. "We definitely want adults to check and make sure you are up to date on your Hep A, Hep B shots," said Amanda Balser with the Tippecanoe County Health Department. "Especially with the recent Hep A outbreak." Staff will help people create an online vaccination records account. It's used to keep track of your immunizations. "You can access it anywhere in the world," said Balser. "We actually have stress balls that are the world stress balls and they have the myvax information on them." Lunch in the Park goes from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m. Thursday, in Riehle Plaza. 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 A police chief suffered severe injuries after a bike accident. Brandon del Pozo who is the police chief in Burlington, Vermont, was riding his bike when he crashed. He was rushed to the University of Vermont Medical Center, where he was placed in the Intensive Care Unit. He is expected to remain hospitalized for a sustained period of time after the serious bicycle crash left him with a head injury. Mayor Miro Weinberger said that del Poz suffered a head injury and broken bones in the single-bike crash while riding in Keene, New York. Doctors are optimistic about a full recovery, according to the press release from the city. Deputy Police Chief Jan Wright will serve as acting chief while del Pozo is recovering. Slow and low flypast for Airbus newest widebody aircraft This article is old - Published: Tuesday, Jun 19th, 2018 Airbus employees were treated to a stunning flypast yesterday morning when the plane makers newest widebody aircraft, an A330neo paid a visit over the skies of Wrexham as part of its flight test programme. Around 100 Airbus employees watched, along with Wrexham.com and Deeside.com, as the aircraft flew in from Hamburg arriving over Broughton just after 12.30pm, it performed a low and slow pass along the runway before powering up and heading off to Toulouse. Great sight as a brand new TAP A330 neo performs a fly last at Airbus Broughton pic.twitter.com/hYxdhoeFgR Deeside.com (@DeesideDotCom) June 18, 2018 The jet will now embark on a tour of 15 major airports worldwide over five continents, aiming at achieving 150 flight test hours in three trips. The tour will demonstrate the A330s readiness for airline operations ahead of entering service with Portuguese flag carrier TAP Air Portugal, the tour is the final step in the aircraft certification phase. The function & reliability tests, also known as route proving will include ETOPS missions landing at diversion airports and testing airport handling services. Following the flypast over Airbus European sites yesterday, the A330neo will head for 15 major airports worldwide over five continents, aiming at achieving 150 Flight Test Hours in three trips. The route proving tests are performed with the first A330-900 production aircraft, fully equipped with an Airspace by Airbus cabin and flying in launch operators Tap Air Portugal colours. The aircraft first flew on May 15 this year launching flight-tests to check cabin systems such as air conditioning. Route proving tests form part of the last trials required for aircraft Type Certification scheduled for summer 2018. The A330neo family was launched in 2014 and is the new generation A330, comprising two versions: the A330-800 and A330-900. The A330neo is powered by Rolls-Royces latest-generation Trent 7000 engines and features a new Broughton made wing with increased span and A350 XWB inspired Sharklets. World Socialist Web Site reporter Eric London spoke to Professor Chris Fradkin, a Fulbright scholar and expert on child psychology who teaches in California and Brazil. In January, Fradkin published a comment on a recent study in the journal Frontiers in Pediatrics titled Fear of massive deportations in the United States: Social implications on deprived pediatric communities. Eric London: What is your professional opinion of the impact of the Trump administrations policy of separating immigrant children from their parents? Chris Fradkin: I agree with my colleague Dr. Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, who called the family separation policy child abuse. It is a form of child abuse that is particularly affecting children of brown skin whose parents do not speak the language of the country theyre seeking refuge in. EL: How will being separated from their parents impact immigrant children in the long run? CF: This will certainly affect some of these children long-term. We are talking about trauma. Scientifically, this means compromised language and speech, deficits in motor skills, and in some cases developmental delays related to this trauma. There is no other word for this other than trauma. There is trauma to the parents too. If the infant is physically removed from your breast and you cannot do anything about it, that mother may never see her child again. The guilt that she is going to endure is immeasurable. EL: What have you come across in your research that helps explain the impact of family separation? CF: In the 1950s, Harry Harlow ran a study in which he separated infant rhesus macaque monkeys from their mothers and substituted wire frame surrogate mothers for their real mothers. He set up two different wire surrogates. One was wire framed and had a bottle of food attached, while the alternative had no food but was covered with a soft cloth. Almost all of these monkeys chose the warm cloth-covered mother in lieu of having food. When the monkeys touched the cloth surrogate they would cling to it because it was a similar to touching their mothers. Harlow concluded that it is essential for healthy developments of monkeys and children to have physical contact with their mothers at early ages. There is a bond established at the age of between 3 months to 12 months between the child and the mother and, as a result, the child requires physical contact and emotional stability from the mother. There are profound negative results later on as the infant would mature into adolescence and adulthood if this is unavailable. It is no stretch for a social scientist to say that some of these children, if they are not reunited with their parents in the next week, will suffer because of this for the rest of their lives. There is variability, but the ones that are more vulnerable to this will be devastated. Something must be done quickly. If something isnt done quickly, there will be a generation of dysfunctional, scarred children growing into dysfunctional, scarred teenagers and dysfunctional, scarred adults. They will have a compromised quality of life, a compromised ability to contribute to the society in which they live, and they will be less able to parent children of their own. They will be less able to have functional loving relationships. And these children in the cages are not the beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed children that look like Ivanka Trumps child. These are brown children. So I see it as a line of demarcation based on race, ethnicity and coming from a country looking for opportunity to a place that they have dreamed about coming to. What the United States used to represent was a place for immigrants who came over from Ireland, Russia, Italy, from all over the world. Our statue of liberty welcomed them in the past. For these reasons its difficult to accept the present situation. It is difficult, as a social scientist, not to get emotionally involved, knowing that for some of these children every day and every week that this forced separation from their blood relatives continues, that every day that goes by we are that much closer to creating a generation of dysfunctional, scarred children. EL: As an expert in your field, what is your scientific conclusion about the policy changes that need to come? CF: This policy should be reversed immediately. I challenge any scientist or human being to not be profoundly affected by what is going on, by the facts about what is going on, because they are facts and not opinions. There are children in cages and camps separated from loved ones, including nursing infants. It makes it difficult to treat the matter purely scientifically, which is my job as a social scientist. Dont just sit on your phone and click petitions. People need to get out, get in their cars, drive to the deportation centers and protest until they are let out. That is how you will really have an impact. Professor Fradkin previously spoke to the WSWS about the long-term impact of deportation on immigrant communities and immigrant children. That article can be found here. Glasgow School of Arts (GSA) world famous, revered and hugely popular Mackintosh building has been destroyed by fire. A blaze discovered at 11:20 p.m. Friday rapidly developed into an inferno that gutted the entire building end to end, destroying the roof and most of its floors. At the time of this writing, it is not clear if the buildings shell can even safely remain standing. Two adjacent buildings, an historic cinema now functioning as a music venue and a night club, have also suffered serious damage. At its peak, the fire, visible for miles around, rained burning embers around neighbouring streets, forcing the evacuation of nearby flats. Despite this, no one, neither residents, youthful clubbers thronging the Sauchiehall Street area around the fire, nor any of the 120 firefighters involved in efforts to suppress the conflagration, suffered any injuries. The fire was the second in just over four years in a building considered to be the finest work of popular Glasgow-born architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In May 2014, a fire broke out in the basement when an aerosol cannister of expanding foam placed beside a hot projector as part of an art installation exploded. Fire rapidly spread via the buildings timber lined walls and through horizontal and vertical ventilation ducts. It emerged that a fire suppression system for the vulnerable and flammable public building, completed in 1909, had not yet been completed. In 2014, however, extraordinary efforts by firefighters saved 90 percent of the building and 70 percent of its contents. The most significant loss was that of the Mackintosh library, listed among one of worlds most significant architecturally, along with the collected labours of many GSA students, whose graduate exhibitions were consumed. The fire also revealed a great appreciation of the building itself, among its hundreds of thousands of former students, lecturers and visitors. The Mackintosh building is loved not only as an art school, a place of exploration, craft and cultural experiment, but as an extraordinary work of public art itself enjoyed by everyoneworkers, students, tourists and film stars alikewho had the good fortune to study or simply wander about in it. As a consequence, after the 2014 blaze, GSA management, with public support and assistance from a significant number of celebrities and former students, was able to raise the 35 million needed to restore the damaged building, one of several which comprise the GSA. A painstaking and faithful restoration of the library, using original techniques and materials, was nearly complete. The libraries shelves were being stocked from around the world. All these efforts have now been consumed in a far more devastating and horrifying fire. The library and lecture theatre have again been destroyed as have the painting, drawing and sculpture studios which comprised most of the buildings older East Wing, which was undamaged in 2014. The buildings basement has also been damaged. A number of questions present themselves. By great good fortune, there were no fatalities or injuries. But what might have happened if the fire had taken hold during a busy exhibition? The fire spread rapidly to two neighbouring, older, public buildings. What might have been the death toll if the inferno had taken hold when both of these had been packed with clubbers and music fans? The ABC O2, whose roof has collapsed, was evacuated quickly, but DJ Grant Robertson reported that the venue was relatively empty. Later in the evening, things might have been very different. If the 2014 fire revealed the vulnerable buildings inadequate or absent fire prevention measures, then why was this was not fully and immediately addressed during the reconstruction? A spokesman for the British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association said that sprinklers had not been fitted during the reconstruction, despite the fact that construction work often involves a heightened fire risk. Why? No fire prevention patrols appear to have been taking place either. Why? Who is actually responsible for the buildings fire safety? A June 17 statement from GSA management claimed that day-to-day management of the site was controlled by contractor Kier Construction Scotland. Does this include fire safety? Why, in any case, have GSA and Kier Construction between them been unable to organise fire prevention for such a world famous cultural artefact? Why have both the British and Scottish governments already refused a public inquiry when many, including GSA architecture professor Alan Dunlop, are calling for one? The British governments Scottish Secretary David Mundell said, I dont at this stage think theres a case for a public inquiry unless someone can bring forward some exceptional reason. Fiona Hyslop, Scottish culture secretary, echoed Mundell, stating Im not giving any commitments at this stage. A major reason for the reticence will be the huge number of lucrative public contracts handed out by the British and Scottish governments characterised by dangerously shoddy work and blatant profit gouging. Speaking to the Herald, leading Rennie Mackintosh expert, Roger Billcliffe, said that questions had to be answered regarding the latest fire, but warned, dont hold your breath, were still waiting for answers about the 2014 fire. He noted, Its well known that buildings such as Charles Rennie Mackintoshs art school are most at risk during building worklook at [Royal Family palaces] Hampton Court and Windsor Castle, both extensively damaged, rebuilt and restored. So what precautions were taken at Renfrew Street? Any? None? The restoration of the school seems to have been remarkably successful, but it was 35m of unneeded expenditure. Now it is tragically wasted. We dont know the cause of this latest fire, but dont be surprised if it turns out to be linked to the 2014 fire, through exposure of the building to implicitly dangerous rebuilding operations. Last years catastrophic fire at Grenfell Tower in London revealed the disastrous consequences of the decades of systematic deregulation of all aspects of fire and building safety. Seventy-two people were killed, and the government was forced to convene an inquiry that has ruled out any examination of the economic and social factors behind the fire. Still no one has been arrested, let alone charged, for the tragedy. Grenfell is the worst high-rise fire in British history. But there are countless other examples of cost cutting endangering public safety, including in Scotland. In 2016, following the collapse of a wall at Oxgangs Primary School, 17 schools across Edinburgh were closed when Edinburgh Schools Partnership (ESP), a private consortium that built and managed the schools, was unable to offer assurances on safety. A subsequent report found poor construction, inadequate supervision, a lack of quality assurance and poor record keeping to blame. Kier Construction Scotland was itself recently the subject of a damning report by construction safety expert Professor John Cole into the companys work on the DG One leisure centre in Dumfries. Coles research found virtually unprecedented numbers of building, roofing and drainage faults in the 17 million leisure centre which opened in 2008, only to close six years later. It has subsequently been largely demolished and rebuilt. The building was also threatened with closure by the fire service in 2011. Quoted in the Herald, Cole said the extent and nature of the defects discovered are evidence of a lack of care, attention, basic construction skills or understanding of some of the fundamental principles of good construction on the part of those who built this building and those who supervised them. Cole also found the contractor had failed to comply repeatedly with the Building (Scotland) Act 2003. Dumfries and Galloway Council are now passing Coles report to the police. Kier Construction is nevertheless part of a joint venture which recently won a place in the Clyde Commercial Framework, a 750 million scheme to refurbish HM Naval Base Clyde at Faslane, where the Royal Navys fleet of nuclear submarines are based. The company has also won 180 million worth of contracts for schools, colleges, including the William McIllvanney Campus in Kilmarnock and new NHS facilities in Clydebank. Kier Construction Scotland are also carrying out restoration work at the Edinburgh College of Art, Aberdeen Music Hall, Glasgows Burrell Collection of artefacts, paintings and tapestries and the Citizens Theatre. As investigations into the Grenfell fire have revealed, privatisation and deregulation of the construction industry has created an impenetrable, barely regulated anarchy of competing profit centres, each clawing at each other regardless of the social consequences. After Grenfell, the destruction of Glasgows Mackintosh building underscores that there is not a single revered cultural institution or essential social facility which cannot be reduced to ashes, rubble or dysfunctional chaos by the uncontrolled predations of the profit system. The Trump administration is preparing to dramatically expand the number of immigrant children imprisoned and separated from their families. Officials told the Washington Examiner that the administration plans to expand child detention to 30,000 by August, detaining 250 additional children per day. This corresponds to new reports from the border. Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, told the World Socialist Web Site: They are trying to increase capacity at the tent cities so that nobody is released. Thats their goal, and we will probably see that very soon. There are other locations where tent cities are coming. I hear they will be increasing these more. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen made an unexpected return to Washington DC to give a fascistic press briefing yesterday afternoon in which she said reports of cruelty were hearsay and merely a narrative. The real issue, she said, is that the border is being overrun by those who have no right to cross it. Children are being well taken care of, she lied, calling it offensive that any reporter would call the policy inhumane and adding that family separation is not a controversial idea. Earlier yesterday, she tweeted that opposition to the policy is the product of misreporting by press & advocacy groups, which is irresponsible and unproductive and must stop. Trump responded to growing opposition by demonizing immigrant parents in a series of Monday morning tweets. In one, he declared, Children are being used by the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country. At a press conference with military leaders later, Trump echoed the language of Italian neo-fascists when he said, The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility, not on my watch. Hundreds of millions of people in the US and internationally increasingly view the United States as a pariah state that functions in foreign and domestic policy on the basis of total criminality. United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad Al Hussein denounced the US government yesterday in his global report on human rights. Citing an American Association of Pediatrics statement calling the separation of children from their parents followed by detention government-sanctioned child abuse, Hussein said, The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable. I call on the United States to immediately end the practice of forcible separation of these children. New details are emerging of the brutal treatment of immigrants in those facilities already in use. Christina Garcia of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, told the WSWS that the government is hiding children from their parents and refusing them the right to communicate with one another. Its really scary to see that these detention centers continue to pop up, she said. Their goal is to fill them at max capacity. We are also seeing uncertainty on when these children and parents will be released, where it can take months. We have cases where mothers do not know where their children are for weeks. Ruben Garcia, who runs the non-profit Annunciation House in El Paso, Texas, told the WSWS, We are helping a mother who has a 14-year-old son and when she was prosecuted for crossing, her son was taken from her. He said that it took the mother months to make bond and win release from detention in Texas. Her son had been shipped to detention in Chicago. The son was angry, he said. He never knew what was happening. The government never gave him info about whether or when he would see his mother again. She couldnt call him and he couldnt call her. He also noted that immigrants are being routinely denied the right to file for asylum. They are denying people even the opportunity to file for asylum, he said. I have a dad with a 16-year-old son escaping violence. They attempted three times to present themselves to a port of entry and they were turned away. CBP [Customs and Border Protection] functions as a law unto themselves. Christina Garcia shared a similar story of a mother who has been separated for her child all year. The real nightmare, alongside family separation, is the denial of asylum seekers to apply. There are rumors that this is a new policy from above to stop people from requesting asylum. Secretary Nielsen flat out lied when she said at yesterdays press conference that reports of asylum denials were not true. Photos, audio and video were released over the weekend deepening popular shame and horror over the detention of children in cages. One image shows a young child branded with the number 47. In audio secretly released from one detention center, border guards can be heard mocking crying children shouting mommy and daddy and please dont deport my dad. Another report surfaced of a four-year-old child who was left by guards with a dirty diaper. Unable to change the diaper herself, the child asked older children to do it for her. DHS and the Department of Health and Human Services released highly selective photos and video from inside child immigration jails, evidently believing its own photos (which depict only older boys) in the cleanest facilities would calm tensions. This plan backfired as millions reacted with disgust to even the official footage showing dozens of children in cages huddled under emergency blankets. There are indications that an explosion of opposition may be on the horizon. A Quinnipiac poll released yesterday showed that 66 percent of Americans oppose the family separation policy, while just 17 percent believe immigration should be decreased. The percentage of people who believe immigrants should not be allowed to stay in the US has fallen nearly in half since 2014, from 35 percent to 19 percent. Spontaneous demonstrations have broken out in dozens of cities, most of which were not organized by a Democratic Party group. Small groups of people have begun driving to the nearest detention center to protest. In at least one area, the Democratic Party-backed Womens March organization has called protests for the same time as the spontaneously organized protests in an effort to pre-empt popular demonstrations. The Democratic Party is petrified of the prospect of mass demonstrations and has dispatched a number of congressmen to head them off by carrying out token protests against the administrations policies. Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, whose husbands are both to blame for separating millions of family members through mass deportation, issued cynical calls alongside Laura Bush for Trump to halt the forced separations. Fourteen Democratic congresspersons gathered at a facility in Southern California to call family separation unconscionable. The Democrats hope to cover up their own active role in setting up immigrant internment camps across the country detaining thousands of children, including thousands in isolation from their parents. Most of the camps where children are currently held were constructed by Barack Obama, including the large facilities in Dilley and Karnes City, Texas. An American Civil Liberties Union report last month detailed widespread physical, sexual and mental abuse of child detainees by Customs and Border Protection under Obamas watch. From mid-2014 to mid-2016 alone, Obama arrested 127,000 family units, as the government calls them, or, parents and their children. In 2009, Obamas DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told a Senate committee he was implementing a rapid deportation process and that there are adults who brought their children with them. Again, our message to this group is simple: We will send you back. An August 2016 Washington Post story titled Inside the [Obama] administrations $1 billion deal to detain Central American asylum seekers reads: According to lawmakers and administration officials, Johnson determined that the United States could cut down the surge only by demonstrating that asylum seekers wouldnt receive leniency. Johnson won approval from the White House to explore ramping up family detention for asylum seekers on a scale never before seen in America, part of what he called an aggressive deterrence strategy. He ordered ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to figure out a way to make it work. This whole thing [was] building and reaching an unsustainable level, said Christian Marrone, then Johnsons chief of staff. We had to take measures to stem the tide. Trump has now extended this policy to qualitatively new levels of brutality. Protests in defense of immigrants must take place independent of and in opposition to both parties responsible for the reign of terror against them. Millions of truck drivers across India began an indefinite strike yesterday over rising fuel prices, sharp hikes in third-party insurance premiums and increases in tolls across the countrys states. The strike was called by the All India Confederation of Goods Vehicle Owners Associations (AICGVOA), a Delhi-based national umbrella organisation for nearly 600 truck owner associations covering eight million goods vehicles. AICGVOA president Channa Reddy told the media on Monday that about nine million trucks would be off the road. As of now, Reddy said, over 60 percent of trucks are not plying the roads across India. According to the Business Standard, as a result of the strike, supplies of essential commodities were partly disrupted at most mandis [rural markets] across the country on Monday. Quoting data compiled by the National Horticultural Research & Development Foundation, the article shows onion supply in the benchmark Lasalgaon mandi at 1,400 tonnes on Monday, down from 1,717 tonnes on Friday. The supply in the Pimpalgaon mandi also declined to 1,980 tonnes on Monday, from 2,510.5 tonnes on Friday. The government is levying abnormal taxes on diesel and needs to make it affordable, Reddy said. In 2013, the price of diesel was 53 rupees per litre, when the international crude price was $US110 per barrel. However, the current rate is $70 per barrel, yet the diesel price is 74 rupees per litre, AICGVOA secretary general S. Rajinder Singh told the Hindu on May 29 that the practice of daily price revisions for fuel will bankrupt truckers and destroy the trucking industry. We are sure that the impact on small operators has been considered by you. Singh said: Considering that a vehicle on an average consumes 50 to 150 litres of diesel a day, this means an increased spending of about 970 million rupees [$US14,246,781] every day [across the trucking industry]. AICGVOA president Reddy complained that third party insurance premiums had steadily increased year after year. Throughout the past year, millions of truck drivers have struck time and again over the same demands. In early April 2017, nearly half the commercial vehicles in Tamil Nadu were off the road to protest against a 50 percent hike in insurance premiums, increased penalties and a four-fold hike in Regional Transport Office fees. Again, on October 9, 2017, more than 9 million truck operators launched a two-day strike over the goods and services tax (GST), diesel prices, the harassment of truck operators and corruption in relation to roads and toll policies. In February 2018, more than 4,500 LPG tanker operators struck against a new state-level tender process introduced by the national petroleum ministry and major oil corporations for fixing the hire charges for operating LPG tankers. In May, more than 4,000 transporters hauling containers to and from the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT), Indias biggest container port, stopped work. They were protesting against the JNPT granting exclusive rights to four transport operators to move import containersa threat to small transporters at the port. AICGVOA general secretary R. S. Bhasin told the media that the truckers are a harassed lot, as the government charges 8 rupees per litre on diesel as a cess [tax] for road building, and another 8 rupees per litre as a toll from multi-axle vehicles for using roads, which is unfair. The main issues for lorry owners, who are mostly small business people, are the rise in toll gate costs, diesel prices and the GST, which has cut into their profits. However, those most affected are the lorry drivers, who are not covered by any social security schemes, such as pensions, health care or insurance. The wages of drivers are quite stagnant despite their oppressive and tiring work conditions. They get a wage of 15 paise (cents) per 100 rupees worth of load, which is not enough to cover their medical, lodging and travel expenses. The key issue in the truckers strike, fuel price hikes, is also affecting the working people and rural toilers. But the union bureaucrats prevent any united struggle of the working class against fuel price increases and other austerity measures imposed by governments at the central and state levels. The transport sector unions keep workers divided. The All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC), for example, decided against taking part in the current strike. AIMTC Core Committee chairman Bal Malkit Singh told the media that the strike was a flop show because it had no support from the AIMTC. Instead, the AIMTC, which according to its website, represents approximately 9.3 million truckers and five million bus and tourist operators, has announced a separate strike on July 20 on the same issue. During a meeting with the National Space Council yesterday, President Trump announced his intention to create a Space Force as the sixth branch of the US military. The move would elevate US military operations in space within the overall command structure of the military, placing it on an equal footing with the Navy, Air Force, Marines, Army and Coast Guard. US military operations in space are currently overseen by the Air Forces Space Command. Trump made clear that the move was part of preparations for war with Russia and China. Our destiny beyond the Earth is not only a matter of national identity but a matter of national security, Trump said yesterday, adding that the United States should not have China and Russia and other countries leading us. In his typically ignorant fashion, Trump declared that the new branch would be separate but equal from the Air Force, a phrase infamous in American history as the legal pretext for segregation in the public schools. The announcement came unexpectedly, during a signing ceremony for an apparently unrelated policy directive aimed at streamlining the tracking of space traffic and debris. However, it follows months in which Trump has repeatedly floated the idea in public appearances and lengthier discussions within the military and political establishments. An early draft of last years military spending bill included provisions for the creation of a Space Corps as a new branch of the military. Whether Trumps plan will come to fruition remains to be seen. Last years proposal in Congress was opposed by Secretary of Defense James Mattis and by the Air Force on the ground that it created needless organizational complexity, indicating that Trumps announcement could face opposition within the Pentagon and his own cabinet. Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also tweeted his opposition, adding that Trump could not carry out such action without congressional approval. All of Trumps opponents, however, share the basic strategic aim of maintaining and bolstering American military supremacy in space. Since the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) under Reagan, commonly known as Star Wars, the establishment of space superiority has been a significant and growing element in American military planning. The US military already has a considerable presence in space. The latest military budget includes $12 billion for unclassified space programs, a sum which has increased steadily even as funding for the civilian space program under NASA has stagnated or declined. Over 20,000 personnel are already under the Air Forces Space Command, which is larger than the entire air force of Canada. The US operates 123 of the approximately 320 military satellites orbiting the Earth, according to World Atlas, serving a variety of functions like reconnaissance, GPS and communications. Together, they form a critical element in the military infrastructure of American imperialism. Drone pilots, for example, rely on satellites to carry out assassinations from halfway around the world. The Air Force also operates an experimental drone space shuttle, the X-37B, whose purpose and mission remain shrouded in secrecy. The US also maintains significant counter-space capabilities, or the ability to deny access to space to its adversaries. In 2008, it demonstrated the capacity to shoot down orbiting satellites with ground-launched missiles when it destroyed a malfunctioning spy satellite, under the pretext that it would pose a danger to people on the ground if it re-entered Earths atmosphere. The test followed a similar Chinese exercise the previous year. The renewed focus on space as a warfighting domain, as Trump put it during a speech earlier this year, flows from the growing preparations for war, not with impoverished, war-torn countries in the Middle East, but with more advanced countries, which have their own capabilities in that sphere, including not only Russia and China but also Europe. There are evidently serious concerns within sections of the ruling class that American technological dominance in space has been severely eroded. Congressman Mike Rogers (R-AL), one of the foremost congressional advocates of a Space Force, warned last year during NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) negotiations of a Space Pearl Harbor, i.e., the possibility that American space supremacy could be challenged or successfully countered in the outbreak of a major war. Of particular concern is the rapid growth of Chinas space program over the past 30 years. China is now a major player in the commercial satellite market and became the third country to conduct a manned spaceflight with the launch of Shenzhou 5 in 2003. Russia also maintains a robust space program inherited from the Soviet Union, and US domestic aerospace companies are heavily reliant on the Russian-produced RD-180 for their own rocket launches. The major European powers also maintain a significant presence in space, with launches conducted from Frances overseas territory in South America. India, Israel, North Korea and Iran have also successfully placed small satellites into orbit. TUMWATER, WA (AP) A gunman wounded two people before being fatally shot by a bystander at a Walmart store in Washington state Sunday evening. The incident happened about 5 p.m. in Tumwater. KOMO-TV reports that a witness says people were in line when they heard gunfire in the store. The station reports that as people fled the store, the gunman followed and shots were heard outside. Police tell the station that the gunman then attempted to carjack someone and was shot by a bystander. One shooting victim was flown by helicopter to a hospital, while another was being treated for a non-life threatening injury. Police are investigating four scenes connected with the shooting. Tumwater is in Thurston County and near Olympia. Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. PRINCETON, Ind. (WTHI) - From the sky you can see what remains after a train wreck Sunday night. The fires are still burning almost twenty-four hours after the incident. However, if you ask residents, things are a lot calmer today then last night. Shannon Theys says, "Me and my daughter and my granddaughter were sitting out by the pool when we heard what sounded like a jet engine making a very loud noise. And then we heard a crash and at that time we were scrambling to see what was going on." A rail car loaded with 30,000 gallons of liquid propane exploded. Resulting in a ploom of smoke and fire. Theys says, "It was kind of scary because of all the smoke and at first, we weren't for sure what they had in the trains." The Princeton fire department evacuated a half-mile radius around the wreck. Despite the severity, no one was injured in the incident. Princeton fire chief Mike Pflug says the accident's location played a major factor. Pflug says, "You couldn't really have found a better location. It's isolated away from everything. It's far enough out of town that it hasn't really had much effect to the neighborhoods outside of where we've just evacuated." In all, 23 railcars derailed in the incident. Five of those were carrying propane. At this time residents are being allowed to return to their homes and traffic is being opened back up on us 41. Princeton Mayor Brad Schmitt says, "Everybody here, I tell you what, that's how you handle these types of situations. Is that you have a good team around you." News 10 will continue to follow this story as it develops. TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - A local bike park is continuing to do its part to honor the sacrifice of service members. Griffin Bike Park" is hosting Vigo County Salutes Week. It's a way to honor Vigo County's service men and women. The park is dedicated to Sergeant Dale R. Griffin, who died serving his country. Monday's event featured Indiana Lieutenant Governor, Suzanne Crouch. Other events are planned for the rest of the week, including a visit from Retired Lt General William G. Boykin. The Terre Haute Chamber of Commerce has compiled a list. BRAZIL, Ind. (WTHI) - Police are investigating a shooting that happened in Brazil, Indiana on Sunday. The Brazil Police Chief says the shooting happened in the area of Deloss and Depot Streets. The Chief says police first learned about the shooting by a call to dispatch after 5 p.m. Sunday. The call was from the hospital, saying a person who'd been shot in the hand showed up for treatment. Police say that person was 20-year-old Gavin Johnson. Officials say Sunday's shooting incident in Brazil took place in the area of Deloss and Depot Streets. (WTHI Photo, Lacey Clifton) Officials say Sunday's shooting incident in Brazil took place in the area of Deloss and Depot Streets. (WTHI Photo, Lacey Clifton) The Chief says a dispute between brothers is what lead up to the shooting. He says the shooter is a 17-year-old boy. Officials say the suspect fired a shot with a handgun at Johnson and a woman. Then, police say the 17-year-old and Johnson got into a physical fight. The Chief says there was possibly a second and third shots, with the final shot hitting Johnsons hand. Officials say the 17-year-old fled the scene. They say he was later arrested outside of Brazil. He's being held in the Vigo County Juvenile Detention Center. Police say the suspect faces preliminary charges of aggravated battery, and criminal recklessness. Officials say his first court appearance was Tuesday. They say the investigation into the incident is on-going. TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - Firefighters battled a massive fire Monday afternoon in Clay County at an abandoned coal building. The fire happened near State Road 42 and County Road 500 West in western Clay County. A sign on the property is for Bowie Refined Coal's Chinook plant. The Posey Township Fire Department said the building was once used in the coal mining process. Firefighters at the scene told us construction workers were trying to take the building apart. They were using a torch, which caught coal dust on fire. The fire spread from there. Crews at the scene told us liquid oxygen was inside the building. Due to safety concerns, firefighters decided to let the fire burn out. The Posey Township Fire Department said there was no direct threat to public safety because the property is in a secluded area. TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - The Terre Haute Police Department says its satisfied with a judges decision in a dispute over a city ordinance. Recently, News 10 introduced you to Tommy Williams. He said the city unfairly cited his wife, Kemi Williams, after she threw a private birthday party. However, police disagree. They said the party was open the public, which goes against a so called dance ordinance. Thats because Williams didnt have a permit. A Terre Haute judge recently sided with police and ruled Kemi Williams was in violation of the ordinance. Police went on to say this case was never about dancing or holding a private birthday party. A judge will decide the punishment in this case in August. An airstrike close to the Iraq-Syria border Sunday was carried out by Israel, and not by the US or the coalition fighting ISIS, a US official tells CNN. Syrian state TV blamed the strike that targeted pro-regime forces and caused multiple casualties on the US-led coalition combating the terrorist group, but a spokesman for the coalition said there were no coalition strikes in the area near Abu Kamal. The Israel Defense Forces declined to comment on the strike, per its normal policy. US officials have said that many pro-regime militias that are also aligned with Iran operate in the border area between Syria and Iraq. The area is some distance from Israel and Israeli jets would have had to overcome significant logistical hurdles to strike that area. Israel has repeatedly warned that it would target Iranian-linked groups in Syria. "We will take action - and are already taking action - against efforts to establish a militarily presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria both close to the border and deep inside Syria. We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday at a cabinet meeting. Netanyahu spoke with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Russian President Vladimir Putin over the weekend, two of the key players in influencing Israel's policy and actions over Syria. Sunday's strike was very different from those normally attributed to Israel. Generally, strikes by Israel occur in the western region of Syria, principally in the area around Damascus and Homs. Recently, these strikes have targeted Iran's infrastructure and military presence in Syria, which Israel has staunchly opposed. Israel also has struck shipments of advanced weapons from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon in the past. This attack in Eastern Syria is hundreds of miles away from that area, and the target -- pro-regime forces -- differs from what would be Israel's usual mark, namely Iranian military positions. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) - A Florida circuit court has reinstated a stay on smoking medical marijuana. The state's 1st District Court of Appeal has ruled that the hold will remain in effect "pending final disposition of the merits of (a recent) appeal." The Department of Health appealed to a higher court earlier this month after Leon County Circuit Court Judge Karen Gievers upheld her May 25 ruling that the Florida Legislature's provision banning smokable medical marijuana is unconstitutional. This is the second medical marijuana case that the 1st District is taking up. Gievers ruled on April 11 that a Tampa man - Joseph Redner - is entitled under state law to possess, grow and use marijuana for juicing. Redner was prescribed juicing treatments from his doctor to prevent a relapse of Stage 4 lung cancer. (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) TALLAHASSEE, FL - Capital City Pedicabs is hosting the "Pedal for a Cause" in Tallahassee. *Mike Goldstein.* and Harry Smith joined Christine Souders on Second Cup. The goal is to have guest pedicab drivers from the community raise money to the cause of their choice. They are renting out the pedicab and anything they bring in from rides goes to their cause. Kicking off the initiative for 2018 is Harry Smith of Harry Smith Outdoors who is raising money for Apalachicola Riverkeeper and their RiverTrek 2018. They are looking for more guest drivers for throughout the year as there is no shortage of worthy causes in Tallahassee. Pedal for a cause initiative, kicking off 2018 with guest driver Harry Smith of Harry Smith Outdoors on Friday, 22 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.at Railroad Square Art Park 602 McDonnell Dr, Tallahassee, Florida. If you are interested in joining in on the cause you ca call, 850-567-6255 and check out www.capitalcitypedicabs.com TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - A Leon County judge has determined a Tallahassee woman will stay behind bars, ahead of her husband's murder trial. Judge James Hankinson denied bond to Denise Williams who was asking to be released on a bond amount of $100,000. Denise Williams has been in jail since last month, 17 years after her husband Mike was killed. Friends and family of both Denise and Mike Williams watched this case closely. Denise was arrested last month. She was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, first-degree murder, and accessory after the fact. Monday afternoon, the court listened to a sworn statement from her ex-husband Brian Winchester about what happened to Mike. In that statement, Winchester admits he killed Mike and planned the murder with Denise. He said the two wanted to be together and take advantage of Mike's life insurance policies. Winchester described the events leading up to the murder, how he did it, and where he hid the body. Denise's attorney has maintained his client is innocent and that the only person tied to Mike's murder is Winchester. However, Winchester was granted immunity in exchange for the information he gave, so he won't face any charges related to this case. Trial is set for September 24. Speedy trial has not been waived. JACKSON COUNTY, Fla. (WTXL) - A correctional officer trainee has been arrested after an investigation into her bringing drugs into a local facility revealed she instead smuggled in a gold grill mold kit to give to an inmate. The Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) announced the arrest of Correctional Officer Trainee Crystal Leeks. Leeks is charged with introduction of contraband and possession of contraband. According to a probable cause affidavit, security staff at the Jackson Correctional Institution received information on June 14 that Leeks was intending to smuggle in an unknown type and amount of drugs into the facility. The next day, officials interviewed Leeks and determined that she intentionally smuggled in a "gold teeth dental mold kit," which is commonly used for making grills, with the intent to deliver the kit to an inmate. Following the interview, officials searched Leeks' car and found a partially full bottle of Crown Royal along with two Heineken beers and one Corona. Based on the investigation, Leeks was charged with introduction of contraband into a state correctional institution and possession of contraband (alcohol). TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - The Poor People's Campaign has been rallying against poverty, racism and many other social issues for over 40 days in the Capital City. For their final day, members from across the country met in the Florida Capital Building tackling systematic racism and even the comments made by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions regarding family separation issue this past week. Members say it's all about making a difference. "We have a government that doesn't even pretend to care about the poor, women, immigrants," said Micheal Panella, a member of the Poor People's Campaign. "We need a government where the people come first not corporations.The policy needs to reflect that." The Poor People's Campaign also held a mock trial were members presented fake judges with demands which the judges denied. The organization say the trial was a reflection of how are government responds to the needs of the people. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - There's a battle at the border, where federal agents have separated nearly 2,000 immigrant children from their parents for entering the country illegally. The Trump administration's policy is turning into a human rights issue, drawing criticism on both sides of the aisle. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol released photos from inside a detention facility in Texas. The FSU Center for the Advancement of Human Rights says the policy is more than just a matter of national security. With vulnerable groups like children involved, it's a human rights issue, too. "This is a significant departure from not only current but historical approaches toward these issues, so it's not to minimize the challenge," said Mark Schlakman, who's an attorney and the senior program director at the FSU Center for the Advancement of Human Rights. "The challenge is real. This is just unprecedented." The center said Florida had its own immigration issues in the 90's when an influx of Cubans and Haitians were coming to Florida, but that Governor Lawton Chiles didn't separate families. CALHOUN COUNTY, Fla. (WTXL) - Two Blountstown men have been arrested on drug trafficking charges after deputies discovered a large amount of crystal meth inside their car. The Calhoun County Sheriff's Office says that on Friday around 6:38 p.m., deputies spotted a vehicle traveling near the intersection of S.R. 69 and C.R. 286 by the Ocheesee community. Deputies stopped the car on C.R. 274 near Grady Tew Road in Altha. However, when the vehicle pulled over, a passenger got out of the car and the driver took off. After a brief chase, deputies were able to arrest the driver, identified as Charles Corbin Jr. of Blountstown. The Florida Fish and Wildlife (FWC) assisted during the pursuit and were able to help apprehend the passenger of the vehicle, identified as Kristopher Bailey of Blountstown. By the end of the incident, deputies discovered 88.1 grams of crystal meth, plastic baggies commonly used to sell drugs, and various drug paraphernalia items. Both Corbin Jr. and Bailey were booked into the Calhoun County Jail. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-18 18:37:17|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close Afghan peace marchers arrive in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan, after walking 700km, June 18, 2018. An Afghan peace activists' convoy of more than 70 youth, calling for an end to war, have arrived in the capital Kabul, after starting a foot journey from the southern Helmand province and trekking several provinces, a member said Monday. (Xinhua/Rahmat Alizadah) KABUL, June 18 (Xinhua) -- An Afghan peace activists' convoy of more than 70 youth, calling for an end to war, have arrived in the capital Kabul, after starting a foot journey from the southern Helmand province and trekking several provinces, a member said Monday. The group initially launched a sit in protest demanding an end to the war after a suicide car bombing killed 16 civilians and injured 55 others near a sport stadium in Lashkar Gah, capital of Helamnd on March 23. However, they began the foot journey toward Kabul at early May. The aim of the journey that took up to 700 km to walk in 37 days, was to meet Afghan authorities and discuss cease-fire and lasting peace in the country, Jamal Nasir, 30, who joined the convoy in eastern Ghazni province told Xinhua. "None of us will return home unless peace was restored in Afghanistan," he warned. A Kabul resident Mohammad Nasir Hakimzada, 28, who was presenting flower wreath to the members of the convoy, in Kabul, told Xinhua that the convoy members have done great work, their target was peace and giving a small branch of flower was a small thing to do for them. Bacha Khan Mavlana, a member and one of the key leaders in charges of the Peace Convoy, native to the largely Taliban controlled Helmand province, told Xinhua that they had sent a written letter to the two sides of conflict to set a truce and end the long war and bloodshed, but none of them gave positive response. "We began the march in Helmand, where we were only eight members, but en route to Kabul, the number reached to 72," he said. The peaceful protest march picked up supporters during the long journey and arrived in the relatively peaceful Afghan capital after a three-day holiday cease-fire that brought rare calm to most of the Afghan citizens. The short cease-fire encouraged the Afghan government main rival Taliban to enter the big cities including the capital, where they could visit their relatives and shake hand and hug Afghan security forces, sending an unprecedented hope and peace message to the war-weary nation. In his Eid-ul-Fitr address, Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani on Friday urged Kabul citizens to warmly welcome the peace activists coming from Helmand upon reaching the capital. However, two joint gathering of the Taliban and the Afghan security forces have been blown up in eastern province of Nangarhar and Saturday and Sunday, leaving dozens, including several civilians, dead or injured. The Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the incidents. Although, the government had offered extension of the cease-fire, but the Taliban announced Sunday that the truce would end by the evening of the last day of Eid-ul-Fitr which falls on Sunday, and their fighters would return to their positions to resume their fighting. The violence has been on the rise as Afghan security forces struggle against a surge in attacks by anti-government fighters since the drawdown of foreign forces within the past three years. More than 760 civilians were killed and over 1,490 others injured in conflict-related incidents in the first three months of the year in the war-torn country, according to figures released by the United Nations mission in the country. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 07:00:31|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, June 18 (Xinhua) -- The Security Council on Monday condemned the two "heinous and cowardly" terrorist attacks in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar over the weekend that led to dozens of deaths. The members of the Security Council expressed their deepest sympathy and condolences to the families of the victims and to the Afghan government, and wished a speedy recovery to those injured, said the council in a press statement. The council members underlined the need to hold perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors of these reprehensible acts of terrorism accountable and bring them to justice, and urged all UN member states to cooperate actively with the Afghan government and all other relevant authorities in this regard. They reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security and stressed the need for all states to combat by all means threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts. At least 15 people were killed and 45 others wounded on Sunday in an explosion in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar. The bombing targeted a meeting between Afghan officials and Taliban members during a rare cease-fire. On Saturday, 25 people were killed after a suicide car bombing struck a crowd of Taliban militants, members of Afghan security forces and civilians, who were celebrating the temporary cease-fire for the Eid al-Fitr holiday. Fifty-four people were wounded in the attack on the outskirts of Jalalabad, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 07:30:38|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close by William M. Reilly UNITED NATIONS, June 18 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres believes that children must not be traumatized by being separated from their parents, his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said on Monday. His voice was just one of many raised in objection to a recently introduced U.S. immigration policy that separates children from parents illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States resulting in their arrests. Some 2,000 children taken from parents have been put in detention centers in southwestern U.S. states, U.S. officials said. "As a matter of principle, the secretary-general believes that refugees and migrants should always be treated with respect and dignity, and in accordance with existing international law," said Dujarric in a statement. "Family unity must be preserved." The secretary-general was concerned about the situation along the Mexico-U.S. border in the statement, read out by the spokesman at a regular press briefing. "What the secretary-general would like to see at all borders is to see people being treated with dignity and respect for their rights, that people claiming asylum be given proper hearings," Dujarric said. "This is not a position that he has specifically against the United States. This is a principled position that he has for the way refugees and migrants are treated the world over." "We've all been following what's going on at the border and I think he is concerned as anyone else," said Dujarric. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein was more direct. "In the United States, I am deeply concerned by recently adopted policies which punish children for their parents' actions," he said in Geneva, home of the council. The American Association of Pediatrics in the United States had called it a cruel practice of "government-sanctioned child abuse" which may cause "irreparable harm" with "lifelong consequences," said Zeid. "The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable." He called on the United States to immediately end the practice of forcible separation of these children, and encouraged the government to at last ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in order to ensure that the fundamental rights of all children, whatever their administrative status, will be at the center of all domestic laws and policies. U.S. President Donald Trump continued to blame Democrats in Congress for their inaction for the arrests of parents and separate detention of their children. On Monday, he repeated in tweets his accusation, repeatedly called out as untrue by his critics. Trump said in one tweet, "Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change! This is why we need more Republicans elected in November. Democrats are good at only three things, High Taxes, High Crime and Obstruction. Sad!" However, various media outlets in the United States have "fact checked" his allegations, refuting them, with some going beyond merely calling them "untruths" to actually call them "lies," saying it is only his administration's policy causing the separation and detention of children. MEXICO CITY, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Mexican authorities have arrested the alleged chief hitman for a drug cartel during an operation in the western state of Jalisco, the prosecutor-general's office (PGR) announced on Monday. Juan Francisco "N", alias "Juan Pistolas", was identified by the PGR as the man charged with recruiting gunmen for Jalisco New Generation drug cartel in Guadalajara, the capital of the state of Jalisco. The director of the PGR's criminal investigation agency, Omar Hamid Garcia, told the press that the arrest was made on June 9 and had dealt a significant blow to the cartel. PGR agents and army troops made the arrest in a building of Tlajomulco de Zuniga, a municipality close to Guadalajara, he added. "He probably enlisted people to the service of the criminal group in order to maintain control over the zones of Guadalajara and Tlajomulco de Zuniga from the presence of rival criminal groups," said Garcia. According to investigations, those recruited by "Juan Pistolas" were then trained in weapons handling and tactical operations. In a separate action on June 9, agents also arrested a suspected accomplice, who was tasked with guarding a firearms cache. This arrest took place in house in Zapopan, also near Guadalajara, where an arsenal was found. "The capture of Juan Francisco 'N' affects, in a significant way, the distribution of drugs and weapons in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, and the communications network of the criminal gang," added Garcia. According to the PGR report, the suspect was allegedly operating under the orders of a lieutenant close to Nemesio Oseguera, alias "el Mencho", the top leader of the cartel and one of the most wanted men in Mexico and the U.S. Garcia explained the two men had been charged with drug trafficking and violating laws against the carrying of weapons. Jalisco New Generation is the cartel with the largest physical presence across Mexican territory, after having been created in 2010 by former allies of the Sinaloa cartel. Authorities have blamed the cartel for a number of violent acts in Guadalajara this year, including the disappearance of three film students and an assassination attempt against the former Jalisco prosecutor-general. Enditem Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 09:35:57|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close WASHINGTON, June 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. State Department said Monday that Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation Christopher Ford will lead a delegation to Seoul and Tokyo to convey the U.S. Iran policy. The tour scheduled for June 18-20 aims "to convey the Administration's Iran policy, including with regard to the re-imposition of nuclear-related sanctions on Iran," according to a State Department statement. "The United States is working with nations around the world to create a new global effort to counter Iran's nuclear and proliferation threats, as well as its support for terrorism, militancy, and continued development and testing of ballistic missiles," it added. Ford would be joined by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Andrew Peek and other U.S. government officials. The Trump administration exited the historic Iran nuclear deal in May, threatening to re-impose nuke-related sanctions on Iran and punish those that have business links with the Middle East nation. The move has been criticized by many European nations. Iran signed the landmark nuclear deal with the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany in 2015 to halt its nuclear weapons program in exchange for sanctions relief. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 10:16:08|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close SEOUL, June 19 (Xinhua) -- South Korea and the United States have decided to "suspend" all planning activities for their annually-held joint military exercises scheduled for August, South Korean Defense Ministry said Tuesday. The ministry said in a statement that the two countries' military authorities would suspend all planning activities for the Ulchi Freedom Guardian, a computer-simulated command post exercise which the ministry said is defensive in nature. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) had denounced the exercise as a dress rehearsal for northward invasion. The South Korean Defense Ministry said it will continue to consult with its U.S. counterpart on further measures, noting that no decision had yet to be made on other war games between Seoul and Washington. Other war games refer to the joint springtime war games, codenamed Key Resolve and Foal Eagle. This year's Key Resolve and Foal Eagle joint military drills were staged in April as they were delayed for the South Korea-hosted Winter Olympics. The Ulchi Freedom Guardian is slated for August this year. The decision to halt the war games came after U.S. President Donald Trump said after the DPRK-U.S. Singapore summit last week that he would stop the "provocative" military drills. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 10:16:09|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close YANGON, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar's House of Representatives (Lower House) has voted down a motion on death penalty for rape of minors, the official Global New Light of Myanmar reported Tuesday. The motion, tabled by a parliament member, called on the government to enact an effective special law to prevent the rape of minors and to include the death penalty in the law. Noting that Myanmar is a member country of the United Nations and had pledged to uphold human rights and basic freedom, lawmaker Daw Myint Myint Soe said in a debate in the House Monday that Myanmar had also unconditionally accepted the fact that no crime should have the death penalty as agreed by many member countries of the UN and furthermore there is no evidence to show that the death penalty deters or reduces crime. She pointed out that the biggest weakness of the death penalty is that there is absolutely no chance for the person accused of the crime to take a legal recourse. "Death penalty is contrary to a democratic system, establishment of peace and the rule of law which our country is undertaking as preliminary step," she added. Other MPs said taking a life is not related directly to reducing or eliminating this crime, urging to adopt other methods so that people in the society live according to ethics. A government official recalled that there is a death penalty in law in Myanmar but it is no longer imposed. Meanwhile, the government is drawing up a bill for a special law on children's rights and a bill for a law on preventing violence against women which are being submitted for consideration. The official concluded that these two bills are what the motion is proposing, saying that if the MPs work on these two bills, appropriate action would have been taken. The House took the decision on the motion through voting with 141 in favor and 227 against. The motion was announced to be kept on record. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 10:26:11|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close MEXICO CITY, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Cultural exchanges between Latin America and China over the past four decades have brought the two distant regions closer together, Latin American academics, students and diplomats have said. They called for enhanced exchanges between the two sides to make people gain deeper knowledge of each other's language, history and arts as China marks the 40th anniversary of its reform and opening up this year. Marisol Villela, a graduate of China Academy of Art, completed studies last year on China-Latin America cultural ties and 20th-century art, a subject she said opened up "a spectrum on what mutual ties represent and entail." Established in 1928 in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou that is rich in cultural heritage, China Academy of Art is the first public fine arts college in China. "I am often impressed by the figures released regarding economic and trade ties, but it's also important to highlight that our ability to know each other in other fields, such as culture, not only expands our knowledge, but also helps us understand all fields better," the 25-year-old told Xinhua. Speaking at a recent event on China-Mexico art exchanges at Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM), she said "cultural exchange between Latin America and China must be redoubled" as young people and the society in general aspire to better understanding and closer ties between Latin America and China. "Those of us who have had the chance to study and live in China are certainly richer for the experience, since we have been able to learn about this changing society, and then return to our countries and share what it's like ... so that we understand each other better," Villela said at the event titled "The arrival of 1956: Socialist modernism and China-Mexico artistic exchange in the 1950s." Mariana Escalante, who teaches at UNAM and Anahuac, a private university, said it "is essential" to maintain cultural exchange between the two regions, as "it makes the relationship and the understanding more accessible." She noted that in recent years, the Chinese embassy in Mexico has been actively promoting cultural events. "Mexicans are increasingly taking part in ... celebrations like the Chinese New Year or fairs that feature Chinese music, dance, handicrafts and even cuisine," she said. Eugenio Anguiano Roch, Mexico's first ambassador to China who served two terms -- first between 1972 and 1976 and then from 1982 to 1987 -- said cultural exchanges in the past 40 years "have led to better understanding of one another." While expecting more work to be done in the future to expand people-to-people and cultural exchanges, the veteran diplomat acknowledged that language barrier is often an obstacle but that both sides are working to overcome it. "The language difference is something that is still being worked on by both sides, and that will definitely help strengthen understanding and coexistence, especially among today's and future generations," Anguiano said. CANBERRA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The Australian government has been buoyed by growing interest in thermal coal from Southeast Asian countries, saying the increased demand demonstrated how bright the future was for Australian coal. Australia's Resources Minister Matt Canavan made the comments on Tuesday in the wake of a new 0report which showed Asia's coal import demand was set to increase by 400 million tonnes (Mt) by 2030. The study, undertaken by Commodity Insights, also showed Australia's thermal coal exports had grown from 112Mt in 2007 to 200Mt by 2018, largely due to the increased population and industrialization in Southeast Asia. While Japan was by far the biggest importer of Australian coal over this period, China and South Korea had become rapidly growing markets. Canavan said the figures countered any claims that the future of the Australian coal industry was in doubt. "Not only is world demand for coal growing but importantly that demand is focused on the Asian region, which we supply," Canavan said in a statement on Monday evening. The demand is coming from new coal-fired power plants that require high-quality coal and that's what we specialise in. Those that want to move away from coal are denying Australians future opportunities for jobs and increased wealth. Australia produced 430Mt of coal in 2017 which made it the world's fifth-largest manufacturer behind China, India, the U.S. and Indonesia. According to the study, a failure by Australia to meet international coal demand could lead to higher emissions as lower quality products may be used. Meeting that demand means exporting coal from existing basins, and also from new basins as they become viable in the future supported by strong demand growth, Greg Evans, the director of the Minerals Council of Australia, told News Corp on Monday. The use and exportation of coal over other renewable energy sources has been debated in Australia in recent years as opposition parties look to develop a transition strategy away from coal. "Reality is catching up with the great lie that we can continue to export coal in an age of climate change," the Australian Greens Party Resources and Energy spokesman, Jeremy Buckingham, said earlier this month. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 10:51:16|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close HAVANA, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Officials from east China's Zhejiang Province signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Cuban authorities here on Monday to boost trade ties and economic collaboration. The document was signed by Wu Guiying, chairperson of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, and Ruben Ramos, vice president of Cuba's Chamber of Commerce (CCC). It calls for cooperation "in the areas of business development, bilateral exchange and information, investment and commercial activities designed to benefit both sides." Ramos told Xinhua that the MOU is "very useful" because it opens "new perspectives" on expanding exchanges with China. Zhejiang is one of China's most dynamic provinces in terms of economic development, said Ramos, underscoring the importance of the document. Havana has signed some 30 similar agreements with different Chinese provinces. Ramos also said the sectors in which cooperation is growing strongly and Chinese partners would invest correspond to Cuban priorities, such as the agricultural and food sectors, mechanical and electrical industries, and biotechnology, among others. "We coincide in many areas." Wu said many Zhejiang companies that are keen to do business in Cuba have attended past trade fairs in the Caribbean island nation. To deepen mutual understanding, the two sides kicked off a two-day business forum on Monday with representatives from 32 Zhejiang companies and Cuban firms to explore cooperation potential. "We hope to take advantage of this forum to promote mutual visits and the exchange of information between Cubans and industrial and commercial companies in Zhejiang, increase economic cooperation projects and achieve greater mutual benefit," Wu said. According to Wu, Cuba has become a tourist destination for Zhejiang residents, and more Cuban goods, such as tobacco, rum, sugar, seafood, biotechnological products and others, have appeared in the daily life of Zhejiang people. Besides bilateral meetings over business opportunities, the Chinese delegation is set to tour Cuban companies, factories and other sites of economic interest in Havana. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 11:06:17|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, June 18 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres believes that children must not be traumatized by being separated from their parents, his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said on Monday. His voice was just one of many raised in objection to a recently introduced U.S. policy that separates children from parents who were arrested for illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States.X Some 2,000 children taken from parents have been put in detention centers in southwestern U.S. states, U.S. officials said. "As a matter of principle, the secretary-general believes that refugees and migrants should always be treated with respect and dignity, and in accordance with existing international law," said Dujarric in a statement. "Family unity must be preserved." The statement, read out by the spokesman at a regular press briefing, is seen by many as directed against the United States. While the spokesman denied that the statement was directed specifically against the U.S. policy, he admitted that the secretary-general was concerned about the situation along the Mexico-U.S. border. "What the secretary-general would like to see at all borders is to see people being treated with dignity and respect for their rights, that people claiming asylum be given proper hearings," Dujarric said. "This is not a position that he has specifically against the United States. This is a principled position that he has for the way refugees and migrants are treated the world over." "We've all been following what's going on at the border and I think he is concerned as anyone else," said Dujarric. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein was more direct, saying he was deeply concerned about the U.S. policies that "punish children for their parents' actions." The Geneva-based UN official cited the American Association of Pediatrics' earlier comments calling the U.S. approach a cruel practice of "government-sanctioned child abuse" which may cause "irreparable harm" with "lifelong consequences." "The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable," said Zeid. He called on the United States to immediately end the practice of forcible separation of these children, and encouraged the government to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Measures should be taken to "ensure that the fundamental rights of all children, whatever their administrative status, will be at the center of all domestic laws and policies," he said. U.S. President Donald Trump continued to blame Democrats in Congress for their inaction over the arrests of parents and separate detention of their children. On Monday, he repeated in tweets his accusation. He said in one tweet: "It is the Democrats' fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime. Tell them to start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration. Change the laws!" He misspelled "border." In another tweet the U.S. president said: "Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change! This is why we need more Republicans elected in November. Democrats are good at only three things, High Taxes, High Crime and Obstruction. Sad!" However, various media outlets in the United States have "fact checked" his allegations, refuting them, with some going beyond merely calling them "untruths" to actually call them "lies," saying it is only his administration's policy that has caused the separation and detention of children. But U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defended the president on Monday. "We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do," she said in a speech in New Orleans, Louisiana. "Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get-out-of-jail-free cards." The spokeswoman for first lady Melania Trump said on Sunday that "Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle (in Congress) can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform." As of Monday, three former first ladies have criticized the Trump policy. Laura Bush, the wife of former Republican President George W. Bush, wrote on Twitter Sunday: "I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart." Hillary Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, spoke out on Monday at a women's group in New York City, calling such family separation "an affront to our values." "Jesus Christ said, 'Suffer the little children unto me' not 'let the little children suffer,'" she said in response to members of the administration citing biblical justification for her opposition to the policy. Michelle Obama, the wife of former Democrat President Barack Obama, on Monday endorsed Laura Bush's Sunday tweet, saying, "Sometimes truth transcends party." WASHINGTON, June 18 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Defense Department said on Monday that it has suspended all planning for the joint military drills with South Korea in August. Pentagon spokesperson Dana White said in a statement that the decision was "consistent with President Trump's commitment in concert with our Republic of Korea ally." "The United States military has suspended all planning for this August's defensive 'wargame'," she said, adding that no decisions have been made over subsequent military exercises. The suspended drills refer to an annually-held South Korea-U.S. military exercise slated for August with the full name of Ulchi Freedom Guardian. Pyongyang has denounced them as a rehearsal for northward invasion and a violation of the spirit of the Panmunjom Declaration issued during the inter-Korean summit in late April. The most-anticipated move came a week after the historic summit in Singapore between U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). They issued a joint statement after the meeting, promising to build new bilateral relations and work toward the "complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." In response to it, Trump said the United States would stop war games with South Korea "unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should." He also said the drills were "very expensive" and "provocative." According to the Pentagon statement, the suspension has "no impact on Pacific exercises outside of the Korean Peninsula." It said there would be a meeting at Pentagon later this week attended by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton. Last year's Ulchi Freedom Guardian went on for 11 days and about 17,500 U.S. military personnel participated. The other major U.S. exercises with South Korea, codenamed Key Resolve and Foal Eagle, took place earlier this spring. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 12:21:30|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close RIO DE JANEIRO, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Brazil hopes the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) to conclude free trade negotiations with the European Union (EU) in the next months, the foreign ministry said Monday. According to an official statement, Brazilian President Michel Temer on Monday travelled to Paraguay for the biannual Mercosur meeting with confidence that progress will be made on the bloc's agenda with the EU. "We hope to conclude (the negotiations with the EU) in the next months. Afterwards, there will be work to refine legislation, but we wish to resolve the larger parameters as soon as possible," Paulo Estivallet, the ministry's deputy secretary for Latin America and the Caribbean, said in the statement. Mercosur, the trade bloc comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, and the EU have been negotiating a free trade agreement for about two decades. Brazilian Foreign Minister Aloysio Nunes said on Wednesday that Mercosur and the EU could have a free trade agreement ready to be signed before Brazil's presidential elections in October. European officials also said earlier this month that talks with the Mercosur were nearing a close. During the meeting in the Paraguayan city of Asuncion, the South American trade bloc also seeks an agreement with the Pacific Alliance, another Latin American trade bloc composed of Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. Both groups currently have various agreements in force, but want to increase business opportunities. According to Estivallet, the Mercosur meeting also wants to demonstrate that its members are united in their intention to expand commercial negotiations and increase the bloc's standing on the international stage. "For us, protectionism is certainly not the solution and not the route we wish to take," he added. At the Mercosur meeting in Paraguay, the host country will pass the six-monthly presidency of the bloc to Uruguay. BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The United States' newly imposed controversial tariffs on imports from countries and regions including China and Europe have sounded the alarm to global observers. Though Washington claims that the extra tariffs were allegedly meant to safeguard its "national security," international experts believe the U.S. protectionist move is merely undermining the global trade order and development. On Friday, the United States announced additional tariffs of 25 percent on Chinese imports worth approximately 50 billion U.S. dollars. In response to that, China decided to impose additional duties of 25 percent on U.S. products worth about the same value. The U.S. unilateral additional tariffs are a selfish, narrow-minded, irresponsible act which does no more than to destabilize and slow down world economic growth and development, because the China-U.S. trade relationship is the world's biggest bilateral one, said Wilson Lee Flores, analyst and columnist of Philippine Star. U.S. President Donald Trump "is creating a trade war. A trade war by definition reduces global economic prosperity," said Subhomoy Bhattacharjee, a consultant with the Research and Information System for Developing Countries based in Delhi, India. China also can "create hurdles for American investment, raising costs all round," Bhattacharjee said. British newspaper The Guardian reported quoting British advisory firm Oxford Economics as saying that the tariffs came "at a bad time for the world economy." Oxford Economics calculates that the short-term economic impact of the dispute is likely to be modest, lowering growth by a fraction of a percent in both China and the United States. "However, such numbers still matter, and the increased uncertainty and risks will weigh on business confidence and investment, especially cross-border investment. Thus, there will be an impact on growth, in China, the U.S. and elsewhere, at a sensitive time for the global economy," it noted. The United States' attitude seems irrational and contrary to previous commitments and treaties, said Daniel Haber, president of France Pacific Consultants and former adviser to the French minister of foreign trade. The trade war that Trump is initiating now will be a global one, and probably, all countries will retaliate, taking a bit of time to do it, said Haber. The main and largest impacts of the U.S. tariff measure will be overwhelmingly negative, said Alessia Amighini, co-director of the Asia Center and a fellow at the Institute for the Study of International Politics (ISPI) in Italy. "There is a great economic interdependence between the European Union, China, and the U.S. and this will only make trade more expensive and slow economic growth for the countries involved," said Amighini. "I say it's a net loss for Europe ... overall it's bad for Europe and there's a thought that Europe might even be a secondary target with this. Maybe the U.S. intention is to weaken trade for Europe as well as for China," Amighini added. The U.S. capriciousness in its trade dialogue with China has shown "the unreliability of the United States at the world level and the demise of its international responsibility," said Fabio Massimo Parenti, associate professor of international studies at the Institute Lorenzo de' Medici, Florence, Italy. "With Trump, the U.S. has been defending protectionist and economic nationalist policies. Despite China's willingness to deal with trade issues through dialogue and diplomatic negotiations, the Trump administration is pushing for customs and sanctions," said Umit Alperen, advisor and analyst with Ankara Policy Center based in Ankara, Turkey. Trump's unilateral aggressive stance harms U.S. credibility in the international system, and his irresponsible policies keep the United States away from being the leading country in the international order, he said. Also, Trump's protectionist trade barriers and his withdrawal from international trade agreements will hurt the United States and American people and increase prices for American consumers, he said. Trump's unilateral protectionist trade policies could help plunge the United States into a great depression as that happened in 1930, which "will also negatively affect the whole world, which is in a state of economic interdependence," he added. (Xinhua reporters Yang Ke and Dong Wencheng in Manila, Hu Xiaoming in New Delhi, Xu Tian in Paris, Wen Xiqiang in London, Chen Zhanjie in Rome, Zeynep Cermen in Istanbul contributed to this story.) Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 12:41:33|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close ASUNCION, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Uruguayan President Tabare Vazquez on Monday called on member countries of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) to renew trade talks with China. During a Mercosur summit in Paraguay's capital Asuncion, Vazquez said the group needs greater trade integration with other regions, especially as 18 years of negotiations toward a free trade agreement with the European Union have yet to yield a deal. China is the leading trade partner for Mercosur, said Vazquez, adding the bloc should not hamstring its members from expanding their trade ties. "We humbly request that we proceed (with talks with China) and if for some reason one of us cannot, we should discuss it among ourselves to find a solution that, without damaging Mercosur, takes into account member countries, because integration is not a cage nor should it be," said the head of state. In November 2012, a Mercosur trade mission traveled to Shanghai and met with Chinese government representatives there, recalled Vazquez, but the visit was more of a diplomatic mission, and led to no concrete agreements. The sub-regional bloc Mercosur, which includes Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, was founded in 1991. YANGON, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar's Yangon Regional High Court has dismissed appeals by suspects, maintaining most of the original charges against them in the murder of U Ko Ni, prominent legal advisor of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD), local media reported Tuesday. U Ko Ni, who was also an advocate, was gunned down at the Yangon international Airport on Jan. 29, 2017 upon his arrival back from a senior leadership program in Indonesia's Jakarta. Gunman U Kyi Lin was charged by district court with principal murderer for shooting U Ko Ni to death, while U Aung Win Zaw and U Zeya Phyo were accused of plotting the assassination with the gunman as co-conspirators. The court also charged U Kyi Lin and U Aung Win Zaw with allegedly carrying illegal arms. Another suspect U Aung Win Tun, who was granted bail, was charged with allegedly concealing the criminals. However, the High Court on Monday allowed revising the original charges against U Zeya Phyo and also approved revising the charges against U Aung Win Zaw, exempting him from the case, claiming that he was not responsible for the illegal possession of guns under Arms Act. The hearing of the trial has been going on for more than a year. During the incident, the gunman also killed a taxi driver who had tried to capture him before he was arrested by the police and bystanders. U Aung Win Zaw, the second suspect, was blocked and captured 12 hours after the incident on Thanlwin Bridge in Hpa-an, Kayin state on Jan. 30, 2017 when he ran away from Yangon to Hpa-an. The prior two suspects confessed the involvement of the third suspect, Aung Win Khaing, who is still escaping. The appeal to the high court to revise the charges was made while the district court was hearing the accounts of suspects and defense witnesses. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 12:56:36|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close BUENOS AIRES, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Argentina's central bank BCRA on Monday announced a series of measures to stop the peso's tumble against the U.S. dollar, after the national currency hit a record low last week. Under its new President Luis Caputo, the bank announced it will inject 400 million U.S. dollars in cash into the financial market between Monday and Tuesday. In a statement the bank said the amount is separate from the 7.5 billion U.S. dollars to be made available starting Wednesday, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is scheduled to disburse the first tranche of a 50-billion-U.S.-dollar loan to the Argentine government to help shore up its economy. "This operation will be carried out independently," the BCRA said. The bank also announced a package of measures, including raising reserve requirements for banks by 5 percentage points. The other measures call for reducing the level of dollar holdings at banks from 10 percent to 5 percent; strengthening treasury bills by offering investors more flexible conditions; and creating a new mechanism for selling dollars during times of exchange rate volatility. The new system involves a central bank auction that will last just 15 minutes. Participants will be able to put in up to three bids each, for "a minimum amount of one million U.S. dollars each and in increments of one million U.S. dollars," the bank said. The measures are the first to be announced since Caputo took over the agency following the resignation last week of Federico Sturzenegger. The remaining half of the IMF's first 15-billion-U.S.-dollar disbursement will be used to beef up the country's international reserves, Argentina's Treasury Minister Nicolas Dujovne said Friday. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 13:06:38|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close NEW DELHI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- At least six children were killed and one was rescued Tuesday after a car carrying them plunged into a roadside pond in India's eastern state of Bihar, officials said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 13:56:49|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close Nepalese Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli speaks during an exclusive interview with Xinhua prior to his visit to China at the Prime Minister's residence in Kathmandu June 18, 2018. Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli is to visit China from Tuesday to Sunday. (Xinhua/Sunil Sharma) by Santosh Ghimire KATHMANDU, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Nepal wishes to enhance cross-border railroad connectivity, infrastructure development, trade, investment and tourism cooperation with China under the framework of Belt and Road Initiative, Prime Minister of Nepal, K.P. Sharma Oli, said here ahead of his visit to China. The Nepali Prime Minister, who is embarking on a five-day visit to China on Tuesday, told Xinhua during an interview that his country is fully committed to implementing the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative signed with China two years ago. His government has formed a mechanism to implement projects under the Belt and Road Initiative and various ministries are working for the same target, the prime minister said. The prime minister said that the Nepali side wants to discuss with the Chinese side cooperation modality in implementing projects under the Belt and Road framework during his visit to China. "Our two countries have common views on the concept of Trans-Himalayan Multi-Dimensional Transport Network. Based on this broad framework, we want to seek cooperation with China on cross-border connectivity of railway, road, transmission lines and other related areas for mutual benefit," Oli said. Nepal has viewed the Belt and Road Initiative as an important development initiative, he said. The prime minister said Nepal has recently proposed some projects in the areas of roads, railway, energy, transmission line for cooperation with China under the B&R framework. While talking about Nepal's ties with China, Oli said that the Government of Nepal attaches great value to its relationship with China. "China is our immediate neighbor. Our two countries share a long history of friendly relations which are multifaceted and deep rooted." "Our relations are based on the solid foundation of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence," he said, reiterating the country's long-standing one-China policy. He vowed not to allow the use of Nepali territory in engagement of any activities against China. "On its part, China has always respected Nepal's sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence. It has been providing valuable assistance for Nepal's development efforts. Harmonious co-existence founded on the principle of good neighbourliness characterizes our relationship. It has always been our sincere desire to maintain friendly relations with our neighbors," he said. The prime minister said that he is looking forward to having substantive discussions with the Chinese leaders on ways and means to further widen and deepen bilateral relationship and areas of cooperation. "I am hopeful that my visit will provide an excellent opportunity to build on our existing friendly relations further and expand the scope of our overall bilateral cooperation," he said. He believed that China can help a lot in his country's socio-economic transformation as Nepal is marching ahead to achieve economic prosperity at present. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 14:01:51|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close ULAN BATOR, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia will hold a ground-breaking ceremony for its first oil refinery in southeastern Dornogovi Province later this month, the country's Foreign Ministry said Tuesday. The ceremony will take place on June 22 in Altanshiree soum (administrative subdivisions) of Dornogovi province, attended by Mongolian Prime minister Ukhnaa Hurelsukh and Indian Minister for Home Affairs Rajnath Singh, among other officials, according to the ministry. The project was financed by a loan from India, which was announced during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the country in 2015. The refinery will have a processing capacity of 1.5 million tons of oil per year and will annually produce 560,000 tons of gasoline and 670,000 tons of diesel fuel, as well as 107,000 tons of liquefied gas. The refinery, to be ready for operation by 2022, is expected to boost Mongolia's gross domestic product by 10 percent. Mongolia currently exports crude oil to China while importing petroleum products from Russia. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 14:11:52|Editor: Liu Video Player Close People participate in the dragon boat race in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on June 16, 2018. A dragon boat race was held on the Ljubljanica River in Ljubljana on Saturday. The event was organized by the Confucius Institute of the University of Ljubljana to celebrate Chinese traditional Duanwu Festival, or Dragon Boat Festival. (Xinhua/Wang Yaxiong) by Xinhua writer Qu Junya BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The Dragon Boat Festival was celebrated among overseas Chinese communities worldwide over the weekend with the specialty food Zongzi, but not necessarily a dragon boat race, both widely seen as its logos. Dragon boat racing is officially a competitive sport played under rules set by the International Dragon Boat Federation. This is something beyond what the Chinese people could imagine some 2,500 years ago when they took boats to distribute feed in a river trying to keep fish from disturbing the permanent rest of patriotic and beloved poet Qu Yuan, who chose to die along with his doomed country. The move inspired a water sport and a rice food, and accidentally,changed the face and the name to be known abroad of an old Chinese festival focusing on health and epidemic prevention -- the 5th day of the 5th month of a Chinese lunar year which coincidentally marks the death anniversary of Qu. A SPORT THAT HAS GONE GLOBAL The Dragon Boat Festival this year fell on June 18. However, a dragon boat race nowadays takes place any time in a year in several countries. It is one of Britain's fastest growing water sport as well as a highlight in London's cultural calendar. On June 3, the 23rd edition of the annual London Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival entertained 10,000 visitors. Hundreds of players, among them teenagers, elders, amateurs and corporate employees, of 33 teams from across Britain paddled vigorously to the beat of each team's own drum and amid stormy cheers from the bank, competing for six cups at London's Regatta Center. "I have never, ever experienced anything like it. I think it is amazing. I found it is really interesting, but honestly, I do not know much about it," Stephanie Ann, a local visitor coming with her family, told Xinhua. On the sidelines, live music, traditional Chinese lion dances, and an Asian food market are among the diverse cultural activities contributing to the biggest dragon boat races in Europe. In the United States, dragon boat racing is popular in cities including San Francisco, Kansas City and Boston. In New York City, it has become the largest local summer event. The 28th annual Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival in New York is scheduled for Aug. 11-12, and more than 200 well-trained teams will participate. "I'm captain and drummer, we have a new steerer this year and we are moving into using the fiber glass boats instead of the timbre boats for the race," Julia Chesler told Xinhua after a three-hour team training recently on the Meadow Lake, the race venue. A FESTIVAL GOES FURTHER WITH DRAGON BOATS Still, somewhere, the old-fashioned dragon-headed boats strongly suggest a cultural background, indicating a close link of the sport with China. "It was quite a good experience...I will remember it because it is something we associate with Chinese culture," said Din Musovic, a high school student of the champion team from the June 9 race held in Croatia's capital Zagreb to mark the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival. At least, the dragon boat's unique shape is eye-catching. On Saturday, a dragon boat sailed in a canal running through downtown Aveiro in northern Portugal, interesting many people. The sailing proved to be the most dramatic part of the local Dragon Boat Festival celebrations. City official Catarina Barreto praised the celebrations co-hosted by the Confucius Institute at the University of Aveiro, saying they brought together the traditional cultures of Portugal and China and called for more. Uganda saw the 2nd edition of its Dragon Boat Festival on Saturday on the shore of Lake Victoria. It turned out to be a big event with barbecues, kite flying, live music, Chinese and Ugandan food, performances of Chinese waist drums and Ugandan folk dance. Its opening ceremony was attended by Uganda's Vice President Edward Kiwanuka Ssekandi and a visiting Chinese official. "I'm sure this Dragon Boat Festival will be an avenue to make Ugandans and Chinese (migrants) live more happily together and cooperate better," Ssekandi said, adding that the dragon boat race integrated elements of the two countries' traditional cultures. Addressing the opening ceremony, Wang Yang, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said dragon boat racing embodies traditional Chinese values such as mutual benefit, seeking harmony in diversity, and working in unity and cooperation. FAMILY-MADE ZONGZI Traditional Chinese festivals can always be tasted, and the Dragon Boat Festival is no exception. Zongzi, a glutinous rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo or reed leaves in cone- or pyramid-like shapes, is the special treat and delicacy on the festival table. It was purely good luck that led Frank, a German visitor who only gave his first name, into Lao Sze Chuan in downtown Chicago on Sunday, who ordered for friends a debuted special offer by the Chinese restaurant. It was a Zongzi stuffed with pork and duck egg yolk amid rice. "It's really a good combination of flavors, I really enjoyed it... It's worth a shot," he commented. "I was actually quite surprised." The restaurant said guests consumed more than 280 pieces of Zongzi in less than three hours. But for Richard Hennessy, it was more than a pleasing dining experience -- he took the invitation to make Zongzi with the help of cooks. Hennessy believed the Zongzi he made was the star of the night. "It's a great fun. Now we can go home and practice some more," he said. Although modern life facilitations enable the Zongzi made in China to be only a few clicks away, restaurant owner Tony Hu plans to make Zongzi-making a Dragon Boat Festival routine. "Chinese food is the easiest way for them to know China, and cut short their distance with Chinese people," said Hu. Zongzi has been a food mostly family-made in China, and many Chinese learn the knacks of making it from their parents. It is a good example to show traditional Chinese values -- the cooking activity calls for collaboration among family members, with its results shared by all. For many Chinese, making Zongzi never fails to evoke a feeling of being at home. "On a festival like this, we want to help with the homesickness of Chinese living abroad, and introduce traditional Chinese culture to people here," said Zuqi Su, co-owner of Chinese restaurant Jasmine in downtown Manhattan, New York, which offered a Zongzi making workshop on Saturday and Sunday. Anirudh Singh did his homework on Chinese culture before participating in the restaurant's Dragon Boat Festival celebration. "The fishermen threw rice in the river to make sure the fish didn't eat Qu Yuan's body, right?" he said."I learnt all about it before I came here." Do It Yourself was partly why the workshop charmed Thomas Hasler, an Austrian among the more than 100 participants. "I enjoy this so much," he said. "I eat out a lot at Chinese restaurants, but being able to make something has been so much more fun." (Xinhua reporters Bai Jie, Gao Lei, Liang Xizhi, Lyv Tianran, Qiu Junzhou, Ronald Ssekandi, Xu Jing, Yang Shilong, Zhang Gaiping, Zhang Mocheng and Zhang Yadong contributed to the story) Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 14:16:53|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close ULAN BATOR, June 18 (Xinhua) -- A total of 2,530 surveillance cameras have been installed in Ulan Bator, Mongolia's capital, over the last two months in an effort to clamp down on crimes, police authorities said Tuesday. According to the Metropolitan Police Department, the measure is part of the "let's install cameras" campaign aimed at preventing crimes and creating safe and healthy living conditions for citizens. The department said that over 28,780 individuals and entities participated in the campaign, and that the cameras, installed at places where crimes happen frequently, are worth 580 million Mongolian tugriks (nearly 240,000 U.S. dollars). Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 14:16:53|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislature opened its bimonthly session on Tuesday, with legislators scheduled to deliberate a draft law and amendment, as well as bills and reports. Legislators will review the draft e-commerce law and a draft amendment to the individual income tax law, at this session of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee. They will review draft revisions to the organic laws of the people's courts and the people's procuratorates respectively. The legislators will deliberate on a bill on the duties of the NPC Constitution and Law Committee, submitted by the chairpersons' meeting of the NPC Standing Committee, and a bill on maritime rights protection and law enforcement of the China Coast Guard, submitted by the Central Military Commission. They will consider a State Council report on 2017 final accounts and an audit report on the central government's 2017 budget, fiscal revenue, and expenditure, as well as examine and approve the central government's final accounts in 2017. They will review reports on national sci-tech projects, solid waste disposal, implementation of the Statistics Law, and top legislator Li Zhanshu's visit to Ethiopia, Mozambique and Namibia. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 14:26:54|Editor: Liangyu Video Player Close Nepalese Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli waves as he left for China at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal, June 19, 2018. Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli started a six-day visit to China on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Sunil Sharma) KATHMANDU, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Nepali Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli embarked on an official visit to China on Tuesday morning. During the visit, the two countries will sign several agreements and memorandum of understandings, according to the foreign ministry. Prior to the visit, in an exclusive interview with Xinhua, the prime minister said that Nepal wants to enhance cross-border railroad connectivity, infrastructure development, trade, investment and tourism under the Belt and Road Initiative. This is the first visit of the prime minister to China after he came to power in February. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 15:42:10|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close HEFEI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- When Zhang Laiyi first heard of a giant box that could purify her home's sewage, she didn't believe it. "I'd seen wastewater treatment plants on TV before, but I never expected to have one in our village. A long time ago, we actually used to irrigate our land with domestic wastewater," said Zhang, a resident of Yongting Village in east China's Anhui Province. "Since we no longer use wastewater for irrigation, it would drain directly into a ditch near our house. It smelled terrible, especially in summer," Zhang added. With more than 5,000 people in the village, the situation has improved since the first solar-powered sewage treatment facility came into operation in 2017. Connected by sewer pipes, Zhang's domestic sewage now flows directly into the box-shaped facility. "This facility can treat wastewater for around 40 households. The water quality in our village is much better now. We've even seen tadpoles and small fish around the facilities outflow pipe," said Chen Houquan, deputy town head. So far, the town has installed nine sewage treatment facilities, however, Chen said it's far from enough. "Residents live in scattered rural areas, our facilities can only cover 30 percent of them," he said. A sewage treatment plant is scheduled to be built in the town in 2020, and each village will be equipped with one sewage treatment facility, covering all the residents in the town. The General Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council unveiled a three-year action plan to improve the rural living environment in February. The plan said that improving the rural living environment is an important task for the country to accomplish its goal of building a moderately prosperous society by 2020. It has great significance to the well-being of farmers and harmony of rural society, according to the plan, which listed a number of key tasks in rural areas in the following years, including better garbage sorting, upgraded toilets, and improved residential sewage treatment and village management. In Datangyan Village of east China's Jiangsu Province, sewage treatment has significantly changed the lives of locals. "Rain usually spread sewage everywhere in the village before we had sewage facilities. Water quality, as well as the image of the village, were damaged by the smelly wastewater," said 69-year-old villager Chu Baixiang. "It helps bring back the beauty of our hometown," Chu added. So far, a sewage treatment network with two sewage treatment devices has been set up in the village. Detailed sewage treatment information including the flow process and daily sewage treatment capacity will be published everyday. Datangyan Village is under the jurisdiction of Yixing City, which is located in the Taihu Lake Conservation Area. As home to more than 200,000 households, the treatment facility has made a remarkable impact on the water quality of Taihu Lake, one of the country's largest freshwater lakes. Jiangsu Province issued a document in May suggesting the province speed up its construction of sewage treatment facilities, expand the sewage treatment networks and improve rural area management. China aims to improve its rural living environment by 2020. Villages should be clean and tidy, and residents should have enhanced hygiene and health awareness. KATHMANDU, June 19 (Xinhua) -- China contributed to around 87 percent of foreign direct investment (FDI) commitments received by Nepal during the first 10 months of the current fiscal year that began in mid-July 2017, Nepal's Department of Industry (DoI) said. According to DoI Statistics, Nepal received FDI pledge of 43.22 billion Nepali rupees (396 million U.S. dollars) from China against total FDI commitments of 49.87 billion Nepali rupees (457 million U.S. dollars) received by the Himalayan country by mid-May from the beginning of current fiscal year. Chinese investment pledges stand at 86.66 percent of total FDI commitment received by Nepal over the period. India came second with FDI pledge of 4.04 billion Nepali rupees (37.11 million U.S. dollars). The United States came third followed by Japan and South Korea. China had topped the chart in committing FDI in the last two consecutive fiscal years, 2016-17 and 2015-16, according to the DoI. Information Officer at DoI Durga Prasad Bhusal told Xinhua on Tuesday that they were seeing surging flow of Chinese investors at the DoI for registration of industries in recent years. "We feel it is just a part of growing Chinese investment across the world," he said. According to him, Chinese investment in Nepal has grown in the areas of hydropower, agriculture and tourism. During the first 10 months of this fiscal, the highest Chinese FDI pledge came into areas of energy-based industries. Mineral, manufacturing and agro- and forest-based industries came second, third and fourth in terms of receiving FDI pledges from China, according to DoI. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 15:52:15|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close By Ng Tze Yan, Cheng Lu and Wang Feng SHENZHEN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Before 2017, gastroenterologist Cheng Chunsheng had to inspect over 1,000 gastroscopy pictures to search for possible esophageal cancer symptoms, a cancer which appears in the food pipe. However, this painstaking process is no longer needed since the People's Hospital of Nanshan District in Shenzhen where Cheng works introduced "Tencent AIMIS", an AI medical imaging software released in August last year. "The AI system screens through each report and notifies the doctor if further inspection is needed," said Cheng. The system has significantly boosted his efficiency. A doctor's experience is the most important tool when diagnosing esophageal cancer at an early stage. Cheng said the system, developed by Tencent, would assist younger doctors in making more precise diagnoses. "It is often difficult for new doctors to judge whether an erosion or an ulcer is related to cancer. The AI application would recommend younger doctors to discuss the case with an expert instead," he added. Chen Guangyu, Tencent's vice president, said the program has scanned hundreds of thousands of gastroscopy images and is over 90 percent accurate in diagnosing preliminary esophageal cancer. "By accumulating mass data, the analysis is expected to become even more reliable," Chen added. Tencent AIMIS is now used in more than 100 hospitals across China. The company has also partnered with over 10 hospitals to build AI medical laboratories. Chen said that through the AI laboratories, Tencent AIMIS can be used to screen more diseases such as lung nodules, diabetic retinopathy, cervical cancer and breast cancer. Apart from Tencent, other internet corporations are also exploring the AI healthcare market. In 2016, Baidu launched Melody the Medical Assistant, an AI-powered chatbot designed to converse with patients and collect data on their conditions to save physicians time. ET medical brain, an AI healthcare system produced by Alibaba, can aid doctors in medical imaging, drug development and health management. China's State Council issued a guideline in April to promote health services using internet technologies. The guidelines on "Internet Plus Healthcare" say internet technologies should be used to offer medical and public health services, promote family doctor practices, improve drug supply and medical bill payments, and provide medical education. According to a 2017 industry report released by VCBeat Research, more than 80 companies are working on AI for the Chinese health market by developing products such as medical imaging devices, AI to analyze patients' clinical history and chatbots. Luo Xudong, head of People's Hospital of Nanshan District in Shenzhen, said the advancement of AI-assisted healthcare can help alleviate the problem of inadequate and imbalanced medical resource allocation in China. According to China Statistical Yearbook, every 1,000 Chinese urban residents had access to 3.92 physicians in 2016, while every 1,000 rural residents had only 1.59. "AI-powered medical products support remote medical consultation and training. Through an application, villagers in remote areas can also enjoy similar quality services as those urban residents," Luo said. Chang Jia, who manages Tencent's "internet plus" healthcare center, said that a small error in the medical field could be a matter of life or death. "The industry still positions AI as an assistant to the doctors. On one hand, medicine is a mix of humanities, ethics and science, and there are no easy answers; on the other hand, AI-based medical technologies remain in a fledging state and still need time to learn before they mature," Chang said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 15:57:18|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close ADEN, Yemen, June 19 (Xinhua) -- A wide-scale military operation supported by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was launched Tuesday to kick Houthi rebels out of Hodeidah's airport in western Yemen, a military official told Xinhua. The forces began an assault aimed at reclaiming both the civilian and military buildings in Hodeidah's airport, the military source said on condition of anonymity. UAE helicopters heavily participated in the operation and supported the Yemeni ground troops to advance further inside the large area of the airport, the military source said. The Houthi rebels showed stiff resistance and retaliated with heavy mortar shelling, tank and gunfire exchanges with the Yemeni troops. An anti-Houthi army commander told Xinhua by phone that "Houthis were granted a chance to withdraw from the airport and other areas without fighting but they refused and the deadline ended hours ago." After days of stagnant, residents told Xinhua that "huge explosions rocked the city and fighting intensified everywhere in Hodeidah." Black smoke plumes could be seen rising from the Hodeidah International Airport following the airstrikes, residents said. International humanitarian agencies have warned that an assault on Hodeidah would be a major disaster to the densely populated port city and would block aid supplies to more than 20 million people. Hodeidah is the only lifeline route of supplying imports and humanitarian aid to the northern Yemeni provinces. The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015. The war has killed over 10,000 people, mostly civilians, and forced 3 million others out of their homes. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 15:57:19|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close NEW YORK, June 18 (Xinhua) -- China might catch up with the United States, which has a lead so far in venture capital investment, entrepreneurs attending a forum said here Monday. At the "China's Innovation Revolution" forum, they gave examples of ride-sharing conglomerate Didi Chuxing and electronic device provider Xiaomi, both of which have attracted billions of U.S. dollars in equity financing. The forum was organized by Silicon Dragon, a Silicon Valley-based group providing insights to tech innovation centers. The event, drawing over 200 entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, was aimed at exploring investment opportunities in China and the United States. Hans Tung, managing partner of venture capital firm GGV Capital, said over the past decade, Chinese e-commerce has become an industry leader, both domestically and globally. Super apps, better service and higher efficiency driven by the go-and-get-it attitude of giants like Alibaba, Meituan and Xiaomi might spearhead a new growth wave, which would enable China to surpass the United States, Tung said. Xiaomi has set up localized production bases in India, where it has already emerged as the top hardware provider. The company has customized mobile phones for the Indian market, adapting to India's summer heat wave and unstable power supply. With China poised to become the world's biggest market for new energy vehicles, Baidu, the Chinese internet giant investing heavily in artificial intelligence and automatic driving technology, is aiming at a big share of the market, Nan Zhou, director of Baidu Capital, said. Experts also said China's rapidly emerging new start-ups could herald a shift in the technology and innovation landscape around the world and see China take the lead. HANOI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The first festival to honor Vietnam's brocade culture will take place from Dec. 27 to Dec. 30 in the country's central highland province of Dak Nong, organizers said on Tuesday. The four-day event will showcase finest handmade brocade products made by various ethnic groups in Vietnam. A fashion show, which introduces traditional and modern brocade designs, will be the highlight of the festival. On the sidelines of the event, a trade fair will take place to promote consumption of brocade products, besides many folk games and art performances, said the organizers. LOS ANGELES, June 18 (Xinhua) -- The Arizona State University (ASU) said Monday that it shares concerns with the family of Jiang Yue, a Chinese ASU exchange student who was fatally shot by an American woman after a rear-end crash in Arizona two years ago. Holly Davis' sentencing last Friday "underscored the family's concern that the charge of second degree murder and a prison sentence of 25 years did not do honor to the memory of this promising ASU sophomore," ASU President Michael M. Crow wrote to Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, adding that the university shares the concern. A Maricopa County Superior Court judge sentenced Davis to 25 years for second-degree murder with no possibility of early release. In January 2016, 19-year-old Jiang was driving when Davis, 32, rear-ended her car in the city of Tempe. Davis then got out of her car, walked up to Jiang's car and opened fire. The shooting killed Jiang, who was in the driver's seat, and injured six others after Jiang's car veered out of control and struck an oncoming car. Davis fled the scene and was later taken into custody by police. She has remained in jail since then. Prosecutors had sought to charge Davis on 14 criminal counts, including first-degree murder. She pleaded not guilty to all the charges at the initial hearing in February 2016, and entered into a plea agreement. Under the plea agreement, Davis would face a 25-year sentence and pay up to 250,000 U.S. dollars in restitution in exchange for pleading guilty to second-degree murder and dismissal of all other charges. Jiang's family protested against the plea deal strongly and family members told the media that the local attorney's office had not informed them before reaching the agreement. "Last week, I sent a letter to the sentencing judge stating that ASU 'stands with our Chinese students and their families' and that 'ASU supports the strongest penalty that the facts and our laws allow,'" Crow said in the letter. "The family feels that a charge of first-degree murder would have better reflected the seriousness of the crime, the value (Jiang) Yue's life had and the devastating impact of her death upon her loved ones. They also are concerned that a sentence of 25 years leaves open the possibility that (Jiang) Yue's murderer will one day be free to destroy another life, another family." Under the Arizona Victims' Bill of Rights, Jiang Yue's family was entitled to be heard at any proceeding involving a negotiated plea, and sentencing. However, her family said they did not see the e-mail the county attorney's office said it had sent about the upcoming plea agreement hearing. "We tried our best to fight for justice," Jiang's cousin Xu Xiang said after the trial last week. "We had no choice but to face it." The ASU president stressed that the university stands with the family in the belief that the spirit of the Victims' Bill of Rights requires more than mere technical compliance by e-mailing a notice. "This possible failing in our system is quite concerning. If Friday's hearing is any measure, the family's participation at the time of the plea agreement hearing might have changed the outcome. But even if it would not have changed anything, having that opportunity could at least have provided a small measure of comfort that their concerns were heard at a point when it might have made a difference," Crow said. ASU is one of the largest public universities in the United States by enrollment. It has seen a steady increase of Chinese students. Ten years ago, there were only 591 students from China. In the most recent school year, which ran from August 2017 to May 2018, there were 3,920 Chinese students. TOKYO, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Osaka Prefecture in western Japan continues to be rattled by tremors in the wake of a 6.1-magnitude quake that struck the region a day earlier killing four and injuring hundreds of others, local officials said Tuesday. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), dozens of aftershocks have continued through Tuesday with a significant tremor hitting again in the early hours of Tuesday morning and jolting the entire region again. The aftershocks made for an unimaginably uncomfortable night for the some 1,700 people who were forced to spend the night in emergency evacuation centers, local Osaka government officials said. Due to the continued seismic activity and heavy rainfall expected to hit the affected region through Wednesday, the JMA has deployed its emergency task-force to Osaka and nearby areas to help with recovery efforts and help prevent secondary damage. "Frequent seismic activity is continuing in the northern part of Osaka Prefecture. Strong tremors could have raised the risk of landslides or building collapse. People in such areas are advised to watch out for further seismic activity and rain," the JMA said in an earlier statement on the issue. Around 112,000 homes in the quake-hit region remain without gas, according to Osaka Gas Co., who said that gas supply will remain suspended until next Monday, while in some parts of the hard-hit cities of Takatsuki and Minoo hundreds of homes remain without water. Local authorities have dispatched water trucks to help with the water shortage in these areas, local authorities said. More than 370 people have been injured as a result of the powerful temblor and 334 houses have been damaged by the quake, the government said Tuesday. One of the lives lost in the quake was that of nine-year-old girl who was on her way to school when the quake struck at 7:58 a.m. local time on Monday (2258GMT Sunday). Due to the quake's shallow origin the intensity was violent enough to bring down the outer wall of her school's swimming pool and crush the young girl to death. A police investigation has been launched into the girl's death as there are suspicions that the wall did not meet safety standards meaning the girl's death could have been a result of negligence. An education ministry official said after investigating the scene of the fatal accident that the concrete wall may have contained reinforced steel that was too short to properly connect the concrete-block wall to its foundations. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 16:57:29|Editor: ZX Video Player Close SAN FRANCISCO, June 18 (Xinhua) -- China's southern city of Shenzhen hosted an event in Silicon Valley Monday to seek pragmatic collaboration with the birthplace of U.S. hi-tech innovation. Shenzhen and Silicon Valley can leverage each other's advantages in infrastructure and service-related conditions to foster collaborative innovation and create synergy, Wang Weizhong, secretary of the Communist Party of China's Shenzhen Municipal Committee, said. He made the remarks at the "China Shenzhen-U.S. Silicon Valley Investment Collaboration and Exchange Conference" hosted by the Shenzhen Municipal Government in Santa Clara, California. The event was attended by executives of Chinese and U.S. companies as well as entrepreneurs interested in launching startups in China. Wang briefed the conference on Shenzhen's business and industrial environment. Last year, Shenzhen's GDP reached about 330 billion U.S. dollars, making it China's third largest city in terms of economic size. It has fostered seven Fortune Global 500 enterprises and 14 unicorn startups, according to Wang. So far, 280 Fortune Global 500 companies have invested in Shenzhen and the number of listed companies has surpassed 380. "Silicon Valley is the world's capital of innovation. It has impacted the development of global hi-tech," Wang said. "Shenzhen will help innovators in Silicon Valley to transform their technologies into products at the fastest speed." As an innovation hub of China, Shenzhen's patent applications have accounted for nearly half of the total applications in China for 14 consecutive years, according to Invest Shenzhen, an organization assigned by the Shenzhen government to attract investment. The city will ensure intellectual property protection (IPP) and a fair and transparent business environment for foreign companies, Wang said. Shenzhen has so far issued 36 IPP policies. Chen Liren, global vice-president of Qualcomm, said seven of the 10 top smartphones are made in China, and five of these seven are made in Shenzhen. Qualcomm set up a research center in Shenzhen in 2015. Since then, the company has been working closely with the Shenzhen government, Chen said. "China and the United States are the world's leading innovators, which have (a) strong mutual and beneficial relationship," he said. Chinese Deputy Consul-General in San Francisco, Zhang Jianxin, said innovation and entrepreneurship will become a new highlight of sub-national cooperation between the two countries, which will contribute to the China-U.S. relationship. LUANDA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- A special envoy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on Monday briefed Angolan President Joao Lourenco on the DRC's upcoming elections. The DRC is committed to holding general elections on Dec. 23, DRC Foreign Minister Leonard She Okitundu told the press after meeting with Lourenco, who is also president of the Southern African Development Community's political cooperation, defense and security body. Filing nominations for the legislative and presidential elections will kick off on July 24, the minister added. Angolan Foreign Minister Manuel Augusto said it is in Angola's interests that the elections in the neighboring country take place without any constraints. Initially marked for Dec. 31, 2017, the DRC elections were rescheduled for Dec. 23, 2018 after the opposition demanded the departure of Joseph Kabila, whose presidential mandate expired in 2016. Constitutionally, Kabila is barred from running for another presidential term. The former president has said he would comply with the electoral calendar. According to media reports, dozens were killed in recent demonstrations in capital Kinshasa to stop Kabila from running for a third term. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 17:12:32|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BAGHDAD, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi Foreign Ministry Tuesday condemned the airstrikes that targeted the Iraqi paramilitary Hashd Shaabi forces fighting the extremist Islamic State (IS) militants near the border with Syria. "The Iraqi Foreign Ministry condemns the airstrikes on the forces that are fighting Daesh (IS group), whether in Iraq, Syria or anywhere else as this enemy (IS) threatens humanity," the ministry spokesman Ahmed Mahjoub said in a statement. Mahjoub said that targeting the Hashd Shaabi fighters, or any force fighting IS militants "only benefits the extremist IS militants to reorganize and to extend their presence in the area after it (IS group) has been defeated by the Iraqi forces." The Iraqi Foreign Ministry urges all the world states "to unite and stand together in the face of such extremist groups," as the ministry believes it is necessary for the anti-IS international coalition to coordinate with the forces fighting the terrorist IS group and support them, according to the statement. On Monday, the Iraqi Hashd Shaabi forces said that 22 of its members were killed and 12 others wounded in suspected U.S.-led airstrikes on its base inside Syria near its eastern city of al-Bukamal. The forces said the U.S.-led coalition aircraft fired two guided missiles at 10 p.m. local time Sunday night (2000 GMT) targeting a headquarters of the Hashd Shaabi's 45 and 46 brigades, which are tasked with protecting the Iraqi border with Syria from infiltration of IS militants. However, a U.S. military spokesman denied that the U.S.-led coalition aircraft conducted any strike in the area, saying "we're looking into who that could possibly be but it wasn't the U.S. or the coalition." On Dec. 9, 2017, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi officially declared full liberation of Iraq from IS militants after Iraqi forces recaptured all the areas once seized by the extremist group. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 17:17:34|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress (NPC) has begun reviewing a draft amendment to the Individual Income Tax Law at its bimonthly session that opened Tuesday. The draft amendment raises the minimum threshold for personal income tax from 3,500 yuan (about 544 U.S. dollars) per month to 5,000 yuan, or 60,000 yuan per year. This standard will also be applicable to those who have no domestic residence but receive an income from wages in China, as well as those who live in China but receive an income from overseas wages. The draft amendment adds special expense deductions for items like children's education, continuing education, treatment for serious diseases, as well as housing loan interest and rent. Entrusted by the State Council, Finance Minister Liu Kun told lawmakers at Tuesday's opening of the session that the revisions are aimed at implementing decisions by central authorities and ensuring a smooth individual income tax reform in accordance with the law. The revisions focus on content that is no longer suitable for China's continuing reform, Liu said, adding that the changes have taken people's rising consumption expenses into account. The changes are conducive to reducing tax burdens for taxpayers, raising people's income and boosting consumption, the minister said. The amendment defines resident individuals and non-resident individuals as two types of taxpayers. In addition, the length of time used to distinguish between the two groups will be adjusted to 183 days from the previous 365. "This will help establish tax jurisdictions and safeguard national tax rights and interests," Liu said. The amendment also adds an anti-tax avoidance clause, empowering tax authorities to adjust taxation in a reasonable way when individuals transfer property in violation of independent trading. Individuals will also be subject to the clause when they evade taxes in overseas tax havens or obtain improper tax benefits by organizing unlawful commercial activities. The individual income tax was the third major contributor to China's total tax revenue, following value-added tax and enterprise income tax. In 2017, China collected individual income taxes worth nearly 1.2 trillion yuan, about 8.3 percent of the total tax revenue. The current law has undergone seven revisions since it was enacted in 1980, when the original threshold for individual income tax exemption was 800 yuan per month. It was raised to 1,600 yuan in 2005 and 2,000 yuan in 2007. The current threshold is 3,500 yuan according to the revision made in 2011. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 18:07:50|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- China Tuesday welcomed the Afghan government's decision to extend a ceasefire with the Taliban, and appreciated its efforts to promote domestic peace. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang made the remarks at a routine news briefing when asked to comment on Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's announcement of an extension of the temporary ceasefire with the Taliban last Saturday. China appreciates the Afghan government's efforts to promote peace, welcomes the extension of the ceasefire, and calls on all parties in the conflict in Afghanistan to achieve reconciliation and peace through dialogue and negotiations, said Geng. "China firmly supports the Afghan-led and Afghan-owned inclusive reconciliation process, and is ready to work with the international community to continue to make constructive contributions for an early realization of peace in Afghanistan," Geng said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 18:12:51|Editor: ZX Video Player Close DAMASCUS, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The drums of war could be heard banging again in southern Syria as the Syrian army continued to send reinforcements to launch a wide-scale military offensive amid reports of failing Israeli-Russian talks to reach an agreement about the situation there, a pro-government newspaper said Tuesday. The pro-government al-Watan daily said the battle between the Syrian army and the foreign-backed rebels are inching closer, particularly in the western parts of the southern provinces of Daraa and Quneitra. It said the eastern part, in the countryside of Sweida province, is already witnessing battles amid the advance of the Syrian army in that part of the country. The situation in Daraa, near Jordan, and Quneitra, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, has been subject to negotiation by Russia, Israel and the United States. The deal was said to have focused on the withdrawal of Iranian-backed forces from areas in southern Syria, the evacuation of rebels from areas they control in Daraa and Quneitra, and the return of the army to border areas with Jordan and Golan Heights. While the talks have been ongoing since last month, the Syrian army has also been sending reinforcements to launch the offensive should the talks fail. The al-Watan newspaper said the Israeli-Russian talks had failed. The Israelis have recently demanded the withdrawal of Iranian forces from all of Syria, not only the southern part, while the Syrian government side said that the presence of the Iranian military experts and forces are not for negotiation. In a recent interview, Assad said the Iranian-Syrian relations are strategic and not subject to any settlement in the south, adding that the Israelis are trying to provoke and embarrass Iran through their demands. Assad charged that Israel was hindering the reach of a settlement for the situation in southern Syria as it supports the rebels in that area and prevents them from accepting to leave. On June 17, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Israel will take further actions against Iran and its allies in Syria to prevent them from establishing a military foothold near the border of the Israeli-occupied territories of Golan Heights. Netanyahu told the ministers that he had talked about that with Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over the weekend. "I reiterated our guiding principles regarding Syria. First, Iran needs to withdraw from all of Syria. Second, we will take action -- and are already taking action -- against efforts to establish a military presence by Iran and its proxies," he said. "We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria," he said, stressing that Israel could act both close to the border and deep inside Syria. So it seems that Israel's demand of the Iranian forces' withdrawal from Syria is one hurdle, and the second one is the Syrian demand for the U.S. forces to withdraw from the al-Tanf area in southern Syria as a prelude to any deal in southern Syria. The U.S. forces have been positioned in al-Tanf, near the Iraqi border, since 2014 and the Syrian government demands the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from that area. "The battle of the south has become closer than any time before and the Zionist occupation (Israel) will not be able this time to protect its mercenaries inside Syria as the army is determined to win the battle quickly," a Syrian military source was cited by al-Watan newspaper as saying. Meanwhile, Muhammad Majid al-Khatib, a commander in one of the rebel groups in Daraa, was cited by al-Watan as saying that a recent U.S.-British-Russian meeting about southern Syria has resulted in big differences, noting that the government forces will launch the offensive in southern Syria soon. It's worth mentioning that some of the aforementioned areas in southern Syria are included in a cease-fire agreement supported by Russia and the United States, but the decision to begin an offensive comes after the Syrian army wrested back control over the entire capital Damascus. The Syrian forces also offered a reconciliation deal for the rebels in southern Syrian areas, but the rebels turned them down. Also, some militant groups in southern Syria had pledged alliance with the Islamic State (IS), which explains the desire of the Syrian army to recapture those areas and end the cross-border threats on Syria. The situation in that part of the country is expected to be inflammatory, particularly as the United States warned last month that it would take "firm and appropriate" measures "to protect the cease-fire in southern Syria if President Bashar al-Assad forces moved against the rebels there. In its report Tuesday, al-Watan said the Syrian army started artillery fire against the rebels in the city of al-Hara in the northern countryside of Daraa and the surrounding areas coupled with similar shelling on the rebels' positions in Quneitra. Earlier this week, Syria's Defense Minister Ali Abdullah Ayoub visited Syrian military positions in southern Syria, which was read by observers as a message that the war will start soon in that region. A day earlier, state news agency SANA said the Syrian army foiled an attack by the militant groups on its military posts in Quneitra. On Tuesday, SANA said the rebels in the eastern countryside of Daraa fired several mortar shells on the residential neighborhoods in the adjacent Sweida city, which has remained relatively safe during the war in Syria. However, the countryside of Sweida has witnessed the war between the Syrian army and the IS militants. The local media said the Syrian army brought in more reinforcements to the countryside of Sweida as part of the military operations against IS. MOGADISHU, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Somalia has launched a new education curriculum for primary schools across the country to ensure access to quality education for its youthful population, a government official said. Hassan Mohamed Ali, the Director General of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Higher Education said the new curriculum will be implemented in the new academic year that begins in August. "We hope this new curriculum will make a positive input into the education of the Somali children," Ali said in a statement released by the AU Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) on Tuesday. The new curriculum was announced late Monday during celebrations to mark International Day of the African Child held in Mogadishu where the government vowed to work closely with development partners to ensure access to quality education for its youthful population. "The curriculum will be adopted for use in schools across the country, whether they are private schools or public schools," said Ali. He said children in Somalia have a right to education like their counterparts in other African countries, noting that the government will work tirelessly to ensure its population is well educated. Ali described education as the cornerstone for Somalia's development, urging ministries and government institutions to work together to improve schooling after decades of conflict. The International Day of the African Child is marked every year on June 16 and this year's theme "leave no child behind for Africa's development" is aimed at creating awareness on the importance of protecting the rights of children and ensuring both boys and girls have equal opportunities. ANKARA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Tuesday criticized a U.S. Senate decision to block delivery of F-35 jets to Turkey, describing it "unfortunate" and "regrettable." "The decision is an unfortunate move," Yildirim said in Turkey's western province of Izmir, adding that "Turkey is not without alternatives. Such attempts are regrettable and goes against the spirit of strategic partnership." The U.S. Senate on Monday approved a 716 billion U.S. dollar defense budget bill including an amendment prohibiting sales to Turkey of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin. The amendment claimed that Turkey's purchasing of the S-400 air defense system from Russia increases tensions and risks to the NATO alliance. It also demands the release of U.S. Pastor Andrew Brunson held in Turkey who faces terror charges. According to the amendment, U.S. President Donald Trump should certify that Turkey does not threaten NATO, purchase defense equipment from Russia or detain U.S. citizens. The bill still needs to be passed by the U.S. House and is not expected to become law until later in the summer, reported Daily Sabah. The first two F-35 jets are scheduled to deliver to Turkey by June 2, according to the F-35 project agreement. Earlier, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Turkey would turn to other markets if the United States does not allow it to buy F-35 jets. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 18:32:54|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) shakes hands with Bolivian President Juan Evo Morales Ayma during a welcoming ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, June 19, 2018. Xi Jinping held talks with Juan Evo Morales Ayma on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Li Xueren) BEIJING, JUNE 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and visiting Bolivian President Juan Evo Morales Ayma agreed on Tuesday that the two countries would establish a strategic partnership to promote greater development of bilateral relations. Xi pointed out that since the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Bolivia 33 years ago, their relations have continued to steadily develop and are currently the best they've ever been. China appreciates that Bolivia firmly adheres to the one-China policy, actively responds to the Belt and Road Initiative, and vigorously promotes the deepening of China-Latin America relations, said Xi. "We are willing to work with Bolivia to take establishing a strategic partnership between the two countries as an important opportunity to continuously deepen exchanges and cooperation in various fields, push bilateral relations to a new level and open up new prospects," Xi said. Xi stressed that China and Bolivia should be friendly partners of political mutual trust, firmly support each other on issues involving core interests and major concerns of both countries, and strengthen exchanges at all levels and in all fields. He said that the two countries should become development partners focusing on pragmatic cooperation, synergize development strategies within the Belt and Road framework, and jointly create a new model for cooperation in investment, trade and services. The Chinese side is open to importing more Bolivian farm and ranch products, he added. Both China and Bolivia are countries with ancient civilizations, said Xi, calling for mutual learning between the two countries and exploring the use of ancestral wisdom to better deal with today's problems. Xi suggested the two countries become strategic partners of multilateral coordination and continue to coordinate positions on United Nations affairs as well as major international issues such as sustainable development and climate change. He called on the two sides to jointly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of developing countries, build a new type of international relationship featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation and join hands in building a community of shared future for mankind. For his part, Morales said the Bolivian people are deeply impressed by China, admire China's development concept and achievements, and highly commend China's contribution to world peace and development and the building of a harmonious human society. "China's support and aid to Bolivia's economic and social development never attaches any political conditions," said Morales, adding that Bolivia trusts China and expects a closer strategic partnership in the future. He said Bolivia hopes to jointly build the Belt and Road and to strengthen practical cooperation in various fields with China, so as to promote China-Latin America cooperation and make greater contributions to world peace, development, fairness and justice. Xi said that the essence of China-Latin America cooperation is South-South cooperation, featuring mutual aid and support, complementary advantages, and cooperation with win-win results. He said China has always worked with the Latin American countries in line with the principle of equality, mutual benefit and common development, and the Belt and Road Initiative has provided a new platform for China-Latin America cooperation. "China stands ready to work with Bolivia to push for sustainable and steady development of the China-Latin America comprehensive partnership of cooperation," Xi said. After the talks, the two heads of state signed a joint statement on establishing the strategic partnership between the two countries and witnessed signing of documents on jointly building the Belt and Road, and cooperation in other fields. Prior to the talks, Xi held a welcome ceremony for Morales at the North Hall of the Great Hall of the People. KABUL, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Afghan law enforcement agencies have arrested 16 people in connection with drug-related crimes in three provinces, authorities said Tuesday. "Afghan Counter Narcotics Police and detective security organization arrested 16 people on suspicion of transportation of drugs and narcotics in Kabul, Nangarhar and Farah provinces over the past seven days," the Counter-Narcotics Criminal Justice Task Force of Afghanistan said in a statement. Those among the detainees included a woman and a foreign national. The cases were sent to the Counter Narcotic Justice Center, a special Afghan court for jurisdiction of major drug cases, for further investigation, the statement added. Police also seized 31 kg of heroin, 940 kg of opium, 271 kg of hashish, 150 kg chemical elements that has been used in making heroin, 19 mobile phones and four different types of vehicles from the suspects, according to the statement. The security forces also confiscated local and foreign currencies from the suspects, totaling around 1,700 U.S. dollars. YANGON, June 19 (Xinhua) -- As many as 7,400 people were left homeless by a flash flood in Myanmar's southern Mon state, triggered by torrential rainfall at weekend, said the Information Ministry Tuesday. About six towns - Mawlamyine, Mudon, Kyaik Ma Yaw, Thanbyuzayat, Yay and Paung in the state - were severely affected by the flood and strong wind, the worst in several decades. The flood destroyed pagodas, schools, houses, bridges and roads and the loss is initially estimated at 644 million kyats (473,602 U.S. dollars), the authorities said. Continuous heavy rainfall is forecast in the state until the third week of June, according to the Meteorology and Hydrology Department. The flood victims are being accommodated at 38 temporary relief camps in the state. Nationwide flooding has submerged a total of over 200,000 acres (81,000 hectares) of cultivated area including 50,000 acres of sesame fields and over 2,500 acres of paddy fields among other crops, said the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation. Since early June, flooding hit Magway, Sagaing, Ayeyawaddy, Rakhine and Mon regions and states nationwide, of which Sagaing region was the worst affected, according to local 7-Day News Tuesday. HARARE, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Police in southern Zimbabwe have banned the carrying of dangerous items in a bid to minimize political violence as the July 30 general elections approach. The state-controlled Herald newspaper reported Tuesday that the officer commanding Beitbridge Francis Phiri had on Monday published a notice prohibiting the possession of offensive weapons between June 7 and Sept. 7. "No person shall carry or display in a public place thoroughfare, whether openly or by concealment, the following weapons: catapults, machetes, axes, swords, knives, knobkerries, daggers or any traditional weapon. "Any person found in possession of such weapons shall be guilty of an offense," he said. Phiri, however, said that no incidents of politically motivated violence had been reported around Beitbridge, which is Zimbabwe's gateway to South Africa. He said the police had agreed with representatives of all political parties in the district that it was important to maintain peace during the election period. Zimbabwean police always ban the possession of dangerous weapons during elections to curb violence as different parties square off. Despite favorable pre-election polls, President Emmerson Mnangagwa's Zanu-PF party anticipates a stiff challenge from a coalition of opposition parties running under the banner of the MDC Alliance. KAMPALA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- As the world is set to commemorate World Refugee Day on June 20, new figures by the UN refugee agency show that the refugee population in Uganda increased by 44 percent in 2017 compared to the previous year. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Global Trends Report 2017 released on Tuesday, attributes the increase to new arrivals of refugees from neighboring South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) pushing the number to 1.4 million refugees. The report showed that in addition to 1,037,400 refugees from South Sudan, Uganda also hosted sizable refugee populations from the DRC (226,200), Burundi (38,200), Somalia (25,000), and Rwanda (14,300). In sub-Saharan Africa, the report showed that the number of refugees increased by 22 percent (1.1 million people) during 2017, mainly due to the crisis in South Sudan, from where more than 1 million people fled to Sudan and Uganda. The report said with 6.3 million refugees, the sub-Saharan region hosted almost one-third of the world's refugee population. According to UNHCR most of the displacement is due to conflict, persecution, human rights abuses and food insecurity. ULAN BATOR, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The Northeast Asian Mayors' Forum-2018 concluded here Tuesday, with city heads of six countries sharing green development experiences and highlighting environmental and ecological issues. Mayors from 18 cities in six countries, including Ulan Bator, Beijing, Guangzhou, Moscow, Seoul, Busan and Tokyo, as well as more than 300 representatives from international organizations attended the two-day event. They discussed opportunities to cooperate and share experiences on improving air quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. "As a result of the event, we decided to establish the Secretariat of the Northeast Asian Mayors' Forum with permanent activities, and share information and experiences on how cities are addressing their challenges," Ulan Bator's Mayor Sunduin Batbold said at the closing ceremony of the forum themed "The development of low-carbon cities: Improving air quality and reducing greenhouse gas emissions". "Also, we decided to hold the forum once every two years in one city selected by participating cities and once in every four years in Ulan Bator," he said. South Korea's capital Seoul was selected as the host city of the next forum, which will take place in 2020. Ulan Bator initiated the Northeast Asian Mayors' Forum in 2014. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 19:13:08|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close RAMALLAH, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Secretary General of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Saeb Erekat said Tuesday that the United States is trying to depoliticize the Palestinian cause and turn it into a humanitarian issue. His statements came through the official Palestinian radio station Voice of Palestine against the backdrop of Washington's fundraising for humanitarian projects in Gaza. Erekat said "Washington has entered a very dangerous game by replacing the national Palestinian rights with humanitarian projects." He accused Washington of working to get rid of the Palestinian leadership due to its adherence to the Palestinian national rights and demanding Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state. Earlier, Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt will visit the region for talks about the U.S. Middle East peace plan without meeting with Palestinian officials. The envoys are set to meet with leaders of Gulf countries to raise around half a billion U.S. dollars for vital projects in Gaza Strip, in several proposed projects, particularly in the field of energy. The newspaper said that Kushner and Greenblatt will also hold talks with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. The aim, said the report, is to create a positive clout ahead of announcing the U.S. peace plan. Palestinians have rejected U.S. ideas since President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on Dec. 6, 2017. The U.S. facilitated negotiations between Israel and Palestinians collapsed in 2014. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 19:18:09|Editor: zh Video Player Close Photo taken on June 19, 2018 shows Indonesian search and rescue team during operation for the sunken boat in North Sumatera Province, Indonesia. Rescuers continued search on Tuesday for at least 94 people who are still missing after a boat capsized in Lake Toba of North Sumatra in western Indonesia a day earlier, officials said. (Xinhua/Albert Damanik) JAKARTA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Rescuers continued search on Tuesday for at least 94 people who are still missing after a boat capsized in Lake Toba of North Sumatra in western Indonesia a day earlier, officials said. A statement obtained by Xinhua from the national police headquarters said the number of the missing is expected to rise as families keep reporting their missing family members. The statement said one person was dead and 18 others rescued, which is lower than the number reported on Monday by head of provincial disaster agency Riadil Luebis, who said 19 were rescued. Kapal Motor Sinar Bangun boat sank at 5:30 p.m. local time (1030 GMT) on Monday after departing Simanindo port in Samosir district and was 1.61 km away from its destination of Tigaras Parapat of Simalungun district. Seven boats with over 25 personnel in each of them were dispatched to recover and rescue the victims, but the operation was hampered by unfavorable weather condition, said Mahler Tamba, head of operational unit at disaster management office in Samosir district. "The search is being undertaken at the scene and is being expanded by up to 2 kilometers from the spot," Tamba told Xinhua via telephone from one of the searching boats. He said the cloudy and rainy weather, among others, was hindering the rescue mission. "Hopefully tomorrow the sun will shine brightly," he added. Tamba said several bags, a jacket, an identity card and other items have been found in the scene. Taking boats or ships is a favorable way of transportation in Indonesia, a vast archipelagic nation, but lack of standards of safety has often caused accidents. A US Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II jet fighter is seen exhibited during the 2018 Berlin International Air Show (ILA) in Schoenefeld, Germany, 25 April 2018. (DPA photo) ANKARA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Tuesday criticized a U.S. Senate decision to block delivery of F-35 jets to Turkey, describing it "unfortunate" and "regrettable." "The decision is an unfortunate move," Yildirim said in Turkey's western province of Izmir, adding that "Turkey is not without alternatives. Such attempts are regrettable and goes against the spirit of strategic partnership." The U.S. Senate on Monday approved a 716 billion U.S. dollar defense budget bill including an amendment prohibiting sales to Turkey of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin. The amendment claimed that Turkey's purchasing of the S-400 air defense system from Russia increases tensions and risks to the NATO alliance. It also demands the release of U.S. Pastor Andrew Brunson held in Turkey who faces terror charges. According to the amendment, U.S. President Donald Trump should certify that Turkey does not threaten NATO, purchase defense equipment from Russia or detain U.S. citizens. The bill still needs to be passed by the U.S. House and is not expected to become law until later in the summer, reported Daily Sabah. The first two F-35 jets are scheduled to deliver to Turkey by June 2, according to the F-35 project agreement. Earlier, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Turkey would turn to other markets if the United States does not allow it to buy F-35 jets. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 19:43:15|Editor: ZX Video Player Close CANBERRA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Both Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Chinese Ambassador Cheng Jingye said on Tuesday that it was time to put aside any mistrust in bilateral relationship and work toward a more respectful and constructive accord. Turnbull, Cheng and Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop were among the speakers at the annual Australia China Business Council meeting, held in the Parliament House. The summit, which was aimed at promoting trade between the two nations, came at a difficult time in relations between Canberra and Beijing - partly caused by the Australian government's crackdown on the so-called foreign interference. Turnbull said the Australian media had sometimes overstated the tensions in the Australia-China relationship and he remained confident that the ties between the two countries would remain strong despite occasional and inevitable disagreements. "From time to time, there will be differences, and in terms of issues, particular issues, but the important thing is, we deal with them, as friends," the premier said at the parliament on Tuesday. "Mutual respect is the absolute key. That is what we undertake and I know that is what characterizes our relationship. "I am filled with optimism about the relationship, I think we should all be positive about it and recognize the strengths of the engagement and also note that sometimes in the media, there is always going to be, an emphasis on differences, on conflict, on problems. Overwhelmingly the relationship is strong and by any measure, getting stronger," he said. Ambassador Cheng said Australia and China should look to build mutual trust in order to eliminate the current "Cold War mentality." "The development of our bilateral relations has not always been smooth. Sometimes, there will be clouds, even rain and wind," Cheng said. "It is my belief that in order to disperse the clouds and achieve sustained and sound development in our bilateral relations, the two countries need to have more interaction and inclusiveness, with less bias and bigotry." The ambassador noted that China and Australia had many shared interests and the potential for future cooperation was huge, including trading services. Both countries stood for free trade and an open economy. "China never interferes in the internal affairs of other countries, let alone carry out infiltration of other countries. China's idea is to carry out equal cooperation with all countries, including Australia, to achieve mutual benefit and win-win outcomes." Foreign Minister Bishop in her speech said Australia and China shared a "comprehensive strategic partnership." "No two countries agree on every single aspect of foreign policy. It's how we manage those differences that counts," she said. "We're working closely with China on the international economic order." Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 19:53:17|Editor: yan Video Player Close Xi Jinping (R), general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Chinese president, holds talks with Kim Jong Un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), in Beijing, capital of China, June 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Ju Peng) BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and Chinese president, on Tuesday held talks with Kim Jong Un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), in Beijing. The two leaders had a candid and in-depth exchange of views on the current development of China-DPRK relations and the situation on the Korean Peninsula. They agreed to safeguard, consolidate and develop China-DPRK relations, and jointly push forward the sound momentum of peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula to make a positive contribution to safeguarding world and regional peace, stability, prosperity and development. BRUSSELS, June 19 (Xinhua) -- A European Union (EU) court on Tuesday ruled that French far-right leader Marine Le Pen must repay the European Parliament some 300,000 euros (346,454 U.S. dollars) that had been "unduly paid" to her assistant. The money was paid between December 2010 and February 2016 when Le Pen was a Member of the European Parliament, according to a press release of the General Court of the EU. The Luxembourg-based Court confirmed the European Parliament's decision to recover the fund "on the ground that she did not prove the effectiveness of that assistant's work." The European Parliament has complained that Le Pen used the fund, which is supposed to pay parliamentary assistants, to pay her own party assistant. In response to the rule, Le Pen tweeted that she has "provided the tribunal with 655 pieces of documents proving the work of my parliamentary assistant." "The court refuses to take this into account on the ground that I should have provided them to the European Parliament, which did not ask me to do so," she tweeted. She vowed to lodge an appeal to the Court of Justice of the EU. (1 U.S. dollar = 1.16 euros) Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 20:38:24|Editor: Yamei Video Player Close SUVA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Tonga held on Tuesday a UN regional meeting for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in the Pacific region to review progress in implementing the SAMOA Pathway, the dedicated program of action for SIDS. According to Matangi Tonga Online, Tonga's leading news website, speaking at the opening of the meeting in Tonga's capital city of Nuku'alofa, Tonga's Prime Minister Samuela 'Akilisi Pohiva said that the meeting was at a critical juncture in terms of their common interests in the sustainable development of their islands. It was the 5th year since the world came together in Samoa in 2014 and endorsed the SAMOA Pathway, it is critical that people recalled the mandate of that conference, he said. Fekitamoeloa Katoa 'Utoikamanu, high representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States, said that the meeting helps to chart the future direction of sustainable development for the island nations in the region and Tonga has played a critical role in this process. The three-day meeting, which ends on Thursday, will discuss achievements, challenges and gaps in the first five years of implementing the SAMOA Pathway. Participants are expected to agree on an outcome for accelerating implementation in the region. ABC/Randy Holmes; ABC/Image Group LALuke Combs and Lauren Alaina will celebrate Independence Day this year with a collection of the biggest stars in American music, as they perform on the 2018 edition of the PBS special A Capitol Fourth. Jimmy Buffett, The Beach Boys and The Temptations are also set to sing on the show, hosted by actor John Stamos. A cappella sensation Pentatonix and gospel legend CeCe Winans will also take the stage thatll be set up on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. The annual special will also commemorate Americas 242nd birthday with an impressive fireworks display, set against the Washington, D.C. skyline. You can tune in to watch A Capitol Fourth Wednesday, July 4 at 8 p.m. ET on PBS. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. : - . . - , , , , , , . . . , . - . : - , ? : , , . , 800 . - 500 , - 740 . , , - . : - , ? : , , , - . - , . , , - . . , -. : ? : , . , . , . , , , , . , , . , , . -. . , , , 20 30 . MOSCOW, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Council of Europe (CoE) Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland will pay a working visit to Russia from Tuesday to Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Tuesday. Jagland is scheduled to have talks Wednesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, it said in a press release. The parties will discuss further cooperation between Russia and the CoE, the situation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the CoE (PACE), and interaction between Russia and the European Court of Human Rights, it said. Russia joined the CoE in February 1996 to become its 39th member. Currently, it actively participates in the work of all the CoE bodies, except for the PACE. "Unfortunately, the parliamentary dimension of the CoE turned out to be hostage to a relatively small but well-organized group of representatives of anti-Russian forces," the ministry said. In April 2014, the PACE approved resolutions depriving the Russian delegation of the right to vote due to Crimea. Russia decided to leave the PACE in late 2015, repeatedly stressing that it will only return to the organization after the full restoration of its voting right. Moscow also suspended the payment of its contribution to the CoE in 2017, although it continues to fulfill all other obligations under the CoE conventions. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 20:43:27|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close SARI PUL, Afghanistan, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Up to seven militants and one security personnel were killed in fighting between Taliban and Afghan forces in the northern Sari Pul province on Tuesday, spokesman for provincial governor, Zabihullah Amani said. Taliban fighters, according to the official, launched massive offensives on several security checkpoints in Sayad and Sangcharak districts Tuesday morning and security forces retaliated, forcing militants to flee after suffering casualties. Amani also added that 12 more insurgents and four local police personnel were injured. The security forces would continue to target the insurgents elsewhere in the restive province, he said. Taliban militants are yet to make comments on the report. SKOPJE, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Macedonian Assembly on Tuesday adopted amid tensions and debates with 69 votes for "for" and 40 votes "against" a draft law proposal for ratification of a name deal with Greece to be brought in shortened procedure. The decision was opposed by the opposition VMRO-DPMNE deputies, who have been against the agreement with Greece since its announcement by the government. Following the speech of one of the co-coordinators of the opposition parliamentary group Dragan Danev, who said the agreement is counter-constitutional and that this government wants to introduce deputies to participate in this genocide of the legal state, VMRO's deputies left the session of the Assembly. The European Affairs Committee of the Macedonian Assembly will discuss the proposal and after passing to the Commission, the proposal will be sent again in the plenary session for final ratification. A protesting group went in front of the Assembly at a time when the debate about approving the bill on ratification of the name dispute settlement agreement was underway. The gathered citizens have called on the leader of VMRO-DPMNE, Hristijan Mickoski and his deputies to join the protesters. "We call on Mickoski to get out here and prevent the loss of the state. Zoran Zaev (Macedonian Prime Minister) cannot sell Macedonia. We call on you and we ask you to resign. If they think they can settle us as a nation, they are very wrong, "stated the organizers of the protest, appealing to other citizens to join as well. Meanwhile, the Assembly has continued the debate in a tense atmosphere where it is trying to pass the bill on ratification at first reading, then to go to parliamentary committees for discussion The protests against the agreement began on the day of the announcement of the agreement by Zaev, while Monday night they escalated with violence. Macedonian interior ministry reported that 17 people, including 10 police officers, were injured, while 26 people were arrested. According to the police's announcement, forcibly detained persons had pushed police barricades, stoned police and other pyrotechnic tools with an attempt to enter the Assembly. On Sunday Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov and his Greek counterpart Nikos Kotzias signed the final agreement on the name dispute settlement and the establishment of a strategic partnership between the two countries. Both countries have been working towards settling the decades-old dispute over the use of the name Macedonia in the past months. The issue began in 1991 when the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) declared its independence from Yugoslavia, choosing the name Macedonia, which is also the name of a northern Greek province. Athens is worried that the use of the same name by the neighboring state could lead to territorial claims. MANILA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The order of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to launch a crackdown on loiterers on Manila's streets is not a prelude to a nationwide martial law, presidential spokesman Harry Roque said on Tuesday. Duterte last week warned the "tambays", or the people who stay on the streets, that they are potential "trouble makers." He asked police to be strict with loiterers, saying if they refuse to go home, police can bring them home or bring them to bureau offices. Local police said more than 5,500 "tambays" have been arrested since Duterte's order on June 13. In a press briefing in Cotabato City in southern Philippines, Roque reiterated Duterte's statement that "martial law in the entire Philippines will become very complicated." "The president has absolutely no intentions right now unless there would be reasons to do so. He does not see any reason for now," Roque said, adding Duterte only wanted a strict enforcement of laws to prevent crime. As to the new directive, Roque explained that both the Department of the Interior and Local Government and the Philippine National Police are working on the guidelines for the implementation of the directive. The targets of the anti-loitering campaign are those who are drinking and gambling on the streets, said Roque, adding the public need not to worry since there are "built-in" guarantees to this directive. For example, the Bill of Rights assures its citizens of fair and just trial, he noted. Roque also said last week that "every Filipino deserves to be safe in the streets." "Duterte's 'tambay' remarks simply mean he wants a strict enforcement of city ordinances as part of making our streets safe from criminals and other unscrupulous elements." Metro Manila Police Chief Superintendent Guillermo Eleazar said loiterers were arrested for violation of various city ordinances, like curfew, drinking in public places or roaming the streets half-naked and smoking in public places. Others who were rounded up included illegal street vendors and those doing karaoke on the streets. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 20:53:34|Editor: ZX Video Player Close Li Zhanshu (R), chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), meets with Speaker of the Greek parliament Nikolaos Voutsis at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, June 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing) BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislator Li Zhanshu met with Speaker of the Greek parliament Nikolaos Voutsis on Tuesday in Beijing. Hailing the traditional friendship between the two countries, Li, chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), said all-round pragmatic cooperation under the guidance of leaders of the two countries has produced fruitful results, with joint construction of the Belt and Road playing a leading role. Li said China's NPC is willing to cooperate more with the Greek parliament to create a better legal and social environment for building the Belt and Road and promote the China-Greece comprehensive strategic partnership. Voutsis appreciated China's rapid development and said Greece is willing to actively participate in the Belt and Road Initiative and would like to promote cooperation between Europe and China, and he hopes both sides will have more legislative exchanges to promote friendly exchanges and pragmatic cooperation between the two countries. Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan also met with Voutsis on Tuesday in Beijing. "China and Greece are traditionally friendly countries," Wang said, noting that both sides understand and respect each other's core interests and major concerns, and are working to consolidate their strategic trust. Wang said China attaches great importance to its ties with Greece and is willing to make joint efforts with Greece to strengthen exchanges of various levels, expand pragmatic cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, and enhance people-to-people exchanges to benefit the two countries and two peoples. Voutsis expressed satisfaction with the high level of bilateral relations and said Greece respects China's core interests and is willing to cooperate more with China. Greece is willing to promote joint efforts between China and the EU to play a more important role in global and regional security and stability, as well as economic globalization. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 21:03:36|Editor: zh Video Player Close UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (C), Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ine Eriksen Soreide (L), and Somalian Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire, attend a joint press conference in Oslo, capital of Norway, on June 19, 2018. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday that more mediation is needed as the world is "dangerous" and the situation is "deteriorating." (Xinhua/Liang Youchang) OSLO, June 19 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday that more mediation is needed as the world is "dangerous" and the situation is "deteriorating." "As a matter of fact the number of countries with violent conflicts is the highest in the last 30 years," Guterres told a joint press conference with Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide and Somalian Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire on the margins of the Oslo Forum. "At the same time, taking as a reference 2005, when we had the lowest number of people being killed in battle, we have now tenfold that level, which means that the situation is indeed deteriorating in the world," he said. The UN chief noted that there are very strong reasons to do everything to prevent conflict and to do everything to solve conflict. "To prevent is not enough because conflicts are there, they need to be solved, and so mediation becomes an absolutely fundamental instrument in our action," Guterres said. More than 100 of the world's prominent armed conflict mediators, peace process actors, high-level decision-makers and eminent thinkers would gather on Tuesday and Wednesday at the Oslo Forum for informal discussions to reflect on current peacemaking trends and challenges. The overarching theme of the 2018 forum is "The End of Big Peace? Opportunities for Mediation". Participants would explore the challenges posed to peacemakers by the increasingly atomised and internationalised nature of ongoing conflicts. "Indeed, we live in a dangerous world where we see a multiplication of new conflicts, old conflicts that seem never to die, and conflicts becoming more and more interlinked and more linked to what is now a new threat of global terrorism," Guterres said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 21:03:36|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislature began discussing bills on two draft revisions of laws on the organization of courts and procuratorates to prevent intervention in judicial affairs. Lawmakers will deliberate the bills at a four-day bi-monthly session of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, which runs from Tuesday to Friday. According to the draft revisions of the organic laws of the people's courts and the people's procuratorates, any organization or people cannot require judges or prosecutors to do anything outside their jurisdiction. Judges and prosecutors should reject and make a faithful record of intervention in judicial affairs by officials and their meddling in specific cases, said the draft revisions, adding that violators would be punished based on the seriousness of their behavior. The draft revision to the Organic Law of the People's Procuratorates also legislates for procuratorates to urge administrative agencies to rectify their illegal exercise of functions and powers or inaction. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 21:08:39|Editor: yan Video Player Close This cartoon shows that China will raise the minimum threshold for personal income tax from 3,500 yuan (about 544 U.S. dollars) to 5,000 yuan per month, or 60,000 yuan per year, as proposed by China's top legislature in a draft amendment to the Individual Income Tax Law on Tuesday. (Xinhua/Xu Jun/Shi Manke) BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislature Tuesday began reviewing a draft amendment to the Individual Income Tax Law as part of efforts in the country to achieve fairer income distribution and common prosperity. The draft amendment, submitted for the first reading at a bimonthly session of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, raises the minimum threshold for personal income tax from 3,500 yuan (about 544 U.S. dollars) to 5,000 yuan per month, or 60,000 yuan per year. This standard will also be applicable to those who have no domestic residence but receive an income from wages in China, as well as those who live in China but receive an income from overseas wages. REVISIONS FOR CONTINUING REFORM Entrusted by the State Council, Finance Minister Liu Kun told lawmakers at Tuesday's opening of the session that the revisions are aimed at implementing decisions by central authorities and ensuring a smooth individual income tax reform in accordance with the law. "With this year marking the 40th anniversary of reform and opening up, the revisions focus on content that is no longer suitable for China's continuing reform," Liu said, adding that the changes have taken people's rising consumption expenses into account. The draft amendment adds special expense deductions for items like children's education, continuing education, treatment for serious diseases, as well as housing loan interest and rent. "This is the first time that special expense deductions have been introduced in China's individual income tax system," Liu said, adding that they adhere to the basic principles of individual income tax and are helpful for a fair taxation system. The changes are conducive to reducing tax burdens for taxpayers, raising people's income and boosting consumption. The amendment defines resident individuals and non-resident individuals as two types of taxpayers. In addition, the length of time used to distinguish between the two groups will be adjusted to 183 days from the previous 365. "This will help establish tax jurisdictions and safeguard national tax rights and interests," Liu said. The individual income tax was the third major contributor to China's total tax revenue, following value-added tax and enterprise income tax. In 2017, China collected individual income taxes worth nearly 1.2 trillion yuan, about 8.3 percent of the total tax revenue. CHANGES FOR EQUITY The current law has undergone seven revisions since it was enacted in 1980, when the original threshold for individual income tax exemption was 800 yuan per month. It was raised to 1,600 yuan in 2005 and 2,000 yuan in 2007. The current threshold is 3,500 yuan according to the revision made in 2011. According to the draft amendment, the previous method of taxing monthly income will be replaced with a new calculation which focuses on taxing annual income. "The new method will be fairer and more reasonable for those whose monthly salary varies," said Zhang Bin, an expert from the National Academy of Economic Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. If the revisions are adopted, those whose monthly salary ranges from 5,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan will see their tax cut by over 50 percent and those whose monthly salary ranges from 20,000 to 80,000 will see their tax cut by 10 to 50 percent. "The personal income tax reform is primarily a good news for middle to lower income groups as people with less income will see a larger tax reduction," said Li Wanfu, head of the institute of tax science of the State Administration of Taxation. FLEXIBLE TAXATION PREVENTS TAX EVASION The draft amendment also adds an anti-tax avoidance clause, empowering tax authorities to adjust tax rates when individuals transfer property in violation of independent trading. Individuals will also be subject to the clause when they evade taxes through overseas tax havens or obtain improper tax benefits by organizing unlawful commercial activities. "The addition of the clause is meant to let taxpayers pay their taxes in accordance with the law, which is better for the society," Li said. "Concerted efforts are needed to fix tax evasion loopholes and make taxation more open and transparent," Li added. LONDON, June 19 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May and her advisers were Tuesday working on a strategy as they prepare for a vote in the House of Commons in just 24 hours following a crushing defeat in the unelected House of Lords. A vote Monday night in the Lords over the wording of a "meaningful" vote on a Brexit deal, means MPs in the House of Commons will have a final vote on the issue on Wednesday. The former government Attorney General who paved the way for the vote in the House of Lords insisted Tuesday that rebel members of May's Conservative Party are not trying to collapse the government. Instead back-bench MP and pro-EU politician Dominic Grieve insisted that a meaningful vote in parliament on a Brexit deal may help avoid a crisis moment. The dilemma centers on what would happen if May and her Brexit team fail to strike a Brexit deal with the EU. Without parliament intervention, it could lead to no-deal bring struck, the so-called cliff-edge option, critics of May's approach to Brexit claim. Brexit supporters backing the government say if May's hands are tied by the British parliament, it is more likely to encourage Brussels to offer Britain a poor deal. The Guardian newspaper in London quoted Grieve Tuesday as saying one of the reasons he supported a House of Lords amendment was "precisely to avoid a situation where the government would immediately collapse," insisting he did not want to collapse May's government. Grieve said the new amendment, won in the House of Lords by a margin of 354 votes to 235, was a mechanism by which the House of Commons could express a view, without moving to a motion of no confidence in May's government, which could collapse the government. "All of us must hope this doesn't happen. But there is a risk it will happen, and if we have no deal at the very end it is a serious crisis," Grieve said. The new amendment, to be debated Wednesday, means ministers must update parliament by Jan. 21 if there is no prospect of a deal with the EU, and then have two weeks to return to the Commons with a statement on how the government plans to proceed. MPs would then be given a vote on whether to approve what action the government proposes to take. The House of Lords vote came on a day a debate took place at Westminster Hall to discuss a public petition to parliament signed by more than 200,000 people calling for the abolition of the unelected House of Lords. Conservative MP Paul Scully, who led the debate, said it called for a "Give the referendum on the abolition of the House of Lords. The petition stated: "The House of Lords is a place of patronage where unelected and unaccountable individuals hold a disproportionate amount of influence and power which can be used to frustrate the elected representatives of the people." He told MPs the timing of the debate was apt because at the other end of Parliament, the Lords were currently exercising "an incredible amount of influence and power over the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill", as they debated amendments rejected by the House of Lords. There was no vote on the petition, but it demonstrates the depth of feeling on the powers of the unelected chamber in the Houses of Parliament. VILNIUS, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Current state of relations between Lithuania and Ireland contributes to further cooperating and implementing modern decisions which are important to all Europe, President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins said Tuesday after meeting with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite. "I am grateful for a warm welcome and I would like to stress how much I value our meeting and discussions not only about the past, but also about future problems and cooperation potential," Higgins was quoted as saying by local media. The two presidents reviewed collaborative work in the European Union (EU). According to Grybauskaite, Lithuania and Ireland stand in the same line on migration, economic, security, and Brexit-related challenges facing the EU, and work together to resolve them. In Brexit negotiations, Lithuania and Ireland stand for closer ties between the EU and the United Kingdom, Lithuania's presidency said in a statement. "Lithuania supports Ireland's determination not to create new borders in Europe," Grybauskaite was quoted as saying in the statement. The two countries are also linked by a large Lithuanian community in Ireland, its third largest ethnic group. "Lithuanian community's contribution in Ireland is very positive as regards economy and culture," Higgins said. According to official statistics, around 40 thousand Lithuanian emigrants currently reside in Ireland. As of last year, the Lithuanian language has been included into the Irish school program as an optional second language. "Ireland is similar to Lithuania in size, interests and values. We see Ireland as a model example of responsible policies, successful economic development and ability to bring its emigrants back home," Grybauskaite said. In her words, Ireland, a country that has suffered a major wave of emigration, is now returning its compatriots from abroad and serves as an example to Lithuania as the Baltic country is also calling on its emigrants to come home. Three agreements on cooperation in science and educations are to be signed during the visit. According to the two leaders, there is also much potential for economic cooperation, especially in IT, FinTech and life sciences. SUVA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Officials from the member countries of the Pacific Islands Forum are meeting on Tuesday in the Fijian capital of Suva to discuss a possible new regional framework for crisis response. The new crisis response mechanism could replace the Biketawa Declaration, which was agreed to by Pacific Islands Forum leaders in 2000 following a coup in Fiji and amid ongoing ethnic tensions in Solomon Islands. Dubbed "Biketawa Plus", a new framework may include security issues beyond defence and law and order. Dame Meg Taylor, the forum's secretary general, said that the expanded concept of security is inclusive of human security, humanitarian assistance, prioritising environmental security and also regional cooperation around building resilience to disasters and climate change, so it is not just a military concept. The security of economic zones and fisheries were also included and led by the Pacific Community (SPC), she added. Meanwhile, Fiji's Minister for Foreign Affairs Ratu Inoke Kubuabola said that Fiji is currently undergoing a process of reviewing and revitalizing its national security and defence postures. "The new National Security Strategy will provide the basis for establishing strong, effective, and modern architecture and system that has the capacity and capability of responding to the evolving security needs of Fiji," Kubuabola said. He encouraged all forum members to develop national security policies that would serve as building blocks to securing their Blue Pacific and maintaining a region of peace, security and stability. The new declaration would enable forum members to work better collectively and forge a secure and stable environment for the Pacific people, he added. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 21:18:44|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Global traders were thrown into further uncertainty on Tuesday after the United States threatened to slap an additional 10-percent tariff on 200 billion U.S. dollars worth of Chinese goods. Washington's latest move drew a swift and firm response from China, which pledged to take comprehensive measures to retaliate and safeguard not only its own interests but also the free trade regime and common interests of all. Analysts said the United States' unilateral and protectionist moves would hurt developing and developed countries alike. The nations affected should jointly fight back and prevent Washington from sliding further in the wrong direction. CASUALTIES ON ALL SIDES The new threat, issued by U.S. President Donald Trump in a White House statement, came soon after Washington announced plans to impose additional tariffs on Chinese goods worth around 50 billion dollars. "Such practice of imposing extreme pressure and blackmailing is contrary to the consensus the two sides have reached through rounds of consultations, and disappoints the international community," a spokesperson of China's Ministry of Commerce said Tuesday. "The trade war waged by the United States is against both the law of the market and the development trend of today's world. It undermines the interests of the Chinese and American people, the interests of companies and the interests of the people all over the world," the spokesperson said. Umit Alperen, an analyst with Ankara Policy Center, a Turkish think tank, pointed out that developing countries need fewer trade barriers to sell goods and develop their economies. "Almost all developing countries are troubled by Trump's protectionist policies," he said. "I am sure that all developing countries will fight for multilateral trade against Trump's protectionist policies." Developed economies are also poised to suffer. Alessia Amighini, a senior associate research fellow at the Institute for International Political Studies in Italy, referred to the spillover effect on the European Union. "There is a great economic interdependence between the European Union, China, and the U.S., and this will only make trade more expensive and slow economic growth for the countries involved," Amighini said. "There are problems we can't even calculate yet. For example, you could have a European carmaker who makes some of their vehicles in China to sell in the U.S. market. How will that be impacted?" she said. The United States is not expected to emerge unscathed either. U.S. business news channel CNBC cited a 2015 study by Oxford Economics, a global research firm, as saying that 2.6 million jobs in the United States across a range of industries are supported by the U.S.-China trade relationship. U.S. equipment manufacturers and agricultural associations have voiced strong opposition to the Trump administration's decision to move forward with tariffs on Chinese goods, saying it will put over 1 million jobs in America at risk and inflict heavy losses on the U.S. side. COUNTERMEASURES NEEDED In the face of Washington's protectionist whims, "the affected countries should not sit quietly," V. Upadhyay, a professor of economics at the Delhi-based Indian Institute of Technology, said. "(They) should take countermeasures targeting the United States. In this case, China should retaliate and announce similar measures on ... U.S. goods." "If the affected countries do not announce countermeasures, Trump's confidence in his protectionist policy will only drastically increase in the days to come," he stressed. Daniel Haber, a former adviser to the French minister of foreign trade, called Trump's attitude "irrational and contrary to previous commitments and treaties." "China must be determined and fight back firmly in response to the capriciousness of the United States," added Haber, who is now president of France Pacific Consultants, a consulting firm. In its response to Washington's new threat, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said that if the United States loses its rationality and unveils another list of Chinese products for additional tariffs, China will have no choice but to take comprehensive measures combining quantitative and qualitative ones. China has repeatedly said it would hate to be engaged in a trade war with the United States, and wants to resolve bilateral trade issues through negotiations. However, it will fight back, if necessary, to safeguard the interests of its people. "America has thrown the first punch in a trade war where there will be no winners," Tom Watkins, an adviser to the Michigan-China Innovation Center, a nonprofit organization seeking to build business ties between the U.S. state of Michigan and China, said last week. "For the sake of the American and Chinese people, let's hope calmer heads prevail and we walk back these decisions and negotiate a mutually satisfactory settlement," he added. (Xinhua reporters Xu Tian in Paris, Chen Zhanjie in Rome, Peter Mertz in Los Angeles, Miao Zhuang and Xu Jing in Chicago, Hu Xiaoming in New Delhi, and Zeynep Cermen in Istanbul contributed to this report.) Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 21:23:47|Editor: ZX Video Player Close BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists said they have released the first remote sensing monitoring report on wheat pests and diseases globally, providing references for early warning and solutions. The report was conducted by scientists from the Vegetation Remote Sensing Research Team of the Aerospace Information Research Institute with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It shows the occurrence and development of typical wheat pests and diseases in ten wheat production countries in the Northern Hemisphere, namely China, Russia, France, Turkey, Pakistan, the United States, Germany, Iran, Uzbekistan, and the United Kingdom, during April and May. Quantitative monitoring of major wheat pests and diseases, such as wheat rust, fusarium head blight, and aphids, was conducted, including spatial distribution, damage levels and areas. The report was released on the website of the Crop Disease and Pest Monitoring and Forecasting System, which was developed by the research team to release remote sensing forecasting and monitoring of crop pests and diseases. Pests and diseases have become one of the most important factors restricting agricultural production and threatening food security. According to Huang Wenjiang, head of the team, remote sensing can effectively and objectively monitor the occurrence and development of crop pests and diseases on a large scale with the help of high-resolution satellites. "In the future, our team will release monitoring reports of pests and diseases for more crops including maize, rice, and soybeans to provide support for agricultural production," Huang said. NAIROBI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank on Tuesday urged African governments to embrace the use of public private partnerships (PPPs) in order to bridge their infrastructure deficit gaps. Johan Mistiaen, the program leader for Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions at the World Bank Group, told journalists in Nairobi that the financing gaps in infrastructure in the continent are so enormous that they cannot be met by public resources or international development organizations alone. "We are therefore urging African governments to strengthen their PPPs frameworks in order to crowd in private sector in terms of financing, expertise and solutions for the development of critical infrastructure," Mistiaen said during the launch of Kenya's PPPs Projects Disclosure Portal, a website portal that will provide timely data on the infrastructure investment deals with the private sector. The portal was developed jointly between Kenya and the World Bank. Kenya has a relatively well-developed legal framework for PPPs due to the enactment of the PPPs Act in 2013. Mistiaen said infrastructure investments help enhance economic growth, can reduce poverty as well as boost shared prosperity. He noted that the building-up and improving of the stock of infrastructure assets remains a key policy priority in Kenya, in the wider region, and indeed across the world. The World Bank official said there is massive scope and opportunities to enhance the provision of services through PPPs investments in roads, energy, agriculture, housing and health among others. Mistiaen said PPPs disclosures web portals have taken center stage as consensus develops globally that a major factor hindering projects implementation in countries around the world is a lack of awareness, transparency and accountability. "The portals will also help to create a level playing field for investors, promote objective criteria for PPPs procurement, reduce renegotiations in PPPs contracts as well as improve competition and help grow the PPPs market," he said. Henry Rotich, Cabinet Secretary in Kenya's National Treasury, said PPPs will play a role in the government development agenda as it seeks to roll out critical infrastructure and increase access to public services. Rotich said government policy has shifted towards a more citizen centric approach to development, with a keen focus on the well-being of each and every Kenyan. "This is reflected in the government's four key strategic areas which focus on health, manufacturing, affordable housing and food security," he said. He noted that PPPs will be key in enabling the government to achieve the Big Four Plan. Rotich said that in order to accelerate economic development, the government is cognizant of the fact that it will need to deploy both physical infrastructure and technical expertise across all 47 counties. "This is a capital-intensive venture that we cannot hope to finance through the national budget alone," he added. Kamau Thugge, the Principal Secretary in the National Treasury, said Kenya hopes to leverage both private sector funds and expertise in the delivery of essential services to the public. "In this regard, the government is keen on utilizing PPPs to ensure projects are delivered on time and on budget, without compromising on quality," Thugge said. BERLIN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- New orders in the German manufacturing industry have risen thanks to strong demand from international customers in April, preliminary figures by the Federal Statistical Office showed on Tuesday. According to the figures, price- and seasonally-adjusted orders in the key sector of the German economy were up by 0.8 percent in April compared to March 2018. The number of incomplete domestic orders hereby fell by 0.8 percent, while the outstanding stock of foreign orders rose by 1.6 percent. Broken down into manufacturing sub-categories, the data compiled by the Federal Statistical Office revealed monthly increases in the number of orders for both the producers of intermediate goods and capital goods by 1.8 and 1.0 percent respectively. By contrast, demand for consumer goods as measured by outstanding orders fell by 0.7 percent. The Wiesbaden-based government agency noted that German companies in the manufacturing industry could currently keep operating at the same capacity for 5.6 months to service outstanding orders without generating any new sales from April onwards. The figure was stable after having already measured a 5.6 month "reach" of outstanding orders under this definition back in March. Whilst only marking a relatively modest increase, the continued upward trend in total manufacturing orders comes in spite of growing concerns over a cooling of economic momentum in Germany. Experts at the German central bank recently downgraded their growth forecast for 2018 and warned that many companies are already operating at the limits of their productive capacities. The Frankfurt-based institute pointed to domestic skilled labor shortages and external risks posed by swelling trade conflicts in particular as being responsible for the dampened outlook. Speaking to Xinhua on Tuesday, however, Simon Junker, economic expert at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), highlighted that industrial growth rates would at least remain above average in the short-term thanks to an "ample order backlog." "Today's figures on the stock of orders emphasize that industrial production can be expected to increase markedly in the coming months, sustaining the overall economic expansion" Junker explained. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 21:33:53|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close TEHRAN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Iran will not accept Saudi Arabia's proposal to increase crude output of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Iran's representative to the OPEC was quoted as saying Tuesday. Iran, along with Venezuela and Iraq, is going to veto the Saudi Arabia's proposal at the June 22 OPEC meeting in Vienna, Hossein Kazempour Ardebili was quoted by Tehran Times daily as saying. If Russia also increases its production, that would be a breach of the cooperation agreement, Ardebili said. OPEC members are set to meet later this week in Vienna to discuss the proposal by Saudi Arabia to end the OPEC/non-OPEC deal to balance the oil market and increase the oil price. Last year, OPEC members unanimously agreed on the oil price of 60 U.S. dollars per barrel, by cutting oil output by 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) to 32.5 million bpd. Non-OPEC members including Russia, Oman and Mexico also agreed to cut 558,000 bpd off their production to stabilise the market. VILNIUS, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Lithuanian Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis on Tuesday denied suggestions by the country's parliamentary opposition that he would resign in the event that the parliament rejects his government's tax and pension system reform. "The government is ready to ensure that the reforms which were submitted to the parliament are implemented," Skvernelis said in an interview with national radio broadcaster LRT. "Those should step down are those who are not in favor of more than a million working people getting higher revenues due to the reform, who don't want Lithuania to become the most competitive country in the region," he added. Skvernelis expressed hope that the parliament would approve the tax reform by July 1 which would allow the changes to be introduced in 2019. In his words, taxes on workers' salaries would decrease by one billion euros (1.16 billion U.S. dollars) within three years due to the reform. The prime minister said last week that some of the government's proposed tax and pension system improvements are making slow progress through parliament, and hoped to reach a compromise and carry through the planned changes. Meanwhile, the chairman of opposition's Homeland Union - Lithuanian Christian Democrats (TS-LKD) Gabrielius Landsbergis said on Monday that it is "obvious" from public discussions among lawmakers from the ruling Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union (LZVS) that there are disagreements within the party. Stasys Jakeliunas, a member of LZVS and one of the main finance experts in the party, earlier criticized some parts of the planned tax reform on his Facebook profile. "If the main 'tax person' within the farmers' party does not agree with the planned tax changes, how can we speak about any compromise?" Landsbergis was quoted as saying by local website Delfi. "The Prime Minister repeatedly mentioned at various meetings that if he does not see a real support from the ruling majority, he would consider stepping down," the head of TS-LKD party added. Ramunas Karbauskis, the leader of LVZS and Member of Parliament, said the compromise proposals were drafted after relevant discussions at the parliamentary committees last week. "In essence, we all agree with the Cabinet's position regarding the essential principles of the tax reform: wage-related taxes in Lithuania must be the smallest among the Baltic States, the tax system has to be made clearer and more socially just. Therefore, there are no reasons for parliament to stop the measures suggested by the government," Karbauskis was quoted as saying by news agency Elta. TOKYO, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Osaka Prefecture in western Japan continues to be rattled by tremors in the wake of a powerful quake of 6.1 magnitude that struck the region a day earlier. The quake has killed five people and injured hundreds of others so far, local officials said Tuesday. The fifth fatality as a result of the powerful quake was confirmed by local police as a 66-year-old man was found dead at his home in the hard-hit city of Takatsuki in Osaka Prefecture. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), dozens of aftershocks have continued throughout Tuesday, with a significant tremor hitting again in the early hours of Tuesday morning and jolting the entire region again. The aftershocks made an uncomfortable night for the some 1,700 people who were forced to spend Monday night in emergency evacuation centers, local Osaka government officials said. The number of evacuees, as of Tuesday evening, stood at more than 1,000 people, according to local authorities. Due to the continued seismic activity and heavy rainfall which is expected to hit the affected region through Wednesday, the JMA has, in an unprecedented move, deployed its emergency task-force to Osaka and nearby areas to help with recovery efforts and prevent secondary damage. "Frequent seismic activity is continuing in the northern part of Osaka Prefecture. Strong tremors could have raised the risk of landslides or building collapse. People in such areas are advised to watch out for further seismic activity and rain," the JMA said in an earlier statement on the issue. Around 110,000 homes in the quake-hit region remain without gas, according to Osaka Gas Co., which said that gas supply will remain suspended until next Monday. As a result, shoppers have been flocking to supermarkets and convenience stores to stock up on bread and food that can be microwaved, local media reported Tuesday. In some parts of the hard-hit cities of Takatsuki and Minoo, hundreds of homes also remain without water. Local authorities have dispatched water trucks to help with the water shortage in these areas, local officials said. More than 380 people have been injured as a result of the powerful temblor and at least 470 houses have been damaged across four prefectures by the quake, the government said Tuesday. One of the lives lost in the quake was 9-year-old Rina Miyake who was on her way to school when the quake struck at 7:58 a.m. local time on Monday. Due to the quake's shallow origin, the intensity was violent enough to bring down the outer wall of Miyake's school swimming pool and crush the young girl to death. A police investigation has been launched into the girl's death as there are suspicions that the wall did not meet safety standards, meaning the girl's death could have been a result of negligence. An education ministry official said after investigating the scene of the fatal accident, the concrete wall may have contained reinforced steel that was too short to properly connect the concrete-block wall to its foundations. BERLIN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- German companies are increasingly concerned about a dampening of growth prospects in Italy and Spain, a study by the Association of the German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) found on Tuesday. According to the study, recent political developments in Italy and Spain were seen as posing a potential threat to the ongoing economic recoveries of the two Eurozone countries. The findings were based on a survey among German companies operating in Southern Europe, which was conducted by the DIHK's foreign branches in Italy, Spain, Greece and France. In Italy, the controversial fiscal plans of the new coalition government formed by the Lega Nord and Five Star Movement parties was cited as creating significant unease on behalf of German companies, with presences in the Eurozone's third largest economy. "Fiscal discipline and efforts to lower public debt are being put on the backburner (by the newly-inaugurated cabinet), undermining the international competitiveness of Italy as a base for production", the DIHK commented on the development. Amongst others, the governing cabinet led by prime minister Giuseppe Conte in Rome wants to introduce a basic minimum income and slash income taxes in spite of Italy's already high level of public debt at 132 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017. Although the Italian economy is currently experiencing a phase of moderate growth again, 59 percent of respondents consequently indicated that economic framework conditions posed the greatest risk to their business models. Similarly, German companies operating in Spain drew attention to uncertainty posed by recent political upheaval as a source of concern. The DIHK argued that it was too early to tell whether the new prime minister Pedro Sanchez would continue along a path of structural reform and fiscal consolidation which has witnessed a return to strong GDP growth rates (plus 3.1 percent in 2017) in Spain during recent years. The DIHK further highlighted the unresolved political conflict between the Catalan regional and Spanish central government. By contrast to growing uncertainty in Italy and Spain, German firms polled in France and Greece were more upbeat about their future prospects. DIHK pointed out that respondents had offered widespread praise for the reformist course adopted by French president Emmanuel Macron in France and the Eurozone as a whole. In Greece, falling unemployment, faster growth and the nearing end of the country's European bailout program in July also inspired more confidence on behalf of German companies. The study further noted that a majority of respondents in all of the four countries assessed by DIHK indicated that they anticipated an improvement of business conditions in the short term. Speaking to Xinhua on Tuesday, Juergen Matthes of the Cologne Institute for Economic Research, also emphasized that for the time being the Eurozone was still experiencing a "broad-based period of economic strength." According to Matthes, this circumstance at least in part also owned to "comprehensive economic policy reforms" which Southern European countries had underwent since the 2007/08 crisis. "Policymakers must not squander these successes", the expert warned. HARARE, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwe's main opposition MDC Alliance on Tuesday decried the delay by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) to give it a copy of the voters' roll. This comes after some candidates and non-governmental organizations have since been issued with the roll in preparation for the July 30 vote. ZEC released the voters' roll which contains 5.6 million registered voters last Friday. MDC Alliance leader Nelson Chamisa tweeted Tuesday that they had made a request to ZEC but were still to get a copy of the voters' roll four days after its release. "We still don't have the voters roll. Our people have been told to wait 48 hours. We are struggling to understand why ZEC is frustrating our attempts to access this important document," Chamisa said. The opposition party and others have also complained about ZEC's failure to release the final voters roll before the nomination courts sat on June 14 as required by law. ZEC chairperson Priscilla Chigumba said they could not meet the deadline because they were unable to complete data cleaning on time. Chamisa, who is President Emmerson Mnangagwa's main challenger, has threatened that no elections will be held if ZEC fails to meet its demands for electoral reforms. His party has also accused Mnangagwa's ruling ZANU-PF of planning to steal the election through systematic rigging and denying other political parties access to information. However, Chigumba said Monday nothing short of a catastrophic natural disaster can stop the general election as the law requires the country to proceed with polls after the president proclaims the dates. "The first thing to take note of is that once the president has proclaimed the election date there is nothing short of an earthquake which can stop the election," Chigumba said. "So whether candidates scrutinize the voters' roll, whether they see anomalies in it, whatever the anomalies are or whatever legal recourse that they have will not stop the election." Mnangagwa has promised to deliver a free, fair and credible election which will be observed by Western observers for the first time since 2002. Chigumba said at this stage of the electoral process, parties could only gather evidence to challenge the outcome of the election. She said ZEC will in a few days time publish the names of all successfully nominated candidates and thereafter issue them with free copies of the voters' roll. A total of 23 candidates have registered to contest the presidential election, the highest number since Zimbabwe's independence in 1980. SOFIA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Some 75 percent of the agreement on Britain's exit from the European Union (EU) has already been negotiated, Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva said here on Tuesday. In the first phase of the negotiations, it was agreed to guarantee the rights of all European citizens, a topic that was a priority for her country, Zaharieva said at a discussion about the impact of Brexit on the EU and Bulgaria. An agreement has also been reached on Britain's financial commitments, with London participating in the EU budget by the end of the current seven-year programming period -- 2020, Zaharieva said. The border between Ireland and Northern Ireland remained a serious issue, she said. Due to Brexit, the UK would leave 750 agreements with the EU, and this would undoubtedly affect all spheres of public life, Zaharieva said. "It is very important to ensure predictability and security for EU citizens and businesses," said Zaharieva, who is also Bulgaria's deputy prime minister. According to Zaharieva, the EU-UK relations should not be limited to a free trade agreement. Cooperation should be sought in security, foreign policy and defense, as well in the social sphere, with a focus on labor mobility, culture and education, she said. ZAGREB, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Major creditors of Croatia's troubled company Agrokor unanimously endorsed a settlement deal here on Tuesday. The settlement has to be approved by local court within 15 days. If approved, creditors will meet again and vote on the deal before the deadline on July 10. According to the deal, Russian Sberbank will own 39 percent of the new company, Russian VTB Bank eight percent, Croatian banks 12 percent, while the rest will be owned by the U.S. fund Knighthead and other creditors and suppliers. "It was one of the biggest restructuring processes in Europe and it was extremely successful for Croatia," Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic told reporters. Still, there are some who are not happy with the settlement process, and one of them is Adris, an important Croatian company that did not accept the agreement of the creditors. "Adris cannot support the agreement that is neither fair nor just. The legality of the entire procedure is questionable. Time will show how much this settlement is in the Croatian national interest," the company said in a press release. A representative of the Russian Sberbank Sergey Volk expressed satisfaction with the process of restructuring Agrokor at the end, saying it was a very complex business. Agrokor is the largest producer and food retailer in southeastern Europe, and it employs 60,000 people across the region. Revenues in 2015 were about 15 percent of Croatian GDP. In January 2017, the founder and owner of the company, Ivica Todoric, asked the state's help because he could not get new liquidity loans, but the Croatian government rejected it and Agrokor was facing bankruptcy. On April 6, 2017, the Croatian Parliament adopted a special law that allowed the current settlement. The founder of the company is in exile in London and awaiting a court decision to be extradited to Croatia where he is charged for financial crimes and numerous economic malversations. The estimated value of Agrokor Group is 21.2 billion kuna (3.3 billion U.S. dollars), and the total debt until April 2017 was 43 billion kuna (6.7 billion U.S. dollars). BERLIN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Audi chief executive officer (CEO) Rupert Stadler wants to testify before judicial authorities following his recent arrest over the German diesel emissions scandal, the Munich II State Prosecution office confirmed on Tuesday. A spokesperson for the state prosecution office told Handelsblatt newspaper that Stadler was "willing to talk" at a still undefined date. Stadler was taken into police custody on Monday. The prosecution office subsequently informed press that an arrest warrant had been delivered to the CEO because of a danger of collusion posed by the suspect. The Audi CEO and another unnamed senior manager at the company are both suspected of committing fraud and "indirect false certification" in the European marketing of diesel vehicles, which were fitted with illicit defeat devices to understate their actual Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) emissions. German investigators believe the luxury car maker has sold at least 210,000 diesel vehicles with illegal emissions-cheating software in the United States and Europe since 2009. According to prosecutors, Stadler must have been aware of the illicit practices following the first revelations in the United States back in 2015, but still refused to halt sales of affected vehicles in Europe thereafter. The prosecution office was unwilling to reveal the name of the prison into which Stadler had been taken into custody on Tuesday. The investigators merely emphasized that he was being held in a different location from that of Volkswagen manager Wolfgang Hatz, who was also arrested earlier for his alleged involvement in the diesel emissions scandal. According to Handelsblatt, Stadler is set to be replaced temporarily at Audi by Bram Schot. Volkswagen Group, the parent company of Audi, has repeatedly emphasized that it is cooperating fully with German authorities in their investigations. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 22:34:10|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta (L) meets with Wang Yang, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), in Nairobi, Kenya, June 19, 2018. Wang visited Kenya from Saturday to Tuesday at the invitation of Justin Muturi, speaker of the National Assembly of Kenya. (Xinhua/Ding Haitao) NAIROBI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- China and Kenya agreed to enhance pragmatic cooperation and further promote bilateral ties as China's top political advisor Wang Yang visited the eastern African country from Saturday to Tuesday. During his meeting with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday, Wang, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), hailed the robust development of bilateral ties. He said Chinese President Xi Jinping and Kenyatta lifted the China-Kenya ties to comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation in May 2017, blueprinting a bright future for bilateral ties. Calling China-Kenya cooperation "a good example" of China-Africa cooperation, Wang said he has fully felt the vigor and vitality of Kenya's economic and social development and the strong momentum of China-Kenya cooperation during the visit. This year marks the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and Kenya. Wang called on both countries to further deepen political mutual trust and enhance synergy of their development strategies. He also called on the two countries to provide firmer support to each other on issues concerning their core interests and major concerns, promote high-level cooperation in more areas and intensify coordination on international and regional affairs. Wang said new measures leading China-Africa cooperation in the new era will be announced during the Beijing summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in September to boost China-Africa win-win cooperation. He extended welcome to Kenyatta for the attendance of the summit. Hailing the solid political mutual trust and win-win cooperation between the two countries, Kenyatta said Kenya has actively participated in the Belt and Road Initiative and gained substantial benefits. Kenya firmly supports China in hosting a successful FOCAC summit, said Kenyatta, adding that his country stands ready to strengthen exchange of high-level visits and dovetail development strategies. He said Kenya welcomes China to expand cooperation in areas including investment, economy and trade and tourism so as to develop an even stronger comprehensive strategic partnership of cooperation with China. During his talks with Justin Muturi, speaker of the National Assembly of Kenya, Wang expressed his appreciation to Muturi for inviting the CPPCC delegation. Wang said Kenya is an important stop of his current three-nation African tour, which has taken him to the Republic of Congo and Uganda. The aim of his visit to Kenya is to well implement the important consensus reached by Xi and Kenyatta, and strengthen interactions between the CPPCC and relevant bodies of Kenya, said Wang. He introduced the multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), expecting the CPPCC and the National Assembly of Kenya to give full play to each other's advantages in order to promote bilateral economic cooperation and people-to-people exchanges. Muturi said the National Assembly of Kenya staunchly supports the two countries in developing pragmatic cooperation on an equal footing. Noting that every country has the right to choose its own political system and development path, he said Kenya and China have always respected each other's choices and been real good friends and partners. The National Assembly of Kenya stands ready to strengthen exchange of visits with China's National People's Congress and the CPPCC and help to complement and boost bilateral ties, Muturi said. During his meeting with Kenya's Senate Speaker Kenneth Lusaka, Wang said the CPC and the ruling Jubilee Party of Kenya have both made bright plans for the two countries' development and shouldered historical responsibilities to develop national economies, improve people's livelihood and wipe out poverty. He called on both parties to boost exchange of experience on party-building to improve internal cohesion and capabilities. The CPPCC is willing to work with the Senate of Kenya to promote economic, cultural and local exchanges in the hope of consolidating the social and public will's foundation of China-Kenya friendship, Wang said. Lusaka spoke highly of the unique role that the CPPCC has played in advancing the Kenya-China and Africa-China cooperation. The Jubilee Party of Kenya would like to learn from the experience of the CPC and promote its governing and leadership, said Lusaka. During his four-day stay in Kenya, Wang visited the Nairobi Terminus of the Chinese-built Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) connecting Kenya's port city of Mombasa and its capital Nairobi. Wang also visited the Maramba tea factory and the first Sino-African Joint Research Center, and met with representatives of Chinese enterprises and media outlets in Kenya. Kenya is the last stop of Wang's 10-day African tour starting on June 11. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 22:49:14|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- China's top legislature opened its bimonthly session on Tuesday to deliberate a draft e-commerce law and amendment to the Individual Income Tax Law as well as bills and reports. Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, presided over the meeting. TAX THRESHOLD RAISED Reviewing a draft amendment to the Individual Income Tax Law is one of the major tasks for the lawmakers and has drawn wide attention from the public. The draft amendment raises the minimum threshold for personal income tax from 3,500 yuan (about 544 U.S. dollars) to 5,000 yuan per month. The draft amendment adds special expense deductions for items like children's education, continuing education, treatment for serious diseases, as well as housing loan interest and rent. Entrusted by the State Council, Finance Minister Liu Kun told lawmakers at Tuesday's opening of the session that the revisions were aimed at implementing decisions by central authorities and ensuring smooth individual income tax reform. The changes are conducive to reducing the tax burden for taxpayers, raising people's incomes and boosting consumption, he said. The amendment also adds an anti-tax avoidance clause, empowering tax authorities to adjust taxation when individuals transfer property in violation of independent trading. REGULATING ONLINE MARKET China's draft e-commerce law was submitted to the top legislature for a third reading, further regulating online market order and protecting consumer rights. "The draft law aims to further support and promote the development of e-commerce, regulate market order, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of all parties in e-commerce," Cong Bin, deputy chairman of the NPC Constitution and Law Committee, said in a report to the lawmakers. Cong said that the draft law would focus on the obligations and liabilities of e-commerce operators, especially platform operators. China has the world's largest e-commerce market, with online retail sales growing 32.2 percent year on year in 2017 to reach 7.18 trillion yuan. NO JUDICIAL INTERFERENCE According to the draft revisions to the organic laws of the people's courts and the people's procuratorates, any organization or people cannot require judges or prosecutors to do anything outside their jurisdiction. Judges and prosecutors should reject and make a faithful record of intervention in judicial affairs by officials and their meddling in specific cases, said the draft revisions, adding that violators would be punished based on the seriousness of their behavior. Lawmakers also reviewed a draft decision on the duties of the NPC Constitution and Law Committee, and reports on national sci-tech projects, solid waste disposal, and top legislator Li Zhanshu's overseas visits to Ethiopia, Mozambique and Namibia. CAPE TOWN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The 5th International Climate Change Adaptation Conference kicked off in Cape Town on Tuesday with participants urging the world to help Africa adapt to climate change. The three-day conference, taking place in the African continent for the first time, brought together more than 1,000 government officials, scientists, experts and business leaders from around the world to connect, learn and inspire actions for climate change adaptation. The conference highlighted Africa's vulnerability to climate change. Participants agreed that the impacts of projected warming in Africa are relatively extreme compared to the historical climate condition under which human and natural system have evolved. "Africa faces a significant challenge in adapting to climate change with the cost and damages of the climate change impacts rising rapidly with increased warming," said Tlou Ramaru, Acting Deputy Director General at the South African Department of Environmental Affairs. Addressing the challenges posed by climate change will inevitable require adaptation, but the intensity of the needed adaptation measures and the scale of damages will be tightly linked to the achievements or inadequacies of efforts made to curb emission, Ramaru told the delegates. A technical report released at the conference showed that extreme weather events, including droughts, flood and heat waves are likely to become more frequent and more severe, particularly in Africa. According to the report, human health will be undermined by the risks associated with extreme weather events and increased incidence of transmittable diseases as well as malnutrition. Those African populations that are already most vulnerable to climatic variability, such as poor inhabitants of informal settlements, will become even more vulnerable, the report said. "We are therefore, looking forward to exchanging experiences and knowledge that will help the African continent to adapt to these impacts," Ramaru said. He shared the experiences in South Africa where unprecedented extreme weather events have occurred in the past few years due to climatic variability in the country, ranging from severe storms and cyclones to a debilitating drought over large parts of the country. "The reality became more evident last few months when our government declared the current drought crisis across the country a national disaster," Ramaru said. South Africa, he said, has just developed the draft National Climate Change Bill, which is currently published for public consultations. The Bill will provide for the effective management of inevitable climate change impacts through enhancing adaptive capacity, strengthening resilience and reducing vulnerability to climate change, with a view to building social, economic and environmental resilience, and an adequate national adaptation response, according to Ramaru. The biennial International Climate Change Adaptation Conference, also known as Adaptation Futures, is the world's premier conference on climate change adaptation, organized by the UN Environment Program. MOSCOW, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Russian and South Korean officials will discuss economic cooperation and the Korean Peninsula issue during the upcoming visit of South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov said Tuesday. "We will seek economic cooperation with South Korea, which is our second largest trading partner in Asia after China," Morgulov told reporters, adding that the two sides will also exchange views on the Korean Peninsula issue. Earlier this month, the Kremlin announced that Moon will pay an official visit to Russia on June 21-23 at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin. The Blue House confirmed the visit. According to the Kremlin, the two leaders will host high-level talks on June 22 on the further development of Russia-South Korea relations in political, trade and economic, and humanitarian spheres. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that there will be discussions in a narrow format, expanded talks, protocol events, signing of documents and a statement for the media. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 22:54:15|Editor: yan Video Player Close JERUSALEM, June 19 (Xinhua) -- A second competition for Israeli start-ups to win Chinese investment for conducting innovative projects will be held on August 27 in Israel, local media reported. A delegation of representatives from major Chinese corporations will visit Israel to participate in the Israeli chapter of the Intellectual Property Innovation & Entrepreneurship Contest (IPIEC) in 2018, which aims to locate start-ups at the initial product stage, the Hebrew-language People & Computers website reported. The Chinese companies will invest 25 million U.S. dollars in the Israeli start-ups winning the contest, in innovative projects in the fields of autonomous vehicles, renewable energy, artificial intelligence and robotics, big data, bio-medicine, IT and communications, innovative materials and more. The international contest is organized by WTOIP, a leading entrepreneurial resource-sharing platform based in China's Guangzhou, capital city of Guangdong province, which focuses on intellectual property and utilizing the new business model of "IP+Internet+Sharing Economy." "The Israeli entrepreneurs are very much in demand in China, which opens up a lot of possibilities for them in the areas of development, research, marketing and more," Tian Zongfu, CEO of Guangdong Yueke Investment Fund in China and a senior judge in the competition, was quoted as saying. "The challenges facing our investors and entrepreneurs include the language barriers, cultural differences and regulations that cause difficulties, and our goal is to bridge these gaps and establish fruitful relationships between Israeli investors and Israeli technology companies," said Tian. Israeli start-ups are invited to enter the competition, and the three top winners will be awarded free trips to China to participate in the semi-finals and final there. In addition, they will receive first-hand acquaintance with the Chinese market, assistance in building a business network in the country, meetings with top Chinese experts and investors in various sectors, online and off-line promotion and increased public exposure. This is the second year for the competition to be held in Israel. It is co-organized by the Israel Commerce Union, which acts as a bridge between China and Israel for business cooperation. Last year, 20 of Israeli start-ups participated in the IPIEC Israeli competition, six of them won trips to take part in the semi-finals in China. Two Israeli start-ups - Betalin and Carticure - reached the final, while Betalin was awarded the first prize of 100,000 U.S. dollars. Both Israeli start-ups received agreements from Chinese companies. The semi-finals of the international contest will be held in October in Mianyang city, southwest China's Sichuan province, while the final is to be held in December in Guangzhou. People take part in a protest to condemn U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in Tehran, Iran, on May 11, 2018. Thousands of people marched on the streets in Tehran chanting anti-U.S. slogans. (Xinhua/Ahmad Halabisaz) WASHINGTON, June 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. State Department said Monday that Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation Christopher Ford will lead a delegation to Seoul and Tokyo to convey the U.S. Iran policy. The tour scheduled for June 18-20 aims "to convey the Administration's Iran policy, including with regard to the re-imposition of nuclear-related sanctions on Iran," according to a State Department statement. "The United States is working with nations around the world to create a new global effort to counter Iran's nuclear and proliferation threats, as well as its support for terrorism, militancy, and continued development and testing of ballistic missiles," it added. Ford would be joined by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Andrew Peek and other U.S. government officials. The Trump administration exited the historic Iran nuclear deal in May, threatening to re-impose nuke-related sanctions on Iran and punish those that have business links with the Middle East nation. The move has been criticized by many European nations. Iran signed the landmark nuclear deal with the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany in 2015 to halt its nuclear weapons program in exchange for sanctions relief. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 22:59:16|Editor: yan Video Player Close ISTANBUL, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Tuesday said 30,000 Syrian refugees who have been granted Turkish citizenship will vote in Sunday's presidential and parliamentary elections. "They have the right to vote," Yildirim was quoted by the Hurriyet daily as saying in Turkey's western province of Izmir. "They are our guests and they will return to their country," the prime minister also noted. The latest official data revealed that Turkey is hosting a total of 3.5 million Syrian refugees, nearly 2 million of them are over the age of 18. All Turkish citizens over 18 have the right to vote in elections and referendums under the Turkish law. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 22:59:19|Editor: yan Video Player Close JERUSALEM, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Israel's Finance Ministry announced on Tuesday approval of the acquisition of the state-owned Israel Military Industries (IMI) by Israeli defense giant Elbit Systems. Elbit will pay the Israeli government 495 million U.S. dollars under the deal, said the ministry in a statement, adding that an additional payment of about 27 million dollars will be due upon IMI meeting certain performance goals. The deal, approved by the Committee for the Tender of the Sale of State Shares, came after years of negotiations between the Israeli government and Elbit. Elbit will relocate the IMI facilities from central Israel to the southern Negev area under the deal, a move that would allow real estate development in central Israel and economic development in the Negev Desert, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon said in the statement. Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that his office "ensured that the old factories of IMI will be replaced with new ones, which will provide 1,000 jobs in southern Israel." Bezhalel Machlis, president and CEO of Elbit Systems, said this acquisition "will be beneficial for Israel's economy." "The completing of the transaction will enable us to offer an enhanced portfolio to both the Israeli and global markets," Machlis said. IMI is the maker of ground forces ammunition, multiple types of rockets for air and artillery systems, and precision ordnance, as well as Israel army' iconic infantry firearms like the Uzi, the Galil assault rifle, and the Negev machine gun. The privatization of IMI was first approved by the Israeli government in 2013, and Elbit won the government's tender process for the purchase, according to Israeli media reports. MOSCOW, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Russian is working on mechanisms to encourage nationals abroad to move back to the country, said Deputy Interior Minister Igor Zubov on Tuesday. "As part of the currently drafted migration policy concept, we are dealing with the issue to create conditions to secure the return of compatriots from all countries," TASS news agency quoted Zubov as saying. "We have received such proposals, and we are working on this," he added. Earlier this month, President Vladimir Putin said during his annual Question and Answer session that the Russian authorities should streamline the procedures of obtaining Russian citizenship as a way to solve the demographic problem. According to Putin, the number of Russian women of childbearing age will decrease over 25 percent by 2032 due to a decline in births in the 1990s, which is becoming a constraint to economic growth. Russia welcomes those who consider themselves closely linked to the Russian world, speak Russian, want to work in the country and have the requisite skills regardless of their ethnicity or religious affiliation, Putin said. He also said that procedures of obtaining Russian citizenship should be streamlined for immigrants from the insurgent region of Donbas in southeast Ukraine. Russia aims to boost its economy in the coming years, but faces a decline in native population, which could translate into a labor shortage. The government plans to gradually extend the retirement age to 65 from 60 for men and to 63 from 55 for women starting next year. The country also rolled out a set of measures, including financial support, to encourage births. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 23:09:22|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- A Silk Road international alliance of art museums was established in Beijing Tuesday. The opening ceremony took place on the same day at the Beijing-based National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), attended by guests from national art museums and major art institutions of 18 countries and regions along the Silk Road, including Greece, Hungary, Russia, Ukraine and Vietnam. "Different countries can improve their mutual understanding, friendship and win-win cooperation through the donation, collection and exhibition of unique art works," said Wu Weishan, curator of the NAMOC. The museum also held both a forum and a conference of the multi-cultural alliance on Tuesday. The alliance has also opened an art exhibition featuring 17 art works from 14 countries along the Silk Road. SOFIA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Some 400 U.S. troops along with Bulgarian units on Tuesday began a military drill at Novo Selo Training Area, which will last until Oct. 30, Bulgarian Defense ministry said in a statement. Tanks M1A2 Abrams, armored vehicles M2A3 Bradley and APC M113, as well as self-propelled howitzers M109A6 Paladins, would be used during the exercise codenamed "Joint Training 2," the statement said. It noted the drill was "part of the measures to strengthen security in the Black Sea region." Bulgaria, a NATO member since 2004, signed a defense cooperation agreement with the United States in 2006. According to the agreement, the United States may deploy defense equipment and no more than 2,500 personnel to the Novo Selo Training Range, the Aytos Storage facility, Bezmer Air Base, and Graf Ignatievo Air Base, and use these facilities for activities such as security cooperation exercises, refueling of aircraft, and temporary maintenance of vehicles. VIENTIANE, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Vietnamese Vice President Dang Thi Ngoc Thinh arrived in Vientiane on Tuesday for a four-day visit to Laos. The Vietnamese vice president had a meeting with her Lao counterpart Phankham Viphavanh before she paid a courtesy call to President Bounnhang Vorachith and had bilateral talks with Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith, Lao News Agency (KPL) reported. According to local online newspaper Vientiane Times, the two vice presidents agreed to work together to deepen the friendly relations, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two neighbors. During their bilateral talks, the leaders agreed to educate their Party cadres, officials and peoples, especially the younger generation, to fully grasp the tradition of special solidarity between Laos and Vietnam. The two sides pledged to intensify cooperation in maintaining security along their shared border, to prevent transnational crime, human trafficking and the cross-border transport of drugs as well as illicit trade. They also agreed to increase cooperation in preventing the illegal exploitation and excavation of natural resources along the border, striving to create a shared border of peace, friendship and development. The leaders agreed to ensure that Vietnamese enterprises doing business in Laos were operating smoothly. They vowed to work hand in hand to increase the value of bilateral trade to meet agreed targets. The two governments agreed to increase bilateral import-export turnover to three billion U.S. dollars by 2020, up from the 1.26 billion U.S. dollars recorded in 2015. It was reported in December last year that Laos had licensed 423 projects invested by Vietnamese firms with a value of more than five billion U.S. dollars, putting Vietnam among the top three foreign investors in Laos. Vietnamese investment is mostly in the fields of hydropower, mining, transport, industrial tree plantations, and services in Laos. On the same day, the Vietnamese deputy president and her delegation also met with Lao President Vorachit and Prime Minister Sisoulith. The leaders said they highly valued the friendly relations, special solidarity and comprehensive cooperation between the two Parties, states and peoples of Laos and Vietnam. They agreed to work together to further enhance their special ties, according to the report. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 23:24:26|Editor: yan Video Player Close ADEN, Yemen, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The pro-government Yemeni forces fully captured the international airport in the western port city of Hodeidah on Tuesday following fierce battles with the Houthi rebels, Yemen's Defence Ministry said. With support of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi-led warplanes, the joint Yemeni government forces took full control of the airport, after the escape of Houthi militants, the ministry declared in a statement posted online. Colonel Abu Zara'a al-Mahrami, the general commander of the Coast Front in Hodeidah, declared that "all parts of Hodeidah airport have fallen to the hands of the forces of Al-Amaliqah Brigades and it's out of Houthis control now." Sources confirmed to Xinhua by phone that the government forces seized the tower and runway of Hodeidah airport and started to dismantle hundreds of landmines planted inside the facility. Some buildings in the airport were partially destroyed as a result of the Houthi shelling and airstrikes by the Saudi-led warplanes, the sources said. The UAE official news agency WAM said that pro-government forces seized also AlMandhar village, west of Hodeidah airport, expelling Houthi militants from the area. The Abu Dhabi-based Sky News Arabia TV reported that more than 10,000 fighters from the recently liberated areas joined the government forces in securing Hodeidah province. Local sources noted that the airport will now be used to bring in humanitarian aid or supplies for government forces in the upcoming battles against Houthi rebels. Local army commanders told Xinhua by phone that the Yemeni government forces entered the airport's main compound earlier in the day and got engaged in intense battles with the Houthi fighters in and around the facility. The significant achievement comes with the help of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, particularly the UAE. Several battalions backed by armored vehicles from the Southern Resistance Forces based in Aden joined the ongoing military operations against the Houthi rebels in Hodeidah. Under orders issued by Yemen's President Abdu-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the Yemenis forces and the Saudi-led coalition launched the offensive against Hodeidah airport as they aimed at capturing the airport to besiege the Houthi forces by cutting their supply lines. Political activists allied with the Houthi group refused to acknowledge losing Hodeidah airport, but said their fighters withdrew from the area in "a tactical move." Meanwhile, the Yemeni troops continued their advance into the center of Hodeidah amid fierce fightings with the Houthis who established trenches and blocked the city's main roads with cement barricades. Local media reports suggested that pro-government forces began military preparations for taking over the city's seaport after seizing the airport. Civilian neighborhoods were also badly affected as a result of the bloody fightings between the two warring rivals for the seventh consecutive day, local residents said. The United Nations office in Yemen said that more than 5,000 families have fled their homes since June and emergency aid is being distributed to the newly displaced people. Earlier in the day, UN special envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths left the Houthi-controlled capital Sanaa after four days of fruitless talks with Houthi leaders regarding their withdrawal from Hodeidah. The Houthis vowed to fight "foreign forces and local mercenaries till liberating the entire Yemen." Strategically situated on the Red Sea coast, Hodeidah, Yemen's fourth largest city with a population of 600,000, is the only major port city under Houthis control. The Saudi-backed Yemeni government regarded retaking Hodeidah and its seaport as a milestone on the path of restoring the country from the grips of the Houthis. The Hodeidah port, which the Iranian-backed Houthis captured in October 2014, serves as a key source of strength for Houthi militias because it is regarded as a lifeline for many Yemenis. The UN warned that the battles to liberate Hodeidah, which has the highest poverty and malnutrition rates in the war-torn Yemen, could kill 250,000. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-19 23:34:32|Editor: yan Video Player Close TEHRAN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Iran is trying to find ways to boost its agricultural exports to the U.S., despite the latter's threat to reimpose sanctions after withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the Financial Tribune reported on Tuesday. The Trade Promotion Organization (TPO) of Iran is preparing the ground for increasing the exports of Iran's agricultural and food products to the U.S. market, Mahmoud Bazari, director of TPO's Exports Bureau, was quoted as saying. Most agricultural and food brands in Iran export their products to the U.S., Bazari said, adding that the Iranian goods have high added value. "The Iranian export to the United States is carried out through third countries, including Mexico, Canada and certain European states," he said. Referring to Washington's unilateral exit from the Iranian nuclear deal in May, Bazari hoped that the pullout would not hamper Iranian exports to the U.S. Iranian ice creams have just entered the U.S. market recently, he noted. In January, Iran announced that it had exported caviar to the U.S. after receiving A license from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). "We have exported 10 kg of natural caviar to the United States last year after receiving license from the FDA," said Abbas Rajaei, managing director of Agricultural Services of Specialized Holding Company. In May, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. pullout from the landmark Iranian nuclear deal, while vowing to reimpose the nuclear-related sanctions which were relieved under the 2015 deal. BANGKOK, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Thailand's former foreign minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul was sentenced on Tuesday to two years in prison for unduly granting a passport to former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra several years ago. The court judges in charge of criminal lawsuits against politicians ruled Surapong, who served as foreign minister in the time of former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, guilty of the National Anti-Corruption Act and the law on duty negligence by issuing the Thai passport to Thaksin who had been allegedly involved in charges, and gave him a two-year jail term without suspension. However, since the former politician planned to appeal, the court later granted him parole under with a 5-million-baht bail (about 160,000 U.S. dollars) on condition that he will not leave Thailand unless otherwise allowed by the court. TRIPOLI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The international pledges to resettle 25,000 migrants from Libya are moving slowly, said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi on Tuesday. Grandi made the remarks at a press conference here after visiting several refugee shelters and camps. "We have received international commitments on the issue of resettling 25,000 refugees from Libya. However, unfortunately these commitments are not going well, but slowly," he said. "We need to speed up the pace of the resettlement program," he said, adding that only a small part of the program has been implemented and less than 2,000 immigrants have been received. "We have resettled a small number to Italy and Romania. About 1,300 immigrants, the largest number, have been transferred to Niger," the UN official said, thanking the government of Niger for setting up a temporary facility to receive the migrants. Grandi called for speeding up the return of the internally displaced Libyans to their cities. "In the absence of a real political agreement, the suffering of the displaced people continue and increase," he said. Libya is a preferred point of departure for illegal immigrants wanting to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, due to the state of insecurity and chaos in their homelands. The reception centers in Libya are overcrowded with tens of thousands of illegal immigrants, a few of whom have a chance to resettle in a third country, while most of them are voluntarily repatriated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). In 2017, the IOM repatriated 20,000 immigrants voluntarily from Libya to their countries of origin. KIGALI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda targets to attract more investments in the information communication technology (ICT) sector as the country aims to become an ICT hub of Africa, an official said Tuesday. "Disruptive innovation due to emerging technologies is transforming global economic potential. Rwanda is looking for more investments to boost the ICT sector in order to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in the country," said Regis Gatarayiha, permanent secretary in the ministry of ICT, at a national ICT hub strategy consultation forum in the Rwandan capital Kigali. ICT links consumers to businesses and also enables innovators to share ideas and seek funding and advice through the shared economy, said Gatarayiha. "As the world continues to evolve, so too does the way we view the importance of technology. There's huge potential in the ICT sector that is still untapped," he said, noting opportunities for investors to build on the ICT infrastructure laid across the country. According to him, Rwanda targets to become an ICT hub of Africa, but this will be achieved through heavy investments in ICT industry. According to the 2015 Global Information Technology Report (GITR) by the World Economic Forum, the small central African country has made considerable improvements to exploit the potential of ICTs to drive social and economic transformation and catch up with more advanced nations. It plans to establish an ICT park in the Kigali Special Economic Zone in the suburbs of Kigali, which will be a base of technological investments, including training, industries, research and development. In 2014, Rwanda rolled out 4th Generation Long-Term Evolution (4GLTE) internet network offering the fastest wireless broadband on high-speed data for mobile phones and devices such as modems and routers. BANGKOK, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha is scheduled to visit Britain and France from June 20 to 25, during which he will showcase Thailand's economic potential and investment opportunities, the Thai foreign ministry announced on Tuesday in a statement released to media. The prime minister will be accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak, Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai and other ministers as well as high-level officials, including representatives from the Thai business sector. According to the statement, Prayut is set to meet British Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday and French President Emmanuel Macron on June 25. Bilateral discussions will be held between Prayut and the two European leaders on strengthening strategic partnership in areas of mutual interest as well as exchanges of views on a wide range of topics, including regional and international issues. The statement mentioned that in London and Paris, the Thai prime minister will launch the "Roadshows on Thailand 4.0" to promote Thailand's economic potential and investment opportunities among high-profile British and French investors, particularly those with interest in investing in target industries of the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC). Thailand 4.0 is a strategy put forward by Prayut's government aiming to transform Thailand into an innovation and technology driven economy while EEC, a special economic zone set up in three southeastern Thai provinces to develop high-valued industries, is the flagship project to realize the strategy. by Maria Spiliopoulou LARISSA, Greece, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Over the past two decades, Larissa, a city of some 170,000 inhabitants in central Greece, faced an invasion of thousands of crows mainly in the night hours that kept people awake with the noise and left behind acid droppings all over the main squares. All this has changed in the past 18 months thanks to Haroula, a five-year old female Harris hawk which has been hired by the municipality to solve the problem. Haroula, means Joy in Greek, came to the city of Larissa in autumn 2016 and started her night shifts in January 2017, after authorities had tried in vain several methods to drive away the flocks of birds, her handler Yorgos Christodoulou told Xinhua in a recent interview here. IMPRESSIVE RESULTS "Whatever we had tried, laser, pulsating light or ultrasounds and so on, was not effective," Christodoulou, a forester employed by the municipality with a 20 year experience in managing the wildlife, explained. Introducing hawking to Larissa was his idea. Although natural predators like hawks and falcons are used across the world for decades in airports and other sites to tackle the birds' problem, locals were not used to the image of a hawk perched on the gloved hand of a man at the city's main square, next to kids riding bicycles. "At first people were quite negative. They believed that also this project would fail to bring results. But it did work very well and now Haroula is so famous that she has become something like the city's mascot. Everybody knows her by her first name," Christodoulou said. The results of her 4-5 hour patrol each evening across the city center have been impressive. "From the very first days of our operations we recorded amazing results. Here in the squares of the center of Larissa some 5,000-7,000 crows were flocking. After almost one month of operations, the number of the birds who were reaching the city was smaller than 200-300," her handler explained, adding that now the number has further declined to 50-100 crows. "Haroula's target during the night shifts of course is not to kill birds. Her goal is to scare them off, to create a climate of insecurity so they stay away," Christodoulou underlined. In the past authorities encouraged the killing of birds to control their populations, but in recent years they ignored people as non threats, as they gradually ignored the lasers and other methods used to deter them. Flying a hawk in the city center on a regular basis proved in comparison an environmental friendly, humane and most effective way to keep the city free of the crows and their waste droppings which carry many serious diseases. TRAINING Christodoulou underwent training with Haroula in the summer of 2016 after they first met at a hawk-breeding center in northern Greece. In Greece, the possession of a wild hawk is illegal. Birds of prey like his feathered colleague are used only when they come from breeding centers. The female hawk had received basic training and was used to the contact with humans, city lights and sounds and obeying to simple whistle calls to fly away or return to the handler. Haroula was further trained by Christodoulou on site to operate in the urban environment after sunset, since he noted that crows were panicking more by her presence once they had nestled for the night seeking warmth inside the city. "It is the only project in the world dealing with crows during night time," Christodoulou noted. "In big cities like London, Manchester or Paris hawks, in particular Harris hawks, are used to scare away or decrease the number of birds, mainly pigeons and sea gulls which fly during day time," he explained. Larissa's hawk was trained to recognize between various birds, leave aside pigeons or sparrows and focus on crows only, as she recognizes her handler. "We have reached a stage where Haroula can recognize me among thousands of people and flies to my hand regardless of the difficult conditions of the urban environment," Christodoulou said. He is after all the man who is taking care of her every day and night. The working hours each evening depend on her mood, he added smiling. Haroula is on the job throughout the year, with the exception of rainy nights and when her handler is on vacation. In about two months, another winged municipal employee will join the team. Artemis, another 5-year old Harris hawk, is currently trained by Christodoulou to start patrols in the sky of Larissa. NEW DELHI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- India and Australia held a key meeting here to discuss various aspects of terrorism and the ways to combat financing of terrorism, an official statement issued by the external affairs ministry said Tuesday. As strategic partners, the two sides discussed contemporary counter-terrorism challenges such as radicalization and violent extremism, the use of internet for terror purposes, and foreign terrorist fighters, at their tenth meeting of the joint working group on counter-terrorism, the statement said. Both sides assessed and exchanged views on prevailing terrorism threats in their respective regions. The two sides also agreed to further strengthen counter-terrorism cooperation through regular exchange of information, capacity building efforts, mutual legal assistance, sharing of best practices on countering violent extremism and cooperating in multilateral fora such as the United Nations and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). The next meeting of the Indo-Aussie joint working group on counter-terrorism will be held in Australia in 2019. by Larry Neild LONDON, June 19 (Xinhua) -- A year on from the very first meeting between Brexit minister David Davis and the EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, Britain remains a country divided. British and EU negotiators started two days of talks Tuesday in Brussels, concentrating on talks about the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic on day one. Wednesday sees a round a talks on the crucial question of the future relationship between the UK and EU. Neither Davis nor Barnier will take part in these talks. Davis, son of a single mom, was appointed to the job by Prime Minister Theresa May following the 2016 when, against all expectations, Britain voted by a 52-48 margin to end its membership of the European Union. Just days after May's snap general election on June 8, 2017, Davis headed to Brussels for his first face-to-face meeting with Michel Barnier, the politician mandated by the EU to negotiate Britain's departure terms. May had gone into the snap election in the hope of building on her narrow majority in the House of Commons. Instead she emerged leading a minority government, striking a deal worth more than a billion dollars, to get the small Northern Ireland party, the Democratic Unionists Party, to shore up her fragile hold on government. It meant Davis was already weakened as he journeyed to Brussels for that first encounter. The talks were billed as the most important negotiations in British history. The Guardian reported on that crucial introductory meeting between the pair that an election-chastened Conservative government had been forced to accept it could not dictate the terms of Brexit. Instead, the newspaper reported, Britain made a significant climbdown on the first day of talks in Brussels. "It now seems clear that a 'divorce bill' running into billions will have to be agreed before negotiations on the big prize of free trade can commence," the report added. Davis, the Brexit secretary, tried to put on a brave face, saying: "It's not how it starts, it's how it finishes that matters." Barnier said after the meeting: "I am not in a frame of mind to make concessions or ask for concessions ... We are looking to unravel 43 years of patiently built relations." A year on, and with the departure date set at 23.00 hours GMT on March 29, 2019, Brexit negotiations have proved to be a difficult beast to tame. Still unresolved is the question of the 500 kilometer border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK, and the Republic of Ireland, which will remain as a member of the EU. The border between the two will be the only UK-EU land border after next March, but both the British and Irish governments insist they don't want border posts. The other big question is Britain's future relationship with the European single market and its customs union. The EU insists on sticking to its rules, that membership of the two, mean free movement of EU citizens. One of the strongest factors in the referendum vote in 2016 had been control of immigration into Britain. Marking the anniversary Professor Anthony Glees from the University of Buckingham said the Brexit vote has led to political and now constitutional chaos without parallel in recent times. "Mrs May has in effect lost the slim majority she cobbled up a year ago. Investment in the UK is down by about 60 percent since 2016. The pound sterling has lost around 15percentof its value and there has been only a 1 percent growth in exports as a result. Productivity continues to slump. Major companies are pulling out of the UK if trying not to publicize this as they want to continue to sell to British people," he said.. Glees told Xinhua: "Brexiters have not revealed their economic and political blueprint for Brexit and plainly more and more people are beginning to wonder if they have one, or, if they do, whether it will be so radical that the UK will take 15-20 years to recover. "The British people have never had it explained that membership of the EU is an investment in a club which brought a return of ten times the fee. They don't now understand that you can't have the privileges of membership without paying." Glees, a supporter of the EU, was outspoken in his views on leading politicians. "Big political egos like Boris Johnson (the Foreign Secretary) leading Brexiteer Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg and cabinet minister Michael Gove are circling like sharks, waiting to destroy Ms May," said Glees. "No one knows how this will end. Some think there will have to be a second referendum, but the tragic Grenfell Tower fire in London will come to be seen as the symbol of the painful Brexiting of Britain," added Glees. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-20 00:14:50|Editor: yan Video Player Close SANAA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- UN envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths left Yemen's capital Sanaa on Tuesday morning, failing to secure a deal to stop the fighting in Hodeidah, a Houthi official told Xinhua. Griffiths arrived in Sanaa on Saturday in a renewed effort to stop the fighting in the western port city of Hodeidah. It was his second official visit to the rebel-held capital in two weeks. "Griffiths met (Houthi) president of the ruling supreme political council Mahdi al-Mashat," Osama Sari, a spokesman at al-Mashat's office, told Xinhua. Sari added that Griffiths discussed with al-Mashat the consequences of the ongoing fighting in Hodeidah on the peaceful political process, as well as the possibility of resuming the peace talks. Griffiths on Monday briefed the United Nations Security Council via a video conference from Sanaa, saying he would launch a first round of Yemeni peace talks next month. Earlier in the day, the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV reported that the Yemeni government troops, supported by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, seized control of the Hodeidah airport. Sari admitted the Houthi loss of the airport during Tuesday morning's offensive by the coalition forces, but adding that their forces were still setting a siege around the airport. Adel Bishr, a humanitarian activist of the independent al-Saleh Charity Foundation in Hodeidah, told Xinhua by phone that the coalition used Apache helicopters and warplanes to support the ground advance by the Yemeni forces, while Houthi fighters used tanks to resist the coalition advance. Baseem al-Jenani, a pro-Yemeni government media spokesman in Hodeidah said on his Twitter account that the airstrikes hit at least three military vehicles of Houthi fighters around the airport. "One of the airstrikes hit a bus carrying escaping civilians in a regular road near the airport, badly injured a man, his wife and their 6-year-old daughter," Al-Jenani said. International humanitarian agencies have warned that an assault on Hodeidah would be a major disaster to the densely populated port city and would block aid supplies to the residents there. Hodeidah is the lifeline route for importing and transporting humanitarian aid to northern Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen's civil war in March 2015. The war has so far killed over 10,000 people, mostly civilians, and forced 3 million others out of their homes. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-20 00:19:55|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) meets with Bolivian President Juan Evo Morales Ayma, who is on a state visit to China, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, June 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Yao Dawei) BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang Tuesday met with Bolivian President Juan Evo Morales Ayma in Beijing, saying he hoped for deepened pragmatic cooperation between China and Bolivia. China is willing to consolidate political mutual trust and deepen pragmatic cooperation with Bolivia in accordance with the principle of equality and mutual benefit, in a bid to promote greater development of bilateral relations, Li said. China hopes to work with Bolivia to seize the new opportunities for the development of bilateral relations to push forward cooperation in such areas as economic and trade, tourism and culture, and increase imports of Bolivia's products with competitiveness and high quality, he said. He called on the two sides to strengthen cooperation in production capacity and enhance the development and utilization of resource to advance industrialization in Bolivia. China-Bolivia cooperation is an integral part of South-South cooperation, he said, noting that China is willing to work with Latin American countries, including Bolivia, to safeguard the common interests of developing countries and boost world peace, stability and development. Morales said the establishment of strategic partnership between the two countries has brought bilateral relations to a new level. During this visit, the two countries signed a number of cooperation agreements in the fields of investment, economic and trade, which will vigorously promote the development of bilateral relations, Morales said. As the rotating chair of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2019, Bolivia is willing to actively push forward the CELAC-China cooperation, he said. China's top legislator Li Zhanshu also met with Morales Tuesday. Li called on the two countries' legislative bodies to enhance friendly exchanges and provide institutional and legal guarantee as well as social foundation for the two countries' development and cooperation, so as to make China-Bolivia ties a model for China-Latin America relations and South-South cooperation. ALGIERS, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Algerian police have arrested two suspects for killing a Chinese citizen earlier this month, said the Chinese Embassy in Algeria on Tuesday. On June 10, an employee of a Chinese company was robbed and killed by several knife-wielding criminals in the region of Dalbeda in the Algerian capital Algiers. Abdel Ghani Hamel, Algeria's director general of National Security, met Chinese Ambassador to Algeria Yang Guangyu on Monday to report on the progress of the case, the embassy said in a statement. Hamel said that two main offenders in the case had been arrested and the third suspect would be arrested soon, it said. He stressed that the Algerian police attached great importance to the case and sent additional police forces to search for the murderers after the incident. Hamel also pledged to take further measures to ensure personal and property safety of the Chinese citizens in Algeria. For his part, Yang lauded the police for their capability and efficiency in handling the case, voicing hope that the Algerian police will continue to work to seize the fugitive and take effective measures to protect the Chinese citizens. After the fatal robbery, officials from the Chinese embassy had met with Algerian police and Foreign Ministry officials to express serious concerns about the murder case and the Chinese citizens' safety. KIEV, June 19 (Xinhua) -- At least ten people were hurt in clashes between protesters and police near the Ukrainian parliament here on Tuesday, authorities said. Andriy Kryshchenko, the head of Kiev Police, told reporters that eight policemen and two protesters appealed for medical help with minor injuries, while two demonstrators were detained. According to local media reports, the skirmishes occurred after a group of protesters tried to enter the parliament building, but police prevented them from doing it. The protesters reportedly hurled bottles at the policemen. About 2,000 coal miners, Chernobyl accident liquidators and Afghan war veterans held the demonstration in central Kiev to demand the parliament not to cut their benefits. It was unclear which group of protesters clashed with the police. VIENTIANE, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The 2018 Laos' National Economic Development Planning and Strategy Training Workshop was opened here on Tuesday. At the workshop, teachers from China will offer a 21-day training to Lao trainees. Khenthong Sisouvong, vice president of the Laos-China Cooperation Commission, when addressing the opening ceremony, expressed his gratitude to the long-term support and help to Laos' human resources development from the Chinese commerce ministry's Academy for International Business Officials (AIBO). Training in the relevant sectors which China has been providing to Laos has contributed to Laos' development, he said. This is the first time a training workshop of this kind has been held in Laos, and the workshop matches the development reality in nowaday Laos, Khengthong said. The Lao trainees will attentively join the courses, actively exchange ideas with teachers, and make full use of what they learn at the workshop in their future work. Li Xiaobing, president of AIBO, said that China and Laos, linked by mountains and rivers, are good neighbors, good friends, good comrades and good partners. In recent years, the number of trainees from Laos to China has been increasing, with the number reaching 1,657 in 2017. The Chinese side is willing to continuously strengthen cooperation in human resources sector with the Lao side, Li said. Economic and commercial counselor of the Chinese embassy in Laos Wang Qihui said he hoped the workshop will achieve the expected effect and make positive contribution to Laos' socio-economic development. Altogether 56 trainees from Laos' central and localities' economic planning departments are taking part in the 21-day workshop. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-20 01:15:14|Editor: zh Video Player Close Jordanian Prime Minister Omar Razzaz attends a news conference in Amman, Jordan, on June 19, 2018. Jordan's newly formed government announced a plan on Tuesday to cut public spending by 150 million dinars (about 210 million U.S. dollars) this year. (Xinhua/Mohammad Abu Ghosh) AMMAN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Jordan's newly formed government announced a plan on Tuesday to cut public spending by 150 million dinars (about 210 million U.S. dollars) this year. "It is unacceptable whenever there is weak economic growth and there is a decline in revenues that we resort to imposing taxes, the priority should be for cutting public spending," Prime Minister Omar Razzaz told a press conference in Amman. The premier said the Ministry of Finance has prepared a report on reducing spending by all ministries and independent public agencies and institutions by 150 million dinars during 2018. Razzaz said the step will reduce the country's reliance on imposing taxes. He said the government will immediately embark on a national dialogue about the income tax draft bill. "There will be a comprehensive revision of the overall tax structure and the tax burden with focus on the income tax draft bill to ensure justice," he said, promising transparency to ensure accountability. The income tax bill triggered nationwide protests that resulted in the resignation of the government of former Prime Minister Hani Mulki. Razzaz also said Jordan is committed to an extended fund facility (EFF) with the International Monetary Fund. In 2016, the IMF approved a loan of 700 million U.S. dollars to Jordan under the EFF in 2016. Under the new deal, the government and the IMF agreed on six conditions that aim at reducing public debt to safe levels and stimulating the economy. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-20 01:25:17|Editor: yan Video Player Close AMMAN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- King Abdullah II of Jordan on Tuesday met with White House senior adviser Jared Kushner to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian peace, the state-run Petra news agency reported. At the meeting, also attended by U.S. Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt, the two sides discussed the ways to boost the Jordan-U.S. ties in various areas, as well as regional and international issues. King Abdullah voiced his support for the U.S. aid to Jordan that enables the Kingdom to implement several projects in various areas and reduce the pressure it faces due to regional conditions. On the Palestinian issue, the King underlined the need for reaching a just and lasting peace in the region that enables the Palestinians to raise their legitimate aspiration to build their state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. He underlined the need to end the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian peace, by relaunching the peace talks on the basis of the two-state solution, the Arab Peace initiative and the UN resolutions. The Jordanian leader said the issue of Jerusalem should be addressed via the Israeli-Palestinian final status talks as resolving the dispute over the holy city is key to achieving the Middle East peace. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-20 01:45:22|Editor: yan Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Israel has taken no steps to cease settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory as demanded by Security Council Resolution 2344, said Nickolay Mladenov, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, on Tuesday. Some 3,500 housing units in settlements in Area C of the occupied West Bank were advanced, approved or tendered during the period from March 26 to June 12, Mladenov told the Security Council. One-third of those units are in settlements in outlying locations deep in the West Bank, he said. No advancements, approvals or tenders were made in occupied East Jerusalem, said the UN envoy. During this period, there was an overall increase in demolitions across Area C in the West Bank compared with the previous reporting period. The authorities demolished or seized 84 Palestinian-owned structures, resulting in the displacement of some 67 people and potentially affected the livelihoods of 4,500 others, he said. "I reiterate that all settlement activity is illegal under international law. It continues to undermine the practical prospects for establishing a viable Palestinian state and erodes remaining hopes for peace," said Mladenov. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-20 02:00:25|Editor: Chengcheng Video Player Close Xi Jinping (R), general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Chinese president, holds talks with Kim Jong Un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), in Beijing, capital of China, June 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Ju Peng) BEIJING, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and Chinese president, held talks with Kim Jong Un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) and chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), in Beijing on Tuesday. The two leaders had a candid and in-depth exchange of views on the current development of China-DPRK relations and the situation on the Korean Peninsula. They agreed to safeguard, consolidate and develop China-DPRK relations, and jointly push forward the sound momentum of peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula to make a positive contribution to safeguarding world and regional peace, stability, prosperity and development. Xi said that China was pleased to see the important summit between Comrade Chairman and U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore achieve principled consensus and positive results in realizing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and establishing a lasting peace mechanism on the Peninsula. "China speaks highly of the summit," Xi said. Comrade Chairman's visit to China showed the great importance he attaches to the strategic communication between the two parties and two countries, Xi said, expressing his appreciation to Kim. Xi stressed that he and Kim had met three times in less than three months, which pointed out the direction for the development of the relations between the two parties and the two countries, and opened a new chapter in the development of China-DPRK relations. "The CPC and the Chinese government attach great importance to China-DPRK friendly cooperative ties," Xi said. "No matter how the international and regional situations change, the firm stance of the CPC and the Chinese government on consolidating and developing the relations with the DPRK remains unchanged, the Chinese people's friendship with the DPRK people remains unchanged, and China's support for the socialist DPRK remains unchanged," he said. Xi voiced his willingness to work with Kim to continue implementing the important consensus reached by both sides, and promoting the long-term development of China-DPRK relations in a healthy and stable way, to benefit the two countries and the two peoples. This year marks the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening-up policy. Xi said that since the reform and opening-up, the Chinese people have been courageous to carry out self-reform and innovation, on the basis of the national conditions and having the whole world in view, and have explored a development path suitable for China's national conditions. "We are happy to see that the DPRK made a major decision to shift the focus to economic construction, and the development of the DPRK's socialist cause has entered a new stage in history," Xi said, adding that China supports the DPRK's economic development, the improvement of people's livelihood, and its development path that accords with its national conditions. Kim said he was very happy to meet with General Secretary Xi Jinping again in a short period of time. He stressed China is DPRK's great friendly neighbor, and Comrade General Secretary Xi Jinping is a great leader who is greatly respected and trusted by the DPRK people. Kim said he appreciated the sincere friendship of and valuable support from Comrade General Secretary Xi Jinping and the CPC, the Chinese government, and the Chinese people, to himself, the WPK, the DPRK government, and the DPRK people. "I will guide all WPK members and the DPRK people to earnestly implement the important consensus reached by Comrade General Secretary and me, to lift the unbreakable DPRK-China relations to a new level," Kim said. Xi said for a period of time, with joint efforts of parties concerned, the Korean Peninsula issue had been put back on the right track of seeking settlement through dialogue and consultation, and the situation on the Peninsula was developing towards peace and stability. "Comrade Chairman has made positive efforts for realizing denuclearization and maintaining peace on the Peninsula," Xi said. On the recent DPRK-U.S. summit, Xi said it marked an important step forward in the political settlement of the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue. He called on the two sides to implement the outcomes of the summit, and parties concerned to make concerted efforts to advance the peace process. China will continue to play a constructive role to this end, Xi said. Kim said the DPRK-U.S. summit had achieved positive results in line with the interests of concerned parties and the expectations of the international community. "If the two sides can implement the consensus of the summit step by step solidly, the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula will open up a new and important prospect," Kim said. He said the DPRK greatly appreciated China's important role in promoting denuclearization of the Peninsula as well as in maintaining peace and stability on the Peninsula. "The DPRK side hopes to work with China and other concerned parties to promote the establishment of a lasting and solid peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula, and make joint efforts to achieve lasting peace on the Peninsula," Kim said. Before the talks, Xi held a welcome ceremony for Kim at the North Hall of the Great Hall of the People. After the talks, Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan held a welcome banquet for Kim and his wife Ri Sol Ju, and watched an art performance together. Related activities were also attended by Li Keqiang, Chinese premier and member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee; Wang Huning, member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee; Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan; Ding Xuexiang, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee and director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee; Yang Jiechi, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee; Guo Shengkun, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee and head of the Commission for Political and Legal Affairs of the CPC Central Committee; Huang Kunming, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, member of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee and head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee; Cai Qi, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and secretary of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee; and State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Choe Ryong Hae, vice-chairman of the WPK Central Committee; Pak Pong Ju, DPRK premier; Ri Su Yong, vice-chairman of the WPK Central Committee and director of the International Department; Kim Yong Chol, vice-chairman of the WPK Central Committee and director of the United Front Department; Pak Thae Song, vice-chairman of the WPK Central Committee and Minister for Science and Education; No Kwang-chol, Minister of People's Armed Forces; and Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, attended related activities. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-20 02:00:25|Editor: yan Video Player Close SANAA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Yemen's Houthi rebels on Tuesday fired a ballistic missile at the Saudi city of Khamis Mushait in the southwest, but it was intercepted. The Houthi-controlled Saba news agency reported that the missile was aimed at the Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco in the region. But the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV reported that the Saudi air defense intercepted and destroyed the missile fired at Khamis Mushait in the Saudi southwestern region of Asir. The missile was fired hours after UN Envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths left the Yemeni rebel-held capital Sanaa, following his four-day visit to negotiate with the Houthis over resuming peace talks with the exiled Yemeni government. The attack also came hours after the pro-government Yemeni troops, supported by the Saudi-led coalition, seized control of the airport in the port city of Hodeidah and advanced towards the seaport. Saudi Arabia has been leading an Arab coalition in a war against the Iranian-allied Shiite Houthis to support the Yemeni exiled government since March 2015. Tuesday's missile attack was part of frequent attacks against various areas in the kingdom from the Houthis, with the majority of the missiles reportedly intercepted. Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in during their meeting at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia, Sept. 6, 2017. MOSCOW, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Russian and South Korean officials will discuss economic cooperation and the Korean Peninsula issue during the upcoming visit of South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov said Tuesday. "We will seek economic cooperation with South Korea, which is our second largest trading partner in Asia after China," Morgulov told reporters, adding that the two sides will also exchange views on the Korean Peninsula issue. Earlier this month, the Kremlin announced that Moon will pay an official visit to Russia on June 21-23 at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin. The Blue House confirmed the visit. According to the Kremlin, the two leaders will host high-level talks on June 22 on the further development of Russia-South Korea relations in political, trade and economic, and humanitarian spheres. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that there will be discussions in a narrow format, expanded talks, protocol events, signing of documents and a statement for the media. NAIROBI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Majority of the Kenyan population support refugee integration, said a survey released in Nairobi on Tuesday. According to the survey done by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), 71 percent of Kenyans would like to see refugees be allowed to work, while a significant 42 percent would like them to move freely within the country. The survey reveals that 88 percent of those interviewed prefer that the government will support refugees to establish a livelihood. "Kenyans' views on refugee integration are more progressive than the current policy position," Mohamed El Montassir, IRC Country Director for Kenya, said during the launch of the survey in Nairobi ahead of the World Refugee Day. Out of the 1,672 Kenyans who were interviewed, 93 percent support that the government provides proper security services to refugees and 39 percent support provision of land assistance. The survey found that most Kenyans have never interacted with refugees and get information through mass media, particularly radio and television. "What Kenyans know about refugees and issues affecting them is largely driven by the media, and tends to focus on crisis and controversy," Kurt Tjossem, IRC regional vice-president for East Africa, noted. Tjossem said Kenyans require more information on the positive developments, such as the efforts by the government to end protracted displacement. On the proposed closure of Dadaab refugee camp, the survey found that 54 percent of the people interviewed approve of the decision to close the camp by the government while 27 percent think refugees pose a security risk. The study also reveals that 62 percent of Kenyans interviewed support refugees born or raised in Kenya to become Kenyan citizens. Kenya is currently reviewing the Refugee Act 2006, after a previous bill enacted by Parliament in 2017 failed to obtain presidential accent as it had not been subjected to public participation. BUJUMBURA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- At least 32,345 Burundian refugees have returned home from refugee camps in Tanzania since a meeting on repatriating Burundian refugees, an official of UNHCR in Burundi said Tuesday. After the meeting that brought together officials from Burundi, Tanzania and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) at the end of March, some 32,345 Burundian refugees have by now returned to their villages from Tanzanian refugee camps, said Gogo Hukportie, representative of UNHCR in Burundi. The reintegration of returnees in their home villages is being done normally and other UN agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Children's Fund are supporting the reintegration process, said Hukportie at a press conference organized in the context of the World Refugee Day, which will be celebrated on Wednesday in Kavumu refugee camp in Cankuzo province, eastern Burundi. Hukportie indicated that the number of Burundian refugees currently living in exile in the Great Lakes region notably in Tanzania, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) and Uganda is estimated at 340,000. "On top of more than 310,000 Burundian people who fled the country's 2015 crisis, there were others estimated around 30,000 who had fled the 1972 crisis. Tanzania alone hosts about 240,000 Burundian refugees," said Hukportie. Burundi plunged into a crisis in 2015 when President Pierre Nkurunziza decided to run his controversial third term. His candidature, which was opposed by the opposition and civil society groups, resulted in a wave of protests, violence and even a failed coup on May 13, 2015. More than 400,000 refugees and asylum-seekers have fled Burundi since the outbreak of violence. RABAT, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The 16th Regional Meeting of National Authorities of African States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) kicked off Tuesday in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. The meeting gathered delegations from 38 African states parties to the CWC and several regional and international organizations. The meeting, organized in partnership with the Secretariat of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), focuses on the role of governments in the CWC implementation, as well as the coordination and reinforcement of the implementation of the convention at the national level. The meeting aims to highlight African priorities, and further develop the means of fostering cooperation between OPCW's Technical Secretariat and the African states parties. Speaking at the opening of the meeting, Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said the potential use of chemical weapons by non-state actors poses a serious threat to international peace and security, and is a real concern for the international community which should address it in a resolute way. He stressed that Morocco, African coordinator for the OPCW, considers the group's regional approach a pivotal asset for setting the principle of universality of the convention and a chief lever to approach realities, spot challenges facing the state parties and provide assistance and cooperation for every region and sub-region. By hosting this major event, Morocco reaffirms its long-standing support for actions undertaken by the OPCW, which it joined upon the enforcement of CWC on April 29, 1997, Bourita noted. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-20 02:50:35|Editor: yan Video Player Close TEHRAN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has taken necessary measures to protect Iranian authorities from bio-terrorist attacks, IRGC's security commander told Tasnim news agency Tuesday. Ali Nasiri, commander of the IRGC's security squad, said the IRGC is duty bound to combat any kind of threats and prepare necessary facilities and training programs, including plans to counter bio-terrorism, to guard Iranian authorities and scientists. Stressing the need to update its capabilities to deal with such threats, Nasiri said his forces have received necessary training, while experts in this field have also been recruited. In July 2016, Gholam Reza Jalali, head of Iran's Civil Defense Organization, called for measures to ward off bio-terrorist attacks and protect senior Iranian officials from falling victim to such plots. A Palestinian protester uses a slingshot to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers during clashes after a protest against the expanding of Jewish settlements in Kufr Qadoom village near the West Bank city of Nablus, on April 13, 2018. (Xinhua/Nidal Eshtayeh) UNITED NATIONS, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Israel has taken no steps to cease settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory as demanded by Security Council Resolution 2344, said Nickolay Mladenov, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, on Tuesday. Some 3,500 housing units in settlements in Area C of the occupied West Bank were advanced, approved or tendered during the period from March 26 to June 12, Mladenov told the Security Council. One-third of those units are in settlements in outlying locations deep in the West Bank, he said. No advancements, approvals or tenders were made in occupied East Jerusalem, said the UN envoy. During this period, there was an overall increase in demolitions across Area C in the West Bank compared with the previous reporting period. The authorities demolished or seized 84 Palestinian-owned structures, resulting in the displacement of some 67 people and potentially affected the livelihoods of 4,500 others, he said. "I reiterate that all settlement activity is illegal under international law. It continues to undermine the practical prospects for establishing a viable Palestinian state and erodes remaining hopes for peace," said Mladenov. The reporting period was characterized by high levels of violence, including rocket attacks from Gaza, he said. Since March 30, 135 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces during a series of protests in Gaza. Two Israeli soldiers were also injured during the protests, with at least five other people lightly injured as a result of rockets and mortars launched from Gaza, he said. Hundreds have approached and attempted to breach the border fence with Israel, burned tires, threw rocks and fire bombs at Israeli forces, launched incendiary kites and laid improvised explosive devices at the fence. Palestinian protesters also damaged and looted equipment and installations on the Gaza side of the border at the Kerem Shalom crossing, said the UN envoy. "I want to again reiterate the call of the (UN) secretary-general on all to unequivocally condemn, in the strongest possible terms, all actions that have brought us to this dangerous place and led to the loss of so many lives in Gaza." Israel has a duty to protect its citizens but must do so while exercising maximum restraint in the use of live fire, and to not use lethal force, except as a last resort against imminent threat of death or serious injury, he said. The actions of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other groups in Gaza put at risk not only the lives of Israelis and Palestinians alike, but also efforts to ensure a livable future for people of Gaza. They must prevent the launching of rockets and breaching of the fence, he said. The need to reverse, or at the very least contain the impact of, negative trends, especially illegal settlement activity, violence and incitement, is critical not only to preserve hope for a meaningful return to the negotiating table, but also to prevent the escalation of broader regional tensions, said Mladenov. "I urge key regional and international partners to re-engage and remain steadfast in pursuit of ending the occupation and realizing a two-state solution, in line with relevant United Nations resolutions and previous agreements." An Iranian military truck carries part of surface-to-air missiles during a parade on the occasion of the country's annual army day on April 18, 2018, in Tehran. (AFP photo) TEHRAN, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Iran's military said Tuesday that Iran does not need to increase the maximum range of its ballistic missiles beyond the current 2,000 km, the Tehran Times reported. "All are aware that we are able to increase the range of our missiles, but our policy is to keep the range within 2,000 km, and we can reach our strategic objectives within this range," Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), was quoted as saying. Jafari also denounced what he called the "U.S. threat to weaken Iran's defense and missile capabilities." U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from Iran's historic nuclear deal in May and threatened to reimpose sanctions on Tehran eased under the 2015 nuclear deal. Trump stated that the nuclear deal could not bring peace to the Middle East region, as Iran's ballistic missile program is not covered. Over the past weeks, the Iranians have been divided into two camps, as some believe that Iran should negotiate with the U.S. over a series of issues, while others disagree. Jafari strongly criticized those in Iran who proposed direct talks between Tehran and Washington to reach a new deal. "If these people cannot be called crazy, they are misguided," he added. TRIPOLI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Libyan Red Crescent teams on Tuesday recovered bodies of six illegal immigrants off the coast of Libya's western city of Janzur, some 15 km west of the capital Tripoli, a Libyan navy spokesman said. "Information was received about a boat carrying migrants off Janzur. It was later discovered that the rubber boat has drowned, and bodies of six migrants were washed ashore," Ayob Qassem told Xinhua. "We do not know how many migrants were on board," he said, suggesting that the boat most likely drowned Tuesday or Monday night, as the bodies did not decompose. A day earlier, the Libyan coast guards recovered five bodies of illegal immigrants, and rescued 191 others in two separate operations off the western Libyan coast. Libya is a preferred point of departure for illegal immigrants who want to cross the Mediterranean toward Europe because of insecurity and chaos in their countries. ARUSHA, Tanzania, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Tanzania on Tuesday launched a six-month test and treat campaign that seeks to put people with HIV on anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs) immediately upon testing positive. Speaking during the launch in the country's capital Dodoma, Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa directed local government leaders to sensitize residents to take HIV test so that those found with the virus can start medication immediately. Majaliwa encouraged Tanzanians to come out and test for the virus and those found to be living with the virus to start using the drugs. He particularly said men should be given special attention in the campaign since they normally do not respond to such initiatives as positively as their female counterparts. Majaliwa reaffirmed Tanzania's commitment to working with other development partners towards achieving its goal of eradicating AIDS. According to statistics by the Tanzania Commission for AIDS (TACAIDS), Tanzania has an estimated 1.4 million people living with HIV, but only 52 percent of them are aware of their condition. The disease has mostly affected the youth aged between 14 and 25, says TACAIDS. TRIPOLI, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Canadian Ambassador to Libya Ashley Adams on Tuesday met with Khalid al-Meshri, head of the Libyan Higher Council of State, in the capital Tripoli to discuss mutual cooperation between the two countries. According to a statement by the Council's information office, the meeting focused on the developments in Libya and the outcomes of the recent Paris conference. "In her first meeting with the elected head of the Council, the Canadian ambassador confirmed her country's full support for Libya, expressing aspiration for permanent return of the Canadian embassy and companies to Libya," the statement said. Most foreign embassies and companies in Libya left following the 2011 uprising due to the insecurity and chaos in the country. "The head of the Council praised Canada's positive and supportive role and neutral policy with all countries, calling for more momentum to resolving the Libyan crisis, not only on the political level, but also on the economic and educational level, given the positive impact on the Libyan political scene," the statement added. Despite signing a UN-sponsored political agreement by the Libyan parties in December 2015, Libya remains politically divided between rival authorities in the east and west of the country, both competing for legitimacy. Paris recently hosted a meeting on Libya with the participation of different Libyan parties to end the political crisis. The parties agreed to hold and commit themselves to "credible" presidential and parliamentary elections slated for Dec. 10. by Eric J. Lyman ROME, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The heads of the two parties supporting Italy's new government are clashing over a plan to conduct a census on the country's largely un-measured Roma population with an eye towards deporting those whose documentation is not in order. At least 150,000 members of the nomadic Roma are thought to live in Italy, mostly near large cities like Rome, Milan, and Naples. As many as half are thought to be born outside of Italy or to be Italian-born non-citizens. Matteo Salvini, Italy's minister of the interior and head of the nationalist League, one of the two parties supporting the government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, started the row this week. Salvini said he instructed government officials to "prepare a dossier on the Roma question" in order to know "who they are, where they live, and how many of them there are." Salvini said those without Italian citizenship would be deported, and he complained that for those with Italian citizenship, "Unfortunately, well, you have to keep them." Salvini has not been shy about extreme views since the new government was installed on June 1. He has repeated his campaign promise to deport as many as half a million migrants from Italy, and earlier this month earned worldwide headlines after refusing to allow a rescue ship with 629 refugees on board to land in Italy. "I will not quit," Salvini said on social media Tuesday. "We're moving forward," Salvini said, defending the counting of the Roma community in the country was necessary for reasons of security. But the latest comments from the League have sparked the first rift with the Five-Star Movement, the other party backing the Conte government. Luigi Di Maio, minister of labor and head of the Five-Star Movement, said Salvini's order was "unconstitutional." Some lawmakers from the party said they would instruct officials to refuse to act on it. Paolo Gentiloni, who was prime minister for 18 months until Conte was installed, also criticized Salvini's actions. "Yesterday the refugees, today the Roma," Gentiloni said via social media. "How tiring it is to be wicked." Roberto Malini, from the activist organization Every One Group, told Xinhua that in attacking migrants and the country's well-established Roma population, Salvini was a way to divide the country. "Salvini has been saying this kind of thing for years," Malini said. "His message has never been that everyone is the same, that everyone has the same rights. He is telling voters that everyone's rights are different, that some people are better than others." The Roma population has deep roots in Italy, with some sources estimating they first arrived in the 14th Century. But they often live on the periphery of cities and rarely integrate into Italian culture. Polls show that at least three in four Italians say they have an unfavorable view of the Roma. Former prime minister and billionaire media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, a one-time ally of Salvini and the League, proposed a census of the Roma in Italy. But the plans were scuttled after an Italian judge ruled they were illegal. MEXICO CITY, June 19 (Xinhua) -- At least nine people were killed and another 12 injured after a bus overturned in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora, federal police said on Tuesday. The accident took place around 10:45 p.m. local time Monday night close to the city of Caborca, said the police. Four men and three women died at the scene, while emergency services evacuated 14 passengers to hospitals in Caborca and Hermosillo, the state capital. According to local press, two of the injured were pronounced dead later on Tuesday. Local press also reported that the bus carrying 21 passengers left the border city of Tijuana in the northwestern state of Baja California traveling to Guadalajara, the capital city of western state of Jalisco. Survivors said that the bus veered off the road and overturned several times before coming to a stop on its side. Several passengers needed to be rescued from inside the bus. The governor of Sonora, Claudia Pavlovich, offered her condolences to families who lost their relatives and said that authorities were continuing to administer medical services to the injured. According to federal police, officials from the Sonora prosecutor's office were currently investigating to ascertain the cause of the accident. MINSK, June 19 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday expressed his willingness to increase trade with Belarus to 50 billion U.S. dollars a year. Russia is interested in the development of the Union State and the fostering of political and economic integration with Belarus, Putin said during a meeting of the Supreme State Council of the Belarus-Russia Union State in Minsk. The Russian president said that trade between two countries needs to be further expanded and diversified. Last year, bilateral trade grew 23.5 percent to 32.4 billion U.S. dollars. Bilateral trade has also been increasing this year. He noted that the volume of Russian investments in the Belarusian economy has exceeded 3.9 billion U.S. dollars. In turn, Belarusian enterprises have invested 620 million U.S. dollars in Russia. Putin considers it important to improve the business and investment environment, to implement the agreed financial, credit and tax policies, and to continue the harmonization of regulatory activities. In addition, he called for further measures to boost industrial cooperation between Belarus and Russia. Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-20 05:51:17|Editor: yan Video Player Close GENEVA, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The President of the UN Human Rights Council Vojislav Suc on Tuesday stressed that it is essential that we uphold a strong and vibrant Council in times when the value and strength of multilateralism and human rights are being challenged on a daily basis. In a statement issued right after the announcement of the withdrawal of the United States from the UN Human rights Council, the UN official said the Council should be recognized as a central part of the United Nations for the 21st century. HOUSTON, June 19 (Xinhua) -- The governor of U.S. state of Texas has ordered the State Operations Center (SOC) to elevate its readiness level as heavy rain and storms continue to impact the Texas coast, according to a news release by the governor's office on Tuesday. The SOC increased its readiness level from level IV (normal conditions) to level III (increased readiness) Tuesday morning. Greg Abbott, the governor, said in the news release that the number one priority is the safety and wellbeing of Texans, adding "I encourage everyone in the affected areas to stay safe and heed all warnings from local officials." The governor said that Texas is no stranger to this type of severe weather. Hurricane Harvey blew ashore on Aug. 25, 2017 as the most powerful hurricane to hit Texas in more than 50 years, displacing tens of thousands of people and damaging some 200,000 houses in the path of destruction that stretched for more than 480 km. The Houston area was hit by severe flooding after receiving heavy rain in just several days. It took the lives of at least 88 in Texas directly or indirectly, and the majority of deaths, or 62, were caused by wind, rain and floods, which led to drownings or trees falling on people. The prosecutors asked for life imprisonment for the man accused of setting off a bomb in central Budapest in 2016. Two police officers were wounded in the attack on September 24, 2016, one of them with life-threatening injuries, when the bomb exploded near a ground floor shop entrance in Budapests central Terez Avenue. The suspect, identified as Laszlo P, was detained in Keszthely, in western Hungary, on October 19 on charges of premeditated terrorist act targeting authority. The opposition Socialist Partys congress on Sunday elected Bertalan Toth party chairman. Toth garnered 54% of the votes, while Attila Mesterhazy, the other candidate, was supported by 46% of the party delegates. After his election, Toth said that he would seek to build a cooperative party which represents traditional leftist values relentlessly, one which believes in solidarity, justice, equal opportunities and national cohesion. He added that his party should be a real community and offer hope by protecting those persecuted by the establishment. He also said that the Socialists should implacably criticise the government and become the driving force for a government change. Toth said it was inevitable that his party should face the past. He argued that Hungarys Left had been lazy and failed to express and promote its own truth while ruling Fidesz promoted a post-fascist world view and made it popular. MTI Photo: Bruzak Noemi GRANGER, Wash. As the state continues to mark newly issued standard drivers licenses as not meeting federal standards, some Yakima Valley r By RALPH ANSAMI [email protected] Damage assessments were under way Monday after as much as a foot of rain fell over the weekend in parts of northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula. For the weekend, Ironwood streets flooded both Friday and Sunday as the storms caused untold damage. According to the National Weather Service, Ironwood received nearly 8 inches of rain over the weekend. The The heaviest total was 3.64 inches for the 24-hour period to 7 a.m. Saturday at the wastewater treatment plant off Cloverland Drive, but there was more than an inch every day from Thursday through Monday morning. The Ironwood Public Safety Department and city public works crew were kept busy over the weekend. The Montreal River over Norrie Park Road flooded Saturday afternoon. IPSD officer Adam Clemens was checking out that damage when he spotted a tree over telephone lines east of the park. Washouts included a sinkhole developing near the walking trail on North Curry Road on Friday, when U.S. 2 was under about a foot of water following a deluge. The IPSD investigated deep ditch wash-outs on the Old County Road, near South Davis Road. The south shoulder washed out, but the water had subsided by Monday afternoon. A power line was discovered down near Pioneer Park Apartments, where there was a power outage. Much of the city, including stores along the highway, were without electricity on Sunday evening. There were homeowner reports of flooded basements in the city throughout the weekend. On Friday morning, U.S. 2 had to be closed between Lowell Street and Douglas Boulevard because of flash flooding. Heavy winds downed trees, as many toppled because root structures were saturated. At noon on Monday, about a dozen MJ Electric, Iron Mountain and Xcel Energy repair trucks were parked in the lot at the Ironwood Area Schools bus garage. A worker said the crews had been dispatched from the Minnesota area and had trouble getting to Ironwood because of earlier detours on Wisconsin 169 and Wisconsin 77. Rainfall totals for 24-hour periods to 7 a.m. in Ironwood included: Friday, 1.57 inches; Saturday, 3.64 inches; Sunday, 1.17 inches; Monday, 1.44 inches. The forecast calls for sunshine most of the rest of the week. There were scattered power outages from Friday through Sunday throughout the Gogebic Range and Xcel Energy said 5,400 customers were affected in northern Wisconsin. Gogebic County Road Commission Director-Engineer Darren Pionk said while his crew made road repairs throughout the weekend, Sundays storm destroyed all those repairs. The road commission website listed 17 road closures or areas to be repaired as of Monday. Coun Perez reiterates warning to barangay leaders involved in drugs 07 Aug 2017 Hits:37 Comments(0) Liga ng mga Barangay President, Councilor Jerry Perez yesterday reiterated his warning to all barangay officials from using or selling drugs. Perez said he is closely monitoring the activities of all the barangay officials and vowed sanctions against erring leaders. Aqui gane na mio barangay ya quita ya iyo na puesto cunel dos barangay leaders quien mas temprano ya sale positivo na... Source: Xinhua| 2018-06-17 10:57:43|Editor: ZD Video Player Close Vice President of Maldives China Trade and Cultural Organization (MCTCO) Midhuam Saud is interviewed by Xinhua News Agency in Male, capital of Mavldives, on June 13, 2018. The Maldives and China have always enjoyed a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship, which has reached to a historic level over the past few years, Midhuam Saud told Xinhua in the interview. (Xinhua/Zhu Ruiqing) By Zhu Ruiqing, Tang Lu MALE, June 17 (Xinhua) -- The Maldives and China have always enjoyed a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship, which has reached to a historic level over the past few years, Vice President of Maldives China Trade and Cultural Organization (MCTCO) Midhuam Saud told Xinhua in a recent interview. In the future, with sky being the limit, infinite possibilities lie in the cooperation between the two countries, said Midhuam. Midhuam said, today, the Maldives is cooperating with China in a wide range of platforms, from co-building the multi-national Belt and Road Initiative, to joining China-proposed financial institutes like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to several culture exchange programs. The cooperation between the Maldives and China has yielded fruitful results and indeed brought benefits to the Maldivians, said the vice president. "For instance, the China-Maldives Friendship Bridge is realized under the Belt and Road Initiative; the ambitious social housing project in the Maldives' Hulhumale island is realized under Chinese finance. And over 300 Maldivian civil servants went to China for professional training last year alone." "In addition to the Chinese government scholarships, China Maldives Cultural Association and MCTCO which I represent, both registered NGOs in the Maldives, are now working closely with the Chinese side in promoting all kinds of exchange programs to strengthen people to people relationships," the vice president said. Midhuam continued, "as we speak, a team from the Maldives's local government authority including several councilors are preparing to go to China for a training program." China indeed plays a vital role in the "economic boom" in the Maldives today. And this is not a case local to the Maldives but a global phenomenon. China is a vital economic and trade partner of many countries on earth, not just the Maldives, he said. While commenting on the questioning rhetoric that the projects undertaken by Chinese companies in the Maldives are making the island country increasingly debt-burdened, Midhuam said that debt is a "natural" issue common to all developing countries like the Maldives, as well as most developed countries. "Debt per say, is not an issue, if the borrowing nation has a plan to pay back. The only way we, as a developing nation, can achieve our developmental goals is by taking loans, and most people I meet here accept this fact," he explained. Midhuam further explained why the Maldives chooses to take the loan from China, saying that over the past few years, not only the Maldives, many developing countries in need of loans to bring major economic changes have turned to China, the only country which has the capacity to give loans with friendly conditions. "After decades' development, today's China has the financial capacity to provide loans to other countries with the attached terms and conditions being far more attractive than those from other financial institutes. That's why we take the loan from China," the vice president said. The Maldives is a young country, with the median age less than 30 years old. By quoting legendary U.S. political activist Malcolm X's saying "the future belongs to those who prepare for it today", Midhuam called on the youths in the Maldives to be ready for the opportunities brought from the cooperation between China and Maldives. "Economically, 35 percent of the world growth from 2017 to 2019 will come from China according to statistics; environmentally, China has promised to achieve blue skies in all major cities, and China is already equipped with state-of-the-art solar energy technology now. The rise of China is dominating the world picture today," Midhuam said. "It is necessary that our youths understand the opportunities they get today through the Maldives, China cooperation will help them to be well prepared for tomorrow. The future does belong to those who prepare for it today," Midhuam concluded. New Delhi: Instant messaging app WhatsApp has updated its support feature, updating the list of smartphones that will stop working soon. In the run up to offering better service to consumers, the Facebook-owned chat messenger will reportedly stop working on a host of devices, the list of which has been freshly updated. The reason, WhatsApp says is because we'll no longer actively develop for these operating systems, some features might stop functioning at any time. The following operating systems are no longer supported: Android versions older than 2.3.3 Windows Phone 8.0 and older iPhone 3GS/iOS 6 Nokia Symbian S60 BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 For the following operating systems, you can no longer create new accounts. However, you'll be able to continue using WhatsApp on: Nokia S40 until December 31, 2018 Android versions 2.3.7 and older until February 1, 2020 iOS 7 and older until February 1, 2020 If you currently use an older operating system, WhatsApp recommend upgrading to a newer version, or to one of the following: Android running OS 4.0+ iPhone running iOS 8+ Windows Phone 8.1+ Keep in mind that WhatsApp can only be activated with one phone number on one device at a time. There is currently no option to transfer your chat history between platforms. However, WhatsApp provides the option to send your chat history attached to an email. PATNA: Amid growing discontent between the NDA allies in Bihar over seat sharing for the 2019 parliamentary elections, a senior BJP leader has said that the party would contest from all 23 Lok Sabha seats it won last time in the state. Clarifying the party's stand on the issue, BJP general secretary Rajender Singh has said that there would be no compromise on the sitting seats. "BJP would contest all seats it won last time and the seats being represented by the party in the Lok Sabha," he said. In 2014, the BJP had won 23 of 40 Lok Sabha seats and its allies - Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) and Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) - had won six and three seats, respectively. Interestingly, the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had contested 2014 polls on its own and won only two of the 40 seats. After Singh said that the party would not share its winning seat with allies, particularly the JD(U) that joined hands with the BJP only last July to form government in the state, JD(U) spokesperson Sanjay Singh said that if the BJP was confident to win all seats, it did not need any allies. Sanjay Singh also cautioned the BJP leaders to avoid making such statements in public ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The statement from Rajender Singh came at a time when there are reports of growing resentment among constituents of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) over seat sharing for the 2019 polls. Citing lack of coordination in the BJP-led NDA, RLSP chief and Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha had earlier this month demanded a decision on distribution of seats among the allies for the parliamentary elections. Soon after that, the LJP led by Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan too backed Kushwaha and said that said that it would not compromise on the seats held by it. Interestingly, two senior JD(U) leaders - Pawan Verma and KC Tyagi had earlier claimed that Nitish Kumar would spearhead the NDA challenge next year, and other party leaders followed by saying that the party would contest 25 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar as it did in 2009 as an ally of the NDA. Such demands may spell trouble for the BJP-led NDA in Bihar with regard to seat sharing. Apparently, the BJP is keen to play the "big brother" in the backdrop of its better-than-expected performance in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. New Delhi: Bollywood's talented find, Kangana Ranaut is currently busy shooting for her upcoming venture 'Mental Hai Kya'. The film stars Rajkummar Rao opposite her and this brings back the 'Queen' jodi on-screen. Kangana's team decided to share some of her breezy pictures from the streets of London where she is shooting for the film. In one of her recent clicks, the Himachali beauty can be seen enjoying her shopping time on the streets of London. Here's what the caption read: Let's have some shopping smiles!! #KanganaRanaut spotted shopping in #London in between her #MentalHaiKyashoot. We say the breaktime is being perfectly utilized #Queen #shopping #shootdiaries#shootfun #shootlife #picoftheday A few days back, the lead pair of the film recently shot for the poster and they had some crazy time it seems. The psychological thriller is being produced by Ekta Kapoor and is directed by Prakash Kovelamudi. On the professional front, Kangana will next be seen in period drama 'Manikarnika: The Queen Of Jhansi'. The epic tale is based on the life of Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi. Kangana plays the titular role of Rani Laxmi in the venture and the story revolves around her war against the British East India Company during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It is being directed by Krish. The release date is yet to be announced. Rajkummar, on the other hand, will be seen in 'Fanne Khan' starring Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Anil Kapoor. Also, he will be seen in 'Stree' starring Shraddha Kapoor in the lead role. NEW DELHI: In what is likely to snowball into a diplomatic tussle between the two countries, it has now come to light that over 2000 Indian workers have either lost their jobs in the Maldives or were denied employment visas to work there in the last three months. According to reports, the Immigration Department in the Maldives had recently denied employment visas to nearly 300 Indian workers, who were hired by a Singapore-based company working in the Island nation. The company is engaged in the construction of a modernised airport in Male, the reports said. The company, which earlier requested to bring machinery for the project from India, was later denied permission by the customs officials at the airport, forcing it to hire the same from China-backed local companies, the reports suggested. The Government of India (GoI) is believed to be keeping a close eye on the unpleasant developments in the Maldives and has directed the External Affairs Ministry (MEA) and other agencies to collect data in this regard. The agencies have been asked to prepare a breakup of those who have either lost jobs or denied entry in the Island nation. The government agencies have also been directed to prepare a list of Indians who have returned home after losing their jobs in the Maldives. Just a few days ago, Male had asked the Indian authorities to take back two helicopters, which were gifted by India to the Maldivian government, by June end. The Maldives government has also reportedly instructed its Immigration Department to put on hold fresh work permits for Indians. However, the Maldives Immigration Department has categorically refuted reports that it is denying work permits to Indian citizens. Immigration Controller Mohamed Anwar said that Maldives Immigration officers do not discriminate when carrying out their duties and the authority will continue to grant Indian citizens work permits and visas in accordance with the country's regulations, according to media reports. Congress president Rahul Gandhi had last week taken up the issue of cancellation of work visas of Indian nationals in the Maldives and slammed the Narendra Modi government at the Centre. Attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi over worsening of ties with the Maldives, the Congress chief said that the foreign policy of the country had become one about photo ops and no agenda meetings. Claiming that the Maldives was cancelling work visa of Indian nationals, the Gandhi scion tweeted, The Maldives, once one of our closest allies & beneficiary of massive aid, is cancelling Indian work visas & putting up Not Hiring Indians signs. This happens when foreign policy becomes about photo ops & "no agenda meetings" instead of strategic intent. Maldives, once one of our closest allies & beneficiary of massive aid, is cancelling Indian work visas & putting up Not Hiring Indians signs. This happens when foreign policy becomes about photo ops & "no agenda meetings" instead of strategic intent. https://t.co/rk1csSLTT1 Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 14, 2018 President Abdulla Yameen declared an emergency on February 5, following an order by the Supreme Court to release a group of Opposition leaders who had been convicted in widely-criticised trials. While India reacted strongly over the extension of emergency by a month, the island nation declined India's invitation to participate in the eight-day mega naval exercise - Milan - from March 6-13. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has ended his strike at Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijals office, reported news agency ANI. The strike by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders ended a day after the Delhi High Court pulled them up saying they could not hold dharna at someones office or residence in this manner. Kejriwal and other AAP ministers had started the dharna at the L-Gs office, demanding that the latter must ask IAS officers to end what AAP describes as strike and resume work. The dharna began on June 13. Two AAP ministers Satyendar Jain and Manish Sisodia had gone on a hunger strike a day after the dharna began. However, earlier this week, the health condition of both Jain and Sisodia deteriorated and they were admitted to LNJP hospital in the national capital. During his dharna, Kejriwal got the support of various opposition parties, barring the Congress. Chief Ministers of four states Andhra Pradeshs Chandrababu Naidu, West Bengals Mamata Banerjee, HD Kumaraswamy of Karnataka and Pinarayi Vijayan of Kerala had even gone to the L-G office to meet Kejriwal and other AAP leaders. However, they were denied permission to meet the leaders sitting on dharna. Following this, the chief ministers went to the residence of Kejriwal and met his family members Patna: Thousands of answer scripts of candidates who took Matric examinations, conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) in 2018, went missing from the strong room of a school where these were kept after evaluation, the BSEB said on Tuesday. The declaration of results for Matriculation, which was scheduled for Wednesday, has now been deferred to June 26, the BSEB said in a statement released in Patna. The results will be declared on biharboard.ac.in. The principal of the school - situated at Gopalganj district - was summoned by the BSEB and later detained by police for interrogation. The latest episode has further tarnished BSEB image which had drawn widespread condemnation in the wake of "toppers scam" when non-deserving students were declared top rankers in Arts as well science streams out of materialistic considerations in 2016. "Pramod Kumar Srivastava, the principal of SS Girls's Senior Secondary High School had registered an FIR on Sunday stating that over 200 bags, containing more than 40,000 answer scripts evaluated at the premises and kept thereafter in the strong room, were missing", SHO of Town police station in Gopalganj, Ravi Kumar, told PTI-Bhasha over phone. The SHO said that in the FIR, Srivastava had named some non-teaching staff who had been entrusted with manning the school building. BSEB Chairman Anand Kishor said "Srivastava was called to the Board headquarters here for questioning. He was later detained by the police for further questioning". Deputy SP, Law and Order, Patna, Manoj Kumar Sudhanshu confirmed the detention of Srivastava. However, both Kishor and Sudhanshu declined to divulge details of the investigation. The BSEB later issued a press note stating "the DM and the SP of Gopalganj have been directed to ensure recovery of the barcoded, evaluated answer scripts, identify the culprits and take action against them as per law". The Board also announced that the results would now be declared on June 26 but claimed that disappearance of the answer scripts will have "no effect on the overall results nor on preparation of the list of top-ranking students". "All the evaluation centres have provided the BSEB headquarters with award sheets stating the marks awarded to each candidate. Hence, we are already in possession of the respective scores of even those candidates whose answer scripts have gone missing", the BSEB release said. SRINAGAR/NEW DELHI: Minutes after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulled out of the alliance with People's Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti and her team of ministers sent their resignations to the state governor Narinder Nath Vohra. The state is now headed for President's rule. Senior BJP leader Ram Madhav said at a press conference that the decision was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah. "We have taken a decision, it is untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with PDP in Jammu & Kashmir, hence we are withdrawing," he said The alliance fell out following differences in opinion over revoking a month-long suspension of a ceasefire in the state during the Holy month of Ramzan. While the Mufti-led PDP wanted Centre to reach out to the separatists, the latter argued that the separatists were given several opportunities to stop their terror-related activities. Citing the assassination of Rising Kashmir's editor Shujaat Bukhari's, Madhav said, "Terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of the citizens are under danger in the Valley. Shujaat Bukhari killing is an example." The veteran journalist was shot dead in Srinagar by unidentified assailants last week. The step was taken keeping in mind the larger interest of India's security and integrity and that J&K is an integral part of India, said Madhav. "In order to bring control over the situation prevailing in the state we have decided that the reigns of power in the state be handed over to the Governor. Even if Governor rule is imposed in the Jammu & Kashmir, our efforts to fight terrorism will continue. We had to respect the mandate of the people. If we would not have formed govt at that time, Governor's rule or Presidential rule would have been imposed in the Valley. We had an alliance with them just for the mandate that was given by people," he added. Earlier on Tuesday, BJP president Amit Shah met party legislators from Jammu and Kashmir and state unit leaders at the party headquarters in Delhi on Tuesday. There were reports that PDP was reportedly unhappy with the Centre's decision to revoke the month-long suspension of the ceasefire which was in force during Ramzan. In the current Assembly, the BJP has 25 MLAs and the PDP 28 MLAs. The majority mark is 45. New Delhi/Srinagar: Hours after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulled out of the three-year-old ruling coalition with the People's Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir and called for Governor's rule, Director General of Police SP Vaid said on Tuesday that operations against terrorists in the state will be intensified in the coming days. "I am sure things should work very effectively and it will have an impact on the security situation in the Valley," he said. Vaid added that counter-terrorism operations were stopped only during the just-ended period of Ramzan. Operations against terrorists will be intensified, says J&K DGP "They were going on earlier also, but we will intensify these operations in the days to come. And it would be, I think, much easier to work," the J&K police chief said when asked if Governor's rule would make a difference. He said terror activities increased during the period the security forces suspended the operations. "But we will go all out and intensify operations against the terrorists now," Vaid said. He further said that the suspension of operations had an impact in the fight against terrorists as they were at an advantage. "The orders were to maintain a high alert in the camps so that if the camps were attacked, we are able to retaliate effectively. But one could not launch operations even when there was specific intelligence about the presence of terrorists. So that obviously was advantageous for the terrorists," Vaid said, PTI reported. BJP-PDP alliance collapses in J&K: The J&K government collapsed on Tuesday with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the announcement after the J&K ministers were summoned to New Delhi for emergency consultations. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor NN Vohra. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in the state," Madhav told reporters at a press conference in New Delhi. The BJP blamed the PDP for failing to improve the security conditions in the Kashmir Valley. Madhav cited last week's killing of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar in the highly secured area of Press Enclave by unidentified gunmen. The same day - two days before Eid - an Army jawan was abducted while going on leave and killed. On the other hand, addressing the press in Srinagar, Mehbooba said, "I submitted my resignation to the Governor and have told him that we are not looking to explore any other alliance... We had formed the alliance with BJP because we shared a grand vision. It took us many months to form an alliance whose prime focus was reconciliation and dialogue." She added, "I am not shocked... We didn't do this alliance for power. This alliance had a bigger motive - unilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of 11,000 cases against the stone pelters... We always said muscular security policy will not work in J&K, reconciliation is the key... We have safeguarded Article 370 and 35-A (of the Constitution) and we will continue to do that." The PDP and the BJP had formed a coalition more than two months after the December 2014 Assembly elections returned a hung verdict, in which the PDP got 28 seats and the BJP 25, while the National Conference bagged 15 seats and the Congress managed to win 12 in a House of 89. The government came to power on March 1, 2015. NC leader Omar Abdullah calls for fresh elections in J&K: Former J&K CM and National Conference leader Omar Abdullah said on Tuesday that they will not be staking claim to form the government in the state. He also called for fresh Assembly elections soon. "I met the Governor. I told him that National Conference didn't receive the mandate to form the government in 2014 and we don't have the mandate in 2018 also. We haven't been approached and we aren't approaching anyone," he said, addressing the media. "I have told Governor that since no party has the mandate to form the government, he will have to impose Governor's rule in the state. We also requested the Governor that Governor's rule should not remain imposed for a long time period. After all, people have the right to choose their government. Fresh elections should take place and we will accept the mandate of the people," he added, as per ANI. NN Vohra recommends Governor's Rule in J&K: Following the collapse of the coalition government in the state, J&K Governor on Tuesday forwarded his report to President Ram Nath Kovind for the imposition of Governor's rule. The report was sent to the President after he held consultations with Mehbooba, BJP state chief Ravinder Raina, Omar and Congress J&K president GA Mir. "The Governor received a letter by fax, jointly signed by Raina and Kavinder Gupta, state BJP president and leader of BJP Legislature Party respectively, about withdrawing BJP's support to the coalition government," a Raj Bhawan spokesperson said, as per PTI. He added that Mehbooba tendered her resignation thereafter, but the Governor has asked her to continue in office till alternative arrangements are made. "The Governor spoke to Kavinder Gupta and Mehbooba Mufti to ascertain whether their respective parties intended to explore alternative alliances to form a government in the state and was informed in the negative by both the leaders. He also spoke to Mir, who informed that his party did not have the numerical strength to form a government on its own or in an alliance," the spokesperson said. Later, the Governor had a meeting with Omar, who stated that there was no alternative to Governor's rule and elections. "After concluding his consultations with all the major political parties, Governor Vohra has forwarded his report to the President for the imposition of Governor's rule under Section 92 of the Constitution of J&K," he further said. (With Agency inputs) NEW DELHI: The Centre is eyeing a major push to improve the infrastructure at higher education institutions across the country. Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar has said the Higher Education Funding Agency (HEFA) would make Rs 1 lakh crore available to institutions over the next four years for infrastructure upgrades. The availability of funds would be implemented under the Centre's goal to plug infrastructural holes and improve systems in the higher education sector by 2022, Javadekar said. The funding that HEFA is meant to facilitate for higher education institutions would be over and above their budgetary allocations. The Narendra Modi government had announced the establishment of HEFA in the 2016-17 Union Budget. The goal of the agency is to function as a not-for-profit body that would leverage funds from the market and supplement them with donations and CSR funds. HEFA would make these funds available to institutions as interest-free loans. It has been recognised as a non-banking financial institution (NBFC) by the Reserve Bank of India. Javadekar's comments on the HEFA push were part of a press conference he addressed on New Delhi on Monday on the achievements of the Union HRD Ministry over the past four years. Javadekar claimed that the Ministry had kicked off 33 new initiatives to strengthen the education sector. He said 141 universities, 14 Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), seven Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and one National Institute of Technology (NIT) have been opened during the last four years, when the Narendra Modi government has been in power. He also said 103 new Kendriya Vidyalayas and 62 new Navodaya Vidyalayas have been opened in the last four years. Javadekar summarised another major initiative, the National Assessment Survey, in which the data was gathered on about 37 lakh students. Terming it the world's largest such exercise, he said assessments had been carried out of 22 lakh students of Classes III, V and VIII, and 15 lakh Class X students. The educational profile of each district in the country has also been collated and shared with the respective Chief Ministers, MPs and other relevant officials, Javadekar said. NEW DELHI: The Haryana government has issued a circular reminding all its officials that they are required to stand up while meeting MPs and MLAs and that they should respond to any communication from them promptly. The circular is merely a repetition of one sent to the state government by the Union government. However, it has attracted attention considering the ongoing face-off between IAS officers and the Delhi government. The circular was issued by the office of Haryana Chief Secretary Depinder Singh Dhesi. It is dated May 28 and has been signed by Under Secretary Political Devinder Kapil. The circular sparked a wave of criticism on social media, accusing the BJP of using different standards for the behaviour of officers in Haryana and Delhi. However, the Haryana circular is essentially a forward of a memorandum sent by the Department of Personnel and Training of the Centre on February 7. The memorandum, addressed among others to the Chief Secretaries of all the states, requests that they circulate the information to all officers and periodically review the implementation. The issue pertains to some complaints received by the Parliamentary Committee on Violation of Protocol Norms and Contemptuous Behaviour of Government Officers with Members of Lok Sabha, that officials were not treating the elected members in accordance with the prescribed rules. The Haryana circular also attached the rules for reference. The parts that have attracted attention in the context of the Delhi government stand-off pertain especially to the protocols for how officials should receive, send-off and communicate with MPs and MLAs. "An officer should be meticulously correct and courteous to rise to receive and see off a Member of Parliament/State Legislature visiting him. Arrangements may be made to receive the Members of Parliament when, after taking prior appointment, they visit the officer of the Government of India, State Government or local government," read one guideline that has become the focus on online anger. "Any deviation from an appointment made with a Member of Parliament/State Legislature must be promptly explained to him to avoid any possible inconvenience. Fresh appointment should be fixed in consultation with him," said another. Online discussions and arguments also raised questions on what officials would have to do if the request of an MP or MLA was found to be at odds with the law. "While the Government servants should consider carefully or listen patiently to what the Members of Parliament and of the State Legislatures may have to say, the Government servant should always act according to his own best judgment and as per the rules," read the guideline on this matter. The guidelines in question have been in place for years. The Centre or state governments from time to time, whenever controversy erupts, keep issuing circulars reminding officials to behave in accordance with the guidelines. The Indian Air Force carried out a rescue operation in the Bay of Bengal to help douse a major fire that had broken out onboard a merchant vessel. The mission saw the IAF use its helicopters to drop water on the fire to put it out. The IAF responded to a call for help from the merchant vessel MV SSL Kolkata. The ship was off the shore of the Sunderbans in West Bengal. A fire onboard the ship had grown into a major one. An IAF Mil Mi-17 helicopter took off from the helipad at the Frazergunj Harbour and spotted the burning ship. The chopper assessed the wind patterns and used a helicopter bucket to drop water on the fire. The IAF has said it made six water runs with the chopper and dropped 15000 litres of water on the fire to bring it under control. #SavingLives : The crew displayed great professionalism & dropped the water with pin point accuracy over the exact location of fire. The operations by IAF Mi-17 V5 Helicopter controlled the massive fire & fully doused it within a short period of time.#RescueAtAnyCost pic.twitter.com/sKmbhVcV0C Indian Air Force (@IAF_MCC) June 18, 2018 "The crew displayed great professionalism and dropped the water with pin point accuracy over the exact location of fire. The operations by IAF Mi-17 V5 Helicopter controlled the massive fire and fully doused it within a short period of time," read a post on social media by the IAF. The Mil Mi-17 is a medium lift transport helicopter that is among the mainstays of the Indian Air Force. The Russian machine has been used by the IAF in a number of scenarios, including multiple rescue operations like the 2013 Uttarakhand flash floods and the 2014 Kashmir floods among others. The IAF usually uses the Mi-17s for airlifting stranded people or to airdrop food and other aid materials to affected areas. It has also been used in combat scenarios, most notably during the Kargil conflict. The IAF had suspended helicopter operations after an Mi-17 was shot down, and had brought its fighter jets into play. NEW DELHI: National-level engineering entrance test Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains and medical test National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) are likely to be held twice every year by the upcoming National Testing Agency (NTA). If implemented, the tests will be conducted in December 2018, for the academic year 2019. The NTA was approved by Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year. Following the formation of the autonomous group, Minister of State for Human Resource Development (HRD) Upendra Kushwaha had informed the Lok Sabha that NEET and JEE (Mains) would be conducted twice a year. Currently, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) conducts both the exams. "IIT Kanpur has already been assigned the task of setting up the agency and they have started with forming a team of subject experts in various fields and technical experts to design the question papers. The agency will be able to conduct the first examination in December next year," a senior official said in November last year reported DNA. A question bank will be created by subject experts and the same will be used in the exams. The official further said that creating a question bank, ideating and managing the online system are the key tasks that we will be carried out by the NTA. The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur will be the first institute to conduct JEE (Mains) under NTA in December 2018. NTA aims to bring in high reliability, standardised difficulty level for assessing the aptitude, intelligence and problem solving abilities of students. New Delhi/Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Governor NN Vohra on Tuesday forwarded his report to President Ram Nath Kovind for the imposition of Governor's rule in the state after the PDP-BJP coalition collapsed and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti tendered her resignation. The report was sent to the President after Vohra held consultations with Mehbooba, BJP state chief Ravinder Raina, National Conference vice president Omar Abdullah and Congress state president GA Mir. "The Governor received a letter by fax, jointly signed by Raina and Kavinder Gupta, state BJP president and leader of BJP Legislature Party respectively, about withdrawing BJP's support to the coalition government," a Raj Bhawan spokesperson said, as per PTI. He added that Mehbooba tendered her resignation thereafter, but the Governor has asked her to continue in office till alternative arrangements are made. "The Governor spoke to Kavinder Gupta and Mehbooba Mufti to ascertain whether their respective parties intended to explore alternative alliances to form a government in the state and was informed in the negative by both the leaders. He also spoke to Mir, who informed that his party did not have the numerical strength to form a government on its own or in an alliance," the spokesperson said. Later, the Governor had a meeting with Omar, who stated that there was no alternative to Governor's rule and elections. "After concluding his consultations with all the major political parties, Governor Vohra has forwarded his report to the President for the imposition of Governor's rule under Section 92 of the Constitution of J&K," he further said. After concluding his consultations with all the major Political Parties in #JammuAndKashmir, Governor NN Vohra has forwarded his report to the President of India for imposition of Governors Rule under Section 92 of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir. (File pic) pic.twitter.com/LAlQZNGmVr ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 The state has come under the Governor's rule on seven occasions before in the past four decades. In all states of India, the state government's failure results in President's rule. The process is slightly more nuanced in J&K where not the President's but Governor's rule is imposed. Under the provision of Section 92 of the J&K Constitution, Governor's rule is imposed for six months, but only after the consent of the President of India. The Constitution of India grants special status to J&K among Indian states, and it is the only state in India to have a separate Constitution and regulations specific to it. The President's rule in other states of India is imposed under Article 356 of the Constitution of India. Under the Governor's rule, the state Assembly is either kept in suspended animation or dissolved. If it is not possible to restore the state machinery before the expiry of the six-month period, the provision is extended. Article 370 of the Constitution of India states that Parliament of India and the Union government jurisdiction extends over limited matters with respect to state of J&K and in all other matters not specifically vested in federal governments, actions have to be supported by the state legislature. The three-year J&K government collapsed on Tuesday with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulling out of its alliance with the People's Democratic Party (PDP). BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the announcement after the J&K ministers were summoned to New Delhi for emergency consultations. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to the Governor. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in the state," Madhav told reporters at a press conference. The BJP blamed the PDP for failing to improve the security conditions in the Kashmir Valley. Madhav cited last week's killing of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar in the highly secured area of Press Enclave by unidentified gunmen. The same day - two days before Eid - an Army jawan was abducted while going on Eid leave and killed. Terrorism, violence and radicalism have risen and the fundamental rights of citizens, including right to life and free speech, are in danger, the BJP leader said. On the other hand, addressing the press, Mehbooba said, "I submitted my resignation to the Governor and have told him that we are not looking to explore any other alliance... We had formed the alliance with BJP because we shared a grand vision. It took us many months to form an alliance whose prime focus was reconciliation and dialogue." She added, "I am not shocked... We didn't do this alliance for power. This alliance had a bigger motive - unilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of 11,000 cases against the stone pelters... We had always said muscular security policy will not work in J&K, reconciliation is key... We have safeguarded Article 370 and 35-A (of the Constitution) and we will continue to do that." The PDP and the BJP had formed a coalition more than two months after the December 2014 Assembly elections returned a hung verdict, in which the PDP got 28 seats and the BJP 25, while the National Conference bagged 15 seats and the Congress managed to win 12 in a House of 89. The government came to power on March 1, 2015. (With PTI inputs) New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Tuesday said that the 'opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance' set Jammu and Kashmir on fire, killing many innocent civilians and brave soldiers. "The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically and destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance and hatred always fail (sic)." The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 19, 2018 The three-year J&K government collapsed on Tuesday with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulling out of its alliance with the People's Democratic Party (PDP). BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the announcement after the J&K ministers were summoned to New Delhi for emergency consultations. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor NN Vohra. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in the state," Madhav told reporters at a press conference. The BJP blamed the PDP for failing to improve the security conditions in the Kashmir Valley. Madhav cited last week's killing of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar in the highly secured area of Press Enclave by unidentified gunmen. The same day - two days before Eid - an Army jawan was abducted while going on Eid leave and killed. Terrorism, violence and radicalism have risen and the fundamental rights of citizens, including right to life and free speech, are in danger, the BJP leader said. On the other hand, addressing the press, Mehbooba said, "I submitted my resignation to the Governor and have told him that we are not looking to explore any other alliance... We had formed the alliance with BJP because we shared a grand vision. It took us many months to form an alliance whose prime focus was reconciliation and dialogue." She added, "I am not shocked... We didn't do this alliance for power. This alliance had a bigger motive - unilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of 11,000 cases against the stone pelters... We had always said muscular security policy will not work in J&K, reconciliation is key... We have safeguarded Article 370 and 35-A (of the Constitution) and we will continue to do that." The PDP and the BJP had formed a coalition more than two months after the December 2014 Assembly elections returned a hung verdict, in which the PDP got 28 seats and the BJP 25, while the National Conference bagged 15 seats and the Congress managed to win 12 in a House of 89. The government came to power on March 1, 2015. (With PTI inputs) New Delhi/Srinagar: The three-year Jammu and Kashmir government collapsed on Tuesday with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP setting the stage for yet another round of Governor's rule. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the surprise announcement after the party high command summoned its J&K ministers for emergency consultations in New Delhi. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor NN Vohra amid a swirl of political activity in Srinagar and New Delhi. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in the state," Madhav told reporters at a press conference. Following are some of the reactions by various political parties: - National Conference vice president Omar Abdullah on Tuesday said his party would not stake claim to form the government in the state since it did not have the mandate. "I have met the Governor just now. I told him that the NC did not have the mandate in 2014 nor it has in 2018. We are not in talks with anyone to form the government. Nobody has approached us. We are also not going to approach anyone. There is no option left but to impose the Governor's rule in the state. We have requested the Governor to hold an early election so people can decide who they want to bring to power in the state," he said - Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said the BJP had committed a "Himalayan blunder" by forming a government with the PDP. He added that the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. "The regional parties should have been allowed to form an alliance among themselves," Azad told reporters. - Congress president Rahul Gandhi tweeted: The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 19, 2018 - Delhi CM and Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal tweeted: Didnt BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened? https://t.co/S9nyOMocKl Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 3 years lost in the valley, 3 years that saw huge civilian & army casualties, 3 years later the valley is worse-off from where it stood then. This is what happens when you put politics over people. I will not allow Delhi to suffer because of dirty politics of Modi Govt Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 - The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) said the saffron party took the decision in a bid to "save" itself from the "governance failures" of the last three years. "The four-year-old BJP rule at the Centre and the three-year-old coalition of the BJP and PDP in J&K has been an utter failure. The BJP's decision to pull out (of the coalition government in J&K) is a bid to save itself from the governance failures of the last three years," alleged NCP national spokesman Nawab Malik. Also Read - What led to the collapse of BJP-PDP alliance in Jammu and Kashmir: The flashpoints - The Left parties said that the coming together of the BJP and the PDP after the J&K Assembly polls in 2014 to form the government was itself "opportunistic". "Such coalition should not have happened. These two parties have no similarities. They coming together was an opportunistic move to be in power," CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said. "The situation in J&K had been deteriorating ever since the BJP-PDP coalition came to power. The present situation is worrisome. The Home Minister recently visited the state and met the CM and the state authorities. He was giving positive signals regarding peace in the Valley. What is the assessment of the Central government nobody knows. The government could have called an all-party meeting and shared its assessment," CPI leader D Raja said. The BJP won 25 seats and the PDP 28 in the 87-member Assembly and came together in an alliance, two months after the December 2014 elections. The NC has 15 seats, the Congress 12 and others seven. (With PTI inputs) NEW DELHI: Congress president Rahul Gandhi turned 48-years-old on Tuesday. Several leaders from the political spectrum including Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended birthday greetings to the Gandhi scion on his 48th birthday. PM Modi took to Twitter and wished Rahul Gandhi a 'long and healthy life'. "Birthday greetings to Congress President Shri @RahulGandhi. I pray for his long and healthy life," he tweeted. Birthday greetings to Congress President Shri @RahulGandhi. I pray for his long and healthy life. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 19, 2018 This is Rahul Gandhi's first birthday after becoming the Congress president last year. Meanwhile, the Congress workers celebrated Rahul Gandhi's birthday outside party's headquarters in Delhi. Several posters of Rahul Gandhi were put up outside the party headquarters and his supporters and well-wishers distributed sweets and played the drums on the occasion. Delhi: Congress supporters celebrate outside Party headquarters on the occasion of Rahul Gandhi's 48th birthday. pic.twitter.com/soDEsrderG ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 Later in the day, the Congress is expected to throw a grand birthday bash for the party president, which is also be attended by all top party leaders and office bearers. Rahul Gandhi has been very critical of the Narendra Modi government's functioning, its policies and decisions. The Congress scion has strongly lashed out the BJP-led NDA regime for implementing the Goods and Serves Tax, which he had labelled as the Gabbar Singh Tax and also found fault with the Centre's demonetisation move, which he alleged had ruined the economy and the medium level traders. (With ANI inputs) PUNE: Security of several prominent rationalists and noted writers whose names were found mentioned in a diary recovered by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) during the Gauri Lankesh murder probe has been tightened. The gang involved in the murder of journalist-activist Gauri Lankesh had confessed that many others key targets were on its hit list, the Special Investigation Team had claimed last week. The SIT made these shocking revelations after confirming the arrest of Parashuram Waghmare, the last of the six suspects arrested in connection with the Gauri Lankesh killing, on Friday. The SIT claimed that during its investigation, it obtained a diary from a man identified as Sujith Kumar alias Praveen which revealed that noted Kannada writer Prof KS Bhagawan, actor Girish Karnad, former minister BT Lalitha Naik, rationalist CS Dwarakanath and pontiff Veerabhadra Channamalla Swamy of Nidumamidi Mutt were also in the hit list of the gang that killed Lankesh. These persons were targeted for their anti-Hindutva stance. The dairy also had some coded instructions written in Marathi. The SIT managed to bust the gang with the help of Praveen, who used to recruit people for his gang in Karnataka. It was through him that the entire network was busted including the alleged shooter Parashuram Waghmare from his home at Sindagi in Karnataka, the SIT claimed. The gang has a wide network spread across at least five states and comprised at least 60 people, a senior SIT official said. The organised gang refrained from giving any specific name to their underground organisation and included people drawn from Hindu right groups, the SIT official said, adding that it had around 60 members spread across at least five states but had no name. "We discovered that this gang has a network in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa and Karnataka," the official said. The SIT also stated that the gang might have recruited people from hardline right-wing outfits like Maharashtra-based Hindu Jagruti Samiti and Sanatan Sanstha, but cautioned that these organisations may not be directly responsible for the killings. Both the outfits also categorically denied any role in the killing of Lankesh, Pansare and Kalburgi. The investigators also found out that the suspects used to carry out their work in a phased manner. It involved recce, weaknesses of the person (target) and finally executing the plan, the SIT official said. During the press conference, the SIT said that the plan to kill rationalist KS Bhagwan was almost complete before the murder of Gauri Lankesh. "The process of accomplishing the mission used to take six months to a year. The gang had almost reached the last phase of killing Prof KS Bhagawan (Kannada writer) when we nabbed them," he said. Bhagwan had often angered the right-wing outfits with his writings and utterances against Hindu Gods. Police had uncovered the plot to kill Bhagwan recently and arrested four men, whose suspected role in the Lankesh murder case is also being investigated. ''Noted actor and Jnanpith recipient Girish Karnad too was in the hit list. His surveillance was in the last phase,'' the official said. Security of these rationalists and writers was tightened soon after the murder of Gauri Lankesh, but in light of the new revelations, the SIT has now asked for additional arrangements due to the threat from right-wing fringe groups. Lankesh, who was known for her anti-Hindutva voice, was shot dead on September 5 evening when she returned home in her car and was opening the gate of her house. The murder triggered a nationwide outrage. Government constituted the Special Investigation Team to probe the murder. Moscow: The tri-service joint Russia-India military exercise Indra-2018 will take place in an Indian military base in the second half of 2018. According to Interfax news agency, a Russian military delegation has visited India to discuss the logistics of the exercise. Combined military units of the Russian Eastern Military District will participate in the drills, it said. Members of the Indian defence forces will also be involved in planning of the exercise including practical operations of the units besides catering, consumer services and medical support for the Russian units. In addition, the parties will agree on the procedure for receiving and servicing of military transport aircraft in India. A Yazidi family looks out from their accommodations at a camp for displaced persons in Dohuk, Iraq, on Feb. 22, 2017.Ryan Remiorz/CPBarbara KayJune 19, 20182:22 PM EDTFiled underIll call her Nada, not her real name.Nada is a Yazidi woman from Sinjar, Iraq, now age 31. On Aug. 3, 2014, ISIL came for her people. The Kurdish Peshmerga, tasked with protecting them, fled, leaving them helpless. Nada and her two children a boy, eight months and a girl, two were separated from her husband and father-in-law, whom she never saw again.The girls and women were taken to Mosul. As a married woman, Nada should not have been grouped with the girls, but she was. Their photographs were taken, overseen by an ISIL sex-slavery organizer (Ill call him X; as youll learn, he remains newsworthy). They were taken to Raqqa in Syria, where Nada and her children were bought by an ISIL emir. For 10 days Nada was enjoyed by his soldiers.ISIL survivors Suham Haji, left, Samira Hasan, centre, and Saud Khalid sit in the Dohuk Girls and Women Treatment and Support Centre in Dohuk, Iraq, on Feb. 22, 2017. The three women were among 900 being treated at the centre after being kidnapped and sold multiple times by ISIL before escaping captivity. Ryan Remiorz/CPThen she was resold. In all she was passed around to 13 men, including X for some months. Her first owner eventually bought her back. She fell pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl, who was given to her owners family. Nada was eventually made wife to an Iraqi fighter. He would put a gun to her head or mock hang her children to keep her submissive. He would constantly tell her, You are an infidel, and You are dirty. But all her captors said those things constantly, including their kinswomen.At one gruesome point, Nada told me through an interpreter during our hour-long interview at an educational meeting on the Yazidi situation this past Sunday, Nada and her children were forced to watch four men being beheaded. Eventually, because Nada speaks fluent Arabic and could pass as Muslim, she was able to escape with her children and contact family members in Kurdistan, who paid for smugglers to take them there.Canada accepted Nada and her children, but not her father or sister. She has been living in London, Ont., for eight months. Recently, on a bus, she recognized X the slave-market boss who had owned her and used her for months. They got off at the same stop. X saw her, covered his face and ran off.They got off at the same stop. X saw her, covered his face and ran ofNada went to the refugee centre and told them the mans real name and his ISIL name. The official there responded that she was too traumatized to be sure of what she saw. And then that person reportedly told her, Dont tell anyone.But Nada, who doesnt need to be submissive any more, told me. I will be happy to share this mans identity with any immigration official who asks for it. Maybe hes the only ISIL member who slipped through Canadas vetting net, or maybe hes one of a hundred. Nada doesnt care, nor (at the moment) do I. She does not want to spend her life in Canada terrified she will cross his path again, nor should she have to.An Iraqi woman from the Yazidi community cries at her house, which was badly damaged by Islamic State fighters, during their occupation of Bashiqa, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Dec. 7, 2016. Hadi Mizban/AP In June, 2016, a United Nations report declared that the slaughter, sexual slavery and rounding up of Yazidis to erase their identity met the 1948 Convention on Genocides criteria for genocide. In October of 2016, Canadian MPs unanimously supported a motion by Conservative MP and immigration critic Michelle Rempel to bring in an unspecified number of Yazidi women and girls within 120 days. Following much study, our government agreed to bring more than a thousand victims of ISIL, including Yazidis, by the end of 2017.In mid-October, 2017, the government said it was on track to meet its target and had taken in about 800 ISIL survivors from Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey. By years end, 981 victims, 81 per cent of them Yazidi, arrived in Canada. Although the government is committed to taking those Yazidi already in process, the (Immigration, Citizenship and Refugees Canada) department will not be receiving any new applications under this initiative, IRCC spokeswoman Faith St. John told CBC news. Why not? It is baffling to me that the gravity of the situation for this tiny people perhaps a million in all has failed to arouse the critical mass of support it deserves in its darkest hour. Along with the Assyrians and Kurds, the Yazidis are the Indigenous people of their ancient, sacred space in northern Iraq, with a culture reaching back 6,000 years. Monotheistic, non-proselytizing, peaceful, with no history of enmity to others, they have endured 74 genocidal campaigns, including, in 1914-18 (alongside the Armenians) the loss of 350,000 members under the Turks. They risk extinction as a viable entity.Refugees deserve our sympathy, but displaced Muslims are surrounded by millions of religious brethren, and may someday, perhaps sooner than later, return to their homes. The Yazidi are now and for the foreseeable future a people in exile. If choices must be made, our government should prioritize victims of genocide over refugees.For more information on the Yazidi situation, visit Yezidihumanrights.org/news.php.This is just so outrageous.You can depend on Canada to do nothing.The Trudeau gov't, for all his talk of "feminism", has consistently dragged their feet when it come to saving women that are the victims of sex slavery, and people that are the target of genocide.The only reason the Liberals took the steps they did was they were pushed to it by those heartless Conservatives. This after they eliminated the preferential treatment given Christians (another persecuted group) from the area, despite the fact that particular subsection would have slid into Canadian society basically seamlessly.This guy needs to be hunted down, and tried for war crimes (if not a Canadian citizen) or treason (if he is a Canadian citizen). Personally, I'd like to see him hanged from a lamp post on Yonge Street, but shot would be almost as satisfying. But, Canada being what it is, I suppose I'd have to be happy with 25 years (the only possible sentence for high treason) or a couple of years and then expulsion, if war crimes was the charge.This so pisses me off. I watched a "selection" at the time on YouTube. Yazidis were brought into a courtyard, the young girls and women torn away from their families, and the others taken away, most never to be seen again. So reminiscent of Auschwitz.In 2019, Trudeau and the Liberals have got to go.They are simply scum. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended its alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. Though the nail in the coffin for the alliance is said to be the resumption of anti-terror operations after the holy Ramzan, there have been many other issues on which the BJP and the PDP have been at loggerheads in the last four years. Heres a look at the issues which ultimately led to end of alliance between the BJP and the PDP: Reaching out to separatists: While the PDP always maintained that the state and the central governments must talk to separatists, the BJP was of the opinion that they merely worked for the agenda of Pakistan and there was no point in reaching out to them. Actions were also initiated against various separatist leaders despite Mehbooba Mufti-led PDP repeatedly calling for dialogue. Talks with Pakistan: Since the BJP-PDP alliance came to power in Jammu and Kashmir, Mufti had often urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led NDA government at the Centre to engage in talks with Pakistan. She asserted on various occasions that talking to Pakistan was the only way to resolve the Kashmir issue. The BJP-led NDA government at the Centre, however, responded to the same saying no talks can happen with Pakistan unless the neighbouring country stopped terror-related activities emanating from its soil. Killing of Burhan Wani: When security forces killed Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Burhan Wani in Kashmir in 2016, the PDP had questioned the move. The issue was raised by the party even in the Lok Sabha when PDP MP Muzaffar Hussain Baig asked on the floor of the House what was the need to kill Burhan Wani? He had also questioned the timing of the killing of the terrorist, which led to widespread protests in the Valley. Curfew had to be imposed in parts of the Valley due to the protests triggered by the killing of Wani. Article 35 A: Article 35 A of the Constitution restricts people from outside Jammu and Kashmir from buying property in the state. It empowers Jammu and Kashmir Legislature to define who are permanent residents of the state. In 2017, the BJP had proposed to repeal the law, making way for people from outside J&K to own property in the state and join government jobs. The PDP strongly objected to the move and sided with opposition parties National Conference and Congress over the issue. The matter is currently pending in the Supreme Court. Kathua rape case: Two MLAs of the BJP in the state had participated in protests supporting those accused in the brutal gangrape and murder of an 8-year-old girl in Kathua near Jammu. Mufti had strongly voiced her opinion over the same and even took to microblogging site Twitter to hit out at those supporting the accused. Following the outrage, the BJP had made Lal Singh and Chander Prakash Ganga to quit as ministers in the state cabinet. However, they were later re-inducted in the cabinet through a reshuffle. Resuming anti-terror operations after Ramzan: The central government had suspended military operations in Jammu and Kashmir during the month of Ramzan. Though the PDP wanted the central government to extend the unilateral ceasefire, the BJP decided against it and the Home Ministry issued a directive to the armed forces to resume their operations, giving them a free hand. This did not go down well with the PDP. Killing of Aurangzeb and Umar Fayaz: The killing of two Indian Army personnel Umar Fayaz and Aurangzeb in Jammu and Kashmir is said to be another flashpoint between the BJP and the PDP. Lieutenant Umar Fayaz was abducted and killed in May 2017 by Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists. And in similar manner, the terrorists abducted and killed Indian Army jawan Aurangzeb in Pulwama in Jammu and Kashmir. On the same day, some terrorists assassinated Rising Kashmir editor-in-chief Shujaat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar, raising questions on the situation in the Valley. Public anger over the alliance: Since the inception of the alliance between the BJP and the PDP in 2014, there was resentment over the political tie-up among the people of the state. The alliance was necessitated as the PDP bagged maximum seats in Kashmir region while the BJP won on most seats in Jammu region. After the installation of the government, when PDP patriarch Mufti Mohammad Syed died, there was not much turnout for his funeral, suggesting that people in the Valley were unhappy over the alliance. SRINAGAR: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has pulled out of the alliance with People's Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. Mehbooba Mufti and her team of ministers have sent in their resignations to the governor. The state is heading for a President's rule. Confirming the development at a press conference, BJP leader Ram Madhav said, "We have taken a decision, it is untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with PDP in Jammu & Kashmir, hence we are withdrawing." The move comes after the Centre revoked the month-long suspension of a ceasefire in the state. Citing the assassination of Rising Kashmir's editor Shujaat Bukhari's, Madhav said, "Terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of the citizens are under danger in the Valley. Shujaat Bukhari killing is an example." The veteran journalist was shot dead in Srinagar by unidentified assailants last week. The step was taken keeping in mind the larger interest of India's security and integrity and that J&K is an integral part of India, said Madhav. "In order to bring control over the situation prevailing in the state we have decided that the reigns of power in the state be handed over to the Governor. "Even if Governor rule is imposed in the Jammu & Kashmir, our efforts to fight terrorism will continue. "We had to respect the mandate of the people. If we would not have formed govt at that time, Governor's rule or Presidential rule would have been imposed in the Valley. We had an alliance with them just for the mandate that was given by people," said Madhav. Earlier today, BJP president Amit Shah met party legislators from Jammu and Kashmir and state unit leaders at the party headquarters in Delhi on Tuesday. There were reports that PDP was reportedly unhappy with the Centre's decision to revoke the month-long suspension of the ceasefire which was in force during the holy month of Ramzan. In the current Assembly, the BJP has 25 MLAs and the PDP 28 MLAs. The majority mark is 45. Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir caretaker CM Mehbooba Mufti said on Tuesday that the People's Democratic Party (PDP) did not join hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for power, but to build an atmosphere of reconciliation in Jammu and Kashmir. Addressing the press after the BJP broke alliance with the PDP, she said, "I submitted my resignation to the Governor and have told him that we are not looking to explore any other alliance... We had formed the alliance with BJP because we shared a grand vision. It took us many months to form an alliance whose prime focus was reconciliation and dialogue." Mehbooba added, "I am not shocked... We didn't do this alliance for power. This alliance had a bigger motive - unilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of 11,000 cases against the stone pelters... We had always said muscular security policy will not work in J&K, reconciliation is key." She began her press conference by raising Article 370, under which the state enjoys a special status and said, "We have safeguarded Article 370 and 35-A (of the Constitution) and we will continue to do that." The PDP and the BJP formed a coalition more than two months after the December 2014 elections returned a hung verdict, in which the PDP got 28 seats and the BJP 25, while the National Conference bagged 15 seats and the Congress managed to win 12 in a House of 89. The government came to power on March 1, 2015. The BJP on Tuesday pulled out of the PDP-led J&K government, citing growing terror activities and radicalisation in the Valley making its continuance "untenable". BJP general secretary Ram Madhav said, at a press conference, that deputy CM Kavinder Gupta and nine other ministers from the party have tendered their resignation to Governor NN Vohra and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti. The state leaders were called to the national capital for urgent consultations. The move came less than a year ahead of the 2019 General Elections and a couple of months after the BJP had replaced its Deputy CM in the wake of outrage over Kathua rape incident. It also came two days after the Centre decided not to continue with the ceasefire. "After reviewing the work of the government in the last three years and after consultations with the Home Ministry and the agencies and after consultations with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah, we have come to the conclusion that it is difficult for the coalition to move forward in J&K. It has become untenable for the BJP to continue the alliance in the state in the situation that has developed today. Terrorism and violence have increased in the Valley and radicalisation is fast spreading. Fundamental rights of citizens and right to free speech of people have come under threat in the valley as symbolised by the murder of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari in broad daylight in Srinagar," Madhav said, as per IANS. The BJP leader said that the coalition was formed with an intention of restoring peace in Kashmir and encouraging fast development in all the three regions of the state including Jammu and Ladakh. "The BJP did its best to give a good government. The Centre had given a package of Rs 80,000 crore. The Home Minister (Rajnath Singh) had made several visits to the state and the Central government had also appointed an interlocutor in a sincere attempt to resolve issues in Kashmir. On the border also, we took steps to contain violence by erecting 4,000 bunkers. Whatever the state government wanted we were ready to give," he said. But, Madhav said, they were sad that the government failed to discharge its responsibilities and the feeling of discrimination towards Jammu and Ladakh regions continued. "After three years, today we have come to the conclusion that in the interest of the entire nation of which J&K is inalienable part and in the interest of integrity and sovereignty of the country, keeping in mind the larger interest of the security, in order to bring situation under control, we have decided that is it time the reins of power be handed to the Governor for a spell of Governor's rule. After the situation is restored, we will consider what to do in the future and take the political process forward," he said. Madhav further said the ceasefire was announced by the Centre with the intention of bringing peace to the state and to give relief to the people of Kashmir during the holy month of Ramzan. "It was our hope that we will get a good response from terrorists and separatist forces like Hurriyat. We were under no compulsion. It was a goodwill gesture and we did it from a position of strength," he said. (With Agency inputs) JAMMU: BJP president Amit Shah is expected to meet party legislators from Jammu and Kashmir and state unit leaders at the party headquarters in Delhi on Tuesday. As per reports, the BJP chief will discuss the current political and security situation in the state, especially after the Centre revoked the month-long suspension of a ceasefire in the state, during today's meeting. BJP state chief Ravinder Raina and general secretary (organisation) Asho Kaul have also been called for the meeting. "All the BJP ministers have been called to New Delhi for a meeting on Tuesday," a senior BJP leader from Jammu and Kashmir BJP had said earlier. The call for today's meeting comes days after Centre revoked the month-long ceasefire against terror groups active in Jammu and Kashmir. The meeting also assumes significance in the wake of reports that all is not well between the PDP and the BJP - the two partners in the coalition government in J&K. The Mehbooba Mufti-led PDP is reportedly unhappy with the Centre's decision to revoke the month-long suspension of the ceasefire which was in force during the holy month of Ramzan. The decision was taken in the wake of sensational killing of 'The Rising Kashmir' editor Shujaat Bukhari and Army rifleman Aurangzeb by Pakistan-backed terrorists. Interestingly, Amit Shah is also scheduled to visit Jammu on a two-day visit beginning June 23. Some BJP legislators claimed that they had been summoned to Delhi to review the functioning of the state coalition government, as also the performance of their respective ministries. However, the insiders said the situation in the state post-resumption of Operation All Out was on the top of the agenda. The BJP ministers have been summoned by the party high command within less than two months since the last reshuffle in the BJPs ministers. The party had effected major reshuffle of its ministers in April last in the wake of reports that resentment was brewing in Jammu region, its main bastion, against the functioning of some of its ministers. The reshuffle was also seen as a course correction before the 2019 parliamentary elections. Sources said the high command was not much satisfied with the functioning of some of its ministers. The party wants best results and better delivery on the ground. It wants to win the peoples confidence and doesnt want to take any chance before the 2019 parliamentary elections, party sources informed. Deputy Chief Minister Kavinder Gupta said the call, which had come separately to all BJP ministers from Delhi, had been all of a sudden. The working and performance of the ministers is likely to be reviewed by the national president, he added. All the ministers have been told to report to Delhi on Tuesday, he said. Meanwhile, Amit Shah is set to visit Jammu coming weekend for two days to discuss and formulate a strategy for 2019 parliamentary elections for the state. Shah will have a packed schedule in the city, where the BJPs influence is centered, separately meeting with party lawmakers, ministers, the state election management committee and senior party leaders apart from RSS functionaries. The saffron partys state spokesperson, Arun Gupta said that the main motive of Shahs visit is to discuss the 2019 parliamentary elections. Shah will be accompanied by party national general secretary (organization) Ram Lal, and head of Dr Shyama Parsad Mukherjee Research Foundation, Anirbhan Ganguly. The all-powerful president of BJP, Shah will also attend a function organised by Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Foundation to observe the right-wing ideologues death anniversary and pay him tributes. One of the important meetings Shah is scheduled to hold during the visit, beginning June 23, is with the top brass of the state unit of RSS to take feedback regarding organisational matters, sources in the state BJP unit said. New Delhi: In a major development, the BJP on Tuesday ended its alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led by Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti and pulled out of the government in the state, saying it had become "untenable" to continue in the coalition. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government," Bharatiya Janata Party leader and party's J&K in-charge Ram Madhav told reporters. "Three years ago BJP formed a government in Jammu and Kashmir with the PDP with some goals. But now it has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government," Madhav told the media here. He said the decision was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah. "Keeping in mind the larger national interest of India`s integrity and security... in order to bring in control the situation prevailing in the state. It is time that the reins of power in state be handed over to the Governor (NN Vohra)," the BJP leader said. He added that terrorism and radicalisation had increased in Kashmir. With the BJP pulling out of the PDP-led coalition government in J&K, the Mehbooba Mufti government has now come in minority and the situation now leads to a possibility of President's Rule being imposed in the state. As per the current tally in the 89-seat J&K Assembly, PDP has 28 seats while BJP has 25. The main opposition party, the National Conference has 15 seats while the Congress has 12 and the others have seven seats. In the 89-member assembly, a party or a coalition requires at least 45 seats to be able to form the government in the state. Here is the party-wise standing in 89-member J&K Assembly 1. PDP 28 2. BJP 25 3. J&K National Conference (J&KNC ) 15 4. Indian National Congress (INC) 12 5. Independent & Others (IND) 6 6. Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M) 1 7. J&K PEOPLES DEMOCRATIC FRONT (PDF) 1 8. Nominated 2 Total: 89 Several days after the assembly elections in December 2015, which recorded one of the highest voter turnouts in Jammu and Kashmir, the PDP led by Mehbooba Mufti emerged as the single largest party with 28 seats. BJP had managed to win 25 seats. Omar Abdullah-led National Conference bagged 15 while Congress 12. Though, the PDP and BJP agreed that Mufti will be the chief minister for the full six-year term, there were concern over whether the two parties will be able to function together given their vast ideological differences on critical issues like Article 370, which gives special status to Jammu and Kashmir State, and the AFPSA law, which shields soldiers from prosecution in conflict zones. BJP has stood for the abrogation of Article 370, but PDP pushed for greater autonomy than what is available under the current constitutional scheme. BJP backs AFSPA as necessary to battling the low-intensity insurgency in Kashmir, but PDP wants its withdrawal. Lucknow: At least five people died after a massive fire broke out at a popular hotel in Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow in the wee hours of Tuesday. The fire was reported at the basement of Hotel Virat International located in the Charbagh locality in Lucknow. The fire quickly spread to other areas and engulfed another hotel adjacent to it - SSJ International hotel. A woman and a child are among those killed in the blaze. The authorities fear more people may have been trapped inside the two fire-struck buildings. More than 50 people have been rescued and rushed to the nearby hospital for treatment. Lucknow: Fire broke out in Charbagh's SSJ International hotel, in the early morning hours; More details awaited. pic.twitter.com/o3uebFPnFg ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) June 19, 2018 Several fire brigade teams were pressed into service to douse the fire. #UPDATE: Fire broke out in Charbagh's SSJ International hotel, in the early morning hours. Police says, 'Search operation on the first floor is underway. 5 people have been taken to hospital for treatment. Cause of fire yet to be ascertained. Investigation is underway'. pic.twitter.com/f2Z8AKDyMY ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) June 19, 2018 The authorities also conducted a massive search operation with the help of the fire brigade teams to ensure that no one is trapped inside the two hotels. The cause of the fire is yet to be ascertained, but preliminary reports suggest that it could have been due to a short circuit in the electrical system. Giving more information about the incident, S Pandey, IG Lucknow, earlier told reporters that at least 4 people have died and more than 50 people have been rescued from the building. ''What caused the fire is yet to be ascertained. If we find any lapse on hotel's part during our investigation, we will take strict action against the people concerned,'' Pandey said. 4 people have died & more than 50 people were rescued from the building. Cause of fire still to be ascertained. If we find any lapse on hotel's part during our investigation, we will take strict action against the people concerned: S Pandey, IG Lucknow on Charbagh fire incident pic.twitter.com/R6UoP7jUCx ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) June 19, 2018 There is a resentment among the locals over late arrival of fire brigade teams, which, they alleged, led to the tragic deaths of five people. An investigation has been launched and the authorities are trying to determine whether the fire-fighting measures were put in place. The two hotels have been completely gutted due to the fire, which has now been contained. It took the firemen more than two hours to douse the raging flames during which the two buildings were completely damaged. There is no official confirmation from both hotels about the number of people checked-in at the time of the fire. (With ANI inputs) New Delhi: Indian benchmark equity indices opened lower on Tuesday mainly due to sell-offs in auto, bank and IT counters as investors turned cautious over escalation of trade tariff spat between the US and China. The BSE gauge Sensex fell 111.72 points to 35,436.54 in early morning trade. Similarly, the NSE Nifty slid 41.15 points to 10,758.70, taking cues from tumbling global shares. Trump warned on Monday that Washington would impose a 10 percent tariff on $200 billion of Chinese goods after Beijing`s decision to raise tariffs on $50 billion in US goods, which was in retaliation for US tariffs announced on Friday. A sell-off in Chinese stocks drove Asian equities to a four-month low on Tuesday. MSCI`s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan lost more than 1 percent to its lowest level since early February, dragged down by a slide in Chinese shares. The index was last down 0.95 percent. The Shanghai Composite Index dropped 1.9 percent and Hong Kong`s Hang Seng shed 2 percent. With Reuters Inputs San Francisco: Samsung is reportedly preparing to exclusively release a Galaxy Note 9 variant with 512GB onboard storage in certain markets such as South Korea and China, the media reported. "Android 8.1 Oreo coupled with the latest version of 'Samsung Experience' is set to ship straight out of the box, with all of this being backed by a 4,000mAh battery," PhoneArena reported late on Sunday. As of now, it is unclear if any changes other than the inbuilt storage capacity will be made to the top-end variant. The upcoming flagship Note device could make its way to other markets as well, according to tech website SamsungMobile.News. The device is expected to come with 6GB RAM alongside Samsung's own Exynos 9810 Octa-core chipset. When it comes to the camera department, a variable aperture sensor is likely to be included next to a secondary telephoto lens. An 8MP selfie sensor is rumoured to be placed on the front. Previous Samsung Galaxy Note smartphones have featured MicroSD slots so users can expect it to return this time. Notably, it is not known when the South Korean giant would host an "Unpacked" event for the smartphone's unveiling. The company is also expected to launch the Samsung Gear S4 smartwatch alongside. New Delhi: Superstar Shah Rukh Khan and Gauri Khan's daughter Suhana is one of the most loved star kids around. Suhana has several fan clubs sharing pictures and videos on the social media and we can't thank them enough! Likewise, one of her fan pages on Instagram shared some throwback pictures of the gorgeous Suhana where she can be seen posing with her friends. Check it out here: A post shared by Suhana (@suhanakhan143) on Jun 16, 2018 at 9:11am PDT A post shared by Suhana (@suhanakhan143) on Jun 18, 2018 at 5:51am PDT A post shared by Suhana (@suhanakhan143) on Jun 18, 2018 at 9:55pm PDT A few days back mommy Gauri too had shared some adorable pictures on social media where she can be seen posing with daughter Suhana Khan. Gauri's caption revealed that the fab mom and daughter duo attended the final year bash of Ardingly college, the United Kingdom where Suhana studies. Soon after Gauri shared the pictures on her social media handles, SRK got all philosophical and wrote: Was reading and came across this line.... Life doesnt come with a manual, it comes with a mother and then this picture of the ladies...sach hi hai!! Was reading and came across this line.... Life doesnt come with a manual, it comes with a mother and then this picture of the ladies...sach hi hai!! pic.twitter.com/sk0CwIMoMP Shah Rukh Khan (@iamsrk) June 10, 2018 Earlier, we saw Suhana accompany daddy cool to the high octane IPL matches and the pictures of which sent the internet into a tizzy! This year is a season of star kids making their debut in Bollywood. From Janhvi Kapoor, Sara Ali Khan, Ishaan Khatter to Ananya Panday, all will be seen making that first impression on the audiences. LUCKNOW: At least 22 people have been arrested for cheating during the constable recruitment examination being conducted by the Uttar Pradesh Police Public Services Commission, reports said on Tuesday. According to ANI, the arrests have been made in Meerut by the Special Task Force (STF) of the UP Police. A large number of mobile phones, cash and other materials, including electronic devices, have also been seized from those arrested by the UP STF. The UP Police had on Monday picked up three men in Allahabad for using unfair means during the constable recruitment exam. Three arrested by police in #Allahabad along with electronic devices they were going to use for cheating in UP Police Public Services Commission (PSC) constable recruitment exam scheduled for today & tomorrow pic.twitter.com/GZd2DN5RWf ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) June 18, 2018 The three men in question men were planning to send pictures of the question paper to solvers while sitting in the examination hall, the authorities claimed. The solvers would then send the answers through a spy mike. The solvers had allegedly charged Rs 5 lakh from each candidate. ''The modus operandi was that one person sitting in the exam will immediately send the picture of question paper to solvers, who will then provide answers through spy mike. Prima facie, the solvers charge Rs 5 lakh per candidate,'' Nitin Tiwari, SSP Allahabad, had told ANI. The modus operandi was that one person sitting in the exam will immediately send the picture of question paper to solvers, who will then provide answers through spy mike. Prima facie, the solvers charge Rs 5 lakh per candidate: Nitin Tiwari, SSP Allahabad pic.twitter.com/i70DDzlov6 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) June 18, 2018 The STF, which arrested the three men, also recovered Rs 4 lakh and identity cards of 12 persons from their possession, according to media reports. The report also claimed that some more persons were arrested by the STF in Gorakhpur in this connection. The constable recruitment exam, which is being held at 860 centres across 56 districts, will fill up 41,520 vacant posts in the state police. Over 23 lakh candidates had applied for it. In order to prevent cheating during the examination, the authorities have put in place strict measures. They have implemented a dress code for the candidates and restricted them wearing shoes, heels, flowers or heavy jewellery. The constable recruitment examination started at 10 am today. Paris: President Emmanuel Macron upbraided a French teenager on Monday after the boy addressed the president informally as "Manu" and sang the socialist anthem in front of him. Macron was attending a ceremony in northern France to commemorate General Charles De Gaulle`s call for popular resistance during World War Two. The young man, who looked to be in his mid-teens, was standing behind a barrier as Macron passed along the crowd. He was captured on LCI television singing the words of the international socialist anthem before asking the president, "Ca Va Manu?" (How`s it going, Manu?). "No, no, you are here at an official ceremony," Macron, 40, told him sharply. "You can`t just behave like that. "You can act like a clown, but it`s the `Marseillaise` and the `Partisans Song` we`re singing. You address me as Mr President of the Republic or plain mister." The boy, shaggy hair falling in front of his eyes, apologized. But Macron, who is known for his quick tongue and often mixes elevated language with street slang, went on: "You need to do things the right way. Even if you want to lead a revolution one day, you`ve first got to earn a diploma and learn how to put food on the table." It`s not the first time Macron has been captured on camera giving lessons to those who challenge or disrespect him. During the presidential campaign last year, a striking worker accused him of being a man in a suit. "The best way to pay for a suit is to get a job," snapped back Macron. North Korea's supreme leader Kim Jong-Un is currently in Beijing for a two-day confidential meeting with top Chinese officials from June 19 to 20 (Tuesday and Wednesday), reported Chinese state media. This unexpected trip comes days after the historic US-Korea Summit, where the North Korean met President Donald Trump in Singapore on June 12. Kim Jong-un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, visits China from June 19 to 20, informed Chinese news agency Xinhua. Kim Jong Un visits China from June 19 to 20 https://t.co/oTcGmdV79W pic.twitter.com/4OzFNs94P2 China Xinhua News (@XHNews) June 19, 2018 This will be Kim's third visit to China this year. He earlier traveled to Beijing in March and northeastern city of Dalian in May. While the exact nature of the trip is unknown, sources claim that the North Korean leader is seeking relief from economic sanctions in return for his pledge of denuclearisation. During the Singapore summit last week, Kim signed a landmark document that made North Korea commit to denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula. Hailing the outcome of the summit, Trump took to Twitter to highlight the points agreed upon. "The World has taken a big step back from potential Nuclear catastrophe! No more rocket launches, nuclear testing or research! The hostages are back home with their families. Thank you to Chairman Kim, our day together was historic!," he wrote. While China was not a direct player in the negotiations, but sources claim it maintains a strong behind-the-scenes influence. Kim, it seems, has been trying to mend the relations between the two neighbouring nations. On Friday, June 15, for the first time in five years, Kim sent a letter and flowers to Chinese President Xi Jinping on his 65th birthday. Relations between the two neighboring countries began to worsen in 2013 after Kim executed his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, the then number two of the regime and who had close ties with Beijing and pushed ahead with country`s third nuclear test that same year. China then joined the international initiative led by the US to impose sanctions on North Korea, which further worsened the North`s ties with Beijing. Relations between the two countries began to take a positive turn in 2018 in the current framework of detente with North Korea and, above all, after the two summits between Kim and Xi held in March and April. With agency inputs Beijing: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Tuesday briefed Chinese President Xi Jinping on his historic summit with US President Donald Trump in Singapore, underscoring Beijing's "important role" in the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. President Xi and Chairman Kim exchanged views on the current development of China-North Korea relations and the situation on the Korean Peninsula, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Kim's third visit to China since March is taking place amid sharp escalation of rhetoric between Beijing and Washington over tariffs almost spiralling into a trade war. Kim, who visited Beijing twice earlier before his Singapore summit with Trump, arrived by air to meet the top Chinese leadership. Unlike his two visits which were shrouded in secrecy until their completion, China announced the visit just as the North Korean dictator landed in Beijing. "Kim Jong-un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) visits China from June 19 to 20," Xinhua said. Xi held a welcoming ceremony for Kim at the Great Hall of the People. The two leaders also inspected the guard of honour. "They agreed to safeguard, consolidate and develop China-DPRK relations, and jointly push forward the sound momentum of peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula to make a positive contribution to safeguarding world and regional peace, stability, prosperity and development," the agency said. Kim praised China's "important role in protecting the Korean Peninsula's peace and stability," state-run CCTV said. North Korea "hopes to work with China and other concerned parties to promote and establish a solid, long-lasting peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula and make joint efforts to achieve a lasting peace on the peninsula," Kim said. On his part, Xi said that he "wants North Korea and the US to carry out the results of their leadership summit" in Singapore, the report said. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang parried several questions on Kim's visit and its purpose saying details will be released in a timely manner. Kim is visiting China and there is a reason for this, he said. As to why news of the visit was released at this point, he said the relevant information will be released according to the specific situation. Geng was not forthcoming when asked whether China will join Russia in calling for the lifting of UN sanctions against North Korea in the light of the Singapore summit. "China stands against the unilateral sanctions outside the UNSC. This position is very clear. We believe that sanctions itself is not an end and all parties should support and coordinate with the current diplomatic efforts and dialogue to work hard for denuclearisation and political settlement of the Korean peninsula issue," he said. The UN Security Council imposed a series of economic sanctions against North Korea after it conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, crippling Pyongyang's economy. Since he took over, Trump piled pressure on China to stringently implement the UN sanctions which many believe led to Kim agreeing to scale down his nuclear programme leading up to the summit with Trump on June 12. While announcing the halt of South Korean and US military exercises, Trump has been maintaining that the sanctions will remain. Despite reports of differences, China remains a close ally of North Korea. Officials here say his visit was expected to crystallise the next course of action by him to announce the denuclearisation process and further steps on the Korean peninsula. Trump in the past has said Kim has changed his mind after his talks with Xi. Kim's visit this time here is taking place amid escalating trade tensions between the US and China with the two countries already announcing tariffs up to USD 50 billion each while Trump is threatening more sanctions. For its part, China has been warning of strong retaliation. Sue Mi Terry, a Korea expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Kim's recent engagement in diplomacy with frequent visits to China and meetings with Xi, rather than phone calls, made sense. China was also briefed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the Singapore summit during his recent visit here. After his talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Pompeo stressed the importance of China being a constructive participant in the next steps? after the Trump-Kim summit. "There remains hard work" and "difficult days" in denuclearisation negotiations with North Korea, Pompeo had said. During a joint press conference with Pompeo, Wang said China would like the US and North Korea to see the summit as ?a new starting point? from which they can ?maintain a momentum of dialogue and consultation, accommodate each other's legitimate concerns, and work with other parties to advance the process of denuclearisation and the political settlement of the peninsula issue?. "China will continue to play a positive role in this process,? Wang added. Tokyo: Japanese authorities on Tuesday issued landslide alerts in Osaka, after a strong earthquake a day earlier measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale left four dead and 381 injured. Heavy rain is expected to continue until Wednesday in Osaka which may cause landslides as the quake had loosened the terrain, EFE news reported quoting the Japan Meteorological Agency. Government spokesperson Yoshihide Suga advised people to monitor the situation through television and radio news. Suga also confirmed the death toll and the number of injured while admitting that the exact number of missing in the earthquake that had struck Japan`s second most important city on Monday, is not yet known. The public transport service resumed on Tuesday after 80 flights were canceled and 113 bullet trains were suspended on Monday, affecting 230,000 commuters. Gas and water supply continued to be interrupted even in cities bordering Osaka while neighboring towns have pitched in with assistance as authorities consider relief options. According to the company Osaka Gas, it will take around 10 days to restore gas supply in the 110,000 homes currently without it. Electricity supply has almost been restored in its entirety to the 170,000 homes that were affected, Efe news reported. The earthquake, which damaged 334 houses, also caused several buildings to collapse with at least six catching fire, confirmed the fire service. Kathmandu: Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli on Tuesday embarked on a six-day official visit to China, his second trip to a foreign country after India, since taking power in the Himalayan nation. His visit was on the invitation of his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang, reports The Kathmandu Post. Oli boarded a special Himalayan Airlines flight leading a 120-member delegation including four ministers, lawmakers, government officials and media persons. They are slated to reach Beijing at 2.30 p.m. The Prime Minister on Monday briefed the House of Representatives about the visit. He said every agreement and discussion in Beijing would be guided by "our national interests and dignity" in a transparent manner. Oli will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday and his counterpart Li on Thursday. China and Nepal will reach an understanding to undertake a survey and prepare a detailed project report of a Trans-Himalayan economic corridor. The two countries will also sign other agreements and memorandum of understandings (MoUs), reports The Himalayan Times. Oli will visit Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet, where he will meet with the provincial leaders. The Prime Minister and the delegation will return home on June 24. Washington: President Donald Trump has ordered the US military to establish a "space force" as the sixth branch of its armed forces to ensure "American dominance" in space amidst competition from Russia and China. Details of what a new space force would look like and what it would do were not immediately clear. But Trump said it would be "separate but equal" to the Air Force. The other US military branches are the Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marine Corps. Addressing the members of the National Space Council at the White House, Trump, also the commander-in-chief of the military, said the whole world is "looking up" to the US and the country is being respected again. The president said he has directed the Pentagon to start a process for creating a "Space Force". "I'm hereby directing the Department of Defence and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a space force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. That's a big statement," Trump said. He also said it would be unacceptable to let either China or Russia lead in space, and he would be directing federal agencies to "implement a state-of-the-art framework for space traffic management". However, the US Congress would need to pass a law authorising the Trump administration to create any new branch of the military, media reports said. "When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space, he said in his address to the advisory body led by Vice President Mike Pence. Trump said that the US will have the Air Force and the Space Force, separate but equal. "It is going to be something so important... But that's the importance that we give it. We're going to have the Space Force," he said. Trump said the American economy has become a "strong economy" under his leadership and the foreign policy that he has adopted after coming to power. "The whole world is looking up to the US, and the US is respected again. It was a period of time, we were not so respected, not so long ago. The US is respected again," he said. "This is an incredible time for our country. I would say that our economy, and many of you know that very well, is doing better than it ever has done," he said, adding that the employment numbers are the best-recorded history. He also promised that the US would "return Americans to the Moon" and would eventually send people to Mars. "We will establish a long-term presence, expand our economy, and build the foundation for the eventual mission to Mars, which is actually going to happen very quickly," he said. "Today we're taking one more step to unleash the power of American ingenuity," he said as he signed a new directive to federal departments and agencies. They will work together with American industry to implement a state-of-the-art framework for space traffic management, he said. Washington: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will announce on Tuesday that the United States is pulling out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, a Trump administration source told Reuters. The United States is half-way through a three-year term on the main UN rights body and had long threatened to quit if it was not reformed, accusing the 47-member Geneva-based body of being anti-Israel. Reuters reported last week that activists and diplomats said talks with the United States on reforms had failed to meet Washington`s demands, suggesting that the Trump administration would quit. Washington`s pullout would be the latest US rejection of multilateral engagement after it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. It also comes as the United States faces intense criticism for detaining children separated from their immigrant parents at the US-Mexico border. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra`ad al-Hussein on Monday called on Washington to halt its "unconscionable" policy. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric declined to comment until a US decision was announced, but added, "The secretary general is a strong believer in the human rights architecture of the UN and the active participation of all states." When the Human Rights Council was created in 2006, US president George W Bush`s administration shunned the body. Then under President Barack Obama the United States was elected to the body for a maximum two consecutive terms on the council by the UN General Assembly. After a year off, Washington was re-elected in 2016 for its current third term. In March 2011, the UN General Assembly unanimously suspended Libya`s membership in the council because of violence against protesters by forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. But UN officials said no member has withdrawn. Haley said a year ago that Washington was reviewing its membership and called for reform and elimination of a "chronic anti-Israel bias." The body has a permanent standing agenda item on suspected violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories that Washington wants removed. "The UN Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel," said Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth. The council last month voted to probe killings in Gaza and accused Israel of excessive use of force. The United States and Australia cast the only "no" votes. Israel`s ambassador in Geneva castigated the council for "spreading lies against Israel." Read the original text at 112.ua. Open source Undeniably, many Ukrainians left for work in Poland, and not only. Moreover, Poland has actually violated the labor legislation of the EU and allows our people to work without labor visas, following the so-called "statement", which allows Ukrainians to work in Poland up to 9 months a year. At the moment, Polish lawmakers want to extend the term "on application" to 12 months a year, which actually means a massive labor migration to Poland. There are data that in 2017, 1,7 million Ukrainian citizens were employed in seasonal work in Poland. And, although they have already returned to Ukraine, they are in no hurry to seek work in Ukraine and go to work in Poland again. There is nothing surprising. The average salary in Ukraine (after paying taxes) is about 300 euros, while in Poland it is about 700 euros. The difference is significant, and it will always encourage Ukrainians to seek work in Poland, not in Ukraine. What should our businessmen do? There are several ways to solve the problem of labor shortages, and, above all, it is about working profession, because there is no shortage of managers or directors in Ukraine and in Poland. The first and more effective method that Poland uses is to attract labor from the other countries. Millions of Poles left for work in the US, UK, and Germany, and therefore there is such a great demand for Ukrainian workers. Ukraine needs to do the same, but with respect to the inhabitants of Central Asia, for example, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. To do this, it is necessary to simplify the legislation to make it easier for residents of Central Asia to obtain citizenship and work legally in Ukraine. To some extent, this may even be a blow to the Russian economy. Since the Russian economy currently strongly depends on migrant workers from Central Asia, although there are problems with obtaining Russian citizenship for residents of Central Asia. So here Ukraine could lift Russias game. Moreover, many residents of Central Asia speak Russian and would agree to work in Ukraine. The second way that can solve the problem of a labor shortage is the ban of a simplified taxation system, especially of the second and third groups. Many Ukrainians illegally work in Ukraine, because there is an opportunity to engage in illegal business under the guise of a simplified taxation system. If this privilege is eliminated, or follow the EU model, where only the first group belongs to the simplified tax system taxpayers, then most of the Ukrainians will be forced to find official work or go abroad. But, in any case, everyone will not go abroad, and they will be forced to seek legal work in Ukraine. The third way is more complicated, although it also deserves attention I mean raising wages in Ukraine to a level of 500, and preferably 600 euros. In this case, it makes no sense to go to work in Poland, because the cost of living in Poland is higher than in Ukraine. This can be done through production cooperation with Poland, and better with other EU countries. This method can be called "Turkish way." Previously, many people in Turkey went to work in the EU, and now, on the contrary, part of the European Turks returned to Turkey and works in Turkey. Production cooperation involves the creation of a network of factories and workshops where products for European companies will be produced. Such a positive experience already exists in Ukraine, but so far these productions are very little. We need more of them. This requires free economic zones throughout Ukraine, not only in Western regions, as some might suggest. This will encourage European companies to transfer production from Poland to Ukraine. It was such a trick made by Turkey, and now it has a large share of foreign business in the country's GDP. And the fourth way is doing nothing. Businesses will continue to complain about the shortage of labor and will raise the salaries of employees with an effort. In turn, this will provoke an increase in the cost of Ukrainian products, which means that Ukrainian prices for Ukrainian goods will grow. As a result, in Ukraine, the salary will be the same as in Poland, but the prices will be as high as in Poland. This cannot be done in a year, but it can be done in 5-7 years. In fact, it took some ten years for Poland to reach its current level of salaries and prices, so Ukraine also has to do it. There are many ways out. In any case, if you just complain that there are no people who want to work for your salary, nothing will happen. And do not forget that in the EU the average profitability of the business is 1-2%, and in Ukraine, it is about 25%. It is clear that if you want to be "like in the EU", then the profitability should be much lower in Ukraine. Times of big profits have passed. Any developed country in the world is famous not only for its high salaries, but also for high prices, high taxes, and low profitability of the business. In developing countries, there is more chaos, but the salary is lower, and the profitability is higher. This is the axiom of the world economy. Total investment can reach EUR 7.25 million upon exercise of share subscription warrants Amsterdam, The Netherlands - 19 June 2018 Transaction highlights Potential financing of up to EUR 5 million through private placements of convertible notes with share subscription warrants attached over the next 24 months, subject to fulfilment of certain conditions Upon the exercise of all share subscription warrants, the total investment can reach EUR 7.25 million Subscription by European Select Growth Opportunities Fund, based in Australia Esperite to convene a general meeting to present the details of the financing to its shareholders and to propose to approve the issuance of tranches of convertible notes with share subscription warrants attached Proceeds to be used to support Esperite's commercial activities and development of innovative technologies in the field of genetics, data-driven medicine, regenerative medicine and Immuno-therapeutic drugs Esperite N.V. (Euronext: ESP, "Esperite" or "the Group") announces today having entered into a second issuance agreement with European Select Growth Opportunities Fund ("ESGO" or the "Investor), following the discussions announced on June 12, 2018 regarding a new external financing (the "Issuance Agreement"). Pursuant to the Issuance Agreement, the Investor has committed to subscribe for an amount of up to EUR 5 million of convertible notes (the "Notes") with share subscription warrants attached (the "Warrants"), in several tranches over the 24 months following the issuance of the first tranche, subject to the fulfilment of certain conditions, including shareholders' approval by the general meeting of Esperite for the issuance of the Notes and Warrants to the Investor. The issuance of and subscription to the Notes and Warrants will be structured through the issuance by Esperite to the Investor of tranche warrants (the "Tranche Warrants"), whose characteristics are described in Appendix 1 to this press release. This new external financing is in addition to the earlier issuance agreement of up to EUR 9 million (plus EUR 4.05 million in case of exercise of all share subscription warrants) entered into between Esperite and the Investor on March 8, 2017 (the "2017 Issuance Agreement"). Under the 2017 Issuance Agreement, EUR 6.85 million of convertible notes have been issued, leaving EUR 2.15 million still available for issuance by Esperite. Characteristics of the Notes and of the Warrants The Notes have a principal amount of EUR 10,000 each and will be subscribed for with an initial tranche of EUR 300,000 and subsequent tranches of EUR 250,000 (unless increased or decreased upon mutual consent of Esperite and the Investor). The Notes bear no interest and have a maturity of 12 months from their issuance. During their term, the Investor may request to convert any or all of the Notes at a price equal to the lowest daily VWAP over the 10 consecutive trading days preceding the conversion request, minus a 6% discount (it being specified that days during which the Investor will have traded shares on the market will be excluded). Upon such conversion request, Esperite shall have the option to remit at its discretion, cash, shares in the capital of the Company or a combination of both. The Warrants have a maturity of 5 years from their issuance date and will be immediately detached from the Notes. Each Warrant will give right to subscribe for 1 new share in Esperite at a price equal to 115% of the lowest daily VWAP over the 10 consecutive trading days preceding the request from Esperite to issue the applicable tranche. Esperite can request the Investor to subscribe a tranche every 3 months (or earlier to the extent all outstanding Notes have been converted or redeemed). The Investor can subscribe to tranches at its discretion within the first EUR 2.5 million of the EUR 5 million commitment. Furthermore, the terms of the Notes and Warrants include: (i) customary business and compliance covenants; (ii) early redemption events; and (iii) standard anti-dilution mechanisms. Detailed terms and conditions of the Notes and the Warrants are set forth in Appendix 1 to this press release. At the next general meeting, Esperite will present the details of the new external financing to its shareholders and the shareholders will be asked to resolve to approve the issuance of the Notes and Warrants. *** About ESPERITE ESPERITE group, listed at Euronext Amsterdam and Paris, is a leading international company in regenerative and precision medicine founded in 2000. To learn more about the ESPERITE Group, or to book an interview with CEO Frederic Amar: +31 575 548 998 - ir@esperite.com or visit the websites at www.esperite.com, www.genoma.com and www.cryo-save.com . *** This press release contains inside information as referred to in article 7 paragraph 1 of Regulation (EU) 596/2014 (Market Abuse Regulation). With respect to Member States of the European Economic Area that have transposed European Directive 2003/71/EC of the European Parliament and European Council (as amended in particular by Directive 2010/73/EU to the extent that the said Directive has been transposed into each Member State of the European Economic Area), no action has been taken or will be taken to permit a public offering of the securities referred to in this press release requiring the publication of a prospectus in any Member State. This press release and the information it contains do not, and will not, constitute an offer to subscribe for or sell, nor the solicitation of an offer to subscribe for or buy, securities of Esperite in the United States of America or any other jurisdiction. Securities may not be offered or sold in the United States of America absent registration or an exemption from registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), it being specified that the securities of Esperite have not been and will not be registered within the US Securities Act. Esperite does not intend to register securities or conduct a public offering in the United States of America. Terms and conditions regarding the issuance of tranche warrants for the subscription of convertible notes with share subscription warrants attached Legal framework of the transaction On June 18, 2018, Esperite N.V. ("Esperite") and European Select Growth Opportunities Fund, a fund based in Australia (the "Investor") entered into an issuance agreement pursuant to which the Investor has agreed to subscribe for up to 500 tranche warrants (the "Tranche Warrants") pursuant to which the Investor has committed to subscribe for up to 500 convertible notes, with a principal amount of EUR 10,000 each (the "Notes"), with share subscription warrants attached (the "Warrants") over the 24 months following the issuance of the first tranche, subject to the fulfilment of certain conditions (as set out below), including shareholders' approval to be obtained at the next general meeting. Main characteristics of the Tranche Warrants During a period of 24 months as from the issuance of the first tranche, Esperite may request (a "Request") the exercise of Tranche Warrants and the issuance of Notes with Warrants attached in tranches of EUR 300,000 (first tranche) and EUR 250,000 (subsequent tranches) each, upon the earlier of (i) the full conversion into shares and/or redemption in cash of all outstanding Notes and (ii) the 3-month anniversary of the issuance of the previous tranche of Notes, provided that the following conditions are satisfied: no more than 24 months shall have expired from the issuance of the first tranche; (a) all the Notes that had been issued in connection with a previous tranche have been converted into shares and/or repaid in full (including the Notes issued under the existing financing agreement dated March 8, 2017) or (b) more than three months have elapsed since the last Tranche Warrant exercise date; no material adverse change shall have occurred; no event that constitutes an event of default and no triggering event that would constitute an event of default if not cured during the applicable cure period, if any, shall be in existence; no suspension of the trading of the shares on Euronext (other than intra-day suspension at the request of Euronext Amsterdam under Euronext rules) shall have occurred over the 90 preceding calendar days (including the date of the sending of the Request); the Issuer shall have at least: 2 times coverage of shares (based on the Conversion Price) authorized, available and approved for issuance to the Investor upon conversion of the maximum amount of Notes to be issued for the applicable Tranche, increased, as the case may be, by the amount of any other outstanding Notes; and 1 time coverage of shares authorized, available and approved for issuance to the Investor upon exercise of the maximum number of Warrants to be issued for the applicable tranche; taking into account the Notes to be issued to the Investor under the requested tranche, the Investor shall not hold more than EUR 750,000 of aggregate principal amount of Notes; the closing price and the daily volume weighted average price on each of the 5 preceding trading days shall be at least equal to EUR 0.70 (subject to adjustments resulting from share consolidation or share split); and the average daily value traded of the shares over the 10 preceding trading days shall be at least equal to EUR 20,000, and the Investor shall have the obligation to subscribe for such tranches of Notes with Warrants attached. The Investor may waive these conditions at its sole discretion, for an additional consideration. The Investor shall also have the right to exercise Tranche Warrants at its sole and exclusive discretion in respect of the first 250 Tranche Warrants (i.e. up to an aggregate principal amount of EUR 2.5 million). The remaining 250 Tranche Warrants shall only be exercisable upon request of Esperite. The Tranche Warrants are not transferable, except that the Investor may transfer or assign all or part of its Tranche Warrants to one or more of its affiliates. The Tranche Warrants will not be admitted to trading on any financial market. Main characteristics of the Notes The Notes have a nominal value of EUR 10,000 each and will be subscribed at 99.5% of such nominal value. The Notes bear no interest and have a maturity of 12 months from their respective issuance date. Each Note gives its holders a conversion right to receive, at Esperite's discretion (i) cash, (ii) ordinary shares, or (iii) a combination of cash and ordinary shares (a "Conversion"). If Esperite chooses to remit cash, the corresponding amount shall be equal to: A = (Nv / Cp) * VWAP "A": cash amount payable to the Note holder; "Nv": nominal value of the Note (EUR 10,000); "Cp": "Conversion Price", equal to 94% of the lowest daily volume weighted average price of the Group's share during the relevant pricing period; "VWAP": the volume weighted average price of the Group's share on the Conversion date. If Esperite chooses to remit new and/or existing shares, the corresponding number of shares shall be equal to: N = Nv / Cp "N": number of new and/or existing shares to be remitted to the Note holder; "Nv": nominal value of the Note (EUR 10,000); "Cp": the applicable Conversion Price. At maturity or upon the occurrence of any event of default, any Note for which no Conversion has occurred shall be redeemed at par in cash by the Group. The Notes may be freely transferred or assigned by the Investor to one or more of its affiliates and may not be transferred or assigned to any other third party without the prior written consent of Esperite. The Notes will not be admitted to trading on any financial market. Main characteristics of the Warrants The number of Warrants to be issued under each tranche will be such that, multiplied by their strike price (determined as described below), the resulting amount shall be equal to 45% of the principal amount of the tranche, i.e. for the first tranche of EUR 300,000, an amount of EUR 135,000, and for each subsequent tranche of EUR 250,000, an amount of EUR 112,500. The Warrants shall be immediately detached from the Notes. They may be freely transferred or assigned by the Investor to one or more of its affiliates and may not be transferred or assigned to any other third party without the prior written consent of Esperite. The Warrants shall have a maturity of 5 years from their respective issuance date (the "Exercise Period"). Each Warrant will give right to its holder, during the Exercise Period, to subscribe 1 new share of Esperite, subject to customary anti-dilution protection. The strike price of the Warrants will be equal to 115% of the lowest daily volume weighted average price of the share over the 10 consecutive trading days preceding the Request from Esperite to issue a tranche (or the Tranche Warrant exercise date, in case of Tranche Warrants exercised at the discretion of the Investor). The Warrants will not be admitted to trading on any financial market. New shares resulting from Conversion of Notes or exercise of Warrants The new shares issued upon Conversion of Notes or exercise of Warrants will be admitted to trading on Euronext as from their issuance, will carry immediate and current dividend rights and will be fully assimilated to and fungible with the existing shares (ISIN code NL0009272137). Commitment of the Investor Until the latest of (i) the 24-month anniversary of the issuance of the first tranche and (ii) the full conversion into shares and/or redemption of all the outstanding Notes, the Investor has committed: Actors of the Teart.doc theatre were arrested in the center of Moscow on Monday, June 18. They were spreading the leaflets in support of the Ukrainian political prisoner in Russia Oleg Sentsov. This was reported by Novaya Gazeta agency. Reportedly, the actors Maria Chuprynskaya and Grigory Gandlevsky, as well as artist Alisa Safina and activist Natalia Savoshkina, distributed leaflets in English and Spanish In the leaflets, they told about Oleg Sentsov and the reasons for his persecution. They were arrested by the police. The protocol on violations of the procedure for holding action was drawn up against participants of the action made. The police took away leaflets, and after that, the actors were released. Teart.doc is a Moscow theatre, working in the genre of documentary. The majority of theaters productions are based on real biographies, texts and interviews. As it was reported earlier, Ukrainian movie director Oleg Sentsov and Crimean activist Oleksandr Kolchenko were detained by the Russian FSB in the annexed Crimea. Both were taken to Russia. Sentsov was charged with preparing a terrorist act in Crimea and sentenced to 20 years in the high-security penal colony. Kolchenko was sentenced to ten-years-long imprisonment. Oleg Sentsov has announced a hunger strike on May 14. This way, he demands that all Ukrainians detained in Russia and annexed Crimea be released. Sentsov said he was ready to die if the requirements were not fulfilled. According to Michael Roth, the Ukrainian government has to do more to spread information about positive changes in Ukraine Minister of the German Foreign Ministry Michael Roth, at the meeting with Vice Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, called Russian propaganda a challenge for the whole of Europe. This was reported by the Government Portal. "Currently, Ukraine's image in the world is not represented in the best way, and the influence of the propaganda machine is obvious here. Of course, in a war it is extremely difficult to be successful on different fronts, but the Ukrainian government must do more to spread information about the positive changes that are taking place in Ukraine," he said. According to him, Russian propaganda is a challenge not only for Ukraine but for the whole of Europe. "Today, many people, both within the EU and outside, are not interested in a strong Europe, so our common task is to maintain unity and trust in the success of the European project," Roth said. In her turn, Klympush-Tsintsadze informed about the results of the analysis of Russia's information space, recently published by independent experts. According to it, 30% of the negative information in Russian media is about Ukraine. "The situation is complicated, the information space of the hybrid war is one of the most dangerous, because it is a struggle for people's minds and beliefs, but it's nice that our European partners understand this and can distinguish the truth from manipulation," the Vice Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine said. As it was reported earlier, Richard Grenell, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany has criticized the Nord Stream 2 project and claimed that the US is very concerned about. Grenell has noted that the US closely works with the Europeans who share these concerns. He called the current strategy on the gas pipeline very problematic and he also warned Germany and Europe on the Russian influence through this project. According to US Secretary of State, the State Department used economic sanction authority for the United States to play the best role Open source Speaking at the Detroit Economic Club, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that an increase in United States exports to Europe could force Russia to retreat. This is reported by the press service of the Department of State. Indeed, increasing our exports is central to our security. If we can export to Europe, we put Russia on its back foot, he said. If we can export to Asia, we can do the same with China, Pompeo added. As it was reported earlier, Mike Pompeo said he supported the plans to provide Ukraine with defensive lethal weapons. Pompeo said that at the five-hour-long confirmation hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. When Republican Senator Rob Portman asked Pompeo whether he supports providing lethal weaponry to Ukraine for defense, Pompeo said Senator, I do. He said sanctions against Russia and the decision to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine were evidence that Mr Trumps national security strategy, rightfully, has identified Russia as a danger to our country. The release of Ukraine's political prisoners from Russian jails and opportunities to deploy the UN peacekeepers in the combat area in eastern Ukraine - these were the main topics of the phone conversation between President Petro Poroshenko and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. According to the presidential press service, the head of the Ukrainian state informed the interlocutor on the latest developments in Donbas. 'The sides discussed the more active involvement of the UN in the solution of the situation in the region - specifically, by deploying the international peacekeeping mission in occupied Donbas,' the message says. The officials also talked through the release of Ukraine's political prisoners illegally detained in Russia. The president expressed his concern over the worsening situation in human rights area in the temporarily occupied Crimea. Earlier, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said that the demand of Kyiv to deploy the UN peacekeepers at the Russia-Ukraine border section, which not controlled by Ukraine, contradicts the Minsk Agreements. "We explained that the ideas offered by the Ukrainian colleagues and the American representatives to turn this peacekeeping mission to some military-political office that will control all territory of these self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk 'republics' and will decide whom and how to elect completely contradict the Minsk Agreements," he said. At the same time, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said that the opinions of the foreign ministers on the deployment of the UN peacekeepers are completely different. The defense capacity of Ukraine was undermined long before Russia's armed aggression against Ukraine. Military units not ready for battle, demoralized and demotivated officers and soldiers, numerous corruption scandals related to the sale of military weapons, equipment, land scandals, - such were the Armed Forces of Ukraine as of 2014. All the leaders of the military agency who have been in charge of it since independence have contributed to this state of affairs. But none of them took responsibility. The members of the initiative group studying corruption operations in the Ministry of Defense, including Dmytro Snegirev, Co-chairman of the Civil Rights Initiative Andrii Peliukhovskyi, and the journalist, Lieutenant Colonel Oleksandr Kholiava, are rigid in their beliefs concerning this situation. They made public the results of their work during a press conference. 'The responsibility for destroying the Armed Forces of Ukraine must be borne by all heads of the agency. The collapsed army has become the reason why Russia ventured upon the annexation of the Crimea and the occupation of the Donbas. Today we are starting a series of briefings, during which we will tell the public about the activities of each minister. Today, it is widely known that under the leadership of Minister Anatolii Hrytsenko, the Ministry of Defense sold weapons and military equipment, land plots at rock-bottom prices all over Ukraine. Unfortunately, law enforcement officers did not give an assessment of such activity', said journalist Oleksandr Kholiava. According to him, there are many court decisions invalidating such actions. But their initiators did not incur any responsibility. In his turn, Dmytro Snegirev spoke about transactions with the property of the Dnipro military hospital, which was alienated to commercial structures during the time of Hrytsenko, and then was owned by the bank of the aggressor state. In addition, the strategic state enterprise 'Technology Institute of the pipe industry for the production of guides for Grad, Hurricane and Smerch rocket systems' was destroyed in Dnipro. In Vinnytsia, in the military unit A0215, in 2017, an agreement was signed for 52 million USD for repair of the Antonov AN-26 aircraft, which in 2015 was 'revived' at the expense of the 'Phoenix Wings' charity fund and with the direct participation of the State Enterprise 'Antonov'. 'I demand from the prosecutor's offices to start checks on each fact', said Dmytro Snegirev. The head of the NGO 'Protection and Assistance' Andrii Peliukhovskyi said that his organization conducts anticorruption investigations into the abuse of office by high officials of the current and former governments of Ukraine. He pointed out the blatant facts of irresponsible attitude to the problems of society demonstrated by politician A. Hrytsenko, which he addressed to him for support and assistance. He did not wait for any response from him. What do we need a team of cowards for, headed by a man who plans to run for the highest office in the state, said Peliukhovskyi. As the speakers have mentioned, they filed complaints to the General Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine, demanding the investigation of these and other facts, the introduction of these data to the Unified Pretrial Investigations Register, and the initiation of a number of criminal investigations to establish the truth. In addition, they will appeal to the public about an international audit of the activity of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine since independence. Open source The Russian side still has not provided the specific data about current health conditions of the Ukrainian political prisoners, who are now starving in Russian penal colonies. Lyudmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian parliamentary envoy for human rights, said that as quoted by her press service. She reiterated that Ukraine's Volodymyr Balukh, Oleg Sentsov and Stanislav Klykh continue to starve - for 93, 37 and 12 days, respectively, remanding to release all Ukrainian political prisoners from Russian prisons. Oleksandr Kolchenko also went for a hunger strike but he ceased it, having lost eight kilograms. Denisova added that their health conditions are worsening, but there's been no certain official information about any of them. The Ukrainian ombudswoman asked her Russian counterpart to assist her in visiting the said prisoners, which would let Denysova monitor their rights for the necessary medical assistance. In response, the Ukrainian side offers to provide the Russian officials simultaneous visits of four Russian citizens, who now serve time in Ukraine - according to the lists of prisoners sent by the Russian side. The decision says that the Russian company has 48 hours to send Naftogaz-Ukraine the list of all assets, based in England or Wales, if their overall price exceeds USD 50,000 The commercial court of London ruled that the assets of Gazprom enterprise will be frozen - on the appeal filed by national joint stock company Naftogaz-Ukraine. The latter's press service reported that on Tuesday. Naftogaz reiterated that the asset freeze is necessary to implement the decision of Stockholm court of arbitration, which foresees that Gazprom should pay Naftogaz 2.6 billion dollars as a refund. The decision of London's commercial court says that the Russian company has 48 hours to send Naftogaz-Ukraine the list of all assets, based in England or Wales, if their overall price exceeds USD 50,000. In March 2018, Russia's energy monopolist Gazprom refused to abide by the decision of Stockholm arbitrary court. Naftogaz-Ukraine company reported this after the last week's meeting with Gazprom's representative. 'Gazprom made it extremely clear that it's not going to resume gas supplies to Ukraine, which the court ruled earlier, in December 2017. Gazprom also refused to pay 2.6 billion U.S. dollars, which was also foreseen by the court's decision in February, in the transit contract case', the press service of the Ukrainian company reported. As a result of two arbitrations in Stockholm, Gazprom is to pay Naftogaz $2,56 billion. The court dismissed the demands of Gazprom that stated that the money hadnt been paid as it was considered the fines for what they called unlawfully seized by Naftogaz volumes of the transit gas. Ivan Drach was one of the Sixtiers,- new generation of the Soviet Intelligentsia whose views were formed by years of Stalin's repressions and purges Ivan Drach, the famous Ukrainian poet, cinema script writer, the Hero Of Ukraine and the former MP of the Ukrainian Parliament, has passed away after a tough disease. The head of Ukrainian Association of Cinematographers Serhiy Trymbach wrote this on his Facebook page. 'He died in the morning, which could mean he hasn't lived enough. He was 81. Yesterday evening, I spoke to his wife, Mariya. There was still hope - and yet, it happened,' Trymbach wrote on Facebook. According to the poet's last will, he will be buried in his home village of Telizhyntsi, next to the grave of his son Maksym. The Ukrainian MPs honored their colleague with a moment of silence. Ivan Fedeorovych Drach was the Ukrainian politician, poet, playwriter, and the literary critic of the Soviet era. Born in Ocotober 1936 in Telizhyntsi, Kyiv region, central Ukraine, Drach is known for his membership in the movement of Ukrainian dissidents who stood against the Soviet regime in the 1960s-1990s. Along with Vyacheslav Chornovil, Mykhailo Horyn' and other notorious Ukrainian dissidents, Drach created the NRU, Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy (People's Movement of Ukraine, - 112 International). which became the first official anti-Soviet organization. Drach was the three-time member of teh Ukrainian Parliament. In 2006, he was granted the title of the Hero of Ukraine - for his 'selfless service to the Ukrainian people, which he performed in poetry, standing for the ideas of freedom and democracy'. Ivan Drach was one of the Sixtiers, - new generation of the Soviet Intelligentsia, most of whom were born between 1925 and 1945, and entered the culture and politics of the USSR during the late 1950s and 1960s after the Khrushchev Thaw. Their worldviews were formed by years of Stalin's repressions and purges, which affected many of the Sixtiers' immediate families; and World War II, where many of them had volunteered to fight. Sixtiers were distinguished by their liberal and anti-totalitarian views, and romanticism that found vivid expressions in music and visual arts. The Hollywood actor who portrayed T-1000, the bad guy from 'Terminator 2: The Judgment Day' will appear in the film based on the story by Ivan Franko, the prominent Ukrainian poet and prosaic Open source Robert Patrick, the famous Hollywood actor is going to play the main part in 'Zakhar Berkut,' the film by Ukraine's film director Akhtem Seitablayev. The original story was created by Ivan Franko, the 19th-century poet and prosaic from western Ukraine. IMDb reported that on Tuesday. The shooting process already began, with the crew gathering in the Carpathian mountains. Patrick even shared some photos from his Instagram account. Apart from Patrick, whom the TV audience may know as T-1000 from 'Terminator 2: The Judgment Day', Seitablayev will enjoy the company of U.S. filmmaker John Wynn, who previously worked with Guillermo del Toro and Marvel company. Famous U.S. producer Jeff Rice, who worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Silvester Stallone, Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, also joined the team. The film is to be aired next year. Recently, Ukrainian film directors gathered in Kyiv to support Oleg Sentsov, who is now starving in Russia, demanding to release Ukrainian political prisoners from Russian penal colonies. 'The cinema week, organized by Oleg's colleagues should send maximum information about his fare and that of other hostages of the Kremlin. We should give another impetus for the society so that it understands that Russia has been leading cruel and obnoxious hybrid war against Ukraine. Oleg could not take it, and he is now fighting. We have no right to betray him. We've got to fight - with words, actions and weapons. Until he's finally free', said the message of the press service. The funds raised during the campaign went to the political prisoner's family. As we reported Ukrainian political prisoner Oleg Sentsov who continues the hunger strike in Russia, wrote the letter, addressed to the leaders of G7 member countries. Ukrainian political prisoner Oleg Sentsov has announced a hunger strike on May 14. This way, he demands that all Ukrainians detained in Russia and annexed Crimea be released. Sentsov said he was ready to die if the requirements were not fulfilled. Open source Populists and oligarchs inhibit the implementation of the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU. Hugues Mingarelli, Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Ukraine expressed such an opinion at the session of the Assembly of the Ukrainian side of the civil society platform Ukraine-EU, according to Interfax-Ukraine. Related: European Parliament approves EUR 1 billion of macrofinancial assistance for Ukraine 'As you all know, there are a lot of people in Ukraine who dont like the agreement, who want to prevent the implementation of it. We call them populists and oligarchs. All these people are not interested in making political and economic structures of the country modern,' he said. Along with this, he pointed out that there are relevant ministries which motivated to implement the agreement, but we need a support from all of them. 'As you all know, we confront with a strong resistance and it is not something new. If we want to beat the resistance, then we need to gather a lot of Ukrainian representatives. To do so we need to explain what the implementation of the agreement means for citizens' life,' the ambassador mentioned. Related: EU Parliament adopts resolution urging to immediately release Sentsov The process of the implementation of the agreement is still complicated in the Committees of the Verkhovna Rada 'Ukrainian Parliament', Mingarelli added. Reportedly, Petro Poroshenko claimed that the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU is completed by 15 percent. 19 June 2018 - Reference is made to the announcement on 16 May 2018 regarding a Letter of Intent with Equinor. AKOFS Offshore, a company owned by Akastor ASA, has today signed a contract with Equinor for provision of year round light well intervention services (LWI) on the Norwegian continental shelf for a period of five years, with an option period of three years. The terms are in line with the previous announcement; the contract value for the initial five-year period is approximately USD 370 million and the work will be performed from the AKOFS Seafarer well intervention vessel with a scheduled commencement first half of 2020. About AKOFS Offshore AKOFS Offshore, headquartered in Oslo, Norway, is a global provider of vessel based subsea well intervention and installation services to the oil and gas industry. In addition to the AKOFS Seafarer, the company is operating two specialized vessels for Petrobras in Brazil on long term contracts. The Skandi Santos has successfully performed subsea intervention and equipment installation work since 2010, and Aker Wayfarer commenced similar operations early 2018. For further information, please contact: Leif Borge Chief Financial Officer Mobile: +47 917 86 291 E-mail: leif.borge@akastor.com Akastor is a Norway-based oil-services investment company with a portfolio of industrial holdings and other investments. The company has a flexible mandate for active ownership and long-term value creation. This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to sectio 5 -12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act. Moreover, two partakers of the protest were detained by police The number of the police officers suffered in the clashes near the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine increased up to eight; moreover, two protesters were wounded. Kyiv Police Head Andry Kryshchenko claimed this as 112 Ukraine reported. "Eight police officers appealed for the aid. According to the doctors, two civilians have slight scratches. The police officers also have slight bodily injuries and they are sprayed by the teat-gas," he said. Kryshchenko specified that two people detained due to the unrest near the parliament. One of them grabbed the equipment of the police officers and tried to pull him out of the line. About 500 law enforcers keep order in the capital, up to 15 law enforcers defense the building of the Pechersk Police Department. 'According to our information, the maximal number of the partakers attempted to enter the Verkhovna Rada, there were about 2, 000 people," the police noted. As we reported the clashes between the protesters who are Soviet-Afghan War veterans and police took place in the downtown of Kyiv near the building of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. MP Dmytro Dobrodomov commented to 112 Ukraine that the main demand of the Afghani veterans to equal their benefits to the benefits of the participants of the military activities. According to him, there are also the miners among the protesters. Open source Fugitive MP Andry Artemenko appealed to Obolon District Court of Kyiv with an appeal to testify as a witness in the case of the state treason of former president Viktor Yanukovych. Vitaly Serdyuk, the lawyer of Yanukovych claimed this as his press service reported. It became known about the intention of the MP to testify in the court after his meeting with Serdyuk. The lawyer also published the proper appeal of Artemenko. On February 19, 2017, the American The New York Times newspaper wrote that MP of Radical Party Artemenko worked out the conception of the conclusion of the peace between Ukraine and Russia and lifting of the sanctions from Moscow that was passed to Michael Flynn, then adviser of Donald Trump. According to the newspaper, the plan provided the withdrawal of the Russian troops from the East of Ukraine and holding of the Ukrainian referendum with leasing of Crimea to Russia for 50 or 100 years. Artemenko claimed that the group of MPs from different parties worked out the plan, including the opposition but he belied that the leasing of Crimea was mentioned in his conception. On May 16, 2017, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine supported the urgent dismissal of MP Artemenko. 244 MPs voted for this. Earlier President Poroshenko signed a decree on the deprivation of Artemenko's Ukrainian citizenship. Yanukovych is charged with state treason, assistance in deliberate actions against Ukraines state border, sovereignty and territorial integrity and assistance in leading the aggressive war against Ukraine. Open source The officers of the Chief Department of Counter-intelligence Defense of State's Interests in Economy Security of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) disclosed the international payment system in the cooperation with the Russian company that is under the sanctions as the SBU reported. "The officers of the special service established that one the payment systems banned in Ukraine used the international payment system "TYME" to avoid the sanctions imposed at it. The implementation of the payment systems of this banned company is confirmed by the proper document," the message said. The SBU already informed the National Bank of Ukraine on the risks of the occurrence of the threats to the national security due to such activity. The National Bank of Ukraine canceled the registration of TYME. It was noted that the SBU monitors the efficiency of the imposed sanctions provided by the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDC) "On imposing of the targeted special economic and other restrictive measures (sanctions). As we reported Petro Poroshenko has signed a decree that introduced the decision of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) on the targeted sanctions against persons and entities connected with the Russian aggression. The sanctions are imposed for three years or indefinitely to individuals and legal entities which are involved in Russian aggression against Ukraine, preparing and conducting illegal voting in the occupied Crimea within the framework of the presidential elections, representatives of the Russian occupation administration in Crimea, militants of Russian armed groups in the occupied territory of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, etc. Besides, sanctions were imposed on people who are involved in the information and cyber attacks against Ukraine, in unlawful actions against Ukrainian citizens which are illegally detained in Russia, on members of the State Duma and members of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, etc. Open source On June 15, detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), together with the officers of the Counter-intelligence Service of the Security Service of Ukraine, detained a likely accomplice to the peoples deputy of Odesa Regional Council, who is suspected of offering an unlawful benefit of 500,000 dollars to a NABU investigator. This was stated in the report of the organization. Pechersk District Court of Kyiv on June 16, at the request of the investigators of the General Prosecutor's Office, selected a suspected preventive measure in the form of detention with an alternative of 2 million dollars bail. As it was reported earlier, on June 7, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted for the law on the establishment of the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court. The decision was supported by 315 deputies. The Verkhovna Rada supported in the first reading the presidential bill number 7440 on the Anti-Corruption Court on March 1. The law on Supreme Anti-corruption court (SACC) has come into force in Ukraine on June 14. The law obliges to form the Anti-corruption court within a year that should consist of at least 35 judges, 10 of which are representatives of the Appeal Chamber. The document offers the president to submit the draft law on the creation of the new court to the Verkhovna Rada. During the month after the appointment of 35 judges, the senior of them should call a meeting at which they will determine the date of the beginning of the courts work and solve the organizational matters. Yesterday the document was approved by the Supreme Justice Court Open source President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko submitted the draft law "On creation of Supreme Anti-corruption court" to the Verkhovna Rada as urgent for the priority consideration as the press service of the Ukrainian leader reported. "President Petro Poroshenko submitted the draft law "On creation of Supreme Anti-corruption court" to the Verkhovna Rada as urgent for the priority consideration according to article 93 and 2nd part of article 125 of the Constitution of Ukraine," the message said. On June 18, the Supreme Justice Court supported the presidential draft law on the creation of the Supreme Anti-corruption court. Poroshenko claimed that he will insist on the consideration of the draw law in the parliament on June 19. As we reported Petro Poroshenko has signed the law 'On Supreme Anti-Corruption court'. We recall, on June 7, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted for the law on the establishment of the Supreme Anti-Corruption Court. The decision was supported by 315 deputies. The Verkhovna Rada supported in the first reading the presidential bill number 7440 on the Anti-Corruption Court on March 1. Since that day, the head of state has called upon the people's deputies to speed up the work on the adoption of the full document. The clashes between the protesters who are Soviet-Afghan War veterans and police took place in the downtown of Kyiv near the building of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine as 112 Ukraine reported. According to the correspondent of the channel, the Afghani veterans succeeded to break through the police perimeter at the square near the parliament and get to the building of the Verkhovna Rada. Now, they are near the windows of it. Due to this, all entrances and exits are blocked and nobody is allowed to come in and come out. As Interfax-Ukraine reported, the clashes take place at the stairs of the parliament, the police applied special means, and the protesters throw the bottles at the police. MP Dmytro Dobrodomov commented to 112 Ukraine that the main demand of the Afghani veterans to equal their benefits to the benefits of the participants of the military activities. According to him, there are also the miners among the protesters. Vice Speaker of the parliament Iryna Gerashchenko came to the protesters and urged them to form an action group for the negotiations. According to the correspondent, a few thousands of people protest near the parliament. Some of them attempt to enter the building. As we reported a rally against Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine took place near the Russian Embassy in Kyiv. The protesters put symbolic cardboard coffins near the building. The Secretariat is ordered to publish the final version of the draft law with all recorded and rejected amendments The Ukrainian Parliament Defensive Committee recommended to the Verkhovna Rada to adopt the draft law #8068 on the national security of Ukraine as 112.ua reported. "I put on the voting to recommend to the Verkhovna Rada to support the bill #8068 as the basis and generally during the second reading given to you with the amendments announced by Vynnyk. Secondly, I order to the Secretariat to order to the Verkhovna Rada to publish the final version of the draft law with all recorded and rejected amendments on the website," Serhy Pashynsky, the Head of the Committee said. The Committee's Secretary Ivan Vynnyk told the norms of the draft law. "The SBU functionality restricted by the fight against terrorism, counter-intelligence of the state, disruptive activity was specified; in fact, it focuses on the defensive issues of the critical infrastructure. We specified some definitions in the security and defense sector, clearly distinguished the authorities of the defense's and security forces; specified the functionality of the National Guard that enters the security forces during the peaceful time and will be guided by the general staff during the war and implement the measures and activities for the defense of the state," Vynnyk said. According to him, the creation of the parliament committee on monitoring of the activity of the special law enforcement bodies and bodies with law enforcement functions is supposed. "It will be represented by different parties of the parliament, there will be a rotation of the leaders, it will be able to invite the heads of the proper bodies they will report on the issues of observation of human rights and freedoms," he noted. Vynnyk specified that it will allow to put the discussion on the possible groundless intervene in the business there. "The status is changed according to this bill, the SBU will be called special state body with law enforcement functions. It means that they cannot register the proceeding on the application independently and will deal with the functionality provided by the law. There will be fewer cases of the conditional bashing of the IT-company or company that deals with the monitoring in the sphere of the state management. If they take place it will become the issue for the parliamentarian committee on monitoring of the activity of the special law enforcement bodies," Vynnyk said. It is not planned to liquidate the Department for Fighting against Corruption. However, Vynnyk expressed the belief that the SBU will not pay to the workers who cannot carry out the previous commitments. "I think it will be notably reformed in the context of the aims in which the SBU is restricted," MP noted. In Serious Times We All Like a Good Laugh: New... 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!) The year is 2020The Future. In a dimly lit oval office, the leader of the free world contemplates the view and rolls ice in his tumbler. He turns, his noble browdestined to grace Mount Rushmore one dayis framed by a halo of moonlight. This president has seen it all. He once wrestled a lizard man to the death. He wore tights in earnest. Yes. We are talking about William Shatner . This Wednesday, June 20 , at the Kiva Auditorium , show your peers where you stand by witnessing our future president's inspiring live presence. The legendary Shatner will be performing from 7:30 to 9:30pm . Tickets start at $52 . The Canadian actor, author, producer and director brings his talents and antics to the stage. William Shatner is a Canadian actor, author, producer, and director. In his seven decades of television, Shatner became a cultural icon for his portrayal of James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, in the Star Trek franchise. He has written a series of books chronicling his experiences playing Captain Kirk and being a part of Star Trek, and has co-written several novels set in the Star Trekuniverse. He has written a series of science fiction novels called TekWar that were adapted for television. Shatner also played the eponymous veteran police sergeant in T.J. Hooker (198286) and hosted the reality-based television series Rescue 911(198996), which won a People's Choice Award for the Favorite New TV Dramatic Series. Shatner also appeared in seasons 4 and 5 of the NBCseries 3rd Rock from the Sun as the "Big Giant Head" that the alien characters reported to. From 2004 until 2008, he starred as attorney Denny Crane in the final season of the legal drama The Practice and its spinoff series Boston Legal, a role that earned him two Emmy Awards. As of December 2017, he is in his second season of the comical NBC real-life travelogue with other male companions "of a certain age" in Better Late Than Never.Tickets go on sale through Ticketmaster on Friday, April 27th at 10am. $52.00 - $72.00 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!) Dublin, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Global Genetic Testing Market Outlook 2018-2022" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The report Global Genetic Testing Market Outlook 2022 provides a detailed analysis of the genetic testing market. The report also provides an insight regarding the current and future prospective of the market. This report covers the major trends and drivers, and their impact on the market. The report also discusses some of the restraints that can hinder the growth of the market, as well as rising opportunities which can provide new dimensions to the industry. The advent of genetic tests has revolutionized the molecular diagnostics and cytogenetic industry. It is one of the most rapidly growing segments in molecular diagnostics industry, which helps in delivering customized health services or personalized medicine. The share of genetic testing is incessantly increasing in the market. Growing awareness about genetic testing, technological advances in genetic sequencing, and rising incidences of genetic diseases especially cancer are some of the major factors propelling the genetic testing market. Based on application, the genetic testing market is divided into Diagnostic Testing, Newborn Screening, Prenatal Testing, Carrier Screening, and Others. Diagnostic testing and Newborn screening are the major application areas of genetic testing industry. The large shares of these applications can be attributed to presence of huge players in the segment, and to rising number of genetic tests performed for this purpose. The Carrier Testing market is expected to witness the highest growth during 2017-2022. This growth is likely to be driven by the huge population opting for carrier screening of cystic fibrosis, exhibiting unprecedented rise in the US. The report provides current and forecasted market for each of the application areas of Genetic Testing. The major disease profiles/conditions for which Genetic Testing is used include Alzheimer's Disease, Cystic Fibrosis, Cancer, Down Syndrome, and Others. Cancer accounts for largest share amongst the diseases for which genetic testing is done. This large share can be attributed to the rising prevalence of cancer, which is expected to increase as the global population ages. Approximately 75-80% of all cancers are diagnosed in people aged 55 or older, and this pattern is expected to increase by 2020. The report provides current and forecasted market for each of the genetic conditions of Genetic Testing. Moreover, the report also contains markets for the major regions including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. North America contributes the largest share in the global genetic testing market, followed by Europe. Presence of major players, increased awareness and higher disposable income, are some of the prominent factors that have led to North America being the market leader. The Asia-Pacific market is expected to witness the highest growth during 2017-2022. The major reasons for the high growth are the increasing per capita income and gradual development of healthcare sector in countries, such as India and China. North America and Europe are expected to grow at modest rate due to launch of new and innovative products in these markets. The company profiles segment in this report is entirely devoted to profiling leading companies of the genetic testing industry including some major players like Abbott Laboratories, Roche Diagnostics, Myriad Genetics, Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Hologic, Inc., Cepheid, Agilent Technologies and QIAGEN. Key Topics Covered: 1. Analyst View 2. Research Methodology 3. Genetic Testing Overview 3.1 Applications and Advantages 3.2 Methods 3.3 Genetic Testing Laboratories - Unmet Need Analysis 4. Industry Overview 4.1 Drivers 4.1.1 Rising Incidence of Chronic Diseases 4.1.2 Growth in Ageing Population 4.1.3 Increasing Government Initiatives 4.1.4 Rising Investments in Genetic Testing Market 4.1.5 Incessant Launch of New Genetic Tests 4.2 Challenges 4.2.1 Low Awareness for Genetic Testing in Developing Countries 4.2.2 High Cost of Genetic Tests 4.2.3 Varying Reimbursement Policies 4.2.4 Ethical and Policy Issues 4.3 Opportunities 4.3.1 Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) 4.3.2 Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) 4.3.3 Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) for Cancer 4.3.4 Personalized Medicine 4.4 Trends 4.4.1 Genetic Testing in Oncology: Gaining Momentum 4.4.2 Strong Demand for Pharmacogenomics 4.4.3 At-Home DNA Tests or Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) Genetic Tests 5. Global Genetic Testing Market Outlook 6. Global Genetic Testing Market by Application 6.1 Carrier Testing 6.2 Diagnostic Testing 6.3 New Born Screening 6.4 Predictive & Pre-Symptomatic Testing 6.5 Prenatal Testing 6.6 Others 7. Global Genetic Testing Market by Disease 7.1 Alzheimer's Disease 7.2 Cystic Fibrosis 7.3 Cancer 7.4 Down Syndrome 7.5 Others 8. Global Genetic Testing Market by Geography 8.1 North America 8.2 Europe 8.3 Asia Pacific 8.4 Rest of the World (RoW) 9. Genetic Testing Regulations 10. Mergers & Acquisitions 11. Company Profiles (Overview, Product Offering, Financials, Developments, Strength & Weakness) 11.1 Abbott Laboratories 11.2 Roche Diagnostics 11.3 Myriad Genetics, Inc. 11.4 Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. 11.5 Agilent Technologies, Inc. 11.6 Hologic, Inc. 11.7 Illumina, Inc. 11.8 QIAGEN N.V. 11.9 Cepheid 11.10 Quest Diagnostics For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/c3gpkg/global_genetic?w=12 cc The Digital Age is a paradoxical time to live in, an era defined by the internet and its contradictions of connection and confinement. Despite an unprecedented freedom to access the corpus of knowledge accrued across and about the universe, to learn about and with one another, our once-ravenous curiosity to explore and experience the world has been suddenly satiated, placated with spectral images of the real thing. The internet has made us content witheven cravethe sterile calmness of our own homes, distanced from the reality we now know too much about. Most damagingly, it has allowed us to forget how to coexist and collaborate with one another outside of the digital planeand to forget our cooperative potency in the real world. We are so distractedso accustomed to airing our issues out on the internet, so trained to believe that a simple retweet is a genuine act of activismthat we have forgotten how to actually get shit done. Thankfully, there are countercultures across the country persevering against this passive trend. These groups realize that the people are not apatheticwe simply lack the motivation and mechanism to make our compassion count. One such organization is the American Ethical Union, who convened in Albuquerque last week in pursuit of their mission to foster a world that is democratic, compassionate, just and sustainable through the development and nurturing of ethical humanist congregations and communities. The theme for this 103rd(!!) iteration of the annual assembly was Seeds for the Future: Environmental Justice and Ethical Culture. A series of panels, presentations and workshops fostered discussion around effective strategies to combat and counteract the environmental injustices inflicted on the marginalized residents of inner cities, poor rural areas and indigenous landscommunities that have been unreasonably and unrighteously victimized by the detrimental impact of large industry. One such community is the San Jose neighborhood in southeast Albuquerquea majority-Hispanic neighborhood that is home to 1 percent of the citys population and a whopping 30 percent of its polluting industry, with nearby factories producing everything from asphalt to gasoline to chlorine. Whats more, the area has been federally designated as a superfund site in need of immediate cleanup due to dangerous contamination by hazardous waste and pollutants. The neighborhood also boasts vastly premature mortality rates, increased poverty rates, and high population density. And still factories are moving in, with more air emissions permits being issued every yearthough not without a fight. Local residents Steven and Esther Abeyta, with the generous help of Kitty Richards, managed to stave off a mixed-waste facility that was attempting to move into their loving locale. At the AEU conference, they spoke to the lessons learned in successfully coordinating and achieving environmental activism and justice. The truths they spoke ring out powerfully in this modern, seemingly-apathetic era. They reminded us that the one thing which always prevails, which trumps all argument, is the truthbecause the truth is always right. They reminded us that activism is for everyone, and that we all must play our part to realize true change. Activism is about fighting for what is right: for you, for your family, for your community, and for the world. They reminded us that change is possible. It is inevitable. It doesnt happen all at once, and the fight towards change can feel suffocating and defeating and soul-crushing, but the world is constantly evolving, and we have the power and potential to play our part in achieving that. They reminded us that we are not voiceless and we are not alone, though it may feel that way at times. All it takes to enact great change is simply showing up and making your voice heardand together our voices resound much farther. These are ideas of critical importance, now and eternally, and they perfectly encapsulate the principles upon which the American Ethical Union is founded: interaction and engagement. Through interactionwith one another, with our environment, and with our worldpeople become people. We become aware of the lived realities and experiences of one another. We learn how to live to allow everyone in the world to thrive, with fairness and justice. Through engagement, we discover our own responsibilitiesto one another, to our environment and to our worldand become activists. We learn how to effectively and collectively impact our world. As the American Ethical Union seeks to expand into the Albuquerque area, Id like to invite you to add your voiceand our collective oneto their national mission for justice through interaction and engagement. Do not let yourself become part of a generation of wacktivists who let the world pass them by, who let their visions for the future be dictated by the world as it is. Ill leave you with the most potent lesson I learned at the American Ethical Union conference: Dont hide yourself. Dont bury your passion and your love and your care for the world. Those are the things which speak to people and around which community can be built. Those are the things which create connection, which enable us to speak soul-to-soul as agents of changeas true activists. " " This skeleton of a theropod, a carnivorous dinosaur, was discovered in the state of Wyoming by British paleontologists and was sold by French auction house Aguttes on June 4, 2018, for $2.36 million. Chesnot/Getty Images On June 4, 2018, the remains of what is most likely a predatory Allosaurus were sold to the highest bidder at the Aguttes auction house in Paris, France. Nearly 30 feet (9.1 meters) long and 70 percent complete, it's valuable in more ways than one. Like all fossils, these bones are ambassadors from an earlier time. The creature they belonged to drew its last breath in Wyoming 150 million years ago. It was a different world back then: Earth was considerably warmer and most mammals were rabbit-sized or smaller. Advertisement Dinosaurs and Dollar Signs Auction houses know there are plenty of buyers who will pay top dollar to own a rare and scientifically significant piece of prehistory. Aguttes sold the skeleton of another meat-eating dino for $3.2 million in 2016, and it recently fetched $641,000 for a complete woolly mammoth. Those sums look like pocket change next to the $8.36 million that the Chicago Field Museum and several corporate partners (like the Walt Disney World Resort and Ronald McDonald House Charities) paid in 1997 for "Sue," the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. Advertisement Private vs. Public Land Before you can have a sale, there has to be a seller. We recently discussed the legality of fossil collecting with P. David Polly, a professor of geology at Indiana University. On top of his duties to the school, Polly is the current president of the international Society for Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP), which boasts over 2,300 members. "Laws covering fossils vary considerably from country to country," says Polly in an email. In the United States, fossils that are discovered on federal land are considered public property. "They are held in trust on our behalf by the U.S. federal government," Polly explains. "The Paleontological Resources Preservation Act (PRPA), which was passed by Congress in 2009, stipulates that scientifically important fossils ... can only be collected with a scientific permit and must be placed in an approved repository i.e., a research collection of a museum or university where they will be available to scientists and other interested people." (Native American land is exempted; according to the Federal Register, fossil-collecting on this soil falls "under the jurisdiction of tribal authorities.") The act is a bit more lenient when it comes common plant and invertebrate fossils like trilobites. Private citizens are allowed to collect these "for personal use in reasonable quantities" on federal land without a permit. However, any fossils taken from federally owned rock "may not be bartered or sold" later. Note that special rules may apply to certain remains and locations. For example, it's a misdemeanor to collect petrified wood in Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park. If you've got any questions about the rules in your area, please get in touch with the closest BLM office. "Some US states, such as Wyoming and California, have similar laws protecting fossils on state lands," Polly notes. Privately held land is a horse of a very different color. In countries like Mongolia, dinosaur fossils are considered to be part of the nation's shared cultural heritage regardless of where they were found. As such, they can't be sold in private markets, and personal ownership of these remains is against the law. But in America, fossils discovered on private property belong to the landowner. So if you, as a resident of the United States, find a dino skeleton on real estate that you own, you can legally keep, sell or export it. The question is, should you? Advertisement A Blow to Science? The carnivorous dino that just changed hands in Paris was excavated from private land between 2013 and 2015. Upon learning that Aguttes planned to auction it off, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology wrote an open letter begging the organization to cancel the sale. Aguttes sold it anyway. The buyer's identity isn't known, but he or she has stated that the bones will be loaned out to a museum at some point so researchers will get the chance to study them. For the world's scientific community, this assurance isn't enough. Peer review is an important facet of paleontology. If one dinosaur expert writes something about a particular fossil, his or her colleagues need to be able to go back and inspect the specimen for themselves. Doing so requires guaranteed access to the remains something private fossil-owners may choose to withhold. Geological context is another thing to consider. The rock in which a fossil is found is just as important as the fossil itself. To figure out how old a specimen is or what its environment looked like, we need to know exactly where it came from. Private fossil-buyers might be unable to provide this information. Then there's the small matter of museum budgets. Universities and public museums frequently can't afford to meet some of the high prices that've been set by auctioneers and fossil-dealers in the wake of Sue's blockbuster sale. "Almost everybody has gotten excited at one time or another about the massive dinosaurs that once walked the Earth," says Polly. "That inspiration comes directly from the fact that many of them were carefully excavated, placed in public trust repositories, and become part of the scientific record. Unfortunately, that same excitement can make people want to have one of their own." It's true that fossil salespeople have made some major contributions to paleontology. (Just look at Mary Anning, an English seller of prehistoric treasures who discovered the extinct marine reptiles Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus.) Regardless, Polly and many of his fellow scientists worry that countries which don't commit to putting their important fossils in the public trust "where anyone can study them" are forfeiting a gold mine of knowledge. "Fossils are not like works of art: they weren't created to be high-priced collector's items," he says, "they are rare remnants of our past that are important to us all." Now That's Interesting Actor Nicolas Cage (of all people) now knows a thing or two about Mongolia's strict fossil laws. In 2007, the skull of an Asian tyrannosaur called Tarbosaurus went up for auction. Cage bought it for $276,000, outbidding fellow movie star Leonardo DiCaprio. When he learned that the fossil had been illegally poached from Mongolia, Cage agreed to repatriate his Tarbosaurus head back to its native land. YEREVAN, JUNE 15, ARMENPRESS. Kamar business center located near Yerevans Shahumyan square was built in 2014. The architects are Ruben and Mikayel Hasratyans. ARMENPRESS reports director of Kamar business center Artashes Kazakhetsyan toured in the building with journalists introducing the entire building. The history of Kamar business center Kamar business center combines buildings of 3 different eras Tsarist era, Soviet era and modern era. The Black building constructed in 1910 was designed by Tbilisi-Armenian architect Mikael Ohanjanyan. It served as the building of Erivan Branch of Tiflis commercial bank. The Agricultural Bank was also built there in 1926. Nikolay Buniatyan was the architect, while the idea belonged to Alexander Tamanian. The companies located in the business center The building consists of 9 ground and 2 underground floors and is already almost fully occupied by different companies. Only 12-15% remains vacant. 100 cars can be parked on the underground floors. Nearly 25 million USD was spent on the project by the private sector. The head offices of Zangezur Copper and Molybdenum Combine, and Phillip Morris companies, Asian Development Bank, Rosgostrakh Company, Ameriabank, a notary office as well as a restaurant with Asian kitchen are located here. Soon the Embassy of Great Britain to Armenia will be moved here. BREEAM Certificate Kamar business center is the first A-class business center in Armenia, and is BREEAM certified. BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) is a methodology created by British BRE Global Company in 1990. Kamar is the first project in Armenia to be BREEAM certified. It leaves behind almost all the building in Armenia in terms of eco-efficiency. Being granted with BREEAM certificate means preserving a number of high standards. KAMARs design The building is equipped with modern technological solutions that ensure high quality of service. There is a museum in the building about Yerevans financial history. The historical black tufa stone has been preserved in the interior and has been successfully combined with modern solutions, green corner and high technologies. The Green Building The construction of the Green Building has been implemented with materials free of risks for environment. The energy-saving systems reduce utility costs up to 35%. The highest in Europe green wall is located on the first floor of the business center, which is 20 meters high and covers a total area of 160 sq/m. In addition to freshness and natural view, the green wall also performs air filtration, thermal insulation and reduces noise. It also serves as a protective from sunrays, mitigating the heat by 8-10 degrees. A special device has been acquired from Italy to organize plant care without a direct access and exit at a height of 20 meters. A book about KAMAR business center A book telling the entire story of the building has been published. There are assessments of different specialists architects and historians about Kamar business center, interesting facts., as well as memories of Yerevan residents. Lilit Demuryan Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, JUNE 18, ARMENPRESS. The tiger which was found in a private zoo belonging to arrested MP Manvel Grigoryan is being transported to the Yerevan Zoo. FPWC - Foundation for the Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets released a video showing experts transporting the animal from the Ejmiatsin compound of the MP. Earlier the Yerevan Zoo said it is ready to help in caring for the tiger. The National Security Service (NSS) of Armenia has released details over the arrest of Member of Parliament Manvel Grigoryan and the evidences discovered in the lawmakers properties. Grigoryan was placed under arrest on June 16. The NSS said agents searched Grigoryans compound in the village of Arshaluys in Armavir province on June 16, and his mansion in Ejmiatsin city (Vagharshapat) within the framework of an ongoing criminal case. NSS said agents discovered an arsenal and a collection of dozens of both vintage and modern vehicles in Grigoryans Arshaluys compound. The compound was also used to store military canned food, medication and military uniforms. NSS said the boxes which were supposed to be delivered to soldiers, contained letters addressed to servicemen, which shows that it was aid sent to frontline soldiers in Artsakh during the 2016 April 4-day war days. NSS said it is investigating how the military clothing, medicine and other discoveries have appeared in the MPs compound. Various kinds of foodstuffs aid sent from kindergartens and schools to soldiers have been discovered stored in the compound, NSS said. NSS said it also found foodstuffs labeled For Soldier a special production supplied to the defense ministry which is not available for sale or any other use. The huge amount of weapons and ammunition found in MP Grigoryans compound in the village included more than a dozen anti-tank grenade launchers, 20 hand grenades, over 20,000 various caliber rounds, TNT explosives, and many other types of weapons. Weapons have also been found in the Ejmiatsin mansion, namely 79 rifles, 39 handguns and over 12,000 rounds. Dozens of property ownership licenses have also been found. The collection of vehicles includes motorcycles and snowmobiles, NSS said. The NSS said they also discovered SUVs and an ambulance vehicle which were designated to be used in the military during the 4-day war. The vehicles were donated to the Defense Army of Artsakh by representatives of the Armenian community of Russia, and Grigoryan has misappropriated them, according to the NSS. NSS said it also discovered a private zoo in the premises of the mansion, with bears and a tiger among the animals. The mansion also has a horse track. According to information, Grigoryan has used the military food which was supposed to go to soldiers of the 4-day war to feed the animals of his private zoo. The NSS said the investigation continues and additional information will be provided. Two days after the arrest of Member of Parliament Manvel Grigoryan in suspicion of illegal acquisition and possession of firearms, the Prosecutor Generals office filed a motion on stripping the lawmaker of immunity on June 18, the Prosecutor Generals office said. On June 17, Prosecutor General Arthur Davtyan transferred the investigation from the national security service to the special investigations service. He also tasked to form a task force from detectives of both services. The Prosecutor Generals office said the investigation has revealed sufficient evidence implicating Manvel Grigoryan. Thus, the Prosecutor General applied to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to request the parliament on behalf of the government to convene an extraordinary sitting to debate the motion. The MP is suspected in embezzling military supplies and donations, as well as illegally possessing firearms. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. US President Trump said on Monday that he would direct the Pentagon to establish a sixth branch of the armed forces dedicated to protecting American interests in outer space, New York Times reports. During a speech at a meeting of the National Space Council, President Trump announced plans to protect American interests in space through monitoring commercial traffic and debris, initiatives he said would be great not only in terms of jobs and everything else, its great for the psyche of our country. Minutes later, the president zeroed in on Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and tasked him with the undertaking of creating another branch of the military. General Dunford, if you would carry that assignment out, I would be very greatly honored, Mr. Trump said. We got it, the general replied. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. 25 US Congressmen have sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, urging to assist the positive political developments in Armenia, Congresswoman Jackie Speier told the Voice of America. According to the Congressmen, Nikol Pashinyan, who became Prime Minister with the support of the people, through a peaceful way, has the unique chance to transform Armenias political, governmental and economic field and the entire nature of Armenia. This chance, however, contains significant risks, and we can reduce these risks by helping to strengthen Armenias political and civil institutions, assisting the implementation of political priorities chosen by Armenia, the letter says. According to the Congressmen, the US assistance is especially significant in the transition period, when the government and citizens are together trying to overcome the corruption past. The US lawmakers call on Secretary of State Pompeo to significantly increase aid to Armenia and help the country in the fight against corruption. The letter was signed by Armenian Caucus Co-Chairs, Jackie Speier, Frank Pallone, as well as Adam Schiff and Eliot Engel. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. A delegation of nine MEPs, led by Foreign Affairs committee Chair Mr David McAllister, visited Armenia on 18 June to take stock of EU-Armenia relations and reform efforts, the EP office said. A nine-MEPs strong delegation met Prime Minister Mr Nikol Pashinyan, the Speaker of the National Assembly Mr Ara Babloyan as well as ministers, national MPs and civil society representatives to assess the political situation in Armenia, EU-Armenia relations and new reform efforts since the recent political turmoil, resulting in a change of government. The European Parliament has followed very carefully what happened in Armenia during the months of April and May 2018. The level of civic involvement of Armenia citizens and peaceful support for changes and fighting against corruption have been very impressive. This is a key moment for Armenia. To strengthen its democracy, to deepen its relations with the EU and to make long-lasting peace. Armenias citizens want this, Armenias leaders have committed to this and the European Union will be there to help every step of the way, said EPs delegation chair Mr. David McAllister (EPP, DE) after the visit. On 4 July, the European Parliament will also cast its final vote on the EU-Armenia Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement. The ratification of this new agreement is just the beginning - successful implementation is key to ensure the modernisation of Armenia. Successful implementation will help attract EU investment, stimulate trade with the EU and provide concrete benefits for the Armenian people, he added. I know that there are calls for us to start negotiating a new deal to allow visa-free travel for Armenian. Let me be very clear. We are ready to support the launching of such a dialogue. I understand that existing agreements are being implemented. But we also need to see a reduction in the number of migrants from Armenia illegally staying in some EU Member States. And again, key reforms such as on fighting corruption need to bear fruit, he said. The results of the mission will feed into the European Parliaments final vote on the EU-Armenia comprehensive and enhanced partnership agreement, to be held in Strasbourg in July 2018. In addition to Mr. McAllister, the EPs delegation was composed of eight MEPs: Chair of the Delegation to the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly - Ms Rebecca HARMS (Greens, DE), Chair of the Delegation to the EU-Armenia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee - Mr Sajjad KARIM (ECR, UK), Foreign Affairs committee Rapporteur on Armenia - Mr. Laszlo TOKES (EPP, HU), Ms Zeljana ZOVKO (EPP, HR), Ms Neena GILL (S&D, UK), Mr Boris ZALA (S&D, SK), Ms Eleni THEOCHAROUS (ECR, CY) and Mr Petras AUSTREVICIUS (ALDE, LT). Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. The Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) faction will vote in favor of stripping MP Manvel Grigoryan of immunity, head of the faction Vahram Baghdasaryan said today in parliament. Grigoryan is a member of the HHK faction, but not the HHK party. We are declaring that, with respect to the presumption of innocence, we will not obstruct the investigation, we will vote in favor, he said. The charges presented by the prosecutor, if confirmed, the perpetrators must be punished with the entire force of the law, he said, adding that criminals shouldnt be protected, regardless of their past, achievements or position. This is our stance, we will be consistent, he said. During todays special session of parliament, Prosecutor General of Armenia Arthur Davtyan presented the motion on stripping MP Manvel Grigoryan of immunity. Speaker of Parliament Ara Babloyan said that MP Manvel Grigoryan, who is currently under arrest, has notified him with a letter that he is refusing to take part in the debate. Prosecutor General Arthur Davtyan began his speech by mentioning that the National Security Service filed a criminal case against Grigoryan in suspicion of illegal possession of firearms and ammunition. He said that the investigation has proven that Grigoryan has indeed illegally acquired and possessed large amounts of weapons and ammunition. He said that the MP, together with his family members and others, began transporting and moving firearms from June 5 to different location in order to clean them. A search conducted in the compounds belonging to the MP has revealed 26 hand grenades, 19 anti-tank grenade launchers, 12 TNT explosives, more than 17000 rounds of different caliber ammo, other firearms and weapons. The search also revealed over 70 million drams, 80,000 USD, 67,350 Euro and 246,500 Ukrainian currency in cash. 33 vehicles were found, including military transportation vehicles. The search also discovered food which was donated by schoolchildren and teachers to soldiers of the 4-day April War in Artsakh. The aid includes more than 2,000 pieces of condensed milk cans, 160 cans of canned meat, and other supplies, including clothing supplies for servicemen. Letters written by schoolchildren to soldiers have been found within the boxes which contained the supplies. The Prosecutor General said that during the search, the MP immeditaly contacted his son at the scene and instructed him to claim that the items belong to him. About thirty minutes into the search the son of the MP arrived at the scene and claimed that the belongings are his. The Prosecutor General says they have sufficient evidence to charge Grigoryan for illegal acquisition and possession of firearms and grand theft. Davtyan filed the motion in parliament, requesting MPs to strip the arrested lawmaker of immunity in order to keep in pre-trial detention. Member of Parliament Manvel Grigoryan, a former general who chairs the Yerkrapah Volunteer Union, a paramilitary organization, was arrested on June 16 by national security service in his hometown of Ejmiatsin (Vagharshapat). The lawmaker from the Republican Party faction is suspected in embezzling military supplies and illegal possession of firearms. Upon searching the compound of Grigoryan, agents found huge amounts of military weapons and ammunition and supplies, including donated food and clothing which was meant to be sent to soldiers in Artsakh back in 2016. The donated supplies even include letters written by schoolchildren during the days of the April War of 2016. The Prosecutor General requested an extraordinary sitting of the parliament to take place to strip the MP of parliamentary immunity, in order to keep him in pre-trial custody. The MP has denied any wrongdoing, and in a letter sent to the Speaker said he will restore his reputation, and called on his colleagues to strip him of immunity since he has no desire to obstruct the investigation. A private zoo and a large car collection were also found during the search of the compound. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. Member of Parliament Manvel Grigoryan has testified in the ongoing case after being brought in as a suspect. The MPs attorney, Karen Kamalyan, told reporters that Grigoryan has testified that he has nothing to do with the items found by the national security agents. He has said that he has no connection with the items and that he is surprised how the items have appeared in the territory owned by him. He also said that he has been visiting the given property very rarely, twice or three times in a year, the attorney said. Member of Parliament Manvel Grigoryan, a former general who chairs the Yerkrapah Volunteer Union, a paramilitary organization, was arrested on June 16 by national security service in his hometown of Ejmiatsin (Vagharshapat). The lawmaker from the Republican Party faction is suspected in embezzling military supplies and illegal possession of firearms. Upon searching the compound of Grigoryan, agents found huge amounts of military weapons and ammunition and supplies, including donated food and clothing which was meant to be sent to soldiers in Artsakh back in 2016. The donated supplies even include letters written by schoolchildren during the days of the April War of 2016. The Prosecutor General requested an extraordinary sitting of the parliament to take place to strip the MP of parliamentary immunity, in order to keep him in pre-trial custody. The MP has denied any wrongdoing, and in a letter sent to the Speaker said he will restore his reputation, and called on his colleagues to strip him of immunity since he has no desire to obstruct the investigation. A private zoo and a large car collection were also found during the search of the compound. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan Correction: Minutes from ordinary general meeting 31 May 2018 Correct version of minutes of ordinary general meeting held 31 May 2018 is attached hereto. Board of Directors authorisation to increase the share capital and purchase own shares are valid until the annual general meeting 2020, and no later than 31 May 2020 Korreksjon: Protokoll fra ordinr generalforsamling 31. mai 2018 Korrekt versjon av protokoll fra ordinr generalforsamling avholdt 31. mai 2018 er vedlagt. Styrets fullmakt til a forhye aksjekapitalen og kjpe egne aksjer gjelder frem til ordinr generalforsamling 2020, dog senest 31.mai 2020. YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. SWAT teams of the organized crime unit of Yerevan police have carried out a special operation based on intelligence reports suggesting that a former official, Hovhannes Hovsepyan, and his entourage are keeping firearms and ammunition in their vehicles. Police told ARMENPRESS that the special operation was carried out around midnight June 18 in a street in Yerevan. An assault rifle and a handgun have been found in the vehicle. Police are currently checking the possession permit. Two vehicles of the entourage had false license plates, and were illegally equipped with sirens and police lights, and radio contact devices. Police are investigating the incident. Although police failed to mention other information about the Hovhannes Hovsepyan, the name rings a bell. Hovhannes Hovsepyan served as head of the presidential oversight service from 2008 to 2016. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. Pittsburgh rapper Jimmy Wopo was shot dead on Monday in a drive-by in his hometown that also wounded a second man, TIME reports. Police responded to the shooting in the citys Hill District around 4:22 p.m., according to the Tribune Review. Two men were rushed to hospital with gunshot wounds. Wopos manager, Taylor Maglin, later confirmed that the rapper had died. The second man, who has not been named, was reportedly in stable condition, TIME reported. Wopo,21, whose real name is Travon Smart, was best known for his 2016 single Elm Street. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. Major general Artak Davtyan, chief of the general staff of Armenias armed forces, has released a statement regarding the latest scandalous incidents. Impunity is from now on history. The fundamental stance of the military-political leadership in the new historic situation of our country is ensuring the rule of law and justice, the uncompromising fight against corruption, anarchy and impunity. The loud events of the recent days didnt leave out the military too. Such discoveries not only served as a precedent for increasing trust among the society, but also a signal for carrying our principled and consistent work for ruling it out. I assure you, that our armed forces, staying committed to their mission, will further continue steadily carrying out the constitutional function of ensuring the defense, security, territorial integrity and inviolability of the borders of Armenia and Artsakh, by tactically responding and waging irreconcilable fight against even seemingly small offenses, in which we also expect the practical assistance of the society, the statement says, according to the defense ministry. Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan outlines two main directions of his activities fight against corruption and development of high-tech industry, Pashinyan announced during his visit to Synopsys Armenia company. Addressing the staff of the company, Pashinyan made a joke, saying that its the first time he is in an office area with those young people (Synopsys Armenia employees), since they used to meet in the same street or square. I think this is a symbolic change in our relations, ARMENPRESS reports Pashinyan as saying. Nikol Pashinyan said that the sphere of high technologies breaks the boundaries of impossible and enlarges the scope of possibilities. I have a symbolic perception in my mind that if someones welfare improves in front of my eyes, there are usually two possible cases that person is involved either in corruption or in high technologies. For that reason the two main directions of my activities are connected with corruption and high technologies, PM Pashinyan said. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, 19 JUNE, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 19 june, USD exchange rate down by 0.33 drams to 482.26 drams. EUR exchange rate down by 2.60 drams to 557.01 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate down by 0.10 drams to 7.52 drams. GBP exchange rate down by 3.96 drams to 635.33 drams. The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals. Gold price down by 71.00 drams to 19870.46 drams. Silver price down by 9.80 drams to 257.46 drams. Platinum price down by 226.59 drams to 13706.44 drams. YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. Court of General Jurisdiction of the City of Yerevan made a ruling to remand Artur Asatryan, aka Don Pipo, for 2 months. He was arrested by National Security Service agents on June 16. In a statement, the NSS said that a criminal case was launched back in 2017 on the alleged murder plot against Asatryan. Arthur Asatryan, aka Don Pipo, is an Ejmiatsin native who has been residing in Italy. According to some media reports, Asatryan is allegedly tied to organized crime. NSS said that three of the four suspected plotters of the murder have said that they had been kidnapped and taken hostage for three days last year, where theyve been subjected to violence and demanded to name who is behind ordering the murder. A new criminal case was launched later in 2017 on the kidnapping of the three suspects. NSS said it has found a mobile phone video showing the kidnappers threatening and interrogating the three men. The video also shows that the interrogation was carried out by an individual calling himself Pipo, NSS said. Furthermore, the kidnapped men have refused to cooperate with law enforcement agencies. The investigation nevertheless continued, and as result of searching the mansion of Arthur Asatryan in Ejmiatsin on June 16, a big amount of weapons and ammunition was discovered, NSS said. The weapons included AK-74 assault rifles, five handguns and a revolver. Asatryan was detained and later arrested in suspicion of kidnapping and illegal acquisition and possession of firearms. Within the framework of the same criminal case, four Russian citizens have also been arrested. The four suspects are most likely the bodyguards of Asatryan who are involved in the illegal possession of the firearms, NSS said. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, JUNE 19, ARMENPRESS. Russia has intentions to supply Armenia with Su-30SM fighter jets, ARMENPRESS reports Russian Kommersant informs. Its mentioned that before the power change in Armenia the leadership of the country cancelled the purchase of multifunctional Su-30SM jets until 2024. The contract between the sides had been signed in 2012, but never entered into force. The newspaper informs that Russia plans to implement the contract with the new authorities of Armenia. Its mentioned that Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan has already been inside Su-30SM and called the fighter jet one of the best in the world. The newspaper writes that talks about Armenia's desire to acquire Su-30SM jets started after the Armenian PM posted a photo on his Facebook page inside the jet in Yerevans Erebuni airport. Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan Extraordinary scenes of Afghan Taliban and security forces spontaneously celebrating a historic ceasefire showed many fighters on both sides are fed up with fighting, analysts say, raising hopes for peace in a country ravaged by war. The jubilant response to the first truce between the Afghan government and the Taliban over the Eid holiday took many by surprise, although observers warn that an end to the nearly 17-year conflict is still a long way off. "It is difficult to predict what the next move might be, but the spell has been broken," Afghan political analyst Ghulam Sakhi Ehsani told AFP. "From all the photos and videos, it seems the foot soldiers from both sides are tired of war." In scenes unimaginable only a few days ago, Taliban fighters and security forces long locked in a seemingly intractable conflict were seen hugging and taking selfies together around the country. Civilians, who have borne the brunt of the bloody war, also flocked to greet the insurgents as they entered urban areas that they usually visit only to attack, including the capital Kabul. Fighters on both sides of the conflict expressed hopes for the unprecedented ceasefire to continue. "We have held the ceasefire well so far," Taliban commander Baba told AFP during celebrations in the eastern province of Nangarhar on Saturday. "Everyone is tired of war and if our leaders order us to continue the ceasefire, we will hold it forever," he said. But the sight of its fighters openly mingling with security forces and civilians appeared to alarm the Taliban's leaders, who ordered their men back to their posts. Michael Kugelman, an analyst at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, said the Taliban leadership may have feared that "more days without fighting could convince the rank and file that peace is better than a war". "A little bit of freedom is good but too much, why go to paradise," a Western diplomat told AFP, referring to the virgin angels the Muslim holy book, the Koran, says await good Muslims, especially martyrs, when they die. - 'Building block' - Two suicide attacks in Nangarhar, both claimed by the Islamic State group -- which was not part of the ceasefire -- marred the otherwise peaceful Eid holiday that follows the holy month of Ramadan. But the fact that the truce held and was welcomed on both sides suggested the "dynamics of this conflict may have changed", Afghanistan Analysts Network co-director Kate Clark told AFP. "Once there's a recognition of common humanity, that everyone is Muslim, that people in the cities were celebrating Eid as in the villages, that it's really nice to have an ice cream with someone, hopefully it becomes more difficult to kill them," she said. Kugelman said the ceasefire had provided "a major building block" for the government's efforts to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban, which have so far failed. "While reconciliation still feels like a remote prospect, it now feels at least a bit more of a possibility," he said. Initial euphoria over the ceasefire quickly turned to disappointment and anger among many Afghans when the Taliban resumed fighting on Monday. While analysts had expected the Taliban to return to the battlefield, some people saw it as a betrayal. "Death to the Taliban and their backers. Once again they have shown that they love shedding the blood of innocent Afghans," Madena Momad posted on Facebook. - Hopes for dialogue - What comes next in the long conflict is unclear. There has long been secret back-channel dialogue between interlocutors on both sides of the war, and direct talks between Kabul and the Taliban were held in Pakistan in July 2015, but were quickly derailed. Analysts say even if the Taliban could be convinced to give formal talks another try -- they now refuse to negotiate with the Afghan government, which they see as illegitimate -- it could still take years to reach and then implement an agreement. There is no roadmap and neither side appears to be clear on what a post-conflict Afghanistan would actually look like or has identified their "red lines" in talks. President Ashraf Ghani announced over the weekend that the government's eight-day ceasefire, due to expire on Tuesday, would be prolonged for another 10 days. But while Taliban leaders hailed the three-day truce a success and a demonstration of their "full control" over their fighters, they refused Ghani's request for an extension. The government's move may buy the president more time to work out how to keep the momentum going. "Ghani's only option is to keep trying for peace," Kugelman said. "The war can't be won militarily so he'll need to make any and all possible efforts to secure some type of negotiated end to the war." Ghani's February offer of peace talks with the Taliban, considered to be one of the most comprehensive plans ever offered by an Afghan government, was ignored by the militants, which went on to launch their annual spring offensive. The insurgents have repeatedly demanded direct dialogue with the United States, which Washington has refused, and the withdrawal of foreign troops. But last month the Pentagon said that senior Taliban officials have been secretly negotiating with Afghan officials on a possible ceasefire. "This weekend was a very strong indication that if the pieces fall together in the right way there can be a constructive dialogue," another Western diplomat said. In jubilant scenes, an Afghan Taliban militant armed with a rocket launcher celebrated the ceasefire with residents of Jalalabad The Eid ceasefire Afghan Taliban militants and residents of southern Kandahar province celebrate the Eid ceasefire Afghan Taliban militants took to the streets on the outskirts of the eastern city of Jalalabad to celebrate the landmark truce The modern state of Turkey emerged out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire to become a powerful strategic nation that borders Greece to the west and Iran to the east. It has been ruled since 2002 by the Islamic-rooted conservative party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He has overseen some of the biggest changes since modern Turkey was created in 1923. But in presidential and legislative polls on Sunday, Erdogan and his party will face the biggest test at the ballot box to their one-and-a-half-decade grip on power. Here are five facts about Turkey. - Successor to an empire - At its peak, the Ottoman Empire ruled a swathe of territory extending from the Balkans to modern Saudi Arabia, including the holy sites of Islam. But the Empire suffered centuries of decline and its end was confirmed by defeat in World War I, in which it had fought on the side of imperial Germany. After a War of Independence, Turkish military leaders including Mustafa Kemal Ataturk were able to salvage a modern state extending from Thrace to Mesopotamia, declaring the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Under Erdogan, Turkey has sought to rebuild its Ottoman-era influence in the Middle East, notably in Syria and Iraq as well as the Balkans and also Africa. - Secular, Western democracy - Ataturk, Turkey's first president until his death in 1938, turned the country towards the West and made secularism one of its founding principles. Multi-party democracy was introduced in 1946. Under Ataturk's successor Ismet Inonu, Turkey remained neutral in World War II. In 1952 it joined NATO along with its one-time foe Greece with the strong backing of the United States, keen to ensure Ankara never fell into the orbit of the USSR. Critics have accused Erdogan of increasing authoritarianism, presiding over a creeping Islamisation and changing Turkey's Western tilt. But the president insists he is committed to a secular republic anchored in NATO. - Scarred by coups - Turkey's powerful military ousted incumbent governments in coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980. The 1960 coup was followed by the hanging of ousted prime minister Adnan Menderes -- Erdogan's political hero -- along with two ministers. After coming to power, Erdogan clipped the wings of the military in a bid to make political interventions by the army far less likely. But in July 2016 he survived a coup attempt by a renegade army faction. Erdogan said that attempt was ordered by his one-time ally, the US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, who denies the charges. Erdogan then declared a state of emergency that has seen some 55,000 people arrested in an unprecedented purge. He -- and the opposition -- have vowed to lift the emergency after the elections. - Host to refugees - The country of over 80 million has sought to boost its influence, staunchly opposing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria's civil war but then working closely with his ally Russia to end the conflict. Turkey has taken in around 3.5 million Syrian refugees, who live mainly in the southeast and Istanbul, as well as smaller numbers from Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2016, it signed a deal to limit the flow of refugees to Europe after one million crossed the Aegean through Turkey in 2015. The deal was seen as a boost to Turkey's hopes of joining the European Union but the process has floundered ever since. Turkey has given passports to a few tens of thousands of Syrian refugees bur critics say it lacks a strategy to deal with their long-term presence. - 'Kurdish problem' - The non-Muslim minorities on the territory of modern Turkey were forced out in the 20th century and only small populations remain today. Armenians regard the killings and massacres of their ancestors as genocide, a term vehemently disputed by Turkey. Most Greeks left the country in the population exchanges of 1923. By far Turkey's largest ethnic minority are the Kurds. They make up a fifth of the population and have long complained of being denied their rights in what they call the "Kurdish problem". The outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) took up arms in 1984 in a bloody insurgency that has left tens of thousands dead. Erdogan in the first years of his rule took unprecedented steps towards giving the Kurds greater rights and opened talks with the PKK. But a ceasefire unravelled in 2015 and violence continues, with still no peace deal in sight. People wave Turkish flags as they hold a commemoration at the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey's first president Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, pictured on this flag during a commemoration day at his mausoleum, made secularism one of modern Turkey's founding principles Turkey has taken in around 3.5 million Syrian refugees Supporters of jailed Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan demonstrate in Istanbul English Latvian Riga, Latvia, 2018-06-19 10:42 CEST (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Being under the process of liquidation, ABLV Bank, AS, registration number 50003149401 (hereinafter the Bank), hereby informs that the shareholders meeting of 26 February 2018 decided to approve the commencement of voluntary liquidation of the Bank. The following persons are appointed to be liquidators: Eva Berlaus, Arvids Kostomarovs, Andris Kovalcuks and Elvijs Vebers. On 12 June 2018, the Financial and Capital Market Commission approved the decision of the shareholders meeting of the Bank about voluntary liquidation, which shall be deemed the day of the commencement of the voluntary liquidation of the Bank. In order to ensure protection of interests of all creditors and in accordance with the provisions of Section 211 of the Credit Institutions Law of the Republic of Latvia, the liquidators hereby invite the creditors of the Bank to file their claims (or complaints) to the Bank not later than by 18 September 2018 (inclusive) by submitting them to the Liquidation Committee at 23 Elizabetes St., Riga, LV-1010, Republic of Latvia. More information is available at www.ablv.com. An institution authorised to review complaints about the liquidation: Financial and Capital Market Commission, 1 Kungu St., Riga, LV-1050, Republic of Latvia. China has pledged around $100 million to help modernise Cambodia's military, the government said Tuesday, the latest largesse showered on the country amid a crackdown on dissent before national elections. The pledge came from visiting Defence Minister Wei Fenghe, who arrived on Saturday for talks with his Cambodian counterpart and Prime Minister Hun Sen, said defence ministry spokesman General Chhum Socheat. Wei, who leaves Wednesday, "promised to support, to train, and to help reform our military to be modernised like others", he said, adding that the two countries would next year hold their third series of joint military exercises known as "Golden Dragon". The aid pledge comes at a time of worsening relations between the United States and Cambodia, which scrapped joint military exercises last year. Hun Sen also accused the US of assisting in a plot by the opposition to topple his government, claims dismissed by the current ambassador as "absurd". Hun Sen is looking to extend his 33-year grip on power in the vote next month after the main opposition party was dissolved last year and one of its leaders arrested. Analysts say unwavering support from China in the form of loans and investment has allowed him to hammer away at threats to his rule without fear of consequences. The US has withdrawn financial support for Cambodia's elections and this month sanctioned the head of Hun Sen's bodyguard unit for his alleged role in human rights abuses. In a separate case, dozens of Cambodians who formerly worked at the US embassy in Phnom Penh protested outside it on Tuesday after being fired from their jobs in March, when allegations of sharing sexually explicit material and child pornography surfaced. Carrying posters of Hun Sen and US President Donald Trump, they called on the embassy to provide evidence and asked for compensation. "We were sacked from the jobs unjustly," said one former employee Chuon Im. An embassy spokesman said it takes incidents involving child pornography and child exploitation "very seriously" but would not comment on internal personnel issues. China's Defence Minister Wei Fenghe (C) and Cambodia's Defence Minister Tea Banh (L) look at a soldier's uniform on display during a military exhibition in Phnom Penh The easing of China's one-child policy was a godsend to Zhang Yinzhe and his wife Xu Mengsha, who had decided they wanted to use in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to freeze an embryo in the hope of one day having a second child. But most IVF procedures are restricted in China to couples who are infertile, and surging demand at overwhelmed reproductive clinics since the policy was relaxed two years ago would anyway have meant months of waiting. So the Beijing couple flew to Thailand, part of a wave of Chinese spilling overseas into Southeast Asia, the United States, and elsewhere in a test-tube baby boom. "There is an old saying in China: a son and daughter complete the family," said Zhang, a 31-year-old airline pilot. Zhang spoke after a consultation at Bangkok's Piyavate Hospital, its walls festooned with Mandarin-language posters on IVF as other Chinese patients waited their turn. Definitive numbers on China's share of the assisted-reproduction tourism sector are unclear, but its spending was estimated by the state-linked Qianzhan Industry Research Institute to have grown 22 percent annually to $1.4 billion in 2017. Further rapid growth is expected. Overseas clinics are adding Mandarin-speaking staff, Chinese-language websites, and increasingly marketing to Chinese seeking a second or even third child. Chinese figures estimate that 90 million women became eligible for another child once the family-planning policy was relaxed, and more second children were delivered last year than first-borns. But Chinese couples are increasing having children later, past their reproductive primes, and may require help from science. Around 12 percent of the childbearing population are unable to conceive naturally, according to Chinese studies, yet China only has about 400 licensed IVF clinics, where waiting lists can approach one year. - Fertile ground - IVF involves combining egg and sperm in a lab and implanting any viable embryos into the womb. The one-child policy caused birth rates to plummet, and China eased it to ensure a big enough future workforce to support its fast-aging population. But it still bans or restricts fertility options like egg donations, surrogate motherhood, gender selection, and freezing embryos for later use partly over fears that opening the floodgates could spark a population explosion. Only around 500,000 Chinese IVF procedures took place in 2016, health officials estimate, far short of what fertility doctors say is required. "There is big demand in China, but we can't handle it here," said Ri-Cheng Chian, director of reproductive medicine at Shanghai?s 10th People's Hospital. So Chinese are booking tickets to Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and even Russia. IVF treatments cost around 30,000 yuan ($4,700) in China, but can be several times that abroad, where many Chinese feel they can find higher-quality care. Zhang, the pilot, wants IVF partly to screen for genetic defects, something restricted at home. "That's a lot of money for a Chinese family but compared to the health of my next generation, I should spend it," he said. Chartree Saenghiranwatana, a fertility specialist at Piyavate, said the clinic has been "getting increasing demand from Chinese patients the past year or two", and is recruiting Mandarin-speaking doctors and nurses. Some Thai clinics say up to 80 percent of their customers are Chinese. - Baby bump - "A new industrial chain is forming, for reproduction, in Southeast Asia," said Wei Siang Yu, the Singaporean founder and chairman of Borderless Health Group (BHG). BHG has created a video-conferencing platform on which Chinese patients can consult fertility experts around the world, aided by Mandarin-speaking interpreters. BHG is also establishing sperm and egg banks in countries including Thailand, Australia and the United States, primarily for Chinese clients, complete with a phone app allowing them to monitor their "fertility assets" almost like a bank account. Yu said two years ago Chinese patients placed sixth or seventh in the ranks of foreign patients coming to Thailand for medical tourism, but will be the largest group this year. Besides infertility or the desire for a larger family, the Chinese preference for male heirs sends some couples abroad in search of clinics that will perform gender screening -- though that is technically illegal in most countries -- and Chinese LGBT couples are also packing their bags. Li Na, who is from central China, went through expensive IVF procedures in Shanghai, Hong Kong and the United States. All failed. But she and her husband hit the jackpot in Thailand, and now have twin girls through a surrogate mother there and a boy through IVF. Li, 41, has parlayed the experience into a side career as a consultant to other Chinese couples seeking the same joy she felt. "I couldn?t stop crying when I flew down to Thailand to pick them up," Li said. "It was hard to believe they were mine." Chinese couple Xu Mengsha (R) and Zhang Yinzhe (C) speak to Thai fertility physician Chartree Saenghiranwatana at the Piyavate Hospital in Bangkok specialising in in-vitro fertilisation Overseas clinics are adding Mandarin-speaking staff, Chinese-language websites, and increasingly marketing to Chinese seeking a second or even third child Zhang Yinzhe (L) and Xu Mengsha (R) decided they wanted to use in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to freeze an embryo in the hope of one day having a second child Around 12 percent of China's childbearing population are unable to conceive naturally, according to Chinese studies, yet the country only has about 400 licensed IVF clinics, where waiting lists can approach one year An inquest into the Dreamworld tragedy has heard one of the theme parks workers went into emergency mode and tried to save people at the site of the ride, which claimed four lives. One of the detectives giving evidence said Courtney Williams was at the unload area of the ride. She went into emergency mode and assisted everyone she could including Cindy Lows son. Ms Low was one of the four who died but her son survived. The court also heard Ms Williams was on the first week of her job and that she was previously told not to press an emergency button on the ride. She is expected to give evidence on Tuesday along with other members of Dreamworld staff on the second day of the inquest into the October, 2016 tragedy. Courtney Williams. Source: Facebook/ Courtney Williams The long-awaited inquest began on Monday in a packed Southport Coroners Court. Cindy Low, Kate Goodchild, her brother Luke Dorsett and his partner Roozi Araghi all died instantly after being thrown from a raft when the Thunder River Rapids ride malfunctioned in October 2016. Ms Goodchilds 12-year-old daughter and Ms Lows 10-year-old son were also thrown from the raft but survived. The resumed on Tuesday with police forensic crash investigator Senior Constable Steven Cornish continuing to give evidence. The site of the Dreamworld tragedy in October 2016. Source: AAP Snr Const Cornish told the inquest the ride lacked automatic safety features such as a water level sensor which would have prevented the tragedy. He said the correct application of an emergency shutdown button at any time from the failure of a water pump until the rafts collided, would have also ensured no loss of life. The inquest had earlier heard the water pump had failed twice on the day of the tragedy, and there had been previous incidents involving rafts colliding on the 30-year-old ride since 2001. The potential for that to happen was always there, Sen Const Cornish told the inquest. It was evident by the testing we did, that the rafts could become inverted. French far-right leader Marine Le Pen must repay nearly 300,000 euros to the European Parliament for funds paid incorrectly to an assistant, a top EU court ruled on Tuesday. The General Court of the European Union, the bloc's second-highest tribunal, rejected a bid by Le Pen to overturn a ruling that she had wrongly used parliamentary funds to pay an aide who was based at her party's headquarters in Paris. The Luxembourg-based court said in a statement that it "confirms the decision of the European Parliament to recover from Marine Le Pen MEP almost 300,000 euros ($347,000) for the employment of a parliamentary assistant, on the ground that she did not prove the effectiveness of that assistant?s work". Le Pen, who lost the 2016 French presidential election in a run-off with Emmanuel Macron, provided no evidence "of any activity whatsoever on the part of the parliamentary assistant that comes under parliamentary assistance, which she moreover acknowledged during the hearing," the court said. Le Pen, who served as an MEP from 2009 to 2017, swiftly announced her intention to take the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the bloc's highest court. "This ruling is based not on the substance of the case but on a procedural aspect. We are going to appeal against this decision," she told AFP. Le Pen's National Rally party -- known until a recent name change as the National Front -- criticised the court's ruling. "When you don't submit evidence the General Court says there was no parliamentary work. When you submit evidence it says it's in the wrong form. Then when you submit the evidence in the right form, it says it's too late," the party said in a statement. In December 2016, the parliament ruled that 298,500 euros had been "unduly" paid to Le Pen over a five-year period for parliamentary assistance provided by her aide Catherine Griset, who was based in Paris and not at parliament, which meets in both Brussels and Strasbourg, eastern France. The parliament began withholding part of Le Pen's allowances as an MEP to recover the money -- a move that she unsuccessfully challenged in the EU court last year. A source at the European Parliament told AFP that it managed to recover around 60,000 euros from Le Pen before she quit the assembly in 2017. Le Pen is not the only member of the former National Front to run foul of rules on payments to parliamentary aides. Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front, was ordered to repay 320,000 euros in 2016, while parliament has demanded a total of nearly 400,000 from three other MEPs. French far-right leader Marine Le Pen swiftly announced her intention to take the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the bloc's highest court Israel declined to comment on Tuesday on a weekend air strike against an Iraqi paramilitary base in eastern Syria after its US ally implicated it in the attack. The Sunday evening strike against the Al-Hari base on the Syrian side of the border with Iraq came less than 24 hours after Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would strike Iran's "proxies" anywhere in Syria. Fighters of Iraq's Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force, mainly composed of Iran-trained Shiite militia, have played a major role in the war against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State group in Syria as well as Iraq. But their presence has sparked confrontations with both Washington, which has been supporting a Kurdish-led alliance that controls other parts of eastern Syria, and Israel, which fears Iranian-inspired attacks on its forces in the occupied Golan Heights. Syrian authorities and the Iraqi paramilitaries both blamed Washington for the strike, which killed at least 52 fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. But US officials denied any involvement and instead pointed the finger at Israel. "We have reasons to believe that it was an Israeli strike," one US official told AFP on condition of anonymity. The Israeli military declined to be drawn on the US claims. "We are not commenting on foreign reports," a spokeswoman said. The military has carried out previous strikes against Iranian targets in Syria, but most have been significantly closer to Israel or the Israeli-occupied Golan. Last month, Israel launched a large-scale attack on what it said were Iranian targets in Syria, raising fears of a major confrontation. Those strikes followed a barrage of rockets that Israel said was fired towards its forces in the occupied Golan by Iran from Syria. Even before that, Israel had been blamed for a series of recent strikes inside Syria that killed Iranians, though it has not acknowledged them. Speaking at a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem on Sunday morning, Netanyahu reiterated his position that "Iran needs to withdraw from all of Syria". "We will take action -? and are already taking action -? against efforts to establish a military presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria both close to the border and deep inside Syria," the prime minister said. "We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria." Israeli seized a large swathe of the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967 and later annexed it in a move never recognised by the international community. Iran has been a close ally of the Syrian regime for some four decades and, with Russia, has been a key supporter in the civil war that broke out in 2011. Map of Syria locating air strike in Al-Hari. Italy's Osteria Francescana was crowned the world's best restaurant for the second time on Tuesday by an influential list compiled by British trade magazine Restaurant, beating out top eateries in Spain and France. Run by chef Massimo Bottura, the restaurant in Modena, Italy, overtook last year's winner, New York's Eleven Madison Park, in the World's 50 Best Restaurants awards, which were handed out in Bilbao in Spain's northern Basque Country, famous for its avant-garde haute cuisine. Osteria Francescana first won the award in 2016. Spain's El Celler de Can Roca, which took the top honour in 2013 and 2015, came in second while third place went to Mirazur in southern France. Restaurant magazine launched the awards in 2002 and they are now as coveted by restaurants as Michelin stars, although the methodology used to select the best restaurants has faced criticism, especially from several French chefs who say it is unclear. There are no criteria for putting a restaurant on the list, which is based on an anonymous poll of more than 1,000 chefs, restaurant owners, food critics and other industry insiders from around the world. Each member gets 10 votes and at least four of those votes have to go to restaurants outside their region. The winner has been in Spain seven times, the most of any country. In addition to El Celler de Can Roca's two wins, ground-breaking Spanish chef Ferran Adria's El Bulli, which he closed in 2011, took the prize a record five times. This year was the first time the ceremony was held in Spain. The event has been held before in London, New York and Melbourne. Italian chef Massimo Bottura celebrates his Osteria Francescana winning the world's best restaurant award in Bilbao, Spain North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is visiting China on Tuesday and Wednesday, state broadcaster CCTV said, a week after his unprecedented summit with US President Donald Trump. CCTV did not say whether Kim had arrived in Beijing, but security lined the freeway leading to the city's airport Tuesday morning as authorities prepared for his arrival. The trip will be Kim's third to China since March, when he made his inaugural foreign trip as leader. An AFP reporter in Pyongyang said the only scheduled international flight -- an Air Koryo plane to Beijing -- had been briefly delayed for no apparent reason, which often happens when Kim travels. Kim is seeking relief from economic sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise and is believed to be seeking support from China for that, Japan's Nikkei business daily said in a dispatch from Beijing. Following the historic US-North Korea summit in Singapore a week ago, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic punishment of its Cold War-era ally. China was not a direct player in the negotiations in Singapore but retains strong influence behind the scenes. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed to Beijing to brief Chinese President Xi Jinping and other top leaders soon after the Trump-Kim meeting. In a joint statement following the Singapore summit, Kim pledged to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." Trump hailed this as a concession but critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. In return, Trump said he would stop joint military drills with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. On Tuesday, the US and South Korean militaries confirmed they have called off upcoming joint exercises following Trump's order. China retains a strong influence in North Korea Another attempt at church- mediated talks to end a deadly political crisis in Nicaragua fell apart on Monday, a clergy statement said. With the death toll from almost daily street violence now at 180, opposition groups and Catholic bishops walked out of the discussions, accusing the government of failing to make good on a promise Friday to invite international organizations to come to Nicaragua and help probe the violence. "When the government sends us a copy of those invitations and the international organizations confirm to us they have received them", working groups and a plenary session of the government-opposition dialogue will be convened again, the Nicaraguan Bishops Conference said in a statement. Nicaragua's descent into chaos was triggered on April 18 when relatively small protests against now-scrapped social security reforms were met with a government crackdown. Those demonstrations mushroomed into a popular uprising, with anti-government protesters facing off against police and paramilitaries supporting President Daniel Ortega, whom critics accuse of acting like a dictator. Under an agreement reached Friday, the government was supposed to invite representatives of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights -- an autonomous branch of the Organization of American States -- the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and the European Union. At a session Monday, Foreign Minister Denis Moncada, head of the government delegation, cited "bureaucratic" reasons for the invitations not having been issued, said Carlos Tunnerman, a member of the opposition delegation. "Go to your office, write the letters, send the invitations and a bring a copy of those letters to the plenary session on Tuesday," Tunnerman said he told the minister. That session has now been called off. Nicaraguans attend the burial of six people who died when their house was set on fire over the weekend as political unrest continued Atlanta, GA, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Jesus Cepeda of Lawrenceville, GA, is a 97-year-old U.S. Navy veteran of WWII and survivor of Pearl Harbor, who, like countless other aging veterans, never visited the war memorials built in their honor in Washington, D.C. Today, Cepeda has visited those memorials, thanks to VITAS and virtual reality. The Honor Flight Network sends veterans from around the country to the nations capital at no cost to visit and reflect at their war memorials. Unfortunately, some veterans are unable to make the trip due to mobility issues or terminal illness. VITAS Healthcare, the nations leading provider of end-of-life care, is committed to serving the men and women who sacrificed so much for our county. If some veterans are unable to visit the memorials, VITAS wants to bring the memorials to the veterans. The company purchased virtual reality headsets to share the Honor Flight experience with its home-bound patients. Through pre-recorded visits led by retired military tour guides, veterans in VITAS care visit the WWII Memorial, Korean War and Vietnam War memorials, Womens Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery in 3-D virtual reality. A quiet gentleman, Jesus Cepeda didnt say much during his virtual tour, but he was enthralled. His family stood close by and watched. Thank you for making him feel so very special. He was not feeling well that morning, but after [the experience], he was all smiles! Cepeda was the first hospice patient in Atlanta to take the tour virtually. VITAS expects to incorporate this innovative approach with its veteran hospice patients throughout Georgia and other states where VITAS operates. Its important to allow veterans, especially combat veterans, to express their feelings and come to terms with their war experience, explains Reverend Larry Robert, MDiv, VITAS bereavement services manager and veteran liaison in Atlanta. At VITAS we understand that talking about everything a veteran has dealt with allows them to make peace with the past and share their legacy and what they have sacrificed with others. About VITAS Healthcare VITAS Healthcare, a pioneer and leader in the hospice movement since 1978, is the nations leading provider of end-of-life care. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, VITAS (pronounced VEE-tahs) operates 45 hospice programs in 14 states and the District of Columbia. (California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin). VITAS employs 11,765 professionals who care for terminally ill patients daily, primarily in the patients homes, but also in the companys 28 inpatient hospice units as well as in hospitals, nursing homes and assisted living communities/residential care facilities for the elderly. At the conclusion of the first quarter of 2018, VITAS reported an average daily census of 17,380. Visit www.vitas.com. ### Attachments North Korean leader Kim Jong Un briefed Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday about his historic summit with US President Donald Trump, a visit that underscores Beijing's efforts to remain at the centre of fast-moving nuclear diplomacy. Xi urged the US and North Korea to implement the agreements reached at the June 12 summit in Singapore, while Kim thanked Xi for his role in the diplomatic efforts, according to Chinese state media. Kim's third trip to China since March comes as Beijing tries to strengthen its role as a mediator between the US and the North, where it claims compelling security and economic interests. The North's leader, who is believed to have landed in the Chinese capital Tuesday morning, was greeted with a military honour guard at the ornate Great Hall of the People, as the Cold War-era allies repair ties that worsened when Pyongyang tested nuclear weapons and Beijing backed UN sanctions. Kim "felt thanks for and highly praised China's promotion of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula and its important role in protecting the peninsula's peace and stability," state broadcaster CCTV said. North Korea "hopes to work with China and other concerned parties to promote and establish a solid, long-lasting peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula and make joint efforts to achieve a lasting peace on the peninsula." For his part, Xi told Kim he "wants North Korea and the US to carry out the results of their leadership summit", the report said. Trump and Kim pledged in a joint summit statement to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula". In return, Trump made the shock announcement that he would stop joint military drills with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. The US and South Korean militaries confirmed Tuesday they have called off a major joint exercise. Kim told Xi his summit with Trump "achieved results that are in line with the interests of all parties and the expectations of the international communities," according to CCTV. "If the two parties can solidly implement the summit's consensus step by step, it will open a new, important phase of the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." The United States relies on China to enforce UN economic sanctions against the North, giving Beijing potential leverage in its looming trade war with Washington. "I think that North Korea can be another card Beijing can play to win leverage in negotiations with Washington," Yang Moo-jin, professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies, told AFP. Following the Singapore summit, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic restrictions. Wang Dong, an international relations expert at Peking University, said he expected Kim to ask China for help in easing the sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise. "The Chinese and North Korean leaders are carrying out consultations on how to jointly move the Korean nuclear issue forward," Wang said. China may not have been at the table in Singapore but it retains strong influence behind the scenes, Wang said. Tuesday's visit shows that "China is indispensable to the entire Korean nuclear issue," he said. - 'Differences ahead' - Trump had hailed Kim's denuclearisation pledge as a concession. But critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. It was urgent for Xi and Kim to discuss how North Korea would work towards meeting US demands, said Beijing-based international relations commentator Hua Po. "There may be differences ahead between the DPRK (North Korea) and the US in regards to denuclearisation, because the US wants irreversible and verifiable denuclearisation. It may be difficult for Kim Jong Un to accept," Hua told AFP. "Therefore, both China and the DPRK want to strengthen communication and form an overall strategy to deal with the United States going forward," Hua added. Analysts saw the summit outcome as a sign of China's influence. Beijing has repeatedly called for a "suspension for suspension" approach, under which the North would stop its nuclear and missile tests in exchange for the US and South Korea halting military exercises. Washington had previously rebuffed the proposal. Kim will be in Beijing through Wednesday, state media reported. His two previous trips to China, including his maiden official voyage abroad in March, had been kept secret until he returned home. "I think that China convinced North Korea that high-profile trips like this can no longer be kept secret for so long," said Yang, the Seoul analyst. "Also Kim Jong Un is seeking to establish this image as a normal leader of a normal country in the international community." jch-mis-ric-rld-dly-lth/sm China retains a strong influence in North Korea The motorcade believed to be carrying North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is escorted through Beijing The visit is the North Korean autocrat's third to China since March, when he made his inaugural foreign trip as leader. The two leaders are pictyred together on May Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sunday's elections risks seeing his vote critically eroded by an unlikely foe -- a religiously conservative party with roots in the same Islamic political ideology as his own. Temel Karamollaoglu, the mild-mannered but strong-willed leader of the Saadet (Felicity) Party, is among the opposition candidates standing against Erdogan and hoping to push him to at least a second round. And with parliamentary polls being held on the same day, Saadet has joined an alliance of opposition parties that wants to rob the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) of its majority. For Erdogan to win the presidential poll, he needs at least 50 percent to guarantee outright victory in the first round. While Saadet and Karamollaoglu are at best expected to improve on their last result by a couple of percentage points, this alone could be enough to tip the balance in what many pundits predict to be a very tight election. Saadet emerged from the same political movement as Erdogan's late mentor Necmettin Erbakan who for the first time brought political Islam at the centre of politics in the officially secular country. The 77-year-old Karamollaoglu, leader of Saadet since 2016, told AFP his party fell out with Erdogan's AKP after it moved away from key principles. "Mr Erdogan declared those principles in the 2002 elections: justice, democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of thought. But he appears to have put them on the shelf now," he said. Saadet also backed the "No" side in the April 2017 referendum to oppose a package of constitutional amendments granting Erdogan sweeping executive powers. "There might be a president's office but there also must be a strong parliament. And the justice system must be far from their influence," he said. - 'Pious alternative' - Anthony Skinner, MENA director at risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, told AFP that Saadet and Karamollaoglu were playing an important role in the elections in "frustrating" Erdogan. "Karamollaoglu's candidacy in the presidential race is significant in that he could draw votes away from Erdogan who needs as many ballots as he can get to avoid a potentially tough second round vote," he said. Saadet represents a movement started by Erbakan that startled the secular establishment in Turkey but inspired AKP's co-founders like Erdogan and former president Abdullah Gul. Erbakan later founded Saadet while Erdogan and his allies in 2002 launched the AKP. Karamollaoglu even held talks with Gul -- who since leaving the presidency in 2014 has also fallen out with Erdogan -- on standing for the presidency. But the habitually reticent ex-president decided not to put his head above the parapet. Saadet currently does not have an MP in parliament and received only 0.7 percent of the vote in the 2015 parliamentary elections. However, some polls predict a stronger performance this time. "He (Karamollaoglu) offers an alternative to pious constituents who have become disillusioned with Erdogan and the AKP," said Skinner. - 'Momentum coming' - Saadet is well below the 10-percent threshold required to send MPs to parliament. But its clout has increased by joining the so-called "National Alliance" of opposition parties challenging Erdogan in the parliamentary elections. Its allies here include the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), a staunchly secular grouping which may seem an unlikely bedfellow for the Islamic-rooted Saadet. But being in the alliance means that Saadet could be able to send MPs to parliament. Karamollaoglu indicated the party regarded with some disdain the AKP's attempts in the early period of its time in power to integrate with the European Union and form a strategic alliance with the United States. "We said we need to pursue a foreign policy with spine. But those guys left it behind and we are now waiting at Europe's doorstep," Karamollaoglu said. Karamollaoglu is upbeat about Sunday's vote, saying the opposition can ride a wave of change that also helped leading Turkish businessman Ali Koc end the two-decade reign of long-standing Fenerbahce chairman Aziz Yildirim on June 3. "The momentum is coming, we saw it from the Fenerbahce congress," he said. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could see his vote on Sunday critically eroded by an opposition party with roots in the same Islamic political ideology as his own Opposition leader Temel Karamollaoglu hopes to draw votes away from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who needs as many ballots as he can get to avoid a potentially tough second round vote Composition of the current Turkish parliament ahead of elections Crocodiles may be one of the deadliest hunters in the animal kingdom, but in a small village in Burkina Faso it is not unusual to see someone sitting atop one of the fearsome reptiles. People in Bazoule, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the capital Ouagadougou, share their pond with more than 100 of the razor-toothed creatures. "We got used to the crocodiles when we were young, swimming in the water with them and all that," said Pierre Kabore, just a few metres (yards) away from a crocodile feasting on chicken provided by the village. "Now we can always approach them and sit on them -- and if you have the courage, you can lie on them too. There's no problem, they are sacred crocodiles. They don't do anything to anyone." According to local legend, the startling relationship with the predators dates back to at least the 15th century. The village was in the grip of an agonising drought until the crocodiles led women to a hidden pond where the population could slake their thirst. "The villagers organised a party to celebrate and thank the reptiles," Kabore said. A celebration known as Koom Lakre is still held every year during which villagers make sacrifices and ask the animals to grant their wishes of health, prosperity and a good harvest. Far from being considered a threat, the crocodiles are deemed to have a mystical connection with Bazoule. "Crocodiles are represented as the soul of our ancestors and if one of them dies, they are buried and even given a funeral as if they were human," said Kabore. "When a misfortune is about to happen in the village, they cry out. Elders are charged with interpreting the cries, and then make wishes to ward off bad luck." - Tourism attraction - The unusual contact between man and croc has drawn disbelieving tourists to the village to see for themselves. On their arrival, travellers can buy a chicken which is hung on a stick by a guide and used to entice the crocodiles out of the pond so that visitors can pose with the creatures. "It was nice to watch from a distance but sitting on one was a bit freaky," said Thomas Baspin, a young Frenchman who came to visit his grandparents in Burkina Faso. "I'm glad I did it -- but I'm also glad it's over!" he quipped. Tourism has become a big money-spinner for the impoverished villagers, but a three-year-old jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso is taking its toll. Ouagadougou has come under attack three times, most recently in March, when jihadists attacked the military headquarters and French embassy. "We could have more than 10,000 visitors per year but at the moment, there's no more than 4,000 or 5,000," said Raphael Kabore, one of the guides. Global warming is also believed to be having an impact. Rainfall levels are down each year, and the famous pond that is the crocodiles' home is shrinking. When it disappears, will the reptiles once more guide their human friends to a new watery home? Give me a hug: Crocodiles in Bazoule are considered sacred. Local youths often sit on them, saying the crocodiles never attack them Feeling peckish: A Bazoule crocodile tucks into a dead chicken Why did the crocodile cross the road? He was following the chicken, of course! Dozens of farmers from across Slovakia drove their tractors into the capital Bratislava on Tuesday to protest against alleged irregularities in EU farm subsidy payments first made public by murdered journalist Jan Kuciak. The farmers are demanding transparent rules for land usage rights and the distribution of EU subsidies among other issues, the Rural Platform group organising the protest said in a statement coinciding with the arrival of the tractors in the capital. "Problems have escalated over a long period of time," Marian Glovatak, a farmer from the northern Orava region, told aktuality.sk, the news website that Kuciak had worked for. "Without Kuciak's murder, this would probably not have happened," he added. Kuciak was gunned down in his home gangland-style as he was about to publish an investigative report into corruption and alleged ties between politicians and the Italian mafia. The article included allegations that several million euros in EU farm subsidies had been lost to fraud. The murder and Kuciak's last explosive report plunged the eurozone country of 5.4 million people into crisis, sparking weekly mass protests that forced the government to resign in March. "We are open to dialogue, but to this day we have not received any request for a meeting from these farmers," Agriculture Minister Gabriela Matecna told journalists on Tuesday. Protesting farmers plastered their tractors with signs saying "Give back our land" and "We need agricultural reform". They rolled into public parking lots on the banks of the Danube river on Tuesday evening to spend the night. Many brought caravans, while some were prepared to spend the night in tents. "Racketeering among the white-collar workers is unreal," Robert Mikula, a farmer from the eastern Slovak city of Kosice, told AFP. "If someone has the money, they can 'make arrangements' to receive state subsidies. We can't do that," Juraj Hospoda, a farmer from the northern town of Namestovo said. "Subsidies must become transparent," he added. Organisers said they intend to continue their protest by driving their tractors into central Bratislava, possibly to parliament, on Wednesday. Slovak farmers drive their tractors towards the capital Bratislava to demand transparent rules for land usage rights and the distribution of EU subsidies Slovak farmers on their tractors travel across a bridge towards Bratislava, where they will continue their protest on Wednesday South Sudan President Salva Kiir will meet with rebel leader Riek Machar in Ethiopia's capital on Wednesday in their first face-to-face in nearly two years, an Ethiopian official said Tuesday. "The two principals will meet in Addis Ababa upon the invitation extended by his excellency, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed," Meles Alem, a spokesman for Ethiopia's foreign ministry, told AFP. South Sudan's ambassador to Ethiopia, James Pitia Morgan, confirmed Kiir's planned attendance, as did Manasseh Zindo, a senior official in Machar's SPLM-IO rebel group. The two leaders, whose political rivalry triggered the start of a civil war more than four years ago have not met since Machar and his forces were chased from the capital during fighting in July 2016. Successive international efforts -- led by regional bloc IGAD -- have so far failed to impose a functioning peace deal or meaningful ceasefire. Abiy "will call upon the two leaders to narrow their gap and work for the pacification of South Sudan," Meles said. Tens of thousands have died and nearly four million South Sudanese have been driven from their homes since December 2013, while millions are going hungry amid a massive humanitarian crisis. Last month the UN Security Council gave the warring sides a month to reach a peace deal or face sanctions. Combination of pictures created on June 19, 2018 shows South Sudan's President Salva Kiir (L) in Addis Ababa on January 29, 2018 and South Sudan's rebel leader Riek Machar in Kampala on January 26, 2016 Thailand has carried out its first execution since 2009, putting a 26-year-old convicted murderer to death by lethal injection in a move condemned by Amnesty International as "deplorable". Theerasak Longji was executed on Monday, six years after his conviction for stabbing a 17-year-old student 24 times to steal his mobile phone and wallet. The execution came as Thailand's coup leader-turned-premier Prayut Chan-O-Cha prepares to travel to Britain and France on a highly-publicised official visit. The trip may now see the former army chief face awkward questions over the use of the death penalty as well as Thailand's wider human rights record since he seized power in a 2014 coup. Prayut, however, defended capital punishment on Tuesday, telling reporters that in order to maintain peace and order in society, executions are "still a necessity and what people want". "There are many serious cases happening today," he said. The Department of Corrections, which oversees one of the world's highest incarceration rates, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935, the majority by shooting. That practice ended on December 11, 2003. Between then and 2009 a further six were executed by lethal injection. Monday's execution serves as a "lesson to deter those who wanted to commit serious crime", the department added in a statement. But rights groups and the United Nations hit out at the sudden resumption of the death penalty, which remains mandatory for a number of offences including aggravated murder. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Amnesty International said, accusing the kingdom of reneging on commitments to move towards abolition of the death penalty. Thailand was "also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment". Figures provided to Amnesty by the Ministry of Justice show 510 people including 94 women were on death row at the end of last year. Nearly 200 had exhausted all final appeals -- like Theerasak. As a last resort they can seek a pardon from Thailand's king. The death penalty is still in force in numerous countries in Asia and China remains the world's top executioner. The International Federation of Human Rights said Thailand would have become a "de facto abolitionist" had it not carried out any executions before August 24, 2019, 10 years after the last death sentences were carried out. About 10 protesters rallied on Tuesday afternoon outside the high-security prison in Bangkok where Theerasak was executed, holding placards that read "Execute Justice, Not People" and "Choose Humanity, Not Barbarity". The UN Human Rights Office for Southeast Asia said it "deeply regrets" the resumption of executions. Thailand's justice system has been criticised for favouring the wealthy and connected and is notoriously slow and harsh for poor suspects. In 2015 two Myanmar migrant workers were sentenced to death for the 2014 murder of two British backpackers, one of whom was raped, on the dive resort island of Koh Tao after a flawed police investigation. Their lawyer told AFP on Tuesday they were awaiting a ruling on their final appeal. Thailand's Department of Corrections, which oversees one of the world's largest prison populations, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935 Facing a major funding shortfall, the UN Palestinian refugee agency is planning to defer payment of salaries and suspend some of its operations in Gaza, an official said Tuesday. The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees was thrown into severe financial crisis after the United States cut $250 million from its budget. UN envoy Nickolay Mladenov told a Security Council meeting that UNRWA is "weeks away from painful cuts to its emergency assistance for Gaza and elsewhere in the region." "In Gaza, this would include a deferral of salaries to some of its workforce in July and the start of suspending core operations in August," he added. The United Nations on Monday will host a pledging conference for UNRWA in New York - the second such donors' meeting in three months. In March, it raised $100 million for UNRWA during a conference in Rome but fell short of the $446 million needed to keep the agency afloat. The United States is the biggest single donor to UNRWA, which provides schools and health clinics to 5.3 million refugees in the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. The cuts to UNRWA services in Gaza come amid warnings from the United Nations that the enclave is close to the brink of war after scores of Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire during protests near the border fence with Israel. In January, President Donald Trump's administration announced that it was reducing its contribution to the agency, arguing that UNRWA was in need of reform. US Ambassador Nikki Haley has said Washington will not restore the aid until the Palestinians agree "to come back to the negotiation table" with Israel. Palestinian school students shout slogans and hold placards in a protest against the US move to freeze funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees at the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip on March 28, 2018 US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross held assets for much of last year that created conflicts of interest and has since transferred ownership to a family trust instead of divesting outright, Forbes reported Monday. Days before coming under negative media scrutiny last year, Ross shorted stocks in a company tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin's inner circle in a way that would have let the commerce chief benefit from falling share prices, according to the magazine. The Commerce Department told AFP that, along with the US Office of Government Ethics, it had certified that the transactions at issue were in compliance with legal requirements. "The secretary continues to follow the guidance of Department of Commerce ethics officials to ensure compliance with federal laws and regulations," the agency said in a statement. Citing previously undisclosed reports Ross filed with the ethics office, the magazine said Ross had sold some assets to the investment bank Goldman Sachs. But he moved others to a family trust, leaving his family's wealth tied to China, Russia and others he dealt with as commerce secretary, according to the report. These assets included a stake in a shipping company and an auto parts company, both of which stood to be directly affected by Washington's escalating trade dispute and both of which are co-owned by the Chinese government, according to Forbes. In October and November, as journalists working on the Panama Papers revelations were preparing to expose Ross's stake in Navigator Holdings, a shipping firm whose owners include Putin's son-in-law, Ross sold his shares in the company, according to Forbes. He then opened a short position in the company, meaning that if its share price went down, he would profit, the magazine said. In November, the magazine removed Ross from its billionaires list, saying he had inflated his personal fortune for more than a decade. US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is said to have held assets linked to Russia and China that are coming under scrutiny SAN RAMON, Calif., June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Oregon Bankers Association (OBA), through its whollyowned subsidiary Synergy by Association (Synergy), has endorsed vCom to bring IT spend management software and managed services to the banking industry. vComs unique approach to IT lifecycle management from procure-to-pay was vetted by Synergys Emerging Technology Committee and approved by the Synergy Board of Directors. The partnership between Synergy, OBA and vCom will help inform, advise and promote technology solutions that will benefit banking IT leaders. Banks, like other institutions, are challenged with managing complex and evolving technologies, and escalating IT costs with limited resources. vComs vManager software helps banks manage their IT spend for networks, mobile, hardware, cloud and collaboration technologies in a single platform to increase visibility, productivity and profitability. Leading banks in the Pacific Northwest, such as Riverview Community Bank and Bank of the Pacific, along with others, have optimized their return on IT investments by using vCom. The launch to the Oregon Bankers Association will be the first of many as Synergy brings this solution to state bankers associations across the nation. vCom is proving to be a valuable technology partner. They helped me audit our existing telecom services and contracts in order to identify overpriced, and in some cases unnecessary services, stated Craig Heimuller, Senior Vice President and CIO at Redding Bank of Commerce. Heimuller, a Synergy board member, added, vCom acts as our telecom trusted advisor, billing consolidator, contract negotiator, and project manager. Our account team at vCom has partnered with us to re-engineer our data and voice networks to consolidate carriers, reduce complexity, improve performance, and save us money. vCom is my single point of contact in dealing with multiple carriers. They consolidate invoices into a single, and easy to digest invoice. vCom has helped us save well over 25% in annual operating expenses and several hours every month on accounts payable. I highly recommend them, and wish I had partnered with them years ago. We are thrilled to partner with Synergy to educate the financial services industry and deliver real cost savings. This relationship is the beginning of a national effort to partner with additional state bankers associations and their members, stated vComs Chief Revenue Officer Joe Condy. vManager provides enterprise-wide visibility into IT spend across a wide variety of technologies including SD-WAN, IoT, Unified Communications and Cloud services, among others. The company is leading the charge for greater control and management of IT spend for mid-sized enterprises. Explore vManagers new features. About vCom Solutions vCom is a cloud-based software and managed services company focused on helping enterprises manage IT spend from procure-to-pay. vCom improves visibility and control within a single software while decreasing expenses for networks, mobile, cloud and collaboration technologies. To learn more about vCom, visit http://vcomsolutions.com. About the Oregon Bankers Association Established in 1905, the Oregon Bankers Association is Oregon's only fullservice trade association representing FDICinsured state and national banks and trust companies doing business in Oregon. More information is available at www.oregonbankers.com. About Synergy by Association Synergy by Association is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Oregon Bankers Association, providing trade association members with superior products and services through partnerships with industryleading suppliers. More information is available at www.synergybai.com. vCom Contact: Audrey Bold, 925-415-2146, abold@vcomsolutions.com Synergy Contact: Andee Rose, 503-581-3522, arose@synergybai.com The United States on Tuesday said it was imposing steep import duties on Chinese imports of alloy aluminum sheet valued at nearly $1 billion which Washington says have been dumped on the US market. Trade relations between the world's two top economies on Tuesday were at the brink of all-out conflict, with US President Donald Trump having threatened late Monday to place tariffs on almost all of Chinese exports to the United States. Tuesday's announcement was part of a process begun in November that marked the first time in 33 years that the US Commerce Department had self-initiated the process of imposing anti-dumping import duties by itself -- not at the behest of US manufacturers. "The Department of Commerce will do everything in its power to stop the flow of unfairly subsidized or dumped goods into US markets," US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement. The department said Tuesday it had reached a preliminary conclusion that Chinese exporters had sold the aluminum sheet in the US at 167.2 percent below fair value. As a result, US Customs and Border Protection will begin collecting cash deposits from importers based on the alleged dumping rates. A similar Commerce Department process found in February that the imports were subject to impermissible Chinese subsidies. US imports of Chinese-made common alloy aluminum sheet in 2017 were valued at about $900 million, according to the Commerce Department, up about 50 percent from 2016. A final determination is due in late 2018 and could be blocked by the independent US International Trade Commission, which has disagreed with several of the Trump administration's dumping- and subsidy-related tariff decisions. China is also subject to 10 percent US duties on primary aluminum imports announced in March but the United States imports only a marginal amount of that substance from China every year. A container being transferred at a port in Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong province June 8, 2018 UAE-backed Yemeni government forces fought their way into Hodeida airport on Tuesday, pressing an offensive that has seen some of the most intense fighting of a three-year war against Shiite Huthi rebels. The United Arab Emirates, which has US-trained troops fighting alongside the Yemeni army, said the alliance had entered the airport in Hodeida -- a Red Sea port city that is a key aid hub and the entry point for three-quarters of Yemen's imports. "With the participation and support of the Emirati armed forces, the joint Yemeni resistance (army) entered Hodeida airport," the UAE state news agency WAM tweeted. A Yemeni military source confirmed to AFP that troops had entered the rebel base at the disused airport on the southern edge of the city. Military sources also reported 33 Huthis and 19 soldiers killed in Tuesday's battle, bringing the death toll in Hodeida this week to 216 fighters. No civilian casualties have yet been confirmed. The battle for Hodeida has sparked fears of a new escalation of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, which is already teetering on the brink of famine. The United Nations has warned any attack on Hodeida port could cripple shipments of desperately needed aid to the 8.4 million Yemenis facing imminent starvation. Hodeida's residents are now bracing for what they fear will be devastating street fighting, as tanks and buses carrying uniformed troops roll through the empty streets of the once-bustling city. One resident, who asked not to be identified for fear of arrest, said civilians had been "banned from using their phones to take pictures and are questioned about their movements if they're seen in the streets". The rebels have also begun to dig trenches in the streets, he said. Fierce fighting in the Hodeida area has already driven 5,200 families from their homes as pro-government forces advanced up the Red Sea coast, according to the UN. The coalition launched a major offensive on June 13, dubbed Operation Golden Victory, to drive the rebels out of Hodeida, now the most intense battlefront in an already brutal war. - UN envoy leaves empty-handed - Since Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their regional allies intervened in Yemen in 2015, there have been multiple rounds of UN-brokered peace talks, but they have all failed to achieve any breakthrough. UN envoy Martin Griffiths has been holding talks in the rebel-held capital Sanaa since Saturday to seek concessions from Huthi leaders that might avoid all-out fighting in the streets of Hodeida. Griffiths appears to have failed to make a breakthrough. He told the UN Security Council by video-conference on Monday that he was hopeful a first round of preliminary talks could take place next month, according to two diplomats present at the closed-door session. But the UN envoy flew out of Sanaa on Tuesday without making any comment to journalists. Just hours after he left, Saudi state media said the kingdom's air defences intercepted a ballistic missile fired from rebel-held territory in Yemen -- the latest in a series of such attacks. There were no casualties, it said. Yemen's Iran-allied Huthis said via their Al-Masirah news outlet they had targeted a Saudi Aramco facility near the southwestern city of Abha. The Yemeni government and its allies have insisted that the Huthis must fully withdraw from Hodeida and turn over the port to UN supervision. The rebels have so far agreed only to share control of the port with the United Nations. The Gulf Arab states accuse their regional arch rival Iran of smuggling arms to the rebels through the port, a charge Tehran denies. The coalition held a press conference in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday to display what it said were explosives used by the Huthis in Yemen, including landmines and improvised explosive devices described by one UAE official as "a fraction of what the coalition has seized". The Yemen conflict has killed nearly 10,000 people, most of them civilians, since 2015. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their allies joined the Yemen war that year, after President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi fled into exile as the rebels overran much of the country. The coalition has helped pro-government forces to regain control of the south and much of the Red Sea coast but the rebels still control Sanaa and most of the north. Yemeni pro-government forces backed by United Arab Emirates troops gather on the outskirts of the rebel-held port city of Hodeida on June 18, 2018 in readiness to advance into the city's battleground airport Graphic showing the imports of food and fuel into the ports of Hodeida, Salif and Ras Isa and their location. The UN says fierce fighting in the Hodeida area of Yemen has already driven 5,200 families from their homes as pro-government forces advanced up the Red Sea coast The Saudi-led coalition puts on display some of the weapons used by the Iran-allied Huthi rebels in Yemen at a news conference in Abu Dhabi on June 19, 2018 Yemeni government forces, backed by the United Arab Emirates, entered Hodeida airport on Tuesday, the UAE said, as the fight for control of the rebel-held port city intensifies. "With the participation and support of the Emirati armed forces, the joint Yemeni resistance (army) entered Hodeida airport," the UAE state news agency WAM tweeted. A Yemeni military source confirmed the report to AFP. Troops from the UAE and neighbouring Saudi Arabia are the mainstay of an Arab coalition that has been fighting the Huthi Shiite rebels in support of the Yemeni government since 2015. The coalition launched a major offensive on Wednesday to drive the rebels out of Hodeida, a Red Sea port which is the entry point for some three-quarters of Yemen's imports. Saudi Arabia accuses its regional arch rival Iran of smuggling arms to the rebels through the port, a charge Tehran denies. Riyadh and its allies imposed a blockade of the port earlier this year in response to a series of rebel missile attacks on Saudi territory. It sparked an outcry from relief organisations who warned of the risk of famine if aid shipments and commercial food imports were not fully restored. The United Nations has described the conflict as the world's largest single humanitarian catastrophe. Around 22 million people are in need of aid, with 8.4 million of them on the brink of starvation, according to the UN. Yemeni pro-government forces backed by United Arab Emirates troops gather on the outskirts of the rebel-held port city of Hodeida on June 18, 2018 in readiness to advance into the city's battleground airport Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday slammed U.S. Rep. John Katko for the central New York Republican's support of a compromise proposal to resolve outstanding immigration issues, including funds for a border wall and protections for children who were brought to the U.S. illegally. Cuomo, a Democrat, released a statement hours after Katko, R-Camillus, commented on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. Families have been separated by authorities due to a new federal government policy that seeks to deter immigrants from crossing the border. The Department of Justice wants to prosecute adults who illegally enter the U.S. If an adult brings a child with them, the child is separated from the adult and held a separate facility. Members of both parties have criticized the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy. But a compromise bill drafted by Katko and other House Republicans wouldn't end family separations. It would, however, address other immigration-related issues, such as protections for individuals who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. On Monday, Katko urged the Trump administration to keep the borders secure "in a humane way that preserves family unity and keeps young children safe." He also highlighted his work on the compromise immigration proposal. "I'm hopeful that we can pass this measure through the House this week," he said. But Cuomo, who has been critical of Katko's vote for the tax overhaul last year, lambasted the Syracuse-area Republican. "While Katko pays lip service against the moral atrocity on our border, he is leading the charge to pass an extreme immigration bill that does nothing to stop it," the governor said in a statement. "His anti-immigrant immigration bill is an attack on our communities and our American values, and it doesn't touch the policy this administration is using to force parents and children apart." He added, "If Katko really cared for the children being separated from their parents by this administration, then he would show some backbone and stop his overlords in the White House from tearing families apart." Erin O'Connor, a spokesperson for Katko, responded to Cuomo's statement: "Rep. Katko is leading constructive efforts in Congress to tackle immigration reform. As a former prosecutor with experience on the southern border, he appreciates the input of the governor, who seems eager to change the subject with the start of this week's corruption trial in the Southern District of New York." Cuomo's statement comes one day before Vice President Mike Pence will visit central New York to headline a fundraiser for Katko and tour Nucor Steel in Auburn. Love 0 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 4 A progressive group that opposes the tax legislation approved by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump late last year has launched a digital ad campaign criticizing U.S. Rep. John Katko for his support of that measure. Not One Penny is investing $250,000 in digital ads targeting several House members, including Katko. The 47-second spot criticizing Katko, R-Camillus, features Ady Barkan, an activist with ALS. In the ad, Barkan highlights how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act supported by Republicans would hurt the Affordable Care Act, a 2010 health care law that was one of then-President Barack Obama's signature achievements. The tax overhaul contained several provisions, including a corporate tax rate cut and reduced income tax rates for millions of Americans. But it also eliminates the individual health insurance mandate, which was a key element of the Affordable Care Act. "I was shocked when Congress proposed a tax bill that would take away health care from people like to fund tax cuts for billionaires," Barkan said in the ad. Katko was one of four New York Republicans who voted for the tax legislation in December. He has said that the measure benefits a "vast majority" of his constituents. After the vote, he reiterated his support for eliminating the individual health insurance mandate. "I don't think there is a time or a place where we should impose mandates on people where basically, if they don't do something that is strictly a voluntary thing like get insurance, they are going to be penalized for it," Katko said in December. "I just don't think we should do that. I've voted that way int he past and my vote on this bill is consistent with that." Democrats have seized on that portion of the legislation because it is expected to have an adverse impact on the number of insured people. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that eliminating the individual mandate will increase the number of uninsured people by 13 million in 2027. The new digital ad was released late last week before it was known that Vice President Mike Pence would be visiting central New York to headline a fundraiser for Katko in Syracuse. Pence will also stop in Auburn to tour Nucor Steel. According the White House, Pence will tout the tax overhaul at Nucor. Love 1 Funny 1 Wow 1 Sad 1 Angry 2 A top labor union is taking sides in the 24th Congressional District Democratic primary. Democratic congressional candidate Juanita Perez Williams announced Monday that she has been endorsed by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The union represents more than 60,000 members in retail, service and other industries. Perez Williams' campaign noted that the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union is the first labor organization to endorse in the 24th district race. "Juanita is a proven champion for working men and women in central New York," said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. "She stood with New York workers in the Fight for 15 to raise the minimum wage. She fought Governor Pataki's illegal layoffs as a member of the NY Public Employees Federation. She carried forward Governor Cuomo's women's equality agenda as regional director for the New York State Department of Labor. He added, "Juanita is the fighter we need, and has stood with labor time and time again RWDSU is proud to stand with her now." The union's support is one of several endorsements announced by the two Democratic candidates over the past week. Perez Williams, D-Syracuse, was endorsed late last week by the Latino Victory Fund. The fund also donated $5,000 to her campaign. Dana Balter, the other Democratic candidate in the race, received the support of some prominent central New York elected officials. Her new supporters include Assemblywoman Pam Hunter and Syracuse Common Council President Helen Hudson. Last week, Balter also received the support of Our Revolution, a group that formed after U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2016. There is one week to go until the Democratic primary in the 24th district. A Spectrum News/Siena College poll released last week showed Perez Williams leading by 13 points. The primary election is Tuesday, June 26. Polls will be open from noon to 9 p.m. across the district. Love 1 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 AUBURN Vice President Mike Pence touted the Trump administration's economic accomplishments during a visit to Nucor Steel Auburn Tuesday. After touring the steel mill, Pence addressed a crowd of employees and company executives. His speech, which lasted for nearly 15 minutes, focused mainly on economic issues. One of the achievements mentioned by Pence was a tax overhaul passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in December. Nucor Steel Auburn general manager Jason Curtis, who introduced the vice president, called the tax legislation "a game-changer for manufacturers and the nation." Protesters slam Trump immigration policies during VP visit to Auburn AUBURN Protesters and supporters gathered outside Nucor Steel in Auburn Tuesday afternoon Pence also highlighted the Trump administration's efforts to scale back regulations and boost American-made energy. He made sure to note that Trump signed an executive order requiring new energy pipelines to be built with American steel. The main theme of Pence's remarks was tying the steel industry's successes to the national economy's performance. The vice president claims that the economy has been surging since the 2016 election, when he and Trump were elected to lead the nation. According to Pence, companies have created 3.4 million new jobs since Election Day in 2016, including 174,000 new jobs in New York. He added that unemployment is at its lowest point in a half-century and the jobless rate for women is at a 20-year low. "This mill is a powerful symbol of an American comeback, not just in steel, but in every area of our economy," Pence said. Nucor Steel Auburn has nearly 300 employees and produces rebar, which is commonly used in construction. During his tour of the plant, Pence observed the company's new $30 million rolling mill in action. The rolling mill was unveiled last summer. Nucor officials said at the time that it would boost production and increase worker safety. What wasn't mentioned by Pence was the tariffs imposed by Trump's Commerce Department on steel imports from several countries, including Canada, China, Mexico and the European Union. The tariffs were the result of a Section 232 investigation conducted by the Commerce Department. A Section 232 investigation examines whether imports pose a national security threat to the U.S. The agency's inquiry found that the steel imports were a threat to American security. While Pence didn't address the tariffs directly, he did discuss steel's role in national security. "To have a strong and secure America, America needs steel to be strong," he said. "We didn't build those battleships with plastic. We're going to make sure that American steel is there now and for generations to come for a stronger and more secure America." The visit to Nucor Steel Auburn capped off Pence's swing through central New York. He flew into Syracuse Hancock International Airport Tuesday morning, then traveled to a Syracuse hotel for a $1,000-a-plate fundraiser benefiting U.S. Rep. John Katko's re-election campaign. The fundraiser was closed to the press, but Pence praised Katko, R-Camillus, while speaking in Auburn. He called the incumbent congressman "a champion of steel" and recognized him for voting in support of the tax overhaul. Pence's appearance was the first vice presidential visit to Cayuga County in four years. In June 2014, then-Vice President Joe Biden made a surprise trip to Auburn to attend his niece's wedding. Online producer Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding. Love 20 Funny 2 Wow 0 Sad 1 Angry 24 AUBURN A contractor from Seneca County was ordered to pay more than $8,000 in restitution and fines for failing to provide workers' compensation insurance during a siding and roof repair job in Aurelius. Stephen Pollot, 37, of 907 Waterloo-Geneva Road, Waterloo, pleaded guilty Tuesday to failure to secure the legally required coverage, a class E felony under Workers' Compensation Law. During his plea, the owner of D&S Home Improvements-Property Maintenance admitted to failing to obtain insurance for seven employees in June 2015. Cayuga County Chief Assistant District Attorney Chris Valdina discussed the case in court Tuesday, noting that Pollot was initially investigated by New York State Police for fraud and larceny after an Aurelius homeowner filed a complaint. Then, Valdina said, the Inspector General's Office got involved, as authorities discovered the contractor had not insured his employees during that project, which lasted from June to September 2015. Pollot could have faced up to four years in prison for the crime; however, in exchange for his plea, Judge Mark Fandrich sentenced him to a three-year conditional discharge. He was also ordered to pay $3,500 in restitution, which he paid Tuesday, and $5,000 in fines, which he will pay in installments of $450 per month. Also in court An Auburn man was sentenced to prison Tuesday for committing two separate crimes. Earlier this year, Paul Oattes, 43, 300 Seymour St., pleaded guilty to three class E felonies in Cayuga County. First, he admitted to third-degree rape and third-degree criminal sex act for raping a 15-year-old girl in August 2016; then, he confessed to fourth-degree conspiracy for planning a home invasion in Montezuma two months later. A second felony offender, Oattes was previously convicted of third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance in November 2007 and sentenced to 42 months in prison. And on Tuesday, Oattes was sent back to prison. Oattes was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison on each count for the rape; those sentences will run consecutively to one another. He will also serve 10 years post-release supervision and have to register as a sex offender for that crime. Meanwhile, for conspiracy, Oattes was sentenced to 1 1/2 to three years in prison. Judge Fandrich said that sentence will run concurrently to his other term, for a total of five years in prison and 10 years post-release supervision. Staff writer Megan Blarr can be reached at (315) 282-2282 or megan.blarr@lee.net. Follow her on Twitter @CitizenBlarr. Love 1 Funny 2 Wow 3 Sad 0 Angry 5 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. AUBURN Protesters and supporters gathered outside Nucor Steel in Auburn Tuesday afternoon while Vice President Mike Pence toured the facility and spoke about immigration and the economy inside the steel mill. Over 100 protesters lined the sidewalk on York Street in front of Nucor and marched with hand-made signs, chanting in opposition of President Donald Trump's zero-tolerance immigration policies that have resulted in children being removed from their parents at the southern border. Auburn business owner Sue Waby organized a group of demonstrators when she heard Pence was coming to Auburn. As a Christian, Waby said, she felt she needed to stand up against "the abuse of children and families and what it's doing to these innocent victims. "I'm deeply offended that this administration stands on Christianity when Jesus a compassionate, loving God," Waby said. "(This administration is) defaming Christianity and that deeply offends me and it grieves my heart and it grieves the heart of the Lord." Ryan Whirtley, 21, and Margaret Canty, 19, held up matching signs displaying phrases such as "Black lives matter" "No human is illegal" and "Water is life." They said they had the signs made when Trump first took office and have used them at different protests during the past year and a half, including the Women's March in Seneca Falls and March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C. "It's sad that a year and a half later, everything on these signs are still a problem," Whirtley said. The two high school friends said they came to the protest not only to speak out against policies they find oppressive, but also to add a youthful voice. "These things will affect us," Canty said. On the other side of the street, about a dozen Trump and Pence counter-protesters gathered, waving American flags, holding signs and wearing T-shirts in support of the current administration. Many said they support Trump and Pence's "America first" policies. Supporter Aukina Fenzel, who immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands, brought her two homeschooled sons, Francis, 15, and Karol, 13, because she wanted them to "see democracy in action." She said she supports the Trump administration's immigration policies and believes those who want to enter the United States should follow the legal process. "You don't walk through a desert in Mexico with children," Fenzel said about immigrants attempting to enter the country illegally at the southern border. "You don't do that. It's wrong." Port Byron resident Jordan Stevens joined the supporters and said he also agrees with the immigration policies, but said children being separated from their parents is "an unfortunate casualty." He held a sign that read "Latinos for Trump" and said his grandparents came to the United States legally. "America is a land of opportunity and in order to have that opportunity, you should come here through the legal process," Stevens said. "What makes anyone coming to the county now more worthy just to walk in than my grandparents?" After Pence arrived at Nucor around 2 p.m., some protesters made their way to North Street and stood across the street from Nucor's Quarry Road entrance, waiting for the vice presidential motorcade to leave the steel mill. As cars carrying Pence and his staff made their way down Route 34, the protesters shouted, "What do we want? Free the children. When do we want it? Now." Staff writer Natalie Brophy can be reached at (315)282-2239 or natalie.brophy@lee.net. Follow her on Twitter @brophy_natalie. Love 7 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 4 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. AUBURN Barbara L. (Roe) Morrissey, 82, formerly of Weedsport and Standart Woods, Auburn, passed away Friday, June 15, 2018, at Huntington Living Center, Waterloo, with her seven children at her side. The daughter of the late John Morrissey and Marion and Robert Ashby, Barb was born Sept. 8, 1935 in Auburn. She was a graduate of Weedsport High School and attended Cayuga Community College. Previously she had been employed with General Electric of Auburn. In her early years, Barb loved ballet and playing in the spirited family card games at holidays. After marrying at age 19, raising her large family was a full-time job, but she somehow also took on other jobs at times to help her family. When she was able to carve out time for herself, she enjoyed baking, knitting, and drawing. She thoroughly relished a conversation with a friend or family member over a cup of coffee and a sweet treat. Barb will be remembered for her gentle tenacity, her indomitable spirit, her sweetness and grace in the face of so many medical challenges and of course, her love and delight in her family. Barb is survived by her four daughters, Deborah (George) Piascik, of Weedsport, Lorian Matson, of Auburn, Wendy Fragola, of Syracuse, and Lisa (Scott) McDeid, of Weedsport; three sons, Mitchell (Christy) Roe, of Union Springs, Mark (Jennifer) Roe, of San Francisco, and John (Betsy) Roe, of Weedsport; 26 grandchildren; 27 great-grandchildren; a brother, Lewis (Cheryl) Ashby, of Tennessee, and many nieces and nephews. Ms. Morrissey was predeceased by a grandson, Matthew; a great-grandson, C.C.; a son-in-law, Michael Fragola, and the father of her children, Joseph E. Roe. Funeral services will be held at 6 p.m. (today) Tuesday, June 19, at White Chapel Funeral Home, 2719 Erie Drive, Weedsport. Burial will be at 10 a.m. Wednesday in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, Port Byron. Friends are invited to call on the family from 4 to 6 p.m. today at White Chapel prior to services. Washington D.C., June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In celebration of cancer survivorship, Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center at Sibley Memorial Hospital and Suburban Hospital has partnered with StoryCorps to collect the stories of resilient cancer patients in the Metropolitan Washington-area and the journeys theyve travelled with their medical teams. The stories, recorded in early May 2018, invite listeners into the lives of patients and give them the chance to hear first-hand about the will, courage, and drive of individuals facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Fatima Djalo and Dr. Akila Viswanathan talk about what helped Fatima cope with her illness and many treatments, life lessons learned from her experience, and her relationship with Dr. Viswanathan. Edmund and Mary Goldwag and Dr. Armine Smith talk about Dr. Smiths treatment of Edmunds prostate cancer that had spread to other organs. Edmund begins by describing his initial diagnosis. Susan (name withheld) and Dr. Ben Levy discuss the diagnosis and treatment of Susans lung cancer, the longstanding misconceptions about the cause of the disease, and the advances in treatment. Through this partnership with Story Corps, we have had a wonderful opportunity to share the often difficult and always profoundly moving stories of real people, along with their physicians and care team, who are defying cancer every day, said David Simpkins, vice president of marketing and communications, community hospital division at Johns Hopkins Medicine. Their stories are part of the rich fabric of cancer survivorship in the Washington region. The Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center is bringing world-class, innovative care and groundbreaking clinical research to the Washington, D.C., area. The Cancer Center melds the clinical expertise and translational research of Baltimores Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center with the compassion and community-oriented approach that patients have come to expect from Sibley Memorial and Suburban hospitals. Trump is a bull in a china shop, busting up everything around him. Traditional norms of presidential behavior have been busted. International agreements (Paris Accord, NAFTA, Iran deal, TPP) and long-time friendships are being busted. His disdain for science, research and facts is having serious consequences both here at home and internationally. Most disturbing to me is his absolute lack of honesty, integrity or compassion. It is troubling how timid the GOP is to call out his most offensive actions. Mr. Katko is one such GOP representative. He hides behind a wall of isolation and silence, having held no open town hall meetings this year. Sure, Katko appears for photo ops with local groups and businesses. He holds canned phone town halls that keep he safely away from any kind of real face-to-face interaction with constituents. He votes with Trump 91 percent of the time, yet brags about being bipartisan. Not even Susan Collins votes with Trump as often as Katko does. Dana Balter, is an antidote to this situation. Dana demonstrates what democracy should look like. She did the hard work of meeting with constituents in all four counties of the 24th district, earning their unanimous support to face Katko in November. Just two weeks before the end of the nomination process, the DCCC decided to ignore the will of the people and put big money behind Juanita Perez Williams. Balter has won Democrats' trust and support in all four counties of the 24th district. She exudes the integrity, honesty, and clarity of purpose that I am looking for in a representative. She is refusing big money from corporations and is proud that her campaign is fueled by regular folks like me. She stands with the people and for the people. Cynics will claim that she is naive for that. But, all one needs to do is listen to her speak to be able to hear the power of her vision, the strength of her commitment, and her wholehearted enthusiasm for the journey ahead. Dana Balter is the real deal. Kathryn Franz Marion Love 8 Funny 6 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 5 LOS ANGELESBrattySis.com has been crowned by fans as Best New Site in the 2018 Fleshbot Awards. This is the first award win for the taboo members site which was launched just one year ago by the dirty minds behind NubilesPorn.com. The site features weekly updates and creative, HD scenes that keep fans guessing who BrattySis will do next. Were so excited about BrattySis first award win! said Belinda of NubilesCash.com. Weve put a lot of work into making captivating scenes with the most popular young starlets and its amazing to have fans appreciate all of that hard work. Spearheaded by adult industry mainstay Fleshbot, the Fleshbot Awards honor the best websites, talent and content in the adult industry. The awards are for the people, with XXX fans voting on their favorites to determine the winners. BrattySis is celebrating their win by offering major discounts for fans and incentives for affiliates. For marketing requests, contact Belinda via email at [email protected]. "The court's decision allows the case to move forward, closer to a trial, where we are confident we will prevail." "Shortly after Todd was killed, I promised myself that if and when I made it back to the United States, I would move on from the Marine Corps, be an ordinary citizen, and pursue the American Dream." "We heard various excuses from FBC - for example, it was just the particular time of year, we needed to be packaged in bottles, etc. Notably, however, at this same time in Craven County, the one county in which Beer Army Combat Brewery continued to self-distribute, we were still extremely successful. It was a mystery to us that the one portion of our business that was self-distributing was so successful, while the remaining portions of our business that were using a third-party distributor were not." [ME]: "That, to me, seems punitive in nature, you know and that ..." [BOORAS]: "Oh, absolutely." [ME]: "We are being punished because . . ." [BOORAS]: "(laughter) Absolutely. [ME]: "But why are we being punished? You know, I mean ..." [BOORAS]: "(laughter) It was, it was definitely punitive. And you know it was just ... I'm a, I'm um ... " [ME]: "You know I have kids, man. ..." [BOORAS]: "I'm a mercurial guy, you know? My temperature goes hot and cold." "If you're a person who cares at all about veterans, small businesses, economic freedom, craft beer, or all of the above, this recording will be enough to make you sick. What is worse, our state's unconstitutional laws actually encourage and reward this type of disgusting behavior." A Greensboro-based company told a North Carolina brewer he could get out of his distribution contract if he paid the distributor 16 times more than it cost to get in, an affidavit in a lawsuit filed by a group of North Carolina brewers says.Dustin Canestorp of Beer Army Combat Brewery in Jones County entered into an agreement in which Freedom Beverage Co. paid $25,000 for the right to distribute Canestorp's beer. Things were fine at first, but after a few months sales began to decline.Canestorp appealed to FBC, which maintained a "focus list" of brands it wanted sales reps to push, the affidavit says.Hoping to expand to neighboring states, Canestorp hired Global Beverage Group.His distribution and sales in North Carolina, he says in the affidavit, then fell even further.Canestorp, a Marine Corps and war veteran, first set up his beer operation as a nonprofit benefiting charities, including those that help veterans.the court document says.Tensions grew between Canestorp and FBC, to the point the brewer, based on positive conversations with FBC early on, asked to be released from the contract.That was possible, FBC said.As long as Beer Army paid FBC $400,000.The affidavit is part of a lawsuit filed by the brewers against the state of North Carolina seeking to end enforcement of the state's distribution cap and franchise laws on breweries.The complaint - filed last year in Wake County Superior Court by Craft Freedom LLC, The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery LLC, and NoDa Brewing Co. - says the distribution cap and franchise laws injure and threaten to impose additional damage on the brewers. They can produce no more than 25,000 barrels of beer each year without contracting with a distributor.Canestorp's concerns aren't related to the distribution cap but instead on what he considers the one-sided relationship between distributors and brewers.Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour on May 15 found for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, allowing the case to proceed toward a trial. He denied a motion filed by the state saying the complaint should be dismissed with prejudice, and that the challenge, according to statute, must be heard by a three-judge panel of the Superior Court.Discovery will continue, subpoenas will be issued, and members of the N.C. Beer and Wine Wholesalers will be deposed.says Drew Erteschik, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.The complaint tackles two state laws - the distribution cap,- and the franchise law. That law, says the complaint,The plaintiffs' brief also included a deposition by N.C. ABC Commission Administrator Robert Hamilton, as well as the Canestorp affidavit, which may offer some insight into Baddour's thinking and the resultant decision.Canestorp served in Afghanistan and Iraq and took part in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Swift Freedom.the affidavit says.Canestorp returned to the U.S. via Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, where he met with fellow Marines to play cards.To talk about what happened. About feelings of survivors' guilt. About struggling to overcome PTSD.Trying to acclimate.A home brewer, Canestorp often brought beer to the meetings, which morphed into gatherings of the "Beer Army." That evolved into the nonprofit, which, on April 21, 2013 - Patriots Day - evolved into the brewery.The beer did well in Craven County, and Canestorp expanded to Wake, as well as Carteret, Pitt, and Onslow. It did well enough the company decided to hire a distributor, although it kept the right to self-distribute in Craven.After 90 days, the court document says, sales declined. Canestorp asked why?Beer Army hired Global, and, says the affidavit, "FBC's distribution of Beer Army Combat Brewery's beers in North Carolina fell even further. Apparently, there had been some 'bad blood' between the leadership at FBC and the leadership at Global. As FBC's manager Greg Leone explained, FBC was not using its best efforts to distribute Beer Army Combat Brewery's beers as punishment for our decision to engage Global. In May 2014, Mr. Leone at FBC sent me an email saying that FBC's President, Tim Booras, was 'very angry' about Beer Army's engagement of Global and, as a result, had directed that Beer Army's brands be removed from the Focus List."By the following month, the divide between FBC and Beer Army Combat Brewery had deepened further. In June 2015, Mr. Booras sent me an email saying that he believed Beer Army 'shot the first round when [it] hired Global.' In that same email, Mr. Booras further stated that he did not need Beer Army's beer for their portfolio, stating, 'We don't need your [excrement]. ... We really don't need your beer.'"Beer Army wanted to terminate the contract. In North Carolina, it's not that easy. As Canestorp explains, the contracted brewer must repurchase from the distributor self-distribution rights for, says Canestorp,defined asErteschik and co-counsel Bob Orr argued in court the law amounts to economic protectionism and interferes with the plaintiffs' constitutional right to earn a living, which the N.C. Supreme Court has called inalienable The rules enrich one party in lieu of another, they say.Erteschik said.Canestorp met with Booras in a Jacksonville restaurant Sept. 18, 2014. Canestorp recorded the "roughly" 40-minute conversation, and it's part of the court record."I questioned him about whether Beer Army Combat Brewery's decreasing distribution sales were the result of decreasing consumer demand, or whether, instead, the decreasing sales were actually the result of FBC punishing us for personal reasons. As the recording reflects, the following exchange then occurred:The affidavit attributes the following statement to Booras:Canestorp turned in his brewers' license April 30, 2015.He continues with his philanthropic work and has opened a craft-beer-themed burger restaurant in New Bern. He hopes to again open a brewery.he says in the affidavit,"For years," Erteschik said in an email, "distributors have been telling our General Assembly and the public that they don't engage in certain behavior, and for years, craft brewers have known otherwise. Now, in this recording, we have a distributor who is caught on tape, cackling with laughter as he admits to inflicting 'punitive' measures (in his words) on a two-time veteran, family man, and small-business entrepreneur - a man who started his brewery to raise money for veterans charities and to honor the memory of his friend and fellow Marine who was killed in Iraq. It is truly disgusting and sad.Booras failed to immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 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. DEERFIELD, Ill., June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- BAB, Inc. has announced that on Monday, June 25, 2018, Big Apple Bagels restaurants nationwide will celebrate the anniversary of the brands 1993 launch as a national franchise. The concept started out as a simple bagel bakery with a small menu offering. However, while Big Apple Bagels is one of the few bagel concepts that continues to make its bagels from scratch on the premises of the individual store locations, just as it did in 1993, over the last twenty-five years it has evolved into a casual yet comfortable fast casual bakery-cafe. In addition to serving up to 18 varieties of its bagels with proprietary cream cheese spreads, customers now enjoy a diverse offering of hand-crafted breakfast and lunch sandwiches, the extraordinary My Favorite Muffin muffins BAB, Inc.s companion brand to Big Apple Bagels which are also made in-store, and coffee beverages under BAB, Inc.s specialty coffee brand, Brewsters, which is roasted exclusively for the Companys franchisees and licensees. Big Apple Bagels will show its appreciation to its customers with twenty-five cent promotional offers that will vary per location and are being offered exclusively through its new mobile loyalty app. The offers will be available only on June 25, 2018. Prior to the event, customers can download the app in order to take advantage of the anniversary offers and other loyalty offers to come in the future. Twenty-five years after its inception, Big Apple Bagels has steadily improved on its strong foundation, maintaining its original vision better than ever. The Company is committed to maintaining the standard of excellence it has set forth over the years, yet simultaneously looking for ways to build upon it in order to meet and exceed the expectations of its customers. Voters will see another minority party on North Carolina's ballot.The Bipartisan State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement unanimously voted Wednesday, June 6, to officially recognize the Constitution Party The Constitution Party joins the Green Party and the Libertarian Party on North Carolina's ballot as third-party alternatives to Democrats and Republicans.Originally formed as the U.S. Taxpayers Party in 1992, the party rebranded itself 1999 as the U.S. Constitution Party to better express its commitment to the Founders' ideas, namely limited government, conservative morality, and a strict reading of the Constitution. The party appeared on 41 state ballots in 2004, but it never made it onto the North Carolina ballot until 2018.Wednesday's recognition was a long-time in coming, Constitution Party vice-chairman Kevin Hayes said.It isn't a coincidence that 2018 alone has marked the introduction of two political parties to the state's ballot.In 2015, North Carolina ranked as the 14th most restrictive state for ballot access, according to FairVote . Law required third parties to collect 2 percent of the vote in the previous governor's election, and 200 registered voters had to come from each of four congressional districts in North Carolina.Today, that's 94,222 signatures.But in the Electoral Freedom Act of 2017, Congress dropped the requirements from 2 percent to .25 percent of the gubernatorial vote, and from four congressional districts to three. Any parties that appeared on the ballot in 70 percent of the states in the previous presidential election also could appear on the North Carolina ballot. The bill passed over Gov. Roy Cooper's veto in Oct. 2017.The Green Party qualified for ballot access six months later, and the Constitution Party followed suit Wed. with 12,651 valid signatures.Hayes said.Five other parties have petitioned for ballot access, but so far no party has collected more than 20 valid signatures.State law requires new political parties to nominate their candidates by convention, which the Constitution Party will hold in Charlotte on June 16. Candidates have until June 12 to apply to run for the Constitution Party's nomination.The House of Representatives already would restrict minority parties potential nominees. The House passed Senate Bill 286, which will return to the Senate for concurrence. The bill contains a " sore loser " provision, which extends the law preventing losers from running as write-in candidates to block them from running under a minority party.Hayes said, adding that he believes the provision was a response to the interest Rep. Beverly Boswell, R-Dare, expressed in running under the Constitution Party.Hayes said that he is sure the Constitution Party will challenge the bill if the "sore loser" provision is signed by the governor. No cliche is more ubiquitous at teacher protests than signs that read, "if you can read this sign, thank a teacher." That is, unless you disregard variations on the theme of "pay us more." And yet, student performance on national and international tests suggest that the reading comprehension of most American students does not extend far beyond an understanding of nine-word sentences and basic signage.In the United States, only a fortunate few acquire reading proficiency. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have barely budged since 2002. On the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the U.S. average reading score for fourth-grade students trailed 12 education systems and was not significantly different than 15 others. PIRLS test scores have also seen no measurable improvement since 2001. Similarly, the average score of 15-year-old students on the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading test was lower than 14 education systems and was not measurably different than the international average-or from the 2003 average score.In Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, And What Can Be Done About It, Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, takes these test results and other indicators of functional illiteracy seriously. Rather than dismiss the scores from reputable reading tests, he argues that they indicate deeply embedded and systematic shortcomings in how college teacher training programs prepare prospective educators.It would be misleading to characterize the book as merely an examination of teacher education, pedagogy, or education policy. Seidenberg devotes much of Language at the Speed of Sight to discussing what he has spent a long and distinguished career researching: the science of reading.In just a handful of chapters, he summarizes an immense body of scientific literature about the acquisition and development of reading skills, dysfunctions that may occur during the process, and the environmental, social, and cognitive barriers to mastery. He recognizes, however, that little of what researchers know about the science of reading informs the training of teachers or their instructional practices. In the final three chapters of the book, Seidenberg explores the disconnect between literacy science and public schooling, and what can be done to address it.The succession of problems that functional illiteracy creates are well known and appear to be incontrovertible. This is especially so for the way that persistent academic struggles limit occupational options and lead to economic stagnation. But vocal and influential defenders of public schooling, namely moderate-turned-leftist Diane Ravitch, claim that American education is mostly a success and that those who say otherwise are democracy-hating tools of the dreaded school privatization movement. According to Ravitch and other defenders of government schools, isolated shortcomings in academic performance are the product of socioeconomic and political factors that can be solved by enacting "progressive" laws and policies.Seidenberg devotes nearly an entire chapter to countering Ravitch's critique of reading test scores. For example, Ravitch argues that there are multiple alternative explanations for the performance of U.S. students on national and international reading tests, and it is to Seidenberg's credit that he carefully assesses all of them. After all, if Ravitch is correct that the NAEP, PIRLS, and PISA results are equivocal, circumstantial, and mostly irrelevant, then policy prescriptions that change the teaching profession would lead us down the wrong path.Ravitch argues that students need to know more than ever before, and test results do not reflect these higher demands and more challenging curricula. Moreover, she notes that there have been incremental improvements in test scores across all student groups since 1992. Seidenberg points out that the former is true, and it is the responsibility of schools to meet those demands. The latter gives too much weight to minuscule, mostly insignificant, numerical increases in test scores.Ravitch also points out that graduation and college enrollment rates have increased steadily even as test scores have stagnated. Seidenberg recognizes that these increases can be attributed to factors that are independent of how much children learn or teaching quality. Numerous anecdotal accounts, empirical studies, and alternative measures, including those frequently highlighted by the Martin Center, call into question the reliability and meaningfulness of graduation and college enrollment metrics.Ravitch also disagrees with Seidenberg on the macroeconomic relevance of testing outcomes that is often cited by critics of American education. She points out that, despite poor showings on national and international assessments, the U.S. economy is strong, and there are no signs of educationally induced economic stagnation.Seidenberg, on the other hand, points to the research of Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann, whose research concludes that there is a meaningful relationship between student achievement and GDP growth. He misses a critical point, however, by failing to mention that America's economic vitality may be due to the ability of U.S.-based corporations to attract workers from abroad. Highly skilled labor is drawn from nations in Europe and the Pacific Rim that have a long record of excellence on international assessments and support highly selective systems of higher education.The final and most frequent issue cited by Ravitch is the role of poverty and the related concerns of race and ethnicity. Perhaps the U.S. performs poorly because we have a racially and ethnically heterogeneous population and a "disproportionate" number of children in poverty. Seidenberg is wise to spend several pages carefully assessing the poverty argument. Ravitch and many others are eager to blame defenders of the free market for, among many other things, championing laws, policies, and institutions that purportedly reproduce inequalities that systematically create an economic and educational underclass. Based on an analysis of PISA data, Seidenberg finds that U.S. students at all socioeconomic levels, even rich kids, lag compared to their counterparts.After finding none of Ravitch's arguments to be persuasive, there is one variable that remains-the "culture of education" that underlies the teaching profession and classroom instruction. Seidenberg is appalled by what he finds. Rather than acting as a bridge between literacy science and the classroom, Seidenberg observes that schools of education are designed to "socialize prospective teachers into an ideology-a set of beliefs and attitudes about children, the nature of education, and the teacher's role." The central feature of this ideology is the notion that individuals and groups construct knowledge according to their beliefs and unique experiences. The teacher's role in this arrangement is not to transmit knowledge but to cultivate and nurture it through collaboration and discovery in partnership with each child.This constructivist theory of knowledge gives way to the abandonment of practices that have solid empirical support, such as the use of phonics in reading instruction, and the dissemination of pseudoscientific approaches to reading instruction espoused by hucksters like Frank Smith, Kenneth Goodman, and Marie Clay. Of course, most teachers find constructivist theory to be appealing in theory but unworkable in practice, a fact that apparently is lost on the schools of education that trained them to adopt constructivism in the first place.Seidenberg proposes various ways to reform teacher training programs. They include greater collaboration between education school faculty and literacy scientists, the development of interdisciplinary programs, and changes to the teacher education curriculum, such as requiring teachers to complete an introductory course in linguistics. But he is not convinced that schools of education will adopt of any of these initiatives voluntarily. He concedes that schools of education are "well-established, well-funded, trusted institutions" staffed by an "isolated, inbred community of scholars and practitioners" who "developed an arms-length stance toward research." And that this intransigence has existed since the emergence of university-based teacher training programs in the late 19th and early 20th century.Seidenberg also recommends a host of alternatives to teacher training reform-albeit with some reservations. For example, states could raise teacher licensure requirements by adopting the rigorous Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure (MTEL), but he recognizes that top-down regulatory approaches seldom produce meaningful change. He proposes the use of assistive and other types of educational software to aid instruction, but he is also concerned about the relative costs and benefits of these technologies. He considers whether third-party tutoring or teacher training programs could address the problem more efficiently and effectively but eventually admits that it would be difficult to find a sufficient number of well-trained tutors to staff them.With most recommendations deemed impractical or unsustainable, the reader will reach the final pages of Mark Seidenberg's Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, And What Can Be Done About It feeling disheartened about the possibility of transforming teacher education into something firmly grounded in scientific research. And one cannot help but feel a bit misled by the subtitle. As much as we know about how we read and why so many can't, it's not apparent from the book what can be done about it.But we know one thing that clearly won't help: teacher protests against "insufficient" funding. Maybe their signs should read: " He/she adds that "it was DOJ opa [Office of Public Affairs] who threw us under the bus." Rojas replies "Doj is likely overwhelmed so in [sic] hoping it wasn't intentional. I know it wasn't you guys because I know you have great judgement. Nothing good would come from that. Her staff should have avoided that scenario. The bu[reau] will be fine but obviously disappointed on how this is happening. Unfortunately, she's taking heat from all over the place and I feel bad for her. I know she didn't want this on her plate or for this to happen." The colleague then concludes by saying that he/she thought the leaker was "a Phoenix cop assisting with the motorcade." "These emails are astonishing, no wonder the FBI hid them from Judicial Watch and the court," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "They show anti-Trump, pro-Clinton FBI Agent Peter Strzok admitting the decision not to prosecute the Clinton email issue was made back in April 2016 - long before even Hillary Clinton was interviewed. And the new emails show that the FBI security had the political objective of protecting then-Director Comey from 'embarrassment'-which is, frankly, disturbing." On June 27, 2016, Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with former President Bill Clinton on board a parked plane at Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona. The meeting occurred during the then-ongoing investigation of Mrs. Clinton's email server, and only a few days before she was interviewed the Justice Department and FBI. (Judicial Watch filed a request on June 30 that the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General investigate that meeting.) The tarmac meeting also came just days before former FBI Director James Comey held the July 5, 2016, press conference in which he announced that no charges would be filed against Mrs. Clinton. In his subsequent, May 3, 2017, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Comey said the Lynch-Clinton tarmac meeting was the "capper" among "a number of things" that had caused him to determine that Department of Justice leadership "could not credibly complete the investigation and decline prosecution without grievous damage to the American people's confidence in the justice system." (Washington, DC) Judicial Watch today released 16 pages of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) documents related to the June 2016 tarmac meeting between former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and former President Bill Clinton showing involvement of the FBI's former Chief of Counterespionage Peter Strzok.The FBI originally informed Judicial Watch they could not locate any records related to the tarmac meeting. However, in a related FOIA lawsuit , the Justice Department located emails in which Justice Department officials communicated with the FBI and wrote that they had communicated with the FBI. As a result, by letter dated August 10, 2017, the FBI stated, "Upon further review, we subsequently determined potentially responsive documents may exist. As a result, your [FOIA] request has been reopened ..." This is the second batch of documents the FBI produced since telling Judicial Watch they had no tarmac-related records.The new documents were obtained by Judicial Watch in response to an October 2016 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:16-cv-02046)) filed after the Justice Department failed to comply with a July 7, 2016, FOIA request seeking:All FD-302 forms prepared pursuant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private e-mail server during her tenure.All records of communications between any agent, employee, or representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding, concerning, or related to the aforementioned investigation. This request includes, but is not limited to, any related communications with any official, employee, or representative of the Department of Justice, the Executive Office of the President, the Democratic National Committee, and/or the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.All records related to the meeting between Attorney General Lynch and former President Bill Clinton on June 27, 2016.In a previously unseen email, on July 1, 2016, Strzok forwarded to Bill Priestap, assistant director of FBI counterintelligence, and other FBI officials an article in The New York Times titled then " Lynch to Remove Herself From Decision Over Clinton Emails, Official Says." Priestap comments on it, saying: "The meeting in PX is all over CNN TV news this morning ..." Strzok replies: "Timing's not ideal in that it falsely adds to those seeking the 'this is all choreographed' narrative. But I don't think it's worth changing ... later won't be better." Priestap responds "Agreed."In November 2017, Judicial Watch revealed 29 pages of FBI documents showing officials were concerned about a leak that Bill Clinton delayed his aircraft taking off in order to "maneuver" a meeting with the attorney general. The resulting story in the Observer was discussed in this production of documents. The Strzok email was absent from this production.Another Strzok email suggest the decision on the Clinton email matter has been under discussion since April 2016-three months before then-FBI Director James Comey announced he would recommend no prosecution.On July 3, 2016, an email with the subject line "Must Read Security Article" someone from the FBI's Security Division (SECD) forwards the article in the Observer and reveals concern:I believe that the source quoted in the article is one of the local Phoenix LEO's [law enforcement officers]. Needless to say that I have contacted the Phoenix office and will contact the local's [sic] who assisted in an attempt to stem any further damage. This is exactly why our Discretion and Judgement are the foundation of the AG's trust in our team, which is why we can never violate that trust, like the source did in this article." [Emphasis in original]A July 1, 2016, email from an unidentified official in the FBI Security Division sent to officials in several FBI offices with the subject line "Media Reports***Not for Dissemination***", sent in the wake of the tarmac meeting, an FBI official warns his colleagues (with emphasis) "Our job is to protect the boss from harm and embarrassment." [Emphasis in original] He emphasizes that FBI officials should ask themselves "What issues are currently being reported in the media? And what actions/interactions/situations that the Director may be in could impact them." The official then cites an example of a public relations disaster near-miss when Comey's plane "literally just missed Clinton's plane" when they flew into the White Plains, NY airport (HPN) a few months earlier, and saying, "Imagine the optics and the awkward situation we would have put the Director in we would have been at the FBO at the same time as Secretary Clinton."In a July 1, 2016 email exchange FBI Section Chief Rachel Rojas warns a colleague to "stay away" from discussion of the Clinton Lynch tarmac meeting following publication of the meeting, unless they hear from a "higher up". The colleague responds the next day, telling Rojas not to worry because, "I know better According to Very Objective Journalist George Stephanopoulos and his "sources," Michael Cohen, the president's personal lawyer - a man whose offices were raided by the FBI for reasons yet unknown - may be about to flip on the Trump team. Here's the report from ABC News:Here's the problem with this report: we have no idea what Cohen knows or doesn't know about the president. And just because Cohen has dirt on Trump doesn't mean that dirt is criminal. The going theory suggests that Cohen channeled money from Trump to Stormy Daniels to shut her up about a 2006 one-night stand - but it's not clear that's criminal in any case. Even the campaign finance violation talked about wouldn't seem to be a major problem, given the John Edwards failed prosecution on similar grounds.So, what does Cohen have? The media are assuming he has a lot. But that could be wishful thinking. Here's Stephanopoulos again:Two sources who are familiar with a warrant in the case told ABC News in April that federal agents were hunting for records tied to Cohen's personal business dealings and secret deals with alleged mistresses, media organizations and the 2016 presidential campaign.Apparently the vast majority of documents seized from Cohen have been ruled non-privileged for purposes of prosecution.If the FBI truly raided Cohen's office with DOJ go-ahead - all for a simple supposed campaign finance reform violation on the basis of Trump and Stormy Daniels - all hell is going to break loose, and it should. As Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, there is a pretty high bar when it comes to raiding attorneys' offices, and the grounds had better be solid. Raiding the offices of the attorney for the president would presumably require even more discretion. As Dershowitz stated,We'll soon find out. But beware media eagerness to declare the Trump administration dead and buried over "sources" saying that Michael Cohen has "flipped." SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP alerts investors in TAL Education Group (NYSE:TAL) to the August 17, 2018 Lead Plaintiff deadline in the securities class action pending in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. If you purchased or otherwise acquired TAL securities between April 26, 2018 and June 13, 2018 and suffered losses contact Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP. For more information visit: https://www.hbsslaw.com/cases/TAL or contact Reed Kathrein, who is leading the firms investigation, by calling 510-725-3000 or emailing TAL@hbsslaw.com. On June 13, 2018, an analyst published a report accusing TAL of fraudulently overstating its profits since at least fiscal year 2016. Among other things, the analyst accused the Company of overstating net income by over 40% during the last two years. This news drove the price of TAL securities down $4.54, or about 11%, to close at $41.11 that day. Were focused on investors losses and the analysts accusations which, if true, suggest that the Company may have seriously misled investors, said Hagens Berman partner Reed Kathrein. Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding TAL should consider their options to help in the investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under the new program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Reed Kathrein at 510-725-3000 or email TAL@hbsslaw.com. About Hagens Berman Hagens Berman is a national investor-rights law firm headquartered in Seattle, Washington with 70+ attorneys in 11 offices across the country. The Firm represents investors, whistleblowers, workers and consumers in complex litigation. More about the firm and its successes can be found at www.hbsslaw.com. For the latest news visit our newsroom or follow us on Twitter at @classactionlaw. LONDON, Ontario, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mr. George Lunick, CEO of Pearl River Holdings Limited (Pearl River) (TSX VENTURE:PRH), regrets to announce the recent passing of Mr. Rodney (Rod) Peter Bell. Mr. Bell was with Pearl River since 1996, and has played an integral role with Pearl River and as the President of Rodman Plastics Company Limited, an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Pearl River, and since 2011, as a director of Pearl River. Rods dedication and contributions will be greatly missed. George Lunick, President and CEO of Pearl River, as well as the Pearl Rivers Board, extend their deepest condolences to Mr. Bell's family. Mr. Andrew Paul has been named the Chairman of the Board of Rodman Plastics Company Limited. Pearl River and its subsidiaries will continue to operate business as usual through its current operations teams and systems. A further news release regarding the operations of Pearl River and its subsidiaries will be issued in the future if warranted. About Pearl River Through its subsidiaries, Pearl River Holdings Limiteds principal business is the manufacturing and distribution of plastic products in China, Australia and the United States of America. For further information please contact: George Lunick CEO T: (519) 645-0267 E: george@lunick.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. Back in January, Microsoft announced that they were "proud" to support ICE. Honestly, what company wouldn't be? A U.S. federal contract, no matter how large your coffers and corporate reach might be, is a good get, due both to the amount of American lucre you'll pocket and the visuals that come from being trusted by one of the most powerful countries in the world to meet their cloud computing needs. But hey: it isn't January anymore and Microsoft in June, 2018 is looking a little bit like IBM back in the 1930s. Under the Trump Administration's direction, ICE and other Homeland Security entities have been busy breaking up families, emotionally scarring thousands of innocent kids, and driving their anguished caretakers into cages, or worse, to suicide. That Microsoft's Azure cloud computing services are helping such villainy along, in any capacity, might be good in the short-term, for the company's bottom line, but the optics are shit. More than this, the company's association with ICE is raising the hackles of some of their their most important assets: not their shareholders or board, but their employees. According to Gizmodo, a number of Microsoft employees, who prefer to remain anonymous in the interest of protecting their careers, have stepped forward to report that the computer technology company's relationship with ICE has led to growing dissent among the company's workforce. When Giz questioned Microsoft's PR team on the matter, the response was a bit wishy-washy: From Gizmodo: Microsoft condemned family separation by ICE in a statement to Gizmodo but declined to specify if specific tools within Azure Government, like Face APIfacial recognition softwarewere in use by the agency. The company also did not comment on whether it had assisted in building artificial intelligence tools for ICE, something the agency has been seeking (and courting Microsoft over) for some time. I'm one to hazard on the side of whatever the most intensely terrible possibility is, these days: side-stepping whether ICE is rocking Face API? Microsoft is totally serving up Face API to assist ICE in identifying and tracking detainees of all ages within their system. Is there any proof that this is the case? Nope and I really hope that I'm wrong. But with military contractors being used to wrangle throngs of kidnapped children, tent cities being erected in military bases and old Walmarts being turned into prisons for kids, I don't feel that making this sort of leap of faith is unwarranted. For the time being, Microsoft has said that they are dismayed by what ICE has been up to and that they "urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families." If wishes where horses. It'll be interesting to see, as more of Microsoft's employees become aware of the company's involvement with ICE, whether or not we'll see the same sorts of protests and resignations as came from Google's errant push to provide the U.S. military with A.I. Image via Wikipedia Image via Wikipedia Commons On Monday, the Supreme Court will review the 9th Circuit's decision in Apple Inc. v. Pepper, in which the plaintiffs argue that Apple has established a monopoly over apps for Ios (this part is actually incontrovertible, as Apple has used both technology and law to prevent rival app stores from operating), and that Iphone and Ipad owners have a right to ask the government to break up this monopoly (that's the controversial part). Apple and Trump's DoJ say that antitrust law does not provide any relief for App Store customers, because Apple is just a (monopolized) marketplace, brokering sales between app creators and their users. It's weird that the Supreme Court is hearing this case; the lower courts that have heard similar cases have all agreed not to proceed with them, so there's no "circuit split" (disagreements in the lower court), which is the usual trigger for Supreme Court scrutiny. The current state of antitrust law can be traced to the Chicago School's influence in the Reagan era; these economists said that the only time the government should wield antitrust law is when companies conspire to raise prices (note: that's effectively what the Plaintiffs are saying Apple did with the App Store), and that everything else (including predatory low pricing, monopolizing supply chains, and other monopolistic practices) is fair game. Tech was the first industry to be born under this new regime (Reagan was elected the year I got my first Apple ][+ computer) and has had the least baggage to shed to take advantage of it, but it's hardly the only monopoly-heavy industry: cars, construction, agribusiness, movies, publishing, newspapers, pharma, finance, nursing homesPractically every sector is concentrated in the hands of a small number of players, who have found a lot of ways to make peoples' lives worse without conspiring to fix high prices. A win here would broaden the pool of people who could sue companies for monopolistic practices, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they will win Apple could still prevail in a suit over monopolism. But the interesting thing about market concentration is that it has produced giant companies with deep pockets that no-win/no-fee lawyers are licking their chops over: if they can secure a victory for their clients and get their costs back (either by being awarded costs or by taking it out of their clients' award), the biggest companies become the juiciest targets. This time, though, the highest court could rule that Apple is, in fact, a distribution monopoly. A ruling in the plaintiffs' favor could have serious implications for other tech companies with similar business models, like Amazon, which sells a wide range of products from third-party companies. And it could make it harder for them to argue that they're merely neutral intermediaries. That means the Illinois Brick Doctrine might get squashed, or significantly altered. The case is "really significant for platforms in general," says Vaheesan. "Platforms and other intermediators that rely on a commission-based model might be able to avoid antitrust liability in the form of lawsuits" if Apple wins. But even if Apple loses, the plaintiffs still face a long, uphill battle. A favorable ruling from the Supreme Court would allow the suit to go to trial, but it may get settled out of court before that even happens. In trial, the plaintiffs would have to face a host of other issues in order to successfully argue that Apple's App Store really constitutes a monopoly. For example, consumers can buy other kinds of smartphones aside from iPhones, which come with access to other app stores. The Supreme Court Will Decide If Apple's App Store Is a Monopoly [Louise Matsakis/Wired] Texas has some of the most draconian marijuana laws in the United States. Possession of small amounts can result in 6 months in jail and a $2,000 fine. And of the 60,000 people who get arrested on marijuana charges there, 98 percent are popped for simple possession. Reason says "penalties extend beyond the immediate criminal sanctions, too." "Criminal penalties for drug possession, even marijuana, come with a lifetime of collateral consequences. That's hindered access to education, employment, housing, your driver's license is suspended for 6 months," says [Heather Fazio, a spokesperson for Texans for Responsible Marijuana Policy]. "With those of us in Texas supportive of our Second Amendment protected rights, our license to carry in Texas is suspended for five years." That could change, now that the Republican Party of Texas is supporting the decriminalization of marijuana. The proposed penalty would be a civil fine of $100 or less. From Reason: The change complements efforts being made on the local level in Texas. In December 2017, the city of Dallas dispensed with arresting people on misdemeanor marijuana charges. Kim Ogg, district attorney for Harris County (which includes the city of Houston) has gone even further. As of March 2017, her office is declining to prosecute most marijuana offenses and instead diverting people into "cognitive decision-making classes." Image: Mitch M/Shutterstock "Well, we have an orchestra here. What's missing is a conductor." That's the voice of a Border Patrol official, mocking a sobbing group of 10 terrified Central American children who've been separated from their parents at a US border-crossing. Propublica published the audio, whose origin is not disclosed. The children are sobbing so hard it's hard to understand them, but some of their words can be made out, like the six-year-old Salvadoran girl who keeps repeating her mother's phone number, begging someone to call her. My daughter is ten. When she was born in 2008, something weird happened to me. I stopped being able to watch or read fiction in which children were in peril. I also stopped being able to write those stories. Something profoundly changed inside me the day she was born. Listening to this, I am physically sickened. I can't imagine being the father or mother of one of these children. It would take Herculean self-control not to physically attack anyone who did this to my child. I would be literally out of my mind. This is happening on our watch, with our tax dollars, in our name. The audio obtained by ProPublica breaks that silence. It was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who "heard the children's weeping and crying, and was devastated by it." The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable. Listen to Children Who've Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border [Ginger Thompson/Propublica] In a tweet this morning, Trump chooses the dehumanizing word "infest" to describe immigrants coming to the US. This is eerily similar to German Nazi propaganda "linking Jews and vermin or disease to Germany." "Democrats are the problem. They don't care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can't win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!" Democrats are the problem. They don't care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can't win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2018 Twitter users responded strongly. Actually, Trump, you have infested the US with your brand of hate. You destroy everything you touch. Your children are just like you. Complicit, immoral, despicable. You are Satan's pin-up. Dilly Dilly ??? (@okeydoke4) June 19, 2018 "Infest our country" now where have I heard that before? Oh. Oh right. It was how Hitler described the Jewish people. You knowright before he murdered millions of them.#uspoli #immigration #TrumpCamps #TrumpConcentrationCamps #WhereAreTheChidren #FamiliesBelongTogether Andrea Dorego (@doregs) June 19, 2018 Infest. What a cruel asshole word to use. Shows your nature and intent. vintagecat (@vintage_vendor) June 19, 2018 You're referring to human being that "infest" our country? "Infest?" Human beings don't "infest." Bugs infest. As in "There is an infestation of bugs in this dilapidated home." You are the lowest of the low to use such dehumaning language to describe other human beings. womanofgrace (@WomanofGrace72) June 19, 2018 Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link Trump envoy Nikki Haley today said the United States is withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council. She said the Human Rights Council is 'not worthy of its name.' Yep. What is there to say? This is in the same week America discovered that Trump's racist regime is tearing kids from parents at the border, then placing unaccompanied minors by the thousands in what amount to concentration camps. At State Dept., @SecPompeo and @nikkihaley announce US withdrawal from UN Human Rights Council, calling it "a protector of human right abusers and cesspool of political bias." pic.twitter.com/biZvXFGRwu Mark Knoller (@markknoller) June 19, 2018 Amb Haley says the Human Rights Council is not worthy of its name, but should it become reformed, the US would be "happy to rejoin." pic.twitter.com/lH6h3XdEL5 Mark Knoller (@markknoller) June 19, 2018 From Reuters: The United States withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday after no other countries "had the courage to join our fight" to reform the "hypocritical and self-serving" body, said U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. "In doing so, I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from our human rights commitments," Haley said. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley had criticized the council for what she called a "relentless, pathological campaign" against Israel, a staunch U.S. ally. https://t.co/rXUviYHTEV NPR (@NPR) June 19, 2018 THE LOWDOWN: Here's an immigration lawyer's first-hand account of confronting former President Barack Obama on family detention centers. Trump's a monster, but failings of previous administrations paved the way for his abuses. Being an #immigration #lawyer in the age of @realDonaldTrump is like that episode of #BattlestarGalactica where Cylons attack every 33 min R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) September 4, 2017 "Systematically separating kids and parents is a new Trump policy," said NBC News reporter Jacob Soboroff today about this first-person account. "But detaining families isn't." You're going to want to read this thread. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights on Twitter) is "an attorney fighting alongside immigrant communities in the Deep South and across the country to defend deportations and advance civil rights." Thread: How did we get here? In 2015, I shook President Obama's hand, thanked him for DACA, and asked him to reverse course & close the for-profit baby jails (also known as "family detention centers") he opened in Dilley & Karnes City, Texas. What he said shook me to my core 1/ pic.twitter.com/K5vi6S2RPj R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 2/ Specifically, I told him, "It's wrong. And it's going to be a stain on your legacy." He stopped moving on to the next person in the rope line and looked back at me. I'd gotten his attention. He turned back, looked at me and "Are you an immigration lawyer?" "Yes" R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 3/ Just days before, President Obama's senior immigration policy advisor @cecmunoz had received a chilly welcome during her keynote address to the @AILANational annual conference attendees in National Harbor. She was greeted with silent protest & signs saying #EndFamilyDetention R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 4/ I later learned that her meeting with senior AILA attorneys had been testy to say the least. See, Obama had previously timed great news, like #DACA to coincide with the AILA annual conferences. We all watched ecstatic in Nashville in 2012 as he announced it on giant screens. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 5/ So the President's immediate association of "End Family Detention" with immigration lawyers wasn't random. He'd been told and believed we were basically the only ones who'd care, and even then, it would be a minority of us that wouldn't extract from him a political cost. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 6/ So when I said "Yes", the President looked back and engaged: "I'll tell you what we can't have. It's these parents sending their kids here on a dangerous journey and putting their lives at risk." R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 7/ And he walked on down the rope line. Not, "I know. I'm working on it." not, "Thanks for your support". Just, "Yes. This is the right move given what I perceive the facts to be." I was dumbfounded. Let's unpack the logic of what he said because it's that logic which led us here R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 8/ First, the President tacitly admittedly that he was using detention of mothers and children as a deterrent. Days later, a federal court would find that policy likely violates the due process clause. https://t.co/FxCyUqnWSW. And rightly so, as @ACLU powerfully demonstrated. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 9/ Detention as Deterrence of future migration works only if it's unpleasant, and only if you can ensure that people don't get out. You don't just detain to deter. You detain to deport. You have to do it by sending a Gandalf message down the pipeline to the Northern Triangle. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 10/ What's wrong with that? First, it doesn't work. It assumes a parent would rationally chose to watch her daughter raped or murdered in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras instead of helping her flee to seek the domestic and international legal protections of US law. Would you? R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 11/ People in the Northern Triangle were (and are) fleeing for their lives. They're looking to what we've held out as a shining city on a hill and following the beacon to safety. To convince them not to flee, you must convince them a worse fate awaits at the end of the journey. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 12/ Today's DHS Kidnapping policy is the logical extension of yesterday's family detention decisions. It's the same mouthful of detention-as-deterrence mouthwash, just swished to the other side. Nothing, NOTHING in our law requires us to abuse and traumatize families and children R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 13/ The reason otherwise friendly partisans on the left went to the mat with the Obama Admin is because we saw the utter inhumanity that happens inside these internment camps. Women aren't allowed to let their children farther than 3 feet away from them. Imagine your toddler. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 14/ I remember holding back tears when I saw cutouts from Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar on the walls in the "kids' area" of the legal trailer and thinking about how this would mean those kids will always associate the same book I was reading my child with this jail. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 15/ I remember hearing the constant, violent coughing and sickness of small children, and the worry of their mothers who stood in the sun outside the clinic all day only to be told their kids should "drink water." I remember nearly doubling over when I saw the line of strollers. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 16/ if being in these cages ate away at our humanity, getting to know the people locked inside them helped restore it. They women We represented had been raped, beaten, or stalked in some of the most violent places on the planet. They carried on for their kids. They had hope. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 17/ And the detention policies of the last administration were set up to deter that hope. All the while yielding a hefty corporate profit. It was and is a moral failing that these places still existed when President Obama left office. It wasn't for want of trying to close them. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 18/ I remember sitting down with my Member of Congress soon after I got back from the baby jail and trying to impress upon him the fierce urgency of taking immediate action to close these places down. I believed if people just knew, it would end. We as a nation would end it. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 19/ what I hope for us in this moment of critical mass, in this tipping point, is that we will collectively have the courage to hold our leaders accountable when they tell us putting families in for-profit cages to deter asylum-seeking is necessary to stop family separation. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 20/ To do that, we need smart, effective experts helping our leaders formulate the policy solutions. To me, that means helping @ThinkLawLab and @CGRShastings deploy their wealth of knowledge. It means helping @Grassroots_News and @ConMijente and @PuenteAZ and @PuebloSF organize. R. Andrew Free (@ImmCivilRights) June 19, 2018 SAN DIEGO, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Max Sound Corporation (OTC:MAXD) provides the following update regarding the Attia litigation against Google and other related defendants. In the United States District Court Northern District of California in the matter of Attia et al v. Google LLC et al, on June 13, 2018 the Court granted Attia Leave to Amend the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) Claim on or before August 13, 2018. Background of the Attia vs. Google case: In July 2017, the Company engaged the expert services of Christian, Smith & Jewell (CSJ) and G. Robert Blakey, the author and nation's foremost authority on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), and for the drafting of the RICO Claim. Soon thereafter, the Law Firm Buether Joe & Carpenter LLC filed a Fourth Amended Complaint against Defendants Google, Inc., Flux Factory, Inc., Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Sebastian Thrun, Eric "Astro" Teller, Michelle Kaufmann, Jennifer Carlile, Augusto Roman, Nicholas Chim, and DOES 1-100. The fourth amended filing is a Motion for Leave to add Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) pursuant to 18 U.S.C. 1961, et seq. In May 2014, MAXD entered into a representation agreement with world renowned architect Eli Attia giving MAXD the exclusive right to pursue claims on his behalf against violators of Attias intellectual property rights. The lawsuit was filed on December 5, 2014, in the Superior Court of California, County of Santa Clara, against Google, its co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Googles spinoff company Flux Factory, and senior executives of Flux alleging among other causes of action misappropriation of trade secrets and breach of contract. The lawsuit contends that Google and the other Defendants stole Mr. Attias trade secrets, proprietary information, and know-how regarding a revolutionary architecture design and building process that he alone had invented, known as Engineered Architecture which Google called Genie before it changed the name to Flux. Defendants engaged Attia to translate his architectural technology into software for a proof of concept, based on decades of his lifes work with the goal of determining at that point whether to continue with full-scale development of Attias project. The lawsuit alleges that once Attia had disclosed the trade secrets and proprietary information which Google needed to bring the technology to market, they severed ties with Attia and continued to use his technology without a license and without compensation in order to bring the technology to market without him. Google valued the project at $120 billion dollars a year. Google later spun-out the business, and the new company was renamed Flux Factory which is substantially funded and has grown to 800 employees according to an interview with one if its founders. Plaintiffs seek a permanent injunction against the defendants, punitive damages, and restitution. About G. Robert Blakey: George Robert Blakey is an American attorney and law professor. He is the author and nation's foremost authority on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), teaches criminal law and procedure, federal criminal law and procedure, terrorism, and jurisprudence at Notre Dame Law School. Prof. Blakey's extensive legislative drafting experience resulted in the passage of the Crime Control Act of 1973, the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1970 and the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, Title IX of which is known as "RICO". He has been personally involved in drafting and implementing RICO-type legislation in 22 of the more than 30 states that have enacted racketeering laws. He frequently argues in or consults on cases involving RICO statutes at both the federal and state levels, including several cases before the United States Supreme Court. Read more: Professor Blakey Bio and CV. About Buether Joe & Carpenter: Buether Joe & Carpenter, LLC is an intellectual property and commercial litigation boutique law firm focusing on patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, and unfair competition lawsuits, as well as antitrust, contract and other business disputes for both plaintiffs and defendants. BJC offers clients the expertise of attorneys with decades of experience in handling complex litigation in an effective and efficient manner. For more information, visit www.bjciplaw.com. About Christian, Smith & Jewell: Christian, Smith & Jewell (CSJ) stands out as a premier law firm in the Houston legal community. CSJ takes pride in handling tough cases, both large and small in state and federal courts across the United States and abroad. CSJ excels in all types of civil litigation, including shareholder and partnership disputes, stock fraud, commercial, oil and gas, real estate, lender liability/debtor litigation, loan work outs, director's liability litigation/arbitration, structured settlements, construction law, personal injury, and international arbitration/litigation. For more information, visit www.csj-law.com. About Max Sound Corporation: As creators of the acclaimed MAX-D HD Audio, Max Sound can provide a better solution for Audio, Video and Data transmissions. Max Sound Corporation is the company that brings forth technologies for the betterment of our world, including being co-owners of the Optimized Data Transmission Technology patent portfolio. Max Sound, MAXD and MAX-D Audio Perfected and HD Audio are registered trademarks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. To learn more about the MAX-D Technology, please visit http://maxd.audio. SAFE HARBOR STATEMENT UNDER THE PRIVATE SECURITIES LITIGATION REFORM ACT OF 1995: Statements in this press release which are not purely historical, including statements regarding Max Sound's intentions, beliefs, expectations, representations, projections, plans or strategies regarding the future are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, the risks associated with the effect of changing economic conditions, trends in the products markets, variations in the company's cash flow or adequacy of capital resources, market acceptance risks, technical development risks, and other risk factors. The company cautions investors not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements contained in this press release. Max Sound disclaims any obligation and does not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements in this press release. Expanded and historical information is made available to the public by Max Sound Corporation and its Affiliates on its website http://maxd.audio or at http://www.sec.gov. Contact: Max Sound Corporation info@maxsound.com "More than 60 percent of those who served in senior positions at the beginning of the administration have exited." Joe Hagin is the White House deputy chief of staff for operations, and the guy who led planning for Donald Trump's meeting last week with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. Hagin today today he will leave the Trump administration on July 6 to work in the private sector again. He has served in every Republican White House since the Reagan administration. From the Associated Press: Hagin's departure comes as the Trump administration continues to set records for staff turnover. More than 60 percent of those who served in senior positions at the beginning of the administration have exited. No successor has yet been identified. A White House official said that after departing Singapore last week, Trump made a rare appearance in the staff cabin of Air Force One to praise Hagin for organizing the Kim summit and led White House staff in a round of applause. () Hagin's portfolio includes oversight of the scheduling and advance staffs, as well as the military office including the replacement projects for Air Force One and Marine One. 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However, he was not arrested following the accusation.According to a leaked police radio, the officer in charge Allan Mafuratidze, (40), offered a lift to a 36-year-old female constable together with other passengers on 26 May 2018 and raped her once after all passengers had disembarked."The accused person gave the complainant a lift from Harare to Bindura. On arrival in Bindura he offered to drop the complainant at her residence after all passengers had disembarked.The accused person drove towards Zimbabwe Ezekial Guti University and parked at a secluded place.Mafuratidze stopped and locked his vehicle doors using central locking system before jumping at the back seat where the complaint was sitting.He forced open the complainant's legs pushed aside her pant and raped her once, after the rape the complainant's was dropped at her place of residence.She reported the rape to her husband who advised her to withhold reporting the case, the complainant then reported the case on 15/06/18 to Bindura Central Police after seeing no intention from her husband to file a formal criminal report.Bindura Central Police attended the scene and the accused was not arrested, investigations are in progress under RRB number 3553389," reads the radio. News / National by Staff reporter The Welshman Ncube led MDC has dismissed its Deputy National Spokesperson Mbuso Siso from his position.Party Secretary-General Miriam Mushayi revealed in a statement without giving any reasons that the party had recalled Mbuso Siso the Deputy Spokesperson and replaced him with Bulawayo Province Spokesperson Oscar Ncube with immediate effect."Please be advised that the Standing Committee has appointed Oscar Ncube as the Deputy Secretary for Information and Publicity with immediate effect," said Mushayi in a brief statement.Party sources indicated to Bulawayo24 that Siso was dismissed after he had protested the in the inclusion of Welshman Ncube's son as a council candidate for Ward 2 in Bulawayo.Efforts to get a comment from Siso were fruitless as he declined to comment on the matter. Opinion / Columnist When both President Mnangagwa and ZEC chairperson, Priscilla Chigumba took office; following last November's military coup that forced Robert Mugabe and Rita Makarau, respectively, to vacate their offices; the two promised to hold free, fair and credible elections. Now it is clear they are failing to honour their promise.Even at the time the two took their oath of office, it was already clear ZEC would never register all the 7 million targeted voters because there was no time. The BVR exercise should have started in January 2015, at the very latest, only started in September 2017. ZEC has reportedly registered 5.5 million voters and so 1.5 million voters have already been denied the vote for no fault of their own.It is inconceivable that President Mnangagwa was not aware of the very late start of the BVR and what the consequences would be, after all he was the Minister of Justice unto the October reshuffle and ZEC fall under his remit until then. As an aspiring ZEC Chairperson Justice Chigumba must have known about the very late start of the voter registration exercise and about the host of other ZEC problems certain to stop the commission delivering the free and fair elections as promised.The very late start of the voter registration affected everything downstream, there was no way ZEC was ever going to produce a verified voters' roll in time, many people had predicted. This too has now come to pass and Justice Chigumba has the cheek to suggest we, the people of Zimbabwe, will have no choice but to take this one too on the chin."Whether the candidates scrutinise the voters' roll, whether they see any anomalies in it, whatever the anomalies are, whatever legal recourse they have will not stop an election. I want that to be very clear, nothing stops the election," she said."Let me put the law into perspective, first thing to take note is once the President has proclaimed the election date, there is nothing short of an earthquake that can stop the election."With all due respect, madam Justice, President Mnangagwa should surely have consulted and got confirmation from ZEC that the verified voters' roll was ready before he proclaimed the election date. Having a verified voters' roll is such a key requirement for free, fair and credible elections it is therefore nonsensical that ZEC should even be arguing the elections should go ahead with it.In 2013, nearly one million voters were denied the vote, an unacceptably large number given only 4 million voted and Mugabe's winning margin was just over one million; because their data were not in the constituency voters' roll they expected it to be. This would have been spotted and corrected if the ZEC had produced a verified voters' roll as demanded by law. ZEC is making the same mistake again this year and so, many, many more voters will also be denied the vote again, worse this year since voting has been narrowed even more to voting by polling station only.There are also a thousand and one other ways beside using the dodgy voters' roll for Zanu PF is rigging these elections. There is no free public media, Zanu PF is robbing the nation blind to bankroll its vote rigging and vote buying schemes, etc.President Mnangagwa has had many golden opportunities to implement the democratic reforms everyone agreed at the onset of the 2008 GNU were necessary for free and fair elections. He has stubbornly refused to implement even one reform. It is the regime's fault that voter registration was started very late leaving ZEC no time to produce a verified voters' roll. It is totally nonsensical that the nation should bullied and bamboozled into another flawed election and accept the outcome as a matter of course.These elections are not free, fair and credible and all men and women of good judgement must declare the flawed and illegal elections null and void.If President Mnangagwa and Justice Chigumba cannot deliver on their promise to hold free, fair and credible elections then the nation has every right to demand that the regime stands aside to allow the appointment of an interim administration who will implement the pre-requisite democratic reforms and hold free and fair elections."Nothing short of an earthquake that can stop the election!" No Justice Chigumba, there is no need to stop the election; go ahead. What we are demanding is for the elections must be declared null and void because they have failed to meet even the bear minimum standards for free, fair and credible elections! Opinion / Columnist "It pays in the end to get the best in the beginning!" ran the Eric Davis advert. To those who do not know or have forgotten; Eric Davis was a top-notch man's clothing shop in First Street, Harare. Yes, one paid top dollar for everything in Eric Davis from the hat to the socks and designer shoes but, by Jove, it was worth every dollar!Forget the classical advice, "You are never fully dressed without a smile!" When you are wearing one of those Italian design suits complete with shirt, tie and shoe; trust me, you are fully dressed! You will be griming from ear to ear all day and a string in every step!I have never thought of the corollary to the Eric Davis advert until today. "You pay small change for crap but, in the long run, you will pay dearly for it!"As far as politicians go, Morgan Tsvangirai and his MDC friends are crap in every sense of the word and after nearly 20 years of them occupying centre stage it has just dawned on me how dearly the nation has paid for having elected them in the first place. The people of Zimbabwe risked life and limb electing MDC into power on the promise they will bring about the democratic changes the nation was dying for. MDC have not only failed to deliver even one democratic change in 20 years but, worst, they are the ones blocking change with the blundering incompetence!"The Military Assisted Transition (MAT) took place in November last year. It is now six months into 2018 and seven months since the MAT. How are we doing? Our world has certainly changed and it is very noticeable. We have more freedom than at any time since the Rhodesian government clamped down on the nationalists and detained most of them in 1964," wrote Eddie Cross, former MDC-T founder member and MP. "The repressive laws adopted at that time were never dismantled by former President Robert Mugabe, who then used them to repress all opposition in his efforts to establish a one-party State." All efforts to educate Mr Cross and all his MDC friends that the people of Zimbabwe have risked life and limb to elect them into power dismantle the de facto Zanu PF one-party dictatorship have accomplished nothing. SADC leaders did their best to remind MDC leaders to focus on implementing the raft of democratic reforms designed to stop Zanu PF rigging elections, but they too were ignored.MDC leaders have wasted one golden opportunity after another to end the Zanu PF dictatorship because they are breathtakingly corrupt and incompetent. They are crap!Mr Cross says, "We have more freedom than at any time since 1964," in one breath. But quickly adds, "None of these repressive laws have been rescinded - they are just being ignored. It's a process that has not been formalised (and it's not permanent until it is), but it's real."President Mnangagwa and his coup junta know that their political legitimacy is hanging a spider thread, the international community was not as easily fooled by all that military assisted transition bull this was a coup period! The junta is desperate to regard political legitimacy hence the temporary truce on use of the repressive laws. The junta has refused to give up all its other dictatorial powers such as control of public media, ZEC, etc.The very fact that President Mnangagwa has stubbornly refused to implement even one democratic reforms had alarm bells ringing like church bells in everybody with half a brain. The very fact that no such alarm bell is ringing in Mr Cross' head confirms what we already know.Ever since the last GNU Zanu PF has never been under more pressure to hold free, fair and credible elections than it is this year. It is very disappointing that the international community especially SADC and the American are the ones demanding that Zanu PF deliver on its promise and MDC are content with the truce on violence even though the other vote rigging activities have continued."Still, this is Africa and we must allow for a gradual assumption of such rights - after all, it took Britain 600 years to get there and we could argue that many older States are still not there in all respects. The one thing that is true, is that we are in a much better place to hold a reasonable election than at any time since 1964," concluded Mr Cross.How patronizing! This is the 21st century for Britain but for us in Africa we are 600 years behind.For all you condescending and white supremacist attitude, I would like to remind you that Zimbabwe is not being asked to reinvent democracy and the rules to ensure free, fair and credible elections; these are already there. We are being asked to apply them, that is not a tall order. By the way there are countries like Botswana and South Africa, to name just those two, which have successful held free, fair and credible elections. Why should Zimbabweans have to wait 600 years to do the same?It is the incompetent, corrupt and tyrannical Zanu PF thugs who have dragged the nation into this political and economic hell-hole but it is corrupt and incompetent MDC village idiots who have held us prisoner in this hole for the last 20 years. Nations get the government they deserve, by being so reckless in the selection of our political leaders, we certain deserve these Zanu PF thugs complete with the entourage of the MDC and opposition crap!Mr Cross is not running for public office in these elections. Good bye and good riddance! Please, please spare us your patronizing crap. We have certainly paid dearly for having elected crap like these MDC leaders into power in the first place. Opinion / Speeches I have been thinking deeply about this of late. It hurts to think that when the Zimbabwean parliament voted to train the 5th Brigade we had ZAPU representatives in parliament.The day they voted to deploy them in Matabeleland, there were ZAPU representatives in that parliament.They were outnumbered and differed in mind and couldn't interpret the impending danger about to fall on their unprotected people (the Ndebele/Mthwakazi peoples).Through out the almost 40 years we have had representatives of Matabeleland in the Zimbabwean parliament while all the atrocities and marginalization have taken place. Draconian laws have been passed right under their noses while they were bound by the majority rule and stood as democratically elected accomplices to the marginalization of our people.The only thing that the Zimbabwean parliament has managed to do is alienate the Matabeleland representatives from their people, starve them of resources in the budget while we keep asking ourselves why they are doing nothing for us. When these representatives finally lose their membership of parliament, they have been a disgrace to their people and do not want to participate kumzabalazo for their people any more against a system whose power they now have first hand experience with.Now almost 40years down the line, we still have some Mthwakazi peoples who have high hopes that membership of such a parliament (zimbabwean parliament) will avail us something that will deliver Mthwakazi from the Lucific machinations that were designed to totally obliterate ubuMthwakazi bethu.The enemy now knows well that they can never be accepted in Matabeleland so they need democratically elected PUPPETS to justify their existence koMthwakazi. These will be representatives of the oppressive system in the land of our people. They will be given useless portfolios to water down their impact in parliamentary proceedings and their resistance crushed down by Majority rule.Their defeat even in Matabeleland by Shona led parties is going to be Christmas for the propagandist journalists as proof that the Mthwakazi dream has failed khona kanye koMthwakazi. This will justify the state perpetrated cruelty against any restorationist activists as malcontents who are fighting a democratically elected system. This was the term used to refer to ZAPU in 1982. This game is being played with cruel intelligence far higher than just the excitement of just holding an office in parliament.SPEECH DELIVERED BY:NKOSINATHI MKHWANANZIMLF VICE PRESIDENT A new northern Alberta school district is blazing a trail for Indigenous-led education in Alberta and the rest of Canada. The Kee Tas Kee Now Tribal Council Education Authority was formed for the current school year by five First Nations which are home to six schools. Up to this year, the nations involved Loon River First Nation, Lubicon Lake Nation, Peerless Trout First Nation, Whitefish Lake First Nation and Woodland Cree First Nation each had their own curriculum in their schools. Under the new framework, the schools have the same land-based learning program for students, with the goal that consistency will help educators learn from each other and lead to better attendance and graduation rates. Land-based learning includes teachings on Cree culture, finding and harvesting medicinal plants and teaching survival skills. Alan Rollins, CEO of the Kee Tas Kee Now Tribal Council, said he's thrilled the education authority is finally operational after more than 20 years of trying to get it up and running. "This has been a long, long process," Rollins said. "This was a coming together of a number of First Nations to work co-operatively." A single board for First Nations schools may seem long overdue, Rollins said. But many communities saw their culture and language taken from them during the residential school system and only gained control of their education 30 years ago. Things are moving quickly now with the introduction of the education authority, Rollins said. "They have done in 30-odd years what took the province over a century to do," he said. "I think that's kind of like, greased-lightning speed." Isolation challenges As their first year wraps up, there are already signs of success. Attendance and graduation rates in the schools have improved, according to David Eggen, Alberta's education minister. But there have also been challenges. The authority was desperate for teachers in early September. Story continues The isolation can make it difficult for schools to recruit and retain teachers, said superintendent Daphne Mai'Stoina. "The isolation factor is big," Mai'Stoina said. "It's huge." Eggen, who attended one of the education authority's winter camps, said teaching in the communities is a unique opportunity. "It's a wonderful place to teach," he said. "There's no two ways about it. "Many people thrive in that environment, but they need to have those supports every step of the way." Funding gap Those supports are harder to come by at on-reserve schools as they are funded federally, not by the province. Federally-funded schools receive far less money, Eggen said. "With that funding gap, students are just naturally not getting as good of a quality education," he said. In 2016, the Alberta government gave the authority $2.1 million in funding as a kick start. "We're trying to bridge that gap and also encourage the federal government to pay their fair share, too," Eggen said. Eggen said he watched the authority closely to see what worked and what didn't, lessons the province will apply to the Maskwacis education authority, set to be formally announced Wednesday. Maskwacis will be able to take lessons from Kee Tas Kee Now in dealing with isolation, communication and recruiting teachers and apply them to its education authority, Eggen said. For Rollins, the lessons learned were to be expected. "We are talking about five First Nations operating six schools in semi-isolation in north-central Alberta, so there's no urban environment to lean on," he said. "We're just out there, in the pine trees, trying to do the right thing. "It's been one heck of a lot of fun, and I think these communities are starting to get there." Mai'Stoina said joining an education authority may not be for every First Nation. A much larger nation, like Siksika Nation in southern Alberta, might want to keep its education separate from other First Nations, she said. "A lot of First Nations want their autonomy, and that's perfectly fine," she said. But for smaller nations, pooling resources can help improve education outcomes, Mai'Stoina said. Kee Tas Kee Now is already accepting three more schools from Northlands School Division next year. And though the education authority is currently Cree only, all parties are open to accepting nearby nations that speak other Indigenous languages. It's a partnership Mai'Stoina said she's happy to build, if there's interest. "Ultimately, all of this is for the children," she said. "There is so much room for improvement, but at least we know where we're going and we have a good, strong organization to be able to move forward." @kylemuzyka kyle.muzyka@cbc.ca By John Benny (Reuters) - Baytex Energy Corp will buy rival Raging River Exploration Inc for C$2.8 billion ($2.13 billion), the Canadian oil and gas producer said on Monday, becoming the latest company to bet big on Canada's vast shale reserves. Oil producers have made a beeline for the Duvernay and Montney formations, known for their light oil which is easier to refine and cheaper to produce than northern Alberta's oil sands crude. Seven Generations and Encana Corp are already among the leading Canadian producers operating in the two regions, while Chevron Corp announced its first Canadian shale development in the Duvernay in November. The oil sands boom dates back two decades, when improved technology, rising crude prices and fears of global oil shortages sparked a rush to develop the world's third-largest reserves. However, in the last five years, much of that investment has migrated south as U.S. shale firms pioneered new drilling techniques and flooded global oil markets with cheaper-to-produce crude. Earlier this year, the Canadian heavy oil discount widened significantly against the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) as growing oil stockpiles couldn't be moved out of the resource-rich province of Alberta due to transport bottlenecks. After the announcement of Monday's deal, shares of both companies fell and analysts pointed to investor skepticism about the all-stock deal and a low premium for Raging River shareholders. The Baytex deal, the second all-stock acquisition in the Canadian oil industry this year after Vermilion Energy's buyout of Spartan Energy, sends investors the message that capital is not available for large-scale cash transactions, said Lyndon Dunkley, an analyst at Beacon Securities. Baytex's offer 1.36 Baytex shares for each Raging River share represents a 10 percent premium to Raging River's Friday closing price, according to Reuters calculations. The premium was much lower than investors' expectations, Dunkley said. "It's just not what we believe the market was expecting as an outcome for the strategic repositioning process (Raging River) announced in March," Dunkley added. Raging River has since March explored strategic options for its business, including selling certain assets. The combination of Baytex and Raging River will be led by Baytex Chief Executive Officer Edward LaFehr once the deal closes in August, Baytex said. The companies expect to produce a combined 100,000 to 105,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2019 and expect capital expenditure of between C$750 million and C$850 million. (Reporting by Parikshit Mishra and John Benny in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila and Shounak Dasgupta) VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pacific Rim Cobalt Corp. (CSE:BOLT) (FRANKFURT:NXFE) (OTCQB:PCRCF) (the Company or Pacific Rim Cobalt), wishes to make the following statements regarding recent market activity concerning its common shares (the Common Shares) traded on the OTCQB marketplace. The Company became aware of certain promotional activity on its securities on June 13, 2018 when it received correspondence from OTC Markets. The Company has no knowledge of any promotional activity other than its understanding that there appears to have been promotional emails describing the prospects of its business and the investment opportunity related to its securities. Although the Company has no way of directly correlating such promotions to their impact on its securities, the effect of this on the Companys securities may have resulted in an increase in trading volume and an increase in share price. However, it should also be noted that during the timeframe of such increases, the Company had issued press releases announcing the undertaking of a processing options study (February 26), advancement of its 2018 work program (March 27), commencement of a drill program (April 24) and commencement of a topographical study (June 11), and the Company believes these announcements also likely contributed to such increases. The Company routinely responds to inquiries from shareholders, potential investors, and investment analysts, and generates its own marketing materials. However, to the Companys knowledge, neither the Company, its officers, directors, any controlling shareholders, or any third party service providers have, directly, or indirectly, authorized or been involved in any way (including payment to a third party) with the creation or distribution of promotional materials that make any exaggerated or misleading claims about the Company or its securities. Since June 1, 2017, the Company has engaged the following third-party providers of investor relations, public relations, marketing and other related services: Full Service Media Inc., One22 Media, LLC, Native Ads Inc., Public Eye Consulting Busche and BlackX Management GMBH. The Company provided factual information and materials to such third-party providers and had limited editorial control over content produced. Upon inquiry of management, directors, control persons and third party service providers, during the past 90 days, Steven Vanry, Chief Financial Officer of the Company, purchased an aggregate of 15,000 common shares of the Company, Sean Bromley, Director of the Company purchased an aggregate 78,750 common shares and exercised 18,750 common share purchase warrants of the Company, and Ranjeet Sunder, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company, purchased an aggregate of 186,500 common shares of the Company. The Company is unaware of any such persons having executed any sales transactions during such time period. Such transactions were in accordance with the Company's insider trading policy and were reported with the System for Electronic Disclosure (www.SEDI.ca). The Company has not issued any convertible debt or equity instruments that allow conversion to equity securities at prices constituting a discount to the current market rate at the time of issuance. About Pacific Rim Cobalt Pacific Rim Cobalt Corp. is a Canadian publicly listed company currently focused on the development of cobalt projects within Indonesia. Its TNM cobalt project encompasses cobalt and nickel mineralization as well as excellent infrastructure for year-round development activities. The Company believes cobalt will be the next dominant investment trend related to the critical components of lithium-ion batteries. Cobalt is currently in a global supply deficit, has a vulnerable supply chain, and is part of an emerging sector with extraordinary potential. Pacific Rim believes that the quality of our assets and our proximity to markets give us the opportunity to be a leader in the cobalt development space. CONTACT Pacific Rim Cobalt Corp. Ranjeet Sundher President and CEO (604) 922-8272 rsundher@pacificrimcobalt.com Steve Vanry CFO & Director (604) 922-8272 steve@vanrycap.com Sean Bromley Director & Investor Contact (778) 985-8934 sean@theparmargroup.com Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements Statements in this news release that are forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties concerning the specific factors disclosed here and elsewhere in both Pacific Rim Cobalts periodic filings with Canadian securities regulators. When used in this news release, words such as will, plan, estimate, expect, intend, potential, should, and similar expressions, are forward-looking statements. Information provided in this document is necessarily summarized and may not contain all available material information. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding future oriented events and other statements that are not facts. Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by management based on the business and markets in which Pacific Rim Cobalt operates, are inherently subject to significant operational, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. Such forward-looking statements should therefore be construed in light of such factors. Although Pacific Rim Cobalt has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements, there can be other factors that cause results, performance or achievements not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate or that managements expectations or estimates of future developments, circumstances or results will materialize. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this news release are made as of the date of this news release, and Pacific Rim Cobalt disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise such information, except as required by applicable law, and Pacific Rim Cobalt does not assume any liability for disclosure relating to any other company herein. Party spokesperson Catherine Major told Radio-Canada that the Conservatives discovered "unacceptable comments" on Hugues Bonneau's Facebook page and that he "offered his resignation as soon as he was contacted." "We condemn all racist and xenophobic statements and these words in no way represent the position of our party," Major said. Bonneau became the president of the Conservative Association of Riviere-du-Nord on May 4, according to the association's Facebook page. At the same time, he was active in at least two of La Meute's regional groups. H Loup Garou Bonneau is also a member of the La Meute group in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. Group hold anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim views La Meute members have organized, or participated in, several recent demonstrations calling for tighter border controls following the increase in asylum seekers crossing into Quebec from the U.S. The group says current immigration and multicultural policies threaten Quebec society. Its members frequently post Islamophobic comments online. Contacted by Radio-Canada, Bonneau sought to portray La Meute as a moderate group of political activists. "It is unfortunate because once again we [La Meute] are associated with extremists, whereas we are just ordinary citizens who hold the Liberal Party to account." Other parties respond Liberal Party spokesperson Braeden Caley stated in an email, "Hatred has no place in our politics and these reports are certainly very alarming. We need leadership that brings people together and no political party should welcome the participation of those who are trying to divide us." Riviere-du-Nord's Bloc Quebecois MP Rheal Fortin said La Meute does not represent his riding's values. NDP MP Alexandre Boulerice, who represents RosemontLa Petite-Patrie's, told Radio-Canada, "It is very disturbing and I hope that the Conservative Party will take these revelations seriously. We are talking about an extreme right organization that is openly racist." Close to 2,000 crane operators abandoned major work sites right across Quebec Monday, virtually paralyzing construction in a wildcat strike to protest against a reduction in the number of hours required to pilot a crane. The Commission de la construction du Quebec (CCQ), which regulates the construction industry, has declared the strike illegal, warning protesters and their union that they could face tens of thousands of dollars in fines. The operators take issue with a new rule that allows workers with little training to operate a crane even if they do not have a professional crane operator's diploma, said their union, FTQ-Construction, in a news release Monday. The union said it did not organize the pressure tactic, however, it supports the crane operators' concerns. "Crane operators have a dangerous job, and the requirement that they have a DEP [professional diploma] ensures that anyone operating a crane or a boom truck has had solid training," the union said. Since the introduction of the DEP in 1989, it said, accidents involving cranes on Quebec work sites have decreased by 66 per cent. The union has filed a complaint with Quebec's ombudsman, calling the rule change which went into effect May 14 a safety concern not just for workers but also for the public, since cranes often move heavy objects overhead in densely populated areas. The workers have been stepping up pressure tactics for more than a month, beginning with a demonstration in front of Premier Philippe Couillard's Montreal office on May 5. Last week, the crane operators working on the new Champlain Bridge deserted that construction site. On June 9, a crane was set on fire in a parking lot in the borough of Riviere-des-PrairiesPointe-aux-Trembles in Montreal's east end, and police have since confirmed the fire was intentionally set with the use of accelerants. Shortage of crane operators Guillaume Houle, spokesperson for the Association de la construction du Quebec (ACQ), which represents construction companies, could not confirm how many job sites are affected by the strike. Story continues Houle told Radio-Canada Monday that operators play an an important role on any major construction site, and "with one day of delay, we have major consequences." Construction projects are on tight deadlines, he said, and crane operators play a crucial role in meeting those deadlines. There has been a shortage of crane operators in the industry since 2009, and after lengthy negotiations, new rules were adopted to help mitigate the issue, Houle said. The rules were adopted in partnership with the CCQ, he said. Houle said crane operators who have their diploma are still given preferential treatment, and "that's why we don't understand the union's demands right now." Workers against strike report intimidation The CCQ said striking workers could face prosecution and fines for breaking the collective agreement, which is in effect until 2021. Fines range from about $8,000 to $80,000 per day for associations or association representatives. Workers who participate could be fined up to $199 a day. Crane operators who showed up to work reported being intimidated by their striking colleagues Monday morning, CCQ spokesperson Melanie Malenfant said. "There are currently workers who want to work and employers who want to see their jobs go forward, who have the right to do so, but who cannot because they are afraid of reprisals," she said. Malenfant said 100 inspectors have been deployed to work sites across Quebec to "gather evidence" that could be used in court proceedings. (Reuters) - The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will send a technical specialist to observe a Tesla Inc examination into the causes of a battery fire last Friday involving one of the electric automaker's Model S vehicles in California, the agency said on Monday. A spokesman for the NTSB said that observing the examination into the fire in West Hollywood will "provide the agency with an opportunity to learn more about fires in all types of battery-powered vehicles." The safety board is investigating four Tesla crashes since last year and looking at post-crash fire issues and the use of Autopilot. Earlier this month, the NTSB issued a preliminary report saying the driver of a Tesla Model X car using Autopilot did not have his hands on the steering wheel in the six seconds before a fatal crash in California in March. A spokeswoman for Tesla said in an email that the battery fire on Friday was "an extraordinarily unusual occurrence, and we are investigating the incident to find out what happened." She wrote that the cabin of the Model S was unaffected by the fire, allowing the driver to exit the vehicle safely. "While our customer had time to safely exit the car, we are working to understand the cause of the fire," she added. (Reporting by Nick Carey; Editing by David Gregorio) With condemnation streaming in from all sides, U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration continue to staunchly defended their new zero-tolerance border policy. Critics of the policy, from current and former first ladies to the U.N. to Canadian politicians, have decried the way it separates parents and small children at the border, with children being housed in shelters with strangers while their parents await sentencing in separate facilities. Amidst pressure to respond, PM Justin Trudeau released a statement on Wednesday condemning the Trump administration. What is happening in the United States is unacceptable. I cannot imagine what these families are going through. Obviously this is not the way we do things in Canada, Trudeau told reporters. The Prime Minister had previously said he didnt want to play politics in the U.S. scenario, but public outrage has reached a bubbling point. So far, the U.S. government has separated 1,995 undocumented children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border between April 19 and May 31, officials confirm. The practice has been labelled traumatizing, cruel and immoral. But Trump says its necessary for the security and stability of America, and that the separations are the result of a law enacted before he came into office. The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility it wont be, he said at the White House on June 18. Trump has argued existing law requires border security to separate minors from their guardians when they cross into America legally, but thats not true, the New York Times reports. While the zero-tolerance policy of detaining, prosecuting and deporting illegal immigrants has been around since the Bush administration, New York Magazine reports both George W. Bush and Barack Obama were opposed to separating children from their parents, and avoided doing so. Still, Trump denies that separating families was the objective of his administrations policy, saying instead that it is an unfortunate outcome of the zero-tolerance policy they believe is a necessary tool for protecting Americas borders. Story continues Response in Canada Speaking to CBC, immigration lawyer Arghavan Gerami said detention is always the last resort in Canada, and that decisions are made in the best interest of the child. Separation of parent and child is a policy, she said, that would never stand here. If the most vocal Canadian opponents of the practice reflect the sentiments of Canadians in general, she could be right. The Toronto Star published an editorial cartoon by Theo Moudakis on June 19 that satirizes the sequel to the popular musical Come From Away with a poster showing border patrol officers separating a mother and child. Opinion | Theo Moudakis: Come From Away 2 https://t.co/SRs3BP1T2Z via @torontostar Yvonne O'Reilly CRSP (@YvonneOHS) June 19, 2018 Vancouver-based journalist Travis Lupick shared an article highlighting the harm caused by separating children from their parents. 'What separation from parents does to children' https://t.co/4RA2Ebqfs2 "Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites.wreaking dramatic and long-term damage" Travis Lupick (@tlupick) June 19, 2018 NDP MPs Don Davies and Jenny Kwan have both called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to publicly denounce the Trump administrations separation tactics and cancel the Canada-U.S. Safe Third Country Agreement. Under the agreement, refugee claimants seeking entry to Canada from the U.S. must request refugee protection in the U.S. before making claims in Canada. Trumps US is separating children from their parents as punishment for seeking refugee status & refusing to acknowledge those fleeing domestic & gang violence as refugees. UN calls this cruel & unusual. NDP asks Trudeau to now admit the US is not a safe 3rd country he refuses. Don Davies MP (@DonDavies) June 18, 2018 Despite pressure to publicly condemn the practice, Justin Trudeau has said he wont get involved. What we will not do is play politics with this, Trudeau said during question period on June 18. Meanwhile, Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu has made the controversial prediction that if Canada legalizes cannabis, it will open the door to people coming in from Mexico to take over Canadas drug trade. What do you think? Should Canada consider adopting harsher border policies? Let us know by responding to the poll above or have your say in the comments below. Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. . ..Abu Yehuda..18 June '18..Great swaths of land in the Negev desert near the Gaza strip, agricultural land and nature preserves formerly the habitats of numerous endangered plant and animal species, have been reduced to ash and smoke by Palestinian fire-kites and balloon-borne incendiary devices during the past few weeks. The entire area is blackened with the smoke from fires that are being set faster than Israeli firefighters can put them out.Our powerful army dithers, ever pursuing its apparent goal of fighting wars without hurting anyone. Today I understand that a car belonging to one of the leaders of the bombing campaign was destroyed by an airstrike, probably a drone-launched missile. The car was parked and empty. Thatll teach him.Israeli officials are afraid of the legal consequences of taking effective action against those who are launching the kites and balloons. They are afraid that they will be dragged into the International Criminal Court (even though Israel did not sign the treaty creating it and does not consider itself bound by its decisions), if the army kills any of the civilians that are burning our country. Those under the age of 18 are counted as children, and as you know one of the themes of anti-IDF propaganda is the false claim that we deliberately target children.Purposely burning agricultural land is a war crime. Attacking from heavily populated civilian areas and employing child soldiers are war crimes. Hamas and PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) dont care, of course. Their whole strategic plan is to take advantage of the fact that Israel considers herself bound by the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions and other treaties, while they permit themselves to do anything that will kill Jews.They dont do it by themselves. They have help.Israel is always required to fight an n+1 front war, with n representing the enemies that are shooting at us, Hamas, PIJ, Hezbollah, and the rest. The additional one is the international diplomatic and legal system, led by our friends in the European Union.In the past week, two Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria have been partly demolished, because homes have been found to be built on private Palestinian land. This means that regardless of whether the land was considered state land when the homes were built a Palestinian claim, sometimes not even by an individual owner, that the land was at one time used for agricultural purposes by Palestinians, has been accepted by Israels Supreme Court. The remedy is invariably that any structure that encroaches on such land will be demolishedRecently, the Knesset passed a law (the Regulation Law ) that allows the state to financially compensate the Palestinian owners when the land was not considered private at the time the structures were built, instead of bulldozing the buildings (this can be tricky, since there usually are no records that might prove ownership in the sense familiar to those living in normal countries). This law didnt apply in these cases, because the Supreme Court had ordered the demolitions some months ago, before the law was passed. The Court has now frozen the law awaiting its decision on various petitions against it.Naturally, our European friends and home-grown champions of Palestinian rights were scandalized by this law. Its legalized land theft, they say. This is quite an exaggeration, since the law calls for the Palestinians to be paid above-market value for the land, which they are not using and may not have used for decades (if ever). Eminent domain proceedings in the US, in which an owner can befrom property where he is living or using for business, are far harsher. But my guess is that despite this, when the Supreme Court rules on the petitions filed against it, they will overthrow the law.Now you may wonder who files these petitions, the ones against the Regulation Law and the ones claiming that Israeli structures have been built on private Palestinian land. The answer is that there is a whole industry in Israel of human rights non-governmental organizations that employs a battery of expensive and dedicated lawyers to fight the State of Israel. Thanks to Israels extraordinary system in whichcitizen may petition the Supreme Court on almostmatter, regardless of whether he or she is affected by it, left-wing groups like Peace Now,, and others can and do involve themselves in these matters.But who supports the organizations, pays their staffs and their lawyers? Probably no more than a few percent of Israelis support what most see as their extremist ideology. And yet left-wing NGOs are everywhere, filming and trying to provoke IDF soldiers doing their duty, finding Palestinians who will testify that their grandfathers worked the land on such-and-such a hill where today an Israeli settlement stands, and filing petition after petition in the Israeli courts, particularly the Supreme Court.The money does not come from Israel. It doesnt even come from the Palestinians, whose leaders are happy to skim millions from the aid they get from the US and Europe, primarily to live well or put into their Swiss bank accounts. It comes, unsurprisingly, mostly from Europaen governments, where millions of Euros are funneled into organizations like Peace Now,, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Breaking the Silence,, and many others. Somewhat less important donors include the American New Israel Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.These foreign-funded NGOs are active in the Israeli and international legal arenas, as well as the international propaganda campaign to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel. Some explicitly support BDS, despite the official positions of their donors. For example, several of them recently sent a letter to the American Secretary of State calling for an arms embargo against Israel because of its actions to defend its border.Today the NGO Monitor organization, which keeps track of anti-Israel NGOs and their funding, released a report showing that the European Union has given large grants (hundreds of thousands of Euros) to several NGOs to press war crimes accusations against IDF officers and soldiers and other Israeli officials in foreign courts. This sort of thing may in part explain the timidity of the IDF to take effective action against the arsonists of Gaza.While our Arab and Iranian enemies have had little success in damaging our Jewish state with wars and terrorism, our European ones have succeeded with their Euros to roll back settlement activities in Judea/Samaria, resulting in the expulsion of Jews from their homes. They have fought tooth and nail against our governments efforts to deport illegal migrants, whom it rightly considers a demographic and social threat. They have hamstrung the IDFs response to arson terrorism from Gaza, and turned the main concern of the IDF from defeating our enemies to avoiding legal entanglements.The message this sends to the terrorists of Hamas, the PLO, and the PIJ is simple: you have a green light the Jews are too weak to fight back.There are solutions to these problems. Two years ago, the Knesset passed a relatively weak transparency law requiring some NGOs to report contributions from foreign governments. It needs to be strengthened in fact, there is no reason for Israel to permit foreign governments to intervene in our domestic affairs at all. Opponents will tell you, precisely inverting the truth, that limiting the influence of foreign-funded NGOs is anti-democratic, as if democracy requires subverting the will of Israeli voters! But there is only one reason that such legislation is opposed in the Knesset, and that is because some members are themselves treasonously sucking at the European teat. That has to stop.The Supreme Court has far too much power and zero accountability. No other democratic country has such a situation. The balance of power between the branches of government must be restored.The other necessary change is a change of attitude. The more Israel refrains from self-defense because of fear of the legal consequences, the more she will be threatened with such consequences. The cycle must be broken, both because it prevents us from acting and because it broadcasts weakness to our enemies. The arson kites need to be met with deadly force, not endless debate. Jewish residents of the territories should have at least equal rights as Arabs, and not be evicted from their homes as a result of legal catch-22s. Illegal migrants should be deported (see here and here ).The legal and diplomatic decks are stacked against us today, partly because of our own actions. We need to get over it and defend ourselves. I am a Cat Woman. My self-appointed mission in life is to save the feline world! To accomplish this mission, I get cats fixed. Perhaps my mission might be slightly delusional. This blog is a mishmash of wishful thinking, rants, experiences as I remember them and of course, cat stories and cat photos. I have a nonprofit now, to help keep the cats here cared for and to fix community cats. Happy Cat Club formed in 2015. Currently, we are on a mission to fix 10,000 cats. The fate of whether New Yorkers may legally sell ice cream made with beer or hard cider (hell, why not both?) now rests in Governor Andrew Cuomo's hands, as the New York State Assembly passed a bill yesterday that would legalize ice cream made with those adult beverages. (The State Senate passed their version of the bill last week.) The boozy ice cream would be limited to 5 percent alcohol by volume, and would require labeling and warning statements. Sales to customers under 21 years old would be prohibited. Wine ice cream was made legal in New York State back in 2008, and then snack-sized wine ice-cream cups were legalized last year. We're still holding out for Chateauneuf-du-Pape Dippin' Dots. "Farmers and brewers already enjoy a great symbiotic relationship and this legislation will clear the way for a new product that will capitalize on homegrown New York ingredients," said the Senate bill's sponsor, Senator James L. Seward, on Thursday. He also revealed that the bill was suggested by a central New York restaurant, Gilligan's Island, that makes homemade ice cream. The bill now awaits the governor's signature. Cuomo been a cheerleader for New York's craft beer industry, cideries, and dairy farming, so a beer-cider-ice cream law seems like a no-brainer. MONDAY, June 18, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Many aging Americans are both overweight and burdened by arthritis of the knees. New research shows that shedding those excess pounds can mean shedding joint pain, too. "This study adds to the evidence that weight loss is one of the few truly effective nonsurgical measures to reduce pain and improve function in overweight patients with knee osteoarthritis," noted Dr. Matthew Hepinstall, a joint specialist who wasn't involved in the new research. "As an orthopedic surgeon treating several hundred patients per year with knee osteoarthritis, I see the detrimental effects of excess body weight on a daily basis," said Hepinstall, associate director of the Center for Joint Preservation & Reconstruction at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. It's estimated that more than 250 million adults worldwide have knee osteoarthritis, a gradual deterioration of the joint. The new study was led by Stephen Messier of Wake Forest University and published June 18 in Arthritis Care & Research. In earlier research, Messier's team found that weight loss of 10 percent or more over 18 months led to a 50 percent reduction in pain and significant improvements in mobility for people with arthritic knees. The new study found greater weight loss led to better outcomes for those overweight or obese patients with knee osteoarthritis. In analyzing the data on 240 such patients, the researchers report that a weight loss of 20 percent or more led to an additional 25 percent reduction in pain. The patients also had continued improvements in physical function, compared to people who dropped only 10 percent of their weight over the study period. The more weight the person lost, the better they fared in terms of discomfort, overall function, the distance they were able to walk in six minutes, and their physical and mental health-related quality of life. Two measurements of knee health -- joint compression force and levels of an inflammatory marker called IL-6 -- also improved as patients shed excess pounds. "A 10 percent weight loss is the established target recommended by the National Institutes of Health as an initial weight loss for overweight and obese adults," Messier noted in a journal news release. "The importance of our study is that a weight loss of 20 percent or greater -- double the previous standard -- results in better clinical outcomes, and is achievable without surgical or pharmacologic intervention." Hepinstall acknowledged that "weight loss is easy for physicians to recommend but hard for patients to accomplish." He added, "This study reinforces the message that the typical results of weight loss are beneficial enough to justify the effort required in patients with knee osteoarthritis." More information The American Academy of Family Physicians has more on knee osteoarthritis. TUESDAY, June 19, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Michael Wright was just 16 when he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and although his friends supported him, he always felt different. "I would do my injections and testing in private [in another room or even the bathroom] to avoid having conversations about diabetes with people," he said. It was also to avoid stares from strangers or awkward questions about how he got the blood sugar disease. People would sometimes ask, "Was it from eating too much fast food?" Wright recalled. For some teens and young adults, feeling stigmatized leads them to ignore or forgo their diabetes management. This kind of stigma can lead to worse diabetes care, and a team of researchers (including Wright while he was a college student) recently examined the issue. The Canadian online survey of nearly 400 teens and young adults (ages 14 to 24) with type 1 diabetes found that stigma is pervasive. Nearly two-thirds reported feeling stigma because of their disease. And feeling stigmatized was linked to a twofold higher risk of poor blood sugar management, the study found. "People who felt stigma had slightly less of a sense of well-being. Stigma doesn't make people feel good, and it can impair how the condition is managed," said senior study author Dr. Kaberi Dasgupta. She's an associate professor of medicine at McGill University in Montreal. With type 1 diabetes, the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy, insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. Insulin is a hormone that helps usher the sugar from foods into the cells to be used as fuel. Someone with type 1 diabetes no longer makes enough insulin on their own, and must replace it with injections or an insulin pump. The study also looked at severe low blood sugar levels (hypoglycemia) that required assistance from another person to treat. Hypoglycemia occurs when someone takes too much insulin, causing shaking, sweating, a fast heart rate and changes in behavior. If blood sugar levels drop too low, passing out and seizures can happen, according to the U.S. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. "Among those who reported stigma, they were three times more likely to have had severe hypoglycemia," Dasgupta noted. They were also more likely to have poor blood sugar management. But, she noted, it's difficult to know which came first. She said that having a severe hypoglycemia episode could certainly make someone more self-conscious, but it's also possible that feeling stigmatized might have led someone to forgo blood sugar testing, which could lead to severe low blood sugar. "It's hard to know, but I think it's probably a combination. I don't think it's all perceived," Dasgupta said. The study was published recently in the Journal of Medical Internet Research. Dr. Mary Pat Gallagher is director of the Pediatric Diabetes Center at Hassenfeld Children's Hospital at NYU Langone Health in New York City. "It's a very normal thing for this age group to feel different anyway, so we have to come up with some creative solutions to work with them where they are," she said. "Diabetes management doesn't have to be 100 percent by the book all the time. Work with a child on how they'll be comfortable but safe," Gallagher suggested. She described a patient who wouldn't inject insulin in front of friends. Gallagher convinced him to try a particularly discreet insulin pump, and he now gets his insulin when he needs it. And Gallagher noted that the study found a feeling of stigma doesn't end in the teen years. "Stigma was reported in more of the young adults than in the adolescents. As you begin your careers, maybe you're more conscious of being perceived as having a vulnerability or weakness in the workplace, instead of being viewed as capable," she said. The study authors -- including Wright -- created a virtual support group for type 1 teens and young adults in Canada. "I would like people to know that living with type 1 diabetes is a full-time job which we are not allowed to quit or take a vacation from," said Wright, now 22 and a college graduate. "It requires 24/7 monitoring of insulin and blood sugar levels, which can become very overwhelming. [The support group] has helped me tremendously in not feeling alone with this disease." More information Learn more about living with type 1 diabetes from the American Diabetes Association. The Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy on immigration has separated around 2,000 immigrant children from their families between April 19th and May 31st, according to the Department of Homeland Security. This past Sunday a select number of journalists were allowed to tour the largest Border Patrol processing facility for the first time, where they saw children and adults imprisoned inside chain link cages. Horror stories continue to emerge from the new enforcement strategy: A woman from Honduras says her daughter was ripped away from her while she was breastfeeding at a detention center, and ProPublica obtained audio of a Border Patrol officer derisively comparing the sound of wailing children to an orchestra. If you're wondering what you can do to channel your outrage and empathy, here are some active ways you can help the families being separated at the border. Donate. If you're not sure where to start, ActBlue distributes money evenly to 14 organizations working to help protect children who are separated from their families. Some organizations under ActBlue include ACLU, Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) and La Union del Pueblo Entero, a Rio Grande-based grassroots organization founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. You can donate to the listed organizations above separately, as well. There are also the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), which is the largest immigration nonprofit in Texas and the Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee, which helps to oppose migrant detention. Contact your elected officials. Call up your elected officials and voice your concerns about Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policy. The ACLU has put together a helpful call sheet that has a contact list of Senators and a script on what to say. If you'd like to get involved with your representatives on a local level, check out Who Represents Me: NYC, a tool created by the Graduate Center at CUNY in partnership with the League of Women Voters of the City of New York. The handy website lets you see who your city representatives are and provides contacts so you can get in touch with them. Mark your calendar for Saturday, June 30th. On June 30th, cities across the country will come together in protest of the Trump administration's strict immigration policy. The Families Belong Together rally will have a number of events throughout the New York City. Some events for June 30th include a march to Trump Tower on 5th Avenue, a rally at Rockaway Beach, and a community discussion in the Bronx. You also have the option of creating your own event for the day, too. Sign a Petition. The New York Immigration Coalition released a Google Doc that has a number of resources, including petitions you can sign online. Here are some petitions calling on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, President Trump, and even Ivanka Trump to desist. MONDAY, June 18, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Using the psychiatric drug lithium early in pregnancy may raise the risk of birth defects -- but not as much as previously thought, a large new study suggests. Researchers found that women who used lithium during the first trimester were more likely to have a baby with a birth defect, compared to pregnant women who had a mental health disorder but did not take lithium. But the absolute risk was lower than previous studies had suggested, said researcher Dr. Veerle Bergink, a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Birth defects affected slightly more than 7 percent of children born to moms who used lithium during the first trimester. That compared with just over 4 percent of children in the group not exposed to lithium. Experts said the findings offer women and doctors more information to use in making treatment decisions. Lithium was approved in the United States almost 50 years ago. It is mainly used to treat bipolar disorder -- a mental health condition that causes severe shifts in mood, energy and ability to think clearly. People go through periods of depression and bouts of "mania," where they feel elated, but may also become irritable, reckless and impulsive. Close to 3 percent of Americans have bipolar disorder, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. For people with the condition, Bergink said, lithium is considered the most effective medication for stabilizing mood. However, she explained, its use has been limited in pregnant women and women who might become pregnant. That's because studies have linked the drug to a heightened risk of birth defects, such as malformations affecting the heart, particularly when it's used in the first trimester. But a "major challenge" in that kind of research is separating the effects of medication from any effects of the underlying mental health disorder, said Dr. Katherine Wisner, a perinatal psychiatrist and professor at Northwestern University in Chicago. The new study compared women who used lithium in the first trimester with women who also had bipolar disorder or depression but did not use the drug. The goal was to zero in on the effects of lithium itself. Wisner, who was not involved in the research, called the findings "welcome and long overdue." Wisner is a member of the Organization of Teratology Information Specialists. The group runs the MotherToBaby service, which provides research-based information on various pregnancy exposures. The new findings are based on more than 22,000 women from six countries who gave birth between 1997 and 2015. All had a mood disorder -- including bipolar disorder or depression -- and 727 of them used lithium during the first trimester. Overall, the study found, women on lithium did not have increased risks of any pregnancy or delivery complications. But their babies were more likely to have a "major malformation" -- such as heart defects, neural tube defects (such as spina bifida) and malformations of the penis. Those risks, however, must be weighed against the risks of stopping lithium, Bergink and Wisner said. "The risks associated with lithium treatment must be balanced with the risks of relapse for women who require this drug to treat bipolar disorder," Wisner said. That relapse, she noted, may result in mania, depression, psychosis or self-harm. Bergink said some options during pregnancy can include lowering the lithium dose, or going off the drug during the first trimester, then starting again -- all done under medical supervision. There are other medications for bipolar disorder. But they may carry pregnancy risks, too. The drug valproate (Depakote), for example, should not be used, Bergink said. It carries a significant risk of serious birth defects like spina bifida. Antipsychotic medications are another option. The evidence shows they do not carry a birth defect risk, Bergink noted. But they are typically not as effective as lithium, she said. The bottom line, said Bergink, is that women should talk to their doctors about their treatment options before they become pregnant. "That way, you'll have a good plan in place that will get you through your pregnancy," she said. Those one-on-one discussions are crucial, Wisner agreed. "Each woman brings her unique illness course and values to the decision-making," she said. The study findings were published online June 18 in The Lancet Psychiatry. More information The National Alliance on Mental Illness has more on bipolar disorder. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram Beirut, June 19, 2018The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on Israeli authorities to release Palestinian freelance photojournalist Bilal Hamid al-Taweel or disclose charges against him. Israeli security forces arrested al-Taweel at his home in the southern West Bank city of Hebron on June 11, according to news reports and the regional press freedom group Skeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom. The journalists brother, Shaaban al-Taweel, told Skeyes that soldiers broke into the familys house at dawn, arrested al-Taweel, and seized his cell phone, laptop, and camera, without giving a reason. Another of the photographers brothers, Hamdan al-Taweel, told CPJ the family has not been told the reason for his arrest, and that a hearing scheduled for June 14 in his case was postponed to June 20. Israeli security forces should immediately release Palestinian freelancer Bilal Hamid al-Taweel or explain why they arrested him, said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour from Washington, D.C. Authorities should return his confiscated equipment and stop interfering with journalists ability to do their work. The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately reply to CPJs email requesting comment. According to the Palestinian prisoners support group Asra Media Office, al-Taweel is in Ofer prison, west of Ramallah. Al-Taweel mainly publishes photos and video of protests and life under occupation to his social media accounts, including Facebook and Instagram, and his work is sometimes picked up by media outlets, including the Hamas-affiliated agencies Quds News Network and Shehab News Agency, and the Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera. Recent work included covering the protests in Hebron over the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem in May, and photos and footage of Israeli checkpoints. The photographer is best known for a picture showing an attack on an Israeli soldier that was widely shared by news outlets in October 2015. According to news reports, Israel is considering introducing a law to outlaw photographing or filming soldiers. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram Washington D.C., June 18, 2018The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on Sudanese authorities to stop harassing the press by censoring news outlets, questioning journalists, and revoking reporters accreditation. In recent days, National Intelligence and State Security agents prevented the dailies Al-Tayar and Al-Youm al-Tali from distributing editions; questioned Shamael al-Nur, a reporter for the privately owned Al-Tayar, and Ahmed Younes, a correspondent for the London-based paper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, about their critical coverage; and revoked Youness press accreditation, according to the local press freedom group Sudanese Journalists Network and news reports. The National Intelligence and State Security service did not immediately respond to CPJs email requesting comment. Sudanese authorities cannot hide behind the censor every time a journalist expresses a critical opinion or exposes harsh realities, said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour. Sudanese authorities must stop harassing the independent press, and let the media work and publish freely. On June 14, security agents questioned Younes about his work and revoked the press credentials that allow the Khartoum-based journalist to work for a foreign outlet, Younes told the independent Sudanese broadcaster Radio Dabanga. Younes told the broadcaster he was questioned about his recent coverage and a report on alleged corruption, which he denies writing. The journalist added that he was not told if he will be able to get his accreditation back. Security agents questioned al-Nur on June 9 and 10 over her column in al-Tayar headlined The Siege, in which she criticized government officials over oil shortages, the Sudanese Journalists Network said in a statement. The agents did not say if any action would be taken against her, according to the statement. Security agents prevented al-Youm al-Tali from being distributed on June 14 and 15 by ordering the printing house to delay printing until the end of the day, the Sudanese Journalists Network said in a statement. The NISS order did not specify the reason for the delay. The June 14 edition included a column that criticized the ruling party and called on the Sudanese president, Omar Al-Bashir, to limit his travel costs, the Sudanese Journalists Network said in a statement. Osman Mirgani, the editor-in-chief of Al-Tayar, told Radio Dabanga that authorities ordered the print house to delay the distribution of his paper on four days from June 9 without giving a reason. The countrys security service has previously used print delays as a way to censor the news and force publications to incur significant financial losses. Earlier this month, CPJ documented how the National Intelligence and State Security service prevented the privately owned Al-Jarida from distributing an edition by causing delays at the printing press, resulting in a loss of 50,000 Sudanese pounds (US$2,770) for the paper. Central Water Commission (CWC) has signed collaboration agreement with search engine giant Google for flood forecasting and dissemination of flood related information to masses. This initiative will help crisis management agencies to deal extreme hydrological events in better manner for effective flood management in India under National Hydrology Project (NHP). Key Facts Under this collaboration, CWC will use state-of-the-art technological advances made by Google in field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning and geo-spatial mapping for effective management of water resources particularly in the field of flood forecasting and dissemination of flood related information to masses widely using dissemination platforms developed by Google. Under this Agreement, CWC and Google will share technical expertise to collaborate on Improving flood prediction systems, which will help provide location-targeted, actionable flood warnings, High priority research project utilizing Google Earth to help visualize and improve flood management. Cultural project to build online exhibitions on Rivers of India. Under this collaborative arrangement, Google will use high resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and vast computational resources and its technological expertise to generate flood inundation maps utilising level forecast input provided by CWC. This information will be disseminated with lead time of up to 3 days. The inundation forecasting will be done trial basis for flood season of 2018 and it will be scaled up in near future. Significance The collaborative arrangement will save of crore of rupees which would have been spent by government on acquiring high resolution DEM, high end computational resources and developing dissemination platforms widely used by masses. This would enable Government as well as disaster management organisations to identify well in advance locations and population, which are at risk from floods and require warnings and information. This initiative is expected to be milestone in flood management and in mitigating the flood losses. Central Water Commission (CWC) CWC is Indias apex technical organization in field of water resources functioning under Union Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation. It is mandated for initiating, coordinating in consultation of State Governments, schemes for control, utilization and conservation of water resources throughout the country. These schemes are meant for purpose of flood control, irrigation, navigation, drinking water supply and water power development. It is National Hydrology Project (NHP) NHP was launched by Ministry of Water Resources in 2016-17. It is World Bank assisted central sector scheme with pan India coverage. Its objective is to improve extent, quality and accessibility of water resources information, decision support system for floods and basin level resource assessment and planning and to strengthen capacity of targeted water resources professionals and management institutions in India. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has classified gaming addiction as mental health disorder in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 11. This is as per draft of new document that was released in December 2017. This classification will be used by health professionals across the globe to uniformly diagnose and classify risks for addictive gaming behaviour. WHO definition of gaming addiction WHO defines gaming disorder as pattern of gaming behaviour (video-gaming or digital-gaming) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increased priority given to gaming over other activities to such extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities. It also includes continuation or escalation of gaming despite occurrence of negative consequences. For its diagnosis, behaviour pattern must be of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning and normally have been evident for at least 12 months. Need Mental health experts and psychiatrists believe that internet and gaming addiction though affecting small population now, has become emerging psychological malady and it is likely to be major mental health problem in the coming years. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders-V, a diagnostic bible for mental health professionals published by American Psychiatric Association already has classified gaming disorder as mental health condition. Nearly 7% of population studied for gaming and internet addiction have exhibited depressive symptoms, somatisation and anxiety, including behavioural changes and sleep disturbances. International Classification of Diseases (ICD) ICD is the international standard diagnostic tool for epidemiology, health management and clinical purposes. Its full official name is International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. It is maintained by WHO and is revised periodically. ICD serves as foundation for identifying health trends and statistics worldwide. It is designed as health care classification system to provide system of diagnostic codes for classifying diseases, including nuanced classifications of wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances and external causes of injury or disease. It provides common language that allows health professionals to share health information across the globe. It contains around 55,000 unique codes for injuries, diseases and causes of death. It maps health conditions to corresponding generic categories together with specific variations, assigning for these designated code, up to six characters long. It also promotes international comparability in collection, processing, classification, and presentation of these statistics. ICD-11 It will be presented at World Health Assembly in May 2019 for adoption by WHO member states, and it will come into effect on January 1, 2022. It also has for first time added chapter on traditional systems of medicine. This will pave way for such treatments to be covered by insurance as insurance reimbursements based on ICD coding. The World Sustainable Gastronomy Day is observed every year on June 18 across the world. The day acknowledges gastronomy as cultural expression related to natural and cultural diversity of the world. It also reaffirms that all cultures and civilizations are contributors and crucial enablers of sustainable development. Gastronomy It is study of relationship between food and culture. It is art of preparing and serving rich or delicate and appetizing food, cooking styles of particular regions, and science of good eating. Background The World Sustainable Gastronomy Day was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) by adopting resolution A/RES/71/246 in December 2016. Observance of this day, emphasizes need to focus worlds attention on role that sustainable gastronomy can play, owing to its inter-linkages with three dimensions of sustainable development in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by promoting agricultural development, food security, nutrition, sustainable food production and conservation of biodiversity. Eight children who were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border last month as part of the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy have been moved to a private shelter on Long Island, Newsday reports. The children range in age from 6 to 12 years old, and are mostly from Central American countries, including Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. They were reportedly moved here not because of family connections in the region, but because the federal government is in desperate need of beds to house the children of parents they've detained. Between April 19th and May 31st, ICE agents separated around 2,000 kids from their families at the southern border, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The eight children who ended up in Long Island are staying at the Syosset-based MercyFirst group homes run by the Sisters of Mercy. Gerard McCaffery, president and CEO of the group, confirmed to Newsday that they are the only Long Island-based agency to have a contract with the federal government. Earlier this morning, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services confirmed that some children are also being held without their families in New York Citythough the spokesperson would not say where those children are located. The kids in Long Island are attending school at the agency's Syosset campus temporarily. Some of them may soon have local sponsors, but "everything is delayed because they have overwhelmed the system," according to New York Immigration Coalition policy director Anu Joshi. Placed in facilities more than 2,000 miles from where they last saw their parents, the young children are struggling. "Kids are very resilient but it doesnt take much for a kid to start crying and miss his mom," McCaffery told the newspaper. Yesterday, ProPublica obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which several Central American children can be heard sobbing as a CBP agent mocks them. Meanwhile, ICE agents in New York City are now reportedly imitating detectives and other law enforcement officials in order to detain and deport local immigrants. Ukrainian law enforcers ready to fight smuggling at customs PM Groysman The Cabinet and law enforcement agencies have developed a joint plan to combat smuggling. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter It said China takes around 20 percent of all U.S. crude exports. Oil prices fell nearly one percent on Tuesday as an escalating trade dispute between the United States and China triggered sharp selloffs in many global markets. Crude was also weighed down by expectations that producer cartel OPEC and key ally Russia will gradually increase output, as reported by Reuters. The United States and China are threatening punitive tariffs on each other's exports, which could include oil supplies, putting pressure on shares markets. Read alsoU.S. oil slumps as China threatens duty on U.S. crude imports Reuters Brent crude futures LCOc1 were at $74.69 per barrel at 06:46 GMT, down 65 cents, or 0.9 percent, from their last close. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures CLc1 were at $65.24 a barrel, down 61 cents, or 0.9 percent. Oil traders are closely watching a threat by China to react to U.S. tariffs by putting a 25 percent duty on U.S. crude oil imports, which have been surging since 2017 to a value of almost $1 billion per month. "The tariff war between the U.S. and China is showing signs of escalating," said Sukrit Vijayakar, director of energy oil consultancy Trifecta. "China recently hinted that it may levy tariffs on (U.S.) crude imports as well. This could make a huge dent in the U.S. bid to export oil," he added. Energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie said the United States "would find it hard to find an alternative market that is as big as China". It said China takes around 20 percent of all U.S. crude exports. Ukraine harvests 281,000 tonnes of grain as of June 19 The average yield of cereals is estimated at 3.26 tonnes per hectare. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Smuggling would have been impossible without involvement of law enforcers - Groysman According to the prime minister, smuggling costs the Ukrainian economy tens of billions of hryvnias. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Naftogaz is confident that the Stockholm court will rescind its decision to suspend the Stockholm Arbitration award, Kobolyev believes. Naftogaz on Tuesday served Gazprom with an order to freeze assets in England and Wales. The order was issued by the Commercial Court in London on June 18, 2018, to enforce the Stockholm arbitration award, whereby Gazprom owes Naftogaz US$2.6 billion. In addition to freezing assets, it requires Gazprom to provide Naftogaz with a list of all assets with a value greater than $50,000 located in England or Wales, according to the Naftogaz press service. The court has scheduled a hearing on the order for July 6, 2018. In the meantime, Gazprom is obligated to maintain assets in England and Wales equal to the value of the transit award. Naftogaz today has also notified the London offices of 17 banks doing business with Gazprom of that they may not facilitate any reduction in Gazprom's assets in England and Wales of the order against Gazprom. Banks that fail to comply could be penalized. The English court ruling was made in full knowledge of a temporary decision made on June 13, 2018, by the Svea Court of Appeal in Stockholm to suspend the enforcement of the transit award. On June 17, 2018, Naftogaz filed a pleading with the Stockholm court requesting that the court reverse its decision. In its request, Naftogaz submitted evidence refuting Gazproms allegations that the award had not been drafted in a proper manner. Naftogaz is confident that the Stockholm court will rescind its suspension decision in light of our submission. Despite media reports to the contrary, the Swedish court ruling does not suspend the award itself, it only suspends enforcement in Sweden. It is up to the courts of each individual country to determine, under its own national laws, whether the Swedish ruling suspends the enforcement of the award in such country. The Transit Award remains valid, and interest continues to accrue and we will seek enforcement in jurisdictions where enforcement is an option, says Andriy Kobolyev, CEO of Naftogaz. Half a block behind Manhattans federal courthouse, two blocks from City Hall, three blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge, and less than a mile from the hustle-and-bustle of Wall Street, sits a detention center that has been condemned by a United Nations human rights expert for exposing its inmates to conditions akin to torture. While reports of the horrendous conditions on Rikers Island helped spur Mayor Bill de Blasios pledge to shutter the jails violence-plagued facilities, far less attention has been paid to the environment inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the federal jail which mainly holds people who have been charged but not yet convicted of crimes, who in the eyes of the law are still presumed innocent. Yet those locked up at the MCC are subject to their own indignities and rights violations, say those who have spent time there on both sides of the bars. These include filthy conditions, vermin infestations, substandard medical care, and violence and abuse at the hands of guards. Interviews with a dozen people who have spent time locked up there as recently as 2017, as well as with attorneys who have represented clients at MCC, human rights groups, and others with direct knowledge of the prison, confirm that those incarcerated at MCC often endure a rat-infested, high-rise hell just yards from the federal courts that send them there. I thought there was nowhere worse than Rikers Island, Melvin Rodriguez, who spent three weeks at MCC, told Gothamist. In October 2016, Rodriguez was arrested in the Bronx on federal charges for selling drugs to a confidential informant, as part of the largest gang raid in New York City history. Rodriguez said the bug and rodent infestation at MCC was particularly horrifying. The cells [are] very small and at nighttime you hear the mouses, see waterbugs in the shower, he told Gothamist. At least one former MCC prisoner said the mice would find their way into commissary boxes, and gnaw away at their food. You asked about the conditions, wrote Ricardo Stewart, another young man indicted as part of the Bronx gang raid. We saw rats so big it seemed like they could only be in the sewer. But they wasn't in the streets or the sewers, Stewart added. They were more like roommates. In a special jail-within-a-jail called 10 South, alleged terrorists, mobsters and drug kingpins are subject to some of the most brutal conditions of solitary confinement in the nation. This extreme isolation, reserved for those charged with the most heinous crimes, was described as a punitive measure that is unworthy of the United States as a civilized democracy, according to a former special monitor on torture and punishment for the United Nations who investigated the case of one prisoner held there for three years. Hundreds of people indicted in the Southern District of New York, as well as many individuals indicted in the Eastern District, based in Brooklyns federal court across the river, end up at the jail awaiting trial for federal offenses including drug-related crimes, fraud, bribery, and sex offenses. Defendants facing terrorism charges have spent more than three years at the facility, attorneys say. But even those facing less high-profile charges generally spend at least one or two years there before their criminal cases are resolved. (Madeleine Crenshaw / Gothamist) The MCC is one of two federal pretrial facilities in New York City; Metropolitan Detention Center, located on the waterfront in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is the other. They are part of a network of eleven such facilities run by the federal Board of Prisons, with nine spread across the continental U.S. and two others in Honolulu and Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. Many others awaiting trial on federal charges are detained in local jails. This past February, a British appeals court blocked the extradition of alleged hacker Lauri Love to the United States, where he would have most likely been held at either MCC or the federal jail in Brooklyn, the Metropolitan Detention Center. The court determined that Love, who has been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome and depression, would be at high risk of suicide if he were extradited, in part because of the poor mental health care available at the facilities. MDC and MCC share a single psychiatrist and each have only a handful of psychologists on staff, according to court documents, raising questions about whether the two facilities could adequately treat the nearly 500 inmates suffering from significant psychiatric illnesses. New York attorney Joshua Dratel, who has represented clients at the notorious U.S. facility at Guantanamo, says in some regards, MCCparticularly 10 South is worse. Dratel said he has represented nearly a dozen people who have served time on 10 South, and countless others in MCC. He describes the prison as soul-negating. Its physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionallyas unaccommodating to the idea of being human as any place Ive been, Dratel told Gothamist. Because MCC is a federal prison, the accountability mechanisms that have helped bring change to Rikers and, to a lesser degree, to New Yorks state prisons, cannot be applied. Conditions at MCC may only worsen in the age of Trump and Sessions, who have vowed to step up federal prosecutions while signaling their disdain for the rights of individuals in custody. Jeanne Theoharis is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College who has written extensively about conditions at MCC. If I described these conditions to youfilthy, freezing, no natural light, isolation so extreme that youre punished for speaking through the walls, absurd rules like prisoners not getting to see the newspapers unless theyre 30 days old, secrecy so deep that people are force-fed and lawyers can be punished for describing the conditions their clients are experiencingyoud be forgiven for thinking that this was Iran or Russia, she said. But in fact this gulag exists right here in lower Manhattan. Activists outside MCC in 2014 during a vigil organized by the No Separate Justice campaign. (Courtesy Tom Martinez) When MCC first opened in 1975 as part of the broader renovation of New Yorks downtown civic center institutions, the move was praised as an important step towards prison reform. [T]he new Metropolitan Correctional Center at Foley Square will bring to New York City its first piece of advanced - and humane - prison design hailed The New York Times in an article published just before the facilitys completion. The cells were designed to be single occupancy, with a total rated capacity for the facility of 474 inmates. But today the prison population at MCC is almost double that numberjust shy of 800. Although the vast majority of individuals held at the facility are men, a few dozen women are also detained there. On residential floors, the north and south wings each contain six groups of eight rooms, arranged in a two-tiers clustered around what the Times story termed a doubleheight lounge space designed to allow prisoners a sense of privacy while ensuring they could be observed from the common space. But the lounge hardly resembles a college dorm suite, and by all accounts the overcrowding at MCC leaves little room for comfort. In the dormitory units on the 11th floor, dozens of men are expected to share one toilet, one sink, and one shower. According to one 2015 pro se lawsuit against the BOP filed by a prisoner named Levit Fernandini, when the toilets broke down men were given bags to defecate in, which were then not removed from the unit. Some men used the shower as a toilet. In his lawsuit, Fernandini describes the presence of rat and mice droppings throughout the floor, and states that he has found rats in his bed and seen rats crawling on inmates while they slept. When he was bitten by a rodent in January 2014, the counselor for the unit was far from surprised, if anything in light of the infestation, the only surprise is that not every inmate is bitten," he wrote. Fernandini maintains that medical staff ignored his requests for treatment for several days, even after the bite became infected. Medical care at MCC was also condemned by former prisoners and defense attorneys. Unless its life or death theres no immediate medical care, prisoner Marlon Roberts wrote Gothamist in a letter. [I]t can take 2 months to answer your sick call request. Andrew Laufer, a civil rights attorney who has filed several lawsuits challenging conditions at the BOPs two federal jails in New York City, recalled suing the BOP on behalf of a prisoner at MCC who had had his fingertip chopped off by a cell door. Rather than being placed in an ambulance, alleges Laufer, the man was chained at his ankles and wrists and brought to the hospital by correctional officers, bleeding profusely. "I think its a human rights violation, Laufer says of the medical care at MCC. I think its an Eighth Amendment violationdeliberate indifference. There are also claims of extreme brutality by those who are held at the MCC. In September of 2017, Laufer filed a lawsuit alleging that after 35-year-old Roberto Grant was beaten to death at MCC in May 2015, the prison staff tried to cover it up, by telling his Grants family hed died of an overdose. Gothamist reviewed a copy of the autopsy performed on Grant by the New York City Medical Examiner, which stated the father of two had suffered blunt force injuries of the head, neck, torso, and extremities and had no detectable traces of drugs in his system. You have someone whos beaten to death in MCC, and there are cameras everywhere, Laufer said. Theres not an inch of that facility that is not surveilled. No one cares. The case is ongoing, and Laufer recently lost a motion to compel the government to release documents and other materials relevant to Grants death. In court filings, the Department of Justice has denied wrongdoing. The Bureau of Prisons did not respond to written inquiries about this incident or other allegations laid out in this story. A spokesperson for the BOP also declined to comment. Several prisoners told Gothamist that they had been physically assaulted by staff. I ended up catching a new charge in MCC for defending myself, said Fabian Morrison in a letter. A crazy officer attacked me and I defended myself, Im the seventh inmate he put hands on. He is really fucked up in the head from the military. In the past fifteen years, at least one correctional officer at MCC has been convicted of beating an inmate, and at least three guards have been found guilty of sexually assaulting prisoners. In 2016, a former correctional officer at MCC was sentenced to seven years behind bars for raping a woman detained at the facility. Even in my dreams, I am suffering flashbacks where Im repeatedly raped, the woman told the court. And this past April, a guard was arrested for taking bribes to smuggle food, alcohol and cellphones into the facility. When individuals held by the Bureau of Prisons are charged with disciplinary offenses, they wait in what is called the Segregated Housing Unit (SHU) for a Disciplinary Hearing Officer (DHO) to review the allegations. That process can take weeks, sometimes months, explained Sarah Kunstler, a New York City-based civil rights and criminal defense attorney who has extensive experience working with clients locked up at MCC. Prisoners dont get credit for that time towards their eventual punishment, creating a substantial incentive for them to just accept the charge. Moreover, at the hearing, the DHO is often evaluating the prisoners word against that of the officer, so challenging the allegations can feel pointless. "There's an impunity that the officers [at MCC] have to enforce discipline without any recourse, which allows a kind of arbitrary scheme, said Kunstler. There's no test of the allegations, ever." While the BOP does release broad statistics documenting violent incidents across the federal prison system, it does not publicly release data on how rates of violence vary in individual facilities. However, a September 2012 Government Accountability Office report on overcrowding in federal prisons noted that more inmates are sharing cells and other living units, which brings together for longer periods of time inmates with a higher risk of violence and more potential victims. Sally Butler, another attorney who has represented individuals locked up at MCC, says she encourages her clients do whatever they can to stay out of the crosshairs of correctional officers. If the officer says jump, you jump, she said. Butler noted that in state court, it makes no difference if a prisoner is charged with disciplinary infractions pretrial. But those tickets can make a huge difference as to what facility federal prisoners are sent to post-conviction. The recreation yard at MCC is on the roof, and prisoners told Gothamist they are brought up for a brief period of exercise about once every three days. The rest of the time theyre locked up in their units with little to do and no access to fresh air or sunlight. Meanwhile, for prisoners held on 10 South, recreation is taken in what essentially amounts to a double cell, with a narrow, barred window, which looks out onto the street and lets in just a tiny bit of fresh air. They are never let outside. (Madeleine Crenshaw / Gothamist) In January 2017, after escaping from two Mexican high-security prisons, alleged Mexican drug kingpin El Chapo, whose legal name is Joaquin Guzman Loera, was extradited to the US to face charges as the head of the Sinaloa cartel, and locked up in 10 South. After months, Guzmans sanity started to unravel, according to legal motions filed by his attorneys over the spring and fall of 2017. Auditory hallucinations, depression, paranoia, the inability to remember people, places and events, the client repeating himself often and sometimes forgetting what the discussion is about, were the symptoms described by his attorneys in a letter submitted to federal judge Brian Cogan in October 2017. It is plain to the defense team that something is not right with Mr. Guzman. But Guzman is just one of the most recent arrivals there. For the last two decades, Muslim men facing terrorism charges have been held on the unit for up to four years before the resolution of their criminal case. Wali Khan Amin Shah said that he was moved onto 10 South right after it was built, in February 1997. The year prior, he and two codefendants were convicted of conspiring to simultaneously blow up about a dozen planes over the Pacific. Shah was held in 10 South until September 1998, when he was transferred to a different part of the facility. I been around in this world, almost a decade in a war zoneseen my part of torture and bad prisons, I was in jungles and deserts, Shah wrote in an email from a federal prison in Indiana. But the time I spent in 10 South took a large chunk of my soul, it is a very bleak place by design." The lights in 10 South are left on 24 hours per day, according to several former residents. There is a window flap in each cell door, which only the guards can open. The cells are about 17 feet by 8 feet, with two cameras fixed on each cell at every moment. Defense attorneys said there were only about six or seven cells on the unit. Ali Yasin Ahmed was transferred to MCC in September 2014, and spent about a year there while he faced charges for providing material support to al-Shabaab. Its another thing if someone is at a black site, or all the way in Gitmo, he told Gothamist, when asked what it was like to experience such austere isolation in downtown Manhattan. But it is happening [right] next to you, and people dont realize it. Like everyone else in the unit, while in 10 South Ahmed was placed under additional restrictions called Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). SAMs came into being in 1996, soon after the Oklahoma City bombing, and give the U.S. Attorney General sole discretion to limit a prisoners communication if a determination is made that there is substantial risk the prisoners contact with others could pose a security threat. (Guzman is currently under SAMs). During his time at MCC, Ahmed was only allowed to communicate with his attorneys and immediate family members, including his parents, siblings, wife and son. He was permitted one non-legal phone call each month along with one letter per week. But since the letters were first analyzed and copied by the FBI before being sent out, they often took one to two months to reach his loved ones. Communicating with the media was also strictly prohibited. Former 10 South residents told us that prisoners are also not allowed to share books. If a guard brings a book out to the tier and one person reads it, the book must then be destroyed. SAMs generally prohibit prisoners from speaking to each other. At least one individual on 10 South lost his meager family phone privileges for months after greeting another detainee with the Arabic words A-Salaam-Alaikum. A September 2017 report published by Yale Law Schools Allard K. Lowensteins International Human Rights Clinic and the Center for Constitutional Rights raised concerns that Muslims were disproportionately targeted by the measures. It appears that a major criterion for deciding whom to place under SAMs was not the prisoners demonstrated capacity to communicate dangerous information, but rather the prisoners religion. In a 2011 letter to then-Attorney General Eric Holder, Amnesty International expressed concern that conditions on 10 South fall short of international standards for humane treatment and appear incompatible with the presumption of innocence. The brutal nature of life on the unit, including its extreme conditions of isolation, were also documented in a 2014 Human Rights Watch report about human rights abuses in US terrorism prosecutions. During his six-year term as the UN Special Rapporteur for Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which ended in October 2016, the BOP prevented Juan Mendez from speaking to suspected or convicted terrorists. Mendez was able to investigate the conditions at 10 South by interviewing family members of the incarcerated and contacting the State Department about the allegations. He ultimately determined that international human rights protections had been violated. Prolonged or indefinite solitary confinementthat is, solitary confinement that is prolonged beyond a few daysinflicts mental pain and suffering consistent with the definition of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, Mendez told Gothamist. And as I said, in some cases is consistent with the definition of torture. (Madeleine Crenshaw / Gothamist) Public accountability has played a key role in Mayor de Blasios plan to shutter Rikers Island over the next decade and create borough-based jails for the 10,000 people held there. Even New Yorks often brutal upstate prisons have come under increased scrutiny by the press and grassroots activists in recent years. New York State legislators voted last spring to stop automatically prosecuting 16 and 17 year olds as adults (although Raise the Age has yet to be fully implemented), and a bill sharply curtailing the use of solitary confinement has gained considerable ground. But when it comes to federal facilities like MCC, the primary responsibility for oversight falls to Congress, which has a long track record of dereliction, according to Amy Fettig, Deputy Director for the ACLU's National Prison Project. Congress has so much going on, that for them to oversee the Bureau of Prisons in a systematic and effective manner is almost impossible, Fettig said. Her words were echoed by Phil Fornaci, the Director of the DC Prisoners Project of the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, an organization which that has sued the BOP. Theres no oversight unless theres a [Congressional] hearing called, he said. Fornaci says the Department of Justice has investigated prison conditions on the state and local level. When it comes to the BOP, however, not only does the DOJ not provide oversight, but they actually defend the BOP in litigation. Both he and Fettig agreed that there needs to be an agency established external to both Congress and DOJ if the BOP is to be properly monitored. The Justice Committee within the House of Representativesand more specifically the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigationsholds jurisdiction over prison issues. No members of the subcommittee, which include 7 Democrats and 10 Republicans, responded to repeated requests for comment. While there has been increasing advocacy for reforms to local jail and prison conditions, federal prisons remain a kind of political orphan, a situation compounded in the Trump era. Rikers is a good example of the power of people in a democracy to hold their elected officials accountable, said Fettig, but in the federal contextfederal facilities house people from all around the country, and so theres no natural constituency in the state, city, county theyre located in to express concern about whats happening on the inside. As a result, for people locked up at MCC, theres little hope that conditions will improve anytime soon. That could be exactly the way jailers and prosecutors want it. Pre-trial detention, which often lasts years, can become not only unsafe, but coercive; as a result, individuals are pressured to provide information to prosecutors or accept plea deals in their desperation to be released, say former prisoners. You want to plead guilty and get out of this dump to a prison, said Nicky, the former inmate.The feds have a 98% conviction rate for a reason, Melvin Rodriguez, another former prisoner said. They mentally break you. Asked why he thought MCC has received so much less coverage than Rikers, Rodriguez replied, I think [MCC] went unnoticed because people think just because its the feds the conditions are better.There are certain things that go on in these places that the government covers so the public would never know." Listen to Aviva Stahl discuss MCC with WNYC. On June 20th, we observe World Refugee Day. It is an occasion to highlight the plight of refugees around the world, commend their resilience, and express gratitude to their hosts. According to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, a refugee is someone who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country." In 2017, the worlds refugee population topped 25 million, more than ever before. The displaced come from all walks of life, singly and in families, across a wide spectrum of ethnic, religious, economic and educational backgrounds. But they have one thing in common: all have been forced from their homes and homelands. They flee to escape persecution or violent conflict, including terrorism. Often, people flee because their towns have been turned into battlefields and staying means nearly certain death. This is a global crisis that is affecting more men, women, and children than ever before and for longer and longer periods of time. As we observe World Refugee Day, we are reminded that as long as violence and persecution continue, there will be a pressing need for comprehensive humanitarian action and a global response. That is why the United States is proud to continue its leadership in providing humanitarian aid around the world. This life-saving assistance protects refugees, feeds those who might otherwise starve, shelters those who would otherwise be exposed to the elements, ensures access to safe clean water and basic healthcare, and more. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and as Deputy Secretary John J. Sullivan said, helping those in need is and always has been one of our countrys core values. The victim of a Tribeca hate crime is now speaking out. The 57-year-old lawyer described being attacked by another woman who yelled "Take that, white bitch!" and swung a metal make-up box in her face. "It's the worst pain you ever felt in your face," she told NBC New York. "You just don't know what you look like. My eye was bloody, totally shut." The victim, who spoke anonymously, was walking on Warren Street on May 31st when the attack occurred. In an interview with CBS New York, she said, "I was walking back from a meeting and I saw a woman on the street that had her hand all the way back and I thought she was dancing. Instead, the next thing I knew she smashed my face with a metal box." She also recalled that the attacker, who was caught on surveillance video, "was laughing that she hurt me." The pain was so intense that the victim said she "felt like I was going to pass out but I tried not to. And I went over to the first person I saw and said, 'Do I have teeth in my mouth?'" The victim went to the hospital for her injures: She suffered a black eye and "my face was double the size it is and my nose was all the way on the other side of my face," she said. The NYPD's Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating the incident. The victim told CBS New York, "This isnt just something thats happening, its not a freak accident. I just really hope whoever did this gets the help they need and nobody else gets hit like this." Police describe the suspect as being 30-40 years old. She was last seen wearing a blue jacket and light colored pants; she carried a black shoulder bag and a silver and black metal box. Anyone with information in regards to this incident is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime stoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577. All calls are strictly confidential. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has submitted to the Verkhovna Rada a bill on the creation of the High Anti-Corruption Court (HACC) in Ukraine, the press service of the head of state reported on Tuesday. The president defined this document as urgent for extraordinary consideration by parliament. "In accordance with Article 93 and Part 2, Article 125 of the Constitution of Ukraine, President Petro Poroshenko submitted to the Verkhovna Rada the draft law of Ukraine 'On the Establishment of the High Anti-Corruption Court'," the report says. The purpose of the draft law is to fulfill the requirements of the Constitution of Ukraine, the law "On the High Anti-Corruption Court" and the Law "On the Judicial System and the Status of Judges" for the commencement of activities of the HACC. Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Oleksiy Filatov will report on the bill during its consideration at a plenary meeting of the Verkhovna Rada. The presidential bill has not yet been posted on the parliament's website. As reported, on June 7, the Verkhovna Rada adopted presidential bill (No. 7440) on the High Anti-Corruption Court, which is a key requirement to continue cooperation with the IMF. Some provisions of this bill were amended at second reading following consultations with the IMF. The most controversial clause concerned the decisive role of the public council of international experts during the selection of judges. In particular, the law determines the procedure for holding a competition for the selection of anti-corruption judges. According to the wording of the bill at second reading, criminal proceedings against corruption crimes provided for in the commentary of Article 45 (1) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, Article 206 (2), 209, 366 (1) of the Criminal Code will be subjected to the High Anti-Corruption Court. The law enters into force on the day after its publication, with the exception of certain provisions that come into force with the commencement of the work of the High Anti-Corruption Court. On June 13, the law on the HACC was published in the parliament's Holos Ukrainy newspaper. On June 14, in accordance with the procedure specified in Part 2, Article 125 of the Constitution of Ukraine, the head of state sent the draft law "On the Establishment of the High Anti-Corruption Court" to the High Council of Justice (HCJ). According to the Constitution, courts in Ukraine are created and liquidated by laws, whose drafts are submitted to the parliament by the president of Ukraine after consultations with the HCJ, after which the Verkhovna Rada should support a respective bill. On June 16, Poroshenko said that he planned to register this bill in the Verkhovna Rada if it were supported by the HCJ. The president noted that he would define the document as urgent and would ask the parliament to vote for it. The HCJ at a meeting on June 18 unanimously supported the presidential draft law "On the Establishment of the High Anti-Corruption Court." Verkhovna Rada Chairman Andriy Parubiy said that if the president submits the bill to the Verkhovna Rada on June 18, the parliament could adopt it on Thursday, June 21. Ukraine's hero, poet, translator, screenwriter, playwright, state and public figure Ivan Drach has died at the age of 81. "Ivan Fedorovych Drach passed away today," Verkhovna Rada Speaker Andriy Parubiy said at a plenary meeting of parliament on Tuesday. The parliamentarians honored the memory of the deceased with a minute of silence. Yuriy Tandyt, an adviser to Ukrainian Security Service head Vasyl Hrytsak, said he has tendered his resignation, which has been accepted. "I have tendered my voluntary resignation, and it's been accepted," Tandyt said to Interfax-Ukraine on Tuesday. He refrained from explaining the reasons behind his decision and did not say what he is planning to do next. At the same time, he said he would remain committed to hostage exchange matters, considering his experience in this field. The Ukrainian Security Service confirmed to Interfax-Ukraine that Tandyt's resignation has been effective since June 1. Tandyt, a negotiator at the Ukrainian Security Service's center for facilitating the release of hostages, was appointed an adviser to the Security Service chief in July 2015. Ukraine's representatives have handed over to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres a list of Ukrainians illegally held in Russia, Ukraine's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, former Ukrainian Ambassador to Russia Volodymyr Yelchenko has said. "There was a touching telephone conversation with Valentyn Karpiuk Jr., the brother of Mykola Karpiuk, a political prisoner who is serving an illegal prison term in Russia. He is one of those on the list of the Kremlin's prisoners, which has just been handed over to the UN Secretary-General," Yelchenko wrote on Twitter on Monday. Several police injured in skirmishes with protesters near Rada Several police officers have been injured in skirmishes with protesters outside the Verkhovna Rada in Kyiv on Tuesday. Police said they are receiving information about the victims. Police spokesman Artem Shevchenko said at least two policemen have been injured. He said one received a head injury and the other was overcome by tear gas. Some 500 police are guarding the parliament building. The Ukrainian side is interested in a constructive settlement of the problematic issues with Hungary and hopes that the negotiations with the participation of the foreign and educational ministers of the two countries, as well as the representatives of the Hungarian community of Zakarpattia will be successful, spokeswoman of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Mariana Betsa has said. "The Ukrainian side has been and remains interested in a constructive settlement of the problematic issues with Hungary and the unblocking of the dialogue between Ukraine and NATO and cooperation in the international arena with Budapest. We expect that negotiations with the participation of the foreign and educational ministers of the two countries, as well as representatives of the Hungarian community of Ukraine in Zakarpattia on June 22 will be successful," the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said in response to a question from the Interfax-Ukraine agency on Tuesday. Betsa recalled that the Ukrainian government accepted and submitted proposals to the Verkhovna Rada on the extension of the transitional period of the implementation of Article 7 of the Law "On Education" until 2023. "The Ukrainian side offered the Hungarian side to sign a declaration at the level of ministers of education following the meeting on June 22 to further confirm the strength of all existing bilateral documents, as well as readiness for cooperation in the implementation of the law "On Education," the diplomat noted. Betsa also said that for the practical beginning of such cooperation it was proposed to create a joint Ukrainian-Hungarian working group on the implementation of Article 7 of the Law "On Education", composed of representatives of the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs of both countries and representatives of the Hungarian community in Ukraine. According to her, the working group will ensure the development of a general mechanism for the implementation of Article 7 of the law in general secondary education institutions with training in Hungarian language in accordance with the final recommendations of the Venice Commission and will facilitate systematic consultations on the development of implementing legislation in pursuance of the Law on Education. The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said that the Ukrainian side also invited the representatives of the Hungarian minority to join the working groups on developing normative documents on the implementation of the law "On Education," in particular the Law of Ukraine "On General Secondary Education," the standards of education and educational programs. In addition, Ukraine proposed the preparation of a new protocol on cooperation in the field of education and science between the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and the Ministry of Human Resources of Hungary for 2019-2022, which would detail the issues of teaching and studying the Hungarian language in secondary schools in places of compact residence of the Hungarian national minority in Ukraine. "We expect that all these steps will help relieve tension in the Ukrainian-Hungarian relations, unblock the Ukraine-NATO summit and restore constructive cooperation on all issues," Betsa said. On Wednesday, June 20, at 12.00, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host a press conference entitled "Who Ordered the Police to Disperse a Peaceful Rally?" Participants include an activist of the Tradition and Order movement, a photo model beaten by police, Hanna Levina; a minor student who had his leg broken by police, Ruslan Koval; blogger, journalist, whom the police beat and stole his camera, Matvei Dikhanovsky; public figure, representative of the S14 organization, Andriy Medvedko; Head of the Institute of Legal Protection of Society Yuriy Noyevy; head of the Right Sector office in Kyiv Volodymyr Zahazey (8/5-A Reitarska Street). Registration of journalists requires press accreditation. Additional information can be obtained by phone: (093) 703 8896 (Serhiy). On June 18, 2018, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin, while on a working visit to the State of Israel, opened the theatre showing of the movie "Cyborgs: Heroes Never Die." The movie "Cyborgs", which is inspired by the fate of the defenders of the Donetsk airport, tells us not about the war, but about the peace that the Ukrainian nation wants to build and to enjoy, - said P.Klimkin. The movie by the Ukrainian director Ahtam Seitablayev is based on a true story of the battle for the Donetsk airport and tells about the history of modern-day Ukraine. "This film has to be seen by everyone in order to understand what Ukraine lives today. Therefore, I am extremely happy that I took part in organizing this event in Jerusalem. The truth needs to be known!"- noted Oleg Vyshniakov, Honorary Consul of the State of Israel in the Western region of Ukraine. Within the framework of the event the project "Ukraine: Tiding over an exhibition was presented to the wider public. The photo exhibition, organized by the Ukrainian Institute of Public Diplomacy and the Baltic-Black Sea Security Confederation, shows how Ukraine is passing through its toughest challenges of present-day, occupation of Ukrainian land, a powerful information warfare machine. The movie also underlies the invincibility of the spirit of Ukrainian soldiers. Overcoming in this battle, is giving a powerful impetus to the revival of a modern European nation. The event was attended by the Israeli officials, representatives of the diplomatic corps, local community and community of Ukrainian immigrants to the State of Israel. The movie caused the standing ovation of the guests. The showing was organized by the Embassy of Ukraine in the State of Israel with the organizational support of the NGO "Israeli Friends of Ukraine" and Honorary Consul of the State of Israel in the Western region of Ukraine Oleg Vyshniakov. An ultraconservative Iranian student group has called for the return of an expropriated villa occupied by the Islamic Republics former Armed Forces Chief of Staff Hassan Firouzabadi. The villa located in Lavasan, north of the capital, Tehran, was expropriated after the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and let for free to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Major General Firouzabadi in 1993. In its open letter to Tehrans prosecutor, an ultraconservative student group, called Justice Seeking Students Movement (JSSM), says, The Islamic Republics Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has twice ordered the evacuation of the villa, but it is still occupied by the retired IRGC Major General Firouzabadi. The JSSM was formed in early 2002, as a group supporting the anti-corruption statements of ayatollah Khamenei. As such, the group maintained regular presence in state sponsored meetings and gatherings. However, over time it somewhat gravitated toward former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supported him in his two election bids. The general secretary of JSSM, Mohammad Javad Motametinezhad attended a meeting of student groups with Khamenei on May 28, where he delivered stinging attacks on Irans judiciary. This was an unusual act in the presence of the Supreme Leader, who appoints the heads of the judiciary and directly supervises them. The head of the judiciary has been promising for years to publish the list and images of corrupt judges, but nothing has come of it, Motametinezhad said at the meeting with Khamenei. A lack of transparency has led to a situation where the corrupt elements feel safe, rather than the oppressed -- people have lost their trust in the judiciary. Motametinezhads words are very similar to the literature used by Ahmadinejad. The letter, published on Sunday, June 17, has maintained, Despite numerous legal warnings, Firouzabadi has defied the law and continued to stay in the one-hectare villa. The day after the publication of the letter, a senior official insisted that no orders were ever issued for the villa to be vacated. Firouzabadi, 67, was dismissed as the Islamic Republics Armed Forces Chief of Staff nearly two years ago, after holding the position for 27 years. According to the letter, the villa, expropriated after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, is officially owned by Executive Headquarters of Imams [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic] Order. The headquarters is managed under the direct supervision of Khamenei. Firouzabadi was also appointed chief of staff by Khamenei, who is the commander in chief of the armed forces. The letter, published on the Justice Seeking Students Movements website, insists, Despite two consecutive orders by the Supreme Leader and legal verdicts, the security forces (led by IRGC commanders) have refused to force the retired Major General to evacuate the villa. Meanwhile, in an unprecedented tone, the JSSM has warned authorities, If the occupation continues, the Movement will be duty-bound to implement its revolutionary right, forcing him (Firouzabadi) to evacuate the property. However, it is not yet clear how Firouzabadi has defied orders of Khamenei and judicial authorities, if what the ultraconservative student movement says is true. According to some posts in social media, the luxury villa belonged to the late Princess Ashraf, twin sister of the last monarch of Iran, Mohammad-Reza Shah. The villa, along with thousands of other properties owned by authorities of the ancient regime, as well as Jewish and Bahai citizens, was expropriated after the Islamic Revolution in February 1979. The ownership of many of the expropriated properties was transferred to the nascent regimes officials and institutions for free, in a situation still shrouded in mystery. Irans Prosecutor-General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri has threatened June 18 to prosecute a local Sunni Imam in the city of Iranshahr in the southeastern province of Sistan va Baluchestan for disclosing that 41 girls have been raped in that city. Mawlavi Tayeb Mollazehis disclosure of the rape cases on Friday, June 15, stirred controversy in the Sunni-populated province and has put the Islamic Republics judicial officials on the defensive. Officials have an aversion to acknowledging rape cases because they are concerned these might undermine the claims to high standards of morality by the religious state. This is probably why Prosecutor-General Montazeri rejected the local Imams assertion about the rapes as baseless and threatened to prosecute him if he fails to prove what he said, adding that news about crimes with a family honor angle should remain secret, several Iranian agencies quoted Montazeri as saying. Montazeri is downplaying the gravity of the case, knowing that in an extremely traditional society it is difficult for the Imam to ask all the victims families to admit that their daughters have been raped. This is a matter of honor and few people may come forward to support the Imams statement. According to the local governor of Iranshahr, Mohammad Baluchzehi, family members see the victims as a disgrace to their honor and the victims might be murdered by locals including their own family members. He said this kind of crime has happened in the region before. However, he maintained that the victims were innocent, and called on higher-ranking officials to provide counselling for the families. Baluchzehi added that it was the families silence about the rapes that led to the rise in the number of victims. In the meantime, an Iranian MP has said that one of the rapists is a rich and powerful man. Local judiciary officials, however, have said only three girls have been raped, adding that there are four suspects in the case. The local prosecutor of Iranshahr has said only three families have filed complaints. The local Imam has said that the rapist, a rich man has confessed to 41 counts of rape. Meanwhile he called on the family members of the victims to come forward and file complaints about the rape case. He also called on the families and state authorities to protect the victims. Reports from Iranshahr say groups of people have staged protest demonstrations in front of the local governors office on Sunday demanding governments attention to the case. On Monday, Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said that he has ordered redoubled efforts by investigators to probe into the case. The case is to be reviewed at the Iranian Parliament on Tuesday. In the meantime, MP Tayebbeh Siavashi has implied a link between the perpetrator and local big-wigs without naming anyone. Siavashi said One of the suspects is a rich and powerful man. A local governor in the region, Nabi Bakhshi, has been more explicit about the culprits, saying The perpetrators will be arrested and punished no matter whose sons they are and to which ethnic group they belong. Sistan va Baluchestan is a volatile province because of its ethnic make-up, which is a mixture of Sunni and Shia and for being on the drug transit route from southwest Asia to Europe via Iran as well as for occasional insurgency of local tribes that at times have even taken members of Iranian security forces hostage. VIENNA (AP) Iran lashed out Tuesday against U.S. President Donald Trump's call on OPEC to increase oil production and limit global energy prices, saying the cartel "is not an American organization." The OPEC oil ministers began arriving in Vienna on Tuesday ahead of their official meeting Friday, when they will also confer with Russia, a non-OPEC country that since late 2016 has cooperated with the cartel to limit production. Analysts expect the group to consider an increase in production of about 1 million barrels a day, ending the output cut agreed on in 2016. The cut has since then pushed up the price of crude oil by about 50 percent. The U.S. benchmark in May hit its highest level in three and half years, at $72.35 a barrel. That prompted Trump to call on OPEC to cut production, tweeting in April and again this month that "OPEC is at it again" by allowing oil prices to rise. Iran's oil minister, Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, said upon arriving in Vienna that "OPEC is not an organization to receive the instruction from President Trump and follow it." Underscoring how difficult the discussion about a production increase will be, Zanganeh said that Trump's comments have cast doubt on the prospect of a deal. "Every decision in OPEC needs the unanimity and I don't believe in this meeting we can reach agreement," he said, adding the issue "has been politicized by President Trump." Experts like Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets U.K., note that the price of oil is high not only because of OPEC and Russia's agreement to limit output, but also because of Trump's policies, including a decision to reinstall sanctions on Iran. That crimped the country's ability to export crude, limiting supply and pushing up global prices. The U.S. sanctions on Iran also mean that if OPEC agrees on an increase in output as a group, Iran will be one of the countries to lose out, as it will not be able to export as much as it would like. By contrast, Saudi Arabia, the cartel's biggest producer and a fierce regional rival to Iran, could have the room to increase output more and make more money to make up for the shortfall in countries like Iran. So an OPEC deal to increase output could also influence the balance of power in the Middle East. Ultimately, Hewson says, the 14 countries in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries are likely to agree on a production increase. "There is an element of self-preservation in seeking to do this, as while most oil producers prefer higher prices they will also want to avoid a scenario where prices reach a level where demand drops off sharply, thus triggering a global slowdown, as well as accelerating the push for renewable (energy)," he said. LONDON, June 19 (Reuters) Iran has no plans to extend the range of its missiles since their 2,000-km (1,240-mile) reach is enough to protect the country, the Revolutionary Guards commander said on Tuesday, amid mounting U.S. pressure over Tehran's missile programme. Iran's government again ruled out negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump over Tehran's military capabilities and regional influence, saying that such talks would be against the values of the Islamic Republic. Trump withdrew the United States last month from the 2015 accord between Iran and world powers that curbed Tehran's nuclear activity in exchange for sanctions relief. He said the deal was deeply flawed as it had not curbed Iran's ballistic missile programme or reined in its support for proxies in conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and said Washington would reimpose tough sanctions on Tehran. "We have the scientific ability to increase our missile range but it is not our current policy since most of the enemies' strategic targets are already within this 2,000-km range. This range is enough to protect the Islamic Republic...," Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency. Jafari said on Tuesday previous negotiations with the United States about Iran's nuclear programme were "an exception", and called Iranian politicians and activists who have favoured fresh talks with Trump as "traitors and anti-revolutionaries". On Saturday, over 100 activists associated with the moderate and reformist camps in Iranian politics welcomed Trump's deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un envisaging a complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. In a statement published by Iranian media, the activists urged Tehran to start direct negotiations with Washington "with no preconditions" to resolve decades of enmity between the two countries dating to Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution. Jafari rejected their call. "The North Korean leader was a revolutionary but a communist, not an Islamic one. That is why he surrendered, but we will not do the same," he was quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency as saying. Iranian government spokesman Mohammad Bagher Nobakht echoed Jafari's remarks. "There are no grounds or logic to talk to such a person (Trump). Public opinion would not welcome that either," Nobakht was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency. Jafari said previously that the range of Iran's ballistic missiles was based on limits set by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who commands the armed forces. (Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin Editing by Mark Heinrich) KYIV -- Crowds of protesters including coal miners, Chernobyl cleanup workers, and Soviet Afghan war veterans have clashed with police outside the Ukrainian parliament. Some of the more than 2,000 protesters broke though a police cordon and were trying to enter the parliament building during the demonstration on June 19. Police used what appeared to be tear gas, but the protest continued. The protesters included veterans of the Soviet Union's 1979-89 war in Afghanistan, "liquidators" who were sent to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant after the 1986 disaster there, coal miners, and Ukrainians who have fought in the ongoing war with Russia-backed separatists in the country's east. Their demands included improved benefits for public transportation use, increases in state support for disabled veterans, and the allocation of billions of hryvnyas for the development of the countrys struggling coal industry. Kyiv police said earlier that the protests caused complications for transport on two major streets in the city center. Dozens of students at Tehran University have abstained from attending semester tests, protesting the detention of their peers during the widespread anti-establishment uprising late last December and in early January. Scores of students were arrested in the unprecedented protests that broke out in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad and soon spread to more than 100 other cities across Iran. According to state-run Iran Students News Agency (ISNA), a number of students of Tehran Universitys College of Social Sciences assembled on June 18 on their campus to protest their fellow students being detained and a police state dominating the university. The students will carry on their protests until receiving an acceptable response from the officials of the Science and Higher Education Ministry as well as the authorities responsible for the arrests, the secretary of the Students Islamic Association at the Social Science College, Mohammad Kazem Parhizgar, said on June 18. According to Parhizgar, the dean of the college along with several lecturers attended the assembly, talked to students, and urged them to sit the tests. The dean, Mehdi Etemadi, presented the protesters with a report concerning his efforts toward following up on the detained students legal cases. Earlier, while attending the funeral of sociology professor Mohammad Amin Qaneei Rad on June 17, dozens of students had held a similar protest demonstration on the campus. University student activists Sina Darvish Omran and Ali Mozaffari were each sentenced to eight years in prison on June 11 by Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran for allegedly joining protests in Tehran earlier in the year. "The judge issued the maximum sentence of eight years in prison, but when the sentences are combined, only the five-year sentence for 'assembly and collusion against national security' will be applied," a student activist told the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI). "The court's verdict was on the basis of reports given by Intelligence Ministry interrogators who forced the suspects to make confessions in the absence of legal counsel," the source added. "The court did not pay attention to statements by the suspects in their defense." A German language graduate of Tehran University, Omran, and Mozaffari, studying anthropology, are among an unknown number of students rights activists arrested by the Intelligence Ministrys agents during the demonstrations on December 30 and 31. Meanwhile, Tehrans representative to the parliament, Fatemeh Saeidi, tweeted, The parties responsible for the arrests had promised us to exempt the detained students from any legal prosecution, but, they did not deliver. While President Hassan Rouhanis Intelligence Ministry is directly responsible for the arrests, his deputy for legal affairs, Shaheendokht Molaverdi, simply said that she was following up the detainees cases. At least 100 students were arrested during the December and January protests across Iran, when tens of thousands of demonstrators chanted vitriolic slogans against the highest authorities of the regime. An MP, Farid Mousavi, at the time cited Intelligence Ministry officials as describing the arrests as a preventive measure." Scores of legal experts immediately rushed to say that none of the laws of the land allows arrests merely on the basis of preventing a crime." Nevertheless, Omran and Mozaffar have been convicted of the vaguely defined charges of acting against "national security" and waging "propaganda against the state." A hard-line judge notorious for issuing harsh sentences in cases involving politically motivated charges, Abolqasem Salavati, has also issued a two-year ban that prohibits the students from traveling abroad, participating in political activities, and posting on the internet. Omran and Mozaffari were held in solitary confinement, interrogated without the presence of their lawyers, and released on bail, said the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons, CHRI reported. Furthermore, a student of anthropology, Ms. Layla Hassanzadeh, has also been sentenced to six years' prisons and a two-year ban from leaving the country. Social sciences student Sina Rabiei and theater set designing student Mohsen Haqshenas were also sentenced. By RFE/RL The United States and human rights watchdogs have condemned Iran's execution of a Sufi man who was convicted of killing three police officers during clashes between police and a Sufi sect in February. Mohammad Reza Salass rushed execution is the latest example of the Iranian regimes disregard for the human rights of its citizens," U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement late on June 18. "The application of the death penalty, without affording Mr. Salas the fair trial and appeal guarantees to which he was entitled, is a clear violation to Irans international human rights obligations," she also said. Following Salass execution near Tehran at dawn on June 18, his remains were buried in Borujerd, hundreds of kilometers from the Iranian capital, under heavy security presence, according to human rights groups. Supporters have said Salas he maintained his innocence but claimed he was tortured into a forced confession. Amnesty International condemned in the strongest terms Salass execution, which it called a travesty of justice that is abhorrent and unconscionable." The Iranian judiciarys determination to execute Salas after rushing his trial and sentence despite serious allegations of torture betrays the legal systems core function of upholding justice, Human Rights Watch said. The Salas case centered on the deaths of three officers who were run over by a bus during battles between security forces and followers of one of Irans largest Sufi orders in Tehran in February. Salas's supporters have said he maintained his innocence but claimed he was tortured into a forced confession. Followers of the Nemattolah Gonabadi order, known as dervishes, were protesting the arrest of members of the sect. Some 300 dervishes were reportedly arrested following the violence. Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, is not illegal in Iran but rights groups accuse the Iranian government of harassment and discrimination against its followers. Nauert called on Iranian authorities to "release the hundreds of Sufis who remain imprisoned on account of their beliefs." "The Iranian people deserve rule of law, transparent and accountable governance, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, not the callous impunity that continues to define the regime," she said. With reporting by AP Baku, Azerbaijan, June 20 Trend: Unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remains an obstacle to strengthening stability and prosperity in the regio, said in the reference material published on the website of the European Union. The material notes that the EU is firmly convinced that the conflict requires an early political settlement in full compliance with the norms and principles of international law. "Since 2003, the EU Special Representative has been working to promote dialogue between the EU and the countries of the region, and to promote the development of a comprehensive EU policy towards the states of the region, including through its special representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia, supports and complements the efforts of the co-chairing countries of the OSCE Minsk Group (France, Russia and the US) to resolve the conflict, and the EU also promotes activities aimed at strengthening peace on both sides of the conflict", the material says. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: The Azerbaijan-Israel relations will further flourish, Aviran Mishiev, member of the city council of the Israeli city of Tirat Carmel, who was born and brought up in Baku, said in an interview with STMEGI, news website of Mountain Jews. "I think that our countries have warm and friendly relations, he said. The most important thing is that our peoples have such relations because the peoples can prolong these relations and further intensify them. I am proud of my roots. I wish and I am sure that these relations will further flourish. We have the same values, namely, publicity, democracy, multiculturalism, tolerance. We can further bring relations closer both between our countries and peoples on the basis of these values." Speaking about the awareness of the residents of Tirat Karmel city about Azerbaijan and the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Mishiev stressed that those who arrived from Azerbaijan are well informed about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and sincerely want the soonest liberation of all the occupied lands of Azerbaijan. "The local population understands well the whole tragedy of this conflict thanks to our efforts," he added. Together with AzIz Israel-Azerbaijan international association, we hold various events. For example, we have recently held an event dedicated to the tragedy in Azerbaijans Khojaly city, where 613 elderly people, women and children were brutally murdered." Mishiev also stressed that those who arrived from Azerbaijan tell the local population about the country, while Israel understands that there is another resort country that can compete with European countries. "Local people are gradually showing interest in Azerbaijan, they are booking sightseeing tours, he added. Baku is a city of the future and it is fairly called "European Dubai". The Azerbaijani authorities consist of talented and far-sighted politicians who are turning Baku into a city of the future. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 By Fikret Dolukhanov Trend: The Armenian Foreign Ministry has turned from the diplomatic mission into a herald of propaganda forces, which are looking for an excuse to damage Azerbaijans image, political analyst, professor of the Western Caspian University of Azerbaijan Fikret Sadikhov told Trend June 19. The Armenian Foreign Ministry has been engaged in various insinuations for a long time, trying to find out and distorting the statements of various foreign politicians and statesmen, he said. "Azerbaijan is a full member of the Council of Europe, Sadikhov added. Taking into account all the complexities and problems which in particular, are not in favor of Azerbaijan because sometimes they contradict the interests of our country, Baku continues to participate in all sessions of the organization and takes an active part in the discussion of all issues on the agenda." Therefore, it is silly for the Armenian Foreign Ministry to make such statements about the alleged consideration of the issue of depriving Azerbaijan of membership in the organization, he added. "I think that this is another stupidity of the Armenian Foreign Ministry, which, of course, would like to see such a situation, Sadikhov said. He added that such statements, which are disseminated by the press-service of the Armenian Foreign Ministry, are absolutely unfounded and unverified. Earlier, the Armenian media quoted Tigran Balayan, spokesman for the Armenian Foreign Ministry, as saying that Secretary General of the Council of Europe Thorbjrn Jagland allegedly voiced an initiative to cease Azerbaijan's membership in the Council of Europe. At the same time, Balayan stressed that the process is quite long-term but he did not disclose the process. In his turn, Spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Hikmet Hajiyev told Trend June 18 that Jagland always had a pro-Armenian stance and a biased attitude toward Azerbaijan. Hajiyev added that thanks to the spokesman for the Armenian Foreign Ministry, the public learned about the things which everyone knew about Jagland on the sidelines of the organization. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @FDolukhanov Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 By Anvar Mammadov - Trend: The average price in the car market of Baku was 30,208 manats in 2018, Nusret Ibrahimov, director general of the MBA Group consulting company and real estate expert, told Trend. He said the average price in the car market grew by 11.4 percent compared to the previous month. In May 2018, 2,134 cars were put up for sale in the automobile market of Baku, he added. "The portfolio of offers in the car market increased 5.17 percent compared to the previous month," he said. "The majority of cars offered for sale 86.27 percent are cars with gasoline engine. The average price of cars of this category was 30,195 manats. Diesel cars made up 13.73 percent of the proposals; the average price of such cars was 30,290 manats. The share of cars with automatic transmission was 71.93 percent, with an average cost of 38,023 manats. The share of cars with a manual transmission was 28.07 percent, with an average price of 10,180 manats." Ibrahimov said the average mileage of cars in the market in May 2018 was almost 171,660 kilometers, with a decrease by 8.62 percent over the month. The average age of cars was 12 years, he added. The expert added that the average annual wear of cars offered in the market was 6.66 percent. "At the same time, the average annual wear of cars under five years of age was 8.09 percent, from 5 to 10 years 7.16 percent and from 10 to 15 years 5.82 percent," Ibrahimov said. (1.7 manats = 1 USD on June 19) -- Follow the author on Twitter: @Anvar_Mammadov Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 By Fikret Dolukhanov Trend: Uzbekistan is interested in using the Navoi-Turkmenbashi-Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway transport corridor, which will connect the railways of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Georgia with Turkeys transport network, Azerbaijans Ambassador to Uzbekistan Huseyn Guliyev said in an exclusive interview with Trend June 13. "The Navoi-Turkmenbashi-Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway will allow Uzbekistan to ensure an access to the Mediterranean Sea via Turkeys Mersin port." The ambassador stressed that upon the order of the country's leadership, an Uzbek delegation led by Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov visited Azerbaijan and took part in the opening ceremony of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, which testifies to Uzbekistan's interest in the project. Guliyev added that Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev approved a resolution on a comprehensive program for the improvement of Uzbekistans transport infrastructure and diversification of foreign trade routes for cargo transportation for 2018-2022. "After the approval of the program, Uzbekistan began to plan test transit transportation via the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway in the first quarter of 2018," he said. "This program envisages Uzbekistan's participation in the formation of the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey-EU single transit corridor. Uzbekistan also sees this corridor as an access to the ports of Poti, Batumi and Chornomorsk, to the countries of the Middle East and North Africa." "As an important component of the New Silk Road corridor, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway will contribute to the development of the infrastructure and technical capabilities of the countries that have joined the One Belt-One Road initiative and will promote the development of land, marine and air communication programs," Guliyev said. "The One Belt-One Road project is meant to be developed jointly," he said. "Therefore, this initiative does not envisage the creation of a specific route. It welcomes the active participation of all countries, international and regional organizations for the common good." The ambassador added that Uzbekistan is located in the very center of the Central Asian region, which is as an important junction on the ancient Great Silk Road. "In the 1990s, Uzbekistans first president, Islam Karimov, announced the initiative to revive the Great Silk Road," he said. "This initiative aims at establishing closer ties between the countries of Asia and Europe, bringing new mutually beneficial cooperation of these countries to a new historical level." The official opening ceremony of the BTK railway was held in Baku Oct. 30, 2017. The BTK railway was constructed on the basis of the Georgian-Azerbaijani-Turkish intergovernmental agreement. The railways peak capacity will be 17 million tons of cargo per year. At an initial stage, this figure will be one million passengers and 6.5 million tons of cargo. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @FDolukhanov Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: The new pipelines will provide Baku with an opportunity to increase the gas supply volumes to the foreign market, according to Russias Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper). "Azerbaijan has been recently pursuing the energy policy aimed at consolidating its role as an exporter of hydrocarbon resources in the European direction, the article said. The expansion of cooperation with Turkey facilitates this task. The implementation of new gas pipeline projects was launched as a result of the cooperation between Azerbaijan and Turkey. The construction of these pipelines will increase the volumes of Azerbaijani gas supplies to the foreign market." In particular, the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP), which is part of the Southern Gas Corridor, envisaging the transportation of Azerbaijani gas to Europe, can be considered as a pipeline project, which is of interest primarily for Azerbaijan and Turkey. "Baku has obtained a new export route for its gas, while Ankara has strengthened its role in gas supply to Europe," the article said. After TANAP and TAP pipelines, which form the Southern Gas Corridor, are constructed and reach the full capacity and after the implementation of the Turkish Stream project, Ankara will greatly strengthen its positions by becoming a key player in the supply of hydrocarbons from the Caspian Sea region to the European countries. "New pipelines will give Baku additional opportunities to increase the volumes of its gas supplies to the foreign market," the article said. Azerbaijans energy policy meets the interests of the EU, which sees the Caspian Sea energy resources as an alternative to Russias supplies. Moreover, the European Investment Bank approved a loan for the TAP construction in the amount of 1.5 billion euros, which also underscores the interest of European countries in the creation of new pipeline routes." Azerbaijans President Ilham Aliyev, Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko and Serbias President Aleksandar Vucic attended the inauguration ceremony of TANAP project in the city of Eskisehir, Turkey on June 12. The launching ceremony of the first stage of the Southern Gas Corridor project was held in Baku on May 29. The gas from Azerbaijans Shah Deniz field has already gone through the first segment of the Southern Gas Corridor - from the Sangachal terminal to the expanded South Caucasus Pipeline. TANAP together with Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor, which envisages the transportation of gas from Shah Deniz field to Europe. The initial capacity of TANAP is expected to be 16 billion cubic meters of gas per year. About six billion cubic meters will be supplied to Turkey, and the rest to Europe. After completion of the TAP, the gas will reach Europe in early 2020. The share distribution in TANAP is as follows: Southern Gas Corridor CJSC - 51 percent, SOCAR Turkey Enerji - 7 percent, Botas - 30 percent, and BP - 12 percent. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 Trend: Azerbaijani Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov will visit Vienna on June 21-23 at the invitation of OPEC Secretary General Mohammad Barkindo, the Azerbaijani Energy Ministry said in a message June 19. The minister will take part in the 7th OPEC International Seminar "Petroleum cooperation for a sustainable future". The Azerbaijani minister is expected to deliver speech in the 5th session "The future of oil for the world economy". Moreover, Shahbazov is expected to attend the 9th meeting of the OPEC/Non-OPEC Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee. Shahbazov will take part in the fourth meeting of the ministers of OPEC and non-OPEC countries at the 174th meeting of the OPEC Council of Ministers on June 23, 2018. In December 2016, at a meeting of oil producers in Vienna, 11 non-OPEC member countries agreed to cut oil production by a total of 558,000 barrels a day. The agreement was concluded for the first half of 2017 and was extended until the end of the first quarter of 2018 at a meeting on May 25, 2017. At the recent OPEC meeting in Vienna, the agreement was again extended until the end of 2018. Azerbaijan supported the decision. Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 By Fikret Dolukhanov Trend: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are planning to jointly conduct combined tours, Uzbek media reported citing specialist of the Tourism Department of Kyrgyzstan Sanjar Borkeev addressing a press conference in Bishkek. Letters have been sent at the intergovernmental level to these states to consider our idea of combined tours. Today, private travel companies organize tours to cities such as Almaty, Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent for citizens of Kyrgyzstan, whereas creation of joint tours with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will be carried out at the state level, Borkeev said. Uzbek Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Komil Rashidov noted that development of the tourism sphere is strategically important for Uzbekistan and the Uzbek side is ready to create joint combined tours in this regard. He also added that Kyrgyz citizens can stay on the territory of Uzbekistan without a visa for 60 days. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have canceled the visa regime since March 16, with the citizens of the two countries now being able to stay on another states territory without a visa for 30 days. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @FDolukhanov Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 Trend: The supplies of Kazakhstans liquefied gas to Ukraine increased by 11.5 times and amounted to almost 87,700 tons in January-May 2018, UPECO consulting company said in a message June 19. Ukraine imported 8,000 tons of Kazakh gas in January-May 2017. "Almost 87,700 tons of Kazakhstans LPG (including re-export through Belarus) were supplied to Ukraine in January-May 2018 compared to 8,000 tons in the same period of 2017, the message said. About 17 percent of supplies accounted for Kazakhstans gas in Ukrainian imports in the reporting period." The main exporter of Kazakhstans LPG to Ukraine is Tengizchevroil. The company exports propane and butane fractions directly in accordance with long-term and spot contracts. Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 Trend: A decision was made at the meeting of the Tajik government, which was held by the countrys President Emomali Rahmon, to establish the National Council for Financial Stability, Asia-Plus reported. The countrys government also approved the state program on targeted social assistance for 2018-2020, the presidential press service said. The action plan of the Tajik government for the second half of the year, as well as an education plan for the country's universities, were also approved at the meeting. The government also approved the draft amendments to Tajikistans laws on Combating Corruption, Leasing, Insurance Activity and Public Organizations. Tehran, Iran, June 19 By A. Shirazi - Trend: The head of Irans National Potato Association said the country has called off its pre-planned decision to export potato to Russia due to high transportation costs and tariffs. Irans potato export to Russia has been canceled due to high transportation costs and duties, Rahim Niazi told the Trend news agency on June 19. He added that Iran is currently exporting potatoes to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf littoral states. Niazi further said that the country produces 5 million tons of potatoes annually from which 650,000-700,000 tons are exported, mainly to Iraq, per year. Niazi said the amount of potatos annual production in the future hinges upon the domestic market, tariffs and domestic economy in Iran. He said potato is being sold in the market at a lower price compared to the last year due to excess supply. The provinces of Hamedan, Ardebil, Kurdistan, East Azarbaijan and Isfahan are the main producers of potatoes in Iran. Agriculture accounts for 13% of Irans GDP and over 20% of its employment. The country is the worlds 20th country by agricultural output, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The sector, however, has its own detractors who say the industry is using up 92% of the countrys water and draining its water tables amid inefficient agriculture and food production practices. They are pushing for farming overseas in countries such as Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Brazil and Ghana through long-term leasing or ownership of farmland with higher agribusiness potential. Tehran, Iran, June 19 By Kamyar Eghbalnejad - Trend: Iran has turned to targeting new markets in the region and among the CIS nations, following Washingtons decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, said Adnan Mousapour, a board member of Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture. "Before and after the JCPOA, Iran has been a tradition importer of goods from Europe and the US," Mousapour told Trend. He added that Iran, however, has long been a major exporter of goods to its neighboring countries in the region. In the past two months, Iran has been targeting new markets in Central Asia and those in CIS area, the official said. Referring to impending US sanctions, Mousapour said, "No opportunity should be lost under difficult circumstances like sanctions, banking restrictions, and political pressure". He added that Iran is currently suffering from weaknesses in the areas of programming and support for exports and that they should be addressed soon. Elsewhere in the interview, Mousapour said that trade transactions between Iran and Qatar are underway and Tehran is mainly exporting agricultural products and construction material to this Arab country. In a speech from the White House on May 8, US President Donald Trump announced the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement between Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany), known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Trump also said he would reinstate US nuclear sanctions on Iran and impose "the highest level" of economic bans on the Islamic Republic. The new US sanctions will take six months to kick in, but a number of European companies have already halted their businesses in Iran despite verbal pledges by their governments to protect them against any fallout. Tehran, Iran, June 19 By A. Shirazi - Trend: The deputy head of Irans National Saffron Council voiced concern about the unrestrained smuggling of Iranian saffron bulbs to Afghanistan. Widespread and illegal outflow of saffron bulbs has increased the products price inside the country, IRIB news agency quoted Gholamreza Miri as saying on June 19. He added that this has impeded Irans saffron export to the international market as now wholesale Iranian saffron is smuggled to the neighboring country of Afghanistan where Irans red gold is exported to other countries, particularly Europe. The value of Irans saffron export currently stands at $300 million, Miri said, calling on the government to take the necessary measures and fight against smugglers. Saffron is a strategic crop that its production exclusively belongs to Iran and the government should make more effort to combat the problem, he said. Irans position as the lead supplier of the spice is also being undercut by counterfeit business under which genuine saffron from the country is adulterated and resold to the high-end global market, with the UAE and Spain being the prime destinations. Saffron cultivation and harvest is a painstaking process which requires 200,000 strands of crimson crocus blooms to be gingerly picked in the morning to make one kilo for sale. Much of the crop produced by villagers are bought at knockdown prices by local arbiters who themselves sell it to foreign buyers in large stocks. This means the bulk of the added-value accrues to foreign intermediaries, while the genuine produce barely reaches the end consumer. Saffron cultivation has a history of more than 3,000 years in Iran, where the reddish, aromatic substance is used to flavor food and pastries, with further application in medicine and cosmetics. Iranian researchers have produced saffron extract for suppressing cancer, lowering blood pressure and curing depression. Tehran, Iran, June 19 By Kamyar Eghbalnejad - Trend: The chairman of the Islamic Republic of Iran Railways said the country plans to raise the weight of its annual cargo transportation via rail to 120 billion tons-kilometers in the next three years. Last year, the weight of the countrys cargo transportation via rail stood at 30.3 billion tons-kilometers, Saeed Mohammadzadeh told the Trend news agency on June 19. He added that the country needs to increase the amount to 120 billion tons-kilometers in the next three years. The government built 1,300 kilometers of railroads across the country in 2017 from which 500 kilometers were constructed in line with developing the countrys transportation infrastructures, Mohammadzadeh further said. Despite tight budget and little investment, Iranian President Hassan Rouhanis administration has been able to increase the share of rail in cargo transportation in Iran, setting the stage for realizing the ambitious targets set in the sixth five-year development plan (2017-22). Currently, 12 percent of cargo transportation in Iran are carried out via rail. The share stood at 8.5 percent the year Rouhani took office (2013). Iran's development plans outline government strategies in its budget planning for the next five years. The plan also tasks the government with increasing the share of rail in passenger transportation to at least 20 percent by 2021. Taking advantage of its strategic geopolitical position in the region, Iran seeks to become a hub of transportation, thereby boosting transport revenues and reducing reliance on oil that currently accounts for the lions share of the national income. The government is also trying to transfer as many passengers and as much freight as possible from roads to rail to facilitate transportation, save hydrocarbon fuels and reduce air pollution. Plans are underway to build 9,134 kilometers of railroads across the country. Track-laying of more than 3,500 kilometers of railroads is currently underway, with 540 kilometers in the final stages, according to officials with the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development. Major railroad projects in need of financing include Qazvin-Rasht (388 km), Tehran-Isfahan high-speed line (410 km), Mianeh-Tabriz (200 km), Tehran-Hamedan-Sanandaj (430 km), Shiraz-Bushehr (250 km), Gorgan-Bojnourd-Mashhad (570 km), Mianeh-Ardabil (175 km), the so-called Gharb (West) Rail project as well as electrification of Garmsar-Incheh Borun and Tehran-Mashhad lines. Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 Trend: Iranian government spokesman Mohammad Bagher Nobakht has rejected direct negotiations with the US administration. Nobakht made the remarks while reacting to a request by well-known Iranian activists for launching direct negotiations with the United States, the Iranian state-run IRINN TV reported June 19. There are no grounds or logic to talk with the US president Donald Trump, Nobakht said. "Who will we negotiate with? With a person who doesn't have a political and intellectual stability? Now there are no grounds for negotiations with such a person and the public opinion doesn't welcome that, the Iranian official said. Recently more than 100 Iranians activists and well-known personalities issued a statement calling for direct talks between Tehran and Washington without setting any pre-conditions to resolve the disputes between the two parties. The statement insists that the perilous and precarious situation of the region needs a serious and responsible resolution to the current crisis-ridden relations between Tehran and Washington. The US and Iran have not had diplomatic relations since US embassy personnel in Tehran was taken hostage for 444 days starting in late 1979. In the absence of formal relations, Switzerland represents US interests in Tehran, and Pakistan represents Iranian interests in Washington. The only Iranian diplomatic presence in the US is its delegation to United Nations headquarters in New York. It should be noted that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the then US President Barack Obama spoke by phone in September 2013 on the sidelines of the annual UN General Assembly. The phone conversation was the first direct communication in decades between the heads of state of the two countries. Iranian conservatives severely criticized Rouhani on the issue. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is expected to arrive in China on Tuesday to hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Japanese media outlet reported, citing its sources. According to the Nikkei Asian Review, citing sources privy to the matter, Kim plans to discuss the recent summit with US President Donald Trump, in particular, a further negotiations strategy. The North Korean leader is expected to arrive in Beijing, where the security preparations are currently underway, the newspaper added. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un participate in a signing ceremony during a meeting on Sentosa Island, Tuesday, June 12, 2018, in Singapore On March 25-28, Kim paid an unofficial visit to China, where he held meetings with the Chinese president amid an international effort to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. This was Kim's first ever international visit since coming to power in 2011. The meeting between Trump and Kim took place on June 12 in Singapore. The two leaders signed a final document that includes an agreement to establish new bilateral relations between the United States and North Korea as well as join efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean peninsula. Chinas Foreign Ministry on Tuesday urged the United States to stop its damaging words and deeds, after President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 10 percent tariff on $200 billion of Chinese goods, Reuters reports. Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang made the comment at a regular news briefing, adding that China did not want a trade war but was not afraid of one. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in Beijing Tuesday for their first face-to-face talks since Kim's historic summit with US President Donald Trump in Singapore on June 12, CNN reported. The two leaders held a bilateral meeting after a welcoming ceremony for the North Korean leader, which included a crowd of jubilant children jumping up and down and waving Chinese flags. At their third meeting in as many months, Xi lavished praise on the younger man for his handling of the US meeting, according to Chinese state media CCTV. Xi said he was very pleased both with the results of Kim's Singapore talks as well as North Korea's future goal of economic development. According to state media, the two men agreed they wanted to further deepen the already-close ties between Pyongyang and Beijing in the months ahead. After their talks, the two leaders then joined their wives for a banquet hosted in Kim's honor. China's Foreign Ministry had announced Kim's visit to the Chinese capital earlier on Tuesday but hadn't provided any details of his schedule or when he would meet Xi. France will take the lead in the development of a next generation combat jet with Germany under an agreement the two governments signed on Tuesday, the French defense ministry said, Reuters reported. The new combat jet is intended to replace from 2040 Frances Dassault Aviation (AVMD.PA) Rafales and Germanys Eurofighters, made by a European consortium. The Franco-German agreement calls for work on the project to begin before the end of the year, starting with a study phase, the ministry said. In addition to being capable of acting on its own, the new aircraft is expected to be at the center of a broader weapons system, capable of commanding a squadron of drones. Dassault and Airbus (AIR.PA), a Eurofighter consortium member, signed an agreement in April to work together on the new project, but avoided saying which of the two groups would be in charge. The fact that France is now in the driving seat of the project favors Dassault to take charge since most of Airbus defense activities are in Germany. Developing a future multi-role combat aircraft for France and Germany integrated in a weapons system network is a major issue for Europes strategic autonomy, Dassault Chief Executive Eric Trappier said in a statement to Reuters. The other members of the Eurofighter consortium are British defense group BAE Systems (BAES.L) and Italys Leonardo (LDOF.MI). German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron first agreed to jointly develop the new aircraft shortly after his election in May 2017, burying past rivalries in favor of tighter defense cooperation. France and Germany also agreed on Tuesday that Germany would take the lead in a joint project to develop a new battle tank with a first phase of the program to be launched by mid-2019. The aim is for the tank to be operational in 2035. The two countries also signed agreements for a joint future artillery system and plans to launch a Franco-German military satellite. Baku, Azerbaijan, June 19 Trend: Air China aircraft made an emergency landing at the airport in Minsk, the press service of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Belarus said. "The board landed safely at our airport at 17.20, the assistance of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Belarus was not requested", the press service posted on Twitter. The representative office of Air China in the national airport of Minsk told RIA Novosti that "an unforeseen situation occurred, the plane landed accidentally". The US Senate adopted the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2019, which obliges the Secretary of Defense to present a special report regarding the potential purchase of the S-400 air and missile defense system from Russia by the Turkish government, TASS reports. Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of the Authorization Act, "the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of State, shall submit to the appropriate congressional committees a report on the status of the United States relationship with the Republic of Turkey," the document said. According to the Act, "the Secretary of Defense may not take any action to execute delivery of a foreign military sale for major defense equipment" to Tukey until the report is submitted. The required report should include "an assessment of the potential purchase by the Government of Turkey of the S-400 air and missile defense system from the Russian Federation and the potential effects of such purchase on the United States-Turkey bilateral relationship, including an assessment of impacts on other United States weapon systems and platforms operated jointly with Turkey to include the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike aircraft; the Patriot surface-to-air missile system; the CH-47 Chinook heavy lift helicopter; the AH-1 Attack helicopter; the H-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter; and the F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft," the Senate said. The Secretary of Defense is not allowed to take any action "to execute delivery of a foreign military sale for major defense equipment subject to congressional notification to the Republic of Turkey until the Secretary submits to the appropriate congressional committees the report," the Act said. Earlier reports said that Ankara intends to purchase over 100 F-35 warplanes. The proposed measure may hinder the execution of the contract. Russias S-400 Triumf (NATO reporting name: SA-21 Growler) is the latest long-range antiaircraft missile system that went into service in 2007. It is designed to destroy aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles, including medium-range missiles, and surface targets. The S-400 can engage targets at a distance of 400 kilometers and at an altitude of up to 30 kilometers. In November 2016, it was announced that Turkey and Russia were negotiating the contract for the supply of S-400 air defense systems. Russia confirmed the conclusion of the contract on September 12, 2017. Dupa inscrierea pe site-ul HotNews.ro, poti deschide sectiunea MyHotNews ca sa completezi sau sa schimbi profilul de utilizator. Atentie! Logarea pe site se face cu adresa de email, nu cu nickname-ul. Adresa ta de email va ramane confidentiala si nu va fi niciodata data unor terte persoane sau institutii. Inainte de a te inscrie pe site te rugam sa parcurgi termenii si conditiile atasate unui cont HotNews.ro. KYODO NEWS - Jun 19, 2018 - 15:20 | All, World Japan's top government spokesman on Tuesday expressed concern over China's call to require foreign airlines to label Taiwan as part of China. "Generally speaking, it's not favorable that the government requires (private companies) to take steps in line with a certain political position," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said at a regular press briefing. His remarks came after Japan Airlines Co. and All Nippon Airways Co. changed their descriptions of Taiwan on their websites for Chinese customers to "Taiwan, China" in response to China's request made in April. China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and has threatened to invade should the island's government formally declare independence. Taiwan's Foreign Ministry on Monday protested at the changes made by the two major Japanese airlines. The Associated Press reported last month that it found 20 carriers, including Air Canada, British Airways and Lufthansa, that now refer to Taiwan as a part of China on their global websites. KYODO NEWS - Jun 19, 2018 - 08:02 | All, World U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday he is likely to make yet another visit to North Korea "before too terribly long" to follow up on last week's first-ever summit between the two countries. Speaking at an event in Detroit, Pompeo said there is a great deal of work to do to flesh out an agreement U.S. President Donald Trump and the North's leader Kim Jong Un struck in their historic encounter on June 12 in Singapore. (Getty/Kyodo) [File photo] "I'll likely travel back before too terribly long," Pompeo said. "We still have to flesh out all the things that underlay the commitments that were made that day in Singapore." Pompeo, however, said it is "hard to know" whether there will need to be a second summit between Trump and Kim. Pompeo traveled twice to Pyongyang recently to lay the groundwork for the Trump-Kim summit. In a joint statement issued after the summit, Kim reaffirmed his "firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," while Trump committed to provide security guarantees to North Korea. Kim promised to "fully denuclearize his country," Pompeo said, adding, "It's not just the weapons system, it's everything." In return, Trump committed to making sure that the United States and North Korea "alter the armistice agreement," along with South Korea and China, and provide security assurances Kim needs, according to the chief U.S. diplomat. Pyongyang has been calling for replacing a Korean War armistice with a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-1953 conflict. The armistice -- signed by the U.S.-led United Nations Command, North Korea and the Chinese People's Volunteer Army -- has left the main combatants technically in a state of war. In telephone talks Sunday, Pompeo and South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung Wha reaffirmed the goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization, the State Department said Monday. Pompeo and Kang agreed to maintain pressure on Pyongyang until it denuclearizes, it said. KYODO NEWS - Jun 19, 2018 - 22:45 | World, All Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un confirmed Tuesday that it is important for an agreement signed by U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim to be steadily implemented to achieve denuclearization on the divided peninsula. Xi and Kim held their third summit talks in as many months in Beijing, state-run television reported, just one week after the first-ever Washington-Pyongyang summit in Singapore, in the latest sign of the increasingly strong ties between China and North Korea. Kim, meanwhile, was quoted by the state broadcaster as telling Xi that North Korea will realize nuclear disarmament in a phased manner, although Washington says economic sanctions against Pyongyang should be lifted only after it attains "complete denuclearization." If the United States and North Korea can implement the agreement reached at their June 12 summit "step by step," denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula "will open up a new and important situation," Kim told Xi, according to the official China Central Television. Xi was quoted as telling Kim that China "highly evaluated" the results of the U.S.-North Korea summit and that the country will "play a constructive role" in creating peace on the peninsula, indicating his eagerness to be actively involved in the issue. At the Singapore summit, Kim reaffirmed his pledge to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, while Trump promised to provide security guarantees to North Korea. Kim is believed to be trying to secure concessions, such as the easing of sanctions, from the United States, in exchange for vowing to denuclearize in a "phased" and "synchronized" manner. Kim is visiting China for two days from Tuesday, CCTV said in the morning, as a plane thought to be carrying him arrived in Beijing. His wife, Ri Sol Ju, and high-ranking officials including Kim Yong Chol, a senior ruling party official who held talks with Trump at the White House earlier this month, are accompanying Kim. The North Korean leader is making his third visit to China since assuming power in 2011. A vehicle thought to be carrying Kim was seen entering the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse on Tuesday, where foreign dignitaries usually stay on their trips to Beijing. Earlier in the day, an Air Koryo freight plane previously used to haul Kim's limousine to Singapore for the summit also arrived at Beijing International Airport. In March, Kim met with Xi in Beijing on his first foreign trip since becoming supreme leader following the death of his father Kim Jong Il in 2011. The two met for two days in May again in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian. The arrival of the plane thought to be carrying Kim came within hours of the United States and South Korea announcing that they are suspending a major joint military exercise held every August, which North Korea has denounced as a rehearsal for invasion. China is known as Pyongyang's main economic lifeline. It has shown willingness to be involved in U.S.-North Korean denuclearization talks, having provided chartered aircraft for Kim to travel to and from Singapore for the Trump-Kim summit. China and North Korea, which fought together in the 1950-1953 Korean War against the U.S.-led United Nations Command, have been described as "blood brothers." Kim Jong Un's previous two trips to China: N. Korea's Kim vows denuclearization in his historic trip to China Kim Jong Un vows to give up nuclear weapons if there is no security threat Relations between Beijing and Pyongyang have improved markedly since Kim's first trip to China in March. Bilateral ties had, prior to then, grown distant and strained over Beijing's enforcement of crippling economic sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council for North Korea's continued development, in defiance of international warnings, of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Kim likely aims to obtain support from Xi ahead of full-fledged negotiations with the United States. Senior U.S. and North Korean officials, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, are expected to hold talks as early as this week. Pompeo met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Xi in Beijing on Thursday to brief them about the Trump-Kim summit. By Ko Hirano, KYODO NEWS - Jun 19, 2018 - 20:10 | All, World A former top U.S. diplomat for Asia has recommended that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe directly engage with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the diplomatic opening created by the first-ever U.S.-North Korea summit last week. "I fully accept Prime Minister Abe to be more directly engaged going forward," Kurt Campbell said in an interview Monday in Washington, in reference to Abe's efforts to resolve the issue of Pyongyang's abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as that of short- and medium-range North Korean missiles capable of hitting Japan. "He's trying to reach out and explain why a diplomacy between Tokyo and Pyongyang is so wise," said Campbell, who served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under President Barack Obama's administration. "And I certainly support him in this." (Kurt Campbell) Campbell expects Kim to respond to Abe's call for dialogue in hope of winning an easing of sanctions and eventual economic cooperation. "I think everything I saw from Kim Jong Un suggested that he wanted to work with the West and to find some way to do business and trade. We'll see how that plays out." While giving President Donald Trump some credit for employing a "top-down" approach in dealing with North Korea, Campbell criticized Trump's decision to suspend joint military exercises with South Korea as a "huge" concession even before the North's denuclearization process actually begins. "I think the long tradition of the U.S.-South Korea alliance is that these exercises are about establishing and determining a robust defense and a deterrent capability that helps maintain peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula," and not as a rehearsal for invasion, as claimed by Pyongyang, he said. Referring to Trump's remarks that Washington can save "a tremendous amount of money" by suspending what he called "very provocative" drills against Pyongyang and possibly scaling back U.S. troop levels in South Korea, Campbell said, "I think the president's view about U.S. forces in Korea and these exercises is actually much closer to Kim Jong Un than to traditional American positions." "And that I find troubling," said Campbell, who is now chairman of the Asia Group, a strategic advisory and capital management group in Washington. Asked if such a shift would dilute the U.S. military presence in Asia, Campbell said, "I think weakening is happening now," a development that would make China and Russia happy but Japan, a key American ally, nervous. The former U.S. official said he has high hopes of Abe's ability to engage Trump in a way that will lead him to allay uncertainties over his administration's Asia policies and handling of alliances. "We want Mr. Abe to be effective with the counsels of power in Washington," he said. Campbell said Trump's top-down approach, which led to the Trump-Kim summit on June 12 in Singapore, "gives us some hope" in that it "tries to instill some urgency into the process by having the full force" of the two leaders. Alluding to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's hope that Pyongyang will achieve denuclearization by January 2021, the end of Trump's first term, Campbell suggested such a goal may be too ambitious. "Seems pretty political to me," he said. "Let's see where we are in the next couple of months." Asked what would be a first major step for Pyongyang to achieve the "complete" denuclearization Kim committed to in the joint statement he signed with Trump in Singapore, Campbell cited "an honest catalogue of their nuclear facilities, their capabilities and their nuclear sites." But Campbell was skeptical as to whether Kim will actually give up his nuclear weapons program in a complete, verifiable and irreversible way, despite Trump taking a "giant" first step by meeting with Kim and suspending exercises with Seoul, as well as promising to provide security guarantees to Pyongyang. "I think the president is right to make this an effort," he said. "We have to get behind him in the hope, but I think it is premature at the extreme to suggest that there have been big changes or that the nuclear threat is gone, or that North Korea is going to follow through on its commitments." Asked what lessons the United States can learn from previous denuclearization negotiations with North Korea, Campbell said: "Trust and verify. Expect the worst. Many lines of communication, and I think again the innovation that President Trump has provided is the importance of high-level engagement, and he's probably right in that." Higher education institutions will remain closed on Monday. Several Kerala varsities too have cancelled examinations scheduled on the day. Researchers have found a way to convert nanoparticle-coated microscopic beads into lasers smaller than red blood cells. These microlasers, which convert infrared light into light at higher frequencies, are among the smallest continuously emitting lasers of their kind ever reported and can constantly and stably emit light for hours at a time, even when submerged in biological fluids such as blood serum. The innovation, discovered by an international team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), opens up the possibility for imaging or controlling biological activity with infrared light, and for the fabrication of light-based computer chips. Their findings are detailed in a report published online June 18 in Nature Nanotechnology. The unique properties of these lasers, which measure 5 microns (millionths of a meter) across, were discovered by accident as researchers were studying the potential for the polymer (plastic) beads, composed of a translucent substance known as a colloid, to be used in brain imaging. Angel Fernandez-Bravo, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry, who was the lead author of study, mixed the beads with sodium yttrium fluoride nanoparticles "doped," or embedded, with thulium, an element belonging to a group of metals known as lanthanides. The Molecular Foundry is a nanoscience research center open to researchers from around the world. Emory Chan, a Staff Scientist at the Molecular Foundry, had in 2016 used computational models to predict that thulium-doped nanoparticles exposed to infrared laser light at a specific frequency could emit light at a higher frequency than this infrared light in a counterintuitive process known as "upconversion." Also at that time, Elizabeth Levy, then a participant in the Lab's Summer Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program, noticed that beads coated with these "upconverting nanoparticles" emitted unexpectedly bright light at very specific wavelengths, or colors. "These spikes were clearly periodic and clearly reproducible," said Emory Chan, who co-led the study along with Foundry Staff Scientists Jim Schuck (now at Columbia University) and Bruce Cohen. The periodic spikes that Chan and Levy had observed are a light-based analog to so-called "whispering gallery" acoustics that can cause sound waves to bounce along the walls of a circular room so that even a whisper can be heard on the opposite side of the room. This whispering-gallery effect was observed in the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral in London in the late 1800s, for example. In the latest study, Fernandez-Bravo and Schuck found that when an infrared laser excites the thulium-doped nanoparticles along the outer surface of the beads, the light emitted by the nanoparticles can bounce around the inner surface of the bead just like whispers bouncing along the walls of the cathedral. Light can make thousands of trips around the circumference of the microsphere in a fraction of a second, causing some frequencies of light to interact (or "interfere") with themselves to produce brighter light while other frequencies cancel themselves out. This process explains the unusual spikes that Chan and Levy observed. When the intensity of light traveling around these beads reaches a certain threshold, the light can stimulate the emission of more light with the exact same color, and that light, in turn, can stimulate even more light. This amplification of light, the basis for all lasers, produces intense light at a very narrow range of wavelengths in the beads. Schuck had considered lanthanide-doped nanoparticles as potential candidates for microlasers, and he became convinced of this when Chan shared with him the periodic whispering-gallery data. Fernandez-Bravo found that when he exposed the beads to an infrared laser with enough power the beads turned into upconverting lasers, with higher frequencies than the original laser. He also found that beads could produce laser light at the lowest powers ever recorded for upconverting nanoparticle-based lasers. "The low thresholds allow these lasers to operate continuously for hours at much lower powers than previous lasers," said Fernandez-Bravo. Other upconverting nanoparticle lasers operate only intermittently; they are only exposed to short, powerful pulses of light because longer exposure would damage them. "Most nanoparticle-based lasers heat up very quickly and die within minutes," Schuck said. "Our lasers are always on, which allows us to adjust their signals for different applications." In this case, researchers found that their microlasers performed stably after five hours of continuous use. "We can take the beads off the shelf months or years later, and they still lase," Fernandez-Bravo said. Researchers are also exploring how to carefully tune the output light from the continuously emitting microlasers by simply changing the size and composition of the beads. And they have used a robotic system at the Molecular Foundry known as WANDA (Workstation for Automated Nanomaterial Discovery and Analysis) to combine different dopant elements and tune the nanoparticles' performance. The researchers also noted that there are many potential applications for the microlasers, such as in controlling the activity of neurons or optical microchips, sensing chemicals, and detecting environmental and temperature changes. "At first these microlasers only worked in air, which was frustrating because we wanted to introduce them into living systems," Cohen said. "But we found a simple trick of dipping them in blood serum, which coats the beads with proteins that allow them to lase in water. We've now seen that these beads can be trapped along with cells in laser beams and steered with the same lasers we use to excite them." The latest study, and the new paths of study it has opened up, shows how fortuitous an unexpected result can be, he said. "We just happened to have the right nanoparticles and coating process to produce these lasers," Schuck said. ### Researchers from UC Berkeley, the National Laboratory of Astana in Kazakhstan, the Polytechnic University of Milan, and Columbia University in New York also participated in this study. This work was supported by the DOE Office of Science, and by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The Molecular Foundry is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. 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. It may sound too good to be true but the future of dentistry could be less painful thanks to world-first research funded by the Australian Research Council A trip to the dentist is not an experience many people look forward to, especially when major work is involved, but a world-first QUT-led project aims to take away some of the pain using the power of light. Australian Laureate Fellow Professor Christopher Barner-Kowollik and his team have just been awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grant of $364,503 to support its partnership with Liechtenstein-based Ivoclar Vivadent to develop ground-breaking new 'on-demand visible light degradable dental materials'. "Our project aims to break new ground in the field of advanced adhesives by pioneering a unique system that can be cleaved with a defined visible light trigger, enabling the removal of previously bonded material without mechanical force," said Professor Christopher Barner-Kowollik. "So instead of having to use pliers or some other tool on a patient to lever out old work, the dentist would be able to simply wave a beam of light over the area to create that separation. "Apart from making a visit to the dentist less painful, it would allow two materials to be strongly bonded, including dental crowns, braces and implants." His QUT Science and Engineering faculty colleague Dr James Blinco added the project would advance on-demand degradable materials design, introducing an advanced class of responsive networks for applications where reversible bonding is critical. "This in turn will have flow-on benefits in future dental material applications and also have applications where simple-to-remove, temporary adhesives are required." Said Dr Blinco. In 2017, Professor Barner-Kowollik was awarded an ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship worth more than $3 million to investigate how monochromatic light provided by lasers could be used to program and reprogram coatings and materials. Another QUT team he leads, which is exploring how light can be used in OLED manufacturing, was also last year awarded an ARC Linkage grant of $159, 916 to support its partnership with German firm Cynora. ### Professor Barner-Kowollik's team awarded the latest ARC Linkage grant includes Dr James Blinco, Dr Eva Blasco, Dr Andreas-Neil Unterreiner (both Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) and Dr Yohann Catel (Ivoclar Vivadent) QUT is part of a national collaborative group of five major Australian universities that form the ATN (Australian Technology Network of Universities). Media contact: Amanda Weaver, QUT Media, 07 3138 9449, amanda.weaver@qut.edu.au After hours: Rose Trapnell, 0407 585 901, media@qut.edu.au Amazon may not have much choice but to address mounting criticism over its sales of facial recognition tech to governments. The American Civil Liberties Union has delivered both a petition and a letter from 17 investors demanding that Amazon drop its Rekognition system and exit the surveillance business. While the two sides have somewhat different motivations, they share one thing in common: a concern for privacy. Both groups are worried that Amazon is handing governments surveillance power they could easily use to violate civil rights, particularly for minorities and immigrants. They could use it to track and intimidate protesters, for instance. And for the shareholders, there's an added financial incentive to leave the business behind. They're concerned the technology could "raise substantial risks" for Amazon, hurting its stock price by casting a negative light on Amazon's business. Amazon hasn't addressed these newer campaigns, but its previous response was to dismiss the concerns as fearmongering. "Quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse [it]," a spokesperson told BuzzFeed in May, imagining a scenario where society banned computers. The argument doesn't really hold water, though. Rekognition is designed for situations where abuse is trivially easy, and there are no guarantees that Amazon will refuse to sell its tech to agencies that might misuse the technology. Amazon once offered to connect Washington County with a body camera manufacturer despite body camera facial recognition being illegal in Oregon -- if problems like that exist, how does the public know it won't sell Rekognition to an overreaching police force? And whether or not these factors matter to Amazon, it may have to bow to pressure if investors start selling their stock and hurting Amazon's bottom line. Cable traders stay alert for any fresh Brexit headlines. Phillip Hammond says Second Referrundum could help break the current Brexit impasse. Long-term Technicals indicated a strong bear trend. Investor concerns over a possible escalation of a trade war between the U.S. and China weighed on the AUD/USD and NZD/USD on Monday. The Aussie was the weaker of the two as investors positioned themselves ahead of todays release of the Reserve Bank of Australia Monetary Policy Meeting Minutes and the quarterly HPI report at 0130 GMT. The AUD/USD reached a low of .7413 late in the session, just slightly above its May 9 bottom at .7412. The next target under this level is the June 2, 2017 bottom at .7372. The NZD/USD wasnt as nearly as weak, still holding well above bottoms reached at .6883 and .6850 over the past month. The overall tone in the market is bearish because of the divergence between the monetary policies of the hawkish U.S. Federal Reserve and the dovish Reserve Bank of Australia and New Zealand. We may find out how wide the gap between the Fed and the RBA actually is early Tuesday with the release of its minutes. On top of the bearishness fueled by central bank activity, Aussie and Kiwi traders are also in a defensive mode due to the US-China trade spat that puts global economic growth at risk. Forecast Lingering concerns over the US-China trade dispute could continue to pressure the AUD/USD and NZD/USD or at the least limit their upside potential if there is a short-covering rally. The fact that both Forex pairs havent crashed suggests that investors feel that some solution will be reached as long as both parties are still at the negotiation table. If the worst case scenario for the Aussie and Kiwi, an end to trade talks and further retaliation by the U.S. and/or China could fuel a more severe break. In economic news, the RBA will release the minutes of its June meeting at 0130 GMT. At this meeting it kept rates on hold at the record low 1.5 percent for the 20th consecutive month. Currently, traders dont see the RBA lifting Australias official cash rate until mid-2019 or even 2020. Recently, RBA Governor Philip Lowe said that a rate hike is some time away. Therefore, we dont expect to see any surprises in todays minutes. Story continues Also in Australia, the Bureau of Statistics will release its quarterly house price index. The report is expected to show that Australian house prices declined 1.5 percent since the last quarter, reflecting weaker growth in Sydney and Melbourne. In my opinion, the key market driver will be any new developments over the trade issue between the US and China. This article was originally posted on FX Empire More From FXEMPIRE: TheStreet.com Using technical analysis of the charts of those stocks, and, when appropriate, recent actions and grades from TheStreet's Quant Ratings, we zero in on five names. While we will not be weighing in with fundamental analysis, we hope this piece will give investors interested in stocks on the way down a good starting point to do further homework on the names. Nu Skin Enterprises Inc. recently was downgraded to Hold with a C+ rating by TheStreet's Quant Ratings. blockchain Brussels Airport has launched an application based on blockchain technology meant to assist in tracking cargo movement from ground handlers to freight forwarders. The application will work in conjunction with BRUcloud, the open data management platform of Brussels Airport that is hosted on the cloud. BRUcloud, which is based on the data technology of Nallian a supply chain collaboration platford aimed at the business-to-business market was launched in 2016 for Brussels Airports cargo community. The blockchain-based app is the next logical step with regards to the Landside Management tool that Brussels Airport is developing alongside its BRUcargo community stakeholders. The goal of Brussels Airport is to ensure that the logistics flow is fully digitized using applications which are offered through the BRUcloud platform. In so doing, Europes 23rd busiest airport aims to eliminate the use of paper in the import process, enhance transparency, and increase efficiency. Seamless Integration with Current and Future Apps Known as Freight Management App 1.0, the tool will work with current apps which include Slot Booking App, as well as others which are yet to be developed. Among the members of the BRUcargo community, BRUcloud will facilitate cloud-based sharing of data, thus allowing the different stakeholders along the supply chain to work in a more cohesive and integrated manner. Bitcoin price It will also be possible to add applications to the existing infrastructure. The various users will additionally be able to install nodes of their own, which can then register transactions. These transactions will be accessible by all the parties who will be granted access rights, thus ensuring complete transparency. Data will be stored centrally once and the moment a company gets connected it will be possible to use the various applications to exchange information with other stakeholders without having to maintain individual system-to-system connections with the various partners. Story continues Reliability and Cost-Effectiveness Some of the companies that have been supporting BRUclouds development at Brussels Airport include DHL Global Forwarding, an ocean and air freight forwarding services provider, and WFS, a ground handler. According to the chief executive officer of DHL Global Forward in Belgium and Luxembourg, Luc Jacobs, enhancing reliability and transparency in the supply chain will lead to a reduction in the operating expenses. DHL Global Forwarding is pro-actively seeking supply chain visibility and transparency tools and improvement areas, in order to facilitate the supply chain of our customers. We firmly believe that an increasing transparency and reliability will decrease the overall supply chain costs in the future, said Jacobs. During this years World Air Cargo Awards which were held in Shanghai, China, BRUcloud won the Information Technology award. Images from Shutterstock The post Brussels Airport Unveils Blockchain App for Tracking Cargo Movement appeared first on CCN. [caption id="attachment_1660" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Assault-Weapons gun guns Photo Credit: DBTN/iStockphoto.com.[/caption] A last-ditch effort to revive a bill to ban the sale of assault weapons in Delaware failed Tuesday in the state Senate, as two Democrats joined the chamber's Republican caucus in rejecting a maneuver to bring the legislation up for debate. Lawmakers voted 10-9 not to consider Senate Bill 163 after the most controversial gun-control measure of the legislative session failed to clear a key committee earlier this month. Last week, Senate President Pro Tempore David McBride, D-Hawk's Nest, said that he would support a bid to bring the bill to the floor for an up-or-down. However, supporters first needed 11 of the Senate's 21 members to agree to suspend the rules in a chamber where Democrats hold just a one-seat edge over the Republican minority. On Tuesday, Sen. Brian Bushweller, D-Dover, and fellow Democrat Sen. Bruce Ennis of Smyrna cast the decisive "no" votes, leaving supporters two votes short of the majority they needed to trigger debate. Two Republican senators were recorded as absent during the roll call. The vote came as a stinging loss for the bill's proponents, who said the measure was desperately needed to combat a rash of mass shootings that has gripped the country in recent years. "This is a disservice to Delawareans on all sides of the legislation," the bill's sponsor, Sen. Bryan Townsend, D-Newark, said after the vote, which the Law Weekly monitored via a live audio stream posted to the General Assembly's website. Gov. John Carney, also a Democrat, had announced the bill in March, invoking the Feb. 14 tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 59 concertgoers in October. In both cases, lone gunmen used legally purchased semiautomatic rifles to carry out the massacres. Modeled after a similar ban in Maryland, SB 163 identified a range of assault long guns and other weapons that would no longer be approved for manufacture, sale and transport in the First State. The bills synopsis noted that Marylands law, passed in 2013, was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in a ruling that applied U.S. Supreme Court precedent that found the Second Amendment did not apply to guns deemed to be exceptionally lethal weapons of war. The Supreme Court in November denied an appeal by gun dealers and the Maryland branch of the National Rifle Association, who had challenged the law in federal court. Delawares bill listed 45 types of long gunsincluding the AR-15 and AK-47that would be outlawed, along with certain assault pistols and copycat weapons. The measure did not include firearms that were legally purchased before the legislation was set to go into effect, though those guns would have been subject to tighter restrictions after the bills effective date. The proposal sparked intense opposition from gun-rights advocates, who have organized demonstrations in Dover and on Tuesday filled the Senate gallery in anticipation of the vote. They argue that the measure would violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms, as well as a provision of the Delaware Constitution that protects the right to carry outside of the home. Opponents applauded the bill's defeat from their seats above the Senate floor, and audible groans could be heard when Townsend stood to speak, prompting a rebuke from Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long, who as the Senate president would have cast the tie-breaking vote in the event of a deadlock. "I will have this chamber evacuated with all guests if we are not here in a professional forum," she said. Sen. Anthony Delcollo, R-Elsmere, said SB 163 would not have passed constitutional muster in light of recent decisions from the Delaware Supreme Court and federal appeals courts, and he decried the attempt to depart from the Senate's normal order, which require that legislation receive a favorable committee vote before it can advance to the floor. "Today, I believe our vote has supported the process," he said. Townsend has promised to reintroduce the measure when the next session of the General Assembly convenes in January. This session, Carney has signed into law three gun-related bills measures, which aim to outlaw bump stocks, crack down on straw purchases and restrict access to weapons for people determined to be a threat to themselves or others. A separate "red flag" billwhich would allow family members and law enforcement to obtain a protection order from a court to remove firearms from people found to be a threathas cleared the Delaware House of Representatives and is awaiting a Senate vote. Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) said that its sales in China fell 29% in May from a year ago, to 61,744 vehicles, continuing a trend of precipitous declines in sales of Ford-brand vehicles in the world's largest new-car market. Year to date, Ford's sales in China are down 22% from the same period a year ago. A red Ford Edge, a midsize crossover SUV, parked on a waterfront. The Edge has a Chinese-language front license plate. Not long ago, this special seven-seat version of the Ford Edge was a hot seller in China. But sales have plummeted: Year to date through May, Edge sales are down 23%. Image source: Ford Motor Company. The raw numbers Ford reports four categories of sales in China: Mainstream Ford-brand passenger vehicles produced by its joint venture with Chinese automaker Changan Automobile, called Changan Ford or CAF Trucks and commercial vehicles produced by its joint venture with Jiangling Motors (JMC); those include three Fords, as well as several truck models sold under the Yusheng and JMC brand names Ford-brand vehicles that are imported into China Lincoln-brand vehicles, all of which are currently imported into China Here are the results reported by Ford for each of those categories in May: Category May 2018 Sales Change vs. May 2017 CAF 34,026 (43%) JMC 22,712 * Imported Fords 1,305 (20%) Lincoln 3,701 (3%) Data source: Ford Motor Company. *JMC sales are essentially unchanged from last year's (six vehicles more than a year ago). Why are Ford's sales down so much? Here's another way to look at those sales numbers that gives us a clue to what's happening. Sales of Ford-brand vehicles fell 40.4% in China in May; meanwhile, combined sales of Yusheng, JMC, and Lincoln vehicles rose 4.7%. This seems to be a Ford-brand problem. It may be that Ford has become old news in China, which is the fastest-moving major auto market in the world. Ford's product-launch cadence has fallen behind faster-moving rivals, and there's a sense that Ford hasn't kept pace with Chinese market trends. It's also possible that the ongoing war of words between the Trump administration and the Chinese government may be starting to dent Ford's sales in China. There are precedents for this: Back in 2012, Chinese sales for Toyota, Honda, and Nissan all fell sharply during a dispute between the Chinese and Japanese governments over ownership of a group of islands. Story continues Ford is a very, very American brand; if Chinese consumers are feeling upset with the United States, it certainly won't help the Blue Oval's sales. Here are the sales results for the five top-selling Ford-brand vehicles in China. As you can see, the numbers are not good: Vehicle May 2018 Sales Change vs. May 2017 Year-to-Date Sales Change vs. 2017 Escort 12,070 (37%) 67,443 (23%) Focus 6,313 (50%) 33,880 (45%) Edge 5,899 (22%) 35,327 (23%) Mondeo 3,794 (50%) 25,553 (30%) Kuga 3,782 (52%) 22,030 (37%) Data source: Ford Motor Company. Take particular note of the sales results for the Edge and for the Kuga, which is the Chinese version of the Ford Escape. Like Americans, Chinese auto-buyers are increasingly favoring crossover SUVs, a Ford specialty. But Ford's mainstays, both of which are locally built and thus not priced particularly high because of import tariffs, are a tough sell right now. It's especially tough because the Edge isn't all that old, having been launched just three years ago. What's more, Ford builds the Edge in a special longer-wheelbase version for China, with three rows of seats, and that variant was very popular for a while. But sales of both have slid sharply along with the rest of the Ford-brand lineup. Ford can fix this, but it will take time Ford is working on an elaborate overhaul of its China lineup, part of what it calls a "repositioning" effort that will unfold between now and 2025. The plan calls for 50 new-to-China products over the next seven years, along with changes to Ford's operational structure in China that have already begun to happen. The first new Fords will include all-new versions of the Focus and the Escort, still the company's top sellers in China, along with three new or revamped SUVs for Lincoln and a version of the midsize Ranger pickup. (The Escort is a value-priced China-only compact sedan based on the Focus; the global Focus is positioned as a premium offering in China.) Those will help. But it seems likely that Ford's sales in China will need more than a few new models to fully recover. Investors should be prepared to be patient here. More From The Motley Fool John Rosevear owns shares of Ford. The Motley Fool recommends Ford. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. * FDA notes questions on data not related to efficacy, safety * Duobrii approval could be delayed to 2019 - analysts * Valeant requests meeting with U.S. FDA (Updates share price) By Manas Mishra June 18 (Reuters) - Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc's plaque psoriasis treatment did not get approval from U.S. health regulators, a setback for the company which had high hopes for the lotion. A possible delay in approval of the treatment could be a blow to the company, as the treatment is one of the seven products, dubbed as the "Significant Seven", highlighted in Valeant's pipeline projected to raise over $1 billion over the next five years. "We wonder if Valeant will need to update this expectation for the 'Significant Seven' peak sales following the setback to Duobrii," Wells Fargo analyst David Maris said in a note. The company's U.S.-listed shares fell 7.1 percent to $24.94 on Monday. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's letter to the company did not cite any deficiencies related to clinical safety or efficacy of the treatment, Duobrii, but highlighted questions regarding pharmacokinetic data, Valeant said. Pharmacokinetic data https://www.fda.gov/downloads/Training/ClinicalInvestigatorTrainingCourse/UCM340007.pdf shows how the body reacts to a treatment, including the duration and intensity of the drug's effects. Valeant did not elaborate further on the data that the FDA had questioned. Additional data, if required by the FDA, may take as much as six or more months to be generated, Maris said in a note. "We suspect that Duobrii is no longer a 2018 launch, as Valeant had previously guided, and may not even be a 2019 event," Maris added. Chief Executive Officer Joseph Papa has worked for the past two years to regain investor confidence following a flurry of investigations into Valeant's accounting and pricing practices and has been building on the company's product portfolio. Valeant in May said it would change its name to Bausch Health Cos Inc, as it seeks to distance itself from a series of scandals and accounting issues under the its previous management. Valeant has requested a meeting with the U.S. health agency as it worked towards Duobrii's approval, Chief Executive Officer Papa said on Monday. Duobrii sales could reach up to $175 million in 2022, according to Mizuho analyst Irina Koffler, who said the estimate was still achievable, provided Valeant could rapidly address the FDA's questions. About 7.5 million in the United States suffer from psoriasis, according to the American Academy of Dermatology. (Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel and Shounak Dasgupta) Wells Fargo Spencer Platt / Getty Images Wells Fargo owes some of its customers money. Until July 7, Wells Fargo clients affected by Wells Fargo's fraudulent account scandal can join a class action settlement. Wells Fargo is paying $142 million to settle a number of lawsuits related to the scandal. Wells Fargo might owe you money. The bank is currently undergoing a class action settlement over the roughly 3.5 million unauthorized accounts its employees opened in the name of unsuspecting clients from 2009 to 2016. Wells Fargo is due to shell out $142 million to those affected by the scandal, some of whom were hit with fraudulent fees and dinged credit scores. The bank has also sent out a number of statements about the class action settlement to clients (full disclosure, I get these alerts because I'm a Wells Fargo customer). "If you believe Wells Fargo opened a checking, savings, credit card, or line of credit account for you without your permission, or if you purchased identity theft protection from us, you may be entitled to compensation from this fund," reads a statement emailed to customers on April 20. "If you submit a claim, you may be eligible for reimbursement of fees, compensation for potential impact on your credit, and an additional cash payment based on any money remaining in the fund after benefits and costs are paid out." How to file a claim with Wells Fargo over fraudulent accounts People who are ready to file a claim can do so on the class settlement's website. A Wells Fargo spokesperson told Business Insider that customers with specific questions about accounts can visit their local Wells Fargo or give 1-800-869-3557 the bank's customer service line a ring at any time. The Wells Fargo Unauthorized Accounts Settlement website also has a number: 18664318549. The bank spokesperson added that the bank is maintaining a database of closed accounts going all the way back to May 2002. Story continues Rief Kanan, the director of The Business Institute at the State University of New York at New Paltz, told Business Insider said his best advice for Wells Fargo customers affected by the fraudulent accounts would be to contact the bank. "My suspicion would be that they are bending over backwards for customers to make sure a customer knows all of the details of their accounts and what to do in order to close unauthorized accounts, and how to get restitution if there's any restitution necessary," he told Business Insider. Kanan added that Wells Fargo is especially inclined to restore its pre-scandal reputation, which, he said was "squeaky clean" for a "behemoth bank." Wells Fargo customers have until July 7 to file a claim Wells Fargo customers who had unauthorized accounts opened in their names should have already received notifications and in some cases financial compensation from the bank. Customers who have already received a payment can still file a claim as part of the class action settlement. The bank has extended the deadline to take part in the settlement to July 7, 2018. For affected customers who wish to exclude themselves from the settlement in order to file their own suit against Wells Fargo, the deadline to get out of the class action settlement is May 14, 2018. Affected clients who file a claim will receive compensation based on the financial impact the scandal had on your life, according to NPR. USA Today reported that the bank previously refunded $3.7 million to customers from September 2016 and July 2017, in compensation for "bank account fees charged on unauthorized accounts and lines of credit." The New York Times reported that the bank will also pay $1 billion to federal regulators over its practices regarding auto insurance and mortgages. Check your credit report for unauthorized accounts if you haven't already If you aren't sure whether unauthorized accounts were opened in your name, you can click over to the The Federal Trade Commission's annual credit report website. It allows you to obtain a credit report from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. You can check the report for fraudulent accounts. Kanan said that it's impossible to say whether or not other major banks could be sitting on similar fraudulent activities. "If major banks didn't take a look inside their operations and say, 'Could this be going on in our organization?' they've made a bad mistake," Kanan said. "It's the kind of thing where if you're the CEO of Bank of America and you witness what happened to Wells Fargo, you go to your senior people and say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, could this be going on in our organization? If so, let's make sure it's stopped and remedied immediately.' I would be surprised if that conversation didn't go on in the C-suites." Are you a Wells Fargo employee with a story to share? Email acain@businessinsider.com. NOW WATCH: Ex-Wells Fargo employees reveal how some bankers abused customers See Also: SEE ALSO: Wells Fargo to pay $1 billion in fines for mortgage and auto lending abuses Alex Krizhevsky didnt get into the AI business to change the course of history. Krizhevsky, born in Ukraine but raised in Canada, was just looking to delay getting a coding job when he reached out to Geoff Hinton about doing a computer-science PhD program in AI at the University of Toronto. The fateful moment was when, as a graduate student, Krizhevsky and a fellow student named Ilya Sutskever, decided to enter the ImageNet competition, a test for AI consisting of a huge database of online images. The competition, open to anyone in the world, was to evaluate algorithms designed for large-scale object detection and image classification. The point wasnt just to crown a winner, but to test a hypothesis: with the right algorithm, the massive amount data in the ImageNet database could be the key to unlocking AIs potential. The two grad students, working with Hinton as an advisor, decided to enter the 2012 competition using a fringe idea: an artificial neural network designed by Krizhevsky. The approach dominated the contest, beating every other research lab by a huge 10.8% margin. They beat every other research lab by a huge 10.8% margin. Thus, the current AI boom was born. Google hired the three researchers to seed a new, major projects using neural nets; the technologys decision-making prowess soon put the words deep learning on the lips of every founder and Silicon Valley executive. Other tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft started positioning their businesses around the tech. Now Krizhevsky, following a four-and-a-half year stint at Google, is riding the wave he helped generate, by joining deep-learning startup Dessa as its technical adviser. Dessa, previously called Deeplearni.ng, works with companies to overhaul their businesses with AI. For example, it worked with Scotiabank to develop a deep-learning system that identifies the signs of potentially-delinquent customers faster. Story continues A highly non-obvious solution Back in his grad school years, Krizhevsky was reading papers on an earlier algorithm invented by his advisor, Hinton, called the restricted Boltzmann machine. He had seen graphics processing units (GPUs) used with restricted Boltzmann machines, instead of central process units (CPU). He thought that if could use those GPUs on other kinds of neural networks with more layers (or, deep neural networks) he could ratchet up processing speeds of deep neural networks and create a better algorithm.The result was a neural network design to quickly beat other state-of-the-art benchmarks in algorithm accuracy. Shortly after that discovery, in 2011, Sutskever, another of Hintons grad students, learned about the ImageNet dataset. It was more than a million images, specifically crafted for the kinds of computer-vision algorithms that the Toronto team were trying to tackle. I realized that his code was capable of solving ImageNet, says Sutskever. A highly non-obvious realization at the time. Krizhevsky then used the enhanced capabilities of his GPU-sped code to train the neural network on the dataset. The higher calculation speeds allowed the network to process those millions of images in five or six days, rather than the weeks or even months it would have taken previously. All the extra data that could be processed enabled the neural network to have unprecedented sensitivity in telling the differences between objects in an image. Unlike many other researchers, hes an engineer at heart. Hinton was originally resistant to the idea, since the neural network still needed to be told which objects were in which images rather than learning the labels itself, but still contributed to the project in an advisory role. It took six months just to break even with what were then the image-classification benchmarks for ImageNet, and then another six to achieve the results the team submitted. [Krizhevsky] has an extremely deep understanding of [machine learning], and unlike many other researchers, hes an engineer at heart, says Sutskever, who is now director of research at OpenAI. He has the ability to keep at a problem until its solved. Krizhevsky, who is soft-spoken and has never talked to the media before now, chuckles when recalling the weeks after the 2012 ImageNet results came out. It became kind of surreal, he says. We started getting acquisition offers very quickly. Lots of emails. The end goal of computer science The eventual neural-network framework was validated in a seminal research paper (pdf) in the field of AI, first presented at AIs largest annual conference in 2012, after the ImageNet challenge. That study has now has been cited more than 24,000 times, according to Google Scholar. The neural-network framework that resulted is now known colloquially as AlexNet, but it didnt originally bear that name. After the acquisition, the name was rightfully changed to AlexNet. After the ImageNet challenge, Google tasked an intern named Wojciech Zarembanow head of robotics at OpenAI with recreating Krizhevskys paper for the company. Since Google has a tradition of naming neural networks after their creators, the companys approximation of Krizhevskys neural network was originally called WojNet. But then Google won the war for the rights to hire the researchers and acquire their technology. After the acquisition, the name was rightfully changed to AlexNet. During his Google tenure, Krizhevsky worked on Google Photos and then became deeply entrenched in the companys self-driving car project. In September 2017, he left the companyhe lost interest in the work, he says. At Dessa, Krizhevsky will advise and help research new deep-learning techniques. The company is looking to double in size to 80 employees in 2018. To Krizhevsky, it makes perfect sense that AI has become such a force in the tech world and beyond. Artificial intelligence is sort of the end goal of computer science, Krizhevsky says. Computer science is about automating stuff, and artificial intelligence is about automating everything. Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news. More stories from Quartz: The following is a government press release. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has received a delegation of OSCE-member States representatives, led by Veronique Roger-Lacan. The Prime Minister stressed the importance of Armenias close cooperation and constructive dialogue with OSCE and the governments of its member States. Nikol Pashinyan touched upon Armenias internal political developments, foreign policy priorities, and answered the questions of interest to the meeting participants, which bore on the Armenian governments political and economic activities and programs, the reforms planned for the development of democratic institutions, etc. The head of the Armenian government presented his views about holding snap parliamentary elections in our country, amending the Electoral Code, combating corruption, improving the business environment, and fighting monopolies. Nikol Pashinyan touched upon the negotiations on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement, Armenian-Turkish relations and spoke about Armenias relations with Russia, the European Union, the United States and other countries. Thankful for a sincere and direct dialogue, Veronique Roger-Lacan stressed that the OSCE stands ready to develop and deepen partnership with Armenia in a bid to support the Governments reforms. FILE PHOTO: The logo of Mellanox Technologies is seen at the company's headquarters in Yokneam, in northern Israel July 26, 2016. Picture taken July 26, 2016. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun By Liana B. Baker and Svea Herbst-Bayliss NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chipmaker Mellanox Technologies Ltd struck a settlement with activist investor Starboard Value LP to appoint new board members and name a director if the company fails to meet certain operating goals. Mellanox, based in Israel and the United States, said on Tuesday that three newcomers will join its 11-member board, reaching a negotiated settlement five months after Starboard said it planned to oust all sitting directors. The company said the New York-based hedge fund, which owns a 10.5 percent stake, will be allowed to appoint a direct representative to the board if certain performance thresholds are not met. This is an unusual step, handing more power to an activist investor that has pushed for changes at a variety of companies ranging from Darden Restaurants Inc to Verizon Communications Inc's Yahoo in the last years. Reuters earlier on Tuesday reported the names of the three new board members after reporting on Sunday that a settlement was near. Mellanox will add two directors from Starboard's proposed nominees including Greg Waters, the chief executive officer of semiconductor company Integrated Device Technology Inc and Jon Olson, a former chief financial officer at programmable chipmaker Xilinx Inc, the company said. The two sides also agreed to add another independent director, Jack Lazar, a former chief financial officer at camera maker GoPro Inc, the company confirmed. "Jack, Jon and Greg will bring valuable experience and perspectives to the Board, and we look forward to working closely with them," board Chairman Irwin Federman said. The newcomers replace Dov Baharav, Shai Cohen and Tom Riordan who are stepping down. Thom Weatherford will serve as chair of the audit committee until March 2019 when he will step down from the board. Story continues In January Starboard took the unusual step of nominating its two co-founders, Jeffrey Smith and Peter Feld, and seven other executives with experience in the semi-conductor industry after criticizing the company for being too reserved when it announced its 2018 margin targets. The hedge fund said it would add back two sitting directors for continuity. "We are pleased to have worked constructively with the Board and management team," Feld said. J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Credit Suisse acted as financial advisers to Mellanox while Latham & Watkins LLP and Herzog Fox & Neeman provided legal counsel. Olshan Frome Wolosky LLP advised Starboard. (Reporting by Liana B. Baker and Svea Herbst-Bayliss in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker) Satya Nadella Stephen Lam/Stringer Microsoft is being criticized over its contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for its cloud-computing software Azure Government. In a blog post in January, Microsoft said it was "proud to support" the agency with the software. ICE has been heavily criticized in recent days for enforcing a policy of separating families at the US-Mexico border and operating detention centers for separated family members and children. Microsoft has come under fire after a blog post from January resurfaced detailing how the company is "proud to support" Immigration and Customs Enforcement with a contract for its Azure Government cloud software. Azure Government is cloud-computing software that Microsoft sells to various government agencies, but the contract with ICE has received criticism in light of its enforcement of family-separation policies and operation of detention centers, some of which house hundreds of children who have been separated from their parents or family members. Tweet Embed: //twitter.com/mims/statuses/1008390090710757376?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Microsoft @azure is "proud to support" the work of ICE. This quote is from a page that was created this year. To all the people lecturing me recently on having negative feelings about MS buying Github: y'all are ok with this? I'm not ok with this. pic.twitter.com/vm26BmWF81 Tweet Embed: //twitter.com/mims/statuses/1008731840780177415?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Friends who work for @Microsoft, FIGHT THIS. Make the biggest noise imaginable about it. Don't fall for the "all companies take government contracts" spin. Your company has THIS contract and is *proud* of it. Resources are available to help you fight. I believe in you. https://t.co/P19aEWR45n Around 1 p.m. ET Monday, the blog post's section about ICE seemed to have been removed, though it reappeared about 20 minutes later. Tweet Embed: //twitter.com/mims/statuses/1008756580903313408?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Looks like Microsoft removed the part about being proud to support ICE (below) from its Azure blog post https://t.co/5uWXdVJ2ch Here's the archived version https://t.co/GlNcA8vIxS pic.twitter.com/DVfF3K4OEz Story continues Microsoft told the Wired reporter Nitasha Tiku that the removal of the portion referencing ICE was a "mistake" and attributed it to an employee who edited the blog after seeing discussions about it on social media. Additionally, Microsoft issued a statement. "Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border," the statement said. "Family unification has been a fundamental tenant of American policy and law since the end of World War II. As a company Microsoft has worked for over 20 years to combine technology with the rule of law to ensure that children who are refugees and immigrants can remain with their parents. We need to continue to build on this noble tradition rather than change course now. We urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families." Amid the backlash against Microsoft on social media, a website developer named Mat Marquis wrote on Twitter that he would end his business with the company over its ICE contract. Tweet Embed: //twitter.com/mims/statuses/1008749313219063808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Ive terminated my contract with @Microsoft.https://t.co/GkvLBXxFjs They have an outstanding invoice which, upon receipt, I will be donating to https://t.co/TIlNWOGSQS NOW WATCH: How to know which MacBook you should buy See Also: A batch of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies Donald Trump fired another salvo in his trade war against China on Friday (June 15), announcing 25% tariffs on an estimated $50 billion worth of Chinese goods. The tariffs mean that US businesses and consumers will likely be shelling out more money for certain items. But Americans have dodged at least a few bullets. Trumps original tariff list, announced back in April, included 1,333 items. After fielding comments from the public and trade experts, the administration has winnowed the targets down a bit. Now only 818 products (worth about $34 billion) will initially face the 25% tariff, which goes into effect July 6. (The Trump administration is still considering 284 product lines (pdf), estimated to be worth around $16 billion.) The items that got cut from the original list offer somewhat bemusing insight into the Trump administrations understanding of American prioritiesand expose just how reliant the US is upon China for many basic goods. Which Chinese products were exempted from US tariffs? The list focuses on products from industrial sectors that contribute to or benefit from Chinas industrial policy, according to the administration, and does not include goods commonly purchased by American consumers such as cellular telephones or televisions. In other words, the tariffs are meant to hit China where it hurts, while sparing Americans from spending more on particularly valued products. The new tariff list does indeed spare TVs. But the Trump administrations concern for US consumers extended far beyond the obvious. Chainsaws, hot-air balloons, snowmobiles, and trash compactors were subject to the 25% tariff back in April. No longer. The 515 items spared from the tariffs include some other curiosities: Story continues bakery and biscuit ovens spaghetti-making machinery brewery machines sugar-making machines and parts bookbinding machines photocopiers central heating boilers foil air conditioning frames fire extinguishers and fire extinguisher parts passenger and freight elevators snowplows and snowblowers golf carts jukeboxes chainsaws and parts blowtorches cash registers non-refrigerated vending machines strobe light parts cigarette-making machines psychological aptitude testing apparatus passenger boarding bridges other than the kinds used in airports dishwashers for domestic use (sorry, restaurantscommercial washers stayed on the list) Scores of items taken off the list hint at just how much the US depends upon China for health-related productsvaccines, defibrillators, chemical contraceptives, diagnostic tests, dental fillings, hearing aids, and hormones, for example, have all been struck from Trumps original list. (Meanwhile, a hundred or so steel and aluminum products were removed the list, presumably because they already are covered under tariffs Trump announced in March.) Others are more baffling. The original list included several size classes of motorcycles and mopeds. The final tariff list nixed three of the less powerful motorcycle types. However, the US will still be levying tariffs on Chinese-made bikes of the biggest engine size (think Harley-Davidsons). Thats odd given that, since 2011, the US imported less than $21,700 worth of these from China. Meanwhile, three other categories of electric motorbikes have been added to the roster of 284 product lines newly under investigation for benefiting from Chinese industrial policies. That makes a bit more sense given the Chinese governments promotion of electric vehicle technology, though its hard to see mopeds as a source of Chinese industrial might. Meanwhile, the list seems designed to ensure that Americans still have easy access to guns. Meanwhile, the changes to the list seem designed to ensure that Americans still have easy access to weapons. Telescopic sights for machines and appliances will now face a 25% tariffthose used for rifles and other arms are no longer included. In fact, the whole sweeping range of weaponry included in the April list has now been cut. Americans will still be able to enjoy duty-free prices on Chinese rocket launchers, flame-throwers, shotguns, ammunition, pistols, grenade launchers and imports classified as bombs, grenades, torpedoes, mines, missiles and similar munitions of war. And, yes, the US does import a few million dollars worth of those goods each year. Another 284 products may be added to the tariff list pending more discussion and a public hearing. That list is primarily composed of industrial chemicals, machinery, and machine parts. But it too includes items seemingly unrelated to Chinas state-sponsored manufacturing might. To be on the safe side, Americans might want to stock up on floating docks and direction-finding compasses before the trade wars next front opens up. Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news. More stories from Quartz: coupons grocery shopping Joe Giblin/AP Photos The grocery store can really eat up a budget the monthly median spending on food for American families is roughly $520. But anyone can cut up to 50% off their grocery bill, according to Coupons.com's Jeanette Pavini. The key to grocery shopping the right way lies in joining your grocery store's loyalty program and being strategic to maximize your member's savings benefits. Grocery shopping is known to eat away at our budgets. The monthly median spending on food for American families is roughly $520, according to a 2017 survey by Gallup. But your grocery bill doesn't have to be that high. "Your grocery bill is one of the few items in your monthly budget where you actually have some control in what you spend and save," consumer savings expert Jeanette Pavini of Coupons.com told Business Insider. "Unlike other expenses that are set in stone (think rent, tuition, or mortgage) you actually can cut your grocery bill by up to 50%." That is, if you shop for groceries the right way. Here are Pavini's steps for saving on groceries: Join your grocery store's loyalty or rewards program There's no reason why you shouldn't be a member of your local grocery store's loyalty program it's free and takes about a minute to sign up, says Pavini. "Now, you will be able to get all the reward member deals...and I mean deals!" she said. Grocery store rewards programs, such as those of Winn-Dixie or Safeway, offer members-only promotions and discounts throughout the year and can offer other bonuses, such as rewards points. Those deals become even bigger when you use them with coupons. Pavini previously told Business Insider that being a member of a grocery store loyalty program and using coupons is the cheapest option for foods like cereal, especially for an average family. Coupons are the perfect example of getting the most bang for your buck once you're a member of your grocery store's loyalty program. To truly maximize the savings you get by being a member, you need to be strategic. Story continues Create a pre-shopping strategy Before you head to the store, lay out a plan. Don't create a weekly grocery shopping list based solely on the holes in your pantry and empty drawers in your fridge. "Build your menu around what is on sale at your grocery store," said Pavini, adding that you should look for deals online or in weekly newspaper ads. "Most sales start on Wednesdays." And don't forget your coupons, which you can also find in weekly newspaper ads or via the Coupons.com app, which adds coupons directly to your loyalty cards in your grocery store's app. At checkout, both the store sales and coupons will come off your total bill. You can also get cash-back buying groceries at places like Walmart and Costco, adds Pavini, who says all you need to do is clip the coupon before going to the store and scan the receipt for a rebate. But your strategy doesn't end there. Shop smart at the store Even with your carefully curated grocery list, coupons, and loyalty card in hand, you still need to be a savvy shopper in the grocery store. If a sale item is out of stock, ask for a rain check, says Pavini. "This means when the item comes back into stock, you will get it at the sale price even if it's not on sale any longer." You should also compare prices, and don't forget to look high and low while doing so you can often find less expensive products of the same type of item if it's not at eye level, according to Pavini. You can also save a lot of money by avoiding pre-cut produce. You're ultimately paying for the convenience of pre-cut produce, and, as Pavini puts it, it doesn't take much time to wash, peel, and cut when you think about the savings. Another area you can save on is meat. "Ask your butcher what time of day meat is typically marked down," said Pavini. "This meat is discounted because it's approaching its sell-by date, but it should still be good if you cook it that night or freeze it later." And typically, a large cut of meat will be cheaper than the same amount cut into smaller pieces, but some butchers will happily cut the large meat into smaller pieces for free if you ask, she added. All it takes to maximize your savings in the store is a keen eye and a few good questions. NOW WATCH: How this couple saved enough to pay for their own wedding while living in New York City See Also: SEE ALSO: The 20 US cities where shoppers save the most money DON'T MISS: The only right way to save money for a house By: Janus Henderson Investors Harvest Exchange June 19, 2018 Opening the Oil Spigot: Why OPEC May Ease Production Cuts and the Impact on Energy Stocks Opening the Oil Spigot: Why OPEC May Ease Production Cuts and the Impact on Energy Stocks | Janus Henderson Blog Research Analyst Noah Barrett explains why OPEC may ease production cuts and what that means for investors. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia have said they might ease production cuts in the second half of 2018. Why? Since 2017, OPEC and certain non-OPEC producers, such as Russia, have undertaken coordinated production cuts to help lift oil prices. The effort has been effective, with crude prices rising appreciably over the past year. But the Trump administrations decision to reimpose sanctions on Iran helped send Brent crude above $80 per barrel in May, the first time it has done so in three-and-a-half years. A drop in output from Venezuela has also weighed on global oil supply. To alleviate these supply disruptions and keep crude from potentially spiking, OPEC and Russia have said they might consider reducing production cuts during the cartels June 22 meeting. This change is notable, but I still think supply/demand fundamentals for crude remain strong. I also dont think it changes the positive backdrop for energy stocks in 2018 and beyond. Why is that? OPEC and Russia could be signaling that they want to support oil demand. However, I think the demand story looks quite positive for 2018 and 2019, even if Brent were to hit $85 or $90 per barrel. This year, the International Energy Agency expects worldwide oil demand to climb by 1.4 million barrels per day, thanks to a sound economy. Should higher oil prices weigh on that figure slightly, it would still be a healthy demand environment, a positive for energy stocks. Could a reversal in OPECs policy cause oil prices to retreat to the lows of 2016? I dont think so. If OPEC and Russia reverse their existing policy, theyre likely to add only 300,000 to 800,000 barrels per day to global output. Already, the cartel is producing about 800,000 barrels below their coordinated quota, so technically these countries would not be in violation of the existing policy if they brought back the higher end of that expected range. In addition, the more supply that comes back from OPEC and Russia, the less spare capacity there is in the market. Should there be a supply shock, oil prices could rise materially, a scenario that the cartel likely wants to avoid. Story continues To read more about the current supply/demand environment for oil and how its impacting energy stocks, please see the June 2018 version of Janus Hendersons Global Sector Views. Receive updates from our experts. SUBSCRIBE Footnote: The energy industries can be significantly affected by fluctuations in energy prices and supply and demand of energy fuels, energy conservation, the success of exploration projects, and tax and other government regulations. A concentrated investment in a single industry could be more volatile than the performance of less concentrated investments and the market as a whole. C-0618-17512 The post Opening the Oil Spigot: Why OPEC May Ease Production Cuts and the Impact on Energy Stocks appeared first on Janus Henderson Blog. RSS Import: Original Source Originally Published at: Opening the Oil Spigot: Why OPEC May Ease Production Cuts and the Impact on Energy Stocks US-Border-control-immigrant-crackdown The Donald Trump administrations controversial new border policy has led to at least 70 south Asian asylum-seekers being detained at a federal prison in the state of Oregon in the USs Pacific northwest. Out of the 123 immigrants that were transfered to the facility over the past month, 52 are reportedly Indian, mainly Sikhs and Christians who say they are fleeing religious persecution, according to a report in The Oregonian newspaper. The group also includes 13 immigrants from Nepal and two from Bangladesh. The rest come from Mexico, Brazil, and China, among other countries. Breaking: At least 70 South Asians reportedly separated from their families & detained in Sheridan, Oregon (52 from India, many who speak Punjabi, 13 from Nepal, 2 from Bangladesh). Need translators. Contact @APANONews. Please RT to spread the word. #FamiliesBelongTogether Valarie Kaur (@valariekaur) June 18, 2018 These immigrants have reportedly faced brutal conditions in the correctional facility, separated from their wives and children and forced to stay in their cells for hours on end. Many only speak Hindi or Punjabi, and have not received help from translators or any legal aid, according to the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), a social justice organisation. These detainees are isolated, have limited access to interpretation, and are at-risk of abuse in their current prison housing arrangement, the APANO said in a post on its website. The organisation has been trying to coordinate help and raise funds for support, besides recruiting volunteers to help with translation. On June 18, several hundred local residents reportedly gathered near the prison to protest the detention, holding signs that said Make America compassionate again and Keep families together. Story continues CALL TO ACTION: 123 immigrants seeking asylum have been detained and transferred to Oregons Sheridan federal prison. The majority of those detained are South Asian and have limited access to interpretation. If you believe #FamiliesBelongTogether ACT NOW:https://t.co/uYwCFWYM4T APANO (@APANONews) June 18, 2018 The asylum-seekers have been detained under the Trump administrations new zero tolerance immigration policy, which was introduced in May. With this policy, all immigrants illegally crossing the border into the US can be criminally prosecuted in federal court. Any minors travelling with them are taken into government custody. In the wake of the new rules, horrifying stories of young children being separated from their families have emerged, prompting heavy criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, notably former first lady Laura Bush, and even Melania Trump herself. The policy is a sign of the intensifying crackdown on immigration in the US, which has picked up pace since Donald Trump was elected. Indians are the fastest-growing illegal immigrant population in the country, with their number hitting half a million in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. While some overstayed their student or business visas, others have made the treacherous trip across central America to cross the border into the US. Last year, the Trump administration deported 460 Indian illegal immigrants, and another 33 were sent home earlier this year. Sign up for the Quartz Daily Brief, our free daily newsletter with the worlds most important and interesting news. More stories from Quartz: Ivan Duque, a populist conservative, won Colombias presidential election Sunday with about 54% of the vote. He defeated former guerrilla member and past Bogota mayor Gustavo Petro with a platform focused on economic revival and reform of the countrys recent rebel peace deal. Duque, 41, will become one of the youngest presidents in the countrys history. A newcomer to politics, Duque worked at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington before being elected to Colombias senate in 2014. His political rise is thanks much in part to former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who mentored Duque. Many fear Duque will be a puppet of Uribe, a politician known for his strength and harsh tactics against guerrilla rebels. Uribe was president for two terms from 2002 to 2010, but is constitutionally barred from running for a third term. Uribe is also known as an adamant critic of the countrys 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and Duque has carried this criticism into his own platform. The peace deal formally ended more than 50 years of rebel warfare that left more than 250,000 dead, but Duque says the deal is too soft on FARC terrorists. Many accused of war crimes have avoided prison, and past guerrilla fighters now sit in the Colombia congress. The reform of the peace deal was a primary part of Duques presidential running platform. Duque says his party does not want to tear the agreement to shreds but rather make it clear that a Colombia at peace is a Colombia where peace meets justice. Duque has also promised to cut business taxes, simplify the tax-code, and boost the nations coal and oil exports, making him a friend of those in the business community. These moves are an effort to improve and maintain Colombias $324 billion economy. After his victory Sunday, Duque tweeted support for building a diverse range of companies. This will be the government that brings entrepreneurship to all of Colombia because we want to make the country of micro, small, medium and large companies, he wrote. Story continues Este sera el gobierno que lleve a toda Colombia el emprendimiento porque queremos hacer el pais de las micro, pequenas, medianas y grandes empresas. #GraciasColombia ???????? pic.twitter.com/FHxpWgQpep Ivan Duque (@IvanDuque) June 18, 2018 When it comes to drug control, Duques stance doesnt stray far from that of his mentors. The president-elect aims to completely eradicate coca, supporting the use of aerial spraying to do so. Chemical spraying had been banned under the previous administration due to health concerns. Aside from Duques conservative plans for Colombia, his election was notable for another reason: his vice president, Marta Lucia Ramirez, will become the countrys first female VP. This milestone was not lost on anyone, sparking comment from Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). Congratulations to @IvanDuque, the new President-elect of the Republic of Colombia. Today, is a historic day for #Colombia as they democratically elected a woman, @mluciaramirez, as Vice President of the nation. Senator Rubio Press (@SenRubioPress) June 17, 2018 Duque will take office this August. June 19 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories on the New York Times business pages. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. - U.S. President Donald Trump further escalated his trade fight with China on Monday, saying his administration was prepared to impose tariffs on another $200 billion worth of Chinese goods and potentially even more if Beijing continues to fight back. https://nyti.ms/2I2iwBJ - Google will invest $550 million in the Chinese online retailer JD.com, the two companies said on Monday. In return, JD.com will join the Google Shopping advertising platform, and will work with the Silicon Valley company on other e-commerce projects in Europe, Southeast Asia and the United States. https://nyti.ms/2K1m0pV - German authorities arrested Rupert Stadler, the chief executive of Volkswagen's Audi luxury car division, as part of a probe into emissions test cheating. https://nyti.ms/2K1oyEv (Compiled by Bengaluru newsroom) By a vote of 77 to 3, Armenias National Assembly today approved a motion to prosecute MP Manvel Grigoryan and keep him in pre-trial detention on charges of illegal arms possession and embezzlement. Two ballots were considered invalid. Grigoryan was arrested last Saturday after National Security Service forces raided his home in Etchmiadzin and a summer resort in the Armavir village of Arshaluys. A large cache of illegal weapons and stockpiles of food and other supplies destined for Armenian army soldiers were found. (Reuters) - President Donald Trump told Apple Inc (AAPL.O) Chief Executive Tim Cook that the U.S. government would not levy tariffs on iPhones assembled in China, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing a source familiar with the negotiations. The newspaper reported that Cook travelled to the White House last month to warn Trump of the potentially adverse effects of Trump's trade policies on Apple in China but did not specify precisely when Trump made the commitment to Cook. Apple and the White House were not immediately available for comment. A list of tariffs proposed in April largely excluded consumer electronics. But last week, Trump unveiled a revised list that included several categories of chips, raising fears that tariffs could impact the U.S. technology sector. (Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Lisa Shumaker) Officials at the Department of Heath and Human Services (HHS) say they could be caring for some 30,000 children by the end of August as the hard-nosed push on federal immigration laws continues. A senior administration official at HHS tells the Washington Examiner that the division expects to take in roughly 250 children per day as border officials separate kids from parents or guardians accused of attempting to enter the country illegally. 11,500 children are reportedly already being held, which would push the number to 30,000 by August 31. The Examiners figure of 11,500, though, is considerably higher than the official tally from the Department of Homeland Security. Officials with that organization on Friday said that a total of 1,995 children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border during a six-week period that ended last month. The Trump administration has come under fire from both sides of the aisle for the policy that separates immigrant children from their parents when they illegally cross the border. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the plan in early May, but President Donald Trump on Friday blamed political opponents for the policy, saying Friday the Democrats have to change their law. Thats their law and we can change it tonight. (White House officials have been unable to cite any part of U.S. law that requires separating children from parents. Trump, meanwhile, said on Twitter that he would not approve any changes to the immigration bill unless it fully funded his proposed wall along the Mexican border.) The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda. Any Immigration Bill MUST HAVE full funding for the Wall, end Catch & Release, Visa Lottery and Chain, and go to Merit Based Immigration. Go for it! WIN! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2018 Mental health authorities, meanwhile, have warned that the policy of separating children from their parents could result in a mental health crisis, and urged the administration to commit to the more humane practice of housing families together pending immigration proceedings to protect them from further trauma. While there was risk yesterday from Central Bankers very little was said to move the market. Instead, the Trade War narrative boiled up again with the latest headlines that US President Trump is planning to impose an additional $200Bn in tariffs against China. The increase in intensity has markets rattled with stocks lower globally, Japan 225 Index down -1.75% overnight, and strong moves in USD Index as it fell below $95.00 yesterday, currently trading at $94.66. There was a noticeable shift in sentiment with USDJPY back down under 110.000 overnight. AUDUSD fell to a one year low at 0.73806 while AUDJPY fell from 82.000 to 81.000 as Australia is at risk of spillover from the impact of US tariffs on China. In Germany, Angela Merkel is under pressure politically as a two-week deadline was imposed upon her to agree with a deal on migrants. This deadline will fall at the end of June and failure is likely to result in a break in the coalition and her being forced from her position as Chancellor. The German 30 Index fell yesterday -1.3% from 13064.00 and has declined further overnight with the index expected to open around 12710.00. EURGBP is down -0.09% around 0.86670. US WTI Oil staged a recovery yesterday from support at $63.36 to a high of $65.78 after declining on Friday ahead of OPEC meetings this week. Headlines suggested that the production increases to be discussed at the meeting were much less than was reported, 300K to 600K against 1M to 1.5M barrels per day. The preliminary meeting is taking place today in Vienna and the market may be impacted by headlines from participants. Russia and Saudi Arabia want to increase production while Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela want to maintain current levels. EURUSD is unchanged overnight, trading around 1.16224. USDJPY is down -0.83% in the early session, trading at around 109.619 GBPUSD is up 0.07% this morning trading around 1.32554 Gold is up 0.37% in early morning trading at around $1,282.70 WTI is down -0.90% this morning, trading around $65.12 This article was written by FxPro This article was originally posted on FX Empire More From FXEMPIRE: Armavir Provincial Governor Gagik Mirijanyan has told Hetq that a temporary mayor will be appointed in Etchmiadzin to replace Karen Grigoryan who resigned from the post on Sunday. Mirijanyan said that investigators will soon launch a series of probes into all aspects of the Etchmiadzin municipalitys activities. Karen Grigoryan, son of Manvel Grigoryan, served as Etchmiadzin mayor since 2008. The provincial governor said that protests, as occurred in Etchmiadzin last week, are manifestations of public discontent, and can happen anywhere in Armenia. Mirijanyan said young people in the town of Armavir are publicly voicing their displeasure and have sought a meeting with him, to which hes agreed. Photo: Gagik Mirijanyan For more than a decade, Mullah Fazlullah remained the dreaded face of terror for millions in northwest Pakistan. They faced death, injury, humiliation, and displacement because of his violent campaign. His reported death in a U.S. drone strike in eastern Afghanistan last week has prompted many of his prominent victims to question Islamabads counterterrorism gains given that most senior Taliban figures were reportedly killed in attacks by unmanned U.S. drone aircrafts. Fazllullah, believed to be in his mid-40s, established a Taliban fiefdom in Swat Valley, a picturesque tourist haven in Pakistans northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, which borders Afghanistan. He earned the nickname Mullah Radio after successfully utilizing fiery sermons on an illegal FM station to transform himself from a rural chairlift operator into one of the most feared Taliban commanders. By 2007, he had established control over Swat, banned polio vaccination, and discouraged girls education. Zahid Khan, a community leader in Swat, was one of Fazllullahs early opponents. He told RFE/RLs Radio Mashaal that his repeated requests to local officials to shut down the Taliban leaders radicalization campaign fell on deaf ears. He was a nasty criminal who ultimately met his fate, but we want to ask why our [intelligence] agencies and security forces were unable to deal with him, he asks. All senior [Pakistani] Taliban commanders have been killed in these [U.S.] drone strikes. Pakistani security forces cannot claim to have killed a single senior Taliban figure or present his dead body to the people. Khan now wants the Pakistani authorities to deliver justice to captured and surrendered Taliban figures such as former Swat Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan and Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP). In December 2016, a military court sentenced Muslim Khan to death. His appeal is now pending in the Pakistani courts. Ehsan remains in government custody after surrendering in April 2017. Ajwan Khan lost his son Asfan Khan in an attack on the Army Public School in Khyber Pakhtunkhwas capital, Peshawar, in December 2014. Nearly 150 schoolchildren and teachers died in the attack, which was claimed by the Pakistani Taliban. We are not satisfied with the killing of Fazlullah and want to ask where our protectors [security forces] was when all this was happening, he told VOAs Deewa Radio. Our grievances are aimed at our protectors. Fazal Khan, an outspoken Peshawar-based lawyer, also lost his son Omar Khan in the Peshawar school attack. He noted how Pakistani authorities released Fazlullahs father-in-law, Sufi Muhammad, in January and are keeping Ehsan away from courts despite efforts to hold Ehsan accountable for publicly claiming responsibility for scores of atrocious Taliban attacks. We praise the United States for killing him [Fazlullah] because apparently he was our enemy, or our security institutions led us to believe that he was our enemy, he told VOAs Deewa Radio. Since the TTPs emergence as an umbrella organization encompassing various Pakistani Taliban factions in 2007, most of its senior leaders and those of its splinter groups have been killed in alleged U.S. drone strikes. These include the movements founding leader, Baitullah Mehsud (2009), and his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud (2013). Qari Hussain, believed to be the mastermind of the TTPs suicide bombing operations, was reportedly killed in a drone strike in 2010. Wali-ur Rehman, another senior commander, was killed in a drone strike in 2013. Omar Mansur, the alleged mastermind of the Peshawar school massacre, was killed in an alleged U.S. drone strike in July 2016. Pakistans powerful military, however, forcefully rejects assertions that it has failed in combating the Pakistani Taliban. We defeated Al-Qaeda, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan, and Jamat-ul Ahrar, Pakistans army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, declared in February. Today, I can say with pride and conviction that there are no organized terrorist camps on our side of the border. In a June 15 statement, the military termed the killing of Fazlullah a positive development. It gives relief to scores of Pakistani families who fell victims to TTP terror including the APS massacre, the statement noted. But some of the most prominent victims of Taliban violence in Pakistan say that the day they can truly feel relieved is still far off. Ziauddin Yousafzai, the schoolteacher father of Nobel laureate education activist Malala Yousafzai, was once on Fazlullahs hit list. He told Radio Mashaal that the Taliban chiefs death reminded him of all the atrocities he had witnessed in Swat, which include the destruction of more than 400 schools and massacres of entire families. He was a symbol of terror, and his death will have some deterrence impact, he said. But the fundamental thing is that we need to abandon [Pakistani] state policies and narratives that have paved the way for the emergence and empowerment of blood-thirsty characters like Fazlullah. Yousafzai says new approaches aimed at transforming Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Afghanistan from a theater of war into an arena for peaceful economic cooperation remains the only path to sustainable peace. Only then we can be adamant that this chapter [of terrorism] is closed forever and new people like Fazlullah will not emerge, he said. Uzbekistan has emphasized its readiness to host direct peace talks between the government of neighboring Afghanistan and the Taliban, after both sides announced cease-fires for the Eid al-Fitr holiday. "The Foreign Ministry confirms its full readiness to create, at any stage of the peace process, all the necessary conditions for setting up direct talks between the government of Afghanistan and the Taliban movement on Uzbekistan's territory," it said in a statement on June 18. The Taliban announced a three-day cease-fire that ended on June 17, except against foreign forces. That overlapped with an Afghan government truce set to run until June 20. The Uzbek statement expressed hope that the truces, which coincided with the holiday ending the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, is extended indefinitely." The former Soviet republic is seeking to raise its international profile as part of President Shavkat Mirziyoevs campaign to open up the nation of 32 million after decades of isolation. Mirziyoev has taken steps to improve Uzbekistan's ties with its neighbors since he became president after authoritarian President Islam Karimov's death was announced in September 2016. In March, Tashkent hosted an international peace conference on Afghanistan during which the Uzbek leader offered to host peace negotiations between the Kabul government and the Taliban, who did not attend the gathering. Uzbekistans Foreign Ministry said it had established appropriate contacts and held working meetings with high-ranking representatives of the Taliban. The prospects for dialogue and interaction for establishing long-term peace and stability in Afghanistan and its economic development were discussed during these meetings, it added. With reporting by Reuters Manvel Grigoryan was brought to Yerevans Nor Nork Administrative Court today just hours after Armenias parliament stripped the former army general of his immunity as a legislator, thus allowing him to be prosecuted on illegal arms possession and embezzlement charges. The court will now have to decide whether to keep Grigoryan in pre-trial detention or release him on bail. Also brought to the court was Artur Asatryan (aka Don Pipo), who was also arrested on June 16 in Etchmiadzin, and is charged with various counts of kidnapping (Article 131, Pts. 1, 2, 3, 6 of the Criminal Code) and one count of illegal arms procurement/possession (Article 235. Pt. 2) The court has already started to review a motion of the Prosecutor Generals Office to keep Asatryan in pre-trial detention. Photo (from left): Manvel Grigoryan, Artur Asatryan VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Veritas Pharma Inc. (CSE:VRT) (OTC:VRTHF) (Frankfurt: 2VP), (Veritas or the Company) is pleased to announce that it has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Colombian medical cannabis company Foliumed S.A.S. (Foliumed). Under the terms of the MOU, Veritas and Foliumed will jointly conduct scientific research, undertake product development activities, and commercialize select medical cannabis products with the help of Veritas research arm, Cannevert Therapeutics Ltd. (CTL). Foliumed will provide Veritas with pharma grade medical cannabis extracts derived from unique Colombian cannabis strains, manufactured in a GMP certified extraction facility. The focus of the collaboration will be aimed at advancing specific cannabis cultivars for specific disease and chronic conditions through joint Intellectual Property Development and commercialization of certain trademark medicinal products. Veritas Pharma and Foliumed Colombia aim to have products based upon Cannevert formulations produced and ready for commercial distribution in Latin America and Western Europe by Q1 2019. The products dosing and method of administration will be standardized to actively compete with over-the-counter medicines. With the help of Cannevert scientists, the Company wants to provide physicians and patients with scientifically tested and clinically proven cannabis therapies. Veritas CEO, Dr. Lui Franciosi stated, Foliumed will assist us in further developing proprietary strains that can produce consistent and optimal therapeutic effects in patients. We want a collaborative agreement with them, which will outline this development work and related intellectual property as well as the approach to profit sharing. Foliumeds founder and Executive Chairman, Oliver Zugel, stated, We are pleased to be working with Veritas and their Cannevert scientists to develop medically relevant cannabis strains and cannabinoid formulations with optimal therapeutic properties with Colombian genetics. Foliumed is looking forward to leverage the capabilities of both parties in producing medicines for patients in Latin America and Western Europe through our international distribution network. Pursuant to the MOU, a Co-IP Development Agreement and Joint Venture Agreement with respect of the transactions contemplated in the MOU are expected to be executed by the parties on or before the next forty-five (45) and ninety (90) days respectively. About Foliumed S.A.S. Foliumed is a vertically integrated producer of value added, medical cannabis products based in Colombia. We target patients in Latin America, a market with a population of 625 million, as well as Germany and other federally regulated European markets where we have an established presence. Foliumeds strategy is to combine its low cost position, access to unique cannabis cultivars and international distribution with medical product IP sourced from leading R&D organizations and LPs in North America and Israel. Foliumed expects to receive its licence approvals for cultivation, extraction, domestic commercialization as well as exports from the Colombian authorities in Q3 2018. It has a 14 hectare cultivation and production site in close proximity to Bogota with an annual throughput capacity of 65,000 kg of dried flower and 15,000 kg of pharma grade cannabis extracts. Foliumed is the medical division of Folium Global, which also produces branded, adult use infused products under TapRoot Holdings, a vertically integrated cannabis company located in Las Vegas, Nevada and also provides international regulatory consulting from its offices in Germany and Spain. For more information, please contact us at info@foliumed.com or call (+34) 628414330 For more info on Foliumed, please visit the company website at: www.foliumglobal.com About Veritas Pharma Inc. Veritas Pharma Inc. is an emerging pharmaceutical and IP development company, who, through its 100% owned subsidiary Cannevert Therapeutics Ltd. (CTL), is advancing the science behind medical cannabis. It is the Companys aim, through its investment in CTL, to develop the most effective cannabis strains (cultivars) specific to pain, nausea, epilepsy and PTSD, solving the critical need for clinical data to support medical marijuana claims. CTLs unique value proposition uses a low-cost research and development model to help drive shareholder value, and speed-to-market. Veritas investment in CTL is led by a strong management team, bringing together veteran academic pharmacologists, anesthetists & chemists. The companys commercial mission is to patent protect IP (cultivars & strains) and sell or license to cancer clinics, insurance industry and pharma, targeting multi-billion-dollar markets according to Deloittes Insights and Opportunities. Veritas Pharma Inc. is a publicly traded company in Canada, on the Canadian Stock Exchange under the ticker VRT; in the United States, on the OTC under the ticker VRTHF; and in Germany, on the Frankfurt exchange under the ticker 2VP.For more information, please visit our website: veritaspharmainc.com On behalf of the Board of Directors " Dr. Lui Franciosi" Dr. Lui Franciosi President and Chief Executive Officer Further information about the Company is available on our website at www.veritaspharmainc.com or under our profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on the CSE website at www.thecse.com. Investor and Public Relations Contact Veritas Pharma Inc. Sam Eskandari Telephone: +1.416.918.6785 Email: ir@veritaspharmainc.com Website: www.veritaspharmainc.com Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. The Canadian Securities Exchange has not in any way passed upon the merits of the proposed transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release. LONDON, June 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Maru Group (Maru or the Group), the technology-enabled customer insights company, today announces Maru/Blues acquisition of Tu Cuentas, a Hispanic research panel targeting Spanish speaking communities in the U.S. The addition of Tu Cuentas to Maru/Blues range of Market Research Online Communities will significantly strengthen the companys research capabilities with the Hispanic population. Founded in 2010, Tu Cuentas is a Hispanic market research panel with over 8,000 registered members in the U.S. Its proprietary online research platform targets Hispanic communities and gathers insights from both open community discussions and private Market Research Online Communities. Launched in April 2018, Maru/Blue provides its clients access to high-quality known respondents from market communities. In addition to the rich insights delivered by Maru/Blues well-established market research communities, Springboard America, Springboard America Business, Maru Voice Canada, and Maru Voice Canada Business, Tu Cuentas will provide Maru/Blues clients with new access to well-curated responses from a deeply-engaged Hispanic community. Ged Parton, CEO of Maru Group said: This is an exciting time for Maru Group. We have recently launched Maru/Blue, opened a new hub in Latin America and made a raft of senior appointments across the Group in the first half of 2018. Our acquisition of Tu Cuentas represents another strategic addition to the Group that will consolidate and enhance Marus insight capabilities within one of Americas largest communities. Rob Berger, Managing Director of Maru/Blue added: Maru/Blue is committed to providing clients with high-quality, reliable and actionable insights from a range of quality sources. The addition of Tu Cuentas well-established community to our bank of capabilities will greatly enhance our offering, adding valuable insight from the U.S. significant Hispanic population. Notes to editors: About Maru Group Maru Group (Maru or The Group) is a technology-enabled market and customer insights company, whose brands are leading the way in the provision of research, insight and advisory services powered by cutting-edge technology and innovation. The Group is quickly emerging as an exciting challenger brand, disrupting the traditional market research and insights industry. Established in 2016 by industry veteran Ged Parton, Maru uses in-depth knowledge of industry sectors and its state-of-the-art technologies to equip its clients with targeted and relevant insights at speed. These insights enable Marus clients to adapt their corporate strategy and innovate quickly to stay ahead of the competition. The Group is developing a portfolio of market-leading companies with growth characteristics, talented management teams and collaborative cultures that prize intellectual generosity. Maru is backed by Primary Capital Partners LLP, a UK-based provider of private equity finance for high potential and growth companies. For more information please visit: https://www.marugroup.net About Maru/Blue Maru/Blue is a premium quality data services firm that provides reliable global data connections for brands, agencies, and market research. We create value for our clients by connecting them with expertly profiled known respondents. The result? Reliable, reproducible insights. We deliver instant access to the general population, specific markets, and your or your competitors customers. We began disrupting the market community industry in 2000. Our market communities broke new ground, adding depth and richness to clients understanding of what motivates their customers and shapes their markets. Now, as part of the Maru Group, we continue to provide reliable global data connections for agencies, brands, and market research firms. Springboard America, and Maru Voice Canada, established more than a decade ago, are a testament to our commitment and depth of engagement. More recently we developed the Maru Voice Business Canada and Springboard America Business Forum, both an excellent source for business to business research. For more information please visit: https://www.marublue.net COSTA MESA, Calif., June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 2NDGEAR, a subsidiary of Insight Investments, LLC, today announced that it has been awarded a contract renewal with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvanias cooperative purchasing program, COSTARS, as an approved vendor for IT hardware. 2NDGEAR has been an approved vendor with COSTARS since 2016. This renewal provides COSTARS members continued direct access to 2NDGEARs refurbished IT products and IT support services with a streamlined purchasing process. We are very pleased to continue to be part of the COSTARS program as it allows local schools, municipalities, and nonprofit organizations an excellent way to purchase necessary equipment without having to go through the bidding process, said Andrew Golembiesky, Director, National Sales, 2NDGEAR. We are committed to providing the highest quality technology products and services to our customers. The COSTARS contract renewal validates our offerings and gives us a trusted channel to continue to serve more organizations. As a qualified vendor in the COSTARS program, local public procurement units, local government units, and eligible non-profits throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania can access 2NDGEARs products and services. The offerings include IT hardware from Dell, HP, and Lenovo which are laptops, desktops, monitors, servers, storage, networking equipment, and peripherals. 2NDGEARs COSTARS contract number is 003-436. For more information on the Pennsylvania COSTARS program visit: http://www.dgs.pa.gov/Local%20Government%20and%20Schools/COSTARS About 2NDGEAR 2NDGEAR, a subsidiary of Insight Investments, LLC, is a leading supplier of new, recertified and refurbished IT equipment and software from partners including Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft, Adobe and more. Offering IT implementation and support services including data destruction, imaging, deployment, office technology relocation, asset liquidation and warehouse outsourcing, 2NDGEAR supports the entire IT lifecycle. An established company respected for its uncommon dedication to service, 2NDGEAR has served thousands of businesses and educational institutions across the U.S. For more information, visit www.2NDGEAR.com. Contact: Christy Kemp 303-898-3390 ckemp@dahliapr.com If advertisers carefully monitor and purchase advertising time, then that would mean that they would be aware of the audience group of Candle and seeing that Candle viewership is increasing for the age group 18-49, they would definitely buy advertising time. This would thus, increase the income of Candle television. Out of Scope: We are not concerned with people over 49-year-old and what they buy This is kind of a weakener, because if the advertisement is going to increase for people over 49 years old, then Candle will not be able to show more advertisement, as they are expecting the increase in income from the 18-49 year target group Out of Scope - We don't know if these reruns will help in getting more advertisement or whether they target the 18-49 age group. Out of Scope - Even if they have less disposable income, they might spend it on the product that is advertised. So this is not a strengthener. Work Hard! Have Fun! Create History! Signature Read More This is I guess a pretty straightforward question. Most of the given options were out of scope/irrelevant.Conclusion: Candle Corporations television stations are likely to have more income from advertisers than previously.Premise: This is because advertisers prefer to reach people in the 18- to 49-year-old age group and the number of people in the group watching Candle television is increasing. Furthermore, among Candle viewers, the percentage of viewers 18 to 49 years old is increasing.Pre-thinking: Advertisers like to target 18-49-year-old group and Candle television watchers in that target group. So, advertisers would start advertising on Candle television and that in turn would generate more income for Candle.Which of the following, if true, would most strengthen the argument that Candle Corporation will receive more income from advertisers?A) Advertisers carefully monitor the demographic characteristics of television audiences and purchase advertising time to reach the audiences they prefer to reach. [B) Among people over 49 years old, fewer viewers of Candle stations buy products advertised on television than do viewers of other stations. [C) There will be increasingly more advertisements on television that are directed at viewers who are over 49 years old. [D) Candle stations plan to show reruns of television shows during hours when other stations run shows for the first time. [E) People 18 to 49 years old generally have less disposable income to spend than do people over 49 years old. [_________________ In State Y, public funding for education is currently restricted to public schools. New legislation has been proposed in State Y's senate that would expand public funding to private schools that do not have a religious affiliation. If state funding for education were to be provided to private schools that have no religious affiliation, most private schools would still be forced to rely on tuition and private donations for support. Notes $ restrict to pub. school plan = $ give to pub. and private w/o religious affil. plan > prim. still need tuition & donations Analysis The author starts of by giving us context that public funding is currently restricted to public schools but the new plan is for the funding to also include private schools but only those without religious affiliation. He then goes on to claim that even so, many private schools will still need money! Why? There's definitely a big gap between private schools needing money and the plan covering those without religious affiliation. Therefore, the assumption is likely that many of them are likely religiously affiliated. Therefore, our best choice is (C). The conclusion that most private schools would still rely on tuition and private donors under the new legislation depends on which of the following assumptions? A) Schools would be able to raise as much money through tuition and donations as they would receive from state funding. We dont really care about HOW much they can raise through tuition/funding. We care about the differences between the funding for private and public schools (and the religious affiliation)! This covers schools too generally. B) Most donors prefer to give money to schools that do not already receive state funding. This answer choice tells us the preference of donors giving money. If anything, this weakens the idea that private schools would be forced to rely on donations...or that this plan would even benefit them? C) Most private schools have some religious affiliation . This is the correct choice. If most schools dont have SOME religious affiliation, they wouldnt be forced to rely on tuition/donations because they would receive state funding. D) Public schools generally have more money per student than private schools have. Money per student is not the crux of the argument. Its about religious affiliation. Just because public schools have more money doesn't mean that private schools would definitely still RELY on tuition/donors....(unless this were true and they were also religiously affiliated). E) A reduction in the amount of money per student in public schools would eventually reduce the proportion of students enrolled in public schools. Proportion of student enrollment relevant to the argument. . "What you do in practice determines your level of success . I used to tell my players: You have to give 100% everyday. Whatever you don't give, you can't make it up tomorrow ." Signature Read More _________________ Varun Sharma sisyphus84 wrote: Hi Everyone, Request everybody to evaluate my profile for ISB, Here goes my profile, I work for my Father and we run an Information Security product company in India. In my 12 years of experience I have been tasked with building teams (Implementation, Support and Business Development), conduct Market Research to identify new technologies and build products and I have pretty much been involved in various other activities to build the company that it is today. UG : Electronics and Communications from College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai UG Score : 5.9/10 (I know its low) Work Experience : 12 years Designation : Associate Vice President Products GMAT Score : V-35, Q-48, Total - 680, AWA - 6, IR - 6 Should I retake my GMAT or is this sufficient to get an interview call? Also, what are my chances of making it into ISB? Varun Sharma MBAkarma.com info (at) MBAkarma (dot) com info (at) MBAkarma (dot) com Signature Read More Statement from New York State Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker on Status of Regulated Marijuana Report ALBANY, N.Y. (June 18, 2018) - Governor Cuomo called on the Department to assess the impact of a regulated marijuana program back in January. At that time the Governor correctly pointed out that the facts have changed regarding this issue. Our border states have already legalized marijuana or are in the process of doing so. The report is being finalized, but it concludes the pros of a regulated program outweigh the cons. The report also concludes that should a regulated program be implemented, special consideration will need to be given to a number of factors including the age of who can purchase marijuana, who can grow and distribute it, the location of dispensaries, and at what rate the product would be taxed. The report raises a number of thoughtful questions and we look forward to delivering it for Governor Cuomos review. One out of 7 on one day of each seven-day week, every U.S. dairy cow produces milk for the international market. One out of 4 Mexico buys 1 pound out of every 4 pounds of U.S. dairy product exports. The math is that simple. Mexico is Americas No. 1 international dairy customer. Tariffs may be coming President Trump placed new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada, Mexico, and the European Union in late May. On top of this, Trumps team is considering levies on cars and auto parts. The targeted move was meant to bring trading partners back to the negotiating table to discuss economic concessions. In politics, every action comes with a reaction. Unfortunately, that reaction could involve dairy and a host of other agricultural products. Various cheese, pork, berries, grapes, and apples could be tariff targets by Mexico up to an amount comparable to the level of damage as a reaction to U.S. on steel and aluminum tariffs, stated Mexicos Economy Ministry. For cheese, that could involve Cheddar, Gouda, and other products. Thats a big deal to U.S. dairy farmers already struggling with very tight or even negative margins. In 2017, Mexico accounted for $1.3 billion of Americas $5.4 billion in dairy product exports. Canada a concern, too Americas neighbors to the north, Canada, collectively purchased $636 million in dairy products last year. That accounted for 12 percent of all U.S. dairy exports. Between Mexico and Canada, $1.95 billion or 36 percent of U.S. dairy exports are now at risk if a trade war ensues. As for the European Union, it did not rank among the top 10 of U.S. dairy customers. Of the top 10, that group collectively accounted for 87 percent of global U.S. dairy product sales. Will it help steel? Mexico only accounted for 9 percent of finished steel products and 11 percent of semi-finished steel. Given those sales, dairy could be a bigger loser in lost export sales than the U.S. market would be in a gain for U.S. steel milling jobs. Canada is different. That country accounted for half of the raw aluminum imported by the U.S. and 21 percent of the finished steel. Bottom line: Now that U.S. dairy export markets have been risked, every dairy farmer should think seriously about contacting their respective national leaders before we collectively take another hit on our milk checks. To comment, email your remarks to intel@hoards.com. (c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2018 June 4, 2018 Did 35-year-old midget Khalid Ali Razzaz, a former ISIS soldier, enter Sweden as a refugee by pretending to be a 6-year-old boy? No, that's not true: the story was made up by a site that makes a living by inventing tales of bizarre crimes and sex acts so people would visit the site and click on their ads. The story is not real, it did not actually happen. The story originated from an article published by World News Daily Report on June 19, 2018 titled "Sweden: 6-year-old migrant was in fact 35-year-old midget from Syria" (archived here) which opened: Stockholm | Swedish authorities have identified a 35-year-old former ISIS soldier that had been masquerading as a 6-year-old boy for over a year. Khalid Ali Razzaz's identity was finally revealed after school officials at Eriksdalsskolan Elementary School became suspicious of the man's indecent sexual behavior with school personnel. Razzaz apparently touched a number of women teachers in an "inappropriate manner" according to the school administration, as well as displayed "highly sexualized behavior" in front of other classmates. Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail and may have mistaken it for real news: Sweden: 6-year-old migrant was in fact 35-year-old midget from Syria Stockholm | Swedish authorities have identified a 35-year-old former ISIS soldier that had been masquerading as a 6-year-old boy for over a year. Khalid Ali Razzaz's identity was finally revealed after school officials at Eriksdalsskolan Elementary School became suspicious of the man's indecent sex The tiny terrorist is real enough though: DWARF SOLDIER: Move over Bulldozer, Jihadi 'Little' John is the next big ISIS terror IG/AP Pics of the diddy diehard and his arsenal of terror, including AK47s and rocket launchers, have been doing the rounds on social media. It comes after Islamic State's 20st executioner 'The Bulldozer' was revealed to the world beheading victims in cold blood for the camera. But the website World News Daily Report is a well known satire website specialized in posting hoaxes and made up stories. The disclaimer on their website is pretty clear about that even though you have to scroll all the way down the page to find it: World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website - even those based on real people - are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is purely a miracle. It is run by Janick Murray-Hall and Olivier Legault, who also run the satirical Journal de Mourreal, a satirical site spoofing the (real) Journal de Monteal. Very often their stories feature an image showing a random crazy mugshot found in a mugshot gallery on the internet or on a stock photo website superimposed over a background of flashing police lights or crime scene tape. Articles from the site are frequently copied (sometimes even months or years later) by varous fake news websites that omit the satire disclaimer and present the information as real. We wrote about worldnewsdailyreport.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site: Please call your State Representative and State Senator and tell them to vote against legislation repealing the Parental Notice of Abortion ... 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 Her husband, Reza Khandan, said that Nasrin had been informed that she was to serve a five-year prison sentence. Neither Nasrin nor Reza knew anything about this supposed sentence. Nasrin has been an outspoken critic with regards to the Iranian regimes strict and extreme laws and she had represented several high-profile Iranian protestors. One such client was Narges Hosseini who was arrested after peacefully protesting against compulsory veiling for women. She had also challenged the recent change to Iranian law that prevents the accused from being represented by a lawyer of their choosing following arrest on charges of threatening national security. Nasrin received the Sakharov prize in 2012, the highest reward for human rights. She bravely continued her work after being harassed by the clerical regime. Two years previous to this, the Iranian regime prosecuted her for gathering and colluding to commit crimes against national security and spreading propaganda against the system. She was handed a six-year prison sentence. Simon Tisdall from the Guardian wrote that the Iranian regimes oppression is a result of US President Donald Trumps action towards Iran. He said that Trump argued his action would force Iran to change its behaviour for the better, but what it has actually done is forced conservative hardliners into expanding their grip on Iranian society. It is this type of rhetoric that holds others accountable for the Iranian regimes inexcusable actions that exacerbates the problem. Trump could be blamed for many things, but how can anyone hold him responsible for the actions of a corrupt and torturous regime that has been acting in the same way for decades? This is the problem the Iranian regime has never been held accountable for its belligerence and its abuse of human rights. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the main opposition to the Iranian regime, has been calling on human rights organisations and leaders to end the regimes impunity. On 30th June, it will hold its annual gathering in Paris. It will once again highlight the cruel, brutal and corrupt regimes behaviour. Nasrin Sotoudeh is a brave woman that deserves recognition for her wonderful and courageous work that she carries out despite the huge personal risk to her. She is like millions of others in Iran who refuse to remain silent when faced with the oppression imposed on them. Many people in Iran risk arrest, torture, imprisonment and even execution to defend their rights that are systematically quashed by the regime. Those that make excuses for the regime, or indeed remain silent, are enabling its behaviour and emboldening it. The oppression will not stop for as long as the regime is in power because it knows that its biggest threat is the people of Iran and their resistance. During the protests by Dervishes, five members of security forces were killed in two separate incidents. Salas arrest supposedly stemmed from his having been identified as the driver of a bus that plowed into a group of police officers, killing three. However, the Amnesty statement notes that several witnesses insisted that Salas had already been placed in detention before the event in question. He also pointed out that the bus he had been driving was undamaged, and cited this as evidence that another vehicle and driver were responsible for the deaths in question. This potentially exculpatory evidence was reportedly discounted from a trial that has been described as unfair, a miscarriage of justice, and an exercise in revenge against the Dervishes, rather than a genuine effort to enforce the law. According to Amnesty, the only evidence that was presented in order to secure Salas conviction in March was a confession that he had signed. But up until his execution, Salas continued to insist that the confession had been elicited under torture a tactic that is frequently employed by Iranian interrogators, particularly in politically motivated cases. On the basis of these various concerning elements of his case, Amnesty had previously issued an urgent call to action when it was reported that Salas execution was imminent. However, judiciary authorities moved ahead with the implementation of his sentence promptly at dawn on Monday. They also saw to it that Salas was buried quickly, in defiance of the wishes of his family, who were not present and had expressed the desire that he be returned to Tehran for funeral services. This measure has been described as a means of preventing an independent examination of his body, which would have almost certainly revealed signs of torture. The CHRI quoted Salas son Alireza Azami as saying that when Salas was at trial, his head was covered with stitches, which authorities had attempted to conceal with makeup. The effort to quickly bury Salas may also have been motivated by anxiety over the possibility of public demonstrations coinciding with his funeral, especially in the wake of the revelation of new evidence for his mistreatment and possible innocence. This anxiety might also have prompted a quicker implementation of his death sentence if not for the holy month of Ramadan, which ended last week. During that month, executions are typically suspended, although the judiciary has been known to quickly implement large numbers of executions in the days immediately following Eid al-Fitr, the post-Ramadan holiday that took place between June 15 and 17 this year. According to Iran Human Rights, the Salas execution was only one of six to be carried out on Monday, June 18 in Rajai Shahr Prison. As well as highlighting the Iranian judiciarys propensity for mass executions, this report also pointed out that although all six cases involved murder charges, at least one of them highlighted the problem of the lack of classifications for different degrees of murder and manslaughter, which results in persons being put to death for killings that may not have been intentional, or may have been subject to other extenuating circumstances. Even supposing that Salas is responsible for the deaths of the three policemen during the Dervishes protest, no real evidence was presented to demonstrate that the bus had driven into them deliberately. Despite being forced, the defendants confession still maintained that the killings had been the result of his trying to flee the clashes between protesters and security forces. And in the other case highlighted by Iran Human Rights, the defendant reportedly made at least some effort to prevent the death for which he was deemed responsible. That is, he informed police of the location of a car he had stolen, unaware that there was an infant in the back seat. Even the Tehran prosecutor acknowledged that the care probably should have been recovered earlier, suggesting that the thief may have had diminished responsibility for the child dying from excessive heat and lack of oxygen. In other words, it is doubtful that such cases would rise to the level of most serious crimes whereby the death penalty may be justified along international standards. But Iran is notoriously unforgiving about its application of the death penalty, and thus maintains a record as the nation with the worlds highest per-capita rate of executions, year after year. This record appears secure in spite of the fact that the Iranian parliament took measures last year to raise the standards by which non-violent drug crimes qualify for mandatory death sentences. Reports indicate that although the number of such executions has indeed gone down, the judiciary may be partially compensating by expediting the implementation of other types of death sentences. In light of the crackdown on dissent following the January mass uprising, it is also possible that these expedited executions include executions of political prisoners. In fact, the judiciary publicly warned that persons deemed responsible for that uprising would likely face the death penalty. And the National Council of Resistance of Iran has determined that upwards of 8,000 Iranians were arrested as a direct result of those protests. That crackdown continues to this day, as evidenced by the June 13 arrest of Nasrin Sotoudeh, a renowned Iranian human rights lawyer who in recent weeks has been an outspoken advocate for participants in the Girls of Revolution Street womens rights protests, as well as for political prisoners subject to hardline interpretations of Article 48 of Irans Code of Criminal Procedure, which has allowed the judiciary to deprive political prisoners of access to any lawyer other than a select group of 20 regime-approved attorneys. Sotoudeh is currently being held at Evin Prison on unspecified charges. The absence of formal charges often suggests that Iranian authorities are attempting to fabricate a case against the person in question, and this fact was presumably a contributing factor in the protests that erupted outside of Evin to call for Sotoudehs arrest. This predictably resulted in several more individuals being detained, according to IranWire. Fortunately, Nasrin Sotoudeh, a 2012 recipient of the European Parliaments Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, can expect considerable support from both inside and outside the country. But as the Salas case makes clear, vigorous external pressure is not always effective. Whats more, that pressure will surely continue to be distributed across a number of cases. On Sunday, Iran Human Rights Monitor pointed out that Amnesty International had issued another call to action, regarding the torture and denial of medical care for Iranian Kurdish political prisoner Zeynab Jalalian, who is serving a life sentence as a result of grossly unfair trial. Jalalian is in urgent need of dental treatment for a three-month-old infection, and is also suffering from heart, intestinal, and kidney problems, and is in danger of losing her eyesight. The denial of medical treatment is a commonly used pressure tactic in Iranian prisons, and according to IHRM, authorities have alternately rejected Jalalians requests for release to hospital and declared that they would be granted if she would record a videotaped confession. Another IHRM report points to the possibility of authorities denying treatment to a number of prisoners who were recently wounded in clashes with prison guards. Notably, though, the riot in question, at Sanandaj Prison, was reportedly the result of inmates coming to the defense of Ramin Hossein Panahi, another Kurdish political prisoner and an object of urgent attempts at intervention by international human rights defenders. CHRI noted on Monday that United Nations human rights experts had again spoken out about Panahis case after it was reported that prison guards were attempting to transfer him to solitary confinement in preparation for his execution on the grounds of his supposed membership in a Kurdish separatist group. International statements regarding Jalalian, Panahi, and others tend to reflect the same concerns regarding the lack of due process which failed to convince Iranian authorities to vacate the death sentence for Mohammad Salas. Although they are unauthorized to speak on the matter, two intelligence officials, who requested that their identities be protected, admit that that while the immediate threat of armed conflict with North Korea has diminished, there is a growing concern that Pyongyang may consider selling the technology for its most advanced weapons systems to Tehran. One of the senior U.S. intelligence officials explained, We know for a fact that North Korea will sell almost any of its military hardware if the price is right and Iran has paid that price time and time again. In the past, there is ample evidence even in the public domain that proves North Korea will sell conventional weapons, all different types of missile technology, and even nuclear tech and expertise if you have the funds to pay for it, He continued, What terrifies many of us is that we might not even know that Pyongyang has even sold such technology until its too late to do anything about it. Think about how much information you can store on just a flash drive today. All it would take is one North Korean agent, selling a 256-gig USB stick to an Iranian operative filled with blueprints, design specs and advanced warhead shielding technology to make a massive difference. Just that amount of information on ICBM technology alone would be a game changer for Tehran and we would not even know about it until the new designs were included in their missile tests. North Korea has previously sold arms to some of the worlds most anti-U.S. states, fueling conflicts across the globe. Pyongyang reportedly helped Syria with its chemical weapons and missile programs. North Korea began building a nuclear reactor for the Bashar Assad, but it was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2007. It has already been reported that North Korea sold multiple classes of missile platforms to Iran. Now, with missiles that can reach the U.S. continent, and the sanctions that affect the North Korean regimes ability to raise money, Pyongyang may be willing to sell its best weaponry, even at the cost of detente with Washington. It will be just a matter of time before North Korea sells this stuff (ICBM technology) to Iran. We need to prepare for this as it might even already have happened, claimed the other senior intelligence official, who added, I want to stress I have no proof of that, but what would you do if your nation was being hurt by sanctions and you can cause America and its allies some pain? The Iran Nuclear Deal appears to be falling apart. However, even if Tehran abides by its provisions with willing non-U.S. partners, acquisition of missile technology is not prohibited under the terms of the deal. For Iran, it would be the strategic move. It could spend the next several years designing, testing, and perfecting missile technology, all the while honoring its nuclear agreement with Europe, Russia, and China. Then, in 2025, the year Iran can legally leave the agreement, it could perfect a working ICBM to be used as the delivery system for a nuclear weapon. With this possibility in mind, any deal between the U.S. and North Korea should minimally include a provision that Pyongyang would not be able to sell any missile technology, or allow its scientists to work on other nations missile programs. As well, a full accounting of any missile sales to foreign powers like Iran, should be demanded by Washington. Many U.S. intelligence officials believe North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons, so we might be facing Kim Jong-Uns weapons of war in a future conflict, whether they are fired by North Korea or Iran. Bring back for better Sentence transfer is a reformative justice tool that protects the rights of migrants Now the crowd is right on the steps of the entrance to the parliament. Clashes between law enforcers and the participants of the rally of miners, Chornobyl victims and veterans of war in Afghanistan took place near the central entrance to the building of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, on June 19, 2018. The protesters broke through directly to the building on the Constitution Square, an UNIAN correspondent reports. Now the crowd is right on the steps of the entrance to the parliament. Participants of the rally used truncheons and tear gas against law enforcement officers. A skirmish is taking place between the protesters and law enforcers. Participants of the protest are trying to break through to the building. They demand to cancel the monetization of benefits for travel, increase compensation for disabled veterans to 6-8 subsistence minimums in accordance with the disability group, and allocate over UAH 6 billion for the development of coal industry. Rap Artist XXXTentacion Killed in Apparent Robbery 20-year-old rapper XXXTentacion has died during an apparent robbery on Monday, June 18 Broward Co. Sheriffs Dept. said. Born Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, the rapper was shopping for motorcycles in Deerfield Beach, Florida and as he was leaving the motorsport dealership two armed suspects approached his car. One of the gunmen shot XXX before fleeing the scene, said Keyla Concepcion, Broward County sheriff department public information officer. A video that was uploaded to Twitter showed a seemingly lifeless XXX sitting still in his car with first responders surrounding his vehicle checking his pulse. ADVERTISEMENT XXX was later brought to a Broward County hospital where he succumbed to his injuries and died. The Florida-native released his first debut studio album 17 in August 2017 which charted at number two on the US Billboard 200. Editors Note: This story has been updated due to inaccurate initial reporting. Update 1:02 p.m.: On Wednesday evening, homicide detectives arrested Dedrick Williams following a traffic stop in connection to the fatal shooting of rapper XXXTentacion, Broward Sherriffs Office tweeted on June 21. Detectives are still searching for additional suspects. An audio recording was published Monday that appears to capture the voices of young children crying out for the parents at a U.S. immigration detention center. The audio file was first published by the nonprofit news group ProPublica. The recording added to the growing disapproval of the Trump administrations policy of separating immigration children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. One child, in Spanish, can be heard shouting, Papa! Papa! Some are crying too hard to speak. One young Salvadoran girl is heard asking several times if she can call her aunt to ask her to come get her. Human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury said she received the tape from a whistleblower. She told ProPublica it was recorded in the last week. She did not give details about where exactly it was recorded. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she had not heard the audio. But she told reporters that children taken by the government are treated humanely. She said the children are well cared for. She also claimed that Congress needs to change the law so that families can stay together. President Donald Trumps Republican party controls both chambers of Congress. The family border policies were set by his administration. The audio surfaced as politicians and activists have come in recent days to visit immigration detention centers. Their visits to the U.S.-Mexico border are meant to increase pressure on the Trump administration to end the practice of separating families. Representative Ben Ray Lujan is a Democrat from New Mexico. He visited a center near the Texas city of Brownsville. He described the place as a former hospital that had been turned into living areas for children. Rooms are divided by age group. There is even a small room especially for babies, he said. Texas Rio Grande Valley is the busiest area for people trying to enter the country. Border Patrol officials say separating adults from children is a way to dissuade others from trying to come to the United States illegally. Manuel Padilla, the areas Border Patrol chief, said, When you exempt a group of people from the law...that creates a draw. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat from California. She spoke to reporters during a visit to detention centers near her states border with Mexico. She said family separation is a heartbreaking...issue that could be changed in a moment by the president of the United States. Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, announced Monday that he was introducing emergency legislation meant to keep immigrant families together. All Americans are rightly horrified by the images we are seeing on the news, children in tears pulled away from their mothers and fathers, Cruz said. This must stop. On Monday, Trump strongly defended his administrations policy. The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility, Trump said. Not on my watch. Im Ashley Thompson. The Associated Press reported this story. Ashley Thompson adapted it for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story whistle-blower - n. a person who tells police, reporters, etc., about something (such as a crime) that has been kept secret humane - adj. kind or gentle to people or animals exempt - v. to say that (someone or something) does not have to do something that others are required to do draw - n. someone or something that causes a lot of people to come to a place challenge - v. to say or show that (something) may not be true, correct, or legal conscience - n. the part of the mind that makes you aware of your actions as being either morally right or wrong horrified - adj. greatly upset and shocked The United Nations refugee agency reported Tuesday that nearly 69 million people were displaced last year. Each of the last five years has set a record. This years number tops all of them. The U.N. estimates that about 44,000 people become refugees every day. They are fleeing war, violence, and other attacks. Some have fled or been removed from their countries many times. The top U.N. official for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said crises in South Sudan, Congo and Myanmar raised the number of refugees in 2017. Grandi also said that some people believe rich countries are having a refugee crisis. He said that is not true. He said U.N. data show that 85 percent of refugees are from developing countries. Many of those areas are desperately poor, he said. The country that has the highest number of refugees is Turkey. Most refugees there come from Syria. The United States received the most new individual applications for asylum last year. Germany received the second-most. Jan Egeland leads the Norwegian Refugee Council. He said countries are not working together to take responsibility for refugees. Rich countries are building walls against families fleeing war, at the same time as less money is available for aid to people in conflict areas, he said. Egeland also urged countries to be more like Uganda, a country he described as generous toward refugees. It receives refugees and protects them, he said. World Refugee Day is Wednesday, June 20. I'm Kelly Jean Kelly. The Associated Press reported this story. Kelly Jean Kelly adapted it for VOA Learning English. Ashley Thompson was the editor. _______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story desperately - adv. very severe or strong application - n. a formal and usually written request for something generous - adj. freely giving or sharing money and other valuable things We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page. Requesting usage of VOA Learning English content Learning English texts, MP3s and videos are in the public domain. You are allowed to reprint them for educational and commercial purposes, with credit to learningenglish.voanews.com. VOA photos are also in the public domain. However, photos and video images from news agencies such as AP and Reuters are copyrighted, so you are not allowed to republish them. If you are requesting one-time use of VOA Learning English content, please fill out the information in this form and we will respond to you as soon as possible. If you are interested in becoming an affiliate, please contact our Office of Business Development. High-resolution audio and video files can be downloaded for free through USAGM Direct an online service providing original multimedia content from Voice of America for publication across all platforms: online, mobile, print and broadcast. Access to USAGM Direct requires user registration. If you have any questions about our policies, or to let us know that you plan to use our materials, write to learningenglish@voanews.com. The Williams Cos., Inc. operates as an energy infrastructure company, which explores, produces, transports, sells and processes natural gas and petroleum products. It operates through the following segments: Transmission and Gulf of Mexico; Northeast G&P; and West. The Transmission and Gulf of Mexico segment comprises of interstate natural gas pipelines, Transco and Northwest Pipeline, as well as natural gas gathering and processing and crude oil production handling and transportation assets in the Gulf Coast region. The Northeast G&P segment includes midstream gathering, processing, and fractionation businesses in the Marcellus Shale region primarily in Pennsylvania and New York, and the Utica Shale region of eastern Ohio. The West segment consists of gas gathering, processing, and treating operations in the Rocky Mountain region of Colorado and Wyoming, the Barnett Shale region of north-central Texas, the Eagle Ford Shale region of south Texas, the Haynesville Shale region of northwest Louisiana, and the Mid-Continent region which includes the Anadarko, Arkoma, and Permian basins. The company was founded by David Williams and Miller Williams in 1908 and is headquartered in Tulsa, Read More 11 hours ago In quiet debut, Alzheimer's drug finds questions, skepticism The first new Alzheimers treatment in more than 20 years was hailed as a breakthrough when regulators approved it more than four months ago, but its rollout has been slowed by questions about its price and how well it works. Several major medical centers remain undecided on whether to use Biogens Aduhelm, which is recommended for early stages of the disease. Read Article 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 Ormat Technologies, Inc. operates as a holding company. The firm engages in the provision of geothermal and recovered energy power business. It operates through the following segments: Electricity, Product and Energy Storage. The Electricity segment focuses in the sale of electricity from the company's power plants pursuant to PPAs. The Product segment involves in the manufacture, including design and development, of turbines and power units for the supply of electrical energy and in the associated construction of power plants utilizing the power units manufactured by the company to supply energy from geothermal fields and other alternative energy sources. The Energy Storage segment consists of battery energy storage systems as a service and management of curtailable customer loads under contracts with U.S. retail energy providers and directly with large commercial and industrial customers. The company was founded in 1965 and is headquartered in Reno, NV. Read More Genesee & Wyoming Inc. owns and leases freight railroads. It operates through three segments: North American Operations, Australian Operations, and U.K./European Operations. The company transports various commodities, including agricultural products, autos and auto parts, chemicals and plastics, coal and coke, food and kindred products, lumber and forest products, metallic ores, metals, minerals and stone, petroleum products, pulp and paper, waste, and other commodities. It owns or leases 122 freight railroads, including 105 short line railroads and 2 regional freight railroads located in the United States, 8 short line railroads located in Canada, 3 railroads located in Australia, 1 railroad located in the United Kingdom, 1 railroad in Poland and Germany, and 2 railroads in the Netherlands with a total of approximately 16,200 miles of track. The company also operates 6,200 additional miles of track that is owned or leased by others. In addition, it operates deep sea maritime containers and provides bulk haulage, including coal, aggregates, cement, and infrastructure services. Further, the company provides rail service at approximately 40 ports; rail-ferry service in North America, Australia, and Europe; and contract coal loading and railcar switching for industrial customers. Genesee & Wyoming Inc. was founded in 1899 and is headquartered in Darien, Connecticut. Read More Abu Dhabi Fund for Development (ADFD) has announced its support for Ethiopian government as it signed with the national bank of the African country an agreement for the allocation of a $3 billion aid to support economic policies and facilitate investment for Emirati companies in Ethiopia. The announcement came following the signing on Friday of terms of the funding between Mohammed Saif Al Suwaidi, director general of ADFD, and Teklewold Atnafu, governor of the National Bank of Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa, Arabia Business reports. The aid package is set to meet two targets. $1 billion of the package will be used to bolster the countrys fiscal and monetary policy, as well as to enhance the liquidity and foreign exchange reserves of its central bank, Emirati media notes. The remaining amount, nearly $2 billion, will spur Ethiopias economy and promote joint investment. The signing took place under supervision of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmad Ali. I was pleased today to arrive in Addis Ababa, a city of history, civilisation and cultural diversity, tweeted Sheikh Mohammed. I am even more delighted to enhance ties of friendship and cooperation between our countries. Ethiopia is one of Africas leading fastest growing economies. Since assuming office in April, Prime Minister Ali has embarked on international charm tour to attract foreign investment and open his country to more foreign capital. The country is in need of foreign currency reserves to cover large spendings on infrastructure projects, analysts note. Credit: CC0 Public Domain A rat model found preconception binge drinking may have negative consequences on future offspring's growth, social interactions and pubertal development, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of the Endocrine Society. Binge drinking during adolescent development can have long-lasting effects in the brain, and recent data shows that these effects may directly impact first-generation offspring. These observations could have consequences for human health as more than 4.5 million Americans under the age of 21 report engaging in binge-pattern alcohol abuse. "Our animal study demonstrates that drinking large quantities of alcohol in a 'binge' fashion before pregnancy can impact future offspring," said the study's senior author, Toni Pak, Ph.D., of Loyola University Chicago in Maywood, Ill. "Importantly, this is true for drinking behaviors of both parents, not just the mother. Our previous data supports the idea that alcohol is affecting the parental sperm and eggs to induce these modifications in the offspring, but this most recent work shows the extent of those effects on social behavior, pubertal maturation, and stress hormones as the offspring grow to adulthood." Researchers found that a rat model of binge-pattern drinking during puberty had several consequences for the animals' offspring, including smaller body weight, fewer play behaviors, and decreased circulating testosterone. In addition, the parents did not pass down to the offspring any adaptive traits that allowed them to better tolerate alcohol. "By better understanding which parental preconception behaviors impact future generations, we can do more to prevent their perpetuation," Pak said. The study, "Binge Drinking and Intergenerational Implications: Parental Preconception Alcohol Impacts Offspring Development in Rats," will be published online. Explore further Maternal binge drinking linked to mood problems and alcohol abuse in offspring A tissue sample from a cervix with severe dysplasia (HSIL). Credit: University of Copenhagen Compared to a birth cohort from 1983, girls in the first birth cohort to receive the HPV vaccine showed a lower degree of dysplasia that could eventually lead to cervical cancer. This is the conclusion of a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, who have conducted the first study of the vaccine's effect on the general population. The effects of the HPV vaccine, which in 2009 became part of the Danish childhood vaccination programme, have been examined by researchers from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen, and the conclusion is unmistakable: The HPV vaccine works. The new study, recently published in the scientific International Journal of Cancer, is the first to examine the effect of the vaccine in the population at large, according to Professor Elsebeth Lynge and Ph.D. student Lise Thamsborg from the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen. "It is the first study in the world to test the Gardasil-4 vaccine on a population level. The childhood vaccination programme, which includes the HPV vaccine, is targeted at the entire population. Therefore, it is important to look at the entire population and the effect of the vaccine after the first screening of women aged 23 years," says Professor Elsebeth Lynge, last author of the study. Reduction in Severe Dysplasia The researchers have looked at the 1993 birth cohort, which was the first birth cohort to receive the vaccine. They compared it to a 1983 birth cohort that did not receive HPV vaccination. The two birth cohorts of women are comparable and resemble each other as regards level of education and average age of sexual debut, among other things. The researchers examined the results of the women's first cervical screening tests. The 1993 birth cohort was invited to a screening test in 2016, while women born in 1983 had their first screening test in 2006, before the vaccine was marketed. The researchers discovered a 40 percent reduced risk of severe dysplasia in the 1993 birth cohort compared to the 1983 birth cohort. "This means that fewer women have to be referred to a gynaecologist for further examination and have a tissue sample taken. Eventually, we also expect fewer to fall ill," says Lise Thamsborg, first author of the study. Credit: University of Copenhagen The girls from the 1993 birth cohort were 15 years old when they received the vaccine. And the researchers expect the effect to be even more pronounced today, when girls are offered the vaccine at the age of 12. "We expect the effect to be greater among those vaccinated at the age of 12, because very few have been sexually active at this age," says Lise Thamsborg. However, the study did not only find a reduction in severe dysplasia. Contrary to expectation and the results of randomised trials, the women born in 1993 showed a higher level of mild dysplasia than the women born in 1983. The cause may be new technology introduced in 2006 for examining the cell samples that reveal cases of dysplasia. "The new technology has led to fewer inadequate samples, and the samples are of a higher quality today. So the samples are more sensitive. This may be the cause," says Lise Thamsborg. The next step for the researchers is to examine the tissue samples taken from women with dysplasia. The aim is to learn whether and how cases of mild and severe dysplasia have developed. If a woman suffers from severe dysplasia, a tissue sample is taken. It can reveal precursor lesions to cervical cancer. There are different levels of these precursor lesions. If a woman shows mild dysplasia, she is typically invited to an exam six months later to see whether the changes have stopped or developed further. Explore further HPV vaccine should not be delayed More information: Lise Holst Thamsborg et al, Impact of HPV-vaccination on outcome of cervical cytology screening in Denmark - a register based cohort study, International Journal of Cancer (2018). Journal information: International Journal of Cancer Lise Holst Thamsborg et al, Impact of HPV-vaccination on outcome of cervical cytology screening in Denmark - a register based cohort study,(2018). DOI: 10.1002/ijc.31568 Chinese couple Xu Mengsha (R) and Zhang Yinzhe (C) speak to Thai fertility physician Chartree Saenghiranwatana at the Piyavate Hospital in Bangkok specialising in in-vitro fertilisation The easing of China's one-child policy was a godsend to Zhang Yinzhe and his wife Xu Mengsha, who had decided they wanted to use in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to freeze an embryo in the hope of one day having a second child. But most IVF procedures are restricted in China to couples who are infertile, and surging demand at overwhelmed reproductive clinics since the policy was relaxed two years ago would anyway have meant months of waiting. So the Beijing couple flew to Thailand, part of a wave of Chinese spilling overseas into Southeast Asia, the United States, and elsewhere in a test-tube baby boom. "There is an old saying in China: a son and daughter complete the family," said Zhang, a 31-year-old airline pilot. Zhang spoke after a consultation at Bangkok's Piyavate Hospital, its walls festooned with Mandarin-language posters on IVF as other Chinese patients waited their turn. Definitive numbers on China's share of the assisted-reproduction tourism sector are unclear, but its spending was estimated by the state-linked Qianzhan Industry Research Institute to have grown 22 percent annually to $1.4 billion in 2017. Further rapid growth is expected. Overseas clinics are adding Mandarin-speaking staff, Chinese-language websites, and increasingly marketing to Chinese seeking a second or even third child. Chinese figures estimate that 90 million women became eligible for another child once the family-planning policy was relaxed, and more second children were delivered last year than first-borns. Overseas clinics are adding Mandarin-speaking staff, Chinese-language websites, and increasingly marketing to Chinese seeking a second or even third child But Chinese couples are increasing having children later, past their reproductive primes, and may require help from science. Around 12 percent of the childbearing population are unable to conceive naturally, according to Chinese studies, yet China only has about 400 licensed IVF clinics, where waiting lists can approach one year. Fertile ground IVF involves combining egg and sperm in a lab and implanting any viable embryos into the womb. The one-child policy caused birth rates to plummet, and China eased it to ensure a big enough future workforce to support its fast-aging population. But it still bans or restricts fertility options like egg donations, surrogate motherhood, gender selection, and freezing embryos for later use partly over fears that opening the floodgates could spark a population explosion. Only around 500,000 Chinese IVF procedures took place in 2016, health officials estimate, far short of what fertility doctors say is required. "There is big demand in China, but we can't handle it here," said Ri-Cheng Chian, director of reproductive medicine at Shanghai's 10th People's Hospital. Zhang Yinzhe (L) and Xu Mengsha (R) decided they wanted to use in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to freeze an embryo in the hope of one day having a second child So Chinese are booking tickets to Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and even Russia. IVF treatments cost around 30,000 yuan ($4,700) in China, but can be several times that abroad, where many Chinese feel they can find higher-quality care. Zhang, the pilot, wants IVF partly to screen for genetic defects, something restricted at home. "That's a lot of money for a Chinese family but compared to the health of my next generation, I should spend it," he said. Chartree Saenghiranwatana, a fertility specialist at Piyavate, said the clinic has been "getting increasing demand from Chinese patients the past year or two", and is recruiting Mandarin-speaking doctors and nurses. Some Thai clinics say up to 80 percent of their customers are Chinese. Baby bump "A new industrial chain is forming, for reproduction, in Southeast Asia," said Wei Siang Yu, the Singaporean founder and chairman of Borderless Health Group (BHG). Around 12 percent of China's childbearing population are unable to conceive naturally, according to Chinese studies, yet the country only has about 400 licensed IVF clinics, where waiting lists can approach one year BHG has created a video-conferencing platform on which Chinese patients can consult fertility experts around the world, aided by Mandarin-speaking interpreters. BHG is also establishing sperm and egg banks in countries including Thailand, Australia and the United States, primarily for Chinese clients, complete with a phone app allowing them to monitor their "fertility assets" almost like a bank account. Yu said two years ago Chinese patients placed sixth or seventh in the ranks of foreign patients coming to Thailand for medical tourism, but will be the largest group this year. Besides infertility or the desire for a larger family, the Chinese preference for male heirs sends some couples abroad in search of clinics that will perform gender screeningthough that is technically illegal in most countriesand Chinese LGBT couples are also packing their bags. Li Na, who is from central China, went through expensive IVF procedures in Shanghai, Hong Kong and the United States. All failed. But she and her husband hit the jackpot in Thailand, and now have twin girls through a surrogate mother there and a boy through IVF. Li, 41, has parlayed the experience into a side career as a consultant to other Chinese couples seeking the same joy she felt. "I couldn't stop crying when I flew down to Thailand to pick them up," Li said. "It was hard to believe they were mine." Explore further Finally allowed 2nd child, older Chinese parents turn to IVF 2018 AFP Credit: CC0 Public Domain High altitude is a particularly challenging environmentthe terrain is physically challenging and the land has a relatively poor crop yield, so food can be sparse. Most importantly, oxygen levels are lower meaning that conversion of food into energy in an individual's body is not very efficient and leads to relatively limited energy available for growth. In new research published today in the journal Royal Society Open Science, an international team of scientists examine how high altitude and the associated limited available energy affects the growth of long bones in Himalayan populations. By measuring the limbs of people of similar ancestry from high altitude and low altitude regions, the team found that those living at high altitude had significantly shorter lower arm segments. However, compared to people living at low altitude, the length of the upper arm and hand were relatively the same. According to lead author Stephanie Payne of the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, "Our findings are really interesting as they show that the human body prioritises which segments to grow when there is limited energy available for growth, such as at high altitude. This comes at the expense of other segments, for example the lower arm. The body may prioritise full growth of the hand because it is essential for manual dexterity, whilst the length of the upper arm is particularly important for strength." "We're really grateful to the Himalayan Sherpa populations who participated in the study. We measured and examined over 250 individuals and then compared our findings to genetically similar Tibetan groups living in the lowlands of Nepal." "Our research actually mirrors evidence previously found in Andean populations. Our study demonstrates a similar pattern of growth prioritisation across the limb segments." But, as Payne can attest to, there are many challenges associated with conducting research at high altitude. In addition to undertaking the so-called "most dangerous flight in the world" from Kathmandu to Lukla airport, a two day trek at c. 3500m above sea level left Payne, a National Geographic young explorer, suffering from altitude sickness. "We used Namche Bazaar on the Everest Trail as our base to conduct the study with the local population. It was an incredible experience with yaks carrying our anthropometric equipment through the mountain passes. It is not an easy journey, but thanks to the dedicated team, including my research assistant Oliver Melvill, we were able to collect the valuable data and obtain a suitable sample size." Whilst this pattern of differential limb segment growth is interesting, scientists are still uncertain of the biological mechanism behind it. Further research is required to determine whether it might be related to temperature changes down the limb during growth, altered blood flow down the limb, or differences in nutrient delivery between limb segments, or another unknown mechanism. Explore further How does altitude affect the body and why does it affect people differently? More information: Thrifty Phenotype vs Cold Adaptation: Trade-offs in Upper Limb Proportions of Himalayan Populations of Nepal, Royal Society Open Science, rsos.royalsocietypublishing.or /10.1098/rsos.172174 Journal information: Royal Society Open Science Thrifty Phenotype vs Cold Adaptation: Trade-offs in Upper Limb Proportions of Himalayan Populations of Nepal, Credit: University of Gothenburg Feeling unattractive and dissatisfied with their sexual ability that is reality for many teenage and young adult cancer survivors. Research from Sahlgrenska Academy, Sweden, now gives a voice to a group that often has a difficult journey back to a normal life. "People in healthcare are afraid to talk about this, but you have to dare and you have to be willing, without being brusque or overly upbeat," says Maria Olsson, who holds a Ph.D. in pediatrics from Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, and is a specialist nurse in cancerrehabilitation at Sahlgrenska University Hospital. In her dissertation, she conducted eleven focus group interviews and a web-based survey involving 540 participants, all cancer survivors aged 1529. The interviews clearly showed that teenagers and young adults would like to have age-appropriate treatment environments. "If you're 17 years old, it isn't easy to be cared for among screaming toddlers. Meanwhile, a 25-year old may find himself in a four-bed hospital room with men in their 60s and 70s who are discussing the stock market. These patients rarely end up with someone from their own generation; they are usually scattered about," says Maria Olsson. Scars and attractiveness The results from the questionnaire study showed that the young cancer survivors felt they were less attractive because of their physical scars compared with the control group. Appearance is important to many teenagers and young adults, and scars from cancer treatment should not be ignored, according to Maria Olsson. Just over four out of ten teenage boys and young men, and close to eight out of ten teenage girls and young women who survived cancer replied that they felt less attractive because of their scars. They also expressed low satisfaction about their sexual ability compared with the control group, though the study showed that this response was more for psychological reasons than due to the physiological side effects of treatment. "They feel dissatisfied with their sexuality, and they dislike their bodies and the scars that remind them of the disease and the difficulties they've experienced. That's why they need more counseling and psychological support toward the end of treatment," says Maria Olsson. Open to discussing sex At the beginning of the study, she and her colleagues encountered resistance to the possibility of asking questions about topics such as sexuality and suicidal thoughts. The funding sources, registry owners and ethics committees who were to approve the study considered the topics to be too sensitive. However, the young people disagreed. The issue of fertility was the greatest concern among the nearly ten percent of participants who were worried about something in the questionnaire, followed by recurrence of cancer. However, discussing sex was no problem; on the contrary, there was a strong need to do so, according to Maria Olsson. "You can't do that in a four-bed hospital room, but there are many other opportunities. The topic can be addressed when the side effects of treatment come up for discussion, like how the mucous membranes are affected. By asking open questions first, it becomes evident whether the patient wants to talk, and that provides a lead to bring up the topic. It's also important to show willingness to discuss the subject." Explore further Is more digital support needed for young cancer patients? More information: Adolescent and young adult cancer survivors - body image and sexual health. Adolescent and young adult cancer survivors - body image and sexual health. hdl.handle.net/2077/55381 Credit: IRHOM2 in AD It is known that the onset of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with the accumulation of Amyloid beta (A) peptides in small molecular clusters known as oligomers. These trigger the formation of so-called 'neurofibrillary tangles' within neurons hamper their workings, ultimately causing cell death and so significant cognitive decline. Very large A oligomers which form plaques outside neurons, alongside neuroinflammation have also been found to play a key part in the progression of the disease. The EU-funded iRhom2 in AD project took as its starting point the protein iRhom2, which has been identified as a genetic risk factor for AD due to its pro-inflammatory properties. The team were able to explore further the influence of iRhom2 on neuroinflammation in mice. Modulating iRhom2 iRhom2 recently emerged as a protein of note in AD as it aids the maturation of an enzyme called TACE (tumor necrosis factor- converting enzyme) guiding it towards a cell's plasma membrane where the enzyme releases a cell-signalling cytokine (TNF), implicated in the regulation of inflammatory processes. While mice studies have shown that TNF-dependent inflammation can lead to sepsis and rheumatoid arthritis, it is also thought that the process contributes to neuroinflammatory signalling events, which can cause harm in the brain. The EU-funded iRhom2 in AD project worked with mice that are prone to develop the hallmarks of AD, amyloid plaques and memory deficits. The team genetically altered iRhom2 in the mice then analysed the progression of the pathology using an array of biochemical and histological methods, together with a number of behavioural tests to assess cognitive decline. The results were somewhat surprising as project coordinator Prof. Dr. Stefan Lichtenthaler recalls, "We initially hypothesised that iRhom2 would affect one specific aspect of neuroinflammation in AD. What we discovered was even more exciting as it actually affects several different aspects of neuroinflammation simultaneously. So modulating iRhom2 appears particularly well suited to interfere with AD." Beyond treatment to prevention While AD is mainly a disease of the elderly, 5-10 % of all cases may have an earlier onset, especially when it comes to cases of familial AD. As Prof. Lichtenthaler elaborates, "As the first changes in an AD brain happen 25 years before the onset of AD symptoms, in order to stop the disease, we have to treat the causes and not just the symptoms, obviously years before disease onset. We need to move beyond treatment to prevention." Yet, until very recently, all potential cures have been tested in patients that had already developed the disease and so by definition, are applied too late in the process. Drugs are only now being tested before the onset of symptoms. But these longitudinal studies, which follow subjects from being disease-free until they develop symptoms, will not yield results until at least 2024. Another hurdle to overcome is the need for a new diagnostic that can indicate who is likely to develop the disease in the coming years. Identifying iRhom2 as a new therapeutic target for AD sets the stage for the future development of drugs which can modulate the protein. As Prof. Lichtenthaler says, "Such drugs used for the treatment of the disease could have a terrific impact on improving the lives of many people. Crucially, this therapy could be used not only to prevent the disease, but also potentially to help patients that do already have disease symptoms." Currently the project team are working to better understand the precise mechanism by which iRhom2 influences AD at the molecular level and apply this knowledge for drugs that can block the activity of iRhom2 in patients. Explore further New insights into the release of molecules involved in inflammatory diseases Mental health law centres and advocates who uphold values of connectedness, hope, empowerment and identity can positively influence people with mental health issues, new research led by Curtin University has found. The research, published in the journal Advances in Mental Health, found that mental health law centres and advocates who implemented the CHIME (connectedness, hope, identity, meaning and empowerment) recovery framework directly influenced someone's personal recovery journey. Lead author Dr. Ben Milbourn, from the School of Occupational Therapy, Social Work, and Speech Pathology at Curtin University, said the research uncovered potential links between legal representation and personal recovery. "Mental health legal advocacy services play a pivotal role in promoting the legal and social rights and increased participation in decision making for people diagnosed with a mental illness, which is especially important if the person is unaware of their legal rights," Dr. Milbourn said. "The aim of our study was to determine if key values found in the CHIME recovery framework could be reflected in activities such as legal representation and advocacy delivered by mental health law advocates. "We found that four out of the five values from the CHIME recovery framework impacted people with mental health. These included connectedness with law centre staff, messages of hope from staff, experiences of empowerment and validation which informed a positive sense of identity." Dr. Milbourn explained that the research uncovered how businesses and professionals who interact with mental health consumers can contribute to their personal recovery. "Mental health law centres aren't necessarily required to do 'recovery work', but by taking the stance of listening, believing and positioning consumers as credible authorities on their experiences, it can greatly assist with personal recovery processes," Dr. Milbourn said. "Our findings suggest that the stance and values adopted and enacted by health, human service and legal advocacy programs can create spaces which offer forms of connection, the conditions for empowerment, hope and, exploration of identities beyond 'mental illness'." The research was co-authored by researchers from the School of Occupational Therapy, Social Work and Speech Pathology at Curtin University, and the Mental Health Law Centre in Perth. More information: Ben Milbourn et al. Can mental health legal representation and advocacy contribute to personal recovery?, Advances in Mental Health (2018). Ben Milbourn et al. Can mental health legal representation and advocacy contribute to personal recovery?,(2018). DOI: 10.1080/18387357.2018.1480397 Universitatsmedizin Berlin have successfully tested a new technology for use in the assessment of overweight adolescents with liver disease. Known as 'time-harmonic elastography' (THE), the technology enables physicians to determine the disease's severity without having to resort to invasive liver biopsies. The results of this research have been published in Radiology. Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is the most common chronic liver disease in overweight adolescents. In most cases, the disease will remain stable for decades without causing significant impairment of liver function. If the disease progresses, persistent inflammation in the liver will cause the formation of excess connective tissuea stage known as liver fibrosis. Eventually, the disease may damage the liver's entire cellular structure, resulting in liver cirrhosis. "Time-harmonic elastography is a new, ultrasound-based technology used to measure liver fibrosis. It works without the need for invasive liver biopsies," explains Dr. Christian Hudert, a pediatric gastroenterologist from Charite's Center for chronically sick children (SPZ). Until now, the grading and staging of liver disease has only been possible through the analysis of tissues taken at biopsy. Elastography is capable of visualizing differences in the elasticity of different tissues. In patients with liver fibrosis, excess connective tissue causes the liver to be stiffer than a normal liver and means that liver stiffness constitutes a measure of disease progression. The trolley on which the patient is positioned during their examination is a special and defining characteristic of Charite's THE technology. This trolley produces vibrational waves, which are not unlike those produced by a massage chair. Using ultrasound technology, these waves are then measured inside the liver tissue, thus providing information on liver stiffness. In contrast to previous elastography techniques, this technology is capable of taking measurements at greater tissue depths, making it particularly suitable for use in obese patients. This study used the newly-developed technology to examine 67 adolescents with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. Liver stiffness measurements were used to determine the degree of fibrosis present. Summing up the study's findings, Dr. Hudert explains: "The THE technology was shown to be capable of accurately distinguishing between patients with no fibrosis or mild fibrosis and patients with moderate or advanced fibrosis." Should the technology prove successful in further studies, it may eventually reduce the need for patients to undergo invasive liver biopsies. The THE method is also particularly suitable for use in the long-term monitoring of patients and may help to verify the success of weight loss treatment options as well as their impact on the outcome of liver disease. Explore further Many diabetics don't know they have serious liver disease More information: Christian A. Hudert et al, US Time-Harmonic Elastography: Detection of Liver Fibrosis in Adolescents with Extreme Obesity with Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, Radiology (2018). Journal information: Radiology Christian A. Hudert et al, US Time-Harmonic Elastography: Detection of Liver Fibrosis in Adolescents with Extreme Obesity with Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease,(2018). DOI: 10.1148/radiol.2018172928 (HealthDay)The care received by Robert F. Kennedy after he was shot in the head 50 years ago this month was the best possible at the time, and his injuries were so severe that he'd still have a low chance of survival today, researchers say. The senator was shot on June 5, 1968, after his victory speech at the California Democratic Party presidential primary. He died of severe traumatic brain injury the next day. Immediately after the shooting, a number of doctors provided on-scene care to Kennedy. Due to a transport protocol in place at the time, there was a delay of about 45 minutes in transporting Kennedy to the hospital best equipped to treat his wounds. Diagnostic tests that are commonplace today, such as CT scans and CT angiography and venography, were not available in 1968. A surgical procedure called craniotomy that was performed on Kennedy is similar to what would be performed today, but there are differences in some postoperative monitoring techniques and preferred medications, the study authors noted. The Duke University researchers said Kennedy suffered extensive brain damage, with bone and bullet fragments scattered throughout his brain. The penetrating gunshot wounds to the head suffered by Kennedy are associated with a high death rate that has not changed much in the last 100 years, according to the article published June 19 in the Journal of Neurosurgery. This representation was created based on data from the autopsy report and testimony, as no imaging studies are available for review. Credit: Illustrator: Megan Llewellyn, MSMI; copyright Duke University; with permission under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/). "By all accounts, an aggressive and valiant effort was made to save the senator's life. Unfortunately, a similar injury would likely also be fatal, or severely debilitating, in 2018," researcher Dr. Jordan Komisarow, of Duke's School of Medicine, said in a journal news release. Explore further JFK was not shot from the grassy knoll, suggests new research More information: Komisarow JM, Pappas T, Llewellyn M, Lad SP. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: An analysis of the senator's injuries and neurosurgical care. Journal of Neurosurgery, published online, ahead of print, June 19, 2018; Journal information: Journal of Neurosurgery Komisarow JM, Pappas T, Llewellyn M, Lad SP. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: An analysis of the senator's injuries and neurosurgical care., published online, ahead of print, June 19, 2018; DOI: 10.3171/2018.4.JNS18294 Copyright 2018 HealthDay. All rights reserved. Top: A schematic representation of the evolutionary relationship between mammal species that were tested for ZIKA susceptibility. Bottom: Princeton biologists Qiang Ding and Alexander Ploss analyzed dermal fibroblasts (skin cells) isolated from the different species and infected with the ZIKA virus. Viral titer was determined three days after infection. Credit: Qiang Ding and Alexander Ploss, Princeton University Princeton University researchers Qiang Ding, Alexander Ploss, and colleagues have identified one of the mechanisms by which Zika virus (ZIKV) circumvents immune control to replicate in human cells. The paper detailing this work appears June 18, 2018 in PNAS. In 2013, and again in 2015, the world witnessed devastating outbreaks of ZIKV, a hitherto obscure member of the flavivirus family. Although infection with this virus usually produces no symptoms in most adult humans, it can cause severe pre-natal neurodevelopmental disorders. It also sometimes sparks a serious autoimmune disorder, and in rare cases causes male sterility in adults. It's clear the virus poses a major threat to human health, but people are not its native hosts. ZIKV can spread between people via sexual contact, but the virus likely dwells in some wild animal populationprobably non-human primatesbefore being picked up by mosquitos and transmitted to humans. In fact, ZIKV was first detected in a monkey in Africa in 1947. However, the identity of the virus's reservoir host is still unknown, and no one has yet conducted any comprehensive examination of which species may host ZIKV. This was the problem the Princeton scientists set out to address. "We systematically tested the ability of ZIKV to infect cells from humans, great apes, New World and Old World monkeys, and mice," explains Ploss, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology. Dermal fibroblasts (skin cells) from these animals were exposed to ZIKV, and the level of viral replication was monitored. Mice are known to be resistant to the virus, and as expected, the mouse cells repelled viral invasion. However, the cells of every primate species tested, from humans to squirrel monkeys, were susceptible to ZIKV and produced large amounts of virus. What accounts for the failure of ZIKV to mount infections of mouse cells? Prior studies have shown that proteins called interferons are essential for this protection; mice that have been genetically engineered to be deficient in interferon alpha/beta; responses are susceptible to ZIKV infection. Interferons are secreted proteins that are critical for stimulating inflammation and triggering immune system defenses against viruses, bacteria, parasites and cancers. Virally infected cells recognize the presence of viruses using one of several different immune "pattern receptors" that bind to pathogen DNA or RNA and respond by stimulating interferon secretion. To determine which immune pattern receptor is important for recognizing ZIKV infection, Ding and colleagues examined whether exposure to ZIKV impairs the function of any these pathways in human cells. They found that ZIKV shuts down signaling by the cGAS-STING DNA sensing pathway. When the researchers examined the components of this pathway, they observed that the STING protein was cleaved into two fragments in ZIKV-infected cells. This is consistent with earlier studies, which had shown that a ZIKV protein called NS2B3 also targets this pathway by destroying cGAS. Ding et al. discovered that NS2B3 cleaves human STING, and identified the site at which this cleavage takes place. The mouse version of STING has different amino acids at the cleavage site than does the human protein, so NS2B3 cannot cleave mouse STING. "Notably," says Ploss, "this cleavage site appears to also be shared by NS2B3 of other flaviviruses including West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis virus, and dengue virus, but not yellow fever virus." Interestingly, the STING proteins of several primates, including chimpanzees, rhesus macaques, and squirrel monkeys, also differ from human STING at the NS2B3 cleavage site, and STING from these species was resistant to cleavage by NS2B3. Even when the human amino acids were swapped into the primate proteins at the cleavage site, only chimpanzee STING became vulnerable to NS2B3 cleavage. This suggests that chimpanzee STING may share some structural feature or other characteristic with human STING that more distantly related animals do not. Nonetheless, ZIKV replicates in all these species, which suggests the virus employs other mechanisms besides STING degradation to evade primate immune defenses; some of these have already been identified. To test whether mouse STING's resistance to cleavage by NS2B3 accounts for the animal's ability to curb ZIKV, Ding et al. used CRISPR/CAS9 technology to remove STING from mouse cells. This change rendered the cells susceptible to ZIKV infection in vitro. But even though the virus could replicate in these cultured mouse cells, the authors found that STING-deficient mice were still able to resist ZIKV infection, and did not become ill. This indicates that there exist other mechanisms that help keep the virus in check in mice. As Ploss points out: "Our data point to a molecular basis for the restricted host tropism of ZIKV. This could aid in the development of mice with inheritable susceptibility to ZIKV and potentially other flaviviruses. Such a model would pave the path to testing novel drug and vaccine candidates and for gaining a deeper understanding of how ZIKV and other viruses cause disease." Explore further Some veterans at higher risk of Zika complications More information: Qiang Ding et al, Species-specific disruption of STING-dependent antiviral cellular defenses by the Zika virus NS2B3 protease, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018). Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Qiang Ding et al, Species-specific disruption of STING-dependent antiviral cellular defenses by the Zika virus NS2B3 protease,(2018). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1803406115 Credit: leungchopan/Shutterstock.com An international team of scientists have developed a new way to screen for age-related cognitive decline at home using a test which asks people to detect sounds and flashes on their laptop or phone. Developed by researchers from Switzerland and the UK, the study shows that the simple, cost-effective test may be used to help improve early diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and provide interventions as early as possible. This is particularly relevant given that MCI can develop into Alzheimer's disease in 30 to 50 percent of people. The research, which included UK researchers Dr. Trudi Edginton from City, University of London and Dr. Alison Eardley from the University of Westminster, also sheds new light on our understanding of how the brains of older individuals process information from the different senses. It is published today in today in Nature Scientific Reports. There are currently no diagnostic blood tests like those for diabetes for MCI, and instead the existing diagnosis involves lengthy neuropsychological assessments with tests of cognitive control and memory, along with questions about daily activities and mood. These costly tests require training, often take a lot of patient and clinician time, and can be impacted by factors such as the individual's IQ, socio-economic status and even the testers themselves. As a result, with an ageing global population, and an around 50 million people estimated to be living with dementia worldwide, there is an urgent need for such a test. As part of the study, the 123 participants were simply asked to press a button whenever they saw a flash of light or heard a sound. At times, the flashes or sounds were presented alone, but at other times the two appeared simultaneously. The participants included 51 healthy young adults, 49 healthy older adults and 23 older MCI adults. The researchers, who were led by Professor Micah Murray from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, then extracted two measures about each person's performance: 1) whether they were faster at detecting flashes or sound, and 2) the extent to which they benefited from detecting an auditory-visual event versus either flashes or sounds. Dr. Paul Matusz from the University of Lausanne explained that by using just these two measures, the team could accurately tell if a person was diagnosed with MCI using standard clinical tests. Professor Murray, Professor of Radiology and Clinical Neurosciences at the University Hospital Centre and University of Lausanne, said: "We are particularly excited about this work because it shows how very simple tests can help clinical practice by reaching a wider population, at a lower cost. We are happy that our findings clarify the link between our vision and hearing and their role in supporting memory (dys-)function; it becomes increasingly clear that how preserved our cognitive skills are as we age depends on how intact our senses are. This importantly extends our similar existing findings in school-age children." Dr. Alison Eardley, a psychologist at the University of Westminster (London, UK), explained the impetus for the study: "The current tools used for assessing abnormal ageing are by no means unanimously supported or even sufficient on their own. Not a single existing assessment instrument currently provides an unequivocal diagnosis. The choice of the primary diagnostic tool itself continues to be a topic of a heated debate." Dr. Trudi Edginton, a cognitive neuroscientist and clinical psychologist at City, University of London (London, UK), said: "Our findings open the exciting possibility that a simple perceptual task could be a valuable complementary screening and assessment tool for MCI. However, the test we introduced should not yet be considered as a substitute or replacement for tests currently used in clinical practice. The team is now designing new ways to validate this new screening tool and exploring the role of neurotransmitter systems in age-related and pathological changes in sensory and cognitive functions to inform early diagnosis and potential treatment options." Explore further The role of verb fluency in the detection of early cognitive impairment in Alzheimer's disease More information: Micah M. Murray et al. Sensory dominance and multisensory integration as screening tools in aging, Scientific Reports (2018). Journal information: Scientific Reports Micah M. Murray et al. Sensory dominance and multisensory integration as screening tools in aging,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-27288-2 Airway size in rats with a low birth weight is more varied than those born at a normal weightwhich Western Australian scientists think may play a role in the development of asthma. Around 2.5 million Australians suffer from asthma, causing breathing difficulties when they're experiencing an attack. But around 5-10 per cent of them suffer severe asthma, meaning they have difficulty breathing most, or all, of the time. These people have a thicker muscle in the airways, which is a pathological feature of asthma. "Reduced oxygen supply to the womb results in smaller babies. We know that small babies have an increased risk of developing asthma when they get older, but we don't know why," says the leader of the research, Kimberley Wang, previously of the Telethon Kids Institute and now at the University of Western Australia. "We also know that there are structural changes in the airways of asthmatic patients, but we don't know how and when these abnormalities occur. "My team found that the airway size within the lungs of adult rats that were born small are not as uniform as those of the adult rats that were born with average birth weight, which could have significant implications on how they breathe. So we're investigating the idea that the airway structures are already different at birth if the womb has a reduced oxygen supply." The research was published in the journal Respirology. More information: Kimberley C.W. Wang et al. Increased heterogeneity of airway calibre in adult rats after hypoxia-induced intrauterine growth restriction, Respirology (2017). Journal information: Respirology Kimberley C.W. Wang et al. Increased heterogeneity of airway calibre in adult rats after hypoxia-induced intrauterine growth restriction,(2017). DOI: 10.1111/resp.13071 Provided by Freshscience SAN FRANCISCO Apples chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, may be the leader of the worlds most valuable public company, but lately he has had to act a lot like the tech industrys top diplomat. Last month he visited the Oval Office to warn President Trump that tough talk on China could threaten Apples position in the country. In March, at a major summit meeting in Beijing, he called for calmer heads to prevail between the worlds two most powerful countries. In a trade and technology showdown between the United States and China, Apple and Mr. Cook have a lot to lose. With 41 stores and hundreds of millions of iPhones sold in the country, there is arguably no American company in China as successful, as high-profile and with as big a target on its back. Since he took over Apple from its co-founder Steve Jobs, in 2011, questions about whether Mr. Cook, 57, could recreate the magic that led to the iPod and iPhone have persisted. For Mr. Cook, the analogous breakthrough and potentially his legacy as the heir to Mr. Jobs has come not from a gadget, but from a geography: China. RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc (LSE: ECM), the global distributor for engineers was founded as Radiospares, in 1937. The company started as a supplier of parts to the burgeoning radio market that has evolved into a global distribution enterprise, with operations in Europe, North America, Asia and now Africa offering a diverse portfolio of more than 500,000 industrial, maintenance and electronic components across 2500 global brands. RS is globally renowned as one of the first industrial distributors to successfully transition into an e-commerce business within the B2B space and continues to win awards for innovation and supplier development. RS South Africa opened its doors in 1996, the flagship operation in Africa with 22 years of experience distributing products and components to engineers around the African continent. RS South Africa recently launched the Africa website www.rsonline.africa geared to meet the requirements of a growing continent with demand from various industries such as manufacturing, mining, automotive, utilities, electronics, and industrial IOT. Customers in Africa had access to our products prior to the website, however there were long lead times and higher freight costs depending on location. With the new website customers receive their products much quicker and we can give additional markets in Africa access to our range through our e-commerce platform where they can pay via credit card. There is also an improved customer experience with our French and Portuguese speaking sales agents, so that customers can comfortably engage in their language of preference. So much is happening in Africa we want our engineers, makers and maintenance professionals to have access to the widest range of products and the latest technologies to achieve their goals and to develop the products and solutions of the future. The rest of the world has easy access to these goods, now so does Africa, said Brian Andrew, Managing Director of RS South Africa. RS is passionate about STEM education and globally supports a number of initiatives aimed at upskilling the next generation of engineers and technicians. This includes being a global distributor for Raspberry Pi (a credit card size single board computer at $35) which essential functions as a PC and has sold over 15 million units worldwide. RS also supports numerous engineering endeavours such as Solar Car Challenges, the SpaceX Hyperloop challenge, Development of 3D prosthetics, various robot prototypes, and initiatives that develop and improve satellite technology for space. The new RS Africa website currently services the following countries Angola, Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe with more to follow in the future. RS will be exhibiting at the Manufacturing Indaba taking place on 19-20 June 2018 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Manufacturing Indaba is the leading manufacturing event in Sub-Saharan Africa where manufacturing leaders and experts explore opportunities to improve and grow their manufacturing operations. RS will be showcasing some of its Industrial IoT products used in Industry 4.0 applications as well as the latest technologies used in automation. For more information visit the website: www.rsonline.africa Email: [email protected] Tel: +2711 691 9300 19512018 Our beloved wife, mom, Grammie, sister, Auntie and friend went to be with the Lord June 4, 2018. Christina Marie Meyers was born to Emil and Martha Meyers September 13, 1951 at Parks Victory Hospital. Christina Chris grew up in Napa, attending Dee T Davis Elementary, Redwood Middle and Napa High Schools and was an active Rainbow Girl and member of her church. Her Christian faith was the cornerstone in her life and it was at church camp Chris met the love of her life, Tom Conlee at the age of 16. They wed shortly after her 18th birthday and made their home in Santa Clara County eventually welcoming three childrenTom Jr., David and Amanda. Before Google there was Christina Conlee, friends and family were always impressed by her wordsmithing abilities and intelligencehistory, religion, cookingshe was regularly called upon to proof a paper or advise on a recipe. (If any typos or grammatical errors exist in this, it is because she was unavailable to review.) She worked for many happy years as the Office Manager at De Anza Bible Church (which later was named Abundant Life) as well as teaching Sunday school and playing the piano for services. After relocating back to Napa in 1998 she spent many entertaining years working with her brother (he made her laugh everyday) at the construction company started by their father, until her retirement in 2016. I remember when Jan moved to the valley to open Catahoula it was the beginning of a loving friendship, said Lissa Doumani, co-owner of Terra Restaurant in St. Helena. Jans passion and support for Meals on Wheels is legendary. He rallied us to donate great lots that seemed to bring in more and more money each year. Even recently he and Linda went to a thank you and fundraiser for Meals on Wheels that was for Jan and Nancy Oakes. He wasnt in the best of health but thats how important it was to him. Writing on a Facebook post that shared the news, Ashley C. McCumber, CEO of Meals on Wheels San Francisco, wrote, Meals on Wheels San Francisco stands on the shoulders of giants in our community. Chef Jan Birnbaum was one of those giants. Almost 32 years ago he helped launch the legendary Star Chefs and Vintners Gala. Because of his commitment to others, millions of meals have been delivered to tens of thousands of San Francisco seniors. Because of Jan, a new generation of chefs continue to give back. Lasting memories Most of us look forward to summer all year long, especially those of us who live in colder climates. If you are planning an outdoor activity that will include senior citizens, such as a trip to the beach, a picnic in the park, or a cookout in your backyard, its important to take extra sun safety precautions. Older adults are often more sensitive to heat. Sometimes it is because of a health condition, such as heart disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and other times it is the result of a medication. Sun sensitivity can be a side effect of some medications commonly prescribed for seniors. Aging brings another safety concern: skin health. As we grow older, our skin becomes thinner and more fragile, causing it to burn more quickly. Sun poisoning is also more common among seniors than younger adults. To help everyone in the family safely enjoy the summer, we pulled together six leading safety tips for you to use and share. 1) Sunscreen He then met Terrys mother, got a divorce through the mail and started his new family in the States. But, according to Terry, he never forgot his old one. When Terry was about 10, her father told her about the daughter he left behind. Then I went snooping, Terry Lockrem said. She rummaged through her dads old Army box and found letters between her dad and Dots mom, the divorce papers and a photo a photo of Dot, just over 2 years old and holding a stuffed kangaroo. The back of the photo read: To my darling daddy from his darling daughter Dorothy. When I was older, he spoke of her a lot to me, Lockrem said. He really wanted to go back and see her. But, due to health issues, she said, he was never able to. Lockrem saved the photograph of her half-sister and, over the years, has tried to locate her, but to no avail. Meanwhile in Australia, Cherry was searching for her father. Since her family didnt talk about him, she didnt have much to go on just his name, the names of some aunts and uncles and census data from where the family settled in South Dakota before moving to Petaluma. A 33-year-old Napa man was arrested by Napa Police after his partner reported being attacked on Saturday night in their bedroom. Jesse Wayne Cooke, also known as Jesse Espinoza, 33, was booked into the Napa County jail for possible charges of spousal rape, corporal injury to a spouse, oral copulation and false imprisonment. He was released on $250,000 bail. The woman told officers that she was slammed into a wall and flooring numerous times and punched in the head several dozen times before being sexually assaulted, Napa Police reported. Medical personnel said the woman had multiple injuries to her head and body, police said. Cooke came to the police station on Sunday evening where he was arrested without incident, police said. 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 main Norwegian social wealth fund is especially interesting because it does not invest in speculative real estate or coal, and is planning to divest from oil and gas. It also excludes companies from its portfolio if they violate human rights and labor rights or engage in environmentally destructive practices. Once the wealth is collectively owned, that raises an interesting question: What to do with the income it generates? In Norway, the money goes into public spending, mostly on robust social welfare programs. Another answer is to fund a universal basic income, or UBI (also called a universal basic dividend or social dividend) for everyone in society. Such a program exists in Alaska and helps to ensure everyone benefits from the states wealth, not just the super-rich. In part because of this, Alaska is the most equal state in America. Unlike a JG, this kind of UBI has been tried successfully. Since 1982, Alaska has used investment returns from the Alaska Permanent Fund to pay out a universal basic dividend to everyone who lives in the state. In some years, the dividend has been as high as $2,072 for a single person or $8,288 for a family of four. If Norway paid a dividend from its much larger fund, it would have been $23,970 per person last year or $95,880 for a family of four. Both the Alaskan and Norwegian programs are wildly popular, work as advertised and could easily be copied by our national government. The Problem Is Profits By Rohan Grey and Raul Carrillo Like Matt, we oppose the concentration of wealth and ownership. However, his approach of redistributing capital income, rather than reducing it, stands to make a bad situation worse. Financial inequality is a symptom, not a cause, of capitalism. It exists because capitalists and managers control production while exploiting workers and the broader public for their own power and profit. This system scars communities and the environment in ways dividends cannot heal, causing death, disease and ecological collapse. Consequently, proposals that rely on ever-greater profits risk entrenching the current economys worst abuses. In particular, we oppose linking the performance of stocks, bonds and real estate to poverty reduction, as Matts social wealth fund proposal would do. Goldman Sachs, Monsanto, Halliburton, Facebook, Amazon and the rest of the Fortune 500 are not merely money-making machines; they are sprawling private governance regimes that warp the lives of billions. Whats good for General Motors is rarely good for the country (or planet). Furthermore, the hostility of central bankers to the working class, especially workers of color, should cause leftists to balk at reforms featuring a technocracy of fund managers. The Norwegian and Alaskan experiences also cause us concern rather than comfort. Norways sovereign wealth fund (SWF), for example, amassed its wealth by investing in fossil fuels. Today it invests in overseas real estate and earns passive income off the backs of workers in the Global South. The Alaska Permanent Fund (APF), still rakes in healthy profits from fossil fuel extraction, while Alaska remains plagued by poverty, unemployment and underinvestment in public services. Meanwhile, the highest dividend paid by the APF$2,072 per personis still far too low to provide substantial respite from work, the alleged advantage of a universal basic income (UBI) over a job guarantee (JG). Regardless of the size of the payout, we are concerned that mailing everyone an identical check will increase inequality, rather than reduce it. Early social dividend proponents, such as C.H. Douglas, envisioned an aristocracy of producers and a democracy of consumers. A standalone UBI, financed by a wealth fund or otherwise, does not challenge the capitalist system of production. History demonstrates technocratic elites favor a standalone UBI precisely because it actually subsidizes corporate power, rather than threatens it. Instead of a stock dividend, we should guarantee housing, healthcare, education, family and disability support, reparations, and other public goods through a full employment economy, undergirded by a JG. Rather than leaning into financialization, we should reduce our dependence on mega-corporations and money managers by establishing a right to a job, then building alternative systems of community-oriented production. The solution to capitalist-driven inequality is not making everyone a capitalist. Its less capitalism. Read next: Do We Need a Federal Jobs Guarantee? A Debate. Jobs Guarantee or Universal Basic Income? Why Not Both? Matt Bruenig is the founder of the Peoples Policy Project, a socialist-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. Rohan Grey is a doctoral candidate at Cornell Law School. He is a director of the National Jobs for All Coalition and the Modern Money Network. Raul Carrillo is an attorney fighting for economic justice in New York City. He is a director of the National Jobs for All Coalition and the Modern Money Network. Never miss a story. Subscribe to the free In These Times weekly newsletter: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. While taking a tourist couple from St. Helena to Napa on Saturday afternoon, an Uber driver said he was attacked by a drunken passenger who cursed at him and threatened to kill him because of his country of origin. The incident was reported to the Napa County Sheriff's Office shortly before 5 p.m. from a winery on the 4500 block of Silverado Trail where the fearful driver had stopped to dial 911, Capt. Jon Crawford said Monday. Things went bad when the male passenger, who had slurred speech and smelled of alcohol, asked the driver where he was from, Crawford said. When the driver, who lives in Concord, said Afghanistan, the passenger became belligerent. He said the driver didn't belong in the U.S. and let loose with a string of curses, Crawford said. When the driver pulled over mid-route to Napa and tried to unload his customers at a winery, the male passenger grabbed him by the shirt, uttered more profanities and threatened "to punch your big nose," according to Crawford. The driver pulled away after the couple left his vehicle and tried to call 911 from the winery parking lot, but the drunken passenger followed him and hit the side of the car with his hands while uttering another death threat, according to the sheriff's report. Said Brown, The commission will determine whether or not to exclude customers with onsite generation through the general rate case processI believe the commission will act to ensure that energy costs to ratepayers are fair and equitable. Thats about as naive a statement as anyone could make about energy price regulation in this state, which has the highest electric rates in the Lower 48 states, and features utility companies continually pressing for even more profits. Its a fairy tale to believe the PUCs processes are fair and equitable. Rather, they have been stacked in favor of utilities for more than half a century, with some PUC members moving to big utility company jobs and some utility executives, like Peevey, moving onto the commission. The general rate case process cited so trustingly by Brown has also long been as good as fixed. Utilities invariably request larger-than-needed rate increases even when profits are historically high, all the while knowing the PUC will cut their proposals by about half and then brag about saving money for consumers. So theres every reason to believe the PUC will conspire with utilities that hate the idea of rooftop solar to penalize those who install it. Its simply naive to think otherwise, as Brown plainly does. The bottom line: Theres no disputing the constructive aspects of Browns second eight years as governor. But theres also no doubt about the unfair practices and actions hes tolerated and/or approved. Thomas D. Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column. He is author of the book, The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Governments Campaign to Squelch It. Last month, the community rallied for Rianda House, an anchor partner with the Alzheimers Association. This month, June 17-19, more than 1,000 volunteers rally in Washington, D.C. pushing for more Alzheimers research funding in Congress. The number of people living with Alzheimers is projected to triple to 16 million in 2050, with costs expected to rise to $1.1 trillion. In California, there are now more than 650,000 people living with the disease, with an anticipated increase to 840,000 by 2025. In just two years, Alzheimers jumped from the fifth- to the third-leading cause of death in California. The Alzheimer's Association and Alzheimer's Impact Movement worked with bipartisan champions in the House, such as Rep. Mike Thompson, and Senate to introduce legislation, the Building Our Largest Dementia (BOLD) Infrastructure for Alzheimers Act (S 2076 /H.R. 4256), which prioritizes a national approach to Alzheimers disease as a public health issue. Next time Mike is in your neighborhood, thank him for cosponsoring this act to increase quality of life for those affected and reduce costs. Despite the odds against them, nothing could stop the feeling of cautious euphoria that was being expressed by the proponents of Measure C on Saturday, June 9 at the home of Andy Beckstoffer in Rutherford. After a contentious campaign between the yes and no on Measure C organizations, the The Napa County Water and Oak Woodlands Protection Initiative held an early lead by 40 votes, although tens of thousands of votes remained to be counted. The election update on Wednesday, June 13, shows that Measure C faces a 632-vote deficit with about 97 percent of the votes counted, leaving it in need of a hugeand perhaps improbablecomeback if it is to pass. The update showed the watershed and oak protection initiative had 17,471 no votes and 16,839 yes votes. All that remains now is for the Election Division to release a final, certified count, perhaps during the last week of June. On June 9, though, the Yes on C volunteers were celebrating a cleanly run, fully energized campaign and the Rutherford event was the thank you party. Measure C initiative co-author Mike Hackett said hundreds of people had spent thousands of hours, knocking on doors, calling friends and neighbors, writing postcards and otherwise getting the word out to the community about the initiative. We put this important initiative before voters to provide key protections for Napa Countys watershed lands, Hackett said. Regardless of the final outcome of the election, we hope that our community will come together to do what it takes to protect our water supplies and quality of life for our children and our grandchildren. At the food truck in the driveway, as people waited for their tacos and burritos, that feeling of cautious optimism could not be contained. Its so close, said one volunteer. Imagine that! Just 40 votes! Asked what they would do, should Measure C fail, one volunteer was clearly motivated. If it fails, this is only the beginning, said a woman with her taco plate cupped between her fingers. How can the vintners say this is against agriculture? Dont they realize that without water they wont have their precious grapes? The following Monday, Hackett said, We ran an honest campaign and ran up against big money and deception at every turn. He said he was still feeling emotional when interviewed over the phone. We had so many obstacles: the countys rejection of the 2016 initiative on a technicality, the court battles, and then the confusing alternative facts from our opponents. Its hard for me to get past the fact that our opponents ran a campaign that was essentially trying to trick voters into voting against their own best interests. He recalled how he and Jim Wilson had started the campaign for the 2016 election which ultimately failed to get on the ballot due to what Hackett called a technical issue. It was just the two of us with just 10 weeks to get 3,800 signatures, he said. But within a week, we have 50 volunteers out gathering signatures, and we made the deadline. I still get very emotional at the response of these volunteers. Yet now, two weeks later and with the acknowledgement that Measure C has failed at the ballot box, proponents the Napa County Water and Oak Woodlands Protection Initiative do not seem to be going away quietly. In their June 15 press release, the supporters of Measure C seemed to be looking for the next election. A lot of people are waking up these days to the outsized influence that the wine industry, tourism and developers have in Napa County, wrote Julia Winiarski, a key volunteer for the Yes on C campaign in the press release. Theyd like to see more attention paid to needs of residents. The situation will only grow more dire if nothing changes. Dirty tactics and big money may have won this time around, but we are not going to give up on doing what it takes to protect our water security. Who is setting the table for our children and our grandchildren? wrote Jim Wilson, co-chair of the Yes campaign. They are counting on us to make the right decisions today to protect essential resources for them in the decades to come. The services of healthy oak woodlands are needed now more than ever. We will keep fighting, Wilson continued. Until we find a way to protect water supplies and Napas irreplaceable oak woodlands for future generations. 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. I am following with great interest the SHAPE Committees progress, as it is shaping the bureaucratic takeover of our town. All the discussions 0930 -- Four new tires with Honda rims were found in a vineyard near Sulphur Springs Avenue. 0940 -- A brown wallet containing a large amount of cash was found under a park bench near Grove Court. 1059 -- Two callers saw a white double dump trailer make a bad turn at Main/Charter Oak, going over a curb and knocking down and driving over a sign and control box that pedestrians use to cross the street. The matter is under investigation as a hit-and-run. 1222 -- Report of a young boy and girl, ages 10 to 13, riding ATVs in a vineyard near Pratt Avenue. They werent wearing helmets, and they almost caused a collision when they drove onto the roadway. Police checked the area. 1224 -- Report of a dog barking inside a car parked at Oak/Adams. Police made sure the animal wasnt in distress. 1846 -- Report of a dog left inside a car parked on Main Street. 1905 -- Police took a hit-and-run report on Meadowcreek Circle. 2018 -- Report of a pickup going 100+ mph and crossing lines on Highway 29 in Rutherford. 2023 -- Wires and branches were down on Vallejo Street. 2236 -- Report of a possible drunk driver slowing down and weaving on Highway 29 south of St. Helena. Armenia local elections: Voter turnout at 33.23% as of 8pm when polls closed Lawyer: Purpose of this Armenia police search was to disrupt work of Goris mayor blocs election headquarters UK very interested in Turkish drone program, says Turkey official Germany still tops EU countries list of asylum seekers Armenia local elections: Voter turnout at 25.57% as of 5pm Azerbaijan soldiers complete Mountain Commandos training in Turkey Lawyer explains why Armenia police broke into Goris mayor blocs election headquarters Armenia local elections: Voter turnout at 15.97% as of 2pm Armenia police break into mayor Arush Arushanyan bloc headquarters in Goris on local election day Georgia parliament delegation to head for Turkey on official visit Armenia police apprehend "Arush Arushanyan" bloc candidate for Goris city council Russian-Egyptian military exercise to be held in Egypt Hurricane Pamela leaves at least 9,000 victims in Nayarit state of Mexico Bill Clinton expected to be discharged from hospital on Sunday Armenia local elections: Voter turnout in Dilijan at 8.43% as of 11am Armenia local elections: Shirak Province voter turnout unprecedentedly low as of 11am 65 Italy cities holding second round of local elections Iran tanker truck falls into gorge in Armenia, driver get stuck in cabin Armenia local elections: Syunik Province voter turnout as of 11am announced 1,697 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia 17 American Christian missionaries, their families kidnapped in Haiti China surprises US intelligence with new hypersonic missile Armenia Iranologist: Iranian propaganda field has put Azerbaijan presidents regime in corner Large number of police forces brought to Armenias Goris on eve of local elections US to release only Afghan in Guantanamo prison Armenia local elections underway Armenia ombudsman: Azerbaijanis opened fire at Yeraskh village (VIDEO) WHO recommends third COVID-19 vaccine UN Secretary General calls on all parties in CAR to support ceasefire Arabian coalition announces elimination of more than 160 Houthis as result of strikes in Yemen Two resistance commanders killed in Afghanistan NATO Special Representative to visit Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan Situation with COVID-19 discussed at Pashinyan's Bali earthquake kills 3 people UN court hearings on Armenia against Azerbaijan is over Expert: War and defeat should be a shock shock that will stimulate the formation of a new elite US authorities offer compensation to relatives of those killed in impact of drone in Kabul Erdogan and Merkel quarrel over forms of government Russia, US and Israel agree to hold meeting of heads of Security Councils 65-year-old man killed in Armenias Tavush province Armenia reports 1,863 COVID-19 new cases ISIS claims responsibility for Afghan mosque bombing Quake hits Kuril Islands Japanese PM allows possibility of preemptive strikes on enemy bases Armenia launches case of attack on military posts by Azerbaijani army and attempt to murder 6 Karabakh soldiers Ruben Vardanyan: I'm involved in politics, but I'm not seeking power, I'm ready to lose it all in Russia and Armenia Karabakh Defense Army: News spread on social networks about shelling near Harav village inaccurate Ilham Aliyev blames Iranians and Armenians for alleged collapse of mosques in Nagorno-Karabakh Karabakh Ombudsman: Azerbaijani Armed Forces fired a few gunshots in sector of military posts near Harav village Armenia Deputy PM Suren Papikyan discusses North-South Energy Corridor with Russian counterpart Armenia PM proposes to strengthen trilateral mechanisms to investigate incidents and adhere to ceasefire Russian academician: Erdogan understands that direct confrontation with Russia may be fatal Opposition 'Armenia' alliance issues statement Bill Clinton recovering from infection in hospital US to lift curbs for vaccinated foreign travelers starting November 8 Karabakh President spokesperson: Situation on Artsakh-Azerbaijan line of contact stable, not counting provocation Iran MFA responds to Aliyev's allegations Opposition 'Armenia' faction receives leaders of Karabakh's parliamentary factions Armenia Parliament Deputy Speaker receives leaders of Karabakh legislature's factions Taliban announce creation of Supreme Court in Afghanistan Armenia ex-defense minister Davit Tonoyan to not be released Armenia Justice Ministry: Officials aren't mandated to get COVID-19 vaccine because they can't be relieved of posts Voytolovsky: Any escalation of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh will require direct involvement of peacekeepers Digest: Latest on Azerbaijani fire near Artsakh border, more on injured soldier's health condition Armenia Ombudsman: Azerbaijanis deliberately set 8,000 ha of grass of Yeraskh villager on fire with gunshots Yerevan Investigation Department of Armenia Investigative Committee has new head Russian academician: Yerevan has never recognized Artsakh and has not addressed Russia for assistance Lavrov: Armenia's leadership is interested in plan to open Russian schools Karabakh FM pays working visit to Russian Federation, holds meetings Voytolovsky describes consequences of deterioration of Russian-Turkish relations for Yerevan and Baku Pashinyan: Armenia ready to hand over minefield maps to Azerbaijan in exchange for captives Artsakh State Minister: Only one of 6 soldiers wounded yesterday is in severe condition (PHOTOS) Ambassador: Russia is, in practice, the only country that stood by Armenia's side last year Lukashenko calls on Armenia, Azerbaijan not to turn CIS into platform for clarifying separate matters Armenia premier: Many not only do not believe in but also do not want peace, stability in region Armenia MOD: Azerbaijan fires at Yeraskh, resident's barn and haystacks burning Karabakh MFA: Azerbaijan policy is terrorism Armenia PM: Yerevan-Baku peace talks must resume under OSCE Minsk Group auspices Artsakh ombudsman: Recorded incident another proof that Azerbaijan theses on peaceful coexistence are false Russian Orthodox Church to establish diocese in Armenia Armenia PM: South Caucasus is on threshold of major transformations Armenia's Pashinyan: Russia and its president played a crucial role in stopping 44-day war in Karabakh Armenian and Belarusian FMs touch upon bilateral cooperation agenda in detail Putin: Russia peacekeepers are guarantors of ceasefire in Karabakh Armenia MFA highlights undertaking necessary steps through mediation of Russian peacekeepers Pashinyan: Armenia ready to start border delimitation, demarcation with Azerbaijan Karabakh prosecutor's office: Provocative actions from Azerbaijan outpost only 400m away had started Wednesday Azerbaijan uses drone yesterday, Artsakhs President spokesperson says Night passes calmly in Harav, Norshen villages of Karabakh after Azerbaijan shooting PAUL Armenia will be located at a historical building in Yerevan: details of the long-awaited project have been released Armenia ombudsman: There were Azerbaijan attacks also at Harav village, some other Artsakh civilian settlements 1,765 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Artsakh MOD: Azerbaijan armed forces opened fire on Defense Army sanitary vehicle Part of downtown Paris is named after Armenia PM: Armenia highly values development, deepening of friendly relations with Austria Monumentwatch.org: Azerbaijani roads, endangered Armenian cultural heritage Newspaper: Imprisoned Armenia community leaders will remain in prison even if re-elected Newspaper: Russia peacekeepers concerned about rate of emigration from Artsakh YEREVAN. After the National Security Service (NSS) discoveries in connection with Yerkrapah (Defender of the Land) Volunteer Union Chairman and National Assembly Republican Party of Armenia Faction MP, General Manvel Grigoryan, some Armenians living abroad have provided various information to the Ministry of Diaspora of Armenia, regarding their dealings as well as unsuccessful attempts of cooperation with the Grigoryan-led organization. The press service of the Ministry of Diaspora has informed about the aforesaid. As per the source, Diaspora Minister Mkhitar Hayrapetyan has transferred the received information to the Special Investigation Service, to process it by law. On June 17, the NSS disseminated footage in which food, medicine, and personal hygiene products which Armenias schoolchildren had sent for military servicemen as assistance were discovered at the summer residence of General Manvel Grigoryan. Grigoryan was arrested a day earlier, and within the framework of the criminal case that was filed into the finding of illegal weapons and ammunition in his summer residence. Subsequently, he was charged with embezzlement too. Speaking to Bianet website of Turkey, Istanbul Armenian MP and vice-chairman of the opposition pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) of the country, Garo Paylanwho is running for parliament again, reflected also on the recent bloodless revolution in Armenia. Paylan said he knew about the Way Out (Yelk) coalition still during his visit to Armenia in 2017, he wished meet with Yelks leaderincumbent Prime MinisterNikol Pashinyan, but he was advised not to meet with him arguing that Yelk was a minor political force in the country. But I insisted that the program and ideas of that [political] party are close to my partys, Paylan added, in particular. I had a long meeting with Pashinyan; I told him that Armenia deserved their party. But I didnt expect everything to happen so quickly. Six months later, they came to power without bloodshed, with a revolution, with a truly democratic revolution. Im very happy, and I congratulated them. Pashinyan also wishes to open the Armenian-Turkish border without preconditions. I hope a democratic power in Turkey too will open the border as soon as possible. The National Assembly (NA) of Armenia on Tuesday is convening two special sessions. The matter of for stripping Yerkrapah (Defender of the Land) Volunteer Union Chairman and National Assembly (NA) Republican Party of Armenia Faction MP, General Manvel Grigoryan from his parliamentary immunity is on the agenda of the first session. The parliaments consent is needed in order to launch criminal proceedings against Grigoryan and decide on his preventive measure. The prosecutor general has submitted a respective petition to the legislature. On June 17, the National Security Service disseminated footage in which food, medicine, and personal hygiene products which Armenias schoolchildren had sent for military servicemen as assistance were discovered at the summer residence of General Manvel Grigoryan. Grigoryan was arrested a day earlier, and within the framework of the criminal case that was filed into the finding of illegal weapons and ammunition in his summer residence. Subsequently, he was charged with embezzlement too. After the parliamentary debates on this matter, the Armenian NA will start its second special session, which has seven matters on its agenda. In particular, the MPs will debate on the bills with respect to making amendments to the laws on charity and funded pensions. Armenias National Assembly approved two petitions with respect to Volunteer Union Chairman and Republican Party of Armenia Faction MP, General Manvel Grigoryan. One of these petitions was on launching criminal proceedings against Grigoryan, to include him in these proceedings as a defendant, and bringing charges against him. The second petition was about getting the NAs consent for placing Manvel Grigoryan under arrest, thus stripping him of parliamentary immunity. Later in the day, Grigoryan was charged with illegal possession of firearms and ammunition as well as embezzlement on a massive scale. All the circumstances, including the possible complicity by senior officials from the Ministry of Defense (MOD), will be examined during the investigation, Prosecutor General Artur Davtyan said. A drone of the Defense Army of Artsakh was shot down by the adversary in the south-eastern direction of the line of contact on Tuesday. The drone was conducting border monitoring, Artsakh Defense Army said in a statement. Despite Azerbaijani sides attempts to prevent the flights of Armenian drones, the Artsakh Armed Forces are determined to continue regular air monitoring, the statement says. There are no obstacles for the ratification of the EU-Armenia Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA), member of the European Parliament said in Yerevan. David McAllister, along with other eight MEPs visited Yerevan on Monday to hold meetings with the new leadership. On July 4 the European Parliament will cast its final vote on CEPA, he said. During the visit, MEPs reiterated their call for peaceful resolution of the Karabakh conflict and expressed readiness to support the launch of a free-visa dialogue with Armenia. Progress in anti-corruption reforms, will be of key importance for the decision on visa liberalization, they said. Germania airline of Germany has launched regular flights between Yerevan and Berlin. The Germania airplanes will conduct these direct flights once a week. The minimum price of the airline ticket will cost Armenian drams equivalent to about 169, and a roundtrip ticketapproximately 338. Twenty-five Congress members have called on US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to provide considerable assistance to Armenia. In a letter to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the lawmakers said US assistance is particularly important in the transition period, when the Armenian government and people together are endeavoring to overcome the corrupt past. The US Congress members urge Pompeo to considerably increase assistance to Armenia and help the country fight against corruption. In the year past, more than 7,000 Armenian citizens petitioned to EU countries with a request for being granted refugee status, says the European Asylum Support Offices 2017 report on the situation of asylum in the EU. As per this report, a total of 7,750 Armenian citizens had applied for refugee status last year. In 2016, however, 8,565 Armenian citizens had petitioned for such request. YEREVAN.- Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan received on Tuesday newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Japan to Armenia Jun Yamada, the official website of the Prime Minister of Armenia reported. The PM highlighted the activation and future development of Armenian-Japanese relations, adding that there is the potential to raise the level of partnership to a new level. Nikol Pashinyan thanked the Government of Japan for providing Armenia with 200 new vehicles of Japanese production and hoped that the close cooperation of the Executives of the two states will foster the attraction of Japanese capital to Armenia. The Ambassador assured that he will spare no efforts to strengthen the Armenian-Japanese relations, including in the direction of new investment projects. The interlocutors assessed promising the deepening of cooperation in the spheres of industry, IT, tourism and other spheres. The sides also highlighted high level mutual visits. PM Pashinyan thanked the Japanese side for its balanced stance on Nagorno Kartabakh conflict, adding that it fosters regional peace and stability. YEREVAN.- Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan received on Tuesday Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Lebanon to Armenia Maya Dagher, the official website of the Prime Minister of Armenia reported. The interlocutors discussed a number of issues referring to the future development and deepening of Armenian-Lebanese relations. PM Pashinyan highly assessed the level of bilateral political partnership and highlighted the expansion of relations in economic sphere. We see good potentials for economic cooperation between the two states and we are confident that we will manage to achieve concrete results with mutual efforts, Nikol Pashinyan said, adding that the Lebanese business men can launch activities also in the 3 free economic zones of Armenia, where there are all the favorable conditions for doing business. The PM thanked Lebanon for its positions on the Armenian Genocide and Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Ambassador Dagher emphasized the important role of the Armenian community in Lebanon and informed a visit of Lebanese business delegation to Armenia is being prepared, adding that the President of Lebanon will pay a visit to Armenia in autumn to participate in the summit of La Francophonie. During the meeting the sides also discussed a number of issues of bilateral interest. 1. Comments must not be racist, misogynistic, homophobic, or otherwise bigoted. 2. Comments must not involve little more than name-calling and insulting remarks. 3. Comments must not be made by "anonymous" or "unknown". 4. Comments must not try to sneak in some free advertising for themselves (like spam). I invite anyone who wishes to comment on this blog to do so. I enjoy the comments, whether you agree with what I have said or not. But some people want to abuse the right to comment, and since this is my blog, I have decided to lay down the following rules. If your comment violates these rules, it will not be published. The Gun Culture's Dirty Little Secret By L. Neil Smith. June 16th, 2018. (lneil@netzero.com) Attributed to The Libertarian Enterprise Does the United States Constitution mean what it says? Does it say what it means? Was it written as some kind of obscure code that can only be interpreted into English by individuals with special education and credentials? Or was it written as the "operating system" for a free society, by and for ordinary men, women, and children, and intended to be read and understood by everyone? Does not the insane, relentless struggle, year after year, decade after decade, excuse after lame excuse, to write certain provisions out of the Constitution that those in authority don't really approve of, comprise that "long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evincing a design to reduce them (meaning you and me) under absolute despotism" that Thomas Jefferson warned us about in The Declaration of Independence? As you probably expected, I'm writing here of the Second Article of the Bill of Rights, which is the highest law of the land: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Look up the definition of "infringe". It's what "progressives" call "gradualism." Individuals capable of reading history are aware that "well-regulated" has nothing to do with "laws governing the conduct of ... ". It refers to the fact that, in the eighteenth century, when the Second Amendment was written, firearms were manufactured by hand, and varied from one another in their internal dimensions. Each gun was supplied with its own bullet mold, appropriate to its bore diameter, which cast bullets (round lead balls), whose dimensions didn't match those of any other weapon. This was no small matter, applied to supplying a large body of armed men charged with protecting their families and property from "enemies, foreign and domestic". The problem wasn't really solved until the War Between the States. The term "well regulated" referred to the idea of making weapons -- and supplying ammunition for them -- of uniform dimensions. It had nothing to do with controlling the behavior of individuals who own, or want to own, guns. In other words, the colonial militias desired that all their balls to be of the same size. Strangely egalitarian, you may think. Modern ammunition manufacturing has made that dream come true. Similarly, laws written in the first part of the twentieth century, to make the ownership or possession of "fully automatic" weapons or "machine guns" illegal or hopelessly burdensome had nothing to do with their supposed use by gangsters in the 1920s, as invariably illustrated by highly fictionalized movie versions of the infamous 1929 "St. Valentine's Day Massacre", presented by mass media fully as corrupt as they are today. There are even some historians who believe it was committed by the Chicago police. Wikipedia's primarily Marxist interpretation of phenomena and events makes it difficult to determine what was really going on back then, but the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was supposedly "transfomative" (for which read "socialist"), the same way Barack H. Obama's was. There had already been one attempt, in 1932, to assassinate the Democrat President-Elect, and a veterans' "Bonus Expeditionary Force", several tens of thousands strong, who marched on Washington D.C., and had to be put down brutally by the U.S. Army. Roosevelt intended to seize control of American manufacturing and agriculture, altering the composition of the United States Supreme Court in order to do it. In 1933, supposedly, a number of businessmen, apparently from Delaware, decided to stop him. To accomplish this, they recruited a large number of World War I veterans, promising to arm them with Remington weapons and DuPont ammunition. To lead them, they recruited Marine Corps major general Smedley Darlington Butler, the highest-ranking Marine officer and one of only two living individuals to win a pair of Congressional Medals of Honor. Unfortunately for the businessmen, Butler was an enthusiastic leftist who promptly turned them in -- although nobody was ever prosecuted, and it's said that Roosevelt changed many of his more socialist cabinet appointments before taking office. When Roosevelt's wacky collectivist economic policies failed to get America out of the Great Depression (which had been caused by wacky collectivist economic policies in the first place), the Second World War he helped to start killed 60,000,000 people. How much harder was it to organize and carry out "a little revolution" as Jefferson prescribed, that might have prevented World War II and saved those lives, because Roosevelt had tampered with the Second Amendment by passing the 1934 National Firearms Act which illegally put automatic weaponry -- and adequate protection from power-hungry socialists like Roosevelt -- beyond reach of the average individual? (Similarly, if Germans -- especially JewishGermans -- had been better armed, we might never have heard of Adolf Hitler. They don't call 'gun control' "victim disarmament" for nothing.) Here's the dirty little secret even the "good guys" are keeping from you, the truth that most pro-gun organizations lack the gonads to express and defend. Since those days in the 1930s, not a single gun law in this country, at any level, federal, state, county, or municipal, is legal, consistent with the original intentions of the Founding Fathers, or effective in preventing crime. To be brief, in the United States, laws against automatic weapons, semi-automatics, "bump stocks", silencers, and so on, are themselves illegal. Both sides, Democrats and Republicans alike, deeply fear ordinary people and will do absolutely anything they can to avoid the real solution to problems like school shootings -- which is to arm everybody, even responsible kiddies -- and kill the shooters as quickly and neatly as possible. Instead, with the encouragement of the putrescently corrupt mass media, we customarily wallow around obscenely in the fetid insides of the murderers' minds and suffer a progressive loss of our rights with each and every one who strikes. The Second Amendment does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to adults, or to those individuals that everybody agrees are not crazy, a subjective judgement at best. (Democrats think that anybody who voted for Donald Trump is crazy, and they will eventually try to use it to disarm us all.) The solution to the problem is guns in the hands of everybody, crazy or not. Likewise, when an individual is released from incarceration, his need for self-defense does not diminish and his rights -- including his Second Amendment rights -- must be restored immediately, or else the "corrections" system is exposed as the dirty joke it is. Your rights, under the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, or Tenth Amendments (let alone the Thirteenth, which outlaws slavery) are no more secure from government abuse than your rights under the Second. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks," although the viciously biased Snopes claims he didn't. (Leftists like Snopes hate, loathe, and despise Thomas Jefferson.) He also wrote that "No man shall be debarred the use of arms." Any politician, bureaucrat, or policeman -- Democrat or Republican -- who ever advocated, introduced, passed, or enforced a gun control law of any kind is a criminal and must be treated as such. Let us begin today, putting them in prison where they belong. ************************ Award-winning novelist and essayist L. Neil Smith is a retired gunsmith, Publisher and Senior Columnist of L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise and the author of over thirty books. Look him up on Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com. He is available, at professional rates, to write columns, articles, and speeches for your organization, event, or publication, fiercely defending your rights, as he has done since the mid-1960s. His writings (and e-mail address) may also be found at L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise, at JPFO.org or at https://www.patreon.com/lneilsmith, to which you can contribute, directly. His many books and those of other pro-gun libertarians may be found (and ordered) at L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE "Free Radical Book Store" The preceeding essay was originally prepared for and appeared in L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE. Use it to fight the continuing war against tyranny. Back to Top The number of new print magazines started in the U.S. fell by more than half in 2020 to 60, compared t Elon Musk proclaims hes a socialist which makes perfect sense, as his business runs on other peoples money No doubt the billionaire founder of PayPal, Elon Musk, is enjoying the fruits of his labor, that being the development of the worlds first real interactive online service accommodating the online interaction between merchant and buyer. Its not like hes living in poverty or anything, nor would we expect him to. He devised something of value to hundreds of millions or even billions of people, and he sold that something of value for a lot of money. Good for him. Hes what we used to call a shining example of The American Dream. But that dream was built on an economic model known as capitalism the very same model that brought an end to Medieval European feudalism which, for a thousand years, kept people poor, dependent, and unable to escape their cycle of poverty. Why, then, would this stellar example of capitalism embrace an economic model that has failed everywhere its been tried and which continues its record of failure today? That would be socialism. In recent days Musk, current CEO of Tesla maker of electric cars that spontaneously combust took to Twitter (where else?) to declare his adherence to an economic model that would have never delivered the riches he currently enjoys. Could it be due to his reliance on government funding in order to get his venture off the ground? Perhaps. After tweeting last week that socialists have no sense of humor, Musk wrote, Those who proclaim themselves socialists are usually depressing, have no sense of humor & attended an expensive college. Fate loves irony. Those who proclaim themselves socialists are usually depressing, have no sense of humor & attended an expensive college. Fate loves irony. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2018 When he was challenged to identify his own beliefs, he responded, A socialist. Socialism is socialism is socialism He then wrote: By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all. By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 16, 2018 How can that be true when every instance of socialism witnessed since the concept was devised involves some deranged crackpot authoritarian leader confiscating wealth from the haves and redistributing it to the have-nots (until the haves run out of resources and theres nothing left to give away)? Could it be that Musk is just running around in social and political circles that require him, as a really rich guy, to be apologetic about it while pretending like he feels bad about developing a billion-dollar enterprise? (Related: Elon Musk pushing carbon tax con that will pad his own pockets with billions.) Because thats what it looks like. Musk also tweeted this out: There is considerable confusion between wealth as consumption & wealth as labor allocation. By latter measure, anyone in govt whose budget exceeds $1B is a billionaire. Government is the largest corporation. [emphasis added] Thats good as far as Musk is concerned, considering hes built an empire worth billions based on billions in government (read taxpayer subsidies). As reported by The L.A. Times: Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups. He definitely goes where there is government money, Dan Dolev, an analyst at Jefferies Equity Research, told the paper. Thats a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day. Because it must. And for the record, socialism is a failed economic model, no matter how academically you try to make the case for it. Even if Elon Musk, the government money addict, proclaims otherwise. Think not? Take a peek at Venezuela and see how that latest socialist experiment is working out. Catch more Elon Musk news at ElonMuskWatch.com. J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel. Sources include: Breitbart.com LATimes.com NewsTarget.com Road sign reading new job just ahead. Source: Getty Images 1 of Cities where jobs abound If the economy is sputtering or leaves a little to be desired where you live or where your loved ones live, you might like to be aware of some regions in the U.S. where there are plenty of jobs to be found. You may not be too interested in packing up and moving, but for some people, it's a smart move to relocate to a more burgeoning area, where financial worries will be fewer and advancement will be easier. The Bureau of Labor Statistics regularly reports on unemployment levels across the country. From its latest data, here are the 12 cities with the lowest unemployment rates in the country. ALSO READ: Should You Move for a Job? Previous Next Bell tower at Iowa State University. Source: Getty Images 2 of 1. Ames, Iowa Ames tops the list of 12 metropolitan regions with the lowest unemployment, with a rate of merely 1.7%, as compared with the national rate of 4.1%. (That national rate is also on the low side, historically speaking.) Top employers there include Iowa State University (more than 10,000 employees), the Iowa Department of Transportation (2,000 to 5,000 employees), the Mary Greeley Medical Center (1,000 to 2,000 employees), and Danfoss (1,000 to 2,000 employees). At Glassdoor.com, Iowa State University gets particularly high marks as an employer, rating 4 1/2 stars out of 5. Ames offers a low cost of living, too. The city describes itself this way: "A perfect balance of small-town life with big-city amenities, Ames offers an educated workforce, award-winning utilities, nationally recognized schools, the very best in health care and a wonderful community to put down roots and grow." Previous Next Aerial beach view of Wailuku, Hawaii. Source: Getty Images 3 of 2. Kahului-Wailuku-Lahaina, Hawaii The three towns of Kahului, Wailuku, and Lahaina, on the island of Maui in Hawaii, make up a metropolitan statistical area that is tied for second place for unemployment levels, with only 1.9% of the labor force unemployed. The region recently had a median household income of $68,771, along with a median home value of $528,500. That can be a challenge, financially, and it's forcing many people to leave the area, which is helping lower unemployment rates. Story continues Many people in Maui work in the lodging and food service industry, along with real estate and agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting -- which is not surprising, given that Hawaii is a major tourist destination. Top employers in Maui include fancy hotels such as the Waldorf Astoria, Four Seasons, and Ritz Carlton, as well lots of other hospitality businesses, along with the Maui Memorial Medical Center, Walmart, and the police department. Previous Next Honolulu coast line with rainbow. Source: Getty Images 4 of 3. Honolulu, Hawaii Honolulu, Hawaii, is tied with the Kahului-Wailuku-Lahaina region for second place in unemployment, with only 1.9% of its workforce out of work. Like Kahului, Wailuku, and Lahaina, Honolulu is also a place with relatively astronomical median home values (recently $665,600) and relatively normal median incomes (recently $78,309), which has been driving many people away and thereby boosting job opportunities for those who can afford to live there. The cost of living is about 43% above average. Top employers in Honolulu County include personnel specialist Altres Industrial (about 10,000 employees), the Kapiolani Medical Center (5,000), the Queen's Medical Center (3,928), and Hawaii Health Systems (3,400). Previous Next Illustration depicting Iowa City, Iowa. Source: Getty Images 5 of 4. Iowa City, Iowa We go back to Iowa for the metropolitan area with the fourth-lowest unemployment rate. Iowa City boasts only 2.1% of its labor force out of work. Iowa City residents aren't as financial challenged as those in areas with steep costs of living. The median home value is about $214,200, and the median household income was recently around $42,720. A recent article in the Iowa City Press-Citizen pointed to a healthy economy, saying, "More than 80% of our local interstate commerce companies view their core products as emerging or growing, and 87% plan to launch new products and services in the next two years." Top employers in Iowa City include the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine (about 11,000 employees), the City of Iowa City (10,000), Ferrellgas (3,908), and other University of Iowa divisions, such as healthcare and hospitals. ALSO READ: More Than 1 in 4 Workers Would Move For a Job Previous Next Welcome to Indiana sign. Source: Getty Images 6 of 5. Elkhart and Goshen, Indiana The Indiana towns of Elkhart and Goshen make up a statistical region that ranks fifth in unemployment in the U.S., with only 2.2% of its workforce unemployed. They're both in Elkhart County, a bit outside the city of South Bend. Why are they on this list? Well, their fortunes have changed lately. Elkhart used to have one of America's highest unemployment rates -- about 20% in 2009 -- but there have more recently been labor shortages and rising wages. The town is America's recreational vehicle (RV) capital, with close to 90% of all RVs built there -- and that business has been doing quite well lately. With manufacturing jobs plentiful, the Indiana Star noted that, "Elkhart is among few places in America in 2018 where you have an extremely good chance to get a high-paying job -- the average hourly salary is $22.96 -- without a college degree." Top employers in Elkhart County include manufacturers Thor Industries (recently with 13,662 workers) and Forest River (10,000), along with Beacon Health System (2,600) and Elkhart Community Schools (1,800). Previous Next City of Burlington, VT at night. Source: Getty Images 7 of 6. Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont The towns of Burlington and South Burlington in Vermont rank sixth in the towns with the lowest unemployment rates in the country. They feature only 2.3% of their workforce out of work. The median home value in Burlington was recently $330,000, and the median household income $82,400. Cost of living estimates vary, but the folks at Payscale.com have pegged Burlington's at 21% above the national average. Fortunately, incomes are generally above average, as well. The area's top industries include manufacturing, tourism, and finance, with manufacturing jobs significantly in electronics. According to city-data.com, items produced in the greater Burlington area include "electronics and computer parts; food products; textiles; apparel; lumber; paper and wood products; furniture and fixtures; chemicals and allied products; petroleum, coal, rubber, plastic, leather, stone, clay, and glass products; toys; jewelry; primary and fabricated metals; machinery and electrical equipment; instruments." Top employers in the Burlingtons include the University of Vermont Medical Center (recently with a workforce of 6,405), the Air National Guard (980), and IBM in nearby Essex Junction (5,400). The state's "Think Vermont!" campaign and website aims to lure workers to its growing economy, craft breweries, maple syrup, and progressive culture. Previous Next Wisconsin state capitol building at dusk. Source: Getty Images 8 of 7. Madison, Wisconsin Madison is in a three-way tie for seventh place on the list of the U.S. cities and regions with the lowest unemployment. Only 2.4% of its labor force is out of work, which is significantly less than America's overall unemployment rate of 4.1%. The cost of living in Madison is about 9% above average, with the median home value recently $250,200. Madison is a bit different from the rest of the state, with Kenan Fikri of the Economic Innovation Group noting, "Madison has a classic, purely high-end professional services and knowledge economy that is doing really well." That makes sense, as it's a big college town. Top employers in the county include the University of Wisconsin at Madison (recently with a workforce of more than 10,000), UW Health (15,000), and American Standard Insurance (4,000). Other employers include Epic Systems Corp, American Family Insurance, Covance Laboratories, CUNA Mutual, and Sub-Zero Inc. Previous Next Oil rig drilling in the sunset. Source: Getty Images 9 of 8. Midland, Texas Midland is in a three-way tie for seventh place on the list of the U.S. cities and regions with the lowest unemployment. About 2.4% of its working population is currently jobless. The median home value was recently $216,000, up almost 9% over the previous year, and reflecting an economy that is being boosted by rising oil prices. Advances in technology are also helping the oil industry extract more from each acre, increasing profits further. It's not surprising that the key industry in Midland is oil and gas, but it's not the only significant one operating there. There are also jobs in aerospace, ranching, agriculture, mining, health care, and transportation, among others. Top employers in the area include local public schools and colleges, many national retailers, and gobs of oil- and gas-related business such as ConocoPhillips, Halliburton Energy Services, Chevron , EOG Resources, Dawson Geophysical, and many others. ALSO READ: Could You Survive 6 Months of Unemployment? Most Americans Can't Previous Next A waterfront city. Source: Getty Images 10 of 9. Portland and South Portland, Maine Most people have heard how Portland, Oregon, is booming -- but Portland, Maine, isn't doing too shabby, either. Rounding out the three-way tie for seventh place on the list of the U.S. cities and regions with the lowest unemployment are the towns of Portland and South Portland, in Maine. They feature unemployment rates of just 2.4%. The median home value in Portland was recently $293,200, up about 8% over the previous year, while South Portland sported a median of $273,400, up only 6%. Maine is home to more than just a tourism industry, and the Portland-South Portland area has been accounting for much of the state's economic growth lately. Commercial real estate has been growing, as has the local International Marine Terminal. One challenge the state faces is an aging workforce -- so attempts are being made to draw younger workers, in part by dispelling any sterotypes of remote, frigid wildernesses. A recent beacon of economic hope is the animal health industry, which has been expanding in the area via investments by companies such as Idexx Laboratories, Dechra Pharmaceuticals PLC, ImmuCell, and Vets First Choice. Top employers in the area include TD Banknorth, Maine Medical Center, Unum Life Insurance, as well as public schools, governments, and local colleges. Previous Next City of Boulder illustration. Source: Getty Images 11 of 10. Boulder, Colorado Boulder, Colorado, is in a three-way tie for 10th place on the list of the U.S. cities and regions with the lowest unemployment. It has only 2.5% of its labor force unemployed. Like the low-unemployment areas in Hawaii, though, Boulder presents a financial challenge, with median home prices recently $717,400 -- and growing. It can be hard to work in a region where home prices are hard to afford. Estimates of costs of living vary, but the folks at salaryexpert.com recently pegged the Boulder area's cost of living at 31% above the national average. Top employers in the Boulder area include the University of Colorado at Boulder (recently with more than 13,300 workers), the University of Boulder (4,500), and Boulder County (2,500). There are many technology companies operating in and around Boulder, too, in part because of its well-educated population. The area recently boasted the highest percentage of college-educated adults in the country, at 61%. Some other notable local employers include IBM, Covidien, Seagate Technology, Amgen, Crocs, Wells Fargo, and Google, subsidiary of Alphabet. Previous Next Indiana state flag. Source: Getty Images 12 of 11. Columbus, Indiana Columbus, Indiana, home to Vice President Mike Pence, is also tied for 10th place on the list of U.S. cities and regions with the lowest unemployment, with a rate of just 2.5%. The city is near Indianapolis and Bloomington, offering smaller-town charm and affordable living. The median home value was recently $144,300, and, per Forbes, the median household income $57,301. Partly driving Columbus's success is an educated workforce, with about a third of its adult population having at least a college degree. Manufacturing dominates the area, and the most notable employer in Columbus is engine maker Cummins. The danger there, though, is having too much of the region's fortunes tied to a major employer, as some are worrying whether Cummins can sustain its recent growth rates. Other employers in Columbus include NTN Driveshaft and France-based auto parts maker Faurecia, and the Indian company AXISCADES plans to set its U.S. headquarters there. ALSO READ: Why Cummins Is Struggling to Reassure Nervous Investors Previous Next Aerial view of Fort Collins, Colorado. Source: Getty Images 13 of 12. Fort Collins, Colorado Fort Collins, Colorado, rounds out the three regions tied for 10th place on the list of U.S. cities with the lowest unemployment, with just 2.5% of its workforce out of work. The median home value is steeper than the national average, recently at $376,600. Median household income was $68,135, per Forbes. Top employers in or near Fort Collins include Colorado State University and the University of Colorado Health, with other notable employers including Meritage Homes, Anheuser Busch InBev, Kaiser Permanente, Toll Brothers, Columbine Health Systems, First National Bank, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Wells Fargo. Though the economy has been doing well in Fort Collins, some foresee a pullback, in part due to rising minimum wages which are leading some companies to lay off some workers. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fools board of directors. Selena Maranjian owns shares of Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Amgen, Cummins, IBM, and Seagate Technology. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A shares), Alphabet (C shares), Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, Cummins, and Idexx Laboratories. The Motley Fool recommends Meritage Homes and Thor Industries. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Previous Next The focus this week was expected to be entirely on the OPEC meeting on June 22-23 and how much, and when the production hikes would begin, however, it now appears that bearish investors could be in for a rocky ride with issues being raised over Chinese tariffs on U.S. crude and potential supply disruptions in Libya. Todays massive reversal to the upside in August WTI crude oil is further proof that volatile times are ahead. Coming into today session, the market was under pressure as investors continued to raise expectations for an increase in production from OPEC and its major partners at the cartels meeting in Vienna on June 22-23. The narrative driving prices lower was that the group, led by major producers Saudi Arabia and Russia, would increase production by at least 1 million barrels per day. This figure is also believed to be the amount that the U.S. had asked Saudi Arabia to consider. The huge sell-off on Friday and todays subsequent follow-through move indicated that the increase in output was a done deal although there were still questions over the amount and the timing of the production hike. However, since the early session sell-off, the market has recovered to trade higher for the day. Some traders are now saying that the production hikes are going to meet opposition from Iran, Iraq and Venezuela. While these three countries may not have the economic strength to convince Saudi Arabia and Russia to forego their plans to raise production, it does put increased pressure on OPEC to create a unified front. While Saudi Arabia and Russia have been wielding the big stick during the production cut era which began in January 2017, they have managed to cover-up any disputes dealing with the agreement. Now that it looks like the deal to reduce output is beginning to crumble, cracks are starting to show signifying that perhaps the deal may not even last until the end of the year when it is expected to expire. Additional factors triggering a volatile response today in the crude oil market is the possibility that China may further escalate its developing trade war with the United States by imposing import duties on U.S. products, including crude oil. This is also a potentially bearish development because an escalation of the trade war could hurt global economic growth that could have an impact on demand. Story continues Furthermore, earlier today, Libyas National Oil Corporation (NOC) said storage capacity at Ras Lanuf port had been cut by 400,000 barrels after a second crude oil tank was set on fire amid fighting between rival factions for control of two key export terminals. The NOC warned that the blaze that broke out at storage take No. 2 early Sunday could spread to three further tanks, which would stop exports from Ras Lanuf port completely. So although the focus was expected to be entirely on the OPEC meeting on June 22-23 and how much, and when the production hikes would begin, it appears that bearish investors could be in for a rocky ride this week with issues being raised over Chinese tariffs on U.S. crude and potential supply disruptions in Libya. This article was originally posted on FX Empire More From FXEMPIRE: Yeah.. im gonna give her a pass on that! Im excited for the rumored album this September feautring the Mariah duet Reply Thread Link BRITNEY!!!!!! Wow, gorgeous. WOWOOOOOWWWWWWW Reply Parent Thread Link I just went back and rewatched that video and it is sooooo good. Glory is an incredible album. The production and her voice are slammin'. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link she's pretty much killed her brand by continuing to perform "live" past 2007. i love her for a throwback but her shows are actually appalling. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link sounds dated already Reply Thread Link ooop did Pitbull get lost during this whole Latin explosion? I totally forgot about him. Reply Thread Link Lol why OP. You can like both legend X and Brit but go off I guess. It might be good? Hey Mama was good, not Kkkamilas version. Also, I feel like Pitbull fell off the face of the Earth? Reply Thread Link Yes we can stan Britney and inhabitants of her shadow aka the other girl during the Madonna and Britney kiss, and I'll keep going off thanks! Reply Parent Thread Link the good sis OP has taste. Reply Parent Thread Link taste in flops, yes. Reply Parent Thread Link Wait? ONTD stans for a racist? Reply Thread Link are you talking about his earlier raps? or is there something more recent Im not aware of? Reply Parent Thread Link This aint slick. Reply Parent Thread Link wait? you're projecting right now? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I'm more into that Mariah/Britney duet rumor. How is that gonna sound?! Reply Thread Link Breathy Reply Parent Thread Link The Roof 2.0 so excited!!! Reply Parent Thread Link NGL I've been waiting for a Cardi collab! I think it'd be cute. Reply Parent Thread Link Hmmm...this might be fire. I dunno. I never like her collabs tbh. (minus Boom Boom and MATM) Reply Thread Link Ugh hes gonna kill yet another era for her DOA Reply Thread Link i like armando pero like no Reply Thread Link it already sounds awful Reply Thread Link Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in Hello! Your entry got to top-25 of the most popular entries in LiveJournal!Learn more about LiveJournal Ratings in FAQ Reply Thread Link Christina is smokin' hot in that gif !!!!!!! Reply Thread Link I think about dear Ben a lot lol Reply Thread Link now listening (when that came out i think you had to buy or otherwise DL it... 2002 was prehistoric) Reply Parent Thread Link The vocals dont even start until a minute + in bahaha Reply Parent Thread Link This is a fucking mess. Im also jealous as fuck because I wanna see Meat Davidsons cock, I just know itd tear my hole. Reply Thread Link Oh Betty Reply Parent Thread Link Lmao Reply Parent Thread Link Lmao gurl. I'm so sure the dick is THAT good Reply Parent Thread Link lol oh YOU Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO Reply Parent Thread Link Now Betty.... Reply Parent Thread Link This is truly the kind of comment I joined this site for. Reply Parent Thread Link I haaaaaaaate the way she types. You're a grown ass woman sis. Reply Thread Link SAME and kinda related but i feel like no one really calls her out on her fake accent in songs is also noticeable on her twitter. it's almost like iggy 2014 flashbacks for me...not to mention that tan Reply Parent Thread Link ? Shes Cuban American sis. Why are you coming for her? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link does she ever enunciate enough in her songs to have something approaching an accent?? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Bitch eating crackers Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Thats cute and all but watch them break up by the time this album drops lol. August is a ways away and this feels ready to crash and burn at any moment. Reply Thread Link This Is Me...Then is her best album to date, and I hate that she changed that song title last minute. Never feature your partners on song titles or music videos. It's like having their name tattooed. Reply Thread Link You think shed learn her lesson since every single ex has somehow been associated with her music and none worked. Reply Parent Thread Link oh wow i didn't know she changed it. what was the title before? Reply Parent Thread Link It was supposed to be "Perfect." It was pretty ironic...then... Reply Parent Thread Link I lived for that album when it came out Reply Parent Thread Link her greatest work with an ex to date Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I adored that album Reply Parent Thread Link JLos impacT! Nothing will be more iconic than Dear Ben though. Reply Thread Link LOL! Damn I remember I rocked that record with my J.LO track suit in 2002. Reply Parent Thread Link i'll be honest - i hope this works out for them. i love seeing people fall in love, and just bc 99% of the time it winds up a shitshow doesn't mean it won't work 1% of the time. so for both of them, i hope it works. at the very least, i hope it ends well. Reply Thread Link I do too, lol. They've both been through some serious shit. I don't think it will though, oop Reply Parent Thread Link billion to one odds but fingers crossed lol Reply Parent Thread Link Same. And honestly, we don't actually know how long this shit has been going on for. She did SNL in 2016, how do we know they haven't at least been close? Idk, I just don't buy this "they met weeks ago and are engaged" narrative. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link you honest to god believe that these two are going to be together when they're 80 years old? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I hope they will get married because I live for drama. Edited at 2018-06-19 10:10 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link does she really think the clown won't bite back? Edited at 2018-06-19 12:49 am (UTC) Reply Thread Link "lifes too short to be cryptic n shit about something as beautiful as this love Im in." Reply Thread Link Lmao he looks so mad! Reply Parent Thread Link i mean i get the 'life's too short' sentiment but 'this beautiful love i'm in' makes me roll my eyes lol Edited at 2018-06-19 01:27 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link Where is this from?!?!?? Is it real? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Lmao srsly. Coming from the same bitch who came for Ryan on air when he implied that shed made it Instagram official with Mac or whoever Reply Parent Thread Link exhausting Reply Thread Link this gif needs to be projected at their engagement party Reply Parent Thread Expand Link LOL Reply Parent Thread Link Brigitte should be part of the bridal party Reply Parent Thread Link lollll yes Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO Reply Parent Thread Link this is the official gif of their relationship Reply Parent Thread Link I love that this gif is in every AG posts lmao. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link dammit i submitted a post for this... anyway, i wonder when public opinion is gonna shift on her. like ONTD can't stand this couple but they really haven't gotten any bad press. is it because no one curr about ari outside of stan twitter and gossip sites? Reply Thread Link The general public doesn't know or care lol Reply Parent Thread Link yeah lol her support from the general public really faltered with donutgate imo that's the only reason she can get away with being so annoying about pete Edited at 2018-06-19 01:00 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link That Jaehyun user icon tho... Get my dimple bias outta here!! Reply Parent Thread Expand Link The general public knows but doesnt take it to heart like ontd Reply Parent Thread Expand Link i dont know about that. i asked my mom if she'd heard about this mess (she likes reading people magazine) and she knew all about it Reply Parent Thread Expand Link it's a cute interlude dedicated to your fiance.....what else are you going to name it ?? "celery" ?? cameron // pete davidson stan (@GRANDESDEVOTlON) June 18, 2018 Reply Thread Link adele made 2 entire albums about her ex without mentioning his name once. ariana knows what she's doing. Reply Parent Thread Link ikr Reply Parent Thread Link mte Reply Parent Thread Link unless the entire song is her singing "peteee", im sure there is a plethora of english words she mumbles that could make a song title. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link This relationship is *2010Gagavoice* performance art & a commentary on how quick and constant our culture is moving with social media. As we're phasing into nostalgia and revivals (fashion, TV) being so popular, next thing you know we're going to miss the 2010's before you know it. What is a modern relationship? She's a vehicle for her fans living halfway between fantasy and reality. They're the modern day Sid and Nancy tbh... Reply Thread Link lmao Reply Parent Thread Link lmfao Reply Parent Thread Link This might be my favorite ONTD comment of 2018 Reply Parent Thread Link LMFAO Reply Parent Thread Link She's a vehicle for her fans living halfway between fantasy and reality lmao i hate you Reply Parent Thread Link omg I love this comment Reply Parent Thread Link Edited at 2018-06-19 03:22 am (UTC) this thesis-level comment. happy graduation, sis! Reply Parent Thread Link I can't get over how 'Political' is misspelled on here. So clearly English is not one of the degrees that can be earned at ONTD University. Reply Parent Thread Link LOL Reply Parent Thread Link Nnnnn i just cackled irl Reply Parent Thread Link holllyyy shit hahahaha this is amazing Reply Parent Thread Link i just choked omg Reply Parent Thread Link i imagined it was oprah speaking this instead of gaga. Reply Parent Thread Link lol wow Reply Parent Thread Link Edited at 2018-06-19 03:47 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link lmao Reply Parent Thread Link That comment is gold but the gif really pushes it to another level Reply Parent Thread Link Whew this comment is top 10 for me already Reply Parent Thread Link lol I love this Reply Parent Thread Link ive been through a lot good sis and im not out here embarassing myself to my millions of followers about a 4 week romance. Reply Thread Link all the more reason to keep shit quiet like imagine the embarrassment when it all ends... i could never :( you can always delete instagram pics but you cant delete album tracks once its out mannnn Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Insane clown posse has a tag?! . Thats all I have to bring to this post. Reply Thread Link Of course they do! Have you missed all the amazing Gathering of the Juggalos posts over the years? It's a brilliant trainwreck that brings ontd together to bask in the horror. Reply Parent Thread Link i know. i feel so blindsided and left out. :( Reply Parent Thread Link Juggalo posts were a staple around here for YEARS. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link lol why wouldn't they? juggalo posts are a time-honored ontd tradition Reply Parent Thread Link Umm yes and you better put some respect on it, those posts were always so much fucking fun. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link juggalo posts were basically party posts back in the day Reply Parent Thread Link There's nothing like a juggalo post to make ONTD put their differences aside and unite as one. Reply Thread Link Yes! Here in the juggalo post we are all family. Reply Parent Thread Link That and late night to catch a predator viewing posts Reply Parent Thread Link RIP old ONTD I remember the post about Chris Hanson getting caught cheating. That was an iconic moment in ONTD history. Reply Parent Thread Link rip ass dan Reply Thread Link Ima live forever! Reply Parent Thread Link never forget Reply Parent Thread Link lmfao this throwback Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO Reply Parent Thread Link I'd go to a gathering tbh, I'd love observe the juggalos in their natural habitat. Reply Thread Link Same. Did we miss it this year already? Reply Parent Thread Link XXXTENTACION R.I.P. Young homie. 20 years old. Damn. It aint right out here. Why dont people understand he was just a kid? Kids wild out man. He may have grown up and became a great man... Who knows now? Damn very sad. -ICP Insane Clown Posse (@icp) June 18, 2018 Reply Thread Link boys will be boys Reply Parent Thread Link Lol fuck no lmao Reply Parent Thread Link What a shock Reply Parent Thread Link here's the thing...maybe he went through some fucked up shit that time could have healed but he gave 0.000000 repeating indication that he was planning on changing. 20 is young. 20 is an age when you do stupid shit. but 20 is not an excuse to beat a pregnant woman. 20 is not an excuse to beat someone within an inch of their life for being gay and then bragging about how you would have killed them if the guards hadn't jumped in. maybe he could have changed. but more than likely he was going to continue to do the same fucked up shit and hurt a lot more people in the process. probably even killing someone himself based on HIS WORDS AND ACTIONS before he died. personally, let's save our tears for the poor children being held in cages by our psychotic president and let xxx move on and do better in his next life. Reply Parent Thread Link I would go to the Gathering to save a close family member. I've given my family full permission to kidnap me if i ever join a cult or make some truly terrible decisions (becoming a Juggalo would def. fall under that.) Reply Thread Link (i liked them in high school, but only bc the girl with the good weed and shitty parental supervision was a juggalo and she would play their stuff all the time and it like invaded my psyche.... and i have shitty taste and was a bit of an edgy prick) Reply Parent Thread Link My current bf was into ICP when he was in high school. In fact, when he was fifteen he went to "The Dark Carnival" with his MOM, which I always thought would make a fun indie film, especially since he and his mom are Russian immigrants, and so not the typical Gathering peeps. Reply Parent Thread Link I saw a lesbian with an icp tattoo a few weeks ago and I was so tempted to ask her why. Reply Thread Link I've seen like 3 ICP tattoos in the past few weeks. One was on the side of a guy's neck. Reply Thread Link I know!!! I've literally lurked on ONTD for like nearly 15 years and when I saw news about this movie I decided it was finally my time to make my first post. Hopefully this will help revive Juggalo posts. They were such fun. Reply Parent Thread Link it's a great first post. I think i want to see this. Reply Parent Thread Link Wow! What a legendary beginning. Reply Parent Thread Link lol excellent debut Reply Parent Thread Link excellent first post Reply Parent Thread Link I found out a few years ago my first ~*serious*~ high school boyfriend is now an active Juggalo in New Hampshire. Like, I knew I had trash taste but even this revelation was a blow. #ButterMyPopcorn yallI found out a few years ago my first ~*serious*~ high school boyfriend is now an active Juggalo in New Hampshire. Like, I knew I had trash taste but even this revelation was a blow. Reply Thread Link bitch, I need a name. Reply Parent Thread Link Oh no I gotta have a little self respect! For real though, he was... okay, not the worst for the time (LONG time ago now). Reply Parent Thread Expand Link that movie actually sounds hilarious tbh Reply Thread Link In the '90s I bought an Insane Clown Posse t-shirt for my brother for Christmas. I live with the guilt every day, but I live in Ohio (prime juggalo country) so it could have been worse. Reply Thread Link I'm so sorry abotu living in Ohio Reply Parent Thread Link Thank you. :'( It's been especially difficult because I was raised in Washington state, so I've always known what I was missing out on. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Toledoan here, and since I'm a poor fatty, my mom tends to bring home any bigger shirts she finds at thrift stores since I don't have a lot of clothes. One day, she brought home an ICP shirt. I nearly recoiled when I saw it and I still feel some shame! Reply Parent Thread Link my roommate is a juggalo AMA Reply Thread Link lmao well he's an old coworker and he's a really nice guy, but he and his babymama (who doesn't live with us, they are not together) are some deep Florida swamp. they both have hatchetman tattoos. one time he and I went to a wrestling show and there were juggalos there and he walked up to them and gave them hugs and I was like "oh cool you know people here" and he was like "I have never met these people, but juggalos are a family." at that same wrestling show he discovered Violent J was there out of make-up and J had this little like, convoy of juggalos following him around all night I've been told the proper way to drink Faygo is just to pour it over your face basically. my roommate's bbmama also has a tattoo that is like, a map of Florida but also a gun? he's been to one Gathering and said he doesn't really remember it much except it was a great time. it was in Ohio, which I know because every time I trash Ohio (because it sucks), he is like, "i had one of the best times of my life in Ohio" Reply Parent Thread Link shut up, that's amazing. did you know when you moved in? do they wear clown makeup? is there faygo in your fridge? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Obviously her taste in music is shitty, but what music selection (besides the obvious) was so bad it actually caught you by surprise? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link What is the most disgusting snack you've found juggalos in the reintroduction to society program, enjoy? what's the strangest thing you've found on the floor of your apartment? when juggalos are in public spaces do they sniff butts in greeting? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link fucking magnets.... how do they work??? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I watch the news. Reporters are letting the administration blame this on democrats, and yet even all the former first ladies came out to oppose this. then of course trump blames bush. and the GOP sits back and does nothing. this is sickening and it's time to riot. Reply Thread Link I only watch msnbc but they have pushed back hard on Trump blaming the dems. Reply Parent Thread Link It's def time to riot. Reply Parent Thread Link yeah like I'm shook he really out there saying complete bullshit and we're just.... rolling with it. I mean why be shook tho we've been doing this for two fucking years. Reply Parent Thread Link I honestly feel like rioting is never going to happen. We're never going to get to that French revolution style of raiding the homes of the rich, beheading them in the streets, and carrying their heads around on pikes to equal things out. In America, rioting is something a black man does because he wants to loot something. They don't see it as a part of our history, that when you push the poor and the desperate into a corner, when you sick the dogs on them, when you give them the choice to fight or die, they will fight. And I'm wondering just how far the brainwashing by the conservative media, combined with the systemic racism, that will prevent poor whites from rising up against their TRUE oppressors. And then those who are woke enough to even consider rioting pull the liberal ideology that you should never resort to violence, that things can be sorted diplomatically. I'm too angry for that shit. I can't even look at the news anymore without getting more and more furious, that this is what has become of my country. That we're going to have the dumbest, fattest, oldest, and ugliest dictator that ever lived, and that's our history. We couldn't get a Hitler or a Stalin or a Castro, nope, we deserve the big orange idiot in charge because we're dumb enough to fall for someone with negative charisma points. He can't even fucking read! This is like the opposite of all history, that the oppressor is less-educated than those whom he is oppressing. /so much anger rn Edited at 2018-06-19 04:04 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Expand Link White people are not going to riot unless it affects them personally. And the US is too spread out to ever have the sort of riot to overthrow the government. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Omg, i am so glad that in US "raiding the homes of the rich, beheading them in the streets, and carrying their heads around on pikes" is unlikely to happen. Wtf is this comment? Are you a child? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link At least once a week since teh 2016 election, my roommate has looked at the news and then looked at me and said "So the guillotine is definitely coming back, right?" Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I'm not for beheadings, but massive work stoppages? Constant on-going protests run on shifts? Grinding government to a halt until it stops this shit? Let's go. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link My friend and I were talking about this last night. Americans are not really going to revolt against this terrible administration and the neoliberal nightmare that's been brewing for decades. People can't even be bothered to do the bare minimum with respect to citizenship (i.e. voting), so of course we're not going to overthrow the state. Additionally, most people believe people get what they deserve (a fucking falsehood), so we're never going to have any real redistribution of wealth. Also, we're a country full of racists, so the idea of Blacks and Latinos getting a fair shake in life enrages people who would rather cling to their white supremacy. We're fucked. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link People need to protest in the streets in every city. Reply Parent Thread Link I am going to a protest by an immigration detention center in Atlanta, GA on june 30. I hope there are a ton of people there. I also hope it does not tirn into a riot, though, as i am pregnant. I am an immigrant, and always passively though that borders should be open and restricting movement is immoral and not government's job. I mostly sound like an idiot when i argue this, so i would appreciate if someone who agrees with me could give me some reading i can use to educate myself! Edited at 2018-06-19 06:15 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link I think Ted Cruz is introducing some bill Reply Parent Thread Expand Link definitely DEFINITELY time to riot Reply Parent Thread Link pitchforks and torches, people not the tiki torches tho Reply Parent Thread Link People keep saying this is a bipartisan issue that will be resolved after the videos and photos have leaked...and well, don't the majority of Trump supporters want to kill these people? They don't give a shit about them being in cages or separated from their families, they want them gone, doesn't matter how. Reply Thread Link Trump supporters are happy to watch these videos. GOP can't deliver on any promise to white people besides treating POC like shit. That is what unites them, hated. Reply Parent Thread Link My father voted for trump and he is 100% against what is happening. Hes absolutely disgusted. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Exactly. What makes them think this will change anything. I fear that if we let this continue, we will start looking at legal residents and stripping of green cards/visas for any minuscule thing then we will start with those that were residents and became citizens, anyone with a "mexican/latino/hispanic" last name. I mean Nazi Germany 2018/2019. Reply Parent Thread Link This is what is most baffling to me. This is exactly what Trump supporters want. This isn't Trump going rogue or whatever, or a policy implemented with unintended consequences. This is what Trump ran on. Reply Parent Thread Link don't the majority of Trump supporters want to kill these people? They don't give a shit about them being in cages or separated from their families, they want them gone, doesn't matter how. Liberals really need to come to terms with that. Instead they keep exoticizing them and making dumb ass videos on how Trump supporters are ~just like us~ because they like bacon with their eggs or something equally stupid. Reply Parent Thread Link Yeah they probably relish in their torture. Reply Parent Thread Link Who is saying it's a bipartisan issue? The GOP is in control of the House and the Senate, and the White House. Democrats have no power to do anything. They're shut out of the meetings to discuss the issue. This is all about Trump holding these children hostage until he gets funding for his border wall. Period. He thinks it's a campaign promise that he has to keep in order to win the midterms. He doesn't give a shit about the children. The reason we've only seen footage of the boys being held is because it fits into his narrative that they're gang members, coming across the border to murder Americans. If they showed pics of little girls crying for their moms, it wouldn't fit his narrative that they all want to rob and kill. Reply Parent Thread Link "At least during the internment, we remained a family, and I credit that alone for keeping the scars of our unjust imprisonment from deepening on my soul." This is sf tragic. When i read an article about the children crying and the (wannabe-SS)guards just joking about it i started to cry. Reply Thread Link I didn't know George's experience :( Honestly, every time I try and catch up with everything-- even just in the past couple weeks-- it makes me so sad and angry that this is where we are. Everything that's happening, if we make it through, will be in the history books. I'll have to tell my future kids about all this shit. Reply Thread Link He made a pretty good musical about his experiences called Allegiance a few years ago with Lea Salonga and Telly Leung Reply Parent Thread Link Even if he gets impeached and removed tomorrow, Trump still gets a state funeral when he dies. It makes me so mad that even in death, we'll still be spending money on this asshole. Reply Parent Thread Link Elections have consequences. This is why when I see BernBots out here still pushing their agenda it just brings out the worst inme Reply Parent Thread Link I wouldn't count on that. He may end up in prison and I don't think felons get a state funeral. You can take solace in the fact that if he does get a big send-off, it will be the most poorly attending in history. Reply Parent Thread Link He gets a library. I hope it's full of history books and sneaky ass librarians. Reply Parent Thread Link I saw a childrens puzzle of the US presidents and it included trumpI was stunned. it was truly a moment of hopelessness and despair Reply Parent Thread Link George has his issues, but his vocal anger and lived history regarding Japanese internment is a really good part of his legacy. I only learned about the camps in 8th grade, and my English teacher didn't believe me and told me I was exaggerating when I showed him the book I was reading about it. It wasn't taught in any formal classes until I was in college. It's shameful and something we, as a country, have largely forgotten, allowing history to repeat itself. Reply Parent Thread Link Rep Ro Khanna made a really good post about this to that Im gonna share because I think he highlights the issue well: There has been a lot of misinformation regarding the immoral family separation policy currently being enacted at our border, so I would like to explain clearly what is happening. The Trump administration is separating migrant children from their parents for two reasons. The first is to act as a deterrent against future migrants. They want to show people that the cost of trying to enter the United States will not be worth it. The legal rationale behind this decision is that the Department of Justice under Jeff Sessions has chosen to prosecute every single immigrant who crosses the border with criminal offenses, rather than civil offenses as immigration law has historically been done in this country. Under the justification that migrants are now under suspicion of criminal offenses, Customs and Border Patrol agents then separate the children from the parents. What happens after that is unclear. We do not know what happens to the children or their parents, whether or not they are reunited, or how they are being cared for. We have still only seen reports from boys camps, and no girls camps. Many camps are privately owned and operated and no one has seen anything from them. Secondly, they are doing this in order to force legislative concessions from Democrats in Congress. The GOP does not have the votes to build the wall. They believe that by holding children hostage, they can force Democrats to allow the wall to be built in exchange for ending this practice. They are using these children as political pawns to fire up their base before the midterm elections in November. While we continue to seek answers to these questions, I am working on the following courses of action to stop this inhumane practice. First, I have cosponsored four pieces of legislation that would prohibit this practice as well as improve care for migrants at the border, most notably the Keep Families Together Act sponsored by Congressman Jerry Nadler and is the companion bill to Senator Dianne Feinstein's bill in the Senate. Secondly, I have cosigned letters to Department of Homeland Security appropriators that will limit DHSs ability to use appropriated funds for the family separation policy as well as make clear that this policy is not a lawful interpretation of our immigration laws. Fundamentally, this administration has made the conscious choice to criminalize an entire population of people without due process in order to force concessions from Democrats in Congress. It is a cruel and inhumane policy and I promise to do everything in my power as your Representative to stop it now and from ever happening again. Reply Thread Link "Many camps are privately owned and operated and no one has seen anything from them." oh ffs "They believe that by holding children hostage, they can force Democrats to allow the wall to be built in exchange for ending this practice." ofc " I am working on the following courses of action to stop this inhumane practice." ok, but what about ICE? Reply Parent Thread Link SHOCKER Reply Parent Thread Expand Link ICE takes their orders from the White House. ICE is not the whole problem. The one directing the chaos is the problem, and that's Donald Trump. ICE is the same as it was under Obama and Bush. The only difference is Trump. Obama deported more than any other president. He just didn't separate the families. He's not a barbarian. Reply Parent Thread Link Right. The private prisons are making a killing. Neither of the GOP proposals include ending the separation policy DEMS can't fall for it. Reply Parent Thread Link I seriously hate human beings. Reply Thread Link The US has no right to take the moral highground on anything when it comes to human rights abuses in other countries or when it comes atoning for their crimes against humanity imo. Is the japanese internment even taught in school there? Reply Thread Link It's a page in a chapter in my experience. But the removal of Native American people isn't taught as genocide and slavery isn't taught as the main reason for the US civil War soooo. Reply Parent Thread Link Well no one should be surprised when we end up back at concentration camps then :( Reply Parent Thread Link This was my experience in school as well. But don't forget about the month + of WWII and the narrative about how we (the US) liberated the Jewish and saved the day! Reply Parent Thread Link I read Farewell to Manzanar twice in elementary school, once in English and once in History, we definitely learned about it but education varies so much from school to school. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Depends what state you are tbh, I learned it in public school but I went to school in Massachusetts so the bar for education is set higher than other states like Mississippi, where I'm sure the curriculum would be different. (But tbh I don't think that even made a difference bc ppl are still idiots up here) Edited at 2018-06-19 04:12 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Our history books are whitewashed. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Canada also loves to toot its horn, especially compared to the US, but we also had Japanese internment. And currently, more Native children live in foster care than with their birth families -- not to mention the way Native women's disappearances go under- or uninvestigated. What's happening at the border is disgusting but what's more disgusting are people trying to make it an "Us vs. Them" when there are horrifying atrocities going unacknowledged. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Depends on the state, and tbh probably county of that state. I was taught about it in multiple grade levels and I lived in SC Reply Parent Thread Link Yes Reply Parent Thread Link Unfortunately it needs a lobby so space can be made among other things like the colonial era, Civil War, Trail of Tears, suffrage, the Depression, McCarthyism, Civil Rights Movement... I grew up in Southern California so trips to the Japanese American museum and lectures by the author of "Farewell to Manzanar" were available. Awareness in Seattle seems poor in comparison, despite a decently large Japanese population. My Hawaiian friends of Japanese descent knew about it, but their education was more focused on Hawaiian history. I learned nothing about French Louisiana in school. Reply Parent Thread Link I grew up in PA. I skipped one grade (8th) so maybe they taught it there, but I didn't even know they existed until I randomly saw a story about it on some TV. Then I looked it up. I'm Asian American and was raised in a white family. I honestly wouldn't surprised if a whole bunch of people didn't know about them. Reply Parent Thread Link I learned about it, but I'm in Northern California in a "progressive area". All my high school history teachers were young (and not white) so they were forthright about how shitty the U.S. is. However, in elementary school (so like 1998) my teacher had us make pilgrim and "Indian" costumes out of card stock and had a mini Thanksgiving. It was beyond fucked up... Reply Parent Thread Link yeah but it varies state to state i think. i grew up in a state that had several camps so we learned about it in multiple grades but i'd imagine in other places it's probably pretty minimized. but that's u.s. "education" for you. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I never heard of it until I was an adult and had moved to Colorado. There were a couple of camps located in western Colorado, and I knew nothing about it until my friend pointed it out while on a road trip. She had always known about it, I guess it was taught in school here. Reply Parent Thread Link I was at my schools in Los Angeles but I can imagine in many parts of the US, particularly the places that try to gloss over the brutality of American slavery, that doesnt get taught. Reply Parent Thread Link I'm in California where there were multiple internment sites. Additionally my US history teacher was a child of parents who experienced the internment so it was definitely something we learned about. Reply Parent Thread Link Depends on the state. I learned about it in school. But also I live in CA where many of the interment camps were and actually had friends whose grandparents were sent to the camps. Reply Parent Thread Link The US school system is based on nationalist propaganda, so I'm not surprised we are on our way to repeating history Reply Parent Thread Link Ironically my white history teacher in middle school taught us about Harriet Tubman, the Native American Genocide and about Japanese internment camps. The textbooks didnt cover much of it so he always expanded on it to fill in gaps. I went to school in a California tho Reply Parent Thread Link Like others have stated, it depends on where you live. I'm in New York but went to Catholic school. I literally never heard about this until about a year or two ago. I'm still learning about it. Japanese internment camps weren't even really taught in school but the US will make sure that kids learn about anyone who has ever done them wrong or what they believe is a perceived wrong. Reply Parent Thread Link I don't think I was ever taught it in school, I read about it on my own in a children's book from the library and then later I was taught about a legal case in college that had to do with it and that's the only times I've ever heard about it. Reply Parent Thread Link What I didn't know till recently is the U.S. govt also kidnapped Japanese-Latin Americans mostly from Peru to use for pow exchange. They were sent to internment camps in the U.S. http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Japanese_Latin_Americans/ I don't remember learning about it in school, I only know about it b/c I'm Japanese-American and my dad told me about it when I was little.What I didn't know till recently is the U.S. govt also kidnapped Japanese-Latin Americans mostly from Peru to use for pow exchange. They were sent to internment camps in the U.S. Reply Parent Thread Link I went to public school in California and we studied Executive Order 9066 to the extent that I will never forget any of it. I think it all depends on the teachers. They have a curriculum, but they can focus on certain things if they want. And saying the US is shit on human rights doesn't excuse atrocities around the world. They don't cancel each other out. The current administration in the White House is morally bankrupt and nothing but an endless stream of lies. He doesn't represent America, he represents a small faction of racists. The UK has Brexit, Merkel has her hands full with the far right in Germany, it's not a problem exclusive to the US. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link i remember it got like a paragraph in my history book in high school...our teacher never directly addressed it nor was the subject in any of our exams about that period, smdh. Reply Parent Thread Link i'm so sickened by all of this, theres no coming back from this for us as a country. Reply Thread Link well no shit, I was referring to the societal structures we have now. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Dont forget Sandy Hook. That was the cherry for me. But even then we literally murder people every day here and abroad so weve been past the point of no return for a while. Reply Parent Thread Link Humanity has been doing horrible shit to one another since the beginning of our existence tbh, this is just more of the same. Reply Parent Thread Link North America was founded on this. There was nowhere to go but further down. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link for the record i have said since election night that this was following the pattern of american history and what the country has always been, BUT-- i def agree with you that there is now a shift, there are precedents that have altered and it will be crazy to see how things play out. yes they were a long time coming, but the world is in the middle of a storm right now, a different kind of storm. so while i agree that someone saying like ~this isn't us~ is false, i don't think it's fair to always jump on people just because they are commenting on the culture shift that is happening right now. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Of course there is. In the first place, Trump doesn't represent a majority of Americans. The 2016 election is under investigation from Russian tampering and he didn't win the popular vote. If there was no coming back from this, Germany would be one of the most powerful nations in the world and neither would Japan. Have you forgotten WWII? There are peaks and valleys. We are in a deep valley right now, but we don't have to stay there. Reply Parent Thread Link I'm super late but just chiming in to say I completely agree! Yes america has always been trash but there were some good things, even if they were just ideals and even if they didn't always include everyone. but whatever you think of america, there's no doubt that it has been changed forever. and I don't think it's for the better but we'll see. Reply Parent Thread Link This made me cry yesterday. Everything about this is so horrific. Thankfully all my reps are against this. I dont understand the callousness of otherpeople :( Also, i just know some of these families will never see each other again and it is seriously distressing Reply Thread Link I can't tell you how trippy it's been watching people who were literally calling folks liars when they pointed out how horrific ICE and our immigration policies were before 2016 suddenly caring about these things while also acting like all these issues just fell out of the sky this year. Reply Thread Link Its been a real trip. Reply Parent Thread Link Omg i miss your astrology posts sis!!! Bring them back - signed thirsty Leo Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Edited at 2018-06-19 05:37 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Expand Link You didnt lie Reply Parent Thread Link MTE. Apparently racism, homophobia, etc. didn't exist prior to 2016. Reply Parent Thread Link The US is a big mistake since its conception, a country so full of entitlement that it can't even see past its own shit. It's unbelievable how a "First World democracy" can treat people already within it's borders. Between this and Italy's blocking the arrivals of the African migrants, it's been an specially shitty week already. Reply Thread Link A week at sea! Fucking disgusting. There shouldve been countries lining up to bring them in. Reply Parent Thread Link The person who accused him of assaul lied. Reply Parent Thread Link Correct. There was a post on here about it as well. Reply Parent Thread Link There was a post disparaging the person who accused him where the writer picked at every little inconsistency in his story, so folks on ONTD decided that meant no assault ever happened, because that's literally all it takes for people to abandon their "believe survivors" mantras. Reply Parent Thread Link Wow. History truly repeats itself. The US is out of control. Trump is out of control. I wouldn't put it past him to want a wall in exchange, if the tweets are correct, but this is a whole new low for the US. This is Fascism. Reply Thread Link The whole point is to get funding for his wall. He's holding these kids hostage until he gets it. He thinks it's a campaign promise he made that he has to keep in order to get his base to vote in November. It's not about kids, or immigrants or crime, it's about getting funding for that stupid wall and he will do anything to make that happen. He's a terrorist. Reply Parent Thread Link honestly at this point I feel like giving up, how do ya'll not give up? Reply Thread Link bc Drumpf going down will be a greater victory. Reply Parent Thread Link Because watching (hopfully) Trump and his cronies get (hopefully) indicted and taken away in cuffs will be a bittersweet victory. Reply Parent Thread Link At this point, indictment and being in prison isn't enough. It's probably the best we can hope for, I want more done. I don't care that it doesn't resolve anything and shit. These families- the harm the US is causing might span generations to these families. Reply Parent Thread Link unfortunately i highly doubt this'll happen Reply Parent Thread Link Anger. I basically just wake up really fucking angry and do what I can to churn it into power. Reply Parent Thread Link I can't give up because there's no where else to go for most people here. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I feel this all the time but thats what they want. We cant give up. Take a mental health break here or there but we have to figure out a way to help these families and to stop every other horrible thing trump and this administration want. Giving up will just let this grow...that being said I have no idea what to do. Reply Parent Thread Link All through history there have been soulless monsters trying to do horrible things. Trump is just another one. We have to fight back, we have to resist and never accept what he does is normal. There are more of us than there are of his supporters. We need to keep speaking out saying this is unacceptable. And register to vote and make sure everyone you know is registered. We can block him if there are enough Democrats in Congress. Right now there are no checks and balances because about half of the GOP have been bought off by the Russians. McConnell took $2.5 million from Russians and I don't know what the figure is for Ryan, but it was plenty. They're all compromised and they have to go. Reply Parent Thread Link An OPEC technical panel has found that global oil demand is on pace to stay strong in the second half of this year, suggesting that the oil market could comfortably absorb a production increase without sending oil prices plummeting, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing three OPEC sources. A technical panela kind of economic body within OPECmet on Monday to take stock of the oil market situation and to prepare a report for the ministers of the OPEC countries at their meeting later this week. If OPEC and its allies continue to produce at May levels then the market could be in deficit for the next six months, one of the sources told Reuters. The market outlook in the second half is strong, according to another source. OPEC is up for a tough meeting in Vienna this week after the leaders of the two groups of the OPEC/NOPEC production cutsSaudi Arabia and Russiahave signaled that they are willing to boost production to offset what is sure to be further supply disruptions, mostly from Venezuelas collapsing oil industry and from a potential decline in Irans oil exports in view of the returning U.S. sanctions. But its Iran and Venezuelafounding OPEC members and those most affected by U.S. sanctions and unable to boost productionthat are most vehemently opposing an increase in the cartels production. According to one of Reuters sources, at the technical panel on Monday, Iran and Venezuela, as well as Algeria, continued to voice opposition to a production boost. This faction is reportedly also supported by Iraq. Iran said over the weekend that it would veto any proposal for a production increase with the support of Venezuela and Iraq. Related: Permian Discount Could Rise To $20 Per Barrel Saudi Arabia and Russia are proposing an increase of the OPEC and allies production by 1.5 million bpd, Ecuadors Oil Minister Carlos Perez said upon arrival in Vienna on Monday. According to one OPEC source who spoke to Reuters, the Saudi proposal of a 1.5-million-bpd production boost was just a tactic, to have wiggle room to negotiate a compromise with other OPEC members and settle on a lower number for the increased production, possibly between 500,000 bpd and 700,000 bpd. Due to the staunch opposition to any production increase from the faction led by Iran and Venezuela, analysts expect this weeks OPEC meeting to be a very difficult one, comparing it to the 2011 meeting, which the then Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi described as the worst OPEC meeting of all time, Commerzbank commodities analyst Carsten Fritsch told Reuters. By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: The U.S. Gulf of Mexico, (GoM) has been a tremendous resource that has largely been developed over the last thirty years or so. One by one, companies ventured into deep waters using their wits, and brawn to bring these deeply buried resources to market. Wits and brawn, and a lot of money. Many companies learned the hard way that deep water was not a fun place to play if your checking account was low. The companies who were adequately capitalized did well, rebounding from the initial steepness of the learning curve to add huge reserves and daily production increases to their bottom lines. Those of us who drive and use gas to heat our homes can be glad they were successful, as now much of the U.S. Daily Offshore Production comes from wells drilled in more than a 1,000 of water. (Click to enlarge) Source As can be seen from the graphic below, the oil industrys advance into deeper waters has been a fairly gradual one. Led primarily by the marine engineering developments that occurred as fields farther and farther offshore were explored, discoveries made. (Click to enlarge) Source After a tremendous initial burst in exploration activity geologists began to run out of prospects, and the pace of new discoveries slowed. Only the fairly recent ability to see beneath the salt led to the massive peak in E&P activity in the early 2000s that led to Miocene discoveries like Thunderhorse, Mad Dog, K2, and a number of others. This miracle continued with Lower Tertiary discoveries like St. Malo, Jack, Shenandoah, Anchor, and again, a number of others. This period has been referred to as the Great Unveiling, and in the view of some represents a peak potential for the offshore GoM deep water play. So, is this it for the GoM? Are we destined to an inevitable decline in production deep water? Not all are convinced, and that is where the meat of this article really begins. Shell and the Norphlet Shell was the first oil company to really begin to explore and produce deep water resources in the U.S. GoM. Beginning in the early 1980s with the record breaking jacket supported Cognac, and Bullwinkle platforms, they took the experience they gained from decades of exploratory work onshore and in near-shore waters and began to stretch the universe of what it was possible to do offshore. (Click to enlarge) Source In the picture above the Bullwinkle jacket is being towed out to sea from its fabrication site in the Corpus Christi Channel. Deepwater helped to build Shell into the highly technical Super Major oil company they are today. A lot of lessons were learned along the way. Lessons that they can now apply to tackling the production challenges of today, where the capital costs associated with reserves development must remain positive in low oil price environments. Shell has been drilling the Norphlet for decades onshore in the Missississpian and Alabaman Gulf Coast areas. In the late 80s and early 90s it extended its familiarity with this reservoir into Mobile Bay. From five wells drilled in the Fairway Field, offshore Alabama, Shell produced gas in prolific amounts~200 mmscfd, for a number of years. These wells were drilled in shallow water to about 20,000 MD, and cost upwards of $20 mm to drill and complete at a time when the oil price was about $10/bbl. Related: Russia, Saudi Arabia Extend Oil Partnership Indefinitely Success like this encouraged Shell geoscientists to wonder just how far offshore this prolific trend might extend. In the late 90's Deepwater was becoming a catch phase in the oil patch. (Click to enlarge) Source In the table below, you can see that right off the bat, Shell had more success than other companies developing this formation. While its apparent they drilled their share of dry holes, the five commercial discoveries listed below are Shell's, and only Shells. Other companies just seemed not have the early affinity for picturing this reservoir the way they did. Since this was published however, nearly four years ago, other operators have cashed in on the Norphlet, most notably, Chevron, at the Ballymore prospect, and discussed briefly in another article earlier this year. (Click to enlarge) Source As can be seen in the next graphic Shell has feasted off their in-house expertise picturing the Norphlet, and in 2015 sanctioned the mega-project Appomattox. (Click to enlarge) Source You can see above with their latest discovery, Dover, announced on May 24th, Shell has continued their winning ways in the Norphlet. They cut 800' feet of pay here. I expect these wells will be tied-back to the Appomattox hub, through subsea completions. Related: Permian Discount Could Rise To $20 Per Barrel The Appomattox hub is designed to deliver up to 180K BOEPD from 15 producing wells. Initially only the Appomattox and Vicksburg fields will be flowed to the hub, with the other satellite fields to be produced later. Production will consist of oil and gas. Characteristics of the Deepwater Norphlet Around 200 mm years ago the supercontinent of Pangea began to pull apart from emerging tectonic activity. In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, the North American plate separated from the African and South American plates, creating a rift basin that developed grabens (valleys) that filled with volcanic, largely windblown (eolian) sediments. Tectonic subduction and crustal stretching over the eons allowed for intrusion of marine waters, creating a shallow sea as they did. Geologists have named this the "Louann sea." Evaporation and replenishment of this sea over time led to the massive halite deposition now known as the Louann salt. Fed by riverine (fluvial) and eolian clastics (particulates) this salt layer gradually became buried under sediments that carried the organic material that draws Shell's interest today. (Click to enlarge) Source: An example of modern day eolian duning that is thought to be representative of early sand bedding in the Norphlet. (Click to enlarge) Source: The clastic depositional model for the Deepwater Norphlet. This shows the mountainous source of the sediments. (Click to enlarge) Source: A closer look at the tightly compacted sediments from the Norphlet. Thin-sections (shaved sections of cores) are used to analyze the detailed structure of the rock. This sort of analysis has many uses. For the purpose of understanding this article, note the blue areas in the slides that provide contrast. This is where the oil and gas are. (Click to enlarge) Source Two very encouraging aspects of these plots taken from a BOEM study done in 2014. First, from the upper graph, the porosity and permeability are fairly high. Porosity is the void space in the rock where hydrocarbons can exist. Permeability is a measure of the reservoirs horizontal flow characteristics. Second, from the lower graph, the Aeolian net sand, or highly porous section of the interval is a large portion of the gross. Summary It remains to be seen just how prolific this reservoir will be. First production from Appomattox isnt due for another couple of years. Will the area in which Shell will be driven have sands accumulated under Aeolian conditions, or Fluvial? Something that only time and actual drilling will tell, and from the plots above will be indicative of the quality of the sands being produced. The early indicators look good in the Norphlet, with permeability exceeding what was thought to be possible in a deeply buried reservoir such the this. Shell has made the biggest bet so far on this reservoir based on their years of experience with it. Other bets may follow. Hopes are high, but now we just have to drill it. By David Messler for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: In its eighth year of paralyzing austerity, Greece is facing another hot summer. Political controversies will be even more heated than the blessed Peloponnese climate, as the Tsipras Government is expected to vote on another round of austerity measures to unlock a final 12 billion bailout tranche. If the vote is passed, Greece should exit the bailout programme on August 20 this year and, if all goes according to plan, Athens might see some sort of debt relief after the three botched bailout loans. Against the background of an impending labour, tax and pension reforms, many Greeks still wonder where future Greek economic growth will come from the recent surge in tourism, accounting for 20 percent of national GDP, has certain organic limits, whilst other sectors of economy have been largely withering. Despite colossal constraints, the Greek economy has been growing for the fifth consecutive quarter already, albeit from a very low baseline. Greeces GDP is expected by the IMF to grow 2 percent this year, yet much more is needed. Energy might play a key role in kick-starting economic growth in the long-suffering country Greeks already are Europes foremost shippers, so perhaps it is even logical that they develop other spheres of activity, too. Hellenic Petroleum, the leading actor on the Greek downstream market, has been posting profits against all odds (i.e. higher taxation) and even managed to expand its presence abroad, most notably in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Notwithstanding its noteworthy success, the Tsipras government is about to privatize 50.1 percent of Hellenic Petroleum, delivering on previous EU bailout instructions. There is little doubt Hellenic Petroleum, Europes third largest refiner, will be privatized (international trading majors Glencore and Vitol are seen as most likely candidates so far), just as the national gas corporation DEPA and the power utility company PPC. The new owners ought to bring in a more profitable and market-oriented business approach, yet the truly untapped potential for Greece lies beneath the waves of the Ionian Sea. Although the idea might seem ridiculous at first, it need not be dismissed right off the bat, as continental Europes (excluding Russia) largest oil field, the Albanian Patos-Marinza, is located quite close to the island of Corfu, which is set to become the primary drilling site of the new Greek offshore drive. Related: Permian Discount Could Rise To $20 Per Barrel Greece rarely comes to mind when one thinks of oil-producing nations it imports the overwhelming majority of oil and gas it needs, producing only minuscule amounts of its own hydrocarbon resources. In fact, in 2017 it has produced one-and-a-half as much olive oil as crude oil (with crude output around 3100 bpd). Yet Greeces offshore potential is largely unknown no exploratory drilling was conducted in Greece since 2005 as investors looked elsewhere to place their bets on. The next few months and years, however, will mark the beginning of a new period in Greek upstream, that of offshore drilling. Bearing witness to the ambitiousness of the task is the involvement of European majors Total and Repsol, alongside Greek companies Hellenic Petroleum and Energean Oil&Gas. The island of Corfu is increasingly seen as the new offshore point of attraction. Following the 2014 International Licensing Round, Total has secured Block 02 to the west of the island (in a joint venture with Italys Edison and Hellenic), whilst Hellenic Petroleum has clinched acreage (Block 01) to its north. Moreover, Spanish major Repsol has farmed in into Energeans Ioannina and Aitoloakarnania blocks last year, also taking over as the projects operator. The island of Crete also attracted significant interest as gas finds in Egyptian and Israeli waters have stirred up interest in the Eastern Mediterranean, Total and ExxonMobil have declared their willingness to conduct test drills there. It is virtually impossible to foretell whether the future drillings will bear fruit as Western Greece, especially its deepwater offshore, is massively underexplored. Western Greece exhibits several blocks that were already mapped to a certain extent Hellenics offshore Gulf of Patraikos between the island of Kefalonia and the Peloponnese is assumed to contain at least 100 MMbbl of oil. The tax regime should not be a burden on the companies, as it is quite light despite the difficult economic situation companies will have to pay a 20 percent special income tax, coupled with a 5 percent regional tax. Even if Greek oil turns out to be as viscous and sulphurous as Albanias (Patos-Marinza is 10 API, 5 percent sulphur), it would do tremendous good to the nations energy industry. Related: LNG Spot Prices In Asia Spike To Four-Year Highs If one is to take into consideration Greeces quite massive refinery output (32 mtpa for its four refineries), domestically produced crude might significantly improve the nations refining profitability. Even though its refinery production is expected to shrink in the long-term by an average annual decrease of 1-2 percent, there is still ample space to make money as Greeces refiners have managed to establish a solid foothold in the Southern Balkans, Cyprus and Turkey. Moreover, the potentially heavy sour nature of crudes will by no means be a problem, as due to their high conversion depth, sophisticated Greek refineries have been traditionally set up to process heavier sulphurous crudes Iraq and Russia taking up two-thirds of its crude imports is illustrative of this tendency. Having said that, Greece ought to be very prudent as for how it handles its oil drilling plans politically. The ultimate task of the Greek political elite is to insulate the nascent oil & gas upstream sector from political upheavals and policy U-turns. Previous prime ministers of Greece, most notably Antonis Samaras in 2012, have created an intense public anticipation of good things to come by announcing that Greeces oil worth billions of dollars is on the brink of being turned to account. Then, after nothing happened and the Greek populace was confronted with further rounds of austerity, erstwhile ambitious plans turned sour. Simplifying and quickening the approval process, whilst guaranteeing stable and unchanged fiscal terms throughout all the phases of development would be the best contribution that one can imagine from the politicians. Having done that, everything would be in the oilmens hands. Disclaimer: views set out in this article are solely those of the author in his private capacity. By Viktor Katona for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: The pipeline constraints in the Permian basin have become a hot topic lately, not least because of the steep discounts that oil producers in West Texas have been forced to accept. But the midstream bottlenecks might not get resolved soon, raising questions about the growth prospects of the Permian, and thus, the entire U.S. shale complex. The Permian pipelines are essentially at full capacity, which means that ongoing increases in output are forcing producers to try to find creative ways to get their oil to market, including shipping oil on trains and trucks, or consuming the oil locally. Ultimately, however, these methods might not be enough to soak up all the expected increase in supply. The constraints have not yet significantly altered oil growth forecasts, whether it be from the IEA, EIA, OPEC, or a range of private sector analyses. However, Goldman Sachs says that it sees the pipeline problems lingering for quite some time, and efforts to resolve the bottlenecks do not appear to be imminent. Neither public nor private producers appear on track at present to narrow the 0.2-0.4 million bpd of regional oversupply we see in 1Q-3Q 2019, Goldman Sachs wrote in a note, adding that there was little optimism among most producers that there would be suf?cient trucks entering the region on a temporary basis to ?ll the gap. The lack of resolution for takeaway capacity will mean the painful discounts that shale producers are starting to see will stick around for a while. We continue to see Permian oil prices of around $50/bbl in 2Q/3Q 2019 and a discount to Gulf Coast prices of around $19-$22 per bbl in 4Q18-3Q19, Goldman wrote. Related: The Bullish And Bearish Case For Oil That only magnifies the recent conclusion that some analysts have come to, which is that the Permian is now made up of Haves and Have Nots. That is, shale companies that have lined up pipeline capacity under contract should emerge from this period unscathed, while those shale companies, often smaller ones, that have failed to secure pipeline space are suffering from the discounts. Goldman has Buy ratings for Occidental Petroleum, Pioneer Natural Resources and WPX Energy because of either secure pipeline contracts or because production is hedged at fixed prices for the next year. Goldman Sachs analysts recently met with Permian producers, and came to the conclusion that drilling activity has not slowed all that much. Even for a handful of drillers without secure pipeline space, the fact that oil prices have moved up significantly over the past year means that they still think they will spend within their cash flow, even after taking into account the discounts. Obviously, the shale industry is not monolithic, and some drillers are leaving open the option to cutback, but Goldman said one of its key takeaways was that the pace of drilling is continuing at a high rate. But the price discount for oil in Midland will widen from around $9 per barrel this month, to between $14.50 and $17 per barrel for much of 2019. The bank predicts that when the current slate of pipeline projects come online, the discount will vanish by 2020, but until then, the problem could grow progressively worse. There will be a period of time in 2019 when U.S. shale production has grown significantly from current levels, but new pipelines will still be under construction, which means the discounts will increase. The gap between production and takeaway capacity will grow over that period, meaning drilling will ultimately have to slow down. Assuming Permian oil production is on track to grow 0.8 mn bpd in 2018 and 0.7 mn bpd in 2019, we believe the call on trucking to clear the basin is almost 400K bpd in 3Q19, Goldman wrote. Related: Iranian Influence In Iraq Grows However, here is where things get tricky. The investment bank warned that it isnt clear how trucks will handle the load. Without greater visibility on how trucking can ramp to meet this call or a large pipeline solution, risk to our base case Midland price of $50/bbl in 2Q-3Q is skewed to the downside as, all else equal, Permian production growth would need to further slow in 2019 to help alleviate the bottlenecks. The investment bank said that because there is already a bit of shortage of truckers nationwide, the shale industry does not expect that trucking will be a meaningful solution to the lack of takeaway capacity, especially because the need for trucks will be temporary. Up until now, Goldman had assumed that the 0.4 mb/d of surplus supply would have to be resolved somehow, and it assumed a 50/50 split between moving oil by trucks and production cutbacks. But after meeting with Permian producers, the investment bank is not as confident in trucks as a solution. But it also didnt come across a lot of companies that had plans to reduce production. That raises a lot of unanswered questions for the basin and for investors in these companies. [T]he combination of companies not overtly indicating plans to slow/delay activity while simultaneously re?ecting bearish view on trucking capability is likely to drive continued investor concern on the potential for Permian differentials to widen further, Goldman wrote. By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Crude oil continued sliding today on the back of growing tensions between the United States and China and anticipation of a difficult OPEC+ meeting on Friday. At the time of writing Brent crude was trading at US$75.04 a barrel, down 0.40 percent, with WTI down 1.25 percent to US$64.87 a barrel, after President Trump said he will consider imposing import tariffs on another US$200 billion worth of Chinese goods. The move followed Chinese retaliation against the Friday round of tariffs, which also included a 25-percent levy on U.S. crude oil, gas, and coal imports, among other goods and products. Reuters reported yesterday that Chinese tariffs on U.S. oil will disrupt a business worth some US$1 billion monthly and will hurt U.S. producers in favor of OPEC and Russia. Iran could turn out to be a special beneficiary of the trade spat, which would undermine another line of President Trumps foreign policy. Yet oils fundamentals are also pressuring prices. S&P Platts quotes Goldman Sachs analysts as saying in a note to clients that oil prices have been pressured in the past three weeks, not just by geopolitical developments but also by weaker demand from emerging markets and rising inventories. Related: Iran Looks To Veto Saudi, Russian Oil Production Proposal Indeed, shipping data recently showed oil in floating storage in Europe, for one, was at an 18-month high in May, at 12.9 million barrels. In Asia, oil in floating storage was 9.7 million barrels in the same month. These updates certainly dont work for prices as OPEC and Russia are about to meet on Friday and Saturday to discuss reversing the oil production cuts they agreed to in late 2016. There is staunch division within OPEC about the reversal, and the cartel risks breaking apart after this meeting if it fails to arrive at a consensus decision. Still, the consensus expectation is for a production rise following the meeting, which exerts its own pressure on oil pries and will continue doing so until at least Friday. By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: Extraordinary scenes of Afghan Taliban and security forces spontaneously celebrating a historic ceasefire showed many fighters on both sides are fed up with fighting, analysts say, raising hopes for peace in a country ravaged by war. The jubilant response to the first truce between the Afghan government and the Taliban over the Eid holiday took many by surprise, although observers warn that an end to the nearly 17-year conflict is still a long way off. "It is difficult to predict what the next move might be, but the spell has been broken," Afghan political analyst Ghulam Sakhi Ehsani told AFP. "From all the photos and videos, it seems the foot soldiers from both sides are tired of war." In scenes unimaginable only a few days ago, Taliban fighters and security forces long locked in a seemingly intractable conflict were seen hugging and taking selfies together around the country. Civilians, who have borne the brunt of the bloody war, also flocked to greet the insurgents as they entered urban areas that they usually visit only to attack, including the capital Kabul. Fighters on both sides of the conflict expressed hopes for the unprecedented ceasefire to continue. "We have held the ceasefire well so far," Taliban commander Baba told AFP during celebrations in the eastern province of Nangarhar on Saturday. "Everyone is tired of war and if our leaders order us to continue the ceasefire, we will hold it forever," he said. But the sight of its fighters openly mingling with security forces and civilians appeared to alarm the Taliban's leaders, who ordered their men back to their posts. Michael Kugelman, an analyst at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, said the Taliban leadership may have feared that "more days without fighting could convince the rank and file that peace is better than a war". "A little bit of freedom is good but too much, why go to paradise," a Western diplomat told AFP, referring to the virgin angels the Muslim holy book, the Koran, says await good Muslims, especially martyrs, when they die. - 'Building block' - Two suicide attacks in Nangarhar, both claimed by the Islamic State group -- which was not part of the ceasefire -- marred the otherwise peaceful Eid holiday that follows the holy month of Ramadan. But the fact that the truce held and was welcomed on both sides suggested the "dynamics of this conflict may have changed", Afghanistan Analysts Network co-director Kate Clark told AFP. "Once there's a recognition of common humanity, that everyone is Muslim, that people in the cities were celebrating Eid as in the villages, that it's really nice to have an ice cream with someone, hopefully it becomes more difficult to kill them," she said. Kugelman said the ceasefire had provided "a major building block" for the government's efforts to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban, which have so far failed. "While reconciliation still feels like a remote prospect, it now feels at least a bit more of a possibility," he said. Initial euphoria over the ceasefire quickly turned to disappointment and anger among many Afghans when the Taliban resumed fighting on Monday. While analysts had expected the Taliban to return to the battlefield, some people saw it as a betrayal. "Death to the Taliban and their backers. Once again they have shown that they love shedding the blood of innocent Afghans," Madena Momad posted on Facebook. - Hopes for dialogue - What comes next in the long conflict is unclear. There has long been secret back-channel dialogue between interlocutors on both sides of the war, and direct talks between Kabul and the Taliban were held in Pakistan in July 2015, but were quickly derailed. Analysts say even if the Taliban could be convinced to give formal talks another try -- they now refuse to negotiate with the Afghan government, which they see as illegitimate -- it could still take years to reach and then implement an agreement. There is no roadmap and neither side appears to be clear on what a post-conflict Afghanistan would actually look like or has identified their "red lines" in talks. President Ashraf Ghani announced over the weekend that the government's eight-day ceasefire, due to expire on Tuesday, would be prolonged for another 10 days. But while Taliban leaders hailed the three-day truce a success and a demonstration of their "full control" over their fighters, they refused Ghani's request for an extension. The government's move may buy the president more time to work out how to keep the momentum going. "Ghani's only option is to keep trying for peace," Kugelman said. "The war can't be won militarily so he'll need to make any and all possible efforts to secure some type of negotiated end to the war." Ghani's February offer of peace talks with the Taliban, considered to be one of the most comprehensive plans ever offered by an Afghan government, was ignored by the militants, which went on to launch their annual spring offensive. The insurgents have repeatedly demanded direct dialogue with the United States, which Washington has refused, and the withdrawal of foreign troops. But last month the Pentagon said that senior Taliban officials have been secretly negotiating with Afghan officials on a possible ceasefire. "This weekend was a very strong indication that if the pieces fall together in the right way there can be a constructive dialogue," another Western diplomat said. The easing of China's one-child policy was a godsend to Zhang Yinzhe and his wife Xu Mengsha, who had decided they wanted to use in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) to freeze an embryo in the hope of one day having a second child. But most IVF procedures are restricted in China to couples who are infertile, and surging demand at overwhelmed reproductive clinics since the policy was relaxed two years ago would anyway have meant months of waiting. So the Beijing couple flew to Thailand, part of a wave of Chinese spilling overseas into Southeast Asia, the United States, and elsewhere in a test-tube baby boom. "There is an old saying in China: a son and daughter complete the family," said Zhang, a 31-year-old airline pilot. Zhang spoke after a consultation at Bangkok's Piyavate Hospital, its walls festooned with Mandarin-language posters on IVF as other Chinese patients waited their turn. Definitive numbers on China's share of the assisted-reproduction tourism sector are unclear, but its spending was estimated by the state-linked Qianzhan Industry Research Institute to have grown 22 percent annually to $1.4 billion in 2017. Further rapid growth is expected. Overseas clinics are adding Mandarin-speaking staff, Chinese-language websites, and increasingly marketing to Chinese seeking a second or even third child. Chinese figures estimate that 90 million women became eligible for another child once the family-planning policy was relaxed, and more second children were delivered last year than first-borns. But Chinese couples are increasing having children later, past their reproductive primes, and may require help from science. Around 12 percent of the childbearing population are unable to conceive naturally, according to Chinese studies, yet China only has about 400 licensed IVF clinics, where waiting lists can approach one year. - Fertile ground - IVF involves combining egg and sperm in a lab and implanting any viable embryos into the womb. The one-child policy caused birth rates to plummet, and China eased it to ensure a big enough future workforce to support its fast-aging population. But it still bans or restricts fertility options like egg donations, surrogate motherhood, gender selection, and freezing embryos for later use partly over fears that opening the floodgates could spark a population explosion. Only around 500,000 Chinese IVF procedures took place in 2016, health officials estimate, far short of what fertility doctors say is required. "There is big demand in China, but we can't handle it here," said Ri-Cheng Chian, director of reproductive medicine at Shanghais 10th People's Hospital. So Chinese are booking tickets to Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and even Russia. IVF treatments cost around 30,000 yuan ($4,700) in China, but can be several times that abroad, where many Chinese feel they can find higher-quality care. Zhang, the pilot, wants IVF partly to screen for genetic defects, something restricted at home. "That's a lot of money for a Chinese family but compared to the health of my next generation, I should spend it," he said. Chartree Saenghiranwatana, a fertility specialist at Piyavate, said the clinic has been "getting increasing demand from Chinese patients the past year or two", and is recruiting Mandarin-speaking doctors and nurses. Some Thai clinics say up to 80 percent of their customers are Chinese. - Baby bump - "A new industrial chain is forming, for reproduction, in Southeast Asia," said Wei Siang Yu, the Singaporean founder and chairman of Borderless Health Group (BHG). BHG has created a video-conferencing platform on which Chinese patients can consult fertility experts around the world, aided by Mandarin-speaking interpreters. BHG is also establishing sperm and egg banks in countries including Thailand, Australia and the United States, primarily for Chinese clients, complete with a phone app allowing them to monitor their "fertility assets" almost like a bank account. Yu said two years ago Chinese patients placed sixth or seventh in the ranks of foreign patients coming to Thailand for medical tourism, but will be the largest group this year. Besides infertility or the desire for a larger family, the Chinese preference for male heirs sends some couples abroad in search of clinics that will perform gender screening -- though that is technically illegal in most countries -- and Chinese LGBT couples are also packing their bags. Li Na, who is from central China, went through expensive IVF procedures in Shanghai, Hong Kong and the United States. All failed. But she and her husband hit the jackpot in Thailand, and now have twin girls through a surrogate mother there and a boy through IVF. Li, 41, has parlayed the experience into a side career as a consultant to other Chinese couples seeking the same joy she felt. "I couldnt stop crying when I flew down to Thailand to pick them up," Li said. "It was hard to believe they were mine." German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday hosts French President Emmanuel Macron for joint cabinet talks on EU reform, especially the flashpoint issue of immigration that divides the bloc and heaps domestic pressure on Merkel. The two leaders of Europe's biggest economies will seek to thrash out a compromise between Macron's bold vision for sweeping EU change and Germany's stance that is more cautious, especially when it comes to finance. Merkel and Macron have both stressed that, as US President Donald Trump openly challenges the EU with a trade war and over security and climate policy, the bloc must learn to stand its ground on the world stage. The ministerial retreat at Meseberg castle near Berlin aims to hammer out a joint Franco-German stance ahead of a June 28-29 summit on the EU's post-Brexit future, at a time when populists and eurosceptics are rapidly gaining ground. As outspoken pro-Europeans, Merkel and Macron both face harsh opposition from nationalist and right-wing populist forces at home, and in the governments of Italy, Austria and several eastern European countries. The question of how many migrants the bloc can absorb came back to the fore strongly when last week Italy and Malta both turned back a rescue vessel carrying 630 refugees, which was eventually accepted by Spain. The move sparked a clash between France and Italy as immigration also triggered a domestic crisis for Merkel, a leader already weakened by her decision in 2015 to keep open German borders to a mass influx of more than one million refugees. - 'Domino effect' - Merkel now faces a dangerous mutiny from her hardline Bavarian Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who has vowed to defy her and order police to shut German borders to most asylum seekers by early July absent an EU accord. Merkel, arguing that the issue must be resolved at the EU level, has pledged to reach deals with transit and arrival countries in the narrow two-week window ending with the Brussels summit. "Turning away migrants at our borders at the heart of Europe will lead to negative domino effects that could hurt Germany and put into question European unity," she warned Monday. Trump chimed into the debate with a Twitter taunt, charging that "the people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition". Merkel and Macron agree that overburdened Mediterranean countries need financial support or incentives, and that the EU's Frontex border force must receive more funding, while Paris also advocates the creation of asylum processing centres in Africa. - Finance, defence - While migration looked to be the most urgent issue, a host of other tricky topics were on the agenda Tuesday -- from eurozone finance and investment to common defence. Macron last year outlined his vision for a stronger, more united Europe as a forceful reply to the far-right and isolationist National Front he defeated at the polls. But he was long left waiting for a response from Berlin as Merkel, weakened by poor September election results, was occupied by half a year of arduous coalition talks. When she finally gave a reply several weeks ago, it fell short of many of Macron's core demands. She dashed Macron's hopes for a joint eurozone finance minister and budget, mindful of German public fears that their tax money be squandered on what voters see as fiscal irresponsibility in southern EU states. The Elysee Palace said Monday it hoped for "a substantial agreement" with Berlin on reform of the 19-member common currency area, with a specific budget on a "safety net" to save banks in trouble. Merkel has agreed on a common investment budget for the bloc, but says it should be worth several tens of billions of euros, not the hundreds of billions suggested by Macron. Paris and Berlin are also discussing ways to turn the European Stability Mechanism into a more potent firefighter and lender for troubled economies, akin to a European version of the International Monetary Fund. France and Germany may also strike a deal aimed at harmonising corporate taxes across the bloc, to stop multinationals from taking advantage of low-tax regimes in for example the Netherlands, Ireland or Luxembourg. On common defence, Merkel has said she is "favourable" to Macron's demand for a rapid reaction force dubbed the European Intervention Initiative. But they differ on its make-up, and Merkel faces the restraint that the German parliament must debate and vote on any military mission abroad. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is visiting China on Tuesday and Wednesday, state broadcaster CCTV said, a week after his unprecedented summit with US President Donald Trump. CCTV did not say whether Kim had arrived in Beijing, but security lined the freeway leading to the city's airport Tuesday morning as authorities prepared for his arrival. The trip will be Kim's third to China since March, when he made his inaugural foreign trip as leader. An AFP reporter in Pyongyang said the only scheduled international flight -- an Air Koryo plane to Beijing -- had been briefly delayed for no apparent reason, which often happens when Kim travels. Kim is seeking relief from economic sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise and is believed to be seeking support from China for that, Japan's Nikkei business daily said in a dispatch from Beijing. Following the historic US-North Korea summit in Singapore a week ago, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic punishment of its Cold War-era ally. China was not a direct player in the negotiations in Singapore but retains strong influence behind the scenes. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed to Beijing to brief Chinese President Xi Jinping and other top leaders soon after the Trump-Kim meeting. In a joint statement following the Singapore summit, Kim pledged to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." Trump hailed this as a concession but critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. In return, Trump said he would stop joint military drills with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. On Tuesday, the US and South Korean militaries confirmed they have called off upcoming joint exercises following Trump's order. Violators of city ordinances being detained at a police station PASAY CITY, Philippines Personnel of the Southern Police District made rounds Monday night, June 18, in key cities to accost violators of city ordinances. Authorities apprehended over 600 individuals in the cities of Taguig, Makati, Pasay , Paranaque , Muntinlupa and Las Pinas who were brought to the citys respective police headquarters. A total of 162 individuals were caught drinking in public; 98 were shirtless; 287 minors were held for violating the curfew hours; 39 were caught smoking in public areas; 4 were caught urinating in public; 21 were nighttime idlers and one was an illegal fixer. Hindi naman por que nakatambay eh huhulihin na. Hindi naman iyon ang utos. Ang utos is, kung may mga nag-uumpukan, i-approach ng magalang at kung maaari pauwiin sila tapos yung may mga na-violate na batas, yun lang ang pwede naming arestuhin, explained PSInsp. Ricky Culanding, the Commander of the Police Community Precinct in Buendia, Pasay. (You dont get arrested just for loitering. That is not the directive. The instruction is to politely approach a group of loiterers and send them home. Only violators of ordinances are being arrested.) All arrested will be subject to inquest proceedings while the minors will be turned over to the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD.) Authorities remind the public to abide by the city ordinances as President Rodrigo Duterte himself ordered the arrest of offenders. Asher Cadapan Jr. The post Over 600 offenders of city ordinances accosted in South of Manila appeared first on UNTV News. MAKATI CITY, Philippines At least 20 people were rushed to the hospital after a passenger bus slammed into a private car at EDSA Magallanes area in Makati City on a rush hour Tuesday morning, June 19. Based on the initial investigation by authorities, the driver of Joyselle Express bus lost control of the steering wheel which led to it hitting another bus owned by VTSC. After which, the Joyselle Bus rammed into the car and continued on until it hit the steel railing of a waiting shed and concrete firewall fence of San Lorenzo Village. The involved buses were impounded at the Makati Traffic Bureau compound while the investigation is still ongoing. Asher Cadapan Jr. The post Vehicular accident injures at least 20 in Makati City appeared first on UNTV News. Credit: Judy van der Velden/Flickr, CC BY-NC Last Friday, the Australian government released its first report on our progress towards meeting the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. These 17 goals are a call to action to ensure economic prosperity and social inclusion, while protecting the planet. They cover issues ranging from health to reducing inequalities and clean energy. According to the report, Australia has made some steady progress towards most of our goals. However, to achieve the goals in just 12 years from now, we need transformative actions. These are missing in the report. Without a strong vision and new models of partnership between government, industry and communities, we will not meet the 2030 deadline. What the report says In 2015, most of the world's nations signed up to the United Nation's 2030 Agenda. In July this year, Australia will present its first voluntary review of progress towards the goals at the UN. These reviews are a crucial component of accountability. Australia's Voluntary National Review (for which I facilitated a consultation workshop to give input from the university sector) is a showcase of policies, actions and initiatives from across different sectors that are, in the report's language, "relevant" to achieving the goals. The report highlights that Australia is a prosperous and generally healthy country. But it also acknowledges significant challenges, such as improving the health and prosperity of Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and helping workers in the resources or manufacturing sectors who are facing technological and industrial transitions. The report highlights that local councils, statutory authorities, businesses and universities are taking actions that are explicitly aligned with the global goals. For example, a number of Australian universities have signed a commitment to the goals and are including the 2030 Agenda in their curricula. However, no sector has fundamentally changed its practices in response to the Sustainable Development Goals, nor embedded the goals into its core business. At the national level, there has been limited specific engagement with the goals. Most of the national policies outlined in the report were developed for other reasons, and some have been around for years or decades. Examples are the National Disability Strategy, which dates back to pre-2010, or the National Drought Policy, which began in 1992. In other words, at the national level, the report emphasises what we have already been doing not new initiatives explicitly related to the goals. Notwithstanding success stories from across different sectors, the reality is that we will not be able to meet the goals in just 12 years on a business-as-usual trajectory. Instead, we need transformative plans across all sectors. What is transformative change? Sustainable development, as opposed to conventional development, involves big systemic transformations. Let's use the example of clean energy. Taking carbon out of our energy system is not simply about using wind and solar instead of coal. It involves big changes in how we consume energy, in manufacturing technologies and in the ways governments help (or hinder) the adoption of new technologies and practices. It requires systemic transformation, rather than incremental improvements. Research into systemic transformation has identified a range of factors for making change happen. Two critical factors are creative decision-making and strong partnerships across disciplines and sectors. If we are serious about achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, we need to act now. Transformative decision-making Conventional decision-making favours the status quo and is largely risk-averse. It can cope with small incremental changes, but not big ones. In transport, for instance, we often tend to augment or replicate existing infrastructure building another highway, for example rather than innovating by trying to get people out of their cars. Conventional decision-making also prefers to react: we often wait for a crisis situation and then quickly respond. This almost always favours short-term over long-term benefits. Transformative decision-making, on the other hand, is proactive and takes deliberate actions to shape a desired future. It works toward a long-term vision and doesn't shy away from uncertainty and complexity along the way. As Australia's review correctly acknowledges, the Sustainable Development Goals are all about "longstanding, complex policy challenges with no simple solutions". Solving complex problems requires a great deal of innovation and experimentation. We need governments, businesses and communities to be willing to try new things, even if they occasionally fail. Developing partnerships Improving the lives of people and the planet requires myriad skills, tapping into various networks and reaching out to all segments of society. Universities, for instance, often play a key role in analysing problems, developing new solutions and providing the evidence base that a solution actually works. But it is only through partnering with communities, businesses and policy organisations that they can put these solutions into practice. The Voluntary National Review has highlighted the role of cross-sectoral partnerships. What is missing is a plan for fostering the partnerships that can enable substantial change in just 12 years. As Australia prepares to present our progress report at the 2018 UN High Level Political Forum in July, we need more critical assessment of our performance. How can we start doing things differently to be able to celebrate achieving these ambitious global goals in 2030? Explore further Using data to assess progress of sustainable development goals This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Credit: University of Oregon Drawn to a behavior she didn't understand, a UO researcher watching bonobos in a zoo has revealed how young female bonobos prepare for motherhood. "After studying bonobos for several years, I noticed that juveniles and adolescents were obsessed with the babies," said Klaree Boose, an instructor in the UO Department of Anthropology. "They played with the babies and carried them around. It appeared to be more than just play behavior." Her findings, now online, will be part of a special issue of the journal Physiology & Behavior. The study documents how young females acquire maternal skills and forge alliances that pay off in times of hostility by handling infants, whether they are related to them or not. The research, done with captive bonobos at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio, also explains behaviors that scientists have seen but only focused on in the wild, said study co-author Frances White, head of the UO's anthropology department. White has studied bonobos in their natural habit in Africa for years. "It is common in the wild to see infant bonobos be a focus of enormous interest to others, especially to adolescent bonobos," White said. "It is often noticeable how bonobo mothers are willing to let others get close and interact with their infants, as compared to chimpanzees who are more restrictive." This study, she said, allowed the team to take that knowledge and explore individual relationships in a way that has not been done in the wild. "The Columbus Zoo has done a wonderful job of copying wild behavior in letting the bonobos divide on a day-by-day basis into different groupings, much as they do in the wild," White said. "This zoo setting made this kind of study, which looks at normal wild behaviors, possible." Bonobos in the wild live in a small area of the Congo Basin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They are often mistaken as chimpanzees but are a separate species. The females hold high-ranking positions and often form female-female coalitions that stand up to males. Booseborn in Yakima, Washington, but raised in a tiny, rural community north of Ohio's capital citycame to the UO in 2009 after earning a bachelor's degree from Ohio State University. She now holds a doctorate from the UO and has been teaching while completing a series of papers based her observations at the Ohio zoo. Her new findings, which drew from 1,819 hours of observations of 11 females and eight males during summer months of 2011-2015, were surprising, Boose said. "Like all ape species, bonobo females don't need somebody to help them take care of their infants," she said. "They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves." Initially, Boose observed that all juvenile bonobos, ages 3-7, were obsessed with handling the infants, all under age 3. As they entered adolescence, however, females continued to approach the mothers and help care for the infants, while males turned away in favor of other behaviors. "Handling behavior picked up among the female adolescents, and it was really intense," Boose said. "They would approach the mothers, groom them briefly and then carry the babies away. They'd move across the enclosure, where they would engage in nurturing and other maternal behaviors with the infants, such as grooming and cradling them, putting them on their belly and carrying them on their back. These were very deliberate caretaking behaviors." Boose also found a hormonal link to her observations. Elevated levels of oxytocinassociated with complex social behaviors and social cognition, including maternal and caregiving activitieswere common in urine samples collected after infant-handling activities. As young females interact with the infants, Boose said, increased oxytocin may reflect how the body reinforces caregiving activity or social bonding with mothers or infants. That bonding also reaped dividends for young female bonobos. Mothers often came to the aid of younger females that had handled their infants when conflicts arose over access to food and other fighting situations. "When a fight involved a handler, particularly the adolescent females, the mother would help the individual that had handled her infant attack the aggressor, usually an adolescent or adult male but sometimes another female," Boose said. "They would intervene and support them." The work provides preliminary evidence for where bonobos fit among the various theories about infant handling among primates. Explore further Bonobo females found to protect and support a female giving birth More information: Klaree Boose et al. Infant handling in bonobos ( Pan paniscus ): Exploring functional hypotheses and the relationship to oxytocin, Physiology & Behavior (2018). Klaree Boose et al. Infant handling in bonobos ( Pan paniscus ): Exploring functional hypotheses and the relationship to oxytocin,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2018.04.012 Species range margins arise due to intrinsic interplay between ecological and evolutionary dynamics. The collapse of adaptation can be explained by just two dimensionless parameters - these are depicted on the axes. Adaptation fails when genetic drift reduces genetic diversity below that required for adaptation to heterogeneous environment. Credit: Polechova What stops a species adapting to an ever-wider range of conditions, continuously expanding its geographic range? The biomathematician Jitka Polechova, an Elise Richter Fellow at the University of Vienna, has published a paper in PLoS Biology which explains the formation of species' range margins. The theory shows that just two compound parameters, important for both ecology and evolution of species, are fundamental to the stability of their range: the environmental heterogeneity and the size of the local population. All species have restricted distributions. Yet a joint coherent theory explaining the span and borders of species' ranges has been missing both due to the complexity of the problem and the disparate traditions in ecology and evolution. Jitka Polechova provides a general, testable prediction for formation of species' range margins. The theory includes both population and evolutionary dynamics, and elucidates the role of dispersal for adaptation across a species' range. Dispersal has conflicting effects: on the beneficial side, it increases the genetic variation that is necessary for adaptation and counters the loss of genetic diversity due to genetic drift. However, dispersal also carries a cost: it may swamp adaptation to local conditions. This interplay is crucial for the evolution of a species' range. The novel theory demonstrates that adaptation across a species' range depends on two dimensionless parameters: i) the fitness cost of dispersala measure of environmental heterogeneity, and ii) the strength of genetic drifta measure of the reduction of genetic diversity. The more heterogeneous is an environment, the more challenging it is to expand into, and the lower the genetic diversity, the more limited is the scope for potential adaptation. Together, these two parameters define an expansion threshold: adaptation fails when the number of individuals accessible by dispersal within one generation is so small that genetic drift reduces genetic diversity below that required for adaptation to a heterogeneous environment. This threshold provides a testable prediction for the formation of a range margin and for the collapse of a species' range. Interestingly, the parameters are independent of the genetic architecture, offering a wide scope for empirical tests of the theory across many species. Furthermore, the theory explains that the benefits of dispersal into marginal populations are likely to outweigh the costs, offering a theoretical base for management strategies of threatened populations. Explore further Hitting the borders of expansion More information: Jitka Polechova et al. Is the sky the limit? On the expansion threshold of a species' range, PLOS Biology (2018). Journal information: PLoS Biology Jitka Polechova et al. Is the sky the limit? On the expansion threshold of a species' range,(2018). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2005372 Credit: CC0 Public Domain Ever found yourself crushed in a metro station at rush hour? The mathematician Carlo Bianca and physicist Caterina Mogno, both from the engineering research lab ECAM-EPMI in Cergy-Pontoise, France, have developed a new model to study the movement of crowds exiting a metro station. In a recent study published in EPJ Plus, they have for the first time employed models typically used to study gases consisting of a large number of molecules that collide at random (known as thermostatted kinetic theory) to study the consequences of the different interactions occurring among pedestrians in a crowd while exiting a metro station. The authors assume that what motivates pedestrians to leave a metro station can be modelled as an external force that explains the conditions under which they leave due to the crowd pressure. Their model combines aspects representing the interactions between pedestrians and governed by thermostatted kinetic theory with the cooperation between pedestrians as intelligent and self-organised decision-makers, which is governed by game theory. The model thus depicts what happens to a crowd of pedestrians trying to leave a metro station consisting of different exits at rush hour. Bianca and Mogno seek an approximate solution to the problem by starting from the exact solution of a simpler, related problem. The results show how, as pedestrians try to make their way out of the station, the interaction dynamics among them can in fact be negligible, as they do not influence the flow of pedestrians toward the exit as much as their motivation to leave (the external force) does. Numerical simulations on the magnitude of the external force explain how internal interactions between pedestrians can be affected by an external force driving them to leave the station. What matters most is that all of the pedestrians are individually in the same hurry to exit the station and get away from the crowd. The latter aspect is gauged by a thermostat modelling the temperature of the molecules in a gas, which represents the individuals in the crowd, who are under a steady level of crowd pressure pushing them toward the exit. Explore further Warnings to texting pedestrians may not eliminate risks, but they can help More information: Carlo Bianca et al, A thermostatted kinetic theory model for event-driven pedestrian dynamics, The European Physical Journal Plus (2018). Carlo Bianca et al, A thermostatted kinetic theory model for event-driven pedestrian dynamics,(2018). DOI: 10.1140/epjp/i2018-12055-5 Credit: J. Stewart A new study on how Cape ground squirrels live in the wild is revealing the effects of social stress on ageing. The research has potential to help understand ageing mechanisms in humans as well. In many animal species, group living can bring various benefits such as reduced predation risk, as well as many threats such as increased disease transmission. Little research has been conducted regarding the stress-related costs of group living on health and life, especially in the wild. The EU-funded SOCIAL COST project studied the behavioural, physiological and molecular effects of social stress in natural conditions. "Social stress can cause physiological stress in group living animals, including humans, leading to poor health or fitness reduction," says project coordinator Dr Shirley Raveh. "This is important as many effects of group living are still poorly understood, especially in natural populations," she underlines. Squirrels reveal ageing dynamics Working at the Kalahari Research Centre in South Africa, the project team examined how group size and composition, reproduction and individual social status might affect the level of social stress. It looked at how social stress can affect telomeres, the protective tips at the end of chromosomes which prevent the erosion that can take place during cell division. "Telomere dynamics and oxidative damage are linked to the occurrence of stressors and to fitness," Dr Raveh explains. The project team particularly studied direct links between social status, group size, sex and ecological stressors of free-living Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris) at the Kalahari Research Centre. It also looked at the associated physiological factors such as oxidative damage and hormone levels, as well as molecular effects. Unsurprisingly, the preliminary results have suggested that telomere shortening is affected by age i.e. younger squirrels have longer telomeres compared to older individuals in line with the expectations based on other species. "How age-specific telomere dynamics vary with individual behaviour, social status, group size and composition, and the associated physiological changes, will provide new insights into the costs of sociality," notes Dr Raveh. Unravelling the biological impact of sociality The study could eventually help to understand the social costs in humans. "Although in general one has to be cautious in extrapolating across species, humans are social animals and are subject to social stress, and many of the processes involved are conserved across diverse groups of mammals," explains Dr Raveh. Already, the preliminary results of this project have been presented at several meetings, including a symposium on the diversity of telomere dynamics organised in Edinburgh in 2017. The research will also be presented at the Telomere Network UK Meeting 2018 in Newcastle and Conference on Behavioural Biology in Liverpool in 2018. By opening up a new mammal study system to examine social stress, especially under natural conditions, the project yielded valuable new data about the impact of social status, group composition and sex on behaviour. It also helped understand physiological as well as molecular processes indicative of biological states such as telomere shortening and oxidative damage. Such findings pave the way for examining the biological impact of sociality and the nature of resilience, which should provide valuable insight into ageing. To this end, the project was successful in collecting substantial samples and behavioural data that will contribute significantly to understanding the cost of sociality. Explore further Biological age explains variation of responses to stress The trickling stream running into St Oswalds Bay on Englands south coast, where Mars analog conditions have resulted in fatty acids from life being preserved inside iron-rich minerals. Credit: Imperial College London A little stream in the south of England could guide the way towards finding evidence for ancient life on Mars, in the form of fatty acids preserved in an iron-rich mineral called goethite. Researchers from Imperial College London ventured to the county of Dorset on the UK's south-coast to sample an acidic stream running into St Oswald's Bay, which is close to the famous Durdle Door limestone rock formation. The acidity of the stream, which has a pH of 3.5, is believed to be similar to water that flowed on early Mars during its Hesperian epoch over three billion years ago. The stream flows over sandstone beds dating back to the Cretaceous period. During that distant era, forest fires deposited charcoal into the sands. Bacteria were able to live on the charcoal, using sulfate to decompose it and produce the iron-sulfide mineral known as pyrite, or 'fool's gold'. Fast forward to the present day and the water in the stream is oxidizingthe pyrite, producing a weak sulfuric acid that gives the water its pH, while a variety of iron-sulfate minerals precipitate out onto the stream bed, including a mineral called jarosite. Jarosite excels at trapping organic matter, particularly acids, which are among the most common type of organic compound produced by life. Over time, the water turns jarosite into another mineral called goethite. In dry conditions, such as on Mars, goethite dehydrates into yet another iron-rich mineral called hematite, which is what gives Mars its rust-red color. Jarosite, goethite and hematite have all previously been discovered on Mars in substantial quantities. The Curiosity rover on Vera Rubin Ridge, where it will potentially search for fatty acids left by ancient Martian microbes. Credit: NASA/JPLCaltech/MSSS The Imperial College researchers Jonathan Tan, James Lewis and Mark Sephton found that the goethite in the stream contained an abundance of well-preserved fatty acids. Based on that abundance, and assuming that ancient Mars hosted a microbial biomass similar to that found in the Dorset stream, the researchers estimate that there could be at least 28.6 billion kilograms of fatty acids locked up in iron-rich rocks on the red planet. Unambiguous biomarker The significance of finding fatty acids made of long chains of carbon atoms on Mars should not be understated for they would be an unambiguous biomarker, says Sephton, who is a Professor of Organic Geochemistry and Head of Imperial's Department of Earth Science and Engineering. "If you just throw carbon atoms together in a non-biological fashion, then there are 50,000 other possible isomers that the carbon atoms could form before they get to a chain of 18 carbon atoms," he tells Astrobiology Magazine. "The presence of an 18-carbon-atom fatty acid is almost certain to have been produced by biological processes." Measuring the pH of the water in the Dorset stream. Credit: Imperial College London The trick is finding Martian fatty acids, if they exist. The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite on NASA's Curiosity rover works by baking samples of dirt and rock to evaporate organic molecules to make them easier for the on board Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GCMS) to detect. SAM also carries nine sealed 'wet chemistry' cups, each filled with a mix of chemicals. When samples are mixed with these chemicals and heated to up to 900 degrees Celsius, the chemicals can transform any organic molecules present into more volatile products that are easier for the GCMS to analyze. Two of the cups are filled with tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) and methanol, with which fatty acids could be detected. Neither of the two cups has yet been used. "We only get two attempts at the experiment," says Jennifer Eigenbrode of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who led the science team in the recent discovery of organic molecules on Mars. "The team is considering all options, including a clay-rich layer adjacent to Vera Rubin Ridge, which has been a key target for analysis since the start of the mission." Taking the right samples While Eigenbrode reminds us that their origin remains uncertain, the presence of organic molecules on Mars bodes well for the possibility of ancient life on Mars. However, Sephton thinks that the iron-rich goethite samples are additional options to the clay-rich material. In 2008 NASA's Phoenix lander discovered that Mars' surface is covered by certain minerals that release oxygen when heated, and that oxygen combines with the organic compounds and destroys them. Jarosite is one of those minerals, but goethite is not. This means that if any ancient life on Mars left behind fatty acids that became encapsulated in jarosite that turned into goethite, then they those fatty acids should still be detectable. The Imperial College researchers at work in St Oswalds Bay. Credit: Imperial College London Sephton says that taking the right sample is crucial. "You can have the best instrument, the best technique, but if you've got the wrong sample, you won't find any fatty acids," he tells Astrobiology Magazine. "The work we've done in Dorset is to try and provide the information that will allow the best choice of sample on Mars." The findings also show that expensive and time-consuming field trips to exotic locations such as Chile's Atacama Desert, Antarcticaor the Rio Tinto river basin in Spain are not always necessary to find Mars analogs. The stream studied by the Imperial College team is just a meter across. "There's neutral pH conditions on the edge of the stream and very acidic conditions in the center, and as geochemists this gives us wonderful opportunities to track the onset and disappearance of these conditions," says Sephton. "If you understand the detailed chemistry, then these micro-analog sites can give you more than the big kilometer-sized analog sites." In the coming years, Curiosity will be joined by NASA's Mars 2020 rover and the joint EuropeanRussian ExoMars rover, both of which will be equipped with on board laboratories that could detect fatty acids or other organic compounds that could prove that Mars was once inhabited. "Mars is full of surprises," says Eigenbrode. "You never know what we will come across next." This story is republished courtesy of NASA's Astrobiology Magazine. Explore the Earth and beyond at www.astrobio.net . Illustration of incident light traveling through a glass prism before entering and after exiting the hyperbolic metamaterial, which is composed of stacked metal and transparent oxide layers. By sending incident light through the glass prism, the researchers minimize the mismatch between the wavelengths of light in air and in the hyperbolic metamaterial. This enables the light to penetrate farther into the metamaterial and more accurately assess its electromagnetic properties. Credit: NIST Manipulating light in a variety of waysshrinking its wavelength and allowing it to travel freely in one direction while stopping it cold in anotherhyperbolic metamaterials have wide application in optical communications and as nanoparticle sensors. But some of the same optical properties that make these metamaterials so appealing make them frustratingly difficult to evaluate. For example, the mismatch between the wavelength of incident light, traveling through air, and the much shorter wavelength inside these metamaterials typically prevents the incident light from penetrating very far. That property can be used to create a nanoparticle sensor but poses a problem for measuring just how well a hyperbolic metamaterial performs its light-warping feats, characterized by an electrical property known as permittivity. If light can't probe deeply into a hyperbolic metamaterial, it can't accurately assess the permittivity. CNST researchers have now developed a new measurement method that circumvents this difficulty. Using an off-the-shelf glass prism to enhance the interaction of incident light with hyperbolic metamaterials, a team led by Cheng Zhang of the CNST and the University of Maryland's NanoCenter and Henri Lezec of NIST has devised a simple and much more accurate way to determine the permittivity. Zhang, Lezec and their colleagues, which include researchers from the J.A. Woollam Co. in Lincoln, Nebraska, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, described their findings in a recent issue of ACS Photonics. Cross-sectional view of the hyperbolic metamaterial examined in the new study shows layers of copper-doped silver and tantalum pentoxide. Credit: NIST The glass prism serves two functions. Light traveling through glass has a wavelength intermediate in size between that of the incident light and the light inside a hyperbolic metamaterial. By sending light into the glass prism before it enters the hyperbolic metamaterial, the researchers minimize the mismatch in wavelength, enabling the light to penetrate farther into the material. In addition, the shape of the prism directs the light to strike the hyperbolic metamaterial at the optimum angle to probe the material Because the technique uses an off-the-shelf prism and does not require any modification of the hyperbolic metamaterial, it promises to serve as a reliable and easy to adopt method to characterize a broad class of highly anisotropic materialsstructures whose optical properties depend on the angle at which light strikes the surface. And as Zhang and his colleagues fabricate more complex versions of such materials, using nanoengineered layers of different compounds, such measurements will take on added importance. Explore further 'Darker-than-black' metamaterial could lead to more efficient solar cells More information: Cheng Zhang et al. Robust Extraction of Hyperbolic Metamaterial Permittivity Using Total Internal Reflection Ellipsometry, ACS Photonics (2018). Journal information: ACS Photonics Cheng Zhang et al. Robust Extraction of Hyperbolic Metamaterial Permittivity Using Total Internal Reflection Ellipsometry,(2018). DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.8b00086 This story is republished courtesy of NIST. Read the original story here. Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir Mehbooba Mufti has resigned as the chief minister of Indian-administered Kashmir after her coalition partner, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), pulled out of the ruling alliance. After submitting her resignation on Tuesday, Mufti said the muscular policy will not work in Kashmir, referring to the hard line policies adopted by the central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Jammu and Kashmir is not an enemy territory, Mufti told reporters in Srinagar, the capital of the region. The collapse of the government comes days after Indias Ministry of Home Affairs refused to extend unilateral ceasefire announced on the eve of Ramadan. While announcing the decision in New Delhi, Ram Madhav, the National General Secretary of the BJP, told the reporters that it had become untenable for the BJP to continue with the alliance in Jammu and Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir is not an enemy territory. The muscular policy will not work in Kashmir MEHBOOBA MUFTI, THE PDP LEADER He also cited rising instances of violence and radicalisation as one of the reasons to pull the plug on the state government. After a meeting with BJP [President] Amit Shah, we decided that we cannot continue with the PDP in the state. The Hindu nationalist BJP had formed an alliance with regional Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2014. The alliance, which was touted as coming together of north pole and south pole, was fraught with friction between the two partners on how to deal with the issues facing the region. The rift in the alliance was out in the open in February after BJP ministers publicly supported alleged rapists of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Kathua district. The two ministers were subsequently sacked. Incompatible alliance The governors rule is likely to be implemented in the region, which means the disputed region will be directly ruled by the central government through its appointed person until the elections. Noor Ahmad Baba, a political analyst based in Srinagar, said it was an incompatible alliance from the beginning. Both parties had lost trust in their own constituencies, Baba said. The senior leader of the opposition congress party, Ghulam Nabi Azad, told reporters that the BJP has been a failure in the state and it cant escape its responsibility. Cant tie hands of forces The state BJP spokesperson, Sunil Sethi, told Al Jazeera that the terrorism was increasing and it was becoming difficult for the government to handle the situation. The terrorism was increasing. We wanted to deal with the situation strongly. We cant tie the hands of security forces. Everyone was suffering due to this situation. We had to take a call for the interest of the nation, he said. Despite the Ramadan ceasefire announced by the BJP there was no end to violence. At least 30 people were killed during the ceasefire period. The killing of prominent Kashmiri journalist, Shujat Bukhari, last week has sent shock waves in the disputed Himalayan region. The violence has seen an uptick in the region since the beginning of this year. SOURCE: AL JAZEERA NEWS The Anzick site in Montana. The white post signals where the burial was found. Credit: PNAS A team of researchers from the University of Oxford, Texas A&M University and Stafford Research LLC has found evidence bolstering the theory that the skeletal remains of an infant unearthed in Montana are those of the only known Clovis burial. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their testing methods and what they found. In 1968, construction workers came upon the remains of an infant skeleton. Those remains became known as Anzick-1 and were believed to represent a member of the Clovis people. The Clovis people are believed to have been the first widespread group of people living in North America. Prior research has suggested they lived approximately 13,000 to 12,600 years ago. Their name comes from the distinctive Clovis-style projectiles they created. In the years after Anzick-1 was found, teams of researchers studying the remains found mixed results when testing for age. Some showed the remains as very nearly the same age as nearby Clovis artifacts, while others found the remains to be thousands of years more recent. In this new effort, the researchers sought to settle the matter once and for all using new and improved dating techniques. The new techniques involved using pretreatments of collagen found in the remains to factor out decontamination and for extracting a single amino acid for radiocarbon dating. The researchers report that all of their tests showed that antlers found near the burial site and the skull of a second specimen (Anzick-2) were roughly the same agewhich was approximately the same as prior testing had shown. But some of the testing showed the remains of Anzick-1 to be approximately 1000 years younger. Another test the team performed, though, called HYP extraction, showed the infant remains to be approximately the same age as the antlers and Anzick-2. The differing results from the other tests, the researchers suggest, were likely due to contamination issues. They contend that because HYP is the more precise measurement technique, their results show that Anzick-1 is approximately the same age as the other artifacts. And this, they claim, suggests that the debate about the age of the remains should be considered resolved. Lorena Becerra-Valdivia at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (ORAU), University of Oxford, working on the equipment (HPLC) that was used to extract hydroxyproline from the Anzick site bone samples. Credit: Eileen Jacob (University of Oxford, Oxford). Artifacts from the Anzick site. Credit: Texas A&M University Explore further New dating of Neanderthal remains from Vindija Cave finds them older than thought More information: Lorena Becerra-Valdivia et al. Reassessing the chronology of the archaeological site of Anzick, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018). Lorena Becerra-Valdivia et al. Reassessing the chronology of the archaeological site of Anzick,(2018). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1803624115 Abstract Found in 1968, the archaeological site of Anzick, Montana, contains the only known Clovis burial. Here, the partial remains of a male infant, Anzick-1, were found in association with a Clovis assemblage of over 100 lithic and osseous artifactsall red-stained with ochre. The incomplete, unstained cranium of an unassociated, geologically younger individual, Anzick-2, was also recovered. Previous chronometric work has shown an age difference between Anzick-1 and the Clovis assemblage (represented by dates from two antler rod samples). This discrepancy has led to much speculation, with some discounting Anzick-1 as Clovis. To resolve this issue, we present the results of a comprehensive radiocarbon dating program that utilized different pretreatment methods on osseous material from the site. Through this comparative approach, we obtained a robust chronometric dataset that suggests that Anzick-1 is temporally coeval with the dated antler rods. This implies that the individual is indeed temporally associated with the Clovis assemblage. Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2018 Phys.org An agent for MPaisa, the mobile banking system that researchers used as the forerunner for a savings system administered via cellphones, interviews customers in Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan. Credit: Jan Chipchase/Creative Commons Billions of people worldwide, particularly those in developing countries, face challenges saving money. They may already hold a device that can assist them in the palms of their hands: their cellphone. In collaboration with a mobile network provider in Afghanistan called Roshan Telecommunications, three researchers, including Tarek Ghani, assistant professor of strategy at Olin Business School at Washington University St. Louis, designed a mobile money-based savings wallet that could "nudge" people into saving. This study, co-authored by Joshua Blumenstock of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael Callen of the University of California, San Diego, is forthcoming in American Economic Review and was highlighted in Harvard Business Review June 15. Naming their product "M-Pasandaz" ("Pasandaz" means savings in Dari), the researchers deployed and evaluated their product in Afghanistana country where only 1-in-10 adults have a bank account, and where only 1-in-25 people actively use an account. They started their experiment with 949 Roshan employees who were already receiving their salary via mobile money. (Mobile money is a system that allows customers to change currency for e-float, which can then be transferred to any peer on the network or used to purchase goods.) The study involved a broad range of Roshan's employees working across the country and working in jobs ranging from janitor to security guard to engineer. Employees could contribute up to 10 percent of their monthly salary into their account. They also were randomly assigned to receive either a 0 percent, a 25 percent, or a 50 percent matching contribution. These paid out at the end of a six-month trial period. Employees could access their principal at any time, but the employer match was only provided after 6 months. Employees were either randomly "defaulted in" to a contribution level of 5 percent or defaulted out at a contribution of 0. Simply defaulting employees in increased their participation in the plan by 40 percentage points. To achieve a similar level of participation using financial incentives alone, if employees are defaulted out, would require providing a 50 percent match. Over the six-month study, the average participating employee accumulated 38.9 percent of their average monthly salary, or 12,615 Afghanis, and employees without a match as an incentive saved 18 percent of a month's salary. To test whether the employees' experience of having part of their salary directed into a savings wallet created a lasting change to behavior, the researchers asked every participant at the end of the study whether they would like to continue having a portion of their salary directed into the account. Employees who had been defaulted in at the start of the study were 25 percent more likely to continue contributing to the account than employees who had been defaulted out, suggesting that automatic enrollment had helped employees learn about the benefits of saving. There are roughly 400 million mobile money users worldwide, many of whom receive salaries or cash transfers, or are regularly involved in transacting goods. This creates a tremendous opportunity for products like M-Pasandaz to be deployed, particularly in developing countries, where the benefits may be the largest. This takes a deep, important insight from behavioral economics exhibiting that defaults impact behavior, and provides a platform for this insight to be used to increase savings globally. Said Olin's Ghani: "There are many barriers to saving, and previous research from high-income countries shows that default enrollment into automatic savings plans is very effective at increasing deposits. Our findings are the first to find similar effects in a low-income country context and suggest that automatic enrollment could have a broader application than previously thought. Combined with the rapid proliferation of mobile money, there is real potential to meet the financial needs of individuals in developing countries." The researchers believe theirs was the first study to experimentally compare default savings and incentive effects on the same population for a single product. The study also helped to shed additional light on why such default programs work through an additional set of follow-up experiments aimed at moving employees away from their default contribution level. The researchers found, among other facets, that a larger employer's matching contribution isn't necessary for a successful savings plan. By focusing the experiment on one of the world's poor countries, they showed how changing behaviors to increase savingsincentivized or notcould be significantly beneficial to its people. Afghanistan's per-capita GDP ranks 156th of 175 countries, at $1,877 in U.S. dollars. However, it should be noted that the study group included salaried employees earning the equivalent of $5,415 U.S. The poorer employees in the sample, though, were comparable to the broader Afghanistan population and showed clear, positive effects from the automatic contributions, the researchers said. Thomas Guillaume, lead author, collecting samples in Sumatra, Indonesia. Credit: EPFL / WSL A recent study by EPFL and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) shows that intensive farming of palm oil has a major impact on the environment. Both short- and long-term solutions exist, however. The article, which was published on June 19 in Nature Communications, analyzed the carbon costs and benefits of converting rainforests into oil palm plantations. Indonesia and Malaysia together account for nearly 85 percent of global palm oil production. Palm oil is commonly used in processed foods, cosmetics and biofuels, and while it is inexpensive, the environmental and social costs are high. Each year, thousands of hectares of rainforest disappear in order to meet the growing demand for the oil worldwide. In 2012, Indonesia had the highest deforestation rate in the world, according to a study published in 2014 in Nature Climate Change. Thomas Guillaume, a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL's Ecological Systems Laboratory (ECOS) and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), is the lead author of a synthesis study on the environmental impact of oil palm cultivation in Indonesia. The article, which was published on 19 June in Nature Communications, analyzed the carbon costs and benefits of converting rainforests into oil palm plantations. Drawing on more than two years' worth of data collected by the University of Gottingen on the soil and vegetation in central Sumatra, the researcher compared the impact of oil palm monoculture with that of intensive and extensive rubber cultivation practices. Converting rainforest land into oil palm plantations leads to the most important carbon emissions: one hectare of converted land equates to a loss of 174 tons of carbon, and most of this carbon will find its way into the air as CO2. "The quantity of carbon released when just one hectare of forest is cleared to grow oil palms is roughly equivalent to the amount of carbon produced by 530 people flying from Geneva to New York in economy class," says Guillaume. Higher than the IPCC's figure This loss estimate is higher than the figure published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to quantify the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by oil palm farming; it is also higher than the figure used by sustainable palm oil certification bodies. The study also shows that carbon loss in the soil must not be overlooked as it is currently happening with the present methodologies when plantations are established on non-peatland. Intensive rubber farming, on the other hand, is associated with a loss of 159 tons of carbon, while extensive rubber production corresponds to 116 tons. This difference between oil palms and rubber plants owes largely to the shorter plantation rotation time of oil palms. However, oil palm farming is more efficient than intensive and extensive rubber farming in terms of the number of tons of biomass produced annually versus the resulting loss of carbon. In other words, more can be produced on a smaller area of land. But this positive finding should not obscure the downsides. Following the harvest, the amount of biomass that returns to the soil to feed living organisms in the ground can be 90 percent lower than in a rainforest. This is because almost no natural "litterdead leaves and woodgoes back into the ground, as the soil on oil palm plantations is constantly being cleared and treated with pesticides to make the farmers' work easier. As a result, large amounts of fertilizers are needed to make up for the loss of fertility in the soil and the decrease in its biological activity. "The quantity of biomass that humans take away in order to produce palm oil compared to the quantity left for the ecosystem sheds real doubt on the sustainability of this form of farming," says Guillaume, who also compared microorganism activity in cultivated fields and in the rainforest. Short- and long-term solutions This study also offers some practical advice on reducing the short-term environmental impact of both rubber tree and oil palm monocultures. For one, deforestation should be done only if the wood that is felled can then be usedsuch as for construction purposeswithout being burned. In addition, a more abundant layer of vegetation should be left on the ground as a natural fertilizer. Finally, the waste from palm oil mills should be returned to the soil as another form of fertilizer. For a longer-term approach, Guillaume points to the OPAL project (Oil Palm Adaptive Landscapes), which is being funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The group led by Professor Alexandre Buttler, the director of EPFL's ECOS lab, is studying the carbon footprint of oil palm plantations that do not entail deforestation: they are looking at plantations set up in grassland plains or in the savanna in Colombia, and at intercropped plantations in Cameroon. These efforts are aimed at minimizing the need to clear natural land for agriculture. Explore further Minimising the impacts of palm oil plantations More information: Thomas Guillaume et al, Carbon costs and benefits of Indonesian rainforest conversion to plantations, Nature Communications (2018). Journal information: Nature Communications , Nature Climate Change Thomas Guillaume et al, Carbon costs and benefits of Indonesian rainforest conversion to plantations,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04755-y A photo taken on June 1, 2016, on the banks of the Seine. Credit: Leighton W. Kille/The Conversation, CC BY In 1910, Paris was subject to a historic flood that is still remembered, and it's far from a unique event. In France, the risk of flooding is the number-one natural hazard, affecting one in four people, or 17 million residents. Rising river levels are a natural phenomenon that can lead depending on their intensity (height, speed), duration and geographical reach to overflow flooding (where the river breaks its banks), and half of all floods are linked to water runoff. Risk, hazard and vulnerability Flood risk, flood hazard, and flood vulnerability: in everyday language, these terms are often used synonymously, although each has its own precise definition: A flood hazard is a hydrological concept referring to rising river water levels; referring to rising river water levels; Flood vulnerability is a sociological concept related to the damage flooding would cause in a given area. For example, a field or a forest might have low vulnerability, since vegetation can easily tolerate being submerged for short periods of time. However, if an electrical goods store is built on the same site, its level of vulnerability would increase significantly. related to the damage flooding would cause in a given area. For example, a field or a forest might have low vulnerability, since vegetation can easily tolerate being submerged for short periods of time. However, if an electrical goods store is built on the same site, its level of vulnerability would increase significantly. Flood risk is a combination of hazard and vulnerability. An extraordinary flood caused by a remarkable rise in water levels in an uninhabited area presents no risk, since there is no vulnerability. On the other hand, a relatively moderate flood in a shopping centre would have severe economic consequences and therefore present a high level of risk. These concepts enable us to establish water level alert thresholds (yellow, orange, red), corresponding to rising levels of danger, for a given point on a waterway. How are water levels monitored? In France, the national flood forecast network monitors more than a thousand points across the major waterways. Made up of regional flood forecast services (Services de prevision des crues or SPCs) and a central service (Service central d'hydrometeorologie et d'appui a la prevision des inondations, or SCHAPI) run by the Environmental Department, this network uses flood forecasting models to predict hazards a few hours or days in advance, depending on the effectiveness of the catchment basins. Some such as GRP and AIGA developed by the IRSTEA research institute and used in many regional SPCs are hydrological models. These use information provided by Meteo-France on the amount of rainfall that has already occurred, as well as the expected rainfall for the hours or days to come, to predict future water flow in the river. Forecasts from these models can then be used by hydraulic models to simulate the movement of flood waves upstream. Depending on these forecasts, risk levels are allocated for different stretches of river and published in real time on www.vigicrues.gouv.fr, along with the corresponding weather reports. How can we better protect ourselves? To better protect ourselves from flooding, we can try to mitigate either hazards or vulnerability. To reduce hazards, we can attempt to store some of the water in an upstream reservoir or flood channel so as to spread out the volume of floodwater over time (this means attenuating the peak flow). To reduce vulnerability, we can either avoid building sensitive infrastructure (hospitals, schools, etc.) on the flood plains of rivers, protect the affected zones (using dykes), or warn populations with sufficient notice. To act in time, we need both hydrological forecasting (with predictive models) and appropriate organization, as demonstrated by the Sequana exercise that was held in Paris on March 7-18, 2016. Should we be concerned about potential major flooding episodes? That year, weather conditions led to significant rises in water levels in the Loing valley and in small Ile-de-France waterways (the Yvette), and slightly smaller rises in the Yonne and the Brie rivers (the Grand and Petit Morin, and the Yerres). The upper basins of the Seine and Aube were less affected. There was therefore only one basin contributing to the rising water levels in Paris in 2016, so it was unlikely that that the city would see similar scenario to that of the great flood of 1910. An exceptional month of May? While the timing is unusual, the situation in 2016 was not completely unexpected. Historically, the Seine in Paris has flooded in winter (in January 1910, 1924 and 1955, and in February 1945). However, this does not necessarily have to be the case. Other bodies of water, also subject to oceanic conditions, have seen major floods in the spring, as the Loire did in June 1856. In May 2013, a fairly similar (although more localised) event also affected the Yonne basin. Although Paris broke the rainfall record for May in 2016 (176mm, up from the previous record 132mm in 1992), it should be remembered that May is generally a rainy month and, generally the rainiest month of the year in Paris. Explore further Paris flooding harks back to one of the great breakthroughs in hydrology This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Two scenarios of electron-hole recombination in graphene. In radiative recombination (left), the mutual annihilation of an electron and a hole, shown as blue and red spheres respectively, frees energy in the form of a photon, a portion of light. In Auger recombination (right), this energy is picked up by an electron passing by. The Auger process is harmful for semiconductor lasers, because it consumes the energy that could be used to produce laser light. For a long time, the Auger process was considered to be impossible in graphene due to the energy and momentum conservation laws. Credit: Elena Khavina/MIPT Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Tohoku University (Japan) have explained the puzzling phenomenon of particle-antiparticle annihilation in graphene, recognized by specialists as Auger recombination. Although persistently observed in experiments, it was for a long time thought to be prohibited by the fundamental physical laws of energy and momentum conservation. The theoretical explanation of this process has until recently remained one of the greatest puzzles of solid-state physics. The theory explaining the phenomenon was published in Physical Review B. In 1928, Paul Dirac predicted that an electron has a twin particle, which is identical in all respects but for its opposite electric charge. This particle, called the positron, was soon discovered experimentally. Several years later, scientists realized that the charge carriers in semiconductorssilicon, germanium, gallium arsenide, etc.behave like electrons and positrons. These two kinds of charge carriers in semiconductors were called electrons and holes. Their respective charges are negative and positive, and they can recombine, or annihilate each other, releasing energy. Electron-hole recombination accompanied by the emission of light provides the operating principle of semiconductor lasers, which are devices crucial for optoelectronics. The emission of light is not the only possible outcome of an electron coming in contact with a hole in a semiconductor. The liberated energy is often lost to thermal vibrations of the neighboring atoms or picked up by other electrons (figure 1). The latter process is referred to as Auger recombination and is the main "killer" of active electron-hole pairs in lasers. It bears the name of French physicist Pierre Auger, who studied these processes. Laser engineers strive to maximize the probability of light emission upon electron-hole recombination and to suppress all the other processes. Thus, the optoelectronics community enthusiastically greeted the proposal for graphene-based semiconductor lasers formulated by MIPT graduate Victor Ryzhii. The initial theoretical concept said that Auger recombination in graphene should be prohibited by the energy and momentum conservation laws. These laws are mathematically similar for electron-hole pairs in graphene and for electron-positron pairs in Dirac's original theory, and the impossibility of electron-positron recombination with energy transfer to a third particle has been known for a long time. However, experiments with hot charge carriers in graphene consistently returned the unfavorable result: Electrons and holes in graphene do recombine with a relatively high rate, and the phenomenon appeared attributable to the Auger effect. Moreover, it took an electron-hole pair less than a picosecond, or one-trillionth of a second, to disappear, which is hundreds of times faster than in contemporary optoelectronic materials. The experiments suggested a tough obstacle for the implementation of a graphene-based laser. The researchers from MIPT and Tohoku University found that the recombination of electrons and holes in graphene, prohibited by the classical conservation laws, is made possible in the quantum world by the energy-time uncertainty principle. It states that conservation laws may be violated to the extent inversely proportional to the mean free time of the particle. The mean free time of an electron in graphene is quite short, as the dense carriers form a strongly-interacting "mash." To systematically account for the uncertainty of particle energy, the so-called nonequilibrium Green's functions technique was developed in modern quantum mechanics. This approach was employed by the authors of the paper to calculate Auger recombination probability in graphene. The obtained predictions are in good agreement with the experimental data. "At first, it looked like a mathematical brain teaser, rather than an ordinary physical problem," says Dmitry Svintsov, the head of the Laboratory of 2-D Materials for Optoelectronics at MIPT. "The commonly accepted conservation laws permit recombination only if all three particles involved are moving precisely in the same direction. The probability of this event is like the ratio between the volume of a point and the volume of a cubeit approaches zero. Luckily, we soon decided to reject abstract mathematics in favor of quantum physics, which says that a particle cannot have a well-defined energy. This means that the probability in question is finite, and even sufficiently high to be experimentally observed" The study does not merely offer an explanation for why the "prohibited" Auger process is actually possible. Importantly, it specifies the conditions when this probability is low enough to make graphene-based lasers viable. As particles and antiparticles rapidly vanish in experiments with hot carriers in graphene, the lasers can exploit the low-energy carriers, which should have longer lifetimes, according to the calculations. Meanwhile, the first experimental evidence of laser generation in graphene has been obtained at Tohoku University in Japan. Notably, the method for calculation of the electron-hole lifetimes developed in the paper is not limited to graphene. It is applicable to a large class of so-called Dirac materials, in which charge carriers behave similarly to the electrons and positrons in Dirac's original theory. According to preliminary calculations, the mercury cadmium telluride quantum wells could enable much longer carrier lifetimes, and therefore more effective laser generation, as the conservation laws for Auger recombinations in this case are more stringent. Explore further The photoexcited graphene puzzle solved More information: Georgy Alymov et al. Auger recombination in Dirac materials: A tangle of many-body effects, Physical Review B (2018). Journal information: Physical Review B Georgy Alymov et al. Auger recombination in Dirac materials: A tangle of many-body effects,(2018). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.97.205411 Credit: CC0 Public Domain New insight on how antibiotics affect the gut microbiomethe community of microbes that live inside ushas been published in the journal eLife. The study in mice hints at new methods for maintaining a healthy microbiome or controlling invasion from harmful, disease-causing bacteria. "The gut microbiome consists of a community of microbes which, when disturbed, exposes the host to risks such as infection," says first author Aspen Reese, who led the study while a Ph.D. student at Duke University, North Carolina, US. "While it was already known that antibiotics kill or prevent the growth of bacteria in the gut, it was not clear exactly how and when those changes affect the gut environment." To learn more about this question, Reese and her team sought to understand what ecological changes happen to microbiota during and after treatment with broad-spectrum antibioticstreatments that act against a wide range of harmful bacteria. The scientists began by administering antibiotics to mice over five days to broadly inhibit their gut bacteria. They found that the gut's redox potentiala measure of the chemical environment including an estimate of how easily organisms are able to respire within itincreased under antibiotic treatment. While evidence suggested that these redox shifts were associated with the host immune system, the shifts also occurred when gut microbial communities were treated with antibiotics in an artificial gut that had no immune system. "We also saw that as antibiotics removed bacteria and reduced their metabolic rates in the mouse gut, there was an increase in oxidising agents called electron acceptors," Reese explains. "This new environmental state meant that the microbial community which recolonised after treatment looked very different from the original community." The bacteria that appeared immediately following treatment, including some potentially harmful species, were able to take advantage of the electron acceptors to grow quickly. As they grew, they used up the excess resources, causing the gut environment to return to its normal state. However, this did not guarantee recovery of the original microbial community. "Antibiotics may drive some microbe species extinct in a gut community, so new microbial immigrants from outside the mousein this case from an untreated mouse in the same cagewere likely needed to return the microbiota to its original state," says senior author Lawrence David, Assistant Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Duke University. Together, these results suggest new ecological models for how antibiotics reshape the gut microbiome and how redox shifts could be associated with intestinal disease, with changes in electron acceptor availability setting the stage for post-antibiotic recolonisation of gut bacteria. "In the future, our work could help inform the development of drugs that either include chemical alterations of redox potential, or that introduce competitors for excess electron acceptors, to help treat microbial disorders or prevent antibiotic-associated infections," Reese concludes. Explore further Antibiotic use increases risk of severe viral disease in mice More information: Aspen T Reese et al, Antibiotic-induced changes in the microbiota disrupt redox dynamics in the gut, eLife (2018). Journal information: eLife Aspen T Reese et al, Antibiotic-induced changes in the microbiota disrupt redox dynamics in the gut,(2018). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.35987 Christabel measured and dissected dugites found as roadkill for her research. Credit: Dr Bill Bateman, Curtin University For the Spotted Brown Snake (or dugite), size doesn't matter when it comes to sex. Perth researchers found no difference between the lengths of tongue tines (the two sides of the tongue's 'fork') between male and female dugitesgiving clues as to the snakes' behaviour. "Initially we were surprised, because while sexual differences between snakes tend to be quite subtle, previous studies have shown that male North American pit vipers have longer tongue tines than females," says Christabel Khoo, who conducted the study as part of her Ph.D. at Curtin University. "We think the differences can be explained by the two snakes' lifestyles. North American pit vipers are sedate ambush predators, and males are only active during the breeding season when they seek out females. In contrast, dugites of both sexes are active all year round." Snakes use their forked tongues to collect chemicals from their environment, with a special organ in the roof of their mouths that interprets these chemicals as smells. The tines of the fork take samples from two places, allowing them to compare the signals and decide the direction the smell is coming fromhelping them track prey or mates. "This kind of research is important in helping us understand mating habits, and for informing conservation strategies for endangered reptiles," Christabel says. Next, the team plans to investigate sexual differences in tine lengths in other reptiles with forked tongues, including other snake species, and lizards such as goannas. Christabel presented the work at the Australian Society of Herpetologists Conference and the West Australian Herpetological Society Expo in 2017, and the research has been submitted to the Journal of Zoology. Explore further Why do snakes flick their tongues? Provided by Freshscience Credit: CC0 Public Domain A quarter of the seafood tested from Metro Vancouver grocery stores, restaurants and sushi bars is not what you think it is. A new UBC study used DNA barcoding to determine that 70 of 281 seafood samples collected in Metro Vancouver between September 2017 and February 2018 were mislabelled. Researchers from UBC's Lu Food Safety & Health Engineering Lab conducted the study in partnership with independent charity Oceana Canada and the Hanner Lab at the University of Guelph. "We aim to comprehensively understand the fraudulent labelling of fish products sold in Metro Vancouver, as the first step in studying the complicated seafood supply chain that serves the west coast of Canada," said Xiaonan Lu, who leads the Lu lab. "Our study demonstrates the importance of improving both the regulation of seafood labelling, and the transparency of the fish supply chain." The supply chain for seafood is complex and opaque. A fish can be caught in Canada, gutted in China, breaded in the U.S., and ultimately sold back to Canada as an American product. Misidentification can happen anywhere along the way. When it's intentional, it's food frauda $52-billion worldwide problem defined as the misrepresentation of food for economic gain. "Seafood fraud cheats Canadian consumers and hurts local, honest fishers as well as chefs and seafood companies looking to buy sustainable seafood. It causes health concerns and masks global human rights abuses by creating a market for illegally caught fish," said Julia Levin, seafood fraud campaigner with Oceana Canada. "The key to fighting seafood fraud is boat-to-plate traceability. This means tracking the seafood product through the supply chain and requiring that key information travels with the product." The UBC team and Oceana Canada gathered samples from sellers in Vancouver, Richmond, Coquitlam, Burnaby, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Surrey and Langley. The Lu lab analyzed UBC's samples, while Oceana Canada's went to TRU-ID, a Guelph-based company that provides DNA certification of foods and natural health products. DNA barcoding involves comparing genetic information from test specimens with reference sequences that can help identify species. Data from the two sources was later collated. Restaurants had the highest rate of mislabelling, at 29 per cent, followed by grocery stores (24 per cent) and sushi bars (22 per cent). The most commonly mislabelled fish was snapper, with 31 of 34 samples mislabelled. The researchers found evidence of both intentional and unintentional mislabelling. For example, many fish sold as snapper or red snapper were actually far less valued species such as tilapia. Sutchi catfish took the place of halibut, snapper, sole and cod. Economic motivations were less likely in other cases, such as the substitution of sockeye for pink salmon. The situation doesn't appear to be improving. An Oceana study conducted in the U.S. from 2010 to 2012 found the mislabelling rate to be 33 per cent. A study in Metro Vancouver 10 years ago had similar findings to the new UBC study, with a much smaller sample size. Oceana Canada found nearly half of samples tested last fall in Ottawa to be mislabelled. They will release a national seafood fraud report this fall with findings from testing done in Halifax, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria. "Canada is one of the top seafood-producing countries in the world and our industry complies with much more stringent labelling when exporting products to the European Union, but Canadian consumers don't benefit from this same level of transparency at home," said Robert Hanner, chief technology officer at TRU-ID. "This situation compromises consumer choice and even facilitates laundering illegally harvested seafood into the domestic market, at the expense of legitimate suppliers. This situation must change." A 2018 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations called for a harmonized DNA-based system that provides universal access to a standard database using scientific names. Authors of the UBC study support several measures to help consumers understand what they're buying: harmonize common names of fish between major trading countries require scientific names on labels provide consumers with information about where fish was caught or farmed, its processing history, and the fishing/farming methods used Explore further Sushi-bar-coding in the UK More information: Yaxi Hu et al, Study of fish products in Metro Vancouver using DNA barcoding methods reveals fraudulent labeling, Food Control (2018). Yaxi Hu et al, Study of fish products in Metro Vancouver using DNA barcoding methods reveals fraudulent labeling,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.foodcont.2018.06.023 In this Tuesday, May 2, 2017, file photo, Verizon corporate signage is captured on a store in Manhattan's Midtown area, in New York. Verizon is pledging to stop selling data to outsiders through middlemen that can pinpoint the location of mobile phones, the Associated Press has learned. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File) Verizon is pledging to stop selling information on phone owners' locations to data brokers, stepping back from a business practice that has drawn criticism for endangering privacy, The Associated Press has learned. The data has allowed outside companies to pinpoint the location of wireless devices without their owners' knowledge or consent. Verizon said that about 75 companies have been obtaining its customer data from two little-known California-based brokers that Verizon supplies directlyLocationSmart and Zumigo. Though Verizon is the first major U.S. wireless carrier to end sales of such data to brokers that then provide it to others, Verizon did not say it was getting out of the business of selling location data. Verizon's chief privacy officer, Karen Zacharia, said the company would be careful not to disrupt "beneficial services" such as fraud prevention and would "work with these aggregators to ensure a smooth transition for these beneficial services to alternative arrangements so as to minimize the harm to customers and end users." The nation's largest mobile carrier in subscribers count made its disclosure in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been probing the phone location-tracking market. Last month, Wyden revealed abuses in the lucrative but loosely regulated field involving Securus Technologies and its affiliate 3C Interactive. Verizon says their contract was approved only for the location tracking of outside mobile phones called by prison inmates. After a thorough review of its program, Verizon notified LocationSmart and Zumigo, both privately held, that it intends to "terminate their ability to access and use our customers' location data as soon as possible," Zacharia wrote. Location data from Verizon and other carriers makes it possible to identify the whereabouts of nearly any phone in the U.S. within seconds. Popular commercial uses for so-called geolocation tracking include emergency roadside assistance; keeping tabs on packages, vehicles and employees; bank fraud prevention and targeted marketing offers. The cutoff won't affect users' ability to share locations directly with apps and other services. Rather, it deals with the practice of selling data to third parties with which users have no direct connection. Wyden wrote all four major U.S. wireless carriers on May 8 after learning about a web portal that let law officers track Americans' locations without proper oversight. A former sheriff in Missouri has been accused of using Securus data for unauthorized surveillance of a judge, a sheriff and state highway patrol officers. Days later, a Carnegie Mellon University security researcher discovered a security flaw in LocationSmart's website that could have allowed any reasonably sophisticated hacker to secretly track almost any phone in the U.S. or Canada. Wyden asked the carriers to identify which third parties have been acquiring carrier location data and to provide details such as any third-party sharing of location data without customer consent. His office shared the companies' responses with The AP. None of the four carriers named any third parties, with two exceptions. One was Securus, which all four carriers have since cut off. The other was 3CInteractive, the reseller that supplied Securus. Only Verizon has pledged to end the sale of location data from its 116 million wireless subscribers through so-called "geolocation aggregators. "Verizon did the responsible thing and promptly announced it was cutting these companies off," Wyden said in a statement. "In contrast, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint seem content to keep selling their customers' private information to these shady middle men, Americans' privacy be damned." Wyden has complained that people's physical security could be endangered if the information falls in the wrong hands. "The big concern was that this was probably the tip of the iceberg," said Laura Moy, deputy director of the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology. She said Verizon's move "indicates that it cannot actually police this process, that it doesn't have the ability." Nor can the other carriers, she said. Verizon did not respond to questions from the AP on whether it plans to sell location data directly that had been brokered by the two California companies. A spokesman, Rich Young, said he could not say whether the other big carriers would follow its lead. "We're trying to do with right thing for our customers," he said. "We're not waiting to see whether others to do the same." The other carriers did not immediately respond Tuesday to emailed requests for comment. AT&T and T-Mobile , No. 2 and 3 in customers, said in letters to Wyden they only allow authorized third parties to access customer location data if the affected customers have given consent or if it is required by lawfor instance, a court order. Verizon said the same. Sprint said account holders must "generally be notified" if the data is to be used so they can decide whether they consent. T-Mobile has offered to buy Sprint for $26.5 billion. The carriers left most of Wyden's questions unansweredsuch as how many of their customers had been affected by location sharing they never agreed to. Gigi Sohn, a former top advisor at the Federal Communications Commission in the Obama administration, said Verizon has lately proven itself a "shining example" on privacy. "I think they understand that bad privacy practices are bad for business," she said. But a Verizon pullout from the aggregator arrangement won't crater the market for this data, Sohn said. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, for one, jointly have nearly 200 million wireless customers who marketers want to reach. Moy said Verizon may have been motivated by an FCC fine for an earlier episode in which the company quietly tracked its wireless customers' online travels with a "supercookie" for at least 22 months beginning in December 2012. The company subsequently signed a consent order with the FCC promising to restrict that tracking to customers who affirmatively agreed to it. It was fined $1.4 million. The case also spurred FCC rules that would have required carriers to obtain consent for selling their customers' wireless location data. But the GOP-led Congress quashed those rules last year. Analysts say it's difficult to gauge the size of the location-tracking aggregation market. On its website, LocationSmart claims it is the No. 1 "location-as-a-service" provider with data from every top tier U.S. wireless carrier and more than 200 enterprise customers. Zumigo appears oriented to the financial sector, and lists Intel, Wells Fargo and Capital One among investors. Analyst Rich Mogull of Arizona-based Securosis LLC said telecom providers track and sell location data as a matter of course, with a wide range of businesses including Google extensively attempting to compile location datasets on consumers. "We are all tracked, all the time, primarily for marketing purposes, by such a large number of companies I 'm not sure I would even know where to start the math," said Mogull. 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Srinagar, Jun 19: Police on Tuesday night said that all the three militants trapped in a house in Nazneenpora village of Tral in south Kashmirs Pulwama district have been killed. An official said the identity of the slain militants was being ascertained. He said a CRPF officer and four army men were injured in the gunfight that broke out after forces launched a cordon-and-search-operation in the village. Reports said that the house in which militants were hiding was detonated with explosives by the forces. Massive clashes had erupted near the site of the gunfight with youth trying to disrupt the anti-militant operation. All is not well Lack of co-ordination among ministries not a good sign for the government Just to make it simple, lets define Europes illiberal democracies as those countries where elected leaders profoundly disagree with the liberal, inclusive, affluent worldview of the EUs political classes. The British disagreed with this worldview so violently that they left the Union altogether. Most of the other illiberal democracies arent in strong enough positions to leave (yet), but many of them would if they could. We are talking about the UK, Italy, Switzerland (not an EU member), Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Russia (also not a member) at the very least. In other words, the great majority of Europes people are living in illiberal democracies, with only a few liberal democracies huddled up precariously against the Atlantic seaboard. How could this have happened? What went wrong? If you ask the EU political classes or the media they control, the problem is simple: unscrupulous populist politicians are duping their citizens by playing on their fear of immigration and of losing their sovereignty. Certainly, there is something to this, but its better to assume that the everyone out there is stupid except us explanation is usually wrong. Instead, if you talk with people in central and eastern Europe, you get a very different explanation: the problem is with the EU itself. After all, illiberal or not, the illiberal democracies are at least democracies, which is far more than we can say about the EU. The EU itself recognizes that it has a so-called democracy deficit. But thats a euphemismthe EU isnt a flawed democracy, its an autocracy. As Ive noted before, of the many institutions that make up the EU, only onethe European Parliamentis elected, and it is powerless. It best resembles the late unlamented Supreme Soviet, the USSR body that rubber stamped Stalins decisions. Or maybe the National Peoples Congress in China, which meets for two weeks every year to rubber stamp Xis decisions. Meanwhile, the powerful EU bodiesthe European Council, the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, the European Central Bankare all appointed bodies. So if the EU isnt democratic, and if even the EU recognizes that it has a democracy deficit, and if Britain has already left in disgust and many other countries are infuriated, why in Gods name doesnt the EU do something about it? The answer, unfortunately, is straightforward: the EU doesnt want to be a democracy, it simply wants to get its way. If the EU were a democracy, what chance would it have of imposing hated migration policies on its member states? How could it possibly foist a vast array of bureaucratic requirements on people who despise those rules? In what dream world could it impose its liberal, inclusive, affluent worldview on cultures that are based on religion and tradition? To be fair to the EU, its laws, rules and policies arent arbitrary. On the whole they are designed to improve the health, justice, environment, and efficiency of Europe and its people. If we simply looked at each EU rule, law or policy one-at-a-time, it would be hard to find much to object to. The problem, however, is that there is always a delicate balance between the desirability of any new rule and the harm that rule does to the people it is imposed on. But the EU officials cant make that balance because they are operating from inside an elite bubble that, even if we happen to agree with it, represents a fringe worldview relative to the wild diversity of Europe. The EU doesnt recognize that permitting increased migration of desperate people from foreign cultures threatens long-established existing cultures. It doesnt appreciate that rules designed to improve health outcomes or to standardize products interfere with peoples freedoms to live their lives as they wish. It doesnt understand that extending rights to minorities inevitably diminishes the rights of the majority. It doesnt seem to care that every action it takes reduces the sovereignty of every member nation. These arent new problems and they arent easy problems. They are so problematic, in fact, that over the entire course of the human experience we have managed to find only one way to make such decisions in a consistently sound manner: via democratic processes. In other words, as a thought experiment, lets assume that every rule the EU promulgates is a better one than a democratic EU could promulgate. (Setting aside the breathtaking arrogance of that assumption.) The correct response to that is: so what? The point of governments isnt to make endlessly good decisions, even if it were possible always to distinguish good from less good rules. No, the point of governments is to create an environment in which citizens can maximize their wellbeing, their dignity as individuals and their happiness as members of society. You dont do this by issuing commandments from on high and you dont do it by installing technocrats who ignore the popular will. You do it by allowing people to participate in their own governance, to have a say in the rules that govern their lives. Like it or not, the EU is a kind of roach motel: once you get in, you cant get outthe economic consequences are just too awful. But the UK showed it can be done. The future of the EU thus resolves itself into this: What are the chances that member states will become so irritated with the EUs autocratic ways that they will no longer care about the economic damage of exiting? The highly educated political class that operates the EU are certainly smart people, and they undoubtedly mean well, but they lack a more important characteristic that would allow democracy to plant itself in Brussels: wisdom. My guess is that, unless the EU democratizes itself (a highly unlikely outcome), the illiberal democracies will continue spread across Europe and the EU will continue to devolve until even its economic allure wont save it. Next up: Shined Shoes Can Save Your Life Devkotas childhood school in Gorkha closes for a day Dr Upendra Devkotas childhood school at Palungtar Municipality-4 in Gorkha district closed educational activities for a day to pay homage to the deceased neurosurgeon. June 19, 2018 in Tips and How To (E) [prMac.com] Vancouver, British Columbia - CogZest is pleased to announce the availability of Dr. Luc P. Beaudoin's new e-book, Cognitive Productivity with macOS(R): 7 Principles for Getting Smarter with Knowledge. In today's competitive economy, Mac users need to deal with unprecedented amounts of information and technology options under intense time pressure. Beaudoin's new, screencast-rich e-book demonstrates pro-active strategies for assessing, organizing, selecting, processing and mastering information. Cognitive Productivity with macOS is the Mac-focused, practical sequel to Beaudoin's ground-breaking e-book, Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective. 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Cognitive Productivity books are themselves prequels to CogSci Apps' upcoming, first-of-its-kind, cognitive productivity app. Cognitive Productivity with macOS book is available today on Leanpub and imminently on iBookStore and Amazon Kindle Store. Profound personal, organizational and societal achievements are based on knowledge. We use cognitive science to build products that improve your cognitive productivity. That is your effectiveness and efficiency at using knowledge to solve problems, develop products and develop yourself. Our products are designed for the human mind. We are here to help you "thrive in the sea of knowledge." We've identified several important problems people have that can be solved by extending and applying cognitive science. Cognitive science is the modern science of the human mind. We develop simple, beautiful, effective products based on this understanding. CogSci Apps help you use technology to act in accordance with knowledge. All Material and Software (C) Copyright 2018 CogZest. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo and macOS 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. ### Man arrested for raping daughter in Baridya Police have arrested a person on charges of raping his daughter from Badhaiyatal Rural Municipality-8 in Bardiya district on Tuesday. Half of NC Upper House members pick 2-yr term National Assembly Chairman Ganesh Timilsina and Home Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa will serve their full six-year tenure in the Upper House while Finance Minister Yubaraj Khatiwada will retire after two years as their terms were decided by drawing lots on Monday. Mentally-disabled girl, 13, raped in Bajhang Police are searching for a forty-year-old man accused of raping a mentally-disabled 13-year-old girl at Talkot Rural Municipality in Bajhang. Located on Highway 246 in Santa Ynez, the Chumash Casino Resort is an age 21-and-older venue. Tickets for the show are available for $35, $45 & $55 at the Chumash Casino Resorts Club Indulge or online at www.chumashcasino.com. Ministry retracts decision on NGOs Home Ministry has backtracked on its decision to strictly scrutinise Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) while renewing their registration Education Reporter Mathew Burciaga is a Santa Maria Times reporter who covers education, agriculture and public safety. Prior to joining the Times, Mathew ran a 114-year-old community newspaper in Wyoming. He owns more than 40 pairs of crazy socks from across the globe. Stephen Popkin, who has 32 years of experience in health-care management, has been selected as the next CEO of Lompoc Valley Medical Center. Nepal hopes to boost China ties Nepal will hope to cement its bilateral relations and work on furthering socio-economic ties with China as Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli embarks on a state visit on Tuesday. 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. A French official sparked a major row Tuesday by suggesting gay people came lower in the pecking order than heterosexual couples when applying to adopt children. Pascale Lemare, head of the adoption service in the Seine-Maritime region of Normandy, northern France, said same-sex couples were likely to be left with adoptive children who were ill or otherwise "atypical", prompting outrage from gay rights groups. "Children that no one wants -- there are people who don't want to adopt children who are too damaged, too psychologically damaged, too big, or handicapped," Lemare said. She had been asked in an interview with France Bleu local radio if it was more "complicated" for a gay couple to adopt a healthy baby. "There are parents who correspond better to the required criteria," she replied. "Not a gay couple, then?" asked the interviewer. "Well, no," Lemare said, adding that same-sex couples were "a little atypical, you might say, with regard to social norms and biological norms". She went on: "If their plan includes children with atypical profiles... if homosexual couples have open expectations, they can indeed adopt a child." France legalised gay marriage and same-sex adoption in 2013 after large demonstrations against the changes by Catholic and conservative groups. Pascal Martin, head of the Seine-Maritime region, said he "very strongly condemned" Lemare's comments. "In no case is the sexual orientation of future parents a criteria of evaluation" in the region, he insisted in a statement. Lemare was not available for comment, her office said. - 'Scandalised' - But her comments prompted furious reactions from French gay rights activists. "We are extremely shocked by these comments," said Alexandre Urwicz, head of the Same-Sex Parents' Association (ADFH), adding that his group had filed a legal complaint. Geraldine Chambon, a gay rights activist living in Normandy, said she was "scandalised" and similarly considering a lawsuit. "We had heard things about the region's adoption policy, but it was just rumours," she said. France Bleu had spoken to three gay couples who complained that Lemare's department discriminated against them when they applied to become parents. One woman, a 38-year-old who had been with her partner for 10 years, said she met Lemare in 2016 and was told it would be "very difficult for a homosexual couple to see their application approved". "If we wanted to pursue it, we would have to be prepared to take in a child with specific needs -- an older child or one with health problems. We ultimately abandoned our plan to adopt," she said. "We weren't very surprised by this kind of talk given that we experience discrimination on a daily basis." Regional authorities said Martin was waiting for the results of an external audit before considering possible disciplinary action against Lemare. An American student held in Vietnam for "causing public disorder" at violent protests this month has appeared on state television to say he regrets breaking the law and will stay away from future rallies. William Nguyen was detained on June 10 in Ho Chi Minh City after attending mass demonstrations against proposed special economic zones that would grant investors 99-year leases. Video footage shows the Texas-born 32-year-old with a bleeding head wound being dragged by plainclothes men through the streets into custody. Police accuse Nguyen of "causing public disorder" and trying to damage a fence and flip over police vehicles on the main road to the airport. Nguyen, a Yale graduate, appeared on television on Monday night to say he broke the law. "I understand that my acts violated (the law)... I regret that I caused trouble for people heading to the airport. I blocked traffic and caused trouble to my family and friends," Nguyen said in Vietnamese on HTV in footage provided by city police. "I will not join any anti-state activities any more," added Nguyen, who was arrested while passing through Vietnam en route to Singapore to get his Masters degree next month. Choreographed confessions are common in Vietnam where accused criminals are paraded publicly to admit guilt -- sometimes in exchange for a softer sentence -- though rights groups have also accused the one-party state of forcibly extracting statements. Scores were detained this month after protests in several cities turned violent in some places, rare in the one-party state where demonstrations are routinely banned or broken up. Nguyen tweeted from the rallies, posting images of large crowds and saying he supported Vietnamese people "exercising their civic duty to protest injustice". Friends and family lobbying lawmakers in Washington for Nguyen's release say he did not have a political agenda. - Torture claims - At least 30 people are still in custody and security forces blanketed Ho Chi Minh City last weekend to deter further protests. Amnesty International said they had received "deeply disturbing" reports that several protesters were tortured by police in custody. "We urge the Vietnamese authorities to launch a prompt, thorough and effective investigation into the claims and to hold anyone suspected of being responsible to account," said Minar Pimple, Amnesty's senior director of global operations. Demonstrators had rallied against a draft law to grant lengthy leases in proposed special economic zones, citing fears valuable land would be handed over to China. The bill made no specific mention of China and the government has said it would consider shorter leases, but the concession did little to assuage anger. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said the government would consider public feedback but issued a warning to "bad seeds" looking to kick up unrest. "If you oppose officials on duty, vandalise state property... then you have to be strictly handled in accordance with the law," Phuc said Monday. China and Vietnam have had a fraught relationship since a brief but bloody border war in 1979 and resentment over Beijing's extensive claims in the South China Sea runs high in Vietnam. Nepal, Japan sign pact for 14 weekly flights Nepal and Japan on Monday revised their bilateral air services agreement (ASA), increasing the number of flights seven-fold from twice weekly to 14 weekly flights with any type of aircraft on a reciprocal basis. Chinas middle classes could soon be much better off thanks to a raft of personal tax incentives under consideration by the government. As well as raising workers monthly personal allowance to 5,000 yuan (US$775) from 3,500 yuan, the changes will make interest payments on mortgage loans, and education, training and medical expenses tax deductible. The proposals have already been drawn up and are expected to be endorsed by the National Peoples Congress, Chinas legislature, this week, Xinhua reported. The changes come at a time when consumer spending is under serious pressure retail sales in May slowed to their lowest level in 15 years as Chinese households feel the pinch of rising mortgage bills and falling wages. At the same time, the governments revenue from personal income tax in the first five months of the year rose 20.6 per cent from the equivalent period of 2017. Like US and Hong Kong, China is cutting taxes for its middle class too Under the current system taxpayers can claim for very few deductibles against their tax bills, so the planned changes, although unlikely to take effect for several months, have been well received. Its the best news this year, because my property debts are killing me, said Eli Mai, a sales manager from Guangzhou in southern Chinas Guangdong province. My income has actually dropped from the same period of last year because the market is so bad. In the past couple of months, my wife and I have only just managed to cover our monthly repayments, and I have had to ask my father for a loan to help with our living costs. Mai said the couple paid about 25,000 yuan a month in mortgage repayments on loans of about 3 million yuan taken out against two flats. If approved, the amendments will be the first significant changes to Chinas personal tax system for seven years. Lawmakers and political advisers have long called for consumers tax liabilities to be lightened as a way to stimulate consumption. Story continues Against the backdrop of slowing infrastructure investment and growing headwinds for exporters not least because of Chinas trade row with the United States Beijing is keener than ever to encourage people to spend. In the first quarter of this year, revenue from the sale of consumer goods in Guangzhou was almost unchanged from the same period of 2017 at 224.1 billion yuan, while in the neighbouring city of Shenzhen, the figure rose by just 2 per cent to 133.2 billion yuan. Say goodbye to Huallywood? The star tax probe clouding a Chinese citys movie-making dreams Chinas total tax revenue in 2017 rose 10.7 per cent from a year earlier to 14.4 trillion yuan, its first double-digit increase in five years, according to figures from the Ministry of Finance. Of the total, revenue from personal income tax surged 18.6 per cent to 1.2 trillion yuan, it said. The last significant change to Chinas individual income tax system came in 2011, when the personal allowance was raised to 3,500 yuan from 2,000 yuan, and the number of tax brackets was cut to seven from nine. This article China set to cut tax rates for middle classes in bid to stimulate consumer spending first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo are not the most popular Chinese smartphone brands in the continent The article The Chinese smartphone maker youve never heard of is dominating the African market by Elliot Zaagman originally appeared on TechNode, the leading English authority on technology in China. When thinking of Chinese phone brands, what names come to mind? If youre like most people I speak to, youre probably thinking about Huawei, Xiaomi, or possibly Vivo or Oppo. But what about TECNO? Even in China, where the phone makers parent company, TRANSSION Holdings, is based, TECNO is hardly a household name. It has never even cracked the top ten in Chinas smartphone market, and has not focused heavily on developed markets. However, if you live in Africa, the brand is just about unavoidable. In fact, TECNO, its sister brand itel and other TRANSSION devices make up nearly half phones that are sold on the continent, according to company representatives. TRANSSION is just one of many Chinese technology firms who have made inroads into Africa in recent years, and with the increasing focus that China is devoting to the region, the firms there now may simply be the first wave of Chinese tech pioneers on a continent that may be poised for same kind of dynamic economic growth that China itself experienced in the 1990s and 2000s. chinese_smartphone_africa_a Founded in 2006, the themes of TRANSSIONs origin story are similar to those of many hardware firms in their hometown of Shenzhen who have gone on to have global success. Rather than attempting to fight their way into the overcrowded consumer markets of the developed world, they saw opportunity in the less-glamourous markets of the global south. By 2010, TECNO ranked among the top three brands in the African mobile phone market. In September 2011, they opened a manufacturing facility in Ethiopia. They have remained a dominant force in Africas mobile phone market since. Also Read: Russia is now the new frontier for Chinese smartphone makers Story continues Getting there first and localising When speaking with those in and around the company about their recipe for success in Africa, the terms hard-working and street smart were frequently mentioned. First, Id say we got into the market at the right time, explained one TRANSSION employee who has worked for the company in three different African countries. We also focussed on building up brand equity in these markets over the long-term, not just make money quickly. And finally, we localise to meet the needs of our African users. It is worth noting that TRANSSIONs localisation contrasts with the commonly-held stereotype of Chinese companies in Africa. In a November 2017 an op-ed in Chinese newspaper The Global Times by Huang Hongxiang and Huang Ye of the Nairobi-based firm China House wrote a scathing critique of how their home countrys firms often fail to adequately build goodwill with local populations on the ground in Africa. The Chinese always say China-Africa is win-win cooperation and we are brothers. I dont know whether it is win-win, and who are the brothers they talk about, maybe our government officials? asked one African reporter who was interviewed for the piece. This failure to engage and benefit the general public, whether real or perceived, can undermine the message of shared development that China and its companies are attempting to send in Africa. Joint Ventures and localisation were crucial for Chinas growth. Thats the model African countries are looking to get from Chinese companies too where they can get maximum knowledge transfer, local jobs, and tax from the foreign investment, illustrated Hannah Ryder, CEO of Development Reimagined, a Beijing-based consultancy focused on China-Africa development issues. It is the fact that their approach contrasts so dramatically with the stereotype of Chinese firms in Africa that makes TRANSSIONs success in Africa so remarkable. Their approach to localisation has been quite holistic. In our case, acting locally entails creating products that are fully localised and based on in-depth market insights; explained Group VP Arif Chowdhury in an email for this piece, It also means actively building strong relationships with local distribution partners, with whom we then build and grow brands together; it also means hiring a great number of local employees to drive local employment. In other words, we get fully involved in local mobile business as well as economic and community development. In addition, we are also running numerous CSR programmes, which contribute to our good reputation as a responsible business actor in the communities we operate in. One strategy they used was to build strong long-term relationships with local vendors who could offer a greater depth of understanding regarding the local cultures and market demands. Also Read: Enjoy being slow: Why Chinese tech companies are embracing a slower culture We are also sharing experiences with partners such as local suppliers, to drive more development, said Chowdhury. In our early days, TRANSSION worked closely with Mwale, a Nairobi local advertiser. As TRANSSION took off, so did Mwales advertising business, quickly becoming one of Kenyas top 10 advertising companies and later expanding to other African countries. TRANSSION has applied their localisation focus to product design as well. Theyve tailoredtheir devices for Africans needs by focusing on internet connectivity, allowing for dual sims, and by featuring louder speakers for phone calls and music. As African markets can suffer from inconsistent power supplies, they focused on longer battery life. Theyve also designed a camera specifically for African facial features and skin tones. Their low price-points (TECNO phones can run from US$50-100) and ubiquity on the continent meant that for many Africans, TRANSSION was the company that made smartphone ownership a reality. chinese_smartphone_africa_b Many TRANSSION devices are designed specifically for the African market Managing instability Despite their success on the continent, the sustainability of their good fortune is hardly a given in African markets, where political and economic uncertainty can often be par for the course. The companys plans for a 280,000-square-foot factory in Ethiopia were put on hold recently after the surprise resignation of Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn destabilized the countrys ruling regime and prompted its government to declare a state of emergency. Ethiopias tumultuous political environment could put the companys future at risk. However, for TRANSSION, managing such risk seems to be a chance theyre willing to take to maintain a foothold in the continents high-potential markets. When asked about the risk that such instability poses, Chowdhury emphasized a long-term outlook, saying: Africa has been a focus market for us for the past 10 years. As we look towards the future, Africa will certainly remain our priority market. We hope that in this case, through our efforts, the new factory will not only provide local consumers with high-quality products but also contribute to the development of the local community. We will let you know as soon as we have further updates. For the many Chinese companies using TRANSSIONs case as a model for African localization, they will certainly be watching closely. The article The Chinese smartphone maker youve never heard of is dominating the African market first appeared on TechNode. Image Credit: rawpixel on Unsplash Come to the Echelon Asia Summit 2018, which will be held at the Singapore Expo from the 28th to the 29th of June. Click here to get your tickets now. Enter the promo code e27-ROCKS to redeem a free pass! It is limited to only 30 passes and expires on the 20th of June, so hurry now! The post The Chinese smartphone maker youve never heard of is dominating the African market appeared first on e27. Elderly Hong Kong woman loses HK$2 million in Skype scam after being given suitcase full of waste paper An elderly Hong Kong woman has been duped out of HK$2 million, which she was asked to transfer to a non-local bank account while safeguarding a suitcase full of valuables. The items turned out to be waste paper, and police said similar scams often involve victims being convinced to make payments while holding valuable items as collateral only to find that the goods are worthless. It is unclear what motivated the 77-year-old woman to transfer the money. She met the con artist through Skype in 2014, and was asked to help look after a suitcase that carried valuables, according to police. The suitcase was sent to her home on Hung Hom Estate on Man Yuen Street, in 2015. The suspect then used different excuses to convince the victim to transfer money into a designated bank account, a police spokesman said. The victim transferred HK$2 million (US$255,000) into the bank account in multiple transactions over the last three years. The money was not transferred to a local bank account, a police source said, and the victim never met the con artist in person. The woman realised she had been scammed recently, when she opened the suitcase and found it was filled with waste paper. She told her daughter about the suitcase on Monday. The daughter called police that night. So far, no one has been arrested. This article Elderly Hong Kong woman loses HK$2 million in Skype scam after being given suitcase full of waste paper first appeared on South China Morning Post For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018. The European Commission has updated its blacklist of airlines banned from operating in the European Union, which now drops from 178 to 120. Europe has greenlit nearly 60 airlines to fly in the Union's skies. Previously, the EU blacklist featured 178 carriers, of which 172 were banned due to a lack of safety oversight by their local aviation authorities, and the remaining six were banned due to safety concerns with regard to the airlines themselves. In 2016, a total of 216 airlines were banned from EU skies. Now, the European Commission has updated its list to include a total of 120 carriers from 21 different countries. Many are based in African countries, such as Angola, DRC, Djibouti, Eritrea, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Suriname and Zimbabwe. Six other airlines, including Air Koryo, Iran Air and Air Service Comores, must operate under certain restrictions, mainly relating to the types of aircraft they can use. BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungary should not pass legislation making people or organisations providing help to illegal immigrants liable to jail, before the Council of Europe's advisory body gives its opinion on the bill on Friday, it said on Monday. The President of the Venice Commission, which advises on constitutional matters, called on Hungary "at least to take into account the Commission's recommendations as they appear in the draft opinion which has already been sent to the authorities." The bill is part of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's campaign against EU migration policies and against George Soros, a Hungarian-born U.S. financier known for funding liberal causes. Parliament is due to vote on it on Wednesday. (Reporting by Krisztina Than; editing by John Stonestreet) FILE PHOTO: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban addresses the supporters after the announcement of the partial results of parliamentary election in Budapest, Hungary, April 8, 2018.REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger/File Photo By Marton Dunai BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Two leading European rights bodies have told Hungary that its "Stop Soros" bill criminalising help to illegal immigrants is "arbitrary" and vague, unduly threatens non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and violates European law. In a June 15 draft report seen by Reuters, the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) gave a detailed opinion on a bill that Hungary's parliament is expected to approve on Wednesday. Under the draft law, individuals or groups who help migrants not entitled to protection to submit requests for asylum or who help illegal migrants gain status to stay in Hungary will be liable to jail. The bill "criminalises activities that are fully legitimate," the two European bodies wrote in their report. The Venice Commission, a Council of Europe expert body which advises on constitutional matters, has asked Hungary to await the final report it will probably adopt later this week. But Hungary's Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, speaking during a visit to Stockholm, angrily dismissed the criticism in the report and said the bill would be approved on Wednesday. Hungary's Finance Ministry also joined the fray on Tuesday, announcing plans to introduce a 25 percent special tax on aid groups which support migration. ORBAN VS SOROS Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Fidesz party was re-elected with a two-thirds parliamentary majority in April after a campaign attacking U.S. billionaire George Soros and liberal NGOs he supports. Orban accuses Soros of encouraging mass immigration in order to undermine Europe, a charge Soros denies. Orban, in power since 2010, has led eastern European resistance to EU plans to share out some of the large numbers of mostly Muslim migrants who have arrived on the continent since 2015. He says they threaten Europe's Christian civilisation. The Hungarian leader has said "Stop Soros" will be among the first bills to pass the new parliament, along with a constitutional change which says no "alien population" can be settled in Hungary - a jab at the EU's migrant quota plan. Story continues The European Commission, the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner and the Venice Commission have "formed the pro-immigration union of George Soros," Szijjarto told public television. "Hungary's government fights against pressure from international forces." In the 25-page draft, the Venice Commission and the OSCE said the bill "may result in further arbitrary restrictions... of the indispensable work of human rights NGOs and leave migrants without essential services provided by such NGOs". The draft bill "lacks the requisite precision... (it) is not in line with European standards," the bodies wrote. The Venice Commission proposed exempting humanitarian aid, advocacy and campaigning activities from criminal sanctions. "Only explicitly encouraging migrants to circumvent the law should give rise to criminal prosecution," the draft said, adding any law should state clearly that NGO help is not a crime and that money the NGOs receive does not fund criminal acts. (Additional reporting by Daniel Dickson in STOCKHOLM; Editing by Gareth Jones) The UN envoy for Yemen hopes to relaunch talks on a peace plan next month despite an offensive on the key port city of Hodeida that threatens to escalate the war and trigger a humanitarian disaster, diplomats said Monday. Speaking by videoconference from Sanaa, Martin Griffiths briefed the Security Council behind closed doors on his framework for peace talks even as the Saudi-led coalition pressed on with an assault on the city. A first round of preliminary talks could take place next month to restart negotiations on a political transition, Griffiths told the council, according to two diplomats in the chamber. Following the meeting, Russian Deputy Ambassador Dmitry Polyansky said council members renewed their call for the port at Hodeida, the entry point for vital aid deliveries and commercial goods, to remain open. "We hope that nothing terrible happens in Hodeida," said Polyansky whose country holds the council presidency this month. Fierce fighting this month has displaced 5,200 families mostly from districts south of the city, UN officials said, adding that the number of those fleeing the violence was expected to rise. The Saudi-led coalition launched an offensive on June 13 to drive out Yemen's Huthi rebels from the Red Sea port city of 600,000. - No deal on Hodeida - Griffiths has been in talks with the Huthis and the coalition about the fate of Hodeida but there has been no breakthrough in the intense negotiations. The coalition has insisted that the Huthis must fully withdraw from the city and turn over the port to UN supervision, but the rebels have so far only agreed to shared control with the United Nations of the port. After days of talks with the Huthis in Sanaa, Griffiths told the council that he was consulting with the coalition on the next steps in his efforts to avoid an all-out battle in Hodeida, diplomats said. The United Nations has warned that an attack on Hodeida port could cripple deliveries of commercial goods and humanitarian aid to millions of people in Yemen who are on the brink of famine. UN aid chief Mark Lowcock told the council that so far, the humanitarian impact had been limited because there had been no large-scale fighting in the city, diplomats said. On Sunday, however, coalition air strikes hit close to an area where the World Food Programme is operating, Lowcock said, according to the council diplomats. The aid chief warned that current food stocks will run out in two months and that it would be "catastrophic" if the fighting lasted longer. More than 22 million people are in need of aid, including 8.4 million who are at risk of starvation, according to the United Nations, which considers Yemen to be the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia has been leading a military campaign to push back the Huthis and restore the internationally recognized government to power. The conflict has left nearly 10,000 people dead in Yemen, already the Arab world's poorest country. Nepal lands best travel booth award Nepal won the Best Booth Operation Award for its outstanding booth operations with the warmest hospitality and excellent display at the Korea World Travel Fair (Kotfa) 2018. Italy's far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini on Tuesday defended his plans to count the Roma community living in the country and deport those without legal status, despite outrage at home and abroad. "I'm not giving up and I'm pushing ahead! The Italians and their safety first," Salvini tweeted, after opposition MPs slammed the idea of a census as "racist" and "fascist". The anti-immigrant Salvini -- already under fire over refusing to let a rescue ship carrying 630 migrants land in Italy last week -- had floated the plan on national television on Monday. A census would allow the authorities to "see who, how (they live) and how many there are," he argued. It would then allow the authorities to study the possibility of expelling Roma of foreign nationality without the proper documentation, he said. Condemnation of his proposal was rapid and widespread, with not only the opposition parties but also members of the newly-established ruling coalition adding their voices. Deputy prime minister Luigi Di Maio -- leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement that makes up the coalition alongside Salvini's League -- said any census based on ethnicity would be "unconstitutional". It is the first time that Di Maio has spoken out against his coalition partner and fellow deputy prime minister Salvini since the populist new government was sworn in on June 1. - 'Clearly discriminatory': PM - The plan also drew the ire of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. "No one is planning to create files or conduct a census on the basis of ethnicity, which would be unconstitutional because it is clearly discriminatory," Conte said in a statement Tuesday. He also called for checks to ensure Roma children had access to school services, "since they are often kept out of compulsory education courses". The European Union also weighed in on the controversy. EU Commission spokesman Alexander Winterstein told journalists that "as a general rule, we cannot deport a European citizen based on ethnic criteria" Confronted with the backlash on Tuesday, Salvini sought to clarify his plans. "It is not our intention to record or take anyone's fingerprints," he said, according to a statement from his far-right League party. "Our goal is a recognition of the situation of Roma camps. We intend to protect thousands of children who are not allowed to attend school regularly." - 'Memories from 80 years ago' - Italy's Jewish community said the idea of a census drew parallels with measures targeting Jews under fascist war-time leader Benito Mussolini. The "announcement is worrying and evokes memories from just 80 years ago which are sadly increasingly forgotten," said community leader, Noemi Di Segni. Salvini already caused a diplomatic crisis with Italy's EU partners earlier this month when he barred a charity-operated rescue ship with 630 mostly African migrants from docking. He has also repeatedly taken aim at the Roma community, making promises to bulldoze Roma camps during his election campaign. His calls for a census also drew sharp criticism from Italian opposition centre-left Democratic Party (PD). "Yesterday refugees, today the Roma, tomorrow guns for everyone. It must be tiring being nasty," former premier Paolo Gentiloni tweeted on Monday. The PD's current leader Matteo Orfini tweeted: "If we really want to carry out the census, I would start with the census of racists and fascists. To better avoid them." According to a report by Association "21 Luglio," which works with the Roma community, there are between 120,000-180,000 Roma living across Italy. Salvini's popularity is on the rise, nevertheless. One opinion poll published by La7 TV channel on Monday put the League as Italy's leading political force for the first time ever, with 29.2 percent support, compared with its 17 percent share of the vote in the March election. The poll put Five Star narrowly in second place with 29 percent. France's Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday jumped to the aid of his core European partner, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is under mounting domestic pressure over the divisive issue of immigration. The French president said Paris and Berlin agreed that EU countries must be able to turn back at their borders all asylum seekers who previously registered in another member country, usually their Mediterranean first port of call. Merkel is under heavy pressure at home to quickly ink deals with heavily-burdened EU frontline states like Italy and Greece -- or risk a political crisis that could topple her government. After allowing in more than one million asylum seekers into Germany since 2015, sparking a strong xenophobic backlash, Merkel is now fighting for her political future. Her hardline interior minister Horst Seehofer on Monday gave her a two-week ultimatum to reach such deals, threatening he would otherwise defy her and shutter German borders to these migrants, a move that would likely end their coalition. Macron -- who has passionately called for bold EU reforms as his answer to populist, rightwing and eurosceptic forces -- has been at pains to work closely with Merkel, veteran leader of the bloc's biggest economy. Backing Merkel on the make-or-break migrant issue, he said France and Germany would seek agreements to ensure newcomers whose details were already in EU databases "can be taken back as quickly as possible to the country where they were registered". In a joint paper, they pledged to "jointly and resolutely tackle secondary movements inside the EU" and ensure "swift transfers" back where they first registered. - 'More solidarity' - As outspoken pro-Europeans, Merkel and Macron both face harsh opposition from nationalist and rightwing populist forces at home, and from the governments of Italy, Austria and several eastern European countries. The question of how many migrants the bloc can absorb came back to the fore last week when Italy and Malta both turned away a rescue vessel carrying 630 refugees, which was eventually accepted by Spain. After their joint cabinet meeting near Berlin, Macron called for a "more efficient system of solidarity and responsibility" on registering and distributing asylum seekers. Both vowed steps to better protect the EU's external borders by boosting the Frontex agency, fighting human traffickers and creating a fairer system of burden-sharing within the bloc. US President Donald Trump, who has taken a "zero tolerance" line on immigrants, this week weighed in on the European debate with angry tweets, charging Monday that due to the migrant influx, "the people of Germany are turning against their leadership". He doubled down Tuesday on his debunked claim that "crime in Germany is way up" due to the "big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!" At a joint news conference with Macron, Merkel calmly responded to Trump's latest tweet saying her government's statistics on crime, at its lowest level in years, "speak for themselves". - 'Moment of truth' - Both Merkel and Macron have stressed that, as Trump openly challenges the EU with a trade war as well as on security, immigration and climate policy, the bloc must learn to stand its ground on the world stage. In Tuesday's talks, they also proposed a joint budget for the 19-member eurozone and turning the European Stability Mechanism into a more potent firefighter for countries with serious debt problems, akin to a European IMF. Macron said Europe, with its rise in populist rightwing forces, faces "a moment of truth" and must seek common ground on migration as well as economic, political, financial, environmental and defence issues. He said the EU now faced a "civilisational choice" between those who would allow Europe to "unravel" and "those who believe, as we do, that we can move Europe forward by making it both more sovereign and united". Germany's Sueddeutsche newspaper praised the partnership, saying that "with unrest so rife across the EU, Europe can consider itself lucky if it is able to find any common ground at all". "In an unhinged world, France and Germany should be grateful for the ties which still bind them." North Korean leader Kim Jong Un briefed Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday about his historic summit with US President Donald Trump, a visit that underscores Beijing's efforts to remain at the centre of fast-moving nuclear diplomacy. Xi urged the US and North Korea to implement the agreements reached at the June 12 summit in Singapore, while Kim thanked Xi for his role in the diplomatic efforts, according to Chinese state media. Kim's third trip to China since March comes as Beijing tries to strengthen its role as a mediator between the US and the North, where it claims compelling security and economic interests. The North's leader, who is believed to have landed in the Chinese capital Tuesday morning, was greeted with a military honour guard at the ornate Great Hall of the People, as the Cold War-era allies repair ties that worsened when Pyongyang tested nuclear weapons and Beijing backed UN sanctions. Kim "felt thanks for and highly praised China's promotion of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula and its important role in protecting the peninsula's peace and stability," state broadcaster CCTV said. North Korea "hopes to work with China and other concerned parties to promote and establish a solid, long-lasting peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula and make joint efforts to achieve a lasting peace on the peninsula." For his part, Xi told Kim he "wants North Korea and the US to carry out the results of their leadership summit", the report said. Trump and Kim pledged in a joint summit statement to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula". In return, Trump made the shock announcement that he would stop joint military drills with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. The US and South Korean militaries confirmed Tuesday they have called off a major joint exercise. Kim told Xi his summit with Trump "achieved results that are in line with the interests of all parties and the expectations of the international communities," according to CCTV. "If the two parties can solidly implement the summit's consensus step by step, it will open a new, important phase of the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." The United States relies on China to enforce UN economic sanctions against the North, giving Beijing potential leverage in its looming trade war with Washington. "I think that North Korea can be another card Beijing can play to win leverage in negotiations with Washington," Yang Moo-jin, professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies, told AFP. Following the Singapore summit, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic restrictions. Wang Dong, an international relations expert at Peking University, said he expected Kim to ask China for help in easing the sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise. "The Chinese and North Korean leaders are carrying out consultations on how to jointly move the Korean nuclear issue forward," Wang said. China may not have been at the table in Singapore but it retains strong influence behind the scenes, Wang said. Tuesday's visit shows that "China is indispensable to the entire Korean nuclear issue," he said. - 'Differences ahead' - Trump had hailed Kim's denuclearisation pledge as a concession. But critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. It was urgent for Xi and Kim to discuss how North Korea would work towards meeting US demands, said Beijing-based international relations commentator Hua Po. "There may be differences ahead between the DPRK (North Korea) and the US in regards to denuclearisation, because the US wants irreversible and verifiable denuclearisation. It may be difficult for Kim Jong Un to accept," Hua told AFP. "Therefore, both China and the DPRK want to strengthen communication and form an overall strategy to deal with the United States going forward," Hua added. Analysts saw the summit outcome as a sign of China's influence. Beijing has repeatedly called for a "suspension for suspension" approach, under which the North would stop its nuclear and missile tests in exchange for the US and South Korea halting military exercises. Washington had previously rebuffed the proposal. Kim will be in Beijing through Wednesday, state media reported. His two previous trips to China, including his maiden official voyage abroad in March, had been kept secret until he returned home. "I think that China convinced North Korea that high-profile trips like this can no longer be kept secret for so long," said Yang, the Seoul analyst. "Also Kim Jong Un is seeking to establish this image as a normal leader of a normal country in the international community." jch-mis-ric-rld-dly-lth/sm FILE PHOTO: An aerial shot of Boracay Island taken during the Department of Agrarian Reforms (DAR) aerial inspection with members of the UNTV News Team MANILA, Philippines The Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) already submitted to the Office of the Cabinet Secretary its proposed guidelines in distributing Boracay lands to farmers. This will be calendared soon sa (at the) Cabinet meeting and this will be presented to the president for the specific recommendation of the executive order pertaining to Boracay alone. And with that we hope that we will be able to clear and have a specific guidelines on the way agrarian reform program in Boracay has to be implemented, said Department of Agrarian Reform Secretary Atty. John Castriciones. With this, Secretary Castriciones said the president might release this week an executive order to speed up the process of land reform in the island. Castriciones noted that the president wants to immediately distribute the land in Boracay which then warrants the removal of illegal structures built there. DAR is currently conducting surveys, inspections and farmer identification on the island. If there is no law giving justification on why they are allowed there, we will take measures to include those areas to be distributed to farmers, said the Agrarian Secretary. The government has estimated that 25 hectares of land may be distributed to members of the Ati tribe to improve their lives. Meanwhile, the DAR secretary revealed that the government is offering affordable housing units to farmers. The housing units can be bought at lower prices and are payable within 30-years with the help of other agencies like Pag-IBIG and Landbank. Around 2.8 million farmers are expected to benefit from the program. There are model houses in Bayumbong, Nueva Vizcaya, San Leonardo, Nueva Ecija, Argao, Cebu and Panabo City, Davao del Norte. Castriciones said farmers just need to show their proof of income from farming to avail of the said program. Cathy Maglalang The post Palace set to release EO for Boracay land reform program DAR appeared first on UNTV News. The Vatican's top investigator called Tuesday for justice for child sex abuse victims of Chile's Catholic Church as fresh cases involving pedophile priests came to light. Malta Archbishop Charles Scicluna spoke as he wound up a weeklong mission to Chile, where a child sex abuse scandal has rocked the Church. "Investigating is a duty of justice, we need to do justice to the victims for the good of the country and the good of the Church," Scicluna told reporters. Shortly before leaving Santiago airport, Scicluna testified as a witness in one of the sexual abuse cases being investigated by Chilean state authorities. It was Scicluna's second visit in four months to Chile in a scandal that has directly embroiled Pope Francis and led to the resignation of some 34 bishops, only three of which have been accepted by the pope. Several members of the Chilean church hierarchy are accused by victims of ignoring and covering up child abuse by Chilean pedophile priest Fernando Karadima during the 1980s and 1990s. Dioceses in the southern cities of Temuco and Aysen said four more priests were being investigated for the sexual abuse of minors. In a statement, Church authorities in Temuco reported that Pablo Isler Venegas was punished in 2015 for the sexual abuse of minors, and prohibited from publicly practicing as a priest or working with adolescents and young people. Scicluna told reporters that "recognizing and admitting the full truth, with all its painful repercussions and consequences, is the starting point for authentic healing, both for the victims and the author of the abuses." - Victim outreach - Scicluna and another papal envoy, Spanish priest Jordi Bertomeo, said they had taken testimony from sexual abuse victims during their stay, and set up a victim outreach or "listening service" to help others come forward. Francis's defense of one of the bishops at the heart of the scandal, Juan Barros, tainted his visit to the country earlier this year. At the time, the pontiff said he was convinced that Barros was innocent and demanded "proof" before he would speak out against him. Francis later apologized to the victims, three of whom he recently received at the Vatican, and admitted he had made "grave mistakes" after reading a 2,300-page report by Scicluna on the abuse in Chile. He accepted Barros's resignation last week. Crocodiles may be one of the deadliest hunters in the animal kingdom, but in a small village in Burkina Faso it is not unusual to see someone sitting atop one of the fearsome reptiles. People in Bazoule, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the capital Ouagadougou, share their pond with more than 100 of the razor-toothed creatures. "We got used to the crocodiles when we were young, swimming in the water with them and all that," said Pierre Kabore, just a few metres (yards) away from a crocodile feasting on chicken provided by the village. "Now we can always approach them and sit on them -- and if you have the courage, you can lie on them too. There's no problem, they are sacred crocodiles. They don't do anything to anyone." According to local legend, the startling relationship with the predators dates back to at least the 15th century. The village was in the grip of an agonising drought until the crocodiles led women to a hidden pond where the population could slake their thirst. "The villagers organised a party to celebrate and thank the reptiles," Kabore said. A celebration known as Koom Lakre is still held every year during which villagers make sacrifices and ask the animals to grant their wishes of health, prosperity and a good harvest. Far from being considered a threat, the crocodiles are deemed to have a mystical connection with Bazoule. "Crocodiles are represented as the soul of our ancestors and if one of them dies, they are buried and even given a funeral as if they were human," said Kabore. "When a misfortune is about to happen in the village, they cry out. Elders are charged with interpreting the cries, and then make wishes to ward off bad luck." - Tourism attraction - The unusual contact between man and croc has drawn disbelieving tourists to the village to see for themselves. On their arrival, travellers can buy a chicken which is hung on a stick by a guide and used to entice the crocodiles out of the pond so that visitors can pose with the creatures. "It was nice to watch from a distance but sitting on one was a bit freaky," said Thomas Baspin, a young Frenchman who came to visit his grandparents in Burkina Faso. "I'm glad I did it -- but I'm also glad it's over!" he quipped. Tourism has become a big money-spinner for the impoverished villagers, but a three-year-old jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso is taking its toll. Ouagadougou has come under attack three times, most recently in March, when jihadists attacked the military headquarters and French embassy. "We could have more than 10,000 visitors per year but at the moment, there's no more than 4,000 or 5,000," said Raphael Kabore, one of the guides. Global warming is also believed to be having an impact. Rainfall levels are down each year, and the famous pond that is the crocodiles' home is shrinking. When it disappears, will the reptiles once more guide their human friends to a new watery home? South Sudan President Salva Kiir will meet with rebel leader Riek Machar in Ethiopia's capital on Wednesday in their first face-to-face in nearly two years, an Ethiopian official said Tuesday. "The two principals will meet in Addis Ababa upon the invitation extended by his excellency, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed," Meles Alem, a spokesman for Ethiopia's foreign ministry, told AFP. South Sudan's ambassador to Ethiopia, James Pitia Morgan, confirmed Kiir's planned attendance, as did Manasseh Zindo, a senior official in Machar's SPLM-IO rebel group. The two leaders, whose political rivalry triggered the start of a civil war more than four years ago have not met since Machar and his forces were chased from the capital during fighting in July 2016. Successive international efforts -- led by regional bloc IGAD -- have so far failed to impose a functioning peace deal or meaningful ceasefire. Abiy "will call upon the two leaders to narrow their gap and work for the pacification of South Sudan," Meles said. Tens of thousands have died and nearly four million South Sudanese have been driven from their homes since December 2013, while millions are going hungry amid a massive humanitarian crisis. Last month the UN Security Council gave the warring sides a month to reach a peace deal or face sanctions. Nepali worker dies in gas cylinder explosion in South Korea A Nepali migrant worker has died in an industrial accident in Miryang (often spelled Milyang), in Gyeongsangnam-do Province in South Korea on Tuesday. Thailand has carried out its first execution since 2009, putting a 26-year-old convicted murderer to death by lethal injection in a move condemned by Amnesty International as "deplorable". Theerasak Longji was executed on Monday, six years after his conviction for stabbing a 17-year-old student 24 times to steal his mobile phone and wallet. The execution came as Thailand's coup leader-turned-premier Prayut Chan-O-Cha prepares to travel to Britain and France on a highly-publicised official visit. The trip may now see the former army chief face awkward questions over the use of the death penalty as well as Thailand's wider human rights record since he seized power in a 2014 coup. Prayut, however, defended capital punishment on Tuesday, telling reporters that in order to maintain peace and order in society, executions are "still a necessity and what people want". "There are many serious cases happening today," he said. The Department of Corrections, which oversees one of the world's highest incarceration rates, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935, the majority by shooting. That practice ended on December 11, 2003. Between then and 2009 a further six were executed by lethal injection. Monday's execution serves as a "lesson to deter those who wanted to commit serious crime", the department added in a statement. But rights groups and the United Nations hit out at the sudden resumption of the death penalty, which remains mandatory for a number of offences including aggravated murder. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Amnesty International said, accusing the kingdom of reneging on commitments to move towards abolition of the death penalty. Thailand was "also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment". Figures provided to Amnesty by the Ministry of Justice show 510 people including 94 women were on death row at the end of last year. Nearly 200 had exhausted all final appeals -- like Theerasak. As a last resort they can seek a pardon from Thailand's king. The death penalty is still in force in numerous countries in Asia and China remains the world's top executioner. The International Federation of Human Rights said Thailand would have become a "de facto abolitionist" had it not carried out any executions before August 24, 2019, 10 years after the last death sentences were carried out. About 10 protesters rallied on Tuesday afternoon outside the high-security prison in Bangkok where Theerasak was executed, holding placards that read "Execute Justice, Not People" and "Choose Humanity, Not Barbarity". The UN Human Rights Office for Southeast Asia said it "deeply regrets" the resumption of executions. Thailand's justice system has been criticised for favouring the wealthy and connected and is notoriously slow and harsh for poor suspects. In 2015 two Myanmar migrant workers were sentenced to death for the 2014 murder of two British backpackers, one of whom was raped, on the dive resort island of Koh Tao after a flawed police investigation. Their lawyer told AFP on Tuesday they were awaiting a ruling on their final appeal. By Ben Blanchard BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese President Xi Jinping offered high praise to visiting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday, lauding the "positive" outcome of his historic summit with U.S. President Donald Trump and promising unwavering friendship. Meeting Kim on his third trip to China this year, and just a week after Kim met Trump in Singapore on June 12, Xi said China was willing to keep playing a positive role to promote the peace process on the Korean peninsula. Kim's visit was the latest in a flurry of diplomatic contacts, and unlike during his previous two visits to China, the government announced his presence while he was in the country rather than waiting for him to leave. Xi told Kim he was very happy to see the "positive" outcome of his meeting with Trump, and the important consensus reached on denuclearisation and setting up a lasting peace mechanism, according to Chinese state television. "No matter the changes in the international and regional situation, China's party and government's resolute position on being dedicated to consolidating and developing Sino-North Korea relations will not change," the report cited Xi as saying. "The Chinese people's friendship for the North Korean people will not change, and China's support for socialist North Korea will not change," Xi added. Kim told Xi he hoped to work with China and other parties to push the peace process, Chinese state television said. Asked about Kim's latest Beijing visit, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said, "we are watching it closely". She said Washington was in continuing communication with the North Korea government and added: "We look forward to them following through on their commitments and agreements that they made last week at the summit." At the Singapore summit, the first meeting between a serving U.S. president and a North Korean leader, Kim reaffirmed a commitment to "work towards complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula", while Trump said he would end "provocative" joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises. Story continues Although Trump has hailed the Singapore summit as a success, sceptics have questioned whether he achieved anything new, given that Pyongyang, which has rejected unilateral nuclear disarmament, appeared to make no new concrete commitments. The United States has led an international sanctions drive to press North Korea to abandon development of nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States and Trump has expressed concern that China may be easing up on its enforcement of these steps. South Korea and the Pentagon announced they would halt the annual Ulchi Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August. At the summit, Trump also said North Korea had agreed to return remains of U.S. soldiers missing from the 1950-53 Korean War and U.S. officials said on Tuesday that that process could start within the next few days. While not formally billed as a state visit, China gave Kim most of the trappings of one, including a welcome ceremony with honour guard in Beijing's Great Hall of the People. Xi greeted Kim warmly, in images carried on state television. The two men were accompanied by their wives. Xi said he was pleased to see North Korea's decision to promote economic reforms, adding that China's own reform and opening up process had meant the Chinese people's eyes had been open to the world. North Korean state media had not mentioned Kim's visit by early evening. A Kim trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China is North Korea's most important diplomatic and economic backer but has been angered by its nuclear and missile tests. South Korea's foreign ministry spokesman said South Korea and China shared the strategic goal of completely denuclearising the Korean peninsula. "Our government hopes China will play a constructive role in resolving this problem," ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-deok told a regular briefing. "We hope Chairman Kim Jong Un's visit will contribute to that." 'DUAL SUSPENSION' China has welcomed the warming of ties between the United States and North Korea, and offered to help. It has been particularly pleased by Trump's decision to suspend military drills with South Korea. It has long proposed a "dual suspension", whereby North Korea stops weapons tests and the United States and South Korea stop military drills, to encourage talks. "South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August," South Korea's defence ministry said in a statement. The Pentagon confirmed the suspension, adding that the secretaries of defence and state as well as Trump's national security adviser would meet on the issue this week. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops joined the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than field exercises. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. The decision to halt military exercises in South Korea has bewildered many current and former U.S. defence officials, who only learnt about it when Trump announced it in Singapore, after the summit with Kim. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said there would be no changes to joint drill plans between the United States and Japan, both of which regularly practise to deter North Korea. "The United States is in a position to keep its commitment to its allied nations' defence and our understanding is there is no change to the U.S. commitment to the Japan-U.S. alliance and the structure of American troops stationed in Japan," Suga told a regular briefing. Japanese Minister of Defence Itsunori Onodera said the decision to suspend the U.S.-South Korean exercises was made to support the diplomatic effort between the United States and North Korea but added it was "important to be wary of North Korea actions". "Our view of the threat has not changed. Joint training is an important in maintaining peace and stability in the region," he said. (Reporting by Ben Blanchard in BEIJING and Christine Kim in SEOUL; Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom and Idrees Ali in WASHINGTON and Kaori Kaneko in TOKYO; Editing by Robert Birsel and James Dalgleish) Romania is a model for combating corruption in eastern Europe, a senior US official said Monday, as its left-wing government tries to dismiss the country's top graft fighter. "The US supports your anti-corruption institutions, through them you are a role model to the region," US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Wess Mitchell told a University of Bucharest audience. "You have made significant progress and now is not a moment in history when we would want to see Romania take a step back from there," Mitchell added. Romania's left-wing government has made fighting corruption a priority since taking office in January and it wants to sack the head of the anti-graft office Laura Codruta Kovesi for "harming the image of the country". In May, the constitutional court ordered President Klaus Iohannis to dismiss Kovesi. The centre-right opposition says such moves undermine anti-corruption efforts in a country were graft is endemic. Many judges have denounced what they say are politically motivated "attacks" against the judicial system by the left-wing government which has organised demonstrations against corruption. The high court of appeal is due to rule on Friday on the case of Liviu Dragnea, a leading left-wing figure, over a fake jobs scandal. We receive a lot of random emails on a regular basis but the one from Sergio Mejuta from Cream Prime ranks as one of the most unexpected yet. Cream Prime is a company based in the Basque Country who manufacture non-abrasive griptape branded as CreamGrip. Whilst their claim to be the first people manufacturing such a product is open to debate, (I remember earlier versions of this idea stretching back into the 1980s) what separates this brand from previous ones is their USP in so far as the Social Skate aspect of their business model. When you live in prosperous countries with easy access to skate product its easy to forget the struggle of those who love skateboarding but are not in a position to replace skate shoes every couple of months. In this context, non-abrasive griptape makes a lot of sense and thus, Cream Prime have an arrangement whereby they donate a sheet of their CreamGrip to an NGO working with skateboarding in a developing country for every sheet they sell. Currently they have a relationship with SkatePal, Megabi Skate (in Ethiopia) and the umbrella organisation Skate Aid. Part 1 Cream Prime in Tel Aviv and Ashdod, Israel This brings us nicely onto what youre looking at here, which is some coverage of their recent trip over to Israel and Palestine to skate and to meet up with the fantastic people working for the SkatePal NGO, based in Asira Al-Shamaliya, a village close to Nablus. Along with meeting up with the SkatePal heads, the CreamGrip crew, consisting of Julen Arizmendi, Sergio Mejuto, Aritz Irazoki, Hector Heredia and Javier Boes, hit up various skateparks across Israel, (including Ashdod park in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Jaffa and Jayyous) along with some street spots that they stumbled across. Julen Arizmendi Crailslide Skatepark of Galid, Tel Aviv. Photo: Jon Sanchez Perez Anyhow, thats the basics of the back story watch the videos and peep the photos, all courtesy of SlamFilms (AKA Jon Sanchez Perez) and take a wander over to their site to find out more at: Cream Prime. Hector Heredia ollie Ashdod. Photo: Jon Sanchez Perez Part 2 Tel Aviv Nepali worker dies in India A Nepali worker died after being hit by a rock at a road project site at Lipu-Lekh area in Uttarakhand, India, on Sunday. Oli visits China PMs visit to China is an ideal time to deepen Nepal-China engagement Bhattarai is a former ambassador and a faculty member at the Institute of Crisis Management Studies, Tribhuvan University. Wally Broeker: Father of Global Warming, in a Warning to his Granddaughter Posted on 19 June 2018 by greenman3610 This is a re-post from the Columbia University Earth Institute Wallace Broecker from Columbias Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is one of the worlds greatest living geoscientists. He discovered the global conveyor belt that connects the worlds oceans and can cause to abrupt climate change. His pioneering work on the carbon cycle and melting polar ice made him the grandfather of climate science. But to Anna Keyes, hes just Grampy. Growing up, Keyes didnt realize that her grandfather was something of a science celebrity. When youre a kid, you think everything in your life is the way it is for everyone, she says. I was like I have a scientist grandfather, no big deal. Shed seen photos of Broecker with Bill Clinton, and with the Pope, but the reality of her grandfathers importance didnt hit home until middle school, when she and her mother were flown to Rome to see him accept an award from the Italian president. Ive come to understand him differently over time, Keyes explains. The older I get, the more I appreciate being his grandchild. So, when she was in college and there was a contest about sustainability and combating climate change, she decided to interview her grandfather. The resulting video is posted on Keyes Vimeo page, and you can listen to the audio right here: Not only was this a conversation, but it was a collaboration, says Keyes. Science can be very academic or in a bubble, and there needs to be people to communicate science to an everyday person. It felt special to me to be able to bring my skill set to spread the word about his work. Keyes graduated college last year, and now works at the New York Transgender Advocacy Group and as a freelance filmmaker. Although her work doesnt usually focus on climate change, she hopes the video will open a few minds to the very real threat of climate change. She also hopes it will inspire others to use their skills in media and outreach to think about showing science through a new lens. Have you ever seen the crowd goin apeshit? Thats the musical question posed in Apeshit, the latest single from Beyonce and Jay-Z, who also released a lush Louvre-set video for the song over the weekend. But that prompts another question: Why do we say go apeshit to mean go crazy? As with other scatological expressions like shithole and shithouse, it can be a bit difficult to track the origins of any elaborations on shit, long a taboo term in print. But based on the historical evidence we can piece together, it looks like go ape was first popularized as American youth slang, conjuring the image of an apes out-of-control behavior, and this got embellished into go apeshit among Air Force pilots and other military men during the Korean War. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Go ape may have first caught on among students in the Southwest. A list of campus slang from the University of New Mexico appearing in a December 1951 article in the Albuquerque Journal gave he went ape as an example, glossed as to extremes. But the faddish younger set may have already been tiring of that expression. Two months earlier, in the Desert Sentinel of Desert Hot Springs, California, a high schooler named Jackie Darling wrote, I hear that the new by-word is Im going gorilla instead of Im going ape. (Jay-Z is, of course, up on this lingo too.) It looks like go ape was first popularized as American youth slang, and this got embellished into go apeshit among Air Force pilots and other military men during the Korean War. Still, go ape spread around the country in short order. In October 1952, the Daily Times of Davenport, Iowa, printed a letter to the editor from a student complaining that the newspaper betrayed a bias in favor of Dwight D. Eisenhower in that years presidential election. If you want to get your candidate Eisenhower into the White House by going ape all the way during the last days of campaigning, then do it in a more journalistic and ethical manner, the student wrote. Advertisement Meanwhile, more profane versions of the expression were catching on in the military. The earliest known example of go apeshit, as recorded by Jonathan Lighter in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, appeared in Troubling of a Star, a 1952 novel by Walt Sheldon set among Air Force personnel serving in the Korean War. One character says, What do I want to fight for? You going apeshit? From around the same time, Lighter also cites a songbook from the 41st Fighter Squadron, which flew air defense during the war: Theyll drive you ape shit, theyll drive you insane. Advertisement Of course, apeshit wasnt typically fit for print back then, so various euphemisms had to be enlisted instead. One popular substitution was ape-sweat. In the August 1954 issue of Argosy, Frank Harvey wrote an article entitled They Call It Ape-Sweat, about pilots serving in the remote Thule Air Base in Greenland, the U.S. militarys northernmost installation. Harvey followed that up in Flying magazine later that year, in which he explained how some of the troops at the base go ape-sweat: Advertisement Advertisement Ape sweat is a term which means the same as Glacier Goofy, Rock Happy or Snow Stupid. It simply means a guy has snapped his cap for some reason or other, usually because he got bad news from the girl friend. Another euphemism showed up in an August 1955 article in the Chicago Tribune about the crews working the arctic-defense perimeter at Thule and other bases. A first sergeant is quoted as saying that after a few months of serving, the men have a couple of weeks of going ape-nuts. Ape-nuts is particularly clever, as it manages to work in another American slang term for crazy. Nuts (or nutty) originally meant infatuated with someone or something before it took on more deranged connotations. Later in the 1950s, go bananas emerged as another member of this slang family, likely influenced by the earlier popularity of go ape. Advertisement Advertisement Go apeshit, as Beyonce and Jay-Z are well aware, is a far more intense expression of lack of control than the more innocuous go ape. For some, the phrase might bring to mind the image of a primate flinging its feces, but -shit is working as a more general intensifier here. As the lexicographer Kory Stamper wrote on the Strong Language blog (where I also contribute), go ape tends to imply a happy, usually harmless frenzy, whereas go apeshit almost always refers to violent or other ill-mannered explosions. The intensifying power of the -shit suffix can also be seen in batshit, which first referred to something worthless before embarking on the same crazy train as apeshit, most likely inspired by bats and batty in the mentally unstable sense (derived from the idea of someone having bats in the belfry). And when political strategist Rick Wilson said on MSNBC last year that Republicans were afraid of Donald Trump going crazy, you know, ripshit bonkers on them, his use of ripshit took advantage of -shit as an intensifier as well as the demented predecessors apeshit and batshit. Advertisement Advertisement Beyond all this, the Carters use of apeshit takes on additional resonances. In the song, Jay-Zs verse draws on other animalistic imagery, quoting a line from Faneto by the Chicago rapper Chief Keef: Im a gorilla in a fuckin coupe/ Finna pull up to the zoo. The conscious use of ape and gorilla reclaims terms that are too often used as racial slurs (as Roseanne Barr has recently reminded us). The songs evocation of the crowd goin apeshitespecially when juxtaposed with the staid, classical European art in the videois transgressive in more ways than one. Its a role like any other, a coat she puts on when necessary and sheds as soon as shes done, but she can see its working: the men trying for eye contact, checking the cleavage shes made sure to reveal, allowing just enough bounce in her girls to make it memorable. The women sizing up her entire five-foot-nine-inch frame with envy, from her knee-high chocolate leather boots to her flaming red hair, before checking their husbands to see what they think of the view. She will be memorable, no doubt, the tall, leggy, busty red-head hiding in plain sight. Advertisement So reads our introduction to one of the characters in The President Is Missing, the best-selling new novel co-written by James Patterson, the absurdly popular thriller writer, and Bill Clinton, the increasingly unpopular former president. Lest you think that these early pages of Chapter 3 (out of 129) are somehow a cherry-picked, uniquely revealing window into the psyche of the man who governed America for two terms in the 1990s, I can assure you that they are in fact representative of the entire book. By Chapter 3, the fictitious narrator-president has already undergone a partisan House hearing (Here I am. Just me. The President of the United States, facing a mob of accusers) from which he storms away ( This is over. Were done. I lash out and whack the microphone off the table. I knock over my chair as I get to my feet.), but not before uttering lines like, Im on the side of the American people, thats whose side Im on. The italics, here and throughout, belong to Clinton and Patterson; this is the sort of subTom Clancy thriller that simultaneously preaches a dreary populism and believes its readers are too stupid to understand dialogue that isnt enunciated on the page. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement But let us return to the passage above, which is notable in several ways, not the least of which is that the authors dont seem to know the meaning of the phrase hiding in plain sight. (The whole point of the passage is obviously that this woman is not trying to obscure herself at all.) No matter: Ask yourself if you find anything a tad strange about a president whose legacy is forever besmirched by sexual misbehavior referring to a womans breasts as her girls mere pages after penning a ridiculous fantasy version of himself saying all the things he dreamed of saying to Kenneth Starr and Newt Gingrichbut doing so not to defend himself from X-rated accusations, but rather in the service of protecting the homeland from dangerous foreign adversaries. Advertisement The parallels here are hard to ignoreand if you, a former president, opt to co-write a thriller starring a current president, you are shamelessly inviting them. Im lingering over the perpetually fascinating inner life of Bill Clinton because it is by far the most compelling aspect of The President Is Missing. Still, the reader should know that there are delights one can glimpse before even approaching the text itself. Those unaware of Patterson, for example, can turn to his bio on the book jacket, which informs us that He holds the Guinness World Record for the most #1 New York Times bestsellers. It continues: A tireless champion of the power of books and reading, Patterson created a new childrens book imprint, JIMMY Patterson, whose mission is simple: We want every kid who finishes a JIMMY book to say, PLEASE GIVE ME ANOTHER BOOK. The combination of crude sales figures and claims of charitable generosity is so fittingly Clinton-esque that my hopes were briefly raised about the duos potential to pull off an enjoyable page-turner. Advertisement Advertisement Alas, the quality of The President Is Missing is signaled almost immediately by the name of the title character: Jonathan Lincoln Duncan. (This book so warped my brain that it took me several minutes to recall that Clintons middle name is Jefferson.) Both men have a daughter. And, would you believe the circumstances of Duncans meeting his wife recall Bill and Hillarys courtship? Obviously, one should be careful not to project too much authorial autobiography onto a novels protagonist. But the parallels here are comically hard to ignoreand if you, a former president, opt to co-write a thriller starring a current president, you are shamelessly inviting them. Duncan, though, unlike Clinton, is basically a stick in the mud: deadly dull, humorless, and upright. Its depressing that Clintons idealized version of himself is a man who makes Jack Ryan seem like Jim Carrey, but at least it allows for passages like the following, ostensibly about the veep: It hasnt been easy being vice-president, though she is well aware that any number of people would trade places with her. But how many of those people came within a breath of winning the nomination only to see their dreams upended by a war hero with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of humor. (I like to envision this passage being written by an eager-to-please Patterson who nonetheless had to endure Clinton inserting the word rugged.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement But on to more serious matters: The United States is facing the risk of a gigantic cyberattack, and Duncanthe former war hero who was tortured while serving his countryis the only man who can stop it. Indeed, the plot requires him to go undercover to stop the dastardly plot being carried out by a smorgasbord of Americas enemies (terrorists, Russians, assassins of ambiguous origin). Although Clancy, that old reactionary, had a tendency to overstuff his narratives with mindless details and far too many villains, at least he kept his tales compelling enough thanks to his (never lightly worn) research into the national security world. The resulting jingoismwhich was toned down in the film versions of his bookswas often unseemly, but it rarely dragged. Clinton, who presumably knows a thing or two about the American national security apparatus, reveals nothing of interest about its workings. The book lacks even the tiniest insider-y details that one might naively presume were what made Patterson want to join forces with the former president. Advertisement Its depressing that Clintons idealized version of himself is a man who makes Jack Ryan seem like Jim Carrey. Regardless, its notable that these two men, respectively renowned for their powers of narration and oration, seem unable to overcome the challenge of composing good prose. Part of the problem is their fondness for mixed metaphors: One unfortunate character is forced to bite her tongue and accept her place as second fiddle. Even for a thriller, some passages are laughably overheated, especially when it comes to descriptions of women: A flutter runs through him. The sting of betrayal, Ninas betrayal. And loss, too. Perhaps even he didnt understand his feelings for her. Her evolutionary mind. Her hard, agile body. Her voracious appetite for exploration, in the world of cyberwarfare and in the bedroom. The hours and days and weeks they spent collaborating, challenging each other, feeding each other ideas, offering up and shooting down hypotheses, trials and errors, huddling before a laptop, theorizing over a glass of wine or naked in bed. Was the theorizing going on in the bed, too? Anyway, youve probably noticed that the book is written in the present tense, which tiresomely leads the authors to stress what characters are doing right now, at this exact moment, even when what they are doing is boring: I exhale and stretch my arms, letting out nervous energy. Theres no way Ill go back to sleep. Todays the day. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Still, while I have no idea who did the bulk of the writing, the one thing that simply cannot be kept off the page is Clintons ego. His resentmentstoward Republicans, toward the media, toward those who doubted himpop up constantly, even when President Duncan has more pressing business at hand. Where do they get this crap? he asks of the news coverage of his presidency at one point. I have to admit its sensational. And sensational sells over factual every day. This comes during a hilarious scene in which Duncan obsessively checks every channel to see how he is being talked about; remind you of anyone else? And then there is the weird digressionhow one wants to get Clinton away from his desk and onto the couchin which one characters career is revealed to have been nearly derailed simply because she called someone a cocksucker. Advertisement The only remaining point of interest is the books politics, which are fairly tame by genre standards but tend to insist that Americas problems can only be solved by a strong president with no interest in rules and regulations and niceties. (Hows that going for us?) Duncan is constantly fuming, for example, that Congress wants to know what his administrations anti-terror policy actually is, instead of just letting him go undercover and take care of the bad guys. Dirty Harry would have understood. Mixed in with this tough-guy posturing are some political clichesa safe and stable United States means a safe and stable Israelas well as a few less savory bits. Duncan goes on a brief rant against Islamophobia because the terrorist group hes battling is not composed of Muslim extremists. And yet, near the end of the book, with the president and the fictional Saudi leader lauding each others fortitude, we find the following exchange: Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement We have been successful in our interrogation of the subjects, says the king. The Saudis permit a little more leeway in their interrogation techniques than we do. Theyre talking? Of course, he says, as if it were obvious. and naturally we will make all this information available to you. I appreciate that. There is so something so classically Clintonian about going out of your way to be politically correct about the motivations of a terrorist group called The Sons of Jihad while simultaneously finding time to merrily report on Saudi Arabias torture of suspects. (The U.S.Saudi alliancefear notremains strong.) And yet the book has several moments that made me feel almost sad for Clinton. Your wife was right. You really are a shitty politician, a character tells Duncan. But she meant it as a compliment, he replies. Ah yes, the old Clinton dream of being seen as something, anything other than a natural-born political animal. And yet, hundreds of pages later, the books tacked-on epilogue begins: After the speech, my approval ratings rose from less than 30 percent to more than 80 percent I got some criticism for using the speech to advance my agenda, but I wanted Americans to know what I wanted to do for them and still leave plenty of opportunities for working with the other side. Advertisement Advertisement How can one not pity a poll-obsessed politicianand erstwhile political geniuswho writes a novel in which he is transformed into a brave war hero with everything going for him except political skill, but still feels the need to, on the third-to-last page, inform the exhausted reader that the American people love him after all? A part of Bill Clinton knows thathis perfectly OK presidency asidehe will be remembered for his sexual life and his charisma, and not much else. In response, he has co-written a book where he faces down terrorists, chews out the Russian ambassador in manly fashion, and is beloved for all the right reasons. Its enough to make Jefferson jealous. I heard the rumor throughout my time in the Florida panhandle. The panthers are coming back. Nearly extinct by the 1990s, the big cats have rebounded thanks to a successful breeding program and are pushing north again out of the Everglades. Anecdotes of huge paw prints and nighttime sightings have followed in their wake. Id hear neighbors speculate that state officials were downplaying the predators spread, for fear of jumpy citizens and trigger-happy cattle ranchers. But many residents know: The panthers are here again, stalking the subdivisions, skirting the edges of the visible, seen only in stray glimpses of an eye or the flickings of a yellowy tail. Advertisement That panther decorates the cover of Lauren Groffs new collection, Florida, and its resurgent spirit stalks through its pages. The stories have a nearly zoological fierceness. They contain a states worth of ways that human desires are baffled and broken apart. Sometimes that might be for the best: Those human desires led to the political and ecological disasters that also haunt this book. The expanding territory of predatory cats may be a welcome development after all. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Florida marks an expansion of territory for Groff too. Born in upstate New York, Groff kept to those general latitudes in her first three books. Her novel Fates and Furies included a foray to Florida, but this new collection is her deepest immersion in the state where she has lived with her family for well over a decade, in the inland city of Gainesville. Its a headlong plunge. Groff throws open the windows and turns off the A/C, mosquitoes and heatstroke be damned. In Eyewall, a woman rides out a hurricane with nothing but a few bottles of excellent wine. When its over, she finds that the storm had stripped the sheets like a good guest, and they had all blown away, save one, which hung pale and perfect over the mirror, saving myself from the sight of me (p. 99). Stepping outside in the post-storm humidity is like forcing my way through wet silk. But what matters is that shes still standing, and lives to see an altered world. Advertisement Advertisement Like Fates and Furies protagonist Mathilde, the narrator of Eyewall is in an impassioned argument with the men she has loveda debate over the wildly differing details of a life they barely seem to have shared. But the difference here is that all of the men are dead. They are chatty specters, stirred up by the storm and the bottles of Burgundy. A cheating husband, an expansive boyfriend, and a distant father all come in from the rain. But in the end, they cant help her, either to survive the storm or untangle her life. Theres no wisdom coming from you, she tells a carefree ghost as the wind howls. Everythings all right for the dead. Advertisement Advertisement Groffs fevered Florida erases the boundaries between dead and alive, waking and dreaming, as easily as a wave washing away a line in the sand. In The Midnight Zone, a character has an out-of-body experience in a cabin shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub (p. 68). Alone there with her two young sons, she knocks herself loopy in a fall off a stool. I felt the dissociation, a physical shifting, as if the best of me was detaching from my body and sitting down a few feet distant (p. 80). Her spirit then goes on a walk through the woods while her body remains in bed: Advertisement I wasnt in any single place. I was with the raccoonswith the red-winged hawk chicks breathing alone in the nest, with the armadillo forcing its armored body through the brush. I hadnt realized Id lost my sense of smell until it returned hungrily now; I could smell the worms tracing their paths under the pine needles and the mold breathing out new spores, shaken alive by the rain. Advertisement This is not fantasy or magic; it is a characters carefully documented experience, strange though it may seem. More than gators, more than rattlesnakes, this state of bemused dissociation is what defines Groffs Sunshine State. Her characters reality is as porous as the limestone underneath their feetand as anyone who has seen coverage of Florida sinkholes knows, that limestone can collapse. A midstorm visit from the dearly departed, a concussed communion with the pinewoods: These are precisely cataloged symptoms of simply being alive in an overwhelming landscape. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement What is Groffs aim, with this title? As a writer who grew up in Florida and lives here now, I felt vaguely nervous when I first heard the title of this collection. It sounded something like an intention to lasso and capture the whole of the state, a daunting goal for any writer, much less one raised up north. But as I read, I found that the book operates something like Christine Schutts feral 2003 novel, also named Floridaso much so that I wondered whether Groffs title was a kind of tribute. Throughout Schutts account of a particularly phantasmagoric childhood, the word Florida pierces through repeatedly like a ray of light. It comes to stand for hope, escape, a place with good health all the time where fruit fell in the meanest yard. Advertisement Of course, this place does not quite exist. Each writers book teaches us this painful fact. Far from making a triumphal claim on the territory, both Schutt and Groff seem to use Florida to invoke the whole array of hopes, dreams, Utopian delusions, and desperate plans that are forever being pinned on this state. And of course, the way that all these unrealities can go smash when exposed to the light. Advertisement Advertisement Groffs story Dogs Go Wolf is a staggering explication of that hard truth. Two young girls are spirited away to an island by a passel of indifferent adults, and then abandoned there. Alone with a dog, they watch Snow White on repeat until the generator runs out of gas. Then they are forced to scrounge for food and water. They paint each other with left-behind makeup. At one point, they eat cherry ChapStick. Advertisement Lacking food and pursued by a bad man, the sisters survive on stories. One panicked telling of Hansel and Gretel substitutes blue aquarium pebbles for breadcrumbs. Myths and fairy tales have preoccupied Groff since The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia, but her use of them here feels harder and truer than anything that has come before. In Arcadia, stories out of the Brothers Grimm were splendidly well-wrought objects of admiration; in Dogs Go Wolf, fairy tales are made out of dirt, grit, and blood. They are shaped by the desperate conditions of the girls lives. In that way, they are closer to the spirit of the Grimms than any faithful retelling. As Groff recently observed, the fairy tale is a survival tool, adapted to our specific predicaments. Fairy tales act as tiny inoculations against anxiety or terror: we are exposed to the worst scenarios and, through the pluck and intelligence of the protagonist, we are carried into a better life than before, she told the New Yorker. I believe that stories are the most powerful weapons we have. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement I looked into one of those panther sightings once. A neighbor up the road swore shed seen one the night before. Her yard abutted parkland. I looked around for tracks, but didnt find much. A dogs scrabbled paw prints, a bobcat at best. I remember the way the womans sister rolled her eyes at me behind her back. But my neighbor was insistent. The panther had passed there, right there. Long and yellowish and about yay high. Maybe it did, and maybe it didnt. She wasnt changing her story. And why should she? For her, the night was that much fiercer, and that much fuller. Groffs Florida may do the same thing for its readers: surprise and menace us, fascinate and sometimes frighten us, and leave the whole world fuller than it was before. Florida by Lauren Groff. Riverhead. Read all the pieces in the Slate Book Review. Six years ago, Jim Dalypresident of Focus on the Family, a nonprofit devoted to evangelical causesjoined a conservative Christian coalition calling for immigration reform that protects the unity of the immediate family. The time has come for Christians to lead on the issue, Daly wrote on Focus website at the time, in a post that called immigration reform a family issue. But as outrage mounts against the Trump administrations zero tolerance approach to families seeking asylum at the Southern border, Focus on the Family has attempted to steer clear of taking a position. The organizations Twitter account spent the weekend tweeting about Fathers Day, and the social issues page of its website has posts on the Masterpiece Cakeshop court decision and talking to your children about transgender issues. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement There are a number of people who work there who are outraged, said one former employee. The silence has been especially glaring because so many conservative Christian organizations and leaders see the situation at the border as a moral emergency. Groups including the Southern Baptist Convention and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have denounced the family-separation policy. Eight leaders of organizations including the National Association of Evangelicals and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities signed a letter on June 1 condemning the policy on the grounds that God has established the family as the fundamental building block of society. That letter was produced by the same group, the Evangelical Immigration Table, that produced the 2012 statement Daly signed. Though about 10,000 people have privately signed the June 1 statement after its release, according to the EIT, Daly was not among them. Advertisement The dissenters to the presidents new policy include Christians who share many of Focus values. On this issue, there is dissension in the ranks, one ex-employee told me. There are a number of people who work there who are outraged. On a press call on Monday hosted by the EIT, Focus former vice president of child advocacy, Kelly Rosati, condemned the policy in strong terms. We do not punish innocent children for the behaviors of their parents, she said. I happen to think their parents are heroic for risking everything to try to get them what we all want for our kids. But even if youre someone who doesnt happen to think that way, you can still raise your voice on behalf of the innocent children. (Rosati left Focus on the Family this year after 10 years.) Advertisement Advertisement In response to an interview request last week, a Focus on the Family representative initially sent a brief statement on behalf of Daly. Were mindful of the fact that children being separated from their parents can be harmful and traumatic, it read in part. Were following the current debate closely and awaiting the specifics of the proposed legislation intended to address these and other concerns related to immigration reform and border security. Advertisement The representative confirmed that Daly was waiting on legislation that the House of Representatives is expected to vote on later this week. When I checked in on Monday to see whether Daly had had a chance to review the legislation, I was told not to expect any further statements in the near future. But then, midday on Tuesday, the representative sent a longer statement that he said Daly would be posting online later. The post notes that seeing images of innocent, crying boys and girls in custody is enough to rip your heart out. But it also uses the crisis as a springboard to discuss issues more firmly in Focus stable of pet issues: Advertisement Over the weekend, on Fathers Day, Planned Parenthood tweeted the following: In our hearts and minds today: all of the fathers and parents who have been separated from their children at borders. Keep families together You deserve to be together regardless of immigration status. Keeping families together is reproductive justice. Are they serious? Surely, this is the height of hubris. Planned Parenthood permanently separates children from their parents each and every day by taking the life of a child, to the tune of over 300,000 innocent lives a year. In fact, the most dangerous place for a child to be is in the womb of a woman inside a Planned Parenthood clinic. Tragically, children arent just being separated from a parent at abortion clinics or the southern border. Each and every day, millions of kids in the United States are living without a parent because of divorce, abuse, criminal activity, opioid or alcohol addiction or any number of other conditions outside their control. It would be a good thing if the same degree of energy we see exhibited for the border crisis was applied to the domestic crisis surrounding the American family. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The post does not mention President Donald Trump and says the crisis has been years in the making, a complex consequence of bad policy, unenforced laws and an inability of politicians to make difficult and often unpopular decisions. Its only calls to action are to move beyond social media sound bites, to pray for American leaders, and for government officials to work together for a solution that preserves the integrity and sanctity of the family unit while also protecting our borders and assuring the safety of our citizens. Why would an organization whose mission is helping families thrive attempt to stay neutral on one of the most talked-about family-related policy issue of the moment? Conversations with former employees depict an organization beholden to a pool of donors that is white, suburban, aging, and loyally Republican. The donor base doesnt allow for the leadership to take a position on these really pivotal issues that could really truly propel the ministry forward, and show the world that we arent just this gay-hating organization, said another former employee. The donor base limits Focus ability to engage in conversations that could put people first and show the love of Christ in a more effective, compassionate way. (The former employees I spoke with requested anonymity either because they continue to contribute to Focus work or because they do not want to jeopardize their relationships there. These interviews took place before Daly released his second, longer statement.) Advertisement Advertisement Focus on the Family was founded in 1977 by psychologist James Dobson, a lion of the original religious right, which was nearly indistinguishable from the Republican Party. The Colorado-based organization has defined family issues broadly over the years, with resources devoted to abstinence, healthy marriages, and parenting, along with political and cultural issues like abortion, gambling, pornography, school choice, intelligent design, and opposition to same-sex marriage. Dobson, who also founded the Family Research Council, stepped down as president and CEO of Focus on the Family in 2003. He has become a firm defender of the president: In January, the now-82-year-old called for a day of fasting and prayer to support Trump and prevent his impeachment. Advertisement Advertisement When Daly became president of Focus on the Family in 2005, many observers saw him as a leader who could take the organization into the new millennium without compromising its core values. He loosened the dress code and said he would sit down with pro-choice activists who shared the goal of making abortion rare. He warned about the dangers of political polarization and of demonizing opponents, and emphasized the importance of civil discourse. In a 2011 Christianity Today cover story about Dalys leadership, he told reporter Sarah Pulliam Bailey that immigration is a family issue precisely because families could be separated. Advertisement Advertisement The next year, Daly signed the immigration reform statement issued by the EIT, which was widely discussed in the evangelical world at the time. (Back then, no one debated the line about protecting the unity of the immediate family; the statement was only controversial because of another item about immigrants path toward legal status.) The statement was not well-received by Focus donors, and discussion about the issue is now discouraged within Focus official publications. The first former employee I talked to described an erosion over time of Dalys intentionsor at least his abilityto be a new kind of leader: The people he has surrounded himself with in leadership were not on that page. A recent Focus resource guide to issues relating to the dignity and sanctity of every human life included a slim chapter on immigration and refugee issues but omitted any mention of the statement Daly signed. Advertisement That former employee describes the problem at Focus as something larger than deference to a graying donor base. Its a nationalist worldview, the ex-employee said. Its a worldview that has twisted politics and religion together for so long that they cant distinguish one from the other. Advertisement Advertisement Though many evangelical leaders, including Franklin Graham, have spoken up against family separation over the past few weeks, white evangelicals tend to be hawkish on immigration in general. A Washington PostABC poll in January found that 75 percent of white evangelicals said the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants is positive (compared with 46 percent of adults overall). But other polling shows a split between younger and older evangelicals on immigration policy, with younger evangelicals viewing immigration more warmly than their elders. Advertisement Several former Focus employees depicted Daly as struggling to straddle that gap while steering an organization with a $90 million budget that has faced several rounds of layoffs in the past decade. Having to maintain the loyalty of large donors has meant forgoing outreach to younger conservative Christians who are less loyal to the traditional Republican Party. Looking ahead, that makes the organizations weakness look like not just a moral error but a strategic one. [Daly] has been the president for 10 years and we havent seen a big course-correct, the second former employee said. A lot of these pivotal conversations that could have set Focus up to be a major leader with younger evangelicals going forward, theyve missed that ship. Theyre still on the dock. Pioneer neurosurgeon Dr Devkota no more Neurosurgeon Dr Upendra Devkota passed away at the Bansbari-based Neuro Hospital in Kathmandu on Monday. The criticism of the Trump administration policy separating migrant children from their parents at the border, which had been slowly building over the past weeks, blew up over the weekend, after Democratic lawmakers made a surprise visit to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center and after Rep. Beto ORourke of Texas led a march to a tent city for migrant children. Other reports surfaced of frightened and distressed children being held in cages. (The Trump administration has contested the use of the term, while admitting to it being technically correct.) And on Monday, protests of a speech by Jeff Sessions defending the policy led to conflicts with the police and several arrests, while outrage grew as we learned of Border Patrol agents joking about wailing children in their custody. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement As the critics called for Trump to end the practice, Trump, predictably, became defensive and agitated, falsely blaming Democrats for the policy and demanding Congress CHANGE THE LAWS! in a tweet on Monday. Trump, like some in his administration, has said that while he doesnt like that children are being separated from their parents, the policy is necessary to deter criminals. Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country, he said in a Monday tweet. Has anyone been looking at the Crime taking place south of the border. It is historic, with some countries the most dangerous places in the world. Not going to happen in the U.S. Advertisement A later, typo-ridden tweet from the president, after the policy came under further criticism: It is the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime. Tell them to start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration. Change the laws! But while some aides and Republican legislators have echoed Trump, there have also been Republicans willing to take a stand for what they consider a basic humanitarian issue. Here, broken down by level of conviction, is an updated list of both Democrats and Republicans who are on record for or against the zero-tolerance policy that breaks up families at the border: Advertisement Unapologetic Defense Jeff Sessions. The attorney general has not wavered in his defense of the policy, certain in his belief that only the migrant parents can be blamed for illegally crossing the border and choosing to bring their children into a situation in which they will be taken away. Advertisement He also cited the Bible in his defense. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order, he said. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful. Advertisement He has also maintained that the policy protects the country from gang violence. These are people, children, young people that came without adults and their parents. Coming through our borders. Which has led to a resurgence of the violent MS-13 gang terrorizing high schools and even middle schools in Maryland and Long Island. Sarah Huckabee Sanders: In a back-and-forth with reporters on Thursday, the White House press secretary said it was very biblical to enforce the law. Advertisement Ted Cruz: When you see reporters, when you see Democrats saying, Dont separate kids from their parents, what theyre really saying is dont arrest illegal aliens. It was later reported that Cruz was planning to introduce emergency legislation to keep the families together. (Update, June 19, 12:30 p.m.: Heres how Cruzs proposal would work.) Advertisement Steve Bannon: I dont think you have to justify it, he told ABC on Sunday. Fake News/Necessary Evil Defense Kirstjen Nielsen: The secretary of homeland security first argued that there was no policy that separated children from their parents. Later, she defended the policy, describing it as ugly but necessary to upholding the law. Ignoring the potential dangers of undocumented families was a luxury, she said. Advertisement Timid Partial Defense Melania Trump: Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform, her office said in a statement. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. Kellyanne Conway: As a mother, as a Catholic, as somebody who has a conscience I will tell you that nobody likes this policy, she told NBCs Meet the Press. Nobody likes seeing babies ripped from their mothers arms, from their mothers wombs, frankly, but we have to make sure that DHS laws are understood through the soundbite culture that we live in. Advertisement Advertisement Hesitant Condemnation Sens. Susan Collins and Jeff Flake: Collins and Flake sent a letter to Nielsen and the Health and Human Services Department asking for clarification about the situation. But Collins also told Face the Nation that separating children from their parents is traumatizing to the children who are innocent victims, and it is contrary to our values in this country. Advertisement Gentle Reprimand Mitt Romney: I agree that we need a more compassionate answer. Full-Throated Condemnation Laura Bush: I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel, the former first lady wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. She also compared the policy to Japanese internment during World War II. Advertisement Michael Hayden: The former CIA director tweeted a photo of the Birkenau concentration camp with the caption Other governments have separated mothers and children. He told CNN later that he was warning to be careful not to move in that direction, not comparing current Trump policies to the Holocaust. Sen. Ben Sasse: The Republican from Nebraska wrote in a lengthy Facebook post, Family separation is wicked. It is harmful to kids and absolutely should NOT be the default U.S. policy. Americans are better than this. He said he was working on a possible solution. Sen. Lindsey Graham: The Republican from South Carolina called on Trump to end the policy on an appearance on CNN. President Trump could stop this policy with a phone call, he said. Ill go tell him. If you dont like families being separated, you can tell DHS, Stop doing it. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Jeb Bush: Children shouldnt be used as a negotiating tool, Bush tweeted. [Trump] should end this heartless policy and Congress should get an immigration deal done that provides for asylum reform, border security and a path to citizenship for Dreamers. Advertisement Hillary Clinton: In a Twitter thread calling the family separations a humanitarian crisis, Clinton, perhaps responding to Sessions, quoted the Bible: Those who selectively use the Bible to justify this cruelty are ignoring a central tenet of Christianity, she wrote. Jesus said Suffer the little children unto me. He did not say let the children suffer. Sen. Kamala Harris: The California Democrat released a statement calling on Nielsen to resign. The government should be in the business of keeping families together, not tearing them apart, she said. And the government should have a commitment to transparency and accountability. Under Secretary Nielsens tenure, the Department of Homeland Security has a track record of neither. As a result, she must resign. Advertisement Anthony Scaramucci: The former White House communications director has been surprisingly vocal about the policy, which he has called inhumane and atrocious. He called for congressional immigration reform, but he also called the Trump administration out for inconsistent defenses made for the policy. You cant simultaneously argue that family separation isnt happening, that its being used as a deterrent, that the Bible justifies it and that its @TheDemocrats fault, he said on Twitter. [The president] is not being served well by his advisors on this issue. Advertisement John McCain: In a tweet, McCain called on the administration to undo the policy: The administrations current family separation policy is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded. The administration has the power to rescind this policy. It should do so now. Update, June 19 at 11:30 a.m.: The U.N. human rights chief, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, criticized the policy on Monday as unconscionable and compared it to child abuse. It was the latest point of tension surrounding the U.S. threat to withdraw from the Human Rights Council. You can call it a policy (Jeff Sessions) or you can call it a not-policy (Kirstjen Nielsen) or you can call it a law (Sarah Huckabee Sanders). You can say that yes its a policy but nobody likes it (Kellyanne Conway) or you can say its a zero-tolerance enforcement of a Democratic law (Donald Trump) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of an amalgam of various congressional laws (Nielsen) or a zero-tolerance enforcement of the Department of Justices own preferences with respect to enforcing prior laws (Sessions). Advertisement You can say the purpose of the Justice Departments family separation policy is deterrence (Stephen Miller, John Kelly) or you can claim that asking if the purpose of the policy is deterrence is offensive (Nielsen). You can claim in your legal pleadings that the family separation policy is wholly discretionary and thus unreviewable by any court, meaning that only the president can change it (Justice Department in Ms. L v. ICE). Or you can claim that only Congress can fix loopholes (Nielsen) or you can say that Congress as a whole cant fix anything because congressional Democrats are entirely to blame (Trump, Mike Huckabee). You can blame all this newfound loophole action on a consent decree from 1997 in a case called Flores (Sessions, Paul Ryan, Chuck Grassley) or on a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that interpreted Flores (Nielsen) or on a 2008 law called the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (Nielsen). Better yet, you can fault some magical mashup of the law that forces you to defend every statute to its most absurd extreme (Sanders). By this logic, you can also claim that Korematsuthe case authorizing the removal and detention of Japanese Americans during World War IIis still on the books and thus needs to be enforced because its also the law, but that would be insane. Oh, but wait. Trump proxies made that very claim during the campaign (Carl Higbie). Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement You can pretend that by turning every adult who crosses the border into a presumptive criminal your hands are tied, so you need to jail children to avoid jailing children (Nielsen). You can insist that the vast majority of children who cross the border are being smuggled in by gang members (Nielsen) or that all asylum-seekers are per se criminals (which they are not) or that lawful asylum-seekers should just come back at a better time (Nielsen). You can claim you never intended your policy (if it is in fact a policy) to have any impact on asylum-seekers at all (Nielsen) but of course it would turn out you were lying and this has been the plan all along (John Lafferty, Department of Homeland Security asylum division chief). Advertisement You can pretend that your hands are tied so you need to jail children to avoid jailing children. You can say the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sessions). You can say again, incredibly, that the Bible wants you to separate children from parents (Sanders). But that would be pathetic (Stephen Colbert). You can blame the press for the photographs they take (Nielsen) and for the photographs they dont take (Nielsen). You can suggest that the children in cages are not real children (not linking to Ann Coulter) or that the cages are not in fact cages (Steve Doocy) even though government officials admit that they are cages. You can claim that the detention facilities are summer camps or boarding schools (Laura Ingraham). You can take umbrage that the good people of DHS and CBP and ICE are being maligned (Nielsen). Advertisement You can say that separating children from their parents is a strategic move to force an agreement on Trumps wall, which would make the children purely instrumental (Trump). Or you could say that this is a way to protect children by deterring their parents, which would also make the children purely instrumental (Kelly). Or you can instead say you are protecting the children from all the harm that happens to children transported over borders by doing untold permanent damage to them as they scream in trauma (Nielsen). Because the best way to deter child abuse is through child abuse. Advertisement Advertisement You can fight to the death about comparisons to Nazis or you can celebrate a candidate (Corey Stewart) who is a hero to Nazis or you can merely show a staggering lack of comprehension about what Nazis actually did (Sessions). Advertisement You can fact check and fact check and fact check these claims and it wont matter that they are false. And the fact that nobody in this administration even bothers to coordinate their cover stories at this point reflects just how pointless it is to fact check them anyhow. Its an interactive game of choose your own logic, law, facts, and victims, but every single version of this story ends with screaming children in cages, sleeping under foil blankets as strangers change their diapers. The trick is twisting and dodging and weaving until you get to that final page. It is very sad (Melania Trump). Something should be done (Ted Cruz). If only there were some mechanism to stop torturing children. If only there were some way to stop litigating why were doing it and who is doing it and just stop doing it. The House of Representatives is expected to vote later this week on two Republican immigration bills, one of which is strictly conservative while the other is marginally less so. At the moment, it is not entirely clear that either can pass, that President Trump would sign the marginally less conservative one in the rare event it got that far, or that either will address the family-separation crisis in a humane or thorough fashion. The first bill, co-authored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, would allow undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children, and who are currently beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, to apply for renewable legal status, in exchange for full border-wall funding, sharp cuts to legal immigration, crackdowns on sanctuary cities, and so on. It wont pass. The compromise legislation, negotiated between conservative and moderate Republicans, offers a longer period of legal status to a wider pool of Dreamers and, eventually, a fighting chance at citizenship. It too funds the wall, eliminates the diversity visa lottery, cuts certain family-immigration visas, and heightens standards for asylum-seekers. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Neither bill does much to address the family-separation crisis on the border, which became the central flashpoint in the immigration debate over the weekend. House Speaker Paul Ryan last week told his conference that President Trump was excited about the possibility of signing the compromise bill, saying he had worked hand in glove with White House staff. When asked on Friday whether he would sign this more moderate proposal, though, President Trump said he certainly would not. House Republican leaders were planning to begin whipping support for the bill during a Friday morning vote series but called it off as they sought assurances from the White House. Unnamed White House officials quickly emerged to say that the president was confused, had misspokenperhaps triggered into defiance by the use of the word moderateand that he wholeheartedly supports the legislation. Well, unnamed White House officials say a lot of things. Members of the House Republican conference, who dont want to vote for a bill granting even one undocumented immigrant legal status without complete and consistent cover from the president, will want to hear it from the man himself. Theyll get their opportunity late Tuesday afternoon, when the president visits the Capitol to address a GOP conference. Advertisement Even if (as one expects) Trump tells them that he would sign the compromise legislation, members might already be too spooked to go forward with a difficult vote. The bill isnt going anywhere in the Senate, and Trump could just change his mind again. Its obvious enough that certain conservatives, who entertain the fantasy that the president killing the compromise bill might bring enough votes to the Goodlatte bill as the only alternative, have Trumps ear. Advertisement Neither bill does much to address the family-separation crisis on the border, which became the central flashpoint in the immigration debate over the weekend. Though House Republicans, in releasing their discussion draft of the compromise legislation last week, tried to portray it as putting an end to family separation, it doesnt. There is one line in the bill overruling the 1997 Flores settlement, which dictates the conditions under which children at the border can be detained: There exists no presumption that an alien child who is not an unaccompanied alien child should not be detained, and all such determinations shall be in the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security. Advertisement Advertisement Without addressing the administrations zero-tolerance policy itself, this just makes it easier to detain families indefinitely. As Voxs Dara Lind writes, It doesnt even specify that there are any additional conditions on how children can be detainedtheres nothing preventing the Trump administration from simply putting children in existing ICE detention centers for adults, rather than expanding detention centers designed for families. Even if the language is improved, though, theres growing discomfort from some Republicans on the Hill over the administrations strategy of using encaged babies whove been forcibly separated from their parents as leverage to secure hawkish immigration policies. As senior Michigan Rep. Fred Upton, for example, said in a statement, Its never acceptable to use kids as bargaining chips in political process. (Encaged babies are the second class of human beings that the administration has taken hostage in an effort to secure an immigration deal. Lets not lose sight that this entire legislative clown show began last year when Trump ended DACA.) Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, not known to be a warm and cuddly type, also came out against the White Houses rationale behind family separation on Monday. Advertisement Advertisement While I firmly support enforcing our immigration laws, I am against using parental separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration. My concern, first and foremost, is the protection of the children. Senator Pat Roberts (@SenPatRoberts) June 18, 2018 What theyre beginning to hint to the administration is that it needs to end the zero-tolerance policy for prosecuting undocumented immigrations because its killing them politically. Faced with deciding the most important partisan-gerrymandering cases in more than a decadeGill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamonethe U.S. Supreme Court decided on Monday not to decide. This was not a massive surprise after oral arguments in Benisek, the Maryland gerrymandering case that ostensibly gave SCOTUS an even cleaner vehicle than the already-sparkling-clean case it had before it in Gill. As Rick Hasen predicted after the Benisek arguments, a court looking for a reason to punt now had the capacity to punt. And so, cue the punting. Advertisement There will be a tremendous amount of focus in the days to come on Justice Anthony Kennedy, who, like Captain Ahab, has been on a hunt for his white whale of a justiciable political gerrymander for close to 15 years now. He will surely, even after this week, know it when he sees it. But the other theme that emerges from another punt in a landmark case is that the Supreme Court is now too frightened of public outcry to decide anything. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Voters will be more certain than ever that their votes dont matter and that the courts wont get involved. Recall that Chief Justice John Roberts fretted openly at oral arguments in Gill last October about the erosion of public confidence in the courts. As he explained it to Paul Smith, arguing for the challengers in the Wisconsin case, he didnt want the court to get involved in the conflict because We will have to decide in every case whether the Democrats win or the Republicans win. So its going to be a problem here across the board. And if youre the intelligent man on the street and the court issues a decision, and lets say, OK, the Democrats win, and that person will say, Well, why did the Democrats win? In case that wasnt entirely clear, he then added the following gloss: The intelligent man on the street is going to say thats a bunch of baloney. It must be because the Supreme Court preferred the Democrats over the Republicans. And thats going to come out one case after another as these cases are brought in every state. And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country. (And then he insulted Americas social scientists for good measure.) Advertisement Advertisement Many, many people, including the aggrieved social scientists, found this stated fear rather worrisome. As Jennifer Rubin put it at the time in the Washington Post, Especially for a conservative justice, where does it say in the Constitution that the court should ignore constitutional violations if it makes the court less respected by people who dont read opinions? This is an entirely illegitimate concern. But today I am thinking that one can draw a straight line between the chief justices concerns about judicial legitimacy and the attacks on the Supreme Court as a whole after Mitch McConnell saw fit to steal a seat. Advertisement After Justice Antonin Scalias death in 2016, just as Senate Republicans were inventing a justification for neither holding a hearing nor ever voting on anyone President Obama put forth for the Supreme Court, Sen. Chuck Grassley took to the Senate floor to berate Robertswho had voted twice to uphold Obamas Affordable Care Actfor his corrosive and unseemly politicization of the high court. In April 2016, after Merrick Garland had been selected for the vacancy at the court and blanked by Senate Republicans, Grassley lectured the chief justice for politicizing the confirmation process. Whats troubling is that a large segment of the population views the justices as political, Grassley said. And whose fault is that? The justices themselves have gotten political, he declared. And because the justices decisions are often political and transgress their constitutional role, the process becomes more political. Roberts, Grassley noted, is part of this problem. Grassley pointed out that his own constituents believe that the number of his votes have reflected political considerations, not legal ones, adding with a flourish, so, physician, heal thyself. Advertisement Advertisement In case his message wasnt crystal clear, Grassley then added a warning for Roberts to stay out of the public fight over the vacancy: Thats a political temptation that the chief justice should resist I cant think of anything any current justice could do to further damage respect for the court at this moment than to interject themselves into what [Vice President Joe] Biden called the political cauldron of an election-year Supreme Court vacancy. You may recall that the chief justice responded to this personal assault on his own integrity and that of the independent judiciary with a series of furious tweets, letters to the editor, and speeches. Nah, he did nothing of the sort. Like a good standard-bearer of an independent judiciary, he steered the court through two terms of relative quiet with narrow opinions and careful punts. Thus, he navigated the most polarizing presidential election in two decades without much denting of the bumpers. Advertisement Advertisement You can call it Mitch McConnells court now. Not only did he successfully persuade his country and his party that presidents of the opposing party may not appoint Supreme Court justices, he also continues to crow about how his politicization of that same Supreme Court remains his single most important achievement. And the corresponding (and perfectly rational) response from the court continues to be to shy away from anything that resembles partisanship. Advertisement In his opinion in Gill, the chief justice wrote that this is not the usual case. It concerns an unsettled kind of claim this Court has not agreed upon, the contours and justiciability of which are unresolved. That wishy-washiness all but forced Justice Elena Kagan to craft an even more perfect set of facts for the next challengers, in the hopes that maybe the court would someday resolve this. As Garrett Epps notes, the hot-button cases of the term are beginning to dissolve into a version of the refrain from Melvilles Bartleby the Scrivener, who, when asked to do one or another part of his job, was wont to reply, I would prefer not to. Advertisement What that suggests to me is that its precisely because the country is on fire, and we seem to be edging ever closer to a constitutional crisis, that the court will seek to preserve its own institutional legitimacy where it can. Thats totally rational, completely legitimate, and damnably terrifying. The court now joins the chorus of democratic institutions that fear using their own authority, and its precisely that fear that puts us in the most danger. Paul Smith, when questioned by the chief justice at oral arguments in Gill about why the court should rush into a pitched political battle, had a practical response that should not go unheeded. As Smith explained at the time, it would be just as risky for the court to stay neutral in the biggest voting case of the term as it would be to pick a side. It may be that you can protect the court from seeming political, Smith said, but the country is going to lose faith in democracy big time because voters are going to be like voters in Wisconsin (saying) It really doesnt matter whether I vote. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Nothing that happened today was neutral. Voters will be more certain than ever that their votes dont matter and that the courts wont get involved. More public confidence in the court nets out to less public confidence in the franchise. And as public confidence in everything thats supposed to matter at the Supreme Courttruth, decorum, fairness, equality, dignity, integrityis under attack, it must be tempting for the institution to save its powder for an enormous crisis. I hope the majority of the justices are correct, and that a better vehicle to protect the vote comes along soon, or that state Supreme Courts step in where the high court stands down. But saving your institutional powder as institutions crumble increasingly feels like a risky bet. More than 600 members of Jeff Sessions own religious denomination, the United Methodist Church, denounced him in a letter released Monday for enforcing the Trump administrations immigration policy. The letter was signed by clergy and church leadership as well as members around the world. The letter charges Sessions with child abuse, immorality, racial discrimination, and dissemination of doctrines contrary to the standards of doctrine of the United Methodist Church, including the misuse of Romans 13the Bible verse that Sessions quoted in a press conference last week in an attempt to justify the Trump administrations immigration policy. (That same Bible verse was also used in the 19th century to defend slavery.) Advertisement It also points to Sessions tremendous social/political power as well as his leading role as a Sunday school teacher, and calls for a reconciling process to help Sessions step back from his harmful actions and work to repair the damage he is currently causing. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Sessions is a lay member of Ashland Place United Methodist Church in Mobile, Alabama, and an active participant in Clarendon United Methodist Church in Arlington, Virginia, according to the letter. The public outcry comes in response to President Trumps zero tolerance policy on immigration. As attorney general, Sessions has been a key figure in enforcing the policy, announcing that the Department of Justice would pursue criminal prosecution for all adults attempting to illegally cross the border, which has resulted in border agents separating children from their parents. Advertisement Its not the first time that the United Methodist Church has spoken out against the Trump administration policy of separating families at the border. The churchs Council of Bishops publicly denounced the policy on June 7, joining other faith organizations. That statement said, As we continue to serve and love our neighbor, we pray for the children and families that will suffer due to this policy and urge the Administration to stop their policy of separating families. The United Methodist Church has about 7 million lay members and 44,000 clergy members in the United States, according to its website. Trump has deflected blame to Democrats and said that only Congress can resolve the issuein spite of the fact that the separations are not mandated by law but rather by the Trump administrations decision to prosecute as many immigrants as possible for illegally crossing the border. The policy has sparked a backlash from several members of Congress, including Republicans. Its not the first time that church and state have clashed in recent months. In April, House chaplain Father Patrick Conroy was asked to resign after delivering a prayer for the poor that criticized the GOP tax bill. (He was reinstated the following month, after retracting his resignation letter and gaining the support of House members.) But religious organizations have also faced criticism for their complicity with the Trump administration and its policies, particularly white evangelical churches. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobachs signature voter-suppression initiative received a likely fatal drubbing on Monday when U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson permanently invalidated the law in a comprehensive and exasperated 118-page ruling. Robinsons decision is remarkable for a number of reasons: It definitively debunks Kobachs allegations of widespread noncitizen voting in Kansas, dismantles the claims of expert voter fraud alarmists like Hans von Spakovsky, and orders Kobach himself to attend extra continuing legal education to redress his egregious misunderstanding of civil procedure and the rules of evidence. Advertisement A little-noted aspect of Mondays opinion, however, may prove to be even more consequential than this factual shellacking. Robinson did not only hold that Kansas proof-of-citizenship measure runs afoul of the National Voter Registration Act; she used the extensive findings gathered at trial to hold that it also violates the U.S. Constitution. Kobach has long hoped to amend the NVRA to permit proof-of-citizenship laws like Kansas. Now, thanks to Robinson, even if Congress did change the statute to his liking, he could not legally implement his pet initiative. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Mondays decision in Fish v. Kobach turns primarily on the proper interpretation of the NVRA. The law allows states to demand only the minimum amount of information necessary when registering voters, and allows states to require that all voters attest to their American citizenship under penalty of perjury. In 2016, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Kansas may go further and require proof of citizenship only if it can demonstrate that a substantial number of noncitizens have successfully registered notwithstanding the citizenship oath. So Robinson conducted a bench trial to give Kobach an opportunity to prove the existence of substantial noncitizen registration. Advertisement In an extraordinarily ill-advised move, Kobach decided to represent himself at trial. He quickly broke countless rules of evidence and civil procedure, prompting Robinson to deliver multiple lectures from the bench on basic trial procedure. Even worse, he called experts whose ostensible proof of voter fraud rested on flawed methodology, flagrant bias, and guesswork. They embarrassed themselves and Kobach with their flailing performances, unintentionally revealing the absurdity of their own claims. Shortly after the trial ended, Robinson held Kobach in contempt of court for disregarding her previous orders and then trying to throw his staff under the bus. (He had already been fined $1,000 for earlier misrepresentation to the court.) Advertisement The whole fiasco was a profound humiliation for Kobach and his allies. But through it all, the secretary of state hinted that he had a backup plan: If the courts agreed that Kansas could not demand proof of citizenship under the NVRA, Kobach would simply persuade Congress to amend the NVRA. In fact, he had long intended to pursue this goal. When Kobach met with Donald Trump after the 2016 election, he carried a paper into his meeting that mentioned altering the NVRA. (He later lied about the papers content to conceal his scheme; thats what prompted the $1,000 fine.) Kobach also sent an email to the Trump transition team a day after the election explaining that he would draft amendments to the NVRA to make clear that proof of citizenship requirements are permitted. Had Robinson merely ruled that the Kansas law violated the NVRA, Kobach would have mounted a crusade to gut the federal statute through an amendment. Advertisement Advertisement Robinson did, of course, find that Kansas proof-of-citizenship law ran afoul of the NVRA, since Kobach could not prove that a substantial number of noncitizens had registered to vote before its implementation. But she also gathered so much evidence about the measures impact that she decided to address the constitutional claims, as well. Because the case was so easily resolved on statutory grounds, without resort to the 14th Amendments Equal Protection Clause, this move was unusual and unexpected. Yet Robinson felt she had enough information to adjudicate the issue, so she forged ahead. Advertisement To gauge the constitutionality of a restriction on voting, courts must balance the character and magnitude of the injury against a states justifications for the burden. They must also determine the legitimacy of the states justification and consider the extent to which its really necessary. Advertisement Kobachs law, Robinson noted, placed an extraordinary burden on the right to vote. During the three years it was in effect, more than 30,000 people were disenfranchised, and the state did little to help them regain their right to vote. To the contrary, it forced them to track down and pay for a birth certificate that might be in another statethen, if they couldnt find it, to plead with the State Election Board to let them vote again. Yet Kansas proffered no proof that this massive burden is necessary in the slightest, as it put forth no evidence of significant voter fraud or noncitizen registration. Based on this record, Robinson wrote, the magnitude of the burden on unregistered eligible Kansas voters cannot be justified by the state interests relied on by defendant. Thus, the law infringes upon voters equal protection rights. Advertisement There is an excellent chance that, on this extensive record, the 10th Circuit will once again decline to second-guess Robinson and affirm her ruling. And, contra Kobachs fantasies of a Supreme Court showdown, it seems unlikely that the justices would wish to wade into this toxically political dispute. In all, the odds are good that Robinsons decision will remain the law in Kansas. That means that even if Kobach succeeds in his quest to amend the NVRA, Kansas will not be able to re-enact a proof-of-citizenship requirement. Kobachs worst-case-scenario, in other words, has come trueand he has nobody but himself to blame. The secretary of state fought this case all the way to the bitter end, dead set on using it as a vehicle to prove the existence of rampant voter fraud. Instead, he gave Robinson all the proof she needed to determine that Kansas law is unconstitutional. No one, it seems, is better at undermining Kobachs asinine voter suppression tactics than Kris Kobach himself. ProPublica published an audio recording taken inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility last week that shows just how terrified and desperate the young children separated from their families are. In the recording, which ProPublica says was of roughly 10 Central American children dealing with border patrol and consular officials, you can hear young children weeping and crying out Mami and Papa over and over again. At one point, a Border Patrol agent interjects. Well, we have an orchestra here, he said. Whats missing is a conductor. Advertisement The recording was taken secretly last week inside the detention facility. Press access to detention centers has been tightly managed, and access to detaineesyoung and oldhas been pretty much nonexistent. The fact that the recording is not part of a choreographed effort by the U.S. government to make its treatment of young children forcibly separated from their parents somehow seem more palatable makes the recording that much more powerful. It is the most truthful depiction yet of what its like for the separated children; it is also a mirror being held up to the face of American society. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. The individual passed the recording along to a prominent civil rights attorney who has lived and worked on immigration issues for decades in the Rio Grande Valley. Heres what the person who took the recording said about the circumstances that the tape comes from: Advertisement The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable. Later in the recording, a 6-year-old Salvadoran girl tells a consular official that she had memorized her aunts number and begs her to call her and have her come pick her up. ProPublica called the number and spoke to the aunt after she had spoken to her niece. The aunt came to the U.S. two years ago and is seeking asylum with her 9-year-old daughter to escape gang violence at home. It was the hardest moment in my life, the aunt said of the call. Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. Shes crying and begging me to go get her. She says, I promise Ill behave, but please get me out of here. Im all alone. Last month, during a roundtable conversation on immigration, President Trump decried the animals entering the United States. We have people coming into the country, or trying to come inand were stopping a lot of thembut were taking people out of the country. You wouldnt believe how bad these people are, he told a group of California sheriffs. These arent people. These are animals. Critics accused the president of dehumanizing immigrants, while his conservative defenders accused major news outlets of taking Trump out of context, claiming he was referring specifically to MS-13 gang members. Both sides dug in, and the fight eventually ended in a draw, as new controversies overtook the news cycle. Advertisement But if Trumps meaning was debatable then, its certainly clear now, as the president defends his commitment to separating immigrants families at the Southern border and refuses to budge in the face of broad criticism and condemnation. The animal comments help explain his core beliefs, which his recent remarks make crystal clear: President Trump sees all Hispanic immigrantsand not just MS-13as animals threatening the cultural and racial integrity of the United States. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement It was always clear Trump would lean on racism to try to win the midterms. Whats now apparent is the shape and scope of that appeal. News outletsand liberal criticswere right to tie his animal comments to a broader attack on undocumented immigrants. That was the context then, and Trump continues to use dehumanizing language now, casting all immigrants as bent on crime and violence, likening their presence to an infestation of the United States. Democrats are the problem. They dont care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13, the president declared on Tuesday. They cant win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters! Advertisement Those comments echoed a Monday-morning rant, in which Trump railed against Democrats for their alleged silence on crime and gangs, tying both to immigrants: Why dont the Democrats give us the votes to fix the worlds worst immigration laws? Where is the outcry for the killings and crime being caused by gangs and thugs, including MS-13, coming into our country illegally? Later, he attacked German Chancellor Angela Merkels policy on refugees, falsely blaming migrants for a purported rise in crime, before going on a racist rant against asylum-seekers during a White House event to announce a new space force. The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee-holding facility. It wont be, he said, adding a country without borders is not a country at all and blaming immigrants for death and destruction. They could be murderers and thieves and so much else. Advertisement Advertisement This will only get worse as November approaches and the president fights to hold a Republican majority in Congress. To energize its voters, the White House plans a campaign of vicious demagoguery. People dont turn out to say thank you, said political adviser Corey Lewandowski to the New York Times, If you want to get people motivated, youve got to give them a reason to vote. Saying build the wall and stop illegals from coming in and killing American citizens gives them an important issue. Part of the strategy involves additional crackdowns on immigrants, to demonstrate the administrations commitment to these draconian policies. Advertisement In the meantime, conservative media has embraced the overt racism and dehumanization of the administration, from downplaying the cruelty of the child detention campsSome have referred to them as cages, but they built walls out of chain-link fences, said Steve Doocy of Fox & Friendsto championing a white-nationalist message. They care far more about foreigners than about their own people, said Tucker Carlson on his own Fox show, blasting the ruling class for its opposition to family separation. Advertisement While some Republicans have backed away from the policy, others have charged in defense, adopting Trumps language and rhetoric. Dems Keep Families Together Act is better called the Child Trafficking Encouragement Act, declared Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton on Twitter, spinning a fantasy that falsely casts asylum-seekers as dangerous criminals. Show up at border with a minor & call him your child, then you get released into the US! Children will be abducted & sold to drug cartels & slave-traders as a free ticket into US. It was always clear Trump would lean on racism to try to win the midterms. Whats now apparent is the shape and scope of that appeal. In 2015, when he kicked off his campaign by calling immigrants rapists and drug dealers, Trump also tried to give himself a sheen of plausible deniability: Some, I assume, are good people. But in 2018, he intends an unvarnished message of brutality and dehumanization; a white-supremacy campaign for the 21st century. Stephen Miller has always liked to provoke. Before he was a White House adviser, Miller was a teenage provocateur devoting his time and talents to trolling his ideological foes. He brought that same ethos to the Trump administration, delighting in the outrage accompanying his travel ban and his push against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, indifferent to the human cost of his favored policies. The trouble for Millerand the White Houseis that amoral trolling is not good politics. The outrage to Millers policies does not dissipate like the anger around his college newspaper columns; it becomes critical fuel for action and opposition. The response to the travel banmass protests and organized legal actionhelped crystallize early opposition to the administration, dealing it a major political blow and ending whatever honeymoon it enjoyed with the public. The DACA crisis spawned by Miller has split conservatives in Congress and could cost some moderate Republicans their seats come November. Trumps new zero tolerance approach to border crossingsin which immigration agents separate parents from their children and treat asylum-seekers as criminals may win Miller some plaudits from conservative pundits, but it too is a fundamentally rotten policy that is likely to backfire on the administration. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The zero-tolerance policy, crafted by Miller, is meant to provoke; to send the administrations opponents into a spiral of anger and outrage. By that measure, it has been a success. The policy has sparked protests across the country and vocal condemnation from a variety of civil groups and religious figures, including Franklin Graham, a prominent Trump supporter. Its disgraceful, and its terrible to see families ripped apart, and I dont support that one bit, he said. Amoral trolling is not good politics. Images from the borderof young children in pens, of panicked parents desperate to see their sons and daughtershave only heightened that opposition. One former shelter worker recounted prison-like conditions as well as children running away, screaming, throwing furniture and attempting suicide, while the Associated Press reported on an old warehouse where hundreds of children wait in cages. These stories underscore the incredible cruelty of this project, driven less by the demands of the lawthe decision to charge all border-crossers with illegal entry and subject them to a criminal process is discretionaryand more by President Trumps stated aim of reducing immigration to the United States from shithole countries. Advertisement Democrats have gone on the attack, blasting the administration and highlighting the conditions of migrant children at detention centers across the country. What the administration is doing is, theyre using the grief, the tears, the pain of these kids as mortar to build their wall, said Rep. Adam Schiff on NBCs Meet the Press. Its an effort to extort a bill to their liking in the Congress. At a Border Patrol processing center in McAllen, Texas, former San Antonio Mayor Julian Castrowho served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Obamajoined protesters in condemning family separation. It amounts essentially to state-sponsored child abuse that is traumatizing young children by taking them away from their parents, not letting them know when theyre going to see their parents again, keeping them in conditions that we wouldnt want any of our children in, he said. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Early polling shows the public does not support the administrations draconian policy. According to a recent poll by Ipsos and the Daily Beast, just 27 percent of Americans agreedand 56 percent disagreedthat it is appropriate to separate undocumented immigrant parents from their children when they cross the border in order to discourage others from crossing the border illegally. Likewise, in a new poll from Quinnipiac University, just 27 percent of Americans approve of the policy, while 67 percent disapprove. And while roughly half of Republicans approve46 percent and 55 percent in the respective surveysthose are low numbers for a policy backed by the Republican president. And those numbers may get worse as coverage and criticism intensifies. Advertisement This dramatic and unprecedented unpopularity may explain why the administration has struggled to craft a coherent line on whether it is responsible for the policy. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Miller defend it outright. Illegal entry into the United States is a crimeas it should be. Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution, said Sessions, bolstering his case with Scripture and echoing antebellum slaveholders in the process. No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement, Miller said to the New York Times. It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. By contrast, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced there was no policy of separating families at the border over the weekend, before switching gears and defending the policy outright. We will not apologize for doing the job that the American people expect us to do, she said on Monday. Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Trump simply blames Democrats, attributing family separation to pre-existing laws that dont actually exist. It is the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime, the president said Monday on Twitter. Tell them to start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration. Change the laws! The common thread among each administration official is that they have grossly mischaracterized the situation at the border, hoping to justify their actions by portraying asylum-seekers as vectors of criminality, when they have a legal right to seek asylum, and when their offenses are only misdemeanors. Theyve gotten scant support from fellow Republicans, who seem to see political danger, if not the moral challenge at hand. The President should immediately end this family separation policy, said Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska in a Facebook post, calling the policy wicked and correctly framing it as a new, discretionary choice. Many Republicans rightfully fear a backlash at the polls, should the policy continue. Stephen Miller may have successfully trolled his opposition, but like the attempted Muslim ban, his weapon of choice is a moral travesty and a political disaster in the making. Instead of bolstering his boss, it may weigh him down with another crisis, jeopardizing his partys hold on Congress and the administrations ability to operate with impunity. On Monday, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz announced his plan to introduce a bill to keep illegal immigrant families together pending their asylum claims. Perhaps spooked by the response Beto ORourkehis Democratic opponent in Novembers Senate racereceived after organizing a march to protest a new tent city being erected for migrant children, Cruz now insists hes concerned for the welfare of the thousands of children currently being held captive in the state he represents. Cruzs proposal, however, will do little to improve those childrens welfare. Instead, it will keep families detained without limitation while undercutting their ability to retain attorneys or adequately prepare asylum claims. Advertisement Cruz says that the ironically named Protect Kids and Parents Act would mandate that illegal immigrant families must be kept together absent a threat of harm to the children. In order to keep those families together, Cruz would authorize the construction of multiple new family detention centers where children would be imprisoned alongside their families as they await asylum hearings. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The idea of family detention is not new. The Obama administration used multiple so-called family detention centers to house women and children in places like Dilley, Texas. These facilities, which are still in use today, house families behind barbed wire in rural areas far from legal assistance. Pro bono providers have stepped up to try to help families navigate the system, but the conditions are punishing. Women and children held in family detention often lack basic medical care, legal services, and schooling. Advertisement Legal and medical experts have long criticized family detention centers on the grounds that they are dangerous, inhumane, and limit the ability of families to prepare their cases for asylum in the United States. Immigrants who are able to prepare their immigration cases outside of detention have the opportunity to find counsel, gather documents, and steel themselves for the emotionally punishing hearing process. Those inside detention have access only to legal providers who serve that detention center, who are often few and far between, and detained families are frequently unable to gather pertinent evidence for their cases from behind bars. Health advocates have decried family detention centers as causing post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems. Cruzs bill would allow for seemingly unlimited expansion of these types of facilities. Advertisement Advertisement Additionally, because of the negative effects of detention on children, the federal government is currently bound by a 1997 agreement known as the Flores settlement. The Flores settlement requires the government to release undocumented children as soon as possible rather than keeping them in detention until their immigration hearings. Cruzs proposed bill risks running afoul of this agreement, which Republicans have previously referred to as a loophole that encourages unauthorized immigration. The only way, it seems, that Cruzs legislation wouldnt violate Flores is if it includes a provision that eliminates the need to comply with the settlement altogether. Advertisement Whats most disturbing about Cruzs proposal is that hes using outrage about family separation to attempt to further dismantle our asylum system. His proposed bill would require that asylum cases be heard within 14 days. While Cruz frames this expedited timetable as a way to limit the amount of time families spend detained in the new temporary detention facilities his bill would authorize, the imposition of such a time frame would be an incredibly sinister move. Even the most competent attorney needs weeks to prepare a robust asylum case. The court filings alone regularly number in the thousands of pages, and attorneys need time to gather evidence and documents from the clients country of origin. And that is only once an attorney has been retained. Clients who are held in detention centers regularly fight their asylum cases pro se, with only the help of often-outdated legal materials that are available only in English. Advertisement Advertisement The practical effect of Cruzs bill would be a system where families are detained, held in deplorable conditions that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars per year to maintain, and deported after they are unable to develop robust asylum cases in a mere 14 days. Of course, his 14-day processing deadline doesnt account for the nearly 300,000 pending asylum cases that have yet to be adjudicated. Cruzs bill does propose doubling the number of immigration judges to 750 but fails to explain how these new positions would be filled. If the administration were able to find hundreds of new judges, they likely wouldnt be impartial; the Department of Justice has been accused of discriminating on the basis of political or ideological affiliation in hiring new immigration judges. Advertisement There is one other curious omission in Cruzs proposed bill. The Trump administration has explained family separation as a consequence of the criminal prosecution of parents who enter the country without authorization. Children cannot remain with their parents during the criminal process and any subsequent jail sentence. Cruzs bill seems to not address this at all, leaving the question open: What will happen to these kids as their parents go through criminal hearings and potentially serve time behind bars under Attorney General Jeff Sessions zero tolerance policy? Advertisement Advertisement Ted Cruz hasnt suddenly grown a heart. His proposed bill is an attempt to convert nationwide disgust with family separation into dangerous, anti-immigrant legislation. If Cruz were really concerned with the welfare of children separated from their parents, he wouldnt have a problem crossing the aisle to support Dianne Feinsteins proposed bill, which would limit family separation without allowing for the detention and deportation of entire families without due process. Instead, hes trying to undercut the already-scant legal protections currently in place for detained children and asylum-seekers. We should all be desperate to find a quick solution to the horror of child separation at the border, but Cruzs bill is no solution at all. Rather, its a cynical ploy, one that uses vulnerable children as a bargaining chip. 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. In a defensive and rambling speech in which the president was clearly venting frustration over the rising tide of bipartisan outrage over the policy that separates migrant families, Donald Trump told an audience of small-business owners a series of falsehoods and dramatic, fear-mongering warnings as he doubled down on his now familiar justifications for child separation. While reserving blame for the Democrats (who, he said, support open borders because they consider MS-13 gang members future Democrat voters and who forced this outcome by building loopholes in the immigration laws) and Mexico (They do nothing for us), Trump still seemed to take some ownership of the policy, justifying it as a necessary step in protecting the border. When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally, which should happen, you have to take the children away, he said. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement President Trump: We want to solve family separation. I dont want children taken away from parents, and when you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally which should happen you have to take the children away. https://t.co/KtOSwpYQIS pic.twitter.com/dH8qySE0IG CNN (@CNN) June 19, 2018 The speech, delivered to the National Federation of Independent Businesses on Tuesday, dealt much more with immigration than with small-business issues, as Trump has appeared to become increasingly agitated in the face of both Democrats and Republicans calling his administrations policy cruel and inhumane. Advertisement But the president did deliver a strange set of remarks about trade and tariffs, with a warning to Canada that its tariffs are too high, meaning were treated horribly. He shared a strange example: The tariffs to get common items back into Canada are so high that they have to smuggle them in. They buy shoes, then they wear them. They scuff them up. They make them sound old or look old. Advertisement Its unclear where he pulled this anecdote from. He concluded, No, we have to change our ways. We can no longer be the stupid country. We want to be the smart country. But the presidents most inflammatory statements came when he spoke about Central American migrants, who, in one of his more fearmongering speeches, he described as violent people, often either bringing gang violence to the country or trafficking children. Some highlights from the speech: Advertisement Advertisement People that come in violate the law, they endanger their children in the process, and frankly, they endanger all of our children. You see what happens with MS-13 where your sons and daughters are attacked violently. Kids that never even heard of such a thing are being attacked violently. Not with guns but with knives because its much more painful. And remember, these countries that we give tremendous foreign aid to in many cases, they send these people up, and theyre not sending their finest. Does that sound familiar? Remember I made that speech and I was badly criticized? Oh, thats so terrible what he said. It turned out I was 100 percent right. Thats why I got elected. Advertisement Advertisement Trump also cited some false or misleading facts in his speech to bolster his anti-immigrant views, including his assertion that since Germany began accepting a large number of refugees, the countrys crime has increased by 10 percent. Germanys crime levels are actually at a 25-year low. Trump also portrayed migrants as savvy and able to hire lawyers who tell them exactly what to say to be released, allowing them to leave and never return for their court date. In reality, many asylum-seekers are left to navigate the asylum process without the help of any legal counsel, and a significant percentage do return for their hearing. And he rambled about the large number of judges they want at the border. Its unclear who he was saying wanted thousands and thousands of judges, though Ted Cruz has said he would increase the number of judges in his proposed immigration plan. Advertisement And he finally made a promise that he would withhold aid from the migrants home countries: Hundreds of millions of dollars we give to some of these countries, and they send them up. Well, Im going to go very shortly for authorization that when countries abuse us by sending their people up not their best were not going to give any more aid to those countries. Why the hell should we? Advertisement Advertisement And for a little personal color in his attack on Democrats, who, he said, did a terrible job of letting people know what they stood for, he said his opposing party united around an anti-Trump message which, essentially, was too mean. I used to go home, I started disliking myself, he said. Its true. I said, man, am I that bad? Advertisement Trump also hit some of his other traditional points. He boasted about the economy. He bragged about his election, a beautiful thing. And he threw in accusations that the fake news media were actively aiding criminals: They are helping these smugglers and these traffickers like nobody would believe, he said. They know it, they know exactly what theyre doing, and it should be stopped. The U.S. plans to announce its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council today, according to Reuters. Its certainly interesting timing, coming just a day after the U.N. human rights chief, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, slammed the Trump administrations policy of separating migrant parents from their children as unconscionable. But the move has been expected for some time now and has more to do with the United States pushing back against U.N. criticism of Israel. Advertisement U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley told the council a year ago that the U.S. would leave unless its chronic anti-Israel bias was addressed. Haley has also been pushing for reforms that would make it easier to kick egregious rights abusers off the council. The U.S. previously boycotted the council for similar reasons under the George W. Bush administration before rejoining under Barack Obama. The Trump administration has now made it a practice to withdraw from U.N. organizations it sees as having an anti-Israel bias. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement The Human Rights Council is certainly not above reproach. While its members are, in theory, required to uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights and a few countries have been blocked, the membership system has allowed the likes of Burundi, Cuba, Togo, and Saudi Arabia to join. (That system is based on regional blocs, making it easy to circumvent a full vote on admittance.) Advertisement While human rights criticism of Israels occupation of the Palestinian territories is certainly warranted, its ridiculous that of all the worlds conflicts and human rights violations, this is the only one for which the council has a permanent standing agenda item. Of course, like the rest of the U.N., the councils priorities reflect those of its member governments. As human rights groups have argued, it would be more productive for the U.S. to stay and advocate for reforms than just take its ball and go home. Plus, with the Trump administration under fire, at home and abroad, for egregious human rights abuses at its Southern border and with the president saying he wants Americans to sit up at attention like they do in North Korea, the U.S. clearly is not the most credible voice for reform on this issue at the moment. On Monday, Sen. Kamala Harris called on Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to resign, saying she had misled the public about the Trump administrations apparent practice of splitting up families at the border. Harris cited a tweet from over the weekend in which Nielsen said that the government had no such policy. We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period. Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen (@SecNielsen) June 17, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Harris might confused about what Nielsen meant here because over the past few days, a number administration officialsincluding Nielsen herselfhave said different things about the apparent practice. In an interview published with the New York Times on Saturday, Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said that separating families was a simple decision and necessary to send the message that no one is exempt from immigration law. Last week, Jeff Sessions cited a bible verse famously used to justify slavery to defend the apparent current practice. Trump had previouslyand untruthfullyblamed Democrats for the apparent practice, but on Monday he seemed to at least acknowledge that the administration had some part in it, citing his desire to prevent the U.S. from becoming like Europe as part of his rationale. Advertisement The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 We dont want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country. Has anyone been looking at the Crime taking place south of the border. It is historic, with some countries the most dangerous places in the world. Not going to happen in the U.S. Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 Advertisement CHANGE THE LAWS! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 Advertisement It is the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime. Tell them to start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration. Change the laws! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Chief of Staff John Kelly as recently as last month, meanwhile, described the practice as a deterrent. Advertisement On Monday, Nielsen herself seemed to acknowledge some sort of policy that led to the separation of parents from children. We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are in fact a family, she said. We have to do our job, we will not apologize for doing our job. As former White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci said on Monday, these seemingly contradictory messages make the administrations position difficult to decipher: You cant simultaneously argue that family separation isnt happening, that its being used as a deterrent, that the Bible justifies it and that its @TheDemocrats fault. @POTUS is not being served well by his advisors on this issue. Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) June 18, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Theres likely a reason, though, why Nielsen has insisted categorically that no such policy exists. That reason is that such a policy would almost certainly violate the due process clause of the Constitution. In rejecting the governments request to dismiss an ACLU lawsuit challenging the practice earlier this month, District Court Judge Dana Sabraw opined that a policy of indefinite family separation would be brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency and a clear violation of the constitutional right to family integrity. The judge, who is yet to rule on the merits of whether or not child separation is actually in fact whats taking place, applied that logic equally to asylum seekers who have presented themselves lawfully at a port of entry and those who have been prosecuted for illegal entry and served their time. Those who had applied for asylum at a port of entry and saw their children taken away without any apparent lawful basis, as well as asylum seekers who had seen their children separated lawfully while they were detained for immigration offenses and had served their sentences were on equal footing for purposes of pursuing [a] due process claim, the judge ruled. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement That means the judge has written that indefinite child separation of asylum seekerseven in cases where a parent had been convicted of illegal entrywould be unconstitutional if it were happening. So in order to keep the practice going, the government has to deny publicly that it is in fact happening, as Nielsen did over the weekend. As my colleague Mark Joseph Stern noted last week, in that failed motion to dismiss the due process grounds of the ACLU lawsuit, the government acknowledged it was making the choice to separate families, justifying it as an unreviewable discretionary decision. In that legal brief, the Department of Justice argued it was in its discretion to both indefinitely separate parents who had been convicted of the crime of illegal entry and those who had lawfully sought asylum by presenting their family at a port of entry. ICEs discretionary [] decision to detain an alien in a particular facility is not judicially reviewable, the government argued. This is essentially an acknowledgment that the decision to hold families separately is a choice that Donald Trumps government is making. Advertisement Evidence is piling up of what that looks like in practice. The ACLU lawsuit is full of declarations, including from parents who presented themselves lawfully at a U.S. port of entry, describing child separation. On Monday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein reported that 2,342 children had been separated from their parents at the border between May 5 and June 9. The Washington Examiner reported thatincluding children who arrived at the border by themselvesthe administration could be holding 30,000 undocumented immigrant children by August. And for those who are willing to allow themselves to experience what child separation sounds like in practice, ProPublica has published an audio recording of one such separation taken from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility. New research showing that certain women with early-stage breast cancer may be able to skip chemotherapy has created understandable excitement: Avoiding the side effects of chemotherapy without compromising ones prognosis is highly appealing for women diagnosed with this difficult disease. Interestingly, such an approach would have been of little surprise to a group of largely forgotten 20th-century physicians who vehemently argued that breast cancers had distinctive biologies and therefore needed different treatments. It is worth revisiting the recommendations of these pioneering clinicians, and the scorn they received, as we incorporate this new research into daily clinical practice. Advertisement The treatment of choice for breast cancer in the early 1900s was the radical mastectomy, popularized by Johns Hopkins University surgeon William Halsted. The operation, which involved the removal of the affected breast, nearby lymph nodes, and both chest-wall muscles on the side of the cancer, was drastic, but it was believed to be the only chance that a woman could survive. In some instances, aggressive radiation therapy was added to the surgery to try to kill additional cancer cells. (Chemotherapy did not become widely available until the 1970s.) Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement This treatment of breast cancer was uniform, but certain physicians began to do research suggesting that not all cases of the disease were the same. For example, a 1925 study by Boston surgeon Robert B. Greenough identified three different types of cancers under the microscope: those of low, medium, and high malignancy. Whereas 68 percent of those with low malignancy survived five years, none of those with high malignancy survived. Medium malignancy gave an intermediate survival rate of 33 percent. Advertisement The postWorld War II era was the beginning of the modern war on cancer, and only the most aggressive therapies seemed able to obliterate the enemy of cancer, much as the Allies had outfought their opponents. But it was not until the 1950s that a group of physicians, loosely unified under the name biological predeterminists, began to argue that treatment of the disease should reflect its microscopic characteristics and its apparent spread. The term biological predeterminism was likely coined by an iconoclastic Los Angeles physician named Ian MacDonald who had trained in pathology, radiotherapy, and surgery. In a 1951 paper, MacDonald argued that full-scale surgery and radiotherapy did not make sense either for cancers that looked nonaggressive (and would likely not metastasize) or very aggressive (and would likely be lethal regardless of the treatment). Rigid ideas of prognosis in terms of duration and dimension, MacDonald wrote, should be abandoned in favor of an attempt to evaluate the biological potential of a neoplasm in an individual host. Advertisement Advertisement Ironically, MacDonald, who was a visionary in the world of breast cancer, firmly rejected the idea that cigarettes caused lung cancer and continued to smoke. He died in 1968 from a fire started by a cigarette. Adding to MacDonalds work was research by New York pathologist Maurice M. Black. Focusing on the nuclear grade of cancer cells, Black argued that microscopic examination of breast cancers revealed their biology and could be used to guide treatment. Even more notably, in retrospect, was Blacks suggestion that findings on microscopic exams could also reveal how well a womans own body was fighting her breast cancer, a concept that foreshadowed modern cancer immunotherapy. Advertisement Fellow physicians often reacted to MacDonald, Black, and the other predeterminists with disdain. The postWorld War II era was the beginning of the modern war on cancer, and only the most aggressive therapies seemed able to obliterate the enemy of cancer, much as the Allies had outfought their opponents. One breast specialist noted that the best surgeons had a sharp knife, a stout heart, and unquenchable optimism. Advertisement In this climate, those emphasizing biologyand the notion that many women could safely skip radical mastectomy in favor of smaller operationswere criticized as nihilists. Therapeutic defeatism, dismissingly wrote one set of authors in 1957, is the fashion. The following year, another group of physicians argued that the focus on biology was confusing and demoralizing to young physicians beginning their careers. Privately, many surgeons believed that the predeterminists, with their overemphasis on biology and statistics, were killing women. Advertisement In retrospect, of course, the predeterminists largely had it right. What modern research has confirmed is that breast (and other) cancers have a distinctive genetic makeup that helps to determine their biological potential. As Maurice Black suspected, knowledge of this biology can help guide treatments, making them more aggressive when necessary and milder when warranted. Advertisement Invoking biology to guide cancer prognosis and treatment is no longer heretical. The New England Journal of Medicine study cited above indicates that as many as 70 percent of patients with early-stage breast cancer do not need chemotherapyand there has been no apparent backlash by the oncologists who administer these drugs, nor by the companies that make them. But dont think for a moment that the current culture of cancer is so different from the 1950s. Despite many an article and book bemoaning our overuse of the war metaphor, women with breast cancer are still often referred to as courageous soldiers fighting their disease, even though this mindset harms the very women attempting to navigate their diagnoses. It is the challenge of modern clinicians and patients to work together to process and incorporate the radically new approach to breast-cancer treatment that theseand likely futurestudies portend. Biology may be key, but we still must process it as a society. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been advising employees to look out for turncoats in their ranks, according to emails obtained by CNBC. In a company-wide email Musk sent on Sunday night, he claimed that he had recently learned of an employee who had conducted quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations. The employee allegedly used fake usernames to make direct coding changes to the companys manufacturing operating system and sent large quantities of confidential data to third parties. Advertisement Even though the saboteur claimed that he was simply upset that he had not received a promotion, Musk indicated that there will be a further investigation into whether he had any accomplices or was colluding with external organizations. The CEO then ran through a list of enemies who want Tesla to die, such as Wall Street short-sellers, who have already lost billions of dollars and oil & gas companies. He also suggested that big gas/diesel car company competitors may be particularly willing to resort to underhanded tactics. As Musk wrote, If theyre willing to cheat so much about emissions, maybe theyre willing to cheat in other ways? Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Musk sent another email to all Tesla employees on Monday regarding a strange incident that was hard to explain. On Sunday night there had been a small fire on one of the production lines in its Fremont factory that held up manufacturing for several hours, but did not result in any injuries or critical damage to the equipment. As CNBC has reported, the factorys paint shop has seen at least four fires since 2014, yet Musk floated the possibility that an arsonists might have been behind this most recent fire. He wrote in the email, Could just be a random event, but as [former Intel CEO] Andy Grove said, Only the paranoid survive. Advertisement At the end of both emails, Musk urges employees to be on the lookout for evidence of sabotage or negligence, and to report suspicious activity to management. Tesla has recently been under immense pressure to streamline production of the Model 3 sedan, which has experienced repeated delays over the last year. Musk told investors during Teslas annual shareholder meeting in early June that the company is on track to become profitable in the third quarter, but that likely will only happen if it is able to ramp up operations to produce 5,000 Model 3s per week, a target that its factory has missed in the past. The battleground over health care has moved out of the national sphere and into state politics. Trump administration policies have rolled back consumer protections from the Affordable Care Act, including the repeal of the individual mandate through tax reform and the decision to permit insurers to offer deregulated, short-term insurance plans. This only furthers the trend set in motion after the 2012 Supreme Court decision that led to some states refusing to expand Medicaid, creating a patchwork of health care systems, neatly divided by state borders. Advertisement States continue to change their models: On May 30, Virginia became the 33rd state to pass Medicaid expansion through the state Legislature, and New Jersey became the second state, after Massachusetts, to adopt an individual health insurance mandate, which it did as a countermeasure to the repeal of the federal mandate. At the same time, Iowa is pushing forward on a plan to allow its Farm Bureau to sell skimpy non-insurance insurance plans to Iowans. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A paper published in March comparing U.S. health care spending with other high-income countries put the growing health care gap between states into context. Researchers from Harvard and the London School of Economics wrote: The life expectancy of Minnesota, a state comparable in size & demographics to Sweden or Denmark, has more similar population health outcomes to these countries than Minnesota has in comparison to Mississippi. Advertisement Recent federal rollbacks, and the subsequent response by states, have amplified these divisions in access, affordability, and coverage of health insurance between red and blue states. Blue states are creating their own laws to both expand coverage and serve as stopgap measures to block Trump administration moves from destabilizing their own individual insurance markets. Red states, on the other hand, are falling in line with federal positions on health care policy that would both limit access to Medicaid and erode risk sharing, leaving sicker patients to pay higher premiums. Recent federal rollbacks, and the subsequent response by states, have amplified these divisions in access, affordability, and coverage of health insurance between red and blue states. Two Trump administration moves spurred the widening health care divide between red and blue America. In December, Congress passed tax cuts that repealed the federal individual mandate for health insurance, which previously helped distribute risk in the individual market by requiring all Americans to buy health insurance. In February, the Trump administration proposed extending the duration of short-term insurance plans to 364 days. These plans are usually meant as a temporary measure for those between jobs and dont need to comply with ACA regulations, meaning they can offer high deductibles with barebones benefits and deny coverage to patients with pre-existing conditions. Both these measures could lead to an insurance death spiral. Young, healthy people will either buy skimpy, short-term insurance plans that come with cheaper premiums or forgo coverage altogether. Older and sicker people will be more concentrated in ACA marketplace plans and, because they are costlier to insurers, will face higher premiums. As premiums rise year over year, more individuals will be priced out of the market and lose health insurance until only the sickest remain. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Blue states immediately fought back. Following in the footsteps of New Jersey and Massachusetts, states like Maryland are considering imposing statewide individual mandates. Other states, including California, Illinois, and Washington, have either limited the duration of short-term insurance plans or banned them outright. After the federal reinsurance program ended in 2016, Alaska, Oregon, and Minnesota created their own reinsurance initiatives to bring down premiums for their residents. The reinsurance program in Minnesota has been so successful that, in contrast with the rest of the country, insurers in the state are seeking to decrease their premiums next year. Medicaid expansion in Virginia is simply waiting for the governors signature. Even Utah and Idaho, solid red states, are putting Medicaid expansion on the ballot. Advertisement In addition to balancing pushback from federal policy changes, some states are actively working to expand access to health care. Policymakers in New Mexico and Illinois are looking into proposals for a statewide public option to compete with private plans on the exchanges. California has begun inching toward proposals akin to single payer, including all-payer rate setting, which would set a single, fixed price that every private insurer pays for any given medical service. As blue states are building their own path toward universal coverage, red states have remained on course with the Trump administration, imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients and deregulating insurance markets. To date, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, has approved waivers for instituting work and reporting requirements for Medicaid beneficiaries from four states: Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, and New Hampshire. At least 10 other states are considering similar waivers for their respective Medicaid programs. These reporting requirements could place an additional burden on Medicaid recipients, many of whom are often switching between jobs and homes, and cause them to lose coverage even if they are compliant. Advertisement Advertisement Idaho and Iowa have gone even further. In January, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter signed an executive order allowing state health insurers to skirt key ACA consumer protections. People on these plans could be charged more for their or their familys medical history, could hit an annual cap for medical benefits, and can be denied benefits altogether for not maintaining continuous coverage, all limitations that were banned by the ACA. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Idahos largest insurer, announced five new insurance plans that dont comply with ACA regulations shortly thereafter. CMS subsequently sent Idaho an enforcement letter barring the move. Advertisement While Idahos bill was dead on arrival, Iowa is trying to carve a loophole to escape oversight from federal agencies. The Iowa bill states that the new coverage provided by the Farm Bureau would not technically be defined as health insurance, and thus not be regulated by Iowas insurance commissioner or federal insurance regulations. It has been two months since Iowa passed the law, but theres been no response nor repercussion from the federal government. Other states, such as North Carolina, have begun to follow in Iowas footsteps, writing legal loopholes to skirt federal law. These policies could lead to the very same insurance death spirals that blue states are actively working to avoid. All of this is to say that the health care gap between red and blue states is widening. People move for jobs, education, and family. They rarely move for affordable health care. But with health insurance premiums set to significantly rise again this fall, the compounding of state and federal action could make otherwise exceptional stories about moving for affordable care more commonplace. Artificial Intelligence is already delivering a real value for businesses. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being implemented across all industries dramatically increasing human productivity and it will continue to transform the global economic and social ecosystems. Will Slovakia stay at the forefront of a technology that will shape the future of everyone? AI is rapidly moving from the laboratory into business and consumer applications. AI is forecast to contribute 16 trillion USD to the global economy and boost global GDP by 26% by 2030 and is poised to have a transformative effect on consumers, enterprises, and governments around the world, quotes Todd Bradshaw, President of AmCham Slovakia and CEO of PwC from the PwC 2018 AI. According to Peter Kolesar, member of the AmCham Slovakia Board of Directors and CEO of Neulogy, Venture Capital investors worldwide already put $11 billion into AI and machine learning companies in 2017. OECD governments to absorb - and exploit - the innovative potential of AI Just recently, a Google CEO presented a new Google Assistant powered by Duplex Artificial Intelligence Technology, making lifelike phone calls. Those of you, who have seen and heard the phone calls, where the other side could not distinguish human from a chatbot - you either considered it amazing or scary. No matter what your position is, it is certainly transformative. However, AI is much more than chatbots. The technology is transforming the entire industries from robotics and medical imaging to marketing, commerce, finance and, of course, IT & manufacturing, adds Peter Kolesar. On May 15, 2018 American Chamber of Commerce in Slovakia (AmCham Slovakia) with its main partners Adient, IBM, Accenture and Microsoft and in cooperation with the Deputy Prime Minister Office for Investments and Informatization of the Slovak Republic and the Representation of the European Commission in Slovakia organized a conference on AI and Data Science. Many national and international experts discussed the key challenges in using the potential of Artificial Intelligence for the benefit of the Slovak economy and society. Several of AmCham Slovakia members are at the forefront of AI research and are investing in technologies that will transform peoples lives. AmCham Slovakia, within the newly formed AI-SK Platform (Artificial Intelligence Platform in Slovakia) cooperates closely with experts from the business, academia and government in order to define a common path forward to accelerate the growth of knowledge and technologies in the field of AI. In the last ten years, Artificial Intelligence has changed the world in sweeping ways and without a doubt, it will have broad implications on the competitiveness as well as the socio-economic development of Slovakia. The AI-SK platform will discuss the AI challenges and ways how to build trust in AI systems by adopting a responsible approach towards daily use, says Petra Zappe, Coordinator of AI-SK Platform in AmCham Slovakia. A creative open mind will prove to be a big asset in the near future, as technology advances and we continue to experiment with using AI to solve the problems we face today. Its becoming clear that AI is at the very core of what will shape the future of our economy in the years to come. It is now up to all of us business community, academia and, policymakers to actively shape how Slovakia will respond to this challenge. __________________________________________________________________________________ The American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) was founded in 1993 in Bratislava as an independent and self-supporting organization, entirely dependent on contributions from its members. Today, it serves as one of the most active foreign Chambers of Commerce in Slovakia. Currently, its membership has reached more than 330 international and Slovak companies, including many of the largest and important firms in Slovakia. Of this amount, approximately 23 % are American companies, about 42 % are Slovak companies and about 35 % are other nationalities. 19. Jun 2018 at 4:35 Welcome to Slovakia? Following Henry Acordas horrific killing, businesses need to stand up. It was not that long ago that the sound of English in Bratislavas streets could still turn heads. But since the 1990s, most Slovaks, and particularly those living in the capital, have added the word expat to their colloquial vocabulary. Statistics from Slovakias labour offices show that there were just short of 50,000 foreigners working legally in the country in 2017, and their number is expected to grow in the coming years. Some businesses have already started actively seeking qualified workers from beyond Slovakias borders; others most recently Jaguar Land Rover, which is set to start building cars in Nitra in the autumn admit they will most likely have to do so in the near future. Unlike the state authorities who, despite the fact that literally all demographers and labour market observers agree the economy will not be able to cope without a sustainable migration policy, have failed to come up with one private companies have acknowledged they will need people like Henry Acorda in the future. His death, following an horrific street attack, was an outrage. The businesses that seek to attract employees like him to Slovakia, should recognise the damage it could do to them, as well as to the country. 19. Jun 2018 at 8:42 | Michaela Terenzani PM Oli arrives in Beijing Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli arrived here in Beijing on Tuesday for an official visit to China at the invitation of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. Murdered Filipino taken home by Slovak government plane The body of expat killed in a violent street incident in downtown Bratislava at end of May has been transported to his homeland. The body of Filipino Henry John Serafica Acorda, who was beaten to death in the centre of Bratislava last month, has been transported to his homeland by a Slovak government aircraft, Interior Ministry spokesperson Petar Lazarov told the TASR newswire on June 18. Read also: Read also: Bratislava called for justice for Henry Acorda and an end to violence Read more The transport of Acordas body with the government plane was proposed by Interior Minister Denisa Sakova earlier in June, after she met the Filipinos relatives. Sakova also discussed financial compensation for the bereaved with Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini. What happened in downtown Bratislava? Acorda, aged 36 and who worked for an IT company in Bratislava, was attacked by Juraj Hossu, 28. The attack occurred on Obchodna Street, in the centre of the capital in the early hours of May 26. He had attempted to put a stop to the harassment of his two female colleagues. He died from the brutal injuries in a hospital five days later. Read also: Read also: Expat dies following street attack in Bratislava. Attacker charged with manslaughter Read more Following the incident, Sakova has promised to improve the security situation in the locality. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of the street wrote a letter to Bratislava Mayor Ivo Nesrovnal, asking him to enforce public order, the Pravda daily wrote on June 19. Earlier, the burial mass took place in St Ladislaus church in Bratislava where Acorda used to attend the masses of the English-speaking community. The community met to commemorate to Acorda and pay their respects to him on June 9 at 13:00. The ceremony was presided over by priest Benjamin Kosnac, who leads the English-speaking Catholic in Bratislava, TASR wrote. The plane was welcomed by dozens of people in the Philippines, including the Filipino Foreign Minister, the Sme daily wrote. While the Filipinos thanked Slovakia for help, the Slovak Interior Ministry delegation apologised for the pain caused, Slovak police wrote, as cited by Sme. One boy even held a placard saying 'Thanks, Slovakia' praising the help of the Slovak public toward the family of the murdered man. Read also: Read also: Welcome to Slovakia? Read more 19. Jun 2018 at 13:29 | Compiled by Spectator staff Five years after the Moldava raid, the victims have turned into perpetrators June 19 marks the fifth anniversary of the brutal and much-discussed raid in the Roma settlement; and it points to five of those beaten being charged with perjury. The infamous police raid on Budulovska Street of the Roma settlement in Moldava and Bodvou took place on June 19, 2013. Since then, police have been found not guilty of any wrongdoing but the situation took an even more surprising twist. The coalition of non-governmental organisations (Equity, o.z., ERRC European Roma Rights Centre, ETP Slovensko, Amnesty International Slovensko, CVEK) claim that the investigation of the raid was not consequent and detailed, not to mention independent, the SITA newswire reported. On the 5th anniversary, they point out that until now, no police officers have been made responsible. On the contrary, the beaten Roma have been charged, Jan Glovicko informed for the coalition of NGOs. Read also: Read also: UN condemns Moldava raid Read more They do not agree with the findings of the investigation of the Interior Ministry, nor with the charge concerning six Roma for perjury as they recognised the officers who beat them during the raid. Police, judiciary missteps NGOs also protested against the steps of the Kosice I District Court which ruled, without a main trial and through a criminal order, that two of the six charged Roma are guilty. The activists point to the violation of the principle of consistency, since the first steps of the investigation steps were taken seven months after the raid; and the principle of independence, since the Interior Ministry inspection is not an independent investigation body, and the rule that a police officer cannot investigate his/her colleague must be observed, according to SITA. Read also: Read also: Kalinak speaks out on Moldava raid Read more The courts proceeding seems to be inadequately prompt in this case, Jarmila Lajcakova of the Centre for Research of Ethnicity and Culture (CVEK) pointed out for SITA. The Prosecutors Office delivered the charge to court on May 30; while the single judge sentenced them the next day, May 31, 2018, through a criminal order, without any possibility of coming to court and defending themselves. The pro bono lawyer active in this case, Roman Kvasnica, is of the same opinion. He adds that the clients are innocent since the course of events they testified to in connection to the police raid was a description of what they had experienced. It is obvious that in particular their right to defence and a fair trial has been violated, Kvasnica sums up. NGOs publish their demands The coalition of NGOs thus put together requests aimed at the state bodies, asking that the prosecution of beaten Roma be stopped, an independent investigation body be established, as well as addressing the top representatives of the armed forces not to use stigmatising language that worsen prejudices and not to violate the principle of equal treatment, Kamila Gunisova of Amnesty International Slovensko told SITA. Read also: Read also: Fico defends police in Moldava nad Bodvou Read more The NGOs have prepared a website, www.policajnarazia.sk, which includes the full chronology of the case, including statements of the public officials who politicised the investigation, as well as the demands of the NGO's. Updated information on the case will be published on the website as well.. Leonard Horvath, one of the dozens of Roma from Moldava nad Bodvou beaten by the police officers during the controversial June 2013 raid, now lives in Germany. Police, ministry see things differently The Police Corps President Milan Lucansky claims that the Roma beat themselves, and both the Interior Ministry and the Constitutional Court back the officers. On the other hand, the incident has been criticised by then-ombudswoman Jana Dubovcova and former government proxy for Roma communities Peter Pollak, the Dennik N daily writes. Horvath is one of six beaten Roma who have been accused of perjury. A man and a woman have already been sentenced, with one receiving one year conditionally with 15-month probation. The woman has not been sentenced to a combined sentence, due to her previous sentences and punishments, the Kosice Korzar daily explained. Read also: Read also: General Prosecutors Office becomes involved in Moldava raid case Read more Four other men are still awaiting trial. They are accused of falsely declaring that the police officers beat them. The case very much resembles the infamous case of Hedviga Malinova, Lydia Suchova of the Equity NGO noted, as quoted by Korzar. 19. Jun 2018 at 13:41 | Compiled by Spectator staff Verdicts passed in the case of 71 migrants found dead in a truck The four main defendants heard their verdicts in the case of the refrigeration car in which 71 dead migrants were found. Font size: A - | A + The case of 71 migrants found dead in 2015 near the Austrian village of Parndorf close to Slovakia the four main defendants were sentenced to 25 years in prison in the southern Hungarian town of Kecskemet, the Sme daily wrote in mid-June. The first-instance verdict finds one Afghani and four Bulgarian citizens guilty of complicity in human smuggling and murder. None of them can leave prison sooner than in 25 years. Moreover, the Afghani man, who received asylum in Hungary but was then stripped of it, is expelled from Hungary for good, while the three Bulgarians are expelled for 10 years. Also, their possessions, worth 103 million forints (322,000), will be confiscated. Read also: Read also: Refugees die in a truck near the Slovak border in Austria Read more A total of fourteen people were charged with human smuggling, MTI newswire informed. In the case, fifty-nine men, four women and eight children were locked in the cargo part of the truck; they probably suffocated on Hungarian territory. The vehicle was found on the Austrian highway, near the village of Parndorf. The truck was originally from Slovakia, although it changed owners repeatedly. It was sold from Slovakia by the Hyza poultry-processing company to the Hungarian company MasterMobilKer. The latter failed to remove ads from the vehicle, which caused the vehicle (and also the perpetrators) to be thought of as Slovak. 19. Jun 2018 at 13:47 | Compiled by Spectator staff Team of US military experts to arrive in Slovakia A small American team will come to Slovakia on July 1 and stay for 18 months to train and consult local armed forces. A team of American military experts will come to Slovakia this summer to provide training and consultation for the Slovak Armed Forces. Parliament approved their presence in Slovakia with 113 votes on June 19, after they were given the governments consent. The goal of the Civil Affairs teams presence in Slovakia is to increase mutual interoperability, and also to develop military capabilities within the Slovak Armed Forces, Defence Minister Peter Gajdos told the TASR newswire. The team will feature a maximum of four members from the US Armed Forces and a maximum of two military vehicles. They will be based in Martin (in Zilina Region, north of the country) as of July 1 for 18 months. All of the costs related to the team's presence in Slovakia will be paid by the USA, TASR wrote. 19. Jun 2018 at 20:48 | Compiled by Spectator staff Parliamentary committee disagrees over President Kiskas campaign financing Some members believe Kiska clearly violated the law while others are criticising the committee for acting outside of its jurisdiction. Slovak President Andrej Kiska violated the law, according to the vice-chair of the ruling Smer party, Juraj Blanar. The Smer MP who sits on the committee for incompatibility of functions told media after the committees session that it is obvious Kiska exceeded the limit candidates are allowed to use for election campaigns. He added, as quoted by the SITA newswire, that the committee asked the Financial Administration (FA) to find out whether the presidents company KTAG gave the resources to Kiska as a gift, or resulted from his financial obligation towards the firm. Regardless, the funds were not stated in Kiskas property return when they should have been. Based on the FAs findings, the sum of the fine for the president will be set as follows: if the financing was a gift, the sanction is worth three monthly salaries; if it was obligation, the sanction is worth ten monthly salaries. The committee handed the file to the Finance Ministry, committee vice-chair Robert Puci (also Smer party) told SITA. The Finance Ministry will get the motion with the file [] and it is up to the ministry to evaluate whether this deed has been time-barred, or not, Puci said. Kiskas office reacted by claiming that the Finance Ministry already checked on the whole election campaign once, and this is mere political interest of the Smer party. The presidents spokesman, Roman Krpelan, added for SITA that the committee acted unlawfully, and on the political order of Smer. "The Finance Ministry already checked the election campaign of Andrej Kiska in the lawful deadline, in 2014, and found no flaws, Krpelan noted. The Finance Ministry informed SITA that it will deal with the motion, as they have not checked on the campaigns of individual candidates; they only received documents on incomes and expenses and they were not obliged to check on data stated in the documents, the ministry stated in a press release for SITA. Different opinions Chairman of the committee for incompatibility of functions, Vladimir Sloboda (Freedom and Solidarity-SaS), thinks that the committee is not authorised to evaluate any election campaign. The committee deals with property returns of public officials, he explained for SITA. It is clear who financed the presidential campaign of Andrej Kiska, and to what amount. The election campaign falls under the remit of the Finance Ministry, he summed up. Campaign may be time-barred MP Ondrej Dostal added that the violation of rules of the election campaign by Kiska is time-barred. The Finance Ministry cannot do anything about it, he noted. Since September 2017, the committee for incompatibility of functions has been dealing with information concerning President Andrej Kiskas election campaign to determine whether or not he violated law. The move against Kiska was filed by the non-parliamentary party, New Parliament, chaired by unsuccessful presidential candidate Jozef Behyl, according to SITA. Earlier, Behyl said that the party field the motion against President Andrej Kiska due to justified suspicion he violated constitutional law on protection of public interest when executing the functions of a public official. 19. Jun 2018 at 21:07 | Compiled by Spectator staff There are few things in this world better than starting your day with really good coffee and a really good bagel. But this, inexplicably, is exceedingly rare. Its either a good cafe with a disappointing bread round or its a delicious, fluffy bagel but served with a side of black char water. And then there is Pavement Coffeehouse in Boston, Massachusetts, who started out as a bagel company before expanding their horizons into the world of coffee. Its a match made in heaven. And now, with their seventh location, Pavement is getting into the roasting game. Having long been a Counter Culture stalwart in the greater Boston area, Pavement is moving to the other side of the roaster to produce coffee for their own cafes, including their brand new roastery/cafe in a former warehouse for Harvard University. Roasting, baking, a cafe, everything that is right and good is all under one roof at the brand new Pavement Coffeehouse in Boston. As told to Sprudge by Larry Margulies. For those who arent familiar, will you tell us about your company? We are a local Boston company with seven cafe locations. We have our roots in the bagel business, providing our customers with fresh, kettle-boiled bagels. For the last 10 years we have been continually focused on pushing our coffee program forward to accompany our bagel program. We served Counter Culture Coffee at all locations and have recently built our own roasting facility. Can you tell us a bit about the new space? Our new space is the culmination of many years of planning. Weve wanted to roast since 2011, but the company had other growth opportunities that had to come first. In time, we found ourselves with two separate bakery locations, a separate office location, and 6 cafes to manage. It took us a couple years to find the perfect location for us to bring the whole company together in a 5,000-square-foot building that could house our baking facilities, an office headquarters, a cafe, and most importantly a roasting space. In 2016, Harvard University approached us about an old warehouse that they own. They were looking to invest in the building and activate it for the local community. The building needed a lot of work, but the location and size made it the perfect space for us. The partnership proved successful as we transformed a dilapidated, windowless warehouse, into a 20 seat cafe with patio, coffee roastery, bakery with a commissary kitchen, and office HQ. Whats your approach to coffee? Our customers are coming to us for our cafe environment, our bagels, and our coffee, so we serve coffees on our batch brewer that are delicious and approachable for a broad audience. For espresso, our Rathskeller Blend is typically a 50/50 blend of two washed coffeesone from Ethiopia and one from Central or South America. For the rest of our coffees, which we offer by the cup on a Poursteady in our new cafe and offered in retail bags at all of our locations, we look for interesting, dynamic, sparkly coffees from a variety of origins. Any machines, coffees, special equipment lined up? We are roasting on a Loring S15. We are loving the consistency of the roast and repeatability of workflow that the software and design allows. We are also psyched about Bostons first Poursteady three-cup brewing system that we had installed. This lets us roast and feature coffees that are more unique and interesting in a single-cup format, while mitigating some of the service bottlenecks that can accompany manual brewing services. Whats your hopeful target opening date/month? We are open! Are you working with craftspeople, architects, and/or creatives that youd like to mention? Shout out to Lana Kirby at Lana Kirby Design. She has designed all seven of our locations. Thank you! The Build-Outs Of Summer is an annual series on Sprudge. Live the thrill of the build all summer long in our Build-Outs feature hub. The following companies are subsidiares of Air Products and Chemicals: 7001 Hamilton Properties LLC, ACP Europe SA, ACP Zolder Invest NV, AJWAA Gases LLC, AP Services South America SpA, APCI (U.K.) Inc., Air Products (Anshan) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (BR) Limited, Air Products (Cangzhou) Co. Ltd., Air Products (Changsha) Co. Ltd., Air Products (Chongqing) Chem-Materials Co. Ltd., Air Products (Dongguan) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Guangzhou) Electronics Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Hangjin Qi) Co. Ltd., Air Products (Hefei) Electronics Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Hong Kong) Co. Ltd., Air Products (Huaibei) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Jiangxi) Co. Ltd., Air Products (Jincheng) Co. Ltd., Air Products (Jinjiang) Electronics Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Kunshan) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Linfen) Co. Ltd., Air Products (Middle East) FZE, Air Products (Nanjing) Electronics Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Ningbo) Hi-Tech Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Rozenburg) B.V., Air Products (Shenyang) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Air Products (Xi'an) Gases Co. Ltd, Air Products (Xiamen) Electronics Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products (Zhongshan) Gases Co. Ltd, Air Products (Zhumadian) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products A/S, Air Products Advanced Materials LLC, Air Products Asia Inc., Air Products Asia Inc. Taiwan Branch, Air Products Bahrain W.L.L, Air Products Brasil Ltda., Air Products Canada Ltd./Prodair Canada Ltee, Air Products Caribbean Holdings Inc., Air Products Central Asia Group LLC, Air Products China Inc., Air Products Debang (Lianyungang) Co. Ltd., Air Products Ecuador S.A., Air Products Emirates Gases LLC, Air Products Equipment Limited, Air Products Gas O.O.O., Air Products Gases Holdings B.V., Air Products Gases S.A.E., Air Products Gesellschaft mbH, Air Products GmbH, Air Products Group Limited, Air Products Gulf Gas LLC, Air Products Helium Inc., Air Products Helium Inc. Qatar Branch, Air Products Holdings B.V., Air Products Holdings GmbH, Air Products Huadong (Longkou) Co. Ltd., Air Products Hydrogen Company Inc., Air Products Iberica S.L., Air Products Industrial Gas LLC, Air Products International LLC, Air Products Investments B.V., Air Products Investments Holdings LLC, Air Products Investments LLC, Air Products Ireland Limited, Air Products Italia S.r.l., Air Products Japan Inc., Air Products Japan K.K., Air Products Korea Inc., Air Products LLC, Air Products Leasing B.V., Air Products Llanwern Limited, Air Products LuAn (Changzhi) Co. Ltd., Air Products Maghreb S.A.R.L., Air Products Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Air Products Management S.A., Air Products Manufacturing Corporation, Air Products Manufacturing LLC, Air Products Middle East Industrial Gases LLC, Air Products Nederland B.V., Air Products Netherlands Gases B.V., Air Products O.O.O., Air Products PLC, Air Products PLC Branch, Air Products Peru S.A., Air Products Qudra (GICIS), Air Products Renewable Energy Limited, Air Products S.A., Air Products SAS, Air Products San Fu Co. Ltd., Air Products Services Europe S.A., Air Products Shared Services Sdn. Bhd, Air Products Singapore Industrial Gases Pte. Ltd., Air Products SinoHytec (Beijing) Hydrogen Energy Technology Co. Ltd., Air Products Slovakia s.r.o., Air Products Sp. Z o.o., Air Products Specialized Process Equipment SDN, Air Products Switzerland Sarl, Air Products Taiwan Holdings Co. Ltd., Air Products Ukraina LLC, Air Products West Coast Hydrogen LLC, Air Products Yanbu Limited, Air Products and Chemicals (Anhui) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Banan) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Beijing) Distribution Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Binzhou) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Chengdu) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (China) Investment Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Chongqing) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Dalian) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Guiyang) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Hefei) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Hohhot) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Jiyuan) Onsite Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Lianyungang) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Nanjing) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Nanjing) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Pengzhou) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Putian) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Qingdao) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shaanxi Pucheng) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shaanxi) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shanghai) Electronics Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shanghai) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shanghai) Gases Production Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shanghai) On-Site Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shanghai) Systems Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shangluo) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Shenzhen) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Tangshan) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Tongxiang) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Weifang) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (WuXi) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (WuXi) Gases Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Xingtai) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Xinxiang) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Xian) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Yichun) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Yulin) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Zhangjiagang) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Zhejiang) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Zhuhai) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals (Zibo) Co. Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals Inc., Air Products and Chemicals Inc. of Utah (Utah), Air Products and Chemicals Tech Development (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Air Products spol s.r.o., Asia Industrial Gas Company Ltd., Beijing AP BAIF Gases Industry Co. Ltd., Blue Ocean Industrial Gases Co. Ltd., Carbolim B.V., Carburos Via Augusta Logistics S.L., Centro Tecnico Indura Limitada, Chengdu Air & Gas Products Ltd., Contse S.A.U., CryoService, CryoService Limited, Dixons of Westerhope, DuPont Air Products NanoMaterials, EPCO Carbon Dioxide Products, EPCO Carbon Dioxide Products Inc. (Illinois), East Coast Nitrogen Company LLC, East Coast Oxygen Co., Gardner Cryogenics (Pennsylvania), Gas Direct Limited, Gas Supply Services Ltd., Gas Technologies Ltd., Gases Industriales de Columbia S.A. Cryogas, Gases Integrated Company Limited (GIC), Gasin II Unipessoal LDA, Gastel Limited, Goar Allison & Associates, Green BioFuel s.r.o., Harvest Energy Technologies (California), Harvest Energy Technology, Helap SAS, Indura, Indura Argentina S.A., Indura Holdings Colombia LLC, Indura Inversiones Limitada, Indura Peru S.A., Indura S.A., Indura S.A. (Peru), Indura Sociedad Comercial Limitada, Ingemedicas Santandar Ltda., Ingenieria en Redes de Gases S.A. - Gasproject S.A., Inversiones Air Products Holdings Limitada, Jazan Gas Projects Company, Jazan Integrated Gasification and Power Company (JIGPC), KRIG Holdings B.V., KRYVYI RIH Industrial Gas, Korea Industrial Gases Ltd., Kulim Industrial Gases Sdn Bhd, Lida SAS, Markaziy Osiyo Sanoat Gaz LLC, Matgas 2000 A.I.E., Napro S.A., Olin DNT Limited Partnership, Oxigeno Medicinal Domiciliario Limitada, Oxigeno de Sagunto S.L., Oxigenol S.A., Oxygen & Argon Works, Oxygen & Argon Works Ltd., Oxygen Center Ltd., Oxygen Warehouse Trade (1980) Ltd., PQ Ammonia, PT Air Products East Kalimantan, PT Air Products Indonesia, PT Air Products Indonesia Services, Permea China Ltd., Permea Inc., Procal (California), Prodair Air Products India Private Limited, Prodair Corporation, Prodair Escravos Limited, Prodair S.A.S., Prodair Services Limited, Prodair et Cie S.C.S., Quimica Basica S.A., ROVI Cosmetics International, S.I.Q. Beteiligungs, SAGA SAS, SCWC Corp., STP & DIN Chemicals Sp. Z.o.o., Servicios Indura Limitada, Sociedad Espanola de Carburos Metalicos S.A., Soprogaz SNC, Stravinsky Investments LLC, The Former SR Manufacturers Inc., Tyczka Industrie-Gase GmbH, Union Mobiliere Industrielle S.A.R.L., United Industrial Gases Company LLC, Vitalox Industrial S.L.U., WuXi Hi-Tech Gas Co. Ltd., Yangon Industrial Gas (Thilawa) Company Limited, Zibo Chuangcheng Engineering Design Co. Ltd., and ir Products Israel Ltd.. Wall Street analysts have given Enel Generacion Chile 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 Enel Generacion Chile wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. Wall Street analysts have given iShares MSCI United Kingdom 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 United Kingdom ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. PM Oli off to China for six-day official visit (with photos) Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has embarked on a six-day official visit to China upon the invitation of his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang on Tuesday. KAZ Minerals PLC, together with its subsidiaries, engages in mining and processing copper and other metals primarily in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. It operates through Bozshakol, Aktogay, East Region and Bozymchak, and Mining Projects segments. The company operates the Aktogay and Bozshakol open pit copper mines in the east region and Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan; three underground mines in the east region of Kazakhstan; and the Bozymchak copper-gold mine in Kyrgyzstan. It also develops greenfield metal deposits; operates Koksay deposit in Kazakhstan, and the Baimskaya licence area in the Chukotka region of Russia; and produces and sells various by-products, such as gold, silver, molybdenum, and zinc. In addition, the company supplies and distributes heat, water, and electricity; and offers construction, project management, financing, management, sales and logistics, and repairs and maintenance services. The company was formerly known as Kazakhmys PLC and changed its name to KAZ Minerals PLC in October 2014. KAZ Minerals PLC was founded in 1930 and is based in London, the United Kingdom. Read More Yaser Naseri, who arrived in Australia as a refugee, is studying commerce at Sydney, thanks to support from University donors. It's early morning on 17 December 2011. Yaser Naseri is trying to sleep below deck on an old boat lurching in the waves as it heads from Indonesia towards what he hopes is a new life in Australia. The boat is meant to transport produce, not people, but there are about 250 asylum seekers crammed on board too many, as it turns out. There are Afghanis, Syrians, Iraqis, Sudanese and Iranians like Yaser. Women and families on the upper deck, single men below. Yaser watches the ceiling as it seesaws above his head. Right, left. Right, left. "Then it went right and it didn't come back," he says. "The water rushed in. The noise was crazy. I grabbed the edge of the table I was lying on and hung on. "Then I don't remember. I think the water pushed me out a window. I'm in the ocean and the boat is a long way off. There are people all around, all their stuff baggage, luggage. We're not wearing life jackets. "Close to me there's a bit of broken wood from the boat with a few people hanging on. So I swim to them and grab hold. We can see the boat has capsized. It's upside-down. The waves are very strong. There are dead bodies. People are crying because their families are dying in front of them and there's nothing they can do. People are shouting - Jesus, Allah, God. We can't see any land at all." Our Girl Season 3 is back tonight - from the cast to first spoilers, here's all you need to know. The second part of Series 3 of Our Girls will continue tonight on Wednesday 17 July at 9pm on BBC One with the latest new episodes part of a 12 episode commission. Advertisements Our Girl series three is comprise of three separate tours. This first tour of four episodes aired last year and saw Georgie on a relief mission in Nepal following a devastating series of earthquakes. Our Girl Series 3 cast Corporal Georgie Lane (Michelle Keegan) - Gutsy, passionate and unstoppable, Georgie is an army medic from Stockport who relishes the adrenaline that comes with the adventures of her work. Captain James (Ben Aldridge) - A charismatic leader and brilliant officer, Captain James is an army man to the core and well respected by the men who fight alongside him. Private Maisie Richards (Shalom Brune-Franklin) - Brash and fearless, Maisie has always been front and centre of any group within which she finds herself. A free spirit, she often pokes fun at Georgies traditional ideas of love and romance. Private Rab Kalil (Harki Bhambra) Elvis Harte (Luke Pasqualino) - (Part 1) Elvis is a cheeky Londoner who has grown into a remarkable leader, joining the SAS selection after a number of tours with the army. Our Girl spoilers In tonight's episode, as the camp is hit by a dangerous cholera epidemic, 2 Section are tasked with protecting Inspector Chowdhrey (Navin Chowdhry) who is now a key witness in bringing down the leaders of the drug gang. Horrified when a particularly gruesome message is sent demanding his silence, the Inspector fears for his familys safety and refuses to cooperate. Advertisements When Georgie (Michelle Keegan) suspects that Barsha knows more than she has previously let on, she hatches a plan to persuade Inspector Chowdhrey to make a full statement. However disaster strikes when the couples young son, Sumon, (Imran Khan) is kidnapped by the gang and it falls to Georgie to get the child back. Meanwhile, fellow medic Ruby (Patrick McNamee) catches cholera whilst treating patients in the camp. Tika R Pradhan is a senior political correspondent for the Post, covering politics, parliament, judiciary and social affairs. Pradhan joined the Post in 2016 after working at The Himalayan Times for more than a decade. The lopsided discourse The hegemonic account of conservation relies on unequal power relations "A little fill here and there may seem to be nothing to become excited about. But one fill, though comparatively inconsequential, may lead to another, and another, and before long a great body may be eaten away until it may no longer exist. Our navigable waters are a precious natural heritage, once gone, they disappear forever," wrote the Wisconsin Supreme Court in its 1960 opinion resolving Hixon v. PSC and buttressing The Public Trust Doctrine, Article IX of the Wisconsin State Constitution. Tributes pour in for deceased neurosurgeon Devkota The mortal remains of neurosurgeon Dr Upendra Devkota has been kept at Bansbari-based Neuro Hospital for final respects. Its not true that only the wealthy can afford to buy homes in Luxembourg. Finding a nice place within your budget is simply a matter of keeping your eyes and your mind open. Merl Pixabay, Ben Kerckx This pretty one-room home is situated in a tidy backyard of an actual house in one of Luxembourgs finest neighbourhoods. If youre nice to the owners, they might let you use their kitchen from time to time. Price: only 350,000 euros. Rollingergrund Pixabay, Max Pixel Who said living in the capital had to be a boring, modern affair? Get in touch with nature by moving into this earthy hut, located in a patch of mud on a hill in Rollingergrund. Price: a steal at 299,000 euros. Differdange US gov/J.P. Gomez An inviting, wide entrance adorns this spacious abode near Differdange, and the fact that it extends 1.6 kilometres into the ground is a nod to the regions mining heritage. Price: a low 123,000 euros. (Note: flood insurance mandatory.) Grevenmacher J.P. Gomez If its good enough to transport millions of litres of rain water, sewage, and other waste, this subterranean dream home is good enough for you and your family. Plus, youll be able to tell your friends that you have your own private underground transportation network. Price: 985 euros. Almaty Pixabay, Skeeze This six-bedroom beauty comes with a swimming pool, separate quarters for domestic servants, and a huge cellar stocked with hundreds of bottles of vintage wine. Price: 234,000 euros. (Note: located a short commute from Luxembourg in an exclusive area of Kazakhstans largest city.) The Luxembourg Wurst is a humour and satire website about life in the Grand Duchy. Read more at wurst.lu Everton 'hold talks' with Dragovic | Monday, 18 June 2018 The Austrian, who spent last season on loan at Leicester City from Bayer Leverkusen, was said to have been on Roberto Martinez's shortlist around the time Everton faced his former club Dynamo Kiev in the Europa League but he eventually moved to the Bundesliga in 2016. He made just 14 appearances for the Foxes in all competitions last term but, according to Rob Tanner of the Leicester Mercury, he is in talks with Everton. Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer About these ads ToffeeWeb Veteran neurosurgeon Dr Devkota cremated with state honours (With photos) Last rites of late Neurosurgeon Dr Upendra Devkota was performed with state honours at Pashupati Aryaghat in Kathmandu on Tuesday. De Ligt eyed as Martins links persist | Monday, 18 June 2018 Along with another player reported to be on Marcel Brands's shortlist, William Carvalho, Martins has filed to terminate his contract at Sporting following the attack on some of the club's players by a group of fans a few weeks ago. That would make him a free agent and, according to The Telegraph, he is said to be interesting the likes of Arsenal, Liverpool and Tottenham as well as Everton. De Ligt, meanwhile, has emerged as one of the most sought-after young defenders in the Netherlands. The 18-year-old Ajax defender was reportedly being tracked by Manchester City. The same Telegraph article suggests that the Blues would, indeed, face significant competition for a player who could cost upwards of 50m but that they will try to leverage his agent Mino Raiola as well as Brands's knowledge of his abilities from his time at rival PSV Eindhoven. Note: the following content is not moderated or vetted by the site owners at the time of submission. Comments are the responsibility of the poster. Disclaimer About these ads ToffeeWeb Google Maps(LITTLE ROCK, Ark.) -- Women seeking medical abortions in Arkansas will have two weeks to access them after a court temporarily suspended a state-wide ban. Medical abortions -- those that use pills rather than surgery to end a pregnancy -- were banned in Arkansas after the Supreme Court declined to review a lower court's decision in late May. That meant that of the state's three abortion clinics, only one has been able to continue providing abortions because it performs surgical abortions. On Monday evening, a federal district court issued a temporary restraining order, allowing clinics to offer medical abortions for two weeks before the ban goes back into effect. The 100-page decision stated that "the Court finds that the threat of irreparable harm to [Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma] and Dr. [Stephanie] Ho, and the public interest, outweighs the immediate interests and potential injuries to the state," citing the doctor at one of the Planned Parenthood clinics whose patients have been impacted. Ho is a medical abortion provider at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Fayetteville. "As a physician, I appreciate that the court has taken a stand to protect the rights of my patients and block this unnecessary, targeted law," Ho told ABC News in a statement. "The patients I see dont take their rights for granted even for a minute. This case has real impacts for real women. We wont have to turn away patients from our health centers this week because of the courts intervention and I couldnt be more proud to provide my patients with a full range of high-quality sexual and reproductive care," she added. The temporary restraining order expires on July 2 and does not reverse the ban. A spokesperson from Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which oversees Planned Parenthood of Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma, told ABC News that nurse practitioners and abortion providers are canceling their planned vacations to make sure that they are available during the 14-day period. Brandon Hill, the president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, released a statement saying the "ruling is a victory for the women of Arkansas." "For more than two weeks, our patients had to live with uncertainty, enduring the cancellation of appointments and a lack of options. The courts decision offers relief to our patients, at least for now. We will continue to do everything we can to protect our patients right to safe, legal abortion," he said. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge released a statement saying she was "disappointed" in the decision. "Judge Bakers ruling allows Planned Parenthood and Little Rock Family Planning Clinic to administer medication abortions without the necessary safety net available for women who experience emergencies and complications," Rutledge said. "Last year, the 8th Circuit unanimously ruled that Judge Bakers original attempt to block this law was incorrect. This order is completely inconsistent with the 8th Circuits decision and should not stand." Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Here are the news stories you should not miss today, June 19: Society -- Authorities in the central Vietnamese city of Da Nang has required Muong Thanh Group, developer of the Muong Thanh hotel and apartment complex, to provide compensation for buyers of the 104 illegally built apartments on the second to fifth floors of the building, as the illicit flats are set to be pulled down. -- Police in the central province of Quang Nam has initiated a manhunt for a suspect who robbed a local gold shop with a hammer at around 4:00 pm on Sunday. -- The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development announced on Monday that approximately 562 locations along the coast and riverbanks across the Mekong Delta are susceptible to subsidence. -- A pile-up collision between three automobiles occurred inside the Hai Van Tunnel, located at the border between Da Nang and the north-central province of Thua Thien- Hue, on Monday afternoon. -- Officers in Nha Trang, a resort city in the south-central province of Khanh Hoa, affirmed on Monday they had begun legal proceedings against two men for disrupting public order and damaging a tourist bus carrying Chinese visitors on June 10. -- Cost of 88 healthcare services in Vietnam has been reduced by five to 15 percent for the first time in six years, following a decision of the Ministry of Health. -- Doctors in the southern province of Dong Nai confirmed on Monday they were able to rescue a 15-year-old patient who had suffered cardiac arrest for multiple times after being electrocuted. -- Police in the north-central province of Thanh Hoa have arrested and initiated legal proceedings against Nguyen Van Quang, 31, for regularly posting anti-state information on his Facebook page. -- A heat wave is expected to bring hot weather to the northern and central Vietnam from June 19 to 23, with highest temperature between 35 to 39 degrees Celsius, according to the National Center for Hydro-meteorological Forecasting. Business -- Starting from July 1, trucks weighing under 3.5 metric tons that are used for transport business operations will be subject to fines worth VND4 million (US$176) to VND10 million ($440) if they are not equipped with a black box. -- A conference on applying high technology into agricultural production was organized by the Peoples Committee in the Mekong Delta province of Soc Trang, in coordination with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, on Monday. Four Vietnamese men who have been slapped with jail terms of up to 48 months for spreading pornographic content by operating a child porn website have had their sentences slashed on appeal. The groups leader Nguyen Duy Hai and the other accused, Do Van An, Nguyen Xuan Tung, and Tran Chi Trung, first appeared in court in Dong Da District, Hanoi in March. They were found guilty of spreading pornographic content and handed jail terms of between 36 and 48 months. All of them appealed against their sentences. An appellate court in Hanoi on Monday approved the mens appeals to have their sentences lowered to between 24 and 42 months, with Hai getting the highest sentence due to his role as the mastermind. Hai, 25, began researching methods of making money online in July 2015 when he noticed many people were willing to spend money on porn sites to watch content involving the sexual abuse of minors, according to his indictment. Hai started out alone, creating a website to upload child porn videos, using one administrator account and many clone accounts. He also placed ads on foreign forums and websites offering similar content to increase traffic to his page. Visitors who wanted to view the sites content had to sign up for an account and pay a subscription fee of up to US$16.99 per month. A slight discount was offered to those who subscribed for longer periods and paid up front. Hai admitted to having membership fees sent to a foreign bank account before they were transferred to his girlfriends account in Vietnam as a way to avoid police detection. Tempted by Hais illicit business, his friends An, Tung, and Trung asked to join and became partners in running the child porn site. Hai directly operated four websites, while his partners were in charge of 11 websites that offered the same content, including around 4,400 porn videos. At the time of their arrest in late 2016, the men had garnered a membership base of over 40,000, including 600 paid members. They had made more than VND3.2 billion ($140,000) from the business before being busted by law enforcement. The money was partially used to re-invest into the websites development, while the rest was split among the four. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Huynh Hong Hiep, a Phu Quoc resident, owns a 1,500-square-meter plot of land on the island where he grows perennial crops for a living. When a land fever broke out in Phu Quoc recently, Hiep applied for a certificate of land use rights, commonly known as the red book in Vietnamese, to formalize his ownership over the land plot. However, while his application was being processed, Hiep said a group of men arrived on four cars and started erecting fences and a prefabricated house on his land, which only took one night to complete. Even after he had legally obtained his red book, Hiep said he could not step onto his own land for fear of being assaulted by the hostile strangers, who stood guard over the area 24/7. His plea for help to the administration of Kien Giang Province was answered with a directive asking the Phu Quoc chairman to handle the case with urgency. However, no action has been taken by the local authority since then, Hiep said, leaving him with no choice but to take the matter into his own hands by hiring ten bodyguards to take over the land with force. But it was not the end of the story, he added. I receive phone calls, threatening to have my land re-appropriated, almost every day. Bodyguards are hired by a land owner to keep watch over a piece of land on Phu Quoc Island off Kien Giang Province in southern Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre The gangsters prey on not only land owned by regular residents but also estates that belong to large investment projects, according to Ngo Truong Thy, general director of Saigon Sovico Phu Quoc Company. A plot of land where the company plans to develop a project in Phu Quocs Cuu Duong Commune has been illegally occupied by a group of strange men, he said. Public land was neither spared from gangsters grip, as they have publicly occupied and offered for sale areas owned and managed by the administration of Ham Ninh Commune. According to victims of gang activities in Phu Quoc, the gangsters often demand a payment of 10-20 percent the value of the land they occupy in exchange for their withdrawal. Those who refuse to pay risk being dragged into a legal dispute over land ownership, as the criminals would go as far as declaring the land their possession using fake papers. In the first six months of 2018 alone, authorities in Phu Quoc have received 258 formal complaints concerning land disputes, of which only 28 have been resolved, according to the provincial inspectorate. Phu Quoc Island is among three locations where Vietnam plans to develop new special economic zones in a US$69.16 billion scheme to lure foreign investment. The zones Phu Quoc, Van Don, and Bac Van Phong will offer potential foreign investors fewer restrictions and greater incentives, including visa waiver policies, tax exemptions, and the legalization of activities outlawed elsewhere in the country. News of the project initiated a race to own estates on Vietnams largest island, as many locals became billionaires overnight through sales of their land. Concerns about a potential land bubble in Phu Quoc also prompted banks to tighten restrictions on loans taken for investment into the real estate sector. Signs advertising land sale on Phu Quoc Island off Kien Giang Province in southern Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre We have requested police raids into the illegal constructions and are currently taking steps to eradicate the illegal activity, said Dinh Khoa Toan, chairman of Phu Quoc. A team of officers from Kien Giang police and the Ministry of Public Security are already on the island to investigate the situation, a provincial police chief said on Monday. As of June 19, 160 suspects have been summoned for questionings over links to the mafia-like activity, of whom 63 had been charged and imprisoned for past crimes. A majority of these gangsters are not local people but have come from northern provinces, police say. We will immediately arrest suspects who are caught red-handed making threats or destroying properties following citizens report, said Luu Thanh Tin, deputy police chief of Kien Giang. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Vietnams agriculture ministry on Monday introduced an online map detailing all subsidence hotpots in the Mekong Delta, which is aimed at providing better control over risks and safety in the affected areas. The map, accessible at http://satlodbscl.phongchongthientai.vn, highlights all locations along local coasts and riverbanks that are susceptible to land collapse, according to Hoang Van Thang, Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development. Subsidence has become increasingly serious, leaving negative impacts on sustainable development in the rice bowl of Vietnam, Deputy Minister Thang assessed, referring to the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam. If we continue building houses and exploit sand without proper planning, the situation will soon be out of control, the official stressed. There are currently 562 locations at risk of coastal and riverbank subsidence in the region, Thang said, adding that 55 of them are especially dangerous. The map is capable of showing important information, namely length, depth, possible impact on the environment and local residents, and satellite images of the subsidence-prone areas. Thanks to the information, competent authorities will be able to issue warnings and evacuation, if necessary, in a prompt manner, the deputy minister stated. Specialized units in each Mekong Delta province will carry out regular examinations to update the database. The agriculture ministry will continue coordinating with local authorities and experts to evaluate the status of all subsidence hotpots across the Mekong Delta to propose both short-term and long-term solutions. Different measures such as building embankments or relocation will be applied depending on the situation and resources in each locality Thang elaborated. The Mekong Delta is home to over 20 million people and holds strategic significance in terms of socio-economic development and national and defense of the country. Subsidence occurs in almost all provinces in the region and is most serious in An Giang, Dong Thap, Ca Mau, and Bac Lieu. The central government has decided to channel VND1.5 trillion (US$66 million) from its budget into dealing with subsidence in the Mekong Delta in 2018. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Twenty Vietnamese fishing boats taking shelter from a tropical depression near the Hoang Sa (Paracel) Islands in the East Vietnam Sea on Monday were chased away by Chinese vessels, Vietnamese authorities said on Tuesday. The fishing boats, which had set sail from the north-central province of Quang Ngai, were caught in a tropical depression that formed in the East Vietnam Sea on Monday. The fleet with 100 Vietnamese fishermen on board had maneuvered to safety near the Bach Quy (Passu Keah) Reef at 11:00 am the same day, before they were chased away by some Chinese vessels, according to Vietnams National Committee on Disaster Response, Search and Rescue. The Bach Quy Reef is a part of Vietnams Hoang Sa Islands, which have been illegally occupied by Chinese forces since 1974. Captains of the Vietnamese ships asked Vietnamese authorities to work with their Chinese counterparts in allowing the ships to be anchored near the island for safety reasons. The search and rescue committee has therefore requested that the Consular Department under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs inform Chinese authorities on the situation and make every effort to ensure the safety of Vietnamese fishing boats operating in the East Vietnam Sea. The Vietnamese coordination center for search and rescue missions at sea has also notified their Chinese counterpart about the distressed ships and asked for assistance in possible rescue missions. Authorities in Vietnam have been put on high alert to swiftly response to any negative developments concerning the fishing boats. Chinese vessels are known to have ambushed Vietnamese fishing ships conducting legal fishing activities in the East Vietnam Sea in the past. In March, two Vietnamese fishing ships reported to a local border guard unit that they had been ambushed by Chinese vessels and robbed off their fishing equipment while operating near the Hoang Sa Islands. A week earlier, a vessel from Quang Ngai was also ambushed and had its fishing equipment destroyed by Chinese men while operating near the Tri Ton (Triton) Island in Hoang Sa. Actress Heather Locklear has been hospitalised after police responded to her California home on Sunday. Our deputies responded, along with Ventura County Fire, a police spokesperson said. When we responded and contacted the person at the residence, [we] determined that there was no crime. It was strictly a medical call. There was a patient that was transported to a local hospital. Reports suggest her elderly parents went to their daughters house after she sounded distressed but things allegedly turned violent, prompting her mother to place the 911 call. The 56 year old actress was reportedly acting erratically and threatened to kill herself but no weapons were found. A domestic violence call was also reported in February. During an arrest, police said Locklear became combative and uncooperative. Domestic violence charges were eventually dropped, against the former Melrose Place guest star, but she is still facing four counts of misdemeanour battery on an officer and one charge of resisting or obstructing an officer. She entered a not guilty plea in April. She also entered a treatment facility in March. Sources say her family is concerned for her well-being and have encouraged her to seek medical care. She was previously rushed to hospital in 2012 after a recent split from fiance Jack Wagner. Lifeline 13 11 14 Beyond Blue 1300 22 46 36 Source: ET Online, Yahoo UK-US drama Patrick Melrose will have its Australian premiere at Series Mania in Melbourne next month, with writer David Nicholls as a special guest. Free tickets for the Benedict Cumberbatch drama are available at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, screening on Friday July 20, just days ahead of BBC First broadcast. The industry event with David Nicholls is ticketed at $18. The full Series Mania Melbourne program will be revealed on June 27 at acmi.net.au. Starring Oscar nominee and Emmy winner Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock Holmes, The Imitation Game and Doctor Strange) as Patrick Melrose, and featuring Hugo Weaving and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the series is adapted from the novels of Edward St Aubyn. At once harrowing and hilarious, the series tracks Patrick, a member of the British upper class, from a privileged but deeply traumatic childhood in the South of France through severe substance abuse in his twenties in New York and, ultimately, toward recovery back home. Critics are raving, describing Patrick Melrose as a headlong triumph in every department (The Telegraph UK), an award-worthy mini-series (The Independent), and a tight, intelligent adaptation (The Guardian), with Variety describing Cumberbatchs performance as riveting. As well as being a celebrated screenwriter, Nicholls is also the author of bestsellers Starter For Ten and One Day, both of which have been adapted for the screen. One Day has sold 5 million copies around the world and been published in over 40 languages. Nicholls latest novel Us was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and in the year it was published (2014), Nicholls won UK Author of the Year at the National Book Awards. Nicholls worked as an actor before moving into script-editing for theatre, radio and TV. His first produced screenplay was an adaptation of Sam Shepards play Simpatico, starring Jeff Bridges, Sharon Stone and Albert Finney. He then worked in British TV for several years, writing episodes of Cold Feet, as well as original series Rescue Me and I Saw You. Nicholls screen-writing credits include adaptations of Tess of the dUrbervilles and original contemporary drama The 7.39, all for the BBC. As well as his own novels, Nicholls has adapted Blake Morrisons memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? starring Jim Broadbent and Colin Firth, Dickens Great Expectations with Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham-Carter, and the 2015 adaptation of Hardys Far from the Madding Crowd featuring Carey Mulligan. Nicholls will take part in the Series Mania Melbourne Industry Day on Friday July 20. Patrick Melrose will screen to the public on Friday July 20, followed by an In Conversation with Nicholls. Patrick Melrose will air in Australia on BBC First, from July 23 at 9:30pm. Shark Tank guru Steve Baxter has fired back at viewers on Twitter after some took issue with his abrupt manner last night. Baxter, who grilled several entrepreneurs last night, also argued with Naomi Simson who attempted to defend one early-level inventor. On social media some viewers accused him of belittling women and mansplaining: You dont have to be such an arsehole Steve. ? #SharktankAU Steves aggressiveness that gets worse week on week is disgusting. Use to be a huge fan, no more. Steve needs to stop mansplaining to women entrepreneurs The way you speak down to the women who present themselves to you as if youre their superior is disgusting. Im always very mindful of TVs editing and viewers perception but its hard to believe youre a victim of post-production when you spew so much vitriol and negativity. I thought Naomi v Steve was last week? #SharkTankAU Man Steve Baxter is brutal on @sharktankau proclaiming to be a tech guru, its time for Steve to accept the fact he was a tech guru in the nineties, but he is being incredibly arogant and rude to this Nadi X lady, its appalling. No wonder Australians dont take the risk to open businesses when you have arrogant sharks like Steve be littling people on TV, not a shark, a toadfish!!! Im so sick of Steve being rude and arrogant to Naomi and the other contestants. Can he be replaced? What a rude p***k Steve Baxter @sbxr was to this lady! How about showing some respect to women! He was aggressive and offensive for no reason! #auspol #metoo @TenNewsSydney The more I watch #SharkTankAU the more I think Steve is an INTJ personality But others defended his abrupt manner: I like how Steve tells it like it is and doesnt mince his words Sharknado Steve is tearing it up Im with Steve.. cant believe I said that ? Baxter himself, who regularly engages with viewers, gave as good as he got to TEN viewers on the social media platform: Yeah well tell me which bit where I (and the rest of the men) are disgusting sexist pigs else go away. Your comments so far make you look like an anonymous man hater. You have a poor attitude to employers. Easy to tar with same brush, lose the prejudice. Mansplaining? When? What did I say? I call BS btw, not a defensive question. Bully? We see far more entrepreneurs who produce, sell at markets, get into independent stores etc. no reason for no progress when you pitch an investor. Goodo. Goodbye You an expert? Tell us how they work? The person pitching for $1.8m HAD NO IDEA. Yes we do. Stop watching then if you dont like it. or complain about it on twitter. Be littling one word belittling At least I use my real name you should back your rude comments with convictions and name yourself! I am on no meds. Why would you say that? Childish brat. and you think I am off meds! You seem to not even use your real name! Last year Baxter told TV Tonight, I have a merry band of online trolls, theyre pretty funny. If you go on Facebook and people have a go at you I Like them, which must drive them insane. They call me nasty, or sexist, or something-ist. Im a huge believer of the freedom of the internet. But you can go into an online room and have a conversation, or you can just as easily leave the room and ignore them. So I choose to leave. If they are being nasty to me I dont have to listen to them. They have a right to free speech and I respect that, but it doesnt mean I have an obligation to listen to them. The United States of America is expected to withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council today. According to The Telegraph, the action is being taken as a sign of protest against long-standing bias against Israel and willingness to allow human rights abusers to be members of the council, such as China and Saudi Arabia. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, and Nikki Haley, US ambassador to the UN, are expected to make the announcement publicly to the Geneva-based council. It is not clear at this moment, however, whether the U.S will withdraw from the council altogether. If that will be the case, the US will no longer cooperate with the council in any way, shape or form. The US has criticised the council for some time The United Nations Human Rights Council was created back in 2006, its mission is to promote and protect human rights around the world. It has 47 elected members and is based in Geneva in Switzerland. The latest three-week session started yesterday (June 18) and the first issue to be addressed was President Trumps immigration policy. The UNs high commissioner for human rights called the policy of separating immigrant children from their parents "unconscionable. This latest withdrawal has been expected for some time. Ms Haley announced a year ago that Washington was reviewing its membership. John Bolton, US National Security Adviser was the US ambassador in the council back in 2006 when it was created, and has since been very critical. George W. Bush did not sign the US to be a member of the council, however, Barack Obama put the US back in as an effort to show the world that human rights were a priority for the United States. Criticise the council while separating children from their parents The Trump administration has been active in pulling the United States out of signed agreements, such as the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. At the time that Ms Haley said that Washington was reviewing its membership, she added that the US did not want to leave the council but would do so if no changes were made. That is not the first time the council has been criticised for allowing countries with poor human rights records to become members. The criticism from the US comes at a time of turbulence, as the Trump administration has faced harsh criticism for its strict immigration policy. News media has reported of immigrant children being separated from their parents at the Mexico/US border, and while President Trump sticks to his previous statements that it is in the hands of the Democrats to fix it, little is being done regarding those children. Thomas Markle, the father of the newest member of the Royal Family hit the headlines once again this morning when he did an interview for "Good Morning Britain". Although told by both the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to avoid the media during their engagement, Markle once again ignored their advice in his latest interview. Piers Morgan made it clear in his own interview on "This Morning" that the royal family were unaware of Markle's interview for "Good Morning Britain". Phillip Schofield asked Morgan "Did you keep it quiet because the palace would have shut it down?" as quoted by the Express, to which Piers Morgan replied "Yes." Father and daughter During his interview, Markle reminisced about his relationship with the Duchess as a child. He told hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid how he had nicknamed his daughter 'Bean' after her favourite fairy-tale "Jack and the Beanstalk." Thomas Markle also told the hosts about the code he and the Duchess had used when talking about Prince Harry. Markle's conversation with his daughter was quoted on Sky News when she had told her father "Of course we'll have to call him 'H' so no one knows that we are talking about Harry." Sky News then went on to quote from Markle's "Good Morning Britain" interview, in which he said, "He's a prince, but my daughter has been a princess since the day she was born." Although Thomas Markle appears to be a loving and caring father, some might argue that he does not have her best interests at heart. In an interview on "This Morning", Piers Morgan said, "Not very much, a few thousand pounds," when questioned on whether or not Markle was paid for his appearance. However, despite his love and support for his daughter, Markle was unable to attend his daughter's wedding due to a heart surgery shortly before the big day. It was left to Charles to walk the Duchess down the aisle, however, Thomas Markle held no ill will towards Prince Charles, telling Piers Morgan "It might have been a treat for him as well because he didn't have a daughter." Courting controversy During the engagement of Prince Harry and the Duchess both Thomas Markle and the Duchess's half-sister Samantha Grant were accused of making money off of her. This caused controversy with the media and fans of the royals who began to turn against them. Now he has gone to the media once again to discuss the royal couple. His most controversial moment was perhaps his comments that Prince Harry may have at one point been a Trump Supporter, "I would hope not, but at the time he might have been," quoted Sky New when Markle responded to a question on Prince Harry's current political views. Piers Morgan reacted to Markle's comments about the Duke of Sussex's view on Donald Trump, in his interview on "This Morning". The Express quoted him saying: "If I was Meghan and Harry, an exception to Harry's political views that I'm sure will get a bit of blowback, but for the rest of the interview, I would defy them to find anything less than positive about it." Some may feel that Markle's latest interview without the palace's blessing was controversial and question his intentions. Markle has a reputation for using his daughter's new royal status to benefit himself, without putting the wishes of his daughter first. The palace has yet to issue a comment on Markle's interview, however, the royal family is renowned for their privacy and this may not happen. A general view shows Beirut international airport, Lebanon June 19, 2018. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir Thomson Reuters BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanese ministers will review a security agency's decision to allow Iranians to enter at the airport without having their passports stamped, an interior ministry source said on Tuesday. The move by the General Security agency has sparked an outcry from some politicians who fear it reflects the deepening influence of Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah movement, which emerged from a recent parliamentary vote with more sway. The staunchly anti-Hezbollah Lebanese Forces, a Christian party, described the change as an attempt to help Iran send more forces to Syria through Beirut or move money to Hezbollah despite U.S. sanctions. The agency, which oversees airport security, has defended its decision and said entry cards will be stamped instead. Iran's state news agency IRNA, reporting on the new measure this week, said some Iranians who had traveled to Lebanon had faced difficulty obtaining European visas. The United States considers Hezbollah a terrorist group and has tightened sanctions against those accused of doing business with it. The European Union classifies Hezbollah's military wing as terrorist. Tehran and Shi'ite Hezbollah provide critical support to the Syrian army in the seven-year conflict next door. Caretaker Interior Minister Nohad Machnouk, returning from a trip abroad, will meet Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri and other officials on Wednesday to discuss the passport move and determine whether or not to nullify it, the source told Reuters. Machnouk retweeted an article on Monday in local daily al-Nahar that cited ministry sources as saying he would challenge the measure. Major General Abbas Ibrahim, who heads General Security, defended the step as a normal procedure. "Unfortunately, some in Lebanon have a wide imagination," he said in remarks to local daily al-Joumhouria. A database automatically registers all Iranian arrivals and departures, said Ibrahim, a Shi'ite official who has coordinated with Hezbollah and its political ally the Amal party. Story continues He added that many European and Gulf countries refrained from stamping passports and that introducing new technology at Beirut airport would eventually eliminate the need for stamps. A lawmaker with the Lebanese Forces, which nearly doubled its seats in parliament in the election, said he believed the interior ministry would cancel the new measure. "This does not need discussion," Wehbe Katicha told Reuters. "A director general made an administrative decision, when it should be a political one. It's a mistake." (Reporting by Ellen Francis in Beirut; Additional reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin in London; Editing by Tom Perry) See Also: * Report alleges HBOS knew of fraud as early as 2004 * Lawmakers had urged publication of confidential report * Publication puts pressure on Lloyds over handling of fraud (Adds bank's statement) By Lawrence White and Emma Rumney LONDON, June 19 (Reuters) - An internal Lloyds Banking Group report written by a former manager at the bank and published on Tuesday alleges serious misconduct by the lender over the handling and disclosure of a fraud at its HBOS Reading unit. The report, written in 2013 after the Lloyds manager had taken her concerns to the police, alleges HBOS executives knew of the fraud as early as 2004 and failed to properly disclose it, with far-reaching implications given Lloyds' takeover of HBOS in 2009. It also states Lloyds mishandled its investigation and disclosure of the fraud following that takeover. "This report was provided to the FCA and the police at the time, in 2014," a spokesman for Lloyds said, referring to the regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The former Lloyds manager began looking into the bank's handling of the fraud case on her own initiative, and was then asked to write the report when she alerted the bank's Audit department, the Lloyds spokesman said. Lloyds did not in its statement address the substance of the report's allegations that it misled investors over its financial health by not disclosing the fraud earlier. Lawmakers last week urged Lloyds to publish the report, which the bank had declined to do on the grounds it contained sensitive information about its customers. Scottish businessman Neil Mitchell, a frequent critic of Britain's big banks, published the report online on Tuesday, saying it was in the public interest. The report has circulated privately among regulators and law enforcement officials for years but has not been made available to the public. Six people including two former HBOS bankers were jailed last year for a combined 47 years for their role in the fraud, in which the conspirators enriched themselves at the expense of the banks business clients. Story continues The report says that if HBOS had properly disclosed the fraud in its 2007 annual report, the 4 billion pound ($5.3 billion) 2008 rights issue that stabilised its precarious financial position, and its subsequent takeover by Lloyds, would not have happened. Its publication comes at a sensitive time for Lloyds as it attempts to move past a painful legacy of missteps before and during the financial crisis. That process has been complicated by ongoing scrutiny of the bank's handling of the HBOS fraud. Britain's financial watchdog is conducting a probe into HBOS and what its executives knew of the fraud, while a retired judge is probing whether Lloyds then properly investigated the incident after it bought HBOS in 2009. That report will likely not be published until late next year at the earliest, Reuters reported in May. Britain's National Crime Agency has also widened a review into the fraud at HBOS to look into allegations that fell outside of the initial criminal investigation. ($1 = 0.7590 pounds) (Reporting By Lawrence White and Emma Rumney Editing by Keith Weir and Edmund Blair) A logo is pictured in the headquarters of INEOS chemicals company in Rolle, Switzerland, November 13, 2017. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse EDINBURGH/LONDON (Reuters) - Scotland's highest court ruled against petrochemicals company INEOS on Tuesday, after it challenged a devolved Scottish government moratorium against fracking for oil and gas. INEOS, headed by billionaire founder Jim Ratcliffe, argued the Scottish government had imposed an unlawful ban on fracking in October 2017 and had sought a judicial review to overturn it. The Court of Session said the government had not imposed a ban, despite several statements to that effect, and had instead an "emerging and unfinalised planning policy expressing no support on the part of the Scottish government" for fracking. The extraction of oil and gas from tight rocks by fracturing them using chemicals has become a contentious issue in Europe after it helped reverse a fall in U.S. oil output, transformed its gas sector and boosted the economy of several states. Despite that, fracking is also associated with environmental issues such as increased industrial activity, fears over water contamination and objections that it boosts fossil fuel production when more renewable energy should be encouraged. INEOS operates a refinery at Grangemouth, down the Firth of Forth, and ships shale gas from the United States to supply it. It holds the rights, expiring on June 30, to explore for gas over a 400 km area between Glasgow and Falkirk. The devolved Scottish government announced last October it was against fracking, in line with public opinion. It ordered local authorities to reject planning applications from companies seeking to frack, a measure that energy minister Paul Wheelhouse told parliament was "sufficient to effectively ban the development of unconventional oil and gas extraction". "The decision that I am announcing means that fracking cannot and will not take place in Scotland," he said then. Judge Lord Pentland said, despite such ministerial statements which he cited in the court opinion, "there is indeed no prohibition against fracking in force at the present time". Story continues INEOS welcomed the court's decision which it said clarified the "confusion arising out of government announcements". "Today's judgement makes it clear the SNP government will now have to make decisions based on facts and science rather than prejudice and political expediency," it said. "With an environmental assessment and business and regulatory assessments still to be carried out, there may never be a fracking ban in Scotland." Wheelhouse said, in reaction to the court ruling, that the government's position against fracking remained unchanged. Just over 100 miles south of the border, British shale gas developer Caudrilla expects to fracture its first two horizontal wells in Blackpool later this year, subject to approvals. (Reporting by Elisabeth O'Leary and Sabina Zawadzki; editing by Stephen Addison and Alexandra Hudson) By Lesley Wroughton and Michelle Nichols WASHINGTON/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States withdrew from a "hypocritical and self-serving" United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday over what it called chronic bias against Israel and a lack of reform, a move activists warned would make advancing human rights globally even more difficult. Standing with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the State Department, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley slammed Russia, China, Cuba and Egypt for thwarting U.S. efforts to reform the council. She also criticized countries which shared U.S. values and encouraged Washington to remain, but "were unwilling to seriously challenge the status quo." Washington's withdrawal is the latest U.S. rejection of multilateral engagement after it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. It also comes as the United States faces intense criticism for detaining children separated from their immigrant parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein on Monday called on Washington to halt its "unconscionable" policy. "Look at the council membership, and you see an appalling disrespect for the most basic rights," said Haley, citing Venezuela, China, Cuba and Democratic Republic of Congo. She did not mention Saudi Arabia, which rights groups pushed to be suspended in 2016 over killings of civilians in the Yemen war. Among reforms the United States had pushed for was to make it easier to kick out member states with egregious rights records. Currently a two-thirds majority vote by the 193-member U.N. General Assembly is needed to suspend a member state. Haley also said the "disproportionate focus and unending hostility toward Israel is clear proof that the council is motivated by political bias, not by human rights." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the U.S. decision. Story continues The United States has long shielded its ally Israel at the United Nations. In citing what it says is bias against Israel, the administration of President Donald Trump could further fuel Palestinian arguments that Washington cannot be a neutral mediator as it prepares to roll out a Middle East peace plan. Washington also relocated its embassy to Jerusalem after recognising it as the capital of Israel, reversing decades of U.S. policy. The United States is half-way through a three-year term on the 47-member Geneva-based body and the Trump administration had long threatened to quit if it was not overhauled. 'MISGUIDED POLICY' Rights groups have criticized the Trump administration for not making human rights a priority in its foreign policy. Critics say this sends a message that the administration turns a blind eye to human rights abuses in some parts of the world. "Given the state of human rights in today's world, the U.S. should be stepping up, not stepping back," Zeid said after Haley announced the U.S. withdrawal. Reuters reported last week that talks on reforming the council had failed to meet Washington's demands, suggesting the Trump administration would quit. "The Human Rights Council enables abuses by absolving wrongdoers through silence and falsely condemning those that committed no offence," Pompeo said. Diplomats have said the U.S. withdrawal could bolster countries such as Cuba, Russia, Egypt and Pakistan, which resist what they see as U.N. interference in sovereign issues. Haley said the withdrawal "is not a retreat from our human rights commitments." Twelve rights and aid groups, including Human Rights First, Save the Children and CARE, warned Pompeo the U.S. withdrawal would "make it more difficult to advance human rights priorities and aid victims of abuse around the world." Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Human Rights Program, said Trump's "misguided policy of isolationism only harms American interests." The EU said Washington's decision "risks undermining the role of the U.S. as a champion and supporter of democracy on the world stage." British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said it was regrettable and that the council was the "best tool the international community has to address impunity." FIRST MEMBER TO WITHDRAW The Human Rights Council meets three times a year to examine human rights violations worldwide. It has mandated independent investigators to look at situations including Syria, North Korea, Myanmar and South Sudan. Its resolutions are not legally binding but carry moral authority. When the Council was created in 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush's administration shunned the body. Under President Barack Obama the United States was elected for a maximum two consecutive terms on the council by the U.N. General Assembly. After a year off, Washington was re-elected in 2016 for its current third term. U.N. officials said the United States would be the first member to withdraw from the council. Haley said a year ago that Washington was reviewing its membership. The body has a permanent standing agenda item on suspected violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories that Washington wanted removed. The council last month voted to probe killings in Gaza and accused Israel of using excessive force. The United States and Australia cast the only "no" votes. "The U.N. Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel," said Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth. (Additional reporting by Steve Holland in Washington, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Ori Lewis in Jerusalem; Writing by Michelle Nichols, Editing by Yara Bayoumy and James Dalgleish) 25 years ago, on June 11, 1993, Jurassic Park premiered in theaters across the United States. The film was indomitable from release, its financial success and enduring place in the culture assured. Princess Diana attended the London premiere. A thousand products made by a hundred companiesvideo games, figures, sleeping bags, fanny packswere timed to the release, at the time the second widest ever, with only Batman Returns shipping more prints to theaters. Despite opening like a monster moviean armored crate emerges from the fog, the mysterious monster inside screeching and snortingJurassic Park was conceived, from its origins as the latest in a long line of Michael Crichton technothrillers (I was writing the most expensive movie ever made, Crichton would jokingly tell people before Steven Spielberg bought the movie rights for $1.5 million), with scientific fidelity in mind. Spielberg wanted to show people real dinosaurs, as they lived in the Mesozoic Era. This isnt The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, you know? Spielberg said from the London premiere red carpet, referencing a 1953 movie about a city-stomping lizard awoken by an atomic bomb test. This is really a movie that I think is really happening as Im watching it. Trending: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem He wasnt alone. A whole generation of paleontologists can describe just where they were when they first saw Jurassic Park and just what it meant to them. Kristi Curry Rogers Ph.D., Professor in the Biology & Geology Departments of Macalester College, was an undergraduate at Montana State University in 1993. Her advisor: Jack Horner, a paleontologist who discovered the duck-billed Maiasaura and described its nurturing nesting habits, part of a wave of revisionist research that dramatically recharacterized animals once seen as slow, dumb lizards. A technical advisor on Jurassic Park, Horner secured a Bozeman premiere for the movie. It was some of Jacks discoveries of dinosaur nesting sites in Montana that really prompted my first interest in paleontology as a kid, Rogers told Newsweek. Story continues I was a first-year college student, Rogers said. I got to see the movie with Jack. That same summer, Rogers began fieldwork at Egg Mountain, the bonebed where Horner made some of his most consequential discoveries. The dig site became the basis for Snakewater, Montana, where Jurassic Park founder John Hammond (Richard Attenborough, who Spielberg convinced to take up acting again after a 15-year hiatus) first invites Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) to inspect his biological preserve and maybe even pen a wee testimony. Egg Mountain 1993 courtesy Kristi Curry Rogers It was the first time in a long time a pop culture venue actually seemed to take the science seriously and take the animals seriously. And they accomplished that with very little embellishment, Thomas Carr Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biology and Director of the Carthage Institute of Paleontology told Newsweek. When Jurassic Park came out, Carr was working on a senior thesis focused on Tyrannosaurus growth, a subject that continues to animate his work. He remembered one shot in particularthe escaped T.rex stepping in front of a Jeep, its immense body visible through the windshieldas a magical moment. It carried me away, Carr said. It does the animals justice. I think most of us felt our hearts flutter when we saw the scene with the Ornithomimus running across the field, said Karen Chin Ph.D., Associate Professor and Curator of Paleontology at University of Colorado, Boulder. Weve been working on dinosaurs for so long and well never see them in their natural habitat. Thats a scene you would expect to see if you were transported back in time by a time machine: a herd of dinosaurs, perhaps startled by something. Others were still a bit too young. I was not liking the scary dinosaurs, Caleb Brown Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at Canadas Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta, recalls of his first viewing. A lot of people in paleontology who are my age or slightly older were almost all influenced to get into the field because of Jurassic Park. Im kind of the opposite. I liked dinosaurs before that, but it almost put me off them because it was so scary. And Jurassic Park didnt get everything right. The Brachiosaurus was too big. So were the Velociraptors (that annoying kid who compares the predator to a six-foot turkey would be closer to the real scale, if only he dropped the six-foot). Its not true that T.rex visual acuity is based on movement, as Grant says. (That poor kid, one paleontologist commented. If that were a real T.rex that kid would have been sensed and eaten instantaneously.) Even that pile of poop was too big. When I first saw that scene I just burst out laughing, I think what they meant was they had kind of shoveled it all together? Chin said. An expert in coprolites, or fossilized feces, the largest dung mass Chin has seen was between 7-9 liters in volume, just enough to overflow a dutch oven. Its quite possible the sauropods produce a larger fecal mass, she said. But Jurassic Park wasnt going for perfect realism, nor would perfect realism have been possible. Technical advisers like Horner and Robert T. Bakker, an early proponent of swift, warm-blooded dinosaurs, were able to offer the most up-to-date science, but theres a limit to our understanding. There was no way to get everything right, and in some ways it wasnt supposed to, something Spielberg knew. Theres a mystery about dinosaurs. I think thats why the uncovering of bones in Montana or in Canada or wherever they find dinosaur bones today, is like a great mystery. What we did with this was, we sort of fleshed them out, Spielberg said at the London premiere. At a certain point, choices become more about storytelling than scientific extrapolation. The sauropod eyes look like cow eyes and the Velociraptor eyes look like lizard eyes. And T.rex eyes kind of look like the eyes of a lion, Rogers said. There are all of these subtle things, if youve seen Jurassic Park as many times as I have, there are all these subtle hints of how we are supposed to feel. (Rogers said shes seen Jurassic Park 10 times, but after some reflection upgraded to 12, maybe more.) Where some dinosaurs were designed to remind us of more familiar animals with anthropomorphic associations, others were tweaked to feel more alien, particularly the Dilophosaurus that kills Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight). dilophosaurus-jurassic-park Universal Pictures A little hopping creature that spits venom and has a big neck frill: that was created for the movie, John Scannella Ph.D., the John R. Horner Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman said. Its so fantastical, but that helps raise questions about what possible things could these animals have going on that we wouldnt necessarily know about? How would we find evidence of that in a fossil? I love the film, Im not going to sit and nitpick about it, Stephen Brusatte Ph.D., an Associate Professor in the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh and author of the recently released The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs told Newsweek. "Jurassic Park is probably the best thing that ever happened to paleontology. Don't miss: Soccer Has an Intolerance Problem? After Mexicans Yell Anti-Gay Slur, FIFA Opens Investigation But while Jurassic Park depicted dinosaurs as close to the true state of paleontological understanding in 1993, the field has changed a lot in the intervening 25 years. New technology, new research and new discoveries have expanded our understanding of not just individual dinosaur species, but an entire ancient ecosystem of astounding diversity and complexity. Feathers Though feathers have yet to infiltrate the Jurassic Park sequels, the connection between dinosaur and birds was in the series from the very beginning. When Grant speculates, maybe dinosaurs have more in common with present-day birds than they do with reptiles, he was voicing a growing consensus in the field, Jurassic Park once again situating itself right on the frontier of the science. And though a narrow clade of feathered species, including Archaeopteryx, pointed to the evolutionary continuity between dinosaur and birds, widespread dinosaur feathers were still just a supposition. That changed in 1996, when Li Yumin, a farmer and amateur fossil hunter, uncovered Sinosauropteryx in Chinas Liaoning Province, where volcanic ash from Mesozoic eruptions preserved spectacular fossils. Sinosauropteryx was a bipedal predator and close relative of the Compsognathus (seen in Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World killing Peter Stormare), smaller than a house cat, believed to feed on small lizards and mammals. It was also covered in short feathers, close to the thickness of fur, but likely coarser. We even have an idea what color it was: reddish-brown, its tail striped with chestnut and rust. Sinosauropteryxfossil Sam / Olai Ose / Skjaervoy CC BY-SA 2.0 Sinosauropteryx was just the beginning. Further discoveries made in Liaonings Yixian Formation included dinosaurs with not just feathers, but wings. They probably couldnt fly, but instead used them for display, Brusatte said. What had once been theoretical now has extensive fossil evidence. New research even pointed to feathered, fully-plumed Velociraptor. Now its almost a common occurence to find feathers on dinosaurs and it further strengthens the link between non-avian dinosaurs and birds, Scannella said. Meateaters, by and large, had feathers, but not all of them, Carr said. Things like T.rex were actually scaly, not feathery. And that was normal for dinosaurs. The big theropods (bipedal predators, including the raptors), Stegosaurus, Ankylosaurus. But while not all dinosaurs were feathered, Carr pointed out an essential difference in our new understanding: unfeathered dinosaurs likely represent evolutionary reversals from their feathered predecessors. Carr pointed to the discovery of a feathered tyrannosaurid, once again in Liaoning Provincenot Tyrannosaurus rex, but Yutyrannus huali, which was only 30 feet long and 3,000 poundsas evidence toward large, featherless predators having reversed from feathered forebears. yutyrannus-huali-t-rex-jurassic-park-tyrannosaurus Eden, Janine and Jen under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) The conversation has essentially flipped, with dinosaurs now often discussed as presumptively feathered, with a deepening fossil record pointing to the evolution of feathers in a common ancestor to pterosaurs (winged reptiles) and dinosaurs. Which means, as much as Jurassic Park sequels may not want to embrace the feathers, the fuzzy, plumed dinosaur isnt going away. Instead, theyve become as central to our modern understanding of dinosaurs as was the warm-blooded, nurturing animals of Bakker, Horner and John Ostroms Dinosaur Renaissance in the decades leading up to Jurassic Park. Why not show accurate dinosaurs? Carr asked. Hell, Id say a feathery Velociraptor that could do a short glide, thats a scary animal. Why not? Dinosaurs are like Birds Dinosaurs are like Crocodiles Dinosaurs are like Dinosaurs While modern-day birds are dinosaurs, theres another category of living vertebrates that also bear comparative similarities to dinosaurs: the crocodilians. Rather than evolving from dinosaurs, like birds, the evolution of crocodilians split off early in the Triassic, to form a clade known as Pseudosuchia. They were doing a greater range of body sizes and behaviors. There were crocodiles the size of buses, some that ate plants, some covered in armor and spikes and some that walked on two legs, Brusatte said. The dinosaurs were playing second fiddle to them. But 200 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic, there was another mass extinction eventprobably a combination of factors, including supervolcanoes, the resulting runaway global warming and the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaeathat wiped out the Psuedosuchia, all except a narrow group of crocodilians. The close evolutionary lineage of the crocodiles makes them a useful comparison point for understanding dinosaurs. Modern techniques, like high-resolution CT-scanning, have enabled paleontologists to reach astoundingly specific behavioral conclusions. Tyrannosaur facial skin is highly innervated, and we know that because the entire snout is shot through with really tiny holes that allowed nerves through to skin to bring the sensation of touch back to the brain, Carr said, comparing the complex weave of nerve canals running from its brain to facial skin to the snouts of alligators, crocodiles and caimans. With facial skin more sensitive than human fingertips, Tyrannosaurus likely used its head for far more than scent and a powerful bite. Like crocodiles, high facial sensitivity would have made them sensual animals, prone to communicating by touch. Its not hard to imagine that tyrannosaurs would have used their snouts in the same way, Carr said. They will be rubbing snouts with each other, they will be monitoring their nest, they will be touching carcasses theyre feeding on. With birds in their direct lineage and crocodilians as close cousins, a diagnostic practice known as extant phylogenetic bracketing has deepened our understanding of dinosaurs since Jurassic Park. In extant phylogenetic bracketing, an extinct taxon is compared to, and bracketed by, its nearest living relatives. The method, introduced in 1995 by Lawrence Witmer, Professor of Paleontology at Ohio University, allows researchers to infer traits to an extinct species, by looking for traits common to the living relatives that bracket it. Extant phylogenetic bracketing provides a common framework and set of standards for paleontologists extrapolating from the present for insight into these distant past. These inferences can be scaled to various confidence-levels based on the strength of bone or soft tissue evidence available and whether a proposed trait, such as warm-bloodedness, matches with one or both bracket taxons. We always try and frame our arguments, especially about things that arent so easy to preserve in the fossil record, using this comparative model, Rogers said. Sometimes dinosaurs are more like crocodiles than they are like birds, and sometimes more like birds. We really need to think about dinosaurs as dinosaurs. Most popular: Kirstjen Nielsen Accused of Lying For a Racist by Mika Brzezinski Over Defense of Trump Policy Separating Families Rogers offered dinosaur growth rates as an example. All dinosaurs grow faster than living reptiles, some of them grow more than 50 times faster than living reptiles, she said. Yet, no dinosaur growth rate has been discovered that matches the much-faster growth rate found in birds. The slower and faster growth rates on either side of a dinosaurs phylogenetic bracketing form theoretical bounds. Comparative method helps us find the places where they are uniquely dinosaur, Rogers said. Dinosaurs are different, theyre doing their own thing. Which means theres always room for the unexpected. CAT Scans and the Rise of Molecular Paleontology Jurassic Park had its own vision of the future of paleontological fieldwork. A few more years development and we wont even have to dig anymore, a technician says in the film, excited at the prospect of sonar imaging in the field. But that never really came to pass. Its still pretty basic, its still jackhammers, we dont use any fancy sonar, Rogers said. But mapping techniques have gotten more specific. GPS is really important to people in the field. jurassic-park-dinosaur-dig courtesy of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology But if digging up dinosaur bones remains low-tech, the same cant be said of lab analysis techniques developed since 1993. CT scans, which computer-process multiple X-ray measurements into virtual slices of a 3D object, like a dinosaur skull, have become a major driver of new discoveries. "If we CAT scan the skulls of dinosaurs we can build digital models of the brain, of the ear, of the blood vessels and all the things that are hidden in the head, explained Brusatte. From dinosaur cochlea, paleontologists can extrapolate the sound-space in which individual dinosaur species existed. Their immense olfactory bulbs have granted researchers insight into the primacy of smell in the lives of raptors and tyrannosaurs. In 2007, Prof. Mary Higby Schweitzer and her colleagues announced the discovery of proteins recovered from the fossilized femur of a Tyrannosaur rex. Paleontologists had previously believed fossilization didnt preserve cellular structures. Now a variety of biochemical markers can be extracted from dinosaur fossils, including protein fragments called peptides, amino acids and nucleotides. We are learning things about dinosaurs we thought we would never be able to tell for certain, Schweitzer told Newsweek. We have learned a lot about how things preserve, what kinds of information fossils can yield at the molecular level, and new ways to analyze dinosaur tissues. Its opened up a whole new field of, basically, biochemistry for dinosaurs, Carr said. She just thought about fossils in a different way. A Quick Aside About Cloning The Jurassic Park scenariorecovering dinosaur DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amberno longer seems viable. The blossoming of molecular-scale paleontological research has lead to a disappointing conclusion: DNA and RNA strands simply dont survive for millions of years. Horners 2009 book How to Build a Dinosaur proposes an alternate strategy: awakening dormant genes in modern birds and reversing evolution, trait-by-trait. In 2015, scientists identified and activated a gene in chickens that matched ancestral fossil forms, creating a chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beakthe first step toward a chickenosaurus. Its still uncertain whether enough of these atavistic genes can be found and activated within the chicken genome to fully recreate an extinct species. Growing up Dinosaur Studying microscopic structures in dinosaur bones, known as histology, has become a commonplace paleontological practice, a change from the more anatomical and taxonomic focus of generations preceding Jurassic Park. One particularly promising new technique is microscopic examination of what Brown described as lines of arrested growth, where minute variations in the cellular structure of a dinosaur bone seem to correlate to annual growth cycles, giving deeper insights into how dinosaurs grew and what they looked like at various life-stages. Theres been a lot more research looking inside bones to examine the microstructures and see how bones are remodeling and transforming as these animals grew, Scannella said. Now its clear dinosaurs underwent very dramatic transformations as they grew from babies to adults. A baby T.rex probably looked very different than the adult. Combine this refinement in research with an ever-deepening fossil record and youll find the basis of the several headline cases of multiple dinosaur species collapsed into a narrower grouping, most famously Triceratops and Torosaurus, now believed to be younger and older examples of the same genus. TriceratopsTyrrellMuseum1 Mathknight / Royal Tyrrell Museum under CC BY 3.0 license The International Dinosaur Headline-grabbing finds in Liaoning Province have made China the epicenter of global paleontology. China is the place where the most and the most exciting discoveries are happening right now, probably half, if not more. But people are finding dinosaurs all over the world now, Brusatte said. One species a week, which is just nuts. Its a crazy pace. Major finds in Mongolia, Argentina, Brazil, even north of the Arctic Circle have made paleontology more international, resulting in both a widespread collaborative network of researchers and a large enough data set to better understand the total Mesozoic ecosystem, which could provide insight into some of the biggest unanswered questions in paleontology. For example, was the boloid that struck Mexicos Yucatan peninsula solely responsible for the death of the dinosaurs? While an asteroid or meteor striking the Earth at the same time the dinosaurs went extinct seems like more than coincidence, there are many different possible interpretations of the catastrophic event. Were they already on the way out? Or were they moving along just fine and then KABAM, theyre done? Brown asked, characterizing the open questions that remain. RTMP-KPg-boundary courtesy of Royal Tyrrell museum of Palaeontology There are still so many things to do and so many things to discover. The field is far from finished, Rogers said. Im constantly struck by how many exciting, new things we learn every time we ask a new question or use a new tool. Paleontology Survived Jurassic Park In a 1993 issue of The New York Review of Books, Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist and popular science writer, fretted over the potential downsides of over-popularizing a scientific field. He writes: For paleontologists, Jurassic Park is both our greatest opportunity and our most oppressive incubusa spur for unparalleled general interest in our subject, and the source of a commercial flood that may truly extinguish dinosaurs by turning them from sources of awe into cliches and commodities. Will we have strength to stand up in this deluge? Goulds concern was not entirely unfounded. There have been downsides, notably a sprawling black market for dinosaur fossils. In 1997, the largest and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex ever discovered, nicknamed Sue, was auctioned by Sothebys and sold for $8.3 million to Chicagos Field Museum of Natural History. However, many specimens wind up in private hands and inaccessible to researchers. 1920px-Sues_skeleton Connie Ma from Chicago, CC BY-SA 2.0 Dinosaur fossils on private land in the United States do not have any legal protection, Carr said, oftentimes they make it to market. Despite dedicated efforts by countries like Mongolia to repatriate fossils smuggled out of the country and sold in black markets, theres only so much paleontologists can accomplish against buyers who have transformed dinosaurs into luxury market items. Fossils are information and when they buy fossils theyre depriving humanity from learning about dinosaurs. Because we dont know everything! Carr added. I can get 11,000 data points from a single Tyrannosaurus skull. So theres a dozen privately-owned T.rex, so I lose 132,000 data points because those fossils arent in real museums. While Jurassic Park has helped transform dinosaurs into objects of private desire, Goulds more spiritual concernsthat our awe will fadenow seem unfounded. A generation later, paleontology is more vibrant than ever, thanks in part to the influx of new scientists whose imaginations were set aflame by the movie. More jobs, more funding, that came from Jurassic Park, Brusatte said. I dont think we can overstate how important that was to paleontology. I probably wouldnt have my job and a lot of my colleagues wouldnt either. And though theyve been extinct for tens of millions of years, understanding dinosaurs could help us understand ourselves. They were enormously successful. They survived periods of global warming and global cooling, changing CO2 levels, continental shifts, changing food sources and changing habitats. They adapted to a range of conditions humans have not yet seen, Schweitzer pointed out. It behooves us to use every method and tool and source of information at our disposal to see just exactly how they rose to these challenges." This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek By Karolina Tagaris and Aleksandar Vasovic PRESPES, Greece/BITOLA, Macedonia (Reuters) - (This June 17 story has been refiled to correct academic institution of expert in penultimate paragraph.) Greece and Macedonia set aside three decades of dispute on Sunday as they agreed on a new name for the former Yugoslav republic, paving the way for its possible admission to the European Union and NATO. The foreign ministers of the two countries signed an accord to rename the former Yugoslav republic the "Republic of North Macedonia", despite angry protests on both sides of the border over a deal seen as a national sellout by some on both sides. In the idyllic setting of Prespes, a lake region that borders Greece, Macedonia and Albania, leaders from the two countries embraced and shook hands in the presence of European and United Nations officials. The agreement still requires the approval of both parliaments and a referendum in Macedonia. That approval is far from assured, as it faces stiff opposition from the Greek public, and Macedonia's president has vowed to block the deal. "Very few believed we would be able to leave behind 26 years of unfruitful dispute," said Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who survived a no-confidence vote mounted by the opposition in parliament on Saturday. "We have a historic responsibility that this deal is not held in abeyance," Tsipras said as he and his Macedonian counterpart Zoran Zaev received a standing ovation. In the Macedonian capital Skopje, police fired stun grenades and tear gas on Sunday night to disperse a protest rally by several hundred nationalists. A Reuters witness saw protesters pelting police with stones, chanting "Macedonia, Macedonia we will give our lives for Macedonia." Some of the demonstrators were arrested. Across the border, up to 70 percent of Greeks object to the name compromise, an opinion poll by the Proto Thema newspaper showed on Saturday. In Psarades, the tiny lakeside community where the deal was signed, the church bell tolled in mourning, draped in a Greek flag. Story continues Some 30 km (20 miles) away in the Greek village of Pisoderi, about 3,000 people rallied against the deal and at least six were injured in clashes with police who fired tear gas to disperse an angry crowd on a hillside. "We don't accept anything, we don't recognise anything. For us none of it is valid," said Costas Venetikidis, a protester. "Macedonia is in our soul, that's why we're here." Not far from the Greek border in the Macedonian city of Bitola, thousands protested draped in national flags, chanting "This is Macedonia." "This shameful deal will not pass. We will defend Macedonia's name and pride," said Petre Filipovski, 40. 'WE HAVE MOVED MOUNTAINS' Following the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, Greece's northern neighbour took the name Macedonia. Athens refused to accept it, saying it implied territorial claims over the Greek province of Macedonia and an appropriation of ancient Greek culture and civilisation. Zaev, who arrived from across the lake on a speedboat, said the two neighbours had "moved mountains" by reaching the accord. It was "a dignified solution acceptable to both sides", he said. Veteran UN mediator Matthew Nimetz, who has overseen talks for a quarter-century, described the agreement as a fair and honourable deal. It was, he said, an example of "how neighbours can solve a problem if they really work at it". "Today is my birthday," said Nimetz, 79. "I told my family this year I don't need any gifts because two prime ministers are going to give me a big gift." Athens had blocked Macedonia's hopes of joining the EU and NATO, objections it must now lift under the deal. Others might still object. "One big concern is Russia. Moscow has noticeably refused to endorse the agreement," said James Ker-Lindsay, senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. "It knows that this will see Macedonia join NATO," he said. "Given recent allegations of Moscow's involvement in other elections and referendums, this will be a real concern for NATO and the EU." (Additional reporting by Michele Kambas, Phoebe Fronista and Kole Casule; editing by Andrew Roche and Ros Russell) Immigrant children, many of whom have been separated from their parents under a new Thomson Reuters By Nelson Renteria SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) - Honduras called on Monday for the United States to stop separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. border, while El Salvador warned that the policy puts children's health at risk and could cause psychosocial scars. El Salvador's foreign ministry said in a statement that the Trump administration's hardline policy of separating immigrant parents and children violated human rights and "strongly urged" for an end to the practice. "These provisions are mainly affecting migrant children and adolescents ... exposing them to extremely adverse conditions, which will surely have consequences in their physical health and long-term psychosocial development," the statement said. The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has responded to an increase in immigration from Central America with a "zero tolerance" migration policy that provides for the arrest of all adults caught trying to enter the United States illegally, including those seeking asylum. Images of children and youths sitting in concrete-floored cages in U.S. detention centers have fanned outrage over the policy. Trump administration officials have defended the policy as a way to secure the border and deter illegal immigrants. Official figures indicate that from mid-April to May, U.S. authorities have divided more than 2,000 children from their families. Many are from Central America, where immigrants are fleeing poverty and widespread gang violence. El Salvador insisted parents had the right to know where their children were and asked that consular officials be "speedily" notified of where the children have been taken. Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez on Monday also called for an end to the family separations after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, echoing the call that children's rights should come first. "We can also see how many leaders, from both parties in Congress ... have also emphasized that this should not continue," he said, calling on U.S. lawmakers to take action. Story continues U.S. Democrats blasted conditions in detention centers while the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives moved toward voting later this week on two pieces of immigration-related legislation. For its part, the government of Guatemala, which has tried to show support for Trump and backed his decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, refrained from criticism. "We are respectful of foreign policy on migration issues," Guatemalan presidential spokesman Heinz Heimann told a news conference. (Additional reporting by Sofia Menchu in GUATEMALA CITY and Gustavo Palencia in TEGUCIGALPA; Editing by Simon cameron-Moore) See Also: FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban addresses the supporters after the announcement of the partial results of parliamentary election in Budapest, Hungary, April 8, 2018.REUTERS/Leonhard Foeger/File Photo By Marton Dunai BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Two leading European rights bodies have told Hungary that its "Stop Soros" bill criminalising help to illegal immigrants is "arbitrary" and vague, unduly threatens non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and violates European law. In a June 15 draft report seen by Reuters, the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) gave a detailed opinion on a bill that Hungary's parliament is expected to approve on Wednesday. Under the draft law, individuals or groups who help migrants not entitled to protection to submit requests for asylum or who help illegal migrants gain status to stay in Hungary will be liable to jail. The bill "criminalises activities that are fully legitimate," the two European bodies wrote in their report. The Venice Commission, a Council of Europe expert body which advises on constitutional matters, has asked Hungary to await the final report it will probably adopt later this week. But Hungary's Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, speaking during a visit to Stockholm, angrily dismissed the criticism in the report and said the bill would be approved on Wednesday. Hungary's Finance Ministry also joined the fray on Tuesday, announcing plans to introduce a 25 percent special tax on aid groups which support migration. ORBAN VS SOROS Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Fidesz party was re-elected with a two-thirds parliamentary majority in April after a campaign attacking U.S. billionaire George Soros and liberal NGOs he supports. Orban accuses Soros of encouraging mass immigration in order to undermine Europe, a charge Soros denies. Orban, in power since 2010, has led eastern European resistance to EU plans to share out some of the large numbers of mostly Muslim migrants who have arrived on the continent since 2015. He says they threaten Europe's Christian civilisation. The Hungarian leader has said "Stop Soros" will be among the first bills to pass the new parliament, along with a constitutional change which says no "alien population" can be settled in Hungary - a jab at the EU's migrant quota plan. Story continues The European Commission, the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner and the Venice Commission have "formed the pro-immigration union of George Soros," Szijjarto told public television. "Hungary's government fights against pressure from international forces." In the 25-page draft, the Venice Commission and the OSCE said the bill "may result in further arbitrary restrictions... of the indispensable work of human rights NGOs and leave migrants without essential services provided by such NGOs". The draft bill "lacks the requisite precision... (it) is not in line with European standards," the bodies wrote. The Venice Commission proposed exempting humanitarian aid, advocacy and campaigning activities from criminal sanctions. "Only explicitly encouraging migrants to circumvent the law should give rise to criminal prosecution," the draft said, adding any law should state clearly that NGO help is not a crime and that money the NGOs receive does not fund criminal acts. (Additional reporting by Daniel Dickson in STOCKHOLM; Editing by Gareth Jones) NAIROBI (Reuters) - Eight Kenyan police officials were killed when their vehicle hit an improvised explosive device planted by Somalia's al Shabaab militant group, police said. The militants took eight weapons six AK47 assault rifles and two G3 battle rifles and 510 rounds of ammunition from the eight officers killed on Sunday in the east of the country, a police report said. Al Shabaab is fighting to topple Somalia's government, establish their own rule based on their strict interpretation of Islamic law and drive out of the country peacekeepers deployed by the African Union. The militants frequently launch attacks in neighbouring Kenya to pressure it to withdraw its troops which form part of the peacekeeping force. Charles Owino, Kenya's police spokesman, told Reuters that the five administration police and three reservists were killed while protecting the country's borders. Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab's military operations spokesman, said the group killed 10 Kenyan soldiers in the attack. Earlier this month, five Kenyan police officers were killed in a similar attack in the same region. [L5N1T836L] (Reporting by Humphrey Malalo, Noor Ali in Isiolo, and Feisal Omar and Abdi Sheikh in Mogadishu; Additonal reporting by Carlos Mureithi; Writing by Maggie Fick; Editing by Alison Williams) By Kaori Kaneko and Malcolm Foster TOKYO (Reuters) - A magnitude 6.1 earthquake in Osaka, Japan's second-biggest metropolis, killed four people, injured hundreds more and halted factory lines in an industrial area, government and company officials said on Tuesday. Authorities were assessing the damage from Monday's quake which injured 380 people, according to the latest government estimate on Tuesday. Live footage showed toppled walls, broken windows and water gushing from burst mains after the quake hit Osaka, which will host next year's Group of 20 summit, just before 8 a.m. on Monday (2300 GMT Sunday) as commuters were heading to work. Quakes are common in Japan, part of the seismically active "Ring of Fire" that stretches from the South Pacific through Indonesia and Japan, across to Alaska and down the west coast of North, Central and South America. The epicentre of Monday's earthquake was just north of Osaka city at a depth of 13 km (8 miles), said the Japan Meteorological Agency. The agency originally put the magnitude at 5.9 but later raised it to 6.1. Collapsing walls killed a 9-year-old girl as she walked to school and an 80-year-old man, the government said. An 85-year-old man died when a bookcase fell on him and an 81-year-old woman was found dead under a toppled dresser. The quake struck a key industrial area of central Japan. Trade minister Hiroshige Seko said on Tuesday the quake had forced factories to halt operations but there was no information on the damage to facilities. "We will closely monitor the impacts, including on supply chains," Seko told reporters. Osaka-based electronics firm Panasonic Corp <6752.T> said it resumed some operations at three of its plants. Daihatsu Motor Co, a unit of Toyota Motor Corp <7203.T>, stopped day-time operations in its factories in Osaka and Kyoto and at one plant in Shiga while the company checked for damage. Tractor maker Kubota Corp. <6326.T> said it halted two plants in the area, while air conditioner maker Daikin Industries Ltd suspended operations at two plants, one of which had restarted. Story continues Honda Motor Co. <7267.T> and Mitsubishi Motors <7211.T> said they were resuming operations after suspensions and safety checks. Sharp Corp <6753.T> also restarted work at a joint venture plant with parent Hon Hai Precision Industry <2317.TW> that it had stopped for safety checks. Japan's JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy Corp <5020.T> is likely to take about a week to resume normal refining operations at its 115,000 barrels-per-day Osaka refinery that was shut down following the quake, the trade ministry said. 'TERRIFIED, CONFUSED' Tourists spoke of the panic when the earthquake struck. "We were sleeping and it woke us up abruptly," said Kate Kilpatrick, a 19-year-old American who was staying at a Osaka hotel. "It was so terrifying because this is my first earthquake. I thought it was a nightmare because I was so confused," she said. No irregularities were detected at the Mihama, Takahama and Ohi nuclear plants to the north of Osaka, said Kansai Electric Power <9503.T>. It said more than 170,000 households in Osaka and neighbouring Hyogo prefecture lost power for a short time. Osaka Gas Co <9532.T> said it would take eight to 12 days to resume piped gas supplies to more than 110,000 customers in the quake-hit area. Most trains in the area had resumed service on Tuesday, Osaka police said. Osaka prefecture, which includes the city and surrounding areas, is home to 8.8 million people. The city is close to Kobe, which was hit by a deadly magnitude 6.9 quake in 1995. A massive 9.0 quake struck further north in March 2011, triggering a huge tsunami that killed some 18,000 people and the world's worst nuclear disaster in a quarter of a century at Tokyo Electric Power's <9501.T> Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Japan introduced a law after the Kobe quake requiring owners of large buildings such as hotels and hospitals to have their buildings inspected for earthquake resistance. (Reporting by Kaori Kaneko, Mari Saito, Kiyoshi Takenaka, Osamu Tsukimori, Makiko Yamazaki, Naomi Tajitsu, Linda Sieg, Ami Miyazaki and Maki Shiraki; Writing by Malcolm Foster; Editing by Darren Schuettler) Summer traditionally marks a time for us to gather with our loved ones and look up at the night sky. Lucky for us, this summer will be filled with plenty of awe-inspiring celestial events to ensure that your summer nights are especially memorable. From spotting our two closest heavenly neighbors to watching the best meteor shower of the year, this summer sky will be anything but boring in the upcoming weeks. However, not all events can be observed from every location on Earth. Make sure to check out how to watch these events so you dont miss them. July 13: Partial Solar Eclipse Not all the celestial events are during the evening. On July 13 there will be a partial solar eclipse. Unfortunately for us, this will occur nearly entirely over open water. However, those on the most southern tips of New Zealand and Australia may be able to catch a brief glimpse, according to Space.com. Trending: David Hogg Calls For Laura Ingraham Advertising Boycott After 'Summer Camp' Comments July 15: Catch a Glimpse of Venus Our neighbor Venus gets far less attention than Mars, but on July 15 at sunset, sky-watchers can observe it in the sky. The best place to observe this is North America, according to National Geographic. 06_18_Venus Stan Honda/AFP/Getty July 27: Total Lunar Eclipse This will be the second total lunar eclipse of 2018 and can be seen in Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and South America, TimeandDate reports. This will also be the longest lunar eclipse of the 21st century and will last for one hour and 43 minutes, according to IFL Science. Unfortunately, North Americans wont be able to catch this one, as itll arrive in the daytime on their continent, Time reported. Don't miss: Python Strangles Forest Officer As He Poses For Selfie With it Wrapped Around His Neck July 27: Mars at Opposition If you arent able to catch the lunar eclipse, you may have more luck spotting Mars, which will come into view the same evening. On July 27, Mars will sit opposite to the sun in our sky, which means that the Red Planet will look extra bright and orange in our sky, according to National Geographic. Story continues August 11: Partial Solar Eclipse This partial solar eclipse will be visible in most parts of Canada, Greenland, Northern Europe and northern and eastern Asia, Seasky.com reported. Although not as grand as a total eclipse, the partial eclipse will cause the sun to appear to as if a bite was taken out of it, as the moon will only partially block its shadow. August 12-13: Perseid Meteor Shower The Perseid meteor shower will occur in mid-August and is largely considered to be the best meteor shower of the year. At its peak, you can see between 60 and 70 meteors an hour, Space.com reported. The shower can be observed from both hemispheres, but meteors are seen in greater volume in the Northern Hemisphere. Most popular: Donald Trump Administration Can't Get Child Separation 'Policy' Messaging Straight Perseid Meteor Shower Ethan Miller/Getty Images The meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through the densest part of the Swift-Tuttle comet. This means that although the peak is the nights of August 12 and 13, you may be able to catch some meteors both before and after this point. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek If you feel like youre constantly surrounded by psychopaths, it may be that you live in the wrong city. New research measured which areas of the country are home to the individuals with psychopathic personalities and found that the Northeast hosts a larger percentage of these individuals, with Washington, D.C., and Connecticut housing the most. The study was conducted by Ryan Murphy, a research assistant professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas. In the paper, which hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, Murphy used data on state personalities that had previously been collected in a 2013 study that estimated regional differences in personalities. The prior research used five separate samples of individuals to create an idea of the average temperament of individuals from a specific region. Using this data, Murphy then estimated psychopathy levels state by state. These results are the first estimates we have, to the best of my knowledge, on the degree of psychopathy found in each state," Murphy told Newsweek. Trending: PUBG Mobile Update 0.6.0 Adds First-Person & Royale Pass - Patch Notes The true definition of a psychopath is hard to pin down, as the term has been misrepresented by TV and movies so many times. However, today, psychopathy refers to an extension of antisocial personality disorder. This is characterized by traits such as lack of empathy, selfishness and superficial charm, The University of North Texas reports. The study focused on the Big Five personality traits as a measurement of ranking for the psychopathic personality. This measured an individuals neuroticism, agreeableness, extroversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience, Inc. reported. 06_18_washington DC Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images Story continues Don't miss: Who Is Joshua Adam Schulte? Former CIA Employee Charged Over Vault 7 Leak According to the new research, residents of the District of Columbia scored highest for measurements of psychopathy. The state with the highest psychopathy score, however, was Connecticut. Following Connecticut, the next top observations of psychopathy were California, New Jersey, and a tie of New York and Wyoming for fifth. Murphy told Newsweek that he suspected a number of factors played a role in the variety of psychopathy we see in the results. My own speculations would be that the urban/rural distinctions drive a lot of the variation, and the historical distribution of cultures within the United States have a lot to do with it as well, he said. Certain placing seemed to match previous notes on psychopathy. For example, according to previous research by Murphy, individuals with more psychopathic personality traits enjoy the political sphere. This may explain Washington, D.C.s high score, the study reported. Although the number of individual psychopaths is quite low, understanding the general personality of a geographic area can be useful. However, Murphy noted he was not able to establish a relationship between these results and higher homicide ratesso dont worry too much if you call the Constitution state your home. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek One in six homeless people pull their own teeth out as they are refused access to dental services, MPs have heard (Picture: Getty) One in six homeless people pull their own teeth out as they are refused access to dental services, MPs have been told. Labour MP Stella Creasy told the Commons that many homeless people hit a brick wall when they try to access dental services, leading them to perform their own procedures. Its little wonder that one study shows that 15% of homeless people have pulled their own teeth out because they cant access services, said the Walthamstow MP, going on to ask Health Minister Jackie Doyle-Price to commit to changing the situation and making sure her promises arent toothless. Toothless promises MP Stella Creasy urged Health Minister Jackie Doyle-Price to do something to change the situation (Picture: Getty) Health Minister Jackie Doyle-Price agreed to meet Ms Creasy, adding: I agree with her, notwithstanding what expectations we have of GPs and dentists in this area, it is quite clear that homeless people are not always getting access to the treatment that they should have. Following Ms Creasys comments Charlotte Waite, the British Dental Associations (BDA) chair of of England Community Dental Services, said current policy on NHS dentistry was failing vulnerable patients. MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO She said: A civilised society does not leave homeless people so debilitated by oral disease they resort to pulling out their own teeth. There is no easy solution, but any progress is impossible without adequate investment in mainstream and dedicated services. The failure to invest in community dentistry is hurting patients who cant always be cared for in traditional settings. Its hitting the homeless, the housebound, and patients with dementia, learning disabilities and phobias who are all entitled to effective care. Story continues Study a 2017 study by homelessness charity Groundswell revealed worrying figures about homeless peoples dentistry (Picture: Getty) A 2017 study by homelessness charity Groundswell approached over 260 homeless people in London through focus groups and one-to-one interviews to look at health inequalities and the impact on homeless people. The research found 15% of homeless people had pulled out their own teeth, 70% reported having lost teeth since they had been homeless, 17% said they had lost teeth following acts of violence and 7% had no teeth at all. Slovenias Prime Minister Miro Cerar arrives at a European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium, March 22, 2018. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir Thomson Reuters By Marja Novak LJUBLJANA (Reuters) - Slovenia will take neighboring Croatia to court because Zagreb is unwilling to implement an international arbitration ruling on the border between the two European Union members, Prime Minister Miro Cerar said on Monday. The case against Croatia will be filed at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg in July, he said. Slovenia and Croatia both declared independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991 but have so far failed to agree on parts of their common sea and land border. "The government will on Thursday confirm the decision to file the suit ... I expect the suit will be filed by the middle of July," Cerar told a news conference. A year ago the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague ruled that Slovenia should have "uninterrupted access" to the international waters in the Adriatic Sea. The dispute has chiefly affected fishermen from both countries who are being fined by the other state for illegally crossing the border. The Hague court's ruling is final and binding but Zagreb has said it is not valid because Croatia withdrew from the arbitration process in 2015. This followed the leaking of a recording in which a Slovenian judge on the panel improperly exchanged confidential information with the Ljubljana government. The judge resigned and the court continued with the case, saying the incident had not compromised its ability to reach a verdict. Slovenia asked the European Commission in March to issue its opinion on the matter but earlier on Monday Brussels said it would not do so. "I am very worried about the silence of the Commission ... I believe politics prevailed over the law in this case," said Cerar, adding the rule of law is "one of the fundamentals of the European Union". Croatia believes the dispute should be solved in bilateral talks although the two countries turned to arbitration in 2009 after failing to resolve the matter themselves in almost two decades. Story continues The dispute has prompted a change in the EU's expansion strategy, which was released in February and states that countries will no longer be able to join the bloc before resolving their border issues. Another former Yugoslav republic, Macedonia, signed a deal with neighboring Greece on Sunday to settle a long-running dispute over its name. The agreement paves the way for the country's possible admission to the EU and NATO. (Reporting By Marja Novak; editing by David Stamp) See Also: Syrian state media accused the U.S. of launching airstrikes against Syrian military targets in the east of the country which caused deaths and injures, though the U.S. military has denied any involvement. The attack took place in al-Harra, southeast of the town of Albu Kamal, state media said, citing a military source who gave no breakdown of casualties other than saying there were several martyrs and others were wounded. GettyImages-872910064 Getty Images Trending: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem A commander in the alliance fighting alongside Damascus told Reuters that drones which were probably American bombed positions of Iraqi factions between Albu Kamal and Tanf, as well as Syrian military positions. The commander, who is not Syrian and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the strike killed and injured some Iraqi fighters, but did not give a toll. In Baghdad, Iraqi officials told the Associated Press that state-backed Shiite militias came under attack south of the town of Qaim, just across the border from Boukamal. They said 20 fighters were killed and dozens were wounded, adding that the cause of the attack was not immediately clear. Major Josh Jacques, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, said: No member of the U.S.-led coalition carried out strikes near Albu Kamal. Don't miss: Soccer Has an Intolerance Problem? After Mexicans Yell Anti-Gay Slur, FIFA Opens Investigation The U.S. led-coalition supports Arab and Kurdish militias in their battle against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) northeast of Albu Kamal. The militant group has been ousted by the Syrian and Iraqi military and U.S.-led coalition from virtually all the territory it once controlled in Iraq and Syria, but still controls pockets of territory along the border of the countries. Story continues President Bashar al-Assads army, with the help of Iran-backed militias including Hezbollah and Iraqi groups, drove ISIS from Albu Kamal and its environs last year, but the jihadis have since staged attacks there. Last week they launching an attack on Boukemal that reached the outskirts of the town before being driven back by Syrian government forces. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said unidentified planes had struck Lebanons Shiite Hezbollah and other allied foreign militias around Albu Kamal. The U.K.-based war monitor said the strikes killed 40 people. Most popular: Kirstjen Nielsen Accused of Lying For a Racist by Mika Brzezinski Over Defense of Trump Policy Separating Families Asked about the reported air strikes, an Israeli military spokeswoman said: We do not comment on foreign reports. Throughout Syrias seven-year war, Israel has carried out scores of strikes within the neighboring country against what it describes as Hezbollah or Iranian targets. Israel, alarmed about the clout of arch enemies Iran and Hezbollah, has pressed Russia, Assads other key ally, to make sure Tehran does not entrench its military sway in Syria. President Donald Trump in March said that the U.S. "would be coming out of Syria very soon," indicating a possible U.S. military withdrawal from the country. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek By Damali Mukhaye. The Opposition forum for Democratic Change has called upon the Judiciary to probe the 13 years of former IGP Gen Kale kayihura and punish him for his crimes. Addressing journalists at the party headquarters in Najjanakumbi, the party spokesperson Ibrahim Ssemujju claimed that many people lost their lives during Kayihura tenure and as such an independent system should try him and punish him for the crimes committed. Ssemujju says cases of homes of the opposition members being surrounded by police on his orders and mishandling of people hence all those cases should be investigated and tried in court. They suggest that the high court selects a panel of three judges to try kayihura and his colleagues. The Trail Mountain Fire in Utah grew to 13,710 acres as of Sunday, fire officials said in an update. The fire, which began when a prescribed burn broke free of its designated area due to high winds, was burning about 15 miles northwest of Orangeville. The blaze was about 40 percent contained Sunday, and almost 600 fire personnel continued to battle the flames. Eight helicopters and 23 engines were at the scene. Officials said fire movement was decreasing due to the containment line. The fire was burning on lands managed by the Manti-La Sal National Forest, Price Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management and the Utah Division of Forestry, as well as private land. In the Manti-La Sal National Forest, the Indian Creek Campground was closed, while a flight restriction remained in place over the fire. The incident team said a high voltage power line was in the path of the fire but that it had not been significantly damaged. Trending: California Wildfires: Elon Musks Flamethrower Toy Could Be a Problem At least one structurea cabin near Whetstone Creekwas burned in the fire. It was unclear whether there were any injuries as a result of the fire. Slightly cooler temperatures were expected in the area Monday evening. Evacuations were lifted for residents living in Trail Canyon. State Route 31 also reopened Sunday, though residents were asked to stay away so first responders and equipment could proceed through. Elsewhere in Utah, the Willow Creek Fire also continued burning. The 1,301-acre blaze, located north of Highway 40, was almost 50 percent contained Monday. The fire was caused by lightning, officials said. No structures or power lines were threatened, and 91 fire personnel were on scene. Authorities said the fire had not grown for the past several days, but was smoldering through dead timber. A temporary closure remained in place, north of Highway 40, west of Co-op Creek road, south of Bjorkman Hollow Road and east of Strawberry River Road. Story continues Trail Mountain Fire InciWeb This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Biomaterials and medical device company Aortech International on Tuesday signed a development agreement with Vascular Flow Technologies (VFT) for the development of a synthetic heart valve. The project undertaken by the duo will see detailed computational modelling and analysis of AIM traded firm AorTechs heart valve before design optimisation, manufacturing and testing commences with the objective of preparing data to justify in man testing of the technology. VFT is a medical device development and testing company with medical imaging and computational fluid dynamic capabilities. Craig Dunlop, general manager and director of VFT, said: "We are very excited to be a key partner in the development of the next generation of prosthetic heart valves which should represent not only a step change in performance, but dramatically reduce the cost to manufacture these life enhancing devices." Meanwhile, Aortechs polymers are currently in use cardiology and urological applications, including pacing leads, cardiac cannulae, stents and neuro stimulation devices. Devices manufactured from these polymers have received approvals from the US food and drug administration, the Australian therapeutic goods administration and the Japanese ministry of health. Bill Brown, chairman of AorTech, said: "In partnering with the team at VFT, AorTech now has access to Europe's leading experts in the combined field of medical imaging, guided finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics. Combining the design history with this ground breaking imaging analysis should much improve the quality of the product design, reliability and performance." As of 1149 BST, Aortech Internationals shares were up 9.22% at 45.00p. Intellectual property firm Frontier IP Group on Tuesday confirmed that it has acquired a 24% stake in mechanics and material deformation company Cambridge Material Testing Solutions (CMTS). The AIM traded company said CMTS is currently developing software and hardware to measure the material characteristics of critical metal components, such as their brittleness and remaining working life, in order to make testing equipment more mobile. Current testing equipment, which is essential for the aerospace, nuclear, and oil and gas industries, is bulky and can only be used in a laboratory environment. James Dean, chief technology officer of CMTS, said: "With Frontier IP's expertise in the commercialisation of advanced technologies and its ready access to the sectors we intend to penetrate, where the accurate and non-destructive characterisation of material properties is crucial to the safe operation of high value assets." CMTS was established in order to support the word of mechanics and materials expert James Dean, formerly of Frazer Nash Consultancy and Double Precision Consultancy. Neil Crabb, chief executive at Frontier IP, said: "Frontier IP is delighted to be working with Dr James Dean and his team to help accelerate the commercialisation of this exciting technology. We believe Cambridge Material Testing Solutions could prove invaluable to companies in critical sectors which need to ensure the materials they use are safe and robust." As of 0834 BST, Frontier IP Groups shares were down 3.59% at 80.50p. Infrastrata on Tuesday entered into a contract with WSP Global to provide engineer services for the front end engineering and design (FEED) programme at the Islandmagee project. The AIM-quoted natural gas storage firm said WSP will represent the company in the design and development stages at the project, ensuring that Infrastratas requirements and standards are successfully met. The company will also provide a degree of technical and commercial due diligence on behalf of InfraStrata as the project advances. Adrian Pocock, chief executive of InfraStrata, said: "The FEED programme is meeting all of its milestones, and the extensive experience of WSP over many years in similar projects should ensure that we maximise the financial potential of the project." The FEED programme for the Islandmagee gas storage project is co-financed by the European Union's Connecting Europe facility, and is a facet of a proposed 500m cubic metre natural gas cavern storage facility. This would provide more than a quarter of the UKs natural gas storage once constructed and will be situated adjacent to the Scotland-Northern Ireland gas pipeline. As of 1451 BST, Infrastratas shares were up 7.32% at 0.44p. Oil and gas company Mayan Energy updated the market on its proposed low-cost development programme at the 1,520 net acre Zink Ranch Field in Oklahoma on Tuesday, in which it has a 100% working interest and a 75% net revenue interest. The AIM-traded firm had announced on 15 May that the multi-phase work programme, consisting of workover, new drill and pressure maintenance operations, was focussed on increasing production and proving up substantial reserves at Zink Ranch that it believed to be economically recoverable. On Tuesday, it said a turnkey contract had been entered into with a third-party oilfield service company to initiate a well workover programme, for a total of five wells at Zink Ranch targeting 100 net barrels of oil per day in the mid-term. Following the approval of Mayan as the operator at Zink Ranch, its intention was for four wells to be worked over as producers from the Pennsylvanian Sands formation, with an initial baseline level of production for each well to be established over a 30-day period. A fifth well would be worked over as an injection well, the board said, as part of a pilot pressure maintenance test project focussed on enhancing production levels. Nitrogen would be injected in three phases, with the amount injected increasing with each phase and the performance of the wells closely monitored after each phase to evaluate the impact of the test project. Subject to positive results, Mayan said it intended to implement a field-wide pressure maintenance programme in 2019, to enhance production on the remaining 12 wells in the field. As part of the turnkey contract, an environmental impact study, permitting and site selection for the drilling of possible future new wells - beyond the initial five - would be undertaken, Mayan added. The total cost of the programme would be $0.26m, the board claimed, which included an initial payment of $0.13m to the contractor, payable in Mayan shares, based on 0.0085 per share and equivalent to 11,141,176 ordinary shares. It also included an additional payment of $0.1m upon completion of the five well workovers prior to the nitrogen injection. Mayan said it could elect to pay in cash or ordinary shares at the time of completion. A payment of $5k per month in cash for six months for pumping and regulatory reporting services was also part of the total cost. The contractor indicated a preference to receive the initial $0.13m payment in shares of Mayan, the board claimed, which it said highlighted the contractor's confidence in the success of both the programme at Zink Ranch as well as ongoing activity across Mayan's Texan assets. It said the contract anticipated initiation and completion of the five workovers within 30 days of Mayan assuming operatorship at Zink Ranch. The company said it had engaged counsel to complete that process, and anticipated a timely resolution of the matter. Zink Ranch represents untapped value for Mayan, said managing director Eddie Gonzalez. With the signing of this contract we have now taken the first tangible step towards unlocking what could become a significant asset for the company. Together, with the success we are having at the Forest Hill and Stockdale Fields in Texas, we believe that Zink Ranch can make a substantial contribution towards achieving our production goal of 300 to 500 net barrels of oil per day. Gonzalez claimed that furthermore, oil production from the Pennsylvanian Sands tended to be longer-lived than production elsewhere, and as a result, the implied value of a barrel of oil in the ground from that horizon had historically realised a premium to other formations. We are therefore keen to commence this programme which, subject to positive results, could confirm our view that Zink Ranch is a high quality and valuable asset. As development milestones and nitrogen test results become available, Zink Ranch will generate much news flow in the coming weeks and months. Gonzalez said he was further encouraged that seasoned oil field professionals were interested in receiving shares as payment for their services in lieu of cash. This serves as a testimony to the hard work the Board and our employees have done not only in restoring the reputation of the company with both investors and industry partners but also in delivering on our strategy to build a highly cash flow generative oil and gas company. Norwegian Air Shuttle has had takeover approaches from a number of potential bidders and is open to a deal on the right terms, the airlines chief executive said. Norwegian has rejected two offers by IAG, British Airways owner, and Deutsche Lufthansa is considering a proposal. "Several others" are also interested, CEO Bjorn Kjos told Bloomberg. The potential suitors are "very well run airlines with good people", Kjos said. Having said he did not want to sell, Kjos has said he is now more open to a deal, which would depend partly on price and the effect on the workforce. "If the owners want to sell, I will not stop it," Kjos told the newswire. But he said a sale now would feel too early because "we have not started harvesting." IAG CEO Willie Walsh is reported to be considering a third attempt to buy Norwegian after building a stake of 4.6% in the carrier, which has launched a budget service to the US. Walsh has played down his interest, saying IAG does not need to do a deal and that he does not want to lodge a hostile bid. IAG shares rose 0.5% to 722p at 13:21 BST. The Chinese ambassador to Australia claimed that "less bias and bigotry" was required to repair relations between the two as concerns that China's influence in the nation continues to mount. "We need to see each other's development and policy intentions from a more positive perspective with less Cold War mentality," ambassador Cheng Jingye said on Tuesday. Frustrations between Canberra and Beijing intensified after Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull claimed China was meddling in domestic affairs back in 2017, leading Chinese media to accuse Australia of being arrogant with its "distorted view on relations". Despite Australian wine exporters being hit with blocks and delays last week when Chinese customs officials held up shipments, Cheng was seemingly willing to look past recent events after being introduced by former Australian politician John Brumby, a director of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies's Australian wing. Cheng said he believed that, in order to achieve "sustained and sound development" in bilateral relations, both countries would need to have "more interaction and inclusiveness with less bias and bigotry". However, having already denied Huawei a contract to provide broadband equipment to its national 5G network due to national security concerns, Australia also blocked the firm's plan to run internet cables from the Solomon Islands, north of Australia, to Sydney. Julie Bishop, Australia's minister for foreign affairs, has said that Chinese lending in the Pacific would undermine the sovereignty of countries in the area. "We're concerned that the consequences of entering into some of these financing arrangements will be detrimental to their long-term sovereignty," Bishop told the Sydney Morning Herald. "We want to ensure that they retain their sovereignty, that they have sustainable economies and that they are not trapped into unsustainable debt outcomes. The trap can then be a debt-for-equity swap and they have lost their sovereignty," she said. Eurozone construction output is growing more strongly, official data showed on Tuesday, indicating the second quarter will make a good recovery from an extremely slow start to the year. Eurozone construction output increased 1.8% month-to-month in April, data from the Eurostat statistical office showed on Tuesday, with the year-on-year figure also hitting 1.8% from an upwardly revised 1.2% in March. A 4.0% jump in civil engineering, primarily in Germany, was the key driver but residential construction also increased 1%. The highest increases in production in construction were recorded in Slovenia, Hungary and Germany, with France and Italy also positive, while the largest decreases were in Spain, Belgium and Slovakia. UK construction rose 0.6% in April after a fall of 2.3 the month before. "Finally, an upbeat economic report in the Eurozone," say economists at Pantheon Macroeconomics, after cold weather constrained large-scale building projects in the latter part of the first quarter, pushing activity forward to the beginning of the second. They added: "Even if the headline index remains unchanged for the rest of the quarter, it would still increase a solid 1.5% quarter-on-quarter, rebounding from a 0.4% decline in Q1. As a result, we are confident that construction will provide a positive boost to GDP growth in Q2." President Donald Trump instructed his country's Trade Representative to identify another $200bn-worth of goods on which to levy 10% tariffs. He also called for a separate list to be prepared detailing a further $200bn-worth of Chinese goods that could be targeted if Beijing responded with countermeasures of its own. The moves overnight followed Beijing's decision, on 15 June, to retaliate for the duties on another $50bn-worth of Chinese goods which Washington had announced that same day. China's Ministry of Commerce responded immediately, describing the move as "extreme pressure and blackmail." "I have an excellent relationship with President Xi, and we will continue working together on many issues. But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world," the President said in a statement issued by the White House. "We will continue using all available tools to create a better and fairer trading system for all Americans." According to the White House, "These tariffs are being imposed to encourage China to change the unfair practices identified in the Section 301 action with respect to technology and innovation. They also serve as an initial step toward bringing balance to our trade relationship with China. "However and unfortunately, China has determined that it will raise tariffs on USD50bn worth of US exports. China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology. Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening US companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong." Separately, the US Senate had amended Defence Bill 85-10, which included a measure killing Trump's recent deal to spare Chinese tech giant ZTE. Commenting on that decision, analysts at Rabobank said: "Of course, there is still the House of Representatives to pass first before the damage is done, but the firm's shares have tanked again, and the president is going to have to be very persuasive given the way the political winds are blowing on China in the US." In terms of potential responses on the part of China, the Dutch broker added: "Yet we should expect China to think strategically and reach out politically first. There will be an attempt to build an anti-Trump coalition with the EU: though who trusts China on trade?! Furthermore, the recent Trump-Kim meeting only happened with Chinese help.. "We might soon find out if there is genuine detente there due to the keys to Disneyland being dangled, or if Trump is about to lose face and face the need for military action - and once again we are back to the nuclear concept! Or, China might chose to raise geopolitical tensions elsewhere --and we aren't short of flashpoints-- to ask the question of the US: "Is it really worth it to you to pursue this simple trade issue? Are a few electronic goods worth that fight?"." 1630:Close Equities paid more attention on Tuesday to the ratcheting-up of tensions between Beijing and Washington as trading kicked-off with a sharp move lower on the Shanghai bourse. As ever, weakness in the pound helped to stem the selling on the top-flight index, but less so on the FTSE 250. Commodities-focused issues were weakest, while defensive finally found a bit of a bid, as did shares of RBS and Royal Mail, with the latter two companies' shares bolstered by broker upgrades. FTSE 100 down 27.48 points to 7,603.85. 1611: Courtesy of IG's Chris Beauchamp: "UK and European investors are engaging in damage limitation this afternoon, lifting their home markets off the lows, but in the US few buyers are yet to be found today. Perhaps their bruising overnight, when an apparent success in pushing the Dow back to 25,000 was followed by swift fall, has tempered their ardour. Optimism about the global economy has also been tempered as the two strongest pillars bicker over trade tariffs, with equities still looking vulnerable to more downside after their recent gains." 1534: CBOE's VIX up 15.43% to 14.21 (not very high frankly). 1514: Atlanta Fed GDPNow model predicting growth of 4.7%, down from 4.8% previously. But in the aggregate, UBS's Arend Kapteyn says: "Our DM real GDP now-cast model (see "DM hard data nosedives") accurately predicted the slowdown in DM growth from 2.4% in Q4 to 1.6% in Q1. We had presumed that this 'soft patch' would be temporary and that by end-Q2 DM growth would be back above 2% (for reference: the 2010-2017 average for DM is 1.8%)." UBS's tracking estimate for US Q2 GDP last at 3.8%; nevertheless, Kapteyn adds that "it may well be in excess of 4.0%". 1433: Gold futures on COMEX are slipping 0.23% to $1,277.20/oz., prompting Capital Economics to wonder aloud if the yellow metal has lost its 'safe haven' allure. Interestingly, they point out how: "Oil prices are still 56% higher than at this time last year, which means that inflationary pressures are building regardless of the latest fall in prices. Indeed, US inflation expectations as proxied by 5-year 5-year forwards jumped on Friday." In any case, their answer is "no", referencing US dollar strength and technical selling as reasons for its seeming detachment and telling clients to expect gains in case trade war fears ramp-up. Investors holdings of gold remain near five-year highs they add. Yet their end-2018 price forecast remains at $1,300/oz.. 1330: Housing starts in the US increased in May at a 5.0% pace month-on-month to reach an annualised clip of 1.350m (consensus: 1.311m). Permits on the other hand fell by 4.6% on the month to hit 1.301m (consensus: 1.35m). "Starts likely won't be sustained at this level, given that permits are weakening. The pace of permit issuance is much less sensitive to the weather than starts, and it usually reflects the pace of new home sales, which we think have now peaked for this cycle," says Pantheon Macroeconomics's Ian Shepherdson. 1319: Shares of Norwegian Air are rising by more than 4% after its chief says it has received other bid approaches aside from those tabled by IAG and Lufthansa. Perhaps, but for the FT's Lex column upside in the stock is limited. 1318: PBoC Governor has reportedly assured investors central bank will use appropriate monetary policy tools in order to insure liquidity. On a related note, earlier UBS said: "We think RRRs may be lowered by as much as another 200 bps this year. We maintain our 2018 GDP growth forecast of 6.6% but see more of a downside risk to this forecast." 1033: E.ON has just announced it is increasing its standard variable electricity and gas prices, following rises from rivals. 1029: The Ifo Institute is revising down German growth forecast for 2018-2019, slashing forecasts for this year to 1.8% from 2.6%, with 2019 cut to 1.8% from 2.1% due to the risks around a euro crisis sparked by Italy and a potential trade war with the US. The economy developed significantly more weakly than anticipated in the first few months of the year, Ifo economist Timo Wollmershaeuser says. The global economic risks have risen significantly, he adds. 1017: Construction in the Eurozone increased 1.8% month-to-month in April, with the year-on-year figure also hitting 1.8% from an upwardly revised 1.2% in March. A 4.0% jump in civil engineering, primarily in Germany, was the key driver but residential construction also increased. "Finally, an upbeat economic report in the Eurozone," say economists at Pantheon Macroeconomics, after cold weather constrained large-scale building projects in the latter part of the first quarter, pushing activity forward to the beginning of the second. "Across countries, strong gains in France, Germany and Italy drove the EZ headline higher, offsetting a decline in Spain. Even if the headline index remains unchanged for the rest of the quarter, it would still increase a solid 1.5% quarter-on-quarter, rebounding from a 0.4% decline in Q1. As a result, we are confident that construction will provide a positive boost to GDP growth in Q2." 0926: Womens value clothing retailer Bonmarche is defying the retail doom and gloom, posting a 38.1% jump in full-year pre-tax profit even as revenue declined, as the online segment provided a boost. 0901: The profits warnings keep flying, with Footasylum crashing 45% as it reported in-line earnings for last year but warned earnings for this year would be hit by increased investment in its stores and website. Peel Hunt changed its stance on the stock from hold to reduce. Analysts say: "FY18 numbers are in line with expectations but the outlook statement is unfortunately flagging a couple of issues which means that forecasts have to fall today. "There are lots of elements to like about the Footasylum story: the brand is growing top line fast but there are longer term concerns about product allocation that won't go away. Negative forecast momentum will not be taken well by the market, and we would expect the shares to struggle today." 0859: Walt Disney is readying an increased offer for 21st Century Fox, adding a cash component to its previously agreed US$52.4bn stock offer for Fox assets, according to the Financial Times. The boss of Pfizer has also warned that Brexit threatens UK life sciences, the FT says, with Britain needing to "cement its position" or risk erosion of this critical industry. 0834: Profit warnings from Debenhams and McCarthy & Stone this morning sending both shares tumbling in the teens. The department store group says annual profit will be at least 20% less than market expectations as it faces weak consumer spending and discounting by competitors. Retirement housebuilder McCarthy has packed off its CEO into early retirement as it too cites consumer caution, as well as launching a strategy review amid softer pricing trends. 0821: Report cites Chinese officials as saying banking and insurance sectors stable, amid a tad of market chatter regarding possible moves by Beijing to ease policy, such as by reducing banks' reserve requirement ratio. As an aside, the yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury note is down by five basis points at 2.87% with the intra-day low to be found at 2.85%. Two-year note yield off by four basis points to 2.51%. "Overall we would suggest that, in line with one of our previous themes, the recently enacted tax reforms have increased the ability of US companies to invest but the uncertainty around Trumps trade policies has decreased the demand to do so," Rabobank says. 0818: Chinese ambassador to Australia, Cheng Jingye, says "less bias and bigotry" needed to repair relations, calls on Canberra to drop Cold War mentality. 0807: The FTSE 100 drops 1.0% on the open to 7,554.94, its lowest level in over a month. 0751: European stock markets sure to fall on the open. The Shanghai composite index is down almost 5% (and below the psychological 3,000 point level), which would make it the biggest drop since 2016 as the White House prepares $400bn-worth of possible tariffs on Chinese made goods. Dollar/yen down by 0.83% to 109.613 in reaction to the news on the global trade front. Commenting on the scope for further tensions and the impact that they might have, Rabobank says "Of course, neither side wants multi-dimensional, let alone economic, confrontation. So while its prudent to think of where strategic logic suggests this could go, it's equally prudent to think of what deal both sides could live with. "How much Chinese opening up will do? How much US compromise? Only if the answers are 'none' and 'none' should we head for the bomb-shelters: what are the answers? What does your gut tell you about both?" Among the 'nuclear' options that Beijing might mull are devaluing its currency, which the Dutch broker says would be an end-of-the-gold-standard moment (as with the UK in 1931), or ratcheting up geopolitical tensions, be it on the Korean peninsula or elsewhere. 0745: Economists are not expecting a Bank of England rate hike this week and increasingly are not expecting one in August any more either. Reuters said its poll of economists found none expecting a rise this week and some getting cold feet about their forecasts for an August hike, while less than 55% of analysts polled by Bloomberg expect a hike in August, down from 60% from May's survey. Stocks are giving back more ground as traders wait on the outcome of the rapidly-escalating trade threats between the US and China. Unsurprisingly perhaps, speaking at the European Central Bank's 2018 Forum in Sintra, Portugal, the president of the Governing Council, Mario Draghi, said that "uncertainty permeates the economic outlook," arguing that policy needed to remain "patient, persistent and prudent". His words sent the single currency duly lower. On a related note, earlier the prestigious IFO institute slashed its forecast for German GDP growth in 2018 and 2019, with its forecast for the current year dropping by 0.8 percentage points to 1.8%, due to the less "dynamic" external environment now anticipated. As of 1205 BST, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was down by 0.71% or 2.76 points at 383.15, alongside losses of 1.31% or 167.62 points to 12,665.16 for the German Dax. Nevertheless, both equity benchmarks were off their worst levels of the day. The FTSE Mibtel on the other hand was seeing a dip of 0.36% or 79.55 points to 22,016.26. In parallel, euro/dollar was down by 0.65% at 1.15476, while the yield on the benchmark 10-year German government note was four basis points lower to 0.36%. Overnight, the US administration had ratcheted up the pressure on Beijing, announcing preparations to foist 10% tariffs on another $200bn-worth of Chinese goods after China responded to earlier levies with its own retaliatory measures. Commenting on the fresh threat of tariffs from the White House, analysts at Oxford Economics said: "President Trump has upped the ante on the trade conflict between the two. "China has quickly vowed to retaliate - and if such an escalation does materialise, it would have significant economic impact on China, the US and the rest of the world, at a sensitive time for the global economy. In principle, there is still room for negotiation and we cannot rule out de-escalation in the coming weeks." Elsewhere on the economic front, Eurostat reported construction sector output in the single currency bloc was up by 1.8% month-on-month in April. Those figures came alongside a current account surplus of 28.4bn for the same month, as per the latest ECB data. Oblivious to the turbulence in global capital markets, stock in Norwegian Air was again heading higher, after its boss, Bjorn Kjos, said the carrier had attracted bids from various potential bidders and that - given the right terms - the company was open to striking a deal. Chancellor Philip Hammond warned ministers that the NHS 25bn a year rise in NHS spend by 2023 would leave no extra cash for defence and policing, though the Prime Minister is thought to be prepared to go against manifesto pledges and sanction tax rises. The Chancellor, The Times reported, drew a red line at a Cabinet meeting a day after Theresa May announced an extra boost for the UK health system. Hammond specifically warned that if the government goes through with the NHS boost it would leave no money for the UKs military, schools, prisons and police. One cabinet minister told the newspaper that ministers "could see the implications are going to make life quite difficult". May had argued in a speech on Monday that the extra funding would come from higher taxes and a Brexit dividend from money no longer being paid to the EU after the divorce in 2019. The funding for the new plans have raised doubts since it is unlikely that there will be a Brexit dividend to support the boost. According to The Guardian, May is prepared to discard the Tories tax pledges from 2017s general election to pay for the new NHS plan. Planned cuts to corporation tax and a pledge to increase the personal income tax allowance to 12,500 a year by 2020 could both be ditched. Two thirds of leave voters in the Brexit referendum prefer a hard Irish border to not leaving the customs union after the divorce. According to a poll by Conservative Lord Ashcroft, six in ten leave voters would rather cut Northern Ireland loose if it means that the rest of the country can leave the EU. Only one third think it completely unacceptable for Northern Ireland to have a different status than the rest of the UK. Over 9 of 10 unionists in Northern Ireland, and three out of four Conservatives in Britain believe that the border issue is "deliberately exaggerated by politicians and others to suit their own political agenda." Writing in The Telegraph, Lord Ashcroft said that most British voters thought Brexit was taking too long with Leave voters blaming those who wanted a softer divorce. "Given these views - impatience with the process, determination for the UK to operate an independent trade policy, and the suspicion that Brexit opponents are deliberately throwing up hurdles - it is not hard to imagine how Leave voters would react if told the UK would not be taking back as much control as they hoped because of the Irish border, an issue they believe is being blown out of proportion," he wrote. Lord Ashcroft conducted separate polls with 3,294 voters in Britain, including among 1,666 people in Northern Ireland and 1,500 in the Republic. A majority of voters in Northern Ireland said Brexit had made the Irish unification a possibility in the foreseeable future, with almost half of the voters wanting a united Ireland. In the Republic, only 35% of those canvassed said they would like to see a united Ireland in the next few years with 56% saying it would not be practical or affordable in the immediate future. Across the United States, people are coming together to protest Donald Trump and the zero-tolerance policy at the border. Immigrant advocacy groups plan to protest nationwide on June 30. Among the demonstrations will be one taking place across from the White House in Washington D.C. It's no secret that the United States has been cracking down on immigration, and families trying to illegally immigrate to the United States will receive little to no kindness. Zero-tolerance border policies The Trump administration has enacted its zero-tolerance policy for families seeking asylum by coming across the US-Mexico border, as children are taken away from their parents. Between April 19 and May 31, almost "2,000 children were separated from 1,940 adults," King 5 News reported. These numbers come from the administration, and surely those numbers have increased in the weeks since then. These policies are, of course, targeting Mexican immigrants who have been deemed as illegal. The asylum seekers were caught at the border and separated from their families shortly after. Once taken from their parents, children are being placed in detention camps of sorts. Vox News cited a Washington Post report, where Juan Sanchez, the CEO of Southwest Key, a nonprofit that runs the Brownsville site under government contract, said, "Were not a detention center. What we operate are shelters that take care of kids. Its a big, big difference. Nevertheless, any kids behind wire is generally seen as being bad. These images were just released by border patrol @CBP showing the McAllen, Texas detention facility that we were allowed to tour today. For now, we can only rely on what they give us. They will not allow us inside to film on our own. Why? Privacy; they dont want faces shown pic.twitter.com/laZAyEHwij David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) June 17, 2018 The protests Pramilla Jayapal, a Democrat representative in Washington, announced the demonstrations. Discuss this news on Eunomia In a tweet, she wrote, We are ready to have a mass mobilization. This has to be taken right to the White House and to @realDonaldTrump's doorstep. The rallies are called Families Belong Together, and they particularly take aim at the Trump administrations tearing families apart. Scheduled for June 30, there will also be a tentpole rally at Lafayette Park, a location very near to the White House. This rally will begin at 11:00 AM EST, ensuring people will take notice. We are ready to have a mass mobilization. This has to be taken right to the White House and to @realDonaldTrump's doorstep.https://t.co/OclGJhMjvy #EndFamilySeparation pic.twitter.com/d9DwEuqoGB Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) June 19, 2018 These protests are not new but have started gaining traction since Fathers Day. Others speak out Rep. Jayapal isnt the only Washington leader speaking out against the zero-tolerance policy. In a letter to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary Kirstjen Nielson, signed by Governor Jay Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson, the two call on the Trump administration to tell the truth, demanding honest answers about the separated families. They specifically want answers regarding the 200 immigrants detained in the Sea-Tac detention center. As the human trafficking of immigrants becomes a more prominent issue, answers to this situation are necessary. Representative Suzan DelBene, WA-01, is another Washington politician making her opinion known. She is a co-sponsor of the Keep Families Together Act, an initiative that would make sure children are not taken from their families unless they are victims of abuse or trafficking. Additionally, DelBene held a press conference in which she gave asylum seekers the chance to tell their own stories. This opportunity helps Americans put a face and personal history to asylum seekers, humanizing them in the process. XXLs "Most Controversial Freshman," XXXTentacion, was shot to death in Florida on Monday afternoon. According to TMZs emergency dispatch audio that they picked up, the incident was a drive-by shooting located at the Deerfield Beach motorcycle shop. CNN reported that he was "leaving a motorsports store shortly before 4 p.m. when two men in a dark-colored SUV shot and killed him in an apparent robbery." 20-year-old Jahseh Onfroy, known as XXXTentacion, started his career at the age of 16 while in a juvenile facility. He often collaborated with his friend and fellow jailmate, Ski the Slump Mask God, and released his first songs on Soundcloud in 2014. Due to his rising fame in conjunction with his public legal troubles, XXXTentacion quickly became a household name in hip-hop, earning the top spot in XXLs list of Hip-Hop Freshman in 2017. The Broward County Sheriffs Office confirmed the rappers tragic demise on Monday evening on Twitter. #BreakingNews The adult male that was taken to the hospital has been pronounced dead. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 The adult male victim has been confirmed as 20 year old Jahseh Onfroy aka rapper #XXXTentacion. Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 Legal troubles and rise to fame Pitchfork noted that the rapper was accused of very serious and gruesome domestic violence crimes by ex-girlfriend Geneva Alaya. During the time of the shooting, Onfroy was still awaiting trial for those charges, which include false imprisonment, gun possession, aggravated assault and battery against a pregnant woman, and witness tampering. He was also under house arrest for several months at the beginning of 2017, which is how he claimed he was able to focus on making his first studio album. Discuss this news on Eunomia His first single Look At Me went viral during Onfroys stint in prison, which ultimately led the Florida native to sign a record deal just weeks before being released on probation. The following summer, after a beef with rapper Drake and with a number of mixtapes under his belt, XXXTentacion embarked on (and eventually canceled) his first tour, The Revenge Tour, Complex.com wrote. The cancellation came after the death of his cousin, as well as numerous controversies, such as punching fans at events. Spotify deletes XXXTentacion music In March of 2018, the popular streaming service Spotify conducted a Hate Content & Hateful Conduct Policy, which focused on promoting tolerance and respect following the #MeToo movement. Due to this new policy, the streaming service decided to stop promoting XXXTentacions music on their algorithmic playlists. After threats from popular artists such as Kendrick Lamar to stop putting their music on Spotify, the service then put XXXTentacions latest single at the time, titled Sad! back on the Rap Caviar playlist. Pitchfork notes that following news of Onfroys death, Spotify is now displaying the message Rest in peace, XXXTentacion. Celebrities say their condolences Many of Onfroy's collaborators and celebrity friends have taken to Twitter to speak on his untimely death: rest in peace I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing pic.twitter.com/QU7DR3Ghbw KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) June 18, 2018 My heart dropped when I heard about @xxxtentacion, I feel like we only got to see a glimpse of his artistry. I didnt know him personally but I respect how passionate he was about his music and message. Nobody deserves this kind of ending. gone too soon, damn! RIP Sean Don (@BigSean) June 19, 2018 X WE LOVE U U WILL BE MISSED I CANT BELIEVE THIS SHIT REALLY HAPPENED Lil pump (@lilpump) June 18, 2018 His second studio album was released in March to great success, debuting at number one on the Billboard 200 Top Albums chart. The alleged shooters have yet to be identified, but Florida police are looking for anybody with information to come forward. Virginia Tech cleared two important accreditation hurdles to integrate the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine as the universitys ninth college on July 1. Today, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACS-COC) will post public notice of its approval for the medical school to become part of the university. An official letter will be sent July 3. On June 13, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) sent the university notification of its final approval for integration, allowing Virginia Tech the ability to award the M.D. degree through the college and putting the medical school under the authority of Virginia Techs Board of Visitors. SACS is a regional accrediting body for 11 states, including Virginia, and is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. SCHEV is the Commonwealth of Virginias coordinating body for higher education. Virginia Tech and the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine kept both accrediting bodies aware of the plans to integrate over the last two years as the process unfolded. The notifications this week were the final approvals from each accrediting body, allowing the medical school to officially move into the university July 1. We are very pleased to achieve these milestones and have our accrediting bodies support, said Virginia Tech President Tim Sands. As an independent institution, the school has been an incredible success over the past decade. As a college, we hope to build on that success with the school at the center our continued plans for a robust health sciences and technology campus in Roanoke, benefiting the region, the university, and Carilion Clinic, our key partner throughout this journey. As an MD-granting medical school, the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine is also accredited by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME). The school received full accreditation in 2014 after the charter class graduated for a term of five years. The LCME will have a site visit at the medical school in October to evaluate the program and integration with Virginia Tech to determine accreditation beginning in 2019 for a new term. Over the last two years, there have been more than 100 people from the school, Virginia Tech, and Carilion Clinic serving on integration committees to look at every detail of the medical school and figure out how to fit us into the university so that everyone benefits, said Cynda Johnson, founding dean of the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Now less than two weeks away, its exciting to see the final pieces fall into place to make the transition a reality. The Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine accepted its first class of students in 2010. It has since graduated five classes that each had a 100-percent match rate to residency. Over 200 alumni are across the country in residency, fellowships, and practicing medicine. The Class of 2022 will be the first to enroll and receive their entire education as the ninth college of Virginia Tech. About 4,000 students applied for 42 spots. The class begins their education on July 30. The Bank of New York Mellon pays an annual dividend of $1.36 per share and currently has a dividend yield of 2.40%. 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. American Electric Power Co., Inc. engages in the business of generation, transmission and distribution of electricity. It operates through the following segments: Vertically Integrated Utilities, Transmission & Distribution Utilities, AEP Transmission Holdco and Generation & Marketing. The Vertically Integrated Utilities segment engages in the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity for sale to retail and wholesale customers through assets owned and operated by its subsidiaries. The Transmission & Distribution Utilities segment engages in the business of transmission and distribution of electricity for sale to retail and wholesale customers through assets owned and operated by its subsidiaries. The AEP Transmission Holdco segment engages in the development, construction and operation of transmission facilities through investments in its wholly-owned transmission subsidiaries and joint ventures. The Generation & Marketing segment engages in non-regulated generation and marketing, risk management and retail activities. The company was founded on December 20, 1906 and is headquartered in Columbus, OH. 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(aka Masterlease Europe), GMAC Nederland N.V., GMAC Prestadora de Servicios de Mao de Obra Ltda., GMAC Servicios, GMAC UK, GMAC de Venezuela, GMAC-Prestadora de Servios de Mo-de-Obra, GMACI Corretora de Seguros, GMACI Corretora de Seguros Ltda, GMAM Real Estate I, GMCH&SP Private Equity II, GMCH&SP Private Equity II L.P., GMF Australia Pty Ltd, GMF Europe, GMF Europe Holdco, GMF Europe LLP, GMF Floorplan Owner Revolving Trust, GMF Funding, GMF Germany Holdings, GMF Global Assignment, GMF Global Assignment LLC, GMF International, GMF International LLC, GMF Leasing LLC, GMF Leasing Warehousing Trust, GMF Wholesale Receivables, GMGP Holdings, General Motors (China) Investment Company, General Motors (China) Investment Company Limited, General Motors (Thailand), General Motors (Thailand) Limited, General Motors - Colmotores, General Motors - Colmotores S.A., General Motors Advisory Services LLC, General Motors Africa and Middle East, General Motors Africa and Middle East FZE, General Motors Asia, General Motors Asia LLC, General Motors Asia Pacific Holdings, General Motors Asia Pacific Holdings LLC, General Motors Asset Management, General Motors Asset Management Corporation, General Motors Australia, General Motors Australia Pty Ltd., General Motors Austria, General Motors Austria, General Motors Auto, General Motors Auto LLC, General Motors Automobiles Philippines, General Motors Automobiles Philippines Inc., General Motors Automotive Holdings, General Motors Automotive Holdings S.L., General Motors Belgique Automobile NV, General Motors Belgium, General Motors Chile, General Motors Chile Industria Automotriz Limitada, General Motors China LLC, General Motors Daewoo Auto and Technology, General Motors Daewoo Auto and Technology CIS LLC, General Motors East Africa, General Motors Egypt, General Motors Egypt S.A.E., General Motors Espana, General Motors Europe Holdings, General Motors Europe Limited, General Motors Financial Chile, General Motors Financial Chile Limitada, General Motors Financial Chile S.A., General Motors Financial Company, General Motors Financial Company Inc., General Motors Financial International, General Motors Financial Italia, General Motors Financial Suisse, General Motors Financial UK, General Motors Financial of Canada, General Motors Financial of Canada Ltd., General Motors Finland, General Motors France, General Motors GBS Hungary, General Motors Global Service Operations, General Motors Global Service Operations Inc., General Motors Hellas, General Motors Holden Australia, General Motors Holden Australia NSC, General Motors Holden Australia NSC Pty Ltd., General Motors Holden Australia Pty Ltd., General Motors Holdings LLC, General Motors IT Services (Ireland) Limited, General Motors India Private, General Motors India Private Limited, General Motors International Holdings, General Motors International Holdings LLC, General Motors International Operations, General Motors International Operations Pte. Ltd., General Motors International Services Company, General Motors International Services Company SAS, General Motors International Services LLC, General Motors Investment Limited, General Motors Investment Management, General Motors Investment Management Corporation, General Motors Investment Participacoes, General Motors Investment Participacoes Ltda., General Motors Investments, General Motors Investments Pty. 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Limited, GigaPower LLC, Global Services Detroit, Global Services Detroit LLC, Global Tooling Service Company Europe, Global Tooling Service Company Europe Limited, Go Motor Retailing, Go Trade Parts, Grand Pointe Holdings, Grand Pointe Holdings Inc., Grand Pointe Park Condominium, Grand Pointe Park Condominium Association, H.S.H., Haines & Strange, Holden New Zealand, Holden New Zealand Limited, IBC Pension Trustees, IBC Pension Trustees Limited, IBC Vehicles, Lease Ownership Cooperative, Lease Ownership Cooperative LLC, Lidlington Engineering Company, Lidlington Engineering Company Ltd., Limited Liability Company "General Motors CIS", Master Lease Germany, Maven Drive, Maven Drive LLC, Millbrook Pension Management, Millbrook Pension Management Limited, Monetization of Carve-Out, Monetization of Carve-Out LLC, Motor Repris Automocio, Motors Holding, Motors Holding LLC, Motors Properties, Motors Properties (Trading), Multi-Use Lease Entity Trust, North American New Cars, North American New Cars LLC, Omnibus BB Transportes, Omnibus BB Transportes S. A., OnStar Connected Services Srl, OnStar Egypt Limited LLC, OnStar Europe, OnStar Europe Ltd., OnStar Global Services, OnStar Global Services Corporation, OnStar LLC, OnStar de Mexico, OnStar de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Opel Bank, Opel Danmark, Opel Group, Opel Group Warehousing, Opel Leasing, Opel Norge, Opel Sonderdienste, Opel Southeast Europe, Opel Sverige, Opel Szentgotthard Automotive Manufacturing, Opel Wien, P.T. G M AutoWorld Indonesia, P.T. General Motors Indonesia, PIMS, PIMS Co., PT. General Motors Indonesia Manufacturing, Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center, Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center Company Ltd., Prestadora de Servicios GMF Colombia S.A.S., Rapid Motor Vehicle Company, Reliance Motor Car Company, Riverfront Holdings III Inc., Riverfront Holdings Inc., Riverfront Holdings Phase II Inc., SAIC GM (Shenyang) Norsom Motors Co. Ltd., SAIC GM Dong Yue Motors Company Limited, SAIC GM Dong Yue Powertrain Company Limited, SAIC GM Wuling Automobile Company Limited, SAIC General Motors Corporation Limited, SAIC General Motors Investment Limited, SAIC General Motors Sales Company Limited, SAIC-GMAC Automotive Finance Company Limited, SAIC-GMF Leasing Co. Ltd., Servicios GMAC S.A. de C.V., Shanghai Chengxin Used Car Operation and Management Company Limited, Shanghai OnStar Telematics Co. Ltd., Sherwoods (Darlington) Limited, Sidecar Technologies, Skurrays Limited, Stam-Terberg Autobedrijven B. V., Strobe Inc., VHC Sub-Holdings (UK), Vauxhall Defined Contribution Pension Plan Trustees Limited, Vehicle Asset Universal Leasing Trust, Vickers (Lakeside) Limited, Vision Motors Limited, WRE, WRE Inc., and Zona Franca Industrial Colmotores SAS. Ralph Lauren Corp. engages in the design, marketing, and distribution of premium lifestyle products. The firm offers apparel, accessories, home furnishings, and other licensed product. It operates through the following segments: North America, Europe, and Asia. The North America segment consists of sales of Ralph Lauren branded apparel, accessories, home furnishings, and related products made through the Company's wholesale and retail businesses in the U.S. and Canada, excluding Club Monaco. The Europe segment caters to sales of Ralph Lauren branded apparel, accessories, home furnishings, and related products made through the Company's wholesale and retail businesses in Europe and the Middle East, excluding Club Monaco. The Asia segment covers the sales of Ralph Lauren branded apparel, accessories, home furnishings, and related products made through the Company's wholesale and retail businesses in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. The company was founded by Ralph Lauren in 1967 and is headquartered in New York, NY. Read More Vattenfall, the Swedish energy group, and the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult will collaborate to give innovators the opportunity to test and demonstrate new technology in real-world operating conditions at Vattenfalls European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre (EOWDC), off Aberdeen. Gunnar Groebler, head of Vattenfalls Business Area Wind, said: Vattenfall has already delivered innovation-driven cost reduction in offshore wind with the deployment of game changing technology at the EOWDC, supported by the Scottish Government, Crown Estate Scotland and the Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group. Now we want to continue that pioneering spirit, in collaboration with ORE Catapult, by demonstrating the potential of UK innovators ideas to reduce costs and improve safety at an operating wind farm. We do that, and we get to freedom from fossil fuel faster. Chris Hill, ORE Catapults Operational Performance Director, added: The collaboration with Vattenfall on EOWDC provides a unique opportunity for UK innovators to work with ORE Catapult to bring new technologies to market through testing in a controlled real-world environment. To meet the sectors ambitious targets, innovation is going to be a key enabler. Facilitating technology demonstration opportunities is the next logical step for innovators in the de-risking process, going from the lab to testing, using facilities such as at the Catapults Levenmouth and Blyth sites, or in the offshore operational environment at EOWDC. Jean Morrison, chair of the Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group, said: From the beginning, we always envisioned the EOWDC as a pioneering project that would help drive down the costs of offshore wind and make it a competitive energy resource. The North-east of Scotland is emerging as an international centre of offshore wind innovation and this partnership between Vattenfall and ORE Catapult provides an exciting opportunity for the industry to learn and take this knowledge forward to future projects. Vattenfall has agreed to collaborate with the Catapult on innovation deployment at the EOWDC . The Catapult will manage engagement with innovators in the offshore wind supply chain and educational institutions to promote test and demonstration opportunities at the EOWDC , as well as supporting Vattenfalls selection process and the review and communication of results. The EOWDC , supported by the EU with a 40m grant, is an offshore wind test and demonstration facility. It recently completed the installation of 11 innovative wind turbines and foundations. It will be fully operational later this summer. The Vattenfall owned 93.2MW EOWDC , which is scheduled to generate first power in the summer, will produce the equivalent of more than 70% of Aberdeens domestic electricity demand and annually displace 134,128 tonnes of CO2. It features nine 8.4MW turbines along with two 8.8MW models which both represent an industry first in that they are the first of this power capability to be deployed commercially in the offshore wind industry. Getty Images Currently Available Treatments There are two main types of immunotherapy currently approved to treat certain types of cancers: drugs called checkpoint inhibitors and the less frequently used chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. We break down both below, starting with the drugs. 1. Checkpoint inhibitors This class of FDA-approved drugs is now being used now for many types of cancer, including melanoma, lung and kidney cancers. One drug, pembrolizumab, made headlines earlier this year when a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that when it was combined with chemotherapy, it dramatically boosted patients' odds of surviving lung cancer. Brand names: Keytruda (pembrolizumab) Opdivo (nivolumab) Tecentriq (atezolizumab) Bavencio (avelumab) Imfinzi (durvalumab) Yervoy (ipilimumab) How they work: An important part of our immune system is being able to discern between normal cells and potentially cancerous ones. That way, it can attack the foreign ones while leaving healthy ones alone. But some cancer cells are smart enough to figure out how to outwit our immune systems completely, explains Vamsidhar Velcheti, M.D., associate director, of the Center for Immuno-Oncology Research at the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center. What checkpoint inhibitors do is boost your immune systems ability to fight cancer cells while inhibiting their ability to turn our cells against us. To do this, they target our immune system's checkpoints molecules on certain immune cells that need to be turned on (or off) to start an immune response. Which cancers they're used for: These drugs have been approved by the FDA to treat a range of different cancers, including melanoma, lung cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer, head and neck cancers, and Hodgkin's lymphoma. But they only work in about one-third of all patients, Velcheti cautions, and theres no good way to predict who will respond to them, and who wont. Risks: Research suggests that if these drugs are given under the wrong circumstances, they can be deadly. Recently, 20 patients with an uncommon blood cancer called adult T-cell leukemia-lymphoma were enrolled in a clinical trial to see if they would respond to nivolumab. But researchers had to halt the study after three patients given a dose of the drug rapidly worsened instead of staying the same or improving. The drug itself stimulates T-cells, so it may have stimulated some of the cancerous T-cells as well as the healthy ones, explains Patrick Hwu, M.D., division head of the Division of Cancer Medicine at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas. While this isnt likely to happen with other cancers, Hwu warns that even people who take these drugs and respond to them experience potentially serious side effects. They can cause your immune system to go into overdrive, so that it attacks healthy organs in your body, causing symptoms like colitis, Hwu said. 2. CAR T-cell therapy Used much more rarely than checkpoint inhibitors, and currently only for blood cancers, this treatment follows the same basic principles as the drugs boosting our own immune systems to identify and fight cancer cells. It focuses on T cells (a type of protective white blood cell), which are collected in a blood sample, modified in the lab to better fight cancer, then reinfused back into a patient's system. Brand names: Kymriah (tisagenlecleucel) Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel) How it works: In this type of therapy (chimeric antigen receptor T-cell), immune cells extracted from a cancer patient are injected with a man-made receptor (CAR) to make them better able to spot and fight cancer cells, Lichtenfeld explains. The whole process can take several weeks. There are currently three CAR T-cell therapies that are approved by the FDA, though clinical trials are testing its use for other types of blood cancer. Which cancers its used for: CAR T has only been approved for use for acute lymphoblastic leukemia and advanced or recurrent large B-cell lymphoma, Lichtenfeld says. Researchers are also now studying it for other blood cancers, such as multiple myeloma and a type of lymphoma known as mantle cell lymphoma, as well as for breast cancer and brain tumors. Risks: CAR T does have side effects, some of which can be life-threatening, such as very high fevers and dangerously low blood pressure as well as brain changes that can lead to confusion, seizures or severe headaches. On the Horizon The treatment that led to such a dramatic recovery from late-stage breast cancer for Judy Perkins is one of several immunotherapy treatments that are in development. Heres a look at some of the most promising therapies currently in clinical trials. If all goes well, researchers hope to see some of these treatments getting FDA approval and becoming available to the general public in two to five years. 1. TIL therapy The experimental tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy that Perkins had involves removing immune system cells deep within tumors, growing them in the lab by treating them with a compound called interleukin-2, then injecting them back into the patient. The idea is that these immune cells are trying to work but are not doing a good enough job. So we grow them into large enough numbers so they can do what they need to do, Hwu explains. Researchers have had some success using TIL therapy to treat other cancers, such as liver cancer and colorectal cancer, but warn that the success rate is still very low only about 15 percent. 2. Vaccines There are a host of different vaccines that are being studied to fight cancer, Hwu says. These include tumor cell vaccines (made from actual cancer cells removed during surgery) and antigen vaccines (which use only a small piece of protein rather than the whole tumor cell) to dendritic cell vaccines (which involve taking special immune cells in the body that help the immune system recognize cancer cells and helping them grow). Clinical trials are looking at these types of vaccines to fight a slew of cancers, including cervical, colon, kidney, pancreatic and lung cancer. Many pension funds for public workers already owe far more in retirement benefits than they have in the bank, and the problem will only grow worse if the economy slows down, according to a report released by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The Pew study found that the New Jersey and Kentucky funds are in such perilous shape that they risk running dry. "Even after eight years of economic recovery eight straight years of stock market gains the public pension plans are more vulnerable than they've ever been to the next recession," researcher Greg Mennis said in an interview. Governments have been ramping up contributions to the funds to help cover the promises they've made to retirees, but that leaves less money to spend on schools, police, parks and other core government services. Another option is reducing pension benefits. A plan to do that in Kentucky led to teacher walkouts this year. The Pew study, published by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard University, examines what would happen to pension funds in 10 states under various economic scenarios. If a fund doesn't bring in enough money to cover its promised retirement costs, the state would have to make up the difference. In New Jersey, that would mean spending at least $2 billion more a year. A spokeswoman for the state Treasury Department said Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat who took office in January, wants to increase the surplus by 50 percent. Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, signed a bill last month reducing some retirement benefits for current and future teachers, but not for those already retired. Top area high school top performers from the week of Oct. 15 Here are some noteworthy performances from the week of Oct. 15. Life can get complicated when a sovereign nation moves in next door, as the Lundgren family of Skagit County, Wash., discovered. For three generations, stretching over 70 years, the family owned a 10 acre parcel in the foothills of the Cascades north of Seattle. The family land was bounded on the north by a barbed wire fence that had been in place since at least 1947. The family treated all the land south of the fence as its own. In 2013, the Upper Skagit Tribe bought the 40 acres directly north of the Lundgren land and began incorporating it into its adjacent reservation. As part of the process, the tribe hired surveyors, who broke the news that the barbed wire fence was in the wrong place. The tribe had paid for about one acre that lay on the Lundgrens side. When the tribe informed the Lundgrens of its plan to tear down the old fence and replace it with a new one farther south, the Lundgrens responded by filing a suit to quiet title that is, to establish their legal ownership of the land, which they claimed to have acquired by adverse possession. Adverse possession is the formal legal recognition of squatters rights. Under Washington law, a person can gain title to land by occupying it without interruption for 10 years in an open and notorious way and generally acting like the owner. (In New Mexico, the claimant must additionally possess color of title some deed-like document and pay taxes.) The Lundgrens easily satisfied those requirements. If they had brought a quiet title suit against the former owners of the land, a private party, they undoubtedly would have prevailed. But all American governments, being sovereign, are immune from suit except when they have consented to it, and the Upper Skagit Tribe didnt consent to be sued in Washington state court. The tribe asked to have the Lundgrens otherwise-meritorious suit dismissed under the doctrine of tribal immunity. To a majority of the justices of the Washington Supreme Court, it didnt seem fair that the family should lose land that had been in the family for so many decades without a right to be heard. And yet their hands were seemingly tied by tribal immunity. They tried to get around the problem by declaring they were exercising jurisdiction only over the land (in rem) and not over the tribe itself. The justices position, boiled down, was that by intoning the phrase in rem, they could nullify the tribes title to an acre of land without affecting the tribes rights a kind of magical thinking. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state courts reliance on the in rem dodge was an error in this particular instance, without, however, prohibiting the state from resorting to it in the future on different facts. In doing so, incidentally, the high court established that the New Mexico Supreme Court acted correctly when it rejected the same argument in a 2016 case about road access involving San Felipe Pueblo. The high courts opinion, by Justice Gorsuch, didnt explain what options remained open to the Lundgrens. This bothered some of the other justices, especially Justice Thomas, who dissented. He would have decided in favor of the Lundgrens on the basis of the immovable property exception to sovereign immunity which the Lundgrens themselves never raised. In a nutshell, when a foreign nation purchases real estate for non-diplomatic reasons, for instance, as an investment, the property remains subject to the ordinary operations of the law. The same rule, suitably modified, should apply to Indian tribes, according to Thomas. It sounds like a sensible solution. But Thomas, joined by Justice Alito, didnt stop there. He went on to criticize the very notion of sovereign immunity as applied to tribes, referring to it as a judge-made doctrine rather than an incident of treaty rights, and characterizing its legal impact as quite exorbitant. The Thomas-Alito hostility to tribal interests was a bit much for the more mild-mannered Justices Roberts and Kennedy, who suggested only that the scope of tribal immunity might need to be addressed in a future case if the immovable property rule doesnt solve the Lundgrens problem. That looks like four votes in favor of recognizing the immovable property exception to tribal immunity. Notably, Gorsuch (joined by the four Democrats) didnt say anything in opposition to the exception, merely holding that the issue should be addressed in the first instance by the state courts. The writing is on the wall. New Mexico tribes, and everybody involved in real estate transactions with them, should take note. Joel Jacobsen is an author who recently retired from a 29-year legal career. If there are topics you would like to see covered in future columns, please write him at legal.column.tips@gmail.com Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal A monthlong, meth-fueled romance ended in a police shooting Saturday at the Smiths grocery store near Yale and Coal SE, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court. Richard Rivera, 47, was shot and killed by an Albuquerque police officer, and Jennifer Rael, 39, was arrested, police said. Rivera was running in the Smiths grocery store parking lot when he was shot, witnesses told the Journal. Before the shooting, police said, Rivera and Rael were involved in an armed robbery at a Verizon store near Menaul and San Pedro NE. Police didnt say if Rivera was armed or if he had threatened a police officer or someone else prior to the shooting. They also didnt identify the officer who shot Rivera. Gilbert Gallegos, a police spokesman, said the department plans to hold a news conference and release video of the shooting at a later date. A crowd of about two dozen protesters gathered at the site of the shooting Monday evening. Olivia Martinez, one of the protesters, lives across the street from the grocery store. She said she heard a loud screech and what she thought was fireworks Saturday afternoon, then learned from a neighbor that she had heard a shooting. Its really scary to think of something happening like that in such a heavily populated area, she said. Anybody in this parking lot could have been shot. Its a direct threat to my safety and my neighbors safety. Rael, of Albuquerque, made her initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Kirtan Khalsa in federal court Monday morning. She has been charged with aiding and abetting armed bank robbery and using a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence. Rael will remain in custody at least until a preliminary hearing and detention hearing scheduled for this morning, according to the U.S. Attorneys Office. Rael was arrested outside the grocery store after the shooting. According to the criminal complaint, Rael was with Rivera when he robbed a gas station June 10 and a bank June 11. She was driving a U-Haul that she had rented when he committed the robberies, according to court documents. Rivera had a warrant for his arrest at the time of the shooting for a different armed robbery, according to the criminal complaint. In an interview with special agents after her arrest, Rael said Rivera moved in with her in mid-May, and she started using methamphetamine twice daily. The couple had met after Rael smuggled meth into the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility near Las Cruces for her ex-husband and another man, according to the complaint. She told agents that she has used drugs off and on since she turned 16. Rael had purchased a pistol and kept it in her closet, but she said Rivera had access to it and would regularly carry it, according to the complaint. The shooting marks the second time this year that Albuquerque police officers have shot and killed someone. The department is in the midst of a years-long reform effort that aims to address a pattern of excessive force, including shootings. WASHINGTON Thousands of children split from their families at the U.S. southern border are being held in government-run facilities. A look at how we got here, whats real and whats not, and what might happen next. HOW DID WE GET HERE? Tens of thousands of parents and children, mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, have been caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally in recent years with stories of fleeing drug cartels, extreme poverty and gang violence. The U.S. cant send them back over the border unless they are Mexican citizens, and instead must refer their case to an immigration judge. In 2008, President George W. Bush focused on the problem of minors crossing the border without their parents and signed a law unanimously passed by Congress that called for such unaccompanied minors to be released into the least restrictive setting. By 2014, President Barack Obama was facing an influx of both children traveling alone and families as a result of violence in Central America. At one point, his administration tried housing the families in special detention centers. But after a federal judge in California ruled the arrangement violated a long-standing agreement barring kids from jail-like settings, even with their parents, the government began releasing families in to the U.S. pending notification of their next court date. Fast forward to Trump, who campaigned on building a border wall, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who derided these longtime U.S. immigration practices as catch and release. Trump and Sessions insisted that people exploit the system, even traveling with children to ensure they arent jailed and slipping away before their court dates. SO DID U.S. POLICY CHANGE OR NOT? Yes. While Trumps new immigration policy doesnt call for families to be separated, as pointed out by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the policy makes separations inevitable. Following Trumps election, then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly now Trumps White House chief of staff floated the idea of separating families as a way to discourage illegal border crossings. But much of the administrations focus went into a travel ban aimed at Muslim-majority nations. By this April, Sessions announced a plan: The U.S. would have zero tolerance for illegal crossings. If a person doesnt arrive at an appropriate port of entry to claim asylum, the crossing is deemed illegal and prosecuted even if the person does not have a criminal history. With the adult detained and facing prosecution, any minors accompanying them are taken away. Nielsen has muddied the debate by insisting that children will only be separated in narrow circumstances, including if the adult has broken the law. That falsely leaves the impression that only children traveling with gang members or other violent criminals will be separated. But under U.S. law, the act of crossing the border without proper documentation itself is a crime and would trigger a separation, unless a person can find a designated port of entry and claims asylum. The result is that in the six weeks following Sessions announcement, nearly 2,000 minors were separated from adults at the border. DID THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ALSO SEPARATE FAMILIES AT THE BORDER? Nielsen said Monday that separating families at the border is not new and that it happened in the Bush and Obama administrations, albeit to a lesser degree. Make that a much lesser degree. Gil Kerlikowske, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection commissioner from early 2014 to the end of Obamas term, said parents were split from their children if they were arrested maybe on a drug charge or had an outstanding warrant. But, he writes, the number of separations was minuscule considering how many people were coming at the time. Kerlikowske oversaw the border agency in the summer of 2014, when Central American families and children overwhelmed U.S. inspectors in greater numbers than today. WHAT DO DEMOCRATS HAVE TO DO WITH IT? Not much, except that they seem to be seizing on the issue to press Republicans to break from the president ahead of the midterm elections. Trump has repeatedly said Democrats are to blame and cited a horrible law that separates families. But no law mandates that parents must be separated from their children at the border, and its not a policy Democrats have pushed or can change alone as the minority in Congress. (That 2008 law signed by Bush dealt only with unaccompanied minors, not families.) Perhaps a bigger obstacle is that Republicans, currently in control of Congress, have been deeply divided on immigration. Moderate Republicans have been trying to negotiate a plan that would reduce family separations and also open a door to citizenship for young immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and who stayed illegally. But many hardline conservatives are leery of any legislation that would protect from deportation immigrants who arrived illegally, calling it amnesty and complicating the GOPs ability to pass legislation in both the House and reach the needed 60 votes in the Senate. Some Democrats have speculated that Trump is using the humanitarian crisis as leverage to negotiate a tougher immigration bill, an assertion the White House has rejected. But White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said Monday that any crisis belongs to Democrats because they are the ones who rejected Trumps initial immigration plan. Its a dangerous situation for this country and its all on the backs of the Democrats, he told Fox News. WHATS THIS ABOUT THE BIBLE? Last week, Sessions cited the Bible in defending the policy. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order, he said. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Sessions use of the Bible saying it is biblical to enforce the law. But one longtime Trump ally, the Rev. Franklin Graham, rejected the zero-tolerance policy as disgraceful, while former first lady Laura Bush called the practice cruel and immoral. Police have identified the man who was dropped off at Lovelace Medical Center near Downtown with a fatal gunshot wound more than a week ago as 41-year-old Raymond Parker. Homicide detectives are investigating his death and no one has been arrested at this time. They havent provided any details about the person who brought Parker to the hospital or if that person stuck around. Simon Drobik, a spokesman for the Albuquerque Police Department, said that around 4 p.m. on June 10, officers were called to Lovelace Medical Center on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr NE for reports that Parker had been dropped off at the emergency room. They took him to the University of New Mexico Hospital trauma center, where he died. Parkers family didnt respond to calls from the Journal Monday. LOS ANGELES Former Mexico President Vicente Fox, who calls himself a soldier in the global campaign to legalize marijuana, is joining the board of directors of venerable cannabis publication High Times to advance his agenda. Speaking with The Associated Press about his views on cannabis and his new appointment, Fox said he foresees a day when a robust legal marketplace will produce new jobs and medicines while sharply reducing cartel violence in his home country. He also sees pot being part of the North American Free Trade Agreement among Mexico, Canada and the U.S., where some 30 states are embracing legalized marijuana in some form. Foxs appointment to the magazines board points to the growing acceptance of the once-scorned industry. Earlier this year, former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, reversed his long-held position against legalization and became an adviser to a cannabis company. WHY GO LEGAL? Reason one, Fox says, is freedom, which is maybe the highest value that human beings have. I dont think that governments will ever have the capacity to impose behaviors, to impose conduct, to human beings. At the very end, prohibitions dont work. What works is your own free decision. Then, its history. The war on drugs has been a total failure since the days of former President Richard Nixon, Fox concludes. Fox also cites the experience in Mexico, where tens of thousands of killings have been attributed to drug violence. The trend toward legalization is moving out of a crime activity, a criminal activity that causes death and blood on the streets, into a business, an industry, that is proving every day that it is sustainable, Fox says. To me, marijuana, cannabis, its only the first steps. At the very end, these principles that I spoke about apply to all drugs. WHAT DO YOU HOPE TO ACHIEVE AT HIGH TIMES? Well, I am a soldier, in the sense of being an activist, working for this new future, working to break the paradigm, he says. In short, joining together those who believe in this future. THE LESSON OF MEXICO Mexico has legalized medicinal marijuana, but Fox says regulations are needed to put the change into effect. With legalization spreading in the U.S., and Canada expected to broadly legalize cannabis later this year, Fox is eager to see Mexico follow suit. We have to come up to where the United States is, he says. This is happening in several key states throughout the union, and also like other world nations are doing, like Holland, like Portugal, Uruguay, so Mexico has to be updated on this public policy. If Mexico takes the next step to full legalization one of the things that Im absolutely convinced that will happen in Mexico is that well take away half of the money that cartels get from selling drugs in the United States, and that half of the money will reduce the amount of guns and ammunition bought by the cartels. COULD MARIJUANA BECOME PART OF THE NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT? Yes, Fox says. Once its a legal industry and a legal farming product, it should form part of NAFTA, Fox says. Its another product that can enhance our private sector, corporations, farmers, retailers so it should happen. We should promote it. HOW CAN THE U.S. RECONCILE THE CONFLICT BETWEEN FEDERAL LAW, WHICH SEES POT AS ILLEGAL, AND STATE LAWS THAT PERMIT USE? The only fix, Fox says, is to change policy at the federal level. However, Im not appealing to (President Donald) Trump because he never understands anything, Fox says. Fox believes members of Congress should visit states where marijuana has been legalized. Go around California, visit Washington state, visit Colorado. Look at the successful stories Look at the amount of taxes that are being collected, look at the peaceful and harmonious way this new industry is being grown. We need Congress to pay attention to this. Fox says. THE BLACK MARKET CONTINUES TO THRIVE IN CALIFORNIA, DESPITE LEGALIZATION. WHAT CAN BE DONE? The thing is, those criminals that used to have control of this industry in the United States are still there, Fox says. This is one more reason why in the long term I think that all drugs should be legalized. But we must educate people. We must educate consumers. We must prevent the wrong things from happening. ____ Michael R. Blood is a member of APs marijuana beat team. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MichaelRBloodAP. Find complete AP marijuana coverage here: apnews.com/tag/LegalMarijuana. Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal SANTA FE Concerns over New Mexicos pension liabilities and deeply rooted spending challenges prompted a national credit rating agency to downgrade the states bond rating on Monday a blow to the states fiscal reputation and its second downgrade in two years. Moodys Investor Service noted in its announcement that the states cash reserves have been built back up after being depleted during a recent budget crunch but that the growing pension liabilities, a high Medicaid enrollment rate and other budget-related issues prompted the downgrade from an AA1 to an AA2 rating. Although the credit rating agency set the states outlook as stable, the rating downgrade could lead to higher borrowing rates for infrastructure projects. It also represented Moodys first rating change for a state this year. Its not a surprise disappointed, but not a surprise, Sen. John Arthur Smith, a Deming Democrat and chairman of the influential Senate Finance Committee, said of the rating downgrade. After having its top bond rating downgraded in October 2016, New Mexico appeared to have dodged an additional downgrade last year, which Gov. Susana Martinezs office said at the time validated the governors anti-tax increase stance. But New Mexicos two large retirement systems unfunded liabilities have increased in recent years, as 2013 solvency fixes aimed at shoring up the Public Employees Retirement Association and the Educational Retirement Board have not been as effective as intended. As a result, the state could be facing big questions about how it plans to pay future retirement benefits for thousands of state workers and teachers. In a statement, a Martinez spokesman appeared to blame lawmakers and pension fund officials for the downgrade. He also said the states rating outlook was shifted from negative to stable after the downgrade. The governor has also ensured New Mexico has maintained a budget that lives within its means and is currently overseeing an unprecedented reserve level, Martinez spokesman Ben Cloutier said. But until the Legislature and Educational Retirement Board address true pension reform, we will continue to face the same extremely high levels of liability with our pension funds. Some lawmakers, including Smith, have suggested the solution might involve requiring government agencies and employees to contribute more financially to the pension funds to help put them in a stronger fiscal position. But its no small challenge to tackle, given that the funds are billions of dollars away from being actuarially sound. Demographic changes in the workforce, the early retirement allowed for public safety officers and other factors have contributed to the challenge of addressing the states pension funds, Smith said. Combined, the states two large retirement systems had unfunded liabilities of roughly $12.5 billion as of June 2017, with the pension fund covering nearly 60,000 active teachers, professors and other school workers having the larger liability of the two. Unfunded liabilities represent the difference between current assets on hand and future retirement benefits owed, and both pension funds liabilities have increased in recent years. Meanwhile, New Mexico also faces other systemic economic problems, despite a recent revenue uptick driven primarily by an oil drilling boom in southeastern New Mexico that has led to the state collecting $582.1 million more in revenue through March or 14.5 percent than it had during the same time period in the most recent budget year. Some of those challenges were cited by Moodys analyst, along with the pension funding issue. That pressure is compounded by spending challenges associated with a large Medicaid caseload, a revenue structure more concentrated and volatile than most similarly-rated states, an economy that has lagged the nations, below-average wealth levels, and financial reporting practices which, while improving, are weaker than typical for a U.S. state, Moodys analyst Kenneth Kurtz wrote. New Mexico has one of the nations highest unemployment rates, although it has dropped in recent months, and more than 40 percent of the states population is enrolled in Medicaid. The states unemployment rate was 5.1 percent in May. Lawmakers did take action in 2017 aimed at shoring up the states budget including setting aside more money in cash reserves and creating a rainy-day fund to help keep state government operations running in future cash-lean years that were signed into law by Martinez. While a $119,308 mistake might not sound like much from a $15.5 billion retirement fund, those who have to budget their income to pay their bills know every dollar counts. So kudos to the New Mexico state Auditors Office for finding the $47,350.94 in pension reimbursement overpayments to Village of Tijeras employees, as well as $71,957.99 in pension fund overpayments from Village of Tijeras employees. Mayor Gloria Chavez and former acting village clerk Diane Klaus misinterpreted a resolution governing the Public Employees Retirement Fund (PERA) and are among the folks who will have to repay thousands of dollars. Others are owed money the village needs to scramble to pay. It is this kind of nuts-and-bolts auditing work that helps New Mexicans know their tax dollars are going where intended. And in that vein, New Mexicos high-risk insurance pool should quit stonewalling and turn over its annual financial audits to the Auditors Office for approval. The pools contract attorney insists it does not meet the definition of a state agency and is instead a nonprofit entity made up of private business members. But the pool was created by the state Legislature to provide access to health insurance coverage for the chronically ill considered uninsurable, and all health insurers in New Mexico pay into the pool and get tax credits. As enrollment has plummeted under Obamacare and political accusations have flown in this election year it is important to know what and how the pool is doing. On Friday, the pools website included its audits since 2007. If its board truly is committed to transparency and effective administration for its clients, as attorney Laura Sanchez-Rivet says, then it will turn its information over to the Auditors Office for approval, as well. This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers. SANTA FE After coming up short in his bid to win the Republican nomination for an open southern New Mexico-based congressional seat, Gavin Clarkson is shifting his gaze to the secretary of state race. Clarkson, a former Trump administration official who is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation, said Monday that he plans to submit his name to the GOP state central committee for consideration when it meets to select a new secretary of state candidate. The partys official nominee for the office, JoHanna Cox, withdrew from the race last week, citing family obligations. Cox has been sued for legal malpractice three times in the past five years. A former associate professor in New Mexico State Universitys College of Business, Clarkson might seem an unlikely choice to be the states top elections official. But in his letter to central committee members, he said his business background would come in handy in running the secretary of states Corporations Bureau. States have swamps too, and I think Ive demonstrated the energy, experience, enthusiasm and commitment to really move the ball in the right direction at the state level in Santa Fe, Clarkson told the Journal. Clarkson came in third in a four-way GOP primary for the congressional seat currently held by Steve Pearce, receiving about 12.4 percent of the more than 32,000 votes cast in the race. He took a leave of absence from his NMSU job to serve in the Trump administration in the Interior Department and later launched his campaign for Congress. But Clarkson recently filed a lawsuit against the university after NMSU canceled his leave of absence and fired him. OFFICIAL RESULTS: New Mexicos primary election results are expected to be made official next week. The states Canvassing Board, which includes the governor, secretary of state and chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court, are scheduled to meet next Tuesday to certify the results. Based on unofficial returns, a total of 262,533 voters cast ballots in the June 5 primary election. That represents about 27.6 percent of those who were eligible to vote. Meanwhile, two contested primary races a House District 27 race between two Democrats and a three-way Republican contest for a Public Regulation Commission seat appear headed for automatic recounts under a state law that applies to races where the margin of victory is less than 1 percentage point. Dan Boyd: dboyd@abqjournal.com AL-BAB, Syria A newly paved road links the Turkish town of Elbeyli to the Syrian town of al-Bab, across the border. In al-Bab, Turkish and Syrian flags line the streets, and signs on government buildings are in Arabic and Turkish. One of the first billboards honors Turkish soldiers killed in the battle to liberate this town from Islamic State militants. Al-Bab, still scarred by war, is busy with construction. A large Turkish-funded hospital is nearly complete. A huge tree-encircled plot on the main highway will be the towns first industrial zone. A census and registration of land deeds are underway. Overseeing the beehive is a veteran Turkish provincial official, Senol Esmer, deputy governor of the Turkish city of Gaziantep, sent here to direct al-Babs development. His office is in the local police station which swarms with Turkish security alongside construction workers building an extension. The main reason for Turkeys support is humanity, Esmer said. We call it justice of fraternity because we have been living together with these people for 600 years, since Ottoman times. And after that, as neighbors, he said, referring to Syrias longtime place in the Ottoman Empire, which fell with World War I. Turkey is growing long-term roots in its northern Syrian enclave, nearly two years after its troops moved in, modeling the zone on its own towns and bringing in its own administrators and military, financial and security institutions. Turkey now holds sway over more than 4,000 square kilometers (1,500 square miles) of Syrian territory. Almost a quarter of Syrias population is under Turkish control indirectly or directly including 3.6 million refugees in Turkey, around 600,000 people living in the enclave, most of them displaced from elsewhere in Syria, and the 2 million people in Idlib, the last remaining rebel-held province, where Turkey has gained a major say. The major Turkish investment has raised speculation Ankara has ambitions to revive old imperial claims to Syrian provinces. But there are strategic goals behind its deepening hold. Fundamentally, Turkey aims to keep out its nemesis, the U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. Also, Turkey, presenting itself as the protector of the Syrian opposition, is now positioned to be the main negotiator along with Russia over shaping Syrias future. Moscow may be open for that: It gave a green-light for Ankaras move into Syria. Turkey hopes its weight will lure Washington away from the alliance with the Kurds to rely on it as a bulwark against Iranian influence in Syria. The Turkish intervention is the most important development in the Syrian conflict since Russia threw its military might behind President Bashar Assad in 2015, said Nicholas Heras, of the Washington-based Center for New American Security. Having troops on the ground and controlling large parts of the Syrian population definitely means no solution is possible without Turkish cooperation, said Heiko Wimmen, project director for Iraq, Syria and Lebanon with the International Crisis Group. The zone is the latest phase in the evolution of Turkeys aims in Syrias war. At first, it joined a Western and regional alliance funding and arming rebels with the aim of ousting Assad. Then it said it needed to protect its own security, fearing the growing clout of the Kurdish militia. Ankara considers the YPG a front for its own domestic Kurdish insurgency. The United States allied with the militia to fight the Islamic State group, and it now holds nearly 25 percent of Syria, including much of the border with Turkey and Syrias richest oil fields. In the summer of 2016, Turkey launched its military incursion alongside allied Syrian fighters to drive out both the Islamic State group and the YPG. It took more than three months of fighting for the Turkish-led forces to take al-Bab district, killing more than 70 Turkish soldiers. But the battle cemented the working relationship with Moscow: For the first time, the Russian air force backed Turkish forces advancing on the town. Al-Babs strategic location allowed Turkey earlier this year to uproot the YPG from its westernmost stronghold Afrin, thwarting a contiguous Kurdish entity along the border. That secured Turkeys hold on northwest Syria, but also brought it close to Syrian government forces. Now Ankara is installing a Turkish-European style government in what it calls the Euphrates Shield area. Esmer, the Turkish official, oversaw the formation of a 21-member governing body in al-Bab, which employs nearly 150 staff, most paid by Turkey. He estimated the council will collect some $1.7 million in revenues from rents, taxes and municipal fees in 2018. We provide the flour, but they (Syrians) process it to make bread. With a small profit, they organize the distribution, Esmer said. Most Turkish spending goes to health and education. Thousands of teachers are paid by Turkey. Schools are being rehabilitated and new ones are coming up. A new $17-million hospital financed by the Turkish Health Ministry opens this month in al-Bab. A Turkish university plans a branch in the town, and others held tests here for Syrian students wanting to enroll in Turkey. Turkey has moved its troops out of towns, positioning them mostly on nearby hills. In al-Bab, it trained some 2,000 Syrian security, including 100 women, to police checkpoints in al-Bab. New courts are overseen by Turkish judges and prosecutors but use former Syria government judges, following Syrias French-inspired code. A terrorism court opened in Azaz. Al-Bab boasts a modern correction facility. To facilitate financial transactions, Turkish post offices which serve as banks transfer salaries and funds to Syrian towns, in Turkish liras. Ahmed Hussein Taher, a school principal in Jarablus, said that means the 1,300 teachers in the town get salaries far more quickly and efficiently. Taher was promoted to principal by the Turkish-backed administration, a post he said he never would have had under Assad since he wasnt a ruling party loyalist. We teach Turkish language classes to first and second graders. Hopefully in the coming years well offer it to all grades, he said. Turkish language is a must. Our Turkish brothers have given us everything and we work with them. In al-Bab, engineer Zakaria Haj Hassan ordered pipes from Turkey to install in a new industrial zone that he hopes will attract Syrian investors, both here and in Turkey. Dependency on Turkey, he said, is natural and historic. I remember our grandparents singing: from Aleppo to Antep, he said, using the old Ottoman name for Gaziantep. We still have relatives in Turkey. As for the future, he said, Are we going to be part of Turkey? Are we going to be a small independent statelet? We dont know. Those who are nationalists would call it colonialism. Those who are religious would say we are all Muslims. We have no problem. In the old days, we were one nation from Istanbul to Yemen to Morocco. A big test for Turkey is keeping security. Thousands of Syrian fighters worked with the Turkish military to liberate these areas. Thousands more flooded in since then as the Syrian government seized rebel-held areas elsewhere. Turkish officials estimate that now up to 60,000 Syrian gunmen operate in the Turkish zone, with nowhere else to go and no other supporter but Turkey. Bloody clashes have frequently broken out among them, mostly triggered by lack of resources, competing leadership and disputes between locals and newly arrived fighters. Violence paralyses towns for days. One battle erupted in al-Bab when a gunman claimed an empty lot of land, claiming it had been IS property, and the local owner protested, prompting clashes with heavy machine guns. The newly-trained local security didnt interfere. Days later, a gunman beat a nurse in a hospital, setting off fighting that ended when his commander offered to hand him over. There have also been reports of radicalism among the militias, with some seeking to impose strict Islamic dress on women and others seizing and looting homes of Kurdish residents. A senior Turkish official blamed the Syrian government, saying it seeks to destabilize the Turkish zone by flooding the area with the thousands of gunmen transferred from other areas. But we are not going to let that happen. It is part of our military planning, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations. Turkeys objective is to get Syria back on its feet. If there is a power vacuum and social structures are weakened, it will end up back where it was. The challenge is greater in neighboring Idlib, where a witchs brew of more extremist organizations, including al-Qaida, are in control, said Heras. Turkey, in agreement with Russia, has set up observation posts around Idlib, protecting the area as it seeks to remodel rebels there into a more moderate force. But those posts also bring it into potential friction with Syrian troops. Mohammed ElSheikh, 25, a humanitarian worker in al-Bab, said he expects Turkeys control of northern Syria to last for a decade. He said Turkey is serving the Syrian revolution and that it and Moscow will work out a new system that keeps Syria together but doesnt include Assad. But ElSheikh said Turkish control can be heavy-handed as well. He said it took him months to wade through Turkish bureaucracy and security checks for approval of his organization, which supports school drop-outs. Turks, he said, must help Syrians, not rule them. Right now, they are ruling. ___ This story has been corrected to say that the Turkish town directly across the border from al-Bab is Elbeyli, not Cobanbey. Cobanbey is the Turkish name for the Syrian border town of al-Rai, north of al-Bab. WASHINGTON President Donald Trump on Tuesday told House Republicans he is 1,000 percent behind their rival immigration bills, providing little clear direction for party leaders searching for a way to defuse the escalating controversy over family separations at the southern border. And its uncertain if Trumps support will be enough to push any legislation through the divided GOP majority. GOP lawmakers, increasingly fearful of a voter backlash in November, met with Trump for about an hour at the Capitol to try to find a solution that both holds to Trumps hard-line immigration policy and ends the practice of taking migrant children from parents charged with entering the country illegally. Many lawmakers say Trump could simply reverse the administrations zero tolerance policy and keep families together. While Trump held firm to his tough immigration stance in an earlier appearance Tuesday, he acknowledged during the closed-door meeting that the coverage of family separations is taking a toll. Trump said his daughter, Ivanka, had told him the situation with the families looks bad, one lawmaker said. He said, Politically, this is bad,' said Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas. Its not about the politics, this is the right thing to do. But Trump touched on many topics during the meeting, including his historic meeting with the North Korean Kim Jong Un. He praised a few GOP lawmakers by name for defending him on TV, according to one Republican in the room. And he took a jab at Rep. Mark Sanford, congratulating the South Carolina Republican on his recent campaign, according to others granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting. Sanford, a frequent Trump critic, lost after his GOP primary opponent highlighted his criticism of the president. As Trump walked out of the session in the Capitol basement, he was confronted by about a half-dozen House Democrats, who yelled, Stop separating our families! Leaders in both the House and Senate are struggling to shield the partys lawmakers from the public outcry over images of children taken from migrant parents and held in cages at the border. But they are running up against Trumps shifting views on specifics and his determination, according to advisers, not to look soft on his signature immigration issue, the border wall. Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D., said Trump told lawmakers he would continue to support the legislation, and that people shouldnt be worried that he would change his mind. She said it was a light moment. Everybody laughed. Even if Republicans manage to pass an immigration bill through the House, which is a tall order, the fight is all but certain to fizzle in the Senate. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader from New York, is adamant that Trump can end the family separations on his own and that legislation is not needed. Without Democratic support, Republicans cannot muster the 60 votes needed to move forward on legislation. Schumer said with most Americans against family separations, its Republicans feeling the heat on this issue, and thats why theyre squirming. In the House, GOP leaders scrambled Tuesday to produce a revised version of the broader immigration bill that would keep children in detention longer than now permitted but with their parents. The major change unveiled Tuesday would loosen rules that now limit the amount of time minors can be held to 20 days, according to a GOP source familiar with the measure. Instead, the children could be detained indefinitely with their parents. The revision would also give the Department of Homeland Security the authority to use $7 billion in border technology funding to pay for family detention centers, said the person, who was not authorized to discuss the matter by name and commented only on condition of anonymity. In the Senate, meanwhile, Republicans are rallying behind a different approach. Theirs is narrow legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, that would allow detained families to stay together in custody while expediting their hearings and possible deportation proceedings. Cruzs bill would double the number of federal immigration judges, authorize new temporary shelters to house migrant families and limit the processing of asylum cases to no more than 14 days a goal immigrant advocates say would be difficult to meet. While cases are pending, families should stay together, tweeted Cruz, who is in an unexpectedly tough re-election battle. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters hes reaching out to Democrats for bipartisan backing. The family separation issue boiled over Tuesday at a House hearing on an unrelated subject, when protesters with babies briefly shut down proceedings. Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, pleaded with Republicans on the panel to stand up to Trump. Under the administrations current policy, all unlawful crossings are referred for prosecution a process that moves adults to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and sends many children to facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Under the Obama administration, such families were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, not requiring separation. More than 2,300 minors were separated from their families at the border from May 5 through June 9, according to the Department of Homeland Security. The national outcry has roiled midterm election campaigns, emboldening Democrats while putting Republicans on the defensive. Top conservatives, including key Trump allies, have introduced bills to keep the migrant families together. Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a leader of the conservative Freedom Caucus, said he has introduced a measure that becomes a backup proposal if others fail. The House is to vote later this week on two bills that address broader immigration issues to protect young immigrant Dreamers, who have been living in the U.S. illegally since childhood, from deportation and fund Trumps border wall. But outlook for passage is dim. One conservative measure is expected to fail. And its unclear if Trumps backing will help the compromise legislation that GOP leaders negotiated with moderate Republicans. Rep. Steve Scalise of Lousiana, the GOP whip, told reporters he thought it had enough support to pass. Votes are expected Thursday. Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa.,a member of the House Freedom Caucus, says he doesnt like compromise bill because its all compromising in one direction. Perry was not at the meeting with Trump, but said he doubts the presidents words will affect his position. Well, good for him, but hes not running for Congress. ___ Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire, Jill Colvin, Ken Thomas, Matthew Daly and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report. ___ See APs complete coverage of the debate over the Trump administrations policy of family separation at the border: https://apnews.com/tag/Immigration Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal SANTA FE Republican Steve Pearce and Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham both oppose the Trump administrations zero-tolerance policy, which separates children and their parents at the border. And the two gubernatorial candidates both agree the nations immigration system is broken. But they sharply disagree over how to fix it. Their position on family separation, in any case, puts them at odds with the person theyre hoping to succeed in the Governors Office Republican Susana Martinez, who, in a Journal interview last week, firmly backed the zero-tolerance policy on illegal border crossings, which results in minors being separated from adults they come over with. The two gubernatorial candidates both of whom are giving up safe seats in Congress to run for governor of New Mexico weighed in Tuesday as audio of children crying out for their parents and images of separated families fueled the national debate over immigration. Pearce, a member of the staunchly conservative Freedom Caucus in the U.S. House, said, The current policy should not continue. His district abuts the Mexican border. As I have stated many times, he said Tuesday in a written statement to the Journal, it is almost never a good idea to separate children and families. We must treat all people with respect and dignity. The political games on both sides must stop. He added that the nation must also secure our border and fix the immigration system. Lujan Grisham, chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, called the separation policy inhumane. She visited immigration detention centers in San Diego earlier this week. President Donald Trump, she said, has the power to stop the separation of families. He is traumatizing the country. He is traumatizing these children. He is traumatizing these families, Lujan Grisham said Tuesday in video taken by The Washington Post at the U.S. Capitol. It is nothing short of child abuse. In written statements, she has said there is overwhelming evidence that separating children from their parents has long-lasting negative effects. The two gubernatorial candidates, meanwhile, have different approaches as the U.S. House prepares to vote on a compromise immigration proposal being negotiated by Republican leaders. The proposal is expected to offer a way to help young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and now live here illegally, often referred to as Dreamers. They could apply for permission to stay. It would also provide funding for Trumps proposed border wall and impose stricter standards for immigrants seeking asylum, among other provisions. Late Tuesday, the bill was being revised to allow children to be detained with their parents for extended periods, rather than being split up. The proposal would give the Department of Homeland Security the authority to use $7 billion in border technology funding to pay for family detention centers. Lujan Grisham, in a statement issued last week, said she opposes the compromise legislation. She called it an anti-immigrant bill that would waste money on a border wall, cut legal immigration and end our obligation to protect vulnerable children, mothers and families lawfully seeking asylum. Pearce, in turn, hasnt staked out a position on the proposal, noting that the legislation is undergoing changes and it isnt clear what form it will ultimately take, a spokesman said. Last year, he introduced legislation that would have allowed the children of parents who came to the U.S. illegally a chance to remain in the country lawfully. Neither Lujan Grisham nor Pearce granted a Journal interview request on immigration. The intense political pressure on immigration comes after the Trump administration, in April, adopted a zero-tolerance policy for illegal crossings into the United States. That means adults who cross illegally are prosecuted, even if they dont otherwise have a criminal history. Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal CORRECTION: This story has been updated to clarify who issues teacher licenses. Starting July 1, teacher preparation programs in the state will be graded by the Public Education Department, with the majority of points coming from components of its teacher evaluations a controversial measuring system that gubernatorial candidates have vowed to do away with. A new rule allows the PED to rate educator preparation programs or EPPs through site visits and a scorecard system, mirroring the A through F school grades. And it gives the department the final decision on which programs can stay up and running. Instead of being monitored by national accreditation groups, New Mexicos private and public EPPs will be scored annually based on recruitment, training, hiring and retention, and graduates performance. In anticipation of the rule change, the PED released preliminary 2017 scorecards based on those factors for 13 EPPs in the state none of which got an A. Although these scorecards will not have any consequences for the programs, the PED aimed to show how based on its measures the programs are doing. The majority of schools in the state got Cs. But the University of New Mexico, Central New Mexico Community College, New Mexico State University and Northern New Mexico College each earned Bs. For every factor being graded, the program must meet a benchmark percentage to get the full number of points. For instance, the PEDs goal is to have 75 percent of the student cohort be an ethnically diverse representative of varying minorities, which the department says mirrors New Mexicos student population. UNM had about 58 percent. UNMs data also showed that 56 percent of its teachers stay in the state, and the PED expects that to be closer to 85 percent. These factors contributed to UNMs getting a B in all four categories. The dean of UNMs College of Education, Salvador Hector Ochoa, wrote a comment to the Journal that said UNM strives for continuous improvement and will continue to work with the PED. But UNM did not respond to questions on how it felt about the score or whether UNM agrees with the rules measures. PED Secretary-designate Christopher Ruszkowski said there are five areas in which all New Mexico teacher prep schools could be doing better: practice over theory, clinical experience, collaboration with districts, data tracking on teachers post-graduation and emphasis on recruitment. He signed the rule into effect last week, saying it hadnt really changed after public comments in May. During the comment period, some expressed support for the rule, saying the policy addresses teachers who arent prepared the first day of school and children facing the consequences. But opponents said the PED was overreaching its authority and was grading the program on factors that cant be controlled, such as the diversity of a cohort or whether teachers stay in the state. Ruszkowski said the PED did alter some calculations in response to feedback from college deans. Part of what we did was adjusted the weights based upon what we want to signal as important versus what we want the bulk of the grade to be comprised of, he said. University and college officials said they think there still are factors in the rule that colleges cant change. About 50 percent of the measures are things we dont have control over, said Betsy Cahill, interim associate dean at NMSUs College of Education, adding NMSU has asked the PED for the research used to construct the scorecard and didnt receive any. She pointed to factors such as the hiring and retention component, saying the prep program doesnt have control over whom districts hire or whether teachers stay in the state. But Ruszkowski said the rule aims to make retention a priority for educational change in the state. New Mexico has the absolute obligation to value teachers teaching in New Mexico and to incentivize teachers in the state, he said. Factors out of the schools control also are concerns for Virginia Padilla-Vigil, interim dean of the Highlands University School of Education, and CNM President Katharine Winograd. There are certain elements we arent sure how we are going to influence yet, Padilla-Vigil said. But Padilla-Vigil also said she feels there are positives to the rule, such as having access to new data and the emphasis on a high bar for recruitment at Highlands, which got a C on the evaluation. I embrace the C, she said. Theres always room for improvement. Winograd also expressed optimism, saying, (The PEDs) B rating for CNM will be considered as we continue striving to improve our program and prepare teachers for this highly rewarding and critically important profession. Ruszkowski noted the majority of the score is how teachers are doing in the classroom through their teacher evaluations. U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who won the states Democratic gubernatorial primary, previously said that current teacher evaluations punish educators working with vulnerable students and that she would work to come up with a new system. And U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce, the Republican candidate for governor, who was unopposed in the primary, has said he would make changes to the system. With possible changes in teacher evaluations, Cahill said she thinks that makes EPP requirements a moving target, but said NMSU will move forward with the rule while recognizing some aspects may be temporary. And Padilla-Vigil said Highlands will, too, but noted there are parts of NM Teach teacher observations and rubrics that she plans to continue implementing despite changes. Ruszkowski said New Mexico is among the first few states to start evaluating EPPs. The others include Tennesssee and Delaware, he said. Three new department heads for Santa Fe city government have been announced by Acting City Manager Erik Litzenberg and Mayor Alan Webber. Theyre the first department heads hired since Webbers March election. Regina Wheeler, former CEO of Sunpower by Positive Energy Solar, is the new director of the Public Works Department. The new head of the city Finance Department is Mary McCoy, who formerly held positions in New Mexico state government and is returning from Boston where she was revenue manager, Administration and Finance Cabinet, in city government there. Bernadette Salazar, Santa Fe Countys human resources director, is taking over the same job in city government. In the news release, Litzenberg said, Big changes are coming to City Hall, with more than half of our leadership team turning over. These three stood out from a talented applicant pool for their unique combination of vision and expertise, and were excited to see their leadership shape our City. Webber said, Were building a diverse and accomplished team to lead this City. These three women are going to help us make Santa Fe the most eco-friendly, sustainable City in the nation, rebuild our finances from the ground up, and create an entirely new culture of support and accountability for our employees. These are the people whose leadership will turn ideas into action and deliver real change to Santa Fe. Heres what the news release says about three new department heads: Regina Wheeler moved to New Mexico as a teenager and brings 20 years of leadership experience in the public and private sectors to the Public Works Director position. An engineer by training, she earned her Bachelors degree from UNM in Electrical Engineering and her Masters in Environmental Engineering from NMSU. Ms. Wheeler joins the City from the solar industry, where she was the first CEO of Positive Energy Solar, building the companys structure, people, and processes into one of the leaders in New Mexico. She also has a successful history leading the Environmental Services Division at the City. Throughout her career, Ms. Wheeler has developed a reputation as a leader and an innovator in sustainability, aligning with Mayor Webbers goal to make Santa Fe the most eco-friendly City in the nation. Ms. Wheeler said, Im really excited to be coming back to the City in this leadership role to help make the Mayors goals for sustainability, family-friendliness, and user-friendliness a reality. The Public Works staff does extraordinary work in many areas that touch public life in our community, and I am ready to work with our employees and our City leaders to support those efforts.' -Mary McCoy brings more than a decade of experience in government finance, administration, and fiscal policy to a Finance team that is a central focus of Mayor Webbers administration. Previously, Ms. McCoy has worked for the New Mexico Department of Finance, the Legislative Finance Committee, and the New Mexico Livestock Board. She is returning home from Boston, where she managed $3.3 billion in revenue for the City of Boston, oversaw city-wide revenue maximization, crafted legislation to fund universal Pre-Kindergarten, implemented a $20 million annual fund for affordable housing, open space, and historic preservation. McCoy said, I am honored to join Mayor Webbers team and come back home to New Mexico to serve the residents of Santa Fe. I have a strong background instituting financial controls, navigating tough audits, and building a solid financial foundation for municipal and state governments. I am eager to start working on the 10-point corrective action plan presented by the Mayor and the Finance Committee.' Born and raised in Albuquerque, Ms. McCoy is a Fullbright Fellow and the first in her family to attend college. She graduated from Wellesley College and earned a masters degree from Georgetown Universitys School of Foreign Service. Bernadette Salazar joins the City after 12 years leading Santa Fe Countys HR Department, where she built a successful track record establishing exactly the type of professional management and employee development programs the Mayor is seeking to implement at the City. Ms. Salazars role will be central to professionalizing the City and creating a workplace culture of accountability and results that Santa Feans can be proud of. Born and raised in Santa Fe, she is a graduate of Santa Fe Community College and the University of Phoenix and earned an MBA in Human Resources Management from the College of Santa Fe. She brings 17 years of HR experience at the municipal and county levels and five years in the private sector. I am very grateful for all the opportunities and experiences I have had working in local government so far. Its exciting to join this team that has such great vision of what is possible for my hometown. I believe Santa Fe has amazing potential and Im ready to bring my knowledge and expertise to support the culture of professionalism, success, and accountability to have a positive impact on the people we serve.' Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal Before an alleged robber was shot and killed by a police officer Saturday, the man fired a gun at police while driving a stolen van during a vehicle chase, a special agent with the FBI said in federal court Tuesday. The agent made no mention of a gun being found on or near Richard Rivera, 47, after he was shot and killed by police in a grocery store parking lot at Yale and Coal SE. The agent said that a magazine was found outside the van and that authorities believed they would find a pistol and another magazine when Albuquerque police on Tuesday executed a search warrant on the vehicle Rivera was driving moments before he was shot and killed. Special Agent Jordan Spaeths account of the shooting was a more detailed description of Albuquerque polices second fatal shooting of 2018. The testimony was made during a preliminary hearing for Jennifer Rael, 39, who was arrested in the van Rivera was driving when he reportedly shot at officers. Albuquerque Police Department spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said police plan to hold a news conference and release video of the shooting at a later date. Police have not released the name of the officer or officers involved in the shooting. Rivera and Rael had been on an eight-day crime spree in which the pair were allegedly involved in robberies at two banks, a gas station and a cellphone store, according to court testimony. The FBI is involved in the case because they investigated bank robberies believed to have been committed by the two. After a robbery at a Verizon store in Northeast Albuquerque, the pair were chased by Albuquerque police Saturday afternoon. Spaeth said in court Tuesday that at some point during the chase Rivera, the driver, shot at Albuquerque police officers. Maureen Trujillo was watering plants at a home on Stanford SE when she saw the van and officers in a chase. I see this white van careening down Stanford. It jumped the curb, kind of went airborne a little, and landed in the yard two doors down, she said. Then four shots rang out. She said she heard the gunshots, and the van took off again. Not long after that, officers deliberately crashed into the van near the Smiths grocery store, Spaeth said in court. Rivera then got out of the van and started running from officers. He reportedly reached for his waistband, at which time police officers shot and killed him, the agent said in court. A citizens video posted online appears to show Rivera sprinting toward the entrance to the grocery store when police shot at him about six times. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Rael was taken into custody in the van Rivera was driving. She had rented it on June 8 from U-Haul and never returned it. Rael has been charged with aiding and abetting armed bank robbery and using a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence. U.S. Magistrate Judge Kirtan Khalsa on Tuesday found there was probable cause that Rael committed the crimes and ordered that she remain in custody until her trial. Mallory Gagen, Raels attorney, asked that she instead await trial at a halfway house. She said Rael has little criminal history just a misdemeanor domestic violence arrest and no convictions. She also pointed out that Rael has a daughter and mother who live in Albuquerque and that when trying to regain custody of her daughter from the state Children, Youth and Families Department, Rael was successful at complying with the agencys terms. She is capable of doing what she is told when monitored by authorities, Gagen said. Rael and Rivera had known each other for about six weeks when they launched into their crime spree, police say. Rael told FBI agents Rivera moved in with her in mid-May and she started using meth twice daily. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Burkhead argued that although Raels criminal history was minimal, authorities believe she rented the getaway vehicle, purchased the gun that Rivera used to commit the robberies and, in at least one of the robberies, cased the bank to make sure there wasnt an armed guard on duty before Rivera robbed it. Some business leaders are condemning the Trump administrations decision to separate children from parents who are accused of crossing the border illegally, but its unclear what impact if any they will have. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was donating money to groups that help immigrant families get legal advice and translation services at the border. He asked others to do the same. Around 2,300 minors have been separated from their parents at the border between May 5 and June 9, according to the Department of Homeland Security. We need to stop this policy right now, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. Google CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted that the stories and images about family separation were gut-wrenching. In an interview with The Irish Times, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the policy is inhumane. It needs to stop. And in a joint statement, the three founders of Airbnb said separating kids from their families is heartless, cruel, immoral and counter to the American values of belonging. Conservative-leaning business lobbying groups also weighed in. The Business Roundtable, which represents the CEOs of Walmart, General Motors, Boeing, JPMorgan Chase, Mastercard and others, urged immediate end to the policy. So did the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 3 million small and large businesses. Surely a nation as big, generous and compassionate as the United States can find a way to prevent separating children from their parents at the border. If we cant agree on that, then we cant agree on anything, U.S. Chamber President and CEO Thomas Donohue said in a statement. The flurry of corporate statements might soothe CEO consciences and rally their employees and customers, but theyre unlikely to lead to policy changes, said Erik Gordon, an assistant professor at the University of Michigans Ross School of Business. When business leaders weigh in on issues in which they have expertise like trade, taxes or regulations it does influence policy, he said. But on issues that involve them less directly, like immigration or gun control, they tend to have less impact. They have a bigger voice, but Im not sure they have a bigger influence, Gordon said. In some cases, the rallying appeared to make a difference. Former Facebook employees started a fundraising page over the weekend that began with a goal of $1,500 the minimum bond to get a parent out of detention to send to a nonprofit group in Texas. By Tuesday afternoon, the page had raised more than $5.9 million on its way to a new goal of $8 million. Some companies spoke up because they feared being connected to the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy. Microsoft, which has a cloud computing contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, insisted on Tuesday that its not working with the government on any projects related to separating children from their parents. But some of its own employees protested the deal. The New York Times reported Tuesday that more than 100 Microsoft employees have sent a letter to CEO Satya Nadella on an internal message board urging him to take an ethical stand and stop working with ICE. Microsoft said in a statement it was dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border, but didnt immediately respond to a request for comment on the employee letter. General Dynamics Information Technology, a government contractor, said it has no role in the family separation policy or in the construction or operation of detention facilities. Its work supports unaccompanied minors, helping them receive medical care and reuniting them with families, the company said. ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. Federal authorities say the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued a diner in Farmington, New Mexico for subjecting a Muslim woman to religious discrimination by refusing to let her wear a head scarf. Elizabeth Cadle, director of the agencys five-state district office in Phoenix, said Tuesday the commission sued the Blue Moon Diner for refusing employee Samantha Bandys request to work while wearing a hijab, a head scarf some Muslim women wear. The commission also alleges Bandy was fired because of her religion. A man who answered the telephone at the diner said he had no knowledge of the lawsuit and hung up. The lawsuit asks that Bandy be given back wages and compensatory and punitive damages, and that the diner be permanently banned from engaging in religious discrimination. After a review, Monsanto has awarded the advertising mandate for its hybrid corn seed brand Dekalb to Bang in the Middle. The agency is tasked with creating a multimedia campaign to increase the brand awareness of Dekalb. Monsanto is a leading global provider of technology-based solutions and agricultural products that improve farm productivity and food quality. It remains focused on enabling both small-holder and large-scale farmers to produce more from their land while conserving more of our world's natural resources. Commenting on the win, Govind Agarwal, Branch Head, Bang in the Middle, said, It is very satisfying to win the communication mandate of Monsanto, coming from a young office and even younger team. We are very excited to partner Monsanto. Its our fresh insightful approach that made the communication solution liked by the client. Bhushan Pandit, ECD, Bang in the Middle, added here, Working for a brand that works with farmers is not the easiest thing to do. We spent many hours chatting with them, and I am very excited to become a part time farmer with the consumers of Dekalb. We hope to break the campaign soon. Bang in the Middle handles the duties for INOX Leisure, TimesPro, Times Second Wind, Mumbai Duty Free, Mahindra First Choice, Amira Basmati, Home Credit, VNL, Dulux, The Chefs Bowl, Waffle Wallah, and Living Media, among other brands. Post a multi-agency pitch, J Walter Thompson Kolkata has been entrusted by UNICEF West Bengal to develop a 360-degree campaign on behavioural change that will promote toilet-use as a natural and daily habit among the target audiences. The campaign is part of Mission Nirmal Bangla, a Government of West Bengal initiative that is aligned to the objectives of the national flagship programme: Swachh Bharat Mission that aims for an Open Defecation Free India by October 2, 2019, coinciding with Mahatma Gandhis birthday. The year-long scope of work assigned to JWT Kolkata includes research, pre-test, multi-stakeholder consultations, strategy development, creative package development, capacity building plan and monitoring tools and a 6-month pilot project for implementing the campaign in one selected district of West Bengal. Vijay Jacob, Senior, VP& Managing Partner, JWT Kolkata, said, We have been partnering with UNICEF for creating socially relevant campaigns for many a worthy cause. We welcome the opportunity yet again and look forward to doing some great impactful work together. Pragyan Bharati, WASH Specialist, UNICEF Kolkata, added here, After reviewing pitches by several agencies, we were happy to zero in on JWT for their strategic understanding and creative expression. The overall objective of Mission Nirmal Bangla is to generate positive changes in health and hygiene practices and behaviour of rural West Bengal. Specifically, the agenda is to make all the villages in the state Open Defecation Free (ODF). So far, 11 of the 23 districts in West Bengal have been declared ODF. As more and more districts are catching up, the aim is to sustain the ODF status and integrate second generation sanitation components like Solid Liquid Resource Management, and Menstrual Hygiene Management, among others. 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. RAMALLAH, West Bank The Israeli and Palestinian governments both want to infuse East Jerusalem schools with money in what many see as a tug of war for curriculum control. Palestinian Education Ministry spokesman Sadiq al-Khadour told Al-Monitor that in late May, the cabinet in Ramallah approved $30 million to support and improve the level of education in East Jerusalem. The National Plan for the Support of Education is designed to counter Israel's efforts to impose its curriculum and undermine the use of the Arab language in Palestinian schools, Khadour said. Israel recently announced it will allocate 2 billion shekels (roughly $560,000), most of it for introducing the Israeli curriculum in East Jerusalem educational institutions. The plan Khadour outlined includes bringing Palestinian kindergartens up to par with Israeli ones, reducing school fees, supporting the staff of schools that are affiliated with the Jerusalem Directorate by offering them bonuses, maintaining and adding classrooms to private schools and teaching the Palestinian curriculum. There will also be efforts to purchase new buildings for schools as well as tablet computers for 5,500 students. Students in schools in the Old City section of Jerusalem who are currently in their final year and who graduate will receive full scholarships to Palestinian universities, and graduating students outside the Old City are being offered scholarships to fund 50% of their higher education. Despite these positive steps, many Jerusalemites believe the plan won't be enough to resolve the problems of education in East Jerusalem. The system there is complex, and schools are affiliated with or directed by various parties. Some schools are directed by the Jerusalem municipality, and others by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The city also has private schools, some of them nonprofit. Students often can't afford all their expenses at private for-profit schools, and Israel offers financial aid which, again, some critics say is just a way to control the curriculum. Some semi-private schools are licensed by the Jerusalem municipality and fund 60% of students' expenses. The public schools are affiliated with the Palestinian Authority and operate under the umbrella of the Islamic Endowments Directorate. According to a report by the Gaza-based Center for Earth and Human Research and Studies, East Jerusalem had a total of 216 schools during the 2015-16 school year. At that time, 42.8% of students (38,220) were enrolled in public schools licensed by the Jerusalem municipality and the Israeli Ministry of Education, 31.4% (28,076) attended the 79 private schools in the city, 13.8% (12,420) attended the 46 schools run by the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs of Palestine and 2% (1,541) were enrolled in East Jerusalem's seven UNRWA-run schools. The remaining 10% of students attend Sakhnin schools, which are private schools that are licensed by the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem and receive financial support from Israeli authorities. Ziad Shamali, chairman of the East Jerusalem parents' committee, told Al-Monitor the Palestinian expenditures might be too little, too late. He said, We have been calling for such improvements for years before things hit rock bottom. The situation is extremely bad, and more than 75% of schools are now affiliated with the Israeli Ministry of Education either directly or indirectly. By "indirectly," Shamali meant public and private schools that receive financial assistance from the Jerusalem municipality, which is affiliated with the Israeli government so those schools must follow Israeli Ministry of Education directives to receive funding. Reforming the education system requires a permanent strategy by the government that's not the initiative of only one certain minister or ministry. Had the Palestinian government been spending half of what Israel spends on a regular basis on education, we would have been able to protect our schools from Israeli infiltration, he said. Yahya Hijazi, a researcher and educational adviser at Al-Quds University, concurred with Shamali and stressed the need for the government to spend consistently to introduce permanent reforms to the education system. Hijazi told Al-Monitor the new plan comes as a reaction to the controversial US decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and is not part of a comprehensive reform strategy. He said there is a confidence issue between Jerusalemites and the Palestinian government over the latters past neglect of the city and the sporadic spending that does not cover the schools basic needs. Schools need steady and consistent spending to cover the regular operating expenses. The government ought to set clear and defined budgets for schools. The PAs intermittent aid prompts [East Jerusalem] schools to accept the steady contributions from Israel, he added. Hijazi believes the PAs long overdue offers of support are insufficient. He described field meetings with owners of private schools to offer them PA aid as "gloomy." Most of these schools refused my offer, arguing that Palestinian support is not stable. In East Jerusalem, only two private schools refuse Israeli aid, he noted. Hatem Abdel-Qader, a member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council and a former minister for Jerusalem affairs, believes the problem isn't in making plans and that the education minister is always seeking to improve education in East Jerusalem. He told Al-Monitor that the problem lies in getting the Ministry of Finance to authorize budget disbursement orders, as well as a lack of political will to take action in the eastern part of the city. This plan if implemented in full would be the minimum level of Palestinian action [required] to face Israeli plans that target the entire education process, Abdel-Qader said. Meanwhile, funds for all these plans remain pending because the PA depends on donor funding that is disbursed irregularly and education in East Jerusalem remains unstable. It's going to cost more for foreigners including refugees to live in Egypt if pending legislation wins approval. Human rights groups are concerned by proposed amendments that would allow the government to drastically increase fees on foreigners, their dependents and those accompanying them, such as nannies and tutors. On June 11, the Egyptian parliament agreed to refer proposed amendments to the law on foreigner residency and entry to two committees in an effort to increase the states revenues and push forward the national economy. The plans will be considered by the Defense and National Security Committee as well as the Planning and Budget Committee, with a target of implementing them as of July. The amendments stipulate that foreigners living in Egypt and working for ministries, government institutions or the private sector shall pay 200 Egyptian pounds ($11) per month instead of the current fee of 500 pounds ($28) per year for each of their children, wives, husbands, parents and others as of July 1. Each year, the monthly fees would rise by 100 Egyptian pounds ($5.60) until they reach their maximum of 5,000 pounds ($280) per month, per person, by 2021. Fees would be imposed even on refugees who do not work. Such amendments would greatly harm refugees in Egypt, many of whom are suffering to afford their living, said a Syrian refugee who has lived with his wife and three children in Egypt since 2011. The man, who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, added that there are many Syrians in Egypt struggling to make ends meet. They pay house rents and their daily expenses including food and transportation by themselves or with minimal support [from nongovernmental organizations, charities and international groups]." The refugee also said that a lot of Syrians have made investments in the country and started businesses that have helped the economy. Does the Egyptian government want to scare away those Syrian investors, instead of welcoming them and encouraging them to continue living in Egypt and [making] more investments? This makes no sense, he said. The amendments were presented by the head of the parliaments Defense and National Security Committee, Maj. Gen. Kamal Amer. On May 8, Amer told Youm7 that the amendments are very important for our country, as the budgets input stands at 988 billion Egyptian pounds [$55 billion], while the states expenditures stand at 1.2 trillion Egyptian pounds [$67 billion]. Amer said that the proposal changes come as part of the states efforts to reduce financial burdens from public services, including health care, education and infrastructure, among others, in light of the recent increase in the number of foreigners and their families in Egypt. The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics said in a 2017 statement that the number of foreigners working for Egypts private and investment sectors stood at 14,045 in 2016, up 1.1% compared with 13,896 a year earlier. Amer added that in addition to lowering the state's general budget deficit, the proposal could help support development projects in Egypt. He noted Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have taken similar measures. Last year, those countries obliged foreign expatriates to pay fees for their dependents and attendants to increase state revenues. However, Egypt's proposal is drawing a lot of criticism from human rights organizations. In a June 3 statement, the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) called on the parliament to consider the conditions of refugees and asylum-seekers when it discusses the amendments. The ECRF said such amendments turn a blind eye to those groups, endangering their stability. According to the commission, there are more than 250,000 refugees and asylum-seekers in Egypt, most of whom are Syrian refugees. The ECRF cited a 2014-15 report by the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, saying 94% of Syrian refugees in Egypt live under the poverty line, which stands at 592.40 Egyptian pounds ($33) per month. It noted that 48% of Syrian families in Egypt have to borrow money just to meet basic needs such as food, housing and health care. If the law was applied with the proposed amendments, the refugees in Egypt would be put in a very dangerous situation. That's because it is impossible for a refugee family consisting of a father, a mother and two children to pay 800 Egyptian pounds [$45] per month just for residing in Egypt, the ECRF statement read. Some economists lauded the new amendments, which they said would generate revenues and boost the economy. Ahmed el-Shami, a professor of economics and feasibility studies at Cairo University, told Al-Monitor that he is "totally for" the amendments. Foreigners, he said, benefit from the public services offered by the government, so they should have to pay for these services. He said such fees are imposed on expats in several countries around the world. According to Shami, the amount isn't much and wouldn't constitute a huge financial burden on foreigners living in the country. In Saudi Arabia, for example, expats pay such fees multiplied by five, he added. However, economist Ahmed Koura, a veteran banker and former head of Al Watany Bank of Egypt, suggested that parliament exclude refugees and asylum-seekers from paying the fees. I believe that the government has the right to impose such fees on foreigners to increase its revenues and financial sources, but this should not come at the expense of refugees and asylum-seekers, he told Al-Monitor. Editor's note: This article has been updated since its initial publication. Yahya Staquf, an Indonesian cleric and secretary-general of the Jakarta-based Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the worlds largest Muslim organization, believes that rahma, meaning compassion or mercy in Arabic, can provide the basis for a political solution to the conflict between Israel and the Muslim world. Leading a small group of Indonesian Islamic scholars, Staquf was in Israel from June 10-13, invited to speak at the American Jewish Committee's annual Global Conference, which was held in Jerusalem. During his stay, Staquf met briefly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; spoke at several forums, including at the Israel Council on Foreign Affairs and the Hebrew University; visited with a delegation of Women Wage Peace, an Arab-Jewish peace group; and was guest of honor at a song fest at the Tower of David in Jerusalems Old City, where he delivered a convocation of peace together with a priest and a rabbi. Indonesia and Israel do not maintain diplomatic relations, but according to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, some 30,000 Indonesians, mostly Christian pilgrims, obtain visas to visit Israel each year. In addition, several dozen Israelis visit Indonesia, mostly for business purposes. Staquf repeatedly emphasized that his was a private visit. Yet, given his position as an adviser to Indonesian President Joko Widodo and Staquf's leadership of the Nahdlatul Ulama a Sunni group founded in 1926 and with more than 50 million registered members his visit stood to have political implications, especially as Indonesia continues its efforts to assert itself in world politics, including in attempts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Diminutive, with a gentle appearance, Staquf wore a religious cap and most often dressed in Western attire, only occasionally wearing an Indonesian-style shirt. He speaks softly yet decisively. Using a metaphor, he explained his concept of rahma to Al-Monitor. If a person is sick with diabetes or heart disease, he will not gain any advantage from medication unless he changes his lifestyle, Staquf said. The lifestyle of this conflict must change, too. We have tried everything negotiations, talks, maps, and constant conflict. If operationalized as a political tool, rahma could be a new start. Staquf visited with Netanyahu, although their meeting was not listed on the prime minister's official schedule. A knowledgeable source told Al-Monitor that the meeting had been hastily arranged. The Prime Ministers Office said in a press release that Netanyahu had told Staquf, Muslim states are becoming closer to Israel because of the common struggle against the Iranian regime and because of Israeli technology. The prime minister hopes that there will be progress in our relationship with Indonesia, too. In an interview with Al-Monitor, Staquf said, I am a religious man, but I am not naive. Political leaders must find solutions, but only if they bring rahma to their negotiations will they ever find those solutions. He emphasized that he was not in Israel as a government representative, but that Widodo was aware of his visit. My country wants to promote relations between Israel and Indonesia, Staquf said, because the conflict is part of complex world problems that must be dealt with comprehensively in a global manner. But for there to be full normalization between Israel and Indonesia, the worlds largest Muslim country, Israel must also address the global context of the problem and recognize that it must make peace with its Muslim neighbors. During the interview, as in his speeches, Staquf also expressed his strong support for the Palestinian cause. It must be obvious that I stand by Palestine and the Palestinian people. What else could be expected from an Indonesia Muslim like me? I stand here on the basis that we all have to honor Palestines sovereignty as a free country. Staquf's visit to Israel, however, was denounced in Indonesia, especially on social media. Before his trip, the Indonesian government had canceled all Israeli visas to protest the recent killings of Palestinians by the Israeli military on the Gaza border. The Palestinian ambassador to Indonesia personally asked that I not come, Staquf said. They do not understand that my message of rahma is for the good of the Palestinians. Giora Eliraz of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and the Truman Research Institute at the Hebrew University said Staqufs visit must be viewed in terms of Indonesia's domestic and international contexts. Within the Muslim community, there is a struggle between moderates and conservatives over the nature of Indonesian Islam and its manifestations in political and social structures, institutions, and culture. Opposing factions have two very different views for the future of Indonesia: one side, which Staquf represents, wants to continue the democratic Indonesia of today, where no religion has primacy over another, while the other wants a state that reflects the majority Muslim demographic by being governed under Islamic law. That [latter] side tends to support the Palestinian cause very strongly. The Palestinian Authority also denounced Staqufs visit. Fatah spokesman Osama al-Qawasmi said in a June 11 press statement, The participation of an Indonesian delegation of religious scholars in a conference of the American Jewish Committee in occupied Jerusalem is a crime against Jerusalem, against the Palestinians and Muslims in the world, and constitutes support for the criminal Israeli occupier against our fighting and resolute people. Qawasmi demanded that senior Indonesian officials and the Indonesian people settle the account with those who have sold their souls to the devil and agreed to serve as pawns in the hands of the Zionists and Israelis. Staquf met in Jerusalem with Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, founder of the Wasatia movement, which is similar to the Nahdlatul Ulama in outlook. Dajani, who in 2014 lost his position at Al-Quds University after taking a group of Palestinian students to Auschwitz, responded sharply to the official Palestinian position. Why do we not embrace this visit and consider it a step toward peace, reconciliation, rapprochement and dialogue between religions at a time we are in urgent need of a glimmer of hope? Dajani said to Al-Monitor. Because of our condemnation of the visit, the Indonesian religious scholars have heard only the Israeli view. ... We did not listen to their ideas and their call for mercy, love and peace. On a more personal level, Staquf spoke almost ecstatically about his visit to the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, and unusually, had difficulty articulating the depth of his experience. Ahh, as a Muslim, to pray at this holy site, just to be there. The feeling went into my soul. I do not have words, Shaquf said. He acknowledged that efforts to bring religion into the political arena could sometimes be problematic. Too often, religion is used as a justification for conflict. In Islam, like in so many other religions, it is possible to interpret certain texts and hadiths [acts or statements of the Prophet Muhammad] in a problematic way, he said. The Quran and hadiths were written in the context of reality at the time. They are historical documents that contain the canons of morality to guide us in spirit. As the reality changes, the manifestations of that spirit must change, too. Eliraz said of Shaqufs teachings, which weave traditional Indonesian tolerance into Islam, are very controversial, especially since Indonesia is located on the geographic periphery, far from the centers in the Middle East considered to be most central to the development of Islam. He is a very brave man, navigating very stormy waters, always having to carefully balance between opposing forces, condemning terrorism while asserting his loyalty to the Palestinian cause. But until there is a resolution to the conflict, and a Palestinian state is established, Indonesia and this form of Islam cannot take a leading role. Staquf concluded, Hopefully, my teaching of rahma will help to move something toward the positive. After Iranian President Hassan Rouhani introduced his second-term Cabinet in August 2017, many in the Reform camp criticized his choices. As the country moves toward an internal political and economic crisis, it appears Rouhani is adding his voice to those of the critics. In an April 29 speech, Rouhani slammed the seeming passiveness of some of the ministers and managers in the government. The president said that his ministers could be divided into pessimists and optimists, questioning the former's use of complaints over such matters as low budgets and insufficient rainfall to defend lackluster outcomes and hailing the latter's positive remarks and suggestions for constructive solutions. This was not the first time in the current Iranian year, which began March 21, that the president has criticized his own government. On April 21, Rouhani said, Some of our government managers have taken a vow of silence. I don't know what they are afraid of. Anyone holding a government post, at whatever level, should know that based on the constitution and their religious obligations, they have abilities and must perform their duties. If they are intimidated by others, then they should just step aside. Rouhani also warned his Cabinet members, stating, If a minister, manager or governor thinks he cannot abide by the duties required of him by law, or believes his powers are limited, he is not obliged to maintain his post for the full four-year term. He can step aside now. If someone is intimidated by one phone conversation and thus fails to fulfill his duties, it is forbidden for him to remain in that post. He must step aside now. First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri has also on several occasions voiced his disapproval of the pessimistic attitude among some Cabinet members. On April 21, Jahangiri called on government managers to practice self-sacrifice. About a week earlier, on April 12, he charged that some managers immediately flee the political battlefield with the slightest pressure from hard-liners. Such criticisms have sparked varying reactions. Conservative media outlets have called on Rouhani to address the ministers in private instead of publicly expressing his concerns. On April 30, Alef, a conservative news outlet run by former parliamentarian Ahmad Tavakoli, published a piece headlined Mr. Rouhani, Solve the Differences With Your Ministers Inside the Cabinet. In it, Tavakoli wrote, Mr. Rouhani and Mr. Jahangiri have recently criticized their own ministers in public forums. Could they not have voiced their objections to their own ministers [in private]? If the ministers have produced weak performances up until now, which we surely believe they have, then the responsibility lies with the head of the Cabinet. Making comments that sow discord will not relieve them [Rouhani and Jahangiri] of this responsibility. The Reformists were never too keen on Rouhanis Cabinet either. Morteza Moballegh, a pro-Reform political activist who served as deputy interior minister under former President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), was reported as saying on June 5, Rouhanis campaign promises cannot be fulfilled with a silent and passive Cabinet. From the start, the Reformists alerted Mr. Rouhani [about the need] to choose brave and capable Cabinet members so that in times of hardship and pressure, they will not cave in and will perform their duties well. Fortunately, today, Mr. Rouhani has realized this and is trying to make a change without creating tension. He knows that society needs tranquility, which is why he has tried to solve these issues calmly. There are, however, some who believe Rouhani has no serious intention of rectifying the situation and is only trying to win over public opinion by voicing dissent about his own Cabinets performance in the media. Reformist journalist Mahdi Ghadimi told Al-Monitor, Rouhani is more interested in portraying himself as someone who wants to make a change than actually wanting to do it. If this [change] were his intention, he would not have nominated such a Cabinet. The Reformists were critical of his Cabinet choices in both [his] administrations. But both times, Rouhani decided on the main body of his Cabinet via interactions with different political groups. Therefore, it is natural to have difficulty believing what he says today, especially since he is not willing to shuffle Cabinet members again and is only content with criticizing them in media outlets. The reality is that while Rouhanis foreign policy, carried out under the management of Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, has been admirable even mindful of the dire straits of the nuclear deal his domestic and economic policies have been the subject of much criticism. This has been voiced not only by the governments conservative and hard-line rivals, but also by the Reformists. Among the issues regularly cited by the Reformists are the continued house arrests of opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Zahra Rahnavard; the lack of political freedom; and ongoing troubling economic issues that threaten to destabilize both the economy and society, such as unemployment, high prices and the rials devaluation. Meanwhile, instead of taking practical measures to overcome these hurdles, Rouhani and his first vice president give the appearance of primarily being focused on issuing statements designed to win over public opinion rather than implementing actual changes. Rouhani has roughly three years left as president. In early 2020, Iran will hold parliamentary elections, which will prepare the ground for presidential elections the following year. If Rouhani's administration fails to alter its current trajectory, it could have serious consequences for the future direction of Iranian politics. First and foremost, a continuation of the status quo could lead to serious disenchantment with the Reformists. The immediate impact of this will likely be lower voter turnout, which in the past has propelled hard-liners to victory in parliamentary and presidential balloting. The situation will only worsen if Rouhani fails to keep the nuclear deal alive, thereby being confronted once again with challenges stemming from harsh sanctions. As such, if Rouhani's aim is to maintain the path of moderation pursued by the executive and legislative branches, he must translate his words into action, sooner rather than later. GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip The Israeli army announced in a statement June 10 that it had destroyed an underwater tunnel that Hamas had built to allow its members to enter through one of its military positions in northern Gaza and to exit to the sea without being noticed. This tunnel, which according to the army allows Hamas to launch operations from the sea, was destroyed during the latest escalation between both parties. In the early hours of June 18, the Palestinians launched three rockets toward Israel from the Gaza Strip after Israeli airplanes shelled nine Hamas targets in response to incendiary kites and balloons that were sent into Israel during the Great Return March protests. These rockets were the first in two weeks after an unofficial truce was reached between Hamas and Israel. This is the first underwater tunnel the Israeli army has targeted, but it is expected that the army may discover other underwater tunnels in its efforts to take action against the land tunnels. The latest operation took place in April, when the army said it destroyed the longest land tunnel it had discovered thus far, which was connected to a large network of Hamas tunnels. Israeli Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot announced Jan. 18 a comprehensive plan to destroy all tunnels of the Palestinian resistance that reach beyond the Israeli borders by the end of 2018. Meanwhile, the Israeli army confirmed that the underwater tunnel, which allowed frogmen to dive in the sea and reach Israeli land without being discovered, was destroyed June 3 in an air raid, and that it is the first the Israeli intelligence discovered in northern Gaza. The army reported that the tunnel, which was 2-3 meters (6.5-10 feet) deep and 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the Israeli border, extended from a Hamas-affiliated military facility to the Mediterranean Sea. At the end of May, the Israeli Ministry of Defense began building an underwater checkpoint on the Gaza borders to deter Hamas members from infiltrating by sea. Five Hamas frogmen had tried to reach Zikim military base during the 2014 war. Back then, Israel announced it succeeded in killing them as soon as they got out of the water, while Hamas military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, claimed they got through and armed clashes ensued. The military information office of al-Qassam Brigades did not reply to a request for comment on the Israeli air raid of the underwater tunnel. Ibrahim al-Madhun, a political analyst close to Hamas, told Al-Monitor that the Israeli army is trying to show its citizens that it possesses a lot of information about Hamas and can control it and target any military progress the movement achieves. He said that the declaration is merely for propaganda and military muscle-flexing. He noted, Although Israel knew about the tunnels existence [for months] according to the army statement, it never targeted it until the recent escalation. This means that Israel is committed to the rules of engagement and does not want a war at this stage. Madhun added that al-Qassam Brigades are aware that Israels announcement about destroying the tunnel is an attempt to provoke a reaction from Hamas. For that reason, the movement would rather keep mum instead of engaging with the Israeli narrative and being dragged into a media mess. He said al-Qassam Brigades' naval power remains undocumented in the media, and it is difficult to know their capabilities and what equipment they have available, because Hamas is trying to keep this information from becoming public for security reasons. Madhun noted that the underwater tunnel clearly points to the ability of Hamas to develop its land, air and naval strategy and equipment, and that it can make weapons and have a research and military equipment development unit. Maamoun Abu Amer, a Palestinian journalist focusing on Israeli affairs, told Al-Monitor that the aim behind Israels announcement about the underwater tunnel stems from the nature of the latest confrontation with Hamas in Gaza. In his view, the Israeli government and officials felt that the army did not make tangible achievements in the Gaza Strip recently, and this announcement resembled a victory. He said, I think the tunnel might be a way to dive into the sea and to train al-Qassam Brigades' naval forces, or it might be a safe and hidden pathway from the land to the sea. It was not built for naval confrontation with Israel. According to Abu Amer, the Israeli army seems to be trying to show that it is fulfilling its security mission and its ability to strike the Palestinian resistance, adding that both sides tried to avoid casualties in the recent escalation to keep things under control. Mohammad Khalil Mosleh, a writer with the Democratic Arabic Center for Strategic, Political and Economic Studies, told Al-Monitor that the announcement about destroying the tunnel constitutes a media war. Israel wanted to show the world that it is fighting the terrorism hubs in the Gaza Strip, especially since it lost its credibility when it claimed it targeted terrorism during the recent protests along the Israeli-Gaza border. Israel killed over 123 citizens and wounded more than 14,000 during these protests. Besides, Israel wants to prove that Hamas is squandering aid money by building useless tunnels that Israeli intelligence discovers and destroys. Mosleh added that the increasing discovery of tunnels lately shows a huge security instability that Hamas must be aware of. He said that, by diversifying its methods, Hamas would beef up its self-protection and fend off any confrontation with Israel. He ruled out the possibility of underwater tunnels being Hamas' strategic option in the coming phase. On June 11, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman presented a new proposal, which was outlined by a committee he established a few months ago for drafting ultra-Orthodox youth. The committee was established after the High Court ruled that the law exempting ultra-Orthodox from enlisting was unconstitutional. Now, one week after he presented his new conscription guidelines, Liberman is confident that the ultra-Orthodox will finally come to their senses and support him unanimously, so that the emerging coalition crisis finally comes to an end. His outline will be brought before the Knesset for approval in the coming weeks. According to Liberman, it offers the only practical guidelines that both the secular and ultra-Orthodox communities can rally around, before Israeli society misses the bus. The ultra-Orthodox would have to be crazy to bring down this law. If it doesnt happen now, the Supreme Court will conscript them by force, Liberman told Al-Monitor. Liberman is referring to efforts by ultra-Orthodox Deputy Minister of Education Meir Porush (Yahadut HaTorah) to stir up a coalition crisis, if the economic sanctions imposed against yeshivas that fail to meet conscription targets are not removed from the guidelines. As of now, this demand by Porush has not been taken up by the other ultra-Orthodox politicians. It is seen more as internal politicking, so it is getting limited attention in the larger political arena too. Liberman is dismissive of the approach led by left-wing Meretz Knesset member Mossi Raz and others that the time has come to get rid of compulsory military service entirely. The State of Israel could not exist with just a professional [volunteer] army. It is a big mistake to think that it is even possible, Liberman told Al-Monitor. Our military is built on the model of a peoples army. The two objectives set for it by our first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, when the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] was first found, are as relevant now as they were then. These are to defend our borders and serve as a melting pot. These two principles also underlie the new Conscription Law. Barring any surprises, there is a good chance that the new law will be approved before the Knesset leaves for its summer recess on July 22. That is because even if the new law shows enormous flexibility some even call it surrender in dealing with the ultra-Orthodox, the fight against it in the political arena, led mainly by the opposition, is being kept on a low flame. Even centrist (opposition) Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid is signaling that he will support the law, even though ultra-Orthodox avoidance of military service has been one of his banner issues for years. It is hard to believe that the ongoing, evolving crisis over ultra-Orthodox conscription isnt evoking the same passionate response as it once did. At one time, it led to a coalitions collapse when Kadima under Shaul Mofaz quit the government in July 2012 and it built up Lapid as a powerful secular brand in the 2013 election. In the late 1990s, the Supreme Court ruled that the defense minister does not have the authority to grant yeshiva students a comprehensive exemption from military service. As a result, the Tal Law, passed in 2002, was the first attempt to regulate exemptions from compulsory military service and encourage the ultra-Orthodox to enlist. The problem was that a decade later, in 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that this historic law failed to achieve its objectives and rescinded it. Since then, each successive government has failed to come up with a solution that meets the Supreme Courts standards, advances the idea of equitable service and the needs of the IDF as a peoples army, and win the support and cooperation of the ultra-Orthodox. The governments failed in their attempts to employ a positive approach and obtain cooperation from the ultra-Orthodox, and they failed again with a more punitive approach, which included sanctions against the ultra-Orthodox. One prominent example of this failure to reach a compromise was the decision by Kadima, led by Mofaz, to join the Netanyahu government in May 2012 to resolve the problem of equal service. The partnership collapsed just two months later because the ultra-Orthodox boycotted the process and Netanyahu folded. The guidelines suggested at the time, which included personal economic and criminal sanctions against those people avoiding military service, were seen by the ultra-Orthodox as an attempt to humiliate and even persecute them. Another window of opportunity opened up in 2013, when Lapid won 19 seats in the election after running largely under the banner of sharing the burden (namely that all Israelis, including ultra-Orthodox, should enlist). He was then able to force Netanyahu to put together a government without the ultra-Orthodox. This, in turn, led to the passing of the 2014 Conscription Law, which included personal sanctions against people avoiding the draft. While Lapid emerged as the big winner then, his law was revoked in 2015 after the ultra-Orthodox parties made rescinding this law a major condition for them to join the new coalition. The fourth Netanyahu government went on to put together a new law that the ultra-Orthodox could accept, but the Supreme Court intervened again. It overturned that law in September 2017 on the grounds that it failed to correspond with basic principles such as equality and a peoples army. The court then instructed the government to pass a new law within a year. At this point, the hot potato got passed to Liberman. That is what led to the birth of this weeks new law. The ultra-Orthodox would be able to live with it, the Supreme Court would not overturn it and, no less important than that, the highly regarded Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot would embrace it. The new guidelines do not include criminal or personal economic sanctions against people who avoid conscription. Instead, it just imposes sanctions against yeshivas that fail to meet their conscription targets. These targets are less ambitious too, while the standard of Who is ultra-Orthodox? was expanded to encompass former yeshiva students who no longer devote their lives to study. Set in terms of the turbulent years of the struggle to share the burden equitably, this constitutes a surrender to the ultra-Orthodox. If, however, everything that happened in the past two decades is taken into account, it looks like there is no alternative to some mutual compromise. It is unclear to me why the Knesset is responding to these guidelines with silent acquiescence, but I plan to lead the opposition to them, said Zionist Camp Knesset member Itzik Shmuli, speaking to Al-Monitor. For the past few days, Shmuli has been trying to spur his party into action, out of the belief that there is a large public within Israel that sees this struggle as representative of a larger struggle for a society of equals and the refusal to surrender to the ultra-Orthodox. And of course, this would pay off electorally as well. It seems as if his efforts are starting to take hold too, with party chairman Avi Gabbay already starting to speak out against the new guidelines. But there really is no drama. Shmuli will likely discover that in 2018, secular Israelis are either apathetic to or exhausted with the struggle to share the burden equitably. Given the professional and official support for the new guidelines by the chief of staff, there is a real chance that Libermans pragmatic approach is politically feasible. In other words, this time it could work. The latest outline for conscription of ultra-Orthodox Israelis, presented by Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, has reignited debate on the issue. Many voices in Israel have called over the past few years for equal sharing of the burden, meaning for ultra-Orthodox youth to serve like everybody else. But while politicians are divided over the existing law and compromise proposals, Knesset members from four disparate parties have joined forces to promote legislation ending military conscription altogether. Knesset member Menachem Moses of the ultra-Orthodox Yahadut HaTorah party and his coalition partner from the Likud, Yehuda Glick, have joined forces with secular leftists Mossi Raz and Issawi Frej from Meretz and Dov Khenin from Arab-Jewish Hadash to end the countrys compulsory military service. Explaining their proposed bill, the lawmakers argue that the idea is an anachronism ill-suited to contemporary Israeli society. Can the State of Israel, with its array of security challenges, afford to shrink its standing army? According to the bill's explanatory notes, over a third of those required by law to enlist already do not do so, compared with a quarter in 1990. Between 2013 and 2017, the number of soldiers discharged as unsuited to military service has grown 15%. At the same time, combat units are almost full to capacity, and supply exceeds demand in non-combat units. Five years ago, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said, This era of massive regular forces no longer exists. We have to take advantage of human resources and technological developments. [We need] a small regular force equipped, fast, flexible, armored, lethal and ready. Raz explained to Al-Monitor this week that according to his model, fewer people would enlist but they would serve longer periods, meaning the soldiers would be older even parents more professional and more level-headed. At the same time, straight-A high school students prevented from serving in combat units because of medical issues could make good use of their talents and contribute to the country in the civil sector. What about the principle of equally sharing the burden of military service espoused by many politicians in recent years? The data provided in the introduction to the bill indicate that those who suffer most from compulsory service are soldiers from disadvantaged families. Three of four soldiers incarcerated in military jails are serving time for going AWOL or deserting to work and help their families financially. Also according to the bill, some 13% of these inmates are Israelis of Ethiopian origin, the poorest demographic group in Israel, even though they make up only 3% of the conscripts and a far lower percentage of the overall population. According to data from 2009, the current conscription system is a heavy burden on the state coffers at an annual 9 billion shekels ($2.5 billion), or 1.2% of the GDP, due to hidden unemployment in the military and the removal of Israelis aged 18 to 21 from the labor force for two to three years. This money could be allocated to improving the school system and scientific research, important building blocks for the states long-term security. The 2017-2018 budget reads, Army recruits are a very dear resource given that they are a potential part of the work and education force, and the meaning of military service means deferring the realization of this potential. At the age of 18, while young people in the West are joining the labor force or acquiring an education, their Israeli counterparts go into an employment freeze. Few regular soldiers, barring technicians and computer programmers, acquire skills during their military service that are relevant to the civilian market. Raz is unfazed by assessments that if the draft is ended, the number of secular and leftist soldiers would shrink and the army would be comprised largely of recruits from religious, right-wing backgrounds. This is the case today already, he said. Half the graduates of officers training and 40% of the brigade commanders belong to the Zionist religious stream, and that rate keeps growing. I actually think that revoking compulsory service and making military service voluntary would open up the Israel Defense Forces to new population groups and balance them out. For example, many Arab-Israelis join the police because it is not compulsory. A comprehensive survey conducted in 2016 among hundreds of non-ultra-Orthodox youths between 15 and 18 suggests that doing away with compulsory recruitment would scarcely affect the rate of enlistment: Only 26% of those surveyed said they would not enlist if service were not mandatory, compared with the third who do not serve today. In February 2006, a revolution was announced: Male soldiers were to serve two instead of three years by 2010. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz announced at a joint news conference that combat soldiers and those with special skills would serve two years and four months and get a significant stipend. The promise did not materialize. In 2014, the militarys Center for Behavioral Science recommended preparing for changes in the recruitment model and ending compulsory enlistment. A wide-ranging study conducted by Yuval Benziman for the Center for Behavioral Science noted that over the past few decades, many countries had done away with the draft, and military service is only mandatory in six European states and several countries in Asia and Africa. Despite the strength of its supporters' arguments, the multi-party bill repealing conscription could end up in the Knesset archives. Even though the IDF is considered the strongest army in the region, and even though whole brigades are serving in the West Bank protecting the settlers outside the boundaries of Israel, Israels military still enjoys the status of David protecting his people against Goliath. The militarys education corps teaches 18-year-old men and women soldiers that guarding illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank is defense of the state. Lecturers sent by the armys rabbinate and Chabad proselytizers are invited to speak at army bases and tell recruits that they were fortunate to have taken part in a God-sanctioned mitzvah war. On the other hand, activists of the anti-occupation Breaking the Silence organization, IDF veterans who expose the injustice of the occupation they experienced during their military service, are banned from army facilities. Raz and Khenin should bear in mind that many youngsters who believe that the IDF must be not only strong but also moral would hesitate to volunteer, reluctant to spend three years managing the West Bank occupation or the Gaza siege. Raz and Glick are organizing an open debate on the proposal and the draft at the Knesset June 25. On the morning of June 14, with just a couple hundred armed men driving a dozen pickup trucks, Ibrahim Jadran, the commander of the so-called Petroleum Facilities Guard, took over two of Libyas main oil exporting terminals used by the Libyan National Oil Company (NOC) Es-Sidra and Ras Lanuf. The terminals are located in eastern Libya near Jadrans hometown, Ajdabiya, where his tribesmen of al-Magharba tribe are concentrated and seem to have helped him. The NOC was forced to declare a state of force majeure, suspending oil exports and evacuating its employees from both terminals and surrounding areas. In a statement sent to Al-Monitor, the NOC estimated losses at tens of billions of dollars before adding that the burning of at least two oil depots at the terminals will take years and even more costs to repair and return production to normal sustainable levels. The statement also warned of catastrophic environmental consequences on the region due to leaking and burning oil. NOC Chairman Mustafa Sanalla condemned the attack in a recorded video message broadcast on NOC's website June 14, calling Jadran an outlaw who cost Libya in 2013 more than $100 billion. Back then, Jadran and his men had taken over the terminals, suspending oil exports from 2013 to 2016, before he was forced to flee after the self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA), commanded by Khalifa Hifter, took control of the oil ports. Sanalla pointed out that Libya will lose daily production of about 400,000 barrels per day as lost exports, and if the status quo continues, the estimated cost will be about $880 million a month. He concluded by saying, This is a national catastrophe and the outlaw [Jadran] should be forced to leave the terminals. Indeed, the loss is huge and very detrimental to any economic progress or stability since oil is the main source of revenue for the militia-dominated country. Jadran said in a recorded video June 14 that the bulk of his force is made up of former Petroleum Facilities Guard members and other groups, including the notorious Benghazi Defense Brigades, which is a loose coalition of Islamist groups formed to counter Hifters LNA in Benghazi before he chased them out in July 2017 by taking over the entire city in eastern Libya. Jadran also claimed that some of Libyas Tebu men, a minority of nomads roaming southern Libya with a concentration in Sebha, are among his fighters. Nevertheless, Tebus social leader Ahmed the First denied this while threatening Jadran with legal action for abusing our tribes reputation. The attack apparently surprised Hifter, whose forces were busy clearing Derna from al-Qaeda and Islamic State fighters since the LNA launched its offensive to retake the coastal town in northeastern Benghazi on May 8. Continuing the fight in Derna is likely to deplete and weaken any capabilities the LNA managed to amount to counter Jadran let alone force him out of the terminals. And leaving Derna after it is almost fully conquered could mean Islamist remnant forces inside the city might gain the military momentum again and launch their counter attack, which is likely to be very costly for the LNA, in both men and equipment. In the wider political scene in Libya, the attack is likely to have serious negative repercussions after an atmosphere of hope prevailed in anticipation of the Dec. 10 elections set by UN envoy Ghassan Salame and agreed on in the latest inter-Libya talks hosted and supported by France in Paris on May 29. In the military sense, Jadran cannot launch such daring operations alone and he likely has some support from inside and outside Libya. Technically speaking, his group consists of a gang with little military capacity and know-how fighting in a desert, which is difficult even for professional armies, let alone for groups of this size and capability. Militarily, Jadran is likely to face challenging problems to maintain his grip on the oil crescent, particularly the two terminals. His supply lines are going to be a major headache. If he depends on any supply lines extending from the south of Libya from where he launched his attack, then such lines are easily disrupted and cut since they run through a harsh open desert with little natural cover and zero military air cover. If he depends on supplies from within the region, particularly from his tribesmen in nearby villages and towns, such supplies are hard to sustain and people involved in such work are likely to be subjected to harsh revenge once LNA soldiers get to their areas. Besides, the terminals area is hard to defend for many reasons. Its proximity to the seashore makes it open to sea attacks, as Jadran lacks any sea-mounted military equipment. The nature of its installation which is highly flammable makes it a hazardous place to use military force where any tank could be hit at any time. It is difficult to control such a place, especially after most of the NOCs professional firefighters have already left. LNA spokesman Ahmed Mesmari announced on June 17 that LNAs air force has gone into action in the areas around the terminals all the way to Sirte, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) to the west, warning civilians to be careful. It is a matter of time before Jadran and his forces are ejected from the areas. But the repeated phenomena of gang attacks against the countrys main lifeline will always be a looming threat as long as no central government is in place with full power over the entire territory of Libya. The Government of National Accord in Tripoli can hardly do more than issue statements of condemnation, which it did, but that will not help retake the oil terminals or enable NOC to resume oil exports. Israel has made several statements promising to ease the stifling living conditions in the Gaza Strip. On May 18, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that White House special adviser Jared Kushner and US peace envoy Jason Greenblatt are expected to hold talks in the region this week. They will most probably be calling on Gulf states to inject around $500 million in the Gaza Strip to improve the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in the besieged enclave. In an interview with Israeli Walla news website on June 13, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov warned of another war in Gaza, stressing the dire need for urgent actions to prevent any destructive military conflict. He stressed the need for improving the water and electricity situation in cash-strapped Gaza, calling for a new plan aimed at creating new jobs and developing trade and economy. Meanwhile, on June 7 at the International Conference in Support of the Intifada, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas political bureau, expressed his movements readiness to deal positively with any real initiative to end the decadelong Israeli blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip. For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a press statement June 4 that Israel was weighing several possibilities to avoid a collapse of the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The latest wave of calls and statements urging the relaxation of the siege on Gaza indicates that political efforts are underway between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Gaza and Cairo, as well as Washington and Doha. These efforts aim to defuse a potential military confrontation that could break out amid the deterioration of the living situation in the Gaza Strip. Our people are entitled under international law to live in freedom and dignity. The Israeli blockade on Gaza is a flagrant violation of this right, Hamas spokesman Hazem Qassem told Al-Monitor. Gazans want to live like other peoples of the world. We do not want to remain at the mercy of partial relaxation of the siege. We want the siege to be fully lifted, to be allowed a free movement of goods and individuals. The return marches will continue until they achieve their objectives, including the lifting of the siege imposed on Gaza. He was referring to the Great Return March demonstrations that began on March 30. Hamas is well aware that Gaza is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe and fears this tragic situation would drive Gazans to take to the streets. An internal popular movement could derail Hamas main endeavors against Israel outside the Gaza Strip, forcing it to focus on controlling the security situation at home. The outburst of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza might encourage Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to further tighten the blockade on the besieged enclave in a bid to thwart Hamas' efforts. If caught in such a predicament, Hamas would be forced to accept any solutions, even temporary, that may ward off the specter of any internal explosion in Gaza. Al-Monitor talked to Mohammed Abu Jiab, the editor-in-chief of Al-Eqtesadia newspaper in Gaza. It is unlikely that Israel takes serious steps to address the crises in Gaza before scoring victories against Hamas, such as getting back its captured soldiers. Abu Jiab noted that pumping cash and bringing in power generators to Gaza may not lead to an improved situation for the people of Gaza. He explained that these measures are for temporary relief. All plans aim to prevent the collapse of the Gaza Strip since such a scenario will result in chaos that harms the security of Egypt and Israel, he said. But a Palestinian official close to President Mahmoud Abbas told Al-Monitor that any humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip must pass through the PA, all other aid measures would entrench the separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank. Anything else would be a political maneuver to push for the establishment of a separate state in Gaza. This is something we reject. In an article on June 8, Israeli Maariv newspaper revealed details of a reported humanitarian plan for the Gaza Strip, with the contribution of Israel, the United States and Jordan. This plan consists of injecting millions of dollars into Gazas markets and banks, the establishment of a Palestinian industrial zone in Sinai, building a desalination plant and distributing thousands of generators to Gaza's hospitals and schools. The article noted that Israeli political and security departments greenlighted these measures. On June 1, the Israeli army Southern Command recommended that the Israeli government ease the stifling living conditions of the residents of Gaza, out of a fear that further deterioration in the security situation could develop into an extended military confrontation. The recommendation called for granting work permits inside Israel to residents in the Gaza Strip. Saleh al-Naami, a Palestinian researcher of Israeli affairs and lecturer at the Islamic University of Gaza, told Al-Monitor, There has been a major shift in the Israeli positions on the issue of easing the blockade on the Gaza Strip. Israel had always set Hamas disarmament as a precondition for any measure easing the economic and humanitarian situation. The recent escalation between the resistance and Israel on May 9 might have softened the Israeli positions. Remarkably, in a statement to Voice of Palestine radio station in Ramallah on May 21, Azzam al-Ahmad, a member of the PLO Executive Committee and a member of the Fatah Central Committee, had warned that the measures aimed to ease the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza fall within the scope of the US administrations deal of the century. He argued that the political objective behind these measures is to bypass the Palestinian leadership. Ahmad also pointed to the involvement of unnamed Arab countries in this political maneuver. Therefore, the PAs position opposing any relaxation of the siege on Gaza under the pretext of punishing Hamas and seeking to pressure its residents to revolt against it may hinder any humanitarian initiatives. With its punitive measures against Gaza since April 2017, the PA is seen by some as contributing to the siege on the enclave. For his part, Atef Adwan, the head of the Economy Committee in the PLC, told Al-Monitor that lifting the siege on Gaza requires only a signed decision by Israel and the PA. The recent meetings, such as Israels Cabinet meeting on June 10 and the Washington meeting on March 14 to discuss easing the siege on Gaza were intended to calm and anesthetize the Palestinians. He added, I do not expect to see any relaxation of the siege in the near future. Israel and some international parties want us to stop the return marches in exchange for minor improvements in Gaza. I told foreign intermediaries I will not disclose their identities that Israel is demanding Hamas to offer concessions on the return marches and the captured Israeli soldiers in exchange for easing the siege of Gaza. The Palestinians in Gaza are seeing their situation at the heart of decision-making circles in Israel, the region and the international community. But they also realize that the relaxation of the siege is not easy. Hamas, the PA and Israel have their separate objectives and goals, and the Gaza Strip's population will remain the first victim of their differences, with no solution in sight. Local and international media organizations have criticized the Palestinian security forces for their role in an attack on journalists during a June 13 demonstration in Ramallah. The demonstrators, who were calling for the reinstatement of salaries to Gaza's public servants, were brutally attacked by plainclothes officers. The Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA), a Palestinian media watchdog, reported June 14 that at least 17 Palestinian and foreign journalists were among those attacked and prevented from filming the protests in Ramallah. Heba Erekat, a female reporter with Shasha News, was attacked by 10 undercover security officials who pushed her to the ground, kicked her and attempted to take away her cellphone even though she told them she was a journalist and a member of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, MADA reported. MADA and various media outlets published a number of other testimonials, though no credible source was able to certify whether President Mahmoud Abbas was directly behind the attempts to muzzle protesters. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) issued a statement June 13 calling on its members not to publish any official Palestinian government news as a response to the violation of the journalists right to work. Naser Abu Baker, the head of the PJS, told Al-Monitor that the decision to boycott the Palestinian government is being largely implemented. It is hard to gauge the effectiveness of the boycott because we had a holiday [Eid al-Fitr] and there has been no news coming out of the government. Abu Baker said he holds the security forces and the prime minister responsible for what happened. We will not be drawn into a discussion about whether the attack was made by uniformed or non-uniformed security. The fact is that the security forces were present and allowed the attacks to take place without intervention. We hold the heads of the security forces and [Prime Minister Rami] Hamdallah responsible for this violation of the Palestinian Basic Law that guarantees freedom of expression and freedom of the press, he added. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) issued a detailed statement June 15 condemning the attack on members of the press by the Palestinian security. This is not the first time that security forces have used violence and intimidation to prevent coverage of protests that the authorities may dislike, said CPJ Deputy Executive Director Robert Mahoney. The Palestinian Authority must deal firmly with all those who assault journalists to send a clear message that it is committed to press freedom. CPJ quoted Seth Herald, an American freelance photojournalist who was covering the protests for the independent Israeli news magazine +972, saying, A police officer ordered him to stop taking photos of an injured protester and tried to grab his camera. Herald told CPJ that several plainclothes officers beat him with batons and their fists, kicked him, and one of them twisted his arm and grabbed his camera. Herald was dragged to a police van, where he was detained for about an hour, before being taken to a military barracks where he was held for two hours, the CPJ statement noted. The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) issued a statement June 14 supporting its affiliate member, the PJS, and called for an investigation into the incidents. IFJ General Secretary Anthony Bellanger stated, We are deeply concerned about such attacks targeting both local and foreign journalists and call on the government to respect Palestines commitment to protecting media freedom. There must be a full investigation and action taken against those responsible. The Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel also chimed in, calling the behavior completely unacceptable. The FPA said that covering peaceful demonstrations is one of the most basic jobs of the media and journalists should be able to do so without fear of attack or censorship. The FPA joined other local and international organizations in urging the Palestinian Authority to investigate this incident and to apologize. Unlike previous attacks on the press, the Palestinian leadership was totally silent. A senior Fatah source told Al-Monitor that the incident has caused major embarrassment and that the leadership is unhinged and doesn't know what to do. Abu Baker told Al-Monitor that the PJS will escalate its protests until it is certain that the action is apologized for and that a serious investigation will take place followed by actions that will ensure it doesnt occur again. A similar incident in Gazas Saraya Park against demonstrators and journalists June 18 by the Hamas-controlled security forces produced similar, although less publicized reactions. The PJS issued another strong statement on June 19 calling on its members to boycott news of what it called the Hamas gang. The retraction of basic rights in Palestine, as exemplified by the recurring attacks on journalists both in the West Bank and Gaza, reflects a general sense of desperation and lack of confidence by both the PLO-run West Bank and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. It is not clear if boycotting all the news will matter much to either power. Journalists have a responsibility to inform the public, and boycotting news even if it is news on the Palestinian government in Ramallah or Hamas in Gaza will punish the public at large. A more serious united effort is needed to deal with the problem of the denial of basic freedoms guaranteed in the Palestinian Basic Law. As Turkey keeps up attacks against Kurdish rebels in their stronghold in the Qandil Mountains straddling Iran and Iraq, the plight of Turkish soldiers, intelligence operatives and various other Turkish citizens being held by the militants has received scant attention and there is growing worry among their families they might get caught in the middle. Rights groups have urged the opposition to highlight their plight ahead of critical presidential and parliamentary elections on June 24. Critics charge that Turkeys President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched the latest wave of airstrikes on Qandil to garner nationalist support in the polls. We are bombing Qandil. And in a few days we will have auspicious news for you, Erdogan said at a campaign rally on June 15, prompting speculation that either a senior Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) figure would be captured or killed, or the hostages freed. There are easily dozens of such captives in the hands of the PKK, said Ozturk Turkdogan, the president of Turkeys Human Rights association who liaises with the rebels and the government on their families behalf. We contacted all the opposition leaders urging them to say something and got no response, he told Al-Monitor. Turkdogan speculated they are ignoring the issue for fear that Turkeys hawkish president would use it against them. Erdogan could easily accuse them of trying to sabotage the Qandil operation and of supporting terrorists. Erdogan has already leveled similar accusations against Muharrem Ince, his pro-secular opposition rival who has emerged as something of a potential nemesis according to recent opinion polls. Erdogan called Ince a terrorist flunky after Ince visited Selahattin Demirtas, the imprisoned presidential contender running for the largest pro-Kurdish bloc. He is leaning on murderers with bloodstained hands for support, Erdogan declared at a campaign rally in the mainly Kurdish province of Van on June 19. On June 7, the PKK released videos of nine captives who complained about the governments inertia and appealed to authorities, members of the opposition and civic rights groups to take action on their behalf. The government should do something for us. Have we been stripped of our citizenship? Not a soul even utters our names, lamented one Muslum Altintas, who was captured by the PKK on Oct. 2, 2015, during his mandatory military service in Tunceli province. Another conscript called Suleyman Sungur said he had been held for three years. I havent heard from my mother, my father, from nobody. This war has continued for 40 years, with nothing gained. People have only died. We want peace, for people not to die and to be reunited with our families. Turkey has steadily escalated attacks against the PKK since a mutually observed cease-fire collapsed along with peace talks in 2015. The PKK has been waging a bloody campaign initially for Kurdish independence and now for self-rule inside Turkey since 1984, and is formally designated a terror group by the United States and the European Union. Turkdogan said the PKK had agreed to post the videos of the captives at his behest. We wanted families to see with their own eyes that they are alive and OK but also to create awareness, he said. The militants might have also reckoned that the videos would serve as a deterrent against further Turkish attacks. The Turkish government has not commented on them so far. In January, the PKK published footage of two high-ranking members of Turkeys national spy agency MIT who were seized during a sting operation in the Iraqi Kurdish-controlled Sulaimaniyah province as they were allegedly plotting to assassinate Cemil Bayik, a top PKK commander. The affair was a huge embarrassment and MITs high-flying boss Hakan Fidan has kept a low profile ever since. ALEPPO, Syria Abu Suleiman, from al-Maliha in eastern Ghouta's Rif Dimashq, is currently residing in the town of Kafr Nabl in the Idlib countryside. He works in a bakery that he opened with the help of a local resident and is able to support his family of five. Abu Suleimans family came to Idlib with the fourth batch of the tens of thousands of internally displaced persons who left eastern Ghouta during March, escaping the siege by the Syrian regime imposed in 2012. Abu Suleiman chose Kafr Nabl as a second home and was able to quickly adapt to his new surroundings and situation. He befriended the residents of Kafr Nabl, much like other people from eastern Ghouta who settled in the city. He wanted to work and managed to open his own bakery to make Damascene pastries with the financial support of a well-off Kafr Nabl resident. Abu Suleiman told Al-Monitor, We were part of the fourth batch of people to leave eastern Ghouta. My extended family is made up of 25 people. We got off in Kafr Nabl and we decided to settle here. It was necessary to find work to support our women and children, and with the help of a resident, we managed to rent a shop about a month ago for $150 a month. My friends and I have been baking Damascene pastries for a while, so we knew how to equip the shop so we can work effectively. He added, We Syrian people love to work; its in our nature. We always work hard to make a living. We have had some very bad experiences in eastern Ghouta under siege shelling and starvation, what have you so we forgot what it was like to have a life. We thought we could die at any moment. He continued, When we were finally able to leave and settled in a relatively stable town where goods are available, we started seeing life from a different perspective. We do not want to live off aid provided by humanitarian organizations or the well-off residents here. We want to work and earn our money. Thank God we were able to do so. Abu Suleiman noted, There are many internally displaced persons from eastern Ghouta who come to us every day and buy Damascene pastries, in addition to residents of the area. Everything is going well. We live as if we were at home and we hope security and safety will prevail in all Syrian areas so people can go back to their normal lives. According to the nonprofit Humanitarian Response in northern Syria, 83,214 people were displaced from eastern Ghouta, and most of them settled in the countryside of Aleppo and Idlib. They lost everything, and locals in the areas they settled in were happy to help them start over. There are a number of humanitarian organizations operating in northern Syria, providing food assistance to internally displaced persons from eastern Ghouta and from the northern countryside of Homs. Nour Awad, spokesman for Violet Syria, an independent organization operating in Idlib, told Al-Monitor, Violet provides food aid to the approximately 5,000 families of internally displaced persons from the northern countryside of Homs and eastern Ghouta, enough to feed a family of four for a month. Resident Abu Ali has provided several young men from eastern Ghouta, Abu Suleiman included, with financial help so they can take their first steps into the towns labor market. He told Al-Monitor, We are all brothers from the same motherland. We share the same concerns and we are all the same. Each and every resident who is able to help out our brothers from eastern Ghouta should do so. Helping them find work is better than all the money we could give them because this will be good for them on the long run should they decide to stay here. He added, I decided to help Abu Suleiman so he would not have to be dependent on anyone. He can rely on himself. He does what he does very well and the money I gave him is more of a loan. He can pay me back whenever, so long as he gets back on his feet and is able to provide for his family. He did not specify how much he loaned Abu Suleiman. Abu Ali noted, I wish every person able to help financially would do the same as I did. When we help each other out, we can achieve anything. We can rebuild all that was destroyed during the years of war. Sooner or later, humans will be rewarded for everything they do on earth. On June 5, Turkish authorities arrested two high school students for spray painting a kettle on the wall of a house in Istanbul. Next to the kettle they wrote, There is a message coming from the kettle. The reason for their arrest was reported as creating propaganda for terror organizations. Next to and beneath the kettle were acronyms for banned organizations. The owner of the house, rather than filing a complaint against the young men, came to their defense, explaining, They only drew the kettle image. The names of organizations were already there. The kettle has become a political symbol thanks to Selahattin Demirtas, the imprisoned former chairman of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) also known as the Kurdish Obama. Demirtas, who was arrested in November 2016, had in September 2017 allowed his attorney to send tweets from his Twitter account. After the tweets, guards thoroughly searched his space to figure out how he was able to tweet. Demirtas had to publicly state through Twitter that he was not actually typing and sending the messages. Naturally they could not find any tweets in the rooms, he joked. There was a tea kettle in the room, but they concluded it is not able to send tweets. The popularity of the unassuming kettle took off in Turkish politics in early May. At that time, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had accidentally provided the opposition with the resonating motto TAMAM (Enough), signifying how some might feel toward him. Each opposition figure stepped forward to join the Enough movement, but Demirtas, due to his incarceration, lagged behind in joining them. He eventually tweeted, There was a complication with the kettle, that is why I am late. TAMAM. In some 40 days, his message was retweeted in excess of 23,000 times and received 92,000 likes. In the meantime, kettle images began appearing in public, symbolizing the hope of an imprisoned politician. Demirtas kettle is now one of the strongest images on Turkey's political scene and surprisingly pleasant. The HDP and Demirtas deserve praise for how they have handled legal and situational challenges in the run-up to presidential and legislative elections scheduled for June 24. The party published a study documenting attacks and arrests on party members and property from April 18 to June 10. They tallied 57 attacks on HDP campaigners, offices, cars and buses, and 208 members detained. Prior to that, hundreds of HDP members, including dozens of elected municipal leaders and lawmakers were arrested. The government filled the vacant municipal posts with its own people. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are concerned that the HDP will succeed in entering parliament. The HDP has not joined a coalition and must pass the 10% voter threshold in order to do so. If it fails to surpass the threshold, the AKP is expected to benefit and garner a majority in the legislature. A video recording of Erdogan emerged on social media on June 13 illustrating the depth of Erdogans concern. Most likely recorded by cell phone at a gathering in Istanbul, Erdogan is shown and heard addressing local AKP representatives who will be counting votes. He advises them to arrive early at the polling stations before others so that, he said, This business will end before it begins. More important, he advises them to obtain voter registration lists and examine them, one by one, and work on potential HDP voters. He warns, Friends, our party organization needs to do a different kind of study on the HDP. I will not say this outside. Having delivered these seemingly cryptic instructions, he then goes on to explain how beneficial it will be to them if the HDP fails to pass the threshold. With all this, HDP officials believe that Erdogan is encouraging election fraud. Giran Ozcan, the HDP's US representative, told Al-Monitor, Turkey is being led by a man who believes his life depends on his ability to maintain and tighten his grasp on every single iota of power in the country. To do this, he has extensively polarized the country and raised tensions on the social level to unprecedented levels. The HDP has been subjected to the severest criminalization by Erdogan, ordering the courts, which are effectively under his control, to clamp down on many of our members, elected officials and even our former co-chairs, Figen Yuksekdag and Selahattin Demirtas. About the video, Ozcan emphasized, Erdogan is heard ordering his party officials to work specifically on ensuring that the HDP does not pass the election threshold, even going as far as profiling HDP voters. Erdogans reign depends on the HDP falling short of the threshold, and for this, he is willing to sacrifice not only the democratic institutions of the country, but even the whole social fabric of Turkey. Kurdish affairs analyst Mutlu Civiroglu added, The public is rarely able to see HDP representatives in mainstream media reaching out to voters to deliver their messages. Yet, HDP members are rallying with a nice photo of Demirtas and with broad smiles. Demirtas is imprisoned, but his [creative] appeal is there. He writes [fiction] books, sends handwritten notes, sings and draws. He is smart and creative to use every little opportunity to reach the public, Civiroglu told Al-Monitor. Each week Demirtas is allotted 10 minutes of phone time to speak to his wife, and as he turns each call into a rally streamed from their living room or into messages on WhatsApp, Turkish authorities work tirelessly to contain the HDP's campaign. For example, on June 12, an image was widely shared on social media showing an HDP campaign bus, with Demirtas photo on the side, being seized with two HDP campaigners inside. Hatice Altinisik, chair of the Alevi Bektasi Institute, believes that the messages from Demirtas kettle are being heard. She said that a big crowd turned out in Diyarbakir at a Republican Peoples Party rally for presidential candidate Muharrem Ince. She noted that while Erdogan constantly refers to Demirtas as a terrorist, Ince, who had visited Demirtas in prison, spoke sensibly about the struggles of the Kurds in Turkey. Al-Monitor conducted focus group interviews June 1-12 with HDP volunteers and sympathizers in Diyarbakir, Agri and Hakkari, cities in the east and southeast with majority-Kurdish populations. Those interviewed expressed confidence that the HDPs share of the vote has increased since the last election. According to one person, Demirtas is a hero campaigning from prison. That unites the people here. There was concern, however, about election fraud. A farmer from Hakkari said, We thought Erdogan was different, but there is no difference. Kurds are destined for three places in this country prison, exile or the grave. The struggle for Kurdish votes took a deadly turn on June 14, when a fight broke out as an AKP parliamentary candidate campaigned in the border town of Suruc. Four people died and 10 were injured in a still-murky incident involving an exchange between the armed entourage of the AKP lawmaker and an HDP shopkeeper and his staff. So far, HDP members and Demirtas have campaigned in an upbeat manner employing a witty sense of humor. Given that most credible polls show that Erdogans vote share increases as terror concerns increase, and it decreases when economic challenges arise, there is good reason to fear more violence. Irans refutation of official Turkish claims that it supports the military operation launched by Turkey against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Iraqs Qandil region has stoked more resentment for Tehran in Ankara. In a statement issued last week, Iranian military spokesman Gen. Abulfazil Shekarchi also denied Turkish suggestions that Iran was considering mounting joint operations with Turkey against the PKK in Iraq. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a crowd of supporters during an election rally in the central Anatolian city of Nigde on June 11 that Turkish forces had started an operation the previous day against PKK camps in the Qandil region. This was followed by remarks from Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu during a television interview in which he indicated that Ankara was in contact with Tehran about conducting joint military operations in the region; the Qandil Mountains extend into Iran. Turkish Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli also went on record shortly before Turkey launched its Qandil operation and said Ankara had Tehrans support for the move. Our offer to Iran was to carry out the operation together. Iran, in its remarks at least, has voiced very important support, Canikli said in an interview with the government-controlled Anadolu Agency. Shekarchi, however, put a damper on Ankaras optimistic expectations. The Islamic Republic of Iran thinks military action against the territory of another country without permission from its legitimate government, with the excuse of combating terrorism, is illegal, he said in his rebuttal of the Turkish ministers. Iran will never support initiatives that will damage the sovereignty of neighboring countries, he added. These words represented a serious embarrassment for Ankara in the light of Cavusoglu's and Caniklis remarks. This was not the first time Iran has angered Ankara over Turkish military operations against the PKK in Iraq and the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) group in Syria. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani enraged officials in Ankara in April after he indicated that the Turkish military presence in Syria was a violation of that countrys territorial integrity and called on Turkish forces in the northern Syrian city of Afrin to be pulled back and for the city to be turned over to the Syrian regime. Afrin was captured from the YPG by the Turkish military in March under Operation Olive Branch, which Turkey launched in January. Turkey says the YPG is linked to the PKK and has declared war on the group in Syria. Like Russia Turkeys other partner in Syria under the Astana process Iran also maintains that only foreign troops invited by the Syrian and Iraqi governments are legally present in those countries. Ankara counters by arguing that Baghdad and Damascus have lost control over parts of Iraq and Syria used by the PKK and the YPG, and says this has left Turkey with no choice but to act unilaterally in order to ward off the existential threat to the countrys security from these groups. During his interview with Anadolu Agency, Canikli also suggested that Baghdad was in full agreement with Ankara regarding an operation in Qandil. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, however, denied this. Responding to remarks from Turkish government officials showing that such an operation was imminent, Abadi had called on Ankara to respect his countrys sovereignty. Abadi added that there would be no military coordination with Turkey during such an operation. He went on to claim that the talk about an operation in Qandil out of Ankara was designed to shore up the support base for Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party prior to Turkeys presidential and parliamentary elections June 24. Erdogan and the AKP have strongly rejected claims which have also been voiced by the Turkish opposition of a link between the timing of the Qandil operation and the elections. He has not held back, though, from using this operation and the capture of Afrin in March to hit at his political rivals during his election campaign. Erdogans remarks during his Nigde rally are a case in point. Ankara and Baghdad also remain at odds over the presence of the Turkish military in Bashiqa near Mosul. Iraq has repeatedly called on Turkey to pull back its forces there, a demand Ankara has refused to meet so far, citing the threat from the PKK. Hopes were raised in Ankara that cooperation between Turkey and Iran over the Kurdish issue would increase after both countries rejected the results of the independence referendum held by the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq in September 2017. Irans own war against the PKK-affiliated Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan also fueled these hopes. Irans ongoing fight against this group, however, has not prevented Tehran from having a different policy on Turkeys fight against the PKK or the YPG. Canikli also indicated in his interview with Anadolu Agency that Turkey would remain in northern Iraq until all terrorist groups were removed. Our goal now is to be a lasting presence there until terror is completely removed; we will remain in northern Iraq, he said. Such remarks which clearly indicate that the Qandil operation is designed to give Turkey a military foothold in the region and that Turkish forces would remain there for the long haul have clearly been met with dissatisfaction in Tehran. Ankara, eyeing its relations with Iran for a host of economic and political reasons including its ongoing cooperation with Tehran and Moscow for a settlement to the Syrian crisis has largely held back from officially hitting back at Iranian criticism of its operations in Iraq and Syria. The job of lashing out at Iran has, however, been taken over by columnists and analysts from government-friendly media and think tanks. Responding to Shekarchi, Burhanettin Duran the general coordinator of the government-funded Political, Economic and Social Research Foundation (SETAV) wrote that Iranian officials are fueling hostility toward Turkey in Baghdad. They are concerned that the Turkish presence in the Qandil Mountains and, more broadly, northern Iraq will have long-term consequences, Duran wrote in his column for the pro-government Daily Sabah. Needless to say, that kind of presence would make Turkey a much more prominent player in Iraq, he added. Duran underlined Irans deep concern over developments in Iraq, whose population is predominantly Shiite. For the Iranians, Turkey's greater involvement in Iraq would represent a weakening of the line of resistance, which was formed in the Middle East after the 1979 revolution and, more specifically, in the wake of the Arab revolts, he argued. Duran went on to refer to Turkeys current negotiations with the United States over the northern Syrian city of Manbij, which he said could lead to Ankara and Washington working together in Syria. When the Americans knock on Ankara's door to develop a comprehensive Iran strategy, it will be too late for Tehran. One cannot help but wonder if they will regret their greed then, Duran wrote. Ufuk Ulutas, the director for foreign policy at SETAV and a columnist for the pro-government daily Aksam, also pointed to increasing international pressures on Iran. Irans failure to respond positively to Turkeys call for cooperation against the PKK points to strategic shallowness on the part of Tehran, to put it mildly, at a time when friendship toward Iran is becoming vague while deepening enmity toward it is becoming operational, Ulutas wrote in his column for Aksam. Such a view clearly reflects the rancor felt toward Iran in Ankara, even if government officials refuse to reflect this openly for a number of reasons. Pragmatism and a shared dislike of the West may impel Ankara and Tehran to maintain the appearance of good ties presently. Many expect, however, differences over Syria and Iraq to increase in time, because Turkey and Iran are ultimately on different sides of the Middle Easts active and growing sectarian fault line. Irans discordant position on Turkeys Afrin and Qandil operations also points to this. By the time its production begins in Alabama, Mercedes-Benz's electric SUV will have gone through an impressive array of tests. This summer, the EQC prototype is in Spain, probing the vehicle's strengths and weaknesses in 122 degree heat. This is after subzero tests over three winters, according to the company. Mercedes-Benz released this photo of prototype electric SUVs undergoing testing in Spain. What's the aim? According to Mercedes, exposure to heat risks battery damage. So the company is paying attention to the battery's cooling circuit, how it manages high power requirements and how the heat affects operating range. One way to know is to drive the vehicle until the battery is completely drained of power. During trials, the vehicle is also evaluated for noise, the accuracy of battery range calculations and other factors. These trials come after months of cold testing to see how the battery loses power in freezing temperatures. And with electric vehicles, special attention is paid to the electric powertrain and the battery, the company said. Mercedes uses a ratio of 35 percent digital or simulation testing, and 65 percent real-world testing. EQ SUVs are expected to start rolling off assembly lines in Tuscaloosa by the beginning of the next decade. Tragedy was averted in Birmingham Tuesday morning after a young boy was accidentally left in a hot, locked vehicle for about one hour. Birmingham police and firefighters responded shortly before 11 a.m. to a parking lot in the 700 block of 32nd Street South after a passerby spotted the 4-year-old boy in the backseat of a small sedan. The car was parked under a tree and the windows were slightly cracked, but the doors were locked. The boy was taken out of the vehicle and into a nearby office building where he was checked for dehydration, but he was Ok. He was smiling and drinking water as the investigation continued. Birmingham police South Precinct Sgt. Matthew Nicosia said the mother told officers she had dropped her other two children off at daycare where they were scheduled to go on a field trip and thought her 4-year-old son had gotten out with them. She said she was rushed trying to get to work and didn't realize her son was asleep in the backseat. A Family Services detective and the Jefferson County Department of Human Resources were summoned to the scene as a precaution. Nicosia said the boy appeared to be in good health and well-cared-for. "We first just want to make sure this doesn't happen again,'' he said. Nationwide, 13 children have died so far this year after being left in hot cars. Those deaths have happened in South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Texas, Indian, Tennessee, Virginia, Louisiana and Florida. In 2017, 42 children died from vehicle heatstroke, according to noheatstroke.org, and all of those deaths were preventable. At least four children died in Alabama last year after being left in vehicles: - The body of Dra Kadyn Hudson was discovered just after 4 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 25, 2017. The 3-year-old boy was left in the car while the grandmother was at work at Miles College. His death was from environmental hyperthermia - an elevated body temperature due to the failed thermoregulation that occurs when a body produces or absorbs more heat than it dissipates - and ruled accidental. - Christian Evan Sanders died from hyperthermia after he was left in his father's truck outside of a Vestavia Hills company where the father worked. Christian was last known to be alive at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, April 7, 2017. He was found unresponsive at 4:37 p.m. and pronounced dead at Children's of Alabama at 5:06 p.m. The Jefferson County District Attorney's Office in July said a three-month probe into the incident yielded no sign of criminal wrongdoing. - Giuliana Susan Grace Ramirez, 14 months, died March 29, 2017. Her mother, Memory Ryan Vieyra, was charged with murder and aggravated child abuse in the incident, which happened at 2713 Leonard Chapel Road in Carbon Hill. The criminal complaint for murder against Vieyra stated that she engaged in conduct which manifested extreme indifference to human life and created a grave risk of death to the little girl. Vieyra did so by "violently shaking Giuliana and/or leaving (her) in a vehicle that reached extreme internal temperatures for an extended period of time." Court records don't indicate a disposition on that case. - In August 2017, Mobile daycare worker Valarie Rena Patterson was charged with corpse abuse and manslaughter in the death of 5-year-old Kamden Johnson. Johnson was found dead in the driveway of a home in the 2100 block of Demotropolis Road on August 21. Patterson is accused of recklessly causing the death of Johnson by leaving him in a van. She reportedly then dumped his body. That case is still awaiting trial. Since 1998, 755 children have died in hot cars with an average of 37 per year. In Alabama, 20 of the deaths have happened since 1998. Nicosia said police are thankful for the outcome of Tuesday's incident. "It could have been worse,'' he said. The Birmingham City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved the $436 million fiscal year 2019 operating budget. The budget is $8 million larger than last year's budget, due to increased revenue from use and occupational taxes. According to the mayor's office, 133 vacant jobs were cut from the budget, saving the city $4.7 million. Despite the larger budget, Mayor Randall Woodfin said there still wasn't enough money for street paving or additional funding for Birmingham City Schools. Tuesday's passage of the budget was about two weeks ahead of the start of the fiscal year. The budget passed 8-0. Councilor Lashunda Scales wasn't present for the vote. The only money for street paving in 2019 is coming from the Alabama Department of Transportation. Andre Bittas, director of planning, engineering and permits, said the city received $2.2 million in funds from ALDOT for citywide street paving. Another $2 million has been committed from ALDOT for street paving in the Fountain Heights neighborhood due to the interstate construction in the area. He said $4 million is also being spent on truck routes in Districts 6 and 7. Last week, Woodfin told city councilors that he wanted to put some general fund money towards paving in 2019. That plan went to the wayside, though, when he learned the city must make an unanticipated payment to Trane for ongoing energy upgrades. The city announced in 2016 a plan to invest $61.3 million for energy upgrades in 125 city buildings. This was expected to create $100 million in energy and operational costs over the next two decades. Birmingham City Schools will receive $3 million. Woodfin restored funding to the city's 99 neighborhood associations in the budget after hearing objections from the council and residents. Each neighborhood will receive $2,000 for a total of $198,000. In the 2018 budget, neighborhood associations were allocated $499,700. The mayor appropriated $3.2 million for weed abatement and demolition of dilapidated structures in the 2019 budget. "A lot of this budget reflects our No. 1 priority and that is neighborhood revitalization. There is more money for weed abatement and demolition as far as putting money on the ground in neighborhoods,'' Woodfin told reporters following the council meeting. Among the budget highlights are: A 1 percent cost of living adjustment for all city employees (at a cost of $2.8 million) Continuation of merit pay and longevity pay for employees (totaling $4.3 million) Funding for expansion of the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex ($3 million a year for 30 years) Preventative building maintenance ($495,000) Replace street lighting ($400,000) Replace interstate lighting ($500,000) Woodfin increased pension funding in 2019 by $2.9 million. That brings the city's pension funding to about $23.4 million in 2019. The city's major pension fund -- the Retirement and Relief System -- is underfunded by 25 percent or about $330 million, according to the city's 2017 financial report. The Fire & Police Supplemental Pension System was underfunded by $52.9 million as of July 2016. Updated at 3:50 p.m. with quote from Mayor Woodfin and amended appropriation for weed abatement and demolition. The shooting death of a 35-year-old Birmingham woman at the hands of her own mother has family members grieving the loss of not just one loved-one, but possibly two. Tiffany Cooper, described by her large, close-knit family as "the life of the party," died Monday night at her mother's 16th Place Southwest home. On Tuesday, police charged 57-year-old Angela Cooper with reckless murder. West precinct officers responded to the 1200 block of 16th Place Southwest at 6:15 p.m. Monday on a report of a person shot, Birmingham police Sgt. Johnny Williams said. Once on the scene, they found Tiffany Cooper dead inside in the home from a gunshot wound. She is Birmingham's 47th homicide victim this year, and the 71st for all of Jefferson County. Williams said Tiffany Cooper had been involved in an argument with her mother just before she was shot but did not elaborate. On Tuesday afternoon, family members gathered at the home where the shooting happened, remembering Tiffany Cooper and vowing to stand behind Angela Cooper, who they say is torn up about what happened. "She loved her mom and her mom loved her,'' said Kawani Cooper, who was raised alongside Tiffany Cooper as sisters even though they were actually cousins. "We don't blame her. We're standing behind her and God is standing behind us all." Family members didn't want to talk about what led up to the deadly shooting but called in an "unfortunate chain of events." "It was an accident,'' Kawani Cooper said. "We aren't a confrontational family." Tiffany Cooper, they said, was raised in Birmingham. She attended Northside Christian School, which is K-8, and then graduated high school from private Maranthan Academy. At the time of her death, she worked at a daycare. She didn't have children of her own but doted on the children at the daycare, as well as her many nieces and nephews. "She loved those kids,'' Kawani Cooper said. "She loved all kids." Relatives described Tiffany Cooper - who was engaged and planned to be married in August - as a fashionista and the family comedian. "She was so full of laughter and had a contagious laugh,'' she said. "She cracked everybody up." "Tiffany was a combination of glitter, feathers, neon highlighters, cayenne pepper and leopard print,'' Kawani Cooper said. "You shake all that up and it comes out Tiffany. She was one of a kind." Tiffany Cooper's niece, LaWanakee Cooper Daniels, said the family is taking the death hard, but they are standing on their strong faith. The loss of Tiffany Cooper, she said, will be felt by all. "She had such a beautiful spirit,'' she said. "Being around her made you want to grow and be a better person." As fiercely as the family will miss Tiffany Cooper, it's with the same fierceness they plan to rally around Angela Cooper. She was booked into the Jefferson County Jail Tuesday with bond set at $20,000. Under Alabama law, reckless murder is when "under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life, he or she recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to a person other than himself or herself, and thereby causes the death of another person." "She is the one who needs the most prayer,'' Kawani Cooper said. "One thing about the Coopers is we know the battle is not ours, it's the Lord's." "We're going to be here for her,'' she said, "And we're just asking God to wrap his arms around us." There are asterisks and qualifiers to what U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne said Tuesday in Huntsville. But what he said would likely grab your attention. Asked about the just-announced Space Force - a new branch of the Armed Services equal to the Air Force, as described Monday by President Trump - Byrne already had a home for the initiative less than 24 hours after Trump brought it to national attention. "I think it should be headquartered here in Huntsville," Byrne said. "I just told the (Huntsville-Madison County) Chamber (of Commerce) group that. I think this is the natural place to headquarter it." Yes, Huntsville is a part of the NASA backbone. And, yes, Huntsville is a backbone of the country's missile defense and supportive warfighter efforts. As for the asterisks and qualifiers: Byrne was also shopping for votes in a potential campaign to run for the U.S. Senate in 2020 against Democratic incumbent Doug Jones. While Trump made the announcement Monday to much fanfare, there is no framework in place to create a Space Force - much less earmarked money or personnel to put it into action. But if, and when, it happens, Byrne has already found it a home. "When you think about the space program in general in the United States of America, civilian and military, it begins and continues in Huntsville, Alabama," the congressman said. "From the very beginning, when they brought Dr. von Braun here before Sputnik, that rocket and missile program was here. "There's just no better place than Huntsville. We have the right people here. We have the expertise here. I'm not saying that you don't have good people and lots of other expertise in other places. You just have so much of it here. You have such a strong history and expertise here that's built up over a long period of time. I just think it's the right place in America to do it." Byrne made no secret of the fact that he was in Huntsville, in part, to test the waters of a Senate run. Byrne has long been considered a top candidate to see the Republican nomination in 2020. He also visited Redstone Arsenal in connection with his seat on the House Armed Services committee. "We've got the gift of time so I don't feel any pressure to have to make a decision right away," Bryne said of a Senate campaign. "So what I've been doing is taking my time, going around the state and talking to friends. This is not the end of it. I'm going to be making further trips. I'll be back up here again talking to people over the next several months." Byrne also spoke unprompted about Jones, the Democrat from Birmingham who narrowly defeated Roy Moore in the Senate special election last year. Jones is filling the remainder of Jeff Sessions' term in the Senate. "I know Sen. Jones very well, known him for a long time," Byrne said. "I have nothing but the highest regard for him personally and professionally. He's a terrific prosecutor, terrific lawyer. He's a Democrat with one set of political views. I'm a Republican with another set of political views. In some respects, they are very different. "So I think it's important for Republicans to talk about having a candidate in 2020, one that represents our conservative viewpoints but also one can win. I've heard for a long time, 'Oh, any Republican can beat any Democrat.' If we proved anything last year, we proved that's not true. So we have to have the right Republican running both to have the right person serving but also to win." As for Space Force, Byrne said he "strongly supports it" and pointed out that funding was included in the defense authorization act passed by the House last year. That allocated funding, though, was removed by the Senate. "I hope it's something we can work on with the president over the next several months and make it a reality," Byrne said. "I don't know if the president can do that just on his own. I think he's going to have to have some legislation. We've already been working on it very hard and I'm looking forward to working with him on it and make it a reality." It won't be easy and it won't happen quickly, according to Mohammed "Mo" Khan Jr., a retired Air Force colonel who attended the chamber of commerce event at which Byrne spoke Tuesday. Khan was director of space operations for the Air Force in 2007-08, giving him a keen insight into the issue. At separate times in an interview, Khan said of the Space Force that "this could be a fairly long process" and "it will be no small task." And while now as a Huntsville resident, Khan said he would favor the Space Force HQ landing in the Rocket City, the Air Force Space Command has a long history at its Colorado Springs home of Peterson Air Force Base. "This is not a new conversation," Khan said. "In excess of a decade, the nation's had an internal dialogue about whether the relevance of the space mission area warrants it being a separate force, a separate corps or some construct like this. It's not until it got the traction in Congress or certainly the president's announcement that we've seen the inertia, the momentum that's built up. The elements of execution to make this a reality have yet to be clearly defined." A former counselor is asking a judge to toss an indictment that accuses her of having sex with teens at Three Springs home for troubled youth in Madison. Amanda Williams is indicted on two felony counts of school employee having sexual contact with a student. Amanda Williams is indicted on two felony counts of school employee having sexual contact with a student. The 29-year-old is accused of performing oral sex on teens when she worked at Three Springs, a home for troubled youths that's also known as Sequel TSI, according to police. Authorities haven't said how old the teens were at the time, though court papers say they were younger than 19. Defense attorney Rachel Morgan has asked a judge to drop the charges, arguing in court records that Three Springs isn't a school and her client wasn't a school employee. In a response motion, Madison County Assistant District Attorney Tim Douthit said it's up to a jury -- not a judge -- to decide the facts of the case. "The defendant's status as a 'school employee'... is an element of the offense," Douthit wrote in court papers. "It is a question of fact that must be determined by a jury and cannot be pre-emptively ruled upon by this Court." At a hearing before Madison County Circuit Judge Donna Pate, Douthit said he will present evidence to the jury that Three Springs is a school. The word "school" isn't defined in the section of the Alabama criminal code under which Williams is charged. In her motion to dismiss, Williams' lawyer cited part of the Alabama sex offender laws, which define a school as a licensed or accredited public, private or church school that offers instruction in grades K-12. Douthit said that definition doesn't apply to criminal charges -- only to setting rules for sex offenders who have been convicted. "I don't think you get to pick and choose how that definition is used," Morgan responded in court. Morgan said Three Springs is defined on its website as a "residential treatment facility" for boys ages 12-18. The medium risk secure facility operates programs for teens with behavioral, emotional or physical challenges, the defense motion states. "It is not a school," Morgan wrote. "The Defendant's job title was Youth Care Worker. The Defendant was not a school employee." The judge hasn't yet issued a ruling. If convicted of the felony charges, Williams faces up to 40 years in prison and a lifetime on the sex offender registry. Freely accessible local news is vital. Please power our reporters and help keep us independent with a donation today. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe Compton resident Karen Lewis addresses Sativa's general manager Maria Rachelle Garza during Q&A. (Josie Huang / LAist) A troubled water district serving 1,600 ratepayers in Compton and Willowbrook is fighting for its existence, after complaints of discolored water coming out of taps have led to calls for its dissolution. More than 150 people turned out in Compton for a meeting Monday night, most of them there to criticize the Sativa Los Angeles County Water District for failing to clear up its muddy water. THE BACKSTORY Complaints about the discolored water date back months. The problem? Sediment build-up in the water district's aging pipes. Public health officials say the water, darkened by high levels of the mineral manganese, is safe to use. But.... Samples of water from the Sativa water district. (Josie Huang / LAist) So it's not surprising customers avoid drinking the water. They also avoid using it for cooking or bathing. Compton resident Genoveva Camargo said the water at her home has looked dirty since she moved there a year ago. Her daughter, now three, broke out in rashes. "When she sees the water running brown, she doesn't want to shower," Camargo said. "I have to shower her every day, so I have to buy gallons and gallons of water." HOW UNUSUAL IS THIS PROBLEM? It's actually a common problem. It just doesn't usually last this long. Water districts regularly open fire hydrants and increase water flow to flush out discolored buildup. That's usually enough to alleviate brown water issues and typically, customers would only see it for a few hours or a day. The brown water in Compton and Willowbrook has been around since mid-April. Twist: Compton woman Maria Villarreal whips out bottle of brown water and says its city water, to groans of people there to testify on Sativa water. Barragan aides guide her outside to get her info. pic.twitter.com/39nm0uH2OX Josie Huang (@josie_huang) June 19, 2018 WHO ARE THE SATIVA CUSTOMERS? Many are low-income and officials have acknowledged that, on the whole, they cannot afford a rate hike substantive enough to pay for upgrades. (Currently, each household pays a flat $67.84, as the water is not metered.) SO WHAT'S NEW? The months of complaints prompted a county-wide regulatory body to last week start the process of dismantling the water district and replacing it with another agency. Monday night's meeting was second town hall organized in as many months by Democratic U.S. Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragan. The congresswoman told the audience, "We're here because we believe everybody regardless of your zip code deserves clean water." WHO SHOWED UP? Barragan expressed concern that not everybody was at the event for the right reasons. She threw up a slide of a Craigslist ad looking for people in the Compton area to attend a two-hour meeting for $40. The ad made no mention of the water district, but Barragan alleged that whoever was behind it was paying people to come to her town hall and "pretend like they were customers, to say good things about the water company." Before public starts to pose questions, Rep. Barragan asks if anyone here tonight is being paid to speak. Puts up Craigslist ad for advocacy job opportunity in Compton thatll pay $40/session. African-Americans and Latinos encouraged to apply. No audience response. pic.twitter.com/6mI1iq9hk7 Josie Huang (@josie_huang) June 19, 2018 She warned any such individuals to not participate in the Q&A session -- and they didn't. In a statement issued the next day, Sativa's general manager Maria Garza wrote "the district absolutely and categorically denies that it in any way paid anyone to attend or speak on behalf of the district." Monday night was dominated by dozens of people who lined up and vented their frustration directly to Garza. "I don't trust you," Karen Lewis said, glaring at Garza, seated just feet away. "I want another entity in here." SO WHAT'S THE FUTURE FOR THE SATIVA WATER DISTRICT? The Los Angeles Local Agency Formation Commission voted June 13 to pursue dissolution. LAFCO will vote July 11 to adopt a resolution to legally begin the work. "Staff will be working to determine which agency is willing and best suitable to take over the services of Sativa county water district," said Adriana Romo, LAFCO's deputy executive officer. The dissolution process could take up to a year, but Romo said her agency is trying to cut that down to nine months. She said Assemblymember Mike Gipson has introduced a bill that would designate a state administrator to oversee the district while LAFCO searches for a successor agency. "Hopefully in the shortest amount of time possible, Sativa (customers) can have clean water," Romo said. A staff report had found that the district has struggled with years of operational issues. LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn, who sits on the commission, said in a statement that problems include "include inadequate water sources and storage capacity, an absence of water meters, aging water mains, inadequate operational and management resources, and an inactive contaminated well that needs to be properly destroyed." WHAT DO SATIVA OFFICIALS HAVE TO SAY? Garza's response: The district's board "wants to just work with everybody to see what's the best solution for the district." Garza maintained that should another agency take over, it'd still face the same conundrum: Finding the $10 to $15 million needed to update pipes that are 70 to 80 years old. She said the district currently has $1.5 million of that amount. For the short-term, Garza says infrastructure upgrades are being made in parts of the district where the water discoloration problem is particularly bad. She said a recent survey found that 7 percent of 970 respondents had complained of no improvement in their water quality. "That's why we made a plan to immediately fix the infrastructure in that area," said Garza, who said the worst cases were concentrated among 60 to 70 homes on two streets. Garza said upgrades to the entire district will require state and federal funding, and that the Water Replenishment District of Southern California and Barragan's office are trying to help locate grants. HOW LONG BEFORE CUSTOMERS SEE IMPROVEMENTS? On Monday night, Garza refrained from giving exact timelines. Sativa customer Camargo said she is not counting on any improvement in her water anytime soon. "They just say they're fixing the problem, they're fixing the problem," said Camargo, who is 27. "Then, tell us when is the problem going to end?" Pasadena-based lawyer, Jorge Reyes, hopes that some of the customers will join a class-action suit that he said he plans on filing as early as Friday. He was among those who spoke at the meeting in Compton. This prompted Barragan to urge potential complainants to read the fine print, and understand that lawyers will take a large cut to recover their fees. "Don't be fooled into thinking you're going to get a $1 million, ok?," she said. News happens every day. Here at LAist, our goal is to cover the stories that matter to you and the community you live in. Now that we're part of KPCC, those stories (including this one you're on right now!) are made possible by generous people like you. Independent, local journalism isn't cheap, but with your support we can keep delivering it. Donate now. The first wrongful death suit stemming from the 2015 Dauphin Island Race disaster ended with a settlement earlier this month, but what that bodes for a spate of federal suits remains unclear. In the settled case, Valentina Henry had sued Fairhope Yacht Club over the death of her father, Robert Lonnell Thomas. Thomas was one of six sailors who died when an unusually severe storm swept over Mobile Bay in April 2015, wreaking havoc on the scores of boats competing in the annual regatta. The office of Presiding Circuit Court Judge John Lockett confirmed that a settlement had been reached June 5 just as jury selection was about to begin. "It's a confidential settlement but the family was pleased," said Rusty Comley, an attorney with the Mississippi-based firm Watkins & Eager and part of the team representing Henry. "Mr. Thomas' four children were pleased with it." Attorneys for Fairhope Yacht Club were not available for comment. Such settlements typically involve no admission of fault. Comley said the settlement in circuit court did not necessarily provide a template for proceedings in federal court: Henry's suit touched on maritime law and Alabama's wrongful death statute, while the others were filed after the statute of limitations had run out on state claims. Other differences also could affect the likelihood of a settlement, he said. Four federal suits have been filed, and Senior U.S. District Judge Callie V.S. Granade has ordered that three are to be consolidated because they involve one boat, the Razr. Adam Dean Clark, 17, of Mobile, died; his mother, Angelina Tew, has filed a wrongful death suit for $2 million. Jimmy Charles Brown, 71, also of Mobile, died as well; his widow, Jane Brown, has filed a wrongful death suit seeking more than $1.5 million, according to court documents. Robert Luiten and his son Lennard Luiten, of the family that owned the Razr, are seeking $1 million for emotional distress and damages such as the loss of the boat. Granade has ruled that a fourth suit should be heard separately. Kris Beall, 27, of Pineville, La., had been on a boat named Scoundrel. His widow, Amanda Beall, has filed a $2 million wrongful death suit against the yacht club. Comley said he expects months of motions to come. "I think we may be looking at a June 2019 trial date," he said. Police have released the identities of the three people who died in a suspected double murder-suicide outside a Walmart store in Tallassee. Tresea Miller, 58, and her 75-year-old mother, Barbara Buttles, suffered multiple gunshot wounds and died at the scene, Tallassee police said. Police identified the suspected shooter as 65-year-old Harold Miller, the husband of Tresea Miller. Police said Harold Miller is believed to have fatally shot himself after gunning down his wife and mother-in-law. Officers were dispatched to Walmart at 2190 Gilmer Avenue to investigate a shooting around 10:15 a.m., Tallassee Chief Matthew Higgins said. Officers found two crashed vehicles in the parking lot near the garden center, then saw Harold Miller's body. The women were found inside one of the crashed vehicles, police said. Mayor Johnny Hammock said the shooter crashed a car into another vehicle before he opened fire in the parking lot. "Preliminary investigation has determined that there was a previous history of domestic incidents between the family members and at this time the case is being ruled a Murder/Suicide," the police chief said in a news release. Tallapoosa county court records show Tresea Miller filed a protection from abuse order against her husband, Harold, on Monday. The order says the couple has been married for 43 years, but says they have a pending divorce. She also claimed in the order that Harold threatened to kill their son, verbally abused her and threatened to set her house on fire. The Alabama State Bureau of Investigation is assisting local authorities, Capt. Joe Herman said in an email to AL.com. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also is investigating, said spokesman Michael Knight. Knight said ATF's Crime Gun Intelligence team is tracing the firearm from today's killings and suicide to determine whether it has been used in other crimes. He said agents will trace the gun to previous owners to see if any criminal charges could be levied. Tallassee, a town with fewer than 5,000 residents, is about 30 miles east of Montgomery. "Keep Tallassee in your thoughts and prayers," Mayor Hammock said. "It's a tragedy. It doesn't matter how big or small your town is, tragedy can happen." Updated at 3:27 p.m. with the identities of the suspected shooter and victims. AL.com journalist Anna Beahm contributed to this report. More than 450 unaccompanied immigrant children have been released to sponsors in Alabama since October 2017, with almost a quarter going to two counties, according to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS's Office of Refugee Resettlement tracks the number of immigrant children who arrive illegally in the U.S. without a parent or legal guardian. Since October 2017, 452 immigrant children have been placed in Alabama, with 117 of them split almost evenly among two counties: Jefferson and Marshall. From 2016-2017, 598 unaccompanied minor immigrants were placed in Alabama, down from 870 in 2015 to 2016 and 808 from 2014-2015. The largest percentage - 45 percent - of unaccompanied immigrant children are from Guatemala, according to DHS, followed by El Salvador (27 percent) and Honduras (23 percent). Less than 3 percent came from Mexico Zero tolerance policy The Trump administration has come under fire for its immigration policies - including separating families that cross over the border illegally - as well as its handling of undocumented minors arriving in the U.S. Unaccompanied minors arriving illegally in the U.S. or separated from their parents are turned over to the ORR, which is responsible for housing and feeding them. The Trump administration's zero tolerance policy, which includes criminal prosecution of adults crossing the border illegally, has driven more children into DHS housing. That housing is now 95 percent full and the White House is considering opening new temporarily facilities to house the overflow. The latest DHS information states the data "does not specifically reflect referrals from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's recently enacted 100 percent prosecution policy of illegal immigration cases." Unaccompanied minors in the U.S. Undocumented children are held in DHS facilities until sponsors - typically family members - can be located. If a sponsor is found, they must agree to ensure the child is present for all future immigration proceedings, as well as removal if a judge orders them to leave the country. That has been an issue in the past, however. "It can take months and sometimes years to adjudicate those claims once they get into the federal immigration court system, and they often fail to appear for immigration proceedings," Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said last month. "In fact, approximately 6,000 unaccompanied children each year fail to appear when they've been summoned. They're released and they don't show up again." In 2017, the average length of stay in a federal shelter facility was 41 days. According to DHS, 30 percent of the unaccompanied minors who enter the U.S. illegally are under age 14; 69 percent are 15-17. Seventy-seven percent are male; 23 percent are female. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently said the cost of housing and caring for the children tops $1 billion a year. Updated June 19 to add country of origin. The Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs is hosting a surplus property sale June 20. The sale will start at 8 a.m. at ADECA's warehouse in Montgomery and lasts until the last item is gone. ADECA's Surplus Property Division is responsible for the sale of almost all property declared excess by state agencies. At any give time, the division has as much as $50 million in inventory on hand. Public entities and qualified nonprofit organization get the first shot at purchasing before the items are offered to the general public. Items available through the auctions are diverse, typically including automobiles, boats, tools, trailers, computers, office equipment, furniture and more. This week's auction includes audio equipment, televisions, refrigerators, office furniture, computers and tools. Cars, trucks and buses are also available. You can send an email to alstatesurplusreg@adeca.alabama.gov to receive notifications of future auctions. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management has rescinded its policy for receiving and investigating civil rights complaints, an action one lawyer says should call into question the department's millions of dollars in federal funding. ADEM rescinded its civil rights policies in response to a lawsuit filed in state court, which argued that the policies functioned as a "rule" under state law but had not gone through the required public notice and other procedures mandated by state law. The Alabama Attorney General's office on June 5 filed a motion with the court that complaints about the policy were moot because the policy had been rescinded. The court filing included a letter from ADEM Director Lance LeFleur stating that the Department had rescinded Memorandum No. 108, otherwise titled "ADEM Civil Rights and Environmental Justice Complaint Reporting and Investigating Process." LeFleur's letter was one sentence long, stating "Memorandum #108 and associated web-based version of the same are hereby rescinded and Number 108 is reserved for future use." ADEM External Affairs Chief Lynn Battle told AL.com the department would not comment on the matter due to the ongoing litigation. David Ludder, attorney for the plaintiffs, said entities that receive federal funding are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and are also required to have procedures in place for investigating complaints from people who believe they have been discriminated against. Ludder said ADEM is now in violation of those requirements. "The evidence is now unequivocal that ADEM does not have discrimination grievance procedures as required by 40 C.F.R.," Ludder wrote in a letter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's External Civil Rights Compliance Office. Ludder asked the EPA to require ADEM to take immediate action, or "commence proceedings to deny, annul, suspend or terminate EPA assistance to ADEM." That EPA assistance consists of grants, awards and federal programs that provide millions of dollars to the state environmental department every year. Ludder said that while part of his argument is procedural -- that ADEM did not follow the legal process in adopting these civil rights guidelines -- he also believes the substance of ADEM's old policy was inadequate. "My contention is that the procedures that were rescinded were not supported by statutory authority and they were just a sham, a pretense, so ADEM could collect financial assistance from EPA without any real intention of providing protection for minorities," Ludder said in a phone interview. Ludder said he believes implementing an adequate civil rights complaint policy may require action the state legislature, and will take some time to accomplish. "It'll probably take a year, at minimum," Ludder said. "But ADEM needs to get moving on it." The complaint that prompted ADEM to rescind its policy was filed in January 2017 by five Alabama residents who live near landfills or wastewater treatment plants. The plaintiffs argued that the department's permitting of the facilities in areas where high percentages of minorities live amounted to racial discrimination, and that the policy for investigating complaints was "invalid." It was not the first time the Department's civil rights policies have been challenged. The EPA dismissed two civil rights complaints against ADEM in March, stating it found insufficient evidence of discrimination. In that decision, the EPA did not address the procedural matters of state law that are at issue in the state court complaint. Ludder's complaint was initially dismissed, but an appeals court overturned that decision and sent the matter forward to trial. Ludder said the state's decision to dismiss the policy more than a year after he filed suit was "frustrating." "It's just unfortunate that they put us through all this effort, yet they really do know that they were wrong to begin with," Ludder said. Read the documents below for Ludder's full complaint and the letter from ADEM rescinding the policy. ADEM EPA Complaint on Scribd A black rights coalition group delivered a petition with 50,000 signatures to the Saraland Municipal Court Monday demanding that criminal charges against Chikesia Clemons be dropped. The coalition group, known as Color of Change, also encouraged Waffle House to denounce the alleged violence against Clemons, who was arrested at a Waffle House in late April. Her supporters contend that she is a victim of police brutality. " Chikesia's case is a part of the pattern of abuse against Black women in this country that has become all too common ," said Arisha Hatch, Color Of Change's Managing Director of Campaigns. " Across the country, police departments deliberately fail to track cases of excessive force and misconduct against Black women. Prosecutors have a duty to stand up for Black women and hold the police accountable for this pattern of violent crimes. Saraland City Attorney Andrew Rutens must drop these charges and clear Chikesia Clemons of all wrongdoing." As protesters walked the 100 feet from their press conference to the front of the court, they chanted while carrying the boxes with the signatures inside. The city's attorney, Andrew Rutens, allowed the group in to the building and collected the boxes. Rutens did not say if he would consider dropping the disorderly conduct and resisting arrest charges, but said that he still supported the officers involved. Video of Clemons being arrested shows her sitting on a seat in Waffle House talking to police. Suddenly one officer is seen wrestling her to the ground before threatening to break her arm. Two other officers assisted in the arrest. Clemons' breasts were exposed as she allegedly resisted officers. Saraland Police Department has said during a press conference in the aftermath of the arrest that it supports the actions of its officer and said that the aggression used was appropriate. Waffle House employees called 911 after Clemons and two friends allegedly brought alcohol into the restaurant. After being asked to leave, Clemons traded insults with one of the employees before leaving and then returning moments later. Earlier reports on the standoff claim that Clemons was unhappy about being charged $0.50 cents for plastic cutlery. Witnesses that were spoken to by police claim that the trio had been drinking and that Clemons threatened to shoot the place up. Ben Crump, a Tallahasee-based attorney, said new witness testimony that contradicted Saraland Police Department's version of events. One woman said in her witness statement that a Waffle House employee told Clemons that she should "know your place," which Crump believed had racial overtones. At previous protests and gatherings, Al Sharpton, the New York civil rights leader, also called on charges against Clemons to be dropped. Alabama Power's dramatic exit from the Business Council of Alabama has brought the organization - and its President and CEO Bill Canary - into the spotlight. Here's more on BCA, its leadership, purpose and the current controversy: What is the BCA? The Business Council of Alabama was founded in 1985 when the Alabama Chamber of Commerce merged with the Associated Industries of Alabama. Through its members, BCA says it represents more than 1 million Alabamians. A non-profit 501(c)6, the BCA represents the business community before the Alabama Legislature and the U.S. Congress. The organization's agenda includes education, infrastructure, small business, manufacturing, judicial and legal reform, environment and energy, health care, tax and fiscal policy, and labor and employment. BCA membership BCA's membership has traditionally included the largest industries in the state - Regions Bank, Alabama Power, Blue Cross Blue Shield, each of which pump large sums of money into the organization. Currently, BCA's membership directory is not operational online. Progress PAC The BCA also operates ProgressPAC, which seeks to help elect pro-business candidates. Its most recent filings with the Alabama Secretary of State's Office shows the PAC has a balance of $743,019. Canary is listed as a registered lobbyist with the Alabama Ethics Commission. BCA develops agendas for both the Alabama Legislature and Congress. Endorsements BCA issues political endorsements each year, most recently backing Gov. Kay Ivey; Lt. Gov. hopeful Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh, who is in the Republican runoff against Rep. Will Ainsworth; and Attorney General Steve Marshall, who faces former state AG Troy King in the July runoff. All the statewide candidates backed by the BCA are Republicans. BCA & money According to its most recently filed 990 filing, BCA reported net assets of $5.95 million but with expenditures topping revenue by $633,695 with a total of $2.53 million going toward salaries. BCA's website currently lists 17 staff members, including Canary. Nancy Wall Hewston, senior VP of communications for BCA, told AL.com Tuesday the 990 form is a "snapshot at the time of reporting." "It has no bearing on an organization's ongoing financial health," Hewston said. "The BCA finished 2016 with a balanced operating budget and a surplus. The BCA has zero debt and currently has more than one-year's operating budget in reserves." Leadership Canary has led the BCA since March 2003 after coming to Alabama after serving as president and CEO of the American Trucking Association in Washington, D.C., according to his online bio. His previous experience included serving as special assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs under President George H. W. Bush and as chief of staff for the Republican National Committee. Canary was also a close aide of former Republican Gov. Bob Riley. BCA & Siegelman Cananry's wife is Leura Canary, a former U.S. Attorney in Montgomery who was involved in the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Siegelman claims she stayed involved in the case after recusing herself because of her husband's involvement with Republican campaigns. Courts rejected those claims during Siegelman's appeals. Canary & Hubbard Canary was close with former Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard. During Hubbard's trial on a host of felony ethics violations, Canary said he and other lobbyists close to BCA served as a "kitchen cabinet" to help shape the state's legislative agenda. The admission drew questions about BCA and Canary's power and its role after Hubbard was convicted. BCA & AEA The BCA and the Alabama Education Association - onetime the major force in Alabama politics - often found themselves at odds on a range of issues. In 2013, BCA took on AEA head on, forming the Business and Education Alliance. Led by former state superintendent Joe Morton, BEA counts among its partners Alfa Insurance, AT&T, Blue Cross, Regions, Honda and Alabama Power. Tensions at BCA Tension with the BCA heated up in 2017 following a particularly difficult legislative session. The organization had three main legislative agendas: kill a bill requiring insurance companies to cover autism treatments; revamping the Alabama Accountability Act; and raising the state gas tax. All three efforts failed and BCA's relationship with lawmakers, especially former Republican backers, soured. Shortly after that, Alabama Power pulled out of BCA's annual conference. With the heat on, 14 former BCA chairs and vice chairs signed a letter of support for the CEO but discussions reportedly began related to Canary's exit. Alabama Power's exit Founding BCA member Alabama Power announced Monday it was withdrawing from the BCA "effective immediately." In a letter to BCA Chairman Perry Hand, Alabama Power CEO Mark Crosswhite said the organization had "needlessly alienated federal and state officials, failed to communicate with its own members, squandered our collective corporate goodwill, allowed its financial health to decline, and become a divisive force in our state." BCA response For its part, BCA said Alabama Power has not been a member since April because of nonpayment of dues. In his response, BCA Chairman Perry Hand said the executive committee would not "in good conscience" be able to meet "deadline dates (Alabama Power had) prescribed to our Executive Committee," regarding Canary's exit. Alabama Power asked that Canary be removed by May 1 or June 1; the executive committee said it is working on a transition plan aimed at having a "a new CEO installed no later than Jan. 1, 2019." What does Alabama Power's exit mean? From Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, who battled BCA over its opposition to the autism bill: "That's a big seismic shift there. I think the question is now, where does the Power Company go? Do they create a whole new organization? Do they maybe join another organization out there?" Updated June 19 at 12:14 p.m. to include comments from BCA. A new $85 million Embassy Suites hotel, described as a "transformative" project, will anchor Alabama's most visible and recently renovated public beachfront. The city of Gulf Shores, on Tuesday, announced it has reached an agreement in principle with DD Partners LLC, a development team led by Birmingham-based developer Ron Durham and Marietta, Georgia-based developer Ron Day. The group will lead the construction of a 229-room, mixed-use hotel development on a 1.93-acre parcel at the corner of West Beach Boulevard and West 1st Street. "This is the type of transportation project we envisioned for the beach area when we adopted Vision 2025 and committed to make a 'make it happen' mentality," said Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft in a statement, referring to a plan the city adopted in 2014. The 398,000-square-foot project will be anchored by the Embassy Suites and will include a fine dining restaurant, street front retail, and a 23,000-square-foot outdoor rooftop featuring a pool, bar, lounge and event terrace overlooking the recently renovated Gulf Place beachfront. Additional hotel amenities will include nearly 12,000 square feet of conference space including a 7,800-square-foot ballroom, full-service spa, indoor pool and fitness center. The new development comes on the heels of the city completing the first two of three phases of a $15 million revitalization of its half-mile public beach. According to the city, the beachfront investment was "pivotal" in gaining franchise approval from Hilton Worldwide, which owns the Embassy Suites chain. In April, the city unveiled the most visible aspect of the project, just west of the iconic Hangout restaurant at Alabama 59 and Beach Boulevard. That portion included a new beachfront park, a 20-foot-wide boardwalk, shade structures, playground, and new landscaping features including palm trees. The project's final phase, which begins this fall, will open in about a year. It will include the further extension of the beachfront boardwalk past the Phoenix All Suites condominiums. A new parking lot and police station will be added. "We set out to create a pedestrian- and bike-friendly beachfront," said Craft. "We wanted to attract new development that would boost our shoulder seasons and stimulate businesses." He added, "This (Embassy Suites) project will be the catalyst to drive these initiatives to a new level and a model for future development by obtaining LLE certification and utilizing flood proofing construction techniques." Said Durham: "This project has been a true public-private partnership from the start. We would not be announcing this project without the city's vision and commitment to Gulf Place and beyond. Their investment will yield returns and spur additional private investment for decades to come." Gulf Shores will join Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery and Tuscaloosa as the only cities in Alabama to boast an Embassy Suites hotel. Grant Brown, a city of Gulf Shores spokesman, said negotiations with Hilton Worldwide have been going for over two years. The city submitted a request for proposals to hotel developers for a project located near its beachfront. Blake Phelps, the economic development coordinator with Gulf Shores, said the city has agreed in principle to "utilize economic development tools available to us to facilities this project without the city" assuming any debt or additional risk. He said the specifics of the development agreement will be presented to the Gulf Shores City Council at an upcoming meeting. The development team expects to complete all necessary permitting by the end of 2018 and begin construction in early 2019. Construction is expected to take place for 22 months, Brown said, with an opening targeted for the beginning of the summer of 2021. "This new Embassy Suites will add greatly to the current inventory of hotels and other lodging options that span our coastline," said Herb Malone, CEO of Gulf Shores & Orange Beach Tourism. "This is the perfect project for this location and we anxiously await the grand opening." This story was corrected at 1:37 p.m. on Tuesday, June 19, 2018, to state that the city of Gulf Shores will consider a development agreement that could include some economic development incentives. Four inmates have already committed suicide this year in Alabama state prisons - one on death row and three in solitary confinement units. In all of 2014, the Department of Corrections reported just one inmate suicide, and last year there were four suicides in Alabama prisons over 12 months. Four suicides may sound like a small number for a prison system that houses about 21,000 inmates. But if the trend continues for the remainder of 2018, the inmate suicide rate in Alabama's prisons will be about 40 suicides per 100,000 inmates this year, ten times higher than the rate the DOC reported four years ago. In 2014 - the latest year for which such data is available from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics - there were 249 inmate suicides in state prisons across the nation. That's a rate of about 18.4 suicides per 100,000 inmates, or less than half the rate Alabama's prisons are experiencing so far this year. The Southern Poverty Law Center on Wednesday issued a statement blaming the Alabama prison system's "dramatic increase" in inmate suicides largely on the DOC's failure to take adequate steps to improve the conditions of its solitary confinement units and its treatment of mentally ill inmates. "As far as we can tell, the state has done very little beyond promising to improve conditions in Alabama prisons," Maria Morris, senior supervising attorney for the SPLC, said in the statement. "We continue to see the mentally ill kept in extreme isolation, and this is driving a steep rise in suicides." While reducing prison suicide rates is a difficult and complex task, multiple attorneys told AL.com that there are a number of concrete steps the DOC should take to begin that process in Alabama's overcrowded state correctional facilities. Those steps include boosting staffing levels, decreasing the number of mentally ill people held in isolation, fixing faulty solitary confinement cells, and improving the living conditions in solitary confinement units. Dr. Edward Kern, who was appointed in April 2018 as the DOC's first director of psychiatry, said in a statement issued by the department Friday that the DOC is already working to address the issue of inmate suicides. "ADOC is developing a comprehensive strategy for suicide prevention to go along with the changes already implemented in response to the court" following a June 2017 court ruling that "ordered the state to enter mediation and develop a remedial plan" to address a number of mental health care issues, the DOC statement said. A marked uptick A key step toward bringing down the suicide rate would be to reduce the number of inmates - and particularly inmates with diagnosed mental illnesses - in the state's solitary confinement units, according to lawyers and experts who study such remedies. And yet, the DOC has instead seen a marked uptick in the number and percentage of mentally ill people incarcerated in its solitary confinement - also known segregation or "seg" - units since 2014. In January 2014, 196 prisoners on the DOC's mental health caseload were being held in segregation units statewide, a number that represented 17.7 percent of the 1,096 people in such units at the time, according to data collected by the SPLC. As of January 2018, there were 274 prisoners on the mental health caseload incarcerated in seg units, or 25.5 percent of the 1,076 people who were in such units. The increase in the use of solitary confinement to house mentally ill inmates creates a situation in which suicide is more likely, according to experts including Lisa Borden, an attorney with the Memphis-based firm Baker Donelson and co-counsel in a lawsuit against the DOC over prison conditions. Jamie Wallace, a client of Borden's, committed suicide in his cell at Bullock Correctional Facility prison in December 2016, less than two weeks after he testified in the trial in that case, which challenges the adequacy of the Alabama prison system's mental health care. "Less use of segregation would absolutely make an enormous difference, in my opinion," Borden said Thursday. "When you have hundreds and hundreds of people in units that need that level of supervision, that's a big problem and you need lots of staff to make that feasible." Kern said in the DOC's Friday statement that though mental illness is often linked to suicide, a study released earlier this month by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated "that 'many factors contribute to suicide,' and that despite the strong association between mental illness and suicide, research 'has found that more than half of people who died by suicide did not have a known diagnosed mental-health condition at the time of death.'" The study looked at all suicides, not just those that took place within correctional settings. The DOC added that "increasing the number of mental health professionals available to provide treatment within ADOC has been and remains a top priority ... The department has increased the number of clinical positions, including psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, psychologists and licensed counselors, and is working with Wexford Health Sources to fill these positions." Understaffed, overcrowded Meanwhile, the DOC faces both a severe staffing shortage and overcrowding crisis, which means that solitary units often go without proper levels of supervision, which increases the likelihood of inmates committing suicide, according to Maria Morris. "They have a system that is putting people at an unconscionable and unconstitutionally high risk of harm," Morris said Thursday. "Unfortunately, in the Department of Corrections they are not staffing [segregation] units anywhere near as well as they should be because of staffing shortages throughout the whole correctional system." In January 2017, AL.com reported on internal DOC documents that showed that barely half of the posts at Holman Correctional Facility were staffed on two nights in October 2016. On one of those nights, a single officer was tasked with keeping an eye on both the prison's death row and segregation unit. DOC spokesman Bob Horton said at the time that the segregation unit alone "should be staffed with two roving correctional officers, a supervisor and one additional officer," and that "severe understaffing creates significant security and safety issues for both staff and inmates" in prisons across the state. The DOC said in its Friday statement that the DOC is taking steps to boost staffing levels in its prisons. "To address the correctional understaffing problem, in March 2018, ADOC implemented an institutional realignment plan by closing Draper Correctional Facility in Elmore County and moving correctional officers and staff to nearby institutions housing more than 7,000 inmates; increasing correctional staffing levels at these facilities by more than 10 percent," the statement said. Still, Borden said that the situation remains at a crisis point, and that inmates are often left alone in solitary confinement units for hours at a time. "During a [court] hearing we had yesterday there was some discussion that the ADOC's own regulations say they should have security checks in seg units every 30 minutes, but that is actually the case almost nowhere," she said. "So you'll have periods of hours with no officer checking on them." Design flaws Even if the DOC significantly reduced the number of inmates in segregation, flaws in the design of many Alabama prisons' solitary confinement cells that make it easier for inmates to kill themselves would remain a concern, according to multiple attorneys who are involved in lawsuits against the department. Some segregation unit cells have ceiling light fixtures or cell doors with exposed bars from which inmates can hang themselves, they say. And many are each served by a single water pipe that feeds into both a metal combined toilet-sink unit and a fire sprinkler directly overhead. That setup creates an opportunity for inmates to kill themselves, according to Morris. "If you want to kill yourself, you can climb up on the sink and hang yourself from the sprinkler head," she said. The design quirk is one the DOC could fix by running new lengths of pipe to different parts of cell ceilings so the sprinklers could be installed in locations that are not directly above the toilet-sink units. The DOC did not respond to specific questions about the design of its solitary confinement cells. Alternatively, the DOC could install "sprinklers that are designed in a way to avoid the problem of people being able to hang themselves from them," Morris said. "Basically you want sprinklers that give way to any kind of pressure." Some prison systems in other states have made these sorts of fixes in order to reduce the ability of inmates to commit suicide. But performing such work in all of Alabama's state prisons - where sprinklers installed directly over toilet-sink units is "a pretty universal setup," according to Morris - would likely cost millions of dollars, and the DOC has repeatedly stated in recent years that budgetary constraints limit its ability to make all manner of upgrades to its prisons. On Jan. 14, 2017, Anil Mujumdar, an attorney with the Birmingham firm Zarzaur Mujumdar & Debrosse, asked DOC Commissioner Jeff Dunn during the trial challenging the adequacy of the prison system's mental health care if he would "prioritize cost savings on sprinkler heads over the value of life," according to a trial transcript. Dunn responded that "[t]he value of a life is much greater than the cost of a sprinkler head. But to the specific detail as to the hundreds of items in a particular contract, I think that would have to be dealt with in concrete, in the sense of at the time, to determine." James Tucker, the executive director of the Alabama Disabilities Advocacy Program - one of the outfits representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the DOC challenging the adequacy of the prison system's mental health care - argues that inmate safety should trump budgetary concerns. "In any environment in which health care is being provided to persons who have serious mental health needs, there should be breakaway construction and a broad review of all aspects of physical setting so that any physical structure that can be used in completing a suicide can be removed," he said. "Yes, the objection of cost is made, but we're talking about human lives here." Isolated for years The fact that some inmates are left in solitary confinement for months or even years at a time likely also contributes to the high rate of suicide in Alabama's state prisons, according to lawyers and inmates. "Back in December 2016, we were aware of numerous people who had been in solitary confinement for years on end, sometimes with a couple of short breaks," Morris said. "The time I was last in Holman's seg unit, which was 2016, there was a person who was in solitary since 2003, but he's an outlier." Psychological studies have repeatedly shown that solitary confinement can wreak havoc on the mental health of inmates, according to a 2015 review of the literature by Mary Murphy Corcoran of New York University's Department of Applied Psychology. "Confined inmates experience a multitude of psychological effects, including emotional, cognitive, and psychosis-related symptoms ... Longer stays in solitary confinement are associated with greater mental health symptoms that have serious emotional and behavioral consequences," Corcoran wrote. As such, many experts advocate a total ban on solitary confinement of mentally ill individuals and argue that even people without mental health diagnoses should never be isolated for long periods of time. In April 2016, the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, a non-profit advocacy group, issued a position statement with a list of 17 "guiding principles" for the use of solitary confinement in correctional facilities. The first two principles were: "Prolonged (greater than 15 consecutive days) solitary confinement is cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and harmful to an individual's health," and "Juveniles, mentally ill individual (sic) and pregnant women should be excluded from solitary confinement of any duration." Yet the DOC continues to house inmates in solitary confinement for periods greatly exceeding 15 days. And as of January, 274 prisoners with mental health diagnoses were incarcerated in seg units across the state. Poor conditions One more problem that lawyers and inmates say contributes to suicides is the dismal physical state of the solitary confinement units in Alabama's prisons. Conditions are so poor in many facilities, they say, that they contribute to the breaking of inmates' will to live. The inmates confined in the dozens of cells in the three-tier seg unit at Holman, for example, are subjected to terrible conditions, according to Morris. "Many of them lack electric light, and they get very little natural light through the window. It's incredibly loud, because the sound just echoes and bounces. There's very little staff in there," she said. "When someone in the unit realizes that there is a problem, either a mental health crisis, or someone's committing suicide or having a heart attack, they all bang on the walls incredibly loudly, and maybe someone will come 20 or 30 minutes later - maybe. A lot of them reported starting fires to get someone to come help." The segregation unit at Bibb Correctional Facility houses inmates in "nasty," inhumane conditions, according to an inmate in an Alabama prison who spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for his personal safety. The inmate, who spoke with AL.com last week via telephone and Facebook Messenger, spent two weeks in Bibb's seg unit but has since been moved to a different state prison. He said the cells in Bibb's solitary unit are "filthy," have "no ventilation whatsoever," and that correctional officers and "maintenance don't care" about the conditions in the cells. He added that inmates in Bibb's seg unit are not given adequate health care and that often "inmates are beaten" while incarcerated there. "They place inmates with mental health care issues, deprived of basic necessities such as mattresses, etc.," the inmate wrote via Facebook Messenger. "It's set up for torture unless a man has a very strong mind." Mentally ill people subjected to such conditions, in addition to dealing with other issues like the overwhelming stench and the fact that they are locked in their cells more than 22 hours per day, often see their mental health degrade further, which increases the risk of suicide attempts, the lawyers said. "They are horrific, atrocious environments, that are dark and dank and filthy, where people are in these cells that have just a tiny window into the hallway and then a tray slot for their meals and that's their view outside of their disgusting cell," Borden said. "Inside the cells there's plenty of ways for someone to kill themselves should they become so inclined." The DOC did not respond to specific questions about the conditions in its segregation units. "Our department is committed to safely and humanely incarcerating every individual in its custody and providing proper and appropriate care for those with mental illness," Dunn said in the Friday statement. "We will continue to follow the court's order, which includes working with the plaintiffs to remedy challenges that is (sic) in the best interest of those receiving mental-health care in the state prison system." The Jefferson County Board of Education approved a resolution seeking the resignation of member Donna Pike, after a Birmingham activist last week called her a 'racist' because of posts she made on Facebook. Pike denied the claim and was not at the meeting Tuesday morning. Pike has not responded to request from AL.com for comment. Board president Oscar Mann, after reading the resolution, said since last Tuesday's board meeting, it had been "a very taxing and trying time for many reasons." Mann brought copies of 29 television and print, 11 radio and talk shows, four videos, and numerous comments that were made in social media that involved the district. Mann said board members also received phone calls and emails. Mann said the resolution was carefully considered and researched by their legal counsel before taking action. The resolution was completed on Monday afternoon. "This action is in the best interest of the students and the district," he said. "We don't support those types of actions (Pike's social media posts)," board member Ronnie Dixon said. Dixon said it isn't possible for board members to "fire" Pike. "It is a personal responsibility of Ms. Pike," Dixon said. "For the good of the district, it's the right thing to do, but the board doesn't have the authority to make somebody do the right thing." Board member Martha Bouyer, the only other member attending, also voted for the resolution. In her remarks, Bouyer said, "I agree with this measure. We stand for every child, every employee, every family represented by Jefferson County schools." The resolution will be delivered to Pike today, Mann said. It is completely up to Pike to choose whether or not to resign, he said. The resolution read in part, "The postings in question are repugnant to the Board's values and undermine public confidence in the Board's willingness and ability to provide equitable educational and employment opportunities in an inclusive and racially unbiased environment." "Recent social media postings by Board Member Donna Pike are divisive if not inflammatory, have generated unflattering local, statewide, and national media attention and a negative public response, and have diverted time and attention from the District's pressing educational needs and challenges." Jefferson County Board of Education resolution calling for board member Donna Pike's resignation, approved by a 3 to 0 vote on June 19, 2018, at a special-called board meeting in Birmingham, Ala. Center Point High School Principal Van Phillips was among the nearly 25 Jefferson County principals who attended the meeting. Phillips said he was "horrified" when he realized why his phone was ringing endlessly during a conference last week He said he watched the video of Pike's remarks and what really bothered him was her reaction to the accusations. "No contrition. No attempt to apologize," he said. Phillips, who is African-American, said it wasn't personal for him. The district's student body and faculty is diverse, he said. "When you're going to encounter people of all backgrounds," he said, "your heart has to be right." Craig Goolsby has two children in Jefferson County schools. During the meeting, Goolsby, choking back tears, said he was deeply saddened. Goolsby said Pike should "do the 36,000 kids in this system a favor and let's get someone on this board that can carry themselves in a manner that is professional, that cares about these kids like I do." Goolsby went further, saying he witnessed other behavior from Pike he said was "erratic" and "unprofessional." He said he doesn't think Pike takes her responsibility as a school board member seriously, given her behavior. Jefferson County Superintendent Craig Pouncey was attending a superintendents' conference in south Alabama, but sent this statement to AL.com: "The board certainly had it within its authority to address the public's concerns. I have personally been dealing with this from concerned parents, employees, and the public as a whole. As public officials we must never forget our obligations to those we serve. All of them! I support the board's actions wholeheartedly." During the meeting, Mann said the board does not have the power to "fire" Pike, but can only ask her to resign. There is no ability to recall her through an election process, either, he said. The resolution read in part, "The postings in question are repugnant to the Board's values and undermine public confidence in the Board's willingness and ability to provide equitable educational and employment opportunities in an inclusive and racially unbiased environment." The resolution continued: "Recent social media postings by Board Member Donna Pike are divisive if not inflammatory, have generated unflattering local, statewide, and national media attention and a negative public response, and have diverted time and attention from the District's pressing educational needs and challenges." Alabama Association of School Board Executive Director Sally Smith told AL.com last week that board members certainly have First Amendment rights, but that must be balanced with the consequences of posting material that the community could view unfavorably. "Board members," Smith said, "should always be cognizant that what they do as individuals does carry over as a board member and could impact the view of the board as a whole." School board members, whether appointed or elected, in Alabama are required to sign an affirmation to abide by a code of conduct upon being seated in their district. Pike signed this affirmation in November 2016. Board members are also required to undergo training each year. A Jefferson County Board of Education spokesperson confirmed that Pike has completed all required training. Smith told AL.com Tuesday morning that she is not aware of any other Alabama board of education asking for a member's resignation since she became Executive Director in 2007. Though the images were posted around the beginning of June, it wasn't until the board's June 12 meeting when Carlos Chaverst showed a packed conference room images of not only that post, but others showing Pike supported Roseanne Barr, whose show was recently canceled by ABC after Barr referred to Jarrett as an "ape" on Twitter that the public began to weigh in. "Ms. Donna Pike," Chaverst said during the meeting, "is a staunch racist on the school board." Pike admitted she shared the post and defended doing so. "I shared it, and I'm not sorry I did, and I meant it because it shows hypocrisy in our country," Pike said. "Some people can get away with it and some people can't. It was not racist." Later, Pike said she did not agree with what Roseanne said, but if Roseanne got fired, then others should be fired, too. Pike did not say specifically who should get fired. A school board member in Marion, Ind. recently resigned (and apologized) after sharing the exact same post as Pike on Facebook. "I by no means whatsoever condone the words that Roseanne put in her tweet," board member Cathy Moritz wrote after quickly deleting the post. "I unfortunately clicked a button on Facebook too quickly without knowing the facts and am truly sorry." Soon thereafter, Moritz resigned "for the integrity of this board and out of love for this community." Pike said last week she would not resign her elected position over this, having first been elected in 2016 by winning the Republican primary runoff by 15 votes, out of 2,577 cast. Superintendent Craig Pouncey cautioned board members at last week's meeting about posting on social media. "In the public positions that we all are in, we have to be sensitive toward others," Pouncey said. "Because we have a surrogate responsibility as a leader whether we're actually in our jobs or not." Pouncey said teachers are under the same directive. "Teachers holds a special place in the public trust. And whether they're at school from eight to three is immaterial in terms of the public's perception to them." Pouncey said teachers should always be aware that the public is taking note of their behaviors. Pouncey released a statement Thursday evening emphasizing Pike's posts did not reflect the district's values. Freely accessible local news is vital. Please power our reporters and help keep us independent with a donation today. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe (Photo by IcaWise via Flickr) The high cost of housing may be keeping job seekers from moving to California. Business leaders say it's challenging to recruit new workers -- and to keep existing ones. This issue is the focus of the latest installment of The California Dream series -- a statewide media collaboration including LAist's cohort, KPCC. Housing costs were still a concern for 75 percent of large employers in Los Angeles, according to a 2017 University of Southern California survey. The survey also asked if companies were losing workers due to unaffordable housing. Some weren't sure, but among those who did answer, 70 percent said yes. USC public policy professor Raphael Bostic said if housing costs continue to push certain workers out of state, California's economic growth could be affected. The prospect of losing people has even led some employers -- like the Los Angeles Unified School District -- to develop affordable housing options for some workers. Even with the housing issues, plenty of workers are still drawn to sunny California, says Los Angeles recruiter Matt Stone. "Living near the beach, having that active lifestyle, being able to see the Hollywood stars every once in awhile," Stone said. "Those are the reasons for the people who aren't from here." If you want to tell the #CADream project about your experience looking for work in California, hit up their Facebook group. The California Dream series is a statewide media collaboration of CALmatters, KPBS, KPCC, KQED and Capital Public Radio with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the James Irvine Foundation. This is an opinion column. Mr. U.S. Attorney General: please consider this a sincere and heartfelt invitation to attend my Sunday morning Bible study class the next time you're in Birmingham. And bring your friends. I mean it. Really. Like Jeff Sessions, I am a Christian. I attended one church or another throughout most of my life (alas, like many folks, there were gaps) and do so now. I don't claim to be a Bible scholar, but, as in other areas, I strive to learn, grow and know more. By now, we all know Deacon Sessions last week cited parts of Romans 13, written by the prolific Apostle Paul, to justify the horrific administration policy--not the law--of separating children from their parents as they cross our southern border seeking refuge, asylum or simply a fresh start in a nation still deemed by many (miraculously enough) as a land of hope and opportunity. He called the scripture a "wise command ... to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful." Again, I'm not a Bible scholar, but I know scripture, taken without context, can be scripted to mean just about anything you want. As abhorrent as it may be. Evil leaders, many of whom, like Sessions, were government officials, have historically cited the Bible to variously justify apartheid, the Holocaust, lynchings, slavery and other massive acts of terror. Governments used it to squelch uprisings, like the one--yes--that led to the founding of this nation. They used it to justify unjust laws--and immoral policies. As you read this, more than 11,000 immigrant children are being detained from their parents by our federal government. Not by law--but by policy. Donald Trump's policy, one he could waiver at the stroke of a pen. The two previous administrations used the so-called "catch and release" approach when people were caught at our borders without legal documentation. It allowed them to retain their freedom and keep their families together while awaiting a hearing before a judge. Today, Trump and his minions are choosing the Draconian path, ripping children from their parents' arms and holding them in tents, converted department stores, and other facilities. Trump now has 11,432 migrant children in federal custody. Separated from their parents. Housed in old Walmarts and tent cities. This is still a democracy, so it is happening IN YOUR NAME. We cannot and will not accept this moral outrage. Jim Himes (@jahimes) June 15, 2018 By most accounts, the children are reasonably well treated. Photographer John Moore, who took the now-famous photograph of the Honduran toddler crying after her mother had to put her down to be body searched by border officers after a debilitating and dangerous month-long trek across Mexico, says he's seen many of the facilities where the children are kept. "They have food, milk, and get plenty of exercise," he told CNN. "They have all they need; what they don't have is their parents." The recent images of bawling children and grieved parents unleashed a barrage of criticism, largely from expected political enemies but also from Republicans and faith leaders who have almost unfailingly backed Trump. Former First Lady Laura Bush on Sunday called the practice "immoral'. On Monday, Bishop David Graves, head of the Montgomery-based Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church--Sessions' own denomination--called the separations "unjust acts." "It deeply troubles me and burdens my heart that innocent immigrant children are being separated from their parents," he said. Last week, the same denomination released a statement calling the policy "antithetical to the teachings of Christ." Many Birmingham faith leaders agree: "Those who use the law will be judged by the law," shared Rev. John L. Cantelow, Jr., pastor of Sixth Avenue Baptist Church (and my own pastor). "So, if you do not show mercy, you will not be shown mercy since all of us, at some point, are guilty of breaking the law of men and God." Children listen to speakers during an immigration family separation protest on Monday, June 18, 2018, in Phoenix. Pastor Van Moody of The Worship Center cited the 10th verse of Romans 13, which Sessions conveniently omitted: Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. By ignoring it, by continuing to do harm to our neighbors--whom, by the way, God does not define by geography, nationality or race--Sessions, Moody said, is a modern-clone of the Levite and the Priest, both of whom passed by a man who had been attacked and stripped of his belongings by robbers before the Samaritan stopped, treated his wounds then placed the man on his donkey, delivering him to an inn, where he paid for the man to stay. "Jeff Sessions," said Moody, "is not a good Christian, either." "Jesus is our example in all things," Moody said, citing 1 Peter 2:21. "Since that is the case, the question for any good Christian is: How did Jesus handle this issue? Or the more popular, WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?). The answer is not hard to find. Jesus cared about those who were disenfranchised and marginalized." "Paul was speaking of righteous persons and we're definitely not talking about righteous leaders," added Rev. Gregory Clarke, pastor of New Hope Baptist Church. "There is a purpose for government authority. At some time, though, political leaders need to be godly in order for this [scripture] to apply. We've not only lowered our spiritual standards, but also our moral standards." Of course, the criticism only emboldened an administration long void of compassion for "neighbors" unlike them. Monday, 600-plus Methodists sought church charges against Sessions. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump's Secretary of Homeland Security, was absolutely indignant in her defiance, questioning even that some who cross the border as family members may not be so. "We do not apologize," she said Monday. "We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to the country as a family unit are, in fact, a family." It seems Trump is all but holding these children hostage, demanding from Congress a ransom of $25 billion to build the border wall he promised his supporters during the campaign before he signs any meaningful and merciful immigration reform bill. Of course, that's no surprise. It's long been clear he enacts policies only to please his base. But this one just might finally backfire. Few things bridge the nation's acerbic political divide like family, especially children. People who scream ugliness at each other over health care, tariffs, tax cuts or athletes kneeling during the anthem generally agree that ripping children from their parents for what is, after all, a misdemeanor, is just dead wrong. And contrary to at least one thing I learned in years of Bible study: that the two greatest of God's commandments--love Him and love our neighbors as we love ourselves--trump everything else. Especially a policy that pulls our neighbors apart. Roy S. Johnson's column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Hit me up at rjohnson@al.com or/and follow me at twitter.com/roysj. Listen to the above recording of children crying at border detention center, which sparked more outrage. Dozens of people protesting the United States' immigration policy gathered Monday morning (June 18) outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, where U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is giving a speech. The protesters at 8:15 a.m. held signs mainly about the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy and resulting separation of families. They started off standing in the neutral ground on Convention Center Boulevard and later linked arms and marched toward the convention center, chanting "No Sessions, No KKK, no fascist USA." At one point, the protesters linked arms and tried to push their way into the convention center, but police officers from various local agencies prevented the group from entering the building. One officer with St. John the Baptist Parish could be seen forcefully pushing a woman back toward the crowd as the group was moved away from the Convention Center door. As the officer shoved her, the woman continued chanting with the crowd and sat down, holding a railing to remain steady. Mary Yanik, an attorney for the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, and William Quigley with the Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic and Center for Social Justice, said Monday that a total of five protesters had been detained by officers shortly before 11 a.m. All five were issued summons for disturbing the peace while protesting and were released on the scene, according to Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office spokesman Phil Stelly. Sessions was giving a speech at the National Sheriffs' Association conference on Monday morning at the convention center, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Rep. Steve Scalise. (Warning: The below video from the protest contains explicit language) Nearly 2,000 children have been taken from their parents since Sessions announced the "zero tolerance" policy, which directs Homeland Security officials to refer all cases of illegal entry into the United States for prosecution. Border Patrol officials argue they have to crack down on migrants and separate adults from children as a deterrent to others. Previously parents who crossed the border with their children asking for asylum were allowed to remain together until their cases were heard in immigration court in the U.S. During the New Orleans protest, authorities blocked Convention Center Boulevard after one of the protesters was hit by a truck. The truck was driving toward Poydras Street when it appeared to have been surrounded by protestors as the group moved from the neutral ground to the street. A few moments later, the driver hit the woman about 20 feet down the street from where the protestors gathered. Susan Morris said she was trying to get out of the way of the truck when it hit her. She didn't think she was intentionally hit, but it wasn't immediately clear if the driver stopped after she was injured. A police officer came out to take her statement, she said. Police interviewed the driver and no charges were filed and no arrests were made related to the collision, NOPD spokesman Aaron Looney said. Morris said she had cuts on her knee and elbow and blood could be seen below her pant leg. She said she hurt her head, but she thinks she's OK. She said she was at the protest because of her concerns about immigration. "This isn't what our country is about, taking children and caging them and they are doing this in our land," she said. "Where does it go from here? Where does it end?" After a fire truck and additional police arrived at the protest, about 30 attendees of the National Sheriffs' Association convention came out of the building. They declined to comment about the protest, but they were filming it with their phones. Protesters said they found out about the rally late last night and early Monday morning. "I'm a mom. I'm an American. It sickens me," said Litzy Carlson, a mom of three who found out about the demonstration through a text message at 7:30 a.m. Monday. Chloe Tucker said she got an email Sunday night letting her know about the protest. "To get that message on Father's Day, it makes you think and want to show up," Tucker said. Several of the protestors said that they had hoped to join the hundreds of people who gathered to march at a border crossing outside of El Paso, Texas on Sunday (June 17) to a tent encampment that is housing migrant children separated from their parents at the border, according to several news outlets. "I couldn't be there," said Wes Cheek. "So I'm here." Reporters were allowed to briefly visit an old warehouse in South Texas over the weekend where hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. Read more about the facility. -- The Associated Press and NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune photographer Michael DeMocker and reporter Carlie Kollath Wells contributed to this story. Airbus and Bombardier may have scored a big new customer for the jets they plan to build in Mobile, according to industry news outlets. A founder of JetBlue plans to launch a new airline, and he reportedly wants 60 new jets, at least some of which could end up being built in Alabama. On June 8, Airbus and Bombardier announced that they had won regulatory approval for a joint venture called the C Series Aircraft Limited Partnership (CSALP). The project gives Airbus a majority stake in building and selling a new commuter jet designed and developed by Bombardier; plans call for Airbus to build a new assembly line alongside the one where it constructs its own A320 family aircraft in Mobile. The C Series jets are similar to the A320 line but smaller, seating roughly 100 to 130 people depending on model. Bombardier and other backers think they're tailor-made to suit a lucrative market niche. As of June 8, the biggest order for the C Series had been placed by Delta, which ordered 75 of them in April 2016. (That development triggered a trade complaint by Boeing, though the ruling ultimately favored Bombardier.) In recent days, Airline Weekly reported that entrepreneur David Neeleman plans a new airline tentatively named Moxy. Neeleman previously has been involved with JetBlue, Canadian line WestJet and Brazilian line Azul, among other ventures. Airline Weekly said that Neeleman was lining up $100 million in startup capital, but that he had declined comment. According to a Bloomberg report citing another industry publication, Moxy has secured orders for 60 CS 300 jets and is "soliciting proposals from Chinese lessors to finance 18 of the aircraft for delivery between 2020 and 2022." Airbus and Bombardier have yet to reveal a detailed timetable for the planned Mobile assembly line. Officials broke ground for the current Airbus Final Assembly Line in April 2013, and in April 2016 the FAL delivered its first jet -- which, coincidentally, went to JetBlue. While there's no guarantee as yet what jets will be built where, that three-year timetable suggests that a new Mobile FAL could be operational in time to produce at least some of the aircraft wanted by Moxy. Currently, all C Series jets are built in Mirabel, Quebec, near Montreal. Airbus and Bombardier will officially close their partnership on July 1. That's two weeks before the Farnborough Air Show in England, a prime occasion to announce new orders. A Virginia school that once bore the name of a Confederate general has been renamed to honor the country's first black president. The school board in Richmond, Virginia voted 6-1 to rename J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School to Barack Obama Elementary School, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The school, which opened in 1922, was named for James Ewell Brown Stuart, known as "Jeb," a Virginia native and Confederate cavalry leader who died in the Civil War. "It's incredibly powerful that in the capital of the Confederacy, where we had a school named for an individual who fought to maintain slavery, that now we're renaming that school after the first black president," Superintendent Jason Kamras told the newspaper. "A lot of our kids, and our kids at J.E.B. Stuart, see themselves in Barack Obama." The Virginia school's student population is more than 90 percent African-American. Students, teachers and administrators, as well as the public, were asked for their suggestions on renaming the school. Other suggestions included Oliver Hill Elementary in honor of a prominent civil rights attorney; Barbara Johns Elementary for a civil rights leader; and Henry Marsh Elementary for the first black mayor of Richmond. The student pick for the school was Northside Elementary, based on its location, with Obama finishing second. The administration opted to use the Obama name, however, a move approved by the school board. The Virginia school isn't the first to honor Obama. An elementary school in New Haven, Connecticut was named for the former president, as was a school in Upper Marlboro, Maryland and in Jackson, Mississippi. More than 600 United Methodist clergy and church members are bringing church law charges against U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a fellow United Methodist, over a zero tolerance U.S. immigration policy that includes separating children from parents apprehended for crossing into the U.S. illegally, according to the United Methodist News Service. A June 18 letter signed by 640 clergy and church members accused Sessions, a Mobile, Alabama church member, of child abuse, immorality, racial discrimination and dissemination of doctrines contrary to the standards of doctrine of the United Methodist Church. The letter said the charges against him are based on violations of Paragraph 2702.3 of the denomination's Book of Discipline. Twelve Alabama clergy and church members signed the letter including: Joe Openshaw, Northern Alabama Conference Bobby Prince, Northern Alabama Conference Beth Ann Higgs, North Alabama Conference Lisbeth Ash, Alabama-West Florida Conference Rev. Michelle Ozier Wallace, North Alabama Conference Rev. Denise Mullaney, North Alabama Conference Rev. Dr. Sam Persons Parkes, Alabama-West Florida Conference Rev. Paula Champion Jones, North Alabama Conference Kimberly Glass, North Alabama Conference Jamie Glass, North Alabama Conference Alberta Coulter, North Alabama Conference Paula Crosby, North Alabama Conference In the letter, the signees accused him of child abuse in reference to separating children from their parents and holding them in "mass incarceration facilities." He's accused of racial discrimination for his alleged attempts to criminalize Black Lives Matter and other racial justice groups and targeted incarceration of those perceived as Muslim or Latinx. The signees also said his "misuse of Romans 13 to indicate the necessity of obedience to secular law, which is in stark contrast to Disciplinary commitments to supporting freedom of conscience and resistance to unjust laws," constituted spreading false doctrine. The United Methodist Church criticized Sessions' use of Romans 13 to justify the zero-tolerance immigration policy last week. Church officials said the complaint has been emailed to Sessions' home church in Alabama, and to a Northern Virginia church that Wright said he understands Sessions regularly attends. David Graves, Bishop of the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, the conference Sessions' home church belongs to, released a statement Monday calling separating parents and children "unnecessarily cruel and detrimental to the well-being of parents and children." Graves did not comment on the church's discipline against Sessions, according to the News Service. You can read the full June 18 letter and read the names of all the signees below. A Complaint Regarding Jefferson Sessions by Anna Beahm on Scribd This is an opinion column. As my wife reminds me daily, our son is listening to everything we say. It doesn't matter he isn't yet three years old. His mind is a better recording device than whatever the NSA might have embedded in our smart speaker. He eats at our table. He plays on our floor. He might look a little bit like me and a little bit more like her, but he's a sleeper spy for his generation, diligently documenting our conversations when we think he's entranced by Sesame Street. I know this to be true because, when I was his age, I spied on my family, too. At Thanksgivings, and weddings, and funerals -- whenever and wherever adults had adult conversations, I listened and tried to make sense of the things they said. "You know, if Wallace hadn't been shot, he might have won." In my mind's filing cabinet, I kept this one in a special folder. I didn't know at first what it meant, but I knew it was significant because I heard it so many times. Gradually, I filled in enough blanks to understand that nothing about this President Wallace alternate timeline would have been good. It was a reminder that the American electorate had a dangerous impulsiveness -- what might be waiting for us if Uncle Sam stopped at the liquor store on the way home. I comforted myself with wrong-headed assumptions -- that we had made progress and learned from our mistakes. America recognized the genocide of natives had been wrong, I thought. It understood the Jim Crow South was untenable and cruel, and that the Japanese internment had been unnecessary. Women's fortunes had improved and things were looking up for the LGBT community, too. America's crimes were in its past, and in its future was an opportunity to atone for those sins by living up to our nation's promise. We elected a black president, right? I might never have been more wrong about anything in my life. The Alabamafication of America is not a joke anymore. It is a reality. Wallace is dead, but his politics live. Open your eyes. Wallace won. Today, along our nation's border, agents of our government -- working in our name and paid with our money -- are tearing families apart, on orders from a man we elected, Donald Trump, and another man that guy appointed -- Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Alabama's own. These families might have entered this country illegally, but they are still families, deserving of mercy and dignity. However, our president and our attorney general have made it clear that these tactics are meant to deter others. Perhaps it's bloodless cruelty, but it is cruelty, still. It is a form of torture. And thousands of those we're torturing are children, some no older than my son. Meanwhile, Sessions has defended his actions with a lot of sloppy Bible talk. "I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order," Sessions said. There's an argument to be made here -- and many have made it already -- that Sessions didn't read far enough in that chapter, to where Paul talks about love being the ultimate fulfillment of the law. But that misses the point. Sessions doesn't care about Jesus any more than he cares about immigrants. Forrest Gump might have known what love is, but not this Alabamian. Instead, Sessions skipped over the red-letter stuff he didn't like and probably found his verse by typing hate speech into Google. The only moral instruction Sessions could ever find in the Bible's pages is how to crucify somebody. If you question his government, according to Sessions, you are questioning God. Using religion to defend the indefensible is old politics in Alabama. The exact passage Sessions quoted was once used to convince slaves to accept their bondage and obey their masters. Unfortunately, we in Alabama have seen how this ends, even if we haven't taken history's lessons to heart any more than the Bible's. What's happening on our nation's border is HB56 all over again -- the toughest-in-the-nation anti-immigration law passed by the Alabama Legislature and signed by our governor in 2011. In the last seven years, we've seen the moral authority of HB56's authors laid bare. The bill's state Senate co-sponsor, Scott Beason, became a national embarrassment when, while an informant in a federal corruption investigation, he recorded himself calling black people "aborigines." Micky Hammon, the House sponsor, recently pleaded guilty to mail fraud charges after he spent campaign funds on a get-rich-quick scheme that left him broke. Governor Robert Bentley, who signed the bill into law, pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and resigned from office after he betrayed his wife and used campaign funds to pay his love interest. The politics of hate leads to sepsis of the soul. But to see where the Alabamafication of America ends, there is no better example than Wallace himself. In Spike Lee's documentary, "Four Little Girls," Lee interviews Wallace in his last years. The scene is a Dorian Gray portrait of where the politics of division and hate leads those who dabble in it. Before his end, the former Alabama governor suffered through a living death. In front of the camera, a barely intelligible Wallace mutters a weak defense about the good he did for African-Americans before he beckons his black nurse, Ed, to his side. Ed goes with him everywhere in the world, Wallace says. "Here is one of my best friends right here," Wallace says, tugging Ed's hand. Ed, who doesn't want to be in the picture, awkwardly withdraws his hand and sidesteps out of the frame, leaving Wallace alone again and in silence. Sometimes our rewards and punishments come to us before we're dead. If we let Wallace's politics win, something like that ugly, sad scene is waiting for us, too. Because if God doesn't judge us, our children will. And they are watching. They are listening. Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group. Want access to the best analysis and in-depth reporting about Alabama each week? Sign up for the weekly Reckon Report newsletter and follow Reckon on Facebook and Twitter. Alabama Democratic gubernatorial candidate Walt Maddox said Tuesday he opposes the controversial Trump administration policy of separating parents and children at the border, saying he would try to persuade President Trump to reconsider the policy instead of deploying Alabama National Guard Troops to the southern border. "If I were governor, I would use the power of the office to encourage the president to find a humane solution to this issue. We can protect our borders while at the same time not dividing families," Maddox said before speaking to the Tuscaloosa Rotary Club at the Indian Hills Country Club. "Our values tell us there's a better way to do this. As governor, I think you can exert that influence, and hopefully the president would listen." The Trump administration maintained that its hands are tied and that they are just following the law. Images of crying children and children being detained in cages at the border have incensed those critical of the policy. And U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions, formerly Alabama's junior senator, inflamed the tensions further last week when he cited a Bible verse to justify the policy. Maddox, currently the mayor of Tuscaloosa, said that while he has not studied the "intricacies of immigration policy," he believes the president could provide security to the country "but at the same time doing it in such a way that doesn't divide and separate families. "We're a country that's achieved great things, and it's certainly not only in our best strategic interest, it's in our best moral interest to find a way not to separate these families," Maddox said. "I just can't believe that anyone would not want that to be the intent." WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Trump administration is poised to announce its departure from the United Nations' main human rights body in its latest withdrawal from an international institution. FILE - This is a Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2008 file photo, showing a general view of the Human Rights Room (Room XX) at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Diplomats say the United States is about to quit the United Nation's main human rights body, primarily over Washington's claim that the Human Rights Council is biased against Israel. The move would be the Trump administration's latest snub of the international community. The U.S. State Department said Friday, June 15, 2018 no decision has been made to leave. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP, File) Officials say Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will deliver the verdict on the U.N. Human Rights Council in a joint appearance at the State Department on Tuesday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly preview the decision. Haley threatened the pull-out last year, citing longstanding U.S. complaints that the 47-member council is biased against Israel. But Tuesday's announcement also comes just a day after the U.N. human rights chief denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents. It also extends a broader Trump administration pattern of stepping back from international agreements and forums under the president's "America First" policy. Since taking office, the administration has announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the U.N. educational and cultural organization and the Iran nuclear deal. Other contentious moves have included slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum against key trading partners, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the U.S. Embassy to the holy city from Tel Aviv. Haley has been the driving force behind the move, which would be unprecedented in the 12-year history of the council. No country has ever dropped out voluntarily. Libya was kicked out seven years ago. The move could reinforce the perception that the Trump administration is seeking to advance Israel's agenda on the world stage, just as it prepares to unveil its long-awaited peace plan despite Palestinian outrage over the embassy relocation. Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, is visiting the Middle East this week as the White House works to lay the groundwork for unveiling the plan. Last year, Haley warned the Geneva-based council that the U.S. would withdraw if it did not end its systematic scrutiny of Israel and its alleged rights abuses against Palestinians. She denounced the council as a "forum for politics, hypocrisy and evasion" and accused member countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, China, Burundi and Saudi Arabia of failing to fulfill their duties to "uphold the highest standards" of human rights, while emphasizing what she said was the council's anti-Israel bias. Since last year, Haley's office has also pushed the council and its chief not to publish a U.N. database of companies operating in West Bank settlements, a so-called blacklist that Israel is concerned could drive companies away and cast a further pall over its presence in the Palestinian-claimed West Bank. Israel is the only country in the world whose rights record comes up for discussion at every council session, under "Item 7" on the agenda. The officials said the administration had concluded that its efforts to promote reform on the council had failed and that withdrawal was the only step it could take to demonstrate its seriousness. It was not immediately clear if the U.S. would remain a non-voting observer on the council. A full pullout by the U.S. would leave the council without one of its traditional defenders of human rights. In recent months, the United States has participated in attempts to pinpoint rights violations in places like South Sudan, Congo and Cambodia. There are 47 countries in the Human Rights Council, elected by the U.N.'s General Assembly with a specific number of seats allocated for each region of the globe. Members serve for three-year terms and can only serve two terms in a row. The United States has opted to stay out of the Human Rights Council before: the administration of President George W. Bush did so when the council was created in 2006. Item 7 on "Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories" has been part of the council's regular business almost as long as it has existed. A pullout could be largely symbolic: The United States' current term on the council ends next year, when it could revert to the observer status held by other countries that are not members. In that situation, the U.S. would be able to speak out on rights abuses, but not to vote. A key question will be where a U.S. pullout would leave Israel if its biggest and most powerful defender abandons its voting rights or drops out of the council altogether. The State Department's web site says protection of fundamental human rights was a "foundation stone" for the United States' creation over two centuries ago and that promoting respect for human rights since has been a "central goal" of U.S. foreign policy. ___ Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten in Geneva and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed. This story was updated at 7:50 p.m. June 19, 2018 to include quotes from a telephone interview with Phillip McCain and new details about how the backlash to his Facebook post is negatively impacting his life Birmingham musician Phillip McCain has brought on the wrath of social media users who are upset about an expletive-laced Facebook post he made offering "to shoot" immigrants. The post, which McCain appears to have taken down but lives on in screenshots spreading swiftly across social media, has even resulted in him being kicked out of his band Buck Wild and three venues canceling solo shows he had scheduled for the coming weeks. "I'll tell ya what I'll volunteer to shoot their a**es when they approach the border. Problem solved. No more illegal f**ks coming in here. Period," McCain's Facebook post stated. "I don't give a s**t about them, their kids, their s****y life or asylum. I care about American kids and American families. You've got to be a complete idiot to not get it, but then again we are talking about the libtard agenda. Liberalism is a mental disorder and I'm d**n sure glad that I'm not dumb s**t." A screenshot of the posting is making the rounds on social media both within Alabama and beyond. Philip McCain thinks its okay to harm innocent children. Hes a musician https://t.co/0RVSCjNT0w and this is NOT right. This is a threat. #KeepFamiliesTogether #FreeTheChildren pic.twitter.com/fevPoYZxgY Rachel Kay (@sweetsereniteee) June 19, 2018 Rachel Kay, a New York woman who helped spread the screenshot via Twitter, told AL.com that she was appalled by McCain's Facebook post. "When Phillip first stated that he would shoot innocent children/families - I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe my eyes," Kay said Tuesday evening via email. "I am glad this is getting out - we need to put an end to this hate - and any death threats. I am surprised so many people are supporting him." It is unclear exactly when McCain posted the comments on Facebook as he says his Facebook account has been deactivated for 30 due to user complaints (he was using a new account Tuesday evening), but the backlash appears to have begun on Monday. Putu Primanta, restaurant manager at Pablo's Restaurante & Cantina in Birmingham's Shops of Colonnade shopping center, told AL.com via telephone that he canceled McCain's scheduled Tuesday evening show in response to a deluge of social media messages criticizing McCain and calling on Pablo's to nix the performance. "I'm an immigrant myself, I'm from Indonesia and I work in the Mexican restaurant here, and I'm doing the booking for the restaurant," Primanta said Tuesday afternoon. "Our clientele is from many different backgrounds and I was afraid it was going to hurt our business. I'm just here trying to make a living and be friends with everybody." McCain told AL.com via telephone Tuesday evening that the response to his Facebook post is already having a significant negative impact on his life. "I lost my job in my band Buck Wild, roughly $3,000 [in expected future performance fees], and I've lost three solo gigs already. And that's all for voicing my opinion, and yes, it was harsh, but it was just an opinion," he said. He added that the Facebook post "was taken out of context. I really just meant that I would protect America's border at any cost. That's what I should have said and now I'm completely screwed." He did not, however, recant the statement entirely, instead blaming the response on people's unwillingness to listen "the truth" as he defines it. "I'm not the person I'm being made out to be right now. I'm just an American and I believe in America first, and that's something that people don't want to hear these days," he said. "When people speak the truth, they don't want to hear it these days. And now I've found myself in a s**tstorm, so to speak." According to a biography posted on McCain's personal website, he recalls that "growing up the son of a southern Baptist preacher I heard a lot of gospel tunes." The bio goes on to state that he has been in a number of bands including "Diamondback, Hail Mary, Young Geezer, Lords of Porn, 4th and One, Voodoo Jones and Hunting Delilah," and that he has "extensively traveled and played the southeast most all of my adult life." A Mobile man charged in Saturday's child abduction will appear in court for a bond hearing Tuesday morning, according to court records. John Betancourt was charged with interference with custody Sunday after police say he took a woman's vehicle and her 7-week-old daughter. Mobile police said the child's mother met Betancourt near the Family Inn at 900 West I-65 Service Road and offered him a ride. Police said they met around 9 a.m. Around 3 p.m., the woman and suspect went to Burlington Coat Factory. The 7-week-old girl was with them, police said. The woman said she gave her daughter to the suspect as they were leaving Burlington Coat Factory and asked him to take her to the car. The woman was then detained for suspected shoplifting, but was later released, police said. The woman then went outside and told police she could not find the man, her child or her car, police said. Police responded and determined an Amber Alert should be issued. At 7:12 a.m. Sunday morning, police received a tip that the vehicle involved was in the 6200 block of Old Pascagoula Road. Police found the vehicle, child and suspect. The child is in good health and was placed in the care of DHR, police said. Freely accessible local news is vital. Please power our reporters and help keep us independent with a donation today. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe Earlier this month, a flier shared on Reddit made some waves in Los Angeles. The resulting discussion thread has grown to nearly 250 comments, which range from extremely confused to really angry. The leaflet in question is jarring. It urges readers that the community members "need YOUR vote TO KEEP KOREATOWN!" and suggests that the neighborhood's borders are in danger of being repurposed to make way for "Bangladesh Town." But that's not true. The election in question is not to redraw Koreatown's physical borders. It's to decide whether or not to create a new neighborhood council in the area. Los Angeles has more than 95 neighborhood councils already, but this election specifically focuses on splitting the existing Wilshire-Center Koreatown neighborhood council into two. "Proponents for this new subdivision would like to create the Wilshire-Center Bangladesh neighborhood council within the existing council boundaries," said Chris Garcia, a city project manager in charge of L.A.'s neighborhood council elections. The existing neighborhood council encompasses a central part of Koreatown and consists of council districts 10 and 13. But Koreatown as a whole is much larger and goes beyond the neighborhood council's borders. The split would favor Little Bangladesh in terms of council jurisdiction area, according to their proposed boundary map. It would start north at Melrose Avenue and run south to 5th Street between Western and Vermont avenues. The Little Bangladesh community's effort has been met with heavy resistance in Koreatown, just the latest spat in long-simmering tension between the two neighborhoods. An official statement from the Korean American Coalition of Los Angeles accused the formation committee of failing to reach out to Korean and Latino residents and business owners, adding that the proposal "sidesteps any effort to honor and build community together." After misinformation about the subdivision election began to spread, the office of the L.A. City Clerk's office sent out a FAQ in an effort to clear things up. One of the points highlighted in the release was why create another neighborhood council. "The proponents have stated that, for an area that has approximately 100,000 residents, additional representation is needed," the FAQ states, adding that those in favor of a new council feel the current 26 board seats within the existing Koreatown-area council "are not enough to fully represent the area." In-person voting begins at 2 p.m. Tuesday at two locations. The polls close at 8 p.m. Harvard Elementary School - Multi-Purpose Room, 330 N. Harvard Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004 - Multi-Purpose Room, 330 N. Harvard Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90004 Founders Church of Religious Science - Hornaday Hall, 3281 W. 6th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90020 Think of neighborhood councils like a liaison between the community and elected officials and city departments. "Each gets about $42,000 a year from the city and they're comprised of elected board members who provide community support, put on events, sponsor local organizations, really advocate on the neighborhood's behalf with the city," said Garcia. The subdivision would in essence double the amount of representation in the community by creating a newly elected board and a new amount of funding that that board can put to use. LAist news editor Ryan Fonseca contributed to this story. Editor's note: A version of this story was also on the radio. Listen to it here on KPCC's Take Two. News happens every day. Here at LAist, our goal is to cover the stories that matter to you and the community you live in. Now that we're part of KPCC, those stories (including this one you're on right now!) are made possible by generous people like you. Independent, local journalism isn't cheap, but with your support we can keep delivering it. Donate now. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey must decide this week whether the state will commit around $5.3 million in funds to complement federal money to restart Amtrak rail service along the Gulf Coast. (file photo) Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey must decide by Wednesday whether the state will make a $5.3 million commitment over three years to bring Amtrak service back to Mobile, connecting the city with New Orleans. Rail advocates who are pushing for the return of Gulf Coast passenger rail say that Ivey has yet to meet with them and frustrations are mounting. Said Jerry Gehman, the governor's designee to the 21-member Southern Rail Commission: "On Thursday, this project is dead for Alabama. She's the only one who can do this. Not her chief of staff or the Legislature. We need the governor's signature." The restarted route would include two Amtrak trains running daily from New Orleans to Mobile with stops in Mississippi towns - Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi and Pascagoula. Ivey spokesman Josh Pendergrass, in a statement to AL.com, said, "Transportation infrastructure has been and continues to be a priority of the Ivey Administration. In May, Governor Ivey sent a letter to U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao in support of the Southern Rail Commission's efforts to restore passenger rail along the Gulf Coast. Alabama has not made a financial commitment to the project." Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Walt Maddox called on Ivey to pledge the matching funds. Maddox said the situation underscores a past "failed policy" of turning down "free money that will improve its economy, for reasons that defy explanation." Said Maddox: "There is no logic that justifies another failure on the part of the governor's office to let this opportunity pass us by. Governor Ivey, do the right thing and make the commitment to the restoration of Gulf Coast passenger rail service before the upcoming deadline leaves us filled with regret over yet another missed source of much-needed revenue." 'This is important' States involved in the project must pony up funds to complement $35.5 million in federal commitments set aside through the Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements grant program - CRISI, for short. That money was set aside in omnibus bill signed by President Donald Trump in early April for restoring lost passenger rail service, such as the Gulf Coast route. Louisiana officials have already signed off on $10 million for their end of the project, which would restart Amtrak service along a CSX freight line from New Orleans for the first time since Hurricane Katrina battered the coast in 2005. Mississippi, with four stops along the line - Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi and Pascagoula - will have to provide an estimated $20 million. On Monday, rail advocates called on Gov. Phil Bryant to dedicate a source of money to make the rail repairs. He, too, faces a Wednesday deadline. Mississippi has already committed an estimated $2.3 million to operate the rail line during the next three years. But Bryant must determine how the state will supply the matching funds for all of the required construction and upgrades. "You got to let the governor know this is important," said John Robert Smith, a chairman of Transportation for America and the former mayor of Meridian, Mississippi, during a news conference Monday in Gulfport, Mississippi. Smith said Bryant has talked with county and city leaders in Mississippi to gauge their interest in dedicating resources to restart the rail route. 'Black eye' An economic analysis on the rail project's impact, completed by the University of Southern Mississippi's Trent Lott National Center, shows Alabama experiencing a $11.9 million boost annually in tourism from a 1 percent tourism bump from passenger rail traffic. If the rise were to reach 20 percent, that would funnel $220.4 million into the state, according to the analysis. Mississippi has the potential to see the greatest gain, with an estimated $485 million impact from tourist travel. Mississippi politicians and coast communities have also demonstrated enthusiasm for the project. In February 2016, Bryant participated in a rail inspection trip from New Orleans to Florida, which marked the first time an Amtrak train rolled across the Gulf Coast line in more than a decade. Then-Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, who was lukewarm to the prospects of restarting the service, did not attend. Gehman, the SRC member who is from Atmore, said he met with Bentley on multiple occasions to discuss the project. He said he's had no rail meeting with Ivey since she took office in April 2017. "We would solicit her support and urge her to sign a letter of financial commitment from the state of Alabama immediately," said Gehman, who was in Mississippi for the press conference. "By Wednesday, this opportunity is gone," said Gehman. "It gives Alabama a black eye." Opportunity or Interruptions? The new service would be dramatically different from the old Sunset Limited, which operated with night-time stops through the Gulf Coast region as part of a transcontinental Los Angeles-Florida run. On-time performances and train ridership were both poor. Smith and other rail advocates say that the restarted route, with its twice-daily runs, can be a boon for economic activity in the cities that have a train station. The SRC committed $139,500 in federal money to build a new train station in downtown Mobile, to accommodate the Amtrak's return. The SRC has also committed funds to restoring the train stations in Mississippi. It's possible, too, that the rail service would extend on to Florida. A future study, paid for mostly through the federal CRISI funds, would then analyze the impact of taking the rail route eastward through the Port of Mobile's property. The port relies heavily on the movement of freight rail. Jimmy Lyons, CEO of the Alabama State Port Authority, has long expressed concerns of intersecting Amtrak trains with freight cars along a crowded CSX line in Mobile. Dozens of trains, whether CSX or other freight operators, run through the Port of Mobile on a daily basis. "I remain extremely concerned over the interruptions the proposed passenger rail service will have on port rail traffic," Lyons said in a statement. "All trains calling the Port Authority's terminals on the river must use the same CSX line, so adding passenger rail traffic will only further delay services to customers using the port." The SRC, however, is hopeful Lyons will be interested in discussing ways that passenger and freight rail can co-exist, allowing the Amtrak's future line to lead toward Atmore and into Florida. The ultimate goal for SRC, is to revive the link from New Orleans to Jacksonville and Orlando, Florida. "The Port of Mobile is a Rubik's cube, and we understand freight rail transportation is a vital part of what ports do and what state's do," said Knox Ross, vice-chairman of the Southern Rail Commission. "We want to make that work." Ross said that one potential future rail stop in Mobile, before the Amtrak comes to the downtown area, is at the Aeroplex at Brookley near the Airbus manufacturing plant and where the potential exists for relocating commercial air service close to the downtown area. Amtrak service to Mobile, Ross said, could allow the city to capture more customers to fly out of an airport located at Brookley. "The whole Brookley area is a home run," said Ross. "Everything we've been told is that (a relocated airport) will happen. We think it would be a tremendous intermodal opportunity." A mutiny from within her own government leaves Angela Merkel scrambling for a joint migration policy in a divided EU. Just months after sealing the deal on her fourth coalition government, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing what some have called the worst crisis of her political career. On Tuesday, Merkel met with French President Emmanuel Macron in hopes of finding a joint Franco-German stance on European migration policy. The meeting came a day after German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer and leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) the Bavarian sister party to Merkels Christian Democratic Union (CDU) gave the chancellor a two-week ultimatum to broker an agreement with European leaders on migration. The move offered Merkel a temporary reprieve from a mutiny within her own government. The ongoing standoff revolves around a 63-point immigration master plan devised by Seehofer, who wants, among others, migrants who have already registered elsewhere in the European Union (EU) to be turned away at the German border. This has brought the CSU leader into a deadlock with Merkel, who is of the opinion that such a measure will go against Europes open border agreement and certain provisions on laws and conventions on refugees and migrants. On Monday, Seehofer said he would implement his immigration plan step-by-step and hold off on turning away all migrants who have registered in another EU country while Merkel attempts to find a solution. With a European summit on migration policy scheduled for late June, his ultimatum expires on July 1. Its really a challenge, there actually is no easy way out for her, said Andrea Roemmele, a professor at Hertie School of Governance in Germanys capital, Berlin. Every potential way weakens her power, unless she really manages which is highly unlikely to pull off a great deal at the summit, she added. Macron and Merkel met in hopes of finding a joint Franco-German stance on European migration policy [Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters] Open door policy The CDU/CSU conservative alliance came first in Septembers general elections, securing 33 percent of the vote but losing nine percentage points compared with 2013. The current so-called grand coalition between the CDU/CSU and the Social Democrat Party (SPD) is the result of four months of negotiations, during which Merkels attempts to work with the liberal Free Democrats and the Green Party failed. In January, the CDU, CSU and SPD reached a breakthrough by producing a 28-page document, outlining positions on a number of issues, including migration. In the draft pact, the parties agreed to limit the arrival of asylum seekers to around 200,000 a year. {articleGUID} Seehofer has long been a critic of Merkels immigration policy. As early as October 2015, he threatened to legally challenge the chancellors open door policy in the constitutional court more than one million refugees and migrants arrived in Germany that year. But today, Roemmele said, the refugee issue is a non-issue. It has already been regulated in the coalition agreement, she explained, with all parties agreeing to the annual cap. Many analysts have explained Seehofers challenge of Merkel by pointing to the upcoming October state elections in Bavaria, where support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is on the rise. [Immigration] is an issue that works well in the Bavarian campaign. This is the CSU really trying to move towards the right, Roemmele said. Political theatre Karl Kopp, director of Pro Asyl, a human rights group advocating for refugees, said the current standoff is a theatre within the Christian Democratic family. There is real political crisis in Brussels, he told Al Jazeera, referring to the Belgian capital which hosts several EU institutions. Kopp argued that Seehofer knows his plan will not work because it is in contravention of EU and international law. The only thing achieved by putting the proposed restrictions in place, added Kopp, is to create new profit lines for the [people] smuggling industry. Andrew Geddes, director of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, said the interior ministers attitude is reflective of a core tension at the European level. What we see is a quite powerful tension between solidarity within the EU and a much stronger emphasis on external border control, he told Al Jazeera. Merkel long sought to address Europes migration woes through a system of redistribution through quotas but has changed tack in the face of opposition from bloc members. At the upcoming EU summit, she will likely champion a flexible solidarity system in which countries can refuse to take in refugees in exchange for financially compensating other member states. While Merkel will look to put into practice the principle of solidarity at the summit, Geddes said Seehofer has aligned himself with countries whose governments are taking a stronger line, such as Italy, Hungary and Austria. Last week, the German interior minister invited his Italian counterpart, Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League party who campaigned on a staunchly anti-immigrant platform, for talks. Seehofer is also reportedly friends with Viktor Orban, Hungarys anti-immigrant prime minister. The tension between solidarity and secure borders is a key one, Geddes said. It went right through the heart of the EU and its going to be quite a difficult divide to bridge at the summit meeting. Vague expectations The kind of agreement Merkel will need to placate the CSU is unclear, as Seehofers expectations of the chancellor are absolutely vague, according to Roemmele. On Monday, Seehofer told a press conference that he would start preparing for the implementation of his measures in case Merkel came home empty-handed. We want this national solution unless a European solution comes together, he said. We wish the chancellor much luck. {articleGUID} In a press conference of her own, Merkel remained defiant. She said there would be no automatism if a European agreement would fail to come about. Turning away migrants at our borders at the heart of Europe will lead to negative domino effects that could hurt Germany and put into question European unity, she said. Roemmele doubts that the CSU would play hardball to the point of splitting from their long-term allies, the CDU. But even if the CSU decides to walk away from Merkels government, it might not mean the end of her fourth term as chancellor. No one wants new elections now, Roemmele said. Instead, she explained, Merkel could forge ahead with a minority government: losing the support of the CSU would leave her only a few seats short of a majority in the 709-seat German Bundestag, something she could overcome by making deals with the Greens, for example. Macron meeting Speaking after her meeting with Macron at Germanys Meseberg castle, Merkel reiterated her commitment to solidarity, even as both leaders restated that the flow of undocumented migration to Europe needs to be reduced. Commenting on the German-French talks, Geddes said that an agreement on immigration between two of the EUs most powerful countries will carry significant weight within the bloc. But with some member states moving in a different direction, this might not be enough, he added. The next few weeks will serve to send powerful signals about whether the EU can tackle its migration issues, Geddes said. At the moment, EU migration policy seems on the verge of disintegration, Geddes said. There are approximately 20 people displaced every minute as a result of conflict or persecution. This is according to r ecent figures from the United Nations that put an unprecedented 65.6 million people worldwide in the category of forcible displacement. In 1972, Rupal Rajani and her family became victims of one of historys most blatant displays of cultural prejudice on the African continent. Then Ugandan President Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the countrys Asian population, displacing tens of thousands from the place they called home. Merely a child when they left Uganda, Rajani recalls a confused childhood in the UK, conflicted family memories and her return to a country she still somewhat considers home. This is her story in her own words: Rupal Rajani, Ugandan Asian broadcast journalist based in Leicester, UK [Rupal Rajani/Al Jazeera] I was only two years old when we had to leave Uganda. We lived in Kakira, which is a huge sugar plantation. There was my mum and dad, my grandmother, my brother and two older sisters, with me being the youngest. I dont actually remember much, but Ive heard many stories and Ive been back to Uganda a couple of times. My dad was about 14 years old [when he moved from India to Uganda]. He wanted to be a doctor originally, but my grandfather died when he was just seven months old. After that, it was just my grandmother and him, so he decided to go to Uganda to try and find work to better his life. He ended up doing odd jobs, selling whatever he could on his bike. He worked his way up to the point where he was working for one of the richest Asian families in Uganda as an accountant. He also ran their store. My family was happy in Kakira They had a community, they were settled, they felt like they belonged. Life was good, and it was a huge shock when people were asked to leave. Expulsion: From Kakira to Leicester In 1972, Idi Amin announced that all Asians had 90 days to leave the country. A lot of people were wary and I think people did have an inclination of something going on when Amin came to power, but it was still a big shock when it happened. {articleGUID} We moved, obviously. The UK had set up army camps for Ugandan Asians and thats where we were for a few weeks. Eventually, we ended up in Leicester with thousands of other Asians. Of all the places in the world, why Leicester? Because we had heard of it. Leicester city council, back in the day, had put out an advert in a Ugandan newspaper discouraging people from going to Leicester. Ultimately, people had heard of the city and it sort of backfired. We had relatives that had settled there previously for work, so we ended up renting a property from an uncle until we got our own house. What I remember growing up as a kid is being quite confused as to what was going on. Living in Leicester, you had a completely different identity at home and a completely different identity at school. What you were doing was trying to fit in. The only conversations we really had at home were about, Uganda was fantastic. We miss this about Uganda. We miss that about Uganda but we never really, certainly not in my younger days, talked about what exactly happened. As I grew up I wanted to know more about the expulsion of Asians from Uganda, but I didnt really question it until I was much older . It really wasnt part of my life in a lot of respects. I couldnt relate to it personally. All I knew was families talking about their memories and how wonderful life was in Uganda. The only conversations we really had at home were about, 'Uganda was fantastic. We miss this about Uganda. We miss that about Uganda', but we never really talked about what exactly happened. Rupal Rajani Return to Uganda: Rose-tinted memories vs reality The first time I went back to Uganda was a bit of a culture shock in the sense that the stories that Id heard from my family were completely different from the reality I saw. I dont know whether its because when you leave somewhere, people reminisce; they see things through rose-tinted glasses. They said there were lots of Asian people around. There was lots of integration, the place was bustling, the weather was fantastic. {articleGUID} What I found when I got there was that people in Uganda are still quite angry at Asians because of the way they felt they were treated by the Asian community. It was always whites at the top, Asians next, and black Ugandans were treated like second-class citizens in their own country. If you go to the rural communities, the average Ugandan still holds quite a lot of anger, but there are others that have moved on and are trying to make a difference saying, its our country now. Were trying to rebuild it. Theres lots of investment from China now. Things are moving, things are changing. I think theres more equality. A lot of Asians who returned to Uganda have changed their attitude and the newer Asians are just trying to fit in and are not quite aware of the racial tensions that existed back in the 1970s. When I went back thats when I realised that my family saw life in Uganda very differently. My parents didnt see that racism. They were there and they were getting on with what they were doing on the sugar plantation. This was just how things were. White people on top, then us, and the black people were the servants. Although there was resentment, I dont think my parents realised how one man [Idi Amin] who suddenly had a dream and wanted to get rid of all the Asians was quite reflective of the community that they lived in. People are still quite angry ... It was always whites at the top, Asians next, and black Ugandans were treated like second-class citizens in their own country. Rupal Rajani A proud Ugandan Asian Life was very different for my dad in Leicester. He lost his status, if you like. He was something over there, and here I can never remember him working because he was a lot older. That being said, I think the one thing about Asians or Indians, particularly from Uganda, is that they are resilient. They will do their best to fit in to the circumstances that theyre given, and they will make the best of it. If you look around Leicester, they are the ones that are running businesses and a majority of the restaurants, and are more affluent because they worked really hard. They havent sat back on their laurels and said, What are we going to do? The majority have really excelled in their lifestyle since coming to this country. I think a lot of Ugandan Asians are very proud of the fact that they lived in Uganda. There is that affection for the country, for the people, for the country generally. There is so much love still for it that people are extremely proud of their roots. I am one of them, and I left when I was only two, but if somebody asks me: I am a proud Ugandan Asian. PM Pedro Sanchez has already disappointed Basque and Catalan nationalists who propped up his minority government. Since taking office, Spains new government led by Socialist party (PSOE) leader Pedro Sanchez has been receiving praise for its pro-EU stance and progressive policies. On June 17, it decided to welcome the Aquarius rescue ship, which had been drifting in international waters for two days with more than 600 people on board after being rejected by Italy and Malta. Not everyone in Spain, however, is content with the new governments performance. Basque and Catalan nationalists, who played a fundamental role in Sanchezs unexpected rise to power, have mixed feelings about the countrys new leader and government. Sanchez was sworn in as Spains new prime minister on June 2, a day after a vote of no-confidence booted his conservative Peoples Party (PP) rival Mariano Rajoy from power. He is now presiding over a minority government, propped up by the leftist Podemos bloc and other parties, including Basque (PNV and EH Bildu) and Catalan (ERC and PdeCat) nationalists. In other words, Sanchez is Spains prime minister today only because he was able to gain the support of the aforementioned parties. He did this by promising to help with the Basque peace process and suspend the application of article 155 of the Constitution on Catalonia. Article 155 was used by the central government to suspend the regions autonomy after it held an independence referendum in October 2017, which was deemed illegal by the Spanish courts. On Sanchez first day in office, a new cabinet was sworn in Catalonia, automatically ending just over seven months of direct rule from Madrid by Spains central government. Moreover, on June 8, the cabinet announced that it is lifting direct financial controls imposed on Catalonia through Article 155. However, the new prime minister did not give Catalan nationalists everything they wanted. Ever since September 2015, Madrid had been keeping tabs on the Catalan governments use of funds from the Regional Liquidity Fund (FLA), to make sure that the money did not go to sponsor the independence drive in the region. As part of this arrangement, Catalan authorities were required to send Madrid monthly reports. Sanchezs government says it will continue to require the reports. In Catalonia, this is seen as a sign that Sanchez is not serious about normalisation. The Catalan government is also still waiting for Sanchez to release political prisoners that were incarcerated following the regions controversial independence vote. Moreover, Catalans want the new prime minister to take steps to end the persecution of nationalist politicians that are still in exile, such as former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont, who is now in Germany. So far, Sanchez did not make any moves to solve these issues. Jose Luis Abalos, organisation secretary of the PSOE, said the decision over political prisoners and those in exile concerns only the judiciary. Just like the Catalans, Basque nationalists, who helped the new government win the confidence vote, are also not entirely convinced about Sanchezs commitment to normalisation and dialogue. Arnaldo Otegi, leader of the Basque political party EH Bildu, recently said he does not view the PSOE as a real democratising option for the Spanish state. Otegi brought up Sanchez and his partys support for both the full application of Article 155 on Catalonia and the penal code reform that allowed secessionists to be incarcerated, and said they will evaluate the PSOE on its future actions and will wait to see what steps they take. Some appointments Sanchez made to his cabinet already alarmed Catalan and Basque nationalists and, for some, took away any remaining hope for real negotiations. The new prime minister appointed Josep Borrell, former European Parliament president, as foreign minister. Borell has been accused of supporting GAL, an anti-Basque paramilitary group linked to the PSOE, which was active in the 1980s. He also made some very damaging statements about Catalan separatists over the years. Another blow to Basque and Catalan separatists was the appointment of conservative judge Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who is known for his harsh verdicts against secessionists and reluctance to investigate allegations of torture against political activists, as interior minister. Grande-Marlaska was involved in six of the nine cases in which the European Court of Human Rights subsequently condemned the Spanish state for not investigating torture claims against detainees. Isabel Celaa, the new education minister, once defended the elimination of big companies obligation to provide services in the Basque language. The new defence and justice ministers are also considered problematic political figures by Basque and Catalan nationalists. Sanchez is currently between a rock and a hard place. He needs the support of Catalan and Basque nationalists in Parliament to stay in power, but he risks losing the support of Spanish voters if he takes steps towards normalisation. By back-tracking on key issues regarding Catalan autonomy and making questionable cabinet appointments, he already alienated many Basques and Catalans. Moreover, the left-wing Podemos, another party that was key to Sanchezs rise to power, has expressed its reservations about the cabinet. In sum, despite the fanfare abroad, the Sanchez government is isolated and fragile. It has ministers and advisers seemingly chosen to please the right-wing opposition (PP and Ciudadanos) more than its left-wing and nationalist allies. The chances of a sincere, constructive dialogue between separatist forces and Madrid still looks as unlikely as ever. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. Nicola Perugini Nicola Perugini is lecturer in international relations at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. He is the co-author of ... more The Human Right to Dominate. The first time I met a woman who had been raped inside a Syrian prison, it was November 2011. I was in Homs and the city was under siege. We were there meeting victims of the first wave of crackdowns on residents of a city that had become known as the capital of the revolution against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. Many of them were children who had been tortured in the regimes prisons. On our last day in the city, we met a family whose daughter had been arrested during a demonstration. She had been held in a detention centre and raped. I knew she was in the room with us, but I didnt know which of the women she was. I was told that she had changed her mind about talking to us; that she was too traumatised, too scared. In the years that followed, I have often recalled the faces of those women, wondering which of them had just endured the one thing they could not bring themselves to name. And, ever since, I have thought about making a film in which women like her would finally be able to speak of it. Making Silent War was to take a journey into the heart of darkness; to the most secret crime perpetrated against the women of Syria. In talking for the very first time about what they endured in the prisons of the Syrian regime, the women in the film exposed what had, from the very beginning of the revolution, been imagined as the perfect crime. In a country where rape is such a taboo and where it is used to bring shame upon a womans entire family, destroying the woman without killing her, the regime had expected its victims to remain silent and their stories untold. But they didnt. It wasnt easy and it took a long time. But a few months ago, cracks started to appear in the wall of silence. With al-Assad still in power and the West seemingly accepting Russias new peace and order in Syria, I started to notice a need to talk among the survivors. Afraid that their wounds would never heal and that theyd be forgotten by history, they wanted at long last to name the crime that had been perpetrated against them. I remember one of them telling me: Since 2011, you the West have done nothing. Nothing has moved you; not 400,000 dead, not thousands of children, women and men dying in chemical attacks, not the Caesar files and the tens of thousands of bodies photographed. Maybe this, the intimate, ultimate, forbidden wound that can cost us our lives if we tell you about it; maybe this will move you. At that moment, as a filmmaker who has made films about human rights abuses in Syria, I felt shame and helplessness. But the fact that women were suddenly wanting to speak out, just once, so that their testimony might leave a trace, so that some abstract concept of international justice might hear their plea, convinced me that I had to make this film. Some of the women even decided to show their faces and to name those who had abused them. They all told me they had nothing left to lose. I felt that what I was witnessing was a revolution of the mind; they had decided not to be victims any more. This film was their way of fighting back against the crime and the silence that surrounds it. Everyone I had spoken to about the film told me it would be impossible to make and there were times when I thought they might be right. It took months to gain the womens trust. Sometimes they would agree to speak and then change their minds at the very last moment. When they did speak, I barely asked any questions. I told them I wanted them to begin by speaking about their childhood memories, what it was like to grow up in Syria, their life before the darkness descended and then to talk about the other side. I wanted it to be a film about Syrian women, not only about the rape of Syrian women. But once they started to speak, they didnt stop. Sometimes they would talk for hours, sometimes for days. But the word rape rarely came quickly or easily. Pain and relief seemed to pour out of them with every word. Sometimes they would shake as they spoke, often they would cry. Whenever it seemed as though we ought to stop, we would. But they would ask us to keep filming. We have decided to talk, you have to film, they would tell us. The film, it seemed, was becoming theirs. No matter how great the physical, mental and emotional torment of speaking and how severe the potential consequences, they wanted the world to hear their stories. Many of these women were rejected by their husbands, their mothers, their siblings, upon coming out of prison. They were forced to leave their homes with their children. The shame their society associates with rape has doomed them to lives of exile and loneliness. But they were prepared to risk further stigma and isolation because, as they told us: For us, it is too late. We feel as if we are already dead. If we take the risk to speak out today it is for the hundreds of women who are still inside Assads prisons. The world must know and must make those women come out of that hell, now. In the months since the film was made, it has been pirated and many Syrians who are still inside their country have viewed it via social media. Syrian friends tell me that it has triggered a debate and that, for the first time, they are hearing the word rape being spoken. A younger generation seems to be saying no more. In France, I have spoken to NGOs that say the film is helping female refugees from Syria dare to say what happened to them. There have also been death threats from the regime and from some of the womens families. But the lines so often drawn around this crime are beginning to tremble. Of course, it remains a highly sensitive issue. But it is a start and, maybe, a time will come when these women will be recognised as victims and not as guilty of being victims. The words of one woman stay with me: Death is easier than rape. Our society refuses to consider us as victims. The regime rapes us and our people reject us. If it happens to you, then you must die But we are not a shame, we are an honour. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. Over 1,500 refugees and migrants reach Spain The group is in addition to 629 refugees and migrants who arrived in Spain last week after being rejected by Italy and Malta. Tripartite meeting in Geneva ends with some common ground was beginning to emerge, UN envoy says. Geneva, Switzerland A tripartite meeting between Russia, Turkey and Iran to discuss the formation of an all-inclusive committee tasked with drafting a new Syrian constitution had ended without a major breakthrough, and a plan to reconvene in a few weeks time. The officials of the three nations acting as guarantors of a ceasefire in the war-torn country met on Tuesday in the Swiss city of Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations. In a brief statement issued after the meeting, UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said some common ground was beginning to emerge around the formation of the committee. Constructive exchanges and substantive discussions took place on issues relevant to the establishment and functioning of a constitutional committee. Many questions For its part, the Syrian opposition said it needs to receive guarantees about the scope and form of the constitutional body before endorsing its mandate. There are many aspects that are not yet clear about the prospected constitutional committee, Yahya al-Aridi, spokesperson for the Syrian Negotiation Commission (SNC) told Al Jazeera from the Turkish city of Istanbul. {articleGUID} We are asking many questions about the formation, functions, terms of reference of this committee. Who will be accredited to participate? Is it going to be part of the transitional process? That is why there is a delay in the presentation of the list of names that should be part of it on behalf of the opposition. In the past few days, de Mistura said the Syrian government had already presented a list of 50 names to be part of the committee that would be tasked with drafting Syrias new constitution. But al-Aridi said there is an attempt on behalf of groups who are not recognised by the Syrian opposition to become part of the body. There are small groups that are not considered by the people as opposition who are rushing to present their credentials, said al-Aridi, without giving any more information. The only opposition group that can participate seriously in a constitutional committee is the SNC as per the Security Council Resolution 2254. Yahya al-Aridi said the opposition wanted to know which bylaws would regulate the committees work [File: Denis Balibouse/Reuters] The Syrian opposition is afraid that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may hijack the work of the constitutional committee with the end result that, like for the 2012 Constitution, it would leave too much power in the hands of the government. A sticking point in the forthcoming constitutional debate will be the authority of the Syrian president. {articleGUID} Al-Aridi said the opposition, which was not part of todays tripartite meeting in Geneva, was waiting to know which bylaws would regulate the work of the committee and its legitimacy. Who is to legitimise the constitution they will come up with? al-Aridi said. Aridi added that the creation of the committee should not belittle the other issues at stake in the Syrian political process under Security Council Resolution 2254. If the whole Syrian issue is condensed into the creation of the committee, this is ridiculous. It has to be part of the implementation of Security Council resolution 2254 and not divert the attention from the discussion of the other issues. Baskets of reform The meeting in Geneva followed up on the agreement signed at the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in the Russian city of Sochi in January, whose final statement called for the creation of a constitutional commission formed by government, opposition and Syrian civil society. The creation of the constitutional committee would the first step for a political solution of the conflict as mandated by the Security Council Resolution 2254. De Mistura had earlier declared that besides government and opposition, it will be important that independents, civil society, experts, and women at least 30 percent of women all find their place into this constitutional committee. The UN-led peace process based in Geneva has laid out the so-called four baskets of reform for a political settlement of the crisis. They include the drafting of a new constitution, parliamentary elections, the creation of a non-sectarian transitional government and the fight against terrorism. But the talks have made little progress so far as government and opposition have failed to find an agreement over the fate of al-Assad. Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, more than 465,000 Syrians have been killed and over 12 million half the countrys population have been displaced. In report sent to UN Security Council before Tuesday meeting, UN condemns Israeli use of force against Palestinians. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the most serious escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip places the besieged enclave on the brink of war, urging Israel and Hamas to recommit to a 2014 ceasefire. The UN chief said in a report obtained by news agencies that he is shocked by Israels use of live fire since border protests began in Gaza on March 30. Guterres said its military has a responsibility to exercise maximum restraint except as a last resort. The report was sent to the council last week in advance of a meeting on Tuesday on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The killing of children, as well as of clearly identified journalists and medical staffers by security forces during a demonstration are particularly unacceptable, Guterres said. They must be allowed to perform their duties without fear of death or injury. Israelhas not yet responded to the accusations. {articleGUID} Guterres also told the Security Council that he unequivocally condemns the steps by all parties that have brought us to this dangerous and fragile place in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He warned that actions by Hamas and other Palestinian groups not only risk Palestinian and Israeli lives but efforts to restore dignity and the prospects of a livable future for Palestinians in Gaza, citing rockets fired at Israel and attempts to breach the Gaza-Israel fence by some protesters. Since weekly mass protests began along the Israel-Gaza border on March 30, at least 130 Palestinians have been killed and 13,000 others wounded by Israeli army fire. The overwhelming majority of the dead and wounded have been unarmed, according to Gaza health officials. Two Palestinian journalists were killed while covering the protests in April and two medics including a 21-year-old were also shot dead in May and early June. James Bays, Al Jazeeras diplomatic editor reporting from the United Nations headquarters in New York, said that these kind of reports mainly raise the issues. The US is very strongly particularly this administration on the side of Israel, so they will block anything that they do not like, Bays said. Of course weve had the general assembly take action with a resolution. I think it worths reminding viewers that on the central issues, whenever the security council has discussed them recently, its been a situation of 14-1 with most of the security council all but the US on one side and the US on the other. I think reports like this although they wont have any effect they certainly raise the issues again and I think show that the international community isnt particularly happy with the way things are moving and being directed by the Trump adminsitration. Independent investigation Guterres renewed his call for an independent and transparent investigation of the shooting deaths in Gaza. Israel, which says Hamas has used the protests as cover for attacks on the border fence, has rejected the appeal and argued that the use of force is justified to defend its borders. The marchers have pressed demands for a right of return for Palestinian refugees to their families homes which they were forced to flee 70 years ago. More than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in the 1948 war over Israels creation. Two-thirds of Gazas two million residents are internally displaced people. He also expressed concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation and economic collapse in Gaza, marked by a severe liquidity crisis and an acute shortage of cash. {articleGUID} Guterres reiterated that there is no viable alternative to the two-state solution, with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace and with Jerusalem as the capital of both states. But he said that only by changing the reality on the ground by recognising and addressing the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, ensuring that all sides recommit to the 2014 ceasefire understandings, and supporting Egyptian-led efforts to restore control of the legitimate Palestinian government in Gaza can we preserve the possibility of a viable, independent and fully representative Palestinian state and avert another disastrous, lethal conflict. He reiterated that any unilateral step made by any party to alter the character or prejudge the final status of Jerusalem are inconsistent with United Nations resolutions and are an obstacle to peace. Guterres condemned the ruling made by the Israeli High Court on May 24 to demolish buildings in the Bedouin community of Khan Al Ahmar. It may constitute a grave breach of international humanitarian law, Guterres said. The secretary-general also condemned Israels settlement activity that he says continue unabated, highlighting Israels decision on May 30 to approve 3,500 housing units in the West Bank the largest batch of new housing since June 2017. The UN considers the expansion of settlements on land earmarked for a future Palestinian state to be illegal. Guterres said the construction must cease immediately and completely. Hundreds have been forced to leave their homes due to severe flooding in the economic capital, Abidjan. At least 15 people have died and hundreds have been forced to leave their homes due to severe flooding in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, the countrys interior minister said. Torrential rains triggered severe flooding across Abidjan yesterday night and killed 15 people, washed away houses and displaced hundreds of families, Sidiki Diakite told journalists on Tuesday. About 115 people have been rescued and are in shelters. I broke the ceiling and called my neighbour for help. He came to bring the children out of the roof, said Kadidiatou Diallo, one of the survivors. Emergency agencies continued the search for more casualties on Tuesday as the heavy rains persisted and the armed forces had been deployed to assist the effort, the minister said. Many roads in Abidjan remained flooded on Tuesday, with sinkholes forming beneath some streets. Several days of heavy rain and subsequent flooding left seven people dead in Abidjan in 2017. Ivory Coast is in the middle of its rainy season and meteorologists have forecast heavy rains until late June. Freely accessible local news is vital. Please power our reporters and help keep us independent with a donation today. Start your day with LAist Sign up for the Morning Brief, delivered weekdays. Subscribe Now, he's followed that up by making a large donation to NPR and, um, us. And, by us, we mean KPCC as a whole, not just the LAist us. (In case you didn't know/haven't noticed/don't love us, LAist is now part of KPCC!) He's donating $2 million to NPR, and $500,000 to KPCC. The deal came together faster than a cutaway on Family Guy -- MacFarlane reached out to KPCC on Sunday afternoon, and boom, donated. MacFarlane said he was interested in having his donation support independent, non-profit, non-biased media -- and encouraging more philanthropy from others to support our work. 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Steve Levitan, co-creator of Modern Family (which airs on ABC but is produced by Fox), retweeted MacFarlane and said he was also ashamed to work for a company that has anything to do with Fox News. Filmmaker Judd Apatow has been one of the most outspoken in recent days, with writer/director Paul Feig joining in retweeting Levitan today. Looks like we've got a regular media Chicken Fight on our hands. We guess he felt bad about perfectly mocking us: Thanks for the support, Seth! You made it! Congrats, you read the entire story, you gorgeous human. This story was made possible by generous people like you. Independent, local journalism costs $$$$$. And now that LAist is part of KPCC, we rely on that support. So if you aren't already, be one of us! Help us help you live your best life in Southern California. Donate now. Abiy Ahmed said security institutions tortured citizens in order for government to remain in power. Ethiopias Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said his countrys security institutions tortured and committed terrorist acts against its own citizens in the past, in a rare and candid admission. Ahmed, who was sworn in last April, also hinted that he will seek to abolish the infamous anti-terrorism law that led to the detention and prosecution of thousands in the East African country. Our constitution doesnt allow it, but we have been torturing, causing bodily damages and even putting inmates in dark prison cells, he said while addressing parliament on Monday. These were terrorist acts committed by us, and using force just to stay in power is a terrorist act too, Ahmed said. Ahmed took office after his predecessor resigned amid widespread anti-government protests that claimed the lives of several hundred people, mainly in the restive Oromia and Amhara regions. Ethiopia lifted its state of emergency this month, and Ahmed has been making numerous changes in a country considered highly repressive by rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. More than 1,000 prisoners have been freed under Ahmeds watch. Among those freed in recent months are several senior opposition leaders accused of charges, including terrorism and incitement to topple the government. One of them is Andargachew Tsige who was found guilty on charges of terrorism and sentenced to death in absentia in 2009 over his role in the opposition group Ginbot 7. The father of three was arrested during a stopover at a Yemen airport in June 2014 and taken to Ethiopia. Last week, Addis Ababa said it would release more than 304 prisoners, including 289 convicted on terrorism charges. Ethiopia has also made moves towards repairing relations with its archrival and neighbour Eritrea. Addis Ababa announced earlier this month that it will fully accept the terms of a peace agreement with neighbouring Eritrea. Ethiopia said it will comply with the outcome of a 2002 border commission ruling, which awarded disputed territories, including the town of Badme, to Eritrea. The ruling Syriza party has defended its approach to Greeces economic crisis amid criticism from workers and the poor. This article has been corrected to reflect the bailout referendum took place in July 2015, not June, as previously stated. Drapetsona, Greece Stavros Manikas, who has lived in one of the poorest suburbs of Piraeus for more than 35 years, scoffs when asked if Greeces decade-long crisis is almost over. A rawboned 53-year-old, the bus driver and union activists shoulder-length grey hair shows streaks of blonde and black. Manikas sits cross-legged on his billowy couch and carefully rolls a cigarette on his lap. The crisis hit the area so hard that no one throws out food any more, he tells Al Jazeera. Thats why you dont even see people digging in dumpsters here. Asked how the crisis impacted his own life, Manikas looks up and says sternly: Everything changed. Although Drapetsona has long been a poor and institutionally-deprived area, the crisis hit the cash-strapped residents harder than middle-class and comparably well-off neighbourhoods in Athens and Piraeus. Speaking alongside left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in April, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker declared that Greece would be a normal country by the end of the summer. In Drapetsonas narrow, coiling alleyways and cluttered streets, few people see cause for hope as the European Union and the Greek government promise the country is only months away from exiting its prolonged economic crisis. Deserted factories and shuttered small businesses are testament to the jobs that left the area. The windows and doors of many homes are boarded up. Meanwhile, homelessness, drug use and prostitution have grown increasingly visible, Manikas says. With a son at university and another completing his mandatory military service, Manikas and his wife have struggled to make ends meet. Since 2010, he has seen his salary cut by nearly 55 percent. From his balcony overlooking Piraeus port, he can see boats carrying international tourists and well-off Greeks to faddish islands like Crete and Mykonos. Manikas and his wife cant afford a night out, and they can only muster enough money to use their car for two weeks out of each month. Many small businesses in Drapetsona have shuttered during Greeces economic crisis [Nick Paleologos/SOOC/Al Jazeera] We cant go out to a cinema or a taverna because it will have an impact on our everyday life, he explains. When my son has leave from military service, we cant afford to pay for him to travel back to visit us. {articleGUID} With utility bills and mortgage payments piling up, Manikas had to strike deals with the bank, as well as with the water and electricity companies to stay in their home. We all like to read, and we used to buy books often, he says, exhaling a dense cloud of tobacco smoke, but we havent bought a new book since 2014. The crisis Since the global financial crisis reached Greece in 2009, Greeks have suffered from diminishing wages, soaring unemployment and increasingly harsh austerity measures. The parliament passed the first austerity package in February 2010, allowing for a freeze of government employees salaries, slashing bonuses and restricting overtime work. A slew of austerity measures and bailout packages followed. In January 2015, the left-wing Syriza party made history when it won the parliamentary elections and formed a coalition with the Independent Greeks (ANEL), a right-wing party. Syriza campaigned on promises to abandon the bailout programmes and negotiate a new deal with Greeces creditors. In July 2015, Greeks took to the ballot boxes to cast their votes on the countrys bailout conditions. Upwards of 61 percent voted against the conditions. Although Syrizas rise to power and the referendum stoked fears that Greece could exit the eurozone, it wasnt long before the party quietly acquiesced to the terms imposed on the country. Not long after the July 2015 referendum, the Syriza-led government accepted a bailout package with larger cuts to pensions and more extensive tax hikes than the ones voters had rejected. For the past three years, Syriza has overseen a series of new austerity measures, including additional tax increases, capital controls, home auctions, growing insurance contributions and expanding privatisation. Syrizas inability to keep its promises has been the source of widespread frustration for working-class and poor Greeks. Strikes and protests have become part and parcel of life in the Mediterranean country. {articleGUID} The capitulation of Syriza was a sort of defeat of mass movements, Panagiotis Sotiris, an academic and member of the left-wing Popular Unity party, tells Al Jazeera. It means that an alternative can only come from political currents that oppose this programme and are in favour of breaking from the eurozone. No one was bailed out here With the current bailout programme slated to end on August 20, Greeces government has expressed its hopes to regain unrestricted access to markets and implement its own economic policies. On Thursday, eurozone finance ministers discussed the terms of Greeces bailout exit. Nikos Xydakis, a Syriza parliamentarian, says many challenges lie ahead of Greece, opining that the crisis will truly end when the country goes back to where it was in 2008. With the national unemployment rate hovering around 20 percent and youth unemployment topping 43 percent, residents of places like Drapetsona fear there is no end in sight for their economic crisis. The crisis hit the area so hard that no one throws out food any more. That's why you don't even see people digging in dumpsters here. Stavros Manikas, Drapetsona resident While still high, those numbers mark a significant decrease from the 26 percent unemployment and 51 percent youth joblessness Syriza inherited when it first came to office, Xydakis tells Al Jazeera. However, the ending of the memoranda will be an important moment, a starting point of revival, of gaining back part of national sovereignty, he adds. It signals the end of some really hard, often irrational belt-tightening measures and the end of a constant uncertainty in Greek society. Yet, reassurances that Greece is nearing the end of several years of intense supervision by the International Monetary Fund and the eurozone have done little to assuage the concerns of some of the countrys poorest citizens. Back in his apartment in Drapetsona, Stavros Manikas reiterates his claim that one government after another sacrificed working-class Greeks like himself throughout the crisis. {articleGUID} People are living in abandoned homes, some are camped out under bridges. Many of the small shops in the area were shut down, he concludes. I cant see any end to the crisis here No one was bailed out here. The situation will stay like this, or it might get worse. Far-right interior minister defends position as opposition politicians slam idea of registry as racist and fascist. Human rights activists and politicians in Italy and abroad have slammed Matteo Salvini, the Italian interior minister, after he announced plans to count the countrys Roma community with an eye to expelling those who do not have Italian nationality. The far-right politician, who is also one of the countrys two deputy prime ministers, defended his position on Tuesday, a day after stirring controversy by saying on TV that he had commissioned a dossier on the Roma situation in Italy to see how many there are in the country. He evoked the idea of expelling many of them, adding that unfortunately we have to keep Italian Roma people in Italy because you cant expel them. Salvini, who caused uproar last month when he barred an NGO-operated rescue ship from landing hundreds of mostly African refugees and migrants in Italy, ran into similar protests for his latest remarks. {articleGUID} Opposition MPs condemned the idea of a census as racist and fascist, while members of the newly-established ruling coalition also criticised his comments. The opposition centre-left Democratic Partys leader Matteo Orfini tweeted: If we really want to carry out the census, I would start with the census of racists and fascists. To better avoid them. Luigi Di Maio, fellow deputy prime minister and leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement that makes up the coalition alongside Salvinis far-right League party, said any census based on ethnicity would be unconstitutional. A Roma Nation Association statement noted that the authorities had carried out a count of the community last year and called for a meeting with Salvini at the earliest opportunity. The European Union also weighed in on the controversy. EU Commission spokesman Alexander Winterstein told journalists that as a general rule, we cannot deport a European citizen based on ethnic criteria. Italys Jewish community said the idea of a census drew parallels with measures targeting Jews under fascist war-time leader Benito Mussolini. The announcement is worrying and evokes memories from just 80 years ago which are sadly increasingly forgotten, said community leader, Noemi Di Segni. Despite the criticism, Salvini stuck to his guns on Tuesday. Im not giving up and Im pushing ahead! The Italians and their safety first, he wrote on social media. But confronted with widespread anger, Salvinis League party said in a separate statement it is not our intention to record or take anyones fingerprints. It added: Our goal is a recognition of the situation of Roma camps. We intend to protect thousands of children who are not allowed to attend school regularly. Salvini has repeatedly taken aim at the Roma community, making promises to bulldoze Roma camps during his election campaign. According to a report by Association 21 Luglio, which works with the Roma community, there are between 120,000 and 180,000 Roma living across Italy. Heres a round-up of social media reaction to Salvinis comments: Translation: Refugees yesterday, Roma today, tomorrow guns for all. How exhausting it is being bad, Paolo Gentiloni, a centre-left Italian politician and former politician wrote. Ieri i rifugiati, oggi i Rom, domani le pistole per tutti. Quanto e faticoso essere cattivo Paolo Gentiloni (@PaoloGentiloni) June 18, 2018 Rachele Salvatelli, a PhD researcher, said: Something scary is happening in Italy right now. Interior minster #Salvini is calling for a Roma census. Making a census on people's ethnicity. Where is that I've heard this before? OH. RIGHT. #Salvinischedacitutti Rachele Salvatelli (@r_salvatelli) June 19, 2018 Ana Gomes, Socialist Member of the European Parliament, wrote: Kathleen Van Brempt, a member of the European Parliament, tweeted: First they came for the #refugees. And I did not speak out, because I was not a refugee. Then they came for the #Roma. And I did not speak out, because I was not a Roma. Then they came for the rest of us. And there was no one left to speak for us. #Salvini Kathleen Van Brempt (@kvanbrempt) June 19, 2018 Author and activist Harry Leslie Smith said this is how it all started in 1930s Germany, referring to the time when the Nazis reached power: Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir Mehbooba Mufti has resigned as the chief minister of Indian-administered Kashmir after her coalition partner, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), pulled out of the ruling alliance. After submitting her resignation on Tuesday, Mufti said the muscular policy will not work in Kashmir, referring to the hard line policies adopted by the central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Jammu and Kashmir is not an enemy territory, Mufti told reporters in Srinagar, the capital of the region. The collapse of the government comes days after Indias Ministry of Home Affairs refused to extend unilateral ceasefire announced on the eve of Ramadan. While announcing the decision in New Delhi, Ram Madhav, the National General Secretary of the BJP, told the reporters that it had become untenable for the BJP to continue with the alliance in Jammu and Kashmir. Jammu and Kashmir is not an enemy territory. The muscular policy will not work in Kashmir Mehbooba Mufti, the PDP leader He also cited rising instances of violence and radicalisation as one of the reasons to pull the plug on the state government. After a meeting with BJP [President] Amit Shah, we decided that we cannot continue with the PDP in the state. The Hindu nationalist BJP had formed an alliance with regional Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2014. The alliance, which was touted as coming together of north pole and south pole, was fraught with friction between the two partners on how to deal with the issues facing the region. The rift in the alliance was out in the open in February after BJP ministers publicly supported alleged rapists of an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Kathua district. The two ministers were subsequently sacked. Incompatible alliance The governors rule is likely to be implemented in the region, which means the disputed region will be directly ruled by the central government through its appointed person until the elections. Noor Ahmad Baba, a political analyst based in Srinagar, said it was an incompatible alliance from the beginning. Both parties had lost trust in their own constituencies, Baba said. The senior leader of the opposition congress party, Ghulam Nabi Azad, told reporters that the BJP has been a failure in the state and it cant escape its responsibility. Cant tie hands of forces The state BJP spokesperson, Sunil Sethi, told Al Jazeera that the terrorism was increasing and it was becoming difficult for the government to handle the situation. The terrorism was increasing. We wanted to deal with the situation strongly. We cant tie the hands of security forces. Everyone was suffering due to this situation. We had to take a call for the interest of the nation, he said. Despite the Ramadan ceasefire announced by the BJP there was no end to violence. At least 30 people were killed during the ceasefire period. The killing of prominent Kashmiri journalist, Shujat Bukhari, last week has sent shock waves in the disputed Himalayan region. The violence has seen an uptick in the region since the beginning of this year. Kenyan medic loses appeal to block deployment of Cuban doctors Kenyan union complains of unemployment crisis as about 100 doctors from Cuba deployed across the country. Defence minister orders inquiry as 25 bodies found after a military crackdown on suspected fighters and ethnic militia. Malis defence minister has admitted soldiers were involved in killings in the countrys troubled central region which has been plagued by violence between security forces and fighters. The comments by Tiena Coulibaly on Tuesday came after local media reports said that 25 bodies had been found in three mass graves after a military crackdown on suspected fighters and allied ethnic militia. The discovery of the graves added to accusations of summary executions by government troops. The inspection mission sent to the area confirms the existence of mass graves implicating some armed forces personnel in serious violations causing the deaths of men in Nantaka and Kobaka [Mopti region], Tiena Coulibaly, the minister, said on Tuesday. Coulibaly instructed military prosecutors to open an inquiry. He said the authorities were firmly resolved to fight impunity and get soldiers to strictly observe international rights and humanitarian conventions, a statement said. An NGO called Kisal, which campaigns for the human rights of pastoral communities, said 25 people from the Fulani ethnic group, who are predominantly herders, were picked up last week by the army in the localities of Kobaka and Nantaka. Human rights groups accuse the Malian military of conducting extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, torture and arbitrary arrests against suspected sympathisers of armed groups charges the army has promised in the past to investigate. The announced investigation is good news, but promises arent enough, Corinne Dufka, Human Rights Watch associate director for West Africa, told Reuters news agency. Since 2017, Ive documented over 60 alleged executions by the army of suspects who are buried in at least seven common graves, none of which have resulted in justice for the families, added Dufka. Mali has been in turmoil since Tuareg rebels and loosely allied armed groups took over its north in 2012, prompting French forces to intervene to push them back the following year. Growing violence has raised doubts about whether Mali will be able to hold credible elections scheduled for the end of next month, in which President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita will seek a second term. Kims third trip to China in three months comes just a week after his landmark summit with US president in Singapore. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has arrived for a two-day visit in China, where he is expected to discuss with Chinese leaders his next steps after his summit with US President Donald Trump. Kims visit beginning on Tuesday is the third trip he made to China in three months, and comes exactly a week after his landmark meeting with the US leader in Singapore on June 12. He visited the city of Dalian in May and Beijing in March. Trump agreed to work with Kim towards complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula, committed to provide the Norths regime with security guarantees and pledged to end war games, which Pyongyang and Beijing have long seen as provocative. On Tuesday South Korea and the Pentagon announced they would halt the annual Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August. In an unusual move, Chinese state media announced Kims visit and said he would stay for two days. Previously China would only confirm Kim had visited after he had left the country. No other details were provided. A Kim trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China is North Koreas most important diplomatic and economic backer but has been angered by Pyongyangs nuclear and missile tests. Kim reportedly took an Air Koryo flight to Beijing, and headed straight to the Diaoyutai state guest house, according to South Koreas Yonhap news agency. Chinese President Xi Jinping is exerting a lot of influence from behind the scenes, said Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Glaser said it was predictable Xi would want to be briefed by Kim directly about the North Korean leaders talks with Trump. I expect they will talk about the path going forward and where priorities should lie, Glaser said. Those priorities, from Chinas perspective, would be to ensure that Beijing is included in any peace treaty talks and for creating an environment on the Korean Peninsula that will make it unnecessary for US troops to remain. Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor at Renmin Universitys School of International Studies in Beijing, said the frequency of Kims visits was unprecedented. He noted that unlike on previous visits, Chinas state broadcaster CCTV announced Kims visit before his departure. This is an improvement. This shows that China is moving toward a healthier and more normal direction in relations with North Korea, Cheng said. Meanwhile, South Koreas foreign ministry said it is hopeful that KIms visit to China will help in the denuclearisation process. Our government expects China to play a constructive role in order to resolve the issue, Noh Kyu-duk, a foreign ministry spokesman, said. Calling for a new approach to tackle the issue, UNHCR says 53 percent of the 68.5 million people displaced are children. Nearly 69 million people who have fled war, violence and persecution were forcibly displaced last year, according to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR). In its annual report released on Tuesday, UNHCR said continued crises in places like South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as the exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar that started last year, raised the overall figure of forced displacement in 2017 to 68.5 million. At least 53 percent of the total displaced are children, including many who are unaccompanied, according to the Global Trends report. Of that the 68.5 million total, 16.2 million were displaced last year an average of more than 44,000 people a day, it said. This is a global phenomenon that requires international solidarity and cooperation on a global scale, Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told Al Jazeera from the Libyan capital, Tripoli. And this is what the rising figures tell the world. Refugees are fleeing violence, war and persecution. We have an obligation to help them, Grandi said. Far more comprehensive approach Earlier, Grandi called for a new and far more comprehensive approach to deal with the refugee situation. UNHCR said the figures debunk a flawed perception that a refugee crisis has affected more developed countries in the Global North. According to the UNHCR, four out of five refugees lived in countries bordering the homes they fled. Grandi said that these neighbouring countries such as Turkey, Pakistan and Uganda which host the majority of refugees need to be helped. Lets not forget that of the 68.5 million refugees and displaced, 85 percent of them are not in rich countries, he said. Some 25.4 million refugees fled their countries to escape conflict and persecution, according to the report. The UNHCR chief expressed his concerns at the response of Western countries in dealing with the refugee situation. And they are not even effective, if you close avenues on one side they open on another, he said. We need to look at root causes and we need to address the reasons why these people leave violence and war. In South Sudans war, thousands suffer rape and sex attacks Although thousands of women have reported rape and other sexual atrocities in South Sudans war, human rights groups say the figure is likely to be much higher. Losing Hudaida would weaken Houthi rebels by severing supply lines from Red Sea port city to their stronghold in Sanaa. The battle between a Saudi and Emirati-led coalition and Houthi rebels has entered the main compound of Yemens Hudaida airport, according to a Yemeni military source and resident. Saudi and UAE backed forces stormed the gates of the airport on Tuesday, according to sources on the ground, while Houthis used tank, artillery and mortar fire to shell the inside of the airport. They have stormed the airport, a Yemeni military source told Reuters news agency. The facility was stormed after fierce battles broke out early in the morning between coalition forces and Houthi fighters who hold the main port city of Hudaida. On Monday, Saudi and UAE Apache attack helicopters pounded Houthi positions as civilians fled in search of shelter from the biggest battle of the war in three years. The attack reportedly targeted Houthi snipers and fighters positioned on rooftops of schools and homes in the Manzar neighbourhood near Hudaidas airport compound, residents said, in fighting that has wounded dozens of civilians and prevented aid organisations from reaching parts of the city. While most of the intense fighting is in Hudaida, Houthi media reported more than 40 air strikes in other parts of Yemen over the past 24 hours. Losing Hudaida would significantly weaken the Houthis by severing supply lines from the Red Sea port city to their stronghold in the capital, Sanaa, and possibly depriving an estimated 70 percent of the population of access to food and medicine. It could also give an edge to the Western-backed Saudi and UAE-led coalition that, despite superior weaponry and firepower, has failed to defeat the Houthis in a war that has killed 10,000 people and created the worlds most urgent humanitarian crisis. Speaking to Al Jazeera Sami Hamdi, editor-in-chief of the International Interest, highlighted how essential the citys airport and seaport are for the coalition forces and the Houthis. The Houthi gamble has always been that as long as they can stay in Sanaa and Hudaida, then international pressure will force Saudi Arabia to the table to discuss negotiations. Taking the airport and seaport are absolutely fundamental for the coalition forces because this is the battle that will cut off the lifeline for the Houthis. If Hudaida is taken, there will be a severe weakening of the Houthis position and it may very well force the Houthis into a fight for survival which may make them take negotiations more seriously. The battle for Hudaida, launched seven days ago, could drag on, inflicting more suffering on civilians who have already endured air raids, port blockades, hunger and a cholera epidemic. In a post on social media late on Sunday, Anwar Gargash, the UAEs minister of state for foreign affairs, said that a coalition victory in Hudaida will pull the Houthis back to the negotiating table. Grave worry Tens of thousands of residents have fled the fighting along Yemens western coastline where pro-government fighters backed by the Saudi-led coalition are engaged in fierce battles with Houthi rebels. Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, told reporters on Monday that about 5,200 families, or around 26,000 people, have sought safety within their own districts or in other parts of Hudaida governorate. The number is expected to increase as hostilities continue, he said. Earlier, UN human rights chief Zeid Raad al-Hussein voiced concern that the Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates-led military operation in Yemen could endanger millions of civilians. I emphasise my grave worry regarding the Saudi and Emirati-led coalitions ongoing attacks in Hudaida which could result in enormous civilian casualties and have a disastrous impact on life-saving humanitarian aid to millions of people which comes through the port, al-Hussein said on Monday. He was speaking at the opening session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, where he gave an overview of the overall human rights situation while denouncing the threat of growing chauvinistic nationalism around the world. Turkey says US bill is going against the soul of strategic partnership, warning it could buy stealth jets elsewhere. The US Senate passed a bill on Monday that could be used to block or slow the transfer of the F35 advanced warplane to Turkey, a NATO ally that has an increasingly strained relationship with Washington. There have been bipartisan efforts in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, to potentially stop the transfer to Turkey. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) now needs to be reconciled with a bill from the House of Representatives and could be approved by the end of the summer. The Senate version of the act is worth about $716bn. Both houses have introduced their own version of amendments that target Turkey one of the partner countries on the F35 programme. {articleGUID} The Senate version would prevent the transfer until the Pentagon devises a plan to remove Ankara from the programme. The Republican party of US President Donald Trump controls both chambers. Not without alternatives In a reaction to the US Senate bill, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Tuesday criticised the US decision, calling it an unfortunate development. Turkey is not without alternatives. Such attempts are regrettable and go against the soul of strategic partnership, Turkish daily Hurriyet quoted the prime minister as saying. Ankara was seeking to buy about 100 of the stealth jets. However, various legislators have cited a number of concerns with Turkey, including its plans to buy advanced Russian air defence systems, warming ties to Moscow and the arrest of US citizens and consulate staff. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on June 4 emphasised that if Washington decides not to sell F35s to Turkey, Ankara will look further to other countries or produce its own. According to the F35 project agreement, the first two F35s must be handed over to Turkey in the US by June 21 for training and testing purposes. Political rivals have not met face-to-face in two years since Machar fled South Sudan in 2016. South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar are set to meet on Wednesday for their first face-to-face meeting in two years, according to the Ethiopian foreign ministry. Wednesdays meeting in Ethiopias capital, Addis Ababa, comes amid efforts to end the worlds youngest countrys five-year civil war, which has killed tens of thousands of people and caused about four million to flee their homes. The warring leaders will meet at the invitation of Ethiopias Prime Minister Ahmed Abiy. Ateny Wek Ateny, South Sudans government spokesman, called Abiys invitation significant, telling The Associated Press news agency: anything that brings peace in South Sudan is wanted. The meeting was initially scheduled for Tuesday but postponed by one day at the last minute. It will be mediated by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an East African regional bloc that has led several rounds of failed peace talks. Failed truce Having split from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan descended into civil war in 2013 after Kiir accused Machar, then his deputy, of plotting a coup. {articleGUID} Since then, multiple ceasefire agreements and peace efforts have failed to yield any positive results. Machar fled South Sudan in July 2016 after new fighting erupted in the capital, Juba, ending a brief attempt at peace in which he returned to his role as Kiirs vice president. The rivals have not met since. Sanctions Pressure has been growing on the warring sides to end a conflict that has created Africas largest refugee crisis since the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Both sides have been accused of abuses against civilians, including along ethnic lines. Earlier this month, the UN Security Council adopted a US-sponsored resolution that threatens an arms embargo on South Sudan and sanctions against six individuals, including the countrys defence chief, if fighting does not stop and a political agreement reached. The resolution asks UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to report to the Council on that by June 30. Representatives from three nations meet in Geneva to discuss committee tasked with drafting Syrias new constitution. Geneva, Switzerland Representatives from Russia, Iran and Turkey are meeting in Geneva on Tuesday to discuss the establishing a committee tasked with drafting Syrias new constitution. Members of the Syrian opposition have also arrived in the Swiss city where officials of the three nations acting as guarantors of a ceasefire in the war-torn country are meeting under the auspices of the United Nations. I dont expect, lets be frank, a major breakthrough, but I am confident progress is possible, said UN envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura in a statement to the press in advance of the meetings. There is something moving in that direction and we need to capitalise on it. The meeting in Geneva follows up on the agreement signed at the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in Sochi in January, whose final statement called for the creation of a constitutional commission comprising government, opposition and Syrian civil society members. The creation of the constitutional committee would the first step in the political solution of the conflict as mandated by the Security Council resolution 2254. {articleGUID} Besides government and opposition, it will be important that independents, civil society, experts, and women and as you know, we have been strongly recommending at least 30 percent of women all find their place into this constitutional committee. We must have an inclusive process, said De Mistura. I want to discuss with Iran, Russia and Turkey some preliminary thinking and hear their own views too on how the Sochi Final Statement can be given effect to. De Mistura said the government of Syria had already conveyed to him a list of 50 names. De Mistura said serious efforts were under way to draw the opposition list. The UN envoy called for the Geneva meeting after concluding a round of consultations that brought him to Turkey, Iran and Egypt to discuss how to speed up the process for the creation of a constitutional committee. Baskets of reform Alexander Lavrentyev, presidential envoy for Syria, and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin are attending the meetings for Russia. Sedat Onal, the deputy undersecretary for foreign affairs of Turkey, and Hossein Jaberi Ansari, senior assistant to Irans foreign minister, are also attending the meeting. The UN-led peace process based in Geneva has laid out the so-called four baskets of reform for a political settlement of the crisis. {articleGUID} They include the drafting of a new constitution, parliamentary elections, the creation of a non-sectarian transitional government and the fight against what Damascus calls terrorism. But the talks have made little progress so far as government and opposition have failed to find an agreement over the fate of President Bashar al-Assad. Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, more than 465,000 Syrians have been killed and over 12 million half the countrys prewar population have been displaced. US officials scramble to defend policy of separating families at the border after audio of screaming children surfaces. The Trump administration again doubled down on its practice of separating families at the border as audio of crying children in a so-called immigration shelter generated further outrage over the approach. Papa! Papa! one child weeps as screams and cries of others are heard in an audio clip released by ProPublica, a US-based media outlet, on Monday. Well, we have an orchestra here, right? a Border Patrol agent is heard saying in the clip. Whats missing is a conductor. According to ProPublica, the clip was obtained from prominent civil rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury who was given the audio by an unidentified individual who recorded the children in a detention centre. The now-viral clip has driven anger that continues to mount against US President Donald Trump, whose administration has introduced a zero-tolerance approach towards migrants and refugees who cross the US southern border without documents. Part of the policy has been separating children from their parents who are detained. Inside a detention center last week. Children separated from their parents wail and ask for help. A Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. Well, we have an orchestra here, he jokes. Whats missing is a conductor. Listen to the full audio here: https://t.co/FrqfILMSUP pic.twitter.com/3Htj4t7alB ProPublica (@propublica) June 18, 2018 Last week, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesman said that nearly 2,000 minors were separated from 1,940 adults who crossed the US border without documents between April 19 and May 31. Administration officials say they are simply following the law, however, there are no statutes that mandate separating children from families at the border. On Monday, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen faced a number of questions from White House reporters over the practice. She again blamed the policy on politicians, saying that Congress alone can fix it. However, critics point out that the administration can simply end the zero-tolerance approach. Rights groups accuse Trump of using the issue as a way to pressure Democrats into pushing through immigration reform legislation that includes funding for his border wall on the US-Mexico border. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, as well as Democratic Senators Kamala Harris and Tina Smith have called on Nielsen to resign. She says, Im all alone Nielsen told reporters on Monday that she had not listened to the nearly eight-minute audio clip obtained by ProPublica. In the clip, a six-year-old girl can be heard asking for her aunt, saying the phone number she had memorised. The aunt told ProPublica that her sister and niece left for the US from El Salvador more than a month ago. When she spoke to the young girl, she said she pleaded with her to come and pick her up. Imagine getting a call from your six-year-old niece. She's crying and begging me to go get her. She says, 'I promise I'll behave, but please get me out of here. I'm all alone' Aunt of six-year-old speaking to ProPublica It was the hardest moment in my life, the aunt told ProPublica. Imagine getting a call from your six-year-old niece. Shes crying and begging me to go get her. She says, I promise Ill behave, but please get me out of here. Im all alone.' Prior to the audio clip going viral, Trump said that he would not allow the US to become a migrant camp, adding that it will not be a refugee holding facility. It wont be. Nothing short of torture Trumps comments came as many legislators on both sides of the aisle, as well as rights groups, intensified their criticism, with Amnesty International calling his policy nothing short of torture. Make no mistake, these family separations are a crisis of the governments own making, Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnestys Americas director, said in a statement on Monday. This is a particularly cruel policy, where frightened children are being ripped from their parents arms and taken to overflowing detention centres, which are effectively cages, she said. This is nothing short of torture. The cages Guevara-Rosas was referring to are the so-called shelters and detention centres where individuals, including children, are being housed. DHS released photos of the centres after a small group of reporters and politicians went on a tour of a facility in Texas over the weekend. The photos show individuals, including children, sitting on mattresses on the floor in chain-link fences. Over the weekend, protesters also marched to the newly erected tent city in Tornillo, Texas, where hundreds of boys will be housed, according to Congressman Will Hurd, who toured the area. Immigrant children, many of whom have been separated from their parents are shown walking in single file between tents in their compound next to the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas [Mike Blake/Reuters] In February, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report that found that women and children detained by US Customs and Border Protection were regularly held in freezing cells and suffer other harsh treatment. The report was based on interviews of about 110 women and children who were held in centres in 2015, 2016 and 2017 under the administrations of both Trump and former President Barack Obama. The majority of the interviews were conducted in 2017. Obama was also criticised after photos in 2014, showed children in similar holding cells, also referred to by rights groups as cages. At the time, Obama officials said the facilities were necessary to deal with an influx in the number of unaccompanied minors coming to the US. The photos outraged the public, as well as immigrants rights groups, many of whom were also staunch critics of the former presidents tough immigration policies. According to a study by the racial justice think-tank Applied Research Center (now known as Race Forward), more than 5,100 children in 22 states in 2011 were in foster care due to deportations. Local news reports at the time documented stories of children and teens coming home to find a parent detained and eventually deported. Unlike Trump, however, previous administrations, including that of Obama, did not have a policy of separating nearly all families at the border. Make no mistake, these family separations are a crisis of the government's own making. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International Trumps zero-tolerance policy is a departure from the previous precedent that placed those detained in immigration proceedings while their asylum claims were examined or deportation proceedings finalised. Families were often kept together in centres, or released to await their hearings. Trump has repeatedly rallied against immigrants since the 2016 presidential election, running on a campaign to build a wall on the US -Mexico border. A Honduran girl and her mother are taken into custody near the US-Mexico border on June 12 [John Moore/AFP] He expanded the powers of the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to focus on detaining the majority of undocumented immigrants, including those with no criminal record. The administration has also ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for thousands of Salvadorans, Haitians, Nepalis, Nicaraguans and Sudanese. Trump also attempted to end protections for children brought to the US without documents. That decision has been temporarily blocked by the courts. Announcement by Ambassador Nikki Haley comes a month after body votes to probe killing of Palestinians in Gaza. The United States has withdrawn from the United Nations top human rights body accusing it of chronic bias against Israel, in a move that was criticised by human rights groups and described as regrettable by foreign leaders. The decision to pull out of the UN Human Rights Council was announced on Tuesday by Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN. We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organisation that makes a mockery of human rights, she said alongside US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington, DC. {articleGUID} Minutes later, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, called the announcement by US President Donald Trumps administration disappointing, if not really surprising. Given the state of human rights in todays world, the US should be stepping up, not stepping back, he added. The European Union said the move risks undermining the role of the US as a champion and supporter of democracy on the world stage, while British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called it regrettable. On the other hand, Israel, a major ally of the US, praised Washingtons courageous move. "Disappointing, if not really surprising, news. Given the state of #HumanRights in today's world, the US should be stepping up, not stepping back" UN Human Rights Chief #Zeid following USA decision to withdraw from U.N. Human Rights Council.#StandUp4HumanRights UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) June 19, 2018 The US announcement comes after the council voted last month to probe the killing of scores of Palestinian protesters in the Gaza Strip and accused Israel of excessive use of force. Al Jazeeras Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington, DC, said the US exit from the 47-member Geneva-based body did not come as a shock, as it was something that Haley had talked about almost from the moment that she became the US ambassador to the UN in early 2017. {articleGUID} She was quite adamant at the time that the council held a very deep anti-Israel bias and that the US was going to try to root it out; otherwise it would leave the council, said Jordan. But the primary reason why the US is pulling out of the council now is because of its efforts to reduce or eliminate of the unfair criticism, in the US view, of Israels treatment of Palestinians, she added. In the larger scheme of things, this really is a way of standing by its ally, Israel, but also using the opportunity to try to exert its own vision of human rights even though a number of international human rights groups are roundly criticising the Trump administration for leaving the council. In their remarks, both Haley and Pompeo said the decision had been made after a long year of efforts to shame the council into reform. Haley said the move is not a retreat from human rights commitments and accused the council of being a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias. Look at the council membership, and you see an appalling disrespect for the most basic rights, she said Haley, citing Venezuela, China, Cuba and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Child separation policy The Trump administrations move also comes as it faces widespread criticism for detaining children separated from their immigrant parents at the US-Mexico border. On Monday, al-Hussein called on Washington to halt its child separation policy. The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable, said the top UN human rights official. Washingtons withdrawal is the latest US rejection of multilateral engagement after it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Unions Human Rights Program, said Trumps misguided policy of isolationism only harms American interests. Twelve rights and aid groups, including Human Rights First, Save the Children and CARE, had earlier warned Pompeo the US withdrawal would make it more difficult to advance human rights priorities and aid victims of abuse around the world. For the Trump administration, it's more important to defend Israel from criticism by the UN Human Rights Council than to defend human rights victims in Syria, North Korea, Myanmar and South Sudana sadly one-dimensional human rights policy. https://t.co/dtjveAySOG pic.twitter.com/qQSD9Eq20m Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) June 19, 2018 In May, the council voted to send a team of international investigators to probe the deadly shootings of Palestinian demonstrators by Israeli snipers in the Gaza Strip during weeks-long rallies protests the Great March of Return along the fence with Israel. The US and Australia cast the only no votes at the time, while the Israeli ambassador in Geneva attacked the council for spreading lies against Israel. Speaking to Al Jazeera from New York, Louis Charbonneau, the UN director at Human Rights Watch, said: Unfortunately the US is placing protecting Israel from criticism for its abuses over all else. He added that despite some shortcomings, the Human Rights Council has done some very good work, highlighting human rights abuses around the world, scrutinising and bringing facts to light which enable us to holding these countries to account. Charbonneau cited a commission of inquiry set up for war-torn Syria, saying that it has been working for the last seven years uncovering ghastly abuses and reporting publicly on them; the establishment of a fact-finding mission on Myanmar, where weve seen ethnic cleansing on a scale that is mind-blogging; as well as looking at the problems in South Sudan, Burundi, Congo and North Korea. The US move is unprecedented in the 12-year history of the council, as no country has ever dropped out voluntarily. Libya was suspended in 2011 after a government crackdown on protesters. Boycotting the council The councils 47 members are elected by the UNs General Assembly for a three-year period, and can only serve for two terms in a row. A specific number of seats is allocated for each region of the globe. Under President George W Bush, the US boycotted the body for three years after its establishment 12 years ago. When the Human Rights Council was first stood up back in 2006 the ambassador to the UN at the time was John Bolton, who persuaded then-President Bush not to join the body for the reasons that Haley today spelled out, said Al Jazeeras Jordan. Its worth pointing out that Bolton is now the national security adviser and certainly much of his views about the UN have not changed in those 12 years, she added. Under President Barack Obama, who was sworn in as president in 2009, the US was elected to the body for the maximum two consecutive terms. After a year off, it was re-elected in 2016. The fierce clashes risk escalating dire humanitarian crisis in the country, where eight million are at starvation risk. A major military push by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and allied Yemeni forces against the Iranian-aligned Houthi militia group in the port city of Hudaida is showing no signs of slowing down as the offensive to take the vital gateway enters its second week. Dubbed Operation Golden Victory, the push marks the biggest military effort for the Saudi-led forces in three years, which began pounding Yemen in March 2015 after the Houthi group took over the capital, Sanaa, and tried to exert their influence in other parts of the country. In addition to the naval shelling from the Red Sea, Saudi Apache helicopters are also directing air attacks on Houthi positions. UAE troops are on the ground, backing Yemens Amaleqa brigades. According to Yemeni military sources, the death toll so far is up to 216 fighters, including 33 Houthis and 19 soldiers killed in Tuesdays fighting. No civilian casualties have yet been confirmed. The fierce clashes also risk escalating the dire humanitarian crisis in the country, where out of a population of 28 million people, eight million are at risk of starvation, and 22 million depend on aid. Why are Saudis and UAE forces attacking Hudaida? Hudaida, home to an estimated 600,000 people, has been under the control of the Houthis since 2014, along with other western-coast ports and much of northern Yemen. The citys seaport was responsible for delivering 70 percent of Yemens imports mostly humanitarian aid, food and fuel pre-2015. Yet the Saudis say that the Houthis, who reportedly generate $30m to $40m a month in revenue from the port, are using it to smuggle in weapons from Iran. The Saudis and Emiratis want the port to be handed back to Yemens government, led by exiled leader Abdrabbo Mansour Hadi, or to be placed under UN supervision. Joost Hiltermann, the MENA programme director for the International Crisis Group, said that the UAE has been taking the lead on the operation. [The offensive] comes from a [point of] frustration for the UAE over the stalemated situation, and a desire to push the Houthis into a position in which they would have to make greater compromises, he told Al Jazeera. According to Adam Baron, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations, the battle of Hudaida has been a long time coming. Ultimately, the coalition views the Houthis control of Hudaida as unacceptable, whether in war or peace, Baron told Al Jazeera. They dont want them to have access to the port and this is a way of creating facts on the ground, so to speak in addition to a means of taking the revenue generated by the port out of the Houthis hands. Further to the south, some 14km away, lies the airport, which has been the main battle arena in the first days of the operation. On Tuesday, residents of the city said that Saudi-led troops had taken over the main runway and were fighting for the control of passenger terminals, as well as the flight control tower. According to a Yemeni military source, large parts of the airport were under their control and fierce fighting was continuing. The UAEs official news agency WAM reported the presence of its forces at the airport. With the participation and support of the Emirati armed forces, the joint Yemeni resistance (army) entered Hudaida airport, WAM said in a post on Twitter. Baron said that the battle, if successful, would also force the Houthis to the negotiating table. The coalition assesses that the loss of Hudaida would weaken the Houthis to the point that theyll be more likely to engage in future talks in good faith, he said. What if Operation Golden Victory is successful? A day after the coalition offensive was launched on June 13, Hadi, the exiled president, returned from Saudi Arabia to Aden, his governments temporary capital since 2015, for the first time in more than a year. Our imminent victory in Hudaida will be the gateway to retrieving our kidnapped capital and exerting the influence of the government over every inch of the country, he said. Loss of the governorates port and airport would deliver a massive blow to the Houthis, who will see their supply lines cut and their coffers significantly reduced thus limiting their war efforts. Coalition control over the two strategic points would, in turn, reinforce their own vital supply lines, which would tip the balance of the so-far deadlocked war in their favour in what Baron explained would constitute a major shift in momentum that could amount to a spillover effect, especially if stabilisation efforts are successful. Capturing Hudaida would also mean gaining a new potential staging point for future efforts, likely leading to the Houthis complete loss of control of the coast of Hudaida, he said. How are Hudaidas residents affected? Several human rights organisations have warned of what Amnesty International called the devastating impact for hundreds of thousands of civilians not just in the city but throughout Yemen that the offensive could wreak. With an estimated 600,000 people living in and around Hudaida, all sides to the conflict must take all feasible precautions to ensure that the civilian population is protected, Amnesty said last week. Racha Mouawieh, Amnestys Yemen researcher, told Al Jazeera that millions of lives are at risk. The closing of Hudaida port would prevent life-saving supplies from reaching civilians in desperate need, she said. It would put millions of lives are at risk in what was already being described as the worlds worst humanitarian crisis. Hudaida has been the scene for smaller battles on the ground and from the sky in recent months, as hostilities between pro-government forces and Houthi fighters played out. An Amnesty researcher who visited civilians who had fled Hudaida to the city of Aden last May said that they had described facing mortar attacks, air strikes, landmines and other dangers. This is just a glimpse of what is to come as the fighting edges closer to residential areas, Mouawieh said. The United Nations said that since the beginning of June, 26,000 people or 5,200 families, have fled the fighting and sought safety within their own districts or other areas in Hudaida governorate. The number is expected to rise, UN general-secretary spokesman Stephane Dujarric said. People are on the edge regarding the potential of urban warfare in the city itself, Baron said. While those with the means may aim to flee to avoid the fighting, many if not most of those left in Hudaida lack the finances to do so. Manal Qaed, an independent journalist and resident of Hudaida told Al Jazeera that civilians are worried and are unsure of what is going to happen. The sound of the warplanes above never ceases, night and day, she said. Joost Hiltermann warned that if the ground battles crept to the city, the level of ruin would be immeasurable. Urban warfare is utterly destructive, and if there is street-to-street fighting in Hudaida city, the impact on civilians will likely be devastating, physically and psychologically, he said. But life under Houthi control has not been smooth sailing for the governorates residents either. Since the start of the conflict, Amnesty International has documented how Houthi and allied forces have arbitrarily arrested and detained critics, opponent, journalist and human rights defenders, Mouawieh said. Aid workers have also reported how excessive and arbitrary bureaucratic procedures have led to restrictions on the movement of humanitarian staff and aid. The Houthis heavy hand has seen internal oppression and crackdowns mix with the ongoing threat of coalition air strikes, Baron agreed. The surrounding countryside holds some of Yemens most impoverished areas which humanitarian groups have warned about for years, he added. What is next for Hudaida? According to Mouawieh, all parties must respect the rules of war in order to ensure that the flow of essential goods will not be hindered. The UN Security Council must step up and impose targeted sanctions on the individuals responsible for these violations, she said. The UN envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths concluded a three-day visit to Yemen by calling on the Houthis to hand over the Hudaida port either to Hadis government or to the UN. The Houthis refused. According to Hussein al-Bukhaiti, a pro-Houthi journalist, the group were incensed that Griffiths did not hold Saudi Arabia accountable to the role it has played in the conflict. As for the next step, Bukhaiti said that there must be a compromise from all sides. The ones suffering are the Yemeni people, he told Al Jazeera, speaking from Sanaa. To solve what is happening in Yemen, the Houthis have to sit with the Saudis and other parties under the supervision of the UN. The FBI brass must have needed hazmat suits to scrub DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz's report on agency misconduct in the 2016 elections, since the evidence of high crimes at the highest level of government was abundant. The truth is being hidden, by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the result is a sort of fiction representative of something out of George Orwell's '1984.' So, we must do everything within our power to force the issue, quite contrary to status quo voices in government and the media, who are not representing the U.S. Constitution and its objectives based on our founding virtues. We must, in fact, hold these perpetrators, in the FBI, the DOJ, and elsewhere within the government, accountable for illegally conspiring to prevent Donald Trump from winning the election and afterwards trying to unseat him from power. The five-hundred page IG report was released to Congress on June 12, 2018, and it barely scrapes the surface. It doesn't really reveal anything that the American people were not already aware had occurred. I made note of the Peter Strzok and Lisa Page texts in January 2018, just as the IG report recently did. As reported by John Bowden on June 14, at The Hill , Page texted Strzok in August 2016 and asked, "[Trump's] not ever going to become president, right? Right?" "No. No he won't," Strzok responded. Why are these two FBI agents still working for the FBI? And yet, in regards to investigative decisions by FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, the lead investigator on the Clinton email case and the Russia investigation, and Lisa Page, an FBI attorney, Inspector General Michael Horowitz incredibly offers us that there was "no evidence that the conclusions by the prosecutors were affected by bias or other improper considerations." Radio host Mark Levin really put things in their proper perspective , on Thursday June 14, when he spoke with Fox News personality Sean Hannity and observed that the "cabal" of Strzok, Page, FBI Director James Comey, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and others intentionally tried to sabotage Donald Trump's run for president and worked to protect Hillary Clinton from indictment. Levin further explained to Sean Hannity, as he observed: "I went through this major report here. I see several things. Number one, out of all the texts, all the documents, all the emails that have been reviewed. You know what's interesting, Sean? There is not a single pro-Trump text. There's not a single anti-Hillary text. There's not a single pro-Trump senior FBI official. There's not a single anti-Hillary FBI official. This was a cabal. And what these people had as their purpose, to interfere with a presidential election." Among several other important items, the report also gives Hillary Clinton a pass on the mishandling of Top Secret information, even though it's unfathomable that any career government official would not realize that an insecure system was not any place for those conversations. Seven email chains were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level and went through Clinton's private server in an unsecured manner, Steven Lee Myers reported on July 5, 2016 for the New York Times, and it is now known , that "foreign actors" [ Russians? ] did, in fact, access them, according to a recent report by Catherine Herridge and Adam Shaw at Fox News. This was willful and criminal misconduct by Hillary Clinton, because the gap between unclassified and Top Secret was so wide and obvious. She had to know her actions were criminal and illegal, and there was a purpose and a deception at work here, namely to cover up the illegal actions she and Obama took in Libya and across the Middle East. Horowitz's report split hairs with the definition of "gross negligence" -- concluding that the term encompassed conduct "so gross as to almost suggest deliberate intention" or something that falls just short of being willful. Horowitz found that Hillary Clinton did not intend to violate the law, much in the disingenuous fashion that former FBI Director James Comey also claimed. Any person capable of reading the law and cogent thought knows that our prisons are full of people whose crimes were not intentional, but they were still prosecuted and imprisoned for breaking the law. This report has all the appearances of a whitewash and an evasion of the FBI's troubling role in this garbage barge of institutional roguery. Americans remain in the dark, due to questions left unanswered, such as what really transpired between former President Bill Clinton and Obama administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch during their July 2016 airport tarmac tete-a-tete, a few days before Comey let Hillary, a presidential candidate, off the hook on the email server issue. How was it not a conflict of interest for Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe's wife to receive $700,000 for her state legislative race, from Clinton's campaign bag-man, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe? How did the wife of a top Justice department official, Bruce Ohr, get on the payroll of Fusion GPS, the company that brokered the Steele dossier? And how did the FBI conceal the fact from the judges who ruled on FISA warrants against President Trump and his associates, that the Steele dossier was bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign? There isn't a hint of any IG report on other FBI abuse of power, like inserting an actual spy, reportedly Stefan Halper , into President Trump's campaign. Neither is there any attention given to the FBI concealment of Obama's mendacious denial that he knew anything about Clinton's secret server. What alternate universe is Horowitz from and when are these lawbreakers to the United States going to be prosecuted and thrown into the deepest, darkest dungeon, underneath a prison? U.S. Attorney John Huber has supposedly been investigating several of these crimes since November 2017. His boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has informed House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that such an investigation is within the full scope of Huber's existing mandate. With 470 investigators, Huber has enormous investigative firepower that far exceeds the staff of any special counsel. Americans need plain sight and new leaders with plain sight, pure and simple, because something evil is coursing through the halls of our government and in the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation these days. Anytime an average citizen can recognize the multiple acts of treason that were committed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their minions, through the State Department, the FBI and the Department of Justice, but career federal agents dismiss them as oversights or "unintended," something is terribly wrong, and if the Inspector General's report is any indication, our Republic is on its last dying legs, unless the patriots of America can right the Republic, peacefully or not. Your Ship Has Just Come In Why is it that a countrys most famous ships seem to take on a personality of their own, as if they are living, breathing entities like movie stars, athletes, or entertainers? Theres no question that this is true. Everyone, no matter what their age, demographic group or generational category, can name ships that are noteworthy to them. They may be military naval vessels, they may be private/commercial yachts, or boats, but everyone has their favorites. There have been a lot of famous ships through the years, from a lot of countries. For this discussion, were going to limit it to American vessels. (That means no Titanic, no Bismarck, no Yamato, no Queen Elizabeth. Sorry.) In no particular order, here are some that come to mind: Maine A late-1890s battleship, the Maine was assigned to protect American interests in Cuba during its war of independence from Spain. Three weeks after its arrival in Havana, the Maine was wracked by a tremendous explosion on the night of February 15, 1898 and quickly sank, claiming the lives of 260 of its crew of 374. No definitive cause for the explosion was ever determined, but the initial theory of an external mine has been generally discounted in favor of an accidental internal fire that subsequently ignited the ships armament magazines. The sinking itself and the hyperbolic press coverage of the event was the cause of considerable American political bellicosity towards Spain, serving as a major catalyst of the Spanish-American war later in 1898. The sinking gave rise to the famous saying, Remember the Maine! Constitution Perhaps the most acclaimed U.S. Navy warship of all time, the U.S.S. Constitution was a 44-gun three-masted frigate, used by the American Navy in the War of 1812 against Britain. She is best known for her dramatic victories in several one-on-one confrontations with major British warships. In one of these battles (against the British frigate HMS Guerriere), cannon fire from the enemy ship supposedly bounced harmlessly off the thick, sturdy oak sides of the Constitutions hull, causing its crew members to exclaim, The hull must be made of iron! Hence, perhaps the most famous nickname in all of naval history -- Old Ironsides -- was born. Arizona A Pennsylvania-class battleship completed and commissioned in 1916, the Arizona was larger and more powerful than the Nevada-class ships that preceded her. Even though Arizona was fully active two years before WWI ended in 1918, it saw no action in that war, serving mostly in training duties. After WWI, the Arizona played a prominent role in diplomatic service, showing off American sea power in missions around the world. A major modernization took place between 1931 and 1941, which included more powerful engines and some rudimentary anti-aircraft gunnery. The lack of effective anti-aircraft defense -- common to all warships in the late 1930s/early 1940s, not just Arizona -- would prove disastrous during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. During Japans December 7th, 1941 surprise attack, several Japanese warplanes broke through the American defensive airspace around Arizona and scored numerous bomb hits on the ship. One of these penetrated the forward deck and exploded below in the ships magazine, causing a massive, catastrophic explosion that tore the ship in two. Arizona sank quickly, with the loss of 1177 U.S sailors, the largest single source of the more than 2300 U.S. personnel lost in the attack. A permanent memorial was built in Pearl Harbor over the sunken remains of the ship. Amazingly, the Arizona itself still leaks two quarts of oil a day into the harbors waters. Missouri Entering service with the U.S. Navy during the latter stages of WWII in 1944, the Missouri was the most advanced battleship to see service with the Navy. Compared to the Arizona, the Missouri was an entirely different caliber of ship -- far larger, faster, and with incomparably more advanced weaponry. It represented the most modern thinking in battleship design. Despite its impressive battle record in the closing stages of the war, the Missouri is probably best known for being the site of the official signing ceremony of Japans surrender to the United States on September 2, 1945, bringing the hostilities of WWII to an official close. After participating in combat operations during the Korean conflict from 1950-1953, Missouri was decommissioned in 1955, the battleship having been supplanted by the aircraft carrier and nuclear submarine as the primary offensive weapons of the Navy. However, in the late 1980s Missouri was modernized and recommissioned and took active part in shore bombardments during the 1991 Gulf War, firing several hundred rounds of 16-in shells. The ship was finally decommissioned for good in 1992, after an active combat career spanning nearly a half-century. Missouri was also featured prominently in two high-profile movies: 1992s Under Siege with Steven Seagal and the 2012 science fiction thriller Battleship. Known by the nicknames Mighty Mo and Big Mo, the Missouri is unquestionably one the most famous American ships ever. Nautilus The name Nautilus has graced at least two famous ships. One was the fictitious submarine in Jules Vernes 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, in which the books main character, Captain Nemo, leads the submarine Nautilus on a series of scientific adventures and battles against giant sea creatures. The book quite accurately describes and depicts the modern submarine, decades before such vessels became a reality. Although the submarine played a major role in both WWI and WWII, the basic technology of submarines was largely unchanged from 1914 to the early 1950s: small ships with narrow hulls, diesel engines for running on the surface, and electric engines with rechargeable power supplies for limited-time operation when fully submerged. Not only were the electric engines severely restricted in their below-surface operating time, the breathable air inside the submarine was also a limiting factor in the submarines underwater effectiveness. Unless those limitations could be overcome, the submarines potential impact would always be limited to a certain level. In 1954, those limitations were shattered forever with the advent of the U.S.S Nautilus, the worlds first nuclear-powered submarine. Free of needing oxygen or petroleum-based fuel for its propulsion, the Nautilus could spend a nearly unlimited amount of time fully submerged, and power from the nuclear reactor drove on-board air- and water-purification systems as well. For the first time, submarines could roam the oceans at will, virtually undetected, for almost unlimited periods of time. As Jules Vernes Nautilus ushered in a new era of thinking about undersea vessels, so the U.S.S. Nautilus changed forever the importance and impact the submarine had on the balance of world power. Enterprise Although many U.S. Navy ships have carried the name Enterprise, the one were talking about here is the WWII aircraft carrier. Completed and commissioned before America entered the war in 1941, Enterprise participated in every major Pacific action and earned more battle stars 20 -- than any other U.S. ship. Probably her most famous action occurred during the pivotal Battle of Midway, in which her aircraft were directly responsible for the sinking of three Japanese carriers. Known by the nickname The Big E, she was also called The Gray Ghost, since the Japanese mistakenly thought theyd sunk her on several occasions, only to find out the hard way that she was still very much alive. Tough, versatile, and resilient, the Big Es impressive accomplishments epitomized Americas successful carrier-oriented naval strategy in the Pacific in WWII. There have been other notable ships named Enterprise: 1961 saw the debut of the worlds first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, named Enterprise as a fitting tribute to the famed battle veteran of WWII. And there is the well-known fictional Starship Enterprise of "Star Trek" fame. But it is the WWII aircraft carrier Enterprise for whom the spot on this list is most deservedly held. Whether real or imagined, military or commercial, large or small, famous ships through the years hold an unshakable place in our collective consciousness, evoking a fascinating mixture of pride and respect. Press whips up emotion in child migrant feeding frenzy, and workable solutions get obscured The press here is doing what it did in Europe to encourage the vast migrant waves: focusing on children, as it did in the case of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who drowned at sea in 2015 as his parents attempted to enter Europe illegally. With no legal ground to stand on, the idea has always been to ensure that emotionalism outweighs rational immigration laws that are humane for everyone. After all, everyone cries when a child drowns, and everyone wants to comfort a small child crying (as the news photos now show); why have immigration law at all? That was what led to the great human waves inundating Europe which have since led to a lot more drownings and other mayhem. The problem is that reacting on that emotional level is a good way to ensure more child misery and victimization because these things are already happening as a result of perverse incentives within the law itself. A good piece to read on the background of why illegal immigrants are coming to the border, instead of the embassies, to claim asylum, is by Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review, headlined "The Immorality of Open Borders." His opener is a perfect summary of all the hard facts he supports with diamond-clarity: We have two choices when it comes to border security and interior enforcement. We can continue telegraphing the message that when you come here with children you are home free. This will continue fueling the drug crisis, growing MS-13, enriching the drug cartels, inducing sex trafficking and terrible crimes at the border, encouraging illegals to kidnap children to gain admission, and causing death and mayhem on both sides of the border. Or we could finally deter this behavior by announcing an end to any immigration requests not processed in a controlled environment through our embassy. If you are concerned about "separating children" and don't support the latter path, then you need to seriously examine your values and priorities. He points out that the child border crisis didn't arise out of nowhere, but came as a result of the perverse incentives embedded into President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals de facto amnesty for child illegals. From there on out, the migrant waves stopped being all about military-aged young men and turned to women and children. Amnesty, he notes, is a big prize to get. What's more, drug-dealers and cartels are all in for this, given the amount of money they make from border crossings, which has the double advantage of tying up the Border Patrol as they process entries about four hours per illegal per agent, he surmises. Border Patrol agents tied up with famished and thirsty illegals are a golden opportunity for drug-smugglers fueling the opiate epidemic in the states, because drug-smugglers know how to cross the desert border, armed and provisioned. The lawmen, tied up with the diapers and crying, can do nothing. Nobody benefits more than cartels from child-smuggling, and in many ways, Horowitz notes. The whole perverse incentive of this is that migrants are now claiming asylum to win entry, not just asking for a green card. Given that cartels are benefiting so much from this setup, Horowitz writes that ending all asylum applications at the border and taking them only at U.S. embassies is what will end the scam and all its incidental human carnage. That is something President Trump can do and should do pronto. Read the whole thing. A former CIA engineer who was already under indictment on child pornography charges has now been indicted on charges that he masterminded the largest leak of classified information in the agency's history. Joshua Schulte, 29, was charged in a new grand jury indictment with providing WikiLeaks with a massive trove of U.S. government hacking tools that the online publisher posted in March 2017, the Justice Department announced on Monday. Schulte was previously facing child pornography charges in federal court in New York, but the indictment broadens the case to accuse him of illegally gathering classified information, damaging CIA computers, lying to investigators and numerous other offenses. In January, attorneys involved in the child porn case revealed in court that Schulte was the target of a major investigation into WikiLeaks' release of a CIA collection known as "Vault 7." The Justice Department's news release announcing Schulte's indictment does not mention WikiLeaks by name, signaling that it has not been charged in the case. There was no mention of any other individuals being charged. Attorneys for Schulte did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The new charges make Schulte the fourth individual to face charges related to classified leaks since President Donald Trump took office and vowed a crackdown on leaks. WikiLeaks called the classified info given to WikiLeaks by Schulte "Vault 7." CNET: The leaks, which Wikileaks called "Vault 7," revealed tools used by the CIA to hack phones, TVs and computers as part of its investigations. The disclosures showed the lengths to which government investigators go to access electronic evidence, tailoring hacks for specific smart TVs, for example. They also caused an uproar, with some in tech saying they'd further harm relations between Silicon Valley and the US government. But some privacy advocates saw an upside, saying the leaks showed investigators were relying on hacking individual suspects to find evidence of crimes, rather than using dragnet surveillance techniques that scoop up information on everyone's online activities. The US government hasn't officially acknowledged the CIA was hacked, but President Donald Trump has revealed a breach occurred at the CIA during the Obama administration. "I just want people to know: the CIA was hacked and a lot of things taken," Trump told Fox in March 2017. "That was during the Obama years." The leak put US national security in jeopardy, Justice Department officials said. "Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims. As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of classified Information," William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the New York FBI office, said in a statement Monday. As with Edward Snowden, who leaked massive amounts of NSA secrets, the CIA somehow let this guy slip through the cracks. Snowden was a befuddled "patriot." Schulte's motivation is unclear at this point, but the material he gave to WikiLeaks suggests that he was not enamored of the CIA's ability to spy on people. Both men violated sworn oaths to keep secrets, fancying themselves answering to higher authority namely, their own consciences. If what they did bothered them, they could have resigned. Instead, they endangered national security by employing a personal sense of morality that under some circumstances might be seen as admirable. In Schulte's case, that personal sense of morality is quite selective. New York Times: But instead of charging Mr. Schulte in the breach, referred to as the Vault 7 leak, prosecutors charged him last August with possessing child pornography, saying agents had found 10,000 illicit images on a server he created as a business in 2009 while studying at the University of Texas at Austin. Court papers quote messages from Mr. Schulte that suggest he was aware of the encrypted images of children being molested by adults on his computer, though he advised one user, "Just don't put anything too illegal on there." Again, the question must be asked: why did the CIA miss this? He may have used a computer application that hide his online activities, but shouldn't a psych evaluation have raised red flags somewhere? It makes you wonder how many more Schultes are employed by the agency and how endangered our nation's secrets have become. Migrant families should be kept together...in the Virgin Islands Do you care about migrant families? And by migrant families, I mean undocumented migrants. And by undocumented migrants, I mean illegal aliens. I figure that you must care, because for days now, all we have heard from the media, and our elected politicians, is about the plight of illegal aliens whose children are separated from their parents. A photo of a two-year-old girl from Honduras crying as her mother was arrested for committing a crime got a tremendous splash in the media, the kind I never see when Americans kids cry as their parents are arrested for DUIs, theft, and armed robbery. We didn't see photos of the same child crying as her mother put her two-year-old on a raft on the Rio Grande, or of her crying during their wild and wacky adventures with smuggling rings across Mexico. Regardless, I agree with the liberal media (and Paul Ryan) that these separations should end. We should go back to the Obama era policy catch and release with a slight twist: catch and release in the US Virgin Islands! The whole issue of family separation came into being once President Trump started criminally prosecuting illegal aliens. A liberal judge invented a law stating that children couldn't be held in detention with their illegal alien parents. So in order to put the parents in detention, Trump had to separate the children. But if instead of sending the parents to jail (let's face it: they are all virtuous even the ones who have swallowed packets of drugs; they have no business being in prison), they were sent to open-air facilities in the Virgin Islands, that would not be a form of imprisonment that would require them to be separated from their kids. Imagine illegals in bright, airy barracks in the Virgin Islands. They would not be confined at all. They could go anywhere. They could have their kids with them. There they can await their court date on a gorgeous pacific island. Just look up some photos of these islands. If you came from Central America, wouldn't the Virgin Islands be a tremendous improvement? "Undocumented migrants" could enjoy windsurfing as they awaited the resolution of their cases. Migrants could jet ski at illegal speeds. They could enjoy relaxing evenings on the beach, united together with their children, or at least the kids they say are their children. And it is perfectly legal to put the illegals there while they await the resolution of their cases after all, the Virgin Islands are a U.S. territory. Since they are "undocumented," they would not be able to hop on a plane to the continental U.S. But if they wanted to build a raft and head to Cuba, they would be free to do so! Actually, I can't really take credit for this great idea Australia thought of it first. Australia has a practice of putting illegal aliens on remote islands to keep them from roaming around Australia. It had a number of illegal alien Muslims on a small Pacific island until President Trump agreed to bring them to America. What do you think of the idea of sending illegal aliens to the Virgin Islands? Wouldn't it be great to keep families together in a pacific paradise? Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com. The defining characteristic of the White House press corps: They don't listen As fabulous as Sarah Sanders is, watching her daily press briefing is beyond frustrating; it is infuriating. The people she faces each day in that room are rude, antagonistic, angry, and generally vile. They are perpetually on the attack. They never listen to what she says. On Monday, Kirstjen Nielsen, also an amazing woman, faced them with similar results. These not-reporters apparently did not hear a word she said. That was evident from the questions they shouted at her the minute she offered to answer a few. These press jackals are ignorant of facts. They fall for the lamest narratives pushed by a panoply of anti-Trump groups, many of them financed by George Soros. This explosion of insanity over children being separated from their "parents" is just more amped up propaganda. Nielsen's presentation on the events at the border was fact-filled, clearly stated, and easily checked if any of those not-reporters were interested in facts. But they are not. They are interested only in maligning the president. They are the stupid people. They actually seem to believe that their childish shouting and bullying of Sarah Sanders and Kirstjen Nielsen, in an obviously orchestrated campaign for open borders, is going to win over voters in November. It will not. Most Americans are sick to death of what "migrants" have done to our cities. We are sick to death of governors and mayors who claim their cities and states to be sanctuaries for the likes of MS-13. When these criminals kill innocent citizens, they look the other way and double down on insanity. They blabber on about "the children." But thousands of those unaccompanied kids whose parents sent them our way have been handed over to child sex-traffickers. On this score, A.G. Sessions has been making inroads. The Trump administration is rescuing trafficked kids and, at the border, separating many of them from their users and abusers. Many of those so-called "family units" are not family units at all. President Obama successfully, with intent, flooded the country with illegal migrants. He invited them, encouraged them to come here. He is responsible for the danger thousands of them endured to get here alone. President Trump is right to say, as he did on Monday, that "the United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility." We are already a homeless camp. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle have been blighted by their homeless populations, invited there by their local progressive politicians. Hundreds of other cities throughout the country are enduing the same fate. The not-reporters, not-journalists, do not care about the homeless any more than they care about the children "separated" from their families at the border. Have they ever expressed concern about the tens of thousands of children left parentless by citizen-criminals who are sent to prison? No. Never. It is a safe bet that those children have a rougher time than those being cared for by HHS at the border. Our media, especially those who have the privilege of being part of the White House press corps, are petulant children with high self-regard, just as members of gangs have high self-esteem. Their defining characteristic is that they do not listen or learn. They do not care about facts or truth. They see themselves as authors of America's script, the script they have in their heads. That script was rejected by the voters who love their country. Stormy Daniels didn't take Trump out. Maybe this will? No, it will not. As usual, the media and the Democrats like the odious Pelosi believe to the core of their beings that the rest of us are "poor to middle class, un-educated, lazy pos" (Agent 5 to Agent 1, FBI). To this day, they cannot accept the fact that so many of us voted for the man they loathe and who, they fear, will expose their venality. Image: Screen shot from White House video. After the Trump administration announced a 25% tariff on $50 billion in Chinese goods last Friday, the Chinese responded immediately by imposing tariffs on $50 billion in U.S. goods. Who's going to blink first? Or will there be any blinking at all? Now the president has upped the ante considerably and brought the two sides closer to an all-out trade war that is rattling markets and worrying companies involved in the bilateral trade relationship. CNNMoney: The White House said Monday evening that if China goes through with its promise to retaliate against the US tariffs announced last week, the United States will impose tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. "Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods, and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," Trump said in a statement. The Trump administration said Friday that it will impose a 25% tariff on $50 billion of Chinese exports. China, claiming the United States had "launched a trade war," retaliated almost immediately, outlining its own tariffs on US goods worth $50 billion. The escalating conflict between the world's two largest economies has rattled markets and companies, which fear disruption to their global supply chains. The Chinese Commerce Ministry reacted quickly to Trump's announcement, accusing the United States of "extreme pressure and extortionist behavior" and warning it would "strike back hard." Analysts warned that the risks are growing of an increasingly damaging clash that will ripple around the globe. "The tit for tat brings the two sides closer to a full-blown trade war," Louis Kuijs, head of Asian economics at research firm Oxford Economics, wrote in a note to clients. "While there is in principle still room for negotiation, attitudes seem to be hardening." If Trump has an ace up his sleeve in this high-stakes game of poker, now is the time to play it. No nation wants to be seen as negotiating under a gun. Trump obviously believes that China will fold rather than risk an all-out trade war. But when national pride is at stake, all bets are off. For Trump to maintain credibility, he must convince the Chinese that he's willing to follow through on his threat. Can he do it while giving them an "out" to save face in this showdown? A small, symbolic concession by the U.S. that would allow both nations to step back from the abyss? Trump must be able to see the danger to U.S. companies doing business with China of ruinous tariffs on Chinese products. There may be a large trade imbalance with the Chinese, but there are hundreds of U.S. companies who sell Chinese products in the U.S. whose business is threatened by a trade war. It means lost jobs as well as lost profits. Is the president prepared to accept those consequences? We are told this is just a negotiating tactic by Trump and everything will work out in the end. As it stands now, we're not hearing any give from the Chinese on the issue. Rapone's social media posts were full of hate for the army, for officers, and civilian leaders while advocating for a "socialist revolution" in America. Spenser Rapone, the West Point cadet who rocked the army by sporting a "Communism will win" message on his hat, has been kicked out of the Army with a less than honorable discharge. Fox News: He is no longer part of the U.S. military after top brass at Fort Drum's 10th Mountain Division accepted his resignation Monday after an earlier warning for "conduct unbecoming of an officer." He's leaving the military with an other-than-honorable discharge. Army officials condemned the cadet last year and opened an investigation into his social media activity. "Second Lieutenant Rapone's actions in no way reflect the values of the U.S. Military Academy or the U.S. Army," an Army statement read. His open advocacy of communism attracted the criticism from Florida Sen. Marco Rubio who then urged the U.S. military to dismiss Rapone for supporting the country's enemies. The now-former cadet said the probe found him advocating for socialist revolution online and disparaging high-ranking officers and U.S. officials. The Army said it took "appropriate action" in dealing with the situation. But Rapone remains unabashed, posting a picture on Monday showing him [giving] the middle finger at a sign at the entrance to Fort Drum, captioned with "One final salute." This guy reminds me of Lee Harvey Oswald, accused assassin of JFK and an ex-Marine who spouted Marxist propaganda while in the Corps. Oswald later defected briefly to the Soviet Union, but his understanding of Marxism was childlike, and he appeared to adopt the persona of a revolutionary to get attention. Rapone knows as much about "socialism" as Oswald grasped of Marxism. With hashtags like "#turnthegunsaround" and quotes from Howard Zinn, it's clear Rapone has little in the way of critical thinking skills. But that doesn't answer the question of how and why he got into West Point in the first place. And how he went through four years without being outed as an anti-American loon. The Army took its own sweet time in discharging him, although there is some talk of making Rapone pay the government back the money spent on his education, since he didn't fulfill his five-year service obligation. He has become a hero to the far left, so if he's forced to pay the taxpayer back, he will no doubt easily raise the cash to do so. Consumer advocacy organization Fight For The Future released a statement on the battle over state-level net neutrality regulations in California, with Deputy Director Evan Greer saying that The whole internet is watching. While that sounds like hyperbole, its no understatement to say that California mounting the boldest stand of any state yet against the FCCs dismantling of Title II net neutrality laws is a real precedent-setter. The whole internet is indeed watching the proceedings closely, as are lobbyists, lawmakers, carriers, media companies, web and tech firms and of course journalists nationwide. Fight For The Future, for its part, is cheering on a recent combination of bills by two senators to form a single catch-all net neutrality regulation that would put all of the normal key protections in place, with the notable addition of banning a variant of zero-rating, a fairly common practice wherein some types of traffic count against a data cap, and some dont. Specifically, it seeks to keep zero-rating and ISP interests wholly separate by banning the practice of letting companies and sites pay for zero-rating, in cash or otherwise. This practice has never been outright banned before, though the prior regulations did control how it could be used in order to keep it from becoming a practice that amounted to glorified fast lanes. The new bill has been the subject of lobbying and massive campaigns by both political and market sector interests, including mobile carrier AT&T. Californias hard and fast proposal will be set before the states Communications and Conveyance Committee on Wednesday, and only with a successful vote there can it move on in the state legislative process. For those not familiar with Californias bill, it bans zero-rating as noted above, as well as allowing media and content providers to pay for priority on the network, along with blocking or throttling certain traffic, among other practices. The bill is noteworthy in its scope, which exceeds the original Title II net neutrality regulations. A New York senator has introduced a version of the bill for consideration there, and if the bill manages to pass in both states, the FCC could have a tough fight ahead if it wants to enforce a passage of its repeal notice stating that individual states were not allowed to create their own net neutrality laws. Many other states already have similar proposals in various stages of legislature, though none so far match the bills in California and New York in their restrictions on what ISPs can and cannot do. The first known camera samples of the Xperia XZ2 Premium appeared online earlier this week, having been authored and shared by tech blog Mobile01 which managed to obtain a pre-production unit of Sonys latest Android flagship. The results seen in the gallery below are quite impressive, showing an extremely high dynamic range and being indicative of accurate exposure and white balance calibration mechanisms. The source tested both daylight and low-light photography, having also attempted several macro shots with the Xperia XZ2 Premium and concluding that the device is an extremely capable imaging tool. As the smartphone used for taking the newly emerged photographs was a pre-production affair, its software still hasnt been finalized and the models that end up being offered to consumers may boast even more impressive imaging capabilities. Originally announced in mid-April, the Xperia XZ2 Premium is being touted as Sonys most powerful Android handset to date. While the Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer already embraced the trend of bezel-less 18:9 devices earlier this year, its new flagship sticks with the 16:9 aspect ratio as its still geared toward multimedia enthusiasts. As Sonys designers recently revealed, the company wanted to avoid delivering a media-focused device with an elongated screen as doing so would force users to look at more black bars than what they deemed necessary. The back side of the 5.8-inch phablet features a dual-camera setup entailing a 19-megapixel sensor and a 12-megapixel one, with the former being an RGB module mounted behind an f/1.8 lens, whereas the latter is a monochrome unit utilizing an f/1.6 lens. Predictive phase detection and electronic image stabilization are part of the package as well, together with a laser autofocusing system and a dual-LED (dual-tone) flash unit. The Xperia XZ2 Premium is expected to begin retailing on a global level by the end of the month, though Sony has yet to officially disclose its pricing details. Google has continued its push to highlight Android developers with the start of yet another new series its calling #IMakeApps stories. Unlike some prior developer series shared by the company, however, any app developer who wants to take part can, barring a few obvious exceptions. All they need to do is post to any social network with the hashtag #IMakeApps. The post needs to include a share of the app or game that was worked on and what role was held by the sharer in its development or creation. The post should also include an image which Google describes as best depicting who the sharer is outside of work. The search giant will be following those hashtags and selecting which stories to share, choosing the ones that best show the wide diversity of app developers. More to the point, the company hopes to show that developers can come from a huge variety of backgrounds, whether thats cultural, financial, or in terms of interests and aspirations. To that end, the first story Google has chosen to share in the series centers its attention on a visually-impaired app developer and chair restoration hobbyist from Denmark named Hans Jrgen Wiberg. The man in question was a key part of an application called Be My Eyes, which is available for Android. Development on the application began when Wiberg started going blind himself at the age of 25 while working for the Danish Blind Association as a consultant. For those who may not be aware, Be My Eyes acts as a visual assistance service for the blind over a video call and was inspired by his role with the association. According to Wiberg, it spawned from consultations with blind clients asking for advice about their indecision regarding who to call for precisely that type of assistance. That was back in 2012 and after years of work on the project, it finally launched late last year. Since then the app has gained as many as a million volunteers to help provide the service and has been spread to as many as 150 countries across 180 languages. Google hasnt provided any information about any upcoming highlights in the series or whether or not those will all take a video format. With more than 3.6 million apps currently available in the Google Play Store, it wouldnt necessarily be too surprising if the company was forced to take a wider variety of approaches to sharing their stories. Google-owned Waymo, along with a number of other companies with interest in self-driving car technologies such as Ford, Lyft, and FedEx, put together a coalition called The Partnership for Transportation Innovation and Opportunity, meant to examine and act on the economic implications of bringing self-driving technology into the mainstream. According to data gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 3.8 million people in the United States currently have a job that involves driving in some capacity, which means that these companies push to bring self-driving vehicles into the mainstream could cost all of those jobs and perhaps more. It is exactly those issues that the PTIO seeks to tackle. PTIO Executive Director Maureen Westphal said that the group plans to collaborate with stakeholders in the autonomous driving world, as well as adjacent industries, to figure out how to sustain the job market surrounding the driving world as direct driving positions are phased out by autonomous cars. Self-driving freight trucks are just one sector of the future revolution, and theyre aimed straight at a market segment that currently employers somewhere around 1.7 million Americans. The job loss once self-driving vehicles start rolling on a wide basis will obviously be huge, but a Goldman Sachs report tried to quantify those numbers and came up with job losses potentially hitting up to 25,000 per month. The PTIO has yet to say how it plans to offset this, aside from helping to educate workers on other roles that they could fill. The development is just another chapter in the ongoing story of AI technology, in this case self-driving cars taking over human jobs. This is a natural step forward in the evolution of the technology, and the market will have to adapt by finding or creating new roles for these displaced workers, save the occurrence of some sort of drastic shift in the way the world economy works. It stands to reason that more ventures like this one, dedicated to helping displaced workers fit into the new economy created by the inevitable march of technology, will crop up in the coming years as AI encroaches on a wider range of industries and functions. An entirely new job market with programmers and creatives at its core is a possibility in the future, as is a brand of socialism wherein AI and robots take care of all the work and leave humans to leisure, and those are only a couple of a near-infinite range of possibilities as to how the global economy may change to adapt to AI growth. It will all depend on how things are handled now and in the near future, and only time will tell how everything ends up. The Moto Z DROID Edition and the Moto Z Force DROID Edition, the Verizon-exclusive variants of Motorolas 2016 flagship smartphone offerings, are now receiving a software package that will upgrade the handsets operating system to Android Oreo. These two devices originally shipped with Android 6.0 Marshmallow pre-installed, although it was later upgraded to Android Nougat a few months after its launch. Verizons support website has provided details regarding the new features and improvements incorporated into the latest software update. Upon updating their devices to the latest software version, users can take advantage of the features of Android Oreo, including the Picture-in-Picture mode, autofill functionality, smart text selection, and adaptive icons. This latest software version brings the notification channels feature, which provides users greater control on the way applications push notifications, and it also enables the user to snooze notifications, which temporarily hides notifications for a short period of time. The software package also introduces under-the-hood improvements to the operating system, including improved audio quality over Bluetooth and increased battery life due to additional restrictions imposed on applications background activities. The operating system upgrade also brings slight changes to the devices user interface. For example, the user interface of the phone application has been modified in an effort to improve its usability. The software package also installs the May 2018 Android security patch to the two devices, which resolves a number of vulnerabilities found in the media framework and the system partition of the operating system. Furthermore, the carrier also noted that this update should improve the Wi-Fi connectivity of the two smartphones. Verizon is now distributing the software package to both the Moto Z DROID Edition and the Moto Z Force DROID Edition, although it may take several days before all units receive the software upgrade. A notification should soon appear on the users handsets which states that the update is now available for download and installation, although interested consumers may also proceed to the About Phone menu of the device settings to manually trigger the update process. Before installing the operating system upgrade, it is advisable to first back up the files and images stored in the smartphone to a microSD card or a personal computer to prevent the loss of important data. Samsungs Galaxy Tab S4 will feature a 7,300mAh battery, a significant improvement over the 6,000mAh cell found inside the South Korean companys Galaxy Tab S3-series slates launched last year, according to a new rumor which emerged on Twitter earlier today. Other newly reported specs of the device include a 10.5-inch display panel with a WQXGA resolution of 2,560 by 1,600 pixels amounting to a rectangular aspect ratio of 16:10, as well as Qualcomms Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip, an expected choice given how the Galaxy Tab S3 line utilized the Snapdragon 820. The upcoming Android tablet family will also utilize a 13-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel front one, as per the same source. The newly emerged rumor and a number of other recent reports on the matter indicate that the Seoul-based consumer electronics maker is looking to improve its 2017 tablet series across the board, delivering successors with larger screens, higher-capacity batteries, better processors, and possibly more RAM, as well as an iris scanner meant to both supplement and complement the fingerprint reader embedded into the physical Home button on the front. Support for Samsung Desktop Experience (DeX) Pad may also be part of the package, allowing future Galaxy Tab S4 owners to leverage the device as a large touchpad while having it connected to a monitor and other PC peripherals such as a keyboard. As the Galaxy Tab S4 should also ship with an S Pen stylus, DeX support may allow it to act as a limited replacement for graphics tablets. The Galaxy Tab S4 will be introduced after the Galaxy Note 9 Android handset launches on August 9, according to the latest report on the matter, though previous rumors suggested the two may be unveiled together. A separate launch scenario is more likely because without the Galaxy Note 9, Samsung will need to put in extra effort to maintain its historically strong presence at IFA, a Berlin, Germany-based consumer electronics trade show taking place in late summer which was traditionally used as the venue for Samsung to announce its new Galaxy Note-series flagships. Besides the Galaxy Tab S4, Samsung may also unveil the Gear S4 smartwatch lineup at the same event. Amazons facial recognition software, Rekognition, has a few customers in law enforcement, which include Orlando, Fl; and Washington County, OR. And its forcing shareholders to urge Amazon to cease the sales. About 20 groups of shareholders are urging Amazon to stop selling Rekognition to law enforcement, citing concerns of privacy. The software allows the customers to upload face databases to automatically identify people. There was a case where the Washington County Sheriffs office had identified persons of interest using this software, including a shoplifter who was caught on camera. This helped the sheriffs quickly identify the person and press charges, instead of needing to use memory to find and identify the person. But many groups are worried that this software is too much of a privacy intrusion. The ACLU has already been after Amazon to stop selling the software, and now some shareholders, which include Social Equity Group and Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment, have joined in the fight. These groups are pointing out the risks of doing mass surveillance such as this. These groups also warn about potential civil and human rights violations with Rekognition. Facial Recognition isnt something that Amazon is doing alone, many tech companies are now using facial recognition for different things, and theres not much in the way of them uploading that data to a server in the cloud. Which means this issue could become a hot topic in the coming years. Amazon likely wont be the only one that shareholders begin to urge to stop selling facial recognition software. Of course, law enforcement agencies are always looking for things like this that can help them do their job easier and catch more people breaking the law. Itll be interesting to see how this pans out in the coming weeks, but it wouldnt be surprising to see Amazon discontinue Rekognition, or at least stop selling it to law enforcement. AT&Ts Smart City Alliance has added a new partner firm called Badger Meter to its mix in order to explore smart city solutions with a primary focus on water utilities and waste management. Badger Meter is a U.S.-based firm which works with cellular advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and, according to the company, has joined the alliance as a long-term partner. That means its goals within the group will almost certainly extend beyond the two items listed above. In fact, future projects will include furthering the alliances goals with regard to energy-efficient lighting solutions. That could mean smarter monitoring of the use of electricity for city-infrastructure-based lighting, among other things. In the meantime, the company will begin by bringing on board its currently available solutions in order to fill out gaps in AT&Ts smart city framework. More directly, Badge Meters AMI solutions are designed to measure fluids, such as water, oil, and chemicals. Those are actually already in use by several commercial and municipal customers but should prove useful in terms of gaining a deeper understanding of a municipalitys interconnected systems. To begin with, AT&T wants to initially use the solutions to enable smart city monitoring of water utilities. The company hasnt provided many details about that but it presumably includes monitoring how much water a city is using and optimizing the systems to be more efficient. Moreover, it could include making improvements to leak detection and monitoring for other common water problems. Moving beyond water, the two companies also plan to extend into solutions geared toward waste management utilities. Similar solutions to those used in water management could easily be ported over and adjusted to work there, so its a fairly logical step going from one to the other. Moreover, those two utility types often go hand-in-hand. With regard to the alliance itself, the project was first started by AT&T back in 2016 and currently has several projects already up and running. Although optimization of the solutions or development of new solutions may take some time, that should mean comparatively quick initial implementation of Badge Meters existing AMI solutions. The groups current IoT projects are underway in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Miami-Dade County, Montgomery County, and at the Georgia Institute of Technology. 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 Clifford Chance was the lead legal counsel of The Carlyle Group in its recent investments in two of Chinas most prominent fintech companies. The American investment giant, with more than US$200bn in assets under management, subscribed to the Series C preference shares of Ant International and invested US$1.9bn into Du Xiaoman, also known as Baidu FSG. Ant International is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ant Financial. Financial details of the subscription were not disclosed, but the investment is part of Ant Financials equity financing totalling US$14bn. HFW and CAL have entered into a cooperation agreement and HFW partner Fernando Albino and other local colleagues will join CAL. In addition, HFW has hired former TCMB partner Julio Costa as a partner. Costa is widely regarded as Brazil's leading aviation lawyer. He will work closely with HFW insurance and reinsurance partner Geoffrey Conlin. "As part of our strategy to be the world's leading law firm to the aerospace, commodities, construction, energy, insurance and shipping industries, we have been investing heavily in the international markets that are most important to those six sectors. Brazil is the world's eighth-largest economy and a key centre for many of our clients, explained HFW global senior partner Richard Crump. NRF deploys Australian chatbot creation in Canada Norton Rose Fulbright clients in Canada will talk to an artificial intelligence chatbot to determine if they need to report a data breach. Parker was originally created in Australia by the firms global head of technology Nick Abrahams and Sydney-based technology associate Edward Odendaal. The GDPR came into effect on 25 May 2018. Youll have no doubt noticed a spike in messages arriving in your inbox in the week or two leading up to 25 May (and in the case of certain stragglers, a week or two after) notifying changes to your favourite service providers privacy policy. Congratulations if you managed to read to the end of any one of these privacy policies! Chances are that most in Australasia didnt pay much attention. However, if youre counsel for a corporation which has an EU presence, maybe you did sit up and take notice: especially when you looked into the global reach of the GDPR, and when you saw that organisations who fail to comply can be fined up to the higher of 20 million, or 4% of global turnover. Thats a lot of money in anyones books. Fortunately, in most cases, you can relax for a moment or two. How the GDPR will apply in practice to us Antipodeans remains to be seen, but what does seem fairly certain is that EU regulators will initially focus on enforcement against those organisations (mostly large US tech companies) that have a significant EU presence. For organisations that dont, you may have a bit of breathing space, which should give you some time to prepare. Is it possible to take over a case from a migration agent? Long story short we have been assigned a case officer but we are not entirely happy with the way our agent is handling our case so we would like to know if it was possible to take over our case and remove the agent? If so will this impact the processing of the case if it's already got a case officer? Then again, Drake is loaded. The Canadian rapper shelled out $150,000 for an impressive, baby blue Bentley Azure that he gifted his father, Dennis Graham. He even made sure the car was delivered on his doorstep and that the whole thing was a surprise, TMZ reports.Talk about a loving son! According to the celebrity publication, Graham was at home on Sunday evening, when he was told there was a package for him outside. He went out, thinking it was mail or something along those lines, so you can imagine his surprise when he saw the gorgeous car parked in front of the house.When he found out it was gift from Drake on Fathers Day, he FaceTimes him and thanked him profusely. Then, as one does, he took to social media to boast about what an amazing (and rich) boy he has.I am the happiest Dad in America for Fathers Day, Graham writes in a post including a photo of the sweet new ride. My wonderful son graced me with a beautiful Bentley for my day. Thank you so much my baby boy, @champagnepapi, it just doesnt get any better than this. I love it, son, and I love you.TMZ says that the cars estimated value is about $150,000, but it doesnt offer any details on the specs. Apparently, Graham was so surprised and overwhelmed, and yet so eager to share his joy with the world, he even provided TMZ with a photo of himself standing next to the new baller Bentley , beaming with pride, in his Sunday, baller, all-white outfit. A peculiar incident is making headlines in the British media, after funeral workers left a hearse unattended while they grabbed a bite to eat. Later, they left their vehicle for another 15 minutes while they smoked a cigarette, the Daily Mail reports.Thats not the worst part, though. That would be that there was a coffin in the hearse and it was covered with flowers, which usually means theres a body inside. Eyewitnesses tell the publication they even caught a glimpse of someones photo on the coffin, so it was, without a doubt, not empty.With all that, the workers didnt mind leaving the vehicle parked on a road in Cambridge for 40 minute, while they had brunch at a nearby restaurant. To add insult to injury, it was pretty hot outside, so whatever was going on in that coffin, it wasnt good.The hearse was initially parked outside Chesterton Carpets, and one carpet fitter came out of the shop and went to the restaurant to give the funeral workers a piece of his mind.I told them it was a bloody disgrace. They had left a family's deceased relative in a lay-by on full public display, he tells the Mail. They told me they had the right to eat, but in my view they had no respect. If that was my family member, I would have been disgusted.Another carpet fitter joined in, and the funeral workers eventually returned to the hearse and drove away. They didnt go too far, though: the same report notes that they merely went down the road, where they parked it once more, got out and had a smoke. Only afterwards, did they drove away and (presumably) delivered the coffin to the final resting place of its occupant. That could very well be a motto for New Zealand-based personal trainer Josef Rakich, who brands himself as worlds number one online trainer. He can afford pretty much anything he sets his mind to, so his idea of a proposal included all of the above and so much more.Though he usually posts workout videos to his YouTube channel, his latest upload has nothing to do with fitness. It is, in fact, a video of how he prepared for and carried out the proposal to his girlfriend of 3 years, Maryam Matti, aka Mimi.It included, as you can see, buying her a hot pink Range Rover Evoque Convertible that he had customized to suit her liking, a helicopter ride, renting out the countrys biggest stadium, Eden Park, and shelling out on a gorgeous and huge diamond ring. Oh, and throwing a surprise party afterwards that looked very much like an actual wedding.Rakich says he wanted to come up with the best proposal ever, and as such, it had to include everything that Mimi loved and some things she hated, too. In the former category was the pink wheels, which he presented to her in a giant pink box, surrounded by pink balloons. Yes, everything about the little Range Rover was pink, including the message Will you marry me? on the windshield.In the latter category, he included a helicopter ride and a surprise, that of being proposed. We have a hunch she didnt mind either.Once they arrived on the stadium, Rakich gave Mimi the car and then popped the question with the massive diamond ring, while their family and friends cheered them on. Luckily for him, considering the money and effort he put into this elaborate surprise, she said yes. A video was posted to social media at the weekend, and its gone viral ever since. It was supposedly shot at the Serengeti Safari Park in Tanzania and it shows tourists in a car admiring a bunch of lions and lionesses.At one point, one male tourist sticks his hand out the window and lightly pats the lion on the back. You can imagine the animals reaction wasnt that of a domestic cat: the lion turns to face the open window, lets out a roar and seems ready to attack. The tourists inside jump back from the window and rush to close it, just now aware of how stupid their gesture was.And it was just that, South African safari ranger Naas Smit tells The Sun . It might seem like a fun thing to do, but reaching out of the vehicle to pat wild animals can probably cost you your life and of everyone else in the car. This is particularly true of lions, whose strength and speed are legendary.Only those who work in the wild know the speed of a lion and it could have torn the arm off the person touching it, Smit explains. It would have the power to pull that tourist straight out of that window and kill them instantly in front of their friends. It was an incredibly stupid thing to do.It could also just have easily crashed its way through the open window and torn into those inside. They were lucky to get away with it. They are wild animals, Smit continues. I just have to shake my head when I see people behaving like this and they deserve all they get.Next time youre on a safari, remember this, if you feel like you cant help but touch the animals outside. Senate employees get to try out the modern PUV first Anton Andres June 19, 2018 12:30 June 18, 2017 is the day the modern PUV hits the road. Isuzu, one of the manufacturers part of the PUV modernization program (PUVMP), has turned over the first 15 units of their class 2 PUVs to the Senate Employees Transport Service Cooperative or SETSCO. With that, SETSCO will serve as the pilot operator of the PUVMP as it is set to shuttle employees of the Senate. The class 2 PUVs are based on the Isuzu QKR77 truck with its body designed and built by Almazora. It features a square body and, as it follows class 2 regulations, offers seats for 23 with standing room available. Powering it is a Euro 4 compliant 3.0-liter diesel with 106 PS and 230 Nm of torque, which is then mated to a five-speed manual transmission. As for features, the modern PUV comes with air-conditioning, fare payment through Beep card, CCTVs, a reverse camera and a forward facing camera. For SETSCO, it even comes with monitors which will serve as digital posters for ads and the like. For commuters to see the next stop from the outside, there is also an LED sign flanking the top part of the PUV. Another 20 units will follow during the course of the year, bringing the fleet total to 35 units. The route runs through Star City-Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) and Paranaque Integrated Terminal Exchange (PITX) and vice versa. Along the way, there are stops along Philippine International Convention Center (PICC), Government Service Insurance System (GSIS)-Senate and SM Mall of Asia (MOA) complex. 1 big thing: What to watch as OPEC meets Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (on left) and Russian President Vladimir Putin talk before the start of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Photo: Pool/Getty Images With OPEC heading into a pivotal meeting in Vienna this week, I'll share part of an interview I did with a smart cartel-watcher, including her thoughts on a pivotal dynamic to watch Russia and Saudi Arabia. What the Saudis want: Ellen Wald, president of Transversal Consulting, says the meeting's outcome is "pivotal" for the future of the Saudi-Russian alliance and by extension the broader OPEC/non-OPEC group on market cooperation. Recent discussions between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on a long-term relationship will look less important if the meeting breaks down, she says. Of note: Russia and the Saudis are reportedly in agreement on an output increase but facing pushback from some members. Russia and the Saudis are reportedly in agreement on an output increase but facing pushback from some members. It doesnt mean nearly as much if they cant get a deal done this week. Otherwise its just talk between two authoritarian rulers, Wald tells Axios. It's a top priority heading for Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih. If he can get the group to agree to an increase, however small, that will strengthen this alliance between Russia and Saudi Arabia, she says. On Aramco: Wald does not believe the meeting will offer much insight into Saudi Arabia's hazy plans for the IPO of state oil giant Aramco. That's despite frequent speculation that the kingdom is looking to achieve a certain oil price to support the listing. His (al-Falihs) real concern right now is maintaining this alliance. He sees the IPO as separate from oil policy, according to Wald, author of the recent book "Saudi, Inc." On U.S. influence: Wald says an agreement to boost output will not reflect the influence of the White House, despite President Trump's public pressure on the cartel to boost production, but rather calculations about the market for additional barrels. Saudi Arabia is not going to do it for the U.S., she says. Crystal ball: Wald predicts the meeting will yield plans for a production boost in the 300,000 to 600,000 barrel per day range. The outcome of this week's OPEC meeting in Vienna is "pivotal" for the future of the Saudi-Russian alliance and by extension the broader OPEC/non-OPEC group says smart cartel-watcher Ellen Wald, the president of Transversal Consulting. Crystal ball: Wald predicts the meeting will yield plans for a production boost in the 300,000 to 600,000 barrel per day range. But it's not clear whether that will come from a firm agreement or relaxed compliance among producers notably the Saudis, Russia, UAE and some others with spare capacity. Recent discussions between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on a long-term relationship will look less important if the meeting breaks down, she says. Of note: Russia and the Saudis are reportedly in agreement on an output increase but facing pushback from some members. Russia and the Saudis are reportedly in agreement on an output increase but facing pushback from some members. It doesnt mean nearly as much if they cant get a deal done this week. Otherwise its just talk between two authoritarian rulers, Wald tells Axios. It's a top priority heading for Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih. If he can get the group to agree to an increase, however small, that will strengthen this alliance between Russia and Saudi Arabia, she says. On Aramco: Wald does not believe the meeting will offer much insight into Saudi Arabia's hazy plans for the IPO of state oil giant Aramco. That's despite frequent speculation that the kingdom is looking to achieve a certain oil price to support the listing. His (al-Falihs) real concern right now is maintaining this alliance. He sees the IPO as separate from oil policy, according to Wald, author of the recent book "Saudi, Inc." On U.S. influence: Wald says an agreement to boost output will not reflect the influence of the White House, despite President Trump's public pressure on the cartel to boost production, but rather calculations about the market for additional barrels. Saudi Arabia is not going to do it for the U.S., she says. Behind the scenes in Vienna, part 1: The Wall Street Journal cautions that despite outward signs of discord, the meeting will yield a successful Saudi-Russian push to boost output despite dissent from Iran and some others. "OPEC is back to its squabbling ways after an unusual period of near harmony. But investors who are bidding up oil prices in the expectation of a split are misunderstanding both the history of the cartel and the current state of the oil market," the paper reports. Behind the scenes in Vienna, part 2: Per Reuters, Harold Hamm, CEO of U.S. shale powerhouse Continental Resources, has scuttled his planned appearance at an OPEC event. I was one of thousands of Americans who cast a ballot last Tuesday. Mine wasn't for a Senate primary, though it was for president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The back story: One of the many controversies surrounding December's elections in the DRC is the plan to use voting machines, a move Nikki Haley has said carries enormous risk. The commission brought one to D.C. in an attempt to ease those concerns, and allowed me to try it out. (No, my vote doesn't actually count.) The big question is whether President Joseph Kabila, the only president the DRC has known since a brutal war ended in 2003, will try to extend his rule despite being constitutionally barred from running again. He has confounded observers by declining to say hell step aside, and based on recent propaganda, he may indeed be planning to stick around. When I stepped up to vote, I noted that Kabila was among my choices for president. An official hastened to clarify that the machine displayed the candidates from 2011. I asked Corneille Nangaa, president of the DRCs independent electoral commission, when the suspense surrounding Kabila will end. He said when presidential candidates are officially named on Aug. 7, then you will know he is not a candidate. Nangaa insisted that if Kabila planned to remain president he would have changed the constitution, as others in the region have done. The voting process seemed quite simple, particularly after Id seen the 58-page newspaper-style ballot used in 2011. (Congos electoral system is convoluted, and that ballot included 18,000 candidates.) The officials said it would be twice as long this time due to provincial elections, and could not possibly be printed and distributed by election day. I told Nikki Haley: no voting machines, no elections in December, Nangaa told me. Who will be blamed for that? As for her concerns that the technology is unfamiliar to millions of Congolese and makes results difficult to trust, he counters that she is making the trust problems worse based on incorrect information. More from the interview Nangaa said hed been told he was at risk of U.S. sanctions due to his role in delaying the elections. If you sanction me, what do you expect to get from me? I can proclaim a referendum, I can do what they dont want me to do, he said. However, he said he will not support any additional delays. We need to get elections. The country needs it, he said. "The country cannot be suspended by one man." He said the vast country of 80 million faces political challenges (are all political parties ready for the election? Some of them I doubt it), technical and logistical concerns (90,000 polling stations, the new machines) and security challenges, particularly in the East. One other concern: No one has ever asked what role the army and the security services will play. They are people who believe strongly in Kabila. How are they going to behave when Kabila says hes not a candidate? The European Union stands ready to help Armenias new government implement sweeping reforms promised by it, a senior member of the European Parliament said after visiting Yerevan on Monday. David McAllister, the chairman of the EU legislatures Committee on Foreign Affairs, headed a multi-partisan delegation of EU lawmakers who met with Prime Minister Pashinian, other senior Armenian officials and civil society representatives during the visit. This is a key moment for Armenia, McAllister said in a statement. To strengthen its democracy, to deepen its relations with the EU and to make long-lasting peace. Armenias citizens want this, Armenias leaders have committed to this and the European Union will be there to help every step of the way, he added. Pashinian reportedly briefed McAllister and either European Parliament members on his governments stated efforts to combat corruption, break up economic monopolies hampering faster growth and democratize Armenias political system. The purpose of our actions is to bring about real changes in the country, he was quoted by his press office as saying. The Armenian premier said last week that he will visit Brussels to meet top EU officials later this month. The EU closely monitored the political crisis in Armenia sparked by former President Serzh Sarkisians attempt to hold on to power after serving out his second presidential term on April 9. It repeatedly urged Armenian political factions to end the standoff through dialogue. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, and Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, sent a congratulatory letter to Nikol Pashinian, the main organizer of massive anti-Sarkisian protests, two days after he was elected prime minister on May 8. We look forward to cooperating with you in your new position to further strengthen the relations between the European Union and Armenia, particularly through the implementation of the EU-Armenia Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA), Tusk and Juncker wrote. The CEPA was signed by the former Armenian government last November. It calls for political and economic reforms in Armenia. It also commits Yerevan to gradually approximating Armenian economic laws and regulations to those of the EU. Pashinian called for a quick ratification of the CEPA by all EU member states when the Armenian parliament elected him prime minister. McAllister said the European Parliament will vote on the 350-page agreement on July 4. The CEPAs ratification and implementation will help Armenia attract more EU investment and boost its trade with the EU, added the German lawmaker. By Trend Thorbjrn Jagland, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe (CoE), has always had a pro-Armenian stance and a biased attitude towards Azerbaijan, Hikmet Hajiyev, Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told Trend June 18. He was commenting on the statement made by the press secretary of Armenian Foreign Ministry Tigran Balayan about the allegedly possible suspension of Azerbaijan's membership in the Council of Europe. Hajiyev noted that thanks to the press secretary of Armenian Foreign Ministry, the general public learned about what everyone knew about Jagland on the sidelines of the Council of Europe. "It seems that the Secretary General of the Council of Europe has authorized the Armenian Foreign Ministry to speak on his behalf. Finally, all masks fell down," Hajiyev said. Earlier, Armenian media quoted Tigran Balayan as saying that Jagland has allegedly initiated suspension of Azerbaijan's membership in the Council of Europe. At the same time, Balayan noted that this is quite a long-term process." However, Balayan didnt explain about which process he was talking about. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend An event dedicated to the World Refugee Day will be held in Baku June 20. The event will be organized by the Azerbaijani State Committee for Affairs of Refugees and Internally Displaced People, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani State Migration Service. The representatives of the state organizations, including ministries, companies and other structures of Azerbaijan, diplomatic structures, accredited in the country, UN structures, international and local humanitarian organizations, as well as communities of refugees and IDPs will attend the event. According to the resolution adopted in 2000 by the UN General Assembly on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, June 20 has been celebrated as the World Refugee Day since 2001. --- Sara Israfilbayova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Sara_999Is Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Rashid Shirinov Azerbaijan openly and actively cooperates with the UN special rapporteurs on human rights, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein said on June 19. He made the remarks at the 38th session of the UN Human Rights Council being held in Geneva. During his speech, the high commissioner criticized the human rights situation in several countries of the world and listed the states that are hesitant to cooperate with his Office and the special rapporteurs of the UN. Zeid al-Hussein also listed 19 countries that openly and actively cooperate with the UN special rapporteurs on human rights and give a positive response to appeals in connection with their visits. These are Azerbaijan, the U.S., Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Great Britain, Chile, Georgia, Ghana, Greece, Honduras, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, South Korea, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Tunisia and Ukraine. The high commissioner noted that these countries have received more than five special rapporteurs on human rights over the past five years. It is noteworthy that in June last year, the High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that Azerbaijan is among the countries that in time submit their report to the UN human rights structures. --- Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Sara Israfilbayova The oil prices of reference marks are lowered because of fears of growth of production in OPEC and the emerging trade war between the U.S. and China. Brent crude futures, the international benchmark for oil prices, were at $76.86 per barrel, down 0.64 per cent, U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were at $65.28 a barrel, down 0.62 percent, according to Rosbalt. Earlier, Energy Minister of Ecuador Carlos Perez confirmed that Saudi Arabia and Russia had made a proposal to increase oil production in the OPEC + countries by 1.5 million barrels per day, which will be distributed among countries. Ecuador is ready to increase production by 20-25 thousand b/s, if necessary, the minister said. A few days ago, US President Donald Trump again criticized OPEC for the fact that this organization, in his opinion, supports world oil prices at a "too high" level. Until recently, oil prices reached $80 per barrel. However, as the head of the Bureau of Complex Analysis and Forecast Sergey Dyachenko explained to the site Today, this price was speculative. $80 is an unrealistic price for oil, in principle, everyone recognized that $45-50 is a comfortable price for most oil-producing countries, they were oriented to it, $ 80 is already a speculative price, Dyachenko noted. OPEC and non-OPEC producers reached an agreement in December 2016 to curtail oil output jointly and ease a global glut after more than two years of low prices. OPEC agreed to slash the output by 1.2 million barrels per day from January 1. Non-OPEC oil producers such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Oman, Russia, Sudan, and South Sudan agreed to reduce output by 558,000 barrels per day starting from January 1, 2017. OPEC and its partners decided to extend its production cuts till the end of 2018 in Vienna on November 30, as the oil cartel and its allies step up their attempt to end a three-year supply glut that has savaged crude prices and the global energy industry. The next meeting of the ministerial monitoring committee of OPEC + will be held on June 21 in Vienna. It will be followed by a meeting of the OPEC countries on June 22 and a meeting of all 24 OPEC member countries on June 23, at which quotas for production reduction can be revised. --- Sara Israfilbayova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Sara_999Is Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Kyrgyz migrants working abroad have transferred more than $700 million to their homeland since early 2018, the National Bank of Kyrgyzstan said in a message June 18, TASS news agency reported. This is $84.5 million more than in the same period last year, the bank said. The National Bank of Kyrgyzstan noted that about 95 percent of the total value of funds comes from Kyrgyz migrants working in Russia. Over the past year, Kyrgyz migrant workers transferred about $2.4 billion to their homeland, $2.2 billion of which were sent from Russia. The State Migration Service under the government of Kyrgyzstan said that about 800,000 Kyrgyz citizens are temporarily working abroad. More than 600,000 of them work in Russia and about 30,000-50,000 in Kazakhstan, while the rest work in Turkey, South Korea, countries of Europe and the US. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Iran has turned to targeting new markets in the region and among the CIS nations, following Washingtons decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, said Adnan Mousapour, a board member of Iran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture. "Before and after the JCPOA, Iran has been a tradition importer of goods from Europe and the US," Mousapour told Trend. He added that Iran, however, has long been a major exporter of goods to its neighboring countries in the region. In the past two months, Iran has been targeting new markets in Central Asia and those in CIS area, the official said. Referring to impending US sanctions, Mousapour said, "No opportunity should be lost under difficult circumstances like sanctions, banking restrictions, and political pressure". He added that Iran is currently suffering from weaknesses in the areas of programming and support for exports and that they should be addressed soon. Elsewhere in the interview, Mousapour said that trade transactions between Iran and Qatar are underway and Tehran is mainly exporting agricultural products and construction material to this Arab country. In a speech from the White House on May 8, US President Donald Trump announced the US withdrawal from the nuclear agreement between Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany), known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Trump also said he would reinstate US nuclear sanctions on Iran and impose "the highest level" of economic bans on the Islamic Republic. The new US sanctions will take six months to kick in, but a number of European companies have already halted their businesses in Iran despite verbal pledges by their governments to protect them against any fallout. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz A former Beaumont tax preparer was sentenced Tuesday for income tax fraud, according to information from the U.S. Attorney's Office. Charles Maull II pleaded guilty in February to six counts of willfully aiding in the preparation and filing of false income tax returns, the department said. He was sentenced Tuesday to 30 months in federal prison. Instead of docking boats along the Neches River or spreading blankets out in Riverfront Park, Fourth of July revelers will watch the area's largest fireworks display next month from the Downtown Event Centre and Lake a first in the event's 32-year history. The city is relocating the patriotic party this year because Riverfront Park is still closed because of damage sustained during Tropical Storm Harvey. Despite a change in location, "the event will be bigger and better than before," promised Emily Wheeler, marketing division manager for Beaumont's event facilities department. Since the Event Centre is "a cornerstone of activity in downtown," Wheeler said it seemed like a good fit for the festivities, which will include food, fireworks, live music and a laser show. Attendees can spread out on blankets or in chairs on the center's Great Lawn, she said. "I think people really like to be in that area, it's progressive and new," Wheeler said, pointing to the facility's busy schedule, which she said has been booked two years out since it opened in 2012. Live music will start at 5 p.m. on three stages. Booked acts include the Cool Breeze Band, which performs R&B hits, and Briana Adams, who promises a Waylon Jennings, Lynyrd Skynrd and Janis Joplin fusion performance. The Symphony of Southeast Texas will take the stage at 8 p.m. and perform a program, touted as "a sensational salute to our nation's past," for a little more than an hour, said Douglas Fair, SOST's executive director. 32nd Annual City of Beaumont Fourth of July Celebration When: 5-10 p.m. July 4 Where: Downtown Event Centre and Lake, 700 Crockett Street Cost: Free More: Local food trucks will be on site. Lawn chairs, blankets and coolers are permitted but are subject to search No outside alcohol may be brought in to the event. See More Collapse The performance will run "right up until they start shooting fireworks," he said. "That's our cue to stop." Fair said it will be a change for the group's 70 members, who are used to playing inside the Julie Rogers Theater before the annual fireworks show. He admitted it was likely going to be hot for the musicians out in the "dry heat," but said they'd be ready to put on a great show. Prior to the fireworks show, revelers can look forward to a Laser Show on the Lake, according to the city's event schedule. The fireworks display will be launched around 9 p.m. from an area near the Great Lawn, Wheeler said, ensuring attendees the "best view in town." Although folks might miss the atmosphere or nostalgia of Riverfront Park, Wheeler said she still expects "thousands of people" to turn out again this year. All parking in downtown is free, Wheeler said, and several lots around the Event Centre should be enough to accommodate the Fourth of July crowds. "We've had Fourth of July (festivities) for many, many years," said Chris Boone, the city's planning and community development director. "It's one of many events the city puts on to try to encourage people to come downtown." The City of Beaumont has "invested quite a bit in that area," Boone said, pointing to the Beautiful Mountain Skate Park, Centennial Playground and the soon-to-open Lakeside Center for seniors. With the City of Beaumont working with consultants to repair and possibly enhance Riverfront Park, Boone said he could eventually see the Fourth of July event moving back to its traditional venue. Phoebe.Suy@BeaumontEnterprise.com Twitter.com/PhoebeSuy Corporations like Exxon Mobil should not be punished in state or federal courts for their positions in the debates over climate change years ago even if they were wrong by current standards. The growing effort by some environmentalists to do that would criminalize a policy difference and have a chilling effect on the robust exchange of ideas that our country needs. Attorneys generals in several states have sued or considered joining lawsuits against oil companies, charging that they knew their products were contributing to global warming. Oil companies are being compared to cigarette manufacturers, who famously denied the health risks of smoking for years. But this issue isnt the same. As recently as 10 years ago the impact of carbon emissions on the global climate was still being debated. Today, that debate is basically settled, and the rise of global temperatures has been measured for some time. Yet some researchers still suggest that other factors like solar cycles might also be affecting the earths climate. Its a complex issue even if carbon emissions lie at the heart of it. Issues like that need more discussion, not less, and certainly not a single approved version. Free people benefit from having as much information as possible to formulate their own opinions. Back in the 1990s or the first decade of this century, when this debate was heating up, it would have been surprising for any oil company to agree that it was the villain for climate change. That period also saw considerable progress in reducing the air and water pollution from oil refineries worldwide, something that had already been done in U.S. facilities. It still seemed plausible that better technology could overcome any negative effects from drilling for oil, refining it or using it. Its also worth noting that Exxon Mobil, along with some other energy companies, now supports a national carbon tax as well as the Paris climate treaty that President Trump withdrew from. That shows that their position on environmental issues has changed, which should be the goal of any group making a political argument. This doesnt mean that businesses have the same free speech rights as individuals. The courts have correctly held that they dont, or cant make false claims about their products. If any business knowingly harmed its customers or anyone else, it should certainly be held accountable. Yet those arguments dont apply retroactively to climate change. Instead of rehashing the past, lets all move forward. Environmentalists or business groups should be able to advocate for their side of an issue, and elected officials can use that process to develop any new laws. The debate should play out in the court of public opinion, not a court of law. Lunaticoutpost.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program , anaffiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.Amazon, the Amazon logo, MYHABIT, and the MYHABIT logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.Don't be a pest to the forum.No profanity in thread-titles or usernamesNo excessive profanity in postsNo Racism, Antisemitism + HateNo calls for violence against anyone..This website exists for fun and discussion only. The reader is responsible for discerning the validity, factuality or implications of information posted here, be it fictional or based on real events. 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Here's what you should know: 1. BPC has three offices in Louisville and LaGrange, Ky. 2. Law enforcement officials wouldn't elaborate on what they were investigating. 3. Some local pharmacies will not fill prescriptions for clinic patients because of the investigation. 4. Wave 3 reporters returned to the clinic June 18, but were turned away. Christopher Nelson, MD, issued this statement, "For over 10 years we have been proud to provide exceptional patient care to our community. We look forward to continuing to serve our patients and are grateful for their continued trust." 5. Despite the investigation, the Kentucky Board of Medicine said all physicians at the clinic still have active medical licenses. The percentage of freestanding ASCs located within 250 yards of main hospital buildings is large enough to influence analyses of observational studies using ambulatory surgery datasets, researchers found. Here are five takeaways from a study published in the Journal of Clinical Anesthesia: 1. Researchers identified 124 hospitals with an affiliated ASC within 10 miles of the main campus. 2. Fifty-three of the 124 facilities were freestanding. Twenty-two or 42 percent were located within 250 yards. 3. Researchers using U.S. national data should not assume ambulatory surgery reported as performed at a hospital has been performed within the hospital. 4. They also should not assume hospital-affiliated freestanding surgery centers are more than a five-minute walk for anesthesia and operating room personnel from the hospital. 5. The findings apply to national ambulatory surgery datasets such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's State Ambulatory Surgery Database, which includes procedures performed at hospital outpatient surgery departments. The American Medical Association passed its first policy addressing artificial intelligence which it refers to as "augmented intelligence" during its annual meeting in Chicago, which ran June 7 to June 13. The policy, which outlines tasks for the AMA to address regarding the use of AI in healthcare, builds on a proposed a "baseline policy" the association laid out in a May report to its board of trustees. In the May report, the trade association described why it chose to use the term "augmented intelligence," rather than the more traditional "artificial intelligence." "Artificial intelligence constitutes a host of computational methods that produce systems that perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence," the report reads. "However, in healthcare a more appropriate term is 'augmented intelligence,' reflecting the enhanced capabilities of human clinical decision-making when coupled with these computational methods and systems." The following organizations offering revenue cycle management-related services have announced new hires this year: 1. Prism Healthcare Partners, a Chicago-based national healthcare consulting firm, added Sean Angert as managing partner. 2. Axxess, a self-described "home healthcare technology company," hired financial expert Spencer Marks to oversee the company's RCM services growth. 3. Healthcare consulting firm The Wilshire Group named Andrew Wade senior revenue cycle consultant. 4. Clearwave Corp., a healthcare software company focused on self-service registration, named Shaun Priest chief revenue officer overseeing sales activities. 5. Cantata Health, a provider of healthcare RCM, EHR, accounting and portal solutions, appointed two new leaders. 6. Avelead hired Jay Galbreath as senior director of its revenue cycle services practice. 7. Access Healthcare named Jim Carlough senior vice president-North America operations. 8. Global Healthcare Resource named Jeffery Linn vice president of RCM. 9. Harmony Healthcare, a provider of population health and revenue cycle management staffing and consulting solutions, named Bilal Mushtaq, MD, CMO. 10. T-System, a provider of health IT solutions for emergency and urgent care, including charge capture and coding, named Steve DeCosta CFO. 11. GeBBS Healthcare, a revenue cycle management and health information management solutions provider, named Denise Cawley senior vice president of operations and client relations management. 12. Intersect Healthcare, a revenue cycle software developer, named Tracey Tomak director of project management and client engagement. 13. CarePayment, a self-described "patient financial engagement company," appointed Brian McCarthy senior vice president and general counsel. 14. Encoda, a healthcare reimbursement automation and services provider, tapped Adrianna Iorillo to direct the company's RCM services. 15. Capio, a provider of patient financial solutions, added Dan Kutchel, Jay Hicks and Trent Rosebrook to its management team. 16. Nordis Technologies, a Coral Springs, Fla.-based provider of healthcare customer communications management and payment solutions, named Paul Sykes COO and CFO. 17. Armco Partners, a Norcross, Ga.-based provider of revenue cycle management and health information management services, named Charlie Eckert vice president of sales. 18. Ontario Systems named Mike Meyer, Roger Carney and Steve Scibetta vice presidents. 19. Change Healthcare appointed Fredrik Eliasson executive vice president and CFO. 20. R1 RCM named Alex Mandl lead director of the company's board. 21. Xsolis appointed Zach Evans chief technology officer. 22. Alpharetta, Ga.-based nThrive, a healthcare RCM company, brought on a new CIO, data and analytics president and board member. 23. CCi, an employee-owned revenue cycle company, named its former CFO, Charles Jordan, president. 24. Healthcare Administrative Partners, a provider of RCM solutions, named Rick Grodin executive vice president. 25. Revenue cycle solutions provider Surgical Notes named Nathan Hess chief technology officer. 26. Healthcare Financial Resources named Joshua White regional vice president of client development (Midwest). 27. AccessOne, a provider of patient financing options, appointed Pia Labos as West Coast regional vice president of business development. 28. Connance named Tyler Drolet CFO. 29. Xifin named Doug Wheeler chief marketing officer. 30. Utica, N.Y.-based Mohawk Valley Health System named two revenue cycle leaders. 31. Credit Management Co., an accounts receivable and collection management provider for healthcare and other industries, promoted Joel McKiernan to executive vice president of sales. 32. CareCloud, a provider of RCM, practice management, EHR and patient experience management solutions, named Greg Novak vice president of channel sales. 33. Revenue cycle solutions provider VitalWare named two new executives. 34. Peak Health Solutions, an AMN Healthcare company offering mid-revenue cycle solutions, named Brad Hill president. 35. Health Payment Systems, a healthcare technology and services company focused on medical billing, named Terry Rowinski president and CEO. Here are 74 revenue cycle management service expansions involving healthcare vendors and providers implemented or announced this year: 1. Landmark Hospitals, a Naples, Fla.-based system of critical care facilities, chose HCS Interactant as its RCM and financial platform. 2. Recondo Technology, a Denver-based RCM solutions company, plans to put a greater focus on its automated solutions with advanced machine learning and other artificial intelligence capabilities. 3. Aquina Health launched Curae to provide non-recourse-based financing for patients. 4. Vituity, an integrated, multispecialty partnership of physicians, advanced providers and healthcare professionals, will open an office in Leawood, Kan., to offer billing and administrative services to providers. 5. Aquiline Capital Partners acquired revenue cycle management company Aspirion Health Resources. 6. An unnamed large West Coast-based academic hospital revealed plans to deploy eValuator automated pre-bill coding analysis technology from Streamline Health Solutions. 7. GeBBS Healthcare Solutions revealed plans to open its second delivery center in Manila, Philippines. 8. Methodist Health System in Dallas chose VisitPay's cloud-based patient financial experience platform. 9. TransUnion agreed to purchase Healthcare Payment Specialists, a healthcare advisory service focused on Medicare reimbursement. 10. AccessOne completed its acquisition of patient financial services provider HealthFirst Financial. 11. Wellsoft Corp. and Venture Development-GoRev are teaming up to provide urgent care centers with an EHR, practice management and RCM solution suite. 12. GeBBS Healthcare Solutions partnered with Prospect Medical Holdings for health information management and RCM. 13. R1 RCM completed its acquisition of Intermedix Corp. for about $460 million. 14. Health IT company MTBC agreed to acquire most of Orion Healthcorp's revenue cycle, practice management and group purchasing organization assets, as well as assets of 13 of its affiliate companies. 15. The SSI Group revealed a new revenue cycle offering called Access Director. 16. Bethlehem, Pa.-based St. Luke's University Health Network is offering patients more options for paying their medical expenses and managing their finances via its new online bill pay system. 17. Healthcare RCM software provider Ontario Systems acquired Justice Systems. 18. Loyale Healthcare and ClearBalance entered a partnership that will expand Loyale's patient engagement platform to include ClearBalance's patient financing solutions. 19. Xifin, a healthcare IT company, and PriorAuthNow, a software company, partnered to help hospital-based and independent labs with prior authorization. 20. R1 RCM will provide expanded services to South Bend, Ind.-based Beacon Health System. 21. The Texas Hospital Association and Connance, a provider of predictive analytics solutions, are teaming up for revenue cycle management improvement. 22. Cognizant closed its acquisition of RCM company Bolder Healthcare Solutions. 23. Citizens Medical Center in Victoria, Texas, partnered with AccessOne, a Fort Mill, S.C.-based provider of patient financing options. 24. OmiSYS and Comprehensive Pharmacy Services are joining forces to provide technology solutions designed for hospitals' retail pharmacies. 25. Infinitt North America, a healthcare image and data management solutions developer, revealed it will provide ImagineSoftware's medical billing solution. 26. HealthCare Futures, Premier Healthcare Systems and RSI Enterprises joined forces to launch an RCM company. 27. MedData, a provider of RCM solutions, has a new patient financial platform. 28. Navigant Consulting and Miami-based Baptist Health South Florida created an RCM joint venture. 29. SCI Solutions, a Seattle-based patient scheduling, referral management and revenue cycle software provider, added DatStat to its portfolio. 20. Healthcare Administrative Partners, a provider of RCM solutions, launched a radiology-focused clinical data analytics and business service called Deep Dive Analytics. 31. Triad Radiology Associates, a Winston-Salem, N.C.-based radiology practice, picked Healthcare Administrative Partners for RCM and practice management services. 32. AdvantEdge Healthcare Solutions added to its healthcare finance offerings with the acquisition of Professional Management Inc. 33. QueueLogix, a provider of RCM software and services and a HealthChannels subsidiary, partnered with ReferWell, a cloud-based platform focused on the medical referral process. 34. Revenue cycle services company Advantum Health acquired Med Advantage, a provider enrollment and credentialing verification organization, March 6. 35. CareCloud, a provider of RCM, practice management, EHR and patient experience management solutions, will host a summit this fall focused on physician practices that use the company's technology and services. 36, The Queen's Health Systems in Honolulu partnered with AccessOne, a provider of patient payment options. 37. Cognizant agreed to acquire RCM company Bolder Healthcare Solutions. 38. Sonoma (Calif.) Valley Hospital, a 75-bed district facility, chose health IT solutions provider ezDI for various tools aimed at revenue cycle improvement. 39. R1 RCM revealed its new revenue cycle platform called Patient Experience. 40. VitalWare is adding a professional Revenue Integrity Services business unit. 41. Columbia-based University of Missouri Health Care revealed plans to deploy Cerner's RCM offerings at various facilities. 42. iVita Financial, a patient payment solutions provider, is offering patients a loan program that will allow them to pay before treatment. 43. RevSolve, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based provider of receivables management and recovery solutions, merged with USCB America, a Los Angeles-based provider of business process outsourcing and accounts receivable management solutions. 44. Health IT vendor eClinicalWorks will offer hospitals and health systems a new platform for acute care EHR and revenue cycle management. 45. Revint Solutions, a national healthcare solutions and consulting services provider, acquired healthcare data analytics firm Naveos. 46. St. Louis-based Ascension chose R1 RCM to serve its medical group's physician practice care sites. 47. R1 RCM entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Intermedix Corp. for about $460 million. 48. Ability Network and Hands On Technology are joining forces on RCM offerings for physical therapy providers. 49. Cincinnati-based Mercy Health chose healthcare RCM company PMMC for contract management and modeling. 50. Chicago-based Presence Health revealed plans to deploy R1 RCM's end-to-end revenue cycle services in its 10 hospitals and more than 150 Illinois physician care locations. 51. Daytona Beach, Fla.-based Halifax Health and AccessOne entered a revenue cycle management partnership. 52. Healthcare payment solutions provider Rectangle Health and Jacksonville, Ark.-based North Metro Medical Center entered an RCM partnership. 53. GeBBS, an RCM and health information management solutions provider, joined forces with Continuum Health, a provider of physician engagement and payer value-based solutions, for RCM solutions. 54. Revenue cycle solutions provider Surgical Notes released an updated mobile transcription app for its ambulatory surgery center and surgical hospital clients. 55. Windham Brannon and Digitize.AI are teaming up to deliver artificial intelligence and intelligent automation resources to healthcare providers for improved revenue cycle management performance. 56. San Francisco-based Pacific Inpatient Medical Group, a 100-plus physician organization on seven Sutter Health campuses in northern California, implemented MD Coder 10 Charge Capture Solution software from Medical Design Technologies. 57. Revenue cycle management organizations Navicure and ZirMed revealed the name of their combined company: Waystar. 58. InSync Healthcare Solutions, a cloud-based healthcare technology software provider, added Encoda's BackOffice platform to its revenue cycle offerings. 59. Baker Tilly Virchow Krause, an accounting and advisory firm aims to help healthcare providers improve revenue cycle performance through its new innovation center. 60. Mediware Information Systems, a provider of healthcare and human services software, acquired revenue cycle solutions provider MEDTranDirect. 61. Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare acquired a $20 million stake in revenue cycle management services provider R1 RCM. 62. Frost-Arnett, a provider of healthcare accounts receivable management, and HealthiPASS, a digital check-in and patient payments platform, revealed plans to join forces to help providers with revenue cycle improvement. 63. Intermountain Healthcare revealed plans to transfer roughly 2,300 nonclinical employees to R1 RCM. 64. The United States Army Medical Command awarded $100 million in medical coding contracts to professional services firm Mindseeker. 65. Sunnyside, Wash.-based Astria Health selected Cerner's integrated EHR and revenue cycle management systems. 66. Nordic, a health IT solutions provider, revealed plans to add The Claro Group's revenue cycle transformation practice. 67. Flywire, an international payment and receivables solutions provider, revealed plans to add OnPlanU and OnPlan Health. 68. Cayuga Medical Center in Ithaca, N.Y., will deploy a number of revenue cycle offerings from ezDI, a Louisville, Ky.-based health IT solutions provider. 69. AccessOne, provider of patient payment options, agreed to acquire patient financial services provider HealthFirst Financial. 70. Baltimore-based Bon Secours Health System selected Effy Healthcare, a healthcare solutions provider focusing on financial, operational and clinical areas, for RCM. 71. Change Healthcare revealed the general availability of its blockchain solution for healthcare. 72. The Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and Harris Healthcare inked an RCM contract. 73. Philadelphia, Miss.-based Neshoba County General Hospital and Nursing Home selected Cerner's integrated EHR and RCM system. 74. Roseville, Calif.-based Adventist Health and Cerner expanded their partnership. In this special Speaker Series, Becker's Healthcare caught up with Carina Edwards, senior vice president of customer experience at Imprivata. Ms. Edwards will speak during the Becker's Hospital Review 4th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference on "HIT Security & Privacy: Best Practices and Key Issues," at 9:00 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 20. Learn more about the event and register to attend in Chicago. Question: Can you share your best advice for motivating your teams? Carina Edwards: Common goals, transparent communication, living our culture and recognizing success. In my experience, being transparent on goals and measures of success, [as well as] using multi-channel communication, are critical for motivating teams. I lead an organization of 132 team members, half of whom work from their home office or from customer sites across 21 countries. My advice for motivating teams is to start with creating a common rallying cry that supports your corporate strategy ours is "Create Customers for Life." From this, outline key goals and metrics, including your measurement of success. In communicating these goals, ensure you share the "Four Whys:" 1. Why is this important for the individual? 2. Why is this important for the team? 3. Why is this important for our customers? 4. Why is this important for our company? Lastly, think through your communication strategy and cadence. I chose a quarterly all-hands call recorded so folks with conflicts can watch at any time and monthly email communication for sharing direction at the executive and board level, updates on progress and on-the-ground success stories. I frequently join sub-team meetings to hear about successes and challenges. And, I recognize achievements both within the group and throughout the entire company, tying back to our overall goals and the goals of our customers. It's critical to keep the team aligned with the corporate strategy, to highlight examples where the team is living Imprivata's culture and where work is translating into customer success. It's a reminder to the team that what they do every day is important. They are enabling care providers to deliver better, more efficient care. And it holds me accountable to our goal of creating customers for life. Q: How does your organization gain physician buy-in when it is implementing a new technology or solution? CE: Implementing a new system is never easy, but to ensure we gain physician buy-in, we use the following recipe for success: 1. Understand the customer's current state and outline their future state. Leveraging clinical resources from our team, we go onsite [to] observe clinical teams in their environments and document workflows in their "as-is" state. This allows us to baseline the current experience and build tangible goals for the solution being proposed, [for example,] reduce login times by 60 percent. 2. Engage the clinicians in the design, implementation and rollout of the new solution. From that baseline, we carefully identify and engage clinical champions in the workflow design to streamline productivity and increase satisfaction. During implementation, we over-communicate and have folks on the ground working alongside our champions to help with enrollment, training and answering ad hoc questions. This also gives our clinical resources the opportunity to collect feedback for future enhancements and best practices to share with other customers. 3. Optimize. A system is never fully implemented. There is always the opportunity to optimize and leverage new functionality. Think Microsoft Office I think I use only about 30 percent of the features in Word. As part of our standard methodology, we circle back with the clinical champions and clinical teams three months post-deployment to take a new baseline and see where we can continue to optimize to achieve even more success for the end users. Q: What is your No. 1 deal breaker when it comes to evaluating vendor partnerships? CE: I've changed the question a little bit [to] "What is your No. 1 deal breaker when it comes to evaluating customer partnerships?" At the core of a true partnership between a healthcare organization and a technology vendor there must be a shared goal at the executive level. Imprivata enjoys partnerships with 1,700 healthcare organizations around the world and, for the most part, we have a shared goal to bring technology to bear on the acceleration of the digital transformation, enabling providers to deliver care anytime, anywhere in an efficient, secure and scalable manner. We are in the solutions business, not the widgets business. My No. 1 deal breaker when it comes to evaluating customer partnerships is being relegated to "procurement." If there is no executive sponsor for the project, no common goal and no understanding of success and ROI for both organizations then our solution is not considered strategic and won't get the attention it needs to make the customer successful, [or in other words], a customer for life. In this special Speaker Series, Becker's Healthcare caught up with Rebecca Wiedmeyer, project manager of health IT initiatives at the Chicago-based Erie Family Health Center. Ms. Wiedmeyer will speak during the Becker's Hospital Review 4th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference on " Practical Uses of Telemedicine and Improvement," at 1:00 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 19. Learn more about the event and register to attend in Chicago. Question: What is the one thing about your patient population that has really surprised you? Rebecca Wiedmeyer: Working for an urban Federally Qualified Health Center, I anticipated that our patient population would be far less savvy with technology than they are. We serve the under- and uninsured patient population of Chicago, and we've adopted technologies in recent years to assist in improving the dialog between caregivers and patients. Examples of these include secure texting between clinician and patient, text-based patient reminders and electronic patient surveys. Because of the prevalence of smartphones being used in our waiting rooms, we are always seeking out better ways to leverage the preferred technologies of our patients to continue to engage them in their own health. Q: What's the best thing you've read lately? RW: I recently read Slow Medicine by Victoria Sweet, MD. Dr. Sweet discusses how extensive charting and extremely limited time with the patient impacts the quality of care we provide, often leading to negative outcomes. She discusses how "slow medicine," or the comprehensive consideration of the patient as a person rather than the culmination of data points, should be integrated into our often overly-rapid delivery of care to improve quality of care and outcomes. Q: What's the biggest misconception about health IT? RW: From the perspectives of other industries, health IT may appear, at first blush, behind the curve in technology. However, while many healthcare organizations are trepidatious to adopt the "cutting edge" technologies on the market, others arguably have been driving vendors further, pushing the limits to see how things like [artificial intelligence] and machine learning can improve the healthcare experience for the patient and the provider. Our industry, arguably, has grown the fastest in recent years in terms of consumer engagement. Though providers may not always appreciate it, patients are on the internet searching symptoms and potential diagnoses in advance of their visit. This is a tremendous leap ahead, in my opinion, from the days where patients were passive health consumers and took their provider's word to be the only answer. Obviously, there needs to be a balance here, but the fact that there is now a dialog is a tremendous leap forward. The American Medical Association passed a resolution during its 2018 Annual Meeting, which took place June 9-13 in Chicago, to commission a study examining how venture capitalists' and private equity firms' investment in physician practices affects the healthcare industry. The study, which will be presented at the organization's 2019 Annual Meeting, will examine a number of issues, including the degree of venture capital and PE investment in the healthcare marketplace, the effect of such investment on physician practice and independence and the effects of ownership turnovers and bankruptcies on patients and physician practices, among other trends. Medical practices have become an increasingly attractive target for private equity and venture capital firms in recent years. For example, around the time the AMA's House of Delegates passed the resolution to commission the study, New York City-based private equity firm KKR & Co. entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Nashville, Tenn.-based physician services provider Envision Healthcare for $9.9 billion. However, physicians most affected by the trend fear the shift may have significant consequences, since investors are typically most concerned with increasing profit, which may come at the expense of patient care, MarketWatch reports. "Profit is important, but we want to make sure what's done in the patient's best interest is decided by a physician and not others who don't understand other nuances [of patient care]," Sherif Zaafran, MD, president of the Texas Medical Board and an alternate AMA delegate who voted in favor of the resolution, told MarketWatch. "As this is becoming much more prevalent, what are safeguards we can put in place to make sure physician autonomy and clinical decision-making processes with regard to their patients are safeguarded?" California's Supreme Court has rejected a pre-election challenge to block a statewide dialysis ballot initiative in November. The Fair Pricing for Dialysis Act qualified for the ballot earlier this month, although the initiative's sponsor, Service Employees International UnionUnited Healthcare Workers West, has until June 28 to decide if they want to keep the initiative on the ballot. A petition to block the measure from going before voters was filed, but the state high court denied the petition June 13, according to SEIU-UHW, which is among more than 130 organizations supporting the initiative, including healthcare organizations, churches and labor unions. "The court's order shows dialysis groups cannot silence the voice of voters who want to make sure quality and safe care for vulnerable patients with kidney failure are the focus, not massive industry profits," said Dave Regan, union president. "Opponents didn't think they could stop this initiative at the ballot box, so they tried to stop it in the courts. It didn't work." Andrea Messina, executive director of the California Dialysis Council, and Patient and Caregivers to Protect Dialysis Patients filed the dismissed petition. Kathy Fairbanks, spokesperson for the Patients and Caregivers to Protect Dialysis Patients, a coalition of about 100 groups such as the American Nurses Association of California, California Medical Association and emergency room physicians, was not surprised by the order. She told Becker's Hospital Review via email: "It is unusual for the courts to accept pre-election challenges so this outcome is not uncommon. This ballot measure is so flawed and so dangerous for dialysis patients that we intend to take all appropriate steps to ensure it's never enacted. We are confident that voters will reject this dangerous and deceptive scheme that will put the lives of vulnerable dialysis patients at grave risk." If passed, the Fair Pricing for Dialysis Act would limit how much outpatient kidney dialysis clinics may charge for patient care, according to the Attorney General's official title and summary of the initiative. It also would penalize clinics for excessive charges, and requires clinics report information about clinic costs, patient charges, and revenue to the state each year. Additionally, clinics would be barred from discriminating against patients due to how they pay for care. Supporters which include healthcare, veterans and community groups, civil rights and social justice organizations, churches and labor unions argue the initiative is a way to spur dialysis corporations to invest more in patient care. However, opponents contend dialysis clinics won't be able to cover their operating costs, dozens of clinics will close, and patients will lose access to dialysis if the initiative passes. More articles on legal and regulatory issues: CHS: Microsoft's copyright infringement claims are barred Texas hospital's $58M lawsuit against BCBS gets second life 3 California physicians charged in $580M billing fraud scheme A nursing supervisor for Novus, a shuttered hospice provider in Frisco, Texas, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud for her role in a $60 million scheme that federal prosecutors say involved fatally overdosing patients for profit, according to The Dallas Morning News. Jessica Love, RN, served as Novus' nurse case manager and regional director before the company shut down several years ago. She was one of 16 defendants charged in the healthcare fraud scheme in February 2017. According to court documents, Ms. Love and her co-conspirators, including Novus' owner and CEO Bradley Harris, allegedly enrolled as many people as possible in hospice care, even patients who were not eligible for the services. Once the patients were enrolled, they were given around-the-clock care, which Medicare reimbursed at a higher rate than routine care. If hospice patients were in continuous care for too long, Novus workers allegedly overmedicated them so they would die. Ms. Love was allegedly involved in the fatal overmedication of two patients, according to the report. Documents from Ms. Love and another Novus employee, who also pleaded guilty in the case, stated Mr. Harris instructed "nurses to intentionally overmedicate beneficiaries with medications such as hydromorphone and morphine with the intent to hasten their deaths," according to the report. Mr. Harris has denied any wrongdoing. "We are not aware of any evidence that shows that Mr. Harris caused, hastened or otherwise contributed to the death of the hospice patients being treated by Novus," Chris Knox, an attorney representing Mr. Harris, told The Dallas Morning News. More articles on legal and regulatory issues: CHS: Microsoft's copyright infringement claims are barred Texas hospital's $58M lawsuit against BCBS gets second life 3 California physicians charged in $580M billing fraud scheme The Fifth Circuit Appellate Court has revived a Texas hospital's $58 million lawsuit against 16 independent insurers and claims administrators doing business under the Blue Cross and/or Blue Shield trademarks across the U.S. over alleged underpayments. Here are 10 things to know about the lawsuit: 1. In 2012, Victory Medical Center-San Antonio (Texas), previously Innova Hospital San Antonio, sued the BCBS independent insurers and claims administrators in Texas state court. In the lawsuit, which was removed to federal court, the hospital alleged the insurers failed to reimburse it for covered claims or reimbursed it at significantly below applicable rates. 2. The insurers moved to dismiss the lawsuit for failure to state a claim, arguing the hospital needed to identify the provisions in specific plan documents that the insurers allegedly breached. 3. The case was administratively closed in early 2013 and reopened later that year after the parties failed to reach a settlement. The hospital filed a second amended complaint containing allegations relating to medical services provided in 863 separate instances to patients with benefit plans governed by either Employee Retirement Income Security Act plans or non-ERISA contracts. The complaint alleged more than $58 million in damages. 4. Victory Medical Center was an out-of-network provider, and the hospital alleged the insurers reimbursed it at an average rate of 11 percent, when they were required to reimburse out-of-network providers at 80 percent of "reasonable and customary" expenses after the deductible. Like the two prior complaints, the second amended complaint did not include the actual plan language from an ERISA or non-ERISA contract at issue. 5. The insurers once again moved to dismiss the case for failure to state a claim, arguing the second amended complaint failed the plausibility pleading standard because the terms of the various benefit plans were essential allegations not included in the complaint. The district court granted the motions to dismiss, reasoning that the hospital's second amended complaint was insufficient because it did not identify the specific plan provisions at issue. The hospital filed an appeal in the case. 6. On appeal, the hospital argued the district court's requirement that it plead specific plan language to survive the motion to dismiss conflicted with pleading requirements established in case law. According to the hospital, the district court created a "heightened pleading standard" by requiring the hospital to plead information that it did not have access to without the insurers' cooperation. 7. The appellate court agreed with the hospital's arguments. Citing case law, the appellate court said ERISA plaintiffs should not be held to an excessively burdensome pleading standard that requires them to identify particular plan provisions when it may be extremely difficult for them to access the plan provisions. The court also emphasized that the hospital was unable to obtain plan documents even after good-faith efforts to do so. 8. The appellate court held that the factual allegations in the second amended complaint allowed the court "to draw the reasonable inference" that the insurers are liable for the misconduct alleged. "We agree with the hospital that it pleaded sufficient facts in its second amended complaint to survive the insurers' motion to dismiss the claim for ERISA plan benefits," states the court's opinion. 9. The appellate court also held that the lower court erred in dismissing the hospital's breach of contract claim. "The hospital has alleged the existence of valid contracts (non-ERISA plans), performance by the hospital, breach of the contracts by the insurers, and damages in the form of underpayment or non-payment sustained as a result of the breach," states the court's opinion. "The hospital's second amended complaint adequately states a claim for breach of contract under Texas law." 10. The appellate court remanded the case to the district court for further proceedings. More articles on legal and regulatory issues: Florida health system accused of illegally poaching physicians from competitor 3 California physicians charged in $580M billing fraud scheme 11 latest healthcare industry lawsuits, settlements Methadone could be a more effective treatment than morphine for babies introduced to opioids in utero and born with withdrawal symptoms, known as neonatal abstinence syndrome, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics. Every twenty minutes, a baby is born to a mother addicted to opioids, according to TIME. About 80 percent of NAS cases in the U.S. are treated with morphine, and 20 percent are treated with methadone, which is less addictive than morphine and oxycodone. Jonathan Davis, MD, vice chair of pediatrics at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, conducted a study comparing the use of methadone and morphine to treat babies born with NAS. Among 116 babes born with NAS, those randomly assigned methadone for treatment left the hospital about three days earlier than babies treated with morphine, Dr. Davis found. Babies treated with methadone also stopped their medication routine roughly two days earlier. We hope people will look at these results and see the success and think, 'that's something we can also adopt' so we don't have hundreds of different approaches throughout the U.S. for treating these babies, Dr. David told TIME. More articles on opioids: These 4 states saw the biggest drop in opioid prescriptions Viewpoint: Physicians should no longer use opioids as 'simple solution' to pain Cryptomarket opioid sales increased after DEA tightened prescribing regulations Programs dedicated to monitoring prescription drug use in Kentucky, New Mexico, Tennessee and New York have significantly reduced opioid prescriptions, according to research published in Health Affairs. All states have prescription drug monitoring programs, with the exception of Missouri, but some programs are more comprehensive than others, lead study author Rebecca Haffajee, PhD, assistant professor of health management policy at University of Michigan's School of Public Health told Futurity. Dr. Haffajee and her colleagues monitored prescription drug program laws to identify which states offered physicians the most access to comprehensive and recent prescribing data. The researchers identified Kentucky, New Mexico, Tennessee and New York as state's with the most robust drug monitoring programs. Out of all 50 states, Kentucky displayed the most dramatic and consistent reduction in opioid prescriptions and dosages. After implementing a stricter drug monitoring program in 2012, the state experienced a 1.6 percent reduction in opioid fills byt by the end of 2014. "If a state implements a robust prescription drug monitoring program, it will probably reduce the proportion of commercially insured adults who receive opioid prescriptions, as well as the strength of those prescriptions," Dr. Haffajee told Futurity. "But we would caution that any reductions in opioid prescriptions or dosages must be accompanied by careful clinical oversight so that patients don't suffer potential unintended consequences of reductions in their prescription opioid supply." More articles on opioids: Opioid crisis: Many stakeholders, common themes, Part 1 Viewpoint: Physicians should no longer use opioids as 'simple solution' to pain Viewpoint: Federal opioid response must address childhood trauma As disruptors continue to push into the healthcare arena and pressure accumulates to reduce drug prices, pharmaceutical companies are taking steps to remain competitive and enhance their drug pipelines. 2017 marked a slow year of mergers and acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry. However, experts from some of the largest drug manufacturers are expecting the pace of deals in 2018 to significantly accelerate as a result of the tax overhaul. So far, they have been right. In the first quarter of 2018, the volume of pharmaceutical takeovers rose to a record-setting level, according to Bloomberg, and this trend has shown no signs of slowing. Since Jan. 1, the following drugmakers have announced or completed mergers, acquisitions, partnerships and general transactions. Note: This is not an exhaustive list. Deals were reported by Becker's Hospital Review and are presented in the order they were reported on. 1. Roche to acquire Foundation Medicine for $2.4B Pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding will pay $2.4 billion to acquire the remaining shares it doesn't already own of Foundation Medicine, putting more stake into a future for personalized cancer treatments. 2. J&J divests LifeScan unit for $2.1B: 3 things to know Johnson & Johnson will sell its LifeScan diabetes unit to the private equity firm Platinum Equity for $2.1 billion. 3. A new medical device giant? Stryker makes takeover bid for Boston Scientific Medical device maker Stryker has reportedly approached its rival Boston Scientific with a takeover bid, a move that would create a combined company with a market value of more than $110 billion. 4. A new pharma giant Takeda acquires Shire for $62B Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. acquired its much larger rival Shire for $62 billion in cash and stock a deal that catapults the Japanese company into a new league of drug industry giants. 5. Shire sells oncology unit in $2.4B deal London-based rare disease drugmaker Shire divested its oncology business to the French drug company Servier for $2.4 billion. 6. Novartis to acquire gene therapy firm AveXis for $8.7B Novartis will pay $218 per share for AveXis, a $8.7 billion deal that is a 72 percent premium to the company's 30-day volume-weighted average stock price. 7. Roche completes $1.9B acquisition of oncology EHR vendor Flatiron Health Roche closed its acquisition of oncology EHR vendor Flatiron Health, the Swiss pharmaceutical and diagnostics company confirmed April 6. Roche purchased the New York City-based startup for $1.9 billion on a "fully diluted basis, subject to certain adjustments." 8. Allergan eyes sale of women's health unit: 4 things to know Allergan is looking into strategic options for its women's health unit amid a financial slump driven by heightened competition for its best-selling skin and eye drugs. 9. GlaxoSmithKline buys Novartis' stake in consumer healthcare unit for $13B: 4 things to know GlaxoSmithKline will purchase Novartis' 36.5 percent stake in their consumer healthcare joint venture for $13 billion. 10. Canadian devicemaker to purchase Cogentix Medical for $239M Toronto-based Laborie Medical Technologies will acquire Minnetonka, Minn.-based Cogentix Medical for $239 million. 11. Pfizer sells neurology drug to Biogen in nearly $600M deal: 4 things to know Biogen shared plans in March to buy Pfizer's experimental neurology drug in a deal worth up to $590 million. 12. Merck to purchase Viralytics for $394M: 3 things to know In a move to expand its cancer immunotherapy pipeline, Merck & Co. inked a deal Feb. 21 to buy Viralytics, a virus-based cancer drug firm, for $394 million. 13. AbbVie, Voyager ink $69M deal to develop Alzheimer's drug AbbVie, a pharmaceutical company based in North Chicago, Ill., teamed up with Voyager Therapeutics, a clinical stage gene therapy company, to develop a treatment for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. 14. J&J reportedly seeks buyers for its $2B sterilization division: 4 things to know As part of its move to divest non-core assets, Johnson & Johnson reportedly is seeking buyers for its sterilization products division. 15. Novartis looks to auction off US generics business: 4 takeaways Novartis plans to auction off its generic pill business in the U.S. amid heightened competition. 16. Bristol-Myers, Nektar ink $1.85B cancer drug deal Bristol-Myers Squibb will pay Nektar Therapeutics $1 billion to develop a cancer immunotherapy treatment one of the largest deals ever inked for a single drug's development. 17. Sanofi to buy US hemophilia drugmaker for $11.6B Paris-based Sanofi will acquire all outstanding shares of Waltham, Mass.-based Bioverativ for about $11.6 billion. 18. Celgene to acquire Juno Therapeutics for $9B, betting on a future for CAR-T therapies Biopharmaceutical giant Celgene will purchase Juno Therapeutics for $9 billion in a move to expand in the increasingly competitive cancer treatment landscape. 19. Celgene to acquire Impact Biomedicines for up to $7B U.S. biopharmaceutical firm Celgene will acquire Impact Biomedicines, a San Diego-based startup focusing on developing treatments for complex cancers, for up to $7 billion. 20. Mallinckrodt to acquire Sucampo Pharmaceuticals for $1.2B: 3 things to know United Kingdom-based drugmaker Mallinckrodt will acquire Rockville, Md.-based Sucampo Pharmaceuticals for $18 per share. Including Sucampo's debt, the total transaction value is approximately $1.2 billion. With the recent Ebola outbreak in the Congo, many U.S. hospitals are evaluating their ability to diagnose, treat, contain and craft a disease plan. Jennifer Rainer, RN, PhD candiate, was the senior director of quality, patient safety and infection prevention at Texas Health Dallas during the diagnosis and treatment of three U.S.diagnosed Ebola patients in 2014 and led the hospital's comprehensive performance improvement plan for future emerging diseases. Here are nine things she wants you to consider: 1. The process of notifying and communicating with important hospital staff, such as lab leadership, is crucial to preventing further outbreak. "That gray time of initial decision-making has the greatest potential for delays in patient treatment while clinical staff and leaders decide how to protect staff from exposure," she writes. 2. Proper training of hospital staff is critical to patient treatment and limiting the outbreak. 3. Have critical care physicians treat the patients with the emerging disease from the start, even if the patient is not yet critically ill. Also consider that those physicians treating the ED patient should not see other patients. Extra staffing maybe required, which can be a financial burden. 4. It is possible that staff on duty in the hospital with the quarantined patient should not return to their families, at least right away, due to exposure. 5. Waste management is another means of protecting hospital staff and everyone outside of the quarantine. Ebola waste is considered class A and requires a department of transportation permit to carry to another state, Rainer writes. Until the hospital is able to obtain permits to properly dispose of the waste, leaders must decide where to store it. 6. Due to the emergent nature of the disease, a hospital will more than likely host local or governmental authorities, both of which will ask who is in charge. Make sure to include who will be in charge of the necessary duties outlined in a protection plan. 7. It is important to ensure the EHR is up to date with screening questions and will make doing the right thing easy for staff. 8. Assess what resources are available and ensure the facilities can accommodate an Ebola patient. A one-directional ante room, patient room, dirty room and shower, as well as a telemetry monitor so staff can monitor the patient in question while limiting time in the room, are all crucial to treating Ebola patients. 9. Plan for care of hospital staff after the quarantine is lifted. Provide employee assistance and critical incident debriefing sessions. More articles on clinical leadership and infection control: Confirmed Ebola cases in Congo spikes to 39 Ebola workshop for health leaders set for August in Atlanta WHO chief hesitant to call preemptive victory against Ebola outbreak On June 14 at Logan (W.Va.) Regional Medical Center, two families were given the wrong babies due to incomplete name tags, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail. When Barbara Colegrove arrived at the hospital to visit her daughter, Crystal Perry, and her newborn grandson, her son-in-law Andrew "Junior" Perry went to the nursery to get the newborn, Dawson Perry, for the family to hold. "He went to the nursery and there [Dawson's] basket was, lying in the same spot it had been. It said 'Perry' on the card, but nothing else was filled out on the card. Not the height, not the weight, it just said Perry, Ms. Perry told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. "He noticed on the card it said number five, and our baby had been in number four. ... He told the nurse, 'Why is he in a baby cart that says number five?' She said, 'Oh thats fine, that's your baby.' He thought it was because all he saw was his blonde hair. She just walked over there with a Sharpie marker and crossed off [Room] 205 and wrote 204." For the next two hours, Colegrove and her other daughter held the baby they thought was Dawson. Mr. Perry started looking through the drawers on the cart to find milk to feed his son, and noticed the onesies and other supplies inside didn't look familiar, Ms. Perry told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Then a nurse came in and asked for the number on Ms. Perry's arm band. When she realized it was 204 and not 205, she left and returned with the Perrys' baby, Dawson. The Perrys were given the wrong baby due to there being another family in the hospital with the last name Perry. Crystal and Junior Perry's relatives had been holding Colton Perry, the newborn son of Heather Perry, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail. "I don't think he was in there for a couple hours, I think it was just a couple seconds," Heather Perry said in a telephone interview. "I haven't heard anything about [them taking pictures with Colton]." Crystal Perry warned other parents about potential baby mix-ups. "I've had three other kids. Anytime I've been in the hospital, any single time that they bring your baby in, a nurse brings them in and they ask you to read your arm band. Then, they check the baby's arm band, which is usually on their foot," she said. "That never happened one single time." The hospital's spokesperson was unable to confirm or disclose particular information about the event due to patient privacy. Both Dawson and Colton have been returned to the right families and discharged from the hospital. More articles on clinical leadership and infection control: 9 things to consider with US Ebola prevention in hospitals Pizza Hut vows to phase out antibiotic use in chickens by 2022 Choosing the right mask: A guide to ASTM barrier protection standards McKesson, a medical supply and pharmaceutical distributor, will close its facility in Rocky Hill, Conn., resulting in job losses for 105 people, according to a Fox 61 report. The distributor sent a letter to Rocky Hill Mayor Joe Kochanek the week of June 11 alerting him to its plan to move out of Connecticut. While McKesson didn't disclose the reason for moving out of the state, the company said "the move will be soon." McKesson has been sued recently by several Connecticut cities, including New Haven, Norwalk and Danbury, which allege the company had a role in the U.S. opioid crisis. Kuros Biosciences will present results from clinical case studies of MagnetOs Granules at the 15th annual State of Spine Surgery Think Tank on June 21 to June 23 in Aruba. Here are three things to know: 1. Dr. Alwyn Jones, a consultant orthopedic spinal surgeon at Spire Cardiff Hospital in the United Kingdom, implanted MagnetOs in the spines of five patients requiring spinal fusion in 2017. 2. Major takeaways from the case studies include: MagnetOs Granules were well-tolerated and no device-related adverse events were reported MagnetOs Granules were easy to apply as a standalone graft, when mixed with bone marrow aspirate or local bone Resorption and remodeling of MagnetOs Granules was evident from as early as three months after implantation The granules promoted spinal fusion in a mixed patient cohort when implanted using five different surgical approaches 3. MagnetOs is a bone graft substitute comprised of biphasic calcium phosphate with a submicron surface topography intended to direct bone formation after implantation. More articles on biologics: Dr. Mark McFarland performs spine surgery with SpineFrontier LES Technology & NanoFuse Biologics: 4 highlights Wright Medical wins premarket approval for biologic alternative 6 insights New study will compare Kuros Biosciences' MagnetOs, autograft for spinal fusion: 3 insights An artist's impression of how Portland 88 will look The sale of 28 apartments in a new development in south Belfast has yielded 5.6m - prompting claims of "a return in confidence" in city centre housing. Barnett Developments said the sales had been made in the second phase of building at the 17m 'Portland 88' project on the Ormeau Road. The seven-storey block includes 88 apartments with 'smart home intelligence systems', enabling residents to control heating and lighting and other appliances from a smartphone. The development, which started in April 2017, is due for completion in December 2018. The apartments are on sale through agents Colliers. Barnett Developments chief executive Nick Barnett claimed the success of the sales so early in the release of the first two phases is a "huge show of a demand in the city centre residential market". "Belfast is on the cusp of a returning confidence and demand for city centre living like many of our UK and European neighbours," he said. Expand Close Success: Nick Barnett / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Success: Nick Barnett The block is made up of 10 one-bedroom apartments, 74 two-bedroom apartments and four three-bedroom luxury apartments. Prices range from one-bedroom properties at 165,000 and nine two-bedroom apartments for between 189,000 to 219,000. A three-bedroom penthouse on the site is listed as 'sale agreed' but with no indication of price given. Mr Barnett said the development had drawn a range of purchasers. "To date, our purchasers have been a mix of young professionals, couples who work in the city and people relocating to Belfast for work, and indeed investors who see the opportunity for purchasing the properties through buy-to-let for the thriving rental market," he said. The development is being built by Graham Construction and was designed by Gregory Architects. There are already a number of apartment buildings in the area, including Lucas Building and Tyrone House on Ormeau Avenue, and Somerset Studios and Shaftesbury Court buildings on Marcus Ward Street. Meanwhile, nearby Havelock House - the birthplace of broadcaster UTV - is on the market through estate agent Savills. The property has an asking price of 3.5m and has been on the market since April. The TV station, which is now owned by ITV, is in the process of relocating to new studios at City Quays. A US software company has opened a new technology hub in Belfast employing 50 highly-paid staff. New York-based HHAeXchange provides software to help streamline healthcare and homecare services in America. It moved into the Scottish Provident Building next to Belfast City Hall last week, representing its first investment in Northern Ireland. Five jobs are already in place with another 45 to follows over the next three years. Invest NI will fund the company to the tune of 400,000. It said the combined wage total of all 50 jobs will eventually contribute 2m to the economy. HHAeXchange has pointed to the level of software knowledge and skills in Northern Ireland as the key factors for bringing it across the Atlantic. The company's CEO Greg Strobel also cited the "ease of travel from New York City". He said the new Belfast hub will work to develop "cutting-edge technology solutions" for its expanding customer base. An increasingly ageing population in the United States, coupled with recent changes in legislation, has led to an upsurge in demand for HHAeXchange's web-based platform, which provides a real-time connection between homecare providers and payers. "We have won many new contracts recently, which means we need to scale our business quickly to support this growth," said Mr Strobel. "Our new tech hub in Belfast will focus on developing cutting-edge technology solutions to meet the needs of our expanding customer base." "Our software serves as the single source of truth for payers and providers, improving transparency and communication for better homecare environments. "The Belfast team will focus on new enterprise technology developments that are central to our business' growth. Gary Hanley, who heads Invest NI's American operations, said the economic development agency has continued to highlight Northern Ireland as a location for US software developers. "In this case, HHAeXchange was told about the access to great talent by another US company investing here. You can't get a better testimonial than that," he added. Mrs Bradley with Jonathan Gray, principal of Arvalee School and Resource Centre, and pupils Shannon Kelly and Iain Walker Karen Bradley at Strule Shared Education Campus project with John Smith, deputy secretary of the SSEC Programme, and Jennifer Morgan, Strule Construction director A shared education campus in Omagh has received a 140m Government funding boost. Strule will be the largest of its kind in Northern Ireland and will bring together more than 4,000 pupils from six schools and all backgrounds. It will offer collaborative education opportunities to students across the Steam (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) area of the curriculum. Secretary of State Karen Bradley said: "UK Government funding will help support integrated and shared education in Northern Ireland and break down barriers through cohesion to give young people the valuable skills they need to succeed." She visited the site yesterday but said an Executive should be restored at Stormont to build on her announcement. Mrs Bradley said the sharing of facilities, skills and resources will enable a more flexible approach to learning with enhanced curriculum choices, encouraging young people to flourish. The Secretary of State was welcomed to the Strule campus, a huge building site, by John Smith, deputy secretary at the Department of Education, and Jennifer Morgan, construction director, for a tour, during which she heard about the scale and ambition of the project. At Arvalee School and Resource Centre, a special needs school on the edge of the site and the first school to move to the new shared location, she was greeted by principal Jonathan Gray and John Hall, chairman of the school's board of governors, for a tour of the school and grounds. She also met the principals of the other five schools involved in the project, as well as a number of pupils from all six schools. Strule is the only campus in Northern Ireland where students with moderate and severe learning difficulties will be educated alongside mainstream schools. Mrs Bradley added: "Our strong commitment has been demonstrated in recent years in the 2013 Economic Pact with the Executive and in both the Stormont House and Fresh Start Agreements. "It is our ambition that we ensure all young people can benefit from a high-class education and fulfil their potential, irrespective of their background. "The Strule project demonstrates the huge importance of devolved government in Northern Ireland to drive forward projects like this for the benefit of the whole community." Home Secretary Sajid Javid has announced a review into the use of cannabis-based medicines in the UK, which could lead to their re-scheduling and pave the way for doctors to issue prescriptions for treatments. He said the current situation - highlighted by the Billy Caldwell case - demonstrated how it was "not satisfactory" for parents or doctors. The Government minister was giving a statement in the House of Commons on the issue of drug licensing on Tuesday. Read More Billy's mum Charlotte welcomed the move. "We are on the threshold of the next chapter of the history book," she said. Sitting alongside the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, he stressed the move was "in no way a first step" to legalise cannabis for recreational use. He said the penalties for unauthorised supply and procession of the drug would remain unchanged. The Home Secretary intervened over the weekend to allow Northern Ireland boy Billy access to life-saving treatment for severe epileptic seizures. His mother Charlotte had the drugs confiscated when she tried to return from Canada last week. Billy (12) was later rushed to hospital after taking seizures. Read More Mr Javid said cases like Billy's and others demonstrated a need to "look closely" at the provision of cannabis-based medicines in the UK. He said his actions in issuing an emergency measure was "unprecedented". Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott welcomed the announcement, asking if Billy Caldwell would be allowed access to his remaining medication. Mr Javid said his officials were working with the family. Mr Javid said that while the medicinal benefits of cannabis was not recognised in law, the review would consider the evidence presented by clinicians. The review would be broken into two parts. The first part would consider the benefits of multiple cannabis-based medicines which would put forward potential treatments for consideration in part two, which would provide an assessment of which, if any, would be re-scheduled for public use. He said that while the process would take time, cases would be considered on an individual basis by an expert panel, as announced on Monday. He added: "As a father I know there is nothing worse than seeing your child suffer. You would do anything to take away their pain. That is what I have the utmost sympathy for Billy Caldwell, Alfie Dingley and others. "I will do everything in my power to make sure we have a system that works to make sure these children and their parents have access to the best possible medical treatment." A Co Down man who survived prostrate cancer after a four-year battle has said men in Northern Ireland are being let down by health trusts that don't have access to the latest scan technology. Raymond McKee (57) from Newtownards was checked for prostate cancer in 2014 not long after his cousin was diagnosed with an advanced form of the disease. Prostate Cancer UK said yesterday that research has shown that a multiparametric MRI (mpMRI) before a biopsy could radically boost detection of prostate cancer and cut unnecessary biopsies. However, only two of our health trusts are offering this - and none are providing it to a high enough standard to rule men out of a biopsy altogether. Raymond, who has been given the all-clear, is appalled that mpMRI is still not available to most men here. "I was diagnosed with prostate cancer on May 15 2014," he explained. "I'd gone to my GP after my cousin was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in the same year." The results of a test that measures the amount of prostate specific antigen (PSA) in blood were slightly elevated, so Raymond was referred to a urologist at his local hospital for further investigation. "However, after being told I needed to wait nine weeks for a biopsy, I decided to go private. I had a TRUS biopsy (which takes 12 random samples from the prostate gland) followed by a normal MRI," he said. "But TRUS biopsies can miss some clinically significant cancers. "An mpMRI scan gives a very detailed picture of the prostate gland and can detect approximately 90% of clinically significant prostate cancers. "However, mpMRI is not available in all areas across the UK, and in Northern Ireland nowhere provides mpMRI to the gold standard. "When you're faced with a cancer diagnosis, there are so many uncertainties, but if mpMRI was available when I was diagnosed I would have instantly known what I was up against." He added: "The exact location of the cancer could have been located and my biopsy could have been targeted, rather than using the stab in the dark technique which can miss some cancers. "It is outrageous that men in Northern Ireland are being denied this diagnostic technique despite it being proven to radically boost detection of prostate cancer and cut unnecessary biopsies." Raymond was diagnosed with stage two prostate cancer. "It came as a tremendous shock. I had no symptoms and was only 53 years old. I opted to have a radical prostatectomy and was referred for treatment in Cambridge because surgery was not available in Northern Ireland," he said. Heather Blake, director of Support and Influencing at Prostate Cancer UK, said all men should be able to access the latest diagnostic scans. "The evidence in support of mpMRI before biopsy is overwhelming - it is the biggest breakthrough in prostate cancer diagnosis for decades," she said. The Department of Health did not respond to a request for comment. A Bangor woman has won a 25,000 settlement and an apology from an internship company in a sex discrimination case she claimed was linked to her pregnancy. Ruth Faulkner was a work placement officer for Intern Europe Limited, which sources professional internships across Northern Ireland. Assisted by the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, she lodged a tribunal case alleging sex discrimination related to her pregnancy. Intern Europe Ltd denied the allegation, but agreed to make a settlement before the tribunal and without admitting liability. Ms Faulkner said that during her maternity leave she had asked to make a "small change" to the pattern of her working hours to help with childcare commitments. Instead, she claimed the company reduced her hours. On the first day of her return from maternity leave she was called to a meeting where she was said to have been informed that her post was potentially at risk of redundancy. Ms Faulkner alleged she was told the firm wanted to discuss an option with her where she would apparently "choose to leave rather than go through a formal redundancy situation". She claimed she was informed that if she wanted to consider this option, she would have to leave the office right away. "Before I told them of my pregnancy I felt I was a respected member of their staff and that my work was appreciated," said Ms Faulkner. "Afterwards, I felt isolated, excluded, sidelined and ignored. When I returned to work after the birth of my child, to be confronted with a proposal to terminate my employment, I was shocked and upset. There are better ways and fairer ways within the law to treat people." Ms Faulkner said the case was settled before it went to a tribunal. Equality Commission senior legal officer Mary Kitson said: "In settling this case, Intern Europe apologised to Ms Faulkner for any injury to feelings, distress and upset caused. It also affirmed its commitment to equality of opportunity and undertook to liaise with the Equality Commission." Intern Europe Limited said: "As a business we were facing financial difficulty, we were looking at having to make some hard decisions, and cost savings was a part of that. We stated that we in no way selected the claimant because of her pregnancy, or issues related to it, and have not accepted liability. We accept the process of approaching the claimant caused upset, which is regretful, but was never intentional, and we sincerely apologised for this. "We entered into an agreement with the claimant via the Equality Commission to settle the claimant's claim. The settlement was, from our point of view, a commercial choice which also brought about what we feel was an amicable end to the claimant's employment, as well as an end to her claims. "Any compensation paid was paid as a whole based on all of these aspects. We are happy to work with the Commission on reviewing any policies, and as a business we want to ensure we have fair and transparent policies in place." Arlene Foster has strongly defended her decision to hold a landmark meeting with the LGBT community - and has revealed that her party may have gay elected representatives. The DUP leader was speaking as her decision to attend an event paying tribute to the LGBT community's contribution to Northern Ireland was widely welcomed. Read More However, the Belfast Telegraph understands that two DUP councillors voiced concerns internally about their leader's LGBT meeting. Both representatives declined to comment when contacted yesterday. DUP Ballymoney councillor John Finlay said: "If you want any comment, see the press office." Bangor councillor and farmer Alan Graham said: "Speak to the press office." Mr Graham was at the centre of a worldwide media storm in 2011 when he called on pop star Rihanna to cover up as she filmed a video in a state of semi-undress in his field. The DUP leader was backed by North Belfast councillor Dale Pankhurst who tweeted: "Fully supportive and behind Arlene Foster in reaching out to people from a variety of traditions and beliefs. As we head towards 2021, everyone must and will feel inclusive in a strong and vibrant Northern Ireland." Mrs Foster is to join the leaders of Northern Ireland's other four main parties at the Stormont event hosted by PinkNews on June 28. She was invited by CitiBank. DUP sources said she was not set to speak at the event. LGBT advocacy group The Rainbow Project said it hopes her presence will be the start of bridge-building with the community. Veteran gay rights' campaigner and Belfast Ulster Unionist councillor Jeff Dudgeon welcomed the meeting, but said it wasn't enough and the DUP had to now move to facilitate same-sex marriage. Speaking on UTV last night, Mrs Foster said: "Over this past couple of years there has been a perception of the DUP as people who don't value the LGBT community. I just want to make sure that the LGBT community are aware that I do value their contribution to Northern Ireland. "The fact that we disagree on the definition of marriage of course is an issue. "But that shouldn't stop me from saying I value these people as citizens of Northern Ireland and thank them for the contribution they make on a day and daily basis." Mrs Foster acknowledged that the "perception" that the DUP didn't value the LGBT community was "sometimes caused by things that have been said in the past". She continued: "There are many people in Northern Ireland who vote for the DUP who are lesbian and gay. In fact, I'm quite sure we have lesbian and gay members in the DUP. Who knows, we may even have elected representatives in the DUP who are lesbian and gay." Gavin Boyd of the Rainbow Project said: "It will be the first time that a DUP leader will attend an LGBT event and it's great to see Arlene Foster taking this important step. I hope that it will be the start of bridge-building. "I hope it will be the start of a process of reconciliation between the DUP and LGBT people in Northern Ireland who have had to bear the brunt of the DUP's hostility and bigotry here over the past four decades. There is room for trust and respect to be built." In her statement disclosing that she would attend the LGBT event, Mrs Foster said her party had sometimes been subject to vile abuse by a minority in the LGBT community. Mr Boyd said he hoped that she would not use the Stormont event to lecture gay rights' activists on their criticism of her party. If she did so, they would have to remind her that in the past DUP representatives had described being gay as worse than sexually abusing children and had claimed the existence of gay people had caused God to send hurricanes to earth. Mr Dudgeon noted that Mrs Foster's gesture to the gay community followed similar outreach to the GAA and Muslims in the past week. "Arlene seems to be clearing the decks in preparation for a new round of talks with Sinn Fein in September," he said. "I welcome her attendance at the Stormont event but if she is serious about recognising the rights of gay people, then she must tell Theresa May to allow the necessary time for an equal marriage bill in the House of Commons. Equal marriage is the touchstone of whether you are truly willing to accept diversity." Tyres, asbestos and construction rubble are among the top items of commercial waste being tipped across Northern Ireland. File image Tyres, asbestos and construction rubble are among the top items of commercial waste being tipped across Northern Ireland. Items from house clearances - such as white goods and furniture - are also among the most frequently dumped items, according to figures released by the NI Environment Agency. In 2017 there were 155 incidents of tyres being dumped illegally reported - 30% were left at the side of a road, 23% dumped on farmland, 14% at bonfires and 12% on commercial premises. Mark Cherry from NIEA's enforcement branch said: "We are keen to remind all businesses, no matter how big or small, of their legal duty to dispose of their waste properly. "It's their rubbish and their responsibility. Even if a business pays for someone to dispose of their waste they must ensure that it is stored, treated, transported and dealt with safely and properly. "Some commercial operators want to avoid disposal costs and so dump the material. Our advice is to always use a licensed waste carrier or use an authorised waste management facility." Throughout the year NIEA visits tyre retailers to remind them that end-of-life tyres must be disposed of properly. Mr Cherry said: "We assess all reports and investigate any reasonable lines of enquiry with a view to enforcement action and possible prosecution, especially when there is a significant volume or waste or a pattern of repeat offending." Prosecutions can lead to a maximum fine of 50,000 or imprisonment. Belfast City Hall is getting a new reception area less than a year after ratepayers footed the 28k bill for the buildings current welcome counter. At a Planning Committee last week, the council put forward plans for a new combined reception and memorabilia exhibition area in the foyer of City Hall. Some councillors questioned the plans, as construction on a reception area, including display cabinets, was only completed in July last year. Although there was debate about paying for the same job twice, as one councillor put it, the plans were later granted approval. It has now emerged that the construction and installation of the current reception area at City Hall, located to the right rear of the foyer, cost ratepayers almost 30,000. The specific cost of the current reception area was 28,500, a council spokesperson said. This included for removal of the old desk; the manufacture, supply and installation of the new desk, display cabinets, works to the floor and associated works. Expand Close Conceptual image of the new reception area. Credit: Andrew Madden / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Conceptual image of the new reception area. Credit: Andrew Madden Council officers said the current placement of the reception area is not ideal and it would be more effective and noticeable if it was moved to the left of the foyer, close to the main entrance. Belfast City Council Property and Projects Management propose that the desk be located as a first point of contact in a convenient position within the rotunda/main entrance and be accessible by all members of the public, council documents state. By positioning the merchandising stands nearby all visitors can view freely and be greeted by staff at the desk for any information they may require. The desk will be occupied daily by Belfast City Council staff providing information and a service to the general public. Expand Close Belfast City Hall reception. Credit: Andrew Madden / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Belfast City Hall reception. Credit: Andrew Madden The plans will see the existing reception and display cabinets removed to create a new desk to combine both functions across the foyer, close to City Halls Lavery Room, where committee meetings take place. At last weeks committee meeting, Sinn Feins JJ Magee was sceptical of the plans, questioning having the public pay for the same job twice. PUP councillor Billy Hutchinson, however, agreed that the location of the current reception area is too small and not fit for purpose. If you didnt know about it, you would even know its there, he added. Its hidden away - I know of [one councillor], who forgot about it being installed last summer and tripped over it. Charlotte Caldwell and her son Billy outside the Home Office (Yui Mok/PA) The mother of Northern Ireland boy Billy Caldwell has called on the Home Office to issue a licence for the import of cannabis oil before her son runs out of medication again. Billly, from Castlederg, suffers from severe epilepsy and requires cannabis oil to keep seizures under control. Read More However, his mum Charlotte has revealed he only has 16 days worth of the anti-epileptic drugs left. She said: "It is likely that any further medication, whether for Billy or any other families, will have be sourced in Canada. By law, Health Canada can only release this medication at 30 days' notice. It takes two days to ship. "This makes instigation of new policy extremely urgent as any families wanting or needing medication now will not receive it until this time next month at the earliest." Sajid Javid has announced a review into the use of cannabis-based medicines in the UK and has set up a expert panel to assess applications for a licence for the medication. Ms Caldwell said she anticipated being invited to meet the Home Secretary. Expand Close Charlotte Caldwell. Pic: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire PA / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Charlotte Caldwell. Pic: Dominic Lipinski/PA Wire She has also asked to participate in some way with the new expert panel. The 12-year-old was using prescribed cannabis oil to treat epileptic seizures until the Home Office blocked its prescription. His mum tried to bring the medication into Heathrow Airport in a last-ditch effort to treat her 12-year-old son, but it was removed by border officials. Last Friday Billy's condition deteriorated and he was rushed to hospital. After a week-long struggle, Home Secretary Sajid Javid used "an exceptional power" on Saturday to return one of the seven bottles of medication. However, this medication is now running out. Former Health Ministers could face legal action after an official investigation found residents at a Co Antrim care home suffered inhumane and degrading care. Families of residents of Dunmurry Manor have taken legal advice following the publication of a damning report by the Commissioner for Older People in Northern Ireland (COPNI). Among the shocking catalogue of deficiencies was a failure to act over resident-on-resident sex abuse, elderly people left for hours in urine-soaked clothing, residents going without food and water and some going without medication for three weeks at a time. In one particularly upsetting example of neglect uncovered by the Commissioner, a residents bone was exposed as a result of a pressure sore that had been left to fester. Following a meeting between residents families and Joe McVeigh from KRW Law yesterday afternoon, a spokeswoman said: Our solicitor is currently considering the COPNI report with a view to possible criminal liability and the role of all statutory agencies, up to and including various health ministers. The development came just hours after health officials announced an outbreak of a potentially deadly bug at the care home, outside Belfast. The Public Health Agency (PHA) declared an outbreak of C difficile at the home, just days after the Belfast Telegraph revealed a resident died there a few weeks ago while suffering from the bug. An outbreak is defined as two or more cases, however the PHA last night refused to say how many people have been diagnosed with the infection, or when it was informed of the situation. It is the latest incident at the facility, which came under fire last week following publication of the Commissioners report. A PHA spokesman last night said it is working with this facility and advice on management of the incident has been given. Most people carry the C. diff bacteria in their bowel without becoming ill, however, it can be deadly in people who are elderly or who suffer from other health problems. The C. diff spore is present in faeces and the infection is spread by poor hand hygiene. Last week the family of an elderly resident of the home, who died there two weeks ago, said staff had not used gloves or aprons when dealing with their loved one while they had C diff. They added that they were never told they should wear protective equipment to stop the infection from spreading further. Dunmurry Manor is owned by Runwood Homes, a company based in England. The health service has paid more than 4.6m to the firm for people to live at Dunmurry Manor since it opened in 2014. Following the publication of last weeks damning report, Gordon Sanders, Runwood Homes owner, said he had implemented a number of measures to drive up standards. He also revealed the companys managing director Logan Logeswaran had resigned the day before. However, Mr Logeswaran subsequently denied his departure had anything to do with the failings at Dunmurry Manor. And Runwood Homes finance director Martin Cooper subsequently said: I can assure you Logan has left for his own personal reasons and he has left on completely good terms with us. We wish him the best going forward. The company has refused to explain the two conflicting accounts it has given and a spokeswoman from the firm said it would be making no further statements on the matter. She also refused to provide any reassurances about the current safety of residents living in the home. A former Ulster and Ireland rugby player accused of assaulting his ex-partner has been "drifting" since his sporting career was cut short by injury, the High Court heard. Ryan Cyril Caldwell's lawyer said he still suffers pain and had "no plan B" in place when his playing days came to an end. The 33-year-old denies two counts of common assault and a further charge of criminal damage to a glass tumbler. Caldwell, of Drumart Drive in Belfast, was granted bail but banned from contacting his former partner. The alleged offences occurred at a house in the Lisburn area on June 12. A judge was told the incident was linked to requests between the defendant and complainant to look at each other's phone. Defence counsel Peter Coiley claimed the allegations against his client lacked credibility. He said the complainant initially told police she sustained a bump on the head in an incident which caused her to vomit in the street. But when further questioned she changed her account to say she was only sick in her mouth, according to Mr Coiley. He described the couple's relationship as "mutually destructive". Caldwell, a former Ulster and Ireland lock, also played for Bath and Exeter Chiefs before being forced to retire from professional rugby more than two years ago. "His career was cut short by head injuries," Mr Coiley told the court. "The termination of his playing career really was a jolt to his system, there was no plan B and he has been drifting ever since." Counsel added: "He has difficulties in terms of memory recall; he attributes it to the repeated head injuries he had." At one point Lord Justice Deeny stressed any problems would not be helped by any alleged use of Class B drugs. Mr Coiley responded it may have foolishly been thought that taking cannabis would "ameliorate" conditions. "He reported that he's in significant pain - a throwback to repeated physical injuries." Granting bail for Caldwell to live at an address well away from the alleged victim, the judge said: "It's a sad enough story which is redeemed in his case by the loyalty of members of his family." Lord Justice Deeny also ordered: "He shall not consume any illegal or other potent drugs unless prescribed by a GP." A woman who has been forced to leave her unsafe Belfast city centre apartment claims the housing association has failed to keep its promise of having 24/7 fire marshals on-site. Cecilia Van Helden (49) is angry that she was given 28 days to leave her high-rise home in Russell Court last Tuesday. The hotel receptionist is also upset over what she claims was a lack of fire marshals throughout the weekend. Last week Radius Housing promised fire marshals would be stationed at the Lisburn Road site 24/7 until residents had been vacated from the building. And Radius Housing was adamant last night that fire marshals had been present at all times, and firmly rejected any claims to the contrary. "The safety of our residents is our number one priority," it insisted. Ms Van Helden claimed: "There were two marshals stationed at the entrance all last week, then as soon as the weekend came they disappeared. "I went looking for them (the marshals) at one point and couldn't find them anywhere." The evacuation came after a fire survey raised "serious concerns" over Block B's capacity to meet modern safety standards. Belfast actor Paddy Scully (77), who has lived in Russell Court for 32 years, also claimed the marshals, who are employed directly by Radius Housing, disappeared over the weekend. "They were here all week and then they were gone," he said. Ms Van Helden, who moved to Northern Ireland from the Netherlands five years ago, described how a group of men attempted to light "a mini-bonfire" in the building's car park on Saturday. "You would think if the marshals were there they would have appeared at that point," she said. "But they didn't appear again until today (Monday)." Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph from a nearby city centre park, Ms Van Helden claimed Radius Housing had made other "impossible" guarantees to residents. The organisation, which has banned the media from accessing the apartment block, prevented Ms Van Helden from being interviewed in her home, and this reporter was ordered off the grounds. "There are 60 (Russell Court)residents who all want a city centre apartment in south Belfast and they are all being told they will get it - that just doesn't seem possible," she said. "There is a continuous contradiction in everything they tell us." The tenant, who has been officially rendered homeless, has declined to be rehomed by Radius Housing. She initially accepted an offer of a "high in demand" apartment in Coopers Court,0 only to find out later about its history. "I asked them to Google it when they made the offer but they said it wasn't possible," she claimed. "They said I had to sign the acceptance letter quickly, so I did." As soon as Ms Van Helden returned to the apartment where she lives with her son Declan (20), she did a Google search of her new address and was "horrified" by the results. "All these news articles came up about a woman who was the same age as I am now," she said. "It said she died in suspicious circumstances and I have been unable to find out anymore about it. "I still don't how that woman lost her life." The "exhausted" tenant expressed frustration over the situation she now found herself in. "I was discouraged from proceeding with a transfer request back in April," she said. "I outlined serious concerns about the quality and safety of the building before." Ms Van Helden also claimed fire alarms failed to sound when her fuse box caught fire on at least two previous occasions. She has now accepted a Housing Executive offer of temporary accommodation. It comes after an accidental leak by an NIO official revealed officials believe there will be "huge disruption" for Russell Court residents. The briefing notes for Secretary of State Karen Bradley also referred to the fire safety marshals who will be "on alert around the clock" as residents prepare to move out. The Housing Executive confirmed all residents have now been assessed and are beginning to receive offers of permanent accommodation. Radius Housing said that it remained committed to supporting all residents during what is a "difficult time". The Home Office has firmly rejected calls from former Conservative leader Lord Hague for the legalisation of cannabis. In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Lord Hague urged the Government to review Britains failed (and) unsustainable cannabis laws, license medicinal use of the drug and consider creating a legal, regulated market for recreational users. But the Home Office said the Government had no intention of reviewing the classification of cannabis, which would remain a Class B drug. I agree with William Hague. Drug legalisation is no go area for most frontline politicians but on public health grounds, we should legalise cannabis. If we care about mental health, street cannabis is much bigger danger & experience of eg Portugal suggests use unlikely to rise. https://t.co/a0YS6ip7R5 Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) June 19, 2018 And it said: Any debate within government about the medicinal and therapeutic benefits of cannabis-based medicines does not extend to any review regarding the classification of cannabis and the penalties for the illicit possession, cultivation and trafficking of cannabis will remain the same. A Downing Street spokesman confirmed the Government had no plans to legalise or decriminalise cannabis for recreational use, telling reporters: The evidence is very clear cannabis can cause serious harm when misused. The spokesman rejected claims that the war on drugs had failed, saying: More adults are being treated successfully, waiting times for support services are down, greater powers have been given to police to remove harmful substances from our communities, drug use as a whole is lower than 10 years ago and we remain absolutely committed to reducing it and the harm that it causes. Theresa May is facing increasing political pressure to review the law on cannabis amid furore surrounding children who have been denied access to products which could alleviate life-threatening epileptic seizures. Home Secretary Sajid Javid granted an emergency 20-day licence for 12-year-old Billy Caldwell to be treated with cannabis oil, after he was admitted to hospital with seizures following the confiscation of supplies his mother had brought from Canada. Expand Close Charlotte Caldwell and her son Billy outside the Home Office in London (Yui Mok/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Charlotte Caldwell and her son Billy outside the Home Office in London (Yui Mok/PA) And Home Office minister Nick Hurd on Monday announced the establishment of a new expert panel to advise ministers on the licensing of cannabis-based medicines in individual cases. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt acknowledged that the current laws on medicinal cannabis were not right, and said it was time to look for a different way. But Lord Hague went much further, arguing that Billys case had shown the law to be inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date. The Conservative peer who led the party from 1997 to 2001 and was foreign secretary from 2010 to 2014 said it was beyond ridiculous that border officials should be seizing medicines of clear benefit to patients because they contain a tiny amount of a banned product. Can British Conservatives be as bold as Canadian Liberals? We ought to be. After all, we believe in market forces and the responsible exercise of freedom, regulated as necessaryLord Hague Mr Javids decision to return the oil showed that the Home Offices position was indefensible, he said. Arguing that the ready availability of illegal cannabis on Britains streets showed that any war on the drug had been comprehensively and irreversibly lost, Lord Hague said that a major change in policy was now needed. Licensing medicinal cannabis would be a step forward, but the Government should also consider legalising the drug, as Canada is on the verge of doing, he said. Proposals being considered by the Canadian parliament would establish a legal market with licensed stores selling cannabis of regulated strength, with a strict prohibition on sales to teenagers, he said. If this works, it sounds more sensible than the current position, said Lord Hague. Can British Conservatives be as bold as Canadian Liberals? We ought to be. After all, we believe in market forces and the responsible exercise of freedom, regulated as necessary. We should prefer to provide for lawful taxes than preside over increased profits from crime. On Monday, fellow Tory Crispin Blunt, who chairs the All-Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform, urged the Home Office to clear out of the way and let the Department of Health take control of policy on medical cannabis. Expand Close Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable backs the decriminalisation of cannabis (Steve Parsons/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable backs the decriminalisation of cannabis (Steve Parsons/PA) Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable backed calls for reform, telling BBC Radio 4s Today programme that decriminalising cannabis would be a sensible step for the country to take. The second step would be to look at the various experiences of legalisation to make absolutely sure that we do not produce an epidemic, that we actually control use very considerably, he said. The objective is to prevent a situation where large amounts of this drug are in circulation in a very damaging form which is poisoning large numbers of young people and resulting in psychological damage. Billy was discharged from hospital early on Monday afternoon, but now Ms Caldwell, 50, from Co Tyrone, wants an urgent review of the law on cannabis oil, which is banned in the UK despite being available in many other countries. Ms Caldwell credits the substance with keeping the boys seizures at bay, saying he was seizure-free for more than 300 days while using it. She demanded a meeting with the Home Secretary and the Health Secretary within 24 hours. A man discovered licking the ground on a busy Belfast city centre street has been given a conditional discharge. Alan Ritchie, 33, shouted and swore at police and members of the public after being spotted on Monday afternoon. Prosecutors said he also told officers who arrested him: "I'm bringing you to a police ambulance, man." Ritchie, of no fixed address, admitted a charge of disorderly behaviour. Belfast Magistrates' Court heard a PSNI patrol saw him licking the ground at Ann Street. He became increasingly agitated and was searched, but no drugs were found on him. Crown lawyer Natalie Pinkerton said he also directed verbal abuse at passers-by in the area. Defence solicitor Pearse MacDermott confirmed Ritchie has a history of drug problems. "He's a man with difficulties," he told the court. Mr MacDermott acknowledged it was "a very unusual set of circumstances" which led to his client spending a night in custody. "It's his first time in court for disorderly behaviour, he's normally compliant with police," the solicitor added. Recognising Ritchie had been kept in prison overnight, District Judge Fiona Bagnall imposed a 12-month conditional discharge. A 64-year-old man allegedly returned to a Belfast social club with a gun to scare someone he had just rowed with, a court was told. James Patrick Reynolds appeared before the city's Magistrates Court accused of possessing a firearm. Reynolds, of Kinnaird Close in Belfast, was arrested following an incident on Monday. During a brief hearing he nodded to confirm that he understood the charge against him. Defence counsel Michael Boyd said his client was not yet in a position to seek bail. "This case involves him allegedly returning to a social club with a weapon to frighten someone he had an argument with," Mr Boyd told the court. "His address at the moment is viewed as being too close to that club." District Judge Fiona Bagnall agreed to a two-week adjournment. She remanded Reynolds in custody to appear again by video-link on July 3. A man with multiple sclerosis (MS) has told how he became a virtual prisoner in his own home as a result of the controversial new benefits system. Simon Matchett, who is unable to even get out of bed at times, saw his payments slashed by 120 a month, while his car was also taken away. Mr Matchett is speaking out today to coincide with a campaign by the MS Society calling for a review of a "senseless and unfounded rule in the disability benefits system". The charity has said people with the neurological condition have been increasingly losing vital support since the introduction of Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in Northern Ireland in 2016. It estimates the benefit cuts to people with MS are costing the health service at least an additional 7.7m a year in GP services and attendances at overstretched emergency departments. In particular, the charity has hit out at the introduction of the 20-metre rule - meaning that if a person is assessed as able to walk the length of two buses, they lose the higher rate of mobility support. Simon, who was diagnosed with the condition when he was 32, explained: "The nurse who assessed me knew nothing about MS. My physical assessment consisted of asking me if I could stand on my tiptoes and my heels, which I couldn't, and I had to squeeze her hands. "She actually said I could walk 40 metres even though she hadn't actually witnessed me doing that and it was not part of the assessment. As a result of that, I was given 10 points and I needed 12 points to get the higher level of benefits. "It meant I was on the standard rate of mobility, so I lost my car, and I received 21.80 per week but that only covered two return taxi fares to the supermarket. "The nearest bus stop is 200m away from my house and I use a crutch so walking to the bus would be a massive challenge. "Then I would have to get a bus into the town and then another bus to the supermarket and do that all the way back with shopping, while using a crutch. "It impacted my life massively and it was so isolating. There are days where getting up and getting dressed, or going into the kitchen and making myself something to eat, are massive challenges. "I knew nothing about MS before I was diagnosed but it can be extremely debilitating and I have never regained the use of my left side from when the condition attacked my nervous system before." Simon, who is now 38 and was forced to give up his job as an account manager and move back to Northern Ireland from Edinburgh following his shock diagnosis, was subsequently assessed as being entitled to a motability car following an intervention by his local MP, Lady Sylvia Hermon. After three and half months without access to a vehicle, he was finally given a new car. However, he remains on the lower band when it comes to the living element of his PIP payments. This equates to a 120 monthly reduction, from 320 under the now defunct Disability Living Allowance to 200 a month. He has been forced to reassess his finances in order to live within his means. "I have to be careful with my money, and I had to get rid of little things that people might regard as a luxury but make a massive difference to my life," he said. "I cancelled my Netflix subscription which might not seem a big deal but for me, who might not be physically up to leaving the house for days at a time, it is significant." Patricia Gordon, Northern Ireland director of the MS Society, said that contrary to the Government's insistence that PIP is meant to help those with the greatest needs, it is actually causing enormous harm to people with the condition. "Many of them are losing their independence as a result," she said. "This senseless and unfounded rule is leading to people with the highest need facing the biggest losses. "The 20-metre rule was strongly opposed by charities, people with MS and medical professionals when it was first introduced. "We can clearly see the negative impacts in Northern Ireland. Enough is enough - PIP needs to change, starting with scrapping the 20-metre rule." Theresa May is facing increasing political pressure to review the law on cannabis after a raft of MPs including a former Conservative leader called for reform. Lord Hague joined those who have called for change of approach over the drug, writing in a newspaper that the idea the narcotic can be driven off the streets and out of peoples lives by the state is nothing short of deluded. Read More His comments came after Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt suggested a different way was needed following widespread outrage over the confiscation from Co Tyrone mother Charlotte Caldwell of cannabis oil supplies which she brought from Canada for her 12-year-old son Billy, who has acute epilepsy. Asked whether the parents of children like Billy would still be facing similar problems in months or weeks time, Mr Hunt replied: I sincerely hope not. After Billy was rushed to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Friday night in a critical condition having suffered multiple seizures, Home Secretary Sajid Javid granted a 20-day emergency licence granting use of the oil. Yesterday, fellow Tory Crispin Blunt, who chairs the All-Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform, urged the Home Office to clear out of the way and let the Department of Health take control of policy on medical cannabis. The Government announced a new expert panel of clinicians is to be established to give swift advice on the prescription of cannabis-based medicines to individual patients. But Prime Minister Theresa May suggested that the Government would look only into the operation of the current system of licences for use in individual cases, rather than reviewing the law more widely. Writing in the Telegraph, Lord Hague, who led the party from 1997 to 2001 and was foreign secretary under David Cameron from 2010 to 2014, called for the party to rethink policy, saying the war against the drug had been lost. He wrote: Everyone sitting in a Whitehall conference room needs to recognise that, out there, cannabis is ubiquitous, and issuing orders to the police to defeat its use is about as up-to-date and relevant as asking the Army to recover the Empire. This battle is effectively over. Billy was discharged from hospital early yesterday afternoon, but now Ms Caldwell (50), from Castlederg, wants an urgent review of the law on the substance, which is banned in the UK despite being available in many other countries. Ms Caldwell credits cannabis oil with keeping the boys seizures at bay, saying he was seizure-free for over 300 days while using it, but tetrahydrocannabinol is restricted in the UK. She demanded a meeting with the Home Secretary and the Health Secretary within 24 hours. Speaking outside hospital, she said: The fact that Billy has been discharged is testimony to the effectiveness of the treatment and underlines how vital it is that every child and every single family affected in our country should have immediate access to the very same medication. Mr Hunt had earlier told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: I dont think anyone who followed that story could sensibly say that we are getting the law on this kind of thing right. I think we all know that we need to find a different way. Home Office minister Nick Hurd told the House of Commons that chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies would take forward the establishment of the expert clinicians panel to advise ministers on any individual applications to prescribe cannabis-based medications. Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said Labour supports the legal prescription of cannabis oil for medical purposes, adding: Children have been put at risk and experienced extraordinary suffering because this Government drags its heels and refuses to grant cannabis oil licences. But asked about the law Mrs May was more cautious, saying: Do we need to look at these cases and consider what weve got in place? Yes. But what needs to drive us in all these cases has to be what clinicians are saying about these issues. Theres a very good reason why weve got a set of rules around cannabis and other drugs, because of the impact that they have on peoples lives, and we must never forget that. Former Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg said that ministers resistance to legalising medicinal cannabis was based on prejudice. An Islamic State fanatic plotted to assassinate Prime Minister Theresa May in a suicide attack on 10 Downing Street, a court has heard. Naaimur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, was encouraged to cause carnage in Britain by an uncle who had joined IS and died in a drone strike in Syria, jurors were told. He allegedly thought he was just days away from inflicting lethal violence with a blade and explosion before his arrest last November. Expand Close Naaimur Zakariyah Rahman (left) and Mohammed Aqib Imran in the dock (Elizabeth Cook/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Naaimur Zakariyah Rahman (left) and Mohammed Aqib Imran in the dock (Elizabeth Cook/PA) But his plan was uncovered by an MI5 agent who posed as a senior IS official in Syria, the Old Bailey heard. Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC read out Telegram chat in which Rahman was allegedly snared by the fake Amir. On September 14 last year, Rahman said: Can you put me in a sleeper cell ASAP? I want to do a suicide bomb on Parliament. I want to attempt to kill Theresa May. The next day, he said: My objective is to take out my target. Nothing less than the death of the leaders of Parliament. The court heard Rahman went on to praise the Manchester arena bomber, saying he did well. He allegedly said he thought about wearing a vest, driving past Parliament and pushing the button to clear the entire block. Jurors heard he said: Everyone inside, including the Prime Minister would be dead. Rahman talked about the MI5 building but allegedly said: Getting outside Parliament when all the leaders are there is simple, you can walk right outside. On September 23 last year, Rahman also said he had an idea based on what his uncle had told him about the IS development of poison, jurors were told. Rahman is accused of conducting reconnaissance, recording a pledge of allegiance, and delivering a rucksack and jacket to be fitted with explosives. Mr Heywood told jurors: His settled conclusion was that lethal violence here, directed at the very heart of the United Kingdom Government, was the only effective way to pursue his intentions. Before his arrest prevented it, he was, he believed, just days away from his objective, which was no less than a suicide attack, by blade and explosion, on Downing Street and, if he could, upon the Prime Minister Theresa May herself. He said Rahman planned a full frontal attack and fully expected to die. The defendant is also accused of helping his friend Mohammad Aqib Imran, 22, join IS in Syria by recording a sponsorship video. Mr Heywood said the men knew each other well and shared the same warped ideology. On Imran, he said: He elected to travel and set about assembling money, acquiring a fake passport, engaging in research and otherwise equipping himself with the information and means to travel aboard for violence for terrorist purposes. Jurors heard how both defendants were engaged in chat with MI5 role players, even though they discussed the dangers of spies. On October 23 last year, Rahman met a contact known as Abu Waleed in a Shepherds Bush shopping centre. He told the agent that he planned to use a suicide belt, drone, improvised explosive device and poison, referred to as P or curry mix. He allegedly divulged the targets of the MI5 building and Parliament. Meanwhile, Imran was asking his MI5 role-player to get him a passport quickly. On November 1, Abu Waleed introduced Rahman to another member of the network called Shaq, an undercover police officer, to help him get a blade and suicide vest. Rahman allegedly told him: If you can put a belt on me, Id actually want to do that. He said he would aim to strike when Mrs May came out of 10 Downing Street to talk to the press, jurors heard. If he could not get to her, he would kill a few guards then detonate himself to create big news, the court heard. Jurors were shown covert video footage of a meeting in Shaqs car in a PC World car park in Brixton on November 6 last year. In it, Rahman said he would get past the gate and make a 10-second sprint for the door of Number 10. He allegedly said his main objective was to take her head off. At a further meeting on November 15 last year, Rahman allegedly said: Theyre gonna shit it, especially her who is inside. Three days later, Rahman carried out reconnaissance around Whitehall, walking past the entrance to Downing Street, the court heard. Rahman, from Finchley, north London, has denied two counts of preparing terrorist acts. Imran, of Sparkbrook, Birmingham, has pleaded not guilty to preparing terrorist acts and possessing a terrorist document on his Kindle entitled How To Survive In The West A Mujahids Guide 2015. Court artist sketch of Naaimur Zakariyah Rahman (left) in the dock at Westminster Magistrates Court (Elizabeth Cook/PA) An Islamic State fanatic plotted to assassinate Prime Minister Theresa May in a suicide attack on 10 Downing Street, a court has heard. Naaimur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, allegedly thought he was just days away from inflicting lethal violence with blade and explosion before his arrest last November. But his plan was uncovered by an MI5 operative, who posed as a senior IS official in Syria, the Old Bailey heard. On September 14 last year, Rahman was allegedly snared in Telegram chat with an MI5 role player, posing as an Amir in Syria. The court heard Rahman asked him: Can you put me in a sleeper cell ASAP? He told the agent he was under investigation because of his uncle. When he is asked for more information, he allegedly said: I want to do a suicide bomb on Parliament. I want to attempt to kill Theresa May. The next day, jurors heard he said: My objective is to take out my target. Nothing less than the death of the leaders of Parliament. The court heard Rahman went on to praise the Manchester arena bomber, saying he did well. He allegedly said he thought about wearing a vest, driving past Parliament and pushing the button to clear the entire block. Jurors heard he said: Everyone inside, including the Prime Minister would be dead. Rahman is charged with preparing terrorist acts by conducting reconnaissance, recording a pledge of allegiance, and delivering a rucksack and jacket to be fitted with explosives. Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC said: His settled conclusion was that lethal violence here, directed at the very heart of the United Kingdom government, was the only effective way to pursue his intentions. Before his arrest prevented it, he was, he believed, just days away from his objective, which was no less than a suicide attack, by blade and explosion, on Downing Street and, if he could, upon the Prime Minister Theresa May herself. The defendant, of Finchley, north London, is also charged with helping his friend Mohammad Aqib Imran, 22, to prepare terrorist acts. Expand Close Prime Minister Theresa May was the target of the attack, it is alleged (Kirsty OConnor/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Prime Minister Theresa May was the target of the attack, it is alleged (Kirsty OConnor/PA) He allegedly recorded a sponsorship video for Imran to join IS in Syria. Mr Heywood said the men knew each other well, and shared the warped ideology of IS. Rahmans uncle had joined IS in Syria and allegedly encouraged his nephew to attack the UK before he was killed in a drone strike, jurors heard. By September last year, the defendants had allegedly met someone online who they believed would provide useful contacts. Mr Heywood said Rahmans focus was on attack planning in the UK. He said: The evidence shows in detail his developing fervour as he first assembled his plan, carried out reconnaissance and perfected his ideas and then acquired the means to execute it. At the last he took back his own coat and his own rucksack both modified with improvised explosive devices, so that he could achieve his settled aim of a full frontal assault on the gates and then the door of Number 10. In this he expected to die. But he also hoped for personal reward beyond death and, in doing so, to cause death and great fear in a place and to people symbolic of the country itself. On Imrans plans, Mr Heywood said: He elected to travel and set about assembling money, acquiring a fake passport, engaging in research and otherwise equipping himself with the information and means to travel aboard for violence for terrorist purposes. Rahman has denied two counts of preparing terrorist acts. Imran, of Sparkbrook, Birmingham, has pleaded not guilty to preparing terrorist acts abroad and possessing a terrorist document on his Kindle entitled How To Survive In The West A Mujahids Guide 2015. Members of the RMT union are to stage more strikes over the role of train guards (Jonathan Brady/PA) Rail services will be disrupted on Tuesday by a fresh strike in the long-running dispute over guards on trains. Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union on Arriva Rail North (Northern) will walk out for 24 hours, and again on Thursday and Saturday. Northern said it will concentrate on running as many services as possible between 7am and 7pm on Tuesday and Thursday, while services will start later and finish earlier than usual on Saturday. Regional director for Northern Sharon Keith said: On each day of the strike action we will be running fewer services and expect those services we do operate to be extremely busy. It is, therefore, vital that anyone thinking of travelling with Northern on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday plans their journey carefully. Its another day and another rail scandal under Chris GraylingMick Cash, RMT union The RMT has called for last-ditch talks to resolve the dispute, and complained that taxpayers and passengers, and not Northern, are footing the bill for the cost of strike action. A clause in the franchise agreement signed between Northern Rail and the Government says Transport Secretary Chris Grayling can reimburse Northern Rail for net losses arising from industrial action, said the union. RMT general secretary Mick Cash said: Its another day and another rail scandal under Chris Grayling. It is utterly shocking that he is using Northern taxpayers and passengers money to reimburse German state-owned Northern Rail for money they have lost as a result of strike. By bankrolling Northern in this way, Chris Grayling is seeking to prolong this dispute and break the workforce. It will not work and our members remain as solid as ever in the fight to ensure safety and access for all on railways across the North. Instead of propping up a foreign owned company in its fight against British workers, Chris Grayling should be allowing meaningful discussions to take place which would allow passengers to keep a second member of staff on every train. A Department for Transport spokesman said: The only people hitting taxpayers in this pointless and unnecessary strike action is the RMT. This dispute is not about jobs or safety. Guards have been guaranteed their jobs and the independent rail regulator has ruled that driver-controlled trains, which have been used in this country for 30 years, are safe. We urge the union to abandon these strikes, work with the train operator and make passengers services their number one priority. RMT members on South Western Railway will strike for three days from Thursday in the same dispute. An Islamic State-inspired Uber driver attacked police with a samurai sword outside Buckingham Palace because he hated the Queen, a court has heard An Islamic State-inspired Uber driver attacked police with a samurai sword outside Buckingham Palace because he hated the Queen, a court has heard. Officers bravely wrestled a 42-inch long blade from the hands of Mohiussunnath Chowdhury (27) after he crashed his car outside the palace, jurors were told. They feared for their lives during the "surreal" confrontation with Chowdhury, who shouted repeatedly "Allahu Akbar" (God is the greatest), the Old Bailey heard. Jurors were told how the accused had left his sister a suicide note expressing his hatred for the Queen before setting out in his Toyota Prius on August 25 last year. He allegedly wrote: "The Queen and her soldiers will all be in the hellfire, they go to war with Muslims around the world and kill them without any mercy. They are the enemies that Allah tells us to fight." He bought a knife sharpener in Sainsbury's and initially headed to Windsor Castle, but ended up outside the Windsor Castle pub due to a "SatNav error", jurors were told. He then drove past the Coldstream Guards' barracks in Windsor and on to Buckingham Palace, where he attracted the attention of a passing police van by ploughing into traffic cones. When Acting Sergeant Gavin Hutt approached the car, Chowdhury allegedly told him: "It's all a bit f***** up." Mr Hutt told jurors he wrestled with Chowdhury when the defendant reached for the handle of a blade and shouted "Allahu Akbar". The accused "was not complying" and "seemed very determined to get the weapon out and do whatever he was going to do", he said. The officer told jurors: "I started punching him in the face, just trying to pull his arm away as well. My instinct was to try and render him unconscious." His colleague PC Ian Midgley grabbed the sword and was punched in the head, the court heard. Chowdhury was sprayed with CS gas, dragged out of the car and arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, the court heard. Mr Hutt said: "I feared for my own life, my colleagues and members of the public." Both officers suffered cuts to their hands in the struggle. Chowdhury, of Kirkwood Road, Luton, Bedfordshire, denies preparing acts of terrorism, claiming he only wanted to get killed. The Duke of Cambridge opened a centre for helping men who are suicidal (Jeff Spicer/PA) The Duke of Cambridge has met the mother of a young man who took his own life as he opened the UKs first centre outside of a clinic or hospital for helping suicidal men by giving counselling and therapy. James Place, a four-storey town house in Liverpools Georgian quarter is a new initiative formed by Clare Milford Haven and Nick Wentworth-Stanley, the parents of James Wentworth-Stanley, 21, who took his own life while a student in Newcastle in 2006. Expand Close James Wentworth-Stanley who took his own life (Family handout/PA) PA / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp James Wentworth-Stanley who took his own life (Family handout/PA) On the visit the duke heard that both young and middle-aged men are especially at risk of suicide as they do not use conventional medical services, sometimes through stigma or a sense of shame, when they are in crisis. James Place aims to offer a calm, friendly, non-hospital or clinic environment, where men can get help. Thank you for coming today, it means the world to usClare Milford Haven, bereaved mother of James James younger brother, Harry, and three friends rowed across the Atlantic in 2016, raising 600,000 in donations to help build the centre, which has been 10 years in the planning, since James death 11 years ago. James mother, who is the Marchioness of Milford Haven, thanked the duke for bringing the subject out of the shadows as he officially opened the centre. Suicide is the biggest cause of death for men under 35 @JamesPlaceUK, opened today by The Duke of Cambridge, will be the first centre of its kind in the UK to provide face-to-face support for men in their time of need. pic.twitter.com/kleXyZ0HI8 The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (@KensingtonRoyal) June 19, 2018 She said: Thank you for coming today, it means the world to us. Very much spurred on by our own tragedy and our own experience of James looking for help when he felt very anxious and suicidal in Newcastle, for him not finding that help, the help he needed anyway. I always felt had a place like this existed, he might still be here today. So that was a very compelling reason to start this project. Expand Close William unveils a plaque during a visit to James Place in Liverpool (Anthony Devlin/PA) PA / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp William unveils a plaque during a visit to James Place in Liverpool (Anthony Devlin/PA) I feel very much that James is here with us. Taking referrals from local hospitals, student counselling services, police and street triage services, visitors will be offered a service of one-to-one free therapeutic support during their time of need. Visitors will have an initial appointment to find out the treatment needed and then will be offered a tailored service of one-to-one free therapeutic support. James family, who are from Hampshire and Worcestershire, have no connections to Liverpool, but set up the centre in the city as the local health authority, Mersey Care, were the most receptive to the project, they said. Speaking to parents who also lost sons to suicide during the hour-long visit, the duke said: Suicide really is a quite a big problem, and we dont talk about it. Expand Close The Duke of Cambridge shakes hands with a robotic hand made by a 3D printer (Peter Byrne/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Duke of Cambridge shakes hands with a robotic hand made by a 3D printer (Peter Byrne/PA) Earlier, the duke visited the International Business Festival in Liverpool, touring the events exhibition space, talking with delegates and meeting young entrepreneurs. The duke visited exhibitors from India and Shanghai, Liverpools twin city, before he was shown the Governments UK Innovation Hub at the event, to see cutting-edge and transformative technologies, including 3D-printed robotic limbs produced by a team based at the University of Manchester. Addressing delegates the duke said: I was impressed to learn that the Festival has delivered more than half a billion pounds of new trade and investment to date. Britain has always been a champion of trade and a hub for commerce and exchange between our nations. There is perhaps nowhere in the country that embodies this more than Liverpool. Expand Close The Duke of Cambridge explores a driverless pod at the International Business Festival (Peter Byrne/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Duke of Cambridge explores a driverless pod at the International Business Festival (Peter Byrne/PA) We know that one of the major challenges for industry is access to a skilled workforce. Its something which business and civil society must work together on. It is only by investing in the skills of our young people in enterprise that we will be able to build the fair and prosperous society that we want our children to inherit. Max Steinberg, chairman of the International Business Festival, said: The support of the duke has helped us to champion the importance of the business sector, and to inspire, connect and inform businesses from across the UK and the world. Making new global connections will help the small and medium businesses at the Festival to find growth and reach their potential. President Donald Trump, second from right, and first lady Melania Trump, right, welcome Spains King Felipe VI, second from left, and Queen Letizia, left, to the Oval Office (Susan Walsh/AP) President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump have welcomed Spains King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia to the White House. King Felipe described his first Oval Office meeting with the president as a great end to a perfect visit. Today, President Trump and the First Lady welcomed King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain to the White House. pic.twitter.com/65dEjyA1r8 The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) June 19, 2018 The royals were in the US to mark the 300th anniversaries of the founding of New Orleans and San Antonio, stopping in both cities with historical ties to Spain before arriving at the White House. Expand Close President Donald Trump, left, and Spains King Felipe VI, right, walk along the Colonnade (Susan Walsh/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp President Donald Trump, left, and Spains King Felipe VI, right, walk along the Colonnade (Susan Walsh/AP) Mr Trump called it really a tremendous honour to have the royal couple in the Oval Office. The president also praised the outstanding relationship between the US and Spain over the years and, I think, especially right now. Excellent trade relationship, military relationship. Just about everything you can have. So we love Spain. Trade was expected to figure prominently in their talks. The first lady recently resumed her schedule of public appearances following surgery last month to treat a benign kidney condition. A Rohingya volunteer guides fellow refugees upon their arrival at the Balukhali refugee camp in Ukhia, a sub-district of Coxs Bazar district in southeastern Bangladesh, Jan. 21, 2018. A Rohingya leader who had criticized ARSA insurgents and often interacted with Bangladeshi officials and visiting foreign dignitaries due to his language skills was slain in a refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh, police and local sources said Tuesday. The news came as the Bangladeshi foreign ministry confirmed to BenarNews that the U.N. secretary general and president of the World Bank would both visit Rohingya refugee camps in the southeast next month. Arifullah, a leader at the Balukhali-2 camp in Coxs Bazar district, was hacked to death on Monday, Mohammad Abul Khayer, officer-in-charge of the police station in Ukhia upazila (sub-district), told BenarNews. Police are trying to nab Arifullahs murderers, Khayer said, adding that Arifullah had previously received death threats. Sources in the refugee camp said Arifullah was an outspoken critic of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the insurgent group that launched attacks against government security outposts in Myanmars Rakhine state last August, killing at least 12 people. Myanmars security forces responded with a brutal counter-insurgency clampdown that engulfed Rakhine in violence and forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to cross the border into Bangladesh. Arifullah frequently accompanied foreign delegations during their visits at Rohingya refugee camps, local official Mohammad Nikaruzzaman Chowdhury said. Arifullahs killing underscored infighting that has become common in the refugee camps, camp leaders told BenarNews. Just a day before his slaying, at least 10 Rohingya refugees were injured when two rival groups clashed in the same camp, according to Mohammad Atikullah, officer-in-charge of the police station in Teknaf, another sub-district of Coxs Bazar. Two were in critical condition, he said. Foreign ministry confirms UN, WB visit In Dhaka on Tuesday, a Bangladeshi foreign ministry official said that U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim were scheduled to visit the refugee camps on July 1. Khandakar Masudul Alam, deputy chief of protocol at the foreign ministry, said Guterres was expected to meet with Rohingya in Coxs Bazar either on June 30 or July 1. He will be accompanied by the World Bank chief during this visit, he told BenarNews. In April, a delegation from the U.N. Security Council paid an unprecedented visit to the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh. The 24-strong delegation also visited refugees camped out in a no-mans land along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border and later stopped by the sprawling Kutupalong refugee camp. In November 2017, Myanmar and Bangladesh struck a bilateral deal to repatriate hundreds of thousands of Rohingya. But the process has not yet begun and U.N. officials have expressed misgivings on whether conditions are safe enough for the refugees to return to Rakhine. During the past two months, meanwhile, the Bangladeshi and Myanmar governments have separately signed memoranda of understanding with the United Nations for U.N. agencies to assist them in the voluntary repatriation of refugees. Setev Shaariibuu (left), father of murdered Mongolian model Altantuya Shaariibuu, is joined by his lawyer, Ramkarpal Singh, as he prepares to meet Malaysia Attorney General Tommy Thomas in Putrajaya, June 19, 2018. Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad has expressed interest in seeking justice in the gruesome 2006 killing of a Mongolian model linked to a submarines acquisition scandal that plagued the recently ousted ruling coalition, her father said Tuesday, ahead of a meeting with the prime minister. Altantuya Shaariibuu was 28 years old and pregnant when she was shot dead and her body blown up with military-grade explosives in a remote jungle outside Kuala Lumpur in October 2006. Her father, Setev Shaariibuu, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur he was surprised that Mahathir was willing to meet him, adding he would ask the PM to reopen the case. I understand the PM is interested in seeking justice for this case, Setev said through an interpreter after meeting with new Malaysian Attorney General Tommy Thomas for about an hour in Putrajaya, the nations administrative center. I am full of hope that the new government will do everything under its power to render justice and bring an end to grief and suffering of my family. Setev was accompanied by his lawyer, Ramkarpal Singh, who said he was confident the investigation would be reopened based on the existence of new leads, but did not elaborate. A BenarNews source confirmed that the meeting between Setev and Mahathir is to take place Wednesday afternoon. Prior to that, Setev is expected to lodge a police report and urge authorities to reopen the murder probe. Altantuya Shaariibuu worked as a translator during the Malaysian governments negotiations for the purchase of two Scorpene-class submarines from French shipbuilding giant DCNI in 2002. She was also reportedly the mistress of Abdul Razak Baginda, a defense analyst close to then-Defense Minister Najib Razak. Two police officers who were serving as members of Najibs personal security detail at the time were convicted of the murder and sentenced to death, but the court did not establish their motive. One of them fled to Australia, where he is being held at an immigration detention center since January 2015. Abdul Razak was tried but acquitted of abetting the crime. The court has not determined who planned the killing. Najib, the now former prime minister whose Barisan Nasional coalition was trounced in the May 9 general election, has denied any links to the killing and rejected allegations of corruption in the purchase of the submarines. When contacted by BenarNews on Tuesday, Abdul Razak declined to comment on the latest developments which took place less than a month after Mongolian President Khaltmaa Battulga wrote a letter urging the new government to find justice. Altantuyas alleged affair with Abdul Razak emerged after reports said that, soon before her death, she had demanded a payoff for working as a language translator in the submarine deal. Altantuya left behind two sons who now are 20 and 14. The younger boy is disabled and bedridden. Her death devastated her family as she was the breadwinner, Setev said. Malaysia struck the U.S. $1.1 billion (4.4 billion ringgit) deal in 2002 with Frances state-controlled warship builder DCN International. Malaysian human rights group Suaram alleged that the sale resulted in about $130 million (520 million ringgit) in commissions being paid to a shell company linked to Abdul Razak. Najib, who was ousted from office after the stunning defeat of his coalition in the May 9 election, has also been questioned by the anti-graft commission probing allegations that billions of dollars had been siphoned from the state fund known as 1MDB. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Tuesday his government had a near perfect case against predecessor Najib Razak over the alleged theft of state money, while a source told BenarNews that Malaysias anti-graft agency had proposed criminal charges against the ex-PM. The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) proposed charging Najib under the anti-money laundering act and for misappropriating properties in connection with a financial scandal around the 1MDB state fund, sources close to the case said. The MACC presented an investigation paper to Malaysias new attorney general last week. The proposal on the charges never changed, it is the same as the one we proposed to then- Attorney General Apandi (Ali), a source who was not authorized to speak to the media told BenarNews. The investigation paper sent on June 12 focused on 42 million ringgit (U.S. $10.6 million) that was allegedly transferred from SRC International, a subsidiary of 1Malaysia Development Berhad, to Najibs personal bank account. Serving as prime minister when the SRC investigation began in 2015, Najib sacked then-Attorney General Abdul Gani Patail who was preparing a case against him. Ganis replacement, Apandi, subsequently cleared Najib of all wrongdoing in relation to 1MDB and SRC. A source said MACC was working on two other investigation papers into 2.6 billion ringgit ($650 million) in SRC money that ended up in Najibs account. Najib became the focus as Malaysias new government pledged to investigate the 1MDB scandal and other major cases involving corruption in its first 100 days after upsetting the former prime ministers Barisan Nasional coalition in last months general election. Since Mahathir was sworn in as prime minister on May 10, police said they had raided properties linked to Najib and confiscated 114 million ringgit ($28.75 million), along with 284 boxes containing luxury handbags. U.S. Department of Justice officials have described the 1MDB case as the worst kleptocracy scandal in recent times, pointing out that more than $4.5 billion (17.9 billion ringgit) was stolen from the fund since its inception by Najib in 2009 until its advisory board was dissolved in 2016. We think that we already have almost a perfect case, Mahathir told Reuters news service. Najib played a central role in the scandal, Mahathir said. He was totally responsible for 1MDB. Nothing can be done without his signature, and we have his signature on all the deals entered into by 1MDB. Therefore, he is responsible, Mahathir told the news agency. In response, Najib denied doing anything wrong and added that even if he had given orders at 1MDB, the management and fund board would not have been bound to act. As far as I am concerned, I did not do anything that I thought was illegal, he told Reuters. The statement was consistent with Najibs previous denials involving 1MDB. Mahathir also confirmed that Najibs wife, Rosmah Mansor, was being investigated. Some of the money is believed to have gone to her, lots of money, Mahathir told Reuters. We know about this, but finding the paper trail is a bit more difficult in this case because she doesnt sign any papers. Najib signs a lot of papers. Both Najib and Rosmah have been questioned by MACC as part of its investigation into SRC International. Attorney generals priority When he was appointed as Malaysias attorney general on June 6, Tommy Thomas declared that 1MDB would be his top priority. He said his office would need time to review the investigation paper but it appreciated the urgency and sensitivity of their task. He said he had appointed two teams to study the paper, one to consider instituting criminal prosecution and another to consider civil proceedings. Members of both teams are experienced deputy public prosecutors and senior federal counsels who will report directly to me, he said. In related developments, MACC officials earlier this month ordered businessman Low Taek Jho, better known as Jho Low, and SRC director Nik Faisal Ariff Kamil to contact them immediately to assist in the 1MDB investigation. Home Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said authorities had sufficient information that Jho Low was among the main suspects behind the 1MDB scandal. The government also sought Interpols assistance in locating the men and issued arrest warrants, according to media reports. They are super important to the investigation, MACC deputy commissioner Azam Baki said at the time. Jho Low, identified as a close friend of Najib, agreed to assist, his attorney said in a statement in response to the order. Later, reports surfaced that the fugitive financier sought a deal from the Malaysian government where he would give up his claim to assets valued at more than 4 billion ringgit ($1 billion) in exchange for immunity from prosecution. In his interview with Reuters, Mahathir said he had turned down Jho Lows offer and would not consider any similar deal with Najib. The Philippine Supreme Court on Tuesday denied with finality an appeal by the ousted chief magistrate to reconsider its decision to expel her from office last month, effectively removing President Rodrigo Dutertes highest-ranking critic. The court said it has also begun a three-month search for a candidate to replace Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, whom Duterte had branded as his enemy. Dutertes allies in Congress did not follow through on a threat to impeach the 57-year-old Sereno, the first woman to hold the top post of the judiciary. Instead, her peers on the bench voted her out in May over questions about her integrity. The justices ruled on a petition filed by the countrys solicitor-general, who had sought her disqualification on charges that she had failed to publicly disclose her true net worth. On Tuesday, the justices voted 8-6 to uphold their May 11 decision and issued a brief statement, saying they had denied with finality respondents motion for reconsideration. A strong voice While the decision was largely expected, Sereno vowed to be a strong voice in defending the countrys democratic institutions and to push for accountability from Duterte, whose governments war on drugs has left thousands dead since he became president two years ago. Speaking during a gathering at the countrys premier state-run university, Sereno branded her removal as an unjust decision. But I do not have to be chief justice to defend our laws and institutions. I live the law, so do all Filipinos who uphold the dignity of every fellow Filipino, Sereno told her supporters. When we take up the cause of a voiceless Filipino, we live the law. Every time we show justice and compassion to a fellow human being, we live the law. Each day we resist the abuses of power and call out evil in government, we live the law, she said. And we will continue to live the law and fight for our democracy and the institutions that safeguard it, she said. Sereno had clashed with Dutertes policies, openly questioning his supposed drug list that he claimed contained names of 150 individuals, including some judges. She had told judges to ask policemen to properly show arrest warrants before giving up, and wrote Duterte cautioning him about the legality of his procedural short-cuts. At least three mayors on the list were earlier killed by police in alleged shootouts, although the veracity of the list was put into question after one of the judges named was later found out to be long deceased. Duterte had also been angered by Serenos opposition when he placed the entire south under martial law to defeat pro-Islamic State militants and he moved to transfer the remains of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos to Manilas heroes cemetery. On Tuesday, Sereno said that the rule of law had been weakened two years into Dutertes six-year term. But truth has a way of coming out eventually. And he (Duterte) is making a mistake if he thinks the Filipino is so easily fooled, Sereno said. This president has attacked and his supporters have attacked many who dared question his actions, she added. Dutertes spokesman, Harry Roque, on Tuesday urged Filipinos to simply respect the decision of the high court. Serenos term as Chief Justice is over, Roque said. We wish her good luck in her everyday life as a private citizen. Felipe Villamor in Manila contributed to this report. Ohio Gov. John Kasich has appointed Ava Harter of Ottawa Hills to the Bowling Green State University Board of Trustees. Her nine-year term will run through 2027. Harter is senior vice president, secretary and general counsel at Owens Corning. Prior to joining Owens Corning, she served as general counsel and chief compliance office at Taleris and as general counsel of GE Aviations Avionics business. She has significant expertise in an array of legal disciplines, including ethics and compliance, large acquisitions, significant commercial deals and product liability. I am pleased to accept this appointment to the Bowling Green State University Board of Trustees, Harter said. This is an important time in higher education and I am looking forward to working with President Rodney Rogers and the board to contribute to the Universitys impact on the region and beyond. Ms. Harter will be an excellent addition to this board, Rogers said. As a leader in the northwest Ohio business community, her input and perspective will be vital as we educate and train the next generation of skilled workers. Harter has a bachelors degree in political science from Northwestern University, a masters degree in sociology from the University of Nebraska, and a J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law. She has served as an adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve Universitys School of Law and has written and lectured extensively on legal business issues, security, regulatory compliance and risk management and has published in several law review articles. The new graduate student representative has also been announced. Adam Smidi of Sylvania is a doctoral student in the School of Media and Communication, where he works as a graduate teaching instructor for courses in public speaking and media information and society. Prior to joining his doctoral program, Smidi taught for six years as a visiting instructor in the College of Business Administration at the University of Toledo. Smidi is active as a scholar, having presented and published research with his BGSU colleagues on religious freedom, community building and communication. At BGSU, Smidi is an active member of the Muslim Student Association. He is also a board member for Central Academy of Ohio, a regional charter school. His term ends May 17, 2020. By Bob Cunningham They called him "The Chief," and at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, June 23, 101 of his former students will play at Bowling Green State University's Kobacker Hall in his memory. Mark Kelly, who directed the BGSU bands from 1966 to 1994, died in November 2017 at the age of 91. The College of Musical Arts (CMA) will host a memorial service for Kelly. His daughter, Karen Kelly, has brought together dozens of alumni and former students of her father to perform together as a band. Capt. Ryan Nowlin, assistant director of the "The President's Own" U.S. Marine Band, will conduct the band during its performance. Karen Kelly '75, '82 is touched that so many alumni are coming back to the University to pay their respects to her father. "It speaks to the interest Dad maintained in the life and careers of the students, whether they continued in music, or completely different careers, away from music," said Kelly, who was the band director at Van Wert (Ohio) High School for 34 years. "Outside of music, the careers included Air Force pilots, business entrepreneurs and scientists. His leadership was not music education specific." Before Mark Kelly came to BGSU, he taught high school band at his alma mater in Centerville, Iowa, for several years. Three of his students from that time period will play in the memorial concert. Others are traveling from Washington D.C., Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Illinois, Maryland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, Connecticut, New York, New Hampshire and Texas. Alumni performing Saturday include Lisa Welling Baker '84, flute, a retired Shelby (Ohio) High School band director whose daughter is a twirler with the Falcon Marching Band; George Edge '79, oboe, retired Grove City (Ohio) band director; Roger Kantner '88, bassoon retired member of "The President's Own" U.S. Marine Band; Patty Ruckman '90, clarinet, New Bremen (Ohio) choirs; Stan George '80, alto sax, Perrysburg (Ohio) Schools; Ray Novak '83, trumpet, retired (Toledo) Whitmer High School band director; Amy Horn '89, French horn, retired member of "The President's Own" U.S. Marine Band; Dale Laukhuf '67, trombone, retired Bath (Ohio) Local Schools; and Jeff Macomber '75, euphonium, Missouri State Southern University. "To say that Mark Kelly made a meaningful contribution to BGSU as director of bands is an understatement," said William B. Mathis, College of Musical Arts dean. "His influence and legacy is felt in the College of Musical Arts every day as students rehearse in Kelly Hall, through the Mark S. Kelly Band Scholarship and through lives and careers of the hundreds of students that he taught and mentored. "Anyone who knew Mr. Kelly knows of his caring personality, high standards and incredible passion for bands, music education and, most of all, students." Kelly also will play bass clarinet with the band as it performs some of her father's favorite songs. "It reflects the mutual respect between Dad and the students," she said. "He emphasized citizenship and camaraderie of the students in the ensembles, and was always aiming for the 'individual group,' not a group of 'individuals.' Integrity, respect of the individual, honorable character and discipline are words frequently associated with Dad. "As a musician, his goal was for the sonority, blend, balance and the color of the ensemble, whether outdoor marching band, or indoor concert band. It shows the care, concern, and the attention to detail required to create the sound and tone of the ensembles. His students recognized this." Kelly researched the music played during her father's tenure and tried to program those most frequently performed, including "Fanfare/Forward Falcons" (Bohrnstedt/Marini), "Iowa March" (Goldman), "Lincolnshire Posey" (Grainger), "The Pathfinder of Panama" (Sousa) and selections from "My Fair Lady" (Lerner & Loewe/ Bennett). The concert will be live streamed at BGSU.edu/cmalivestream. When she was a girl, she used to catch poisonous snakes. Later, her job was to track down Mafiosi and war criminals like the Butcher of the Balkans, Slobodan Milosevic, and Syrias toxic gas murderer, Bashar al-Assad. Carla del Ponte (71) was the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia from 1999 to 2007. For four years, she was also responsible for investigating war crimes in Rwanda. Following several years as Ambassador to Argentina, she became member of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria. The scandal occurred in 2017 in protest against the UN Security Councils refusal to convene an international tribunal, she resigned. In this BILD interview, the Swiss native explains how the UNs inactivity in the face of the atrocities in Syria, which have even amounted to genocide, drove her to despair and why she wants a woman to head the United Nations. BILD: Before we talk about your hunt for war criminals, is it true that you used to catch poisonous snakes when you were a girl? Carla del Ponte: Oh yes. I grew up with three brothers in a valley in the Canton of Ticino, which was home to aspic vipers. One day, we read in the newspaper that an institute in Locarno would pay 50 francs per snake. So we got an antidote in case we were bitten and took off with our dog and a long wooden stick. We did it secretly, of course. When we were successful, we would put the snakes in a box under the bed. I was seven years old. I had piano lessons in Locarno once a week and took the train there. Once, a snake almost escaped on the train through a breathing hole in the box. The conductor came and asked me: Carla, what are you hiding there? Unfortunately, he knew my mother and told her everything (laughs). So our business ended before it could really start. Your biography is very moving: together with legendary investigator Giovanni Falcone who was killed by the Cosa Nostra in 1992 you tracked down Mafiosi for years. What did you learn from Falcone? Del Ponte: Primarily, how to conduct an interrogation questioning techniques. When you have someone in front of you, you have three to five minutes to understand how you have to deal with them whether you should be strong and rigorous or proceed more gently. Giovanni was perfect at this, and it helped me a lot later. How did you manage things in The Hague with the former Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic your most famous defendant? Del Ponte: We had to be tough with him. It didnt help much, though. To the very end, he never acknowledged his crimes; there was no sense of guilt. With one exception a minister from his government who deeply regretted what he had done all of those who were responsible in Belgrade felt that they were heroes who had sacrificed themselves right to the end. In most of the articles about you, you are described as fearless. Is this at all accurate? Auch Interessant Del Ponte: At the beginning, I was afraid, of course. Especially when a caller with a strong Sicilian accent threatened me on the phone and told me that they had their eyes on me. But over time In Belgrade, they once tried to stage a car accident, but we were prepared. I always had good personal security. Whats easier to catch: poisonous snakes or war criminals? Del Ponte: It is far easier to lock up snakes than war criminals like Milosevic and al-Assad. Your book gives the impression that this is not only due to the culprits themselves but also due to those who prevent their being tried. Del Ponte: When youve been investigating horrible crimes like those in Syria, there has to be a tribunal at the end, an international court of justice. Were talking about barrel bombs on queues at bakeries, the deliberate shooting of people in schools and hospitals, the use of the toxic gas sarin against civilians, rape and torture even of children. Many of the offenders and structures are known. However, the international community the UN Security Council, to be more precise does not want this tribunal. Syria is a member of this committee. The ambassador is allowed to spread his stupid ideas there. The UN, who likes to consider itself the worlds conscience, prefers to watch and do nothing. Who has prevented al-Assad and his henchmen from being brought to court? Del Ponte: Russia and China with their right to veto. Russia used to support al-Assads father. Now they are standing by a war criminal. Dont forget that Russia is selling weapons. In seven years of war, you need a lot of weapons. One low point of this war was the killing, enslavement, and displacement of the Yazidis by the terror militia ISIS. Did the culprits get away? Del Ponte: We were able to identify them. The result was an indictment for genocide. This time, it was directed not at the Assad regime, but at ISIS. We therefore naively thought that now, finally, something would happen. For two or three days, there was a stir in New York, and there were certain signals that a tribunal would be created. For the first time, there was a lot of talk about responsibility. But in the end, nothing happened again. (shakes her head) Total impunity. The UN has failed in protecting human rights That sounds like youre accusing the UN. Del Ponte: Let me make one thing clear: the UN has failed. It has failed completely when it comes to the protection of human rights. Things might be different regarding climate issues. Here the United Nations is still one of the worlds most important institutions. What would have to be done differently in New York? Del Ponte: Human rights violations are happening everywhere in the world. In Africa, in Yemen. Half of the states who are members of the Human Rights Council violate human rights themselves. We urgently need a reform. Countries that violate human rights every day must be kicked out of the UNHRC. The right to veto must go. Kofi Annan once tried this, to no avail. We can only hope that the next Secretary-General will be a woman. Women are more courageous. The New York Times has already suggested Angela Merkel as a candidate for the job Del Ponte: Exactly. She is very good. Although I have to say that she and the Pope are the only people in the world who havent wanted to meet with me. You write that the war in Syria made you lose faith in humanity. Del Ponte: Even though the culprits crimes are unconscionable, I dont want to give them that triumph. Now that Ive had a bit more distance from the victims reports, I have again come around to the idea that theres hope, that there are people who are good, after all. Some people say that there is only a thin, cracked layer of civilization that covers the darkness thats slumbering in every human being. Del Ponte: I tend to agree. Take Rwanda as an example. Neighbours who lived and even ate together all the time suddenly killed each other with machetes. This hatred was the consequence of brainwashing. The same thing that Milosevic did in Yugoslavia. Although I very much hope that something like this is not possible in my home country, I cannot exclude the possibility. Germany is historically influenced by the Second World War. This memory at least protects todays generation. Given that as you have written you have managed to maintain your faith in God, do you think that all of these war criminals will one day have to answer to the Supreme Judge? Del Ponte: They should. Especially in the case of Milosevic, who died shortly before his conviction, this was a brief, comforting thought. However, in the fight for justice, I prefer to remain on Earth. Your book is called In the Name of the Victims (not translated into English yet). If your life were to be turned into a movie, would that be your preferred title? Del Ponte: In fact, there are already quite developed plans for a movie. The actress has even been chosen. Shes a very likeable, world-famous actress. A movie without a happy ending. Writing about your Syria investigations, you say that your work was ridiculous. Del Ponte: We merely served as an alibi. I had to realize that my name was being used to create the impression that the world cared about Syria. All we did was record crimes. It was a waste of time, a waste of expenses. Thats the simple truth. PS: Sind Sie bei Facebook? Werden Sie Fan von BILD.de-Politik! Donald Trump once more harshly criticizes Chancellor Angela Merkels refugee policy. In a new tweet, the US President claims that criminality in Germany has risen by 10 percent. The German officials allegedly do not want to report these numbers. He thus accuses the German government of covering up crimes committed by migrants. However, Trumps claims are wrong. They ignore the most recent Police Crime Statistics (PCS) for Germany. Auch Interessant In 2017, the number of offences committed in this country was the lowest in 25 years. In the 2017 PCS, the number of registered offenses was 5.76 million which is 9.6 percent less than in 2016. The crime clearance rate has risen to 57.1 percent a new record high (2016: 54%). Moreover, it has never been covered up that the percentage of foreigners (those without a German passport) is at 34.8 percent (2016: 40.8%) disproportionally high among crime suspects, given their proportion of the overall population (approximately 12 percent). On Monday, Trump already referred to Germany as a warning example of a rise in criminality due to migration. He tweeted that criminality in Germany is way up. He warned: We dont want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us! At the same time, he claimed that Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) is in a crisis of confidence because of her refugee policy. The people of Germany are turning against their leadership, Trump wrote. The issue of migration is allegedly rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. One possible motive for Trumps backstabbing: in the US, he is being heavily criticized due to his immigration policy. Both Democrats and Republicans criticize him, because his administration has small crying children brutally torn away from their parents at the Mexican border and has thousands of families separated. The FDA sent inspectors to the facility in Taoyuan in September 2017, and found that the firm failed to establish sound lab procedures for testing drug products and keeping detailed records. The USFDA has sent a warning letter to Taiwan Biotech Company, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in Taiwan. On May 31, the U.S. FDA sent a letter of warning to Taiwan Biotech Company summarizing significant violations of good manufacturing practice (GMP),and asking them to take steps towards remedying the problems within the first half of June. The FDA sent inspectors to the facility in Taoyuan in September 2017, and found that the firm failed to establish sound lab procedures for testing drug products and keeping detailed records, reported Taiwan News. The primary areas of short-comings listed in the FDA letter are failures to; establish an adequate system for monitoring environmental conditions in aseptic processing areas; and to follow an adequate written testing program designed to assess the stability characteristics of drug products. Further, Taiwan Biotech failed to maintain written records so that data therein could be used for evaluating, at least annually, the quality standards of each drug product to determine the need for changes in drug product specifications or manufacturing or control procedures. The FDA has advised the company to consult with a GMP specialist to ensure compliance with U.S. standards. The letter closes by stating that until Taiwan Biotech is in compliance with the GMP standards, the FDA may withhold approval of new product applications, and may eventually issue a complete refusal of products manufactured at the Taoyuan facility for sale in the United States. Government of India designed awareness, screening, early detection, and palliative care programmes will be implemented through the Assam Cancer Care Foundation. The Government of Assam and the Tata Trusts has set forth on their joint initiative of establishing a comprehensive cancer care network in the state, with Mr. Sarbananda Sonowal, the Chief Minister of Assam, Mr. Amit Shah, Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha, Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Health Minister of Assam, and Mr. Ratan N. Tata, Chairman of the Tata Trusts, together unveiling the foundation stones of 19 modern cancer care facilities that will dot the state. The Government of Assam and the Trusts have set up the Assam Cancer Care Foundation, dedicated to this initiative. Of these 19 facilities, 12 will be comprehensive cancer care centres on the premises of Government Medical Colleges in the state. Located at Barpeta, Dhubri, Diphu, Jorhat, Karimganj, Kokrajhar, Lakhimpur, Nagaon, Nalbari, Silchar, Tezpur, and Tinsukia they will offer diagnosis and treatment of cancer cases. Another five will be adjacent to District Hospitals. Located at Darrang, Goalpara, Golaghat, Haflong, and Sivasagar, they will offer diagnostic and day care services, including chemotherapy. Assam Medical College, Dibrugarh, will be upgraded to an apex cancer centre with education and public health research capabilities. The State Cancer Institute (SCI) in Guwahati will be expanded to a 500-bed South Asia Research Centre. This network will become operational beginning April 2019. It is designed to ensure that no patient has to travel more than a few hours for accessing full suite of cancer treatment within the public system so that care is affordable. The facilities have been designed to maximise patient comfort as they have to spend prolonged periods in the hospital. The facilities will be equipped with appropriate technology and task shifting tools so that the network virtually becomes one. The Digital Nerve Centre (DiNC) set up at SCI and will enable this virtual unification across the State. It will help guide patients from the community to the apex level so that appropriate referral mechanisms and appointment systems are followed. It will also provide tele-health and virtual tumour board services at all network facilities so that any apex facility nationally can be consulted easily. This will eventually lead to an enhanced patient experience by ensuring that patients and caregivers do not spend time at hospitals because of lack of information regarding the treatment process. Mr. Tata and Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma inaugurated the DiNC yesterday. Government of India designed awareness, screening, early detection, and palliative care programmes will be implemented through the Assam Cancer Care Foundation. This will be critical in ensuring that patients come forward for treatment at the first sign of symptoms. It is envisaged that after the network becomes operational and the programmes are fully implemented the shift from late stage to early stage detection will be evident within a three-year period. Dr. Sarma announced at the unveiling ceremony that cancer will be made a notifiable disease starting September 2018 in the State so that all patients are able to access care through the public healthcare network on the backbone of the DiNC. Once cancer is made a notifiable disease all practitioners will have to report any cancer case detected to the Health & Family Welfare Department of the State by filling basic information regarding the patient online. Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Sarbanada Sonowal said, The aim of this great initiative jointly undertaken by the Government of Assam in association with the Tata Trusts is to provide cancer care to marginalised sections of society and bring them some hope. I am very glad that the Tata Trusts have fulfilled their commitment by implementing this initiative as promised. I offer my sincere gratitude to Mr. Ratan Tata on behalf of the people of Assam for his great and philanthropist initiative for the state and the entire North - Eastern region. This initiative will benefit the people across this region, especially those who are marginalised. Mr. Ratan N. Tata said, Cancer care in India is hindered by the lack of facilities, late diagnosis, and high cost of treatment. The Tata Trusts have resolved to tackle this by supporting the establishment of infrastructure across the country for high quality affordable care, and nation-wide screening and early detection programmes. Together with partners if we can achieve this, India will be able to dramatically increase survival rates, as in the developed countries. I am happy that we are able to join hands with the Government of Assam to achieve this transformation in the state and the region. The Government of Assam has made healthcare a top priority and has launched several initiatives in universalising cancer care, such as the establishment of the State Cancer Institute in Guwahati, provision of free diagnostics at District Hospitals, and the introduction of the Atal Amrit Abhiyan scheme which covers a large range of oncology services and almost 90% of the States population. The network of Government Medical Colleges has also been expanding rapidly in the last few years. The proposed infrastructure will therefore be a platform to utilise these schemes. The Trusts are currently in conversation with various other State Governments, like Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and Telangana, for establishing similar networks. Over the next three years, about 100 such centres are expected to be added. Kallyope will receive an upfront payment and research support for activities conducted in the collaboration. Kallyope Inc. and Novo Nordisk A/S have entered into a research collaboration and option agreement to discover novel peptide therapeutics to treat obesity and diabetes. Kallyope will receive an upfront payment and research support for activities conducted in the collaboration. Under the terms of the agreement, Novo Nordisk has an option to license exclusive worldwide rights to develop and commercialize up to six products discovered in the collaboration. Kallyope will receive a license fee if Novo Nordisk chooses to exercise an option to a therapeutic discovered and validated in the joint research plan and potential research, development, and sales milestones. In addition, Kallyope will receive royalties on worldwide product sales of licensed products. A Labourer Struggles To Save His Newborn Girl With The Daily Wages He Earns Life oi-Staff A disease can happen to anyone, anywhere, and strike when you are least expecting it. When Rajesh and his wife were expecting their baby earlier this year, the thought of any kind of sickness was the farthest thing on their minds. The couple were instead preoccupied with how best to welcome their baby into the world. In late May, their beautiful baby daughter arrived and Rajesh and his wife were overjoyed. But this happiness did not last. When doctors examined the infant, they found that she was born with a serious defect - Pulmonary Atresia. Children with this condition have a weak pulmonary valve in their hearts, which does not allow for proper pumping of blood. The only solution, doctors have told Rajesh and his wife, is a surgery, which will involve placing a stent in the baby girl's heart to correct the defect permanently. The process will cost Rs. 5 lakhs at Apollo Hospitals in Chennai, where Rajesh's baby has been hospitalized for the 23 days of her life. Rajesh is a daily wage labourer, and his monthly income comes up to about Rs. 4,000, with which he has supported himself and his wife for years. His wife manages their household and has no income of her own. Their small emergency fund, painfully saved, disappeared within days of their baby's birth, in hospital expenses. They borrowed about Rs 20,000 from friends. But Rs. 5 lakhs is a sum this humble family cannot begin to dream of. They have no assets to sell and their relatives aren't in a position to help. Rajesh has turned to crowdfunding in this troubled time to help pay the enormous cost of his little daughter's surgery, postoperative care, and rising hospital bills. His last hope is the generosity of donors he may not even know, whose contributions to his daughter's fundraiser will save her life and lead her into health. You can donate to the fundraiser here and share the story to help Rajesh's baby. GET THE BEST BOLDSKY STORIES! Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 16:20 [IST] The three small homes built on the 1000 block of Seventh Street have been listed for $239,900 each, which falls within the guidelines of Brandons new Homebuyer Assistance Program. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/6/2018 (1216 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Advertisement Advertise With Us FILE These homes on Seventh Street, where the developer sought to have detached garage suites but was denied by city council, have been listed for sale. The three small homes built on the 1000 block of Seventh Street have been listed for $239,900 each, which falls within the guidelines of Brandons new Homebuyer Assistance Program. The unique two-bedroom, one-bathroom homes are 800 square feet and fully furnished. "We thought if we could provide all interior furnishings with it, then that would be easier for somebody to then get this (Homebuyer Assistance) grant and all these things be included in their mortgage," said Steve McMillan, vice-president of planning services for VBJ Developments. "Rather than get a mortgage for something a bit cheaper and then have to pay out of pocket for everything else." Leanne Petrin, affordable housing programs co-ordinator with the Brandon Neighbourhood Renewal Corp., said the Homebuyer Assistance Program offers first-time homebuyers a forgivable loan to cover their down payment, as well as a portion of closing costs. The maximum home price for the program is $250,000. Petrin said the program attracted a lot of attention leading up to last weeks deadline. She said many people were excited to see there are new, fully furnished homes as one of their options. The price for the Seventh Street homes includes furniture, sheets, bedding, dishes, cutlery, etc. "You almost cant put a price on it. When you get all your appliances, I mean everything down to the art on the walls thats a dream come true," she said. "If people can afford that, thats huge." The program is funded through the Manitoba Housing and Renewal Corp. A total of 10 people will be assisted through the program this year. The new Seventh Street homes have made headlines over the past few months, as VBJ Developments was originally planning to include detached garage suites for each property. After neighbourhood residents spoke out against the plan, city council ultimately voted 6-5 in opposition. This was the first development of this nature to come to council, since the secondary suites bylaw was amended five years ago. A main issue was the size of the property. VBJ Developments purchased the property at 1056 Seventh St. last summer and demolished the single family home on the site. The 75-foot by 120-foot property consisted of three 25-foot lots, which the company legally separated. According to city bylaws, a property should be at least 33 feet for a detached suite to exist. McMillan said the company was looking to bring in an innovative affordable housing option for the new owners. While the 800-square-foot home was always going to be at market cost, the detached suite could have helped to supplement their income. "There was never any free money handed out or subsidized housing or anything like that. Its a formula that would work, without a handout," he said. "The whole affordable aspect of it was this garage suite in the back. Youd have a rental unit which would support the homeowner with a monthly rent ... That would then supplement the mortgage that someone would pay for the entire property." The homes were recently listed on Brandon Area Realtors, which sparked some commentary in online forums. Some people thought the small homes should have come in at an equally smaller price. McMillan pointed out it is a "total turn key" home, with a one-year warranty with J&G Homes, along with five years of National Home Warranty. "An 800-square-foot house, compared to 1,000 square feet all the mechanical and electrical and everything you put into a house, that cost is always going to be there," he said. "So just because you make the house smaller doesnt mean that the cost goes down by the same percentage as the square feet." Coun. Lonnie Patterson (South Centre) was one of the votes in opposition of the detached suites idea, as she said it didnt seem to work for that particular property. She is hopeful, however, that development companies continue to be innovative with affordable housing ideas in the future. "I am really happy that VBJ has looked at the guidelines for this housing program and taken that into consideration," she said. "I think theres a lot of experience in our community building affordable housing, mostly within the not-for-profit sector Private developers could learn a bit about developing affordable housing from those that have experience and Im really encouraged that they are taking a look at it." jaustin@brandonsun.com Twitter: @jillianaustin By Padraig Hoare Amazon has said it will add 1,000 jobs in Dublin over the next two years, after opening a 170,000sq ft building in the city centre. The Jeff Bezos-founded company, worth around 718bn, said the jobs would double the growth target that it committed to in 2016, when the company pledged to hire 500 people in two years. The jobs will be based at its new facility as well as north County Dublin, Blanchardstown and Tallaght. They will be in IT specialist roles and technical management for Amazon and Amazon Web Services. The firm said the jobs reflected its growing investments in the country as a centre for software engineering, research, and customer services. Amazon employs more than 2,500 in Ireland supporting customers from around the world, according to Amazon Web Services Ireland country manager Mike Beary. Amazon first opened an office here in 2004 and added a customer service centre in Cork in 2006, which employs more than 1,000. There is an abundance of talent in Ireland which helped us to exceed our talent growth targets ahead of schedule. Ireland is a great place to do business, the countrys creative culture and diverse pool of technical skills make it an ideal location for our rapidly expanding business, said Mr Beary. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the jobs further positioned the country as an innovative digital economy and a global leader for the tech sector, and would bring tangible benefits right across the city. He said existing staff and management at Amazon in Ireland allowed the company to go from strength to strength here over the last 14 years. IDA chief executive Martin Shanahan said that tech talent and investment are fundamental to our countrys continued growth. Companies like Amazon are bringing even more energy, vision, innovation and good jobs to Ireland, he said. Separately, there were 100 jobs for Dublin announced by digital innovation firm Avanade, which announced the launch of its business in Ireland. Cork native Graham Healy, former managing director in the Accenture health and public service operating group, has been appointed to lead the Irish arm of the firm. Avanade was established by Accenture and Microsoft in 2000, and has more than 30,000 employees globally. The firm will initially share an office with Accenture at Grand Canal Square. By Alan Healy Apple boss Tim Cook is in Cork today to open an expansion to the companys campus in Hollyhill and to address staff. His visit to Cork is part of a trip to Apples operations in Europe. Last night, Mr Cook met with the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in Dublin. Apple has been based in Cork for over 35 years and now directly employs 6,000 people here. However, the company was forced to abandon plans to build a 850m data centre in Athenry in Galway due to planning delays. The company's Irish team has doubled in size over the last five years and includes over 80 different nationalities. Good meeting with @tim_cook of @Apple this evening at @merrionstreet. Hes on to Cork next to open an extension to the facility there pic.twitter.com/XRBTHzNC2c Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) June 18, 2018 Since 2012, Apple has invested nearly 220m to develop their Hollyhill campus and have just expanded again with a new building that provides space for 1,400 employees. Apple is Corks largest private employer and we are proud that many of the team have been with us for decades, the company said. Cork is also home to Apples only wholly owned manufacturing facility in the world. It provides 'configure-to-order' iMacs which are for customers across Europe, Middle East and Africa. This story originally appeared in the Evening Echo By Greg Stohr The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear Apples bid to kill an antitrust lawsuit over the market for iPhone apps in a case that could shield e-commerce companies from consumer claims over high commissions. The lawsuit accuses Apple of monopolising the app market so it can charge excessive commissions of 30%. Apple, backed by the Trump administration, said it cant be sued because the commission is levied on the app developers, not the purchasers who are suing. A victory for Apple could insulate companies that run online marketplaces and interact with consumers on behalf of third-party sellers. Companies that could be affected include Google, Amazon, and Facebook, the Supreme Court was told by Apple in its appeal. This is a critical question for antitrust law in the era of electronic commerce, argued Apple. The suit accuses Apple of thwarting competition by approving apps only if the developer agrees to let them be distributed exclusively through the App Store. The suit, filed in federal court in Oakland, California, seeks class action status. A lawyer pressing the case has said Apple could be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars. A federal appeals court let the suit go forward. The panel said Apple is serving as a distributor, selling directly to consumers through its App Store and pocketing part of the price of each app. The Supreme Court said in 1977 that only direct purchasers, and not those who buy a product further downstream, can sue under federal antitrust law. The court said that rule was necessary to avoid duplicative recoveries. The lawyers pressing the case say the consumers who filed the lawsuit meet that test. They are undoubtedly the first party in the distribution chain to buy from the monopolist, the group said in court papers. Apple said it ultimately charges the commission to the developers, making consumers indirect purchasers who are precluded under the 1977 ruling from suing. The appeals court expressly opened the door to duplicative recoveries by different plaintiff groups, argued Apple. Apple credited the App Store with helping create a dynamic new industry. In 2016 alone , developers earned more than $20bn through the App Store, which offers more than two million apps to consumers, the company said. Bloomberg By Geoff Percival The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has said any scope for further tax cuts is very limited with Ireland set to reach so-called full employment levels by the end of next year. In its latest commentary on the economy, the economic think-tank has forecast 4.7% GDP growth this year, with growth slowing to just under 4% next year. It sees the unemployment rate averaging 5.6% in 2018, but declining to under 5% by the end of 2019. Employment is likely to exceed 2.3 million people next year, around 70,000 more people at work than at the peak of the Celtic Tiger period at the end of 2007. Such levels generally qualify as full employment and could be a trigger for economic overheating, through excess consumer spending due to an increase in personal wealth. On the back of that, the ESRI has warned the Government not to further stimulate the economy, via tax cuts, in the October budget. Given the Governments commitment to the National Development Plan in the medium term, there is little, or no, scope for cutting the overall tax burden which would stimulate the economy further, said the think-tank. This is not an economy that looks like it needs additional stimulus, said ESRI senior research officer Conor OToole. ESRI research professor Kieran McQuinn said the Government should be very wary of cutting personal tax rates in the next budget and should target a neutral overall package on tax. He said if personal tax changes are deemed necessary, then they should be offset by increases in tax elsewhere. The ESRI sees consumer spending levels rising by 2.4% this year and by a further 2.5% in 2019. However, it said that careful monitoring is required given the pace of acceleration in new lending levels, with SME lending up 10% last year and new mortgage lending ahead by 13.5% in the first quarter of this year. At present, new mortgage lending is rapidly increasing in Ireland following the crisis-related downturn. While this does not yet appear to be unsustainable, the high growth in house prices, coupled with rising average loan sizes, suggest that credit levels are set to continue to increase. That said, Mr OToole said credit risks are relatively subdued at present, with lending being in line with incomes and lending rates being better managed than previously. However, he warned that it could quickly unravel and said there is currently no case to be made for a loosening of Central Bank mortgage lending rules. Any increase in ECB rates, however, could bring about elevated levels of mortgage repayment stress for Irish consumers. The ESRI still sees continued house price growth over the medium term, but on the back of recently revised house completion data from the CSO, the think-tank now thinks around 18,700 new houses will be built this year and 23,200 next year. That compares to previous respective estimates of 25,000 and 31,000 for the two years. Regarding non-domestic risks, the ESRI said: Uncertainties at a European level, whether through Brexit or in other member states, present challenges to a small open economy like Ireland. Furthermore, any reduction in global economic activity, such as through a reduction in trade openness, would have a material impact on the domestic economy. 90,000 foreign workers will be needed over the next two years to prevent a labour shortage, according to the ESRI. The think-tank has released a new report ahead of the publication of the Government's Summer Economic Statement later. Business leaders and unions today present their wishlist to the Government for Budget 2019. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ISME, Social Justice Ireland and Dublin Chamber of Commerce will outline their hopes, concerns and priorities to a Dail Budget Oversight Committee. Committee Chairman Colm Brophy says the process will lead to a set of recommendations for Government. "We take submissions and listen to the views of the trade unions, the employers, social groups," he said. A real cross-section of society will come before the committee to outline their wishlist. "Then we work with that and come together to form a committee viewpoint and bring that to the Government in terms of our views of what should be in the Budget." Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe will today publish the Government's Summer Economic Statement. The report will give a guideline on state spending ahead of Budget 2019. It is expected the Minister will flag plans to set aside some of the country's corporate tax take into a so-called 'rainy day fund' during today's announcement. The Government is being warned not to bring in any major income tax cuts in the next Budget. A report from the ESRI think-tank says the economy is showing signs of overheating and we need to be careful not to stoke it. It is also urging the Finance Minister to watch credit growth. The Taoiseach has already said the Government will not repeat 'the mistakes of the past' when it comes to planning the budget. Leo Varadkar says the country will not be adopting a 'because we have it we'll spend it' mindset. Men who were convicted for being gay before it was decriminalised in 1993 will receive an apology from the government today. It comes ahead of a reception at Dublin Castle on Sunday to mark the 25th anniversary of decriminalisation. By Alison O' Riordan A protected witness gave an explosive statement to gardai concerning the fatal shooting of Gareth Hutch when she was interviewed in her flat, the Special Criminal Court has heard. Detective Sergeant Enda OSullivan said the content of the woman's statement was unbelievable and he struggled himself to believe it. Mr Hutch (36), nephew of Gerry the Monk Hutch was shot dead as he was getting into his car outside Avondale House flats on North Cumberland Street in Dublin on the morning of May 24, 2016. He died as a result of four gunshot injuries. Thomas Fox (31) with an address at Rutland Court, Dublin 1, Regina Keogh (41) from Avondale House, Cumberland Street North, Dublin 1 and Mr Keogh (32) of Gloucester Place, Dublin 1, have pleaded not guilty to murdering Mr Hutch. Mr Fox has also denied unlawfully possessing a Makarov 9 mm handgun on May 23, 2016, at the same place. Yesterday Det Sgt Enda OSullivan gave evidence that gardai became immediately concerned for the safety of Mary McDonnell and her twin daughters after she gave them a statement about the shooting. Under cross-examination today (Tues) by Sean Guerin SC, defending Mr Keogh, Det Sgt OSullivan said he executed a search warrant on Mrs McDonnells flat at 3.45pm on May 25 after viewing CCTV footage of two suspects coming from her flat on the morning of the murder. Her flat had been declared a crime scene within a couple of hours of the murder, the court heard. The witness said he saw CCTV footage of one of the shooters carrying a plastic bag and going in the direction of Mrs McDonnells flat on the morning of the shooting and he believed the guns were contained in this bag. Det Sgt OSullivan said he spoke to Mrs McDonnell about her family and the neighbourhood as part of a general conversation when he was in her flat. She said there was a spot on the couch where she likes to sit which overlooks Avondale House and that led on to a conversation about seeing a fight between Gareth Hutch and Jonathan Keogh on the night before the murder, he said. Mr Guerin asked the witness if he recalled anything that was said to Mrs McDonnell by him or his colleagues before she made this statement. There wasnt a question put to her, she led into talking about a fight from the night before, he said. The court heard Detective Sergeant Peter Woods asked Mrs McDonnell if she was willing to make a statement and she agreed. The witness said Mrs McDonnell was asked would she like to go to Mountjoy Garda Station to make her statement but she declined, saying she wanted to make it in her flat. Mr Guerin said Det Sgt OSullivan had reasonable suspicion that the two shooters had been in Mrs McDonnells apartment for around three hours on the morning of the murder and still she was not a suspect at this stage. Mr Guerin asked Det Sgt OSullivan why Mrs McDonnell was not a suspect, having sheltered the shooters in her flat for three hours and having lied to gardai. If I had made that decision, she would have been arrested but thats not the case, he said. Mr Guerin told the witness it was evidence of extraordinary gullibility not to have suspected Mrs McDonnell in light of the information he had at the time. Det Sgt OSullivan said by the time Mrs McDonnell made her statement, other matters overtook everything else and the main priority was the safety of Mrs McDonnell and her children. He said when gardai went to Avondale House he did not have safety concerns but he did by the end of Mrs McDonnell making her statement. The witness told the court that the content of Mrs McDonnell's statement was "unbelievable" and he "struggled" to believe it. "I wanted to verify it when I went back to station, he said, adding it was an explosive statement, to say the least." In the general conversation, he said, they had discussed another murder just weeks earlier at Sunset House and how people were nervous in the area about this gang feud and what it was doing to the local community. The witness said Mrs McDonnell loves Avondale House and she was adamant she would be there for the rest of her life. He denied he and other gardai tried to encourage Mrs McDonnell to have fears about living there but he said he did encourage her not to return to Avondale House. She was in a very serious predicament where she was exposed to both sides of the feud, he said. No notes were taken by gardai concerning the general conversation which occurred before making her statement, the court heard. Mr Guerin told the witness it was an extraordinary failure of basic garda competence and procedure not to make a note. Det Sgt OSullivan said he knew they were going to take a statement from Mrs McDonnell which they did. Earlier, the court heard submissions from the prosecution and defence on the issue of the admissibility of the statement from Jessica McDonnell. Ms McDonnell, who is the daughter of key witness Mrs McDonnell, yesterday (Monday) gave evidence via video-link in the trial. Ms McDonnell told the court in her evidence that she could hear men speaking in her mothers flat on the morning of the shooting but could not recognise their voices. However, she later accepted that in a statement to gardai, she said she recognised one of the mens voices as Mr Keogh. The witness agreed with prosecution counsel Paul Burns SC that the statement she had made to gardai at Mountjoy Garda Station on May 25, 2016, was true as it was closer in time to the event. Im trying to remember back to two years ago which isnt easy, she added. Mr Justice Tony Hunt, presiding, sitting with Judge Patricia Ryan and Judge Michael Walsh said the court will rule on the matter on Thursday. At the opening of the trial, the prosecution told the court that the killing of Mr Hutch was not a spontaneous or spur of the moment act but a brutal and callous murder. It was premeditated and a significant amount of planning had gone into it, counsel said. The prosecution says the three co-accused each had their own part to play in bringing about the death of Mr Hutch. The prosecution contend that Mr Keogh threatened to kill Mr Hutch the evening before the shooting, that Mr Fox and Ms Keogh were instrumental in planning the murder, and Mr Keogh and another man, Mr AB, were the shooters. The trial continues tomorrow. By Ann O'Louglin A High Court dispute arising out of an alleged failure to count votes in elections for positions on the Irish Country Women's Association's national executive has gone to mediation. The case has been adjourned to allow that process to take place. The action was initiated by Patricia Madden, who joined the ICA 39 years ago and says the organisation is in breach of its constitution when it failed to count ballots cast by its membership in advance of its AGM last May. She also claimed the ICA should have declared the winners of the election at the AGM for positions on its national executive board including National President, National Secretary and National Treasure for a term of office that runs from 2018 to 2021. Up to 30 other members have been given permission by the court to be joined as co-plaintiffs to the action. Ms Madden's application for various injunctions is opposed by the ICA. Represented by Frank Beatty SC, the ICA accepts there are issues in relation to the election which need to be addressed. It has proposed holding fresh elections for the positions. When the matter returned before Ms Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh at the High Court yesterday ( Tuesday) the judge suggested the dispute goes to mediation. The Judge said it was in the interest of all partied that mediation is considered as a way of resolving the dispute. It was preferable to the court deciding the issues the Judge said, adding that a hearing could lead to bitterness within the Association. Following talks between the parties, Ms Madden told the court the dispute should go to mediation. The parties want the process to commence as soon as possible and were seeking to have a mediator appointed. The Judge welcomed the fact that the parties have agreed to mediate the dispute, which she hoped is successful. The matter was adjourned to a date in early July. In her action Ms Madden seeks various injunctions, including one restraining the ICA from filling any vacancies on its board, to be put in place until the action has been decided by the Court. She said she has brought the action so the votes can be counted and the winners declared. Ms Madden, a barrister of Saint Mobhi Road in Glasnevin, Dublin 9 has also brought separate, but related, proceedings where she seeks an injunction restraining the ICA from destroying or interfering in any way with ballot papers returned for the organisation's 2018 national elections. The ICA has given an undertaking not to destroy the ballots. By Sonya McLean Update 5.50pm: The tax inspector in charge of the case against Independent TD Michael Lowry has accepted that he never met with the politician to discuss the investigation against him. It is the State's case that Mr Lowry's company, Garuda Ltd, received Stg 248,624 (372,000) in commission from Norpe OY, a refrigeration company based in Finland, in August 2002. It is alleged that Mr Lowry arranged for this payment to be made to a third party, Kevin Phelan, residing in the Isle of Man, and therefore it didn't appear in the company accounts for that year, nor did he declare it as income. It is further alleged that the accounts were then falsified in 2007 to reflect that the payment was received in 2006. Tim Lester, a tax inspector, who headed up the criminal prosecution against Mr Lowry and Garuda agreed with Michael O'Higgins SC, defending the TD, that attempts were made to meet his client to conduct an interview. He accepted that a number of attempts were made and Mr Lowry suggested potential dates for meeting but he ultimately never questioned him. Mr Lester said that once the investigation commenced and summons had been issued, he was advised that he should not interview Mr Lowry. He confirmed that the file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions on September 30, 2013, and a supplementary report was submitted on November 14, 2013. Mr Lester confirmed that an individual's obligation to pay tax arises when money is earned. He accepted a suggestion from Mr O'Higgins that the prosecution are not in a position to show when the commission of 372,000 was accrued and agreed that there is no documentation to reflect the receipt of the 372,000. Mr O'Higgins said he accepted that if documents were missing, it does not absolve an obligation to pay tax but added that with no invoice relevant to the payment it is impossible to determine when the money is earned. Mr Lester agreed with Patrick Treacy SC, defending Garuda, that an unsigned CT1(corporation tax) form was submitted to Revenue on October 3, 2003, and later processed. He accepted that a faxed copy of this CT1 form, signed by Mr Lowry, and sent by his company to his accountants, BBT, on October 2, 2003, was an exhibit in the case. Mr Lester agreed that Garuda is not charged with filing incorrect corporation tax for 2002, rather it is charged with filing an incorrect corporation tax for 2006. In re-examination by Remy Farrell SC, prosecuting, Mr Lester confirmed that he carried out enquiries as to what happened when the 372,000 left Norpe OY. He identified a deposit advice from a bank on the Isle of Man that showed that Stg 248,624 was received by the Glebe Trust by order of Norpe OY. Mr Lester identified a letter dated November 2, 2010, and addressed to a K Phelan of Omagh, in Tyrone, asking Mr Phelan to confirm the relationship he had with Norpe OY and enquiring as to why Stg 248,624 was paid into the Glebe Trust by Norpe. Mr Lowry (64) of Glenreigh, Holycross, Co. Tipperary, has pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to four charges of filing incorrect tax returns on dates between August 2002 and August 2007 in relation to a sum of Stg 248,624 received by his company, Garuda Ltd, and one charge in relation to failing to keep a proper set of accounts on dates between 28 August, 2002 and August 3, 2007. He further pleaded not guilty on behalf of Garuda Ltd to three similar charges in relation to the company's tax affairs and one charge of failing to keep a proper set of accounts on the same dates. The prosecution has closed its case before Judge Martin Nolan and the trial continued in legal argument in the absence of the jury of eight men and three women. Earlier: Michael Lowry had denied deliberately hiding 2002 payment from auditors, jury told The jury in the trial of independent TD Michael Lowry has heard how the TD denied at a previous hearing that he had a deliberately hidden a 2002 payment from his auditors. It is the State's case that Mr Lowry's company, Garuda Ltd, received Stg 248,624 (372,000) in commission from Norpe OY, a refrigeration company based in Finland, in August 2002. It is alleged that Mr Lowry arranged for this payment to be made to a third party, Kevin Phelan, residing in the Isle of Man, and therefore it didn't appear in the company accounts for that year, nor did he declare it as income. It is further alleged that the accounts were then falsified in 2007 to reflect that the payment was received in 2006. The Dublin Circuit Criminal Court jury has been hearing the transcripts from an appeals commission at which Mr Lowry successfully challenged a 1.1 million tax bill raised against him personally and his company Garuda Ltd. Transcripts from Mr Lowry's testimony before the appeals commission hearing in April 2015 were read out by Remy Farrell SC, prosecuting. During his cross-examination by Revenue's lawyers, the TD refused to accept that the payment of 372,000 represented a salary paid to him by Garuda. I refute the suggestion that I 'constructed this situation' and that I made a profit from this transaction. It wasn't a salary to me or a payment to me. It was me calling in my director's loan at a time when I needed it, Mr Lowry told the appeals commission. The nub of the issue is it should have been recorded in 2002 when it wasn't. I can be accused of all sorts of things but the bottom line is it was a genuine mistake, he continued. Mr Lowry told the hearing that nobody knew that the sum had been missed, but the minute he found out about in September 2006, he said I moved to correct it and he said he notified his accountants. He accepted there was no invoice raised for the commission but said that was because Norpe didn't require it. He said Norpe looked for an authorisation from Garuda that the payment could be transferred to Kevin Phelan and this was done to their satisfaction. His office provided Mr Phelan's details to Norpe and they facilitated the transfer. Mr Lowry said Garuda was struggling in 2002 and he made a personal plea to Frank Dunne of Dunnes Stores to give him another 12 months to see if I could help the company survive. I knew it was bad and the reason it was very bad is because I wasn't looking after the company, Mr Lowry continued. He accepted a suggestion that had he properly accounted for the commission figure from Norpe, Garuda would not have recorded a loss in 2002, as it had done, but instead would have recorded a profit. Mr Lowry told the hearing that the commission received should have been reflected in the director's loan account as money was owed back to him. I put money in. I took money out. I felt I was entitled to do that. I believed I was owed that money. It wasn't a salary it was a repayment of money that I had lent to the company. Mr Lowry continued before he agreed that he was saying that the only salary he received from the company that year was a figure of just over 59,000, which had been reflected in the 2002 accounts. Mr Farrell told the jury that the appeals commissioners made their decision on June 10, 2015. He said it was concluded that there was not enough evidence to support Revenue's determination that the 372,000 was an emolument, (a wage or salary), paid to Mr Lowry and that, therefore, the assessment which had been raised was incorrect. The assessment was reduced to nil, clearing both Mr Lowry's and Garuda's tax bill. Mr Lowry (64) of Glenreigh, Holycross, Co. Tipperary, has pleaded not guilty to four charges of filing incorrect tax returns on dates between August 2002 and August 2007 in relation to the sum of Stg 248,624 received by his company, Garuda Ltd and one charge in relation to failing to keep a proper set of accounts on dates between 28 August, 2002 and August 3, 2007. He further pleaded not guilty on behalf of Garuda Ltd to three similar charges in relation to the company's tax affairs and one charge of failing to keep a proper set of accounts on the same dates. The trial continues before Judge Martin Nolan and a jury of eight men and three women. Heroin with a street value of over 1m has been seized at Dublin Airport. The drugs arrived on a flight in a number of packages labelled as 'household goods'. The invitation for President Donald Trump to visit Ireland still stands, according to the Taoiseach. Leo Varadkar says it is better to engage with people you do not agree with. Tom Tuite Two youths charged after a teenage girl was allegedly sexually assaulted on her way home from school have been given another two weeks to decide how they will plead. The incident is alleged to have happened after a group of boys surrounded her and prevented her from getting away. A 17-year-old boy and another boy, aged 16, appeared again at Dublin Childrens Court. Judge John OConnor adjourned the case until a date in July for them to indicate how they will plead. The older youth was charged with sexual assault and false imprisonment of the girl on a street in north Co. Dublin on a date in 2016. The co-defendant was solely charged with false imprisonment of the girl, who was 16 at the time. The boys were aged 15 and 14 at the time of the alleged incident. The pair, who were accompanied to court by their mothers and their lawyers, were remanded on continuing bail. At an earlier stage in the proceedings, Garda John Delaney told Judge John OConnor the teens had no reply after they were charged. The Director of Public Prosecutions had recommended the case should be dealt with in the juvenile court and not in the circuit court, which can impose lengthier sentences. The boys cannot be named because they are minors. In an outline of the allegations against the 17-year-old boy, Garda Delaney had said it was the prosecution case that the girl, was walking home from school at about 4pm when she was stopped by a group of youths of which the accused is alleged to have been one. She was not allowed to continue on her journey and it is alleged the accused grabbed the injured partys breast before leaving the scene, Garda Delaney said. He alleged the co-accused had been in the group of youths that surrounded the girl and prevented her from leaving while she was assaulted, the court was told. Judge OConnor has made orders for disclosure of prosecution evidence to the defence. By Olivia Kelleher Medicinal cannabis campaigner, Vera Twomey, who secured a licence for the medication for her ill daughter, has been invited to speak in the House of Commons in London tomorrow so she can explain the benefits of the alternative medicine in treating conditions such as severe epilepsy. Vera became friendly with British mother Hannah Deacon when they lived on the same street in Holland during a period where they were both "medical refugees." Vera was in the Hague to receive medicinal cannabis for her daughter Ava while Hannah was also in the same position with her son Alfie Dingley. Vera returned home to Aghabullogue, Co Cork with a licence but Hannah Deacon and her son had to leave as they ran out of funds. Alfie (6) was today due to become the second child with epilepsy in the UK to be granted a licence for medical cannabis. Alfie suffers up to thirty seizures a day arising out of his condition. Vera Twomey said she will be "honoured and privileged" to speak on a panel in relation to medicinal cannabis alongside Hannah Deacon, leading cannabis oil activist Callie Blackwell, and medicinal cannabis researcher Jeff Ditchfield. Alfie was exiled to the Netherlands like Ava. It is most extraordinary that we lived just ten doors down from each other. His mother Hannah was over the same time as us. I am delighted to sit on the panel. A delegation of cross-party MPs were prepared to fight Alfie's case. Vera says that she is disappointed that Irish TDs and councillors are fairly mute on the subject of medicinal cannabis. Billy Caldwell was discharged on Monday, days after Home Secretary Sajid Javid granted a 20-day emergency licence granting use of cannabis oil (Yui Mok/PA) "Gino Kenny will be at the meeting with me. (If the licence had not come through) the British politicians were standing up and saying 'We are going to do something.' They never did it here. The MP's who are supporting the medicinal cannabis extended the invitation to me. My amazement at being asked to speak in the House of Commons is as you can imagine enormous. "It makes me feel deeply saddened that the MPs in Great Britain will invite a woman like me to speak where the TD's in the Irish government never showed a willingness to speak except under intense duress." Ms Twomey said the "exile for medical attention" continues in Holland for families like those of Darren Gibson and his daughter Sophia. The six year old County Down schoolgirl suffers from the same condition as Ava, Dravet Syndrome. The catastrophic form of epilepsy causes multiple seizures. This has to stop as vulnerable little boys and girls should not be put through this any longer. Ms Twomey rose to national prominence during a three-year campaign to secure access to medicinal cannabis to treat Avas rare form of epilepsy, called Dravet Syndrome. The condition has previously pushed Ava into cardiac arrest and an eight-day coma. Her campaigning included two 260-kilometre walks from Cork to the Dail to capture the governments attention to Avas struggle. She also mounted a very successful social media campaign and husband Paul had to live abroad with Ava to guarantee supply of her THC cannabis. Ms Twomey campaigned for Health Minister Simon Harris to grant a special licence which allows Ava to receive medicinal cannabis treatments. Further to securing the right for Ava to receive the treatment, Ms Twomey also successfully lobbied the government to include the cost of Avas 12,000 a year treatment under its long-term illness scheme. Vera and her husband Paul had been paying for Avas treatment out of their own money, alongside donations raised through a GoFundMe page. The government has committed to looking into introducing legislation to cater for prescribing cannabis for medicinal purposes. Vera says she continues to campaign for others around Ireland who are in need of medicinal cannabis. Nearly 69 million people who had fled war, violence and persecution were forcibly displaced last year, the UN refugee agency said, a record for the fifth straight year. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said the continued crises in places like South Sudan and Congo, as well as the exodus of Muslim Rohingya from Burma that started last year, raised the overall figure of forced displacements in 2017 to 68.5 million. Of that total, 16.2 million were newly displaced last year - an average of more than 44,000 a day. Most have been displaced for longer than that, some forced to flee multiple times. "The global figure has gone up again by a couple of million," said the High Commissioner, Filippo Grandi. "This is because of protracted conflicts and lack of solutions for those conflicts that continue, continuous pressure on civilians in countries of conflict that pushed them to leave their homes and new or aggravating crises, like the Rohingya crisis." The UNHCR said the figures debunk the flawed perception among some that a refugee crisis has affected more developed countries in the "Global North". It said 85% of refugees are in developing countries, many of them "desperately poor". 16.2 million people were forced to flee in 2017. 44,400 people ever single day. 1 person every 2 seconds. UNHCR Global Trends - https://t.co/alidwxfgQ1 #WithRefugees pic.twitter.com/vCqOh4e0nu UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency (@Refugees) June 19, 2018 "It should be an element dispelling the perception, the notion that is so prevailing in many countries: that the refugee crisis - singular - is a crisis of the rich world," Mr Grandi said. "It is not. It continues to be a crisis mostly of the poor world." The data release came ahead of World Refugee Day tomorrow. 2/3 of all refugees come from just 5 countries. Syria Afghanistan South Sudan Myanmar Somalia Imagine what peace in just one of those countries could mean.https://t.co/4Mh6nmmpLK pic.twitter.com/VKOgpDnta3 UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency (@Refugees) June 19, 2018 - Digital Desk and PA Thousands of Queensland jobseekers who applied for roles with companies that used a cloud-based HR recruitment service may have had their personal data stolen by cyber criminals in the process. Overnight, updated advice from HR software provider PageUp People has revealed details from job applications going back as far as 2007, in some cases, could now be in the hands of hackers. Cybersecurity expert warns data breach could spell the end for PageUp Some of the countrys largest corporates, including Telstra, Queensland Rail, Aurizon and Maurice Blackburn were among those affected by the PageUp data breach. Earlier this month, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and department stores David Jones and Myer pulled down their careers pages after the breach was first notified. Insurance Australia Group is set to be left with surplus capital that it may return to shareholders after selling three of its Asian businesses for more than half a billion dollars. The insurer on Tuesday said it would sell its businesses in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia to two different overseas buyers, which will deliver an after-tax profit of $200 million in its full-year results next year. IAG said the sale of the Asian businesses would boost its capital position. Credit:Bloomberg Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance, part of Japan's largest property and casualty insurance group, would purchase IAG's Thai and Indonesian businesses for $525 million, IAG said. We believe Tokio Marine is an ideal owner given its experience in the region, and that this is a good outcome for the associated employees, customers and other stakeholders, IAG chief executive Peter Harmer said. Atlas Iron has given its first suitor Mineral Resources three days to respond to the $390 million play for the miner lobbed by Gina Rinehart on Monday. The deadline puts the ball firmly in the court of Chris Ellison's Mineral Resources to make the next move in the high-profile contest for the struggling junior miner that has turned into a three-way tussle between Mr Ellison and mining billionaires Mrs Rinehart and Andrew Twiggy Forrest. Gina Rinehart has made a $390 million bid for Atlas, seen here with Anthony Pratt. Credit:Wolter Peeters In a statement to the ASX on Tuesday, Atlas said the window for Mineral Resources to make a counter offer to the bid from Redstone Corp, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mrs Rineharts Hancock Prospecting, would expire on Thursday. Until MinRes has had an opportunity to make a counter proposal to the Hancock offer, the Atlas directors maintain their existing recommendation in favour of the MinRes scheme proposal, Atlas said. Woolworths has taken it to the street with an expanded footprint in the Sydney city, after snaring a prime location for its latest Metro supermarket in Pitt Street Mall. It will open on Wednesday, June 20 in the basement area of the former fashion store Forever 21 at 400 George Street, which is owned by the Investa Commercial Property Fund, (25 per cent), Mirvac on behalf of CIC (50 per cent) and M&G (25 per cent). Forever 21 is closing down the store. A new tenant is under negotiations for the ground floor and level 1 of the site that fronts Pitt Street Mall. Sydney arcade, 400 George Street, the new home of Woolworths Metro supermarket Woolworths has committed to a 7-year term for the 1,240 square metre space and intends to open a Metro store aimed at grab and go shopping, with extended trading hours to capitalise on the high volume of pedestrian traffic in the precinct. Seems like a great idea why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app for your small business when you could get it done overseas at a fraction of the price? But as the saying goes, buy cheap pay twice, which is especially the case with the often-unscrupulous international web of app developers. Overseas developers can seem cheaper at first. Credit:Glenn Hunt Jess Conti is one small business person who has been badly burnt by overseas app developers. He has recently developed a dating app called Flirt Party. Nightclub owners can promote parties through the app, with the idea being people download the app and sign in at the party. They match with and meet other people who have also downloaded the app at the club. Its venue specific, so the app only activates inside a specific club. The Australian Human Rights Commission has launched a national inquiry into workplace sexual harassment, which will be a year-long, "in-depth examination" of the issue, Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins said. In response to growing social pressure to address sexual harassment in the workplace, the Turnbull government ordered the AHRC to inquire into the causes and make recommendations to employers, Minister for Women Kelly ODwyer said. The government will contribute $500,000 towards the AHRC Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in the Workplace, which will run for 12 months and cost $900,000. Australian women have the right to be safe in their homes, in their communities and in their workplaces, Ms ODwyer said. Wearing a hard hat and cargo jacket, the artist Christo stood on a platform looking over the Serpentine lake one April morning and watched his latest creation come to life. As ducks glided across the water, men in orange jumpsuits began assembling the installation, a crane hovering above their heads. Artist Christo attends the unveiling of his first UK outdoor exhibit, the London Mastaba, in Hyde Park. Credit:Dominic Lipinski The London Mastaba, Christo's first major outdoor work in Britain, is now floating in the middle of the lake in Hyde Park. A trapezoidal pyramid of 7506 painted and horizontally stacked barrels, it is 20 metres tall as tall as the Sphinx in Egypt and weighs nearly 600 tonnes. Named after a flat-roofed structure with sloping sides that originated about 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia (the word "mastaba" means "bench" in Arabic), it is a test for a mastaba roughly eight times as high that Christo hopes to put up in the desert in Abu Dhabi. If you believe the catwalks of Europe, one of the biggest trends of the coming summer is feathers. But from January, consumers will no longer be able to buy them from online fashion giant ASOS, after the company announced it was phasing out several luxury fabrics and fibres. ASOS is phasing out cashmere, among other materials. Credit:asos.com The e-tailer has partnered with animal-rights group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) to ban silk, cashmere, mohair and feathers from its fashion range by January 2019. Following an expose by PETA on the treatment of mohair-producing goats in South Africa, the source of most of the world's yarn, about 150 retailers worldwide, including H&M and Topshop, have announced plans to stop selling garments containing the fibre. PETA applauds ASOS for leading the charge for compassion in fashion, PETA executive vice-president Tracy Reiman said in a release. In response to PETAs campaigns, consumers are changing the face of the industry by demanding that designers and retailers ditch animal-derived materials in favor of cruelty-free alternatives that look great without causing suffering. Its a fair bet that anybody whos stepped onto a plane and walked past business class to get to their economy seat has wondered how those fortunate few can afford to sit at the pointy end of the plane. Theyre probably rich, you tell yourself. And to an extent, that's true but these primo passengers are often rich not in money, but in frequent flyer points. With some 20 million members between the loyalty schemes of Qantas and Virgin Australia, frequent flyer points are often considered as Australias de facto second currency. Virgin Australia business class cabin. The good news: with the right approach, anybody on an average wage can earn mountains of airline points every year and then swap those points for spacious business class seats and private first class suites, access to exclusive lounges with a la carte restaurant dining and even in-lounge spa treatments before they jet away. The "secret" is not really a secret at all. Its just being smart in how you earn and use your frequent flyer points. First up, think of your points as if they were money. This is a small yet significant shift in mindset, because you wouldnt throw away money. Lyn Balfour's breast cancer diagnosis three years ago at the age of 49 came as a complete shock. With no family history it just wasn't on the radar. Lyn Balfour believes her out of pocket expenses could be as high as $15,000. Credit:Jamila Toderas But it was her diagnosis of lymphedema - a common side effect from cancer treatments involving the lymph nodes - that she was really not prepared for. The Dunlop woman wants better understanding, support and treatment options for what she believes is a forgotten chronic condition. December 17, 1987 Mr Eastman had an alleged physical altercation with a neighbour, Andrew Russo. December 23, 1987 Police told Mr Eastman he would be charged with assaulting Mr Russo. December 24, 1987 Mr Eastman wrote to Ms Finke, saying he would kill Mr Russo, the witnesses and the "bastard police". "Now you know the truth," he wrote. Between January 19 and January 30, 1988 Mr Eastman looks at guns from 10 different gun sellers who had advertised in the Canberra Times. February 10, 1988 Mr Eastman bought a rifle and scope from Geoffrey Bradshaw but later returns the gun without the scope. 13 February 1988 Mr Eastman bought a Ruger 10/22 from James Lenaghan. May 1, 1988 The Lenaghan Ruger was found hidden in a drain in a gun bag. June 4, 1988 Mr Eastman allegedly looks at a Ruger 10/22 belonging to a Scott Thompson. November 20, 1988 There is a note in Mr Eastman's diary about a Ruger for $250. November 26, 1988 Mr Eastman called and saw a man in Sydney about a gun. Withdrew more than $200 cash from an ATM in Sydney. Late 1988 Mr Eastman allegedly told his solicitor Greg Walker he would kill Mr Winchester and get the Ombudsman too. December 16, 1988 Mr Eastman met with Mr Winchester and ACT shadow attorney general Neil Brown about the assault charge against him. The Crown says Mr Eastman wanted the charges dropped. December 20, 1988 Mr Brown sent a letter confirming the assault charge against Mr Eastman would proceed. December 31, 1988 Mr Eastman allegedly ested a Ruger 10/22 from a seller named Louis Klarenbeek. January 1, 1989 Mr Klarenbeek sold the murder weapon with a silencer and without a scope. Mr Eastman withdrew $200 from an ATM. The Crown alleges Mr Eastman bought the Klarenbeek Ruger for $250. A neighbour sees a man wearing a green jacket walking down the street with a gun over his shoulder. January 4 to January 7, 1989 Mr Eastman allegedly attempted to sell the Klarenbeek Ruger to a Denis Reid. Mr Reid's son Peter heard a car that sounded like it had a hole in the muffler. January 6, 1989 Mr Eastman met with his general practitioner Dr Dennis Roantree and told him about the meeting with Mr Winchester and the shadow attorney general Mr Brown. Mr Eastman allegedly told the doctor he felt like pushing Mr Winchester off his chair. Mr Eastman said he felt fobbed off, and said police should be taught a lesson. January 8, 1989 Anne Newcombe sees a suspicious car on Lawley Street, near the Winchester home. She says the car was a Mazda and its colour was turquoisy-blue green. January 10, 1989 Mr Eastman received letter from police confirming decision of Mr Winchester to proceed with charge. Mr Winchester murdered that night. January 11, 1989 Mr Eastman spoke with police and said he could not remember where he went the night before. The Crown says he never accounts for a critical two hours between 8pm and 10pm. January 12, 1989 The hearing date for Mr Eastman's assault charge against Mr Russo. January 19, 1989 Police searched Mr Eastman's flat and seized his diaries and a green jumper. January 19, 1989 Mr Eastman's solicitor sent a letter to police outlining his client's position. At 94, Robert Pople of Woollahra hasn't lost interest in words. In a letter which arrived in a Fairfax Media reply-paid envelope, ("to obtain attention when emails fail"), he introduces "Trumpery" which is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as: "Rubbish", "Showy but worthless" and "Delusive". "I've planted some baby carrots, with the instructions telling me to pull them when they get to four inches," writes Bryan O'Keefe of Kembla Heights. "Given they are a root vegetable, how am I supposed to know when they've reached the desired length?" Brian Collins of Cronulla asks: "What is it with children accompanying players onto the sporting field? Are they their children/relatives? Did they win some sort of lottery? Not just who are they but why are they there? Like most things these days, it probably meant something when it first started but once everybody starts doing it, the significance now seems lost." The question does anyone still remember General Holmes? (C8) has garnered reliable intelligence from one of his own. Christine Holmes of Roseville writes: I certainly remember General William Holmes he was my great grandfather. He was the first Secretary of the Board of Water Supply and Sewerage from 1895-1917. He rose to the rank of Major General with the First AIF after service in the Boer War, the capture of German New Guinea, Gallipoli and on the Western front where he was killed in July 1917 at Messine showing the then Premier of NSW, Mr Holman, around the trenches. He is buried in the Trois Arbres cemetery near Armentieres, France." Always on the lookout for examples of nominal determinism, Patricia Farrar (aka Dr Trish) of Concord noticed that a talk at Sydney University on the therapeutic value of dogs is to be presented by Dr Sandra Barker. We thank Patricia for the lead. A NSW Coroner has recommended a probe be launched into the possibility that police caused evidence to be lost in the murder investigation of a Rebels bikie. Edin Smajovic, 23, was shot once in the chest soon after arriving at a Campbelltown car yard with associate David Meatuai at about 2.30pm on January 9, 2009. Edin Smajovic (left) was shot dead in 2009. Pictured here with his brother Kenan Smajovic. A recent statement by one of the original investigating officers, Detective Senior Constable Max Kral, has pointed the finger at Anthony Tan, one of two owners of the Macarthur Auto Centre, who was initially charged over the murder, along with his colleague Nathan Reddy. "From evidence and information available to me at this time I believe that sufficient evidence exists which identifies that Tan is responsible for the murder of the deceased Edin Smajovic," Senior Detective Kral said in the May 2017 document. The life of 22-year-old Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon will be remembered in Brisbane on Thursday night, at a silent vigil that will also honour all 31 female victims of gendered violence this year. A candlelight vigil in Melbourne on Monday night drew thousands of people to Princes Park to remember Ms Dixon, who was found dead at the park in North Carlton last week. Thousand of people attended a candlelight vigil in solidarity for the Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon who was found dead at Princes Park in North Carlton last week. Credit:The Age/Eddie Jim Similar vigils were held in Canberra, Sydney, Perth and across the country. QUT student Yolanda Robson, 24, said she decided to run the vigil after Brisbane did not host one on Monday, joining forces with another similarly inspired woman, Anna McCormack, to create Thursday's event. She previously held senior roles at the University of Melbourne and the University of Wollongong. While QUT does not provide a BA, Professor Sheil said she had witnessed a resurgence of interest in the degree in her previous positions as a solid generalist degree that taught critical thinking and writing. I think its never really gone away, actually, the students that are interested in politics and philosophy and political science different universities offer different mixes of subjects in that, she said. In Melbourne we saw there was very strong demand, but that was partly the [University of Melbourne] model which means that you do an arts degree and then you potentially do something else after it. The bachelor of arts is still very strong there, its still very strong at ANU and UQ. The increasing rise of double degrees or ongoing studies means many people are completing an arts degree then continuing into law or another degree, she said, extending their time in university, but also their understanding. Loading Dr Danaher said some courses at CQU, such as accounting, had deliberately made units of an arts degree compulsory for their students. Having accountants with a strong grounding in history, ethics and sociology gave them a better footing to face the world and perform at work, he said. But while universities are increasingly making use of the BA, the challenge remained to convince people that the degree wasnt a waste of time, or a delaying tactic before finding a career. People who run BAs have always got to be learning how to communicate the value of their [degree] again, and its a real challenge because youre up against all the other vocational kinds of degrees, Dr Danaher said. If we dont get the message out there to students and parents, theyll dismiss the bachelor of arts. As a strong generalist degree providing students with a fundamental understanding of history, society, culture and ethics, the arts degree can be interpreted in different forms through different universities. Bond University executive director of strategy Ken Richardson said the private, not-for-profit university focused on allowing students to select topics from different degrees to develop a deep knowledge base. The popularity of the [arts] degree may have waned over the years, but at the same time we have seen the creation of a vast number of innovative programs and dual-degree offerings that are responding to the same need for a combination of breadth and specialisation, he said. The university also provides a free secondary training program encouraging critical thinking and innovation themes usually closely aligned with the BA. Professor Sheil said the BA was an area particularly attractive to donors and sponsors keen to support the humanities and traditional degrees. Philanthropists and donors have wanted to engage in that space, she said. Melbournes got a number of examples there which have been highly successful, philanthropy has funded a chair in Irish studies, its funded a chair in classics I think its been an area where people, donors and others, have wanted to maintain that kind of high level of scholarship. Academic rigour and academic freedom are two aspects all universities hold as a matter of pride, with committees inspecting all new degrees and units thoroughly for their subject matter and student interest. Questions around academic independence were at the heart of ANU rejecting a Ramsay Centre funding offer, with fears that the western civilisation degree at the heart of it would risk being unduly influenced by the foundation. Dr Danaher said a small university like CQU could not necessarily offer all the arts subjects it wanted, such as philosophy, but academics could choose what they taught and how without any influence from higher up. Loading That independence meant academics had no obligation to teach a particular subject or present a particular viewpoint, he said. Likewise, Bond Universitys council is the only answerable governing body, Mr Richardson said. Bonds independence is at the core of our foundation and our ongoing success, he said. We simply do not enter into arrangements that might compromise our independence. Professor Sheil said the crux of the matter was communication: while many universities relied upon financial backing of philanthropists and sponsors, the expectations on both sides needed to be clearly laid out. The donors may set some expectations around what theyre seeking to achieve as an outcome, but the decisions around the hiring and firing and the management of people are up to the university, she said. Decisions on course content are normally done by the academic board and that seems to be where this has broken down [at ANU]. So does the BA still have a role in society, or should students select more mainstream and direct-to-career degrees free of apparent social influences? Professor Sheil said if the BA were to disappear, wed be the poorer for it. She pointed to a time when she was working at the University of Wollongong, when questions were raised about the validity of continuing to provide units in Russian history. People had the view that maybe Russian history wasnt really relevant any more now understanding Russia is so critical for world politics, she said. Its important that we have people here in Australia who understand Russia. Peter Nemeth, the senior ride operator at Dreamworlds Thunder River Rapids Ride on the day four people died in 2016 told an inquest it would have been better if he could push one button and stop the ride. He also classed himself as one of the 10 best ride operators at Dreamworld in 2016. Yes, it would have been easier, he said. He was asked by barrister Matthew Hickey, representing victim Cindy Lows family, if he knew of any reason why a single complete shutdown button was not installed on the ride. A Mackay police officer was hit by a car and taken to hospital with a possible broken nose on Tuesday afternoon, with two men arrested and others allegedly on the run. The incident happened in North Mackay just before midday, with police saying it was believed the officer was attempting to intercept a car on Cremorne Street when he was struck. A police officer in Mackay was reportedly struck by a vehicle and taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. A Queensland Ambulance Service spokesman confirmed paramedics treated a person on Cremorne Street in Mackay for foot injuries and abrasions, and took them to Mackay Hospital. Two people were arrested at the scene but police could not confirm if the arrests were linked to the officer hit by the car. Staff at Gold Coast theme park Dreamworld pushed a stop button on a ride after two rafts had already collided, a Queensland inquest has been told. Sydney-based mother Cindy Low and Canberra visitors Kate Goodchild, her brother Luke Dorsett and his partner Roozi Araghi all died instantly after being thrown from a raft when the Thunder River Rapids ride malfunctioned in October 2016. On Tuesday, a forensic crash investigator told a packed Southport Coroners Court the rafts had collided and two passengers had already been flung from the raft by the time a stop button was pushed on the main control panel. An emergency stop panel at the nearby unloading dock, which would have stopped the raft conveyor belt in just two seconds, wasn't pushed at all, the inquest heard. A worldwide search to try to find the best companies to build Brisbanes tunnels and metro vehicles is about to start. Brisbane City Council is progressing with its $944 million Brisbane Metro, first announced in 2016, with plans to go to market with the project within weeks. To date, the council has finalised the metro routes, the location of the stabling depot and released the draft design report, but many aspects of the multimillion-dollar project remain unknown. The council has now said it wanted a 25-metre-long metro vehicle that could carry 150 people, had Wi-Fi and could run through underground tunnels at the Cultural Centre and Adelaide Street. The bitter fight between the Victorian Liberal Party and its main fundraising arm the Cormack Foundation is not over with party president Michael Kroger vowing to keep fighting for control the $70 million fund. Loading Mr Kroger says "further action" will be considered if the action against the foundation which in turn says the Liberal Party will be the loser if the dispute drags on. In the wake of a Federal Court decision last week to leave the Cormack directors in control of its millions, the foundation has offered to fund the election campaign of Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy directly, bypassing the Liberals administrative set-up which is led by Mr Kroger. The former treasurer of the partys federal branch on Tuesday lashed out at that idea of direct funding of candidates, branding it "unwise, unwarranted, incomprehensible" and accusing the Cormack directors of "playing games" with Liberal money. The Australian newspaper has been found in contempt of Victoria's judicial system after publishing a series of stories that referred to the criminal history of construction union boss John Setka before he faced court last month. The publishers of The Australian, Nationwide News Pty Ltd, last week agreed to plead guilty to contempt in the Supreme Court. Charges against CFMMEU secretary John Setka (centre) and his deputy Shaun Reardon (second from right) were dropped on May 16. Credit:Justin McManus The Murdoch-owned broadsheet ignored several warnings from the Office of Public Prosecutions by releasing details of Mr Setka's convictions in three articles, including a claim, in a story from April 2016, that "the only thing bigger than his [Mr Setka's] biceps is his police rap sheet". The article also revealed that Mr Setka, the Victorian secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, had been "convicted or fined in relation to 40 of those offences, including for theft, assault by kicking, criminal damage and assaulting police". Brad Collins talked a big game. As second in charge at Royal Caribbean Cruises, the American lothario promised the world to his lovers. Overseas holidays, luxury hotel suites. It was all on offer when Mr Collins swept his girlfriends off their feet. One Perth woman was even going to marry him. But the $30,000 ring he proposed to Annabelle Morgan with turned out to be - like so many other things in Brad Collins life - fake. I met him in July last year on Oasis, which is a dating site, Ms Morgan said. The state government has fought off criticism for awarding a key WA toursim contract to an eastern states company. Management of the Western Australian Visitor Centre will be handed to Queensland company The Tourism Group next month, after a tender process conducted by Tourism WA found the organisation was most suited to the job. The Western Australian Visitor Centre. Credit:Hello Perth In advertising the tender, Tourism WA said it was seeking a "resourced entity" to provide visitor information services, retail sales and booking services through the WAVC. Applications were initially set to close on April 24 but were extended to May 3, but it is unclear why the date was extended. The world's rarest marsupial has been given another reprieve from extinction thanks to a new home in WA's Great Southern region. Gilbert's potoroos in WA's Great Southern are finding their feet in their new home. The critically endangered Gilberts potoroo was believed to be extinct until it was rediscovered in 1994 at Two Peoples Bay near Albany. In the following years, new populations were set up close by on Bald Island and in a fenced enclosure in Waychinicup National Park. But in 2015 a lightning strike sparked a 1230 hectare fire at Two Peoples Bay, destroying 90 per cent of the potoroos habitat at that location. The trial of a Perth pensioner who admitted stabbing his son to death is drawing to a close, with prosecutors urging jurors to reject his self-defence argument, describing the killing as "effectively an execution". Ernest Albert Fisher, 67, confessed in late October 2016 to fatally stabbing Matthew Kyle, 23, at their Parmelia home four weeks earlier. Matthew Fisher-Turner's body was found in a hidden grave in his family's backyard. He initially told detectives he believed his son was "over east" but came clean after about one-and-a-half hours of questioning, saying he did it because Matthew was a violent and threatening "arsehole" towards his family. Fisher lifted his shirt to show bruises and also claimed his son "went ballistic" when he mentioned getting a violence restraining order against him. The next federal election is shaping as the great class war of 2018-19, with 10 million taxpayers drafted to the cause. No election in the last 50 years has come close. That Bill Shorten is prepared to stand between moderate income earners and legislated tax relief in order to stop tax cuts for the rich reveals Labors confidence that it can prosecute a class argument, and from there, win an election. Loading Labor is asking the bulk of voters to make a leap of faith: to gamble that Labor will win and, after that, deliver a fairer distribution to more households. That Malcolm Turnbull has declared it will be his full three phase, seven-year tax package or nothing speaks to the governments belief in selling an aspirational Australia, and the Prime Minister's commitment to prevail regardless. A new skirmish on energy policy is pitting Malcolm Turnbull against Tony Abbott in an argument about one of the most loaded terms in Australian politics: carbon tax. The Prime Minister had to tough out another challenge from his predecessor on Tuesday morning when Abbott urged a rethink of Coalition policy on energy and climate change. It is hard to see this as anything other than a grudge match. Abbott tried to reopen old decisions about cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that were made under his own government, pinning the blame on Turnbull instead. Carbon tax protesters outside Parliament House in 2011. Credit:Andrew Meares At one point the former prime minister even blamed bureaucrats for making expensive commitments at the Paris climate change talks, as if the policy had sneaked through his own office. The multimillion-dollar college that trains Australias border security personnel has overpromised and underdelivered and immigration and customs officials have repeatedly abused their powers, a scathing report has found. The government-commissioned findings also said many department staff lack the training needed to perform their jobs and jaws of death have gripped officials struggling to complete more work with fewer resources. The government-commissioned report said the Australian Border Force College had "overpromised and underdelivered". In May 2014 the Coalition Abbott government controversially announced the creation of the Australian Border Force (ABF), as part of a merger of customs and immigration border operations. Crucial to the new super-charged agency was the establishment of the ABF College, with multiple campuses, to ensure recruits and existing staff have the right skills to do their jobs. Under the former department of immigration and border protection, consultants RAND Australia were asked to evaluate the progress of the merger, ahead of the creation of the Home Affairs portfolio in December last year which combined immigration, border protection, law enforcement and intelligence. Labor has hardened its approach on income tax cuts worth $144 billion over seven years, taking a formal decision to oppose the entire package if it is not amended to stop the most expensive parts of the plan from passing the Senate. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten declared the tax plan to be irresponsible and said Labor would only vote for the first stage of the cuts, which are worth $22 billion and are due to start in July this year. Mr Shorten said Labor would vote against the entire reform, including the first round of cuts, if the government insisted on trying to legislate the second and third stages of the seven-year plan. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's decision on the Coalition's income tax cuts will force the government to negotiate with Pauline Hanson. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The move forces the government to try once more to gain the support of One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and her colleague Peter Georgiou to have any chance of passing the full tax cut through the upper house this fortnight. Malcolm Turnbull has been speaking at the Australia China Business Council networking event. Emphasising the depth of the personal and economic relationship between Australia and China, the PM says there is often "a lot more negativity presented [by the media and some politicians] than is actually the case". "It's always important to reinforce the reality of the relationship," he says. "From time to time, there will be differences in terms of issues, particular issues, but the important thing is that we deal with them as friends, with respect. Mutual respect is the absolute key." He notes "issues at a fairly granular level" like recent delays with wine getting into the Chinese market. "I'm filled with optimism about the relationship. I think we should all be positive about it and recognise the strength of the engage and also note that sometimes in the media there is always going to be an emphasis on differences, on conflict, on problems. Overwhelmingly, the relationship is strong and, by any measure, getting stronger," he says. This looks like a continuation of a point Julie Bishop seems to have made recently with the Chinese government, associating much of the recent tension in the relationship with media coverage, rather than Australian government policy or rhetoric. The truth is that tensions have really stemmed from alleged Chinese Communist Party interference in Australian domestic politics, escalating Chinese activity in the disputed South China Sea, and China's growing role in the Pacific. Australian government ministers, including Turnbull, have made public comments about these matters that have angered the Chinese government. It is worth noting that, according to some observers of these issues, there has been an apparent failure by some in China to understand the nature of free speech and an independent media in Australia's democracy. There is a suggestion that this is a pretty foreign concept in authoritarian China, where the media operates under tight government control. So, to some Chinese people, any reports in the Australian media or comments from federal politicians (which are not necessarily positive for China) are sometimes associated, automatically and wrongly, with the government. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has told Liberal and Nationals MPs that Australia must do its part to cut greenhouse gas emissions, as his predecessor Tony Abbott led another attack on the issue in the Coalition party room. Mr Turnbull held the line on the governments pledge to cut emissions by 26 per cent by 2030 under the National Energy Guarantee, against vocal concerns from six Liberal MPs, including Mr Abbott. At one point Mr Abbott claimed he was misled by bureaucrats over the cost of the emissions cut he helped decide as Prime Minister in 2015, which was taken to the United Nations climate talks in Paris that year. Former prime minister Tony Abbott has again questioned the Coalition's energy policy. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The skirmish is another stage in the federal governments painful internal debate on energy and climate change, in the face of objections from conservative MPs including Mr Abbott, backbencher Craig Kelly and former ministers Eric Abetz and Ian Macdonald. More than $300 million in funding for projects in the Canberra region was announced in the NSW budget on Tuesday. The Berejiklian government targeted roads, health and education in the region as major sources of funding. NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Deputy Premier John Barilaro have announced a budget targeting roads, health and education in the region surrounding Canberra. Credit:AAP The drive to Murrumbateman and Yass will become easier, and safer, after the NSW government committed $50 million to the upgrade of the Barton Highway. The federal government will put $100 towards the upgrade. NSW Roads Minister Melinda Pavey said the stretch of road between Canberra and Yass had become notorious for crashes and welcomed the federal funding in addition to what the state had contributed. How do revolutions start? For the Americans, it was because of no taxation without representation. For the French, it was the growth of Enlightenment ideals and the brutality of the nobles. Yet for Australia, it seems there is no cause great enough to make the common man throw metaphorical boxes of tea into Sydney Harbour. In particular, I am thinking about one of Australias greatest injustices: housing prices. And the biggest question of all is: why arent we marching in the streets about it? Where is our housing affordability revolution? What will it take for Australians to revolt against the housing affordability crisis? It is clear that many players benefit from the current scheme of things, not least our state and federal governments, addicted to the rivers of gold of stamp duty. So perhaps it is no surprise that there are no significant measures to address housing affordability in this weeks NSW government budget. The winners appear to be parents, motorists, grey nomads and apprentices. The losers include renters, who can apparently be safely ignored. Pre-election sweeteners, getting tradies to work and big-ticket infrastructure projects are deemed more important (or perhaps easier to deliver) than addressing housing affordability. Mayors from across Australia have taken the Turnbull government to task for failing to stump up cash for housing in remote Indigenous communities. A motion moved by Palm Island Mayor Alf Lacey, which accused the federal government of failing to commit long term funding, passed 173 votes to 16 at the Australian Local Government Association's national general assembly in Canberra on Tuesday. Palm Island Aboriginal Shire Council Mayor Alf Lacey. Credit:Michael Chambers "Failure to do this risks reversing the gains made in these communities to Close the Gap of Indigenous disadvantage in Australia," the motion reads. "Refusal to provide funding will have catastrophic impacts on the social, educational and health outcomes including increased mental health and family violence in these communities." The North East Link could affect an area of land four times the size of Melbourne's CBD, new documents show, as fears grow about serious environmental risks to the Yarra River. Victoria's largest ever infrastructure project has grown to cover more than 1000 hectares, an environmental impact report given to the federal government shows. The 10 per cent expansion of the $15.8 billion project was made without a community consultation group ever being told. One green group said the project would "absolutely trash" the Yarra. In January, Canberra was told the top of the toll road's tunnels would pass 24 metres beneath the riverbed. This misty, mountainous city of 30 million people appears to be where Chinese President Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy dream to invest a trillion dollars in infrastructure along new overland and sea routes and connect more of the developing world through trade began. In this advanced manufacturing hub in the middle of China, the Belt and Road Initiative is no mere slogan nor grand geopolitical strategy it is a reality. This morning, another train departed in the opposite direction, to Vietnam, carrying plastic particles for manufacturing to Hanoi. The high-value cargo mobile phones, LCD monitors, mechanical parts and clothing is packed in insulated containers to protect it from Central Asias extreme temperatures, which can plummet to minus 30 degrees along parts of the 10,000-kilometre journey. Now, in the humid night, the train is being reloaded for its journey back to Europe. At a quarter past midnight in Chongqings biggest container terminal, milk powder for infants is the hottest new product to come off a freight train that has just rolled in from Germany. The map is as much projection as reality. It envisages freight train lines stretching east to Europe, south to Malaysia and as far as Singapore. Sea routes plough through waters from Malaysia to Africa, and then the short-cut to Europe through the Suez Canal. On a hill above the busy Chongqing rail logistics centre, where lorries queue to enter and unload, a commemorative map gives the clue that this was the prototype for One Belt One Road, as it is known in China. But it is the recent arrival of the international trains that has transformed trade here. Trains are faster than boat, river or sea. Chongqing opened to foreign trade in 1895. The river barges sit low in the water as they ply its silty waters, bringing iron ore and coal to Chongqing's factories, or steel for car manufacturing from downriver. There are sights in Chongqing long since lost in the glossy hubs of Beijing and Shanghai. Older men and women carry their daily loads in woven baskets hanging from either side of a bamboo pole balanced on their shoulders. The magnificent Yangtze River, known as the Chang Jiang, or long river in Chinese, swirls in a languid yellow flow through the ancient river trading port. There are always fishermen on its banks. These routes notably avoid the South China Sea, those highly contested waters that are now a potential military flashpoint between the US and China. Washingtons Centre for Strategic and International Studies calculates that 64 per cent of China's maritime trade, worth $US874 billion ($A1.16 trillion), passes through the South China Sea, making it a critical vulnerability for China. The trains to Europe are dubbed the Land Silk Road Economic Belt. The sea routes, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. But the projects are being built. In 2011, a new train, Yuxinou started carrying freight overland from China to Germany, setting out from Chongqing, and travelling via Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus and Poland. Chinese products can reach Europe in 13 days compared to 30 to 40 days by sea. Yuxinou is jointly owned by the Chinese, Kazakh, Russian and German state railways, plus a Chongqing state enterprise. Its business is to smooth the customs processing and paperwork for the freight booked along the China-Europe railway and now Vietnam so that a container is never unloaded from the train until it reaches its destination. As a developing country, Vietnam has a huge demand for European products. The vision is for Vietnamese fruit and electronics not only to enter China by rail but then to continue on to European markets. It is a very meaningful thing to link the entire Asia-Europe continent and south-east Asia through a 13,000-kilometre route, he says. At Yuxinous headquarters, next door to IKEA, a world map dominates the wall and the phones are buzzing. Open-plan meeting rooms are full. Clients are being taken through a PowerPoint presentation of the benefits and speed of rail freight to Vietnam. Qi also explains the loftier benefits of the rail line in Belt and Road terms: We want better connections and communication channels, whether it is the economy, trade, culture or even politics. We want China to understand the world in a better way, and let the world understand China. Central Asian countries may use our railway to reach Singapore, then a fast and direct shipping route to Australia will be cheaper than air transport, says the freight logistics executive. And, though the rail line wont reach Australia, Qi says there are business opportunities for Australia too. The head of the Singapore Chamber of Commerces branch in Chongqing, Amos Goh, explains that Singapore is the largest foreign investor in Chongqing, focused on logistics, aerospace and IT. It takes five days for goods to travel to Vietnam. But Qi says the goal is a rail freight service to Thailand (a Chinese-backed railway is under construction) and, ultimately, all the way to Singapore along Malaysias east coast. The night shift at Chongqing Western Logistics. Credit:Sanghee Liu Slogans and aspirations The Belt and Road Initiative is now a far grander vision than the map on the hill in Chongqing. It describes Xis strategy for a rising China to engage the world. Its reach stretches far and wide. It is designed to secure supply lines for the energy and food that Chinas 1.3 billion people rely on. And its become a political mantra in a Chinese communist system that loves a mantra for the times. It is formally enshrined in the Chinese constitution. It is so ubiquitous that it's become a catchcry attached by the marketing savvy and politically astute to any foreign-related investment project or forum, even offshore tourism ventures. Loading After Xi gave two speeches in Kazakhstan and Indonesia in 2013, calling for the building of the economic belt and the maritime road, overseas Chinese infrastructure projects already underway such the massive China-Pakistan Economic Corridor a roads and port project were rebadged as Belt and Road. By the end of 2017, 38 cities in China had rail freight links to 36 cities in the European Union. By the time an international Belt and Road Forum was held in Beijing in May 2017, attracting 29 world leaders, about 60 nations had signed memorandums of understanding to join, as well as the United Nations. That number is still growing. The proposed maritime route now extends through the South China Sea and into the Pacific. There is even talk of it encompassing cruise ship tourism, requiring new, larger ports. Rail routes to Europe from China form part of the Belt Road Initiative. Credit:Fairfax The 2017 forum was designed to give international legitimacy to the grand project, and to invite other countries to participate in setting rules, the Chinese foreign ministry said. Yet key Western countries stayed away, or sent ministers or trade officials, not prime ministers. Australia, declining to formally sign up or link the Chinese-owned Darwin Port to the Belt and Road, sent Trade Minister Steven Ciobo. Two state banks, the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, had by then already loaned $US200 billion to BRI projects. Xi boosted another funding pot, the US$40 billion Silk Road Fund, with an extra 100 billion yuan ($A20.7 billion). But by now, concerns were being aired in the West about the motives for the big project and the billions in cheap loans on offer. Was it simply a way for China to export its overcapacity of steel and concrete and avoid huge layoffs at state-owned Chinese construction companies by finding new places for them to keep building stuff? Would Chinese companies be favoured in tenders? By years end, fear of debt trap diplomacy began to grow. Sri Lanka handed a controlling 70 per cent stake in a 99-year lease over its Hambantota port to a Chinese state-owned company after being unable to meet loan repayments. The Chinese-built cargo port ran at a loss. Pakistan cancelled a dam project on national interest grounds after the Chinese construction partner reportedly requested an equity stake. And by June, Malaysia, Myanmar and Nepal were reportedly reviewing whether to go ahead with high-cost Chinese infrastructure projects. A logistics centre at Chongqing's port, connecting the Yangtze and the Belt and Road regions. Credit: Sanghee Liu Will the debt trap bite the lender? In April, IMF chief Christine Lagarde said although BRI was starting to show progress, it faced two key challenges: the first was ensuring that Belt and Road only travels where it is needed. This would prevent failed projects and the misuse of funds. The second was preventing a problematic increase in debt in developing countries receiving BRI loans. She said China's leadership was aware of the potential risks, and that a new government oversight agency might help. The International Development Cooperation Agency was established by the government in April to keep an eye on its overseas aid, including BRI. Its an acknowledgement of concerns within the country that BRI had become too unwieldy. It also acknowledged the geostrategic nature of BRI. Parliamentary documents say the agencys purpose is to give full play to aid as an important measure of major power diplomacy. Loading But even as One Belt One Road became a political anthem for an increasingly powerful President Xi, think tanks were expressing concern about the risk of taxpayer money being wasted as developing nations took big loans to build infrastructure with little prospect of paying it back. Significantly, the former president of the Export-Import Bank of China, Li Ruogu, warned in April that few Belt and Road countries had a good credit rating and the investment risks are relatively large. Raising enough funds for the development of these countries is arduous, he said. Part of the solution, according to central bank governor Yi Gang, is for more international banks and commercial lenders to get involved to help China fill an annual infrastructure funding gap of up to $US600 billion across all Belt and Road countries. Australian banks are said to be watching BRI with interest, but want to see more deal flow before committing. Cars made in Shanghai loaded on a train to Chongqing. Credit:Sanghee Liu Chinese cash cows The law firm Herbert Smith Freehills acts for some of Chinas biggest construction and energy companies, which are making overseas investments now badged as BRI. Asked what has changed, Monica Sun, a partner in the firms Beijing office, replies: Previously, there was criticism in host countries of the motives of outbound investment by Chinese companies. Now China is bringing technology and infrastructure, and power and infrastructure, to help countries. BRI helps Chinese companies create a more positive image for their investment, but it is important for them to make sure the business proposition still has a bankable financial return. Michelle Li, who handles contract disputes for Herbert Smith Freehills, suggests Chinese construction companies can be viewed as a money pot by some developing countries, and she has heard of companies being asked to provide up to 30 per cent of financing to get a project off the ground. There is a somewhat unfair perception of Chinese construction companies always being able to bring Chinese money with them. More often they are reluctant investors, she says. Loading Chinese contractors on projects that are no longer commercially viable have been asked to turn unpaid fees into equity, she says. They have found it is difficult to get much done without taking equity, to avoid accepting delayed payments, which is effectively just a different form of being dragged into investing in the project itself. The biggest impediment to developing countries building much-needed infrastructure has been the perception that these projects are too risky for commercial investors. The arrival of the BRI sovereign funds, such as Chinas Silk Road Fund, may encourage more commercial banks to become involved in co-funding such projects, which may take the pressure off Chinese companies. By the end of 2017, the Silk Road Fund had invested $US7 billion in 17 deals, while the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank had approved 20 projects and invested $US3.7 billion. Cars and containers ready to be freighted out of Chongquin. Credit:Sanghee Liu What does it mean for Australia? The big question for Australia, which has benefited from strong Chinese investment over the past decade, is whether it will miss out if Beijing begins increasingly guiding investment towards BRI countries, its new foreign policy priority. According to Chinas Ministry of Commerce, from January to April this year, the import and export value of goods trade between China and BRI countries was $US389.1 billion, up 19.2 per cent compared to last year. Direct investment increased by 17 per cent and project contracts soared by 28 per cent. Loading Sun thinks there is little chance Australia will miss out, even if the Turnbull government doesn't formally sign on to the BRI. Practically, Australia is still a top destination for outbound investment, she says. It is a stable country, which is attractive to Chinese investors ... In Africa, it is easier [for a major infrastructure project] to get government financing if the country is BRI perhaps, but in Australia, the project may not need government funds because it can more easily access international financing. Li agrees: A country which has a stable government like Australia, which is resource rich, has a reliable legal system and good access to private financing, is therefore more attractive to Chinese companies. Cargo ships sail into Chongqing's free-trade port, connected to 13 rail lines. Credit:Sanghee Liu A great hope A river barge pulls slowly into Chongqings Guoyang Port. It has taken a month to travel from Shanghai. Modern Chinese companies manufacturing high-end technology products and cars prefer to send goods by train these days, but even so, Chongqings old river ports are seeing a revival in their fortunes as Belt and Road snakes out around the globe. Loading In 2016, Xi visited and described this newly combined river and rail port as Belt and Roads great hope. A few years ago this was a field, says Su He, manager of Guoyang Ports railway transportation department, gesturing to a busy rail loading yard piled high with containers. Giant orange cranes heave the boxes up, and onto the decks of a train. In an average day, 200 to 300 train carriages are loaded with containers. A boatload of clothes from Thailand is unloaded from a river boat and the goods transferred to rail for the journey to Europe. There are 13 rail lines coming into the port, which is a free trade zone. The boats also unload iron ore from Brazil and South Africa. As China reshapes the worlds trade routes, this is one risk that Australia should contemplate. Iron ore shipped from Western Australia at low cost feeds Chinas steel mills. The trade has grown, largely because of our proximity. It is our second-largest export earner. But in the future, will Chinas belt of road and rail routes, and its maritime road deliver key food and energy supplies more cheaply and more quickly from somewhere else? Rome: Italy's hardline interior minister, who recently sparked a multinational showdown by refusing entry to a Mediterranean Sea rescue boat packed with 630 migrants, is now taking aim at Italy's minority Roma community. Matteo Salvini told a Lombardy television station on Monday that he wants to conduct a census or "registry" of Roma, also known as Gypsies, in Italy. Salvini, the leader of Italy's right-wing League party, insisted later the project's purpose wasn't to identify individual Roma. "I've asked the ministry to prepare a dossier on the Roma question in Italy," he told TeleLombardia, adding that the current situation of Roma was "chaos" several years after a crackdown. Italy has a sizeable Roma community that includes people originally from Romania and the former Yugoslavia. Authorities periodically clear out the squatter camps where many live on the outskirts of big cities. Washington: A newly released audio recording that depicts screaming children being taken away from their parents has added to the outrage over the Trump administration policy of separating families at the US-Mexico border. The recording captures the cries of Spanish-speaking children being processed by US officials. Kirstjen Nielsen, US Secretary of Homeland Security Credit:Bloomberg The recording, first reported by ProPublica, was later obtained by The Associated Press. Attorney Jennifer Hardury said she received the tape from a whistleblower and told ProPublica it was recorded in the last week. She did not provide details about where it was recorded. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen says she hasn't heard the audio but says the children are not being treated inhumanely. Trump has both applauded the practice and falsely blamed Democrats for it. "We will not apologise for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do," Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told the National Sheriffs' Association in New Orleans. "Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get-out-of-jail-free cards." The phone call that prompted Orantes' monthlong journey to the US border was no idle threat, she said. About three years ago, Abel's uncle was kidnapped by extortionists and freed only after the family paid up, according to her attorney, Matt Adams, legal director of the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. A Federal Detention Centre in Washington state. Credit:AP "When they don't get their money, they kill people," said Orantes, 26. This time, the demand was more than they could muster. And they had only a week to pay, she said. She and her son split from the boy's father in Guatemala. He remains in hiding, and Orantes said she does not know where he is. Upon reaching the border, she and Abel found it impossible to apply for asylum at a port of entry, Adams said. Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: "A lot of people are showing up at the border to apply for asylum and are being told, 'We don't have capacity for them,"' Adams said. "It's not like they can just stand in a line for several days, because then the Mexican officials will grab them and deport them. So they're then forced to go through the ravine or the river." That's what they did. The pair crossed illegally into Texas and immediately reported themselves to immigration authorities and requested asylum, Adams said. They were separated so Orantes could be prosecuted. The woman said she was moved to different detention facilities, including in Laredo, Texas, and placed among other desperate, crying mothers. At one point, officials brought Abel to her, she said. "They told me, 'Say bye to him because he's being transferred.' I asked where," she recounted. "They just told me to say bye to him. ... He just started crying, saying, 'Don't leave me, Mum.' "I just said, 'It'll be OK.' That's all I said." Orantes was detained on May 22 with about 20 other people near Roma, Texas, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. She was convicted of the misdemeanor of unlawfully entering the US and was sentenced to time served - a development she thought would reunify her with Abel. Instead, with detention centres overflowing on the border, she became one of more than 1600 detainees transferred by ICE to federal prisons. She was sent June 6 to the Federal Detention Centre at SeaTac, south of Seattle, where she remains with more than 200 other border detainees, waiting to hear whether her asylum request will proceed. The conditions there are better than they were at the immigration jails, she said. Before Trump's policy changes, she likely would not have been prosecuted, but instead allowed to remain with her son and granted an interview to determine whether she had a credible fear of persecution or torture in her home country. If officials found that she did, she and Abel would probably have been released while their immigration case continued. It was weeks before she learned her son's whereabouts, she said. She has not spoken with him. Her attorney said she has no money and is not allowed to make collect calls to the facility in Kingston, New York, where he is held. The boy has been able to call her sister, Maria Orantes, who lives in Maryland and has petitioned for custody, without success. "He doesn't feel well there," Maria Orantes said in a phone interview. "When he calls, he's crying. He doesn't want to be there." Latest News Revealed: The winners of the 2021 Australian Mortgage Awards All the action from the mortgage industry's biggest night Billion-dollar Wollongong broker sells franchise stake in to rising star Brokerage in one of Australias most lucrative property markets changes hands The ASX has seen two staff changes this week, with one resignation citing the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) banking matter. The chairman of JPMorgan, Robert Priestley, has stepped down from the ASX board with immediate effect. He was appointed a director of ASX in May 2017. He said the ACCCs investigation into cartel conduct by the banks could prove a potential distraction for the board. The cartel charges involve alleged cartel arrangements relating to trading in ANZ shares held by Deutsche Bank and Citigroup. JPMorgan was the joint lead underwriter on the share sale, but has been granted immunity. In a statement, Priestley said, I am very conscious of the unique role that the ASX plays at the heart of Australias financial marketplace, and with all of its participants. There has been considerable interest in the ACCC banking matter which may become a potential distraction for the ASX and my Board colleagues. It is likely that this matter will take some time to resolve, and as there are limits to the information that can be discussed at this time, I think the right course of action in these circumstances is to step aside from the ASX Board to allow the situation to be fully resolved. I look forward to the time when all of the facts and circumstances relevant to this matter are clarified. ASX Chairman, Rick Holliday-Smith said, Robs decision to step down in these circumstances demonstrates his commitment to the highest standards of corporate governance. We understand the difficulty of his position and appreciate that he has made a decision that puts ASX ahead of other considerations. Rob has been a valued member of the ASX board and we look forward to this matter being resolved. Unrelated to Priestleys departure, ASX also announced this week that its chief financial officer Ramy Aziz will retire in September, after 18 years with the group. An executive recruitment process is underway to appoint a successor for Aziz. Related stories: ANZ faces charges for alleged cartel conduct Westpac found to have traded to affect BBSW ANZ partners with broker fintech tool Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC This driver is parked in prison. The motorist who crashed into five people crossing a Park Slope street in March, killing two kids and an unborn baby, cannot make bail and will wait out her trial in New York Citys notoriously hellish Rikers Island where one deranged inmate already assaulted her, according to her lawyer. Dorothy Brunss attorney David Jacobs claimed another prisoner with mental problems served his client a knuckle sandwich in a cafeteria at the citys water-locked detention facility, arguing the altercation should justify lowering the defendants previously set bail from $25,000 to $6,000 cash. But his sob story didnt sway Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun, who, in lieu of reducing Brunss cash bail, ordered she be kept in protective custody, where shell be segregated from the prisons general population for her safety. Bruns is struggling to make bail because she cant collect an income behind bars, according to her lawyer, who said her nephew is helping with the cause, but has so far failed to raise enough collateral for the $75,000 bond Chun imposed in order to release her from the island hellhole. That means shell likely have to wait out her trial for which Jacobs said a date has yet to be set at the brutal detention center, which a 2013 investigation named as one of the countrys worst prisons, and Mayor DeBlasio is pushing to close within the next decade. Were far from a trial, Jacobs said. Last month, prosecutors charged Bruns with reckless manslaughter for hitting and killing the youngsters, claiming she got behind the wheel against the orders of her doctor, who told the seizure-prone driver to stay off the road due to her history of epileptic fits one of which allegedly caused her to lose control of her vehicle and smash into the children, their mothers, and another man crossing Ninth Street at Fifth Avenue on March 5. Bruns faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted. Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC This silence could be deadly. Local HIV-AIDS patients slammed the city for keeping them in the dark about its plans to close and relocate a health-services center on the edge of Boerum Hill next month, which officials said will shutter because its building is set to be demolished to make way for a controversial megadevelopment on the site. The HIV-AIDS Services Administration center at 94 Flatbush Ave. one of three such borough facilities, where patients are connected to government programs that help them combat the illnesses occupies a property owned by builder Alloy Development, which plans to raze the structure to erect its five-building 80 Flatbush complex if the city approves a necessary upzoning. And officials, who rent the current space from Alloy, likely have known of the developers plan to destroy the building since the firm revealed plans for 80 Flatbush last year after buying the lot in 2016, but have yet to inform clients of its July 13 closing date, putting many lives at risk, according to a staffer at a nearby needle exchange who works closely with the center. None of those folks have been consulted or informed, said Jason Walker, who works at Vocal New York, where the mayor wants to open a polarizing safe-injection site for opioid addicts. Its deeply concerning for us, especially for an agency whose clients lives literally depend on accessing these services. Officials are moving the HIV-AIDS centers operations to a nearby Third Avenue building that already houses a similar city-run facility, before it relocates to its new permanent home on Evergreen Avenue in Bushwick inside another complex set to open in 2019, a spokeswoman for the citys Human Resources Administration said. The HIV-AIDS centers lease for its current space between State and Schermerhorn streets expires in December, a spokesman for the Department of Citywide Administrative Services said, and the city likely would have renewed it if plans for the development werent in the works, according to the human-resources agency spokeswoman, who said officials chose to move the center before its lease expires but did not say why the center is closing months before its lease ends. A seven-year client of the center was shocked to learn he will need to schlep to a new site in less than a month and possibly a different, less-accessible location next year when this reporter shared the news with him. This is the first Ive heard, and I am directly impacted by this decision. Its insane and wrong, said Reginald Brown, who lives in Brownsville and sits on the HIV-AIDS centers advisory board. Im 66, I am a long-term survivor, right now [this center] is very convenient for me. No idea where Evergreen is in Bushwick. Brown claimed he never got a call or letter about the move, but said he isnt surprised the city would be cagey with the details because fellow patients have complained about the human-resources agencys lack of communication before. That has been one of the things other people have said, Brown said. And although reopening the center in Bushwick will bring its resources to another neighborhood in need of them, officials should have alerted the community about their plans months ago, so they could include clients and advocates in developing a long-term solution that works for everyone, Walker said. Wed love to see a center in a community thats impacted by HIV, but where its situated its not as accessible, so thats another concern for us, he said. A lot of this can be addressed and answered with engagement. The Councilman whose district includes the Flatbush Avenue HIV-AIDS center who also leads Councils General Welfare Committee, which oversees several agencies including the Human Resources Administration expressed concern that clients didnt know about the move, and promised to push for transparency going forward. There should be ample communication, and if there are clients that dont know, that warrants further scrutiny, said Councilman Steve Levin (DBoerum Hill), who has so far been silent on the 80 Flatbush megadevelopment, despite his likely being the deciding vote on the rezoning request when it reaches Council. Communication with clients needs to be seamless, and if its not, thats really concerning. Human-resources agency staffers told local pols and community boards about its plan for the Flatbush Avenue center in May, according to the spokeswoman, who said they will inform clients this week about the looming closure and relocation. Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC A motorcyclist died after colliding with a car in East New York on Saturday morning, police said. Jermaine Boston, 39, was riding his gas-powered bike on Linden Boulevard toward Pennsylvania Avenue, when he crashed into the back of a Nissan Murano crossover around 10:30 am as the driver of that car crossed Linden Boulevard while traveling on Hinsdale Street toward DeWitt Avenue. The woman behind the wheel of the crossover drove from Hinsdale Street across the 9-lane Linden Boulevard after stopping for a funeral procession traveling on that road toward Pennsylvania Avenue, which Boston was trailing behind on his bike when he hit the four-wheeler, cops said. The woman stayed at the scene, and authorities discovered Boston lying in the street with trauma to his body after the collision, police said. Paramedics rushed the driver and motorcyclist, who lived on Long Island, to Brookldale Hospital, where doctors pronounced her in stable condition and him dead, officials said. Cops made no arrests and are still investigating the fatal crash, a Police Department spokesman 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 probe into 80,000 struck off by the (RoC) in the first lot has hit a dead end. The government had not been able to trace the Permanent Account Numbers (PANs) of 80,000 companies, which was hampering investigations, officials of the corporate affairs ministry said. Banks were asked to furnish the transaction data of these But they did not respond despite multiple reminders. Banks have told us that without card details, it was not possible to track these companies, one of the officials said. is compulsory for any transaction above Rs 50,000. So far, the government has transaction details of only 73,000 companies. These companies deposited Rs 240 billion at the time of Many of these firms were found evading taxes. In a recent communication to the corporate affairs ministry, the income-tax department had asked the RoC to re-activate companies with tax liabilities and pending cases. The tax department had asked the ministry to inform the department before striking them off. ALSO READ: Over 226,000 shell companies de-registered in FY18, says Finance Ministry During a meeting of the task force on on November 30, the director-general of corporate affairs (DGCoA) suggested that the income-tax department approach the RoC for taking up the matter of revival of these companies. It was also suggested that protection of interest on revenue would be strong grounds in favour of such a restoration. ALSO READ: What is a shell company? Govt mulls watertight rules to fix irregularities The government had sent notices to 226,000 companies for not filing statutory returns. After investigation, it unearthed 16,537 shell companies and suspects another 80,670. On the basis of common directors, it drew up a list of another 16,739. The government has issued notices to a further 225,000 shell companies based on non-filing of returns. The number is likely to rise, according to ministry officials. It was quite possible that out of the 1.1 million companies registered with the RoC, only around 500,000 would be fully operative, one official said. Sahara Force India is not up for sale. This is the defiant stand of the Vijay Mallya-owned Britain-based Formula 1 motor racing team, despite months of speculation that the company may change hands. Meanwhile, Mallya has appealed against freezing of his assets last month by the high court of England and Wales, which upheld a ruling by a tribunal in India. Now living in London, Mallya has for over a year been battling against the central government in British courts to resist extradition to India and freezing of his assets. In the first instance, a final hearing is scheduled for July 11 at a ... The government has directly linked the exclusion of from a list of countries offered easier visa norms to India's refusal to sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the return of Britain's Secretary of State for International Trade, Liam Fox, said the reason India had been excluded from a newly-expanded list of countries from where overseas students can benefit from a more streamlined university application process was because the issue of Indian overstayers remained unresolved. This is a constant conversation we need to have with India. There is always a demand for easier norms, but we cannot look at that without addressing the issue of overstayers, Fox said on the sidelines of the launch of UK-India Week in London on Monday. On being asked if India's refusal to sign the MoU relating to had resulted in India's exclusion from an expanded list of countries covering the likes of China, the Maldives, Mexico and Bahrain, the minister said it was important to ensure that all issues are looked at on balance. Our relationship with India is long-term and not just related to trade, he said, dismissing the notion that the move could damage the prospect of a post-Brexit trade deal between the two countries. The Indian Cabinet had approved the so-called MoU on returns to facilitate the deportation of alleged illegal Indian immigrants in the to India and vice-versa days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Britain to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in mid-April. The agreement was touted as the centrepiece of the nearly 25 MoUs to be signed between the two countries during the Indian PM's UK visit. However, India reportedly backed out of signing the pact at the last-minute due to reservations expressed by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) about Indian agencies being given only 15 days to verify the background of an undocumented migrant. We are in favour of smooth and legal migration and discourage all kinds of illegal migration, Kiren Rijiju, minister of state for home affairs, had said after he initialled the MoU during a UK visit in January. The issue has since been caught up in political wrangles, with the Indian government insisting the timelines being offered for the verification of the alleged visa overstayers from India are not feasible to determine whether they are from India or elsewhere in the sub-continent. Senior Indian officials have admitted that the issue has strained the bilateral relationship, which has now resulted in India being excluded from Tier 4 overseas student visa relaxations unveiled by the UK Home Office last week. The move triggered outrage among Indian student groups in Britain and other leading figures within the bilateral space, including some branding it an insult to India by including non-democratic countries on the list but excluding the world's largest democracy. Addressing the UK-India Week launch, Indian High Commissioner here Y K Sinha, said it was important that free movement of people remains at the heart of future ties because it is the students and youth who sustain the bilateral relationship. contribute immensely, not just to the economy of this country but in terms of their expertise. International students are the best soft power tool that the UK has, Sinha said. Ours is a free country and we believe in the free movement of people. Each country has its own requirements and is free to decide its own immigration policies, but we need to look at the larger picture, he said, describing the visa policy as a question of demand and supply. The UK needs more doctors, we will give you those doctors. But we do need them back home too; so once they acquire the expertise within the NHS [National Health Service], please send them back, he added. Indian-origin House of Lords peer and investment banker Jitesh Gadhia welcomed the UK government's Tier 2 visa relaxation for doctors and other professionals from countries like India. Alas, that doesn't yet apply to Tier 4 visas for Indian students, but I am sure there is some work to do there... There is sincere hope in India that Britain will become more flexible and receptive to its suggestions once it is outside the European Union (EU), Gadhia noted in his speech at the launch of UK-India Week. The week-long set of events, organised by UK-based media house India Inc, are aimed at bringing together senior figures in the UK with their counterparts from India in an attempt to enhance the bilateral relationship. For Sandeep Bakhshi, the going will be tough in his new role as the chief operating officer (COO) of ICICI Bank. Fall in profits, rising non-performing assets (NPA) or bad loans and ambitious targets for the upcoming years are some of the challenges Bakhshi will have to deal with on the business front. In addition, he will have to move swiftly to control any damage that may have been caused to the bank's image as well as investor confidence due to the ongoing controversy of alleged conflict of interest with respect to its managing director and chief executive ... A 20-year-old British-Bangladeshi Islamic State fanatic plotted to kill Prime Minister in a daring suicide attack at her Downing Street office here, a UK court was told on Tuesday. Naa'imur Zakariyah Rahman, who is charged with preparing acts of terrorism, was arrested on November 2 last year. Rahman planned to detonate an explosion at the security gates of Number 10 Downing Street before stabbing the Prime Minister, it is alleged. On the opening day of his trial, the jury was told how Rahman was snared in September last year, during a chat on a messaging app with an MI5 operative, who was pretending to be a man called Amir in The MI5 is UK's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. The trial at London's Old Bailey was also told that Rahman believed he was "just days away" from the attack before he was arrested in November last year. Rahman is charged with preparing terrorist acts by conducting reconnaissance, recording a pledge of allegiance, and delivering a rucksack and jacket to be fitted with explosives. He is also charged with helping a second defendant, Mohammad Aqib Imran, 22, to join IS in by recording a sponsorship video. Rahman denies both counts, the BBC reported. Imran, has pleaded not guilty to preparing terrorist acts and possessing a document on his Kindle entitled How To Survive In The West - A Mujahid's Guide 2015. Imran's nationality was not provided. The court heard how Rahman told the agent that he was being investigated because of his uncle. Rahman's uncle joined the Islamic State terror group in and encouraged his nephew to attack Britain before being killed in a drone strike in Syria, the prosecutors said. Jurors were told that Rahman, when asked for more information in the Telegram chat, told the agent: "I want to do a suicide bomb on Parliament. I want to attempt to kill " In another exchange, Rahman allegedly said: "My objective is to take out my target. Nothing less than the death of the leaders of Parliament." The court heard how he also praised the Manchester Arena bomber and said he had thought about wearing "a vest" while driving past Parliament before "pushing the button" to "clear the entire block". Rahman allegedly added: "Everyone inside, including the Prime Minister, would be dead." Prosecutor Mark Heywood told the court: "His settled conclusion was that lethal violence here, directed at the very heart of the United Kingdom government, was the only effective way to pursue his intentions. "Before his arrest prevented it, he was, he believed, just days away from his objective, which was no less than a suicide attack, by blade and explosion, on Downing Street and, if he could, upon the Prime Minister herself." Heywood claimed how both defendants - Rahman and Imran - knew each other well and shared the "warped ideology" of IS. He said: "The evidence shows in detail [Rahman's] developing fervour as he first assembled his plan, carried out reconnaissance and perfected his ideas and then acquired the means to execute it. "At the last he took back his own coat and his own rucksack both modified with improvised explosive devices, so that he could achieve his settled aim of a full-frontal assault on the gates and then the door of Number 10. "In this he expected to die. But he also hoped for personal reward beyond death and, in doing so, to cause death and great fear in a place and to people symbolic of the country itself," Heywood said. Russia and Saudi Arabia are pushing OPEC and its allies to raise oil output steeply from July to meet growing demand and cover supply outages in Venezuela and Libya despite opposition from several members of the producer group including Iran. Oil demand usually grows at the steepest pace in the third quarter ... We could face a deficit if we dont take measures, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters. In our view, this could lead to market overheating. Novak said Russia wanted Opec and non-Opec to raise output by 1.5 million ... Trump said in a White House statement Monday evening that he had instructed the US Trade Representatives office to identify $200 billion in imports from the Asian nation for additional tariffs of 10 percent. He said the US would impose tariffs on another $200 billion after that if Beijing retaliates. The United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other ... 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 will not accept Saudi Arabia's proposal to increase output of Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Iran's representative to the grouping said on Tuesday. Iran, along with and Iraq, is going to veto the Saudi Arabia's proposal at the June 22 meeting in Vienna, Xinhua news agency quoted its representative, Hossein Kazempour Ardebili, as saying. If also increases its production, that would be a breach of the cooperation agreement, Ardebili said. members are set to meet later this week in to discuss the proposal by to end the OPEC/non- deal to balance the oil market and increase the Last year, OPEC members unanimously agreed on the of $60 per barrel, by cutting oil output by 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) to 32.5 million bpd. Non-OPEC members including Russia, Oman and Mexico also agreed to cut 558,000 bpd off their production to stabilize the market. and today signed a historic preliminary agreement to rename the country the Republic of North Macedonia, ending a row that has poisoned relations between the two neighbours since 1991. "This is a brave, historic and necessary step for our peoples," said Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. "We are here to heal the wounds of time, to open a path for peace, fraternisation and growth for our countries, the Balkans and Europe," he said. "Our two countries should step out of the past and look to the future," said Prime Minister Zoran Zaev. "Our peoples want peace... we will be partners and allies," he said. The accord begins to unravel one of the world's longest -- and arguably most arcane -- diplomatic disputes, which began 27 years ago with Macedonia's declaration of independence but whose roots date back centuries. "The time has come again to sing happy songs in the Balkans," Tsipras said, moments before the document was signed by the two countries' foreign ministers. Zaev and several of his ministers arrived by speedboat at the picturesque fishing village of Psarades under a sunny sky, on the southern bank of Lake Prespa that is one of the natural boundaries between the two countries. Tsipras and Zaev embraced on the village dock and entered the large tent where the deal was signed to a standing ovation from gathered dignataries and officials. UN under-secretary-general for political affairs Rosemary DiCarlo, longterm UN negotiator Matthew Nimetz, EU diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini and EU enlargement commissioner Johannes Hahn were at hand. Nimetz, who turned 79 on Sunday and also signed Sunday's agreement, had been trying to broker a solution since 1994, first as a US envoy and subsequently on behalf of the But it was the election of Zaev in 2017, replacing nationalist PM Nikola Gruevski, that proved crucial. An economist and former mayor of Strumica, Zaev made rapprochement with a priority to secure his country's membership of the European Union and NATO, blocked by for years. After the signature, Tsipras will cross over to the Macedonian side of Lake Prespa for lunch, becoming the first Greek prime minister to visit the neighbouring state. Since 1991, has objected to its neighbour being called because it has its own northern province of the same name, which in ancient times was the cradle of Alexander the Great's empire -- a source of intense pride for modern-day Greeks. The two premiers, born just months apart in 1974, have bucked strong hostile reactions at home to push ahead with the agreement. Russia on Tuesday announced retaliatory measures in response to the US move to impose tariffs on foreign steel and aluminium. Economic Development Minister Maxim Oreshkin said in a statement that Moscow has decided to apply retaliatory measures in line with the World Trade Organisation's rules to compensate for damage incurred by the US tariffs. Oreshkin said that additional tariffs will be applied to a range of US imports, but he declined to immediately name them, saying his ministry will release the list in the coming days. He added that the tariffs will be applied to the US goods that have domestic equivalents to avoid hurting the national Oreshkin later told reporters that tariffs may apply to road construction equipment and some other items, but will not target medicines, according to Russian news agencies. The European Union, India, China and Russia all have applied to the to challenge the tariffs that took effect on March 23. Washington argued they were for national security reasons. Cotton yarn prices have jumped a little over 10 per cent in two weeks, due to a sharp increase in demand from markets abroad, following rupee depreciation. Along with yarn, there has been an increase in orders for Indian cotton from China , following a build-up in its trade war with the US. In a retaliatory measure, China has imposed 25 per cent duty on import of cotton from the US and is meeting its demand by sourcing more from India. As of Tuesday, the benchmark 40-count of cotton yarn was trading at Rs 240 a kg, up from Rs 215-218 earlier this month. The rupee depreciated by ... Two over-ground workers (OGWs) of the Pakistan-based Islamic extremist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) were arrested on Monday by the security forces when they tried to escape from a check post. A joint check post was laid by Police Component Rafiaabad, 32 Rashtriya Rifles and the 92nd Battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force near Dachanpora Crossing at Rohama. While checking, a motorcycle with two pillion riders on it tried to escape from the spot. The alert officials at the check post acted swiftly, chasing and eventually overpowering the duo. During preliminary questioning, they revealed their identities as Arif Ahmad Malla, a resident of Shitloo, and Rayees Ahmad Naik, a resident of Damhal Hanji Pora, Kulgam. A pistol, three pistol rounds, and a matrix sheet were recovered from Arif, while the police confiscated a hand grenade and a matrix sheet from Rayees. In this regard, a case under section 2/25 IA. Act, 13 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was registered against the two. During the course of the investigation, it was also revealed that the two were active LeT OGWs. Further investigation of the case is underway. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Malaysian carrier AirAsia Berhad on Tuesday refuted allegations made by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) against its global CEO Tony Fernandes and others, terming them as 'baseless, unsupported and unjustified.' AirAsia, in a statement, said that the claims made against Fernandes and its deputy group CEO, Bo Lingam, would be vigorously challenged. "The Board of Directors of AirAsia Group Berhad (AAGB) refutes strongly ALL the allegations made in the FIR as baseless, unsupported and unjustified and will vigorously challenge these allegations. We question the motives of the unnamed person, persons or organisation that lodged this FIR but we will co-operate fully with the Indian authorities in accordance with due process provided in law," the statement read. AirAsia, however, noted that they would co-operate fully with the Indian authorities in accordance with due process provided in law. The CBI booked Fernandes and others for allegedly trying to manipulate the government policies through corrupt means to get an international licence for its Indian venture Air Asia India Limited. The investigative agency alleged that the AirAsia Group CEO lobbied with the 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. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The general secretary for the All India Congress Committee, Jammu, and Kashmir, Surinder Singh Channi said the Bharatiya Janata Party-Peoples Democratic Party alliance was the "darkest phase" in the history of the state. Channi's statement came after the BJP pulled out of its alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir. "The (BJP-PDP) alliance was the darkest phase in the history of Jammu and Kashmir. A record number of ceasefire violations at the border areas clearly states that the BJP is a failure and all the promises made by them were a complete hoax. Despite being at the Centre, the BJP has failed in both fronts. In the past four years, the state has suffered a lot, be it at the ground level or framing a better policy for the betterment of the state," he said. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in a statement claimed that the BJP's decision to withdraw from the coalition government with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir at this particular moment has the potential of creating greater political instability in the state. "This alliance was untenable since the beginning. It was an alliance between forces that never saw eye to eye on any issue but came together in an act of sheer opportunism to share the spoils of office. The BJP was party to all decisions of the state government during the past three years and hence cannot absolve any responsibility for contributing to a further deterioration in the state and towards deepening the alienation of the people. It signifies the total political failure of the BJP's approach in Jammu & Kashmir," the CPI (M) said in a statement. The Party further claimed that the impending imposition of President's rule may not help in addressing the issue of the deepening alienation of the people. Earlier in the day, the BJP pulled out of its alliance with Mehbooba Mufti's PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, following which Mufti submitted her resignation to the state's governor. The differences between the BJP and the PDP cropped up following the government's decision to resume anti-terror operations in the state, which were suspended during Ramzan. "Terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of the citizens are under danger in the Valley. Shujaat Bukhari's killing is an example. We have taken a decision, it is untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, hence we are withdrawing," BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav said while addressing a press conference. The PDP had 28 MLAs in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, while the BJP had 25. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Centre on Tuesday set up a Chief Ministers' sub-group to coordinate policy approaches for agriculture and the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). The group will be headed by Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, and will constitute the Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Sikkim, along with Ramesh Chand of the NITI Aayog. The idea was proposed by Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu in the fourth Governing Council meeting of the NITI Aayog held on June 17. In the meeting, it was suggested to come out with approaches with special emphasis on pre-sowing and post-harvest interventions using the MGNREGS, for creating durable assets that double income of farmers and reduce agrarian distress. Prime Minister Narendra Modi nominated Chouhan to convene a sub-group of seven Chief Ministers for a coordinated policy approach on the agriculture sector and MGNREGS. The sub-group, which will be serviced by the NITI Aayog, has tentatively been assigned to suggest a wider choice of state-specific interventions both for pre-sowing and post-harvest to further improve the thrust on incomes, water conservation and waste to wealth. It has been asked to align works under the MGNREGS fully to the requirements of achieving the goal of doubling farmers' income by 2022, as this will improve thrust on water conservation, individual beneficiary schemes, and construction of rural 'haats', among others. The sub-group will also make recommendations on interventions of the MGNREGS that can facilitate reduction of agrarian distress including work availability, wage rates and seasonality among others. It will further explore the possibilities of MGNREGS as a livelihood resource for development and diversification of livelihoods of small and marginal farmers, especially those belonging to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe households. The ministers will have to suggest ways of aligning MGNREGS and its livelihood thrust with women Self Help Groups (SHGs), producer groups, and producer companies to enable a better use of resources for livelihood. As part of the sub-group, they will also explore the successful convergence of program resources across departments to ensure optimal fund utilisation, efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability. The sub-group will submit its report within three months from its date of constitution. The first meeting of the sub-group is expected to be held in the next month, as per the convenience of Chouhan. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Information and Broadcasting Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore inaugurated the European Union Film Festival at Siri Fort Auditorium in New Delhi on Monday. Speaking on the occasion, Rathore said it is a big step towards deepening the relationship between India and the European Union. He added, "This platform connects the people of both the countries emotionally, bringing joy and providing opportunities to experience different cultures." Rathore said films not only served as a medium to tell stories, but also allowed people to meet and cultures to converse. Slovakian Producer Katarina Krnacova, whose film 'Little Harbour' is the opening movie at the festival also attended the event. The festival aims at improving cultural ties between India and European countries, with the screening of 24 latest European movies from 23 European countries. The film festival will showcase some of the finest and most riveting films from Europe till 24th of June in Delhi. With a selection of 24 latest European films from 23 EU Member States, this years' film festival will traverse through 11 cities in India including New Delhi, Chennai, Port Blair, Pune, Puducherry, Kolkata, Jaipur, Visakhapatnam, Thrissur, Hyderabad and Goa from June 18 till August 31. Some of the films to be screened at the festival include - The Magic of Children from Austria, Labyrinthus from Belgium, Viktoria from Bulgaria and Cowboys from Croatia. This years' film festival, being organised by Directorate of Film Festivals, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, will brings some unusual stories for the world cinema enthusiasts. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) Pune and the Jammu and Kashmir Department of Information and Public Relations (DIPR), organised a three week long photograph workshop to promote digital photography here. The aim of the workshop is to create a platform for the youth as photography is the only medium that can highlight the beauty, culture, traditions, and general life of Kashmir which is commonly known as a photographer's paradise. The Foundation Course was particularly on both photography and screenplay writing but youngsters showed a keen interest in photography specifically. "As it's a foundation course, we have taught them basic things in different photography genres. We are trying to give them an insight into the photography industry and the equipments used there." FTII Pune trainer Faheem Ahmad Faheem told ANI. The participants were excited to get a chance to attend this type of workshop where they learned many things about professional photography in both theory and practical classes. "Photography is my passion. I want to thank FTII for giving us a platform for the first time where photographers like me can brush up our talent.There should be more workshops like this," said a participant. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday said India and the European Union (EU) should work together to combat the menace of terrorism and radicalisation. Addressing a gathering of diplomats, policy makers and academics in Athens on the subject "India and Europe in a Changing World", President Kovind said terrorism and radicalisation were "pressing global concerns." "Pockets of instability and extremism can be found in the region to Europe's east and India's west. They are a worry for both Europe and India. Promotion of terrorism by state and non-state actors, extremism in a variety of forms and rooted in senseless hate, the proliferation of sensitive weapons, the use of regular communication and financial channels by terror groups - these pose a challenge to not one nation or the other but to all humanity," he said. The President said India and the EU must persuade the to not distinguish between so-called "good" and "bad" terrorists, to shame and sanction state sponsors of terrorism, and to strengthen multilateral platforms such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum (GTCF). President Kovind expressed India's willingness to share its domestic experiences and success stories in a manner that may be useful to EU. He underscored that New Delhi was always committed to peace. President Kovind said that India saw peace not just as the absence of conflict, but as a reflection of sustainable development and indeed of any effort that anticipates and prevents strife and suffering. "When we work for combating climate change, we contribute to peace. When we assist other developing countries, as per their priorities, and strive for a less unequal world we contribute to world peace. When we rescue and evacuate not just our own citizens from troubled regions, but those of 40 other countries - as we did during the Yemen crisis of 2015 - we contribute to world peace. When we put considerable troops and resources at the disposal of United Nations peacekeeping operations, we contribute to world peace," he stressed. The event was organised by the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) - a leading foreign policy think tank in Greece and in Europe. President Kovind is currently on a three-nation visit to Greece, Suriname and Cuba. He will leave for Suriname later in the day. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and France have reiterated their commitment and support to each other in combating terrorism. "It is the priority of both the nations to keep our societies safe. Therefore a co-operation between our agencies is necessary, we will support each other in fight against terrorism," External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj said while addressing media along with French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian. Sushma Swaraj, who is on a week-long four-nation visit to Italy, France, Luxembourg and Brussels, arrived in Paris on Monday. "Besides our bilateral relations, we also focus on regional and international co-operation. We would like to thank France for the support for India's candidature for permanent seat in Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC)," she added. Le Drian said the two countries "would like to work together" on the developments in the Korean peninsula, adding "We think that we will be able to pursue our co-operation in the military field as well." Taking note of the agreement for six nuclear reactors in Jaitapur discussed between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron in March, Le Drian said the two sides have discussed their cooperation in nuclear sector. "We have to move discussions forward so the project is rolled out by end of year," the French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs added. Swaraj has also extended an invitation to Le Drian to visit India at a "mutually convenient time." Her visit is particularly imperative as this year, India and France complete two decades of their strategic ties. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Greece will strengthen the bilateral economic relationship by focusing on sectors like shipping, tourism and agriculture, confirmed an official from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). "Wide range of issues has been discussed during President's visit. Special emphasis is being given to economic issues. We will focus on sectors like shipping, tourism and agriculture to strengthen our economic relations," MEA Joint Secretary (Central Europe) Subrata Bhattacharjee said on Monday on President Kovind's visit to Greece. President Kovind, who is on a three-nation, nine-day visit, arrived in Athens, the capital city of Greece on Saturday. Echoing a similar sentiment, India's Ambassador to Greece Shamma Jain dwelled on as to how Greece, at the moment, is recovering from breakdown of its economy and is looking at nations which can invest here, adding that India holds great importance for Greece. Jain also noted that it is after eleven years that an Indian president visited the European country. Earlier in the day President Kovind attended a business-level meeting in Athens. In Greece, President Kovind had underscored on employment opportunities, Goods and Services tax (GST), and Mudra scheme, digitisation among others. "Greece has worked in fields of processing, shipping, food, and tech, in India which has created employment opportunities in the country," President Kovind had said. He further highlighted the major developments undertaken by India as it became the world's fastest-growing economy, and the third largest market, while the Economic Forum 2017 declared the Indian economy as the third most trusted in the President Kovind mentioned the Goods and Services tax, and Mudra scheme, aimed at banking the unbanked, and digitisation. He also mentioned the International Solar Alliance (ISA), an initiative by India to highlight the importance of solar energy. The ISA's founding conference was held in March in New Delhi. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Indian Government on Tuesday repatriated six Pakistani prisoners, including a woman and a child, back to their country through the Attari-Wagah border. "In addition, four Pakistan prisoners have already been released and repatriated in 2018, so far," read a statement from the Ministry of External Affairs. "India attaches high priority to addressing all humanitarian issues, including early release and repatriation of Indian fishermen and prisoners in Pakistan's custody. The release of 147 Indian prisoners, including 146 fishermen, has been secured in 2018, so far," the statement further read. "I was in jail in India for 1.5 years after the Indian Army arrested me from the border. I am thankful to the Indian government for relieving me," one of the six prisoners, named Mahmed Nadeem, told ANI. Similar was the story of another prisoner, named Akhtar-ul-Islam. "I am from Lahore. I crossed the border and came to India by mistake. The session court and High Court have set me free from all charges. It feels good that I am going back to my nation. Currently, it's my 12th year in India. I was 20 when I was caught," he said. "I want to request the governments in India and Pakistan that please don't do politics when it comes to the life of prisoners because their lives are wasted due to long pending cases," the prisoner added. In October last year, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had suggested that the two sides could progress on humanitarian issues related to elderly, women, children and mentally unsound prisoners. Following that, in March this year, India and Pakistan had agreed to release and repatriate women prisoners and those above 60 and below 18 years of age. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) After consulting leaders from all the major political parties in Jammu and Kashmir, Governor Narinder Nath Vohra on Tuesday forwarded his report to the President of India for the imposition of Governor's Rule under Section 92 of the Constitution. This came after Mehbooba Mufti resigned as Jammu and Kashmir's Chief Minister earlier in the day following the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) exit from its alliance with the People's Democratic Party (PDP) in the state. "I have submitted my resignation (as Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir) to the Governor. The alliance was formed against the wishes of the people, yet Mufti Mohammad Sayeed formed this alliance with a vision. We though BJP is a very big party, which came to power on a strong mandate. We thought this (alliance) would help us solve the different issues of the state," Mufti said in a press conference here. She added that the basic motive of the alliance was "reconciliation, dialogue with the people of Kashmir, promoting confidence-building measures and good relationships with Pakistan." "All these were the agendas of the alliance. When the BJP and PDP got the mandate in Jammu and Kashmir, the biggest apprehension in people's mind was over Article 370, special status to the state," Mufti further said. The BJP's decision apparently came after its President Amit Shah held a meeting with the party's Jammu and Kashmir cabinet ministers. Citing examples of the growing acts of "terrorism, violence and radicalisation" in the state over the past few years, BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav, while addressing a press conference in the capital, said that the party was left with no other option, but to discontinue its alliance with the PDP. "We have taken a decision, it is untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, and hence we are withdrawing," Madhav said. The BJP and PDP formed a coalition government in 2015 after the state elections threw up a hung assembly. However, both of them were ideologically divided on a variety of issues. The BJP had 25 seats in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, while the PDP had 28. This will be the fourth time in the last 10 years if a Governor's rule is imposed in Jammu and Kashmir. It was imposed in July 2008, following the resignation of then chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad in the wake of the PDP pulling out of the coalition government with the Congress. The state was under Governor's rule in December 2014, following the hung verdict in the assembly elections that year. Governor's rule was again imposed in the state in January 2016 following the death of then chief minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, as his daughter Mehbooba Mufti seemed reluctant to continue the alliance with the BJP. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The IndiGo call center received a bomb threat for its Jaipur-Mumbai flight early morning on Tuesday . The call was received around 5:30 in the morning from an unidentified person. "The IndiGo call center received a call at around 5:30 am this morning from an unidentified person mentioning a bomb threat to 6E 218 operating a Jaipur - Mumbai flight. We immediately reported the matter to Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) and followed all security protocols," IndiGo airlines said in a statement. "The concerned authorities carried out the investigation and declared the call as specific bomb threat. Following clearance, operations will be resumed as normal," the statement further added. Further details are awaited. On a related note, in March this year a Delhi-Kolkata Air India flight, AI-020, returned to the Delhi airport after a bomb threat call was received by the carrier's call centre. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) After a period of nine days, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal ended his sit-in strike at Raj Niwas, Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal's office-cum-residence. This move came after Baijal wrote to Kejriwal, asking them to hold a meeting with IAS officers to sort out their differences. Addressing the media, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the officers have started attending meetings, due to which the strike ended. Earlier in the day, Baijal, in a letter to Kejriwal, directed that a meeting be held for the officers to sort out any differences with the government. "Lieutenant Governor (has) requested Chief Minister to urgently meet the officers in the Secretariat so that apprehensions and concerns of both sides can be suitably addressed through dialogue in the best interest of the people of Delhi," a release from Raj Niwas read. "Lieutenant Governor has written that earlier also, he had advised making efforts to restore trust between the elected government and the officers. Lieutenant Governor stated that he was glad that Chief Minister had tweeted an appeal to the officers assuring them of safety and security in their interactions with the elected government," the release further stated. On Sunday, Kejriwal had assured the officers that he would ensure their safety and security if they attend the meeting called by ministers. Kejriwal, Sisodia along with Delhi Health Minister Satyendra Kumar Jain and Cabinet minister Gopal Rai had been camping at the Raj Niwas for the past one week, demanding a direction to the IAS officers working under the Delhi administration to end their undeclared strike. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has again written a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing the Centre of reducing Delhi to a 10-percent state. While urging the Prime Minister to ask IAS officers to call off their alleged 'strike,' Kejriwal, in his letter, also said that the premier was operating with an intention of crippling the Delhi Government as it was not run by the Bharatiya Janata Party. "I am supposed to work with the IAS officers but I can't take disciplinary action against them, can't transfer them, and I can't even punish the corrupt officers," he wrote. Kejriwal further said that the Centre snatched away their rights over the IAS officers, adding that former chief minister Sheila Dikshit had much more power in her hands. "During Sheila Dikshit's regime, she could transfer any officer, suspend them, and take action against corrupt officers. But, we don't have even 10 percent of that power. In an order in 2015, all IAS officers would come directly under the central government and no state government would have control over them." The Chief Minister further demanded that the rights the government had before 2015 to be restored. He continued that they tried to meet Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal for the past eight days, but no meeting took place. "We wrote over 4 letters to the Lt. Governor in the past 10 days, but there is no response. The Lt. Governor refused to meet Chief Ministers, Ministers, and Members of Parliament. In fact, when two MLAs went to meet him, he called the police and threw them out," wrote Kejriwal. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The condition of the wife of Pakistan's former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, Begum Kulsoom, is highly critical, according to the doctors treating her at Harley Street Clinic in London. The five-member board of doctors on Tuesday briefed the Sharif family that Begum Kulsoom will not be taken off the ventilator as of now and asked Nawaz to await another review of her condition, reported Geo TV. Doctors maintained that Begum Kulsoom's condition has not deteriorated but has not improved significantly either since last Thursday, the report said. Kulsoom was shifted to intensive care on June 14, after suffering a cardiac arrest. She was then put on life support and is undergoing treatment. The same day, Sharif with his daughter, Maryam Nawaz, had reached London. Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Shehbaz Sharif on June 17 arrived in London to see his ailing sister-in-law. Following the advice by the doctors, Nawaz and his daughter, Maryam Nawaz have delayed their return to Pakistan. The counsels for Nawaz and Maryam have been asked to seek exemption from appearance in the accountability court of Islamabad. With the exemption request, they will also submit Kulsoom's medical report and the doctor's letter. Meanwhile, the doctors and Sharif family are yet to decide whether to remove Kulsoom's life support or not. Nawaz said, his wife was critical and still sedated. Kulsoom Nawaz has undergone multiple surgeries from August 2017, after she was diagnosed with throat cancer (lymphoma). Her condition began to deteriorate in April this year, after which she was moved to London for treatment. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) Chief Lalu Prasad has been admitted to Asian Heart Institute here. The RJD Chief was hospitalised following chest pain and low haemoglobin count. Lalu was accompanied by his son Tejashwi Yadav and daughter Misa Bharti. Earlier this month, the RJD Chief returned to Patna after undergoing treatment for heart-related problems at the aforementioned heart institute. Prior to that, Lalu was undergoing treatment at Ranchi's Rajendra Institute Medical Sciences (RIMS), where he was admitted on March 16 after he complained of discomfort at Birsa Munda Jail. He was later moved to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi's Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal wrote a letter to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, asking him to hold a meeting with officers to sort out the differences between his government and the bureaucrats. Baijal's letter was in response to Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi, Manish Sisodia's letter to him, seeking the former's help to end the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers' 'strike' in the capital. "Lieutenant Governor (has) requested Chief Minister to urgently meet the officers in the Secretariat, so that apprehensions and concerns of both sides can be suitably addressed through dialogue in the best interest of the people of Delhi," a release from Raj Niwas read. "Lieutenant Governor has written that earlier also, he had advised to make efforts to restore trust between the elected government and the officers. Lieutenant Governor stated that he was glad that Chief Minister had tweeted an appeal to the officers assuring them of safety and security in their interactions with the elected government," the release further stated. On Sunday, Kejriwal had assured the officers that he would ensure their safety and security if they attend the meeting called by ministers. Kejriwal, Sisodia along with Delhi Health Minister Satyendra Kumar Jain and Cabinet minister Gopal Rai had been camping at the Raj Niwas for the past one week, demanding a direction to the IAS officers working under the Delhi administration to end their undeclared strike. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Tuesday announced an ex-gratia of Rs. 2 lakh each for the kin of the people killed in Lucknow fire. The Chief Minister also announced a compensation of Rs. 50,000 to grievously injured. Four people were killed and many others injured after a major fire broke out at a hotel in Lucknow's Charbagh area. An investigation has been initiated in the incident. "If we find any lapse on hotel's part during our investigation, we will take strict action against the people concerned," Lucknow Inspector General (I.G.) of Police, S Pandey told media here. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amid the increasing number of sexual crimes against minors in the country, Union Minister of Women and Child Development (WCD) Maneka Gandhi called for Rape Investigation Kits to be placed in all police stations for immediate preliminary investigation. Speaking at the launch of the "Handbook on legal processes for Police in respect of Crime against Children", Maneka said a number of measures are being taken to increase awareness among children. "The issue has been taken up with HRD Ministry to print POCSO related laws on the front and back of all text books to increase awareness among children.We have also suggested that an e-box complaint system be installed for school children to come up against the issues of sexual harassment," she said. Maneka also shed light on the short documentary "Komal", which aims at sensitizing children on "good and bad touch". She also informed that five new forensic laboratories are being established to cater to the investigation of an average 2,000 rape cases every year. Reiterating the centre's commitment to create a "nation free of violence against women and children," Maneka urged all stakeholders to unite in preventing and combating crimes against children. The handbook is a composite tool which will aid police personnel to chart a step-by-step procedure to be adopted in cases of crimes against children. Legislations and the latest rulings of Courts are also mentioned in the book. A team led by Dr. P.M. Nair of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) has developed this comprehensive, user-friendly, process oriented document published by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D) in partnership with TISS. At the launch event, Maneka said the WCD Ministry will work closely with identified stakeholders to ensure that the Handbook is available in every police station, preferably in local languages. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Mehbooba Mufti on Tuesday resigned as the Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulled out of the alliance with the People's Democratic Party (PDP) in the state. "She (Mehbooba Mufti) has submitted her resignation (as Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir) to the Governor (Narinder Nath Vohra)," PDP's Naeem Akhtar said following the announcement. The BJP's decision apparently came after its President Amit Shah held a meeting with the party's Jammu and Kashmir cabinet ministers. Citing examples of the growing acts of "terrorism, violence and radicalisation" in the state over the past few years, BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav, while addressing a press conference in the capital, said the party was left with no other option, but to discontinue its alliance with the PDP. "We have taken a decision, it is untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, and hence we are withdrawing," Madhav said. The differences between the BJP and the PDP cropped up following the Centre's decision to resume anti-terror operations in the state, which were suspended during the holy month of Ramzan. "Terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of the citizens are under danger in the Valley. Shujaat Bukhari's killing is an example. Keeping in mind the larger interest of India's security and integrity, the fact is that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India. In order to bring control over the situation prevailing in the state, we have decided that the reign of power in the state be handed over to the Governor," Madhav added. Madhav further alleged that the PDP has not shown a whole-hearted effort to control ceasefire violation from across the border. "Centre did everything for the Valley. We've tried to put a full-stop to the ceasefire violations by Pakistan. The PDP has not been successful in fulfilling its promises. Our leaders have been facing a lot of difficulties from the PDP in developmental works in Jammu and Ladakh," Madhav said. With the PDP-BJP coalition falling apart, the state might come under the governor's rule. However, Madhav cleared that the Centre will continue its efforts to stop any kind of violence in the state. "Even if Governor's rule is imposed in Jammu and Kashmir, our efforts to fight terrorism will continue," he said. He also said that the BJP formed an alliance with the PDP just to "respect the mandate of the people". "If we would not have formed government at that time, Governor's rule or Presidential rule would have been imposed in the Valley. We had an alliance with them just for the mandate that was given by people," he said. The BJP's decision to pull out of the alliance came as a surprise for the PDP. "We tried our best to run the government with the BJP. This had to happen. This is a surprise for us, because we did not have any indication about their decision," PDP Spokesperson Rafi Ahmad Mir told ANI. The BJP and PDP have had a love-hate relationship from time to time in the last three years. The two parties formed a coalition government in 2015 after the state elections threw up a hung assembly. However, both of them were ideologically divided on a variety of issues. The BJP had 25 seats in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, while the PDP had 28. In April this year, their alliance seemed to be under strain after the gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl from a Muslim community in Jammu's Kathua district. This will be the fourth time in the last 10 years if a Governor's rule is imposed in Jammu and Kashmir. It was imposed in July 2008, following the resignation of then Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad in the wake of the PDP pulling out of the coalition government with the Congress. The state was under governor's rule in December 2014, following the hung verdict in the assembly elections that year. Governor's rule was again imposed in the state in January 2016 following the death of then chief minster Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, as his daughter Mehbooba Mufti seemed reluctant to continue the alliance with the BJP. As for the Congress, party leader Ghulam Nabi Azad has made it clear that the party has no intentions to form an alliance with the PDP again. "Whatever has happened is good. People of Jammu and Kashmir will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined Kashmir and have now pulled out. Maximum number of civilians and army men died during these three years. That question does not arise (on forming alliance with PDP)," Azad said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Madhya Pradesh Governor Anandiben Patel has directed all state universities and colleges to observe International Yoga Day slated to be held on June 21. The educational institutions have been directed to send photographs of the preparations of the event, the names of the participating students and teachers and a CD of the function to the Raj Bhawan till 4 pm on Tuesday, as per a circular. Further, all universities and colleges have been ordered to hold seminars, competitions, debates and other events on International Yoga Day. On a similar note, West Bengal Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi issued a similar circular earlier this month directing vice-chancellors of all state universities to observe International Yoga Day. In 2014, an international day for yoga was declared unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) accepting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's proposal for the same. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nepal Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli embarked on a six-day official visit to China on Tuesday. On Wednesday, PM Oli is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People and his counterpart Li Keqiang on Thursday. According to officials, after the visit, China is likely to announce a significant aid or project for Nepal to showcase its deep attachment to Nepal. Apart from discussing the Protocol to the Transit and Transport Agreement, other pacts and Memorandum of Understanding (MoUs) on connectivity (through China's Belt and Road Initiative), linking China and Kathmandu via rail, energy, tourism, post-earthquake reconstruction, border entry points and construction of petroleum storage facilities are expected to be signed, Kathmandu Post reported. PM Oli informed that Nepal will seek Chinese assistance in three areas-direct aid, cooperation and joint investments. During his previous visit to China in 2016, Oli had signed 10-point agreement, including a deal on transit trade aiming to reduce Nepal's significant dependence on India. If implemented, the transit agreement would give Nepal access to sea routes via the Chinese port of Tianjin. PM Oli will also meet with the President of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Jin Liquan, to explore projects to be financed by the Chinese-led institution. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Weeks after the tourism industry in Himachal Pradesh was massively hit due to acute water crisis, the hoteliers have appealed to tourists to visit Shimla without any apprehensions. The hoteliers have requested tourists to visit the capital as the water crisis is over now, and also enjoy the pleasant weather. Speaking to ANI, Hotel and Restaurant Association of Northern India (HRANI) president Sanjay Sood said "Tourism which is the backbone of Shimla had taken a hit due to the water crisis over last month, but things have now become normal. Due to water crisis we lost 50 percent business. Thanks to government's intervention as crisis is now resolved". "We want tourists be informed that there is no water crisis now and they can come here. Since bookings have dropped, at this time we are offering discount," Sood added. Sood further thanked Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur and acting Chief Justice Sanjay Karol for ensuring proper water supply in establishments which cater to tourists. "Despite water crisis, we never let the feeling of water shortage prevail among tourists, who had visited the city," Anil Walia, HRANI's member told ANI. The tourism industry, including restaurants and taxi operators, were hit severely due to the water crisis. The tourist influx was dropped over 60 per cent in the city. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chairperson Imran Khan's legal counsel Babar Awan on Monday termed the objections to former's candidacy for NA-53 constituency of Islamabad for the upcoming general elections as baseless. Submitting a reply, Awan's assistant lawyer stated that the objections to Imran's candidacy are baseless and based on fraud, Geo News reported. The reply submitted objects photo stated documents and had issues regarding its verification. The objections raised against Imran fall under the ambit of forgery, it further added. The reply also mentioned that there is a legal procedure in place to send or receive documents from foreign countries, calling the objections raised against Imran's candidacy as allegations. On Monday, the PTI Chief and his counsel did not appear before the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) in Lahore to get their nomination papers for NA-53 scrutinised. Khan had sought ECP's permission to appear on Tuesday, which was later accepted. Imran was further ordered to submit a reply to the allegations put forward by a citizen named Abdul Wahab Baloch. On June 12, Imran's nomination papers, filed from NA-243 Karachi, were challenged by Baloch. Baloch had contested Imran's candidature on basis of Article 62 (1) (f) over allegations that he fathered a "love child" with a woman named Sita White, reports the Express Tribune. Imran has submitted nomination papers from National Assembly constituencies in Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Bannu and Mianwali to contest in the elections slated for July 25. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) As many as 42,000 copies of the Class 10 examination have disappeared from one of the evaluation centres in Bihar's Gopalganj a day before the declaration of results by the Bihar School Examination Board. The principal of S. S. Balika Inter School, Pramod Kumar Srivastav, was held in connection with the same. 216 bundles, amounting to approximately 42,000 answer sheets, went missing on Tuesday. The information about the disappearance of the answer sheets surfaced when the Bihar School Examination Board sought to examine the answer sheets of some students. The principal of the school was summoned to Patna for investigation in the case, upon the completion of which, he was held and handed back to the Gopalganj police for further investigation. Srivastav had earlier lodged an FIR in connection with the incident in the city police station against a guard and a peon who worked at the school. He also blamed a conspiracy against him to be behind the disappearance of the answer sheets. "This has been an ideal examination centre in previous examinations. Some people were jealous of that and they hatched a conspiracy against me, so they committed this crime in the middle of the night," Srivastav had told ANI. The Bihar Board class 10th examinations were held between 21 February and 28 February, and the results were scheduled to be released on Wednesday, June 20. However, in the wake of the incident, the results would now be declared on June 26. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Dr Parakala Prabhakar has stepped down from the post of Advisor (Communications) to the Andhra Pradesh government. The husband of Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Prabhakar has blamed the Opposition for his resignation. Prabhakar has been a target of the opposition parties in the state, ever since the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) broke up with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in March over unfulfillment the Centre's promises to Andhra Pradesh. "Over the last few days, opposition leaders have been pointing fingers at me. They have been questioning your support to me, even when you are fighting with the BJP over the special status issue. This has really made me sad," Prabhakar said in his letter to Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu. "They (Opposition) doubt the struggle that you are leading against the Union government. They are using my existence in the government to mock your commitment towards the state. Even YSR Congress Party chief Jaganmohan Reddy has raised the same issue, and mocked your struggle and commitment," he added. However, Prabhakar said he respected the Chief Minister for neglecting the Opposition's comments on him and his family members. "Claims are being made that because my family member belongs to another party, and has different political views, I might compromise on the state's interest. This has hurt me. I do not want you or your government to be disrespected because of me," he said. "Yesterday, I brought this matter to your notice. You said that you have complete trust in me. I have thought a lot regarding this matter. Therefore, I request you to please accept my resignation," Prabhakar added. Over the past few weeks, Opposition parties in Andhra Pradesh, including the YSRCP, have repeatedly questioned why Prabhakar has continued to hold his position even after the TDP parted ways with BJP in the state. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The PepsiCo Foundation has announced the expansion of its water access initiatives in India with an aim to positively impact 2,00,000 people in communities around its plants. PepsiCo Foundation will provide a USD 4.26 million grant to WaterAid, a leading international non-profit, to provide safe water access to communities in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala by December 2020. The project is in line with Goal 6 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which covers access to safe water and sanitation. Globally, PepsiCo, through its 'Performance with Purpose 2025 agenda', has a goal to provide access to safe water to a total of 25 million people since 2006 in the world's most at-risk areas. Over the next three years, WaterAid in India will focus on implementing solutions that will help increase access to clean water; build community and government capacity to manage water resources including regular water quality testing, conduct trainings for operation and maintenance; and educate community members to adopt sustainable sanitation and hygiene practices. These solutions are aimed at helping improve water security for these communities and will also promote water conservation and recharge measures including rainwater harvesting. "PepsiCo aims to help communities effectively conserve, manage, and distribute water. In India, we work on several programs that focus on water replenishment, livelihood enhancement. PepsiCo Foundation's partnership with WaterAid supports our goal to improve water security for communities through Sustainable Access to Safe Water," said president and CEO, PepsiCo India, Ahmed ElSheikh. "We see a synergy between the PepsiCo Foundation's efforts to provide safe water and our own work, and look forward to creating a stewardship around water that involves all citizens and stakeholders," said chief executive, WaterAid India, VK Madhavan. The grant builds on investments worth over USD 17 million that the Foundation has made in India to date. These grants have been focused on providing safe water and sanitation solutions to underserved communities and have positively impacted 10 million people in water-stressed areas. Programs included partnerships with NGOs like Safe Water Network to set up more than 100 community Reverse Osmosis (RO) water stations in India and Water.Org to provide access to safe water and sanitation through micro-lending. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Days ahead of the International Yoga Day, Yoga guru Ramdev on Tuesday said that he wishes to establish world health, peace and harmony through Yoga. Ramdev also emphasised the benefits of fitness by saying that country can be on top if youth and people excel in fitness. "People who perform yoga will never be sad or depressed...they will not even think of committing suicide. With yoga- mind, body and soul will always be relaxed also youth and people will excel in fitness. For a stress free and disease free life yoga is important," Ramdev told media here. A Yoga camp has been organised in Rajasthan's Kota city ahead of the 4th International Yoga Day. A large number of people attended the camp and practiced yoga asanas. Ramdev conducted the Yoga session along with students and youth. Yoga is a physical, mental and spiritual practice attributed mostly to India. International Yoga Day is celebrated annually on 21 June since its inception in 2015. An international day for yoga was declared unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier in his UN address suggested the date of 21 June for the yoga day, as it is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and shares special significance in many parts of the world. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 17-member South Korean team visited the North Korean border town of Kaesong to repair their liaison office. According to the unification ministry, the two Koreas agreed to open a liaison office for better communication. The group, which included ministry officials and staff of Hyundai Asan, entered the western border town around 10 a.m., the Yonhap news agency reported. The team plans to travel to Kaesong again on Wednesday. The two Koreas decided to open the liaison office at an early date in anticipation of increased cross-border exchanges. The opening of the liaison office is seen as a first step towards implementing promises both leaders made in their summit talks in April and May. In April, North and South Korea agreed to sign a peace treaty formally later this year, ending a 65-year-old long war between them. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hollywood filmmaker Sam Mendes is set to team up with legendary producer Steven Spielberg for the World War I drama film '1917'. Mendes, who co-wrote the film, will direct it too. The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that the script was picked up by Spielberg's Amblin Partners (content creation company). According to the Hollywood Reporter, the deal comes with a commitment of raising $100 million in funds for the movie. Amblin is also planting a flag for a December 2019 release through the company's distribution partner, Universal Pictures. This will be the first time behind the cameras for Mendes since directing the last two James Bond movies, Skyfall and Spectre. Mendes worked with Spielberg on his first two movies while the latter was running DreamWorks. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that this company was behind Mendes' five Oscars for his debut film American Beauty (1999). "Our company has been a home for Sam since his first film," The Hollywood Reporter quoted Spielberg as saying. Spielberg expressed his happiness on getting a talented director like Mendes behind the camera "I am so happy to have him back here in his old room spinning new stories - especially this hugely daring and ambitious new movie." added Spielberg. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is scheduled to visit China on Tuesday to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping. The meeting is in reference to Kim's historic summit with United States President Donald Trump in Singapore. As per Yonhap, a ranking official from Seoul's presidential office Cheong Wa Dae said, the North Korean government is well aware of ongoing developments between Beijing and Pyongyang. It will be the third meeting between Kim and Xi. They earlier met in Chinese port city of Dalian for a summit on May 8. Prior to his summits with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on April 27 and with U.S. President Donald Trump on June 12, Kim made his first foreign trip to China in March to meet Xi in Beijing. Earlier, Trump had explained the outcome of the summit to South Korean President Moon Jae-in in a telephone conversation. Trump and Kim, on June 12 signed a joint agreement, according to which Kim committed to 'complete denuclearisation of Korean Peninsula' and Trump pledged 'security guarantees' to the North. At the summit, Trump and Kim decided to build new relations by making joint efforts to establish a lasting peace on the Korean peninsula. They also recovered the remains of prisoners of war and those missing in action during the 1950-53 Korean War. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States and South Korean militaries on Monday suspended their joint military drill that was scheduled to take place in August. This comes after US President Donald Trump and North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un held a historic summit in Singapore. The Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White on Monday said the Pentagon has "suspended all planning" for the August joint military exercises with South Korea and several allies in the region. "Consistent with President Trump's commitment and in concert with our Republic of Korea ally, the United States military has suspended all planning for this August's defensive 'wargame'. We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent wargames have been made," CNN quoted White as saying. US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton are to meet later this week to discuss the issue, White informed. US President Donald Trump on June 12, after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, had said, that the US would halt war games with South Korea. South Korea and the US have been conducting combined routine training for years to prepare for a possible attack from the North. Trump and Kim, on June 12 signed a joint agreement, according to which Kim committed to 'complete denuclearisation of Korean Peninsula' a while Trump pledged 'security guarantees' to the North. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Dena Bank rose 2.77% to Rs 16.70 at 14:56 IST on BSE after the bank said that a meeting of the board of directors of the bank will be held on 22 June 2018 to consider capital planning of the bank for FY 2018-19. The announcement was made during market hours today, 19 June 2018. Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 172.79 points, or 0.49% to 35,375.47. On the BSE, 2.17 lakh shares were traded in the counter so far compared with average daily volumes of 1.27 lakh shares in the past two weeks. The stock had hit a high of Rs 16.90 and a low of Rs 16.40 so far during the day. The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 36.10 on 11 July 2017. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 15.05 on 6 June 2018. Dena Bank said that a meeting of the board of directors of the bank will be held on 22 June 2018 to consider capital planning of the bank for FY 2018-19. The board may consider raising the fund through FPO / Rights Issue / Preferential Issue / Qualified Institutions Placement (QIP) / Employee Stock Purchase Scheme (ESPS), etc. Dena Bank reported net loss of Rs 1225.42 crore in Q4 March 2018 as against net loss of Rs 575.26 crore in Q4 March 2017. Total income declined 8.48% to Rs 2390.68 crore in Q4 March 2018 over Q4 March 2017. Dena Bank is a public sector bank. The Government of India held 80.74% stake in the bank as on 31 March 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.) Five illegal immigrants were drowned on Monday, and 191 others rescued off the western coast of Libya, Libyan navy spokesperson said. Two separate operations were carried out by the coast guards, Ayob Qassem, adding that the first one was eight miles off Mellita town in the city of Zuwara, some 120 km west of the capital Tripoli, and rescued 115 illegal immigrants on a rubber boat. "Five bodies of immigrants were recovered," Qassem said, reports Xinhua news agency. The illegal immigrants were in a bad condition as a result of waves hitting their boat, tearing it apart, and water leaking. Some of them fell and drowned in the sea, Qassem said. The spokesperson said the rescued were taken to Tripoli naval base, and provided with humanitarian and medical assistance. They were then handed over to the anti-illegal immigration department of Tripoli. Qassem also said that 76 others of different African nationalities were rescued in another operation off the coast of the city of Zawiya, some 45 km west of Tripoli, confirming that the migrants were also handed over to the anti-illegal immigration department. Libya is a preferred point of departure for illegal immigrants who want to cross the Mediterranean towards Europe, due to the state of insecurity and chaos. Improved weather conditions increase the flows of migrants towards Europe, particularly off the western coast of Libya. --IANS nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Arab coalition forces on Monday continued air, sea and ground bombardment on Iranian-allied Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen's Red Sea port city of Hodeidah. The coalition, led by armies of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE), launched major assault six days ago aiming at capturing the city's strategic airport in the southern edge of Hodeidah. Human rights activist Adel Bishr of local independent Al-Saleh Charity Foundation told Xinhua that the ground battles were still centered in Manzara village along the Red Sea shore, around 10 km southeast of the airport. Houthi fighters using AK-47 Klashnikov rifles have strongly fought back, and blocked several advancing attempts by the coalition forces, Bishr said. "The airport and all its gates and main roads around it are still under control of Houthi fighters," said Bishr who along with a 10-member team travelled from Sanaa to Hodeidah last week for a humanitarian task, reported Xinhua news agency. He said the situation inside the city is relatively calm, but the coalition warplanes have conducted tens of air strikes on the airport, "causing panic among the residents." Houthi-run al-Masira television reported six air strikes hit al-Durayhemi district and areas around the airport. It said one air strike hit a house in the district, killing four men and a woman. On Sunday, the television reported 26 air strikes on the airport. The whole port city of around 600,000 people is still under the control of Houthi fighters, according to Bishr. "Houthi fighters have cut off the Kilo 16 Road linking Hodeidah downtown to the highway leading to the capital Sanaa, and set up dozens of military checkpoints," Bishr said. Nearly 3,000 people had fled Manzara and al-Durayhemi district to schools inside Hodeidah city and some others managed to escape to mountainous districts far away. "I heard from some of the displaced families that they saw dozens of dead fighters from both rival forces lying on the streets in Manzara and along the road leading to the airport," Bishr said. The coalition said it has gathered 20,000 soldiers for the most major battle since more than three years of war, and there will be swift and clean assault to seize the air and sea ports. Houthi media reported that they have dispatched 4,000 fighters in pick-up vehicles for defending the port city. Meanwhile, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash told a news conference in Dubai that the coalition forces' offensive in the Yemeni western coast, which leads by his country's forces, are taking into account the humanitarian situations and the population. "Our approach is methodical, gradual to pressure Houthis to do the right thing, which is basically the decision to withdraw unconditionally," Gargash said. Gargash said the coalition leadership is in contact with Martin Griffiths, the UN special envoy for Yemen, to secure a deal with Houthi to retreat from Hodeidah. Griffiths arrived in Yemen's rebel-held capital Sanaa on Saturday, in renewed effort to stop the fighting in Hodeidah. It is the second official visit to Sanaa by Griffiths in two weeks. Griffiths stressed that the UN is determined to press ahead with the political process to halt the ongoing fighting in the southern port city of Hodeidah, according to the Houthi media reports. On Monday, Griffiths met with Houthi top official Mahdi al-Mashat to discuss the possibility of stopping the war, the rebel-controlled Saba news agency reported, but it provided no further details. Griffiths is expected to leave Sanaa on Tuesday, according to a Houthi official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. International humanitarian agencies have warned that an assault on Hodeidah would be a major disaster to the densely populated port city and would block aid supplies to more than 20 million people. Hodeidah is the only lifeline route of supplying imports and humanitarian aid to the northern Yemen. The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen in March 2015. The war has killed over 10,000 people, mostly civilians, and forced 3 million others out of their homes. --IANS nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Budget passenger carrier AirAsia India (AAIL) on Tuesday refuted allegations against it in connection with an alleged bribery case to get FDI rules tweaked. According to the airline, it continues to cooperate with all regulatory agencies "to present the correct facts and hopes to bring early resolution to issues under investigations". The development comes after CBI on May 28 filed a FIR against company's Director R. 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. "The investigations pertain to, inter alia, the interactions of AAIL with government authorities. All such interactions were conducted in a transparent manner and AAIL has not engaged in any wrong doing in relation thereto. Consequently, AAIL refutes all such allegations made against it in the FIR," the airline said in a statement. "AAIL reviews its internal controls and process on a continuous basis to strengthen its operations." As per the statement: "No findings have been made against the Directors of AAIL and furthermore audits and forensic reports have not indicated any impropriety against any of the Directors of AAIL including R. Venkataramanan (Non-Executive Director, AAIL)." The airline said that in April 2016, the company's Board was seized of some inappropriate and questionable actions by the erstwhile CEO of AAIL. "AAIL appointed Deloitte India to examine such issues and based on the report of Deloitte India, AAIL filed criminal charges against its former CEO," the statement said. The budget airline also instituted a civil suit in June 2017 against its former CEO in the Civil Courts in Bangalore. "Based on a prima facie case, the court attached certain properties of the former CEO," the statement added. "The foregoing establishes that it was AAIL that had taken necessary steps to take legal action to remedy the wrongful actions including booking personal expenses on the company account by its former CEO." --IANS rv/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Right to Information (RTI) activist was shot dead on Tuesday by unidentified assailants in Bihar's East Champaran district, police said. Rajender Singh was attacked by motorcycle-borne attackers near Matganvari chowk in Motihari, the district headquarters, said police official Abhisek Ranjan. According to local police officials, Singh had exposed several rackets and scams in LIC, recruitment of school teachers and financial irregularities in welfare schemes and development works in the district. An RTI activist was shot dead in Vaishali district in April. --IANS ik/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police in Ghaziabad on Tuesday announced the arrest of five auto thieves and said they had recovered 19 stolen two-wheelers. The arrests follow the interrogation of two suspects who revealed that they were part of a gang which stole motor vehicles. The gang members were identified as Ravi Kumar and Vikky Thakur of Meerut, Rodass Gabhana of Aligarh as well as Ankur Ali and Kuldeep of Hapur. The police recovered 19 two-wheelers and seized two pistols. The gang revealed that they used to sell the stolen vehicles outside Uttar Pradesh. A court has sent them to judicial custody, said police Inspector Pawan Kumar Tripathi. --IANS sps/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP-PDP was an opportunistic alliance but the BJP pulling out of the coalition government at this point may push Jammu and Kashmir into "greater uncertainty", the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) said on Tuesday. It also stressed that the BJP could not wash its hands of the deterioration in the situation and of "deepening the alienation of the people". "The decision of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to withdraw from the coalition government with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir at this particular moment has the potential of creating greater political instability in the state. It signifies the total political failure of the BJP's approach in the state," the CPI-M said in a statement after the BJP quit the uneasy coalition. "This alliance was untenable since the beginning. It was an alliance between forces that never saw eye to eye on any issue but came together in an act of sheer opportunism to share the spoils of office," it added. The CPI-M emphasised that the BJP was party to all decisions of the state government during the past three years and hence could not be absolved of any responsibility for "contributing to a further deterioration in the state and towards deepening the alienation of the people". It pointed out that the BJP, as a coalition partner, had promised the people of Kashmir a slew of confidence building measures and initiating a political process by way of a comprehensive dialogue with all stakeholders in the Kashmir Valley. "Neither of these two promises which were publicly announced by the Union Home Minister after the all-party delegation visited the Valley in September 2017 have been fulfilled. If they were sincerely followed u,p the situation could have improved," the statement said. It said the Central government "unilaterally" announced the ceasefire and later withdrew it. "Under these circumstances, plunging the state into greater uncertainty and the impending imposition of President's rule may not help in addressing the issue of the deepening alienation of the people," it said. --IANS mak/him/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress on Tuesday accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of ruining the situation in and then pulling out of the alliance government at its convenience. It also ruled out the possibility of an alliance with the Mehbooba Mufti-led People's Democratic Party (PDP). "Whatever has happened is good. People of Jammu and will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined and have now pulled out," said senior Congress leader and former J&K Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. He stressed that the question of Congress forming an alliance with PDP "does not arise". Congress spokesman Randeep Singh Surjewala pointed out that in the last four years, 373 security personnel and 239 civilians have been killed in Jammu and Kashmir due to heightened militancy. "BJP's hunger for power has plunged Jammu and Kashmir into the fire of militancy. In the last four years, 373 jawans and 239 civilians killed. What did the nation get out of this?" Surjewala said in a tweet. "What's the use if you came to senses after the house is ransacked? You yourself set the house on fire and then became an onlooker. The BJP put on a new mask to play a new game," he added. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal pointed out that the Narendra Modi government had claimed that demonetisation in 2016 had broken the back of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir but that did not seem true. "Didn't BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened?" he said. --IANS mak/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Political compulsions seem to be a reason for the BJP and PDP parting ways in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday after their over three year old alliance left both parties apparently wary of their political base shrinking in view of feedback that things had not worked out as desired and could continue the same way till the Lok Sabha polls. The parties had formed the coalition despite having major differences of views on issues such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Article 370. While the BJP was keen to project a strong nationalist image, the PDP was keen on pursuing a "healing touch" policy that included more open borders and addressing the internal and external dimensions of the Kashmir problem through dialogue. Informed sources told IANS that the decision to pull out from the Mehbooba Mufti-led government was taken after feedback from the RSS that the BJP was losing its sheen on the issue of nationalism in view of militants repeatedly targeting security forces personnel and also soldiers. There was a feeling that the visuals of security personnel being pelted with stones or being targeted in ambush was neutralising the image that BJP had sought to build for itself after the surgical strikes of 2016, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly referred to in his election speeches. With less than a year left for the Lok Sabha elections, BJP chief Amit Shah, taking stock of the security situation with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and also receiving feedback from other security agencies, assessed that situation was not likely to drastically improve in the coming months specially under the coalition government and the party will find it difficult to counter barbs on the issue of national security by the Congress and other opposition parties. Jammu and Kashmir has been an electoral issue for the BJP since its inception and the party could ill-afford being seen in the country as having been ineffective in dealing with the militancy and other problems in the state. Having won all its seats from Jammu and Ladhakh, the BJP was apparently sensing a growing sense of dissatisfaction in the two regions with the performance of the coalition government. There was an apparent realisation that pulling the plug too close to the Lok Sabha elections would make it difficult for the party to regain its support base. "Due to the prevailing situation in Jammu and Kashmir, we were losing our grounds in Jammu and Laddakh region. Any political party will be concerned with this kind of situation," a top BJP leader said on the condition of anonymity. Not extending ceasefire initiative after Ramadan and expending only Rs 35,000 crore of the total Rs 80,000 announced as package by Modi in 2015 were among the other reasons that forced the BJP to part ways with the PDP. As terrorist activities continued during the month-long Ramadan ceasefire, the Centre on Sunday decided not to extend its unilateral initiative, declared on May 16 to coincide with the holy month. The decision was taken even after Mehbooba Mufti urged the government to continue with the ceasefire. "She wanted to continue with the ceasefire but the Centre was adamant because ceasefire results were not on expected lines," a senior BJP leader familiar with the developments said. He also said that the Chief Minister had very "poor" control over the administration. "How can a person like Shujaat Bukhari be killed in daylight and that too in Srinagar. This clearly shows her (poor) grip on administration," he added. Bukhari, Editor-in-Chief of Rising Kashmir, was shot dead by militants outside his office on Thursday. His two security guards were also killed in the incident. The decision to pull out from the Jammu and Kashmir government was taken days after RSS top leadership held discussion on government policies at Surajkund in Haryana. They also attended the dinner at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg hosted by the Prime Minister. The two-day brainstorming session on strategy-building and stock-taking of the BJP-led NDA government took place as it has entered into its fifth year. Sources in the RSS told IANS that a report card over the Kashmir situation was also presented at the Surajkund meet and later forwarded to the Prime Minister. The issue also figured during the meeting of Modi, Shah and RSS leaders at the dinner. Another BJP leader, on the condition of anonymity, said that "our cadres and Jammu and Kashmir and across the nation were relieved after the decision". The decision to finally part ways was taken at a meeting of BJP's ministers and office bearers in Jammu and Kashmir with Amit Shah here at party headquarters. Minister of State in Prime Minister's Office Jitendra Singh said that the Centre under Modi did its best for the development of the state. "He never discriminated with any of the areas of Jammu and Kashmir and provided equitable opportunities to valley, Jammu and Laddakh region. No one questioned his commitment for the state," he said. (Brajendra Nath Singh can be contacted at brajendra.n@ians.in) --IANS bns-ps/vd/him/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Running late for his flight to Mumbai, a choreographer associated with shows like 'Dance India Dance' on Tuesday tried to delay the plane with an anonymous call warning of a bomb aboard but was detected and arrested, police said. According to police, Mohit Kumar Tank was booked on IndiGo's Mumbai flight 6E218 but getting late, he called up the airlines' Gurgaon-based call centre and told them there was a bomb on the plane. As the flight had taken off by the time he made the call, the airlines, in a statement, said that they immediately reported the matter to Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) and followed all laid-down security protocols. The crew members were also informed and searched the plane but couldn't find anything questionable. Eventually, the flight, which had 145 passengers, safely landed in Mumbai. Meanwhile, Central Industrial Security Force officials checked the list of passengers and found Tank's name missing from the list of those who boarded. Called to the Jaipur airport with the promise that he will be adjusted in the next flight, Tank was grilled by CISF officials and confessed to the hoax call. Sanganer police station Sub Inspector Jaiprakash Singh told IANS that Mohit has been arrested and charged under various sections of the Indian Penal Code. --IANS arc/vd/him/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy on Tuesday said the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S)-Congress coalition government is committed to waiving farm loans. "I am soon going to call a meeting with the nationalised banks to figure out the modalities to waive loans of farmers in a scientific way. Our government is highly committed to waiving farm loans," Kumaraswamy said at his maiden press conference here after assuming office on May 23. The Chief Minister, who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a two-day visit to New Delhi starting Sunday, said he has requested the Central government to bear 50 per cent of cost of the farm loans the state government plans to waive. "As we are ready to waive loans to free farmers from debt, I request the Central government to provide 50 per cent financial support to our initiative," the JD-S leader had said at the fourth meeting of the governing council of Niti Aayog. He also wrote to the Prime Minister on Monday to allocate 25 per cent of Rs 2 lakh-crore special bonds the Central government plans to raise to bail-out state-run banks to waive farm loans across the country. Admitting that his JD-S did not receive people's mandate, the Chief Minister said his government will work for the all round development of the state and its citizens. "The state government will work towards presenting a scheme which allows all the farmers to get loans without any difficulty." The JD-S leader promised in the party's election manifesto that it would waive farm loans within 24 hours of assuming office if it was voted to power with a majority. "Since we were not voted to power with a majority, we need to discuss with the other leaders in the coalition government," he said. The Chief Minister who was late by 90 minutes for the press conference at Press Club in the city centre said he was busy with public visiting him at his home in the southern suburb. --IANS bha/fb/him/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress on Tuesday ruled out the possibility of an alliance with the Peoples Democratic Alliance (PDP), making Governor's rule look imminent in Jammu and after the BJP pulled out of the PDP-led coalition government. Senior Congress leader and former state Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said the question of an alliance with the PDP "does not arise". "Whatever has happened is good. People of Jammu and will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined and have now pulled out," he said. Blaming the BJP for "devastating" the state government, Azad said that the regional parties like the PDP and Nationalist Conference should have been "left to themselves" in cobbling up a coalition among themselves and form the government. "We (Congress) had approached the PDP and I am glad that (NC leader) Omar (Abdullah) seconded the proposal of having a greater alliance of PDP-NC and Congress. The regional parties should have been left to themselves; they should have been given a choice to form a government. "They could have selected their own partner but the BJP government at the Centre did not allow them to do so and in these three years, the BJP and PDP have devastated the state government," he said. Meanwhile, as the Governor's rule looked imminent in the state, senior Congress leader and former Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram hoped that the Centre would not resort to a "muscular" approach in the Valley. "The muscular, militaristic policy was a disaster from Day One. Let us hope and pray that the muscular, militaristic policy does not come back under the guise of Governor's rule," he said in a tweet. "It is a relief that the opportunistic coalition has collapsed. The long-awaited break of the PDP-BJP coalition will be welcomed by all those who despaired that Kashmir may have been lost forever," he added. Congress spokesman Randeep Singh Surjewala pointed out that in the last four years, 373 security personnel and 239 civilians have been killed in Jammu and Kashmir due to heightened militancy. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal pointed out that the Modi government had claimed that demonetisation in 2016 had broken the back of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir but that did not seem true. "Didn't BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened?" he asked. --IANS mak/vd (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.) An unprecedented political deadlock in Delhi ended on Tuesday as Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal ended his nine-day-long sit-in at the Raj Niwas after IAS officials he alleged were on strike resumed attending his government's meetings. Kejriwal and his cabinet colleague Gopal Rai left the waiting area where they had been camping since June 11 as part of a novel protest that elicited support from several political parties including BJP allies Shiv Sena and Janata Dal-United. On reaching home, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader told party activists to keep agitating for full statehood for Delhi, the lack of which he underlined was the root cause of problems related to governance in the national capital. He was greeted at his home by boisterous slogan chanting by party members. "We will continue the struggle until Delhi becomes a full state," Kejriwal said. Kejriwal walked out of Baijal's office-cum-residence after IAS officers resumed attending the meetings called by the Delhi government. Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the IAS officers attended the meetings on Tuesday called by Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot, Social Welfare Minister Rajinder Pal Gautam and Food Minister Imran Hussain. The officers were also responding to telephone calls from Ministers and Sisodia said he too spoke to a number of officers. "All the senior officers including the Chief Secretary were present at meetings called by ministers on Tuesday," Sisodia told the media. Lt. Governor Baijal wrote to Kejriwal appreciating his assurance to officers about their security. "The LG requested the Chief Minister to urgently meet the officers in the Secretariat so that apprehensions and concerns of both sides can be suitably addressed through dialogue in the best interest of the people of Delhi," said a Raj Niwas statement. The decision to leave Raj Niwas was taken within a few hours after the Lt Governor wrote to Kejriwal. The AAP was also demanding that the Centre approve the Delhi government's policy to supply ration to the poor at their houses. Sisodia said: "When the LG has not responded on the issue in past nine days, there is no point in waiting more." Kejriwal and three of his ministers started camping in the Raj Niwas on June 11 demanding a direction to the IAS officers working in the Delhi administration to end their undeclared strike and the Centre to approve the Delhi government's ration proposal. Two Ministers -- Sisodia and Satyendar Jain -- who were on indefinite hunger strike were shifted to hospital after their health deteriorated. Kejriwal and Cabinet Minister Gopal Rai continued the protest. Earlier on Tuesday, Kejriwal wrote a strongly-worded open letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi accusing him of trying to stifle the AAP government in Delhi by covertly backing the officers' "strike". Also, the Supreme Court declined to hold an urgent hearing of a PIL seeking direction to the Delhi High Court to expeditiously hear a plea for declaring the protest by Kejriwal and others as unconstitutional and illegal. --IANS nks/mr/soni/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Facing a flak over its contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- the agency that's behind the forced separation of children from parents at the US-Mexico border -- Microsoft said it was not working with the agency on any project. In a blog post in January, Microsoft had described a contract with the ICE for its Cloud-based software Azure, saying Azure meets all security and compliance standards necessary to handle ICE's most sensitive unclassified data. "Microsoft is not working with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or US Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border," the tech giant said in a statement late Monday. "Contrary to some speculation, we are not aware of Azure or Azure services being used for this purpose," it added. According to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families after illegally crossing the US border in April and May. "As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border. Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since the end of World War II," the firm said. Microsoft has worked for over 20 years to combine technology with the rule of law to ensure that children who are refugees and immigrants can remain with their parents, it added. The pressure is building on US President Donald Trump to act upon the family separation practice, who has squarely blamed Democrats for this situation. "We urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families," Microsoft said after people took to social media, asking the company to take a stand on the current immigration debate. --IANS na/ksk (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The (DoT) is seeking legal opinion on the Vodafone-Idea Cellular merger with respect to Vodafone's administratively allocated spectrum holdings, according to industry sources. As per merger and acquisition (M&A) guidelines, for such spectrum holdings of the acquired entity, the acquirer has to pay differential between the market determined price and the entry fee. Such payments have to be made for 4.4 MHz of spectrum on a pro-rata basis for the remaining period of licence validity and DoT raised such demands to Vodafone at the time of the merger of Vodafone group in 2015, sources said. Vodafone had challenged these demands with the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT), but part of the demand (Rs 20 billion out of the Rs 67 billion) had been paid on the directions of the The DoT is seeking legal opinion on whether a fresh demand can be raised on Idea for the differential amount between the market determined price and the entry fee paid for 4.4 MHz of the administratively allocated spectrum of Vodafone. It is also seeking legal opinion on whether this would be willful disobedience of the court. (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.) US President Donald Trump has attacked the German government's approach to immigration, as he comes under pressure over his own crackdown on migrants. Trump said German Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition looked "tenuous". Merkel is in the middle of a serious domestic row after defending her government's immigration policy. Meanwhile, Trump has adopted a highly criticised "zero-tolerance" approach, which has split families crossing the Mexican border. That position has been condemned by many, including former First Lady Laura Bush - wife of Republican ex-president George Bush - who wrote about it in the Washington Post newspaper. "(Trump's) zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart," she wrote, citing stories of children held in detention centres. In a series of tweets, the President defended his stance. "We don't want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!" he said. Meanwhile, Merkel is in a migration dispute with her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer. On Monday, Seehofer gave her two-week ultimatum to come up with a European Union (EU)-wide deal on migration, or he will start turning away migrants at the border - a move that could destroy the fragile coalition. Seehofer wants to refuse migrants if they have already registered elsewhere in the EU, but Merkel has refused to back his plan. The disagreement has opened up a rift between Merkel's Christian Democrats and Seehofer's Bavarian CSU party - two parties that have been closely aligned since the end of World War II. Other claims in Trump's tweets have already been debunked by various German news sites, especially his assertion that "crime in Germany is way up". They pointed out that Germany's crime rate is at its lowest since 1992, according to official figures released last month. --IANS nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Five persons, including a woman and child, were killed and over a dozen others injured as fire engulfed two hotels here on Tuesday, police said. The fire broke out at the SSJ International Hotel on Tuesday morning and soon spread to the adjacent Hotel Virat International, gutting both buildings. Fire tenders were rushed to contain the blaze, but it took more than two hours for the raging flames to be extinguished and at least six firemen were among those injured. Two cars parked in the parking area of one of the hotels were also burnt badly. Senior Superintendent of Police Deepak Kumar said the fire started in the basement and soon leaped to the upper floors. Inspector General of Police, Lucknow, Sujit Pandey later said that prima facie, the fire seems to have been triggered by a short circuit. The Uttar Pradesh government has ordered a magisterial probe into the blaze, while cases have also been slapped on the owners of the hotels. Superintendent of Police, West, Vikas Chandra Tripathi said that after the incident, both SSJ International hotel owner Surendra Jaiswal and Virat hotel owners Arpit Jaiswal and Pratik Jaiswal were absconding. The district police has ordered a safety audit of all the hotels in the area and sources told IANS that initial investigation has revealed a "whole lot of discrepancies in the two hotels". The SSJ hotel, which had 42 rooms and a bar, does not have an approved building plan and the 27-room Virat hotel's building plan was approved as a residential premises, officials said. Meanwhile, Chief Fire Officer A.B. Pandey revealed that there were no fire-fighting equipment installed in both hotels and that SSJ hotel, in fact, had been served a notice last month over its non-compliance of safety standards. Due to the police recruitment exams, both the hotels were completely sold out. Tourism Minister Rita Bahuguna Joshi meanwhile visited the injured at a medical facility and directed officials to ensure that there was adequate treatment for those injured. Condition of two injured, who have received serious burn injuries, is critical, said doctors at the Trauma Centre. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has expressed his condolences at the loss of lives in the incident and has announced an ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh each to the families of those who were killed and Rs 50,000 each to those seriously injured. --IANS md/vd/him/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At least four people were killed due to suspected food-poisoning after a house-warming dinner here, police said on Tuesday. The incident occurred at the new home of Subhash Mane, who had organised a vaastu-shanti pooja in Mahad village, followed by the celebratory dinner on Monday night, a Raigad Police spokesman said. After the dinner, many people complained of stomach aches, suddenly started vomiting incessantly and were rushed to nearby private clinics and hospitals. Mahad village in Khalapur is around 75 kms from Mumbai. Of the 70 others still admitted to the hospital, the condition of at least five is described as critical, said the spokesperson. A case has been registered further investigations are underway. --IANS qn/ksk (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A majority of government-owned banks and financial institutions continued to fund coal projects in India in 2017, an analysis of energy project lending said on Tuesday. It also reveals that comparatively, private financial companies are investing more in renewable energy projects compared to coal. The report 'Coal vs Renewables Finance Analysis' by the Delhi-based Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) finds that coal received Rs 60,767 crore ($9.35 billion) in lending whereas renewable energy received Rs 22,913 crore ($3.50 billion). "It seems like the government and public financial institutions are living in a bubble devoid of market forces," CFA Executive Director Joe Athialy said in a statement. "The shift against coal and towards solar and wind is quite well established in the financial markets now and investing in coal has and will expose public banks to further bad loans." The report identifies and reviews project finance lending to 72 energy projects, comprising of coal-fired power stations and renewable energy generation facilities in India that reached financial close in 2017. These projects attracted total lending of Rs 83,680 crore ($12.85 billion). Of the top 10 lenders to coal power projects, eight were majority government-owned banks that collectively gave close to Rs 30,337 crore ($4.5 billion) in new and re-financed lending towards 12 coal power projects. These were Rural Electrification Corporation, the State Bank of India, India Infrastructure Finance Company, Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank, Punjab National Bank and Power Finance Corporation. Over 70 per cent of lending for coal was re-financing of existing debt for projects that have already been built or are under construction. The SBI, among other public banks, financed Rs 11,360 crore ($1,755 million) towards coal power projects and Rs 2,162 crore ($323 million) for for renewable energy. In the financial year 2017, SBI wrote-off bad loans close to Rs 20,339 crore ($3,019 million), the highest among all public sector banks. In contrast to coal lending, half of the top 10 lenders to 60 renewable power projects (solar and wind) were commercial financial institutions such as L&T Finance Holdings, Yes Bank and IndusInd Bank as opposed to majority government-owned banks. As much as 76 per cent of renewable project finance was primary finance and 24 per cent was re-financing of existing project, indicating a vast growth in new renewable projects in 2017. All the lending identified was concentrated in 14 states. Of these, only two attracted no renewables lending; Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh. States with significant renewables lending such as Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Telangana had no coal lending. Projects in Uttarakhand and Odisha received minimal lending overall, with no loans to coal-fired power projects and little to renewables. In states such as Gujarat, renewables lending outpaced coal lending more than four-fold. In most other states with both coal lending and renewable energy lending, coal lending was higher than renewable lending. Chhattisgarh provides an extreme example, where coal-fired power projects attracted almost 10 times that of renewables projects in 2017. The earlier CFA study, 'Coal Currency', mapped lenders of 125 projects, with a total capacity of 243 GW. Of a total available data of Rs 4,82,648 crore, Rs 51,026 crore or 11 per cent, were financed by 22 international financial institutions, while 89 per cent or Rs 4,31,622 crore, was financed by 51 national financial institutions, which include non-banking institutions, public and private commercial banks. "The CFA report clearly identifies that commercial banks are underpinning and supporting the transformation, but state banks are lagging, probably reflecting their history of excessive and poor lending practices to the thermal power sector," Tim Buckley, the Energy Finance Studies Director with the US-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told IANS. It is definitely a timely reminder for India's leading public banks to reduce stranded asset risk and endorse India's global leadership role in accelerating the electricity sector modernisation, he added. India's National Electricity Plan 2018 calls for new generation and grid investments of $30-40 billion annually. --IANS vg/pgh/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Hindi papers of an exam conducted by the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission (UPPSC) slated for Tuesday were cancelled following a blunder, an official said. The cancellation was called after the second section of the paper was distributed during the first half, he added. UPPSC Secretary Jagdeesh said the remaining PCS Mains exams scheduled for Wednesday will be held as per schedule. Fearing a backlash from thousands of students, heavy police force were deployed at the UPPSC headquarters in Allahabad. The date for the Hindi exam will be announced later, an official told IANS. The PCS Mains exams began on Monday at 11 centres in Lucknow and 17 in Allahabad. --IANS md/ksk/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) IAS officers on Tuesday said they are waiting for a formal communication from Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on his assurances of providing security to them while the AAP leader said he was waiting for Lt. Governor Anil Baijal's nod. Reiterating that they were not on strike, the IAS AGMUT (Arunachal, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territories) Association tweeted that they were ready for a meeting in the Delhi Secretariat. "In the context of the Chief Minister's assurance, we await a formal communication for a meeting with him in the Delhi Secretariat. We reiterate that we continue to be at work," the association said. In response, Kejriwal tweeted: "We wrote a letter to the LG on Tuesday seeking a meeting of all stakeholders. We are awaiting for a response from the LG." He said Baijal was waiting for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "green signal" vis-a-vis the meeting. "The LG awaiting green signal from PM, who has to take the decision. Whole Delhi waiting for PM to decide fast," Kejriwal added. Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on Monday wrote to Baijal urging him to "end the IAS officer's strike" and attend a meeting between Kejriwal and bureaucrats serving in Delhi. In the letter, Sisodia said: "Since security and service come under you, we want this meeting is held in your presence so that we can assure the officers everything within our power, and you, within your powers. "Delhi's IAS officers have been on a strike since the past three months. But today (on Tuesday), the officers have agreed to meet Kejriwal. They want to talk about their safety and security and we want the best security measures for our officers. "We want this issue to be resolved as soon as possible so that work for Delhi people resumes," he added. On Monday, the IAS officers in Delhi said they were open to formal discussions to end the impasse in Delhi, a day after Kejriwal assured them their safety and dignity. On Sunday, Kejriwal said: "I wish to assure them that I will ensure their safety and security with all my powers and resources available at my command. I have given similar assurances earlier also to many officers who have been meeting me privately. I reiterate it." Kejriwal and three of his Ministers started camping in the Raj Niwas on June 11 demanding a direction to the IAS officers working in the Delhi administration to end their undeclared strike and the Centre to approve the Delhi government's proposal to deliver ration to the poor at their houses. Two of the Ministers -- Sisodia and Satyendar Jain -- who were on indefinite hunger strike were shifted to hospital after their health deteriorated and have gone back to their homes. Kejriwal and Cabinet Minister Gopal Rai are still camping in the Raj Niwas. --IANS nks/mr/soni (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The current global economy is caught in a major paradox. We live in a world where systems using artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and automation are matching or exceeding human performance in more and more domains. Yet, global productivity levels have been stagnant since the economic crisis of 2008. The global total factor productivity (TFP), which measures the efficiency with which inputs such as labour and capital are used, grew at 1.2 percent per year on an average between 1999 and 2008, slowed to 0.3 percent till 2012, and has stagnated since then. For the advanced economies, including the US, Japan and the Eurozone, TFP growth has either stagnated or fallen into negative territory while the developing countries have shown a mixed performance. India and China have experienced a TFP growth of 1 per cent and 0.8 per cent, respectively, while Brazil and Mexico have witnessed a fall of 0.4 per cent and 0.9 per cent, respectively. These trends are more problematic for the developing world than the advanced nations. After all, rising productivity, or output per worker, directly determines the improvements in the standard of living of a nation's citizens. And, in absolute terms, the TFP levels of advanced nations are almost five times higher than the emerging economies. So, low growth or stagnation of TFP can grossly undermine the ability of poorer nations to catch-up with their richer counterparts. As economist-columnist Paul Krugman aptly commented: "Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything." However, it is almost inexplicable to experience such productivity trends in the face of rapid technological advancements. British economic journalist Martin Wolff recently suggested that the stagnation of productivity in the developed world could probably be a lull before the storm. A similar productivity pause was seen in the US in the 1920s when electricity was revolutionising lives. Soon after the lull, productivity levels shot up rapidly. If that is the case, the emerging economies have all the more reason to be concerned about rising cross-country disparities. A sudden acceleration in productivity growth of advanced nations, as suggested by Wolff, will make it even more difficult for poorer nations to catch up; it will also introduce extreme levels of cross-country inequality. One of the reasons for the low productivity growth levels of developing nations was suggested by Diego Comin and Marti Ferrer of Dartmouth University in a 2013 paper. In a cross-country analysis, they showed that even though these nations have been quick to adopt technologies from the industrialised nations, their penetration rates have been low. This has sustained the gap in productivity levels of the Western and non-Western world. To make matters worse, the various channels of technology adoption are under threat these days. There are three broad channels for knowledge and technology flows between advanced and emerging economies: International trade, foreign direct investment and cross-country research collaborations. Firms regularly gain access to technology through the process of reverse engineering after importing goods from abroad. Investing in other countries also results in a transfer of technology. Finally, location of research centres abroad to take advantage of cost differences can lead to knowledge flows between countries. However, in a post-Trump world, as countries close up their economies, these synergies can come to nought. In such a scenario, the adoption of technologies could take a hit and the productivity disparities between advanced and emerging economies. It is crucial that the rate of productivity growth in developing nations rebound as broad-based increases in standards of living are at stake. The best way for these nations to climb up the ladder of prosperity would be to eliminate all structural impediments to the adoption and penetration of newer technologies. The popular fear of job losses due to higher automation has also been negated by a recent analysis by the Asian Development Bank. In an analysis of 12 developing Asian economies between 2005 and 2015, it was found that a rise in demand more than compensated for the job losses that resulted from automation. In particular, it was estimated that during this period, about 134 million new jobs were created as opposed to a loss of 101 million jobs to technology. So, contrary to expectations, the adoption of newer technologies has induced higher productivity and economic growth in Asian economies. In the light of these facts, the NITI Aayog's latest move to shift the policy focus on AI to stimulate social and inclusive growth is a positive step. Such applications of digital technology can unleash higher levels of productivity gains and push the envelope on the delivery of public goods on a national scale. The real litmus test will be the execution of the policy, but for now it can be said that India has entered the AI playground at the perfect time. (Amit Kapoor is chair, Institute for Competitiveness. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at amit.kapoor@competitiveness.in and tweets @kautiliya. Chirag Yadav, senior researcher, Institute for Competitiveness, has contributed to the article) --IANS amitk/vm/sac (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Japan on Tuesday discussed cooperation in the areas of maritime security and counter-terrorism among other issues during the fifth dialogue under the 2+2 mechanism that involves and foreign and defence policies of the two sides, a statement said. "Both sides reviewed the entire gamut of India-Japan relations and discussed issues having overlapping foreign policy and security dimensions of India-Japan cooperation and consultations," the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement. "Both sides reaffirmed their common desire to build on the strong foundations of bilateral cooperation and exchanges in order to forge a relationship of mutual benefit," it said. "In this context, both sides discussed measures to strengthen cooperation in fields such as counter-terrorism, maritime security, defence equipment and technology, peacekeeping operations, etc." India and Japan, along with the US and Australia, are part of a quad that was revived late last year that aims to work for peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region. India and Japan elevated their bilateral relationship to that of a Special and Strategic Global Partnership during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Japan in 2014 for the annual bilateral summit with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe and, according to the statement, Tuesday's meeting was held in keeping with this. "The discussions, which also centred on important issues covering regional and global dimensions, helped to further underscore the shared values and interests between India and Japan," the statement added. The 2+2 vice-ministerial dialogue was led by Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and Defence Secretary Sanjay Mitra on the Indian side while the Japanese side was led by Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Takeo Mori and Vice-Minister of Defence for International Affairs Ro Manabe. --IANS ab/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India on Tuesday repatriated six Pakistani prisoners back to their country, the External Affairs Ministry said. "Six Pakistan prisoners were repatriated today via Attari/Wagah border," the ministry said in a statement. "In addition, four Pakistan prisoners have already been released and repatriated in 2018, so far," it stated. "India attaches high priority to addressing all humanitarian issues, including early release and repatriation of Indian fishermen and prisoners in Pakistan's custody," the statement said, adding that India has secured the release of 147 Indian prisoners, including 146 fishermen, from Pakistan in 2018 so far. In October last year, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj suggested that the two sides could progress on humanitarian issues related to elderly, women, children and mentally unsound prisoners when Pakistan High Commissioner Sohail Mahmood called on her after freshly assuming office. Then in March this year, then Pakistan Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif approved the humanitarian proposals received from India regarding the civilian prisoners incarcerated in both India and Pakistan. --IANS ab/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has credited the special chemistry between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron for the new dynamism in the Indo-French relationship. "India and France are in a new phase of their relationship. I can see a new energy between the two countries. This is due to the special chemistry that our Prime Minister Modi and French President Macron enjoy. This chemistry was very much visible during the visit of President Macron to India and it allowed us to sign a number of important agreements that will take our bilateral relationship to a new level," Swaraj said while addressing a large gathering of Indian diaspora living in France, organised at the Indian Embassy in Paris. Swaraj left Paris Tuesday afternoon the successful completion to her maiden visit to France in her current role. Swaraj reached Paris yesterday afternoon for a whirlwind 24-hour visit to the French capital, her first visit to France since taking charge as India's External Affairs Minister in May 2014. She called on Macron on Monday at the Palais Elysees and later held discussions with the diplomatic adviser to the French President. She also had long discussions with her French counterpart, Jean Yves Le Drian, at the Qua' d'Orsay, the offices of the French Foreign Affairs ministry, just across the river from the French Presid'nt's home. In the meeting with Drian, of the numerous issues discussed, one of the most significant was the commitment by both the countries to significantly boost their bilateral trade, which has stagnated in the 8-9 billion euro range for several years. The two sides decided to push the trade to 15 billion euros within the next two years. In her address to the diaspora, Swaraj committed that her ministry and the embassy were available to the Indian diaspora at all the time". "My ministry and this embassy is here to help you 24 by 7," she declared, amidst loud cheers from the diaspora. But she also had a word of advice for the Indian community in Franc". "Wherever I have visited, I have heard three things about Indians which make me very proud of our diaspora. One Indians are good neighbours, two they are hard working and three they follow the law and order. These three things are the aspects that are most visible about any community and hence it is very important for all of you to consider yourselves as the real ambassadors of India. Your actions will leave a lasting memory for the French and hence it is important that you keep in mind that you are representing India here and whatever you do will impact In'ia's image in the mind of the ordinary French," Swaraj said. During the event, Swaraj also released a book in French about doing business with Indian states, published by Media India Group on behalf of the Indian Embass". "This is the first time that such a book has been published which will give French businessmen and investors detailed information about investment opportunities in various Indian states," said Indian Ambassador to France Vinay Mohan Kwatra. (Paris-based Ranvir S. Nayar is managing director of the Media India Group. He can be contacted at r.nayar@mediaindia.eu) --IANS ranvir/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Global software major Infosys said on Tuesday it has opened a digital centre of excellence at Marseille to provide expertise to its clients in the region, and hire and train local talent. "The centre will make digital offerings to companies in France as they navigate to the next state of their business journey," the IT major said in a statement here. The port city of Marseille is about 790 km south of French capital Paris. The centre will also deliver on a strategic seven-year partnership with CMA CGM S.A., a French container transportation and shipping firm, which uses 200 sea routes and 420 ports in 150 countries the world over. "The facility will focus on existing and new clients a range of offerings in design and user experience, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data and Analytics, while expanding our footprint in the shipping and logistics industry," said the city-based outsourcing firm. The centre will be part of a global network of centres servicing clients' digital requirements. With an initial capacity of 60 employees, it will attract and train talent in digital technologies to meet the increasing demand. The centre will also house a Digital Farm, Future of Learning and Retail and Warehouse experiences to provide clients a view into the possibilities the company can enable. The $10-billion software firm on the occasion received the 'Invest in Provence Award' from Provence Promotion, Economic Development Agency, in collaboration with Marseille Provence Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Conseil General in recognition of its contribution to the local community. "I laud Infosys and CMA-CGM for the commitment they made to the Aix-Marseille ecosystem with the support of Provence Promotion. Our region will offer resources and skills to help the IT firm develop its centre, catering to the logistics and maritime sectors," Provence Promotion President Jean Luc Chauvin said in the statement. Infosys Chief Operating Officer Pravin Rao said the centre would provide customers in the region access to next-generation digital technologies, skills and talent. "This is in line with our strategy on scaling agile digital business, energising the core via AI and automation, reskilling employees and localising within the markets we operate," Rao added. The company will partner with universities in the region, including Aix-Marseille University for hiring the local talent and extend its flagship partnership programme Instep in the French universities. --IANS fb/him/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Rome, June 19 (IANS/AKI) Italy's Foreign Minister Enzo Moavero Milanesi voiced support for Afghanistan's stabilization and its peace process during a meeting with the Afghan government's chief executive Abdullah Abdullah, the Foreign Ministry said. Abdullah Abdullah was in Rome to attend a board meeting of the UN World Food Programme and for "bilateral meetings", the statement said. Abdullah Abdullah has been government chief executive - a role with Prime Ministerial powers - since 2014 after he lost the Presidential race to Ashraf Ghani. --AKI/IANS mr/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Japan on Tuesday hoped that the US would remain committed towards defending the region despite suspending its annual military drills with South Korea to create a conducive atmosphere for talks on the denuclearisation of North Korea. Government spokesperson Yoshihide Suga also said there would be no change in Japan-US alliance or US military presence in Japan following the cancellation of the Seoul and Washington exercises, Efe news reported. The US and South Korea Tuesday confirmed a temporary cancellation of their Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) manoeuvres, scheduled for August, as announced by US President Donald Trump following his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on June 12 in Singapore. The suspension, Suga said, was a sign of commitment to the summit agreements, where Pyongyang had pledged to abandon its nuclear programme in exchange for Washington ensuring the security of the regime. Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera said on Tuesday that although it was unlikely North Korea would conduct missile or nuclear tests during the dialogue process, the regime is yet to take any concrete action towards denuclearization and thus Japan would continue to monitor its movements. Onodera added that the decision taken by South Korea and the US to stop their summer drills would not affect the Pacific drills carried out by the US and Japan outside the Korean Peninsula. --IANS and/soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Home improvement and construction materials supplier Wilcon Depot Inc. plans to open 65 stores by 2020 ahead of the original target of 2021 as it accelerates expansion. Wilcon chairman emeritus Willam Belo said in an interview following the annual stockholders meeting Monday the company had secured the funds and the sites needed to build the remaining 24 stores under a five-year plan. Wilcon this year is scheduled to open nine stores in areas outside of Metro Manila. This means it can open an average of seven to eight stores yearly from 2019 and 2020 to meet the target of 65 stores. We are not letting up on our expansion plan as we continue to believe in the stability and the resiliency of the Philippine economy and remain bullish of the growth potential of our market, Belo said. He said the demand for residential and condominium units also remained strong this year which augured well with the companys business. Wilcon investor relations officer Mary Jean Alger said the company expected a mid-teens growth in net profit for this year while sales were expected to rise by mid- to high-teens. Same stores sales growth is expected at five percent.Wilcon, meanwhile, is set to launch its e-commerce platform that will enable the customer to buy their needs online before the end of 2018. Wilcon president Lorraine Belo said the online portal would initially carry electric items and Do-It-Yourself products and be available for Metro Manila customers. We expect our e-commerce business to enhance the sales of our stores. We will also offer online payment service and pick-up service, Belo said. Share price of Wilcon on Monday fell 3.2 percent to P11.56 from last weeks close of P11.96. Wilcon reported a net income of P409 million in the first quarter of 2018, up 4.7 percent from P390.7 million year-on-year. Jammu and Kashmir was pushed into a major political crisis on Tuesday after the BJP suddenly pulled out of the ruling combine with the PDP, bringing down Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti's 27-month-old government amid surging violence in the state. The decision, which surprised the Mufti-led Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and came days after the central government decided not to extend the Ramadan ceasefire, made another round of Governor's Rule imminent in the state where no political group or alliance won enough seats in the December 2014 elections to form a government on its own. Mehbooba Mufti stepped down as the Chief Minister immediately after BJP announced its decision in a televised news conference. She made it clear that the PDP wasn't interested in forming an alliance with the National Conference or the Congress for a new government. BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav, announcing his party's decision in Delhi, said the state government had failed to curb growing terror and radicalization in the Kashmir Valley, making the continuance of its alliance with the PDP "untenable". Madhav said the murder of senior Kashmiri journalist Shujaat Bukhari in Srinagar implied how the situation was in Jammu and Kashmir. "Three years ago, the BJP formed a government in Jammu and Kashmir with the PDP with some goals. But it has become untenable for the BJP to continue the alliance in the situation that has developed today. "Terrorism and violence have increased in the valley and radicalization is fast spreading. Fundamental rights of citizens and right to free speech of people have come under threat in the valley as symbolized by the murder of ... Bukhari in broad daylight," Madhav said in a hurriedly called press conference. Immediately after learning about the Bharatiya Janata Party's decision, Mehbooba Mufti rushed to the Raj Bhavan and submitted her resignation to Governor N.N. Vohra -- who has already had three stints of enjoying Chief Minister's executive powers in 2008, 2015 and 2016. The political crisis set the stage of another round of Governor's Rule in the state which has seen three such administrations since 2008 and seven since 1977. No regional or national party has 45 seats in the 89-member Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. The PDP emerged as the single largest party with 28 seats, followed by the BJP with 25 in the last elections. The National Conference won 15 and the Congress managed 12. The BJP and the PDP came together after weeks of negotiations and formed the government on March 1, 2015. The alliance, which brought the ideologically different parties together, was always rocky. After her father's death on January 1, 2016, Mehbooba Mufti reluctantly continued the PDP's alliance with the BJP and formed a new government only on April 4, 2016. Their ties worsened in April this year after the gang-rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl from the nomadic Muslim community in Kathua district near Jammu. With Governor Vohra's tenure, which began at the height of the deadly Amarnath land row on June 25, 2008, set to conclude by the month end, sources in Delhi told IANS that he was likely to get an extension of at least six months to enable a smooth transition of administration in the troubled state. The President of India, unlike in other states, cannot rule directly the state which has its own constitution. A Governor in the absence of an elected government draws executive powers but has no legislative authority even as he or she can pass ordinances which necessarily have to be passed by an elected Assembly. The BJP said it has recommended Governor's Rule in the state "keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India. "In order to control the prevailing situation in the state, we have decided that the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor," Madhav said. Mehbooba Mufti after resigning told reporters in Srinagar that the PDP had not allied with the BJP for power. "We will continue to strive for dialogue and reconciliation in Jammu and Kashmir." She asserted that the PDP had always maintained that a muscular security policy would not work in the state and reconciliation was key. Counting her government's achievements, Mehbooba Mufti said the peace initiative of the unilateral ceasefire during the just ended Ramadan was the PDP's idea that brought a lot of relief to the people. Former Chief Minister and National Conference leader Omar Abdullah said the timing of the BJP's move was surprising even as he had signalled to Mehbooba Mufti to leave the coalition. "I wish she had listened to me and left with dignity instead of having the rug pulled from under her feet." Abdullah said fresh Assembly elections should be held at the earliest. The Congress said it won't ally with the PDP because Mehbooba Mufti's coalition with the BJP had "devastated the state, be it economically or socially". "The alliance has left Jammu and Kashmir in a state of ruins," said senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad. Congress President Rahul Gandhi said the "opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance cost the country strategically" while "damage will continue" under the Governor's Rule. "Incompetence, arrogance and hatred always fails," Gandhi said on Twitter. --IANS sar/mr/soni (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi Chief Minister on Tuesday walked out of Raj Niwas here after nine days of an unprecedented sit-in protest after began attending meetings called by his government. Deputy Chief Minister said Kejriwal took the decision to leave the office-cum-residence of Lt Governor after attended meetings called by Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot, Social Welfare Minister Rajinder Pal Gautam and Food Minister Imran Hussain. The officers were also responding to telephone calls from Ministers and Sisodia said he too spoke to a number of officers. "All the top officers including the Chief Secretary were present at meetings called by Ministers on Tuesday," Sisodia told the media. Kejriwal, who left the Raj Niwas along with his cabinet colleague Gopal Rai, will go to his house, Sisodia said. The decision was taken within hours after Baijal wrote to Kejriwal urging him to urgently meet the officers at the Delhi Secretariat. Asked about the demand for delivery of ration to the poor at their houses, Sisodia said it can be resolved from outside also. "When the LG has not responded on the issue in nine days, there is no point in waiting more." Sisodia reiterated that the Delhi government had "nothing against the officers". Kejriwal along with three of his ministers started camping at the Raj Niwas on June 11 demanding a direction to the working in the Delhi administration to end their undeclared strike. Two of the Ministers -- Sisodia and -- who were on hunger strike were shifted to hospital after their health deteriorated. But Kejriwal and his Cabinet Minister Gopal Rai continued their protest which drew support from several political parties in the country. Seventy new state-of-the-art day-care centres for senior citizens will be opened in Kerala, the assembly was informed on Tuesday. Social Justice Minister K.K. Shailaja, in reply to a question by opposition legislator Roshy Augustine, said the first of the centres has been opened. "The rest of the day-care centres for those above 60 years will be opened this year itself. We have a huge responsibility towards these elder citizens as it's our duty to make their lives more comfortable. We are soon coming out with an insurance scheme for them also," said Shailaja. At least 12.83 per cent of Kerala's nearly 33 million population are aged above 60. Shailaja also said that 21 'maintenance tribunals' which are functioning in the state look after complaints from ageing parents regarding their children not taking care of them. With nuclear families becoming the order of the day and children working abroad, the situation today in the state is such that at present, 50 old age homes are run by various charity organisations, while there are about half-a-dozen hi-tech old age homes. --IANS sg/pgh/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) North Korean leader on Tuesday arrived on a two-day China visit and met President Xi Jinping, just a week after his historic meet with US President in Singapore on the Korean nuclear crisis. The Chinese state broadcaster showed Xi and Kim holding talks at the Great Hall of the People. Kim is understood to have briefed the Chinese President on his meeting in Singapore last week. The development comes amid an ugly trade spat between the US and China, with experts viewing the visit as Beijing's show of leverage it holds over Pyongyang. This is Kim's third visit to China since March this year and the previous two were not made public until the leader left the country. His back-to-back China trips reflect the warming of ties between the Communist countries whose relations were hit hard after Beijing cleared UN economic sanctions on Pyongyang for firing off ballistic missiles and conducting nuclear tests. China is the sole ally of North Korea and always appealed for calm and diplomatic approach whenever tempers frayed between Pyongyang and Washington. In the unprecedented summit between a serving US President and a North Korean leader in Singapore, the two decided to leave the acrimonious past behind and pledged to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula. China was quick to signal that economic sanctions on North Korea should be lifted; a suggestion rejected by the US, which said any such move would come only after Pyongyang dismantles its nuclear arsenal. The animosity between North Korea and the US dates back to 1950 when Pyongyang invaded the South, prompting Washington to fight by the side of Seoul. The North was backed by China and Russia in the Korean War until an armistice was put in place in 1953. North Korea said it built up its arsenal because it feared invasion by Washington and Seoul. China has been Pyongyang's ally since then. Beijing has a strategic interest in keeping the Peninsula calm as it fears that war between Pyongyang and Washington would trigger an influx of North Korean refugees into its border. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Tuesday made yet another surprise visit to Beijing, just a week after his historic meet with US President Donald Trump on the Korean nuclear crisis in Singapore. During the two-day visit, Kim is highly likely to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping and give him a brief about his meeting in Singapore last week. The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not reveal the purpose of Kim's visit, saying the detailed information of his visit will be released in due course. The development comes amid an ugly trade spat between the US and China, with experts viewing the visit as Beijing's show of leverage it holds over Pyongyang. This is Kim's third visit to China since March this year and the previous two were not made public until the leader left the country. His back-to-back China trips reflect the warming of ties between the Communist countries whose relations were hit hard after Beijing cleared UN economic sanctions on Pyongyang for firing off ballistic missiles and conducting nuclear tests. China is the sole ally of North Korea and always appealed for calm and diplomatic approach whenever tempers frayed between Pyongyang and Washington. In the unprecedented summit between a serving US President and a North Korean leader in Singapore, the two decided to leave the acrimonious past behind and pledged to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula. China was quick to signal that economic sanctions on North Korea should be lifted; a suggestion rejected by the US, which said any such move would come only after Pyongyang dismantles its nuclear arsenal. The animosity between North Korea and the US dates back to 1950 when Pyongyang invaded the South, prompting Washington to fight by the side of Seoul. The North was backed by China and Russia in the Korean War until an armistice was put in place in 1953. North Korea said it built up its arsenal because it feared invasion by Washington and Seoul. China has been Pyongyang's ally since then. Beijing has a strategic interest in keeping the Peninsula calm as it fears that war between Pyongyang and Washington would trigger an influx of North Korean refugees into its border. --IANS gsh/mr/soni (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An EU court on Tuesday ruled that French far-right leader Marine Le Pen must repay the European Parliament 300,000 euros ($346,454) that had been "unduly paid" to her assistant. The money was paid between December 2010 and February 2016 when Le Pen was a Member of the European Parliament, according to a press release of the General Court of the EU. The Luxembourg-based Court confirmed the European Parliament's decision to recover the fund "on the ground that she did not prove the effectiveness of that assistant's work", Xinhua news agency reported. The European Parliament had complained that Le Pen used the fund, which is supposed to pay parliamentary assistants, to pay her own party assistant. In response to the ruling, Le Pen tweeted that she had "provided the tribunal with 655 pieces of documents proving the work of my parliamentary assistant". "The court refuses to take this into account on the ground that I should have provided them (documents) to the European Parliament, which did not ask me to do so," she tweeted. She vowed to lodge an appeal to the Court of Justice of the EU. --IANS soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday greeted Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray on the occasion of the party's 52nd Foundation Day. "Heartiest greetings to Uddhav Thackeray Ji and all Shiv Sena workers on the 52nd Foundation Day of their party," Banerjee tweeted. Banerjee, who is playing an active role in promoting the idea of a federal front together with regional party leaders to counter the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2019 general elections, has spoken positively of the Maharashtra-based party's decision to contest all future elections independently. In spite of being the BJP's ally in both Maharashtra and at the Centre, the Shiv Sena and the saffron outfit have been at loggerheads for several months. It has also backed Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's ongoing sit-in protest. --IANS mgr/ksk/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli on Tuesday embarked on a six-day official visit to China, his second trip to a foreign country after India, since taking power in the Himalayan nation. His visit was on the invitation of his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang, reports The Kathmandu Post. Oli boarded a special Himlayan Airlines flight leading a 120-member delegation including four ministers, lawmakers, government officials and mediapersons. They are slated to reach Beijing at 2.30 p.m. The Prime Minister on Monday briefed the House of Representatives about the visit. He said every agreement and discussion in Beijing would be guided by "our national interests and dignity" in a transparent manner. Oli will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday and his counterpart Li on Thursday. China and Nepal will reach an understanding to undertake a survey and prepare a detailed project report of Trans-Himalayan economic corridor. The two countries will also sign other agreements and memorandum of understandings (MoUs), reports The Himalayan Times. Oli will visit Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet, where he will meet with the provincial leaders. The Prime Minister and the delegation will return home on June 24. --IANS ksk (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nepal is willing to enhance cross-border railroad connectivity, infrastructure development, trade, investment and tourism cooperation with China under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli, said here ahead of his visit to Beijing. Oli, who will embark on a five-day visit to China on Tuesday, told Xinhua during an interview that the Himalayan nation is fully committed to implementing the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative signed with China two years ago. His government has formed a mechanism to implement projects under the Belt and Road Initiative and various ministries are working for the same target, the prime minister said. Our two countries have common views on the concept of Trans-Himalayan Multi-Dimensional Transport Network. Based on this broad framework, we want to seek cooperation with China on cross-border connectivity of railway, road, transmission lines and other related areas for mutual benefit," Oli said. Nepal has viewed the Belt and Road Initiative as an important development initiative, he said. The Prime Minister said Nepal has recently proposed some projects in the areas of roads, railway, energy, transmission line for cooperation with China. While talking about Nepal's ties with China, Oli said it attaches great value to its relationship. "China is our immediate neighbour. Our two countries share a long history of friendly relations which are multifaceted and deep rooted. "Our relations are based on the solid foundation of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence," he said. During his visit, Oli will meet Chinese President Xi and Premier Li Keqiang and other senior Chinese leaders in Beijing. He will lead a 100-plus delegation. This is his first visit to China after coming to power in February. --IANS ksk (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor Nicolas Cage says his personal philosophy of filmmaking lies in the pursuit of what he calls "the Super 8 feeling". Cage was at the Shanghai International Film Festival to tease his latest movie and walk the event's red carpet as a special guest. He also interacted during a media briefing where he was asked to explain his personal philosophy of filmmaking, reports hollywoodreporter.com. He said: "The Super 8 feeling is what my brother and I used to feel when we made movies in the backyard with the camera our dad bought us when we were kids. I didn't care about awards or money... It was simply because we loved making the movie and telling a story." Cage said he has experienced the Super 8 feeling just a few times in his professional life, such as when he shot "Raising Arizona" with the Cohen Brothers and during the filming of "Mandy", Panos Cosmatos' recent horror film. The Oscar winner said he also felt it during the recent shoot in Puerto Rico of his next release, "Primal". The film is directed by stuntman-turned-filmmaker Nick Powell. --IANS rb/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The government plans to issue about $1 billion worth of Samurai bonds this year following the two successful floats of dollar- and renminbi-denominated securities in the offshore markets in the first quarter of 2018, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said Tuesday. This year, we are also planning to issue around US$1 billion worth of Samurai bonds, Dominguez said in his opening remarks at the Philippine Economic Briefing held at the Imperial Hotel in Japans capital city. The finance chief gave no other details of the planned yen-denominated bond float in his speech before Japanese businessmen at the sidelines of the Philippine delegations visit in Tokyo this week. He said earlier the government would proceed with the float by September or October this year. Buoyed by the tight spreads of the Philippines earlier bond issuances this year, Dominguez said such developments indicate confidence in the fiscal and debt management of the Duterte administration. Dominguez, in showcasing the Philippines vibrant economic prospects, recalled that when the government issued $2 billion worth of 10-year dollar-denominated bonds in January, the spread was 37.8 basis points over the US Treasuries, while its maiden Panda bond float of 1.46 billion renminbi in March had an even tighter spread of only 35 bps over the benchmark. National Treasurer Rosalia de Leon also quoted the same amount of about $1 billion in an earlier interview with reporters.This years Philippine economic briefing, which showcases the countrys economic resilience amid its goal of spurring infrastructure development to achieve inclusive growth, is the second held in this Japanese capital since last year. Dominguez in his remarks said the bilateral relations between the Philippines and Japan had emerged closer and stronger these past few years as the former rose to join the elite group of Asias tiger economies, fueled by its long-term goal to achieve zero poverty rates about two decades from now. Japan, to date, had been the Philippines major source of official development assistance and a reliable ally in terms of infrastructure support from the period of reconstruction, one of its top trading partners, and its fourth largest source of foreign tourists, Dominguez said. He thanked Japan for its support to the Philippines economic emergence as well as to the reconstruction and rehabilitation of the devastated city of Marawi in Mindanao. Joining Dominguez at the briefing were Economic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia, Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Nestor Espenilla Jr. Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli arrived in Beijing on on Tuesday on a five-day visit where he is expected to sign a slew of deals including a railway project linking Tibet to Kathmandu. India will closely watch visit by Oli, who, in his previous tenure, had inched closer to China, which currently is the largest foreign aid donor to the Himalayan nation and has several on-going projects in the country. Oli was welcomed by Chinese officials at Capital International Airport in Beijing. He was accompanied by his wife Radhika Shakya, Home Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa, Foreign Minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali and several high-ranking government officials. The Nepalese Prime Minister will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday and his counterpart Li Keqiang on Thursday. He will also address the Nepal-China forum of intellectuals and business communities in Beijing. This is Oli's first official visit to China after returning to power in February and second foreign trip after India. According to the Nepal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, various Memorandums of Understandings (MoUs) will be reached with the Chinese side on projects including infrastructure development, energy, trade, investment, tourism and others under the framework of Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The major highlights of the visit will be conducting a survey of Keyrong-Kathmandu railway, opening up of eight more border points of Nepal to use the Tibetan Highway to assist supplies of food and other essentials goods across northern border of the Himalayan nation. Keyrong is Chinese bordering point in Tibet that China has upgraded as international trading point. Oli will also visit Lhasa in Tibet where he is scheduled to hold meetings with key leaders. Several new agreements and understandings related to the Trans Himalayan Multi-Dimensional Transport Network encompassing roads, railway lines, aviation, optical fibre and certain north-south corridors under BRI were likely be signed between the two sides, according to reports. Nepal is also one of the backers of China's Belt and Road project, which is sternly opposed by India as its key artery passes through the disputed Kashmir held by Pakistan and claimed by New Delhi. Earlier in an interview to China's state media in Kathmandu, Oli said Nepal "was fully committed to implementing the MoU on cooperation under the framework of the BRI signed with China two years ago. During Oli's first tenure in 2015, Kathmandu's ties with its conventional ally New Delhi took a beating over the framing of a new constitution, which led to a blockade of the border with India. Oli blamed India for the blockade, accusing it of interfering in Nepal's domestic Since then, he is considered pro-Beijing after he signed a flurry of projects with the country. --IANS gsh-soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Chief Minister and National Conference leader Omar Abdullah on Tuesday demanded early elections in Jammu and Kashmir after the BJP pulled out of the PDP-led government, forcing Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti to resign. Abdullah spoke to the media after calling on Governor N.N. Vohra following the fall of the PDP-BJP government in the troubled state. "Today, suddenly around 2.30 p.m., news came that the BJP has severed its political relationship with the PDP. "I have met the Governor just a little while back. I told the Governor that in the 2014 elections, the National Conference did not have the mandate to form a government and today also we don't have the mandate," he said. "We have neither been approached nor have we approached any party for support to form a government in the state. "The Governor has no option but to impose Governor's rule and improve the situation so that a democratic government is formed in the state after holding fresh elections," said Abdullah. Abdullah said he had assured the National Conference's support to the Governor but added that the Governor and his administration must ensure that early elections are held to put an elected government in place. "As a responsible political party, we will work for peace in all the three regions of the state." Asked about the possible reasons for the BJP's pullout from the government, the National Conference leader said: "I can't speak for the BJP. They alone can explain what prompted their decision. "Yes, I was surprised by the timing of the BJP decision. I expected this to happen later this year, but it happened sooner because of the deterioration in situation." Asked whether the BJP had embarrassed the PDP by taking a unilateral decision, Abdullah said: "Whether PDP is embarrassed or not they would know, but I feel the BJP should have taken the PDP into confidence. "But different parts function differently. They (BJP) claim radicalization and obviously they have better access to information than us. "We believe that both these parties have together pushed the state down the precipice." Abdullah said that Governor Vohra, with his vast experience, can help pull the state out of the current crisis. Asked about his party's earlier offer of support made to the PDP, he said: "That was a one time offer and after they joined hands with the BJP, that offer ended." Asked if his party was happy about the development, he said: "We do not celebrate this break- up. We are mourning the demise of democracy in the state". Would he ask the Governor to keep the state Assembly in suspended animation or seek its dissolution? Abdullah replied: "That is the prerogative of the Governor and of nobody else." --IANS sq/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress-led opposition walked out of the Kerala Assembly on Tuesday in protest against what it said was inaction against the daughter of a top police officer accused of beating up a policeman. Before leading the walkout, Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala slammed Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan for his failure to take prompt action. "It has been a few days since Gavaskar, a police driver of a very senior police officer, was beaten up by his daughter. While the victim is in hospital, a case has been registered against him. But no action has been taken against the official's daughter," Chennithala said. It was alleged last week that the daughter and wife of Additional Director General of Police Sudesh Kumar, the chief of the Kerala Armed Police Battalion, misbehaved with Gavaskar. Kumar's daughter is accused of abusing Gavaskar and hitting him with her mobile telephone after he reportedly came late to pick up her and her mother. He is now warded in the Medical College Hospital. Vijayan said steps were being taken against the archaic practise of senior police officials using policemen for their personal work. "I assure the House that things are being set right and no one, irrespective of their rank, will be spared. Please don't ridicule us as we are determined to set things right. It is against the rules to use policemen for menial jobs," said Vijayan. Earlier, senior Congress legislator K. Muraleedharan sought leave for an adjournment motion and also slammed Vijayan for misleading the House when the Chief Minister in March had pointed out that no senior police officials were misusing the services of their orderlies. "It has recently come to light that an IPS official from Rajasthan had used the service of two women to help his wife have a smooth delivery. And when such things surface in the media, these officials vent their anger on the juniors," said Muraleedharan. --IANS sg/ksk/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela met here on Wednesday with the Vice President of India, M. Venkaiah Naidu, to whom he proposed using Panama's logistics platform as a means to expand Indian presence in Latin America. "Panama has put its geographical position at India's disposal to become its gate to the rest of the region, as a hub for logistics and air connectivity," Varela said during a joint press conference with Naidu, Efe reported. "We want to help India strengthen its competitiveness in world trade by means of our logistics platform," Varela added. The Panamanian President said that he had agreed to build a "much more robust" bilateral agenda with the Indian Vice President, focusing on establishing "technological, scientific and agricultural" projects, as well as promoting tourism. Naidu's visit to Panama takes place a month after the Panamanian government announced the liberalization of visa requirements for tourists from India, a decision which could have a positive effect on tourism and trade, Varela explained. The Panamanian president also said that his meeting with Naidu was part of a larger foreign policy aimed at strengthening Panama's ties with "Asian and Middle Eastern emerging markets, regions with which we have not had close relationships." "India is the fifth largest economy and the second most populated country in the world. India's success is linked to its rich culture and its commitment to entrepreneurship, science, innovation, technology and a highly-qualified workforce," Varela said. Naidu thanked the Panamanian government for liberalizing its visa requirements and praised the Central American country for its economic dynamism. --IANS ahm/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A PIL has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking directions to vest in the President and Governors powers to disqualify a sitting member of Parliament or state Assembly under anti-defection law after consulting the Election Commission (EC). Seeking to strip the Speaker and the Chairperson of their power to disqualify a sitting member under the tenth schedule of the Constitution, petitioner Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay has contended that the impartiality of the presiding officers on account of their past political allegiances is always under question. Pointing to the "apprehensions" about the alleged "partisan nature of the Speaker's decision", the petitioner advocate said: "Since Speakers are party members, they should not be burdened with the job of pronouncing on the membership of their fellow members." Mentioning that motives would be attributed whichever way the presiding officers decide on a plea for disqualification under anti-defection law (the tenth schedule), the recently-filed plea contended that the prevailing system was against the "basic dictum of democracy and free and fair election in spirit of the Constitution's Articles 14, 19 and 324". "It would be unrealistic to expect a Speaker to completely abjure party considerations while deciding on matters under the tenth schedule," the plea said. The Constitution's tenth schedule spells out the provisions for the disqualification of members on grounds of defection under Article 102(2) from either House of the Parliament and Article 191(2) from the state Assembly or the legislative council. The petitioner, who is also a leader of the ruling BJP, referred to the reports of the Goswami Committee on Electoral Reform, EC's proposed electoral reforms, and the Law Commission's 255th report in support of his plea. The EC in its proposed reforms had said that it would give its opinion to the President or Governor on the post-election disqualification of a sitting member after giving full opportunity of being heard to the parties. Coupled with this, the petitioner referred to the judgments of the top court wherein it has held that the decision of the Speaker or Chairperson to disqualify a sitting member was subject to judicial scrutiny under the Constitution's Article 32, 226 and 136. The top court had said that the Speaker or Chairperson were discharging quasi-judicial functions when deciding the question whether a member of the House has attracted disqualification on the grounds of defection, thus their decisions are subject to judicial review. Article 32 provides for the right to constitutional remedies for the enforcement of fundamental rights, Article 226 empowers the high courts to issue directions or orders or writs for the enforcement of the fundamental rights and Article 136 provides for special leave to appeal by the Supreme Court. Upadhyay also referred to the judgment of former Lok Sabha Speaker Shivraj Patil in a defection case involving the members of erstwhile Janata Dal wherein the then Speaker said: "Since Speakers in India are, after all, party members, they should not be burdened with the job of pronouncing on the membership of their fellow members. Whatever they decide, motives would be imputed to them." Even the Goswami Committee recommended that the anti-defection law be changed to provide that the "power of deciding legal issue of disqualification should not be left to the Speaker or Chairman of the House, but to the President or the Governor, as the case maybe who shall act on the advice of the EC, to whom the question should be referred for determination as in the case of any other post-election disqualification of a member". --IANS pk/gt/him/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Britain's Prince Harry and wife Meghan Markle will visit Dublin in July, Kensington Palace said on Tuesday. The royals would travel to Ireland between July 11-12 at the request of the UK government, according to the palace. "They are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and experiencing its rich culture as well as meeting the people who are shaping the country's future," Kensington Palace tweeted. Prince Harry and Markle's trip to the Emerald Isle would become their first official visit following their wedding on May 19 at Windsor Castle, Efe news reported. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have since attended various engagements, such as the annual military parade "Trooping the Colour" in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's official birthday. British monarchs traditionally celebrate two birthdays each year: their actual birthday and an official one that is usually held on the second Saturday of June, depending on the weather. Last week, Markle accompanied the queen on an official visit to the northwestern city of Chester. --IANS soni/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan on Tuesday said that projects in his parliamentary constituency Chandni Chowk, including the Shahjahanabad redevelopment plan, are stuck due to non-cooperation of Delhi's AAP government. He also said that much-awaited Rani Jhansi flyover in north Delhi will be completed by August this year. Asked about works stuck in his constituency, he said that two of his pet projects - the Shahjahanabad redevelopment plan and under-grounding of electric cables in Chandni Chowk - could not be accomplished as the Arvind Kejriwal government did not cooperate. "We followed up the Shahjahanabad redevelopment plan aggressively, I also met Lt Governor (Anil Baijal) and he was interested but the Delhi government backed out. I also met Chief Minister but he was reluctant," said Harsh Vardhan. He further added that another project for removing all the hanging electricity wires and cables in crowded Chandni Chowk area could not be accomplished because of the "attitude" of the Delhi government. "We were in talks with the Union Power ministry and Delhi government... the mechanism is such that you got to have their (Delhi government) support... but after few meetings, the AAP government representatives stopped coming to the meetings," he said. Citing his achievements in his constituency, Harsh Vardhan said these included opening over 50 open gyms, and a skill development centre for Muslim girls at Jama Masjid Police Station. "Eighty more gyms are are planned, besides 35 to be developed with cooperation with DDA (Delhi Development Authority)," he said. The Union Minister also disclosed his plan to provide separate facilities to women in the open gyms so that they are not deprived of the facility due to long queues in parks. He said that around 237 projects were in different phases of progression in his constituency and will be visible in next one year. "People had been walking in my house for past 25 years to get their issues resolved and they don't have to take any appointment... this the kind of public dialogue our government promotes," Harsh Vardhan added. --IANS kd/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Public money is "hundred per cent safe" in state-run banks,Interim Finance Minister Piyush Goyal said on Tuesday, allaying apprehensions in the wake of recent major scams unearthed in public sector banks (PSBs). Briefing reporters here following a meeting with PSB heads, Goyal, who holds temporary charge of the Finance Ministry, said that the government could consider giving additional powers to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to check misdemeanours in state-owned banks. "Public money is extremely safe and secure in PSU banks. The government stands behind them 100 per cent," he said in response to a query. Referring to a recent statement by RBI Governor Urjit Patel, in the wake of the Rs 13,000 crore fraud on Punjab National Bank by accused diamantaire Nirav Modi, that the central bank lacked powers to effectively regulate the PSBs, Goyal said: "Powers are available with the RBI. "Conversations take place between the government and the RBI, and if additional powers are needed, the government is open to the idea." The Minister, instead, said he is unsure how safe public money is in the hands of private companies which have huge income tax dues. "Frauds are committed by the private sector, by companies which use the PSBs as a medium to commit frauds. The few frauds come to light have all been committed by private companies." Goyal also said that it is for this reason that the government will have to become "stricter" in monitoring the private sector. --IANS bc/him/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A senior United Arab Emirates (UAE) official on Tuesday blamed the Qatari leadership for its own isolation. UAE Minister of State Anwar Gargash said through his Twitter account that Qatar's proximity to Iran, the normalisation of ties with Israel and its relations with Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah were isolating its people from surroundings. "The leadership's ambiguous political orientations were responsible" for Qatar's being isolated, reported pan-Arab TV news channel Al Arabiya, citing Gargash's tweets. Gargash also claimed that the Qatari government under its ruler Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani was not representing the people of Qatar, Xinhua news agency reported. "I do not imagine that Qatari citizens are satisfied with his government's support for Houthi or his country's close ties with Tehran, nor did they previously accept the normalization of the country with Israel or its relations with Hezbollah," he tweeted. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and several other countries severed diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar on June 5, 2017, accusing Doha of aligning with non-Arab Gulf state Iran and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen against pan-Arab interests. The Arab Quartet also accused Qatar of supporting "extremism and terrorism", charges which the Al Thani government has denied. Qatar has increased trade relations with Iran and Turkey since then in order to mitigate losses triggered by the boycott. In another tweet, Gargash said "he does not think the Qatari government was accurately providing the real communication activities between its emir and the Iranian President. --IANS soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday turned 48 and several senior Congress leaders reached his mother Sonia Gandhi's residence at 10 Janpath to greet him on his birthday while Prime Minister Narendra Modi and political leaders across the country also wished him. Former President Pranab Mukherjee, in a tweet to wish Gandhi, said that he had "an unparalleled legacy of nation building behind you and an outstanding responsibility in the future". Thanking Mukherjee, Gandhi said: "Thank you Pranab Da for your wishes and kind words. I appreciate them." West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee also wished Gandhi in a tweet. Party supporters and workers got into a celebratory mood, dancing to the beat of drums in the morning outside the Congress office on Akbar Road here. There were similar vibes outside 10 Janpath, where Youth Congress members led the celebrations. They also went inside to meet Rahul Gandhi. Among the leaders visiting Sonia Gandhi's residence were former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Randeep Surjewala, P.C. Chacko, Ajay Maken, Sushmita Dev and most of the steering committee members including A.K. Antony, Ambika Soni, Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ashok Gehlot, Motilal Vora, Mukul Wasnik, Sushilkumar Shinde and others. This is Rahul Gandhi's first birthday after becoming the party President. Greeting him, Modi tweeted: "Birthday greetings to Congress President Rahul Gandhi. I pray for his long and healthy life." National Conference leader Omar Abdullah said: "Here's wishing Rahul Gandhi a very happy 48th birthday. May the almighty bless you with good health, much success & many more years in the service of the nation." RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav tweeted: "Wishing a very Happy Birthday to Rahul Gandhiji. You have exhibited remarkable vision and exemplary leadership. On your birthday, I wish you peace, good health, success and happiness. Congratulations and Happy Birthday." DMK Working President M.K. Stalin also wished Rahul Gandhi, wishing him "many more years of service to the nation". Former Janata Dal-United leader Sharad Yadav also wished him. Gandhi later thanked everyone for the wishes and said: "I am overwhelmed by the birthday wishes that I have received from all corners of our country and abroad." "Your greetings, blessings and prayers are my strength. I want to thank each and every one of you for remembering me today. May God bless you all," he added. --IANS sid-mg/vd/him/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Customs seizes P40-million worth of illegal goods posted June 19, 2018 at 10:50 pm by Vito Barcelo June 19, 2018 at 10:50 pm The Bureau of Customs seized some P40 million worth of beauty products, skimming devices and collectors item branded shoes at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport which came from Dubai, China, Taiwan, Hongkong, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Customs Commissioner Isidro Lapena said among the confiscated items were 6,500 pieces of beauty products and 182 packages of assorted cosmetics estimated to be worth P8 million at the Paircargo warehouse. These non-Food and Administration Agency [FDA] approved beauty products were disguised as balikbayan boxes declared to contain personal effects and household goods, consigned to Associated Freight Consolidators and other multiple consignees, Lapena said.The 12 balikbayan boxes which arrived from Abu Dhabi were banned beauty products such as Goree Day and Night Whitening Cream, Goree Beauty Cream, Goree Lotion, soaps, and other makeup kits. Lapena reiterated the standing order from the DFA on the importation of beauty products such as perfumes, lipsticks, shampoo, lotions, and bar soaps for personal use. COMMENT DISCLAIMER: Reader comments posted on this Web site are not in any way endorsed by Manila Standard. Comments are views by manilastandard.net readers who exercise their right to free expression and they do not necessarily represent or reflect the position or viewpoint of manilastandard.net. While reserving this publications right to delete comments that are deemed offensive, indecent or inconsistent with Manila Standard editorial standards, Manila Standard may not be held liable for any false information posted by readers in this comments section. The tri-service joint Russia-India military exercise Indra-2018 will take place in an Indian military base in the second half of this year. According to Interfax news agency, a Russian military delegation has visited India to discuss the logistics of the exercise. Combined military units of the Russian Eastern Military District will participate in the drills, it said. Members of the Indian defence forces will also be involved in planning of the exercise including practical operations of the units besides catering, consumer services and medical support for the Russian units. In addition, the parties will agree on the procedure for receiving and servicing of military transport aircraft in India. --IANS mg-ps/ksk/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) South Korea and the US have decided to suspend the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercise slated for August, amid dialogue efforts to denuclearize North Korea, the two countries' officials said on Tuesday. Shortly after his Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on June 12, US President Donald Trump unveiled his plan to stop "provocative, inappropriate and expensive" war games with the South, which Pyongyang has decried as an invasion rehearsal, reports Yonhap News Agency. "Following close cooperation, South Korea and the U.S. decided to suspend all planning activities for the UFG, the defensive exercise slated for August," Seoul's Defence Ministry said. "The South and the US plan to continue consultations over additional measures." The ministry also said that there is no decision yet regarding other allied training exercises. The US Department of Defence also made the same announcement. "Consistent with President Trump's commitment and in concert with our Republic of Korea ally, the United States military has suspended all planning for this August's defensive 'wargame' (Freedom Guardian)," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement late Monday. The White House said that the combined exercises are expected to be "on pause" should the North deliver on its denuclearization commitment. "Those conversations are ongoing at this point. As long as North Korea continues to act in good faith, then we expect those things to be on pause," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters also on Saturday. The UFG is a command post exercise based on computer simulated war games centering on a scenario of an all-out war with the North. In 1954, the US-led UN Command started the Focus Lens exercise. It was later combined with South Korea's Ulchi exercise, which was launched in the wake of a North Korean infiltration in 1968. The combined exercise, which was called the Ulchi Focus Lens (UFL), was renamed the UFG in 2008. In 1990, the allies temporarily halted the UFL due to the US' participation in the Gulf War. Amid dialogue with the North in 1992, Seoul and Washington also cancelled their Team Spirit exercise, which resumed the following year. --IANS ksk (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hold an urgent hearing of a PIL seeking a direction to the Delhi High Court to expeditiously hear a plea for declaring the sit-in protest at Delhi Lt. Governor Anil Baijal's office by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and others unconstitutional and illegal. The vacation bench comprising of Justice S. Abdul Nazeer and Justice Indu Malhotra said the matter would be heard on the opening day when court reopens after the summer break even as lawyer Shashank Deo Sudhi, appearing for the PIL petitioner, told the court that there was a constitutional crisis and a vacuum, and the administration was paralysed. Sudhi appeared for PIL petitioner and advocate Hari Nath Ram, who told the vacation bench that the matter was listed before the Delhi High Court on Monday (June 18) but was directed to be heard next on June 22. Seeking a direction to the High Court to hear the matter urgently, Sudhi told the bench that politicians were not above the law and there was a threat to the rule of law. He referred to earlier court pronouncements by which the strikes were held to be illegal. The lawyer said before the High Court they have prayed that perjury proceedings be initiated against the Lt. Governor and the Chief Minister for making conflicting claims on the strike by the bureaucrats serving in the Delhi government. Kejriwal along with Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, Health Minister Satyendar Jain and Transport Minister Gopal Rai has been camping at the Raj Niwas, the official accommodation-cum-office of Lt. Governor Anil Baijal, since June 11. Kejriwal has said he and his colleagues would not leave Baijal's office until their demands, which include direction to IAS officers to end their "strike", action against officers who have struck work for "four months" and approval to his government's proposal for doorstep delivery of ration to the poor, were met. During Monday's hearing, the High Court had sought to know from the AAP government who has authorised Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues to hold a sit-in protest at the Lt. Governor's office as it was not the place to hold a demonstration. The bench had said the protesters cannot go inside someone's office or house and go on strike and as such the strike cannot be held inside the Lt. Governor's office. The High Court has been hearing three separate petitions related to Kejriwal's sit-in protest at the Lt. Governor's office. One petition was filed by Leader of Opposition in the Delhi assembly, Vijender Gupta seeking direction to Kejriwal to return to work. Another petition was filed by Hari Nath Ram through his advocate Shashank Deo Sudhi seeking to declare the sit-in protest at the Lt. Governor's office unconstitutional and illegal. The third plea was filed by advocate Umesh Gupta who sought to end the alleged 'informal strike' by the IAS officers. --IANS pk-gt/pgh/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump has defended his policy of splitting up families entering the US illegally, defying a growing chorus of condemnation. Speaking at a business convention, Trump said children have to be taken away if their parents are jailed for illegally crossing the US border. The President had earlier sparked outrage for tweeting that undocumented immigrants would "infest" the US. Mexico's Foreign Minister has called the US policy "cruel and inhuman". "I don't want children taken away from parents," Trump said on Tuesday during a speech at a National Federation of Independent Businesses event in Washington DC, reported BBC. But he added: "When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally - which should happen - you have to take the children away." He also claimed that separating families was "the only solution" to end illegal immigration, even as he noted that he does not support the practice. Trump said he wanted to "end the border crisis" by giving border officials the resources to "detain and remove illegal immigrant families altogether". US immigration officials say 2,342 children have been separated from 2,206 parents from May 5 to June 9. Trump has blamed "Democrat-supported loopholes" in federal law for the family separations, but critics of the policy say the recent spike is due to the enforcement of US Attorney General Jeff Sessions' "zero tolerance" approach. Sessions has rejected claims that US holding centres for child migrants separated from parents are like Nazi concentration camps. America's top law official told Fox News the "zero tolerance" policy was about enforcing border security. Trump is meeting Republican lawmakers later to discuss a bill that proposes to curb the policy. Sessions was asked on Fox News about a tweet by former CIA Director Michael Hayden likening what happened at Auschwitz concentration camp, where millions of Jews and other minorities were killed, to the separation of undocumented immigrant families at the US border. "Well, it's a real exaggeration, of course," the Department of Justice chief said in Monday night's interview. "In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country." Sessions said: "Fundamentally, we are enforcing the law. Hopefully people will get the message and not break across the border unlawfully." In a remark that provoked criticism, Fox News host Laura Ingraham said the detention centres were "essentially summer camps" for migrant children. It is not the first historical analogy inspired by the policy - former US First Lady Laura Bush has compared it to the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Trump tweeted on Tuesday that immigrants threatened "to pour into and infest our Country", triggering further outrage. --IANS nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL), a grouping of senior separatist leaders, on Tuesday called for a protest shutdown on Thursday against the murder of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari and civilian killings in the Kashmir Valley. Senior separatist leaders Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Muhammad Yasin Malik called for a Valley-wide shutdown. Expressing serious concern over the murder of Bukhari, the editor of "Rising Kashmir", the JRL demanded an international probe into it. Bukhari was shot dead by three motorcycle-borne youths outside his Srinagar office on June 14. The JRL first announced that the shutdown will be observed on Wednesday but later deferred it to Thursday because of a Hindu festival at Mata Kheer Bhawani shrine in Ganderbal district on Wednesday. --IANS sq/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Goa State Industrial Development Corporation on Tuesday issued a show cause notice to Vasudev Parab, whose industrial unit at the Pissurlem industrial estate was raided last week by the DRI officials. During the raid, the DRI (Directorate of Revenue Intelligence) officials had seized more than 100 kg of banned ketamine drug, from the premises. "We have asked him why his industrial plot should not be taken back, because media reports have said that a DRI raid had seized ketamine being manufactured there," the Corporation's chairperson and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Glenn Ticlo told reporters on Tuesday. The show cause notice comes a day after Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar had ruled out a state government probe into the ketamine racket being allegedly operated from Parab's shed at the industrial estate located in North Goa's Bicholim sub district. Since the raid, the industrial shed has been sealed by DRI sleuths. Ticlo also said Parab had been given seven days to respond to the notice. In a three-day operation code-named 'Operation Vitamin', the DRI last week busted an international drug syndicate, seizing 308 kg ketamine, two tonnes of raw material at various sites in Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat, arresting 10 persons including two from UK and one from Vietnam. Used as a tranquiliser for veterinary purpose, ketamine is a common party drug and is known for its hallucinating effects. While the Congress has claimed that Parab is a North Goa BJP office bearer, the ruling BJP has rejected the allegation. --IANS maya/pgh/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) South Korea and the US have decided to suspend the Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) exercise slated for August amid dialogue efforts to denuclearize North Korea, officials of the two countries said on Tuesday. Shortly after his Singapore summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on June 12, US President Donald Trump unveiled his plan to stop "provocative, inappropriate and expensive" war games with the South, which Pyongyang has decried as an "invasion rehearsal", Yonhap news agency reported. "Following close cooperation, South Korea and the U.S. decided to suspend all planning activities for the UFG, the defensive exercise slated for August," Seoul's Defence Ministry said. "The South and the US plan to continue consultations over additional measures." The ministry also said that there was no decision yet regarding other allied training exercises. The Chinese Foreign Ministry welcomed the move, calling it "positive and constructive". The US Department of Defence also made the same announcement. "Consistent with President Trump's commitment and in concert with our Republic of Korea ally, the US military has suspended all planning for this August's defensive 'wargame' (Freedom Guardian)," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in a statement late Monday. The White House said that the combined exercises are expected to be "on pause" should the North deliver on its denuclearization commitment. "Those conversations are ongoing at this point. As long as North Korea continues to act in good faith, then we expect those things to be on pause," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders had said last week. The UFG is a command post exercise based on computer simulated war games centreing on a scenario of an all-out war with the North. In 1954, the US-led UN Command started the Focus Lens exercise. It was later combined with South Korea's Ulchi exercise, which was launched in the wake of a North Korean infiltration in 1968. The combined exercise, which was called the Ulchi Focus Lens (UFL), was renamed the UFG in 2008. In 1990, the allies temporarily halted the UFL due to the US' participation in the Gulf War. Amid dialogue with the North in 1992, Seoul and Washington also cancelled their Team Spirit exercise, which resumed the following year. --IANS gsh/soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) After the BJP pulled out of the coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir, a surprised Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti on Tuesday submitted her resignation to Governor N.N. Vohra. Immediately after she learnt about the Bharatiya Janata Party's decision, Mehbooba Mufti rushed to Raj Bhawan. Later she called an emergency meeting of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In a surprise development, after summoning all its Ministers in the state government to New Delhi, the BJP announced that it had decided to exit from the PDP-BJP coalition. BJP leader Ram Madhav said the continuation of the BJP in the government had become untenable. "We have, therefore, decided to pull out of the ruling coalition." He said the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir had worsened to such a level that keeping the integrity of the county in mind the decision was taken to end the alliance. Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Kavinder Gupta, a senior BJP leader, said that the resignations of all BJP Ministers had been sent to the Chief Minister. "The Governor is being intimated of the decision and it is now for the Governor to decide the next constitutional step in the state," Gupta said. After the 2014 Assembly elections, the PDP and the BJP cobbled up a coalition government based on a mutually agreed agenda of alliance. --IANS sq/mr/him (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Thai authorities on Tuesday executed a male murder convict, the first in nine years. Theerasak Longji, 26, was charged with murder and robbery by the Appeal Court and the Supreme Court. He was then handed the death sentence, reports Xinhua news agency. He stabbed the victim 24 times and stole his mobile phone and wallet in 2012. The execution by lethal injection lasted for three hours. The Justice Ministry issued a regulation on execution by lethal injection in 2003, replacing execution by firing squad, according to the department. The department said Theerasak was the seventh convict executed by lethal injection since the method was introduced. Since 1935, 325 convicts have been executed in Thailand out of which 319 were killed by the firing squad. --IANS ksk/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday urged the European Union (EU) nations to not make distinction between "good" and "bad" and called for their partnership in battling terror taking root in the region between then. Addressing a Greek foreign policy think tank on the topic 'India and Europe in a Changing World', Kovind underlined India's commitment to "world peace" and cited the steps it has taken to further it. "India and the EU (European Union) must persuade the world to not distinguish between so-called 'good' and 'bad' terrorists, to shame and sanction state sponsors of terrorism, and to strengthen multilateral platforms such as the Financial Action Task Force and the Global Counter- Forum," he said at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), as per an official statement. The President said that radicalisation and are pressing global concerns and pockets of instability and extremism can be found in the region to Europe's east and India's west. "They are a worry for both Europe and India," he said. Kovind assured the Europeans also of India's sincerity in combating the global pollution and promises made in the 2015 Paris Agreement. He said India's share of non-fossil fuel usage will be up from "current 31 per cent to 53 per cent by 2027" and that it is targeting 175 gigawatts of renewable energy, of which 100 gigawatts will be solar energy. Kovind said India-Greek trade at $530 million is way below its potential and with some efforts, this can easily be made to cross $1 billion. He invited Greek industries to invest in various Indian enterprises and said that Greek shipping industry will find "lucrative opportunities" in India's ambitious Sagarmala project. The President, who is on a visit to Greece, Suriname, and Cuba, ended his first leg, departing for the South American nation of Suriname later in the day. --IANS vn/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At least 25 overseas Filipino workers detained in Qatar for various offenses were granted a royal pardon by the Emir of Qatar on the occasion of the holy month of Ramadan, Department of Labor and Employment Secretary Silvestre Bello III said. Bello said he has conveyed the gratitude of President Rodrigo Duterte to Sheikh Tamim Bin Hammad Al Thani for his act of compassion. The most kind gesture of His Highness the Emir is a testament to our strong people-to-people linkages and the triumph of the human spirit. We are truly grateful, Bello said. The pardoned workers are soon to be repatriated and receive assistance from the government, he said. Bello graced a gathering of more than 4,000 Filipino migrant workers in Doha in observance of Philippine Independence Day organized by the Philippine Embassy in the oil-rich country.The event, which coincided with the celebration of Edl Fitr, was also attended by the Qatar Minister of Administrative Development, Labor and Social Affairs, Dr. Essa Bin Saad Al Jafali Al Nuaimi and other Qatari officials. I also join our migrant workers in expressing our sincere gratitude for the generosity of His Excellency Minister Nuaimi in co-hosting the gathering, he said. Most of the pardoned workers have been imprisoned for bouncing checks and a handful for drug and adultery cases. They have been in detention for months. The maritime forces of India, the US and Japan participated in the trilateral maritime exercise Malabar 2018 which conducted off the coast of Guam from June 7 to 16, the US Navy's Commander, Task Force 70 (CTF 70) Public Affairs, said on Tuesday. "Initiated in 1992 as an exercise between the US and Indian Navy, Malabar 2018 is the 22nd rendition of the exercise and included the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force (JMSDF), a regular participant since 2015," CTF 70 said in a statement that was shared by the US Embassy here. "The exercise accomplished maritime interoperability training objectives among the three maritime forces, emphasising high-end war fighting skills, maritime superiority and power projection," it stated. This is the first year that Malabar was conducted in the US Navy's Guam operation area. The two-phase exercise took place ashore in Guam and in the Philippine Sea. "While ashore in Guam, training included subject matter expert and professional exchanges on operations, maritime patrol and reconnaissance operations, anti-submarine warfare, medical operations, damage control, helicopter operations, ship tours, and visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) operations," the statement said. According to the statement, the at-sea portions of the exercise conducted in the Philippine Sea were designed to advance participating nations' military-to-military coordination and capacity to plan and execute tactical operations in a multinational environment. "The US, Japan and India have a range of common security interests that include maritime security, counter terrorism, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and having an active role building regional partner capacity and maritime domain awareness. By doing so, they bolster the shared vision laid out by their respective governments to contribute to overall peace and security in the region." India, the US and Japan, along with Australia, are part of a quad that was revived late last year. --IANS ab/mr (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Tuesday criticised the US Senate's decision to block delivery of F-35 jets to Turkey, describing it "unfortunate" and "regrettable". "The decision is an unfortunate move," Yildirim said in Turkey's Izmir province, adding that "Turkey is not without alternatives. Such attempts are regrettable and goes against the spirit of strategic partnership". The US Senate on Monday approved a $716 billion defence budget bill, including an amendment prohibiting sales to Turkey of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin, Xinhua news agency reported. The amendment claimed that Turkey's purchasing of the S-400 air defence system from Russia increases tensions and risks to the NATO alliance. It also demanded the release of US Pastor Andrew Brunson held in Turkey who faces terror charges. According to the amendment, US President Donald Trump should certify that Turkey does not threaten NATO, purchase defence equipment from Russia or detain US citizens. The bill still needs to be passed by the US House and is not expected to become law until later in the summer, reported Daily Sabah. Earlier, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that they would turn to other markets if the US does not allow it to buy F-35 jets. --IANS soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US senate has voted to reinstate a ban on Chinese telecom company ZTE which prevents it from buying US components and using US software despite President Donald Trump's attempts to lift sanctions on the firm, the media reported. The Senate has passed the annual National Defense Authorization Act which included an amendment to stop Trump's deal allowing US companies to trade with ZTE. Several Republican and Democratic Senators said their vote related to national security issues after numerous intelligence warnings about ZTE this year. "The legislation which is considered crucial for continuing defense funding, was passed with 85-10 votes, one of a handful of times the Republican-controlled Senate has deviated from a Trump policy," Business Insider reported on Tuesday. Mark Warner, Vice-Chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee had tweeted that the Senate had "blocked" the Trump administration from making a "bad deal with ZTE". "The amendment is not guaranteed to become law. The bill will now need to be reconciled with a House version -- where the amendment could be stripped out -- voted through both the House and the Senate and signed into law by Trump," the report added. The Shenzhen-headquartered telecommunications firm was hit with a trade ban by the US Commerce Department for seven years after failing to follow through with a punishment for violating sanctions on Iran and North Korea. That ban essentially shut down ZTE, which relies on US parts like Qualcomm processors. However, on Trump's orders, the administration made a deal earlier this month to end ZTE's sanctions in exchange for a $1 billion fine. ZTE, which employs 70,000 people in China, described the move by the US regulators to cut it off from its US parts suppliers as a "death sentence". --IANS ksc/pgh/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US plans to announce its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday, media reports said. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who had last year threatened to pull out of it given longstanding US complaints that it is biased against Israel, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, plans to announce the withdrawal at the State Department here at 5 p.m., Bloomberg reported, quoting two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity. On Monday, the Geneva-based council began its latest session. The announcement will come a day after UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein slammed US President Donald Trump's immigration policy separating migrant children from their parents, The Times of Israel reported, also quoting sources. The Trump administration earlier pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. --IANS him/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Sana'a, June 19 (IANS/WAM) Yemeni forces backed by a Saudi-led air force coalition on Tuesday recaptured an airport that has exchanged hands several times in a violent battle to wrest control of port-city of Hudaydah from Houthi insurgents, military officials said. Abuzaraa al-Mahrabi, a commander for the Army loyal to the internationally-backed Yemeni government said that Houthi insurgents had relinquished control of the airport and fled north back into Hudaydah city. The strategic city is located on the Red Sea coast with its port as one of the main entry points for essential supplies to the country, which is suffering the most pressing humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the UN. Its conquest was seen by government forces as crucial in the wider objective of ending the insurgency. The Houthis were earlier pushed out of the airport on June 16 but managed to retake the complex the following day. The Yemeni ground force, loyal to the internationally-recognized government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi was joined by militiamen from Sudan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and received aerial support from the Saudi-led Arab Air Force coalition. The battle for Hudaydah was the Saudi-led coalition's largest military operation since it intervened in the Yemeni conflict in 2015. The Houthis, a majority Shia armed group allied to Iran, seized power in the capital Sana'a and eastern regions of the country between 2014-15, forcing the Hadi government into exile, from where it requested armed support from its Sunni neighbour Saudi Arabia. The ensuing civil war plunged the nation into a humanitarian crisis. According to the UN, which has limited access to Yemen, hundreds of thousands of people have fled fighting and as many as 8 million people were on the brink of starvation. The UN has warned that some 600,000 civilians in the settlement could be affected by the battle. --IANS/WAM soni/vm (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) After the withdrawal of Bharatiya Janata Party from the alliance of Peoples Democratic Party in Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba Mufti in a press conference on Tuesday said that she formed an alliance with BJP thinking that it would provide stable government for the people of Kashmir and better relations with Pakistan as BJP had managed to get a huge mandate at the Centre. Mufti said her party always believed that muscular policy won't work in Jammu and added that it can't be treated as an enemy state. She added that PDP's agenda of providing a healing touch is still ... The Congress is currently in a tussle with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) over the sharing of seats for the forthcoming assembly polls to Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The elections to these three states, along with Mizoram, are scheduled at the end of November and the first week of December. After it had seemed that the Congress-BSP alliance had been sewn up, the BSPs Madhya Pradesh leadership has threatened to field candidates in the states all 230 seats. Similarly, an SP leader has said the Congress party needed to have ... Three children died and at least 40 people were hospitalised due to suspected food poisoning after they had a meal at a function in Maharashtra's Raigad district, the police said today. A person, identified as Subhash Mane, had organised a house-warming party at Mahad village in Khalapur area last evening, Raigad Superintendent of Police Anil Paraskar told PTI. After having dinner at his place, some of the guests complained of uneasiness and started vomiting. They were taken to a local hospital, he said. But later, more than 50 people, including children, arrived at the hospital with the same complaint. Some of them were even unconscious, another police official said. As their health condition deteriorated, all the victims were shifted to various hospitals in Raigad, Navi Mumbai and Mumbai, he said. Three children -- Kalyani Shingude (7), Rishikesh Shinde (12) and Pragati Shinde (13) - were declared dead before admission in one of the hospitals, the police official said. Nearly 40 people, including children, were still being treated in 11 hospitals. Of them five are stated to be in a critical condition, he said. "We have registered a case and will send the samples of the food served at the dinner to a forensic science laboratory and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for analysis," the official said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A retired Army personnel and two others were shot dead separately when they were sleeping outside their homes at a village in the Raya police station area of the district, police said today. The three -- retired army personnel Bhanvar Singh (55), former village head Satya Prakaskh (72), and Sundar Singh (45) -- were killed at Bharau village last night. In protest against the killings, the villagers staged protest and refused to allow the bodies to be taken for post-mortem. Senior police officers reached the village and pacified the villagers, after which the bodies were sent for autopsy. Five teams of police have been formed to work out the case," Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Prabhakar Chaudhary said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President Rodrigo Duterte wants Norway out as the facilitator of the peace talks and insists that the talks between the government and the communist rebels should be held in the Philippines, Malacanang said Monday. Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque said there was no need to go to another country like Norway to talk peace because the negotiators were all Filipinos. This is a talk between Filipinos, Roque quoted Duterte as saying, adding there was no point in holding the talks in another country. He made his statement even as Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana on Monday denied the rebels claim that the future military offensives against them were the reason the resumption of the peace negotiations set on June 28 was canceled. That is not true, Lorenzana said. The President decided that he needs more time to review all past agreements between the NDF [National Democratic Front] and the GRP [Government of the Republic of the Philippines] and the results of the recent back-channeling talks. Roque agreed with Lorenzana and said the rebels claim was without basis. He said the military was busy confronting the armed groups in Lanao del Sur, but the firefight was not directly intended against the rebels.He called on the rebels to go slow in making public declarations with regard to the peace talks between them and the government. He said it would be sad if the Communist Party of the Philippines would not agree to having the peace talks in the Philippines. Im hopeful that, with the sincerity shown by the government, the venue should not matter, Roque said. He said the peace talks must be held here and in July instead of this month. I do not know if [the talks were] originally scheduled for the 24th [of June] because that information came from [CPP founding chairman] Joma Sison, Roque said. I never announced that date. That is why the term that I used is that the continuation of the talks will be in July as declared by the President. I do not feel bound by anything that Mr. Sison says. But the President is dead-serious about it. He has already asked the Department of Justice to file the necessary motions in Court to set free the individuals who will be participating in the talks, and I think that is the best evidence of good faith on the part of the government. Three top Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militants, including its operational commander, were killed in an encounter with security forces in Tral in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir today, police said. The encounter broke out after security forces launched a cordon-and-search operation in the area following specific intelligence inputs, a police official said. Earlier, Director General of Police (DGP) S P Vaid wrote on Twitter, Encounter going on at Hyena Tral, 3 (three) important JEM Terrorists trapped... The police official said the gunfight was going on when last reports came in. Further details were awaited, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A major fire broke out at two hotels in the busy area of the city early this morning, killing at least five people and critically injuring four, police said. The fire broke out at a hotel in the Charbagh area near the railway station here at around 6AM and spread to an adjacent hotel, police said. As many as 55 people, including the hotel staff, were rescued, a senior police official said. ADG Lucknow zone has been directed to inquire into the incident, Principal Secretary (Home) Arvind Kumar said. People living in and around the densely populated area woke up to the hooting siren of fire tenders and ambulances that virtually made a bee-line to the congested area. Around 60 people were occupying rooms in these two hotels when the incident occurred. "Five people have died, while four others have been hospitalised with severe burns. As many as 55 people, including staff of both the hotels, were evacuated," Superintendent of Police (Lucknow West) Vikas Chand Tripathi told PTI. "Around 15 fire tenders were pressed into service to control the blaze," he said. About the cause of the fire, Tripathi said, "It seems there was a short circuit." Senior minister Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who visited the site, said, "I have come to know that the mishap took place reportedly due to short circuit. We will inquire into the exact cause and come out with a report in a week." Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath expressed sorrow over the loss of lives in the fire. "The chief minister has directed officials to ensure proper medical care for the injured," an official spokesperson said. The government has decided to give an an ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh for the the family members of each of the deceased and Rs 50,000 for each of the grievously injured has been announced. Two charred bodies have been identified, DIG (law and order) Praveen Kumar told reporters at his briefing. They are Priyanash Sharma (40) from Aligarh and an 18-month girl Maher from Kanpur, he said. Kumar also said, "The map of one of the hotels was not approved, while there was no staff to handle fire fighting equipment in the neighbouring hotel. Cases have been registered against the owners of both the hotels under various sections of the IPC, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A group of 52 Indians, mostly Sikhs, has been held at a detention centre in the US State of Oregon for being part of a large contingent of illegal immigrants seeking asylum, an American lawmaker has said. The Indians form the largest group of detainees in the total 123 illegal immigrants being held at a facility in Sheridan. The detention centre was recently visited by a group of Democratic lawmakers from the Oregon State, who later told the media about the alleged inhuman condition of the illegal immigrants. The immigrants are seeking asylum in the US. The detainees from India is the largest group of detainees being held in Sheridan, wrote Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici on her blog post. She along with several other Democratic lawmakers from the State visited the detention centre Saturday. "Through our Punjabi translator, we learned that these men were planning to request asylum because they faced severe religious persecution in India. Most are Sikh or Christian. Instead they were incarcerated in a federal prison," she said. "They said they came to the United States for religious freedom, but they felt as if they were 'going crazy' because they are being confined in small cells for up to 22 hours a day," the Congresswoman said. The Indian detainees pointed out that the other non-immigrant prisoners get far more time out of cells, she said. Most of the detainees at the federal facility are asking for asylum because they experienced violence or persecution in their home countries, Bonamici said. Several had travelled to the border with a wife and a child or children; none knew where their family members are, she said. "This is a shameful hour in US history. I don't care what your stance on immigration is, no one should favour ripping children out of their parents' arms ...." Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer told reporters after visiting the detention center. He alleged that President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have doubled down on their anti-immigrant, xenophobic agenda with the administration's new "zero tolerance" policy on immigration. "The administration is criminalising families who are fleeing abuse and violence and separating children as ICE detains or deports their parents," he said in a statement. According to the local daily 'The Oregonian', of the total detainees, 52 have identified themselves as Sikhs or Christians from India. They alleged that they fled from their country because of religious persecution from the Hindu majority. The Indians told the delegation that their Hindi and Punjabi translators were the first outsiders they've been able to talk to since they were imprisoned weeks ago, the daily reported. The Congressional delegation included Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden. "As the child of parents whose families found refuge in America from the terrors of Nazi Germany, I strongly believe Donald Trump's cruel and callous treatment of human beings seeking asylum flies in the face of America's core humanitarian values," Wyden said. "Trump's choice of zero tolerance for the refugees we met today and for the others imprisoned around the country this Father's Day weekend makes zero sense and shows zero understanding of American values. "What I saw and heard today highlights the urgency of reversing Trump's mean, dangerous and damaging actions returning America to our unique role as a beacon of hope that welcomed our immigrant ancestors and creating the future we want for our children," he said. These 123 detainees are among the more than 1,600 people that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is holding in federal prisons across the US as it enforces Trump's "zero-tolerance policy" on immigration, the lawmakers said in a joint statement. The men come from 16 different countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Cameroon, China, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, India, Mauritania, Nepal, Peru and Russia, as well as from Congo and Eritrea, it said. The Congressional delegation were told that that detainees are being held upwards for 23 hours a day with three men bunked in each cell. The prison does not have the resources to house ICE detainees alongside pre-trial inmates who are normally held in the facility. The delegation was also told that incompatibility between BOP and ICE telephone systems was preventing ICE detainees at the BOP facility from accessing legal services. According to lawmakers, the detainees described stress as they sit in cells day after day without knowing when they will get a hearing, or get a lawyer, or what comes next. "Several men had been separated from their children, and experienced the added stress of not knowing what happened to their families. "Under Trump's 'zero-tolerance policy', the men's children were taken away at the border one man said an ICE official told him, 'it's not my choice; the decision came from above' and the fathers still don't have any information about their location, condition or well-being," the lawmakers said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Six boys from a school here, who had gone missing sending their parents and police into a tizzy, have been found and returned home after a "secret" trip, the police said. According to police, the boys, who are students of class 9 in St Lawrence School at Kamakshipalya here, were found in Maralagundla village near Magadi, about 70 km from Bengaluru. Their urge for adventure made them plan a secret trip to Maralagundla, where a boy's grandparents were staying, police said. Soon after returning home from school, thechildren gave some excuse to venture out of their houseswithout revealing their actual plan, the police said. As they left, only one of them took his mobile phone with him, which he switched off soon after they boarded a bus. After reaching Magadi, they had some mangoes and puffedrice and spent night in an abandoned underconstruction building on the outskirts of the sleepy town. This morning, they all went to some hillocks and in theafternoon, to the house of a boy's grandparents. By the time they reached Maralagundla, the had gone viral and everybody was worried about the missing children, police said. As the children went missing, their parents lodged a police complaint. The boy's grandparents informed his parents who in turn told police. A police team led by assistant commissioner of police Parameshwar Hegde was constituted to trace the children. After learning about their presence in Maralagundla, apolice team rushed to the village and brought the children back. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The overall flood situation in the north-east continued to improve today, except in Assam, where six more people died, taking the death toll due to flood-related incidents in the region to 31, officials said. According to a report of the Assam State Disaster Management Authority (ASDMA), four people lost their lives in flood-related incidents in worst-hit Karimganj district while two died in Cachar district since yesterday, taking the death toll in the state to 20. Over 5.64 lakh people have been affected by the flood in Nagaon, Hojai, Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi districts. Till yesterday, 5.49 lakh people were hit by the flood across six districts, including Golaghat. Karimganj is the worst hit, affecting nearly 2.36 lakh people, followed by Hailakandi with 2.21 lakh, the report said. At present, 727 villages in the affected districts are under water and 3,890 hectares of crop areas have been damaged, the report said. It said the authorities are running 457 relief camps and distribution centres in four districts, where 1,57,524 people have taken shelter. At least 9,250 people have been evacuated by the state and national disaster response forces personnel from Karimganj, Hailakandi and Cachar districts since yesterday. Landslides occurred at Kharguli locality in Guwahati, but no casualty was reported, the report said. Barak river at Badarpurghat in Karimganj, Dhansiri at Numaligarh in Golaghat and Kushiyara at Karimganj town were flowing above the danger marks, the report said. In Tripura, the situation has improved and 19,953 people were staying in 61 relief camps in Kailashahar subdivision of Unakoti, the worst affected district, officials said. Over 72,000 people of the district had been in relief camps till yesterday. A large number of the marooned people have left for their homes after flood water receded in rivers Manu and Deo, the officials said. The flood has so far claimed three lives in Tripura. The issue was raised in the Assembly and Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb said an elaborate report on the damage caused by the flood would be sent to the Centre for necessary assistance. The state government has constituted a committee to assess the damage and submit it to the Centre at the earliest, he said, adding that compensation will be given to the flood hit people as per norms. The chief minister was addressing the house after opposition leader Tapan Chakraborty, who is from the worst hit Unakoti district, expressed his concern about the flood affected people. "We are working together with the Central government. Following our request, the Centre has sent choppers along with NDRF personnel to tide over the situation," Deb said. In Manipur, normal life is gradually coming back as flood water is receding in most of the affected areas, officials said. However, several localities in the five districts of Imphal valley, mostly at Wabagai area of Thoubal district, are still under knee-deep water. The state Relief and Disaster Management department officials said at least 304 village were affected by the flood that claimed eight lives in the state. Water level of major rivers continued a declining trend. Manipur Governor Najma Heptulla and staff members of Imphal Raj Bhavan donated one day salary to the Governor's Relief Fund for the welfare of the affected people, Raj Bhavan officials said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 64-year-old Pakistani woman, who served her 10-year prison term in Amritsar Central Jail for drug trafficking, was today repatriated via the Attari-Wagah border, officials said. Nasreen Akhtar, who was on a wheelchair, was handed over to Pakistani Rangers at the border, they said After her release from the jail, Akhtar greeted the media with a Sat Sri Akal and said: "My mother is 90-year-old and it is her wish to see me before she dies. Enormously happy as I am going to meet my mother." Later, she was received by her mother on the other side of the border. Eight months ago, Nasreen's two sisters Fathima and Mumtaz were released from jail. In May 2006, the three sisters and two others - Rashida Bibi and Rashid - were arrested for drug trafficking after they arrived at Attari Railway Station on board the Samjautha Express. A local court had awarded 10-year prison term each to the five Pakistani nationals. A fine of Rs four lakh each was also imposed on them. Besides Akhtar, five other Pakistani prisoners were today repatriated after being released from various jails in India. The Pakistani prisoners were issued emergency travel certificates by the Pakistani High Commission. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Environmental activist Piyush Manush has been arrested on charges of 'instigating' a section of villagers in Salem district against the proposed Greenfield corridor project connecting Salem and Chennai, police said today. The activist had visited three villages in that district on May 3 along with Tamil film actor Mansoor Ali Khan and had made a 'provocative speech' against the project. Piyush allegedly incited people, particularly farmers of these villages to protest against the project, they said. The actor had also allegedly threatened to kill eight people if the state government went ahead with the same, they added. A case was registered against Piyush, as accused number one and Khan as accused number two in this connection. Piyush was arrested late last night at Omalur in Salem district under sections 506 (ii) criminal intimidation, 189 (threat of injury to public servant) 153 (wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot), police said. Khan was already arrested in Chennai and lodged in Salem central prison. In a related development, a woman social activist Valarmathi was arrested today, when she along with a few villagers attempted to lay siege to revenue officials, who had come to measure the land meant to be acquired for the project near Achanguttapatti on the outskirts of Salem, where the proposed road begins. The 23-year old woman is a post graduate student of journalism of Periyar University in Salem. Valarmathi was arrested on July 12 last year when she, along with another student, were allegedly distributing pamphlets, seeking support for a protest against the implementation of a proposed hydrocarbon project in Pudukottai district. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today slammed the BJP over its decision to pull out of its alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir and alleged that the party had "ruined" the state. The chief minister also brought up the issue of demonetisation in a series of tweets following the BJP's announcement. "After ruining it, BJP pulls out of Kashmir. Didn't BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened?" Kejriwal asked. The BJP pulled out of its alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, saying it had become impossible to continue in the government in view of the growing radicalism and terrorism in the state. The decision to withdraw was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah, the party's general secretary Ram Madhav announced at a press conference here. The BJP's move raises the possibility of governor's rule in the volatile state, the eighth time since it was imposed in 1977. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Algeria's minister says the Algerian government is taking the "extreme measure" of temporarily suspending the entire country's internet connection during national high school exams to stop cheating and the leaking of answers. Nouria Benghabrit today told Algerian national radio that the internet, including social networks such as Facebook, will be blocked during for the first hour of each baccalaureate exam during the June 20-25 exam period. The decision comes after massive online leaks of the baccalaureate, the last mandatory high school exam, in the previous two years. Benghabrit said, "We have put in place a technical device that consists of suspending the internet connection and block social networks from Wednesday to prevent the leaking of baccalaureate subjects." Cell phone jammers are also being installed at each examination centre. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh today hoped Prime Minister Narendra Modi will announce initiatives for the welfare of farmers, including the implementation of the Swaminathan Committee report, during his interaction with them tomorrow. In a statement issued, Singh urged Modi to use the forum to announce reforms in the distressed agriculture sector. Modi will speak to farmers tomorrow via video conference on issues concerning them and the agriculture sector. He is likely to flag his government's schemes aimed at boosting their income. Reiterating his demand for a national farm debt waiver scheme and the implementation of the Swaminathan Commission report in totality, Singh said farmers were in need of the prime minister's intervention. He hoped Modi's interaction with farmers would yield concrete results "and not turn out to be a mere media op". The committee's recommendations deals with measures to improve the state of agriculture and farmers in India. It submitted its final report in 2006 to then UPA government and urged it to take steps to secure farmers' income to check the agrarian distress and farmers' unrest across the country. "Given the extreme agrarian crisis prevailing in the country, which was witnessing suicides by distressed farmers across states, Modi should seize this opportunity to announce major relief measures for the farming community," Singh said. He said if Modi was serious about realising his vision of doubling farm income by 2022, he should waste no time in announcing the implementation of Swaminathan Committee report. Let this occasion be historical in a true sense, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court has affirmed the decision of the Sandiganbayan to dismiss the Philippine Commission on Good Governments bid to sequester in favor of the government P51 billion in an alleged ill-gotten wealth of the late President Ferdinand Marcos, his wife Imelda and their alleged cronies. In a decision written by Associate Justice Noel Tijam, the SCs First Division sustained the judgment handed by the anti-graft court dismissing the PCGGs complaint for reconveyance of the alleged ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses and their cronies for lack of evidence. The Court sided with the Sandiganbayans findings that the weight of evidence fails to preponderate in the PCGGs favor when the commissions evidence is checked against that of the Marcoses and their alleged cronies. No error could be attributed to the Sandiganbayan when it dismissed the Republics complaint for insufficiency of evidence, the SC ruled. The Court noted that the PCGG failed to present the original copies of the documentary evidence they showed despite knowing where they were located and did not show proof of diligent efforts to produce them. In sum, absent preponderant evidence to hold otherwise, the Republic failed to prove that the respondents by themselves or in unlawful concert with one another, accumulated or participated in the accumulation of ill-gotten wealth insofar as the specific allegations in the subject complaint are concerned, the SC ruled. Neither were the Presidential issuances nor the witnesses testimonies sufficient to prove the allegations in the Republics complaint, tribunal said. The Court agreed with the Sandiganbayan in excluding a large part of the PCGGs documentary evidence for being photocopies, making them inadmissible unless shown that the original is unavailable. On July 24, 1987, the PCGG filed a complaint, accusing the Marcos family through former First Lady Imelda Marcos, former construction magnate Rodolfo Cuenca, his son Roberto, former Philippine National Bank president Panfilo Domingo, former trade minister Roberto Ongpin, former Development Bank of the Philippines officer Don Ferry, and 11 others of conspiring to engage in schemes, devices and stratagems to acquire ill-gotten wealth. The PCGG specifically accused Cuenca and the Marcoses of conniving to create the Construction and Development Corporation of the Philippines, the predecessor of the Philippine National Construction Corp., in order to obtain ill-gotten wealth. Based on the complaint, the CDCP obtained favored public works contracts amounting to billions of pesos from the Department of Public Works which later became the Department of Public Works and Highways, and from the National Irrigation Administration, such as the construction of sugar centrals, the Philippine Associated Smelting and Refining Corporation, the Philippine Phosphate Fertilizer Corporation, and the Light Railway Transit Project, among others, under terms and conditions manifestly disadvantageous to the government. The PCGG also said the CDCP secured loans and financial assistance from government financial institutions without sufficient collateral, in contravention of banking laws and sound banking practices.The commission added that Cuenca and the Marcoses also organized the now-sequestered Universal Holding Corporation, a holding company for CDCP, Sta. Ines Melale Forest Products Corp. and Resort Hotels with the participation of other defendants namely Jose L. Africa, Roberto Cuenca, Manuel Tinio, Mario Alfelor, Rodolfo Munsayac, Arthur Balch, Nora Vinluan, and Ricardo de Leon. The UHC, according to the PCGG, was controlled by the Marcoses and served as conduits to deposit illegally obtained funds and property abroad. In its complaint, the PCGG alleged that the CDCP obtained favored public workers contracts worth billions of pesos from the Department of Public Highways, the National Irrigation Administration, the Philippine Associated Smelting and Refining Corporation, the Philippine Phosphate Fertilizer Corporation, and the Light Railway Transit Project. In 2010, however, the Sandiganbayan found the documentary and testimonial evidence presented by the PCGG as insufficient, ruling that executive issuances presented by the PCGG as proof are not per se illegal due to the presumption of good faith in the performance of official duty. In ruling against the government, the SC agreed with the decision of the anti-graft court on the matter of the evidence presented by the PCGG, holding that the Sandiganbayan was correct when it found out that the PCGG failed to show copies of the public documents it presented that were attested by the officer who had legal custody of them. Juxtaposing the specific allegations in the complaint with the Republics documentary and testimonial evidence and as against the respondents documentary and testimonial evidence showing the due organization and existence of CDCP, the Court agrees with the Sandiganbayan that the weight of evidence fails to preponderate in the Republics favor, the Court said. The tribunal pointed out that a photocopy being merely secondary evidence, is inadmissible unless it is shown that the original is unavailable. The tribunal also lamented that there was no proof that the PCGG exerted efforts to produce the original. When the Sandiganbayan inquired as to whether the Republic will present the original or certified true copy of its documentary exhibits, the Republic answered that it will do so if necessary, as the originals are kept in the Central Bank vault. Despite knowledge of the existence and whereabouts of the documents originals, the Republic failed to present the same and contented itself with the presentation of mere photocopies, the Court said. Although the PCGG insisted that the documentary exhibits are public documents, it failed to show a copy attested by the officer having the legal custody of the record, the Court said. Akbayan Party-list Rep. Tom Villarin on Tuesday mocked the Supreme Court decision. Now the cat is out of the bag with a compromised Supreme Court willing to appease the powers that be. It has dismissed a major case filed by PCGG 33 years ago based on technicalitiesthat Marcos own presidential decrees that made the crime and copies of evidence sealed in Central Bank vaults cannot be used to convict the Marcoses. Its a legal quackery that defies logic and reason when it is clear that the Marcoses plundered our country, Villarin said. As someone who shared a close relationship with Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef Joe Bastianich says it is still difficult to process his suicide earlier this month. Bastianich says it is undebatable that Bourdain's legacy is great but his death needs to spark a debate on mental health issues. "Anthony was a friend and mentor of mine for many years and I'm still kind of processing his loss. I haven't really said anything because I don't really know what to say. It's kind of unspeakable. I think another thing about Anthony and his great legacy, about everything he did, is that this is really an opportunity to talk about mental health issues and people with darkness and depression. That's really the conversation," he told PTI in a telephonic interview from New York. A beloved chef, writer and TV personality, Bourdain committed suicide on June 8 at the age of 61. He was found unresponsive in his hotel room in Strasbourg, France, where he was shooting for the new season of his CNN food and travel series "Parts Unknown". From sharing a bread baker to helping him write his memoir, Bourdain was a special friend for the Bastianich, who runs a chain of restaurants around the world including 1 Michelin star Babbo in New York. Bastianich, 49, has fond memories of Bourdain and said he even wrote a chapter in Bourdain's first book "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly" (2000). "When I wrote my memoir 'Restaurant Man', I sat with him for many lunches and he really advised me. I was trying to write something very honest and personal. He was a great mentor in how to get on a page things that are so personal to you. He helped me edit and bring to the page the power and impact that it should have and being centred in the proper way." Bastianich currently serves as one of the three judges of "MasterChef Junior US", which airs in India on Star World and Star World HD every Saturday at 8 p.m. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Just a fortnight before his tenure was supposed to end, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's husband Parakala Prabhakar today resigned from the post of Advisor (Communications) to the Government of Andhra Pradesh. "My continuation as Advisor should not cast dark clouds on your sincerity in the fight against the Centre for the states rights. The government's credibility also should not suffer because of me," Prabhakar said in his two-page resignation letter forwarded to the Chief Minister Chandrababdu Naidu this afternoon. Prabhakar, as advisor, was in effect the Chief Public Relations Officer to the Chief Minister. Opposition parties, including the YSR Congress, had questioned the Chief Ministers sincerity in his fight with the Centre over the special category status and other issues with Prabhakar continuing as government advisor. "I was pained that even the Leader of Opposition Y S Jaganmohan Reddy sought to cast aspersions on you because of me. Attributing political motives and accusing you of resorting to behind the screen deals only expose the mindset of the opposition leader," Prabhakar said. "When I broached the issue with you last night, you rejected my move. But my conscience strongly made me decide to quit, against your wishes. Please accept my resignation forthwith," Prabhakar added. Prabhakar was appointed Advisor (Communications) in July 2014 for a two-year term. His tenure was later extended for two more years and it was supposed to end on July 4. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister late Arjun Singh's wife Saroj Kumari today moved a court here, alleging that her sons Abhimanyu Singh and Ajay Singh were harassing her and had forced her out of her house. A Congress leader, Ajay Singh is the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly. Kumari, 83, filed the complaint under the Protection of Women From Domestic Violence Act in the court of judicial magistrate Gaurav Pragyan. To file the complaint, she personally visited the court along with her daughter Veena Singh and NRI industrialist Sam Varma. The magistrate ordered issuance of notices to the respondents, and listed the matter for hearing on July 19. "My sons Abhimanyu Singh and LoP Ajay Singh indulged in domestic violence against me and forced me out of my own house. They have also refused to take care of my maintenance which compelled me to approach the court," the complaint said. It also named Suniti Singh, Ajay Singh's wife. Kumari's lawyer Dipesh Joshi said his client had also requested the court to grant her ex-parte relief (relief before hearing the respondents) so that she can return to her house in Bhopal. In a media statement too, Saroj Kumari reiterated her allegations. Having been forced out of her own house, she has to live live in an apartment in Greater Noida, she said. Her husband served the Congress his entire life and ensuring protection of women and assisting helpless persons was a matter of principles for him, she said. "But my son Ajay Singh has set aside these principles of the Congress and forced me out of my own house. At this age I have to leave my own home to live in different places. It is not only against the principles of Congress party but also defines the character of the man, who is all-powerful and the leader of opposition," she said. "I have urged the court to help me so that I can live in my own house and also requested it to issue orders for eviction of Ajay Singh from that house," the statement read. When contacted, Ajay Singh told PTI that he would reply to any notice pertaining to the complaint when he receives it. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A group of armed men allegedly barged into a nationalised bank on the busy Madhusudan Marg here and decamped with around Rs 40 lakh after holding the staff and customers at gunpoint. The robbery took place this morning, shortly after the Indian Overseas Bank's (IOB) branch opened, J P Sohala, the assistant branch manager, said. "Three men stormed into the bank and brandished their guns to terrorise the staff and the customers. They were soon joined by four more men, who forced the cashier to open the vault room," he said. The men filled two black bags with cash before fleeing the spot, cashier Mangaraj Jena said. "The amount looted was estimated to be around Rs 40 lakh," Jena claimed. Sanjay Kumar Jha, the branch manager, said the dacoits rounded up the employees before feeling. "The robbers also took away the hard disc of the CCTV before leaving the bank," he said, adding that a police complaint has been filed in the case. Giving details of the investigation process, Rourkela Superintendent of Police Uma Shankar Dash said all exit points have been sealed to prevent the robbers from leaving the area. "We have are frisking vehicles on the National Highway as part of efforts to nab the dacoits," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat today attended the 'chintan shivir' (introspection camp) in Chhattisgarh's Raipur where issues pertaining to the Scheduled Tribes in the country were discussed. The two-day camptitled 'Bharat ki janjatiyon ki asmita aur astitva' (the pride and existence of the Scheduled Tribes of India),was inaugurated in presence of Bhagwat this morning, said programme convener Harsh Chauhan. The camp is organised by the Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, a Sangh affiliate, "Elaborate discussions were held on (issues like) Panchayats (Extension of Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) and its implementation in scheduled areas, ensuring participation of entire scheduled tribe community in reservation, and on Forest Rights Act and development of tribal community," he said. Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram, Union Minister of State for Tribal Affairs Sudarshan Bhagat, Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram's national president Jagdeo Ram Oram, RSS Sarkaryavah (General Secretary) Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi and National Commission for Scheduled Tribes chairperson Nand Kumar Sai, members of RSS and its affiliates were present, according to Chauhan. As many as 135 thinkers and social leaders are taking part in the discussions which will conclude tomorrow, he said. This is Bhagwat's second visit this year to the BJP-ruled Chhattisgarh, where Assembly polls are due by this year-end. The Sangh chief had earlier visited Raipur in January and addressed a public meeting here. The closed-door camp is being considered significant as it is being held against the backdrop of controversial "Patthalgadi" movement of Jashpur district in northern Chhattisgarh. Under the movement, tribals in some villages of Jashpur had put up plaques, painted in green and white, outside their villages declaring the gram sabha as the only "sovereign authority" under the provisions of the Panchayats (Extension of Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), 1996. The slogans on the plaques read that laws enacted by Parliament are not applicable in the scheduled areas where the gram sabha is supreme. The Sarva Adivasi Samaj, an umbrella body of tribal groups, had claimed that the movement was launched because tribals are feeling cheated over improper implementation of the laws meant to protect their interests. According to RSS sources, Patthalgadi issue was also discussed in the camp today. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat today arrived here to take part in the 'chintan shivir' (introspection camp) on issues pertaining to the Scheduled Tribes (STs) in the country. The two-day camp, organised by the Akhil Bharatiya Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, a social welfare organisation which is an RSS affiliate, began today at an institute located on the city's outskirts. Bhagwat, who reached here this morning, will hold deliberations on 'Bharat ki janjatiyon ki asmita aur astitva' (the pride and existence of the Scheduled Tribes of India), the programme'smedia incharge, Ashutosh Mandavi, said. Nearly 140 thinkers and social leaders from ST community along with Union Tribal Affairs Minister Jual Oram, Union Minister of State for Tribal Affairs Sudarshan Bhagat and Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram's national president Jagdeo Ram Oram are expected to take part in the discussions, he said. This is Bhagwat's second visit this year to Chhattisgarh, where the Assembly polls are due by year-end. He had earlier visited Raipur in January and addressed a public meeting here. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The second tranche of Bharat-22 ETF follow-on offer was lapped up by institutional investors today, with the portion reserved for anchor bidders getting subscribed 3.44 times to the tune of Rs 5,163 crore. The government today launched the follow-on fund offer (FFO) of Bharat-22 Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), comprising shares of 22 companies, to raise up to Rs 8,400 crore from the market. The issue opened for anchor investors today, and received subscriptions from investors including mutual funds houses, foreign portfolio investors (FPI), insurance and retirement funds. The FFO will open for subscription for retail and other institutional investors tomorrow and will remain open till June 22. Secretary in the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management Atanu Chakraborty said, "The Bharat-22 FFO is another opportunity for the investors to participate in the India growth story as represented by the industry leading stocks of the ETF. ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund managed Bharat-22 ETF's fund offer, through which the government aims to mop up Rs 6,000 crore with a green shoe option of raising another Rs 2,400 crore. As much as 25 per cent of total issue size, or Rs 1,500 crore, was reserved for anchor investors who put in bids worth about Rs 5,163 crore, ICICI Prudential AMC said. "We are happy to see the continued support received from anchor investors towards the FFO... Now, we look forward to active participation from non-anchor investor category, over the next three days, whereby one has the opportunity to own some of the jewels of Corporate India at a discounted price," ICICI Prudential AMC MD and CEO Nimesh Shah said. The government had in November last year launched Bharat-22 ETF comprising shares of 22 companies, including public sector undertakings (PSUs), public sector banks, ITC, Axis Bank and L&T. The fund had garnered bids to the tune of Rs 32,000 crore, although the government retained only Rs 14,500 crore. The state-owned companies that are part of the new Bharat ETF-22 include ONGC, IOC, SBI, BPCL, Coal India and Nalco. The other central public sector enterprises on the list are Bharat Electronics, Engineers India, NBCC, NTPC, NHPC, SJVNL, GAIL, PGCIL and NLC India. Only three public sector banks SBI, Indian Bank and Bank of Baroda feature in the Bharat-22 index. The government plans to raise Rs 80,000 crore in the current fiscal from disinvestment, lower than over Rs 1 lakh crore raised last year. Besides, the government will launch the initial public offering of railway consultancy firm RITES tomorrow through which it will divest 12 per cent stake. The IPO is expected to fetch over Rs 460 crore to the exchequer. Prior to the launch of Bharat-22 ETF, which has a diversified portfolio, the government had floated the CPSE ETF comprising stocks of 10 bluechip PSUs ONGC, Coal India, IOC, GAIL (India), Oil India, PFC, Bharat Electronics, REC, Engineers India and Container Corporation of India. Through the CPSE ETF, the government had raised Rs 11,500 crore in three tranches Rs 3,000 crore from the first tranche in March 2014, Rs 6,000 crore from the second tranche in January 2017 and Rs 2,500 crore from the third tranche in March 2017. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A sessions court here today declared former BJP MLA Nalin Kotadiya an absconder in the multi-crore bitcoin extortion case being probed by the state Criminal Investigation Department (CID-Crime). Additional sessions judge P G Tamakuwala declared Kotadiya a "proclaimed offender" (absconder) under section 82 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC ) in response to an application by the CID, and asked him to appear before the court within 30 days. The court had earlier issued an arrest warrant against Kotadiya after the CID moved the court saying he did not appear before the agency despite summoning, nor could he be traced during searches at his properties. Several policemen, including a Superintendent of Police, have been arrested in the case so far. As Kotadiya remained untraceable, even after the issuance of arrest warrant, the CID moved the court again, seeking that he should be declared a proclaimed offender. The complainant in the case, Surat-based builder Shailesh Bhatt, had alleged that policemen from Amreli kidnapped him and his business partner Kirit Paladia from Gandhinagar on February 9 and extorted bitcoins worth Rs 9 crore owned by Paladia. One of the accused forced them to transfer bitcoins -- a form of digital currency -- in his name, Bhatt had said and alleged that Kotadiya was also involved in the conspiracy. Following the investigation, the CID registered a case of kidnapping and extortion against Kotadiya. A former MLA of the ruling BJP from Dhari in Amreli district, Kotadiya did not contest the 2017 Assembly election. He is a Patidar leader and had openly supported Hardik Patel over the demand of reservation for the community. He had also claimed to have voted against NDA candidate Ram Nath Kovind during the Presidential poll. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress today today out at the BJP after it pulled out of the ruling alliance in Jammu and Kashmir, saying it ruined Kashmir as much as it could in three years and has now taken the "exit route" from this "self-created tumult". The party also ruled out any tie-up with the PDP. This alliance has devastated the state, be it economically or socially, and has left the Jammu and Kashmir in ruins, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad told reporters here. Terming this fallout between the BJP and the PDP as good for the people of Kashmir, he said, "The BJP did its damage and ruined Kashmir as much as it could in three years and has pulled out now. In the last three years, civilian killings and army deaths have risen sharply." Replying to a question, Azad said, "...There is no question of forming any government with the PDP. The question does not arise." He claimed that he had cautioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on the floor of the house, that they they had done a Himalayan blunder by having a coalition government with a regional party in Jammu and Kashmir. Echoing similar sentiments, his party colleague and Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala attacked Modi over the fall out, saying the prime minister has left Jammu and Kashmir in "deep turmoil" and "is now finding an 'exit route' from this "self-created tumult". In a series of tweets, Surjewala blamed BJP, its "conniving alliance" and "lust" for power for pushing the state into an unending cycle of violence and terror and said that radicalisation at its peak and peace is biggest casualty, adding that that in four years of the alliance government, 373 jawans and 239 civilians lost their lives. "Is this how PM's promise of Jamhooriyat, Insaniyat and Kashmiriyat' fulfilled, or was this also another Jumla'," Surjewala questioned. Azad also said that this fallout is a total failure on the part of government. "The BJP should be squarely held responsible. It and the central government cannot shy away from the responsibility," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Growing restlessness in a section of traditional BJP voters in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere may have been a key reason behind the party's decision to pull out of the coalition government in the state today, BJP sources said. Party leaders in the state's Jammu division said their core support was growing unhappy and the cadre dispirited over what is being seen as the PDP-BJP government's inability to deliver on the saffron party's two main planks -- development and crushing terrorism in Kashmir. Analysts said a likely spell of governor's rule in the state will allow the central government to take tough measures against terrorism, which may provide the ruling BJP a plank in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. "It seems their (BJP's) image is going down on the issue of Kashmir. This is a kind of rebuilding of their image and they will hope to retrieve some ground," said Manindra Nath Thakur, an associate professor with the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The BJP wants to bring some normalcy there before the elections and tell its support base that it means business on the issue of security, he said. Even the recent rape and murder of a minor girl from a nomadic Muslim tribe in Kathua underlined the growing mistrust between the two parties with regional BJP leaders joining protests against the state police probe, which was strongly backed by the PDP. At his press conference where he announced that the party was pulling out of the coalition government headed by Mehbooba Mufti, BJP general secretary Ram Madhav flagged the deterioration in the security situation as one of the reasons for the decision. "The security scenario has deteriorated causing serious concern about the protection of basic fundamental rights of life, free speech, etc, he said. The daylight murder of a respected editor like Shujat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar city is an indicator to the deterioration of the situation and the extent of radicalization," he said. For the BJP, Jammu and Kashmir is a matter of great national importance also, he said, adding there was a grave concern in the country over the security situation in the state. National integration is paramount for the BJP and it cannot compromise on that question, he said. He also claimed that resentment in the state's Jammu and Ladakh regions has been growing over the lack of development and also because of a "perceptible sense of discrimination" felt there. The BJP members in the state government have strived their best to serve the people in the state including those in the regions of Jammu and Ladakh, he said. But the BJP ministers faced a situation where the government as a whole has been lacklustre in dealing with the needs of the people of these regions, he added. Jammu and Kashmir has only six Lok Sabha seats and the BJP's influence is limited to the two seats in Jammu and, to some extent, the one seat in Ladakh. But the situation in the state has an impact on the political discourse elsewhere in the country. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BazouleBurkina FasoCrocodiles may be one of the deadliest hunters in the animal kingdom, but in a small village in Burkina Faso it is not unusual to see someone sitting atop one of the fearsome reptiles. People in Bazoule, around 30 kilometers from the capital Ouagadougou, share their pond with more than 100 of the razor-toothed creatures. We got used to the crocodiles when we were young, swimming in the water with them and all that, said Pierre Kabore, just a few meters away from a crocodile feasting on chicken provided by the village. Now we can always approach them and sit on themand if you have the courage, you can lie on them too. Theres no problem, they are sacred crocodiles. They dont do anything to anyone. According to local legend, the startling relationship with the predators dates back to at least the 15th century. The village was in the grip of an agonizing drought until the crocodiles led women to a hidden pond where the population could slake their thirst. The villagers organized a party to celebrate and thank the reptiles, Kabore said. A celebration known as Koom Lakre is still held every year during which villagers make sacrifices and ask the animals to grant their wishes of health, prosperity and a good harvest. Far from being considered a threat, the crocodiles are deemed to have a mystical connection with Bazoule. Crocodiles are represented as the soul of our ancestors and if one of them dies, they are buried and even given a funeral as if they were human, said Kabore.When a misfortune is about to happen in the village, they cry out. Elders are charged with interpreting the cries, and then make wishes to ward off bad luck. The unusual contact between man and croc has drawn disbelieving tourists to the village to see for themselves. On their arrival, travelers can buy a chicken which is hung on a stick by a guide and used to entice the crocodiles out of the pond so that visitors can pose with the creatures. It was nice to watch from a distance but sitting on one was a bit freaky, said Thomas Baspin, a young Frenchman who came to visit his grandparents in Burkina Faso. Im glad I did itbut Im also glad its over! he quipped. Tourism has become a big money-spinner for the impoverished villagers, but a three-year-old jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso is taking its toll. Ouagadougou has come under attack three times, most recently in March, when jihadists attacked the military headquarters and French embassy. We could have more than 10,000 visitors per year but at the moment, theres no more than 4,000 or 5,000, said Raphael Kabore, one of the guides. Global warming is also believed to be having an impact. Rainfall levels are down each year, and the famous pond that is the crocodiles home is shrinking. When it disappears, will the reptiles once more guide their human friends to a new watery home? The BJP leaders, who had been on a hunger strike at the Delhi secretariat, ended their protest today after Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his ministerial colleagues called off their sit-in at the Lieutenant Governor's office. Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly Vijender Gupta, BJP MLAs Manjinder Sirsa and Jagdish Pradhan, West Delhi MP Parvesh Verma, and rebel AAP MLA Kapil Mishra sat on the dharna on June 13 demanding that Kejriwal and his ministers resume work and address the water crisis faced by Delhi people. Barring Pradhan, all of them started hunger strike from June 15. Gupta had to be hospitalised earlier in the day due to falling health. Sirsa, Verma and Mishra broke their fast in the presence of Union minister Harsh Vardhan who visited them at the Delhi secretariat. Gupta claimed victory, saying the chief minister and his cabinet colleagues were forced to end their "meaningless" dharna due to "stern warning" of the High Court and struggle of opposition leaders. "Many congratulations to people of Delhi. Our struggle as well as stern warning from HC has borne fruit with CM @ArvindKejriwal ending his meaningless dharna & returning to work. Everyone except him was seen working in the Delhi Secretariat today, including AAP ministers," Gupta tweeted. Earlier, Kejriwal called off his nine-day-old dharna at the office of Lt Governor Anil Baijal, demanding him to direct IAS officers to end their "strike" and approve doorstep ration delivery scheme. The development came with Deputy CM Manish Sisodia and minister Satyendar Jain resuming work after they were discharged from hospital. The IAS officers who had been boycotting meetings of AAP government ministers today started appearing in the meetings called by Sisodia and other ministers. The officers' protest was kick-started by an alleged attack by AAP legislators on chief secretary Anshu Prakash during a late night meeting at Kejriwal's residence on February 19. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Shiv Sena today wondered if the BJP's decision to part ways with alliance partner PDP in Jammu and Kashmir was taken to avoid "uneasy questions" over violence in the state ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Dubbing the saffron party's decision as a "political move", Sena leader Sanjay Raut said the coming together of the PDP-BJP to form the government in the state was "unnatural and unholy". He said Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray had opposed the tie-up, calling it an "anti-national" alliance. "Uddhav ji's words have been proved correct today," he said. "The BJP-PDP had cut a deal to gain power. Our soldiers had to pay a big price for this. The incidents of our soldiers' martyrdom had gone up ever since the combine formed the government," Raut told reporters here. "If the BJP took this decision to avoid answering these issues in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, I think it is a political decision," he said. The BJP today pulled out of its alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, saying it has become impossible to continue in the government in view of the growing radicalism and terrorism in the state. The decision was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah, BJP general secretary Ram Madhav said in Delhi. In the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections held in 2015, the BJP won 25 seats and the PDP 28, in the 87-member House. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union minister Ramdas Athawale today said the BJP-led NDA would win the 2019 Lok Sabha polls as it is steered by a "strong captain" like Prime Minister Narendra Modi unlike the opposition parties which have "many captains". Athawale also welcomed the decision of the BJP to pull out of the Mehbooba Mufti government in Jammu and Kashmir, saying attempts were being made to disturb peace in the Valley. Taking a dig at opposition parties that are trying to put up a united front to take on the BJP in upcoming polls, Athawale said, "these parties have many captains whereas the NDA has a strong captain in Narendra Modi. The NDA has a good batsman like me. We will win the 2019 match". When asked about the "Saamana" editorial which termed the BJP's victory in 2014 as a "political accident" that will not repeat in 2019, Athawale said the Shiv Sena and the BJP are friends for the last 30 years and their relationship has seen many ups and downs. "(Sena president) Uddhav Thackeray is known as a thoughtful leader and a true heir of Bal Thackeray. If he wants to continue his father's political legacy, he will associate himself with the BJP," said the Minister of State for Social Justice. He said the Sena would be at loss if it goes against the BJP in elections. He expressed confidence that the Sena and the BJP will remain together for Lok Sabha polls in national interest. "I have spoken to Prime Minister Modi about the Shiv Sena and requested him to address their grievances. BJP chief Amit Shah spent more than an hour with Uddhav Thackeray. I hope the grievances have been addressed," Athawale said referring to a meeting between Shah and Thackeray at the latter's residence in Mumbai earlier this month. The Sena, a long time member of the NDA and a constituent of the NDA governments in Centre and Maharashtra, had announced to go solo in upcoming elections. The Uddhav Thackeray-led party seldom lets go any opportunity to target the BJP and the prime minister through party mouthpiece Saamana. Meanwhile, welcoming the BJP move to quit the Mufti government, Athawale alleged that slogans of 'Pakistan Zindabad' were raised in the Valley. "Those who want to say 'Pakistan Zindabad' should go to Pakistan," he said. The BJP today quit the Mufti government, saying it has become impossible to continue in power in view of the growing radicalism and terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir. "As a member of the NDA, I welcome this decision (of the BJP). It has been taken at an appropriate time," the minister said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) "Black Panther" roared at this year's MTV Movie and TV Awards as the film went on to bag top honours, including Best Movie, while "Stranger Things" was adjudged the Best Show at the ceremony. The Ryan Coogler-directed film also won three other big awards - including Best Performance in a Movie and Best Hero for Chadwick Boseman's performance as T'Challa/ Black Panther. Micheal B Jordan's portrayal as Erik Killmonger in the film won him the title of Best Villain. The Best Movie award was presented by Lady Gaga, who made a surprise appearance at the show. She then announced the award would go to "Black Panther". Boseman, Jordan and Winston Duke (M'Baku) came on to the stage to accept the award. "Thank you all for investing in not just a beautiful story, but investing in a continued conversation in what this industry and what this culture could achieve - and what we all can aspire to be," Duke said. Boseman dedicated his Best Hero award to real-life "true hero", James Shaw Jr, an American man known for disarming a gunman during the Nashville Waffle House shooting in Antioch, Tennessee and saving lives. With three trophies, "Stranger Things" emerged second biggest winner. Actor Millie Bobby Brown from the Netflix series won the award for Best Performance in a Show. Her co-star Noah Schnapp scored the win for the Most Frightened Performance. Brown, who could not attend the show due to a broken kneecap, addressed the audience through a pretaped video message in which she made a powerful speech against bullying. "I was taught, if you don't have anything nice to say, just don't say it. There should be no space in this world for bullying, and I'm not going to tolerate it and neither should any you. If you need a reminder of how well you are and to rise above the hate, message me on Instagram," she said. The actor's remarks come days after she quit social media due to online bullying. For a second consecutive year, both categories were gender-neutral. The Best Fight win was scored by "Wonder Woman" for the scene in which Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman faces off against German soldiers in the battlefield. Lady Gaga's "Gaga: Five Foot Two" won the laurel for the Best Music Documentary. "I love you little monsters so much! And, Happy Pride Month! I just have one problem, I recently found out that I am actually five-foot-three and three quarters I am so, so sorry, but thank you so much," she said in her acceptance speech. "Master of None" co-writer-actor Lena Waithe accepted the Trailblazer Award, who dedicated the honour to the 1990 documentary "Paris Is Burning" that introduced her to trailblazers such as Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Angie Xtravaganza and Willi Ninja. "Avengers: Infinity War" star Chris Pratt received the Generation Award and spoke to the next generation as their "elder" and then went on to offer his 'Nine Rules from Chris Pratt, Generation Award Winner'. The show was hosted by Tiffany Haddish, who made history by becoming the first African American to have headlined the event. She also took home the prize for Best Comedic Performance for "Girls Trip". The cast of "It" received the award for Best Onscreen Team. Madelaine Petsch from "Riverdale" bagged the Scene Stealer award for her portrayal as Cheryl Blossom in the show. The Best Kiss award was shared by Nick Robinson and Keiynan Lonsdale for "Love, Simon" film. "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" was adjudged the Best Reality Series/Franchise and mother-daughter duo Kris Jenner and Kim Kardashian were present to collect the award. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A group of three to four armed men looted Rs 76,500 from the cashier of a company today, police said. The incident took place early morning in Pragpur when the armed men targeted the employee of a stone-crushing plant, they added. A hunt has been launched to nab the accused, SHO of Pragpura police station Suresh Kumar said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The decks have been cleared for the Puducherry government to bring in its full fledgedbudget for fiscal 2018-19 in the territorial Assembly with the Centre giving its nod to the draft budget it submitted in April. Chief Minister V Narayanasamy told newsmen here tonight that he had received a communication from the Home Ministry informing the administration of the approval of the budget. The Union Territory had forwarded the draft budget, finalised by the State Planning Board,seeking allocation of Rs 7,530 crore for the 2018-19 fiscal and it was approved after clarifications sought by the centre were given. Narayanasamyhad camped in Delhi recently to persuade the Home Ministry's Joint Secretary to clear the approval. He said the date of presentation of the full fledged budget would soon be finalised by the Speaker, V Vaithilingam. The House had at its one day session on March 26, adopted a Vote on Account bill,earmarking funds to various departments for April to July months of fiscal 2018-19 with approval of the draft budget not being available from the Centre. The House was reconvened by the Speaker to have a two day session on June 4 and 5. With the Centre's approval still not being available, it adjourned sine die on June 5. The Chief Minister said the government was mulling rise in monthly pension of the former legislators of Puducherry. A bill in this regard would be introduced for adoption in the coming Assembly session, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Children must not be traumatised by being separated from their parents, UN chief Antonio Guterres has said amid a growing backlash over US President Donald Trump's hardline immigration policy which has resulted in the separation of hundreds of migrant families. The Trump administration's zero tolerance policy seeks prosecution for any adult crossing the southern border illegally. The number of separations has jumped since early May, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that all migrants illegally crossing the US border with Mexico would be arrested, regardless of whether the adults were seeking asylum. Since children cannot be sent to the facilities where their parents are held, they are separated, "As a matter of principle, the Secretary-General believes that refugees and migrants should always be treated with respect and dignity, and in accordance with existing international law," a statement issued by Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric said yesterday. "Children must not be traumatized by being separated from their parents. Family unity must be preserved," the statement added. The Secretary General defended the rights of migrant and refugee children, but did not single out the US. When asked if the Secretary-General is concerned about the zero-tolerance policy of the Trump administration on US border security, Dujarric said the Secretary-General would like to see at all borders people being treated with dignity and respect for their rights and that people claiming asylum be given proper hearings. "This is not a position that he has...specifically vis-a-vis the United States. This is a principled position that he has for the way that migrants and refugees are treated the world over," Dujarric said. The UN human rights chief also voiced his deep concern over recently-adopted United States border protection policies that have seen hundreds of migrant children forcibly separated from their parents. "In the past six weeks, nearly two thousand children have been forcibly separated from their parents,"UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said in his opening remarks to the 38th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva the last session before his four-year term expires in August. Zeid said that the American Association of Pediatrics in the US, had called it a cruel practice of "government-sanctioned child abuse" which may cause "irreparable harm" with "lifelong consequences". The human rights situation in the US was one of the many topics to be discussed at the latest Human Rights Council session, which runs through July 6. At the onset of his speech, the UN human rights chief warned of the return of "chauvinistic nationalism" around the world, and urged leading politicians to combat this "menace that stalks our future". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China seeks to acquire the crown jewels of American technology through theft, forced transfer, information-harvesting and acquisition, the White House said today, a day after President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on USD 200 billion worth of Chinese goods. Trump, pursuing his 'America First' policy, has been insisting that China has been unfairly benefitting from a massive trade imbalance with the US, now estimated to be USD 376 billion. "China seeks to acquire the crown jewels of American technology, including ag-tech, through six vectors," Peter Navarro, White House Director of Trade and Industrial Policy told reporters during a conference call. These six vectors are physical theft and cyber theft; forced technology transfer, typically as a condition of access to the Chinese market; evasion of export controls; export restraints on raw materials; information-harvesting campaigns designed to acquire and exploit the openness of our economy. And acquisition of crown jewels by state-backed funds that basically, scour places like Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston and beyond, for the best of what the US have in industries like artificial intelligence, block chain technology, robotics, high-tech manufacturing and high-tech shipping, Navarro said. "These, in fact, are the Made in China 2025 industries that China, with one-fourth of the world's population, wants to control 70 per cent of the production of by 2025," he said. Collectively, these six behaviours constitute what December 2017 National Security Strategy refers to as economic aggression, he said. "Much of this behaviour is outside international norms, and it is critical, both to the interests of the United States, as well as for the integrity and proper functioning of the global economy, that China cease these kinds of behaviour, and integrate its own non-market economy into the global trading system in a way that leads to fair, balanced and reciprocal trade," Navarro said. "As President Trump has said, this nation supports free and fair trade, but it will not support fool's trade," he said. Asserting that Trump has given China every chance to change its aggressive behaviour, Navarro said there was a clear linear path that begins with candidate Trump's famous job speech in June of 2016, in which he explicitly promised to take action under Section 301 if China failed to stop its attacks on its manufacturing and innovation base. "Once President Trump took office, the next point on that linear path was the Mar-a-Lago summit, in which all of these issues related to China's trying to acquire intellectual property were addressed at that summit, and there was 100 days that followed in which China was supposed to come up with proposed structural changes to address these. They did not," he said. "There's also the special trip the president's trade team took to Beijing to discuss these matters, which resulted in no progress. The Chinese delegation then came here to the Treasury Department. Again, no progress," he said. Navarro said that none of these efforts by the president and his team had resulted in any progress on the two core issues facing the US-China relationship: the need to reduce massive trade deficit, which represents an equally massive transfer of wealth, factories and jobs to China. Also more importantly for this country's economic future and national security, China's bid to acquire the crown jewels of American technology and intellectual property by any means necessary, by the six different vectors. Actions of Trump are purely defensive in nature and are designed to defend the crown jewels of American technology from China's aggressive behaviour, he added. "We have seen in the past what has happened to our industries from China's aggressive behaviour. China's predatory resulted after China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, and many of our traditional manufacturing industries basically going to China," he said. China has more than 50 per cent global share of air conditioners, appliances, colour TV sets, computers, electronics, machine tools, microwaves, mobile phones, refrigerators, solar and wind, steel, cement. Trump will not allow China to use the same kind of unfair trade practices and illicit behaviour to capture the so-called Made In China 2025 industries, which China has said that it wants to acquire, absorb, digest and re-innovate, he said. "These are the future of the world and of America, and China cannot have 70 per cent of production of these industries by 2025," he said. Asserting that the US is not backing off, Navarro said that China has much more to lose in this trade dispute than the United States. "If you simply do the numbers, we imported about USD 500 billion worth of China's exports in 2017, and we exported only USD 130 billion to China. We had initially USD 50 billion in tariffs that were very carefully targeted, simply to defend in the China 2025 industries," he said. "What the president did yesterday in announcing an additional USD 200 billion, it's clear that China does have much more to lose. What we have at stake is USD 130 billion going to China. What they have at stake is over USD 500 billion coming to us," Navarro said. He conceded that this trade dispute will lead to relatively small effects where the two economies that collectively add up to about USD 30 trillion in annual GDP. China's behaviour has created a huge structural imbalance in the world economy and lead to this massive wealth transfer to China, not just from US, but from Europe, Japan and from wherever else China is able to acquire technology from and it needs to be addressed. "If our companies are able to operate in China without fear of losing their technology, if our companies are able to operate here without the fear of Chinese cyber agents coming in and stealing the trade secrets, intellectual property and other things, this economy will be stronger, the global economy will be stronger and we will have a much better relationship," Navarro said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A man was detained today for allegedly making a hoax bomb call after missing a Jaipur-Mumbai Indigo flight, an official said. Mohit Kumar Tank (24), a choreographer with a dance reality show, made the call to Indigo's call centre in Gurgaon claiming that a bomb has been planted on Indigo flight 6E218, CISF commandant at Jaipur International Airport Y P Singh told PTI. He said the flight's departure time was 5 am but it took off at 4.52 am. "Since Tank could not reach the airport on time, he made a call to the Indigo call centre at 5.30 am. We traced the accused and handed over him to Sanganer police, the official said. ACP East Ashok Chauhan said the accused has been detained, booked and further investigation into the incident was underway. By the time Tank made the hoax bomb call, the flight was about to land in Mumbai. Upon landing, security agencies took about three hours to clear the aircraft for further schedule operations. IndiGo also issued a statement confirming the incident. "The IndiGo call centre received a call at around 5:30 am from an unidentified person mentioning a bomb threat to 6E 218 operating a Jaipur-Mumbai flight. We immediately reported the matter to Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) and followed all laid down security protocols," it said. "The authorities concerned carried out the investigation and declared the call as 'specific bomb threat'. Following the clearance by the authorities, operations will be resumed as normal," the statement said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US officials Tuesday dodged Iraqs and Syrias blame that the US-led coalition against the Islamic State group (ISIS) and Washington targeted militia fighters aligned with President Bashar al-Assad regime, near the border with Iraq. A US official told US news network CNN that the US was linked to the attack, which hit the eastern Syrian town of Al-Hari. Around 50 fighters from an Iran-backed Iraqi militia paramilitary group, Hashed (Popular Mobilization Units) as well as Shia fighters linked to President al-Assad and Hashed were killed in the area, near the border with Iraq. Syrian authorities and the Iran-backed militia blamed the June 17 mysterious attack on the United States and the international coalition fighting ISIS. A US official source additionally told AFP Washington is in possession of evidence proving Israels responsibility for the air strike. The victims according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in London, included at least 30 Iraqi fighters and 16 Syrians, including soldiers and members of loyalist militias. There are reports of foreign fighters among the victims but their nationalities have not been determined. Israel has not commented on the air strike as per its military policy. It is the first time the Jewish state has targeted the eastern part of Syria, ravaged by the seven-year civil war. Israels most air strikes targeted areas around capital Damascus and Homs on Irans alleged positions in Syria. We will take action and are already taking action against efforts to establish a militarily presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria both close to the border and deep inside Syria. We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday at a cabinet meeting. Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi today said the state will organise a conference on climate change for the first time on June 24-25 here. Ministers of and Forest from states like West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand, Assam, Chhattisgarh, etc, experts of international repute, officials and other stake-holders will take part in the conference at Gyan Bhawan in the state capital, he said. "It will be for the first time that a two-day conference on climate change will be organised in Patna on June 24-25. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar will inaugurate the conference while Union Environment, Forest and Climate Change Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan will be the chief guest at the conference," the deputy chief minister said. The event will discuss and dwell on various issues relating to climate change concerning the eastern states, said Sushil Modi, who also holds the and Forest portfolio. Climate change has its adverse impact on eastern states, including in Bihar, where agriculture and forestry are dependent on rain, he said. Around 100 environment and climate change specialists of national and international repute and farmers will share their opinion and experiences. Stating that students from various schools have also been specially invited to the conference, Sushil Modi said, "Our new generations should know about climate change and its impact and also how to deal with its challenges. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Slamming China for its recent assertive behaviour in the Indo-Pacific region, a US lawmaker today said Beijing's rhetoric about the South China Sea is "blatantly false" and consensus among the countries on a free and open Indo-Pacific is now growing. China is engaged in hotly contested territorial disputes in both the South China Sea (SCS) and the East China Sea (ECS). China claims almost all of the South China Sea. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have counter claims. Congressman Ted Yoho said that consensus among the countries on a "free and open Indo-Pacific" is now growing. "China's rhetoric about the SCS is so blatantly false that it must be designed for a domestic audience, because the rest of the world isn't buying it. Led by democracies, the countries of the Indo-Pacific and the world at large are converging towards a shared vision of free and open future for these water, and it's not the one China is pushing," he said. The US has adopted a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" strategy for Asia that emphasises freedom from coercion, and open sea lanes, airspace, and trade an implicit rebuke of China's desire for a balkanised region. "At the Shangri La defense dialogue in Singapore (last week), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered the keynote address, making it clear that India's vision for the 'Indo-Pacific' is consistent with the 'free and open' US strategy," Yoho said. Japan has also adopted a "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" strategy, and Australia has begun to approach Asia as the "Indo-Pacific" as well. Other regional democracies have adopted similar, compatible strategies, including Taiwan's New Southbound Policy, and South Korea's New Southern Policy, both of which focus on the ASEAN, the lawmaker said. "The consensus of nations on a 'Free and Open Indo-Pacific' is growing, and its proponents are beginning to work together to see it realised," Yoho said reacting to a recent Chinese statement. Responding to a recent US freedom of navigation operation in the SCS, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said, "(if) someone armed to (the) teeth comes to your doorstep every now and then, poking around and showing off muscles, aren't you justified in sharpening vigilance, taking precautions, and increasing defense capacities? The consensus among countries in the region, he said, puts the lie to Hua's colourful metaphor about the armed stranger "showing off muscles". "Let's not forget, China's 9-dash line claims have been totally invalidated before the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and the activities of the US and our partners to uphold the freedom of navigation are consistent with that judgment. When it comes to the SCS, it's China who is the disruptor, and China who is crosswise with everyone else," Yoho said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A man, accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl, has been acquitted by a Delhi court which said the complainant "totally damaged" the prosecution's case by changing her stand during cross-examination. Additional Sessions Judge Pritam Singh absolved the man of the offences of penetrative sexual assault under sections 4 and 8 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act after the girl deposed that she lodged a false case as the man had a quarrel with her uncle. "Prosecution Witness-1 (girl), who is the most important witness in the present case, has totally damaged the prosecution case by deposing that the accused had not done any wrong act to her and she made a complaint to the police as she was upset over the quarrel between her mama (uncle) and the accused. "Hence, the prosecution has failed to prove the charge under section 4 and 8 of POCSO Act, against the accused," the judge said. According to the complaint lodged by the girl, she had visited the house of the accused in south-west Delhi with her maternal uncle and stayed there for a few days. On the night of December 8, 2017, when she went to the washroom, the man caught hold of her and sexually assaulted her, the complaint alleged, adding that she informed her uncle the next day and an FIR was lodged. However, in her cross examination, the girl deposed that a quarrel broke out between her uncle and the accused because of which she was upset and she dialled the police control room. She further denied all the allegations levelled by her against the accused before the court. The court dispensed with the statement of the accused under the CrPC as no incriminating evidence came on record against him. "Accordingly, the accused is acquitted of the offences under section 4 and 8 of POCSO Act," it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Public money in state-owned banks is 100 per cent safe and secure, Finance Minister Piyush Goyal said today against the backdrop of several cases of fraud, including the USD 2 billion scam at PNB unearthed recently. Speaking to the media after meeting heads of public sector banks (PSBs), he also said the government is open to the question of giving more powers to the Reserve Bank for effectively regulating PSBs. "Let me reassure everybody that public money is extremely safe in the public sector banks. Government stands behind public sector banks... Government owned banks' deposits are 100 per cent safe and secure," he said. Goyal added however that he does not know "how safe it is in private sector and some of the companies which have income tax dues, which they don't pay". Several cases of frauds have surfaced in the recent past at PSBs. The most talked about fraud allegedly involves Nirav Modi, who along with associates, used fake Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) defrauding state-owned Punjab National Bank to the tune over USD 2 billion. Various investigating agencies are probing the over USD 2 billion fraud allegedly committed by diamond jeweller Nirav Modi and his associates. Goyal said the frauds were perpetrated by private companies and not PSBs. In reference to recent suggestion by RBI Governor Urjit Patel that the central bank lacked powers to effectively deal with PSBs, Goyal said RBI has powers, but if additional powers are needed the government was open to the idea. "We believe that powers are available with the Reserve Bank and that is the conversation that the government and Reserve Bank will have amongst themselves," Goyal told the media after meeting heads of 13 PSBs here. "If there are any more additional powers required, government is open to that," he said. The minister added however that he personally does not "believe there is any shortage of powers but we will have discussion with RBI and sort them out". Appearing before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance on June 12 here, Patel had made a strong case for more powers to effectively regulate PSBs, as several of them have been hit by frauds. The RBI has cited at least 10 areas where it has no control over PSBs. The central bank has no powers to remove chairman, director or CEO of state-owned banks and also cannot impose restriction on common directors on PSB boards, among others. Goyal further said bankers have decided to embark on a strategy to give a push to lending to genuine corporate borrowers as well as small businesses with a view to support the uptick in the economic activity. "One of the thoughts before the public sector banks has been that they have to once again get into the act of working to support MSMEs and genuine good companies who need working capital finances or loans on investment in fixed assets and have some difficulties in the past," he said. During the bankers meeting, mounting non-performing assets (NPAs) or bad loans in the banking system figured prominently. NPAs in the banking sector were about Rs 9 lakh crore at end-December 2017. Issues related to banks, which are under RBI's supervision (Prompt Corrective Action), too came up for discussion. At the meeting, SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar shared experience about consolidation carried out by his bank by merging five SBI associate banks and Bharatiya Mahila Bank last year. "SBI shared experience about the consolidation. What are the possible pitfalls, what are the advantages and what are the things to watch for when you are undertaking such exercise. "This is food for thought which have been given and now individual banks will use that and look for opportunities but there is unanimity that public sector banks are fragmented as of now," said Kumar, who too was present at the media briefing. Goyal further said that sub-committee headed by PNB Chairman Sunil Mehta on setting up an asset reconstruction or an asset management company will be shortly coming out with the report. Besides, the report by P S Jayakumar committee will also be submitted soon, he said, these reports once submitted will be discussed among banks themselves and decide the way forward. These committee were formed at the last meeting held earlier this month in Mumbai. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Domestic air passenger traffic grew 16.53 per cent to 11.86 million in May this year over the same period a year ago, according to data released by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Tuesday. Twelve together flew 11.85 million passengers as compared to 10.17 million passengers in May 2017, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) released figures said. Budget carrier IndiGo continued to be the market leader, carrying 4.85 million passengers in May, while full service carrier Jet Airways followed it, carrying 1.62 million passengers. According to the data, budget carrier SpiceJet recorded the highest load factor during the month at 94.8 per cent, followed by IndiGo at 91 per cent. The load factor of state-run Air India, in comparison, stood at 81.3 per cent and it carried 1.51 million passengers in May. "This is the 38th month in a row that we have flown the highest loads in the Indian aviation market which is a testament of the combined effort put in by SpiceJet," the airline said after the release of the data. The cancellation rate of Air Odisha and Air Deccan, both of whom have entered the aviation map of the country under the regional connectivity scheme, remained the highest. In case of the former, the cancellation rate stood at 44.22 per cent and 12.12 per cent in case of the latter. Over 194,000 passengers were affected because of delays by all the domestic carriers put together and 724 passenger- related complaints had been received by the scheduled With regard to on-time performance (OTP), IndiGo continued to lead the rest, registering an OTP of 80.9 per cent. The OTP was based on the data collected from the airports of Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad only. "On-time performance is the core of our business and is one of the three values that IndiGo stands for," said the airline's chief commercial officer Sanjay Kumar. The Congress-led UDF opposition today staged a walkout in the Kerala assembly over the practice of deploying junior policemen for the personal service of senior officials even as Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan assured stern action against erring officials. The UDF alleged that the government was not sincere in taking action against senior police officers who deploy junior police personnel and camp followers for their personal service as treat them as "slaves". They protested even as Vijayan maintained that lapses would not be tolerated in the police force and said stern action would be taken against the erring officials irrespective of the position they hold. The UDF members referred to the recent incident of alleged manhandling of a police driver by the daughter of an Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) rank officer here as an example for the 'enslavement' prevailing in the force. Vijayan said there would not be any compromise on lapses and the government's stand on the issue was very clear. "The government will take stern action against any officer who treat their subordinates as domestic helps," he said adding no official had the right to engage them for menial jobs like bathing their pet dogs. "We have received complaints against a few officials in this regard. Stern action will be taken against them after examining the facts," the chief minister said. He, however, said it was not possible to generalise the lapses on the part of a few in the force. K Muraleedharan (Congress) alleged that treating policemen as "slaves" by the senior police officials had brought 'disrepute' to the state and wanted the decades-old practice to be stopped. Before staging the walkout, Leader of the Opposition Ramesh Chennithala accused the Chief Minister of 'trivialising' the issue and not being 'sincere' in initiating action against 'erring' top brass. The government was yet to take any action against the ADGP's daughter who had allegedly manhandled the police driver, he said. The alleged assault of the driver, Gavaskar, by Snigdha, the daughter of ADGP Sudesh Kumar, had triggered widespread condemnation from various quarters. Kumar was was later removed as the head of Armed Police Battalions. Vijayan had yesterday said in the assembly that the practice of deploying junior policemen for the personal service of senior officials would be done away with in the state. In his complaint, Gavaskar alleged Snigdha had verbally abused him and hit him on his neck and shoulder with her mobile phone for delay in bringing the vehicle to pick her up after her morning walk. A case had been registered against Snigdha under various sections of the IPC based on Gavaskar's complaint, while he too was booked over her counter complaint. Crime Branch ADGP is investigating both the complaints. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ministry has allowed import of second hand machines with residual life of at least 5 years for use in electrical and electronics manufacturing unit. "In schedule III in part D...following entries shall be inserted..used plant and machinery having a residual life of at least 5 years for manufacturing of electrical and electronic items by the electronic industry," a notification from the ministry said. The part D under schedule III of Hazardous And Other Wastes (Management and Transboundary Movement) Rules talks about list of wastes allowed for import and export without permission from Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. "This is a very positive step to improve ease of doing business. Our industry's vigorous capital investment cycle is beginning and we are greatly encouraging capacities shifting to India. The decision clearly shows the GOI intent of Reform, Perform and Transform," Indian Cellular Association National President Pankaj Mohindroo said in a statement. The mobile industry body said that the used capital machinery having a residual life of at least 5 years for manufacturing electrical and electronic items by the electronics industry will require only a form filled as per the rules along with a certified chartered engineer certificate with other documents. "This saves an ample four to five months of time which used to be taken to obtain permission from the MOEF committee. Government of India's commendable initiative to promote manufacturing in India," ICA said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a first, scientists have spotted the evidence of a rare intermediate-mass black hole - an elusive object whose existence has been hotly debated. Scientists have been able to prove the existence of small black holes and those that are super-massive, but the existence of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) was never proven. Researchers from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in the US found the strongest evidence to date that such middle-of-the-road black holes exist, by serendipitously capturing one in action devouring an encountering star. "We feel very lucky to have spotted this object with a significant amount of high quality data, which helps pinpoint the mass of the black hole and understand the nature of this spectacular event," said Dacheng Lin, a research assistant professor at UNH. "Earlier research, including our own work, saw similar events, but they were either caught too late or were too far away," Lin said. In the study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers used satellite imaging to detect for the first time this significant telltale sign of activity. They found an enormous multiwavelength radiation flare from the outskirts of a distant galaxy. The brightness of the flare decayed over time exactly as expected by a star disrupting, or being devoured, by the black hole. In this case, the star was disrupted in October 2003 and the radiation it created decayed over the next decade. The distribution of emitted photons over the energy depends on the size of the black hole. This data provides one of the very few robust ways to weight, or determine the size of, the black hole. Researchers used data from a trio of orbiting X-ray telescopes, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Swift Satellite as well as European Space Agency (ESA)'s XMM-Newton, to find the multiwavelength radiation flares that helped identify the otherwise uncommon IMBHs. The characteristic of a long flare offers evidence of a star being torn apart and is known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). Tidal forces, due to the intense gravity from the black hole, can destroy an object - such as a star - that wanders too close. During a TDE, some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speeds, while the rest falls toward the black hole. As it travels inward, and is ingested by the black hole, the material heats up to millions of degrees and generates a distinct X-ray flare. According to the researchers, these types of flares, can easily reach the maximum luminosity and are one of the most effective way to detect IMBHs. "From the theory of galaxy formation, we expect a lot of wandering intermediate-mass black holes in star clusters," said Lin. "But there are very, very few that we know of, because they are normally unbelievably quiet and very hard to detect and energy bursts from encountering stars being shredded happen so rarely," he said. Due to the very low occurrence rate of such star-triggered outbursts for an IMBH, the scientists believe that their discovery implies that there could be many IMBHs lurking in a dormant state in galaxy peripheries across the local universe. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A group of farmers led by Swaraj India today protested outside Nirman Bhawan, which houses the office of the Housing and Urban Affairs (HUA) Ministry, against the delay in implementation of land pooling policy, the party said. Earlier, Delhi Development Authority (DDA) vice-chairman Udai Pratap Singh had said that the land pooling policy was ready and hopefully" by July-end, it would be submitted to the ministry which would then notify it. Swaraj India Delhi State President Anupam tweeted about the protest and alleged that HUA Minister Hardeep Singh Puri got the farmers, who had come to ask for their rights, detained at a police station. Responding to his allegations, Puri in a tweet said, I never cease to be amazed by the extent to which people go to spread #FakeNews. I am in Lucknow, & not even in Delhi today. By the way, I regularly meet concerned citizens including farmers, traders & residents in my office. Better luck next time. Anupam replied back saying he don't expect one of the rare sensible ministers like you (Puri) to term everything that doesn't suit as fake Anupam also posed questions regarding landholding, development charges and time of implementation of policy. In response to the queries, Puri asked him to wait for the real facts on land pooling and advised him not to use social media for disinformation. The farmers also pressed for scrapping of the mandatory provision of five acre landholding and development charges in the yet-to-be-notified policy. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian food industry should focus on R&D and quality certification to ensure that its products do not get rejected in the overseas markets, Food Processing Secretary Jagdish Prasad Meena said today. He also expressed concern over export consignments of many products including basmati rice facing problems. "We are very poor in certification and that is why our products are being rejected. Basmati rice is facing serious problem of pesticide residuals for the last two years and many of the consignments have been rejected. "Now, many of the products including honey have been held up in the US, and Europe is also following suit," Meena said. This is because the industry is not paying proper attention to quality, he said addressing a conference on food processing organised by educational institute NIFTEM. India's export of food products will be smooth and also expand if the industry focuses on quality certifications based on global standards, Meena said. "In food, safety and quality are of utmost importance," he said, while urging the industry to come out with new products that are globally competitive. The secretary said R&D and quality certification are "weakest links" in the food processing sector and emphasised on backward linkages to ensure the quality of raw materials. Addressing the function, Food Processing Minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal said: "NIFTEM is a one of its kind institute and has the potential to become the Harvard of food processing technology and management sector. A university which despite being nascent, has already been ranked 50th out of 3,007 universities in India". Stating that Indians are becoming increasingly aware of healthy food habits, she asked NIFTEM to explore how it can come up with Brand NIFTEM' which is healthier, fresher and cheaper. Badal asked the food industry, especially new entrepreneurs, to utilise the incubation centre and food testing lab at NIFTEM. "I foresee a lot of potential for the new facilities created at NIFTEM. The food testing lab should become a nodal lab for Food Safety Standards Authority of India and also both domestic and international companies to rely on for testing of their products," she said. NIFTEM should open up its incubation centre to new entrepreneurs for trying out new things, Badal said, adding that at least two outlets should be opened at NIFTEM and the ministry premises to market new healthy products. She invited the industry to partner NIFTEM and evolve as a guide to help the ministry form policies for the food processing sector. The National Institute of Food Technology Entrepreneurship and Management (NIFTEM), at Sonepat in Haryana, is an institution under the aegis of Ministry of Food Processing Industries. It is a sector specific institution to cater to various stakeholders such as entrepreneurs, food processing industry, exporters, policy makers, government and existing institutions. The 6th meeting of NIFTEM Industry Forum was aimed at strengthening Industry-NIFTEM collaboration. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An Israeli former minister accused by Shin Bet for spying for Israels foe, Iran, could face death penalty for the offense, the ministry of justice has indicated. An official in the ministry of justice told local media Times of Israel that Gonen Segev charged Monday for espionage in favor of Iran may face death penalty if convicted. Segev, former minister of infrastructure and energy from January 1995 to June 1996, has been hauled in custody pending trial. Israels internal security authorities accuse him of passing on secret information on location of security centers and Israels energy industry to Iran. The ex-minister is also accused of making contact with Israeli figures in security, defense and diplomacy, in order to mine them for information to send to Iran, Times of Israel reports. The former Israel official also according to Shin Bet tried to establish contact between his Israeli contacts and Iranian handlers that he introduced as businessmen. Segev was extradited to Israel last month after his arrest in Equatorial Guinea. He left Israel in 2007 after his release from prison following in detention after being convicted for attempting to smuggle Ecstasy pills into the country in 2004. Shin Bet believes that Segev met his Iranian handlers in the Iran embassy in Nigeria in the past. He reportedly travelled to the Islamic Republic two times. Israel and Iran have been at war of words in the region. The Jewish state has attacked Iranian positions in the region as well as Irans proxies in the Gaza strip, Syria and Lebanon. If convicted, Segev will be the first high-ranking Israeli official to be handed death penalty for espionage. His lawyers told the media the full details of his charges remain secret. Even at this early stage it can be said that the permitted publication attributes extreme gravity to the events, even though within the indictment, of which the full details remain confidential, a different picture is painted, the team of lawyers said. A retired Deputy Superintendent of Police was allegedly abducted today by unidentified persons while he was on his way to Mumbai, and released later, police said. The incident took place this afternoon when the former police officer, whose identity was not disclosed, was heading for Mumbai from Karad in Satara district. Some persons intercepted his car on the Pune-Bengaluru highway and took him to Ratnagiri district where they released him, as per the officer's complaint. A police source said that he was carrying a huge amount of cash in the car, and further probe was on. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Four US states are refusing to deploy National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border, amid a growing outcry over the controversial decision by President Donald Trump's administration to separate the children of illegal migrants from their parents. The Democratic governors of Colorado and New York and the Republican governors of Maryland and Massachusetts all said they would not send members of their state's National Guard units for border duty. "We will not be complicit in this ongoing human tragedy," New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said today. "In the face of the federal government's inhumane treatment of immigrant families, New York will not deploy National Guard to the border," Cuomo said on Twitter. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, said he will not send any National Guard resources to the border "until this policy of separating children from their families has been rescinded." Hogan said he had ordered a four-member helicopter crew which had been stationed in the border state of New Mexico to "immediately return" home. "Immigration enforcement efforts should focus on criminals, not separating innocent children from their families," Hogan said. John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor of Colorado, signed an executive order yesterday that forbids the use of state resources "for the purpose of separating any child from his or her parent or legal guardian," a practice he called "cruel and un-American." Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, said the policy was "cruel and inhumane," and a National Guard helicopter crew which had been scheduled to go to the border later this month would not be deployed. "They're not going to the border," Baker told reporters. The Trump administration is facing condemnation at home and abroad for the separations, the product of a "zero-tolerance" policy on undocumented migrants. US officials say more than 2,300 children have been separated from their parents or guardians since early May, when the "zero-tolerance" policy was announced. President Donald Trump has accused Democrats of causing the crisis by blocking immigration reform legislation. "If you don't have Borders, you don't have a Country!" the Republican president tweeted today. Trump announced plans in April to send thousands of National Guard troops to the border, where they could remain until his promised wall is constructed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two French youths were jailed today over a deadly attack on a Chinese tailor that sparked mass protests by the country's Asian community. The pair, aged 17 and 19 at the time of the attack in August 2016, left Zhang Chaolin with fatal injuries when he fell while they were mugging him. The older defendant was sentenced to 10 years in jail and the younger to four years with an additional year suspended for violent robbery leading to death. The younger, who has already served two years behind bars awaiting trial, burst into tears upon hearing the verdict at a juvenile court near Paris. Prosecutors had asked that the pair be jailed for 15 years and eight years respectively. Zhang's death caused an outcry among Asians living in France, with thousands taking to the streets to protest what they called a rise in anti-Asian racism in poorer French communities. The 49-year-old and a friend were on their way to a restaurant in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers when three teenagers crossed their path. Zhang, who has two children, fell and hit his head on a wall after being kicked in the chest. He died five days later in hospital, while his friend sustained minor injuries. Lawyers for the victims' families welcomed the ruling. "It's important for the victims and for the other victims of similar crimes," said family lawyer Vincent Fillola. "This will be a signal for people from the Chinese community and Asians in general," he added. "The courts have acknowledged the violence that they suffer on a daily basis and saw this violence for what it was -- based on racist prejudice." Marlene Viallet, lawyer for the accused, meanwhile blasted the verdict as "a poor application of the law". The defence team had protested the lengthy jail terms demanded by the prosecution, saying there was no intention to murder and denying their clients were racist. The attack, in which the assailants came away with just a phone charger and some sweets, followed a string of robberies targeting Chinese tourists and small-business owners in France's gritty high-rise suburbs. During police questioning, one of the suspects said the gang had targeted the Chinese pair because they had heard Asians "carry a lot of cash". But Viallet said that while stereotypes about Asians were rife in low-income suburbs, "there is no hatred towards them". The attack on Zhang, she said, was purely an act of "delinquency". Around 10,000 people of Chinese origin live in Aubervilliers, Europe's biggest textile import-export hub, which has a population of 80,000. Community leaders say security has improved since Zhang's death. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 46-year-old gangster, who had been on the run for nine years and was carrying a reward of Rs one lakh on information leading to his arrest, was held from Hapur district in Uttar Pradesh, the police said today. The accused, Mukesh Gujjar, had been declared a proclaimed offender in five cases of murder and attempt to murder, they added. On June 16, the Delhi Police Crime Branch received information about Gujjar's presence in Hapur. A team, with its members posing as local farmers, nabbed him from the Preet Vihar area of Hapur on June 17, said G Ramgopal Naik, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime). Police learnt that he had been planning to eliminate the witnesses in a case of murder of Deepak alias Kanaita, in which his son Himanshu and his sister's son Vikas were named as accused. In 2002, Gujjar, along with his associates, looted Rs 25 lakh and a Santro car from Mohan Lal and shot him dead in Anand Parbat. In 2009, he, along with his associates, killed Budh Bachhan who refused to give him protection money. To evade arrest, he had been moving from one city to another in western UP under pseudo names, said the officer. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) : Georges Monin SAS,a French food and beverages company, today signed an MoU with the Telangana government to set up a production facility in the state. An official release the company signed the MoU in the presence of Industries and IT Minister K T Rama Rao. "With an investment up to Rs 100 crore, Georges Monin SAS will set up a production facility in Telangana to manufacture gourmet flavors from a wide range of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and nuts. The unit is expected to generate more than 200 direct and indirect employment opportunities in the state," the release said. "The State Government is encouraging the food processing sector in the state with the objective of increasing farm income and reducing food wastage. We will provide complete assistance to Georges Monin SAS in setting up of its unit in the state," Rao said. Georges Monin SAS is a France based 106-year-old company and a global leader in gourmet flavour business. The company manufactures syrups, sweeteners, fruit purees and other beverages. The company also offers a line of coffee and tea concentrates. Georges Monin's products are available in more than 140 countries, the release said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) German authorities have suspended a Bavarian village mayor over her alleged support of an anti-government extremist group. Bavaria's state disciplinary authority suspended Bolsterlang mayor Monika Zeller today and filed a suit at a Munich court seeking her dismissal as a civil servant. Intelligence officials have said 16,500 Germans adhere to the Reich Citizens' Movement, a loose grouping that refuses to acknowledge the authority of Germany's post-war federal republic. Some 900 self-styled Reich Citizens are considered right-wing extremists. The disciplinary authority said the mayor had helped arrange for a speaker from the movement to use a municipal venue for a lecture. It said that, in official correspondence, she had cited a 1913 citizenship law and said she was a citizen of the Kingdom of Bavaria as well as Germany. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Haryana government today decided to introduce a scheme under which an incentive of Rs 50 will be given to schoolchildren for planting trees, an official release said. The decision was taken at a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar today to review the progress of environment-centric schemes of different government departments. Under the new scheme, students from Classes 6 to 12 of both government and private schools will be given an incentive of Rs 50 each for every live tree planted by them every six months for a period of three years, the release said. The students will also be provided with books about conservation. The drive will be launched by the school education department on July 10 and the forest department will ensure the availability of adequate number of saplings, the release added. There are about 22 lakh students studying from Classes 6 to 12 in the state, it said, adding that they will be motivated to plant at least one tree in their house or at a public place. To cultivate a sense of connection, the children will be encouraged to name their trees after famous personalities or their ancestors. The education department will submit a weekly report to the chief minister about the progress made under the scheme, the release said. A decision to use water bottles made of glass over their plastic counterparts in the Haryana civil secretariat was also taken at the meeting. Plastic water bottles were recently banned across all state government offices. Reviewing the progress of 'Tooti Lagao Pani Bachao', Khattar ordered the launch of a massive drive for installation of taps in all villages where water was going waste due to open pipes, the release said. He also directed the officials to inform the village panchayats about the wastage of water, it said. Khattar also directed the urban local bodies department to prepare a list of plots measuring over 500 square yards, low lying plots of Haryana Shahari Vikas Pradhikaran (HSVP) and in areas falling under the ten municipal corporations, it said. This list will be used for a plan under which rain water harvesting systems will be made mandatory in these plots. A decision was also taken to replace the existing halogen, sodium vapour bulbs and tubelights in all government offices with energy efficient LED lights before August 15. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Technology giant Google today announced the launch of a training programme for journalists, aimed at raising awareness against misinformation and providing new tools to the fourth estate against fake "The Google Initiative India Training Network will provide training to 8,000 journalists in English and six other Indian languages in the next one year," Google said in a statement. For this, the network will select 200 journalists from cities across India, who will hone their skills in verification and training during five-day boot camps that will be organised for English and six other Indian languages, it added. This network of certified trainers will then train more journalists and the workshops will be conducted in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada in cities across India, it added. "The focus of the training will be fact-checking, online verification and digital hygiene for journalists, using a curriculum built by experts from First Draft, Storyful, AltNews, BoomLive, Factchecker.in, and DataLeads," the statement said. Google Lab Lead (Asia-Pacific) Irene Jay Liu said supporting trusted, authoritative media sources is a top priority for Google. "When journalists and communities work together, armed with the online tools to verify information, they can build a bulwark of trusted media to fight the tide of misinformation," Liu added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Governor's rule in Jammu and Kashmir was imminent after the three-year-old state government collapsed today with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP. The Union Home Ministry was awaiting a report from Jammu and Kashmir Governor N N Vohra after that necessary formalities related to the imposition of the central rule would be initiated, officials said today. Home Minister Rajnath Singh held a high-level meeting at his residence with Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba, and senior officials of the Intelligence Bureau and his ministry to assess the ground situation in the sensitive state. Jammu and Kashmir has come under the Governor's rule on seven occasions before in the past four decades. In case the scenario for the imposition of the Governor's rule emerges for the eighth time, as the prospects of formation of a new government appears unlikely, it will be for the fourth time that the Jammu and Kashmir will be placed under the central rule during N N Vohra's tenure as the Governor. Vohra, a former civil servant, became the Governor on June 25, 2008. The BJP pulled out of its alliance with the PDP, saying it has become impossible to continue in the government in view of the growing radicalism and terrorism in the state. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the surprise announcement after the party high command summoned its Jammu and Kashmir ministers for emergency consultations in New Delhi. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor N N Vohra in Srinagar. Today's announcement comes barely two days after the Home Ministry had said that it would not extend the suspension of operations against terrorists in the state. The Centre had announced the suspension of operations at the beginning of the holy month of Ramzan on May 17 and had said the decision was being taken in the interests of the peace loving people of the state, in order to provide them a conducive atmosphere during the fasting month. According to officials, there were 18 incidents of terror between April 17 and May 17 this year and the figure rose to above 50 during the suspension of operations. The suspension of operations saw brutal killings which included that of an army soldier by militants, attacks on civilians propagating moderate approach and gunning down of veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari, who was a strong voice of peace, they said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Finance Minister Piyush Goyal today said the government is open to giving more powers to RBI to deal more effectively with frauds like the ones allegedly committed by diamond jeweller Nirav Modi in PNB. Goyal's comment comes within days of RBI Governor Urjit Patel reportedly telling a parliamentary standing committee that the central bank lacked enough powers to effectively regulate Public Sector Banks (PSBs). On RBI's stand, Goyal said however that those were the views of the Governor about powers of regulation and supervision of the central bank. "We believe that powers are available with the Reserve Bank and that is the conversation that the government and Reserve Bank will have amongst themselves," Goyal told the media after meeting heads of 13 public sector banks (PSBs) here. "If there are any more additional powers required, government is open to that," he said. The minister added however that he personally does not "believe there is any shortage of powers but we will have discussion with RBI and sort them out". Appearing before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance on June 12 here, Patel had made a strong case for more powers to effectively regulate PSBs, as several of them have been hit by frauds. The most talked about fraud allegedly involves Nirav Modi, who along with associates, used fake Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) to defrauded the state-owned Punjab National Bank to the tune over USD 2 billion. Replying to the questions of lawmakers on PSBs, Patel reportedly told the panel that the RBI has "inadequate" control over them and asked for more powers to regulate them. The RBI has cited at least 10 areas where it has no control over PSBs. The central bank has no powers to remove chairman, director or CEO of state-owned banks and also cannot impose restriction on common directors on PSB boards, among others. On bank frauds, Goyal said those are conducted by private sector and not by public sector. "They (private sector) have used the public sector banks as a medium to conduct the fraud," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ethiopia has appointed a new central bank governor on Monday amid major economic reforms spearheaded by the countrys new Prime Minister Abiye Ahmed. Yinager Dessie who has been serving as head of the National Planning Commission with the rank of a minister, will take over Teklewold Atnafu, according to Fana Broadcasting Corporation. Abiy Ahmed, 41, has said a new start is necessary to end the political crisis and chaos in a country of 100 million people, where 40 percent are aged under 15. The replacement of the Central Bank boss follows major policy shifts enacted over the last two months. On Monday, Abiy told parliament that the state will sell a 30 to 40 percent stake in Ethio Telecom to big telecoms companies and split the company in two to spur competition. The government would remain involved in infrastructure, banking and telecoms, he said. He also announced last month that the state-owned Ethiopian Airlines is open for private domestic and foreign investment. Ethiopia has sustained strong economic growth in the last decade, averaging between 6 to 7% according to the World Bank. For years, mere mention of the country suggested images of famine and conflict. The latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast says Ethiopia will be the fastest-growing economy in sub-Saharan Africa in 2018. Government ownership of Air India with no clear road map would lead the national carrier to "extreme insignificance and possibly closure", aviation consultancy CAPA said today, amid the government deciding to put off the stake sale of the national carrier. The government has decided not to go ahead with Air India divestment for now, a senior official said today, less than three weeks after the proposed strategic stake sale failed to attract any bidders. CAPA South Asia CEO and Director Kapil Kaul said it was disappointing that the government has decided not to go ahead with Air India divestment. "Continuing government ownership and with no clear road map will lead Air India to extreme insignificance and possibly closure," he said in a statement. Noting that funding large scale losses is grossly unfair to the taxpayer, he said there would never be a perfect timing for the stake sale "as conditions for divestment have to be structured by some bold decisions". He also said that the government should now focus on a comprehensive enterprise wide restructuring under a special administration to scale down losses significantly. Consultancy Deloitte India's Partner Peeyush Naidu said disinvestment of the nature of Air India does need time to navigate through the complex issues. "Given the general elections next year, one can understand the practical considerations involved in this latest decision. However, it is important that management and the government continue to make progress on the longer term plan during this period as well," he added. Under the proposed plan, the government was to sell 76 per cent stake in Air India along with complete divestment of low-cost arm Air India Express and a 50 per cent stake in Air India SATS Airport Services Pvt Ltd -- an equal joint venture with Singapore's SATS. In nearly two decades, Air India stake sale has not taken off twice. Back in 2001, during the then NDA government, the disinvestment process was scrapped. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The government has for now dropped plans to sell majority stake in Air India as it may not be the right time to privatise the loss-making flag carrier in an election year, a top official said today. Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu said a decision on the fate of privatisation plan was taken at a meeting yesterday after considering factors like state of global aviation industry and oil prices. "Yesterday we had a meeting, so we have already decided," Prabhu told reporters here today. "Because airline industry globally is losing and particularly with increase in oil (prices), the environment is becoming challenging for the airline industry. So we reviewed it and said we will review it later," he said. The top official involved in the process further said the meeting decided not to pursue the stake sale in Air India in an election year and instead provide enough funds to meet the operational needs of the debt-laden national carrier. The meeting, chaired by Union Minister Arun Jaitley, had Officiating Finance Minister Piyush Goyal, Prabhu and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari in attendance. The move comes within weeks of the Modi government's biggest privatisation move failing to attract even a single bidder. The official, who wished not to be identified said, "The airline is posting operational profits. None of the flights go empty. With all the cost efficient mechanism in place, we will continue improving its operational efficiency. There is no need to rush in for disinvestment as of now." The government is looking at turning around the company to ensure that it makes profits on overall basis before going in for listing, he said. "Right now, the environment is not good for the airline business... That was the view expressed by everybody," he said. Debt-laden Air India is staying afloat on taxpayers' money and has been grappling with financial woes, including delay in payment of salaries to employees. After no bids were received for the proposed 76 per cent stake in Air India when the deadline ended on May 31, officials had indicated that the government was open to dropping the initial plan to retain 24 per cent stake in the airline. It was also said that listing the loss-making airline could help unlock value for the government while retaining control. But the government official, quoted earlier, said the listing of Air India was not on the immediate agenda of the government. "Certain conditions have to be met before listing a company. Once Air India fulfils those, we will go in for an initial public offering and subsequent listing," the official said. As per Sebi norms, a company has to post profit in previous three financial years before it can list itself in the stock exchanges. "The focus is on improving operational efficiency. We will continue to boost employee morale, starting from the top level, to better the functioning of the airline. Funds would be provided as and when required," the official said. In May, Air India's market share stood at 12.8 per cent, as per latest official data. The official said there are also suggestions that professionals from the private airlines industry could be roped into manage certain activities at Air India. Under the proposed plan, the government was to sell 76 per cent stake in Air India along with complete divestment of low-cost arm Air India Express and a 50 per cent stake in Air India SATS Airport Services Pvt Ltd -- an equal joint venture with Singapore's SATS. In nearly two decades, Air India stake sale has not taken off twice. Back in 2001, during the then NDA government, the disinvestment process was scrapped. At the end of March 2017, the carrier had a debt burden of around Rs 48,877 crore. Out of the total amount, Rs 17,360 crore was related to aircraft and Rs 31,517 crore pertained to working capital loans. Air India makes more than 2,300 flights weekly to 54 airports and has 2,543 landing slots at international airports including New York, London, Paris and Tokyo. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The government has sought applications for the posts of two members at the fair trade regulator CCI to strengthen its human resource capabilities. The Competition Commission of India (CCI), which keeps a tab on unfair business practices across sectors, presently has a chairman and four members, while there are vacancies for two members. In April, the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi had approved "rightsizing" CCI in pursuance of the 'Minimum Government - Maximum Governance'. In a public notice, the fair trade regulator said applications are invited from Indian nationals for two posts of member in CCI. The applications need to be submitted by August 2. "The selected candidate will be required to serve at the headquarters of the Competition Commission of India. The location of the CCI is to be in Delhi/ NCR," it added. The members would be paid a consolidated monthly salary of Rs 4 lakh but would not be entitled to house and car. They would be appointed for a period of five years or till they attain the age of 65 years, whichever is earlier. The CCI has gained importance in recent years with all major deals requiring its approval, while it has also been keeping a close vigil for any attempts at cartelisation or other unfair trade practices in various sectors, including real estate, automotive, coal, aviation and banking. Among major deals, Walmart's mega-billion dollar acquisition of Flipkart is currently awaiting the CCI approval. The Commission was established in 2003 to replace the erstwhile Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission. The fair trade regulator draws its power from the Competition Act, 2002, and has been empowered to check anti-competitive behaviour and regulate mergers and acquisitions. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The government on Tuesday said it has constituted a chief ministers' sub-group to coordinate policy approaches for agriculture and with the Madhya Pradesh CM Shiv Raj Singh Chauhan as the convener. Chief Ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Sikkim along with member Ramesh Chand are the members of the subgroup, an official statement said. The move comes against the backdrop of the vision of towards doubling farmers' income by 2022 which requires a multi-dimensional and inclusive approach, it added. At the fourth meeting of the Governing Council of on Sunday, approaches with special emphasis on pre-sowing and post-harvest interventions using were sought for creating durable assets that double incomes of farmers and reduce agrarian distress. According to the statement, the terms of reference of the sub-group include suggesting a wider choice of state-specific interventions both for pre-sowing and post-harvest to further improve the thrust on incomes, water conservation and waste to wealth. Other terms of reference include making recommendations on interventions of that can facilitate reduction of agrarian distress including work availability, wage rates and seasonality as also to explore the possibilities of MGNREGS as a livelihood resource for development and diversification of income of small and marginal farmers specially belonging to SC/ST households. The statement further said sub-group will submit its report within three months from its date of constitution. The first meeting of the sub-group is expected to be held within the next month, as per the convenience of the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, it added. Actor Sean Gunn and longtime girlfriend, Natasha Halevi, are engaged. The 44-year-old "Guardians of the Galaxy" star took to Instagram to share the that he had popped the question to Halevi, while on vacation in Kyoto, Japan, and she accepted the proposal. "I asked @tashalitas to marry me and she said yes. Or to be more precise she said, 'a million times,'" Sean wrote. The "Gilmore Girls" alum shared the alongside a photo of his fiancee giving him a peck on the cheek, as well as a photo of the couple holding hands, with Halevi's new ring shinning in the sunlight. Sean is best known for playing Kirk Gleason on "Gilmore Girls" and appearing as the space pirate Kraglin in the "Guardians of the Galaxy" films, both of which were directed by his brother, James Gunn. James was one of the first to congratulate the couple. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Alarmed by the deaths of 32 lions in and around Gir wildlife sanctuary due to "unnatural causes" in the last two years, the Gujarat government is now considering to fit radio collars on every lion to track their movements. Talking to PTI, Minister of State for Forests and Ramanlal Patkar today said that the issue of using radio collars on each lion was discussed during a meeting held yesterday. "The issue of placing radio collars on each lion (in the sanctuary) is under consideration and a decision to this effect will be taken soon," he said. Besides, for the protection of these felines, the government is also taking some other measures, like cracking down on unauthorised agents who organise illegal lion shows and people trying to take selfies with the animals. The government is also trying to create a network of informers. These decisions were taken during yesterday's meeting, which was also attended by Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, state Forests and Minister Ganpat Vasava told reporters in Gandhinagar today. He said for better co-ordination of security-related issues, the Gir forest, which is spread over the area of 109 square kms covering three different districts, will now be brought under the jurisdiction of Junagadh forest authorities. "Lions are also found residing outside the forest area, and therefore a special division will be created under Chief Conservator of Forest Junagadh (at Amreli district). That division will look after areas such as Lilya, Kukawav, Jafrabad and Rajula of Amreli district and Mahua, Jesar, Palitana and Talaja of Bhavnagar district," he said. "With the increased flow of tourists at Gir we have come to know that some people are organising illegal lion shows for tourists. Incidents of harassment of lions or being chased on vehicles have also come to our notice," Vasava said. "Now, those found indulging in any such activities will be charged under section 9 of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, which has a provision of imprisonment of up to seven years," he said. A network of informers will be created to find out about people indulging in such act, he said. The government has also decided to increase facilities for tourists by creating new tourists zones like Chikhalkuba and areas near Girnar mountain. Earlier, tourists were only allowed to enter Sasan Gir and Devalia forest areas to see lions. "Also, the state government has decided to allow more number of visitors and vehicles in the forest areas now," Vasava said. Recently, the Gujarat high court had also taken suo motu cognisance of the number of lion deaths in Gir and sought the government's explanation. As per the figures, as many as 184 lions- with 32 due to 'unnatural causes'- had died in two years- 2016 and 2017 and the high court had issued notices to the state and central governments over the issue. As per the 2015 census, there were 523 lions in the state, the only abode of Asiatic lions. The government had told the state Assembly that there are four reasons behind the "unnatural" death of lions-- road accidents, railway tracks passing through the forest areas, wells with damaged or no parapets and electric fences around agricultural lands. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a novel initiative, Haryana has decided to give star rankings to its panchayats on the basis of seven social parameters under the state's 7-Star Gram Panchayat Rainbow scheme. As many as 1,120 villages of the state have achieved the rankings under the scheme, launched in January this year, an official release said. Speaking at a State level Panchayat Performance Assessment Committee (SPPAC) meeting here today, Haryana Agriculture minister O P Dhankar said the panchayats will be judged on sex ratio, education, hygiene, environment preservation, governance and social participation. The selected villages will be honoured at an award ceremony to be held in Panchkula, Gurugram and Rohtak next month. Dhankar said the villages would be rewarded Rs one lakh for achieving each parameter. "The villages having equal or more girl population will be given Rs 50,000 as bonus with their reward money. Similarly, the villages which adopt Swachhta Mission will be given additional Rs 50,000 as reward," he said. An online portal has also been developed for receiving claims of panchayats, for evaluation and verification, he said. The minister added that Ambala topped the star ranking with 407 stars followed by Gurugram with 199 stars and Karnal with 75 stars. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Uttarakhand High Court today asked the state government to set up a National Law University in Udham Singh Nagar district and start classes there from August 16. A division bench of justices Rajiv Sharma and Lokpal Singh directed the state government to set up an NLU at a suitable place in US Nagar district on a public interest lawsuit seeking its establishment. Giving three months' time for appointment of the faculty and staff, the high court said classes at the University should be started from August 16. The Court said the Chief Justice of India would act as Visitor while the Chief Justice of Uttarakhand will take the responsibility of being its Chancellor. Two judges will be appointed to act as the governing body, it said. In view of the financial limits of the state, the division bench hearing the plea, made an initial donation of Rs 2 lakh for setting up the University and also asked lawyers to come forward and make donations for the purpose. The court also directed the district magistrate of Udham Singh Nagar to give a representation before the concerned authority with various land options including one at Kichcha. The court had earlier considered opening a National Law University at UJALA in Bhowali. The administration, however, could not fulfil the requirement of 15 acres of land. After this the petitioner had suggested availability of land at places like Patwadangar, Kristi Vigyan Kendra Jyolikot, TB Sanitarium, Bhowali, Farsali, Army Camp Nepa Maldhanchaur and finally Khurpia farm Kicchha and Prag Farm. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Uttarakhand High Court has asked the state government to stop drug and substance abuse by youths and rescue them from its vicious clutches. A division bench of justices Rajiv Sharma and Lokpal Singh The also suggested a slew of measures to combat the menace including opening rehabilitation centers and psychiatric wards in every district within six months. Taking cognisance of a plea related to intoxicants and their effects on children, the court also asked the government to set up up check posts at India-Nepal border to keep a tab on illegal drug trafficking. The court also ordered deployment of sufficient STF personnel at the check posts on the state's borders with UP and Himachal besides one drug inspector in every hilly district and two in the districts located in non-hilly region. It further asked the government to constitute an STF to prevent durg smuggling in the state and to provide the STF officers with modern machinery to test drugs on the spot. The court also directed that a police inspector be posted near schools in plain clothes from 6 AM and to 8 PM to keep a check on children using drugs and asked local intelligence units to keep check on restaurants supplying alcohol illegally. The PIL was related to wine shops being within a distance of 100 metres from school campuses at Almora. The court directed the Almora SDM to measure the distance between such shops and schools within 72 hours and shift the offending shops beyond 100 metres from school premises. While putting on record its appreciation for the work done by DIG and SSP Nainital against drug abuse, the court also asked the state government to initiate destroying wild marijuana plants growing in the forests. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Bombay High Court today directed the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to "reconsider" the blanket permission granted by it to some private and public agencies to trim trees on their premises. A bench of Justices A S Oka and R I Chagla asked on what basis had the civic body granted such blanket permissions, without any condition for determining whether these agencies were adhering to provisions of the Trees Act and the BMC's own rules. The bench was hearing an application filed by city-based activist Zoru Bhatena, challenging BMC's decision to allow some public and private agencies like Tata Power, Reliance Energy, the Railways, and the Airport Authority of India, to trim trees on their premises for the next three years. The corporation told the bench that it had been well within its powers in granting such permission since it was not for felling of any trees, but for trimming and pruning, that was essential for the maintenance of trees. BMC's counsel, advocate Anil Sakhre, argued that under section 383 of the Municipal Act, the corporation had the power to allow trimming and pruning of trees for their maintenance, or in cases where the trees had some overgrown or damaged branches posing a danger to one's life or property. The bench, however, said even section 383 mandated that such permission could be granted to private persons or bodies only after the civic commissioner was convinced that the trees on the respective person's property required trimming. "The Act does not talk of such blanket permission without any application of mind by the civic body. Who is to determine whether the trees that such bodies are trimming actually require to be touched? "And what if in the name of trimming, they cut 90 of the 100 branches and virtually kill the tree? That will be in contravention of the Trees Act," the bench said. "This will have to be reconsidered by BMC," it said. The court also directed the petitioner to amend its plea and make the agencies that have been granted such permission, a party to the plea. The BMC, in the meanwhile, will file a rejoinder justifying the permission granted. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Equatorial Guinean government has invited international observers to participate in the political dialogue slated for mid-July in the Central African nation. According to RFI, foreign personalities and international organizations recognized for their contribution to peace could attend the discussion. The two political parties, Citizens for Innovation (CI) and Convergence for Social Democracy (CPDS) particularly want the presence of the United Nations and African Union and western allies like France and Spain. In a speech broadcast nationally on state television last week, the 76-year-old Equatorial Guineas authoritarian president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema called for national dialogue. The move comes on the heels of a thwarted coup and a crackdown on the opposition. Earlier this year, the EU said Equatorial Guinea must take all necessary steps to fulfil its international obligations regarding human rights and fundamental freedoms. President Obiang Nguema in a January interview with France 24/RFI stressed that there were not as many detainees in jails as widely reported in the media. This is the sixth political dialogue in President Teodoro Obiangs 38-year rule. The objective is to legalize certain opposition parties. Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony of 1.2 million people, awash with oil is mired in poverty and corruption. The Madras High Court today slammed authorities for not taking action against those who posted comments against Chief Justice Indira Banerjee on an order delivered by her on pleas challenging the disqualification of 18 AIADMK MLAs loyal to sidelined leader T T V Dhinakaran. A division bench comprising Justice N Kirubakaran and Justice R Pongiappan, asked the Additional Advocate General (AAG) what action had been taken against those who posted remarks against the chief justice in the social media. The bench posed the question on a plea seeking direction to authorities to take action against some reported advocates, who trespassed into a clinic and threatened a doctor. Justice N Kirubakaran said no action was taken in this case against the offenders. It was only after the intervention of the court that a case was registered, he said. No action was initiated against those who posted comments in the social media against judges or judiciary, the bench said. "If such comments were posted against chief minister, ministers of the state or against higher official you may have immediately suo motu taken action," Justice Kirubakaran told the AAG. The bench posted the matter to June 25 after directing the AAG to submit a report about the action taken against those who posted the comments. In the keenly awaited judgement, the chief justice had upheld the September 18 last order of Tamil Nadu assembly Speaker P Dhanapal disqualifying the MLAs, while Justice M Sundar disagreed with her and struck it down. In his plea, the doctor had alleged that no action was taken against those who reportedly ransacked his clinic. The bench after going through the FIR observed that though the complaint was registered, no action was taken and the petitioner was constrained to approach the court. The court had earlier asked the police to produce the doctor in court as it feared for his safety. The court had also asked the petitioner how he could claim the tenancy when he was not the tenant and asked him to vacate the first and second floors of the house. The bench today said "Merely because the persons claiming themselves to be "advocates" are involved, they cannot be above law. Lawyers, as the nomenclature shows, are supposed to follow the law and they have to safeguard the law and the rights of the citizens. However, "the so-called advocates", hand in glove with the police commit offences including taking possession of property by force by donning the black gown as a shield. If the police and the 'so-called lawyers' come together, it would go against the interest of the society. It is shameful to note that these so-called advocates play the role of "paid goondas (hooligans)," the bench said. The bench recorded the undertaking given by the petitioner that he would vacate the residential portion by June 24. The petitioner sought three months for vacating the clinic. The court directed the registry to transfer the entire file with regarding to anticipatory bail petitions filed by the house owner before it and posted the matter for further hearing to June 25. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A defiant Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy said today he was prepared to nominate the state's representatives on the Cauvery Water Management Authority but not before the concerns raised by him were addressed, a day after he pitched for parliamentary approval to set up the CWMA. Political parties in Tamil Nadu reacted sharply to Kumaraswamy's remarks on the issue, accusing him of trying to "sow seeds for a new problem and confusion" and attempting to score "a few political brownie points". Addressing a press conference in Bengaluru, a day after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi on the contentious Cauvery water sharing issue, Kumaraswamy questioned the Centre's action of notifying the CWMA through a gazette notification before obtaining parliamentary approval for it. "As per laws pertaining to inter-state water dispute, it is for Parliament to give approval to form the Authority, but the central government issued a gazette notification without debating it in the House," he said. In its June 1 notification, the Water Resources Ministry had said it has framed a scheme constituting the Authority and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC) to give effect to the decision of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal as modified by the Supreme Court order. Karnataka, Kumaraswamy said, will abide by the Supreme Court order relating to the sharing of Cauvery water with Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, and was even prepared to send the names of its nominees for the panel "but not before the technical issues raised by me are addressed". Kumaraswamy, after a meeting with Modi had said yesterday that the constitution of Cauvery Water Management Authority should be discussed in Parliament to address the technical aspects related to the Supreme Court's order last month. Tamil Nadu's main opposition party DMK accused the Karnataka chief minister of raking up "unnecessary" issues which have already been rejected by the Supreme Court. DMK working president and Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly M K Stalin denounced Kumaraswamy for "sowing seeds for a new problem and confusion", and accused the Centre of "willingly colluding" with the Karnataka chief minister. Claiming that the Centre was "discriminating" against Tamil Nadu, he said in a statement in Chennai that the BJP-led NDA government's "deception" on the issue cannot go on for long. He demanded that Karnataka immediately appoint its nominees to the CWMA, failing which the Tamil Nadu government should petition the Supreme Court to ensure that the state got its rightful share of Cauvery water. "Our rights will be established by the Authority. We don't care about who meets whom," Tamil Nadu fisheries minister D Jayakumar said reacting to the assertions by Kumaraswamy and his meeting with the prime minister. "The visit can be used to score political brownie points by Kumaraswamy and nothing more will happen. The Supreme Court directions on water sharing will be implemented by the new Authority," he told reporters. Kumaraswamy said instructions from the CWMA like asking Karnataka to release water every 10 days, and on what crops should be planted would go against the interest of his state. "If the Authority, in future, decides to ask Karnataka to release water once in 10 days in a month, then one can understand our condition. And if it decides which crops to be raised....I mean, it will not be in the interest of the people of Karnataka," he said. "There is a need for Karnataka to have a say over releasing of water to neighbouring states because there are some occasions when there will be less water in our dams compared to the neighbouring states where the dams will be full due to rains," he said. Kumaraswamy had earlier written to the prime minister, asking him not to operationalise the Authority and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee, which is supposed to assist it in distribution of water among the beneficiary states, till the time the issues related to cropping pattern were addressed. "Till the issues are resolved and a logical conclusion reached, enforcing the scheme for operating the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal Award be deferred to a later date," he had said, adding changes in agricultural system cannot happen overnight and peasants would take time to switch over to modern farming practises. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Eastern states had no respite from sweltering temperatures today, as West Bengal, Odisha and Bihar continued to reel under heatwave conditions. Kolkata recorded the day's highest temperature at 39.6 degrees Celsius, six notches above normal, while the minimum temperature stood at 30.9 degrees Celsius, four counts above the average, the Met office said. Bankura recorded the highest temperature in the state at 41.8 degrees Celsius, as Diamond Harbour (39.0 deg C), Asansol (40.4 deg C), Burdwan (40.9 deg C) and Sriniketan (41.0 deg C) also witnessed unusually high temperatures, which settled four to seven degrees above normal. West Bengal Education Minister Partha Chatterjee announced an 11-day holiday for state-run schools' students from June 20 to June 30, owing to the searing heat. Several private schools also announced holidays till the end of this week, while some tweaked timings to cope with the uncomfortable conditions in Kolkata and many parts of south Bengal. The Council for the Indian School Certificates Examinations called upon principals of all ICSE-affiliated schools in West Bengal "to adhere and comply" to the request of the state government to suspend classes, due to the intense heat. In Odisha, Bhubaneswar recorded a maximum temperature of 42.3 degrees Celsius, remaining the hottest place in the state for three consecutive days, the Met Department said. The second hottest place was Mayurbhanj district, where the mercury settled at 42 degrees Celsius. With forecast of heatwave for the next 48 hours, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik announced extension of the summer vacation in schools till June 25 from June 21. Bihar experienced similar heat with Patna and Gaya recording maximum temperatures of above 41 degrees Celsius. The Met Department bulletin said Gaya recorded the maximum temperature of 42.0 degrees Celsius, followed by Patna at 41.4 degrees Celsius. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Greenpeace India today said renewable purchase obligation (RPO) target of 21 per cent by 2022 will help India meet 175 GW renewable energy goal by 2022, but RPO compliance by discoms is critical. "The Union government's decision to increase RPO of state distribution companies from 17 per cent in 2019 to 21 per cent by 2022 has been welcomed by Greenpeace India, while also warning that ensuring the Discoms compliance is critical. The RPO target will help India meet its 175GW renewable energy target under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change," a Greenpeace India statement said. "Most state Discoms have failed to comply with existing RPO targets and do not seem to be serious about making the shift to clean energy. "According to a 2017 Greenpeace analysis, only 6 states were able to meet the RPO targets, so it's great that the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has now established an RPO Compliance Cell, though there is no clarity yet on what penalties could be imposed for non-compliance," Pujarini Sen, Climate and Energy Campaigner, Greenpeace India, said in the statement. In order to realistically meet the new RPOs, state and private Distribution Companies (Discoms) will need to implement new & creative renewables projects and not rely on large solar or wind farms alone, it said. The MNRE's recently announced Kusum scheme (Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan) to promote solar arrays connected to irrigation pumps can play a key role in helping states fulfil their RPOs, it added. "The Kusum scheme will empower farmers to generate and sell clean electricity to the grid, generating additional income for the farmer, while also helping Discoms meet their RPO targets and reducing the burden on Discoms to supply subsidised electricity to the agricultural sector. It's a win-win for farmers, Discoms and state governments," says Sen. As an example, Gujarat's Discom MGVCL could be earning up to Rs 2.97 lakhs per year from just 100 kW of solar pumps via the renewable energy credits these generate; they will save another Rs 6 lakhs in avoided costs by not having to supply farmers using these pumps with electricity, according to a recent study of the Dhundi pilot project in Central Gujarat. Grid-connected solar pumps have the potential to be a "remunerative crop" for both farmers and Discoms, it said. The finance minister had mentioned the grid-connected solar pump scheme in his speech during the Union Budget in February this year. Minister of Power R K Singh had also reportedly said that the scheme will be rolled out in July, though disagreements with the Finance Ministry have also been reported, the statement added. (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 9 pm NEWDELHI DEL45 JK-POLITICS New Delhi/Srinagar: The three-year-old Jammu and Kashmir government, wracked by bitter political feuds and worsening security challenges, collapsed today with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP, setting the stage for yet another round of governor's rule. LUCKNOW DEL63 UP-3RDLD-FIRE Lucknow: A major fire broke out at two hotels in the busy area of the city early this morning, killing at least five people and critically injuring four, police said. LUCKNOW DES5 UP-BJP MLA-POWER THEFT Lucknow: An Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA has accused the state electricity department of being "soft" and taking "selective action" in cases of power theft by people from the Muslim community. CHANDIGARH NRG13 HR-CIRCULAR Chandigarh: The Haryana government has advised its officials to be courteous and meticulously correct while dealing with the state or central lawmakers and also rise to receive or see them off on their visits to their offices. LUCKNOW NRG28 UP-TIFF Lucknow/Hapur: A man was lynched over a minor tiff in Hapur district of Uttar Pradesh, the police said today. LUCKNOW NRG10 UP-CABINET-PATANJALI Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh government today gave its nod to Patanjali Ayurveda Pvt Ltd to transfer its land to its subsidiary company in Greater Noida for setting up a Rs 6,000-crore mega food park. CHANDIGARH DES7 PB-AIIMS-TOPPER Chandigarh: Eliza Bansal (17) from Punjab's Sangrur district, who topped the prestigious AIIMS MBBS exam this year, wants to serve her hometown Lehragaga which faces a shortage of doctors, her family said today. LUCKNOW DES18 UP-BUNGALOW-TIWARI Lucknow: Ailing former Uttar Pradesh chief minister ND Tiwari's family has vacated the official residence in the posh Mall Avenue locality and is waiting for the Estate Department to check its property before handing over of the keys. LUCKNOW DES6 UP-MAYAWATI Lucknow: BSP supremo Mayawati today ridiculed the BJP's "Sampark for Samarthan" programme, dubbing it as nothing but a photo-op with the high and the mighty. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami welcomed the idea of disqualified party MLAs returning to his AIADMK, the ruling dispensation today asserted that their homecoming was "bound to happen." Senior AIADMK leader and Fisheries Minister D Jayakumar said those who have accepted the late Chief Ministers M G Ramachandran (AIADMK founder) and J Jayalalithaa, as their 'eternal leaders,' will return to the party fold. The AIADMK's mouthpiece, 'Namathu Puratchi Thalaivi Amma,' also extended an indirect invitation to the disqualified MLAs to return to the party. Speaking to reporters here, Jayakumar recalled the Chief Minister's statement yesterday in Tiruchirappalli that it "is laudable" if eight of the ex-MLAs owing allegiance to TTV Dhinakaran joined AIADMK. He said, "Those who went away, whether MLAs or ex-MLAs or even an ordinary supporter, they all should accept Amma and Puratchi Thalaivar (as leaders) -- it is for sure that those who have accepted them as their eternal leaders will return to the party." While party supporters address Jayalalithaa as Amma, they hail MG Ramachandran as Puratchi Thalaivar (revolutionary leader). In Tamil, Jayakumar described the possible return of the disqualified MLAs as "kaalathin kattayam" (roughly translating to 'bound to happen'). "They all have to come, they will come," he said but declined to reveal if any of the ex-legislators were in talks with the AIADMK high command in this regard. Dhinakaran loyalist Thanga Tamilselvan had said he would withdraw his petition in the Madras High Court challenging his disqualifition by Assembly Speaker P Dhanapal, but ruled out joining the AIADMK, led by Palaniswami and his deputy O Panneerselvam. He had said the people of his constituency have endorsed his decision to take back his plea in the court. Tamilselvan is one of the 18 MLAs who were disqualified last year following their revolt against the chief minister. A day after the factions led by Palaniswami and erstwhile rebel leader Panneerselvam merged on August 21, 2017, MLAs owing allegiance to Dhinakaran met the then Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao, and sought a "change" in leadership saying they had lost confidence in Palaniswami. On June 14, the Madras High Court delivered a split verdict on the petitions challenging disqualification of the 18 MLAs. While Chief Justice Indira Banerjee upheld the September 18 order of Speaker Dhanapal disqualifying the MLAs, Justice M Sundar disagreed with her and set it aside. The verdict had come as great relief for the Palaniswami government as restoration of the membership of the MLAs could have brought it perilously close to losing majority in the event of their joining hands with opposition DMK-Congress-IUML alliance, which has a combined strength of 98 MLAs in the 234-member Assembly. In that eventuality, the Opposition's strength would have swelled to 117, including Dhinakaran, who is the lone independent MLA. The AIADMK also has 117 members in the House, including the Speaker. Meanwhile, in a write-up titled 'Netru, Indru, Naalai' (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow) the AIADMK mouthpiece recalled Jayalalithaa earlier having discarded her confidante, the jailed V K Sasikala, and her family members. While crediting the late chief minister for 'toiling' for the victory of the disqualified MLAs when they represented AIADMK, it also accused Dhinakaran of winning the December 2017 bypoll to RK Nagar here with its arch rival DMK's support. One has to "sense this conspiracy,"it added. Those with gratitude should make it their motto to strive towards fulfilling Jayalalithaa's dream of "a hundred years" of AIADMK rule, it said. "Let that happen at the earliest," it said, apparently referring to the possible return of the disqualified MLAs. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former Union Home Minister P Chidambaram said it was "a relief" that the "opportunistic" PDP-BJP coalition in Jammu and Kashmir collapsed today, and expressed hope that "the muscular, militaristic policy does not come back under the guise of Governor's Rule". Chidambaram, a senior Congress leader, said in a series of tweets, "The long-awaited break of the PDP-BJP coalition will be welcomed by all those who despaired that Kashmir may have been lost forever. The muscular, militaristic policy was a disaster from Day One. It is a relief that the opportunistic coalition has collapsed." "Let us hope and pray that the muscular, militaristic policy does not come back under the guise of governor's rule," he said, adding, "Who the next Governor will be is crucial. A hawk as Governor will make the situation worse." The three-year Jammu and Kashmir government, wracked by bitter political feuds and worsening security challenges, collapsed today with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP setting the stage for yet another round of governor's rule. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the surprise announcement after the party high command summoned its Jammu and Kashmir ministers for emergency consultations in New Delhi. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor N N Vohra amid a swirl of political activity in Srinagar and New Delhi. Terrorism, violence and radicalism have risen and the fundamental rights of citizens, including right to life and free speech, are in danger, the BJP leader said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) IAS officers today said they were waiting for a formal communication from Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for a meeting at the secretariat here to end the impasse following the alleged assault on the chief secretary earlier this year. Their statement comes a day after Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia requested Lieutenant Governor (L-G) Anil Baijal to hold a meeting between the government and the bureaucrats to end the ongoing deadlock. The officers are waiting for a formal communication for a meeting with the chief minister following his assurance over ensuring safety and dignity of bureaucrats, the IAS AGMUT Association said. Sources, however, said Baijal may not convene the meeting as the L-G office had already asked the AAP government to sit with the officers and end the stalemate following the alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash in February. "#DelhiAtWork #NoToStrike In the context of Honble CM's assurance, we await formal communication for a meeting with him in the Delhi Secretariat. We reiterate that we continue to be at work," the association tweeted. Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues have been holding a sit-in at the L-G office demanding a direction to officers to end their "strike" and have the doorstep ration delivery scheme approved. The chief minister tweeted, "We wrote a letter to Hon'ble LG yesterday seeking meeting of all stakeholders. We r awaiting response from Hon'ble LG. Hon'ble LG awaiting green signal from Hon'ble PM, who has to take the decision Whole Delhi waiting for Hon'ble PM to decide fast." Yesterday, the Delhi government and the IAS officers expressed their readiness for talks to end the impasse. Sisodia had written to Baijal requesting him to call a meeting between AAP ministers and the bureaucrats to resolve the issue. The chief minister had also assured the officers on Sunday that he would ensure their safety and security. The officers had yesterday welcomed Kejriwal's assurance about their safety, saying they were open to formal discussions with the chief minister on the matter. "I hope LG calls a meeting soonest to resolve this issue. (sic)," Kejriwal had tweeted after Sisodia's letter. The officers had said that they looked forward to "concrete interventions" for their security and dignity, a move that may break the four-month-long impasse between the AAP dispensation and the bureaucrats following the alleged assault on Prakash by some ruling party MLAs at the chief minister's residence. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US Senate defied President Donald Trump by voting today to overrule his administration's deal with Chinese telecom firm ZTE and reimpose a ban on high-tech chip sales to the company. Senators added an amendment targeting ZTE into a sweeping, must-pass national defense spending bill that cleared the chamber on an 85-10 vote. The company has been on life support ever since Washington said it had banned US companies from selling crucial hardware and software components to ZTE for seven years, after staffers violated trade sanctions against Iran and North Korea. It was fined USD 1.2 billion for those violations, but earlier this month the Trump administration gave ZTE a lifeline by easing sanctions in exchange for a further USD 1.4 billion penalty on the company. The Senate measure nullifies that action, proposing an outright ban on the government buying products and services from ZTE and another Chinese telecoms firm, Huawei. "We're heartened that both parties made it clear that protecting American jobs and national security must come first when making deals with countries like China, which has a history of having little regard for either," a bipartisan group of senators said. The lawmakers, who introduced the amendment, include top Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Marco Rubio. Providing USD 716 billion in funding for national defense for fiscal year 2019 and giving policy guidance to the Pentagon, the bill is not a done deal. The House of Representatives passed its own version of the measure, and the two chambers must now hash out a compromise. "It is vital that our colleagues in the House keep this bipartisan provision in the bill as it heads towards a conference," Schumer and Rubio said. ZTE, which employs 80,000 people, said recently that its major operations had "ceased" after the ban, raising the possibility of its collapse. Its fiberoptic networks depend on US components and its cheap smartphones sold en masse abroad are powered by US chips and the Android operating system. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and France are working to shape a strong development partnership, including in the fields of science and technology, clean energy and infrastructure, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has said as she met the country's top leadership and discussed issues of mutual interest from a strategic perspective. Swaraj, who arrived here from Rome yesterday on the second leg of her four-nation tour, called on French President Emmanuel Macron and discussed follow up to the understandings reached during his visit to India in March this year. She also met her French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian and the two leaders held in-depth and constructive discussions on full range of bilateral relationship, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. "Our trade, capital and technology partnerships are registering impressive growth. Bilateral trade touched Euros 9.85 billion (or USD 10.95 billion) last year. But, we need to do more to reach the set target of trade in goods to 15 billion Euros by 2022," Swaraj was quoted as saying by Kumar. "India and France are also working to shape a strong development partnership, including in the fields of smart urbanisation, science & technology, clean energy, transportation, and infrastructure sectors," she said. She said the visits of Prime Minister Modi to France in April 2015 and June 2017 and Macron to India have infused new momentum and dynamism to bilateral strategic partnership, brought about increased political convergence and built deep mutual trust. Swaraj also met Philippe Etienne, Diplomatic Advisor to Macron, and exchanged views on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest from a strategic perspective. India and France are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their Strategic Partnership. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) UN General Assembly Adopts Resolution about Georgian IDPs By Vladimer Napetvaridze On June 2, the 72nd Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations was held in New York. The resolution on the Status of Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees from Abkhazia, Georgia and the Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia, Georgia was once again adopted.There are more than 250,000 Internal Displaced Persons (IDPs) who were driven from their homes during the series of Russian-backed separatist wars in Georgias breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia.The General Assembly Resolution reaffirms the fundamental rights of internally displaced persons (IDP), right of safe and dignified return to their homes. The Resolution on Status of Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees from Abkhazia, Georgia and the Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia, Georgia is humanitarian and is based on the UN general Principles on Internal Displacement. It underlines the right of IDPs and refugees, to a safe and dignified return to their places of origin and focuses on their property rights. The Resolution reiterates the importance of unimpeded humanitarian access in the regions of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region.The resolution has a practical importance as well, since it calls on the UN Secretary General to draft annual report on the state of the internally displaced persons in Georgia and on the implementation of the resolution. This gains even greater importance in the light of the deploring human right situation in the occupied territories in the absence of international human rights monitoring mechanisms, which constitutes one of the impediments to a safe and dignified return of internally displaced persons,- the statement of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reads.According to the Resolution the participants of the Geneva International Discussions should restore their efforts to ensure security and human rights protection in the occupied regions, which in turn will simplify the return of IDPs and refugees to their homes.Adoption of this resolution by the General Assembly underlines that the situation in Georgia still remains on the agenda of the largest international forum and gains attention of the International community. Such documents reflect the international political situation. The resolution on Status of Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees from Abkhazia, Georgia and the Tskhinvali Region/South Ossetia, Georgia was supported by 81 states, and 16 states, including Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Burundi, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, Myanmar, Nauru, Nicaragua, Philippines, South Sudan, Sudan, Venezuela, Vietnam and Zimbabwe voted against the resolution this year. The list of the states supporting the resolution and voting against it clearly demonstrates the controversy between the pro-Western and pro-Russian forces in the world. Russia often uses its own political and economic leverage to influence other states' foreign activities, example of which was demonstrated a few weeks ago when Syria recognized the independence of Abkhazia. Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh today met his Nepalese counterpart Chakra Pani Khanal and assured full support for the growth of agriculture sector in the neighbouring country. Khanal, the minister for agriculture, land management and cooperatives in Nepal government, met Singh in the national capital, an official statement said. Singh assured his Nepalese counterpart of "India's support to further Nepal's agriculture sector". The minister said that both countries are largely agrarian and agriculture has been identified by the two sides as an important area of bilateral cooperation. In the inaugural ministerial meeting of India-Nepal 'New Partnership in Agriculture', the two ministers discussed ways to strengthen cooperation in the agriculture sector. The co-operation would be in the areas like farm research and education, supply of fertilisers, mutual recognition of inspection, testing and certification system, trade facilitation measures, strengthening livestock services, veterinary research and development facilities, and promoting exchanges between the India Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC). Singh said a pilot project on organic farming and soil health for implementation by India in Nepal has also been finalised. He further said that India would be happy to share with Nepal its experiences in implementing new initiatives for enhancing agri-productivity and welfare of farmers. Initiatives like Soil Health Card, Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna, eNAM, Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojna etc have been yielding positive results, he said, and hoped that the visiting delegation gained fruitful knowledge that would help improve the respective areas of agriculture and allied sectors in Nepal. Khanal, who is on a five-day visit from June 19-23, will visit Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Pusa and National Centre of Organic Farming, Ghaziabad. Singh will visit Nepal for the next 'New Partnership in Agriculture' meeting. The prime ministers of India and Nepal had launched the New Partnership in Agriculture on April 7, 2018 to increase bilateral cooperation in agricultural sector for the benefit of farmers of both the nations. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and the EU must persuade the world that there is no difference between the "good" and "bad" terrorists, President Ram Nath Kovind said today as he called for sanctions on state sponsors of terrorism, in an apparent reference to Pakistan that has been long blamed for providing safe havens to terrorists. He also said that India was committed to an international order marked by robust, rules-based multilateral institutions, by multi-polarity in international governance, and by connectivity projects that are viable, sustainable, respect the sovereignty and territory of nation. "Pockets of instability and extremism can be found in the region to Europe's east and India's west. They are a worry for both Europe and India," Kovind said in a major speech on India's relations with Europe at an event organised by the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy - a leading foreign policy think-tank. Identifying radicalisation and terrorism as pressing global concerns, Kovind said that promotion of terrorism by state and non-state actors, extremism rooted in senseless hate, the proliferation of sensitive weapons, the use of regular communication and financial channels by terror groups pose a challenge to not one nation or the other but to all humanity. He also sought strengthening of multilateral platforms such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum to combat the menace and squeeze terrorists' financing. India, Afghanistan and the US accuse Pakistan of providing safe havens to terrorists, elements of the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network. Pakistan, however, denies the charge. In February, the 37-nation FATF placed Pakistan on a watch list of the countries where terrorist outfits are still allowed to raise funds. At a meeting in Paris, Jamat-ud-Dawa chief and 2008 Mumbai terror attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed and his "charities" were top on the list of the groups that the FATF wanted Pakistan to act against. "India and the EU must persuade the world to not distinguish between so-called 'good' and 'bad' terrorists, to shame and sanction state sponsors of terrorism, and to strengthen multilateral platforms," Kovind told the gathering of diplomats, policymakers and academics. He expressed India's willingness to share its domestic experiences and success stories in a manner that may be useful to EU. "India is committed to world peace," Kovind said, adding that India is a steadfast friend and a stakeholder in the continued security and integrity of Europe. He said that India "sees peace not just as the absence of conflict but as a reflection of sustainable development and indeed of any effort that anticipates and prevents strife and suffering". "When we work for combating climate change, we contribute to world peace. When we assist other developing countries, as per their priorities, and strive for a less unequal world we contribute to world peace. When we rescue and evacuate not just our own citizens from troubled regions, but those of 40 other countries as we did during the Yemen crisis of 2015 we contribute to world peace," he said. Kovind said that India was committed to an international order marked by robust, rules-based multilateral institutions, and by connectivity projects that are viable, sustainable, respect the sovereignty and territory of nations. 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. Beijing 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. China is also engaged in an ambitious connectivity project - the Belt and Road Initiative - with an aim to link Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Gulf, Africa and Europe with a network of land and sea routes. India has not endorsed the BRI as a USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is part of the BRI, passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). On clean energy and climate change, Kovind said that India and the EU are united in their commitment to the 2015 Paris Agreement. "India is scaling up the share of non-fossil fuels in its energy mix. This will go up from the current 31 per cent to 53 per cent by 2027," he said. The President invited Greece to join the International Solar Alliance (ISA). He also expressed happiness at the European Investment Bank's willingness to mobilise finance for affordable solar energy projects in ISA member countries. "The EU is among India's largest trading partners," the President said, adding that EU is a critical source of investment and technology, especially for sustainability programmes. He also said that India was committed to an India-EU Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA), to be achieved in a generous spirit of mutual accommodation and of pragmatism. "India and Europe must work together to ensure that the multilateral mechanism remains resilient and serves future generations as well as accommodates new actors with a merit-based claim for a seat at the table," he said. "Our cooperation whether diplomatic and political or business and security rests on a firm people-to-people understanding. There is no substitute for that. The people of India and of Europe have carefully built and tended our relationship, over centuries," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India repatriated six Pakistani prisoners through the Attari- Wagah border today, the Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement. In October 2017, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had suggested to the Pakistan high commissioner that the two sides could progress on humanitarian issues related to elderly, women, children and mentally unsound prisoners. Then in March this year, India and Pakistan had agreed to release and repatriate women prisoners and those who are over 70 years of age, besides resuming visits by the joint judicial committee. "Six Pakistan prisoners were repatriated today via Attari-Wagah border. In addition, four Pakistan prisoners have already been released and repatriated in 2018, so far. "India attaches high priority to address all humanitarian issues, including early release and repatriation of Indian fishermen and prisoners in Pakistan's custody," the MEA said. India has secured the release of 147 Indian prisoners, including 146 fishermen, from Pakistan this year so far, the statement said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India today urged the Trump Administration to retain the GSP beneficiary status to it as a withdrawal would be discriminatory and detrimental to the development, finance and trade needs of the country. "We request the President (Donald Trump) to maintain the GSP beneficiary status to India," Puneet Roy Kundal, Minister Commerce at the Indian Embassy here, told the US Trade Representatives (USTR). A withdrawal of the GSP benefits to India "would be discriminatory and detrimental to the development, finance and trade needs of India - a vast and diverse developing country with unique challenges," Kundal said in a written submission. America's Generalized System of Preferences program (GSP) provides for the preferential treatment of designated articles when imported from beneficiary developing countries. A self-initiated review by the USTR focuses on whether India is meeting the US criteria for a GSP beneficiary country and particularly if India provides equitable and reasonable market access to products from the US. Noting that a predominant share of GSP beneficiary items exported from India are intermediaries and semi-manufactured goods, he said provision of GSP benefits to these intermediary products enables availability of cost effective and price competitive inputs to the US downstream industry. Kundal said this helps the US industries to maintain their domestic and export competitiveness. In addition, GSP benefits are integral and geared to enhancing India's development and the pace of economic reforms, he said. The products on which India receives GSP benefits belong to sectors which employ several thousands of men and women, especially in rural areas through micro, small and medium enterprises. The GSP benefits help the related sectors to overcome, at least partially, some of the inherent cost and logistical disadvantages prevailing in a developing economy like India, Kundal said. Furthermore, Indian GSP exports represent a miniscule portion of the total imports of the United States and do not pose any threat or disruption to US industry, he argued. "It is pertinent that India stands at a gross national income per capita of USD 6,490.61 per annum in PPP terms in 2016, as reported in the World Bank database, which is well below the threshold of USD 12,476 per annum per capita, according to the official statistics of the World Bank for 2016, Kundal asserted. USTR has also accepted two petitions related to the same criterion. The petitions filed by the US dairy industry and the US medical device industry requested a review of India's GSP benefits, given India's alleged trade barriers affecting US exports in these sectors. In respect of export of dairy products from the US to India, India has explained that its position on dairy products sourced from animals which have consumed feeds containing internal organs, blood meat etc., is based on religious, cultural and moral grounds, Kundal wrote. India, he asserted, is committed to respect the religious and cultural beliefs of its people and it will be inappropriate to impute any other considerations. Moreover, India provides unimpeded market access to dairy products from all countries, and there are exports of these products into India. In respect of medical devices, India, he said, submits that its position is based on providing its citizens with equitable and affordable access to essential medicines and medical devices. Price-control measures are provided only on a limited category of medicines enlisted in the National List of Essential Medicines prepared by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. "The pharmaceutical companies are free to charge reasonable prices for other categories of medicines," Kundal told the USTR. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India will construct a war memorial at Villers Guislain, a town around 200 km from Paris, to highlight the contribution of the soldiers of the undivided India to the freedom of France in the World War I. This was announced by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. "India will construct an Indian Armed Forces Memorial at Villers Guislain," she said. This will be the second such memorial in Europe, she said. During the World War I, Villers-Guislain had witnessed a fierce battle in which the British Indian cavalry regiments were heavily involved. The town was liberated on September 29, 2018. Swaraj, who arrived here from Rome yesterday on the second leg of her four-nation tour, addressed the Indian diaspora at a reception organised in her honour. She said that Indians in every part of the world carry India and its civilisational ethos in their heart. She also addressed the Indian students and unveiled a plaque at the India Hostel to commemorate the golden jubilee of the landmark building. "Bridging the gap between India and France through people-to-people connect! EAM @SushmaSwaraj with the Indian students staying at Maison de l'Inde or Indian hostel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary," Ministry of External Affairs Spokesman Raveesh Kumar tweeted. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An Indian-American IT professional has showcased a unique mobile app at the UN that would help in creating mass awareness and inspire government officials, engineers, civic planners and business community for collective action to ensure a life of dignity and equality for people with disabilities. Pranav Desai, a polio-survivor and founder of the Voice of Specially-Abled People (VOSAP), last week addressed a session during the 11th Conference of State Parties (COSP) to the Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities here. The VOSAP is a global advocacy organisation with its over 4,000 volunteers working for empowerment of persons with disabilities by inspiring everyone in society to take inclusive actions and pursue individual social responsibility towards the specially-abled. During the session, the VOSAP explained its unique approach for creating inclusive society for persons with disabilities and how member countries can adopt this developing country model to benefit from this approach. Desai has been spearheading campaigns to ensure an inclusive and accessible society for persons living with disabilities, specially in India. In 2016, Desai, a Silicon Valley-based IT professional, had welcomed the passage of the landmark Disabilities Bill by the Indian Parliament. Having campaigned for the cause, he had said the bill will have a far-reaching impact and lay the foundation for transforming the country's disability sector and bringing it on par with the developed world. Desai is an adviser to the Department of Persons with Disabilities in India's Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and was also appointed adviser to the Accessible India' campaign aimed at making transport, public spaces and information and communication technology accessible to differently-abled people. During the UN session on June 14, Desai showcased to an audience, comprising UN diplomats and civil society members, the VOSAP mobile app and its features such as the 'Take Volunteer Pledge' that can accelerate mass movements and encourage people's involvement by creating local communities, globally. Through it, volunteers can map out the accessibility level of key buildings in communities and call for action in upgrading the accessibility facilities by spreading awareness among government officials, engineers, civic planners and the business community. Desai said VOSAP focuses on inspiring everyone in the society for their individual social responsibility towards the specially-abled and this sensitisation, mass awareness and collective actions by leaders and volunteers has yielded huge social impact over the last four years. "Its key message is that 'everyone is temporarily-abled' so people should not ignore the needs and rights of the 'Divyang jan' and instead create accessible and inclusive society," he said, adding that when everyone embraces their individual social responsibility, the disability rights movement can achieve its goals much faster. Addressing the inaugural day of the conference, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had said that cementing and protecting the rights of around 1.5 billion people around the world in accordance with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is a "moral imperative". He described the Convention as one of the most widely-ratified international human rights treaties, which reaffirms that people with disabilities are entitled to the same treatment as everybody else. "But signing and ratifying the Convention is not enough. Implementation is essential," Guterres said. "Societies must be organised so that all people, including those with disabilities, can exercise their rights freely." Secretary in India's Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities Shakuntala Doley Gamlin had said that with one in five of the world's poorest people living with disabilities, empowerment of persons with disabilities is the touchstone for measuring inclusive social and economic progress. "Promotion of equality of opportunity and non-discrimination of persons with disabilities; focusing on women and children with disabilities; mainstreaming accessibility requirements so that persons with disabilities enjoy the right to independent living and participate in all aspects of life, are some such areas of synergy that needs attention," she had said. The Accessible India Campaign was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 for barrier-free access to public spaces and in virtual ecosystems. Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act also mandates the government to frame standards for accessibility in built environments, transport systems, information and communication technologies and in other public services, Gamlin had said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India's second largest software services company Infosys today said it has set up a Digital Centre of Excellence in Marseille to strengthen its footprint in France. With an initial capacity of 60 employees, the centre aims to attract and train talent in new digital technologies to meet increasing demand from clients, Infosys said in a statement. The move is part of Infosys' efforts to bring its digital offerings to companies in France as they navigate the next stage in their business journey, it added. Infosys, however, did not disclose the investment details for the centre. The centre will also deliver on a strategic seven-year partnership with CMA CGM Group. The partnership, which was announced in September last year, will help the container shipping organisation simplify and transform its IT applications and improve customer service experience. "The focus of the new facility will be to provide existing and new clients a range of offerings in the areas of design and user experience, artificial intelligence and big data and analytics, while expanding Infosys' footprint in the shipping and logistics industry," the statement said. Infosys COO Pravin Rao said the opening of the new centre in Marseille will provide customers and prospects in the region access to next-generation digital technologies, skills and talent. "This is in line with our strategy focused on scaling agile digital business, energising the core via AI and automation, reskilling employees and localising within the markets in which we operate," he added. To meet its objective of hiring in the region, Infosys will partner with several esteemed universities in the region, including Aix-Marseille University. In addition, the company will extend its global internship programme, Infosys Instep, to these universities. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An Iranian military chief cautioned today that reaching any understanding with Washington, as suggested in a letter signed by a group of political activists, would spell the end of the Islamic republic. "Today everybody knows that striking an understanding with the United States means the death of the Islamic republic," said General Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the elite Republican Guards, quoted by ISNA agency. "While we are not saying that it (the letter) amounts to treason, we must say that it opens the way to making concessions to the enemy," he said. A pro-reformist newspaper, Etemad, on Sunday ran an article on a joint letter addressed to "senior authorities" from around 100 Iranian activists calling for Tehran to make "a gesture" towards direct negotiations with its longtime enemy. The letter itself has not been published. Ties between Tehran and Washington, already severed in the wake of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, have deteriorated under US President Donald Trump. In May, he pulled the United States out of a 2015 nuclear accord between world powers and Iran. A signatory of the letter, Gholamhossein Karbaschi who heads a reformist party, told Etemad that it calls for Iran to say it is "ready to negotiate" if "the United States and Trump give assurances that they will never again renege on their commitments". Also among the signatories was Abdolali Bazargan, a son of the Islamic republic's first prime minister Mehdi Bazargan, the paper said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Isha Foundation here today said it will offer free 'Upa Yoga' to prisoners, lodged in the 16 prisons across Tamil Nadu, on the 4th International day of Yoga on June 21. Its trained persons would conduct the yoga classes in the prisons, a release from the foundation said. The main aim of conducting the yoga programme in the prisons was to help the inmates overcome stress and to reduce suicide rates in jails, it said. Apart from this, the foundation will also offer free yoga programmes to the Defence personnel, including those from the Army and para-military forces, the release said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In all states of India, the state government's failure results in President's rule. The process is slightly more nuanced in Jammu and Kashmir where not the President's but Governor's rule is imposed. Under the provision of Section 92 of the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution, Governor's rule is imposed for six months, but only after the consent of the President of India. The Constitution of India grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir among Indian states, and it is the only state in India to have a separate Constitution and regulations specific to it. The President's rule in other states of India is imposed under Article 356 of the Constitution of India. Under the Governor's rule, the State Assembly is either kept in suspended animation or dissolved. If it is not possible to restore the state machinery before the expiry of the six-month period, the provision is extended. The Governor's rule was imposed on the state for the first time in March 1977, when the Congress withdrew support to National Conference (NC) government led by the late Sheikh Abdullah. Article 370 of the Constitution of India states that Parliament of India and the Union Government jurisdiction extends over limited matters with respect to State of Jammu and Kashmir, and in all other matters not specifically vested in federal governments, actions have to be supported by state legislature. Among notable differences with other states, till 1965, the head of state in Jammu and Kashmir was called Sadr-e-Riyasat, whereas in other state, the title was Governor, and head of government was called Prime Minister in place of Chief Minister in other states. The Government of India can declare emergency in Jammu and Kashmir and impose Governor's rule in certain conditions. Matters related to defence, foreign relations, communication and finance of Jammu and Kashmir are under jurisdiction of the Constitution of India. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The three-year Jammu and Kashmir government, wracked by bitter political feuds and worsening security challenges, collapsed today with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP setting the stage for yet another round of governor's rule. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the surprise announcement after the party high command summoned its Jammu and Kashmir ministers for emergency consultations in New Delhi. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor N N Vohra amid a swirl of political activity in Srinagar and New Delhi. ""It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in the state," Madhav told reporters at a hurriedly called press conference. National Conference leader Omar Abdullah, whose party is the third biggest in the assembly, captured the drama with one sentence, "I wish Mehbooba Mufti had resigned herself... instead of the having the rug pulled from under her feet." The BJP won 25 seats and the PDP 28 in the 87-member assembly and came together in alliance, two months after the December 2014 elections. The NC has 15 seats, the Congress 12 and others seven. Although the BJP and the PDP had campaigned vigorously against each other, they came together with an Agenda of Alliance in the hope of pulling the state out of the cycle of violence. But the Alliance never took hold and the two parties disagreed on most issues even as the security situation continued to deteriorate. Both Omar and the Congress said they will not form an alliance with any party to form government in the state. The BJP also said it favours governor's rule. If imposed, it will be the fourth time since 2008 and the eighth time since 1977. Madhav said the decision to withdraw was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah. Immediately after his conference, senior PDP minister and party's chief spokesperson Naeem Akhthar told reporters in Srinagar that the BJP's decision had caught the party by surprise. The BJP blamed the PDP for failing to improve the security conditions in the Kashmir Valley. Madhav cited last week's killing of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar in the highly secured area of Press Enclave by unidentified gunmen. The same day -- two days before Eid -- an Army jawan was abducted while going on Eid leave and killed. "Keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and in order to control the prevailing situation in the state, we have decided that the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor," Madhav added. Terrorism, violence and radicalism have risen and the fundamental rights of citizens, including right to life and free speech, are in danger, the BJP leader said. BJP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Kavinder Gupta told reporters in Delhi that he and his ministerial colleagues have submitted their resignations to the governor as well as to the chief minister. "Centre did everything for the Valley. We've tried to put a full-stop to the ceasefire violations by Pakistan. PDP has not been successful in fulfilling its promises. Our leaders have been facing a lot of difficulties from PDP in developmental works in Jammu and Ladakh," Madhav said. "We are not questioning the intentions of PDP but they have failed in improving the condition of life in Kashmir," he added. Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said here that the BJP had committed a "Himalayan blunder" by forming a government with the PDP. He said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. "The regional parties should have been allowed to form an alliance among themselves," he told reporters. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Centre may appoint a new governor in after the Amarnath yatra, which starts on June 28 and will continue for two months, a senior BJP leader said on Tuesday. He said the central government would like incumbent to be in charge of the annual pilgrimage given his vast experience. Vohra, who was appointed governor in June 2008 and given a fresh term in 2013, is among the few governors appointed by the UPA government to have continued in his position in the BJP-led NDA dispensation. "We may consider having a new governor after the yatra is over," he said. The conduct of the annual pilgrimage has been a high-security exercise and the deteriorating condition in the Valley has heightened the threat perception this year. Home Minister Rajnath Singh was recently in the Valley to take stock of the security measures ahead of the yatra. The BJP on Tuesday pulled out of the coalition with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, setting the stage for governor's rule in the state. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Japan's two largest airlines have changed "Taiwan" to "China Taiwan" on their Chinese-language websites, officials said today, a move likely to please but anger the self-ruled island. The change was made on June 12 and is meant to accommodate customers, (JAL) and All Nippon Airways (ANA) said. The description remains "Taiwan" on their websites in Japanese and other languages. Both carriers said they had not received any protest from so far, though Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported Taiwan's foreign ministry would lodge a complaint with the airlines through Japan's de-facto diplomatic mission in Taipei. "We made the judgement (to change the name) while consulting and reporting to the transport ministry and foreign ministry," a spokesman at said. "The change came on June 12 as our preparations were done by then," he said. June 12 was the date of the historic summit between North Korea and the United States, which attracted attention. "We chose a description that is easy to understand and acceptable for users of our websites," added the JAL official, who declined to be named. A spokesman at ANA said the change was intended to make the description "easy to understand and acceptable for customers when they use our websites". "We do not mean any particular group of customers here but mean all customers," he said without elaborating further. The airlines are not the only carriers who have made the change recently, with Australia's Qantas earlier this month defending its decision to list as part of China. The Chinese Civil Aviation Administration sent a notice to 36 foreign airlines in April, asking them to comply with Beijing's standard of referring to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as Chinese territories. Japan's ties with China are improving after years of acrimony over historical and territorial issues. Japan has close business ties with but has acknowledged the "One China" policy, which describes Taiwan as an integral part of China. Asked about the change, Japan's top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Tokyo was "not in favour of government authorities demanding certain measures from private based on a specific political stance. In its reply to a notice by the Delhi Minorities Commission, the JNU administration has said no course on "Islamic terrorism" was proposed in the academic council meeting of the university, DMC chairman Zafarul Islam Khan said today. JNU registrar Pramod Kumar has said "there was no course on 'Islamic terror' proposed in the academic council," Khan said. Taking cognizance of media reports, the commission last month issued a notice to JNU asking for reasons to start the proposed course. The registrar provided DMC with a copy of a concept paper on the proposed 'Centre for National Security Studies' and said JNU has no knowledge if a course on "Islamic terrorism" is taught in any Indian or foreign university, Khan said. The registrar has provided DMC with a copy of the minutes of the 145th Academic Council meeting on May 18, where the concept paper was placed for discussion. "Contrary to the assurance given by the registrar of JNU, the concept paper does include 'Islamic terrorism' as part of 'key areas' of the proposed centre which will first do research about these areas before starting teaching them," the DMC chairman said. The commission has written back to JNU saying the proposed Centre is a good initiative and the country needs it but the introduction of "Islamic terrorism" as a subject of research and teaching at the Centre is "flawed" and will "deteriorate" the communal atmosphere on the campus and beyond and will create wrong notions about Muslims, he said. JNU has been advised by the Commission to adopt "Religious terrorism" instead of "Islamic terrorism" as a subject of study and teaching at the proposed Centre so as to cover all forms of terrorism using religion to spread terror, Khan said. Such larger focus will cover the subject properly, offer a better understanding of this kind of extremism and will help us avoid spreading communalism within and without the campus, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today called off his nine-day sit-in at the LG's office after IAS officers started attending meetings with ministers, which the AAP chief termed as a "small victory". Kejriwal's deputy Manish Sisodia said that the protest inside Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal's office "cannot" lead to an approval of doorstep delivery of ration proposal from the LG, one of the key issues behind the sit-in. AAP supporters cheered Kejriwal as he came out of the LG's office and later he was given a welcome at his residence where he addressed party workers. "If the LG has prompted the strike by the IAS officers, it is very unfortunate. It is a small victory. Ninety-nine per cent of the IAS officers are very good. We have done a lot in power and water sectors and we could not have done this alone," he told the party workers. "But some officers in private told us that they were being pressurised not to work with the AAP government. We were silent for the last four months over the IAS officers' strike. But we wanted to resolve the issue. That is why we felt that the matter should be brought before the public. The battle for Delhi's statehood will continue," the chief minister said. Sisodia, in a hurriedly-called press briefing, said that the sit-in was "not a dharna" as they were "waiting to meet the LG." The deputy chief minister said several meetings, attended by IAS officers, were held during the day. Six IAS officers, including Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash, attended key meeetings with AAP ministers, he said. Sisodia claimed that some officers have told him that they had pressure from the top but now they (officers) "received the nod from the top" to attend meetings with AAP ministers. The bureaucrats have been at loggerheads with the AAP dispensation following the alleged assault on the chief secretary in February. Kejriwal, Sisodia, Health Minister Satyendar Jain and Labour Minister Gopal Rai had started a sit-in protest at the LG's office on June 11 over their demands, including a direction to the IAS officers to end their "strike" and an approval to doorstep delivery of ration proposal. Sisodia and Jain, who were on a hunger strike and were hospitalised after their health deteriorated, were discharged this morning from the LNJP Hospital. "It was not a dharna. We were waiting to meet the lieutenant governor," the deputy chief minister said. "Sitting inside the LG's office cannot resolve the issue of doorstep delivery of ration. I spoke to the chief minister and Gopal Rai, and they have agreed that they will come out of the LG's office," Sisodia said. The move came after Baijal, in his first communication to Kejriwal since he began a sit-in at his office, today wrote to the chief minister, asking him to meet officers urgently to address concerns of both sides. Baijal shot off a letter to Kejriwal in response to his Sisodia's communication in which the latter had asked for a meeting between the government and the bureaucrats to end the impasse. Sisodia said that today's development indicates that officers are returning to meetings with ministers while asserting that he had also asked some officers why they were not attending meetings. "I was told by some of them that there was nod from the top to avoid meetings with our ministers. Now they have been allowed to hold meetings," he said. "The officers have now started attending meetings. The LG is not meeting ministers to discuss doorstep delivery of ration so it is not a good thing to remain at the LG's office as the LG has become so arrogant that he doesn't want to meet us," he claimed. Noting that it is "good thing" that officers are attending meetings, he said," I wanted to tell you about most of issues which were stuck due to strike, have been resolved today." Asked about officers' demand to hold meeting with the chief over their safety and dignity, Sisodia said that "our meetings with the officers will be conducted on a daily basis". He said that "for the last three months, we have been saying that our fight was not with the officers". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The stand off between the AAP government and IAS officers in Delhi ended today with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal calling off the nine-day sit-in at the LG's office after bureaucrats started attending meeting with ministers. The move came after Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal shot off a letter to the chief minister, asking him to meet officers urgently to address concerns of both sides. AAP supporters cheered Kejriwal as he came out of the LG's office in the evening and later he was given a welcome at his residence where he addressed party workers. The chief minister termed it as a "small victory" while vowing to keep fighting for Delhi's statehood. "If the LG has prompted the strike by the IAS officers, it is very unfortunate. It is a small victory. Ninety-nine per cent of the IAS officers are very good. We have done a lot in power and water sectors and we could not have done this alone," he told the party workers. "But some officers in private told us that they were being pressurised not to work with the AAP government. We were silent for the last four months over the IAS officers' strike. But we wanted to resolve the issue. That is why we felt that the matter should be brought before the public. The battle for Delhi's statehood will continue," Kejriwal said. Hours after the stir was called off, a joint forum, comprising IAS, DANICS and DASS cadre officers of the Delhi government, wrote to an open letter to Kejriwal seeking a meeting with him over the issue of their safety. It said bureaucrats were politically neutral and requested the chief minister not to label them with any political dispensation. Meanwhile, an unimpressed opposition sounded a note of caution even as Kejriwal ended the protest, saying his "drama" has been exposed before the people of Delhi. Nobody is sure that Kejriwal will not sit on dharna again although he has been "exposed" this time, Delhi BJP president Manoj Tiwari said. "'At the end of the nine days of 'nautanki' (drama) by Kejriwal, the people fail to understand why he sat on dharna and what has he achieved," he said in a statement. Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken alleged that both Kejriwal and the BJP that were playing "dharna politics" in Delhi, have shifted gears due to waning media attention. "Now that the entire country is discussing Kashmir development-Kejriwal and BJP leaders of Delhi thought that sitting on Dharna will not be adequately covered by the media. Both decided to wind up their Dharnas!" Maken tweeted. BJP MLA and Leader of the Opposition in Delhi Assembly Vijender Gupta said Kejriwal's "drama" has been "exposed" by the struggle of the opposition leaders and the hunger strike staged by them. Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues had started the sit-in June 11, demanding a direction by the LG to the officers to end their "strike", a charge rebutted by the bureaucrats. The IAS officers had gone public to express their apprehensions about safety, after the alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by some AAP MLAs in February. Earlier in the day, the Supreme Court refused an urgent hearing on a plea seeking its direction to declare as "unconstitutional" the AAP protest. Kejriwal got the support of four chief ministers -- Mamata Banerjee (West Bengal), Chandradabu Naidu (Andhra Pradesh), H D Kumaraswamy (Karnataka) and Pinarayi Vijayan (Kerala) who went the Aam Aadmi Party leader's residence on Saturday after they were denied a meeting with him by Baijal at his office. The chief ministers had sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi's intervention in resolving what they termed a "constitutional crisis. The sit-in by Kejriwal, his deputy Manish Sisodia, Health Minister Satyendar Jain and Labour Minister Gopal Rai, ended after IAS officers started participating in meetings called by ministers. Baijal's his first communication to Kejriwal since he began a sit-in, came in response to his Sisodia's letter yesterday seeking a meeting between the government and the bureaucrats to end the impasse. The protest started on June 11 when a delegation of the four ministers was denied a meeting by the LG. The minister wanted a direction to the IAS officers to end their "strike" and an approval to doorstep delivery of ration proposal. Sisodia said that the protest inside Baijal's office "cannot" lead to an approval of doorstep delivery of ration proposal from the LG, one of the key issues behind the sit-in. Sisodia and Jain, who were on a hunger strike and were hospitalised after their health deteriorated, were discharged this morning from the LNJP Hospital. Baijal's his first communication to Kejriwal since he began a sit-in, came in response to his Sisodia's letter yesterday seeking a meeting between the government and the bureaucrats to end the impasse. Taking queue from Kejriwal, Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly Vijender Gupta, BJP MLAs Manjinder Sirsa and Jagdish Pradhan, West Delhi MP Parvesh Verma, and rebel AAP MLA Kapil Mishra sat on the dharna on June 13 demanding that Kejriwal and his ministers resume work and address the water crisis faced by Delhi people. They also ended their protest today after Kejriwal and his ministerial colleagues called off their stir. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) North Korean leader Kim Jong-un arrived here today for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping to chalk out his next course of action after his historic summit with US President Donald Trump where it was agreed to denuclearise the Korean peninsula. The visit, Kim's third since March, is taking place amid sharp escalation rhetoric between Beijing and Washington over tariffs almost spiralling into a trade war. Kim, who visited Beijing twice earlier before his Singapore summit with Trump, arrived by air to meet the top Chinese leadership. Unlike his two visits which were shrouded in secrecy until their completion, China announced the visit just as the North Korean dictator landed in Beijing. "Kim Jong-un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) visits China from June 19 to 20," a brief announcement by state-run Xinhua agency here said. For his part, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang parried several questions on Kim's visit and its purpose saying details will be released in a timely manner. Kim is visiting China and there is a reason for this, he said. As to why of the visit was released at this point, he said relevant information will be released according to the specific situation. Geng was not forthcoming when asked whether China will join Russia in calling for lifting of UN sanctions against North Korea in the light of the Singapore summit. "China stands against the unilateral sanctions outside the UNSC. This position is very clear. We believe that sanctions itself is not an end and all parties should support and coordinate with the current diplomatic efforts and dialogue to work hard for denuclearisation and political settlement of the Korean peninsula issue," he said. The UN Security Council imposed a series of economic sanctions against North Korea after it conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, crippling Pyongyang. Since he took over, Trump piled pressure on China to stringently implement the UN sanctions which many believe led to Kim agreeing to scale down his nuclear programme leading up to the summit with Trump. While announcing the halt of South Korean and US military exercises, Trump has been maintaining that the sanctions will remain. Despite reports of differences, China remains a close ally of North Korea. Besides visiting Beijing twice before he met, Kim travelled by an Air China flight to Singapore for the summit with Trump signifying close ties between Beijing and Pyongyang. Officials here say his visit was expected to crystallise the next course of action by him to announce the denuclearisation process and further steps on the Korean peninsula. Trump in the past has said Kim has changed his mind after his talks with Xi. Kim's visit this time here is taking place amid escalating trade tensions between the US and China with the two countries already announcing tariffs upto USD 50 billion each while Trump is threatening more sanctions. For its part, China has been warning of strong retaliation. Sue Mi Terry, a Korea expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Kim's recent engagement in diplomacy with frequent visits to China and meetings with Xi, rather than phone calls, made sense. China was also briefed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the Singapore summit during his recent visit here. After his talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Pompeo stressed the importance of China being a constructive participant in the next steps after the Trump-Kim summit. There remains hard work and difficult days in denuclearisation negotiations with North Korea, Pompeo had said. During a joint press conference with Pompeo, Wang said China would like the US and North Korea to see the summit as a new starting point from which they can maintain a momentum of dialogue and consultation, accommodate each other's legitimate concerns, and work with other parties to advance the process of denuclearisation and the political settlement of the peninsula issue. China will continue to play a positive role in this process, Wang added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) North Korean leader Kim Jong-un today briefed Chinese President Xi Jinping on his historic summit with US President Donald Trump in Singapore, underscoring Beijing's "important role" in the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. President Xi and Chairman Kim exchanged views on the current development of China-North Korea relations and the situation on the Korean Peninsula, state-run Xinhua agency reported. Kim's third visit to China since March is taking place amid sharp escalation of rhetoric between Beijing and Washington over tariffs almost spiralling into a trade war. Kim, who visited Beijing twice earlier before his Singapore summit with Trump, arrived by air to meet the top Chinese leadership. Unlike his two visits which were shrouded in secrecy until their completion, China announced the visit just as the North Korean dictator landed in Beijing. "Kim Jong-un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) visits China from June 19 to 20," Xinhua said. Xi held a welcoming ceremony for Kim at the Great Hall of the People. The two leaders also inspected the guard of honour. "They agreed to safeguard, consolidate and develop China-DPRK relations, and jointly push forward the sound momentum of peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula to make a positive contribution to safeguarding world and regional peace, stability, prosperity and development," the agency said. Kim praised China's "important role in protecting the Korean Peninsula's peace and stability," state-run CCTV said. North Korea "hopes to work with China and other concerned parties to promote and establish a solid, long-lasting peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula and make joint efforts to achieve a lasting peace on the peninsula," Kim said. On his part, Xi said that he "wants North Korea and the US to carry out the results of their leadership summit" in Singapore, the report said. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang parried several questions on Kim's visit and its purpose saying details will be released in a timely manner. Kim is visiting China and there is a reason for this, he said. As to why of the visit was released at this point, he said relevant information will be released according to the specific situation. Geng was not forthcoming when asked whether China will join Russia in calling for lifting of UN sanctions against North Korea in the light of the Singapore summit. "China stands against the unilateral sanctions outside the UNSC. This position is very clear. We believe that sanctions itself is not an end and all parties should support and coordinate with the current diplomatic efforts and dialogue to work hard for denuclearisation and political settlement of the Korean peninsula issue," he said. The UN Security Council imposed a series of economic sanctions against North Korea after it conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, crippling Pyongyang's economy. Since he took over, Trump piled pressure on China to stringently implement the UN sanctions which many believe led to Kim agreeing to scale down his nuclear programme leading up to the summit with Trump on June 12. While announcing the halt of South Korean and US military exercises, Trump has been maintaining that the sanctions will remain. Despite reports of differences, China remains a close ally of North Korea. Officials here say his visit was expected to crystallise the next course of action by him to announce the denuclearisation process and further steps on the Korean peninsula. Trump in the past has said Kim has changed his mind after his talks with Xi. Kim's visit this time here is taking place amid escalating trade tensions between the US and China with the two countries already announcing tariffs up to USD 50 billion each while Trump is threatening more sanctions. For its part, China has been warning of strong retaliation. Sue Mi Terry, a Korea expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Kim's recent engagement in diplomacy with frequent visits to China and meetings with Xi, rather than phone calls, made sense. China was also briefed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the Singapore summit during his recent visit here. After his talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Pompeo stressed the importance of China being a constructive participant in the next steps after the Trump-Kim summit. "There remains hard work" and "difficult days" in denuclearisation negotiations with North Korea, Pompeo had said. During a joint press conference with Pompeo, Wang said China would like the US and North Korea to see the summit as a new starting point from which they can maintain a momentum of dialogue and consultation, accommodate each other's legitimate concerns, and work with other parties to advance the process of denuclearisation and the political settlement of the peninsula issue. "China will continue to play a positive role in this process, Wang added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Karnataka has raised objections before Prime Minister Narendra Modi on certain technical issues relating to the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA), which were not in the interests of the state, Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy said here today. "If the authority, in future, decides to ask Karnataka to release water once in 10 days in a month, then one can understand our condition. And if it decides which crops to be raised, I mean, it will not in the interest of the people of Karnataka," he said. Kumaraswamy, who met Modi in New Delhi yesterday said, it was "impractical and implausible" to implement these directions. "These are the issues I raised objections to during a meeting with the Prime Minister," he said. Karnataka should have a say over timing of the release of the water, he said at a meet-the-press programme organised by the Press Club of Bangalore and the Bangalore Reporters Guild. "There is a need for Karnataka to have a say over releasing of water to neighbouring states because there are some occasions when there will be less water in our dams compared to the neighbouring states, where the dams will be full due to rains," he said. He said the Water Resources Ministry has responded positively to his request of changing two to three clauses on the constitution of the Authority before it begins operating. Kumaraswamy also said he would send names of its nominees for the Authority though not before the technical issues raised by him are addressed. "However, Karnataka will abide by the Supreme Court order relating to the sharing of Cauvery water with Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry," he said. Kumaraswamy also sought Parliament approval for formation of the Authority. "As per laws pertaining to inter-state water dispute, it is for Parliament to give approval to form the Authority, but the central government issued a gazette notification without debating it in the House," he said. In a June 1 gazette notification, the Water Resources Ministry said it has framed a scheme constituting the Authority and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC) to give effect to the decision of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal as modified by the Supreme Court order. Karnataka has been opposing any move to form the Authority and had instead suggested formation of Cauvery Decision Implementation Committee. Earlier, Kumaraswamy had written to Modi seeking redressal of issues related to cropping pattern before operating the CWMA and its regulation committee "Till the issues are resolved and a logical conclusion reached, enforcing the scheme for operating the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal Award be deferred to a later date," he said. The letter said changes in agricultural system would not happen overnight and farmers take a long time to switch over to modern farming practises. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Refuting reports of differences between the Congress and JDS on presenting a full fledged state budget, Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy today said he planned to table a new budget in the first or second week of July. "It is a personal suggestion of Siddaramaiah and it would be considered for discussion at the ministerial meeting to be held in the next two days to prepare for the budget presentation," Kumaraswamy said at a meet-the-press programme here. Former Chief Minister and Chairman of the Congress-JDS coordination committee Siddaramaiah had last week expressed his strong reservations over presenting a new full fledged budget, saying there was no need for such an exercise. Siddaramaiah had said he had already tabled the budget as chief minister a few months ago. Kumaraswamy had, however, strongly pushed for a new budget and took up the issue with Congress president Rahul Gandhi during his meeting with him in New Delhi yesterday and later said he had got the go-ahead from him. He said the coalition government planned to present its first budget in the first or second week of July. Kumraswamy also assured farmers of his government's commitment to waive farm loans in a "scientific way." "I am going to call a meeting with all nationalised banks to chart out the modalities to waive loans of farmers," he said. Kumaraswamy is expected to make an announcement on the farm loan-waiver scheme in the budget. He also said he has sought 50 per cent Central assistance for waiving the farm loans. "In Karnataka, about 85 lakh farmers have outstanding debts on account of agricultural loans from banks. Owing to the recurring drought, the farmers are even more severely distressed. I request the government of India to provide 50 per cent support to our loan-waiver scheme," he said. He also said the government would work towards a scheme to ensure that farmers get the loan without any difficulty and role of middlemen, who siphon off some money, is removed. Kumaraswamy also sought to allay the popular fears that the government would face financial crunch to take up other developmental works if it waives a huge sum of Rs 53,000 crore farm loan. According to the reports, the Congress is wary of the implications of farm loan waiver and officials have informed Kumaraswamy about tough times ahead in implementing it. The farm loan waiver was one of the major promises JDS had made in its election manifesto during the recent assembly polls. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In his first communication to Arvind Kejriwal since the latter began a sit-in at his office, Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal today wrote to the chief minister asking him to meet officers urgently to address concerns of both sides through dialogue. Baijal shot off a letter to Kejriwal in response to his deputy Manish Sisodia's communication in which the latter had asked for a meeting between the government and bureaucrats to end the impasse. Kejriwal, Sisodia, Health Minister Satyendar Jain and Labour Minister Gopal Rai had started a sit-in protest at the L-G's office on June 11 over their demands, including a direction to IAS officers to end their "strike". Sisodia and Jain, who were on a hunger strike at the L-G's office and were hospitalised after their health deteriorated, were discharged this morning from the LNJP Hospital. "The L-G requested the CM to urgently meet the officers at the Secretariat so that apprehensions and concerns of both sides can be suitably addressed through dialogue in the best interest of the people of Delhi," an official from Baijal's office said in a statement. The official said Baijal had earlier advised the AAP government to make efforts to restore trust between the elected government and the officers. "The L-G stated that he was glad that the CM had tweeted an appeal to the officers assuring them of safety and security in their interactions with the elected government. "The L-G observed that he has been informed that the officers have also welcomed the appeal and they are awaiting the CM's presence at the Secretariat to hold discussions," the statement added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The ruling AAP today accused Lt Governor Anil Baijal of working "at the behest" of the BJP-led Centre and not convening a meeting between the Arvind Kejriwal government and IAS officers to end the impasse following the alleged assault on the chief secretary earlier this year. Aam Aadmi Party's Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh claimed that the IAS officers are willing to talk to the government as the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has assured them that he would ensure their safety and security. "Both IAS officers and government want to talk and end the impasse. But, the L-G is not calling the meeting, which proves our charge that he is working at the behest of Narendra Modi," he said. IAS officers today said they were waiting for a formal communication from Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for a meeting at the secretariat here. Singh also hit out at Prime Minister Modi, saying, "He can meet Nawaz Sharif (former Pakistan premier) but not an elected chief minister who is sitting on dharna at the L-G office for the last eight days." The L-G has not responded to the letter written by the Deputy chief minister for calling a meeting, which shows that he is not acting on his own, the AAP leader claimed. "The viceroy used to stay at L-G House (before Independence) where now Baijal lives. It seems the spirit of the viceroy has overpowered him," Singh said and demanded that the L-G end the four-month-long impasse by calling the meeting at the earliest. Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues have been holding a sit-in at the L-G office demanding a direction to officers to end their "strike" and have the doorstep ration delivery scheme approved. The IAS Association has denied that they are on "strike", although they have been avoiding going to meetings called by AAP ministers after following the alleged assault on Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash at the chief minister's residence. AAP spokesperson Dilip Pandey claimed that the IAS officers in "private conversations" with ministers have expressed willingness to join work but they are waiting for green signal from the lieutenant governor. The IAS officers cannot join work despite their willingness unless the Centre gives its nod, he claimed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US Attorney General Jeff Sessions rebutted comparisons to Nazi Germany of the US policy of separating children from their immigrant parents, calling it "a real exaggeration." "In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country," he said in an interview on Fox late yesterday. "But this is a serious matter. We need to think it through, be rational and thoughtful about it. We want to allow asylum for people who qualify for it." Sessions was responding to critics who have compared the separations of children from parents entering the US illegally to what the Nazis did. "Well, its a real exaggeration, of course." Sessions said. Since May 5, some 2,300 children have been taken from their parents after they crossed the US-Mexico border. They are being housed in makeshift shelters with bare concrete floors and chain-link fence dividers, drawing comparisons to animal cages. Instituted as part of US President Donald Trump's policy of "zero tolerance" for illegal immigration, the practice has sparked widespread outrage and condemnation, even among some Republicans. Retired general Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, sparked debate over the weekend when he posted a photograph on Twitter of the portals to the Nazi concentration camp at Birkenau. Over the picture was the message: "Other governments have separated mothers and children. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A minute's silence today marked the first anniversary of the 2017 terrorist attack aimed at worshippers near Finsbury Park Mosque in north London. A Bangladeshi-origin man, Makram Ali, died, and nine others were injured when a van was driven into a crowd of people near the mosque on June 19 last year. Last year's cowardly attack which targeted innocent worshippers leaving Finsbury Park Mosque was an attack on all of us. As with all acts of terrorism, the intention was to divide us. But we will not let this happen, Prime Minister Theresa May said. "And as we remember the victims of this attack, and Makram Ali who tragically lost his life, we should take strength that it is London's diversity and multitude of communities that makes it one of the world's great cities," she said. Victims had just left night-time Ramzan prayers at the nearby Muslim Welfare House when Darren Osborne drove a hired van on to a crowded pavement. The minute's silence was held outside Islington Town Hall near the mosque at 9.30 am local time. Imam Mohammed Mahmoud, who protected Osborne from angry passers-by until police came to arrest him, was among those praised. The 48-year-old attacker was jailed for 43 years in February for the murder of 51-year-old Ali and the attempted murder of those injured. In a speech following the silence, Opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn praised the response of the community following the attack saying "those who seek to divide us by racism... cannot achieve anything". "We will be united forever, they will never divide us," he said. The event was attended by UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid and London Mayor Sadiq Khan. "Terrorism is terrorism no matter the target and regardless of what motivates the sick and twisted perpetrators who carry out these evil crimes, Khan said. On Monday evening, the phrase #LondonUnited was projected on to the Muslim Welfare House and will remain projected to mark a year since the attack. On Saturday, the Islington Faiths Forum will host a 'Great Get Together' in the courtyard of Muslim Welfare House with the aim of "bringing the community together in peace and mutual understanding". "The way the local community in Finsbury Park... came together and remains so strong together is inspirational. Our strength is our unity," said Scotland Yard Commissioner Cressida Dick. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee today announced an additional 18 per cent dearness allowance (DA) to the state government employees from January next. She said that the state government has also decided to merge the 10 per cent interim relief into the DA and the total DA of the state government employees will be 125 per cent from January next. "Because I had made a commitment towards the state government employees. We are announcing it a bit early because we have to follow some planning. "We have decided to release additional 18 per cent DA to the state government employees including teachers and non-teaching staff of educational institutions and employees of rural and urban local bodies. This will be effective from next January," Banerjee told reporters at the state secretariat. The state government will have to bear an annual additional expenditure of Rs 5,000 crore, she said. "With the release of additional 18 per cent DA and merger of the interim relief, the total additional DA to the state government employees from next January will be 125 per cent," Banerjee said. "We are going through a very tight financial condition but despite that because I had promised our state government employees we have decided to release the additional 18 per cent DA," she said. The chief minister said that the erstwhile Left Front government had managed to provide a 35 per cent DA to the state government employees while her government despite financial crisis has given a hike of 90 per cent DA. "We despite our financial crisis and repaying loan to the Centre and running several schemes like Sabujshree, Kanyashree have provided 90 per cent DA to our employees," she stated. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Lucknow-bound passenger was apprehended at the Delhi airport for allegedly carrying five live bullet rounds in his baggage, an official said today. A CISF officer, deputed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) to scan the baggage of commuters, detected bullet-like objects on the x-ray monitor yesterday while checking the bag of passenger R Singh. "Five live bullet rounds of .32 mm calibre were recovered from the passenger who was travelling to Lucknow," the official said. Singh was not allowed to take the flight and handed over to the police as he could not produce any documents for carrying the ammunition, the official said, adding that the man was later booked under sections of the Arms Act. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) today claimed that the Justice (retd) J K Jain Commission has given a "clean chit" to police in the last year's Mandsaur firing incident in Madhya Pradesh in its report. Citing a newspaper report, Madhya Pradesh AAP convener Alok Agrawal demanded that the probe panel's report on the death of five farmers in the police firing be made public without delay. "According to a report published in a Hindi newspaper today, the (Jain Commission) report has given a clean chit to police. We demand that the panel report be made public immediately," Agrawal said. Farmers had held statewide protests in Madhya Pradesh last year demanding better prices for their crops. The agitation was marred by violence at many parts in the state, especially in Mandsaur, which emerged as the epicentre of protests. Five protesting farmers were killed in police firing in Mandsaur on June 6, 2017. "We want the guilty punished. Are farmers not humans? Are their lives worthless? It is shameful that no one is found guilty for the killings though many serious lapses have been pointed out in the report," Agrawal claimed. As per the probe panel report, the police firing on the farmers was lawful and was in self defence. It was necessary to disperse the farmers, the AAP leader said quoting the newspaper. Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Bhupendra Singh couldn't be reached despite multiple attempts. A top official of the Home department admitted that they have received the report of the J K Jain Commission, but refused to divulge its contents. The panel, which was supposed to submit its report on September 11, 2017, finally handed it over to the state chief secretary on June 11 this year. The report was then forwarded to the General Administration department, which handed it over to the Home department two days back. The Justice (retd) J K Jain was appointed by the state government in June 2017. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The father of Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, was today embroiled in a new controversy as it emerged that he was paid over USD 10,000 for a new tell-all interview with a UK television channel following his daughter's wedding to Prince Harry. Thomas Markle made headlines yesterday with an emotional interview with ITV's 'Good Morning Britain', during which he revealed he had wept at missing Meghan's wedding to Prince Harry at Windsor Castle last month. The 73-year-old former Hollywood lighting director also made some embarrassing references to his new son-in-law's political leanings ignoring the fact that royals are expected to remain neutral on politics. Piers Morgan, the presenter who interviewed Markle on the live show, told The Sun' Markle had pocketed "a few thousand pounds", but insisted his "ultimate motive was not money" and had turned down significantly higher offers from American media outlets. The presenter insisted Thomas Markle wanted to get a "proper chance" to put across his "side of the story" on a British programme. "I didn't do this for money, I did this to change my image. I was presented as a hermit hiding out in Mexico but obviously that was a mistake and went wrong, Markle said during the interview. In reference to a previous controversy over staged paparazzi shots of him preparing for the royal wedding, he added, "I spoke to them both(Harry and Meghan) and apologised. I realised it was a serious mistake but it was hard to take it back. I had been seen as a negative for an entire year and I wanted to improve my look." ITV flew him from his home in Mexico to a luxury hotel in California for the interview during which he revealed that his 36-year-old former actress daughter, had wanted children for a long time. In reference to 33-year-old Harry, sixth-in-line to the British throne, he said he had warned his son-in-law to never raise your hand against my daughter when he sought her hand in marriage. The latest revelations will cause further embarrassment for Kensington Palace, the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who were reportedly kept in the dark about the interview. It comes as the new royal couple prepare for their first official foreign tour, to Dublin in neighbouring Ireland. Kensington Palace said the couple "are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and experiencing its rich culture, as well as meeting the people who are shaping the country's future". The visit will take place on July 10 and 11 and comes after Prince Harry's father, Charles, the Prince of Wales, took a trip to Ireland last week with his wife Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. Harry and Meghan's itinerary has not yet been revealed, and it is not clear whether they will cross the border to Northern Ireland, part of the UK, at any stage. On Tuesday, the pair who have put their honeymoon on hold to undertake royal duties will join Harry's grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, at the Royal Ascot horse races where they will present the winning trophy at the annual event. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) "Stranger Things" star Millie Bobby Brown called out online bullies, saying she will never give in to abuse and also urged others to not surrender. The 14-year-old actor slammed the social media trolls as she accepted the Best Performance in a Show for the Netflix series for a consecutive second year. "I want you to know how grateful I am to those that support me. Since I know there are many young people watching this, and even to the adults too, they could probably use the reminder that I was taught - that if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say it. "There should be no space in this world for bullying, and I'm not going to tolerate it and either should any of you. If you need a reminder of how worthy you are, and to rise above the hate, message me on Instagram," Brown said in a pretaped video message as she could not attend the show due to a broken kneecap. This is the first time the actor has addressed cyber bullying after she quit social media, barely a week ago. The actor left the platform after various memes surfaced online depicting her as a homophobe. In the past, "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" actors Kelly Marie Tran and Daisy Ridley also were subjected to online trolling. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray said today that the government led by Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 by spreading "lies", in yet another tirade against the BJP government at the Centre. Addressing Sena workers at the 52nd foundation day of the party in suburban Goregaon, Thackeray said the BJP spread "lies" ahead of the 2014 general elections and made false promises to people to win the mandate. Shiv Sena runs the government in Maharashtra in alliance with the BJP, but their ties have remain fraught. They recently fought bypolls in Maharashtra separately. Thackeray mocked Modi's frequent foreign visits, saying: "Now, Modi will start his tours to other planets." His remark came in the backdrop of media reports that an unidentified flying object was sighted near Prime Minister Modi's Lok Kalyan Marg residence in Delhi earlier this month. On the BJP's decision to part ways with alliance partner PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, Thackeray said: "Did it take three years and sacrifice of 600 soldiers for you to realise that this (Jammu and Kashmir) government is useless?" The BJP today pulled out of the alliance in Jammu and Kashmir, saying it had become "untenable" for it to continue. Thackeray also questioned the ceasefire announced during the month of Ramzan in Kashmir. "If terrorism has nothing to do with religion, then why did you go for a ceasefire? Does Pakistan follow a similar policy during Ganesh festival or Dussehra," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray today took a fresh swipe at ally BJP, saying it came to power at the Centre by "spreading lies". Addressing Sena workers at the 52nd foundation day of the party in suburban Goregaon, Thackeray said the BJP spread "lies" ahead of the 2014 general elections and made false promises to people to win the mandate. Shiv Sena runs the government in Maharashtra in alliance with the BJP, but their ties have remain fraught. They recently fought bypolls in Maharashtra separately. Mocking Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his foreign tours, Thackeray said, "Modi will soon start tours to other planets." He also hit out at the BJP's decision to withdraw support to the PDP-led government in Jammu and Kashmir. "Did you need three years and the sacrifice of 600 jawans to realise that this government was useless?" Thackeray said, questioning the decision to announce ceasefire during Ramzan. If terrorism had nothing to do with religion, why such ceasefire was announced, he asked. "Does Pakistan follow a similar policy during Ganpati festival or Dussera?" the Sena chief asked. Commenting further on the BJP's break-up with the PDP, he said: "When a similar divorce took place with us (ahead of the 2014 assembly polls in Maharashtra), you did not take so much time." Sena and BJP fought the assembly elections separately, but formed alliance after the results were declared. "We never gave up on our Hindutva ideology. If we lose power, we will regain it. But will never back down on Hindutva. "The government with which you broke up today had not announced the ceasefire. It was announced by the Centre," he said. Referring to the solider who was abducted and killed by terrorists, he said: "Aurangzeb was going home for Eid, but was killed by terrorists. And you announce ceasefire for such people (terrorists)." "You have broken up with PDP, now you can crush Pakistan. We will hail you (if you manage to do it)," he said. "I have reiterated several times that we are not in favour of cow-slaughter. But our Hindutva is not restricted to saving cows. Aurangzeb may be a Muslim but he accepted death instead of surrendering to terrorists. To offer him tributes is (also) part of my Hindutva," Thackeray said. The Sena chief also opposed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill of the Centre. Earlier in the day, his party supported the Asom Gana Parishad's stand on the issue. "If the BJP is pushing for this bill, Shiv Sena MPs will oppose it. Why should we add more issues to worry about when we already have many. Why can't similar bill be presented for Kashmir?" he said. The Sena chief averred that the next chief minister of Maharashtra would be from his party. "General elections may be held in December, hence the monsoon session of Maharashtra legislature is being held in Nagpur (instead of Mumbai, as is the custom). If there are some schemes for Vidarbha, then Shiv Sena will support it," he said. Thackeray also slammed NCP chief Sharad Pawar, saying he was dividing Marathi people. Pawar recently stirred up controversy at a function when he said his party should prefer the 'Paagote' such as the one used by social reformer Jyotirao Phule, and not the 'Puneri Pagdi' associated with Brahmin scholars. "Wearing a Pagdi does not make you Lokmanya (Tilak) or Phule... You have aversion to Tilak's Pagdi but you wear a special fur cap for Iftar," Thackeray said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray today said the Maharashtra government's decision to hold this year's monsoon session of state legislature in Nagpur instead of Mumbai hints at a possibility of early polls. As per convention, monsoon session is held in Mumbai and winter session in Nagpur. "The BJP is keen on holding the monsoon session in Nagpur because the party is planning early polls in December instead of May 2019 as per the timetable so that they may announce some package and perks," a Sena leader said. In a departure from convention, the monsoon session of the Maharashtra legislature will be held in Nagpur from July 4 to July 20. The schedule was finalised in the meetings of the Business Advisory Committees of both houses today. Nagpur, the second capital of Maharashtra, hosts the winter session of the state legislature every year while monsoon and budget sessions are held in Mumbai. The speculations about the early polls have been doing rounds since many weeks. Last assembly elections were held in October 2014 in Maharashtra. A sizable group of farmers who cultivate Rabi crops would be busy in sowing so there will be little unrest against the government, said a political observer on the possibility of early polls. As compared to summer, winter is bearable in Maharashtra where overall sentiment is not against the government, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With Madhya Pradesh slated to go for polls later this year, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan will embark on the "Jan Ashirwad" yatra from Ujjain on July 14 to "seek blessings" of the common people. The yatra will be flagged off by BJP president Amit Shah who will address a public meeting on the occasion. Chouhan had undertaken similar 'yatras' or mass outreach campaigns in 2008 and 2013. "Chouhan will offer prayers at famous Mahakal temple in Ujjain on July 14 before embarking on his yatra which will be flagged off by BJP chief Amit Shah," BJP state unit president Rakesh Singh told reporters here. The yatra will culminate in Bhopal on September 25. "Before Chouhan's yatra takes off, Shah will address a public meeting which will be attended by a galaxy of senior leaders," Singh said, adding that Chouhan had taken out Jan Ashirwad Yatras in 2008 and 2013 after seeking blessings of Mahakal in Ujjain. "On both occasions, the BJP had swept the state assembly polls. Similarly, Chouhan's third 'Jan Ashirwada Yatra' would bring the BJP to power for a fourth consecutive term," he added. Singh said the yatra would cover all 230 assembly constituencies compared to 205 segments covered by the previous yatra in 2013. He said two vehicles are converted into chariots for the yatra and Chouhan will ride them during the campaign. "The two chariots would be parked in two separate regions of the state. Chouhan will ride the chariots for four days in a week," he said. Madhya Pradesh is slated to go for polls later this year. Responding to a query on the possibility of the anti-incumbency factor denting the BJP's electoral prospects, which has been in power since 2003, Singh said there is no such anti-government wave. He said the BJP workers are not displeased with the party. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Madhya Pradesh is implementing 26MWp rooftop solar programme via Renewable Energy Service Company (RESCO) mode. The projects are being implemented largely in the government buildings using the subsidy of Central and state governments, Madhya Pradesh Urja Vikas Nigam Ltd (MPUVNL) said in a statement. Under the RESCO model, the project developer invests, builds and operates the rooftop solar project using its own funds and/0r taking debt to generate electricity and sell it to the beneficiary. This programme is in line with India's ambitious target to achieve 40 GW of solar rooftop installation by 2022. MPUVNL said the second pre-bid meeting for this tender will be held in New Delhi on June 22. RESCOs from across the country are expected to participate in this meeting. Bids for the tender are to be submitted by July 9, 2018. Under the provisions of the tender, the rooftop projects are targeted for commissioning within 9 months from the date of execution of power purchase agreement (PPA) with the beneficiary procurers. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) PDP chief and Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti today raised the bogey of Article 370 and unilateral ceasefire, saying muscular security policy will not work in the state and reconciliation is the key. "I am not shocked as this alliance was never for power. PDP never believes in power and we worked for the people," she told reporters after an hour-long meeting with her ministers and party workers at her residence. Mehbooba maintained that Jammu and Kashmir was not an enemy territory as being perceived by a few. "We had always said muscular security policy will not work in J-K, reconciliation is key," she said. She began her press conference by raising Article 370, under which the state enjoys a special status, and said "...we have safeguarded Article 370 and 35-A (of the Constitution) and we will continue to do that". "We have been able to withdraw 11,000 cases against the stone pelters," she said while listing her side of the story after the BJP pulled out of its alliance with the PDP in the state. She also mentioned about the unilateral ceasefire during Ramazan announced by Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Lahore in 2015. Mehbooba, who submitted her resignation to the governor this evening , said her party will continue to strive for dialogue and reconciliation in the state. "I have told the governor we will not go into any other alliance," she said. Mehbooba said her party, PDP, had entered into an alliance with the BJP with the aim of achieving the bigger objective of reconciliation and dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir which will bring out the people of the state from the present situation of turmoil. "Although this was against the sentiments of the people, we entered into the alliance with the BJP after giving it a deep thought. Mufti Mohammad Sayeed entered into the alliance with a bigger vision thinking that BJP is a big party and the Prime Minister has got a huge mandate. We joined hands with the party ruling at the Centre with the aim that it will help in bringing out the state from its situation of turmoil. It took us several months to chalk out the agenda of alliance which was aimed at reconciliation and dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir," she said. Mehbooba said her party's objective was reconciliation in Jammu and Kashmir through dialogue, confidence building measures and good relations with Pakistan. "That is why we had a unilateral ceasefire which had given relief to the people here. People had expressed satisfaction after many years. However, it was not appropriately responded to by the other side and there was an attempt somewhere from the other side to end the ceasefire, which happened," she said. Mehbooba said there was no alternative to the healing touch policy of the PDP. "We believe that there is no alternative to the PDP's healing touch agenda under which talks should be held with Pakistan, people of Jammu and Kashmir, more and more routes (across the Line of Control) should be opened," she added. In an apparent report card of her government, Mehbooba said there were apprehensions with regard to special status of Jammu and Kashmir following the PDP's alliance with the BJP. "The biggest apprehension in the people of Jammu and Kashmir, especially the people in the valley, was about the status of Article 370, (which guarantees) special status of the state. We defended Article 35-A and Article 370 in the court," she said. She said her government also worked towards maintaining the integrity of the state. "After BJP come to power, there was a sense of insecurity among the minorities in Jammu region. There was the Rasaana (Kathua rape and murder) case and cow vigilante case...the government took a stand. We made all efforts to ensure that Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh stay united," she said. Mehbooba said despite facing difficulties at the ground level, the PDP workers supported the government. "We have tried our best for dialogue and reconciliation and in future also we will continue to make efforts in this regard," she added. "We did not enter into this alliance for power. Had it been for power, that time Omar (Abdullah) and Congress had offered us support. This alliance was for a bigger objective -- unilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of cases against 11,000 youths, dialogue offer from Home Minister. This was the bigger objective, not power politics," she added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Gujarat High Court today said it would pronounce the order on the quantum of sentence of three convicts in the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre case on June 25 after hearing all the sides on the same day. A division bench of justices Harsha Devani and A S Supehia today concluded the hearing on the quantum of sentence of P J Rajput, Rajkumar Chaumal and Umesh Bharwad who all were found guilty under section 436 (mischief by fire) of the IPC which prescribes punishment up to life imprisonment or 10 years in jail. In their submission, the three convicts had appealed for reduction of sentence, stating that the court has the discretion to grant minimum sentence. In their submissions, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) and the state government had sought maximum punishment for the trio. Rajput, Chaumal, and Bharwad were acquitted by a special SIT court in 2012. However, the HC, found the trio guilty on April 20 while upholding the acquittal of 29 others. The trio were held guilty under charges other than section 302 (punishment for murder) of the IPC. On April 20, the high court had acquitted former BJP minister Maya Kodnani and upheld the conviction of former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi in the 2002 Naroda Patiya case in which 97 people, mostly from the minority community, were killed in the post-Godhra riots. The high court had upheld the conviction of 16 people, including Bajrangi, and acquitted 18 others, including Kodnani. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) After Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his Andhra Pradesh counterpart N Chandrababu Naidu, Naveen Patnaik too has once again raised the demand of special category status for Odisha, citing its backwardness and high percentage of ST and SC population. Though Patnaik did not attend the 4th Governing Council Meeting of the Niti Ayog held at New Delhi on Sunday, he apprised Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the state's demands including that of special category status for it through a letter. The letter dated June 16 was made available to the media yesterday. Nitish Kumar and N Chandrababu Naidu had vociferously reiterated demand for special category status for their state at the meeting of NITI Ayog chaired by the Prime Minister. Bringing back the demand for special category status by Patnaik is being seen politically as a potent weapon for the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) ahead of the ensuing Odisha assembly and the general elections in 2019. Patnaik, in the letter, has pitched for the special category status citing high percentage of ST and SC population in Odisha. "With high percentage of population belonging to the Schedule Tribes and Scheduled Castes and the state facing frequent natural calamities, Odisha deserves to be accorded 'special category status' to fast-track its ongoing development and may be treated at par with North-Eastern and Himalayan states for the sharing pattern of Centrally Sponsored Schemes," Patnaik said in the letter. The demand for a special category status for Odisha is almost four decades old. It began in 1979 when Nilamani Routray was heading the Janata Party govenrment in Odisha. Non-Congress parties, mostly Janata Dal and its modified version - the Biju Janata Dal (now ruling the state), continued to make demand for the special category status for Odisha. The subsequent Central governments, however, have been rejecting Odisha's demand. According to former state Finance Minister Panchanan Kanungo, Odisha's demand was partly fulfilled when A B Vajpyee was the Prime Minister. The Centre had then provided for special allocation for the poverty prone KBK (Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput) region. Like provision for the SCS states, the Centre was providing funds in the ratio of 90:10 ratio under Centrally Sponsored Schemes for the KBK region. This facility, however, was withdrawn after the fall of the Vajpeyee government, Kanungo said. Patnaik, during his 18-year tenure as the chief minister of Odisha, has dashed several letters to the prime ministers beginning from Vajpayee till Narendra Modi to accord Special Category Status to Odisha. Apart from passing an unanimous resolution favouring SCS for Odisha in the assembly, the BJD government has also undertaken a massive signature campaign in Odisha to further intensify its demand. The signature of about one crore people (of the state's 4.11 crore population) was sent to erstwhile President Pranab Mukherjee seeking his intervention. In a bid to make the signature campaign non-political, Patnaik had invited freedom fighter Purushottam Nayak to put the first signature on the memorandum. Nayak was followed by another ageing freedom fighter Bhabani Patnaik (92). Patnaik's signature came only at third place. Besides these measures, the ruling BJD had also organised a public meeting in the national capital to mount pressure on the then UPA government in 2013 and ahead of the 2014 general elections, seeking SCS for Odisha. Former Minister and BJD vice-president Debi Prasad Mishra said, "Odisha satisfies all conditions to be a special category state except that it has no international border with any country. No positive step appear to have been taken by the Government of India so far. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nepal Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli has arrived here on a five-day visit during which a host of key projects under China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, including a rail link connecting Tibet with Nepal, are expected to be finalised. During his stay here, Oli is scheduled to hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and several other top Chinese officials. Speaking at reception organised by the Nepal Embassy after his arrival, Oli was quoted as saying by the Nepalese media that in addition to railways, Nepal and China are also committed to developing multidimensional connectivity networks of roadways, airways, communications and energy. Oli's visit comes after his trip to India soon after his election as Prime Minister and followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's return visit to Kathmandu. Oli's visit assumes significance as he is expected to attract Chinese investments in a host of infrastructure projects for his country, including a railway line connecting Tibet with Nepal. Oli, during his brief tenure in 2016 widened China-Nepal ties by signing the transit trade treaty with China to reduce the dependence of his land-locked country on India at the height of Madhesis agitation and sought expansion of road links through Tibet besides extension of China's railway to Nepal through the Himalayas. Ahead the visit, China had aired concerns over the reports of cancellation of Chinese companies to build West Seti Hydropower Project. There are some twists and turns on economic cooperation facing China and Nepal and Oli may discuss these issues, Zhao Gancheng, director of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies' Center for Asia-Pacific Studies, told the Global Times ahead of Oli's visit. Nepal cleared China's state-owned Three Gorges International Corp to build a long-delayed hydropower project on the West Seti River in 2015. It is scheduled for completion by 2022. However, Kathmandu announced in May that Nepal would build the 750-megawatt hydroelectric plant, effectively scrapping the USD 1.6 billion deal with China, the report said. China is also expecting its company Gezhouba Group Corporation (CGGC) to get back the contract to build 1200 MW Budhigandaki Hydropower Project, which was cancelled by the previous Nepalese government. China has been investing heavily in Nepal in the last few years to enhance the connectivity and infrastructure. More importantly, it has mooted to the Oli government to build India-Nepal-China economic corridor through the Himalayas. The two projects among others are expected to figure in the Oli's talks with Xi. China has undertaken 15 projects in Nepal, including four hydropower plants, and the country's second international airport at Pokhara, with 14 others in the pipeline, Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post reported recently. "Prime Minister Oli will take up construction of 400-kilovolt cross-border transmission line 800km of its route will lie in China and 80km in Nepal, right up to capital Kathmandu via the Nepal-China border," the report quoted Energy Minister Barshaman Pun as saying. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nicolas Cage says he follows his personal philosophy of "the Super 8 feeling" while taking on projects. The 54-year-old actor said while growing up he did not care about the "awards or money", but for the joy of filmmaking, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "The Super 8 feeling is what my brother and I used to feel when we made movies in the backyard with the camera our dad bought us when we were kids. I didn't care about awards or money; it was simply because we loved making the movie and telling a story," Cage said at the ongoing Shanghai International Film Festival. The Oscar-winning actor said he has experienced the Super 8 feeling a few times in his professional life, such as when he shot "Raising Arizona" with the Cohen Brothers and during the filming of "Mandy", Panos Cosmatos' recent horror film. Cage said the feeling was particularly potent during the recent shoot in Puerto Rico of his next release, "Primal". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nine persons, including three brothers, have been arrested on the charges of rioting and assaulting police personnel at Central Police Station in Ulhasnagar in the district, an official said today. The incident took place yesterday when an estranged couple came to the counselling centre at the police station along with their relatives. The counselling centres at the police stations try to mediate between warring couples. "When the couple was being counselled, an argument broke out between their relatives present there. Some members from both the sides exchanged blows," Thane police spokesperson Sukhada Narkar said. "The policemen and the mediator present there tried to pacify the warring members, but they were also beaten up," she said. Members of both the groups also took out knives, but the police managed to overpower them. Soon, more police personnel and beat marshals arrived at the station and caught nine of the accused, the official said adding that as many members managed to flee. "The woman constable and the mediator sustained injuries in the incident and they are undergoing treatment at a hospital here," Narkar said. The arrested accused were identified as Samir Changle (24), Sachin Murtadkar (21), Yogesh Murtadkar (24), Rahul Murtadkar (26) (all brothers), Mahesh Karpe (36), Vikas Shirsar (26), Akash Shirsat (24), Bandu Shirsat (36) and Amol Shirsat (28), police said. They have been booked under various IPC sections including, section 353 (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of his duty), 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty), 452 (house-trespass after preparation for hurt, assault or wrongful restraint), 147 (rioting), 148 (rioting, armed with deadly weapon) and 506 (criminal intimidation). They have also been booked under the Arms Act and section 7 of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, police said adding that a search has been launched to nab the other accused. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Maharashtra Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the murder of CPI leader Govind Pansare today said that so far it had no plans to seek custody of Parashuram Waghmare, the prime accused in journalist Gauri Lankesh's killing. "At present we do not have any plan like that, but we could take him into custody during the course of our investigation," a senior SIT official told PTI. The Karnataka SIT recently arrested six people, including Waghmare (26), an active member of right-wing group Sri Ram Sene, in connection with Lankesh's murder. "As of now we have not asked for the custody of Waghmare and other suspects," the Maharashtra SIT official added. A forensic report had earlier confirmed that the same weapon was used to kill Lankesh, Pansare and Kannada writer and rationalist M M Kalburgi. The weapon, however, is yet to be traced. Pansare was leading a campaign against road toll tax and was shot at by motorcycle-borne assailants on February 16, 2015 in Maharashtra's Kolhapur city. He succumbed to his injuries at a hospital in Mumbai on February 20. The Maharashtra SIT has not been able to make any major breakthrough in the probe in Pansare's killing. The arrest of Waghmare and others by the Karnataka SIT came as the first major lead for the Maharashtra police. However, the Karnataka SIT has ruled out Waghmare's involvement in the murders of Pansare and Kalburgi. It said the gang was also planning to kill Kannada writer K S Bhagawan, who has often angered the right-wing outfits with his writings and utterances against Hindu gods. According to the Karnataka SIT, the gang has a wide network spread across at least five states and comprises 60 people drawn from right-wing groups. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress today ruled out any tie-up with the PDP after the BJP pulled out of the ruling alliance in Jammu and Kashmir. Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said here that the BJP had committed a "Himalayan blunder" by forming a government with the PDP. He said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. "The regional parties should have been allowed to form an alliance among themselves," he told reporters here. The alliance has devastated the state, be it economically or socially, and has left Jammu and Kashmir in a state of "ruins", he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a setback to bigwigs, Pakistan's election commission today rejected the nomination papers of former prime minister and PML-N leader Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chief Imran Khan for the NA-53 constituency of Islamabad. The nomination papers of Abbasi and his covering candidate Sardar Mehtab Khan for NA-53 were rejected by the returning officer after the candidates failed to fill the affidavit as per the requirements, Dawn reported. According to the returning officer, Abbasi had not submitted complete tax returns with his documents either. The candidates have vowed to challenge the decision in the election tribunal tomorrow. Khan's nomination papers for the same constituency were rejected on account of being incomplete. His nomination papers were challenged earlier this month by Pakistan Justice and Democratic Party candidate Abdul Wahab Baloch, who contended that Khan did not fulfill the criterion under articles 62 and 63 on the issue of Sita White and her daughter Tyrian. Although the returning officer rejected Baloch's objections against Khan's candidature, he turned down the PTI chief's papers saying he had submitted an incomplete affidavit as approved by the Supreme Court. The officer said that Khan had not filled a column in the affidavit in which he was required to describe his performance as an Member of National Assembly (MNA). Khan had served as MNA from NA-56 Rawalpindi. There had been resentment in his constituency as he allegedly never visited it during his five-year term despite living in Banigala only a few kilometres away, the paper said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The CPI(M) today said there was nothing wrong in Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan joining his West Bengal counterpart Mamata Banerjee to rally behind Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and said any "attack on democratic rights" should be defended at any cost. The two chief ministers from opposing political camps -- the CPI(M) and the TMC -- along with their Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka counterparts had on Saturday extended support to Kejriwal, who has been protesting at the lieutenant governor's office in Delhi since June 11 demanding that the "strike" by IAS officers be called off. "The Left is always consistent regarding its views and policies on democracy, secularism and federal polity. Any attack on people's rights must be defended at any cost. There is nothing wrong in four chief ministers rallying behind another the Delhi chief minister," CPI(M) central committee member Sujan Chakraborty told PTI. Another senior CPI(M) leader said it would be unfair to draw any conclusion from the Delhi meet of the chief ministers as the party had been consistent in its fight against the saffron party. "We have a policy against the BJP. We have been the most consistent political party in India in terms of our fight against the BJP and the RSS," he said. Asked about the reaction of the CPI(M) cadres to the meet, given the fact that the party had engaged in a slugfest with the TMC during the recent panchayat polls, Chakraborty said, "It is true that we are fighting against the TMC in Bengal. But the situation in Delhi was different and whatever the Kerala chief minister did was in consultation with party leadership." Meanwhile, TMC secretary general Partha Chatterjee alleged that Kejriwal has been "victimised" by the BJP. "Our party supremo Mamata Banerjee has been fighting against the BJP and its policies. We feel all opposition forces should unite to counter the BJP," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) As the relations between the AAP government and the bureaucrats showed signs of a thaw, the IAS officers today said they were waiting for a formal communication from Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for a meeting at the secretariat here to end the impasse. With the Supreme Court refusing an urgent hearing on a plea seeking its direction to declare as "unconstitutional" the sit-in of Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues at the lieutenant governor's office, the chief minister sought to put the ball in the LG's court, saying he is awaiting a response from LG Anil Baijal. But Baijal is looking for a green signal from Prime Minister Narendra Modi for convening the meeting, he claimed. Stepping up its attack on the LG, the AAP accused him of working "on the behest" of the Centre and not convening a meeting between the Delhi government and the IAS officers to end the logjam. Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and Health Minister Satyendar Jain -- who were on a hunger strike at the LG's office and were hospitalised after their health deteriorated, were discharged this morning from the LNJP Hospital. Meanwhile, AAP MLAs Somnath Bharti and A K Bagga, who were seeking an appointment to meet Baijal, were allegedly removed by the police from the LG's office where they had gone to attend a DDA meeting. Both Bharti and Bagga, members of the Delhi Development Authority(DDA), after the meeting stayed back at the LG's office and sought an appointment to meet Baijal. Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues have been holding a sit-in at the LG's office since June 11, demanding a direction to the officers to end their "strike". The officers have, however, rebutted the claim that they were on strike, saying they continued to be at work with "full dedication and vigour". The Delhi government has also sought an approval of the doorstep ration delivery scheme from Baijal. Earlier in the day, a vacation bench comprising justices S A Nazeer and Indu Malhotra said the plea for declaring the sit-in as "unconstitutional" would be listed for hearing after the the top court's summer vacation. Lawyer Shashank Sudhi, appearing for petitioner Hari Nath Ram, asked for an urgent hearing of the plea, saying a constitutional crisis has been created due to "the unconstitutional and illegal" protest by the chief minister inside the LG's office here. He contended that the citizens have been "left high and dry" due to the protest by Kejriwal and his colleagues even as the city was facing an "emergency situation" because of severe water crisis. Sudhi said the Delhi High Court, which had heard matters relating to the issue yesterday, posted the petitions for hearing on June 22. The IAS AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union territories) Association today said the officers were waiting for a formal communication for a meeting with the chief minister following his assurance over ensuring safety and dignity of the bureaucrats. "#DelhiAtWork #NoToStrike In the context of Honble CM's assurance, we await formal communication for a meeting with him in the Delhi Secretariat. We reiterate that we continue to be at work," the association tweeted. Sources, however, said Baijal may not convene the meeting as his office had already asked the Delhi government to sit with the officers and end the stalemate following the alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by some AAP MLAs in February. The chief minister again took to twitter and said, "We wrote a letter to Hon'ble LG yesterday seeking meeting of all stakeholders. We r awaiting response from Hon'ble LG. Hon'ble LG awaiting green signal from Hon'ble PM, who has to take the decision Whole Delhi waiting for Hon'ble PM to decide fast (sic)." Yesterday, the Delhi government and the IAS officers expressed their readiness for talks to end the impasse. Sisodia had written to Baijal requesting him to call a meeting between AAP ministers and the bureaucrats to resolve the issue. The chief minister had also assured the officers on Sunday that he would ensure their safety and security. Meanwhile, Medical Superintendent of the LNJP Hospital J C Passey said, "Both the ministers were discharged around 10 am. Their health parameters, including ketone level in urine, are normal now." Health Minister Jain was admitted to the hospital on Sunday night after his condition deteriorated. Sisodia was rushed to the hospital around 3 pm yesterday after the ketone level in his urine rose sharply and his sugar level dropped. This morning, Sisodia had tweeted that he was "recovering fast" and would try and resume work from today. "Good Morning!! With Doctor's care and your blessings, I am recovering fast. Yesterday, my ketone level was 7.4 & BP reached 184/100, which was leading to renal failure. But now everything is under control. If doctors allow I'll try to be back to work today only," he said. AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh said that the IAS officers were willing to talk to the government as Kejriwal has given an assurance on the issue of safety. "Both the IAS officers and the government want to talk and end the impasse. But, the LG is not calling a meeting which proves our charge that he is working on the behest of Modi," he told reporters. Singh also lashed out at Modi, saying, "He can meet Nawaj Sharif but not an elected chief minister who is sitting on dharna at the LG's office for the last eight days. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) ministers arrived in Vienna on Wednesday for crunch talks on whether to reverse a landmark pact curbing oil output, with Iran pushing back against Saudi and Russian calls to ramp up production again. The upcoming June 22-23 meetings of and non- energy ministers are set to be the most contentious in a while, with several countries bristling at the thought of reversing a deal that has been in place for 18 months and helped lift to multi-year highs. Resistance is being led by Iran, deeply wary of any move by regional rival Saudi Arabia that could push down at a time when Tehran faces renewed sanctions following US President Donald Trump's decision to quit its nuclear deal, which is likely to impact the country's oil exports. However, Riyadh, which cheered Washington's exit from the nuclear deal, is under pressure from its US ally to boost output as Trump hopes to keep pump prices low ahead of November's mid-term elections. "You're dealing with a very political situation," analyst Amrita Sen of Energy Aspects told AFP. Upon arriving at his Vienna hotel, Iran's oil minister said his country wouldn't back down, and lashed out at Trump for trying to politicise OPEC. "I don't believe in this meeting we can reach agreement," Bijan Namdar Zanganeh told reporters. He said Trump was partly to blame for the higher oil prices, saying the US leader had "created difficulty for the oil market" by imposing sanctions on Venezuela and Iran. "And now he expects OPEC to change something for better prices," Zanganeh said. "This is not fair... OPEC is not part of the Department of Energy of the United States." Operations against militants in Jammu and Kashmir would be intensified in the days to come as extremist activities increased during Ramzan when counter-militancy operations were stopped, state police chief S P Vaid said today. "Operations will continue. Only thing was in between, during this (ceasefire) period, the operations were stopped. They were going on earlier also, but we will intensify these operations in the days to come. And it would be, I think, much easier to work, he said here when asked if Governor's rule would make any difference to the security apparatus of the state in counter-militancy operations. Vaid said the militant activities increased during the period of Ramzan ceasefire. "But, we will go all-out and intensify the operations against the terrorists now," he said. The DGP said he was sure the Governor's rule would have an impact on the security situation of the valley and "things should work very effectively". "I am sure things should work very effectively and it will have an impact on the security situation of the valley," he said. He said there was an impact on the fight against militancy because of the ceasefire as it was advantageous to the militants. "The orders were to maintain high-alert in the camps so that if camps were attacked, we are able to retaliate effectively. But, one could not launch operations even when there was specific intelligence about the presence of terrorists. So, that obviously was an advantageous to the terrorists," he said. Asked whether the ceasefire provided an opportunity to the militants to regroup and if the fight against them would be any difficult, Vaid said, "I think in terms of organising, they had an advantage during this period This job was never easy, it is always difficult and shall continue to be so." On the investigations into the killing of veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari, the DGP said the police would be able to crack the case with a limited period of time. "We had constituted a SIT. DIG central Kashmir is personally monitoring the case. In fact zonal IG Kashmir himself is taking updates on day-to-day basis and there are important leads in the case which I would not like to comment on at the moment because it is too premature to talk about those developments Absolutely, within a limited period of time, we will be able to work-out the case, he said. Similarly, he said, the militants behind the killing of army jawan Aurangzeb will be brought to book soon. "We know those terrorists and we are after them and we will very soon get them. We are after their lives," the DGP said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress president Rahul Gandhi said today that the "opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance" set fire to Jammu and Kashmir, killing many innocent civilians and brave soldiers, and that the damage would continue even if the state was put under central rule. Hours after the BJP pulled out of the alliance government, the Congress leader said, "Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails (sic)." Under the alliance government in the strategically important state, several innocent people and brave soldiers were killed. "It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPA's hard work. The damage will continue under President's rule (sic)," he tweeted. The three-year Jammu and Kashmir government, wracked by bitter political feuds and worsening security challenges, collapsed today with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP setting the stage for yet another round of governor's rule. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the surprise announcement after the party high command summoned its Jammu and Kashmir ministers for emergency consultations in New Delhi. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor N N Vohra amid a swirl of political activity in Srinagar and New Delhi. ""It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in the state," Madhav told reporters at a hurriedly called press conference. The BJP blamed the PDP for failing to improve the security conditions in the Kashmir Valley. Madhav cited last week's killing of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar in the highly secured area of Press Enclave by unidentified gunmen. The same day -- two days before Eid -- an Army jawan was abducted while going on Eid leave and killed. Terrorism, violence and radicalism have risen and the fundamental rights of citizens, including right to life and free speech, are in danger, the BJP leader said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Describing as "very unfortunate" the end of the alliance between BJP and PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi today said it would lead to imposition of governor's rule and it is a prelude to "more repression". "This is a very unfortunate step which will lead to imposition of Governor's rule. I am of the opinion that this is a prelude to more greater repression," he told reporters here. PDP and BJP had an agenda of alliance but no step was taken to implement it, the Hyderabad MP charged. "BJP, as a partner in government, made no serious attempt for a dialogue either by indicating a bare outline of their agenda. Though they had an agenda of alliance which both the parties agreed to, not a single step was taken to fulfil what was promised in their agenda of alliance," he said. Owaisi said he felt sorry for the people of Kashmir and not for PDP which "brought upon this great political disaster for itself". "The PDP said and the BJP also agreed that this is an alliance between north pole and south pole. The people of the nation wants to know what happened to this so-called meeting of north pole and south pole," he said. Coming down heavily on the BJP, he said it cannot run away from 'failure' to provide governance and stopping cross-border terrorism and attacks on army camps. Owaisi said he felt BJP took the decision to pull out of the coalition as the party knew it was losing ground in Jammu. Replying to a query on ceasefire, he said BJP would have to explain to the people why it was announced in a hurry and called off. Asked whether he stood with the government on the issue of ceasefire and whether it should be extended, the MP said he was with the people of the country and Kashmir. He also said BJP cannot blame the PDP for alleged non-performance. "His (BJP general secretary Ram Madhav) own party ministers and deputy CM were there. BJP cannot hide behind or cannot put forward this cowardly defence that our partner was not listening to us...," he said. On Madhav's reported comments that his party was forced to pull out of the coalition because internal security was being compromised, Owaisi claimed the "BJP is running away" as all operations were conducted with the consent of the Centre. Describing the recent killing of journalist Shujaat Bukhari as a "monumental tragedy", he said it was being "exploited to fulfil a policy which was started two years ago". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Sebi has sold two properties for over Rs 2 crore in the Pancard Clubs case, as part of the markets regulator's efforts to recover investor money. While the property in Panvel has been sold for Rs 68.09 lakh, the one in Mumbai has been disposed of for Rs 1.34 crore, as per two separate Sebi orders. The Panvel and Mumbai properties have been purchased by Dilip Dipchand Manwani and Dimple Barola, respectively. The highest bidder (Barola) paid the full bid amount of Rs 1.33 crore along with 1 per cent poundage fee, totalling Rs 1.34 crore, within the time limit to Sebi, the regulator said. Manwani has paid a total of Rs 68.09 lakh, which includes the bid amount of Rs 67.42 lakh and 1 per cent poundage fee, Sebi said. The regulator also noted that no application has been made for setting aside the sale of properties. Pancard Clubs had mobilised Rs 7,035 crore from 51,55,516 investors from 2002-03 to 2013-14 through illegal collective investment schemes. In February 2016, Sebi had directed the firm and its directors to refund the investors. However, the entities did not comply with the direction following which the regulator had initiated recovery proceedings in the case and attached the properties belonging to the firm and its directors. Since the entities failed to repay the dues, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) had issued a notice of sale in April 2018 for selling their properties. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Haryana government today issued transfer and posting orders of eight IPS officers, including the Police Commissioners of Panchkula and Gurugram, with immediate effect. A S Chawla, the Commissioner of Police, Panchkula, with additional charge of Inspector General, Law and Order, has been posted as Additional Director General of Police, Telecommunications, with additional charge of ADGP, Community Policing, an official release said. Charu Bali, the Inspector General in State Vigilance Bureau, will be the new Panchkula Police Commissioner. Navdeep Singh Virk, who was the Inspector General of Police, Rohtak Range, with additional charge of Inspector General of Police, Police Training Centre, Sunaria, Rohtak has been posted as Inspector General of Police, Karnal Range. Gurgaon Police Commissioner Sandeep Khirwar has been posted as Inspector General of Police, Rohtak Range, the release said, adding K K Rao, the Inspector General of Police, Indian Reserve Battalion, Bhondsi has been posted as Gurgaon Police Commissioner. Srikant Jadhav, the Inspector General of Police, State Crime Record Bureau, Madhuban with additional charge of Secretary, Haryana Gau Sewa Ayog and additional charge of Director, Forensic Science Laboratory, Madhuban has been posted as Inspector General of Police, South Range, Rewari with additional charge of Secretary, Haryana Gau Sewa Ayog. C S Rao, Inspector General, South Range, Rewari has been posted as Inspector General, Indian Reserve Battalion, Bhondsi, the release said, adding Subhash Yadav, Inspector General of Police, Karnal Range, Karnal has been psoted as Inspector General, State Vigilance Bureau. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Observing that pavements should not be obstructed by encroachments as it could lead to traffic hazards as well as imperil life of pedestrians, the Delhi High Court has directed the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) to remove a temple built illegally on a footpath near C R Park here. A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar told the corporation that while bringing the pavement in question to its original condition, the deities in the temple be shifted to another place without damaging them. It directed the Deputy Commissioner of Police (South-East) to ensure that adequate police protection is made available to the SDMC for implementing the court's order in which the bench also asked the corporation to file a status report within eight weeks regarding the steps taken by it. The direction by the court came while disposing of a PIL against encroachments on the pavement at Govind Puri Extension opposite F-Block of C R Park. While disposing of the matter, the bench said, "Pavements have to be maintained as pavements and no obstruction thereon can be permitted. The same results not only in traffic hazards but imperils the life of pedestrians who have no place to walk. "In view of the above, the SDMC shall forthwith take steps to remove the entire unauthorized temple opposite F-Block, C R Park, Govind Puri Extension, Kalkaji and ensure that the pavement is brought to its original condition and maintained as such. Needless to say, the SDMC shall take care to ensure the deities are shifted to any other place and that no damage is caused thereto. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Philippine Supreme Court upheld the expulsion of its chief justice, the authoritarian president's highest-ranking critic, in a final ruling today that critics warned is unconstitutional and threatens judicial independence and the country's fragile democracy. Justices voted 8-6 to uphold their May 11 decision to oust Maria Lourdes Sereno from the 15-member high court and deny her appeal, said court spokesman Theodore Te. The government's solicitor-general had asked the court to boot Sereno out for allegedly failing to file some of her past assets disclosures, a charge she denies. President Rodrigo Duterte has 90 days to appoint a replacement. Sereno, a 57-year-old former law professor, was to deliver a speech later today in which she was expected to question the constitutionality of her unprecedented removal, which has sparked alarm, including by a U.N. expert on the independence of lawyers and judges. Duterte's allies said the ruling should be respected, but opponents deplored it, with one opposition group, Tindig Pilipinas, labeling the tribunal as a "supremely erroneous court" and threatening to file impeachment complaints against the justices, who voted to approve the government petition, called quo warranto. "Our constitution mandates the Supreme Court to be the final arbiter of legal and constitutional questions. Let us respect its decision, no matter what our persuasions are," said Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez of the House of Representatives, which is dominated by Duterte's political allies. Sereno's expulsion cut short a separate congressional impeachment attempt against her. She argues that the government petition to oust her violates the constitution, which stipulates that justices like her can be removed only by congressional impeachment. Alvarez said the court ruling has "rendered moot and academic" the impeachment bid. Sereno is a critic of Duterte, who publicly called for her removal from the country's highest court but denies he had a direct hand in her ouster. More than half of the 23-member Senate has asked the Supreme Court to review its decision to oust Sereno, calling the ruling a "dangerous precedent" that infringed on the constitutional power of Congress to impeach senior officials. Sereno angered Duterte after she disagreed with his efforts to take action against judges linked to illegal drugs in 2016, saying the Supreme Court should be the one to punish erring judges. Duterte has said he had avoided getting involved in efforts to remove Sereno but got fed up. "So I'm putting you on notice that I am now your enemy. And you have to be out of the Supreme Court," Duterte said in a speech in April, in which he said he had requested lawmakers to "go into the impeachment right away." The House Justice Committee said in March that there was probable cause to impeach Sereno, accusing her of corruption, breach of public trust and other serious crimes. Sereno has denied any wrongdoing, but Duterte and his officials said she breached the law and should not have been designated chief justice by Duterte's liberal predecessor in 2012. Sereno was the first woman to head the Supreme Court and the first chief justice to be forced out through a government petition. Her predecessor, Renato Corona, was impeached by the House in 2011 and became the first chief justice to be convicted in a 2012 Senate trial for failing to accurately disclose his bank deposits and properties. UN Rapporteur Diego Garcia-Sayan, who looks into threats to the independence of judges and lawyers worldwide, warned recently that Sereno's expulsion from the court is an attack on judicial independence that could imperil Philippine democracy. "If the chief justice can be easily expelled, everybody would have to dance with the same music and with that, the independence of the judiciary is finished and that opens the route of abuse of power," Garcia-Sayan said. Duterte angrily reacted by asking Garcia-Sayan not to meddle in the country's domestic affairs and told him "to go to hell. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi will interact with farmers tomorrow via video conference to flag his government's major schemes aimed at boosting their income, and also address farm sector issues. The interaction with farmers will be the sixth such interaction, that began on the eve of Modi government completing four years in office. "The interaction will provide an opportunity to hear directly from the farmers. Initiatives related to doubling farmers' income will also be discussed," a statement issued by Prime Minister's Office said today. The interaction will be broadcast directly by Krishi Vigyan Kendra's, Common Service Centers (CSC), Doordarshan, DD Kissan and Aakashvaani from all over the country, it said. "People will also be able to interact with the Prime Minister through 'Narendra Modi App'," the statement said. In the previous interactions, the Prime Minister had heard beneficiaries of free cooking gas (LPG) scheme, financial inclusion initiative, start-up enterpreneurs, health scheme and Digitial India. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The first-ever UK-India Week was launched here today with the message that a post-Brexit bilateral trade partnership has the potential to shape the global economy. Britain's Secretary of State for international trade Liam Fox, who is set to visit India later this year for the next UK-India Joint Economic Trade Committee (JETCO), described India as foremost among the UK's allies and trading partners and hailed reforms initiated by the Indian government. "We are here to look to the future and lay out our ambitions for a trading partnership that has the potential to shape the global economy," said the senior Conservative party leader. "In particular, as we leave the European Union (EU), there is the opportunity for both countries to enhance this partnership opening up new sectors for business and minimising barriers to trade," said the minister in charge of the UK's Department for International Trade (DIT). The launch event at Taj Hotel in London was marked by the release of the second edition of the '100 Most Influential in UK-India Relations' covering leading figures across business, politics, arts and culture who are seen as making a significant contribution towards enhancing the UK-India relationship. "Collectively, these change-makers help to build a 'Living Bridge' between the UK and India something Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi has long championed and encouraged," said Manoj Ladwa, Founder & CEO of India Inc. the organisers behind UK-India Week. Matt Hancock, UK Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Indian minister of communication Manoj Sinha and the Indian High Commissioner to the UK, Y.K. Sinha, were among the other prominent guests at the event. "It is important that India and the UK ensure that the true potential of this relationship is tapped. As the UK leaves the EU and as India grows steadily, yet surely, there is a definite match between the two countries," said Sinha. The week-long set of events are aimed at bringing together senior figures in the UK with their counterparts from India for high-level talks. It will include a two-day UK-India Leadership Conclave tomorrow and Thursday, when ministers and business leaders from both countries will descend upon Latimer Estate in the English countryside in Buckinghamshire to address the prospects of post-Brexit partnership opportunities. "UK-India Week celebrates the strong partnership between the UK and India and is a catalyst for promoting opportunities for future collaboration," Ladwa said. "There is a huge opportunity for these two great countries now equals on the world stage to harness their shared values, trade, technology and talent to enhance prosperity at home and around the world," he said. The conclave, backed by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) as well as leading Indian companies like Infosys, Ola Cabs, and Hero Future Energies, will include a Global Investors Forum and Young Leaders Forum as well as spin-out sessions on smart cities, soft power, energy and climate change. Alongside hard-hitting political and economic debate, the conclave now in its fifth year will celebrate the cultural ties between the UK and India, including an early morning yoga session in celebration of International Day of Yoga on Thursday. UK-India Week will culminate with the second annual UK-India Awards in London on Friday, to honour high-achievers within the bilateral space. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan has claimed "non-cooperation" by the BJD-led Odisha government in efforts to attract investment in the state's food-processing sector, and sought a meeting with Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. The ruling BJD, however, accused Pradhan of playing "cheap politics" by releasing his letter to media. The war of words between the BJP and the BJD could be seen in the context of the ensuing assembly election in Odisha next year. In a letter to Patnaik, the petroleum minister said he had written to him and the state government on the need to explore the market for the state's food products in the Gulf, and also to attract investors from these countries in the food processing sector. However, there was no response from the state government and the chief minister's office also did not acknowledge his letters, Pradhan claimed in his fresh letter dated yesterday. The minister also alleged that he has been "humiliated and called names". "State officials have dubbed me as post peon and called me a Bihari. I am ready to face humiliation, but the anger on me should not deprive Odisha of its potential benefits," he said in the letter. Pradhan also alleged that top officials were not allowed to meet him to discuss investment in Odisha and said the chief minister should give him an opportunity to meet and apprise Patnaik of investment opportunities for the state. Instead of dumping my letter, give me an opportunity to meet you at your office as I am keen to apprise you of my efforts for participation of overseas investors in Make In Odisha conclave to be held this year, he said. Pradhan said business groups of UAE in food and beverage trade have evinced interest to explore the Odisha market for possible investments. The Union minister said he had made a strong case about Odisha's advantages in areas like infrastructure, agriculture, food and marines products during his recent meeting with several investors in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Pradhan said he had also made a special reference to Paradip Port which has the potential to emerge as a food processing hub for the gulf countries. Odisha's diverse agro-climatic zones, forest coverage, water availability, trained and skilled manpower as well as a wide range of authentic Odia food products have good potential to find a place in Gulf countries, he said. Pradhan said he had also highlighted various products from Odisha's special aromatic rice from western Odisha, marine products from Chilka, mangoes, exotic flowers, turmeric from Kandhamal and ginger from Koraput which can be exported to the Gulf region. During the meeting in UAE, prominent business groups like Emaar, Lulu, Al Maya, AKM and NMC showed interest to send their teams to explore Odisha market, the Union minister said, adding that he made efforts to make the linkages between export potential of Odisha with the requirement of such products in the UAE. He said there is a huge scope to raise export of food, processed food, agriculture and marine products to the Gulf countries and Odisha should not ignore it. The ruling BJD, however, rubbished his charge. BJD spokesperson P K Deb in a statement said if Pradhan sincerely wanted investment in food processing sector and growth of business in marine and food products, he should channel the proposals through the ministries concerned instead of indulging in "cheap politics by releasing his letter to the media". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Clashes broke out near the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev today when more than 1,000 protesters demolished a metal fence in a bid to enter the building, police said. Coal miners, veterans of the Soviet Afghan War and Chernobyl "liquidators" (people who dealt with the 1986 nuclear disaster) demonstrated to demand decent wages and social benefits. Miners also called for compensation over unpaid wages. Several law enforcement officers were injured in the clashes, police said after detaining one protester. Authorities stepped up security measures outside parliament, deploying 500 police officers. Vice Speaker of the parliament Iryna Gerashchenko addressed the gathering and representatives from each protesting organisation were invited to negotiations. Protests outside government buildings in Ukraine's capital are not uncommon. In March 2018 clashes broke out near parliament after police removed a makeshift camp put up to protest corruption. In 2015 four national guard members were killed and over a hundred people injured during clashes between Ukrainian nationalists and security forces. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who was on a hunger strike since June 13 at the lieutenant governor's office and hospitalised after his health deteriorated, said that he is "recovering fast" and will try and resume work from today. Sisodia was rushed to the LNJP Hospital here around 3 pm yesterday after the ketone level in his urine rose sharply and his sugar level slumped. "Good Morning!! With Doctor's care and your blessings, I am recovering fast. Yesterday, my ketone level was 7.4 & BP reached 184/100, which was leading to renal failure. But now everything is under control. If doctors allow I'll try to be back to work today only," he said on Twitter today. Health Minister Satyendar Jain was hospitalised on Sunday night after his condition had deteriorated. He was taken to the LNJP Hospital where his condition is stable. On Saturday, a team of doctors had examined Sisodia and Jain. While Jain went on indefinite fast at the L-G's office last Tuesday, Sisodia had been on a hunger strike since Wednesday. Kejriwal, along with his colleagues, have been at Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal's office since June 13, demanding a direction to IAS officers to end what the AAP describes a "strike" and approval of the doorstep ration delivery scheme. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) South Korean and US officials confirmed today the suspension of scheduled joint military drills, making good on a pledge by President Donald Trump during his summit with North Korea's leader. Seoul, which has tens of thousands of US troops on its soil to help protect it from its hostile northern neighbour, said the suspension would affect the large-scale Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises slated for August. "South Korea and the US plan to continue discussions for further measures," the South's defence ministry said in a statement, adding that "no decisions have been reached for other ensuing drills." Some 17,500 US military personnel were due to take part in the Freedom Guardian drills. "We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent war games have been made," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in confirming the suspension. "There is no impact on Pacific exercises outside of the Korean Peninsula." White said US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton would meet later this week at the Pentagon to discuss the issue. Last week, Trump made the surprise announcement that the US would halt "war games" with its South Korean security ally -- without making clear when the freeze would begin. The US leader raised eyebrows by describing the exercises as "provocative" -- a term used by the North. US and South Korean forces have been training together for years, and routinely rehearse everything from beach landings to an invasion from the North, or even "decapitation" strikes targeting the North Korean regime. Pyongyang typically reacts furiously. Following drills last year, the North fired ballistic missiles over Japan, triggering global alarm. Trump's decision raised concern in Japan, which hosts tens of thousands of US troops and has eyed the diplomatic outreach to Pyongyang with deep suspicion. But officials were sanguine on the announcement today, with Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera saying Trump's move would not affect US-Japan exercises. "In talks with Secretary Mattis, we confirmed that we will implement drills between Japan and the US," he told reporters. Foreign Minister Taro Kono added that Tokyo understood the drills were being halted as a way to press Pyongyang to negotiate in good faith. "I understand that if North Korea stops negotiating with good will, the joint drills will resume," he said. Choi Hyun-soo, a South Korea defence ministry spokeswoman, added: "We are expecting a corresponding measure from North Korea in response to the suspension of the joint drills." At their landmark Singapore summit, Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un signed a joint statement in which Pyongyang committed to "work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." But critics have pointed to the vague wording of the non-binding document and raised fears that the summit could weaken the international coalition against the North's nuclear programme. Pompeo, who has stressed that sanctions will remain in place until North Korea's complete denuclearisation, said he plans to meet Kim for follow-up talks. South Korea said sanctions against the North could be eased once it takes "substantive steps towards denuclearisation," seemingly setting the bar lower than Washington for such a move. But Pompeo's office said both allies remain "committed to the goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union Minister and senior Shiromani Akali Dal leader Harsimrat Kaur Badal today demanded that Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP party should sack its Punjab MLA Sukhpal Singh Khaira for reportedly supporting Sikh referendum campaign. Badal, who is Union Food Processing Minister, accused the Delhi Chief Minister of "tacit support" to Khaira by maintaining silence on the issue. Last week, Khaira reportedly said: "I support the Sikh referendum 2020 movement as Sikhs have the right to demand justice against atrocities suffered by them." Replying to queries on the issue, Badal said: "On one side he (Kejriwal) is siting on dharna asking for independent statehood of Delhi, on the other side his own MLA and the leader of opposition of Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab is talking about supporting Refrendum 2020 which is about 'separating Punjab from India's clutches'." Expressing "shock" that Kejriwal has not spoken even a word on issue in the last four days, she said: "It clearly shows, keeping his mouth shut means tacit support". She further said that Congress, the ruling party in Punjab, should have taken "necessary legal action" against Khaira and Kejriwal should have "reprimanded and removed" his MLA from the party. Badal said any patriotic Indian will condemn Khaira's statement. 'Referendum 2020', she said is about separating Punjab from India, which is being "supported by Pakistan" and "spearheaded by those anti-India elements which are settled abroad". Political parties in Punjab, including Congress and the BJP, have strongly criticised Aam Aadmi Party senior leader Khaira. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh condemned Khaira for "backing secessionism" by supporting the campaign, propounded by Sikh radicals for a separate Sikh homeland. Amid a barrage of criticism, Khaira had responded to the Punjab chief minister in a tweet: "I am surprised a leader of your level is tweeting against me without checking his facts, I am not a votary of 2020 but I don't hesitate to point out a consistent policy of discrimination against Sikhs by central governments! Be it attack on Darbar Sahib, genocide of Sikhs leading to 2020." Asked about her today's meeting with Home MInister Rajnath Singh, Badal said her party has demanded compensation be given to about 375 people who were detained during Operation Blue Star of 1984. She also demanded that documents related to Operation Blue Star should be made available after declassification in the United Kingdom. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The News in Brief Govt claims Progress against Asian Stink Bug Achieved The government of Georgia claims that certain progress has been achieved against the Asian Stink Bug, which damaged major portion of harvest in the west Georgia last year. The Head of Georgias National Food Safety Agency, Zurab Chekurashvili stated at a special briefing on Wednesday that the first stage of fighting the insect is over. Compared to the same period of last year, the number of the insect has been significantly reduced. I would like to thank to all who contributed, Chekurashvili said. He stated that the government of Georgia has provided ten times more and modern techniques against the insect this year than it did the last year. In order to carry out anti-pest measures, 150 units of high-level specialized techniques are mobilized.In total, activities have been conducted in 382 villages of 22 municipalities, he said and called on the public to get involved in the fight against the Asian Stink Bug. Three Youngsters Sew Lips Shut in Protest against Local Police Chief Three young men have sewed their lips shut as they demand the resignation of the police chief and his deputy in Georgias western Chiatura region. The youngsters say that police chief Lasha Chkhitunidze and his deputy Mikheil Gigauri are abusing people and provoking clashes. Since Chkhitunidze and his deputy came in power, young people have been in permanent pressure. We are told that we will be detained and some illegal objects or things will be planted on us, or in our vehicles, the young people say. They claim that in some cases police chiefs and officers walk around drunk, causing clashes or verbal disputes with their rude behavior. The Ministry of Internal Affairs says that the three young men who are demanding the change of law enforcers were detained for disobedience and were also found guilty for petty hooliganism in early June. (By Mariam Chanishvili) Sadbhav Infrastructure Project today entered into a contract worth Rs 55 crore with its wholly-owned arm for maintenance and repair of a road in Rajasthan. "The company has signed maintenance contract with Sadbhav Jodhpur Ring Road Pvt Ltd (a wholly-owned subsidiary) worth Rs 55 crore for maintenance and repair works during the development period and construction period," Sadbhav Infrastructure Project said in a BSE filing. The maintenance and repair is for a 74.6-km road section in Rajasthan, the statement said. Sadbhav Infrastructure Project already has ten buildoperatetransfer (BOT) projects with total lane kms of 2595.92. According to the company's website, six are operational, one is partially operational and three are under development. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court today refused an urgent hearing on a plea seeking its direction to declare as "unconstitutional" the sit-in of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues inside the lieutenant governor's office here. Kejriwal and his ministers have been staging a sit-in at L-G Anil Baijal office since June 11 evening to press for their demands, including a direction to IAS officers to end their "strike" and action against those who have struck work. A vacation bench comprising justices S A Nazeer and Indu Malhotra said the plea would be listed for hearing after the summer vacation. Lawyer Shashank Sudhi, appearing for petitioner Hari Nath Ram, sought the urgent hearing of the plea, saying a constitutional crisis has been created due to "the unconstitutional and illegal" protest by the chief minister inside the L-G's office here. Moreover, the citizens are "left high and dry", he said. Sudhi said the Delhi High Court, which had heard the matters on the issue yesterday, has now posted them for hearing on June 22 and that the city is facing an "emergency situation" in which citizens are facing severe water crisis. "We will list it on reopening of the court," the bench said, while declining the request for urgent hearing. Besides seeking declaration of the sit-in as unconstitutional, the plea also sought initiation of perjury proceedings against either the chief minister or the office of the lieutenant governor (L-G) on the ground that one of them is lying. The chief minister has been claiming that the IAS officers are on strike, but the L-G's office has asserted that the officers are very much on the job, the lawyer said. The high court had virtually disapproved the sit-in led by Kejriwal at the LG's office and asked the AAP government who had authorised such a protest. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Markets regulator Sebi has imposed a fine of Rs 5 lakh on packaging firm Huhtamaki PPL in a matter related to non-redressal of investor complaints. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) had received complaints in July 2014 against the company from the daughters of one Mansukhal Lavajibhai Patadia who was holding 5,465 shares of the firm. The regulator had then initiated adjudication proceedings against the company for failure to redress grievances raised in the complaints. In its order dated June 18, Sebi said that the proceedings have been initiated against the company for the acts of its RTA -- Sharepro -- on the basis of principal-agent relationship. Sharepro had acted as registrar and share transfer agent (RTA) for Huhtamaki during the period from 2009 to 2014. The company has a principal-agent relationship with its RTA, and as principal, the former is liable for the acts of commissions and omissions by the latter, the regulator noted. According to a notice issued to the company by Sebi, one of the complainants through letters in 2009 had informed the firm about Patadia's demise in 2008 and requested for not transferring the 5,465 shares held by him to any person. She had also submitted copy of her father's death certificate through letters. In response, Sharepro had sought certain documents from her. The regulator noted that the company had acceded to request for change of signature of Patadia made in 2011 and subsequently, transferred 5,465 shares held in his name to another person despite the RTA having acknowledged the letter of the complainant in 2009 communicating the fact of his death. Subsequently, the company was advised by Sebi to resolve the complaints through Sebi complaints redressal system (SCORES) and provide written explanation to the complainants on issues regarding the transfer of shares and submit an action taken report (ATR). Having "negligently" accepted the change in signature of the deceased shareholder after his death and then having effected transfer of his shares, Sharepro and Huhtamaki were duty bound to ensure remedy to the legal heirs, the regulator said. "It is relevant to mention that the registered intermediaries have an important role towards protection of interests of investors. They cannot be expected to act in a manner as found in this case which is clearly to the determent of the investors," Sebi said. Noting that the complaints have remained "unresolved" till date, Sebi said Huhtamaki is liable for penalty. Accordingly, Sebi has imposed a fine of Rs 5 lakh on Huhtamaki. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after backing Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's sit-in at the lieutenant governor's office, the Shiv Sena today extended its sympathies to the Asom Gana Parishad which is opposing the Centre's Citizenship (Amendment) Bill. It said the "political accident" of 2014 (of the BJP coming to power with a thumping majority) will not happen in the next year's general elections. Taking a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his frequent foreign visits, the Sena said while India was witnessing dust storms, the PM, being mostly out of the country, might not be affected by it. The Sena said some representatives of the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) yesterday visited 'Matoshree', the residence of party chief Uddhav Thackeray here. "They expected the Sena to lead a coalition of regional parties at the national level," it said in an editorial in party mouthpiece 'Saamana'. Noting that AGP, an ally of the BJP in Assam, was strongly opposing the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, the Sena said every region has its own 'element of pride', hence a linguistic-based state formation policy was accepted. "It is not a treason to love Maharashtra," the Sena, whose primary base is in the western state, said. The Asom Gana Parishad, a constituent in the BJP-led Assam government, has expressed its apprehensions over the Citizenship (Amendment Bill), saying the historic Assam Accord would become meaningless if the bill was passed. The Assam Accord states that all illegal foreigners, who entered the north eastern state after 1971 from Bangladesh, irrespective of their religion, had to be deported. Meanwhile, the Sena, which had earlier announced to go solo in future polls, exuded confidence of winning the next Maharashtra elections. "The Shiv Sena will certainly come to power on its own in Maharashtra. It will also garner enough strength at the Centre to become a decisive factor on who will sit at the throne in Delhi (referring to the prime ministerial post)," the Marathi publication said. The Shiv Sena has completed 52 years and the journey has been full of struggle, it said. "When (Maratha warrior king) Shivaji decided to have his own kingdom, several questions were raised about the challenges and difficulties. A similar struggle was faced by Sena founder late Balasaheb Thackeray," it said. The Sena said questions were being raised whether there was a pre-Emergency situation in the country. Jawans were being killed in Kashmir, it said and alleged that the government elected with a mandate in the national capital (referring to the Kejriwal-led dispensation in Delhi) was being throttled. "If the bureaucracy continues to function on its whims, it will be difficult to hold elections and run a government," the editorial said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Separatist leaders have called for a complete shutdown in Kashmir tomorrow against the killings of journalist Shujaat Bukhari and civilians, gunned down by security forces in the past few days. The Joint Resistance Leadership, an amalgamation of separatist groups, said in a statement today that there had been a sudden spike in civilian killings since the eve of Eid. It also demanded an international probe into Bukhari's killing. "Joint Resistance Leadership has called for a complete strike tomorrow against the continued civilian killings in the valley, which has witnessed a sudden spike since the eve of Eid... three young boys have been brutally gunned down by the Indian forces while the fourth is struggling for life at SKIMS," the statement said. He said the strike will also be observed against the brutalkilling of Bukhari, who was shot dead along with his two personal guards outside his office on June 14 by unknown gunmen. "JRL demands an international probe into this gruesome murder," a JRL spokesperson said in the statement. He said cordon and search operations had returned with a vengeance to the villages as people were being severely beaten and harassed and used as human shields. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Rebel shellfire slammed into the southern Syrian city of Sweida today for the first time in three years, a monitor said, as fresh regime reinforcements arrived in the area. The government holds most of Sweida province but rebels still control much of the nearby Daraa and Quneitra governorates. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said opposition forces today fired shells into Sweida city, "which led to loud blasts but no casualties". "It is the first time since 2015 that the city has been subjected to shellfire," said Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman. Syrian state agency SANA also blamed rebels "spread out in the towns and villages in eastern parts of Daraa province" for firing shells on Sweida. Sweida, whose residents are mostly from the Druze minority, has remained relatively insulated from seven years of war that ravaged the rest of the country. But rebels hold a sliver of territory in western Sweida that borders their main bastion in the province of Daraa, and clashes and exchanges of fire have erupted in that area in recent days. Syria's government has set its sights on ousting rebels from the south and has been dispatching troops and equipment there for weeks. Today they dropped new flyers on the rebel-held half of Daraa city, calling on residents to expel rebels, "like your brothers did in Eastern Ghouta and Qalamun", referring to two areas near Damascus recently recaptured from the opposition. Rebels appeared to fear the regime would use Sweida's civilian population as justification for the assault, and issued a message addressed to them today. "We call on our people in Sweida province not to serve as bait for the goals of the regime, sectarian militias from Iran, and Hezbollah, which are trying to occupy this land and divide its people," they said in a statement. But the government has also hinted that a political settlement over the south's fate could be reached. "We have moved towards the south and we are giving the political process a chance..."If that doesn't succeed, we have no other option but to liberate it by force," Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said last week. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) South Delhi Mayor Narendra Chawla urged Railway Minister Piyush Goyal to improve the services on the ring rail network in the city so that more passengers can use the facility, officials said today. The 35-km-long ring rail network, constructed in 1975, links with the 231-km Delhi Metro network at seven locations, and many stations of the ring rail fall in south Delhi. The mayor, who called on the minister here, also apprised Goyal about green spaces, beautification and installation of public arts on spaces underneath flyovers which once had practically become dumping ground for waste, the SDMC said in a statement. "The mayor requested the rail minister to make the ring rail services better so that the number of passengers could increase," it said. Some of stations on the circular rail network are Lajpat Nagar, Lodhi Colony, Sarojini Nagar, Safadurjung and Chanakyapuri. The network carries around 4,000 people daily. During the brief meeting, Chawla also assured that there will be full cooperation from the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) in making areas along rail lines green and attractive. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court today granted an interim protection from arrest to a Lucknow school principal and a teacher, accused of abetting the suicide of a class 12 student in December 2016 after allegedly giving him corporal punishment. A vacation bench of justices S Abdul Nazeer and Indu Malhotra also sought a response from the Uttar Pradesh government on a plea seeking quashing of the case and the charge sheet against the principal and the teacher. During the hearing, senior advocate Sanjay Hegde and lawyer Ajay Singh, appearing for principal Melvin Saldhana and physical training teacher James John, said that since the charge sheet has already been filed, their custodial interrogation was not required. Therefore, they should be granted protection from arrest, the counsel contended. Hegde submitted that the deceased student was not given corporal punishment in the school by any of the authorities and this was evident from the postmortem report. The principal and the teacher have challenged the May 22 order of the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court dismissing their plea for quashing the case and the charge sheet lodged against them for alleged abetment to suicide. They said that the high court dismissed the plea without considering the statement of an eyewitness by which it was apparent that no prima-facie case of abetment to suicide was made out. The class 12 student, Lalit Yadav, who was studying in Cathedral Senior Secondary School, Hazratganj in Lucknow, had on December 3, 2016 committed suicide at his home by shooting himself with his father's licenced pistol. It was alleged that the student felt humiliated following corporal punishment being given to him by the principal and the PT teacher after he was caught roaming outside the school with his friend and had met with an accident with his motorcycle ramming into a rickshaw. The plea alleged that the police has conducted a one-sided investigation in the case as the father of the deceased was a police official and had booked the school officials for abetting the suicide on presumptive grounds of causing humiliation and inflicting corporal punishment. It claimed that the friend of Yadav had made a categorical statement before the investigating officer that the deceased was not given corporal punishment either by the principal or the PT teacher. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Removal of 1,000 tons of sulphuric acid in a storage tank of the closed Sterlite plant here, a small quantity of which leaked last Sunday, was continuing, official sources said. Experts from the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, and officials of the revenue and health departments, headed by Sub Collector Prashanth, were getting the acid removed, they said. District Collector Sandeep Nanduri had said on June 17 that the leak was a minor one and there was no need for panic. Thirteen people were killed in police firing on May 22 and 23 when violence broke out at the protest by locals, demanding closure of the plant over pollution issues. The state government subsequently issued an order for "permanent closure" of the operation of Sterlite plant. Meanwhile, an advocate moved the Madras High Court bench in Madurai, seeking Rs 620 crore compensation from the Vedanta Group, which owns Sterlite, to rehabilitate those affected by the anti-Sterlite stir. Petitioner S P Vijay Nivas, in his Public Interest Litigation, also sought a compensation of Rs 10 crore each to the families of the 13 persons killed in the firing. He submitted that traders had been badly affected as they could not transact business to the tune of Rs 100 crore.Export and import from this port town were also hit, he said. Fishermen alone suffered a loss of Rs 80 crore as they could not put out to sea from May 22 to 28, he said People had been affected due to the pollution caused by by the Sterlite plant and were suffering from various diseases like cancer and asphyxia, he said. It was only to ventilate their anger that they had taken out a procession. However the police action had been brutal, for which the plant was mainly responsible, he said Hence he sought a direction from the court to pay Rs 620 crore for rehabilitating the affected people and Rs 10 crore each to the families of those killed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Sushma Swaraj today arrived in Luxembourg on the third leg of her four-nation tour, becoming the first external affairs minister from India to visit the European country. "First ever official visit by an India Minister of External Affairs! EAM @SushmaSwaraj was warmly received in the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg on her arrival," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. India and Luxembourg are celebrating 70 years of establishment of their diplomatic relations. During her stay here, Swaraj will call on Grand Duke of Luxembourg Henri Albert Gabriel Felix Marie Guillaume and Prime Minister Xavier Bettel. Swaraj arrived in Luxembourg for a two-day visit from France where she met the top French leadership and addressed the Indian diaspora at a reception organised in her honour. Earlier, she had visited Italy on the first leg of her tour. On the last leg of her tour, Swaraj will visit Belgium from June 20-23. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Crime Branch of Pune police today arrested a suspected aide of underworld don Chhota Rajan from New Delhi in the builder Deven Shah murder case. This takes the number of persons arrested in the case to seven. A team of Pune police headed by assistant commissioner (crime) Sameer Shaikh arrested Rajesh alias Pandit Agrawal from the national capital. Shah, a city-based builder, was shot dead by two men here on January 13 this year. Police initially arrested Rahul Shivtare and Ravi Chorage in connection with the killing, which was followed by four more arrests. According to police, the killing was the fall-out of a dispute over commission for a piece of land which the accused had allegedly secured for Shah. "We had received information that Agrawal was in Delhi and arrested him today. He is suspected to be associated with Rajan," said ACP Shaikh. He did not divulge Agrawal's alleged role in the killing, saying he was yet to be interrogated. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) More than 20 fighters from an Iraqi paramilitary force key to the battle against the Islamic State group were killed today in an eastern Syria air raid the United States linked to Israel. The bombing raid hit Al-Hari, a town controlled by regional militias fighting in Syria's complex seven-year war alongside President Bashar al-Assad's forces. Both Syrian authorities and Iraqi forces pointed the finger at the US-led coalition, which denied it was involved in Sunday night's attack. "We have reasons to believe that it was an Israeli strike," a US official told AFP on condition of anonymity. The raid slammed into a regime-controlled position in the border town and left at least 52 fighters dead, according to a Britain-based monitor. Among them were fighters from Iraq's powerful Hashed al-Shaabi military alliance, some of whom have crossed into Syria to fight against IS. The Iran-backed Hashed claimed that "US planes fired two guided missiles at a fixed position of Hashed al-Shaabi units on the border with Syria, killing 22 fighters and wounding 12." The bodies of three Iraqi fighters killed in the raid were returned to their hometowns for burial, said AFP's correspondent in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a total of 30 Iraqi forces were among the dead in Al-Hari, as well as 16 Syrian forces and six unidentified fighters. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Syro-Malabar Church head Cardinal George Alencherry today called on Mizoram Governor Kummanam Rajasekharan at a guest house here. Rajasekharan, who was sworn-in as the Governor of the Northeastern state on May 29, is currently on a visit to his home state. Church sources said it was a courtesy call. After meeting Rajasekharan, the Cardinal was asked about reported protests by some Christian organisations in the northeastern state opposing the appointment of the former Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh pracharak and chief of the 'Hindu Aikyavedi' in Kerala as governor of the state. Rajasekharan was also the BJP's Kerala unit president for three years before his appointment as governor. The Cardinal told reporters that he had urged the Bishop of Mizoram to cooperate with the governor in the state's development works. The Syro-Malabar Church head said he had informed the Mizoram Bishop that Rajasekharan was a leader who maintained cordial relations with all religious sections in society. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP president Amit Shah today appointed Tajmen Imna Along, the Nagaland minister of higher and technical education, as the party state president, a statement from the party said. The BJP is a partner of the ruling coalition in Nagaland along with the Progressive Democratic Alliance (PDA). Along, patron of the RSS-affiliated Janjati Shiksha Samiti, will replace Visasolie Lhoungu as the state president of the party. The state education minister came into the spotlight in March this year when he delivered his speech in Hindi in the budget session of the state assembly. A first-time legislator, Along won the Alongtaki constituency in Mokokchung district on a BJP ticket. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Several students faced difficulties in completing their admission formalities as the Delhi University's server came under severe pressure and the DigiLocker, a government-owned public cloud storage where certificates and documents were stored, was not integrated with the varsity portal yet. The website was inaccessible for quite some time, forcing the students to flock to colleges and seeking help from professors in generating forms. According to the admission rules, applicants need to study the cut-off list, select courses and colleges on the university website, take printout of the admission slip and finally approach the respective colleges with the slip and required documents. While some students and professors claimed that the website was inaccessible, a senior Delhi University official said that there was heavy traffic on the website but said that it was functioning properly. A Delhi University professor said that students were quite hassled after they were not able to generate admission slips since the website was not functioning properly. "There was heavy traffic on the website between 9.30 am and 11.30 am but later, the traffic eased...Around 1,070 students registered on the website today," said the varsity official. Students also faced problems since DigiLocker is not yet integrated with the system. "The certificates and documents stored on DigiLocker could not be accessed by the students since they are not yet integrated with our system. However, the university has given them a time of 10 days to furnish documents," said an official. DigiLocker refers to dedicated personal electronic space in a government-owned public cloud storage, where individuals can keep their documents, files or certificates. The individual is also able to download or share them online with various stakeholders as and when required and the storage space is linked to the Aadhaar of the user. The university had also changed norms for students seeking admission under the OBC category by stating that they will have to produce certificates issued only after March 31, 2018. "Many students had not read the rules properly and were confused when we did not accept their documents. We sent them to varsity officials and later they issued a clarification saying that the colleges can provisionally admit the students, who are mandated to submit the certificates within a period of two weeks," said a professor of Shri Ram College of Commerce. Delhi University yesterday announced its first cut-off list for merit-based undergraduate courses in the 2018-19 academic year, recording a drop in the minimum required marks as compared to last year. The highest cut-off this year is 98.75 per cent for BA (programme) in Lady Shri Ram College. Delhi College of Arts and Commerce has a cut-off of 98.50 per cent for BA (Hons) in Journalism, while LSR College has a cut-off of 98.25 per cent for BA (Hons) in Psychology. Last year, the highest cut-off was 99.66 per cent for B.Sc (Hons) in Electronics in SGTB Khalsa College. In humanities stream, Khalsa College had set the highest cut-off at 99 per cent for BA (Hons) in Political Science. In science stream this year, the highest cut-off is 98 per cent for B.Sc (Hons) in Physics in Hindu College. Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College also has a cut-off of 98 per cent for its B.Sc(Hons) in Computer Science course. The varsity threw open its admission portal for aspirants of various undergraduate courses on May 15. The registration for these courses ended on June 7. According to an official from the university, 2,78,544 aspirants have made payments. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Thailand has carried out its first execution since 2009, the Department of Corrections said, killing a 26-year-old convicted murderer in a move condemned by Amnesty International as "deplorable". Theerasak Longji, 26, was killed by lethal injection, six years after he was convicted of murder in Trang province. His death came with Thailand's coup leader Prayut Chan-O-Cha set to travel abroad to the United Kingdom and France. "We still have the death sentence, we have not cancelled it yet," Tawatchai Thaikaew, deputy permanent secretary at the Justice Ministry, told AFP, adding that the execution yesterday was carried out "according to the law". The Corrections Department, which oversees one of the world's largest prison populations, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935, the majority by firing squad. That practice ended on December 11, 2003. Between then and 2009 a further six inmates were executed by lethal injection, the department added. Rights groups hit out at the sudden resumption of the death penalty, which is frequently handed down by the courts for serious crimes. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Amnesty International said, accusing the kingdom of "reneging" on commitments to move towards abolition of the death penalty. The country is "also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Thousands of answer scripts of candidates who took Matric examinations, conducted by the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) this year, went missing from the strong room of a school where these were kept after evaluation, the BSEB said today. The declaration of results for Matriculation, which was scheduled for tomorrow, has now been deferred to June 26, the BSEB said in a statement released here. The principal of the school - situated at Gopalganj district - was summoned here by the BSEB and later detained by police for interrogation. The latest episode has further tarnished BSEB image which had drawn widespread condemnation in the wake of "toppers scam" when non-deserving students were declared top rankers in Arts as well science streams out of materialistic considerations in 2016. "Pramod Kumar Srivastava, the principal of SS Girls's Senior Secondary High School had registered an FIR on Sunday stating that over 200 bags, containing more than 40,000 answer scripts evaluated at the premises and kept thereafter in the strong room, were missing", SHO of Town police station in Gopalganj, Ravi Kumar, told PTI-Bhasha over phone. The SHO said that in the FIR, Srivastava had named some non-teaching staff who had been entrusted with manning the school building. BSEB Chairman Anand Kishor said "Srivastava was called to the Board headquarters here for questioning. He was later detained by the police for further questioning". Deputy SP, Law and Order, Patna, Manoj Kumar Sudhanshu confirmed the detention of Srivastava. However, both Kishor and Sudhanshu declined to divulge details of the investigation. The BSEB later issued a press note stating "the DM and the SP of Gopalganj have been directed to ensure recovery of the barcoded, evaluated answer scripts, identify the culprits and take action against them as per law". The Board also announced that the results would now be declared on June 26 but claimed that disappearance of the answer scripts will have "no effect on the overall results nor on preparation of the list of top-ranking students". "All the evaluation centres have provided the BSEB headquarters with award sheets stating the marks awarded to each candidate. Hence, we are already in possession of the respective scores of even those candidates whose answer scripts have gone missing", the BSEB release said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Three people, including the driver, were killed and six others were injured in Jharkhand's Dhanbad district early today when a car carrying them rammed into the parapet of a bridge on National Highway-2 and was left hanging on its edge, a police officer said. The accident occurred around 2.30am at Dardaha in Topchanchi police station area of the district when all nine of them, members of two families, were returning to Gujarati colony in Bokaro from a wedding in Aurangabad district of neighbouring Bihar, he said. "It seems the driver lost control on the wheels and hit the walls of the bridge. Three of them - two women and the driver - died on the spot. Six others were rescued by local people, who then took them to Patliputra Medical College Hospital," Shiv Pujan Baheli, the officer in-charge of Topchachi police station, explained. A doctor at the hospital said two of the six injured people were in critical condition. Khushboo Kumari, one of the survivors, said the driver was intoxicated. "Around 1 pm, he stopped the car to consume alcohol. When we protested, he said he had the habit of driving cars in intoxicated condition," she said, adding that most of them were sleeping when the accident happened. Baheli said the police have started an investigation into the matter. "We would be able to give further details in the case only after investigation," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor Tim Robbins, the Oscar winning star of "Mystic River" and popular film "Shawshank Redemption", will receive the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF). The honour will be presented to 59-year-old Robbins at the 53rd edition of the festival, which is held annually in July in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, the organisers said in a press release. Robbins, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role in "Mystic River" in 2003, will also present his two films "Bob Roberts" and "Cradle Will Rock" at the festival. In addition, Robbins will also appear in a special concert performance by Tim Robbins and the Rogues Gallery Band. Apart from this, director Terry Gilliam will also attend the festival to present his new film "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote", which had its premiere at Cannes. Oscar winner Anna Paquin and actor/director Stephen Moyer will present "The Parting Glass" along with screenwriter and co-star Denis O'Hare and producer Cerise Hallam Larkin. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Philippines' top court heard arguments today for the legalisation of gay marriage, a historic first in the overwhelmingly Catholic nation. Two same-sex couples denied licenses to wed urged the Supreme Court to strike down a 1987 law that states marriage must be between a man and a woman. "When the right to marry, a decision so personal, so intimate and so life-changing, is denied to LGBT people, the state is not valuing their dignity," lawyer Jesus Falcis, who is also a co-plaintiff, told justices in Manila. It took three years for the Supreme Court to schedule a hearing and the case will likely move at a glacial pace. Judges will next hear from the government's lawyers, but the court does not set itself deadlines to issue rulings and cases sometimes take years to resolve. Legal experts say the case is still highly significant. "The decision will be landmark because the court has never pronounced on this," University of the Philippines law professor Antonio La Vina told AFP, adding, "Obviously, it would be even more landmark, more historic if they say marriage is not between a man and a woman." Outside the court today, about 20 members of Manila's LGBT community waved rainbow flags and lit multi-coloured candles in support of the petition. Danton Remoto, founder of the LBGT political party Ang Ladlad (Out of the Closet) told AFP he welcomed the Supreme Court's hearing of the case. "A space has been opened up to discuss this case legally," Remoto added. The Philippines -- where 80 per cent of a population of over 100 million is Catholic -- is the only place outside of the Vatican where divorce is outlawed. Abortion is also illegal, largely due to church influence. However, the plaintiffs may have an ally in President Rodrigo Duterte, who has expressed support for gay marriage but since backed off from a campaign trail pledge to legalise it. "I am for same-sex marriage. The problem is, we'll have to change the law. But we can change the law," Duterte told a gathering of LGBT people in his southern home city of Davao in December last year. The case comes as Duterte pushes back against the country's clergy, who are at odds with some of his key policies including a deadly drug war that has killed thousands. In May, Duterte allies in the House of Representatives passed landmark divorce legislation, though it is unlikely to become law due to lack of support in the Senate. Church leaders have fought efforts to legalise divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion, while losing a long battle against a state-funded free contraceptives law. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nationwide truckers' strike enters the second day with the goods vehicles umbrella body ACOGOA today claiming that the ongoing strike has a wide impact in the northeast as it is the only gateway from West Bengal. The truckers under All India Confederation of Goods Vehicles Owners Association (ACOGOA) had yesterday proceeded on an indefinite nationwide strike, protesting hike in diesel prices, increase in toll charges and increasing third party insurance premium. However, another transporters apex body AIMTC, which had called for a nationwide strike from July 20 on the similar issues alleged that the strike was orchestrated by a small section and had no impact. "Northeast has completely gone on a standstill as it is the only gateway from West Bengal. About 30,000 vehicles moving in and out from northeast are therefore stopped ... Taking off from yesterday, West Bengal continues under complete chakka jam all over the state," ACOGOA General Secretary R S Bhasin told PTI. Bhasin claimed that in Maharashtra, the markets have reported prices of vegetables like Onion have shot up. Even Delhi today has reported stoppage of about 4,000 vehicles at Sanjay Gandhi Transport Terminal, he said, adding that in Karnataka also, the situation continues to be encouraging with vehicle movement continuing to be stopped all over. ACOGOA in a statement said that about 50 lakh vehicles were not running, which translated into losses to the tune of Rs 1,000 crore to the lorry owners. Both the bodies, All India Confederation of Goods Vehicles Owners Association (ACOGOA) and All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC), claim membership of over 80 lakh truckers each. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Trump administration today defended its controversial "zero tolerance" border policy of separating immigrant parents and their children on the US border, and alleged that Democrats do not want to have a comprehensive solution to the current immigration crisis. According to the Department of Homeland Security, under President Trump's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy, nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their parents and guardians and placed into holding facilities between April 19 and May 31 of this year. "This entire crisis, just to be clear, is not new. It's been occurring and expanded over many decades. But currently, it is the exclusive product of loopholes in our federal immigration laws that prevent illegal immigrant minors and family members from being detained and removed to their home countries," Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters at a White House conference. In other words, these loopholes create a functionally open border, she said, noting that apprehension without detention and removal is not border security. "We have repeatedly called on Congress to close these loopholes," Nielsen said. She said that in the last three months, illegal immigration on southern border exceed 50,000 people each month. Since last year, there has been a 325 per cent increase in unaccompanied alien children and a 435 per cent increase in family units entering the country illegally. "Over the last 10 years, there has been a 1,700 per cent increase in asylum claims, resulting in asylum backlog to date, on our country, of 600,000 cases," Nielsen said. Since 2013, the US has admitted more than half a million illegal immigrant minors and family units from Central America, most of whom today are at large in the US. At the same time, large criminal groups such as MS-13 have violated the US borders and gained a deadly foothold within the US, the Homeland Security Secretary said. Nielsen asserted that the Trump administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border. "We have a statutory responsibility that we take seriously to protect alien children from human smuggling, trafficking and other criminal actions while enforcing our immigration laws," she said. Asserting that there has been a long-existing policy, she said multiple administrations have followed that outline when they may take action to protect children. "We will separate those who claim to be a parent and child if we cannot determine a familial or custodial relationship exists. "For example, if there's no documentation to confirm the claimed relationship between an adult and a child, we do so if the parent is a national security, public or safety risk, including when there are criminal charges at issue and it may not be appropriate to maintain the family in detention together," Nielsen said. The system also separates a parent and child if the adult is suspected of human trafficking, she explained. There have been cases where minors have been used and trafficked by unrelated adults in an effort to avoid detention, Nielsen claimed. "In the last five months, we have a 314 per cent increase in adults and children arriving at the border, fraudulently claiming to be a family unit. This is, obviously, of concern," she said. The top Trump administration official said that she has not seen the photos of children in cages. "The image that I want of this country is an immigration system that secures our borders and upholds our humanitarian ideals. Congress needs to fix it," Nielsen said. Meanwhile, Congressman Bennie Thompson, Ranking Member of the Committee on Homeland Security, in a letter to Nielsen expressed his concern and requested more information regarding US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) recent transfer of 1,600 detainees to five federal prisons due to President Trump's zero-tolerance policy. "The Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy punishes asylum seekers and separates children from their parents at the border. Ill-prepared for the inevitable consequences of its own misguided and inhumane policy, the administration has now begun to shuffle immigrant detainees to federal prisons and place thousands of children in one or more tent cities along the border. "This administration's response to our broken immigration system, much to the fault of its own making, continues to be inhumane and un-American," he said. Senator Tina Smith called on Nielsen to resign amid families being cruelly separated at the border, which is a policy she oversees in her leadership role within the Trump administration. Democratic Leader Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who visited San Diego Immigration Detention Facilities, said that this is not an immigration issue but a humanitarian issue. It's about the children. It's also about people seeking asylum. The public outcry in the wake of images and stories of the children caught in the middle of Trump's controversial immigration policy has sparked fierce debate in the US. In a rare statement on a policy issue, First Lady Melania Trump weighed in through her spokeswoman on the immigration crisis, saying she "hates to see children separated from their families". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump escalated a growing trade war with China by unveiling plans today to impose 10 per cent tariffs on an additional USD 200 billion worth of Chinese goods. With the world's two largest economies already engaged in a confrontation long feared by markets and industry, Trump said he was pushing forward with fresh punitive measures over Beijing's "unacceptable" move to raise its own tariffs. "Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," Trump said in a statement. The US leader warned that after the new measures are in place -- on top of existing 25 per cent tariffs on USD 50 billion in Chinese imports -- tariffs on another USD 200 billion of Chinese goods would go forward "if China increases its tariffs yet again." "The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable," the president said in explaining his decision. "I have an excellent relationship with President Xi (Jinping), and we will continue working together on many issues. But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world." Trump had already warned last week of "additional tariffs" should Beijing hit back with tit-for-tat duties on American goods. Then China followed suit, unveiling 25 per cent duties on USD 50 billion in US imports -- matching the US rates. Trump moved forward with measures after months of sometimes fraught shuttle diplomacy in which Chinese offers to purchase more American goods failed to assuage his grievances over the soaring trade imbalance and China's aggressive industrial development policies. And the China trade offensive is only one side of Trump's multi-front battle with all major US economic partners. "China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology," Trump said in a statement. "Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President Donald Trump unveiled plans today to impose 10 per cent tariffs on USD 200 billion worth of Chinese goods on top of previous punitive measures over Beijing's "unacceptable" move to raise its own tariffs. "Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," Trump said in a statement. The US leader warned that after the new measures are in place -- on top of existing tariffs on USD 50 billion in Chinese imports -- punitive measures on another USD 200 billion of Chinese goods would go forward "if China increases its tariffs yet again. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on an additional USD 200 billion worth of Chinese goods unless Beijing ceases its "unfair practices", escalating a trade war between the world's two largest economies. The move followed tariffs applied last week on USD 50 billion in Chinese imports to the US. China responded by saying it would hit 659 US products worth USD 50 billion. Trump has been insisting that China has been unfairly benefitting from a trade imbalance with the US for years. In a statement yesterday, Trump said that he had ordered US Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer to identify a second tranche of goods imported from China for tariffs of 10 per cent. Trump said after the legal process is complete, these tariffs worth USD200 billion will go into effect if China refuses to change its practices. If China increases its tariffs yet again, we will meet that action by pursuing additional tariffs on another USD200 billion of goods. The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable, Trump said. However, and unfortunately, China has determined that it will raise tariffs on USD50 billion worth of United States exports. China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology, Trump said. "Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong," he said. He said China's latest action clearly indicated its determination to keep the US at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in massive USD376 billion trade imbalance in goods. "This is unacceptable...Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods, and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," he said. US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer welcomed the decision. It is very unfortunate that instead of eliminating these unfair trading practices China said that it intends to impose unjustified tariffs targeting US workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses. At the President's direction, USTR is preparing the proposed tariffs to offset China's action, Lighthizer said. China's Commerce Ministry responded swiftly to Trump's latest threat, warning that if the Trump administration followed through, China would have to adopt comprehensive measures combining quantity and quality to make a strong countermeasure. The US "practice of extreme pressure and blackmail departed from the consensus reached by both sides during multiple negotiations and has also greatly disappointed international society," it said. Trump's latest comments came hours after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused China of engaging in predatory economics. Chinese leaders over these past few weeks have been claiming openness and globalisation, but it's a joke. Let's be clear: It's the most predatory economic government that operates against the rest of the world today. This is a problem that is long overdue in being tackled, Pompeo said. Whether that's threatening our technology leadership through intellectual property theft or forced technology transfer, we are hard at ensuring that we protect American property, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two District Reserve Guard (DRG) personnel were injured in an encounter with Naxals in Chhattisgarh's Kanker district, the police said today. The face-off took place last night in a forest near Tamora village when a team of DRG was conducting a search operation along the border of Kanker and Narayanpur districts, a senior police official told PTI. The DRG squad had received a tip-off following which it launched the operation in the forest last evening, he said. When the patrolling team was cordoning off the forest area near Tamora, a gun-battle took place between the security personnel and ultras, the official said. After a prolonged exchange of fire, the rebels fled into the core forest area, he said. "Sub-Inspector Sukku Ram Nureti and head constable Pareshwar Gawde of the DRG sustained injuries in the gunfight," the official said. Reinforcement was rushed to the spot and the injured personnel were airlifted to Raipur for treatment, he said. The official said that as per the ground report, two to three Naxals were killed in the gunfight but their colleagues managed to drag the bodies inside the core forest. During the search, several Naxal related items, including bags, were recovered from spot, he said. Further details are awaited as the search operation was still underway in the region, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Haryana Police today arrested two criminals, siblings of a dreaded gangster, in a raid conducted in the state's Nuh district, police said. Acting on a tip-off, the police raided the hideout in Badli village in the hopes of catching Mushtaq, who is wanted in over 20 criminal cases in different states including the murder of an assistant police sub-inspector in 2011, they said. A police team reached the house in Punhana area at around 5.30 am but were fired upon by the criminals present on the first floor. In the shootout that ensued, two police personnel including head constable Krishan and constable Chanderpal were injured. While Krishan was shot in the head, Chanderpal sustained bullet injuries in the stomach. Both are being treated at a private hospital in Gurgaon. However, police managed to catch two criminals -- Adil and Hafiz-- both residents of Badli village and siblings of Mushtaq. "Adil and Hafiz are siblings of Mushtaq and engaged in criminal activities like theft and robbery in the area. Adil was recently released on bail. The siblings are involved in criminal activities and several cases are registered against them," spokesperson of Haryana Police said. Police teams were conducting search operations to hunt for the other criminals who were present at the hideout but managed to escape. Cases under various sections of Indian Penal Code were registered against them, the spokesperson said. All the offenders would be nabbed soon, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay today condemned the killing of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari and hoped that the authorities will spare no effort in seeking and prosecuting his killers. Bukhari, the editor-in-chief of the daily 'Rising Kashmir', was shot dead outside his office in Srinagar on June 14. Two police officers provided to him as personal bodyguards were also killed in the attack. The government has blamed militants based in Kashmir for the killings. "I condemn the murder of Shujaat Bukhari and his bodyguards," Azoulay said in a statement. "I trust the authorities will spare no effort in seeking and prosecuting the killers who were undeterred by the presence of police in their determination to silence a journalist known as a voice of moderation," the official said. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization or UNESCO promotes the safety of journalists through global awareness-raising, capacity-building and a range of actions, notably the UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists and the Issue of Impunity, the statement added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Trump administration is poised to announce its departure from the United Nations' main human rights body in its latest withdrawal from an international institution. Officials say Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will deliver the verdict on membership in the UN Human Rights Council in a joint appearance at the State Department today. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly preview the decision. Haley threatened the pullout last year citing longstanding US complaints that the council is biased against Israel. But today's announcement also comes just a day after the UN human rights chief denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The today passed with an overwhelming majority a $716 billion defence bill which among other things seeks to strengthen ties with America's 'Major Defence Partner' India. The US recognised India as a "Major Defence Partner" in 2016, a designation that allows India to buy more advanced and sensitive technologies from America at par with that of its closest allies and partners, and ensures enduring cooperation into the future. The National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) 2019, passed by an overwhelming, bipartisan vote of 85-10, is named in the honour of Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, who is battling cancer for the past several months. "This legislation continues our reform agenda and helps better position the Department of Defence and the joint force to implement the National Defence Strategy by continuing to restore readiness, rebuild capacity and modernise capabilities," McCain said. The House has already passed the bill. The two different versions of the bill now heads for a conference between the Senate and the House. Once the joint committee agrees on an identical version, they would have to be voted by the House and the Senate again before being sent to the for US President Donald Trump's assent. The Senate version of the bill authorises $5.2 billion for the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund, $350 million in Coalition Support Funds to reimburse certain nations for support provided to or in connection with US military operations and authorises $300 million to train and equip the vetted Syrian opposition to counter the ISIS terror group. The bill "expresses the sense of the Senate that the US should strengthen and enhance its major defence partnership with India". It also expresses the sense of the Senate that if Turkey purchases the S-400 air defence system from Russia, the President should impose sanctions against Turkey under the Countering America's Adversaries through Sanctions Act. The Senate bill authorises $500 million for US-Israel missile defence cooperation and up to $50 million for US-Israel counter-tunnel cooperation. In what is being described could be a major clash between the Congress and the White House, the Senate as part of NDAA-2019, reinstated trade restrictions on "Importantly, this legislation would also ensure that neither nor Huawei will be eligible for government contracts in the future. "To further prioritise our national security, I also supported the inclusion of a bipartisan CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) bill similar to what we passed in the Banking Committee to ensure that foreign investments in the US do not pose a national security risk," Senator Mark Warner said. The bill also allows a pilot programme for testing machine-based inspections in place of humans to determine the authenticity and security of microelectronic parts in weapons systems a necessary ability in an era of Chinese-made knockoffs and counterfeits. "No country has been more aggressive than China in going after American technology in sectors like aviation, robotics, new energy vehicles, and others where the US has established ourselves as a global leader. "Our bipartisan bill will give CFIUS and our export control agencies the tools they need to ensure that these types of investments don't slip through the cracks," said Senator Sherrod Brown. The NDAA also calls out China for illegally creating and fortifying islands in the South China Sea for military purposes and modernises the Committee on Foreign Investment to address national security concerns and stop China from trying to steal sensitive technology from US companies. "The NDAA counters Russia's growing aggression and influence across Eastern Europe by directing a study on permanently stationing US forces in Poland and conducting a study on Russia's malign influence around the world," said Senator Jim Inhofe. The withdrew from the Human Rights Council today, condemning the "hypocrisy" of its members and its alleged "unrelenting bias" against The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, came to to announce the decision alongside Donald Trump's top diplomat, Secretary of State Both insisted the would remain a leading champion of human rights, but for many, the decision will reflect Trump's general hostility to the world body and to multilateral diplomacy in general. The announcement came after the top UN human rights official criticised for separating migrant children from their parents who are seeking asylum after crossing into the country from But Haley and Pompeo stressed the decision had been made after a long year of efforts to shame the council into reform and to remove member states that themselves commit abuses. "These reforms were needed in order to make the council a serious advocate for human rights," Haley said. "For too long, the Human Rights Council has been a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias. Regrettably, it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded." The Geneva-based body was established in 2006 to promote and protect human rights worldwide, but its pronouncements and reports have often clashed with US priorities. In particular, the council's focus on Israeli behavior towards Palestinians in the territory it occupies on the and in has infuriated But, as Haley stressed, Washington also believes it comes up short on criticizing even flagrant abuses by US opponents like and "Countries have colluded with each other to undermine the current method of selecting members," Pompeo said. "And the council's continued and well-documented bias against is unconscionable," he said. "Since its creation, the council has adopted more resolutions condemning than against the rest of the world combined." Haley, who issued a warning a year ago that Washington would make good on its threat to leave the council if reforms were not carried through, used even starker language. "We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights," she said. UN Secretary-General said he regretted Washington's decision, adding: "The UN's human rights architecture plays a very important role in the promotion and protection of human rights worldwide." On Monday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein -- a Jordanian -- had rebuked Trump over the US practice of splitting up migrant families detained on the Mexican border. "The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable," he said. Union Minister Vijay Goel visited Mehandipur Balaji temple in Dausa district of Rajasthan today and recommended over Rs five crore for development work. Goel, a Rajya Sabha MP from Rajasthan, also held a meeting with officials at Udaipura to review work done through his Members of Parliament Local Area Development (MPLAD) Scheme funds. I have recommended more than Rs 5.50 crore for the development of the area, including Rs 3.50 crore for construction of drainage system in front of Mehandipur Balaji Temple, Goel tweeted. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor Will Ferrell is all set to star and produce a Netflix film, based on Eurovision Song Contest. The film, titled "Eurovision" and to be co-penned by the 50-year-old actor with Andrew Steele, will be set at the music competition, reported Deadline. The contest, created in 1956, pits each participating nation from the European Broadcasting Union against one another, challenging them to write and perform an original song for a live TV and radio performance. Ferrell and Jessica Elbaum will be producing the project for Gary Sanchez Productions, with Adam McKay as executive producer. Ferrell recently produced the Netflix comedy release "Ibiza", and will next be seen onscreen opposite John C Reilly in "Holmes & Watson". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP leader Eknath Khadse had raised issues of the OBC community in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly and had worked for them, NCP leader Chhagan Bhujbal said here today. Bhujbal, a former deputy chief minister, also said that he would like to work with Khadse in future. Khadse had to step down as Revenue Minister in 2016 on allegations of corruption. Khadse, believed to be a political adversary of Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, is struggling to make a come back in state Cabinet since he stepped down. Bhujbal, an accused in a money laundering case, was granted bail by the Bombay High Court in May this year after remaining in jail for more than 24 months. "Former minister Eknath Khadse had raised issues pertaining to OBCs in the state Assembly. He had worked for the cause of OBCs. In future, I will work with Khadse," Bhujbal told reporters. He recalled that late BJP leader Gopinath Munde had reacted positively on the issue of the OBC census. "I will raise the issues pertaining to OBCs in the Assembly and at other forums with the support of various stake-holders. The OBC cause is beyond politics," he said. Bhujbal, who represents Yeola constituency in state Assembly, said he had not yet decided to contest future elections. He replied in negative when asked whether he would contest the Lok Sabha elections in 2019. "I am unwell. I cannot tell you about my future course of action at this juncture. My party will decide about me on the basis of my work," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 19-year-old woman, working as a hostess in a private bus company, was shot dead in Pakistan's Punjab province allegedly by a man after she refused his marriage proposal, police said today. The incident took place in Faisalabad, about 150 kms from Lahore, a few days ago. According to the FIR, Umar Daraz, a security guard with the bus company, shot at Mahwish at the bus terminal in Faisalabad and fled. The victim's mother, Ramzana Kausar said that she had gone to see her daughter at her workplace where she saw Daraz grabbing her hand when she was returning to her hostel. Kausar said she saw Daraz arguing with Mahwish after which he fired at her and fled from the scene. She was taken to a hospital in critical condition, where she died. "Daraz wanted to marry Mahwish but she had refused," she said, adding Daraz had been after Mahwish for the last one year. "My daughter had repeatedly refused his proposal but he kept following her," she said. A video of Daraz firing at Mahwish had also gone viral on the social media. Punjab caretaker Chief Minister Dr Hassan Askari Rizvi has sought a report from police. The accused has been arrested, police said, adding that he had confessed to his crime. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) UAE-backed Yemeni government forces fought their way into Hodeida airport today, pressing an offensive that has seen some of the most intense fighting of a three-year war against Shiite Huthi rebels. The United Arab Emirates, which has US-trained troops fighting alongside the Yemeni army, said the alliance had entered the airport in Hodeida - a Red Sea port city that is a key aid hub and the entry point for three-quarters of Yemen's imports. "With the participation and support of the Emirati armed forces, the joint Yemeni resistance (army) entered Hodeida airport," the UAE state agency WAM tweeted. A Yemeni military source confirmed to AFP that troops had entered the rebel base at the disused airport on the southern edge of the city. Military sources also reported 33 Huthis and 19 soldiers killed in today's battle, bringing the death toll in Hodeida this week to 216 fighters. No civilian casualties have yet been confirmed. The battle for Hodeida has sparked fears of a new escalation of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, which is already teetering on the brink of famine. The United Nations has warned any attack on Hodeida port could cripple shipments of desperately needed aid to the 8.4 million Yemenis facing imminent starvation. Hodeida's residents are now bracing for what they fear will be devastating street fighting, as tanks and buses carrying uniformed troops roll through the empty streets of the once-bustling city. One resident, who asked not to be identified for fear of arrest, said civilians had been "banned from using their phones to take pictures and are questioned about their movements if they're seen in the streets". The rebels have also begun to dig trenches in the streets, he said. Fierce fighting in the Hodeida area has already driven 5,200 families from their homes as pro-government forces advanced up the Red Sea coast, according to the UN. The coalition launched a major offensive on June 13, dubbed Operation Golden Victory, to drive the rebels out of Hodeida, now the most intense battlefront in an already brutal war. Since Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their regional allies intervened in Yemen in 2015, there have been multiple rounds of UN-brokered peace talks, but they have all failed to achieve any breakthrough. UN envoy Martin Griffiths has been holding talks in the rebel-held capital Sanaa since Saturday to seek concessions from Huthi leaders that might avoid all-out fighting in the streets of Hodeida. Griffiths appears to have failed to make a breakthrough. Griffiths told the UN Security Council by video-conference on Monday that he was hopeful a first round of preliminary talks could take place next month, according to two diplomats present at the closed-door session. But the UN envoy flew out of Sanaa today without making any comment to journalists. The Yemeni government and its allies have insisted that the Huthis must fully withdraw from the city and turn over the port to UN supervision. The rebels have so far agreed only to share control of the port with the United Nations. The Gulf Arab states accuse their regional arch rival Iran of smuggling arms to the rebels through the port, a charge Tehran denies. The coalition held a press conference in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday to display what it said were explosives used by the Huthis in Yemen, including landmines and improvised explosive devices described by one UAE official as "a fraction of what the coalition has seized". The Yemen conflict has killed nearly 10,000 people, most of them civilians, since 2015. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their allies joined the Yemen war that year, after President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi fled into exile as the rebels overran much of the country. The coalition has helped pro-government forces to regain control of the south and much of the Red Sea coast but the rebels still control Sanaa and most of the north. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) KPMG, one of the world's "Big Four" accounting firms, has shown an "unacceptable deterioration" in how it audits top British firms and will be first to undergo special supervision, Britain's accounting watchdog said on Monday. The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) said the Big Four auditors - which also include PwC, EY and Deloitte - must act swiftly to reverse the decline in this year's audit inspection results if they are to hit targets set by the watchdog. It singled out KPMG, however. "There has been an unacceptable deterioration in ... By Tim Hepher and Michel RosePARIS (Reuters) - Airbus is in talks to rescue a plane sale to China thrown into doubt earlier this year shortly after a perceived gaffe by two European envoys over China's sensitive historical relationship with Japan, people familiar with the matter said.The Airbus talks come as France's prime minister embarks this week on a trip to Beijing and as the United States threatens new tariffs on Chinese goods. French officials cautioned there were no signs of an imminent airplane deal.State-controlled China Eastern is seeking 150 single-aisle jets like the Airbus A320 ... By Alex Lawler, Rania El Gamal and Polina NikolskayaVIENNA/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Iran said on Tuesday OPEC was unlikely to reach a deal on oil output this week, setting the stage for a clash with Saudi Arabia and Russia, which are pushing to raise production steeply from July to meet growing global demand.The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meets on Friday to set output policy amid calls from U.S. President Donald Trump and China to cool down oil prices and support the global economy by producing more crude.OPEC's de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, and non-member Russia have ... By Alex Lawler, Rania El Gamal and Polina NikolskayaVIENNA/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and Saudi Arabia are pushing OPEC and its allies to raise oil output steeply from July to meet growing demand and cover supply outages in Venezuela and Libya despite opposition from several members of the producer group including Iran."Oil demand usually grows at the steepest pace in the third quarter ... We could face a deficit if we don't take measures," Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters. "In our view, this could lead to market overheating."Novak said Russia wanted OPEC and non-OPEC to ... LONDON (Reuters) - The world sugar market is poised for two consecutive years of surplus production, following a surge in output from Thailand and India, Rabobank said on Tuesday.The global market is likely to see a sugar surplus of 10.5 million tonnes, raw value, in the 2017/18 season due to "enormous" harvests in the two countries.This was up 3 million tonnes from the group's previous quarterly forecast, with Rabobank signalling it was almost entirely due to revisions to its Indian and Thai production expectations. "These crops haven't been merely big, they have both been enormous," the ... The ICICI Bank has been under a lot of duress of late with its CEO Chanda Kochhar facing allegations of quid pro quo in sanctioning loans to Videocon Group. With Kochhar going on leave till the allegations against her are investigated by an internal panel, the reins of the second-largest private lender in India will be in the hands of Sandeep Bakhshi. He has been named the Wholetime Director and Chief Operating Officer (COO) designate by the ICICI Board. This means he will effectively become the boss after getting the green light from the regulators and other authorities. Bakhshi will hold the post of ICICI Bank COO for a period of five years. He will be responsible for all the business and corporate centre functions of the bank during his tenure as COO. During this time, he will report to bank's MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar. Till the time she is away, he will be answerable to the ICICI Bank board. Assuming office in turbulent times, Bakhshi has his work cut out for him. For starters, he will have to make investors, shareholders and regulators believe in the corporate governance standards, which are being questioned after the Videocon loan scam came to light. Bakhshi will also have to promptly deal with the stressed assets on the hands of ICICI Bank. Dealing swiftly these challenges might spell big rewards for Bakhshi. With Kochhar set to retire on March 31, 2019, Bakhshi might become the top choice for the post of chief executive. He is also the senior-most official at ICICI after Chanda Kochhar, which might help his ascension to the top job at the ICICI Bank. An XLRI alumnus, Bakshi started his professional career at a computer marketing company ORG Systems on 1983. He came to ICICI Ltd in 1986 and handled the corporate clients of the company for the northern and the eastern regions. He later moved on to ICICI Lombard in 2002 where he was responsible for business development, project appraisals, project monitoring and business re-structuring. He was appointed as MD and CEO of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company in August 01, 2010, a position he held till his latest appointment. In his stead, N S Kannan, the executive director at ICICI Bank, will now become the CEO of ICICI Prudential. Also, while Kannan will no longer be part of the ICICI Bank board of directors, Bakhshi will keep his seat at the ICICI Prudential board. Meanwhile, ICICI Bank stock slipped marginally on Tuesday following Bakhshi's appointment as the COO. The scrip had soared more than three per cent on Monday after the ICICI Board acnnounced its decision. Will the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies agree to ease the voluntary production cuts they kicked off in January 2017 and finally increase output? And by how much? These two questions have been endlessly speculated upon in the past few weeks and the answers are finally close at hand. The upcoming OPEC/non-OPEC Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) meeting in Vienna on June 22 will play a major role in determining the trajectory of fuel prices here on. According to Mint, with OPEC accounting for around 40 per cent of global production, any decision will have a wide-ranging impact on energy markets. It must be noted that OPEC's 13 (now 14) member countries and 11 (now 10) non-OPEC oil producing countries had started to withhold output in January 2017 to reduce excessive global stockpiles that had depressed oil prices since 2014. They had decided on voluntary production adjustments of around 1.8 million barrels per day, which caused global oil prices to jump from around $30 per barrel in 2016 to over $80 per barrel in May. In response, domestic fuel prices had spiralled to an all-time high. Global oil prices - and prices at home, eventually - started coming down only after Saudi Arabia, the de-facto OPEC leader, and Russia recently signalled that they are considering boosting oil supply. To be sure, the supply squeeze alone had not caused the oil price rally. US President Donald Trump's decision to re-impose sanctions on Iran also played a role - the price of the benchmark Brent crude had reportedly jumped around 4 per cent since he announced abandoning the landmark UN-backed deal. Also, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), when sanctions were imposed in 2012, Iran's exports fell by about 1.2 million b/d. "It is too soon to say what will happen this time, but we should examine whether other producers could step in to ensure an orderly flow of oil to the market and offset a disruption to Iranian exports," it added. Making matters worse, Venezuela, which boasts the world's largest oil reserves of over 300 billion barrels, is now on a six-year-long oil production decline. S&P Global Platts claims that its production of 1.41 million b/d in April was a whopping 40 per cent drop in two years, and experts estimate May production to have dipped to 1.36 million b/d. So a major agenda in the upcoming Vienna meeting is sure to be the dipping supplies from Iran and Venezuela. "To make up for the losses, we estimate that Middle East OPEC countries could increase production in fairly short order by about 1.1 mb/d and there could be more output from Russia on top of the increase already built into our 2019 non-OPEC supply numbers [1.7 mb/d]," said the IEA in its latest Oil Market Report. "However, even if the Iran/Venezuela supply gap is plugged, the market will be finely balanced next year, and vulnerable to prices rising higher in the event of further disruption. It is possible that the very small number of countries with spare capacity beyond what can be activated quickly will have to go the extra mile," it added. Given that India is the world's third largest oil importer, it will certainly be hoping for some good news this week. As per Petroleum Planning & Analysis Cell data, the average cost of the Indian basket of crude has gone up to $75.31 per barrel in May 2018, up from $69.30 in the previous month. The rising oil imports have already widened the country's trade deficit in May. Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who is scheduled to participate in the OPEC international seminar in Vienna this week, recently said that India will be pitching for "responsible" crude pricing out there. "There was a time when oil producing countries were playing a lead role. We do not want crude at $25 per barrel. But oil price should not be out of reach. Why should the price go beyond $55 to 60 per barrel? India is consistent on that. Today's oil prices are pinching us and creating problem for us. We will raise this issue in OPEC conference," he told reporters at a CII conference yesterday. "Whenever we have met OPEC members, we have told them that crude oil prices should be controlled, reasonable, responsible and should meet demand. We will raise this issue there," he added. His visit comes at a crucial juncture, when the global crude oil prices are at the highest since the peak of 2014. According to a recent statement by the oil ministry, India's engagement with OPEC is important as India sources about 82 per cent of crude oil, 75 per cent of natural gas and 97 per cent of LPG from OPEC member countries. With PTI inputs Dumping its alliance partner, PDP, ahead of 2019 elections, the BJP on Tuesday pulled out of the coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). The move will pave the way for Governor's rule in the restive state. This comes days after senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari was assassinated by militants in the heart of Srinagar city. Following BJP's decision, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti also resigned from her post. At a press conference in New Delhi, BJP General Secretary Ram Madhav, who was the main architect of agenda of alliance between the two ideologically opposite partners, said that continuing in the alliance had become "untenable" as terrorist activities were on the rise. The BJP said that the Mehbooba Mufti government failed to contain militancy and radicalisation of youth in the Kashmir Valley. "The situation in Kashmir Valley has deteriorated. Radicalisation is on rise," Madhav added. Interestingly, just last year, Madhav had claimed that militancy in the trouble-torn Kashmir was on decline. Talking to media after submitting her resignation, Mufti said PDP had partnered with a powerful party(BJP) as it had a bigger vision for the state. The main intention of this alliance with BJP was reconciliation with the masses, said Mufti. A muscular policy would not work in Kashmir, added Mufti. "We had asked for a Ramzan ceasefire to bring relief to common people. PDP's agenda of healing touch, talks with Pakistan and withdrawal of FIRs against 11,000 youth, we did everything we could from our side under this alliance," she added. The decision to withdraw from the government came a day after suspension of ceasefire in Kashmir Valley. Mehbooba Mufti is understood to have demanded extension of ceasefire in the valley. In a bid to reach out to the locals, the Centre had suspended operations against terrorist organizations during Ramzan. BJP's withdrawal from the coalition government is being seen as move to pander to its core voter base in Jammu, who felt disenchanted with certain decisions of the Mehbooba Mufti government. On several occasions BJP's local leaders had said that Kashmir Valley was being pampered at the cost of Jammu and Ladakh. Former CM Omar Abdullah has said that he is not looking to form government in Srinagar. "If we did not get the mandate to form government in 2014, then we don't have the mandate now," Abdullah said at a press conference soon after he met Governor NN Vohra. In the 89-seat J&K assembly, PDP had 28 seats while the BJP had 25 seats. Before forming alliance with PDP, the national party had included abrogation of Article 370, which grants special status to Jammu and Kashmir, in its election manifesto. Here's what has happened so far: 07:30 pm: Governor NN Vohra recommends President's rule in Jammu and Kashmir. 05:30 pm: "There was a perception that Kashmir betrays Delhi but we have proved it is Delhi which betrays Kashmir but Kashmir does not betray Delhi. There were already difficulties in being North Poles close to South Poles and finally BJP has taken the decision to end alliance for securing its interests for 2019 Lok Sabha elections," PDP Spokesman and the outgoing Public Works Minister, Naeem Akhter was quoted as saying by Rising Kashmir. 05:00 pm: This alliance was untenable since the beginning. It was an alliance between forces that never saw eye to eye on any issue but came together in an act of sheer opportunism to share the spoils of office, CPI (M) said in a statement. 04:30 pm: Omar Abdullah: We are not celebrating this break up. "I don't know what broke the camel's back but I am not celebrating this," Omar Abdullah said while addressing a press conference after the BJP pulled out of the alliance with the PDP. "Any political party should not celebrate and will not celebrate President's rule," Abdullah added. 04:00 pm: Election should be held soonest, says Omar Abdullah. Abdullah said that his party will extend "full support" for a Governor's rule in Jammu and Kashmir but added that it should go on for "very long". "Governor's rule shouldn't indefinite, there should be elections as early as possible," Abdullah said. 03:45 pm: Former CM Omar Abdullah has said that he is not looking to form government in Srinagar. "If we did not get the mandate to form government in 2014, then we don't have the mandate now," Abdullah said at a press conference soon after he met Governor Vohra. 03:40 pm: It was unnatural and unholy alliance, Sanjay Raut, Sena MP 03:25 pm: Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said that the BJP-PDP alliance in Jammu & Kashmir was nothing but 'himalayan blunder'. 03:15 pm: Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal took a jibe at BJP. "After ruining it, BJP pulls out of Kashmir," he tweeted. Kejriwal also said, "Didn't BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened?" The second part of Kejriwal's tweet referred to the BJP listing rise in radicalisation among the reasons it had decided to quit the Jammu and Kashmir government. The megacity of Mumbai may be woefully lacking quality infrastructure to live and travel for its people, but the aspirations of authorities to create next generation infrastructure and technology are sky high - which range from creating artificial intelligence clusters to Hyperloop mode of transport. A technology which is still at concept level and has not been experimented anywhere in the world. In a recent tour to the Middle East, Canada and the US to attract foreign investments into Maharashtra, the State Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and team inked a few deals that involve high level of next generation technologies. One among them was meeting with Rob Lloyd, CEO and Board Member of Virgin Hyperloop One. In February 2018, the Maharashtra Government had signed a memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Richard Branson-led Virgin Group to build the Mumbai-Pune hyperloop. Post MoU, so far, Virgin Hyperloop One has completed the pre-feasibility study for Mumbai-Pune route and the Pune Metropolitan Region Development Authority has identified land for laying a 15 kilometer demonstration track. It will be made with 70 per cent of materials and components sourced from Maharashtra. Plans are to fast track the project to be operational by 2024. Hyperloop, a conceptual futuristic transportation system, with passenger pods travelling through tubes at speeds faster than that of aeroplanes, is still in an early stage of development. So far, the fastest prototype pod has travelled only up to a speed of 240 miles per hour, in December last year, at a test run conducted by Virgin Hyperloop One at its demonstration track at Nevada desert in the US. Even Virgin Hyperloop One's plans are to begin testing full-sized Hyperloop systems by 2021. Elon Musk's Boring Company and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies are two other companies carrying out a feasibility study to start hyperloop systems. Experts say hyperloop may be a commercial reality by 2030 and it may cost about $121 million for a mile. The CM also met Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle and signed MoUs to start advanced data centres in Mumbai for deploying artificial intelligence on government data to build a common data backbone for government. Once active, this will enable citizens to access all information at one place, which also means that they will not require going to different departments for same information. He also met Greg Clark, CEO of Symantec and signed a MoU for cyber security that will enable the government to create a mechanism for effective cyber policing. In technology, one MoU was with the Network for Global Innovation (NGIN) to develop a clean tech incubator ecosystem in Maharashtra to accelerate adoption of sustainable technologies and encourage growth of trade and investment of these technologies to develop a "High Performance Innovation Ecosystem". With the Georgia Tech (Georgia Institute of Technology), the state government will do a new pilot research project to understand the consumer dynamics and consumers responsiveness to adoption of new technologies in the electricity sector in Maharashtra. Earlier, IVADO and Next AI, two artificial intelligence accelerator firms in Quebec, a predominantly French-speaking province in eastern Canada, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (moU) with the Government of Maharashtra to set up AI clusters in the state. With the news of Sandeep Bakhshi being appointed as the chief operating officer (COO) of ICICI Bank pouring in, the stock hit a fresh intra day high of 296.55 on the BSE today. The news of appointment came with the bank's MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar deciding to go on an indefinite leave to facilitate an independent probe into sanctioning of Rs 3,250 crore loan to the Videocon Group. Even as media reports continue speculation around the future of the top post at the bank, we look at how the stock has moved during all the major developments since Kochhar took charge in 2009. On December 19, 2008, the bank announced Chanda Kochhar's appointment as CEO and MD of with effect from May 1, 2009. The ICICI Bank stock closed at 85.96 level on that day. On May 1, when Kochhar took charge, the market was closed and it was a Friday. On May 4, the stock which opened at 89.11 closed 7 points higher at 96.35 on the same day. On March 15, 2016, Arvind Gupta, an investor in ICICI Bank and Videocon Group accused Kochhar of favouring the Venugopal Dhoot-led conglomerate in a letter addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The stock's closing price stood at 201.23 level on that day. Since Kochhar took charge at the bank, the stock clocked over 125% returns till that date. The letter by Gupta did not seem to deter the rally in stock price as it closed higher for six straight sessions post March 15, 2016. In fact, the stock carried on its gains to next year and closed at 255 level on March 15, 2017. On January 23, 2018, the stock closed at 362.05, its highest this year buoyed by the market rally which took Sensex, Nifty to all-time highs. Later, the stock fell off it all time highs (intra day) of 365.65 level which it touched on January 29, 2018. The matter came to light again on March 28, 2018 after the bank board countered allegations of a quid-pro-quo in sanctioning of Rs 3,250 crore loan to the Videocon Group, and backed CEO Chanda Kochhar, saying that no individual employee, irrespective of his or her position, has the ability to influence credit decision at the bank. The stock closed at 278 level on BSE that day. It had clocked nearly 212 percent gains since Kochhar took charge as the CEO and MD of the bank. The stock fell over 6% within three trading sessions (March 29, 30 and April 2) due to the controversy. It fell the most (7 per cent) on April 2 amid reports that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was set to question ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochhar and her husband Deepak Kochhar in connection with the Videocon loan case. The stock closed at Rs 261 level on the same day. Since then, the stock has been rising amid flow of negative news for the bank. Analysts said the stock had become a good buy when compared to its private peers and short covering. On Tuesday, the stock closed 0.17% lower to 292 level on the BSE. Yesterday, the stock was top Sensex gainer amid a report that its life insurance venture's CEO Sandeep Bakhshi may be appointed as interim chief at the private sector lender. It closed 3.61% or 10 points higher at Rs 292.50 level. A disgruntled customer, a Twitter interaction, and the ensuing outrage! The social media was abuzz on Monday following a bizarre conversation between telecom operator Airtel and one of its annoyed customers. Airtel would regret the manner in which its social media representatives handled religiously-sensitive comments of a customer. An Airtel DTH customer, named Pooja Singh, tagged the company's social media handle on Twitter raising complaint of a rude behaviour against one of its employees. One of the Airtel's customer care representatives, named Shoaib, assured her to look into the matter. The customer replied with concerns in dealing with this particular rep because he's a Muslim, and asked to assign her a Hindu rep. Instead of taking a tough stance against such a request, Airtel's social media team yielded to her demand and assigned Gaganjot to assist her. An Airtel spokesperson says that Airtel do not differentiate between customers or its employees and partners on the basis of caste or religion. "If a customer contacts us again for an ongoing service issue then the first available service executive responds in the interest of time. We request everyone not to misinterpret and give it unnecessary religious colour. The said customer has been responded to." For any consumer-centric company, the customer care team - at the call centre or behind the social media desk - plays a crucial role. Their biggest mandate, as one US-based back-office service provider told me recently, is customer retention - at any cost. The Airtel's social media reps did exactly just that even if it required compromising on the ethical business practice of not discriminating its customers/employees on the basis of their caste, race or religion. Meanwhile, companies specializing in customer care are bringing in new tools, including automation and artificial intelligence (AI), to get a better grip on understanding their customers. In India, telcos and financial institutions like Airtel, ICICI Bank and Wipro use specialized BPM (business process management) agencies to sort out issues of their customers. Based on machine learning, there are tools being built by BPM firms that predict the odds of losing a customer in case of dissatisfaction. These tools also suggest measures to retain the customers - by hook or by crook. Since retaining a customer is at the core of everything, basic business practices often take a back seat. Whether there's an interaction involving an actual person, or the use of intelligent assistants (chatbots), the customer care teams needs to be sensitized about issues that can cause irreparable damage to the brand. By supporting ethical practices, businesses can strengthen the brand-customer relationships. There's no denying that AI is the future for the BPM industry; in the end, a brand's reputation can be built around sound practices. 19 Jun 2018, 5:57 PM ICICI Bank CEO Chanda Kochhar to be on leave till probe is over, Sandeep Bakhshi named COO The ICICI Bank's Board of Directors has said that Chanda Kochhar, MD and CEO of ICICI Bank, will be on leave till the ongoing independent enquiry against her is completed. In its meeting, the Board also appointed Sandeep Bakhshi as the Whole Time Director and Chief Operating Officer (COO) designate. He will report to the ICICI Bank CEO. In its regulatory filing, ICICI Bank has also established that Kochhar will continue to hold the position of chief executive in the organisation. Bakhshi's tenure will be for a period of five years and his appointment is subject to regulatory approval. He will assume office on June 19, 2018, or on the date of regulatory and other approvals, whichever is later. Arun Jaitley predicts a brighter future, more jobs in detailed Facebook post He may be on sick leave and unable to attend office but that has not stopped Union Minister Arun Jaitley from actively batting for the government on the social media. He took his latest pot-shot at the opposition earlier today, tweeting that "The economy & the markets reward structural reforms, fiscal prudence, and macro-economic stability. They punish fiscal indiscipline and irresponsibility. The transformation from UPA's 'policy paralysis' to the NDA's 'fastest growing economy', conclusively demonstrates this." Jaitley's post focuses on booming sectors instead. "An analysis of the data released clearly shows that the construction sector is expanding by double digits. It is a job creating sector. Investment is increasing. Domestic investment is also increasing. The FDI is at an unprecedented level," he said, adding that the manufacturing sector is also expanding. That apart, the government had increased expenditure on infrastructure creation and rural projects. Vijay Mallya first person to be booked under new Anti-Financial Fraud Law The Enforcement Directorate has filed a prosecution complaint or a supplementary charge-sheet against liquor baron Vijay Mallya under the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act. The document has been filed before a special court under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), naming the defunct Kingfisher Airlines, UBHL (United Breweries Holdings Ltd) and Vijay Mallya under the new law. The Fugitive Economic Offenders Ordinance, 2018 aims to deter economic offenders from evading the law by remaining outside the jurisdiction of Indian courts. Central Water Commission to use Google technology to forecast floods The Central Water Commission (CWC) has entered into an agreement with Google to improve flood forecast systems and disseminate flood-related information by using technology developed by the tech giant. "The initiative is likely to help crisis management agencies to deal with extreme hydrological events in a better manner. Under this agreement, the CWC and Google will share technical expertise in various fields, including geospatial mapping and analysis of hydrological observation data," the Water Resources Ministry said.The CWC, which is an apex technical organisation in the field of water resources, will use Google technology to improve flood prediction systems and will also use tech giant's earth engine to visualise and improve flood management. Tata Nano to get another lease of life with new electric motor; Ola among first buyers The Tata Nano is all set to come in a new avatar, the all-new Jayem Neo EV. Not only that, the new Nano will also be incorporated in the cab service company Ola, where 400 units of the new car will initially be supplied. Jayem Automotive, an engineering company has supplied parts to Tata Motors for a very long time. Tata Motors announced a joint venture with Jayem Automotives Pvt. Ltd. to develop special performance vehicles. Jayem Automotives will now source the body shell and cycle parts from Tata Motors and assemble the Neo Electric in Coimbatore. Ayushman Bharat: Only half the states ready to launch scheme on August 15 On August 15, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM), almost half of the states would not be part of it. Only 12-15 states will launch the scheme that day as the others are not prepared to roll it out on time. States like UP, Bihar, Assam and West Bengal may take up another 6 months or longer to launch Ayushman Bharat. Announced in the 2018 Budget, the AB-NHPM was touted as the 'world's largest government funded health care programme' 19 Jun 2018, 10:05 PM Australian Court fines Apple An Australian court fined US electronics giant Apple Inc A$9 million ($6.7million) on Tuesday after a regulator accused it of using a software update todisable iPhones which had cracked screens fixed by third parties. TheAustralian Competitor and Consumer Commission (ACCC) sued the world's biggest companyby market value for "bricking" - or using a software update todisable - hundreds of smartphones and tablet devices, then refusing to unlockthem if the devices had been serviced by non-Apple repairers. On Tuesday theAustralian Federal Court found in the regulator's favour, saying Apple hadbreached the country's consumer law by telling some 275 customers they were noteligible for a remedy if their device had been repaired by a third party. Mi Max 3 spotted on TENNAA Details of the Xiaomi Mi Max 3 have been leaked yet again and this time viaTENNA listings. The listings do not feature images of the phone, however, theydo have the full specifications of the phone. As confirmed by CEO Lei Jun, thesmartphone is supposed to launch in July. Earlier leaks had hinted the XiaomiMi Max 3 to have an iris scanner, fast charging, and wireless charging support.TENAA authority in China has certified Xiaomi phones with model numbersM1804E4C, M1804E4T, and M1804E4A. The phone runs on Android 8.1 Oreo and islikely to be based on MIUI 10 ROM. It will feature a 6.9-inch FullHD (1080 x2160 pixels) display with an aspect ratio of 18:9. The Max 3 is listed to havean octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 SoC clocked at 1.8GHz. It clarifiesprevious rumours which said it will be powered by the Snapdragon 710. WhatsApp reveals list of devices that will stop receivingsupport WhatsApp has been a boon to people across the globe and it has been connectingpeople for almost a decade. However, the messaging app will soon stop workingon a lot of smartphones. The latest update from the messaging company hasconfirmed that a list of devices would no longer be compatible with themessaging app. Many old devices will not be able to run WhatsApp as they willfail to meet the requirements for new features that the company is coming upwith. The company said some devices will not be able to run WhatsApp withimmediate effect while other devices will lose support by end of 2018. Thecompany said in its website, "These platforms don't offer the kind ofcapabilities we need to expand our app's features in the future. If you use oneof these affected mobile devices, we recommend upgrading to a newer iOSversion, or to a newer Android running OS." https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/whatsapp-will-stop-working-on-these-devices/story/279297.html. The News in Brief Belgium Calls on Georgians Not to Seek Asylum in Belgium Belgiums Secretary of State for Asylum, Migration and Administrative Simplification, Theo Francken called on Georgian citizens not to request asylum in Belgium. Francken noted that the number of asylum seekers from Georgia in Belgium has tripled since the EU Visa free regime entered into force in March, 2017. He added that Belgium considers Georgia as a safe country and this is why Georgian citizens will not be granted asylum in Belgium. We have discussed the issue of growing asylum seekers from Georgia in Belgium. The number of Georgian citizens demanding shelter in Belgium has almost tripled, and this negatively affects the results of visa liberalization that Georgia has received. It is therefore very important that Georgians know they should not request asylum in Belgium, said Francken. He met with the Minister of Justice of Georgia Tea Tsulukiani on June 13. Tsulukiani presented the migration regulation steps planned by the Georgian government to the Belgian delegation. Discussions were held about legislative reforms, campaign against violations of visa-free regime and abuse of asylum request. ADB President Pays Official Visit to Georgia President of Asia Development Bank (ADB), Takehiko Nakao is paying an official visit to Georgia for the first time after cooperation was launched between Georgia and Bank. The Ministry of Finance stated that his visit is a clear confirmation of ADB's support for Georgia. This visit will enable Georgia to deepen and expand cooperation with the Asian Development Bank. Nakao will meet the Georgian President, Giorgi Margvelashvili, acting Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili, acting First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development Dimitri Kumsishvili, acting Minister of Regional Development and Infrastructure Maia Tskitishvili, President of National Bank Koba Gvenetadze and Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze. The Bank supports Georgia by funding in various fields including energy, municipal and urban infrastructure, rehabilitation/construction of water and sewage systems, etc. Georgia has been a member of the Asian Development Bank since 2007. The amount of funding allocated by ADB to Georgia is estimated at 2.4 billion US dollars. (By Mariam Chanishvili) The Tata Nano is all set to come in a new avatar, the all-new Jayem Neo EV. Not only that, the new Nano will also be incorporated in the cab service company Ola, where 400 units of the new car will initially be supplied. Jayem Automotive, an engineering company has supplied parts to Tata Motors for a very long time. Tata Motors announced a joint venture with Jayem Automotives Pvt. Ltd. to develop special performance vehicles. Both Tata and Jayem will work together to enhance performance and appearance of these vehicles in order to offer its customers a niche range quality and exciting products. Guenter Butschek, CEO and Managing Director, Tata Motors, said, "We are delighted to partner with Jayem, a brand known for its capabilities in concept creation and prototyping of special performance vehicles. This partnership is a step towards creating long-term relationships as a part of our transformation journey and to bring more exciting performance variants to our product range." Jayem Automotives will now source the body shell and cycle parts from Tata Motors and assemble the Neo Electric in Coimbatore. Jayem will use an electric motor of 23 HP that runs on a 48V electric powertrain. No further details about the new hatchback are known as of now. The Jayem Neo is likely to feature the Tata badge on the bonnet. This will be a big step for the hatchback as the car's petrol version sale in India has been dismal. Electric cars in India have seen a surge in demand and have already gone big scale in foreign countries. With rising fuel prices and environmental concerns, electric cars could replace petrol and diesel cars in the next decade. Ola has big plans for electric cars as well. The company plans to have about a million electric cars by 2021 which will include both electric three-wheelers and electric cars. This move can bring a lot of benefits as it will bring down the running costs of the cars. Also, it will impact the pollution levels as there will be no emissions from the exhaust pipes. More electric cars also means India will be less dependent on expensive crude oil imports. WhatsApp has been a boon to people across the globe and it has been connecting people for almost a decade. However, the messaging app will soon stop working on a lot of smartphones. The latest update from the messaging company has confirmed that a list of devices would no longer be compatible with the messaging app. Many old devices will not be able to run WhatsApp as they will fail to meet the requirements for new features that the company is coming up with. The company said some devices will not be able to run WhatsApp with immediate effect while other devices will lose support by end of 2018. The company said in its website, "These platforms don't offer the kind of capabilities we need to expand our app's features in the future. If you use one of these affected mobile devices, we recommend upgrading to a newer iOS version, or to a newer Android running OS." "If you use one of these affected mobile devices, we recommend upgrading to a newer OS version, or to a newer Android running OS 4.0+, iPhone running iOS 7+, or Windows Phone 8.1+ so that you can continue using WhatsApp," Here is the list of devices which will not be able to run WhatsApp Nokia WhatsApp will stop working on all devices running on Nokia S40 platform by end of this year. Nokia Asha series will also not be compatible with the messaging app. Current users will not be able to create new accounts neither will they be able to re-verify existing accounts. WhatsApp will also not run on Nokia Symbian S60 platform. Android All smartphones with Android 2.1 (Eclair) and Android 2.2 (Froyo) will not be compatible with WhatsApp as the App has stopped all updates. People who have Android version 2.3.7 (Android Gingerbread) will get updates for two more years. Blackberry Users with phones running on Blackberry OS, Blackberry10 and older will not be able to run WhatsApp. Windows Phone All users with Windows phones 8.0 will not be able to get WhatsApp updates this year. The messaging app is also not compatible with Windows Phone 7. iPhones WhatsApp will not work on iPhone 3GS and devices that run on iOS 6. Users with all the listed platforms will not have the option to transfer chat history to their new platforms nor will they be able to transfer chat history between platforms. However, users will get an option to send their chat history attached to an email. Xiaomi Mi A2, the awaited Android One version of the company's premium mid-range offering Mi 6X, has been making appearances every now and then in leaks and rumours. Now, the device has been spotted on Switzerland-based online retailer platform Digitec. The Swiss e-tailer has put up the device with three storage options and three colour options. The listing mentions that the device will go on sale on August 8, and the deliveries will begin on the same date. The Xiaomi Mi A2 has been listed in 32GB, 64GB and 128GB storage options. The first two options come coupled with 4GB of RAM, whereas as the last one is paired with 6GB of RAM. The 32GB variant is priced at CHF 289 (around Rs 19,800), whereas the 64GB variant will be available at CHF 329 (around Rs 22,500). The top of the line 128GB variant will come with a price tag of CHF 369 (around 25,300). The Swiss online electronics retailer has listed the Xiaomi Mi A2 in black, blue and gold colour options. The Mi A2 will replace the Mi A1 which garnered praise as the first Xiaomi device to deliver a stock Android experience, being a part of the Android One programme. Xiaomi is yet to confirm the existence of Mi A2, though. Apart from running vanilla Android instead of MIUI, the Xiaomi Mi A2 is expected to have the same design elements and specifications as the Mi 6X, which was launched in China in April earlier this year. The device is likely to be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 SoC and Adreno512 graphics processor, same as the Mi 6X. The 5.99-inch Full HD+ (2160x1080 pixels) no-notch screen seen on Mi 6X will most likely make an appearance on Mi A2. As per the listing by the Swiss e-tailer, the camera at the back of Xiaomi Mi A2 is expected to be a dual camera setup with a 12MP sensor and a 20MP sensor. The front camera will be a 20MP sensor. The phone will be powered by a 3010mAh battery and will support Qualcomm's Quick Charge 3.0. Connectivity options in the listing include 4G LTE, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5.0, USB Type-C, and no 3.5mm audio jack. Ireland will set aside some of its historically high corporation tax receipts for a "rainy day fund" it hopes will help shield its booming economy from any potential shocks in the future, a spokeswoman for the finance minister said on Monday. Ireland, which is the European headquarters for some of the world's biggest multinational companies, has seen its corporate tax swell from just under 4 billion euros in 2012 to a high of 8.2 billion euros last year. The government has already collected 267 million euros or 22% more corporate tax than it expected so far this year. That has made it the third biggest tax head in the overall code, representing 16% of all tax collected and the government now intends to use some of it to boost the new contingency reserve fund it is setting up this year. The reserve will be funded initially by transferring 1.5 billion euros from the country's sovereign wealth fund, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF), and 500 million euros a year from the exchequer for the next three years. Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said last month that he wants the "rainy day fund" to grow to 8 billion euros over the medium term. "We must be careful to base spending commitments on sustainable revenue. That is why we are setting aside some of the historically high levels of corporation tax for the purpose of creating the Rainy Day Fund," the spokeswoman said. Donohoe will outline on Tuesday how much budgetary space he has for tax cuts and spending increases in October's budget for 2019. The spokeswoman said a full application of all of that space would involve the adoption of pro-cyclical policies not appropriate to Ireland's position in the economic cycle. (Reuters) Source: www.businessworld.ie Ryanair's Irish union extended a ballot on industrial action by two weeks on Tuesday, saying its members wanted more time to consider the move, which could lead to a strike. Europe's biggest budget airline averted widespread strikes before last Christmas by agreeing to recognize trade unions for the first time in its 32-year history. But the airline, which operates in 37 countries and last year carried some 130 million passengers, has since struggled to reach agreement on terms in some countries. This has led to minor disruption in Germany and Portugal and the Irish Air Line Pilots' Association (IALPA) said it would ballot pilots if a new system for dealing with base allocations, promotions, and leave was not introduced. IALPA began the ballot last week, a letter to members seen by Reuters on Monday showed and the results were due on Tuesday. However, a memo circulated by IALPA later on Monday said it had extended the vote to July 3, giving pilots more time to consider "such an important matter" and avoiding a clash with a meeting of Ryanair's unions across Europe organized by the European Cockpit Association. "It is self-evident that Ryanair and its on-going disputes with pilots across Europe will be a feature on the agenda of the ECA Conference," it said. A spokesman for Ryanair, which this month signed its first cabin crew union recognition agreements with staff in Italy and Britain, was not immediately available for comment. (Reuters) Source: www.businessworld.ie It was announced today that 17 entrepreneurs have created new businesses and jobs over the last 9 months, thanks to the WREN Programme the Womens Rural Enterpreneurial Network. The WREN programme supports female entrepreuneurs, startups led by women or those interested in becoming self-employed through training and business development supports. The programme is operated in partnership with Ballyhoura Development, Cork Institute of Technologys Rubicon Centre and Hincks Centre for Entrepreneurship Excellence and funded by Department of Justice and Equality and the European Social Fund. It includes personal development and business skills training, one to one and group mentoring, female 'role model' sharing of experience and support, themed networking and experiential learning events, formation and facilitation of the facilitated networking sessions and a networking / business pitching event. The programme is currently recruiting for the next round of potential female entrepreneurs, which would begin the next WREN programme in September 2018 until May 2019. Speaking this week, CEO at SECAD, Ryan Howard said, "Todays showcase of 17 new companies created by women is inspirational and exciting. Over the past 9 months, the WREN participants have established diverse businesses across a number of sectors from food and hospitality to photography and craft and many have international and export potential." He added, "It is vital for rural communities that female entrepreneurship is supported and today certainly demonstrates how creative and successful these businesses can be." Source: www.businessworld.ie European Union leaders are expected to call for progress on new rules to tax companies' digital revenues at a summit next week in Brussels, according to draft conclusions of the meeting. The text, which is still subject to change, would represent an attempt to revamp the EU Commission's proposals for a 3% tax on large firms' digital turnover after many EU states opposed the plan. EU leaders, who will meet in Brussels on June 28-29 for a regular summit, will urge progress to "take work forward on the Commission proposals on digital taxation," the draft said. The Commission, the EU's executive arm, proposed in March to reform the way online business is taxed in a bid to raise more revenue from large corporations accused of paying too little in Europe by routing their profits to low-tax member states, such as Ireland or Luxembourg. Some smaller states, like Luxembourg and Malta, have immediately opposed the plan saying tax changes should be made only at global level to avoid damage to Europe's competitiveness. This argument was also supported by the bloc's Nordic countries in a joint statement this month, in which they criticized the proposed plan to tax companies on their turnover rather than profits. However, global reforms of tax rules have proved very slow in the past, and leaders will reiterate their commitment to move forward alone, if needed. "The fight against tax avoidance, evasion and fraud must be vigorously pursued both at global level (notably in the OECD) and within the EU," the draft document said, referring to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a global group of mostly rich nations, which includes EU countries, the United States and Japan. (Reuters) Source: www.businessworld.ie The online Master of Science in Legal Studies program at California University of Pennsylvania creates a wide-ranging educational opportunity for working professionals and other serious students with an interest in law and public policy. The program builds professional skills in research, critical thinking, writing and persuasion as students analyze and critique the law and explore its implications in various contexts. Thought-provoking coursework, taught by legal scholars and other subject-matter experts, positions students to advance their careers in law enforcement, criminal justice, paralegalism, business, government and other related fields where a specialized knowledge of the law is beneficial. Program Advantages: Students in the M.S. in Legal Studies program benefit from in-depth interactions with professionals from a variety of career fields. Professors have practical experience and expert knowledge of the subjects they teach. Consequently, they can provide students with opportunities for networking and partnering on research for publication in academic and professional journals. The legal studies program also partners with the FBI Law Enforcement Executive Development Association (FBI-LEEDA Inc.) to award three graduate credits for completion of all three leadership courses required for the Trilogy Award. The three credits can be applied toward completion of the M.S. in Legal Studies. Choose a concentration for your online masters in legal studies. Students in this fully online graduate program specialize their studies by choosing from one of three options: The law and public policy concentration helps students apply the principles of legal research and policy analysis to a wide variety of complex governmental policy issues. Coursework emphasizes how law and policy intersect to influence individuals, communities and our culture. helps students apply the principles of legal research and policy analysis to a wide variety of complex governmental policy issues. Coursework emphasizes how law and policy intersect to influence individuals, communities and our culture. The criminal justice concentration focuses on the practical application of law and policy within the criminal justice system. Students examine real-world legal and policy issues that impact justice agencies within federal, state and local governments. focuses on the practical application of law and policy within the criminal justice system. Students examine real-world legal and policy issues that impact justice agencies within federal, state and local governments. The homeland security concentration At Cal U, students can earn a legal studies masters degree in each of these concentrations, or complete a specialized 15-credit graduate certificate 100% online. Accelerated Degree Option Students in Cal Us legal studies program can save time and money with the accelerated B.A. to M.S. degree option. Undergraduates who complete up to 12 graduate-level credits during their senior year are positioned to move seamlessly into the masters degree program, where those courses also fulfill core requirements. The accelerated program gives students get a head start on their graduate studies and they enter the M.S. program prepared to examine practical legal and policy issues through the lens of law and public policy, criminal justice or homeland security. news, crime "He was the first man I ever killed." Accused murderer David Harold Eastman, 73, allegedly whispered this sentence alone in his Reid unit a year after Canberra's top cop had been executed. On the same day, Mr Eastman also allegedly said: "I had to kill him sitting down". The phrases were captured by police bugs, installed to spy on Mr Eastman, by detectives investigating Colin Winchester's 1989 assassination. An ACT Supreme Court jury was on Tuesday told the Crown would rely on the recordings during Mr Eastmans trial for the murder of Canberra's chief police officer. Mr Eastman has pleaded not guilty. Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Mr Winchester was gunned down as he sat in his car after he had pulled into his neighbour's driveway about 9.15pm on January 10, 1989. Mr Winchester was killed with two bullets to the head, shot at close range. Prosecutor Murugan Thangaraj, SC, completed his opening address to the jury on Tuesday morning. Mr Thangaraj said the recordings, to be used in evidence during the trial, would show that Mr Eastman would talk to himself, often in whispers, and made a number of comments relevant to the case. The silk outlined three crucial phrases he said had been admissions of his involvement. The phrases included Mr Eastman allegedly saying, "He was the first man I ever killed" and "I had to kill him sitting down", both uttered in June, 1990. The crown said this was in reference to Mr Winchester's execution while sitting in his car. The following month, Mr Eastman is alleged to have said: "I mean, about the only thing he didn't do, he didnt provide me with a bag of stones". Mr Thangaraj said this had been a reference to the Biblical tale of David and Goliath. The silk, however, warned that the quality of the recordings had been tainted by background noise, such as the radio or television. The Crown alleged Mr Eastman would utilise background noise as he had become aware of the bugs. Mr Thangaraj pointed out of the use of the television, as Mr Eastman had previously told investigators he did not watch it. Jurors were told they would be supplied with transcripts of the covert recordings, however, it was up to them to determine whether the transcription matched what was said on the bugs. Mr Thangaraj, on day two of the trial, also addressed the possibility someone else had killed Mr Winchester. He told jurors the Crown must exclude all other reasonable possibilities to prove its case. He said the police pursued many lines of inquiry during the investigation, including Mafia involvement. Mention of alleged Mafia involvement briefly closed the court. Acting Justice Murray Kellam ejected members of the public and media for about five minutes as prosecutors broached the topic. After the court reopened, Mr Thangaraj provided jurors with 21 points, including a number of coincidences, to be met if organised crime or a professional hit man carried out the assassination. These points included that the Mafia killer had used supersonic ammunition with a gun that had a silencer fitted, left cartridges at the scene, had killed the same person Mr Eastman had threatened, and had bought a gun from the same seller on the same day the accused had withdrawn cash. The trial continues on Wednesday. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/81e22872-9465-4646-9017-1f7bc5d51dbf/r0_105_3295_1967_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news When Drago Gvozdanovic's beloved dog Izzy went missing from his home on June 10, the Kambah resident was distraught. "She's a little Maltese who's 17-years-old and blind who resides in my laundry most of the time," he said. "I took her outside and was watching her when I got distracted by a phone call, and when I finished the call she was gone." Despite constantly searching the area during the day and checking with the Domestic Animal Services (DAS) and RSPCA lost pet sites, Mr Gvozdanovic was unable to find Izzy. But a phone call the next day would prove to be even more distressing. Mr Govzdanovic was told by a Canberra vet that Izzy had been brought into the clinic by DAS staff, where the vet was ordered by DAS to euthanise the dog, only 24 hours after she had gone missing. The order from DAS staff came despite DAS policy stating that impounded dogs are required to be held for seven days, with dogs either re-homed, sold or euthanised after this period. Emails seen by The Canberra Times from vet staff to Mr Govzdanovic said they initially refused to euthanise Izzy, saying despite the dog being old, she was in a healthy condition. "We do see rather a lot of stray injured and sick dogs, some of which are euthanised for humanitarian reasons, but Izzy does not seem to have been one of those," the email said "[Izzy] did not appear to be life-threateningly unwell on presentation and it was felt her discomfort could be managed." Vet staff said despite the directive from DAS to euthanise Izzy, they felt it "was not animal cruelty to care for Izzy overnight". "Records indicate that a call was made to DAS the following morning advising that [DAS] should not pick up the body as the dog had not been euthanised as per instruction," the email said. "This apparently led to a lively response from DAS demanding Izzy be euthanised on animal welfare grounds. [Staff] did not feel able to refuse in face of an insistent and demanding person from DAS and complied with the directive." Mr Gvozdanovic said he was devastated when he heard the news from the vet. "I'm deeply upset at my pet being killed, I'm just in disbelief that this is how my pet came to its end," he said. "I regarded Izzy as a member of the family. "I didn't pursue Izzy more aggressively because Izzy had been found by DAS I had seven days to get in touch, so I had faith in the process." ACT Opposition urban services spokeswoman Nicole Lawder wrote to City Services Minister Meegan Fitzharris on Friday about the situation. "Could you please advise as a matter of urgency how this sad event has taken place within hours of a much loved elderly family pet going missing," Ms Lawder wrote. In a statement, a Transport Canberra City Services spokesman said Izzy was in "poor health" with its coat "highly matted" when it was found by DAS staff. "Both DAS and the treating veterinary practice attempted to contact the owner via the details found on the microchip, however the recorded details were not current and after a number of attempts contact was unsuccessful," the spokesman said. "After further liasion between DAS and the treating veterinary surgeon, the dog was euthanised. "DAS are currently investigating the matter further, including talking with the owner." /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/d136bc15-8f4f-44e3-a6ed-8ad003280897/r0_200_3730_2307_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, crime Police have released a face-fit image of a man who they say tried to lure a child into a car in Canberra last month. ACT Policing said the man was driving an old, white sedan with several scratches and dents on the panels when he approached a child on Kitchener Street, Garran, about 8.25am on Friday, May 25. The man allegedly offered the child a lift, but the child refused and ran from the area to tell their parents. The man is described as Caucasian in appearance, 30-40 years old and of medium build. He was unshaven, had a deep voice and a red and green tattoo on his right wrist/lower forearm. He was wearing a black beanie and dark jacket with the sleeves rolled up. Police are urging anyone with information or dash-cam footage that could help with their investigation to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000, or via the Crime Stoppers ACT website. Information can be provided anonymously, quoting reference number 6269577. Police encouraged everyone to remind children of the importance of stranger safety, and to report any unusual approaches by calling 131 444, or 000 in emergencies. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/8356d0ab-f55b-45b8-a867-cd415f91a23a/r0_336_751_760_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news A multi-use development with up to 1200 apartments across four buildings is planned to take over a car park in Canberra's city centre. As reported in The Canberra Times in March, Barry Morris' Morris Property Group signed a deal to buy the block from Mirvac, which bought the site from the ACT government in a joint venture with Leightons for $93 million in 2007. The Morris group purchase settled for $85 million on Monday. The estimated $500 million development, designed by Sydney-based architects FJMT Studio, will be built in four stages, with the first to focus on the section bounded by Vernon Circle, Edinburgh Avenue and an extension to Knowles Place, Mr Morris said. However, a works approval application, similar to a development application, is yet to be submitted to the National Capital Authority for the development on Section 100, formerly known as Block 12 Section 63. A works approval was lodged on Monday for a temporary two-storey building, which Mr Morris said would be used as a display suite. The first stage of the development will be broken down into four parts at eight storeys high, each with about 90 units. There will also be 500 square metres of retail space, public car park for 750 cars plus parking for the associated units. The undeveloped 2.6-hectare site has been used as a car park for a decade. "There is a requirement under the deed of agreement with the territory to provide 750 public available parking spaces," Mr Morris said. "So across the first stage, there will be about 1300 car spaces in total. "A requirement of purchasing the site is that the first stage must include the public car parking space and then well roll the other stages out." Mr Morris said parking would be across three levels; ground, and basement level one and two. Also part of the agreement, Morris Property Group must extend Edinburgh Avenue to Vernon Circle, the same way Constitutional Avenue meets with Vernon Circle on the opposite side. The extension would divide the car park, separating a smaller part that Mr Morris said was owned by the territory. In the 2018 budget, the government announced it would release the block which would then make way for another 350 apartments as part of the City to the Lake project. Mr Morris said the extension would involve bringing services to the site, including sewer, stormwater and fire services. The second stage will focus on the corner of Edinburgh Avenue and London Circuit and will see an 18-storey building with 350 units and 700 square metres of retail space. It will also have three levels of basement car parking just for residents. Mr Morris said the third and fourth stages had the potential to be either residential, with about 250 units in each, or commercial office buildings of about 20,000 square metres. He said the buildings in stages three and four had the larger retail space and hoped to include a 1500-square-metre supermarket with other retail and restaurants facing London Circuit. "If it was all residential there will be 1200 apartments but if we went commercial and apartments it would be about 700 apartments and 40,000 square metres of commercial office space." Mr Morris said a hotel was not on the cards. Work on the site is expected to start early next year. Mr Morris said the first stage was "large scale" and would take a minimum of two years to build, and depending on the third and fourth stage could be about five to six years until completion. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/45031cb3-f941-41e9-807b-ee318f8a119a/r0_97_3062_1827_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, act-politics The Canberra Institute of Technology will close its Woden campus this year, with the future of the site up in the air. The closure was foreshadowed in 2015, after the Tuggeranong campus opened in November. In budget estimates on Tuesday, Higher Education Minister Meegan Fitzharris said the CIT Board recently recommended the campus close soon. About 130 students and staff remain at the campus. Students and staff were gradually relocated to CIT's other campuses in 2015 and 2016. CIT's music program will be the last department to move, with the faculty heading to a refurbished section of CIT Reid in the second semester of this year. Its students will continue to be trained in workplaces across Woden, including the Canberra Hospital. The closure is part of the training institute's campus modernisation strategy, which sees it shed surplus assets and expand its footprint online. Ms Fitzharris said the government was yet to decide what would be done with the site, but it would remain zoned for community use. "In terms of the future use of that site, that is not being determined except for the fact it will remain a community space. Exactly what that means will be the subject of further work and consultation over the next six months particularly," Ms Fitzharris said. Ms Fitzharris said CIT were looking at ways to expand their reach across Canberra, but added "it's not likely to be a physical presence". She said while there were no university campuses on the south side, Canberra was "incredibly well-serviced" in the field of tertiary education for a city of 400,000 people. Chair of the CIT Board Craig Sloan said there would be no loss of courses or jobs because of the closure. "It's not like we've got thousands of staff sitting on that campus at the moment because it's surplus to our needs," he said. "Part of the campus modernisation strategy was always going to be reducing our footprint and doing multi-storey purpose built facilities rather than occupying such a large space on our current site. "We are working with the minister and government to transition that land back to the government for their consideration of what to do with it in the future." Woden Valley Community Council president Fiona Carrick said she would like the site to remain in community hands. "There are various groups keen to use it, playgroups, gymnastics, the University of the Third Age," Ms Carrick said. "Woden is densifying and should we ever need to open up Chifley Public School again there are lots of community organisations in there, the YMCA, they could go to the old CIT site." Ms Carrick said the proximity of the campus to the hospital could also be a plus. "It's right next to the Canberra Hospital so they could use the site for health and education organisations that complement it," she said. The closure comes amidst falling student numbers. CIT fell nearly 2000 enrolments short of its 2017-18 targets and its 2018-19 targets are only 500 students higher at 11,700. However CIT chief executive Leanne Cover also ruled out the closure of other CIT campuses at Reid, Fyshwick, Tuggeranong and Bruce. Chief Minister Treasury and Economic Development Directorate deputy-director general Kareena Arthy said there were growing opportunities with the memorandum of understanding between CIT and UNSW, including for student housing on the Reid site. "We're looking very much about what facilities are required to support a significant student base on there and certainly part of that consideration is the provision of student facilities and student accommodation," Ms Arthy said. "That is one of the major attractions for the site that is now occupied by CIT and the car park opposite, it provides incredible opportunities for a greater bank of student accommodation within the city precinct." However Mr Sloan said they had been "very focused on protecting CIT's brand" during the negotiations. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/e67f17a9-5afb-48c4-8999-9eac0b004b49/r3_0_1996_1126_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, act-politics Unions say calls to reform the ACT's lease variation charge are an attempt to grab more "free money" from the ACT government. Unions ACT secretary Alex White came out swinging, after the construction and property sector said the current change of land use charge lacked "transparency and certainty". The territory government raised the charge to change the use of land from a house block to a strata title from $7500 a unit for the first three units and $5000 a unit after that to $30,000 in last year's budget. But despite the hike, the tax raised $14.7 million less than predicted last year. Master Builders Association ACT chief executive Michael Hopkins said government should introduce a fixed charge on developments to provide more "certainty" about the level of tax to be raised. Property Council ACT executive director Adina Cirson argued levying the charge up front would provide more "certainty" to both developers assessing the feasibility of a project and the government when forecasting revenue. But Mr White said the construction and property sectors were getting a great deal regardless of the tax hike. "The lease variation charge and its predecessor is one of the ways the public can realise the value the improvements and investments public money makes to local areas," Mr White said. "The reason why developers want lease variations because the property is worth more and 99 times out of 100 it's because government invested in beautification and infrastructure, not private investors." Mr White said it was "pretty rich" for the property and construction sectors to call for more tax cuts when they had also been at the forefront of lobbying for $80 billion worth of company tax cuts federally. He said the lease variation take was always smaller than budgeted for because of the number of concessions the government gave out. The ACT government failed to meet repeated deadlines last week for figures around lease variation charge concessions for the last financial year. However the 2015-16 annual budget shows planning officials gave five partial waivers at 55 per cent and one full waiver. Mr White also said the government did not check that developments granted concessions on environment and social grounds actually matched what was expected of them. "I'm not saying every development doesn't meet the standards, I'm saying no one has checked," he said. "We don't know how much money could have gone to fund more nurses, more walk-in centres and housing affordability instead." The charge has been criticised as deterring infill, despite government saying it wants more people to live in established suburbs. Last year's increase prompted developers to file 147 applications for lease variations between June 6 and June 30. By comparison, a total of 243 development applications with lease variations were filed in 2016-17. Chief Minister Andrew Barr has said he will not consider revoking the charge, despite sustained pressure to do so. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/851f1bf9-797f-4a66-8503-2f5e22cc3771/r0_17_320_198_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus O.Kravchenko meets the designated Ambassador of Poland 19-06-2018 On June, 18, 2018 the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Republic of Belarus, Oleg Kravchenko, met the designated Ambassador of the Republic of Poland to the Republic of Belarus, Artur Michalski. During the meeting a wide range of bilateral issues were discussed. The sides noticed with satisfaction progress achieved in bilateral political contacts and parliamentary relations as well as increase and balanced character of trade turnover between Belarus and Poland. It was agreed to further promote the improvement of trust and mutual understanding between both countries and to increase level and practical impact of bilateral contacts. The parties discussed bilateral events, scheduled for 2018-2019 and highlighted priorities in bilateral agenda. print version 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. FPI Management, a property company in California, wants to hire dozens of people. Factories from New Hampshire to Michigan need workers. Hotels in Las Vegas are desperate to fill jobs. Those employers and many others are quietly taking what once would have been a radical step: Theyre dropping marijuana from the drug tests they require of prospective employees. Marijuana testinga fixture at large American employers for at least 30 yearsexcludes too many potential workers, experts say, at a time when filling jobs is more challenging than its been in nearly two decades. It has come out of nowhere, said Michael Clarkson, head of the drug testing practice at Ogletree Deakins, a law firm. I have heard from lots of clients things like, I cant staff the third shift and test for marijuana. Though still in its early stages, the shift away from marijuana testing appears likely to accelerate. More states are legalizing cannabis for recreational use; Michigan could become the 10th state to do so in November. Missouri appears on track to become the 30th state to allow medical pot use. And medical marijuana users in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island have won lawsuits in the past year against companies that rescinded job offers or fired workers because of positive tests for cannabis. Before last year, courts had always ruled in favor of employers. The Trump administration also may be softening its resistance to legal marijuana. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta suggested at a congressional hearing last month that employers should take a step back on drug testing. We have all these Americans that are looking to work, Acosta said. Are we aligning ourdrug testing policies with whats right for the workforce? There is no definitive data on how many companies conduct drug tests, though the Society for Human Resource Management found in a survey that 57 percent do so. Nor is there any recent data on how many have dropped marijuana from mandatory drug testing. But interviews with hiring executives, employment lawyers and agencies that help employers fill jobs indicate that dropping marijuana testing is among the steps more companies are taking to expand their pool of applicants to fill a near-record level of openings. Businesses are hiring more people without high school diplomas, for example, to the point where the unemployment rate for non-high school graduates has sunk more than a full percentage point in the past year to 5.5 percent. Thats the steepest such drop for any educational group over that time. On Friday, the government is expected to report another robust jobs report for April. Excluding marijuana from testing marks the first major shift in workplace drug policies since employers began regularly screening applicants in the late 1980s. They did so after a federal law required that government contractors maintain drug-free workplaces. Many private businesses adopted their own mandatory drug testing of applicants. Other Drugs Most businesses that have dropped marijuana tests continue to screen for cocaine, opiates, heroin and other drugs. But James Reidy, an employment lawyer in New Hampshire, said companies are thinking harder about the types of jobs that should realistically require marijuana tests. If a manufacturing worker, for instance, isnt driving a forklift or operating industrial machinery, employers may deem a marijuana test unnecessary. Employers are saying, We have a thin labor pool,' Reidy said. So are we going to test and exclude a whole group of people? Or can we assume some risks, as long as theyre not impaired at work? Yet many companies are reluctant to acknowledge publicly that theyve dropped marijuana testing. This is going to become the new dont ask, dont tell,' Reidy said. In most states that have legalized marijuana, like Colorado, businesses can still, if they wish, fire workers who test positive. On the other hand, Maine, which also legalized the drug, became the first state to bar companies from firing or refusing to hire someone for using marijuana outside work. Companies in labor-intensive industrieshoteliers, home health care providers, and employers with many warehouse and assembly jobsare most likely to drop marijuana testing. By contrast, businesses that contract with the government or that are in regulated industries, like air travel, or that have safety concerns involving machinery, are continuing marijuana tests, employment lawyers said. Federal regulations require the testing of pilots, train operators and other key transportation workers. Dropping marijuana testing is more common among employers in the nine states, along with the District of Columbia, that have legalized pot for recreational use. An additional 20 states allow marijuana for medical use only. But historically low unemployment is driving change even where pot remains illegal. After the Drug-Free Workplace Act was enacted in 1988, amid concerns about cocaine use, drug testing spread to most large companies. All Fortune 500 companies now engage in some form of drug testing, according to Barry Sample, a senior director at Quest Diagnostics, one of the largest testing firms. In Denver, in a state with just 3 percent unemployment, 10 percent of employers that screen for drugs had dropped marijuana as of 2016, according to a survey by the Employers Council, which provides corporate legal and human resources services. Its because unemployment is virtually nonexistent in Colorado, said Curtis Graves, a lawyer at the council. People cannot afford to take a hard line against off-duty marijuana usage if they want to hire. Thats particularly true in Colorados resort areas, where hotels and ski lifts are heavily staffed with young workers, Graves said. They can lose their jobs and walk across the street and get another one. FPI, a property management firm in San Francisco that employs 2,900 around the country, from leasing managers to groundskeepers, has dozens of jobs listed on online boards. Its ads say applicants must pass a full background check and drug screening. But it adds, As it relates to marijuana use, FPI will consider any applicable state law when dispositioning test results. FPI didnt respond to requests for comment, which isnt unusual given that companies that have dropped marijuana tests arent exactly billboarding their decisions. Most still seek to maintain drug-free workplaces and still test for harder drugs. Theyre pretty hush-hush about it, Graves said. AutoNation, which operates dealerships in 17 states, is one of the few that have gone public. The company stopped testing for marijuana about a year ago. Marc Cannon, a company spokesman, said it did so mostly in response to evolving public attitudes. But it also feared losing prospective employees. The labor market has tightened up, Cannon said. AutoNation heard from other business leaders, Cannon said. They said things like, Were doing the same thing; we just didnt want to share it publicly. Relaxed attitudes among employers are spreading from states where recreational marijuana is legal to those where its lawful only for medical use, such as Michigan and New Hampshire. Janis Petrini, who owns an Express Employment staffing agency in Grand Rapids, Mich., said that with the areas unemployment rate below 3 percent, employers are growing desperate. Some are willing to ignore the results of drug tests performed by Express, which still screens for marijuana and wont place workers who test positive. We have had companies say to us, We dont worry about that as much as we used to, Petrini said. We say, OK, well, we are still following our standards.' One of Reidys clients, a manufacturer in New Hampshire, has dropped marijuana testing because it draws some workers from neighboring Massachusetts and Maine, which have legalized pot for recreational use. Another client, which runs assisted living facilities from Florida to Maine, has stopped testing its housekeeping and food service workers for marijuana. The stigma surrounding marijuana use is eroding, compounding pressure on employers to stop testing. Sixty-four percent of Americans support legalizing pot, a Gallup poll found, the highest percentage in a half-century of surveys. In Las Vegas, where recreational use is legal, marijuana dispensaries look almost like Apple stores, said Thoran Towler, CEO of the Nevada Association of Employers. Many high-tech companies have been moving from California to Nevada to escape Californias high costs, and theyre seeking workers. Towler said the most common question from his 400 member executives is, Where do I find employees? He estimates that roughly one-tenth of his groups members have stopped testing for marijuana out of frustration. They say, I have to get people on the casino floor or make the beds, and I cant worry about what theyre doing in their spare time, Towler said. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. By 2025, Volvo plans to utilise a minimum of 25 per cent of recycled plastic in every new car. To present its future plans to the world, the Swedish car manufacturer revealed a specially built version of its XC60 T8 plug-in hybrid SUV. The vehicle looks identical to the existing model, but has received several recycled plastic components. The SUV was showcased at the Ocean Summit during the Gothenburg Volvo Ocean Race stopover. The special Volvo XC60 on display features a tunnel console made from renewable fibres and plastics from discarded fishing nets and maritime ropes. On the floor, the carpet contains fibres made from PET plastic bottles and a recycled cotton mix from clothing manufacturers offcuts. The seats also use PET fibres from plastic bottles. Moreover, used car seats from old Volvo cars were used to create sound-absorbing material under the car bonnet. Speaking on the occasion, Hakan Samuelsson, President and CEO of Volvo Cars said, Volvo Cars is committed to minimising its global environmental footprint. Environmental care is one of Volvos core values and we will continue to find new ways to bring this into our business. This car and our recycled plastics ambition are further examples of that commitment. Adding to it, Martina Buchhauser, Senior Vice President of Global Procurement at Volvo Cars said, We already work with some great, forward-thinking suppliers when it comes to sustainability. However, we do need increased availability of recycled plastics if we are to make our ambition a reality. That is why we call on even more suppliers and new partners to join us in investing in recycled plastics and to help us realise our ambition. Volvo cars is also encouraging industry suppliers to work closely with car manufacturers to develop next-generation components that are as sustainable as possible, especially with regards to incorporating more recycled plastics. Volvo XC60 60.89 Lakh Onwards Volvo | XC60 | Volvo XC60 Photo: Contributed Head to one of this summers career fairs, and youll see the usual mix of mostly tourism, agriculture, and retail industries clamouring for new workers. However, another organization is popping up this year along with the hotel chains and big-box stores, and its one you likely wont expect. The Shambhala Music Festival has been hitting the career fair circuit hard this year as it looks to fill thousands of vacancies across just about every type of profession. Each year, Shambhala builds and dismantles what is essentially an entire business organization, thousands of employees strong, over the course of just a few months. This year, the festival will hire 2,800 people as it builds six unique departments from the bones of last years crew. By the time the week of the festival hits, the campus will have grown into the largest city in the West Kootenays. That means we have to have all the infrastructure that a city has: the fire department, the hospital, civil services, basically whatever we need to run a city, Nicole Seaboyer, the festivals director of human resources says. For more on Shambhala's recruitment, including why they're butchering cows on their campus, check out the full story on Castanet's sister business news website Okanagan Edge. Photo: CTV A British Columbia man's Facebook posts allegedly threatening violence in support of the Islamic State group provide enough evidence to suggest he poses a security risk to Canada and should be deported, an official for the Canada Border Services Agency says. Othman Hamdan's lawyer has argued his client's online views amounted to freedom of expression as guaranteed by the charter. Randal Hyland, a hearings officer for the border services agency, told an admissibility hearing of the Immigration and Refugee Board on Monday that Hamdan's praise and encouragement of martyrdom and so-called lone-wolf terrorist attacks mean he could incite others to commit such offences. The Jordanian national came to Canada in 2002 after living in the United States. He was arrested at his home in Fort St. John, B.C., in 2015 and charged with multiple terrorism offences related to 85 Facebook posts. A B.C. Supreme Court judge acquitted Hamdan last September citing insufficient evidence, but immigration authorities arrested him and have determined at 11 detention review hearings that he poses a threat to the public. Hyland said Hamdan's violent mindset extended beyond his views on Facebook starting in 2014, adding he lashed out at the social media giant in a letter, saying its employees would be harmed because his accounts were deleted. He said Hamdan also told a cell mate he would attack RCMP personnel and bomb the force's headquarters in Surrey, B.C., after officers translated his posts, which were in Arabic and English. In May, an RCMP officer told Hamdam's hearing about two translated Arabic posts in which Hamdan discussed infrastructure in Canada, including a dam in Revelstoke, B.C., and a bridge near Nipigon, Ont., suggesting they were weak targets. Hyland, who made submissions on behalf of Public Safety Canada, said that despite his acquittal, Hamdan's threats of violence should be taken seriously. Photo: CTV A Vancouver entrepreneur has a novel idea to build more laneway homes in the city. Duane Laird is offering to build the second homes for free if you sign a deal giving him control of the property for 12 years. He'll then rent out the homes and return them to the property owner free and clear after that period. "If I can get someone's backyard for 12 years, I can profitably build a laneway house, rent it out for 12 years, and then give it back to the person that owns the property," he told CTV. Laird estimates it would cost $100,000 to $125,000 to build each prefab 500-square-foot home. They would rent for $1,200 to $1,500 a month an attractive price in Vancouver's hot rental market. The owners would also have the option to buy Laird out for the cost of the build at any point. "We're not looking to gain market value," he said. But at least one realtor says many homeowners have seen their properties rise in value so much, they would already have the equity to finance the projects themselves. Aaron Jasper said that way, the owner reaps the benefits immediately. Laird says several investors and potential clients have already expressed interest. with files from CTV Vancouver Photo: CTV/Jason James A BC ferries passenger was rescued near Bowen Island Tuesday morning after going overboard. BC Ferries says a rescue boat was deployed to retrieve the man after he went into the water during the 8:45 a.m. sailing of the Queen of Cowichan between Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver and Departure Bay in Nanaimo. The man did not suffer serious injuries, but was cold, a Ferries spokesperson said. A Coast Guard hovercraft was also sent to the scene. It's not yet known how the man ended up in the water. The incident delayed the voyage by about an hour. with files from CTV Vancouver Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Belarus O.Kravchenko meets Minister of Justice of Brazil 19-06-2018 On June 19, 2018 the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, Oleg Kravchenko, met with the Minister of Justice of Brazil, Torquato Jardim, during the first Brazilian high-level visit to Belarus. During the meeting, the sides discussed relevant topics of actual bilateral interaction, in particular, expansion of legal framework. The Belarusian side expressed hope for further cooperation in this direction in order to establish a closer dialogue and strategic partnership at all levels. print version When Prince Harry married Meghan Markle, many people rejoiced at the woman they celebrated as the first black princess. Markle, the child of an African American mother and a Caucasian father, looks to some like a milestone. And yes, they royal family has presided over centuries of slavery and colonialism. However, that designation might not ring exactly true, for a variety of reasons. No. 7 might sound picky, but it bears repeating. 1. Some historians say mixed-race marriages did happen According to some historians, mixed-race marriages among European royalty did not come as uncommon as you might think. Throughout history, racism within the royal family and European society meant those who could pass as white would often do so. For that reason, historians think some might not have stayed totally honest about their heritage. And given the society at the time, we also understand why. 2. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz came from African heritage Historian Mario Valdes claims that Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who married Britains George III in 1761, had African heritage. He posits she carried the same lineage as Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a black member of the Portuguese royal family. During her reign as queen consort, critics mocked her as having a true Mulatto face. Sir Walter Scott once wrote that Charlottes family looked like ill-colored, orang-outang looking figures. Valdes maintains that Charlotte had dark skin and features consistent with African descent. 3. Some historians believe alternate theories Other historians say that accounts of Charlottes looks did not actually indicate her real heritage, but that critics used stereotypes to insult her looks. The generational distance between Charlotte and her presumed African forebear is so great as to make the suggestion ridiculous, wrote The Guardians Stuart Jeffries. Furthermore, they say even the evidence that [her Portuguese relative] was black is thin. 4. Archduchess Le von Habsburg-Lothringen of Hungary is black While Markle may or may not rank as the first mixed-race British royal, she would not hold the title as first black princess. Archduke Franz Ferdinand von Habsburg-Lothringen, of Hungary, married an African-American lawyer. His wife, Archduchess Lei von Habsburg-Lothringen, has also not seen her race really affect her position. For the modern Habsburgs, the archduke told The New York Times, the importance of who your wife is, is more about whom you have fallen in love with than how they fit into the aristocratic family. 5. Interracial royal marriage says something to children For the archduchess, her position doesnt fall right in line with the Disney ideal. She believes that all children, especially children of color, should fantasize about doing anything, crown or no crown. Its not an American princess fantasy, but an American opportunity fantasy, she said, of her life. Sometimes, in our communities, we dont get across that all children children of color have a right to experience everything in the world. If you are standing in a castle at a black-tie affair next to your husband, you belong there. 6. Many other African princesses exist In addition to the Hungary couple, other European royal families also feature non-white members. Prince Maximilian of Liechtenstein married Angela Gisela Brown, an Afro-Panamanian from New York City. Christian Louis, Baron de Massy of Monaco, also married a woman from Guadeloupe. While certainly the most famous, at least in the United States, the UK does not have the market cornered on monarchies. Non-white monarchies reign across the world, so to consider Markle the first black princess actually sounds a little ethnocentric. 7. She likely wont become a princess at all Because of her husbands position, Markle also probably will remain a duchess. That means she will get to live as part of the royal family, but a princess? Probably not so much. While she can still serve as a role model to children especially children of color everywhere the black princess idea doesnt quite fit. Well settle for loving Markle for her civil rights work and great fashion sense, and leave the black princessing to the real ones. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un finally had their historic summit in Singapore, where Trump made history by becoming the first sitting president to meet with a North Korean leader. Plenty of interesting things happened at the summit and gave us a glimpse inside the minds of the American president and the North Korean dictator. Even the outfits that the two leaders showed up in revealed plenty about their intentions and their personalities, too. Read on to discover the biggest revelations made by what Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un chose to wear to the historic summit. 7. Kim Jong Un wants to maintain North Koreas socialist identity The biggest clue: His suit Kim Jong Un almost always wears the same kind of suit. Racked reports that Kims signature long black jacket with a short, stiff collar is called a Mao suit, after Mao Zedong, who popularized the style and linked it irrevocably to communism. Kim isnt the only communist leader who wears the style today. But he seems to wear it to link his own image to his grandfathers. Instead of opting for the western suit hes worn on some occasions, Kim stuck with the Mao suit for his summit with Trump. USA Today reports that Kims choice of suit indicates he wants to maintain his countrys socialist identity though hes now pushing to improve ties with the outside world. And as Racked reported of another recent occasion when Kim wore the Mao suit, He was making it clear that North Korea has its own distinctive identity. 6. But Kim wants to step out of the shadow of his predecessors Telltale sign: His lack of badges All North Koreans Kim Jong Un included are supposed to wear lapel pins with the images of Kims late father and grandfather. But as USA Today reports, Kim has recently appeared without the obligatory pins. And he also left them behind when he appeared with Donald Trump at the summit in Singapore. As you might guess, the omission definitely means something. USA Today explains, Analysts say Kims no-badge appearance may reflect his push to open a new era by staying out of the shadows of his predecessors. 5. Donald Trump was OK giving North Korea a PR win Dead giveaway: His tie If the entire notion of a face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong Un didnt already send the message loud and clear, Donald Trump seemed to use his accessories to show that he felt just fine about giving North Korea a major PR win. The president wore his standard navy blue suit and cherry red tie, with a small American flag pin on his lapel. That sounds innocuous enough. But as Racked reports, The look was very much of a piece with the alternating American and North Korean flags that provided the backdrop for Trump and Kims joint photo op, a controversial display that could be construed as a big PR win for Pyongyang. The row of U.S. and North Korean flags side-by-side at the summit seemed to cast the U.S. and North Korea as peers, Quartz reports, already a problematic visual. 4. Trump also doesnt care to conform to suiting standards The biggest clue: The wrinkles in his suit Racked points out that its unlikely that Donald Trump was trying to send a particular message with the way he styled his suit for the summit. But that communicates something about him, too. So the wrinkles in his suit and the crooked knot in his tie actually reveal something about him and the way he approached the historic summit. (Such as how he said that he didnt have to prepare much for his meeting with Kim Jong Un.) A perfectly pressed suit would have signaled some kind of deference for the occasion, and thats not Trumps game, Racked explains. He doesnt conform with suiting standards and he doesnt adhere to diplomatic norms or to presidential norms generally. A slightly off-kilter suit is classic Trump. 3. Kim Jong Uns eyesight may be deteriorating Dead giveaway: His glasses The New York Times reports that unscripted moments stole the show at the summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. One example? Kim entered the hotel where the summit was held first. Although he is revered as a near deity at home, he is still less than half Mr. Trumps age, and in Korean culture, respect comes with age, the Times notes. The person who enters a site last is also the one with the higher status. Despite his youth as compared to Trump, Kim was the only one of the pair wearing glasses. USA Today reports that Kim often wears horn-rimmed glasses, leading South Korean media to speculate that Kims sight may have deteriorated due to diabetes caused by obesity and that hes likely short-sighted. 2. Trump thought he looked better than Kim Telltale sign: His wrinkled suit and his comment to photographers Another potential explanation for Donald Trumps choice to skip pressing his suit or double-checking his tie? He probably thought that he would look better or at least photograph better than Kim Jong Un, despite the wrinkles. As USA Today reports, Trump made an apparent fat joke at Kims expense when he asked photographers snapping pictures of the two leaders, Getting a good picture, everybody? So we look nice and handsome and thin and perfect? USA Today adds that Video of the moment then shows the camera panning to Kim as he listens to the translation. Our interpretation of Kims facial expression and body language? Lets say he wasnt bursting with pleasure. 1. Kim Jong Un is self-conscious about his height Dead giveaway: His shoes Donald Trump reportedly measures up at 6 feet 3 inches tall, while Kim Jong Un reaches a more modest 5 feet 7 inches. But you would have never guessed that by looking at official photographs of the two leaders, in which Kim looks suspiciously tall. If you believe the rumors, Kim was wearing lifts in his shoes to get some extra height. GQ reports that Kim apparently felt insecure enough about [the height] disparity that he had some poor North Korean shoemaker make him a special pair of laceless dress shoes with built-in height inserts. But as the publication concedes, its well-known that Trump takes body language seriously. So being able to meet Trumps eye-line was probably a well-calculated move by the North Koreans. Read more: These Insane Conspiracy Theories About North Korea Will Blow Your Mind Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! @alextdaugherty Hillary Clinton made an unsurprising endorsement in the Democratic primary to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, saying former Clinton Foundation director Donna Shalala would make an excellent Congresswoman if elected. "I know she will be an excellent Congresswoman from Florida," Clinton told an audience of women in New York on Monday. Hillary Clinton, speaking in NYC, endorses Donna Shalala, former Clinton admin official and candidate for Congress in Florida's 27th district: "I know she will be an excellent Congresswoman from Florida." Shalala, who also ran the Clinton Foundation, introduced Clinton today. Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) June 18, 2018 It's not clear if Clinton would hop on the campaign trail for the former Health and Human Services Secretary and University of Miami President, who faces a competitive primary for the Democratic nomination. Shalala faces former Knight Foundation director Matt Haggman, Miami Beach commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez, former University of Miami academic advisor Michael Hepburn and former state Rep. David Richardson in the Democratic primary. Ros-Lehtinen's Miami-based district voted for Clinton over Donald Trump by 19 percentage points in the 2016 election, the most Democratic-leaning result of any congressional district currently held by the GOP. Everyones heard the jokes about men of a certain age and the cars many end up buying. Theyre usually fast, sharp-looking, luxurious, or all of the above. Likewise, most are very, very expensive. However, considering these rides are used to treat the loneliness and/or boredom of middle age, they may prove a good value over time especially compared to therapists fees. Besides, after the kids graduate college and youve paid off the mortgage, you deserve a little fun in your daily drive. A new study by iSeeCars.com can even make such a purchase affordable. The research site looked checked the highest depreciation in late-model cars men over the age of 50 covet. Here are the best deals you can find on a midlife-crisis car in 2018. 12. Porsche Boxster Average 3-year depreciation: 35.9% While the Boxster may be the most affordable two-seat roadster Porsche offers, its still quite a treat when brand-new. In fact, average sales prices ran buyers $79,000 a few years back. These days, over one-third of that amount disappeared in the name of depreciation. If a lightly used Boxster delivers what you need, you can get one for less than $50,000 in 2018. 11. BMW M3 Average 3-year depreciation: 36.4% With BMW 3 Series sedans blanketing the worlds streets, the base models simply dont fit the bill for a midlife-crisis car. That job falls to the German brands performance (M) line. In the case of the M3, youre looking at 425 horsepower and a 0-60 time of 3.9 seconds, at the price of $80,000 once you add in the options. On the used market, this hot Bimmer has been selling for an average of $51,000, iSeeCars data showed. 10. Chevrolet Camaro Average 3-year depreciation: 37.8% At an average starting price of $34,119 new, a Chevy Camaro is not exactly a massive splurge. However, a 2015 SS definitely fits the bill in the thrills department. All told, you get 426 horsepower in a manual model and the type of roar that turns heads every time you start it. For about $21,000, you could do a lot worse these days. 9. Mazda MX-5 Miata Average 3-year depreciation: 38.5% In the case of the Mazda Miata, its not just men of a certain age who gravitate toward this car. The MX-5 roadster is about as crowd-pleasing as vehicles get. Read just about any MX-5 review and you understand why: The Miatas driving dynamics make it among the best values you can find in a performance car. If you wait a few years and get a gently used model, it becomes a steal at $19,500. 8. Volkswagen Eos Average 3-year depreciation: 41.7% It may not have the brawn of a Camaro or flash of a Boxster, but the Volkswagen Eos still delivered on what many men want: a good drive in a two-seat convertible. Since production ended in 2015, any Eos on the market these days will sell for at least 40% ($16,000) less than what folks paid a few years back. That leaves the average price near $23,000 in 2018. 7. Mercedes-Benz SLK Average 3-year depreciation: 44.1% Of all the midlife-crisis cars out there, the Mercedes SLK (now named SLC) may be the king. You might be shocked to find anyone besides a middle-aged guy behind the wheel of one. This model, which ended in the 2016 model year, came with the choice of three engines (from a turbo four-cylinder to a 415-horsepower V8), so just how much fun you have in it will vary. However, many versions can be had for under $35,000, which is about $26,000 less than they sold for two-to-three years ago. 6. Audi S5 Average 3-year depreciation: 45.1% Though a regular Audi sedan wont interest this demographic much, the S5 convertible should do the trick. It offers well over 300 horsepower and enough flash to make any drive a blast. After the 45% depreciation three-year-old S5s averaged in 2018, this model came to less than $38,000 used. 5. Mercedes-Benz SL-Class Average 3-year depreciation: 45.7% Like the SLK roadster, a Mercedes-Benz SL grand tourer comes in several different engine choices, the most ferocious of which (an AMG) tops out around 620 horsepower. Clearly, such a scorcher will make any middle-aged man feel like a kid again. The entire range becomes affordable after three years (and 46% depreciation) in an owners or lessees hands. According to iSeeCars data, several SL roadster models have dropped below $60,000 in 2018. 4. BMW Z4 Average 3-year depreciation: 45.8% While the BMW Z4 does not have the same reputation as other sport models from the German brand, you cant argue with its curb appeal or power-to-weight ratio. (Another area of appeal is its hardtop convertible.) Meanwhile, pricing of gently used models makes it affordable for a larger segment of the population in 2018. After 46% depreciation, it sells for less than $35,000. 3. Porsche Panamera Average 3-year depreciation: 47.7% While some may balk at the idea of a four-door Porsche, the Panameras high-end interior and 400-horsepower engine should set most concerns aside. (How it sounds will also settle doubts.) Still, this models biggest turnoff for buyers is usually the price it averaged a $118,000 sticker when new. On the secondhand market in 2018, the Panamera comes in at a palatable $61,812 on average. 2. BMW 6 Series Average 3-year depreciation: 51.7% If you were on the market for a BMW 6 Series coupe or convertible around 2015, you were looking at a price tag close to $100,000. Some three years and 52% depreciation later, this 445-horsepower burner has dropped below $50,000 in some trims. For the full experience, the 650 convertible is the way to go, and examples showing fewer than 20,000 miles on the odometer were selling for $50,000-$55,000 in June 2018. 1. BMW M6 Average 3-year depreciation: 54% Every person alive will be wowed by any BMW 6 Series from the past few years. However, the M6 take the concept to another level of luxury and performance. Specifically, M6 offers 575 horsepower and 500 pound-feet of torque with the Competition Package. Its so indulgent it averaged a sale price of $140,000 in 2015. By 2018, M6 had shown 54% depreciation and could be had for less than $65,000. If you feel a midlife crisis coming on, its time to pounce on this car. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! Gubernatorial candidate Philip Levine says he'll place his assets in a blind trust if he's elected governor of Florida, a decision intended to enable the $133 million man to govern without conflicts under state law by handing control of his investments to a third party. "I think when you're the CEO of an $89 billion organization, I'm not so sure you have time to run anything else,'' Levine said Monday in Tallahassee after explicitly disclosing his net worth and assets for the first time in his political career. "When you become governor, your number one priority is to be governor 24/7. I only wish that the same law in Florida would apply to the presidency full disclosure and everything else." Levine made the commitment while opening a Tallahassee regional office for his campaign, and shortly after filing a detailed financial disclosure with the Florida Division of Elections in order to make the August Democratic primary ballot. Levine declared his net worth at $133 million or about five times the $25 million he said he might be willing to invest in his own campaign when he announced he was running for governor. Though Levine filed five years' worth of financial disclosures with the city of Miami Beach during his 2013 run for public office and his four ensuing years as mayor, those disclosures were limited in scope and did not require him to explicitly explain the value of his investments or his annual income. On Monday, he laid out an array of stocks, securities and funds that altogether were worth $140 million minus an $8.3 million liability with City National Bank and brought him more than $5 million in revenue last year. Read more here. In 2020, we were the church on our heels. A global pandemic shut down much of our world. But the church has been on the move since it was birthed; it will continue to be on the move until God makes all things new. My wife had just dropped off our kids at the local Coptic Orthodox Church we attend in Cairo and sat down with her Egyptian friend at the adjacent church-owned cafe. After initial pleasantries, she spoke of this current article I was then researching. Oh, do Americans have Sunday School also? inquired the mother. I never knew. My wife and I have lived in Egypt for nearly nine years and consider ourselves of evangelical faith. But we wish also to learn about ancient Christianity and, to the degree possible, worship within the Coptic Orthodox Church, which many Protestants here respectfully call the mother church. We have been impressed by their biblical fluency. We have marveled at their forgiveness after martyrdom. But to entrust our own children to them? We have been blown away by their care for the next generation. It takes two years of training to even teach a kindergartener. It was not always so, and they have the Americans to thanksort of. Foreign Influence The modern Sunday school movement began in late 18th-century Britain and spread quickly to the United States. In 1825, the UK Church Missionary Society arrived in Egypt, and American Presbyterians followed in 1854. Both immediately began distributing childrens literature, working alongside the population at largeMuslims particularly. Neither group had much success, and they adopted different attitudes toward the Copts. The English missionaries sought to work alongside what they considered to be a sisterly episcopal body unaffiliated with Catholic Rome. Coptic papal permission was given to establish a seminary in 1843 to train Orthodox priests in their parish ministry. At that time, clerical roles were mostly inherited within families, with no formal training beyond rites and rituals. The seminary closed five years later, unable to cross-pollinate amid considerable suspicion. The Americans opened schools. Still a new idea in Egypt, they were of vastly better quality than the few local options, especially in Upper Egypt. Presbyterians trace their seminary in Cairo, now over 150 years old, to a boat purchased to sail up and down the Nile River. As they attracted Coptic converts, the missionaries established congregations, and the Sunday schools proved popular. In 1870 there were around 200 Egyptian children attending; seven years later, more than four thousand. It was a dire moment for the Copts. Authorities granting equality with Muslims a generation earlier also allowed entry of competing versions of Christianity, preached by foreigners with financial means and modern education. The Coptic Pope Kyrillos (Cyril) IV (18541861) became known as the Father of Reform for welcoming Western innovations. He opened the Great Coptic School and imported a printing press. But his successor, Demetrious II, gave far less attention to education, instead threatening excommunication for families sending their children to missionary schools. Popes would alternate between reform and reversal, but all were trying to undo a situation of inherited darkness. Looking backward eight decades, the beloved Pope Shenouda III, known as the teacher of generations, described the solution with primordial imagery. Our teacher started his life in an age that was almost void of religious education and knowledge, said the patriarch, who died in 2012. Then, God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And the light was Habib Girgis. Coptic Educator Extraordinaire Girgis was born into a middle-class family in Cairo in 1876. One of four children, his father died when he was only six years old. Even so, young Habib was fortunate to be educated in the Great Cairo School. In 1893, Pope Kyrillos V (18741927) resumed his namesakes reforms and opened the Clerical College, the first Coptic theological institution since the patristic-era School of Alexandria. Girgis was one of 40 students chosen to be part of the first class. Unfortunately, he discovered that almost none of the instructors had any training in theological education. The dean simply read aloud from religious materials. Girgis lamented the situation. Is there among us anyone who is capable of responding to those who ask him about his religion and why he is a Christian? he asked in a student lecture four years later. I am sure that most of us do not have an answer, except to say that we were born from Christian parents and hence we are Christians. To a large degree, Girgis had to educate himself. He read Tacitus, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, and Clement of Rome. Even before graduating in 1898, he was appointed as a theology professor. Twenty years later, in 1918, he would be named dean of the Clerical College, a position he held for the rest of his life. In the intervening time, Girgis began the most transformative change in Coptic education since the patristic era: the Sunday school movement. Sunday School Is in Session Girgis remained celibate his entire life and poured himself into a ministry he created almost entirely on his own. A faithful Orthodox Christian and archdeacon in the church, he mingled with the missionaries who offered their materials and Arabic Bibles. But he wrote his own four-volume catechism to adapt their methods to Coptic distinctives. Girgis began childrens Bible studies in his central Cairo neighborhood of Fagallah and slowly branched out. In 1900 he went to Upper Egypt for the first time, to spread his ideas there. He established lay societies to promote education and social services. And in 1904 he self-funded publication of The Vine, the first Coptic journal in centuries, to revive patristic studies. In 1907 Pope Kyrillos V endorsed Girgiss efforts, writing a letter of support to the emerging Sunday school teacher community. A year later, the pope convinced state authorities to allow Christian religion in the public school system, five years before education became compulsory for all. But within the church it was more difficult. Coptic Egypt was experiencing the rise of an educated, lay elite, threatening the traditional leadership of priests. A later Clerical College professor described Girgiss generation as full of devious leaders who put up fierce resistance to his reforms. Girgiss solution was to ground the Sunday school movement in the church, under their authority. He worked to establish centers in each village, and in 1918 Pope Kyrillos named him to be on the inaugural General Sunday School Committee, formalizing the movements ecclesiastical ties. This official adoption was celebrated by the Coptic Orthodox Church this past March, as the 100th anniversary of the movement. By 1938, 10,000 students were attending Coptic Sunday schools, with additional branches started in Sudan and Ethiopia. The Sunday school explosion was underway, with Girgis a key link between the clerics and laity. He was elected a member of the Lay Community Council three times, navigating leadership struggles and financial constraints. And from his trusted position as a confidant to Pope Kyrillos, the Sunday school began to infiltrate the church. Lasting Legacy Girgis naturally organized the movement from his position as dean of the Clerical College. But despite his efforts, even today the Coptic Church does not require its priests to graduate with academic theological training. Many already possess college degrees in their professional fields and quickly learn the rites of the church. They are identified by local priests, having distinguished themselves in service. And for decadesoutside ministry to the poorthe Sunday school was all that existed. In the 1940s, three particular Cairo churches emerged as centers of the movement, each with a different focus. In time, their students become the most powerful bishops surrounding the pope. The first focused on developing a critical intellect. Bishop Gregorius came to head the newly established Bishopric for High Studies, Coptic Culture, and Scientific Research. The second focused on social activism. Bishop Samuel, killed in the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, came to head the newly established Bishopric for Ecumenical and Social Services. The third focused on spiritual revival. Bishop Shenouda, who later became the aforementioned, beloved pope, came to head the newly established Bishopric for General Education. He was Girgiss direct disciple. But these leaders were not the only ones to continue reforms birthed in the Sunday school movement. Bishop Musa transformed one of Girgiss earlier societiesthe Coptic Youth Leagueinto the newly established Bishopric for Youth. And Matta al-Miskeen led a monastic resurgence that continues today. While priests are free to marry, monks form the celibate, episcopal leadership pool for the Coptic church. Today a university degree is near-universally required of the would-be novice. Despite his success, Girgis remained frustrated through the end of his life, as his ideas outran the ability of the church to accept them. Still, he could celebrate in 1938 that the seminary produced two bishops, over 200 priests, and dozens of preachers. Bishop-then-Pope Shenouda would go on to help it quadruple these graduates. But in Sunday schools Girgis directly witnessed the fruit of his labor. And labor it was. A tireless worker, his strength came directly from his vision for Gods will. In 1948 he counted 43,000 students, four times as many as there were ten years earlier. I felt a voice calling me from the depth of my heart, Girgis said. My soul is ignited, moving to rise up to the duty for which God created mefor I was created for its sake. Girgis died in 1951, and afterward, the Sunday school movement decentralized. Today every diocese, and sometimes even individual churches, organizes its own curriculum and trains its own workerscalled servants in Arabic. The current Pope Tawadros, who canonized Girgis as a saint in 2013, is working to unify the work once again and further prioritize education. The future is bright for Sunday school, he said in commemoration of the 100th anniversary, because it is built on a firm foundation. Member of Parliament Marianne A. Azer also paid tribute. I am so indebted to all the servants in Fagallah, where Habib Girgis began, she said. I have left the Sunday school, but the Sunday school has not left me. But perhaps the most significant remark about Girgiss impact came in conversation with the author of the book upon which this essay is primarily based. Bishop Suriel of Melbourne grew up in the Coptic Sunday Schools of Australia and did his doctoral research on Habib Girgis. He heads St. Athanasius College, which in 2011 became the first Coptic theological institute to be accredited, through the historic Australian University of Divinity. He requires all his priests to study for a degree. As Americans living in the Middle East, we have found the Coptic church to be unique. Longsuffering, but vibrant and Biblical, by contrast other nations Christian communities are torn by war and are rapidly declining. What is the reason for this Coptic resurgence? Girgis made the difference. If he didnt come onto the scene, would there even be a Coptic church today? said Suriel. I dont know; it is debatable. Jayson Casper is the Middle East correspondent for Christianity Today, resident in Cairo since 2009. His website, A Sense of Belonging, chronicles his writings as well as Friday Prayers, a weekly encouragement to seek Gods blessing for Egypt. Primary resources: Habib Girgis: Coptic Orthodox Educator and a Light in the Darkness, by Bishop Suriel. St. Vladamirs Seminary Press, 2017. Renewal in the Coptic Orthodox Church; Notes of the PhD Thesis of Revd. Dr. Wolfram Reiss, by Cornelis Hulsman, Arab West Report, Nov. 22, 2002. https://www.arabwestreport.info/en/year-2002/week-46/23-renewal-coptic-orthodox-church-notes-phd-thesis-revd-dr-wolfram-reiss With furor building over the Trump administration's decision to separate families caught crossing into U.S. borders outside regulated checkpoints, a Miami congressional candidate is going on air with a pledge to work to abolish the country's Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm. Matt Haggman, one of five Democrats hoping to replace Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in Congress, is spending six figures to run the 16-second spot, mostly on Miami network television. "We can protect our border without being cruel to kids," Haggman says in the ad, in which he also takes a swipe at the race's frontrunner. "Donna Shalala, she's had her chance." Shalala and David Richardson are already on TV in the race, which also features Kristen Rosen Gonzalez and Michael Hepburn. But Haggman's timing is good, given that news broke Monday that federal authorities had sent as many as 1,000 children to a previously dormant child shelter in Homestead. On Tuesday, Bill Nelson is heading to the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children -- further highlighting what a poll suggests is an incredibly unpopular policy decision in Miami by President Donald Trump to separate children from their parents as a deterrent to illegal immigration. Most summers, Corner of Love, a Christian nonprofit in northern Nicaragua, hosts 30 teams of volunteers to help with its school, medical services, and water improvement projects. But this year, no ones coming. Ministry leaders canceled the summer programming last month since recent political unrestthe worst in the Central American country since the 1980scould endanger visitors. Already an estimated 200 people have been killed this spring as Nicaraguans take to the streets to protest the current administration, led by President Daniel Ortega. As the protests continue through the summer, Christian groups have begun postponing their mission trips or canceling them altogether, which leaves the communities they hoped to serve in even worse shape amid the national crisis. Everything is on the line: our finca (ranch), our clinic, our hospital, our school, said Corner of Love CEO Tanya Mroczek-Amador, who recently traveled to DC to lobby for support against the Nicaraguan government. Summer is typically the busiest time for ministries in the region; a drop in mission trips during this season stands to hurt them for the rest of the year. Revenue from missions teams supports the work on the ground, including paying staff and taking care of facilities, said Shawn Doss, whose organization Hope Missions recently had to cancel its July trip to Nicaragua. They rely on revenue from teams coming down to help. Theyre really struggling. In the case of Nicaragua, many short-term missions groups work in regions that arent directly affected by the protests and violence. The issue is getting there; most teams fly into major cities like Managua or Granada and then take a bus several hours to their ministry site. Travelers can expect to face holdups at government checkpoints. Every time the car is stopped it represents danger, said Mroczek-Amador, with Corner of Love. Another mission trip coordinator, Praying Pelican Missions, directs teams to the US Embassys Nicaragua page for the governments assessment of country risks. Some churches have opted not to send their high schoolers to the country because of security concerns. I also know of two groups who have said, Yes were coming regardless; we know this is what were supposed to do. Until God tells us no, were going, said Nathan Norman, the organizations operations director for Guatemala/Nicaragua. While overall numbers have dwindled for Praying Pelican Missions Nicaragua teams, another crisis further north hasnt had the same effect. For the past several weeks, an erupting volcano in Guatemala left at least 110 dead, another 200 missing, and nearly 2,800 residents displaced. Despite the chaos, mission trips are still on, and Christian visitors are eager to help. I talked to a team leader today about Guatemala and he said each team member would be bringing toiletry items, shoes, and other supplies in their suitcases to give them to a local pastor, so he could distribute to them to people who needed them, said Norman. Jeff Craig, the family and missions pastor at Crosspointe Church in Anaheim, said he had to assure some young team members and parents about an upcoming trip to the country. I believe God will Romans 8:28 this situation and create more opportunities for us to truly be the church and help people in time of need, said Craig. Some people may be more open to the gospel because of this tragedy. We will be right there. When it comes to supporting people in the wake of natural disasters, founder and executive director of Wheaton Colleges Humanitarian Disaster Institute Jamie Aten exhorts churches to make sure that they coordinate with local contacts. Going in on your own can be a mistake, said Aten. Teams really need to really make sure they arent inadvertently taking away resources from communities that have been affected. Too many times we go into a disaster zone and think were bringing aid, when instead what were doing only increases the chaos. Meanwhile in Nicaragua, the political protests since April only add to ongoing violence and unrest. Last week, pro-government forces murdered an evangelical pastor, his wife, and four other family members after the couple refused to grant them their permission to shoot from their balcony. The whole political situation has been devastating to our partners in Nicaragua, said Norman. The Central American country has seen its Protestant population rise to 40 percentamong the highest in the regionbut has also faced threats of restrictions on missionary activities in recent years. Some ministries report harassment if they dont comply with government pressure. The government is constantly applying pressure and trying to get you to come over to their side, Mroczek-Amador said. There have been nonprofits in Nicaragua that have ended up hanging a Sandinista flag. Prior to his reelection over a decade ago, President Ortega previously oversaw the repressive Sandinista government that went into power after the Nicaraguan revolution. The police are not there to protect you. If you oppose the government, you have no protection all together, she said. Im married to a Nicaraguan who left during the revolution. He said he has already seen this situationback when war broke out. When trips get canceled, churches tend to wait and reschedule rather than switching to another location altogether. Many of our churches seek long term partnerships with ministries and communities, said Doss, whose organization coordinates dozens of trips a year. Theyve been going to the same locations for two or three years. Switching to another location doesnt fit the vision so theyd rather postpone their trip for another season. Even without the opportunity to serve in person, the connection between ministry leaders can inspire Christians to pay attention to crises outside American borders. You have churches who met a pastor in Nicaragua, fell in love with this pastor, helped build a brand-new church, talk to this pastor and church on the internet or telephone, said Norman. Recent disasters should drive us US Christians to our knees to pray for our brothers and sisters around the world. Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment In a ruling that is sure to send shock waves through the nation, Canada's Supreme Court ruled 7-2 against Trinity Western University's (TWU) Law School. In effect, what the court declared is that universities must choose between biblical standards and accreditation. Put another way, the court ruled that Christianity and higher education are incompatible. I am not exaggerating in the least. Here's a brief summary of the case for those who are not familiar with it. Trinity Western is a Christian university that requires its students and faculty to live by basic Christian standards. This means that to be a student or faculty member in good standing, you can't commit fornication or adultery, nor can you engage in homosexual relationships. There's nothing surprising with these requirements, and there are thousands of schools in North America with similar standards. These include Christian schools from K-12, Christian colleges, Bible schools, seminaries, and universities. These standards have long been part of TWU's mandatory covenant, which requires "that all students and faculty pursue a holy life 'characterized by humility, self-sacrifice, mercy and justice, and mutual submission for the good of others.' It requires members to abstain from using vulgar language, lying or cheating, stealing, using degrading materials such as pornography, and 'sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.'" Again, this is gospel 101, the basic requirements of Christian discipleship. And it is honorable that TWU seeks to live this out on its campus. Unfortunately, when TWU opened its law school, it fell afoul of Canada's LGBT activists and their allies. They argued that TWU was discriminating against LGBT students, because of which students graduating with a bona fide law degree should not be allowed to practice law in Canada. There was a ray of hope for TWU when a regional court ruled in its favor. But now, "In a pair of 7-2 rulings, the majority of justices found the law societies of British Columbia and Ontario have the power to refuse accreditation based on Trinity Western University's so-called community covenant." Or, to paraphrase, the Supreme Court ruled that if a Christian law school wants accreditation, it must abandon biblical values. How else can this be interpreted? "The majority judgment said the covenant would deter LGBT students from attending the proposed law school, and those who did attend would be at risk of significant harm." Significant harm? If so, why? Because of biblical teaching. Because of Christian values. This the locus of the battle. This is the point of conflict. Parse it however you like, but this is the hardcore truth. "[The judgment] found the public interest of the law profession gives it the right to promote equality by ensuring equal access, support diversity within the bar and prevent harm to LGBT students." In other words, "diversity" according to the LGBT lexicon. Diversity meaning "the LGBT way or the highway." Diversity meaning, "all views are welcome other than biblical Christian views." That's why we've been raising our voices for so many years. That's why we've been warning. That's why we've said that those who came out the closet want to put us into the closet. That's why we've said that LGBT activism was never simply about "tolerance." It was about the silencing of competing views. And if it could happen in Canada, it could happen in America. (For the skeptics and mockers, give me one good reason why this could not happen here. And note that TWU was not some tiny school hidden in a corner. It has "40 undergraduate programs and 17 graduate programs.") Honestly, I don't know where TWU goes from here. And I don't know how the believers in Canada will respond. But I can say this to my friends and colleagues and fellow-educators and communicators here in America: We either use our liberties or lose them. We either stand fast and stand tall and stand strong, or we cower in a corner. We either do what's right today, or we apologize to our children tomorrow. It's time to push back. What will you do? Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment The immigration crisis unfolding on the US-Mexico border continues to dominate the news. Nearly two thousand children have been separated from their parents since a "zero tolerance" policy was adopted for those entering the US illegally. One facility in McAllen, Texas, houses two hundred such children. According to a migrant rights worker who visited the facility, one girl "was so traumatized that she wasn't talking. She was just curled up in a little ball." A quiet boy was seen clutching a piece of paper that was a photocopy of his mother's ID card. The head of the American Academy of Pediatrics visited a similar shelter in Texas, where she saw a toddler crying uncontrollably and pounding her little fists on a mat. She had been taken from her mother the night before and brought to the shelter. Staff members gave her books and toys, but they weren't allowed to pick her up, hold her, or hug her to try to calm her. As a rule, staff are not allowed to touch the children in the facility. A "zero tolerance" policy Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters last night that the "vast majority" of children being held in detention facilities were sent to the US alone by their parents. She stated that this issue "has resulted after years and years of Congress not taking action." Others blame the Trump administration for the crisis. My purpose is not to fix blame but to consider practical options. Let's begin with some history. In 2005, President George W. Bush launched Operation Streamline, a program that referred all unlawful entrants on the border for criminal prosecution. They were imprisoned, and their trials were expedited for the purpose of deporting them. However, exceptions were generally made for adults traveling with minor children. The Obama administration detained illegal border crossers as families together in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody rather than criminal detention. Last month, after Homeland Security reported a 203 percent increase in illegal border crossings over the past year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a "zero tolerance" policy directing Homeland Security officials to prosecute all cases of illegal entry into the US. Few exceptions were made for parents traveling with minor children. The administration says it must separate children from parents because of the Flores agreement, a longstanding federal court settlement that bars the government from jailing migrant children. However, critics claim that nothing legally requires migrant families to be separated while their cases are being pursued. Federal law requires a lengthier process for those seeking asylum. The children of these adults are separated from them for a much longer time. Complicating the situation even further, some adults reportedly pose with children who are not their own. And smugglers use rented or kidnapped children as cover. As noted, nearly two thousand children have been separated from their parents and placed in mass detention centers or foster care since this policy began. More than one hundred are younger than four years old. "A country that governs with heart" Response has been strong and emotional. Melania Trump's office responded to the unfolding crisis: "Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart." Laura Bush stated in a Washington Post op-ed: "I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart." The other former First Ladies voiced their opposition, as have numerous Republican leaders. In an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network, Franklin Graham said of the border crisis: "I think it's disgraceful, it's terrible, to see families ripped apart, and I don't support that one bit. And I blame the politicians for the last twenty, thirty years that have allowed this to escalate to the point where it is today." What does the Bible say? God's word calls us to obey the government: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities" (Romans 13:1). Border security is biblical: "When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples" (Deuteronomy 32:8). We are warned, "Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set" (Proverbs 22:28; 23:10). At the same time, Scripture commands us: "You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him" (Exodus 22:21). The Bible says that God "loves the sojourner" (Deuteronomy 10:18) and instructs us: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers" (Hebrews 13:2). The issue becomes even more complex when children are involved. Jesus said of them, "to such belongs the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:14). The Bible calls children "a heritage from the Lord" (Psalm 127:3). Three options and my response This is obviously a very complex issue without simple answers, but there seem to be three basic alternatives. One: The government could choose not to prosecute illegal immigrants with children. However, we are a nation of laws. And we do not want to escalate the number of families attempting to enter the US illegally. Two: The government could incarcerate and prosecute all parents who are illegal immigrants while placing their children in separate facilities (the current policy). Three: The government could prosecute all illegal immigrants but keep families together in temporary shelters while their cases are pending, an approach Sen. Ted Cruz and other senators are supporting. Manpower could be increased to process immigrants as quickly as possible; asylum cases could be expedited. According to the biblical worldview, when we are forced to choose between options, choose life. Jesus taught us, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). We are a nation of laws, but our laws are intended to serve our people. No law should victimize the innocent, especially children. Laura Bush concluded her op-ed: "In 2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate and more moral answer to this current crisis? I, for one, believe we can." I am praying she's right. Originally posted at Denison Forum. home World Argentinian bishops decry parliament vote to legalize abortion Catholic bishops in Argentina have denounced the recent vote by the parliament to legalize abortion in the country. The chamber of deputies, the lower house of Argentina's Congress, had voted 129a123 last Thursday in favor of a legislation that seeks to legalize abortions up to the 14th week of pregnancy. In a statement, the bishops' conference expressed disappointment for the vote, saying: "This decision hurts us Argentines. But the pain for the abandonment and the exclusion of innocents must be transformed into strength and hope, to continue fighting for the dignity of all human life." The proposal is also aimed at legalizing the procedure to protect the psychological health of the mother and in cases of fetal deformity. According to Catholic Herald, the legislation must be approved by the Senate before it can be turned into law. Guillermo Galeano, spokesman for the Diocese of Lomas de Zamora, believes that it will be harder for the bill to get approval in the Senate, but expressed concern that it could still pass. "It's a surprise what happened today, so what happens in the Senate could also be a surprise," Galeano said, as reported by Catholic Herald. President Mauricio Macri, who claimed to be pro-life, said that he will not veto the legislation when it reaches his desk. The bishops' conference said that the legislation should prompt the church to step up its efforts in reaching out to those who are affected by abortion or unwanted pregnancies. "As pastors, this recent time has caused us to recognize weaknesses in our pastoral work: integral sexual education in our educational institutes, the full recognition of women and men, and the accompaniment of women who are exposed to abortion or who have gone through this trauma. All of these are calls of a reality, which demands a response as a church," the conference stated, as reported by Catholic Herald. A government survey has indicated that Argentinians are split on the issue of abortion. The poll conducted in April has shown that 45 percent of Argentinians are in favor of legalizing the procedure, while 46 percent were opposed. Prior to the vote, more than three million Argentinians reportedly took part in a protest against the repeal of the country's ban on abortions. Pro-choice activists have argued that despite being illegal, half a million abortions are being carried out in the country each year, resulting in fatal complications and other health issues on women. The question of what constitutes quality of life is one often pondered in healthcare, and it is also one that Jesus addresses. In John chapter 10, verses 10-11, Jesus says, "The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep." God, who created life and gave us breath, wants us to experience it abundantly. He so earnestly desires that we experience this life in Him, that He sent Jesus to die on the cross and conquer death. It is through faith in Him, that we experience His grace and share in His life. I realise that in every consult I do as a doctor, I have the precious opportunity to save lives, and not just physically. Moreover, I have this same opportunity to save lives outside the doctor's office, and we all do. God has given us abundant life, and He commands us to share this life with others so what does this look like? There is life in joy, even through suffering Quality of life is often associated with the perception of happiness; how satisfied are we with our ability to function day to day? The joy God offers finds its source not in daily function, but in daily communion; do we hope in God today? Joy helps us to love people even when we might be having a tough time ourselves. It keeps us going even when our physical function is limited. It shows us a satisfaction and a gladness that reaches deeper and lasts longer than what we know as happiness. Love is what helps us work through a busy day, keep a smile, and return the following day with the same attitude refreshed. "The Lord is my strength and my shield; My heart trusted in Him, and I am helped; Therefore my heart greatly rejoices, And with my song I will praise Him." (Psalm chapter 28, verse 7) God's life comforts the lonely The life we have in Christ was never meant to be a secret, but to be freely shared with all. Jesus reached out to prostitutes, tax collectors, and widows; and he reaches out to us in the loneliness created by sin when it separates us from God. He gives life in the shade of His presence and His lovingkindness. When we see people alone, hurting, afraid or uncertain, we have that same life to give them. It comes in the arm of embrace, the word of encouragement, the walk of friendship. One day, there will be no more sin and no more crying, but until then we have every opportunity to bring the comfort of Christ into our broken world. Isaiah chapter 61, verse 3 speaks about Jesus who was anointed to: console those who mourn in Zion, To give them beauty for ashes, The oil of joy for mourning, The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; That they may be called trees of righteousness, The planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified. Relationship is important to life Our world is curious to discover the fountain of life; what might help us to live longer, and better? Aged care services promote group activities, home supports bring personal contact with practical help, and mental health facilitators encourage community. What is it about relationships that foster life? I greatly appreciate the blessing of fellowship, and it is something I thank God for often. Relationships are an avenue for the love of God to be released. They offer a reminder of identity (we are loved), community (we are in this together), encouragement (we can do this together), and hope (there is good to come). These are qualities of life-giving relationships like those referred to in Ecclesiastes chapter 4, verses 9-10: "Two are better than one, Because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, For he has no one to help him up." God's life heals pain with hope The one greatest thing about the life of God is that it saves; it really saves. It overcomes death through the gift of eternal life found in the righteousness of Christ, and it saves our hearts daily with this hope. This hope gives us a life that overcomes every pain, discouragement and feeling of inadequacy we have and will ever face. Gods life has saved me, and I want the whole world to experience it. We have the opportunity every day to release the life of God to others. We give life to their hearts through joy; we give life in their dark moments through comfort and kindness; we give life through genuine loving relationships; and we give life through bringing hope to our broken world. The life of God lives in us, and it is a light we ought to shine out brightly. So, let us live it out and see lives saved! "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house." (Matthew chapter 5, verses 14-15) Kristen is a family doctor, and author of the e-book An Internship with Jesus. She lives with her husband in Adelaide and writes a weekly blog (lostnowfoundk) on life with God. Her second blog, Lily of the Valleys-K, aims to share her love for Jesus through music and art. See Kristens other articles at: https://lostnowfoundk.com/an-internship-with-jesus-ebook-christian-today-articles/ Dancing vicar becomes internet sensation with Whit Walk boogie A 'boogieing vicar' has become an internet sensation after a video of him dancing on the streets of Ashton-under-Lyne was viewed more than 20,000 times in two days. Rev Ben Brady, a curate at St Gabriel's, took to the streets for his church's annual Whit Walk on Sunday. But instead of the typical procession, Brady threw some outrageous shapes to the tune of The Jacksons' Blame it on the Boogie. 'I was leading the procession, but because it was my first Whit Walk I didn't really know what I was meant to be doing,' he told Manchester Evening News. 'I felt like a bit of an idiot, thinking "Do I wave like the Queen, or what?",' he said. 'But the band were just playing some really, really good music. It was just great, so I started dancing. "I was clicking my fingers and pointing at the drivers, it was a really good laugh. I had a great time.' Dobcross Youth Band, whose music so impressed the young curate, posted a video online after the event, saying they 'won't forget the boogieing vicar in a hurry'. 'We loved playing for our friends St Gabriel's Church today at Ashton Whit Walks,' the Facebook post read. 'Before the procession the Reverend Ben Brady told us it was his first walk of witness, we don't think it will be his last! 'Thank you to him and all at St Gabriel's for making this such a fun day for the players, we won't forget the boogieing vicar in a hurry. An afternoon full of joy and smiles for us all.' Since being posted on Sunday night the video has been viewed more than 21,000 times. Finsbury Park anniversary: Mosque head calls for National Day against Islamophobia Britain should hold a national anti-Islamophobia day in memory of the Finsbury Park terror attack, the head of the North London mosque targeted a year ago today has said. A minute's silence was held to mark the first anniversary of the attack this morning. One man Makram Ali died and nine others were injured when a van driven by Darren Osborne rammed into a crowd leaving evening prayers at the Muslim Welfare House in north London on June 19, 2017. Osborne, 48, was jailed for 43 years for murdering the 51-year-old Ali in the attack during Ramadan last year. Toufik Kacimi, chief executive of the Muslim Welfare House, told Christian Today June 19 should be commemorated every year as a day against Islamophobia and racism. 'Unfortunately the reasons and the causes of what Darren Osborne did are very much with us today,' he said in an interview after the minute's silence at Islington Town Hall. 'It was a tragic, tragic, really horrible event. It is good to remember that those attacks which happened in Manchester, in London Bridge, in Westminster, are exactly the same. 'Terrorists are terrorists. They have no concept of faith, they have no religion, they have no one agenda and no colour. All of them are the same and they speak the language of hate. Hate is something we hate very much.' Asked whether the government had done enough to tackle Islamophobia he told Christian Today: 'What I would say is Islamophobia is up. Racism is up. Hate crime is up. The government should do much more to tackle far-right extremism. We can't see the difference between [Islamist activist] Anjem Choudhry and Tommy Robinson. They are, for us, exactly the same. So racism and Islamophobia it is not really tackled enough.' He added: 'Islam calls for peace. It is a religion of peace. Islam, or Islamist or Islamism any word associated with Islam has to be associated with love and peacefulness because Islam is derived from the word for peace. Terrorism is just a cancer and an illness. Those people claiming to be Muslim terrorists they are doing it under their own agenda, their own political gains. They can't speak under our name. 'But sometimes this is the language spoken by high profile politicians and some media outlets as well. They link Islam to terrorism. We feel like terrorists are murderers and criminals and they should be treated and called what they are which is just criminals.' Communities secretary James Brokenshire was at the minute's silence alongside London mayor Sadiq Khan, home secretary Sajid Javid and shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry among other police officials and religious and community leaders. Speaking to Christian Today afterwards Brokenshire said: 'There is no doubt we have a continuing threat from Islamist related terrorism. But it is also the far-right and other forms of terror as well. That is what is our counter-terrorism strategy is all about. It is about approaching this in this unifying response to all forms of threat we face. He added: 'We are stronger together. We are stronger by being united against that threat and ensuring that there is that sense of understanding between all of us because that is what will make the difference.' Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn spoke to those at the minute's silence on Upper Street, Islington, and praised the response of Imam Mohammed Mahoud, imam of the Muslim Welfare House, who was hailed a 'hero' after he protected Osborne from the furious crowd after the attack until police arrived. 'Imam Mahmoud did a brilliant and wonderful job of making sure that hatred of racism did not turn into violence and anger on the streets that night. 'He helped to ensure that we came together as a community because that is the only response there can ever be to the racism that seeks to divide us,' he said. 'Those who seek to divide us by racism... cannot achieve anything,' he added. 'We will be untied forever, they will never divide us.' In a message to the community Prime Minister Theresa May said it was 'an attack on all of us' and the community's bravery 'sent a message that terrorism will never succeed'. 'Last year's cowardly attack which targeted innocent worshippers leaving Finsbury Park Mosque was an attack on all of us,' she said. 'As with all acts of terrorism, the intention was to divide us. But we will not let this happen. 'And as we remember the victims of this attack, and Makram Ali who tragically lost his life, we should take strength that it is London's diversity and multitude of communities that makes it one of the world's great cities.' Parliamentarians gather for prayer breakfast featuring Tim Keller, Keith Getty Parliament's annual National Prayer Breakfast took place in Westminster Hall this morning, featuring Rev Dr Tim Keller as the event's main speaker. The audience included Prime Minister Theresa May and the event was introduced by the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow. In a written statement, the prime minister said that 'the Christian gospel has transformed the United Kingdom, with its values and teachings helping to shape the laws, customs and society of the country'. She added that the Prayer Breakfast was 'an excellent opportunity both to celebrate Christians' ongoing contribution to this country and to reflect on the role Christianity can play in contemporary public life'. And she urged those attending the annual event to continue their 'engagement as Christians in public life for the common good of all'. Keller, founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, spoke on 'What can Christianity offer our society in the 21st century?' He stressed the roots of the modern understanding of human rights in the Bible and Christianity, and urged the need to challenge the idea that ethics could be purely personal and private. He said that Britain had 'been shaped by Christianity'. 'The ethos that we all take for granted, is the fruit of the Bible and Christianity,' he said, adding that 'what society needed' was 'millions of people who have been shaped by the self-giving of Jesus Christ'. He added that 'British society should let Christians be different, and Muslims be different. They should not say, "You must be secular". Christians benefit society more when they are not just like everyone else in society.' Rev Dr Krish Kandiah, founder of adoption and fostering resource charity Home for Good, told Christian Today: 'It was a fantastic event. Tim Keller offered a cultural apologetic for the invaluable contribution Christianity has made to Western culture.' Keller's address was followed by seminars on the growing civic prayer breakfast movement, reconciliation in a divided culture and the historical and biblical roots of women's suffrage. Worship for the 140-strong audience was led by Keith and Kristyn Getty and featured songs including Behold The Lamb and In Christ Alone. Keith Getty said: 'It was a true honour to play a small part in this morning's breakfast, leading worship in a venue so rich in history. It was fantastic to have the prime minister with us and to see all those in attendance committing to praying for our country and our political leaders.' Getty will be receiving an OBE later this month for his contribution to hymn writing. He added: 'We could never have dreamed that the hymns God inspired us to write would be sung in places of such significance. We are humbled to have been a part of it.' Bible Society was the principal sponsor of the National Prayer Breakfast. Its CEO Prof Paul Williams said the event was 'encouraging and moving'. 'We want to encourage the Church to recover confidence in the Bible,' he said adding that through that Christians would be able to 'help preserve what's good and draw out what's best in society'. What does the intervention of First Ladies mean for the debate about border families? Former first lady Laura Bush and current first lady Melania Trump have spoken out against the controversial policy that is breaking up families attempting to enter America across the Mexican border. The Trump administration's 'zero tolerance immigration crackdown works to prosecute anyone who crosses the border unlawfully. This did not take into consideration parents travelling with their children. The consequence was drastic: thousands of children have been detained in makeshift shelters, separated from their families and with no understanding of what is happening to them. Around 2,000 children have been taken from their parents since this policy began to be enforced. On Sunday, reporters were allowed to visit the facility in which these children are held along the southern border. Cages of up to 20 children filled a large facility with few common areas and portable toilets. The agents who care for those that have been detained state that all inside the facility are given adequate food, access to facilities and medical care. Church groups have condemned this practice. The US Catholic Bishops' Conference has described it as 'immoral'. Bishop Edward Weisenburger of Tucson, Arizona has taken this one step further by suggesting that 'canonical penalties' should be imposed on Catholics involved in these family separations. This could involve denial of the eucharist or even excommunication. His suggestion was not adopted. Other religious leaders have also spoken out. Franklin Graham, son of the famous pastor, Billy Graham, has said: 'It's disgraceful, and it's terrible to see families ripped apart and I don't support that one bit.' Similarly, the Southern Baptist Convention last week passed a resolution to treat immigrants 'with the same respect and dignity as those native born.' Others now speaking out about this include mothers who are horrified that parents and their children can be separated for so long. Some of these prominent mothers include both the current and a former first lady. In an article in the Washington Post, Laura Bush calls the separation 'cruel, immoral and heart-breaking'. Bush has not joined the political debate since her husband left office in 2009. In her column she writes of the hypocrisy of the pride in America being a 'moral nation' that 'sends humanitarian relief to places devastated by...war'. As a champion of children's rights herself, particularly the education of children, Bush invoked the work of her mother-in-law and former first lady Barbara Bush. She spoke about how her role as a mother affected her political persuasions. She said (of Barbara), 'she who after the death of her 3-year-old daughter knew what it was to lose a child, believed that every child is deserving of human kindness, compassion and love'. Her scathing and forceful column asked the question: 'In 2018, can we not as a nation find a kinder, more compassionate, and more moral answer to this current crisis? I, for one, believe we can.' At the same time, current first lady, Melania Trump has also made a statement in reaction to the harrowing images published by Getty Images this weekend. In a rare public statement, it was said that the first lady 'hates to see children separated from their families'. While obviously supporting the work of her husband and stating her belief that 'we need to be a country that follows all laws', she did ask that this governance should not be without 'heart'. This comes after a tweet from President Trump, saying that, 'I hate the children being taken away,' but also blaming the Democrats for creating a law that requires it. Melania has been involved in several children's charities, even before becoming first lady. In 2008 she was the celebrity face of the Fifth Annual National 'Love Our Children' Day. As women, and particularly as mothers, it must be almost impossible for these first ladies to witness these scenes without feeling the pain of mother-child separation. These women have brought their children up under scrutiny, surrounded by police, and occasionally forced into hiding due to press bullying. The First Families do not have it easy. They just want what is best for their children. So too, do the mothers and fathers at the American border. They make these moves out of fear and out of love. Most importantly, they do it to give their children the best lives possible. By speaking out, Laura Bush and Melania Trump have humanised what is ultimately an inhumane practice. They have taken 'zero tolerance' and demonstrated it to have 'zero understanding' of family. The public outcry and subsequent statements have highlighted the controversy in this immigration policy. Debate continues. Nina Mattiello Azadeh studied music and philosophy and was a Faith in Politics media intern in 2016. She has a keen interest in interfaith relations, social action and is a classical ballet dancer. Follow her on Twitter @Ninamataz By any standard, Rupert Stadler, the chief executive of Volkswagens Audi luxury car division, is a survivor. When evidence emerged that Audi had played a major role in developing illegal emissions software on Stadlers watch, he and most other top executives kept their jobs. When an outside monitor faulted Volkswagen for failing to hold executives accountable, Stadler stayed in place. And when Munich prosecutors identified him last week as a suspect in their investigation and searched his home for evidence, Volkswagen said its management board had not even discussed his dismissal. That run may well be ending, however. On Monday, German authorities arrested Stadler, 55, holding him indefinitely pending trial, an acute embarrassment for Volkswagen and one that could finally prod the company to action. Stadlers arrest is the latest example of German officials widening their investigation into diesel cheating at Volkswagen. The company was found in 2015 to be using software to artificially lower a vehicles emissions levels when it was undergoing tests. Thus far, the inquiry into the scandal has largely been led by authorities in the United States, where the carmaker has had to pay tens of billions of dollars in fines and settlements, and where several executives have been arrested or sentenced to jail. In Germany, the investigation had been slower in ramping up, until recently. Last week, Volkswagen agreed to pay a fine of 1 billion euros, or about $1.16 billion, for failing to properly supervise the staff members who came up with the illegal software. Then on Monday, Stadler was detained. The decision indicates the judge was convinced there was a risk that Stadler would flee or obstruct the investigation, which prosecutors have said involves about 70 suspects. The companys supervisory board, which oversees top management, met Monday and was expected to appoint an interim replacement for Stadler, leaving open the possibility that he would return at some point. However, the board did not make a decision. In the case of Stadler, himself a member of Volkswagens management board, the carmaker said he was innocent until proven guilty, granting a top executive much more benefit of the doubt than ordinary employees would typically receive. For picture posts from 2010 and earlier, see the Earlier Picture Posts Page Texas' largest solar farm will soon have a big battery to go with it. FlexGen, an advance battery maker headquartered in Los Angeles, will supply a grid-scale battery to Vistra Energy's Upton 2 solar farm in West Texas that is capable of storing enough electricity to provide 10 megawatts an hour for more than four hours. One megawatt can power 200 Texas homes in the summer. The Upton 2 solar farm, which has a generating capacity of 180 megawatts, went online June 1 and is the largest in the state. The battery system will be housed in 40 shipping container-sized boxes on the site, where work has been going on since May, said FlexGen CEO Josh Prueher. The battery is expected to be online by the end of 2018. GROWTH INDUSTRY: The Texas solar power industry grows but remains tiny Prueher declined to disclose the cost of the energy storage system, but said it is in the tens of millions of dollars. FlexGen has worked on similar battery systems with the military and oil and gas industry for years. The combination of renewable resources and batteries is not the first in the state. In Ector and Winkler counties, Duke Energy's Notrees wind farm is hooked into a 36 megawatt battery system developed by Younicos. The system has been online since 2012 when it was built with lead-acid batteries, and was recently upgraded in December to lithium-ion batteries. At least six storage project are operating in Texas, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT, which oversees Texas' grid supplying 90 percent of its population. SUCH A DEAL: Electricity promotional deals aren't just a Texas thing San Antonio's city-owned utility, CPS Energy, has planned 10 megawatt battery system hooked up to a five megawatt solar farm for more than a year after winning a $3 million grant from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. CPS Energy CEO Paula Gold-Williams has said the facility will be located on the campus of the Southwest Research Institute. Crude dropped as an escalating trade war between the world's two largest economies imperiled energy demand just as OPEC and allied oil producers move toward boosting output. Futures declined 1.2 percent on Tuesday in New York as China vowed to "forcefully" retaliate after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports. The gloom spread to equity markets as well, with almost two-thirds of the stocks in S&P 500 Index trading down. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and Russia are pushing 22 other major oil-producing nations to relax production limits when the group convenes later this week. "The market is in a holding pattern awaiting OPEC decisions and tethered very closely to the stock market, which is crumbling," said Thomas Finlon, director of Energy Analytics Group LLC in Wellington, Florida. This week's gathering of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and allied oil producers in Vienna may be one of the most contentious in recent memory. Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak is advocating a 1.5 million-barrel increase in collective daily output, while Iran, Iraq and Venezuela argue it's too soon to back away from the historic caps that helped erode a worldwide glut. A measure of oil market volatility climbed to the highest level in three weeks. West Texas Intermediate crude for July delivery, which expires on Wednesday, slid 78 cents to settle at $65.07 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The more active August contract closed at $64.90 a barrel. Brent futures for August settlement declined 26 cents to end the session at $75.08 on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. Brent's premium to WTI for the same month was at $10.18. In remarks in Washington on Tuesday, Trump signaled skepticism that talks with China will end the disagreement. Trump on Monday evening ordered up identification of $200 billion in Chinese imports for additional tariffs of 10 percent -- with another $200 billion after that if Beijing retaliates. "We seem to be taking a hit again from the ante being raised in the U.S.-China trade war," said John Kilduff, a partner at New York-based hedge fund Again Capital LLC. "And then of course the looming OPEC meeting: Russia's reiterated that they are looking for a big increase." Meanwhile, U.S. crude stockpiles probably fell by 2.5 million barrels last week, according to a Bloomberg survey ahead of the release of Energy Information Administration data on Wednesday. At the same time, inventories at the biggest U.S. storage complex in Cushing, Oklahoma, decreased by 450,000 barrels last week, according to a forecast compiled by Bloomberg. The industry-funded American Petroleum Institute will release its weekly tally of inventories later on Tuesday. Other oil-market news: Gasoline futures dropped 0.8 percent to settle at $2.0379 a gallon. OPEC and other oil-producing countries are not discussing prices, but output levels that would achieve market stability and prevent price fluctuations, state-run KUNA news agency reported, citing Kuwait Oil Minister Bakheet Al-Rashidi. --With assistance from Tsuyoshi Inajima and Alex Longley. 2018 Bloomberg L.P. HighRadius, a Houston-based financial technology enterprise software firm, has subleased a floor of space from BP at the Westlake Four building for its headquarters and plans to take another floor this summer. The company, which specializes in integrated receivables for large and mid market companies, has started moving into the eighth floor of 200 Westlake Park Blvd. Our plan is to work aggressively to make Houston our core employee center in the United States, HighRadius chief financial officer Johnny Vincent said. The company, which has been named as a Houston Chronicle Top Workplace winner for the last two years, currently employs between 130 and 140 people in Houston. HighRadius plans to double or triple the local employee count in the coming years, Vincent said. The jobs include marketing, professional services, finance, consulting, administrative and customer service positions. Were creating an open, fun and collaborative work space, Vincent said. Thats what we did with the eighth floor, and thats what we plan on doing with the expansion space. Transforming the 25,000-square-foot space required minimal work, such as removing cubicles and adding collaborative areas, lounges and recreation spots for ping pong and dart. A planned expansion to an adjacent floor would house the lobby, Vincent said. The companys cloud-based software is used to optimize cash flow through automation of receivables and payments processes across credit, collections, electronic billing, payment and other types of processing. Many of HighRadius customers are Fortune 1000 companies that do business-to-business transactions. BP put the 20-story, 561,000-square-foot building in its Westlake office campus on the market for sublease in 2016. Employees consolidated to other parts of BPs west Houston campus, near Interstate 10 and Eldridge Parkway, but returned for a brief period while repairs were made to the campus following damages by Hurricane Harvey. After the hurricane, we used it as a temporary office space, BP spokesman Jason Ryan said. We moved back to Westlake One earlier this year. Other occupants of Westlake Four include Intertek and HIREtech. Brokers from JLL represented BP in the deal. Joshua Brown of Jackson Cooksey represented HighRadius in the sublease. With 9.5 million square feet up for sublease, Houston leads the nation in the amount of sublease space on the market, JLL said in a recent report. Energy companies comprising more than three-quarters of the sublease space in the Houston area. As the market gradually recovers, the amount of sublease space has fallen by 15.5 percent collectively across U.S. energy markets since 2016, JLL said. Were doing our part to absorb some of this energy space thats not being utilized today, Vincent said. There were quite a few really great spaces around at great rates. Taking on a five-year sublease was not a concern for HighRadius, which is relocating from the University of Phoenix building at 11451 Katy Freeway near Kirkwood. The move puts the company about three miles closer to Katy. The company, which declined to disclose revenues, has grown rapidly since being founded in 2006. It also operates in Europe and Asia. Were rapidly pursuing crossing the $100 million revenue mark over the next few years, Vincent said. katherine.feser@chron.com twitter.com/kfeser At this moment in Houstons history, there is no more meaningful piece of public art in the city than The Rebirth of Our Nationality, the historic Chicano art movement mural at 5900 Canal Street, on a facade of what is now Harris Countys Precinct 6 headquarters. A crowd of several hundred people braved the heat midday Thursday to celebrate the re-dedication of the early 1970s mural, which the county spent $70,000 to restore as part of an $8 million renovation to the former Continental Can Company property. Befitting the murals sprawling size 240-by-18-feet the remarks ran long, but everyone seemed to be savoring the spirit of the moment and what it represented for three generations of the East End community. This is what public art is for, for the community to share, said Gonzo 247, the urban art entrepreneur who led the restoration. Normally composed and business-like, he was so choked up he could barely get through the list of people he wanted to thank. Leo Tanguma, the murals creator, slowly explained the symbolism of the 70 figures who parade across the monster wall a history lesson about the struggles of Mexican-Americans, the importance of their cultural roots and the need for political activism. Some of the figures that look like victims actually reflect criticisms; Tanguma wasnt afraid to scold his own people. A man who is tied up in a rope, for example, is about Chicanos wrapped up in their own attitudes and machismo, Tanguma explained. He also spoke of unity with other communities of color, including blacks and native Americans. Together, we can accomplish more, he said. Tanguma, now in his 70s, left Houston shortly after creating the mural, frustrated by racism and convinced his politically inflamatory artworks, which included a number of smaller projects, would never be accepted. He has only returned in recent months to help repaint some of the more intricate details of his masterpiece. Gonzo noted that Tanguma put on the first touch of brown paint within the skin of the murals figures, thus blessing the wall with his own hands. Tanguma looked happy but also a little stunned at being called a hero in a community where he had once felt so isolated he saw no other path than to escape. The countys good stewardship had brought the biggest work of his life full circle. Im not used to this kind of accolades, he said. A uniformed group from the Houston chapter of the pro-Chicano organization the Brown Berets looked like figures from the mural come to life as they waved a flag and posed for photographs. Their activism now focuses on educating the community about the citys Chapter 42 ordinance to slow gentrification in the barrios, said member Willie Rodriguez. Its so emotional, said East End resident Yvonne Garcia, who like so many of those who came out for the party grew up watching Tangumas mural slowly decay. We all share a community story, said Gonzo, whose real name is Mario Figueroa Jr. And the community story is this wall behind us. The city's independent crime lab on Tuesday announced an ambitious plan to clear a backlog of hundreds of rape kits and other DNA evidence, the latest effort to rein in a recurring problem that has bedeviled criminal prosecutions for more than a decade. Over a 10-month period, the Houston Forensic Science Center plans to spend $2 million to outsource analysis of nearly 1,000 cases and cross-train staff with the hope of preventing similar backlogs in the future. "HFSC, like many labs across the country, has long struggled with backlogs in its DNA section," said Dr. Peter Stout, HFSC's CEO and president. "Our plan is to simultaneously eliminate a longstanding backlog while building a sustainable, efficient process that allows for an average 30-day turnaround time on DNA work." Prosecutors praised the move, but voiced hope for a longer range solution. "We envision a time in the near future when there is no backlog and all of our forensic needs are handled locally," said Dane Schiller, spokesman for the Harris County District Attorney's Office. Defense attorneys highlighted similar concerns. "While this is at least - and finally - a plan to reduce long standing backlogs, especially of sexual assault kits," said local defense attorney Pat McCann, "having temporary help to handle incoming samples while you retrain your staff does not fix the long term-problems." *** Three years ago, the crime lab wrapped up testing on more than 6,600 old rape kits. At the time, the backlog was a result of long-standing problems in the erstwhile Houston Police Department lab. But this time around the backlog stems from changes in the FBI's data analysis requirements and from delays caused by Harvey and other weather events. "Harvey lost us two production weeks, and the ice storm in February lost us another week," Stout said. "If you're already running at the ragged edge of being able to keep up and you lose that much time, it takes months to catch up." And, while last time around the evidence was sometimes decades old and hadn't been tested at all, at this point the cases have nearly all been tested and are only waiting for the final time-intensive data analysis step. "It's not that anything has been untested," Stout said. "What we're bottle-necked at is configuring ourselves to handle the data analysis." But that's the one part of the process the lab is legally prevented from outsourcing. So to expedite case flow, they'll be sending any new evidence that comes in to a state-certified commercial lab. As of now, the lab's forensic biology/DNA section has 950 outstanding evidence requests that are at least 30 days old. That includes roughly 200 rape kits, around 150 homicides and an assortment of other biological evidence from assaults, robberies and other crimes. In the coming months, the forensic science center will select a commercial lab to handle new cases. But at the same time, they'll train the current lab staff to do the time-consuming data analysis work. Currently, the forensic center's biology staff are each trained to do one part of the three-step process, and only six analysts are certified to do the final step. By outsourcing the incoming cases, they'll be able to free up lab workers to learn more about the data analysis end of things. *** Evidence backlogs have plagued local law enforcement for decades. In 2002, DNA testing was temporarily suspended at the Houston Police Department's crime lab after an audit uncovered shoddy forensic work including unqualified personnel, lax protocols and inadequate, leaky facilities. The lab resumed operations, but in 2009 the National Academy of Sciences found serious deficiencies in the nation's forensic science system, and called for forensic labs to be operated independently of law enforcement departments. In response, the city shifted its crime lab to the independent forensic science center, which is still housed at police headquarters but overseen by a board of directors appointed by the mayor. But as a legacy of the dysfunctional crime lab that came before it, the forensic science center found itself saddled with thousands of untested cases, including more than 6,000 rape kits. City Council approved a $4.4 million plan to outsource testing, and announced the completion of all lab work in 2015. A year later, cases started building up again, and Mayor Sylvester Turner vowed to eliminate the logjam of roughly 400 untested cases and achieve a 30-day turnaround time for lab work. Sean Buckley, the attorney who represented a jailed rape victim who later sued the county, pointed out that the current backlog is "nothing new." "Like every other problem affecting the criminal justice system in Houston and Harris County, it's the inevitable result of years of inadequate funding," he said. "The long-term solution to this must include more than training. You can't train employees to process more lab work than the infrastructure can handle." The man accused of killing an Angleton family told reporters Monday that he was innocent of the charges against him during a jailhouse interview with KPRC 2 Houston. Robert Satterfield was charged with three counts of murder in connection with the deaths of Ray Shaw Hudson Sr., 28; Maya Victoria Rivera, 24; and their 5-year-old son, Ray Shaw Hudson Jr. Their burned bodies were found in rural Wharton County. Witness interviews led authorities to Satterfield who was already in jail in Fort Bend County and agreed to cooperate. Investigators took him to the property roughly 50 miles from the slain family's home, and recovered skeletal remains there. "It is believed these remains to be the same of Hudson, Rivera and their child," the Wharton County Sheriff's Office wrote in a release Sunday. "The remains are at this point unidentifiable as there had been an attempt to dispose of the bodies by burning them." A handcuffed Satterfield told Channel 2 he had been friends with the eldest Hudson since 2010, and he knew his girlfriend and their son. He told the TV station he didnt kill them. It wasnt me, Satterfield told KPRC. Im not guilty of what Im being accused of in this matter I want them to know I wasnt responsible, and I hope the person who is responsible is found. Authorities haven't said when they believe the family died. Satterfield, who Channel 2 reported was arrested driving Rivera's car, said he had the familys permission to use it. The couple's car was recovered in Rosenberg, but authorities declined to offer more information about circumstances of Satterfield's arrest. I was driving around freely, Satterfield said. If I thought I was some kind of suspect or something I definitely would not have been in the vehicle. The investigation is ongoing and Satterfield is being held in jail on $1.5 million bond. The Wharton County Sheriff's Office, the Texas Rangers, Angleton Police Department, Rosenberg Police Department and Texas EquuSearch pitched in on the case. A former Houston police sergeant, an ex-Harris County deputy sheriff and a former Dayton ISD teacher were among 60 people arrested as part of a three-month-long regional operation that targeted internet crimes against children, authorities said Tuesday. For the fifth year, a partnership involving eight counties and 65 different law-enforcement agencies from across the Houston area worked together for 90 days as part of Operation Broken Heart, which stems from the efforts of the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. "We are thankful for the Houston Metro ICAC," Houston Police Chief Art Acevado said during a press conference at the Children's Assessment Center Tuesday. "This is a bittersweet moment we have every year; it's bittersweet because we have to have investigators investigating crimes most people would deem unthinkable. Operation Broken Heart brings relief to children in our communities who are being victimized." PHOTOS: HPD arrests dozens of suspects on DWI charges Former Harris County Sheriff's Deputy Donald Denhert faces five counts possession of child pornography, authorities said. Acevado said Dehnert was also armed with an AR-15 rifle at the time of his arrest that he intended to use to rob a female victim after sexually assaulting her. According to court documents, Mark Bennett of Bennett & Bennett serves as Dehnert's counsel. He has declined to comment on the case. Former Houston Police Department Officer Stephen McGee is charged with stalking and five counts of possession of child erotica, authorities said. And ex-Dayton ISD teacher Joshua Janecka is charged with five counts of possession of child pornography and one count of promotion of child pornography. Janecka's attorney, Neal Davis, was not available for comment. Karen Dennison, McGee's appointed counsel, did not respond to requests for comment. See mugshots from other arrests related to this investigation in the photos above. The Houston Metro ICAC Taskforce investigates online solicitation of a child and child pornography cases which the Children's Assessment Center partnered in 2008 because of an increase in these types of crimes. Operation Broken Heart conducted 255 investigations, which in turn led to 60 arrests. Investigators filed numerous local, state and federal arrest warrants and recovered thousands of gigabytes of child pornography and graphic images. "The most important thing to me is getting these criminals, these victimizers, off the street," Acevado said. "This is a crime that does not discriminate. These suspects look like you and me; it can affect anyone." Acevado encouraged parents to be more vigilant and aware of what their children are doing on the internet, and to contact law enforcement and seek treatment if a child makes an outcry, Acevado added. Michael Minasi/Houston Chronicle Several of the arrests in Operation Broken Heart were made in Montgomery County, where some credit Precinct 3 Constable Ryan Gable with bringing a stronger focus on ICAC since he took office six years ago. "ICAC is something he was doing in Harris County and he wanted to bring it to Montgomery County," said Capt. Dan Zientek, a member of Gable's staff. "ICAC is something that all of the constable agencies and the Conroe Police Department have taken on and it's been a success so far." "We could not do this without our state and federal partnerships." Zientek also stressed the importance of keeping up with advances in technology and the ways predators can reach children through various apps and social media platforms. Going forward, all of the law enforcement agencies that participated in Operation Broken Heart will continue their enforcement efforts. They hope the operation sends a message to others contemplating committing one of these crimes. "We are committed to eradicating this problem," Harris County Precinct 1 Constable Alan Rosen said. "All of these law enforcement agencies have come together to ensure we end this problem. We want to prevent people from preying on our children. "We want offenders out in the Houston area to know if you think about committing one of these crimes, you might be speaking with one of our investigators." One in three teens in the United States has experienced physical, sexual, emotional or verbal abuse from someone they have dated, and of those, experts say only about one third of them ever tell someone else about it. The Safety Series at Evelyns Park held the first of four sessions June 12 and informed Bellaire-area teenagers and parents about the dangers of teen dating violence. Teen dating violence is the physical, psychological, emotional or sexual violence within a dating relationship. It includes stalking. It can occur in person or electronically and between a current or former dating partner, said Jenna McGaw, Crime Stoppers of Houston community education specialist. Healthy dating relationships, she said, should include both partners making decisions together, feeling equal to the other partner and being content to spend time apart and together. McGaw said teens in an unhealthy relationship will see one of the partners making most of the decisions, pressing for sexual activity and drawing boundaries as well as the partners feeling like they can only spend time together. Abusive relationships are usually characterized by one person deciding everything, including sexual choices, and McGaw said usually the victim feels like he or she does not have a voice. McGaw defined consent as an agreement between participants to engage in sexual activity and said that it can be revoked at any point. You can change your mind at any time you want. You can consent at first. You can say Yes. Halfway through, you can say, No. So if a person says, No. Stop. Get off me, you have to stop and get off that person. Just because it started doesnt mean that it has to be finished, McGaw said. McGaw warned against electronic abuse, which can include creating, possessing or distributing naked pictures, all felonies under child pornography laws if the subject is under the age of 18. She said the laws are different for minors and that students are not typically charged with child pornography crimes but with misdemeanor charges. Because parents typically own the phones that their teens use, McGaw said they can be legally at risk as well. More Information Cyber safety July 26 Human trafficking Sept. 13 Every day safety and crime trends Oct. 11. All sessions are at the park at 4400 Bellaire Blvd., Bellaire, from 6-7 p.m. and are free and open to the public. RSVP at crime-stoppers.org/events or by emailing phollek@crime-stoppers.org. See More Collapse Demanding dating partners passwords is also a form of electronic abuse, and McGaw said students should never give them out. The only people that should have any one of your passwords besides yourself are your parents if they are asking for one. But peers with peers, do not give your passwords to people. It is not worth it. I dont care if theyre your best friend in the entire world. I dont care if youre dating that person. Can someone use your password against you? Absolutely, McGaw said. She urged teens experiencing abuse to find the courage to tell an authority figure like a school counselor, nurse, principal or someone at the Crime Stoppers tip line at 713-222-TIPS (8477). McGaw said they should also watch out for abuse among their friends and encouraged them to be their ally by telling an authority figure if they suspect abuse. Bellaire resident Roberta Bernstein has a 16-year-old daughter and said she decided to attend the teen dating violence session to stay informed in a world that is very different from when she was a teenager. I just think that behaviors have changed, and I think your basic things were always there. But theres just a lot more out there now than when I was young. You want to keep in touch with your kid, she said. I want to make sure Im in touch with things when youre bringing in social media or the laws or things that are always changing and dynamic. Future sessions of the Safety Series at Evelyns Park include cyber safety July 26, human trafficking Sept. 13 and every day safety and crime trends Oct. 11. All sessions are at the park at 4400 Bellaire Blvd., Bellaire, from 6-7 p.m. The series is free and open to the public. RSVP at www.crime-stoppers.org/events or by emailing phollek@crime-stoppers.org. Evelyns Park Conservancy Board President Patricia King-Ritter said the organization decided to host the series because the topics are relevant to the Bellaire community. It brings the community together when we are all on the same page, understanding how we can protect each other. Safety is a huge topic, King-Ritter said. tracy.maness@hcnonline.com The United States may lead the world in combined oil and gas production, but the growth in energy demand is driven almost entirely by Asia, especially China and India. A new report from Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy emphasizes the U.S. will play second fiddle to the developing Asian continent when it comes to energy consumption through 2040 and possibly beyond. While renewable energy sources like wind and solar will continue to rise as rapid rates, the growth will continue to require large volumes of crude oil, natural gas and even coal. This all means the U.S. should not retreat from multilateral and bilateral free trade policies or wage wide-reaching trade wars because the U.S. could weaken its position as a global energy exporter and, in effect, decrease the demand for U.S. oil and gas, argued Baker Institute academics Anna Mikulska and Michael Maher. Already, China is threatening to place tariffs on U.S. oil and more as President Donald Trump pushed $50 billion of new tariffs on select Chinese goods starting July 6 in retaliation to alleged intellectual property theft by China. Trump is warning he may escalate that to $200 billion in additional tariffs. China has not yet proposed placing tariffs though on U.S. liquefied natural gas. RELATED: Houston transforms the U.S. into an energy exporting hub Port hubs along the Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana are leading most of the growth to export more oil and LNG worldwide. A number of LNG export complexes are currently under construction, including in Freeport and Corpus Christi, while the Houston Ship Channel and Port of Corpus Christi are expanding to ship out much more crude oil produced from West Texas' booming Permian Basin. There's currently a race to build out several pipelines across Texas to transport the oil to the Houston and Corpus hubs. China and India will account for between 65 percent and 75 percent of the growth in global energy demand through 2040, the report notes. Much of the remaining growth will come from smaller Southeast Asian nations. The region will need more than 400 million metric tons of of additional oil equivalent demand through 2040, which is about half of China's total current demand. The Rice report drew information from the U.S. Energy Department, the International Energy Agency and British energy major BP's annual energy outlook. The report also warned that energy must be produced as sustainably as possible with fewer emissions and more reliance on renewable sources in order to meet global goals to combat climate change while still feeding the growth of the developing world. The Lone Star State is confident it can kill Danny Bible. Earlier this month, the aging Houston serial killer filed a last-minute lawsuit arguing that his veins are so bad and his health problems so severe that he can't be put to death - or it'll turn into a painfully botched procedure. But the state of Texas begged to differ, touting its long history of successful executions. "Texas is the most prolific death-penalty state in the nation," the state wrote in a Friday afternoon court filing. "Bible provides no example of a Texas execution, performed under the current protocol, gone horribly awry because of vein failure." The 66-year-old four-time killer, who is set for execution on June 27, pointed to bloody botched procedures in other states. In February, a lethal injection team in Alabama spent hours poking Doyle Hamm before calling off his execution. The year before that, Ohio found itself in a similar place with condemned killer Alva Campbell. But that hasn't happened here, the state pointed out in its response. "Texas is not Ohio or Alabama, and the court should give little consideration to isolated examples of problematic executions in other states when it has numerous uneventful Texas executions upon which to base its opinions," state attorneys wrote. "Bible has not managed to present even a single instance of defendants failing to successfully access a vein during an execution." The state raised a number of other points, alleging that the condemned killer should have raised the issue sooner and pointing out that prison medical staffers have managed to draw blood for medical testing over the past year. But Bible's lawyers fired back in a Monday court filing, calling out the state's "inflammatory rhetoric" they deemed "devoid of any viable argument." "Defendants' response is most notable for the things absent from it," attorneys Jeremy Schepers, Nadia Wood and Margaret Schmucker wrote, noting that the state doesn't dispute Bible's host of medical conditions ranging from edema to obesity to Parkinson's disease. The state also "attempts to obfuscate" the "real issue" as to whether its execution procedures represent a substantial risk of harm to a man in Bible's medical condition. That particular claim, defense lawyers argue, the state didn't really refute. This isn't the first time a Texas death row prisoner has fought his sentence by questioning the lethal injection process. But other recent cases focused on the possibility that the drugs themselves would cause suffering, a claim that could more generally apply to any death row prisoner. Bible's argument focuses more narrowly on the possibility that he, specifically, is unfit to execute. Instead, his lawyers have suggested alternative methods such as a firing squad or nitrogen gas in order to decrease the risk of suffering. Bible was initially sent to death row in 2003, more than two decades after the crime that landed him there. A former drifter, Bible's lengthy string of violence dates back to at least 1979. That May, a passerby found the bloodied, half-naked body of Inez Deaton along the slope of a Houston bayou. She'd been stabbed 11 times with an ice pick before her killer posed her corpse by the water. For nearly two decades, Deaton's slaying went unsolved but Bible's violent streak continued. In the years that followed, Bible terrorized women in the Midwest, once setting his girlfriend's car on fire because he didn't like her haircut. After he returned to Texas and settled west of Fort Worth, he murdered his sister-in-law Tracy Powers and her infant son Justin. Then, he killed Powers' roommate, Pam Hudgins, and left her body hanging from a roadside fence. Following those killings, he fled to Montana, where he kidnapped a woman and raped an 11-year-old girl, according to court records. Eventually, he was caught and in 1984 he pleaded guilty to Hudgins' murder. He was sentenced to 25 years for the killing and 20 years for a Harris County robbery. He was released on parole eight years later, under a since-repealed mandatory supervision law. While still on parole, he raped and molested multiple young relatives, including a 5-year-old. Then in 1998, he raped Tera Robinson in a Louisiana motel room before stuffing her into a duffel bag when he became enraged that he couldn't maintain an erection. The woman broke free and called for help. Bible was eventually caught in Florida, and freely admitted to his crimes under questioning. Weeks after he was sentenced, Bible narrowly escaped death during a head-on-collision on the way to death row. The officer behind the wheel of the prison transport vehicle, 40-year-old John Bennett, died in the wreck, while Bible ended up in a wheelchair. In past appeals, Bible's attorneys have used his deteriorating medical condition to argue against his execution, saying he can't be a danger in his current state. Texas has already executed six men this year, including another Houston serial killer, Anthony Shore. Aside from Bible's, there are seven other death dates on the calendar in Texas. A Houston man who, while in police custody, escaped from a hospital in The Woodlands on Wednesday was captured in a Heights-area home Monday morning. Ricky Rangel, 55, was being treated at Memorial Hermann The Woodlands Hospital in Shenandoah on Wednesday night after having allegedly crashed into a Harris County Sheriff's Office patrol car while drunk, authorities said. The crash happened in the 19400 block of Texas 249 earlier that day, detectives said. An HCSO deputy was conducting traffic enforcement on the side of the road when Rangel, driving a red Ford Ranger, sideswiped the deputy, according to court documents. PRISON TROUBLE: Warden demoted as investigation into discipline quotas continues Rangel also crashed into another vehicle before coming to a stop, police said. Rangel was injured in the crash and taken to Memorial Hermann The Woodlands Hospital for treatment. Police suspected Rangel was driving drunk. A HCSO deputy drove to the hospital and interviewed Rangel, who allegedly admitted to drinking six beers before getting behind the wheel, court records state. The deputy immediately arrested Rangel, police said. The deputy went back to his patrol vehicle to grab legal paperwork and came back to find Rangel's room was empty. Hospital staff told the deputy Rangel left the room and walked out of the hospital despite being under arrest, court documents show. NAILS IN THE WATER: Second child rescued from Lake Conroe bulkhead He was able to elude police for almost a week but was eventually captured Monday morning inside a home in the 900 block of East 38th Street, near Crosstimbers Street and Airline Drive. Rangel was originally charged with his third DWI and is now also facing a felony escape charge, police said. Rangel's rap sheet in Harris County dates back to the early 90s, court records show. He has previous convictions for assault, DWI, driving with a suspended license, trespassing and evading police with a vehicle. Text CHRON to 77453 to receive breaking news alerts by text message. Jay R. Jordan is a breaking news reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JayRJordan. AUSTIN Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick frequently talk tough about illegal immigration, but they refuse to publicly support the Trump administrations zero-tolerance policy thats spurred outrage for ripping thousands of undocumented children out of the arms of their parents. Neither are they criticizing it. Texas top Republicans are making a calculated decision to hide from the humanitarian crisis, largely taking place on Texas soil, because they are afraid of upsetting their political base. The governor has tried to say as little as possible about the White House policy, making only one public comment backing Trumps argument that the childrens and parents traumatic experiences can be used as leverage for an immigration overhaul. This is horrible and this rips everyones hearts apart about whats going on, Abbott told a Dallas-area TV station. He added that Trump had offered to end the ripping apart of these families if Democrats agree to a new immigration law. Abbott declined repeated requests for comment from the Houston Chronicle. Instead, his staff forwarded the statement made last weekend to NBC TV. The governor seeks to appear loyal without attracting attention to himself. MORE: Democrats howl, Republicans become uneasy over family separations at border It shouldn't be a tightrope to do the right thing, said John Weaver, a longtime campaign strategist from Texas who has consulted for Republicans like George H.W. Bush and now Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Its disappointing that we havent heard from the governor but not surprising. Weve gone from Texas having very strong leaders to having leaders who are very calculating. Some 2,000 minors who crossed the border illegally were separated from their parents in the last six weeks due to a zero tolerance policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in April. Many children have since been sent to a tent camp in Tornillo and a former Walmart in Brownsville, among others, before being released to family or sent into federal foster care, unsure if or when they will reunite with their parents. Patrick never brought up the separation policy or the border when he spoke for half an hour at the Texas Republican Party convention in San Antonio on Friday. His office and campaign have not returned repeated calls for comment. Dan Patricks silence, in the face of such brutality committed on Texas soil, makes him as culpable as the administration. Morally, its as though he wrenched the children from their parents with his own hands, said Mike Collier, a Democratic businessman running against Patrick for lieutenant governor in November. The Trump administration has defended the policy and urged Congress, namely Democrats, to fix the problem. Two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the administrations decision to remove immigrant children from their parents after crossing the border, according to a poll by CNN. However, the majority of Republicans surveyed 58 percent approve of the practice. The poll surveyed 1,012 people between June 14 and 17. MORE: At a border immigration shelter: a room of infants; teen immigrants giving birth Attorney General Ken Paxton, a tea party Republican and attorney for a state with a 1,254-mile border with Mexico, backs the administrations attempt to force passage of Trumps immigration priorities. The separation of families should never be a desired outcome and my heart goes out to these children being used as pawns in a political debate. The issue is whether well have a secure border or an open-border, he said in an emailed statement Tuesday. Any changes to our immigration system to address family separation must come from Congress. House Speaker Joe Straus, often at odds with his partys conservative base, is one of the few Republicans who has pushed back against the White House. On Tuesday he lambasted the zero tolerance policy in a letter to the president, accusing him of using these scared, vulnerable children as a negotiating tool. He urged Trump to listen to faith leaders and elected officials from both parties and rescind the policy, stressing the trauma the children are going through is scientifically proven to lead to poor health outcomes, anxiety, delayed development and mental illness, worsening the many problems that already plague our immigration system. Straus is among a growing group of Republicans speaking out, including U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of San Antonio and former First Lady Laura Bush who called the policy cruel and immoral, and it breaks my heart. Hurd is in a highly competitive race against Democrat Gina Ortiz-Jones in a district that is majority Hispanic, making it necessary to denounce Trumps policy. Donald Trump Jr. pulled out of attending a fundraiser for Land Commissioner George P. Bush after his father, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, lashed out at the Trump administrations handling of the border. Children shouldnt be used as a negotiating tool, said the elder Bush, @realDonaldTrump should end his heartless policy and Congress should get an immigration deal done that provides for asylum reform, border security and path to citizenship for Dreamers. The policy has led to housing children in shelters including a tent city and a former Walmart before being entered into the foster care system. Images of children held in holding cells have spurred the outrage outside of the Republican party base on which Abbott and others rely on for support. If I were Greg Abbotts political adviser, Id say just keep your mouth shut and do something else and stay out of the limelight, stay out of the news as much as you can, said Victoria DeFrancesco Soto, a lecturer with a focus on politics and immigration at the University of Texas at Austin. Andrea Zelinski covers politics for the Houston Chronicle. Read her recent stories here. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook. Send her tips at andrea.zelinski@chron.com. andrea.zelinski@chron.com twitter.com/andreazelinski A two-year-old Honduran girl crying as Border Patrol agents patted down her mother. Photographs of small children in cages at federal processing facilities. Heart-wrenching accounts of parents separated from their children at the southern border, including one father from Honduras who killed himself after his wife and son were taken from him. It's all been unsettling to many Americans, and also confusing. President Donald Trump has insisted repeatedly that Democrats are to blame for his administration's new separation policy. Since it was implemented in April, more than 2,000 children have been removed from their parents after the adults were jailed for illegally crossing the border. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have defended the practice, saying the government is fully enforcing a law that has been on the books for decades. They liken it to Americans who are taken from their children when they are jailed for committing a crime. But some top Republicans and conservative commentators have expressed growing discomfort with the policy. Former Fox News host Bill O' Reilly called it "unacceptable." Former first lady Laura Bush said it is cruel and "immoral." "Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso," she wrote in a Washington Post op-ed column. "These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history." An avalanche of false reports have gone viral over the practice, some claiming that the government is "stealing" children. A few readers have even suggested that because photos of a federal childcare facility in the Rio Grande Valley depicted largely immigrant boys, something nefarious may be happening to the girls. On such an emotive, politically-charged issue, there's sure to be a lot of misinformation. We break it down for you here: Is there a law requiring the separation of immigrant families at the border? No. But crossing the U.S. border without a visa or other authorization and between official ports of entry has been a misdemeanor crime for decades. Some say it was first proposed in 1929, when Coleman Livingston Blease, a pro-lynching Democratic senator from South Carolina, pushed it to cut down on Mexican immigration. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, speaking on "Meet the Press," argued that the policy is a function of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Congress that year was controlled by Democrats and the president was Democrat Harry Truman. Either way, the federal criminal statute was rarely used until the last decade, reserved instead for only the most egregious offenders or those with serious criminal records. In 2005, President George W. Bush's administration launched "Operation Streamline," first as a pilot program in Del Rio, Texas. Under that plan, aimed at deterring illegal border crossers, the government criminally prosecuted most migrants caught within a stretch of the border en masse and channeled them into the federal justice system, where the Bureau of Prisons has more resources to hold them for longer periods of time before they can be deported. Over the next few years, similar prosecution initiatives were tried to varying degrees in six of the nine southwestern border sectors, except for California where U.S. Attorneys declined to take part. Courtesy photo STREAMLINED: Trump pressing for mass criminalization of illegal border crossers Even under "Operation Streamline," U.S. attorneys rarely prosecuted parents traveling with their children. One reason was that the White House, under both Bush and President Barack Obama, did not want to separate parents from their children, who by law cannot be held in federal prison. LISTEN: Children Who've Just Been Separated From Their Parents at the Border But the sheer number of offenders, thousands a day, and the limited capacity of the federal courts also realistically meant most prosecutors used discretion in whom to charge. The expense to the federal courts and Bureau of Prisons of criminalizing what is usually a civil offense is staggering. Detaining migrants on such charges alone costs some $1 billion a year, according to estimates by Grassroots Leadership, an advocacy group in Austin opposing incarceration. Even without Trump's recent policy, the crime of illegal entry made up almost half of all federal cases and 80 percent of the dockets in the Western and Southern Districts of Texas, which includes Houston. How is the Trump administration's policy different from what was done before? Sessions announced in April the that the government would enact a "zero tolerance" approach to prosecute all illegal border crossers, including parents traveling with children and those whom are seeking asylum. Central American families and children make up the fastest-growing demographic of migrants here illegally, one-quarter of all apprehensions at the southern border last year. Shortly after taking office, the Trump administration unveiled a series of policies to discourage such families from making the dangerous journey north. It threatened to prosecute parents if they paid smugglers to bring children and, if necessary, to separate families at the border. The number of those coming here plummeted. Facing intense criticism from advocates, then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly backed away from his initial threats, saying it would occur only in extenuating circumstances such as an illness. Last summer, however, as family arrivals rose once more and Kelly left to become Trump's chief-of-staff, Sessions directed U.S. Attorneys to expand the prosecution of immigration crimes. Federal officials in certain areas along the border quietly began prosecuting parents for illegal entry, an unusual turn of events. Detaining parents while requiring their children go to federal shelters is tantamount to a de facto policy of family separation, as the Houston Chronicle first reported last November. READ: Trump moves to end 'catch and release', prosecuting parents and removing children who cross border In April 2018, Sessions announced the government was expanding the strategy across the border. "Having children does not give you immunity from arrest and prosecution," he reiterated in a speech last week in Fort Wayne, Ind. He and other White House officials have also said the policy is necessary to deter other parents from coming here illegally with their children. The Journal Gazette, MBO / Associated Press READ MORE: Trump administration defends family separations at border Though overall illegal crossings are at their lowest in decades, new statistics this month show that the number of families and children coming here rose another 14 percent in May to almost 16,000, reaching levels last seen during President Barack Obama's administration. What happens to the children after the parents are separated? Once adults are taken to a federal holding area to be prosecuted for the crime, their children are considered "unaccompanied." The government has 72 hours to transfer them to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a subset of the Department of Health and Human Services that is in charge of caring for immigrant children. ORR places the children in one of about 100 federal foster care facilities around the country that are licensed to care for minors. How long do they stay there? That depends. In the past, including during the so-called surge of 2014, most unaccompanied children came to the United States alone. They tended to be older, since they could travel by themselves, with most of them between the ages of 10 and 17. The majority were coming here to reunite with their parents or other relatives. Most such children were quickly placed with their family after the federal government did a basic screening to ensure they weren't being trafficked. Carolyn Cole, MBR / TNS What is different now? Children who have been separated from their parents at the border tend to be younger as many are logistically unable to come here alone. It also may be harder to find relatives to place them with as their direct family members -- their parents -- have been removed from them. They may not have other family here. What happens to the parents? Parents are usually charged with the misdemeanor crime of improper entry and plead guilty in speedy mass hearings that critics have called "assembly-line justice." They usually receive a sentence of a few days in federal prison or "time served" and are taken back to Border Patrol processing facilities before being sent to immigration detention centers run by the Department of Homeland Security. From there, they can be quickly deported under a process known as "expedited removal" that applies to those arrested near the border and means they don't necessarily see an immigration judge. What about those seeking asylum? One of the biggest concerns advocates express about "zero tolerance" prosecution initiatives is that it not only wrongly punishes migrants with valid asylum claims - well-founded fears of persecution in their home countries - but may prevent them from making such petitions at all. The Department of Homeland Security's own Office of Inspector General identified this as a problem in 2015, noting that the United Nations convention on refugees, to which the U.S. is a signatory, holds that countries should not impose penalties on refugees who enter unlawfully to ask for asylum. LEGAL LIMBO: Her husband murdered, her son taken away, a mother seeking asylum tells a judge, 'I have lost everything' The federal government argues that migrants can request asylum after serving their prison sentence. Are parents reunited with their children? Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has said the administration's policy of prosecuting parents is just like "what we do every day in every part of the United States when an adult of a family commits a crime. If you as a parent break into a house, you will be incarcerated by police and thereby separated from your family. We're doing the same thing at the border." The difference is that Americans imprisoned for a crime generally know where their children are while they are being detained. And once they complete their criminal sentence, they are typically reunited with their children unless a judge finds they are unfit parents -- usually a very high bar. Lawyers, social workers for children, advocacy organizations, and media reports indicate immigrant parents and children are not always reunified after the adults serve their time. In one case, a Guatemalan father had his 18-month-old son taken from him and was told only that the boy is in a shelter "somewhere in Texas." Submitted SEE: Immigrant families separated at border struggle to find each other The father served a few weeks in federal prison for the crime before being transferred to an immigrant detention facility in El Paso. He was detained for three months without any information about his toddler. In October, he was deported alone. Five months after the last time he saw his son, the father was reunited with him in December. Immigrant advocates say Esteban Pastor's story is a troubling indicator of all that could go wrong, especially when the children involved are so young. Parents fleeing violence might not return to their homes after being deported and change their numbers or contact information so that it's even more difficult for social workers representing their children to later find them. Children also acquire their own immigration cases and legal advocates once they are separated from their parents and guardian ad litems may argue that it's in their best interest not to return to a situation of danger. Godofredo A. Vasquez, Houston Chronicle / Houston Chronicle Why is it so difficult for parents to find information about their children's whereabouts once they have been separated? Unaccompanied children have certain privacy rights to protect them. The government must verify that adults are not trafficking children before they can release information about them. Officials have pointed to a 1-800 number which parents can call to find the whereabouts of their kids. But advocates say that parents in detention cannot receive call-backs, which is required by the agency. Lomi Kriel/Houston Chronicle READ: New 'zero tolerance' policy overwhelms South Texas courts Mainly, however, there seems to be startlingly few systematic policies in place between the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, which detain the parents, and Health and Human Services, which is in charge of the children, to communicate on the issue. The Office of Refugee Resettlement has said it is "not routinely informed about how or when the (unaccompanied child) became separated from their parent(s) or the whereabouts of the parents." Sometimes parents, attorneys and relatives are able to contact the agency. In other cases, children report that information. Sometimes they fall through the cracks. "We have seen children as young as 18 months deported without their parents and more commonly, parents deported without their children," said Michelle Brane, executive director of the migrant rights program at the Women's Refugee Commission, a national advocacy group. "Parents arrive in Central America with no idea of how to get their children back." How is this situation different from the unaccompanied minor "crisis" in 2014? Nearly 70,000 unaccompanied children and almost as many families, many of them fleeing violence and poverty in Central America, came to the U.S. in 2014. It overwhelmed Obama's administration, and then, as now, photographs of children in caged Border Patrol cells shocked the nation. The Obama administration decided to hold many women and children in three detention centers built specifically for families, two of which are in Texas. Why doesn't the Trump administration also lock up families together instead of separating parents and children? Short answer: Because they can't. Under a landmark 1997 legal settlement governing the rights of children in detention and known as Flores, unaccompanied children can only be held in a detention-like facility for a short period of time. They are required to be treated a certain way, such as receiving a specific number of hot meals and snacks a day, for example. In 2016, a California federal judge ruled that the settlement applied to families as well, effectively requiring that they be released within 20 days. Many were freed to return for a court date sometime in the future. Critics said many never showed up, and Trump campaigned on ending the practice of so-called "catch and release." Immigrant advocates argue practically all those freed under an "Alternatives to Detention" program, including electronic-ankle monitoring bracelets, complied with court requirements. The Trump administration ended that program last year. Why is Trump blaming Democrats for family separation? The president and some of his supporters want Congress to override the Flores Settlement, and change a 2008 bipartisan law intended to protect children from trafficking. The legal agreement and the law prevents the government from detaining families together for long and from quickly deporting many children who are not from Mexico or Canada. What happened with the 1,500 "missing" kids? On Memorial Day weekend, a flurry of false reports went viral conflating family separations at the border and the fate of about 1,500 unaccompanied children of whom the federal government testified it had lost track. In reality, those children had been released to relatives or other adult sponsors. When the government followed up one month later in a single phone call, they could not reach them. The families may have decided not to pick up the phone or changed their numbers. Advocates agree that most of those children probably are fine. Michael Ciaglo/Houston Chronicle Have some children been trafficked after being released to sponsors? Yes. In just one example, several Guatemalan teens were forced to work against their will on an Ohio egg farm. WATCH: Trafficked in America Children have also suffered abuse in the federal shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. A 2014 Houston Chronicle investigation found that youths inside the insular system quietly suffered abuses by the people paid to protect them. MUST READ: CROSSING ALONE How many children are being detained now and where are they? Health and Human Services said Monday more than 11,780 children are currently in its custody. A spokesman, Kenneth Wolfe, said the agency has about 700 open beds and more than 1,000 beds on "reserve status." The agency has put out calls to its federal contractors to find more space. Last week, Southwest Key Programs, a Texas nonprofit with a lucrative federal contract to care for unaccompanied children, confirmed it has signed a lease with the owner of a downtown Houston facility at 419 Emancipation Ave. Its application with the state requests a general residential operating license to hold up to 240 children between the ages of "0 to 17." Several stakeholders who work with immigrant minors said they have been told the facility would largely serve "tender age" children who are younger than 12, as well as pregnant and nursing teenagers. The agency, which is paid more than $400 million to care for thousands of immigrant children, argues it has been operating such shelters for two decades. "Over the years, we have housed many children under the age of 4 who were sent by (the federal government) to stay in our shelters without a parent, family member or guardian," a spokeswoman, Cindy Casares, said in a statement. "While they stayed with us, we did the same thing we do for every child in our care. We worked to reunify them with family or sponsor as quickly as is safely possible." Michael Ciaglo, Houston Chronicle / Houston Chronicle READ MORE: Immigrant children's shelter considered for downtown Houston The government has also opened a tent-like structure in Tornillo, south of El Paso, to house hundreds of migrant children. And it is considering keeping some children on military bases as the Obama administration briefly did in 2014. SEE: Trump administration looks to military bases in Texas to house immigrant children Previously the small percentage of children under 10 who were deemed "unaccompanied" were usually held in government residential care for only a short period before typically being placed with foster parents contracting with federal agencies. Such very young children have specialized needs from older kids who can more easily be held in a group setting. But the sheer number of very young children in recent weeks has overwhelmed the government and its contractors, and agencies have put out emergency calls for more such foster parents. In the meantime, advocates say the shelter in Houston would be the first to possibly provide longer-term care for such very young children. Why do so few photographs from inside federal childcare shelters show girls? No one can just walk into a federal children's shelter and demand access, as U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, found out this month when he was barred from entering one of Southwest Key Program's biggest facilities, a shelter in Brownsville caring for almost 1,500 immigrant children, most of them between the ages of 10 and 17. SEE: Oregon senator finds closed doors in South Texas migrant children's shelter After Merkley's criticism of the facility went viral on social media, Southwest Key offered a media tour and allowed one pool photographer to take pictures. Senator Jeff Merkley Program officials said most children in that particular shelter, an old converted Wal-Mart in Brownsville, just happened to be boys. Do "zero tolerance" prosecutions work to deter parents from coming? That's unclear. An analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit, found Bush's Operation Streamline had no long-term deterrent effect between 2005 and 2013. The Government Accountability Office has also suggested immigrant return rates stayed basically unchanged over a longer time frame. In a McAllen federal court last week, several migrants were back after having recently been deported. One faced the same charge in that very room exactly two weeks before. Sister Norma Pimentel, who runs a migrant shelter near McAllen's downtown Sacred Heart Catholic Church, recently returned from a trip to Guatemala and El Salvador where advocates told her they were struggling with an influx of small children deported alone. Parents tell her they have heard of Trump's policy and are afraid. "But they're still coming," she said. "I ask them why and they say, 'It's worse for us to stay.'" Honduras and El Salvador are two of the most violent countries in the world, and murderous gangs often forcibly recruit children. GANG RULE: In El Salvador, gangs rule the streets with impunity What happens next? The United Nations has condemned the practice of family separation. The Texas Civil Rights Project and other national advocacy groups filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights this month, arguing the practice of separating parents and children violates international protocols. READ: Advocates file human rights complaint to stop family separations at border The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit to block such family separations in February and is expecting a federal judge's ruling soon. The public defender's office for the Western District of Texas in a separate suit argued the practice violates parents' rights to due process as they plead guilty to the crime to reunite with their children. It is on appeal. EXPLAINER: Why can't immigrants here illegally just apply for citizenship? Marie D. De Jesus/Houston Chronicle The growing legal reaction suggests the policy could perhaps meet the fate of some of the Trump administration's other controversial immigration initiatives. Federal judges blocked the so-called travel ban shortly after it was announced last year and it has been largely tangled up in legal wrangling ever since. U.S. Attorneys could limit which parents they decide to prosecute. Or the Trump administration could reverse course on its policy. But its push back Monday suggests that might not happen soon. lomi.kriel@chron.com @lomikriel A Houston railroad worker and the young father he is accused of killing during a late-night confrontation at a Dennys restaurant fought, wrestled and rolled around on the concrete sidewalk in front of the Crosby-area diner before the encounter turned fatal, witnesses testified Monday. Using grainy surveillance video and eyewitness testimony, lawyers for Terry Thompson, who is accused of killing 24-year-old John Hernandez by pinning him to the ground in a chokehold last year, continued efforts to show that Thompson was just trying to get the other diner patron to stop fighting. They were both rolling around fighting, werent they? defense attorney Scot Courtney asked Israel Jaquez, who was called as a witness for the prosecution. Yes sir, said Jaquez, a 19-year-old former server at the restaurant. Hes on top of Thompson, isnt he? Courtney asked, noting that Hernandez for a time was straddling Thompson. Thats quite a struggle, isnt it? Yes sir, Jaquez agreed. The eyewitness account topped the fourth day of testimony in the murder trial, which has made national headlines after bystander cell phone video of the fatal struggle surfaced and sparked a massive protest days over the May 28, 2017 incident. Prosecutors at first accepted assault charges against Hernandez, but later charged Thompson and his wife. Thompson is married to Chauna Thompson, a former Harris County Sheriffs deputy who was also at the restaurant and has been charged with murder, accused of helping to hold Hernandez down. She was fired by Sheriff Ed Gonzalez after Hernandezs death last June. The defense has contended that Hernandez was intoxicated and urinating in the parking lot when Thompson confronted him for exposing himself to Thompsons teen-aged daughter and two other girls. The defense has argued that Hernandez, who was 511, initiated the fight by delivering the first punch and gave Thompson, who is 58, a black eye. Prosecutors have argued that Thompson choked Hernandez for several minutes after he passed out, killing him. He was transported in a coma to LBJ hospital where he died three days later after being taken off of life support. On Monday, Jaquez also testified that he saw Hernandez tapping out once he was on his belly with Thompson straddling him. He was struggling to breathe, Jaquez told jurors. He was tapping his hand on the concrete. He was tapping out. Last week, jurors heard from Hernandezs widow who said her common-law husband got drunk and headbutted her during an argument about three months before he was killed. When he gets drunk, he isnt himself. He gets mean, testified Maria Toral, his 25-year-old common law wife. Earliers, Toral had painted him as a loving father who she fell in love with when they both 19. One of the first witnesses in the trial was Blake Wise. The metal worker was leaving Dennys before the incident, and told the jury a drunken Hernandez picked a fight with him in the moments they passed each other in the parking lot. Wise said he was concerned that Hernandez had driven his late-model Toyota pick-up truck with Toral and their four-year-old daughter. As Wise got into his truck, the intoxicated Hernandez apparently believed he was getting a gun out and shouted that he had gun as well. Wise called 911 as he drove away and reported Hernandez. Mondays testimony was rounded out by Dennys employees including servers Bryan Riefkohl and Melissa Trammell,, who both testified they tried to get Thompson to let Hernandez go. He was fighting for his life, Trammell told jurors. Brian Rogers covers Houston crime and courts. You can email him at brian.rogers@chron.com or follow him on Twitter at @brianjrogers. Saying he will not be an enabler of a plan to put immigrant children in a downtown Houston warehouse, Mayor Sylvester Turner called on the property owner Tuesday to reconsider plans to lease the facility to a nonprofit hoping to operate it as a detention center for children separated from their families at the border. The mayor said he is in no rush to issue city permits at the site, and called on the state not to issue a child care license to the 54,000-square-foot facility two blocks north of BBVA Compass Stadium for use by federal contractor Southwest Key Programs. Turner, flanked by numerous nonprofit, religious and political leaders at City Hall, said he wanted to show a unified front to protest the unjust and immoral policy the Trump administration began enforcing in April, when a zero tolerance approach began driving up the number of children removed from their parents upon crossing the border illegally. Ive done my best to try to stay clear of the national dialogue on many issues. Ive done my best to try to focus on the issues that confront the city of Houston, recognizing that we need the partnership of the national the feds the state, working with the city, Turner said. This one is different. There comes a time when Americans, when Houstonians, when Texans, have to say to those higher than ourselves: This is wrong. IN WASHINGTON: Trump tells GOP to fix immigration system but offers little clarity on the way forward The mayor said he respects the work Southwest Key has done in the past, noting that he worked with the groups leaders during his time in the Texas Legislature. But Turner said the latest circumstances are objectionable and proclaimed he will not be an enabler in this process. The former warehouse at 419 Emancipation Ave. for years a Star of Hope shelter for families who recently had become homeless was sold to 419 Hope Partners in 2016 when the nonprofit moved to a larger campus. The facility then housed about 300 people displaced by Hurricane Harvey through March. This month, Southwest Key signed a lease for the facility. Stakeholders who work with immigrant minors said they have been told the site largely would serve tender age children who are younger than 12, as well as pregnant and nursing teenagers. Turner said he was doubly disappointed to learn of the proposal last week because the city had been in talks with owner David Denenburg about using the space as a joint city-county homeless shelter. Nancy Sims, a spokeswoman for Denenburg, said Tuesday that an unnamed company leasing the building had subleased the facility to Southwest Key. A spokeswoman for Southwest Key did not return messages seeking comment Tuesday. This is a crisis fabricated by the (Trump) administration and his right-wing, anti-immigrant people that are going to the extremes of separating kids from their mothers, said Alain Cisneros, organizer of FIEL Houston, which advocates for immigrants. These people should not be treated like criminals. They should be treated as refugees. Asked by a reporter if he planned to slow-walk the permitting process, Turner smiled. He said city fire inspectors have not visited the property and that health inspectors have yet to grant a food service permit. Code enforcement officials already have granted a certificate of occupancy, affirming that the facility meets the minimum requirements to operate as a dormitory/shelter, though Houston Public Works spokeswoman Alanna Reed said the paperwork connected with that application made no mention of Southwest Key, the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement or the plan to house children at the site. EXPLAINER: Must immigrant parents, children be separated at the border? Health department director Stephen Williams said there are certain deficiencies at the site that would need to be corrected before a permit is issued. Fire Chief Sam Pena said switching from housing adults to housing children will require a more thorough review than what the city fire marshals office conducted when the facility served as a shelter after Harvey. If its primarily children, having enough people there to ensure proper evacuation, proper access, because youre dealing with a different type of juvenile person, Pena said. Were going to be meticulous and judicious as far as our inspections, especially for the proposed use of this, but its nothing different than what wed do for any other business. John Reynolds, a spokesman for the state Health and Human Services Commission, which issues child care licenses, said the agency still is reviewing Southwest Keys week-old application; the review process can take several weeks to a few months, he said. Advocates say Southwest Keys proposal to hold 240 children between the ages of 0 to 17 at the site could make it the first residential center in the nation to detain such small children without their relatives or other foster parents for longer periods of time. By law, the children of adults who cross the border illegally cannot be held in prison with them and are transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a subset of the Department of Health and Human Services. Until the Trump administrations zero tolerance crackdown, most children in the agencys care so-called unaccompanied minors came here alone to find relatives and usually are between the ages of 10 and 17. Most were quickly released to family or other sponsors already in the country. Under the new strategy, however, children as young as 18 months who arrive with their parents have been forced into government custody while the adults serve brief sentences for the misdemeanor crime of crossing the border illegally before going to immigrant detention centers, and in some cases being deported without their children. The surge in border crossings has overwhelmed the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which now has more than 11,400 children in its care in about 100 shelters across the country that are almost full. The ORR has issued calls to agencies that run such facilities for the government to see if they can increase their capacity and are considering housing children in tent-like structures on military bases, including in Texas. Federal officials have opened a facility in Tornillo, a town on the Texas border, to house hundreds of children in air-conditioned tent-like structures. ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Abbott, Patrick quiet on zero tolerance policy The Associated Press reported Tuesday night that the Trump administrations zero tolerance enforcement policy is prompting authorities to open at least three other tender-age shelters in South Texas. Southwest Key is paid more than $400 million to care for immigrant children in 27 shelters across Texas, Arizona and California, and currently houses more than 5,100 kids. The Austin-based nonprofit operates five shelters in the Houston area. The facilities originally were licensed to hold 719 children, but held 720 as of mid-May, thanks to a series of temporary variances that have allowed them to add 112 beds across the local shelters. Lomi Kriel contributed to this report. mike.morris@chron.com olivia.tallet@chron.com This week the Texas Department of Transportation's dynamic message signs (DMS) received more attention than usual for a hip way of reminding drivers to use their seat belts. The message "Awwww Snap Your Seat Belt" received a lot of social media attention after residents snapped photos of it as they drove by. The signs that guide us along our routes through Houston are locally controlled by TxDOT and Houston TranStar, which monitor traffic in the area and try and make life a little more easier. BEHIND THE SCENES: Look deep inside Houston TranStar, where your traffic news originates According to Danny Perez with TxDOT, the signs have three main purposes, besides telling us where the weekend's gun and boat shows are of course. "The messages provide motorists travel and safety information regarding incident management, weather conditions, and roadway conditions," Perez said Tuesday. "And many times we bring awareness to the community about various safety initiatives such as seat belt usage and not drinking and driving through the DMS boards." ROAD PORK: A lost load of butchered pig heads made Houston traffic a little more metal Hence, the fun "Awwww Snap Your Seat Belt" sign that got so much attention this week by Houston commuters. Houston's boards follow the same format as those around Texas. The messages cycle through as needed on the signs on Houston's roadways. "All of our DMS boards are governed the same as DMS boards on state roads across the state," Perez added. There is a human behind the boards, which makes us all feel a lot better. All the current messaging on the boards across Houston can be seen at TranStar's official website, which itself is a must-bookmark for anyone that spends any extended period of time in Houston traffic. Craig Hlavaty is a reporter for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. President Donald Trump has insisted repeatedly that Democrats are to blame for his administration's new policy of separating immigrant families at the border. Since it was implemented in April, more than 2,000 children have been removed from their parents after the adults were jailed for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry.We first reported on this story in November 2017. Click here to follow our full coverage, and follow the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News reporters who are covering the topic today: Lomi Kriel Lomi Kriel writes stories about immigrants, the complicated process of immigration, and its consequences for the Houston Chronicle. If you're an immigrant, lawyer, critic of the current system or a supporter, an ICE or Border Patrol agent, someone who feels they unfairly lost their job to an immigrant, an asylum seeker or a deportee, send tips and ideas to lomi.kriel@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter: @lomikriel Susan Carroll Susan Carroll writes about vulnerable people and the failures of government, big and small as an investigative reporter for thee Houston Chronicle. Carroll previously covered the U.S.-Mexico border for the Arizona Republic and the Tucson Citizen. Send her tips at susan.carroll@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter at @_susancaroll. EXPLAINER: Must immigrant parents, children be separated at the border? Lauren Caruba Lauren Caruba has written about state oversight of San Antonio schools, controversy over a high school's Confederate namesake, the hazing and sexual assault arrests of 13 student-athletes at La Vernia ISD and transgender issues for the San Antonio Express-News. Send her tips at lcaruba@express-news.net. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurenCaruba. Silvia Foster-Frau Silvia Foster-Frau covers immigration for the San Antonio Express-News. he has also been the lead reporter following the Sutherland Springs community in the wake of the November 2017 church massacre. Send her tips at sfosterfrau@express-news.net. Follow her on Twitter at @SilviaElenaFF. Olivia Tallet Olivia Tallet covers Latino issues and culture for the Houston Chronicle and her blog, Calle Houston. Tallet has more than 10 years of experience producing investigative and feature stories focusing on this community and welcomes tips and suggestions for stories related to Latinos. Send her tips at olivia.tallet@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oliviaptallet. MORNING REPORT: Get the biggest headlines in your inbox every weekday Fernando Ramirez Fernando Ramirez is a reporter for chron.com and houstonchronicle.com where he covers Texas politics and other strange happenings. Follow him on Twitter at @fernramirez93. Kevin Diaz 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. Andrea Zelinski Andrea Zelinski covers the crosssection of politics and people as a reporter in the Houston Chronicle's Austin bureau. Send her tips at andrea.zeliniski@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter at @andreazelinski. A NEW AMERICA: A deeper look at what's happening with immigration in Houston and across Texas Mike Ward Mike Ward covers criminal justice and statewide politics, and the intersection of those two. If you have been involved in either and have a tip or comment, contact him at mike.ward@chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ChronicleMike. Jeremy Wallace Jeremy Wallace covers Texas politics as a reporter in the Houston Chronicle's Austin bureau. Send him tips at jeremy.wallace@chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JeremySWallace. Allie Morris Allie Morris is a reporter in the San Antonio Express-News' Austin bureau, where she covers politics and policy. Send her tips at amorris@express-news.net. Follow her on Twitter at @morrisreports. In a Sunday Washington Post article, Laura Bush called the separation of migrant families "immoral" and compared it to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The former first lady isn't the only voice drawing parallels to the ugly moment of American history. Satsuki Ina, a Japanese American who spent time in Texas' only internment camp in Crystal City, called the Trump administration's new separation policy "alarming." "It's so resonant with what my family and my whole community had to experience," she told Splinter News. LATEST: Trump official denies separating families. O'Rourke fires back: I've seen it myself Ina's story reflects the reality thousands of other Japanese Americans faced while imprisoned for two-and-a-half years. In February 1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued an executive order forcing 117,000 people of Japanese descent into prison camps. Two-thirds of the interned were U.S.-born citizens, according to the National Archives. "Life in the camps had a military flavor," reads a description by the Library of Congress. "Internees slept in barracks or small compartments with no running water, took their meals in vast mess halls, and went about most of their daily business in public. Physical mistreatment was rare, but the armed guards and the ever-present snipers in the watchtowers were constant reminders of the residents' new status." To see what life was like inside the internment camps, check out the gallery above. Fernando.ramirez@chron.com Twitter.com/fernramirez93 Microsoft Corp. scrubbed an online reference to its work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the agency faces criticism for its role in separating families at the U.S.-Mexican border. On Jan. 24, Tom Keane, a Microsoft executive, wrote a blog post about new contracts with the U.S. Air Force and ICE for the companys Azure cloud-computing service. Keane touted Azures ability to help the agency handle "sensitive unclassified data" and use tools such as facial recognition and identification. "The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and were proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud," Keane wrote in the post. As of Monday morning, the portion of the post mentioning ICE was missing. The earlier, full version of the post was accessed via the Wayback Machine, a historical record of websites maintained by the Internet Archive. On Monday, Bloomberg News asked Microsoft about the work, and the removal of that section of the blog. Soon after, it was back online. "An employee edited the blog after seeing commentary in social media. This was a mistake and as soon as it was noticed the blog was reverted to previous language," a Microsoft spokesman said. Over the weekend, several lawmakers and human rights organizations blasted the White House policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. Tech Workers Coalition, an advocacy group, wrote on Twitter that Microsoft employees should decide whether they will "be complicit" in the Administrations immigration policies. Some other tech executives weighed in, too. Microsoft currently has $19.14 million in active contracts with ICE, according to Bloomberg Government data. Cloud-computing and software rivals, including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.s Google and IBM, regularly compete for similar government work. Some of these other companies have been criticized for such activity -- in particular Google and a contract with the Pentagon. Microsoft buys a classroom video startup with 20 million users After restoring the blog language, Microsoft issued a statement noting its opposition to the separation policy. "Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border," the company said. "We urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families." Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, also wrote a post on LinkedIn on Sunday that suggested he wasnt a fan of the ICE approach. "This Fathers Day provides an opportunity to recall one thing we shouldnt take for granted the opportunity to be with our children," he wrote. "Given the news of migrant children being separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border, its especially poignant this year." "When we keep children with their parents, we not only follow in the footsteps of one of the worlds oldest and most important humanitarian traditions, we help build a stronger country," Smith added. This is the latest immigration issue to roil relations between the U.S. government and the tech industry. Last year, the sector pushed back against President Donald Trumps ban on travelers from several mostly Muslim countries and have been urging Congress to help "dreamers," undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. On June 16, Googles head of artificial intelligence Jeff Dean tweeted that the separation policy "is immoral and an affront to the values for which many of us stand." Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos used Fathers Day to remind Twitter followers of his dads immigrant origins: "My dad came here from Cuba all by himself without speaking English when he was 16 years old, and has been kicking ass ever since," he wrote. --With assistance from Chris Cornillie. 2018 Bloomberg L.P. The anarchy and disorder dominating progressive cities across the West Coast recently hit a new low in Seattle. King County officials are looking to roll out a safe injection van, a legal venue at which addicts could shoot up illegal drugs unhindered and safely. The first of its kind in the United States, the van would manage to undermine further the rule of law while also doing little to help addicts. Seattles urban decay goes deeper, though, with skyrocketing rates of homelessness, an explosion in opioid usage and deaths, and spikes in violent crime. Seattles predicament is emblematic of the broader crises faced by many progressive West Coast cities, where local leaders have forced law enforcement to take a hands-off approach to policing unsanctioned tent cities and vagrancy at the expense of public safety and health. San Francisco, long considered a model of progressive urban policy, is plagued by filth, chaos, and public-safety hazards. Local leaders plan to spend an incredible $305 million on combatting homelessness for the current fiscal year alone, but disorder spreads as the city fails to enforce the rule of law and basic sanitary measures. Block-by-block surveillance reveals the deterioration of downtown San Francisco. Of 153 city blocks surveyed, 41 contained used drug needles and 96 had human feces present. Tourists are dismayed to leave their downtown hotels, to be confronted by mentally ill and aggressive homeless people who are taking control of the streets. University of California Berkeley professor Lee Riley, an expert on infectious disease, observes that some of San Franciscos streets are dirtier than Third World slums. Portland, Oregon, has continued to experience rapid urban decay in recent years, and the consequences for businesses and residents have been dramatic. In 2016, Columbia Sportswear, a major retailer, relocated a considerable number of its staff to downtown Portland. A little over a year later, in a scathing opinion piece in the Oregonian, the companys CEO voiced his regret over the decision. Employees reported repeated criminal offenses, daily defecation in the stores front lobby, and fears of physical violence. One female employee ran into moving traffic to escape a transient individual, screaming that he was going to kill her. Conditions for other Portland companies have deteriorated as well. Anne Bocci, who owns a premier jewelry and clothing store that prides itself on not being a big corporate business, was robbed and had her life threatened twice. The police came and then [the thief] came back four minutes later after they left, she noted during an interview. Judith Arnell closed her jewelry store after customers felt unsafe entering her shop. She noted that vagrants would frequently defecate on the front steps of her business. Fed-up small-business owners took their concerns to Portlands Democratic mayor, Ted Wheeler, who offered owners training on how to secure their storesand then promptly blamed Department of Housing Secretary Ben Carson for not doing enough to support affordable housing. Cities first step in fixing this mess must be to restore public order. Theres nothing generous or compassionate about letting troubled people sleep on pavement surrounded by used needles. Public-health agencies must enforce basic sanitation standards; individuals should not be going unpunished for public defecation. Elected officials must give police the latitude to exercise their power judiciouslyand the reassurance that their work is valued and supported. Three-strike policies should be implemented, and violators jailed. Most important, people need to feel safe walking the streets. Visitors, residents, and businesses deserve better. Its time to quell the anarchy and disorder dominating West Coast cities. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images More than 4,000 public spaces are being sold off every year and being lost to the community forever, according to a report published by Locality. The representative body for community organisations has published The Great British Sell Off today, revealing that on average 4,131 public buildings and spaces, such as libraries, youth centres and swimming pools are sold off each year. It discovered the scale of the issue after submitting a freedom of information request to councils in England earlier this year. The FOI also found that just 41 per cent of councils had a strategy in place to encourage community ownership. Locality said that this indicated that at the moment public buildings are being sold off on a massive scale for private use and short-term profit. Tony Armstrong, chief executive of Locality, said: More than 4,000 public buildings and spaces are being sold off a year, thats more than four times the number of Starbucks in the UK. This is a sell off on a massive scale. We know that many of the buildings being lost have valuable community uses. Every one of us can think of a local public building or outside space we love and use from libraries to lidos and town halls to youth centres. They are owned by the public and theyre being sold off for short term gain to fill holes in council budgets. Save our Spaces In response Locality has now launched a campaign, Save our Spaces, to increase the number of buildings taken into community ownership. Its report highlights a number of examples where community ownership has saved a resource for the community. Locality said the main barriers to community ownership are funding, lack of expertise and time, and the lack of a clear process. It is now calling for the launch of a community ownership fund worth 200m a year for five years to help save community spaces for the public, a change to Right to Bid legislation to give community organisations one year instead of six months to prepare a bid and a further change to give community organisations a Right to Buy, or have first refusal. Locality also said all local authorities should have a community asset transfer policy and that they should offer zero interest loans to community groups wishing to buy public spaces. Writing an article for Civil Societys Voices section Armstrong said charities could play a vital role because they were often well placed to take the first steps in acquiring a community building. He said: That's why we are asking the charity sector to consider the opportunity of taking on community ownership of an asset under threat. Big charities have had a grim time over the past couple of years. The high-profile travails of Oxfam, Kids Company, 4Children and Lifeline Project come readily to mind, and each case is of course unique. Issues from safeguarding to finances mean that many big charities have faced uncomfortable scrutiny and sadly for some, their difficulties have been terminal. It is false to categorise all these recent difficulties as a failure of big charity but I do wonder whether we need to consider how our sector is most impactful? Ive worked for a large, national charity - as a cirector of Broadcasting Support Services we employed almost a thousand people and our revenues peaked at 30m per annum. We won multi-million-pound contracts and had a drive to grow. At the time the concept seemed quite simple: the more we grew, the greater our reach and impact would be. This formula does not seem so clear to me now. As crown representative for the voluntary sector my brief was primarily to increase the role charities play in public services. Working within the commercial engine of government, charities and social enterprises were seen as a potential supplier to government. The scale of government commissioning means that there are some clear advantages for large suppliers. The financial obligations and risks along with the high-volume demand of public services means it is difficult, and often impossible, for small suppliers to be viable in this market. I led 3SC whos approach was to overcome this barrier through consortia and much of my crown representative focus was to try and find ways for smaller providers to play their part. I have seen many large charities delivering amazing impact but during my years as crown representative and in my most recent role at Mentor UK, I have also recognised how the biggest value that our sector delivers so often comes from smaller, community level charities. The understanding of needs, the relationship with beneficiaries and the trust that small charities can achieve are the gold dust of the sector. Particularly in working to overcome entrenched and difficult circumstances with many of the most disadvantaged or vulnerable in our society small charities can be so much more effective than larger providers. I would argue that communities are best strengthened from the ground up. Small charities and community groups understand the frontline and are more innovative, responsive and flexible. Funders need to find the best way to unleash the power of this ingenuity and effort. So often the greatest examples of inspiring impact come down to passionate people delivering, against the odds, real change for people facing multiple disadvantage at a local community level. There is a growing sense that a significant part of society feels a powerful sense of disengagement and disillusionment. I believe that empowering and rebuilding communities is crucial. The part that smaller charities can play in this is fundamental and I feel that there is immense potential that is largely untapped. We should invest more to strengthen local communities and grow local funding especially in the areas of greatest need. Government and funders need to recognise that small, local charities are our biggest asset and a catalyst for so much positive social change. Michael OToole will be joining Cambridgeshire Community Foundation as chief executive at the end of June. @otoole_michael After weeks of slow-burning coverage, the crisis over family separations at the US border exploded over the weekend, and reporting on the issue dominated the national conversation on Monday. Network and cable news programs broadcast live from the southern border, and journalists pressed administration officials at a heated White House press briefing. The Trump administrations move to separate immigrant families at the border and detain children apart from their parents spiraled into a humanitarian and political crisis Monday as the White House struggled to contain the growing public outcry, write The Washington Posts Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey, and Seung Min Kim on todays front page. President Trump and his spokespeople have remained defiant, falsely blaming Democratic lawmakers for the crisis, even as a bipartisan backlash grows. ICYMI: Reporter for The Atlantic has extreme experience with Facebooks reps Amid firsthand reports and images from detention centers, Mondays most impactful reporting came from an audio clip of children crying as they were separated from their parents. ProPublica obtained the recording from inside a US Customs and Border Protection facility. The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening, wrote ProPublicas Ginger Thompson. Many of them sound like theyre crying so hard, they can barely breathe. New: ProPublica has obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children can be heard wailing. Border Patrol agent jokes, We have an orchestra here. https://t.co/pkmD8DKYmo ProPublica (@ProPublica) June 18, 2018 Sign up for CJR 's daily email The piece published just before a White House Press Briefing from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who again tried to shift the responsibility for the administrations decisions to lawmakers. There is no law requiring parents and children to be separated at the border; the administration has made the choice to refer parents crossing the border illegally for criminal prosecution rather than handling the cases in civil court. Trump, who regularly relies on cable news for information, has been suspicious of the coverage, telling aides that he believes the media cherry-picks the most dramatic images and stories to portray his administration in a negative light, according to the Post. On that front, hes been getting plenty of backup from Fox Newss opinion hosts. Tucker Carlson told his viewers to be wary of those arguing for compassion. No matter what they tell you, this isnt about helping children, Carlson said. Their goal is to change your country forever. Later in the evening, Laura Ingraham ignored the growing body of evidence concerning conditions at the detention centers, arguing that the facilities housing separated children are, essentially summer camps. ICYMI: After 25 years, editorial cartoonist fired from newspaper The administrations lies about and misrepresentations of its border policy have pushed reporters into unfamiliar territory. From headlines to briefing room questions, journalists are taking a more forceful line against the official line. NYUs Jay Rosen flagged a comment from veteran NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell talking about the immigration crisis that sums up the current moment: This has precipitated a real soul searching among journalists. Because those of us raised in the traditional frame of on the one hand and on the other hand are finding that we can no longer stand quietly and just describe this policy without pointing out that this is being misrepresented. And its very uncomfortable for a lot of people of my generation of journalists to constantly be saying the president misrepresented, he misspoke, this is a lie, this is not true. But people have to speak out. Below, more on the growing crisis at the border. How we got here: CNNs Brian Stelter traces the build-up in national coverage over the past few days. Among the reasons for the surge of news coverage: President Trumps lies about the policy, sustained outrage among immigration advocates, and organized protests by Democratic lawmakers, Stelter writes. He also noted that local outlets like the Houston Chronicle were early to the story. CNNs Brian Stelter traces the build-up in national coverage over the past few days. Among the reasons for the surge of news coverage: President Trumps lies about the policy, sustained outrage among immigration advocates, and organized protests by Democratic lawmakers, Stelter writes. He also noted that local outlets like the Houston Chronicle were early to the story. Final word: NBC Newss Lester Holt, anchoring his program from Mission, Texas, concluded last evenings show with a forceful statement: What is happening here is testing our better angels, on multiple fronts, challenging our competing values of protecting our sovereignty and honoring our hearts. As the local border chief here told me today, Its complicated and many-layered, to which I thought to myself, Isnt that the way it is with most matters of the heart? NBC Newss Lester Holt, anchoring his program from Mission, Texas, concluded last evenings show with a forceful statement: What is happening here is testing our better angels, on multiple fronts, challenging our competing values of protecting our sovereignty and honoring our hearts. As the local border chief here told me today, Its complicated and many-layered, to which I thought to myself, Isnt that the way it is with most matters of the heart? United front: All five living first ladies have spoken out against the family-separation policy. Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, and even Melania Trump have, to varying degrees, expressed disgust and concern with the current practice. All five living first ladies have spoken out against the family-separation policy. Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, and even Melania Trump have, to varying degrees, expressed disgust and concern with the current practice. The big picture: As midterm elections approach, The New York Timess Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman tie the administrations defense of its border policy to the racist themes that characterized his campaign. President Trump sent his clearest signal yet on Monday that he intends to make divisive, racially charged issues like immigration central going into the campaign season, they write. Other notable stories ICYMI: Trumps immigration policy takes center stage Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Pete Vernon is a former CJR staff writer. Follow him on Twitter @ByPeteVernon. Update: Article 13 and Article 11 were both passed by the EU's legislative committee in a vote on June 20, and will now go to a vote of the full EU later this year. It hasnt been that long since the European Union caused upheaval on the internet with the launch of the GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation, which brought in a host of cumbersome rules on how consumer data should be protected. Now, some internet activists and free-speech advocates are warning that the EU could take an even larger step in the wrong direction with a proposed copyright law that is up for a vote later this week. If passed, the law could give platforms like Google and Facebook unprecedented power to remove content on the basis that it might be infringing on copyright. The law in question is Article 13 of the proposed Directive for Copyright in the Digital Single Market, and it would require any internet service that hosts content to proactively filter uploads in order to remove copyright infringement. A letter opposing the law was released last week by a group of internet luminaries including Ethernet inventor Vint Cerf, world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, net neutrality expert Tim Wu, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Mozilla Project co-founder Mitchell Baker. The letter says: By requiring Internet platforms to perform automatic filtering all of the content that their users upload, Article 13 takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users. The damage that this may do to the free and open Internet as we know it is hard to predict, but in our opinions could be substantial. The European market currently follows a notice and takedown copyright system, in much the same way that the US does. In the US, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives platforms and content providers a certain amount of immunity (known as safe harbor) for hosting content that might infringe on copyright, provided they act immediately to remove it if infringement is brought to their attention. The proposed EU law would replace notice and takedown with a requirement to remove any infringement before it ever goes online. One risk of this approach is that service providers will remove content that doesnt infringe because they are afraid of contravening the law. So, for example, they might block a meme that uses a copyrighted image to make fun of something, even though that kind of use is typically allowed under fair use rules (known as fair dealing in the UK and a number of other countries). The signatories of the letter also argue that the cost of this new filtering approach will hit smaller internet services harder, since larger platforms like Google and Facebook will have more than enough resources to comply. The filtering/censorship risk isnt the only downside of the proposed law. It also includes a link tax, which would give copyright holders to ability to charge online platforms or providers for using even short snippets of text from a work such as a news article. Germany and several other countries have been working on variations of this idea as a way of charging Google and Facebook for taking their content, but critics of the law say its real impact could be a crippling of the internets inherent power to link to original source material. Sign up for CJR 's daily email The proposed law goes to a vote by the European Unions legislative committee on June 20. They could decide to include Article 13, Article 11 (the link tax) or both, or they could decide to include neither one. Judging by one ranking of the potential votes of committee members, however, it looks as though the filtering proposal will almost certainly pass, and the link tax appears to be close. And that could change the way the internet worksin the EU at leaston a fairly fundamental level. Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Mathew Ingram is CJRs chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg. When Zofia Doktorowicz-Kopotowska moved from Warsaw to New York in 1987, Brooklyns Greenpoint neighborhood was saturated with local Polish newspapers. She immediately joined the ranks of Kurier Plus, which had only begun publishing that year, and then bought the paper in 1994. Today she and her son run the weekly, which is one of just two weekly Polish outlets left in New York, and the only Polish-language weekly in Greenpointand it is thriving. Kurier Pluss modest office is located on the second floor of a brick building on Greenpoints Java Street. A piece of green paper bearing Kuriers logo, taped among the work permits on the front door, is one of the only signs of Kuriers residency here. Inside, there are two desksone for Doktorowicz-Kopotowska, 71, the other for a woman who helps field phone calls. The writers send in their articles, and the computer person, whos usually here two days a week, does the paper remotely from his home, and then he comes in and touches it up, says Rafe Kopotowski, 42, Doktorowicz-Kopotowskas son. About his role at the paper, Kopotowski says, I dont really have a formal position, I do everything. I help run whatever she may need. ICYMI: The decimation of local news in New York City A visit to the neighborhood newsstand on Greenpoint and Manhattan avenues reveals a ream of Polish papers and magazines among the English-language publications. What is not immediately obvious is that most of these publications are foreign papers published in Poland and made available in Brooklyn to cater to the expat community. According to members of the Polish media interviewed for this piece, the local press is struggling, a winnowing version of its former self. While the success of Greenpoint-based Polish papers was safeguarded for many years by the neighborhoods status as a community hub, both demographic and digital changes have eroded that protective wall. In 2010, Greenpoints English-language paper, The Polish-American World, folded after 51 years of serving the community, explaining to readers that its finances were an economic fiasco. In 2011, then-daily paper Nowy Dziennik, considered the leading Polish-American news source, moved its newsroom from West 38th Street in Manhattan to Garfield, New Jersey. In January 2016, it became a weekly, with publishers citing loss of advertising revenue and shrinking sales for the reduced publishing schedule. According to an undated list of newspapers kept by the New York Press Association, Nowy Dziennik and Kurier Plus are the only weekly Polish-language newspapers still serving NYC. The Polonia here in New York City are leaning towards publications that deal exclusively with the events happening around Polish communities in the Statesevents and news that one cannot simply find on the internet, or in English newspapers. Sign up for weekly emails from the United States Project Aleksandra Sabisz, who has been with Nowy Dziennik for 12 years, says the internets effect on the Polish and American presses is comparable. We are all on the same wagon, says Sabisz. Nowy Dzienniks audience does not read mainstream US papers due to the language barriera characteristic that historically strengthened the papers position, but may undercut it in the age of online news. With fewer Poles immigrating to the US, some longtime residents now learning English, and newcomers immigrating with prior English fluency, Sabisz doesnt expect the circulation of Nowy Dziennik to rise in the foreseeable future. Czeslaw Karkowski, who has written columns for Kurier Plus for close to a decade, says there is no difference in the struggles faced by Polish versus American media: The problems, he says, are identical, plus additional difficult competition with the Polish paper magazines imported from Poland. So we may say that Polish local magazines have an extra-tough existence. Generally speaking, the Polonia here in New York City are leaning towards publications that deal exclusively with the events happening around Polish communities in the Statesevents and news that one cannot simply find on the internet, or in English newspapers, says Agnieszka Granatowska, editor in chief of Echo Polonijne, a free quarterly paper released by the Polish Slavic Center, headquartered in Greenpoint. Previously, Granatowska worked for Super Express, a Polish tabloid published in Warsaw with many writers and a large distribution in the United States. In the past three years, Granatowska says, Echo Polonijne has more than doubled its publication, increasing from 2,000 copies a quarter in 2015 to a current circulation of 5,000 a quarter. It came to our attention that there are more Poles scattered in the states neighboring New York who were interested in our paper, she says. Though Greenpoint does not feel as Polish as it once did, says Granatowska, that does not affect the readership. Recently, Kurier Plus also expanded into New Jersey, with a starting circulation of 500 issues. (This is in addition to its 7,000 weekly print circulation along the East Coast.) The paper, which also claims a growing digital audience, now covers more local news in all of its distribution areas, including Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Connecticuta precautionary measure against the challenges of the news landscape. When I press Kopotowski to explain how, in todays bleak media environment, Kurier is increasing its print run, he credits a strong sense of community, Polish pride, and longtime loyalty from readers. We just have a following, he says. Polish people want to support their publications. The expansion reflects not only Kuriers success, but also Greenpoints stagnant Polish population: While many of the Polish-owned businesses continue to prosper along the neighborhoods commercial stretches, its no secret that the forces of gentrification and the call of the old country have rendered Brooklyns Little Poland less and less Polish. There is no influx, Kopotowski says of the local Polish population in Greenpoint. Its just fewer and fewer Poles. While Greenpoint remains a commercial core, Ridgewood, Maspeth, and out-of-state towns have become the primary residences for much of the Polish community, who have sold property in Greenpoint or been pushed out by rising rents. As with the Polish population in Greenpoint, the local Polish press is shrinking, Doktorowicz-Kopotowska says. There are a number of papers that periodically pop up and serve the community then disappear after a few years, such as Bialy Orzel, a Boston-based publication which recently began distributing in New York and New Jersey after a hiatus. My column tells stories about my life here. Poles around the world want to hear about Greenpoint. Kurier Plus, however, is unrivaled in its status as Greenpoints local Polish paper. In its more than 30 years serving the area, its word-of-mouth reputation has solidified the paper as a beloved news sourceand made Doktorowicz-Kopotowska a community matriarch. I dont know if you caught on, but shes kind of this one-woman force, Kopotowski says. Shes everybodys mom. She has people coming [to the office] being like, I want to rent out this space but I cant pay you anything, and shes like, Thats OK, not a problem. Over the years, Doktorowicz-Kopotowska has made Kuriers office space available for numerous gallery shows, concerts, performances, and gatherings. Her generosity has garnered her and her paper much loyalty in their immigrant community. She says that she has people who have been writing the same column for 20 years, Kopotowski tells me in English, translating for his mother. Some people just grow into that and they never want to leave Kurier. Columnists, Kopotowski emphasizes, are the papers backbone. One Kurier columnist, Weronika Kwiatkowska, has written her column for 12 years. The Double Life of Veronique explores the authors deep sense of duality as an immigrant, Kopotowski says. My column tells stories about my life here. Most of her readers find her column online. Poles around the world want to hear about Greenpoint, says Kwiatkowska. As the Polish residential community stagnates, slowly but surely vacating buildings for newcomers, the Polish press morphs and moves. Kurier Plus and Echo Polonijne have thrived despite these challenges, in part because of their hyperlocal appeal. Once-stalwart publications like Nowy Dziennik are weakened, but alive. The Polish press, in large part because of language barriers, exists in a world apart from the vast majority of American media consumers. Yet with publisher powerhouses cum community leaders such as Doktorowicz-Kopotowska, the digital powers that be remain at bayat least for now. ICYMI: Why Im devoting a year to helping black newspapers survive Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Hannah Frishberg is a fourth-generation Brooklynite and freelance reporter. She was previously the Editor in Chief of Brokelyn. Her work has appeared in the New York Post, CityLab, Gothamist, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @hfrishberg. Twice in the last four years American Access Casualty Company, a non-standard private passenger automobile insurer based in Downers Grove, Ill., has been judicially warned in decisions of intermediate appellate courts of two different states (Illinois and Indiana) that its delivery and/or business-use auto insurance policy coverage exclusion was ambiguous and ineffective to overcome liability insurance coverage. The operative facts of the two cases (Am. Access Cas., Co. v. Rodriguez, 2014 Ill.App. Unpub. LEXIS 196, filed Feb. 6, 2014, and Am. Access Cas., Co. v. Cincinnati Ins. Co., 2018 Ind. App. LEXIS 173, filed May 16, 2018) were generally parallel, and the text of the policy exclusions was identical but for the added letter s at the end of the word Damage as quoted in the earlier decision, which was unpublished, making it less authoritative as precedent for other litigants, but preserving its binding effect on American Access itself. It is unclear whether American Access has even yet clarified its auto liability policy exception, which reads as follows: This policy does not apply to and does not provide coverage under Part A Bodily Injury Liability and Property Damage[s] Liability Coverage for: . . . (b) any automobile while used in the delivery, or any activity associated with delivery, of food, mail, newspapers, magazines, or packages for an employer or business or in any trade or business. (Emphasis added.) The facts of the first, 2014 case were that Nyesha Morris sued Erika Rodriguez for injuries resulting from an automobile collision occurring in February, 2011. Rodriguezs auto liability insurer, American Access, filed a declaratory judgment action against Morris and Rodriguez, insured and accident victim respectively, contending that the insurer had no duty to defend or indemnify Rodriguez in the personal injury suit because, at the time of the accident, she was using her vehicle for business purposes, driving from one meeting for her employer to another location for the same purpose. There was no allegation in American Accesss complaint that Rodriguez was making any type of delivery at the time of the collision, so a delivery-use exclusion as opposed to a general business-use exclusion would not defeat coverage in the case. That left for analysis whether the policys exclusion clause created a general business-use exception to coverage, too. American Access contended that the clause quoted above created both a delivery-use coverage exception as well as a general business-use exclusion, because the fourth or in the coverage exclusion the word italicized in the quotation above, the one appearing between the words business and in signaled a separation between two policy exclusions, one for delivery-use and one for use of a vehicle in any trade or business. Contending in a motion for summary judgment in the trial court that Rodriguez was using her vehicle for business purposes at the time of the collision, American Access argued that this was activity excluded from coverage by the policy it issued to Rodriguez. The trial court denied the motion and granted summary judgment in favor of Morris and Rodriguez, because it found that the language in the policy exclusion was ambiguous: That wording could be understood to exclude insurance coverage for business activities generally or could just as reasonably be understood to exclude coverage only for using an automobile for delivery purposes, either for an employer, or in any trade or business. The Appellate Court of Illinois dug into the weeds regarding the ambiguity, stating, [a]t first glance, it appears that the policy exclusion at issue here (subsection (b)) only encompasses a delivery-use exclusion to coverage, as each separate exclusion appears to be separated by subparagraphs and not combined within subparagraphs. However, a closer look at the language of subsection (b) reveals that it is unclear whether the phrase or in any trade or business is intended to be separate from the rest of the delivery-use exclusion encompassed in subsection (b), thereby acting as a broad business-use exclusion, or whether the or in any trade or business phrase modifies the language in subsection (b) to encompass exclusions on deliveries in any trade or business. As such, we find that the language of the exclusion in subsection (b) of the [American Access] policy is susceptible to more than one reasonable interpretation and, therefore, is ambiguous. Given that the language of the exclusion in subsection (b) is ambiguous and any ambiguities are to be construed strongly against the insurer and in favor of the insured, we find that [American Access] failed to meet its burden of showing that Rodriguezs actions fell within the exclusion subsection (b). Accordingly, we find that the trial court was correct in denying [American Accesss] motion for summary judgment and finding coverage exists for Rodriguez in connection with the underlying personal injury lawsuit. The trial court, therefore, invoked what has been termed the contra proferentem rule of contract interpretation: Since the exclusion was ambiguous, it had to be interpreted against its drafter, American Access. (In some jurisdictions, e.g. California, that rule applies only when other cannons of contract interpretation fail to eliminate the ambiguity. (California Nat. Bank v. Woodbridge Plaza LLC, 164 Cal. App.4th 137, 145 (2008) [in interpreting ambiguous lease, rule that language of contract should be interpreted most strongly against the party who caused uncertainty to exist did not apply where the court resolved the uncertainty using evidence of circumstances surrounding leases execution].) The most recent case involving the American Access policy exclusion illustrates another important canon of contract interpretation leading to the same result. The whole of a contract is to be taken together, so as to give effect to every part, if reasonably practicable, each clause helping to interpret the other. (California Civil Code, 1641.) The Indiana court observed that if the exclusion prevented coverage from attaching whenever the automobile insured by American Access was used for any business purpose, that would include situations when the vehicle was being used for delivery purposes in a trade or business. But, the court said, that would render duplicative, superfluous and meaningless the opening sentence of the exclusion, twice negating coverage if the vehicle were used for business delivery. Not only would this violate the rule that a court must if possible give effect to every part of the contract, but also the principle that each clause must, if possible, help to interpret the others. Utilizing the second of these two interpretive tools, the court in the 2018 case said that instead of considering some words to be superfluous and meaningless, rather, in order to harmonize all the terms of the exclusion, the court found that the final clause of the exclusion, reading, any trade or business, especially in the absence of a comma refers the court back to the initial part of the exclusion, reading delivery, or any activity associated with delivery [.]' Finally, the Indiana court in 2018 pointed out that, even if the clause created a general business use exclusion, that would still not bar coverage under the facts of that case. Unlike the facts in the Rodriguez case, where it was uncontested that the policyholder, Rodriguez, was using her vehicle for the benefit of her employer when the collision occurred, the driver in the Cincinnati Ins Co. case was employed part-time by Advantage Home Healthcare. The accident occurred after the driver had concluded one appointment and was on her way to work her shift at a second patients residence. Advantage Home did not compensate its home health aides for their travel time between appointments. So, even if the exclusion were to be construed as a general business use exclusion it would still not bar coverage. Pursuant to her employment with Advantage Home, the driver was paid only for on-premises services performed at a patients residence. Therefore, her time and expense to drive from one patient location to another were not within her employment remuneration, so even a general business use exclusion would not defeat coverage for a driver whose collision occurred when she was not working. This monsoon season, Maricopa County Sheriffs Office will not enforce a law that permits some motorists to be billed for the cost of their rescue from flash floods because authorities worry people who cant afford the fine wont call for help. Under the so-called stupid-motorist law, motorists who drive around a barricade or warning sign into a flooded area, putting themselves and rescuers in danger, can be required to reimburse law enforcement and fire agencies up to $2,000 for rescue costs. The law, passed in 1995, has sparked rumors about how much it costs to get rescued and how often people have to pay. We dont charge people under the stupid-motorist law, Deputy Kevin Kraayenbrink said. This is part of your tax dollars. Were here. Its free. Deputies respond to 12 to 24 water rescues every year, sheriffs spokeswoman Donna Rossi said. Its not clear whether other local agencies enforce the law. Phoenix and Scottsdale police did not return calls, and a Mesa police spokeswoman directed questions to MCSO. Jesse Rutherford, spokesman for a volunteer rescue group that helps the sheriffs office with flash floods and other emergencies, said group members often encounter people worried about the cost of their rescue. A lot of people that we come in contact with sometimes delay their own rescue by not calling 911 because they think theyre going to get charged, said Rutherford, of the Central Arizona Mountain Rescue Association. Were usually not in favor of legislation of fining or charging people for their predicament, he said. One of the examples we have is when you call 911 at your house say theres a grease fire and you threw water on the grease fire well, most people know thats a bad idea, but not everyone does. So, does that mean the fire department is going to charge you? The law, passed by lawmakers frustrated that drivers were ignoring posted warning signs, leading to costly rescues and risking the lives of the public-safety workers. But it was rarely invoked until a 2005 case made headlines and became the talk of online chat rooms. Paul Zalewski was charged in Cave Creek Municipal Court after he drove his Hummer around barriers and into a flooded road in his Cave Creek neighborhood. The rescue cost an estimated $800 and 55 minutes of MCSO deputies time, according to news accounts. After that, people refused to call for help because they thought everybody that does something thats not smart gets arrested. They dont, Kraayenbrink said. I dont know how many times we pull up and people are like, `I cant afford this rescue. Michael Saks, professor of law and psychology at Arizona State University, said laws often become outdated, sometimes because theyre niche, like the stupid-motorist law, or dont evolve as society does. Im sure the law makes sense at the time to the people who vote for them and then, with the passage of time, they either become less sensible or they come to be recognized as less sensible, he said. The stupid-motorist law sounds like its creating a bigger problem than the one that it is solving, which the law does sometimes. It doesnt matter whether the law remains on the books or is repealed, Saks said. The rumor about the prohibitive cost of stupid-motorist fees now has more power than the fact the law usually isnt enforced. Its now as much a part of Arizona as the monsoon season. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A welcome dose of rain spawned by a hurricane that churned through the Pacific has given a boost in the battle against two large wildfires in Colorado and Wyoming. The remnants of Hurricane Bud slowed the growth of the a fire in southwest Colorado, which has blackened more than 50 square miles (129 square kilometers) and is 25 percent contained, The Durango Herald reported Sunday. Butch Knowlton, director of La Plata County Emergency Management, said Bud provided the perfect amount of rain, helping firefighters increase containment. But Scot Davis, a spokesman for the team coordinating firefighters, warned of the misconception that rain has doused the fire. He said it kept the blaze from spreading, but crews are still putting out hot embers that could ignite dry trees, grass and shrubs. Fire officials also are worried that rain could cause flash floods in the burn scar, which now has much less vegetation to hold back runoff. Its going to come down at some point, Davis said at a community meeting Sunday morning. The fire started June 1 about 10 miles (16 kilometers) north of Durango in the Four Corners Region where Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah meet. The area is the epicenter of a large swath of land in the U.S. Southwest that is experiencing exceptional drought. At one point, the blaze forced the evacuation of 2,200 homes, none of which has burned. It also triggered the closure of the San Juan National Forest, which is comprised of more than 2,800 square miles (7,252 square kilometers). Weekend rainstorms also helped crews to the north in their fight against a wildfire that destroyed one home and has burned more than 30 square miles (78 square kilometers). The fire in southern Wyoming near the Colorado border was 62 percent contained Sunday, and firefighters were taking advantage of the moisture to extinguish remaining hot spots near structures and to cut additional containment lines. Late last week, the flames moved from dense forests full of beetle-killed trees into areas with mostly grass and brush that burn with less intensity. The causes of both fires are under investigation. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. AKRON, Ohio - About 40 students in the LeBron James Family Foundation I PROMISE Program, who have met and exceeded the requirements asked of them, are getting an early, hands-on college-prep experience this summer at Kent State University. The first class of I PROMISE students are now spending three weeks in Kent's PAC'T Summer program, which provides specialized programming to help the students stay on track to graduate from high school and be eligible for the college scholarships the foundation has committed to them. "As our oldest I PROMISE students continue to find their footing in high school, they're at that pivotal time where it's critical they get all the support they need to stay on track," said LJFF Executive Director Michele Campbell in a news release. "The team at Kent State has listened to their needs and immediately turned those conversations into action, recognizing that every single day is valuable when it comes to educating our kids and getting them college- and career-ready." The scholarships are available through a partnership with the University of Akron. Every student in the Akron I PROMISE Network who meets the program requirements is guaranteed a four-year scholarship to the University of Akron. Students must stay in the I PROMISE Network and meet grade-point average requirements and ACT scores, which are strict but attainable. They also must participate in community service, which is heavily weighted as a requirement. The oldest I PROMISE class, now participating in the PAC'T program, will enter 10th grade this fall. When the foundation's I PROMISE School opens in downtown Akron next month, the foundation will add third- and fourth-graders, which puts the number of students in the network to about 1,300 students. About 100 students are added each year. The UA scholarship program is committed to students in the program for the next 10 years. The program's ultimate goal is for kids to earn degrees, enter the workforce and eventually give back to the Akron community, foundation officials have said. In Kent State's program, the I PROMISE students are exploring the many options and majors post-secondary education offers. Kent State's three-week Flash P'ACT summer program is designed to enable participants to see themselves as successful college students and allows them to participate in both academia and college life. Kent State tested the kids on entering the PAC'T program to be able to measure how much the program enhances their learning experiences, especially in regard to math and reading ACT test prep. "They're doing a lot of hard work learning and studying," said Melody Tankersley, Kent State's senior associate provost and dean of graduate studies. "We're also making sure they get a good sense of all opportunities post-secondary education offers." The students stay on campus Monday through Friday. When they're not focused on ACT test prep, college readiness and personal development, they're taking part in authentic college experiences, Tankersley said. So far the kids have flown drones with students in KSU's aeronautics and engineering program and watched a movie floating in inner-tubes in the university pool. One evening, they volunteered to work in the campus kitchen, providing meals for Kent residents who are either homeless or live in food-insecure areas. They've also created teams and, working with students in the graphic design program, have designed team logos that convey messaging beyond the visual symbols, she said. "They're looking at all the different careers you might have outside of the high school experience," Tankersley said. "They're exploring things they've never done before. We're helping open their eyes to lots of new experiences." In keeping with the mission of the foundation, the PAC't program includes programming for the students' families. The students are preparing presentations to show their families what they've learned, she said. "That's what's beautiful about the LeBron James Family Foundation," Tankersley said. "It takes the whole family, however that's defined, to lift these children up and also lift their families up." Once the three-week program ends, Kent State will remain actively involved in the I PROMISE students' progress. Kent State students from multiple disciplines - from education and health & human services to English majors - are applying to become mentors to work one-on-one with the I PROMISE students and their families going forward, Tankersley said. The KSU student mentors chosen will be vetted and trained through the iC.A.R.E. mentoring program of the United Way of Summit County. "There's a lot of interest, and the students are really excited about the opportunity to be involved in the UA community and also in the lives of these kids," she said. Want more Akron news? Sign up for cleveland.com's Rubber City Daily, an email newsletter delivered at 5:30 a.m. Monday through Friday. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The trust funds that FirstEnergy created years ago to pay for the demolition of its nuclear power plants and clean-up are no longer adequate, a coalition of consumer and environmental groups is arguing today at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Citing research done by an independent investment consulting company, lawyers for the Midwest-based Environmental Law and Policy Center and a veteran nuclear reactor expert have petitioned the NRC to take another look at the trust funds. The NRC's Petition Review Board is not expected to make a decision on the ELPC request immediately, said an agency spokesman. The ELPC is arguing that as of Dec. 31, 2016, the trust funds were nearly $2.75 billion short. That's the last publicly available decommissioning fund data. And that date was before FENOC and plant owner FirstEnergy Solutions filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from creditors who were owed more than an estimated $2 billion on March 31 of this year. Still, on April 4, the NRC issued a statement declaring that the company's decommissioning funds met NRC regulations. A spokesman for FES/FENOC had no comment, other than to cite the April 4 NRC statement. Howard Learner, a lawyer and executive director of the ELPC, said the announced shutdown of the power plants by 2021 means the funds will have even less time to grow before they are needed to pay for decommissioning. He said the shortfall will probably mean that the company will delay decommissioning the reactors after it shuts them down and instead move them into an NRC category called SAFSTOR. In other words, FENOC engineers and other employees will remove the radioactive fuel rods from the reactors, place them in the spent fuel cooling pool, and lockup the plants while the fuel becomes less radioactive. That could go on for years, while the investment funds grow and the NRC keeps an eye on the still-guarded power plants. FENOC has up to 60 years to complete the decommissioning. The use of SAFSTOR would not be unique, however, and the NRC does not advise against the step before actual decommissioning begins because it is safer for workers who must eventually deal with the fuel rods and place them in reinforced concrete casks. What will happen ultimately to the spent fuel is a federal issue that has not been resolved. The ELPC also wants the NRC to hold parent company FirstEnergy as the company ultimately responsible for the decommissioning of the nuclear plants. FirstEnergy in 2017 began maintaining that decommissioning responsibilities remained with FENOC, not FirstEnergy. "FENOC is responsible, as the licensee for those (nuclear) sites, for the safe shutdown of those facilities," Charles Jones, FirstEnergy CEO, told analysts during a conference call. The ELPC has retained Peter Bradford, a former NRC commissioner, a commissioner on several state public utility commissions and considered an expert on nuclear matters to help present its case to the NRC. In to the Petition Review Board, Bradford points out that the latest FirstEnergy Corp. filings with the SEC indicate that FE is taking responsibility only for the remains of the reactor at Three Mile Island, which partially melted down in 1979. FE had to accept ownership of TMI when it purchased another power plant corporation in 2002. Bradford wrote that state and local governments strongly prefer that the reactors in shutdown nuclear plants be decommissioned as quickly as possible and the land made ready for other uses. "Few communities hosting nuclear plants (and none where the plants were sited before the 1980s) were told that decommissioning might last for many decades after the plants were closed," he wrote in testimony submitted to the NRC. "The SAFSTOR option, legal though it may be, is a breach of the faith of any state or locality that expected to be able to devote the entire nuclear plant site to other uses within a decade or two of the plant closing." Even if the NRC accepts the arguments in the ELPC petition and rules that the trust funds for the reactors are too small, requiring FENOC to contribute additional money could be a problem that will have to be solved by federal bankruptcy court. Once a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition is filed, legal actions that began before the filing are automatically stopped. Judge Alan Koschik last week approved a temporary agreement between FES/FENOC and the ELCP allowing the ELPC to make its case before the NRC. At the same time, the Department of Justice, representing the NRC, insisted that the ELPC did not really have an official case pending before the NRC, only an appointment to appear before the Petition Review Board to discuss its claim. If the judge were to accept that reasoning, the NRC could find itself in line with other unsecured creditors if it were to require additional money for the trust funds. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A judge in Cuyahoga County sentenced a former Olmsted Falls Boy Scout leader who sexually abused a former scout to eight years in prison. Aaron Robertson apologized for "the mistakes that were made" and told the judge that he looked forward to being able to "create a business and move past this." He did so as the former Boy Scout he sexually abused several times sat quiet in the back of the courtroom and watched. He watched as deputies led the man who will now have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life out of the courtroom in handcuffs. Tuesday marked the first time that the boy had been in the same room with Robertson since the 30-year-old pleaded guilty to multiple counts of sexual battery and gross sexual imposition last month and finally admitted what he had denied since the boy first came forward to authorities in 2016. Robertson's attorney Jay Milano argued that the judge should impose a lesser sentence because the sexual abuse of the boy who was 13 years old was "consensual." The boy wrote in a letter that Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Jeffrey Schnatter read aloud at the sentencing. "However long you serve, I never want you to have any contact with me or members of my family," the boy wrote. The hearing came about three years after Robertson, then an assistant scoutmaster in Olmsted Falls, first began abusing the boy. The boy wrote in his letter that he and the other scouts in his troop looked up to Robertson, who in addition to being a scout leader was also an auxiliary police officer in Olmsted Falls and for the U.S. Coast Guard, a volunteer firefighter in Columbia Station and Lodi and a small business owner. Plus, he had a cool truck, the boy wrote. Robertson began grooming him through small physical touching, and eventually worked his way up to sexually abusing him, the boy wrote. The abuse occurred on official scout functions in February 2015 at Camp Mantic, in November 2016 at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, in March 2016 at Camp Firelands, and in June 2016 at Seven Ranges Scout Reservation. "You were in a perfect position to help kids," the boy wrote. "You wasted so much." CLEVELAND,Ohio -- The U.S. Supreme Court dealt those fighting voter suppression three losses with its ruling on Ohio's voter purge process and dismissing two gerrymandering cases. The court handed Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted a victory when it ruled his voter purge process for Ohio was not unconstitutional. In Ohio, if you miss one election cycle, the state sends out a notice seeking an update on your residential and voting status. If you fail to respond, and then miss two more voting cycles, Ohio removes you from the list of eligible voters. Federal law prohibits being removed from voter rolls based solely on a not voting. But the law also allows for confirmation notices to be sent out. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito argued that because Ohio is citing failure to respond to the notice, not just failure to vote, as the reason for the voter to be purged, it is not breaking federal voting laws. In a five to four vote, the court essentially ruled that if "you snooze, you lose" your voting rights. The New York Times reports that a 2016 Reuters study found at least 144,000 people have been purged from voter rolls in the Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland regions. "Voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that have a high proportion of poor African-American residents are hit the hardest," the Reuters' study found. Republican public officials, at the state and federal levels, have long sought to suppress voters by trying to end same-day registration, early voting and imposing stricter voter ID laws. They justify the voting restrictions by saying they are needed to thwart widespread voter fraud. That premise is a fraud itself. Multiple studies have found widespread voter fraud doesn't exist. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote, "The purpose of our election process is not to test the fortitude and determination of the voter, but to discern the will of the majority." Breyer noted the results of Ohio sending out 1.5 million notices that amounted to 20% of Ohio's voters. "Ohio only received back about 60,000 return cards (or 4 percent) which said, in effect: 'You are right, Ohio. I have, in fact moved.' In addition, Ohio received back about 235,000 return cards which said, in effect, "You are wrong Ohio, I have not moved.' In the end, however, there were more than one million notices - the vast majority of notices sent - to which Ohio received back no return card at all, " wrote Breyer. Husted is seeking to suppress the vote by taking advantage of a loop hole in the voter law, and human nature to disregard such confirmation notices that can be easily shuffled in with junk mail. Following last weeks ruling on Ohio's voter purging, the court dismissed two gerrymandering cases, one from Wisconsin and another from Maryland. The court ruled the Wisconsin case did not have standing, saying it must be brought district by district, not made on a statewide basis. Public officials like Husted should be working to make it easier to vote, not harder. In a true Democracy, voting rights should not have a use by expiration date. CHAGRIN FALLS, Ohio - Many restaurants are family affairs, but few will truly embrace that bond like Aurelia. "My father used to call my mother 'Aurelia'," said co-owner and chef James Balchak, who returned to Northeast Ohio after 13 years in Asheville, N.C. "It's a nickname." It's was mom's nickname and dad's advice that stuck with Balchak. Years ago, frustrated in a job, he and his father chatted. "Are you happy?" dad asked. "I said, 'No, I'm not," Balchak replied. "You've got to change it," his father told him. "There is no time like right now." It was one of the last conversations he had with his father. Balchak headed to Pennsylvania Culinary Institute, where he read, cooked, studied and ate - all in the name of understanding food. "We'd run from restaurant to restaurant," he said. If a place had soft-shell crab for a week, he and his pals "would eat it until it was gone." If pumpkin beers were in, they would drink and taste and compare. It was all about keeping food the main part of the conversation, something he still emphasizes with his staff at Aurelia, which aims to open late this month. "I deal with a lot of farmers," he said. "I'm trying to get into being local. It's not easy. They don't all have apps on their phones. Some of them, you call, it's their house phone." But that local movement is really an important way of life, he said. He favors Ohio-made food coming into his kitchen. That means he knows what it is, where it came from - and dollars stay local. Balchak grew up in Eastlake and had parents who worked full time, so he learned to cook out of necessity. He'd go to friends' houses, see their parents or grandparents cooking, and ask a lot of questions. He was gravitating to the busy kitchen life, which he loves. "I've been cooking all my life," he said. He believes in simple preparation, not gunking up dishes with too much seasoning or exotic sauces, letting flavors stand on their own. He's a big believer in deriving sauces from drippings, wine and butter, so it is no surprise that the French-trained chef loves Julia Child. "I used to carry her book around," he said. Other books were dense, unapproachable: "Some of the early French stuff is so heavy, it's like reading how to build an airplane." Another book that stuck with him was "Kitchen Confidential" by the late Anthony Bourdain. "He was a master of language," Balchak said. "He put it in a way a working man could understand." Balchak got it. All the training, studying and cooking have led to Aurelia, a 2,100-square-foot restaurant sandwiched between the planned Heartwood Coffee Roastery and Chicos clothing store on N. Main Street. Aurelia is in the old Dink's and across from the gazebo. Owners are Balchak, his sister Diane Moore, John Moore and mom Arlene Balchak. Balchak's mother took Aurelia as her baptismal name. The restaurant's logo of intertwined curves is designed to represent the power of four - for the four owners - and to pay homage to Arlene. A faux living wall will line one side of the restaurant while a birch-tree mural is coming for the other. The kitchen is open and flows vertically from back preparation area to service stoves and ovens to subway-tiled bar and tables. The restaurant will include 40 seats with 12 bar spots and only 10 to 12 menu items. That menu will be "super seasonal" Balchak said. In a growing season, some items are around for just a few weeks. As Balchak puts it: "A farmer might call and say 'Hey, I have some beautiful mushrooms.' " He's also hoping to use local bake shops and sausage purveyors. "I'd be foolish not to take advantage of what they are doing," he said. Six taps will rotate, fresh juices and mixes will be used in drinks, wines will come from little-known, small wineries to bigger names, and only cane-sugar soda will be served. One brewery that has a good shot of being on tap is Great Lakes Brewing Co. "I really took Cleveland with me wherever I went - a case or two of Great Lakes, Stadium Mustard. My lifelong dream is to run taps with Great Lakes beers." The other part of that dream is the restaurant, of course. And the happiness his mom showed when told about the name. "When we told her, it was a waterfall (of tears)," Balchak said. One of the key points about Aurelia involves, not surprisingly, family. The restaurant will not be opened for dinner Sunday. "That's family time, family dinner," he said. "This place is my family." About Aurelia It's at 16 N. Main St., Chagrin Falls. Hours will be 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. Bar menu will be served 2-5 p.m. Dinner will be 5-10 p.m. Last seating will be 9:30 p.m. Weekend brunch is planned. No reservations. Two-hour free-parking parallel spots are out front. Ross D. Franklin, Associated PRess Don't Edit The Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" policy for undocumented immigrants has resulted at least 2,000 children being separated from their parents at the U.S. borders over the past several months. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has justified the practice by saying parents who enter the country illegally have put their children at risk. When her department brings a criminal case against a parent or legal guardian, she said children with them are transferred to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which cares for the children until they're placed with a parent, relative, or foster home. "Let's be clear," Nielsen told reporters on Monday. "If an American were to commit a crime anywhere in the United States, they would go to jail and they would be separated from their family. This is not a controversial idea." Others say the practice is inhumane for parents and children alike. Democrats in Northeast Ohio's congressional delegation universally condemned the practice. Some Republicans also said they disapproved of the separations, but only GOP Sen. Rob Portman called on the administration to use its power to immediately stop the practice. Other Republicans, including Reps. Jim Renacci, Jim Jordan and Bob Gibbs, refrained from criticizing Trump and instead called for Congress to act. Don't Edit I challenge anyone in the Trump Administration to listen to this audio and defend the child separation policy. https://t.co/akePrmBIZJ pic.twitter.com/SSIgGq8fPZ Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) June 18, 2018 Don't Edit Infest? Were not talking about insects, these are children! These are human beings. You are talking about kids who are scared, alone and being held in cages. You have the power to stop it, do it. https://t.co/D1kgSi4hNb Senator Bob Casey (@SenBobCasey) June 19, 2018 Don't Edit Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown wants President Trump to reverse the policy Don't Edit Don't Edit Tearing apart families is wrong and will not fix our broken immigration system. President Trump can immediately reverse this inhumane policy. https://t.co/18xpi0PB8C Sherrod Brown (@SenSherrodBrown) June 18, 2018 Don't Edit Brown has cosponsored a bill that would prevent children from being separated from their parents, and written a letter to Trump that urges an immediate halt to the family separation policy. All children should be treated with compassion," said a statement from Brown. "Tearing families apart is wrong and will not fix our broken immigration system. Don't Edit Don't Edit Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman says Trump's policy puts children at risk Don't Edit Here is my statement reiterating my opposition to the Trump admin policy of separating families at the border. pic.twitter.com/68xivO7zr6 Rob Portman (@senrobportman) June 19, 2018 Don't Edit Don't Edit Proud to join my colleagues in signing on to @senorrinhatch letter urging @TheJusticeDept to stop the practice of separating children from their families at the border as Congress works on a legislative solution. https://t.co/HbTOViIN1U Rob Portman (@senrobportman) June 19, 2018 Don't Edit Wadsworth GOP Rep. Jim Renacci says Congress should enforce immigration laws, says he supports Trump's efforts Don't Edit Don't Edit Renacci, who has aligned himself with Trump in campaigning to unseat Brown in the Senate race, did not criticize the Trump administration's practice of separating families. Rather, he put the focus on Congress to fix immigration laws to prevent it from happening. Protecting both American jobs and our security by securing our borders and fixing our broken immigration system must be a top priority for the federal government, which is why I so strongly support President Trumps commitment to fixing our immigration laws," said a statement from Renacci. "Its also clear that Congress must swiftly take legislative action to ensure that we can fully enforce Americas immigration laws while also preventing the separation of children from their parents on our border. Don't Edit Niles-area Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan says familes should not be ripped apart Don't Edit Don't Edit Children are not bargaining chips. It's ridiculous that we have to be saying this in 2018, but families should not be torn apart. I urge my Republican colleagues to pass the the HELP Separated Children Act and Keep Families Together Act. End this today. pic.twitter.com/J54nVJ6JMs Congressman Tim Ryan (@RepTimRyan) June 18, 2018 Don't Edit This isn't the America we should want. This immoral and destructive policy must end. https://t.co/s3h4OwvyG4 Congressman Tim Ryan (@RepTimRyan) June 15, 2018 Don't Edit Bainbridge Township GOP Rep. Dave Joyce opposes separating parents from kids Don't Edit I oppose efforts to separate parents from their children. As a father, I believe in family first. I also oppose the policy of catch and release. It is time to find a real, long-term solution to the many issues impacting our broken immigration system. Dave Joyce (@RepDaveJoyce) June 18, 2018 Don't Edit Warrensville Heights Democratic Rep. Marcia Fudge calls separation policy 'inhumane' Don't Edit Don't Edit Sabrina Eaton, cleveland.com Don't Edit "Anyone with a soul can see how separating families and detaining children for weeks in warehouses is inhumane," said a statement from Fudge. "Making false statements and blaming Democrats is a consistent theme for this administration. No one on either side of the aisle is stopping the president from signing an executive order to end this child abuse." Don't Edit Champaign County GOP Rep. Jim Jordan sees broad immigration reform as the way to prevent family separation Don't Edit President Trump is right. We need to pass an immigration bill thats consistent with the mandate of the 2016 election: -Secure our borders -Build the wall -End chain migration -End the visa lottery -Stop sanctuary cities -Reform asylum laws Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) June 15, 2018 Don't Edit Jordan did not express opposition to the Trump administration policy, but a spokesman for the House Freedom Caucus co-founder said he doesn't want kids to be separated from their families. He believes the problem should be solved in the context of broader immigration reform, the spokesman said. In interview last week on CNN, Jordan said the system needs to be cleaned up, to protect those who are "truly being persecuted," not those who are "coached to say the right things so they get to come to this country illegally." "No one wants to separate families," Jordan said. "Everyone knows we need to reform the asylum laws. Eighty percent of those seeking asylum aren't legitimate." Don't Edit Don't Edit Don't Edit Holmes County GOP Rep. Bob Gibbs blasts media 'bias' for outrage over detention practices Don't Edit Sabrina Eaton, cleveland.com Don't Edit A statement from Gibbs did not directly say whether he supports or opposes the practice of separating families, but did say the "status quo is not acceptable." A spokesman clarified that Gibbs considers family separation to be part of that unacceptable status quo. The House is slated to take up legislation to alleviate the many problems with our nations immigration policy this week," said a statement from Gibbs. "Any reforms to our immigration system must include securing the border, instituting merit-based visa reform, and ending chain migration. "We must deter illegal border crossings, otherwise we will continue to have this problem. It is clear the status quo is not acceptable, and I sincerely hope Democrats act in good faith when debating and voting on this weeks immigration legislation. "Biased voices of the mainstream media in outrage over detention practices that have been in place well before the current administration also are not acceptable. The issue of illegal immigration is complex and nuanced, and requires thoughtful debate rather than talking heads on cable news screaming at the cameras. We are a nation of laws. We welcome those who immigrate legally and accept those legitimately seeking asylum. Don't Edit Toledo Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur calls separation policy 'cynical' and 'cruel' Don't Edit Don't Edit .@POTUS policy of separating children from parents at the southern border is inhumane and doesn't make us safer. This has more to do w/ cynical politics of division than sensible immigration policy. The Trump Administration must stop this cruel policy. #KeepFamilesTogether Marcy Kaptur (@RepMarcyKaptur) June 19, 2018 Don't Edit The Trump Administrations policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border is inhumane and does not make us safer," said a statement from Kaptur. "This policy has more to do with the cynical politics of division than any sensible immigration policy that the American people support. Years of Republican inaction on immigration have brought us to this point. Congressional Republicans need to get off their hands and act on comprehensive reform and more immediately, stop this cruel policy of separation. This Administrations harmful policies, and an arbitrary 400 percent increase in employer enforcement actions have torn apart Ohio families and instilled fear in countless other communities across our Great Lakes Heartland. We should not criminalize people who just want to work. AKRON, Ohio -- Akron officials have named the two veteran firefighters accused of making pornographic videos at a city firehouse. Deann Eller and Arthur Dean were both placed on paid administrative leave Monday while officials conduct an investigation, Akron city officials said. Akron city spokeswoman Ellen Nischt said another firefighter told a supervisor about the incident. Officials released photos and the personnel files of both Eller and Dean following a Monday afternoon press conference. Eller, 42, was recently promoted to lieutenant, and Dean, 49, both joined the Akron Fire Department in 2000. A joint statement from Mayor Dan Horrigan and Fire Chief Clarence Tucker said the firefighters were not assigned to work at the same firehouse and were in a long-term relationship. "As leaders of this City and this Department, we find these allegations shocking and distressing to say the least," the statement said. Horrigan and Tucker said the investigation is ongoing and that there will be "prompt and appropriate action" after the investigation is finished. Akron police are not investigating the incident as crime. "These allegations bring unwelcome dishonor and embarrassment to Akron Fire Department and the City of Akron and unfairly discredit the reputation of other Akron Fire officers," the joint statement said. To comment on this story, visit Monday's crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Someone duped a Cleveland man into taking part in a sexually explicit video chat and threatened to release the video on social media unless he donated $10,000 to a charity, police reports say. The man reported the incident to Cleveland police on Sunday. No arrests have been made in the case. The man said in a phone interview the incident began several days ago. He got a friend request on Facebook from an unknown and attractive woman. He accepted the friend request and the woman sent him several messages over the course of three days. She then tried to video chat with him several more times, he said. He tried to pick up the call several times, but the video on the woman's side of the call was a frozen screen. He hung up several times after seeing the frozen screen. He picked up a video call from the woman Sunday, and this time someone was on the other side. The woman, who was naked and lying face down, asked him to flash her his genitals on the video chat. The man said he initially declined, but agreed to do so if the woman showed off her body to him. The woman did, and the man said he reciprocated. The call immediately ended and someone later called him and said they had a compromising video of him. Several ensuing messages via Facebook then demanded $10,000 that was supposed to be donated to an animal rights organization, according to police reports. The man said the ransom amount decreased in the last few days and have stopped after Cleveland police detectives began looking into the case. To comment on this story, visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments page. The suspect in Monday's bank robbery. AKRON, Ohio -- Police are searching for a suspect who robbed a PNC Bank Monday morning. Police say the male entered the bank at 889 W. Market St. at 10:30 a.m. wearing a ski mask and sunglasses and told the security guard not to move. The suspect had something in his waistband, possibly a handgun. The male demanded money from a teller and a customer before running from the building, across the street and into the front passenger seat of a bright red Dodge Charger with gray stripes and gray lettering, police say. There was white primer on the rear passenger door. The suspect is 5-foot-9 to 6 feet tall, 25 to 35 years old and was wearing a black hooded sweat shirt with a plaid shirt underneath and black pants. Anyone with information is asked to contact police. To comment on this story, please visit Monday's crime and courts comments page. MISHAWAKA, Indiana -- A car driving the wrong way on a toll road smashed into a vehicle carrying five Painesville, Ohio, residents, killing three of them, according to the Indiana State Patrol. Four people have died overall as a result of the crash. The crash occurred at about 7:32 p.m. Sunday on the Indiana Toll Road (Interstate 80), a news release from patrol says. Troopers received reports a Toyota was driving "erratically" while heading east when it suddenly turned around and began driving west in the eastbound lanes. While driving west in the eastbound passing lane, the Toyota crashed head-on into a 2004 Chevrolet Tahoe driven by Octavius Rice, 46, of Painesville. The Tahoe ended up on its right side in the center median, but pushed upright by motorists who stopped to help, troopers say. Denita Rice, 42, and Bryson Rice, 1, both were pronounced dead at the scene. Makayla Lanier, 12, of Painesville, died of her injuries at a hospital. Nila Watkins, 10, of Painesville, was flown to a hospital with serious injuries. Octavius Rice also is hospitalized with serious injuries. The driver of the Toyota, Chintan Patel, 32, of South Bend, Indiana, had to be cut from his vehicle and died Monday of his injuries, troopers say. Two other vehicles also were involved in the crash: Jasmine White, 26 of Bowling Green, Ohio, was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, while Ivan Radov, 30, of Berrien Springs, Indiana, was not injured. The investigation into the crash continues but troopers say alcohol is believed to be a factor. Mishawaka is located next to South Bend, Indiana. To comment on this story, please visit Monday's crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Like a bus dodging traffic, the board of the troubled Regional Transit Authority took a couple of sharp turns at a three-hour meeting Tuesday. In the end, acting president Dennis Clough was elected president for a year and Rev. Charles Lucas vice president. During the meeting, board member Valarie McCall withdrew her bid for board president or vice president, saying, "There is a situation of mistrust" within the board and the agency. McCall said the board is not ready for progress, such as finding a new general manager or seeking more tax support. "I can't say I want to lead if we don't want to be leading together,'' she said. McCall declined to elaborate after the meeting. Trustee Leo Serrano said, "We have disagreements and tensions, but we're working through them." In similar words, Clough said, "As with any organization, there are disagreements. The purpose is to work through them to move the organization forward." McCall is Cleveland's chief of governmental and international affairs. In April, she asked to be considered for the board's presidency or vice presidency. Clough is Westlake's long-time mayor, an RTA trustee since 1999 and the board's vice president since 2011. He asked only to be president. General manager and CEO Joe Calabrese said he's keeping plans to retire in February 2020, when his contract expires. Calabrese said he would start looking this week for a recruitment firm to fill his job. McCall said members agreed Monday to put Calabrese's contract on Tuesday's agenda. But Clough asked twice today for colleagues to discuss the item, and no one responded. After the meeting, Clough said, "Obviously, it's been worked out." But McCall said, "Nothing has been worked out, which is a problem." On Monday, members held a private session about an investigation into former president George Dixon III, who is said to own more than $1.1 million for unpaid healthcare premiums. Calabrese has suspended Bruce Hampton, head of human resources, pending dismissal for his alleged cooperation with Dixon. Calabrese said this week that he is still investigating the staff. The board voted Tuesday to deny board members RTA health insurance from now on. No remaining member was using it. The board also approved an $85,000 study of RTA's economic impact to be conducted by Cleveland State. Members have talked about seeking more tax support, but several have said recently that they should wait for the study's results. EAST CLEVELAND, Ohio -- An off-duty University Hospitals officer was shot during an early morning robbery at an East Cleveland bank, police said. The officer, who has not been identified, was withdrawing money Monday at 7:40 a.m. from a U.S. Bank in the 1800 block of Forest Hill Boulevard when he was approached by a man with a gun, East Cleveland police said. The man shot the officer, took his badge, wallet and his off-duty gun, police said. A police report said the officer was shot in the left thigh. Police did not provide any additional information about the robbery. Officials released 911 calls Monday afternoon of the moments immediately following the shooting. Dispatchers juggled multiple calls from people who heard a gunshot and saw a man lying on the ground at the U.S. Bank. A man on the call can be heard swearing and telling dispatcher the he was shot in the leg. To comment on this story, visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments page. HIGHLAND HILLS, Ohio -- A teenager who hopped a barbed-wire fence and escaped from a local detention center last month was captured in Florida. The 17-year-old was arrested by police in Florida and remains in custody in Miami-Dade County, according to Ohio Department of Youth Services spokesman Kim Jump. No additional information was provided about the juvenile's arrest. The teen was one of two who escaped the Cuyahoga Hills Juvenile Correctional Facility in Highland Hills in May. A 16-year-old juvenile and the older teen used a bed sheet to climb a fence and escaped just before 12:30 a.m. Cleveland police captured the younger teen about 6 a.m. near East 131st Street and Miles Avenue in the city's Corlett neighborhood. Investigators thought the older teen was headed to his native Licking County. Officials said he was scheduled for release from the juvenile detention center this month. He was admitted to the detention center in January after failing to complete some stipulations of his parole which stemmed from his arrest for vandalizing business property. To comment on this story, visit Monday's crime and courts comments page. AKRON, Ohio -- A woman suffered a broken jaw during a road rage incident Monday evening involving a motorcyclist in Akron, police said. The 29-year-old woman and her 25-year-old boyfriend got into an altercation with a man on a motorcycle about 7 p.m. in the intersection of North Main Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard, Akron police said. The man threw a piece of concrete into the couple's car window and injured the woman, police said. The woman was taken to Akron City Hospital for treatment. The man had no visible injuries, police said. The couple told investigators that were driving westbound on Martin Luther King Boulevard when they noticed a black motorcycle weaving in and out of traffic. The motorcycle was in front of them as they approached the stoplight on North Main Street, authorities said. The motorcyclist did not move when the light turned green. The couple honked their horn after sitting at the light for several seconds, police said. Authorities said the motorcyclist got off of his bike and approached the couple's car. The woman and the motorcyclist got in to an argument shortly before the man pushed the woman. The boyfriend separated the two, police said. Not long after, the couple crossed a city bridge when they noticed the motorcyclist was standing on the curb. The motorcyclist threw a piece of concrete through the passenger side window, police said. It struck the woman in the face, police said. The concrete landed on the man's arm. Investigators gave a vague description of the man and his motorcycle. Anyone with information should call Akron Police Department at 330-375-2552. To comment on this story, visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments page. After Kirstjen Nielsen held a press conference in which she showed callousness toward children being separated from their parents at the border, many called on the DHS Secretary to step down. Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein believe Nielsen should resign over her "lack of transparency" and "record of misleading statements." But others have come to the defense of Nielsen, arguing she is just doing her job by securing the border. What do you think? PERSPECTIVES Kamala Harris was the first lawmaker to call for Nielsen's official resignation, but Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and others have since followed suit. Im calling on Kirstjen Nielsen to resign as Secretary of Homeland Security. Under her watch, our government has committed human rights abuses by breaking up families along the southern border. And she has failed to be accountable to and transparent with the American people. Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 18, 2018 Critics argue it is inhumane for the Trump administration to use children as political pawns. .@SecNielsen must resign. This is not an immigration issue, it is a humanitarian issue. Children are being used by the Trump Admin to create leverage, with a goal of passing Trumps anti-immigrant agenda. I struggle to think of anything more barbaric. #FamiliesBelongTogether Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) June 18, 2018 Nielsen is trying to shift blame onto Democrats and Congress despite the fact that the "zero-tolerance policy" toward separating migrant families was enacted in April by President Donald Trump's Justice Department. Per the Washington Post: UPDATE: The entire Democratic caucus supports our bill to bar children from being taken from their parents at the border. Ive heard countless Republicans say that they oppose children being taken from their parents. If thats true, they should support our bill NOW! Sen Dianne Feinstein (@SenFeinstein) June 18, 2018 But Nielsen claims there is no policy of separating migrant families at the border, and the media is "misreporting" the facts. This misreporting by Members, press & advocacy groups must stop. It is irresponsible and unproductive. As I have said many times before, if you are seeking asylum for your family, there is no reason to break the law and illegally cross between ports of entry. Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen (@SecNielsen) June 17, 2018 We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period. Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen (@SecNielsen) June 17, 2018 Supporters say Nielsen is being attacked because she is doing her job and doing it well. You know how you can tell a woman in the Trump Administration is doing her job well? Democrats call for that woman to resign. Stand firm @SecNielsen Stacy Washington (@StacyOnTheRight) June 19, 2018 It's simple: don't break the law and you won't be separated from your children. When you rubber stamp illegal activity you create more ILLEGAL ACTIVITY. Get it? Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) June 19, 2018 The Tylt is focused on debates and conversations around news, current events and pop culture. We provide our community with the opportunity to share their opinions and vote on topics that matter most to them. We actively engage the community and present meaningful data on the debates and conversations as they progress. The Tylt is a place where your opinion counts, literally. The Tylt is an Advance Local Media, LLC property. Join us on Twitter @TheTylt, on Instagram @TheTylt or on Facebook, we'd love to hear what you have to say. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Since he began running statewide last year, one of the central arguments of Rep. Jim Renacci's campaign is that he's a businessman who breaks the mold of the career politicians who have run Ohio for decades. The thing is, that message could cause problems for state Attorney General Mike DeWine, his fellow Republican who will appear with him at the top of the November ballot. Back when he was running against DeWine for governor in the contentious Republican primary, Renacci, who has served in Congress since 2011, emphasized the past business career that made him a millionaire, while lambasting DeWine's decades-long tenure in public office. A still-active website Renacci launched in November, www.columbuscartel.com, refers to DeWine as "the epitome of a career politician" who "is only looking out for his next election." After switching from the governor's race to the Senate race in January, Renacci's "career politician" message has remained unchanged. He's now using it -- in a June campaign ad and on social media -- against another longtime Ohio elected official, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. He's even recycled an attack he made against DeWine from December -- pointing out that DeWine had been in office since the original "Star Wars" movie came out -- to use against Brown a few months later. Shortly after he switched races in January, Renacci said in an interview with cleveland.com that he stood by his criticisms of DeWine, and declined to endorse him for governor. Around the same time, Renacci issued a statement distancing himself from an endorsement that his former running-mate, Cincinnnati Councilwoman Amy Murray, made of DeWine. "I'm not really looking [to smooth it over with DeWine]," Renacci told cleveland.com in January. "In the end, I said what I believed in. The problem in Washington is the same as the problem in Ohio. We have career politicians like Sherrod Brown doing nothing but collect taxpayer checks, and in the governor's race, I said the same thing. Our problem in this country is we keep electing career politicians... Mike DeWine's a career politician. So is Sherrod Brown." In an email Tuesday, a Renacci campaign spokeswoman did not answer directly when asked if or how Renacci's views had changed since January. She referred instead to efforts by Republican volunteers last Saturday to distribute literature promoting DeWine and Renacci across the state. "Look, there just isn't a story here," the spokeswoman, Leslie Shedd, said in an email. "Our campaigns have been working together and holding joint grassroots operations since the primary, including the Super Saturday three days ago. In fact, the Congressman and the Attorney General were just together at an event with the Vice President on Friday." Josh Eck, a DeWine campaign spokesman, said Shedd's statement was "spot on" and as proof, shared a photo showing DeWine and Renacci attending the event with Vice President Mike Pence in Columbus. He also said DeWine has endorsed Renacci. Rep. Jim Renacci (front row, third from left) and Attorney General Mike DeWine (back) attending an event featuring Vice President Mike Pence in Columbus on Friday. Renacci now will need DeWine's help to win in November. DeWine not only will appear at the top of the ballot, but the lesser-known Renacci, who is running statewide for the first time with a new top campaign staff, also will need DeWine's more extensive and more experienced political organization. One Ohio Republican operative said Renacci's words -- and his ongoing focus on the "career politician" line - probably anger DeWine's allies, but won't affect DeWine's plans. "I think everyone is trying to run their own race, and doing the things they need to win their races, and aren't too terribly worried about team sports," the Republican operative said. A pair of polls from two well-respected universities last week showed DeWine running a tight race with Richard Cordray, the Democratic candidate for governor, while Renacci trailed Brown by double digits. Before the May primary, DeWine absorbed similar "career politician" attacks from Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, another Republican candidate for governor. As of Monday, all of Renacci's old anti-DeWine attacks on social media were still visible, although most of them were deleted after cleveland.com reached out to the Renacci campaign for this story. In June, Renacci referred to DeWine and his other "Columbus insider" Republican opponents as playing a game of "political musical chairs." In September, Renacci shared a video his campaign produced calling DeWine and the other Republican governor candidates "Columbus fat-cats." In November, after Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted dropped out of the race to become DeWine's running-mate, Renacci posted a web video calling DeWine and Husted "career politicians" who offer "nothing but the status quo." Tom Sutton, a political science professor at Baldwin Wallace University, said claims from one high-profile race might, but don't always, spill over into the minds of voters considering another race. But, he said Renacci's words still could be used to benefit Richard Cordray, DeWine's Democratic opponent in the governor's race. "Where the blowback could happen would be for the Cordray campaign to turn around and essentially use the same exact messaging against DeWine, and quote Renacci and say, 'people from your own party are saying you've been in office for too long,'" Sutton said. "I think the risk is already laid out, and it wouldn't be surprising to see the Cordray folks using some of that." Sutton said Renacci nonetheless might benefit from expanding his argument. "I think he would be better off if he spent less time going after Brown as a career politician, and more on how an outsider with his kind of experience would be a better option," Sutton said. Cleveland.com reporter Seth A. Richardson contributed to this story. COLUMBUS, Ohio--The Republican-dominated Ohio House appears ready to loosen state gun-control laws, defying Gov. John Kasich's call for stricter gun monitoring. House Speaker Ryan Smith, speaking with reporters Tuesday, said lawmakers are likely to vote next week on a so-called "stand your ground" bill, which would eliminate the duty to retreat before using force in self-defense. The legislation, House Bill 228, would also shift the burden of proof in self-defense cases from the defense to the prosecution (Ohio is the only state to have such a rule) and would allow residents or groups to challenge local gun-control ordinances in court, among other changes. Smith, a Gallia County Republican, said he feels "comfortable in saying there's a lot of support for that bill." Kasich is expected to veto the legislation should it pass the Ohio Senate and reach his desk. But Smith said he believes House Republicans would have the 60 votes required to override Kasich's veto. Meanwhile, Smith said House Republicans have "a lot of consternation" with House Bill 585, which seeks six changes to Ohio gun and background check laws - including tightening Ohio's existing background check database and a "red flag" law allowing courts to authorize gun seizures for individuals who show warning signs of violence. The changes were recommended by a bipartisan study group on gun policy; Kasich has been pushing for the changes, particularly after a mass shooting at Parkland High School in Florida in February. Smith said many House Republicans are worried the "red flag" proposal would take away people's guns without due process and could be exploited as a legal weapon in domestic court disputes. "Philosophically, I think our caucus probably lines up with where I'm at, which is - there's no gun law in America that's going to stop a lot of this," Smith said about recent mass shootings. "I mean, criminals don't abide by the law by their very nature. So, it's not to say that we're insensitive to it or don't want to do something on it. It's just people are very protective of the Second Amendment." Smith yielded that House Republicans might be willing to support some parts of Kasich's gun plan. GOP lawmakers plan to talk about the bill's future on Tuesday evening, he said. COLUMBUS, Ohio - Ohio House Speaker Ryan Smith said Tuesday a newly introduced bill would create a study group to look at changing state funding of e-schools. Smith, in his first sit-down interview with reporters since being installed as House speaker, said the bill is sponsored by Republican Reps. Bill Reineke and Keith Faber, who is running for Ohio auditor. House Bill 707 comes after the January closure of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which closed after the state found it overcharged Ohio by $80 million for educating students the school couldn't prove were working online for enough time. "Clearly, changes are necessary," Smith said. "That comes straight out of the national association of charter schools. They have said that we need to look at these different" schools. "They're completely different animals as far as funding goes." A study committee would provide lawmakers time to make thoughtful changes and ensure another ECOT doesn't happen, he said. "We need to make sure the children coming out of there are getting a quality education and hold (the schools) to a high standard. We don't have results like we did at ECOT at any (traditional) public school and if we did, we would take drastic action." This political season, Democrats have hammered Republicans for supporting lenient laws that allowed people associated with charter schools to rake in millions of tax dollars, while students weren't getting a proper education. ECOT's founders donated tens of thousands of dollars to politicians, mostly Republicans. The bill was applauded by Ohio Auditor Dave Yost, a Republican who is running for attorney general. My office has been working & reporting on this issue for years glad to see more our recommendations moving! Thanks to @KeithFaber and @BillReineke for leading! https://t.co/MgHOHki9gU Dave Yost (@Yost4Ohio) June 19, 2018 In addition to the study committee, the bill addresses some problems in Ohio law that Yost found in his most recent audit of the school, Smith said. Among such changes: The Department of Education must define what full-time equivalent means for e-schools. The definition must consider how to document online learning, idle time and student participation. The department must specify the amount of time a student's account may remain idle while online. The department has to determine when schools should dis-enroll students for not actively participating in learning. When the state is advising e-schools on how to calculate students' calculating full-time equivalency they need to include both student participation and the duration a student is logged on. Schools or their management companies must share the amount they spend on food, travel, marketing and promotions, lobbying and legal services -- among other expenditures. If there is a familiar relationship between the governing authority's officers and employees and a management company contracted by the school, the management company must compensate the school for any financial losses under the arrangement, up to the amount the management company earned in profit. ECOT founder Bill Lager is accused of hiring his daughter's company to produce commercials and other communication for ECOT. Lager also had two private companies that the school hired. The state is trying to recover $80 million from ECOT, but will likely be unable unless it can recover money the school paid to Lager's two companies. After the audit showed ECOT may have committed fraud, both Yost and Faber donated to charity campaign contributions they had received from people associated with ECOT. Smith said the House may see the bill on the floor by the end of June. The study committee is supposed to be finished with its work Nov. 1 so lawmakers can pass laws based on its recommendations in the final weeks of the year. Faber's Democratic opponent for the auditor's office, Zack Space, recently announced his plan to audit all for-profit charter schools. "While I'm heartened that Keith Faber agrees with me that for-profit charter schools need stricter oversight, this bill is merely a feeble attempt in an election year by a desperate career politician to reclaim the credibility he has already lost," he said, referring to a Politifact investigation of Faber's claims about shutting ECOT down, which were determined to be mostly false. Steve Dettelbach, the Democrat who is running against Yost for attorney general, also sent a statement, saying his opponent is late in advocating for changes. "It is impossible to overstate Yost's role in botching this investigation; Yost was the one person in Ohio who had regular access to ECOT's books," Dettelbach said. "He had the opportunity and authority to stop this scam years ago. Instead, he handed ECOT awards and took their checks at the same time he was investigating the school." PARMA, Ohio - The Parma City Schools was recently awarded a $10,000 Cox Charities Community Grant earmarked for the district's new afterschool program Every Drop Counts! "This program helps to continue extended learning opportunities for our middle school students, who will be engaged in a six-week program where they will be invited to have an opportunity to work with certified teachers to strengthen their math skills," Parma City School District Federal Programming Director Ava Yeager said. "The fun part is they will also learn about water conservation. These kinds of activities wouldn't happen without grant funding, so we're really excited Cox is supporting this project." The current plan is to introduce Every Drop Counts! this September to roughly 150 students, grades 5 through 7, attending Shiloh, Hillside and Greenbriar middle schools. Every Drop Counts! provides students with rigorous afterschool programming including academic and enrichment activities in a safe and nurturing environment. "Why this is important is that this is going to address the need for intervention in math, which is something we don't often have for our middle schoolers in our everyday curriculum," Yeager said. "Those students struggling will be invited to this program. At the end of six weeks, we'll have a culminating event called 'Watermania' for all stakeholders, including parents and community members to all come together. This is where students can show off what they learned about water conservancy." The Parma City School District previously received Cox Charities Community Grants to support STEAM enrichment opportunities such as working with filmmakers to create, write and produce public service announcements, as well as learning about innovators, computer technology and robotics. "We have a long-standing tradition of giving back to our communities and one of the ways we do it is through Cox Charities Community Grants," Cleveland Market Vice President of Cox Communications Rob Brill said in a press release. STRONGSVILLE, Ohio - Swensons, an Akron-based hamburger drive-in chain that has expanded into Cuyahoga County, wants to build a restaurant on Pearl Road south of Ohio 82. The eatery would lease land from Strongsville City Schools on the west side of Pearl, just south of Rademaker-Miller Lane. It's the site of the district's former pupil services building. School board members are weighing the proposal. On one hand it's a way to increase revenues, especially after administration officials projected in May that the district would start deficit spending in 2019. The board is in the process of placing a new 7.9-mill tax on the November ballot. On the other hand, board members are concerned about how the restaurant would look, and whether it would add clutter to an area that's already well-developed with retail. "Plus we have 50 billion restaurants in Strongsville already," board member Duke Evens said during a June 7 board meeting. The board asked Swensons to prepare a letter-of-intent that would spell out lease terms and present the letter at a future board meeting. According to its website, Swensons was established in 1934 in Akron. The drive-in serves "hamburgs" and "cheeseburgs" with two special sauces, along with sandwiches, soups, sides and 18 flavors of milkshakes. Today, Swensons has restaurants in Akron, North Akron, West Akron, Stow, Montrose, Jackson and North Canton. Locations opened in Seven Hills in 2001 and in University Heights in 2017. Swensons restaurants are now under construction in North Olmsted and Avon. "This is the kind of community we love to do business in," Ronald Dee, Swensons' vice president of real estate, told the Strongsville school board June 7. Jeff Flowers, president and CEO of Swensons, told the board that the Strongsville restaurant would resemble the Swensons in University Heights. The restaurants contain no seating. Customers eat in their cars, served by a carhop. Dee said a typical Swensons lease has an initial term of 20 years, with six options to renew every five years. The rent rate is increased with each lease renewal. The restaurant also maintains the property. Board member Richard Micko said Swensons, due to its charitable and community-based activities, seems to match Strongsville's values. "At least this board member is very interested," Micko said. The Drug Enforcement Administration's acting head, Robert Patterson, has announced he plans to retire near the end of June, a spokesman told CNBC Monday. Patterson said Monday afternoon in an internal email obtained by The Washington Post that planning for the future had become "increasingly challenging in an acting capacity." In that email to DEA employees, Patterson reportedly wrote, "Since taking on the role of acting administrator, I have known that a permanent replacement would eventually be named." He continued: "As such, I took each day as a gift, and with that mentality tried my best to keep the agency moving forward." Patterson has worked at the federal agency for three decades, and has previously served as its principal deputy administrator and its chief inspector. Patterson succeeded Chuck Rosenberg in the role in October. Rosenberg, who was appointed in May 2015, also served in an acting capacity rather than being confirmed by the Senate. He announced that he would step down in September following disagreements with the Trump administration, particularly President Donald Trump's remarks a month earlier encouraging police officers to be more forceful with suspects. North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un visits The Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore, June 11, 2018. Edgar Su | Reuters North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, where he will likely brief Chinese President Xi Jinping on his summit with U.S. President Donald Trump last week, as Washington and Seoul agreed to suspend a major joint military exercise. This is Kim's third trip to China this year, coming less than a week after he met Trump in Singapore for historic talks. Following the Singapore summit, Trump agree to work with Kim toward complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, committed to provide the North's regime with security guarantees and pledged to end "war games", which Pyongyang and Beijing have long seen as provocative. In an unusual move, Chinese state media announced Kim's visit and said he would stay for two days. Previously China would only confirm Kim had visited after he had left the country. No other details were provided. A Kim trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China is North Korea's most important diplomatic and economic backer but has been angered by Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests. Police tightened security along Beijing's main Changan Avenue, which leads to the Great Hall of the People where Chinese leaders normally meet visiting heads of state, and also outside the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where Kim stayed with his wife during his March visit to Beijing. China has welcomed the warming of ties between Washington and Pyongyang, and offered to help. Beijing has been particularly pleased by Trump's announcement to suspend military drills, which China has long pushed for under its "dual suspension" proposal, whereby North Korea stops weapons tests and the United States and South Korea stop military drills, so both sides can sit down for talks. "South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August," according to a South Korean defense ministry statement. A Pentagon statement confirmed the suspension and added that there would be a meeting between the secretaries of defense and state as well as Trump's national security adviser on the issue this week. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops participated in the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than live field exercises that use weapons, tanks or aircraft. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. The decision to halt military exercises in South Korea has bewildered many current and former U.S. defense officials, who only learned about it when Trump made his remarks after the Singapore meeting. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said on Tuesday there would be no changes to joint drill plans between the United States and Japan, both of which also engage in regular deterrence exercises against North Korea. "The United States is in a position to keep its commitment to its allied nations' defence and our understanding is there is no change to the U.S. commitment to the Japan-U.S. alliance and the structure of American troops stationed in Japan," Suga said in a regular briefing. Cost of drills? On the first day, Welch says her reporting try-out went well and she was told she did great. "That was the beginning of trouble," she says. "I started acting, you know, a little too relaxed. Too casual. Too familiar." "I wanted to be a journalist," she tells CNBC Make It , "so I sent my resume to about 50 newspapers from Maine to California, and pretty soon afterward, the Kansas City Times called and asked me to come out for two days." In fact, she says, it was this common mistake that cost her a job in 1981, when she was a recent Harvard University graduate. Nailing an interview is hard, especially for your dream job. That's why bestselling management author and CNBC contributor Suzy Welch says regardless of how qualified you may be, you never want to make the mistake of acting like you've already sealed the deal. She recalls riding to lunch with some editors from the paper and asking, "So, what kinda food we getting?" as if they were old friends. She even met with the editor-in-chief later that day and asked him where he lived as if she were trying to spot potential neighborhoods. The next morning, she says, she got a call letting her know that she didn't get the job because she didn't "fit in." "The editor didn't have to explain himself," she says. "I was dumb, but not so dumb that I didn't know I had overstepped." From that experience, Welch says she learned that you should always remember "there are power dynamics at play in an interview." "Even if you think you're perfect for the job," she adds. "Even if they seem anxious to get you. Even then they are the buyer, you are the seller. Do not let down your guard." After you are hired, the dynamics may change a bit. "But until then," she says, "no open job is yours for the taking; it's yours for the winning, with skill and humility." Welch says that's how she approached her next interview at the Miami Herald. And, as it turns out, she got the job. Suzy Welch is the co-founder of the Jack Welch Management Institute and a noted business journalist, TV commentator and public speaker. Think you need Suzy to fix your career? Email her at gettowork@cnbc.com. Video by Beatriz Bajuelos Castillo Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube! More from Suzy Welch: China's Commerce Ministry said on Tuesday morning that it will take counter measures if the U.S. publishes an additional tariffs list. In a statement posted on its website, the ministry said China will protect its interests, taking both quantitative and qualitative measures against the move. The fresh threats of additional tariffs violate prior negotiations and consensus reached between the two countries, the Chinese Commerce Ministry said. A trade war will hurt companies and people in both countries, it added in the Chinese statement. "This practice of extreme pressure and blackmail deviates from the consensus reached by both parties on many occasions and is disappointing for the international community," the Commerce Ministry said. "The United States has initiated a trade war that violates market laws and is not in accordance with current global development trends," it said. Beijing will respond by safeguarding the interests of China and its people and defending free trade, the statement added. No matter how the external environment changes globally, China will push firmly ahead with reform and opening up, the Chinese ministry said. Apple CEO Tim Cook with U.S. President Donald Trump during a meeting of the American Technology Council on June 19, 2017. President Donald Trump told Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook that the U.S. government would not levy tariffs on iPhones assembled in China, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing a source familiar with the negotiations. The newspaper reported that Cook traveled to the White House last month to warn Trump of the potentially adverse effects of Trump's trade policies on Apple in China but did not specify precisely when Trump made the commitment to Cook. Apple and the White House were not immediately available for comment. A list of tariffs proposed in April largely excluded consumer electronics. But last week, Trump unveiled a revised list that included several categories of chips, raising fears that tariffs could impact the U.S. technology sector. President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping chat as they walk along the front patio of the Mar-a-Lago estate after a bilateral meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., April 7, 2017. According to Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,a trade war consists of actions that affect the full economies, not just a few sectors, of the countries involved. Such back-and-forth measures have sparked concerns that Washington and Beijing have entered into a full-on trade war. But it remains up for debate what exactly defines a trade war. As the world's two largest economies exchange threats of retaliatory tariffs, the rest of the world is watching closely for any knock-on repercussions. If the proposed tariffs on both sides are enacted, then it's a trade war, said Max Baucus, former U.S. ambassador to China under President Barack Obama. Trump's newest announcement of potential tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods "does make a difference," but "we aren't there yet" for a trade war, said Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at Australia-based think tank the Lowy Institute. He explained that the initial list of U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods was "reasonably well chosen" so as to not hurt American consumers, but the additional levies would likely be felt by the U.S. population. Others, however, said the current situation already amounts to a trade war. "This is one," warned Deborah Elms, founder and executive director of the Asian Trade Centre: "$50 billion one way, $50 billion back, escalation to an additional $200 billion. Plus investment restrictions. We've never seen anything like this." Meanwhile, U.S.-based industry group the National Retail Federation did not shy away from using the term for the current U.S.-China tensions: "This is just what we predicted a tit-for-tat trade war has erupted and American families are caught in the middle," the group said in a statement. A logo of Chinese telecommunications company ZTE is seen on an office building in Shanghai, China, on May 3, 2018. Shares of ZTE sank on Tuesday after the U.S. Senate passed a defense bill that had major implications for an agreement struck with the Chinese telecommunications equipment maker. ZTE stock tumbled 23.66 percent in Hong Kong by 3:25 p.m. HK/SIN while the company's Shenzhen-listed shares were limit down 10 percent. The sharp falls came after the U.S. Senate passed a $716 billion military funding bill, called the National Defense Authorization Act, on Monday. The bill contained an amendment that would sink a deal struck with ZTE that would allow the company to resume doing business with U.S. companies if the Chinese company adhered to a number of conditions. That agreement had been made after the Shenzhen-based company's operations took a hit earlier this year when the U.S. government stopped American companies from selling to ZTE, based on its dealings with Iran and North Korea. The U.S. Senate's version of the bill will need to be reconciled with the one passed by the House of Representatives last month. The latter version does not include a ZTE provision, Reuters said. ZTE stock had just returned to trade last week after being halted since April. Shares of the company had dropped some 40 percent in Hong Kong when trade resumed last Wednesday. Tuesday's declines also came amid renewed investor concerns over an escalation in trade tensions between China and the U.S. after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods. Greater China markets were sharply lower on Tuesday, with Hong Kong 's dropping almost 3 percent by 3:25 p.m. HK/SIN and the closing down 3.82 percent. Reuters contributed to this report. People protest the separation of children from their parents in front of the El Paso Processing Center, an immigration detention facility, at the Mexican border on June 19, 2018 in El Paso, Texas. At least five governors, including two Republicans, have announced that they will pull state troops from the southern border or cancel planned deployments in response to the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy. The announcements are evidence of further backlash to the controversial policy that has resulted in migrant families being separated at the border. The policy has already divided Republicans at the national level, with influential Republican senators, former first lady Laura Bush, and former Trump White House officials coming out in opposition. "Until this policy of separating children from their families has been rescinded, Maryland will not deploy any National Guard resources to the border," Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said in a post on Twitter Tuesday. Hogan announced that he ordered back a helicopter and four crew members. Larry Hogan tweet The Republican governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, said Tuesday that the administration's actions were "inhumane" in a statement announcing that he had canceled the deployment of a helicopter and two analysts that had been announced several weeks back. "Governor Baker directed the National Guard not to send any assets or personnel to the Southwest border today because the federal government's current actions are resulting in the inhumane treatment of children," his communications director said in a statement to WGBH News, a local outlet. Democratic governors from Virginia, Delaware, and North Carolina also announced that they would be canceling deployments or withdrawing troops. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said in a statement that he had ordered four soldiers and a helicopter to return from the border. "Let me be clearwe are ready to return and contribute to the real work of keeping our nation safe," Northam said in the statement. "But as long as the Trump administration continues to enforce this inhumane policy, Virginia will not devote any resource to border enforcement actions that could actively or tacitly support it." John Carney, the governor of Delaware, said that he received a request Tuesday for Delaware National Guard troops. "Under normal circumstances, we wouldn't hesitate to answer the call," Carney wrote in one of a series of posts on Twitter Tuesday. "But given what we know about the policies currently in effect at the border, I can't in good conscience send Delawareans to help with that mission." Carney tweet Gov. Roy Cooper, a North Carolina Democrat, called the Trump administration's policy "cruel" and said that he was recalling three members of the North Carolina National Guard. Roy Cooper tweet Not all governors who are opposed to the Trump administration's immigration policy have troops on the southern border, or had plans to deploy any resources. Republican Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who ran against Trump in 2016 for the Republican nomination for president, told MSNBC's Brian Williams Monday that the new immigration policy was "insane." Ohio does not have any troops on the southern border, a Kasich spokesperson told CNBC. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a post on Twitter Monday that New York would not be "complicit in this ongoing human tragedy," and announced that New York would not deploy any members of the National Guard to the southern border. It wasn't clear if New York had any personnel on the border already, and a spokesperson for Cuomo did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC. Cuomo also announced Tuesday that New York intended to file a lawsuit challenging the immigration policy, alleging that the government was violating the constitutional rights of the families separated at the border. Democrat governors from Rhode Island and Connecticut said in statements that they would not send any troops if it were requested. Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who told the Denver Post that Colorado does not have any resources on the southern border, signed an executive order forbidding state agencies from separating children from parents who violated immigration laws. The 334.3 million units shipped during the first quarter of 2018 was a 2.9 percent decline year over year, according to IDC, and was led by China, which declined to a level not seen since 2013. Concept of foldable smartphone. 3-D illustration on white background. iStock | Getty Images With few exceptions, top-selling smartphone models from Apple, Samsung, Huawei and the rest a sea of rectangular slabs with rounded corners and maybe a bezel lately have reached the limits when it comes to impressing consumers with new design elements to stand out. Now they are all about the screen. According to Brett Newman, co-founder of product design firm Daylight Design, the screen is "the point of interface, the centerpiece of the design." Most buyers just want a screen that's durable enough not to crack when dropped, coupled with two diametrically opposed design elements: a bigger, richer screen on which to consume media, but which also lays atop a smaller handset that fits within a palm or pocket. The latter problem is getting closer to being solved. All the major smartphone makers are quietly working on foldable phones, devices that might use two or more bendable OLED panels that form a large screen when unfolded, according to recent reports. Huawei might have something to show us in October, Samsung's foldable Galaxy X is reportedly due for launch sometime in 2018 or 2019, and Apple's version could come as soon as 2020. Apple and Samsung declined to comment. If these devices work well, look sleek and offer a user experience that's as rich or richer than what our iPhone X and Galaxy 8's provide, a flood of phones with 6-inch or 7-inch screens that scrunch down into 3.5- or 4-inch forms might have the potential to shake up the saturated smartphone sector. "Foldable phones could be the future," Newman said. "But they need to meet the current standards of performance and specifications and be foldable to be widely accepted. If they do both, there is a chance for a significant, sustained meaningful change in the market," he added. Apple has filed multiple patents for foldable electronics. In March, a Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst wrote that a foldable iPhone could debut by 2020, and potentially expand into a tablet. There's no doubt that consumers and Wall Street would welcome the debut of a relevant, cutting-edge form factor in the global smartphone market, where shipments have waned due to fewer smartphone converts and fewer people willing to upgrade as often. According to IDC, vendors shipped 334.3 million units during the first quarter of 2018, a 2.9 percent decline over the prior year's first quarter. China drove the decline, where shipment volumes dipped below 100 million a low not seen since late 2013. "The abundance of ultra-high-end flagships with big price tags released over the past 12 to 18 months has most likely halted the upgrade cycle in the near term," IDC said in its most recent Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. "It now looks as if consumers are not willing to shell out this kind of money for a new device that brings minimal upgrades over their current device." The foldable phone is almost a reality A foldable phone powered by technology that delights users might tip the scales up at least a bit. "You only have to look at the other core electronic devices with screens computers, TVs, tablets to know that once you get saturation, there is never going to be this huge explosion of demand for these products," said Stephen Baker, v.p. and industry advisor for technology and mobile at market research firm NPD Group. "[Foldable phones] will be great, awesome products, but I'm sure it will be a slow burn in terms of both the interest level and people's acceptance. But this is the kind of stuff you do as a consumer electronics company you advance the product." There have been a handful of dual-screened, hinged phones released over the past decade, but all have sacrificed too many features to be up to snuff to their one-interface counterparts. ZTE's Axon M, introduced in October, got the market a little closer with its two 5.2-inch LCD screens that form a 6.75-inch tablet when opened. ZTE, which is caught in the middle of the evolving trade war between the US and China, released the Axon M folding, dual-screen smartphone in October 2017. TPG | Getty Images The ZTE Axon M is not a true flexible phone the second screen slides out from the back and is attached with a bulky hinge. And with a price tag of $725, a few shortcomings won't help convince consumers: its displays are lower resolution than most 2017 phones, while the life of its battery, which must power two screens, is expected to be significantly shorter. ZTE also is currently in a fight for its life as the U.S.-China trade war evolves, with a proposed U.S. ban on its use of American technology components posing an existential threat. The biggest design challenge with foldable smartphones is with screens, which like on all high-end models, are made up of various layers of glass and/or polymer films. "Developing any glass to bend at a tight radius hundreds of thousands of times without significant damage, and while maintaining outstanding optical properties, is a challenge," said a Corning spokeswoman. Challenges also exist within the foldable device. The display panel and electrodes, for example, must all meet the same bendability requirements, without compromising display quality, while the bend hinge should not show signs of creasing. "The key is, how good is that display going to be?" said Wai-Loong Lim, co-founder of R&D consultancy Y Studios. "To fold in the middle, to crease it in the middle, is it going to provide the rich visual experience the depth, the immersion that we want?" More from Tech Drivers: Apple will automatically share a user's location in emergency when calling 911 Facebook is getting into the television news business The complicated truth about Sophia the heavily hyped robot Materials break at their weakest points, and as glass gets thinner a necessary trait for a display that bends almost in half it becomes more vulnerable to being punctured. "A foldable display is something like a sandwich with many functional layers," said Calvin Hsieh, a director at research firm IHS Markit. "These layers have to bear bending for several times." Foldable phones are likely to be based on OLED screens, which presents another problem, according to David McQueen, a research director at ABI Research. The OLED layer is semipermeable, which makes it susceptible to moisture leaks. Major display manufacturers LG Display, Samsung and Royole, to name a few are examining ways to coat interfaces with protective barriers. Folding a display 280 times a day Folding a display 200,000 times without damage opening and closing the phone about 280 times a day to meet a two-year device warranty is an early expectation. Hsieh says that mechanical designs haven't quite gotten there, although German glassmaker giant Schott says its materials are ready. "Whatever foldable device that comes to market next year, if it has a glass cover, most likely it will be from Schott," said Jose Zimmer, a vice president Schott Thin Glass & Wafer. The firm developed a production technique that draws down the thickness of its glass significantly to less than 100 micrometers (versus the 300 to 400 that today's smartphone cover glass features). Laminates chemically strengthen its display material. Schott's flexible glass has undergone bend tests of up to 100,000 times. Corning, the display glass market leader, is still working to find the optimal tradeoff between beauty and function for foldable glass. "We can make foldable displays, but they tend not to be that compelling versus what you can have today," said CEO Wendell Weeks on the company's latest quarterly conference call in April. "And if we try to make a very compelling form factor, they tend not to be durable enough. We're a long way from having a really compelling product here." Samsung already offers screens that are flexible and curved, on phones and other smart devices likes its Gear Fit watch. But a truly foldable Galaxy phone isn't out yet, though company officials previously indicated that 2018 could be the year if technical problems are solved. Samsung Display Despite tumbling sales, mounting debts and looming maturities, Sears Holdings is still testing new initiatives to see if something sparks a turnaround. The latest one brings its Sears and Kmart brands together under one roof. A pint-sized Kmart convenience shop was opened inside a larger Sears store in New York's Brooklyn borough this weekend. The 10,000-square-foot Kmart sells everyday items including groceries, health and beauty supplies, cleaning supplies and pet gear. Sears will also soon roll out appliance shops selling higher-end merchandise inside some Kmarts, a spokesman told CNBC. Kmart sells some appliances, but only at opening price points. The moves look to be an attempt by the company to merge Sears and Kmart, capitalizing on the strengths of each brand and bringing the best-selling merchandise to the other. This is also a way for Sears to do more with less real estate, as it shutters hundreds of stores across the U.S. The plan in the near term is to try out the new concepts and see what sticks, according to the company. The goal is for the Brooklyn combo store to become a one-stop shop, similar to a CVS or a Walmart, selling a wider range of items. It follows similar moves by rivals Target, Kohl's, J.C. Penney and Macy's scaling down the size of a store, moving other retailers inside or opening up a tinier location altogether. Still, the initiatives could be too little too late for Sears. The launch of the new Kmart shop in Brooklyn comes at a time when Sears is struggling to stay afloat, weighed down by declining sales, a heavy debt load and too much real estate. The retailer has been shedding its assets recently another round of dozens of stores to raise cash and try to inch its way back to profitability. Sears is also in the midst of evaluating a bid from CEO Eddie Lampert's hedge fund, ESL Investments, to buy parts of the business, including the Kenmore brand. But Sears, led by Lampert, argues the company still has a loyal base of shoppers buoyed by its Shop Your Way membership platform who come to Sears and Kmart stores for their convenience. The company said its customers are welcoming the changes. "There are common things that everyday customers came into the Sears store looking for and unfortunately we had to turn them away," Pearl Thompson, the manager of the new Kmart convenience store in New York, told CNBC. That's not the case anymore, she said. "Our existing customers have been asking for these products (i.e. dish detergent and toothpaste), and we are also seeing new customers as part of the [grand opening]," she said. New York is the site of the store-within-a-store trial because Sears has "some of [the] best stores there," a company spokesman told CNBC. "Our focus is continuing to focus on our best stores. ... It's a market where we have a long history." Looking for ways to make its stores more profitable, Sears has also been testing small-format stores that sell only mattresses and appliances. Members of the business community are voicing their outrage at President Donald Trump's new immigration policy of separating children from their parents at the border, including a group being funded by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. The Libre Initiative, a nonprofit group financially backed by the Koch brothers, called on the Trump administration on Tuesday to reverse course on what's been called a zero-tolerance immigration policy, which forces children to part ways with their families if they illegally cross the border. "The president should take immediate action to end the separation of families at the border by rescinding the 'zero tolerance' policy," Daniel Garza, president of the initiative said in statement. Garza also said his organization will not support two immigration bills that are being crafted within the halls of Congress because he does not believe either do enough to protect participants of the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals program, also known as Dreamers. The Business Roundtable, chaired by J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon also blasted the White House for their latest hostilities toward migrants trying to come into the United States and called for it to be terminated. "Business Roundtable urges the Administration to end immediately the policy of separating accompanied minors from their parents. This practice is cruel and contrary to American values," Chuck Robbins, CEO of technology conglomerate CISCO Systems and chairman of the Business Roundtable Immigration Committee, said in a statement. The Business Roundtable includes some members who are supporting Trump's re-election efforts, including Steve Schwarzman, the CEO of private equity behemoth Blackstone. In December 2017, Schwarzman contributed $344,400 to Trump's joint fundraising committee, the Trump Victory Fund. A spokeswoman for Schwarzman did not return repeated requests for comment asking whether he was willing to denounce the policy himself. One of the most powerful business lobbying groups in the U.S., the Chamber of Commerce, was also not pleased with the new immigration initiative. Thomas Donohue, the Chamber's president, denounced the policy in a statement. "Thousands of children are being forcibly removed from their parents by our government. There is no other way to say it, this is not who we are and it must end now," Donohue said. Trump, however, seems to be shrugging off the criticism and forging ahead with his plans. He defended the decision in a speech during the National Federation of Independent Businesses' 75th-anniversary event in Washington D.C. Every currency in the world from the U.S. dollar to the Chinese yuan will have its own cryptocurrency version, the CEO of fintech firm Circle said. "Our view is that all fiat currency will be crypto," Jeremy Allaire, who co-founded Circle in 2013, told CNBC in an interview on Monday. "It seems inevitable at this point." Allaire's start-up offers a blockchain-powered app that lets people send money to each other for free. Blockchain is the public ledger of activity that underpins cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Circle also has a product that lets users invest in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum, and another that facilitates over-the-counter cryptocurrency trading for institutional investors. The $3 billion company is backed by U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs and Chinese internet giant Baidu. Earlier this year it made its first-ever acquisition, buying cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex. Circle recently said it wants to introduce a new cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar, called "USD Coin." The idea is to speed up transactions made with dollars by using blockchain technology which maintains a continuously growing digital record of transactions and reducing the volatility seen in most cryptocurrencies. It's not the first so-called "stablecoin" on the market other cryptocurrencies backed by fiat have been introduced. The most notable stablecoin is tether, a controversial virtual currency which critics have claimed was used to prop up bitcoin prices last year. Allaire said that Circle's U.S. dollar-backed crypto would benefit from coming under stricter regulations. The token is being built within an open-source platform called CENTRE, which Circle hopes will be joined by financial institutions and other firms. Allaire said that the aim of the USD Coin was to bring mainstream financial processes into the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. "Our focus with fiat stablecoins is we really think of it as a core building block for a crypto native global digital economy," Allaire said. "Our interest is in how do we take all of the tasks involved in the financial industry and move those onto a crypto native infrastructure." The company is also looking to add crypto tokens for the euro and the British pound. American Airlines has canceled about 2,500 flights since Thursday after a computer glitch disrupted crew scheduling at one of its regional carriers. The computer problem occurred at Dayton, Ohio-based PSA Airlines, an American Airlines subsidiary that operates about 12 percent of American's 6,700 flights a day. All PSA flights were canceled on Tuesday morning as the airline "works through schedules, getting aircraft and crews where they need to be to resume operations," American Airlines spokeswoman Katie Cody said in a statement. "PSA will operate a reduced scheduled over the next few days as it restores full service." The airline has "stabilized" its computer system, which was operating too slowly to schedule crew members in time for flights, Cody said. The problem is not affecting any of American's other regional carriers or its mainline operations, she added. American's shares fell 2.2 percent to close at $41.51 on Tuesday, while the NYSE Arca Airline index fell just over 1 percent. Investors will be watching how this impacts U.S. technology firms. Here's what exposure they have to China. It follows tariffs announced on Friday of 25 percent on up to $50 billion of Chinese goods, including semiconductors. Apple could be most at risk of all the big American technology firms if the trade tensions between the U.S. and China escalate. "Apple is most exposed," Neil Campling, co-head of global thematic group at Mirabaud Securities, told CNBC by phone Tuesday. Drilling into the numbers you can see why. In its last fiscal year, Apple generated nearly 20 percent of its revenues from Greater China, which equated to $44.7 billion. In 2017, it shipped over 41 million iPhones into China and was the fifth-largest player in the market, according to data from IDC. On top of that, it has around 40 stores in China. And it also operates its services such as the App Store and Apple Music in China. Services are an increasing part of Apple's business as the smartphone market slows down; in the 2017 fiscal year, they accounted for 13 percent of total net sales, up from 11 percent in 2016. Apple does not break down how much of this came from China. Apple also relies heavily on Asian suppliers. Its iPhones are assembled in China by Taiwanese firm Foxconn. Arguably, Apple has become the most successful U.S. technology company in China but that same strength could be a vulnerability. While Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly got assurances from President Trump that iPhones assembled in China would not be subject to tariffs, there are still risk should a trade war escalate. One risk is that Beijing clamps down on Apple's suppliers, causing delays or even raising concerns about Apple products. The New York Times reported, citing a person close to the company, that this is a concern within Apple should the government do this under the guise of national security. Authorities could also ban Apple services, which it has done before. In 2016, Apple's iBooks Store and iTunes Movies were shut down in China. Beijing could also push its own homegrown smartphone companies, like Xiaomi and Huawei. The latter faced scrutiny in the U.S. with intelligence officials cautioning U.S. consumers not to buy Huawei phones for fear of being spied on by the Chinese. China could theoretically adopt a similar message, saying the iPhone is a danger to national security. Campling noticed that Apple's inventories, which totaled $4.4 billion in the three months ending December 30, jumped to $7.6 billion in the March quarter. Inventories include completed products as well as components used in Apple devices. He said this was evidence that Apple was stockpiling components in case of any disruption and showed the company was concerned. "It is a defensive/protective measure in case there are difficulties in future procurement or supply chain disruption as Apple is potentially in the crossfire of the U.S./Sino trade war," Campling wrote in a note to clients Tuesday. As the government intensifies the fight against counterfeit products, a city pastor has challenged the State to compensate Kenyans who have consumed poisonous sugar. Godfrey Migwi, who ministers at of House of Hope in Kayole, Nairobi called out President Uhuru for failing to protect Kenyans from corruption and harmful products. In the fight against corruption and illegal trade, there is always a lot of big talk but very little action. We appreciate the presidents call for a revolution but Im afraid thats not enough, he has to do more in his final term. We lined up to vote for him and he swore to us that he would protect us, for heavens sake this illegal trade and corruption must be stopped to save Kenya. Im specifically alarmed by the poisonous sugar that my family unsuspectingly being partaking in our home. The same sugar that is in yours and the harmful effects it has on our lives. Matiangi himself who represents the government admitted that this sugar is capable of causing death due to the elements of mercury and copper contained in it, lamented Migwi on Facebook. The outspoken man of the cloth then called for compensation and rallied Kenyans to demand justice. Medical research has shown that these elements have fatal consequences on our nervous, digestive and immune systems. Inorganic salts in mercury, for example, eat away the skin, eyes, stomach and even kidneys eventually leading to death. Which begs the question? How many of us have already been consumed by these products? How many are on the verge of being consumed and they dont even know it? So many Kenyans are in the grave. He added: Government officers sign deals with cartels on a daily basisfor sure Kenya is under siege, oh my God who will save poor Kenyans. Its about time we as Kenyans came forth and demanded for justice. We need to confront the government and present evidence and cases of people who have been seriously affected by this sugar and other fake commodities. We need to show the government and the world just how dire this situation is and why drastic action needs to be taken. The government also needs to compensate ALL OF US for allowing this sugar to find its way into our homes and for failing to perform its most important duty of protecting the people! The duty of any government is to protect its people. So as a fearless leader chosen by God not a man to speak the truth and to support the truth, I urge affected Kenyans to come together and face the government for compensations, doctors and lawyers who fear God need to corporate and support our brothers and sisters who are affected by this menace, even in the court of law please support your brothers , #brotherskeeper #Justiceforkenyans, wrote Pastor Migwi. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to 2.888 percent from about 2.91 percent on Monday, while the yield on the 30-year Treasury bond declined to 3.021 percent. Bond yields move inversely to prices. U.S. government debt prices jumped on Tuesday as concerns over a potential trade war between the U.S. and China intensified. Trump asked the United States Trade Representative to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for additional tariffs, at a rate of 10 percent. If China "refuses to change its practices" and insists on continuing with the new tariffs it recently declared, then the additional levies would be imposed on Beijing, Trump said Monday night. Soon after, the Chinese Commerce Ministry issued a response, stating that the latest threat of more tariffs violates previous negotiations and consensus reached between both the U.S. and China. "The United States has initiated a trade war that violates market laws and is not in accordance with current global development trends," the Commerce Ministry said. "The strategy now seems a trade war of attrition," said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group. "I repeat that I get what the end goal is but the means to that end is now going off the rails if this is the current strategy." "Slower growth and higher inflation is the only result of the current path," he said. Global equity markets fell sharply on the news. The Stoxx 600, which tracks a broad swath of European stocks, pulled back 0.7 percent while the Dow Jones industrial average declined more than 300 points to erase its 2018 gains. CNBC's Nyshka Chandran and Huileng Tan contributed to this report "Receiving an award for playing a superhero is amazing, but it's even greater to acknowledge the heroes that we have in real life," Boseman said. "So I just want to acknowledge somebody that's here today. James Shaw, Jr., where are you? Stand. If you don't know James Shaw, Jr., he fought off a gunman in Antioch, Tennessee at a Waffle House. He saved lives. Come on up here." While accepting his honor, the Hollywood star brought James Shaw, Jr. to the stage and recognized him for his heroic actions during a shooting at a Tennessee Waffle House earlier this year. At Monday night's MTV Movie and TV Awards, actor Chadwick Boseman received the Best Hero award for his performance in "Black Panther." In April, Shaw was hailed as a hero by many people, including Nashville Mayor David Briley, for stopping a gunman from shooting more people at the restaurant. Four people were killed during the tragic event and Shaw suffered minor wounds after wresting the gun away. "This is gonna live at your house," Boseman told Shaw as he handed him the award. After the shooting, Shaw created a GoFundMe page to raise money for the victims and families involved in the incident. Approximately 12 hours after the campaign was created, it exceeded its initial fundraising goal of $15,000. Within a month, over $240,000 was donated to the page from supporters across the country. Shaw spoke with Ellen DeGeneres earlier this year about being labeled a "hero." He says he hopes his story will inspire others to know that they too are capable of the strength and bravery he showed. "So the whole hero thing, I don't have a problem with it," he said. "It's just that if you're in that situation, I want you to know that a regular guy did it. And I want you to emulate the same thing and know you have that fire inside yourself." Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube! Don't miss: Denzel Washington paid for 'Black Panther' star Chadwick Boseman to study at Oxford As China and the U.S. near a trade war, both nations bring different weapons to the table. For the U.S., it's direct tariffs on the plethora of goods it imports, while for China the calculus is a little different. China is limited somewhat in the amount of retaliatory tariffs it can apply, simply because it doesn't import nearly as much in American goods compared with what the U.S. takes of Chinese products. China imported just $129.9 billion from the U.S. in 2017, compared with $505.5 billion in exports, according to the Census Bureau. "China is going to run out of direct reprisals quickly should it look to match the U.S. in tariffs," LPL Research said in a note. "There is also broad agreement globally that China engages in a range of unfair trade practices, which provides some moral high ground for the U.S. to demand concessions." What China does have at its disposal is a handful of other measures that, while not as likely to be implemented as simple tariffs, remain potentially harmful. Markets are clearly nervous about the possibility of an escalation. The Dow industrials took a big tumble in market action Tuesday while government bond yields and commodity prices also mostly moved sharply lower. Describing the environment, Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at forex brokerage Oanda, noted that while China "doesn't want a trade war, it's not afraid to engage in one" and thus "it's difficult to see how and when this ends." In figuring out how it ends, markets will be watching where it's going. After seven straight weeks of gains, chip stocks are getting crushed. That weakness has one technician looking for strength elsewhere. "We wouldn't be making an active bet on semis or against them either. Our recommendation to clients is to place our bets elsewhere in the technology sector," Ari Wald, head of technical analysis at Oppenheimer, told CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Monday. "We're seeing the relative flows go elsewhere in the sector. We like the software side of the sector instead." The 's semiconductor industry group is up 11 percent in the year to date, while software and services has advanced 15 percent. Another market watcher expects the pain for chip stocks to continue as a trade conflict between the U.S. and China escalates. "Usually we don't look at politics and political agendas as affecting the fundamentals of companies, but given the trade wars and the tariff wars that are going on politically right now, we think there is going to be a pause in the uptick of all the semiconductor space," Michael Bapis, managing director at the Bapis Group at HighTower Advisors, said on Monday's "Trading Nation." The SMH semiconductor ETF fell 2 percent on Tuesday after President Donald Trump fired off the latest shot in an intensifying trade dispute with China. On Monday, Trump requested additional tariffs of 10 percent on another $200 billion in Chinese goods in response to reactionary tariffs from China. Many chip names have high revenue exposure to China. Semiconductor names Skyworks Solutions, Qualcomm and Broadcom generate at least 50 percent of revenue from the region, while Intel is as high as 23 percent of total sales. Trade threats will be a painful problem for the time being, but the long-term picture for the chip stocks looks good to Bapis. "Everything we do in this technologically expanding world whether it's artificial intelligence, whether it's the cloud revolves around semiconductors and chips, and we love the space long term. We would own it on dips," said Bapis. "Intel, if it dips a little bit more, we would be buying it. We would also buy Taiwan Semi." Intel has fallen close to 5 percent over the past two days, while Taiwan Semiconductor has dropped 3 percent. The SMH ETF is down 2.6 percent for the week. CNBC Presents Coverage with Special Correspondent Scott Cohn Revealing the 2018 America's Top States for Business across CNBC Platforms on Tuesday, July 10th ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J., June 19, 2018 The war between the states for business and jobs has never been more intense or complicated, thanks to worker shortages, immigration crackdowns, trade tensions and tax reforms. But what gives some states the edge and leaves others bringing up the rear? America's Top States for Business will put it all in perspective. Starting Monday, July 9th, CNBC, First in Business Worldwide, will broadcast coverage of its twelfth annual study of America's Top States for Business. The network will build a special event around this CNBC exclusive study with the complete rankings being revealed, along with the winning state and its governor, on Tuesday, July 10th, during the network's Business Day programming. The complete ranking for all 50 states will be available on CNBC.com and include an in-depth look at each of their respective rankings. CNBC Special Correspondent Scott Cohn will broadcast live from the top-ranked state beginning on Monday and will announce the top five states on this year's list on "Squawk Box" (6AM-9AM ET) Tuesday. CNBC Digital will reveal, in conjunction with on-air, the complete list of America's Top States for Business rankings on Tuesday, July 10th. In addition, topstates.cnbc.com will feature a wealth of coverage about each state including economic snapshots (employment, budget, tax and housing data) and exclusive stories looking at the unique issues facing the states this year, from labor shortages and crumbling infrastructure to the changing dynamics resulting from the new tax law. Follow us on Twitter @CNBC and take part in the social conversation using hashtag #TopStates. Every year since 2007, CNBC's exclusive study has ranked all 50 states based on their scores in ten categories of competitiveness. This year's study subjects the states to 64 metrics across those categories. The tried and true methodology rates the states based on the attributes that matter most to business. To do that, we scour every state's economic development marketing materials to see what they are pitching to business. The more frequently a selling point appears, the more weight it carries in the study. So what makes a state great for business? These are the ten broad categories and the maximum possible points for each in 2018: Workforce (425 points) Most states point with great pride to the quality and availability of their workers, as well as government-sponsored programs to train them. We rate states based on the education level of their workforce, the numbers of available employees, and net migration of college-educated workers. We consider each state's concentration of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) workers, increasingly in demand by business. We measure workforce productivity based on each state's economic output per job. We look at the relative success of each state's worker training programs in placing their participants in jobs. We also consider union membership and the states' right-to-work laws. While organized labor contends that a union workforce is a quality workforce, that argument, more often than not, does not resonate with business. Infrastructure (400 points) Access to transportation in all its modes is a key to getting your products to market and your people on the move. We measure the vitality of each state's transportation system by the value of goods shipped by air, waterways, roads and rail. We look at the availability of air travel in each state, the quality of the roads and bridges, and the time it takes to commute to work. We also consider the condition of each state's drinking water and wastewater systems. Cost of Doing Business (350 points) Cost is a major consideration when a company chooses where to do business. We look at the competitiveness of each state's tax climate, as well as state-sponsored incentives that can lower the cost of doing business. Utility costs can add up to a huge expense for business, and they vary widely by state. We also consider the cost of wages, as well as rental costs for office and industrial space. Economy (300 points) A solid economy is good for business. So is a diverse economy, with access to the biggest players in a variety of industries. We look at economic growth, job creation, consumer spending, and the health of the residential real estate market. We measure each state's fiscal health by looking at its credit ratings and outlook, its overall budget picture, and pension and retiree health care obligations. Because of their own economic impact as well as the ripple effect, we consider the number of major corporations headquartered in each state. Quality of Life (300 points) One way to attract qualified workers is to offer them a great place to live. We score the states on livability including several factors, such as the crime rate, the quality of health care, the level of health insurance coverage and the overall health of the population. We measure inclusiveness by looking at statewide anti-discrimination protections, as well as the ability of local jurisdictions to set their own standards. We evaluate local attractions, parks and recreation, as well as environmental quality. Technology & Innovation (225 points) Succeeding in the new economyor any economytakes innovation. Truly competitive states prize innovation, nurture new ideas, and have the infrastructure to support them. We evaluate the states on their support for innovation, and the number of patents issued to their residents. We also consider federal health, science and agricultural research grants to the states. Education (200 points) Education and business go hand in hand. Not only do companies want to draw from an educated pool of workers, they also want to offer their employees a great place to raise a family. Higher education institutions offer companies a source to recruit new talent, as well as a partner in research and development. We consider the number of higher education institutions in each state as well as long-term trends in state support for higher education. We look at several measures of K-12 education including test scores, class size and spending, and we look at technology infrastructure in the schools. We also look at life-long learning opportunities in each state. Business Friendliness (150 points) Regulation and litigation are the bane of business. Sure, some of each is inevitable. But we grade the states on the freedom their legal and regulatory frameworks provide for business. Access to Capital (100 points) Companies go where the money is, and capital flows to some states more than others. We look at venture capital investments by state, as well as traditional bank financing for small and mid-sized businesses. Cost of Living (50 points) The cost of living helps drive the cost of doing business. From housing to food and energy, wages go further when the cost of living is low. We measure the states based on an index of costs for basic items. About CNBC: With CNBC in the U.S., CNBC in Asia Pacific, CNBC in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and CNBC World, CNBC is the recognized world leader in business news and provides real-time financial market coverage and business information to more than 409 million homes worldwide, including more than 91 million households in the United States and Canada. CNBC also provides daily business updates to 400 million households across China. The network's 15 live hours a day of business programming in North America (weekdays from 4:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m. ET) is produced at CNBC's global headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and includes reports from CNBC News bureaus worldwide. CNBC at night features a mix of new reality programming, CNBC's highly successful series produced exclusively for CNBC and a number of distinctive in-house documentaries. CNBC also has a vast portfolio of digital products which deliver real-time financial market news and information across a variety of platforms including: CNBC.com; CNBC PRO, the premium, integrated desktop/mobile service that provides live access to CNBC programming, exclusive video content and global market data and analysis; a suite of CNBC mobile products including the CNBC Apps for iOS, Android and Windows devices; and additional products such as the CNBC App for the Apple Watch and Apple TV. Members of the media can receive more information about CNBC and its programming on the NBCUniversal Media Village Web site at http://www.nbcumv.com/programming/cnbc. For more information about NBCUniversal, please visit http://www.NBCUniversal.com. CNBC's Jim Cramer wants to make something very clear: the United States isn't hostage to China just because it owns a lot of U.S. Treasurys. "That is not how it works," the "Mad Money" host said Tuesday as markets slid on escalating trade tensions. "If the Chinese decided to dump their treasury holdings, that will move our long-term rates back up where they should be," he said. "The banks will become a heck of a lot more profitable. And commentators will stop droning on and on about the lack of inflection in the yield curve as a sign that the future's bleaker than we thought." In short, China selling its $1.18 trillion U.S. Treasury holdings could actually have major benefits for the U.S. market, Cramer said. "There are plenty of things I am really worried about when it comes to our escalating trade war with the PRC ... but this ain't one of them," he said. "If China wants to sell their $1.2 trillion worth of U.S. Treasurys to somehow punish us, I say go ahead, make my day." The trillion-dollar question in U.S.-China debacle An Apple store in Hangzhou, China. Zhang Peng | LightRocket | Getty Images Carrizo Oil & Gas CEO flags an unusual problem for drillers Chip Johnson, CEO, Carrizo Oil & Gas, with Jim Cramer on CNBC's "Mad Money." Scott Mlyn | CNBC The Permian Basin, the largest shale oil-producing region in the United States, is on a path to become one of the world's largest oilfields, according to recent estimates. But as producers extract more and more resources from the region, which stretches across Texas and New Mexico, an unusual problem is bubbling up: a surplus of water. "In the Permian Basin, you make a lot of water," Chip Johnson, the CEO of independent oil and gas driller Carrizo Oil & Gas, told CNBC on Tuesday. "Typically, you'll make five barrels of water for every barrel of oil." When companies like the $2.2 billion Carrizo extract oil from the Permian, salt water comes out with it, creating issues around handling the extra fluids, Johnson said. "It's probably the most water-rich or water-problem oil basin," Johnson told Cramer. "You have 15 million barrels a day of salt water right now that has to be dealt with, usually re-injected back into briny reservoirs that are deeper than anything else." To watch and read more about Johnson's interview, click here. Off the charts: Calling Tesla's run CNBC Optinose CEO on 'innovative' way to raise awareness When Optinose developed a drug to treat chronic rhinosinusitis, which affects 30 million people in the United States, the pharmaceutical delivery company innovated a new system of raising awareness. "We frankly do things in sort of novel ways," CEO Peter Miller told Cramer in a Thursday interview. Miller said that after the company received regulatory approval for the drug in September 2017, its leadership purposely decided to delay its launch in order to build awareness. And according to Miller, it worked: in September, the drug, called XHANCE, only had 29 percent awareness. Now, it's over 85 percent, the CEO said. "Despite the fact [that] we chose to not launch for a period of time, we had an innovative idea to put clinical nurse educators out in the field prior to the launch of the product," Miller told Cramer. "They were able to educate doctors on the disease state here, how our product ... uses the magic of breath to get the drug high and deep in the nasal cavity, and that, I think, [was] a brilliant idea by our chief commercial officer." Lightning round: Not tapping into TAP As questions swirled Tuesday about who would come out on top if a trade war sparks between the United States and China, CNBC's Jim Cramer weighed each side's advantages. For one, the United States imports much more from China than China imports from the United States, meaning that Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods would more drastically affect producers there, the "Mad Money" host said. But he noted that some U.S. retailers import industrial parts, machinery and electronics from China, which could put pressure on them as they seek other countries from which to source their products. There's also the question of boycotts: Chinese officials could pressure consumers to steer clear of U.S. businesses that operate in China, like Starbucks and Yum China, Cramer warned. Still, he maintained his Tuesday morning call that, even with the president's most recent threat to place $200 billion worth of tariffs on Chinese goods, "China needs us more than we need them." "The one wild card? Will the Chinese risk boycotting Apple when it's one of the largest employers in China?" he said. "That's the trillion-dollar question, as in Apple's run at the trillion-dollar market cap hang[s] in the balance here." "What's bad for Apple is bad for the PRC," he added. With Apple's business off the table, it would become clear that China relies more heavily on the United States than the other way around, Cramer argued. "I think President Trump is willing to take the pain if it means getting China to abandon its most harmful and predatory trade practices," he said. "Our economy's strong enough that he'll let Boeing and Caterpillar and United Technologies get hurt; same goes for Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark or the beverage companies or Yum China. In the long run, President Trump clearly believes it'll be worth it." The "Mad Money" host also flagged one of the United States' biggest advantages: its size. As a global economic leader, if the U.S. scaled back exports to a communist dictatorship like the People's Republic, it could seriously weigh on Chinese markets, he said. "China attempted to create a coherent, Western-style stock market not long ago, but it broke down badly last night, with more than 1,000 stocks falling over 10 percent," he continued. "The Chinese government is going to have to prop them all up they've done that before but that's a multi-trillion-dollar undertaking." So if you're still toying with the question of whether the United States or China is the real paper tiger here, Cramer has your answer. "I think we may find out that China's the paper tiger," he said. "If you think the sell-off in our stock market was bad, just look at the collapse in their stock market. It's possible this could go on for a long time and get very painful, but I wouldn't be surprised if China ends up folding much faster than anyone expects." General Electric Company: "[CEO] John Flannery is doing his best with one of the worst hands that anyone's ever been given. There was so much that was not known. I interviewed Nelson Peltz last week as part of TheStreet.com's Corporate Governance conference for The Deal and he said, 'Look, what could you tell? You didn't know. The company just was not forthcoming.' Now that they're being forthcoming, all I can say is listen to [J.P. Morgan analyst] Steve Tusa. He nailed it when it was at $27." Molson Coors Brewing Company: "It's so funny because I am a Coors Light drinker and all of my friends know that (except for when I'm drinking Corona at my bar), and I just think that Molson Coors is just not doing well enough to recommend the stock. It's just not having good quarters and it also calls into question exactly how sustainable the beer market is. It's that bad." Exelixis: "You know, I'm surprised it's down so much. It's regarded as being very speculative. I think it's not as speculative. I'm a buyer." SemGroup Corporation: "We know that [the] Houston shipping channel is worth a great deal. At the same time, we also know that that group is under a lot of pressure and a lot of the ETFs have a lot of selling pressure on them, so I am not going to recommend that stock even though you're absolutely right [that] they've got a good situation going." Flagstar Bancorp: "Not bad. It's an inexpensive regional. The regionals are doing better than the majors. I am not against that stock. I think it's fine. It won't be hurt that bad by the yield curve." PPL Corporation: "I cannot believe that company yields 6 [percent]. That was my electric company for a very long time and it's very well-run. I think it's a terrific buy here and I would pull the trigger right now." Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc.: "When this stock was at $6, $7, $8, we recommended it. It's gotten up to $11. I am more nervous about it here. Nervous is probably the wrong word; I am concerned because the short position's so big and the shorts just spread constant pain about this one. I don't want to be a part of either side. It has gotten too difficult. It is a true battleground." Box, Inc.: "OK, so Box goes down on what I think is conservative guidance and then it comes right back up, not unlike Adobe. I don't know why people sold it. Maybe they don't understand this man and his business model. [CEO] Aaron [Levie]'s doing a good job." AGNC Investment Corp.: "I know it's got a good yield. I've got to tell you, it is not my cup of tea. I've been against it. I own stocks for appreciation, not for that 11 percent yield. I don't want to touch that one." Sirius XM Holdings Inc.: "I have been behind Sirius now for a double and people keep downgrading it and downgrading it and they're wrong. I'm right. It's a buy." MSCI Inc.: "Henry Fernandez is the CEO. I made him one of the CEOs of the year last year. He's doing an incredible job. That stock is still a buy, even up here, and I've been recommending it now for a double." A CVS Pharmacy store is seen in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, U.S., November 30, 2017. CVS Health is rolling out delivery for prescription drugs before Amazon. Customers will appreciate it, CVS believes, but it's clear the move is an attempt to stay ahead of Amazon. The e-commerce giant's possible entry into the space has kept drugstores on edge, but it's inaction so far has given them time to prepare. Customers in most markets where CVS' nearly 10,000 stores are located will be able to receive their orders either one or two days after placing them. Some customers in urban markets will be able to receive orders the same day. Amazon has already strained retailers with its free two-day shipping and is now eyeing the prescription drug market. CVS' program will be a test of whether patients are willing to wait for their medicines in exchange for the convenience of delivery. "The rollout of delivery from nearly all of our 9,800 retail pharmacy locations nationwide represents another step forward for us in delivering innovative omnichannel solutions that help people on their path to better health," CVS Pharmacy's president, Kevin Hourican, said in a statement. Patients hoping to use CVS' delivery will need to be patient and pay for the convenience. To have their orders filled and delivered in one or two days, CVS will charge $4.99. For same-day delivery, the company will charge $8.99. CVS introduced same-day delivery to New York City at the end of last year. It's now expanding it to Boston, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Customers can place their orders online, through the drugstore's app or over the phone, and can add over-the-counter products like cold and flu medicines, vitamins and baby or feminine care products. This bundled approach could help CVS counteract declines in traffic as people avoid brick-and-mortar stores and opt to instead buy their goods online, often at less expensive prices. CVS' so-called front-of-store sales, which include everything from shampoo to greeting cards, has been declining. CVS could even find a sweet spot in over-the-counter medicines. So far, consumers haven't been buying medicines as much online as they have with other household items. People tend to wait until they're sick and need something instead of stocking up in advance. CVS will ship the products through the U.S. Postal Service, which can leave them at customers' homes even if they're not there. CNBC has reported that Amazon may enter the prescription drug market. The possibility has weighed on drugstore stocks, including CVS and rivals Walgreens Boots Alliance and Rite Aid. The e-commerce giant already sells private label over-the-counter drugs through a partnership with Perrigo, and has obtained pharmacy licenses in a handful of states. Amazon has licenses to distribute medical devices in nearly all U.S. states. Amazon has not appeared to crack the code on prescription drugs quite yet. CNBC reported in April the company had shelved a plan to sell drugs directly to hospitals through its Amazon Business unit. Investors in drugstore stocks welcomed the news, easing up on some of the pressure they faced. Amazon also is partnering with Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan Chase to form a new health-care venture aimed at lowering the cost of its employee health benefits. CVS is also undergoing its own evolution. Late last year, it announced a $69 billion deal to merge with health insurer Aetna. Shake Shack founder Danny Meyer is defending his restaurant group's push into cashless transactions, saying in a blog post, "we're unaware of any federal law that requires private businesses to accept [cash]." Meyer owns Union Square Hospitality Group, which faced criticism after testing cashless operations at select restaurants. Shake Shack was founded by both Meyer and Union Square Hospitality. "We know that some have raised concerns about the socioeconomic implications of operating a cashless business," Meyer said in the post. "By not accepting cash, a restaurant may be excluding prospective guests who do not have a bank account. And we might be inconveniencing guests who simply don't have their credit/debit on them at the time. That's certainly not our aim." Meyer said the company is sticking with the shift for safety considerations and improved efficiency for customers. It's a notable stamp of approval for the digital technology that has been slowly gaining traction in the U.S. Digital payments have proven popular in China and other Asian countries where payment-enabled mobile phones leapfrogged over traditional credit and debit cards. A large-scale rollout of cashless locations for Union Square Hospitality could expedite the adoption. Meyer has a nearly 2 percent stake in Shake Shack, which has previously tested going cashless at one location. Union Square Hospitality declined to comment on the burger chain. Read Meyer's full post on why Union Square is committed to cashless. CNBC's Sarah Whitten contributed to this report. Size 8 Reborn reckons Jalangos recent rant about the Kenyan gospel industry may have been too harsh on artistes. The comedian and radio personality called out Kenyan gospel artistes for lacking content in their music. In a video, Jalango went as far as criticising Willy Pauls recent collabo with secular Bongo star Harmonize. We need to talk and bring back the required content of gospel music, he said, adding, There is no content in this years music. Jalas further called out little-known musician Kennon for his song Kama Pupu, and asked what the message is all about. He said the only song whose content he has understood is Chini ya Mwamba, done by Masterpiece. But still, Jalas has a little problem with it. Shida ni ameweka dye mpaka sasa yuko chini ya dye. They no longer mention God in their songs. Mungu anatajwa tu kama producer. Come back and start doing real gospel music with content, he said. However, Size 8 has jumped to the gospel industrys defense and told Jalango not to judge the whole gospel industry with a few songs. Jalango should not judge people with a few songs because ours is the biggest music industry, and I believe every song has a message. Everyone sings differently, thus it would be wrong to judge them with their content. Like the new Daddy Owen song, Donjo, it is just a way of saying he is enjoying life in Christ. Kula Neno is the word of God, meaning read the word of God. I think the problem is the understanding by people and not the song or perhaps the delivery. But from someone who reads the word, they will understand what every artiste means with their song. Size 8, however, acknowledged that some songs do not glorify God. Well, some of them I will concur with Jalango, but what I can say is he should not judge the whole industry. "And she has failed to be accountable to and transparent with the American people," said the first-term senator, who is considered a potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. Sen. Kamala Harris , D-Calif., first called for Nielsen to step down over the widely condemned separation practice. In a tweet Monday, she contended that "under [Nielsen's] watch, our government has committed human rights abuses by breaking up families along the southern border." The push underscores the massive resistance the White House faces for the policy of splitting up families crossing U.S. borders illegally. While backlash has been bipartisan, the most fierce resistance has come from the political left in blue pockets of the country. Most of the members of Congress calling for the Cabinet member's ouster represent those areas. At least 10 Democratic lawmakers have urged Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to resign over her role in the Trump administration's policy of separation of migrant families. The highest-ranking Democrat to call for Nielsen's resignation is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Other Democratic lawmakers who have pushed for the secretary to step down include Sens. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Tina Smith of Minnesota and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Reps. Ted Lieu and Barbara Lee of California, Kathleen Rice of New York and Donald Payne of New Jersey. President Donald Trump's "zero tolerance" policy which criminally prosecutes all migrants caught crossing U.S. borders illegally has resulted in the separation of children from parents. Condemnation of the practice has increased in recent days as photos surfaced of children sleeping on the floor within wire cages. Other photos and audio from within a detention center depict wailing children. As she leads the agency that oversees border security, Nielsen has become one of the public faces of the crisis. Democrats have argued that she has misdirected or outright lied to obfuscate the Trump administration practices. Nielsen first drew broad condemnation Sunday when she falsely claimed that "we do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period." Nielsen tweet Lawmakers, including many Republicans, have noted that the Trump administration has the ability to change the policy immediately. Numerous members of Congress have urged the president to abandon the practice. However, Nielsen falsely claimed on Monday that "Congress and the court created this problem, and Congress alone can fix it." The Trump administration has held out on a fix while seeking broader immigration legislation that would fund Trump's proposed border wall and enact stricter limits on legal immigration. On Monday, Nielsen denied that children are being used as a political "pawn," saying "we are trying to protect the children." In a statement Monday afternoon, DHS press secretary Tyler Houlton said Nielsen is carrying out the job she was appointed and confirmed to do. "Instead of criticizing a government official who is actually doing the job she was nominated, confirmed & sworn to do and enforcing the laws passed by Congress, the obstructionists in Congress should get to work to secure our borders, end legal loopholes & protect American lives," he said in a tweeted statement. Despite what DHS and the White House have argued, the family separation policy is not a law passed by Congress. None of the Democrats who called for Nielsen to step down this week supported her confirmation in December. Smith, appointed to her seat following Sen. Al Franken's resignation, was not yet in office. Nielsen already came close to resigning once last month, according to The New York Times. Trump reportedly lashed out at her in front of his entire Cabinet for failing to adequately protect U.S. borders, according to the newspaper. At the time, Trump believed Nielsen was resisting his push to separate children from parents, the newspaper reported. Elon Musk wants to find a way to help the thousands of migrant children who are being separated from their parents at the U.S. border thanks to the Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" policy on illegal crossings. "I hope the kids are ok," Musk tweeted Tuesday. "I couldn't even keep the US in the Paris Accord, but if there is some way for me to help these kids I will do so," he said. (In June, Musk urged Donald Trump to honor the agreement to combat climate change, but the President pulled the U.S. out.) I hope the kids are ok I couldn't even keep the US in the Paris Accord, but if there is some way for me to help these kids I will do so What exactly Musk can or will do is not clear. But the Tesla boss says he is "one of the top donors" to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a nonprofit legal organization that defends Americans' constitutional rights. I am one of the top donors to @ACLU The nonprofit thanked Musk for "being one of the biggest supporters of the ACLU" on Twitter. Thank you for helping those in need The ACLU currently has a petition with nearly 160,000 signatures asking the Secretary of Homeland Security to "Stop separating children from their parents in immigration detention. This practice is inhumane, unnecessary, and unconstitutional," it reads. The ACLU is also suing the government for forcibly separating families seeking asylum in the U.S. The organization is waiting to see if a federal judge will issue a preliminary injunction to halt separation of families, according to Mic. Separating families is more than cruel and unnecessary it's torture. We won't sit quietly while the Trump administration terrorizes asylum seekers. Musk also says he is "[inquiring] on many channels" how to help, but did not go into more detail. The comment was in response to a tweet from Cyan Banister, an angel investor, who with husband Scott, invested in SpaceX. Someone just told me the kids in the shelters can just leave. If that's the case, let's go get them. They are there because they can't be detained. Previously if you were caught crossing the border with a child you were set free. So more people showed up with children. I'm working on going with Scott. As soon as we find out how to go through the process for unaccompanied minors, I will let you know. We will go as soon as we can. If you find out sooner please let us know. Will do. Am enquiring on many channels. Regards to Scott. Children are being separated from their parents at the border because of the administration's new "zero tolerance" policy, which calls for everyone who crosses into the United States illegally to be prosecuted. Children are not allowed to remain with their parents under the law because the parents are being charged with a crime, but the children are not. Musk is not the only tech executive to voice concern over the situation. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg encouraged people to donate to organizations offering relief services to families at the border in a Facebook post. "We need to stop this policy right now," Zuckerberg said. The cast and crew of "Black Mirror" accept an award onstage during the 69th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards at Microsoft Theater on September 17, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. Endemol Shine Group, the Netherlands-based TV producer of shows including "Black Mirror" and "MasterChef" has hired Deutsche Bank and Liontree to seek a sale, according to people familiar with the matter. Endemol is co-owned by 21st Century Fox and Apollo Global Management, each of which owns 50 percent of the company. Finding a buyer for the entire entity could simplify ownership and marry Endemol's content portfolio, which also includes "Big Brother" and "Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown," with a larger library. Both Fox and Apollo have agreed to sell their takes if a buyer is found. Fox has already passed up the right to buy all of Endemol, and in fact agreed to sell its 50 percent stake to Disney in December as part of its $52 billion (at the time) sale. Fox is supportive of the business but chose not to acquire it given its deal with Disney, one of the people said. A sale could value Endemol between $2.5 billion and $4 billion, including debt, two of the people said. Deadline reported in April that U.K. media company ITV would consider buying Endemol should a formal process start, which has now happened, said the people. If a sale is completed, Disney or Comcast -- whichever company ends up buying the Fox assets -- would likely be awarded the cash from the sale, the people said. Elizabeth Murdoch, daughter of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, founded Shine and sold it to News Corp in 2011. In 2014, Endemol agreed to merge with Shine Group and Core Media Group with Apollo taking half of the combined company. Spokespeople for Fox, Liontree, Apollo and Deutsche Bank declined to comment. A spokesperson for Endemol couldn't immediately be reached for comment. Disclosure: Comcast is the owner of NBCUniversal, parent company of CNBC and CNBC.com. When Dutch payments processing firm Adyen went public on June 13, the stock jumped 100 percent above the initial share price, giving the company a valuation of 14.8 billion euros ($17 billion). Adyen's spectacular entry into the elite ranks of unicorns companies valued at more than $1 billion was all the more noticeable because it was a European company. For years Europe has had a reputation of nurturing tech start-ups that couldn't grow big enough to reach the billion-dollar mark. But 2018 may be the year that finally puts this stigma to rest. A series of billion-dollar European companies have staged successful IPOs or are planning to list this year on exchanges from London to Sydney. So far this year, 27 IPOs totaling $32.5 billion have been launched in Europe, eclipsing the 57 listings worth $8.28 billion last year, according to dealroom.co, an Amsterdam firm that tracks fast-growing companies. The big difference this year is not the number of listings, which has been fairly steady in recent years, but the size of the valuations of the companies. "There is a clear emergence of unicorns after a few years of increasing investment in the venture capital sector," said Gilles Babinet, a French serial entrepreneur. This year's string of big-value European IPOs started with Spotify's listing in April. The music streaming company, based in Stockholm, offered an unusually small proportion of its shares at a valuation of $29 billion. Then Avast, a Czech cybersecurity group with CVC Capital Partners and Summit partners as investors, went public on May 10 at a valuation of $2.7 billion. Swedish digital payments firm Izettle should have been the next head-turner for investors, but PayPal swooped in with an offer of $2.2 billion twice the IPO value. More from Global Investing Hot Spots: How Italian turmoil could spark a domino effect in Europe The women leading the multibillion-dollar investment revolution More potential unicorns are in the queue. Funding Circle, an alternative lender, and luxury fashion site Farfetch, both based in London, are widely expected to announce IPOs this year. Funding Circle's blue chip investors include Index Ventures and Accel Partners, and the start-up could be valued at $2 billion. CNBC reported earlier that Farfetch could reach a valuation of $6 billion. Its investors include France's Eurazeo and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund Temasek. Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive officer of CareZone Inc. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images Two years after Express Scripts, the giant pharmacy manager, threatened to remove PillPack from its nationwide network, the company is doing the same thing to CareZone, a venture-backed start-up that delivers medications to customers' doors. It's a troubling trend for emerging companies that rely on large pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), which sit between insurance providers and pharmacies and help determine the drugs that insurers will cover and at what price. The PillPack controversy in 2016 was over a contract dispute, with Express Scripts claiming the company misrepresented itself as a retail pharmacy when it was actually a mail-order pharmacy. Express Scripts, which health insurer Cigna has agreed to buy for $67 billion, is now making the same claim against CareZone, as well as accusing the start-up of shipping medicines to states where it isn't licensed to operate. Without a PBM, pharmacies like CareZone generally can't accept insurance to cover customers' drug purchases. CareZone, led by ex-Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and backed by investors including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, disputes Express Scripts' assertions and says it has licenses in all 50 states. Schwartz told CNBC that CareZone would lose about 900 customers if Express Scripts goes through with its plans, hurting many low-income patients in rural areas who are battling multiple chronic illnesses. Schwartz informed patients of the coming change by email last week and included a link they could use to contact Express Scripts and lodge a complaint. In the frequently asked questions section of its website, CareZone said the effective date of the change is July 13, and that it's "working to resolve this issue with Express Scripts." The PillPack disagreement was resolved within weeks, though the companies declined to disclose terms of the agreement. Express Scripts generates about 45 percent of its revenue from the home delivery of prescription drugs and is the largest PBM. "It takes PBMs a while, but once they see something that is gaining traction and poses a threat to their mail-order pharmacy business, they often move swiftly to clamp down," said Stephen Buck, a drug supply chain expert who previously co-founded drug comparison site GoodRx. As of the July termination date, CareZone customers will be unable to access medicines at a lower rate using their insurance and will have to transfer to another pharmacy that partners with Express Scripts and can deliver to the home. Brian Henry, a spokesman for Express Scripts, said the company conducted a thorough review before making the decision and added that patients have plenty of options for affordable drugs. 'Straddle both sides' Using a template provided by CareZone, numerous customers have written formal complaints against Express Scripts to the Department of Justice, arguing that the company will be depriving them of choice. "I, and others who live in more rural locations, rely on CareZone Pharmacy to organize and dispense medicines that are delivered to me at my home," reads a complaint that was obtained by CNBC. "I rely on both the pharmacy's pill packaging and CareZone's smartphone application to make sure I follow my physician's orders, take my medicines as prescribed, and stay out of the hospital." CareZone has hired Boies Schiller Flexner, the law firm led by David Boies, to represent its interest in the matter. While CareZone customers may feel the impact, George Hill, an analyst at RBC, disagrees with the argument that Express Scripts is instituting the change to squelch competition. He estimates that mail order accounts for 40 percent of Express Scripts' earnings, but that CareZone makes up a very small fraction of its home delivery business. He said Express Scripts actually wants more partners reaching a broader set of customers and helping them take their medications. "They straddle both sides of this," said Hill, who has a buy rating on the stock. "CareZone is not significant from a competitive perspective." Tim Wentworth, CEO of Express Scripts. CNBC Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon may be a trailblazer in the fashion industry, but that doesn't mean she hasn't dealt with her own share of challenges during her career. Speaking at the Cannes Lions communications and advertising festival, the British designer looked back at her time in the fashion world, describing how she and the businesses she has been involved with developed. "We're living in an age now where there's a huge culture shift and I think everybody is becoming much more transparent," Mellon told CNBC's Tania Bryer on Tuesday. "People want authentic stories, they don't want things that are glossed over or that just look pretty on the outside. Brands today really cannot be silent anymore. We have to have an authentic voice." In 1996, Mellon co-founded Jimmy Choo, one of Britain's most renowned luxury shoes and accessories brands. Despite her status as one of the heads of such a prominent brand, Mellon faced her troubles including fighting to be paid equally. On Tuesday, Mellon reiterated what she said on Equal Pay Day, about how she did three private equity deals with Jimmy Choo and went onto discover that the male CEOs received double the sweat equity that she did. Sweat equity describes the contribution a businessperson puts into a project in the shape of effort and labor. "Obviously, I had bought shares in the business that had nothing to do with my effort or value, compared to them, and they actually ended up getting double what I did," Mellon said. Peter Strzok, the FBI agent whose text messages highly critical of President Donald Trump have fueled claims that the special counsel's ongoing investigation of the Trump presidential campaign is tainted by bias, was escorted out of the bureau's headquarters, his lawyer said Tuesday. But Strzok "remains a proud FBI agent who wants to continue working to keep the American people safe," his lawyer Aitan Goelman said in a prepared statement. Goelman said that Strzok was "escorted from the [FBI] building as part of ... ongoing internal proceedings." Goelman's statement was issued on the heels of Twitter posts by several reporters saying that Strzok had been marched out of the FBI building in Washington on Friday. That was a day after the release of a report by the Justice Department's internal watchdog, which criticized Strzok for his conduct. Tweet An FBI spokeswoman, when contacted by CNBC, said "we don't have a comment," when asked both if Strzok remained employed by the bureau, and if he was escorted from the building as reported. "Generally speaking, we do not comment on personnel matters," the spokeswoman said. Goelman, in his statement, said, "Pete has steadfastly played by the rules and respected the process, and yet he continues to be the target of unfounded personal attacks, political games and inappropriate information leaks," Goelman said. "All of this seriously calls into question the impartiality of the disciplinary process, which now appears tainted by political influence," Goelman said. "Instead of publicly calling for a long-serving FBI agent to be summarily fired, politicians should allow the disciplinary process to play out free from political pressure." "Our leaders and the public should be very concerned with how readily such influence has been allowed to undermine due process and the legal protections owed to someone who has served his country for so long. Pete Strzok and the American people deserve better." Goelman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC. Strzok was removed from the investigatory team headed by special counsel Robert Mueller last summer after he became aware of Strzok's communications with Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer romantically involved with the agent. Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, possible collusion by members of the Trump campaign team with Russians, and possible obstruction of justice by the president. In one message before the election, Page asked Strzok, "Trump's not ever going to be president, right? Right?!" "No. No he won't. We'll stop it," Strzok replied. A report issued last week by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General which was largely focused on an inquiry into Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server recommended that the FBI take administrative action against Strzok and Page, as well as three other unnamed bureau employees. "The damage caused by [Strzok and Page's] actions extends far beyond the scope of the [Clinton email] investigation and goes to the heart of the FBI's reputation for neutral fact finding and political independence," Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in the report. But Horowitz's report did not say that that Strzok's bias influenced the FBI's probe of Russian meddling. During testimony Tuesday before Congress, Horowitz was asked if he believed whether Strzok's texts showed political bias. "I think as we found it clearly shows a biased state of mind," Horowitz said. Asked if he believed that Strzok's bias had an effect on the initiation of the Russia investigation, Horowitz said "that's a matter that we have under review and are looking at right now." Trump has seized on the texts to criticize Mueller's probe. Tweet Central American asylum seekers wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take them into custody on June 12, 2018 near McAllen, Texas. More than 2,300 children were separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border between May 5 and June 9, an official with the Department of Homeland Security told reporters on Tuesday, and more than 2,200 adults who were traveling with those children were referred for prosecution. Officials did not know how many of those children had been reunited with their parents, however, or how many of these children had been placed in foster care. Reunification figures were one of several types of data that Trump administration officials were as yet unable to provide during a conference call with journalists on Tuesday morning about the recent spike in separations of immigrant children from their parents. Other unanswered questions included what standards are being applied to determine whether to separate very young children from their mothers. Another was what concrete plans are currently in place to expand capacity at the Department of Health and Human Services to accommodate more families that are separated. Officials stressed that under current rules, children detained by DHS must be turned over to HHS custody within 72 hours, meaning most of the more than 2,000 minors detained in the past month. Officials said the children are currently being held in HHS facilities in 17 states, but did not list which states. A fourth outstanding question was when the agency will release new footage of detained children, particularly girls and very young children. Reporters have been prohibited from filming or photographing inside the detention centers. One official said new images could be coming within the "next few days." The family separations have quickly ballooned into a full-blown crisis for the White House in the past week, as Republican lawmakers, prominent religious leaders, business groups and other traditional GOP allies have demanded an end to the policy. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has simultaneously taken credit for, and blamed Democrats for, his newly implemented "zero tolerance" policy, whereby border patrol agents are directed to arrest and detain all adults attempting to cross the border outside of designated ports of entry. This includes migrants seeking asylum and those traveling with children, which represents a shift in policy from previous administrations. Details about the fate of the children separated from their parents were hard to come by on Tuesday. "We don't know how many of the kids have been placed with foster care or reunified with parents. This policy is relatively new," said Steve Wagner, acting assistant secretary at the Health and Human Services Department. Wagner also stressed that children are being provided with medical care, food, toys and mental health services. Only teenagers, he said, are being housed in tents, and not younger children. "We don't have a time limit in terms of days" that minors can be held by HHS. "When kids leave our care, they've received a notice to appear at immigration court," Wagner said. As of Tuesday, there was no uniform policy in place for determining at what age children are old enough to be separated from their mothers, said Brian Hastings, an official with Customs and Border Patrol. "There is discretion given to the field chiefs in the field," he said, and decisions for children under the age of 5 were being made on a case-by-case basis. Overall, it was clear that officials were struggling to respond to the current situation, which is straining resources across several agencies. "We are staying one step ahead of the need," said Wagner of HHS, "and we expect that the new policy will result in a deterrence effect." Underscoring the confusion, however, is that Trump administration officials, including DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as recently as Monday, have denied both that there is any "new policy" or that such a policy is intended to have a deterrent effect. CNBC attempted to reach Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Tuesday for comment on what appeared to be conflicting messages coming out of the two federal agencies. A spokesman did not immediately respond to a call or email from CNBC. In the meantime, Wagner said: "We are prepared to continue to expand capacity as needed. We hope that that will not be necessary in the future." Uber's former Chief Brand Officer, Bozoma Saint John, joined the company just one week after Travis Kalanick was ousted. Former Uber executive Bozoma Saint John told CNBC on Tuesday the company is "on its way to being great. It's not there yet." Saint John had been in charge of repairing Uber's reputation and morale before she left the ride-hailing company last week after just a year. "I came in right in the moment of turbulence," Saint John told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin from the annual Cannes film festival. "[Founder] Travis Kalanick was ousted about a week after I started. And so with that came a whole set of other issues." Saint John called it a "troubling time" for the company. Uber brought on now-CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and suffered through issues on the board. As the chief brand executive, Saint John was tasked with representing what she called "the poster child for everything gone wrong." "I went full force in trying to re-establish what I felt was going to be an important narrative for Uber, which was, of course, fixing the internal cultural issues," Saint John said. Uber under Kalanick faced a handful of scandals around the treatment of drivers and reports of sexual harassment within the company. Uber in recent months launched an extensive ad campaign that prominently features Khosrowshahi and vows to be a "much, much better company" for riders and drivers. Saint John said she wasn't involved in the campaign, but she called the ads "truthful" to the team's efforts. Saint John said she believes in the new leadership. "You know, [Khosrowshahi] is sincere in what he wants to do, along with the leadership team, and so he's trying to communicate that," she said. "The culture is much better. It's on its path." Saint John was slated to represent her former employer on two panels Tuesday and Wednesday at the annual advertising gathering in Cannes, France. She is now chief marketing officer at Endeavor, a holding company that includes marketing companies, media companies and talent agencies. CNBC's Chloe Aiello contributed to this report. In a trade and technology showdown between the United States and China , Apple and Mr. Cook have a lot to lose. With 41 stores and hundreds of millions of iPhones sold in the country, there is arguably no American company in China as successful, as high-profile and with as big a target on its back. Last month he visited the Oval Office to warn President Trump that tough talk on China could threaten Apple's position in the country. In March, at a major summit meeting in Beijing, he called for "calmer heads" to prevail between the world's two most powerful countries. SAN FRANCISCO Apple chief executive, Timothy D. Cook , may be the leader of the world's most valuable public company, but lately he has had to act a lot like the tech industry's top diplomat. The Trump administration has told Mr. Cook that it would not place tariffs on iPhones, which are assembled in China, according to a person familiar with the talks who declined to speak on the record for fear of upsetting negotiations. But Apple is worried China will retaliate in ways that hamstring its business, according to three people close to Apple who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Now, with the Trump administration saying on Monday that it will identify another $200 billion worth of Chinese goods that could face tariffs on top of the $50 billion already planned, and China having threatened retaliation, Apple is stuck in the middle. Under Mr. Cook's leadership, Apple's business in China grew from a fledgling success to an empire with annual revenues of around $50 billion just a bit under a quarter of what the company takes in worldwide. He did this while China was tightening internet controls and shutting out other American tech giants. Since he took over Apple from its co-founder Steve Jobs , in 2011, questions about whether Mr. Cook, 57, could recreate the magic that led to the iPod and iPhone have persisted. For Mr. Cook, the analogous breakthrough and potentially his legacy as the heir to Mr. Jobs has come not from a gadget, but from a geography: China. Apple CEO Tim Cook with U.S. President Donald Trump during a meeting of the American Technology Council on June 19, 2017. Apple fears "the Chinese-bureaucracy machine is going to kick in," meaning the Chinese government could cause delays in its supply chain and increase scrutiny of its products under the guise of national-security concerns, according to one person close to the company. Apple has faced such retaliation before, another person said, and Reuters reported Ford vehicles are already facing delays at Chinese ports. There is also concern that Apple could face reprisals for legal and regulatory efforts in Washington that have made it difficult for the Chinese tech giant Huawei to sell its phones and telecom equipment in the United States. Apple executives and lobbyists in Beijing and Washington, led by Mr. Cook, have been trying to work both sides. They have fostered close ties to the administration of the country's leader, Xi Jinping, an effort called Red Apple by employees at Apple's manufacturing partner Foxconn, after the official color of the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, Mr. Cook has been pleading with the Trump White House to understand that a trade war is bad for the economy and bad for Apple. Mr. Cook, who knows a bit of Mandarin, has attended China's most important political events in a critical year for Mr. Xi. Days after a Chinese Communist Party congress wrote Mr. Xi's ideas and name into the constitution, elevating him to the same status as Mao Zedong, Mr. Cook joined a small group of American and Chinese executives for a meeting where Mr. Xi lectured about innovation and reform. Later, Mr. Cook attended China's World Internet Conference, an effort by Beijing to create a Davos-like conference for technology. There he met Wang Huning, a new member of China's standing committee the party's top leadership group and an ideological force behind China's deepening authoritarianism. In March, just after an annual meeting of China's rubber-stamp Parliament formally abolished presidential term limits, Mr. Cook attended a major summit meeting that brings together Chinese policymakers and corporate leaders. Mr. Cook has long defended Apple's presence in China as a way to help change the country from the inside. "Each country in the world decides their laws and their regulations. And so your choice is: Do you participate, or do you stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be?" he said at a Fortune event in China in December. "You get in the arena, because nothing ever changes from the sideline." Mr. Cook has also put in time in the halls of power in Washington. Last month, he visited the White House to meet with Mr. Trump and his top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow. Mr. Cook began by applauding new corporate-tax rules and reminded Mr. Trump that Apple said it would contribute $350 billion to the American economy over the next five years, according to two people familiar with what Mr. Cook said. Then Mr. Cook switched to explaining why he thought a trade war would reverse the new tax law's progress, the people said. Mr. Cook told the president that tariffs were effectively a tax on consumers and that the trade deficit with China is inflated because of flaws in how it is calculated, one of the people said. "He was very helpful in making some suggestions, and I might also add he loves the tax cut and tax reform," Mr. Kudlow said on CNBC shortly after the meeting. "He says Apple is going to be building plants, campuses, adding jobs, lots of business investment. That was the first point he made to President Trump." Mr. Trump has also told crowds this year that Apple planned to build multiple factories in the United States. Apple has no plans to do so and has not publicly corrected him. Mr. Cook has found cabinet members more accessible in the Trump administration than the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the talks, and he has seen eye to eye with Mr. Kudlow, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary and, on some issues, Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. He has met with Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, but they tend to disagree on trade issues, this person said, and he has avoided engaging with perhaps the administration's most hawkish member on trade, Peter Navarro, a top adviser to the president. Mr. Cook still sees an opening to engage on the trade issue because of disagreement inside the White House, and he doubts that a trade war or Chinese retaliation against Apple ultimately will happen, this person said. "He's willing to put a brave face on and work with the Trump administration because they probably have more at stake than any other tech company when it comes to China and the tariffs," said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst and partner at the investment firm Loup Ventures. The specter of Chinese retaliation against Apple has increased since the administration targeted the Chinese tech company ZTE for breaking American sanctions against Iran and North Korea. But the administration backed away from stiffer penalties this month and said it would fine ZTE $1 billion and install a compliance team picked by the United States. Other measures targeting China's larger telecom champion, Huawei, could lead to new strains. Indeed, congressional pressure this year appeared to quash a deal in which AT&T would sell Huawei phones in America. Apple, meanwhile, has a deal with China's biggest telecom company, China Mobile, giving it a direct channel to nearly 900 million subscribers in China. The competition to sell smartphones in the country has become increasingly intense, with a number of other Chinese companies also offering high-end but usually lower-priced phones. Mr. Cook's frequent visits to China are part of Apple's increased efforts to court China's leadership, started in 2016 after the country suddenly removed Apple's iTunes Movies and iBooks Store there. Apple set up two research-and-development centers in China, made a $1 billion investment in the Chinese ride-sharing company Didi Chuxing, and created a new position, head of China, that reports directly to Mr. Cook. The company appointed Isabel Ge Mahe, who was born in China, to the role. Apple also complied with Chinese orders to store its data on Chinese-run servers and to pull certain apps from its App Store, including The New York Times app and many that allowed Chinese users to get around censorship that blocks sites like Facebook and Twitter. The company has reason to fear retaliation. In 2014, the Obama administration indicted five Chinese military hackers, stoking tensions already high from leaks about American surveillance from the former government contractor Edward J. Snowden. Months later, Chinese regulators delayed approvals of the iPhone 6 for additional security reviews. Apple executives perceived the moves as retaliation, said people familiar with the matter, which has not been previously reported. Apple's primary leverage with the Chinese government is Chinese consumers' love for Apple products, said Dean Garfield, head of the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group that represents Apple and other tech companies. However, Mr. Garfield added, Chinese consumers would also love Facebook and Google, two products blocked in China. "There are limits," he said. "Xi and the national party will do what's in their interest." South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) announced this week that a tender for twelve naval helicopters for the Republic of Korea Navy (ROK Navy) has been issued. DAPA said that it will receive proposals from potential bidders until September 28, 2018. South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) announced this week that a tender for twelve naval helicopters for the Republic of Korea Navy (ROK Navy) has been issued. DAPA said that it will receive proposals from potential bidders until September 28, 2018. A ROK Navy AW159 Wildcat maritime helicopter conducting an ASW exercise for the first time with Incheon-class frigate Gwangju. Picture: ROK Navy The ROK Navy acquired eight AW159 in 2016 in two batches. The first four were deployed in February 2017 with Incheon-class frigates. According to DAPA, the contract vallue for the 12 new helicopters will be approximately 400 million Dollars. They are expected to be operational with the ROK Navy by 2020. The candidates for the tender are set to be Leonardo Helicopters, the manufacturer of the AW159, Sikorsky's MH-60R and NHIndustries' NH-90NFH. Those 12 helicopters will likely be deployed with the future surface combatants of the ROK Navy such as the FFX Batch II and Batch III frigates, the upcomming KDX III Batch II destroyers as well as the KDDX down the road. The Wildcat deploying the Thales FLASH dipping sonar All 8 ROK Navy Wildcat helicopters became operational in July 2017. According to the ROK Navy the deployment of the Wildcat in operation is expected to further enhance its ability to counter North Korean submarine threats, thereby enhancing its three-dimensional operational capability. The AW159 is a new generation multi-role military helicopter that has now replaced Lynx helicopters in service with the Royal Navy and British Army. The Wildcat has been ordered by the Philippine Navy as well. ROK Navy Wildcats are fitted with a Seaspray 7400E radar offering 360 degrees coverage, Thales FLASH dipping sonar, sonobuys, Blue Shark lightweight torpedoes and 12.7mm machine guns. In January 2014, DAPA announced it will equip its Wildcat helicopters with Spike NLOS missiles to provide a stand-off attack capability for engaging targets such as ground artillery and small vessels. The helicopters are expected to operate from the ROK Navy's Incheon-class guided missile / coastal defense frigates. These will be used for search-and-rescue missions, anti-submarine warfare and surveillance. Sleeping at the office is nothing new for Elon Musk. The self-made billionaire CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX famously burns the midnight oil at his Tesla factory. Musk told "CBS This Morning" host Gayle King in April that he sometimes sleeps on a couch in a conference room at the Fremont, California factory as he tries to avoid any further delays and missed production targets for the Model 3 electric cars. But Musk is no stranger to the office couch. In the '90s, before he struck it rich as an entrepreneur, Musk had to sleep at the office because he couldn't afford an apartment. "When my brother and I were starting our first company, instead of getting an apartment, we just rented a small office and we slept on the couch," Musk said in a 2014 commencement speech at the University of Southern California. That first company went on to become Zip2, a web software startup that created online city guides for newspapers. Musk and his younger brother, Kimbal Musk, founded the company in Palo Alto, California in 1995 and eventually sold it to Compaq for roughly $300 million in 1999. Musk used the money from that sale to found X.com, the online financial services service that merged with Confinity in 2000 and later became PayPal. But before Musk and his brother could cash in on their first big venture, the bootstrapping brothers had to rough it by living in their small office. "We showered at the YMCA and we were so hard-up that we only had one computer," Musk said in 2014. "The website was up during the day and I was coding it at night, seven days a week, all the time." "I briefly had a girlfriend in that period and in order to be with me she'd have to sleep in the office," Musk added. A worker monitors the loading of containers onto a ship at the harbor in Qingdao, China. Worries about a U.S.-China trade war hit global markets Tuesday, following a war of words between the Trump administration and Beijing. It has been a journey of more than two years for the White House's efforts to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with China, which rose to $375.2 billion in 2017 from $347 billion in 2016. Here's a rundown of key events up to this point: May 2, 2016: During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump compared the U.S. trade deficit with China to "rape." June 28, 2016: Trump laid out seven steps on trade to bring back American jobs, including labeling China a currency manipulator on day one in the White House and using "every lawful presidential power to remedy trade disputes." Those tactics included tariffs. Nov. 2016 - Jan. 2017: Trump won the U.S. presidential election, then selected known China hawks for key positions on trade. Peter Navarro , author of "Death by China," was named head a newly formed National Trade Council. Robert Lighthizer , who previously negotiated restrictions on steel imports and was deputy U.S. trade representative during the Reagan administration, was named U.S. Trade Representative. April 7, 2017: Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The two-day summit ended on friendly terms. Xi agreed to a 100-day plan for trade talks to increase U.S. exports and reduce the deficit with China, as well as increase cooperation on limiting North Korea's nuclear threat. April 12, 2017: Trump told The Wall Street Journal he will not label China a currency manipulator in the Treasury Department's forthcoming report. Aug. 18, 2017: At Trump's direction, the U.S. Trade Representative began its "Section 301" investigation into "China's acts, policies, and practices related to technology transfer, intellectual property, and innovation." March 8, 2018: Trump signed 25 percent tariffs on steel and 10 percent duties on aluminum, citing national security. Canada and Mexico are initially exempt. March 22, 2018: Following the conclusion of the Section 301 investigation, Trump announced plans for tariffs, a settlement in a World Trade Organization dispute and investment restrictions on China. April 1, 2018: China increased the tariff rate on pork products and aluminum scrap by 25 percent. Beijing also imposed a 15 percent tariff on 120 other U.S. commodities ranging from almonds to apples. The duties took effect that week. April 3, 2018: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a proposed list of tariffs on roughly $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, including products used for robotics, information technology, communications and aerospace. The approximately 1,300 product lines will be open for public comment before any duties are imposed. April 4, 2018: China's Ministry of Commerce released its own tariff list covering 106 U.S. products, including soybeans, beef, corn, some aircraft and a range of vehicles. There was no effective date for the tariffs, designed to address $50 billion worth of U.S. goods. April 5, 2018: Trump said he has asked the U.S. Trade Representative to consider $100 billion in additional tariffs against China. April 6, 2018: China's Ministry of Commerce said if the U.S. goes through with those tariffs, Beijing is prepared to fight back immediately. April 10, 2018: China filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization about Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. On the same day, Xi spoke broadly about China's plans to increase imports, lower tariffs on automobile imports, open up its financial services industry to foreigners and step up intellectual property protection. The speech at the Boao Forum for Asia did not directly address the trade dispute with the U.S., and did not cover new areas of reform. Trump said in a tweet he was "very thankful" for Xi's "kind words on tariffs and automobile barriers." April 16, 2018: The U.S. Commerce Department banned Chinese telecom equipment giant ZTE from buying U.S. components for seven years, saying the company has violated a settlement reached over illegal shipments to Iran and North Korea. Trading in ZTE shares was subsequently halted in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. May 13, 2018: Trump tweeted that he and Xi are working together to help ZTE "get back into business, fast" since there are "too many jobs in China lost." Earlier in the month, the company said it had to halt its main operations as a result of U.S. actions. May 18, 2018: China announced it is ending an anti-dumping investigation into U.S. sorghum imports. Earlier in the day, U.S. officials familiar with trade talks said Beijing was offering a package to reduce the U.S. trade deficit by up to $200 billion, according to Reuters and other media. China's Foreign Ministry subsequently said the reports were not true. May 19, 2018: In a joint statement, the U.S. and China agreed to "meaningful increases in United States agriculture and energy exports" and "significant" increases in U.S. goods and services overall. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer led a delegation that met in Washington, D.C., with the Chinese, led by State Council Vice Premier Liu He. May 20, 2018: The trade war is "on hold," Mnuchin told "Fox News Sunday." "We have agreed to put the tariffs on hold while we try to execute the framework," he said. May 22, 2018: China said it will lower tariffs on automobile imports to 15 percent, from 25 percent. The new rate will be effective July 1. But Trump said that same day he is "not satisfied" with last week's trade talks with China and that the negotiations are only a "start." May 23, 2018: Trump tweeted that trade talks with China will probably have to go in a new direction in order to near a resolution. May 29, 2018: Trump said in a statement on the White House website the U.S. will go ahead with 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, highlighting products related to the "Made in China 2025" program. The final list of tariffs was set for release by June 15. May 31, 2018: Ahead of Commerce Secretary Ross' visit, China announced it will cut tariffs on July 1 for 1,449 product lines. But the items were mostly irrelevant to trade with the U.S., analysts tell The New York Times. June 4, 2018: Ross concluded meetings in Beijing with no specific agreement on trade. The two sides spoke generally about reducing the U.S. deficit by increasing supply of agriculture and energy products to China, according to a White House statement. Beijing is willing to increase imports from the U.S. and other countries, but all outcomes of the trade negotiations will not take effect if the U.S. imposes tariffs, according to a statement from the Chinese side published by the state-run newspaper Xinhua. June 6, 2018: Chinese negotiators proposed a package valued at nearly $70 billion in first-year purchases, if the Trump administration would step back from tariffs, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. The proposal included increased Chinese purchases of soybeans, corn, natural gas, crude oil and coal, the Journal said. June 7, 2018: ZTE settled with the U.S. to pay up to $1.4 billion for violating a March 2017 agreement. Until it makes the payment, the Chinese telecom equipment company remains banned from buying from U.S. components. June 12, 2018: ZTE shares plunged more than 40 percent in Hong Kong after trading resumed following a near two-month halt. June 15, 2018: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a list of 1,102 Chinese imports worth about $50 billion. A 25 percent tariff on 818 of these items, valued at about $34 billion, will take effect July 6. The other 284 products, worth about $16 billion, will undergo a public comment process before a final decision on implementation. China responded with its own list of 545 U.S. imports worth roughly $34 billion that will be subject to a 25 percent tariff beginning July 6. These products include soybeans, electric vehicles, a range of hybrid electric vehicles and a variety of seafood. Aircraft was not on the list. Beijing also said will impose tariffs at an unspecified later date on an additional 114 U.S. goods including crude oil, diesel and magnetic resonance imaging kits. Altogether, the two lists covered 659 U.S. goods, worth $50 billion. June 18, 2018: The U.S. Senate passed a military funding bill with a provision that reimposes a ban on ZTE buying components from U.S. companies. The House of Representatives' version of the bill, which passed in May, did not include the ZTE provision. While a committee works out the differences, the White House can still push for changes. In the evening, Trump said he has directed the U.S. Trade Representative to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for an additional 10 percent tariff. These duties will take effect if China does not change its practices and goes through with the tariffs it has announced, according to a statement on the White House's website. China's Commerce Ministry said the U.S. "has initiated a trade war" and that China will protect its interests. Note: All dates are based on Eastern Time. CNBC's Kate Rooney contributed to this report. Hulu CEO Randy Freer weighed in on Tuesday on consolidation in the media industry and subtly heckled rival Netflix for its content spending. "I think money is a relative term. I think it's how you spend that is really important. We are not going to make 800 shows next year, we'll probably make 20 or 25," Freer told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin. Netflix has said it expects to have 700 original shows this year, spending up to $8 billion on content. To date, Hulu has been more selective in funneling its content dollars to a smaller number of projects, compared to streaming rivals like Amazon and Netflix. "It's important to us to make big, impactful shows that delight our customers, that are relevant and entertaining, and have cultural conversations going," Freer said on "Squawk Alley." Thanks to a joint ownership model, in which Disney, 21st Century Fox and Comcast own equal stakes in Hulu, the media company has streaming rights to ABC, Fox and NBC. Those broadcasters sell content to Hulu, growing its audience and granting access to lots of quality programming for less. "The best thing we get from all of our owners is the vast amount of resources that they have the amount of content they both put on their networks and make available to us, the support they provide, the marketing opportunities," he said. But now Hulu has found itself in the cross-hairs of a media industry pushing for consolidation. Should Comcast or Disney acquire Fox's assets, the winner will also become Hulu's majority owner. It's not immediately clear how the outcome of the battle over Fox would affect Hulu's access to content. Freer refused to weigh in on which potential future owner he preferred, but said it would be easier for Hulu if the ownership structure stays decentralized. "Look, I don't know if one owner would be better than three or four, but what we know today is that we have every opportunity to drive our business forward," Freer said. Disclosure: Comcast is the owner of NBCUniversal, parent company of CNBC and CNBC.com. Comcast is also a co-owner of Hulu. Congressional efforts to end the Trump administration policy of splitting up migrant families gained steam Tuesday as bipartisan outrage about the practice mounted. But Democrats quickly indicated they may not cooperate with a GOP push for a legislative solution, and put the burden on President Donald Trump to change his policy himself. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters that he and "all of the members of the Republican conference support a plan" to keep families together and end the White House practice. The GOP aims to move quickly on a legislative fix, but needs support from at least nine Democrats to get the 60 votes needed to pass one. "My hope is this is not going to be something we're going to do over a matter of weeks and months but something we can do over a matter of days, hopefully this week," Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, added. McConnell said, a bill "would need to be a narrow agreement to fix the problem we all agree needs to be fixed." It means the Senate may not pursue a broader overhaul of the immigration system and border security, as Trump appears to seek. Numerous Republicans and Democrats in Congress have now called on the White House to immediately halt the policy, which critics have called inhumane and un-American. It is unclear whether a Trump administration that has vehemently defended the policy or a deeply divided Congress can take action to end the widely condemned practice. But Democrats put the onus on the president to take action himself Tuesday. An animated Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, "The president alone can fix it with a flick of a pen by signing a presidential order to end the agonizing screams of small children who have been separated from their parents." He shrugged off concerns about the GOP potentially attacking Democrats for not supporting legislation to stop the policy. "Let's hope we never get to that. Let's hope the president does the right thing and solves the problem, which he can do. That's the simplest, easiest and most likely way this can happen," he said, noting that Congress has tried and failed repeatedly to pass immigration bills. Many Republicans who control both chambers of Congress have said the White House can and should stop the policy on its own. Sen. Orrin Hatch, the longest-serving Senate Republican and a Trump ally, gathered signatures from 11 other GOP senators on a letter asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to end the family separations while Congress figures out a faster way to deal with illegal immigrants. "We support the administration's efforts to enforce our immigration laws, but we cannot support the implementation of a policy that results in the categorical forced separation of minor children from their parents," Hatch said in the letter, which was also sent to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Tuesday. The Republicans signees include Sens. John McCain, Cory Gardner, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Bob Corker all of whom have been willing to challenge Trump either in word or deed at various points in his presidency. The congressional proposal could mark a compromise of sorts with the White House, as the Trump administration has falsely argued that only Congress can end the policy. Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer of Intel Corp., holds up a 49-qubit superconducting quantum test chip named 'Tangle Lake' while speaking during a keynote address at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., on Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. By revenue, chipmakers face the greatest risks in escalating trade tensions with Beijing. Among U.S. industries, semiconductor and semiconductor equipment companies have the highest revenue exposure to China at 52 percent, Morgan Stanley equity strategists said in a June 12 report. Chipmaker Qualcomm has 65 percent revenue exposure to China, and optical components manufacturer Lumentum has 23 percent exposure, the report said in a list of 20 stocks most sensitive to China. Source: Thomson Reuters, Morgan Stanley Research Estimates U.S. stock indexes fell sharply after a renewed war of words over tariffs between the Trump administration and Beijing. Telecommunications equipment maker Lumentum skidded 4.9 percent Tuesday morning, and shares of major chipmakers tumbled. Qualcomm and Micron fell more than 1.5 percent, while Intel dropped more than 2 percent. Broadcom fell about 2.3 percent, and Skyworks Solutions traded 2.2 percent lower. Last week, the Trump administration said 25 percent tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese imports will take effect July 6. Beijing quickly retaliated with duties on $34 billion worth of American goods that will also go into effect July 6. If China does not change its practices and goes through with the tariffs, the U.S. will impose more tariffs, President Donald Trump said late Monday. He has asked the United States Trade Representative to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for additional tariffs of 10 percent. Beijing responded by saying China will protect its interests. China's list of tariffs released Friday primarily covered agricultural products and automobiles. The Morgan Stanley analysts also pointed out in the report that semiconductors are components of products sold elsewhere, so negative impact from the high revenue exposure to China "is not as meaningful" as it might be in other industries. While the group says it is nonpartisan, its efforts reveal the potential policy hurdles for Democratic lawmakers, including those running for re-election in Florida in the 2018 congressional midterm elections. CNBC gets a look into the Orlando operation of Americans for Prosperity. Billionaire industrialists Charles Koch and David Koch have been financing a political network that is focusing on the battleground state of Florida. Charles and David Koch Miller Hawkins | MSNBC Billionaire industrialists Charles Koch and David Koch have been financing a political network that is swamping the battleground state of Florida. And while the group says it is nonpartisan, its efforts reveal potential policy hurdles for Democratic lawmakers, including those running for re-election in Florida in the 2018 congressional midterm elections. Americans for Prosperity runs 13 offices in the state of Florida. The group from the Orlando field office was out in full force on Saturday during their day of action in the 7th District, represented by Stephanie Murphy, a Democrat who is preparing for a primary election in August. Brian Schwartz | CNBC Murphy, a one-term congresswoman, is going up against fellow Democrat Chardo Richardson, an up-and-coming lawyer who's running on a more liberal platform. He has said he believes in having a universal health-care system, providing tuition-free education to anyone who meets the academic requirements and a transition away from fossil fuels. Murphy, on the other hand, has become a moderate voice in Congress, with recent votes for a bill that increases criminal penalties for certain immigrants and a bill rolling back Dodd-Frank regulations that passed with bipartisan support. If she gets through the primary, she will face one of three Republican challengers, including Scott Sturgill and Mike Miller. Both have embraced the conservative policies of President Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Sturgill has also been endorsed by former Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Trump associate Roger Stone. While the state has been labeled as leaning Democrat by Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball, the district is split, with 183,000 registered Democrats, 171,000 Republicans and 150,000 independents, leaving Murphy in a potentially vulnerable position come November. A spokesman for Murphy did not return a request for comment. To reclaim the House majority, Democrats need to flip 24 seats. While all 435 seats are up for grabs, only 25 are in territories that Hillary Clinton won during the 2016 presidential election but where a GOP candidate won the House race. Clinton won Florida's 7th District over Trump by seven points. On Saturday, in temperatures that at times reached 90 degrees, the AFP team gauged voters' opinions on two major policies of interest to the Koch network: tax reform and reducing government spending. Murphy did not back the conservative policies, and AFP is making sure voters know it. On their days of action, the goal for the team is to knock on as many doors as possible and survey voters on whether they support the recently passed Republican tax reform bill. They will also ask if the federal government is spending too much. Volunteers for Americans for Prosperity go door-to-door. Brian Schwartz | CNBC Chris Hudson, the AFP Florida state director, says canvassing is intended to educate people about free-market policies in the hope that if their congressional representative isn't following the network's policy initiatives the voters will pressure them either over the phone or at the ballot box. "It's an information campaign to see what the deal is at the door, and it's about building community pressure," Hudson said in an interview. "We try to figure out who wants to stand side by side with us," he added. Hudson also noted that the hope is to have those who participate in the surveys go to the polls and vote based on policy, not their party affiliation. Those who have been part of the effort since the Orlando operation was created in 2014 say the tax reform bill is popular among many of the voters they speak with and calls for spending cuts continue to grow. "It's kind of interesting knowing that we have a lot of people who are starting to see the benefits of tax reform," said Durell Tootle, senior field director at the Orlando division. "We've got folks who have received bonuses and an increase in wages," he added. Murphy, along with all her Democratic colleagues in the House, voted no on the Republican tax reform bill. When it comes to government spending, Tootle has noticed that some believe both parties are responsible while others are placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson. "You will get people who are upset at both parties, and you will get people who aren't happy with Nelson because he's voted straight ticket on certain things," Tootle said. Nelson was one of 65 senators who voted yes on the $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill in March, as did his colleague from across the aisle Sen. Marco Rubio. Nelson is also up for re-election this year, and he's going up against former Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott. The race is neck and neck, with the Real Clear Politics poll showing Nelson with a one-point lead while Sabato's Crystal Ball calls the state's Senate race a toss-up. Florida voters cheer tax reform and call for more spending cuts For Murphy, her constituents' responses to the questions from Orlando's Americans for Prosperity could be of concern as she works to get re-elected. A registered independent voter named Noel, who declined to give his last name, cheered on the tax reform bill and said that government spending has gone too far. "Why wouldn't you want more money in your paycheck," Noel responded after being asked his take on tax reform. "Wasteful spending has gone too far in Washington on both sides, and our tax dollars need to start being spent wisely." Another voter, who declined to be named but answered AFP's questions on her front lawn, called herself a Democrat but said she commonly votes for Republicans. She too said she appreciated the new tax law and also said her two senators, Rubio and Nelson, need to work on eliminating excessive spending. Statewide, AFP finished the weekend with more than 80 volunteers knocking on more than 8,000 doors. AFP downgrades Florida Democratic lawmakers Murphy has had a mixed relationship with AFP. Recently she was targeted in the six-figure advertising campaign criticizing politicians who voted for the spending bill. She was one of seven Democrats who became targets of the network after backing the effort, including another Florida lawmaker, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The initiative is also going after 10 Republicans who supported the bill. On the other hand, the group did thank her for her vote on the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, which rolled back Dodd-Frank regulations mostly on community banks. Democratic lawmakers as a whole have not fared well under the watch of Americans for Prosperity. According to AFP's scorecard, which ranks members of Congress based on their vote for what they dub "economic freedom," Florida Democrats have a score of 11 percent compared with Republicans, who score 85 percent. Murphy's current grade is 26 percent, while Nelson has a lifetime average of 7 percent. Democratic blue wave not a guarantee "Marketing will never be done by robots," John Travis, Adobe's vice president of brand marketing, told CNBC. "And instinct, emotion, all of that which marketers we always talk (about), is more important than ever." But marketers at the event have emphasized that, for all its potential, AI will never replace the emotional connection with consumers that is now so important for brands. Elsewhere, they can hear from Publicis Groupe, the ad agency conglomerate that said it would not attend Cannes Lions this year to instead invest in an internal communications computer program called Marcel, but then did an about-turn to show off the aforementioned new platform at the festival. Attendees at the largest gathering of advertising and marketing professionals in the world can sit in on a presentation titled "How will AI shape the future of Hollywood?" or go to a talk called "Androids, AI and the future of human creativity." Artificial intelligence (AI) and its application to communication is a hot topic at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in France this week. Speaking on a panel at the event Tuesday, Procter & Gamble's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard said human creativity won't be replaced by machines. "Can machines do analysis? Yes. Can machines do algorithms? Yes. Can machines sift through mass amounts of data? Yes. Can machines gain consumer empathy and insight? No. Can machines come up with brilliant creative ideas that touch human emotions? No," he said. "I think that there will absolutely be a place for machine learning or algorithms, or data, but I really believe that it won't replace the humanity of creativity. Creativity is still a very human craft," Pritchard added, citing P&G's award-winning work for "Always - Like a Girl" and "It's a Tide Ad," which was aired during this year's Super Bowl. One area where AI is being deployed is in programmatic advertising, where adverts are automatically placed on websites and targeted at people based on their online browsing. P&G has increased its spend in this area, while decreasing ad dollars on big platforms such as Google and Facebook. Pritchard added that the business had moved from being one focused on mass marketing, to one that could personalize ads to consumers on a large scale. Adobe has changed from being a business that sold boxed software, such as Photoshop, to a subscription model, so using marketing to retain customers has become much more important for the company. But this is a blend of science and art, Travis told CNBC. Adobe's Marketing Cloud helps brands measure the effectiveness of their communications and uses AI to better target consumers. "I love data analytics that makes me such a better marketer and finally have a seat at the table (and) I can prove my value. But the emotional connection (is) more important than ever," Travis said. "If you've just bought Photoshop we suggest things that you can do based on your behavior. We put a lot of effort into making sure if we see that a customer is inactive we engage them," he told CNBC. AI will help "liberate people from the mundane," he added. So if they are searching for a photo that conveys a particular mood, computer programs can help. "These are things that people would spend hours and hours and hours searching for. Now through AI things can be done literally in seconds." But the business is also looking to engage the creatives who use Photoshop in an emotional way, such as its "Hidden treasures of creativity" campaign that saw it make digital Photoshop versions of the paintbrushes used by "The Scream" artist Edvard Munch. Creatives were invited to paint their own Munch-style artworks using the brushes with the winning artist Johann Brangeon seeing his creation displayed in the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. For Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing officer at Mastercard, AI can replace a substantial part of repetitive tasks or data analysis. Speaking on a panel at the event, he said: "Is it going to replace human beings? Hopefully, not in my lifetime." The British government has confirmed it will review the use of cannabis for medicinal use. Home Secretary Sajid David told the U.K. parliament Tuesday that the use of cannabis-based medicines in the health service should be examined, as the current setup wasn't working. "It is not satisfactory for the parents, it is not satisfactory for the doctor and it is not satisfactory for me," he said. The issue has come to public attention after the family of a six-year-old boy who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy applied to the government to use cannabis oil medication. David said a license is being issued today to allow the boy's treatment to go ahead. UPDATE: On July 30, the United Methodist Church said it dismissed the complaint. "In this matter, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was carrying out the official policy of the President and/or the United States Department of Justice. It was not an individual act. I believe this type of conduct is not covered by the chargeable offense provisions of The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church, 2016 for laypersons. Therefore, your complaint is dismissed." More than 600 Methodist ministers and lay members have issued a formal complaint accusing denomination member Jeff Sessions of "immorality" and other sins related to the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents after illegal border crossings. The complaint, which comes amid massive news coverage of separations and detentions of migrant children, also accuses the attorney general of child abuse, racial discrimination and dissemination of doctrines contrary to the standards of doctrine of the United Methodist Church. It says Session's "advocacy and actions ... have led to harm against thousands of vulnerable humans." The complaint, addressed to Session's pastors at Methodist churches he attends in Mobile, Alabama, and Arlington, Virginia, says its signers were "reticent to bring a formal complaint against a layperson" such as Sessions. But it goes on to note that his "unique combination of tremendous social/political power, his leading role as a Sunday School teacher and former delegate to General Conference, and the severe and ongoing impact of several of his public, professional actions demand that we, as his siblings in the United Methodist denomination, call for some degree of accountability." The complaint also says "we deeply hope for a reconciling process that will help this long-time member of our connections step back from his harmful actions and work to repair the damage he is currently causing to immigrants, particularly children and families." Sessions last week used biblical scripture to justify the Trump administration's policy relating to separating migrant children from their parents. "Let me take an aside to discuss concerns raised by our church friends about separating families. Many of the criticisms raised in recent days are not fair or logical and some are contrary to law," Sessions had said in a speech in Indiana on Thursday. "First, illegal entry into the United States is a crime as it should be," Sessions said. "Persons who violate the law of our nation are subject to prosecution. I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order." "Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful." A Justice Department declined to comment on the Methodists' complaint, which was issued Monday. An article about the complaint on the official website of the United Methodist Church quotes the Rev. William Lawrence, a professor emeritus at Perkins School of Theology and an authority on Methodist history, as noting that any Methodist can bring a charge against another Methodist, but that a formal complaint containing charges is very rare. Lawrence also said in that article that he was unaware of any case in the 50-year history of the church when a complaint against a lay member went beyond being resolved but either that person's pastor or by a district superintendent via "pastoral steps." Bijan Zanganeh, Iranian Oil Minister Patti Domm | CNBC OPEC members meeting in Vienna this week are likely to leave the Austrian capital without agreeing on a path forward for their 18-month-old policy of limiting oil output, Iran's energy minister told reporters on Tuesday. The 14-member oil cartel is not scheduled to make a decision until Friday, but the gathering is already shaping up to be one of the most contentious in years. Influential producers such as Saudi Arabia and non-OPEC member Russia are pushing for output hikes, while countries with little ability to pump more including Iran, Iraq and Venezuela are lobbying against any change in current policy. "Every decision in OPEC needs unanimity, and I don't believe in this meeting we can reach agreement," Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh told reporters on Tuesday. I think it's going to be a bad meeting. I don't see how they get an agreement. The probability is about zero. Ed Morse Citigroup global head of commodity research The members' vastly different relationships with the U.S. government are also running through the meeting like a fault line. President Donald Trump has taken the rare step of publicly inserting himself into OPEC policymaking, complaining in a pair of tweets that OPEC is to blame for oil prices recently hitting 3 year highs. The Trump administration also reportedly asked top OPEC producer Saudi Arabia to offset potential disruptions to Iranian oil exports by pumping more. Washington made the request just before Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and restored sanctions on Tehran, the Saudis' chief regional rival, Reuters reported. Zanganeh said it was Trump who had created difficulty for the oil market by imposing sanctions against Iran and Venezuela yet he now expects OPEC to deal with the consequences by pumping more. "President Trump thinks that [he] can order to OPEC and instruct to OPEC to do something," he said. "It's not fair, I think, and OPEC is not a part of the Department of Energy of the United States." OPEC reached a historic agreement with Russia and other nonmembers in 2016 to keep 1.8 million barrels per day off the market. That arrangement has cleared a global glut of crude oil that sent oil prices spiraling from more than $100 a barrel in 2014 to less than $30 a barrel in 2016. International benchmark has since rebounded to about $75 a barrel. OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia appears to have altered its approach to oil production in the wake of repeated Twitter attacks from President Donald Trump, RBC's Helima Croft told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe." The U.S. president accused OPEC of being "at it again" last week, apparently accusing the oil cartel for the second time in as many months of "artificially" inflating crude prices through its current policy of curbing production. Trump, perhaps wary of the average U.S. gasoline price hovering near $3 a gallon, has sought to hold OPEC accountable for a recent upswing in oil prices. Tweet 1 Meanwhile, OPEC alongside Russia and several other allied exporters is preparing to gather for a key meeting in Vienna on Friday. When asked to what extent Trump's criticism of the producer group mattered ahead of their Vienna summit, RBC's global head of commodity strategy, Helima Croft, told CNBC: "I think it is very important because remember in April you had a joint ministerial committee meeting in Jeddah and it looked like there was going to be no change in policy. Then all of a sudden you get a Trump tweet blaming OPEC for high oil prices and you have Al-Falih taking a different line in terms of production." "So the question is how much has U.S. anger over high prices and the Trump administration blaming OPEC cost certain key OPEC states to switch their tune? Now, the Russian oil corporates have long wanted to raise production but Saudi has seemingly switched in the last couple of months," she added. Children sit amidst the rubble of a house hit by Saudi-led coalition air strikes two days earlier on the outskirts of the Yemeni capital Sanaa on November 14, 2016. Troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition stormed the airport compound in Yemen's main port city Hodeidah on Tuesday after fierce battles with Iran-aligned Houthis, residents and Yemeni military sources said. The capture of the airport from the Houthis would be an important gain for the coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have promised a quick assault on the city to avoid disrupting aid deliveries through the port. "They have stormed the airport," an anti-Houthi Yemeni military source told Reuters. "This is the first time we hear the clashes so clearly. We can hear the sound of artillery and machinegun fire," a resident, who requested anonymity, told Reuters. Warplanes bombarded the airport earlier in the morning, the resident added. The Western-backed alliance launched the onslaught on Hodeidah seven days ago to try and turn the tables in a long-stalemated proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has compounded instability across the Middle East. The upsurge in fighting has wounded and displaced dozens of civilians and hampered the work of aid groups in the port city, which is a lifeline for millions of Yemenis. The United Nations fears the offensive will exacerbate what is already the world's most urgent humanitarian crisis, with 22 million Yemenis dependent on aid, and 8.4 million on the verge of starvation. It estimates that 600,000 people live in and around Hodeidah, and in a worst-case scenario the battles could cost up to 250,000 lives. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg criticized the Trump administration on Tuesday for its policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico. "Organizations like Texas Civil Rights Project and RAICES are doing great work helping families at the US border get legal advice and translation services, as well as documenting what is happening on the ground to make sure these stories are shared. I've donated to them and I encourage you to as well. We need to stop this policy right now," he wrote in a Facebook post, calling for donations to the Texas Civil Rights Project. The Department of Health and Human Services has 11,785 minors in its care, NBC News reported Monday, citing a department official. The number of migrant children in HHS custody has climbed as a result of the administration's "zero tolerance" policy on illegal border crossing. President Donald Trump has publicly defended the controversial policy. @realDonaldTrump: We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally. Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2000 are with their parents, many of whom have tried to enter our Country illegally on numerous occasions. Zuckerberg's post raised more than $6,000 in the first 20 minutes. Previously he and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg donated to a campaign to raise money for Texas-based RAICES, which provides immigration-related legal services. That original campaign, started by former Facebook employees Charlotte and Dave Willmer, has raised close to $5 million in about four days. Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized the Trump administration on Tuesday for its "heartbreaking" and "inhumane" policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the Mexican border. "It's heartbreaking to see the images and hear the sounds of the kids," Cook told the newspaper. "Kids are the most vulnerable people in any society. I think that what's happening is inhumane, it needs to stop." Speaking in Dublin on Tuesday, Cook criticized the policy and said Apple will be a "constructive voice" in the situation. "I'm personally a big believer in the way to be a good citizen is to participate, is to try to advocate your point of view, not to just sit on the sideline and yell or complain," Cook told The Irish Times. "That will be the approach we will take here. This one in particular is just heartbreaking and tragic." Cook's comments followed those from technology giant Microsoft, which weighed in on the policy Monday, amid scrutiny over its own work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In a statement, Microsoft said it was "dismayed" by the forcible separation of children from their families. "We urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families," the statement said. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins released a statement on Tuesday, calling the policy "contrary to American values" and urged the administration to put an end to it. The statement came on behalf of Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs of major U.S. corporations that promote pro-business public policy. Several other executives have aired their grievances about the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy on social media. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston in a tweet on Wednesday condemned the "heartbreaking and cruel" policy of separating migrant children from their parents. "We're a nation of immigrants," Houston wrote on Twitter. "Tearing families apart at the US border is heartbreaking and cruel." @drewhouston tweet: We're a nation of immigrants. Tearing families apart at the US border is heartbreaking and cruel. Houston also announced Dropbox would match employee contributions to Kids in Need of Defense and other organizations that help migrant families and fight for human rights. In honor of #WRD2018, I'm making a personal donation and @Dropbox is matching employee contributions to orgs like @supportKIND that fight for families & human rights. (2/2) Google GEO Sundar Pichai urged the government to find "a better, more humane way" to address immigration issues in a tweet on Tuesday. @SundarPichai tweet: The stories and images of families being separated at the border are gut-wrenching. Urging our government to work together to find a better, more humane way that is reflective of our values as a nation. #keepfamiliestogether Pichai has been an outspoken critic of President Trump's policies on immigration, from the travel ban and the fate of the Dreamers, to the visa system U.S. companies use for hiring. He even set up a $4 million crisis fund for immigration causes through Google in 2017. Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, chimed in on Twitter. He invited others in the tech industry to join him at one of the nationwide marches to protest the Trump administration's policy of separating migrant children from their parents. @JeremyS tweet: I hope others from SF/Bay Area tech companies will join me at this march planned June 30. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, an Iranian immigrant himself, called the Trump administration's policy "just plain wrong" in a tweet on Tuesday. @dkhos tweet: As a father, a citizen and an immigrant myself, the stories coming from our border break my heart. Families are the backbone of society. A policy that pulls them apart rather than building them up is immoral and just plain wrong. #KeepFamiliesTogether Jack Dorsey, CEO of both Twitter and Square, tweeted his support on Tuesday for migrant families, using the hashtag #KeepFamiliesTogether. "Do everything it takes to #KeepFamiliesTogether," he wrote on the Twitter. @jack tweet: Do everything it takes to #KeepFamilesTogether. What are the highest impact ways to help? The hashtag was trending mid-afternoon on Tuesday. Box CEO Aaron Levie similarly called separating families "inhumane" and "un-American" in a Monday tweet. @levie: The act of separating families at the border is inhumane and un-American. We cannot let this continue. We need our government to address immigration in a compassionate and scalable way *now*. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said "it's heart-breaking to see what's happening to families at the border." @SusanWojcicki: Regardless of your politics, it's heartbreaking to see what's happening to families at the border. Here are some ways you can help This isn't the first time big tech companies have spoken out against the president's immigration policies. Last year, tech executives expressed concerns over an executive order to restrict migration from several Muslim-majority countries. Industry leaders, including Cook, Tesla's Elon Musk and Zuckerberg, as well as executives from Microsoft, Google and Netflix, were among those condemning the order, saying it could directly impact their own staffers. Truck driver Marion Howard watches soy beans load into his truck on Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2017, at Chris Crosskno's farm near Denton, Mo. Soybean futures plunged Tuesday to their lowest in more than nine years following renewed concerns about a U.S.-China trade war. A war of words between the two countries picked up overnight, following announcements of tit-for-tat tariffs on $34 billion worth of imports late last week. In retaliation against planned U.S. duties, Beijing intends to impose a 25 percent tariff on 545 U.S. goods, including soybeans. Soybean futures for July delivery dropped more than 7 percent to a low of $8.415 a bushel, their lowest since March 2009, according to Thomson Reuters. They were trading near $8.64 a bushel as of 11 a.m. ET. There are a lot of "unknowns and no confidence," said Rich Nelson, director of research at Allendale, an agricultural market research and trading firm. He added that prices could reverse just as quickly if headlines on trade changed. With Tuesday's late morning sell-off, soybean prices are now more than 17 percent lower for the quarter and down more than 10 percent for the year. Corn futures tumbled to their lowest price in more than six months. Wheat and oat futures fell roughly 1.4 percent and 3 percent, respectively, while rough rice futures were mildly lower. "The dramatic drop today is soybeans because soybeans is first and foremost what the Chinese like to buy from us," said Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at The Price Futures Group. More than half of U.S. soybeans go to China, the world's largest consumer of the beans. If Beijing imposed a 10 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans, total American soybean exports could drop by 18 percent, according to a study for the U.S. Soybean Export Council by Purdue University agricultural economists Wally Tyner and Farzad Taheripour. If China implemented a 30 percent tariff, total U.S. soybean exports could fall 40 percent, according to the study, released in late March. Prices would fall 2 or 5 percent over a few years, respectively, under the two different scenarios, the analysis said. In addition to negative sentiment around the trade dispute, Flynn attributed the drop in soybean prices to dollar strength, which makes U.S. goods relatively more expensive overseas. The U.S. dollar index rose about 0.3 percent Tuesday and is up 5.5 percent this quarter. "I think ultimately the world is going to buy our beans," Flynn said. "The demand is there. People have to eat. The decrease in price may offset the fact there might be a tariff." Check out the companies making headlines before the bell: Verizon The telecom giant's stock was upgraded to "buy" from "hold" at Deutsche Bank, which said fundamentals are improving but the stock price hasn't yet caught up. Deutsche Bank points to potential from 5G technology and an improving wireless business, among other factors. Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent an email to workers saying an unnamed employee had engaged in "extensive and damaging sabotage." Musk said the automaker is investigating whether the employee was working with any outside organizations. Apple Apple's iPhones would not be subject to new tariffs on phones assembled in China, according to a New York Times report. The paper said President Donald Trump had made that commitment to Apple CEO Tim Cook in a meeting last month. Wells Fargo The bank is considering a combination of its private client and wealth brokerage services units. Both divisions target affluent clients and many of their functions overlap. AT&T AT&T is promising fewer commercials, smaller channel bundles, and personalized programming following its buyout of Time Warner, according to a Reuters interview with John Stankey, chief executive of the newly renamed WarnerMedia unit. However, J.P. Morgan Securities downgraded the stock to "neutral" noting that strategy will take a few years to provide financial benefits. Foundation Medicine Foundation Medicine is being bought out by Swiss drug giant Roche in a $2.4 billion deal worth $137 per share. Roche had already owned 57 percent of the U.S.-based molecular diagnostic test maker. Sirius XM Holdings Sirius XM was downgraded to "hold" from "buy" at Pivotal Research in a valuation call. Pivotal's target price for the satellite radio operator's stock remains at $7.75 per share. Intuit Intuit was upgraded to "buy" from "hold" at Stifel Nicolaus, which also increased its target price on the financial software maker's stock to $240 per share from $197. Stifel cites improving competitive dynamics at the two primary business divisions, Consumer Tax and QuickBooks Online. Dr Pepper Snapple Stifel Nicolaus cut its rating on the beverage maker to "hold" from "buy," noting the stock's 25 percent run-up this year and the potential impact of higher packaging and logistics costs. Dr Pepper is in the process of combining itself with Keurig Green Mountain, with a shareholder vote coming next week. KKR The private-equity firm is exploring the sale of European telecom operator United Group, according to The Wall Street Journal, in a deal that could value the company at up to $3.47 billion. Amazon.com Amazon has introduced a version of its Alexa virtual assistant for the hospitality industry, aimed at increasing guest access to amenities as well as helping to improve employee productivity. Mattel The toy maker was downgraded to "neutral" from "buy" at UBS, which still sees value in the Mattel brand but notes the stock's 35 percent jump from its March lows despite little change in fundamentals. As the world's largest economies threaten tit-for-tat tariffs, White House trade advisor Peter Navarro tore into Chinese trade practices aimed at stealing American companies' intellectual property. U.S. officials have long complained that intellectual property theft has cost the economy billions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs. "China has targeted America's industries of the future," Navarro said Tuesday citing aerospace, robotics and artificial intelligence as technologies threatened by Chinese cybertheft. "If China successfully captures these emerging industries of the future, America will have no economic future and its national security will be severely compromised," he said adding that "economic security is national security." For the Pentagon, there is no better example of Navarro's comments than the most expensive U.S. weapons system: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. On Oct. 26, 2001, the Pentagon awarded Lockheed Martin a contract worth more than $200 billion to build the next-generation stealth strike fighter. The Pentagon's request was colossal: Develop a fifth-generation aircraft capable of replacing four existing kinds of U.S. military aircraft that also satisfies the needs of international partners. What's more, design three variants of the fighter in order to accommodate the unique missions of each sister-service branch: the F-35A for the Air Force, F-35B for the Marine Corps, and F-35C for the Navy. Brad Parscale, the manager for President Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign, on Tuesday said it was "time to fire" Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and to end the ongoing special counsel's investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Parscale also claimed in a tweet that a report issued by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General gave Trump ammunition to end special counsel Robert Mueller's probe. Tweet A spokesman for Sessions declined to comment. Trump last week claimed that the IG's report, which focused on the FBI's investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state, "totally exonerates me." That is not true, because the report does not resolve questions that Mueller is looking into. The report does address anti-Trump texts by an FBI official detailed to Mueller's team, but that official, Peter Srzok, was removed from the team last summer after Mueller learned of the messages. And it is unusual, at the very least, for the manager of a presidential re-election campaign to publicly call for the ouster of one of the incumbent president's top Cabinet officials, as Sessions is. But Sessions has been out of favor with Trump since last year because of his recusal from any Justice Department inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election and any possible collusion by Trump campaign officials with Russians. And Trump has not been shy about blasting Sessions on Twitter, even as he reportedly refuses to say his name out loud in the White House. Tweet After Sessions recused himself on those areas, and after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey last year, Session's deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appointed former FBI chief Mueller to handle the investigations into those areas. Mueller since has indicted Trump's 2016 presidential campaign boss Paul Manafort on multiple charges related to his consulting work for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. Manafort's associate, former Trump campaign official Rick Gates, has pleaded guilty in that same case to conspiracy and making a false statement. Mueller currently is seeking to interview Trump as part of his ongoing inquiry, which among other things is looking into whether the president has obstructed justice by firing Comey and other actions, such as asking Sessions to un-recuse himself. President Donald Trump said Tuesday he wants to cut off aid to countries that "abuse" the United States by sending "not their best" people to its border, describing the proposal as a bipartisan approach. "We want to end the border crisis by finally giving us the legal authorities and the resources to detain and remove illegal immigrant families all together and bring them back to their country," Trump told the National Federation of Independent Businesses' 75th anniversary event in Washington. "Now think of all that aid that we give to some of these countries," he said. "Well, I'm going to go very shortly for authorization that when countries abuse us by sending their people up not their best we're not going to give any more aid to those countries." Following applause from the crowd, he added: "Why the hell should we? This is a responsible, common-sense approach that all lawmakers should embrace, Democrats and Republicans." The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment on Trump's remarks. Trump's proposal came amid a wide-ranging speech in which he defended his administration's "zero-tolerance" policy on prosecuting illegal entrants to the U.S. Trump defended the administration's policy, which has led to the separation of nearly 2,000 migrant children from their families between April 19 and the end of May, according to a Department of Homeland Security tally. The speech marked Trump's latest threat to rescind foreign aid for another country. Trump had previously suggested that the U.S. could stop sending aid to Honduras following news reports that a "caravan" of asylum-seeking migrants from that country was traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump tweet He had also hinted in December that U.N. member states that vote against U.S. interests could have their aid cut. "We're watching" the votes of "nations that take our money and then they vote against us at the Security Council," Trump said at the time. President Donald Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen has hired former federal prosecutor Guy Petrillo as his new defense attorney to deal with a criminal probe in New York, Vanity Fair reported Tuesday. The reported Petrillo hiring has not yet been reflected in a public filing in a federal court in Manhattan. Vanity Fair attributed the report to two sources. It comes days after reports that Cohen was shopping around for a new lawyer to replace his current attorneys, Stephen Ryan and Todd Harrison. Cohen did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC. Petrillo, a partner in the New York firm Petrillo Klein & Boxer, and Cohen's current defense team did not immediately return requests for comment from CNBC. Petrillo served as chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York from 2008 through October 2009. That is the same division currently investigating Cohen for his business dealings and a $130,000 hush-money payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. Daniels has said the money was in exchange for her silence about an affair she had with Trump. The White House has denied he had sex with her, but Trump has admitted reimbursing Cohen for the payment to her. FBI agents raided Cohen's apartment, office and hotel room in New York on April 9 and seized records relating to Daniels as well as other information. Cohen has not been charged in the case. Petrillo's website notes that "his experience includes hundreds of client representations covering the broad spectrum of criminal prosecutions." He has defended people accused of, among other things, financial industry fraud, money laundering and banking violations. His firm also boasts on its website that it obtains "extraordinary outcomes for clients in high-stakes financial and business disputes and white collar criminal and regulatory matters." Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Members of Jeff Sessions' own church filed a formal complaint against the attorney general, accusing him of "child abuse," "immorality," and "racial discrimination" and the dissemination of doctrines contrary to the established standards of doctrines of the United Methodist Church. The letter, which was signed by more than 600 members of the United Methodist Church including clergy and church leaders, comes as the White House weathers a chorus of bipartisan condemnation over the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy that has led to children getting separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. "While other individuals and areas of the federal government are implicated in each of these examples, Mr. Sessions - as a long-term United Methodist in a tremendously powerful, public position - is particularly accountable to us, his church," the letter reads. "He is ours, and we are his. As his denomination, we have an ethical obligation to speak boldly when one of our members is engaged in causing significant harm in matters contrary to the Discipline on the global stage. Last week, Sessions cited the Bible in his defense of the administration's border policy separating children from their parents after they enter the U.S. illegally, which he issued last month. "I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order," he said on Thursday. "Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful." In the letter, church members took issue with this characterization, criticizing Sessions' "misuse of Romans 13 to indicate the necessity of obedience to secular law, which is in stark contrast to Disciplinary commitments to supporting freedom of conscience and resistance to unjust laws." A representative in the Justice Department's public affairs office told ABC News on Tuesday that DOJ has no comment and said that Sessions' scripture citation was not used to justify the policy. As the White House remains defiant in blaming the policy on Democrats, Sessions did not repeat this claim but adamantly defended the administration's position. "We're doing the right thing. We're taking care of these children," he told Fox News on Monday. "They are not being abused. The [Department of] Health and Human Services holds them in good conditions. They work hard at it." According to the letter, Sessions is a member of the Ashland Place United Methodist Church in Mobile, Ala., and a member of the Clarendon United Methodist Church in Alexandria, Va. Those who signed the letter are members of the United Methodist Church across the country-- including some from the churches in Virginia and Alabama. Members of the United Methodist Church are not the only religious body to speak out against the family separation policy. Franklin Graham, who is a staunch Trump supporter called the practice disgraceful," a group of evangelical groups who have often been supportive of Trump wrote a letter to the White House calling out the traumatic effects of separation. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Emory University President Claire E. Sterk has announced the appointment of Joshua R. Newton as senior vice president for advancement and alumni engagement. He will assume the post on Aug. 27, 2018. Emory University President Claire E. Sterk has announced the appointment of Joshua R. Newton as senior vice president for advancement and alumni engagement. He will assume the post on Aug. 27, 2018. Newton currently serves as president and CEO of the University of Connecticut Foundation, Inc. In that capacity, he presided over the five most successful fundraising years in the foundations history, raising a total of nearly $400 million over fiscal years 2014-2018,representing a 46 percent increase. At Emory, his responsibilities will include the development and implementation of the universitys next philanthropic campaign, building on Emorys 10-year aspiration and focus on academic eminence. The senior vice president for advancement and alumni engagement will also play an important role in furthering Emorys relationships in the Atlanta community as well as engaging nationally and internationally on behalf of the university. Josh is an innovative and articulate leader with an outstanding track record of successful fundraising within higher education, says President Sterk. I am gratified that he is joining the current leadership team and will be leading our advancement and alumni engagement efforts as we move forward into the next decade of our institutional mission. Before his move to Connecticut, Newton served for more than a decade in Emorys Development and Alumni Relations division, most recently as vice president for university development, a position he held until 2013. During his tenure at Emory, the university successfully completed Campaign Emory, a seven-year, $1.69 billion effort, the largest in the universitys history, with nearly 150,000 donors contributing. Emory has a piece of my heart, in large part because of the many wonderful people with whom I was fortunate to build lasting relationships, says Newton. To be part of supporting Emorys vision and aspirations, through strengthening alumni engagement and philanthropic support for the university, is an unbelievably exciting opportunity. A native of Hamlet, North Carolina, Newton is a graduate of Belmont Abbey College in Belmont, North Carolina. He began his career in higher education at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he served as executive director of development, leading the schools successful $75 million campaign to surpass its goal one year ahead of schedule. President Donald Trump questioned Tuesday whether he would back two House Republican immigration bills, casting new doubts about whether the chamber can pass them in an expected vote this week. The president heads to Capitol Hill on Tuesday night to discuss the legislation with GOP lawmakers. Trump, who has set out specific and sometimes shifting goals for immigration legislation, said he plans to review the measures and then "make changes." "We have a House that's getting ready to finalize an immigration package that they're going to brief me on later and that I'm going to make changes to," the president said at an event for small business association the National Federation of Independent Business. "We have one chance to get it right. We might as well get it right or let's just keep it going." Only on Friday, the White House said Trump would sign either bill one which came about as a compromise between centrist and conservative Republicans, and another that captures the demands of the party's right flank. Leaders of the majority Republicans for now thwarted an effort by moderates to potentially force a vote on bipartisan immigration measures. The president's comments Tuesday raise questions about what changes he would seek and whether the House could pass a bill that he supports. Trump's remarks likely do not help him get closer to his goal of Congress passing a bill that funds his proposed border wall, limits legal immigration and ends the White House policy of separating migrant children from parents at U.S. borders. As Trump faces a massive, bipartisan uproar over his administration's practice, he spent much of his NFIB speech venting about immigration. America's biggest and most iconic companies will be the ones to suffer if the U.S. plows ahead with trade tariffs on China, economist Jim O'Neill told CNBC on Tuesday. "I often say to people that America's most iconic modern company, Apple, has for three years sold more iPhones to Greater China than it has to the U.S. So ultimately, if the U.S. genuinely takes this kind of belligerent stance, it's going to be the U.S.' best-growing companies that will suffer," the chairman of think tank Chatham House told CNBC's "Worldwide Exchange." He added that China and the U.S. had been the force behind the majority of global economic growth in recent years, with more and more of that growth being built on the Chinese consumer. "Since the start of the decade, 85 percent of all global GDP has come from China and the U.S., and the rest of us hang off it," said O'Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. "In the Chinese regard, more and more of that (growth) is coming from the Chinese consumer." "There's this feeling that the U.S. is insulated," he added. "But the U.S. ... is an economy that is dominated by the absolute level of its consumer, and for the U.S. to do well the rest of this decade and beyond, it's got to connect more to the rest of the world. "So if the U.S. is going to go attacking more and more important places in terms of trade fights, there's no way that U.S. big multinationals are going to grow." In an interview with Reuters, Grandi said the Donald Trump administration has legitimate concerns over how to manage asylum applications, noting that the United States has the largest backlog of asylum cases in the world. The United Nations refugee agency is very concerned over the United States separating children of asylum seekers from their families, and has raised the issue with Washington , U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said. "One positive sign is that the administration wants to invest more resources on reducing this backlog," he said. But Washington needed to find ways to manage the flow "without penalising the people themselves, people who oftentimes have very valid reasons to seek asylum". "On measures that result in separating children from their families, we are very concerned and have expressed this concern," he said. Grandi said governments in many rich countries had adopted "despicable" rhetoric on migration, ignoring their duty to help people fleeing war or persecution. UNHCR's annual report, published on Tuesday, showed the global number of refugees grew by a record 2.9 million in 2017 to 25.4 million, with another 43.1 million people forcibly displaced in their own countries. The vast majority of refugees remain in poor countries, with only small numbers seeking refuge in the West. "We're not talking about unmanageble numbers moving to the rich countries," he said. Governments should explain why it is right to help refugees, "but the contrary has happened. Governments have projected an image of emergency, of invasion, and actually, unfortunately many political leaders have capitalised on that to gain votes." Volkswagen suspended Audi boss Rupert Stadler and announced an interim replacement on Tuesday, seeking to steady its most profitable business after German authorities arrested Stadler as part of an emissions probe. Audi said Stadler, 55, had requested to temporarily step down from his position, and named sales executive Abraham Schot as an interim replacement with immediate effect, confirming an earlier Reuters story. Stadler's arrest has thrown Volkswagen (VW) back into turmoil almost three years after it admitted to using illegal software to cheat U.S. emissions tests on diesel engines. Analysts said the arrest raised questions about whether Europe's biggest carmaker had done enough to reform itself in the wake of the crisis, and that it threatened a delicate truce among the group's powerful stakeholders, who had previously clashed about whether Stadler should remain in power. VW has set aside around $30 billion to cover the cost of fines, vehicle refits and lawsuits arising from its "dieselgate" scandal, and is spending billions more on electric vehicles to try to rebuild its reputation. Munich prosecutors arrested Stadler at his home in Ingolstadt in the early hours of Monday, saying they saw a risk he could try to suppress evidence. He remains remanded in custody, but has not been charged with a crime. VW and Audi said on Monday that Stadler was presumed innocent unless proven otherwise. Last week, Munich prosecutors said they were investigating Stadler for suspected fraud and false advertising and for his alleged role in helping to bring cars equipped with illegal software on to the European market. VW has for years said only lower-level managers knew of the emissions cheating. However, U.S. authorities filed criminal charges against former VW boss Martin Winterkorn earlier this year, and German prosecutors continue to investigate. Stadler has been under fire from the media, politicians and VW's powerful trade unions for his handling of the scandal, but he survived a management reshuffle announced in August thanks to backing from the Piech and Porsche families that control VW. Schot joined the VW group in 2011 after having worked as president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz Italia. He has been Audi board member for sales and marketing since last September. Peter Mosch, deputy chairman on Audi's supervisory board and head of its works council, said labour representatives had backed a move to appoint Schot as interim CEO to ensure that Audi's business did not suffer from the leadership crisis. "For the employees it is now important that the interim CEO returns the company to calmer waters, drives the (diesel) investigation and brings it to a conclusion, but mostly keeps the day-to-day business in view," he said in a statement. VW shares were down 2.9 percent at 151.60 euros, extending Monday's decline. Wells Fargo said Monday it is considering restructuring and possibly combining two of its retail brokerage businesses, a move to increase efficiency among the two legacy units. The two divisions the private client group overseen by David Kowach and wealth brokerage services overseen by Jay Welker have long overlapped. Both employ financial advisers who work with mass affluent clients. However, the businesses are organized in different channels. Wealth brokerage services, which employs brokers who work in bank branches, is in the same section of the bank as the private bank, which employs wealth managers who advise the ultra-rich. During the bank's investor day conference in March, Jon Weiss, head of wealth and investment management, said Wells Fargo is exploring ways to increase efficiency among the bank's wealth businesses. Wells Fargo Advisors spokeswoman Shea Leordeanu wrote in an emailed statement, "No final decisions have been made because that work continues. Whatever the outcome, we will continue to serve our clients across multiple channels community bank branches, advisor-led branches, FiNet, online and by phone because our clients expect that from us Wells Fargo." Weiss is expected to address the plans on Thursday during a town hall-style meeting with brokers. The bank's plans to restructure were reported earlier on Monday by The Wall Street Journal. The bank had said in March it was examining its wealth and investment management division for possible customer abuse, including overcharging and inappropriate referrals, after inquiries from government agencies. White House trade advisor Peter Navarro said Tuesday he has no knowledge of an exemption for Apple's iPhones in U.S. trade talks with China. On Monday The New York Times reported, citing a source, that President Donald Trump told Apple CEO Tim Cook the U.S. government would not impose tariffs on iPhones assembled in China. The Times' story focused on how Cook visited both the White House and a major summit in Beijing in the last few months in an effort to soothe trade relations between the two countries. The iPhone maker is worried Beijing will retaliate against U.S. pressure in ways that might constrain Apple's business, the Times said, citing three people familiar with the matter. Shares of Apple traded about 1.7 percent lower Tuesday afternoon. The company declined to comment to CNBC. Cook told CNN in an interview earlier this month he doesn't think the iPhone will get a tariff, "based on what I've been told and what I see." Apple sells millions of iPhones in China and has 41 stores in the country. Twenty percent of Apple's revenue is exposed to the Asian country, according to a Morgan Stanley report. Manufacturers of semiconductors, key to iPhone construction, are also the most sensitive industry to China, with 52 percent revenue exposure, the report said. Navarro also said none of the Trump administration's negotiation efforts with Beijing have made progress on changing China's "predatory" trade practices. China's offers shrunk throughout the talks, Navarro said. Beijing did offer to buy $200 billion in U.S. products over three to four years, he said. You don't have to break the bank to fix up restaurant-quality food. That's what a handful of chefs demonstrated at the first annual "$1.25 Throwdown" in New London, Connecticut, earlier this month. Hosted by Dan Giusti and Brigaid, his organization that recruits professional chefs to lead public school kitchens, the fundraising event challenged 10 world-class chefs to create the best meal they could working with the same paltry budget of $1.25-per-head and and the same nutritional standards required by public schools. The idea was to generate awareness around what Brigaid does on a daily basis: Serve thousands of students lunches that not only meet certain budgetary and nutritional guidelines but also taste good. Dan Giusti, former executive chef at Noma and founder of Brigaid Winter Caplanson Making something that the kids actually want to eat is often the hardest part, Giusti tells CNBC Make It: "We come up with a lot of recipes that meet the nutritional guidelines, they meet the cost, we feel good about them as chefs and then you feed them to the kids and they'll despise them." The competition was held on June 2 in a school cafeteria and was set up "just like we would do lunch, with lunch waves," says Giusti, who quit his job as executive chef at the renowned Danish restaurant Noma to launch Brigaid. There were five "lunch waves," with two chefs serving their $1.25 creations during each one. Students helped judge the "$1.25 Throwdown" Winter Caplanson The lunches, which chefs cooked in batches of about 100, were judged by both students and a panel of food writers. The winning recipe was a fish cutter sandwich served with shredded cabbage on homemade Bajan salt bread. Created by Ghetto Gastro, a culinary collective out of the Bronx, the recipe included two sides, which were also made from scratch: sofrito potato wedges and watermelon granita. Ghetto Gastro's creation will be incorporated into Brigaid's 2018-2019 school lunch menu. Second place went to Michelin-starred chef Jeremiah Langhorne, who made chicken carnita tacos, and third place went to Jessica Koslow, a 2018 James Beard Award nominee for best chef, who prepared a Monte Cristo sandwich. The state of Jammu and Kashmir is facing a political turmoil (once again) after the ruling BJP ended an alliance with the regional party in Jammu and Kashmir, leading to the resignation of Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti. With the BJP's immediate decision, the sensitive border state has under the Centre's direct control. Mehbooba Mufti resigned as the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister on Tuesday after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) broke its alliance with People's Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir. The three reasons cited by BJP to end the alliance with PDP, as per CNN-News18, are as follows - the recent killing of the Rising Kashmir Editor Shujaat Bukhari, Indian Army soldier Aurangzeb's murder by terrorists and the freedom of the press in the state. "BJP had joined hands with PDP to form the J&K government with some goals. It has become untenable for BJP to continue with the PDP alliance in J&K and hence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to break the alliance," said Ram Madhav, vice president and general secretary of BJP, in a press conference, adding terrorism and radicalisation have increased in the state. Madhav said the freedom of speech, along with other fundamental rights, have come under threat in the Kashmir Valley. According to BJP, the centre has been proactively supporting the state for the last three years and the objective of the alliance with PDP was to restore peace and development of three areas of the state. "We are not questioning the intentions of PDP but they have failed in improving the condition of life in Kashmir," Madhav added. With BJP breaking the alliance, there are two possibilities for the state government. One, Jammu and Kashmir's National Conference, Congress and PDP may try to form the government and if this doesn't take place, then the state is likely to witness President's rule. 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 UC Berkeley in 2016 saw the potential for teaching about blockchain with a primary focus on bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies the technology underpins. At the time, about 70 students signed up. Next month, the university will kick off an online professional certificate program for blockchain, a three-month, two-part course focusing on cryptocurrencies and permissioned blockchains aimed at equipping students for careers in developing the distributed ledger technology for businesses. So far, 7,400 students have signed up. "We've had other online courses that have done well, mainly STEM-related content... but I'd say this course's early results show very impressive enrollments," said Suzanne Harrison, director of design and development at UC Berkeley. It's the first time Berkeley has opened its blockchain education program to students globally through an online learning platform. The blockchain employment market is red hot. The job of developing blockchain distributed ledgers for businesses was recently ranked first among the top 20 fastest-growing job skills; postings for workers with those skills grew more than 200% last year. In high-tech regions of the U.S. such as Silicon Valley, New York City or Boston, a blockchain developer has a median annual salary of $158,000 - an $18,000 premium over salaries for general software developers. UpWork UpWork, a freelance job website, has placed blockchain as the number one job skill being sought by enterprises today. Berkeley hasn't marketed its blockchain certificate program. Just as bitcoin's value skyrocketed sans advertising from 30 cents in 2011 to more than $6,400 today (along with rollercoaster volatility in between), registration for the new blockchain professional certificate program has grown mostly through word of mouth, according to Rustie Lin, the team lead for Blockchain at Berkeley's edX team. Lin and Mengyi Wang, created the content and are the blockchain program's instructors. The course isn't aimed at producing blockchain coders per se; it's designed more to equip students with strong fundamental blockchain literacy and the basic knowledge needed to enter any type of technical and non-technical blockchain career. While the typical student enrolled in the program majors in computer science, economics, mathematics, business or finance there are also philosophy and law students. As the Blockchain Fundamentals online course description states, it is "accessible by anyone, with any background. Whether students are planning their next career move as a blockchain developer, crypto trader, data analyst, researcher, or consultant, or are just curious about this field, the is the best way to get up to speed on blockchain technology." "We have an entire course module on blockchain use cases," Lin said. "Blockchain, along with many other fields when they first come out had a lot of hype around it. After a couple years we'll find out the long-term effect. But, as it stands right now, blockchain is moving very fast and I think it has technical merit for the very real problems it solves." UC Berkeley/Blockchain at Berkeley A graphic describing Ethereum blockchain as part of UC Berkeley's course curriculum. While bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may have been the first widespread applications enabled by blockchain, today the peer-to-peer transaction network is being used in pilots across vertical industries to enable cross-border payments, supply chain management, cargo shipment tracking and the secure exchange of sensitive data across disparate platforms. Technology providers such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle now offer blockchain-as-a-service. "I think blockchain as a whole is very good at solving coordination failures," Lin said. "One of my favorite one liners: blockchain is a technical solution to a social problem - social coordination." Berkeley's certificate course began as a club called the Bitcoin Association of Berkeley and it matured to become Blockchain at Berkeley, which is part of the on campus DeCal Program accredited classes run by students. Blockchain at Berkeley and faculty from UC Berkeley's Computer Science department then partnered with open online course provider edX to develop the online professional certificate program a survey of core topics in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. "It primarily had a focus on cryptocurrency and blockchain. But over a two-year course of time, we decided to offer a more comprehensive view of the industry," Wang said. "This online platform was really powerful for us." EdX enabled Wang and Lin to expand the course content because they were no longer constrained by the time limitations associated with campus classes and student schedules. Initially, students began recording lectures and discussions and posting them online, a strategy that expanded to 50, hour-long recordings, Lin said. "We saw the need to scale that up, especially as the need for blockchain education is increasing," he said. The online certificate program consists of a set of short video lectures, followed by problem sets, quizzes and opportunities for question-and-answer sessions, "so they know they've grasped the concepts," Lin said. After a six-week course, students are paired up and perform peer review of blockchain use cases they've developed over the course of instruction. The first course, Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies, covers basic properties of bitcoin, the mechanics behind it (i.e. cryptographic hash functions, Bitcoin Script, privacy and hash commitment schemes) and its roots in the Cypherpunk movement and Libertarian ideals. It will also provide an overview of practical applications of Bitcoin such as wallets and mining, as well as how to destroy bitcoins, including network attacks and malicious mining strategies. It will also take a look at Ethereum and how blockchain can be used outside of cryptocurrencies. The second course, Blockchain Technology, initially looks at distributed systems and alternative mechanisms, as well as cryptoeconomic and proof-of-stake governance systems. Then it explores the fundamental applications of bitcoin and blockchain technology, including enterprise blockchain implementations, such as JP Morgan's Quorum, Ripple, Tendermint and HyperLedger, the challenges and solutions around scaling blockchain adoption, and the measures the government is taking to regulate and control blockchain technology. The course wraps up with a look at various blockchain ventures today and concludes with a blockchain-based future thought experiment. EdX's Professional Certificate programs are series of courses designed by universities and industry experts, and they are highly valued by perspective employers. For example, Microsoft recently committed to contribute toward the cost for any community college student to complete the entry level Computer Science Professional Certificate program on edX. Berkeley isn't alone. Several accredited U.S. universities now offer on-campus or online courses on cryptocurrencies and blockchain, including MIT, which offers two courses on cryptocurrency engineering and design; Princeton University; Stanford University; and Duke University, which also has a student-run curriculum. There are also specialty schools such as Mountain View, Calif.-based Blockchain University and London-based education startup B9lab, which launched an online Certified Ethereum Developer Training program in 2016. "Our primary goal with this program... is to build a strong mental model of this new paradigm of distributed blockchain thinking," Lin said. "Whether the students use this knowledge to pursue blockchain development careers... or whether they're trying to pursue non-technical positions, it still requires a fundamental understanding of the technology. That's the thinking we encourage of our students to carry with them into their professional careers." Peers vote to bring back the meaningful vote amendment, setting up a clash in the Commons The House of Lords defied the PMs pleas to keep faith with the British public and fall into line on the EU Withdrawal Bill. Instead they backed the Hailsham amendment in a move which sets the stage for a crunch showdown between Mrs May and her Tory rebels on Wednesday when it returns to the Commons. In a fiery debate, Viscount Hailsham branded Brexit a national calamity and said he was driven to act after ministers reneged on their promise to give Parliament a say if no deal is done by late January. But he was accused of trying to sabotage Brexit and of overstepping their authority by pushing through the change. Peers voted by 354 to 235 to pass the controversial amendment. Mrs May now faces a frantic 48 hours as she tries to pick off Tory backbenchers led by Dominic Grieve planning to join the revolt on Wednesday. Daily Mail >Yesterday: Ashcroft: If forced to choose, Leave voters would rather lose Northern Ireland than stay in the EU While Northern Ireland Unionists are determined that they should have the same deal as the rest of the UK, only one third of voters in Britain say it would be unacceptable for Northern Ireland to have a different EU status from the rest of the country; almost as many say this would be tolerable to get a workable deal. It is not hard to imagine how Leave voters would react if told the UK would not be taking back as much control as they hoped because of the Irish border, an issue they believe is being blown out of proportion. There is more uncomfortable news for Unionists. A majority in Britain said Northern Irelands place in the UK was up to its people to decide but if the province voted to leave, most said they wouldnt mind either way. We also asked Leave voters in Britain whether they would leave the EU, or keep England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales together in the UK, if it were impossible to do both. Most, including more than seven in 10 Tory voters, said they would rather leave the EU. Daily Telegraph Majorities of Leave and Remain voters think the Brexit process is going too slowly Daily Telegraph Single Market enthusiasts still arent being honest about the costs Juliet Samuel, Daily Telegraph The EU threatens to ditch security deal if Britain leaves the Human Rights Convention Daily Telegraph Ministers accused of betraying Gibraltar over airport The Sun Will the Government ever show any fight in its dealings with Brussels? The Sun Says May needs to learn the art of diplomacy Rafael Behr, The Guardian >Today: Steven Woolfe on Comment: To win the working class northern vote, the Conservative Party must change its attitude and tone Health spending boost must be underpinned by reform, May insists Health chiefs say it isnt enough money, and social care needs action, too The Times More cash required The Times May hints she might be willing to repeal the Lansley NHS reforms The Times Civil servants look again at Dilnots social care cost cap Daily Telegraph Hunts plans to overhaul the system are delayed again The Sun Man appeals to Sturgeon after waiting a year for an appointment The Scotsman 20 million fund for community groups to tackle loneliness The Sun Unveiling plans for her 20 billion funding package, she stressed the NHS was mired in too much bureaucracy that acted as a barrier to progress. Explaining how the Government had delivered its side of the bargain, the PM said the NHS now had to deliver a 10-year plan to ensure the money is not wasted. And she criticised the 200-strong NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups, which were only set up to buy-in care for patients by former Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley in 2012. The PM said: It is a problem that a typical NHS Clinical Commissioning Group negotiates and monitors over 200 different legal contracts with other, different parts of the NHS. It is too bureaucratic, inhibits joined up care, and takes money and people away from the front line. The Sun Opinion Editorials There must be serious change if taxes are to rise Daily Telegraph Leader The service needs more money, but people cant bear bigger tax bills The Sun Says Theres no Brexit dividend The Guardian Leader >Today: The Moggcast. There clearly is a Brexit dividend but the IFS and the Bank of England carry on with Project Fear >Yesterday: Theres no money left, the Chancellor tells the Cabinet Philip Hammond has warned the cabinet that he has no more money for other policies after being forced to find 25 billion for the NHS. The chancellor used a presentation to senior ministers before Theresa Mays speech on the health service yesterday to rule out extra spending on areas including schools, defence, prisons and police. He also made clear that, having fulfilled the Vote Leave pledge of paying for the NHS rise from a Brexit dividend, the government would need to find money to replace other funding provided at present by Brussels. One cabinet minister said that there was shock at what this meant: The atmosphere was quite muted. Ministers could see the implications are going to make life quite difficult. Any sense that the taps are about to be turned on were dispelled. The Times May grants Hammond a free hand to rip up tax pledges if he deems it necessary FT She seeks to harness the political power of the Brexit dividend Robert Shrimsley, FT 4,000 public assets sold by councils last year The Times Motorists overcharged for fuel by 500 million The Times Hague: We should follow Canadas example and legalise cannabis Inaction will cost lives The Times Leader Britains drug laws are in the dark ages Simon Jenkins, The Guardian Billy Caldwell leaves hospital Daily Mail May refuses to back Hunt on the issue Daily Mail As far as marijuana, or cannabis, is concerned, any war has been comprehensively and irreversibly lost. The idea that the drug can be driven off the streets and out of peoples lives by the state is nothing short of deluded. Surveys of young people attest that they find it easier to purchase cannabis than virtually anything else, including fast food, cigarettes and alcohol. Everyone sitting in a Whitehall conference room needs to recognise that, out there, cannabis is ubiquitous, and issuing orders to the police to defeat its use is about as up to date and relevant as asking the army to recover the Empire. This battle is effectively over. Daily Telegraph >Today: ToryDiary: No pothead is an island Ban on upskirting will be brought in by the Government Mnisters confirmed a new law to make the practice illegal would be introduced following his intervention. Campaigners praised Government plans to ban the practice of secretly taking photos of underwear as a great day for all right-thinking individuals. The Prime Ministers official spokesman said Theresa May told Cabinet upskirting was an invasion of privacy that leaves victims feeling degraded and distressedOfficials said an upskirting Bill would mean perpetrators were properly punished. Victim and campaigner Gina Martin described it as brilliant news. She said: I kept going because I didnt want to brush it off again and say this is just part of life. I kept going because we needed a change. The Sun >Yesterday: Nicky Morgans column: Chopes upskirting ban veto, and no-deal hard Brexiteers fellow travellers in the campaign to wreck modernisation Wallace: Question Time should retire when Dimbleby departs Rail bosses turn up late to committee hearing about delays Question Time has become a pursuit for those inside the bubble, not a platform for those beyond it as it was once intended. In short, its time to retire this old champion of the airwaves. It had its glory moments, many of which are preserved in memory and online for us to replay, but it has become a shadow of its former self. Like a great band, it is best to go now and leave those echoes of epoch-making brilliance, rather than stagger on trying and failing to relive them. Dimbleby became Question Time. Now he is going, it should go too. Mark Wallace, the i paper Rail bosses sparked fresh fury last night after turning up late to a parliamentary hearing about the calamitous delays and cancellations on Britains rail network. Labour MP Wes Streeting stormed: This is like something from The Thick Of It. You couldnt make it up! Still, its nice to know that rail bosses have got a taste of the everyday misery experienced by their customers. After the Commons Transport committee hearing finally got underway, the bosses of Govia Thameslink and Northern Rail were savaged by MPs for forcing commuters to quit their jobs. They were left humiliated as committee chair Lilian Greenwood read out a raft of tweets explaining how the hundreds of daily cancellations by Govia Thameslink and Northern Rail had driven mayhem through their everyday lives. But Charles Horton, the outgoing Govia Thameslink chief, and Northern Rails David Brown blamed the widespread disruption on Transport Secretary Chris Grayling. The Sun >Yesterday: Chris Walker on Comment: Supercharged Free Ports, the visionary way to boost the north of Englands economy The CSU gives Merkel two weeks to secure tougher EU action on immigration Angela Merkel was given a two-week ultimatum by her Bavarian allies to set tougher migration controls at EU level or they will start rejecting asylum seekers at the German border. The challenge follows days of intensive talks on a migration masterplan drawn up by Horst Seehofer, the German interior minister, which pushed the government to breaking point over his call to turn away certain migrants. Mrs Merkel insisted that there would still be no automatic rejections at the German border even if she could not reach agreement with other EU countries by July 1, deferring a showdown with her coalition partners. Her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has been in a conservative alliance for 70 years with Mr Seehofers Christian Social Union (CSU) party, which organises only in Bavaria. Yesterday, after days of warning that he was prepared to act unilaterally and impose new border controls, Mr Seehofer pulled back from breaking up the alliance. That would have cost Mrs Merkel her majority in the Bundestag. The Times >Yesterday: ToryDiary: Damaged by last years election. Playing for time. Grappling with revolts and resignation threats. We refer, of course, to Merkel. Universities will have to justify Vice-Chancellors pay packets Universities will have to provide a breakdown of performance criteria set for vice-chancellors and how the terms have been met, under a crackdown on excessive pay. The Office for Students (OFS) watchdog has sent a 17-page guide to universities on what data they must provide each year to flush out those who do little for their money. It said that out of kilter salaries were unacceptable and it could fine those unable to justify paying more than the prime ministers 150,000 salary. Labour called the measures watered down and said that it would impose caps on the ratio between the highest and lowest-paid staff. The Times Academics launch disruptive platform to revolutionise education The Times Tech giants will challenge the banks Matthew Lynn, Daily Telegraph Anti-semitism on the left is deterring Jewish pupils from universities, warns Labour student leader Labour donor in trouble with Ofcom The Times Anti-Semitism within Labour is deterring Jewish youngsters from applying to some universities, a student leader warns. Melantha Chittenden, the national chairman of Labour Students, said the problem is widespread and pinned the blame on her own party. She has now called on leader Jeremy Corbyn to launch a crackdown. Her comments follow complaints from students that anti-Semitism has become more socially acceptable among young Labour members who sympathise with the Palestinian cause. Daily Mail >Yesterday: LeftWatch: I went to LabourLive, and all I got was a 15 t-shirt (and free ice cream) News in Brief John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He has written two books on the history of writing and spelling. He is a Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Education Society. I believe that higher education is a valuable part of the social fabric, and a birthright in a civilised society that should be free to anyone who can get the grades. This view has been attacked from the Left by people like Blair and Sir Tim Brighouse, on the grounds that the main beneficiaries are the students, leading to elitism, and from the Right by neo-liberals, starting with The Economist, who see universities as businesses, and are opposed to nearly all forms of subsidy. Michael Gove put the point clearly in a recent television interview, when he said that if university was free, people who did not go to university would be subsidising those who did. The argument, of course, applies equally to family members of the students, including Michael Goves own parents, who, one supposes, did not object to his free education at Oxford. One person who appears to agree that some, at least, of higher education should be free is the former Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, who in 2014 became yet another left-leaning journalist to lead an Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall. Rusbridgers innovation has been a free foundation year for students from modest backgrounds who did not make the normal Oxford admission criterion of three As at A level, but who had at least three Bs. The success criterion of the foundation year is the assessed capacity to proceed to an upper-second class degree, either at Oxford or elsewhere; seven out of the group of ten students who have completed their first year were accepted at Oxford, with the remainder going on to other universities. The merit of this scheme is that it does not follow the leftist proportionality argument of admitting students whether they make the grades or not, but puts them in a position to make the grades by providing the additional teaching of high quality that is available in the best of the private sector and in the best sixth forms, which are often in grammar schools. For far too long, sixth forms in most comprehensive schools have escaped scrutiny by declining to publish their full results by grade and subject, so that an accurate comparison of their results with those of grammar school sixth forms, and sixth form colleges, is not possible. In languages, some students who want to take an A level in a language simply cant do so, because none of the comprehensive schools in their area offers one. This is a denial of opportunity and a waste of talent. For this reason, I suggested to Justine Greening that grammar school expansion should be focused on extending their sixth forms and opening them up to qualified entrants from other local schools, if necessary by paying travelling expenses. Success at sixth form level opens the doors to the best universities, and hence to social mobility. I saw it happen in a leading grammar school shortly after the millennium, where the school had maintained its standards in the face of Labours funding cuts by expanding its sixth form and admitting girls. I hope that Damian Hinds will consider the approach carefully, as it the most cost-effective, and least controversial, way of restoring the values of grammar schools in areas where they have been cut out by comprehensive cartels. Lady Margaret Halls experiment is complemented by systematic work on the part of Oxford as a whole, with each college allocated a geographical area to support. Wadham College, which has a particular focus on Luton, has raised 25m towards a target of 30m by 2020 towards a range of provision, including taster days for GCSE pupils, residential summer schools in politics, classics and engineering and a purpose-built centre of excellence. Wadhams impact report notes a particularly strong effect from its summer schools, which, like Lady Margaret Halls provision, led to seven offers of Oxford places to students who otherwise might not even have applied. Once again, the goal is to enable pupils from all backgrounds to go as far as their talents will take them, and my own view is that schools such as these are likely to be more effective than any other provision in rescuing young people from the effects of poor teaching. If my proposal to expand grammar school sixth forms is taken up, there should be a similar scheme for transition from GCSE to A level. Although the United Kingdom does not have a development bank, there is one which was set up in London Frances Agence Francaise de Developpement (AFD), now one of the worlds largest. It was founded in 1941 during the darkest days of the Second World War by the French Government in London, and was first known as the Central Fund for Free France. I believe that now is the time to found another development bank here, this time for the UK to fund development, both at home and internationally. When we leave the EU, we will also no longer be members of the European Investment Bank (EIB), currently based in London and in which we have been a major shareholder. The EIB has helped to fund many major investments in the UK, including the Thames Tideway Tunnel, the Midlands Engine partly in my own constituency, Merseytravels new trains, and has guaranteed 200 million in loans to northern SMEs. It is essential that the private and public sector continue to have access to such substantial long-term funding on reasonable terms which is often not available from the commercial sector. Internationally. one of the most important challenges in the near future alongside protecting the global environment is the creation of decent jobs and livelihoods for the, at least, one billion young people who will need them during the next ten to 15 years. Most of these jobs and livelihoods will be in the private sector or family enterprises. They will need both access to capital and the development of public infrastructure. Without these, young people from Africa and beyond will continue to undertake dangerous journeys to seek opportunities that they do not have at home. Job creation and economic development is often better achieved through returnable capital (loans or equity), rather than through grants. The former have two advantages. Firstly, they ensure accountability over a longer period. A grant may typically last for two to five years, after which an evaluation is carried out and often support is terminated. Rarely does DFID or any other grant-making agency go back 10 or 20 years later to assess the long-term impact of the money which was granted. The performance of the work supported by loans or equity will be assessed regularly and corrective action taken where necessary. Hence long-term success is more likely, though by no means certain; and 20 years later the impact can be readily assessed. Secondly, the funds are returnable, and therefore can be used again if and when repaid. Grants are one-off. As an example, the International Development Association (IDA the World Banks fund for low income countries) is replenished every three years. About 36 per cent of the $75 billion for 2017-2020 is coming from donors; but nearly 30 per cent was recycled funds which had been repaid by the borrowing countries. If all the money had initially been granted, these recycled funds would not be available. There is another advantage which a development bank has and a grant-making agency generally does not the ability to increase investment through raising bonds based on its balance sheet. AFD does this regularly. The proposal which I am therefore supporting in a Commons debate tommorow is that the UK establishes a development bank both to support medium- and long-term investment in UK projects and businesses, replacing the EIB; and to commit more of our existing international development assistance to loans supporting the creation of jobs and livelihoods. The Government and Parliament have already moved in this direction on equity capital by substantially increasing the taxpayers investment in CDC (formerly the Commonwealth Development Corporation) through the international development budget. The International Development Committee (on which I served from 2010 to 2017) recommended that the Government look at the establishment of a UK Development Bank for our work with developing countries. As the UK leaves the EU, and the EIB, there is even more reason to do so. There are a number of arguments which I have heard against the establishment of a UK Development Bank. The first is that the UK already subscribes to multilateral development banks such as the World Bank, the African and Asian Development Banks. That is true. However, the UK has a limited (though valuable) say in the operation of those banks. That is why other countries such as France, Germany, Brazil, Japan and others have their own development banks. In addition, those banks could not fund UK-based projects. The second is that the UK Government does not favour such independent financial institutions owned by the taxpayer. The last few years will surely have proved the opposite. The Government has established the British Business Bank, focussing on investment and lending to SMEs. It also set up the Green Investment Bank, although it then (wrongly in my opinion) sold it. The final argument is that a Development Bank will require additional taxpayers money to establish, which we cannot afford. That need not be the case. The initial capital for the bank could come from the return of the UKs capital in the EIB and from our international development budget, as has already happened in the case of CDC. Once established, the UK Development Bank would then be able to issue bonds on the basis of its balance sheet. The UK is a world leader in finance. Yet with the departure of the EIB, we will be losing a major financial institution. A UK Development Bank will not only replace that but give us an opportunity to demonstrate expertise and innovation, while ensuring that we meet some of our own and low-income countries needs for development capital. This Bank will be owned by the taxpayer and, if well managed, will be an investment that will benefit UK citizens for decades to come. The Irish border is at the centre of negotiations as to how we will leave the European Union. My latest research, published today, explores what people think about the issue on both sides of the border, how voters in Great Britain see the question in the context of the wider Brexit debate, and the potential implications for the union of nations in the United Kingdom. My report is called Brexit, The Border And The Union, so lets take those themes in turn. Brexit Three-quarters of Leave voters in Britain and a majority of Remainers said they thought the Brexit negotiations and decisions about the UKs future outside the EU were proceeding too slowly. Nearly half of Leavers thought the responsibility lay with British politicians who wanted a soft Brexit, or to stop it altogether, with a quarter blaming the EU and other European governments. Remainers spread the blame more widely, but were most inclined to point the finger at those pushing for a hard Brexit. In our focus groups, most Conservative Leave voters had some sympathy for Theresa May: theres probably a lot to put into place. It wasnt ever going to happen overnight; shes doing the best she can. Shes picked on by the men; Brussels are making it as difficult as they possibly can. As long as were still there, theyre still getting money out of us. But some thought the Government should be tougher in its approach: Im concerned we will end up with a watered-down version. I dont think we have a strong enough negotiating team Theres a lot of appeasement going on. Many non-Tory Leavers held the Party responsible: I blame the Tories, Theresa May. They didnt expect us to leave. They havent got a clue what to do; a lot of the hold-up is because of the Conservative leadership battle. We also asked people, hypothetically, how they would react if the Government were to say we needed an extension to the planned implementation period in order to resolve complex issues. Overall, voters were more likely than not to say this would be acceptable, and three quarters of Remainers agreed that getting our post-Brexit arrangements right is more important than doing them quickly. But two-thirds of Leave voters, and a majority of Conservatives, thought a longer implementation period would just be an excuse for staying in the EU as long as possible, and that we should leave as currently planned. Asked how confident they were that Theresa May and her team would be able to negotiate a good deal for the UK in the Brexit negotiations, where zero meant they had no confidence at all and 100 meant they had total confidence, respondents in Great Britain gave a mean score of 40 (down from 42 when I last asked in November 2017). Leave voters gave a score of 50 (down from 54), and Remain voters a score of 30 (unchanged). Conservative voters confidence had fallen slightly from 62 to 59. In the Republic of Ireland, more than seven in ten voters said they were unhappy that the UK was leaving the EU. Three-quarters thought the country had made the wrong decision, even according to its own interests. More than half thought Brexit would make the relationship between Ireland and Northern Ireland more distant, and two-thirds thought the same was true of Irelands relationship with the UK as a whole. Three-quarters said they felt positive about Irelands EU membership, and 80 per cent said they would vote to remain if there were a referendum. We asked voters in Great Britain whether they thought two things would change life for the better or the worse: leaving all aspects of the EU, and a Labour government with Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. Conservative Remainers were more likely to see a Corbyn government as a change for the worse than leaving the EU, while Labour Leave voters were more likely to see Brexit as a change for the better than a Corbyn government. More than one in five Labour Leave voters said they thought a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn would be a change for the worse. The Border We asked people in Northern Ireland how much importance they gave to five potential Brexit outcomes. For Catholic and Nationalists voters, avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic was far and away the most important consideration. For Unionists and Protestants, however, the issue mattered much less than ensuring the UK was able to negotiate its own free trade deals with non-EU countries, was no longer bound by EU rules, and had more control over immigration into the UK. Making sure Northern Ireland was treated the same as the rest of the UK was also more important than preventing a hard border. Most Leave voters in both Great Britain and Northern Ireland agreed that modern technology would allow any customs checks to be done quickly and easily, so a border would not be damaging or disruptive. Only just over a third of Remain voters in Great Britain agreed, along with fewer than four in ten voters in the Republic of Ireland and only six per cent of Nationalists in Northern Ireland. For them, the border had wider significance: more than nine out of ten agreed that whether or not it is practical, a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would be a very negative symbol, as did a similar proportion of respondents in Ireland. In Northern Ireland, nearly two-thirds agreed that a hard border would be likely to create division and provoke paramilitary activity, threatening peace and security. This included nine out of ten Nationalists, but fewer than four in ten Unionists and only three in ten Leave voters and a quarter of DUP supporters. Unionists in Northern Ireland overwhelmingly agreed that the issue of Brexit and the Irish border is being deliberately exaggerated by politicians and others to suit their own political agenda. More than a fifth of Nationalists agreed, as did a majority in Great Britain including three quarters of Leave voters and four in ten remainers. In both Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the most popular solution to the issue was for the whole UK to leave the Customs Union even if this meant customs checks at the Irish border. In England, Scotland and Wales, the second most chosen option among Leave voters though much less popular was for Northern Ireland to stay in the Customs Union while the rest of the UK left. This was not the case in Northern Ireland, where Leave voters and Unionists said they would rather see the whole UK remain in the Customs Union than Northern Ireland remaining on its own. When we asked voters in Great Britain what they would prefer if it came to a choice between either leaving the EU Customs Union or avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, two-thirds of Conservatives and Leave voters, and even one in five Remainers, said they would rather leave the customs union. The Union Asked whether or not Northern Ireland should remain part of the UK, a majority of voters in England, Scotland and Wales including a majority of Conservatives answered that it was for the people of Northern Ireland to decide. In the event that Northern Ireland did vote to leave, more of this group said they would be sorry than happy, but more than six in ten said they wouldnt mind either way. A majority of voters in Northern Ireland said they thought Brexit had made Irish unification in the foreseeable future more likely. While Catholics thought this overwhelmingly, nearly half of Protestants and a majority of DUP voters said Brexit would make no difference though more of the remainder thought it would make unification more likely rather than less. In Great Britain, people were more likely to say they thought Brexit had made Scottish independence more likely to think the same of Irish unification (and just over half of Remain voters thought the chances of Scottish independence in the foreseeable future had risen) though they were also more likely to say they didnt know in the Irish case. More than nine out of ten Northern Ireland Catholics thought there should be a referendum on Irish unification, or border poll, in the next ten years, and more than eight in ten thought this would actually happen. Meanwhile, 43 per cent of Protestants (and a majority of DUP voters) said there should never be a border poll, but only 13 per cent thought there never would be. Strikingly, 12 per cent of Protestants said they thought there should be a border poll within the next five years. Part of the reason may be the longer term pessimism felt by some of the DUP supporters we spoke to in our focus groups: The sooner we have a border poll the better, because if its soon there is more chance of the Unionists winning it. When we asked how people in Northern Ireland would vote if there were a referendum tomorrow, the margin for remaining in the UK was just five points, with seven per cent saying they didnt know how they would vote. Nearly eight in ten SDLP voters said they would vote for unification, and nearly three in ten Alliance voters were undecided. In the Republic of Ireland, however, enthusiasm for unification was limited. While just over a third said they would like to see it happen soon, more than half said they were in favour of a united Ireland in principle, but it would not be practical or affordable for the Republic of Ireland in the next few years. Finally, we asked Leave voters in Great Britain what they choose to do if it were not possible both to leave the EU and keep England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales together in the United Kingdom. More than six in ten, including half of Labour voters and nearly three quarters of Conservatives, said they would choose to leave the EU. Steven Woolfe is an independent Member of the European Parliament for North West England. I grew up on a council estate in Manchester where, it is said, if you put a donkey with a red rosette on, people will always vote Labour and never ever elect a Tory. When I first entered politics I was told that tribal divisions rule and no political party could escape them. Labour has the working class sewn up. The Conservatives have Middle England sewn up. Well, frankly, a lot of the above is true, but my days in UKIP taught me too many people look down on the electorate and dont listen to them and, when they cared to do so, voters changed their alliances. UKIP did spectacularly, for a while, on those same northern council estates of my youth. In the 2017 election, the Conservative Party targeted those same seats that UKIP won. Indeed, they say there is a strategy to win them back. In her first speech as Prime Minister on the steps of 10 Downing Street, Theresa May said: If youre from an ordinary working class familyI know that sometimes life can be a struggle. Yet despite her warm words and her policies, the 2017 election did not bring spectacular results. The Conservatives won some over, but even though they promoted themselves as the party of Brexit, and despite the travails of the Labour Party, their strategy failed. So why did this happen? The Conservative Party has approached this in totally the wrong way. They talk in brand language and with ad hoc policies, so trapped in the cosy Westminster bubble that they cannot fully understand how the rest of the country sees them. The motto at the 2017 Conservative Party Conference was Building a country that works for everyone, but this does not convince working class people in the north who see no or little improvement to their daily lives. I have seen many attempts by the Tories to woo working class voters with new policies. In the run-up to the 2017 election, they announced a bunch of giveaways which they thought might make a difference, such as new statutory rights for workers and extra worker protections. And how did that work out? I wouldnt be surprised if these didnt sway a single persons vote in the country; not a single one. That is because policies which the Conservatives think are important to northern communities make very little difference at all; the problem is not the Conservatives manifesto, but the Partys attitude and tone. Heres the evidence: if you show people Conservative Party policies without letting them know which party the policies belong to, most voters will say they will agree with them. They will rescind that as soon as you let them know its the Conservative Party. So whats the problem? Increasingly, when working class people watch or hear Conservative politicians, they feel that they are being talked down to, lectured by university-educated snobs who think they know what is best for the rest of the country, and who importantly dismiss working class peoples views as a result of a lack of education. The issue lies in the Partys image and how it communicates with voters, not the actual message. So why did northern, working class communities continue to vote Labour? Part of the reason was the Tories tactics towards Corbyn: attack him, portray him as dangerous, but dont take him on at debates. This strategy clearly backfired. Whilst I think Corbyn is indeed too big a risk and a victory for him would result in chaos for Britain, this sort of overt personal attack and snobbery only pushes voters to rebel. This political snobbery reached ascendancy under Cameron and Osborne and, although I was initially optimistic, we have only seen a further continuation under May. This was epitomised when she refused Corbyns offer of a televised debate during the campaign. The decision was foolish and sent the wrong message to voters: if a candidate truly believes they are more of a leader than their opponent, they must prove it. This, of course, has a policy dimension: on those issues of most importance to working class people Brexit and immigration the Conservative Party leadership is not only out of touch, they show an active disdain for working class views on these topics. The Conservative Party (and the Labour Party, too) has been captured and overtaken by a metropolitan elite. This explains why the Leave vote came as a particular shock to many within the Westminster bubble: step out of London and you gain a more accurate picture of the national feeling. The country is riven by a massive cultural and class divide. When working class people watch the Conservative Party leadership, they see people who do not look like them, do not sound like them, and do not have the same values as them. I know that working class people from the north like honesty and dislike pretence. We call a spade a spade. For example, on one of the key issues of immigration, the Tories say they want to control immigration but no one believes them. They think its all smoke and mirrors. This is because they know the Government is filled with politicians who want open borders, who will not control borders but will pretend they are. As a recent YouGov survey shows, 63 per cent of Conservative voters and 44 per cent of all voters think the Government is not strict enough on immigration The Conservative Party likes to talk up its working class credentials, but there are now very few people with working class backgrounds in the Cabinet or in ministerial positions. Indeed, all political parties focus so much energy on gender, race and LGBT diversity in their parties, but that same attention is not given to class diversity. How can the working class feel represented when they see a government not focusing on their issues? The promotion of Sajid Javid to Home Secretary is progress a working class Lancashire boy, son of a bus driver but such representation is still lacking across the Cabinet. If the Conservative Party wants to win over these voters it needs to have more voices that working people recognise and who values echo their own; but before the party can do that, it first needs to come to terms with the snobbery that prevents it from promoting just these people within its ranks. Only then can the Conservatives start making significant gains in Englands rust belt and truly become a party that works for everyone. Cannabis may or may not be a gateway drug, but the debate over legalising its medical use is certainly a gateway debate. Were this not so, the tale of Billy Caldwell, the boy who fell seriously ill after his medical cannabis was confiscated at Heathrow, would have gained far less media projection. On this site recently, Blair Gibbs suggested that legalising cannabis for medical use could lead to it being legalised for recreational use. Previously, Steve Moore recommended that it should be. This morning, William Hague weighs in, making much the same argument in his Daily Telegraph column thats to say, for a lawful, regulated market in the drug. In doing so, the former Party leader is blazing a trail: he knows perfectly well that the Prime Minister, lacking a majority for infinitely less contentious proposals, couldnt even begin to think about legalisation without a manifesto commitment, in the unlikely event of her being willing to do so in the first place. But just as the debate over the legalising cannabis for medical use is a gateway one, so the dispute over legalising it for recreational use is one, too. Admittedly, its legalisation for such use in some American state has been quarantined from the legalisation or decriminalisation of harder drugs. But discussion about both cannot ultimately be separated from the disputes about cannabis. The arguments that Hague makes about cannabis can be transposed to other illegal substances: that it is easily available; that it is stronger than it was, with grave consequences for public health; that the law is not always enforced; that prohibition is expensive; that the only beneficiaries are organised crime gangs. In any event, the gateway argument about cannabis use leading to harder drug use, plus the certainty that legalising it for recreational use would have knock-on effects, whatever those might be, on the remaining illegal drugs market means that the debate necessarily widens. Nor can considering this illegal market be separated from thinking about about the legal one. Like people in other advanced countries, Britons are huge users of legal drugs. The pharmaceutical industy is one of the countrys commercial success stories. Then there is the question of legal highs, in which inventive producers and consumers keep, very often, one step ahead of the law. The debate in one sense leads nowhere. This Government will not legalise cannabis for recreational use. End of discussion. Nor can the broad sweep of present policy be shown to be failing if consumption is the test: overall, illegal use has declined over the past ten years. But the matter cannot be brushed aside quite so easily. Easier availability of more illegal drugs over the past 50 years or so has affected public attitudes. Opinion polls tell us many things, but many show support for less restrictive approaches, though whether these might be legalisation or decriminalisation or a mix of both is unclear. Politicians are doing exactly what, at least in this case, cynics would expect them to do following, not leading: waiting, perhaps, for public opinion to reach a clear tipping-point, at least on cannabis. We make one additional point. Any eventual review of drugs policy as a whole must focus on collective consequences rather than individual rights. Potential reform has implications for children, including unborn ones, for parents, and for the places that might host drugs tourism in the event of changes to the law. It would also have consequences for taxpayers: whether savings on police and security costs would be outstripped by new healthcare costs, physical and mental, is a subject of fierce debate. As John Donne almost put it, no pothead is an island. In the event of the great national debate that were not having, public opinion might just swing behind a Swedish approach rather than a Portugese one thats to say, towards zero tolerance. But this is not the trend internationally. It is surely significant that the legal bars on cannabis are being breached in the very country whose puritan inheritance has driven the worldwide war on drugs namely, America. At any rate, Hague wont have forgotten from his own brush with cannabis in political terms, that is. When he was Conservative leader, Ann Widdecombe, then Shadow Home Secretary, backed raising fines for possession; inevitably, journalists swooped on Shadow Cabinet members; five of them then admitted to having smoked it in their younger days. We quote from a contemporary account: Letwin said he had tried the drug only by accident while at Cambridge University, because friends mixed some cannabis in with his pipe tobacco. 06/19/2018 Photo (c) Kaspars Grinvalds - Fotolia The summer travel season often means jammed airport terminals and oversold flights. When that happens, you might be asked to give up your seat and take a later flight. Should you, and how much compensation from the airline should you expect? Last year, United Airlines was the unwelcome focus of attention after a passenger, Dr. David Dao, was dragged off a flight after declining to give up his seat so that an airline employee could take his place. United, along with other airlines, immediately implemented changes in how they handle overbooked situations, in some cases increasing the incentives for booked passengers to voluntarily take a later flight. The GO Group surveyed a representative sample of air travelers to learn what consumers think they should get for accepting a bump. The opinions are widely divergent. Willingness to take the money "Perhaps the most surprising result of the survey was that only 22.6 percent of business travelers and 15.5 percent of leisure travelers were unwilling to give up their seats no matter how substantial the compensation, said John McCarthy, president of The GO Group. Given the complications of air travel today, we really expected more people to say 'thanks, but no thanks' if asked to give up their seats." Missing a scheduled flight could mean that the traveler has to scramble to rearrange connecting flights. On the other hand, airlines may be willing to pay travelers more for their trouble. In terms of compensation, 42.5 percent of leisure travelers would settle for $750 to give up their seat. However, only 27 percent of business travelers thought that amount was adequate. Business travelers generally said they would hold out for more, with nearly 15 percent saying $2,000 would be fair compensation. Only 7 percent of leisure travelers said they would ask for that much. All consumers generally agreed that the level of compensation should be based on the inconvenience caused by taking another flight. Passengers rights Since the chances are increasing that you'll be asked to surrender your seat on a flight, it pays to know what the airline can legally do, and your rights as a passenger. For example, airlines are required to seek volunteers who are willing to be bumped before involuntarily bumping someone from a flight. Involuntarily-bumped passengers must also receive written notice of their rights. In 2017, the Department of Transportation fined Frontier Airlines for violating both of those rules. Airlines generally look for volunteers to give up oversold seats before they board the aircraft. The Department of Transportation suggests asking a couple of questions before deciding whether to accept the airline's offer. When is the next flight on which the airline can confirm your seat? The alternate flight may be just as acceptable to you. On the other hand, if the airline offers to put you on standby on another flight that's full, you could be stranded. Will the airline provide other amenities such as free meals, a hotel room, transfers between the hotel and the airport, and a phone card? If not, you might have to spend the money it offers you on food or lodging while you wait for the next flight. Remember that the government has not mandated the form or amount of compensation that airlines offer to volunteers, so it is up to passengers to try to negotiate the best deal possible with the airline. SUBSCRIBE Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates straight in your inbox. AKWESASNE, The Mohawk Council of Akwesasne (MCA) approved the Seaway Claim Settlement Agreement on June 11, 2018. The MCA will now be conducting community consultation sessions with its members before the agreement is put to a final vote in a referendum. Over the past two and half years, Council has devoted substantial resources to resolve this 42 year-old grievance. The MCA negotiating team should be commended for their efforts to reach a settlement with representatives of Canada, said Grand Chief Abram Benedict. The proposed settlement will be the subject of in-depth community education. Once that is complete, the MCA will hold a referendum to determine whether or not the community approves the agreement. The settlement includes $45 million work of compensation in addition to the return of lands along the Seaway Bridge corridor. Lands around the perimeter of Kawehno:ke, known as the Block 1 Lands, were already set to be returned to Akwesasne through the Additions-to-Reserve process, the MCA press release reads. The MCA and Canada have now reached agreement on the return additional lands in the bridge corridor on Kawehno:ke. The MCA state in their press release to the media that the Seaway Expansion project and the construction of the Moses-Saunders Power Dam in the 1950s seriously damaged their communitys lands and way of life. In 2008, the MCA reached an agreement with the Ontario Power Generation (OPG) that saw a $46 million settlement paid to the MCA for the Power Dam project. That settlement money was used to create the Mohawks of Akwesasne Community Settlement Trust. With the completion of negotiations with Canada, Akwesasne is close to a resolution of an historical grievance that will help our community to heal and move forward, said Benedict. The final referendum vote on the federal settlement will happen later in 2018. CORNWALL, Ontario A 41-year-old Morrisburg man was arrested on June 18th, 2018 and charged with breach of undertaking for contacting his ex-girlfriend. It is alleged on June 13, 2018 the man called his ex-girlfriend despite his conditions. Police were contacted and an investigation ensued. On June 18, 2018 the man attended police headquarters to deal with the matter. He was taken into custody, charged accordingly and held for a bail hearing. His name was not released as the conditions stem from a domestic incident and would identify the victim in the matter. CORNWALL, Ontario A 25-year-old Cornwall man was arrested on June 18, 2018 and charged with breach of undertaking for contacting his ex-girlfriend. It is alleged on June 5, 2018 the man contacted his ex-girlfriend despite his conditions. Police were contacted and an investigation ensued. On June 18, 2018 the man attended police headquarters to deal with the matter. He was taken into custody, charged accordingly and held for a bail hearing. His name was not released as the conditions stem from a domestic incident and would identify the victim in the matter. CORNWALL, Ontario Christopher Lynch, 31, of Cornwall was arrested on June 18, 2018 and charged with breach of recognizance for contacting a certain person and being outside of his residence without his surety. It is alleged on June 18, 2018 the man attended the residence of a certain person, despite having conditions to not communicate with that person. Police were contacted and an investigation ensued. During the investigation the man was taken into custody, charged accordingly and held for a bail hearing. BREACH, CRIMINAL HARASSMENT CORNWALL, Ontario A 23-year-old Cornwall man was arrested on June 18, 2018 and charged with breach of a non communication order for having communicated with his girlfriend. The man was also charged with criminal harassment and breach of probation for failing to keep the peace. It is alleged between February and March, 2018 the man repeatedly contacted his girlfriend, despite being on conditions not to communicate with her. Police were contacted and an investigation ensued. On June 18, 2018 a member of the Cornwall Community Police Service attended the Cornwall Courthouse as the man was in custody on an unrelated matter. He was charged accordingly and remained in custody to await a bail hearing. His name was not released as it would identify the victim in the incident. CALLS FOR SERVICE There were 67 calls for service in the City of Cornwall in the last 24 hours (8 am the previous day to 8 am the day of the release). To see whats happening in your neighbourhood visit our Crime Plot Map. CCPS reserves the right not to post all calls for service in order to protect the identity of the victims. Editor's note: "Words from Wiechers" is a series considering the lessons we, as an industry, can learn from the late Johann Wiechers, Ph.D. He was an advisor, colleague, leader and "disruptive force" (in a positive way) in cosmetic science. Presenting his insights is IFSCC education chair, Anthony J. O'Lenick, Jr. This is the fifth in a series of articles discussing concepts presented by the late Johann Wiechers, Ph.D. It is my desire to inspire members of our industry with these words of wisdom from an icon. The present discussion, related to chapter 46 of his book, Memories of a Cosmetically Disturbed Mind, relates to an apparently inherent difference between the pharmaceutical world in which Wiechers was trained and the cosmetic world, to which he so heavily contributed. Making Claims A consummate and well-trained Ph.D. pharmacist, Wiechers was interested in the claims made for cosmetic products and the substantiation of those claims. He always insisted the cosmetics arena should take claims substantiation to the same degree as taken by the drug world. Log in or Subscribe for FREE to read the full story. He was fast to point out that some claims are simply related to advertising and strictly emotive. There are also ingredient claims, which rely on the assumption that an ingredient's presence in a formula translates its activity to the whole of the product formula. Further, product claims are made stating that the formula, in its entirety, delivers an effect or helps to deliver an effect that is not isolated to a specific raw material. Despite which type of claim, Wiechers advocated for full, data-driven claims substantiation. This requires insight about how we test for claims as well as agreement for how we test and confirm these claimsensuring we have a have a high degree of meaning when claims are made and that claims can be proven when subjected to scrutiny. Mind Over Matter Johann often said: What do you do if there are no active ingredients in your formulation? Is everything active? This concept requires closer consideration. For instance, the use of cosmetic products could, in fact, provide benefits that are not only a function of the actives contained in the product, but also an effect due to product application and/or anticipated benefits expected by the consumer. The effect of the mind on the body is well-documented. Touch is known to either increase or decrease oxytocin levels in individuals, depending upon the attitude of the person being touched toward the person doing the touching. Hugging induces oxytocin, the bonding hormone, which is renowned for reducing stress, lowering cortisol levels and increasing a sense of trust and security. As an example, according to research from the University of North Carolina, women who receive more hugs from their partners have lower heart rates and blood pressure, and higher levels of oxytocin.1 Approaches to providing such cosmetic benefits and claims to prove these benefits are still being debated; nonetheless, they are significant. This makes testing and its conditions, including the placebo choice, crucial. Placebo Power Regarding placebos, Wiechers noted: "The modern meaning of the word placebo has, however, also been surrounded by lamentations. In 1939, the Italian physician Fieschi introduced a technique for patients with angina pectoris in which he blocked two internal mammary arteries so that more oxygen would become available to the heart. Dramatic improvements were seen: three-quarters of patients showed an improvement and one-quarter was cured. Due to this success, this technique became the standard surgery practice for the next 20 years. "In 1956, the American surgeon Leonard Cobb had doubts about the technique and decided to check the validity of this intervention by performing two types of surgery. In a group of nine patients, he made the incisions but did nothing more than that whereas in a second group of eight patients, he performed the full Fieschi technique. Again, results were dramatic. Similar improvements were seen in both groupsand that was the end of the Fieschi technique and the beginning of the documented surgical placebo effect. "Ever since these days, every decently performed clinical study must be placebo-controlled. In addition, it must be performed double-blind. Both the investigator as well as the subject should not know which treatment is received to eliminate any form of bias, so we can be completely sure about the true biological effect of a treatment, and do not confuse our data by allowing a suggestive component to play a role. "This is indeed important; after all, Henry K. Beecher, in his 1955 paper, 'The Powerful Placebo,' attributed roughly 30% of overall therapeutic benefits to the placebo effect. That paper, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, described medicinal researchand were working in cosmetics where suggestion is definitely and deliberately a part of the equation!" "Some people do not understand. . . [The belief] that every product should be tested against a placebo, irrespective of the circumstances, is understandable but wrong." Cosmetic vs. Placebo In cosmetic research, selecting a formulation to act as a control is problematic. As Wiechers observed, "If you claim your product is better at providing X than the leading product on the market, then you need to test it against that product and measure the development of X in both cases. "If you claim that your active ingredient is causing X, as is often the case with suppliers, you should test it against the placebo, so that the only difference between the active formulation and placebo formulation is, indeed, the active ingredient. "But, if you claim that your complete formulation is causing X, then X should be tested with and without use of the product for which the claim is made. In other words, it should be tested against nothing, or if you want to make things more difficult for yourself, against the current usual routine of the volunteers (without defining or describing it). "This is exactly what some people do not understand. They claim that every product should be tested against a placebo, i.e, the same formulation without the active ingredient, irrespective of the circumstances, [which is found by reading the claims. This is] understandable but wrong." Is Everything Active? Wiechers continued, "As critics continue to press for the need for me to test my product against a placebo, another interesting issue is raised. What do you do if there is no active ingredient in your formulation? [Does everything become] active? (Because, after all, the formulation does have an effect). "Is isopropyl myristate or mineral oil an active if it helps to moisturize the skin but that activity is not claimed? What do we do if an active is incorporated in an emollient that helps to moisturize the skin and, in doing so, increases the skin penetration of this active? Has the emollient now become an active? "One thing is clear, such a base without actives is not without efficacy; but what is the placebo? That base will definitely have a measurable placebo effect. But how you design your test depends on your claim and not the other way around. Wiechers therefore responded to would-be critics with: "No, highly-esteemed reviewers, this is wrong, as I was not claiming that my active was causing the effect (I had already done that in previous clinical trials) but that the clinical efficacy of an active is determined by the remainder of the formulation. "Yet, when pointing out to the reviewer that (s)he had probably misunderstood the objective of my studies, the [imagined] answer was authoritative: 'In proper research, everything is tested against a placebo.'" Wiechers then argued one could not test it against a placebo because every formulation was different. "Testing against a placebo is completely correct if you want to show that a drug or an active is responsible for the effect. But if you are testing whether or not a complete formulation that you are selling is effective (unless you are a supplier selling an active ingredient), you should be testing against untreated skin. Against nothing." The Lesson Mark Chandler, a longtime colleague and friend of Wiechers from his days at ICI/Uniqema/Crodawho is also carrying on Wiechers's legacy of "Formulating for Efficacy" (see software website)points out: "Viewed another way, from the perspective of regulators [and retired formulating expert Ken Klein], nothing in a cosmetic product is an active ingredient. So as [Wiechers] also describes, there are two levels of studies [to conduct] for cosmetic actives. The first, to be done by ingredient suppliers, is to show intrinsic and then model (drug) effects; followed sometimes by a clinical trial, which can be a very simple emulsion or solution base that has already proven not to provide the desired effect. "The consumer-ready formulation for testing should be optimized, ... going head-to-head with a competitive formulation to see whether the total package makes people feel and look better." Reference A key channel partner said the latest development in the Fujifilm-Xerox saga that Fujifilm is suing Xerox for $1 billion-plus is likely to have no impact on sales. Josh Justice, president of Just-Tech, in LaPlata, Md., said the last six months of announcements, rebuttals, and court fights, have taught him that it just doesnt affect sales performance. Our Xerox hardware equipment sales are actually up year-to-date, Justice told CRN. I was personally surprised back in January with the first announcement, and with the latest news it sort of loses some of its shock factor. Its clear, no matter how this ends up, there will still be a Xerox making multifunction printers and copiers and there will still be a need for channel partners. [Related: CRN Interview: Xerox Channel Chief On Leadership Changes, 'Doubling Down' On Partners And Taking Share From Competitors] Fujifilm yesterday filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, in which it blames activist investors for scuttling the deal with Xerox. The Japanese company said it is suing Xerox for $1 billion in damages for its lost profit opportunities. Two men, Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, waged a months-long battle to break up the deal and unseat ex-Xerox CEO Jeff Jacobson, who negotiated it. On May 13, citing a failure to provide financial records, Xerox did indeed back out of the redemption agreement and a share subscription agreement it had negotiated with Fujifilm. At the time, Xerox said it was doing do because Fujifilm had failed to provide promised financial records. However in their complaint, Fuji called that stated reason false and pretextual. The true reason for Xeroxs purported termination of the SSA and RA is the simple truth that the Xerox Board changed its mind as induced by Deason and Icahn, Fujifilm wrote in their complaint. Xerox, Fuji says, has deprived Fujifilm shareholders of the billions of dollars in synergies that both parties expected, and in doing so has damaged Fujifilm in an amount estimated to exceed $1 billion. In its own statement, released hours after Fujifilm filed suit, Xerox rejected the notion that it was in breach of contract when it stepped away from the deal. We remain extremely confident that the former Board correctly exercised its clear contractual right to validly terminate the transaction agreements due to, among other things, the continuously expanding unresolved accounting issues at Fuji Xerox, the statement reads. Xerox will vigorously defend its decision and pursue any and all remedies available to Xerox arising from Fujifilms mismanagement and misconduct. Under the terms of the deal announced in January, Fujifilm would have given Xerox 100 percent ownership of Fuji Xerox, and Xerox shareholders would have received a $9.80 per share dividend payment financed through debt of the newly formed company. In exchange, Fujifilm would own 50.1 percent of the American copier icon. Icahn and Deason demanded a better deal, and sued in New York state court to block it from happening. The pair convinced a New York judge to order an injunction that halted the sale on April 27. Xerox capitulated to Icahn and Deason about two weeks later. In addition to the $1 billion in damages, Fuji is also demanding Xerox pay a $183 million termination fee, as outlined in their share subscription agreement, negotiated as part of the proposed sale. Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri Monday told several thousand attendees at the company's Global Partner Summit 2018 kickoff session that he is committed to doing more business "with and through" partners in the future. "This has been a company that has been built with our partners," said Neri in a question and answer session with HPE Worldwide Channel Chief Paul Hunter at the general session at the Sands Expo convention center. "It is a partner led company. We continue to be that way. We are not changing that strategy. If anything we want to do more with you, through you. I always say I consider you as part of my sales force." [Related: HPE Discover 2018 Coverage ] In his first appearance at Global Partner Summit since becoming CEO on Feb. 1, Neri said he is commited to giving partners the same sales training as HPE's direct sales force. "Whatever I do to train my sales people whether you are an account manager, pre-sales or solution architect- I am treating you the exact same way," he told partners. At the recent HPE Aspire technical conference 30 percent of the attendees were partners. That commitment to making partners an extension of the sales force was on full display at the Global Partner Summit with HPE unveiling HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity a channel model breakthrough that opens the door for partners to sell on premises HPE infrastructure in a pay per use model. The public cloud busting compensation backed by HPE Pointnext provides partners with a whopping five times the rebate incentive that they would get in a traditional Capex deal. Neri said GreenLake Flex Capacity is a great example of HPE innovating not just on the technology front, but with business models. "Today it is not just about the technology," he told partners. "It is about the economic value that we will bring with you." Neri said he is also committed to making it simpler for partners to engage with HPE. "We know today we still have a lot of friction in the system," he said. "That is why we are making a significant investment to simplify our company." That simplification means improving "the processes and systems" with regard to how partners do business with HPE. "Over the next nine quarters, you are going to see a tremendous amount of change in the way we engage with you and the way we drive the business," Neri told partners. HPE Chief Sales Officer Phil Davis, who outlined the company's high growth, high margin sales strategy, told partners that he would like to drive HPE's total sales through partners from 70 percent to 80 percent. "My aspiration- my goal- is to get us to more than 80 percent through the channel everywhere in the world," said Davis to loud applause from partners. The 80 percent drive comes off a first half of the fiscal year in which HPE sales through partners were up 27 percent adding $277 million in sales to the company, said Hunter. Overall HPE grew in the first six months of its fiscal year at more than $1 billion (from $13.71 billion to $15.1 billion), said Hunter. "That's more than NetApp, more than Nutanix, more than Pure (Storage), more than Cisco, more than the four of them combined," said Hunter. In fact, Hunter displayed a rolling list of partners throughout the world that grew by more than $1 million doubling their business in the first half of the year. "It's a long list," he said. "I'd like to thank you all.Together we are changing the world." Partners, for their part, said they see HPE out-innovating and delivering flat out better economics than competitors. "There is no one that is innovating more or partnering better than HPE," said Rich Baldwin, chief strategy officer at Nth Generation Computing, one of HPE's top enterprise partners headquartered in San Diego, Calif. "They have the best product portfolio they have ever had. They are head and shoulders above everyone else." Baldwin said Nth Generation is particularly pumped up about the ability to drive the on premises pay per use infrastructure with HPE GreenLake Flex Capacity. "We see GreenLake as having huge growth potential for us," he said. "We can now make great money and have control of the account. Basically we are getting paid everything up front as if we just made a massive hardware sales." Nth Generation, in fact, recently closed a $1.2 million, three year GreenLake Flex Capacity deal with a hospital at a 20 percent plus margin, said Baldwin. That GreenLake deal involved the company's CEO and board of directors, said Baldwin. "This deal is giving that customer the ability to adapt their infrastructure in real time," he said. "Its the right thing for the customer. It's easy for the customer to fund this as an ongoing operating expense as opposed to having to get a capital investment approved. This is a massive opportunity. This is better for both customers and partners." Ron Nemecek, business alliance manager for OnX, a CBTS company, a top HPE enterprise partner, called GreenLake Flex Capacity an "innovative game changer" for customers and partners. "We are not talking about what is the next intelligent edge device or what is the next processor," he said. "We are talking about true business outcomes with customers. These are things that really matter to them: how they get compensated and deliver services to their customers, how they innovate in their organizations. This is what customers need from us. They don't need another widget. They need something that is going to help them change their business in a way they have never been able to change before." The GreenLake model, in fact, is opening the door for customers to utilize resources and capital to drive competitive advantage rather than on IT systems, said Nemecek. Pat O'Connor, senior director of business alliances for OnX, said GreenLake Flex Capacity strikes at the heart of what customers are demanding in a pay per use world. "This is what customers are asking for," he said. "This is what customers are telling us will produce better business outcomes for them." Lexmark has launched a massive product refresh, revamping its portfolio with smarter printers that boast speed, durability, and incorporate apps designed to better integrate the products into todays workplace. "This is the largest product launch in our history, all consolidated at one point in time," Lexmark Director of Global Business Development Chris White told CRN during a sneak peek of the new lineup at the company's offices in New York. "It is a massive undertaking, but it brings a lot of excitement and good news for us." The new products will populate the entire range of Lexmark printers and multi-function devices, in color and monochrome models designed for small business up to large workgroups, the company said. In describing the new offerings, Lexmark executives frequently used the phrases future-proof and overbuilt to describe the features on these machines, which, depending on the model can print up to 70 pages-per-minute, and spit the first page out four seconds after the user hits "print." Its a good time for Lexmark, said Sammy Kinlaw, worldwide vice president of channel and OEM sales at Lexmark. Its a good time for the channel to become more aware. We have a lot of work to do in front of us, but these products open the door. Digital to paper and back to digital remains a key element in print strategies for many industries, such as banking and government, White said. With that in mind, the new lineup boasts a single-pass duplex scanner on monochrome MFPs that can input 150 pages per minute, and includes optical character recognition software. Leigh Anne Belcher, manager of global product marketing for large workgroup platforms at Lexmark, oversees the monochrome devices. She said this newest line of products also has increased durability for deployment in unforgiving environments, with a range of temperatures, and altitudes, with no less forgiving users. Gone are the plastic frames of the past, she said. Now all Lexmark models are built with steel frames, and a ruggedness demonstrated when Belcher opened the door to the toner cartridge and heaved, lifting the device by using the door as a lever. Some of our large customers have these situated places where theyre sitting on a floor, or theyre shoved in a cabinet and that drives behavior like kicking the drawer closed," she said. "So to support those needs of those harsh environments weve made a number of enhancements to this category of product, one of the largest being a move away from plastic frames on our current products to steel frames across this line." With the bulk of print jobs numbered at between three to 10 pages, Lexmark said, end-user productivity is not improved once a product can print between 60 and 70 pages per minute. So the focus for engineers became getting the print job out faster. That time to first page and print release requirement was more important to many customers than how many pages per minute it runs, Belcher said. They put a key focus on reducing that and getting it down to four seconds. Thats the fastest time to first page claim that there is in this class of products. Thats a best in class for us. Ron Wells, manager global product marketing for small workgroup platforms at Lexmark said the color units clock a time to first page at seven seconds and print at a speed up to 40 pages per minute. Wells, who runs those printers, said the entire line is built to grow with a company. Theres really a common theme where we simplified the overall experience from the end-users aspect, said Wells, adding, with improved imaging unit life, with extra-long yield so theyre not interacting with the device, improvement to the paper path, and overall reliability and improved touch screen capability on these devices to have a more omni-experience with what they would have in a working on their tablet or mobile phone. Maxta Chief Marketing Office Barry Phillips says the hyper-converged software specialist has a leg up over competitor Nutanix through its pre-configured systems, support of mixed applications on the same cluster and its overall software business model. "We're really the only vendor out there -- whether its technology or even organizationally -- where a customer can go in [and] download the software, put it into production, buy pre-configured systems, put those into production, and put everything together," said Phillips in an interview with CRN. Maxta's hyperconvergence software supports every major server brand -- including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell EMC and Cisco -- as well as multiple hypervisors and containers. Maxta customers can choose software only or have the software pre-installed on existing server platforms. [Related: The Booming Data Center Market: A Look At Hyperscale Spending As It Explodes To An All-Time High ] Another key market differentiator for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor is that Maxta does not have a software refresh tax. "There's no refresh tax which means you own that software license for life," Phillips said. "With an appliance model you have to essentially repurchase that software license every time you refresh. With Maxta you can refresh as many times as you want." Phillips said Maxta's software can reduce capital and operating costs by up to 70 percent and free businesses from the refresh and upgrade cycles of traditional storage vendors. The company has also been diving deeper into the channel community this year. This month, Maxta joined forces with distributor Arrow Electronics to offer hyper-converged bundled, pre-configured systems on servers from Dell, Intel, Lenovo and Supermicro that solution providers can sell. "From a channel partner side, now you can lead with a pre-configured system on any number of server brands and buy that from Arrow," said Phillips. Cisco Systems has named a 17-year company veteran with channel and sales leadership bona fides to its top Americas sales post, the company said. Jeff Sharritts was officially named to the senior vice president, Americas post, a position last held by Alison Gleeson, who announced her departure in May. Sharritts has been Cisco senior vice president of U.S. sales for the last four years. His appointment to the top Americas sales job was made by global sales leader Gerri Elliott. Sharritts has held a variety of sales positions at Cisco, including manager of channel operations from 2003 to 2006, as well as regional sales leadership positions in the West and South. He was made senior vice president of U.S. sales in 2014. [Related: Cisco's Changing Of The Guard: 8 Executive Moves That Illustrate CEO Robbins' Software-Centric Push] "He spent many years in channels, and he gets partners, and that's good compared to bringing in someone from outside," said Faisal Bhutto, executive vice president, enterprise networking, cloud and cybersecurity at Computex, a Houston solution provider that works with Cisco. "His commercial team ran well in the South, so we look forward to him leading the national charge." "He gets the Cisco culture and has been there for years," Bhutto said. "He can help [Chairman and CEO] Chuck [Robbins] with the transition that Cisco is going through. Alison did a great job, and this ensures continuity." Gleeson, a 22-year Cisco veteran held in high regard by solution providers, announced last month that she would leave the top Americas sales job, but would stay on through July to help with the transition. There was speculation that Gleeson was a candidate for the top global sales job when Chris Dedicoat left that position last December. The company in late March hired former Juniper Networks executive vice president Elliott to fill the Dedicoat vacancy. In a statement to CRN, Cisco said, "For nearly 23 years, Alison has been instrumental in driving Cisco's growth and pushing the company forward. By constantly listening to our customers and advocating for our partners, Alison has built an incredible legacy. She'll truly be missed, and we wish her the best in the next chapter of her journey." CrowdStrike has received an additional $200 million in private equity funding to further accelerate global demand for the company's endpoint protection platform as the cybersecurity firm contemplates an initial public offering. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said it has notched a valuation in excess of $3 billion following the Series E financing round led by New York-based growth equity firm General Atlantic, Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm Accel, and Menlo Park, Calif.-based IVP. CrowdStrike said it has doubled both its revenue and headcount in the year leading up to the latest round of funding, according to the firm. The company declined to disclose current revenue figures. "A lot of new investors look at us as the ones who could really be the breakout company in security from a platform perspective," George Kurtz, CrowdStrike's co-founder and CEO, told CRN. "There's a lot of excitement around what we are doing." [RELATED: RSA 2018: 15 Top Executives On The Single Biggest Security-Related Threat Businesses Face Today] CrowdStrike plans to use some of the proceeds to redouble its investments around sales, marketing and enablement for the channel, focused on arming partners with the right information to clearly articulate the value of the company's offering, Kurtz said. Specifically, Kurtz said CrowdStrike would like to enable partners to conduct business value assessments, which can be used to demonstrate the economies of scale and positive payback associated with migrating from legacy to cloud-based offerings. The assessments are typically done today by CrowdStrike's internal sales team. The company also hopes to expand its joint marketing activities with partners both within and outside of the United States, Kurtz said. The joint marketing will be intended to help customers understand the differences and nuances between CrowdStrike's platform and what its competitors are offering. "It's such a busy, noisy market. Everything sounds the same," Kurtz told CRN. "But not every endpoint is created equally." CrowdStrike plans to add more employees around both go-to-market and engineering to ensure that the company's technology remains cutting-edge, according to Kurtz. "We believe that the best technology wins, surrounded by the best services," Kurtz said. CrowdStrike has now hauled in $481 million in six funding rounds since the company was founded just seven years ago. That's at least $180 million more than what next-generation endpoint security competitors Cybereason, Cylance, Endgame, or SentinelOne have been able to raise. "It takes a lot of effort, engineering time and cost to build that [platform of ours] up," Kurtz said. "Our competitors don't have the architecture and personnel to build such an elaborate system, and there's a lot of expense that goes into building it." Kurtz said CrowdStrike's cloud-native, API-driven architecture stands apart from the single-tenant offerings of next-generation endpoint security competitors who are, for instance, focused only on loading up instances of Amazon. The competing architectures aren't cloud-native, don't scale as well, and can become very costly to manage and maintain, according to Kurtz. The company and its more than 1,000 employees have established a strong foothold with the large enterprise, serving 20 percent of the Fortune 500 and 16 percent of the Fortune 1000. CrowdStrike has also enjoyed triple-digit growth in its annual recurring revenue, new subscription bookings, number of subscription customers, and the number of annual transactions in excess of $1 million. It's not uncommon for companies to do a big private funding round before a potential initial public offering, and Kurtz said CrowdStrike continues to have the opportunity to go public in the future. "We're to the scale and scale where we could be a public company, and we're being courted pretty heavily in that arena," Kurtz said. "This just bolsters our balance sheet, and gives us a lot of flexibility and options in the future." CrowdStrike's platform is powered by artificial intelligence and processes more than 100 billion security events daily to stop all attack types, including never-before-seen cyber threats. The company's AI engine can make more than 2.3 million decisions each second, boosting real-time threat protection with speed and accuracy. The company said it's breach prevention capabilities have become increasingly important as the lines blur between nation-state and criminal adversaries and the threat landscape becomes more global and dangerous. And CrowdStrike's Series E round of funding should only accelerate the growth of the company's operations and the pace of its innovation and technology development. Other firms contributing to the latest round include Sonica Monica, Calif.-based venture capital firm March Capital Partners and Alphabet-backed growth equity firm CapitalG. Other prominent investors in CrowdStrike over the course of its history include New York-based private equity firm Warburg Pincus, San Antonio, Texas-based IT services provider Rackspace, and Sydney, Australia-based Telstra Ventures. CrowdStrike has excelled at creating a lot of visibility and awareness for machine learning-based insights, according to Michael Knight, president and CTO of Greenville, S.C.-based CrowdStrike partner Encore Technology Group. Knight would like to see CrowdStrike leverage the influx of capital to bring continuity across all of their interfaces and creates a more bundled approach to their offering. In addition to consolidating and creating commonality among their management interfaces, Knight hopes that CrowdStrike puts more field resources in place for channel partners to take advantage of. Knight would also like to see CrowdStrike make investments around management consoles, apps, APIs, and multi-tenancy capabilities to make it easier for customers to adopt the company's cloud offering. Alongside consolidating the company's hybrid and public cloud interfaces, Knight said that leveraging network architectures would enable CrowdStrike to provide better perimeter protection in the cloud. "It's obviously very clear to the industry and analysts that they are going to be a player," Knight said. "CrowdStrike wouldn't have achieved that [funding] if they didn't have an industry-leading solution." High Impact The market for intelligent edge solutions and the partner-led services that support them is moving fast, and picking up speed. Keerti Melkote, co-founder and president of HPE's Aruba networking business, argues that the next five years will be critical for channel partners as customers get serious about digital transformation. HPE Aruba's strategy centers on the intelligent edge, the ability to gather and act upon data coming from all points in a business's network, and Melkote said the rush to those capabilities means "the faster our partners can transform themselves to offer a managed service around the solution, the more impactful it will be for customers," he said. "It's very timely. The market is moving now. The next five years is where most of the money is going to be made here." What follows is an edited excerpt of Melkote's conversation with CRN. Princess Cruises Golden Princess will return to Melbourne in October for her summer 2018-2019 season with an array of new features following a multi-million dollar refurbishment last month as the line prepares to celebrate 10 years since their first summer season from Victoria. The Golden Princess will complete nine roundtrip itineraries from Melbourne to New Zealand as part of Princess biggest ever New Zealand season, the company said. The Golden Princess now hosts transformed youth centers as part Princess Discovery at Sea program. Designed in partnership with Discovery, the company announced. Princess Cruises is the leading cruise line in Melbourne having carried more than 250,000 Victorians on cruises sailing from the city since 2008, the only cruise line committed to Melbourne for the last 10 years. said Senior Vice President Princess Cruises Asia Pacific, Stuart Allison. Multi-gen cruising is on the rise and opens up an easy way for families to access some of Australias favorite holiday destinations, such as New Zealand. Golden Princess will arrive in Melbourne with a host of new features for family cruising, enabling loved ones to create fun and enriching memories during their cruise holiday. The Golden Princess will also be among the first in the Princess fleet to roll out the latest update of Princess celebrated Across the Ditch program, designed to further immerse guests in New Zealand culture and cuisine. The enriched program will continue to offer uniquely New Zealand experiences through a series of interactive and onboard and shore activities. In preparation for Golden Princess Melbourne homeport, celebrity Italian chef Angelo Auriana partnered with Princess Cruises to enhance the lines signature Italian restaurant, Sabatinis Italian Trattoria. New menu offerings at Sabatinis Italian Trattoria include non-traditional ingredients, and feature handmade pasta dishes inspired by family recipes from Italian chefs across the Princess fleet. Favourite dishes include; risotto made with vialone nano rice, beets dolce latte, gorgonzola and pistachios and Roman seafood al Cartoccio with grouper, shrimp, black mussels, scallops, potato and artichoke. Additional enhanced features onboard Golden Princess include a grand new Movies Under the Stars screen where guests will be treated to premium picture, with extreme wide-angel and advanced outdoor light sensors delivering double the image quality of the previous system. In addition every cabin has been fitted with the award-winning Princess Luxury Bed which has been developed exclusively for Princess by US sleep expert Dr Michael Breus to deliver the most comfortable and rejuvenating sleep at sea. Its not every day that you see an individuals professional career stymied and potentially derailed because of envy or possessiveness, but that is exactly what happened to Eric Abramovitz. Abramovitz is a professional musician and gifted clarinetist who is currently performing with the Nashville Symphony and soon to be joining the Montreal Symphony. But his road to success was bumpy and had a few hairpin curves thrown in for flavor when he found himself the victim business email compromise via the ultimate insider betrayal. That someone was Jennifer (Jooyeon) Lee, a flutist and a former girlfriend of Abramovitz. On June 13, 2018, Judge D.L Corbett of the Superior Court of Ontario, Canada, issued a default judgement against her and ordered her to pay Abramovitz $350,000 in punitive and aggravated damages for her role in sabotaging Abramovitz's educational and career opportunities. What led to the email compromise and fraud A review of the court documents from the Superior Court provide to us the sordid details of what happened. Abramovitz and Lee met in September 2013 at McGill University. They hit it off, and within a short period of time had segued to an intimate relationship. By mid-October 2013, Abramovitz was staying at Lees apartment virtually full-time. Abramovitz shared his laptop and his passwords with Lee, and when 2014 rolled around, they were recognized as a couple. But apparently the pathway to tranquility had some hidden speed bumps. Abramovitz's ambitions and Lee's desires were not aligned. In early December 2013, Abramovitz applied to study under maestro Yehuda Gilad at the Coburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles. If he were one of the two selected, he would receive a full scholarship, including tuition, room and board, and a living stipend to cover meals and incidentals. He passed through the pre-screening interviews and was invited to Los Angeles to audition in February 2014. At the audition, he was told he would receive a decision by April 1, 2014. And he did receive an email from Coburn and Gilad -- well, perhaps more precisely, his email account received the decision. Deceit and trust out the door Gilad wrote to Abramovitz on March 27, 2014, advising that Coburn had accepted Abramovitzs application and that they were offering him a place to study with Gilad and the full scholarship. The doors of opportunity had opened for Abramovitz. Unbeknownst to Abramovitz, his girlfriend was monitoring his email and intercepted the acceptance note from Gilad. She responded, the court documents tell us, and declined the scholarship and opportunity to study under Gilad. She then deleted the email exchange. To close the loop, and provide Abramovitz with the expected email and to preclude his following up with Gilad directly, Lee took the subterfuge to another level. She created a Gmail account called giladyhuda09 and sent an email to Abramovitz informing him that he was not selected, but perhaps a $5,000 scholarship at University of Southern California would be of interest. In 2014, USCs tuition was a mere $51,000 per year. Lee knew Abramovitz would decline the offer, and his email sent to that effect went to Lees bogus email account. This is a clear case of business email compromise, which we see so often involving real estate or other engagement where the perpetrator is trying to have the victim send funds. In this instance, though, the attempt was to dupe both parties and keep them from collaborating. Lee impersonated both Gilad and Abramovitz, and she did this so Abramovitz would not leave Montreal. If he stayed, her hope was that her relationship would continue, which she feared would not be the case if Abramovitz moved to Los Angeles. Abramovitz lost the two-year scholarship and stayed at McGill University and obtained his Bachelor of Music degree. Abramovitz and Lee broke up Lee aware of her subterfuge, Abramovitz blissfully ignorant. How the fraud was discovered Both Gilad and Abramovitz moved along, thinking each had declined to work/study with the other. Abramovitz, unable to afford USCs Masters program (and study with Gilad), applied for and was accepted into a two-year Graduate Certificate in Performance program at USC. This certificate program afforded some, but not much access, to Gilad. Abramovitz went to Los Angeles on his own dime. Gilads statement explained the lost opportunities experience by Abramovitz due to the deception. Abramovitz was the victim of such an unthinkable, immoral act that delayed his progress and advancement as an up-and-coming young musician and delayed his embarking on his promising career. Speaking to BuzzFeed, Abramovitz explained how when he and Gilad had first encountered each other at the audition for the Graduate Certificate, the meeting was filled with tension. Each challenging the other as to why they had rejected the other. They didnt resolve it during this encounter and both left frustrated. A few months later, one of Gilads students asked Abramovitz why he turned down the scholarship to Coburn? It was then that Abramovtiz forwarded the rejection email to Gilads correct email and learned Gilad did not sent that email. Abramovitz investigated. Abramovitz pulled up Gmail account and tried a password that Lee had previously shared with him, and it opened the account. There it was: His by-then ex-girlfriend had created the fake Gilead email account. He confronted Lee, who denied everything and then blocked him on all social media. Abramovitz said their contact has been limited and through lawyers. He described feeling as if Lee had executed a stab to the heart and back. His career is now back on track, and he has a new girlfriend. Peoples United Financial, parent company to Peoples United Bank, is acquiring Farmington Bank and its parent company First Connecticut Bancorp, in a stock transaction valued at $544 million. The Bridgeport-based company announced Tuesday that it has entered into an agreement with Farmington Bank to absorb the Hartford County entities. The transaction is expected to close by the end of this year, strengthening Peoples Uniteds foundation within Connecticut. Were excited about the opportunity, said CEO Jack Barnes. We are very active in the Hartford County market in Connecticut and actually have great familiarity with the market and have always viewed Farmington Bank as a well-run institution with a lot of good customers that we compete for, so acquiring the bank brings those customers and relationships into Peoples United Bank. Farmington Bank has $3.1 billion in assets across 28 branches in central Connecticut and western Massachusetts, ranking 12th for deposit market share in Connecticut as of June 2017 with nearly $2.2 billion. Farmington Bank was established in 1851 and entered 2018 with a workforce of about 350 people. CEO John Patrick Jr. has led the bank and parent company for the past decade, with Patrick previously head of TD Banks Connecticut operations. In its home market of Hartford County, Farmington Bank ranked fourth, one rung ahead of Peoples United. Combined, the banks would leapfrog TD Bank in Hartford County to trail only Bank of America and Webster Bank. Peoples United has assets of $44 billion, with Barnes having articulated the goal of reaching the $50 billion plateau. Once this transaction closes, the Bridgeport-based company will rise to just over $47 billion in assets, according to a spokesperson. While Peoples United is still shy of that milestone, Barnes and his executive team are hopeful the company can grow organically and reach $50 billion in a reasonable time. In the meantime, we continue to have discussions with other banks and so on, not dissimilar to Farmington Bank, he said. If the timing and circumstances work out that both of us are interested in the same time, it is quite possible that we might have additional merger and acquisition activity. Roughly 50 percent of the absorbed branches are expected to close following the acquisition. The remaining branches will be subject to conversion and rebranding once Peoples United obtains regulatory approval, Barnes said. This transaction is Peoples Uniteds first deal on its home turf of Connecticut since 2015, when it spent $10 million for the Bridgeport-based insurance brokerage Kesten-Brown. The company has been busy with expansion outside of Connecticut. Last year, it spent $484 million for Suffolk Bancorp on Long Island, and $220 million for Philadelphia-based Leaf Commercial Capital. We like the community where Farmington Bank is located, Barnes said. Weve competed for those customers, and we think they have a very attractive customer base, and so the addition of those customers will strengthen Peoples United. The acquisition of Hartford County companies and their assets helps reaffirm Peoples Uniteds commitment and foundation in Connecticut, but it also has taken a step away from recent strategy within the state. A considerable amount of Peoples Uniteds success over the last decade has been through its branches within Stop & Shop locations, but the company has a mix of in-store and traditional branches in Fairfield County. With more Stop & Shop branches than standalone banks in Hartford County, the acquisition of Farmington and its stock of banks in the area also factored into the transaction. The combination of our combined banks both the in-store and traditional branches will actually look a lot more similar to the Fairfield County presence, he said. We like the hub-and-spoke idea that a good mix of both has proven successful for us over time. This strengthens our mix in Hartford County. WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump threatened Monday to levy tariffs on nearly all of China's products shipped to the United States unless Beijing agrees to a host of sweeping trade concessions, a dramatic escalation that would enlist American consumers in the brewing U.S.-China commercial conflict. In a statement, Trump said he had ordered his chief negotiator, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, to draw up a list of $200 billion in Chinese products that will be hit with tariffs of 10 percent if China refuses his demands to narrow the yawning U.S. trade deficit and change its industrial policies. The president warned that he was prepared to hit China with an additional $200 billion in import taxes unless Beijing capitulates. Such a step would be virtually unprecedented in U.S. history and would put nearly all of the $505 billion in products that the United States imports from China under tariffs. "The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable," Trump said. "The United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world." The president is adopting an increasingly aggressive posture in seeking to implement his "America First" trade strategy. He has threatened or imposed tariffs on all major U.S. trading partners, including China, the European Union, Mexico and Canada, in a high-stakes bid to reshape global trade in a way that reopens shuttered American factories. Trump's latest threat - if implemented - would dramatically expand the goods facing trade measures to a range of consumer items, forcing Americans to pay more for smartphones, computers, toys, televisions and just about every other middle-class staple. None of the tariffs announced Monday will take effect until industries and consumers have a chance to make their views known in a 60-day public comment period. "This is a threat that the Chinese can't match," said Jeff Moon, a former U.S. trade negotiator. "I see this as a major growl to get the Chinese to take his threats seriously." Rick Helfenbein, president of the American Apparel & Footwear Association, called the president's decision to up the ante "hollow, vindictive and reckless" and said it would endanger the $130 billion in American exports to China. Administration officials believe they have the upper hand in any trade dispute with China, thanks to the larger $20 trillion U.S. economy. Since almost every American who wants work can find it, officials such as Kevin Hassett, head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, say that the United States is positioned to withstand any trade war costs. Others warned that the president could stumble into a costly economic debacle. "I think Trump is completely misreading the Chinese," said Phil Levy, who an economist who served in the George W. Bush White House. "No one who followed China closely thought a direct public threat was going to get them to change. China is fixated on appearing strong." The latest move came three days after Trump imposed tariffs of 25 percent on $50 billion in Chinese imports, an action aimed at compelling Beijing to change a range of industrial policies that the administration says disadvantage foreign companies. The United States complains that China forces foreign companies to surrender their technology in return for the right to operate in China and engages in cybertheft to acquire trade secrets. China hit back with tariffs on $50 billion in American products, including agricultural goods. "This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive $376 billion trade imbalance in goods," the president said in the statement, released by the White House at around 7:30 p.m. Trump doubled his April threat to respond to any Chinese retaliation for his trade actions with $100 billion in additional tariffs. And he vowed to levy tariffs on a further $200 billion in Chinese goods if Beijing hit back against Monday's action. Trump has signaled an interest in using tariff threats to force trading partners to the negotiating table. Lighthizer employed similar tactics in the 1980s while leading American negotiators in talks with the Japanese. But early rounds between the United States and China have made little progress, beyond a now-withdrawn Chinese offer to buy more American goods. That's something that would cheer U.S. businesses and farmers but do little to resolve the structural forces that concern administration hard-liners. They say China seeks to acquire American technology via licit and illicit means to dominate industries of the future, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles and quantum computing. Trump's latest move seems to indicate that discussions between the two sides have fizzled, according to Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute. "There is some sort of fundamental breakdown in communication," Scissors said. "From Trump's standpoint, the Chinese are basically flipping off the U.S. president." Monday night's directive was the most expansive to date in a fast-escalating trade dispute between the world's biggest economies that has rattled business leaders and Republicans in Congress. The White House appeared headed for a showdown with Congress on Monday after the Senate passed legislation to reinstate a ban on the sale of U.S. components to the Chinese telecom giant ZTE. The measure, part of the annual defense appropriations bill, which passed 85 to 10, ordered the reimposition of the punitive measures imposed on ZTE after the company pleaded guilty to violating U.S. sanctions against North Korea and Iran. Trump had sought to roll back the measures last month as part of a deal with Chinese government leaders, arguing that the punishment against ZTE risked putting the company out of business. But several lawmakers - including some of the president's close allies - remain concerned that ZTE's products pose a significant national security risk and could be used by the Chinese government to spy on the United States. Senate leaders decided last week to include language written by two Republicans, Sens. Tom Cotton, Ark., and Marco Rubio, Fla., who along with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., offered the measure to reimpose punitive measures against ZTE in an updated version of the defense bill. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has made multiple trips to the Capitol in the meantime to plead the administration's case with House and Senate Republicans, in the hopes of getting lawmakers to drop the provision during the upcoming conference process, in which House and Senate negotiators will try to hammer out a compromise defense bill that can pass both chambers. Trump's escalation is probably a response to Senate fears that he has been too soft on China in the ZTE case, said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "He needs to persuade Republican senators that he is being tougher than anyone and can get China to give up more than ever if he's given a free hand to negotiate," he said. Irish rock band U2 will make its last stop on the current North American tour at Mohegan Sun Arena July 3, with standing general admission seats on the arena floor surrounding a long, T-shaped stage. There are still seats available higher up, according to a look online recently, but at a price in the $171-$325 range instead of the under-$100 range first announced for the lowest price. SHELTON - A 19-year-old driver, who police said was illegally racing on River Road, has been arrested in an crash that killed two people last April. Abdulaziz Yuldoshev, of Hamden, surrendered to police on Monday after a warrant was issued for his arrest. Yuldoshev was charged with two counts of first-degree manslaughter, two counts of negligent homicide with a motor vehicle, four counts of first-degree assault and illegal racing on a highway. Killed in the crash were Shalymar Herrera, 18, of West Haven, and Briana Torres-Carter, 23, of Bridgeport, who was seven weeks pregnant. Both were passengers in a Mini Cooper that was being operated by the pregnant womans husband, Lawrence Carter, 19, of Bridgeport. Carter and passenger Jessie Abrams, 19. of Bridgeport, were seriously injured. Detective Christopher Nugent said additional arrests are expected. He said witness accounts and surveillance cameras helped determine that Yuldoshev was racing at the time of the crash around 7 p.m. on April 8. The Mini Cooper was head south on River Road when it collided with a Saturn traveling northbound. Nugent said the Saturn had pulled over into the southbound lane to avoid Yuldoshevs Toyota Camry that was heading north racing with another vehicle. Caitlin Kalafus, 25, of Pennsylvania, was the driver of the Saturn that had two passengers; Carly Kalafus, 22, and Paul Valleau, 26. All three were taken to were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. The Kalafus sisters front the band Like Violet. Yuldoshev posted a $50,000 court set bond and is scheduled to appear in Derby Superior Court on June 28. Torres-Carter and Herrera were best friends. Herrera recently graduated from Bridgeport Military Academy with honors, her uncle, Albert Benejan, said. She was living with her parents and younger brother in West Haven at the time of her death. She was my only niece. She was my everything, my princess, Benejan said shortly after the crash. She was very friendly, she had a good heart. Everyone loved her. Benejan said his sister, Herreras mother, called him around two hours after the crash, and family and friends gathered at St. Vincents Medical Center in Bridgeport. Benejan described Herrera as a lover of life and a positive person, something echoed by former classmate Kelly Martinez. She always welcomed you with open arms and was the first to talk to you if you were new, and she always knew how to light up the room in just seconds, Martinez said. River Road has been the site of accidents in the past, and police have investigated motorcycle crashes motor vehicle accidents and even a 54 car accident, Nugent said. This incident was the first involving racing that police were investigating, he added. Were concerned with the safety of all the drivers in our town and others, Nugent said. Our traffic division is conscious of efforts to improve the safety of all our roads in Shelton. WASHINGTON General Dynamics, whose Electric Boat subsidiary in Groton is the nations premier maker of submarines, has surfaced as a facilitator in aiding unaccompanied minors illegally crossing the US-Mexico border, including children caught up in President Trumps zero tolerance policy of separating families. Regularly ranked among the nations top five defense contractors, General Dynamics in recent decades has expanded into government services including work with the Department of Health & Human Services unit that cares for the 2,000 or so children taken from their parents under the Trump initiative. Now, corporate-responsibility advocates are calling on social media followers to register protests with General Dynamics CEO, Phebe Novakovic. Any company profiting from this administrations brutal policy is going to have it heightened, like it or not, said Shannon Coulter, head of #Grabyourwallet, which calls for consumer product boycotts of companies complicit in what it views as injustices. Coulter acknowledged a boycott of General Dynamics big-ticket items is not practical. What were looking for is how can we appeal to these (CEOs) as human beings, she said. The ask is not to break contracts. Thats not realistic. The ask is for them to do what they can do to end this policy. Under mounting pressure, General Dynamics Information Technology, the corporate sub-unit under contract to the HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), issued a statement Tuesday stating it has no role in the family separation policy, nor a role in the construction or operation of detention facilities. But the company said it has worked with ORR since 2000, doing casework to help ensure special needs of unaccompanied children are met. On Twitter, the company attempted to clear the air by listing what we do and what we dont do. Among the items underneath the heading what we dont do, the company said: Determine which children are under care of HHS/ORR. That means General Dynamics has no control over whether its caseworkers minister to minors who arrive unaccompanied or younger children taken from their parents under zero tolerance. Electric Boat is a major player in Connecticuts substantial network of defense industries, which includes helicopter-maker Sikorsky and jet-engine-maker Pratt & Whitney. With new contracts to produce submarines well into this century, Electric Boat is expected to pump about $86 billion into the state economy. It employs 11,500 building Virginia-class attack submarine and planning for the Columbia-class nuclear ballistic missile submarine for launch by the late 2020s. Every American, including all corporate leaders, should strongly and clearly speak out and stand up against this inhumane and immoral policy, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Businesses share this moral responsibility regardless of the specific services or product they provide. I encourage companies to follow the Chamber of Commerce and others in calling for an end to the Trump Administrations despicable, unlawful policy of tearing children away from their parents. National outcry Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers have turned zero-tolerance into a political crusade. They are calling the policy child abuse because it has split apart more than 2,000 immigrant families and relegated small children to detention centers. With a national outcry from churches, business groups and even some GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the Trump administration is standing its ground and refusing to budge. Trump took a late-afternoon trip to rally Republican support in a closed-door meeting at the U.S. Capitol. But the family-separation crisis all but drowned out the normal back-and-forth over immigration, overshadowing what was to be House consideration of two immigration bills this week. House Republicans are offering up two immigration bills, which include provisions to build a border wall and provide a pathway to citizenship for youthful DREAMers. But it is unlikely that either pieces of legislation will pass with opposition Democrats sensing GOP political vulnerability over the heart-wrenching photos and soundbites from the border region. The first bill would provide a pathway to citizenship for young immigrant DREAMers, allowing them to apply for a green card after five years living in the United States. It would modify, but not stop, Trumps zero-tolerance policy that holds illegal immigrants in detention centers. It would also provide $25 million in funding for a border wall between the United States and Mexico a provision Democratic lawmakers have been wary of since it was first mentioned by Trump. The new provision would mostly detain children and parents in the same place to address Democratic lawmakers outcry about the policy ripping immigrant families apart. Camila Bortolleto, a DACA recipient from Danbury and head of CT Students for a Dream, said: "Ever since the Trump administration killed DACA last year, our community has been living under a cloud of fear and uncertainty, with our futures hanging in the balance with deadline after deadline. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said Republicans are rewriting their measure because theyre feeling the heat from the other side. Nonetheless, he said its unlikely that any Democratic lawmaker would vote for either of the bills they still include funding for Trumps wall. They didnt even try, Himes said. In neither bill did they work with Democrats. I would be surprised if either of the bills passes. Rep. Elizabeth Esty, D-Conn., said the immigration bills wont fix a broken immigration system or prevent child-family separation under Trumps policy. I will continue to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform including legislative proposals that put an end to the systematic separation of immigrant families, Esty said. Vulnerable children should never be used as political bargaining chips. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said the House bills are shameful because Republican lawmakers are trying to pass legislation that limits legal immigration and access to asylum at the same time Trumps policy is separating children and families at the border. These bills double down on the Presidents border wall a waste of billions of taxpayer dollars, she said. Congressional Republicans should join Democrats at the table to fix our nations broken immigration system. dan@hearstdc.com; Sarah.roach@chron.com ANSONIA For 150 high school seniors, Monday night was a time of passing from high school to the larger world. For some 17 or more teachers, Monday also represented a time of passing to either a new district, a new career or an unemployment line after budget wars between the city and the school district resulted in layoffs last week. But for a couple of hours Monday, the budgetary battles of the past few weeks were forgotten. Demonstrators who had attended school board and aldermanic meetings stayed home or put aside their placards. Im very happy about that, said Board of Education member Chris Phipps. This is not the time or place for that. Tonight should be a celebration of the kids and what they accomplished. Michael Simon, whose daughter Grace was among the graduates, agreed. It would have been unfair to the kids, he said. I dont know whos right or wrong, but the adults have to act like grown-ups. My daughter came home two weeks ago thinking there would be no graduation. Thats crazy. On June 5, lawyers for the Board of Education claimed in court papers the district was out of money, the school year was in danger of ending early and high school graduation was a question mark. They blamed it on the Board of Aldermen removing $600,000 from the 2017-18 budget. The aldermen described the money as a loan to help the district get through last years state budgetary crisis. When the state eventually provided $1.8 million in grants more than the school system expected the aldermen retained the $600,000 and did not put it in the 2018-19 school budget. That led to administrators cutting 24 positions for the 2018-19 school year including laying off 17 teachers, eliminating some elementary school classes, restructuring the middle school program and increasing class size. It also led to the Board of Education filing suit against the city, which is scheduled to be tried in October 2019. But outside the high school and in its gymnasium Monday, the graduation was center stage. Mayor David Cassetti sat next to Superintendent of Schools Carol Merlone despite their differences. Terri Goldson, who resigned in February as high school principal following a Twitter scandal, was in the audience while incoming Principal Paul Giansanti sat with administrators. Interim Principal Sara Crooks told the new graduates to always remember to learn as much as you can, use technology effectively, value family and friends ... believe in yourself and make a choice every day to be great. The graduates and nearly everyone in the gymnasium rose and cheered the longest for student Cody Denice, who overcame physical disabilities to achieve his diploma. It was a break from what otherwise has been war of money and philosophy for the past two months. The superintendent has vied with the mayor, the Board of Education has argued with the Board of Aldermen and parents and pupils have been pitted against taxpayers and seniors. Theres even a battle of petitions one circulated by Jeremy Musnicki seeking Merlones ouster and another by Brian Perkins supporting her retention. All the schools are being impacted, said Crystal Fogle, who was watching her daughter Alonna Smith graduate Monday night. Her son Alfonso is expected to graduate next year. Next year, she said, will be a year of sharing textbooks, sitting in larger classes and with fewer teachers. Id be willing to pay more in taxes if I knew the money was going to education, she said. I just hope we prioritize education. Steven Cavanaugh, whose daughter Elizabeth graduated Monday, agreed. He blamed the ongoing disputes on Cassettis campaign promise of not raising taxes. Thats coming at the cost of our schools, he said. This vendetta between the mayor and the Superintendent of Schools is out of control. Matt Hough, president of the teachers union, described June as a devastating end to the school year for students and teachers. We cant run a school system on what we have left, said Hough. Ive written more letters of recommendation for teachers seeking jobs elsewhere than ever before. MILFORD The Rev. Brian Bodt, one of the most influential religious figures in the greater Bridgeport region, will retire on June 24. He was the CEO of the Council of Churches of Greater Bridgeport between 2006 and 2012. He was also pastor of the Golden Hill United Methodist Church before he took over the council, and, in recent years, has been pastor of the Mary Taylor United Methodist Church in downtown Milford. About 60 congregations in Bridgeport and the surrounding towns belong to the council, most of them belong to mainline Protestant denominations, although there are a few Roman Catholic parishes, too. Its a faith-based, non-sectarian social services agency dedicated to meeting the needs of people at risk and breaking the cycle of poverty and crisis, according to its website. The council also, from time to time, serves as a moral compass. For example, while Bodt was at the helm, it sent a sharply worded note to former Bridgeport Mayor John Fabrizi in 2006 saying it would demand his resignation if he did not quickly spell out a clear plan to regain the public trust. This was in reference to Fabrizis admission of cocaine and alcohol abuse. Fabrizi told the religious leaders that he had made a terrible mistake in the past and that I faced that adversity head on by asking for professional help. The former mayor was never arrested for drug use; Fabrizi was mayor from 2003 to 2007. Bodt married Carol Galloway of Woodbridge in 2012, his second wife. During his first marriage his name was Schofield-Bodt. He was born on May 1, 1954, in Havre de Grace, Md., where he spent his childhood years. He graduated from McDaniel College then called Western Maryland College and went on to Drew University for his theological education, graduating in 1979; he was ordained as a deacon just prior to that. I had ties to Drew, my uncle was a member of the United Methodist clergy and went there, too. Bodts first assignment was at the Asbury United Methodist Church in Yonkers, N.Y. His next was at Glendale UMC in Queens, N.Y., where he served until 1987. Glendale was interesting they had some upheaval before I came, he said. The good news was that there was an interim pastor who did a lot of healing. By this time the couples first child, Daniel, came along, in 1985. We didnt really want to raise our child in the city, so I asked for a suburban assignment, Bodt said. So I was sent to the Huntington United Methodist Church (in Shelton) in 1987. He said that hes served 31 of his 40 years as a pastor in Connecticut, all in the greater Bridgeport region. Thats a little unusual usually youre sent 50 miles away or more. A second son arrived during the Huntington assignment. In 1995, Bodt became pastor of the Golden Hill United Methodist Church. I wasnt looking to move the leadership was expecting a lot of retirements, he said. Theres one facet of the Methodist faith that Bodt doesnt see eye to eye with, and that is its posture toward the LGBTQ community. Its rulebook states that gays, while they can be members, cant serve in the clergy. They also cant be married by the UMC clergy. Its something that weve struggled with for more than 40 years, and that struggle is still going on, Bodt said. While I was at Golden Hill, we became an open and affirming church, welcoming people regardless of their sexual orientation. And Ive been part of the push-back for a very long time. By 2011, Bodt said he wanted to return to the pulpit. At the time he was told by the Rev. Jerry Streets professor of theology at Yale University You are suffering from undelivered sermons. So, in July 2012, he began his last assignment, at Mary Taylor. That was also the year he was married to Galloway. As for retirement, Bodt says hell pursue his pastime building up his model railroad layout. I recently changed gauges, he said, from N scale to HO. That was a major decision for him. In the model railroad community, switching to a different scale is a little like switching from Protestant to Catholic. There will be a meet-and-greet at Mary Taylor UMC, 168-176 S Broad St, Milford, on June 24 from 2 to 4:30. Thats also the date of Bodts last sermon there. Theyre calling this retirement event my Train-sition, he said. NEWTOWN Surrounded by lush trees and sprawled across 188 acres of manicured property, Garner Correctional Institution is out of view for most residents of this semi-rural town of stone walls and Victorian homes. The maximum-security prison is home to 500 or so of the states worst inmates those guilty of violent crimes such as robberies and assault. Some 48 cells are reserved as segregation units to protect other inmates living in cramped pods. But that dangerous mix burst into the spotlight when state officials declared the death of JAllen Jones, 31, of Atlanta, Georgia, a homicide last week. Jones, who had a history of mental illness, died in March while being restrained by guards armed with pepper spray. "Its alarming," said Dan Barrett, legal director of the Connecticut chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "This was a guy who had mental illness," Barrett said. It makes you wonder if they should be subjected to force or command-and-control tactics. Its very disturbing." Jones death lifts ever-so-slightly the veil over a secretive prison system, and draws questions over what happens behind the high walls and razor-wire topped fences. While Garner is a Connecticut-run prison, a recently published story on federal prisons that are suffering from budget cuts as President Donald Trump and Congress shrink the size of government, raises questions about state staffing. The New York Times story on federal prisons pointed out that officer shortages mean teachers and clerical staff are filling in as guards at some facilities. Connecticut has also cut its prison budget as inmate populations dropped, although its not known if those reductions have anything to do with Jones death. Barrett said the public may have to wait weeks and months before complete information is released. "It would surprise me if they [DOC] ever say they did something wrong," Barrett said. Violent outburst The state medical examiner said last week the homicide classification placed on Jones death does not necessarily mean prison guards did anything wrong. DOC and the state police are investigating the incident. Details released so far indicate Jones had a history of mental illness. He was serving a 10-year sentence for robbery and had been incarcerated since 2014. Jones on March 25 was being taken to the Garner mental health unit when he became "non-compliant," and "combative" with staff. During efforts to restrain him, officers deployed pepper spray. Dr. James Gill, Connecticut's chief medical examiner, said Jones died suddenly "during struggle and restraint with chest compression." Life saving measures were initiated, and Jones was transferred to a nearby hospital, where he was declared dead. DOC officials said an initial review did not uncover wrongdoing by officers or use of excessive force. A DOC spokesperson on Monday declined further comment. In a statement, the union representing correction officers said they work in a dangerous environment and expect that the officers will be exonerated. "No one disputes that inmate Jones' death was a tragedy, but we believe that the correctional officers who responded to the incident acted appropriately and professionally under the circumstances and will be exonerated once all the facts of this case are known," said Michael Tuthill, president of the AFSCME Local1565. Fewer inmates The states prison population has been on a downward trend for years, dropping from a high of nearly 20,000 inmates in 2010 to less than 14,000 this year. The decline is due in part to prison and justice system reforms, and a gradually improving economy. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has focused on prison rehabilitation efforts, education and training for inmates and keeping younger offenders out of prison. Kelly Donnelly, a spokeswoman for Malloy, said Monday the governor is awaiting the conclusion of the investigation. Gov. Malloy takes any untimely death of inmate in the correctional system very seriously, Donnelly said. There have been recent prison controversies. The state is pulling back a $100-million a-year, no bid contract with the UConn Health Center to provide medical services for inmates amid complaints of inadequate care. The program will now be run by DOC. Barrett said the state has cut the prison medical budget over the years, adding DOC may be in the position of having too little money and too many prisoners. Donnelly said budget cutbacks have not impacted treatment of inmates. While fewer prisons and fewer inmates means less correctional staff are needed, the high standard for care and safety has not diminished, Donnelly said. Many of the reforms implemented under Gov. Malloy have enhanced safety inside and outside of the correctional system, but there is of course more work to do that builds upon these improvements, Donnelly said. Mental Health Its generally believed that a high number of inmates suffer from mental health illness. An exact number of inmates with mental health issues could not be obtained. State reports indicate that between Jan. 1, 2005, and Dec. 31, 2016, 307 inmates died while incarcerated, with the leading cause of death being illness. During that time span, 44 inmates took their own life. "My suspicion is the biggest problem in prison is mental illness," Barrett said. "And they are not diagnosed properly because that brings the responsibility of treatment." Barrett added the state should look at whether restraint procedures work in every situation. They may not process information the same way we would ..., Barrett said of inmates with mental illness. bcummings@ctpost.com Teenage depression: If a parent doesnt get treatment for a child, is that abuse? A UF psychiatry professor discusses the deadliest illness facing children, which often goes undiagnosed because parents dont want their children to be treated. Teenage depression is a serious and lonely illness, sometimes leading to suicide. fizkes/Shutterstock.com Hospital visits for kids in the U.S. who have contemplated or thought about suicide have risen sharply. As a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I am not surprised. For years, I ran a child psychiatric hospital, where we treat kids after they attempt suicide. Usually, by the time I diagnose a teenager with depression, it is almost too late. Almost. Its estimated that one in five teens will have depression, but two-thirds of them will go undiagnosed. Lack of screening for depression is one part of the problem in childrens mental health, and efforts are underway to improve screening and detection for depression. Access to care is another problem, as there is a severe shortage of child psychiatrists in our country. Parents may also not see symptoms of a mental health problem or not be aware of how severe the problem is, due to lack of knowledge or understanding of depression in children. These are several barriers to treatment, which are unfortunate. However, one barrier that is rarely addressed is when parents ignore obvious signs of depression or just dont want help. Studies have noted that between 12-26 percent of parents reported not wanting or needing help, or being unwilling to seek help for a childs depression. I authored a paper, published May 31, in which I ask: Would it be considered child abuse for a parent to not get medical help for their depressed teen? A serious illness, often experienced in loneliness In my experience, teens experience depression for much longer than their parents are aware. There are several reasons for this, including the stigma of mental illness, and teens not being forthcoming because they blame themselves for feeling depressed and dont want to upset their parents. In fact, feeling like things are your fault is one of the symptoms of depression. We are lucky if a teen tells their parent they are feeling depressed or a parent sees warning signs and brings their child for an evaluation, because the depression is likely far more severe than the parent realizes. Sometimes, were not as lucky. In my experience, many children who attempt suicide never have been evaluated or treated for depression before. After a child attempts suicide and a parent starts to understand and learn about depression, most parents are willing to do anything to help their child. But in some cases, this doesnt happen. This is incredibly hurtful to teens who ask for treatment and the message they get is their suffering is not important enough to treat. Depression is the deadliest disease of childhood Depression and its worst risk, suicide, are serious and common problems in children and teens. Suicide is the second leading cause of death in U.S. teens, resulting in more deaths than from cancer or any other disease or illness. In addition to deaths by suicide, depression can cause progressively worsening brain changes, according to new research. And yet, even after a trained mental health professional diagnoses a child with depression, some parents refuse treatment. This can occur despite these teens wanting and asking for treatment. Some do not want their children to take antidepressants. Antidepressants carry the FDA black-box label warning on thoughts of suicide in young people. But the consensus in the field is that benefits outweigh risks with careful monitoring. Also, a recent study reported the clinical trials used to form the FDA black-box warning excluded patients who were already at significant risk of suicide, which means this risk-benefit analysis was formed without patients who were the most depressed and at the most risk. Evidence-based psychotherapy also treats depression, but some families dont commit the time or resources to ensure their children have frequent appointments. In most states, teens under 18 require a parents permission to receive treatment for depression. There are some exceptions, but in most cases, a child cannot get treatment on their own. Mental health can be neglected One possible way to overcome this is to view a deliberate lack of providing treatment for depression as a form of child abuse. The term medical neglect refers to a child being harmed due to a lack of medical care. In the criteria outlined by the American Academy of Pediatrics, medical neglect occurs when parents understand the medical advice given, the recommended treatment would have significant benefit for the childs health and be accessible by the family, and the parent or caregiver still denies or refuses treatment or access to care. Another way for neglect to occur is to ignore obvious signs of illness. While these criteria are usually applied to chronic physical illnesses like HIV or asthma, it appears to be rarely applied to mental illnesses. If I told you that a teenager was hospitalized multiple times due to a chronic life-threatening illness, and that teenagers parent refused to bring the child for doctors appointments or allow them to take medication for the illness, what would you think should be done? My guess is if the illness was HIV, diabetes or asthma, the answer would be to ensure the child is allowed to take their medication and attend doctors appointments. But that was not the answer I got with one teen with depression and multiple suicide attempts. The law in Florida, where I teach and practice, is that only when children reach age 18 years can they consent to treating their own depression with medication or with ongoing therapy. I was told this teen would have to wait until he or she reached 18 to get treatment since the parent was refusing. Depression is hard to diagnose because it is not always obvious. Parents may not believe in an illness they dont see. The Practice Parameter for Treating Depression by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) acknowledges that families may not wish to participate in psychotherapy or may object to taking any medications. However, if these are the two evidence-based treatments being recommended and they are available, what are our options for ensuring these children receive appropriate care? Once a professional does make the diagnosis, and if severe enough, why are we allowed to let it go untreated? When we children, parents and physicians view depression like other illnesses, more people will be helped. We as physicians should be working to prevent neglect from occurring by talking to parents about depression and treatment, providing education and addressing their concerns. Parents need to be educated that some illnesses still exist and cause suffering even if they cant always see it. Parents should also know we physicians are not blaming them for their childs illness, but they are responsible for getting their child appropriate treatment. If they dont, I believe that is neglect. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. BEIJING - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is in China. Again. Kim arrived on Tuesday for his third visit to China in the span of three months, meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in the heart of Beijing. The visit comes a week after President Donald Trump met with Kim in Singapore and a day after the United States confirmed it will cancel what Trump called "war games" with South Korea scheduled for August. News of Kim's trip came just hours after Trump threatened China with tariffs on $200 billion worth of goods. On Tuesday evening, Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, were welcomed by Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan. Photos from the event show Kim and Xi shaking hands in front of a row of Chinese and North Korean flags - a visual echo of Kim and Trump's much-photographed handshake in Singapore. Xi reportedly praised the outcome of the Singapore summit, calling it an "important step toward the political solution of the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue," according to the party-controlled press. On Wednesday, North Korean state media said Kim and Xi reached an understanding on denuclearization and other issues following the Singapore summit. The report by the Korean Central News Agency did not give details on the views shared by the two leaders. But, in the past, North Korea defined denuclearization as including an end to the U.S.-South Korean military alliance and a shift in U.S. defense policies to end nuclear protection for South Korea and Japan. During Kim's previous trips outside the country, including the Singapore summit, North Korea's state media waited until he returned home before reporting its version of the talks. Although details are scarce, the timing and staging of Kim's trip sends a clear message about Beijing's place at the center of East Asian diplomacy - and its power over North Korea. With U.S.-China trade ties on the rocks, Kim is well positioned to play both powers, talking sweet to Trump while pursuing a closer relationship with Xi. "Although it seems there is a booming romance between Kim Jong Un and Trump, Kim understands the hierarchy. He knows that Xi is the Asian Godfather," said Yanmei Xie, a China policy analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, an economic research firm in Beijing. "He is making a pragmatic calculation that China can provide economic assistance to integrate North Korea diplomatically and economically into Northeast Asia." Kim's visit to China this week will renew questions about what happens post-Singapore. Although Trump has taken great pains to cast last week's summit as an unqualified success, the next steps are not clear. With North Korea's nuclear testing halted, for now, and August's war games off, China may be willing to cut North Korea some slack. In Beijing, Kim is likely to ask Xi to ease up on economic sanctions - something the United States strongly opposes. Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in Beijing at a news conference with Foreign Minister Wang Yi that China "acknowledged that the sanctions regime that is in place today will remain in place until such time as that denuclearization is in fact complete." But the problem is that there is no consensus on what "denuclearization" means. The United States wants North Korea to abandon the nuclear weapons program that it took years to build - an outcome experts see as extremely unlikely. "There is a regional effort, a sort of Northeast Asia coalition of make-believe, to maintain the fiction that the North Korea will de-nuke as long as Americans keep talking to it," Xie said. China is less focused on getting Kim to give away his weapons than on getting him to fall into line. It may eventually use trade and investment to keep him onside, experts said. With North Korea still struggling under U.N. sanctions, "China's political and economic support is still highly important," said Zhao Tong, a North Korea expert at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing. The question now, Zhao said, is "how can China help North Korea develop its economy?" China can also help Kim normalize North Korea's diplomatic status. That starts with treating him less like a rogue dictator and more like a visiting statesman. On Kim's first visit as leader, in March, he arrived unannounced aboard an armored train. Beijing did not disclose his presence, or publish photos, until he left. He met Xi a second time in May in the Chinese city of Dalian. Photographs of the two leaders strolling and chatting by the seaside were not released until Kim was on his way home. On Tuesday evening, Chinese media released photographs of Kim meeting Xi at the Great Hall of the People, where he often greets visiting dignitaries and heads of state - the first time photos of Kim in China have been released while a visit was in progress. --- Brian Murphy in Seoul and Shirley Zhao and Yang Liu in Beijing contributed to this report. The 26th annual Juneteenth African-American Caribbean Parade and Festival took over downtown Bridgeport on June 9. But June 19 is the actual day known as Juneteenth. This day celebrates the freeing of the last slaves in the United States on June 19, 1865 in what is now Galveston, Texasthis was two years after President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation became official. "The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger's regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance," the official Juneteenth site writes. Today, Juneteenth is not only celebrated in Texas it has spread to communities across the U.S. through colorful celebrations. Hartford has been celebrating for years, but the first celebration of Juneteenth in southwestern Connecticut was in 1992 when a former president of Juneteenth of Fairfield County brought the tradition back to Bridgeport after visiting Texas. Norwalk and Stamford also celebrated for a while, but Bridgeport has remained the only Fairfield County city to hold a continuous celebration. In southwestern Connecticut, Bridgeport is the city with the largest African-American population with 35.5 percent of the population identifying as black or African-American as of 2016. George Mintz, the current president of Juneteenth of Fairfield County as well as the president of the Greater Bridgeport NAACP, didn't know what Juneteenth was until about 12 years ago. He and his wife heard there was a celebration in Bridgeport, so they decided to check it out. When they saw only about 25 people gathered, they just kept driving. But the significance of the day stuck with Mintz. "I think as African-Americans we've tried many thingsKwanza, which was a man-made holiday but we've never had one that was based on a historical fact," he said. "And I can imagine what freedom meant for those people." Ned Gerard / Hearst Connecticut Media About seven years ago, due to reorganization withing Juneteenth of Fairfield County, Mintz found himself at the helm of organizing the parade. He worked hard to get the word out. This year, he predicts 15,000 to 20,000 people attended the paradeand this wasn't even one of the best ones, he said. The 2018 parade lost some sponsorship, so some things had to be cut out. Mintz said they were not able to get some of the bands they wanted and they could not give out prizes for best float, best costume, or best marching band. But he wants to makes some changes going forward to prevent the celebration from slipping. "Usually at the end of the parade have a wrap-up session and then go home until September. We've decided were not going home this year," he said. The organization will have a monthly meeting starting in July and then go to weekly meetings in September. They are also going to assign a captain to concentrate solely on the parade. Mintz said people celebrate Juneteenth for many reasons the older generation understands the meaning of the celebration of freedom; others see Juneteehth and strictly a Texas holiday and don't understand why we celebrate it, he said. "But they all come to the parade, and we try to put on a good show." Mintz said some people feel the holiday is exclusively for African-Americans, but he views it as a celebration of freedom in America, and all the people who helped achieve that. "Juneteenth hopes to also bring to the forefront the white men, and all of those who fought for the freedom of African-Americans," he said. "Anybody who did anything to advance freedom in America is who we hope to lift up." Dan Haar / Hearst Connecticut Media Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen joined 20 other attorneys general across the country in calling for an end to the separation of children from their families seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The policy is not only inhumane, but it also raises serious concerns regarding the violation of childrens rights, constitutional principles of due process and equal protection, and the efforts of state law enforcement officials to stop crime, reads the letter addressed to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who announced the new zero tolerance policy April 6. Because of these concerns, we demand that the Department of Justice immediately cease these draconian practices. Fatherly This is an episode of our podcast Problem Solvers. Each week, an entrepreneur reveals how they overcame an unexpected problem in their business -- and were happier and more successful as a result. The show is hosted by Entrepreneurs editor in chief, Jason Feifer. Listen below, or subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Everyone whos experienced setbacks, rejection and frustration will ask themselves the same inevitable question: What if the naysayers are right? Mike Rothman did that. As he built his company Fatherly -- a media site for dads, which is a market everyone told him was nonexistent -- he was told no over and over again. But instead of quitting, he made strategic decisions that enabled him to discover the truth: His idea really was a good one. And soon, the people saying no started to say yes. Why Florida Democrats cant count on the so-called black vote A UF political scientist and director of African American Studies explains how Caribbean immigrants in Miami are upending old assumptions about black voters in Florida and how neither party should take them for granted in the upcoming midterm election. Floridas Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson meets with residents of Miamis Little Haiti neighborhood, where Donald Trump also campaigned in 2016. AP Photo/Alan Diaz Floridas midterm Senate election is a race to watch this November and not just because it will be a tight match pitting a sitting governor, Republican Rick Scott, against a sitting senator, Democrat Bill Nelson. Black voters, who make up 16 percent of Floridas population, will likely help tip the race in one candidates favor. Black Floridians have long been a swing constituency in the state and have played a key role in every close presidential race since 2000. But my research on minority politics in the South shows that it is time to re-examine old assumptions about Floridas so-called black vote. The Caribbeanization of black politics Thats because not all black people in the United States are African-American. Florida is home to the countrys largest foreign-born black population. One in three black Miami metropolitan region residents today is an immigrant, according to the Pew Research Center. Many are from the Caribbean. The black immigrant population in the U.S. has more than quadrupled since 1980, led by an influx of Haitians and Jamaicans. An estimated 376,000 Haitians represent fully 2 percent of Floridas population. Another 30,000 or so Floridians were born in Jamaica. As my 2018 book on The Caribbeanization of Black Politics in America outlines, these demographic shifts are upending political patterns in predominantly black communities. U.S. political analysts have long assumed that black people mostly think alike on policy issues and vote for the same candidates namely, for Democrats. Thats now changing. Black Republicans I have studied voting patterns of African-Americans, Cape Verdeans and West Indians in four cities: Boston, Chicago, Miami and New York City. I discovered that while these populations are mostly Democratic, foreign-born black communities in all four cities are more willing than African-Americans to put aside partisan differences and vote Republican. Haitians, in particular, lean in a more conservative direction than African-Americans and other Caribbean communities. My research found that Haitian voters in Boston, Chicago, Miami and New York City are more likely to identify as moderate or conservative than African-Americans. Haitians are also more likely to be members of the Republican Party and to run for office as Republicans. The first and only Haitian-American in Congress, Mia Love of Utahs 4th district, is a Republican. In Florida, almost 4 percent of the Haitian-born population is Republican, according to University of Florida political scientist Daniel Smith. Just under 20 percent of Floridas Haitian Americans are Democrats. Many others are not registered voters in the U.S., though they may remain active in Haitian politics. Donald Trump campaigned in Miamis Little Haiti neighborhood in 2016. He went on to win 20 percent of Floridas Haitian vote. After the election, Haitian-American activist Ezili Danto suggested that many Haitian Floridians had supported Trump in part to demonstrate that they wont always vote Democratic. Many Haitians also believed the corruption allegations that had been leveled against the Clinton Foundation, whose work in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake left it with a bad reputation on the island. Community tensions As Floridas Caribbean population has boomed, these political differences have led to some showdowns between African-Americans and the Haitian community. The election of Republican Josaphat Celestin as mayor of North Miami in 2001 is illustrative. He was the first Haitian-American elected to lead a large U.S. city. As I outline in my book, Celestins campaign appealed directly to Haitian voters in this municipality of 60,000, by arguing that they needed their own political representation in a largely African-American city historically governed by white elected officials. The 2001 election brought not just Celestin to power but also put a Haitian-American majority onto the five-member city council, ushering in a new era in North Miami politics. Haitian voters had successfully replaced the citys old white political leadership with new black leadership. But they did so by defeating a Democrat, Duke Sorey, whom most native-born black Floridians hoped would become the citys first black mayor. Motivating black voters All of this means that neither Florida Senate candidate should take black voters for granted in November. Nelson, the Democratic sitting senator, has tradition on his side. Black Floridians like African-Americans nationwide have voted overwhelmingly Democratic in every election since 1948. In 2012, higher-than-usual black turnout for Barack Obama helped Nelson handily secure his second Senate term. As the only Democrat in statewide office in a state dominated by Republicans, Nelson will again need above-average black turnout to beat Scott. Yet the senator recently said he believes black Floridians are already motivated to vote for him and has faced accusations of not courting them enough. Meanwhile, Gov. Scott won 12 percent of black votes in 2014 significantly more than the 8 percent of black voters Trump won nationwide in 2016. Floridas Trinidad-born Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll was the first black female Republican elected to the Florida legislature and the first black Republican woman on a statewide ticket when she ran as Scotts running mate in 2010. Scott alienates black voters Carroll resigned in 2013 amid accusations of financial impropriety. She later wrote a book accusing Scott of treating her like an unwanted stepchild and using her to win black and female votes. AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee As governor, too, Scott has in fact had a very tense relationship with black Floridians. In 2011 he reduced funding to two historically black private colleges in the state. That same year Scott requested that the president of Florida A&M University, a historically black public university, be suspended after the hazing death of a student, a decision the colleges board of trustees rejected. When students protested his recommendation, Scott suggested he could relate to them because he grew up in public housing. It was the second time the governor had insinuated that all black people are poor. On several occasions, Scott has also been accused of suppressing black voters by making it harder for formerly incarcerated people to restore their voting rights. I doubt Floridas Haitian voters will support Scott as they did Trump in 2016. But the days of assuming that the black vote will definitely go Democratic are over. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. I read with incredulity Ken Dixons op ed on Sunday (Where do they get the notion? Hearst Connecticut Media, June17, 2018). Ive been a resident in this state for over 40 years and, yes, we have had governors from both parties but the state House and Senate have been controlled by one party except for only two of those years. There is no question that the state has been overtaxed and mismanaged having gone from one of the best state economies to one of the three or four worst during that period. Dixon is critical of the Bob Stefanowski and Art Laffer economic plans that are principally based on a simple premise that there is a point of taxation when individuals and businesses will just exercise their vote to pack up and leave. Id challenge Dixon to compare the economic and tax policies of Republican states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, and more recently even Massachusetts to the Democratic-controlled states of California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey and unfortunately Connecticut. Tax and spend simply doesnt work. Its time for a change and my belief is that a conservative economic independent, experienced leader like a Bob Stefanowski is worth a bet instead of any of the career political retreads from either of the political parties. John Myers Fairfield Credit union professionals from across the country are gathering today in Seattle to kick off NAFCUs 51st Annual Conference and Solutions Expo the industrys premier strategic planning event for credit union executives and board members. The conference, sponsored by Strategic Resource Management, is NAFCUs largest annual event and runs through Friday. We are excited to bring together hundreds of credit union leaders this week to not only celebrate the industrys and NAFCUs achievements from this past year, but to also equip attendees with the tools needed to help their credit unions continue to grow, said NAFCU President and CEO Dan Berger. This years conference is focused on the power of change and how credit unions can use it to their advantage. Conference sessions officially begin Wednesday with a welcome address from Berger, which will be broadcast via livestream here at 10:45 a.m. Eastern. Today, Berger will lead a member-only Private Conversation with other NAFCU senior staff. Credit union board members can also attend a pre-conference workshop today to attain their NAFCU Certified Volunteer Expert (NCVE) designation. CUNA Mutual Group is sponsoring a networking opportunity for attendees tonight with a welcome reception. The SUV carrying 14 people went out of control at more than 100 miles per hour and overturned on Texas Highway 85, ejecting most of the occupants, Dimmit County Sheriff Marion Boyd said. According to Border Patrol on June 17th, agents received a tip from the Texas Department of Public Safety regarding a stolen vehicle parked at a stash house. Authorities believe the driver and one passenger were US citizens trying to smuggle immigrants into the country, Boyd said. According to News 4 in San Antonio, 12 of the people inside the auto were ejected during the crash and four were pronounced dead at the scene. He said at least one and possibly two others died at a hospital. In 2012, 15 unauthorized immigrants were killed in Goliad County, Tex. when their truck ran off a highway. Local law enforcement officers were familiar with the driver, who was in the area last week to either pick up undocumented immigrants or to scout, the sheriff said. The Border Patrol says it's providing adequate meals, bathrooms access and medical care to people being held. "We did see the children who were held inside here", he told CNN's Ana Cabrera in an interview. He added: 'This is a flawless example of why our borders need to be secure. "We are trying to build to 100 percent prosecution of everybody that is eligible", he said. Just before noon, about 50 miles from the Mexico border, US Border Patrol initiated a pursuit of a Chevrolet Suburban suspected of being in a "smuggling event" near Carrizo Springs, Texas. The agent stopped one of the vehicles and alerted officials about the others. Democratic Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico said the location was a former hospital converted into living quarters for children, with rooms divided by age group. Dimmit County Sheriff office took up the chase, trying to halt the vehicle, which was going over 100mph. "The vehicle rolled over a short distance later on Highway 85 near Big Wells, resulting in multiple injuries and fatalities", the statement reads. Most of the occupants were believed in the country without legal permission. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she had not heard the audio but said children taken into custody by the government are being treated humanely. "It was the hardest moment in my life", the aunt said about getting the call from her young niece. "Most of it is smuggling traffic". "I think we need more boots on the ground, we need more patrol", Boyd said. Two people were injured Thursday in an accident on Kingwood Road The cessation of counter-terror operations by Indian security forces in Jammu and Kashmir during the holy month of Ramzan was an unqualified failure. Now that the hiatus is behind us, it is time to count the cost of an ill-conceived decision and consider the way forward post-Eid. Between May 17, when the "ceasefire" came into operation, and June 17, when it was withdrawn, Pakistani Rangers and Pakistan-sponsored terrorists killed over 40 Indian soldiers and civilians and injured many more. Over 1,00,000 people were displaced from border areas in Jammu, Samba and Kathua. The Pakistani army violated the ceasefire along the Line of Control during Ramzan at will. The abduction and murder of rifleman Aurangzeb and the assassination of journalist Shujaat Bukhari point to critical gaps in security in the Valley. Terror outfits like the LeT, JeM and Hizbul Mujahideen used the Ramzan break to regroup just when the security forces had them on the run. On two occasions in the last few weeks, the Pakistani DGMO raised a white flag, appealed for a meeting with the Indian DGMO and pledged to honour the 2003 ceasefire agreement. Honour though is an attribute the Pakistani army is unfamiliar with: within days following each flag meeting, Pakistani Rangers violated the ceasefire, killing BSF personnel, including an assistant commandant, Jitendra Singh. The Indian government's response to Pakistan's longstanding cross-border venality has been muddle-headed. Pakistan has been waging an undeclared war on India through proxy terrorists since 1989. India has lost countless lives and been hyphenated with a rogue nation with 11 per cent of India's GDP and 2.5 per cent of its foreign exchange reserves among other disparities. Inexplicably, the Indian government retains Pakistan's most favoured nation (MFN) status, giving Pakistan a measure of legitimacy. It maintains cross-LoC trade, which allows Pakistan and Indian smugglers free rein. It continues to host a full-fledged Pakistani embassy in New Delhi teeming with ISI agents who subvert and co-opt Indian journalists, bureaucrats, retired armed forces officers and activists. The Pakistani strategy pays rich dividends. Global NGOs routinely excoriate India for human rights violations without contextualising Pakistan's malign role of sponsoring terror in the Valley which compels the Indian Army to use force when attacked by terrorists or mobs of stone pelters. Post-Eid, what strategy does the Indian government have in J&K? There appears to be none. On the one hand, interlocutor Dineshwar Sharma represents the government's dovish line. He has spent the better part of the year pleading to be heard by anyone who will listen. The Hurriyat leaders, who are Pakistan's overground terrorist handlers and fund conduits, treat him with disdain. Pakistan looks upon him with barely restrained glee as one more sign that India is a soft state which, even under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will never bite the bullet on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in Kashmir. The problem is aggravated by the BJP's alliance with the PDP. Chief minister Mehbooba Mufti has a voter base comprising hardliners. They resent their party's alliance with what they consider a "Hindu nationalist" party. They have a soft corner for the Hurriyat. They want more, not less, autonomy. They make a political issue of opposing the abrogation of Article 370, despite knowing perfectly well that abrogation is impossible in practice for two reasons. First, it needs the approval of the J&K Assembly, which will never give it. Second, the BJP set aside specifically for J&K its national manifesto (which pledges to abrogate Article 370) when endorsing the alliance of government document with the PDP in 2015. To preserve her vote share in a future Assembly election (polls are due in December 2020 at the latest but, if the alliance with the BJP crumbles, they could be held sooner), Mehbooba sits on an uncomfortable fence. In Delhi, she hews to the BJP's relatively hawkish line. In Srinagar, she courts the Hurriyat and Pakistan. What should the BJP now do? First, recognise that a hybrid policy of appeasing separatists along with stop-start counter-terror operations won't work. Appeasement never works with a venal enemy. Former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain learnt that lesson at the infamous Munich Conference with Adolf Hitler in 1938. Britain wanted to avoid war at all costs. It continued to appease Hitler even when the Nazis occupied parts of German-speaking Czechoslovakia. Only when Poland was attacked with whom Britain had a mutual defence treaty did Britain declare war on Germany on September 1, 1939. Appeasement had failed. Second, the BJP must come to terms with the prospect of abandoning its alliance with the PDP. The alliance has run its course. It has cost the BJP goodwill in Jammu. In the next election, the party will encounter the anger of Jammu's electorate, deeply upset with the Valley's growing Wahhabism. Walk out now, impose governor's rule and hope that you can recoup some of your lost credibility in Jammu before the next J&K Assembly election. The Valley in any case is a lost cause for the BJP. Third, the central government must focus on investing in J&K's infrastructure. The Kishanganga hydroelectric power plant, which will generate 330MW of electricity, the tunnel-cum-highway connecting Jammu and Srinagar and new-economy jobs for youth are what J&K needs. It does not need an interlocutor who nobody talks to but whose presence allows Pakistan to thumb its nose at India's position that talks and terror can't go together. What Pakistan especially covets are Track-2 talks between Indian and Pakistan do-gooders mostly retired men with little else to occupy themselves besides swapping nostalgic tales over kebabs in Bangkok or Istanbul. India's Pakistan policy is neither muscular not conciliatory. It falls between two stools much to Pakistan's delight which profits from such hyphenated ambivalence. But Pakistan's own time is running out. A messy general election looms next month while the Financial Action Task Force will meet in Paris on June 24 to consider blacklisting Islamabad, leading to global financial sanctions on Pakistan. Despite India's meandering policy on Kashmir and Pakistan-abetted terrorism, external circumstances may yet rescue it from failure. Also read: No one killed Aurangzeb Fewer tears for Kashmir's slain soldier shows 'liberal' lack of empathy The US government has formally cleared the sale of six AH-64E Apache attack helicopters for $930 million to India for the Indian Army. In addition to the aircraft, the deal includes night vision sensors, GPS guidance and Hellfire anti-armor and Stinger air-to-air missiles. Virtually, even before the ink has dried, questions are being raised about this deal and its cost-effectiveness. They clearly insinuate that the government of India is paying far more for the Apaches than the cost of procurement by the US government. At the outset, yes. It will have to. Firstly, they are being procured in 2018 and not two decades or more ago, when the US government started procuring them. Secondly, the US government has technology and intellectual rights over it. The Apache is a US government-owned product. Hence the cost to itself will be the least. In case we must get such sophisticated war machinery at low cost, we - as a nation - should have invested in getting hold of this technology long back. Our governments through the years have neglected this aspect. All parties are culpable to that extent. No point griping sanctimoniously today. We must play our hand with the cards we have. Having said that, I think there is some haze to be cleared before the impression stays that we are paying an exorbitantly outrageous cost. The impression is being created through part-truths and inadequate background details. Hence the public at large will form the impression that some dubious dealings are on. There seem to be clear political motives behind these insinuations and innuendos to pin the current government down. I really could not care less about multi-cornered and colorful political motives and games which are continually on in India. I am also not bothered about the party in power. But when it comes to national interest and defence procurement we must back the government of India irrespective of the party in power. There is a need to rise above political interests - and be objective and professional. Otherwise, this deal could come undone and India will remain in square one. The Centre signed a contract for 22 Apache helicopters, along with 15 Chinook heavy-lift choppers in 2015 for the Indian Air Force. The deal was inked at a staggering 3.1 billion dollars. The first delivery is to take place next year. The contract had an option clause for India to purchase 11 additional helicopters if required. The six helicopters being bought now are under that option clause - 50 percent as repeat order of the option clause of the previous deal. The whole behind the option clause is protection of cost. Hence, there should be no complaints. There is a need to rise above political interests - and be objective and professional. Photo: PTI Take a step back and understand the deal better. India has been in talks with US for more than a decade for the 22 IAF Apaches. These were to be procured as a combination of a Direct Commercial Sale (DCS) contract and the US' Foreign Military Sales (FMS) programme. The deal acquired some tangibility when cost negotiations commenced in 2012-2013. Cost negotiations were completed in 2014 and the contract signed in 2015. There were no questions then. Why now? Interestingly, this deal has been worked out on a government-to-government basis between the US and India. It has been dealt by two administrations in the US - of Barack Obama and Donald Trump and two governments in India - UPA and NDA. One deal is an extension of the other. The first deal's costs became the basis for the second. In India, it has been handled by two services - IAF and Indian Army. The deal has gone through many hands and viewpoints for any trouble to brew. Also, if cost fluctuation has crept in, it would have been highlighted and thrashed out to mutual satisfaction. To claim now that we are overpaying is a bit hard on the imagination. Why do I say this? The FMS procedure of the US is well laid-out and standard. For instance, there is no cost negotiation. The US government quotes costs as per a standard formula - which is pretty much the negotiated cost at which the US government would have acquired plus charges/profit of Washington DC. They are based on initial and incremental costs over a period, as quoted to other agencies and countries. These are vetted by the Congress and Senate and approved. If there is any deviation in costs or laid-down methodologies, people are taken to task. Having dealt with two FMS cases in detail during service (M777 ULH and ANTPQ WLR), I have realised the US government's negotiators can neither undercharge or overcharge. According to procedure, we would have given them a Letter of Request (LOR) which is equivalent to a RFP. That would have contained all our requirements and details, including the numbers. They would have responded with a Draft Letter of Acceptance (LOA). Here, each item which has been sought for in the LOR would have been costed in detail - literally to the last nut and bolt - line by line. The cost of each item sought by us will be clear and transparent. The draft then passes through a fine toothcomb by both sides and a final LOA is arrived at on a mutually accepted basis. The final costs vary based on discussions as to how many spares are needed and to what extent services should be taken. Most importantly, the FMS deal comes with the sovereign guarantee of the US government. Incidentally, the Washington DC bureaucracy is as worried about any dubious dealings emerging in the deal as we are. In fact, perhaps more than us. In my dealings with them, I found that they were relaxed and comfortable to engage with government servants. They always used to be guarded and tense whenever dealing with or in presence of defence contractors as our officials are. The thought which used to come to my mind was "Sabko apna naukri pyari hai!" Therefore, I believe the government should put to rest doubts by releasing details about the deal in some more measure for public consumption. If needed, they can invite the Parliamentary Standing Committee of Defence to vet the costing. The haze would then be clear. To all doubting Thomases and muckrakers: We are getting some real capability after a long time. For heaven's sake, rise above narrow political brownie points! The man on the ground needs his machine. Also read: A few truths about Kashmir crisis that Twitter trolls don't get It's not clear whether the US will quit the council in a way that means it will not cooperate with it in any form or whether it will continue to at least observe its sessions and engage in some of its investigations, the rights advocates said. Foreign Minister Boris Johnson yesterday urged the council to reform its treatment of Israel, objecting to the permanent Agenda Item 7 which deals with Israeli abuses in the Palestinian territories. A full pullout by the US would leave the council without one of its traditional defenders of human rights. Trump is facing intense criticism - both domestically and on the global stage - over that the policy. The UN's high commissioner for human rights opened the 47-member council's session Monday with an attack against President Donald Trump's zero-tolerance immigration policy. The move could reinforce the perception that the Trump administration is seeking to advance Israel's agenda on the world stage, just as it prepares to unveil its long-awaited peace plan despite Palestinian outrage over the embassy relocation. Before the United States joined, half the country-specific votes condemned Israel. Nevertheless, the move will add to concerns that the United States is, under Trump, retreating from its leading position as an worldwide advocate for human rights. But U.N. officials said no member has withdrawn. Human rights are universal and should be applied universally and not in such a nakedly biased way. "The U.N. Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel", said Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth. The UNHRC, meanwhile, opened its session on Monday with a blistering attack by Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, on Trump's immigration policy - calling the policy of separating children from their parents at the US southern border "unconscionable". The council was established 12 years ago, replacing the U.N. Human Rights Commission. The US and Israel have long lobbied for the elimination of Agenda Item 7. Versum Materials, Inc. develops, manufactures, transports, and handles specialty materials for the semiconductor and display industries in the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, China, Europe, and rest of Asia. The company operates through two segments, Materials, and Delivery Systems and Services (DS&S). The Materials segment provides specialty chemicals and materials used in semiconductors, as well as specialty gases used in the semiconductor manufacturing process, including high purity process materials for deposition, metallization, chamber cleaning, and etching; chemicals mechanical planarization slurries; organosilanes; organometallics and liquid dopants for thin film deposition; and formulated chemical products for post-etch cleaning primarily for the manufacture of silicon and compound semiconductors, and thin film transistor liquid crystal displays. The DS&S segment develops, designs, manufactures, and sells bulk gas, specialty gas, and specialty chemical cabinets and systems, which are used to manage the delivery of key materials into the semiconductor manufacturing process; and flow and temperature control systems and analytical systems to capture data. It is also involved in the project management for installation and startup of the gas and chemical delivery systems, and inventory management; and provision of spare parts, equipment upgrades, equipment maintenance, and training services. In addition, this segment offers on-site services to assist customers in managing the inventory of gases and chemicals comprising ordering, product changes and monitoring, quality assurance, operation of delivery systems, and managing the bulk gas and specialty gas operations. Versum Materials, Inc. was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Tempe, Arizona. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Danaher: AB SCIEX, AB Sciex Germany GmbH, AB Sciex LLC, AB Sciex LP, AB Sciex Pte Ltd., Accu-Sort Systems, Acme Cleveland Corporation, Advanced Vision Technology, American Precision Industries, Applied Biosystems, Applitek NV, Aquatic Infomatics ULC, Aquatic Informatics, Armstrong Tools, BC Distribution BV, Beckman Coulter, Beckman Coulter Australia Pty Ltd, Beckman Coulter Biotechnology (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Beckman Coulter Biyomedikal Urunler Sanayi ve Ticaret Limited [irketi], Beckman Coulter Canada LP, Beckman Coulter Commercial Enterprise (China) Co. Ltd., Beckman Coulter France S.A.S., Beckman Coulter G.m.b.H., Beckman Coulter Genomics Inc., Beckman Coulter Hong Kong Limited, Beckman Coulter Inc., Beckman Coulter India Private Limited, Beckman Coulter International SA, Beckman Coulter International Shanghai Trading Co., Beckman Coulter Ireland Inc., Beckman Coulter K.K., Beckman Coulter Korea Ltd., Beckman Coulter Laboratory Systems (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Beckman Coulter Limited Liability Company, Beckman Coulter Mishima KK, Beckman Coulter Nederland B.V., Beckman Coulter Nippon GK, Beckman Coulter S.L.U., Beckman Coulter Saudi Arabia Co.Ltd., Beckman Coulter Srl, Beckman Coulter Taiwan Inc., Beckman Coulter United Kingdom Limited, Beckman Coulter de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Beckman Coulter do Brasil Ltda., Beckman Finance ApS, Beckman Holdings Ltd., BioTector Analytical Systems Ltd, Biosafe S.A., Blue Software LLC, Cepheid, Cepheid AB, Cepheid Europe SAS, Cepheid GmbH, Cepheid HBDC SAS, Cepheid UK Ltd., ChemTreat, ChemTreat Inc., ChemTreat International Inc., Cispus Hong Kong Holding Limited, Cytiva, Cytiva BioProcess R&D AB, Cytiva Biotechnology (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Cytiva Biotechnology (Hang Zhou) Co. Ltd., Cytiva Europe GmbH, Cytiva Sweden AB, Cytiva Sweden Holding AB, DH Europe Finance II Sarl, DH Europe Finance Sarl, DH Holding Italia SRL, DH Japan Finance Sarl, DH Life Sciences LLC, DH Netherlands BV, DH Technologies Development Pte Ltd., DHKAB Company AB, DTIL Ireland Holdings Ltd., Danaher (Shanghai) Management Co. Ltd., Danaher Hong Kong Limited, Danaher Medical ApS, Delta Consolidated Industries, Devicore Medical Products Inc., Easco Hand Tools, Esko, Esko BV, Esko Finance BV, Esko Graphics BV, Esko Software BV, FHAB Company AB, Fluke, G. Lufft Mess- und Regeltechnik GmbH, GE Biopharma, Gelman Sciences Inc., Gendex, Genetix Group, Gilbarco Veeder Root, Gilzoni Ltd., Global Life Sciences Solutions Austria GmbH & Co. KG, Global Life Sciences Solutions Germany GmbH, Global Life Sciences Solutions Korea Ltd., Global Life Sciences Solutions Manufacturing UK Ltd, Global Life Sciences Solutions New Zealand, Global Life Sciences Solutions Operations UK Ltd, Global Life Sciences Solutions Singapore Pte Ltd, Global Life Sciences Solutions USA LLC, Global Life Sciences Technologies (Shanghai) Co Ltd., Global Life Sciences Technologies Japan KK, Hach Company, Hach Lange Finance GmbH, Hach Lange GmbH, Hach Lange Sarl, Hach Sales & Services Canada LP, Hach Ultra Japan KK, Hach Water Quality Analytical Instru. (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., HemoCue AB, HyClone Laboratories LLC, Hybritech Incorporated, Hyclone Life Sciences Solutions India Private Limited, IDBS Group, IRIS International, Imaging Sciences International, Immunotech SAS, Immunotech Sro, Intabio LLC, Integrated DNA Technologies, Integrated DNA Technologies BVBA, Integrated DNA Technologies Inc., Integrated DNA Technologies Pte. Ltd., Iris International Inc., Joslyn Holding Company LLC, KVHG GmbH, KaVo, KaVo Kerr, Kaltenbach & Voigt, Keithley Instruments, Kipp & Zonen BV, Kollmorgen, Labcyte Inc., Laetus, Leica Biosystems Imaging Inc., Leica Biosystems Melbourne Pty Ltd, Leica Biosystems Newcastle Limited, Leica Biosystems Nussloch GmbH, Leica Biosystems Richmond Inc., Leica Instruments (Singapore) Pte Limited, Leica Microsystems, Leica Microsystems (UK) Limited, Leica Microsystems CMS GmbH, Leica Microsystems Cambridge Limited, Leica Microsystems IR GmbH, Leica Microsystems Inc., Leica Microsystems Limited, Leica Microsystems Ltd. Shanghai, Leica Mikrosysteme Vertrieb GmbH, Life Sciences Holdings France SAS*, Lifschultz Industries, Linx Printing Technologies, Linx Printing Technologies Limited, MDS Analytical Technologies, Marconi Data Systems, McCrometer Inc., Microtest, Molecular Devices, Molecular Devices (Austria) GmbH, Molecular Devices LLC, Navman Wireless, Navman Wireless OEM Solutions, Nihon Pall Ltd., Nihon Pall Manufacturing Limited, Nobel Biocare, OTT Hydromet Corp, Pall, Pall (Canada) ULC, Pall (China) Co. Ltd., Pall (Schweiz) GmbH, Pall Aeropower Corporation, Pall Artelis BVBA, Pall Asia Holdings Inc., Pall Australia Pty. Ltd., Pall Austria Filter Ges.m.b.h, Pall Corporation, Pall Europe Limited, Pall Filtersystems GmbH, Pall Filtration Pte. Ltd., Pall Filtration and Separations Group Inc., Pall France SAS, Pall GmbH, Pall India Pvt. Ltd., Pall International Sarl, Pall Italia Srl, Pall Korea Ltd., Pall Life Sciences Belgium BV, Pall Life Sciences Puerto Rico LLC, Pall Manufacturing UK Limited, Pall Medistad BV, Pall Netherlands BV Irish Branch, Pall Technology UK Limited, PaloDEX, Pantone LLC, Pelton & Crane, Phenomenex, Phenomenex Inc., Precision NanoSystems, QHC Ireland Finance Limited, Radiometer, Radiometer Basel AG, Radiometer K.K., Radiometer Medical ApS, Radiometer Medical Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Radiometer Turku Oy, Raytek, Reytek Corporation, SH Switzerland Finance Sarl, Sea-Bird Electronics Inc., SenDx Medical Inc., Shanghai AB Sciex Analytical Instrument Trading Co. Ltd., Sutron, Sybron Dental Specialties, TCIL Ireland Finance Ltd., Tektronix, Thomson Industries, Tianjin Bonna-Agela Technologies Co. Ltd., Trojan Technologies, Trojan Technologies Group ULC, VSS Monitoring, Videojet Do Brasil Comercio de Equipamentos Para Codificacao Industrial Ltda., Videojet Technologies (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Videojet Technologies Europe B.V., Videojet Technologies Inc., Viridor Waste Management Limited, Vision Systems Limited, Willett International, X-Ray Optical Systems Inc., X-Rite, X-Rite Europe GmbH, X-Rite Incorporated, X-Rite Switzerland GmbH, XOS, Yukon Hong Kong Holding Limited, and Zhuhai S.E.Z. Videojet Electronics Ltd.. "Free our spy. He has kids". Another called for regime change in Israel where, he said, "There are many political prisoners" with "no freedom of expression". Others, whether erroneously or disengenuously, posted photos from old social justice protests, claiming they were rallies in support of Segev. The Israel Security Agency and the Israel Police, last month (May 2018), arrested former minister and MK Gonen Segev on suspicion of having aided the enemy in wartime and spied against the State of Israel. Gonen Segev as Energy Minister during the Oslo Accords debates. Israel and Iran are arch-foes. The developments come weeks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a theatrical presentation as he unveiled what he said was a cache of Iranian files purporting to show evidence that Tehran pursued a secret nuclear programme. The Shin Bet said Segev had been in contact with Iranian embassy officials in Nigeria and later he visited the Islamic republic for meetings with his intelligence "handlers". He was allegedly an active agent at the time of his arrest, and had twice been to Iran to meet his handlers. In January, Israel said it had cracked a Palestinian militant cell suspected of having been recruited and handled by Iranian intelligence officers who worked out of South Africa. More recently, Israeli forces have carried out a number of airstrikes on Iranian forces in neighboring Syria. Though Israeli officials are reportedly nearly certain that Gonen did not provide any sensitive material to his handlers in Tehran, law enforcement authorities are treating the unprecedented case extremely gravely. In order to accomplish the tasks he received from his Iranian operators, Segev maintained ties with Israelis connected to the Jewish State's security, defense and foreign relations. In a statement, the Shin Bet said that the Jerusalem District Prosecutor's Office submitted charges against Segev on Friday accusing him of aiding an enemy country, spying against Israel, and passing multiple messages to an enemy. Some details of the case remain sealed. "Even at this early stage it can be said that the permitted publication attributes extreme gravity to the events, even though within the indictment, of which the full details remain confidential, a different picture is painted", the statement read. The following companies are subsidiares of IQVIA: 159 SOLUTIONS, 159 Technology Solutions Private Ltd, AHM Global Operations Inc., AHM Global Services LLC, AHM Logistics Inc. (Canada), AIECO IT Solutions India Private Ltd., ALIMED Egeszsegugyi Szolgaltato Kft., Advanced Health Media LLC, Advanced Health Media Services, Aileron Solutions, Albatross Financial Solutions Limited, Appature, Ardentia International Limited, Ascott Sales Integration, Asesorias IQVIA Solutions Chile Limitada, Asserta Centroamerica Medicion de Mercados, BUZZEOPDMA LLC, Battaerd Mansley Pty. Ltd., Benefit Canada, Benefit Holding, BioFortis, CDS - Center de Service SAS, COORDINATED MANAGEMENT SYSTEM, CRM Health Korea Ltd., CSD Health Korea Ltd., Cambridge Pharma Consultancy, Cambridge Pharma Consultancy Limited, Cegedim Venezuela C.A., Cenduit (India) Services Private Company Limited, Cenduit Limited, Cenduit Mauritius Holdings Company, Clinical Financial Services, Clinical Lab Minority Shareholder Limited, Coordinated Management Holdings L.L.C., Cote Orphan, Cote Orphan Consulting UK Limited, DATA NICHE ASSOCIATES, Datadina Ecuador S.A., Dataline Software Limited, Datec Industria e Comercio, Dimensiions Healthcare LLC, Drug Dev Inc., DrugDev, DrugDev Limited, EA Institute L.L.C., ENTERPRISE ASSOCIATES, EPS Research Limited, EPS Software Limited, Epernicus, Forcea NV, Foresight Group International UK LTD, Foresight Group Japan G.K., Foresight IT Solutions Consulting India Private Limited, GRACE DATA CORPORATION, Global Crown Investment Limited, HIGHPOINT SOLUTIONS, Hospital Marketing Services Ltd., Hotel Lot C-8B, IMS (GIBRALTAR) HOLDING LIMITED, IMS (UK) Pension Plan Trustee Company Limited, IMS AB, IMS CHINAMETRIK INC., IMS HEALTH GROUP LIMITED, IMS HEALTH KOREA LTD, IMS HEALTH KOREA LTD., IMS HEALTH PUERTO RICO INC., IMS HEALTH TAIWAN LTD., IMS Health (Australia) Partnership, IMS Health Analytics Services Private Limited, IMS Health Bangladesh Limited, IMS Health Bolivia S.R.L., IMS Health Cyprus LTD, IMS Health Egypt Limited, IMS Health Information Solutions Argentina S.A., IMS Health Information Solutions Australia Pty. Ltd, IMS Health Information Solutions India Private Ltd., IMS Health Information Solutions Japan K.K., IMS Health Lanka (Private) Limited, IMS Health Networks Limited, IMS Health Pakistan (Private) Limited, IMS Health Paraguay SRL, IMS Health Surveys Limited, IMS Health Technology Solutions (China) Co. Ltd., IMS Health Technology Solutions Australia Pty. Ltd, IMS Health Technology Solutions Colombia Ltda., IMS Health Technology Solutions Holdings AB, IMS Health Technology Solutions Hungary Ltd., IMS Health Technology Solutions India Private Ltd., IMS Health Technology Solutions Japan K.K., IMS Health Technology Solutions Kazakhstan, IMS Health Technology Solutions LLC, IMS Health Technology Solutions Sweden AB, IMS Health Technology TUNISIA, IMS Health Tunisia sarl, IMS Health Uruguay S.A., IMS Health de Venezuela C.A., IMS Holdings (U.K.) Limited, IMS Hospital Group Limited, IMS Information Solutions Medical Research Limited, IMS Information Solutions UK Ltd., IMS International (Proprietary) Limited, IMS Market Research Consult (Beijing), IMS Meridian Limited, IMS Meridian Research Limited, IMS Republica Dominicana, IMS SOFTWARE SERVICES LTD., IMS Technology Solutions UK Limited, INTERCONTINENTAL MEDICAL STATISTICS INTERNATIONAL, IPP Informacion Promocional y Publicitaria S.A. de C.V., IPP Technology Solutions Mexico SA de CV (FKA Cegedim Mexico SA de CV), IQVA Romania S.R.L., IQVIA (Thialand) Co. Ltd., IQVIA AB, IQVIA AG, IQVIA AG (Mexico Branch), IQVIA AG (UK Branch), IQVIA Adriatic d.o.o. za Konzalting, IQVIA Asia Pacific Commercial Holdings LLC, IQVIA Beteiligungs-gesellschaft mbH, IQVIA BioSciences Holdings LLC, IQVIA CHINAMETRIK INC., IQVIA COMMERCIAL FINANCE INC., IQVIA COMMERCIAL INDIA HOLDINGS CORP., IQVIA COMMERCIAL LICENSING ASSOCIATES LLC, IQVIA COMMERCIAL SERVICES LLC, IQVIA COMMERCIAL TRADING CORP., IQVIA Clinical AB, IQVIA Commercial Deutschland GmbH, IQVIA Commercial GmbH & Co. OHG, IQVIA Commercial I LLC, IQVIA Commercial Software GmbH, IQVIA Commercial Sp. z.o.o., IQVIA Commerical Consulting Sp. z.o.o., IQVIA Consulting Solutions bvba, IQVIA Consulting and Information Services India Private Limited, IQVIA Finance Ireland Designated Activity Company, IQVIA GOVERNMENT SOLUTIONS INC., IQVIA Healthcare QFC branch, IQVIA Hellas Technology Solutions S.A., IQVIA Holdings France SAS, IQVIA IES (UK) Limited, IQVIA IES Brasil Ltda., IQVIA IES Europe Limited, IQVIA IES European Holdings, IQVIA IES Italia S.r.l., IQVIA IES OY, IQVIA IES Overseas Holdings Limited, IQVIA IES Portugal, IQVIA IES Portugal Unipressoal Ltda., IQVIA IES Puerto Rico Inc., IQVIA II Technology Solutions Portugal, IQVIA INC., IQVIA INFORMATION MEDICAL STATISTICS (ISRAEL) LTD., IQVIA Information, IQVIA Information Solutions (China) Co., IQVIA Information Solutions GmbH, IQVIA Informations Solutions France SAS, IQVIA Istanbul Saglik Hizmetler Arastirma ve Danismanlik Limited Sirketi, IQVIA Korea Co. Ltd., IQVIA LTD, IQVIA Market Intelligence LLC, IQVIA Marktforschung GmbH, IQVIA Maroc SARL, IQVIA Mauritius Holdings, IQVIA Medical Communications & Consulting, IQVIA Medical Development (Dalian) Co., IQVIA Medical Education Inc., IQVIA Medical Radar AB, IQVIA Operations France SAS, IQVIA PHARMA Inc., IQVIA Partners AS, IQVIA Pharma Services Corp., IQVIA Pharmaceutical Marketing Services Ltd., IQVIA Phase One Services LLC, IQVIA RDS (India) Private Limited, IQVIA RDS (Pty.) Limited, IQVIA RDS AG, IQVIA RDS Argentina S.A., IQVIA RDS Asia Inc., IQVIA RDS Austria GmbH, IQVIA RDS BT Inc., IQVIA RDS Brasil Ltda., IQVIA RDS Bulgaria EOOD, IQVIA RDS Canada ULC, IQVIA RDS Chile, IQVIA RDS Colombia S.A.S., IQVIA RDS Consulting Inc., IQVIA RDS ESTONIA OU, IQVIA RDS East Asia Pte. Ltd., IQVIA RDS Eastern Holdings GmbH, IQVIA RDS Finland OY, IQVIA RDS France SAS (formerly, IQVIA RDS Funding LLC, IQVIA RDS GesmbH, IQVIA RDS GesmbH Greek Branch, IQVIA RDS Guatemala S.A., IQVIA RDS Holdings, IQVIA RDS Hong Kong Limited, IQVIA RDS ISRAEL LTD., IQVIA RDS Inc., IQVIA RDS Ireland (Finance) Ltd., IQVIA RDS Ireland Ltd., IQVIA RDS Italy Srl, IQVIA RDS Latin America LLC, IQVIA RDS Latvia SIA, IQVIA RDS Magyarorszag Gyogyszerfejlesztesi es Tanacsado Kft., IQVIA RDS Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., IQVIA RDS Moscow, IQVIA RDS Novosibirsk, IQVIA RDS Panama Inc., IQVIA RDS Peru S.r.l., IQVIA RDS Philippines Inc., IQVIA RDS Poland Sp. Zoo, IQVIA RDS Pty. Limited, IQVIA RDS Slovakia s.r.o., IQVIA RDS Spain, IQVIA RDS Spain S.L., IQVIA RDS St. Petersburg, IQVIA RDS Support Sarl, IQVIA RDS Switzerland sarl, IQVIA RDS Taiwan Ltd., IQVIA RDS Transfer LLC, IQVIA RDS UAB, IQVIA RDS UK Holdings Ltd., IQVIA RDS and Integrated Services Belgium NV, IQVIA RDS d.o.o. Beograd, IQVIA SOLUTIONS ASIA PTE. LTD., IQVIA SOLUTIONS CANADA INC., IQVIA SOLUTIONS JAPAN K.K., IQVIA SOLUTIONS OPERATIONS CENTER PHLIPPINES INC., IQVIA SOLUTIONS PHILIPINES, IQVIA SOLUTIONS PHILIPPINES, IQVIA Services Japan K.K., IQVIA Solutions (NZ) Limited, IQVIA Solutions (Pty.) Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Argentina S.A., IQVIA Solutions Australia Holdings Pty. Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Australia Pty. Ltd., IQVIA Solutions B.V., IQVIA Solutions Belgium S.P.R.L., IQVIA Solutions Bulgaria EOOD, IQVIA Solutions Colombia S.A., IQVIA Solutions Consulting Myanmar Company Limited, IQVIA Solutions Denmark AS, IQVIA Solutions Enterprise Management Consulting (Shanghai) Co., IQVIA Solutions Finance B.V., IQVIA Solutions Finance UK I Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Finance UK II Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Finance UK III Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Finance UK V Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Finland OY, IQVIA Solutions Global Holdings UK Ltd., IQVIA Solutions GmbH, IQVIA Solutions HQ Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Holdings (Pty.) Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Hong Kong Limited, IQVIA Solutions Ireland Limited, IQVIA Solutions Italy W.r.l., IQVIA Solutions Kazakhstan LLC, IQVIA Solutions LLC, IQVIA Solutions Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., IQVIA Solutions Norway AS, IQVIA Solutions Pharmaceutical SRL, IQVIA Solutions Portugal, IQVIA Solutions Regional Pte. Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Services Ltd., IQVIA Solutions Sweden AB, IQVIA Solutions UK Investments Ltd., IQVIA Solutions UK Limited, IQVIA Solutions a.s., IQVIA Solutions del Peru S.A., IQVIA Solutions do Brasil Ltda., IQVIA Solutions s.r.o., IQVIA Solucoes de Tecnologia DO Brazil Ltda., IQVIA Staff Services Sp.A., IQVIA TRANSPORTATION SERVICES CORP., IQVIA Technology Services Ltd., IQVIA Technology Solutions Egypt LLC, IQVIA Technology Solutions Finland OY, IQVIA Technology Solutions Poland SP. z.o.o., IQVIA Technology Solutions Romania Srl, IQVIA Technology Solutions S.R.O. Branch Bulgaria, IQVIA Technology Solutions Ukraine LLC, IQVIA Technology Solutions s.r.o., IQVIA Technology and Services AG, IQVIA Tibbi Istatistik Ticaret ve Musavirlik Ltd. Sirketi, IQVIA Trading Management Inc., IQVIA World Publications Ltd., IQVIA Zagreb d.o.o., Iasist Holdco Limited, Iasist Potugal, Iasist SAU Agencia en Chile, Iasist Sociedad Anonima Unipersonal, Impact RX, Infocus Health Limited, Infopharm Ltd., Innovex Holdings I LLC, Innovex Merger Corp., Innovex Saglik Hizmetleri Arastirma ve Danismanlik Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Innovex Saglik Urunleri Pazarlame ve Hizmet Danismanlik Anonim Sirketi, Institute of Medical Communications NCO, Interstatistik AG, Kun Tai Medical Development Hong Kong Limited, Kun Tuo Medical Research & Development (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Laboratorie Novex Pharma Sarl, Laboratorio Commuq Pharma SL, Linguamatics, M&H Informatics (BD) LTD., M-TAG Australia Pty. Ltd., MED-VANTAGE, MG Recherche, Mecurial Insights Holding Pty. Ltd., Mecurial Insights Pty. Ltd., Mercados Y Analisis, Meridian Research Vietnam Ltd., Nordisk Medicin Information AB, Novella Clinical LLC, Novella Clinical Ltd., Novex Pharma Gmbh, Novex Pharma Laboratorio S.L., Novex Pharma Limited, Nuevo Health Pty Ltd, Onkodatamed GmbH, Operaciones Centralizadas Latinoamericana Limitada, Optimum Contact Limited, Outcome Sciences LLC, PILGRIM SOFTWARE HOLDING B.V., POLARIS MANAGEMENT PARTNERS LLC, POLARIS SOLUTIONS LLC, PR Editions S.A.S., PT IMS Health Indonesia, PT Quintiles Indonesia, Penderwood Limited, PharmARC Consulting Services GmbH, PharmARC Inc., Pharma Deals Limited, Pharma Strategy Group Ltd., Pharmadata s.r.o., Pharmaforce, Pilgrim Quality Solutions EMEA BV, Pilgrim Software Asia PVT, Polaris Solutions BV, Polaris Solutions Ltd., Primeum IQVIA SAS, Privacy Analytics Inc., Professional Pharmaceutical Marketing Services (Pty.) Ltd., Pygargus AB, Q Squared Solutions (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Q Squared Solutions (India) Private Limited, Q Squared Solutions (Quest) LLC, Q Squared Solutions (Quest) Limited, Q Squared Solutions (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Q Squared Solutions B.V., Q Squared Solutions BioSciences LLC, Q Squared Solutions China (Quest) Limited, Q Squared Solutions China Limited, Q Squared Solutions Expression Analysis LLC, Q Squared Solutions Holdings B.V., Q Squared Solutions Holdings LLC, Q Squared Solutions Holdings Limited, Q Squared Solutions K.K., Q Squared Solutions LLC, Q Squared Solutions Limited, Q Squared Solutions Proprietary Limited, Q Squared Solutions Pte. Ltd., Q Squared Solutions S.A., Q2 Metrics, Q2 Solutions, QIMS Pharma Services SA DE CV, QUINTILES MEXICO, QUINTILESIMS EUROPEAN HOLDINGS II C.V., Qcare Site Services, Quintiles B.V., Quintiles Benin Ltd., Quintiles Clindata (Pty.) Limited, Quintiles Clindepharm (Pty.) Limited, Quintiles Clinical and Commercial Nigeria Limited, Quintiles Commercial ApS, Quintiles Commercial Germany GmbH, Quintiles Commercial Rus LLC, Quintiles Commercial South Africa (Pty) Limited, Quintiles Commercial US. Inc., Quintiles Costa Rica S.A., Quintiles Czech Republic, Quintiles Denmark, Quintiles East Africa Limited, Quintiles Egypt LLC, Quintiles Enterprise Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Quintiles Finance Sarl, Quintiles Finance Uruguay, Quintiles GmbH, Quintiles Holdings S.a.r.l., Quintiles IMS European Holdings C.V., Quintiles Lanka Private Limited, Quintiles Latin America Inc., Quintiles Luxembourg European Holding, Quintiles Luxembourg European Holding S.a.r.l., Quintiles Luxembourg France Holdings SARL, Quintiles Medical Development (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Quintiles Netherlands, Quintiles New Zealand, Quintiles Norway, Quintiles Phase One Clinical Trials India Private Limited, Quintiles Russia LLC, Quintiles S.a.r.l., Quintiles Site Services, Quintiles South Africa (PTY.) Limited, Quintiles UK (Japan Holdings) Limited, Quintiles Ukraine, Quintiles Vietnam, Quintiles West Africa Limited, RX India LLC, Radar Acquisition Blocker, Redsite Limited, Reportive SA, STI Technologies Limited, Schwarzeck Verlag GmbH, Secureconsent, Shanghai IMS Market Research Co. Ltd., Source Informatics Limited, Spartan Leasing Corporation, Statfinn Oy, Strategique Sante, THE AMUNDSEN GROUP, Targeted Molecular Diagnostics, Tarius A/S, Temas Srl - Societa Unipersonale, TforG Connect BVBA, Themis Limited, UAB IQVIA Commercial, VALUEMEDICS RESEARCH, VCG&A Inc., and iGuard. There is no love lost between Seehofer and the CSU - facing a tough regional election in October - and Merkel, who have fought repeatedly on migrant policy in the last three years. Seehofer leads the CSU, the Bavarian conservative sister party to Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and a crucial coalition partner. "We wish the chancellor much luck", Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told a news conference after the his Christian Social Union (CSU) party unanimously backed his new immigration plan. Merkel is under pressure at home where her conservatives are divided on how to curb migrant arrivals, and the dispute could further dampen her will to make far-reaching concessions to Macron on the euro zone. U.S. President Donald Trump blasted the German government's internal conflict over immigration Monday, claiming on Twitter that the country's citizens are "turning against" their political leaders. Germany's long-time chancellor said Tuesday that the US move was "very regrettable" at a time when the overwhelming majority of countries worldwide are trying to limit global warming. Watch the discussion above. President Donald Trump tweeted Monday that Germans are turning on their leaders due to migration policies and that "crime is way up" in the European country. Conte, who was visiting Germany for the first time since assuming office on June 1, said Italy wanted changes to European Union immigration rules to ensure other European Union countries share the burden of handling refugees. In an appearance Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged her government must act to stem the tide of migration into Germany. The CSU lost thousands of voters to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in federal elections previous year, and is fearful of further losses. Her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, has been calling for Germany to turn back migrants at the border who have previously applied for asylum or registered as asylum-seekers in other European countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel sits in a auto as she arrives for a leaders meeting of her Christion Democratic Union party at the party's headquarters in Berlin on Monday. Merkel blocked the planned rollout last week, arguing that a bloc-wide solution is needed to what is a European problem. "We do not really have a handle on this whole issue of migration", Seehofer told reporters in Munich as Merkel spoke in Berlin. CSU leaders insisted that the causes for the drop in support were in Berlin and that Germany's migration policy was a major factor. The president falsely claimed that crime in Germany is "is way up" and said migrants "have so strongly and violently changed their culture", a phenomenon he said is generating backlash overseas. Merkel later on Monday met Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte for talks in Berlin and said Berlin wanted to support Rome in its efforts to reduce the number of migrants arriving on its shores, possibly handling asylum requests for the European Union in non-European countries including Libya. In 2016, he threatened Merkel's federal government with a lawsuit if it didn't take measures to further secure the border. The following companies are subsidiares of Occidental Petroleum: 1PointFive Inc., 1PointFive P1 LLC, APC Aviation Inc., APC International Holdings LLC, APC Midstream Holdings LLC, APC Venezuela Srl, ARCO Long Beach, Altura Energy, Amarok Gathering LLC, Anadarko 20-25 Company, Anadarko 20-36 Company, Anadarko 20-47 Company, Anadarko 20-48 Company, Anadarko 20-49 Company, Anadarko Algeria Block 403 c/e Company, Anadarko Algeria Block 406B Company, Anadarko Algeria Company LLC, Anadarko Algeria Oil & Gas Company, Anadarko Brazil Investment I LLC, Anadarko Brazil Investment II LLC, Anadarko Canada E&P Limited, Anadarko China Holdings 2 Company, Anadarko Colombia Company, Anadarko Consolidated Holdings LLC, Anadarko Cote d'Ivoire Block 103 Company, Anadarko Cote d'Ivoire Company, Anadarko DBMOS Operator LLC, Anadarko Development Company, Anadarko Development Holding Limited, Anadarko E&P Onshore LLC, Anadarko Egypt Holdings Company, Anadarko Energy Holding Limited, Anadarko Energy Services Company, Anadarko Exploracao e Producao de Petroleo e Gas Natural Ltda., Anadarko Finance Company, Anadarko Gabon Company, Anadarko Ghana Mahogany-1 Company, Anadarko Global Energy S.a.r.l, Anadarko Global Funding 1 Company, Anadarko Global Funding II Ltd., Anadarko Guyana Company, Anadarko Holding Company, Anadarko International Development S.a.r.l, Anadarko International Energy Company, Anadarko International O&G Company, Anadarko International Trading Corporation, Anadarko Jordan Company, Anadarko Kenya Company, Anadarko LMM S.a.r.l, Anadarko Land Corp., Anadarko Mexico B.V., Anadarko Mexico S.a.r.l, Anadarko Midkiff/Chaney Dell BR Corp., Anadarko Midkiff/Chaney Dell LLC, Anadarko Natural Gas Company LLC, Anadarko New Zealand Company, Anadarko OGC Company, Anadarko Offshore Holding Company LLC, Anadarko Offshore Well Containment Company LLC, Anadarko Oil & Gas 5 LLC, Anadarko Peru B.V., Anadarko Petroleum, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Anadarko Realty LLC, Anadarko Rockies LLC, Anadarko Royalty Holdings Company, Anadarko UK Corporate Limited, Anadarko US Offshore LLC, Anadarko USH1 Corporation, Anadarko Venezuela Company, Anadarko Venezuela LLC, Anadarko Venezuela Srl, Anadarko WCTP Company, Anadarko West Texas BR Corp., Anadarko West Texas LLC, Anadarko Worldwide Holdings C.V., Atlantic Rim Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Aventine LLC, Baseball Merger Sub 2 Inc., Bear Branch Exploration LLC, Big Island Trona Company, Bitter Creek Coal Company, Bravo Pipeline Company, Cain Chemical, Cain Chemical Inc., Carbon Finance Labs LLC, Concord Petroleum Corporation, Conn Creek Shale Company, D.S. Ventures LLC, DMM Financial LLC, Deerwood Exploration LLC, Downtown Plaza II, Elk Hills Field, FLAG Development LLC, FP Westport Commodities Limited, FP Westport GmbH, FP Westport LLC, FP Westport Limited, FP Westport Services LLC, FP Westport Trading LLC, Fosters Mill Exploration LLC, Glenn Springs Holdings Inc., Globrep Representaciones S.A., Grand Bassa Tankers Inc., Grupo OxyChem de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Headwater II LLC, Houndstooth Resources LLC, INDSPEC Chemical B.V., INDSPEC Chemical Corporation, INDSPEC Chemical Corporation, INDSPEC Chemical Export Sales LLC, INDSPEC Holding Corporation, Ingleside Cogeneration GP LLC, Ingleside Cogeneration Limited Partnership, Interore Trading Ltd., Joslyn Partnership, KERR-McGEE TT E&P LTD., KM BM-C-Seven Ltd., KM International Insurance Ltd., Kerr-McGee Corporation, Kerr-McGee Natural Gas Company Inc., Kerr-McGee Oil & Gas Onshore LP, Kerr-McGee Shared Services Company LLC, Kerr-McGee Stored Power Corporation, Kerr-McGee U.K. Energy Corporation, Kerr-McGee Worldwide Corporation, Kerr-McGee do Brasil Ltda., Kerr-McGee of Canada Northwest Ltd., Laguna Petroleum Corp., Laguna Petroleum LLC, Liwa Oil & Gas Ltd., MC2 Technologies LLC, Mariana Properties Inc., Marico Exploration Inc., Miller Springs Remediation Management Inc., Moncrief Minerals Partnership L.P., NGL Ventures LLC, Natural Gas Odorizing Inc., New OPL LLC, OEVC Energy LLC, OEVC Midstream Projects LLC, OIH LLC, OLCV CE Holdings ULC, OLCV CE US Holdings Inc., OLCV Net Power LLC, OLCV Services LLC, OOG Partner LLC, OOOI Chem Holdings LLC, OOOI Chem Sub LLC, OOOI Chemical International LLC, OOOI Chile Holder LLC, OOOI Ecuador Management LLC, OOOI Oil and Gas Sub LLC, OOOI South America Management LLC, OPM GP Inc., OPM Holdco LLC, OTCF LLC, OTH LLC, OXY CV Pipeline LLC, OXY Campus LLC, OXY Inc., OXY LPG LLC, OXY Libya E&P Area 103 BR4 B.V., OXY Libya E&P Area 35 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P Concession 103 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P EPSA 102 B.V., OXY Libya E&P EPSA 1981 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P EPSA 1985 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P NC 143 144 145 150 B.V., OXY Libya Exploration SPC, OXY Libya LLC, OXY Little Knife LLC, OXY Mexico Holdings I LLC, OXY Mexico Holdings II LLC, OXY Middle East Holdings Ltd., OXY Oil Partners Inc., OXY PBLP Manager LLC, OXY Support Services LLC, OXY Tulsa Inc., OXY USA Inc., OXY USA WTP LP, OXY VPP Investments LLC, OXY West LLC, OXY of Saudi Arabia Ltd., OXYCHEM (CANADA) INC., OXYMAR, Oakwood Exploration LLC, Occidental (Bermuda) Ltd., Occidental (East Shabwa) LLC, Occidental Advance Sale Finance Inc., Occidental Al Hosn LLC, Occidental Angola Holdings Ltd., Occidental CIS Services Inc., Occidental Canada Holdings Ltd., Occidental Chemical Asia Limited, Occidental Chemical Belgium B.V.B.A., Occidental Chemical Chile Limitada, Occidental Chemical Corporation, Occidental Chemical Export Sales LLC, Occidental Chemical Far East Limited, Occidental Chemical Holding Corporation, Occidental Chemical International LLC, Occidental Chemical Investment (Canada) 1 Inc., Occidental Chemical Receivables LLC, Occidental Chemical de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Occidental Chile Investments LLC, Occidental Chile Minority Holder LLC, Occidental Colombia (Series G) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series J) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series K) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series L) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series M) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series N) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series O) Ltd., Occidental Crude Sales Inc. (Canada), Occidental Crude Sales Inc. (International), Occidental Dolphin Holdings Ltd., Occidental Energy Marketing Inc., Occidental Energy Ventures LLC, Occidental Exploradora del Peru Ltd., Occidental Exploration and Production Company, Occidental Hafar LLC, Occidental International (Libya) Inc., Occidental International Corporation, Occidental International Exploration and Production Company, Occidental International Holdings Ltd., Occidental International Oil and Gas Ltd., Occidental International Services Inc., Occidental Joslyn GP 2 Co., Occidental LNG (Malaysia) Ltd., Occidental Latin America Holdings LLC, Occidental Libya Oil & Gas B.V., Occidental MENA Manager Ltd., Occidental Middle East Development Company, Occidental Midland Basin LLC, Occidental Mukhaizna LLC, Occidental Oil Asia Pte. Ltd., Occidental Oil Shale Inc., Occidental Oil and Gas (Oman) Ltd., Occidental Oil and Gas Corporation, Occidental Oil and Gas International Inc., Occidental Oil and Gas International LLC, Occidental Oil and Gas Pakistan LLC, Occidental Oil and Gas of Peru LLC, Occidental Oman (Block 27) Holdings Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 51 Holding Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 51 LLC, Occidental Oman Block 65 Holding Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 65 LLC, Occidental Oman Block 72 Holding Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 72 LLC, Occidental Oman Gas Company LLC, Occidental Oman Gas Holdings Ltd., Occidental Oman North Holdings Ltd., Occidental Oriente Exploration and Production Ltd., Occidental Overseas Holdings B.V., Occidental PVC LLC, Occidental Peninsula II Inc., Occidental Peninsula LLC, Occidental Permian Ltd., Occidental Permian Manager LLC, Occidental Permian Services Inc., Occidental Peruana Inc., Occidental Petrolera del Peru (Block 101) Inc., Occidental Petrolera del Peru (Block 103) Inc., Occidental Petroleum (Pakistan) Inc., Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Occidental Petroleum Corporation Political Action Committee, Occidental Petroleum de Venezuela S.A., Occidental Petroleum of Nigeria, Occidental Petroleum of Oman Ltd., Occidental Petroleum of Qatar Ltd., Occidental Power Marketing L.P., Occidental Power Services Inc., Occidental Qatar Energy Company LLC, Occidental Red Sea Development LLC, Occidental Research Corporation, Occidental Resource Recovery Systems Inc., Occidental Resources Company, Occidental Shah Gas Holdings Ltd., Occidental South America Finance LLC, Occidental Specialty Marketing Inc., Occidental Tower Corporation, Occidental Transportation Holding Corporation, Occidental West Texas Overthrust Inc., Occidental Yemen Ltd., Occidental Yemen Sabatain Inc., Occidental del Ecuador Inc., Occidental of Abu Dhabi (Bab) Ltd., Occidental of Abu Dhabi (Shah) Ltd., Occidental of Abu Dhabi Holdings Ltd., Occidental of Abu Dhabi LLC, Occidental of Abu Dhabi Ltd., Occidental of Bahrain Ltd., Occidental of Bangladesh Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Chipiron) Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Cosecha) Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Medina) Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Putumayo) Ltd., Occidental of Colombia (Teca) Ltd., Occidental of Colombia PUT-36 LLC, Occidental of Dubai Inc., Occidental of Iraq Holdings Ltd., Occidental of Iraq LLC, Occidental of Oman Inc., Occidental of Russia Ltd., Occidental of South Africa (Offshore) Inc., Occidental of Yemen (Block 75) LLC, Oceanic Marine Transport Ltd., Opcal Insurance Inc., Oryx Crude Trading & Transportation Inc., Oxy BridgeTex Limited Partnership, Oxy C & I Bulk Sales LLC, Oxy Canada Sales Inc., Oxy Carbon Solutions LLC, Oxy Carbon Storage LLC, Oxy Climate Ventures Inc., Oxy Cogeneration Holding Company LLC, Oxy Colombia Holdings LLC, Oxy Colombia TopCo Ltd., Oxy Delaware Basin LLC, Oxy Delaware Basin Plant LLC, Oxy Dolphin E&P LLC, Oxy Dolphin Pipeline LLC, Oxy Energy Canada Inc., Oxy Energy Services LLC, Oxy Expatriate Services Inc., Oxy FFT Holdings Inc., Oxy Holding Company (Pipeline) Inc., Oxy International Ventures Ltd., Oxy LPG Terminal LLC, Oxy Levelland Pipeline Company LLC, Oxy Levelland Terminal Company LLC, Oxy Low Carbon Ventures LLC, Oxy Midstream Strategic Development LLC, Oxy Oleoducto SOP LLC, Oxy Overseas Services Ltd., Oxy Permian Gathering LLC, Oxy Permian Plaza LLC, Oxy Petroleum de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Oxy Renewable Energy LLC, Oxy Salt Creek Pipeline LLC, Oxy TL LLC, Oxy Taft Hub LLC, Oxy Technology Ventures Inc., Oxy Transport I Company LLC, Oxy Vinyls Canada Co., Oxy Vinyls Export Sales LLC, Oxy Vinyls LP, Oxy Westwood Corporation, Oxy Y-1 Company, OxyChem Ingleside Ethylene Holdings Inc., OxyChem do Brasil Ltda., OxyChile Investments LLC, Oxychem Shipping Ltd., Permian Basin JV Tax Matters Member LLC, Permian Basin Limited Partnership, Permian VPP Holder LP, Permian VPP Manager LLC, Phibro, Placid Oil LLC, Ramlat Oxy Ltd., Rio de Viento Inc., Rodeo Midland Basin LLC, San Patricio Pipeline LLC, Scanports Shipping LLC, SequestCo LLC, Stetson Exploration LLC, Sun Offshore Gathering Company, Swiflite Aircraft Corporation, Transok Properties LLC, Troy Potter Inc., Turavent Oil GmbH [in liquidation], Tuscaloosa Holdings Inc., UP Petroleo III Ltd., Upland Industries Corporation, Venezuela US SRL, Vintage Gas Inc., Vintage Petroleum, Vintage Petroleum Argentina Ltd., Vintage Petroleum Boliviana Ltd., Vintage Petroleum International Finance B.V., Vintage Petroleum International Holdings LLC, Vintage Petroleum International LLC, Vintage Petroleum International Ventures Inc., Vintage Petroleum Italy Inc., Vintage Petroleum South America Holdings Inc., Vintage Petroleum South America LLC, Vintage Petroleum Turkey Inc., WGR Asset Holding Company LLC, WGR Canada Inc., Wardner Ranch Inc., Western Gas Resources Inc., Western Gas Resources-Westana Inc., Western Midstream Holdings LLC, Woodlands International Insurance Ltd., and YT Ranch LLC. Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA engages in the traditional banking businesses of retail banking, asset management, private banking, and wholesale banking. It operates through the following segments: Spain, the United States, Mexico, Turkey, South America, and Rest of Eurasia. The Spain segment includes mainly the banking and insurance business that the group carries out in Spain. The United States segment consists of the financial business activity of BBVA USA in the country and the activity of the branch of BBVA SA in New York. The Mexico segment refers to banking and insurance businesses in this country as well as the activity of its branch in Houston. The Turkey segment reports the activity of Garanti BBVA group that is mainly carried out in this country and, to a lesser extent, in Romania and the Netherlands. The South America segment comprises of operations in n Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The Rest of Eurasia segment includes the banking business activity carried out by the group in Europe and Asia, excluding Spain. The company was founded in 1857 and is headquartered in Madrid, Spain. Read More Swiss Re AG is a wholesale provider of reinsurance, insurance and other insurance-based forms of risk transfer. The Company operates in four segments: Property&Casualty Reinsurance, Life&Health Reinsurance, Corporate Solutions and Life Capital. Its Reinsurance Unit provides premiums and fee income through Property&Casualty and Life&Health segments. Its Corporate Solutions segment is engaged in serving mid-sized and large corporations, with product offerings ranging from traditional property and casualty insurance to customized solutions. Its Admin Re segment provides risk and capital management solutions by which the Company acquires closed books of in-force life and health insurance business, entire lines of business, or the entire capital stock of life insurance companies. Its open and closed life insurance books, including Admin Re, are managed under a unit called Life Capital. Read More "A vote against the vote of no confidence is a vote in favor of the Tsipras-Zaev agreement tomorrow", referring to the Macedonia name deal. The foreign ministers of Greece and Macedonia signed an accord on Sunday to rename the former Yugoslav republic as the "Republic of North Macedonia", Reuters reported. "We have a historic responsibility that this deal is not held in abeyance, and I am confident that we will manage it", Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said as he and his Macedonian counterpart Zoran Zaev received a standing ovation from guests at the lakeside ceremony. The European External Action Service (EEAS), the EU's foreign service, announced in a statement that the bloc's foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn will attend the signing ceremony at Prespa lake on Sunday. "It is a very good day for both countries, it is a very good day for the European Union, for Europe and of course for the Balkans", Mogherini said. His government controls 154 of parliament's 300 seats, and the nationalist party that is a junior coalition partner says it will reject the motion despite vehemently opposing the name deal that Tsipras reached with his FYROM counterpart. Thus, as a result of signing the historic Pact, Macedonia has been renamed the Republic of Northern Macedonia. In the agreement, Athens would drop its objections to the country joining North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the European Union. Senior EU officials were also present at the signing ceremony. In the Greek village of Pisoderi, protesters carried a giant Greek flag and one group clashed with riot police on a mountain slope as they tried to break the cordon. "We have forces that are fighting for the future, we have forces that are fighting for the past", Dimitrov said in Skopje. "This shameful deal will not pass, we will defend Macedonia's name and pride", said Petre Filipovski, 40, dressed in the trademark red T-thirt of the opposition VMRO-DPMNE party. Since Macedonia seceded from the former Yugoslavia in 1991, Greece had objected to its use of the name "Macedonia" because it claimed that implied territorial designs on its own northern province of Macedonia. Articles in the Constitution which relate to the need of the country to take care of Macedonian minorities in neighbouring countries should also be removed. Across the border, Zaev has also met with opposition, with President Gjorge Ivanov saying he will not sign off on the agreement. Ordinary Macedonians now have more information on the deal as on June 15, the government made a decision to declassify it and make it available for public. The subject is a deeply emotional one for many Greeks. Following the referendum and the constitutional changes, Greece should ratify the deal at the end of the year. The Macedonian parliament is scheduled to start debating the agreement next week. Vesuvius plc provides engineering services and solutions principally to steel and foundry industries worldwide. It operates in two segments, Steel and Foundry. The company offers foundry consumables and equipment, including binders, coatings, feeding systems, filtration and gating systems, melt shop refractories, metallurgical and pouring control systems, die dressings and coatings, melt treatment products, crucibles, and ceramics for the iron, steel, and nonferrous foundries. It also provides nonferrous metals, such as primary and secondary aluminum, copper, and other metals and alloys; cement and lime solutions, iron ore pelletizing and calcination products, and grains and powders; and process heaters, FCC units, hydrogen reformers, boilers, coke calciners, and thermal oxidizers, as well as sulphur, ethylene, and ammonia plants. In addition, the company offers solutions for power generation and incineration; glass products comprising artistic, display, float, hollow, and optical glass; glass tempering, and reheat and forming products; and solutions for solar multi-crystal silicon ingots, thin film and cell processing, and feedstock. Further, it provides solutions for blast furnace stack repair; taphole clay, iron and slang runner, sampler and temperature, tilting runner, and torpedo ladle solutions; iron ladle solutions; lining, taphole system, bath agitation and tuyere system, electric arc furnace and BOF maintenance, and metallurgical sensor solutions; and ladle, ladle to tundish, and tundish solutions, as well as tundish to mold solutions for conventional slab, thin and slim slab, beam blank, flow control valve bloom or billet, and calibrated nozzle billet casters. Additionally, the company offers ingot casting solutions; and reheat furnace, steel hot forming, galvanized steel, and electrical and stainless steel solutions. Vesuvius plc was founded in 1916 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom. Read More Plains GP Holdings LP owns and operates midstream energy infrastructure and provides logistics services primarily for crude oil, natural gas liquids and natural gas through its indirect investment in Plains All American Pipeline, L.P. The firm operates through the following segments: Transportation, Facilities and Supply and Logistics. The Transportation segment consists of fee-based activities associated with transporting crude oil and NGL on pipelines, gathering systems, trucks and barges. The Facilities segment consists of fee-based activities associated with providing storage, terminalling and throughput services primarily for crude oil, NGL and natural gas, as well as NGL fractionation and isomerization services and natural gas and condensate processing services. The Supply and Logistics segment consists of storage of inventory during contango market conditions and the seasonal storage of NGL, purchase of NGL from producers, refiners, processors and other marketers, extraction of NGL from gas processed at the facilities. Plains GP Holdings LP was founded in July 2013 and is headquartered in Houston, TX. Read More The Boeing Co. is an aerospace company, which engages in the manufacture of commercial jetliners and defense, space and security systems. It operates through the following segments: Commercial Airplanes; Defense, Space and Security; Global Services; and Boeing Capital. The Commercial Airplanes segment includes the development, production, and market of commercial jet aircraft and provides fleet support services, principally to the commercial airline industry worldwide. The Defense, Space and Security segment refers to the research, development, production and modification of manned and unmanned military aircraft and weapons systems for global strike, including fighter and combat rotorcraft aircraft and missile systems; global mobility, including tanker, rotorcraft and tilt-rotor aircraft; and airborne surveillance and reconnaissance, including command and control, battle management and airborne anti-submarine aircraft. The Global Services segment provides services to commercial and defense customers. The Boeing Capital segment seeks to ensure that Boeing customers have the financing they need to buy and take delivery of their Boeing product and manages overall financing exposure. T 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. American Water Works Co., Inc. engages in the provision of complementary water and wastewater services. It operates through the following segments: Regulated Businesses; Market-Based Businesses; and Other. The Regulated Businesses segment provides water and wastewater services to customers. The Market-Based Businesses segment is responsible for Military Services Group, Contract Operations Group, Homeowner Services Group, and Keystone Operations. The Other segment includes corporate costs that are not allocated to the Company's operating segments, eliminations of inter-segment transactions, fair value adjustments and associated income and deductions related to the acquisitions that have not been allocated to the operating segments for evaluation of performance and allocation of resource purposes. The company was founded in 1886 and is headquartered in Camden, NJ. Read More North Korea's Kim Jong-un is making a two-day visit to China, a week after meeting US President Donald Trump. The Pentagon has typically avoided describing the joint exercises as "war games" and has previously insisted they are not provocative because they are exclusively for defensive purposes. The exercises typically comprise beach landings and repelling an invasion by the North, but have also featured "decapitation" strikes targeting senior figures in the regime. The current detente began in January when Kim expressed his willingness to send a delegation to the South Korean Winter Olympics the following month. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops participated in the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than live field exercises that use weapons, tanks or aircraft. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has stressed that sanctions would remain in place until North Korea's complete denuclearisation, said he plans to meet Kim for follow-up talks. Add North Korea as an interest to stay up to date on the latest North Korea news, video, and analysis from ABC News. North Korea is estimated to have thousands massive artillery guns hidden in hardened shelters among the hills and mountains of the country's rugged terrain. "South Korea and the United States plan to continue discussions for further measures", South Korea's defence ministry said, adding that "no decisions have been reached for other ensuing drills". Yasushi Kudo, who heads Genron NPO, said Japan is so far not a major player in the restarted negotiations on North Korea's denuclearization, unlike South Korea and the United States, and that is one of the major reasons behind the considerable difference. In reply, the US president broached his plans to end the joint military exercises at a news conference after the summit, saying it was not appropriate to negotiate while staging "war games". "President Trump agreed to forego joint exercises with the South Koreans, which has been a bulwark of our defense policy for decades, without significant concessions like a concrete timeline for denuclearization", Sen. "Plus, I think it's very provocative". Trump hailed this as a concession but critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding USA demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. The two sides are discussing the possibility of sending a joint team to the upcoming Asian Games in Indonesia. China also was staunchly opposed to the USA military's deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea, which is created to shoot down ballistic missiles. Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last week in Singapore. The following companies are subsidiares of Dover: ALMATEC Maschinenbau GmbH, Accelerated Production Systems, Advansor A/S, Advansor Dover International (Poland) sp. z o.o, Alfred Fueling Systems Holdco Ltd., Alfred Fueling Systems Inc., Alfred Fueling Systems Intermediate Holdco Ltd., All-Flo Pump Company Limited business, Anman LLC, Anthony Equity Holdings Inc., Anthony Holdings Inc., Anthony Inc., Anthony International Foreign Sales Corp., Anthony International Holding Company, Anthony Mexico Holdings LLC, Anthony North Holdco Inc., Anthony Specialty Glass LLC, Anthony TemperBent GP LLC, Automatik Grundstucksverwaltung GmbH & Co. KG, Automatik Plastics Machinery (Taiwan) Ltd., Automatik Plastics Machinery Sdn. Bhd., BSC Filters Limited, Background2 Limited, Belanger Inc., Belvac Middle East FZE, Belvac Production Machinery Inc., BlitzRotary GmbH, Butler Engineering and Marketing S.P.A., CEP Liquidation LLC, CP Formation LLC, CPC, CPC Europe Inc., CPI Products Inc., Caldera, Caldera Inc., Canada Organization & Development LLC, Chief Automotive Technologies (Shanghai) Trading Company Ltd., Chippewa Square Captive Insurance Company, Colder Products Company GmbH, Colder Products Company LTD, Cook Compression BV, Cook Compression LLC, Cook Compression Limited, Cook-MFS Inc., DD1 Inc., DDI Properties Inc., DE-STA-CO Benelux B.V., DE-STA-CO FRANCE, DE-STA-CO Shanghai Co. Ltd., DFH Corporation, DSR BZ Holdings LLC, De Sta Co (Asia) Company Limited, De-Sta-Co Cylinders Inc., DeStaCo Europe GmbH, Delaware Capital Formation Inc., Delaware Capital Holdings Inc., Destaco Ema Industria e Comercio Ltda., Dover (China) Investment Co. Ltd. , Dover (Schweiz) Holding GmbH, Dover (Shanghai) Industrial Co. Ltd., Dover (Shenzhen) Industrial Equipment Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Dover (Suzhou) Industrial Equipment Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Dover Asia Trading Private Ltd., Dover Australia Holdings Pty Limited, Dover Business Services EMEA Limited, Dover Business Services LLC, Dover Business Services Philippines Corporation, Dover CLP Formation Limited Partnership, Dover CR spol s r.o., Dover Canada Finance LP, Dover Canada Holdings ULC, Dover Canada Operations ULC, Dover Corporation Regional Headquarters, Dover DEI Services Inc., Dover Denmark Holdings ApS, Dover EMEA FZCO, Dover Energy, Dover Energy UK Ltd, Dover Engineered Systems Inc., Dover Engineered Systems UK Ltd, Dover Europe Inc., Dover Europe Sarl, Dover Fluids Inc., Dover Fluids UK Ltd, Dover France Holdings S.A.S., Dover France Participations SAS, Dover France Technologies, Dover Fueling Solutions UK Limited, Dover Germany GmbH, Dover Global Holdings LLC, Dover Global Trading Pte. Ltd., Dover Holdings de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Dover India Pvt. Ltd., Dover Intercompany Services UK Limited, Dover International B.V., Dover International Operations Inc., Dover International Ventures Inc., Dover International Ventures Tunisia S.a.r.l., Dover International ithalat ihracat ve Pazarlama Limited Sirketi, Dover Italy Holdings S.r.l., Dover Luxembourg Finance Sarl, Dover Luxembourg Participations Sarl, Dover Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Dover Luxembourg Services Sarl, Dover Operations South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Dover Overseas Ventures Inc., Dover Refrigeration & Food Equipment Inc., Dover Refrigeration & Food Equipment UK Ltd, Dover Resources International de Mexico S. de R.L. C.V., Dover Solutions Colombia SAS, Dover Southeast Asia (Thailand) Ltd., Dover Spain Holdings S.L., Dover UK Pensions Limited, Dover WSCR Holding LLC, Dover WSCR LLC, Dover do Brasil Ltda., Dow-Key Microwave Corporation, Dressor Wayne Data Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Dressor Wayne Fuel Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, EOA Systems Inc., Ebs-Ray Holdings Pty Ltd, Ebs-Ray Industries Pty. Ltd., Ebs-Ray Pumps Pty. Ltd., Em-tec GmbH, Ettlinger Kunststoffmaschinen GmbH, Ettlinger Management Inc., Ettlinger North America LP, Ettlinger Vertrieb und Service GmbH & Co. KG, Ettlinger Verwaltungs-GmbH, Fairbanks Environmental Limited, Ferguson CO. S.A., Fibrelite Composites Limited, Fibresec Holdings Limited, Fibresec Limited, Finder, Finder Oriental (Beijing) Trading Co. Ltd, Finder Pompe S.R.L., Finder United Saudi Arabia Company, GAL LLC, GIIER LLC, Gala Industries Asia Limited, Gala Industries Incorporated, Gala Kunststoff-und Kautschukmaschinen GmbH, Guangdong Tokheim LIYUAN Oil Industry Technology Limited Company, Highland Park Insurance Company, Hill PHOENIX Inc., Hill PHOENIX WIC LLC, Hill Phoenix Costa Rica Sociedad De Responsabilidad Limitada, Hill Phoenix El Salvador Limitada de Capital Variable, Hill Phoenix Guatemala Sociedad Anonima, Hill Phoenix Honduras Sociedad Anonima, Hill Phoenix Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, Hill Phoenix de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Hiltap Fittings Ltd., Hydro Systems, Hydro Systems Europe Ltd., Hydronova Australia-NZ Pty Ltd, Industrial Motion Control LLC, Inpro/Seal LLC, International Trade and Equipment B.V., JK Group SPA, JK Group USA Inc., K&L Microwave DR Inc., K&L Microwave Inc., K. S. Boca Inc., KPS (Beijing) Petroleum Equipment Trading Co Ltd., KPS Asia Sdn. Bhd., KPS Fueling Solutions Sdn. Bhd., KPS Hong Kong Holding Limited, KPS UK Limited, KS Formation Inc., KS Liquidation Inc., KSLP Liquidation L.P., Kiian Digital (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Knappco LLC, Lianyngang Jump Petroleum and Chemical Machinery Co. Ltd., Liquip, Liquip International Pty Limited, MARKEM FZ SA, MARKEM Holdings Inc., MARKEM International Inc., MARKEM S.A. de C.V., MARKEM Tag Inc., MARKEM UK Holdings 1 Unlimited, MARKEM UK Holdings 2 Limited, MIP Holdings Inc., MS Printing Solutions S.R.L., Maag Automatik GmbH, Maag Automatik Inc., Maag Automatik Plastics Machinery (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Maag Automatik Srl, Maag Pump Systems (US) Inc., Maag Pump Systems AG, Maag Pump Systems SAS, Marathon Equipment Company (Delaware), Markem Imaje Center of Competencies Spain S.L.U., Markem-Imaje, Markem-Imaje (China) Co. Limited, Markem-Imaje A/S, Markem-Imaje AB, Markem-Imaje AG, Markem-Imaje AS, Markem-Imaje Application Innovation Center Sarl, Markem-Imaje B.V., Markem-Imaje CSAT GmbH, Markem-Imaje Co. Ltd., Markem-Imaje GmbH, Markem-Imaje Holding, Markem-Imaje Identificacao de Produtos Ltda., Markem-Imaje Inc., Markem-Imaje India Private Limited, Markem-Imaje Industries, Markem-Imaje Industries Limited, Markem-Imaje KK, Markem-Imaje LLC, Markem-Imaje Limited, Markem-Imaje Ltd., Markem-Imaje N.V., Markem-Imaje Oy, Markem-Imaje Pty Ltd, Markem-Imaje S.A., Markem-Imaje S.A. de C.V., Markem-Imaje S.r.l. a socio unico, Markem-Imaje SAS, Markem-Imaje Sdn Bhd, Markem-Imaje Software Development Centre Pvt. Ltd., Markem-Imaje Spain S.A.U, Markem-Imaje Unipessoal Lda (Portugal), Markpoint Holding AB, Midland Manufacturing LLC, Mouvex, Neptune Chemical Pump Company, Northern Lights (Nevada) Inc., Northern Lights Funding LP, Northern Lights Investments LLC, Nova Controls Inc., OK International (UK) Ltd., OK International Holdings Inc., OK International Inc., OPW Engineered Systems Inc., OPW Fluid Transfer Group Europe B.V., OPW Fluids Group Inc., OPW France, OPW Fuel Management Systems Inc., OPW Fueling Components (SuZhou) Co. Ltd., OPW Fueling Components LLC, OPW Iberia Sociedad Limitada, OPW Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., OPW Slovakia s.r.o., OPW Sweden AB, Officine Meccaniche Sirio S.R.L., PDQ Manufacturing Inc., PISCES by OPW Inc., PSG (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, PSG (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., PSG Worldwide Inc., Petro Vend Sp. z o.o., Pike Machine Products Inc., Piston OPW Inc., Pole/Zero Acquisition Inc., Precision Brasil Equipamentos E Servicos Para Postos De Combustiveis Ltda., Precision Service - Servicos De Manutencao E Instalacao De Postos De Abastecimento De Combustivel Ltda., Pump Management Services Co. LLC, RAV Equipment U.S.A. Inc., RAV Equipos Espana S.L., RAV France, Rav Equipment UK Limited, Ravaglioli Deutschland GmbH, Ravaglioli S.P.A., Reduction Engineering GmbH, Revod Corporation, Revod Finance Ireland Limited, Revod Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Revod SAS, Revod Sweden AB, Robohand Inc., Rosario Handel B.V., Rotary Lift Consolidated (Haimen) Co. Ltd, SE Liquidation LLC, SWEP A.G., SWEP Germany GmbH, SWEP Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., SWEP North America Inc., SWEP Slovakia s.r.o., SWEP Technology (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Scheer Pelletizing Systems & Machinery (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Scheer Taiwan Machinery Co. Ltd., Seabiscuit Motorsports Inc., Simmons Sirvey Corporation, So. Cal. Soft-Pak Incorporated, Solaris Laser S.A., Space S.R.L., Start Italiana Petrol Cihazlari Sanayi Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Start Italiana S.R.L., Swep Energy Oy, Swep International A.B., Swep Japan K.K., Sys-Tech Solutions Inc., TQC Quantium Quality S.A. de C.V., TTSI III Inc., TWG Canada Consolidated Inc., TXHI LLC, Tartan Textile Services Inc., The Curotto-Can LLC, The Heil Co., Tokheim Belgium, Tokheim China Company Limited, Tokheim GmbH, Tokheim Group, Tokheim Guardian Venture Sdn. Bhd, Tokheim Hengshan Technologies (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Tokheim Holding, Tokheim Holding B.V., Tokheim India Private Limited, Tokheim Netherlands B.V., Tokheim Sofitam Applications, Trans - Logistic Group S.R.L., Tulsa Winch Inc., Unified Brands Inc., Val TemperBent Glass L.P., Vectron Frequency Devices (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Vehicle Service Group LLC, Vos Food Store Equipment Ltd., Warn Automotive LLC, Waukesha Bearings, Waukesha Bearings Limited, Waukesha Bearings Russia LLC, Wayne Fuel Management UK Ltd., Wayne Fueling Systems (Rus) Limited Liability Company, Wayne Fueling Systems Australia Pty Ltd, Wayne Fueling Systems Canada ULC, Wayne Fueling Systems Deutschland GmbH, Wayne Fueling Systems Italia S.R.L., Wayne Fueling Systems LLC, Wayne Fueling Systems Ltd., Wayne Fueling Systems Pte. Ltd., Wayne Fueling Systems Sweden AB, Wayne Fueling Systems UK Holdco Ltd., Wayne Industria e Comercio Ltda., Wei Li Pump Shanghai Co. LTD., WellMark, and Wilden Pump and Engineering LLC. The following companies are subsidiares of The Kroger: 84.51 HQ Building Company, 84.51 LLC, Agri-Products, Alpha Beta, Alpha Beta Company, Ansonborough Square Investors I, Ansonborough Square Retail, Ardrey Kell Investments, Bay Area Warehouse Stores, Beech Tree Holdings, Bell Markets, Bleecker Ventures LLC, Bluefield Beverage, Bluefield Beverage Company, Box Cutter, Brier Creek Arbors Drive Retail, CB&S Advertising Agency, Cala Co., Cala Foods, Cheeses of All Nations, Country Oven, Crawford Stores, Creedmoor Retail, Dillon Companies, Dillon Real Estate Co, Dillon Real Estate Co., Dillons, Distribution Trucking Company, Dotto, Edgewood Plaza Holdings, Embassy International, FM, FMJ, Farmacia Doral, Food 4 Less GM, Food 4 Less Holdings, Food 4 Less Merchandising, Food 4 Less of California, Food 4 Less of Southern California, Fred Meyer, Fred Meyer Jewelers, Fred Meyer Stores, Gerbes Supermarkets, Glasswing Labs, Glendale/Goodwin Realty I, Grubstake Investments, HT Fuel DE, HT Fuel MD, HT Fuel NC, HT Fuel SC, HT Fuel VA, HTGBD, HTP Bluffton, HTP Plaza, HTP Plaza LLC, HTP Relo, HTPS, HTTAH, Harris Teeter, Harris Teeter LLC, Harris Teeter Properties, Harris Teeter Supermarkets, Harris-Teeter Services, Healthy Options, Healthy Options Inc., Henpil, Home Chef, Hood-Clayton Logistics, Hood-Clayton Logistics LLC, Hughes Markets, Hughes Realty, I.T.A., IRP, ITAC 119, ITAC 265, Infusion Solutions of Puerto Rico, Inter-American Foods, Inter-American Products, J.V. Distributing, Jondex Corp, Jondex Corp., Jubilee Carolina, Junior Food Stores of West Florida, KCDE, KCDE 2012, KCDE 2013, KCDE-2 LLC, KCDE-3 LLC, KCDE-4 LLC, KCDE-5 LLC, KGO, KGO LLC, KP Sourcing, KPF, KPF Insurance Services, KPF Insurance Services LLC, KPS, KPS AG, KRGP, KRGP Inc., KRLP, KRLP Inc., Kee Trans, Kessel FP, Kessel Pharmacies, Kessel RCD, Kessel Saginaw, King Soopers, Kiosk Medicine Kentucky, Kirkpatrick West Retail, Kroger, Kroger Community Development Entity, Kroger Dedicated Logistics Co, Kroger Dedicated Logistics Co., Kroger Fresh Fare, Kroger G.O., Kroger G.O. LLC, Kroger Limited Partnership I, Kroger Limited Partnership II, Kroger MC Holdings, Kroger MTL Management, Kroger Management Co, Kroger Management Co., Kroger Management Corryville, Kroger Management NMTC Athens I, Kroger Management NMTC Champaign I, Kroger Management NMTC Champaign II, Kroger Management NMTC Cincinnati I, Kroger Management NMTC Dallas I, Kroger Management NMTC Danville I, Kroger Management NMTC Griffin I, Kroger Management NMTC Logansport I, Kroger Management NMTC Missouri I, Kroger Management NMTC Oak Ridge I, Kroger Management NMTC Olney I, Kroger Management NMTC Omaha I, Kroger Management NMTC Portsmouth I, Kroger Management NMTC Starkville I, Kroger Management NMTC Topeka I, Kroger Management NMTC Warrenton I, Kroger NMTC Fremont I, Kroger OZ1 Inc., Kroger OZ1 LLC, Kroger OZ2 Inc., Kroger OZ2 LLC, Kroger OZ3 Inc., Kroger OZ3 LLC, Kroger Opportunity Fund I, Kroger Prescription Plans, Kroger Specialty Infusion, Kroger Specialty Infusion AL, Kroger Specialty Infusion CA, Kroger Specialty Infusion Holdings, Kroger Specialty Infusion TX, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy CA, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy CA 2 LLC, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy FL 2 LLC, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy Holdings, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy Holdings 2, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy Holdings 3, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy Holdings I, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy LA, Kroger Specialty Pharmacy TN, Kroger Texas L.P., LCGP3 Home Cooking, Local Mkt LLC, Main & Vine LLC, Matthews Property 1, Mega Marts, Michigan Dairy, ModernHealth LTC, Murrays Cheese LLC, Murrays LIC LLC, Murrays Table LLC, Pace Dairy Foods Company, Paramount Logistics, Pay Less Super Markets, Peytons Fountain, Peytons-Southeastern, Plum Labs LLC, Pontiac Foods, Queen City Assurance, RBF, Ralphs Grocery Company, Relish Labs LLC, Rocket Newco, Roundy's, Roundys, Roundys Acquisition Corp., Roundys Illinois, Roundys Supermarkets, Second Story, Shop-Rite, Smiths Beverage of Wyoming, Smiths Food & Drug Centers, Southern Ice Cream Specialties, Stallings Investors I, Sunrise R&D Holdings, Sunrise Technology LLC, THGP Co., THLP Co., TLC Corporate Services LLC, TLC Immunization Clinic LLC, TLC of Georgia LLC, The Kroger Co. of Michigan, The Little Clinic LLC, The Little Clinic Management Services LLC, The Little Clinic of Arizona LLC, The Little Clinic of Colorado LLC, The Little Clinic of IN LLC, The Little Clinic of Kansas LLC, The Little Clinic of Mississippi LLC, The Little Clinic of Ohio LLC, The Little Clinic of TX LLC, The Little Clinic of Tennessee LLC, The Little Clinic of VA LLC, Topvalco, Turkey Hill, Ultimate Mart, Ultra Mart Foods, Vine Court Assurance Incorporated, Vitacost, Vitacost.com, Woodmont Holdings, and YOU Technology. Wall Street analysts have given iShares China Large-Cap 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 China Large-Cap ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. And it was China who was the first country to indicate the USA would be ending military drills in South Korea, making the statement even before Trump, pointing towards close contact between North Korea and China leading up to and potentially even on the day of the summit. The day after Kim returned to North Korea, the US detainees were released. China has also been pushing for the role as a "guarantor" and a "mediator" in ongoing talks between North Korea and the United States, after a meeting between Kim and President Donald Trump where the two leaders agreed to "establish new U.S. - DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the population of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity". He made the statement after meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12. The visit will be Kim's third to China this year, following trips to Beijing and Dalian in March and May during which he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. North Korean diplomats talking to South Korean officials in the demilitarized border zone between the two countries reportedly offered to remove their long-range artillery guns, which have been a dagger pointed at Seoul's throat for decades. Anticipation over what comes next is swirling amid concern from regional experts, who've argued North Korea (DPRK) and its allies China and Russian Federation came away the big winners of the summit. Meanwhile, the US and South Korea have confirmed they have suspended planning for their next joint military drills. "But based on the loaning of Chinese plane, and the information available.it appears that North Korea has coordinated with positions with China", Sen said. Sun also said that when it comes down to ensuring economic sanctions stay in place, the USA seems to want China, along with Japan and South Korea, to do the "heavy lifting". It is now urgent for Xi and Kim to discuss how North Korea will work towards meeting USA demands, said Beijing-based worldwide relations commentator Hua Po. The August exercise, named Ulchi Freedom Guardian, had been long scheduled for August and final planning with several nations' military forces had been well underway. The ministry also said that there is no decision yet regarding other allied training exercises. "In practice, China and South Korea will push for relaxation of economic pressure on North Korea", he added. Trump said via Twitter on Sunday that it was his initiative to suspend military drills - a step North Korea has long sought. The freeze fits with China's push for a "suspension-for-suspension" process, in which each side would build trust through a series of diplomatic and military gestures. Military upholds President Trump's deal with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. CCTV did not say whether Kim had arrived as yet. "Now the ball is back in the North's court", said Shin Beomchul, director at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies' center for security and unification. It is expected he will discuss sanctions and the commitment he made at the summit, in general terms, to denuclearise the Korean peninsula. South Korea's defense ministry also issued a statement saying the August exercise was canceled after "close coordination" with the United States. "He got an equally broad security commitment from the United States, very vague", said Rice, who served in the Obama administration. While 28.3 percent of South Korean respondents said they had favorable feelings toward Japan, up from 26.8 percent a year earlier, the proportion of Japanese with favorable feelings toward South Korea fell to 22.9 percent from 26.9 percent. Parkland Corporation operates as a marketer, distributor, and refiner of fuel and petroleum products in Canada, the United States, and internationally. The company operates through Canada, International, USA, Supply, and Corporate segments. The Canada segment supplies and supports a coast-to-coast network of 1,860 retail gas stations under the Ultramar, Esso, Fas Gas Plus, Chevron, Pioneer, and Race Trac as well as operates convenience stores under the On the Run/MarchA Express brand. Additionally it offers bulk fuel, bulk and cylinder exchange propane, heating oil, lubricants, and other related products and services to commercial, industrial, and residential customers in various industries, such as oil and gas, construction, mining, forestry, fishing, and transportation under the Ultramar, Bluewave Energy, Pipeline Commercial, Chevron, Columbia Fuels, and Sparlings Propane brands. The International segment operates retail service stations under the Esso, Shell, and Sol brands; and delivers and supplies gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, propane, and lubricants to customers in various sectors, including power, oil and gas, and mining. The USA segment operates a network of gas stations; and delivers bulk fuel, lubricants, and other related products and services under the Farstad Oil, Rhinehart Oil, Tropic Oil, Superpumper, Harts, and On the Run brands. The Supply segment manufactures transportation fuels; transports, stores, and markets fuels, crude oil, and liquid petroleum gases; and manufactures and sells aviation fuel to airlines. This segment also engages in the wholesale, supply, and distribution business. The company was formerly known as Parkland Fuel Corporation and changed its name to Parkland Corporation in May 2020. The company was founded in 1977 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada. Read More The Interpublic Group of Companies pays an annual dividend of $1.08 per share and currently has a dividend yield of 2.83%. The Interpublic Group of Companies has been increasing its dividend for 9 consecutive years, indicating the company has a new, but growing committment to grow its dividend. The dividend payout ratio of The Interpublic Group of Companies is 62.43%. This payout ratio is at a healthy, sustainable level, below 75%. Based on earnings estimates, The Interpublic Group of Companies will have a dividend payout ratio of 42.19% next year. This indicates that The Interpublic Group of Companies will be able to sustain or increase its dividend. View The Interpublic Group of Companies' dividend history. Andeavor, through its subsidiaries, operates as an independent petroleum refining, logistics, and marketing company in the United States. The company operates in three segments: Marketing, Logistics, and Refining. The Marketing segment sells gasoline and diesel fuel through retail, branded, and unbranded channels. This segment operates a network of 3,255 retail stations under the ARCO, Shell, Mobil, and SUPERAMERICA brands. The Logistics segment gathers and transports crude oil by pipelines, as well as by trucks. It operates approximately 13 million barrels of crude oil, feedstock, blendstock, refined product, and asphalt storage tanks. The Refining segment buys and refines crude oil and other feed stocks into transportation fuels, such as gasoline and gasoline blend stocks, jet fuel, and diesel fuel, as well as other products, including heavy fuel oils, liquefied petroleum gas, petroleum coke, calcined coke, and asphalt. It also sells refined products in the bulk market principally to independent unbranded distributors, other refining and marketing companies, utilities, railroads, airlines, and marine and industrial end-users in the western United States. This segment owns and operates 10 petroleum refineries with a combined crude oil capacity of approximately 1,157 thousand barrels per day. The company was formerly known as Tesoro Corporation and changed its name to Andeavor in August 2017. Andeavor was founded in 1968 and is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. Read More "China trade remains a lingering theme, at least until the USA tariffs take effect early in July", said Masahiro Ichikawa, senior strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management in Tokyo. Mr Trump said in a statement that he had asked the USA trade representative to identify the Chinese products to be subject to the new tariffs. A sell-off in Chinese stocks drove Asian equities to a four-month low on Tuesday as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs on Chinese goods in an escalating tit-for-tat trade war between the world's two biggest economies. The US "practice of extreme pressure and blackmail departed from the consensus reached by both sides during multiple negotiations and has also greatly disappointed global society", China's commerce ministry said in a statement on its website. The move comes after intense negotiations between top US and Chinese trade officials in both Beijing and Washington, DC. This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive $376 billion trade imbalance in goods. "If the United States side becomes irrational and issues the list, China will have to adopt measures that are comprehensive measures in quantity and quality in order to make strong countermeasures". Trump once again touted his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Later on Friday, China announced its own tariffs on American goods, including a wide range of seafood and agricultural products, many cars and trucks, petrochemicals and an array of medical equipment. The China trade offensive is only one side of Trump's multi-front battle with the United States' economic partners as he presses ahead with his protectionist "America First" agenda. The move follows China's announcement that it would retaliate in kind to Trump's initial decision to hit $50 billion worth of Chinese goods with a 25 percent tariff. He added that China is a "predatory economic government" that is "long overdue in being tackled", matters that include IP theft and Chinese steel and aluminum flooding the USA market. On Friday, I announced plans for tariffs on $50 billion worth of imports from China. "The United States has initiated a trade war and violated market regulations, and is harming the interests of not just the people of China and the USA, but of the world". The Trump tariffs, which the United States government says are punishment for intellectual property theft, will be enacted in two waves. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said his office was preparing the proposed tariffs and they would undergo a similar legal process as previous ones, which were subject to a public comment period, a public hearing and some revisions. "It did not meet the current development trend of the world, harmed the interests of the people and enterprises of China and the United States, and harmed the interests of the people of the world". -China Business Council in Beijing, said China would undoubtedly "begin looking at other ways to enforce action against U.S companies that are operating in the market". "It is very unfortunate that instead of eliminating these unfair trading practices, China said that it intends to impose unjustified tariffs targeting US workers, farmers, ranchers and businesses". China is now the largest Asian customer for United States crude; imports rose to 3.89 million metric tons in the first quarter of the year, compared with just 443,000 metric tons for the year ago period, according to figures from S&P Global Platts, with the US's market share rising to 3.5 percent at the end of March. "Trump could put more pressure on other countries like Japan and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation courtiers", said Yoshinori Shigemi, global market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management in Tokyo. "Everyone knows. China is the main perpetrator", he said. The decision stems from the conclusions of a Section 301 investigation launched in August that found that China's theft of intellectual property is costing the USA economy billions of dollars. The latest Commerce Department penalties require ZTE to pay an additional $1 billion fine, put in place a new management team and allow the United States to select a team of compliance officers. The Chinese company is accused of violating trade laws by selling sensitive technologies to North Korea and Iran. But President Trump's handout to ZTE, which he said was a personal favor for President Xi, irked many members of Congress, on both parties, which, in a rare sight, collaborated to have NDAA amended to include a clause to reinstate the original Department of Commerce sales ban. The House of Representatives passed its own version of the measure, and the two chambers must now hash out a compromise. The $717 billion measure would give troops a 2.6 percent pay hike - the largest in nine years - and address shortfalls in military readiness such as pilot training, maintenance of equipment and procurement of new weapons systems. According to the agreement, the ban would only be lifted after ZTE pays a $1 billion fine and puts another $400 million in escrow in a US approved bank for 10 years. The decision amounted to a death sentence for ZTE, which relies on US parts. That prompted the company to declare its operations were grinding to a halt just weeks later. "The NDAA is not really a reversal of the ZTE deal, but will in all probability prolong the ban-lifting process for ZTE", said Nikhil Batra, a senior research manager with industry consultancy IDC. But earlier this month, the US and China reached a deal that allows ZTE to stay in business in exchange for paying an additional $1 billion in fines and agreeing to let USA regulators monitor its operations. Republicans and Democrats have expressed national security concerns about ZTE after it broke an agreement to discipline executives who had conspired to evade USA sanctions on Iran and North Korea. But Trump tweeted that he wanted to help ZTE "get back into business". The lawmakers who introduced the amendment include top Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Marco Rubio. "President Trump was flat-out wrong when he made a decision to go easy on ZTE and allow it to start selling its technology in the United States", said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of NY. At Trump's urging, ZTE and the U.S. Commerce Department reached an agreement on June 7 to have the supplier ban, which has prevented ZTE from buying the U.S. components it relies on to make smartphones and other devices, lifted. It might all depend on the group of Republican lawmakers involved in writing the provision who are now scheduled to meet with the President on Wednesday. The result places the Senate on a collision course with the White House. "Unfortunately, that's exactly what this bill would do by removing congressional oversight for building future nuclear weapons", Feinstein said. The United States will announce on Tuesday that it is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, which it accuses of bias against Israel, officials said. But now, with Mike Pompeo at the State Department helm and Nikki Haley at the USA ambassador to the United Nations post, and John Bolton at the National Security Adviser podium - and more importantly, a very "America First" President Donald Trump in the White House seat - the United States is finally going to do more than issue strongly worded statements of criticism. "We will wait to hear the details of that decision before commenting further", said United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric. The 47-member council, based in Geneva and created in 2006, began its latest session on Monday with a broadside against President Donald Trump's immigration policy by the UN's high commissioner for human rights. While previous U.S. administrations have criticized Item 7, President Donald Trump's government has raised the prospect of quitting the council unless it is scrapped. Instead, the U.S. State Dept.is making the historic move to protest what it calls is the Council's anti-Israel bias. Last week, U.S. diplomats told reporters on condition of anonymity that it appeared more a matter of when, not if, the pull out threatened a year ago by the USA ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, will happen. In recent months, the United States has participated in attempts to pinpoint rights violations in places like South Sudan, Congo and Cambodia. Israel is the only country that is subject to a permanent standing agenda item, meaning its treatment of the Palestinians is regularly scrutinised. Haley also has called for ways to kick out council members who have poor human rights records themselves. Nonetheless, he said the United Kingdom wasn't "blind to the value of this council". A USA official confirmed the decision to Fox News. Current members of the Human Rights Council include Cuba, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Pakistan and others. "There is no legitimate human rights reason for this agenda item to exist", Haley said at the time. But, he added: "What is clear is that the secretary-general is a strong believer in the human rights architecture of the United Nations and the active participation of all member states in that architecture". The US only joined in 2009 under President Barack Obama. Get a price in less than 24 hours Fill out the form below. One of our domain experts will have a price to you within 24 business hours. Telecom giant Airtel got embroiled in a controversy after a subscriber sought to interact with a Hindu customer service representative, a demand which the company said it never accepted. (Photo: PTI) New Delhi: Telecom giant Airtel got embroiled in a controversy after a subscriber sought to interact with a Hindu customer service representative, a demand which the company said it never accepted. As it faced online criticism for allegedly not standing up to bigotry, Airtel said it does not differentiate between customers, employees and partners on the basis of caste or religion. It all started with Lucknow-based Pooja Singh, an Airtel direct-to-home (DTH) customer, taking to the Twitter yesterday to lodge a complaint of poor service. A customer care executive from Bharti Airtel India replied to her saying the company would take a closer look into her complaint and get back shortly. The customer care executive appeared to be a Muslim from his name, Shoaib, which prompted Singh to demand a "Hindu representative" as she had "no faith in his work ethics". "Dear Shohaib, as you're a Muslim and I have no faith in your working ethics because Kuran may have a different version for customer service, thus requesting you to assign a Hindu representative for my request. Thanks (sic)," wrote Pooja, whose Twitter handle declares her as a management professional, a "Proud Indian" and a "Proud Hindu". Following this, Gaganjot, another executive, contacted her expressing the intent to assist her, which the company attributed to automated system assigning any new customer complains/requests to the next available service executive. Asked why it agreed to Singh's request for change of representative, Airtel said: "This is incorrect and baseless and Airtel did not agree to any such thing." An Airtel spokesperson said: "At Airtel, we do not differentiate between customers or our employees/ partners on the basis of caste or religion. If a customer contacts us again for an ongoing service issue then the first available service executive responds in the interest of time. We request everyone not to misinterpret and give it unnecessary religious colour. The said customer has been responded to." After the change of service representative drew criticism, Airtel had yesterday responded to Singh saying, "we absolutely do not differentiate between customers, employees and partners on the basis of caste or religion. We would urge you to do the same". It said: "Both Shoaib and Gaganjot are part of our customer resolution team. If any customer contacts us for an ongoing service issue then the first available service executive responds in the interest of time." The move had however drawn criticism from many. Historian Irfan Habib said that he "can't believe this is for real and some of us have degenerated to this dangerous level". Former J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah said he would change his mobile operator and dump Airtel DTH and broadband. "Dear @Airtel_Presence this conversation is genuine (I've seen the timeline myself). I refuse to pay another penny to a company that condones such blatant bigotry. I'm beginning the process of porting my number to another service provider & cancelling my DTH & Broadband," he tweeted. Singh, whose followers seems to have grown from over 10,500 to 13,000 since the controversy broke yesterday, received support from some, which she retweeted. "I am overwhelmed with the kind of support I got from you all and really thankful to you from bottom of my heart. What I said was my personal choice as per my past experience and it was not a publicity stunt by anyway," she said in a statement posted on her Twitter account on Tuesday. She also received a lot of hate tweets for her bigotry. To this, she responded: "I simply made a request to change representative from Muslim to Hindu as my experience in past was not good and that's my right as well. After that, the kind of abuse I'm facing are beyond imagination and that in itself proves that I was right at very first place." Left with few options to tackle the crude price hike impact on the economy, the finance ministry may ask the political leadership to persuade the 21 BJP-ruled states to take the initiative for bringing petroleum products under GST. New Delhi: Left with few options to tackle the crude price hike impact on the economy, the finance ministry may ask the political leadership to persuade the 21 BJP-ruled states to take the initiative for bringing petroleum products under GST. Sources said the finance ministry is of the view that the time has come to start the process of discussions on inclusion of petro products within the GST ambit and BJP-ruled states can take lead on this. Putting petrol and diesel under the goods and services tax (GST) is seen as a permanent solution to recurrent price hike and the resultant demand for relief from higher prices. When fuel prices hit all-time high levels last month, the government had said that it was working on a permanent solution to the problem. The matter of brining petroleum products under GST was discussed earlier in the GST Council but no consensus emerged. Sources said the government would be more specific on the issue next time. An agreement among states is required for any decision to be passed in the GST Council and if the BJP-ruled states can take it up, a majority consensus could be built over time. The ministry is fully aware that states would demand heavy compensation for their revenue loss if petroleum products come under GST. According to one calculation, petrol can be cheaper by Rs 20 per litre under GST, but the Centres share of taxes could fall by over Rs 1 lakh crore a year. Similarly, the hit on states revenue could be around Rs 50,000 crore annually. The revenue losses would be more profound for Maharashtra, Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Telengana which levy a high VAT of over 30 per cent on petrol. Bihar and West Bengal would have to remove additional surcharge of 30 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively, on the VAT levy. A sharp rise in petrol price to Rs 83.67 in the pre-poll year was cited as a major reason for the Congress-led UPA governments loss in the 2014 general elections. This situation is almost identical to price trends under the current NDA government with petrol prices crossing all-time high levels, shooting up to Rs 85.93 in Mumbai. Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis has already sought bringing petrol, diesel under GST to lower prices. But at the same breadth, he also stated that the GST Council would also have to look into aspects like revenue losses. Maharashtra has the highest VAT on petro products. At the same time, BJP leader and Bihar finance minister Sushil Kumar Modi is on record saying that GST wont bring down fuel prices. Principal economic adviser Sanjeev Sanyal has also said that GST can't reduce price fluctuation in fuels, at best it can stop the disparity in petrol prices across the states. There have been demands to look at the possibility of including petro products in the GST. Oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan had argued for inclusion after oil prices touched USD 80 a barrel. Mumbai: Few months back, actor Irrfan Khan shocked everyone when he revealed that he is suffering from the neuroendocrine cancer. In a Twitter post, the 51-year-old actor had earlier said that "sometimes you wake up with a jolt with life shaking you up". Also read: Irrfan Khan opens up about rare disease The actor has now spoken about his illness and described his turmoil to The Times of India. The daily quoted Irrfan as saying, I had been in a different game, I was travelling on a speedy train ride, had dreams, plans, aspirations, goals, was fully engaged in them. And suddenly someone taps on my shoulder and I turn to see. Its the TC: Your destination is about to come. Please get down. I am confused: No, no. My destination hasnt come. No, this is it. This is how it is sometimes. The suddenness made me realise how you are just a cork floating in the ocean with UNPREDICTABLE currents! And you are desperately trying to control it. In this chaos, shocked, afraid and in panic, while on one of the terrifying hospital visits, I blabber to my son, The only thing I expect from ME is not to face this crisis in this present state. I desperately need my feet. Fear and panic should not overrule me and make me miserable, he added, That was my INTENTION. AND THEN PAIN HIT. As if all this while, you were just getting to know pain, and now you know his nature and his intensity. Nothing was working; NO consolation, no motivation. The entire cosmos becomes one at that moment just PAIN, and pain felt more enormous than GOD, Irrrfan further said. The 'Blackmail' actor added, This realisation made me submit, surrender and trust, irrespective of the outcome, irrespective of where this takes me, eight months from now, or four months from now, or two years. The concerns took a back seat and started to fade and kind of went out of my mindspace. For the first time, I felt what freedom truly means. It felt like an accomplishment. As if I was tasting life for the first time, the magical side of it. My confidence in the intelligence of the cosmos became absolute. I feel as if it has entered every cell of mine. Time will tell if it stays, but that is how I feel as of now." Irrfan had shared the news of illness on Twitter earlier. On the work front, Irrfans next film 'Karwaan' is set to release on August 10. Irrfan's underworld film opposite Deepika Padukone has been rescheduled by the makers till the time the actor gains full fitness. Mumbai: Back in 2006, Anurag Basu had introduced Kangana Ranaut in his crime-drama 'Gangster', which also featured Emraan Hashmi and Shiney Ahuja. Though still in her teens, the actress had made an instant impression and bagged some of the years coveted awards. Twelve years later, Kangana and her mentor are all set to team up for the third time for a film interestingly titled 'Imali'. Kangana who is currently in London filming Ekta Kapoors 'Mental Hai Kya' with Rajkummar Rao, is apparently playing the protagonist whose name has a sharp tangy taste to it and thats the flavour of this young urban love story too. According to a source close to the development, the actress will flag off 'Imali' after she wraps up Ashwini Iyer Tiwarys kabaddi drama which rolls in October and for which she has already started attending advanced yoga lessons, and will also train with national-level kabaddi players. The prep for Imali is expected to begin by August but the film should roll only towards the year-end. The search for the male lead is on, informs the source. Kangana and Anurag had previously reunited in 2010 for the Rakesh Roshan-produced 'Kites' during which there were talks of a fallout between the two. The actress was reportedly upset that the other leading lady, Barbara Mori, had got more screen space while her role had not shaped up the way it had been narrated. She was later quoted as saying that she had done the film only because Anurag would not take no for an answer and he was one of the few people she could not refuse, given that he had launched her. Buzz is, after seeing 'Queen', Anurag called Kangana and told his protege that he was proud of her. Since then, everyones been waiting for a hat-trick from the duo. When we contacted Kangana, the 'Simran' actor said, Its too early to talk about Imali as we are starting the film around the end of the year. All I can say is that Anurag is my godfather and everything I am today is because of him I cant wait to go back to the beginning. Kangana is currently excited about her next film, 'Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi'. The period drama is expected to be released in next few months. Mumbai: Sridevi left for the heavenly abode in February at her nephew Mohit Marwahs wedding in Dubai, and today, four months later, her absence is still felt amongst her admirers. In his letter to the mayor, BJP corporator Yogiraj Dabhadkar, who is also the chairman of the K west ward committee, has said, A flyover on Mogra nullah near Celebration Club at Lokhandwala Complex, Andheri west, should be named Abhinetri Sridevi Udanpool in memory of the renowned actress. If the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) accepts the demand made by a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) corporator, the flyover on Mogra nullah at Lokhandwala Complex in Andheri may well be named after deceased Bollywood actress Sridevi, who passed away in February this year while she was abroad. Sridevi, who started her career in Bollywood as a child artiste in the film Julie, acted in several popular movies. Along with Hindi films, she also acted in Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil films. In 2013, Sridevi was felicitated with the Padmashri award by the Centre for her achievements in the field of acting, Mr Dabhadkar had written. Mr Dabhadkars letter was put up for discussion in the civic group leaders meeting on Monday. It was decided to send the proposal to the municipal commissioner for his remarks before taking a final decision on it, said one of the party leaders. Sridevi breathed her last on February 24 this year while she was in Dubai, UAE. Salman Khan starrer Race 3 has already crossed the 120 crore mark within 4 days despite bad reviews. But trade analysts believe that the movie will not be able to make it to the 200 crore club and in fact, call it a miracle if it does. "The euphoria around Salman Khan's Eid release has already worked and that shows in the first three days' collection. But things are not looking encouraging. Barring die-hard Salman fans, audiences haven't liked the film. It will be difficult for it to sustain, especially in multiplexes," trade analyst Amod Mehra told Mid-Day. "It will be a miracle if the film reaches Rs. 200 crore. If that doesn't happen, distributors, who have paid a heavy price, will stand to lose," he stated. "However, the film is going strong in the single screeners across the country. The only advantage is that there is no big release next week, so that will help add numbers to the lifetime collection of the film," he added. Salman, who recently attended a screening of his film, met his Maine Pyar Kiya co-actress Bhagyashrees son. An onlooker told DNA, "Abhimanyu went up to him and introduced himself. Salman and he spoke for a good 15 minutes and the superstar even asked the young actor to show his first film to him." Abhimanyu will debut in Vasan Bala's Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota which is slated to release this year. Screengrabs from pictures and videos of Shah Rukh Khan on Instagram. New Delhi: For the past month or so, Bollywood Badshah Shah Rukh Khan has been shooting for his upcoming drama 'Zero' in the United States. The news came in from the film's director Aanand L. Rai. Announcing the beginning of the climax, Rai tweeted a Hindi quote penned by Mirza Ghalib along with the news. , - . , .!!! Shooting climax on stage 21 for 21 DEC 2018 #zero pic.twitter.com/no1SrHKhbE AANAND L RAI (@aanandlrai) June 18, 2018 Zero has been making news for the teaser starring Salman Khan that was released as Eid gift to fans. Fans and fan clubs also shared pictures and videos on Instagram of SRK arriving for the shoot and waving at them. Some of them managed to capture him during the shoot as well, and we see him in a ganji like we had seen in the announcement video. Also read: Zero: SRK caught in candid discussion with Aanand, Katrina rehearses for IPL on set 'Zero' is a story that celebrates life, the first look of the film featured Shah Rukh Khan as the adorable vertically challenged man piquing the interests of the audience to witness the unusual tale. Helmed by Aanand L. Rai, 'Zero' is going to mark the onscreen reunion of the actor trio, Shah Rukh, Anushka Sharma, and Katrina Kaif, after 2012's 'Jab Tak Hai Jaan'. Also read: Zero: SRK, Anushka in party mood, but looks like work doesnt get enough of them! The romantic-drama is slated to hit the screens on December 21. Mumbai: Will they or will they not? Are they dating or are they just friends? The exact equation between Prabhas and Anushka Shetty has been a mystery for the past few years. Also read: Again, Prabhas-Anushka Shetty marriage rumours! The rumour mills flashing reports of a romance and marriage between Baahubali and Devasena have not slowed down despite the two actors sticking to just friends tag on multiple occasions. The latest development in the saga, if we may call that, was reports of Anushkas parents performing rituals for their daughter, who they are keen to marry off by the end of the year with a 'perfect' groom. Following this, throwback quote of Prabhas uncle Krishnam Raju saying the Tollywood star will get married this year surfaced, and people were quick to put two and two together. The actor has now finally reacted to the rumours. "It's my private matter and I don't want to reveal anything," he told a daily, according to a report in India Today. He added that he would let his fans know when he decides to get engaged. Prabhas response to the rumours this time is very unlike what weve seen of him. The actor usually takes queries regarding the same rumours sportingly. Once he had joked that link-up reports makes him wonder if theres actually something between them, and he had also said such stories are common when a pair does more than two films together. But this time his response hinted at annoyance and we wonder if its a case of 'bitter truth.' For the unversed, even Anushka had said before, We are very good friends. But we aren't getting married. I am in no hurry to settle down." Also read: Prabhas has lovely words for 'Sweetie' Anushka for her fierce act in Bhaagamathie Like the impending marriage of Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, we will have to wait for an official confirmation for this couple, if any. Diabetes was associated with an approximately twofold increased risk of pancreatic cancer. (Photo: Pixabay) Washington: Onset of type 2 diabetes may be an early indicator of pancreatic cancer - one of the most deadliest forms of cancer, scientists say. Researchers from University of Southern California in the US found that diabetes was associated with a more than twofold higher risk of pancreatic cancer in African Americans and Latinos. However, recent-onset diabetes was associated with a 2.3-fold greater increase in risk of pancreatic cancer than long-standing diabetes. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most fatal cancers, with a five-year survival rate of only eight per cent. This is because the vast majority of pancreatic cancer patients (some 80 per cent of them) are diagnosed at a late stage. Identification of high-risk people and ability to detect pancreatic cancer earlier would likely improve patient outcomes. Diabetes has been consistently associated with pancreatic cancer in previous studies, with a twofold higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer among diabetes patients. Diabetes has been proposed to be both a risk factor for and a consequence of pancreatic cancer. The prevalence of diabetes among pancreatic cancer patients is unusually high relative to other cancers. The majority of the diabetes patients with pancreatic cancer are diagnosed with diabetes less than three years before the cancer diagnosis. Among patients undergoing pancreaticoduodenectomies - the surgical operation often used to try to remove pancreatic tumours - over half of patients with recent-onset diabetes have no diabetes postoperatively. Researchers have observed no effect in those who have had diabetes for more than three years. They examined the association between recent-onset diabetes and pancreatic cancer in a prospective study of African Americans and Latinos, two minority populations with high diabetes risk. Questionnaires and hospital discharge files were used to identify new diabetes diagnoses. A total of 15, 833 (32.3 per cent) participants developed diabetes between 1993 and 2013. A total of 408 incident pancreatic cancer cases were identified during follow-up. During an average follow-up of 14 years, among those with diabetes, 128 participants developed pancreatic cancer. Among participants without diabetes, 280 participants developed pancreatic cancer. In pancreatic cancer with diabetes, 52.3 per cent of cases developed diabetes in the 36 months preceding the pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Recent-onset diabetes was strikingly higher among pancreatic cancer cases (16.4 per cent) compared with those with colorectal (6.7 per cent), breast (5.3 per cent), and prostate (5.5 per cent) cancer. Diabetes was associated with an approximately twofold increased risk of pancreatic cancer. When stratifying by disease duration, people with recent-onset diabetes had the highest risk of developing pancreatic cancer. Importantly, the researchers demonstrated that the association of recent-onset diabetes with pancreatic cancer incidence was evident in African Americans and Latinos, two understudied minority populations with high risk of diabetes but different pancreatic cancer rates. The findings support the hypothesis that recent-onset diabetes in pancreatic cancer is a manifestation of developing pancreatic cancer. The work suggests that patients with recent-onset diabetes who go on to develop pancreatic cancer represent a high-risk population of patients who can be studied for additional risk predictors and may be targeted for development of the tests that are needed for earlier diagnosis. Washington: The bacteria found in soil may harbor a potential game-changer for drug design, a study has found. A new study by Scripps Research suggested that scientists could build better drugs by learning from molecules derived from bacteria called thiocarboxylic acids. The findings done by Ben Shen, PhD, and his colleagues at the Florida campus of Scripps Research investigated "natural products" made by organisms such as soil-dwelling bacteria. Professor and co-chair of the Department of Chemistry at Scripps Research, Shen said,"We use natural products as an inspiration for chemistry, biology and drug discovery." Thiocarboxylic acids caught Shen's attention because of their rarity in nature and similarity to lab-made molecules called carboxylic acids. Shen and his colleagues then took a closer look at two natural products, platensimycin and platencin, that have been extensively investigated as potential antibiotics. To their surprise, platensimycin and platencin, are actually made by bacteria as thiocarboxylic acids. The researchers revealed, for the first time, the exact genes, and the enzymes they encode, that bacteria use to create thiocarboxylic acids. After this, the scientists set out to test whether nature-made thiocarboxylic acids could also act as biological warheads as well. The researchers discovered that, as antibiotics, platensimycin and platencin thiocarboxylic acids appeared to bind to their biological targets even better than their carboxylic acid counterparts. Interestingly, thiocarboxylic acids appeared to have been hiding in plain sight. The molecules were thought to be rare and were not much appreciated to date as a family of natural products. "There are many, many thiocarboxylic acid natural products waiting to be discovered, making them a treasure trove of potential new drug leads or drugs" said Shen. The study is published in Nature Communications. After viewing the footage, the participants ranked their moods and body appreciation scores on a scale of five. (Photo: AFP) A new study now suggests that watching Sir David Attenborough's nature documentaries may boost people's sex lives. The study found that the shows Planet Earth and Blue Planet could improve viewers' confidence by helping them to have 'a more compassionate view of their body. According to study author Professor Viren Swami, from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, views of rivers and trees are devoid of materialism and so allow the viewer respite from thoughts of image. He added, Our findings suggest there could be a straightforward and low-cost solution for promoting healthier body image, particularly for individuals who may not have easy access to real natural environments, for example if they live in a city centre or because of a lack of mobility. Previous research suggests people have sex more often if they are confident in their own skin. The study observed 36 students who watched two three-minute films shot from a first-person perspective around Cambridge where one film showed a walk through built-up streets in the city centre, while the other was shot on the banks of the River Cam. After viewing the footage, the participants ranked their moods and body appreciation scores on a scale of five. It turned out that nature helps individuals have a compassionate view of their body. According to Swami, natural environments promote 'soft fascination', which is a state of cognitive quiet that fosters self-kindness and helps individuals have a more compassionate view of their body. The researchers add further research is required to determine how nature scenes promote body confidence. LONDON: Prince Harry and his wife Meghan will make their first official trip abroad to Ireland next month. Kensington Palace said Tuesday that the royal couple will travel to Dublin for two days starting on July 10. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will visit Dublin, Ireland on 10th & 11th July The visit is at the request of Her Majestys Government. pic.twitter.com/sb8I3iJAOI Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) June 19, 2018 The palace said Harry and his wife, now formally known as the Duchess of Sussex, are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and meeting people shaping its future. The couple married in May, and has carried out several royal engagements since then. They plan to join Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Ascot horse races Tuesday afternoon to present a trophy. The royal couple has also announced plans to make an official trip to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga in October. The woman posted on Twitter that she did not want to interact with a customer resolution officer as he was a Muslim. (Photo: PTI) Telecom giant Airtel landed in a bit of a soup on Monday evening after it accepted a womans outrageous request for a Hindu customer service person. The woman posted on Twitter that she did not want to interact with a customer resolution officer as he was a Muslim. In response to this tweet, a man named Gaganjot took the conversation forward, leading many to accuse the company of not standing up to 'bigotry.' The exchange on Twitter soon saw users getting enraged including former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who said he wouldn't "pay another penny to the company". Hey, I most definitely appreciate you reaching out here! Well take a closer look into that & get back shortly with more information. Thank you, Shoaib Bharti Airtel India (@Airtel_Presence) June 18, 2018 Hi Pooja! As discussed, please let me know what days & time frames work best for you so we can talk. Further, please share an alternate number so that I can assist you further with this. Thank you, Gaganjot Bharti Airtel India (@Airtel_Presence) June 18, 2018 Airtel, responding to the angry posts, said in a statement: "We absolutely do not differentiate between customers, employees and partners on the basis of caste or religion." The woman, Pooja Singh, whose Twitter handle declares her to be a management professional and a Proud Indian and a Proud Hindu had earlier complained about a service engineer. Within minutes the tweet conversation went viral. Actress Gauahar Khan was seen responding to Singh's tweet, Be careful! Pls see your ophthalmologist soon !! U are blinded by hatred !!! U couldnt even spell his name right in a reply, !! N its the Quran BTW !! Agar nafrat se dimaag nahi kharaab hua hota toh shayad education mein basic spellings toh pata hi hoti!! Gauahar Khan (@GAUAHAR_KHAN) June 18, 2018 Another user Mehek, could not help but troll Pooja for her baseless comments, Pooja is so Hindu, she doesn't use Petrol/diesel in her car as it comes from Muslim countries, runs it only on Gobargas. Mehek (@MehekF) June 18, 2018 And Twitter users did not spare Airtel either, Hey Gaganjot... Mark this Tweet... now that ur company has given into racial bigotry i shall port my number outta Airtel and make sure atleast 25 of my friends to d same to.. shall forward numbers i helped port soon.. GOOD LUCK Girish Khubani (@girishkhubani) June 18, 2018 Arun Srinranga tweeted, Hi guys. Can you please let me know how to initiate the closure of my Airtel broadband account ? I can't use services provided by a firm which can't stand up to bigotry! Arun Sriranga (@Arun_Sriranga) June 18, 2018 Omar Abdullah too could not hide his outrage at Twitter's response, Dear @Airtel_Presence this conversation is genuine (Ive seen the timeline myself). I refuse to pay another penny to a company that condones such blatant bigotry. Im beginning the process of porting my number to another service provider & canceling my DTH & Broadband. pic.twitter.com/BZxJOaEsN6 Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) June 18, 2018 However, that was not all, soon after Pooja posted her views, several people threatened her of dire consequences. More you abuse, more I will be proved RIGHT! pic.twitter.com/QpiWQKs35Q Pooja Singh (@pooja303singh) June 19, 2018 Twitter users were soon divided with Pooja's revelation through screenshots and were supporting her for her views. One Shweta Singh posted her support for Pooja, Disgusting!Why the hell only jihadis & libtards r entitled to FOE. It is her life,her choice. Who the hell r these bast**ds to give her rape threats for FOE. #ISupportPoojaSingh To hell with secularism where a woman is abused on a silly tweet. Go abuse ur mothers moron jihadis. https://t.co/EZgFJ1gRRz Shweta Singh (@swetassingh1) June 19, 2018 And more followed soon after. #ISupportPoojaSingh More Power to u @pooja303singh Keep fighting these morons.... We all are with u by all means. Stay Sharp & Strong. Shailen Pratap Singh (@shailen_pratap) June 19, 2018 The Skin Doctor felt that her plight too should be highlighted equally, A girl asked Airtel for a non Muslim executive. She was called bigoted & Islamophobic. Eminent journos gave opinion. Democracy & world peace came under threat. Girl is now getting filthy r*pe threats from MusIims. No takers in Media. Not secular enough? Well deserved threats? THE SKIN DOCTOR (@theskindoctor13) June 19, 2018 @pooja303singh You're right and you did nothing wrong that you need to be ashamed of or worry about. Those libtards calling you Anti-Muslim bigot, are themselves Islamofacsists. Stay Strong !#ISupportPoojaSingh Shraddha / (@immortalsoulIN) June 19, 2018 Following the Twitter to and fro, Pooja herself issued a statement for everyone, Kind Request And Statement pic.twitter.com/qUiMG4Lg05 Pooja Singh (@pooja303singh) June 19, 2018 And a businessman opined, "Whn @aamir_khan 's wife feel insecure in country and a particular community feel danger in nation thn its ok But if a hindu girl @pooja303singh shows no faith in particulr community prsn is bigotry!" Mufti also said that her government preserved Article 370 of the Constitution and also stood strong in defence of Article 35-A. (Photo: ANI/twitter) Srinagar: Outgoing Chief Minister, Mehbooba Mufti, on Tuesday sought to play the victim card and tried to wriggle out of the situation which she had been pushed in due to the BJPs abrupt decision to pull out of the alliance. Mufti said, Muscular security policy will not work in Jammu and Kashmir. The BJPs national general secretary Ram Madhav had earlier said that the alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was untenable and ought to blame the state government for the rise in violence, terrorism and radicalisation in the Valley. After concluding his consultations with all the major political parties in J&K, governor NN Vohra forwarded his report to the President for imposition of Governors Rule under Section 92 of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, reported news agency ANI. Mufti, apparently laying out a roadmap ahead for her party, said its patron Mufti Muhammad Sayeed had in 2015 opted to cobble up a coalition with the saffron party for a bigger cause. She said that the coalition was crafted with the BJP, the party which had formed government at the Centre after its landslide victory in the 2014 elections, only after taking the needs of the state into consideration. Also Read: Jammu Kashmir govt collapses as BJP pulls out of ruling alliance with PDP Our alliance with BJP was meticulously planned. We joined hands to solve the issues that Kashmir was facing, she said while speaking to reporters at her official residence after submitting her resignation to Governor, N.N. Vohra at Raj Bhavan here. Acknowledging the fact that choosing BJP as an ally did not go well with the people of the Valley, from where the PDP had won 28 seats in the 2014 Assembly elections, she said it was done for a bigger cause. The ideas for which we chose BJP as an ally to form the government were bigger. We wanted talks with the government, a unilateral ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir, a policy of reconciliation and confidence-building-measures to address the issues, she said. Also Read: J&K headed for prolonged Governors rule as fresh polls unlikely soon She insisted that the PDP did not do it for power but to safeguard the interests of the people of J&K. We didnt do it for power. Had we done it for power then there were numbers with National Conference and Congres. We did it for some objective, she asserted. Mufti also said that her government preserved Article 370 of the Constitution and also stood strong in defence of Article 35-A. She mentioned that the cases against 11,000 first time stone-pelters were withdrawn, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Pakistan for talks and unilateral ceasefire for Ramzan was announced. She said that her government also retained the territorial integrity of the state and addressed cases such as the insecurity of the minority in a case of cow vigilantism as well as the Kathua rape case. Replying to questions, she said that she was not shocked by the BJPs decision and reiterated that the main motive of forming the government with it was to preserve the special status of the state and build an atmosphere of reconciliation. Im not shocked. We didn't do this alliance for power. This alliance had a bigger motive- unilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of cases against 11,000 youth, she said. She also added that she handed over her resignation to the Governor and that her party was not interested in exploring the possibility of entering into an alliance with any other party to form a new government. Congress president Rahul Gandhi took to Twitter to speak on the alliance break-up, "The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails." The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 19, 2018 Delhi Chief Minsiter Arvind Kejriwal also expressed his concern on Twitter. 3 years lost in the valley, 3 years that saw huge civilian & army casualties, 3 years later the valley is worse-off from where it stood then. This is what happens when you put politics over people. I will not allow Delhi to suffer because of dirty politics of Modi Govt Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 National Conference vice president Omar Abdullah said Mehbooba should have resigned from the coalition before with some dignity intact rather than being shunted out. "I can't speculate what happened. I can't speculate if the killing of Shujaat Bukhari or the end of ceasefire was the final straw that broke the camel's back. Something happened but it is not for me to speculate that," he said. Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal also took to Twitter and called the BJP an "opportunistic party". BJP president Amit Shah has called for an urgent meeting of Jammu and Kashmir BJP ministers and some top leaders in the national capital today. (Photo: Twitter/ANI) Jammu: BJP president Amit Shah has called for an urgent meeting of Jammu and Kashmir BJP ministers and some top leaders in the national capital today. The BJP central leadership would deliberate on the party's strategy in the state ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and also take stock of the political situation in Jammu and Kashmir, sources said. "All the BJP ministers have been called to New Delhi for a meeting," a senior Jammu and Kashmir BJP leader said. BJP state chief Ravinder Raina and party general secretary (organisation) Ashok Kaul have also been called for the meeting. Meanwhile, the divide between the ruling People's Democatic Party (PDP) and BJP is once again rearing its head after the centre announced that the Ramzan ceasefire would not be extended and anti-terror operations would resume in Jammu and Kashmir. The meeting between Amit Shah and his Jammu and Kashmir partymen is likely to see them discussing the issue. Ahead of the meeting with Jammu and Kashmir BJP leaders, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval met Amit Shah at his residence in New Delhi. The Centre's special peace initiative was taken with the aim of providing respite to the people of Jammu and Kashmir during the holy month of Ramzan. But data showed terror activities had more than doubled during the period. The strike was to protest against the alleged strike of IAS officers in Delhi. (Photo: File) New Delhi: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal called off his strike at Lieutenant Governor's house on Tuesday evening. Kejriwal along with Deputy CM Manish Sisodia, Health Minister Satyendar Jain and Labour Minister Gopal Rai had began the sit-in protest on June 11 at Raj Niwas -- the residence of Delhis Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal. Breaking his silence on the protest, L-G Anil Baijal on Tuesday urged Arvind Kejriwal to urgently meet IAS officers at the Delhi Secretariat. Baijal shot off a letter to Kejriwal in response to his deputy Manish Sisodia's communication in which the latter had asked for a meeting between the government and bureaucrats to end the impasse. "The L-G requested the CM to urgently meet the officers at the Secretariat so that apprehensions and concerns of both sides can be suitably addressed through dialogue in the best interest of the people of Delhi," an official from Baijal's office said in a statement. The official said Baijal had earlier advised the AAP government to make efforts to restore trust between the elected government and the officers. Also Read: SC refuses urgent hearing of plea to declare Kejriwal's sit-in as 'unconstitutional' The strike was to protest against the alleged strike of IAS officers in Delhi. Kejriwal had maintained that government work had taken a backseat and suffered majorly since IAS officers were skipping meetings for the last four months. Also Read: Recovering fast, will try to resume work today: Delhi dy CM Manish Sisodia (With inputs from agencies) New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulled out of its alliance with Mehbooba Muftis Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Tuesday, ending a three-year rocky relationship that came to a flashpoint this week with the Centres decision to discontinue the Ramzan ceasefire in Jammu and Kashmir. Untenable, the BJP called the alliance, blaming the government for the rise in violence in the Valley. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav told the media: We have taken a decision. It is untenable for the BJP to continue in alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir. Hence, we are withdrawing support. He added: Terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of citizens are in danger in the Valley. Shujaat Bukharis killing is an example. Madhav also cited the lack of development in Jammu and Ladakh. Also Read: Muscular security policy will not work in J&K, says Mehbooba Mufti Party president Amit Shah had called all BJP lawmakers in the state to Delhi for a meeting in the morning. Madhav said the brainstorming was to review the alliance's goals and targets achieved in the last three years. Soon after the announcement Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti handed in her resignation, prompting the way for Governor's Rule, which the BJP favours. Jammu and Kashmir BJP lawmakers welcomed the Centre's decision to pull out from the PDP alliance. They also tendered their resignation to Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti. Jammu Kashmir Deputy CM Kavinder Gupta said, "We have submitted our resignations to CM Mufti. We have now come out of the government." The BJP had 25 lawmakers and the PDP 28 in the state Assembly, where the majority mark is 45. The National Confrence has 15, the Congress 12 and others 7 MLAs in the state Assembly. Also Read: No question of alliance with PDP, says Cong's Ghulam Nabi Azad BJP and the PDP, unlikely partners from the onset of their alliance, have had uneasy relations from time to time in the last three years. Things came to a head on Sunday when Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh lifted the ceasefire that the government had put in force during the month of Ramzan. Anti-terror operations would resume in full force, Singh said on Sunday. Data shows terrorist activity had more than doubled in this month. The killing of Rising Kashmir editor and a moderate voice Shujaat Bukhari was the last nail in PDPs hopes that the ceasefire would continue to promote harmony in the Valley. The ceasefire was Chief Minister Mehbooba Muftis brainchild, though it had met stiff opposition from the state BJP. Sources in Muftis Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said that after deciding not to extend the conditional ceasefire announced by the Centre for the Islamic fasting month of Ramzan, the Modi government has decided to launch a tough military campaign against separatist militants in the restive state and give a free hand to security forces to deal with the situation. The PDP did not agree to it which established the point of no return. The Chief Minister and the PDP had also pleaded for extending the Ramzan truce beyond Eid-ul-Fitr to pave the way for holding talks with the separatists which was ignored by the Centre, the sources said. However, sections of security forces and also senior Army commanders were against extending Ramzan ceasefire and even eager not only to resume but also bump up anti-militant and anti-terror operations across the Kashmir Valley at earliest. They were planning to launch Operation All Out II against the militants. In its first phase, more than three hundred militants, including several top commanders, were killed in 2017 and during the first four and half months of 2018. Local watchers see in the BJPs decision also an attempt to charm its constituency as the party was being openly accused of surrendering for power the interests of Jammu from where it won almost all seats in the 2014 Assembly election. On the other hand, the PDPs support base in Kashmir Valley has eroded because it chose the saffron party as its ally, and because of the unending killings in the Valley over the last three years. Ever since the two parties cobbled up an alliance to form the government in 2015, they have publicly differed on issues including Article 370 which guarantees special status to J&K within the Indian Union. While the PDP would repeatedly say it will never allow dilution of this provision, the BJP would vow that abrogation of Article 370 and its upshot including Article 35A are core agendas of the party and that it could never abandon it. Only for the purposes of running a coalition government in the state, the party had decided not to press for abrogation of Article 370 while in government. The agenda is not abandoned, the party would say. Tension had also simmered over the PDPs promise to talk to separatists, the proposal to remove the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which gives the Army more power in insurgent areas and even in the rollout of the Goods and Services tax in the state. This March, the PDP sacked its minister Haseeb Drabu who was a popular interlocutor between the allies. National Conference leader and former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah tweeted after Tuesday's fallout. And so it has come to pass........ Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) June 19, 2018 Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal also took to Twitter and called the BJP an "opportunistic party". The BJP pulled out of the alliance with Mehbooba Mufti-led coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. (Photo: File) New Delhi: After the BJP pulled out of the ruling alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday, the Congress has ruled out the possibility of extending support to the PDP. Omar Abdullahs National Conference, too, does not plan on extending support to the PDP. This means that the state of Jammu and Kashmir is now headed for Governors rule. A hostile ground situation is another cause of worry if elections are to be held anytime soon. Given that bypolls to the Anant Nag Lok Sabha seat could not be held in the last one year due to a hostile ground situation, it is unlikely fresh elections will be held soon for the state assembly. Also Read: Jammu Kashmir govt collapses as BJP pulls out of ruling alliance with PDP The Army and other security forces are planning to launch a tough campaign against terrorists. An Operation All Out II is in the works against the terrorists in the state. In the first phase of the operation earlier, more than three hundred militants, including several top commanders, were killed in 2017 and during the first four and half months of 2018. Earlier on Tuesday, the BJP pulled out of the alliance with Mehbooba Mufti-led coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir. Also Read: No question of alliance with PDP, says Cong's Ghulam Nabi Azad Sources in Muftis Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said that after deciding not to extend the conditional ceasefire announced by the Centre for the Islamic fasting month of Ramzan, the Modi government decided to launch a tough military campaign against separatist militants in the restive state and give a free hand to security forces to deal with the situation. The PDP did not agree to it which set off differences of point of no return. The Chief Minister and the PDP had also pleaded for extending the Ramzan truce beyond Eid-ul-Fitr to pave the way for holding talks with the separatists which was ignored by the Centre, the sources said. The bomb threat to IndiGo Jaipur-Mumbai flight was analysed and was classified as a 'specific bomb threat'. (Representational Image) Mumbai: IndiGo call centre has received a bomb threat call for its Jaipur-Mumbai flight early on Tuesday morning. The flight was already in the air. According to reports, low-cost carrier IndiGo received the call at around 5:30 am from an unidentified person. The person on the call told the airline that there was a bomb threat to Jaipur-Mubai 6E 218 flight. We immediately reported the matter to Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) and followed all security protocols. The concerned authorities carried out the investigation and declared the call as specific bomb threat. Following clearance, operations will be resumed as normal, IndiGo said. The bomb threat was analysed and was classified as a "specific bomb threat", IndiGo added. Investigations however found the call to be essentially a hoax. "Following the clearance by the authorities, operations will be resumed as normal," IndiGo said. The flight's scheduled departure is at 5:05 am; it lands in Mumbai at 7 am. (With inputs from ANI) Ghulam Nabi Azad said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. (Photo: File) New Delhi: The Congress on Tuesday ruled out any tie-up with the PDP after the BJP pulled out of the ruling alliance in Jammu and Kashmir. Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said that the BJP had committed a "Himalayan blunder" by forming a government with the PDP. He said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. "The regional parties should have been allowed to form an alliance among themselves," he told reporters here. The alliance has devastated the state, be it economically or socially, and has left Jammu and Kashmir in a state of "ruins", he said. Stating that the marriage had 'irretrievably broken down', Indrani Mukerjea had sent a divorce notice to Peter Mukerjea in April this year. (Photo: File | PTI) Mumbai: Former media baron Peter Mukerjea has agreed for a divorce with his wife Indrani Mukerjea, the prime accused in the Sheena Bora murder case, her lawyer told on Monday. The divorce procedure may take some time as both are in jail, a lawyer representing Indrani Mukerjea in the murder case told reporters outside a Mumbai court. "We have received a reply through registered post from Peter's lawyer and they have agreed to divorce by mutual consent," she said. Peter Mukerjea's lawyers could not be reached for comments. Stating that the marriage had "irretrievably broken down", Indrani had sent a divorce notice to Peter Mukerjea in April this year. Both Indrani and Peter are facing trial in the murder case of Sheena Bora. Sheena (24), Indrani's daughter from an earlier relationship, was allegedly killed in April 2012. The killing came to light in August 2015 when Mukerjeas' former driver Shyamvar Rai spilled the beans when he was arrested in another case. According to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the killing was the fall-out of a financial dispute. Meanwhile, the defence lawyers on Monday completed the cross-examination of Pradeep Waghmare, a former domestic help of the Mukerjeas. They submitted that there were some contradictions in his statement to the police. He had told the police, which probed the case before the CBI took over, that he had sought Rs 20,000 from Indrani for his children's education, and when she refused, he got angry and quit the job. However, in the court, Waghmare said this was not his reason for quitting, and the police had put words in his mouth. The next hearing is scheduled for June 25. Asked if Thanga Tamilselvan will be given a Ministerial berth, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palanisamy shot back asking, 'how it can be given?' (Photo: File | PTI) Chennai: In significant remarks, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palanisamy on Monday said any move by pro-Dhinakaran disqualified MLAs to return to AIADMK fold was welcome, but indicated he was not aware of any such plan. "Only you are saying that, if they join it is laudable," he told reporters at Chennai when asked about claims by some quarters that eight disqualified legislators led by Thanga Tamilselvan were likely to come back to the AIADMK fold. The remarks of K Palanisamy, co-coordinator of the ruling AIADMK, come days after senior minister D Jayakumar said it was for the party to take a decision on admitting the disqualified MLAs, loyal to sidelined leader T T V Dhinakaran. However, he had said there was no question of Dhinkaran and his aides being taken back into the party fold. Asked if Thanga Tamilselvan will be given a Ministerial berth, Palanisamy shot back asking,"how it can be given?" Answering another question, he said there can be no bypolls to the constituencies previously represented by the disqualified MLAs as the matter was in the court. Thanga Tamilselvan has said he would withdraw his petition in the Madras High Court challenging his disqualification by Assembly Speaker P Dhanapal, but ruled out joining the ruling AIADMK camp led by Palanisamy and his deputy O Panneerselvam. He said the people of his constituency have endorsed his decision to take back his plea in the court. A staunch loyalist of Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam chief and sidelined AIADMK leader T T V Dhinakaran, Thanga Tamilselvam said consultations will soon be held with the 17 other disqualified MLAs. "It will be effective if all the 18 MLAs," withdrew their petitions challenging their disqualification. Thanga Tamilselvan is one of the 18 MLAs who were disqualified last year following their revolt against the chief minister. A day after the factions led by Palanisamy and erstwhile rebel leader Panneerselvam merged on August 21, 2017, MLAs owing allegiance to T T V Dhinakaran met the then Governor Ch Vidyasagar Rao, and sought a "change," in leadership saying they had lost confidence in K Palanisamy. On June 14, the Madras High Court delivered a split verdict on the petitions challenging disqualification of the 18 MLAs. Chief Justice Indira Banerjee upheld the September 18 order of Speaker Dhanapal disqualifying the MLAs, while Justice M Sundar disagreed with her and set it aside. Also Read: Split verdict on 18 disqualified AIADMK MLAs, case referred to third judge The verdict had come as a massive relief for the Palanisamy government as the restoration of the membership of the MLAs could have brought it perilously close to losing majority in the event of their joining hands with the opposition DMK-Congress-IUML alliance, which together has 98 MLAs in the 234-member assembly. In that eventuality, the Opposition's strength would have swelled to 117, including T T V Dhinakaran, who is the lone independent MLA. The AIADMK also has 117 members in the House, including the Speaker. While Satyendar Jain went on indefinite fast at the L-G's office last Tuesday, Sisodia had been on a hunger strike since Wednesday. (Photo: File) New Delhi: Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who was on a hunger strike since June 13 at the lieutenant governor's office and hospitalised after his health deteriorated, said that he is "recovering fast" and will try and resume work from today. Sisodia was rushed to the LNJP Hospital here around 3 pm on Monday after the ketone level in his urine rose sharply and his sugar level slumped. "Good Morning!! With Doctor's care and your blessings, I am recovering fast. Yesterday, my ketone level was 7.4 & BP reached 184/100, which was leading to renal failure. But now everything is under control. If doctors allow I'll try to be back to work today only," he said on Twitter. Good Morning!! With Doctor's care and your blessings, I am recovering fast. Yesterday, my ketone level was 7.4 & BP reached 184/100, which was leading to renal failure. But now everything is under control. If doctors allow I'll try to be back to work today only. pic.twitter.com/Ham1qOSUMM Manish Sisodia (@msisodia) June 19, 2018 Health Minister Satyendar Jain was hospitalised on Sunday night after his condition had deteriorated. He was taken to the LNJP Hospital where his condition is stable. On Saturday, a team of doctors had examined Sisodia and Jain. Read: Delhi impasse continues: AAP minister Satyendar Jain, on fast, hospitalised While Jain went on indefinite fast at the L-G's office last Tuesday, Sisodia had been on a hunger strike since Wednesday. Read: Delhi dy CM Manish Sisodia, on hunger strike at L-G's office, hospitalised Kejriwal, along with his colleagues, have been at Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal's office since June 13, demanding a direction to IAS officers to end what the AAP describes a "strike" and approval of the doorstep ration delivery scheme. Piyush Manush had also brought actor Mansoor Ali Khan to Salem to speak to villagers regarding the project. (Photo: Facebook) Chennai: Environmental activist Piyush Manush from Salem was arrested by the police on Monday for protesting against the expansion of Salem airport and the proposed eight-lane Chennai-Salem expressway. The arrest came just a day after actor Mansoor Ali Khan was detained by the police for his remarks on the Chennai-Salem expressway. Khan had reportedly said that he would not hesitate to kill officials if the project continued. As per news reports, activist Piyush Manush was arrested for giving a 'provocative speech' inviting people to join the protests and 'instigating enmity between groups', said the police. Salem Superintendent of Police said that Manush has been detained for questioning, but did not clarify what he was being interrogated about, or where he has been held. Manush had brought Khan to Salem to speak to villagers regarding the project. On Sunday, Manush criticised Khan's arrest in a Facebook post and on Monday he was detained by the police. Addressing the media, senior minister and AIADMK spokesperson D Jayakumar said, All should abide by the law. The government will not remain quiet if somebody talks in a way that may incite or propogate violence." Environmentalists are afraid that the proposed eight-lane Chennai-Salem expressway will lead to loss of livelihood as well as become a major threat to the ecosystem in the area. Farmers, too, are not willing to offer their land as they claim the compensation being offered is well below the market rate. Locals and activists also stress on the fact that the two cities are anyway well-connected and the new project will only cut short the distance by a mere 50 km. They say that damaging the area's fragile ecosystem is not worth it. However, the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) counters this claim by saying that the expressway will 'eliminate bottlenecks and reduce travel time between Chennai and Salem'. Chennai: The Madras High Court on Monday observed that the police firing during the recent anti-Sterlite protests in Tuticorin was a fit case for CBI investigation. Since the state police was involved, it is a fit case to be investigated by the CBI, Chief Justice Indira Banerjee observed when a PIL by an advocate came up for hearing before the first bench. Petitioner S Rajinikanth, an advocate practising in the high court, sought a probe by a sitting judge of the court into the May 22 and May 23 police firing, which left 13 people dead during the protests demanding closure of Sterlite's copper unit. He alleged that the police had fired from advanced guns that can only be used against enemies in a war. Besides, police personnel had positioned themselves atop a van and from such a height, the shooter can only target the upper part of a person, he submitted. The petitioner further alleged that the government was trying to conceal the happenings by appointing a 'name sake' inquiry committee. Also Read: Video of anti-Sterlite protest shows cop saying 'at least 1 should die' Advocate General Vijay Narayan submitted that the government had already ordered an inquiry by a retired high court judge into the incident. The court then directed the state government to file its counter and the petitioner his rejoinder, and posted the matter to July 6. Besides the petition by the advocate, three other PILs have been filed before the court over the Tuticorin incidents and demanding various relief, including a CBI probe. Yet another PIL, also seeking a CBI probe, has been filed before the Madurai bench of the high court. Meanwhile, state Fisheries Minister D Jayakumar said the one-member inquiry commission was 'sufficient' as it was headed by a person who had served in the judiciary. "The state government set up panel is probing the case and it is sufficient and everything is being updated. The team does not include officials from government, but a person belonging to judiciary or who served in judiciary," he told reporters. He was responding when a reporter drew his attention to the high court's observation on Monday. On whether the panel probing the incident was an "eyewash", the minister said, "Then there arises a question if inquiry panels set up by various governments in the past were an eyewash too?" In a call recorded by government engineer Avinash Singh, BJP MLA from the Kaushambi district, Sanjay Gupta, was heard threatening him and demanding an account of how many Muslims he had taken action against. (Photo: Screengrab | ANI) Lucknow: Why no action has been taken against Muslims for power theft, these were the words spoken by Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA Sanjay Gupta during a telephonic conversation with an electricity official. In a call recorded by government engineer Avinash Singh, BJP MLA from the Kaushambi district, Sanjay Gupta, was heard threatening him and demanding an account of how many Muslims he had taken action against. "Give me data from April 1, how many Muslims you have acted against. Getting yourself transferred will not save you - wherever you are in Uttar Pradesh, I will have an investigation done. Go to a Muslim locality, see how electricity theft happens," Sanjay Gupta was heard shouting at the engineer who was trying to put his point forward. "To hell with you and your department. I will speak to Lucknow. Only Hindus are being harassed. You are harassing businessmen and Hindus on purpose," fuming BJP MLA Sanjay Gupta was heard saying. The phone call by Sanjay Gupta was made on June 15 after a series of raids by the department on businessmen suspected of electricity theft. Seven FIRs were filed after the raids. Soon after the conversation of outraged BJP MLA got circulated, Sanjay Gupta said he was raising a "genuine grievance" based on figures available with him. "What I said to officials was that it's good that you go to houses of Hindus, but you should also go to houses of Muslims. It's based on latest data provided to me," he claimed. The lawmaker of the Yogi Adityanath government was heard telling engineers at the electricity board office: "I only said you should not act only against one side. Whether it is a Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian, if you act only against one community, do you think my people will leave me alone?" The BJP government led by Yogi Adityanath came to power in Uttar Pradesh after a massive victory in 2017 state assembly elections. Drains are overflowing at Kukatpally Y junction for more than six months. Hyderabad: Drains are overflowing at Kukatpally Y junction for more than six months. Though civic authorities are trying to level the pits and repair the drains, the work is on at a snails pace, complain residents. The work started from both ends of the drain, but the key area, where the drain water is leaking from the manhole, which needs immediate action, remains unattended. When questioned about this, Work Inspector of Kukatpally K. Surya Chandra had a bizarre explanation to give -- The manholes are at a depth of seven to eight feet and workers are not ready to get into them. Mrs G Balamani, who runs a shoe shop near the drain, complained of the mosquitoes that abound due to the dirty sewage water that overflows into nearby shops even with moderate rainfall. Like Balamani, there are many others who have no option but to take the stench. I am afraid to even think of the rainy season, says Balamani. Another resident, Sheik Mahaboob Basha, who works as a mechanic nearby, said, Though this is a main junction road. From here, one road leads to Balanagar and another to Ameerpet. Yet the work is not speeding up. When it rains, the entire area fills up with water and people are not able to see potholes. This can be dangerous. Hyderabad: Confusion prevails among parents after a few city schools declared holiday on Wednesday in view of the ABVPs school bandh call. The ABVP state wing had declared a state-wide bandh demanding a cap on fee hike in the schools of the state. They also demanded action against schools for taking huge donations during admissions. Various schools in the city like DPS, HPS, Sri Chaitanya, Pallavi School and Michael school sent messages to the parents stating that they will be closed on Wednesday in view of the state-wide bandh by ABVP members in the state. Parents from other schools who have not received any information regarding the bandh were confused whether to send their children to the schools or not. Mr Srinivas Reddy, President of Telangana State Recognised Private Schools, said, We have left the decision on the individual schools whether they want to declare a holiday or not. New Delhi: With the BJP pulling from the Mehbooba-led government in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday just after the month-long Ramzan ceasefire hiatus, Operation All-Out is set to begin with a renewed thrust to eliminate Kashmiri militants and smash their networks. Moments after the BJP withdrew support, Union home minister Rajnath Singh held an hour-long meeting at his residence to take stock of the latest security situation in the troubled state. NSA Ajit Doval, Union home secretary Rajiv Gauba and Intelligence Bureau chief Rajiv Jain attended the meeting. Sources said a decision was taken to wait for the J&K governor N.N. Vohras report on the states security situation. Speculations are rife that the Centre could possibly appoint a new governor in J&K after the Amarnath yatra, which starts on June 28 and will continue for two months. Speaking to a news agency, a senior BJP leader said the government would like incumbent N.N. Vohra to be in charge of the annual pilgrimage given his vast experience. It may be recalled that Mr Vohra, who was appointed governor in June 2008 and given a fresh term in 2013, is among the few governors appointed by the UPA government to have continued in his position in the BJP-led NDA dispensation. On Wednesday, defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman will visit the residence of the murdered soldier Aurangzeb in Poonch. She will also meet top officials handling security duties. That the crackdown has already begun became clear with a top security officer whose mandate includes Kashmir operations saying: As soon as the Ramzan ceasefire ended, we already undertook two operations in Bijbehara and in Pampore. Even today, there was an operation in Traal, so Operation All-Out is definitely on now. It may be recalled that the Centre had categorically turned down Ms Muftis appeal to hold talks with the Hurriyat leaders. The Army was also reportedly against the unilateral ceasefire. Until June 22 the present dry weather conditions with rising temperatures are likely to prevail over Telangana and Andhra Pradesh (Representational Images) Hyderabad: A fresh weather system that will revive the weak monsoon currents is likely to develop over the Bay of Bengal by this weekend and this condition will bring rains not just in Southern states but pan India, say weathermen. Until June 22 the present dry weather conditions with rising temperatures are likely to prevail over Telangana and Andhra Pradesh; the monsoon will revive from June 23 onwards. Currently, the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa are receiving heavy rainfall due to a cyclonic circulation prevailing over this region while the rest of the country is witnessing a rise in temperatures as a result of dry hot north-westerly winds. Mr Mahesh Palawat, Vice-President, Meteorology & Climate change, Skymet, explained, Since June 11, North-Western India is receiving dry hot winds from Afghanistan and South Iran. The winds are dry and hot in nature because they originate from regions that have no water bodies. Entire Central and South India are covered by dusty winds that prevail up to 25,000 feet from the ground level and, as a result, the days are turning hot. Also, there is no weather system (depression, trough) over the Bay of Bengal or the Arabian Sea to counter these westerly winds as this condition has weakened the monsoon currents too. The weathermen have indicated that the fresh system that will develop over the Bay of Bengal by the weekend is likely to progress towards coastal Andhra Pradesh and South Telangana and strengthen the currents and thus this will bring rains from June 23 or 24. The intensity of the rains is likely to pick up from June 25th onwards and likely to last up to month end, weather models indicate. However, until the rains gain strength, the scanty spell at irregular intervals will continue in Telangana up to June 22. Chennai: In a verdict that may have a far reaching impact for women, the Madras high court came down heavily on the practice of subjecting women to cruelty in the guise of ceremony. When a petition filed by Chinnaponnu and three others, in-laws of a young woman of Dharamapuri, came up for hearing before Justice N Anand Venkatesh on Tuesday, the judge said no one has the right to force another person into any act in the name of ceremony, which by its nature causes pain and suffering and results in cruelty to a person. Such acts can never be justified even if it had been followed for a very long time. Chinnaponnu and three others were punished by the Judicial Magistrate-II, Dharmapuri, to undergo imprisonment for one year with a fine of Rs. 500 each. On July 30, 2010 Principal Sessions Judge, Dharmapuri had confirmed the order. All four have now challenged the lower court order. According to the prosecution, the young woman was forcibly taken to Thoppiyar Dam at midnight on February 12, 2001 and her clothes were removed, her head tonsured and her tongue burnt with a red-hot needle. Her `thali was removed, it was however, tied again by her husband, who was also present in the place. Suspecting the woman was possessed by an evil spirit, the family members had resorted to the barbaric act. Based on a complaint from the victim and her father, a case was registered at All Women Police Station in Dharmapuri on February 17, 2001. The trial court awarded the sentence, which was confirmed by the sessions court in 2010. Justice N Anand Venkatesh said a ceremony which affects the dignity of a person and which on the face of it is inhuman, the same offends Article 21 of the Constitution and persons who commit such acts in the name of ceremony will have to be dealt with in accordance with law and stringent punishment must be imposed. A strong message must be sent to the society that cruel acts in the name of ceremony will not be tolerated and will be dealt with severely by courts. It is time that courts send a strong message to the society that such grotesque acts will not be tolerated and courts will not turn a blind eye when such incidents are brought to its notice. Taking into consideration the passage of 17 years from the date of occurrence and the age of the accused, who were all women, the judge has modified the sentence of one year imprisonment to a term already undergone by them. Each of the petitioners shall deposit a compensation of Rs. 15,000 before the JM-II in Dharmapuri in the case account within eight weeks. The victim is entitled to withdraw the same. Bengaluru: The accused, who have been arrested in the Gauri Lankesh murder case, were kidnapped by the police before they were shown arrested, charged advocate Virendra Ichalkaranjikar, president of Hindu Vidhidnya Parishada (HVP), who is assisting the accused with legal aid. Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Virendra charged the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of kidnapping the accused Sujeet alias Praveen (37) an alleged Hindu Janjagruti Samiti (HJS) activist from Mangaluru, Amol Kale alias Bhaisab, 39, also an alleged HJS activist from Pune, Amit Degwekar alias Pradeep, 39, a Sanatan Sanstha activist and resident of Goa, and Manohar Edave, 28, a resident of Vijayapura in Karnataka. All these men were illegally detained by the SIT much before their arrest was shown. Sujeet was picked up from coastal Karnataka on May 6, but his arrest was shown from Kolar on May 20. Amol and Amit were detained in Kagal in Kolhapur district on Maharashtra-Karnataka border on May 14. Edave was picked up from Kolhapur the same day, but the arrest of the three was shown on May 20 and 21 in Bengaluru. They were in illegal custody of the SIT before their arrest, alleged Ichalkaranjikar. He said, The Karnataka SIT is working on the same lines as the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS), which during its investigation of the 2008 Malegaon blast case had illegally detained Sadhvai Pragya and Sudhakar Chaturvedi before showing their arrest. He alleged that the SIT has foisted false cases the conspiracy to eliminate writer K.S. Bhagawan and Gauri murder on the accused as an excuse to extend their police custody. After the Bhagawan conspiracy, now they are saying that they could be involved in the murder of Prof M.M. Kalburgi. The SIT has held the accused in illegal and legal custody for so long that by now they should have extracted all information from them and solved the the Gauri murder case if they were really involved. The initial FIR, which was registered against them in Upparpete police station in the Bhagawan conspiracy case under the Arms Act case was a ploy by the police to extend the police custody. The case is bogus, he said. Meanwhile, Chetan Rajhans, spokesperson of Sanatan Sanstha, which is under the scanner, said that barring Amit Degwekar, who was the promoter of Sanatan Prabha the SS magazine none of the other accused were linked to the organisation. Degwekar is a promoter of Sanatan Prabha and he used to tour a lot for its promotion. He used to come to the ashram in Ponda, in South Goa in connection with his work. The Sanstha is involved in the spiritual enhancement of Hindus. We are not killers. There is no connection between the Sanatan Sanstha and Gauri murder. We didnt know her. It is a political conspiracy to target the SS. The Sanstha is blamed for the murder of any atheist or Communist in the country because our presence affects their functioning and business. Gauri was an atheist and she was killed when Siddaramaiah, who is an atheist, was the chief minister. Its high time the main players behind the conspiracy to tarnish the Sanstha are exposed, said Rajhans. Chennai: The 18 MLAs are cheating the people and betraying the AIADMK after winning their seats by using the money given by TTV Dhinakaran, which he got from the loot made by Jayalalithaa. That was a bombshell not from any opposition politician but a charge made by forest minister Dindigul C. Sreenivasan. The howler became a huge hit on social media and regional newspapers, besides the TV channels. The minister could not be reached on phone despite several attempts by DC to get his version on what perhaps was a genuine slip of the tongue. Actually, the affable AIADMK functionary is not new to such very embarrassing guffaws. Sometime back, he apologised in a public meeting for wrongly claiming to have seen Jayalalithaa eating idli and chutney in her Apollo Hospital ward. We lied that Amma ate idli and chutney in Apollo. Please forgive us, makkaley (oh, people), the minister had told at the Anna birth anniversary rally in Madurai last September. In another memorable statement around that time, Sreenivasan told a public meeting that Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam had gone to Delhi to discuss the Dengue outbreak with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Admittedly, such minor slips are not uncommon when hardworking politicos handle too many responsibilities amid trying times. If only Amma is around, she would have made things much easier for Sreenivasan. BENGALURU: Former minister and state BJP president B.S. Yeddyurappas trusted lieutenant, B.J. Puttaswamy, quit the post of chairman of OBC Morcha of the party, to protest the partys decision of denying him another term as Member of the Legislative Council. Mr Puttaswamy, who stood by Mr Yeddyurappa through trying times, sent a three page resignation letter to the Lingayat strongman on Monday, saying: "I am pained to see my perseverance, commitment, loyalty and risking my life to defend you, failed. I still cant make out why an abrupt end was brought to my active political life at this age. The media considers me as a close confidant. And I too lived upto your expectations. I would like to request you to accept my resignation. Soon after he was elected CM in 2008, Mr Yeddyurappa had resurrected Mr Puttaswamys career and appointed him as his political secretary. Later, he was nominated to the Council. During his stint as political secretary, Mr Puttaswamy stood by Mr Yeddyurappa and took on members of JD(S) patriarch H D Deve Gowdas kin when they targeted the former CM. He also unearthed a number of cases of alleged illegal deals to counter the attack against Mr Yeddyurappa. At one point, anti-social elements purportedly instigated by JD (S) attacked Mr Puttaswamys residence. He was subsequently provided with additional security by the state government. In his resignation letter, Mr Puttaswamy claimed that as OBC morcha chief, he travelled the length and breadth of the state in order to network with members of OBC communities on the partys behalf, in spite of confusion over another outfit, Sangolli Rayanna Brigade formed by K.S. Eshwarappa working parallely. He claimed to have organized a massive OBC convention in Bengaluru to drum up support of OBCs for the BJP. Vijayawada: The advisor (communications) to Andhra Pradesh government, Parakala Prabhakar, resigned on Tuesday. The reason he cited is that allegations have been levelled against him because his wife, Nirmala Sitharaman, is in the BJP and is a Union minister. He sent a two-page letter to Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu in which he said that YSRC chief Jagan Mohan Reddy has been critical of his continuance in the state government when his wife is in the Union cabinet. Family members having two political ideologies and sailing in two parties is not an issue at all, he stated. In such circumstances, I cant continue as the advisor, Mr Parakala said and added that his continuance shouldnt affect the image of the CM as well as the government. He said that he never compromised on issues related to the states interests. The Opposition is using my presence in the government only to express doubts over your integrity, Mr Parakala wrote. In a press conference here on Tuesday, minister for agriculture Somireddy Chandra-mohan Reddy clarified that the government will not accept Mr Parakala's resignation. Manmohan Singh had called the Maoist rebels the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by our country. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi were equally realistic about the state of the nation as his predecessor, he would recognise not just that the assassination of Shujaat Bukhari, editor of Srinagars Rising Kashmir newspaper, highlights Indias rapid descent into the violence and anarchy captured by the term Lynchistan, but also an increasing narrow-mindedness that refuses to tolerate opposing points of view combined with the belief that brutality in certain causes is condoned. Since Bukhari was a sober middle of the road journalist, his death was probably the handiwork of separatists, backed by Pakistani terrorists. Theres always a reason of sorts for the most heinous of the spate of lynchings that are reported almost daily. Violence begets violence. What we are suffering from today is the resurgence of primitivism nourished, paradoxically, by sophisticated technology and indirectly by official tolerance of barbarity in selective cases. The dream of Digital India has been foisted on people who cannot count. They are running before they can walk. The mind of India cannot rise above ignorance and superstition if myth and legends are invested with far-fetched significance involving plastic surgery and artificial insemination in Vedic times. This bondage to the past which official citing of the epics tacitly encourages explains the mob frenzy and lynchings in Haryana, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Telangana. Such bogus boasting mocks the scientific temper which Jawaharlal Nehru had sought to instil in people. Rumour plays a large part in disseminating information where poverty and the low level of education restricts access to more reliable sources. Indians long ago had refined the last clause of the old English joke that the three fastest ways of communicating are telephone, telegram and tell-a-woman to tell anyone, man or woman. The 1857 upsurge was instigated by word of mouth and the mysteriously circulating chapati. Indians learnt of the Emergencys Turkman Gate demolitions and coerced nasbandi without a single word appearing in print. Videos and text messages warning of attacks accounted for the panic-stricken exodus in 2012 of Northeastern students and workers from Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune and elsewhere. The circulation on WhatsApp the following year of an old lynching in Pakistan fanned the flames of communal violence in Muzaffarnagar, in which at least 62 people (mainly Muslims) were killed and more than 50,000 were displaced. Technology played an equally important part in instigating the three-day Gujarat pogrom of 2002. Nowadays, the Internet and cellphones accelerate rumours. Millions of people who are mentally still in the Middle Ages share Facebook postings. Theres the mobile where no other form of social media is available. As Martin Kampchen, a Santiniketan-based German scholar once wrote in Kolkatas Telegraph, the mobile is the fulfilment of a primeval Indian desire of being connected any time with ones family, community and neighbourhood, ones friends and also with nature and the divine Never to be alone. People learn through these insidious, ubiquitous but anonymous channels that are the gift of modern technology that someone somewhere has killed or stolen a cow. They hear that someone knows someone who has heard that children have been kidnapped from a nearby village and either been circumcised and converted or sold into prostitution or slavery. Both fears loom large in the national subconscious; both speak of the atavistic horrors that haunted our pre-urban pre-British, Nirad C. Chaudhuri would have said existence. Seven villagers were beaten to death in Jharkhand last year on suspicion of child-lifting. Two innocent young men, Nilotpal Das and Abhijeet Nath, were battered to death on June 8 in Assams Karbi Anglong district. Behind the fear of kidnappers lay a complex history of local interests and grievances. Karbi Anglong is where rhinoceroses take refuge from floods, and killing them for the horn is big business. There are reports, too, of friction with the police over illegal stone quarrying. Ancient ethnic conflict between Ahomiyas and Karbis, the latters dormant but not dead statehood demand, Assamese neuroses about outsiders and infiltrators, the divide between the rich and the poor, and the long dreadlocks that one of the victims sported, may all have contributed to their being singled out as the Other. For whatever reason, the police always seems to be far away and slow to arrive. Theres another category of crime that is more directly connected to folk faith and practices where the official machinery is even more negligent. Twenty-six-year-old Parashuram Waghmore from Pune, who is accused of shooting Gauri Lankesh, the determinedly secular editor of Gauri Lankesh Patrike magazine, on September 5, 2017 reportedly confessed to the police that he knew nothing about his victim except that she was the enemy of his religion which he wanted to save. The sensational killings of rationalists like Narendra Bhabholkar, Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalaburgi, all well-known in leftist intellectual circles, are attributed to the same fundamentalist network that is said to have indoctrinated and used Waghmore. The angry mob that lynched two Muslim men suspected of stealing cattle in Jharkhands Godda district last week may have drawn encouragement from two factors. First, legal exaltation of the sanctity of cattle like the Gujarat law that punishes cow slaughter with 14 years in jail. Second, police indifference and the laws delays create the impression that no matter what Mr Modi might say, gau rakshaks enjoy official protection. A Jharkhand fast track courts conviction three months ago of 11 men, including a district BJP leader and local gau raksha samiti members, for killing Alimuddin Asgar Ansari, a meat trader in Ramgarh, marked a first. Its the only such conviction. There must be many more if India is to shake off the shameful sobriquet of Lynchistan. God nominates some chosen people And promises them a chunk of land He impregnates a Jewish virgin In ways well never understand. He sends us his commandments He even dictates books We dare not call it magic Though thats how it all looks. From Waat ee Dees? Komdi ka Pees by Bachchoo Some years ago, being in Toronto, I took the opportunity to visit a cousin who lives there. Toronto is a vast conurbation and I took a taxi back late at night. Less than a minute after we started, the driver, in friendly north- American fashion, asked me How was your day, bud? he had a thick accent which I tentatively placed. I said my day was good and he remarked that my accent was not American. I said it was Indian tinged with British and said why and remarked that his accent wasnt either. I am from Persia, he said. We were perhaps 10 miles into our journey, making idle chit chat when he asked me my name. When I told him he said So, you are Muslim? No, I said, Im not, trying to balance telling the truth against what I thought might give him offence. But that is a Muslim name, he said. Well, long before the Muslims adopted it, it was a Persian name pre the Arab conquest of Iran 641 AD or so, I said. He looked away from the road and at me very curiously. So you are not Muslim? I couldnt dodge any further. I said No, I was born a Zardushti, using the term he, as an Iranian, would recognise. He swerved the car to the curb and stopped suddenly. I was, to say the least, bewildered. You are Zardushti? So am I, he said. So whats your name? He said it was Abdul or Ahmed or something distinctly Muslim. But thats not a Zoroastrian name. No, no, no, I was born Muslim but I believe in Humata. Hukta, Huvareshta, he said, the Zoroastrian creed. What more religion do we need? He proceeded to tell me that the conversion of Persia (he insisted on that name though I pointed out that the ancient Zoroastrian Kings had named it Eran) to Islam was a tragedy and had to be reversed. I pointed out that apostasy was considered a capital offence in Islam. He said he didnt care as he believed that 80 per cent of the Persian population would embrace Zoroastrianism if they were given a free choice which I said was not likely. He agreed. When we got to where I was going, he wouldnt take the taxi fare. Years later, last week, I had my haircut at my neighbourhood barber. The establishment is run by Aftab, a young Persian hair-stylist. We make routine conversation. After the normal politeness, we discuss politics and this week, we naturally got on to Trump and his moves towards peace with North Korea. Thats all very well, said Aftab and proceeded to support Trumps pronounced aggressive policy towards Iran and the denuclearisation treaty from which the US has withdrawn. Aftab didnt seem perturbed as my white locks fell like snow upon the cloaking barber-sheet. He said its what the mullahs deserve. Surely, its dangerous for peace in the Middle East and the world? I said. He said he didnt care and went on to say that Iran had fought a Shia-Sunni war with Iraq in which he had lost relatives. Now Israel together with Sunni Saudi Arabia was threatening Shia Iran. The divisions between Shia and Sunni had been the cause of slaughter for hundreds of years. This was barber-shop conversation if a little elevated from descriptions of holidays or condemnation of recent local stabbings in our streets. Then he said something unexpected. Islam is an Arab religion, he said, and this Sunni-Shia business is something imported from an old Arab dispute. It shouldnt have anything to do with us Persians. If there was a survey today in Iran, 80 per cent of people would say they want to follow the Zardushti religion. I said that statistic seemed unlikely to me but he insisted the population was tired of the rule of mullahs. Suppose, just suppose, that the unlikely and pigs-will-fly contentions of my two informants, the conversations separated by years but both from the mouths of immigrants or exiles from their native Iran/ Persia, are accurate! And suppose, further, that some revolutionary upheaval in favour of converting whoever wishes to Zoroastrianism takes place in the old country... the hypothesis poses several burning questions. Will there then come about a secular state of Iran with freedom of religious belief, or even a religious Zoroastrian one as were the states of the Achaemenid (Hakamanyush, distorted by the Greeks) and Sassanian dynasties? And will such a new state end all enmity and activity such as the Iranian support for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houtis? And that nuclear capability? And the final question: What will the bigots of the Parsi community of India who oppose any conversion to the religion say? Will they oppose the reconversion of Iran to the religion that invented the singular God? Or will they swallow hard, and in chewing their prejudices say that Zoroastrian blood still runs in the veins of the Iranian population, lending a racial justification to the conversion? Apart from the questions, these conversational observations lead me to a regret. I have, for some time now, wanted to visit or revisit Pasargade and Perseppolis. Perhaps reporting these conversations here will, through the tracking agencies of the current Iranian State, deny me a tourist visa to Persia. More inhibiting is the thought that theyd grant me a visa and arrest me when I reach Iran, try me and throw me in jail on charge of reporting conversations subversive of the Islamic status quo. Thats not fantasy. Its happened to one Nazneen Radcliffe. Look her up and sign the petition! Prime Minister Narendra Modi has mastered the art of utilising insecurity as an instrument of his state policy and needs to demonstrate this at frequent intervals. Or else, when he has better things to do and rather quickly, as time is running out he has decided to rattle the complacent and over-secure babudom of New Delhi. That may explain his intention to recruit 10 new professionals the definition of professionals has been kept delightfully vague for lateral entry as joint secretaries in the Central government. The media decided almost immediately that the Indian Administrative Service was threatened because few in it really distinguish between different species of bureaucrats and could not care less if the incumbent came from the IAS or from the Indian Posts and Telegraph Accounts and Finance Service. To most people, they appear equally obnoxious or are avoidable unless a scoop or a soundbite becomes imperative. Besides, not many people know that the earlier predominance of IAS officers at the level of joint secretaries the real cutting edge of Bharat Sarkar has long gone, partly because other services have to be accommodated and partly because the states are unwilling to let their best secretaries go to the Centre. Leading the latter brigade for over a decade was Mr Modi himself, when he was chief minister of Gujarat. Serving officers survive New Delhis corridors of power on the age-old aphorism every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. But the Opposition cried foul and not without reason, for they simply do not trust an over-controlling Prime Minister who has never disguised his scorn for them. They suspect this to be yet another attempt to saffronise the administration through the backdoor entry, to bypass the Constitution and the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). This fear is not unreal as the advertisement issued by the department of personnel and training does not mention the UPSC anywhere, and under Article 320 of the Constitution, recruitment to senior posts in notified services Central or all-India has necessarily to be done in consultation with the UPSC. The PM may have vetted his idea with legal experts but by being miserly with details, or just imperious, the government could always claim that it never had any intention to circumvent the constitutional provisions. The UPSC has three standard and time-tested methods of recruitment namely, by conducting examinations for selecting directly from the open market; or by promoting to higher posts those who are already in service after rigorous screening; and finally, by transferring incumbents from one post to the other within the government setup. The current proposal to induct 10 professionals would fall in the first category, and it would be most appropriate if the UPSC is entrusted with a mandate to select applicants on a fast-track mode. This is quite possible and feasible and in its seven decades of working experience, the commission has gone through a lot of such exercises. It may conduct special examinations to be fair to all applicants or it could just interview them, which is a bit subjective and thus open to criticism. Or it could do both but the entire process does call for a bit of time and may spill over beyond May 2019, when a freshly-elected government would have to be installed. As a quintessentially stodgy and stable body, the UPSC detests being rushed around and there are instances when posts can take several years to get filled, for various reasons. A government in a hurry that did not utilise the earlier four years which it had to test these flashes of inspiration may not be terribly enthused by the slow and steady modus of the UPSC. No one really knows, and a lot may depend on how the wind blows. Coming to more relevant issues, just 10 new entrants can hardly shake up or devastate the level of joint secretaries in the Central government. The total number is around 470, though this keeps changing as posts are upgraded or kept in abeyance at times. But then, it could also be the thin edge of the wedge. It is clear that Prime Minister Modi is simply taking advantage of the undisguised and widespread frustration at the failure of the IAS and the rest of the bureaucracy to be more receptive, less obstructive and to deliver at the speed that the 21st century demands. But colonial procedures and the clogging need to tackled at Gangotri, not at Ganga Sagar. If we assume that the highly competitive UPSC examinations still select the best possible candidates each year, we need to examine what happens thereafter. All those who qualify can surely not become pompous, insensitive, slothy or corrupt overnight, unless the system demands it and traumatises them into such undesirable conduct. Every government since Independence including this most hyped one has simply permitted the political class to ride roughshod over the system and only unabashedly user-friendly babus could ever make it anywhere. The vast majority was simply numbed into compliance as each incoming government had massive programmes to deliver that they had promised their voters and no one really has ever had the time to discuss problems relating to the engine. Each incoming government had its own blue-eyed boys who came from the same caste, community, district or ideology and the really skilful could swiftly adapt to each new minister. The show thus went on. There is, for instance, no reason why Mr Modi could not introduce the system of pensioning off large numbers at each stage of promotion, as is done in the armed forces. One had expected the mass-scale slaughter of corrupt officers after his 2014 mandate, but nothing spectacular happened. Constrictive rules could have been slashed mercilessly in four years, but this was not seen as a priority task. More energy was spent on gimmickry and in playing around with alphabets like kindergarten kids to find new acronyms for recycled schemes. The professional specialisation of IAS officers was never encouraged as Mr Modis own tightly-controlled DoPT forced highly-qualified engineers, management graduates and other university toppers (who constitute the bulk of the IAS) to move from atomic energy to gobar gas. Besides, this government will be remembered not only for the chilling fear that it has spread amongst terribly insecure babus (for no productive reason), but also as one where imaginative and innovative officers were hardly rewarded but the sycophants prospered, as never before. The distribution of emitted photons over the energy depends on the size of the black hole. (Photo Credit: NASA) In a first, scientists have spotted the evidence of a rare intermediate-mass black hole - an elusive object whose existence has been hotly debated. Scientists have been able to prove the existence of small black holes and those that are super-massive, but the existence of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) was never proven. Researchers from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in the US found the strongest evidence to date that such middle-of-the-road black holes exist, by serendipitously capturing one in action devouring an encountering star. "We feel very lucky to have spotted this object with a significant amount of high-quality data, which helps pinpoint the mass of the black hole and understand the nature of this spectacular event," said Dacheng Lin, a research assistant professor at UNH. "Earlier research, including our own work, saw similar events, but they were either caught too late or were too far away," Lin said. In the study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers used satellite imaging to detect for the first time this significant telltale sign of activity. They found an enormous multiwavelength radiation flare from the outskirts of a distant galaxy. The brightness of the flare decayed over time exactly as expected by a star disrupting, or being devoured, by the black hole. In this case, the star was disrupted in October 2003 and the radiation it created decayed over the next decade. The distribution of emitted photons over the energy depends on the size of the black hole. This data provides one of the very few robust ways to weight, or determine the size of, the black hole. Researchers used data from a trio of orbiting X-ray telescopes, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Swift Satellite as well as European Space Agency (ESA)'s XMM-Newton, to find the multiwavelength radiation flares that helped identify the otherwise uncommon IMBHs. The characteristic of a long flare offers evidence of a star being torn apart and is known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). Tidal forces, due to the intense gravity from the black hole, can destroy an object - such as a star - that wanders too close. During a TDE, some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speeds, while the rest falls toward the black hole. As it travels inward and is ingested by the black hole, the material heats up to millions of degrees and generates a distinct X-ray flare. According to the researchers, these types of flares can easily reach the maximum luminosity and are one of the most effective ways to detect IMBHs. "From the theory of galaxy formation, we expect a lot of wandering intermediate-mass black holes in star clusters," said Lin. "But there are very, very few that we know of because they are normally unbelievably quiet and very hard to detect and energy bursts from encountering stars being shredded happen so rarely," he said. Due to the very low occurrence rate of such star-triggered outbursts for an IMBH, the scientists believe that their discovery implies that there could be many IMBHs lurking in a dormant state in galaxy peripheries across the local universe. 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. On June 23, 1988, a top NASA scientist told Congress and the world that global warming had arrived. NASA scientist James Hansen predicted that 1988 would be the worlds hottest year on record, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels that released heat-trapping gases. The Associated Press is republishing a version of its report on the testimony to mark the 30th anniversary. The greenhouse effect global warming of the earth is here, but the current drought and heat wave over much of the United States cant be blamed on it, a scientist told a Senate panel Thursday. However, similar heat waves and droughts can be expected much more often as a result of future warming, said James E. Hansen, a climatologist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. Hansen told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee there is only a 1 percent chance that he is wrong in blaming rising temperatures around the world on the buildup of man-made gases in the atmosphere. For unknown reasons, the earth has been getting warmer for more than a century, though with cooler intervals. The four warmest years on record have been recorded in the 1980s and without what Hansen called an improbable cooling for the rest of the year, 1988 will break all records. Though there has been much speculation by scientists around the world that the warming resulted from the greenhouse effect, Hansens statement is the most definite yet. Syukuro Manabe, a soil specialist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said it was more likely that the current drought was the result of natural fluctuations than the greenhouse warming. It is an example of the kind of drought that will occur more frequently as the global warming become larger, he said. Many studies have said global warming could bring drastic changes in weather, including more rainfall at low and high latitudes and more drought in between, with drastic shifts in possible crop patterns. A major report from the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program earlier this month concluded that without a major effort to fight warming, global temperatures could increase by 0.54 degrees Fahrenheit per decade until the middle of the next century, and sea levels could rise by a foot. Tropical temperatures wouldnt change much at all, but in Canada, the change could be two or three times as large as the average. Extreme temperatures would occur more often. Hansen earlier calculated that instead of the typical one day a year with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Washington it reached 101 on Wednesday the year 2030 could see 12 days. Dallas would see 78 such days instead of 19. Gases emitted by modern civilization notably carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels but also methane, nitrous oxide and the chlorofluorocarbon gases that major nations agreed last year to reduce trap heat from the earths surface that normally would be radiated out to space just as the glass over a greenhouse traps the suns heat inside. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are 10 percent above 1958 levels and 25 percent above concentrations believed to prevail in 1790 when the industrial revolution brought the first widespread burning of coal in the industry to fire the new steam engines. If we could magically reduce (annual) emissions (of carbon) by about 3 billion tons, we could stabilize the content of the atmosphere, said George M. Woodwell, director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts. It is well within reach, no question about that. The problem ... has the potential for turning the world into a form of chaos not greatly different from that produced by global war, he said. Sen. Wendell Ford, D-Ky., concerned about his states coal industry, asked physical chemist William R. Moomaw of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based policy research organisation if technology could not reduce the harmful emissions. Im trying to find a way to use a resource we have, Ford said. Moomaw replied, I would argue the resource we have in most abundance is the potential for using fossil fuels more efficiently at much lower cost than building any form of power generation. 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. U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday said he was ordering the creation of a sixth branch of the military to focus on space, a move critics said could harm the Air Force. It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space, Trump said before a meeting of his National Space Council. We are going to have the Air Force and were going to have the Space Force. Separate but equal. It is going to be something, he said later. The United States is a member of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bars the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space and only allows for the use of the moon and other celestial bodies for peaceful purposes. The idea of a Space Force has been raised before, by Trump and previous administrations, with proponents saying it would make the Pentagon more efficient. It has also faced criticism from senior military officials. Air Force Chief of Staff General David Goldfein told a 2017 congressional hearing that creating a new space branch would move us in the wrong direction. The Air Force oversees most of the countrys space-related military activity. The move would require the budgetary approval of the U.S. Congress, which has been divided on the idea. Thankfully, the president cant do it without Congress because now is NOT the time to rip the Air Force apart. Too many missions at stake, U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, said on Twitter. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said the departments policy board would prepare to implement Trumps order. Working with Congress, this will be a deliberate process with a great deal of input from multiple stakeholders, White said in a statement. In December, the president signed a directive that he said would enable astronauts to return to the moon and eventually lead a mission to Mars. He has ordered the government to review regulations on commercial space flights. Americans first landed on the moon in 1969, reaching a goal set by former President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and capping a decade-long space race between Washington and Moscow. Since then, U.S. efforts to explore beyond the Earths orbit have largely focused on remote spacecraft that do not have human crew members, though American presidents have raised the idea of sending humans back to the moon or further. 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. An Australian court fined U.S. electronics giant Apple Inc A$9 million ($6.7 million) on Tuesday after a regulator accused it of using a software update to disable iPhones which had cracked screens fixed by third parties. The Australian Competitor and Consumer Commission (ACCC) sued the worlds biggest company by market value for bricking - or using a software update to disable - hundreds of smartphones and tablet devices, then refusing to unlock them if the devices had been serviced by non-Apple repairers. On Tuesday the Australian Federal Court found in the regulators favor, saying Apple had breached the countrys consumer law by telling some 275 customers they were not eligible for a remedy if their device had been repaired by a third party. The mere fact that an iPhone or iPad had been repaired by someone other than Apple did not, and could not, result in the consumer guarantees ceasing to apply, ACCC Commissioner Sarah Court said in a statement. Global companies must ensure their returns policies are compliant with the Australian Consumer Law, or they will face ACCC action, Court said. An Apple spokeswoman said in an email the company had very productive conversations with the ACCC about this without commenting further on the court finding. The ACCC said after it told Apple about its investigation, the U.S. company sought to compensate customers whose devices were made inoperable by the software update, known as error 53. So far, Apple had contacted about 5,000 customers, the ACCC said. Apple has also offered to improve staff training, information about warranties and consumer law on its website, and processes to ensure compliance, the ACCC said. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. The featured allows a user to book the cab right from the maps app and payments were also allowed to be made without the need of installing Uber app itself. Last year, Uber has collaborated with Google to integrate its cab services through Google Maps. It basically allowed users to book cabs right from the Google Maps app whenever they searched for a route or a destination. So this is how it was supposedly working till date when a user searches for any destination or direction in the Google Maps app along with the directions, the maps guide the user to reach the destination either by walking, driving, biking, riding a bike or any mass transit, however after both the companies collaboration, Uber used to appear as an additional option in that navigating menu. This allowed a user to book the cab right from the maps app and payments were also allowed to be made without the need of installing Uber app itself. And now, this feature is axed, yes Google has released a new support page mentioning this feature being removed, (first spotted by Android Police). The page states You can no longer book Uber rides directly in Google Maps. But you can still look up the route in the Maps app and then request the ride from the Uber app. Now, if the user wants to search a route and then book a cab, the Google Maps redirects into the Uber app instead of the above-stated procedure, which was actually convenient. There are currently around 17 cab riding services globally, which utilise this feature in the maps app. As for India, along with Uber, the other ride-hailing services who utilise this feature include Ola Cabs and Meru Cabs, which also lost this support. The reason is still not known about why Google has chosen to stop support for this handy feature globally. 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. Akemi Vargas, 8, cries as she talks about being separated from her father during an immigration family separation protest in front of the Sandra Day O'Connor US District Court building, in Phoenix. (Photo: AP) Washington: The Trump administrations new rule of immigration enforcement policy in the US has resulted in separation of children from their parents. ProPublica, a journalism non-profit organization, published what it claims was a recording taken inside one of the facilities run by US Customs and Border Protection, where children are staying after being taken from their parents. The audio includes the voices of children sobbing uncontrollably and asking for their parents. According to the recording, children have repeatedly been asking for their papi (Spanish for father), mami (mother) or a relative and some had telephone numbers that they pleaded with consular officials to call. The United States is already driven by an ongoing emotional debate regarding immigration and the recording only goes on to add fuel to an already burning fire. It has emerged as additional evidence to the reports, photographs, and documentations showing how hard the federal immigration policy playing out on families along the border. According to ProPublica report, there are more than 2,300 children who have been separated from their parents as a result of the new policy to charge criminally every person caught crossing the border illegally. ProPublica further adds that the audio clip contains sounds of 10 children from Central America who had been separated from their parents last week. The children are estimated to be between 4 and 10 years old. A Border Patrol agent said, "Well here we have an orchestra" over the sounds of sobbing. ProPublica identified one of the children on recording who is a 6-year-old from El Salvador, asking for help to call her aunt, whose number she remembered. The girl says, "My mommy says I'll go with my aunt and that she'll come to pick me up there as quickly as possible." ProPublica called one of the numbers. It was the hardest moment in my life, the relative, an aunt, said. Imagine getting a call from your six-year-old niece. Shes crying and begging me to go get her. She says, I promise Ill behave, but please get me out of here. Im all alone, the aunt added. However, the authenticity of the audio remains to be verified. Ginger Thompson, the Pulitzer-prize winning reporter and former New York Times bureau chief in Mexico City, who reported the piece, wrote that the audio was provided to her by Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has worked on border issues in Texas for decades. Speaking to The Washington Post, Harbury told that the audio came from a whistleblower who had approached her for legal advice and declined to answer questions about CBP facility, citing client's privacy. The recording played in White Houses news briefing room before the start of the daily briefing saw Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the department that oversees immigration and border security, aggressively defending the policy and flatly denying what was happening to these children amounted to child abuse. We have high standards. We give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. There are videos, there are TVs, Nielsen said. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was questioned about the photos and reports that are published on the effects of family separations. Nielsen said, "I think that they reflect the focus of those who post such pictures and narratives." She added that there was no balanced view of what was happening, but added, What's happening at the border is the border is being overrun by those who have no right to cross it. To comment on the new policy Nielsen said that people who have entered illegally are, by definition, are criminals and entering with children, they put their children at risk. Stephen Engelberg, the editor-in-chief of ProPublica, told The Post that publishing the tape was a "straightforward decision." Engelberg added that this is a matter of enormous public interest, access to the facilities is very limited and we feel that people need to know as much as possible about what's going in there. The new policy on immigration has been criticised by people across the political spectrum, including conservatives and Republicans. Rosalyn Carter, the wife of former Democratic president Jimmy Carter, became the newest and last of living former first ladies on Monday to make a rare policy intervention joining Laura Bush, wife of George W Bush, and Michelle Obama, wife of Barack Obama, to publicly oppose the Trump administrations policy. Trump has repeatedly said he wants family separations to end but has refused to take responsibility for them -- instead blaming Democrats, the minority party in Congress. (Photo: File/Pixabay) Washington: President Donald Trump vowed on Monday that the United States would not become a migrant camp as he faced mounting pressure to stop families being separated as a deterrent to illegal immigration. The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility, Trump said in remarks delivered at the White House. It wont be. You look at whats happening in Europe, you look at whats happening in other places, we cant allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch. About 2,000 children have been separated from their parents or guardians over six weeks, according to US authorities, since the Trump administration announced that all migrants illegally crossing the Mexican border would be arrested, regardless of whether the adults were seeking asylum. Since children cannot be sent to the facilities where their parents are held, they are separated from them. Trump has repeatedly said he wants family separations to end but has refused to take responsibility for them -- instead blaming Democrats, the minority party in Congress, whom he accuses of blocking legislation on the broader issue of illegal immigration. He doubled down on that claim on Monday in a series of tweets, and again in remarks before a meeting of the National Space Council. If the Democrats would sit down instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly. Good for the children, good for the country, good for the world, he said. We have the worst immigration laws in the entire world. Were stuck with these horrible laws. Theyre horrible laws. Whats happening is so sad, is so sad. And it can be taken care of quickly, beautifully, he said. But just remember, a country without borders is not a country at all. We need borders, we need security. We need safety. We have to take care of our people. Akemi Vargas, 8, cries as she talks about being separated from her father during an immigration family separation protest in front of a US District Court building on Monday. (Photo: AP) Brownsville (US): An audio recording that appears to capture the heartbreaking voices of small Spanish-speaking children crying out for their parents at a US immigration facility took centre stage in the growing uproar over the Trump administrations policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. Papa! Papa! one child is heard weeping in the audio file that was first reported by the nonprofit ProPublica and later provided to the AP. Human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury said she got a tape from a whistleblower and told ProPublica it was recorded last week. She didnt give details about where exactly it was recorded. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she had not heard the audio, but said children taken into custody by the government are being treated humanely. She said the government has high standards for detention centres and the children are well cared for, stressing that Congress needs to plug loopholes in the law so families can stay together. The audio surfaced as politicians and advocates flocked to the US-Mexico border to visit US immigration detention centres and turn up the pressure on the Trump administration. And the backlash over the policy widened. The Mormon church said it is deeply troubled by the separation of families at the border and urged leaders to find compassionate solutions. Doctors maintained that Begum Kulsoom's condition has not deteriorated but there's no significant improvement either since last Thursday. (Photo: Twitter/@MaryamNSharif) London: Kulsoom Nawaz, Pakistan's former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, is undergoing a treatment at Harley Street Clinic in London. Doctors say, her condition is "highly critical". The 5-member board of doctors on Tuesday briefed the Sharif family that Begum Kulsoom will not be taken off the ventilator as of now and asked Mr Nawaz to wait for another review of her condition, reported the Geo TV. Doctors maintained that Begum Kulsoom's condition has not deteriorated but there's no significant improvement either since last Thursday, the report said. Kulsoom was shifted to intensive care on June 14, after suffering a cardiac arrest. She was then put on life support and is undergoing treatment. The same day, Sharif with his daughter, Maryam Nawaz, had reached London. Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Shehbaz Sharif on June 17 arrived in London to see his ailing sister-in-law. Following the advice by the doctors, Sharif and his daughter, Maryam Nawaz have delayed their return to Pakistan. The counsels for Sharif and his daughter have been asked to seek exemption from appearance in the accountability court of Islamabad. With the exemption request, they will also submit Kulsoom's medical report and the doctor's letter. The doctors and Sharif family are yet to decide whether to remove Kulsoom's life support or not. Sharif said, his wife was critical and still sedated. Kulsoom Nawaz has undergone multiple surgeries from August 2017, after she was diagnosed with throat cancer (lymphoma). Her condition began to deteriorate in April this year, after which she was moved to London for treatment. A Rohingya man carries two children to shore in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh, after they arrived on a boat from Myanmar. (Photo: AP) United Nations: A record 68.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to war, violence and persecution, notably in places like Myanmar and Syria, the UN said on Tuesday. By the end of 2017, the number was nearly three million higher than the previous year and showed a 50-per cent increase from the 42.7 million uprooted from their homes a decade ago, according to a report by the UN refugee agency. The current figure is equivalent to the entire population of Thailand, and the number of people forcibly displaced equates to one in every 110 persons worldwide, it said. "We are at a watershed, where success in managing forced displacement globally requires a new and far more comprehensive approach so that countries and communities aren't left dealing with this alone," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. But around 70 per cent of that number are people from just 10 countries, he told reporters in Geneva ahead of the report's launch. "If there were solutions to conflicts in those 10 countries, or in some of them at least, that huge figure, instead of rising every year, could start going down," he said, calling for a more political will to halt the crises driving so many from their homes. Every two seconds The report showed that 16.2 million people were freshly displaced last year, and included those forced to flee for the first time as well as those who had been previously displaced. This equates to some 44,500 people being pushed out of their homes every day or one person every two seconds, UNHCR said. Most people flee within their own country and are defined as internally displaced people or IDPs. By the end of 2017, there were some 40 million IDPs worldwide, down slightly from previous years, with Colombia, Syria and Democratic Republic of Congo accounting for the greatest numbers. Another 25.4 million people more than half of them children were registered as refugees last year. That is nearly three million more than in 2016, and "the highest known total to date", it said. South Sudan numbers soar Syria's seven-year conflict alone had, by the end of last year, pushed more than 6.3 million people out of the country, accounting for nearly one-third of the global refugee population. Another 6.2 million Syrians are internally displaced. The second largest refugee-producing country in 2017 was Afghanistan, whose refugee population grew by five per cent during the year to 2.6 million people. The increase was due mainly to births and more Afghans being granted asylum in Germany, UNHCR said. South Sudan meanwhile saw the largest increase last year, with the number of refugees fleeing the world's youngest nation soaring from 1.4 million at the beginning of the year to 2.4 million at the end. Grandi said South Sudan was experiencing "a very bad emergency" which had apparently escaped the notice of both the government and the opposition who did not appear to be "taking seriously the desperate situation of their own people." Most refugees in poor countries Refugees from Myanmar more than doubled last year to 1.2 million, as a brutal army crackdown forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to pour across the border into Bangladesh. Tuesday's report also highlighted large-scale displacements in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and DR Congo among others. And as Israel marks 70 years of independence, there are some 5.4 million Palestinians still living as refugees, it said. Despite the focus on migrant numbers arriving in Europe and the United States, a full 85 per cent of refugees are living in low- and middle-income countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Uganda, Grandi said. Turkey was hosting by far the largest number of refugees, with 3.5 million registered there by the end of 2017, most of them Syrians. Islamabad: Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) chief Imran Khans remarks against Western feminist movement were deemed anti-women and drew a social media backlash. Speaking to a Pakistani television channel, Imran Khan had said that he disagreed with the Western feminist movement. Mr Khan claimed that the movement has contributed to degenerating motherhood. The Twitteratis perceived the comments as highly irresponsible and criticised Mr Khan on his lack of knowledge of the ideology and the movement. Mr Khan was accused of having lack of consideration for the gains - right to vote, run for office - of Women Suffrage Movement which also resulted in feminist movements across the globe demanding equal rights to life in a society. Commentators termed the remarks as a major disappointment. Meanwhile, Imran Khan avoided a personal appearance before the Returning Officers (ROs) in connection with objections raised to his nomination papers for NA-131 (Lahore IX) and NA-53 (ICT II), as his lawyers tried to contest challenges to his candidature. RO has directed him to to appear in person to clarify his position. "Wanna' Cap? I say, "Sing Brothers Sing"..." Mert Carlson was this week's winner. The winner's name will be put into a drawing for a free month subscription or extension. Look for a new photo Monday. Achuth Kumar Gani knew every trick in the book. The 31-year-old was Bengalurus undisputed king of chain-snatching. On Monday, he ran out of luck. And tricks. The Jnanabharathi police put an end to Ganis notorious run, as they shot him after he tried to attack beat police personnel and overpower them. A native of Gadag and a resident of Kumbalgodu, Gani had almost turned the de facto master of citys chain-snatching scene, after the arrest of Bavaria gangsters another group that specialised in the crime. After giving sleepless nights to city police with his lightning speed skills, Gani now lies in the Victoria Hospital. A small-scale real estate agent, Gani graduated to the greener pastures of chain-snatching after suffering huge losses. A habitual offender in Chitradurga and Bengaluru, Gani was on the radar of the Bengaluru City Police for quite some time. Ravi D Channanavar, DCP (West), said Gani was spotted by the beat police on Sunday evening in Jnanabharati limits. He was chased by the cop on a Cheetah bike and nabbed, he said. The police decided to take him to Kumbalagodu for further investigation. But Gani had other plans. Around 2.30 am, near Kengeri bus stop, he gave us the slip on the pretext of attending natures call. Three teams were formed to nab him and he was spotted at Banashankari 6th Stage around 5.40 am. He punched a senior officer on the chest and threw stones. SI Praveen Yaligar shot him on his leg and arrested him. Rob, rest, rob Gani was involved in more than 70 chain-snatching incidents across Bengaluru. He used to begin his day as early as 5 am, targeting women on morning walks. Soon after, he used to rest at his Kumbalagodu house and again strike in the evening. Following special orders to nab chain-snatchers, police rummaged through more than 30 DVRs and observed his helmet and jackets to zero in on him. Police commissioner T Suneel Kumar rewarded head constable Chandrakumar, who first nabbed Gani, and the Kengeri team with Rs 1 lakh each. More than 20 fighters from an Iraqi paramilitary force key to the battle against the Islamic State group were killed in an eastern Syria air raid the United States linked to Israel. The bombing raid hit Al-Hari, a town controlled by regional militias fighting in Syria's complex seven-year war alongside President Bashar al-Assad's forces. Both Syrian authorities and Iraqi forces pointed the finger at the US-led coalition, which denied it was involved in Sunday night's attack. "We have reasons to believe that it was an Israeli strike," a US official told AFP on condition of anonymity on Monday. The raid slammed into a regime-controlled position in the border town and left at least 52 fighters dead, according to a Britain-based monitor. Among them were fighters from Iraq's powerful Hashed al-Shaabi military alliance, some of whom have crossed into Syria to fight against IS. The Iran-backed Hashed claimed that "US planes fired two guided missiles at a fixed position of Hashed al-Shaabi units on the border with Syria, killing 22 fighters and wounding 12." The bodies of three Iraqi fighters killed in the raid were returned to their hometowns for burial, said AFP's correspondent in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said a total of 30 Iraqi forces were among the dead in Al-Hari, as well as 16 Syrian forces and six unidentified fighters. The attack was first reported by Syrian state media, which cited a military source accusing the coalition of bombing one of its positions in Al-Hari. It said several people were killed and wounded but did not give a specific number or their nationalities. A military source in Syria's Deir Ezzor province where the targeted area lies later said coalition warplanes hit "joint Iraqi-Syrian positions in Al-Hari". The coalition's press office said it had received reports of a strike in the area that had killed and wounded Iraqi fighters, but denied it was involved. "There have been no strikes by US or coalition forces in that area," it said in an email. Hashed said its fighters had been deployed along the porous frontier with Syria on the orders of the Iraqi authorities. However, late Monday the Iraqi military command denied it had positioned forces in Syrian territory, implying the dead fighters had acted without its consent. Regretting the deaths, the command said it had been assured by the coalition that it was not responsible for the strikes. Hashed is vital to the fight against IS in Iraq, but has also battled the jihadists across the border in their eastern Syria bastions. Al-Hari is in oil-rich Deir Ezzor province where a US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters and Russia-supported Syrian regime forces are carrying out separate operations against IS. The jihadists have lost most of the territory they controlled in Syria and Iraq but remain in pockets of the eastern desert area including Deir Ezzor. The US and Russian-backed forces have mostly avoided each other thanks to a de-confliction line that runs across the province along the winding Euphrates River. Syrian troops are battling IS on the western river bank, while the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces fight on the east. Iraqi warplanes also have occasionally bombed IS positions in eastern Syria. Al-Hari lies on the western side, close to the river and the de-confliction line. The buffer has largely been successful in keeping the two offensives apart, but there have been exceptions. The deadliest incident was in February, when US-led coalition air strikes killed at least 100 pro-regime fighters in Deir Ezzor province, including Russians. "The strike on Al-Hari produced the highest death toll for regime forces since the February incident," Observatory head Abdel Rahman said. Syria's conflict began in 2011 with protests against Assad, but then spiralled into a full-blown war that has drawn in world powers and given rise to jihadists like IS. The strike on Al-Hari came a day after the US-backed SDF announced it had ousted IS from Dashisha, a village to the north in Syria's Hasakeh province. The village had been one of the last IS-controlled areas in a corridor linking Syria with Iraq. "For the first time in four years, Dashisha, a notorious transit town for weapons, fighters and suicide bombers between Iraq and Syria, is no longer controlled by ISIS (IS) terrorists," said Brett McGurk, the US president's special envoy for the war against IS. The southwest monsoon's advance into remaining parts of peninsular India and rest of the country has been delayed further in the absence of a critical atmospheric push from the ocean. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Monday said further progress of southwest monsoon is not likely in the next five to six days due to the prevalence of a weak monsoon pattern. This is for the second consecutive week, IMD warned about a break in the monsoon. On June 13, the MeT agency issued the first alert on the stagnation in monsoon's march to central, north, northwest and parts of peninsular India that has not received much rain so far. Much to the disappointment of the parched and sultry north, central and eastern India, the IMD now forecast continuation of a lull till at least till June 23-24. This has happened because of an unfavourable weather condition known as Madden-Julian Oscillation that can delay monsoon onset, result in a break in activity or end a monsoon season prematurely. "We don't have convection clouds because of an unfavourable MJO. Large-scale flow patterns are not there. There would be no revival of monsoon for the next 5-6 days," IMD scientist M Mahapatra told DH. MJO is a large-scale atmospheric disturbance that impacts the monsoon shower in the tropics where the rainfall is generally associated with thunderstorms and winds are predominantly easterly. Periods of moderate to strong MJO are often followed by little or no activity. The last phase of MJO that boosted the summer monsoon passed the Indian Ocean last week and the next MJO cycle is expected around June 25, when the weathermen expects a revival of the monsoon. Till then, the heatwave in eastern and parts of central India will continue. Truckers launched an indefinite nationwide strike on Monday urging the government to meet their demands including lowering of diesel prices and bringing petro products under GST. According to All India Confederation of Goods Vehicle Owners Association (AICGVOA), around 54 lakh trucks were off the roads and the protest would be intensified from Tuesday. On day one, goods supplies, including perishable food items, were not hit. But if the strike continues, the supply chain may be affected, admitted officials in the Union Ministry of Transport. Another transporters apex body AIMTC claimed that the stir was orchestrated by a small section and had no impact and called for a nationwide strike from July 20. About 40 lakh goods vehicles owners, mostly truckers have joined strike nationwide to protest against rising diesel prices, dual taxation and hike in third party insurance premium, AICGVOA General Secretary R S Bhasin said. The effect was more in West Bengaland Karnataka, he added Truckers were off the roads in Delhi, Punjab, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and several other parts, officials said. RTI activist Rajendra Singh, who shot to fame after exposing several scams in Bihar, was shot dead at Motihari on Tuesday. Unidentified miscreants shot him from close range when he was crossing Piprakothi police station in Motihari in day hours. He died on the spot. The RTI activist, who exposed toilet scam, teachers recruitment scam, the appointment of cops scam, and embezzlement of funds during construction of Indira Awas Yojna, had earlier sought police security cover as he had been receiving constant threats to his life. But his petition for security cover remained under process as the file moved from one table to another in the district police chiefs office. The RJD has taken strong exception to the killing of the RTI activist. In Nitish Kumar regime, anyone who tries to raise his voice against the prevalent corrupt system or exposes how money has been swindled, will be eliminated, said former Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav. One too many Earlier, another RTI activist Ram Naresh Pandey was shot dead in 2014 in Nalanda district when he exposed large-scale corruption in the appointment of postal employees in Nalanda district, the home-town of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. The State has a long history of whistle-blowers being gunned down. A whistle-blower Ram Vilas Singh was killed in 2011 in broad daylight for launching a movement to expose the police-criminal nexus in the forest areas of Lakhisaria and adjoining districts. In neighbouring Begusarai district, some unidentified criminals on a motorcycle gunned down Shashidhar Mishra, a local RTI activist, at his residence. But the most unfortunate murder was that of an IITian Satyendra Dubey, an engineer working with National Highway Authority of India (NHAI). Perceived to be a whistle-blower, who exposed corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral project in Bihar, the young engineer, posted in Gaya, was killed on November 27, 2003, shortly after he had written to the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee detailing financial and contractual irregularities in the project. An alumnus of IIT-Kanpur, Dubey had earlier blown the lid off various instances of large-scale irregularities in NHAI sub-contracting and quality control rules at Koderma and Gaya stretches of the project. The murder sparked nationwide protest, amidst call to bring in legislation to protect the whistleblowers who expose corruption. Morocco has been granted the status of partner in local democracy by the Bureau of the Council of Europe Congress of Local and Regional Authorities. The North African Kingdom has obtained this status thanks to its sustained efforts in decentralization and regionalization. This initiative is part of the Council of Europes neighborhood policy and offers the countries concerned a special framework for institutional dialogue with their European counterparts. The Partner for Local Democracy status enables elected representatives of local authorities of countries in the Council of Europes neighborhood to participate, within the Congress, in strengthening local and regional democracy. It is a fundamental factor for the development and consolidation of genuine pluralist democracy. The Kingdom of Morocco is a long-standing partner of the Council of Europe and participates in the work of several of its bodies such as the Venice Commission, the North-South Centre, the Pompidou Group and the Parliamentary Assembly, said Gudrun Mosler -Tornstrom, President of the Congress. By joining our Assembly of elected local and regional representatives, the Moroccan authorities have confirmed their desire to anchor Moroccan local democracy in the values of the Council of Europe and the principles of the European Charter of Local Self-Government, she added. We welcome the strengthening of our co-operation and are delighted to receive, in Strasbourg, a delegation of Moroccan local and regional elected representatives, which will be the first to benefit from this special status, said Piero Fassino, spokesperson for the South-Mediterranean Partnership. Morocco has ratified several Council of Europe treaties, has taken part in the Pompidou Groups Mediterranean Network (MedNET) since 2006, is member of the Venice Commission since 2007, member of the North-South Center since 2009 and has the Partner for Democracy status granted by the Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) in 2011. In 2016, 11 Moroccan cities joined the Council of Europes Intercultural Cities network. The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities is an institution of the Council of Europe, responsible for strengthening local and regional democracy in its 47 member-states. As the voice of Europes municipalities and regions, it works to foster consultation and political dialogue between national governments and local and regional authorities. This week, 29-year-old David Nicherie, from Oakland, California, received a kidney donation from a woman he found through a Craigslist ad, KTVU reported. Nicherie, who had kidney failure, was desperately trying to save his life by posting the ad. According to KTVU, Nicherie was on a 10- to 15-year kidney waitlist. Luckily for Nicherie, his Craigslist ad reached 29-year-old Jessica Morris, who had made it a New Years resolution to donate a kidney in 2018. After seeing the ad and getting in contact with Nicherie, she decided he would be the recipient of her left kidney. To be in a position where you have the power to actually help someone be happy and also save someones life, then why not do it? Morris told KTVU. I feel like more people should. After sending emails back and forth, Nicherie and Morris realized they had a lot more in common than they thought: They were both born in 1988 in the same Newport Beach hospital. All the coincidences confirmed Morris decision to donate her kidney. I just kind of see it as a gift from God, Nicherie told KTVU. I couldnt have planned it better. I couldnt have written it better myself. Read or watch the full story here. NEW YORK The push toward immigration votes in the House is intensifying the divide among Republicans on one of the party's most animating issues and fueling concerns that a voter backlash could cost the GOP control of the House in November. To many conservatives, the compromise immigration proposal released this past week by House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is little more than "amnesty." One tea party group described the Republican plan as "the final betrayal." Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who is close to President Donald Trump, tweeted Friday that Ryan is "trying to open our borders even more and give illegal immigrants the biggest amnesty in American history." The tension threatens to exacerbate the GOP's political challenges this fall, when their majorities in the House and Senate could be at risk. Passage of the bill could alienate conservatives and depress turnout at a time when enthusiasm among Democrats is high. Yet scuttling the bill could turn off independent voters, an especially important bloc for House Republicans competing in dozens of districts that Democrat Hillary Clinton won in the 2016 presidential election. "The GOP's in a tough spot," said Republican pollster Frank Luntz. "The hardcore Trump voter has a different point of view than the ever-important independent voter, and there doesn't seem to be a middle ground." The draft legislation, resulting from intense negotiations between moderates and conservatives, includes a path to citizenship for an estimated 1.8 million young immigrants in the country illegally. The plan includes $25 billion for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and other security measures sought by the White House. "While the bill contains some positive provisions, including full funding for the border wall and closing loopholes in current law that sustain illegal border surges, it is still a mass amnesty," said RJ Hauman, of the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform. "This bill hardly fulfills President Trump's bold promise to fix immigration, and sure isn't a winning message for the GOP in the midterms," Hauman said. Republicans had trumpeted Trump's support for the plan, yet he told reporters early Friday he would not sign it if it reached his desk. Later in the day, the White House said he was confused by a reporter's question and clarified his support. Skittish conservative lawmakers have indicated there's little chance they would support the current plan unless Trump were to give it a full embrace a tall order, given the confusion Friday about the president's position. "House Republicans are not going to take on immigration without the support and endorsement of President Trump," said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., the GOP's chief deputy vote counter. The politics of the immigration debate have grown more heated since the administration adopted a "zero tolerance" approach at the Southern border. The policy is leading to an increase in the number of detained immigrants being separated from their children. Trump has tried to blame Democrats for his own administration's policy, tweeting Saturday that they "can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change!" Facing a national uproar, House GOP leaders included a provision in the immigration proposal that would require families to be kept together for as long as they are in the custody of the Homeland Security Department. The proposed fix won approval from moderate House Republicans locked in difficult re-election battles, but not from Republican Senate candidates running competitive races in GOP-leaning states. None spoke in support of the bill. "We're studying the proposal," said Arizona Rep. Martha McSally, who is viewed as the GOP establishment's favorite in one of the top Senate races. "I try not get swayed by what the emotions are or the pressure. I really try to look at the policy issues." Kelli Ward, one of McSally's main opponents in the Arizona Senate primary on Aug. 28, was more scathing in her assessment. "Compromising on the rule of law to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants is the wrong path to take," she said of the House plan. "Congress should focus on border security and stop talking about amnesty as a solution." In Pennsylvania, Rep. Lou Barletta, the Republican nominee against Democratic Sen. Bob Casey took an equally aggressive approach against his own party's immigration plan. "I hate it," he told The Associated Press. "What does it accomplish? It's amnesty." Barletta said he has compassion for the children caught up in the immigration debate. But he said he wouldn't support an immigration bill unless it also blocked employers from hiring immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, eliminated "sanctuary cities" and ended family-based migration. Barletta said his party should "absolutely" fear a political backlash from its base this fall should Republicans push through the current compromise. Other high-profile Republican candidates avoided questions about the immigration plan altogether, highlighting the political sensitivity of the issue. The Republicans who declined to comment or ignored AP questions included Senate candidates Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Mike Braun of Indiana and Matt Rosendale of Montana. In an election year in which Democrats appear to have an advantage on voter enthusiasm, Republicans can ill afford to alienate any voters this fall, particularly their most passionate supporters. Former White House counselor Steve Bannon lobbied against the compromise in private meetings with House conservatives earlier this past week. He warned that Republicans "will lose the House and Trump will be impeached" if the House backs the new measure, according to Iowa Rep. Steve King, an immigration hard-liner who was in attendance. The number of Algerians who sought political asylum in Europe in the year 2017 reached 10,000, data from Eurostat, a European statistical agency, showed. According to Eurosat, the 28 countries of the European Union have registered over 750,000 asylum applications in 2017, a decrease from 2015 and 2016 figures, when applicants numbered 1,323,000 and 1,260,000 respectively. A large proportion of Algerian asylum seekers turn to France, their former colonial master. According to French data, the number of Algerian asylum seekers has increased by 24% in 2017, compared to 2016, to 2,456 applications, making Algeria one of the top 10 countries whose nationals have asked for asylum in France. However, faced with the difficulty to obtain asylum in France, more and more Algerians are turning towards other countries such as Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia, etc. Only 3% of Algerian asylum seekers are successful, against 94% of Syrians, 92% of Eritreans, and 69% of Somalis. The security situation in Algeria has been tense in recent years. Terrorist attacks and abductions, including those involving foreign citizens, are a frequent occurrence. There are several Islamist groups operating in various parts of the North African oil-rich nation, including one that has declared allegiance to IS group. SALT LAKE CITY LDS Church leaders are asking Mormons to submit original songs for the first overhaul of the faith's hymnbooks in 30 years, according to a news release issued Monday. The major revisions of "Hymns" and the "Children's Songbook," led by official committees, will eliminate national anthems and better reflect the global membership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, leaders said. The project is expected to take several years. "When the revisions are complete, there will be one hymnbook and one childrens songbook, offering the same hymns and songs in all languages," said a letter sent by the Priesthood and Family Department to general authorities and local leaders around the world. "The new collections will be created over the next several years to reflect the needs of members around the world." Each person can submit up to five hymns and five childrens songs by July 1, 2019. Anyone can provide feedback about current music through an online survey at newmusic.lds.org. Anyone can provide suggestions. For example, some members might suggest the return of "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing," a hymn left out of the last hymnbook but still regularly performed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and BYU choirs. Leaders said the goal of the project is unity. "We recognize the power that sacred music has to unify the members of the church throughout the world," Elder Ronald A. Rasband of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said in a prepared statement. "We desire to offer a consistent core collection of hymns and songs in every language that reflects the diverse needs of the global church in our day." The new books will be translated into multiple languages and used in the faith's 30,500 congregations in more than 170 countries. The committees, made up of church employees and members called to participate because of expertise in music, education, literature, world cultures and church doctrine, will select core hymns and songs that teach LDS doctrines. "The language of music is universal," said Elder Erich W. Kopischke, a General Authority Seventy from Germany. "Even if we come from different cultures and speak different languages, singing together brings the same spirit to everybody." Additional hymns and songs applicable to specific languages and areas will also be made available to members through digital channels. The printed hymnbooks will not include national anthems, the church release said, because the new "Hymns" and new "Children's Songbook" will be the same in every language. Emma Smith compiled the first LDS hymnbook in 1835, followed in 1840 by the Manchester Hymnal, a European collection of hymns. The church published a hymnbook with music added to the text for the first time in 1889, with the "Latter-day Saints' Psalmody." A churchwide hymn contest contributed to "Latter-day Saint Hymns," published in 1927. "Hymns" was first published in 1948 with 387 hymns and revised in 1950. The book was overhauled in the early 1980s, appearing in 1985 with 341 hymns, including 92 new songs, including 44 new LDS compositions. It is now published in 38 languages. The first children's songbook appeared in 1880. The "Children's Songbook" was published in 1989. A composer or author will need to create a profile using his or her LDS Account to submit music or lyrics. Anyone member or nonmember may obtain an LDS Account free of charge at ldsaccount.lds.org. "Perhaps the most meaningful hymns and songs of the Restoration have not yet been written," said Elder LeGrand R. Curtis Jr., a General Authority Seventy. "We encourage our talented members to prayerfully consider what they might add to the body of music already known and loved by the church." BICKNELL, Wayne County A man has died following exposure to an industrial pesticide material, officials said, and the incident led to temporary closure of a medical clinic. The man, identified as George Coombs, 70, of Teasdale, encountered the material in a home in Teasdale about 7:45 p.m. on Sunday. He was then taken to the Wayne Community Health Center in Bicknell, where he died, according to Kassidee Brown, spokeswoman for Wayne County. Everyone within the home where Coombs was exposed to the pesticide was evaluated for contamination, Brown said. Investigators also evaluated the building itself, she said. Medical staff who helped the victim were taken to other medical facilities to be evaluated and were given a clear bill of health, Brown said. The Wayne Community Health Center clinic was closed during "investigation and evaluation of this incident," according to Brown, and a small temporary clinic was set up during the investigation. The civil support team of the Utah National Guard 85th Weapons of Mass Destruction support team, which was investigating, found the clinic safe Monday afternoon and it reopened at 3 p.m., she said. The team found that the pesticide Coombs was exposed to was aluminum phosphide. "It is unclear how or why the pesticide was used," Brown said. Aluminum phosphide is described by the U.S. National Library of Medicine as "one of the most common causes of poisoning among agricultural pesticides." SALT LAKE CITY Eboo Patel has a mental game he likes to play when a news segment or bad interaction has skewed his impression of a group of people. He'll think, "Do I know someone who belongs to that group?," and try to replace the new, negative feelings with the image of a friend. "When I think about that category, whatever it is, I want to think about my friend, not the image I saw on the evening news," said Patel, founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that helps college campuses improve their approach to religious diversity. Then he'll seek out more information on the group, learning if someone who identifies with that religious tradition or political faction designed a famous building or cured a common illness. "I want to see what contributions members of that group made to people in America," Patel said. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy likely didn't have this approach in mind when he wrote the majority opinion in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, ruling the commission was wrongly biased against Jack Phillips, a baker who refused to provide a wedding cake for a same-sex celebration. However, Patel's practice fits well with Kennedy's recommendations. Kennedy urged judges, lawmakers and everyday Americans to be more tolerant of their neighbors, expressing support for both members of the LGBT community and religious believers who object to same-sex marriage. "These disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs and without subjecting gay persons to indignities," he wrote. That's easier said than done, according to experts on religion-related conflict. While tragedy can trigger understanding, such as the outpouring of help in response to the 2017 fatal fire at a high-rise apartment tower in West London, tolerance usually doesn't increase spontaneously. It takes regularly choosing understanding over anger, which is rare at a time when rage is becoming our go-to response, said John Corvino, a professor of philosophy and dean of the Irvin D. Reid Honors College at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. "Our soundbite culture prompts us to respond quickly in anger, instead of stepping back, taking a breath and seeking to understand. My hope is that the Masterpiece decision encourages more of such seeking," he said. Unequal tolerance The Masterpiece Cakeshop case is the latest in a series of lawsuits and legislative actions that bring protections for the LGBT community and protections for the religious community into conflict. The clash was predicted in the aftermath of same-sex marriage legalization, but the way competing interests have been handled has increased ill will on both sides, experts said. As a result, some Americans find it nearly impossible to respect LGBT rights and religious rights at the same time, said Patel, citing his interactions with college and university leaders. "From some perspectives, a commitment to one means that you have to be opposed to the other," he said. Patel's job takes him to about 25 college campuses each school year, where he's observed a related and troubling trend. As school leaders place more emphasis on LGBT equality, they're often failing to provide the tools students need to understand and respect religious diversity. "It's impossible to generalize even about four-year, residential campuses. But having said that, I would note that in many, many places, diversity work views race, gender and sexuality as the most important identities and, very often, has a relatively small space for religion (in the curriculum or program) or even views it as part of the problem," he said. Anecdotes like these help explain why conservative Christians increasingly feel targeted by their non-Christian neighbors. Nearly 6 in 10 white evangelical Protestants say Christians face a lot of discrimination in America today, compared to 33 percent of all Americans, according to a 2017 survey from Public Religion Research Institute. In the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling, Kennedy wrote that religious beliefs deserve respect, even when they're unpopular. He criticized a Colorado commissioner for comparing using religious beliefs to justify a service refusal to using religious beliefs to justify the Holocaust or slavery. "This sentiment is inappropriate for a commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado's anti-discrimination law a law that protects against discrimination on the basis of religion as well as sexual orientation," he wrote. Moving forward, Americans from different religious backgrounds and with opposing views on same-sex marriage have to better listen to one another's concerns, said Corvino, co-author of "Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination." The Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling "signaled that we'll do a much better job of addressing those questions (on LGBT and religious rights) if we're not too quick to label our opponents as 'despicable,'" he said. Confronting bias Corvino, a gay man, has adopted this approach in his own life, seeking out friendships with people who object to same-sex marriage for religious reasons. "A big part (of my motivation) is personal temperament. I like getting along with people," he said. His goal isn't to change minds, although he doesn't shy away from sharing his support for same-sex marriage. Instead, he's focused on getting to know people from different backgrounds and turning a would-be enemy into a friend. "We share this world, and we face some common challenges. We do a better job of addressing those challenges if we can come together in friendship," Corvino said, noting that friendships are "a check against the extreme tendency toward polarization." Humans can't avoid having biases, psychologists note. We're wired to be suspicious of people who are different than us because of our ancestors' experiences battling with competing tribes, as Gleb Tsipursky, a historian at Ohio State University, recently wrote for Psychology Today. However, that doesn't mean we shouldn't confront our prejudicial instincts. Research has shown when you meet someone who contradicts your assumptions, your bias weakens, as Mahzarin Banaji, one of the creators of the Implicit Association Test, told Boston.com. For example, 67 percent of U.S. adults who had a conversation with a Muslim at least occasionally in the past 12 months agreed that Muslims are an important part of the American religious community. Among adults who had no conversations with Muslims, only 45 percent said the same, according to a 2015 survey from Public Religion Research Institute. Jordan Denari Duffner, author of "Finding Jesus among Muslims: How Loving Islam Makes Me a Better Catholic," has watched this research play out in real life, as she's worked to improve relationships between the Catholic and Muslim communities. "When people have an actual, personal relationship where they've talked about deep things, surely that helps," she said. However, friendships aren't a perfect antidote to intolerance, she added. When we recognize a bias in ourselves, we need to take additional steps to confront it, such as following members of the disliked group on social media or reading more about their views. Unless we make an effort to learn more about one another, we'll walk around assuming the worst about our neighbors, Patel said. He recounted sitting in a university student center about a decade ago, listening as a group of young men discussed a news report on a Muslim terrorist playing on a nearby TV. "A Muslim girl in a hijab walked by. One of the guys looked at her, looked at the TV and then said, 'Maybe they're related,'" Patel said. "That guy knew nothing about Islam except what he saw on the evening news." Ongoing debates on LGBT and religious rights won't be solved if people don't go out into the world and try to better understand who they're fighting with, experts said. "It's really important when having these challenging conversations about religion in our current moment to really try to understand where the other person is coming from," Duffner said. SALT LAKE CITY The special agent in charge of the FBI office in Salt Lake City called Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitzs stinging report on the agency's handling of the Clinton email investigation disappointing. "The inspector general does not do good news reports, and you would expect nothing less from him," said Eric Barnhart, who oversees FBI field offices in Utah, Idaho and Montana. "We've been down this road before in that we need to take a hard look and make sure that this never happens again." The 568-page report deemed former FBI Director James Comey "insubordinate" in his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation during the 2016 presidential election. But it also concluded there was no evidence that Comey was motivated by political bias. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, called the report "appalling" and that the significance of its findings can't be overstated. "The report identifies missteps at every level of the Department of Justice from our nations chief federal law enforcement officer to special agents in the field," he said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Monday. "How are the American people supposed to have confidence in the integrity of the FBI and its investigative work when you have agents disparaging the subjects of investigations, calling investigations pointless and a waste of time, and describing themselves as part of the resistance? FBI Director Christopher Wray told the committee that the agency accepted the findings of the report and has started making changes, including about how the bureau handles especially sensitive investigations, according to the Associated Press. The FBI is also reinforcing through employee training the need to avoid the appearance of political bias and has referred employees singled out in the report to the agency's investigative arm for possible discipline. "We're going to learn from the report and be better as a result," Wray said. Hatch said he was disappointed with Wray's response last week that although the report found errors in judgment it focused on a small number of FBI employees. Those employees, he said, were the director, deputy director and leaders of the the Clinton email and Russia investigations, not junior field agents. "And they were insubordinate, unprofessional in their communications, and even untruthful," Hatch said. The inspector general found that the FBI policy limiting who is allowed to speak to the media was widely ignored at all levels of the agency. Barnhart said there is a problem with leaks at the FBI, DOJ and government in general. "Obviously, you all love that but that's problematic for us," he told reporters at the FBI office in Salt Lake City on Monday. "I'll be blunt, that's not who we are and we need to find out the root cause of that." Barnhart said there were some FBI employees who were undisciplined and unprofessional in their use of government devices and gave the appearance of a political bias. Though the report didn't find systematic bias, he said he knows the public is not going to view it that way. "I get it," Barnhart said. "Even one person expressing any of those sort of sentiments is too many for us." Hatch called text messages between FBI agents disparaging President Donald Trump "disturbing" and "shocking." An agent on the Clinton email investigation suggested in texts to a colleague that anyone who planned to vote from Trump was an absolute idiot. The agent also called the Clinton email investigation the most meaningless thing Ive ever done and said, Its just so obvious how pointless this exercise is." Hatch said the errors identified in the report cast a cloud over the Clinton email investigation and its credibility. "Even more troubling is the irreparable harm to the FBIs reputation for neutral fact-finding and political independence," the senator said. Barnhart said he didn't want to get into the political angle. But regarding morale he said for his employees with 25 years experience, the last couple of years have been "different" than the first 20 years or so. And, he said, those with a couple of years in will say, "'Holy smokes, is this what the next 25 to 30 years is going to be like?'" TAYLORSVILLE When Michelle Patey discovered her husband was turning blue on the bedroom floor one night and called 911, emergency responders wouldn't arrive for another nine minutes. Once a person stops breathing, it can take as little as six minutes for brain damage to occur and 10 minutes without oxygen for a person to die, according to the National CPR Foundation. The math was not in their favor. Yet on Monday, Robert Patey, of Murray, stood smiling at a Unified Fire Authority station fully recovered from his medical scare six months earlier to see his wife receive the Unified Lifesaving Award for rescuing him that night thanks to her CPR training. "If it weren't for the firemen and me knowing CPR, he wouldn't be here," Michelle Patey said tearfully. Patey said his wife is his hero, though she said she never thought she was doing anything heroic when she made the simple decision to take advantage of the CPR training offered by her employer, Layton Construction. "I'm grateful that I learned it and knew what to do," Michelle Patey said. "I think a lot of people may hesitate, but when you're put in that circumstance and that instance, it just kicks in and you do what you have to do." Patey said his wife gave him a second chance at life. "CPR matters," he said. "I'm standing here because of that." He added that he hopes more employers will offer CPR training to their employees. Michelle Patey recalled waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of her husband snoring something he doesn't typically do. She tried to wake him, but he didn't respond. Shaking him and yelling, she still couldn't get him to wake up. "His eyes rolled to the back of his head," she said. She realized he wasn't breathing and called 911. The dispatcher told her to roll him off the bed, which she did, and then began administering CPR. "The most critical point in a cardiac arrest is early recognition of cardiac arrest and early administration of CPR," said Chris Middlemiss, a Unified fire medical training specialist. "The reason we like to present the lifesaving award is because we like to bring awareness to the importance of bystander CPR. People in the community that's really what is saving lives is people out there who learn CPR and know how to administer CPR." Middlemiss suggests pushtosurvive.org, a free site that teaches CPR in 10 minutes, to anyone wanting to learn the lifesaving skill. Michelle Patey performed nine straight minutes of CPR on her husband before the emergency responders arrived, and she said those minutes "felt like an eternity." She broke one of his ribs in the process. "We see many lives saved by bystanders performing CPR prior to rescue workers showing up," Middlemiss said. The Patey family and the Unified fire crew agree everyone should learn CPR, because you can never predict when a loved one might stop breathing. SALT LAKE CITY Close to two-thirds of likely Utah voters support a ballot measure that would significantly expand Medicaid coverage in the state, poll results released Monday show. The Utah Policy poll found 63 percent of Utahns are in favor of the measure, 30 percent oppose it, and 7 percent don't know. The survey, carried out by Dan Jones & Associates among 615 likely Utah voters between May 15 and May 25, asked respondents the following: "If it were on the ballot, would you support or oppose requiring the state to expand Medicaid as proposed under the Affordable Care Act to all those who qualify up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level? The initiative would raise the state sales tax from 4.7 to 4.85 percent to help pay for expansion of medical benefits to low-income Utahns." Thirty-five percent of respondents were strongly in support of the measure, with 16 percent strongly against it. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent points. The survey's findings indicate an improvement on the ballot initiative's chances since another Utah Policy poll in November found 59 percent of Utahns in support. Of those surveyed in the new poll, 94 percent of Democrats were in favor of expansion, as were 71 percent of self-identified independent voters. Forty-eight percent of Republican respondents said they support it, with 43 percent against it and 9 percent unsure. RyLee Curtis, campaign manager for the Utah Decides Healthcare ballot initiative campaign, said Monday's findings show "Utahns are ready" for full Medicaid expansion. "Our polling has been very strong and very consistent at that 60 percent range," Curtis said. The Utah Decides Healthcare campaign has estimated the sales tax increase it is seeking would raise about $91 million in state money and draw down roughly $800 million in federal matching funds. The group has said that with coverage expanded to all Utahns up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, an estimated 150,000 people would become newly eligible for Medicaid. "That investment is worth it to Utah voters," Curtis said Monday. When it was passed, the Affordable Care Act required states to expand Medicaid coverage eligibility to everyone up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. However, a 2012 Supreme Court ruling made that part of the law optional for states. Expansion plans passed by states are subject to federal approval. Multiple efforts to fully expand Medicaid coverage have failed in the Utah Legislature in recent years, with critics worrying it could wreak havoc on the state budget. Utah lawmakers passed a bill earlier this year seeking expansion of Medicaid eligibility up to 100 percent of the federal poverty level. If the request were approved as is, Utah would become the first state in the country to qualify for a 90 percent federal funding match for a partial rather than full expansion. Supporters of the state legislatures' version of expansion have said it would make 70,000 and 90,000 Utahns newly eligible for Medicaid and would carry with it significantly fewer concerns over costs. NEWTON, Cache County The body of a Logan swimmer missing since Saturday was recovered Tuesday. About 8 a.m., the Cache County Search and Rescue Team recovered the body of Austin Nsegiyumva, 35, from the Newton Dam reservoir. His body was found about 50 feet from shore under 8 feet of water, said Cache County Sheriff's Lt. Brian Locke. "You could see him under the water today. And it was an area we had searched previously," he said. "We had been in that area with divers the past couple of days." Locke said there have been storms in the area the past couple of days, leading investigators to speculate whether Nsegiyumva's body was dislodged from somewhere else. He noted there is a lot of thick brush on the bottom of the reservoir in that area, including about 3 feet of moss. Crews have been looking for him since Saturday when Nsegiyumva was swimming with friends and disappeared, according to the sheriff's office. Locke said Nsegiyumva was with a group of about 15 campers. He was swimming at the time with several juveniles under 14 years old. By the time the juveniles realized what was happening and were able to get to shore to tell other adults, about 30 minutes had passed, Locke said. Nsegiyumva's body was transported to the Utah State Medical Examiner's Office to determine if there were any other contributing factors to his drowning, he said. The dive team from the Utah Department of Public Safety also participated in the search. Nsegiyumva's Facebook page states he is originally from Rwanda and went to high school in San Diego. Many friends posted tributes and remembrances as word of the recovery of his body spread. "We lost another angel. One of my brother's close friends. You will be missed Shaba. Watch over us and fly high brother," one man wrote. "Having good laughs, being goofy, and just being an amazing person. It's sad losing a good person. But my prayers go out to your family. Hope you're dancing in the sky and singing in the angels choir." "Death is not the end of our life here on Earth. This is only the beginning of our journey to enter the Kingdom of Heaven," wrote another. "Rest in peace Austin Nsegiyumva. You will be missed." EAGLE MOUNTAIN Eagle Mountain Boulevard will be closed from Major Street to Wride Highway between 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Saturday for the inaugural Limitless Supercar Shoot-out and Car Show. The event, hosted by the city and the Cars 4 Kids Foundation, will benefit Make-a-Wish Utah. The free car show will run from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Cory Wride Memorial Park, 5806 Pony Express Parkway. The action will then move to Eagle Mountain Boulevard at 3 p.m. for the shoot-out, where drivers reach speeds of 200-plus mph during the closed highway event. General admission is $10 or $15 (plus a processing fee) for adults and $7.50 (plus a processing fee) for children ages 3 to 12. Tickets on the day of the event are $25 for adults and $12.50 for children ages 3 to 12. For more information or to purchase tickets, log on eaglemountaincity.com. If Trump had to deal with a Senate run by Chuck Schumer rather than Mitch McConnell, his presidency would take a turn for the worse. Photo: Ron Sachs - Pool/Getty Images There is one extremely good reason that political junkies are focused more on elections this fall for the U.S. House of Representatives than for the U.S. Senate: A Democratic takeover of the House is significantly more feasible. If the presidents approval rating stays below 50 percent going into November (a pretty good bet), then the GOP will be in a situation where historically they have lost an average of 36 House races 13 more than theyd need to flip the House this year. Meanwhile, thanks to the sometimes strange effects of Senate classes (one-third of the chamber is up for reelection every two years), the 2018 Senate landscape is one of the worst for Democrats in living memory. Thats because they are defending an abnormally high number of seats (26 of the 35 up this year), and also because 10 of them are in states carried by Donald Trump in 2016 (with only one GOP seat in a state carried by Hillary Clinton). So posting the net gain of two seats needed to regain the Senate would involve either a Democratic wave large enough to swamp many red states, or the kind of inside straight Trump pulled off in 2016 by winning nearly all the close states. This statistic from David Wasserman nicely illustrates the lopsided odds in the Senate: Fact: if all '18 election results were an 8% pro-Dem uniform swing vs. '16 prez results, Dems would gain 44 House seats & lose 4 Senate seats. Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) April 13, 2018 But lets say for the sake of argument that a Democratic Senate might actually happen this November. As Jeff Greenfield notes at Politico, it would be a very, very big deal: [I]f the [Democratic] goal is to thwart the wholesale, radical changes in policy that President Donald Trumps administration is pursuing, the House is the wrong target. Its the Senate that has been the most significant political player of the past four years. Although the president has made himself the obsessive focus of friends and foes, it was the Republican capture and retention of the Senate in 2014 and 2016 that was and is the key to what Trump has wrought. As Greenfield observes, theres really nothing a Democratic Senate couldnt achieve that a Democratic House could, other than initiating impeachment. The Senate has broad investigative and oversight powers, and can certainly cast a big spotlight on various unsavory aspects of the Trump administration. But without a Republican Senate, Trump would lose an awful lot of power. Most notably, with Chuck Schumer replacing Mitch McConnell, hed really struggle to get quick or in many cases, even slow confirmation of judges and of the more controversial Executive branch appointees. Most importantly, the prospect that has provided the real glue between Trump and otherwise skeptical movement conservatives and Evangelical leaders a fundamental revision of constitutional law via the Supreme Court would quickly fade. It is now very unlikely that a SCOTUS retirement can occur in time to give Trump and the GOP Senate the time to fill a seat before the midterms. So the great right-wing hope that Anthony Kennedy or Ruth Bader Ginsburg will give way to that fifth conservative Justice willing to overturn or significantly revise Roe v. Wade will have to be deferred until 2019 or later if Republicans lose the Senate this year. And if Trump took the blame for that happening, his support level in key parts of his base might well decline. On the other hand, imagine that Republicans continue to narrowly hang onto the Senate this November. The possibility of losing the upper chamber in 2020 will hang over the presidential election of that year as well. Depending on what happens in two special elections this year (in Minnesota and Mississippi), Republicans will probably be defending 21 of 33 seats. Yes, all but two will be in states Trump carried in 2016 (the exceptions being Colorado and Maine), but the size of the battleground means that Democrats will have a good chance to win both the presidency and the Senate in what will after all be a more Democratic-leaning presidential electorate. And should Trump again somehow win the White House while losing the Senate, he would be the lamest of lame ducks, unable to get his second-term Cabinet easily confirmed, and blocked from any big game-changing judicial appointments as well. So it doesnt just matter whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate this November. Their margin of control will set the 2020 table for good or for ill. And if they lose the Senate altogether in 2018, Trump may find the second half of his first term to be an unfulfilling experience that he does not want to extend. SALT LAKE CITY Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes told a commission of public lands lawmakers that he is hopeful a federal judge will act within several weeks to decide a venue in legal cases challenging reductions to two national monuments. Multiple lawsuits filed by Native American tribes and environmental groups were consolidated into two cases before Judge Tanya Chutkan on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Chutkan will decide if the cases remain in Washington or are moved to Utah. Once a venue is decided, Reyes said, "we intend to intervene." Reyes gave a briefing Tuesday to members of the Stewardship for Public Lands Commission at their meeting. In December, President Donald Trump announced from the Utah state Capitol the nearly 1.35 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument will be split into two smaller units. Those are the Indian Creek unit at 86,447 acres and Shash Jaa at 142,337 acres. A coalition of environmental groups plus Native American tribes sued to overturn the action, arguing the U.S. president lacks the authority to rescind national monument designations made by previous administrations. Trump also reduced boundaries at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, 1.9 million acres designated in 1996 by then-President Bill Clinton. That monument is broken up into three smaller units: Grand Staircase, 211,983 acres; Kaiparowits, 551,117 acres; and Escalante Canyons, 243,241. Trump made the reductions at the urging of Utah's congressional delegation and rural county commissioners who said the federal designations interfered with multiple use of the land and local economies. The U.S. president said previous administrations had "severely abused" the power granted to them via the 1906 Antiquities Act, which says designations should be made with the smallest area compatible with protection of the objects. Trump directed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to conduct an on-the-ground review of the monument designations in Utah and elsewhere it was evident there was local opposition. Zinke visited Utah in May and delivered a list of recommendations later in the summer. In other updates, Reyes said a lawsuit aimed at the federal government demanding control to 33 million acres in Utah has been drafted. The process now involves assessing the appropriate venue for that case to move forward. The legal argument behind the state in this case growing out of the passage of the Transfer of Public Lands Act rests on the premise the lands should never have been retained in federal control but returned to Utah at statehood. The Utah Attorney General's Office said Tuesday the lawsuit's moving forward also stems in part on the relationship between Utah and the new Trump administration, and how receptive federal agencies are to land use issues. Correction: An earlier version indicated Reyes said he expects a federal court decision on a venue change in weeks. He actually said he is hopeful, and a staffer said it could take months. The government of Ethiopia is inviting bids from private operators for a 30-40% stake in state-run Ethio Telecom. In addition, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced that the state operator would be split in two in order to foster greater competition in the market, saying: There will be two telecom corporations and shares will be sold in both. Somalia, with a population of 12 million, has four telecommunications firms. Ethiopia - with 100 million people - has one. There needs to be competition in the country. Opening up its monopoly on telecoms is a significant departure from Ethiopias previously cautious attitude towards private investment. If they can accept working with the government as the price to pay for access to one of the most untapped telecoms markets in the world, major telecoms will likely be interested. Abiy noted that the shares in both units of the split Ethio Telecom will be sold off after one year or two years of intensive study, and clarified that the government intended to prioritise firms that fall within the top ten largest international telecoms players. This could include South African firms Vodacom and MTN, both of which have indicated their interest in Ethiopia. Additionally, 5% of the units will be made available to the Ethiopian public. MTN has said that Ethiopia would be a natural fit for MTNs existing pan-African footprint, while Vodacom noted that Ethiopia is an attractive market so it follows that there would be interest. Naturally this is dependent on what might become available and if it fits within our investment parameters. Major operators have evidently been anticipating an end to Ethiopias state monopoly. Since taking office in April, former army officer Abiy has introduced a spate of reforms in an attempt to end the political turmoil which he considers to have stalled progress in the country, which has a population of 100 million people of which 40% are under the age of 15. Image credit: Jean Rebiffe - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48468502 Brazilian utility firm Companhia Energetica de Minas Gerais (known locally as Cemig) has seen an unexpectedly high level of interest in its telecommunications assets, which it is planning to sell off to reduce its debt. A total of 16 bidders have expressed interest in infrastructure held by Cemigs telecom unit, as well as its 5,900 miles (9,500 km) fibre optic network. The company was originally hoping to sell off the assets for at least 367 million reais ($96.9 million), and this figure could now increase significantly. An unnamed company source told Reuters: The interest was surprising, a lot more favourable than imagined. They are big companies. The 16 potential bidders are currently adhering to confidentiality agreements, but the source named American Tower Corp, American Movils Claro SA, and Phoenix Tower as interested parties. Previous reports have indicated interest from Algar Telecom SA, Aloo Telecom, Telefonica Brasil SA , TIM Participacoes SA, and Vogel Solucoes em Telecomunicacoes e Informatica SA. Of these, only Vogel and Telefonica have confirmed their interest on record. The auction is currently scheduled for 25th July, with the assets being split into two lots. Cemigs fibre network runs through some of Brazils most prosperous states, and the fibre assets contained in the first lot will cover Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Network assets in Goias, Bahia, Pernambuco and Ceara states will feature in the second lot. Whether it is displays or the chipsets that power its smartphones, Samsung has been one of the front-runners that has developed its own components to compete in the crowded market. While almost all the smartphone manufacturers depend on other SoC-makers like Qualcomm and Intel, Samsung has developed its own Exynos line-up to compete with these companies. A recent job posting on LinkedIn suggests that Samsung is hunting for professionals to develop GPU for its Exynos chips in-house. One Veronica Smith, whose intro on LinkedIn says that she is a Recruiting Partner at Samsung Semiconductor SARC, posted a job titled WE ARE HIRING Engineers for GPU Endeavors. Come shape the history of the digital revolution and make your contribution the future of the mobile world. If you are interested in a quick discussion; you can email me at v1.smith@partner.samsung.com and let me know what youd like to be working on. Samsung may be the place for you, the posting siad. The flagship GPUs will populate lower tier mobile devices, that is, affordable smartphones. The nextgen GPUs embrace evolving markets like autonomous driving and the power of machine/deep learning computations. This is Samsungs proprietary IP. We will define the ISA, the architecture, the SW, the entire solution. Not many companies can claim this - We can, the posting further said. Currently, Samsung uses ARMs Mali graphics cores with its exynos line-up (and with Qualcomm SoC-powered device in the US). According to a report, Samsung was earlier in talks with both AMD and Nvidia to convince them to develop GPU technologies for its exynos processors. But the posting implies the plans didnt go as the South Korean giant had expected and now it will manufacture its own GPU units. Recently, a report claimed that Samsung may be planning to give other OEMs access to its Exynos chipsets. The company was in talks with a number of smartphone manufacturers, including ZTE. In March, Samsung announced Exynos 9610 mid-range processor with 480fps slow-motion support. The Octa-core Exynos 9610 SoC is made using a 10nm architecture and comes with advanced image processing and depth sensing algorithms. Samsung says the SoC is expected to be mass produced in the latter half of 2018. 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. What existed before the big bang? If a tree falls in the woods and no-one Instagrams it, did it really happen? Is Tom Cruise a Scientologist? If a hotel doesnt let influencers stay for free, will it go bust? The answers to many of lifes deepest questions may never be answered. The question of how luxury resorts should deal with the new class of brand-peddling marketers known as instagram models, however, is slowly becoming clear. They are going to have to become more discerning (but not reject the craze altogether). The trend: Influencers like Erik Conover, Alexis Ren, Pia Muehlenbeck and Jay Alvarrez have been making a living on Instagram and Youtube, leveraging their social media popularity to travel the world in style. The problem: although elite influencers of this calibre are usually personally invited by hotel brands, according to The Atlantic, An onslaught of lesser-known wannabes has left hotels scrambling to deal with a deluge of requests for all-expense-paid vacations in exchange for some social media posts. Kate Jones, marketing and communications manager at the Dusit Thani, a five-star resort in the Maldives, told The Atlantic that her hotel receives at least six requests from self-titled influencers per day, typically through Instagram direct message. People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. And even when they have more followers, 10 different bikini pictures a day on the beach is great for (a) bikini company But you cant even tell where its taken. It could be anywhere in the Maldives. Others, she pointed out, send vague one-line emails, like I want to collaborate with you, with no further explanation, and only 10 percent of the requests she receives are worth investigating. Some hotels have even gone so far as to ban social media stars from their establishments. This famously happened in Ireland earlier this year, when the owner of a boutique hotel wrote an open letter to a 22 year old requesting a free five-day stay in return for featuring the hotel in one of her videos. If I let you stay here in return for a feature in a video, who is going to pay the staff who look after you? Who is going to pay the housekeepers who clean your room? Who is going to pay for the light and heat you use during your stay? Maybe I should tell my staff they will be featured in your video in lieu of receiving payment for work carried out while youre in residence? he wrote on Facebook. His post went viral, polarizing public opinion. Some took the side of the blogger. While others stuck up for the hotel. This exchange betrays the same misunderstanding of the value exchange evident in the Kate Jones Maldives hotel situation. Think about it: Instagram has 800 million monthly active users (and counting), who are far more receptive to the recommendations of influencers and idols than they are to advertisements on TV, radio, or even the side of their newsfeeds, enabling hotels to directly market to new audiences in an authentic way. Most hotels acknowledge this, explaining that the real problem is, Determining how to work with themand manage their requests (The Atlantic). And the mistake on the part of amateur influencers is overestimating the value they bring to a hotel or establishment, meaning they need to be more selective, orat the very leastput a bit more thought into their pitch. RELATED: Instagram Boyfriends Reveal What Its Really Like To Date An Influencer Mallya used F1, T20 team and other outfits to divert Rs3,547 cr: ED The Enforcement Directorate has accused Vijay Mallya and the now defunct Kingfisher Airlines of "diverting" over Rs3,547 crore of loan to a UK-based F1 motorsport firm, a T20 IPL team and others. The ED submitted its second charge sheet against beleaguered liquor baron Vijay Mallya's UB Holdings and the now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines, along with others in a special court, accusing them of laundering Rs9,990 crore fraudulently availed as loan from State Bank of India-led consortium of 17 banks. The ED also said in its supplementary prosecution complaint that Mallya did not fully disclose his assets during his personal guarantee agreement with a consortium of 17 lenders, according to The Indian Express. According to ED, the Rs3,432.40 crore was diverted by over invoicing of lease rentals of aircraft between April 2008 and March 2012. Another Rs45.42 crore was diverted for making payment towards the rental lease of a corporate jet, which was used exclusively by Mallya, while Rs50.90 crore was diverted from Kingfisher Airlines to Mallya-controlled Force Indian Formula One Team, Rs15.90 crore from the airlines to IPL team Royal Challengers Bangalore; and Rs2.80 crore to ICICI Bank as repayment of an earlier loan to Kingfisher Airlines. In its charge sheet, the ED estimated the total assets of beleaguered businessman Vijay Mallya at Rs3,164.65 crore as of 2010, while Mallya disclosed his total assets as Rs1,395 crore. The ED has claimed that Mallya has amassed huge properties outside India, especially in the UK, USA, France and other countries and has got interest in various companies which are created / incorporated outside India. These facts of overseas properties and companies have not been mentioned in the asset / liability statement submitted, and have been deliberately hidden from the banks, it said. The ED charge sheet puts the total dues, including interest, that Kingfisher Airlines owed the consortium of banks at Rs9,990.07 crore as of 15 May this year. The ED charge sheet also said the Mallya purchased the Bengaluru franchaise of the T-20 Indian Premier League sporting extravaganza Royal Challengers by siphoning off part of loan amount of Rs15.90 crore from the bank account of KAL held with Deutsche Bank. The agency said it has attached assets valued at Rs4,234.84 crore in this case and by concealing these properties and non-payment of loan amount and diverting the loan proceeds out of India, Mallya and UBHL benefited from the same and hence they are involved in the offence of money laundering. India-Pak issues are bilateral, MEA reminds Chinese envoy India on Monday made it clear that matters concerning its relationship with Pakistan are purely bilateral in nature, and cannot be the concern of any third party, even as the Chinese envoy in India suggested a trilateral meeting of India, Pakistan and China to solve border issues. While Chinese ambassador Lou Zhaohuis proposal for a trilateral summit between India, China and Pakistan was purely personal and there was nothing official about it, the ministry of external affairs decided not to encourage any such misconceptions in any quarters. The Chinese envoys proposal comes days after Chinese President Xi Jinping met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the SCO Summit in Qingdao and accepted his invitation to visit India for an informal meeting in 2019. The trilateral meeting suggested by the Chinese envoy would make China a mediator between India and Pakistan while also helping that country to push its own infrastructure and connectivity agenda. India has always held that issues between this country and Pakistan are purely bilateral in nature and no other country, not even the United Nations, need involve in any bilateral dispute. "Some Indian friends suggested that India, China, and Pakistan may have some kind of trilateral summit on the sidelines of the SCO. So, if China, Russia, and Mongolia can have a trilateral summit, then why not India, China, and Pakistan," ANI quoted Chinese ambassador to India Luo Zhaohui as saying. Speaking at a seminar, titled "Beyond Wuhan: How Far and Fast Can China-India Relations Go" in New Delhi, Zhaohui appealed for a joint effort to maintain peace along the border, and said, "We cannot stand another Doka La incident." He also praised Modi's remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue that Asia and the world would have a better future if India and China work together with trust and confidence while being sensitive to each other's interests. "Modi made a speech in Shangri-La, which sent a positive message to China. In Qingdao, the two leaders agreed to hold a second round of informal summit next year. This is the most significant outcome of the Qingdao meeting (between the two leaders)," Zhaohui said on Monday. He added: "Strategic communications, meetings and heart-to-heart dialogues are important. Whats equally important is to implement the consensus, transmit (the) leaders' personal friendship down to the people, and take more concrete actions. The Qingdao meeting has shown the right direction." Zhaohui also said that India and China are neighbours that "cannot be moved away". "We are most populous and largest developing countries. We shared a historic glory of friendly interactions. We also have pending boundary issues. Our relations so multifaceted and complicated, calling for special care and attention," he said. The Chinese ambassador to India also asserted that India and China have to follow five Cs to improve relations communication, cooperation, contacts, coordination, and control. He tweeted: We need to control, manage and narrow differences through expanding cooperation. The boundary question was left over by history. We need to find a mutual acceptable solution through Special Representatives' Meeting while adopting confidence building measures. "China-India relations have gone beyond bilateral scope. We have broad converging interests and face common challenges in Asia and beyond. We need to enhance coordination and cooperation in SCO, BRICS, and G20, and join hands to tackle global challenges," he said. Mehbooba Mufti resigns as J&K CM as BJP calls off alliance Mehbooba Mufti has resigned as Jammu and Kashmir chief minister as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called off an alliance with her People Democratic Party (PDP) amidst increasing radicalisation of Kashmitri youth. Mehbooba submitted her resignation letter to governor N N Vohra shortly after the BJP announced it was pulling out of its alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue its alliance government in Jammu and Kashmir, hence we are withdrawing" BJP general secretary Ram Madhav said at a press conference in the afternoon. "Terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of the citizens are under danger in the Valley. Shujaat Bukhari's killing is an example" the BJP leader added. Ram Madhav announced the decision after BJPs J&K lawmakers had a meeting with Amit Shah in Delhi. Restoring peace in Kashmir and encouraging fast development in Jammu and Kashmir, these were the objectives with which we joined with the PDP, Madhav said at a press conference. We have taken a decision, it is untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, hence we are withdrawing. Madhav also said that the BJP will be pushing for governors rule in the state, as it feels like the Mehbooba Mufti government has let down the people. Keeping national interest in mind and that Kashmir is an integral part of India, we have to say it is time that the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor, he said. We are not questioning the intention of the government but it has failed to achieve the intended objectives in Kashmir valley. We even appointed an interlocutor for the state to talk with all the stakeholders. The Central government has done whatever the state government sought. Terrorism and radicalisation is on the rise in the state. The murder of editor Shujaat Bukhari shows even press freedom is in danger, Madhav continued. I am not shocked. We didn't do this alliance for power. This alliance had a bigger motive - unilateral ceasefire, PM's visit to Pakistan, withdrawal of cases against 11,000 youth: tweeted Mehbooba Mufti. Dialogue and reconciliation was the main agenda behind the BJP-PDP alliance, she said. Have submitted my resigntion to the governor and have asserted that we do not want any other alliance, she added. This is a surprise for us because we did not have any indication about their decision, ANI quoted PDP spokesperson Rafi Ahmad Mir as saying. Congress leader and leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said the breakup of the alliance was good for the people. Whatever has happened is good. People of J&K will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined Kashmir & have now pulled out, maximum number of civilian and army men died during these three years, Azad said, even as he said Congress wont seek an alliance in the state. The PDP holds 28 seats in the Jammu and Kashmir assembly, and BJP has 25 in the 87-member house. The two parties have had several differences in the recent past, the latest being over the extension of the ceasefire announced during Ramzan. Mehbooba had asked for an extension of the ceasefire, and the state BJP had said that it did not support the idea. The month-long ceasefire in the valley witnessed a spurt in terror strikes. Noted journalist Shujaat Bukhari and Army jawan Aurangzeb were killed in separate attacks on the eve of Eid. Differences between the BJP and PDP had also boiled over when BJP MLAs joined a rally in support of the accused in the gangrape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammus Kathua. The parties have differences on holding talks with separatists and removal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. Activists from the Poor Peoples Campaign protest in Albany, New York. Photo: Courtesy of the New York State Poor Peoples Campaign Eating turkey-and-mustard sandwiches in the First Presbyterian Church in Albany, the demonstrators of the New York State Poor Peoples Campaign are learning how to get arrested. Mark Mishler, legal counsel for the campaign and the only man in the room with a tie on, goes over strategy, best practices, and the likely charges: trespassing or disorderly conduct, neither of which are criminal. Its pretty intimidating, said Mishler. It can be upsetting, even if youve experienced it. The tone he adopts is like teaching someone to dive into water from a decent height. Its not scary okay, its a little scary. Its the final Monday of a six-week program of civil disobedience to jump-start the new Poor Peoples Campaign, marking the transition from nonviolent direct action to a second phase, fighting poverty at the state level. From Mothers Day to Fathers Day, roughly, protesters have marched on the capitals in almost 40 states, demanding an end to systemic inequality and the stigmatization of the poor. The campaign enjoys the symmetry of a 50th anniversary: June 23 marks a half-century since the culmination of the original Poor Peoples Campaign, where 3,000 protesters camped on the Washington Mall for six weeks in the name of economic justice. Launched by Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the campaign targeted the causes of poverty that were not dampened by the civil-rights movement. The original PPC had the momentum of a decade of organizing behind it, but the new campaign is starting nearly from scratch. Hence, the buses up to Albany, the sandwiches, and the arrest lessons. In this campaign, more than 2,000 people have engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience, said Reverend Liz Theoharis, a co-chair of the new Poor Peoples Campaign. On June 11, she and co-founder Reverend William Barber II were arrested and detained for 26 hours at the Supreme Court after the 54 decision to allow Ohio to purge inactive voters from the rolls. She was also arrested the week before in Lansing, Michigan, as part of the six-week campaign of demonstrations. Its such an emergency were willing to put ourselves out there and go to jail and keep on coming back. Already, its paying off. Though theres no legislation to support at the moment, the PPC has caught the attention of politicians working to widen the social safety net. On June 12, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Maryland representative Elijah Cummings hosted a forum on poverty with Reverend William Barber and the PPC on Capitol Hill; two days later, five Democratic reps read testimonials from the campaign on the House floor. There are many returning faces among demonstrators in Albany; most of the 100-or-so preachers, activists, and mobilized poor sharing their stories have attended at least one of the protests in the last six weeks. I didnt learn that schools were falling apart from the news, says Juan Peralta, an organizer at the Justice Center en El Barrio in Harlem. I learned that schools were falling apart going to a school that was falling apart. Claudia de la Cruz, an ordained minister and social worker from the Bronx, joined the campaign two years ago during its reality tour, a road trip assessment of America to determine the focus of the PPC. De la Cruz grew up poor in the South Bronx, despite a father who worked multiple jobs and a mother with a masters degree. I remember, people around me both in church and in school understood poverty as a personal deficiency, she says. But through experience and study I have learned that poverty is convenient to the small group who exploits the majority for profit. It didnt really matter if my dad would have gotten that third gig, or if my mom would have taken on summer classes to get a little bit of cash, they were never going to accumulate not even at the smallest scale the wealth that only a handful of people have in this country. The mandate of the Poor Peoples Campaign is broad reflective of the bounty of challenges that the 41 million Americans under the poverty line face on a daily basis. The PPC demands access to clean water; an end to mass incarceration; health care as a human right; the re-expansion of voter protection laws; immigration policies that protect families; a cut in military spending to pay for it all; and an expansion of the definition of poverty that takes into account the cost of living. The agenda of the PPC is a moral one, and they seek to reclaim the language of the religious imperative from the white, conservative Evangelical. Throughout the day, pastors in Albany lamented the Justice Departments use of the Bible to justify the forced separation of migrant families who cross the border without U.S. citizenship. Its suspicious that Jeff Sessions cites Romans 13, an excerpt that was used to defend slavery, says Rev. Dr. Amaury Tanon-Sanontos, a capital-district pastor originally from Puerto Rico. But he stopped right before it says Love does no harm to a neighbor. Most of the current demands were drawn from Martin Luther Kings original framework for the Poor Peoples Campaign in December of 1967. In the face of a kind of social insanity which could lead to national ruin, King laid out his groundwork for the eradication of poverty, including a guaranteed annual wage, and the construction of 500,000 low-income housing units per year, backed by a $30 billion package as legislative muscle. But four months to the day after the PPC rollout, he was assassinated in Memphis, where he was supporting a strike by black sanitation workers after two men had been crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck while hiding from the rain. June 19, 1968: Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., addresses the Solidarity Day rally of the Poor Peoples Campaign from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She told the nearly 50,000 people gathered that racism, poverty, and war had combined to make matters worse for poor black and white alike. Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images The Poor Peoples Campaign was MLKs pivot from the era of civil rights to an era of human rights, and was prescient in anticipating the sharp rise of inequality over the past 50 years. As the economy has soared, real wages have remained stagnant, with 64 million people working for less than $15 an hour. Rent has gone up faster than income in most American cities; as of 2016, there was no state in the nation in which an employee earning the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum could afford a two-bedroom apartment. The racial wealth gap looks like a decimal error: for every $100 in wealth among white families, black households have only five dollars and four cents. When King put forth his vision, he assumed he would be there, says Al McSurely, a civil-rights lawyer and a veteran of the original PPC who spoke over the phone from North Carolina. The Poor Peoples Campaign has got to have an asterisk on it. The vision was destroyed on April 4 of 1968, when King was killed. Unlike the old vision rising and falling with the fate of one extremely charismatic leader the new PPC finds strength in its broad geographic approach, mobilizing and connecting community projects already in place in 39 states. In a way, its the same work, just under new management: connecting cell systems of activism to create a body that can fight poverty on the national level. Thus, the June 23 Rally to Fight Poverty Not the Poor on the National Mall isnt the culmination of the six-week protest, but a breath before moving forward. In the coming months, the PPC will turn to voter registration drives, following in the vision of co-chair Reverend Barber, whose Moral Mondays initiative in North Carolina helped disrupt the GOPs trifecta control of the state government. In Albany, the PPC demonstrators loaded up on water and walked a few blocks through the sticky heat to the state capitols million-dollar staircase. After 90 minutes of song and speech, ten protesters in T-shirts reading Well Be Back sat with locked arms in front of the entrance to the senate chamber. They were arrested and removed, so protesters blocked a different entrance to the senate, starting a very slow and orchestrated cat-and-mouse game between the state police and the PPC. The process was overwhelmingly polite one officer actually said my bad as he made his way through the crowd to make an arrest. As they waited to be processed, an older woman in a floppy sunhat made jokes with a beefy statey, old friends after six weeks of practice. The rest of the protesters hugged the wall of the hallways, belting protest songs as they waited for the 27 arrested to be processed and released. Due to the grand acoustics of the building the interior is made of marble cut by prisoners at Sing Sing their chants wandered through the halls to the exits. A bunch of freaky hippies in there, said a security guard, manning the metal detector on Washington Street. The nation's truck drivers are burning out The stressful and demanding nature of the work performed by truck drivers, who literally drive this industry, impacts their physical and mental well-being. Forming the backbone of Indias thriving economy, the trucking industry plays an integral role in driving the growth of the nation. Yet, truck drivers have a high rate of occupation-related injury and have among the highest rates of on-job fatality. A month long research study, covering over 1,000 truckers has been carried out by market research and consulting organisation Kantar IMRB, in association with Castrol India, to understand the health issues faced by truckers which can be directly linked to the hazardous nature of the job and working conditions. The report examines the lifestyle of truck drivers to understand driver well-being and personal attitudes towards health. Over 50 per cent of truckers face driving related health issues, such as physical stress, lack of sleep, obesity, back pain, joint pain, neck pain, eye sight issues, loneliness, breathlessness / breathing problems and mental stress. Yet, for 63 per cent of them, health does not feature amongst their top three priorities in life. Unusually long working hours, long periods away from home and family, difficult road and driving conditions, all emerged as issues impacting their health and well-being. The study revealed 50 per cent of truck drivers have trips where the duration is over 12 hours and 46 per cent drive continuously for over six hours with no breaks. This brings to light the stressful lifestyle of long distance commercial drivers. Maintaining mental and physical fitness is of utmost importance in the trucking industry. And yet, 62 per cent of the drivers have not undergone a medical checkup in the past one year. The ergonomic risk factors faced by Truck Drivers as a result of awkward and fixed postures, repetitive twisting of back and neck and working and sleeping in tight spaces result in chronic back, neck and joint pain. This health negligence amongst truck drivers is exacerbated by an unfavourable environment and cultural factors in the road transport industry like poor driver infrastructure, badly maintained vehicles, lack of hygienic food and places to rest, low wages, unplanned driving schedules and long absences from home. Consequentially, most truck drivers end up neglecting their own health while struggling to make a decent living. According to Omer Dormen, managing director, Castrol India, The trucking industry is a significant contributor to our nation's economic growth and prosperity and truck drivers are the vital force in moving the nation forward. Castrol has a long and close relationship with truckers in India for over a century. We have several programmes in place to improve their safety and well-being. Taking cognizance of the results that have come out from the recent survey, we are putting in further effort into finding solutions which could mitigate some of the challenges being faced by this section of society. Castrol also commissioned experts from The Yoga Institute in Mumbai to further investigate the issues and come up with some easy health tips, which can be followed by the truck drivers even whilse driving. The result is a series of Yoga aasanas especially developed for truckers by the The Yoga Institute the Truck Aasanas. Over the next six months, Castrol will work towards sharing these yoga aasanas with truckers across the country, encouraging them to focus on their health and well-being. Diabetes may be an early manifestation of pancreatic cancer A new study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, published by Oxford University Press, indicates that recent-onset type 2 diabetes may be early expression of pancreatic cancer. Diabetes was associated with a more than two-fold higher risk of pancreatic cancer in African Americans and Latinos, but recent-onset diabetes was associated with a 2.3-fold greater increase in risk of pancreatic cancer than long-standing diabetes. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most fatal cancers, with a five-year survival rate of only 8 per cent. This is because the vast majority of pancreatic cancer patients (some 80 per cent of them) are diagnosed at a late stage. Identification of high-risk people and ability to detect pancreatic cancer earlier would likely improve patient outcomes. Diabetes has been consistently associated with pancreatic cancer in previous studies, with a two-fold higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer among diabetes patients. Diabetes has been proposed to be both a risk factor for and a consequence of pancreatic cancer. The prevalence of diabetes among pancreatic cancer patients is unusually high relative to other cancers. The majority of the diabetes patients with pancreatic cancer are diagnosed with diabetes less than three years before the cancer diagnosis. Among pancreatic cancer patients undergoing pancreaticoduodenectomies (the surgical operation often used to try to remove pancreatic tumors), over half of patients with recent-onset diabetes have no diabetes postoperatively. Researchers have observed no effect in those who have had diabetes for more than three years. Here researchers examined the association between recent-onset diabetes and pancreatic cancer in a prospective study of African Americans and Latinos, two minority populations with high diabetes risk. Questionnaires, Medicare data, and California hospital discharge files were used to identify new diabetes diagnoses. A total of 15, 833 (32.3 percent) participants developed diabetes between 1993 and 2013. A total of 408 incident pancreatic cancer cases were identified during follow-up. During an average follow-up of 14 years, among those with diabetes, 128 participants developed pancreatic cancer. Among participants without diabetes, 280 participants developed pancreatic cancer. In pancreatic cancer with diabetes, 52.3 per cent of cases developed diabetes in the 36 months preceding the pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Recent-onset diabetes was strikingly higher among pancreatic cancer cases (16.4 percent) compared with those with colorectal (6.7 percent), breast (5.3 percent), and prostate (5.5 percent) cancer. Diabetes was associated with an approximately twofold increased risk of pancreatic cancer. When stratifying by disease duration, people with recent-onset diabetes had the highest risk of developing pancreatic cancer. Importantly, the researchers demonstrated that the association of recent-onset diabetes with pancreatic cancer incidence was evident in African Americans and Latinos, two understudied minority populations with high risk of diabetes but different pancreatic cancer rates. The findings support the hypothesis that recent-onset diabetes in pancreatic cancer is a manifestation of developing pancreatic cancer. The work suggests that patients with recent-onset diabetes who go on to develop pancreatic cancer represent a high-risk population of patients who can be studied for additional risk predictors and may be targeted for development of the tests that are needed for earlier diagnosis. "This striking relationship between recent-onset diabetes is unique to pancreatic cancer, and is not seen in breast, prostate and colorectal cancer in the cohort," said one of the paper's authors, Wendy Setiawan. "Our findings strongly support the hypothesis that recent-onset diabetes is a consequence of pancreatic cancer and that long-standing diabetes is a risk factor for this cancer. Importantly, here we show that the association of recent-onset diabetes with pancreatic cancer is observed in African Americans and Latinos, two understudied minority populations." A call has been made for urgent answers as to how the dumping of waste took place over so long at a site in Donegal Fianna Fail Spokesperson on Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Timmy Dooley was commenting on a major RTE investigation into illegal dumping at a quarry site in Inishowen. Evidence of long-term illegal dumping at a facility operating under a waste permit from Donegal County Council has been discovered by RTE Investigates. The programme was broadcast last night. The discovery involved the burying and burning of large volumes of commercial and household waste on scrub ground behind a quarry situated near Moville. The proper enforcement of waste and litter bye-laws and the appropriate level of spot checking the local authority to ensure that companies with permits are complying is a basic requirement. It seems to me that this was not happening in Donegal over the past number of years," Deputy Dooley said. He said custodial sentences, if possible, should be on the cards to help with proper enforcement. Our environment is one of Irelands greatest assets and tourism is a key employer in Donegal," he said. Donegal County Councils environment committee is to hold an emergency meeting in wake of the RTE Investigates programme which highlighted illegal dumping in the county. The chairperson of Donegal County Councils Environment and Emergency Services Strategic Policy Committee, Sinn Fein Councillor Jack Murray, has called an emergency meeting of the committee in order to discuss the findings of the programme. Evidence of long-term illegal dumping at a facility operating under a waste permit from Donegal County Council was discovered in the programme. Like thousands of others across the country, I watched the recent programme in horror at what was reported," Cllr Murray said. Since then, I have been contacted by many angry constituents who are rightly demanding decisive action from their local representatives. As such, as chairperson of the Councils Environment and Emergency Services SPC, I have called a special sitting of the committee to look at illegal dumping across the county. There we will have the opportunity to put forward all the questions the public is asking and we will analyse this situation in full. We are lucky to live in the most beautiful county in Ireland. With that, we as a council, have a responsibility to ensure that our scenic countryside is kept pristine for future generations. Illegal dumping cannot be tolerated. We have to act and the council has to be to the fore in that regard. Obesity is the biggest future health crisis in Ireland, according to one local councillor who wants more done to prevent evil empires targeting vulnerable people with junk food marketing. Sinn Fein councillor Anne Campbell believes the multi-million euro business behind major food companies marketing is the biggest threat to the health of the nation and she says not enough is being done to combat it. At last months Regional Health Forum meeting in Kells, HSE representatives presented their START campaign and while the councillor welcomed the initiative, she feels it doesn't go far enough. I really felt that they were just scratching the surface of what is, in my opinion, the biggest preventable health problem the country is facing at the moment, Campbell told The Dundalk Democrat. The emphasis in the presentation was on parental responsibility and while that is certainly a factor in helping kids maintain a healthy weight right throughout their lives, there is nothing in the document to combat the very real and grave threat from junk food marketing, which is now a global, multi-million euro business. Campbell believes junk food companies, what she calls "evil empires, are using every possible means available to reach people, especially impressionable children. The marketing of unhealthy food is a serious threat to the health of the nation and the junk food companies are using every means at their disposal, including now advertising on kid-appealing channels on YouTube to push their wares all the more in a much more sophisticated and personalised way. I have previously referred to them, in council meetings, as the evil empire and I make no apologies for doing so, the councillor added. The food lobby, and not the gun or arms lobby, is the most powerful lobby in the world and more has to be done to combat the effects of marketing to children and families. It's not a fair fight. You cant eat healthy on a budget. These big companies are trying to put a veneer of decency on their evil empire. The HSEs START campaign aims to help children start on their healthy eating journey from an early age, engaging with their parents, guardians, healthcare professionals and teachers. Louth Deputy Declan Breathnach spoke today in the Dail in a debate he raised to get Faughart National School re-opened. The Education Act makes provision for an existing Patron to transfer patronage to another Patron. The school was closed in mid-September 2017 in order to find a solution to the on-going problems relating to management and leadership and the consequent drop in enrolments. At the time it was said verbally to me and others that the Church and Department would allow it to be divested in another patronage. It has been confirmed to me that the Louth Meath Education Training Board (LMETB) are willing to open the school by September 2018 under their patronage and are waiting for various issues to be ironed out to pave the way for this to happen. Reverend Archbishop Martin responded to representations made to him and he stated that he was waiting on clarification on certain issues from the Department. We all know that the village school is the hub of any community, and it is sad and disappointing that notwithstanding valiant efforts by the parents, families, and community in Faughart, this school remains closed today. The families want to get their children back to school at Faughart. I asked the Minister if the Archbishop were to cede the property to the State can the Department not deal with the questions that he has asked as quickly as possible, answer all of the Archbishops concerns, and get Faughart School re-opened as soon as possible. The reply I received in the Dail was that the Minister would look favourably on any request to change the patronage of Faughart National School. However I pointed out that this will not happen unless the Minister meets with Archbishop Eamon Martin and get the necessary Letter of Request for a change of patronage from him. I asked that this would happen immediately." Now, before you grab the pitchforks and spark-up the torches, hear me out - Drogheda could be on to something good. That something good is the recently unveiled Westgate Vision: A Townscape Recovery Guide. This detailed and expansive (75 pages) urban regeneration programme looks to improve, mordernise and ultimately kick-start the historic Westgate area of Drogheda. An area which, like certain parts of Dundalk, has become somewhat derelict and unloved over the last few decades. For various reasons this has happened - both there and here. It is a tale which could be spun across many regional towns around the country. It goes something like this - economic and retail investment is pushed out to the suburbs (cheaper land prices and supposed easier accessibility for the car-loving population), this forces the closure of shops in town centres as the public looks outside the town boundaries for cheaper goods etc. With the closure of these shops, residents - who would have lived above the town centre retail units, depart and the decline gathers pace. This suburbanisation of regional towns essentially removes the core; leaving a hollow, deflated and depressed town centre - not attractive to businesses or people looking for somewhere vital to live. Its nothing new and certainly not exclusive to Ireland. This column previously discussed the need to bring life back into Dundalks town centre by having people live above shops once again. A rather successful Australian model was looked to for hope in this regard. Westgate in Drogheda is an area similar to the northend of Dundalk (think Bridge Street, Patrick Street or Church Street), which has bags of character and an abundance of historic culture, but has been left to essentially go stale and diminish in importance. If the extensive and perfectly executed brochure is anything to go by, then Drogheda has a real chance to achieve urban regeneration - no mean feat. The Westgate Vision is bold in many regards, but why not shoot for the stars? Taking in observations relating to other, more successful urban areas - think Galways Shop Street, Kilkenny and Waterford, the plan wants to use these places as visual guides to what could be achieved in Drogheda. The plan incorporates short term (quick wins as they call them here), medium term and long term goals - with a 5-10 year long-term delivery deadline. The quick wins are the spit and polish aspects of the initial plan - theyre cheap and rather easy to get off the ground in truth - painting of shop fronts, upgrading of footpaths and general housekeeping mostly. But they help to foster the idea of change happening - which is vital. These physical, short term goals are, of course, to be applauded, but they are ultimately superficial, and without strong follow-through on the remainder of the 10 year vision it will only be a bandaid-on-a-broken-leg type solution. Not to try and steal someone elses thunder here, but a lot of this plan could be easily transferable to similar projects in Dundalk. A particular aspect of the plan which caught the eye was the collective want to turn that part of Drogheda back towards the river. The same should hold true right here in Dundalk. Certainly the Castletown River is no Boyne, but for too long Dundalk has faced away from it - removing its potential as an area to allow people to use it as a social amenity - walking, sipping coffee, generally making the most of the potential retail and tourist possibilities. Of course, this lovely brochure and accompanying blue-sky thinking are great in theory, but the nitty-gritty, down in the muck-and -bullets implementation is another thing entirely. Getting that much-used word the stakeholders to buy-into the vision takes a lot of arm-wrestling and finessing - people, and business people to a large extent too, fear change. They need to have confidence not only in the vision, but in those who are leading it. Those who are leading it will need bags of energy and strength of character, patience and perhaps, most importantly, empathy. Change takes time, but it needs to happen if Dundalks historic town centre is to be a going concern for future generations to enjoy. Lets not allow another decade slip by without real and long-lasting urban regeneration for the town becoming a reality. I could not fathom what they meant by chimps sharing 98% of their DNA with humans, until recently when I got first-hand experience watching the behaviour of these distant cousins of ours. You too would see a little of yourself in a chimpanzee if you visited More than 20 years ago as Lilly Ajarova was on a fieldwork tour with colleagues at the Uganda Wildlife Authority, they bumped into two groups of chimpazees in a territorial fight. As the two Alpha males came face-to-face, one was bitten so badly that it took off and looked for a particular plant and squeezed juice from its leaves over the wound and the bleeding immediately stopped. That is when I got this love for chimpanzees. They are not so different from us, Ajarova said at Ngamba. She is now the executive director of Ngamba Island Chimpanzee sanctuary, which is making 20 years old. The island in Lake Victoria is home to 49 orphaned chimpanzees and has also fast-become a destination of choice for tourists. If you are planning for a weekend getaway, a visit to Ngamba island would be ideal; from the joyous boat ride and crossing the Equator on water, to the beautiful sunsets and clear air on the island. I joined a group of journalists for a conservation media camp at the island recently that was full of lessons and touching stories of mans cruelty towards animals, and discovering how close we are to the chimpanzees kept here. Safety rule number one? Walk straight into the water as soon as a whistle announcing the escape of a chimp sounds as they fear water; if you dont heed the warning, you just might receive a slap as heavy as that of six men put together, according to Byron Semambo, a caretaker who, however, tells us chimps escaping from their holding facility are very rare. For the time I spent there, my wish was to see one chimp escape, tease us into the water so I could see the reaction of colleagues who feared both the chimps and the water. Lilly Ajarova Apart from the community of chimpanzees, there are many bird species you will see, a cool breeze, flora and fauna and you just could find a baby monitor lizard inside your camping tent. It is during this visit that I got to sleep in a tent for the first time and I would not want to try it again any time soon, because the night was uncomfortable. There are swanky tented cottages at the lakeshore as an option; so, come with your savings. The programmes offered here include day tours, overnight programs and students camping which cost nearly Shs 180,000 for locals and Shs 240,000 for foreigners. The Island Ngamba is about 95 acres; 90 per cent of it forested and only five per cent taken up by human structures. The forest where chimps spend their day is separated from the human side by a high electric fence. Ngamba has 20 male chimps and 29 females that have been rescued at the airport and different border posts from smugglers. These come from Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. According to Semambo, the United Arab Emirates has overtaken the USA as a major destination market for baby chimps. Forty-six out of the 49 chimpanzees at Ngamba are orphaned, while three have been born here. No reproduction Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary is one of the 22 members of the Pan- African Sanctuary Alliance that has representatives from 13 African countries and has been pointed out as a model sanctuary which is now doing exchange programmes with others. Even with the dwindling numbers of chimpanzees in the country, the ones here are not allowed to reproduce and females have implants to prevent them from conceiving. However, on one occasion, a chimp removed the implant while on another, the contraceptive simply did not work. After those two incidents, the island now has two baby chimps, Easy and Ruparelia, whose presence spices up the community. If we allow them to reproduce, they will eat up this entire forest, which is already too small to hold the number we have. They do not sleep in the same bed twice; each night, they have to make a new nest, Ajarova said. Challenges The conservation centre faces several challenges, among them inadequate funds to feed the chimpanzees. Currently, they feed four times a day on mainly porridge, fruits and cabbages procured from the mainland. Ajarova says this is simply supplementing their meals. They then venture into the forest where they feed on termites and natural foliage. A young chimp Ngamba is neighbouring other islands including Myende, Koome and Bulago, among others, which are predominately occupied by fishing communities and these, according to Ssemambo, could pose a threat to the chimpanzees. However, to give their neighbours a sense of ownership, the sanctuary management is carrying out different projects in public health and sanitation, safety on water for fishermen, education and social ventures including games. A visit to Myende, about 10 minutes away from Ngamba, will blow your mind; the island has a marvellous view of Lake Victoria that some of my colleagues said they had never seen anywhere in the country. We have three days that are open to the community to come and see the chimps for free and that is Easter, Christmas and New Years day, Ajarova said. Chimps too, can draw About 15 years ago, chimps became extinct from about four African countries, according to Ajarova. Today, there are estimated to be merely 170,000 to 300,000 chimpanzees left in Africa and their population is decreasing rapidly. As we talk now, we dont know how many are left. It is a question of what is actually right. These animals deserve to be in their natural habitat, but who is getting them out? Man! Ajarova said. If we dont do anything, we shall have no chimps left in the next 15 years. Semambo explained that for a baby chimp to be captured, about eight adult ones likely to come to its rescue have to be killed. The rescued babies are often times traumatised and, according to Ajarova, some of them overcome trauma through participating in art. You can see how much frustration they have gone through by the way they draw, they draw with so much anger and hatred, she said. Protect the habitat, protect the chimps Jane Goodall Renowned primatologist Jane Goodall graced the Ngamba-at-20 celebrations at Speke Resort Munyonyo last Thursday. Goodall, one of the brains behind the 1998 establishment of Ngamba Chimpanzee Sanctuary is considered to be the worlds foremost expert on chimpanzees social and family interactions. She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute that has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. Jane Goodall (R) with First Lady Janet Museveni (C) at Munyonyo She said at Munyonyo that the institute continues to work with partners like Ngamba to save what remains of the wildlife in Africa and called for conservation of natural habitats. Chief Guest Janet Museveni, who also officially opened Ngamba Island 20 years ago, said government has put in place policies, laws and a constitutional framework for the conservation and management of biodiversity. kamogajonathan50@gmail.com On Monday, Oklahoma became the first state to be granted a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to dispose of its own coal ash, The Associated Press reported. The move displaces the federal government as the body responsible for coal ash disposal in EPA head Scott Pruitt's home state. Coal ash is the residue left over from burning coal for power that often contaminates groundwater. It is a change that industry has lobbied for and environmental groups have opposed. States have demonstrated that "they don't care about the health and safety of communities near coal ash dumps," Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans told The Associated Press. About 100 million tons of coal ash is produced by U.S. plants every year, often left in disposal ponds that leak into groundwater, contaminating it with pollutants like arsenic and radium. Tests ordered by the EPA this spring of groundwater around plants in various states found elevated pollution levels, according to The Associated Press. Despite this, "industry has asked for leniency, less stringency. That's the direction they're going," Evans said. According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, switching coal ash oversight to states was part of an "action plan" proposed by coal industry executive Robert Murray this spring to Pruitt and other officials in the Trump administration. Pruitt defended the decision, saying in a statement that the move empowered "those who are best positioned to oversee coal ash managementthe officials who have intimate knowledge of the facilities and the environment in their state." Pruitt also moved to weaken Obama-era coal ash disposal regulations in March, but the rule change allowing states to control coal ash disposal was actually passed by Congress and signed by former President Barack Obama in 2016, according to NPR. The law said that state rules had to be "as protective as" federal guidelines. "I am pleased that Oklahoma is the first state in the nation to receive approval of its Coal Combustion Residuals permit program. We actually incorporated the federal rule into our state permitting rules program over a year ago," Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Executive Director Scott Thompson said in an EPA press release about the decision. But at a hearing in February, Oklahoma environmental groups said the DEQ was not prepared to adequately regulate coal ash. "The DEQ rules are weaker than the EPA rules," Oklahoma Grand Riverkeeper and activist Earl Hatley told NPR in February. "This is just a boon for industry to do what they want." Waterkeeper Alliance senior attorney Kelly Foster further expressed concerns that the DEQ plan did not provide enough information on how companies would be made to comply with regulations and how the DEQ would take on new responsibilities with existing resources. Georgia and Texas are following Oklahoma in taking steps to control coal ash disposal, The Associated Press reported. By Rachel Smilan-Goldstein On a busy weeknight, takeout and fast food are easy dinner time solutions. But your family's favorite on-the-go meal may come with a side of toxic fluorinated chemicals. Per- and polyfluoralkyl substances, or PFAS, are a family of greaseproof, waterproof and nonstick industrial compounds. They're used in hundreds of consumer products, including ones that touch your food. These chemicals pollute the bodies of almost everyone worldwide, and have been linked to a slew of serious health problems. Some of the most worrisome places these chemicals lurk are in fast food wrappers and takeout containers. Food and Drug Administration tests found that PFAS chemicals can migrate out of food wrappers to contaminate food, especially when the food is greasy. And when the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and colleagues tested fast food wrappers, we found fluorinated chemicals in 40 percent of the wrappers tested. This included packaging for sandwiches, pizza, fried chicken and pastries. Until companies change their packaging, or laws are put in place to keep our food safe from this nasty class of chemicals, PFAS in fast food packages is one more reason to cut back on fast food and greasy carryout whenever possible. Avoiding these substances may be even more important if you are pregnant or have kids, as PFAS chemicals can be particularly harmful to a developing fetus or young child. Babies and young children are exposed to these chemicals in more ways than adults. They can ingest PFAS chemicals by drinking breast milk, crawling on dusty floors and putting their hands in their mouths after touching contaminated materials. Because of their small size, children may have higher exposures by body weight than adults. Toxic fluorinated chemicals can lower a baby's birth weight when the mother is exposed. Women drinking water contaminated with the PFAS chemical PFOA in West Virginia and Ohio had increased risk of pregnancy-induced hypertension and pre-eclampsia. PFAS chemicals at concentrations common in Americans may reduce the effectiveness of vaccines in children. Adding to the long list of concerns, exposure to PFAS chemicals may increase the risk of liver damage, cancer and thyroid disease, and cause endocrine disruption. Stricter regulations would effectively reduce Americans' exposures to these harmful chemicals, but there is no federal law to restrict their use in consumer goods. In the absence of federal action, state and local legislators are beginning to ban PFAS chemicals from food packaging. In March, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed the first state law to ban toxic fluorinated chemicals from food packaging. An ordinance proposed in San Francisco would ban PFAS chemicals from single-use foodware like containers, cups and utensils. It would also require foodware designated compostable to be certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute. The California legislature is considering legislation that requires manufacturers of food packaging and cookware to label their products with a warning if the products contain PFAS. Over the past decade, studies have brought to light just how widespread these chemicals are. Besides takeout containers and fast food wrappers, PFAS chemicals are also in microwave popcorn bags, drinking water, cosmetics and clothing. Read EWG's tips on how to reduce exposure to these chemicals. It's time for Americans to demand that their elected officials and regulators across the U.S. stand up to the chemical and packaging industries, and get PFAS chemicals out of food packaging. (REUTERS/Tony Gentile)A photo of Pope Francis. ope Francis had to take some flak for not speaking out harder against Myanmar's treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority on his recent to the country, but he managed to finesse the delicate matter in his characteristic manner, But Vatican officials noted that Francis had to tread a delicate balance in Myanmar which has some extremist Buddhist nationalists who could threaten the tiny Roman Catholic minority of 700,000 as well as jeopardizing his visit. The Pope said on Dec. 3 after he had left Bangladesh on the second part of his trip that he wept hearing the plight first-hand of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The meeting was a condition set for his trip to Myanmar and Bangladesh, Agence France-Presse reported and Francis mentioned the "word" Rohingya there The Dhaka Tribune headlinesd its report on Francis' visit to Bangladesh, "Rohingya, realpolitik, and a strategic halo." "All through this human catastrophe, what became evident plus perturbing at every step was the assertive presence of realpolitik over simple moral imperative.... "I am not blaming the spiritual leader, whose visit was more of a show of solidarity rather than to achieve anything tangible for the oppressed," editorialized Towheed Feroze in the newspaper. More than 620,000 Rohingyas have fled from Myanmar since Aug. 25 facing assaults, home destruction and rape in what the United Nations has described as a "text book case of ethnic cleansing." Francis defended his silence while in Myanmar on the humanitarian crisis, saying he spoke privately to the nation's leaders about the issue, according to Huffington Post. The Pope said that he had spoken more openly about the issue in private with Myanmar's leaders, He noted he was "very, very satisfied" with his meetings with the country's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been strongly criticized herself been for failing to stand up for the Rohingya and the country's military chief, General Min Aung Hlaing. "It was a good conversation and the truth was non-negotiable," Francis said of the meetings, Reuters reported. "For me, the most important thing is that the message gets through." The Rohingya meeting was a highly symbolic gesture of solidarity with the Muslim minority fleeing violence in Myanmar, and the Pope told journalists on his plane flying back to Rome that the refugees cried as well. "I wept, I tried to do it in a way that it couldn't be seen," he said of the encounter, AFP reported. "They wept too." Francis spoke to reporters during his return flight to the Vatican, following a two-day stop in Bangladesh, and he defended his decision to skirt the Rohingya issue during his public appearances in Myanmar. "If I had used the word ['Rohingya'] during an official speech, I would have slammed the door," he said. Using translators, Francis spoke personally to 16 Rohingya refugees during an interfaith gathering in Dhaka on Dec. 1. The Pontiff avoided using the word "Rohingya" during the first leg of his six-day tour, when he was in Myanmar. On the second leg of his trip, however, he used it at the meeting in Bangladesh with the refugees, when he asked for their forgiveness for what he called the "world's indifference" to their plight. ZTE will sich mit allen Mitteln gegen den Verkaufsstopp wehren, den die US-Bhorden verhangt haben. Das Untenremen erwage laut Berichten aus Asien aber auch den Verkauf der Smartphone-Einheit. The US Senate has confirmed by a large majority under the National Defense Authorization Act the boycott of the Chinese telco group ZTE by US companies, whose share price then plummeted again. The US Senate has voted to reintroduce a ban preventing the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE from buying US components and using US software. The next step in the legislative process must now be a vote with the House of Representatives and President Trump's final document must be signed. ZTE was banned from trading by the US Department of Commerce in April after failing to pay a fine for breaching sanctions against Iran and North Korea. This ban has effectively withdrawn ZTE, which depends on US components such as Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs. Shortly thereafter, Trump said he would make a deal to revive the company and an agreement was actually reached in early June. Among other things, it includes a $1 billion fine, the exchange of ZTE management and a US watchdog for the implementation of the agreed measures. Senators of both parties immediately threatened to stop the agreement and reintroduce the ban and called ZTE a national security risk. Finally, a cross-party group worked to introduce legislation on this issue. In a joint statement after the Senate decision, Senators Marco Rubio (Republican), Chuck Schumer (Democrat), Chris Van Hollen (Democrat) and Tom Cotton (Republican) said: "We are encouraged that both parties have made it clear that the protection of American jobs and national security must come first when doing business with countries like China, which in the past has shown little consideration for both. It is important that our colleagues in this House retain this bipartisan provision in the bill". The Senate voted 85 to 10 in favour of reintroducing the ban. It was incorporated as a supplement to the National Defense Authorization Act (see appendix for original text), a law that has already passed through the House of Representatives. Although this does not include a ZTE delivery ban, both laws would at least prevent the US government from using equipment from ZTE or Huawei - another Chinese telecom company often referred to by the US government as a security risk - or from cooperating with companies that use them. It is not clear how the ZTE supply ban will survive the passage through the House of Representatives or whether it will be weakened after the two proposals have been reconciled. If it remains as decided in the Senate, the legislation could also be vetoed by Trump - however, the bill has at least a 2/3 majority in the Senate that overrides the veto. In a similar case involving sanctions against Russia, Trump then decided to sign the law despite his declared dissatisfaction. The so called "National Defense Authorization Act". Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Verwandte Artikel ZTE Deutschland GmbH Regarded as the continents premier gathering for key African policy makers, developers, corporates, and investors, the 9th annual Africa Property Investment (API) Summit & Expo will be held this year at the Sandton Convention Centre, Sandton Central, on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 September 2018. Highlighting the significant improvements made across Africas real estate investment landscape in the past 12 months, this years API Summit & Expo will provide a platform for stakeholders to discuss how changes in technology, leadership, and skill in African property can build a smarter future for African real estate. Kfir Rusin, Managing Director for API Events, says: This years summit offers an unmissable opportunity for Africas most influential property stakeholders to connect with each other and discuss issues around optimal sizing and restoring global confidence, while also unpacking innovations in building, identifying new funding, and fostering better market transparency. The main sponsor for the event is leading commercial property services company Broll, who bring with them a vast amount of experience from across the continent as a multi-disciplined property service provider operating within the retail, office, industrial and residential sectors. Looking at trends that are building a smarter future for African property, Leonard Michau, Head of Brolls Africa Operations, comments: Investors and developers are starting to adjust their investment strategy, adopting a more educated, informed approach, while also reducing the number of speculative developments. Gold Sponsors for the event include Grit - the largest and only pan-African real estate income group listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the Stock Exchange of Mauritius - and Standard Bank, which has an on-the-ground presence in 20 countries across the continent and provides development funding in all areas of the real estate sector. Zoning in on key factors influencing the future of African property, Standard Banks Gerhard Zeelie, Head of Real Estate Finance for Africa, reveals: We are seeing growing consumerism in Africa, with increased use of mobile and the internet providing increased access to information and digital choice. The retail market for example is rapidly evolving and responding to changed consumer behaviour. Extreme traffic congestion means that people buy the basics at their local markets during the week, waiting for the weekend to travel to a destination mall that mixes both retail, health, wellness and leisure to deliver a fun experience for the whole family. This traffic driven behaviour in different cities and nodes is impacting the way people work (including travel to work) as well as shop and entertain themselves. In addition, Bronwyn Corbett, Chief Executive Officer of Grit reports: The most significant factor contributing to a smarter future for Africa real estate is a change in perception around Africa in general and Africa real estate specifically. The sector is by and large still in its infancy on the continent, however, it has grown exponentially over the last couple of years. In 2018, foreign direct investment, political stability and infrastructure improvements have all been catalysts for creating more depth in Africas real estate markets, and the world is slowly figuring out the opportunities present on the continent. Real estate has a big role to play in tapping into these opportunities. With eight years of success behind them, the 2018 API Summit & Expo is hosted by the well-established API Events and will include participation from almost 30 countries, over 600 delegates and 270 companies, providing infinite networking opportunities and a wide range of key discussions. Michau notes:Broll is proud to sponsor what is recognised as the leading real estate seminar within sub-Saharan Africa. The API Summit & Expo is well organised, providing a range of high-quality content, speakers, and panellists. Corbett of Grit adds: The API conference provides one of the few platforms available to Africa Real Estate sector participants. The structure of the conference allows for interactive participation and knowledge sharing through panel discussions but also and maybe more importantly great networking opportunities. Zeelie points out:Our ability to connect our clients to opportunities is strengthened by strong relationships with governments, regulators, key industry players and investors in all the countries in which Standard Bank has a presence. The API Summit & Expo achieves impressive high-level participation from attendees across the continent while providing an important platform for delegates to showcase the trends and themes driving opportunity in real estate. With the backing of these top African real estate game-changers, as well as ABSA, Profica, Africa Logistics Properties, and JLL among its key industry sponsors, it is no surprise that the conference attracts the foremost leaders and influencers from across the continent. Rusin concludes:Designed by property professionals to provide insight, debate, deal-making, and networking opportunities, the API Summit will also feature a dedicated exhibition area, training workshops and in-depth case studies. The powerful combination of the Summit and the Expo makes this the ultimate African real estate event. 2018-06-19 Maeci The Invest in Italy Roadshow was held in Seoul last 18 June. The Roadshow is co-organised by the ICE Foreign Trade Agency in Seoul and the Italian Embassy in Korea with the support of the Bank of Italy, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) and the Ministry of Economic Development. The event was dedicated to presenting the business climate and the investment opportunities in Italy by representatives of the ICE Foreign Trade Agency, Invitalia, Borsa Italiana-London Stock Exchange Group, the Port Authorities of Messina and La Spezia-Carrara and the Italian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (AIFI). The initiative, which was attended by numerous Korean professionals and investment trust managers, is part of the Italian promotional events aimed at attracting Korean investments that have been regularly organised since 2015 by the Italian Embassy together with the ICE Agency, the delegations of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and the workshops of the Bank of Italy on the reform of the Italian economic system. Special focus was placed on the opportunities offered by the Elite platform of Borsa Italiana, whose representatives attended B2B meetings with members of the major investment trusts in Seoul. According to the figures published by the Import-Export Bank of Korea, South Korean investments in Italy amounted to 8.85 million Euros in 2016. In only the first nine months of 2017, investments recorded a steep rise to 10.48 million euros, 9.10 million of which in the Italian manufacturing sector. At present, the South Korean companies operating in Italy are 57, with an overall annual turnover of 6.25 million euros and more than 3.000 employees (source: Reprint-Politecnico of Milan). Italy is an interesting market, worth your while investing in, affirmed Ambassador della Seta at the event. He added: The Countrys fundamentals are positive and have been growing for years. In this context, it is important to present the investment opportunities in Italy to the Korean public which is not familiar with the Italian stock market. Getting a tattoo may have some unexpected complications if your immune system isn't up to scratch, warn doctors in the journal BMJ Case Reports. The warning comes after they treated a woman for chronic pain in her left hip, knee and thigh some months after she had been tattooed. She had been taking drugs to dampen down her immune system for several years after receiving a double lung transplant in 2009. Her right leg had been tattooed several years earlier, with no ill effects, and she decided to have another on her left thigh. Immediately after this one, she experienced mild skin irritation, which is not unusual, explain the authors. But 9 days later, she developed pain in her left knee and thigh. Her symptoms were so severe that she needed strong painkillers. Although her symptoms eased, they were still troubling her 10 months later. So she was referred to a rheumatology clinic, where she was tested for various conditions, the results of which all came back negative. But a biopsy of her thigh muscle revealed that she had inflammatory myopathy--chronic muscle inflammation. This is often accompanied by muscle weakness and pain. In many cases, the cause of this isn't known, and it may arise spontaneously. But in this case the doctors believe that it is likely to have been linked to the tattoo process itself, the effects of which may have been compounded by a compromised immune system. "While we acknowledge that there is no evidence to definitely prove the causative effect, the timing of onset and the location of the symptoms correlated well with the tattoo application and there were no other identifiable factors to cause the pathology," they write. The woman was given physiotherapy to strengthen her thigh muscles, and one year after the start of her symptoms, she began to improve. And after three years, she was pain free. How the tattooing process might have contributed to the woman's symptoms isn't clear. But it is well known that the type of ink or colourant used in tattoos can cause a reaction, say the authors, who point out that tattooing has been associated with various complications, ranging from mild skin irritation to systemic infection. "The tattoo industry has no regulated or professional body to enhance standards across the UK," highlight the authors. "In this case, the tattoo application by an unregulated parlour, combined with the patient's immune suppression could have resulted in the adverse reaction," they suggest. Getting a tattoo is becoming increasingly popular, they add, so patients with compromised immune systems should be aware of the potential risks associated with this type of decorative body art. ### "We thought she had a bug bite," says Michelle's mom, "but it turned out to be cancer." After seeing several doctors, the family was referred to Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Because the team of specialists at CHLA had access to a specialized genetic test that they helped develop - called OncoKids - Michelle's unique cancer was diagnosed and she was enrolled on a clinical trial that specifically targeted her tumor and saved her life. "OncoKids allows us to identify the precise genomic alteration that causes a tumor so that we can make better diagnoses and can then target that mutation and personalize cancer treatment for children like Michelle," said Dr. Alexander R. Judkins, Pathologist-in-Chief and Executive Director of the Center for Personalized Medicine at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Adult cancer patients have benefited from the use of cancer gene panels - commercially-available tests that can screen for a large number of tumor profiles simultaneously to provide information about prognosis and targeted treatments specific to that tumor. Yet children with cancer have not benefited from these panels since the tests are specific to the most common tumor types - the kinds that effect adults. OncoKids is the first cancer panel designed specifically for children's cancers. The panel was developed at Children's Hospital Los Angeles in collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific. The OncoKids panel detects the genetic alterations for pediatric cancers including leukemias, solid tumors, sarcomas and brain tumors. Results from OncoKids are used to diagnose and treat pediatric tumors, including guiding pediatric oncologists to optimize treatment specific to the genomic basis of the tumors. As a leader in the area of personalized medicine for the treatment of children, Children's Hospital Los Angeles has joined six other pediatric hospitals in the newly formed Sanford Children's Genomic Medicine Consortium, to collaborate on the rapid integration of genetics and genomics into pediatric care. Sanford Health has provided $500,000 in seed funding for consortium projects over the next year. The Center for Personalized Medicine at Children's Hospital Los Angeles will be offering OncoKids testing for pediatric cancer cases across the member hospitals in an initiative funded by Sanford Health. ### About Children's Hospital Los Angeles Founded in 1901, Children's Hospital Los Angeles is ranked the top children's hospital in California and sixth in the nation for clinical excellence with its selection to the prestigious U.S. News & World Report Honor Roll. Clinical care is led by physicians who are faculty members of the Keck School of Medicine of USC through an affiliation dating from 1932. The Saban Research Institute encompasses basic, translational and clinical research conducted at CHLA. For more information, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and visit our child health blog (CHLA.org/blog) and our research blog (ResearCHLABlog.org). About the Sanford Children's Genomic Medicine Consortium Sanford Children's Genomic Medicine Consortium is a collaboration of seven hospitals across the United States with a focus on integrating genetics and genomics into primary and specialty pediatric care. The mission is to develop clinical programs, advocate for children, direct and perform cutting-edge research and provide educational outreach in genomic medicine and pediatrics. Member-hospitals in the consortium include Sanford Children's (Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Fargo, North Dakota); Children's Minnesota (Minneapolis and St. Paul); Children's Hospital Colorado (Aurora); Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine and Rady Children's Hospital - San Diego (all in California); Banner Children's at Diamond Children's Medical Center (Tucson, Arizona); and Nicklaus Children's Hospital (Miami, Florida). Media Contact: Ellin Kavanagh, ekavanagh@chla.usc.edu (323) 361-8505 June 19, 2018 For Immediate Release Contact: Zoe Gentes, 202-833-8773 ext. 211, zgentes@esa.org">zgentes@esa.org The Ecological Society of America recognizes Michael T. Kohl, Benjamin J. Wilson, and Emily E. Ernst for awards for outstanding student research. The Murray F. Buell and E. Lucy Braun awards are given for exceptional presentations at the 102nd Annual Meeting of the Society in Portland, Oregon in August 2017. The Forest Shreve Research Fund award supports graduate or undergraduate student ecological research in the hot deserts of North America. Murray F. Buell Award: Michel T. Kohl Murray F. Buell had a long and distinguished record of service and accomplishment in the Ecological Society of America. Among other things, he ascribed great importance to the participation of students in meetings and to excellence in the presentation of papers. To honor his selfless dedication to the younger generation of ecologists, the Murray F. Buell Award for Excellence in Ecology is given to a student for the outstanding oral paper presented at the ESA Annual Meeting. Award panel members honored Michel T. Kohl with the 2017 Murray F. Buell award. Kohl is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Jack H. Berryman Institute at Utah State University after receiving his PhD this past year. His oral paper investigated whether elk in Yellowstone National park selected their habitat based on the activity schedules and space use of their predators, cougars and wolves. He found that elk frequented open areas at night when wolves were not as active, but selected forested areas in the day when cougars were not as active. Together, this allowed elk to avoid both predators simultaneously while still providing access to high quality forage. Judges were impressed my Michel's thorough background information, his compelling analyses, and great answers to post-presentation questions. A Buell award honorable mention is awarded to Hayley R. Tumas, who received her PhD last month at the University of Georgia. Tumas used microsatellite markers to investigate genetic diversity and population connectivity in Juncus roemerianus, a dominant foundational plant species in Gulf coast salt marshes. Her results could inform coastal restoration and management to conserve natural levels of diversity in Juncus populations. Judges enjoyed her clear and engaging style, her careful pacing, and her thorough knowledge of the study ecosystem. Lucy Braun Award: Benjamin J. Wilson Lucy Braun, an eminent plant ecologist and one of the charter members of the Society, studied and mapped the deciduous forest regions of eastern North America and described them in her classic book, The Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America. To honor her, the E. Lucy Braun Award for Excellence in Ecology is given to a student for the outstanding poster presentation at the ESA Annual Meeting. Papers and posters are judged on the significance of ideas, creativity, quality of methodology, validity of conclusions drawn from results, and clarity of presentation. The 2017 E. Lucy Braun award was won by Benjamin J. Wilson, a postdoctoral researcher at Florida International University, who recently defended his dissertation entitled, "Drivers and Mechanisms of Peat Collapse in Coastal Wetlands." Wilson's poster presented research findings centered around exploring if the negative impacts of saltwater intrusion in the Everglades could be offset by the increase in phosphorus load that accompanies such events. He found that gross and net ecosystem productivity both increased with saltwater influx, possibly due to the associated increases in phosphorus. However, salt negatively impacted root growth and led to an overall decrease in elevation. Judges were impressed by Benjamin's clear explanations, great visualizations, and careful execution of his experiments. Forest Shreve Research Award: Emily E. Ernst Dr. Shreve was an internationally known American botanist devoted to the study of the distribution of vegetation as determined by soil and climate conditions, with a focus on desert vegetation. The Forest Shreve award supplies $1,000-2,000 to support ecological research by graduate or undergraduate student members of ESA in the hot deserts of North America (Sonora, Mohave, Chihuahua, and Vizcaino). ESA awards Emily E. Ernst with the Forest Shreve Research award. Ernst is a PhD candidate studying Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Iowa State University working under the mentorship of Dr. Kirk Moloney. She is studying two problematic exotic grasses of the Sonoran and Mojave deserts, Schismus arabicus and Bromus rubens, and how the microhabitats beneath creosote bush may affect the distributions of these invaders. She is also investigating how their invasion may affect the pathways for potential desert fires to spread. She will use her award to better characterize microhabitat soil nutrient and water availability. 2018 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana 5-10 August 2018 Ecologists from 50 U.S. states, U.S. territories, and countries around the world will converge on New Orleans, Louisiana this August for the 103nd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Up to 4,000 attendees are expected to gather for thousands of scientific presentations on breaking research and new ecological concepts at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on August 5th through 10th, 2018. ESA invites press and institutional public information officers to attend for free. To apply, please contact ESA Public Information Manager Zoe Gentes directly at zgentes@esa.org. Walk-in registration will be available during the meeting. ### The Ecological Society of America (ESA), founded in 1915, is the world's largest community of professional ecologists and a trusted source of ecological knowledge, committed to advancing the understanding of life on Earth. The 9,000 member Society publishes five journals and a membership bulletin and broadly shares ecological information through policy, media outreach, and education initiatives. The Society's Annual Meeting attracts 4,000 attendees and features the most recent advances in ecological science. Visit the ESA website at http://www.esa.org. Does going to church help people avoid struggles with opioid abuse? New research from Florida State University says no. In a new study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, a team of researchers led by FSU Associate Professor Amy Burdette examined the correlation -- or lack thereof -- between drug use and church attendance for women who are mothers. Researchers found while religious involvement could affect a person's decision to use illegal drugs, it had no signifcant effect on women's misuse of prescription drugs, including prescription opioids. "Religious involvement matters for illegal drug use because religious communities directly condemn this behavior," Burdette said. "However, religious communities are just beginning to discuss the dangers of prescription drug abuse." Specifically, researchers found the probability of engaging in any illicit drug use was significantly lower among women who attended church at least once a week compared to those who reported attending services a couple of times a year or less. This was also true for marijuana use. Burdette's study used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a survey of nearly 5,000 children born between 1998 and 2000 and mostly to unmarried parents. The study consisted of interviews with mothers and fathers at the time of their child's birth and again when children were ages 1, 3, 5, 9 and 15 years old. Burdette and her team examined the population of mothers who were primarily single and of low socioeconomic status. Burdette noted that the relationship between parental substance abuse and adverse child outcomes is well established. "Our findings regarding the effects of religious involvement on substance abuse have implications for health and well-being across generations," she said. It is estimated that prescription opioid misuse costs the United States more than $55 billion in expenditures related to health care, lost productivity and criminal justice, according to a recent report from the Analysis Group, a financial and strategy consulting firm. Overall, rates of substance abuse in the study sample were low. "That's a bit of good news," Burdette said. "Whether you're talking about prescription drug misuse or illegal substance abuse, it's somewhat rare in our sample -- it's not that most mothers are doing this." The study found about 5 percent of women reported misusing prescription drugs, with nearly 3 percent of those misusing prescription pain relievers. "Our research suggests that church leaders may want to directly address the issue of prescription drug misuse as churchgoers may not view prescription drugs in the same way that they view illegal drugs, Burdette said. "Not directly addressing the issue may lead to a high degree of moral ambiguity." ### It was just eight years ago that the IceCube detector, a research center located at the South Pole to detect neutrinos emanating from the cosmos, was commissioned. Three years later, it began to register the first momentous results. The detection of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube made viable completely new options for explaining how our universe works. "These neutrinos with their considerable energy are cosmic messengers we have never encountered before and it is extremely important that we understand exactly what they are telling us," explained Dr. Ranjan Laha of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Working in collaboration with a colleague at Stanford University in the USA, the Mainz-based physicist has put forward a new hypothesis on what this interstellar message carrier might be. The two physicists have calculated that what has been detected could be the track of a high-energy tau particle that transited the IceCube detector. Neutrinos are particles that have only very little or no mass, enabling them to pass through material almost unnoticed and making them extremely difficult to detect. But for this very same reason, these elusive particles are particularly important to science because they originate from exploding stars and other high-energy astrophysical phenomena in the furthest depths of space from where they travel to Earth practically unimpeded, giving us insight into what is happening out there. In the case of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the individual detector elements are buried in the Antarctic ice and distributed across an ice volume of a cubic kilometer, where they are well shielded against the effects of possible interference factors. The project team reported the detection of high-energy neutrinos from space for the first time in 2013. Numerous related events have been registered since then. The IceCube team responsible for the scientific program consists of 300 physicists from 49 institutions based in 12 countries and includes researchers from JGU. High-energy track presumably not generated by a muon neutrino Matthew Kistler of Stanford and Ranjan Laha of Mainz University have analyzed the various events, their objective being to attempt to explain a particular enigma: In June 2014, the IceCube sensors detected a particle with extraordinarily high energy. Calculations showed that the particle deposited 2.6 petaelectron-volts (PeV), in other words, 2.6 quadrillion electron-volts. By way of comparison, collisions between protons in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the world's largest particle accelerator, occur at an energy of just 13 trillion electron-volts. "The track registered in June 2014 throws up all sorts of questions," said Laha, pointing out that this is the maximum high-energy event recorded to date. "The foremost questions is what sort of neutrino would leave behind a track like this." There are three types of neutrino: electrons, muons, and tau neutrinos. Looking for an answer, the two physicists first based their investigations on the standard assumption that the track had been produced by a muon. Following collision with an atom nucleus, a muon neutrino would have been transformed into a muon and thus would have been captured by the optical sensors of the IceCube detector. "However, we have demonstrated that this hypothesis is constrained," explained Laha. Instead, the two researchers propose a completely new and unconventional interpretation of the event: the track could be that of a high-energy tau lepton. To be registered by the detector with an energy of 2.6 PeV, the supposed tau neutrino would have to have had an initial energy of at least 50 PeV. "A tau particle that can pass through a detector with a length of one kilometer without decaying and furthermore releasing energy of 2.6 PeV must originate from a neutrino with significantly greater energy," added Laha. "Assuming this is the case, this opens up completely unexpected possibilities, namely that astrophysics should start looking for neutrinos with energy of up to 100 PeV." The two researchers also came to the conclusion that the 2.6 PeV event was probably caused by a component of the neutrino spectrum previously unknown to astrophysicists. A certain continuity is usually to be expected when it comes to the events recorded by IceCube. However, the gap between the stated event with the highest energy captured to date and the other registered data is unusually large. "We still don't really know what caused the 2.6 PeV track. It is generally assumed to be a transiting muon. We show that it is also possible to be a transiting tau particle," concluded Laha. "We consider this event so significant that we believe it should be examined more closely. And we need more data to be able to discover more and decode this message sent us by the cosmos." ### Ranjan Laha is a postdoctoral researcher and a member of the work group of Professor Joachim Kopp, Professor of Theoretical Particle Physics at the Mainz-based Precision Physics, Fundamental Interactions and Structure of Matter (PRISMA) Cluster of Excellence. MAYWOOD, IL - Loyola Medicine kidney specialist Susan Hou, MD, who co-founded a clinic that provides free medical care to indigent people in the Bolivian rain forest, is co-recipient of the 2018 American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists (AACE) Excellence in Humanities and Medical Ethics Award. The other recipient is Dr. Hou's husband, Mark Molitch, MD, who co-founded the Centro Medico Humberto Parra along with Dr. Hou and a Bolivian physician, Douglas Villarroel, MD. The clinic has cared for more than 50,000 patients. Medical students from Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and other centers complete accredited international health rotations at the clinic. Drs. Hou and Molitch pay much of the costs of the clinic themselves, with other funding coming from Loyola and private donations. The AACE award is given annually to individuals who have demonstrated exemplary and continuing dedication to upholding the highest principles of medical ethics and standards for the betterment of the public's health. Dr. Hou is a professor in the division of nephrology at Stritch. Her clinical expertise includes kidney transplantation and kidney disease and pregnancy. In 2002, Dr. Hou altruistically donated a kidney to one of her patients, a mother of two, who suffered kidney failure as a result of polycystic kidney disease. Dr. Molitch is the Martha Leland Sherwin Professor of Medicine in the endocrinology division at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine ### Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Tohoku University (Japan) have explained the puzzling phenomenon of particle-antiparticle annihilation in graphene, recognized by specialists as Auger recombination. Although persistently observed in experiments, it was for a long time thought to be prohibited by the fundamental physical laws of energy and momentum conservation. The theoretical explanation of this process has until recently remained one of the greatest puzzles of solid-state physics. The theory explaining the phenomenon was published in Physical Review B. In 1928, Paul Dirac predicted that an electron has a twin particle, which is identical in all respects but for its opposite electric charge. This particle, called the positron, was soon discovered experimentally. Several years later, scientists realized that the charge carriers in semiconductors -- silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide, etc. -- behave like electrons and positrons. These two kinds of charge carriers in semiconductors were called electrons and holes. Their respective charges are negative and positive, and they can recombine, or annihilate each other, releasing energy. Electron-hole recombination accompanied by the emission of light provides the operating principle of semiconductor lasers, which are devices crucial for optoelectronics. The emission of light is not the only possible outcome of an electron coming in contact with a hole in a semiconductor. The liberated energy is often lost to thermal vibrations of the neighboring atoms or picked up by other electrons (figure 1). The latter process is referred to as Auger recombination and is the main "killer" of active electron-hole pairs in lasers. It bears the name of French physicist Pierre Auger, who studied these processes. Laser engineers strive to maximize the probability of light emission upon electron-hole recombination and to suppress all the other processes. That is why the optoelectronics community greeted with enthusiasm the proposal for graphene-based semiconductor lasers formulated by MIPT graduate Victor Ryzhii. The initial theoretical concept said that Auger recombination in graphene should be prohibited by the energy and momentum conservation laws. These laws are mathematically similar for electron-hole pairs in graphene and for electron-positron pairs in Dirac's original theory, and the impossibility of electron-positron recombination with energy transfer to a third particle has been known for a long time. However, experiments with hot charge carriers in graphene consistently returned the unfavorable result: Electrons and holes in graphene do recombine with a relatively high rate, and the phenomenon appeared attributable to the Auger effect. Moreover, it took an electron-hole pair less than a picosecond, or one-trillionth of a second, to disappear, which is hundreds of times faster than in contemporary optoelectronic materials. The experiments suggested a tough obstacle for the implementation of a graphene-based laser. The researchers from MIPT and Tohoku University found that the recombination of electrons and holes in graphene, prohibited by the classical conservation laws, is made possible in the quantum world by the energy-time uncertainty principle. It states that conservation laws may be violated to the extent inversely proportional to the mean free time of the particle. The mean free time of an electron in graphene is quite short, as the dense carriers form a strongly-interacting "mash." To systematically account for the uncertainty of particle energy, the so-called nonequilibrium Green's functions technique was developed in modern quantum mechanics. This approach was employed by the authors of the paper to calculate Auger recombination probability in graphene. The obtained predictions are in good agreement with the experimental data. "At first, it looked like a mathematical brain teaser, rather than an ordinary physical problem," says Dmitry Svintsov, the head of the Laboratory of 2D Materials for Optoelectronics at MIPT. "The commonly accepted conservation laws permit recombination only if all three particles involved are moving precisely in the same direction. The probability of this event is like the ratio between the volume of a point and the volume of a cube -- it approaches zero. Luckily, we soon decided to reject abstract mathematics in favor of quantum physics, which says that a particle cannot have a well-defined energy. This means that the probability in question is finite, and even sufficiently high to be experimentally observed. The study does not merely offer an explanation for why the "prohibited" Auger process is actually possible. Importantly, it specifies the conditions when this probability is low enough to make graphene-based lasers viable. As particles and antiparticles rapidly vanish in experiments with hot carriers in graphene, the lasers can exploit the low-energy carriers, which should have longer lifetimes, according to the calculations. Meanwhile, the first experimental evidence of laser generation in graphene has been obtained at Tohoku University in Japan. Notably, the method for calculation of the electron-hole lifetimes developed in the paper is not limited to graphene. It is applicable to a large class of so-called Dirac materials, in which charge carriers behave similarly to the electrons and positrons in Dirac's original theory. According to preliminary calculations, the mercury cadmium telluride quantum wells could enable much longer carrier lifetimes, and therefore more effective laser generation, as the conservation laws for Auger recombinations in this case are more stringent. ### The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation. Troy, N.Y. - One year after researchers published their work on a physiological test for autism, a follow-up study confirms its exceptional success in assessing whether a child is on the autism spectrum. A physiological test that supports a clinician's diagnostic process has the potential to lower the age at which children are diagnosed, leading to earlier treatment. Results of the study, which uses an algorithm to predict if a child has autism spectrum disorder (ASD) based on metabolites in a blood sample, published online today, appear in the June edition of Bioengineering & Translational Medicine. "We looked at groups of children with ASD independent from our previous study and had similar success. We are able to predict with 88 percent accuracy whether children have autism," said Juergen Hahn, lead author, systems biologist, professor, head of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Department of Biomedical Engineering, and member of the Rensselaer Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS). "This is extremely promising." It is estimated that approximately 1.7 percent of all children are diagnosed with ASD, characterized as "a developmental disability caused by differences in the brain," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Earlier diagnosis is generally acknowledged to lead to better outcomes as children engage in early intervention services, and an ASD diagnosis is possible at 18-24 months of age. However, because diagnosis depends solely on clinical observations, most children are not diagnosed with ASD until after 4 years of age. Rather than search for a sole indicator of ASD, the approach Hahn developed uses big data techniques to search for patterns in metabolites relevant to two connected cellular pathways (a series of interactions between molecules that control cell function) with suspected links to ASD. "Juergen's work in developing a physiological test for autism is an example of how the interdisciplinary life science-engineering interface at Rensselaer brings new perspectives and solutions to improve human health," said Deepak Vashishth, CBIS director. "This is a great result from the larger emphasis on Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative diseases at CBIS, where our work joins multiple approaches to develop better diagnostic tools and biomanufacture new therapeutics." The initial success in 2017 analyzed data from a group of 149 people, about half of whom had been previously diagnosed with ASD. For each member of the group, Hahn obtained data on 24 metabolites related to the two cellular pathways--the methionine cycle and the transsulfuration pathway. Deliberately omitting data from one individual in the group, Hahn subjected the remaining dataset to advanced analysis techniques and used results to generate a predictive algorithm. The algorithm then made a prediction about the data from the omitted individual. Hahn cross-validated the results, swapping a different individual out of the group and repeating the process for all 149 participants. His method correctly identified 96.1 percent of all typically developing participants and 97.6 percent of the ASD cohort. The results were impressive and created, said Hahn, a new goal: "Can we replicate this?" The new study applies Hahn's approach to an independent dataset. To avoid the lengthy process of gathering new data through clinical trials, Hahn and his team searched for existing datasets that included the metabolites he had analyzed in the original study. The researchers identified appropriate data from three different studies that included a total of 154 children with autism conducted by researchers at the Arkansas Children's Research Institute. The data included only 22 of the 24 metabolites he used to create the original predictive algorithm, however Hahn determined the available information would be sufficient for the test. The team used their approach to recreate the predictive algorithm, this time using data of the 22 metabolites from the original group of 149 children. The algorithm was then applied to the new group of 154 children for testing purposes. When the predictive algorithm was applied to each individual, it correctly predicted autism with 88 percent accuracy. Hahn said the difference between the original accuracy rate and that of the new study can likely be attributed to several factors, the most important being that two of the metabolites were unavailable in the second dataset. Each of the two metabolites had been strong indicators in the previous study. Overall, the second study validates the original results, and provides insights into several variants on the approach. "The most meaningful result is the high degree of accuracy we are able to obtain using this approach on data collected years apart from the original dataset," said Hahn. "This is an approach that we would like to see move forward into clinical trials and ultimately into a commercially available test." ### Hahn was joined on the research by Rensselaer doctoral students Troy Vargason and Daniel P. Howsmon; Robert A. Rubin of Whittier College; Leanna Delhey, Marie Tippett, Shannon Rose, and Sirish C. Bennuri of the Arkansas Children's Research Institute and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences; John C. Slattery, Stepan Melnyk, and S. Jill James of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences; and Richard E. Frye of Phoenix Children's Hospital. The research was partially funded by the National Institutes of Health. Hahn's research fulfills The New Polytechnic, an emerging paradigm for higher education which recognizes that global challenges and opportunities are so great they cannot be adequately addressed by even the most talented person working alone. Rensselaer serves as a crossroads for collaboration--working with partners across disciplines, sectors, and geographic regions--to address complex global challenges, using the most advanced tools and technologies, many of which are developed at Rensselaer. Research at Rensselaer addresses some of the world's most pressing technological challenges--from energy security and sustainable development to biotechnology and human health. The New Polytechnic is transformative in the global impact of research, in its innovative pedagogy, and in the lives of students at Rensselaer. About Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, is America's first technological research university. For nearly 200 years, Rensselaer has been defining the scientific and technological advances of our world. Rensselaer faculty and alumni represent 86 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 18 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 8 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 8 members of the National Academy of Inventors, and 5 members of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, as well as 6 National Medal of Technology winners, 5 National Medal of Science winners, and a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. With 7,000 students and nearly 100,000 living alumni, Rensselaer is addressing the global challenges facing the 21st century--to change lives, to advance society, and to change the world. To learn more, go to http://www.rpi.edu. Quantum particles behave in mysterious ways. They are governed by laws of physics designed to reflect what is happening at smaller scales through quantum mechanics. Quantum state properties are generally very different to those of classical states. However, particles finding themselves in a coherent state are in a kind of quantum state which behaves like a classical state. Since their introduction by Erwin Schrodinger in 1926, coherent states of particles have found many applications in mathematical physics and quantum optics. Now, for the first time, a team of mathematical physicists from Togo and Benin, call upon supersymmetry -- a sub-discipline of quantum mechanics -- to explain the behaviour of particles that have received a photon. These particles are subjected to particular potential energies known as shape-invariant potentials. In a paper published in EPJD, Komi Sodoga and colleagues affiliated with both the University of Lome, Togo, and the University of Abomey-Calavi, in Cotonou, Benin, outline the details of their theory. These findings are relevant to scientists working on solving quantum optics and quantum mechanics applications. The authors show that their new states are not distributed in a classical way. The way the number of photons is distributed is different from the distribution in conventional coherent states. Their work can be applied to all models satisfying shape invariance conditions for which an exact solution exists, such as three-dimensional harmonic oscillator, Coulomb or Morse potentials, etc. ### References: K. Sodoga, M. N. Hounkonnou and I. Aremua (2018), Photon-added coherent states for shape-invariant systems, Eur. Phys. Jour. D 72: 105, DOI: 10.1140/epjd/e2018-80684-y WASHINGTON--A rat model found preconception binge drinking may have negative consequences on future offspring's growth, social interactions and pubertal development, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of the Endocrine Society. Binge drinking during adolescent development can have long-lasting effects in the brain, and recent data shows that these effects may directly impact first-generation offspring. These observations could have consequences for human health as more than 4.5 million Americans under the age of 21 report engaging in binge-pattern alcohol abuse. "Our animal study demonstrates that drinking large quantities of alcohol in a 'binge' fashion before pregnancy can impact future offspring," said the study's senior author, Toni Pak, Ph.D., of Loyola University Chicago in Maywood, Ill. "Importantly, this is true for drinking behaviors of both parents, not just the mother. Our previous data supports the idea that alcohol is affecting the parental sperm and eggs to induce these modifications in the offspring, but this most recent work shows the extent of those effects on social behavior, pubertal maturation, and stress hormones as the offspring grow to adulthood." Researchers found that a rat model of binge-pattern drinking during puberty had several consequences for the animals' offspring, including smaller body weight, fewer play behaviors, and decreased circulating testosterone. In addition, the parents did not pass down to the offspring any adaptive traits that allowed them to better tolerate alcohol. "By better understanding which parental preconception behaviors impact future generations, we can do more to prevent their perpetuation," Pak said. ### Other authors of the study include: AnnaDorothea Asimes and Chun Kim of Loyola University Chicago; and Amelia Cuarenta and Anthony Auger of University of Wisconsin - Madison in Madison, Wis. The study was supported by research grants from the National Institutes of Health. The study, "Binge Drinking and Intergenerational Implications: Parental Preconception Alcohol Impacts Offspring Development in Rats," will be published online. Endocrinologists are at the core of solving the most pressing health problems of our time, from diabetes and obesity to infertility, bone health, and hormone-related cancers. The Endocrine Society is the world's oldest and largest organization of scientists devoted to hormone research and physicians who care for people with hormone-related conditions. The Society has more than 18,000 members, including scientists, physicians, educators, nurses and students in 122 countries. To learn more about the Society and the field of endocrinology, visit our site at http://www.endocrine.org. Teens who are bullied and are autistic or have social communication difficulties have higer rates of depression Teenagers with difficulties in social communication, including autism have higher rates of depressive symptoms, especially if they are being bullied. Researchers at the University of Bristol, using questionnaire, clinic and genetic information on 6091 young people from the Children of the 90s longitudinal study, found that children with autism and those with autistic traits had more symptoms of depression when they were 10 years old than their peers and that this continued at least up to the age of 18. Children with difficulties in social communication were also more likely to have a diagnosis of depression at 18 and the findings suggest an increased risk for those who suffered from bullying. The researchers did not find any link between having higher genetic tendencies towards autism and depressive symptoms. Dr Dheeraj Rai, Consultant Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Centre for Academic Mental Health said: "We still know very little about why mental health problems are common in autism and what could be done to address them. "Thanks to the wealth of data collected within the Children of the 90s study, we tracked the development of depressive symptoms in children with autism and autistic features up to the age of 18 years. "We found that these children have more depressive symptoms than their peers at age 10 and these continue through adolescence to age 18, especially in children who reported being bullied. "More research needs to be done to understand other pathways contributing to the risk of depression in autism across the life course, but these findings suggest that focusing on the role of traumatic experiences such as bullying and interventions targeting these, could be important and may have the potential to make a real difference to the wellbeing of autistic people." Alan Emond, Professor of Child Health at the Centre for Child and Adolescent Health at the University of Bristol added: "Bullying can be detrimental to anyone's mental health, but young people with social communication difficulties and other autistic traits seem to be particularly vulnerable. To protect autistic children and young people a whole school approach is needed to prevent bullying, coupled with targeted support for vulnerable individuals." Dr James Cusack, Director of Science at Autistica, the charity for autism research, said: "Autistic people and families have told us that mental health is their top priority for research. This is not surprising as we know autistic people experience high rates of chronic mental health problems which lead to tragically high rates of suicide. Yet, our knowledge of autism and depression has remained poor. "This excellent study tells us that symptoms of depression are elevated in autistic adolescents. The authors found that it was bullying rather than genetic differences which drove an increase in depressive symptoms in autistic people. "We now urgently need to carefully understand bullying and other traumatic experiences in autistic people as we're now finding they can have a devastating impact. "As the UK's autism research charity, we will be working hard to ensure that further research on priority areas like this is supported. If we can improve the mental health of autistic people we can go a long way to ensuring they can live the long, healthy, happy life they deserve." ### Notes 1. Paper: Association of Autistic Traits with Depression from Childhood to Age 18 Years by Dheeraj Rai, Iryna Culpin, Hein Heuvelman, Cecilia Magnusson, Peter Carpenter, Hannah J Jones, Alan Emond, Stanley Zammit, Jean Golding and Rebecca M Pearson published in Jama Psychiatry. 2. Based at the University of Bristol, Children of the 90s, also known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), is a long-term health-research project that enrolled more than 14,000 pregnant women in 1991 and 1992. It has been following the health and development of the parents and their children in detail ever since and is currently recruiting the children and the siblings of the original children into the study. It receives core funding from the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the University of Bristol. Find out more at http://www.childrenofthe90s.ac.uk. 3. This study was funded by The Baily Thomas Charitable Fund. 4. This study was also supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Bristol Biomedical Research Centre a partnership between University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Bristol. NIHR was established by the Department of Health and Social Care to: fund high quality research to improve health train and support health researchers provide world-class research facilities work with the life sciences industry and charities to benefit all involves patients and the public at every step For further information, visit the NIHR website http://www.nihr.ac.uk. For every three individuals who have had a stent implanted to keep clogged arteries open and prevent a heart attack, at least one will experience restenosis--the renewed narrowing of the artery due to plaque buildup or scarring--which can lead to additional complications. Now, a team led by UBC electrical and computer engineering professor Kenichi Takahata has developed a type of "smart stent" that monitors even subtle changes in the flow of blood through the artery, detecting the narrowing in its earliest stages and making early diagnosis and treatment possible. "We modified a stent to function as a miniature antenna and added a special micro-sensor that we developed to continuously track blood flow. The data can then be sent wirelessly to an external reader, providing constantly updated information on the artery's condition," said Takahata. The device uses medical-grade stainless steel and looks similar to most commercial stents. Researchers say it's the first angioplasty-ready smart stent--it can be implanted using current medical procedures without modifications. Research collaborator Dr. York Hsiang, a UBC professor of surgery and a vascular surgeon at Vancouver General Hospital, noted that monitoring for restenosis is critical in managing heart disease. "X-rays such as CT or diagnostic angiograms, which are the standard tools for diagnosis, can be impractical or inconvenient for the patient," said Hsiang. "Putting a smart stent in place of a standard one can enable physicians to monitor their patient's health more easily and offer treatment, if needed, in a timely manner." The device prototype was successfully tested in the lab and in a swine model. Takahata, who holds patents for the technology, says his team is planning to establish industry partnerships to further refine the device, put it through clinical trials and eventually commercialize it. ### The research is described in the May issue of Advanced Science and featured on its front cover. Engineering researcher Xing Chen, now a research associate at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Babak Assadsangabi, a postdoctoral fellow at UBC's faculty of applied science, also contributed to the study. To understand human health and behavior, researchers would do better to study individuals, not groups. When it comes to understanding what makes people tick -- and get sick -- medical science has long assumed that the bigger the sample of human subjects, the better. But new research led by the University of California, Berkeley, suggests this big-data approach may be wildly off the mark. That's largely because emotions, behavior and physiology vary markedly from one person to the next and one moment to the next. So averaging out data collected from a large group of human subjects at a given instant offers only a snapshot, and a fuzzy one at that, researchers said. The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, have implications for everything from mining social media data to customizing health therapies, and could change the way researchers and clinicians analyze, diagnose and treat mental and physical disorders. "If you want to know what individuals feel or how they become sick, you have to conduct research on individuals, not on groups," said study lead author Aaron Fisher, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. "Diseases, mental disorders, emotions, and behaviors are expressed within individual people, over time. A snapshot of many people at one moment in time can't capture these phenomena." Moreover, the consequences of continuing to rely on group data in the medical, social and behavioral sciences include misdiagnoses, prescribing the wrong treatments and generally perpetuating scientific theory and experimentation that is not properly calibrated to the differences between individuals, Fisher said. That said, a fix is within reach: "People shouldn't necessarily lose faith in medical or social science," he said. "Instead, they should see the potential to conduct scientific studies as a part of routine care. This is how we can truly personalize medicine." Plus, he noted, "modern technologies allow us to collect many observations per person relatively easily, and modern computing makes the analysis of these data possible in ways that were not possible in the past." Fisher and fellow researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands used statistical models to compare data collected on hundreds of people, including healthy individuals and those with disorders ranging from depression and anxiety to post-traumatic stress disorder and panic disorder. In six separate studies they analyzed data via online and smartphone self-report surveys, as well as electrocardiogram tests to measure heart rates. The results consistently showed that what's true for the group is not necessarily true for the individual. For example, a group analysis of people with depression found that they worry a great deal. But when the same analysis was applied to each individual in that group, researchers discovered wide variations that ranged from zero worrying to agonizing well above the group average. Moreover, in looking at the correlation between fear and avoidance - a common association in group research - they found that for many individuals, fear did not cause them to avoid certain activities, or vice versa. "Fisher's findings clearly imply that capturing a person's own processes as they fluctuate over time may get us far closer to individualized treatment," said UC Berkeley psychologist Stephen Hinshaw, an expert in psychopathology and faculty member of the department's clinical science program. ### In addition to Fisher, co-authors of the study are John Medaglia at Drexel University and Bertus Jeronimus at the University of Groningen. UH College of Optometry biomedical engineer Vijaykrishna Raghunathan has received $765,000 from the National Institutes of Health to examine an understudied part of glaucoma - the ebb and flow of aqueous humor, the liquid in the eye whose regulation controls eye pressure. His work could lead to a pharmaceutical cure for the irreversible disease. The most common form of glaucoma, called open-angle glaucoma, is typically associated with elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) due to increased resistance to outflow of the liquid through an area of tissue known as the trabecular meshwork (TM). In a healthy eye, with normal resistance to elimination, the liquid is constantly being secreted and produced. In patients with glaucoma, the resistance to these secretions are increased, and the IOP is high potentially because the liquid is not flowing out normally, but rather staying inside the eye, building pressure. It is widely accepted that outflow itself is not uniform across the TM but is highly segmental with regions of relatively high flow and low flow. Although this is well recognized, why such differences exist and what their implications in disease are is unclear. "We want to know why we have segmental outflow and that's what we are studying with the grant," he said. He previously published a paper reporting that in glaucoma the meshwork is stiffer, particularly in the low flow regions. "Increased stiffness could mean more resistance and the high flow areas may compensate by becoming softer." Add to the mix - the human TM is approximately 20-fold stiffer in glaucoma, suggesting a prominent role of TM mechanobiology. "The mechanism by which this occurs is not known, nor is it known whether these changes are a cause of elevated IOP associated with glaucoma, or whether they are a result of elevated IOP and disease," said Raghunathan, who compares the dilemma to the chicken and egg phenomenon - which came first? Raghunathan and co-principal investigator Janice Vranka of Oregon Health & Science University, are examining the mechanobiology of the TM cells, looking at how the mechanical properties of the microenvironment effects cell behavior and how that governs cell function as it pertains to segmental flow. That will lead them to understand how to lower resistance to the liquid flow and balance the pressure in the eye. "We want to strike the balance where there is some high flow, some low flow but it is maintained in homeostasis," said Raghunathan. As the leading cause of blindness worldwide, glaucoma is something Raghunathan would like to control therapeutically. He thinks he can, by improving the newest class of drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in February 2018. It's a first-in-class drug and has the potential to impact the TM," said Raghunathan. "If we understand the intrinsic differences between the high and low flow we can find a way to control the resistance therapeutically." ### LAWRENCE -- A just-published paper in Science changes the formula scientists should use when estimating the speed of huge ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica that flow into the ocean and drive mounting sea levels around the globe. The change in the formula for predicting ice flow -- or basal sliding -- reduces "the largest uncertainty" in predicting future sea-level rise. It was prompted by analyzing data from 140 glaciers in Greenland. University of Kansas researchers Leigh Stearns, associate professor of geology and research scientist at the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets, and Cornelis van der Veen, professor of geography, discovered friction -- or "basal drag" -- between ice sheets and the hard bed underneath has no influence on how fast glaciers flow. This finding throws out a notion that has colored estimates of glacier speed for decades. "Basal sliding is one of the most important things we try to measure in glaciology and one of the hardest to measure," said Stearns. "Our paper says the parameter most used in ice sheet models is incorrect -- the Weertman model -- developed in the 1950s based on a theoretical framework that how fast ice moves at the bed is based on friction and the amount of water at the bed. We're saying that friction doesn't matter." Instead, the KU researchers found subglacial water pressure, the water pressure between the bottom of the ice sheet and the hard bed underneath, controls the speed of the ice flow. Part of their work included an analysis of decades-old studies of water pressure underneath mountain glaciers, which "have been largely overlooked by the glaciological community." Stearns and van der Veen paired the mountain-glacier results with the recent observations on surface velocity from the outlet glaciers in Greenland. "We can calculate the friction at the bed of glaciers by investigating spatial patterns of surface velocity. Surprisingly, we found that the two are not at all correlated. Pressure is different and much harder to measure. We know what the pressure at the terminus is because the glacier is floating there, and we can calculate up-flow pressure based on ice thickness. It's not a perfect estimate, but it gives us a good first approximation. If we could, we'd love to put boreholes into all 140 glaciers around Greenland and measure water pressure directly, but that's not practical." Stearns and van der Veen found the relationship between subglacial water pressure in Greenland's outlet glaciers lined up with measurements taken from the mountain glaciers in the 1980s, implying the processes for sliding variations are also similar. "The simplified sliding relation can appropriately reproduce spatial patterns of ice velocity," the KU researchers said. "This is in stark contrast to current modeling techniques, which involve tuning the sliding parameter in order to match observed velocities." "Models that are used to predict sea-level change are inexact because we can't directly measure processes happening at the bed," Stearns said. "Current models using Weertman solutions require tuning to match observations. It's an imperfect way of doing what has to be done to come up with estimates. It has a lot of knobs. With this new parameter, we're trying to reduce the amount of tuning needed." Even though "people were waiting for someone to challenge Weertman, people knew it needed to be improved," Stearns said she worried about causing upset with scientists who'd relied on the older model for earlier research. "I was a little nervous," she said. "I was anxious because it negates what people have been using for a while. It calls into question the model they're using. But the reaction has been positive so far. People have been encouraging of a new systematic approach to a sliding law." Stearns has too much humility to dub her new formula the "Stearns model," even though it improves and replaces the less accurate "Weertman model," named after the scientist who devised it. She stressed her revised formula is part of the self-correcting nature of scientific inquiry and shouldn't shed doubt on climate science or the inexorable rise of sea levels around the world as more ice from Greenland and Antarctica melts into the ocean. "I hope it helps people believe in our projections," she said. "This is based more on physical processes and less on things you have to tune for any reason. Anything that's improving how we model ice sheets in the future is a good thing -- how are ice sheets responding to climate change? With these model improvements, we're getting a step closer to a really accurate understanding." ### Study of bonobos in captivity finds young females are gaining maternal skills and building bonds, bringing context to behaviors seen but not understood in the wild EUGENE, Ore. - June 19, 2018 - University of Oregon anthropologist Klaree Boose followed her intuition about her observations of bonobos at a U.S. zoo. She now theorizes that young females of the endangered ape species prepare for motherhood and form social bonds by helping mothers take care of infants. "After studying bonobos for several years, I noticed that immature individuals of juveniles and adolescents were obsessed with the babies," said Boose, an instructor in the UO Department of Anthropology. "They played with the babies and carried them around. It appeared to be more than just play behavior." While multiple theories exist about such behaviors in primates, Boose realized, they had not been examined in bonobos. So, she led a project at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio, to focus on spontaneous activity of the bonobos and collect urine samples from juveniles and adolescents. Eventually, two clear findings emerged. Young females that handle the infants of mothers are building maternal skills they will eventually need and forging alliances with the mothers that pay off in times of hostility. The research, which drew upon 1,819 hours of observations of 11 females and eight males during summer months of 2011-2015, was published online in May ahead of print as part of a special issue for the journal Physiology & Behavior. Bonobos (Pan paniscus) in the wild live only in a small area of the Congo Basin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They are often thought to be chimpanzees, but, they are a separate species than common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Bonobo females hold the highest rank positions and often form female-female coalitions that team up against males. The findings were a bit surprising, Boose said. "Like all ape species, bonobo females don't need somebody to help them take care of their infants," she said. "They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves." Initially, Boose observed that female and male bonobos as juveniles - those 3 to 7 years old - were obsessed with handling the infants, all under age 3, regardless of their relationships with the mothers. As young bonobos entered adolescence at age 8, however, females continued to approach the mothers and help care for the infants, while males turned away in favor of other behaviors. "Handling behavior picked up among the female adolescents, and it was really intense," Boose said. "They would approach the mothers, groom them briefly and then carry the babies away. They'd move across the enclosure where they would engage in nurturing and other maternal behaviors with the infants, such as grooming and cradling them, putting them on their belly and carrying them on their back. These were very deliberate caretaking behaviors." The connection between infant handling to prepare for motherhood and forging bonds with the mothers was seen in hormone production. Elevated levels of oxytocin -- associated with complex social behaviors and social cognition, including maternal and caregiving activities -- were found among many of the 401 urine samples collected after bonobos engaged in infant-handling activities. As young females interact with the infants, Boose said, the increased oxytocin production may reflect how the body is biologically reinforcing in a positive way either the caregiving activity or social bonding with mothers or infants. The social bonding also reaped dividends for the young female bonobos. Mothers were seen coming to the aid of younger females that had handled their infants when conflicts arose over access to food and other fighting situations. "When a fight involved a handler, particularly the adolescent females, the mother would help the individual that had handled her infant attack the aggressor, usually an adolescent or adult male but sometimes another female," Boose said. "They would intervene and support them." The researchers cautioned that the study was exploratory. The work, however, provides preliminary evidence for where bonobos may or may not fit among the various theories about infant handling among primates. "This work was done in a captive population, and we had a finite amount of time," Boose said. "Ideally, we'd do this in a wild population and we'd be able to track these animals over multiple generations." Co-author Frances White, who heads the UO Department of Anthropology and has extensively studied bonobos in Africa, said the study provides helpful information. "It is common in the wild to see infant bonobos be a focus of enormous interest to others, especially to adolescent bonobos," White said. "It is often noticeable how bonobo mothers are willing to let others get close and interact with their infants, as compared to chimpanzees who are more restrictive." This study, White said, allowed the team to take that knowledge and explore individual relationships in a way that has not been done in the wild. "The Columbus Zoo has done a wonderful job of copying wild behavior in letting the bonobos divide on a day-by-day basis into different groupings, much as they do in the wild," she said. "This zoo setting made this kind of study, which looks at normal wild behaviors, possible. ### Co-authors with Boose and White were UO anthropologist Josh Snodgrass, UO anthropology graduate student Colin Brand and Audra Meinelt of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium. The Nacey Maggioncalda Foundation supported the research, along with the UO Department of Anthropology and College of Arts and Sciences. Sources: Klaree Boose, protem instructor of anthropology, boose@uoregon.edu, and Frances White, head of anthropology, 541-346-5278, fwhite@uoregon.edu Note: The UO is equipped with an on-campus television studio with a point-of-origin Vyvx connection, which provides broadcast-quality video to networks worldwide via fiber optic network. There also is video access to satellite uplink and audio access to an ISDN codec for broadcast-quality radio interviews. Links: About Klaree Boose: https://anthropology.uoregon.edu/profile/boose/ About Frances White: https://blogs.uoregon.edu/fwhite/ Department of Anthropology: https://anthropology.uoregon.edu/ A long-serving Professor of Computer Science at the University of Strathclyde has received an international award for his global work in teaching and promoting his subject over nearly 50 years. Emeritus Professor Andrew McGettrick is one of three 2018 winners of the Presidential Award announced by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is one of only 24 people to have received the award since the mid-1980s and the first UK-based winner. Professor McGettrick, who has been at Strathclyde since 1969, is receiving the honour in recognition of "his unwavering commitment to computer science education--particularly in terms of its quality, breadth, and access--for generations of students worldwide." He is to be presented with the award at a ceremony in San Francisco on 23 June. ACM is the world's largest computing society, with nearly 100,000 members. Professor McGettrick said: "Computing is of fundamental importance to education in the 21st century. The vast majority of innovation and creativity is now based on computing, to the extent that it has revolutionised vast sectors of industry and is essential to economic prosperity. The five largest companies in the world are all computer based - and yet the computing revolution has to be seen to be at an early stage of evolution. "Students have to be able to engage in the creative side of computing, so that they are able to influence and benefit from the great opportunities that exist to create change, grasp opportunity and ensure that a fair, safe and just society emerges. With current developments in machine learning, computing advances will impact on the future of work - a vital matter for these students' careers." Professor McGettrick has spent his entire career at Strathclyde, apart from sabbatical periods at Bell Labs in New Jersey and the Australian National University in Canberra. He joined Strathclyde for the inauguration of its degree in Computer Science and has served terms as head of his department, which is currently named the Department of Computer & Information Sciences. He has served as a Vice-President of the British Computer Society and as a member of the UK's Engineering Council, and is currently the UK representative to the General Assembly of the International Federation for Information Processing. Professor McGettrick served on ACM's Education Board for more than 15 years, including around 10 years as chair of the Education Board and Education Council. During this time, computing education began to flourish in the US, both at high school and higher education levels, and has continued to do so; he remains involved with these activities. ACM said that, in this role, Professor McGettrick "(left) an indelible imprint as a passionate advocate for equipping computer science students with the knowledge, skills, and tools to succeed in the field." During his tenure, he steered key curriculum developments in computer science and software engineering. In recent years, Professor McGettrick has played an instrumental role in championing European educational efforts and professional societies, through his work with ACM's Europe Council and Informatics Europe. He was also one of the leading forces behind the Informatics for All initiative, an acclaimed report that explores strategies for Informatics education in Europe at all levels. Professor McGettrick has recently been the co-author of three white papers for the European Commission, covering cyber-security, automation - with aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning - and education. Professor McGettrick has also endowed an annual prize for Strathclyde students. Two Andrew McGettrick Prizes are awarded annually - one to a graduating Honours student and one to a graduating Integrated Masters student, for outstanding performance in their studies. ACM President Vicki L Hanson said: "The ACM Presidential Award is a way to honour those who have gone above and beyond to create a dynamic professional environment in which we all have been able to grow in our careers. "This year's Presidential Award recipients...have served ACM for decades and their contributions have been highly consequential." ### It was Leo Tolstoy who constructed a stereotype of high authorities' sympathetic voice. His voice stereotypes have since been adopted by other writers Leo Tolstoy was the first Russian writer to make voice a distinctive individual, professional and social feature, claims Oksana Bulgakowa, Professor at the Gutenberg University, Mainz and the School of Advanced of the University of Tyumen. "Leo Tolstoy taught Russian writers to 'hear' and created a new stereotypical vocabulary," Bulgakowa says. "He gave his characters constant vocal epithets. Tolstoy's voice stereotypes are highly psychological and national, and his class stereotypes are repeated from one novel to another, creating a group identity. For instance, having a gruff voice is a distinctive feature of the lower class - soldiers, peasants, artists. Politicians are shrill as they raise their voices when addressing a large audience. It was Leo Tolstoy who constructed stereotypes of a repulsive voice for bureaucratic authorities and a sympathetic voice for high authorities". According to the Professor, Tolstoy's vocal stereotyping as a marker of mental state and social role was adopted - possibly subconsciously - by such famous Russian writers as Nikolai Leskov, Yury Olesha and Mikhail Bulgakov, as well as by numerous memoirists. Tolstoy's voice depictions still influence Russian writers today. "This use of vocal stereotypes forms a code, which creates intersubject space and makes the recognition process easier," summed up the expert. The full research work was published in the book 'Voice as a Cultural Phenomenon' by Oksana Bulgakowa. ### Toronto - A paper co-authored by a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management received an award for long run impact from the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science. Prof. Avi's Goldfarb's paper, "Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness," co-authored by Catherine Tucker, a professor of marketing at MIT Sloan, received the INFORMS 2018 Long Term Impact Award. The winning paper was chosen from all marketing papers published in Marketing Science, or Management Science, or another INFORMS journal between 2008 and 2012, that is viewed to have made a significant long run impact on the field of Marketing. The award was presented to Profs. Goldfarb and Tucker at the 40th Annual ISMS Marketing Science Conference in Philadelphia last week. Avi Goldfarb is a professor of marketing at the Rotman School and is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, a Fellow at Behavioral Economics in Action at Rotman, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a co-author of Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, published earlier this year by Harvard Business Review Press. A second paper co-authored by Prof. Nitin Mehta, who is the co-academic director of the Rotman Master of Management Analytics program, was a finalist for the INFORMS 2018 Long Term Impact Award. His paper "Informing, Transforming and Persuading: Disentangling the Multiple Effects of Advertising on Brand Choice Decisions" was published in Marketing Science in 2008, and it was one of the eight finalists for this award. In addition, a paper co-authored by Prof. Goldfarb, along with Rotman colleagues Profs. Ron Borkovsky and Sridhar Moorthy with a graduate of the Rotman PhD program, Avery Haviv, who is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Rochester was a finalist for the INFORMS 2017 John Little's Best Paper Award. Their paper, "Measuring and understanding brand value in a dynamic model of brand management," published in Marketing Science was one of seven finalists for this award selected from marketing papers in all INFORMS journals published in 2017. ### The Rotman School of Management is part of the University of Toronto, a global centre of research and teaching excellence at the heart of Canada's commercial capital. Rotman is a catalyst for transformative learning, insights and public engagement, bringing together diverse views and initiatives around a defining purpose: to create value for business and society. For more information, visit http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca. For more information: Ken McGuffin Manager, Media Relations Rotman School of Management University of Toronto Voice 416.946.3818 E-mail mcguffin@rotman.utoronto.ca The Pound New Zealand Dollar (GBP/NZD) exchange rate is fluctuating this morning, in the wake of the UK Governments latest Brexit defeat. Pound (GBP) Exchange Rate Tumbles as Theresa Mays Future in Doubt After strengthening overnight, the Pound New Zealand Dollar (GBP/NZD) exchange rate has begun to fall back this morning as pressure mounts against Theresa May, following the latest setback in the passing of her Brexit Withdrawal bill. This setback came in the form of the House of Lords, which voted on Monday against the withdrawal bill passed by the House of Commons last week, tabling a new amendment to grant MPs a say on any final Brexit deal with the EU. Most worrying for investors is that this will offer a second opportunity for rebel Tories to vote on the bill, something which could undermine the Prime Ministers position, further weakening the Pound. Jasper Lawler, head of research at London Capital Group, said: This will not only test Mays ability to steer a minority government, but also the Pounds buoyancy as pro-EU rebels promise they can collapse the government if their demands arent met. Theresa May showing signs of weakness and an inability to control her party wouldnt bode well for the future as several other pieces of legislation are still needed in order to prepare for Brexit. The bill narrowly passed through the Commons last week, after May made assurances that parliament would be given a say on the final Brexit bill. However sources suggest no concessions have actually been agreed to as of yet, something which could see backbenchers revolt this time around. The House of Commons will not debate the latest amendments to the bill on Wednesday, with GBP investors likely to watching closely for any political fallout from the vote. Gains in New Zealand Dollar (NZD) Exchange Rate Trimmed by Trade Concerns Meanwhile the New Zealand Dollars (NZD) advance this morning has been slowed by a sharp rise in global trade tensions, following Donald Trumps threats to impose further tariffs on China. In the latest tit-for-tat exchange Trump has announced his plans to implement 10% tariffs on another $200bn of Chinese goods, after Beijing retaliated to the last round of Trumps tariffs with $50bn of its own tariffs against US products. NZD investors fear the US and China are now hurling towards a full-blown trade war, something which could have negative consequences for the Kiwi given New Zealands reliance on trade. Professor Davide Castellani, professor of international business at Henley Business School, said: The risk of an all-out trade war between the US and China is becoming more and more concrete. Both parties do not want to back down, because they would signal to the other party that they could use the threat of trade war in the future to further their negotiation position. GBP/NZD Exchange Rate Forecast: Pound to Surge if BoE Hints at August Rate Hike? Looking ahead, trade in the GBP/NZD exchange rate during this weeks session is likely to be dominated by the Bank of Englands (BoE) latest rate decision on Thursday. While there is no expectation of any policy changes at this months meeting, markets are likely to pay close attention to the BoEs forward guidance, particularly regarding the possibility of a rate hike in August. Economists are currently split almost 50-50 on whether the BoE is likely to deliver a rate hike in August, with recent UK economic data dragging on expectations. However the slightest hint of a hawkish bent from policymakers could tip the scales in favour of a hike, something which would likely prompt the Pound exchange rate to soar. In the meantime NZD investors will be eagerly awaiting the outcome of this afternoons Global Dairy Auction. With dairy products accounting for roughly 20% of New Zealands exports any uptick in prices is likely to bolster the appeal of the New Zealand Dollar. President Trump issued a statement on Monday regarding trade with China, and the proposed actions have caused quite a stir. More tariffs are threatened and China is now faced with some tough choices. Markets are in risk off mode. Equities have fallen sharply and the US dollar is well bid, as is the Yen. A quiet start to the week in most markets got a violent awakening on Monday night as President Trump threatened China with yet more tariffs. Trade war may still be an exaggeration, but the truce proclaimed by Mnuchin just several weeks ago has clearly been broken. Heres some excerpts from the Presidents statement. On Friday, I announced plans for tariffs on $50 billion worth of imports from China. These tariffs are being imposed to encourage China to change the unfair practices identified in the Section 301 action with respect to technology and innovation. They also serve as an initial step toward bringing balance to our trade relationship with China. However and unfortunately, China has determined that it will raise tariffs on $50 billion worth of United States exports. China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology. Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong. This situation could have been anticipated; tit-for-tat tariffs between the US and China are ongoing and threatened by other nations caught up in trade disputes. Yet Trumps response to Chinas new tariffs has caused a stir as it is a step above the usual actions, and more aggressive and hasty than many expected. today, I directed the United States Trade Representative to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for additional tariffs at a rate of 10 percent. After the legal process is complete, these tariffs will go into effect if China refuses to change its practices, and also if it insists on going forward with the new tariffs that it has recently announced. If China increases its tariffs yet again, we will meet that action by pursuing additional tariffs on another $200 billion of goods. The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable. Trump has effectively gone all in with his chips and leaves little room for negotiation. China now has two choices: back down and accept the new tariffs, or call Trumps bluff and retaliate again. Understandably the market is on edge. Equities have fallen heavily overnight, with the US indices such as the S&P500 due for a -1.3% gap down. Gold and bonds have found a bid, as has the Yen. USDJPY is -0.74% as risk off sentiment surrounds the markets. The US dollar has also found a bid, partly due to its safe haven status, but also as it tends to move higher with a protectionism backdrop. Even still, the DXY is below last Thursdays high of 95.13 and still looks short term overbought. It could well stall below 95 until a new catalyst emerges. Tuesdays trading is likely to be dictated by traders digesting and reacting to the new trade threats. This shouldnt cause a panic crash quite yet, but will hurt risk assets. Heres INGs take: While it's likely to take time before the second round of tariffs is imposed (as was the case with the first round, the proposal must go through the public consultation process), the pure signalling effect is negative for risk appetite. In such an environment, it's the risk assets linked to China that are likely to underperform (as per the decline in the Australian dollar overnight) though higher beta FX and in emerging markets, in general, should remain under a pressure. We also note that with the risk of a trade war looming, currencies of open economies are likely to suffer. If I change my decision,more ppl will come here: Imran Khan 19 June, 2018 Related News Imran Khan distributed loan cheques under Kamyab Jawan Programme PTI govt to face all challenges coming its way: Imran khan More on this View All Tips for Taking Incredible iPhone Travel Photos Top 2021 Accessories We Know You Will Love Types of Casino Payment Methods Are Slot Developers Important for players? Best Poker Hands ever played on a Casino Hand Wash and Toiletries in Pakistan And the Role of DUPAS in Reshaping the Industry Woke Bingo ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) chairman Imran Khan, on Monday snubbed party workers protesting outside his Banigala residence against the award of party tickets in some constituencies, telling them categorically that he would never succumb to pressure of their protests. While the PTI chairman came out of his bungalow with former Punjab governor Chaudhry Mohammad Sarwar in an effort to placate the agitating workers and assured them that he would review the decision regarding award of party tickets within the next two to three days, he declared that they could never force him to change his mind with such protests. If I change my decision today under your pressure, tomorrow more people will come here. Should I again change my decision? he asked the disgruntled workers who had come from different constituencies of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. What do you think that by bringing hundreds or thousands of more people here you can get my decision changed? he asked. I want to say it categorically: whether you are 50 or even if 10,000 more people join you, any decision based on justice that I will make in consultation with the parliamentary board will not be changed. No matter how many people gather, I will not change the decision, the PTI chief reiterated amidst slogans by the workers. Mr Khan also expressed his anger against the protesters for carrying banners and placards. Why (are you holding) these placards? Is there any public meeting going on? he said. The protesters from Multan wanted the party chief not to award the ticket to former minister and former PML-N leader Sikandar Bosan. The party has yet to officially announce giving ticket to Mr Bosan though there were reports that the party had assured him of a party ticket. One of the PTI workers reminded Mr Khan that he used to tell them that they were corrupt leaders and they would be made an example, yet the party had awarded tickets to the same corrupt people. The PTI chief said he had already told them to submit review petitions with their arguments so that the matter could be reviewed. When the protesters were dispersing after Mr Khans assurance, another group of protesters from Gujrat reached the venue, chanting slogans against the party leaderships plan to have seat adjustment with the Pakistan Muslim League-Q (PML-Q). Some of the protesters even briefly scuffled with the police and security personnel when they tried to forcefully enter the chairmans office. The capital administration on Monday deployed more police personnel around the hilltop residence of Mr Khan at Banigala to avoid any untoward incident. The PTI chief again came out to give them the same assurance. While asking them to go away so that he along with other leaders could work, Mr Khan said he was a human being and might have committed mistakes. As the protesting PTI workers did not move, Mr Khan told them that he would announce his decision on the review petitions on Tuesday. The protesting workers announced that they would go back home only after hearing the final verdict. Till the filing of this report in the late hours of Monday, more than 1,000 people were camping outside the PTI chiefs residence. The disgruntled PTI workers mostly belonged to Multan, Mandi Bahauddin, Rawalpindi, Gujrat, Peshawar, Dir and Swat. Earlier amid reports of resentment within the party ranks in a large number of constituencies over the distribution of tickets, the PTI had decided last week to constitute reconciliatory committees to sort out differences in the run-up to the July 25 general elections. The decision had been taken by the party leadership at a meeting of the partys media strategy team only a day after announcing tickets for 173 National Assembly seats and 290 seats of provincial assemblies of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The decision of the PTI leadership to award tickets to a large number of electable candidates who recently joined the party after quitting their political parties has created unrest among PTI activists. There were reports of protests at some other places as well against the leadership over the issue of award of party tickets. Talking to media men, PTI Information Secretary Fawad Chaudhry said the party had received nearly 100 complaints against the award of tickets. He expressed the hope that his party would amicably resolve the issue and all the workers would take part in the election campaign with full dedication. Responding to a question, Mr Chaudhry ruled out the possibility of leaving the field open for former interior minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan. He said the PTI had already fielded partys vice president Ghulam Sarwar Khan against him in three of the four constituencies he was contesting. Hi Guys, I am living in Australia at the moment and was intending to apply for a PR here. Unfortunately I am not eligible as my occupation is not classified. Anyway, I did some reading and I think I might be eligible for the Express Entry Scheme in Canada if I manage to get 1 year of full time work experience. The problem here is, I have been employed in my field of study since June 2017, however I worked as a casual, doing anywhere between 10-20 hours per week because of student visa conditions till December 2017. I am working full time since January this year. I just wanted to know, will my hours as a casual employee be counted towards the 1 year of work experience? Or only the weeks after becoming a full time employee will be counted? I read on the website that 1 year full time experience or equivalent to 1 year full time experience if working part time. It also states that the work experience should be continuous, however, being a casual, I had 3 weeks of unpaid leave during Christmas, as the business was closed for Christmas. Will that be an issue? Thanks for the help! As usual, "it depends." If you are an OAP, you should be able to get an S1 (or whatever the document is called these days) and get enrolled in the French health care system. However, you need to know that the French system is not "free at the point of use" but rather a reimbursement system that reimburses at about a 70% level. Most people have a "mutuelle" - which is a top up insurance for which you pay a monthly premium. For just a year in France, it may or may not be worthwhile to switch your enrollment over and back again. You don't actually register with a doctor here the way you do in the UK. If you're in the French health care system, you should declare a "medecin traitant" - which is essentially a doctor responsible for being your main doctor and coordinating your care, by centralizing your records and your referrals to specialists. If you're not in the French system (i.e. if you have private health cover) you don't need to declare a medecin traitant, but rather you just abide by the terms of your private policy. Health care here is based on residence - but you need 3 months of residence in France before you can apply, and it can take "several" months for your application to be processed. Cheers, Bev The French government has frozen the assets of controversial Swiss imam Hani Ramadan as part of the fight against the financing of terrorism. His assets have been frozen for six months, according to the decree published on Sunday in the official French government bulletin and reported on Tuesday by the Lyon Capitale magazine. This is within the framework of an article of the Monetary and Financial Code targeting natural or legal persons, or any other entity that commits, attempts to commit, facilitates, finances, incites or participates in acts of terrorism. He has two months to contest the freezing of his assets, said the decree, made jointly by the economy, finance and interior ministries. Ramadans name was one of 17 on list of foreign nationals sentenced for or suspected of having links to a terrorist organisation or of carrying out propaganda for such an organisation. Ramadan, who in April 2017 was barred from France and escorted by police to the Swiss border, is the elder brother of Tariq Ramadan, also a Geneva-born Islamic scholar who is currently being held in custody in French for allegedly raping several women. He has formally contested the charges. The French Interior Ministry said last April that Hani Ramadan had in the past adopted a behaviour and made remarks posing a serious threat to public order on French soil. Controversies A scholar, teacher and imam born in Geneva, Hani Ramadan, 59, is one of six children. His family fled from Egypt to Switzerland following the assassination of their maternal grandfather, Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ramadan has been director of the controversial Islamic Centre of Geneva since 1995 and leads canton Genevas Union of Muslim Organisations. Ramadan came to attention on September 10, 2002, when French daily newspaper Le Monde published a column he penned titled The misunderstood Sharia, in which he defended the stoning of adulterers, saying it was not as cruel as one might think. He also suggested that HIV was a divine punishment. The controversy that arose from the columns publication let to Ramadans immediate dismissal from his teaching position. Ramadan has also incited controversy with several anti-Israeli statements denouncing conspiracies by the Jewish state. For example, shortly after the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13, 2015, he wrote on his blog, hosted by the Tribune de Geneve: Islam has nothing to do with any of this [] Lets start by looking at Mossad [Israels secret service]. German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday firmly rejected US President Donald Trump's assertion that immigration is fueling a rise in crime in Germany, citing official national data. My response is that the interior minister recently presented statistics on crime and they speak for themselves, she said during a press conference after talks with French President Emmanuel Macron. Trump on Monday claimed that crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture! Germany let in more than a million asylum seekers since 2015, but official data for 2017 released last month show that the countrys crime rate is at its lowest since 1992. Despite the official data, Trump doubled down on his claim on Tuesday, and even sought to cast doubt on statistics published by Germany. Crime in Germany is up 10% plus (officials do not want to report these crimes) since migrants were accepted, Trump said in his latest tweet. Trumps comments have poured fuel on the fire as hardliners in Merkels conservative bloc have given her an ultimatum to tighten asylum rules or risk a political crisis that would rattle Europe. The US president himself faces intensifying pressure to end the forcible separation of migrant families under his zero tolerance policy, which requires the arrest and prosecution of anyone who crosses the US border illegally. German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday to hammer out reforms that can stop the "disintegration" of the European Union, torn by populist forces and deep discord over immigration. The two leaders of Europes biggest economies will seek to thrash out a compromise between Macrons bold vision for sweeping EU change and Germanys stance that is more cautious, especially when it comes to finance. Merkel and Macron have both stressed that, as US President Donald Trump openly challenges the EU with a trade war and over security and climate policy, the bloc must learn to stand its ground on the world stage. The ministerial retreat at Meseberg castle near Berlin aims to agree a joint Franco-German stance ahead of a key June 28-29 summit on the EUs post-Brexit future, at a time when populists and eurosceptics are rapidly gaining ground. As outspoken pro-Europeans, Merkel and Macron both face harsh opposition from nationalist and right-wing populist forces at home, and in the governments of Italy, Austria and several eastern European countries. Ahead of the meeting, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire warned that Europe is in a process of disintegration. We see states that are turning inward, trying to find national solutions to problems that require European solutions. It is essential to propose a new European project on immigration, on economic issues, on financial issues to consolidate Europe in a world where you have the United States on one side, China on the other and we are trapped in the middle. Domino effect The question of how many migrants the bloc can absorb came back to the fore strongly when last week Italy and Malta both turned back a rescue vessel carrying 630 refugees, which was eventually accepted by Spain. The move sparked a clash between France and Italy as immigration also triggered a domestic crisis for Merkel, a leader already weakened by her decision in 2015 to keep open German borders to a mass influx of more than one million refugees. Merkel now faces a dangerous mutiny from her hardline Bavarian Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who has vowed to defy her and order police to shut German borders to most asylum seekers by early July absent an EU accord. Merkel, arguing that the issue must be resolved at the EU level, has pledged to reach deals with transit and arrival countries in the narrow two-week window ending with the Brussels summit. Turning away migrants at our borders at the heart of Europe will lead to negative domino effects that could hurt Germany and put into question European unity, she has warned. Trump chimed into the debate with a Twitter taunt Monday, charging that the people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Merkel and Macron agree that overburdened Mediterranean countries need financial support or incentives, and that the EUs Frontex border force must receive more funding, while Paris also advocates the creation of asylum processing centres in Africa. Unhinged world While migration looked to be the most urgent issue, a host of other tricky topics were on the agenda Tuesday from eurozone finance and investment to common defence. Macron last year outlined his vision for a stronger, more united Europe as a forceful reply to what was known as the National Front, a far-right party he defeated at the polls. But he was long left waiting for a response from Berlin as Merkel, weakened by poor September election results, was occupied by half a year of arduous coalition talks. When she finally gave a reply several weeks ago, it fell short of many of Macrons core demands. She dashed Macrons hopes for a joint eurozone finance minister and budget, mindful of German public fears that their tax money be squandered on what voters see as fiscal irresponsibility in southern EU states. The Elysee Palace said Monday it hoped for a substantial agreement on reform of the common currency area, with a specific budget for a safety net to save banks in trouble. Merkel has agreed on a common investment budget for the bloc, but says it should be worth several tens of billions of euros, not the hundreds of billions suggested by Macron. Paris and Berlin are also discussing ways to turn the European Stability Mechanism into a more potent firefighter akin to a European IMF, and how to create greater defence cooperation. Germanys Sueddeutsche daily praised the partnership, saying that with unrest so rife across the EU, Europe can consider itself lucky if it is able to find any common ground at all. In an unhinged world, France and Germany should be grateful for the ties which still bind them. French students may be suffering one of the most stressful weeks of their young lives as they take their high school exams, but at least they won't be distracted by fighter jets. Frances cutting-edge Rafale military planes will be flying on adjusted schedules this week in a bid to minimise disruption for the students, the commander of a military base told AFP on Tuesday. Commander Cedric Gaudilliere said his base at Mont-de-Marsan in southwest France had adapted its take-off and landing procedures so as not to bother the 3,773 students taking their exams nearby. Rafales will take off from the part of the base furthest from residential areas and carry out slower landings that involve less circling over the town, he added. Other military bases around the country will be following similar procedures, he said. Frances high school baccalaureate exams, launched under Napoleon in 1808, kicked off Monday with the philosophy test which this year included questions such as Does culture make us more human? Some 750,000 students are taking the weeklong exams, most of them aged 17 or 18 though the youngest candidate this year is just 11, and the oldest 76. The Rafales are considered the pride of Frances aerial military arsenal and the country has sold dozens of the jets to India, Egypt and Qatar after struggling to sell them overseas for years. They have been used by French forces in Afghanistan, Libya, West Africa and most recently in Syria in April to strike alleged chemical weapons sites. rhl-pjl/kjl/js/dcr Italy's Osteria Francescana was crowned the world's best restaurant for the second time on Tuesday at an awards ceremony put on by British trade magazine Restaurant, beating out top eateries in Spain and France. Run by chef Massimo Bottura, the restaurant in Modena, Italy pipped last years winner, New Yorks Eleven Madison Park, in the Worlds 50 Best Restaurants awards, after first taking the honour in 2016. It is the only Italian establishment to have won the annual accolade. This is amazing, this is something we built all together, Bottura told the awards ceremony held in Bilbao in Spains northern Basque Country, famous for its avant-garde haute cuisine. I am going to use this spotlight to show that chefs in 2018 are much more than the sum of their recipes. The top restaurants lists organisers praised Botturas contemporary cuisine, which challenges and reinvents Italian culinary tradition while make use of the finest produce from the Emilia-Romagna region. His father wanted him to become a lawyer but when he was 23-years-old Bottura, who was famous for rustling up culinary delights for his friends, dropped his law studies to open a Trattoria in Campazzo, in the countryside around Modena in the Po River Valley. On his days off, he would study with French chef Georges Cogny, who had a restaurant two hours away. He said to me: always follow your palate, because you have a great palate which will make Modena known around the world, Bottura said during an interview with AFP in 2016. He opened Osteria Francescana in 1995 after spending time in New York and Monaco. Two Peruvians in top 10 Spains El Celler de Can Roca, which took the top honour in 2013 and 2015, came in second while third place went to Mirazur in southern France. Restaurant magazine, owned by William Reed Media, launched the awards in 2002 and they are now as coveted by restaurants as Michelin stars, although the methodology used to select the best restaurants has faced criticism, especially from several French chefs who say it remains unclear. There are no criteria for putting a restaurant on the list, which is based on an anonymous poll of more than 1,000 chefs, restaurant owners, food critics and other industry insiders from around the world. Each member gets 10 votes and at least four of those votes have to go to restaurants outside their region. The top 10 included two Peruvian restaurants, Central which slipped to number six from fifth place last year, and Maido which climbed to number seven from eighth place. The only Asian restaurant in the top 10 was Bangkoks Gaggan, whose owner-chef Gaggan Anand has won praise for his modern spin on his native Indian cuisine. Half in Europe Spain continued to dominate the line-up with three restaurants in the top 10, including El Celler de Can Roca, while France had two including Mirazur. The 2018 list of 50 best restaurants included eateries in 22 countries but over half were in Europe. Six are in the United States, six in Latin America and six in Asia. Tuesdays ceremony also handed out individual chef awards. Britains Clare Smyth, who catered the dinner at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle last month, was named best female chef and Frances Cedric Grolet best pastry chef. Perus celebrity chef Gaston Acurio, who is known for combining classic European techniques with typical ingredients from the Andean country, was given a lifetime achievement award. The top restaurant award has gone to Spain seven times, the most of any country. In addition to El Celler de Can Rocas two wins, ground-breaking Spanish chef Ferran Adrias El Bulli, which he closed in 2011, took the prize a record five times. This year was the first time the ceremony was held in Spain. The event has been held before in London, New York and Melbourne. avl/ds/pvh Virgil Abloh paid tribute to his friend and longtime collaborator Kanye West as the US designer took star billing as Paris men's fashion week began Tuesday. Relations between the pair have been tested since Abloh was named head of menswear at Louis Vuitton in March, with the rapper saying it was hurtful to lose his muse and erstwhile artistic director. West has made no secret of his own ambitions to lead a major luxury brand as a designer, and revealed last month that he had also once been in talks with Louis Vuittons owner, French fashion magnate Bernard Arnault. Abloh the son of Ghanaian immigrants will show his own Off-White label in Paris Wednesday before making his debut bow with the worlds biggest luxury brand on Thursday. As he put the finishing touches to his collections he posted a photo of Kanye West to his 2.3 million Instagram followers with legend, The architect of it all. Wests wife Kim Kardashian responded with emojis of a heart and two fires to signal her approval. The rapper who has his own Yeezy line for Adidas remained silent. Black empowerment But he told US radio star Charlamagne tha God in a wide-ranging interview last month that there were no hard feelings. These things are hurtful when you are working with a talent like Virgil and somebody comes through and says Bam! I am going to take Virgil. There is some validation in that someone that I came up with is now the head (of menswear) of Louis Vuitton, West added. Abloh, 38, is only the second black man to rise to the top of a big Paris fashion house, with French designer Olivier Rousteing responsible for both Balmains men and womens lines. As well as his nod to his former employer, Abloh dropped hints on social media that he was about to give the aristocratic Vuitton label a strong dose of black empowerment and streetwear style. Vuittons previous designer, Briton Kim Jones who makes his own debut for Dior Homme on Saturday often referenced British colonial and safari chic in his clothes. Abloh grew up in Illinois where his seamstress mother taught him her trade as he studied engineering and later architecture. He has made it clear his clothes will be much more street. He posted films on Instagram of cotton plants and ceramic neck chains, in what could be seen as references to slavery, as well as a Louis Vuitton record box inspired by hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash, where you can put your coat in while DJing, shielding it from smoky clubs and spilled drinks. Celebrity fans Abloh had worked hand in glove with West for more than 15 years. They designed clothes together on Photoshop and were $500-a-month interns under Karl Lagerfeld at Fendi in Rome in 2009 even though the rapper already had a string of Grammy awards under his belt. West said that he only found out about Abloh taking over at Vuitton as the appointment was announced in March. He (Abloh) made the call two minutes before it hit the Internet He had told me he was looking at Versace too but he knew he was going to Louis Vuitton, he added. West admitted days later in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that the news had weighed on him. Its not bad or good, he said. Abloh has built up a celebrity following at Off-White with high-profile collaborations with Nike, Jimmy Choo and Moncler. Such has been the buzz that fashionistas jostled each other to get into his show in Paris last March. Not everyone, however, is sold on streetwears inexorable rise. New York Times critic Guy Trebay said a lot of what turns up on the runways lately looks less designed than crowdsourced. The young German and Swedish brands CMMN SWDN and Gmbh kicked fashion week off on Tuesday evening after a dance show by choreographer Mathilde Monnier inspired by shoemaker J.M. Weston. French label Pigalle also tried to rethink the catwalk by presenting its new collection during an hour-long music and dance show at one of the French capitals most prestigious concert halls. fg-alm/nla Spain's new Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said he will head to Paris Saturday to meet with President Emmanuel Macron and is also planning to visit Germany and possibly Portugal. In his first television interview since taking office on June 2, the Socialist leader also announced Monday that his first official visit would be to Morocco, probably in the second half of the year, as Rabat is traditionally the first destination for any new Spanish leader. I am announcing that I will undertake a consultation tour with European colleagues in Berlin, in Paris, and hopefully also in Portugal, which also has a Socialist government, Sanchez said Monday. The first stage will be next Saturday with the president of the French Republic (Macron) in Paris, he said. Sanchez will have lunch at the Elysee Palace followed by a press conference, the French presidents office said. France has offered to take some of the 630 migrants rescued by the ship Aquarius which arrived in Spain at the weekend after being turned away by Italy and Malta. While several European Union nations have adopted a harder line against refugees, Spains new Socialist government has announced a series of measures to help migrants since it came to power earlier this month, in a break with the policies of its conservative predecessor. Sanchez took office after conservative leader Mariano Rajoy was toppled in a no-confidence vote. 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. Maryam Nawaz nomination papers cleared by ECP LAHORE: In response to objections raised against PTI chairman Imran Khans candidacy for election in NA-53 Islamabad, his counsel Babar Awans assistant submitted on Monday that the objections were baseless and amounted just to conjecture. The objections concern the PTI chairmans submission of photocopied documents along with his nomination papers. The written response says, There is a legal mechanism in place to send or receive documents from foreign countries, adding that objections raised against Imrans candidacy are mere allegations. Earlier in the day, Imran and his counsel, Babar Awan, excused from appearing before returning officers for the scrutiny of his nomination papers for NA-53 (Islamabad), because they had to appear before the ECP in Lahore. A day earlier, the ECP had summoned Imran, PML-N leader Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Aisha Gulalai, the leader of PTI-Gulali, for the scrutiny process in NA-53. Meanwhile, Lahores NA-125, formerly NA-120, is all set to see a tough contest between PML-N leader Maryam Nawaz, who spearheaded her mothers by-poll campaign in the constituency in 2017, and PTIs Yasmeen Rashid, who has significantly increased her popularity among voters of the area since 2013. Maryams nomination papers were cleared of all objections raised by her PTI opponent by the returning officer, Asif Bashir, on Monday. The PML-N leader has also filed nomination papers for NA-127 but is expected to contest the elections from NA-125, the traditional stronghold of the Sharif family. The constituency was won by former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 2013 and by his wife, Begum Kulsoom Nawaz, following his disqualification in 2017. Due to her illness, Begum Kulsoom could not lead the campaign herself, and Maryam took charge in her absence. Though the PML-N managed to defeat PTI in the by-poll with a margin of over 14,000 votes, the party saw the winning margin decline compared to 2013 as more and more polling stations of the partys traditional stronghold proved competitive. Other key contestants whose papers were approved on Monday were PML-N leader Khawaja Asif and PTI leader Usman Dar, who will contest for an NA seat in Sialkot. Also on Monday, PTI candidate for NA-72 Sialkot, Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan, and PML-N candidate for the same constituency were given a day to respond to objections raised on their nomination papers. The two contestants have been accused of not disclosing in their papers companies registered in their name with the Federal Bureau of Revenue. Objections were also raised on the nomination papers of PTI candidate Ayesha Nazir Jutt, accused of concealing iqama (work permit). Among those whose nomination papers were rejected on Monday were PTI candidate for PP-127 Jhang, Aslam Bharwana, and MQM-Pakistan leader Khawaja Izhar (NA-247). ROs across the country are set to complete the scrutiny of nomination papers on June 19 (today) as per the revised election schedule. The last date for filing appeals against the acceptance or rejection of nomination papers by the ROs is June 22, whereas the last date for a decision on the appeals by election tribunals is June 27. Similarly, the revised lists of nominated candidates will be published on June 28 while the last date for withdrawal of candidature will be June 29. Moreover, the date for allocation of electoral symbols and publication of the final list of contesting candidates will be June 30.LAHORE: In response to objections raised against PTI chairman Imran Khans candidacy for election in NA-53 Islamabad, his counsel Babar Awans assistant submitted on Monday that the objections were baseless and amounted just to conjecture. In defence of what many perceive to be indefensible, associations in Spain, France and Portugal have joined forces to promote the culture and practice of bullfighting. The Bull Foundation of Lydia (Spain), the Observatoire National des Cultures Taurines (France) and ProToiro (Portugal) have agreed a tripartite cooperation, signed on June 18th by the presidents of the three organizations: Victorino Martin (FTL), Andre Viard (ONCT) and Paulo Carvalho (ProToiro). This new grouping is called the International Council of Bullfighting (ILC) which will incorporate all the laws, treaties and conventions, nationally and internationally, that protect the tradition of bullfighting and its cultural environment. The International Council aims to work internationally to establish cooperation on all issues related to the practice, development, defence and promotion of bullfighting. To help in those countries that have not recognised, under the terms of the 2003 UNESCO Convention, that festivals and bullfighting traditions are intangible cultural heritage. The International Council wants to inform institutional and those involved in bullfighting of its cultural, economic, social and educational values. Politics and media are not left out as the Council will inform these of the reality and importance of bullfighting and its cultural place in the three founding countries and will provide information to international bodies, such as the European Parliament and the UN, on the cultural, economic, social and artistic richness of bullfighting. The Associated Press reported in 2016 that, at least 17 Spanish cities and towns have cut municipal funding for bullfights and bull runs, or passed legislation condemning or banning it since the new leftist party Podemos won its first seats in local and regional elections a year ago. Spains Catalonia region banned bullfighting altogether in 2011 and a decreasing number of Spaniards support the practice. An Ipsos Mori poll from January 2016, carried out for animal welfare organisation World Animal Protection, found that only 19% of adults in Spain supported bullfighting, while 58% opposed it, Reuters reported. Spain, Portugal, southern France, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the Philippines all have bullfighting as a traditional spectacle. There are also other places in the world, which have non-lethal versions of bullfighting, and places where bulls fight other bulls, rather than people, such as the Persian Gulf, Bangladesh, Peru, Balkans, Turkey, Japan, and Korea. Arguments for Bullfighting Bullfighting is an art form, and should be seen as an equivalent to dance, or painting, or music. It is a traditional in many areas and in places like Spain, it probably goes right back to at least the Roman period. It is living history. Bullfighters are skilful and behind all the pomp and ritual, the bull is actually being killed in a very efficient manner. Far more bulls are killed to be eaten by abattoirs than die in the bullring. There are many abattoirs who operate in a less than effective manner. The focus on banning bullfighting as being particularly cruel is misplaced. In some places, parts of Spain especially, bullfighting is perceived by many people as being an integral part of the regional culture. Critics sometimes argue that bullfighting is wrong because it is killing for fun, rather than out of the necessity of killing to eat. This should be seen as more of an argument for full vegetarianism, rather than an anti-bullfighting one, however as every time someone chooses a steak over a salad, or a beef burger over a cheese sandwich, you could argue that they are endorsing killing for fun. Arguments Against Bullfighting The practice is barbaric. Essentially, bullfighting is ritually slaughtering an animal purely for fun. It is archaic, rather than traditional. We no longer allow gladiatorial contests, so why should we allow bullfighting? It is not just the bulls who suffer, horses are also injured and suffer death (not to mention the bullfighters themselves, who can be maimed or killed as well). The death of the bull is extended and painful, making it unnecessarily cruel. The argument that the bullfighter kills the bull efficiently is clearly questionable, if anything, the customs of the spectacle demand that the animals death is drawn out, rather than quick. People who are for bullfighting play down the amount of bulls killed, but figures gathered by animal rights groups suggest that 2,500 bulls are killed in Portugal each year and in Spain the figure is closer to 30,000. Smoother, economical and with a new seating design and layout, the new Airbus 330-900neo aircraft is being flown by TAP pilots on a round-the-world series of test flights, before the company starts to take delivery of the first of 53 aircraft on order. A batch of 14 aircraft, ordered in 2016 from the Toulouse-based manufacturer, is heralded by an A330-900neo which was delivered to TAP in April, after test flights in France, in March. This aircraft now is off around the world, flying in TAP livery with Portuguese crew members on board. The aircraft is being tested during a grueling schedule to check the aircraft has no teething problems. Starting in Lisbon the A330neo is off to Rio de Janeiro, returning to the Lisbon and then off to Sao Paulo, Recife and Miami. By the end of June, the A330neo will continue its test flight programme by flying to Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Mauritius. Finally, on the last stage, the new TAP plane flies to New Delhi, Reykjavik, Chicago and Atlanta and then goes back to the Airbus factory in Toulouse for analysis. Antonoaldo Neves, TAPs Chief Executive, commented that, the new A330neo, which will soon join our fleet, marks yet another important milestone in the plan to transform TAP into the company with one of the most modern fleets in the world. It allows us to continue to affirm Portugal as the Atlantic hub for air transport and TAP as a relevant player between Europe, Africa and the Americas, contributing to the economic growth and development of Tourism in our country. This aircraft is part of a series of rolling contracts with Airbus which is to supply TAP with one A320neo, two A321neo and one A330neo this year. In 2019 the French, German, English and Spanish company will supply three A320neo, three A321neo, two A321LR and six A330neo as TAP upgrades it tired fleet. The Portuguese airline will be the first operator in the world to fly a new A330-900 neo which is equipped with newly designed AirSpace cabin interiors, passengers, as well as TAP crew members, will benefit from a new travel experience provided by this innovative cockpit design encompassing comfort, environment, service and design, says TAP. The new A330 has the latest generation Rolls-Royce Trent 7000 engines and improved aerodynamics to give fuel reductions of 14% per seat, making this model the most efficient wide-body airplane and able to carry a maximum of 440 passengers per flight. TAP owners David Neeleman and Humberto Pedroso pledged to upgrade the companys fleet when their Atlantic Gateway company successfully was chosen to bring TAP into the current century. 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. OPEC ministers arrived in Vienna Tuesday for crunch talks on whether to reverse a landmark pact curbing oil output, with Iran pushing back against Saudi and Russian calls to ramp up production again. The upcoming June 22-23 meetings of OPEC and non-OPEC energy ministers are set to be the most contentious in a while, with several countries bristling at the thought of reversing a deal that has been in place for 18 months and helped lift oil prices to multi-year highs. Resistance is being led by Iran, deeply wary of any move by regional rival Saudi Arabia that could push down oil prices at a time when Tehran faces renewed sanctions following US President Donald Trumps decision to quit its international nuclear deal, which is likely to impact the countrys oil exports. However Riyadh, which cheered Washingtons exit from the nuclear deal, is under pressure from its US ally to boost output as Trump hopes to keep pump prices low ahead of Novembers mid-term elections. Youre dealing with a very political situation, analyst Amrita Sen of Energy Aspects told AFP. Upon arriving at his Vienna hotel, Irans oil minister said his country wouldnt back down, and lashed out at Trump for trying to politicise OPEC. I dont believe in this meeting we can reach agreement, Bijan Namdar Zanganeh told reporters. He said Trump was partly to blame for the higher oil prices, saying the US leader had created difficulty for the oil market by imposing sanctions on Venezuela and Iran. And now he expects OPEC to change something for better prices, Zanganeh said. This is not fair OPEC is not part of the Department of Energy of the United States. Geopolitical tensions The 14-nation OPEC cartel and its 10 non-member partner nations, including Russia, together account for more than 50 percent of the worlds oil supply, giving them huge sway over the global market. The so-called OPEC+ group agreed a milestone deal to trim production from January 2017 by 1.8 million barrels a day to clear a global oil glut and shore up low prices. The strategy paid off, with prices jumping from below $30 a barrel in early 2016 to more than $70 in the second quarter of 2018. The pact was meant to run until the end of this year. But a collapse in oil production in crisis-hit Venezuela and the prospect of fresh Iranian sanctions have raised fears of a supply crunch that could send prices spiking. As recently as April however, Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh had voiced support for the oil cut deal, saying the market had the capacity to absorb higher prices. But Trump made it clear he disagrees. Oil prices are too high, OPEC is at it again. Not good! he tweeted last week. Observers believe Trump is dialling up the pressure on Riyadh because he wants to offset the expected drop in Iranian production. In Russia meanwhile, private oil companies are finding it increasingly difficult to justify the cutbacks to shareholders eager to cash in on the higher prices. For technical reasons, any decision to ramp up output also has to be timed not to coincide with Russias harsh winter, meaning the next OPEC meeting in November would come too late. Russias Energy Minister Alexander Novak pleaded in favour of unwinding the supply-cut pact on Tuesday, citing growing global demand in the months ahead. In the third quarter the demand for oil is the highest, so one can expect a shortage in the market if measures are not taken, Novak told Russian news agencies before leaving for Vienna. To raise or not to raise Iran is not alone in its battle against output hikes, with Iraq and Venezuela also objecting. They stand to lose if production is increased, said SEB bank analyst Bjarne Schieldrop. According to the International Energy Agency, only a handful of countries in the OPEC+ alliance are realistically able to boost production in the short term. That includes top supplier Saudi Arabia, its Gulf allies Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, and Russia. For most of the others it would make more sense to stick to the restrictions and sell their limited supply at a higher price. Since OPEC operates on the principle of unanimity, analysts expect some sort of compromise agreement to be thrashed out by Saturday. War is war, business is business, said Sen, noting that OPEC ministers have proved before that they are able to set aside geopolitical differences. js-mfp/pvh US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross held assets for much of last year that created conflicts of interest and has since transferred ownership to a family trust instead of divesting outright, Forbes reported Monday. Days before coming under negative media scrutiny last year, Ross shorted stocks in a company tied to Russian President Vladimir Putins inner circle in a way that would have let the commerce chief benefit from falling share prices, according to the magazine. The Commerce Department told AFP that, along with the US Office of Government Ethics, it had certified that the transactions at issue were in compliance with legal requirements. The secretary continues to follow the guidance of Department of Commerce ethics officials to ensure compliance with federal laws and regulations, the agency said in a statement. Citing previously undisclosed reports Ross filed with the ethics office, the magazine said Ross had sold some assets to the investment bank Goldman Sachs. But he moved others to a family trust, leaving his familys wealth tied to China, Russia and others he dealt with as commerce secretary, according to the report. These assets included a stake in a shipping company and an auto parts company, both of which stood to be directly affected by Washingtons escalating trade dispute and both of which are co-owned by the Chinese government, according to Forbes. In October and November, as journalists working on the Panama Papers revelations were preparing to expose Rosss stake in Navigator Holdings, a shipping firm whose owners include Putins son-in-law, Ross sold his shares in the company, according to Forbes. He then opened a short position in the company, meaning that if its share price went down, he would profit, the magazine said. In November, the magazine removed Ross from its billionaires list, saying he had inflated his personal fortune for more than a decade. An extremist who plotted a suicide attack on British Prime Minister Theresa May wanted to decapitate her in a bomb and knife assault, a court heard Tuesday. Naaimur Zakariyah Rahman, 20, allegedly wanted to make big news by storming Downing Street as May spoke outside her office. Rahman was fully prepared to die in the attack, Englands Old Bailey central criminal court in London heard. He was arrested in November last year. Before his arrest prevented it, he was, he believed, just days away from his objective, which was no less than a suicide attack, by blade and explosion, on Downing Street and, if he could, upon the Prime Minister Theresa May herself, said prosecutor Mark Heywood. In a chat with an undercover security service agent on the Telegram messaging app, Rahman said: I want to do a suicide bomb on parliament. I want to attempt to kill Theresa May. Rahman continued: My objective is to take out my target. Nothing less than the death of the leaders of parliament. He told an undercover police officer that he would make a 10-second sprint for the door of 10 Downing Street, with his main objective to take her head off. Rahman carried out reconnaissance around the entrance to Downing Street, the court heard. He gave a rucksack to the undercover police officer to be fitted with explosives, jurors were told. The defendant is also accused of helping his friend Mohammad Aqib Imran, 22, join the Islamic State jihadist group in Syria by recording a sponsorship video. The pair Heywood said the two men shared the warped ideology of Islamic State. Rahman denies denied two counts of preparing terrorist acts. Imran has pleaded not guilty to preparing terrorist acts and possessing a terrorist document entitled How To Survive In The West A Mujahids Guide 2015. Dutch judges Tuesday threw out a bid by British expatriates to take a landmark case demanding rights as EU citizens after Brexit to Europe's top court. The Amsterdam appeals court found in favour of the Dutch government, ruling the claims brought by the expats too vague to go before the European Court of Justice. In what was believed to be the first such case as Britain prepares to leave the European Union next year, five Britons living in the Netherlands and two expat organisations took the government to court in January. They had argued that by living in the EU for so long they had acquired independent rights as EU citizens, over and above being citizens of any specific EU member country including Britain. But lawyer Erik Pijnacker Hordijk, representing the Dutch government, told the appeals court in April their case was groundless and should be ruled as inadmissible. The Amsterdam court agreed with the lower court that the position of Britons living in the EU after Brexit was a matter of EU law. But it said the issues raised by the group were not concrete enough to be submitted to the European court, and it therefore overturns the earlier judgement and denies the request. Everybody is extremely disappointed, the groups lawyer Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm told AFP. We will study the decision before deciding what to do next, but it could mean either going to the Dutch Supreme Court (Hoge Raad) or starting a new more in-depth procedure before the courts. One of the plaintiffs, Stephen Huyton, said: Im feeling really deflated. But he said he had felt the case was not going their way at the appeal as the judges focused on very narrow areas. Their lawyers would now see what proposals there are, but it leaves the situation very unclear, Huyton told AFP. Currently, about 46,000 Brits live in the Netherlands and the Dutch state had argued in April that there was no reason to believe they will run a serious risk of being told to leave the country. But the group insisted their legal rights as EU citizens including freedom of movement should remain and be protected by the Netherlands even after Britain withdraws from the 28-member body at midnight on March 29, 2019. Had the matter proceeded to the European court based in Luxembourg, it could have had far-reaching implications for the estimated one million Britons who live on the continent. Do Brits lose EU rights? Lower court judge Floris Bakels in February asked the European Court of Justice to answer two preliminary questions: Does Brexit mean that Britons automatically lose their European citizenship or do they maintain their rights, and if so, under what conditions? The issue was also raised in April in the Dutch lower house of parliament with a special round table between MPs and expats to discuss the ramifications of Brexit. The groups lawyer remained upbeat. Although it was overturned, I am still convinced that this question will eventually end up before the European Court of Justice, Alberdingk Thijm said. Tuesdays ruling came just after Britains House of Lords inflicted another defeat on the government of Prime Minister Theresa May, setting up a fresh parliamentary showdown. Unelected peers in the upper house voted by 354 to 235 to support a rebel amendment on the role the British parliament should play, giving MPs another vote, if the government fails to secure a deal with the European Union before Britain leaves the bloc. Payment systems giant Visa said Tuesday that a massive technical glitch earlier this month had affected 5.2 million card transactions, almost half of which were in Britain. Visa, revealing the details in a letter to a British parliamentary committee that is probing the matter, said the rare disruption prevented many cardholders form making payments in Europe for 10 hours on Friday June 1. And the company apologised unreservedly for the failure and outlined plans for a compensation scheme. Overall, for cards issued both in the UK and elsewhere 51.2 million Visa transactions were initiated and sent to Visas European systems for processing, wrote Visa Europe chief executive Charlotte Hogg. Of these, 5.2 million failed to process correctly, she added in the letter to Treasury Select Committee chair Nicky Morgan. The outage was caused by a very rare partial failure of a switch in one of Visas data centres, Hogg added. It has since been fixed. Visa said there were 27.6 million transactions made in the UK during the disruption, of which 2.4 million failed to process properly. At its peak, the disruption affected people in the midst of returning home from work, socialising in restaurants and pubs, and doing end-of-day shopping, Hogg said in the letter published Tuesday. We take seriously our important role in supporting financial stability in the UK. A disruption to our processing that impacts consumers at any time is unacceptable, let alone during a busy Friday afternoon, she added. We apologise again unreservedly to everyone who was affected by the incident, Hogg said. Visa, together with our financial institution partners, has quickly implemented a compensation programme for cardholders. rfj/bcp/ser SEGUIN Dozens of half-built engines, more than twice the size of a car engine, stand in a row. They slowly roll ahead on a conveyor belt, stopping periodically as workers run quality checks, install fuel lines and tighten bolts with power wrenches. These engines, ranging in size from nine to 18 liters, are used in generators, oil and gas operations and industrial applications. Nearly three out of four of them are heading out of the country to foreign markets. The Caterpillar plant, its engines and the 2,000 people who work here are reminders of the stakes involved as the trade conflict between the United States, China and other countries escalates with new rounds of tariffs and retaliatory actions. Caterpillar is part of a broader heavy machinery and equipment manufacturing industry in Texas that employs about 90,000 people and shipped more than $40 billion in industrial machinery to international buyers last year, making it the states second leading export after petroleum and accounting for 16 percent of all Texas exports. Many of our Texas member companies are multinational, they operate all over the world, said Tony Bennett, chief executive of the Texas Association of Manufacturers as he considered rising trade barriers. We will not go unscathed. Fears are growing about the impact of a wider trade war with adversaries and allies alike as the Trump administration moves to alter U.S. trade policies, slapping steep tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum on which manufacturers across Texas and the United States rely and threatening to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. Stock and commodity markets around the world sold off Tuesday, a day after President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese products, and up to $400 billion if China retaliates. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average fell for the sixth straight session, shedding 287 points or about 1 percent to close at 24,700, while oil also lost more that 1 percent to settle at $65.07 a barrel. Caterpillar shares lost nearly 4 percent. Caterpillar is considered a bellwether of the global economy because of its vast international reach and last year earned more than half of its $45 billion in revenues from foreign sales. Caterpillar spokeswoman Rachel Potts said the company is assessing the potential impact of changing trade policies and lobbying the Trump administration to reconsider recent moves that could make it harder for U.S. companies to sell into foreign markets. Right now, is there a level of geopolitical uncertainty in the world that could impact us? Yes, Potts said. Are we engaged on all of those talks? Yes. The Trump administration has done much to create that uncertainty, last week announcing it would go forward with that 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods from tires to ship turbines to can sealing machines starting in July. China immediately retaliated, readying tariffs of a similar scale on U.S. agricultural and other products These moves came just weeks after the Trump administration added Canada, Mexico and the European Union to the list of trading partners getting hit with tariffs on steel, again provoking retaliatory actions. For the time being, the brewing trade war is expected to have a small impact on the U.S. economy, which is driven by domestic spending. Exports account for about 13 percent of the goods and services produced in the United States, according to the Commerce Department. Still, trade disruptions could hurt specific industries, such as those that import lower-cost foreign steel, raise prices for consumers and slow the economic expansion. And few states have as much at stake in the trade conflict as Texas. Texas sells more goods in international markets that any other state, exporting some $265 billion in products in 2017, according to the Commerce Department. Texas also imported one-sixth of all foreign steel coming into the United States, also more than any other state, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. Canada, Mexico and China are Texas top export markets, and already the prospect of deteriorating trade relations is creating uncertainty that is leading companies to delay investments and hiring, said Bennett of the Texas Association of Manufacturers. If youre exporting out of Texas, particularly to Mexico and Canada, you cant really make any plans for plant expansion, plant location, Bennett said. It puts everybody in a holding pattern and is not an efficient way of doing business in a global economy. Caterpillar employs about 4,000 employees in Texas, spread across more than 20 facilities in the state, including San Antonio and Schertz. The Seguin plant, built in 2010 for $170 million, is one of the largest employers in this city of 29,000. The Guadalupe County Appraisal district estimates that in 2018 the Seguin Independent School District could bring in as much as $1.5 million in taxes from the plant, accounting for about 5 percent of the $31 million in property taxes Seguin ISD said it would collect for its 2017-2018 budget. Seguin has come to rely heavily on manufacturing, with city data showing 27 percent of its workforce in manufacturing. Other major manufacturers include German automotive parts manufacturer Continental AG and Seguin agriculture equipment maker Alamo Group. Rye Druzin is a San Antonio Express-News energy reporter. Read more of his stories here. | rdruzin@express-news.net | @druz_journo The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed civil charges and obtained an asset freeze against a San Antonio investment adviser and others involved in an alleged $102 million Ponzi scheme. John Piccarreto of San Antonio and four others bilked at least 637 investors through the sale of securities in three companies they controlled, the SEC alleges in a federal lawsuit filed in New York. The three companies also are named in the suit. The SEC alleges in its lawsuit that of the $102 million raised by the defendants, at least $38.5 million was paid out in Ponzi payments. A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to earlier investors from money contributed by new investors. At least $20 million was transferred to the personal bank accounts of Piccarreto and the four other individual defendants, the SEC alleges. Piccarreto stole at least $1.3 million, the suit says. A large portion of the remaining funds was transferred elsewhere in transactions that appear to be unrelated to the defendants purported businesses, the SEC adds in the lawsuit. Piccarreto was a registered investment adviser in 2014 and 2015 but was suspended for two years by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority almost a year ago for participating in the unregistered offering of securities and for making misleading statements to FINRA, the suit says. Piccarreto, who is either 34 or 35, couldnt immediately be located for comment. The San Antonio Express-News was not able to confirm he lives in San Antonio, as the SEC reported. The other individual defendants are Perry Santillo and Christopher Parris, both of Rochester, New York; Paul LaRocco of Ocala, Florida, and Thomas Brenner of Orville, Ohio. The three companies named in the suit are First Nationle Solution LLC, United RL Capital Services and Percipience Global Corp. All are accused of violating federal securities laws. A federal court will hold a hearing in 10 days concerning the asset freeze and a preliminary injunction. We allege the investors engaged in a massive fraud and swindled investors to line their pockets with ill-gotten gains,Marc Berger, director of the SECs New York office, said in a statement. The suit alleges Santillo used some of the $13.4 million he stole to fund a jet-setting lifestyle. He threw himself a party at a Las Vegas nightclub and commissioned a song about himself to be played at the party, the suit adds. The lyrics refer to King Perry who wears a ten-thousand-dollar suit everywhere he ride. They lyrics reference his lifestyle, too, the SEC adds: Pop the champagne in L.A., New York and Florida; buy another bottle just to spray it all over ya. Piccarreto, the suit says, convinced an 80-year-old Austin investor with dementia to invest $250,000 in Percipience in 2015. Piccarreto later took $21,500 and Santillo took $172,800 of the investment, the suit says. Two years later, the investors daughter expressed concern about her fathers investments. Piccarreto falsely responded in an email, the SEC says. I know this is scary for you and you are just looking out for your dad but I promise you I will not let anything happen to any of the money, his email stated, according to the lawsuit. The investor never received any of his money back. The SEC seeks a court order directing the defendants to turn over any illicit proceeds from the alleged scheme. It also wants them to pay unspecified civil penalties. Patrick Danner is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD Jamas nos callaran Fisica y culturalmente Nec plus ultra, nec variatur Precio del Brent To get the BRENT oil price, please enable Javascript. Precio del WTI To get the oil price, please enable Javascript. Paginas vistas en total Dolar USA Vs Euro Sin ellas, no seremos Deja vu Nada que celebrar Hasta cuando? Colombia Hoy Para nunca olvidar 'Parasite' painted on a statue of Queen, Elizabeth in Kent, England Sin palabras La UE le apunta a la paz Cada vez mas solo Precio del Oro To get the gold price, please enable Javascript. LULA y su Pueblo Bye Bye Homenaje al genial Quino Fueron ellos Una imagen que resume Tan bajo ha caido que se deja tocar el trasero? Porky y el Nene (archiconocido narcotraficante) Ladrones al poder Asi mira el perrito a su amo Crazy Clamor popular La nueva inquisicion Bolivia Chile Hoy Eso es todo amigos! Piensalo! Pinerachet No More Trump Adios Macri, hasta nunca La Marioneta se desinfla Asi o mas cinico Almugre Mexico en 1794 Mas arrastrado imposible Hasta cuando! La pura verdad Solidaridad con Palestina Serie Capitalismo Espejismos de la clase trabajadora Asi es! Comerciantes o delincuentes No pasaran! Asi es la vida USA HOY 01/01/1959 La avaricia no tiene limites AYUDA HUMANITARIA? Chile Hoy Asi son las cosas Mapa Electoral de Venezuela Patagonia argentina? Un aniversario mas del mayor genocidio de la Humanidad Retrato del franquismo en Espana Visca Catalunya! El Chulo de Madrid Cuando la policia se roba la democracia Una imagen dice mas que mil palabras La purita verdad Asi gobierna la maldita burguesia Mi pobre clase media Como Chavez nadie Comparte La Colmena via twitter Twittear Programa de la MUD Asi o mas clarito Por que Trump no ataco Corea del Norte? Hace 15 anos Por que la OEA no se pronuncio? Una verguenza nacional La luz que nos guia La Union Europea Premio Nobel de la Paz? Feudalismo ayer y hoy Obama, el mentiroso Curiosa coincidencia Un mundo de cerdos No es extrano? La Marioneta Los ricos protestan, los pobres celebran MARICORI Y OBAMA Cuantas muertes este ano? 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Por culpa de Chavez Cerveza Polar Algun dia Colombia volvera a la ideologia de Bolivar Translate LOS REVOLUCIONARIOS NO TOMAN CACA-COLA No se trata solamente de un capricho, sino de una sana actitud en todos los sentidos. Desde la solidaridad con el pueblo colombiano donde la empresa Caca-Cola ha cometido los mas grandes abusos contra sus trabajadores incluyendo el presunto secuestro y asesinato de los dirigentes del sindicato, hasta la proteccion de la salud de nuestros hijos, enviciados por ese jarabe de cola y azucar, que les produce obesidad prematura. Pensemos tambien los revolucionarios, que ese dinero que gastamos en los refrescos es utilizado por esas empresas para financiar el terrorismo en nuestro pais. Es cierto, no se trata solo de la Caca-Cola, sino tambien de la cerveza, de los cigarrillos y todos esos articulos innecesarios y mas que eso, daninos para nuestra salud. Podriamos incluso pensar en un dia de parada para cada uno de ellos. Es cuestion de irnos organizando. Pero para empezar, que tal si dejamos de comprar Caca-Cola y sus similares? Cuando lo extraordinario se vuelve cotidiano... Discurso del Acto de Grado en Barinas en 12 de Febrero del 2005 Queridos Graduandos: Mas que un discurso, quiero dirigirles algunas palabras que escribi anoche, despues de visitar en las clinicas, a los estudiantes heridos, a consecuencia de los enfrentamientos con la policia de hace apenas dos dias. Me ha tocado por razones del destino, ser la persona que les otorgue el titulo que bien merecieron con sus estudios. Y me siento sumamente orgulloso de serlo. Me consta que la Universidad de Los Llanos Occidentales Ezequiel Zamora, a pesar de lo dicho por los enemigos de esta universidad, es una universidad de primera. No tendremos la mejor planta fisica, en los salones hace calor. En el comedor hace calor. Pero no es en lo material que las cosas deben valorarse. El mayor capital es el ser humano. Y en eso, nuestra UNELLEZ, lo digo con conocimiento de causa, esta sobrada. Los llaneros venezolanos son nobles, valientes, de coraje. En la UNELLEZ hacen vida, en este momento, aproximadamente 67000 personas. El 97% de ellas son estudiantes. Jovenes que, como Ustedes hasta el dia de hoy, buscan ese titulo, que constata los anos de dedicacion y de estudio. Los jovenes son el rio de la vida, ustedes graduados deben ser los capitanes de esos barcos que naveguen por el rio de la vida. Nuestra Patria atraviesa momentos muy dificiles porque decidio dejar de ser esa matrona de edad vetusta y complaciente, para ser joven, rebelde y altanera. Nuestra imagen ya no es la de una acaudalada ricachona mayamera. En nuestro rostro brilla ahora la sonrisa del Che Guevara, con su diente delantero torcido, su pelo largo y su boina con la estrella. Entender esto, a mi me ha tomado practicamente toda la vida. Tengo 53 anos, y ya perdi mi oportunidad de derramar sangre joven a causa de un ideal. Ustedes son jovenes, estan en la flor de la vida. No cometan por favor el error de renunciar a su instinto de rebelion. El Che Guevara fue Ministro de a Economia en Cuba. Los billetes y las monedas se adornaban con su rostro. Nada de eso le importo. Primero fue a Angola donde paso un penoso ano de combate. Despues se fue a Bolivia, donde encontro la muerte. El Che era el ultimo que comia, el que cargaba la mochila mas pesada. Siempre se sacrificaba por los demas en un estoicismo que mas parecia fervor religioso que ideologia marxista. Si quieren un modelo de vida. Ahi lo tienen. Dije hace unos momentos que el 97% de la poblacion de la UNELLEZ es estudiante. Se imaginan Ustedes la Universidad que podriamos tener si todos los estudiantes tuvieran la abnegacion, la combatividad del Che? Los momentos que se avecinan van a requerir de una gran unidad del pueblo venezolano. La alternativa de continuar siendo libres o regresar a la pobreza se nos planteara en los proximos dias de forma enmascarada, o quizas peor, desenmascarada, vestida con uniforme de soldado del Imperio. Por nuestra parte podemos esperar lo mejor. La macroeconomia no podria ir mejor, la justicia social ha mejorado notablemente. Las misiones ocupan un papel muy importante en el pago de dicha justicia social. Aqui en Barinas ya hemos cumplido con dos de las misiones, la mision Robinson y la mision Sucre. No hay analfabetismo y no hay exclusion en la educacion superior, en estas tierras de Zamora. Pero ay malhaya! Son precisamente estos exitos los que nos hacen mas antipaticos al Imperio. Para ellos, somos inclusive un mal ejemplo que se esta contagiando al resto del continente y cuidado sino al resto del mundo. Nunca venceremos al Imperio. Estara siempre ahi, acechando. Por lo menos hasta que el mismo no se autodestruya. Porque, sepanlo senores, el neoliberalismo es canibal. Cuando le ataque el hambre, se devorara a si mismo. Ustedes, queridos graduandos, a partir de hoy pasan a conformar la elite profesional que debe sostener este pais en los proximos cuarenta o cincuenta anos. Anos decisivos para el logro de nuestra libertad y del rescate de nuestra Soberania. No se dejen comprar. No se dejen corromper. No se dejen gritar. No se dejen pisar. Que nadie les diga que comer, o que vestirse, o que leer. Sean siempre autenticos, rebeldes, contestatarios. Pero eso si, profundamente patriotas, dignos de ser hijos de Bolivar. Muchas gracias y que Dios los bendiga. Alguna duda? Medio siglo de Holocausto Palestino Oscar Zanartu Nacio en Caracas en 1960. Ha realizado exposiciones individuales en las galerias Minotauro, Clave y San Francisco, y en salas de Coro, estado Falcon, y Puerto Ordaz, estado Bolivar. En Paris su obra ha sido exhibida en el Centro Cultural Tanagra, en la Exposicion Cite Internationale des Arts, en las galerias De Mars y Arver Space, al igual que en la Galeria Municipal Levallois, en Levallois Perret (Francia). En muestras colectivas, su obra se ha expuesto en Belgica, Francia, Estados Unidos y Venezuela; en Caracas intervino en la exposicion "Del genesis a la memoria", 1995, organizada por la Fundacion La Previsora. En 1982 obtuvo el Premio Nacional Critven y en 1990 la Mencion de Honor Jose Antonio Paez, en la Embajada de Venezuela en Paris. En 1991 se le concedio el primer premio de Pintura Itinerante, en Levallois Perret, Francia. OZ1 OZ2 OZ3 OZ4 Homenaje a Jason Galarraga La Victoria de Samotracia Odalisca Mas fotos de la nevada del pasado agosto 2008 La Sierra Nevada de Merida Nuestro precioso Churum Meru Homenaje a Picasso Autoretrato Sabes lo que bebes en una Coca-Cola? La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar. Mi profesion? Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos. Sal en la Coca Cola? A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar. De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla: Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gusto Acido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido) azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa) Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantas Mucha Cafeina Conservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o Potasio Dioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebe Sal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracion El uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja. Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos. Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja. En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero). Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma. La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate. Bebidas Light? Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal. Publicado por loretahur En realidad, la formula secreta de la Coca-Cola se puede detallar en 18 segundos en cualquier espectrometro optico, y basicamente la conocen hasta los perros. Lo que ocurre es que no se puede fabricar igual, a no ser que uno disponga de unos cuantos millones de dolares para ganarle la demanda que te metera la Coca-Cola ante la justicia (ellos no perderian).La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gustoAcido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantasMucha CafeinaConservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o PotasioDioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebeSal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracionEl uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el aspartamo , despues de tres semanas mojado, pasa a tener gusto de trapo viejo sucio.Para evitar eso, se agregan una infinidad de otros productos quimicos, uno para alargar la vida del aspartamo, otro para neutralizar el color, otro para mantener el tercer quimico en suspension porque sino el fondo de la gaseosa quedaria oscuro, otro para evitar la cristalizacion del aspartamo, otro para realzar el sabor, dar mas intensidad al acido citrico o fosforito que perderia su sabor por el efecto de los cuatro productos quimicos iniciales... y asi sucesivamente.Un consejo final !!Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.Publicado por loretahur MARGARINA o MANTEQUILLA La margarina fue producida originalmente para engordar a los pavos; cuandolo que hizo en realidad fue matarlos.Las personas que habian puesto el dinero para la investigacion quisieronrecobrarlo asi que empezaron a pensar en una forma de hacerlo.Tenian una sustancia blanca, que no tenia ningun atractivo como comestible,asi que le anadieron el color amarillo, para venderselo a lagente en lugar de la mantequilla.Que tal esa?... Ahora han sacado algunos nuevos sabores para vender mas alos incautos como usted y yo.CONOCE USTED la diferencia entre la margarina y la mantequilla?Siga leyendo hasta el final... porque se pone bastante interesante!Comparacion entre mantequilla y margarina: 1.- Ambas tienen la misma cantidad de calorias. 2.- La mantequilla es ligeramente mas alta en grasas saturadas: 8 gramos,comparada con los 5 gramos que tiene la margarina. 3.- Comer margarina en vez de mantequilla puede aumentar en 53% el riesgo deenfermedades coronarias en las mujeres, de acuerdo con un estudiomedico reciente de la Universidad de Harvard. 4.- Comer mantequilla aumenta la absorcion de gran cantidad de nutrientesque se encuentran en otros alimentos. 5.- La mantequilla provee beneficios nutricionales propios mientras lamargarina tiene solo los que le hayan sido anadidos al fabricarla. 6.- La mantequilla sabe mucho mejor que la margarina y mejora el sabor deotros alimentos.7.- La mantequilla ha existido durante siglos mientras que la margarinatiene menos de 100 anos. Ahora... sobre la margarina: 1.- Es muy alta en acidos grasos trans. (Si, esos que recien ahora loscientificos descubrieron que son malisimos y los gobiernoscomenzaron a prohibirlos) . 2.- Triple riesgo de enfermedades coronarias. 3.- Aumenta el colesterol total y el LDL (el colesterol malo) y disminuye elHDL (el colesterol bueno). 4.- Aumenta en cinco veces el riesgo de cancer. 5.- Disminuye la calidad de la leche materna. 6.- Disminuye la reaccion inmunologica del organismo. 7.- Disminuye la reaccion a la insulina. Y he aqui el factor mas inquietante (AQUI ESTA LA PARTE MAS INTERESANTE! ):A la margarina le falta UNA MOLECULA para ser PLASTICO...!!Solo este hecho es suficiente para evitar el uso de la margarina de porvida, y de cualquier otra cosa que sea hidrogenada (esto significaque se le anade hidrogeno, lo cual cambia la estructura molecular de lassubstancias).Usted puede ensayar lo siguiente:Compre un poco de margarina y dejela en el garaje o en un sitio sombreado.Dentro de unos dias notara dos cosas: * No habra moscas; ni siquiera esos molestos bichos se le acercaran (esto yale debe decir a usted algo). * No se pudre ni huele mal o diferente porque no tiene valor nutritivo; nadacrece en ella. Ni siquiera los diminutos microorganismos puedencrecer en ella.Por que? Porque es casi plastico!! No a la guerra, Si a la Paz Misterios de la ciencia... Los costos de la guerra medicos y capitalismo... Capitalismo... medicos (2) Quien educa a nuestros hijos? Los Medios... Sin Palabras... Chistes feministas - Cual es el problema, Eva? - Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz... - Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas. - Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas... - Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti. - Que es un hombre? - Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente. - Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente. - Cual es el truco?. - Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion. - Cual? - Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer. Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas? Porque todos son unos cerdos Un dia, en el Paraiso, Eva llamo a Dios: Tengo un problema.- Cual es el problema, Eva?- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz... - Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.- Que es un hombre?- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.- Cual es el truco?.- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.- Cual?- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas? Porque todos son unos cerdos Ellas... Ellas (2)... Tres venganzas femeninas VENGANZA NUMERO 1 Hoy mi hija cumple 21 anos y estoy muy contento porque es el ultimo pago de pension alimenticia que le doy, asi que llame a mi hijita para que viniera a mi casa y cuando llego le dije: -Hijita, quiero que lleves este cheque a casa de tu mama y que le digas que: Este es el ultimo maldito cheque que va recibir de mi en todo lo que le queda de su puta vida!!! Quiero que me digas la expresion que pone en su rostro. Asi que mi hija fue a entregar el cheque. Yo estaba ansioso por saber lo que la bruja tenia que decir y que cara pondria. Cuando mi hijita entro, le pregunte inmediatamente: -Que fue lo que te dijo tu madre? -Me dijo que justamente estaba esperando este dia para decirte que no eres mi papa! VENGANZA NUMERO 2 Un hombre que siempre molestaba a su mujer, paso un dia por la casa de unos amigos para que lo acompanaran al aeropuerto a dejar a su esposa que viajaba a Paris. A la salida de inmigracion, frente a todo el mundo, el le desea buen viaje y en tono burlon le grita: - Amor, no te olvides de traerme una hermosa francesita Ja ja ja!! Ella bajo la cabeza y se embarco muy molesta. La mujer paso quince dias en Francia. El marido otra vez pidio a sus amigos que lo acompanasen al aeropuerto a recibirla. Al verla llegar, lo primero que le grita a toda voz es: - Y amor me trajiste mi francesita?? - Hice todo lo posible, - contesta ella - ahora solo tenemos que rezar para que nazca nina. VENGANZA NUMERO 3 El marido, en su lecho de muerte, llama a su mujer. Con voz ronca y ya debil, le dice: - Muy bien, llego mi hora, pero antes quiero hacerte una confesion. - No, no, tranquilo, tu no debes hacer ningun esfuerzo. - Pero, mujer, es preciso - insiste el marido - Es preciso morir en paz. Te quiero confesar algo. - Esta bien, esta bien. Habla! - He tenido relaciones con tu hermana, tu mama y tu mejor amiga. - Lo se, lo se Por eso te envenene, hijo de puta!!! machismo y cibernetica Chiste machista La NASA ha enviado al espacio una mision experimental tripulada por dos monos y una mujer.Apenas abandona la atmosfera, se establece comunicacion con Houston. -Atencion, simio 1, verifique sistemas hidraulicos, controle adecuada presion de los propulsores de arranque. A 60.000 pies disminuya un 25% la velocidad. El simio hace la sena de OK. -Atencion, simio 2, nivele al cruzar la estratosfera y active sistemas anticongelantes. No olvide monitorear sistemas de comunicacion e indicadores de presion. Comprendido?. El simio hace la sena de OK. -Atencion, Houston llamando a mujer: no se olvide. -Mujer: Si, si, ya se! -interrumpe enojada- que no me olvide darles de comer a estos monos de mierda y que no se me vaya a ocurrir tocar nada!. .Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti. Un abogado mantiene un romance con su secretaria.Al poco tiempo, esta queda embarazada y el abogado, que no quiere que su esposa se entere, le da a la secretaria una buena suma de dinero y le pide que se vaya a parir a Italia.Esta pregunta: Y como voy a hacerte saber cuando nazca el bebe ? El abogado responde: Para que mi mujer no se entere, tan solo enviame una postal y escribe por detras: Spaghetti. Y no te preocupes mas, que yo me encargare de todos los gastos. Pasan los meses y una manana la esposa del abogado lo llama al bufete, algo exaltada: Querido, acabo de recibir el correo y hay una postal muy extrana viene desde Italia. La verdad, no entiendo que significa.El abogado, tratando de ocultar sus nervios, contesta:Espera a que llegue a casa, a ver si yo entiendoCuando el hombre llega a casa y lee la postal, cae al suelo fulminado por un infarto.Llega una ambulancia y se lo lleva. Ya en el hospital, el jefe de cardiologia se queda consolando a la esposa y le pregunta cual ha sido el evento que precipito tan masivo ataque cardiaco. Entonces la esposa saca la postal y se la muestra diciendole: No me explico, doctor; el solamente leyo esta postal. Vea usted mismo lo que trae escrito.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti."Tres con salchicha y albondigas y dos con almejas Gol !!!! Chistes de Borrachos Entra un borracho a su casa todo manchado con lapiz labial por todos lados hecho un desastre, y la mujer le pregunta:-Hombre que te paso?Y el borracho le responde:-No me vas a creer, me pelee con un payaso! Este es un borracho que entra en un bar y le dice al camarero:-Me da cinco copas de whisky?Al rato:-Me da cuatro?Al rato:-Me da tres copas?Despues:-Me da dos copas?Luego le dice:-Me da una copa?Y le dice al camarero:-Ves? Cuanto menos bebo, mas borracho estoy! BROWNSVILLE It was a small room in a shelter, with colorful walls of cartoon animals and the alphabet. There was an 8-month-old, Roger, and a 1-year-old, Leah, giggling with other infants in high chairs. It was just heartbreaking. They look at you with big eyes, U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-New Mexico, said Monday afternoon after a congressional roundtable here. Seeing baby Roger there, it really got me. The room of infants was in Casa El Presidente, one of two children immigrant shelters that members of Congress from across the country from Mississippi to New Mexico, Florida to Texas toured Monday afternoon to get a firsthand look at the separation of immigrant families along the U.S.-Mexico border. RELATED: Ayala: For some, refuge is worth child separation About 2,000 children have been placed in shelters since the Trump administration announced a zero tolerance policy last month on illegal entry into the country and began charging their immigrant parents with criminal violations. The separated children are being held in shelters until they can be placed with relatives or foster parents. The administration says it is enforcing existing law and vows to stand by the policy in the face of widespread criticism from congressional leaders including House Speaker Paul Ryan religious leaders, former first ladies and the U.N. human rights commissioner. After their tours, the lawmakers joined immigration advocates in the roundtable to describe what they observed. Ive spent two days here, said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston. Two days of pain. Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville, who organized Mondays congressional tours of Casa El Presidente and Casa Padre, both Southwest Key Programs shelters, said, What we are experiencing in this country today, what were watching for at least 2,000 children and counting ... is the American dream turning into an American nightmare. RELATED: Listen to children who've just been separated from their parents at the border Manuel Padilla, chief of the Border Patrol sector in the Rio Grande Valley, said Sunday that families with children under age 5 were mostly allowed to stay together. Its a haunting feeling, said U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, referring to the infants in the shelter. I think its strengthened everybodys resolve to do everything we can to change this policy. While pressure increases to end the separations and reunite families as the parents seek asylum, Vela said the administration hasnt announced a clear plan for reunification. Legislation is pending to end the separations, including a late announcement Monday by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz that he would file a bill to double the number of federal judges and require that immigrant families seeking asylum be kept together. RELATED: Democrats howl, Republicans become uneasy over family separations at border RAICES, a statewide nonprofit that provides legal counsel to immigrants, launched a Family Reunification Program this month to take up the task that, according to spokesman Justin Tullius, the government has failed to do. It can be very challenging to find the parent, Tullius said. And weve seen no movement at all on the governments part. Imagine a child thats been released from the shelter and into the community, Tullius said. If their mom or dad is being detained in an immigration camp, and is fighting a complex case before a judge and has no lawyer, you can imagine thats a family that will remain separated because the system is stacked against an asylum seeker. During their 45-minute shelter tour, Jackson Lee and Castro said they each held Roger in their arms. Castro said he talked to Leah as she waddled about the room. Lujan had to step outside of that small room of infants, out of frustration and emotion, he said, for the children. Castro described the facilities as a far cry from caged holding areas in processing centers in McAllen but also spartan, with a lot of uniformity. These centers are buying in bulk. All the boys wore the same dark pants and orange striped shirts. RELATED: DPS, Homeland Security investigating fatal Border Patrol crash Vela said that the living situations are not ideal when were talking about children because the ideal situation is that children are home with their parents. Casa Padre, a converted Walmart, houses nearly 1,500 migrant children, all young boys, Vela said, with only 70 of them having been separated from their parents after crossing the border. Of the 80 boys and girls at Casa El Presidente, he said, 40 of those were separated from their parents. The San Antonio Express-News has reported that Casa Padre had 13 health violations last year and that there were 150 violations across Southwest Key Programs. Vela said three teenage women who arrived at Casa El Presidente pregnant gave birth soon after. They are at the facility now with their U.S. citizen children. Lujan said he inquired about the futures of these women and their children. All that they would tell us, the only answer that was repeated was, once they turn 18, if theyre still detained, they cannot stay together, he said. That was the response that kept coming back. Not much else was offered. Mike Seifert of ACLU Texas, urged lawmakers at the roundtable to fight for more government transparency, including body cameras and other surveillance equipment to keep Border Patrol agents accountable. Several congressmen took notes at his suggestion. Dr. Dolly Lucio, a pediatrician, said infants like Roger and Leah likely suffer from complex trauma trauma suffered before the previous trauma has been resolved, referring to the often harrowing route Central American families take to reach the U.S. Youre immediately creating a mentally unstable adult, even if you reunite them with their parents, she said. Castro said he found himself in a bit of a moral quandary after visiting the facilities. On the one hand, he said he would urge the Southwest Key Programs staffers to get out of the business that is effectively participating in the new family separation policy. But on the other, he said, who would you rather have taking care of these kids? Do you want a for-profit institution or some large defense contractor that comes in here and sets up shop? Silvia Foster-Frau is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | sfosterfrau@express-news.net | Twitter: @SilviaElenaFF Beads of sweat dotted Daniel Winters clean-shaven head as he walked across the land that once held the remains of his ancestors in an overgrown corner of Northeast San Antonio. He squinted in the glare of the morning sun as his niece Melanie Winters Brooks and landscape architect Everett Fly followed him, seeking to determine the location of long-gone markers. My uncle and grandfather were in this area, the 85-year-old retired electrical technician said, pointing beneath a grove of trees. Cousin Bessie was over there. Wading through knee-high grass and thorn brush, he gestured toward a wooden stake tied with a strip of pink cloth marking what he said was the burial place of his great grandfather, Amos Jackson, a former Buffalo Soldier. Winters hopes to mark other former grave sites in the coming months. Its a labor of love mixed with anger and despair. The marked graves that were once here were summarily moved in 1986, without any notice to family members, and put into a single mass grave at Holy Cross Cemetery, about one mile away. No knows exactly why the remains were removed, but presumably to make way for development that never occurred. Related: Small world southeast of downtown cleared for HemisFair '68 The disinterment was discovered by Winters and his brothers when they arrived at the cemetery near Nacogdoches and Loop 1604 in the late 1980s. Since then, the family had been at odds over how to rectify the issue until Fly contacted them two years ago for help with another burial site. African American cemeteries were one of the anchors of rural settlements in San Antonio and across the South. They were popular gathering spots for families, not just for funerals but to maintain the grounds. The expansive green areas with giant shade trees also were places for major celebrations, including Juneteenth commemorating June 19, 1865, the day that Union Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to announce that slavery had ended. Winters recalls that, after returning to San Antonio after serving with the Army in the Korean War, a relative would nudge him and say, Lets go work some graves. With shovels and picks, they began a tradition of clearing away weeds in the shade of gnarled mesquite and oak trees where ancestors were buried. Remnants of an old, barbed-wire fence at the now-abandoned land reminded Winters of how they had to squeeze between the strands of sharp spikes to enter the graveyard. Decades before heavy machinery carved away Anderson Road to build Loop 1604, grave markers at the neatly maintained cemetery were often dotted with fresh flowers. On a funeral day, churchgoers in their finest clothes would file behind a horse-drawn carriage bearing the casket to the burial ground. Today, spent shotgun shells and sun-bleached bones of long-dead critters litter what was once the Winters-Jackson Family Cemetery. This is the first time that Im able to stand on this sacred ground, Brooks said of the cemetery shed only heard about in stories. When you have this, it affirms that we had life here. There was just a tenacity of the people, they didnt give up. Read Also: Surviving Doolittle Raider flies on restored D-Day plane The Winters family can recall stories of their ancestors celebrating Juneteenth and the promise of progress awaiting future generations that included Daniel, the patriarch of the Winters family, affectionally known as Uncle Dan. Hes the last living link to a rich heritage and forgotten cemetery that Fly is hoping to rededicate. It really angers me, Winters said, standing in the parched grass where headstones and markers once lay. I feel violated, as if someone broke into your house. A year ago, Fly enlisted the help of the archaeological team at the University of Texas at San Antonio, city archaeologist Kay Hindes, Austin architect Ellen Hunt and other historians to determine the perimeter and extent of the former cemetery. In April, the work by Fly and the archaeologists yielded three bone fragments, personal items and coffin hardware. The cemetery is one of several once owned by black settlers on the Northeast Side and outer parts of Bexar County. The post-Civil War settlements were a sign of the times, when African Americans pooled their resources to purchase land and build independent communities that included their own cemeteries. Fly was a graduate student at Harvard when he began his four-decades of historical research. He has uncovered histories of more than 1,200 African American and Native American historic settlements across the nation. For his work, Fly received the 2014 National Humanities Medal. Flys research and recovered historic artifacts are also preserved by the San Antonio African American Community Archive & Museum, a 501(c)3 nonprofit he helped form. With a camera slung across a shoulder and clipboard in hand, Fly walked along the perimeter of what once had been the Winters-Jackson cemetery. According to Flys research, Morton Southwest owned the land in 1986, when the remains of 72 people were disinterred and reburied at Holy Cross Cemetery. The owners of that development company are long gone; the property has since changed hands several times. And a clerk at Holy Cross Cemetery couldnt answer who had the remains moved to the graveyard, Fly said. If we hadnt had Dans recollection, wed be without an explanation, Fly said. As far as state law is concerned, this is still a cemetery. That means, he said, that the current owners, Midland-based Fasken Oil and Ranch Ltd, have to protect the site, providing a buffer from other construction and providing public access for the descendants similar to the original path, which ran from what is now the Loop 1604 access road to the cemetery. Fortunately, Fly said, Fasken Oil and Ranch Ltd. has been very helpful and cooperative in the efforts to uncover the cemeterys past. As far as I know, San Antonio has never recovered a historic African American site like this before, Fly said, referring to the Winters-Jackson Cemetery. If we hadnt gotten here and found the remains, like right now, it would have been too late. The Kronkosky Foundation funded the April project. Texas Nursery and Landscape donated a back hoe and operator. In April, Fly joined Paul Shawn Marceaux, director of the UTSAs Center for Archaeological Research, project archaeologist, Sarah Wigley, project manager, and lab/field technicians, Jason Perez and Megan Brown, to examine the property. The UT center has lent its expertise to several fact-finding ventures in the past. Last year, UTSA archeologists unearthed bone fragments of an estimated 70 people at the grounds of the Childrens Hospital of San Antonio that had expanded over a 200-year-old cemetery. Fly and the archaeological team had two goals to clear the piles of dirt left at the site after the disinterment and to determine whether there were any unmarked graves outside of the original cemetery perimeter. A back hoe scraped back the top layer of soil to look for cuts in the ground where the burials were made. The archaeologists didnt find evidence of unmarked graves, which is what Fly had expected after studying aerial maps, deeds, and archival records. Photo Courtesy of Everett Fly But it was important to find out for certain. Often you will find unmarked graves, Marceaux said. The cemetery would fill up and they would continue to bury people outside. Markers werent as permanent as we the ones we use today and you might not have visible evidence on the ground of the extent of the cemetery. It was Marceauxs suggestion that team members sift through the dirt piles that resulted in the finding of the artifacts including buttons, a buckle and coffin handles that fit the period of 1890-1920 and the bone fragments, which experts said appear to be from adults. The center has registered the grave site with the Texas Historical Commission. Marceaux said many of the center;s projects are without an emotional connection, such as monitoring installation of utility poles and transmission lines, but helping verify the cemeterys history made them feel like they were restoring a chapter of the citys heritage. This is a great example of a forgotten story of a small family cemetery, connected to the African American community in San Antonio, which is not always represented as much as it should be, Marceaux said. This is a great opportunity to tell that story. I find it incredibly fulfilling and an honor to be a part of that. One of the wins is that it will be preserved and recognized. Fly began his exploration of the forgotten African American settlements in and around San Antonio two years ago. Local historians and archivist David Carlson of Bexar Countys Spanish archives office, have helped Fly discover deeds and records of several black settlements around the city. All were thriving communities built around a similar pattern of land deeded for African American churches, schools and cemeteries. It shows us how diverse and complex our San Antonio history is, said Fly, who served six years on the San Antonio Historic and Design Review Commission. Fly said personal research is essential to safeguarding history. You simply cant depend on whats already in the history books or what the popular theory is about San Antonio history, Fly said. This wouldve been an opportunity for the 300th year (celebration) to set a course for more people to do this kind research, connect these kind of dots and enrich our history and culture. There are other cemeteries like Winters-Jackson just waiting to be uncovered. Curiosity and determination led retired Air Force Maj. J. Michael Wright to the Hockley Cemetery, another forgotten cemetery on the Northeast Side. Wright contacted archivist Carlson about an empty lot in a residential subdivision near Uhr Lane and Higgins. Its covered by dense foliage and is surrounded on three sides by homes and a fourth by school property. They contacted Fly, who was able to verify their suspicions through hours of research, listening to family stories and recording oral histories that the graveyard was the Hockley Cemetery, part of Wetmore, an African American settlement, near the San Antonio International Airport. Time and geographic locale has been the saving grace for remains buried at Hockley Cemetery. Fly said the remains there are safe, but they havent had the funds to start an excavation project similar to the recent exploration of the Winters-Jackson Cemetery. After the visit to the Winters-Jackson family cemetery, the trio gathered at Holy Cross at the stone slab that marks where the remains of the 72 people disinterred are located. Fly said representatives for the current land owner were told by cemetery officials that the remains werent buried more than three deep. But no graves are marked individually and remains were buried along with headstones, they said. When you start stacking, to me thats a mass grave, he said. As Winters stood over the marker, he read the inscription that ends with words from the Book of Wisdom, And the souls of the just are in the hand of God. He thought of how the desecration of his familys cemetery ran counter to the rest of the scripture, not inscribed on the marker: and no torment shall touch them. vtdavis@express-news.net EL PASO More than 1,000 people marched on an immigrant processing center here Tuesday to demand an end to family separations, part of the growing wave of protests that have roiled the country and sent lawmakers in a frantic search for a solution to overturn the Trump administrations zero tolerance approach to illegal border crossers. Protesters here sought the immediate release of children and access to a tent city erected last week at the U.S. port of entry in the nearby border town of Tornillo that is housing around 200 immigrant teenage boys. The shelter has 360 beds and could expand to hold more children in the future, said state Rep. Mary Gonzalez, a Democrat from Clint. Our message is, free our children now, said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, which organized the rally. His words drew cheers and chants from the crowd. The group, along with elected officials, faith leaders and others, also expressed their disapproval of the separations in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. We cannot bear seeing parents, arrived at the country to seek asylum, torn from their children in a heartless attempt to enforce deterrence, the letter said. This is nothing more than inflicting trauma on children and parents at a massive and grotesque scale. We do not accept the subsequent mass incarceration of immigrant children, which follows from those separations, as a policy of our country. Federal authorities have removed more than 2,400 immigrant children from their parents and placed them in some 100 shelters around the country since Sessions announced the crackdown last month on illegal entry into the U.S. The children, including infants, are kept temporarily in shelters or placed with foster families while their parents are detained to faced criminal charges. Some children have been reunited with parents who have been allowed to seek asylum, a process that can take years to complete. The new policy to separate families reversed the more common practice of keeping immigrant families together in detention as they launched their asylum cases. In 2014, a surge to the border of Central American immigrants escaping violence in their countries prompted the government to open large family detention centers south of San Antonio. The South Texas Family Detention Center in Dilley, about 70 miles from San Antonio, is the largest of its kind in the country, with a capacity of 2,400 women and children. A second center, the Karnes County Residential Center, was converted four years ago to hold up to 1,158 migrant women and their children. Despite the longterm use of the immigrant detention centers, the administration has argued it has no legal authority to keep migrant families together in detention and continues to cast blame on Democrats for the current border crisis. Struggling to find an exit strategy amid the growing outrage of the family separations from across the political spectrum, from religious leaders and even the current and former first ladies, Senate Republicans vowed Tuesday to support legislation that would provide legal authority to detain parents and children together while their asylum claims are heard in the courts. The bill would also provide funding for more immigration judges to expedite asylum claims of families. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York rejected the GOP offer. He said President Trump could immediately use his executive authority to end the family separations. In Texas, meanwhile, state Rep. Cesar Blanco of El Paso, the chairman of the House Border Caucus, asked Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday to end border security operations by the state and cancel the recent deployment of state National Guard troops to the border while the family separation policy is in place. The El Paso demonstration Tuesday came two days after Texas political leaders led a Fathers Day protest outside the Tornillo facility. The rally included local residents and protestors who had traveled here from outside the state. They gathered at Edgemere Linear Park with signs that read, No more families torn apart and, Stop hurting children. The out-of-state participants included a contingent from New Mexico and a congressional candidate from New York. For protester Elva OHara, 55, of El Paso, seeing children detained struck her in a personal way. OHara said she and her three siblings were placed in a juvenile detention facility in California when she was 8, after their father killed their mother in front of them. Because of that experience, she said,she could identify with what the detained children were going through. The situation that these children are in now is extremely traumatizing and terrifying. They dont know where they are or whats going to happen to them, OHara said. And all they want is their mom or their dad. Nothing else. After marching a mile to the El Paso Processing Center, which also has a training and recruitment office for the Border Patrol, protesters gathered in front of its gates, holding up posters that spelled out CLOSED in large red letters. They led chants of shame and children need their families. A series of speakers criticized the family separations while Border Patrol officers on a nearby rooftop monitored the crowd and appeared to film and photograph the protest. Amber Ramirez, 25, a former immigration paralegal, said she wanted to help the families be reunited and influence change to the countrys immigration policies. Theyre not coming here for any other reason than to save their lives, she said. Additional protests of federal immigration policy are being planned throughout the country for June 30. Lauren Caruba is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | lcaruba@express-news.net | Twitter: @LaurenCaruba A Laredo man caught with more than 50 immigrants in a tractor-trailer last week in San Antonio has opted to stay in jail because his chances of getting approved for bond were slim, court records show. Besides waiving his bail hearing that was scheduled for Monday, Gerardo Javier Carreon, 36, also waived his preliminary hearing for his latest arrest on an immigrant-smuggling charge that occurred the night of June 12 during a chaotic scene near Broadway and Loop 410. Carreon, who has also lived in Hebbronville, has a lengthy record that includes past convictions for smuggling immigrants and drugs, and some failures to appear for court or violating terms of federal supervision, all of which would have counted against him if he tried to persuade a judge to grant him bail on his latest case, public records show. Carreon made national headlines when authorities from several agencies were called to the 8400 block of Laurelcrest Place and found 53 people suspected of entering the country illegally in and around a tractor-trailer Carreon is accused of driving. Some of the immigrants injured themselves jumping over fences and off houses as they tried to run away. Of the 53 immigrants, six were sent to the hospital, and agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and federal prosecutors kept only four here as material witnesses, and a judge appointed them the same lawyer, court records show. The remainder may be placed into deportation proceedings, or already have been deported, the court documents show. Carreon, a U.S. citizen, has been in and out of jail for a variety of charges, including some that are federal felonies. In 2001, Carreon was convicted of marijuana-smuggling charges and was sentenced to two years in federal prison. But after his release, he turned to smuggling immigrants, with arrests in 2004 and 2008 that resulted in charges and later, dismissals, records show. In 2009, he admitted transporting an undocumented immigrant near Bruni, northwest of Hebbronville, and was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison, and three years of supervised release. He violated the terms of his release in a public intoxication incident and was given seven more months in jail in March 2011, records show. Guillermo Contreras is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | gcontreras@express-news.net | Twitter: @gmaninfedland At 4:27 p.m. on a skillet-hot June afternoon, a dozen weary people waiting outside a day labor depot could no longer stand the wait and began to bolt across Culebra Road at Navidad Street to catch the cooling respite of VIAs approaching 82 bus. They had six divided lanes to cross as cars hurtled by and ignored the 45 mph speed limit sign a pedestrian safety nightmare set amid a familiar San Antonio landscape of mom-and-pop beauty salons, taquerias and burglar-barred homes. Fortunately, at that location pedestrians have a new dedicated crosswalk, a flashing yellow beacon, big yield signs and a raised-curb safety island in the middle lane - a $100,000 affair put in by the Texas Department of Transportation two years ago - but human nature easily takes over. A young couple, holding hands, jay-sprinted to the island, laughing all the way, dodging a Ford F-150 pickup that roared through the yellow lights. A sunburned blonde woman, high on something, gyrated like a puppet on a string, balancing on the curb. People do not stop for you, said Desiree, a neatly-coiffed middle-aged woman carrying a red canvas H-E-B shopping bag. A flashing light aint enough. Its dangerous. The stretch of Culebra between Interstate 10 and Loop 410 is a seven-lane, inner-city free-for-all. On just the 1.7 miles between Zarzamora and General McMullen Drive, nine pedestrians were killed by vehicles between 2010 and 2017, according to Texas Department of Transportation data. Throughout its entire length, dozens have been severely injured in the past decade. Others have died on Culebra this year, the latest on Monday night, when at least three vehicles hit a man as he ran across the road near North Calaveras. At least one driver left the scene, though others stopped to help. The man was pronounced dead at the scene. Hours later, a man was fatally struck by a police cruiser and possibly other vehicles early Tuesday as he tried to run across Interstate 35 near Wurzbach Parkway. Across the city, almost 800 pedestrians were involved in vehicle collisions in 2016 alone, an unusually high number compared to years before and after. Some victims were drunk, drugged, wearing dark clothing at midnight, jaywalking or just oblivious to danger. But many were not. The city and state are well aware of the problems on Culebra and other major traffic arteries Broadway, San Pedro Avenue, Fredericksburg, Blanco and Bandera roads, Austin Highway, Zarzamora Street, Military Drive, among others and theyve made limited improvements that likely saved lives. But critics say such roads remain testaments to outdated auto-centric planning. They are notorious among the urban planners, engineers and pedestrian activists who were in San Antonio on Friday for a statewide convention of Vision Zero, an international initiative with the lofty goal of eliminating all traffic fatalities and severe injuries. In 2015, San Antonio was the first Texas city to join Vision Zero, which began in Sweden in the 1990s, took hold throughout Europe and now has been adopted in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, among other U.S. cities. While dismissed by some as just a feel-good program that puts engineering Band-Aids on deadly highways, Vision Zero supporters say it is, for America, a long-overdue paradigm shake-up that places bicyclists, pedestrians and mass transit on equal footing with automobiles when urban landscapes are being designed or, more often, retro-fitted. Few dispute the need for some nationwide effort on pedestrian safety. The Governors Highway Safety Association estimates that the number of walkers killed on roads hit a 32-year high in 2016 - a 27 percent increase since 2007 even though all other types of traffic deaths decreased by 14 percent. Five states - Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas - account for 43 percent of all pedestrian deaths. The 44 pedestrians killed in San Antonio last year was the lowest number in five years, after inexplicably spiking to 65 in 2016. In San Antonio, the Vision Zero program has been largely directed by the citys Transportation and Capital Improvements department, which used $1 million in 2016 to focus on the five Es of traffic safety - education, encouragement (social media campaigns), engineering (doing 10 projects annually), enforcement (pushing camera speed zones) and evaluation (identifying 20 high-crash corridors and intersections). Additional money from the $850 million in bond projects approved in 2017 will be available for better-designed bridges, streets and sidewalks. After identifying the citys most pedestrian-threatening roads, TCI officials discovered a remarkable statistic - 33 percent of all severe pedestrian-auto crashes in San Antonio were occurring on just 1 percent of its roads, including smaller but bustling streets such as Roosevelt, Probandt and Lone Star. On the citys 76 most dangerous roads, said TCI researchers, about half of the severe pedestrian injuries occurred from 6 p.m. to midnight, with the greatest number from 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. The most frequent contributing factors to pedestrian deaths were predictable - road speed, sidewalk availability, lighting and behavioral issues such as alcohol or drug use but there was little mention of poor road or signal design, or the lack of robust mass transit. We need a more forgiving system, said TCI transportation planner Rebecca Pacini. For example, when a driver gets a green light the pedestrian usually gets a walk signal at the same time. We might should change that interval and let walkers go first and be more visible. But Culebra needs more than signal light tinkering. It has to be fundamentally redesigned, said City Councilmember Shirley Gonzales, an early proponent of Vision Zero for San Antonio. We have a long way to go before it is safe. It should be turned into a `complete street, with bike lanes, sidewalks, trees, lower speed limits and limited driveways for businesses. Gonzales, whose family has owned a pawn shop on Zarzamora for decades, said she can remember when that road and Culebra were more welcoming to pedestrians. But then they were expanded with no concern whatsoever for anything but autos, she said. They just became the way to get out of town. Alberto Virgen, a lawyer who has kept his office on Culebra for 22 years, called it absolutely a war zone. People dart out from everywhere. Every week Im talking to my wife driving home - hands-free and I scream out, Oh, my God, when someone just escapes getting killed. In the last four years, Ive known three people who got hit on Culebra, said Roger Gonzales, a cook at Delicious Tamales who travels Culebra each day. Its not safe to walk. The signs and lights are helpful, said Christian Phelps, a landscaper from Van Nuys, California, who says he has lived near Culebra for 20 years. But you cant be sure anyone will stop. We have hookers at night, people selling heroin, but we also have grandmothers and kids going to school. Dale Picha is what you might expect a veteran TxDOT traffic engineer to be - restrained, exacting, not prone to hyperbole. But when he parks his big state vehicle to monitor the pedestrian chaos on Culebra near Navidad he gets a bit agitated. Those pedestrian islands make a huge difference, but its still a freaking runway, said Picha, who knows Culebra the way a teacher knows a disobedient child. Good luck finding people obeying the speed limit, unless its rush hour. I wouldnt let my daughter cross at this spot. I wouldnt let mine cross Culebra, period, then-TxDOT spokesman Josh Donat added. Through the windshield, Picha, the traffic operations manager for the state agencys San Antonio district, looked at the turn lane in the middle of Culebra. I have a job because of left-hand turn lanes, he laughed, suggesting the margin for head-on human error is small and smart design is essential. He was proud to see the pedestrian refuge at work in the middle lane, but chagrined to see so many pedestrians who would not push the button that, in theory, stops traffic and allows them to cross. You want to yell and scream, Picha said as a middle-aged man actually leaned on the pole that contained the traffic button, but chose to wait for all the traffic to pass. Picha said the Culebra crossing at Navidad has been successful in curbing collisions - in the Vision Zero culture, the word accidents is frowned upon - but that the safety islands were actually opposed by some merchants because they would force traffic to drive perhaps 100 or 200 yards past their desired destination and then make a u-turn. Some called their state representatives to complain. Picha said an understanding of politics, culture and human behavior makes urban planning work. You have to engage the whole community, he said, to make a street safer. bselcraig@express-news.net First, the group helped shut down Deja Vu, a bar and club on the west side of San Antonio. Now, its firing (metaphorical) shots at Sombras Nightclub. Eventually, it hopes to eliminate Las Gatitas as well. The group is the Woodlawn Lake Community Association and its mission is "preservation of the character and history of Woodlawn Lake Park...and its surrounding community," according to the group's Facebook description. Part of that means phasing out late-night bars and clubs in the area and replacing them with more family-friendly retailers or restaurants. The association has focused its latest efforts on Sombras as the bar gets set to renew its permit later this month. "Having that bar there is just not a good fit for what we envision for the area," Association President Alejandro Soto said. "There are some restaurants there that are pretty popular. It would be good to enhance those businesses....The potential is there, but we kind of just see this big bar sitting there in the middle of it. It's just an impediment to the possibilities in the area." RELATED: Woodlawn Lake known for its historic landmarks The decision is up to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, who will decide soon whether or not to renew the permit. Because Sombras has relatively few police and noise complaints, Soto said he's pessimistic about actually being able to shut the club down, despite the letter he sent the commission. "In most cases, (the association) would need to show that there's some sort of public safety violation. Or some sort of regular bad behavior," said Christopher Porter, a spokesman for the commission. He later added: "Every case is different, and until we actually receive the protest, we can't give a definitive up or down on how this will proceed." ZONING DISCREPANCIES The association's revitalization efforts began last year with Deja Vu. According to Soto, the club had a smattering of noise, vagrancy, and other noise complaints. When the association brought the issue to the attention of a state officer, the officer spoke with the landlord and the lease was not renewed, Soto said. In working to shut down Sombras, the association is highlighting zoning discrepancies. Like Deja Vu and Las Gatitas, Sombras's location is zoned commercially, but not for liquor. The nightclub predated the current zoning, so when zoning changes were made, Sombras requested and was granted non-conforming use with the city, according to city spokeswoman Ximena Copa-Wiggins. That means the bar is legally permitted to serve alcohol, even though the area is not zoned for it. RELATED: New bars, attractions to try out this summer in San Antonio "In a sense, by the city not zoning it for bars, the city has made the judgment that bars were not appropriate," Soto said. "They just happened to be there when zoning was changed so they got to stay, but it's grandfathering." Sombras has a valid beer and wine permit with the Alcoholic Beverage Commission. The nightclub was cited for four different license violations between 1998 and 2002, but since then has a clean record, according to Porter. In the past five years, police have been called to the address 71 times. Calls range from "abandoned vehicle" and "drunk" to "disturbance (gun involved)" and "assault in progress." Soto said he reviewed the nightclub's record and didn't intend to focus on it. "There's nothing extraordinary about it. You've got your usual things...but you can't really say that it's a nuisance," Soto said. SOME OPPOSE SHUTTING IT DOWN Association members or at least the two dozen who showed up to the meeting to discuss Sombras and vote unanimously supported shutting the nightclub down, according to Soto. "It's just a bad fit for the area," Soto said. He later added: "This is all member input of what we want to preserve our neighborhood, to make it safer." But not everyone in the area shares the association's opinion. "I have seen no reason to shut down a business that does not add to the neighborhood's crime, traffic, congestion, litter, illegal drug activity, organized crime, etc., as far as I can see," said Tony David, a nearby resident. "It is a small business that fills the community's need to socialize and party on the weekends." Others have reiterated David's laissez-faire approach to the debate, saying there is no reason to interfere with a peaceful business which only appears to be open on weekend nights. Sombras could not be reached for comment. S. M. Chavey is a staff writer for mySA.com. Read more of her stories here. | sarah.chavey@express-news.net | 210-250-3122 | Twitter: @smchavey We should be outraged but not surprised. The signs were there from the start. Deceptive. Indifferent. Paranoid. Cruel. These words describe President Donald Trumps new policy requiring the separation of immigrant children, some of them infants, from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. They also describe President Trump. Theyve described him for years, well before his zero-tolerance policy at the border, long before he ever became president. His supporters have either ignored these traits or embraced them, just as those who continue to support Trump must either ignore his abuse of children or, like Sen. Ted Cruz, accept it as inevitable. Related: Listen to children who've just been separated from their parents at the border The policy is inhumane, but its not inevitable. Trump could end it as quickly as he allowed it. No one familiar with his character should expect him to do so. This is why character matters. It determines how someone wields power. We should not be surprised at how President Trump is wielding power at the border. We are outraged, and I suspect the president will be surprised to learn that this time hes gone too far and the anger will outstrip his support. Trump has made an art of courting outrage. When hes not lying to deflect blame, hes transparent in his cruelty trading in shock value, using it to his advantage. I mean, I wont do anything to take care of them, he once told Howard Stern, speaking of his children. Ill supply funds and (Melania) will take care of the kids. Its not like Im gonna be walking the kids down Central Park. If thats how he felt about his own children, imagine how the president feels about the children of immigrants, a class of people he attacked on Monday as murderers and thieves and so much else. Related: At a border immigration shelter: a room of infants; teen immigrants giving birth Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country, he wrote on Twitter, suggesting that the families hes tearing apart those fleeing violence in Central America only to be separated once they reach the United States arent actually families. This is where the paranoia seeps in. Trump wont acknowledge that most of those seeking asylum are fleeing mortal threats, instead suggesting that Americans are somehow threatened by the threatened. This justifies his cruelty. If the children who appear at the border are the pawns of criminals, then those children can become the pawns of a president in his relentless quest to build a wall. Most Americans recognize that children are simply children. In the end, will it matter? I think the question is, even though people dont like it and have drawn a hard line in the sand, is that enough to change the way they vote? state Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, asked Monday. Because people will say they dont agree with something, but theyre also willing to eat a lot and endure a lot and still vote the way they vote. The president has always kicked sacred cows, from POWs to Gold Star families. His base has lapped it up. Those attacks, though, were rhetorical: Trump talking tough. This is actual suffering inflicted on children. Child abuse isnt tough. Its indefensible. Related: Democrats howl, Republicans become uneasy over family separations at border On Monday, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, toured two facilities in Brownsville, Casa Padre and Casa Presidente, where unaccompanied and separated children are being held. The youngest one I saw was a boy named Roger who was 8 months old, Castro told me. His sister had come to the United States with him, and his mother was deceased. Its jarring to walk into a room with children who are too young to walk and know that their parents are nowhere to be found. The congressman sounded weary, emotionally spent. Its a humanitarian crisis manufactured directly by President Trump, he said. Hes abusing these young kids to get leverage over Democrats in Congress to pay for his border wall. Were going to do everything we can to stop this, Castro added. The American people are in an uproar because they understand this has nothing to do with what political party you support, but its a fundamental question of the American conscience and American morality. We arent surprised. But we are outraged, and this time it cannot redound to the benefit of Trump. bchasnoff@express-news.net Douglas V. Gibbs is a proud member of the American Authors Association Douglas V. Gibbs is a proud member of the Military Writers Society of America. WASHINGTON - Congressional Democrats amped up their outrage Monday, and Republicans expressed growing unease with President Donald Trumps policy of taking children from their parents who try to cross the border illegally. Trump and his top advisers dug in on their controversial new zero tolerance policy of taking immigrant children from parents, saying it is up to Congress to fix the problem. Texas U.S. Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee and Beto ORourke rejected Trumps claims after visiting detention centers along the border. Among the high-profile GOP defections was U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of San Antonio, whose district includes the 400-bed tent facility for immigrant youth in Tornillo, which has become a focal point in the immigration battle. OUTRAGE: Vigil becomes protest as outrage grows over separation of families at U.S. border "If your strategy for border security involves separating kids, then you need to rethink that strategy," Hurd told the Chronicle after touring the facility over the weekend. Hurd faces reelection in a heavily Latino district that encompasses about 800 miles of the border. Former First Lady Laura Bush also weighed in, condemning a Trump administration policy that has resulted in the forced separation of some 2,000 minors in the past six weeks, which she said was reminiscent of World War II Japanese internment camps. Now Playing: ProPublica has obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children can be heard wailing as an agent jokes, "We have an orchestra here." Video: ProPublica I appreciate the need to enforce and protect international boundaries, but this zero tolerance policy is cruel, Bush wrote in an opinion piece in the Washington Post - taking a rare step into a national debate. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. White House officials claimed they have no choice but to enforce immigration laws that they say Democrats helped pass years ago. "It is absolutely the law of the land, White House spokesman Gidley Hogan told reporters outside the West Wing. There are only two things you can do in this particular situation: you can release the entire family unit or you can separate them. That's it. LISTEN: Listen to children who've just been separated from their parents at the border Democrats argued that the family separations could end with a single presidential directive, noting that the practice was not widely put into effect under Trumps predecessors. They say the scenes of terrified children wailing in chain link cages in Texas and elsewhere are the direct result of the zero tolerance policy announced last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. There is a humanitarian crisis at our borders, said Lee, a Houston Democrat who visited the Casa Padre detention facility for unaccompanied children Monday in Brownsville. The Administrations zero tolerance immigration policy is directly, and shamefully, responsible for ripping families apart at the US-Mexico border. JERRY LARA / San Antonio Express-News U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat from the Rio Grande Valley, said he didnt see a single person smile during a tour of a child detention center in McAllen. Its just a real American shame, he said. Separating families is not what a beacon of the world stands for. Trump took to Twitter Monday to shift the focus from mass family separations to crimes committed by immigrants. It is the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime, Trump said. Tell them to start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration. Change the laws! Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen echoed the presidents argument on Monday, telling reporters in a contentious White House press briefing that the current law and court rulings prevent officials from detaining families together while they undergo prosecution for illegal entry. The Department of Homeland Security, she said, is no longer ignoring the law. We are enforcing the laws as they exist on the books. She added that the onus should be on Congress to change the law. CRACKDOWN: Immigrant children's shelter considered for downtown Houston "We will not apologize for doing our job," she said earlier in the day in a speech before the National Sheriffs Association meeting in New Orleans. "This administration has a simple message If you cross the border illegally, we will prosecute you." Nielsen also noted that many people crossing the border as family units are not in fact a family. Regardless, she said, they are treated well. Dont believe the press, Nielsen said. They are very well taken care of. ORourke rejected Nielsens claims that the administration had not choice but to separate families. He led a Fathers Day march Sunday at the Tornillo tent camp, 35-miles from his hometown of El Paso. You do (have a policy), ORourke shot back on Twitter. Ive met moms held in cells w their young kids before you take them. Seen the kids behind cyclone fences after youve unaccompanied them. Been w parents prosecuted like common criminals for doing what any parent would do, through tears asking me where their kids are. ORourke is campaigning against Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who defended Trumps policy at the state Republican Party convention over the weekend in San Antonio. Cruz suggested that the immigrants should bear the blame for putting their children in danger, even as he called the scenes of children being taken from their parents heartbreaking. The states senior U.S. Sen., John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, has argued that the policy might serve as a deterrent to illegal immigration, though there has been little sign of a slowdown of illegal border crossing since the new policy was announced. McALLEN: New 'zero tolerance' policy overwhelms South Texas courts Cornyn said in a Senate speech Monday that he supports the presidents enforcement approach. But he also said he plans to reintroduce legislation he sponsored in 2014 that would allow children to stay with their parents while they undergo criminal or deportation proceedings. The good news is we have it within our power to find a better way because parents who are awaiting court proceedings shouldn't have to do so separated from their children, Cornyn said. Children shouldn't be taken from their parents and left frightened and confused about where they are and what is transpiring around them. That legislation, known as the HUMANE Act, was introduced with U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Laredo Democrat, in response to a wave of unaccompanied children arriving at the border. Cruz also is introducing legislation that he says will keep families together while their immigration cases are pending. Meanwhile Democrats, sensing a potent campaign issue, flocked to detention centers around the country in recent days to dramatize the plight of the separated families. Mississippi U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, also toured the center in Brownsville and took aim at Sessions contention about the Biblical underpinnings of enforcing the law. Attempting to use scripture to defend the indefensible - needlessly breaking up families - is not compatible with the teachings of any church I know, Thompson said. Also on the border in Brownsville Monday was U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, brother of former HUD Secretary Julian Castro, who is exploring a 2020 White House run. NEW POLICY: Trump administration defends family separations at border It was very jarring to see three or four very young children and their parents nowhere in sight, Joaquin Castro said. Even though workers there were treating the children as well as possible, the policy of separating young children their parents is a brutal one. The quickest solution would be for the president to stop this policy." One sign of growing White House concern about the bad political optics of the separations was seen in a statement released by the office of First Lady Melania Trump that sought to balance complicity for the immigration impasse. Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform, it said. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. The controversy is likely to bleed into this weeks negotiations in Congress, where Trump is scheduled to huddle with Republicans on Tuesday to discuss a way out of the deadlock on a new immigration law. White House officials have said that the family separations might give them leverage with Congress to force action on comprehensive immigration legislation limiting both legal and illegal entry into the country. But some conservative pundits have said that strategy, which has sparked global condemnation, appears to be backfiring. "It's an atrocious policy," former White House communications director and Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci said on CNN's "New Day" Monday. "It's inhumane. It's offensive to the average American." Other Trump allies also have spoken out against the family separations. Evangelist Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, called it disgraceful. A host of other religious and child welfare organizations have criticized the policy, which some say could cause the children lasting trauma. AT THE BORDER: Immigrant families separated at border struggle to find each other With Republicans split, House Speaker Paul Ryan had planned votes as early as this week on two GOP immigration measures, one of which would address family separations at the border. That negotiation comes as GOP leaders already were facing pressure to address Dreamers, or young immigrants brought into the country illegally as children. One measure is a plan co-sponsored by Houston-area Republican Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, that gives Trump much of what he wants on limiting immigration, including money for a border wall. A more moderate proposal Ryan plans to put up for a vote would address the child separations by allowing children to be held with their parents in U.S. custody, similar to Cornyns plan. Given the continued divisions over Dreamers and family separations, neither proposal is guaranteed a vote, much less passage. Hurd, who has sought more narrowly-crafted legislation to protect Dreamers, said he does not see the idea of detaining entire families together for indefinite periods of time as a solution. If anyone's waving that as a carrot, Hurd said, nobody is biting." *** 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. Senator Ted Cruz said he is planning on introducing legislation this week to keep migrant families together. "All Americans are rightly horrified by the images we are seeing on the news, children in tears pulled away from their mothers and fathers," Cruz said in a statement. "This must stop. Now. We can end this crisis by passing the legislation I am introducing this week." The senator said he will introduce the "Protect Kids and Parents Act," which will double the number of federal immigration judges, create new temporary "shelters," review asylum cases within 14 days, and "mandate that illegal immigrant families must be kept together." Now Playing: Both Republicans and Democrats, including two first ladies, are calling on the president to put an end to Attorney General Jeff Sessions's 'zero tolerance' border policy of separating parents and children for unlawfully crossing the border. Since the policy went into effect in April, almost 2,000 children have been separated from their families. "These images, everyday, are starting to break through regular Americans, including the Trump base," says Axios co-founder and executive editor Mike Allen. Over the weekend, first lady Melania Trump and former first lady Laura Bush also weighed in on the issue, condemning the separations. Trump will reportedly use this issue as leverage to get funding for his wall when he meets with House Republicans on Tuesday, says Allen. Video: Cheddar TV "Repeatedly, I have visited detention facilities tragically housing young children," Cruz added. "For far too long, children have been the greatest victims of our broken immigration system, with tens of thousands of children who were detained under the Obama Administration and continuing through today, and with far too many of those children facing horrific physical or sexual assault from criminal human traffickers." LATEST: Trump official denies separating families. O'Rourke fires back: I've seen it myself "While these cases are pending, families should stay together," he said. "Children belong with their mothers and fathers. Once their cases have been adjudicated under my legislation, in no longer than 14 days those who meet the legal standard should be granted asylum and those who don't should be immediately returned to their home country." "We can fix this," Cruz said. "If my Democratic colleagues will join me, not play politics but work to solve the problem, we can start to end family separation this week. And, we can honor the rule of law." Cruz' proposed legislation comes a week after defending Trump's policy of family separation in an interview with Dallas public radio station KERA. "There's actually a court order that prevents keeping the kids with the parents when you put the parents in jail," Cruz said last Monday. "So when you see reporters, when you see Democrats saying don't separate kids from their parents, what they're really saying is don't arrest illegal aliens." LABELS: Movement to call migrant detention centers 'concentration camps' swells online The practice of separating migrant families began in April when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new "zero-tolerance" policy prosecuting 100 percent of illegal border crossings. "We are not going to let this country be invaded," he said at the time. "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." During a six-week period in April and May after the policy was implemented, nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents. As of last week, 11,423 migrant children are currently in custody, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. This is a developing story. Fernando.ramirez@chron.com Twitter.com/fernramirez93 DRESDEN This city where Allied bombing in 1945 created a 1,000-degree, hurricane force firestorm that melted glass and skin symbolizes the principle: Things could be worse. A tragic sense of life along with cynical humor and a bit of a persecution complex is typical of Saxony, a German state as culturally distant from Berlin as Kentucky is from New York City. When J.D. Vances Hillbilly Elegy was translated into German, Saxon readers recognized something of themselves. After German reunification in 1989, about 80 percent of people in this portion of former East Germany had to find new ways of making a living. For most, freedom also meant starting over from nothing. About 20 percent of the population mainly younger people moved away. While cities such as Dresden and Leipzig are now doing well, rural areas and small towns are aging, economically stagnant and demoralized. This backwater is now at the center of German politics. Saxony is an electoral stronghold of the Alternative for Germany (AFD) an extreme, right-wing populist party in a country where extreme right-wing populism has frightening historical associations. In the most recent national election, the AFD received about a quarter of votes in Saxony double its national share. Anti-establishment resentment has been building here at least since the European debt crisis. But it was the 2015 refugee crisis that catalyzed discontent. Chancellor Angela Merkel in an act of exemplary moral leadership and tremendous political risk opened the German border to about a million migrants, most fleeing from the Syrian conflict. Merkel is now at the riskiest political moment of her career. If her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), loses ground in next years regional election here in Saxony, it will be interpreted as a repudiation of Merkels refugee policy and could lead to her resignation as head of the party. It would certainty cause open revolt by the conservative wing of the CDU. Many in the party now publicly admit that the initial implementation of Merkels refugee policy was chaotic, contributing to a general sense of lost control. But the real focus of populists here, as elsewhere is not on efficiency but identity. They fear that migrants particularly Muslim migrants wont become Germans. Becoming an American involves accepting democratic values and respecting our constitutional order. Becoming a German involves embracing an intangible way of life a combination of language, historical consciousness and eccentricities. In some versions of Germanness, Syrian refugees will never really belong. So (the argument goes) close down the border entirely. The CDU faces a challenge duplicated across the West: How does a center-right party deal with a populist insurgency? One option is for the CDU to co-opt the AFD by moving to the right on immigration. This would be the effective repudiation of Merkels leadership. And some in the party fear that conceding political ground to populism would merely feed and legitimize it. Another option is for the CDU to draw a sharp distinction with AFD and consolidate control over the political center. In America, because we dont have a parliamentary system, the ethno-nationalists did not gather in their own party. They conducted a successful coup in the Republican Party, and are now consolidating their hold. What remains of the GOP establishment is faced with a similar decision: Imitate the populists or try to marginalize them. In the CDU, this strategic challenge has led to an existential one. Following World War II, the party as its name implies stood for a conservatism humanized by Christian (particularly Catholic) values. But Germany has become overwhelmingly secular. The CDU also sponsored the project of European unity, which now seems under severe strain. Under Merkel, the unifying principle has been pragmatism. But this no longer seems enough compared to the simple, emotional appeal of resurgent nativism. The moral of the story: To effectively oppose right-wing populism, conservatives require a compelling, alternative fighting faith. But that does not emerge merely because it is needed. michaelgerson@washpost.com Re: Cruelty is the objective when it comes to immigrants, Another View, June 2: The headline on Rampells column this morning was a shocker. I dont agree with her opinion in the column, but I positively cannot approve of the headline, which is pure opinion, no facts to back that up. Asserting that cruelty is the objective of immigration policies is absurd on the surface and categorically impossible to prove. I suggest that Ms. Rampell read and absorb the words of Larry Johnsons column on the preceding page: So why should I care about that? J. G. Bice, Del Rio Chief got it wrong Re: Chief got it right, Your Turn, June 2: A person praised the Houston police chief for using his public position to promote his liberal views on gun ownership and the Second Amendment. He went on to attack the values of those who volunteer for the military and law enforcement, stating this is where they should go if they want to handle weapons and kill people. He implies these organizations are only for those wanting to kill people. What a disgusting view of our military and law enforcement, which proudly serve and protect this great country. He further stated no one should vote for any politician who takes money from the NRA. As if the NRA has any control over criminals that break current laws and use a gun to commit a crime. What about politicians of which the vast majority were Democrat that took money from Planned Parenthood (an organization that kills unborn babies) during the 2016 election cycle. Carthel Williams, Spring Branch How it worked Let me try to explain how I think it worked. You and your 100 people get your news through social media and kept getting reports that Hillary Clinton was going to do horrible things like taking your guns, while allowing immigrants to take your jobs and killing people everywhere, while Muslims are coming in by the millions and all the other crazy things Info War promotes. Then Clinton followers received news that she was so far ahead and that her win was in the bag. What would these two voter types do? The Russians are using the divided house method to destroy us from within, and it appears its working very well with minimal investment. J. Luis Rojas, Schertz Readers looking for an heir to Ian Fleming can find one in Ted Bell. The Greenwich writers series of novels about British Lord and superspy Alex Hawke serve up a James Bond-style mix of over-the-top action, black comedy and a political scene that is only a slight distortion of the real world. And, yes, there are plenty of sexy and smart women in the stories. The tenth novel in the series, Overkill (William Morrow), was published last month, and it is as audacious as it is entertaining. In the early chapters, Vladimir Putins rule collapses under pressure from the oligarchs who want to take power. The Russian president decides he might be better off dead than alive and stages his own demise. At least when youre dead, people stop trying to kill you, the deposed leader tells one of his few trusted associates. Putin goes on the run in Europe, taking refuge in a Provence farmhouse, where he plots his return to power with a private army funded by gold taken from Swiss banks. Meanwhile, our hero, Alex Hawke, is horrified when his son, Alexei, is kidnapped during a Christmas vacation at a ski resort. He wonders if old enemy Putin might be behind the crime. The suspense builds to a climax set in and around an enormous Swiss mountain lair built by Albert Speer for Adolf Hitler but never used that Putin buys for a half billion dollars. (Somewhere, the Bond villains Dr. No and Ernst Stavros Blofed are green with envy.) This isnt the first time Bell has used the president in one of his novels, but Overkill places him front and center with all of the cunning and clout of a classic Bond baddie. Think Goldfinger but on a much grander scale. One of the more amusing touches in Overkill is Putins pet dog named Blofeld. It is a lot of fun to write (him), Bell says about claiming a real-world politician as a character. Putin was introduced in the fifth Hawke novel, Tsar. I have heard from semi-reliable sources that he reads the books, the writer adds, chuckling and imagining Putin sitting down to check out Overkill and the arch villain he plays in this story. Bell is flattered by the comparisons with Fleming, because the work of the British writer was a major inspiration for the series. I discovered Fleming the summmer I was 13, and I read every one of the books three times. I became as interested in Fleming as I was in Bond, the writer says of the author who held down a series of jobs including a stint as a stockbroker before he created Agent 007 in his 40s. Although Bell says I was born to write I cant not do it, it wasnt until after he achieved great success in the world of advertising that he turned to novel writing full time. At the time of his career transition, Bell was vice chairman of the board and world-wide creative director of Young & Rubicam, one of the largest advertising agencies in the world. When I wrote (the first) Hawke (book) I had no idea if it would be published. I just wrote it, the novelist recalls. I gave it to my then-agent in New York, who told me to go away for three weeks and not to call back, because it would take that long for someone to get back to us. The next morning my agent called and said Are you sitting down? I can be Simon and Schuster just bought the book. Bell has since switched publishers. When he decided to write international thrillers, Bell wanted to include the exotic settings that added so much spice to the Bond books that many readers enjoyed the stories as armchair travel adventures as well as espionage tales. But the writer has steered away from the Middle Eastern backdrops so popular in other contemporary spy stories. I dont like the desert. I prefer Paris and Bermuda, the writer says, laughing. Bells career in international advertising has come in handy in terms of the novels plush backdrops. I was lucky to have 31 years in a fairly high-profile advertising career. That was 30 years of going to great places and staying in great hotels. S ince he began the series, Bell has run into real-life intelligence officers who have endorsed his work. One high-level British MI6 official made it possible for Bell to be writer-in-residence at Cambridge University. Hollywood has come calling with an offer to make a series of Alex Hawke movies starting next year. We are in negotiations with Paramount and my guy at CAA, Bell says of the movie talent agency. The role of a strikingly handsome British Lord who can outwit and outfight the worlds worst villains could do for the actor who plays Alex Hawke what James Bond did for the career of the young Sean Connery. Chris Hemsworth is one of our two prime picks, Bell reports, adding that the other actor at the top of the list is Tom Hardy. jmeyers@hearstmediact.com; Twitter: @joesview GREENWICH A critical part of launching the congressional campaign of Greenwich resident Harry Arora is raising his profile in the district, and on Saturday he began working to do just that. Arora held an event at his Greenwich Avenue campaign headquarters specifically to meet with members of the Asian-American community. The Republican National Committee event, which the campaign said was put together quickly, attracted a crowd of 70 people who heard from Arora as he talked about the issues and pitched his candidacy. It was a great event, Arora said Monday. The objective was to energize the community to get everyone involved. This is a very specific segment with the Asian-American community, and I think we got a really good turnout and a very good outcome. Arora came to the U.S. 25 years ago as a graduate student from India. He co-founded and runs Northlander Advisors, an investment firm with a focus on European energy that is headquartered in Greenwich. This is his first campaign for political office. Saturdays event was more of a meet and greet than a fundraiser, he said, with a goal of introducing himself, getting more residents involved in the political process and laying the groundwork for more campaigning. This is a community which typically stays apolitical, Arora said. It isnt that involved in the democratic process. A large part of the community is very open-minded and leans toward free market, competitive market economies. Theyre also more oriented toward fiscal conservative ideas like balance your budget and spend money wisely, while still being socially liberal, and thats a natural fit for a campaign like ours. Arora said he hoped the community would be energized and become involved by seeing another Asian American running for office. Greenwich resident Dita Bhargava, who is in an Aug. 14 primary battle for the Democratic nomination for state treasurer, is another Asian-American candidate this year. Arora has secured the Republican nomination and is looking to November, when he will face off against fellow town resident, U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4. Himes, who also has experience working in financial services, is running for his sixth term. At the event, the states economy was very much on the crowds mind, he said. While it will largely fall to the governor and state legislature to boost Connecticuts economic performance, Arora said Congress could also help by pushing for pro-growth, business friendly policies. In the last administration, there was excessive regulation on the financial sector and even an anti-business sentiment that existed then, he said. You could see every bank being sued non-stop. It was an aggressive idea of saying, Lets not just fix things, but saying You make a lot of money so were going to take a bite out of it. Thats how it felt. Most banks were not lending much. They were scared, and you can see bank lending and credit lending grow in the last year-and-a-half. When asked for comment, Himes also said he was focused on regulations but offered caution about returning to the kind of environment that led to the 2008 financial crisis. We need smart regulations and protections, Himes said Tuesday. That doesnt mean rolling back to a pre-Dodd-Frank environment, which puts us at greater risk for another crisis. But it does mean being willing to look at the regulations we have right now to ensure they arent unnecessarily hindering business and growth. Voters who attended Aroras event also pushed for improvements in infrastructure and transit. I would advocate in a very active way for modernizing and significant investment in the New Haven Line and Metro-North, Arora said. Im not talking about incremental stuff. I think this is the largest commuter railroad in the country and it is in an area that is very critical and an economic hub. We should invest in it with federal dollars to make this a state-of-the-art line within the constraints of what exists. Himes said the federal government should lead the way on investments in transportation and infrastructure. A robust, modern and fully funded infrastructure package is one of my absolute top priorities, he said. In Connecticut, and across the nation, our roads, bridges and rail are in a state of disrepair that costs our economy billions of dollars and takes money out of the pockets of our families in the form of higher commute times, higher fuel expenses, and more wear-and-tear on vehicles. The Republican National Committee, which focuses on GOP candidates from the national level, ran the Greenwich event and was pleased with its outcome. Connecticut is in need of fresh, new leadership in both Hartford and Washington, RNC spokesman Nicole Tardif said. Businessman and Republican nominee Harry Arora is an inspiring embodiment of the American Dream with a conservative vision for how to make his district better. Saturdays Republican Leadership Initiative training with Harry shows how energized the grassroots is for Republican candidates up and down the ticket. Also in attendance were state Reps. Michael Bocchino, R-150, and Fred Camillo, R-151, both of whom will be on the November ballot with Arora as they run for re-election. It was a good event, but it was a start, Arora said. There is a long road ahead. You have to realize that as a person running for elected office for the first time, I really need to reach out to many, many people. And something like this is important but has to be done on a larger scale, many, many times over. kborsuk@greenwichtime.com STAMFORD - Sheila Barney put two and two together and came up with 25. And it made sense. First, she got caught in traffic so heavy during a recent afternoon rush hour that it took 50 minutes to drive from Stamford Hospital to her South End home, a distance of less than 2 miles. There was gridlock on every corner, Barney said. Second, she watached on another recent afternoon as a neighbor rushed her 6-year-old son inside. His face was swelling so fast. She had to give him Benadryl right away, Barney said. It was asthma - a particular concern on her side of town, especially this time of year, when sunlight lingers longest, temperatures climb and humidity builds. They are the ingredients of smog, which Barney, a longtime South End resident and community activist, said has increased with the traffic in her neighborhood, site of a massive redevelopment. Still, she was surprised when she came across information on the Internet based on the American Lung Associations State of the Air 2018 report, which lists the 25 smoggiest metropolitan areas in the nation. Stamford made the list, Barney said. Twenty-fifth in the whole country. According to the report, the Stamford-Norwalk-Bridgeport metropolitan area has 24 days a year with high levels of ozone, an irritating gas that is a major air pollutant in the lower atmosphere. To make things worse, Stamford is sandwiched between two other high-smog areas - Hartford, which ranks 24th on the list with 27 high-ozone days a year - and New York, ranked No. 6 with 94 days. The area with the worst air pollution in the United States is Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif., with 267 high-ozone days a year, the report found. But the Stamford area is no stranger to the top 25, said Ruth Canovi, director of advocacy for the American Lung Associations Connecticut chapter. The area has a lot of its own traffic, a lot of traffic from the New York City metropolitan area, and a lot of pollutants from power plants in other parts of the country that weather brings in, Canovi said. It all gets worse this time of year, she said. It begins with volatile organic compounds that are emitted into the air from cars, power plants, factories and other sources. Heat and sunlight cook up the molecules and make it bad for us to breathe, Canovi said. This latest report included data from 2016, which was one of the hottest years on record. With more heat, you get more ozone pollution. Things are worse in areas with a lot of traffic, especially traffic that stalls, Canovi said. Idling vehicles just pump pollution into the air, she said. Barney said she has known that asthma has been a serious concern in her neighborhood, which borders Interstate 95 on one of its busiest stretches, since 2004, when she became vice president of the South End Neighborhood Revitalization Zone. Programs were put in place back then to help people with respiratory problems, Barney said. But with all the added cars coming into the South End now, asthma rates are probably going to go up higher. You see so many people going to the hospital. The South End is the site of a redevelopment that has added hundreds of apartments, with more to come. More than 100 million Americans live in the 25 most-polluted metropolitan areas, and 8.5 million have asthma, about a quarter of them children, according to the report. The Stamford-Norwalk-Bridgeport area has a population of 944,200, and 100,600 people have asthma, it found. Canovi said its important to note that air quality has improved from 40 years ago, though theres a caveat. Overall, were doing better, she said. But with the hotter conditions of the last few years, we are concerned we will reverse some of that. Air pollution has the most effect from May to September, when sunlight is more intense and has enough energy to drive the chemical reactions that produce ground-level ozone, according to The Weather Network. High humidity, especially when there is little wind, exacerbates the effect. Ozone can irritate the lungs, resulting in shortness of breath; coughing; increased susceptibility to infection; and reduced ability to fend off microbes, dust, smoke and other harmful particles, The Weather Network reports. Barney said she wonders whether people understand that Stamford is in the bulls eye. Like me, they might be surprised to find out were No. 25, she said. acarella@stamfordadvocate.com. The deer grazing on the soybeans across the road did not move much when we drove down the drive yesterday afternoon. She was standing in the shade of the woods for an early excursion into culinary Nirvana. Normally she would stay hidden until dusk, but the pull of the soybeans was too much for her. Deer love soybeans They also love red clover, as anyone who used to plow at night with a cab tractor call tell you. In the dark ages, when we plowed sod, it was normal to work after dark with a whole herd of deer for company, sometimes almost close enough to pet. They had no fear of a man in a tractor cab. The genetic imprint of man-fear apparently only applied to man on foot. Man on a tractor had never killed them. Men in cars had, so they run from them. Canada geese love soybeans, also. Plant some near a pond and you discover something about geese you will wish you did not know. That is, they know exactly to the inch which plant is the nearest to the water. Take an aerial photo, get out a compass, and you will realize that you can draw a perfect semi-circle some distance from the pond to the edge of the denuded field. The shape never changes. The distance of the semi-circle from the water is only a function of how much time they have had to eat. Every other year I fed three acres of beans to the geese on one field I used to farm. Feeding wildlife If you farm, you feed wildlife. One farmer I used to go to church with brought some kind of venison meal to every church dinner. He lived in Pennsylvania and had a nuisance deer permit. I remember a farmer in Erie County, Pa., who had a lot of woods. He told me he and his friends shot over 100 deer one day. I suggested that would solve the problem for a while, but he said he could shoot that many more any day he wanted to. The good news for you this morning is that the deer are not costing you as much to feed as they were last month. That is as good as the news gets. The bad news is, prices are still plummeting on good weather and political export news. You know it is a bad day when the first item on the market letter from CHS is, President Trump has announced another set of 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports late yesterday. Since our biggest exports to China are farm products, once again the American farmer is paying the price for foreign relations. We are putting tariffs on high-tech items to try to limit the stealing of intellectual property. Chinese retaliation The Chinese continue to retaliate by putting tariffs on our soybeans. A generation ago, President Jimmy Carter put limits on our ag trade in retaliation for the great Russian grain robbery. This was actually a clever plan by the Russians to quietly buy a lot of wheat from every exporter at the same time. By the time the trade realized the extent of the purchases, a big price run-up was on. The real start to the ag trade wars actually was a Reagan-era attempt to limit soybean exports to Japan. This misguided policy was a result of rising soy and product prices here, which the non-livestock farmers thought was great. Sudden changes in trade policy never end well. The Japanese took a billion dollars to Brazil to start up soybean production, and the rest, as we say, is history. Now Brazil and Argentina export more soybeans than the U.S. does. In theory, the lastest soybean war will not change much. World market Soybeans are a world market, and China will continue to use as many as ever, just not ours. Ours will go somewhere else. In practice, the short-term prices are corroded, and the Brazilians are inspired to increase production yet again. Add to the trade problems the current great weather across the Midwest, and you have corn prices down this Tuesday morning, June 19, another seven cents, beans off 22 cents. December corn futures are down more than 60 cents now in less than a month, with the new contract low overnight at 3.68. November soybean futures are off over $1.55 in the same time. USDA was expected to drop corn crop conditions to 76 percent good and excellent in the Monday report, but they reported 78 percent instead. The soybean condition was downgraded to 73 percent. That was off 1 percent, but still one of the great conditions reported in the last forever. Also, the soybean crop planting is now virtually complete at 97 percent, against an average 91 percent. Ohio is at 95 percent, right on the average. So, enjoy watching the beautiful crops most of you have. Enjoy the deer and the geese, too. Look on the bright side. Dont spend much time on price watching. You wont enjoy it for a while. Farmers in England will now be able to apply for licences to cull ravens on farmland in order to protect livestock. Farmers in five English counties will be able to to receive the licences - Derbyshire, Lancashire, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Dorset, Natural England has confirmed. The increasing number of lambs killed due to ravens has led farmers to call for a cull to "responsibly reduce" numbers. The National Sheep Association (NSA) said it supports licences to allow raven numbers to be reduced. NSA believes licences should also be readily available in other parts of the UK affected by what it says is a "massive increase" in raven numbers. The sheep group says the increase has come about due to the birds protected status allowing populations to grow with little deterrent or control. As well as impacting sheep flocks, local wildlife is also facing the danger of limited food stocks, endangering prey and ground nesting bird species such as oystercatchers and lapwings. With lambing now finished across the UK, NSA has received reports of very high losses to ravens this year. 'Loss of a tongue or eye' NSA Chief Executive, Phil Stocker describes the gruesome way ravens kill lambs. Ravens target lambs in vulnerable moments, even striking the very moment they are born, and the loss of a tongue or an eye is a terrible way for these young animals to die. Farmers respect the legislation but must have trust that when species levels reach strong numbers, there can be debate on sustainable levels. Responsible culling under licence will allow farmers to keep on top of the numbers and protect stock when they are at their most defenceless. The licence application process is stringent, with a farmer required to prove the birds have caused or are at high risk of causing serious damage. Mr Stocker says the licences are used to protect ravens from killing livestock and wildlife, and will not be given out liberally or without proven reason. He says: NSA supports the practice of licencing in this way, as it ensures no action is taken without considered reason. The purpose of protecting a species is to ensure numbers do not fall below dangerous levels, and when positive progress is made and populations boom, options must be provided to prevent unintended consequences on other species of domestic and wild animal. Scotland's Minister for Local Housing has dismissed dairy company Graham's planning appeal to build a 40m processing facility and 600 new homes. The Scottish dairy giant, who last week called on the government to approve its planning application, said it is "extremely disappointed" . Grahams, The Family Dairy wanted the Scottish government to approve its planning application for Airthrey Green in Stirling after it was refused by the the Councils Head of Planning. Now, after a two-year appeal process, Minister for Housing Kevin Stewart decided that the proposed development did not accord with the new Local Development Plan. There are environmental concerns that the project will build houses on an area of greenbelt land, amid concerns about flooding and other issues if the building was to go ahead. 'Failed plan' Robert Graham, Managing Director at Grahams, The Family Dairy said the government is sending out a "contradictory message". We are extremely disappointed by the Ministers decision which appears to place more importance on continuing to protect a failed Local Development Plan process than supporting the delivering of much needed affordable homes, infrastructure and creating full-time jobs within the city and Scottish dairy sector, Mr Graham said. For a Government that talks of its commitment to growing the Scottish economy, prioritising the rural and food and drink sectors as well as tackling the housing shortfall in Scotland, this decision by the Planning Minister sends a clearly contradictory message. The dairy business in partnership with Mactaggart & Mickel Homes first submitted the planning application for the development in 2014. Mactaggart & Mickel Group Director Andrew Mickel said: This is a huge disappointment and a surprising decision by the Scottish Government which has publicly stated that economic prosperity is at the heart of its vision for Scotland. Its also terrible news for the thousands of people who are currently on a waiting list for a house in Stirlingshire, and a bitter blow for families looking forward to a new primary school, neighbourhood centre and public park. 2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Fauquier community has proven resilient. The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning -- 4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS. We understand the importance of working to keep our community strong and connected. As we move forward together into 2021, it will take commitment, communication, creativity, and a strong connection with those who are most affected by the stories we cover. We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Fauquier Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come. About Me Scott Because prophetic scriptures are found throughout the bible, it is obvious that a comprehensive, systematic approach would be useful, if not necessary, for the understanding of prophecy. Past prophecies have been fulfilled in a literal manner, as confirmed by the dating of these writings and historical records of confirmation. These past prophecies also serve as a model of how to interpret future prophecies. A literal view of prophecy clearly indicates a certain sequence of events will occur within a single generation, concluding with the Tribulation and Second Advent and these events will be obvious. The prophetic signs appear to be present in this generation and we believe these signs are revealed in the news from around the world. View my complete profile Kangana Ranaut is known for choosing challenging roles on the big screen. Be it Rani from Queen or Datto from Tanu Weds Manu Returns, she has always surprised the audiences with her choices. Now once again, the actress is ready to do a powerful surprising role in Ashwiny Iyer Tiwaris next film, which is based on Kabaddi. The film will be produced by Fox Star Studios.A source close to the award-winning actress informed a daily that this film is going to be Kanganas most challenging film after Queen and Tanu Weds Manu Returns. It said, She is going to play a kabaddi player in the film and her character has a journey from being a single to a married woman like Priyanka Chopras role in Mary Kom.Makers yet have to finalise the male lead opposite Kangana in the film, considering Ashwiny wants someone who can match up to Kanganas calibre. Kangana is currently shooting for Ekta Kapoors Mental Hai Kya in London. She will be back in Mumbai in July second week and then she will start prepping for Ashwinys film. She is excited to team up with Ashwiny as she had loved her both the films, Nil Battey Sannata and Bareilly Ki Barfi! She was in touch with the director since she saw Nil Battey Sannata and wanted to team up with her. When Ashwiny finalised this story to make, she approached her and she said yes instantly.We are excited to watch this collaboration on the big screen. Are you? Felt Insecure, Devastated & Heartbroken "Delta was left heartbroken. She feels she can't compete with a hottie from Hollywood, whose best friends are royals," an insider reported to Women's Day Magazine. Spending Time With His Brother The magazine further quoted the source by saying that Delta Goodrem has been spending "loads of time" with Nick Jonas' brother Joe Jonas as they're filming The Voice in Australia. Secret Meeting! The magazine reported that Nick Jonas and Delta Goodrem secretly met in 2018 and that sparked Delta Goodrem's hopes to get back as Nick had promised her to stay in touch. They Stayed In Touch! "They stayed in touched via text and FaceTime after he left, and he promised he'd be back,' said the source to the magazine. Who Got Away First? Women's Day magazine had also quoted an insider saying that Delta Goodrem feels that Nick Jonas was "the one who got away." Is Delta Still Single? During the television show, Kyle and Jackie O, Delta Goodrem was asked if she's dating anyone lately and she replied. "I'm single." But Why Insecure? Delta Goodrem is such a beautiful woman all by herself and we wonder why is she insecure in the first place! When Did Nick & Delta Break-up? Nick Jonas and Delta Goodrem broke up in 2012. Since then, she's been badly wanting to get back with him. Was There A Fleeting Reference To Madhuri? Rumors were rife that the makers of the film had included one fleeting reference to Madhuri in Sanju. However, they edited it out on her request. It Was Alleged That Madhuri Wanted No Fleeting Reference To Her In Sanju A Pinkvilla report had stated that Madhuri had called up Rajkumar Hirani and insisted that no reference to her should be there in the film. Director Rajkumar Hirani Reveals The Truth Recently while speaking to us when Hirani was asked about these reports, he clarified, "I received no call from Madhuri Dixit ever. These reports are completely false. She never called me up to edit or delete any portions. There's nothing like that." For Those Who Ain't Aware The story about Sanjay-Madhuri's link-up first broke in when they were shooting for Saajan. Speaking about it in an interview with Movie Magazine in October 1993, Dutt was quoted as saying, "This story broke out around the time of Saajan. In fact when the story broke out in the press, she was shooting for Khel in Kenya. So, when we had a schedule of Saajan after that, I went up and said sorry to her. Because she was under public scrutiny for no fault of her. She took it well." Madhuri's Reaction When Asked About Alleged Affair With Sanjay Being A Part Of Sanju A few months back when Madhuri was asked about rumours about her alleged-liason with Sanjay in the 90s being a part of Sanju, the actress had said, "For where I am today, this [the topic of Dutt] has become redundant. Life has come a long way since then. I don't know where these reports are coming from. In any case, it doesn't make a difference to me." Is Karishma Tannu Playing Madhuri In Sanju? The actress is keeping her lips sealed about her role and was quoted as saying by IANS, "I won't be able to say that but I am playing an important role." Was Ranbir Kapoor Nervous When It Came To Playing Dutt? Ranbir recalled, "It was a daunting task for me. I knew the expectations, I knew I was portraying someone who is still so relevant and a much-loved superstar." Ranbir Had To Represent Him With A Lot Of Respect, Dignity & Heart "I knew the challenges and I also knew that there is a fine line between mimicry and representing someone who is loved by so many people. That's why I had to represent him with a lot of respect, dignity and heart." Ranbir's Prep For Sanju "It took us six to eight months to get ready. It took us a lot of time to prep, do the prosthetic tests, acting and character rehearsals. The bottom line is that it's inspired by his life and we had a one-track mind to achieve it." Is Ranbir Also Larger-Than-Life & Emotional Like Sanjay Dutt In Real Life? To this, he replied, "Not at all. You know me since I was a child. I'm more of an introvert. In this film, I really connected with the fact that we're not seeing the larger-than-life Sanjay Dutt. We're seeing him as a young boy who is lost; someone who is scared of his father; someone who lost his mother at a young age. Nargisji passed away barely two days before the release of his debut film Rocky. He Is Thankful That His Life Doesn't Have Many Controversies There is also the part on him getting into bad company, his addiction to drugs and his personal struggle to come out of it. Everything is there - the trouble he got into over the years, the price he paid for it, how he fell and how he resurrected himself. My life has been very different. Thankfully, there are not so many controversies." Ranbir Doesn't Take His Job For Granted When quizzed if he has ever been unfaithful to a role, Ranbir was quoted as saying,, "I don't take my job for granted. I understand that I'm one of the few privileged people who had it easy in life, and that there are many out there who are way more talented than me. I think if I take my job lightly or don't surrender to every role, I won't deserve the position that I'm in today. The 'Sanju' Actor Feels That He Should Have Worked Harder In Rajneeti "However, when I see Raajneeti (2010), I sometimes feel I should have worked harder in that film. Back then, I didn't understand the movie's beats and nuances. I'm grateful to Prakash Jha for giving me that film. If I had a chance to do it again, I will give it much more." She Is Outspoken Last month Yashika became the talk of the town when she spoke about the taboo topic of pre- marital sex and said that it is perfectly fine if a woman loses her virginity before marriage. If she drops such a bombshell on TV then she is likely to grab plenty of attention. Yashika Knows How To Spice It Up In an interview given to Indiaglitz, Yashika had spoken about watching p*rn for the first time and added that she was caught in the act. Needless to say, these comments had created a buzz in Kollywood and proved that Yashika does not like to keep secrets. It will be worth watching if she shares some 'dirty secrets' on the show. The Mia Khalifa Comparison Yashika became the sweetheart of Kollywood because of her bold scenes in the adult-comedy Iruttu Araiyil Murattu Kuththu. In fact, such was the craze surrounding her that some fans even compared her to the controversial former adult actress Mia Khalifa. This alone makes her an enigma. She Is The Youngest Of The Lot The 18-year-old Yashika is the youngest contestant on Bigg Boss Tamil Season 2. And, this makes her the 'dark horse'. It will be worth watching how she deals with the twists and mind games which are going to be an integral part of Bigg Boss Tamil Season 2. Similarities Between DHTH & K3G: Yogita Bihani & Kajols Characters In K3G, the girl (Kajol) comes from a middle class family and is ambitious. She is also against marriage. Yogita Bihani's character on the show is also similar. Karan Kundra & Shahrukh Khans Characters Also, the hero (Shahrukh Khan) in the film was from a royal family, who took care of family business. He was attached to his family. In this show too, Rithwik (Karan Kundra) belongs to a royal family and is all set to take over the family business! Bond Between The Lead Actors & Their Brothers Another common thing in DHTH and K3G is the bond that the lead characters share with their brothers. The party look on DHTH reminded of K3G. Only difference is the nature of the characters - SRK's character was polite, respected girls, and never thought that love is waste of time, but Karan's character is totally opposite. Fans Are Impressed With Karan Kundra Meanwhile, the fans are completely impressed with Karan Kundra's look and his character Rithwik Noon. They took to social media to praise the actor. Fans Tweets: Khushi_mann "Your were looking so so handsome, Killer look and charming as Rithwik Noon I am loving your great acting and your voice you are #slaying #kingk u r amazing @kkundrra #DilHiTohHai." - (sic) Robin "#DilHiTohHai I watch this show yestdrday 10 pm and I love it. I am really impressed by @kkundrra character Rithvik.Very well done sir. Love you Karan sir. #KaranKundrraIsBack. #karankundrra." - (sic) Karan Ki Muskaan "So true..according to me ritwik noon is a loveable creature..He is not a bad boy as he was showing..Even like aarohi I m also madly in love with him #DilHiTohHai." - (sic) Pari Khan "@kkundrra Finally watched #DilHiTohHai I have just one word.. Brilliant!! Loved both #RithwikNoon & #PalakSharma. Very good chemistry...Congratulations to the entire team for such a magnificent start @ektaravikapoor @iyogitabihani @altbalaji @SonyTVWatching." - (sic) Jaz "@kkundrra and THAT is how you start a show with a bang! #DilHiTohHai captivated my attention from scene one! Rithwik Noon is already so fun to watch, and my inner Punjaban is loving the Punjabi flare to this show! You guys have nailed it with this one, and I'm so happy for you!" - (sic) Shubhangi Atre Trolled For Posting A Monokini Picture Recently, Shubhangi Atre, who has impressed viewers with her sanskari' looks on Bhabhi Ji Ghar Par Hain, was trolled for sharing a monokini picture. The actress looked stunning as she flaunted her curves in the swimsuit on a Thailand beach. The Actress Gives It Back To The Haters While there were many fans who loved her different look, a few started commenting filthy on the picture. But Shubhangi remains unaffected with all the negative comments and doesn't regret sharing the picture. She gives it back to the haters saying that they can't expect her wearing a sari of salwar-kameez on a beach! What Do People Expect Me To Wear On A Beach? The actress was quoted by BT as saying, "What do people expect me to wear on a beach? I obviously can't be wearing a sari or salwar-kameez. I feel fit and I can pull off a swimsuit." I Dont Regret Posting The Picture "I don't regret posting the picture; in fact, it wasn't a planned move. My husband clicked the photograph, and I liked it and posted it. Even on screen, I don't mind wearing a bikini if a character demands it. If one has a good body, why should there be any qualms about flaunting it?" People Expect Me To Be In The Angoori Bhabhi Costume All The Time She further added, "Of course, it feels bad. I don't think I looked cheap or vulgar. People expect me to be in the Angoori bhabhi costume all the time; often, they are shocked to see me in Western outfits." Sharam & Culture Aankhon Mein Hote Hain "They need to understand that I am different from the character I play on screen. This is one of the reasons why women are scared of wearing what they want to. I don't think women should be judged on the basis of their outfits, we need to change our mentality. Sharam and culture aankhon mein hote hain." NORWALK (dpa-AFX) - Fujifilm Holdings Corp. (FUJIF.PK, FUJIY.PK) sued Xerox Corp. (XRX) for breach of contract and estimated damages of more than $1 billion after the printer and copier company walked away from a planned merger earlier this year. Xerox reached a truce with activist investors Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason last month to terminate the deal it had in place with Fujifilm, but it is still fighting with Fujifilm over the soured merger the pair sought to prevent. Fujifilm's federal lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges Xerox unlawfully terminated an agreement to combine with Fuji Xerox, a joint venture between the two companies, due to pressure from Messrs. Icahn and Deason, who argued the deal undervalued Xerox. Japan-based Fujifilm said by settling with the activists, Xerox prevented other shareholders from having a say on the deal. 'It is inconsistent with shareholder democracy to allow Carl Icahn and Darwin Deason, minority shareholders with only 15% of Xerox's shares, to dictate the fate of Xerox,' Fujifilm said in a statement. Xerox said in a statement it remains 'extremely confident' its actions were valid. 'Xerox will vigorously defend its decision and pursue any and all remedies available to Xerox arising from Fujifilm's mismanagement and misconduct,' the company said. 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. HAMBURG, Germany, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- - Cross reference: Picture is available at AP Images (http://www.apimages.com) - CREMER becomes a partner of the Next Logistics Accelerator (NLA). In doing so, the Hamburg-based family-owned company, which is active worldwide, is participating in Europe's largest startup accelerator for the logistics industry. "CREMER moves around 11 million tons of goods each year. Behind all these movements of goods are logistic processes, which are subject to the digital transformation," says Dr. Ullrich Wegner, CEO of Peter Cremer Holding. "As a partner of the NLA, we aim to also stay with the times in the future. We're looking forward to supporting startups from the logistics sector with our expertise and to linking their prototypes with our existing business at an early stage." Miriam Kroger, Managing Partner at NLA, adds: "With CREMER, we're gaining a highly experienced partner for our network. For our founding teams from the first batch, proven logistics experts are on hand as designated partners who feel at home all across the world." About the NLA: The NLA was founded in 2017 by the Hamburger Sparkasse, the Logistik-Initiative Hamburg and New Times Ventures as a sector-specific multi-corporate accelerator. It supports founder teams across the world in developing innovative digital business models. Alongside equity capital of up to EUR 50,000 and access to potential customers and business partners, it offers participating startups a customized training program along with premises. In return, the participants hand over company shares of between three and ten percent to the NLA shareholders. They are moving their focus of work to Hamburg for at least six months in order to promote their business growth under optimum conditions. The program includes startups from what is known as the WIOTTA market sectors. This includes a broad technology- and business spectrum: Warehousing, Internet of Things, Transportation, Mobility, Supply Chain Management, Predictive Analytics, Big Data, Block Chain, 3D Printing, Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles, Drone Technology, Last Mile Delivery, Smart Cities, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). About CREMER: CREMER was founded in 1946 by Peter Cremer and is a company enjoying success worldwide in trade, logistics and industry. It is a third-generation family company. With over 2000 employees, CREMER is active across the world. The company is based in Hamburg. Contact: Peter Cremer Holding GmbH & Co. KG Glockengiesserwall 3 20095 Hamburg, Germany Oliver Schulz Head of Corporate Development o.schulz@cremer.de +49-4032011-321 http://www.cremer.de 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. SAN JOSE (dpa-AFX) - Adobe Systems (ADBE) announced Tuesday powerful new enhancements to Adobe Document Cloud with advancements for Adobe Sign, which now powers majority of Fortune 100 Companies. The company also expanded Microsoft partnership to include PDF Services from Adobe. The company noted that Adobe Sign is now more deeply integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365, providing real-time access to customer details from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and more automated sales processes. It is also the first Cloud Service Provider in the industry to receive FedRAMP Tailored authorization that meets the government's rigorous security standards. With this, Adobe Document Cloud can be quickly deployed across U.S. Federal agencies. Further, with new PDF integrations, all Office 365 users with a subscription to Adobe Acrobat DC for teams or enterprise will now have the ability to create, manipulate, and view high-quality, secure PDFs right from the ribbon in online versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft OneDrive and Microsoft SharePoint. 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. LONDON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Singles swipe not just on basis of looks but also on compatibility Muslim singles in the UK and around the world now have a new way to meet each other thanks to the MuslimMarriage app. MuslimMarriage is launching with a new concept of compatibility and committed swipes. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/707390/MuslimMarriage_Logo.jpg ) Muslim Marriage Solution is an app and website for marriage-minded Muslims who are looking for life partners. Muslim Marriage Solution is a London based company founded by a Muslim woman and is focused on bringing more transparency in the Muslim dating industry providing a targeted approach to Muslim dating. Unlike some other apps, MuslimMarriage scores users based on compatibility. Compatibility scores are prominently displayed on each user's profile, and users are encouraged to connect with each other based on their compatibility scoring. The app is free to download and use and will be available in 10 additional languages. Muslim Marriage offers a variety of in-app features that keep users safe while encouraging socialisation. Among the app's many features: In-App Messaging : Users do not need to worry about giving away sensitive private contact information. The in-app messenger allows singles to socialise safely in a neutral online environment : Users do not need to worry about giving away sensitive private contact information. The in-app messenger allows singles to socialise safely in a neutral online environment Free Video Chat : The in-app video chat feature allows users a safe way to meet virtually before they meet each other in public. With Muslim Marriage, users no longer need to give out their personal numbers to ring prospective matches eliminating concerns they do not look like their profile pictures : The in-app video chat feature allows users a safe way to meet virtually they meet each other in public. With Muslim Marriage, users no longer need to give out their personal numbers to ring prospective matches eliminating concerns they do not look like their profile pictures Locked Snaps : App users can share photographs safely with other users, choosing which photos they'd like to share. Snaps can be hidden with a password and shared only with those with whom the user chooses : App users can share photographs safely with other users, choosing which photos they'd like to share. Snaps can be hidden with a password and shared only with those with whom the user chooses Real Users: The app deals with the issue of inactive profiles where users keep swiping all day long in vain without a response In addition to the always free-to-use version of MuslimMarriage app, an optional premium membership for 5 per month is offered. Premium membership gives users access to unlimited messaging and video communications along with an opportunity to add themselves to an exclusive hot list. MuslimMarriage can be accessed online at https://www.muslimmarriagesolution.com/. The app can be also be downloaded in Apple's App Store and Google Play. Muslim MARRIAGE Solution website: https://www.muslimmarriagesolution.com/ Join MuslimMarriage: https://www.muslimmarriagesolution.com/join Press and Media Inquiries Mrs Zetoon Mohammed Director Email: info@MuslimMarriageSolution.com Phone: +44(0)742-962-8014 LINKOPING, Sweden, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- International medical imaging IT and cybersecurity company Sectra (STO: SECT B) has signed a digital pathology contract with Instituto Portugues de Oncologia de Lisboa (IPO Lisboa). IPO Lisboa is renowned for its cancer care and is the first hospital in Portugal to seamlessly include digital pathology in its existing VNA. The solution allows pathologists to access images from any workstation within the hospital as well as remotely, and enables integrated diagnostic workflows-especially important for improving cancer care. "Sectra's digital pathology solution gives us access to already-proven calculation algorithms that will translate into greater reproducibility of results and have an impact on clinical decisions," says Dr. Jose Cabecadas, Pathology Manager, Instituto Portugues de Oncologia de Lisboa. IPO Lisboa is expanding its medical imaging IT solution for radiology to also include pathology. The solution will provide pathologists with instant access to images and related data, digital tools for reviewing the images and the ability to collaborate across both departments and locations. "The use of a single system for the entire hospital guarantees a universal availability of resources and the possibility to work remotely," continues Dr. Cabecadas. "An immediate additional benefit is that the solution will provide increased efficiency in the preparations for multidisciplinary meetings." Sectra's digital pathology solution Sectra's digital pathology solution includes digital tools which enable the pathologists to make their diagnoses and carry out reporting with higher precision and less time spent per case. It is a complete, vendor-neutral solution for primary diagnostics that includes storage solutions and an advanced review workstation. Sectra's pathology solution is part of Sectra's Enterprise Image Management (EIM) solution. Sectra's enterprise imaging portfolio provides a unified strategy for all imaging needs, and improves patient outcomes while lowering operational costs. The scalable and modular solution supports the most image-intense departments-radiology, breast imaging, pathology, cardiology and orthopaedics. Being built on the same technical platform, customers can easily extend a departmental solution to create a comprehensive VNA. Read more about Sectra Enterprise Image Management and why Sectra PACS is "Best in KLAS" at https://www.sectra.com/medical/. For further information, please contact: Dr. Torbjorn Kronander CEO and President Sectra AB +46 (0)705-23-52-27 Marie Ekstrom Tragardh Executive Vice President Sectra AB and President Sectra Imaging IT Solutions +46 (0)708-23-56-10 This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com http://news.cision.com/sectra/r/portuguese-hospital-expands-its-vna-from-sectra-with-digital-pathology-to-improve-cancer-care,c2551292 The following files are available for download: Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 19, 2018) - Dan Blondal, CEO of Nano One Materials (TSXV: NNO) (OTC Pink: NNOMF) (FSE: LBMB), is pleased to announce that Nano One has met its objectives on pilot plant optimization and received a milestone payment of $760,145 from Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC). "This is the third of four installments from SDTC," said Mr. Blondal, "released to Nano One after delivering on its commitments. SDTC has a comprehensive review process and this confirms Nano One's ability to execute on its plans to date. The funds are an advance on the work currently underway to validate Nano One's technology with third party commercial interests." To date, the Government of Canada has contributed over $3.2 million in non-dilutive support to Nano One's pilot plant project through SDTC and the Automotive Supplier's Innovation Program (ASIP). Nano One has also received support from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) on related projects. Mr. Blondal said "Nano One has optimized and demonstrated the production of pilot scale volumes of various lithium nickel manganese and cobalt based cathode materials as well as its cobalt free high voltage spinel and lithium iron phosphate. SDTC, ASIP and the Government of Canada are providing crucial support and Nano One remains committed to the commercialization of its manufacturing technology for the production of next generation lithium ion battery cathode materials." Nano One Materials Corp. Dan Blondal, CEO For information with respect to Nano One or the contents of this news release, please contact John Lando (President) at (604) 420-2041 or visit the website at www.nanoone.ca. About Nano One: Nano One Materials Corp ("Nano One" or "the Company") is developing patented technology for the low-cost production of high performance battery materials used in electric vehicles, energy storage and consumer electronics. The processing technology addresses fundamental supply chain constraints by enabling wider raw materials specifications for use in lithium ion batteries. The process can be configured for a range of different nanostructured materials and has the flexibility to shift with emerging and future battery market trends and a diverse range of other growth opportunities. The novel three-stage process uses equipment common to industry and Nano One has built a pilot plant to demonstrate high volume production and to optimize its technology across a range of materials. The pilot plant is being funded with the assistance and support of the Government of Canada through Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) and the Automotive Supplier Innovation Program (ASIP) a program of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada ISED). Nano One also receives financial support from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP). Nano One's mission is to establish its patented technology as a leading platform for the global production of a new generation of nanostructured composite materials. For more information, please visit www.nanoone.ca Certain information contained herein may constitute "forward-looking information" under Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, the execution of the Company's plans which are contingent on the receipt of grant monies and the commercialization of the Company's technology and patents. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as 'believe', 'expect', 'anticipate', 'plan', 'intend', 'continue', 'estimate', 'may', 'will', 'should', 'ongoing', or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "will" occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made and they are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, including: the ability of the Company to obtain additional financing; including the receipt of grant monies from SDTC, ASIP, NRC-IRAP and the receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals. 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. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements or forward-looking information that is incorporated by reference herein, except as required by applicable securities 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 NEWS RELEASE Donald Trump directed the US Trade Representative to prepare new tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports Monday as the two nations moved closer to a potential trade war. The tariffs, which Trump wants set at a 10% rate, would be the latest round of punitive measures in an escalating dispute over the large trade imbalance between the two countries. - Guardian Philip Hammond has warned the cabinet that he has no more money for other policies after being forced to find 25 billion for the NHS. ... 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. Investec Asset Management Limited - Form 8.3 - Virgin Money Holdings UK Plc FORM 8.3 PUBLIC OPENING POSITION DISCLOSURE/DEALING DISCLOSURE BY A PERSON WITH INTERESTS IN RELEVANT SECURITIES REPRESENTING 1% OR MORE Rule 8.3 of the Takeover Code (the "Code") 1. KEY INFORMATION (a) Full name of discloser: Investec Asset Management Limited (b) Owner or controller of interests and short positions disclosed, if different from 1(a): The naming of nominee or vehicle companies is insufficient. For a trust, the trustee(s), settlor and beneficiaries must be named. N/A (c) Name of offeror/offeree in relation to whose relevant securities this form relates: Use a separate form for each offeror/offeree Virgin Money Holdings (UK) plc (d) If an exempt fund manager connected with an offeror/offeree, state this and specify identity of offeror/offeree: No (e) Date position held/dealing undertaken: For an opening position disclosure, state the latest practicable date prior to the disclosure 18 June 2018 (f) In addition to the company in 1(c) above, is the discloser making disclosures in respect of any other party to the offer? If it is a cash offer or possible cash offer, state "N/A" No 2. POSITIONS OF THE PERSON MAKING THE DISCLOSURE If there are positions or rights to subscribe to disclose in more than one class of relevant securities of the offeror or offeree named in 1(c), copy table 2(a) or (b) (as appropriate) for each additional class of relevant security. (a) Interests and short positions in the relevant securities of the offeror or offeree to which the disclosure relates following the dealing (if any) Class of relevant security: 0.01p ordinary Interests Short positions Number % Number % (1) Relevant securities owned and/or controlled: 9,838,934 2.21% (2) Cash-settled derivatives: (3) Stock-settled derivatives (including options) and agreements to purchase/sell: TOTAL: 9,838,934 2.21% All interests and all short positions should be disclosed. Details of any open stock-settled derivative positions (including traded options), or agreements to purchase or sell relevant securities, should be given on a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions). (b) Rights to subscribe for new securities (including directors' and other employee options) Class of relevant security in relation to which subscription right exists: Details, including nature of the rights concerned and relevant percentages: 3. DEALINGS (IF ANY) BY THE PERSON MAKING THE DISCLOSURE Where there have been dealings in more than one class of relevant securities of the offeror or offeree named in 1(c), copy table 3(a), (b), (c) or (d) (as appropriate) for each additional class of relevant security dealt in. The currency of all prices and other monetary amounts should be stated. (a) Purchases and sales Class of relevant security Purchase/sale Number of securities Price per unit 0.01p ordinary Sale 9,163 3.4612 (b) Cash-settled derivative transactions Class of relevant security Product description e.g. CFD Nature of dealing e.g. opening/closing a long/short position, increasing/reducing a long/short position Number of reference securities Price per unit (c) Stock-settled derivative transactions (including options) (i) Writing, selling, purchasing or varying Class of relevant security Product descriptione.g. call option Writing, purchasing, selling, varying etc. Number of securities to which option relates Exercise price per unit Type e.g. American, European etc. Expiry date Option money paid/ received per unit (ii) Exercise Class of relevant security Product description e.g. call option Exercising/ exercised against Number of securities Exercise price per unit (d) Other dealings (including subscribing for new securities) Class of relevant security Nature of dealing e.g. subscription, conversion Details Price per unit (if applicable) 4. OTHER INFORMATION (a) Indemnity and other dealing arrangements Details of any indemnity or option arrangement, or any agreement or understanding, formal or informal, relating to relevant securities which may be an inducement to deal or refrain from dealing entered into by the person making the disclosure and any party to the offer or any person acting in concert with a party to the offer: Irrevocable commitments and letters of intent should not be included. If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none" None (b) Agreements, arrangements or understandings relating to options or derivatives Details of any agreement, arrangement or understanding, formal or informal, between the person making the disclosure and any other person relating to: (i) the voting rights of any relevant securities under any option; or (ii) the voting rights or future acquisition or disposal of any relevant securities to which any derivative is referenced: If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none" None (c) Attachments Is a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions) attached? No Date of disclosure: 19 June 2018 Contact name: Ian Gartshore Telephone number: 02075971825 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 atwww.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 19, 2018) - MediaValet Inc. (TSXV: MVP), a leading provider of digital asset management (DAM) software, is pleased to announce that Gartner, Inc. (NYSE:IT) (Gartner), has named MediaValet, in its "2018 Market Guide for Digital Asset Management", as one of nineteen Representative Vendors covering on-premises, cloud, hybrid and SaaS deployments. According to Gartner, "marketers named content creation and management as their top two digital priorities for 2018." Gartner also noted, between 2016 and 2017, their analysts "saw a threefold increase in the number of inquiries about digital asset management from marketing leaders" and "the first quarter of 2018 showed continued momentum, with close to two times more inquiries in 1Q18 than in 1Q17." Gartner's 2018 Market Guide for Digital Asset Management classifies DAM vendors by: Deployment option (on-premises, Cloud, SaaS and Hybrid) (on-premises, Cloud, SaaS and Hybrid) Geographic focus (North America, Latin America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific) (North America, Latin America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific) Cost ($, $$ or $$$) ($, $$ or $$$) Deployment scale (single division, multiple divisions and global) (single division, multiple divisions and global) Primary industry verticals served MediaValet is identified in the Guide as one of only three DAM vendors, that offers an enterprise Cloud (and SaaS) solution that can be deployed across all regions. With key verticals identified in Manufacturing, Media, Travel, Financial Services, Education, Healthcare/Life Sciences, and Technology, MediaValet stands apart from the other vendors based on price and scale, due to its cost effectiveness for large organizations and archives, and ease of deployment across multi-divisions, regions and globally. Figure 1: Gartner Names MediaValet Among Top Enterprise DAM Vendors To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit: http://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3817/35339_a1529391332475_45.jpg "In today's digital, content-centric, highly competitive world, DAM is a must-have for all organizations," commented David MacLaren, founder CEO of MediaValet. "We're honoured to be named by Gartner as one of today's top DAM vendors and we're very pleased how they've positioned us in the market against the likes of Adobe and OpenText. We've worked tirelessly to create an enterprise class solution, with a truly global footprint, that's both easy-to-use and positively impacts organizations' top and bottom lines." Continued MacLaren, "We're committed to innovating and growing with our customers, and to continually setting new benchmarks for application speed, accessibility, reliability and scalability along the way. Our recent launch of Creative Spaces is an example of our commitment. We now help mid to enterprise organizations, both regional and global, securely and reliably manage the entire lifecycle of their creative assets - from creation to distribution." To download Gartner's 2018 Market Guide for Digital Asset Management, please visit: https://www.gartner.com/document/3877363. About MediaValet Inc. MediaValet stands at the forefront of the enterprise cloud-based digital asset management industry. Built exclusively on Microsoft Azure and available in 50 Microsoft data center regions around the world, MediaValet delivers unparalleled enterprise class security, reliability, redundancy and scalability while offering the largest global footprint of any DAM solution. In addition to providing all core cloud DAM capabilities and local support for creative teams, MediaValet offers industry leading integrations into Slack, Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Oracle Marketing Cloud (Eloqua), Drupal 8, WordPress, Hootsuite and many other best-in-class 3rd party applications. Follow MediaValet: Blog, Twitter and LinkedIn Surf: www.mediavalet.com For further information, please contact: David MacLaren Tel: (604) 688-2321 david.maclaren@mediavalet.com Babak Pedram Tel: (416) 644-5081 babak.pedram@mediavalet.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." JAKARTA (dpa-AFX) - Halcon Resources Corp. (HK) said it will reduce its operated rig count in July 2018 from four to three, primarily due to lower near-term realized oil prices in the Midland market. Halcon is currently in advanced negotiations to secure 25,000 bbl/d of firm capacity on a pipeline to the Gulf Coast, which is targeted to be in service by the second half of 2019. The company noted that the agreement will result in it sending a majority of its forecasted oil production to Gulf Coast markets once the pipeline is operational. The agreement is not expected to include any minimum volume commitments or similar obligations. Halcon currently has 8,000 bbl/d of MidCush basis hedges in place for the second half of 2018 at -$11.69 and 12,000 bbl/d of MidCush hedges in place for the first half of 2019 at -$3.02. Halcon said it expects second-quarter 2018 production to be within the previously announced guidance range of 13,000 to 14,000 boe/d. The company plans to provide updated full-year 2018 guidance, including the impact of the reduced rig activity, as part of its second quarter earnings release. Floyd Wilson, Halcon's Chairman and CEO said, 'With widening MidCush differentials, we have seen our recent oil price realizations decline significantly. Accordingly, we have decided to moderate our drilling pace to three operated rigs for the remainder of 2018. We can still generate substantial near-term production growth with three rigs running while at the same time decreasing our cash flow outspend.' 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. PALM BEACH, Florida, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MarketNewsUpdates.com News Commentary Everywhere you look these days, there's a constant introduction of the newest and innovative CBD (or cannabidiol) oil-infused products. Such products as CBD balms for pain, CBD serums for fine lines, CBD moisturizers for acne... the list goes on. Sales and promotions of CBD products (some combined with small amounts of THC) are exploding. Industry analysts predict the market in the U.S. will reach $1 billion a year by 2020. CBD, one of more than 100 cannabinoids found in marijuana, is made into tinctures, elixirs, balms and other products. The products are touted for just about whatever ails you, and also for beauty, hygiene, stress reduction, and wellness. Active Companies from around the market with current developments this week include: Marijuana Company of America, Inc. (OTC:MCOA), mCig Inc. (OTC:MCIG), Cannabis Science Inc. (OTC:CBIS), Medical Marijuana Inc. (OTC:MJNA), CV Sciences Inc. (OTC:CVSI) Marijuana Company of America, Inc. (OTCPK:MCOA), an innovative hemp and cannabis corporation, is pleased to announce that the company's hempSMART brand has launched its revolutionary new cosmetic product hempSMART Face. Each bottle of hempSMART Face is formulated with 150mg of full spectrum, non-pyschoactive, Cannabidiol (CBD) oil derived from the industrial hemp plant. The newly developed hempSMART topical is a nourishing facial moisturizer that combines CBD oil with a unique blend of ayurvedic herbs and botanicals that is designed to refresh, replenish, and restore your skin cells on your face. The innovative new formula is rich in Omega 3, 6, 7 and 9, along with naturally occurring ceramides and contains synergistic ingredients such as Organic Aloe, Sabi Inchi Oil, Argan Kernel Oil, Macademia Seed Oil, Rose Hip Seed Oil, Pomegranate Seed Oil, Tulsi, Turmeric Oil, Frankinsense, Ashwaganda, Sweet Potato Root Extract, Coconut Oil, and Sea Buckthorn Oil. MCOA's CEO Donald Steinberg commented, "Our team is excited to announce the expansion of the hempSMART brand into the world of cosmetic products. HempSMART will continue to build upon our already established and unique formulations to provide our customers and affiliates with the tools needed to succeed in the wellness industry." Read this and more news for MCOAathttp://www.marketnewsupdates.com/news/mcoa.html In the industry developments and happenings in the market this week include: Medical Marijuana Inc. (OTC:MJNA) last week announced it applauds the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for its recent statement on the legality of cannabidiol (CBD) -- which further clarifies that some CBD products, such as hemp-derived CBD products sold by Medical Marijuana, Inc., are legal to distribute freely throughout the United States and do not fall under the regulations of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The statement clarified: "Products and materials that are made from the cannabis plant and which fall outside the CSA definition of marijuana (such as sterilized seeds, oil or cake made from the seeds, and mature stalks) are not controlled under the CSA. Such products may accordingly be sold and otherwise distributed throughout the United States without restriction under the CSA or its implementing regulations." Cannabis Science Inc. (OTC:CBIS) recently announced its latest University Scholarship Expo will begin this weekend at Cali RX, Cannabis Science's flagship location. Cali RX is located at 14006 Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks, California 91423. Another expo will be held at the newest Cannabis Science location, CBIS Nexus RX. Nexus RX is located at 4922 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles CA, that is currently undergoing final renovations and will open for business soon. "As previously stated, these beautiful, state-of-the-art, retail facilities are designed to connect Cannabis Science directly with patients and doctors. Additionally, these facilities provide our company with a platform to contribute to the development of the communities in which we operate," stated Mr. Raymond C. Dabney, Cannabis Science's President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-founder. "As a good corporate citizen, Cannabis Science, through our partners, intends to offer educational opportunities for people in traditionally underserved communities." mCig Inc. (OTC:MCIG) recently announced an update on its 40-acre industrial hemp project in New York. This spring, NYAcres propagated 80,000 industrial hemp seeds with FarmOn! Foundation in Copake NY projecting 55,000 pounds of processable flower for CBD extraction to sell as an ingredient for white label products demanding hemp oil and promoting its benefits. Since sprouting seeds NYAcres is currently planting 40 acres of industrial hemp outdoors in certified organic fields focused on two varieties of CBD concentrated organic seed strains: Cherry Wine, and Berry Blossom, which yield 12-15 percent CBD concentration. These feminized only seed strains are both 100% hemp and 100% organic and are registered with the Department of Agriculture. CV Sciences Inc. (OTCQB:CVSI) last week announced the June 7, 2018 publication of the toxicology and safety results of an extract from the base raw materials used in its market leading PlusCBD Oil consumer products. The Company contracted respected scientific and regulatory consulting firm, AIBMR Life Sciences, Inc, to conduct the battery of toxicological studies to investigate the safety of oral consumption of the Company's hemp cannabidiol (CBD) oil and to support a Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) Independent Conclusion. The monumental study entitled, "An Assessment of the Genotoxicity and Subchronic Toxicity of a Subcritical Fluid Extract of the Aerial Parts of Hemp" concluded that the test article was non-mutagenic, non-clastogenic and non-genotoxic. The toxicological assessment is the first known published data of its kind since the 1980 Rosenkrantz et al.'s publication with respect to toxicology data on CBD, Cannabichromene and hashish oil. The battery of GLP/OECD compliant studies is a major contribution in advancement of the science of hemp-derived CBD. DISCLAIMER: MarketNewsUpdates.com (MNU) is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. MNU is NOT affiliated in any manner with any company mentioned herein. 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Contact Information: Media Contact email: info@marketnewsupdates.com +1(561)325-8757 DETROIT, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Stratview Research announces the launch of a new market research report on Aircraft Composite Enclosures Market by Aircraft Type (Commercial Aircraft, Regional Aircraft, Military Aircraft, and Others), by Shielding Type (Shielded Enclosures and Non-Shielded Enclosures), by Resin Type (PPS, PEEK, PEKK, and Others), by Fiber Type (Carbon Fiber Composites and Glass Fiber Composites), by Manufacturing Process Type (Injection Molding and Others) and by Region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World), Trend, Forecast, Competitive Analysis, and Growth Opportunity: 2018-2023. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660595/Stratview_Research_Logo.jpg ) This market report, from Stratview Research, studies the aircraft composite enclosures market over the trend period of 2012 to 2017 and forecast period of 2018 to 2023. The research report provides detailed insights on the market dynamics to enable informed business decision making and growth strategy formulation based on the opportunities present in the market. The Global Aircraft Composite Enclosures Market: Highlights Enclosures, in an aircraft, are cases or cabinets used to protect critical electronic components. Reduction in thermal loads, protection against aircraft fluids, protection from the environment, and shielding against EMI as well as static electricity are some essential functions performed by enclosures used in an aircraft. Metallic enclosures are predominantly used in the aircraft industry, owing to their superior mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties; however, these enclosures are prone to corrosion and bring excess weight to an aircraft. The industry is keen to adopt composite enclosures which are not only lighter in weight as compared to metallic enclosures, but also offer higher thermal loads and carry electrical properties. As per an indepth study conducted by Stratview Research, the global aircraft composite enclosures market is projected to grow at a healthy rate over the next five years to reach US$ 199.0 million in 2023. Organic growth of aircraft production to support the rising passenger and freight traffic, an increased preference for composite parts over traditional metallic ones, and an increasing use of avionics in the next-generation aircraft are some of the key factors that are proliferating the demand for composite enclosures in the aircraft industry. The research's findings suggest that commercial aircraft is likely to remain the growth engine of the market during the forecast period. Increase in the production rates of key aircraft programs, stringent emission norms for reducing carbon emissions, increase in the use of avionics in aircraft, and rising penetration of composites are likely to aid growth to the segment in the coming years. Based on the resin type, PPS resin is likely to remain the most dominant resin type in the aircraft composite enclosures market over the next five years. The resin type offers good dimensional stability even at an elevated temperature and in the harsh chemical environment. It also helps in molding complex parts with very tight tolerances and has outstanding resistance to a wide variety of aggressive chemical environments and stability of dielectric and insulating properties over a wide range of conditions. Register Here and Ask for a Free Sample on the Report Based on the fiber type, carbon fiber composite is likely to remain the dominant segment of the market during the forecast period, driven by its long list of advantages including lightweight, higher strength-to-weight ratio, good EMI performance, and better aesthetics. Glass fiber composites also offer a wide array of advantages including low cost, low weight, good product performance, and excellent corrosion resistance, over their rivals including aluminum and other metallic enclosures. Injection molding is the most widely preferred manufacturing process in the aircraft composite enclosures market and is likely to remain the most dominant process during the forecast period as well. It is an ideal process for mass-volume applications and can develop complex shapes in a very short cycle time with very fewer scrapes. As per the study, North America is projected to remain the largest market during the forecast period. The USA is the growth engine of the North American aircraft composite enclosures market. Presence of major aircraft manufacturers, tier players, and enclosure manufacturers primarily drive the demand for composite enclosures in the country. Asia-Pacific is likely to depict the highest growth during the same period, driven by China, India, and Japan. All these three countries would remain the growth engines of the region's market for aircraft composite enclosure over the next five years. Major composite enclosure manufacturing companies are TE Connectivity, Kaman Aerospace (Vermont Composites Inc), Carlisle Interconnect Technologies, AIM Aerospace, Automated Dynamics, and Connective Design Inc. The development of lightweight enclosures and collaboration with OEMs for the joint development of enclosures are some of the key strategies adopted by the major players to gain a competitive edge in the market. Report Features This report provides market intelligence in the most comprehensive way. The report structure has been kept such that it offers maximum business value. It provides critical insights on the market dynamics and will enable strategic decision making for the existing market players as well as those willing to enter the market. The following are the key features of the report: Market structure: Overview, industry life cycle analysis, supply chain analysis. Market environment analysis: Growth drivers and constraints, Porter's five forces analysis, SWOT analysis. Market trend and forecast analysis. Market segment trend and forecast. Competitive landscape and dynamics: Market share, product portfolio, product launches, etc. Attractive market segments and associated growth opportunities. Emerging trends. Strategic growth opportunities for the existing and new players. Key success factors This report studies the composite enclosures market in the global aircraft industry and has segmented the market in six ways, keeping in mind the interest of all the stakeholders across the value chain. Following are the six ways in which the market is segmented: Aircraft Composite Enclosures Market, By Aircraft Type Commercial Aircraft (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Regional Aircraft (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Military Aircraft (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Others (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Aircraft Composite Enclosures Market, By Shielding Type Shielded Enclosures (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Non-Shielded Enclosures (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Aircraft Composite Enclosures Market, By Resin Type PPS Composites (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) , , , and RoW) PEEK Composites (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) , , , and RoW) PEKK Composites (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) , , , and RoW) Other Composites (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Aircraft Composite Enclosures Market, By Fiber Type Carbon Fiber Composites (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) , , , and RoW) Glass Fiber Composites (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Aircraft Composite Enclosures Market, By Process Type Injection Moulding (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Others (Regional Analysis: North America , Europe , Asia-Pacific , and RoW) Aircraft Composite Enclosures Market, By Region North America (Country Analysis: The USA , Rest of North America ) Europe (Country Analysis: France , Germany , the UK, and Rest of Europe ) Asia-Pacific (Country Analysis: China , Japan , India , and Rest of Asia-Pacific ) Rest of the World (Country Analysis: Latin America , the Middle East , and Others) Stratview Research has number of high value market reports in the global aerospace & defense industry. Please refer to the following link to browse through our reports: Click Here for Other Reports from Stratview Research in the Aerospace & Defense Industry Some of our other premium market reports in the aerospace & defense industry: Global Aircraft EMI Shielding Market by Aircraft Type, by Application Type, by Product Type, by Location Type, and by Region, Trend, Forecast, Competitive Analysis, and Growth Opportunity: 2017-2022 Aerospace & Defense Thermoplastic Composites Market by Aircraft Type, by Resin Type, by Application Type, by Fiber Type, by Process Type, and by Region, Trend, Forecast, Competitive Analysis, and Growth Opportunity: 2018-2023 About Stratview Research Stratview Research is a global market intelligence firm providing wide range of services including syndicated market reports, custom research and sourcing intelligence across industries, such as Advanced Materials, Aerospace & Defense, Automotive & Mass Transportation, Consumer Goods, Construction & Equipment, Electronics and Semiconductors, Energy & Utility, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Oil & Gas. We have a strong team of industry veterans and analysts with an extensive experience in executing custom research projects for mid-sized to Fortune 500 companies, in the areas of Market Assessment, Opportunity Screening, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence, Target Screening, Market Entry Strategy, Go to Market Strategy, and Voice of Customer studies. Stratview Research is a trusted brand globally, providing high quality research and strategic insights that help companies worldwide in effective decision making. For enquiries, Contact: Stratview Research E-mail: sales@stratviewresearch.com Direct: +1-313-307-4176 Recognized by Leading Analyst Firm for its Laboratory of the Future Platform Synthace Ltd., the company behind the leading cloud software platform for automating and improving the success rate of biological research and development, today announced it has been recognized in Gartner, Inc.'s "Cool Vendors in Life Sciences" report published on June 6, 2018. The companies named in this report represent a look into the new and innovative vendors, products and services in the global Life Sciences market. Gartner's report points out, "Big data and advanced analytics solutions deployed in the cloud are now available to increase supply chain resiliency and design and execute and analyze biological workflows."1 "We are delighted to be named a 2018 Gartner Cool Vendor in Life Sciences report" said Tim Fell, CEO Synthace. "We believe this achievement testifies to Synthace's success in empowering CIOs who are interested in building their laboratory of the future". Fell concluded, "We are at the forefront of a seismic change in the biotechnology sector. The problem, and the opportunity, is how to work with ever increasing biological complexity. Better computer-aided biology is key and an area in which Synthace excels." -ENDS- Gartner Disclaimer Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose Gartner clients can access the report here https://www.gartner.com/document/3877569. To learn more, visit: Synthace Antha: https://synthace.com/introducing-antha Tweet this: New Gartner_inc recognizes @Synthace as a Cool Vendor in its June 2018 Cool Vendors in Life Sciences report https://bit.ly/2Jw3PIQ Follow Synthace Synthace Blog Join the Twitter Conversation Join us on LinkedIn About Synthace Based in London, Synthace is developing Antha, a language and software platform specifically for biology that lets researchers aim higher and achieve better results, faster. Antha is designed to make reproducible and scalable workflows that can be readily edited and shared, and easily automated on labs' existing equipment. With customers across pharma, agritech and industrial biotechnology Synthace has been recognised by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer that is helping shape the Fourth Industrial Revolution a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work and relate to one another. For more information, visit: www.synthace.com. ___________________________ 1 Gartner, Inc., Cool Vendors in Life Sciences, Stephen Davies et al.,6 June 2018. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005065/en/ Contacts: Synthace Bobby Brill Press@synthace.com 07867488769 LONDON and PARIS, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. ("Cerberus") today announced that one of its affiliates has entered into an agreement to acquire Worldwide Flight Services ("WFS") from Platinum Equity. Headquartered in Paris, WFS is the world's largest air cargo handler and a leading provider of ground handling services with over 1.2 billion of total revenues. WFS has a presence in 198 airport locations in 22 countries and serves over 300 customers. "WFS is a market leader in aviation services and is positioned to benefit from attractive long-term industry growth," said Brett Ingersoll, Head of Global Private Equity and Senior Managing Director of Cerberus. "Cerberus has extensive operational experience and a successful track record in aviation and we are excited to support WFS's next stage of growth." Craig Smyth, CEO of WFS, said, "WFS has transformed into a leading global aviation handling player in recent years through growth and operational initiatives. We believe that Cerberus is the ideal partner to support our continued transformation." Craig Brooks, Managing Director of European Private Equity at Cerberus, commented, "We plan to partner with Craig Smyth, and WFS's management team and 22,800 dedicated and hardworking employees, to enhance WFS's growth and services. Cerberus has a longstanding presence in Europe and WFS will be a fantastic addition to our growing portfolio." Citigroup Global Markets Limited served as financial advisor to Cerberus and Linklaters LLP was Cerberus's legal advisor. About Cerberus Founded in 1992, Cerberus is a global leader in alternative investing with approximately $34 billion in assets across complementary credit, private equity, and real estate strategies. We invest across the capital structure where our integrated investment platforms and proprietary operating capabilities create an edge to improve performance and drive long-term value. Our tenured teams have experience working collaboratively and across market environments to seek strong risk-adjusted returns for our investors. For more information about our people and platforms, visit us at www.cerberus.com. About WFS Founded in 1971, WFS (www.wfs.aero) is the world's largest air cargo handler and one of the leading providers of ground handling and technical services with annual revenues of over 1.2 billion. Its 22,800 employees serve over 300 customers at 198 major airports in 22 countries on five continents. Media Contacts Cerberus Andrew Johnson / Lizzie Hyland Glover Park Group 646-495-2700 ajohnson@gpg.com / lhyland@gpg.com WFS Valerie Marchand communication@wfs.aero Featuring Top Trends in Beauty, Fashion, Accessories and More, Box to be Revealed at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity; Available for Purchase on FabFitFun.com CANNES LIONS FESTIVAL OF CREATIVITY -- Leading women's lifestyle brand FabFitFun, announced a collaboration with Pinterest to create the first ever Pinterest Box. The Box will include products aligned with key trends as identified in The Pinterest 100, Pinterest's annual forecast that reveals top trends across categories like beauty, style, wellness, food and more, backed by global data. Revealed exclusively at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, the FabFitFun Pinterest 100 Box will also be available for purchase on FabFitFun.com. "At FabFitFun, we see our boxes as your favorite Pinterest board come to life and delivered to your door four times a year," said Katie Rosen Kitchens, co-founder and editor-in-chief, FabFitFun. "We're also a data driven company that relies heavily on consumer feedback, so the synergy with Pinterest is a no-brainer partnership for us. We combined their industry leading trend forecasting with the power of our merchandising and data science to create a box that features some amazing products that we know are going to become instant favorites." Products in the FabFitFun Pinterest 100 Box include: Pier 1 Imports Sage Vase Pinterest home trend: Sage; saves: +170 percent. Sage is your new home decor BFF. Incorporate the pastel shade into different parts of your home, starting with this Pier 1 Imports ceramic vase. It will soften up your space while adding that much-needed character. Tarte lifted sweatproof mascara Pinterest beauty trend: Lashes; searches +152 percent. A sporty sweat-proof black brown mascara that volumizes and treats lashes. Like a push up sports bra for your lashes, this vegan sweatproof mascara gives you an instant lift and volumizing boost while you sweat, swim or "Om," without the dreaded "racoon eye." Even after the toughest workout, your lashes will still look lengthened and flirty for an effortless no makeup look that lasts from gym to brunch. Kopari Coconut Multitasking Kit Pinterest wellness trend: Cleansing oils; searches +555 percent. Your wish is our command. Your favorite multitasks are now fun sized. We've created a travel-size kit that's the perfect fit for all; whether you're taking a trip, giving a gift, or just wanted to try them all, you can now hydrate from head to toe with our mini multitaskers. The Coconut Melt will moisturize your body from head to toe and take you to coconut heaven. The Coconut Sheer Oil that favors the face and keeps your skin looking sheer at all times. With the Coconut Balm, balm your bod and say goodbye to super dry skin. With the Coconut Body Glow, slather on some summertime shine year round with this lightweight coconut shimmer oil. R+Co ACID WASH ACV Cleansing Rinse Pinterest beauty trend: Hair health; saves +219 percent For long-lasting sleek and healthy hair, look no further than ACID WASH ACV Cleansing Rinse from R+Co. Perfect for cleansing without stripping away natural oils or color, this product softens hair, calms the scalp and adds noticeable shine. Vegan, Sulfate Free, Gluten-Free, Certified Cruelty-Free. The Jetset Diaries Passport Case Luggage Tag Duo Pinterest travel trend: Travel journals; saves +169 percent Jetset in style with the cutest passport case and luggage tag duo. It features a cheeky message in rose gold print and a white background to complement all of your travel outfits. Plus, travel journals are all the rage right now, giving you more of an excuse to take that vay-k. Talking Tables Dipstick Charades Pinterest celebrations trend: Trivia night; saves +279 percent Act the fool! Dip in, pick a stick and have a laugh by acting out a charade for your friends and family to guess. Whoever guesses correctly first wins the stick! 160 Charades in each pack. Recommended for ages 7+. Talking Tables are a design-led brand, creating trendy party accessories, games and gifts. Launching new collections seasonally with award winning products, Talking Tables can be found at the heart of special occasions. With 19 years of experience, Talking Tables are experts in fun and innovative partyware. People around the world are already celebrating with Talking Tables. Whether it's an afternoon tea party, birthday celebration or a wedding; the aim is to help friends and family's celebrate with fun and laughter engaging everyone equally. LORAC PRO Matte Lip Color in Rose or Nude Pinterest beauty trend: Lip tints; saves: +414 percent Go PRO with LORAC PRO Matte Lip Color! This velvety-smooth, matte lipstick is infused with anti-aging antioxidants of Acai Berry, Pomegranate, Grape Seed Extract and Vitamins C and E to help nourish and protect your lips. The PRO lip liner tip hugs the curves of your lips with precision and control while the weightless, PRO formula easily glides on with a long-lasting, matte finish. PRO Matte Lip Color comes in an array of highly-pigmented, buildable, rich colors from natural nudes to vibrant hues for a modern, matte lip in any shade you desire. Color, line and define your lips, just like a PRO with LORAC matte lipstick! K POP Foods Crispy Seaweed Snacks Pinterest food trend: Korean condiments; saves +222 percent Understanding that our friends loved Korean food as much as we did, we created KPOP Foods to spread Korean food and flavors to America, and promote the experience of bringing people together and having fun. Choose one: B-low the belt studded clutch Pinterest style trend: Mixed metals; saves +423 percent The beautiful hardware along the flap keeps the clutch edgy while adding a subtle splash of color. The best part? It's spot on with the mixed metals trend. Tres chic! Summer Rose scarf Pinterest style trend: Long layers; saves: +102 percent. Inspired by summer, this stylish and functional scarf features an ombre design and frayed ends for an effortless beach babe look. "Pinterest is filled with billions of ideas of what people want to do in their lives and when we look at what's trending we can often see the next big thing," said Vikram Bhaskaran, head of market development, Pinterest. "With our partnership with FabFitFun, we can bring these new trends across major lifestyle categories such as food, fashion and beauty to life through the box and we're excited to see people give them all a try." About FabFitFun: Founded in 2010 by Co-CEOs Daniel and Michael Broukhim and Editor-in-Chief Katie Rosen Kitchens, FabFitFun is a lifestyle membership that inspires women to lead happier, healthier lives through product and brand discovery. Its flagship product, the FabFitFun Box, delivers a curated collection of full-size products across beauty, fashion, wellness, fitness, home, technology and beyond each season. In addition to the box, FabFitFun members receive access to FabFitFunTV, a streaming video service offering on-demand wellness videos, daily lifestyle content, the FabFitFun online Community and year-round exclusive sales and shopping experiences. Join FabFitFun by visiting fabfitfun.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005799/en/ Contacts: FabFitFun Michelle Kim michellek@fabfitfun.com Infiniti Research, a global market and customer intelligence solutions provider, has announced the completion of their new market intelligence engagement on the glass packaging industry. A world-leading packaging industry firm wanted to evaluate the trends, challenges, competitive landscape, and market drivers for the glass packaging market across various regions. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005820/en/ Market Intelligence Engagement for a Leading Glass Packaging Client Helps Gain Insights into the Competitor's Market Share and Key Distributors (Graphic: Business Wire) According to the glass packaging industry experts at Infiniti,"Market intelligence solutions help firms in the global packaging industry space to gain an in-depth understanding of the consumer base and answer the why of consumer behavior and preferences." Request for a Proposal to see how Infiniti Research's solutions can help you. The increasing consumption of glass packaging in pharmaceuticals owing to its non-corrosive nature is driving the demand. Also, many properties including recyclability, non-permeability, and zero rates of chemical interaction make it appropriate for use as a packaging material for various applications including soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and medicines. Additionally, with the ongoing R&D to develop packaging materials that are 50% lighter when compared to traditional forms, is anticipated to witness enormous potential over the coming years. The market intelligence solution offered by Infiniti helped the client to gain a detailed overview of the latest technology standards and the distribution structure across the industry. The client was able to gain insights into the global packaging industry for regions including the Americas, EMEA, and the APAC regions. This market intelligence engagement solution provided benefits that helped the client to: Obtain a clear understanding of the current market trends in the industry across the target regions Gain insights into the competitor's market share and key distributors To know more about our market intelligence engagement, ask an analyst This market intelligence engagement solution provided predictive insights on: Garnering further support for the glass packaging industry Gaining a holistic overview of the current distribution structure To read more about the scope of our engagement, request a proposal View the complete market intelligence engagement study here: https://www.infinitiresearch.com/casestudy/glass-packaging-market-intelligence 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/20180619005820/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 DALLAS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / June 19, 2018 / Alternet Systems, Inc. (OTC PINK: ALYI) today announced it has received its pilot production motorcycles and begun testing. The first electric motorcycle the company is producing is retro-classic design based on BMW's classic, WWII era, R71 motorcycle with sidecar. Last month, the company announced the pilot production motorcycles were constructed and shipped well ahead of schedule. Today management reports that the company continues to work well ahead of schedule toward a sales launch in time for the 2018 Christmas Holiday Season. Alternet Systems continues to expand and evolve its portfolio of lithium battery technologies by implementing applications of the technology in multiple industry segments. Goldman Small Cap Research recently issued a research report on the Company. The report includes a "speculative-buy" rating with a target price-per-share of $0.09. The report provides an in-depth overview and analysis of Alternet's patented lithium battery technology portfolio and the first application of the technology in an electric motorcycle being produced by an Alternet subsidiary. To view the report, visit www.lithiumip.com/research-rpt or www.GoldmanResearch.com. An update to the report is anticipated in July following the initial results from the pilot motorcycle testing. About Alternet Systems, Inc. Alternet Systems, Inc. is leveraging its key lithium battery technologies patent agreement to introduce innovative, environmentally sustainable products to various consumer markets. The first product category in which a first run of production will be introduced this year, is lithium battery-powered motorcycles, to be followed by motorbikes. These products will be released through its newly launched ReVolt Electric Motorbikes subsidiary. Keep up with ReVolt's latest developments by checking back periodically to the company's website: www.revoltmotorbikes.com Learn more on the company's website: www.lithiumip.com Disclaimer/Safe Harbor: This news release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Litigation Reform Act. The statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events that involve risks and uncertainties. Among others, these risks include the expectation that any of the companies mentioned herein will achieve significant sales, the failure to meet schedule or performance requirements of the companies' contracts, the companies' liquidity position, the companies' ability to obtain new contracts, the emergence of competitors with greater financial resources and the impact of competitive pricing. In the light of these uncertainties, the forward-looking events referred to in this release might not occur. Alternet Systems, Inc. Contact: Randell Torno info@lithiumip.com 1 800 713 0297 https://www.otc-alyi.com/contact/ SOURCE: Alternet Systems, Inc. BENGALURU, India and MARSEILLE, France, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- To hire and train local talent and provide digital expertise to clients in the region Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology and next-generation services, today announced that it has strengthened its footprint in France by establishing a Digital Center of Excellence in Marseille. The move is part of Infosys' efforts to bring its digital offerings to companies in France as they navigate the next stage in their business journey. In addition, the center will also deliver on a strategic seven-year partnership with CMA CGM Group, the world leading container shipping organisation. This partnership was announced in September 2017 to simplify and transform the group's IT applications and improve customer service experience. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/633365/Infosys_Logo.jpg ) The Infosys Digital Center of Excellence in Marseille will be part of a global network of centers servicing client's digital requirements. With an initial capacity of 60 employees, the center aims to attract and train talent in new digital technologies to meet increasing demand from clients. The focus of the new facility will be to provide existing and new clients a range of offerings in the areas of Design and User Experience, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data and Analytics, while expanding Infosys' footprint in the shipping and logistics industry. With the aim to showcase Infosys' global digital capabilities, the Digital Center of Excellence in Marseille will also house a number of technology-driven showcases such as the Digital Farm, Future of Learning and Retail and Warehouse experiences, that are aimed at providing clients a view into the possibilities that Infosys can enable. The center will also play a key role in Infosys' engagement with CMA CGM, as proximity and access to a large skillset will help accelerate the company's efforts to provide CMA CGM's customers state-of-the-art digital technologies. Infosys is already helping CMA CGM improve its execution processes and performance, using Infosys NIA the company's artificial intelligence platform and its scalable automation tool, AssistEdge. At the opening ceremony held on Tuesday, June 19, Infosys also received the 'Invest in Provence Award' from Provence Promotion, Economic Development Agency, in collaboration with Marseille Provence Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Conseil General, which recognises Infosys' contribution to the local community. The Award was established to promote investment in the region through growth and economic diversity. Jean Luc Chauvin, President, Provence Promotion and President, Chamber of Commerce and Industry Marseille Provence, said, "I applaud Infosys and CMA CGM for the commitment they have made to the Aix-Marseille ecosystem with the support of Provence Promotion. Our region will offer the resources and skills to help Infosys successfully develop its Digital Excellence Center, catering to the logistics and maritime sectors." Pravin Rao, Chief Operating Officer, Infosys, said, "The opening of our new center in Marseille will provide customers and prospects in the region access to next-generation digital technologies, skills and talent that will help them reshape what's next. This is in line with our strategy focused on scaling agile digital business, energising the core via AI and automation, reskilling employees and localising within the markets in which we operate." To meet its objective of hiring in the region, Infosys will partner with several esteemed universities in the region, including Aix-Marseille University. In addition, as part of this effort the company will extend its flagship global internship program Infosys Instep to these universities. About Infosys Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to navigate their digital transformation. With over three decades of experience in managing the systems and workings of global enterprises, we expertly steer our clients through their digital journey. We do it by enabling the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change. We also empower the business with agile digital at scale to deliver unprecedented levels of performance and customer delight. Our always-on learning agenda drives their continuous improvement through building and transferring digital skills, expertise, and ideas from our innovation ecosystem. Visit http://www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise navigate your next. Safe Harbor Certain statements in this press release are forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements concerning our future business opportunities and growth prospects. Such forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017. These filings are available at http://www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of the date of this press release. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law. WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - While the Commerce Department released a report on Tuesday showing a much bigger than expected jump in new residential construction in the U.S. in the month of May, the report also showed a much steeper than expected drop in building permits. The report said housing starts soared by 5.0 percent to an annual rate of 1.350 million in May after tumbling by 3.1 percent to a revised rate of 1.286 million in April. Economists had expected housing starts to climb by 1.8 percent to a rate of 1.310 million from the 1.287 million originally reported for the previous month. With the substantial increase during the month, housing starts reached their highest annual rate since hitting 1.354 million in July of 2007. The bigger than expected spike in housing starts reflected significant increases in both single-family and multi-family starts. Single-family starts shot up by 3.9 percent to a rate of 936,000, while multi-family starts surged up by 7.5 percent to a rate of 414,00. Meanwhile, the Commerce Department said building permits plunged by 4.6 percent to an annual rate of 1.301 million in May after falling by 0.9 percent to a revised rate of 1.364 million in April. Building permits, an indicator of future housing demand, had been expected to edge down by 0.1 percent to a rate of 1.350 million from the 1.352 million originally reported for the previous month. The report said single-family permits tumbled by 4.6 percent to a rate of 844,000, while multi-family permits plummeted by 8.8 percent to a rate of 457,000. On Monday, the National Association of Home Builders released a separate report showing an unexpected deterioration in homebuilder confidence in June amid sharply elevated lumber prices. The report said the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index dipped to 68 in June from 70 in May. Economists had expected the index to come in unchanged. 'Builders are increasingly concerned that tariffs placed on Canadian lumber and other imported products are hurting housing affordability,' said NAHB Chairman Randy Noel. He added, 'Record-high lumber prices have added nearly $9,000 to the price of a new single-family home since January 2017.' Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de Studio City, California--(Newsfile Corp. - June 19, 2018) - Petroteq Energy Inc. (TSXV: PQE) (OTC Pink: PQEFF) (FSE: PQCF) ("Petroteq" or the "Company"), a company focused on the development and implementation of proprietary technologies for the energy industry, announced the successful unveiling of its environmentally friendly heavy oil processing and extraction plant located at the Asphalt Ridge in Uintah Basin, Utah. Management of Petroteq took the opportunity of this media day to initiate production at the plant. Members of national and local press were treated to a complete explanation and demonstration of the production process. Alex Blyumkin, Chairman of Petroteq commented, "This event at the plant was a culmination of two years of hard work by our entire team and getting back into production is a tremendous accomplishment for Petroteq technically and organizationally, as well as the harbinger of value creation to come. We have worked hard to demonstrate our commitment to shareholders, through the completion of our facility, we have received our permits to produce oil at the Asphalt Ridge, we have developed a comprehensive mining plan and demonstrated that our expanded plant can produce oil. Our dedication and focus on re-launching our facility demonstrates our commitment to our investors who have supported us throughout this journey. Further, we were able to raise capital and expand our plant to the point where we are now able to generate revenue at the facility which is being ramped up to what is expected to be 1,000 barrels per day in a cost effective and environmentally friendly way. We now have a plant that has the level of scale that allows us to be self sufficient and generate cash flow to add value to our shareholders." The new facility was part of the original vision of the Company, to relocate, reassemble and upgrade its plant to integrate facility improvements of all major process systems and increase its operational capacity to an expected 1,000 barrels per day (bod). As part of the media day agenda, the Company provided exclusive access to the plant, held meetings with executives as well as geologists and hosted an evening reception for its guests. Petroteq plans to hold a formal grand opening of the plant in September of 2018. Petroteq's technology utilizes a modular and small footprint/capex, allowing the Company to extract over 99% of all hydrocarbons while using no water and generating no greenhouse gases, requiring no high temperatures or pressures. Petroteq has a patented clean oil recovery technology that is environmentally safe and sustainable for the extraction of heavy oils from oil sands, oil shale deposits and shallow oil deposits. The Company's proprietary process produces zero greenhouse gas and zero waste. Subject to having sufficient capital, Petroteq's goal is for the plant to produce as much as 2,000 bod by year end 2019 and 5,000 bod by year end 2020. Petroteq will continue commissioning and production as per its internal processes, and will report updates on production levels and commercial sales when appropriate. About Petroteq Energy Inc. Petroteq is a fully integrated oil and gas company focused on the development and implementation of a new proprietary technology for oil extraction. The Company has an environmentally safe and sustainable technology for the extraction of heavy oils from oil sands, oil shale deposits and shallow oil deposits. Petroteq is engaged in the development and implementation of its patented environmentally friendly heavy oil processing and extraction technologies. Our proprietary process produces zero greenhouse gas, zero waste and requires no high temperatures. Petroteq is currently focused on developing its oil sands resources and expanding production capacity at its Asphalt Ridge heavy oil extraction facility located near Vernal, Utah. The Company also owns a minority stake in an exploration and production play located in southwest Texas held by Accord GR Energy Inc. In addition, the Company, through its wholly owned subsidiary PetroBLOQ, LLC, is seeking to develop the first blockchain based platform created exclusively for the supply chain needs of the oil & gas sector. For more information, visit www.Petroteq.energy and PetroBLOQ.com. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this press release contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. and Canadian securities laws. Words such as "may," "would," "could," "should," "potential," "will," "seek," "intend," "plan," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect" and similar expressions as they relate to the Company, including the production capacity of the plant and the years it may be achieved, the Company successfully developing block chain technology for the oil and gas industry, are intended to identify forward-looking information. Readers are cautioned that there is no certainty that it will be commercially viable to produce any portion of the resources. All statements other than statements of historical fact may be forward-looking information. Such statements reflect the Company's current views and intentions with respect to future events, based on information available to the Company, and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Material factors or assumptions were applied in providing forward-looking information, including: the plant producing as expected by the Company and the Company having the funds (through cash flow or financing) to fund the expansion of its plant as projected, and PetroBLOQ successfully developing and implementing a blockchain-based supply chain management system. While forward-looking statements are based on data, assumptions and analyses that the Company believes are reasonable under the circumstances, whether actual results, performance or developments will meet the Company's expectations and predictions depends on a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results, performance and financial condition of the Company to differ materially from its expectations. Certain of the "risk factors" that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's forward-looking statements in this press release include, without limitation: uncertainties inherent in the estimation of resources including whether any reserves will ever be attributed to the Company's properties; PetroBLOQ not having the expertise and/or funds necessary to develop and implement a blockchain-based supply chain management system; PetroBLOQ not being able to develop the blockchain technology to completion; blockchain technology not being adopted by the oil and gas industry; changes in laws or regulations; the ability to implement business strategies or to pursue business opportunities, whether for economic or other reasons; status of the world oil markets, oil prices and price volatility; oil pricing; state of capital markets and ability by the Company to raise capital; litigation; the commercial and economic viability of the Company's oil sands hydrocarbon extraction technology, the SWEPT technology, the S-BRPT technology, and other proprietary technologies developed or licensed by the Company or by Accord GR Energy Inc., which are of experimental nature and have not been used at full capacity for an extended period of time; reliance on suppliers, contractors, consultants and key personnel; the ability of the Company and Accord GR Energy Inc. to maintain their respective mineral lease holdings; potential failure of the Company's business plans or model; the nature of oil and gas production and oil sands mining, extraction and production; uncertainties in exploration and drilling for oil, gas and other hydrocarbon-bearing substances; unanticipated costs and expenses, availability of financing and other capital; potential damage to or destruction of property, loss of life and environmental damage; risks associated with compliance with environmental protection laws and regulations; uninsurable or uninsured risks; potential conflicts of interest of officers and directors; and other general economic, market and business conditions and factors, including the risk factors discussed or referred to in the Company's disclosure documents, filed with the securities regulatory authorities in certain provinces of Canada and available at www.sedar.com. Should any factor affect the Company in an unexpected manner, or should assumptions underlying the forward-looking information prove incorrect, the actual results or events may differ materially from the results or events predicted. Any such forward-looking information is expressly qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement. Moreover, the Company does not assume responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such forward-looking information. The forward-looking information included in this press release is made as of the date of this press release, and the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking information, other than as required by applicable law. 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 INFORMATION Petroteq Energy Inc. Alex Blyumkin Executive Chairman Tel: (800) 979-1897 US pharma businesses have warned the government that the UK's dominant position in life sciences is threatened by Brexit and the NHS's slow adoption of new medicines. Some influential US companies will call on business secretary Greg Clark to speed up his industrial strategy, launched in 2017, which pledged quicker uptake of medicines by the NHS. In an article in the Financial Times, the UK head of Pfizer, Erik Nordkamp, said: "The UK pharmaceutical industry and the patients who rely on it are ... 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. CANBERA (dpa-AFX) - The Canadian dollar dropped against its major counterparts in early New York deals on Tuesday amid falling oil prices, as fears over a global trade war intensified after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to impose additional tariffs on Chinese goods worth $200 billion and Beijing vowed to 'immediately' retaliate. Crude for August delivery fell $1.05 to $64.64 per barrel. On Monday, Trump said that the U.S. will impose tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, should China proceeds with its pledge to hit back against the U.S. tariffs imposed last week. 'Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods, and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States,' Trump said. China's Commerce Ministry accused the White House of blackmailing by threatening to impose additional tariffs and warned that it would strike back with comprehensive measures if Washington push forward with the plan. Oil has also suffered from speculation that OPEC will ramp up production after this week's meeting in Vienna. Russian output is also expected to increase after a prolonged supply quota. The loonie drifted lower to 82.62 against the yen, its weakest since April 4. The loonie is poised to challenge support around the 80.00 level. The loonie slipped to a 1-year low of 1.3292 against the greenback and held steady thereafter. The loonie is seen finding support around the 1.35 region. Data from the Commerce Department showed a much bigger than expected jump in new residential construction in the U.S. in May. The report said housing starts spiked by 5.0 percent to an annual rate of 1.350 million in May after tumbling by 3.1 percent to a revised rate of 1.286 million in April. The loonie reversed from an early high of 1.5268 against the euro, easing back to 1.5362. This may be compared to a 1-1/2-month low of 1.5383 set at 11:15 pm ET. On the downside, 1.55 is possibly seen as the next support level for the loonie. Report from German Ifo Institute showed that Germany's economy is forecast to expand at slower pace this year and next as global economic risks increased significantly. In the Summer Forecast, the think tank projected the economy to expand 1.8 percent each this year and next. Earlier, the Ifo had forecast 2.6 percent growth for 2018 and 2.1 percent in 2019. Reversing from an early near a 3-week high of 0.9739 against the aussie, the loonie fell back to 0.9785. If the loonie falls further, 0.99 is possibly seen as its next support level. Weekly survey compiled by the ANZ bank and Roy Morgan Research showed that Australia's consumer confidence weakened during the week ended June 17. The consumer confidence index dropped to 122.1 from 123.0 in the preceding week. However, the index remained comfortably above its long term average. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de NOTIFICATION AND PUBLIC DISCLOSURE IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE EU MARKET ABUSE REGULATION OF TRANSACTIONS BY PERSONS DISCHARGING MANAGERIAL RESPONSIBILITIES June 19, 2018 Royal Dutch Shell plc (the "Company") has been notified that following the payment of the interim dividend on June 18, 2018 in respect of the first quarter of 2018, the following Persons Discharging Managerial Responsibilities ("PDMRs") acquired notional dividend shares under the Long-term Incentive Plan ("LTIP") and Deferred Bonus Plan ("DBP") as applicable, as set out below. Details of the LTIP and DBP can be found in the Royal Dutch Shell plc Annual Report and Form 20-F ended December 31, 2017 (www.shell.com/annualreport). PDMR Date Acquired Share Type Number of notional dividend shares acquired Price per Share Ben van Beurden 18 June 2018 RDSA 11,498.86 EUR 29.21 Jessica Uhl 18 June 2018 RDS.A 1,731.24 USD 67.60 John Abbott 18 June 2018 RDSB 3,016.29 GBP 26.60 Harry Brekelmans 18 June 2018 RDSA 2,990.85 EUR 29.21 Andrew Brown 18 June 2018 RDSB 2,906.46 GBP 26.60 Ronan Cassidy 18 June 2018 RDSB 2,054.39 GBP 26.60 Donny Ching 18 June 2018 RDSA 2,247.67 EUR 29.21 Maarten Wetselaar 18 June 2018 RDSA 2,566.73 EUR 29.21 The Notification of Dealing Form for each PDMR can be found below. This notification is made in accordance with Article 19 of the EU Market Abuse Regulation. Anthony Clarke Deputy Company Secretary ENQUIRIES Shell Media Relations International, UK, European Press: +44 20 7934 5550 Shell Investor Relations Europe: + 31 70 377 4540 United States: +1 832 337 2034 LEI number of Royal Dutch Shell plc: 21380068P1DRHMJ8KU70 Classification: Additional regulated information required to be disclosed under the laws of a Member State. 1. Details of the person discharging managerial responsibilities/person closely associated First Name(s) Ben Last Name(s) van Beurden 2. Reason for the notification Position/status Chief Executive Officer Initial notification/ amendment Initial notification 3. Details of the issuer, emission allowance market participant, auction platform, auctioneer or auction monitor Full name of the entity Royal Dutch Shell plc Legal Entity Identifier code 21380068P1DRHMJ8KU70 4. Details of the transaction(s): section to be repeated for (i) each type of instrument; (ii) each type of transaction; (iii) each date; (iv) each place where transactions have been conducted Description of the financial instrument A ordinary shares of 0.07 each Identification Code GB00B03MLX29 Nature of the transaction Acquisition of notional dividend shares under the LTIP and DBP Currency EUR Price 29.21 Volume 11,498.86 Total 335,881.70 Aggregated information Volume 11,498.86 Price 29.21 Total 335,881.70 Date of transaction 18/06/2018 Place of transaction Outside a trading venue 1. Details of the person discharging managerial responsibilities/person closely associated First Name(s) Jessica Last Name(s) Uhl 2. Reason for the notification Position/status Chief Financial Officer Initial notification/ amendment Initial notification 3. Details of the issuer, emission allowance market participant, auction platform, auctioneer or auction monitor Full name of the entity Royal Dutch Shell plc Legal Entity Identifier code 21380068P1DRHMJ8KU70 4. Details of the transaction(s): section to be repeated for (i) each type of instrument; (ii) each type of transaction; (iii) each date; (iv) each place where transactions have been conducted Description of the financial instrument A American Depository Shares (RDS.A) Identification Code US7802592060 Nature of the transaction Acquisition of notional dividend shares under the LTIP Currency USD Price 67.60 Volume 1,731.24 Total 117,031.82 Aggregated information Volume 1,731.24 Price 67.60 Total 117,031.82 Date of transaction 18/06/2018 Place of transaction Outside a trading venue 1. Details of the person discharging managerial responsibilities/person closely associated First Name(s) John Last Name(s) Abbott 2. Reason for the notification Position/status Downstream Director Initial notification/ amendment Initial notification 3. Details of the issuer, emission allowance market participant, auction platform, auctioneer or auction monitor Full name of the entity Royal Dutch Shell plc Legal Entity Identifier code 21380068P1DRHMJ8KU70 4. Details of the transaction(s): section to be repeated for (i) each type of instrument; (ii) each type of transaction; (iii) each date; (iv) each place where transactions have been conducted Description of the financial instrument B ordinary shares of 0.07 each Identification Code GB00B03MM408 Nature of the transaction Acquisition of notional dividend shares under the LTIP and DBP Currency GBP Price 26.60 Volume 3,016.29 Total 80,233.31 Aggregated information Volume 3,016.29 Price 26.60 Total 80,233.31 Date of transaction 18/06/2018 Place of transaction Outside a trading venue 1. Details of the person discharging managerial responsibilities/person closely associated First Name(s) Harry Last Name(s) Brekelmans 2. Reason for the notification Position/status Projects & Technology Director Initial notification/ amendment Initial notification 3. Details of the issuer, emission allowance market participant, auction platform, auctioneer or auction monitor Full name of the entity Royal Dutch Shell plc Legal Entity Identifier code 21380068P1DRHMJ8KU70 4. Details of the transaction(s): section to be repeated for (i) each type of instrument; (ii) each type of transaction; (iii) each date; (iv) each place where transactions have been conducted Description of the financial instrument A ordinary shares of 0.07 each Identification Code GB00B03MLX29 Nature of the transaction Acquisition of notional dividend shares under the LTIP and DBP Currency EUR Price 29.21 Volume 2,990.85 Total 87,362.73 Aggregated information Volume 2,990.85 Price 29.21 Total 87,362.73 Date of transaction 18/06/2018 Place of transaction Outside a trading venue 1. Details of the person discharging managerial responsibilities/person closely associated First Name(s) Andrew Last Name(s) Brown 2. Reason for the notification Position/status Upstream Director Initial notification/ amendment Initial notification 3. Details of the issuer, emission allowance market participant, auction platform, auctioneer or auction monitor Full name of the entity Royal Dutch Shell plc Legal Entity Identifier code 21380068P1DRHMJ8KU70 4. Details of the transaction(s): section to be repeated for (i) each type of instrument; (ii) each type of transaction; (iii) each date; (iv) each place where transactions have been conducted Description of the financial instrument B ordinary shares of 0.07 each Identification Code GB00B03MM408 Nature of the transaction Acquisition of notional dividend shares under the LTIP and DBP Currency GBP Price 26.60 Volume 2,906.46 Total 77,311.84 Aggregated information Volume 2,906.46 Price 26.60 Total 77,311.84 Date of transaction 18/06/2018 Place of transaction Outside a trading venue 1. Details of the person discharging managerial responsibilities/person closely associated First Name(s) Ronan Last Name(s) Cassidy 2. Reason for the notification Position/status Chief Human Resources & Corporate Officer Initial notification/ amendment Initial notification 3. Details of the issuer, emission allowance market participant, auction platform, auctioneer or auction monitor Full name of the entity Royal Dutch Shell plc Legal Entity Identifier code 21380068P1DRHMJ8KU70 4. Details of the transaction(s): section to be repeated for (i) each type of instrument; (ii) each type of transaction; (iii) each date; (iv) each place where transactions have been conducted Description of the financial instrument B ordinary shares of 0.07 each Identification Code GB00B03MM408 Nature of the transaction Acquisition of notional dividend shares under the LTIP and DBP Currency GBP Price 26.60 Volume 2,054.39 Total 54,646.77 Aggregated information Volume 2,054.39 Price 26.60 Total 54,646.77 Date of transaction 18/06/2018 Place of transaction Outside a trading venue 1. Details of the person discharging managerial responsibilities/person closely associated First Name(s) Donny Last Name(s) Ching 2. Reason for the notification Position/status Legal Director Initial notification/ amendment Initial notification 3. Details of the issuer, emission allowance market participant, auction platform, auctioneer or auction monitor Full name of the entity Royal Dutch Shell plc Legal Entity Identifier code 21380068P1DRHMJ8KU70 4. Details of the transaction(s): section to be repeated for (i) each type of instrument; (ii) each type of transaction; (iii) each date; (iv) each place where transactions have been conducted Description of the financial instrument A ordinary shares of 0.07 each Identification Code GB00B03MLX29 Nature of the transaction Acquisition of notional dividend shares under the LTIP and DBP Currency EUR Price 29.21 Volume 2,247.67 Total 65,654.44 Aggregated information Volume 2,247.67 Price 29.21 Total 65,654.44 Date of transaction 18/06/2018 Place of transaction Outside a trading venue OTTAWA (dpa-AFX) - Canada is a step closer to becoming the first G-7 nation to legalize marijuana nationwide after the House of Commons voted to allow recreational use. The bill will now go back to the country's Senate, which had already approved a version of the bill. On Monday, the House of Commons voted 205 to 82 in favor of the Bill C-45, known as the Cannabis Act. Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said that while the government has accepted more than two dozen changes to Bill C-45 made by the Senate last week, it disagrees with more than a dozen amendments to the bill. The Senate will now discuss the amendments and decide whether to accept the proposed changes to the bill. After reconciliation of the House and Senate bills, it will receive royal assent by the governor general, before becoming law. However, the Senate can only delay the bill, not block it. Legalizing marijuana was a campaign promise of Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. An initial July 1 target was set for ending the cannabis prohibition that dates back to 1923. In April 2017, Bill C-45 was introduced to the Canadian Parliament as a means to legalize access to cannabis for non-medical purposes. It would legally allow for individuals aged 18 and over to purchase marijuana for personal use. The bill will also control and regulate how cannabis is grown, sold and distributed. Canada legalized medical cannabis way back in 2001 and is home to many of the largest cannabis companies in the world. The federal government has announced plans to legalize adult use later this year, which would make Canada the first G-7 country to federally legalize adult use. Canada's marijuana industry has evolved a lot more than many other countries and is not hampered by restrictions across state lines, as in the U.S. Based on 2017's consumption data, Statistics Canada estimates that the cannabis market will be worth C$5.7 billion. In the U.S., nine states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana. Medical marijuana is legal in 29 states. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de London's FTSE 250 was down 0.6% to 20,880.08 in afternoon trade on Tuesday amid growing concerns about a trade war between the US and China. Capita was the standout gainer after it agreed to sell its Supplier Assessment Services unit for 160m in cash and after the outsourcer confirmed it had been awarded a British Ministry of Defence contract, beating rival Serco. Satellite group Inmarsat was also higher following a report that US rival EchoStar is considering upping its offer for the company ... 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. SEOUL (dpa-AFX) - The United States and North Korea have agreed to halt joint military drills scheduled for August. This was one of the key assurances given by U.S. President Donald Trump to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a historic summit in Singapore a week ago. In the biggest ever breakthrough for peace on the Korean peninsula as well as restoration of bilateral ties, the United States and North Korea agreed on June 12 to halt two major defense deterrents that posed the biggest threat to each other. North Korea committed to work towards 'the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.' In return, the U.S. gave assurance to North Korea that it is ready to stop 'provocative and expensive' war games with South Korea. Trump added that he wanted to see U.S. troops withdraw from the South. The Pentagon announced on Monday,'Consistent with President Donald J. Trump's commitment to North Korea and in concert with South Korea, the United States military has suspended all planning for Ulchi Freedom Guardian, this August's defensive war game.' 'We are still coordinating additional actions,' Dana W. White, chief Pentagon spokesperson, said in a statement. 'No decisions on subsequent war games have been made,' she added. There will be a meeting on this issue at the Pentagon later this week with the defense secretary, secretary of state and the national security advisor. 'There is no impact on Pacific exercises outside of the Korean Peninsula.' South Korea's defense ministry confirmed the suspension of the war games. It said both the governments 'plan to continue discussions for further measures.' Ulchi Freedom Guardian is an annual U.S.-South Korean command and control exercise that began in 1976 and is designed to 'enhance readiness, protect the region and maintain stability on the Korean Peninsula,' according to Pentagon. Last year, about 17,500 U.S. service members, as well as participants from Australia, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, took part in the massive military drills. The U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises were a major irritant in the relationship between the United States and North Korea, with Pyongyang criticizing the war games as a rehearsal for invasion. U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) is stationed in South Korea to help protect its ally from its hostile northern neighbor. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de SEATTLE (dpa-AFX) - Voip-Pal.com Inc. (VPLM.PK) has filed a lawsuit against Amazon Inc. (AMZN), accusing Alexa's calling and messaging services of infringing its patents. The lawsuit, filed by Voip-Pal in the U.S. District Court in Nevada, accuses Amazon's Alexa calling and messaging system of using Voip-Pal's patented technologies to direct voice/video calls and voice messages to both Amazon subscribers and non-subscribers. The four patents asserted in the lawsuit against Amazon are the same patents that were recently asserted by Voip-Pal against tech giant Apple, Inc. (AAPL). Bellevue, Washington-based Voip-Pal owns a portfolio of patents relating to Voice-over-Internet Protocol or VoIP technology that it is currently looking to monetize. Amazon's Alexa is a cloud-based voice service for communication devices that allows users to make calls or send messages to supported network devices or to telephones on traditional telephone networks in response to voice commands. Alexa calling and messaging services work with Amazon communication devices including Echo devices, and certain Alexa-enabled Amazon Fire, Android and Apple iOS devices. Emil Malak, CEO of Voip-Pal, said, 'After investigating Amazon's Alexa platform and Echo line of products our technical team has concluded that the calling and messaging functions infringe our patents. Amazon's foray into communications seems to be part of a larger trend of giant corporations battling for market dominance by offering Internet-based communication products that integrate with traditional telephony networks.' However, Malak said he prefers an amicable settlement with Amazon. He noted that Voip-Pal's patents have a term of more than nine years remaining, during which time other companies cannot lawfully use its patented technologies without a license. The CEO added that while Voip-Pal prefers to avoid litigation, the unresponsiveness of corporate giants in licensing his company's patents is forcing it to do so. Voip-Pal is already engaged in legal actions against AT&T, Verizon and Twitter for patent infringements. 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. LONDON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Oak Hill Advisors ("OHA") and Varde Partners ("Varde") announced today they entered into an agreement to acquire a US$1 billion portfolio of shipping loans from Deutsche Bank. The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018 pending regulatory approvals. This represents the second sale of shipping loan portfolios from European banks that Varde and OHA have acquired together. "We view this investment as part of our long-term commitment to provide alternative capital to the shipping industry as traditional participants reduce their exposure and change tack following a challenging period for the sector as a whole," said Stephen Seymour, Managing Director at Varde responsible for the firm's investments in the transportation sector. "We are pleased to partner with OHA again as we continue to find compelling investment opportunities as banks divest out of legacy loan portfolios." With over 40 loans secured against 70 vessels, the loan portfolio has underlying exposure to a diversified pool of shipping sectors and borrowers. "We believe the structural changes in the shipping finance industry present an opportunity for flexible capital providers, and we are uniquely positioned given our platform, expertise and relationships in the sector to underwrite and manage these investments," said Alexis Atteslis, Portfolio Manager and Managing Director at OHA who also heads the firm's shipping investment activities. "We are excited to be a partner to the banks, high caliber shipowners and borrowers, as we continue to expand our global shipping and transportation business." About Oak Hill Advisors Oak Hill Advisors is a leading independent investment firm with approximately $33 billion of capital under management. OHA has over 25 years of experience investing in a variety of asset classes, including performing and non-performing corporate credit, shipping, real estate, aviation and structured products as well as private equity. The firm's investment activities are concentrated in North America and Europe. OHA manages multi-strategy and single strategy credit funds, distressed funds, collateralized loan obligations, other customized mandates and a business development company. The firm's investment activities are driven by a fundamental value-oriented philosophy focused on credit analysis, relative value analysis, risk-adjusted return generation, loss avoidance and active risk management. The firm invests on behalf of a diverse, global investor group. OHA employs more than 300 people globally and is headquartered in New York, with other key offices in London, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Sydney and Fort Worth, Texas. About Varde Partners Varde Partners is a $13 billion global alternative investment firm that employs a value-based approach to investing across a broad array of geographies, segments and asset types, including real estate, corporate credit, mortgages, specialty finance, real assets and infrastructure. The firm sponsors and manages a family of private investment funds with a global investor base that includes foundations and endowments, pension plans, insurance companies, other institutional investors and private clients. Founded in 1993, Varde employs more than 300 people globally with regional headquarters in Minneapolis, London and Singapore. Media Contacts: Oak Hill Advisors ohair@oakhilladvisors.com Varde Partners communications@varde.com TIRANA, Albania, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ditmir Bushati, Albania's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Europe, today welcomed a joint letter from the nation's top religious leaders seeking French and German support for the start of EU accession negotiations. The letter, addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, was signed by the leaders of Albania's Muslim, Autocephalous Orthodox, Catholic, Betashi and Evangelical Christian communities. In a meeting with the five leaders Monday, Mr. Bushati thanked them for their commitment to the European future of Albania and praised them for the "maintenance of religious harmony and strengthening of social cohesion" in the nation. The signatories to the joint letter are: H. Skender Brucaj, Head of the Muslim Community, Archbishop (Prof. Dr) Anastasios of Tirana-Durres and all Albania (Orthodox Autocephalous Church of Albania), Msgr. Gjergj Meta, General Secretary of Albanian Bishops' Conference (Catholic Church), H. Dede Edmond Brahimaj, World Bektashi Headquarters, and Pastor Ylli Doci, Chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Albania. The letter comes in advance of a meeting of the European Council June 28-29 in Brussels. The Council, representing all EU heads of government, is expected to vote on a European Commission recommendation that formal talks towards accession be opened with Albania and Macedonia. The letter appeals to the French and German leaders to support the Commission's recommendations. The text follows: "At this moment of great historical significance, we wish to underscore once again what we recently stated in our joint declaration of 21 April 2018: we Albanians are part of Europe. We are part of a history that stretches back to the origins of Europe. It is a history which goes back thousands of years. Our common cultural and social roots bind us together. We believe that our path towards the European Union represents what has always been the desire of our people, with the values of a free society where everyone is able to exercise their rights, among which the right of freedom of religion and belief is fundamental. We are grateful to God that the history of the Albanian people has revealed a consistent living-out of the value of respect for religious difference, living together harmoniously as one family. "Our path toward the European Union is especially critical for our youth. Albanian young people are among the most Euro-enthusiastic anywhere, and yet they are also among the most frustrated, as they live in close proximity to their European peers and yet are excluded from their peers' opportunities. Your support to Albania's accession process is particularly important at this critical time, when the values of tolerance, solidarity, and human rights are under great pressure because of radicalism, fanaticism, and other sinister ideologies. We together call upon you to recognize the earnest desire of all Albanians, and to support our irreversible commitment to Albania as part of Europe. "With fervent prayers, we reaffirm our commitment to remain steadfast supporters of European values for society with freedom, justice and prosperity for all." Mr. Bushati said Albania's religious leaders exemplified why Albania needs now to move forward on its path towards European integration. "You have given the most meaningful example that we are Europeans and now is the right moment for each of us to follow this example," he said. He singled out the leaders' reference to Albania's young, stating that they in particular are counting on EU integration "so they can build their own futures in their own country, the same as their peers." LONDON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Now in its 5th edition the Phoenix Forums IEC 61850 Europe conference re-brands and attracts global participation. Taking place 16-18 October 2018 in Berlin, the IEC 61850 Global 2018 draws together 150+ IEC 61850 specialists and implementation leaders for 3 intensive days of global utility implementation reviews. This year's agenda assesses new approaches to achieving multi-vendor multi-edition interoperability within the substation whilst identifying new ways to drive deployment of the standard across the wider smart grid. "IEC 61850 has reached a tipping point, it is now fully accepted and on the investment agenda of the vast majority of European utilities," says Mandana White, Director at Phoenix Forums, organisers of IEC 61850 Global 2018. "What's been interesting this year is to see how fast utilities outside of Europe, particularly in the US and Canada, are starting to embrace it." As a result, this year's programme reflects a more global participation, both on the speaker line-up and in the audience. With all global stakeholders convening in one place to review standardisation activity, share implementation experiences, identify new product development opportunities, and create new partnerships, take-up of the standard globally is set to speed up exponentially, creating economies of scale that will lead to more cost-effective deployments across the wider smart grid. The event begins on Tuesday 16th October with a Fundamentals of IEC 61850 workshop led by Christoph Brunner, Convenor of the IEC working group TC 57 WG10. This is an ideal opportunity for all participants to get to grips with the essential building blocks of the standard, update on its revisions and new editions, and to influence the direction of new standardisation activity. The main conference takes place on Wednesday 17th and Thursday 18th October and involves an intensive programme of utility case-studies, new system and tool development panel discussions, a series of end-user focused round table discussions, two live demo labs of the latest tools and technologies, a display of the latest 61850-enabled products and services, and an evening networking reception open to all participants. Discussions will deep dive into actual experiences of implementation issues surrounding specification, design, installation, testing, operation and maintenance. Optimisation of key features such as GOOSE and R-GOOSE will be addressed, as well as integration with other standards such as CIM, and building system resilience through 61850-specific cyber security. New approaches to driving IEC 61850 to the grid edge and enabling effective integration of DER and EVs will be discussed. Updates from ENTSO-E and EDSO will reveal how TSO and DSO interest groups are supporting the development of the standard to support large-scale cost-effective deployment worldwide. "IEC 61850 Global 2018 is the only truly end-user driven forum for the 61850 community," says Mandana White. "It was launched to give voice to the utility community, to enable in-depth and honest discussions that would lead to new solutions and partnerships and ultimately faster deployments globally. We believe these objectives are being well met and we look forward to facilitating discussions and partnerships that will lead to the deployment of the standard across the wider smart grid". "A very useful time, open exchange of ideas and information. Excellent real-world presentations." -Allan Wales, Distribution Systems Specialist - SP Energy Networks "Excellent opportunity to network in PACS related subject. Very close to implementation sharing of ideas that can contribute to the improvement of the standard, procedures, tools and equipment. Very useful to be updated with the latest TC57 WG10 developments and to refresh concepts through the workshop." -Bruno Miguel Soares, Researcher, Substation of the Future - R&D Nester "Perfect event for meeting colleagues in the IEC 61850 world: vendors for IEDs, tools, test-sets, TSOs, DSOs, engineering companies and IEC group members. It was interesting to see and hear what others are working with and where the standard is moving. I hope to be able to participate again." -Anders Dahl Johnsen, Protection Engineer - Siemens Discussions topics include: IEC 61850 standards update : outlining the updates to Edition 2.1 of IEC 61850-6 to address the challenges of interoperability and make efficient engineering in a multi-vendor, multi edition system a reality : outlining the updates to Edition 2.1 of IEC 61850-6 to address the challenges of interoperability and make efficient engineering in a multi-vendor, multi edition system a reality Tendering and specification process : developing a new tendering and specification process to address the challenges of ensuring interoperability for multi-edition systems : developing a new tendering and specification process to address the challenges of ensuring interoperability for multi-edition systems Edition 1 to Edition 2 transition : determining the optimum transition strategy from Edition 1 to Edition 2 depending on your current substation implementations : determining the optimum transition strategy from Edition 1 to Edition 2 depending on your current substation implementations Engineering configuration tools : addressing current tool limitations and developing methodologies for configuring and testing different features of IEC 61850 functionality : addressing current tool limitations and developing methodologies for configuring and testing different features of IEC 61850 functionality Maintenance testing : successfully implementing testing tools to ensure effective operation and maintenance in a multi-vendor multi-edition system : successfully implementing testing tools to ensure effective operation and maintenance in a multi-vendor multi-edition system Cyber security : ensuring cyber security in the implementation of feature rich multi-vendor multi-edition IEC 61850 that include GOOSE, MMS and other messaging : ensuring cyber security in the implementation of feature rich multi-vendor multi-edition IEC 61850 that include GOOSE, MMS and other messaging GOOSE messaging : IEC 61850 for GOOSE and R-GOOSE for messaging in the LAN and WAN : IEC 61850 for GOOSE and R-GOOSE for messaging in the LAN and WAN Beyond the substation : integrating IEC 61850 with data management systems and the CIM and extending its application to the control centre : integrating IEC 61850 with data management systems and the CIM and extending its application to the control centre IEC 61850 for DER: making the business case for using IEC 61850 as the communication protocol to effectively integrate DER into the power grid Speakers confirmed include: Christoph Brunner , President of it4power & Convenor - IEC TC 57 WG10 , President of it4power & Convenor - Roberto Zangrandi , Secretary General - EDSO for Smart Grid , Secretary General - Gregory Huon , Head of Engineering Governance at Elia & Group IEC 61850 Convenor - ENTSO-E , Head of Engineering Governance at Elia & Group IEC 61850 Convenor - Peter Rumenapp , Team Leader, Control & Automation Technology - Amprion , Team Leader, Control & Automation Technology - Rannveig Loken , Senior Specialist Control and Protection - Statnett , Senior Specialist Control and Protection - Priyanka Mohapatra , Senior Project Manager - SP Energy Networks , Senior Project Manager - David MacDonald , System Monitoring Lead Engineer - Iberdrola , System Monitoring Lead Engineer - Zigor Ojinaga , Industrialisation Project Leader - Iberdrola , Industrialisation Project Leader - Nicholas Etherden , Senior R&D Engineer - Vattenfall Distribution Nordic , Senior R&D Engineer - Anders Johnsson , Power System Specialist - Vattenfall Distribution Nordic , Power System Specialist - Ronald Poosen , Team Leader, Distribution Protection and Substation Automation - Fluvius , Team Leader, Distribution Protection and Substation Automation - Rene Troost , Specialist AM Network Intelligence - Stedin , Specialist AM Network Intelligence - Anne van der Molen , Technology Officer - Stedin , Technology Officer - Sander Jansen , Data Architect - Alliander , Data Architect - Paul Hayes , Smart Networks Engineer - ESB Networks , Smart Networks Engineer - Nikolay Ignatovski , Automation Engineer - Electricity System Operator Bulgaria , Automation Engineer - Mohd Iqbal Ridwan , Principal Researcher, Utility Automation - TNB Research Sdn Bhd , Principal Researcher, Utility Automation - Byung Tae Jang , Principal Researcher - KEPCO , Principal Researcher - Abhinav Sadu , Research Associate - E.ON Energy Research Centre , Research Associate - Charles Newton , President - Newton-Evans Research Company , President - Sebastian Krause , Group Leader Security Audits - GAI NetConsult , Group Leader Security Audits - Gerardo Rebollar , Executive Product Line Leader - GE Energy , Executive Product Line Leader - Leandro Henrique Monaco , Global Product Manager, Electrical Control Systems - ABB Sponsors & Exhibitors confirmed include: Gold Sponsor: OMICRON Silver Sponsors: RTDS Technologies, Triangle MicroWorks, Efacec, Subnet Solutions, COPADATA, Arteche Group Tekvel, DNV GL Live Demo Lab Sponsors: Kalkitech, OMICRON Exhibitors: JPEmbedded, SAE-IT Systems, OPAL-RT , Doble Event dates and location: Conference: IEC 61850 Global 2018 Workshop: Fundamentals of IEC 61850 Location: Leonardo Royal Hotel Berlin Alexanderplatz, Germany Event website: www.iec61850-global.com For more information, interview and media accreditation: About Phoenix Forums Phoenix Forums is an independent conference producer specialised in the smart grid sector. We work hand in hand with engineering professionals to create innovative event concepts and high-quality programmes that inform technical decision makers and enable them to deliver exceptional results. Our approach is entirely market led. We stay exceptionally close to industry developments. Through our regular, rigorous and unbiased process of depth research with TSOs, DSOs, power generators, engineering consultancies, and technology innovators, we stay one step ahead of industry developments and provide live events that act as a catalyst for new ideas, new directions, and new approaches to achieving future energy security. For more information, interview and media accreditation: Mandana White, Director, Phoenix Forums Ltd Tel: +44-(0)-20-8349-6360 Email: mandana@phoenix-forums.com Phoenix Forums Ltd Central House 1 Ballards Lane London, N3 1LQ. United Kingdom Tel: +44-(0)-20-8349-6360 Email: registration@phoenix-forums.com New suite of tools and services built to empower millions of developers to build, launch and grow connected games; Unity also announces infrastructure migration to Google Cloud Unity Technologies (https://unity3d.com/), creator of the world's most widely-used real-time 3D development platform, today announced a strategic alliance with Google Cloud. The alliance gives developers access to the development tools needed to build single and multiplayer connected games, and the robust infrastructure they need to build, launch, and grow games seamlessly at global scale. "We're proud of the many Unity developers that collectively produce more than half the world's games," said John Riccitiello, Chief Executive Officer, Unity Technologies. "Multiplayer games have long been the fastest-growing type of games. Multiplayer games are also the most challenging to create and properly support. Our alliance with Google Cloud will help developers build multiplayer games more easily and operate them more cost-effectively, at a global scale." Unity Puts Connected Games at the Fingertips of All Developers While connected games are the most played, watched and successful gaming experiences, making them is a challenging endeavor that requires significant resources, technology and knowledge -- a hard feat for developers large and small. Unity and Google Cloud will empower game creators with a suite of features designed to accelerate development of connected games, starting with multiplayer game server hosting and a new open source matchmaking project co-founded by Unity and Google Cloud. Unity will release a fully managed version of the open source matchmaking project, integrated with the Unity development environment and running on Google Cloud. Right from Unity, developers will be able to access the advantages of Google Cloud performant infrastructure, at massive scale all without needing to become cloud experts. "Much like Unity is dedicated to democratizing game development, we're committed to democratizing the use of advanced technology through the cloud," said Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud. "We're excited to work together with Unity to ensure developers have the tools and infrastructure they need to build, launch and grow games at global scale." Unity Migrates Infrastructure to Google Cloud In addition to building solutions for developers, Unity will be migrating its own infrastructure to Google Cloud. Through this alliance, Google Cloud is demonstrating its commitment to supporting game companies big and small. Both Unity and its developer community will benefit from Google Cloud's openness, security, scalability, and innovation through data. Riccitiello continued: "Migrating our infrastructure to Google Cloud was a decision made based on the company's impressive global reach and product quality. Now, Unity developers will be able to take advantage of the unparalleled capabilities to support their cloud needs at a global scale." Unity is committed to enabling success and solving hard problems for all its customers, across the many industries where its real-time 3D development platform is helping bring products to life. Unity currently powers more than 60% of all AR/VR experiences, supports 25+ platforms, and reaches nearly 3 billion devices worldwide. For more information, please visit http://unity3d.com/connectedgames. About Unity Technologies Unity is the creator of the world's most widely-used real-time 3D development platform, giving developers around the world the tools to create rich, interactive 2D, 3D, VR and AR experiences. The company's 800 person engineering team keeps Unity at the bleeding-edge of technology by working alongside partners such as Google, Facebook, Oculus and Microsoft to ensure optimized support for the latest releases and platforms. Games and experiences made with Unity reach ~3 billion devices worldwide and were installed more than 24 billion times in the last 12 months. Unity's renowned flexibility gives developers the power to target and optimize their creations for 25+ platforms including Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Gameroom (Facebook), SteamVR (PC Mac), Oculus, PSVR, Gear VR, HoloLens, ARKit (Apple), ARCore (Google) and more. Unity also offers solutions and services for connecting with audiences including Unity Ads, Unity Analytics, Unity Asset Store, Unity Cloud Build, Unity Collaborate, Unity Connect and Unity Certification. For more information, visit www.unity3d.com and to see the latest games and experiences created in Unity, go to https://unity.com/madewith. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619006105/en/ Contacts: Unity PR Amanda Taggart, 310-980-9587 amandat@unity3d.com or Google Cloud Annie Meenan, 925-699-7307 ameenan@google.com BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - A $716 billion defense policy bill easily cleared the Senate on Monday, although the legislation must still be reconciled with the version previously approved by the House. The Senate voted 85 to 10 in favor of the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes U.S. military spending for fiscal 2019. Seven Democratic Senators, Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Republican Senators Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, voted against the bill. In addition to authorizing $639 billion in base defense spending and $69 billion for ongoing conflicts, the bill includes a provision that essentially kills the Trump administration's agreement to end crippling sanctions on Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp. The bill would restore penalties on ZTE for violating export controls and prohibit government agencies from purchasing or leasing telecommunications equipment or services from the company. Earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had announced an agreement lifting an order that banned ZTE from buying American products. The agreement included a $1 billion fine against ZTE and forced the company to replace its board of directors and executive team and install a U.S.-chosen compliance team. In a joint statement, Senators Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., praised the inclusion of the amendment in the defense bill. 'We're heartened that both parties made it clear that protecting American jobs and national security must come first when making deals with countries like China, which has a history of having little regard for either,' the senators said. He added, 'It is vital that our colleagues in the House keep this bipartisan provision in the bill as it heads towards a conference.' However, the White House is expected to push for negotiators to revise the ZTE language in a joint conference committee. President Donald Trump has previously highlighted the fact that ZTE buys a tremendous amount of equipment from American companies. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Crude oil futures tumbled Tuesday as OPEC geared up for a contentious meeting in Vienna. Saudi Arabia is expected to press for increased output but will face strong opposition from Iran. Russia, the non-OPEC member that has been part of a supply quota plan with the cartel, also wants to ramp up. With global markets also spooked by a brewing trade war between the U.S. and China, oil prices have fallen sharply over the past few weeks. July WTI oil settled at $65.07/bbl, down 78 cents, or 1.2%. Oil is down almost 10% over the past month. The Commerce Dept reported a bigger than expected jump in new residential construction in the U.S. in the month of May, the report also showed a much steeper than expected drop in building permits. The report said housing starts soared by 5.0 percent to an annual rate of 1.350 million in May after tumbling by 3.1 percent to a revised rate of 1.286 million in April. 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. - June 19, 2018) - Ancient Strains Limited ("Ancient Strains"), through its wholly-owned subsidiary Ancient Strains International Ltd. ("ASIL"), is pleased to announce that it has signed a Definitive Agreement ("DA") with Cannabis Uruguay Limitada ("CUL") outlining the terms of an agreement to finance the expansion of a CBD - rich hemp operation in exchange for an 80% equity interest in CUL. Under the terms of the agreement, ASIL will invest USD $6.9 million, and make cash and share payments subject to completion of certain milestones, including first commercial sales of cannabinoid extract. Upon reaching commercial production, expected in mid 2019, CUL is estimated to produce approximately 2,000 kg per year of cannabinoid extracts for export. The transaction is subject to Ancient Strains financing the build - out and expansion, and CUL receiving necessary regulatory and permit approvals. "We are very excited to work with the CUL team in Uruguay. Ancient Strains will provide the financing and Canadian experience and bring international markets for product sales. Uruguay is a stable and progressive country with excellent growing conditions, experienced growers, and favourable export tax treatment. This marks the first step toward our growth as a leader in the international trade in cannabis extracts for medicinal purposes in three key areas: South America, North America/Europe, and south Asia. These regions combine excellent growth opportunities, and substantial future markets." stated President Samir Biswas. SUMMARY of NEAR TERM COMMITMENTS in URUGUAY On signing, CUL receives immediate USD$250,000 cash and $150,000 working capital; Ancient Strains commits an additional USD$500,000 to commence expansions; CUL completes first harvest on 450 sq m (5,000 sq ft), and initiates oil extraction testing; CUL commences greenhouse construction on 2 hectare (215,000 sq ft) property; CUL acquires 30 hectares (3.2 million sq ft) for staged future expansion; Ongoing expansion in Uruguay through 2018 and 2019 upon receipt of approvals KEY ANTICIPATED CORPORATE MILESTONES Ancient Strains expects to conclude one or more agreements in India by August 31; Ongoing development of markets for CBD and other extracts in Canada and abroad; Completion of a go - public transaction anticipated in Q4 of 2018; Completion of a license permit in one other world class grow location anticipated in 2019. This Press Release Is Available on the Company's website www.AncientStrains.ca About Ancient Strains Ancient Strains Limited Is a Canadian federally registered company planning to become a vertically integrated international producer of cannabis extracts required for medicinal purposes. The Ancient Strains' goal is to develop low cost production and extraction near key markets, and in collaboration with industry leaders that are experts in their fields, develop innovative strains of cannabis genetics that will have a positive impact on people's health worldwide. Disclaimers: This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements containing the words "may", "plan", "will", "estimate", "continue", "anticipate", "intend", "expect", "in the process" and other similar expressions which constitute "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements reflect the Company's current expectation and assumptions, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, our expectations regarding the acceptance of our products by the market, our strategy to develop new products and enhance the capabilities of existing products, our strategy with respect to research and development, the impact of competitive products and pricing, new product development, and uncertainties related to the regulatory approval process. Such statements reflect the current views of the Company with respect to future events and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties and other risks which may be detailed from time-to-time in the Company's on-going filings with the securities regulatory authorities, when applicable, which filings would be found at www.sedar.com upon such time the company becomes a reporting issuer. Actual results, events, and performance may differ materially. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements either as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. This document has not been filed with any Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) or other authority that has verified the adequacy or accuracy of this release. For further information contact Daryl Hodges, Chairman and CEO Tel (647) 271-3817 Samir Biswas, President and COO Tel: (416) 545-7214 www.AncientStrains.ca Data analytics company Skyfiiis pleased to announce that it has signed a Master Services Agreement with Nandos Australia.The initial contract will provision the deployment of Skyfiis SaaS recurring revenue IO Platform services, over a two-year contract term, across 120 corporate Nandos restaurants within Australia.Nandos originated in South Africa and now operates a global network of 1,000 restaurants across 30 countries.Skyfii has been growing its presence in the Quick Service Restaurant vertical, with this announcement following a separate deployment across a United Kingdom and United States based premium fast-food chain, covering 342 stores.Shares in Skyfiiare up 3.7 per cent to 14c. Air India has logged losses for over a decade, has a debt of over Rs 50,000 crore and faces stiff competition from private airlines. What should the government's focus be? The government has decided to walk away from the sale of Air India and this will have, both, good and bad consequences. It is a good decision since the process leading up to the sale was riddled with confusion and contradictions and the sale plan had anyway bombed in the first attempt. Restarting it would have meant a massive climb down for the government in agreeing to terms and conditions sought by potential bidders, which could have invited further allegations of wrongdoing. Besides, the risk in an election year with employee unions apprehensive and even some insiders within the government opposing the sale on various grounds was entirely avoidable. But the scrapping of the sale will also have not-so-good consequences too. This gets every stakeholder back to square one. The airline continues to lose money hand over fist, the government as its 100 percent owner stands committed to pump in required funds and the competitive scenario becomes progressively worse. If the government really wanted to insulate the taxpayer from any more funding of AI losses, it has just reneged on this goal. Not to forget the competitive scenario, where Indian airlines are planning to significantly enhance their global networks, striking at the root of AI and its business. Domestic operations are unlikely to be smooth either, with mega plane orders by almost all private airlines this will lead to a shrinking of AIs domestic grip too unless the government again goes on an aircraft buying spree. Which will only mean enhanced investments. Several people involved in the disinvestment process have confirmed that the sale is off. While some have tried to pin the blame on high oil prices scaring away potential bidders, some others have spoken of plans to list the airline as soon as it becomes profitable. In a Rajya Sabha (RS) reply on 3 April, the Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinha has been quoted as saying that as per provisional figures, AIs net loss could be Rs 3,579 crore in fiscal 2017-18. In FY17, AI earned a total revenue of Rs 22,177.68 crore (Rs 20,610.33 crore), operating profit was Rs 211.98 crore (Rs 298.34 crore) and the consolidated net loss was Rs 6,288.52 crore against Rs 4,310.65 crore in 2015-16, an increase of Rs 1,977.87 crore. In other words, the consolidated net loss widened by almost Rs 5.5 crore on each day of fiscal 2016-17. Whether a similar spike in net loss is seen for FY18 too remains to be seen, but the figures still show what a poor financial state AI continues to be in. As per provisional figures, the total loans on the books of AI till December last year were around Rs 54,861.16 crore. The UPA government had approved a Turnaround Plan (TAP) during its second term, under which equity infusion of Rs 30,231 crore was promised up to 2021, subject to achievement of certain milestones as laid down in the TAP. Another RS reply shows, till April this year, equity of Rs 26,545.21 crore had been infused in AI. So, here we have an entity which has been piling up losses for over a decade, has a debt of over Rs 50,000 crore and is now facing stiff competition from private airlines in both, domestic as well as international markets. What should the governments focus be, now that it is clear that no private party is ready to take on the burden? To begin with, the government will have to privatise the board of directors, so to say, by bringing in professionals. A source in the know said that this would be attempted but remember, a similar attempt some years earlier was hardly successful. During the UPA years, a bunch of respected business leaders such as Anand Mahindra and other professionals were inducted as independent directors on the airlines board and a qualified expat COO Gustav Bauldauf was also brought in to manage operations. But none of these eminent professionals could survive the onslaught of bureaucratic apathy and rancour within the board. A second attempt at professionalising the board had better be more sincere and should be made keeping specific goals in mind. Then, the airlines assets that can be monetised should be examined and sold off. This could include land parcels, remunerative subsidiaries, among other things. Last, but not the least, the employees should also be offered a one-time scheme to reduce AIs substantial manpower costs. Even if these landmark steps are taken by a government which is more focused on elections some months away than on AI matters, it will need to invest a large sum of money to keep the airline afloat. According to global aviation consultancy CAPA, Air India is expected to lose a total of $1.5 billion to $2 billion (up to about Rs 13,500 crore) in financial years 2018-19 and 2019-20. These losses will need to be funded by the Indian taxpayers. And this is in addition to the $4 billion of public funds that have been used to subsidise the airline since 2012, it said. Air Indias balance sheet has been splashed with red ink for long and this is hardly about to change in the near future with oil prices remaining firm and competitive intensity increasing in both domestic and international markets. To make matters worse, the airline has never really had a control over costs. Now that the government has decided not to sell the airline, it has no option but to bear the cross. By Lefteris Papadimas and Renee Maltezou ATHENS (Reuters) - With a brief formulation of words, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras may have boosted his chances of persuading foreign creditors to free his nation from years of financial humiliation on better terms than a few days ago. Tsipras agreed a deal with his Macedonian counterpart at the weekend under which Greece's neighbour will be renamed 'Republic of North Macedonia', a formulation offering a chance to end a 27-year dispute with Skopje that has bedevilled the European Union's eastward expansion. By Lefteris Papadimas and Renee Maltezou ATHENS (Reuters) - With a brief formulation of words, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras may have boosted his chances of persuading foreign creditors to free his nation from years of financial humiliation on better terms than a few days ago. Tsipras agreed a deal with his Macedonian counterpart at the weekend under which Greece's neighbour will be renamed "Republic of North Macedonia", a formulation offering a chance to end a 27-year dispute with Skopje that has bedevilled the European Union's eastward expansion. Now the hope is that the political goodwill will earn Athens a warmer-than-usual reception when euro zone finance ministers meet in the Eurogroup on Thursday to plot Greece's steps toward exiting its bailout programme, Greek and EU officials said. That includes possible relief on the country's debts, which have soared since the first EU/IMF rescue in 2010. Tsipras acknowledges that the Macedonia deal, which opens the way for the former Yugoslav republic to seek EU and NATO membership, is separate from any Greek debt relief. "I feel like a chess player who is simultaneously playing two games, because you know at the same time (there are) the name issue negotiations and crucial negotiations for the debt issue," he told the head of the euro zone bailout fund last week after the Macedonia talks achieved a breakthrough. But he added: "I'm hoping, as we had a breakthrough yesterday, we will have the same next week in maybe the most crucial for the country after eight difficult years." Tsipras has often had testy relations with the EU as austerity measures imposed under the bailouts hurt Greeks badly. But an EU official expressed cautious optimism that the Macedonian settlement, which must be approved by both countries' parliaments, will have a positive psychological effect. "I think the deal will help (Greece) in debt relief talks. The government will head to the talks with a different morale," the official said on condition of anonymity, while adding that the deal had never been linked to bailout talks. PROBLEM SOLVER The deal was warmly welcomed in the EU and by the United States, long impatient with what it perceives as Greek obduracy over the name, potentially destabilising the Balkans. "One cannot rule out that it will have a positive impact, since Greece appears to be a force that solves instead of creating problems," a Greek government official said, dismissing any suggestion that debt relief is dependent on the Macedonian settlement. "It was never demanded by European lenders, there was never a trade-off." Another person who has participated in past bailout talks sounded a note of caution as the German government, whose support is vital for any debt deal, is unlikely to be more generous as it is currently preoccupied by an internal row over migrant policy. The Macedonia deal has led to fiery protests in both countries and unrest in Tsipras's left-right coalition, which has a fragile parliamentary majority and is trailing the conservative opposition in opinion polls. It survived a confidence vote on Saturday night but lost one lawmaker from the right-wing Independent Greeks party, Tsipras's junior ally, which has vowed to back the coalition but rejects any settlement that includes the name Macedonia. On Monday, Dimitris Kammenos, who was expelled from the Independent Greeks after backing the no-confidence motion against the government, insisted the deal was indeed a quid pro quo. He said a group of right-wing lawmakers had been dissuaded from submitting a censure motion against Greece's foreign minister who signed the accord on Sunday. "There were arguments related to the economy," Kammenos told Skai TV. "Whether Greece would get the debt deal was subject to whether it would give the name Macedonia," he said. His comments have frequently caused public uproar on social media and angry responses from politicians. The Independent Greeks dismissed his comments. "There was never reciprocity between the process for a deal over Skopje's name and negotiations on financial issues within the framework of the EU," said Independent Greeks' spokesman Theodoros Tosounidis. "He (Kammenos) is obviously trying to link things to cover up his actions." (editing by David Stamp) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. As IT major Infosys completed 25 years of its listing on the stock exchange, a former senior official of the firm paid rich tributes to the co-founder N R Narayana Murthy for creating the 'dream' company Hyderabad: As IT major Infosys completed 25 years of its listing on the stock exchange, a former senior official of the firm paid rich tributes to the co-founder N R Narayana Murthy for creating the "dream" company. "I don't think the country is going to see one more Infosys again because Infosys has been a dream company for many generations," says ex-Chief Financial Officer V Balakrishnan. The Bengaluru-headquartered company, he said, created the middle class aspiration in the country and made them think global. Balakrishnan saw it as an extraordinary story of how a few people with little background came together, built a global company and ran it in a legal and ethical manner, still creating enormous amount of wealth and share it with all stakeholders. "I think all this had been possible because of one iconic leader -- Murthy who had created the dream of Infosys which attracted the best talent to come and work and make their company much bigger," he told PTI. Balakrishnan also said Infosys, which last week celebrated the silver jubilee of its listing in 1993, to some extent institutionalised the Capital market. When Infosys was listed two-and-half decades ago, the Indian capital market was not institutionalised. With global aspiration, the then small company set benchmark for disclosures and value system and enhanced the profile for the whole corporate world in India, according to him. "If you look at the SEBI's recommendations on corporate governance, most of them had been followed (earlier) by Infosys, which was later mandated by the regulator to all companies to follow. So, it improved the whole profile of the corporate world in India, and enhanced corporate governance standards", Balakrishnan said. Infosys put value before profits, and Murthy always demonstrated leadership by example which attracted a good team of people which came and made the dream much bigger, he said. As long as Infosys sticks to its core value system, and governance standards, it would continue to do well, he said. Infosys as a company, Balakrishnan said, has tremendous amount of goodwill of investors and stakeholders, and "everyone wants the company to perform well." The company has done extraordinarily well in the last many years and created tremendous amount of wealth for investors. "I don't see why it (the same thing) will not happen for the next 25 years. Key thing is they should not lose their sight on core value system and principles," he added. The government on Tuesday launched the follow-on fund offer (FFO) of Bharat-22 Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), comprising shares of 22 companies, to raise up to Rs 8,400 crore from the market New Delhi: The second tranche of Bharat-22 ETF follow-on offer was lapped up by institutional investors on Tuesday, with the portion reserved for anchor bidders getting subscribed 3.44 times to the tune of Rs 5,163 crore. The government on Tuesday launched the follow-on fund offer (FFO) of Bharat-22 Exchange Traded Fund (ETF), comprising shares of 22 companies, to raise up to Rs 8,400 crore from the market. The issue opened for anchor investors on Tuesday, and received subscriptions from investors including mutual funds houses, foreign portfolio investors (FPI), insurance and retirement funds. The FFO will open for subscription for retail and other institutional investors on Wednesday and will remain open till 22 June. Secretary in the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management Atanu Chakraborty said, "The Bharat-22 FFO is another opportunity for the investors to participate in the India growth story as represented by the industry leading stocks of the ETF. ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund managed Bharat-22 ETF's fund offer, through which the government aims to mop up Rs 6,000 crore with a green shoe option of raising another Rs 2,400 crore. As much as 25 percent of total issue size, or Rs 1,500 crore, was reserved for anchor investors who put in bids worth about Rs 5,163 crore, ICICI Prudential AMC said. "We are happy to see the continued support received from anchor investors towards the FFO... Now, we look forward to active participation from non-anchor investor category, over the next three days, whereby one has the opportunity to own some of the jewels of Corporate India at a discounted price," ICICI Prudential AMC MD and CEO Nimesh Shah said. The government had in November last year launched Bharat-22 ETF comprising shares of 22 companies, including public sector undertakings (PSUs), public sector banks, ITC, Axis Bank and L&T. The fund had garnered bids to the tune of Rs 32,000 crore, although the government retained only Rs 14,500 crore. The state-owned companies that are part of the new Bharat ETF-22 include ONGC, IOC, SBI, BPCL, Coal India and Nalco. The other central public sector enterprises on the list are Bharat Electronics, Engineers India, NBCC, NTPC, NHPC, SJVNL, GAIL, PGCIL and NLC India. Only three public sector banks SBI, Indian Bank and Bank of Baroda feature in the Bharat-22 index. The government plans to raise Rs 80,000 crore in the current fiscal from disinvestment, lower than over Rs 1 lakh crore raised last year. Besides, the government will launch the initial public offering of railway consultancy firm RITES tomorrow through which it will divest 12 percent stake. The IPO is expected to fetch over Rs 460 crore to the exchequer. Prior to the launch of Bharat-22 ETF, which has a diversified portfolio, the government had floated the CPSE ETF comprising stocks of 10 bluechip PSUs ONGC, Coal India, IOC, GAIL (India), Oil India, PFC, Bharat Electronics, REC, Engineers India and Container Corporation of India. Through the CPSE ETF, the government had raised Rs 11,500 crore in three tranches Rs 3,000 crore from the first tranche in March 2014, Rs 6,000 crore from the second tranche in January 2017 and Rs 2,500 crore from the third tranche in March 2017. With rising oil prices, depreciating rupee and outflow of portfolio investments, there are concerns that CAD might rise in the current fiscal. New Delhi: Current account deficit (CAD) at 2.5 percent of GDP won't be a worry as the government has the required instruments to deal with any imbalance created due to foreign fund outflow, Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg said on Tuesday. "2-2.5 percent CAD is not a problem for us.... If there is stability, in the current year capital account (inflows) should be good enough to take care and we may not worry even if it (CAD) reaches 2.5 percent," Garg said. CAD, which is the difference between the inflow and outflow of foreign exchange, jumped to $48.7 billion, or 1.9 percent of GDP, in 2017-18 fiscal. This was higher than $14.4 billion, or 0.6 percent, CAD in 2016-17 fiscal. With rising oil prices, depreciating rupee and outflow of portfolio investments, there are concerns that CAD might rise in the current fiscal. "Last year, we had $160 billion of trade deficit, $82 billion services surplus and $70 billion remittances. In a way, we are pretty much in balance. "But if oil goes up, this balance gets disturbed and the capital account funds it," Garg said at a CII event in New Delhi. The price of Indian basket of crude surged from $66 a barrel in April to around $74 a barrel at present. Asked about monetary policy tightening by the United States, he said India can afford to be "less edgy and concerned" than it was during Taper Tantrum in 2013. "In the last couple of years of monetary easing, you did not see flood of capital flows coming into emerging markets, including India. Unlike what happened in 2007. There is a confidence that the emerging market economies will do well," he said. He added the government needs to be "very careful and watch out" for the situation, but today "we are at a place where we can manage without having the consequences of what we saw in Taper Tantrum." "We have a number of other instruments to use in that case. We have not called upon them to use so far. Last time we came out with NRE (non-resident external) deposit. We are sitting on reserves which are highest ever at $415 billion. The place where we are is possibly not the kind of situation where we were in 2013," he said. Observing that the fund flow from portfolio investors depend on factors like yields and exchange rate, he said "we still are in good shape. CAD between 2.5-3 percent is something not in our control. It depends on way the oil would behave. "But we are definitely in a place where we can take care these things, unlike 10 years ago when we didn't have fire power. I think on macro front we need to be vigilant, but we can take care," he added. On managing fiscal deficit, he said the government has worked in a very prudent and sound manner. India would shortly achieve the targeted 3 percent fiscal deficit level and it will be more permanent and sustainable in nature, Garg said. By Colin Packham SYDNEY (Reuters) - Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies refuted Australian claims it poses a security risk, calling the criticism 'ill-informed' in an open letter on Monday that threatens to inflame already heightened Sino-Canberra tensions. Australia is likely to ban Huawei from participating in a 5G mobile telecommunications roll-out in the nation as it fears the company is de facto controlled by China and sensitive infrastructure will fall into the hands of Beijing, according to Australian media reports. Huawei denies the allegations, and, in a move that threatens to draw Australian politicians into a public spat that will further stain relations with China, dismissed Canberra's security concerns. By Colin Packham SYDNEY (Reuters) - Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei Technologies refuted Australian claims it poses a security risk, calling the criticism "ill-informed" in an open letter on Monday that threatens to inflame already heightened Sino-Canberra tensions. Australia is likely to ban Huawei from participating in a 5G mobile telecommunications roll-out in the nation as it fears the company is de facto controlled by China and sensitive infrastructure will fall into the hands of Beijing, according to Australian media reports. Huawei denies the allegations, and, in a move that threatens to draw Australian politicians into a public spat that will further stain relations with China, dismissed Canberra's security concerns. "Recent public commentary around China has referenced Huawei and its role in Australia and prompted some observations around security concerns," Huawei Australia Chairman John Lord and board directors John Brumby and Lance Hockridge wrote in the unprecedented letter. "Many of these comments are ill-informed and not based on facts." Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecommunications network equipment and the No. 3 smartphone supplier, has already been virtually shut out from the giant U.S. market because of national security concerns. Australia has longstanding concerns about Huawei. In 2012 it banned the company from supplying its massive National Broadband Network, and in May Canberra committed millions of dollars to ensure Huawei did not build an internet cable between Australia and the Solomon Islands. A decision on 5G would come amid a low in Beijing-Canberra relations. Canberra is preparing to pass laws designed to limit Beijing's influence in domestic affairs following criticism by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull late last year that Beijing was meddling in its affairs. Huawei said in the letter it operates in 170 countries, abiding by national laws and guidelines. Citing 5G investments in Britain, Canada and New Zealand, the company said those governments had taken up its offer to evaluate the company's technology to make sure it abided by cybersecurity protocols. Australia's Attorney-General Christian Porter refused to comment on the specifics of Huawei's letter but said the letter would be seen in a different light once the country's Foreign Interference Bill, which will require individuals to declare links with foreign governments, is passed. "(If) you are acting on behalf of what we would define as a foreign government-related entity, and you're lobbying government, you are trying to affect an outcome for government decisions or you're trying to affect an outcome of an Australian democratic process, that's fine but we simply want it done with full transparency," Porter told reporters in Canberra. The Foreign Interference Bill could pass Australia's Parliament as early as this week. "It won't be great for the relationship if Australia bans Huawei but it won't come as a huge surprise," said Merriden Virrall, director at Australian think tank the Lowy Institute. "What is important is how Australia articulates it. Australia can't make sweeping statements about great foreign powers. That will determine the response from China." Alienating China could herald additional trade restrictions from Beijing, analysts said, as six Australian wines, including some produced by Treasury Wine Estates and Pernod Ricard, continue to suffer in shipping supplies to China. Australia's wine exports to China were worth A$848 million ($631.17 million) last year and are forecast to top A$1 billion in 2018, government figures show. Some analysts say those figures now look optimistic. "The bilateral relationship isn't in a great place, and the government's announcement will be another major pothole," said Danielle Cave, a former analyst at an Australian security intelligence agency, the Office of National Assessments. ($1 = 1.3435 Australian dollars) (Reporting By Jane Wardell and Colin Packham; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Muralikumar Anantharaman) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. The government will increase the capacity under the BPO promotion scheme to one lakh seats from the current 48,000 seats, Ravi Shankar Prasad said New Delhi: The government plans to expand its BPO promotion scheme to one lakh seats, and will also set up India's largest National data centre in Bhopal, IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Monday. "We want to make India a hub for BPO movement," Prasad said at a conference to highlight the achievements of IT and Electronics Ministry over the last four years. The government will increase the capacity under the BPO promotion scheme to one lakh seats from the current 48,000 seats, he said, adding that initiative has not only created new job opportunities but also ensured that people in smaller towns find employment closer home. "BPOs are going to start soon in smaller cities like Gaya and Gazipur...They are already operational in Guwahati, Muzaffarpur, Patna and other places...in all 91 in 27 States...So our efforts that youth should find employment near their cities and towns, have materialised," the minister said. Allocation of 31,732 seats for BPO units operating from smaller towns have created new employment avenues with potential to offer nearly 2 lakh direct and indirect jobs to youth under India BPO promotion scheme and North East BPO promotion scheme, he added. Prasad also said that the fifth 'National Data Centre' - the largest of such centres - will come up in Bhopal with capacity of five lakh virtual servers. The National Data Centres - that host government websites, services and apps - are currently operational at four locations - Pune, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bhubaneswar. Prasad last month, had inaugurated the cloud-enabled National Data Centre in Bubaneswar, which is spread over 40,000 square feet. The data centre will host new as well as existing applications of Central and state governments with ability to support 35,000 virtual servers. "Bhopal data centre is important as India is becoming big centre of data...the huge population has become digitally reliant. We want to create a robust data centre...NIC is working on it," the minister said. National Informatics Centre (NIC) provides technology support to governance services and hosts nearly 10,000 websites of the government. A senior NIC official said that the work on new Bhopal centre has already started and it will be operational in two years or so. The minister further said that 1.23 crore rural adults have been trained so far under Pradhan Mantri Digital Saksharta Abhiyan. This includes 63 lakh candidates who have already received their certification. Commenting on the digital payments initiative, the IT ministry said that the monthly BHIM-UPI transactions touched a record high of 19 crore transactions worth 27,000 crore in April 2018. The ICICI Bank boards duty is to look out for the bank and do right by the lender. Instead, it chose to stand by long-serving boss Chanda Kochhar. Why did ICICI Bank's MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar take such a long time to step aside from her post? Could she have not done this earlier? At least, that would have made her an honourable person, said analysts who spoke to Firstpost, on condition of anonymity, after the private lender said Kochhar will go on leave till the completion of an enquiry, which seeks to determine alleged wrongdoing in the sanctioning of a Rs 3,250 crore ICICI loan to the Videocon Group. If Kochhar were to step down when doubts were first cast on her role in the Videocon loan row, it would have been professional courtesy, said J N Gupta, former ED, Sebi. At least the public opinion on Kochhar would have been different to what it is now, said Manoj Kumar, the founder of Hammurabi & Solomon, and a visiting fellow with the Observer Research Foundation (ORF). The allegation against Kochhar relates to the Rs 3,250 crore loan given to the Videocon group, in 2012. The group's controlling shareholder co-founded a company NuPower Renewables -- with Chandas husband Deepak. A significant portion of the aforementioned loan has since turned sour. Even as the dust of suspicion swirled around Kochhar, the banks Board defended her twice, reposing its faith in the long-serving CEO each time. The board has come to the conclusion that there is no question of any quid pro quo/ nepotism/ conflict of interest as is being alleged in various rumours. The board has full confidence and reposes full faith in the Bank's MD and CEO Ms. Chanda Kochhar," the bank said on 28 March, 2018. But, a couple of days later, the board decided to institute an enquiry that would examine allegations of impropriety against Kochhar. The board then asked retired Supreme Court Justice BN Srikrishna to preside over the probe. The board felt he would be the best person to conduct this inquiry. He has accepted the request. Justice Srikrishna is an independent and credible name, who has a good understanding of the financial markets," The Economic Times reported, quoting an unnamed source. "The scope of enquiry would be comprehensive and will 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 record statements of relevant personnel, etc," the bank said on 31 May. Kochhars decision to go on leave could be one of the pre-conditions of the Justice Srikrishna committee, analysts felt. The committee probing the matter would not have been comfortable with Kochhar carrying out her duties at the bank, said one analyst. The message being given out by the board is that it did not ask her to go, but that she chose to. I feel the Board presented Kochhar with a fait accompli either step aside of your own volition or we will have to ask you to move out, said another analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity. Kochhars term ends in March 2019. With Justice Srikrishna not having indicated when the results of the probe would be out and with the Board not specifying if its a time-bound panel, the Board has provided Kochhar a graceful exit, said Shriram Subramanian, founder and managing director, InGovern - an independent corporate governance research and advisory firm. Ceasars wife must be above suspicion But, what continues to perplex the industry is the lag in Kochhars decision, which was taken only on Monday. So, why did she take so long to arrive at the decision to step aside until the conclusion of the probe? Some recalled the oft-quoted expression: Ceasars wife must be above suspicion'. The allegations against her are serious and she should have left the chair and asked for an enquiry herself, opined a few industry observers. To be fair, though Kochhar was on the committee that sanctioned the Rs 3,250 loan to Videocon in 2012, the bank said she did not chair the committee that had many independent directors. More than Kochhar, the Boards situation has become more precarious, felt Kumar. He added that it is now the Boards turn to explain its conduct and why it was treading with caution all along, since the controversy first broke out. ICICI Bank Board to blame The role of the ICICI Bank Board is not to look after its MD and CEO. In fact, that is not the role of any Board, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst, Founder and CEO of Greyhound Research. The Boards duty was to look out for ICICI and do right by the bank. Instead, it chose to stand by Kochhar. Though she is regarded as an icon in her own right, when there is a major allegation and a serious one like the one against her, she should have stepped down or the Board should have asked her to step aside, Gogia said. Almost everyone who spoke to Firstpost said the role of the Board in the Chanda Kochhar episode must be scrutinised. We must question the role of the Board. Like we did with Infosys, said Gogia. In the case of Infosys, Sikka wasnt wrong but the Board was by not taking action. In the case of ICICI Bank, it is a code of conduct issue. This is a significant allegation. The Board went on defending Kochhar without carrying out any investigation. It is only when Sebi got involved that the Board decided to do something about the allegations, Gogia said. The Board still hasnt explained her going away, he said, except to put out a statement that Kochhar has decided to step aside pending the enquiry. Hasty decision in giving a clean chit The Board made a hasty decision in March when it gave Kochhar a clean chit, said Gupta. When you order a coffee and the barista hands you your cuppa, well, the Board was that quick to give Kochhar a clean chit, said Gupta. Why was there a need to defend Kochhar with such speed and alacrity? That is the one question on everyones mind. Gupta said he isnt surprised by the Board continuing to sing the same tune, of reposing faith in Kochhar. They have to live with that decision and defend it, which they cannot and hence the enquiry, which was forced on them, he said. He also pointed to news in one section of the media that said Sandeep Bakhshi would be the new COO at ICICI Bank, much before the lender put out an official statement. Where is the secrecy among Board proceedings regarding issues like this? he asked, adding that this was a case of insider information that was put out in the public domain. This shows the weakness of the Board, Gupta stressed. That the ICICI Board chose to pledge its allegiance to Kochhar should not be surprising, said analysts. That has largely been the case with most boards in the country, they said. I am still dreaming of a day when independent directors will examine issues without any affiliation. Gupta said company boardrooms need people of the calibre of T N Seshan, the former Election Commissioner credited with reforming the electoral polity in worlds largest democracy. Whistleblower unimpressed Whistleblower Arvind Gupta is skeptical about the setting up of an independent probe by the bank's Board. What compelled the Board to institute a probe after backing Kochhar repeatedly, he asked. Gupta said he had lost all faith in the bank after the press statement from the private lender on Monday evening. This is all eye-wash and stage-managed, he said. Guptas contention is that with the bank board having already absolved Kochhar of any conflict of interests, they cannot now self-appoint an enquiry where the panel will be shown what the bank wants to show it. Do you think the retired learned judge will say that the observations of the bank are wrong? We do not know yet Justice Srikrishna's scope of enquiry, the team, among other things. There is no sanctity to this. In fact, the learned retired Judge will be in a dharam sankat. Should he go by his conscience and come out with the truth or stand by the sponsors of the enquiry, which is the Board, asked Gupta. On being questioned about the appointment of Sandeep Bakhshi to the newly created position of COO, Gupta said he felt pity for him. His appointment is on a temporary ad hoc basis. He will be in a dilemma: Should he be loyal to the Board or to Kochhar. The real issue is the quid pro quo allegations that has led to stakeholders losing money. Chanda Kochhar has stage managed everything. If anyone has to conduct a probe, it has to be the Sebi or the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Not the bank itself, he said. Kochhars role as MD & CEO Though a bizarre turn of events has led to Kochhar being discussed in the manner that she is now in public domain, her contribution as a leading woman banker in the country cannot be emphasised more. In May 2017, she had the distinction of becoming the first Indian woman to receive the prestigious Woodrow Wilson Award for Global Citizenship. That put her in the league of US diplomats Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice who have received the same honour. Kochhars earnings in fiscal 2016-17 was around Rs. 7.75 crore. No one resents Kochhar her space under the sun in the banking sector. ICICI is one of the largest banks in the country and as a person, she took the team along, said Kumar of ORF, adding that it would not be in the fitness of things to question her professional credentials as an MD and CEO of the bank. As the head of the organisation, she fared well. She is entitled to that credit, he said. Kochhar took over the reins of the bank when there was a financial crisis, said Subramanian of InGovern. That she has grown with the bank, became the CEO goes to show that she is a dedicated banker, he said. However, her achievements as a CEO are nothing much to write home about as the non performing assets (NPAs) issue at ICICI Bank remains unresolved, Subramanian added. ICICI Bank's gross non-performing assets stood at Rs 54,063 crore or 8.84 percent of net advances as on 31 March 2018. Kochhar has been a pillar of strength at ICICI Bank, who took the institution to fantastically new heights said Gogia. But the corollary to that, according to Gogia, is that it made her very powerful in the system, and there is more than an iota of doubt if she abused that power vested in her. This is something that stakeholders and investors need to know about, he said. The fact that Kochhar could muster support from the bank when allegations pointed to a conflict of interest also shows that not all is clear with the banks Board, said sector observers. There are two things here to ponder about in the ICICI Bank case, they said. Did things go wrong after Chanda Kochhar became the CEO or was the banks Board bad to begin with? For, if the individual was the bad egg, he/she would have been caught out for any violations. But, now we are forced to think about the pre-Kochhar era too. Were things running in this manner even then? What next for Chanda Kochhar? The 56 year-old veteran banker will have to patiently wait for the Justice Srikrishna enquiry to present its findings. If she is absolved of all the allegations against her, she could have a brighter career with the shining badge of honesty pinned to her lapel. No analyst or sector expert Firstpost spoke with was confident about Kochhar claiming back her chair at the private lender. That seems remote. That is one of the reasons the Board has created a new role of a chief operating officer (COO), with Bakhshi at the helm. It would make it easier to dismantle that position once Kochhar's tenure officially ends in March 2019, observers said. No one was, however, unhappy with the turn of events that led to Kochhar stepping aside. She could have avoided this situation earlier by taking a quick decision and asking for an enquiry into the allegations. That she did not casts a cloud of suspicion on her, they said. MUMBAI (Reuters) - ICICI Bank named group veteran Sandeep Bakhshi as its interim head on Monday, and said its Chief Executive Chanda Kochhar would go on leave pending the completion of a probe over an alleged conflict of interest that has led to months of controversy for the lender. Bakhshi, who currently heads ICICI's life insurance arm, will take up a newly created position of chief operating officer at the bank for a period of five years beginning June 19, pending regulatory approvals, the bank said in a statement late on Monday. Bakhshi will report to the bank's board during the period of Kochhar's leave and will be responsible for handling all the businesses and corporate centre functions, ICICI Bank said MUMBAI (Reuters) - ICICI Bank named group veteran Sandeep Bakhshi as its interim head on Monday, and said its Chief Executive Chanda Kochhar would go on leave pending the completion of a probe over an alleged conflict of interest that has led to months of controversy for the lender. Bakhshi, who currently heads ICICI's life insurance arm, will take up a newly created position of chief operating officer at the bank for a period of five years beginning June 19, pending regulatory approvals, the bank said in a statement late on Monday. Bakhshi will report to the bank's board during the period of Kochhar's leave and will be responsible for handling all the businesses and corporate centre functions, ICICI Bank said. All the executive directors of the bank and its executive management would report to Bakhshi. Kochhar, 56, who has been the CEO of ICICI Bank since May 2009, has faced allegations of favouring Videocon Group, a consumer electronics and oil and gas exploration company, in the bank's lending practices. Videocon's founders had an investment in a renewable energy company founded by Kochhar's husband. ICICI Bank said last month it would institute a probe headed by an independent person into the allegations raised by an anonymous whistleblower against Kochhar. "In line with the highest levels of governance and corporate standards, Ms. Chanda Kochhar has decided to go on leave till the completion of the enquiry," the bank said. The bank's board had initially backed Kochhar, calling the rumours "malicious and unfounded". Kochhar's husband Deepak Kochhar has denied any wrongdoing, as has the head of the Videocon group. Chanda Kochhar has not commented on the issue. (Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy and Abhirup Roy; Editing by Mark Potter and David Evans) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. Bakhshi's to-do list will include managing investors, shareholders and regulators, who have questioned ICICI Bank's corporate governance standards Private lending major ICICI Bank has appointed Sandeep Bakhshi as wholetime director and chief operating officer (COO), as MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar volunteered "to go on leave till the completion of [an] inquiry", which seeks to determine alleged wrongdoing in the sanctioning of a Rs 3,250 crore ICICI loan to the Videocon Group. The bank's board said that Bakhshi, who heads ICICIs life insurance arm, will serve as the lender's COO for five years beginning 19 June. Bakhshi will report to the board for as long as Kochhar is on leave and will handle the business and corporate centre functions According to the Mint, Bakhshi's to-do list will include managing investors, shareholders and regulators, who have questioned the bank's corporate governance standards and its handling of the Videocon loan controversy. The lender also has its share of the non performing assets (NPAs) problem and the COO will be expected to find a solution. Fitch warning Global ratings agency Fitch has said that ICICI Bank had "gaps" in its risk control mechanisms. "An ongoing investigation at ICICI Bank on extending a loan with a potential conflict of interest has also focused authorities' attention on the bank's governance," the ratings agency said in a note last week. Fitch warned that adverse findings may create a "reputational risk", especially if they highlight broader weaknesses in management. Bakhshi now has the difficult job of pulling the bank out of this mess. The industry, however, says he won't have a problem navigating crises. Here is all you need to know about Bakhshi: Bakhshi, according to the Mint, is as cool as a cucumber and cares for stability. Bakhshi is part of the ICICI culture. So, from that perspective, he is the right choice as the senior-most person within the ICICI umbrella after Kochhar, Shriram Subramanian, founder of proxy advisory firm InGovern, told Firstpost. Early in life, Bakhshi wanted to head to the prestigious National Defence Academy (NDA). But dropped that plan, despite having cleared the necessary tests. A mechanical engineer from the Punjab Engineering College, Bakhshi has a post-graduate degree in management from XLRI, Jamshedpur, according to the bank. News18 reported that his first job was at a computer marketing company, ORG Systems, in 1983. He joined ICICI Ltd in 1986 and looked after the firm's corporate clients for the northern and the eastern regions before joining ICICI Lombard in 2002. He then served as the deputy managing director of the bank before going to head the group's life insurance business, in 2010. During his tenure, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company became one of India's top private life insurance providers. He is also credited with taking the first Indian insurance company public. A wildlife enthusiast, Bakhshi visits several wildlife sanctuaries every year to decompress, according to The Economic Times. With inputs from agencies VIENNA (Reuters) - Iranian oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said on Tuesday that he does not expect OPEC to reach an agreement when the oil producer group holds policy discussions this week. 'I don't think' there will be an agreement, Zanganeh told reporters VIENNA (Reuters) - Iranian oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said on Tuesday that he does not expect OPEC to reach an agreement when the oil producer group holds policy discussions this week. "I don't think" there will be an agreement, Zanganeh told reporters. He also lashed out at the U.S. administration, saying oil was not a political tool and that U.S. President Donald Trump's policies had caused high oil prices. Oil ministers from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries meet on Friday in Vienna, followed by talks with non-OPEC oil producers on Saturday. (Reporting by Alex Lawler; Writing by Dale Hudson; Editing by Dmitry Zhdannikov) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. A decision to allow Patanjali to transfer its land to its subsidiary firm was taken at a state Cabinet meeting chaired by chief minister Yogi Adityanath in Lucknow Lucknow: The Uttar Pradesh government on Tuesday gave its nod to Patanjali Ayurveda Pvt Ltd to transfer its land to its subsidiary company in Greater Noida for setting up a Rs 6,000-crore mega food park. The state government decision enables the Haridwar-based firm to meet the Centre's 30 June deadline to fulfil its various conditions, including acquisition of land, for its final nod to set up the food park. A decision to allow Patanjali to transfer its land to its subsidiary firm was taken at a state Cabinet meeting chaired by chief minister Yogi Adityanath in Lucknow, an official spokesperson told mediapersons. The decision comes against the backdrop of the pressure of Patanjali group which had threatened to shift its food park out of the state at a time when it was trying to showcase its investor-friendly image. A day after the group had threatened to cancel the project, BJP president Amit Shah met Ramdev under the party's 'Sampark for Samarthan' campaign and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had called up Ramdev and Patanjali Group CEO Acharya Balakrishna personally to assure them of all possible help and co-operation. Along with its request for transfer of land to its subsidiary company, Patanjali had also asked for a government subsidy of Rs 150 crore for setting up the food park even though the subsidiary company had no land in its name. As the deadline was about to expire, the Centre decided to give 15 days more time till 30 June to Patanjali Ayurved for meeting conditions like acquisition of land, required for the final nod for setting up the proposed mega food park. As the earlier deadline to meet the required conditions was to expire on 15 June, the Uttar Pradesh government had requested the Union Food Processing Ministry to give more time to the leading FMCG firm and extend the deadline till 30 June. "Since the company is already taking action and requested for 15 days extra time to meet the conditions, the ministry will grant the time as requested," Food Processing Secretary JP Meena had said. The company had proposed to invest up to Rs 6,000 crore to set up a plant over 425 acres of land along the Yamuna Expressway through its step-down firm Patanjali Food and Herbal Park. The conditions that were to be complied with include acquisition and transfer of land in the name of Patanjali Ayurved's subsidiary. Patanjali wanted to transfer 91 acres of this land to its subsidiary, Patanjali Food and Herbal Park Noida Pvt Ltd, for setting up a mega food park. The permission had earlier been withheld as the infrastructure and industrial development policy of 2012, under which land had been allocated to Patanjali along the Yamuna Expressway in 2016, did not allow for land to be subleased. On 6 June, Patanjali had said that its mega food park would produce goods worth Rs 25,000 crore annually on full capacity running. It is envisaged to create 10,000 direct jobs. Patanjali is presently investing in mega food park projects, including those in Nagpur (Maharashtra) and Tezpur (Assam). Speaking to reporters after meeting heads of PSBs, Goyal said govt is open to the question of giving more powers to RBI for effectively regulating PSBs New Delhi: Public money is "extremely safe" in state-owned banks, finance minister Piyush Goyal said on Tuesday against the backdrop of several cases of frauds, including the $2 billion scam at PNB, unearthed recently. Speaking to reporters after meeting several heads of PSBs, he said the government is open to the question of giving more powers to the Reserve Bank for effectively regulating public sector banks. "Public money is extremely safe in PSU banks. Government stands behind them 100 percent," Goyal said. He stated however that he was not "sure" as to how safe the public money is with private companies which have huge income tax dues. He said the frauds were perpetrated by private companies and not the PSBs. In reference to recent suggestion by RBI Governor Urjit Patel that the central bank lacked powers to effectively deal with the PSBs, Goyal said RBI has powers, but if additional powers are needed the government was open to the idea. He also said that PSBs would support credit needs of genuine companies, and focus on MSME sector. Various investigating agencies are probing the over $2 billion fraud allegedly committed by diamond jeweller Nirav Modi and his associates. Several other scams too have surfaced in the recent past involving PSBs. (Reuters) - Wells Fargo & Co said Monday it is considering restructuring and possibly combining two of its retail brokerage businesses, a move to increase efficiency among the two legacy units. The two divisions - the private client group overseen by David Kowach and wealth brokerage services overseen by Jay Welker - have long overlapped (Reuters) - Wells Fargo & Co said Monday it is considering restructuring and possibly combining two of its retail brokerage businesses, a move to increase efficiency among the two legacy units. The two divisions - the private client group overseen by David Kowach and wealth brokerage services overseen by Jay Welker - have long overlapped. Both employ financial advisers who work with mass affluent clients. However the businesses are organised in different channels. Wealth brokerage services, which employs brokers who work in bank branches, is in the same section of the bank as the private bank, which employs wealth managers who advise the ultra-rich. During the bank's investor day conference in March, Jon Weiss, head of wealth and investment management, said Wells Fargo is exploring ways to increase efficiency among the bank's wealth businesses. Wells Fargo Advisors spokeswoman Shea Leordeanu wrote in an emailed statement, "No final decisions have been made because that work continues. Whatever the outcome, we will continue to serve our clients across multiple channels community bank branches, advisor-led branches, FiNet, online and by phone - because our clients expect that from us Wells Fargo." Weiss is expected to address the plans on Thursday during a town hall-style meeting with brokers. The bank's plans to restructure were reported earlier on Monday by the Wall Street Journal. The bank had said in March it was examining its wealth and investment management division for possible customer abuse, including overcharging and inappropriate referrals, after inquiries from government agencies. (Reporting by Nikhil Subba in Bengaluru; Editing by Cynthia Osterman) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. The Supreme Court denied an urgent hearing into the plea seeking action against Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for staging dharna. Amid the ongoing tussle between the Aam Aadmi Party government and the Delhi Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal, the Supreme Court on Tuesday denied an urgent hearing into the plea seeking action against Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for staging dharna. A vacation bench comprising Justice SA Nazeer and Justice Indu Malhotra said the plea will be listed for hearing after the summer vacation. Lawyer Shashank Sudhi, appearing for petitioner Hari Nath Ram, sought the urgent hearing of the plea, saying a constitutional crisis has been created due to "the unconstitutional and illegal" protest by the chief minister inside Baijal's office. Moreover, the citizens are "left high and dry", he said. The Delhi High Court, which had heard the matters on the issue on Monday, posted them for hearing on 22 June. Sudhi told the apex court that the city is facing an "emergency situation" in which citizens are facing severe water crisis. "We will list it on reopening of the court," the bench said, while declining the request for urgent hearing. Besides seeking declaration of the sit-in as unconstitutional, the plea also sought initiation of perjury proceedings against either the chief minister or the office of the lieutenant-governor on the ground that one of them is lying. While hearing two petitions one against Kejriwal's protest and another against the alleged strike by IAS officers of the Delhi administration the Delhi High Court on Monday questioned the venue of the protest. "Who authorised the strike/dharna (sit-in by Kejriwal)? You are sitting inside the lieutenant-governor's's office. If it's a strike, it has to be outside the office. You cannot hold a strike inside someone's office or residence," the court said. The observation by a bench of Justice AK Chawla and Justice Navin Chawla had come while hearing two petitions, one against Kejriwal's protest and another against the alleged strike by IAS officers of the Delhi administration. Responding to the query by the bench, senior advocate Sudhir Nandrajog, who appeared for the Delhi government, said Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues took the decision to protest in their individual capacity and they were empowered to do so under Constitution. Nandrajog also told the court that the only direction that can be issued by the bench in these matters was to the IAS officers to attend routine departmental meetings held by the ministers. He said an association representing the bureaucrats had admitted in a press conference on Sunday that they were not attending routine meetings. During the arguments, the Central government told the court that no IAS officers were on strike and urged the bench to direct Kejriwal and others to vacate Baijal's office. Leader of Opposition in the Delhi Assembly Vijender Gupta also moved the high court on Monday against Kejriwal's protest. BJP MP Parvesh Singh Sahib, rebel AAP MLA Kapil Mishra and BJP MLA Manjinder Singh Sirsa are joint petitioners along with Gupta. The AAP later said that the party had followed proper procedures and will respond to the court. "Whatever the high court has asked, we will answer. But I want to clarify one thing. As far as the protest at lieutenant-governor's office is concerned, it did not happen in just one day. We followed all the procedures, wrote letters, sent requests, did everything but ultimately, when we reached out to the lieutenant-governor, he did not even have five minutes to meet us," party leader Sanjay Singh said in response to queries at a press conference. Kejriwal, his deputy Manish Sisodia and ministers Satyendar Jain and Gopal Rai had been camping in the Raj Niwas, the official accommodation-cum-office of Baijal, since 11 June. Sisodia and Jain, who had later gone on a hunger fast, were hospitalised following deterioration in their health condition. Both were discharged on Tuesday. With inputs from agencies Airtels approach to this series of public complaints is very hard to make much sense of. By Sharanya Gopinathan Imagine you are sitting in your safe, cloistered docket at the communal work space where you, along with other Airtel call centre employees, respond to pithy public tweets and messages from disgruntled Airtel customers. The lights are harsh white, your chair swivels but hurts your back when you stay seated for more than an hour. Your name is Shoaib, which is fine, and doesn't tend to cause you any trouble (at work, at least). Until one morning, you come back from tea break and sit down to respond to the next complainant, one Pooja Singh. She tells you that the local service engineer deployed to handle her DTH re-installation had misbehaved with her, and hung up on her, asking her not to call him again. You respond in the way you have been taught by your manager with a cheery, personalised message that promises immediate action, and then a quick sign off with your name, Shoaib. Imagine how you feel when three hours later, you see that Pooja has responded to your message with a public tweet, a tweet that serves as nothing but a slap in your Muslim face. "Dear Shoaib, as you're a Muslim and I have no faith in your working ethics because Kuran may have different version for customer service, thus requesting you to assign a Hindu representative for my request. Thanks" Whom do you escalate this to, and where do you go from here, Shoaib? What is that feeling raging in your heart as you pass on this particular complaint to your friend, one Hindu Gaganjot, and what thoughts pass through your mind as you try to work and go about the rest of your day? Dear Shohaib, as you're a Muslim and I have no faith in your working ethics because Kuran may have different version for customer service, thus requesting you to assign a Hindu representative for my request. Thanks Pooja Singh (@pooja303singh) June 18, 2018 This is not an arbitrary exercise to build empathy. This scene, I imagine, is pretty much exactly what happened at a Bharti Airtel office, where poor customer service executive Shoaib works, on 18 June, 2018. We didn't even change their names, really. Airtel's approach to this series of public complaints is very hard to make much sense of. Instead of asking Pooja to shut up as soon as she made her noxious request, Airtel allowed Gaganjot to cheerfully take over her case from Shoaib. It was only after widespread social media outrage, including a tweet from former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah announcing his firm intention to cancel his Airtel DTH and broadband connection and port his mobile number to a different service provider, that Airtel decided to put out its own direct response. The response brazenly flew in the face of the highly public action it took in shifting Shoaib's case to Gaganjot. It stated that Airtel absolutely does not "differentiate between customers, employees, and partners on the basis of caste and religion." It also stated that both Shoaib and Gaganjot are a part of the customer resolution team, and that the first available service executive responds to ongoing service complaints in the interest of time. What does this mean? That Shoaib was busy when Pooja responded, and Gaganjot just accidentally happened to be the right Hindu, at the right place and the right time to service her bigoted request? This is still hard to stomach, even if you believe Airtel's version about the sequence of events, which, you know, we don't. When you read Airtels statement, don't you get flashbacks to every calm, clear-eyed guy who has looked steadily into your face and said that he never cheated on you while you wave incriminating screenshots and other evidence wildly in front of him? Airtel's response, coming as it does on the heels of Airtel very visibly appeasing the demands of a self-proclaimed bigot, is in pretty sharp contrast to Olas recent response to a case of bigotry on their platform. Not that Ola has a stellar record in responding to customers complaints or anything, given its recent horrible response to a terrible sexual assault case involving one of its drivers in Bengaluru on 1 June, 2018. Ola's response to the customer's bigotry was far more palatable than their response to the sexual assault case. When verified Twitter user Abhishek Mishra, who is also a Vishwa Hindu Parishad and a Bajrang Dal member, posted proudly on social media that he had cancelled a ride on Ola because his driver was a Muslim, Ola immediately responded, saying that Ola, like the country, is a secular platform, and urged all drivers and partners to treat each other with respect at all times. Ola's response to Mishra's bigotry against one of their own drivers was much more enthusiastic and happy-to-help than their response in the recent Ola cab-sexual assault case, probably because they felt less guilty and were more firmly convinced that in the case of Abhishek Mishra, they weren't in the wrong, and were, in fact, technically the 'victim'. In case of the sexual assault, on the other hand, Ola's terse and reticent response was a clear indication of what we used to call "guilty conscience" in school. Now, Pooja Singh of newfound Airtel infamy shows no such Ola-esque terseness or reticence in the face of her obvious wrongdoing. After being trolled on social media for her bigoted and frankly quite evil behaviour, Pooja has now audaciously decided that she isn't sorry or wrong at all. In fact, she has taken the widespread backlash against her filthy behaviour to serve as a thesis that her original contention was correct. Soon after the case blew apart on social media, and she had read what the public had to say about her unique worldview, she tweeted that all she had done was to ask for her representative to be changed from a Muslim to a Hindu, which she imagines is her "right", and that the abuse she faced as a result proves that she was right "at very first place." Dear Abusers, I simply made a request to change representative from Muslim to Hindu as my experience in past was not good and thats my right as well. After that, the kind of abuse Im facing are beyond imagination and that in itself PROVES that I was right at very first place pic.twitter.com/lcCH2QpKo1 Pooja Singh (@pooja303singh) June 18, 2018 What do you do in the face of such breathtaking audacity and abject, almost deliberate and wilful lack of self-awareness? It feels like it's really impossible to say. Perhaps thats why it feels more worthwhile to mull over the specifics of Airtel's response in this case than Pooja's. However long it took Airtel to come around, they at least sound like they know that its wrong to discriminate between Hindus and Muslims. Plus, big service providers have the impetus to do better, if for nothing other than guarding against the loss of business from former Jammu and Kashmir chief ministers. "Management professional.Proud Indian/Proud Hindu/Nation First/Love our army" type individuals, on the other hand, as Pooja describes herself in her Twitter bio, have far more to gain from being toxic and proud of it. Personally, I would be more than happy to leave Pooja in whichever toxic corner of internet she occupies (she now has 13.2K followers on Twitter), and spend time and energy on normal people who engage with reality. The Ladies Finger (TLF) is a leading online womens magazine delivering fresh and witty perspectives on politics, culture, health, sex, work and everything in between. Citizens of Kashmir woke up to blank editorials in all the leading newspapers of the Valley on Tuesday morning, with the publications taking a uniform stand to protest the brutal killing of Rising Kashmir editor Shujaat Bukhari Citizens of Kashmir woke up to blank editorials in all the leading newspapers of the Valley on Tuesday morning, with the publications taking a uniform stand to protest the brutal killing of Rising Kashmir editor Shujaat Bukhari. For the first time in decades, both Urdu and English dailies refrained from publishing editorials, leaving blank spaces otherwise occupied by such pieces. Readers say they were confused at seeing the blank space, wondering if it could be a mistake, before realising every other newspaper also featured a similarly empty block of space. "I have been reading Greater Kashmir for 15 years, and Rising Kashmir ever since it launched in 2008. I was surprised when I saw editorials missing in both papers," said Malik Mohammad Yusuf, a retired senior state bureaucrat, adding that he initially thought it was a mistake. Thousands of people thronged Kreeri village in north Kashmir on Monday to pay their last respects to the slain editor. Bukhari, 50, was leaving his office in Srinagar's Press Enclave on Thursday evening when three motorcycle-borne assailants fired dozens of rounds, killing him and his two security guards. He was headed home to the upscale Humhama neighbourhood, and was looking forward to breaking the Ramzan fast with his wife and children. To protest the incident, the Kashmir Editors' Guild, an influential body of editors in Kashmir, held a meeting on Monday where the decision to not publish editorials was taken. "I don't remember the last time when newspapers decided not to publish editorials," said journalist Reyaz Wani. "During the meeting on Monday, there was even a proposal of suspending publication (of newspapers) for a day. But since the editorial is the heart of a newspaper, we decided to suspend this for a day to protest the editor's killing," said Shifat Kira, a spokesperson for the Kashmir Editors' Guild. Even editors not part of the Guild participated in the protest. Raja Mohideen editor of Tameel Irshad, an Urdu-language daily published from Srinagar, is not part of the Kashmir Editors Guild. He said Shujaat's murder is a "murder of humanity" and of a "great friend". "It's an attack on freedom. We decided not to publish an editorial today to protest Shujaat's killing, in order to tell the assassins that we are all mourning the murder of our colleague and friend. He death is a setback to our community," he said. The Kashmir Observer, a small but influential newspaper, wrote a commentary: "This begs the question, 'who killed Shujaat Bukhari?' The government and militant groups have blamed each other. Militants are seeing the hand of intelligence agencies and the government blames the militants. And in between these allegations and counter-allegations, one more precious life has been lost. What is more, in the absence of the whereabouts of the killers, it is rumour and innuendo that fill up the space." Journalists across the world condemned Bukhari's killing, and the Rising Kashmir staff put out a brief message on Tuesday: "Rising Kashmir, which promised to uphold values such as truth, fairness and integrity in the field of journalism, has received a major setback. It's a difficult task, the benchmark for which was set by Shujaat, but Rising Kashmir's team and family promise to do the best we can. We are thankful to our readers and well-wishers for being our strength and patience when it was needed the most. Rising Kashmir has resumed all its publishing operations and we regret any inconvenience that may have been incidentally caused in the last few days." Furthermore, two major global bodies of editors and publishers have also written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, conveying their "grave concern" over Bukhari's assassination while seeking investigations in the case. "We urge you to do everything possible to end the hostile media environment in Jammu and Kashmir so that journalists are able to work without fear of violence," said the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the World Editors Forum, representing 18,000 publications, 15,000 websites and over 3,000 companies in over 120 countries, with an aim of safeguarding the rights of journalists, in a letter to Modi. On Monday, United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Raad Al Hussein, said he was "deeply saddened" by Bukhari's assassination. "I am tremendously saddened by the assassination of Shujaat Bukhari, a courageous human rights defender actively working for peace, including through his participation in the Track 2 diplomacy seeking to help both India and Pakistan put an end to the violence," Hussein said, during his opening statement of the 38th session of the Human Rights Council. The Committee to Protect Journalists, while strongly condemning Shujaat's killing, said Indian authorities must bring his killers to justice. On Monday, staff members of Rising Kashmir and a few other journalists from other organisations undertook a protest march towards Lal Chowk at the Srinagar city centre. They held placards and walked slowly towards the clock tower at Lal Chowk, where they demanded justice for their slain editor. BJP president Amit Shah has called for an urgent meeting of all Jammu and Kashmir BJP ministers and some top leaders in New Delhi on Tuesday. 'All the BJP ministers have been called to New Delhi for a meeting,' a senior BJP leader of Jammu and Kashmir BJP told PTI. BJP president Amit Shah has called for an urgent meeting of all Jammu and Kashmir BJP ministers and some top leaders in New Delhi on Tuesday. "All the BJP ministers have been called to New Delhi for a meeting," a senior BJP leader of Jammu and Kashmir BJP told PTI. The Economic Times reported that Shah has called the meeting to discuss the political situation in the state including the impact of suspension of operations during Ramzan and its resumption. The report further added that Shah might also discuss the future strategy with ally PDP and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. BJP ministers in the Mehbooba Mufti government, including state unit president Ravindra Raina, party vice-president and incharge of Jammu and Kashmir Avinash Rai Khanna, and state unit office bearers, will participate in the meeting at the party headquarters, The Economic Times report said. Party General secretary (Organisation) Asho Kaul has also been called for the meeting. However, other reports claimed that suspending operations along the border area has miffed the PDP leadership and the rift is showing once again as the Centre wants to resume anti-terror operations in the state after Ramzan. While PDP thinks BJP leaders should make headway with the separatists and initiate dialogue with them, the BJP-led central government says that the separatists lost an opportunity as they did not take a cue from civil society, sources have told NDTV. The Centre decided to suspend anti-terror operations during the holy month "in view of providing respite to the people", however, NDTV reported that data showed the terror activities had more than doubled in this period. As terrorist activities continued even after the announcement of a month-long suspension of anti-terror operations in Jammu and Kashmir, the Centre on Sunday decided not to extend its unilateral initiative, declared on 16 May to coincide with the holy month, evoking dismay among people in the state. "All political issues related to the state are on the agenda. The meeting will not only discuss the 2019 Lok Sabha preparation but also the recent suspension of operations and its impact, relations with allies and other issues," a senior BJP leader was quoted as saying. The home ministry announcement, a day after Eid festivities, said that operations against the militants will resume. "The Government of India decides not to extend the suspension of operations in Jammu and Kashmir announced in the beginning of Ramzan," a ministry statement said. Apart from all this, the BJP president will also meet to ensure that the forthcoming Amarnath Yatra, which begins on 28 June, passes off smoothly without any violence. With inputs from agencies Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad noted that when the incumbent names the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court as his successor as per convention, the executive will take a call. New Delhi: The government's intention on the appointment of the next Chief Justice of India (CJI) should not be questioned, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Monday, noting that when the incumbent names the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court as his successor as per convention, the executive will take a call. He was responding to a question on whether the government will follow the laid-down conventions and procedures to appoint Justice Ranjan Gogoi as the next Chief Justice when incumbent Dipak Misra demits office on 2 October. "The question is imaginary...as far as the appointment of the Chief Justice of India is concerned, the convention is clear...the sitting chief justice names the senior-most judge (of the top court) as his successor. When the name comes to us, we will discuss it," he told a press conference held to highlight the achievements of the law ministry in the past four years. He also said that no one had the "right to question our intention". Speculations surrounding Gogoi's appointment as the next CJI emerged following the unprecedented press conference of four most-senior judges in January when they had criticised Misra over various issues, especially the manner of allocation of cases to certain benches. Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph addressed the unprecedented press conference, perhaps a first in the history of Indian judiciary. According to the memorandum of procedure, a document which guides the appointment and transfer of judges of the apex court and the 24 high courts, "Appointment to the office of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) should be of the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court considered fit to hold the office." Days before the CJI's retirement, the law minister seeks his recommendation for the appointment of his successor. "Whenever there is any doubt about the fitness of the senior-most judge to hold the office of the Chief Justice of India, consultation with other Judges...would be made for appointment of the next Chief Justice of India," the document states. Responding to another question on the delay in finalising the memorandum of procedure (MoP) for appointment of judges, Prasad said discussions were on and the Supreme Court and the government would have to finalise the document together. "Our view (on the MoP) is that the norms of those selected (as judges) have to be mentioned (in the document)," he said. After the Supreme Court struck down a law through which the government had sought more say in the appointment of judges, the top court and the government have been trying to iron out differences on the MoP. He said those claiming hat the government was not appointing judges should remember that "numbers speak for itself". The law minister pointed out that apart from the stay on judges' appointment in 2014 and 2015 due to the NJAC Act issue, the Centre has appointed 126 judges in 2016 and 117 judges in 2017, and that the appointment of more judges is in the pipeline. "We will surpass our own record of appointing 126 judges in 2016 when 2018 comes to an end," he said. An army jawan was injured in an encounter in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. The gunfight took place in the Nazneenpora Hyuna village of the Tral townsh An army jawan was injured in an encounter in the Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. The gunfight took place in the Nazneenpora Hyuna village of Tral township, reported CNN-News18. The soldier has been sent to the hospital. CNN-New18 has reported that at least four militants were holed up in the area as security forces engaged in the anti-terror encounter. According to reports, a cordon-and-search operation in the village was conducted after security forces received inputs about the presence of militants in a residential area of the village. The army fired warning gunshots after which the militants responded. The jawan was injured in this exchange, according to CNN-News18. Massive clashes broke out in the area around the encounter as locals started throwing stones at the security forces engaged in the encounter. Reinforcements from the police were sent to control the situation on the outer periphery. We have tightened the cordon to ensure that militants dont escape from the area, an anonymous official was quoted by Greater Kashmir. The 42 Rashtriya Rifles of the Indian Army conducted the search operation along with a team of Jammu and Kashmir Police and a section of the Central Reserve Police Force, according to the newspaper. On 16 June, two civilians were killed in separate incidents of clashes with security forces in South Kashmir in two days as stone pelters intensified their agitation, the police said. In the first incident, which took place on 15 June, in Pulwama district's Nowpora area, a youth was killed and a woman injured allegedly in firing by Indian Army personnel. In the second incident, a grenade blast killed one civilian in Anantnag on 16 June while there were many incidents of violent clashes between protestors and police on the occasion of Eid. Earlier in June, at least 23 people, including eight security personnel, were injured on 4 June in two grenade attacks by militants in Pulwama and Shopian districts of Kashmir. Arvind Kejriwal's dharna at Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal's office lasted nine days. Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday called off his sit-in protest at Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal's office, nine days after he began the dharna along with three other ministers. He announced the decision soon after Baijal wrote to him his first communication to Kejriwal since the Aam Aadmi Party began the protest on 11 June assuring the chief minister that all IAS officers will attend end their strike and would attend all meetings that MLAs call. Deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, who had participated in Kejriwal's dharna along with Delhi health minister Satyendra Jain and labour minister Gopal Rai, addressed the media after Kejriwal called off the protest. He listed out all the meetings that were held on Tuesday and mentioned how IAS officers had attended them. On reaching home, the AAP leader told party activists to keep agitating for full statehood for Delhi, the lack of which he underlined was the root cause of problems related to governance in the national capital. He was greeted at his house by boisterous slogan-chanting by party members. "We will continue the struggle until Delhi becomes a full state," Kejriwal said. The chief minister walked out of Baijal's office-cum-residence after IAS officers resumed attending the meetings called by the Delhi government. Baijal wrote to Kejriwal after Sisodia reached out to him, seeking a meeting between the Delhi government and bureaucrats to end the impasse. In his letter, the L-G wrote that he was glad the chief minister had tweeted an appeal to IAS officers assuring them of safety during their interactions with the elected government. Baijal has asked Kejriwal to meet IAS officers at the earliest to address the concerns of both sides through dialogue. The L-G also wrote that the IAS officers had welcomed the chief minister's appeal and were awaiting his presence at the Secretariat to hold discussions. Earlier on Tuesday, the Delhi chief minister had written to the prime minister, his third since Thursday. In his latest appeal, he called for Narendra Modi's intervention to resolve the deadlock between the government, lieutenant-governor and bureaucrats in Delhi. He also alleged that the prime minister intended to paralyse the Delhi government since it was not run by his Bharatiya Janata Party. "I am supposed to work with the IAS officers, but I can't take disciplinary action against them, can't transfer them, and I can't even punish the corrupt officers," Kejriwal wrote. At a press conference earlier, Sisodia had said it was not possible to carry on the government's work with absentee officers. There were also reports of AAP MLAs refusing to leave Baijal's office on Tuesday after attending a meeting on the Delhi Master Plan. An official release, issued by the L-G's office, said that two AAP legislators who attended the meeting left the office only after much pursuance. With inputs from agencies. The Left party members in Bengal have supported the union of four chief ministers rallying behind Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal. CPM central committee member Sujan Chakraborty said attack on people rights' cannot be tolerated. Kolkata: There was nothing wrong in Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan joining his West Bengal counterpart Mamata Banerjee to rally behind Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, CPM said on Tuesday. They further added "attack on democratic rights" should be defended at any cost. The two chief ministers from opposing political camps the CPM and the TMC along with their Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka counterparts on Saturday extended support to Kejriwal, who has been protesting at the lieutenant governor's office in Delhi since 11 June demanding that the "strike" by IAS officers be called off. "The Left is always consistent regarding its views and policies on democracy, secularism and federal polity. Any attack on people's rights must be defended at any cost. There is nothing wrong in four chief ministers rallying behind another the Delhi chief minister," CPM central committee member Sujan Chakraborty told PTI. Another senior CPM leader said it would be unfair to draw any conclusion from the Delhi meeting of the chief ministers as the party had been consistent in its fight against the saffron party. "We have a policy against the BJP. We have been the most consistent political party in India in terms of our fight against the BJP and the RSS," he said. Asked about the reaction of the CPM cadres to the meet, given the fact that the party had engaged in a slugfest with the TMC during the recent panchayat polls, Chakraborty said, "It is true that we are fighting against the TMC in Bengal. But the situation in Delhi was different and whatever the Kerala chief minister did was in consultation with party leadership." Meanwhile, TMC secretary-general Partha Chatterjee alleged that Kejriwal has been "victimised" by the BJP. "Our party supremo Mamata Banerjee has been fighting against the BJP and its policies. We feel all opposition forces should unite to counter the BJP," he said. The employee had reportedly sent threatening and abusive messages to the journalist Devanik Saha over an article he authored. Bank of America said it had taken a serious view of the matter. The Bank of America has terminated the services of one of its employees in New Delhi after he was held responsible for sending abusive messages to a journalist on social media. On 11 June, independent writer and journalist Devanik Saha said that he had been sent threatening and abusive messages on social media by a man whose Facebook profile indicated that he was employed as an assistant manager with Bank of America in New Delhi. Saha tweeted screenshots of the messages the man had sent him to Bank of America, asking: Your employee sent me unsolicited abuse for an article. Is this what BoA employees do outside office? Please take action. I am a freelance journalist abused for doing my work." The messages contained abusive language and warned Saha to stop writing such articles. The article in question was authored by Saha for the website IndiaSpend, and examined the responses of members of various religious and social groups in India to the police. Firstpost had also published the same report on 11 June. Quoting the results of a study by the NGO Common Cause and the Lokniti Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Sahas article said that upper caste Hindus fear the police the least, are most likely to have a favourable opinion of them and are least likely to be contacted by them. The report further stated that Sikhs and other Punjab residents, as well as Muslims in southern India were more likely to be fearful of the police. Saha noted that more than 55 percent of all undertrials in India are Muslim, Dalit or tribal. Saha told Firstpost that the mans messages had warned him off writing unwarranted articles for which there is no need. Saha later blocked him on social media. The Bank of America had reached out to Saha via its official Twitter handle, asking for more details and promising to look into the issue. Nine days after Saha tweeted about the incident, BoA said they had let go of the employee after an internal investigation. We take matters of this nature seriously and have conducted a thorough review. The person in question will be leaving the bank, a spokesperson for Bank of America told Firstpost. Meanwhile, the mans Facebook page no longer contains information about his work history. Turning the ship before it hits the iceberg BJP's decision to ally with the PDP was then too seen by Jammu-based social and political organisations as a 'betrayal' of trust of the people of the region, who wanted an end to the alleged hegemony of Muslim-dominated Kashmir Jammu: The Jammu and Kashmir government, which was running on a precarious alliance between the People's Democratic Party (PDP) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has fallen. Its lesser partner BJP pulled the plug on Tuesday, with party general secretary Ram Madhav announcing at a press conference that "it has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in the state". The spurt in terror violence in Kashmir and simmering discontent against the BJP not only in Jammu but also in Ladakh region are believed to be the causes that triggered the collapse. The alliance was stitched in as many as three months after Assembly elections in December 2014 resulted in PDP emerging as the single-largest party with 28 seats and BJP following close behind, winning 25 seats in Jammu region in the wake of the Modi wave. Betrayal of trust BJP's decision to ally with the PDP was then too seen by Jammu-based social and political organisations as a 'betrayal' of trust of the people of the region, who wanted an end to the alleged hegemony of Muslim-dominated Kashmir over Hindu-dominated Jammu and thus voted for the saffron party . While Jammu often raised its voice against the perceived discrimination meted out to the region by successive Kashmir-centric political parties in power, Ladakh has been angry with the BJP over not delivering the Union Territory (UT) status promised ahead of the 2014 parliamentary polls. After victory at the Centre and thereafter in the Jammu and Kashmir polls, the BJP brushed the matter of UT status to Ladakh under the carpet. BJP's image was further eroded in the eyes of Jammu voters a month ago, when the Centre surprisingly accepted Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mebhooba Mufti's proposal to suspend anti-terror operations in the state in the wake of Ramzan. The saffron party drew much criticism for the move as anti-India activities were believed to have risen in the Kashmir region during the period. Many saw the decision as an anti-army order. The two allies were, however, not on the same page over the duration of the non-initiation of combat operations Mehbooba wanted it continued until the Amarnath Yatra which is scheduled to start on 28 June the Modi government at the Centre ended it after Ramzaan and resumed the anti-terror ops. Ladakh woes Thupstan Chhewang, the sole BJP Member of Parliament from Ladakh, said the Lok Sabha polls would not be a cakewalk for his party. "It will not be as easy as it was in 2014," he said. He has reason to be concerned: The BJP recently lost a prestigious bypoll for a seat of Ladakh Autonomous Hill development Council (LAHDC), Leh, held on 4 June. The BJP candidate lost from the Shey-Thiksay segment. Locals said there was anger against the party as it had not seen through its promise of UT status for Ladakh, the demand to open the Kailash Mansarovar route via Ladakh and inclusion of Bhoti language spoken in the region in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. Yet, more than Ladakh, it is Jammu's anger that can be damaging for the BJP. Be it the case of Rohingya refugees or the failure to transfer the Kathua rape and murder case (which widened the BJP-PDP rift) to the Central Bureau of Investigation, or abrogation of Article 370 that provides special status to Jammu and Kashmir: BJP is seen as a failure on all fronts. The removal of BJP ministers Choudhary Lal Singh and Chander Prakash Ganga for taking part in a rally organised by the Hindu Ekta Manch ostensibly seeking a CBI probe into the Kathua case, also sparked anger in Jammu. BJP's opponents also alleged that it knelt down in front of the PDP to stay in power. While the party may have broken the alliance with PDP in the wake of the Lok Sabha elections next year, the damage in Jammu and Ladakh has already been done: Even though the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has stepped in to help the party renew its message and recover its appeal in Jammu and Ladakh regions. What next? The two allies have had a troubled relationship for long, one that many said was a marriage of convenience, and which former chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed termed as the meeting of South Pole and North Pole in 2015. Tassaduq Mufti, minister for tourism in the PDP-BJP government and brother of Mehbooba Mufti, stated in an interview to a national newspaper that we (PDP) have ended up being partners in crime (with BJP) that an entire generation of Kashmiris might have to pay with their blood." State BJP spokesperson Sunil Sethi on Tuesday said the PDP underestimated the BJP in thinking that the PDP will have its ways in all matters. "The door has been rightly shown to it and all forces inimical to national interest," he said. "The decision of the BJP to pull out of the government is well-thought in the given circumstances, as continuation of the alliance anymore would have hurt the national interest. Insistence of PDP on extension of ceasefire and its soft approach towards militants, Pakistan and separatists was only hurting the nationalistic sentiments not only in Jammu and Kashmir but in the whole country," he added. According to professor Hari Om, a political commentator based in Jammu, the credibility of the BJP has been eroded and there are few options left for the party to regain it before 2019. "The case of Rohingya refugees staying in Jammu, inquiry by the Jammu and Kashmir crime branch and demand for a CBI inquiry in the Kathua case were the last nails in the BJP's coffin. Now if it wants to restore its support base in Jammu, the central government needs to act on these issues," he said. Former chief minister Omar Abdullah called for a conducive atmosphere for elections and said people should be given the opportunity to choose the party they want to run the state. "The way the government was working, it caused a restive situation," he said. Mehbooba, on Tuesday, submitted her resignation to Governor NN Vohra, whose rule the BJP is now supporting. Arjun Sharma is a Jammu-based freelance writer and a member of 101reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters As things stand, the PDP will face the negative impact of having remained in coalition with the BJP, despite friction. One expected the Peoples Democratic Party -Bharatiya Janata Party coalition to give way by August, around the time the Amarnath Yatra ends (on 26 August). But the BJP has taken erstwhile chief minister Mehbooba Mufti by surprise, not giving her a chance to resign first, or recommend elections. Both possibilities would have helped her save some face in the political arena. As things stand, the PDP will face the negative impact of having remained in coalition with the BJP, despite friction. The alliance has been very unpopular in the Valley: And, so far, in other parts of the state too. Now that the break has come much earlier than most observers expected, the threat to the Amarnath Yatra, which begins on 28 June, will increase. The Indian Army will be front and centre, with a likely free hand to take tough measures. There will be a period of Governors Rule, perhaps an extended one. The Congress has stated firmly, through former state chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, that there is no question of joining hands with the PDP. National Conference in focus The only possibility left was that the National Conference joins hands with one of the two parties that have parted ways. Given ground-level political animosities, and the Centres likely refusal, the two regional parties are unlikely to get together. Two National Conference spokespersons refused initially to take any stand at all. Omar Abdullah, the partys vice-president, went to Raj Bhavan to meet Governor NN Vohra. Abdullah then stated that his party would neither seek or offer support. Vohra is exactly one week short of completing his second term as governor: On 26 June. He has been remarkably popular in both the Valley and in Jammu, has worked very efficiently, and there have been indications from New Delhi that he would continue in office. Now that a huge responsibility is likely to fall on the governors office, the Centre would be best off trusting it to someone with vast experience. Omar Abdullah too stated that Vohra has run the state expertly. One name over whom there has been speculation is that of Dineshwar Sharma, former Intelligence Bureau chief who was appointed in October as the Centres Representative for talks in Kashmir. Some presumed that his talks with a range of Kashmiris was a preparation for him to take over Raj Bhavan. Sharma has been in Kashmir over the past couple of days. The Centre has also considered a retired Indian Army officer. Given the dark clouds gathered on the diplomatic and geopolitical fronts, this would not be a wise course of action. Tough military challenge The forces will have a tough task ahead. The number of militants has increased sharply in south Kashmir over the past few weeks. Meanwhile, large numbers of foreign militants, mainly from Pakistan, lurk in various parts of the Valley, especially north Kashmir. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav, who announced the withdrawal of his partys support to the PDP in New Delhi, pointed to the assassination of Rising Kashmir editor Shujaat Bukhari in the heart of the city as a security lapse. This might indicate that there will now be a shake-up in the police force, despite the fact that Inspector-General Swayam Prakash Pani and Director-General SP Vaid have earned respect for the way they have handled their responsibilities. The Indian Army will surely be given a free hand to put down militancy strongly. This will prove a tall order, though, since not only the numbers of militants, but their equipment, their motivation, their coordination, and their training have all become more fearsome. Shelling on the Line of Control and reported preparations on the Pakistani side of it augur a bigger game, which is likely to come to the fore over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, diplomatic moves by China, Pakistan and other countries will limit the options of domestic policymakers. On Monday, China proposed a trilateral summit of India, Pakistan and Chinas leaders. The Chinese ambassador mentioned that India-China relations could not stand another Doka La, an ominous reference to the possibility of military stand-offs over the state of Jammu and Kashmir. India rejected the proposal, but the China-Pakistan axis is a reality which will show up in various ways on the military, geopolitical and diplomatic fronts. In addition, a report on Kashmir by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights emerged just a few days ago as a huge challenge for India. The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) is expected to declare the results for Class 10th board examinations at 4.30 pm on 26 June. Students can check the result on biharboard.ac.in. The Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) has released the results for Class 10th board examinations at 4.30 pm on 26 June. Students can check the result on the official board website, biharboard.ac.in. Students can also check their results at News18Bihar.com. The board had announced the Class 12th results on 6 June. The Bihar board Class 10th results were initially scheduled to be released on 10 May whereas the HSC +2 results were scheduled to be released on 12 May. The Class 10th result was then postponed to 20 May and Class 12th result postponed to 18 May. A total of 17,70,42 lakh students sat for the BSEB Class 10th exams and 12,07,986 students appeared for the BSEB Class 12th board exam in 2018. The Class 10th exams were held from 21 to 28 February, while the Class 12th exams were held from 6 to 16 February. Here is how Class 10th and Class 12th students can respectively check their results: - Go to the board's official website: biharboard.ac.in. - Click on the link displayed on the site for Class 10th results. - Enter your roll number and other details and press submit. - Take a printout of your results for future reference. NDTV reported that this year, the Bihar board used bar-coded answer sheets instead of the normal ones to avoid cheating and other unfair practices. The board had also introduced 50 percent objective questions for which students were provided with a different OMR sheet. Officials have completed evaluating the answer sheets and are now decoding the same, the report adds. According to a report in DNA, the BSEB conducts Annual Secondary School Examinations every year in the month of February/March and Supplementary School Examination in the month of August/September on the basis of course/syllabus as prescribed by the state government. As has been observed over the course of the past few weeks, the dates and times of result announcements have been frequently changed around. The information above has not been independently verified. However, this article will continue to be updated to reflect official updates as and when they come in. The CBI has booked Gujarat-based Ardor International and its promoters Fenil B Shah and Bharat R Shah in connection with its loan default of nearly Rs 82 crore towards Central Bank of India, officials said on Tuesday. New Delhi: The CBI has booked Gujarat-based Ardor International and its promoters Fenil B Shah and Bharat R Shah in connection with its loan default of nearly Rs 82 crore towards Central Bank of India, officials said on Tuesday. The company, which is into supply chain management of detergent raw materials and other chemicals, has defaulted on loans amounting to Rs 560 crore between 2016 and 2017 towards a consortium of eight banks, including Central Bank of India, they said. The agency has registered a case on the basis of a complaint from the bank, which allegedly suffered a loss of nearly Rs 82 crore, the officials said. It is alleged that the firm showed inflated stock statements to induce the banks into issuing credit facilities, they said. It had claimed the stock was valued at Rs 92.45 crore but SBI and Central Bank of India officials found during inspections that negligible stock was available at the company site. "It clearly shows that the borrowers have diverted the funds and it appears that the company has disposed of the stock with dishonest and mala fide intention without adjusting banks dues," the bank said in its complaint, which is now a part of the FIR. The bank alleged the company defrauded it and caused wrongful loss to the extent of an outstanding balance of Rs 81.39 crore to it. Activists protesting the Chennai-Salem highway are worried that the Tamil Nadu government has learnt its lessons from the Sterlite protests in Tuticorin. The photograph of a frail woman being led away by a posse of policemen does the image of Tamil Nadu no good. This senior citizen was protesting that her 4.5 acre of land would be gobbled up by the proposed eight-lane 277-kilometre-long Salem expressway that proposes to cut the driving time between Chennai and Salem from the present six hours by half. For the 'crime' of raising her voice, she and a few other women were taken away in a police van. Tweeting the photograph, MK Stalin asked if this is a democratic land or a police hunting forest. His sister and DMK leader Kanimozhi says that Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, who incidentally hails from Salem, is following a "shoot to kill, arrest, NSA and no protests in Tamil Nadu'' policy. She tweeted saying "Palaniswami's keen interest to see the Salem eight-lane project complete would put any ruthless dictator to shame''. On the ground in Salem district, work on marking lush green fields that will soon become tarred road, is on. On 8 June, RS Narayanan, a farmer in Kuppanur village in Salem district got into an argument with officials asking them why they were marking fields without giving any farmer a notice or telling them how much they will get for the land. "The next morning, at 4 am, a police team came home and picked me up. Till 1 pm, I was detained at the police station. Is it a crime to ask questions? No one tells us anything, no one is bothered about our problems. If you ask or object, you get arrested. We are being intimidated,'' bemoans Narayanan. The 43-year-old owns 4.18 acres of land, on which he grows coconut trees, lime and chikku (mudapples). Narayanan is upset that he will lose four acres to the expressway. "They can easily widen the existing four-lane highway. What is the rationale in making so many farmers lose their land?'' he asks. The government's counter argument is that acquiring land 15 metres on either side of the existing highway will translate to 2,200 hectares of land. What is glossed over is that the Expert Appraisal committee that met on 7 May noted that for the greenfield expressway, total land acquisition would be 2,560 hectares. MGM Moorthi, another farmer in Kuppanur village, will lose all the four acres he owns and worse, get a raw deal. Moorthi has been told he will be compensated at the rate of Rs 8 lakh for an acre. The market rate, he points out, is Rs 60 lakh per acre. The irony, Moorthi says, is that Palaniswami also hails from an agricultural family and yet does not feel for what the farmers are going through. "If Palaniswami had become chief minister because of the votes cast by the people, he would have understood our pain. But we voted for J Jayalalithaa. He benefited after her demise,'' says Moorthi. In the last three days, three activists Piyush Manush, Valarmathi and actor Mansoor Ali Khan have been arrested on charges of inciting violence. Their contention was that the project, besides robbing farmers of their livelihood, would cut through environmentally fragile forest area. Though the government assessment is that 6,400 trees will be felled, environmentalists estimate the number will be close to a lakh. Mansoor was arrested for his threatening remarks that he will kill eight people if the eight-lane expressway was implemented. The Tamil Nadu government charges the activists with riding on the Rs 10,000 crore highway project to disrupt peace. "The Tamil Nadu government is not anti-people. But people should represent issues, not take law into their own hands,'' argues D Jayakumar, fisheries minister. It is obvious that the Tamil Nadu government is seeing the expressway as a prestigious project, an example of Centre-state cooperation. "Between February 2018, when Palaniswami proposed the project and May 2018, when all the approvals were in place, the project has moved at breakneck speed. This is clearly a project in which both the Centre and the state are interested,'' says A Shankar, political commentator. But what is worrying the activists is that the Tamil Nadu government has learnt its lessons from Tuticorin, where protests resulted in the police shooting down 13 people last month. The intention, it seems, is to ensure things do not get out of hand and that explains the strong-arm approach. "Today, if I go to Salem, I will be picked up,'' says Henri Tiphagne of the human rights group People's Watch. While the government is within its rights to plan and execute development projects, what is of concern is the 'my way or the highway' attitude, that does not respect public opinion. Making it worse is the surround system that labels anyone who objects as an urban naxalite. Since the suggestion includes a reference to solving border issues, the future of Jammu and Kashmir will surely be foremost on the agenda of both China and Pakistan. While making the suggestion, the Chinese ambassador pointedly spoke of avoiding another Doka La type confrontationa reference that could be read as a tacit threat, or at least coercion. Beijing's proposal on Monday for a trilateral summit meeting of India, Pakistan and China is fraught with danger for India. On crucial matters, this sort of trilateral arrangement will surely become two versus one or at least two close friends strategising behind the scenes. For, both China and Pakistan have repeatedly stated that they consider the other as their most trusted friend, and that theirs is the deepest sort of strategic relationship. Since the suggestion includes a reference to solving border issues, the future of Jammu and Kashmir will surely be foremost on the agenda of both China and Pakistan. While making the suggestion, the Chinese ambassador pointedly spoke of avoiding another Doka La type confrontationa reference that could be read as a tacit threat, or at least coercion. China has repeatedly called CPEC the 'flagship project' of President Xi Jinping's signature One Belt and One Road initiative. China has vouchsafed investments totalling near $80 billion in Pakistan under the aegis of CPEC. Indeed, if one were to take an insightful and long view of the relationship between the three countries, it would be clear that moves, events and trends in Kashmir, and by both China and Pakistan, since 2008 have inexorably led up to this proposal. Tragically, India's security and intelligence analysts and policymakers neglected what was afoot. Damaging United Nations report This suggestion for a trilateral comes close on the heels of a report on Kashmir by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The government is right to hold that the report contains unverified facts. But whether verified or not, these assertions now have the stamp of authority. They are part of a UN report. There is every possibility that some countries will take note of it. A few will latch onto it enthusiastically. Some may even refer to it at the UN General Assembly session this September. Turkey and Iran have already publicly raised concerns about the situation in Kashmir. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke of the issue on the eve of an official visit to New Delhi last year. "We should not allow more casualties to occur, and by strengthening multilateral dialogue, we can be involved, and through multilateral dialogue, I think we have to seek out ways to settle this question once and for all," Erdogan had said in an interview to WION TV. If China should choose to push the issue, it could quite easily press a large number of countries to take it up. China's huge investment commitments, estimated at $750 billion, give it tremendous leverage in almost every region of the world. Let us keep in mind that Jordan is among the several countries in which China has undertaken several debt-laden projects. The High Commissioner for Human Rights who issued this report is from Jordan. Multi-faceted developments Various elements of the situation regarding Kashmir must be analysed in tandem. Militancy within the Valley, public demonstrations, shelling on the Line of Control, and infiltration by foreign militants all form the backdrop for the events unfolding in the world of diplomacy and geopolitics. Domestic politics in light of impending general elections are another vital factor. The most basic fact is that the ground situation is worsening steadily. There were extensive stone-pelting demonstrations across the Valley even after the Eid prayers on Saturday. Several teenagers have gone underground in south Kashmir during the month of Ramzaan, which ended on 16 June. Several hundred militants now roam the place as part of one or other of half-a-dozen radically Islamist groups. In addition, a large number of foreign militants, who belong to various groups, are billeted in various parts of Kashmir, including the north of the Valley. To complicate the situation further, the annual Amarnath Yatra is set to begin on 28 June, and will last till 26 August. This will severely strain the security forces, since they will have to secure the pilgrims even while tracking and combating the militants. An attack on the Yatra could prove politically costly for the government, more so at a time when general elections are less than a year away. Policymakers must urgently look at the unfolding situation in strategic terms rather than just as a question of how much force to apply. Several strands of the currently unfolding developments point to an unprecedented challenge ahead. 'Bukhari had warned repeatedly of alienation, increased militancy in Kashmir and all pervasive fear in which no one was safe,' AS Dulat said. London: Senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari, who was shot dead in Srinagar last week, had approached Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti only a few days ago for increased security, former special director of Intelligence Bureau AS Dulat said on Monday. Bukhari, the editor-in-chief of the daily Rising Kashmir, was shot dead outside his office in Srinagar on 14 June. Two police officers provided to him as personal bodyguards were also killed in the attack. The government has blamed militants based in Kashmir for the killings. "He (Bukhari) had warned repeatedly of alienation, increased militancy and all pervasive fear in which no one was safe," Dulat, who arrived in London last week, said in a statement. Bukhari had "approached the chief minister only a few days ago for increased security. Yet who could have imagined that this gentle soul would become a target. Why? Dulat asked. "We had met at Istanbul about six weeks ago from where he travelled to Pakistan. Despite travelling for more than a fortnight he came from Srinagar to Delhi for the launch of my book The Spy Chronicles on 23 May. As usual he spoke fearlessly about his beloved Valley which he saw sinking in the last couple of years," the former intelligence special director said. Bukhari was the most committed votary of dialogue as the only way out, he said. "He was a gem of a human being and a friend; possibly the brightest journalist in the Valley with a great future," he added. The Delhi Police sent a notice to self-styled godman Daati Maharaj, accused of raping a disciple, asking him to join a probe in a rape case registered against him. New Delhi: Self-styled godman Daati Maharaj accused of raping a disciple in his ashrams in the capital and Rajasthan joined the probe in the case on Tuesday, the police said. He was sent a notice asking him to join the probe by Wednesday. He reached the Crime Branch office on Tuesday and his questioning is underway, they added. On Saturday, a Delhi Police team had visited the godman's ashram in Pali, Rajasthan, to gather evidence. The team, which failed to find the godman at the ashram, was accompanied by the rape victim. The woman had filed a complaint on Sunday against Daati Maharaj at the Fatehpur Beri police station in south Delhi. The case was later transferred to the Crime Branch. The woman had alleged that she was sexually abused at Daati Maharaj's ashrams in Delhi and Rajasthan and had also named two male disciples of the godman in her complaint. Delhi Commission for Women had recently demanded the godman's arrest. The Delhi Police had earlier issued a lookout circular against Daati Maharaj to ensure that he does not leave the country. The woman has told the police that she had been a disciple of Daati Maharaj for a decade but after she was raped by him, she returned to her home in Rajasthan. The fire broke out at the SSJ International Hotel in Lucknow and spread to several floors of the adjacent Hotel Viraat International. A major fire broke out at a hotel in Lucknow's Charbagh area early on Tuesday. The fire, which broke out at SSJ International Hotel, spread to several floors of the adjacent Hotel Viraat International, located near the Lucknow Railway Station. "Four people have died, while five were admitted to a hospital with severe burn injuries. As many as 55 people, including staff of both the hotels, were rescued," Superintendent of Police (Lucknow West) Vikas Chand Tripathi said. The police fear that the toll might rise. "Around 15 fire tenders were pressed into service. The blaze has been extinguished, but there is still a lot of heat in the basement of the hotels. I visited a few burnt rooms of the hotel to gauge the situation," he said. About the cause of the fire, Tripathi said, "It seems that there was a short circuit." Around 60 people were staying in the hotels when the fire broke out, the police said, adding that most of the guests were evacuated safely. All the rooms have been checked thoroughly, fire department officials told NDTV. A preliminary inquiry indicates that a short circuit may have caused the fire, and although the facade of the hotel has been badly damaged, the rooms were not affected. Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Yogi Adityanath has expressed sorrow over the loss of lives in the fire. "The Chief Minister has directed officials to ensure proper medical care for the injured," a spokesperson said. With inputs from PTI Guwahati : To improve the cancer care facilities in Assam and the North Eastern region, BJP president Amit Shah on Monday laid the foundation stone of 19 new cancer care centres in presence of Tata Trusts Chairman Ratan Tata during a ceremonial function held at the Veterinary College ground, Khanapara in Guwahati. Minister of State for Railways Rajen Gohain, Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal, Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu, state health minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma were present in the function. Amit Shah said that, it is one of the biggest ever initiative taken by the Assam government to improve the health sector after independence. Amit Shah acknowledged the crucial role played by Tata Trusts with their philanthropic activities in bolstering public health sector in different parts of the country for so many years. He also referred to schemes of central government like Ayushman Bharat which covers approximately 10 crore poor and vulnerable families (approximately 50 crore beneficiaries) providing coverage up-to 5 lakh rupees per family per year for secondary and tertiary care hospitalization and Mission Indradhanush which aims to immunize all children under the age of 2 years, as well as all pregnant women, against seven vaccine preventable diseases. Shah said that this cancer care programme will enable the underprivileged section of the society get access to quality cancer treatment while minimising out of pocket expenses. He also appreciated the Assam government under chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal for taking up such mega projects within a short period of time to fulfil the aspirations of the people of the state. The BJP president said that, Congress had ruled maximum times in the country after independence, but the NE region deprived from development. But the present Union government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has specially focused on the development of the region, Amit Shah said. On the other hand, Tata Trusts Chairman Ratan Tata said that, cancer is silent killer. Since the north-eastern part of the country has highest occurrence of cancer cases, the Tata Trusts is commited to make cancer care inclusive. Since its inception, Tata Trusts has played a pioneering role in transforming traditional ideas of charity and introducing the concept of philanthropy to make a real difference to communities. Researchers under the Trusts are working for finding cutting edge solutions to manage cancer efficiently so that mortality due to cancer can be reduced through awareness, prevention and early detection while taking care closer to the people, Ratan Tata said. Assam Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal said that, cancer treatment takes a heavy toll on the mental, physical and financial conditions of not only the patient but also the whole family. But the setting up of this 19 hospital cancer care grid in the state will revolutionise the whole cancer management and patients would be able to avail quality treatment without going outside the state. Sonowal said that, said that ever since coming to power the present state government has initiated many schemes like Atal Amrit Abhiyan, free diagnostic facilities which have improved the public health scenario in the state. Following Advantage Assam: Global Investors Summit, the state has come into the investment limelight of the nation and a total of Rs 79,000 crore of investment has been committed to the state as a result of the summit, Sonowal said. The Assam CM also thanked the Chairman of Tata Trusts Ratan Tata for fulfilling the commitment of extending cooperation in setting up 19 hospitals as part of the three tier cancer care programme in the state. Assam health minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma said that a corpus of Rs 1,910 crore has been created under Assam Cancer Care Foundation to set up three different layers of hospitals for cancer patients in 19 districts of the State. As part of the agreement, Tata Trusts will contribute nearly Rs 900 crore, while the state government will provide a grant of Rs 1,080 crore, he informed. Central government has committed another Rs 180 crores in addition to the corpus fund. Elaborating on the plan Dr Sarma said that the Assam Medical College and Hospital at Dibrugarh would be treated as a level 1 hospital, which would largely be a referral hospital with 200 additional beds. The level 3 hospitals would be set up at Darrang, Goalpara, Golaghat, Haflong and Sivasagar. Further, the 150-bed level 2 hospitals would come up in Silchar, Barpeta, Jorhat, Tezpur, Diphu, Dhubri, Kokrajhar, Lakhimpur, Nagaon, Tinsukia, Karimganj and Nalbari. The places identified for level 2 are those where multi-specialty support from the medical colleges is available or at least proposals for setting up medical colleges are already in place. The Assam government and Tata Trusts collaborated for a joint venture under which a three-tier cancer care grid will be established in Assam with a corpus of Rs 2,200 crore to be shared on an equal basis by both parties. The first installment of Rs 500 crore, Rs 250 crore each by Assam government and Tata Trusts was handed over to Assam Cancer Care Foundation (ACCF). A South-East Asia Cancer Research Institute will be set up at Cancer Hospital, Guwahati Medical College Hospital, Guwahati under Assam Cancer Care Foundation (ACCF) and also a Level One facility centre will be set up at Assam Medical College Hospital, Dibrugarh. ACCF will also set up 12 Level Two centres in the government medical colleges in Barpeta, Dhubri, Jorhat, Karimganj, Kokrajhar, Lakhimpur, Nagaon, Nalbari, Silchar, Tezpur and Tinsukia and five Level Three centres will be set up in district hospitals at Daring, Goalpara, Golaghat, Haflong and Sivasagar. The Karnataka high court has directed two magistrate courts to submit a report on allegations of custodial torture of four accused in the Gauri Lankesh assassination case, and non-compliance of judicial procedures. Bengaluru: The Karnataka high court has directed two magistrate courts to submit a report on allegations of custodial torture of four accused in the Gauri Lankesh assassination case, and non-compliance of judicial procedures. The allegations are "serious in nature", and the Registry of the High Court has been directed to communicate the order to the magistrates of the first and third additional chief metropolitan magistrate (ACMM) courts, Justice KN Phaneendra said when the matter came up for hearing on Monday. "They should submit a report on the allegations within 10 days from the date of receipt of this order," he said. In an affidavit, advocate NP Amrutesh alleged that Amol Kale, one of the accused in the case, was beaten, slapped, and punched on his cheek by police officers while in custody. The magistrates also failed to comply with procedures mandated by the Supreme Court regarding people in police custody, he claimed. The advocate is representing Kale, Sujith Kumar, Amit Ramachandra Degvekar, and Manohar Edave arrested in connection with the killing of the veteran journalist. The counsel for the accused also alleged that the magistrate did not order a medical examination even after being informed on 14 June about the torture meted out by the police to one of them. "Instead, the magistrate only recorded injury marks on his body," he said. The counsel also said similar complaints regarding custodial torture of the other accused were also made on 31 May before the magistrate of the third ACMM, which was neglected. Hence, he requested a court direction to authorities concerned to conduct a medical examination of the accused and a probe into their illegal detention and torture by the police. He also sought Rs 25 lakh as compensation for each of the accused, besides a direction to the magistrate to record their statements in in-camera proceedings. On 12 June, the high court had issued notices to the Karnataka government, State police chief, and police officials concerned in the matters. It had also directed the police to ensure that the accused were not ill-treated. Gauri Lankesh, a Left-leaning journalist, and a strong Hindutva critic, was shot dead from close range by motorcycle-borne assailants in front of her house on 5 September last year. The United Nations released the first-ever report on alleged human rights violation in Kashmir and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and demanded an international probe into it, evoking a sharp reaction from India which termed the document as 'fallacious and motivated'. In the opening statement and global update of human rights concerns, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein urged all nations "to do more, to speak louder and work harder for the common purpose and for universal human rights law, to better our chances for a global peace." Zeid, in his address, spoke about violations in Syria, Myanmar, Burundi, Nicaragua, India and Pakistan. "I have sought to engage substantively with both India and Pakistan over the past two years regarding the situation in Kashmir, on both sides of the Line of Control. Refusals by both India and Pakistan to enable unconditional access have led us to conduct remote monitoring, with a first report issued last week. I encourage the Council to consider establishing a Commission of Inquiry for a more comprehensive investigation of the human rights situation in Kashmir, and reiterate my calls for access. I am tremendously saddened by the assassination last week of Shujaat Bukhari, a courageous human rights defender actively working for peace, including through his participation in the Track Two diplomacy seeking to help both India and Pakistan put an end to the violence." The United Nations released the first-ever report on alleged human rights violation in Kashmir and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and demanded an international probe into it, evoking a sharp reaction from India which termed the document as "fallacious and motivated". The report which was released on 14 June evoked sharp response from New Delhi who also lodged a protest with the United Nations, saying the government is "deeply concerned that individual prejudices are being allowed to undermine the credibility of a UN institution." Zeid called for maximum restraint and for establishing a commission of inquiry. He said, "It is also why I will be urging the UN Human Rights Council to consider establishing a commission of inquiry to conduct a comprehensive independent international investigation into allegations of human rights violations in Kashmir." Even in September last year, Zeid, in his comments at the 36th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, had criticised India on the issue of deportation of Rohingya as well as on religious intolerance and threat to rights activists. New Delhi had reacted strongly to the statement saying, it was surprised that individual incidents are being "extrapolated" to suggest a broader societal situation. Here is the full text of Zeid's opening statement at the 38th session of the Human Rights Council *** Mr. President, Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates, Colleagues and Friends, As this is my last global update to the Human Rights Council in a regular session and before I turn, once again, to the important matter of access and cooperation I wish to draw on some final reflections. I heard recently a UN official telling others there is really no such thing as universal human rights, musing that they were picked from a Western imagination. I remember thinking to myself that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the most translated document in the world was negotiated by the same political leaders who poured universal values into the Charter, creating the United Nations. Is the UN also then somehow not universal? Were its values sourced only from a Western tradition unrepresentative of the rest of the world? No. A clear rejection of this comes from a look at the negotiating record itself. The San Francisco Conference, which established the UN, was a circus of sound shaped from many tongues; its result was not a solo tune from a Western instrument. Had that been the case had the countries that joined the organization believed they were being pinned to alien, Western values why then did they not stream toward the exits? Why did they not withdraw from the UN? But then why is the Universal Declaration, and the whole body of human rights law that followed it, the object of so much attack now - not only from the violent extremists, like the Takfiris, but also from authoritarian leaders, populists, demagogues, cultural relativists, some Western academics, and even some UN officials? I have spent most of my career at, and in, the UN. What I have learned is this: the UN is symptomatic of the wider global picture. It is only as great or as pathetic as the prevailing state of the international scene at the time. I also have come to understand how weak human memory is. That to many people history matters only in so far as it can be unsheathed and flung into political battle: they do not view it as a service to deeper human understanding. There is a dangerous remove and superficiality to so many of our discussions, so much so that the deepest, core issue seems to have been lost on many. Is it not the case, for example, that historically, the most destructive force to imperil the world has been chauvinistic nationalism when raised to feral extremes by self-serving, callous leaders, and amplified by mass ideologies which themselves repress freedom. The UN was conceived in order to prevent its rebirth. Chauvinistic nationalism is the polar opposite of the UN, its very antonym and enemy. So why are we so submissive to its return? Why are we in the UN so silent? The UNs raison detre is the protection of peace, rights, justice and social progress. Its operating principle is therefore equally clear: only by pursuing the opposite to nationalism only when States all work for each other, for everyone, for all people, for the human rights of all people can peace be attainable. Why are we not doing this? Those of us in the UN Secretariat, originating from all the 193 Member States, work collaboratively and we do not answer to any State. In contrast, too many governments represented at the UN will often pull in the opposing direction: feigning a commitment to the common effort, yet fighting for nothing more than their thinly-thought interests, taking out as much as they can from the UN, politically, while not investing in making it a true success. The more pronounced their sense of self-importance the more they glory in nationalism the more unvarnished is the assault by these governments on the overall common good: on universal rights, on universal law and universal institutions, such as this one. And as the attack on the multilateral system and its rules, including most especially international human rights law, intensifies, so too will the risk increase of further mischief on a grander scale. The UNs collective voice must therefore be principled and strong; not weak and whining, obsessed with endless wrangling over process, the small things, as it is the case today. If my Office, of which I am very proud, and I, have gotten one thing right over the last few years, it is our understanding that only fearlessness is adequate to our task at this point in time. Not ducking for cover, or using excuses or resorting to euphemisms, but a fearlessness approaching that shown by human rights defenders around the world for only by speaking out can we begin to combat the growing menace of chauvinistic nationalism that stalks our future. I appeal to you to do more, to speak louder and work harder for the common purpose and for universal human rights law, to better our chances for a global peace. This Council session will consider numerous essential issues. Among them, you have before you the report of my Office on Kashmir, and the coming report on Venezuela; you will also be informed of the findings of the Team of Experts on the Kasai regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And as I transition out of my position, the Office will continue its work on the database of business enterprises engaged in specific activities related to Israeli settlements, as called for by the Council, with an update possibly before September. At the September session, the Fact-Finding Mission report on Myanmar will be presented to the Council, alongside the report of the Special Rapporteur on Myanmar; and you will also receive the report on Yemen prepared by the eminent international experts. In that context, I emphasize my grave worry regarding the Saudi and Emirati-led coalition's on-going attacks in Hodeida which could result in enormous civilian casualties, and have a disastrous impact on life-saving humanitarian aid to millions of people which comes through the port. Mr President, Twice in the course of my mandate, I have reported on the troubling failure by a number of countries to grant access, and I will do so again today. These refusals of access constitute a serious affront to our work, and where there is sustained denial of access, and serious reasons to believe violations are occurring, we will consider the option of remote monitoring. The Offices mandate to conduct such monitoring is unassailable, and if the Government concerned fears there may be inaccuracies it should permit us in to see the situation on the ground. Mr President, In Syria, the leaderships contempt and disregard for human rights was what laid the ground for this conflict, and fuelled it for the first year at least. The horrific violations and abuses committed since then principally by the government and its allies, but including also the violent extremists and their supporters have destroyed much of the country along with many of its people. Both my Office and the Council's Commission of Inquiry have been refused access to all regions. The Governments recent, selective acceptance of one Rapporteurs visit, when so many other requests have been outstanding for an extended period, is in no way an adequate stand-in for compliance with this Council's resolutions S18-1 and 19/22, which call for full cooperation with my Office and the establishment of a field presence. Our extensive remote monitoring of human rights violations in Syria will continue. In Myanmar, as the Council is aware, there are clear indications of well-organised, widespread and systematic attacks continuing to target the Rohingyas in Rakhine State as an ethnic group, amounting possibly to acts of genocide if so established by a court of law. In Kachin and northern Shan States, conflict has again escalated since October last year, and longstanding and widely reported human rights violations in the country include allegations of extrajudicial killings; enforced disappearances; torture and inhuman treatment; rape and other forms of sexual violence; forced labour; recruitment of children into armed forces; and indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks arising from conflicts between security forces and armed groups. Although Myanmar has stated that it will investigate allegations and prosecute alleged perpetrators, its actions to date have not met minimal standards of credibility or impartiality. Due to continuing refusals to permit access, OHCHR, the country Special Rapporteur and the Fact-Finding Mission have conducted remote monitoring. In the context of the MOU that the Government of Myanmar has established with UNDP and UNHCR for the repatriation of Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh, I reiterate that no repatriation should occur in the absence of sustained human rights monitoring on the ground, in the areas concerned. Given the gravity and scope of the human rights violations in Venezuela, and continuing denial of access to the Office, we will continue remote monitoring and reporting; our second report will be published in the coming days and we firmly believe the Council needs to establish a Commission of Inquiry. Since last June the Government has issued three invitations to the Special Procedures, the first since 1996. However, the authorities have ignored a long list of requests by others whose mandates are particularly relevant to the current human rights crisis in the country. Despite Burundi's agreement to cooperate with the Team of Experts mandated by the Council last year, the Team was expelled from the country last month and has not been able to return. Access is also denied to the International Commission of Inquiry set up in 2016, and the authorities have refused to finalize discussions on the renewal of the MOU with my Office. Meanwhile, the human rights situation continues to deteriorate throughout the country. The Governments continuing restrictions on civic space, and its decision to revise the Constitution through a referendum last month, have generated a host of human rights concerns including at least 44 alleged cases of arbitrary arrest and detention and may further deepen grievances. I strongly encourage the Government to re-establish engagement with all international human rights bodies. I have sought to engage substantively with both India and Pakistan over the past two years regarding the situation in Kashmir, on both sides of the Line of Control. Refusals by both India and Pakistan to enable unconditional access have led us to conduct remote monitoring, with a first report issued last week. I encourage the Council to consider establishing a Commission of Inquiry for a more comprehensive investigation of the human rights situation in Kashmir, and reiterate my calls for access. I am tremendously saddened by the assassination last week of Shujaat Bukhari, a courageous human rights defender actively working for peace, including through his participation in the Track Two diplomacy seeking to help both India and Pakistan put an end to the violence. In Nicaragua, anti-government protests over the past two months have led to the killing of at least 178 people, almost entirely at the hand of the police forces and by armed pro-government groups, including allegedly the use of snipers, with at least 1,500 wounded. This is in addition to reported abductions and disappearances. I deplore the violence, including the horrific arson attack two days ago. The gravity of these developments may well merit an international commission of inquiry. I expect the commitments made at the resumption of the National Dialogue on 15 June to be upheld, including the cessation of all forms of violence and threats thereof, and the commitment to extend an urgent invitation to OHCHR to visit the country, as we have repeatedly requested. This invitation should be sent without delay. In the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, remote monitoring by my Office has found little change in the countrys longstanding, grave and systematic violations of human rights. The people of the DPRK risk their lives and their dignity for the exercise of their fundamental human rights, including seeking to leave the country and communicating with individuals abroad. While I regret the persistent lack of cooperation with the country mandate-holder, the DPRK's recent engagement with the human rights mechanisms, through one Special Rapporteur visit and treaty body reviews, is encouraging. I call on the authorities to step up that engagement significantly, and without selectivity, including cooperation with the country mandate. The experience of my Office has repeatedly demonstrated that making human rights part of peace talks contributes to meaningful and sustainable peace in the long-term. Our door remains open for greater engagement and cooperation. Israel continues to deny access to the Occupied Palestinian Territory by the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. This has been the case for three successive holders of the mandate. Access has also been denied to all of the Council's previous Commissions of Inquiry, including on Gaza in 2014. I believe the Council's advocacy of impartial monitoring and expert recommendations is entirely justified by the gravity of the situation, and I urge Israel to provide access to all human rights mechanisms including the investigative body mandated last month to enable impartial monitoring and advance accountability and justice. In China, despite efforts by my Office to establish conditions conducive to an effective dialogue, my staff have not been given unfettered access to the country, including to the Tibetan Autonomous Region and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the human rights situation is reportedly fast deteriorating. Moreover, although two mandate-holders have visited the country in the past five years, China has in that period accumulated more than 15 pending requests for visits. I am, furthermore, dismayed by Chinas continuing efforts to prevent independent members of civil society from engaging with human rights mechanisms, including Treaty Body reviews, this Council's UPR, and many mandate-holders. I encourage the authorities to enable all actors to contribute to all the international human rights mechanisms, and to cooperate with them in a spirit of open and mutual partnership, in order to improve respect for the rights and freedoms of Chinas people. Regarding the situation in Turkey, an invitation for the High Commissioner to visit Ankara is not a substitute for access for the Office to directly and objectively assess the situation in the South-East, where the authorities have consistently failed to conduct credible criminal investigations into the civilian deaths which occurred during security operations in 2015 and 2016. In the absence of adequate access, the Office will continue remote monitoring of the situation. I note that Turkey received visits relating to torture, freedom of expression and enforced disappearances in 2016, and encourage the government to allow further visits in the near future. Unconditional access to Bahrain continues to be refused to my Office and the Special Procedures, amid continued crackdowns on civil society and additional legislation which further restricts the people's fundamental rights. I encourage the Kingdom to reverse these profoundly damaging trends and to facilitate effective engagement with the international human rights mechanisms. My Office stands ready to provide technical and legal expertise. I deeply regret that there has been no progress regarding access for the Office to all protracted conflicts in the South Caucasus, to enable us to assess people's human rights needs and assist in addressing protection gaps. In addition, to date, access has not been granted by the authorities in control under the framework of this Council's resolutions 34/37 and 37/40 on cooperation with Georgia. In South Sudan, I acknowledge and welcome the Government's cooperation with this Council's Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan. However, in violation of the Status of Forces Agreement, human rights officers working with UNMISS have been regularly denied access to locations where serious human rights violations and abuses are allegedly committed, impeding UNMISS's mandated task of monitoring the human rights situation. These include facilities run by the National Security Service, where hundreds of people are believed to be arbitrarily detained in conditions that could amount to torture. I am deeply concerned about the intensification of indiscriminate attacks against civilians, particularly a pattern of rapes and killings perpetrated by Government forces and their proxies in Unity State since April 2018. Human rights officers have documented the rape of children as young as four years old, and numerous cases of women, elderly people and others being hanged or burned alive in what appears to be a deliberate scorched-earth policy. I welcome Security Council resolution 2414 (2018) on Western Sahara, which strongly encourages enhancing cooperation with OHCHR. I reiterate the readiness of my Office to undertake as soon as possible a follow-up technical mission to Western Sahara. I am concerned by the suspension of a visit to Rwanda by the Sub-Committee on the Prevention of Torture late last year, due to serious obstruction regarding access to some places of detention; the confidentiality of interviews; and concerns about potential reprisals. The SPT decided to resume the visit in 2018, but there has been no positive engagement with the authorities. I call on them to provide full cooperation so that the Sub-Committee can fulfil its important mandate. In Indonesia, I am concerned that despite positive engagement by the authorities in many respects, the Governments invitation to my Office to visit Papua which was made during my visit in February has still not been honoured. Bangladesh has granted extensive and commendable access to the Office and all relevant human rights mechanisms with respect to the Rohingya refugee crisis. However, it has more than 10 outstanding requests for visits by mandate holders to assess the human rights situation in Bangladesh itself. I encourage greater engagement, particularly with respect to concerns about the shrinking space for civil society, and allegations of extrajudicial actions by the security forces. In Mexico, despite a positive record of openness which we deeply appreciate, I regret the lack of access for the Committee on Enforced Disappearances, despite repeated requests under article 33 of the Convention. Since 2012, the Committee has registered over 310 urgent actions on cases of enforced disappearances in the country, which represent more than 60 per cent of all urgent actions registered to date. In Cameroon, I trust that recent promising discussions with the authorities will swiftly lead to approval for a mission by the Office to all parts of the country. To date this access has been refused, despite the growing crisis in the Anglophone regions, with fighting between up to a dozen armed groups and the security forces. We have received reports of abuses and violations by all sides, including burning of schools and private property; mass arrests and arbitrary detentions; and the use of torture and excessive force by security personnel, leading to the displacement of 150,000 people within the country and over 20,000 to neighbouring Nigeria. On Crimea, we have repeatedly asked the Russian Federation for access, in line with the General Assembly's requests. Special Procedures mandate-holders have also sought to visit Crimea, most recently the Special Rapporteur on Torture. The Russian Federation's replies, while incompatible with GA resolutions 68/262, 71/205 and 72/190, nonetheless recognize that international human rights mechanisms must extend their reach to Crimea. I hope these encouraging responses can pave the way for additional steps to enable our access, in the interests of the human rights protection of the people of the region. Mr President, Almost 40 States have received no visit by a Special Rapporteur over the past five years, despite requests. Among them, 15 States have more than five pending visits: Bahrain, Belarus, Bolivia, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Yemen and Zimbabwe. There is also no exception to the requirement of cooperation for States in disagreement with the majority of Council members: indeed such an approach would eviscerate the meaning of the Council's decisions. I deplore the openly voiced refusal of a number of States to cooperate with this Council's Independent Expert on sexual orientation and gender identity. Notably, the Russian Federation has formally refused to respond to any communications from the mandate-holder, including joint submissions with other experts mandated by the Council, despite serious allegations of violence, discrimination and exclusion of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, especially in Chechnya. In many States, LGBTI people face severe and often official discrimination; and almost everywhere, they are inadequately protected from violence and bigotry. Protecting all human beings, including the LGBTI community, is not "outside" the international legal framework; ending discrimination and violence for everyone, everywhere, is absolutely central to our principles and work. Mr. President, At the same time, I am pleased to note a number of positive developments with respect to access for the Special Procedures. These include an increased response rate to communications, now at 68 per cent (an increase of 13 per cent over 2016); and Afghanistans issuance of a standing invitation to all mandate-holders, taking the number of States having done so to 118 UN Member States and one non-member Observer State. I note and commend the following States which have hosted at least five visits by thematic mandates in the last five years: Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Chile, Georgia, Ghana, Greece, Honduras, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Ukraine, the UK and the US. Regarding engagement with the Treaty Bodies, I welcome long-outstanding reports to the Committees by Bangladesh, Cabo Verde, Central African Republic, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Tonga and Zambia. Allow me also to applaud Qatars accession to the Covenants and Afghanistans accession to the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, alongside many other ratifications. My Office stands ready to support them in efforts to implement these commitments to ensure respect for their people's rights, and I urge other countries which have not ratified these and other human rights treaties to do so. Mr President, In a number of areas, I am heartened by significant progress regarding access. During my second mission to Ethiopia, in April, I was impressed and encouraged by the Prime Ministers commitment to undertake reforms that could well advance the rule of law, and respect for fundamental human rights and principles, including a broad space for expression, peaceful assembly and civil society participation. Following a long period of reluctance to engage with international human rights bodies, the recent conclusion of a much-awaited MOU will facilitate an extensive role for the Office in the country, and I encourage the authorities to also accept visits by and guidance from Special Procedures experts in the context of the ongoing reforms. I applaud the lifting of the state of emergency earlier this month, as well as the release of a number of political detainees. While recognising challenges, I look forward to assisting the authorities in furthering respect for the human rights of all in Ethiopia. I welcome Armenias recent decision to enable the Office to contribute more effectively to upholding the rights of Armenia's people, including its invitation to provide technical assistance through presence of our staff on the ground. I again commend Tunisia for its extensive cooperation with the Office and Special Procedures, and its establishment of a national monitoring and reporting framework to strengthen engagement with the Treaty Bodies. OHCHR has unconditional access to all areas of the country, including to prisons, and the official visit of 12 mandate-holders has been fully facilitated by the Government since it extended a standing invitation to the Special Procedures in 2011. In Moldova, my Office and mandate-holders have recently been given access to the Transnistria region. I am hopeful that we will see deeper engagement with the Office and the UN, and I encourage other States in a similar context, in Europe and worldwide, to review and build on these good practises. Breaking with 15 years of refusals of visits by the Special Procedures, Uzbekistan received the mandate-holder on freedom of religion or belief in October 2017, and in May, Parliament adopted a roadmap on implementing his recommendations. The UN Country Team has also received the government's approval for a project by UNDP supporting follow-up to UPR recommendations, and I understand that the authorities have rolled back a number of restrictions on civil society activity. Libya, following my visit to Tripoli in October, accepted its first ever mission from a mandate holder, the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, and other mandate-holder visits are planned, should the security situation allow. Libya has also co-sponsored this Councils Resolution 37/45, which encourages monitoring and reporting by UNSMIL on human rights violations and abuses in the country and calls for cooperation with human rights mechanisms. The recent decision to redeploy UN staff to Tripoli should also open the door for greater access across the country. The Council may also wish to note the deployment of Human Rights Advisors to Belarus and Zimbabwe, two countries where there have been access issues in the past. Mr President, People do not lose their human rights by virtue of crossing a border without a visa. I deplore the adoption by many countries of policies intended to make themselves as inhospitable as possible by increasing the suffering of many already vulnerable people. In recent weeks, I have become increasingly alarmed by two issues regarding access for civil society organisations to migrants. In Hungary, I am deeply concerned about a bill presented to Parliament last month which, if adopted, would effectively criminalize human rights monitoring at borders and within border zones, as well as criminalizing the provision to migrants of information, legal aid and assistance. The bill would also eliminate or impede judicial review in many cases. It is essential that independent monitoring bodies including not only all international human rights bodies, but also national human rights institutions and civil society be able to monitor the human rights situation of migrants without fear or obstruction. These prohibitions, and related measures adopted by the Government of Hungary in recent months, stigmatize and harm migrants in vulnerable situations and those who seek asylum, as well as punishing the admirable work of human rights defenders who seek to help them. In the United States, I am deeply concerned by recently adopted policies which punish children for their parents actions. In the past six weeks, nearly two thousand children have been forcibly separated from their parents. The American Association of Pediatrics has called this cruel practice "government-sanctioned child abuse" which may cause "irreparable harm," with "lifelong consequences". The thought that any State would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable. I call on the United States to immediately end the practice of forcible separation of these children, and I encourage the Government to at last ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in order to ensure that the fundamental rights of all children, whatever their administrative status, will be at the centre of all domestic laws and policies. Mr President, We request access so we can better work to help bring States laws and practices in line with the commitments which they themselves have made. Every decision to engage more productively with the human rights system is a decision to create openings towards a more harmonious society one where there is greater justice, more sustainable peace and better development. I am heartened by the new areas where access has been achieved over the past year. It is not easy to highlight conflicts which have been averted, violations which have been warded off, and spiralling violence that has been interrupted and diminished. But every step towards greater implementation of the human rights agenda is an act of prevention, which gathers and strengthens the bonds between communities and reinforces inclusive development and peace. I am convinced that the human rights ideal has been the most constructive movement of ideas in our era and among the most successful. Over the past 70 years, a sustained peace has been achieved in and between many societies. Conflicts have been resolved, with respect and through law; a vastly increased number of people have been able to meaningfully express their views, and access education, healthcare and opportunities for development, without discrimination. Some may take these achievements for granted. But they are the enactment of policies policies and laws that uphold the universal principles of human dignity and equality. And they are not the norm. Every society's history is bloody with conflict and deprivation: we need only look back a little way to grasp the dangers, which our work averts. When leaders undermine human rights, and human rights law, this is in no way an act of patriotism. They are eroding the structures which can ensure the safety of their people pitching their societies backwards into violence, destruction, exploitation and disaster. They are recreating the rule of brute force and exploitation within countries and between them. True patriotism consists in viewing every State, and humanity as a whole, as a community of mutual responsibility, with shared needs and goals. True patriotism consists of the work of creating tolerant communities, which can live in peace. I depart an Office which is strong, absolutely committed to its gargantuan task, and which, in the face of heavy headwinds, has made progress. These new areas of access are a testament to the credibility of our operations and the justice of our cause. I remain convinced that the monitoring and reporting we have achieved; our capacity-building for civil society and States; and our clear, steady and impartial advocacy have been significant contributors to governance that is more inclusive and respectful of the rights of the people; societies which are more peaceful; and development that is broader, deeper and of more benefit to all. Finally, Mr. President, I wish to end my last statement in this formal setting with a series of acknowledgments. This is the hardest, most challenging, most fulfilling responsibility I have held. It has been hard on my family and it has affected my relationship with the Government of the country of my birth the country I had the honour of representing diplomatically for so many years, and it makes me sad this is so. However, this price is small in comparison to that paid by so many human rights defenders, and civil society more broadly, who sacrifice so much more, again and again, and who to me are the real heroes, genuine heroes of the human rights movement. Similarly, I hold in high regard those members of my Office, both international and national staff, who work in some of the most dangerous and difficult parts of the world. This Council needs to recognize what they do. We owe them a very special gratitude. It has also been an honour for me to work with my brilliant deputy, Kate Gilmore; an exceptional and courageous leader in her own right, and from whom I have learned a great deal. I have also benefitted greatly from the advice and support of Assistant Secretary General Andrew Gilmour, drawn from his extensive knowledge of the UN, and thank him for his leadership. To all the directors led by Adam Abdelmoula, Georgette Gagnon, and Peggy Hicks, and all the senior officials of whom there are too many to name I admire all of you and thank you too, as well as all the professional and national staff here in Geneva, those in our New York office, in the regional offices and country presences. I owe you all my gratitude. To my spokesperson Rupert Colville and his hardworking team, I feel a special indebtedness for your extraordinary work. And then there is Ruth Marshall, who has been my amazing speechwriter, and from whom it would be difficult to separate we have been operating in each others heads for the last four years! I thank also those in the front office led by the incomparable Maarit Kohonen Sheriff, supported by Cecile Aptel, both of whom I conferred with almost every day in the last four years, as I did with my old friend Anton Nikiforov, as well as with Cecilia Canessa, Carole Ray, and Katayoun Vessali all of you have been close family to me! To my security officers, I am especially grateful for your warmth, dedication and professionalism. And to many other staff, too numerous to name, whose commitment and dedication to their work for human rights drives them to work day and night to further the cause I salute you. And finally to my brother Mohammad Al-Nsour, who accompanied me from New York, via Amman, and has been with me every step of the way, and will always remain a very special friend thank you. I also want to acknowledge all the Ambassadors and their staffs here. The personal friendship and support of so many diplomats who, notwithstanding their official positions, understand what it is we are trying to do, has been deeply meaningful to me. As I close out my last two and half months, I am very keen to reunite with my wife Sarah and our three children: without their love for this strange man, it is impossible for me to see how I could have managed the stresses of this position. I hope I have made them proud. For soon to borrow from the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson this hunter shall be home from the hill. The maritime forces of India, the US and Japan participated in the trilateral maritime exercise Malabar 2018 which were conducted off the coast of Guam from 7 to 16 June. New Delhi: The maritime forces of India, the US and Japan participated in the trilateral maritime exercise Malabar 2018 which were conducted off the coast of Guam from 7 to 16 June, the US Navy's Commander, Task Force 70 (CTF 70) Public Affairs, said on Tuesday. "Initiated in 1992 as an exercise between the US and Indian Navy, Malabar 2018 is the 22nd rendition of the exercise and included the Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force (JMSDF), a regular participant since 2015," CTF 70 said in a statement that was shared by the US Embassy. "The exercise accomplished maritime interoperability training objectives among the three maritime forces, emphasising high-end war-fighting skills, maritime superiority and power projection," it stated. This is the first year that Malabar was conducted in the US Navy's Guam operation area. The two-phase exercise took place ashore in Guam and in the Philippine Sea. "While ashore in Guam, training included subject matter expert and professional exchanges on operations, maritime patrol and reconnaissance operations, anti-submarine warfare, medical operations, damage control, helicopter operations, ship tours, and visit, board, search and seizure (VBSS) operations," the statement said. According to the statement, the at-sea portions of the exercise conducted in the Philippine Sea were designed to advance participating nations' military-to-military coordination and capacity to plan and execute tactical operations in a multinational environment. "The US, Japan and India have a range of common security interests that include maritime security, counterterrorism, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief and having an active role building regional partner capacity and maritime domain awareness. By doing so, they bolster the shared vision laid out by their respective governments to contribute to overall peace and security in the region." India, the US and Japan, along with Australia, are part of a quad that was revived late last year. By Jessica Resnick-Ault NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices rose on Monday in volatile trade as this week's OPEC meeting raised the specter of production increases and as investors assessed the impact of a trade dispute between the United States and China. U.S. crude oil edged up 43 cents a barrel to $65.49 by 1:15 p.m. By Jessica Resnick-Ault NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices rose on Monday in volatile trade as this week's OPEC meeting raised the specter of production increases and as investors assessed the impact of a trade dispute between the United States and China. U.S. crude oil edged up 43 cents a barrel to $65.49 by 1:15 p.m. EDT (1715 GMT). The contract earlier traded at a two-month low of $63.59. Brent crude jumped $1.55 to $74.99 a barrel. U.S. crude's discount to Brent widened to as much as $9.73 a barrel, after narrowing Friday. China's trade restrictions could leave the growing volumes of U.S. crude from shale without a buyer, traders said. While the volumes would ultimately get shipped elsewhere, absent China the price could be depressed, traders said. In May, Brent hit a 3-1/2-year high above $80 a barrel, but has slid since then on reports that top suppliers Saudi Arabia and Russia will increase production. "Volatility is going to be pretty high this week," said Bob Yawger, director of energy futures at Mizuho in New York. Indications from OPEC members and other large producers on the scale of potential production increases are likely to drive the market, he said. "Oil prices are reversing this mornings bout of weakness as bottom pickers enter the fray ahead of this weeks crucial OPEC/non-OPEC meeting," said Stephen Brennock, analyst at London brokerage PVM Oil Associates. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allied oil producers including Russia meet on June 22 in Vienna. Russia and OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia are pushing for higher output. Over the weekend, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak indicated the countries, which have cut production, would now consider increasing output 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in the third quarter only, the TASS news agency reported. Yet any output increase agreement could be muted because other OPEC members including Iraq said last week that production cuts should be maintained because prices still need support. Rising output from U.S. shale has stoked worries about potential oversupply. Five shale executives were set to speak at the OPEC seminar this week, but three, including Continental Resources Chief Executive Harold Hamm, have withdrawn. Despite potential downward pressure from large producers increasing output, Goldman Sachs maintained its bullish outlook. The bank said "the oil market remains in deficit ... requiring higher core OPEC and Russia production to avoid a stock-out by year-end". The bank said it expected OPEC and Russian output to rise 1 million bpd by year-end and another 0.5 million bpd in the first half of 2019. Societe Generale said it expects Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait to increase output by a combined 500,000 bpd beginning in July, and Russia to increase by 200,000 bpd within two to three months. "The focus will be on replacing Venezuelan losses," the bank said. Adding extra pressure are global trade tensions. U.S. President Donald Trump last week pushed ahead with tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports, starting on July 6. China retaliated by imposing import duties on U.S. products, and suggesting that crude oil tariffs were planned. "It's more of a threat than anything," said Joe McMonigle, senior energy policy analyst at Hedgeye Potomac Research. "They're trying to gain leverage in a soft spot for Trump to use for other concessions later." Benjamin Lu of brokerage Phillip Futures said Beijing's retaliation had spooked oil investors: "These punitive measures on bilateral trade have unnerved investors as it hurts global economic growth." U.S. bank Morgan Stanley said in a note to clients that the trade spat meant that economic "downside risks have risen". U.S. oil exports have boomed in the last two years as shale oil production has surged, with China becoming one of the biggest buyers. (Additional reporting by Henning Gloystein in Singapore and Christopher Johnson in London; editing by David Gregorio and Cynthia Osterman) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. Palghar police personnel pooled money to reward a physically challenged tribal boy who wrote his class 10 exam papers with his feet and secured distinction. Palghar: In a humanitarian gesture, some police personnel pooled money to reward a physically challenged 17-year-old tribal boy who wrote his class 10 exam papers with his feet and secured distinction. Kalpesh Dhoda, from Kallole village in Palghar, was born without hands. His father works as a security guard at a firm while his mother is a farm labourer. But, the boy's grit to study did not let his disability and poor financial background come in the way. Dhoda, who studied at a government ashram school for tribals (a residential school) at Betegaon, appeared for his Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examination conducted recently and wrote the exam papers with the help of his toes. He not only cleared the exams but also got a distinction by securing 75.4 percent marks. Moved by Dhoda's determination to invalidate his physical challenges, the personnel of the Kasa police station in Palghar pooled money and collected Rs 21,000. Palghar's Additional Superintendent of Police Yogesh Chavan handed over the sum to the boy's parents at a function on Monday. The emotionally overwhelmed parents of the boy were happy to receive the money. The Kasa police personnel also assured that they would provide any further assistance required for his higher education. Maharashtra Congress president Ashok Chavan lauded the policemen's gesture to reward and encourage the boy to study further. The girl's mother had moved the court seeking permission for either termination of the pregnancy of her minor daughter or a direction to her alleged rapist to pay a compensation of Rs 50 lakhs for her welfare. Jodhpur: A minor girl was allowed by the Rajasthan High Court to have her 21-week-old pregnancy terminated. A division bench of justices PS Bhati and Sandeep Mehta gave the permission on the plea of the minor girl's mother, stipulating that it would be done on an undertaking by her parents. The girl's mother had moved the court seeking permission for either termination of the pregnancy of her minor daughter or a direction to her alleged rapist to pay a compensation of Rs 50 lakhs for her welfare. The petition had been referred to the division bench by a single-judge bench with the recommendation to decide the petition on priority basis considering the pregnancy. Additional Advocate General Shiv Kumar Vyas said before arriving at this decision, the court sought a medical report on the condition of the foetus and risks involved, if any. "On Tuesday, the report was produced in the court by the doctors, who told the court that though the foetus was of 21 weeks but considering the condition of the foetus and the girl, abortion could be allowed," said Vyas. He said on doctors' assurance, the court allowed the abortion, stipulating that girl's parents would give a written undertaking for it. The girl had allegedly been kidnapped by one Gopal and got pregnant. Following a habeas corpus petition, she was produced in the court on 19 April but she refused to go back with her parent, following which she was sent to a minor girls' shelter. Later the girl agreed to go with her parents on the condition that they would not insist upon her to marry anybody else or to have her pregnancy aborted. "But her mother subsequently approached the competent authorities with a prayer to terminate her pregnancy which, she alleged, to be an outcome of rape," said the AAG. She subsequently moved the court under Article 226 of the Constitution claiming that the authorities had refused to permit termination of pregnancy, which she wanted," said the law officer. Separatist leaders have called for a complete shutdown in Kashmir to be observed on Wednesday, against the killing of journalist Shujaat Bukhari and civilians gunned down by security forces in the past few days Separatist leaders have called for a complete shutdown in Kashmir to be observed on Wednesday, against the killing of journalist Shujaat Bukhari and civilians gunned down by security forces in the past few days. The Joint Resistance Leadership, an amalgamation of separatist groups, said in a statement on Tuesday that there had been a sudden spike in civilian killings since the eve of Eid. It also demanded an international probe into Bukhari's killing. "Joint Resistance Leadership has called for a complete strike on Wednesday against the continued civilian killings in the valley, which has witnessed a sudden spike since the eve of Eid. Three young boys have been brutally gunned down by the Indian forces while the fourth is struggling for life at SKIMS," the statement said. He said the strike will also be observed against the brutal killing of Bukhari, who was shot dead along with his two personal guards outside his office on 14 June by unknown gunmen. "JRL demands an international probe into this gruesome murder," a spokesperson said in the statement. He said cordon and search operations had returned with a vengeance to the villages as people were being severely beaten and harassed and used as human shields. The strike comes amid speculations that separatist group Hurriyat Conference, among others, could be responsible for the assassination of 'Rising Kashmir' editor Shujaat Bukhari. The announcement came in the wake of reports claiming that BJP president Amit Shah has called for an urgent meeting of all Jammu and Kashmir BJP ministers and some top leaders in New Delhi on Tuesday. "All the BJP ministers have been called to New Delhi for a meeting," a senior BJP leader of Jammu and Kashmir BJP told PTI. Shah has called the meeting to discuss the political situation in the state including the impact of suspension of operations during Ramzan and its resumption. The report further added that Shah might also discuss the future strategy with ally PDP and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Suspending operations along the border area has miffed the PDP leadership and the rift is showing once again as the Centre wants to resume anti-terror operations in the state after Ramzan. While PDP thinks BJP leaders should make headway with the separatists and initiate dialogue with them, the BJP-led central government says that the separatists lost an opportunity as they did not take a cue from civil society, sources have told NDTV. The Centre had decided to suspend anti-terror operations during the holy month "in view of providing respite to the people". With inputs from PTI Guwahati : Assam police on Monday had arrested five more persons in connection with the Karbi Anglong lynching of two youth artists Nilotpal Das and Abhijit Nath at Panjuri village under Dokmoka police station in the hill district on June 8 evening. Assam police ADGP (Law and Order ) Mukesh Agarwala said that, police had arrested five persons for their alleged involvement in the lynching incident and they were identified as Raikom Timung, Mensing Kro, Roben Mech, Bikram Hanse and Pratap Kro. Police has so far arrested 36 persons in connection with the lynching incident. Police had registered a case (33/2018) at Dokmoka police station under section 302/34 of IPC in connection with the incident. Earlier, on June 13 last, police had arrested the main culprit identified as Alphajoz Timung alias Alpha, who allegedly instigated the lynching incident. Police had arrested Alphajoz nearby the Panjuri village, who sent out the message that the youths are child abductors. On June 8 evening, the main culprit Alphajos Timung allegedly first got into a small altercation with two Guwahati youth Nilotpal Das and Abhijit Nath near Kangthilangso waterfall and Alphajoz alleged that they are child lifters. The two Guwahati youths had refused the allegation and also tried to avoid him and left the place. Immediately, Alphajoz called up some his friends and pelted stones on the car where the youth duo travelled. Alphajoz also called up some people of the village and stating that, he has seen two child kidnappers who left from the place in a black colour SUV and repeatedly called up the villagers to stop the car and attack the child abductors. Rumours about child lifters (locally called Xupadhora) had fuelled the whole incident took place at the remote area and Alphajoz had allegedly used the recent viral messages of child lifter in social media to fulfil his own enmity. India and France are working to shape a strong development partnership, including in the fields of science and technology, Sushma Swaraj has said. Paris: India and France are working to shape a strong development partnership, including in the fields of science and technology, clean energy and infrastructure, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj has said as she met the country's top leadership and discussed issues of mutual interest from a strategic perspective. Swaraj, who arrived from Rome on Monday, on the second leg of her four-nation tour, called on French president Emmanuel Macron and discussed follow up to the understandings reached during his visit to India in March this year. She also met her French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian and the two leaders held in-depth and constructive discussions on full range of bilateral relationship, external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. "Our trade, capital and technology partnerships are registering impressive growth. Bilateral trade touched euros 9.85 billion (or $10.95 billion) last year. But, we need to do more to reach the set target of trade in goods to 15 billion euros by 2022," Swaraj was quoted as saying by Kumar. EAM @SushmaSwaraj : Our trade, capital & technology partnerships are registering impressive growth. Bilateral trade touched Euros 9.85 billion (or US$ 10.95 billion) last year. But, we need to do more to reach the set target of trade in goods to 15 billion Euros by 2022 pic.twitter.com/Gbu4VENhol Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) June 18, 2018 "India and France are also working to shape a strong development partnership, including in the fields of smart urbanisation, science and technology, clean energy, transportation, and infrastructure sectors," she said. EAM @SushmaSwaraj : India and France are also working to shape a strong development partnership, including in the fields of smart urbanization, science & technology, clean energy, transportation, and infrastructure sectors, etc. pic.twitter.com/eezWTFJpH3 Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) June 18, 2018 She said the visits of Prime Minister Modi to France in April 2015 and June 2017 and Macron to India have infused new momentum and dynamism to bilateral strategic partnership, brought about increased political convergence and built deep mutual trust. Swaraj also met Philippe Etienne, Diplomatic Advisor to Macron, and exchanged views on bilateral, regional and global issues of mutual interest from a strategic perspective. India and France are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their Strategic Partnership. Three top Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militants, including its operational commander, were killed in an encounter with security forces in Tral in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir, police said. Security forces have killed three Jaish-e-Mohammed militants, including its operational commander, in an encounter in Pulwama's Tral on Tuesday evening. A CRPF officer and four army men were also injured in the gunfight, Greater Kashmir reported. The encounter broke out after security forces launched a cordon-and-search operation in the area following specific intelligence inputs, a police official said. Earlier, the police had said that two unidentified militants, belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), were believed to have been killed in an encounter in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. Soon, officials confirmed that a Jaish commander has also been killed in the encounter. "Encounter going on at Hyena Tral, 3 (three) important JEM Terrorists trapped, 2 (two) apparently neutralised. Good luck to our boys fighting (sic)," Director General of Police (DGP) SP Vaid wrote on Twitter earlier. Two of the three militants were identified as Adil Ahmad of Midoora area and Danish Ahmad from Pinglish area in Tral. The third militant is reportedly not an Indian national. While Danish had joined militancy barely 23 days back, Adil had joined the militant's group merely 24 hours ago. The encounter broke out after security forces launched a cordon and search operation in the area in south Kashmir's Pulwama district following specific intelligence inputs, a police official said. He said the gunfight was going on when last reports came in, adding further details were awaited. With inputs from PTI Soldiers of an Indian Army patrol allegedly snatched mobile phones from over a dozen youths during random frisking of commuters in the Nowpora village of south Kashmir's Kulgam The altercation that consumed another Kashmiri life on Monday evening began when soldiers of an Indian Army patrol allegedly snatched mobile phones from over a dozen youths during random frisking of commuters in the Nowpora village of south Kashmir's Kulgam. Aggrieved locals alleged that the soldiers demanded that they show them the photo galleries on their phones, apparently for the soldiers to check if there were any pictures or videos of militants. Within minutes, the agitated youths began pelting stones at the army, sparking clashes. What led to the escalation in protests was a video showing the army and policemen turning some youths into human shields in order to protect themselves from stones being pelted at them during the frisking operation. The video went viral on social media, provoking further protests and violent clashes. In response, witnesses said the army fired directly at the protesters, resulting in bullet injuries to two civilians. One of them was identified as Ajaz Ahmad Bhat, a local, who was declared brought dead at a hospital where he was rushed for treatment. Witnesses said that Ajaz was among more two dozen people lined up by the army for frisking. One of his friends said it has become a routine for the forces over the past few years to check mobile phones of locals and search for militancy-related photos or videos. According to rights activists, if any such content is found on any mobile, the owner is subjected to harassment, beatings or even arbitrary detention. "It is a new tactic of intimidation used by cops and army soldiers. They demand mobile phones from pedestrians and commuters, and check them for militancy-related content. It is nothing more than harassment," said Mudasir Ahmad Kanjwal, a resident of Bajerpora-Nowpora in Kulgam district, over the phone. Another youth injured in the army firing on Monday and identified as Rayees Ahmad Shan (a tractor driver by profession) has been referred to a Srinagar hospital for treatment. The death in Kulgam is the third civilian killing in the past four days and it comes a day after Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh announced an end to the month-long halt in counterinsurgency operations, much against the wishes of the state government headed by Mehbooba Mufti. In south Kashmir, the epicentre of anti-India and pro-freedom protests since the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani in 2016, the forces had put a complete halt on counterinsurgency operations against militants. Random cordon and search operations had also stopped, bringing a temporary end to the record-breaking levels of bloodshed in the Valley this year. "Fewer militant attacks had taken place during this month," Director-General of Police SP Vaid, said, "which were carried out by people who are enemies of peace." According to sources, close to two dozen grenades were lobbed at security forces who came under attack as militants rejected the Centres unilateral offer to suspend counterinsurgency operations. With the Centre calling off the 'temporary ceasefire', the situation seems to be sliding back into chaos. On Monday afternoon, two video clips of "informers" surfaced on social media, purportedly showing the men admitting to having passed on crucial information to forces that led to the killings of militants. In the videos, two youths identified as Ajaz Ahmad Mir and Sheraz Ahmad Malik, both residents of Tren village of Shopian, can be seen shivering out of fear as the militants question them about their role in the militant killings. It is not known whether the two men are still alive. This follows another killing on the day of Eid in Anantnag during clashes between protesters and security forces that turned violent. With the situation hotting up, Kashmir is bracing for more bloodshed as government forces are likely to give a push to counterinsurgency operations after a 30-day break. Two operations were launched on Monday in Samboora and Bijbehara of south Kashmirs Pulwama district for the first time in over a month. The political situation also seems to be deteriorating with the BJP high command summoning all its ministers in Jammu and Kashmir to the National Capital for a crucial meeting on Tuesday after the end of the 'ceasefire'. The meeting will take place at a time when the law and order situation in the Valley is worsening and the state government is facing other security and development-related challenges. The Peoples Democratic Party, the alliance partner of the BJP in the state, was hoping that the suspension of counterinsurgency operations would be extended beyond the month of Ramzan as a way for the mainstream to wrest back the control of volatile areas in south Kashmir where governance-delivery systems recorded colossal damage in the past two years. However, the efforts of Mehbooba's party to restore even a semblance of peace have come to a naught. With the partys credibility at an all-time low in Kashmir, its leadership has apparently started taking a recourse to basics. PDP vice-president, Muhammad Sartaj Madni demanded an FIR against the patrolling party of 9 Rashtriya Rifles and an impartial inquiry to probe the circumstances in which a youth was killed and another injured in Kulgam on Monday evening. "It is tragic that civilians of my village are losing their lives for no fault of theirs. I demand immediate and strict action against those who are directly involved in the civilian killing," said Madni. "Whose cause is fulfilled by such brutal killings? This type of violent approach will benefit neither India nor Pakistan. Such an approach always has a devastating effect on the people of Jammu and Kashmir," he added. India has met the MDG (Millenium Development Goal) target for MMR (Maternal Mortality Ratio) of 139/lakh live births by achieving 130 by 2015. By Swagata Yadavar New Delhi: On 11 June, to mark four years of India's Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, Union health minister JP Nadda said: "India has met the MDG (Millenium Development Goal) target for MMR (Maternal Mortality Ratio) of 139/lakh live births by achieving 130 by 2015. At this rate, we shall achieve SDG (Sustainable Development Goal) target of 70 by 2022, ahead of target timeline of 2030." The World Health Organisation (WHO) commended India's MMR decline, calling its performance, "groundbreaking". But has India achieved its MMR goal? Not according to the MDG target listed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This appears to be because the baselines starting figures used by the UNDP and the government/WHO to calculate MDGs differ. On 6 June, the government released the latest MMR data, as calculated by the Sample Registration Survey (SRS), the most regular source for demographic statistics in India. The new data showed that maternal mortality had declined 22 percent over three years, from 167 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2011-13 to 130 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2012-16. The millenium development goal for India was to "reduce maternal mortality ratio by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015". The MMR in 1990 was 437 deaths per 100,000 live births according to the first ever national maternal mortality estimate by National Family Health Survey-1 (1992-93). This is cited by ministry of statistics and programme implementation (MOSPI) and the UNDP. So a 75 percent reduction makes the 2015 MDG target 109. But the MMR in 1990 was 560, according to the WHO and the ministry of health and family welfare (MOHFW). So a 75 percent reduction leaves the 2015 MDG target at 140. That means India has exceeded the WHO and health ministry target for the MDG but is 21 points behind the UNDP and ministry of statistics MDG target. We sent emails seeking comments to WHO on 12 June, and UNDP, ministry of health and family welfare and MOSPI on 13 June. We will update the story if and when they respond. "Post MDG, Sri Lanka, Brazil and China made significant progress in life expectancy, IMR (Infant Mortality Rate), MMR and adult mortality rate whereas Pakistan and India are lagging behind," said this 2016 NITI Aayog report on Sustainable Development Goals. Should India be happy with its progress on MMR? While India's MMR is better than some of its neighbours Pakistan (178), Bangladesh (176) and Nepal (258) and the global (216) and South Asian average (182), it is much behind Sri Lanka (30) according to World Bank figures for 2015. That's less than a quarter of India's MMR. India accounts for 17 percent of global burden of maternal deaths. The leading causes of death in India are haemorrhage (38 percent), sepsis (11 percent) and abortion (8 percent). "An improvement just in MMR figures isn't enough," Nitin Bajpai, technical expert at the Population Foundation of India, an advocacy, told FactChecker. "We need to see the cause of maternal death data collected by SRS. We need to see whether there is a reduction in haemorrhage cases, which would mean that the quality of care at health facilities has improved." While institutional deliveries have increased from 38.7 percent in 2005-06 to 78.9 percent in 2015-16, the number of women receiving at least four antenatal-care visits as the WHO recommends has not risen substantially. Up to 37 percent of women in 2005-06 received four antenatal-care visits, compared to 51.2 percent in 2015-16, according to the National Family Health Survey-4, leaving nearly half of Indias pregnant women with inadequate care, IndiaSpend reported in June 2018. The author is a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend and FactChecker. In Shades of Saffron, Saba Naqvi draws from her own first-person experiences to present anecdotes from the BJP's history and analyse its strategies Editor's note: The Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) win in the 2014 General Elections was a much-talked about result, with pundits not only highlighting the number of votes won by the party, but also its growth from being an entity in coalition politics to the power it assumed because of its single-party hegemony. In Shades of Saffron: From Vajpayee to Modi, journalist Saba Naqvi, who spent two decades covering the party, chronicles the story of the BJP from its birth in 1980 to the two times when it came into power. She draws from her own first-person experiences and interactions with party members to analyse strategies and present anecdotes from history, as well as discussing aspects such as the role of the RSS, political finance, and key figures from the party. The book is published by Westland Books. *** Apparently, right from the time she had decided to enter electoral politics, Sonia Gandhi was keen to contest only from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, the seat of her late husband, Rajiv Gandhi. Yet she ended up in Bellary because sundry arguments were trotted out by the Congress: the BJP would go to any lengths to make sure that she didnt enter parliament, even to the extent of putting up an ailing, dummy candidate whose death would lead to the election being countermanded; the sitting BJP MP from Amethi, Sanjay Singh, would resort to large-scale violence to get the polls countermanded; and finally, if she stood from just one constituency, the BJP would try to pin her down to that seat. Sonia obviously bought into these arguments and gave the go-ahead to a hare-brained plan to throw the Opposition off its track. The evening before the last date for filing nominations, Sonia took off for Hyderabad in a commercial flight, accompanied by her secretary, Vincent George, party General Secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad, and her security personnel. Azad made it a point to deliberately mislead the media into believing that Sonia was headed for Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh. When asked about Sonias eventual destination, he retorted: If we were going to Bellary, why would we be in Andhra Pradesh? As part of this elaborate charade, a small seven-seater aircraft and a helicopter were parked at Hyderabad airport. The flight plan given to the crew was that Sonia would take the chopper to Kadapa, and Azad would fly to Bellary. Finally, the lady accompanied by her entourage, drove to the airport and took off for Bellary, presumably smug in the belief that the BJP had been fooled. Not quite. The BJP came up with a stunning counter and I would eventually ferret out the interesting details of what followed. Several workers of the Congress party were well aware of the smokescreen that the high command was creating in its attempt to mislead the Opposition about Sonias eventual destination. Besides Bellary and Kadapa, the Congress was also putting out rumours that Madam Gandhi may eventually contest from Medak in Andhra Pradesh, which was held by her mother-in-law at the time of her assassination in October 1984. The BJP was first tipped off about this so-called grand plan on the morning of 17 August 1999, just a day before the final date for filing nominations. The civil aviation authorities had informed the ruling party that Sonia was booked for Hyderabad from where she could proceed either to Kadapa or to Bellary, in Karnataka. By noon, the BJP had learnt that the then Andhra Pradesh Congress chief, the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy had proceeded to his constituency, Kadapa instead of waiting on Sonia, as was the protocol. By evening, the BJP was alerted that the Special Protection Group (SPG) was making security arrangements in Bellary. Meanwhile, BJP General Secretary Venkaiah Naidu (now Vice President of India) was in Bengaluru working out details of seat distribution with the newly-constituted Janata Dal (U), even as news of Sonia Gandhis movements began to filter in. He immediately got into action and choreographed a game plan to counter the Congress president. He first telephoned the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, N Chandrababu Naidu in Hyderabad. The two discussed the possibility of propping up a candidate who could give a fight to Sonia in Kadapa. Should it be a strong local leader or an outsider? Why not a film star, suggested Chandrababu, who had piggybacked to political prominence as the son-in-law of the charismatic cinema idol, NT Rama Rao. Over the next few hours, there were four telephone conversations between the two Naidus. The chief minister suggested the names of two popular actressesJayapradha, then a TDP Rajya Sabha member, and Vijayashanti, described as the female Amitabh Bachchan of Telugu cinema, who had joined the BJP the year before. Eventually both felt that Vijayashanti, who had great mass appeal would be a perfect choice for a backward rural constituency like Kadapa. The question now was to get the ladys consent. It was well past midnight and Vijayashanti was in Chennai. Venkaiah Naidu then got in touch with his contacts in the film industry. At the unearthly hour of 1.30 am, Vijayashanti had two visitorsfilm director Chitty Babu, who was a member of the BJP, and Devi Vara Prasad, the well-known producer of several films starring the late NTR, and superstar Chiranjeevi (now member of the Congress party). Even as both men were trying to persuade Vijayashanti into agreeing to the plan, Venkaiah Naidu reached out to Home Minister LK Advani, who was then campaigning in Karaikudi in Tamil Nadu. Finally it took a woman to convince anotherVijayashanti consented after Advanis daughter, Pratibha spoke to her at 2 am. That done, the next step was to ensure that Vijayashanti reached Kadapa before the 3 pm deadline for filing nominations. One chopper was kept ready for her at Tirupati, while the then Civil Aviation Minister (now Minister for Parliamentary Affairs), Ananth Kumar, made sure that another helicopter was on standby at Chennai. Meanwhile, a parallel operation was also being put in place. The same night, the BJP leadership received an Intelligence tip-off that security in Bellary was being tightened. Things began to suddenly hot up in Bengaluru where Commerce Minister Ramakrishna Hegde was hammering out last minute details of the seat adjustments with Venkaiah Naidu. When asked about a possible candidate to prop up against Sonia Gandhi in Bellary, Hegde suggested Sushma Swarajs name. But there was a problemSushma had publicly announced that she wouldnt be contesting the forthcoming polls. Who now would persuade her to change her mind? Ramakrishna Hegde took the lead in this endeavour and rang Sushma Swaraj around midnight; Venkaiah also followed it up by calling her immediately thereafter. After some debate over the issue, Sushma Swaraj agreed to pick up the gauntlet if the BJP leadership decreed. Venkaiah Naidu now moved with great alacrity. At 1.30 am, he called BJP President Kushabhau Thakre. A sleepy Thakre liked the idea in principle, but advised Venkaiah to get it ratified from both LK Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Naidu contacted Advani yet again in Tamil Nadu. Excellent idea, said the Home minister, but clear it with the Prime Minister as well? Reluctant to wake up Vajpayee at that hour, Venkaiah Naidu meanwhile utilised the time to tie up every loose end. He worked through the night to make all the travel arrangements, and got the paper work in order for Swaraj to file her nomination. Finally, Sushma Swaraj was booked on an early morning commercial flight from Delhi to Bengaluru. A helicopter was procured and parked discreetly at the Jakkur airfield in north Bengaluru. At 6.30 am, Venkaiah Naidu finally mustered up the courage to call the prime minister who gave his consent after ascertaining that Sushma was ready to meet the challenge. Soon thereafter, Sushma Swaraj, dressed traditionally as a married Hindu woman, complete with a bright red bindi, sindoor in the parting of her hair, colourful bangles adorning her wrists and a mangalsutra around her neck, embarked on one of the most high-profile electoral battles of her political life. She landed in Bellary wearing BJP colours (a green blouse, and a bright orange sari), and in one of her first statements proclaimed that she represented the swadeshi brand against the videshi Sonia. It became the battle royal of 1999: the BJPs behenji versus the Gandhi bahuji. It is a battle for Indian self-respect, Sushma declared. Quick with words, she picked up a few Kannada phrases and used them to full effect. The BJP believed they wouldnt lose even if Sonia technically won the election. The BJP had won this round, and the Congress president was in a sense, ambushed in Bellary. As a counter, the Congress hurriedly announced the next day that Sonia would also contest from Amethi. The early announcement this time around was aimed at pre-empting the suggestion that she would stand from Amethi (where nominations closed on 14 September) only if the trend in Bellary was unfavourable. In the end, despite the constant manoeuvering and war room-like strategies, it was Sonia Gandhi who won the Bellary seat by a margin of 56,000 votes, although it was clearly a low margin given the seats electoral history. There was also no doubt in anyones mind that Sushma Swaraj had made her mark as a great campaigner and smart politician. When Hegde and Venkaiah Naidu had first suggested the idea to her, she had come up with a clever response: It would be like fighting the Kargil war. Ill either be a glorious martyr or a triumphant victor.' Of the many predictable things about Arvind Kejriwal's dharna at the residence of Delhi lieutenant-governor Anil Baijal, perhaps the most predictable is its timing. Of the many predictable things about Arvind Kejriwal's dharna at the residence of Delhi lieutenant-governor Anil Baijal, perhaps the most predictable is its timing. It was expected that in the run-up to the 2019 general elections, Kejriwal and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) would pull off some stunt to divert the attention of Delhi residents from their non-performance and non-governance (whatever be the reasons for it), including water and electricity woes during peak summer season. Kejriwal and AAP are attempting to extract sympathy by projecting themselves as victims of the system. Victims of the system! The never before heard theory of a chief minister being the victim of the system he is working in! This alone can help rid the AAP of their problem of not delivering to Delhi on its big bang promises. So, as the general elections approach, expect the desperation within the AAP to prove their persecution by their bete noire, the BJP, through Baijal's office to only increase. But desperate measures have the knack of often not being well received by the recipient. Which is what happened with the AAP's dharna this time. First, people were amused to see an air-conditioned dharna for the first time in Indias political history: Four of the most senior AAP government functionaries, including the chief minister, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, and two cabinet ministers, Gopal Rai and Satyendar Jain, reclining on a sofa in front of a humming air conditioner. The photographs of this dharna to protest the IAS officers' "strike", allegedly at the instigation of Baijal were sent to everyone. Gone was the heat and dust of Ram Leela Maidan or the Delhi streets. This time, the site of the AAP dharna was an air-conditioned room. This alone nullified AAP's efforts to create an atmosphere of its revolutionary days before it came to power in Delhi and put its members on the warpath against an "evil adversary". But it didn't work out this time. Second, the people of Delhi didn't seem to buy the idea of people in power protesting against the administration. Usually, it is the powerless who protest against the powerful. Hence, this protest looked unnatural and Delhi citizens gave it a cold shoulder. To be a minister, one must have the ability to handle bureaucrats. A minister's inability to do so is a mark of failure. The bureaucrats seemed to have had the upper hand against the AAP ministers and they rather smartly held a press conference to reiterate that they were never on strike. Which also punctured the AAPs efforts to gain sympathy. Third, it gave the Opposition the ammunition it needed to go after the AAP all guns blazing. BJP leaders and some AAP deserters sat on a dharna inside the Kejriwal's office, which drew the attention of the media. Here, they gave sound bite after sound bite against the AAP. It also gave an opportunity to Sheila Dikshit to claim she had done maximum development work for Delhi while there was a BJP government at the Centre and wondered how a chief minister could blame the L-G for not delivering to the people of Delhi. But it was the Delhi High Court that seemingly put the final nail in the coffin of the AAP dharna when it asked the party's lawyers: Who authorised the sit-in at Baijal's office? While a dharna cannot always be authorised, the fact remains that Kejriwal and the AAP simply barged into Baijal's office and refused to leave until their demands are met. Which also raises questions of trespassing and holding to ransom a constitutional head. The court will take up the matter in a few days and pass its orders, but as of now, this much is known: This time, the people's court in Delhi ruled against the AAP and forced it to call off its dharna. This is the only way it could have ended: With Kejriwal tucking his tail between his legs. Yeh public hai, yeh sab jaanti hai (the public knows all). It can very well distinguish between a dharna and a drama! AAP MLA Somnath Bharti said the Delhi lieutenant governor brought in heavy police to have them escorted from his office instead of speaking to them for two minutes. Aam Aadmi Party MLAs on Tuesday refused to leave Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal's office after attending a meeting on the Delhi Master Plan. An official release, issued by the L-G office, said that two AAP MLAs who attended the meeting refused to leave the office mimicking their chief minister and left after much pursuance, Firstpost reporter informed. The release said: "The meeting ended, two Honble MLAs Somnath Bharti and PS Bagga, who came to attend the meeting, refused to leave the residential premises of Hon'ble Lieutenant-Governor on the pretext of joining the 'dharna' of Honble CM. Hon'ble MLAs were repeatedly requested to end their unauthorised occupation of the residential premises of Hon'ble Lieutenant-Governor. However, they refused to leave and continued their unauthorised occupation for about two hours and left only after considerable persuasion." Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues have been holding a sit-in protest at the lieutenant-governor's office since 11 June, demanding that Baijal order IAS officers to end their "strike" and approve the government's doorstep ration delivery scheme. Bharti took to Twitter to criticise Baijal for his use of force. He said he was "ashamed" that the lieutenant-governor would use "heavy police" to escort them out of their office, instead of "hearing us out" for two minutes. "Possibly the most potent democratic tool, namely dialogue, has no place in the Modi era," he tweeted. Ashamed that Honble LG in place of hearing us out for 2 min used heqvy police led by ACP Sri Tyagi to oust us from LG House. Possibly the most potent democratic tool namely dialogue has no place in the Modi era. pic.twitter.com/OB6NEbpDUr Adv. Somnath Bharti (@attorneybharti) June 19, 2018 Bharti said that along with Bagga, AAP's Krishna Nagar MLA, he was waiting in the conference room of L-G office after furnishing a letter seeking the appointment with Baijal. He said that he wanted to meet the L-G for the "deadlock" in Delhi but was asked to move out and later "ousted" with the help of police. However, a senior police officer said that Bharti and Bagga did not have an appointment to meet Baijal and were asked to leave. "We checked with the control room of the L-G office whether the MLAs had any appointment with the L-G but they said that there was no meeting fixed. The MLAs were asked to leave and no police force used to oust them," he added. Meanwhile, the Raj Niwas in a statement said the Lieutenant Governor chaired the DDA meeting to consider the public suggestions and comments which were sought on the issue of the proposed amendments in the Master Plan of Delhi (MPD) 2021. On Tuesday, IAS officers said they were waiting for a formal communication from Kejriwal for a meeting at the secretariat to end the impasse between IAS officers and the Delhi government, which began after the alleged assault on chief secretary Anshu Prakash in February. Their statement comes a day after Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia requested the lieutenant-governor to hold a meeting with the government and bureaucrats to end the ongoing deadlock. Meanwhile, Sisodia, who was admitted to hospital after his health deteriorated because of his hunger strike at the L-G's office, resumed work on Tuesday after being discharged. Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain, too, is expected to resume work on Tuesday. He was admitted to hospital a day before Sisodia, also because of his hunger strike. The two ministers had been part of Kejriwal's dharna at the L-G's office. With inputs from PTI and Kangkan Acharyya. Kejriwal, in an angry letter to Narendra Modi, alleged that the prime minister was operating with the intention of paralyzing the Delhi government, since it wasn't run by the BJP. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal wrote a letter to the prime minister, his third since Thursday, appealing him to interfere and solve the impasse between government, lieutenant-governor, and bureaucrats in Delhi. Kejriwal, in an angry letter to Narendra Modi, alleged that the prime minister was operating with the intention of paralysing the Delhi government, since it wasn't run by the BJP. He claimed that the Centre was operating in a way to block every move devised by the Government of Delhi and said that former chief minister Sheila Dikshit had much more power in her hands. "I am supposed to work with the IAS officers but I can't take disciplinary action against them, can't transfer them, and I can't even punish the corrupt officers," Kejriwal wrote. "Delhi was half-a-state before you took over the reigns. But after you came to power, it does not even have 10 percent powers of what a state has," Kejriwal said. "You want all the control while you want us to shoulder all the responsibility, how is that possible?" Kejriwal rued. He also demanded that if not full statehood, the Centre should at least restore powers that the previous Delhi governments had, and AAP will end its strike. Warning against the collapse of the federal structure, Kejriwal said that the BJP-led central government is meddling with the constitutional tenets that ensures a federal structure. He also said that the unprecedented, undeclared strike by the bureaucrats also set a dangerous precedent. He also alleged that AAP MLAs Somnath Bharti and AK Bagga, who were seeking an appointment to meet Baijal, were forefully removed by the police from the L-G's office where they had gone to attend a DDA meeting. Both Bharti and Bagga, members of the Delhi Development Authority(DDA), after the meeting stayed back at the LG's office and sought an appointment to meet Baijal. Kejriwal's letter comes on the ninth day of his protest when there are finally signs of a let up in the impasse in the national capital. The IAS officers have asked to meet Kejriwal and his cabinet at the Delhi Secretariat, if their dignity and security was ensured. the they were waiting for a formal communication from Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for a meeting at the secretariat here to end the impasse. "#DelhiAtWork #NoToStrike In the context of Honble CM's assurance, we await formal communication for a meeting with him in the Delhi Secretariat. We reiterate that we continue to be at work," the association tweeted. He had, on Thursday, written to Modi, seeking his intervention to end the strike, claiming that Baijal was doing nothing to end the impasse. Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues have been holding a sit-in at the LG's office since 11 June, demanding a direction to the officers to end their "strike". There are five reasons why the BJP was finally compelled to dismantle the untenable alliance. The only legitimate question that can be asked of a moribund alliance lying in a coma at the intensive care unit is this: What motivated the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to pull the life support plug now? There are five reasons why the BJP was finally compelled to dismantle the untenable alliance. 1. Differences over extension of non-initiation of combat operations The BJP, under pressure from Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had half-heartedly agreed to it as part of coalition compulsion but it eventually came to a conclusion it may have to pay a steep political price for extending it and the cost might have a spillover effect nationally in an election season. The party was also mindful that as a tactical gesture, it may have had limited success for PDP but it sullied BJP's image of a nationalist party that brooks no compromise with separatist elements. An extension would have dealt a further blow to BJP's image and voter base. Conversely, the PDP was keen to ensure an extension because the Indian Army's search and cordon operation was squeezing further its already perilous political space. A strong local component in separatist violence meant that many neutralised terrorists were locals and with each killing of a terrorist or their civilian aides, the PDP government was experiencing further and further erosion of its voter base. 2. Dramatic escalation of conflict in self-interests The self-interests of two "allies" were juxtaposed in such a way that both parties were pulling in opposite directions. While BJP's state leaders and workers were in favour of a strong response against terrorists and backed Indian Army's 'flush-out' operations, Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti was finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the resentment and adopt a counter-narrative. Under the circumstances, Mufti did what she had to. The decision to postpone the search and cordon operations was taken at her behest. It was aimed at generating a political breather for BJP and creating an atmosphere where talks with separatists might be carried out. The BJP was not at all averse to the idea and dropped large hints that it is ready to talk to anyone, including the Hurriyat as a first step towards initiating a peace process. 3. The murders of Bukhari and Aurangzeb This is where Mufti's carefully laid plan was sabotaged by the terrorists. By killing a high-profile target such as Sujaat Bukhari and Rashtriya Rifles jawan Aurangzeb, the terrorists wanted to disrupt the momentum generated by the non-initiation of combat operations (NICO). The cynical plan of the disruptors was incumbent on the calculation that the murder of a noted journalist an independent voice of peace in the Valley will transcend geographical space, gain national and international attention and cause widespread condemnation. Amid the monotony of everyday violence, the terrorists needed to raise the bar to create talking points. Equally, the kidnap and murder of a jawan was planned to sow dissent within the armed forces (that never supported the plan) and show BJP in poor light among its base. These pincer movements, the attackers hoped, would put enormous pressure on Centre and compel it to cancel any idea of extension leading to a strain in the alliance. Once the brutal murders took place, the wheels of the alliance came off. 4. Amarnath Yatra If refusal to extend NICO was the immediate trigger, Amarnath Yatra was the main reason that caused the split. It would have been an enormous risk for the BJP to extend it and hope that terrorists won't conduct an operation similar to the one carried out on 10 July, 2017. It not only hampers search and cordon operations, it also places restrictions on forces' ability to gather intelligence on movement of terrorists. Obviously, it had to go. But that is only one part of the problem. Even if the forces resume their hot pursuit of terrorists to dominate and sanitise the route, a civil administration that may resent the preemptive steps taken by forces presents yet another, and possibly bigger risk. It was inevitable therefore that the alliance would collapse and Governor's Rule will be imposed. The immediate fallout of the breaking of ruling coalition will be on the security situation in the Valley. It is likely that security forces will now launch renewed search and cordon operations without being subjected to the ambiguities of political will. 5. An attempt to cut losses ahead of 2019 Breaking the alliance was the only legitimate move in a toxic climate where radicalism is riding pillion on separatism in the Valley. The BJP could sense that the only way for Valley-based parties like PDP which unlike the saffron unit has no national base to survive is by adopting a shade of separatism that is just a bit softer than the secessionist narrative in the troubled state. BJP's move can therefore be termed as an attempt to cut its losses and consolidate its power in the Hindu-dominated Jammu region. The BJP said it was untenable for the party to continue in alliance in the Jammu and Kashmir government. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on Tuesday, ended its alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir, effectively pulling out of the coalition government. Soon after, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav announced the party's decision at a press conference in Delhi, soon after party president Amit Shah held an emergency meeting with Jammu and Kashmir ministers and other top leaders in the National Capital. "In the last four years, we discussed how many of the objectives we had planned earlier were achieved," Madhav said, "After a lot of discussions, the prime minister, Amit Shah and other BJP leaders decided that it has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance in Jammu and Kashmir." He added that the the present scenario in the Valley cannot be handled by the present government in the state. "We had to respect the people's mandate (when the BJP-PDP) coalition was formed after the last Jammu and Kashmir elections)," he said. In the 89-seat Jammu and Kashmir Assembly, the PDP holds 28 seats and the BJP, 25. The coalition completed three years in February 2018. "Jammu and Kashmir has faced several ups and downs," Madhav said. "There was a rise in violence and terrorism in the past, as well. All I'm saying is that we came to the conclusion that the present scenario cannot be handled by the present government at this juncture. And our presence in this government is totally untenable." Signs of strain in the alliance were visible after two BJP ministers participated in a rally the Hindu Ekta Manch had organised earlier this year in support of the accused in the rape and murder case of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu's Kathua district. The BJP had asked both ministers to resign from state cabinet. However, the final straw that snapped the alliance could be the BJP's decision to not extend the suspension of anti-terror operations in the Valley, which was announced at the onset of Ramzan. "We had implemented the suspension of counterinsurgency operations from a position of strength, but they were not ready to accept this," Madhav said. "Law and order is managed by the state. In Jammu and Kashmir, action against terrorists had been taken by both the state and the Centre, which has produced results." The BJP on Tuesday sent a letter to Governor of Jammu and Kashmir NN Vohra, informing him of its decision to pull out of the state government. Minutes after the party went public with its decision, Mufti called for an emergency meeting of the PDP at 4 pm, which will be followed by a press conference at 5 pm. Follow LIVE updates here. Kathmandu, Nepal: Funeral rites for Senior Neurosurgeon Dr. Upendra Devkota have been performed at Pashupati Aryaghat through electric crematorium on Tuesday. Devkotas funeral pyre was lit by his wife Dr. Madhu Devkota and his daughters trios Medha, Basudha and Manjari. Hundreds of thousands relatives and well-wishers were present at the funeral rites. Before taking at Pashupati Aryaghat for funeral rites, Devkotas body was kept on the premises of Neuro Hospital, Bansbari for condolence. Thousands of well-wishers had paid their last tributes to Devkota. Emerging situations on the ground were such that the BJP leadership couldnt ignore them any longer and had to take the hard decision of pulling out from the government and bring down a popularly elected government of which it was part for the last three years. On 1 March, 2015, PDP and BJP the two most unlikely parties came together to form the first of its kind government in Jammu and Kashmir thereby scripting one of the most debatable chapters in independent Indias political history. Exactly after three years, three months and 19 days, on 19 June, 2018 this bonhomie ended when the BJP unilaterally decided to pull out of the coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir, where the party had become part of the ruling dispensation for the first time. Other than getting surprised and upset with BJP's sudden action, the PDP has little to do as the Mehbooba Mufti government has effectively fallen and a notification on Governor's Rule may be expected anytime soon. It was probably a difficult decision for the BJP leadership, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah in particular. Given the manner things turned out on the ground, it caused a great amount of unease among all ranks in BJP, particularly to those from the Jammu region where the party had swept the Assembly polls in 2014 winning 25 seats (up by 11 seats). Although a complex coalition was stitched between the two parties, the unsustainability of the alliance was increasingly becoming evident. However, until Monday nobody had clue what was in store for Tuesday. What was a matter of pride in 2015-16 for the BJP had gradually turned into a kind of liability, which incurred further diminishing returns with each passing day. Incidents of "terrorism, violence and radicalisation" were on the rise, said BJP general secretary and party' points person for Jammu and Kashmir Ram Madhav while assessing the prevailing atmosphere in the state. In all likelihood, the assassination of journalist Shujaat Bukhari on the eve of Eid was the ultimate trigger for Tuesday's decision by the BJP. Emerging situations on the ground were such that the BJP leadership couldnt ignore them any longer and had to take the hard decision of pulling out from the government and bring down a popularly elected government of which it was part for the last three years. By doing so the BJP could now take a moral high-ground that they sacrificed their own government in the state because of their avowed "nation first" philosophy. Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh had recently visited Jammu and Kashmir and had made a first-hand assessment of the situation. The BJP leadership may have decided to pull down the Mufti government now but their trust in her ability to rule had gone long ago. The only thing that was in contention was the timing. There were a lot of complaints against her that she would not act on central intelligence and security agencies' inputs and would continue to play soft towards anti-social and anti-national elements. A seasoned leader, Singh would appear cool in public with Mufti or while visiting Kashmir but as sources said he was deeply disturbed about the developments in the Valley and didn't really approve of the continuance of the PDP-BJP government in the state. The announcement of ceasefire or NICO (Non-initiation of combat operations) during the holy month of Ramzan was the last ditch attempt by the Centre to build goodwill and see if any faction of separatists, militant outfits or people at large supported it. This despite the fact that there was evidence to suggest when a similar exercise was undertaken by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government years back, the move had become counterproductive. The killing of Shujaat Bukhari and Indian Army soldier Aurangzeb along with the whole lot of other incidents proved that ceasefire was a failed move and thus the Modi government was forced to abort it ahead of Amarnath yatra. Earlier in the day on Tuesday when National Security Advisor Ajit Doval drove to BJP chief Shahs residence in New Delhi, not many people realised the importance of it, least of all what was going to come in the next few hours. Most people mistook this all-important meeting as a general consultation on preparedness for Amarnath yatra. Though it's not unprecedented that top government officials drive to meet top political leaders of various parties to share inputs on specific subjects, but it was left to Ram Madhav to tell the country as to what must have transpired between Doval and Shah. It appears as though Shah wanted to take a full-scale briefing about the situation before taking a final call. He even summoned all senior BJP leaders to the party headquarters in New Delhi for a detailed meeting before taking the call. It can now be expected that security agencies in Kashmir Valley would go tough against militants and take hard steps to restore normalcy. During the ceasefire, they nullified some of the gains it had made in past few months vis-a-vis militants but now with the Governor's Rule in the offing, they will come down hard against overt and covert supporters of militants groups. Containing radicalisation of youth would be prime on the agenda of intelligence and security forces as well. Mehbooba Mufti has resigned as Jammu and Kashmir chief minister and sent her resignation letter to Governor NN Vohra, reports have said. Auto refresh feeds "After a lot of discussions, the prime minister and Amit Shah and other BJP leaders decided that it has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance in Jammu and Kashmir," Madhav said. "In the last fours, we discussed how many of the objectives which we had planned earlier were achieved," BJP national general secretary Ram Madhav said in the press conference. It has become untenable for BJP to continue in alliance in J&K: Ram Madhav "It pains me to say that those who are more in control of the government could not achieve these objectives," he added. "Because the whole government does not belong to the BJP, there was a sort of discrimination which the people of Jammu and Ladakh were experiencing," he said. "The home minister used to visit the Valley from time to time. You know that an interlocutor was also appointed for addressing grievances of the people in Jammu and Kashmir," Madhav said, as he stressed on how the central government had strived for the development of the region. "Central government was doing all it could for the development of Jammu and Kashmir," Ram Madhav said. "We had suspended operations in the Valley because of the importance of Ramzan for the people in Jammu and Kashmir. We had expected a good response from the Hurriyat. This was a goodwill gesture. But during this one month, there was no appropriate response from the terrorists and other people," he said. "Keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India, we have decided that it is time the reins of power in the state be handed over to the Governor," Ram Madhav. Reins of power in the state should be handed over to the Governor: Ram Madhav This is not the first time that differences have cropped up between the alliance partners. Earlier, the PDP reportedly threatened to pull out of the coalition over the issue of two BJP ministers rallying behind the Hindu Ekta Manch, which was demanding a CBI inquiry into the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district. The BJP had asked both the ministers to resign from cabinet. "Today, after destroying the state, BJP cannot just run away from its responsibilities by pulling out of the alliance with PDP," he also said. "During the rule of this government, the most number of ceasefire violations took place along the border," Azad said. "We are glad that BJP has accepted its mistake," said Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad. "When Congress had formed a government in Jammu and Kashmir, we had reduced terrorism. But right from the moment BJP had come to power in Jammu and Kashmir, we had said that the state was on the path of destruction," he added. A principal reason, according to a person familiar with the BJP's decision-making mechanism, was the safety of pilgrims during the upcoming Amarnath Yatra; it was felt that with violence in the Valley continuing unabated during cessation of security operations, the likelihood of yatris being attacked was high, and this did not sit well with BJP leaders. Sources within the BJP said several party leaders were "relieved" that the alliance had been called off. Outgoing Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti is currently chairing a emergency meet with her party's legislators. The meeting was hurriedly called up after the BJP publically announced it was puling the plug on the state government, pushing Mehbooba-led government in minority. She is expected to speak to the press at around 5 pm. Breaking of the alliance was the only legitimate move in a toxic climate where radicalism is riding pillion on separatism in the Valley. The BJP could sense that the only way for Valley-based parties like PDP which unlike the saffron unit has no national base to survive is by adopting a shade of separatism that is just a bit softer than the secessionist narrative in the troubled state. BJP's move can therefore be termed as an attempt to cut its losses and consolidate its power in the Hindu-dominated Jammu region Omar Abdullah said, "We are not at all celebrating this break up. No responsible political party could be happy with the governor's rule. We are mourning the demise of democracy." He said that he had suggested many times that Mehbooba should leave the alliance but she did not do it because she wished to remain in power. He also said that the BJP not informing its coalition partner of its decision was unfortunate. "I as a former chief minister wish Mehbooba Mufti would have gone out with her dignity intact. She chose to be dismissed not to leave with dignity," Omar said. Mehbooba should have gone out with some dignity, says Omar Abdullah Union home minister Rajnath Singh is reportedly heading a high-level security meet on the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir. NSA Ajit Doval and Intelligence Bureau chief Rajiv Jain are reportedly at the home minister's residence, breifing him on the security situation in the Valley. "I think we should trust the wisdom of Governor NN Vohra to take decisions in favour of the state. We have to understand that he is a very senior man and has completed 10 years in the state. He knows how to rule the state," Omar added. "We requested the governor that Governor's rule should not remain imposed for a long time period. After all, people have the right to choose their government. Fresh elections should take place & we will accept the mandate of the people," Omar Abdullah said. "We have always believed that muscular policies won't work in Jammu and Kashmir. This is not enemy territory. This is the reason for the unilateral ceasefire," she also said. "The biggest apprehension was Article 370, about our special status. In the last three years, we defended Article 370 in courts. We also withdrew cases against over 11,000 youths," she added. "It took a lot of months to come to an agenda, whose main objective was reconciliation and dialogue in Jammu and Kashmir. We wanted confidence-building measures in Kashmir," she said. "I have submitted my resignation to the Governor. Mufti Mohammad Sayeed had entered into this alliance, thinking that BJP is a big party which had got a big mandate," Mehbooba Mufti said. "We had not entered into this alliance for power. The bigger objective for this alliance was unilateral ceasefire, peace in the Valley, talks with Pakistan. We did not do this for power," said the outgoing chief minister. "The healing touch policy of PDP is the only policy which will work in Jammu and Kashmir. Muscular policy won't work in Jammu and Kashmir," Mufti said. "This should have happened a long time. This alliance should never have been formed. It was something which could never possibly work," BJP leader Subramanian Swamy told CNN-News18. "Mehbooba has never been straight. She has deep sympathy for terrorists," he said. "The four-year-old BJP rule at the Centre and the three-year-old coalition of the BJP and PDP in Jammu and Kashmir has been an utter failure. The BJP's decision to pull out (of the coalition government in the state) is a bid to save itself from the governance failures of the last three years," alleged NCP national spokesman Nawab Malik. On a day the BJP pulled out of the Mehbooba Mufti government in Jammu and Kashmir, the NCP said the saffron party took the decision in a bid to "save" itself from the "governance failures" of the last three years. The BJP and PDP have devastated the state government. They have had the maximum number of ceasefire violations in this period," said Ghulam Nabi Azad. Whosoever rules Jammu and Kashmir, it makes very little difference unless New Delhi doesnt stop seeing Kashmir from the law and order perspective. Time has proved that from ceasefire to talk offer, everything has failed, Rashid said. Rashid said, BJP has made PDP a scapegoat for more than one reason, and while on one hand, the party proposes to gain sympathies in the rest of India by claiming to have preferred so-called national interest over party interest, on the other hand, New Delhi has been facing huge embarrassments at national and international levels for its failures in Jammu and Kashmir. Claiming that the end of PDP-BJP alliance has exposed New Delhis failures and its flawed policies, independent lawmaker Engineer Rashid has said that unless New Delhi doesnt delink governance with the larger political issue, all measures are going to fail. The party has always maintained the policy of 'nation first', he added. PTI Sethi said that the BJP has proved to one and all that for it staying in power is not significant when it comes to national interest. "It is well thought decision in the given circumstances as continuation of the alliance would have been against national interest," he told reporters in Srinagar. Chief spokesperson of J&K BJP Sunil Sethi said the insistence of the PDP for extension of the period of suspension of operations and soft approach towards militants, Pakistan and separatists were hurting the nationalistic sentiments not only in Jammu and Kashmir but across the country. Glad #BJPPDP alliance ended. No way to run a state. Things are going out of control there and we haven't been able to do anything about it. Time for total rethink on Kashmir and doing what it takes to fix the problem. It took you 3.5 years & sacrifice of around 600 soldiers to realise that you should take back your support in #JammuAndKashmir . When you know how that govt functions, how could you even support them for so long: Uddhav Thackeray, Shiv Sena on BJP calling off alliance with PDP pic.twitter.com/V7XxjuT6oB It took you sacrifice of around 600 soldiers to realise you should take back your support: Uddhav Thackeray to BJP Local leadership, Deputy CM (of J&K) & state ministers were taken into confidence, in the interest of the country & J&K BJP took this step & BJP will continue to do whatever is necessary for benefit of the state: UP CM Yogi Adityanath on BJP withdrawing from alliance with PDP pic.twitter.com/vqqJNcVUNc "The four-year-old BJP rule at the Centre and the three-year-old coalition of the BJP and PDP in Jammu and Kashmir has been an utter failure. The BJP's decision to pull out (of the coalition government in the state) is a bid to save itself from the governance failures of the last three years," alleged NCP national spokesman Nawab Malik. On a day the BJP pulled out of the Mehbooba Mufti government in Jammu and Kashmir, the NCP said the saffron party took the decision in a bid to "save" itself from the "governance failures" of the last three years. The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails. The BJP and PDP have devastated the state government. They have had the maximum number of ceasefire violations in this period," said Ghulam Nabi Azad. Soon after the BJP decided to pull out of the ruling alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, the Left parties voiced their concern over the political and law-and-order situation in the state, and said the Centre should share its assessment of the present situation with all political parties. - PTI Coming together of the BJP and the PDP after the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly polls in 2014 to form government was an "opportunistic" move, the Left parties said. The situation in Jammu & Kashmir has deteriorated completely in the past three years due to naked opportunism and greed for power displayed by the BJP. As a party in power at the centre and state, the BJP cannot avoid responsibility for its actions. BJP-PDP alliance Latest Updates: In latest updates, Jammu and Kashmir BJP chief spokesperson said that the party showed that the nation was the most important for its policies. Mehbooba Mufti said that she has submitted her resignation to the Jammu and Kashmir governor. She said that muscular policies will not work in the state. Jammu and Kashmir governor NN Vohra met former chief minister Omar Abdullah. Mehbooba Mufti has resigned as Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister and sent her resignation letter to Governor NN Vohra, reports have said. Mehbooba Mufti had cancelled all meetings since Tuesday morning after getting a whiff about the New Delhi decision. On the streets of Srinagar people are saying that the break-up was long awaited and hope it happens for the good of people. Mehbooba is set to address media in Srinagar at 5 pm. The PDP has also called for an emergency meeting at 4 on Tuesday evening. Bharatiya Janata Party has snapped the alliance in Jammu and Kashmir with the Peoples Democratic Party which is headed by Mehbooba Mufti, BJP national general secretary and in-charge of Jammu and Kashmir Ram Madhav announced on Tuesday. "It is good that this government ended. They were both brutal. PDP came to power on the promise it would not allow BJP to form the government but ended up making an alliances with the same party," Shuja Ahmad Sheikh, a resident of Srinagar told Firstpost on the Residency Road after the BJP announced that the alliance with PDP has ended. "The BJP has humiliated PDP like no other regional party could do it. It is move aimed at 2019 elections in India," Sheikh said. Madhav said the parties tried hard to maintain the alliance but it became untenable to follow through. "We had called this meeting (Tuesday morning) to discuss the situation in Jammu and Kashmir. Even freedom of expression has become an issue in the Valley," Madhav said. "Terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of the citizens are under danger in the Valley. Shujaat Bukhari's killing is an example," Madhav said. "Centre did everything for the Valley. We have tried to put a full-stop to the ceasefire violations by Pakistan. PDP has not been successful in fulfilling its promises. Our leaders have been facing a lot of difficulties from PDP in developmental works in Jammu and Ladakh," said Madhav. Described as "strange bedfellows" and "uneasy alliance", the BJP-PDP coalition always struggled to run in a state which struggled to sort out any issue amicably. The BJP-PDP alliance was, in fact, called the 'South and North Pole.' As described by Madhav, the problems plaguing Jammu and Kashmir were extremely complex and with an alliance which never saw eye to eye, it was extremely difficult to agree upon anything. This is not the first time that differences have cropped up between the alliance partners. Earlier, the PDP reportedly threatened to pull out of the coalition over the issue of two BJP ministers rallying behind the Hindu Ekta Manch, which was demanding a CBI inquiry into the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district. The BJP had asked both the ministers to resign from cabinet. Here is a list of MLAs in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly The Bharatiya Janata Party pulled out of the alliance with the People's Democratic Party, pushing the Mehbooba Mufti-led is Jammu and Kashmir government i minority. The news comes amid reports of growing tension in the BJP-PDP alliance, each blaming the other for rising militancy, mob violence and low voter turnout in the recent parliamentary bypolls. Amit Shah met the Jammu BJP leaders on Tuesday after which the party has called a press conference. The BJP central leadership would deliberate on the party's strategy in the state ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls and also take stock of the political situation in Jammu and Kashmir, sources said. "All the BJP ministers have been called to New Delhi for a meeting," a senior Jammu and Kashmir BJP leader told PTI. BJP state chief Ravinder Raina and party general secretary (organisation) Ashok Kaul have been also called for the meeting. The announcement comes after Ram Madhav said in April that there was no immediate threat to the alliance. BJP ministers in the Mehbooba Mufti government, including state unit president Ravindra Raina, party vice-president and incharge of Jammu and Kashmir Avinash Rai Khanna, and state unit office bearers, will participate in the meeting at the party headquarters, The Economic Times report said. Party General secretary (Organisation) Asho Kaul has also been called for the meeting. However, other reports claimed that suspending operations along the border area has miffed the PDP leadership and the rift is showing once again as the Centre wants to resume anti-terror operations in the state after Ramzan. While PDP thinks BJP leaders should make headway with the separatists and initiate dialogue with them, the BJP-led central government says that the separatists lost an opportunity as they did not take a cue from civil society, sources have told NDTV. The BJP pulled out of the alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, saying it was untenable to continue in this coalition government. With the pullout orchestrated by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the consequent resignation from office by chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, another spell of Governor's Rule seems imminent in the strife-torn state of Jammu and Kashmir. If it comes to this, it would be the eighth time the state will be directly ruled by the Centre. Governor's Rule can be imposed on the state under Section 92 of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir if the "governor is satisfied that a situation has arisen in which the Government of the State cannot be carried on in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution. The governor may, by proclamation (a), assume to himself all or any of the functions of the Government of the State and all or any of the powers vested in or exercisable by anybody or authority in the State". Mufti Sayeed's death was the cause for the last promulgation of the Governor's rule on 8 January, 2016 after allies PDP and BJP deferred the government formation process till the end of the four-day mourning period. Invoking Section 92 of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, Vohra promulgated Governor's rule after approval by President Pranab Mukherjee. It was the seventh time Governor's rule was promulgated in the state since Independence, the first being in March 1977. The central rule came to an end after Mehbooba Mufti was sworn in as the chief minister on 4 April, 2016. When former president Pranab Mukherjee accepted the Centre's recommendation for Governor's Rule in Jammu and Kashmir on 9 January, 2015, that was the sixth time the state went under direct central rule. Governor's Rule was imposed in the state after the Assembly election results on 23 December, 2014, threw up a hung Assembly, with no party or combination of parties able to stake claim to form government and then caretaker chief minister Omar Abdullah asking to be relieved from the duties with immediate effect on 7 January. The PDP had emerged the single largest party with 28 seats in the 87-member House in the staggered elections held over five of the last six weeks of 2014. The BJP came in a close second with 25 seats, followed by the National Conference (15 seats), Congress (12 seats) and others (seven seats). When the BJP and PDP cobbled up an alliance, it was the fourth consecutive time that a democratically elected government in the state was preceded by a spell of Governor's Rule. Sheikh Mohammad was installed as the chief minister of the state following the Indira-Sheikh Delhi Accord in 1975. The tallest leader of the state returned to power with a thumping majority in the subsequent elections held in July 1977. Direct central rule was imposed in Jammu and Kashmir for the second time in March 1986, when the Congress had withdrawn support to the minority government headed by Abdullah's son-in-law Ghulam Mohammad Shah. Shah had engineered a split in the National Conference in 1984 to form his own government with Congress support. However, he had to step down after the Congress withdrew support over law and order problems in the state, leading to the recommendation of Governor's Rule by the then governor Jagmohan Malhotra. The Governor's Rule came to an end in November 1986 after then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi entered into an accord with National Conference President Farooq Abdullah for power-sharing in the state. Jagmohan's return to the Raj Bhavan for the second term in January 1990 led to the resignation of then chief minister Farooq Abdullah, necessitating another spell of Governor's Rule. This was the longest spell of direct central rule in Jammu and Kashmir six years and eight months as elections could not be held because militancy had risen in many parts of the state. Although Jagmohan was recalled within six months of his second appointment, the Governor's Rule continued till October 1996 when fresh Assembly elections were held. Governor's Rule had to be imposed in the state for the fourth time in October 2002 after caretaker chief minister Farooq Abdullah refused to continue in office in the wake of his party's defeat in the Assembly elections that year. It was the shortest spell of Governor's Rule 15 days as the PDP and Congress, with the support of 12 independents, formed government on 2 November. Governor's Rule was imposed in the state for 174 days after the PDP withdrew support to the Ghulam Nabi Azad-led Congress-PDP coalition government in July 2008. The PDP withdrew support to the government on 28 June, 2008, following widespread protests during the Amarnath land row agitation, which pitted the Hindu-dominated Jammu region against the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley. Azad was to seek a vote of confidence in the Legislative Assembly on 7 July but chose to resign instead. The central rule came to an end on 5 January, 2009, after Omar Abdullah was sworn in as the youngest chief minister of the state. With inputs from PTI. The much strained partnership between the Peoples Democratic Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party has officially come to an end with BJP leader Ram Madhav making an announcement in New Delhi and outgoing chief minister Mehbooba Mufti tendering her resignation to Governor NN Vohra in Srinagar. The much strained partnership between the Peoples Democratic Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party has officially come to an end, with BJP leader Ram Madhav making the announcement in New Delhi and outgoing chief minister Mehbooba Mufti tendering her resignation to Governor NN Vohra in Srinagar. The breaking point, apparently, was the non-initiation of combat operations (NICO) in the Valley, with the PDP expressing strong disapproval of the Centre's decision to not extend it and the BJP, particularly its Jammu unit, opposing it from the outset. Oft described as the coming together of the North Pole and South Pole, it is actually to the credit of the leaders in Srinagar, Jammu and New Delhi that this coalition lasted for more than two years despite huge differences and a number of developments that breached the trust between the allies. Whats next for Jammu and Kashmir? Governor's Rule, for some time. This will give enough space and flexibility for security forces to resume the counter-insurgency operations in the Valley. But it will be a mistake to presume that Vohra will have the last word in state administration. That should go to Dineshwar Sharma and rightfully so the soft-spoken interlocutor who was appointed by the Centre, who carries a mandate from New Delhi and has earned enough credibility among Kashmiris. Vohra has held the fort well but is too status quoist to try anything new. But while Governors Rule may sound like a good arrangement, it is, for all purposes stopgap. The Centre must make an effort to hold fresh Assembly elections as quickly as possible post-Amarnath Yatra, particularly as both bypolls for Anantnag Lok Sabha seat and panchayat elections have been pending for years. Admittedly, this is a high-risk approach: Lower voter turnout may prove counterproductive, but postponing the elections also has its risks as the lack of any political activity may bring more people on streets in anti-India protests. New Delhi has been able to regain some goodwill through the NICO and amnesty to the stone-pelters, and the killing of prominent journalist Shujaat Bukhari on the eve of Eid may have antagonised a section of locals against the militants: Even if temporarily. While this is no cause for hubris, the Centre needs to act on this moral high ground to regain the political initiative. Sharma is the right person to pursue this strategy and perhaps even change the governor by bringing in an eminent, well-meaning and neutral person and disregarding the Modi government's template of appointing a veteran RSS-BJP leader. With the recent UNHRC report on human rights violations in Kashmir, the situation is being keenly watched by the international community and the aim should be to seize the initiative. Mufti has rightfully observed that the state should not be treated as 'enemy territory'. And even more so, this is a good opportunity to pursue development projects for other often neglected parts of the state: Jammu and Ladakh, as rightly observed by the BJP leader Ram Madhav. The separatists, meanwhile, may have held together their tentative unity through the Joint Resistant Leadership, but its a forgone conclusion that they are a spent force, with no wisdom or credible programme of action for Kashmirs future: Political or otherwise. So, this presents a good opportunity for Sharma to engage with students and religious leaders and not just from the Valley and to understand their aspirations and concerns. In short, the end of the PDP-BJP alliance is not necessarily the end of the road for Kashmir as many analysts would have us believe. Every crisis presents us with opportunity and this crisis should be put to good use for Kashmir and India. It's almost inane to say it was inevitable. The split between PDP and BJP in Jammu and Kashmir was long expected. It's almost inane to say it was inevitable. The split between PDP and BJP in Jammu and Kashmir was long expected, particularly after the shameful rape of a minor in Kathua and the subsequent political posturing that followed. The incident allowed the BJP in Jammu to raise its flagging profile, when two of its ministers took up the cause of the accused in protests organised by the Hindu Ekta Manch. Chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, accused of being soft on decision-making, took an equally strong stand in asking for the setting up of a special investigation team of the crime branch. Even then, most Kashmir observers were predicting it was only a matter of time before the alliance ended between two of the most unlikely partners. There is little doubt that the chief ministers position was rapidly becoming untenable. On the one hand, the worsening security situation increased the pressure from her own party for a dialogue with the separatists and Pakistan. Local BJP leaders were of the opinion that the party had been kowtowing to the chief minister beyond the necessities of alliance politics. A meeting of RSS leaders in March at Jammu seemed to bring this sentiment to a head. At that meeting, RSS leader Manmohan Vaidya met state leaders to take forward a road map for Kashmir decided in Nagpur at the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha some time earlier. The local sentiment for a harder line was, however, followed by sacrificing the two ministers of the BJP, Choudhary Lal Singh and Chander Prakash Ganga, who had supported the accused in the Kathua rape case. The resignation would hardly have assuaged local sentiments in Jammu. Ganga had earlier commented that stone-pelters in Srinagar be either shot or beaten with sticks themselves, an opinion that went viral on social media. By April end, the battle flags were up, with the resignation of deputy chief minister Lal Singh accused of being soft on PDP and BJP asking for nine ministers to resign from the cabinet to bring in fresh faces. This freshening included the controversial Rajiv Jasrotia of Kathua, reported as having supported the rape accused, and Shakti Parihar of Doda, a strong loyalist known to stand his ground often at the cost of coalition stability. The PDP's own new candidates included Mohm Ashraf Mir, who defeated National Conferences Omar Abdullah from Sonawar, who came into the limelight for firing an automatic weapon into the air after his victory. The chief minister attempted thereafter to recover lost ground after an all-party meet, declaring that the Centre would be approached for a non-initiation of combat operations (NICO) to be enforced during Ramzan, and only lifted after the Amarnath Yatra which begins in end-June. The demand was supported by the National Conference as well as by various citizens' groups as a way to stabilise a worsening situation. The request received a mixed response in Delhi. At first, it seemed to have been turned down by defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman, but was eventually supported by home minister Rajnath Singh, and then prime minister Narendra Modi. The conditional NICO, and the subsequent visit of Modi mainly to announce new infrastructure projects led to a roar of outrage in Jammu, with protests on the streets against the move. The Ramzan NICO did not reduce terror incidents foreseen by most experts on the ground with an attack in Shopian occurring the very first day. By mid-June, even senior BJP leaders in Pulwama were calling for its end since terrorists were having a field day. Things worsened after the killing of noted journalist Shujaat Bukhari on 14 June in a tragedy that shook the state. Equally horrifying, if less publicly condemned, was the abduction and killing of Aurangzeb, an Indian Army rifleman on leave in Pulwama. After that, it was a matter of time. Rajnath announced an end to the NICO with effect from 17 June, and the Mufti government ended two days later. The state will be again under the rule of the penultimate bureaucrat NN Vohra, governor since 2008, with decades of experience in Kashmir in his time in and out of government. That the two uneasy allies would not go into elections as a coalition was a foregone conclusion. Whatever may happen next, it is not going to be a BJP alliance with the party founded by the soft-spoken Mufti Mohammad Sayeed. That road is closed and the tragedy is that the Common Minimum Programme an extraordinary document did not see more than lip service by either party. That too was inevitable. Until Kashmir can sustain a government that is accountable, and bound to the people for some delivery of promises, no progress can ever be thought of. The essence of the State is a contractual one, where voters elect a set of persons who are expected even in the most minimal ways to address some basic requirements of the common man. That this has rarely ever been attempted in Kashmir is the crux of the problem. Pakistans backing of terrorists merely exacerbates an existing issue that has worsened after the 1970s: A breakdown in governance that is abysmal even by South Asian standards. BJP on Tuesday announced that it is breaking its alliance with PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, saying that it has become untenable to continue. The BJP on Tuesday announced that it is breaking its alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, saying that it has become untenable to continue in the government. BJP's general secretary Ram Madhav, while addressing a press conference, said that terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of the citizens are in danger in the Valley. This comes soon after BJP president Amit Shah called for an urgent meeting of all Jammu and Kashmir BJP ministers and some top leaders in New Delhi on Tuesday. Sources had told News18 that the meeting was likely convened following differences between the PDP and BJP over the issue of the recent Ramzan ceasefire. The ceasefire was just the recent thaw to plague the BJP-PDP alliance in the state. The Centre announced that the Ramzan ceasefire would not be extended and anti-terror operations would resume in the state. Reports said that the decision to end the ceasefire had upset the PDP. Sources told NDTV that PDP maintained that the Centre needs to reach out to the separatists. Meanwhile, the BJP felt the separatists let go of an opportunity by not making use of the ceasefire to work for peace. The report further said that the ceasefire initiative was the brainchild of Mehbooba Mufti, and the state BJP unit had fought it tooth and nail. It had even asked the Centre to spike her recommendation, arguing that "we should not do anything to demoralise the security forces". Shortly after announcing an end to the ceasefire, the Centre said that it wants to ensure that the upcoming Amarnath Yatra starting 28 June is conducted peacefully. The BJP-PDP alliance in Jammu and Kashmir has often been termed as the 'meeting of the north and south poles'. It has had a rocky ride since the start and been fraught with differences. Kathua rape case PDP sources had told Firstpost that Mufti had taken a strong exception to the BJP ministers pointing fingers at the crime branch probe into the case which could have also demoralised the forces. Mufti had even raised the issue of BJP leaders Lal Singh and CP Ganga obstructing the process of justice in the Kathua case with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Singh and Ganga had to resign from the government and the BJP decided to reshuffle the Cabinet. The saffron party had on 17 April asked all its nine ministers in the PDP-BJP government in the state to submit their resignations to enable bringing in new faces in the Mufti cabinet. Haseeb Drabu's removal Jammu and Kashmir finance minister Haseeb Drabu, one of the architects of the PDP-BJP alliance in the state, was unceremoniously removed from the council of ministers by Mufti over his remarks that the Kashmir issue was not a political one. A BJP leader in New Delhi termed Mufti's decision to sack Drabu as a "setback" to the alliance as it could widen the gap between the two parties. Drabu, he said, was often the bridge between the Jammu and Kashmir government and the Centre over a host of issues. He recalled that Drabu played an important role in the formulation of the GST. Drabu was the PDP's point person who worked out the draft of the agenda of alliance with the BJP that brought the two ideologically different parties to power after the 2014 elections produced a hung Assembly. AFSPA The BJP and the PDP were also not on the same page about the revocation of AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act). The saffron party said that the controversial law should not be revoked unless peace and normalcy is restored in state. "BJPs stand is very clear that AFSPA cannot be revoked unless and until peace and normalcy is restored in Jammu and Kashmir," BJP vice-president and incharge Jammu and Kashmir, Avinash Khanna, was quoted as saying by The New Indian Express. His statement came soon after Mufti pitched for withdrawal of AFSPA from some areas. Mufti said she required a "window of peace" for ensuring good governance to "shrink the space" occupied by militants. "We should not shy away from the revocation of AFSPA. When things improve, why not?" she said. However, she ruled out the possibility of withdrawal this year due to the "prevailing situation in Kashmir." Talks with 'stakeholders' In 2017, Mufti told her party's core group members and legislators that New Delhi was going to start a dialogue with all the "stakeholders," but that the normalcy must first return, according to this artcle in Firstpost. She was, however, rebuffed by the leaders of the BJP, saying they are not ready to start any dialogue with those who oppose India, including Hurriyat Conference. Shah and Madhav both reiterated that they are against holding dialogue with Hurriyat leaders. During the tenure of the alliance, leaders from both parties have blamed each other for the rising militancy in the state. According to The Times of India, the main thorn in each side is the approach of the other towards dealing with stone-pelters and mob violence. The BJP's approach is what the PDP calls "confrontationist" politics and the PDP's approach is what the BJP calls "appeasement" politics, the report added. Another major issue which revealed the cracks in the BJP-PDP alliance was Mufti's proposal to restructure Kashmir Administrative Services (KAS) and Kashmir Police Services (KPS) in 2016. According to an India Today report, the BJP objected to the proposal with Nirmal Singh questioning the Jammu and Kashmir government's authority to implement this proposal. Mufti reportedly walked out of the Cabinet meeting following the opposition. With inputs from agencies Follow LIVE updates on BJP ends alliance with PDP The Congress in Goa on Tuesday questioned Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar's silence on the issue of probing a factory, whose owner allegedly has BJP links and which was busted for illegally manufacturing date-rape drug ketamine by the DRI. Panaji: The Congress in Goa on Tuesday questioned Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar's silence on the issue of probing a factory, whose owner allegedly has BJP links and which was busted for illegally manufacturing date-rape drug ketamine by the DRI. "Parrikar should stop being silent over the seizure of ketamine, known as a date-rape drug, from the factory owned by his party office bearer. I dare the chief minister to come on record to declare that BJP office bearers are not in drug trade in Goa," state Congress president Girish Chodankar said in a press statement issued on Tuesday. "Goa wants to know how such a huge quantity of raw material required to manufacture the drugs landed in Goa. Who are responsible for stocking the same? How did Goa Police fail to intercept the same? "Hence, the major issue which surfaces is whether this is a case of an intelligence failure or intelligence connivance? Is it only coincidence that such an activity was happening a factory owned by BJP functionary," Chodankar asked. The statement said the Chief Minister as the home minister has to answer these important questions. "Why did Parrikar refuse to respond to media queries on this issue is another question? The silence of the chief minister cannot be tolerated as it is about the future generation of our state." In a three-day operation code-named 'Operation Vitamin', the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence last week busted an international drug syndicate, seizing 308 kg ketamine, two tonnes of raw material at various sites in Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat, arresting 10 persons including two from UK and one from Vietnam. Nearly 100 kg ketamine and raw material used to manufacture the drug was also found at the premise operated by Vasudev Parab, who the Congress has alleged is an office bearer of the BJP's north Goa desk. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has denied the accusations, saying Parab has never been a member of the party. On Monday, Parrikar refused to say whether the state government would launch an independent probe into the ketamine manufacturing operation at Pissurlem industrial estate. On Tuesday, however, the Goa State Industrial Development Corporation issued a show cause notice to Parab, asking him to respond to the charges of ketamine being manufactured at the premises leased by the Corporation, failing which the industrial plot would be seized from him. Used as a tranquiliser for veterinarian purposes, ketamine is also a common party drug known for its hallucinating effects and is also referred to as a date-rape drug. Sagarmatha Network Pvt. Ltd. is the organization dedicated in the field of printing, publishing service since 2001. As part of media, we've been publishing Review Nepal, an English medium weekly registered at District Administration Office (DAO) Kathmandu with registration number 130-162-163 and reviewnepal.com as an online digital newspaper, with registration number 849-075-076 at Department of Informational and Broadcasting (DIB) from Kathmandu, Nepal since 2003. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has secured agreements to develop islands in Mauritius and Seychelles Port Louis: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has secured agreements to develop islands in Mauritius and Seychelles in an early success for his drive to wrest back influence in the Indian Ocean from China. China has invested millions of dollars in recent years building seaports and highways in countries stretching from the Maldives to Sri Lanka that lie on vital shipping lanes through which much of its energy supplies and trade passes. India, alarmed at the prospect of China building a network of friendly ports in a "String of Pearls" across the Indian Ocean, has stepped up its diplomacy, offering a range of civil and military assistance. On Wednesday, as Modi toured Mauritius, officials signed an agreement to upgrade sea and air links on the remote Agalega islands, offering India a foothold in an area hundreds of miles from its coast. The two sides have been discussing North and South Agalega islands for years but there have been reservations in the about opening up the area to foreign involvement. India's foreign ministry said in a statement the agreement "provides for setting up and up gradation of infrastructure for improving air and sea connectivity, which will go a long way in ameliorating the conditions of the inhabitants of this remote island." The new facilities would also "enhance the capabilities of the Mauritian Defence Forces in safeguarding their interests", suggesting there would be a military spin-off to the development. The North Agalega island has a rough air strip which would likely be upgraded under the agreement, a former Indian navy pilot said. China has also been strengthening political relations with island nations with President Xi Jinping visiting Maldives and Sri Lanka last year where Chinese state firms have won contracts to build airports and seaports. Modi also announced an agreement with Seychelles to develop infrastructure on Assumption island. India has been helping Seychelles with ocean mapping to protect its exclusive economic zone and has given aircraft and launched a radar project. But it had not been directly involved in infrastructure. Modi said 90 percent of India's trade and oil imports moved by sea and as its economy became more globally integrated it would become more dependent on the ocean. "So, the Indian ocean region is at the top of our policy priorities," he said in a speech. China has considered Seychelles as a resupply port for its ships taking part in anti-piracy operations. Modi is due in Sri Lanka on Friday, the final leg of his Indian Ocean tour. Reuters The three-year-old Jammu and Kashmir government collapsed on Tuesday with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP. New Delhi/Srinagar: The three-year-old Jammu and Kashmir government, wracked by bitter political feuds and worsening security challenges, collapsed on Tuesday with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP, setting the stage for yet another round of governor's rule. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the surprise announcement after the party high command summoned its Jammu and Kashmir ministers for emergency consultations in New Delhi. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor NN Vohra amid a swirl of political activity in Srinagar and New Delhi. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government in the state," Madhav told reporters at a hurriedly called press conference in the national capital. Presenting her point of view, Mehbooba said in Srinagar that the PDP has always maintained that a muscular security policy would not work in the state and reconciliation was key. "We will continue to strive for dialogue and reconciliation in Jammu and Kashmir," the PDP leader said after submitting her resignation as chief minister and added that the alliance with the BJP was not for power. National Conference leader Omar Abdullah, whose party is the third biggest in the Assembly, captured the drama with one sentence, "I wish Mehbooba Mufti had resigned herself... instead of having the rug pulled from under her feet." The BJP won 25 seats and the PDP 28 in the 87-member Assembly and came together in an alliance, two months after the December 2014 elections. The National Conference has 15 seats, the Congress 12 and others seven. Although the BJP and the PDP had campaigned vigorously against each other, they came together with an 'Agenda of Alliance' in the hope of pulling the state out of the cycle of violence. But the alliance never took hold and the two parties disagreed on most issues even as the security situation continued to deteriorate. Both Omar and the Congress said they will not form an alliance with any party to form a government in the state. Mehbooba also said she had told the governor that her party would not go into any other alliance. The BJP said it favours governor's rule. If imposed, it will be the fourth time since 2008 and the eighth time since 1977. Madhav said the decision to withdraw was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah. Immediately after his news conference, senior PDP minister and the party's chief spokesperson Naeem Akhtar told reporters in Srinagar that the BJP's decision had caught the party by surprise. The BJP blamed the PDP for failing to improve the security conditions in the Kashmir Valley. Madhav cited last week's killing of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar in the highly secured area of Press Enclave by unidentified gunmen. The same day two days before Eid an army jawan was abducted while going on eid leave and killed. "Keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and in order to control the prevailing situation in the state, we have decided that the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor," Madhav added. Terrorism, violence and radicalism have risen and the fundamental rights of citizens, including the right to life and free speech, are in danger, the BJP leader said. In Srinagar, Mehbooba countered the allegations and listed her government's achievements. "We have been able to withdraw 11,000 cases against the stone pelters, given an offer of talks with all shades of opinion by none other than Union home minister (Rajnath Singh) and brought about a unilateral ceasefire," she said. BJP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Kavinder Gupta told reporters in Delhi that he and his ministerial colleagues have submitted their resignations to the governor as well as to the chief minister. "Centre did everything for the Valley. We've tried to put a full-stop to the ceasefire violations by Pakistan. PDP has not been successful in fulfilling its promises. Our leaders have been facing a lot of difficulties from PDP in developmental works in Jammu and Ladakh," Madhav said. "We are not questioning the intentions of PDP but they have failed in improving the condition of life in Kashmir," he added. National Conference leader Omar said the timing of the BJP's decision had taken him by surprise. Asserting that his party favours governor's rule and early elections, he said, "We did not have the mandate in 2014 and we do not have the mandate in 2018." Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said the BJP had committed a "Himalayan blunder" by forming a government with the PDP. He said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. "The regional parties should have been allowed to form an alliance among themselves," he told reporters. That the PDP, which faces an unprecedented crisis, would resort to this isn't surprising. Crucially, it seems the BJP is ready to forego India's stated Kashmir policy and its own ideology at the altar of power. Editor's note: This piece was first published on 19 July, 2016. The numbers are stacking up in Kashmir. Home Minister Rajnath Singh told Rajya Sabha on Monday that there have been 566 reported incidents of violence from the Valley. About 43 civilians have died, while 1,948 have suffered injuries. Though 1,744 of them have been discharged, 204 are still receiving treatment. Among the security forces, 1671 have suffered injuries while one has died. Since the minister's speech in Parliament, two more protesters have died when a violent mob attacked an army patrol in Qazigund area of Anantnag district, taking the overall toll to 45 since 7 July, the day Hizbul Mujaheedin commander Burhan Wani was eliminated by security forces in a gunfight. Meanwhile, the curfew entered its 12th day in 10 affected districts of Kashmir. Internet is largely inaccessible, mobile services shut, cable TV is blocked while newspapers have failed to hit the stands for the fourth day. Mehbooba Mufti government, however, has clarified to Union I&B minister Venkaiah Naidu that no gag order is in place. Petrol pumps and ATMs are running dry, mounds of garbage are piling up with municipalities unable to clear trash. As the elected government goes missing in action and administration collapses, in a repeat of the scenario when the Hurriyat ran a de facto parallel government for five months during the 2010 street agitation, separatists Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and Yasin Malik and JKLF have called for a fresh three-day shutdown in the valley. China, which holds on to a disputed 5,180 sq km in Ladakh sector and calls it Aksai Chin, has jumped in. Lu Kang, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, has said China was concerned about the casualties due to violence in Kashmir and have called for proper settlement of 'clashes'. Pakistan, whose stated intention is a 1000-year war with India on Kashmir, has again raised the issue in United Nations, calling for a "UN-backed independent and transparent inquiry" into the "extra-judicial" killings in Kashmir. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has called terrorist Burhan Wani a "martyr" and has called for 19 July to be observed as 'black day'. How has the BJP-PDP coalition government responded so far? While Home Minister Rajnath Singh gives all the impression of living in a cocooned ivory tower, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti has failed to take charge. As terrorists fan the flames of unrest, non-state actors like Yasin Malik brew the cauldron with provocative speeches and Pakistan funds and instigates violence as part of its proxy war, the BJP-PDP government lies completely exposed as an impotent, unsure, powerless and weak administration which is happy to let security forces carry out the firefight while mouthing platitudes from the sidelines. There is no space for doubt that we are in the middle of a full-blown war. The cry for 'azaadi' in Kashmir (with recent, deeply worrying Islamist overtones) is a jihad foisted on us by Pakistan. They have, after long last, finally managed to outsource the battle over India's territorial rights to a section of local Kashmiris. This significantly raises the stakes because we stand to lose both the war over territory and the battle of perception if we aren't careful. Pakistan can afford to crush dissent mercilessly in the part of Kashmir occupied by it because it has no reputation to protect. India, which is seen as a responsible, rising power, must tackle insurgency and protect its sovereignty all the while being mindful of the fact that at the other end of the barrel lie its own citizens. Is the BJP government at the Centre and the coalition at the state being able to do that? India Today quotes an Intelligence Bureau report which has revealed that every year almost Rs 100 crore is being channeled from Pakistan to Kashmir through hawala channel to create trouble in the state. The funds go straight to separatists who distribute it among young men to take part in protest rallies against security forces. Stone-pelters, funded by the separatists, are being used as a human shield by trained terrorists who are targeting the security forces during protest rallies. Pakistan's ISI, says the IB report, recently held a meeting with Hizbul supreme commander Syed Salahuddin and Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) chief Hafiz Saeed for illicit fund transfers and to appoint four new 'commanders' to fan trouble in the valley. The meeting also saw the presence of Jaish-e-Mohammed commander Abdul Rauf, who is based in PoK. It's not even a secret any more. A video of Hafiz Saeeds Urdu speech has surfaced on social media. The terrorist says that "after Burhans martyrdom and the martyrdom of many others, I expect the jihad in Kashmir will rise with strength. The scene will change completely." Unless we dismiss the intelligence report as a "lie" and believe a section of the Indian media more who claim that the Kashmir unrest is "completely vociferous", it stands to reason that the BJP-PDP government must move swiftly to tackle the battle on the streets as well the propaganda war. Problem arises when the centre's own coalition partner speaks in forked tongue and endorses Pakistan's view that the elimination of terrorist Burhan Wani was an 'extra-judicial' killing. As many as two PDP leaders MP Muzaffar Baig and minister Naeem Akhtar have sought a probe into Wani's killing. These comments not only run contrary to India's stated position that there could be no compromise on terror, they also serve to demoralize the security forces that are fighting daily aggression on the streets. And even as PDP MLAs are bent on embarrassing the Centre and undercutting its efforts in containing the violence, the Home Minister tells Firstpost's Ajay Singh in an interview that "Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti is doing an excellent job and her popularity is growing." That the PDP, which faces an unprecedented crisis, would resort to this isn't surprising. Crucially, it seems the BJP is ready to forego India's stated Kashmir policy and its own ideology at the altar of power. Sisodia stated that the L-G asked his secretary to take care of them but didn't come and engage with them even once. 21 May, 2015 is a critical date in the history of the way governance is carried out in the national capital. The gazette notification passed on the day superseded the one passed on 24 September, 1998 that made it mandatory for the Lieutenant Governor to consult the chief minister regarding reserved subjects of police, public order, land and services, which is the bureaucracy and those who run the state machinery. Article 239 AA was inserted through the 69th Amendment Act, 1991, to create Delhi's framework for governance, according to which the chief minister does not have executive power over the three reserved subjects. However, the notification passed in 1998 mandated that the L-G can exercise his powers on matters related to public order, police and services in consultation with the Chief Minister of Delhi. Even as Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal finally got a reply from L-G Anil Baijal on the ninth day of his protest, following which he called off his sit-in protest at Raj Niwas, some of the points raised by Deputy Chi f Minister Manish Sisodia earlier in the day were quite interesting. Criricising the L-G in his first press conference after being discharged from Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan hospital after his health improved, Sisodia said that Kejriwal has written to the prime minister demanding that the powers during Sheila Dikshits government be granted to this government too. He asked in the history of democracy anywhere in the world, which Lt. Governor has refused to acknowledge the presence of a chief minister who has come to visit him at his residence? The deputy chief minister said the AAP government had written to the L-G four times who in turn asked for more time. He stated at the press conference at his residence on Mathura Road that the L-G didn't revert to letters sent to him during the nine days of protest and didnt reply to Whatsapp messages either. Sisodia stated that the L-G asked his secretary to take care of them but didn't come and engage with them even once. He said Sanjay Singh is a member of the parliament and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy, and Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan sought Baijal's permission to meet Kejriwal at Raj Niwas, which was denied. Moreover, he added that when two AAP MLAs visited the L-G house, they were manhandled and forced to leave the premises. "Where in a democracy does this happen," asked Sisodia. Mounting the blame of the L-G's arrogance on the central government, the deputy chief minister accused the Prime Minister of being party to the systemic process of disrupting the innovative policies of the AAP like mohalla clinics and doorstep delivery of ration. He said efforts to stall governance have been going on for a while and reflect in the way IAS officers are pulled up if seen drinking a cup of tea with AAP politicians and are scared of being transferred. He also cited that CBI inquiries against bureaucrats trying to execute the vision of AAP are a proof of this. Sisodia quoted Adam Gondvis Urdu prose tumhaari filon mein gaon ka yeh mausam gulaabi hai, yeh aankde jhoote hain, yeh daave kitaabi hain to make the point that not going through files but making field visits are a prerequisite to good governance. He further added that the ministers need the DMs, SDMs and secretaries to accompany them during field visits for any work to get done. Manish Sisodia and Satyendar Jain had been on a hunger strike as part of their protest at the Delhi L-G's office with Arvind Kejriwal. Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi Manish Sisodia health minister Satyendar Jain, who were hospitalised as their health had deteriorated after being on a near week-long hunger strike, were discharged from Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital on Tuesday. The two had started their hunger strike as part of their protest at Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal's office. Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal led the protest, though he did not join their hunger strike. Jain began his hunger strike on 12 June and was hospitalised on Saturday night, while Sisodia joined his hunger strike the next day and was admitted to hospital on Monday. A team of doctors had examined the two at the L-G's office on Saturday. "Both the ministers were discharged around 10 am," said JC Passey, medical superintendent of the hospital. "Their health parameters, including ketone level in urine. are normal now." Sisodia said he was "recovering fast" and would try to resume work from Tuesday. He said on Twitter: "Good Morning!! With Doctor's care and your blessings, I am recovering fast. Yesterday, my ketone level was 7.4 and BP reached 184/100, which was leading to renal failure. But now everything is under control. If doctors, allow I'll try to be back to work today only." Good Morning!! With Doctor's care and your blessings, I am recovering fast. Yesterday, my ketone level was 7.4 & BP reached 184/100, which was leading to renal failure. But now everything is under control. If doctors allow I'll try to be back to work today only. pic.twitter.com/Ham1qOSUMM Manish Sisodia (@msisodia) June 19, 2018 According to NDTV, Jain, too, will not be returning to the protest but will get back to work on Tuesday. Kejriwal and the other ministers began their strike at the lieutenant-governor's office on 11 June, demanding that Baijal meet them and order Indian Administrative Service officers of Delhi to end their "strike" and also approve the Delhi government's doorstep ration delivery scheme. While Sisodia and Jain were admitted to hospital, Kejriwal continued his sit-in protest at Baijal's office along with Delhi rural development minister Gopal Rai. Kejriwal tweeted: Good morning Delhi Eight days of wait to meet Honble LG. Dy CM and UD minister shifted to hospital due to bad health. Honble LG could not find eight minutes in eight days for the people of Delhi. Hope he finds some time today Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 The chief minister continued his dharna on Tuesday even though the Delhi High Court pulled him up the previous day, questioning who authorised the protest. The bench held that no one can hold a protest at someone's house. With inputs from agencies. With Bharatiya Janata Party withdrawing support to the Peoples Democratic Party in Jammu and Kashmir government nearly two-and-a-half years ahead of the ending of its term, the PDP not only failed to implement the Agenda of Alliance (AoA), a common minimum programme, but also faced criticism for use of excessive force to control pro-militant protests. With Bharatiya Janata Party withdrawing support to the Peoples Democratic Party in Jammu and Kashmir government nearly two-and-a-half years ahead of the end of its term, the PDP not only failed to implement the Agenda of Alliance (AoA), a common minimum programme, but also faced criticism for the use of excessive force to control "pro-freedom" protests. After the 2016 uprising following the killing of top Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, over 76 were killed and thousands injured in areas of south Kashmir from where most PDP MLAs were elected. However, after violence erupted during polling for the Srinagar parliamentary seat last April, elections to the Anantnag seat from where Mehbooba's brother and outgoing tourism minister Tasaduq Mufti was to contest polls was cancelled. Of the 28 MLAs the PDP has in the Assembly, 11 are from south Kashmir (including the now separatist bastions of Tral, Shopian and Pulwama). While the PDP has lost ground in south Kashmir, the party has also not been able to implement most of the promises in the AoA. A key promise of the AoA: The Kashmir government would take steps to withdraw the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which is seen to be draconian in nature as it gives the forces powers to kill the people on mere suspicion. It was noted in the AoA, that while both parties (PDP and BJP) have historically held a different view on the AFSPA and the need for it in the state at present, as part of the agenda for governance of this alliance, the coalition government will examine the need for denotifying disturbed areas. This, as a consequence, would enable the Union government to take a final view on the continuation of AFSPA in these areas. Before former chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed took his oath of office, the AoA promised that talks would be initiated with the separatists in Kashmir. However, even as New Delhi appointed interlocutor Dineshwar Sharma, separatists said the assertions that Sharma was coming to restore peace rather than addressing the dispute or its resolution... limits the scope of any engagement with him and makes it an exercise in futility. The separatists contended that the New Delhi was not serious about talks for which Jammu and Kashmir should have been recognised as a disputed territory. Though home minister Rajnath Singh recently said the Government of India was ready for talks with the separatists no direct invitation was extended to them. In the AoA, it was specified that on the lines of NDA government led by former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a dialogue process will be initiated with all political groups, including the Hurriyat Conference, in the spirit of insaaniyat, Kashmiriyat aur hamhooriyat (humanity and democracy). Not much happened on the development front either. The Government of India has not handed over the Dulhasti and Uri hydropower projects to Jammu and Kashmir, as it promised in lieu of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation's water resources. The PDP and BJP jointly formed the government after the 2014 elections in which both National Conference and Congress received a drubbing. The three-and-half-years of the PDP-BJP rule was marked by differences on a range of issues. They even differed on the non-initiation of combat operations (NICO) as the BJP called for withdrawing it and the PDP looked to extend it. Differences also came to the fore after some from the right-wing demanded a CBI inquiry into the rape and murder of a Kathua girl. That led to the expulsion of two BJP ministers Chaudhary Lal Singh, and Chander Prakash Ganga from the council of ministers. There were also disagreements about settling Kashmiri Pandits in Valley and the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution. However, at the press conference addressed by Mehbooba after the withdrawal of support, she said her government took many steps towards peace in Kashmir. She added that besides withdrawing cases against 11,000 youth NICO was also declared while Rajnath extended the offer of talks to separatists. PDPs Zadibal MLA Abid Ansari said the party has been able to fulfil some points in the AoA. Article 370 has stayed intact and even prime minister Narendra Modi visited Pakistan to offer talks. We also withdrew cases of stone-pelting against thousands of youth, Ansari said. Even as some PDP leaders accused BJP of betraying them by prematurely withdrawing support, BJP chief spokesperson Sunil Sethi said the party had no option but to withdraw the support to the PDP as Mehbooba had been soft on stone-pelting youth. He said that as chief minister, Mehbooba was unable to control the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir and the party cant allow the spilling of the blood of innocent Indians in Kashmir. Some were surprised by the BJP's decision to end its alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, and some welcomed it. When Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president Amit Shah called an emergency meeting in Delhi with Jammu and Kashmir ministers on Tuesday, it was speculated that he would discuss their future strategy with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). And discuss they did: The BJP chief decided to pull out of the coalition government in the state and break its alliance with the PDP. BJP national general secretary and in-charge of Jammu and Kashmir, Ram Madhav, made the announcement at a press conference in New Delhi. Soon after, chief minister Mehbooba Mufti resigned and sent her resignation letter to Governor of Jammu and Kashmir NN Vohra. Reports said she had cancelled all the meetings she had scheduled for the day since getting a whiff of the BJP's decision on Tuesday morning. Reactions from politicians and other stakeholders started pouring in even before Madhav ended the press conference. Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah was one of the first to react to the news of the split. "I wish Mehbooba Mufti had gone with some dignity rather than having the rug pulled out from under her feet," Abdullah said, adding that he was not shocked by the BJP's decision but by its timing. And so it has come to pass........ Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) June 19, 2018 The Congress said whatever happened, had happened for the better. I had cautioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi that a BJP-PDP alliance will be a Himalayan blunder," said senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad. "We are happy that the Centre has accepted its mistake." Whatever has happened is good. People of J&K will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined Kashmir & have now pulled out, maximum number of civilian & army men died during these 3 years. That question does not arise (on forming alliance with PDP): GN Azad, Congress pic.twitter.com/rcfVelHdnT ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 PDP spokesperson Rafi Ahmad Mir said: "We had tried our best to run the government with the BJP... This is a surprise for us because we did not have any indication about their decision." We tried our best to run the govt with BJP. This had to happen. This is a surprise for us because we did not have any indication about their decision: Rafi Ahmad Mir, PDP Spokesperson on BJP pulling out of an alliance with PDP in #JammuAndKashmir pic.twitter.com/6laodyNY97 ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 Another senior Congress leader, Kapil Sibal, called the BJP "opportunistic", adding that snapping the alliance with the PDP was an "act of political immorality". An opportunistic BJP First an opportunistic alliance with PDP Now an opportunistic breakaway Both acts of political immorality Kaise Desh badlega ? Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) June 19, 2018 Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said: "After ruining it, BJP pulls out of Kashmir." He also highlighted the BJP's earlier claim that demonetisation had been effective in stopping terrorism in the state. After ruining it, BJP pulls out of Kashmir Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 Didnt BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened? https://t.co/S9nyOMocKl Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 The chief of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Asaduddin Owaisi, said he felt sorry for the people of Jammu and Kashmir. "This was an alliance between the north pole and the south pole. The people of the nation want to know what happened to the north pole-south pole alliance. The BJP cannot run away from failing to stop attacks in Jammu and Kashmir. The BJP is equally responsible. It pulled out of the alliance because it knew it was losing ground," he said. Shiv Sena leader and Maharashtra MP Sanjay Raut said the BJP-PDP alliance had been "anti-national and unnatural" to begin with. He said had they continued with it, "they would have had to answer in 2019 Lok Sabha election". This alliance was anti-national & unnatural. Our party chief had said, this alliance won't work out. Had they continued with it they would have had to answer in 2019 Lok Sabha election: Sanjay Raut, Shiv Sena on BJP calling off their alliance with PDP in #JammuAndKashmirpic.twitter.com/s2JVACZqxz ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 While former director general of the Jammu and Kashmir police K Rajendra Kumar welcomed the decision and said imposing Governors Rule in Jammu and Kashmir would be the "right step towards restoring public order and peace (in the state), especially in the context of rising terrorist incidents and radicalisation". "(This is a) relief for the peace-loving people of the state," he said. Residents of Srinagar, too, welcome the decision, saying they had long awaited the split and now hope it works in people's favour. "It is good that this government ended. They were both brutal," Srinagar resident Shuja Ahmad Sheikh said. "PDP came to power on the promise that it would not allow the BJP to form government, but it ended up making an alliance with the same party... The BJP has humiliated PDP like no other regional party could. The move was made with the 2019 elections in mind." Described as "strange bedfellows" and "uneasy alliance", the BJP-PDP coalition always struggled to run in a state that trouble resolving any issue amicably. As Madhav said at the press conference, the problems plaguing Jammu and Kashmir were extremely complex, and with an alliance that never saw eye to eye, it was difficult to agree on anything. With inputs from agencies. As Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's weeklong protest at Lieutenant General Anil Baijal's office entered the eighth day, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi tweeted about it blaming both, Kejriwal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for the ongoing standoff. As Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's week-long protest at Lieutenant General Anil Baijal's office entered the eighth day on Monday, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi tweeted about it blaming both, Kejriwal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for the ongoing standoff. Rahul said that while the Delhi chief minister is busy "sitting in Dharna at the L-G office" and "Delhi bureaucrats addressing press conferences", Modi has turned a "blind eye" to the ongoing state of anarchy in Delhi but the sufferers in the end are people of Delhi. Delhi CM, sitting in Dharna at LG office. BJP sitting in Dharna at CM residence. Delhi bureaucrats addressing press conferences. PM turns a blind eye to the anarchy; rather nudges chaos & disorder. People of Delhi are the victims, as this drama plays out. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 18, 2018 This is the first time that Rahul has publicly spoken about the week-long sit-in. Congress has been a critic of the Aam Aadmi Party since its decimation in the 2015 Assembly elections. Senior Congress leaders also said the stalemate in Delhi is "extremely unfortunate" while maintaining that Opposition unity was important to safeguard the idea of India and "all right thinking, progressive and pluralistic forces must come together". On non-BJP chief ministers supporting Kejriwal's cause, the party said there was still time for the 2019 Lok Sabha election and they were observing the situation. "What is happening in Delhi is extremely unfortunate. It is an evolving situation. We are observing the situation very carefully," said Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari. "I would like to underscore that the basis of Opposition unity is the larger cause of safeguarding and furthering the idea of India, and for that it is important, it is the demand of time that all right thinking progressive and pluralistic forces must come together... There is still time for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections," he added. Four non-BJP chief ministers met Modi on Sunday at the meeting of the NITI Aayog's fourth general council meeting and urged him to immediately resolve the problems of the Delhi government. The Shiv Sena and Janata Dal (United), both BJP allies, came out in support of Kejriwal. The Samajwadi Party backed the AAP against the central government. But Congress president Rahul Gandhi slammed both Kejriwal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the stalemate. The AAP plans to start a campaign from Tuesday to reach out to at least 10 lakh households in Delhi. Kejriwal and three of his ministers Sisodia, Satyendra Jain and Gopal Rai began their strike at Raj Niwas on 11 June demanding a direction to the IAS officers working in the Delhi administration to end their undeclared strike, and urged the Centre to approve the Delhi government's proposal to deliver ration to the poor at their houses. Jain, who was also on indefinite hunger strike since 12 June, was moved to the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan Hospital on Sunday night. This has left Kejriwal and Rai at the office-cum-residence of Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal. Meanwhile, in the first sign of apparent rapprochement, IAS officers in Delhi on Monday said they were open to formal discussions to end the impasse in Delhi, a day after Kejriwal assured them their safety and dignity. With inputs from agencies A better thing for Rahul Gandhi to do will be to spend more time in nurturing the party and give us a straight fight, with a positive, alternate agenda in 2024. As the youth leader of India turns 48, it is time he realises that his desperation to usurp power by all means is sending wrong signals to both his party and the country. The real test of a political partys character in a democracy is not when the party is in power but when it is in the Opposition. Not many can handle it with maturity, least of all the Congress which somehow had started to believe that it was destined to be in power forever. And hence Rahul Gandhi, who took his partys tenure in government for granted, shying away from responsibilities, bunking Parliament at will and disappearing out of the country for long phases, today finds himself carrying out some desperate acts to keep his party in circulation. To be fair to Rahul, it is believed that he entered politics without any interest and purely because his mother Sonia Gandhi wanted him to, and Priyanka Gandhi wasnt ready. As late as 2013, Rahul equated power to poison, clearly indicating that he wasn't ready to 'take charge' yet. Come February 2016. The suicide of a 'half-Dalit' student, Rohith Vemula suddenly gave Rahul an agenda. He immediately latched on to the Dalit cause, blaming the Narendra Modi government for atrocities against Dalits. What Rahul conveniently forgot was his own party's role in suppressing Dalit voices throughout whether it was BR Ambedkar or Babu Jagjivan Ram. What followed was his support for the an overt anti-establishment faction at Jawaharlal Nehru University. This unpretentious flirtation with this faction, soon had Rahul forge a thick alliance with it. This methodology was put to test in Gujarat where Congress used Jignesh Mevani to manufacture an all out caste war, something the state had not seen in the last 20 years. Soon after, Karnataka saw Rahul adopt an even more vicious strategy: the Lingayat card, where on the eve of the election, the state government suddenly decided to accept a cliched demand to acknowledge the community as a separate religion. Here, Rahul would hop from one temple to the other and then come out of them to hail Tipu Sultan, as an icon of communal harmony. While all this was happening, Congress secretly got into an electoral pact with the political wing of the toxic, PFI. Now, the latest information that I have suggest that Congress is going all out to manufacture a major farmers' unrest in Madhya Pradesh, before the state elections, feeding them with lies and venom. A glaring example of how brazenly Rahul could mislead on facts was seen two weeks ago at a rally in Mandsaur where he accused the Modi government of waiving Rs 2.5 lakh crore worth of loans of the top 15 industrialists of the country. The truth, on the other hand, is that not a single rupee has been waived off from any industrialist. On the contrary, nearly Rs 90,000 crore has been recovered from companies since the inception of the IBC (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code). Now the point is, if this ulterior agenda of Rahul was yielding any gains to the Congress, one could still understand his strategy. What is happening in reality, is that in most of the states the Congress has ceded crucial Opposition ground to the so-called federal front. In fact, after the Congress installed HD Kumaraswamy as Karnataka chief minister, the regional parties have realised the helplessness of the Congress. And the Congress consumed with pathological hatred for one man and bereft of ideas, has fallen into its own trap. So, as things stand today, yes there is a need for BJP to be worried. Ganging up of Opposition parties one year before elections is never a healthy sign. But so far as the Congress is concerned, it is staring at the worst nightmare of its life. None of the regional parties is ready to accept the Congress leadership. Rather, they are avariciously hoping for a 1996-like situation where a HD Deve Gowda kind of dummy candidate might have to be catapulted as prime minister while all of them enjoy the spoils (read loot) of power. Congress chief Rahul Gandhi's 48th birthday should ideally be a time for serious inspection for him. The biggest casualty of his one-point "hate Modi" mission will be the Congress party. Today, Rahuls position is like a callous student who didnt study all year and now just before the exam, wants to get through by hook or by crook. In adopting this short-cut, Rahul is damaging his party, besides harming national interests. My advice to Rahul is simple. Modi will bounce back closer to the elections and win it. A five-year term has slack phases and the current one is probably just that. Given the Congress' abysmal ground situation today, Rahul can't turn the tides overnight. Instead of depending upon an unreliable and outrageously selfish federal front, Rahul must work on himself and the party in the next few years. A better thing for Rahul to do will be to spend more time in nurturing the party and give us a straight fight, with a positive, alternate agenda in 2024. I wish Rahul Gandhi a long and healthy life. The author is a BJP leader and tweets @tuhins. Views expressed are personal. The Congress slammed Narendra Modi for leaving 'no stone unturned to mismanage' the Indian economy and asked who was the finance minister. The Congress on Monday slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government for leaving "no stone unturned to mismanage" the Indian economy and asked who was the finance minister of the country. Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said the BJP-led NDA government and the prime minister have not understood one simple equation, that social disharmony and economic progress cannot go hand in hand. He also asked the prime minister who exactly was the country's finance minister. "Who is the country's finance minister? The PMO and the finance ministry websites have different claims," the Congress leader said. "We would like to ask the prime minister, with great respect and due deference as to who is the finance minister of India? The PMO's website says one thing, the website of the finance ministry tells another story." "The gentleman, who is designated as the minister without portfolio on the website of the PMO... is holding video conferences with officials of the finance ministry," he said. "When the Indian economy is really up a creek about the barrel, it is in choppy waters, the prime minister needs to tell this country who is the finance minister... During the economic crisis, not having clarification regarding this reflects a sad state on governance," the Congress leader said. Piyush Goyal was given additional charge of the finance ministry in May this year when Arun Jaitley had to undergo a kidney transplant at AIIMS. The finance ministry website has Jaitley as the minister while the PMO mentions Jaitley as 'Minister without Portfolio', while Goyal is mentioned as the Minister of Finance, along with Minister of Railways, Coal, and Corporate Affairs. Economy on downward spiral: Congress The Congress leader further claimed that the Indian economy has been on a "downward spiral since 2014." "It is because of the strong foundations and fundamental laid by the UPA during its 10 years, from 2004 to 2014, that the Indian economy still continues to work. Otherwise, the NDA-BJP government has left no stone unturned in order to mismanage the Indian economy and we would like to underscore that response by once again asking who is the finance minister of India?" he asked. "The reason why there has been such gross economic mismanagement over the past four years is because the NDA-BJP government and the prime minister have not understood one simple equation that social disharmony and economic progress cannot go hand in hand," Tewari said. Social disharmony is the enemy of economic development, he added. "Money is a coward, money goes to the safest harbour and unfortunately, the spectre of social intolerance, which has been created by the NDA-BJP government and their ideological fellow travellers is a complete anathema and is totally detrimental to any sustained, substantive economic activity," he said. Tewari, a former union minister, asked the prime minister why his government was not coming out with GDP numbers. "The performance of the economy during the UPA was far better if one goes by the old data released by the United States, China, Brazil and Turkey. This data has changed," Tewari said. "It will show that the economic performance under the UPA was much better than the economic performance of the NDA-BJP government. It will blow the entire canard of policy paralysis which the BJP ran between 2012 to 2014 completely to smithereens, if that data is released," he said. He claimed that in 2009, after the global economic meltdown, the UPA government created one million jobs. This government has hardly created 2.5 lakh jobs per year despite promising employment to two crore people, the Congress leader said. Tewari also accused the government of being "hand-in-glove" with "scamsters" such as Nirav Modi, who he said, "has been let to roam free around the world without any action against him." "Nirav's case is just a symptom of the failure of Modi government," he said. He also asked the prime minister whether the current account deficit for the current fiscal has widened to such an extent that international financial institutions are raising serious questions about it. "Is it not a fact that Modi government is not releasing the data based on new base year because UPA's performance was better than NDA? Why the revised GDP series has still not been put out in the public domain? Prime minister Modi must answer some fundamental questions about the economy of India under his tenure," he said. With inputs from agencies Kathmandu, Nepal: Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli has left for the southern neighbor China for a six-day official visit upon the invitation of his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang on Tuesday. The Prime Minister Oli led jumbo delegation comprises 120 members including cabinet ministers, parliamentarians, government officials, media persons and his nearer including his own wife. Oli is scheduled to hold bilateral talks with high ranking Chinese officials including his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang and President Xi Jinping. tech2 News Staff The Asus ROG Phone was announced at Computex 2018 and it is one of the few devices that panders to a niche, hard-core audience interested in gaming on a smartphone. Before the ROG Phone, it was the Razer Phone and the Xiaomi BlackShark. While the latter two have not made it to the Indian market, it would seem that the ROG Phone just might. If it does come to India, the Asus ROG Phone will be the very first gaming-centric smartphone introduced in the country. As per a report by Gizmochina, the ROG Phone is expected to arrive in India around September, after which the phone will also be included in the European markets. However, it is best to take this information as a rumour because there has been no official confirmation from the company itself. In a country like India, where esports is still in its developmental stage, introducing the ROG Phone might give the necessary push required kickstart India's mobile esports revolution. But that's maybe just wishful thinking. To recall, the phone is powered by a special Snapdragon 845 SoC which has custom Kryo cores clocked to a whopping 2.9 GHz to provide "seamless" gaming. The RAM on the phone happens to be 8 GB and there also is a 512 GB of internal storage variant. The ROG Phone has a 6-inch 2,160 x 1,080 AMOLED display and powering the phone is a 4,000 mAh battery, which supports ASUS HyperCharge, preventing the device from heating during charging. The phone also makes use of Quick Charge 4.0, which reportedly charges the phone up from 0-66 percent in 30 minutes. Reuters It is too early to judge Googles reforms in response to an antitrust case over online shopping, though there are signs some rivals are benefiting, Europes competition chief said on 18 June. The comments from European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager come amid calls from Googles competitors for her to take more drastic action against the worlds most popular internet search engine. A year after being hit with a record 2.4 billion ($2.8 billion) fine by the European Commission, Google has yet to create a level playing field, according to rivals such as British comparison shopping sites Foundem and Kelkoo and others in the travel search, digital mapping and publishing markets. Googles proposal involves allowing competitors to bid for ads at the top of a search page aimed at giving them the chance to compete on equal terms. Vestager said she was aware of the rivals concerns but cited figures to show that competition was improving. We know from our monitoring theres been a steady increase in the numbers over the last few months. The most recent figures show at least one rival appears in about one-third of new shopping boxes as compared to 15 percent of the shopping boxes back in March, she told a European Parliament hearing. Similarly the share of clicks of products of rivals in Google shopping boxes also increased from 2.5 percent in February to 6.1 percent now. Its still too early to draw conclusions. We will continue our active monitoring and talk to market participants, Vestager said. Google, which has previously said its proposal gives everyone a fair opportunity, could face fines up to 5 percent of its average daily worldwide turnover if it fails to comply with the EU order to create a more level playing field. Reuters The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will send a technical specialist to observe a Tesla examination into the causes of a battery fire last 15 June involving one of the electric automakers Model S vehicles in California, the agency said on 18 June. A spokesman for the NTSB said that observing the examination into the fire in West Hollywood will provide the agency with an opportunity to learn more about fires in all types of battery-powered vehicles. The safety board is investigating four Tesla crashes since last year and looking at post-crash fire issues and the use of Autopilot. Earlier this month, the NTSB issued a preliminary report saying the driver of a Tesla Model X car using Autopilot did not have his hands on the steering wheel in the six seconds before a fatal crash in California in March. A spokeswoman for Tesla said in an email that the battery fire on 15 June was an extraordinarily unusual occurrence, and we are investigating the incident to find out what happened. She wrote that the cabin of the Model S was unaffected by the fire, allowing the driver to exit the vehicle safely. While our customer had time to safely exit the car, we are working to understand the cause of the fire, she added. Asheeta Regidi The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case filed against the governments proposal of a Social Media Communications Hub- a proposal which, all at once, is reminiscent of Aadhaar, Cambridge Analytica and Snowden revelations of NSA surveillance. In other words, this is the latest privacy nightmare to hit India, before even the first draft of the Data Protection Bill is out, or the Aadhaar issue is resolved. The allegations include, on the one hand, violation of the right to privacy, and, on the other, violation of the right to freedom of speech. The present case, as per reports, was filed by Trinamool Congress MP Mohua Moitra for an emergency hearing before the Vacation Bench of the Supreme Court, but the Bench directed that the case be heard once the Court reopens. Alternatively, the petitioners are to file the case before a High Court. Previously, the Internet Freedom Foundation sent a legal notice to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, asking for the tender put up for the Social Media Communications Hub be withdrawn. Surveillance of social media platforms, e-mails, blogs For those unfamiliar with the Social Media Communication Hub (the Hub), this is an initiative of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, aiming to monitor, collect and analyse data across all major social media platforms, and combine this with data from e-mails, news sites, blogs and complaint websites. The list of websites, which includes sites like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIN, Google+, etc., along with further details can be found in the tender issued a few months ago (See Page 28 onwards), inviting proposals for the software behind the Hub. 360 degree profiles, real time monitoring and comprehensive metadata As per this tender, data from all these sources are to be collected and combined to create a 360 degree profile of a person. This includes identifying influencers based on follower counts, recording and archiving conversations and messages, and tracking customer loyalty and past behavior. The platform is to have a New Media Command Room, which enables real time monitoring of such platforms and persons, in particular the influencers, customers, competitors and the like (there is no clarity as to who customers or competitors refers to). The tender specifies that the platform must be able to crawl every major website and the world wide web, for data mining. All this data, further, must be backed by location data and comprehensive metadata. The profiling in question, is to be automated as well as manual. Aim is to analyse the impact of governmental initiatives and campaigns This NSA like surveillance has been proposed, not to tackle terrorism (as is commonly used), nor for the public good (as is argued for Aadhaar), but to enable the I&B Ministry to understand the impact of various social media campaigns conducted on various government schemes. The tool, further, is required to provide inputs on how to improve this campaigning and on how to make a topic trending. While this appears to be the primary aim of the Hub, some points mentioned in the tender indicate that the Hub is also to be used for crisis identification and management and reactive communication strategy. There is no clarity on what is considered to be a crisis here. Gauging of peoples sentiment across global languages For these purposes, the tool is further required to have features, including the analysis of the peoples sentiment towards a particular scheme; tracking of trends, topics and hashtags; monitoring of individual social media accounts as well as messages and tweets; among others. Further, this sentiment as well as context must be identifiable for a range of languages, including local languages like Telugu and Punjabi, and also foreign languages like French, Arabic, Chinese and German. It is clear that the scope of the surveillance to be carried out is not restricted to India. Further features, which are unclear, include the use of customers identified through the Hub for targeted advertising. Moulding of public perception Next, the Hub is intended to enable predictive analysis, the details of which make it a concern, especially in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The analysis, as per the tender, is to include predictions of headlines and breaking news across various channels across the globe based on the channels leaning, business dealings, investors and so on; what would be public perception to such news; and how public perception can be moulded in a positive manner for the country. It goes on to require predictions on how nationalistic feelings can be inculcated in the masses, how the perception management of India can be improved and how social media and internet news/ discussion can be given a positive slant for India. The Hub, further, is required to have publishing capabilities, allowing it to disseminate information, indicating the possible use of this dissemination for such purposes of moulding as well. The tender also mentions activities like requiring influencer activation, enabling communication and crisis management, and identifying sentiments based on location. A new CIDR?- The Private Data Centre and the KMS Further, the issue of the CIDR and the large scale storage of biometric data is yet to be resolved, yet this tender proposes a new database- a Private Data Centre, to be set up for backing up and archiving all the Hubs related data and content. A Knowledge Management System is also to be set up, and while it is unclear exactly what this is to store, it is to be used for the creation, capture, management, delivery and archiving of large volumes of document and content, which includes scanned document images, electronic documents and e-mails. The tender also mentions that the Hub must function like a search engine, enabling the search and discovery of information related to, for example, a particular trend. No meeting of tests laid down in Privacy Judgment What is most surprising is that the launch of a project which, on such a large scale, invades the privacy and freedoms of the people, comes so close on the heels of the right to privacy verdict last year. The Puttaswamy judgment affirming the right to privacy laid down the following three tests to be met before the right to privacy could be invaded- first, there must be a law, second, there must be legitimate purpose to be met, and third, the infringement of privacy must be proportional to the purpose sought to be met. Yet, none of these conditions are met. The proposed Hub, based on information publicly available, has no basis on any law. Further, while no purpose justifies mass surveillance (as has also been pointed out by the Supreme Court itself in the Puttaswamy judgment, as well in the PUCL case on telephone tapping), the purpose suggested for the set up of the Hub, alongwith the scale of privacy invasion, simply cannot justify this project. Impact on a persons rights To give a simple example, the analysis proposed by the Hub will easily include political opinion, an issue considered to be highly sensitive personal data, including in privacy legislations such as the GDPR. Such data will not only be collected and analysed by the government, loyalty and behaviour of the person will be analysed and recorded, and all of which will be archived and searchable. Moreover, efforts will be directed to modify this persons opinion, to give it a positive or nationalistic slant. A persons basic right to hold an opinion, express it, change his mind, or to even delete a post is also lost. The tender, further, far from discussing anonymizing this data, requires identification of people. Consent makes no mention anywhere. To make matters worse, as per the Internet Freedom Foundation, the government has earmarked a budget of 42 crores for this. Several questions raised on a persons right to privacy A project of this scale has major implications, for privacy, and for the freedom of speech. A legal battle against this can easily be expected to go along the same lines as Aadhaar, but hopefully not for as many years as the Aadhaar case. This use brings out several questions, on what uses the government intends to put peoples data to, on whether the data protection law will be able to protect people from such uses, and whether, in the forthcoming age, people will have any control, at all, over their own data. A lot, thus, depends on the decision of the Supreme Courts decision in the Aadhaar case, and on the Justice Sri Krishna Committee report on Data Protection. tech2 News Staff India does not have a dedicated data protection law. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had appointed an expert panel headed by former SC judge BN Srikrishna to draft a data protection law last August. The 10-member panel is expected to present its draft this month. But some reports are already hinting at possible entries in the draft. According to a report in The Economic Times, the committee is likely to ask multi-national companies and global internet giants such as Google and Facebook, among others, to store data of Indian citizens within the country. Majority of the members from the panel want to ensure that sensitive personal data of Indian citizens is stored within the country as that will be in our best interests. But it's not a unanimous mandate according to the report, as some members want to ensure there is a free-flow of information to retain the competitive advantage. Members who have spoken to ET have said that there is a high likelihood of the data to be stored in India. The committee is expected to meet on Monday to discuss the issues and the draft is to be presented by the end of June. "While sensitive personal data is already defined under many Acts, the committee will do the remaining job," said a member of the panel to ET. With the misuse of public data with incidents such as the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal, it seems like a lot of the panel members are keen to ensure sensitive data of Indian citizens is stored locally. Needless to say, this will cause a lot of chaos to multinational internet companies, as they will have to ensure that they build data centres locally to store data. Data centre and server costs will have to be taken into consideration for this. The committee had released a white paper on data protection back in November last year, the responses to which would help with the formulation of future data protection laws. Asheeta Regidi, a cyber law expert, has discussed data localisation in detail in part 3 of our 12-part Understanding The Data Protection White Paper series. Some members of the panel are opposed to this mandate of having data stored locally, as they feel it will affect India's software industry and also have an adverse impact on the innovation and economic growth. Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary of SFLC.in in their comment piece for tech2 argued why enforcing data localisation is not the right way to go for democracies such as India and the US. According to them, "Broad requirements to keep local users' data in-country substantially impede the adoption of 'cloud computing' technologies by local businesses as well as international enterprises, however. Data storage and computing power are becoming utilities available on the net without regard to location. The resulting flexibility and price competition are transforming the global market in information technology. Localisation requirements will radically distort that market, a form of protectionism that will raise prices and reduce productivity throughout national economies." According to Moglen and Choudhary, data localisation can impose severe costs that override the benefits. "In societies not governed by the rule of law, localisation amplifies the power of the organs of oppression, just as the form of "personal localisation" represented by the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain amplified the power of Stasi and the KGB. But for democracies, like India or the US, data localisation is altogether the wrong approach to law enforcement in digital society." We shall find out more details on Monday with regards to this particular aspect of the data protection law. By Lisa Lambert and Makini Brice WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Monday defended its hardline immigration policy at the U.S.-Mexico border as criticism mounted over detained immigrant parents being separated from their children, including video of youngsters sitting in concrete-floored cages. By Lisa Lambert and Makini Brice WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Monday defended its hardline immigration policy at the U.S.-Mexico border as criticism mounted over detained immigrant parents being separated from their children, including video of youngsters sitting in concrete-floored cages. While Democrats blasted such treatment as "barbaric" and some Republicans also voiced concerns, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the administration was only strictly enforcing immigration law. "This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border. ... What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law," she told reporters at a White House briefing. The family separations result from Trump's "zero tolerance" policy that provides for the arrest of all adults caught trying to enter the United States illegally, including those seeking asylum. While parents are held in jail, their children are sent to separate detention facilities. Video footage released by the government showed migrant children held in wire cages, sitting on concrete floors. Democrats and some of Trump's own Republicans have admonished the administration for dividing nearly 2,000 children from their parents between mid-April and the end of May. Trump, whose promise to crack down on illegal immigration has been a major theme of his campaign and presidency, responded sharply to critics on Monday. "The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. It won't be. You look at what's happening in Europe, you look at what's happening in other places - we can't allow that to happen to the United States, not on my watch," Trump said at the White House while announcing an unrelated policy. Trump has sought to use the widespread outrage over the family separations to push through other immigration priorities that have stalled in Congress, such as funding for his long-promised wall along the Mexican border. He has blamed Democrats for the impasse, even though his fellow Republicans control both chambers in Congress. Democrats have accused the president of using children as hostages. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called the separation of children from parents "barbaric" and said Nielsen should resign. Pelosi made the comment after visiting a detention centre for children at the border in California. Republican Senator Pat Roberts tweeted: "While I firmly support enforcing our immigration laws, I am against using parental separation as a deterrent to illegal immigration. My concern, first and foremost, is the protection of the children." Trump administration officials say the zero-tolerance policy, which was not practiced by the two previous administrations, is necessary to secure the border and deter illegal immigration. Border crossings briefly dropped after Trump took office in January 2017, but have since risen to levels seen during the administration of his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. Almost 52,000 people were caught trying to cross the southern border illegally in May, according to government figures. (Reporting by Lisa Lambert and Makini Brice; Additional reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Nathan Frandino and Yeganeh Torbati in Washington; Writing by Kevin Drawbaugh; Editing by Grant McCool and Peter Cooney) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. The Donald Trump government's family separation policy is believed to be aimed at deterring illegal immigration to the US. Images of children in cages, distressing stories of their separation from their families, outrage from various quarters and the Donald Trump administration obstinate defence of its latest seemingly inhuman policy is how the weekend progressed in the United States. From 19 April to 31 May, nearly 2,000 children were separated from the migrants' families while trying to seek asylum in the US by crossing the border, TIME reported quoting officials. But the situation, as horrifying as it may already seem, could get worse a senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services told The Washington Examiner that 11,500 children were already being held in detention centres, and the number could rise to 30,000 by August. Separating children from their parents, or the adults accompanying them, is part of the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, which includes federal prosecution of the adults trying to "smuggle" children across the border and either detaining the children at centres run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services or sending them to live with their relatives in the US. It could be said that it is aimed at deterring other migrant families from attempting to cross 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," US Attorney General Jeff Sessions had said in May while announcing the policy. "If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border." On Monday, US Customs and Border Protection released a video from a Texas facility that showed children in cages with a foil to use as sheets. This added fuel to the fire already lit by Trump and officials from his administration for refusing to acknowledge the absurdity of the family separation policy, instead choosing to incorrectly blame the Democrats for their weak stance on immigration laws. BREAKING: Border Patrol @CBP just gave us this video of the detention facility we toured yesterday in McAllen, Texas. We weren't allowed to bring in cameras, or interview anyone. To be clear: this is government handout video. pic.twitter.com/Zjy80qIZFZ David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) June 18, 2018 It is the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime. Tell them to start thinking about the people devastated by Crime coming from illegal immigration. Change the laws! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018 Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change! This is why we need more Republicans elected in November. Democrats are good at only three things, High Taxes, High Crime and Obstruction. Sad! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2018 With protests against the measure gaining momentum, people taking to the streets and politicians speaking out against the family separation policy, it was only a matter of time before the subject of child abuse came up in this context. On Monday, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Colleen Kraft, told CNN that the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy separating migrant families at the US-Mexico border amounts to child abuse". In an appearance on the news channel, she elaborated on the different ways the policy emotionally harms children and described in detail the horror she witnessed while touring a detention centre in Texas. "I can't describe to you the room I was in with the toddlers," Kraft said. "Normally, toddlers are rambunctious and running around. We had one child just screaming and crying, and the others were really silent. And this is not normal activity or brain development with these children These children need their parents This does amount to child abuse." American Academy of Pediatrics president Dr. Colleen Kraft on family separations at the border: These children need their parents This does amount to child abuse. https://t.co/g9mWi01qJc pic.twitter.com/mjdLMQGiG8 CNN (@CNN) June 18, 2018 "This is something that was inflicted on this child by the government, and really is nothing less than government-sanctioned child abuse," she told CNN. It would take no child psychologist to fathom that being separated from their parents would have adverse effects on the children. Kraft explained the "toxic stress" it causes the children when they are taken away from their parents. "It disrupts their brain architecture and keeps them from developing language and social, emotional bonds, and gross motor skills, and the development that they could possibly have." The American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association also compared the policy to child abuse. "The effect of this type of event will follow these children into adulthood and into their entire lives," Ana Maria Lopez, president of the American College of Physicians. "Our federal government is causing a situation that is creating a host of potential health consequences for an entire category of people." A doctor from North Carolina said the US was "systematising something that we know is incredibly harmful and incredibly cruel". The CEO of the American Psychological Association said that "research shows parental separation is harmful to children" and could lead to anxiety and depression. Moreover, a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that growing fears among immigrants have significant negative effects on children's health. One can only imagine the kind of effects the children at the detention centres, separated from their parents indefinitely, will face in future. Echoing Kraft's views, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein condemned the family separation policy as a "cruel practice". "The thought that any state would seek to deter parents by inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable." This was not the first time the UN denounced the US family separation policy. On 5 June, it had declared that the policy violated human rights and international law and urged the US government to end it. "The US should immediately halt this practice of separating families and stop criminalising what should at most be an administrative offence," a spokeswoman for Commissioner Zeid's office had said. Despite proof from the ground, images of weeping children and distraught parents and widespread opposition, the administration seems determined to turn a blind eye to reality. Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen on Monday denied that separating immigrant children from their parents at the border amounted to child abuse, choosing instead to assert that they had "high standards" at the detention facilities. She went on to defend President Trump, saying he was "trying to find a long-term fix" and maintained like others from the administration that the US Congress needed to act to fix loopholes in immigration laws. From what we have seen from the detention centres so far, the child abuse is evident and the paediatricians and immigration activists are not wrong to call for an end to the separation policy. While the Trump administration continues to put children through hell instead of working with the Democrats to find a middle ground to fix what the president believes are flawed immigration laws, Nielsen fooled no one with her claim that the children were not being used as pawns. President Donald Trump announced Monday he is directing the Pentagon to create a new 'Space Force' as an independent military service branch. Washington: President Donald Trump announced Monday he is directing the Pentagon to create a new "Space Force" as an independent military service branch aimed at ensuring American supremacy in space though he may have limited power to develop a new military command. While Trump has previously talked about his desire for a space unit, he seemed to take those musings one step further, specifically ordering the Pentagon to begin the creation of a sixth branch of the American armed forces. "When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space," Trump said during remarks at the White House. "We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal." Turning to seek out Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump said, "General Dunford, if you would carry that assignment out, I would be very greatly honoured also ...Where's General Dunford? General? Got it?" Dunford appeared to acknowledge the order, responding, "we got it." But the directive seemed to take defense officials by surprise. Creating a new joint military command is largely the purview of Congress, which would have to provide the authority and any funding or shifting of money to a new unit. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said that the department understands the president's guidance, and is working on the matter while taking into consideration the implications for intelligence operations for the other services. "Working with Congress, this will be a deliberate process with a great deal of input from multiple stakeholders," she said. A senior congressional aide said that Trump's order is consistent with efforts by members of Congress over the past two years to find a way to dedicate additional resources to the country's warfighting in space. But the issue has been contested, and even Defense Secretary Jim Mattis expressed some early reluctance to creating a new military service citing the expense and broader effort to integrate warfighting. The Defense Department is already in the middle of a congressionally-mandated review of the space force issue. The study began in March, with an interim review due in August and a final report due 31 December. It's not clear if the president's comments Monday were meant to override or influence that study. Decades ago, the military deemed space a critical war-fighting domain, creating the Colorado-based Air Force Space Command in 1982. It includes more than 36,000 personnel around the world that provide space and cyber capabilities for the Defense Department. And the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base in California, designs and buys most of the Pentagon's space systems, while also overseeing satellite and other aircraft launches. In addition, a number of federal defense agencies control portions of the space program, including NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office, which develops and operates surveillance spacecraft and satellites for intelligence gathering. In a March document outlining the review, the Pentagon said it has already made organisational changes to beef up the stature of the space force, but is reviewing others. The document sent to Congress said the review will look at research, capabilities, acquisition and joint warfighting needs, and will assess "whether the Space Corps concept should be implemented." The establishment of an independent space force was mentioned by Trump in a March speech to service members in California, but it has faced opposition since it could create an expensive new headquarters bureaucracy and trigger complex and divisive battles between the agencies that currently control part of the space mission. So far, the Pentagon doesn't have any cost estimates for the development of a new command or any description of how it would be set up or its impact on other defense and intelligence agencies. Ever since the Space Age started with the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, there has been a military and national security aspect to space, even though there are treaties and a United Nations committee that explicitly talk about keeping space a place of peace. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower established two separate space programs a civilian one that became NASA, and a military one. Trump more broadly envisioned a bright future for the US space program, pledging to revive the country's flagging efforts, return to the moon and eventually send a human mission that would reach Mars. The president framed space as a national security issue, saying he does not want "China and Russia and other countries leading us." While the US has dominated in space since the 1969 moon landing, China is making strong headway, while Russia is in decline. "My administration is reclaiming America's heritage as the world's greatest spacefaring nation," Trump said in the East Room, joined by members of his space council. "The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons and to tame new frontiers." The president also used the White House event to establish a new policy for reducing satellite clutter in space. The policy calls for providing a safe and secure environment up in orbit, as satellite traffic increases. It also sets up new guidelines for satellite design and operation, to avoid collisions and spacecraft breakups. The council's executive secretary, Scott Pace, told reporters before the meeting that space is becoming increasingly congested and current guidelines are inadequate to address the challenge. Trump also encouraged SpaceX, Blue Origin and other non-traditional aerospace companies led by wealthy US entrepreneurs to beat NASA to Mars. "Just go ahead, if you beat us to Mars, we'll be very happy, and you'll be even more famous," he said. "As long as it's an American rich person, that's good, OK? They can beat us. We'll save a little money, and they can beat us, and we're taking full credit for it, don't worry about it." President Donald Trump inched closer to an all-out trade war with China by unveiling plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods if Beijing doesn't bend to US demands Washington: President Donald Trump inched closer to an all-out trade war with China by unveiling plans to impose 10 percent tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods if Beijing doesn't bend to US demands. With the world's two largest economies on the brink of a full-fledged confrontation, spooking markets and worrying business leaders, Trump said he was pushing forward with fresh punitive measures over Beijing's "unacceptable" move to raise its own tariffs. "Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," Trump said in a statement. The US president warned he would go even further, with punitive measures on an extra $200 billion of Chinese goods for a possible total of $450 billion of goods, or most Chinese imports "if China increases its tariffs yet again". Last week, Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports, prompting Beijing to follow suit with matching duties on American imported goods. Trump had already warned at the time of "additional tariffs" should Beijing hit back with tit-for-tat duties on American goods. "The trade relationship between the US and China must be much more equitable," the president said in explaining his decision. "I have an excellent relationship with President Xi (Jinping), and we will continue working together on many issues. But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world." Trump moved forward with measures after months of sometimes fraught shuttle diplomacy in which Chinese offers to purchase more American goods failed to assuage his grievances over the soaring trade imbalance and China's aggressive industrial development policies. China had offered to ramp up purchases of American goods by only $70 billion to help cut the yawning trade imbalance with the US, whereas Trump had demanded a $200 billion deficit cut. And the China trade offensive is only one side of Trump's multi-front battle with all major US economic partners. Since 1 June, steel and aluminum imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico have been hit with tariffs of 25 percent and 10 percent respectively. "This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the US at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive $376 billion trade imbalance in goods," Trump said about China's retaliatory tariffs. "This is unacceptable." Two decades ago, China's economy was largely fueled by exports, but it has made progress in rebalancing towards domestic investment and consumption since the global financial crisis erupted last decade limiting the damage trade tariffs could inflict on Beijing. Still, strong exports this year have lifted the economy, which is now showing signs of losing steam under the weight of Beijing's war on debt, launched to clean up financial risks and rein in borrowing-fueled growth. "China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology," Trump said in a statement. "Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening US companies, workers and farmers who have done nothing wrong." Initially, 545 US products valued at $34 billion will be targeted by China, mimicking the Trump administration's tariff rollout. These include major American exports to China such as soybeans, which brought in $14 billion in sales last year, and are grown in states that supported Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Politically important exports like other agricultural products and automobiles also made the list. Beijing also drew up a second list of $16 billion in chemical and energy products to hit with new tariffs, though it did not announce a date for imposing them. The Brahmaputra river that flows from the Himalayas down to India and Bangladesh, has burst its banks, causing floods in more than 1,500 villages in Assam. Dhaka/Guwahati: Flash floods triggered by heavy monsoon rains in South Asia have killed dozens of people and displaced more than a million, mostly in North East India and Bangladesh, authorities said on Tuesday. The Brahmaputra river, which flows from the Himalayas down to India and then through Bangladesh, has burst its banks, swamping more than 1,500 villages in Assam in the past week. The flood situation remains critical, Assams water resources minister Keshab Mahanta told Reuters, referring to at least 10 of the states 32 districts. The weather office is forecasting more rain and thundershowers in the next 48 hours, Mahanta further said, adding that the state was on maximum alert and the army had put helicopters on standby in case they were needed for rescues. The floods have killed nearly 20 people and displaced about 8,00,000 in the Indian states of Assam, Tripura and Manipur. The water level in the Brahmaputra is expected to rise until the end of the week and then level off, in the absence of more heavy rain, Indias Central Water Commission said. Downstream in Bangladesh, 11 people have been killed and more than 2,50,000 have been displaced or affected by the flooding, officials said. Last week, landslides and other mishaps triggered by rains killed at least 12 people in southeast Bangladesh, including two Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar living in camps near the border. The camps, thrown up after an estimated 7,00,000 Rohingyas fled from a Myanmar military crackdown on insurgents that began last August, are believed to be particularly vulnerable to storms in the rainy season, which has just begun. PARIS (Reuters) - France will take the lead in the development of a next generation combat jet with Germany under an agreement the two governments signed on Tuesday, the French defence ministry said. The new combat jet is intended to replace from 2040 France's Dassault Aviation Rafales and Germany's Eurofighters, made by a European consortium. The Franco-German agreement calls for work on the project to begin before the end of the year, starting with a study phase, the ministry said PARIS (Reuters) - France will take the lead in the development of a next generation combat jet with Germany under an agreement the two governments signed on Tuesday, the French defence ministry said. The new combat jet is intended to replace from 2040 France's Dassault Aviation Rafales and Germany's Eurofighters, made by a European consortium. The Franco-German agreement calls for work on the project to begin before the end of the year, starting with a study phase, the ministry said. In addition to being capable of acting on its own, the new aircraft is expected to be at the centre of a broader weapons system, capable of commanding a squadron of drones. Dassault and Airbus , a Eurofighter consortium member, signed an agreement in April to work together on the new project, but avoided saying which of the two groups would be in charge. The fact that France is now in the driving seat of the project favours Dassault to take charge since most of Airbus' defence activities are in Germany. "Developing a future multi-role combat aircraft for France and Germany integrated in a weapons system network is a major issue for Europe's strategic autonomy," Dassault Chief Executive Eric Trappier said in a statement to Reuters. The other members of the Eurofighter consortium are British defence group BAE Systems and Italy's Leonardo . German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron first agreed to jointly develop the new aircraft shortly after his election in May 2017, burying past rivalries in favour of tighter defence cooperation. France and Germany also agreed on Tuesday that Germany would take the lead in a joint project to develop a new battle tank with a first phase of the programme to be launched by mid-2019. The aim is for the tank to be operational in 2035. The two countries also signed agreements for a joint future artillery system and plans to launch a Franco-German military satellite. (Reporting by Cyril Altmeyer; writing by Leigh Thomas; Editing by Adrian Croft) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met his Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijing Tuesday to brief his sole major ally on his unprecedented summit with US president Donald Trump. Beijing: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met his Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijing Tuesday to brief his sole major ally on his unprecedented summit with US president Donald Trump. Kim's third trip to China since March comes as Beijing tries to strengthen its role as a mediator between the US and North Korea, where it claims compelling security and economic interests. The North's leader, who is believed to have landed in the Chinese capital Tuesday morning, met Xi at Beijing's ornate Great Hall of the People, according to state broadcaster CCTV. The young autocrat was given a full ceremonial welcome, including a military review and a gaggle of adoring children shouting out welcomes. During the meeting, the two leaders discussed the prospects for denuclearisation on the Korean Peninsula as well as the potential for developing the North's economy, CCTV reported. The United States relies on China to enforce UN sanctions against the North, giving Beijing potential leverage in a looming trade war with Washington. Kim will be in Beijing through Wednesday, state media previously reported. "We hope this visit will help deepen the China-DPRK (North Korea) relations and strengthen our strategic communication on major issues to promote regional peace and stability," foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a regular press briefing. The visit is Kim's third to China since March, when he made his inaugural foreign trip as leader. Previous trips had been kept secret until Kim returned home. It was not clear why Chinese state media broke with the precedent. In addition to discussing last week's Singapore summit, Kim is expected to ask China for help in easing economic sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise, according to Wang Dong, an international relations expert at Peking University. "The Chinese and North Korean leaders are carrying out consultations on how to jointly move the Korean nuclear issue forward," Wang said. Following the historic summit on 12 June, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic restrictions on its Cold War-era ally. China may not have been at the table for the historic summit in Singapore but it retains strong influence behind the scenes, Wang said. The visit shows that China is "key" to the talks, the analyst added. "It reflects that China is indispensable to the entire Korean nuclear issue." Differences ahead In a joint statement with Trump following the Singapore summit, Kim pledged to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." Trump hailed this as a concession but critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. It is now urgent for Xi and Kim to discuss how North Korea will work towards meeting US demands, said Beijing-based international relations commentator Hua Po. "There may be differences ahead between the DPRK and the US in regards to denuclearisation, because the US wants irreversible and verifiable denuclearisation. It may be difficult for Kim Jong-un to accept," Hua told AFP. "Therefore, both China and the DPRK want to strengthen communication and form an overall strategy to deal with the United States going forward," Hua added. In return for the denuclearisation pledge, Trump made the shock announcement that he would stop joint military drills with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. Analysts saw this as a clear sign of Beijing's influence. Beijing has repeatedly called for a "suspension for suspension" approach where the North would stop its nuclear and missile tests in exchange for the US and South Korea halting military exercises. Washington had previously rebuffed the proposal. But on Tuesday, the US and South Korean militaries confirmed they have called off a scheduled major joint exercise following Trump's order. Trump had raised eyebrows by describing the exercises as "provocative" a term used by the North. The trip will be Kim Jong-un's third to China since March, when he made his inaugural foreign trip as North Korea's leader. Beijing: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is visiting China on Tuesday and Wednesday, State broadcaster CCTV said, a week after his unprecedented summit with US president Donald Trump. CCTV did not say whether Kim had arrived in Beijing, but security lined the freeway leading to the city's airport on Tuesday morning as authorities prepared for his arrival. The trip will be Kim's third to China since March, when he made his inaugural foreign trip as leader. An AFP reporter in Pyongyang said the only scheduled international flight an Air Koryo plane to Beijing had been briefly delayed for no apparent reason, which often happens when Kim travels. Kim is seeking relief from economic sanctions in return for his pledge to denuclearise and is believed to be seeking support from China for that, Japan's Nikkei business daily said in a dispatch from Beijing. Following the historic US-North Korea summit in Singapore a week ago, China suggested the UN Security Council could consider easing the economic punishment of its Cold War-era ally. China was not a direct player in the negotiations in Singapore but retains strong influence behind the scenes. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo rushed to Beijing to brief Chinese president Xi Jinping and other top leaders soon after the Trump-Kim meeting. In a joint statement following the Singapore summit, Kim pledged to "work toward the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." Trump hailed this as a concession but critics said the stock phrase long used by Pyongyang stopped short of longstanding US demands for North Korea to give up its atomic arsenal in a "verifiable" and "irreversible" way. In return, Trump said he would stop joint military drills with South Korea, long seen as a provocation by Pyongyang and Beijing. On Tuesday, the US and South Korean militaries confirmed they have called off upcoming joint exercises following Trump's order. By Idrees Ali WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea could start the process of handing over the remains of troops, including Americans, missing from the Korean War within the next few days, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Tuesday By Idrees Ali WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea could start the process of handing over the remains of troops, including Americans, missing from the Korean War within the next few days, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Tuesday. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said North Korea would hand over the remains to United Nations Command in South Korea, and they would then be transferred to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. One official said "a sizable number" of remains were expected to be handed over, but declined to give a specific number given the unpredictability of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. It could take months or even years before the remains are positively identified, the officials added. U.S. President Donald Trump met with Kim at a historic summit last week in Singapore. In a news conference following the summit, Trump said North Korea had agreed to return the remains of U.S. soldiers. "(The families) want the remains of their fathers, and mothers, and all of the people that got caught into that really brutal war," Trump said. "And (Kim) agreed to that so quickly and so nice - it was really a very nice thing, and he understands it," Trump added. About 7,700 U.S. military personnel remain unaccounted from the 1950-1953 Korean War, U.S. military data shows. According to the Pentagon, North Korean officials have indicated in the past that they have the remains of as many as 200 U.S. troops. More than 36,500 U.S. troops died in the conflict. The remains of some U.S. soldiers were last returned in 2007, when then-New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson visited Pyongyang. Trump has hailed the Singapore summit as a success, but sceptics have questioned whether he achieved anything new, given that Pyongyang, which has rejected unilateral nuclear disarmament, appeared to make no new concrete commitments. Transferring the remains would mark the first step Kim has taken since the summit that could indicate he may be serious about improving relations with Washington. On Monday, the United States and South Korea said they had agreed to suspend a joint military exercise scheduled for August. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he would likely travel back to North Korea "before too terribly long" to try to flesh out commitments made at the summit. Pompeo, who has travelled twice to North Korea this year and met Kim for a third time at the June 12 Singapore summit, told an audience in Detroit that Kim had made "very clear his commitment to fully denuclearize his country," but there was a great deal of work to do. (Reporting by Idrees Ali; Additional reporting by Daphne Psaledakis; Editing by Yara Bayoumy and Peter Cooney) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - One person was killed and four others wounded in a shooting in the coastal city of Malmo in southern Sweden on Monday night, police said. All five were taken to hospital after the shooting STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - One person was killed and four others wounded in a shooting in the coastal city of Malmo in southern Sweden on Monday night, police said. All five were taken to hospital after the shooting. "An 18-year-old man died during the night," said police spokesman Stephan Soderholm. Police were questioning witnesses after sealing off the area where the shooting took place. No arrests had been made, and police said there were no signs the incident was related to terrorism. (Reporting by Johan Sennero; editing by John Stonestreet and Tom Brown) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. There are over 1 billion firearms in the world today, including 857 million in civilian hands with American men and women the dominant owners, according to a study. United Nations: There are over 1 billion firearms in the world today, including 857 million in civilian hands with American men and women the dominant owners, according to a study. The Small Arms Survey says 393 million of the civilian-held firearms, 46 percent, are in the United States, which is "more than those held by civilians in the other top 25 countries combined." "The key to the United States, of course, is its unique gun culture," the report's author, Aaron Karp, said at a news conference."American civilians buy an average of 14 million new firearms every year, and that means the United States is an overwhelming presence on civilian markets." The report said the numbers include legal and illegal firearms in civilian hands, ranging from improvised craft weapons to factory-made handguns, rifles, shotguns and, in some countries, even machine guns. The estimate of over 1 billion firearms worldwide at the end of 2017 also includes 133 million such weapons held by government military forces and 22.7 million by law enforcement agencies, it said. Karp said the new global estimate is significantly higher than the 875 million firearms estimated in the last survey in 2007, and the 650 million civilian-held firearms at that time mostly due to increasing civilian ownership. While the United States was dominant in civilian ownership in 2007 and 2017, the report said the U.S. is only fifth today in military firearms holdings, behind Russia, China, North Korea and Ukraine. It is also fifth in law enforcement holdings, behind Russia, China, India and Egypt. The Small Arms Survey released its study to coincide with the third UN conference to assess progress on implementing a 2001 program known as Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms, which includes marking weapons so they can be traced. The conference opened Monday and ends 29 June. Small Arms Survey director Eric Berman stressed that the Geneva-based research and policy institute isn't an advocacy organization. "We don't advocate disarmament. We are not against guns," he said. "What we want to do, and what we have done successfully for the last 19 years, is to be able to provide authoritative information and analysis for governments so that they can work to address illicit proliferation and reduce it and to reduce also the incidents of armed violence." Karp, a lecturer at Old Dominion University in Virginia, said that since the 2007 report, "we have a much more accurate picture of the distribution of firearms around the world than we've ever had before." He said information, including on civilian ownership from 133 countries, has enabled the Small Arms Survey to publish figures on 230 countries and autonomous territories. But he cautioned that every country's figures include "some degree of estimation." According to the report, the countries with the largest estimated number of civilian-held legal and illegal firearms at the end of 2017 were the United States with 393.3 million, India with 71.1 million, China with 49.7 million, Pakistan with 43.9 million and Russia with 17.6 million. But Karp said the more important number is the estimated rate of civilian firearms holdings per 100 residents and in that table India, China and Russia rank much lower than the US and outside the top 25 while Pakistan ranks 20th. At the top of that ranking are Americans, who own 121 firearms for every 100 residents. They are followed by Yemenis at 53, Montenegro and Serbia with 39, Canada and Uruguay about 35, and Finland, Lebanon and Iceland around 32. Karp said the Small Arms Survey doesn't have year-by-year data but countries whose ownership appears to have gone down relative to 2007 include Finland, Iraq, Sweden and Switzerland, though he cautioned this could be due to better data. He said ownership rates in Canada and Iceland are "clearly up" while the rates in Cyprus, Yemen, Serbia and the United States remained relatively stable. Anna Alvazzi del Frate, the institute's program director, said that "the countries with the highest level of firearm violence they don't rank high in terms of ownership per person." "So what we see is that there is no direct correlation at the global level between firearm ownership and violence," she said. But "the correlation exists with firearm suicides, and it is so strong that it can be used, at least in Western countries, as a proxy for measurement," Alvazzi del Frate said. Regardless of the result and whether Nawaz Sharif wins, the elections in Pakistan in July is likely to be deeply troubling. Come another month, and Pakistan will be going into general elections. This exercise is usually fraught with not just the usual charges of corruption, misgovernance and sundry other allegations, but also veiled pointers indicating the side the "establishment" is backing. This time around, these pointers are far less hidden. The "establishment", which for lay readers means the military, its intelligence agencies and sections of the bureaucracy, have more than made their preferences clear they don't like Nawaz Sharif and they don't like his immediate family. This dislike has been on the front pages for the last few months, and at present, the courts and every investigative agency in the country is bent upon proving Sharif guilty of corruption and thievery on a massive scale before the elections are held. On the face of it, this may seem daunting to the staunchest political head, but not Sharif. He's more than used to this. The problem for the establishment is that a number of factors favour the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) as a party. First, the victimisation of Sharif by the courts has been so apparent that it hardly needs any reiteration. Just two months ago, the Supreme Court of Pakistan barred him from holding any public position during his lifetime due to the very controversial Article 62 (1)(f) of the constitution, which demands that public servants be honest ('ameen') and altogether untarred by corrupt practices. This was seen by even the most even-handed as irrational in the extreme and is likely to help Sharif rather than otherwise. After all, the former prime minister has honed "victimisation" into a poll tactic for years. Second, the attendance at his election rallies in most provinces has been considerable, indicating that party workers have performed their tasks. This means that the party machinery is intact, despite a year or more of battering and doubt. Third, he has an advantage that certain Indian political parties might easily understand he really has no opponent. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari is a babe in arms compared to the canny Sharif family. Imran Khan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has a better profile, but has no national presence. Both Bhutto and Khan will retain their regional ascendancy, but are nowhere near making it to the post of prime minister. While that's the basic reality, there are other factors that are of interest to those following Pakistan's elections scheduled for July. An excellent analysis by The Herald based on public opinion surveys carried out along with the Sustainable Development Policy Institute divides the estimation of polls into two segments. One is the performance of the government according to various benchmarks, which may be by international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund, or more positive projections by Pakistani institutions themselves. The second is based on a study of public perceptions, a very chancy thing indeed, and likely to be swayed even by last-minute events. Polls are unpredictable at the best of times, but the exercise by The Herald seems as exhaustive and even-handed as possible. Broadly, it gives the PML(N) a little more than a fighting chance, with a majority of voters seeing its performance as "average". The factors on which the present government was assessed as having done well is the improvement in infrastructure and relative improvement in power sector. In other words, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is paying political dividends. This perception will drive the next government whomsoever it may be regardless of the fact that the perception itself may be flawed. Regional popularity, or the lack thereof A second factor emerging in the polls is the unsurprising fact that the PML(N) is the most popular in Punjab, which is after all Sharif's home base. But interestingly, the poll in the party's favour is more due to his brother Shahbaz Sharif, with figures seeming to show that Nawaz may actually drag down the party in the province instead of up. In simple words, projecting Shahbaz as the central candidate will win more votes in Punjab, than Nawaz. Shahbaz is now "acting president" of the party, but not its boss. Consider that Nawaz carefully chose a political non-entity to be the prime minister once he was booted out of office. This is South Asia, where family comes first. Nawaz will want a succession line for the head of state into his own family, not that of a brother with two sons. The picture in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is likely to be far more complex. Imran Khan's PTI, notwithstanding its strong tendency to take to the streets on any pretext, seems to have provided some delivery in terms of infrastructure to the province. The polls indicate that Chief Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pervez Khattak may reap the benefit of a reasonable tenure, but the credit for an eventual merger of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas with the province may go to the central government instead of PTI. That picture has yet to emerge, though the fact that this was pushed through at the last minute by the Centre indicates that it is fairly confident of this being a vote winner. The seething discontent that is apparent in the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, and the fact that many of them are being incarcerated in jail, will work strongly against the state government, which at any rate was dilatory in extending its support to the Pashtuns and this could work in PML(N)'s favour. In Sindh, the ten-year rule of the Bhutto family's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) seems to be facing its worst low in years. Ominously, disappointment with the government is not just across the urban electorate, but also in the rural areas, indicating that the party's traditional vote bank is eroding. However, it benefits from the fact that the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), which was once a kingmaker from its seat of power in Karachi, has divided and subdivided itself into a mess. This was due, in part, to the complete irrationality of its founder Altaf Hussain as well as the Pakistani intelligence's chess moves. There's another problem that the MQM any faction of it will have to face. The Mohajir community has seen a steadily declining birth rate, apparent in the Pakistan census data from 1981 and 1998. Along with this is the fact that the Pashtun population has increased steadily with thousands fleeing the unrest in the tribal areas. There is no available reliable count of how many live in Karachi, leave alone in other districts. In the recent delimitation exercise, at least one constituency (NA-250) has an overwhelming Pashtun voting presence. Once caught between the major political parties, Pashtuns are now making their presence felt through huge support for the Pashtun Rights Movement, with rallies seeing an attendance of a reported 15,000. There are some 40 million Pashtuns in Pakistan, and this ethnic group is likely to become a kingmaker of sorts if the present trend of events continues. If Nawaz wants to win, he has to appease this group in all the provinces where they have been harried, jailed and abused. Politics in Balochistan has become so muddied that it is extremely difficult to predict an outcome. Baloch politics is far more locally influenced than most, with tribal chiefs traditionally having the dominant say in the make up of the government. This was rudely shattered when Baloch chief minister Nawab Sanaullah Zehri a powerful tribal chief in his own right was summarily dismissed by his own party members. He was replaced by a relative political non-entity, Mir Abdul Quddus Bizenjo. One of the key dissidents was another political newbie, Mir Sarfaraz Ahmed Bugti, who hails from the Bugti tribal lands where security forces are more or less encamped permanently. Balochistan is a vital area for the Pakistani security since this is where the CPEC debouches into the Arabian Sea through the Gwadar Port. The most significant development in Baloch politics has been the growth of a number of independents, some of whom have now grouped together under a new banner, the Balochistan Awami Party. The PML(N)'s ability to win over these independents depends on its own viability as a political force and on the depth of its purse. The latter is not in dispute at all. In other words, the elections are less about causes and more about money and a lot of it. A review of the Urdu media is disquieting, indicating that elections have little to do with the common man. One sarcastic author has recommended that whichever party comes to power, it should nuke its own citizens so that at least the poor and impoverished can find their own way to a heaven that is denied to them in the state. The term "lootacracy" is now in use to refer to politicians skipping allegiances as nimbly as a goat, depending on who offers what. Others foretell an Arab Spring-like event, powered by the squabbles and fake news on social media. Regardless of the result, this is likely to be a deeply troubling election for Pakistan, with an increasing disconnect between the politicians and the voters and little in terms of actual political dialogue. Although this is hardly limited to Pakistan alone, the repercussions here could be far greater. A vengeful military, a spineless judiciary and an economy that is just about holding off a severe debt repayment crisis could result in an unholy mix. Someone should advise Nawaz to get out while the going is good this prime ministership may be more dangerous than even he can imagine. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday called the Donald Trump administration's 'zero tolerance' policy that has separated children from their parents at the southern US border 'a moral and humanitarian crisis.' Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday called the Donald Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy that has separated children from their parents at the southern US border "a moral and humanitarian crisis." Speaking at an awards lunch for the Women's Forum of New York, Clinton said what was happening to families at the US-Mexico border is "horrific." "Every human being with a sense of compassion and decency should be outraged," Clinton said. Clinton condemned the White House for the way they are handling the crisis in a series of tweets and lying about about 'law' to keep families apart. She also supported ActBlue Civics, an NGO, urging people to donate to support families at the border. I still believe in the vision we share for our country. We will elect politicians and enact legislation to protect the most vulnerable among us but first, we have to address the urgent needs of families at the center of this crisis. Give today. Please. https://t.co/VEAP7b5qNo Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 18, 2018 The separations stem from a policy that turns all cases of people trying to enter the country illegally over for criminal prosecution. Children are not detained with their parents when those parents are facing a criminal charge, as per US protocol. President Donald Trump has defended the policy, which has taken nearly 2,000 immigrant children away from their parents. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," he added. "Not on my watch," Trump said Monday. Those who selectively use the Bible to justify this cruelty are ignoring a central tenet of Christianity. Jesus said "Suffer the little children unto me." He did not say let the children suffer. Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 18, 2018 Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, said she had warned during the campaign that Trump's hard-line immigration stance would result in family separations. "Now as we watch with broken hearts, that's exactly what's happening," she said. The policy has come under increasingly strong criticism, with accounts of children kept in cages and parents not knowing where their children are. Whats happening to families at the border right now is a humanitarian crisis. Every parent who has ever held a child in their arms, every human being with a sense of compassion and decency, should be outraged. Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 18, 2018 Trump has falsely blamed Democrats, and his administration has echoed his stance by claiming it was enforcing the law, with some using the Bible as religious justification. Clinton pushed back on all of those points, saying the separations are required by no law and grounded in no religion. "The test of any nation is how we treat the most vulnerable among us," she said. "We are a better country than one that tears families apart." With inputs from AP South Korean and US officials have agreed on suspending the joint military drills, says Seoul. A Pentagon statement confirmed the suspension and added that there would be a meeting between the secretaries of defense and state on the issue. Seoul: South Korean and US officials confirmed the suspension of scheduled joint military drills on Tuesday, making good on a pledge by President Donald Trump during his summit with North Korea's leader. Seoul, which has a large number of US troops on its soil to help protect it from its hostile northern neighbour, said the suspension would affect the large-scale Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercises slated for August. "South Korea and the US plan to continue discussions for further measures," said the South's defense ministry in a statement, adding that "no decisions have been reached for other ensuing drills." Some 17,500 US military personnel were due to take part in the Freedom Guardian drills. "We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent war games have been made," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in confirming the suspension. "There is no impact on Pacific exercises outside of the Korean Peninsula," she added. White said US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton would meet later this week at the Pentagon to discuss the issue. Last week, Trump made the surprise announcement that the US would halt "war games" with its South Korean security ally - without making clear when the freeze would begin. The US leader raised eyebrows by describing the exercises as "provocative" - a term used by the North. US and South Korean forces have been training together for years, and routinely rehearse everything from beach landings to an invasion from the North, or even "decapitation" strikes targeting the North Korean regime. Pyongyang typically reacts furiously. Following drills last year, the North fired ballistic missiles over Japan, triggering global alarm. Trump's decision raised concern in Japan, which hosts many US troops and has eyed the diplomatic outreach to Pyongyang with deep suspicion. But officials were sanguine on the announcement today, with defence minister Itsunori Onodera saying Trump's move would not affect US-Japan exercises. "In talks with Secretary Mattis, we confirmed that we will implement drills between Japan and the US," he told reporters. Foreign Minister Taro Kono added that Tokyo understood the drills were being halted as a way to press Pyongyang to negotiate in good faith. "I understand that if North Korea stops negotiating with good will, the joint drills will resume," he said. "We are expecting a corresponding measure from North Korea in response to the suspension of the joint drills." Choi Hyun-soo South Korea defence ministry spokeswoman said. At their landmark Singapore summit, Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong-un signed a joint statement in which Pyongyang committed to "work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula." But critics have pointed to the vague wording of the non-binding document and raised fears that the summit could weaken the international coalition against the North's nuclear programme. "Sanctions will remain in place until North Korea's complete denuclearisation," Pompeo said, as he plans to meet Kim for follow-up talks. South Korea said sanctions against the North could be eased once it takes "substantive steps towards denuclearisation," seemingly setting the bar lower than Washington for such a move. But Pompeo's office said both allies remain "committed to the goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation." PARIS (Reuters) - New Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will travel to Paris on June 23 for talks with Emmanuel Macron on migration and euro zone reforms, the French presidency said on Monday. PARIS (Reuters) - New Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will travel to Paris on June 23 for talks with Emmanuel Macron on migration and euro zone reforms, the French presidency said on Monday. It would be the Socialist leader's first overseas visit since defeating his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy in a confidence vote last month. The talks will take place less than a week after Madrid took in 629 mainly sub-Saharan Africans on board the ship Aquarius after Italy's new government refused to let it dock on its shores. The French presidency said the two leaders would discuss bilateral and European topics, specifically focusing on migration and euro zone reform issues, to prepare for a European leaders summit at the end of June. (Reporting by Michel Rose Writing by John Irish; Editing by Toni Reinhold) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. By Angus McDowall BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian state media said on Monday that U.S.-led coalition aircraft had bombed a Syrian army position near the Iraqi border, causing deaths and injuries, but the U.S. military denied it was responsible. By Angus McDowall BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian state media said on Monday that U.S.-led coalition aircraft had bombed a Syrian army position near the Iraqi border, causing deaths and injuries, but the U.S. military denied it was responsible. The attack took place in al-Harra, southeast of the town of Albu Kamal, state news agency SANA said, citing a military source. SANA said the attack caused an unspecified number of deaths and injuries. A commander in the alliance fighting alongside Damascus told Reuters that drones that were "probably American" had bombed the positions of Iraqi factions between Albu Kamal and Tanf, as well as Syrian military positions. The commander, who is not Syrian and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the strike had killed and injured some Iraqi fighters but he did not give any numbers. Iraq's Popular Mobilisation Forces, a grouping of mostly Iran-backed Shi'ite paramilitaries, said a U.S. air strike on the Iraqi border with Syria killed 22 of its members and wounded 12 others. "At 22:00 last night a U.S. plane hit a fixed headquarters of the Popular Mobilisation Forces' 45th and 46th brigades defending the border strip with Syria, using two guided missiles which led to the martyrdom of 22 fighters," it said in a statement. It demanded an explanation from the United States. An Iraqi military statement later said no Popular Mobilisation Forces or other Iraqi troops tasked with securing the Iraqi-Syrian border had been hit by the air strike, and it had taken place inside Syria. "No member of the U.S.-led coalition carried out strikes near Albu Kamal," Major Josh Jacques, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, told Reuters. The U.S.-led coalition uses air power and special forces to back an alliance of Syrian Arab and Kurdish militia fighting Islamic State northeast of Albu Kamal. U.S. forces also are based around the Tanf crossing, southwest of the town in the Syrian desert near the borders of Iraq and Jordan. President Bashar al-Assad's army, with the help of Iran-backed militias including Hezbollah and Iraqi groups, drove Islamic State from Albu Kamal and its environs last year but the jihadists have since staged attacks there. The Popular Mobilisation Forces have been officially included in Iraq's governmental forces but many of them still maintain loyalties to their former leaders and political groups. They said the base that was hit was 700 meters into Syrian territory and the Syrian government was aware of their presence. A U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the U.S. military was concerned that Popular Mobilisation Forces could retaliate against American forces in Iraq. The official said the Pentagon was going out of its way to publicly make clear that it was not involved in the strike in order to minimize the risk of retaliation. The United States has about 5,200 troops in Iraq that are part of a coalition fighting Islamic State militants. "OCCUPYING FORCES" The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said unidentified planes had struck Lebanon's Shi'ite Hezbollah and other allied foreign militias around Albu Kamal. The UK-based Observatory said the strikes had killed 52 people. Reuters could not independently verify the Observatory's report of casualties. Asked about the reported air strikes, an Israeli military spokeswoman said: "We do not comment on foreign reports." Throughout Syria's seven-year war, Israel has carried out scores of strikes within the neighbouring country against what it describes as Hezbollah or Iranian targets. Israel, alarmed about the clout of arch enemies Iran and Hezbollah, has pressed Russia, Assad's other key ally, to make sure Tehran does not entrench its military sway in Syria. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet he had "repeated and clarified" his Syria policy in weekend phone calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. "First of all, Iran must clear out of all of Syria," Netanyahu said on Sunday, according to a statement from his office. "Secondly, we will take action, and are already taking action, against the attempted military entrenchment of Iran and its proxies, both close to the border and deep within Syria." In an interview last week, Assad called Hezbollah "a basic element" in the war and said "the need for these military forces will continue for a long time". He said the United States was an occupying power in Syria and that his state supported "any act of resistance, whether against terrorists or against occupying forces, regardless of their nationality." (Reporting By Laila Bassam, Angus McDowall, Ellen Francis and Lisa Barrington in Beirut; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali in Washington, Dan Williams in Jerusalem, Ulf Laessing and Ahmed Aboulenein in Baghdad; Editing by William Maclean and Bill Trott) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. The attack happened after the Eid holiday cease-fire. The government had offered to extend the cease-fire for another 10 days, but the Taliban announced Sunday that they would resume their attacks. Kabul: An Afghan official says at least four security forces were killed when Taliban fighters targeted army and local police checkpoints in northern Kunduz province. Nematullah Temori, spokesman for the provincial governor, says six other security personnel were wounded in the attack on Tuesday morning in Dashti Archi district. He added that seven of the insurgents were killed and five others wounded in the battle. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack in Kunduz, but Taliban are active in Kunduz and have repeatedly claimed attacks against Afghan security forces there. The attack happened after the Eid holiday cease-fire. The government had offered to extend the cease-fire for another 10 days, but the Taliban announced Sunday that they would resume their attacks. Thailand has carried out its first execution since 2009, killing a 26-year-old convict. It has been condemned by Amnesty International as 'deplorable'. Bangkok: Thailand has carried out its first execution since 2009, the Department of Corrections said, killing a 26-year-old convicted murderer. The move has been condemned by Amnesty International as "deplorable". Theerasak Longji (26), was killed by lethal injection, six years after he was convicted of murder in the Trang province. His death came with Thailand's coup leader Prayut Chan-o-Cha set to travel abroad to the United Kingdom and France. "We still have the death sentence, we have not cancelled it yet," said Tawatchai Thaikaew, deputy permanent secretary at the Justice Ministry, adding that the execution on Monday was carried out "according to the law". The Corrections Department, which oversees one of the world's largest prison populations, said 325 convicts have been executed since 1935, the majority by firing squad. That practice ended on 11 December, 2003. Between then and 2009 an additional six inmates were executed by lethal injection, the department added. Human Rights groups hit out at the sudden resumption of the death penalty, which is frequently handed down by the courts for serious crimes. "This is a deplorable violation of the right to life," Amnesty International said, accusing the kingdom of "reneging" on commitments to move towards abolition of the death penalty. The country is "also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment." ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish air strikes killed 26 militants and destroyed their gun positions, shelters and ammunition stores in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq this week, Turkey's military said on Tuesday. The strikes were carried out on Sunday and Monday in Diyarbakir and Sirnak provinces and an area of northern Iraq where the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has bases, the military said in a statement on Twitter. ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish air strikes killed 26 militants and destroyed their gun positions, shelters and ammunition stores in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq this week, Turkey's military said on Tuesday. The strikes were carried out on Sunday and Monday in Diyarbakir and Sirnak provinces and an area of northern Iraq where the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has bases, the military said in a statement on Twitter. The Turkish military has ramped up air strikes in northern Iraq, targeting PKK bases in Qandil, close to the Iraq-Iran border, where Ankara suspects high-ranking members of the outlawed group are located. Ankara has also recently stepped up warnings of a potential ground offensive into the Qandil region, with President Tayyip Erdogan vowing to "drain the terror swamp" there. "We will continue to topple Qandil on the heads of the separatist terrorist organisation," Erdogan told an election rally in the southern province of Adana. The PKK, which has waged an insurgency in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey since 1984, is designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and European Union. Turkey has carried out two cross-border military operations in northern Syria since 2016. Since January, Turkey has been waging an offensive against the Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara deems an extension of the PKK, in Syria's Afrin region. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Tuesday Turkish troops were advancing on Qandil with "determined steps".[nA4N1QH02O] Separately, a Turkish soldier was killed and two wounded on Tuesday by an improvised explosive device planted by the PKK in the southeastern province of Siirt, the governor's office said. In the neighbouring province of Sirnak, bordering Iraq, two Turkish soldiers were killed and three others wounded in two separate explosions, a security source said. (Reporting by Daren Butler, writing by Ali Kucukgocmen, editing by David Dolan/Larry King) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. Japan modifies two of it's airline names from 'Taiwan' to 'China Taiwan'. According to the spokesman at All Nippon Airlines, the change was made to make the description 'easy to understand and acceptable for customers when they use our websites'. Tokyo: Two of the largest airlines in Japan have changed "Taiwan" to "China Taiwan" on their Chinese-language websites, officials said on Tuesday, a move likely to please Beijing but anger the self-ruled island. "The change was made on 12 June and is meant to accommodate customers," Japan Airlines (JAL) and All Nippon Airways (ANA) said. The description remains "Taiwan" on their websites in Japanese and other languages. Both carriers said they had not received any protest from Taiwan so far, though Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported Taiwan's foreign ministry would lodge a complaint with the airlines through Japan's de-facto diplomatic mission in Taipei. "We made the judgement (to change the name) while consulting and reporting to the transport ministry and foreign ministry," a spokesman at Japan Airlines said. "The change came on 12 June as our preparations were done by then," he said. The date marks the historic summit between North Korea and the United States, which attracted international attention. "We chose a description that is easy to understand and acceptable for users of our websites," added the JAL official, who declined to be named. A spokesman at ANA said the change was intended to make the description "easy to understand and acceptable for customers when they use our websites". "We do not mean any particular group of customers here but mean all customers," he said without elaborating further. The airlines are not the only international carriers who have made the change recently, with Australia's Qantas earlier this month defending its decision to list Taiwan as part of China. The Chinese Civil Aviation Administration sent a notice to 36 foreign airlines in April, asking them to comply with Beijing's standard of referring to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau as Chinese territories. Japan's ties with China are improving after years of acrimony over historical and territorial issues. Japan has closed business ties with Taiwan but has acknowledged the "One China" policy, which describes Taiwan as an integral part of China. Asked about the change, Japan's top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Tokyo was "not in favour of government authorities demanding certain measures from private companies based on a specific political stance." "The government has expressed Japan's interest in this issue on the Chinese side," he added. By David Brunnstrom WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday he would likely travel back to North Korea 'before too terribly long' to try to flesh out commitments made at a landmark summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore last week. Pompeo, who has travelled twice to North Korea this year and met Kim for a third time at the June 12 Singapore summit, told an audience in Detroit that Kim had made 'very clear his commitment to fully denuclearize his country,' but there was a great deal of work to do. By David Brunnstrom WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday he would likely travel back to North Korea "before too terribly long" to try to flesh out commitments made at a landmark summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore last week. Pompeo, who has travelled twice to North Korea this year and met Kim for a third time at the June 12 Singapore summit, told an audience in Detroit that Kim had made "very clear his commitment to fully denuclearize his country," but there was a great deal of work to do. When asked after delivering a speech to the Detroit Economic Club if there would need to be a second summit involving Kim and Trump, Pompeo said it was "hard to know." "There is a lot of work between here and there. My team is already doing it. Ill likely travel back before too terribly long," he said. "We still have to flesh out all the things that underlay the commitments that were made that day in Singapore." On his part, Pompeo said, Trump had committed in Singapore to alter the existing armistice agreement that halted the 1950-53 Korean War and to providing security assurances Kim needed. "And if we can get those two done in a way that matches, we will have reduced a global threat that has bedevilled the United States and the world for decades," Pompeo said. At the Singapore summit, the first meeting between a serving U.S. president and a North Korean leader, Kim reaffirmed a commitment to "work towards complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula", while Trump said he would end "provocative" joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises. A U.S. official said on Monday the United States and South Korea had agreed to suspend a joint military exercise scheduled to take place in August code-named "Ulchi Freedom Guardian," in line with Trump's comments. The official said an official announcement was expected in the coming days. Pompeo told reporters on a visit to Seoul last Wednesday he would take the lead role in driving the North Korea negotiation process forward and that he anticipated that the two sides would resume engagement "some time in the next week or so." He said Washington hoped to achieve "major disarmament" by North Korea within the next 2-1/2 years, within Trump's current presidential term, which ends on Jan. 20, 2021. On a visit to Beijing last week, Pompeo said tough sanctions would remain on North Korea until its complete denuclearization, apparently contradicting the North's view that the process agreed at the summit would be phased and reciprocal. Earlier on Monday, South Korea's First Vice Foreign Minister Lim Sung-nam told Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank that sanctions relief would only be possible once there was "substantial progress" in denuclearization. The United States had led an international sanctions drive to press North Korea to abandon development of nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States. Although Trump has hailed the Singapore summit as a success, sceptics have questioned whether he achieved anything new, given that Pyongyang, which has rejected unilateral nuclear disarmament, appeared to make no new concrete commitments. (Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by James Dalgleish) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters) - The United States and South Korea have agreed to suspend a joint military exercise scheduled for August, South Korean and U.S. officials said on Monday, following President Donald Trump's pledge to end 'war games' after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last week. 'South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August,' according to a South Korean defence ministry statement. WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters) - The United States and South Korea have agreed to suspend a joint military exercise scheduled for August, South Korean and U.S. officials said on Monday, following President Donald Trump's pledge to end "war games" after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last week. "South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August," according to a South Korean defence ministry statement. It added that no decision had been made on other joint drills and the two countries would continue consultation on further actions. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the exercise "Ulchi Freedom Guardian" would be suspended in line with Trump's comments and an official Pentagon announcement was expected in the coming days. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops participated in the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than live field exercises that use weapons, tanks or aircraft. Forces from Australia, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Britain also participated. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. Max Thunders air combat exercises so unnerved North Korea that it issued threatening statements that nearly scuttled the summit. Foal Eagle is designed to simulate war scenarios and involves ground, air, naval and special operations forces. Trump announced the end to the drills following his historic summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, calling exercises expensive and provocative - echoing a North Korean criticism that the United States had long rejected. The decision to halt military exercises in South Korea has bewildered many current and former U.S. defence officials, who only learnt about it when Trump made his remarks. They fear it could erode the readiness of U.S. troops in one of the worlds most sensitive military flashpoints who have long prided themselves on being able to fight tonight, thanks to heightened training. Critics, including in Congress, warn that an end to joint U.S.-South Korean drills could also erode the effectiveness of the military alliance between Washington and Seoul. They also balked at Trumps justification that cutting drills would save money. (Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by James Dalgleish) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and South Korea have agreed to suspend a joint military exercise scheduled to take place in August, a U.S. official said on Monday, after President Donald Trump pledged to end 'war games' after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last week WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and South Korea have agreed to suspend a joint military exercise scheduled to take place in August, a U.S. official said on Monday, after President Donald Trump pledged to end "war games" after his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last week. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the exercise "Ulchi Freedom Guardian" would be suspended in line with Trump's comments and an official announcement was expected in the coming days. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops participated in the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focussed on computerized simulations rather than live field exercises that use weapons, tanks or aircraft. (Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by James Dalgleish) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. The US and South Korean militaries confirmed on Tuesday that they have called off upcoming joint exercises, after President Donald Trump pledged to halt the drills in the wake of his summit with North Korea's Kim Jong-un Seoul: The US and South Korean militaries confirmed on Tuesday that they have called off upcoming joint exercises, after President Donald Trump pledged to halt the drills in the wake of his summit with North Korea's Kim Jong-un. Seoul, which has tens of thousands of US troops on its soil to help protect it from its hostile northern neighbour, said the suspension would affect the large-scale Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises slated for August. "South Korea and the US plan to continue discussions for further measures," the defence ministry said in a statement, adding that "no decisions have been reached for other ensuing drills". Some 17,500 US military personnel were due to take part in the Freedom Guardian drills. "We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent war games have been made," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said while confirming the suspension. "There is no impact on Pacific exercises outside of the Korean Peninsula," she added. White said US defence secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton would meet later this week at the Pentagon to discuss the issue. Last week, Trump said the US would halt "war games" with its South Korean security ally, without making clear when the freeze would begin. The US leader raised eyebrows by describing the exercises as "provocative", a term used by the North. US and South Korean forces have been training together for years, and routinely rehearse everything from beach landings to an invasion from the North, or even "decapitation" strikes targeting the North Korean regime. Pyongyang typically reacts furiously. Following drills last year, the North fired ballistic missiles over Japan, triggering global alarm. At their landmark Singapore summit, Trump and Kim signed a joint statement in which North Korea committed to "work towards complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula". But critics have pointed to the vague wording of the non-binding document and raised fears that the summit would weaken the international coalition against the North's nuclear programme. Pompeo, who has stressed that sanctions would remain in place until North Korea's complete denuclearisation, said he plans to meet Kim for follow-up talks. South Korea said sanctions against Pyongyang could be eased once it takes "substantive steps towards denuclearisation", seemingly setting the bar lower than Washington for such a move. But Pompeo's office said both allies remain "committed to the goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation". Two people were hurt in a town in southern France on Sunday when a woman shouting 'Allahu Akbar' (God is great) attacked them in a supermarket with a boxcutter knife, prosecutors said Marseille: Two people were hurt in a town in southern France on Sunday when a woman shouting 'Allahu Akbar' (God is great) attacked them in a supermarket with a boxcutter knife, prosecutors said. A customer was struck in the chest during the late-morning assault in La Seyne-sur-Mer, outside the Mediterranean port of Toulon, but the wound is not life-threatening, prosecutor Bernard Marchal told AFP. A woman working at a checkout counter was also cut over her eye. Both casualties were taken to hospital. "It appears to be an isolated case by a person with known psychological problems," Marchal said, adding, "Though that doesn't exclude the possibility that she may have been radicalised." "Several witnesses have quoted her as saying it was Allah who told her to do it, that they were all miscreants and that she wanted the police to kill her," the prosecutor said. He added that "contrary to what was said at the start, she was not wearing a veil, but a black tunic over black trousers and black glasses". France has been on high alert following a string of jihadist attacks since early 2015, often by people who have become radicalised or claim to have acted in the name of the Islamic State group. The 24-year-old assailant, who did not have a police record, was overpowered by a customer and two supermarket employees and taken into custody. "I grabbed her wrists to get hold of the cutter," said the customer, an electrician who gave only his first name, Sebastien. "I asked her, 'Why did you do it?' She did not answer." The woman "was in a panic, she was afraid, she did not understand what was happening to her, she had no strength left", Sebastien said. Police later searched her home to determine if she had any links to the Islamic State group, but Marchal said they found only an old Koran and an Algerian flag. A computer was seized from the studio where she lived a few kilometres (miles) from the shop. "We don't yet know if this is a terrorist act, but in any case it was terrifying," Marchal said. The woman, who carried a physical handicap card, would undergo a psychiatric assessment. More than 240 people have been killed in jihadist attacks since the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris in January 2015. Last month, a knife weilding man shouting 'Allahu Akbar' killed one person and wounded four others during a Saturday night attack in central Paris. In March, a Franco-Moroccan man shot dead three people, including a policeman, at a supermarket in the southern town of Trebes before being killed by police. He had also killed the passenger of a car he hijacked in nearby Carcassonne. Shares of GameStop (NYSE:GME) were halted briefly on Monday, only to spike higher after Reuters reported that the video game retailer has hired a financial advisor to assist in discussions that it's been having with private equity firms interested in a potential buyout. Reuters singles out one firm -- Sycamore Partners -- as an interested suitor. Sycamore has a knack for bottom feeding when it comes to out-of-favor retailers. It has bought out or taken sizable stakes in Talbots, Anne Klein, Hot Topic, and Nine West. GameStop would seem to fit the mold of the firm's penchant for mall laggards, though video games are a far cry from apparel and footwear. GameStop investors better hope that if a serious buyout offer does present itself that the retailer gets injected with a heavy dose of humility. Hopefully, it reflects on the sad fate of Circuit City when it dismissed buyout offers just before it started circling the drain. Circuit pity There are lessons to be learned in the fall from grace at Circuit City. It rebuffed a pair of offers, and while turning down a proposal to acquire the big-box consumer electronics chain at $8 a share in 2003 may seem forgivable, rejecting a deal and $17 a share in 2005 was a travesty to shareholders. Investors walked away with $0 a share when Circuit City liquidated itself in bankruptcy a couple of years later. GameStop bulls will argue that the small-box chain is not Circuit City. GameStop is profitable, with a great business model given its sales per square feet, low number of employees per store, and the reasonable rent available in cheap strip mall parcels. GameStop right now is a money tree, spitting out enough cash that it can both shell out a beefy dividend and aggressively repurchase its cascading shares. However, deep down inside, GameStop knows that it's on borrowed time. Circuit City -- when it scoffed at a $17 buyout offer 13 years ago, which coincidentally was around the time that GameStop shares traded as low as they are right now -- was a beast. Circuit City was profitable, gobbling up its own stock through buybacks, and paid a small dividend. It ignored the signs that there was going to be a shakeout in consumer electronics in a future where competing with online retailers with lean cost structures would be a bear. GameStop's bear comes in the form of the way that video game publishers and console makers are delivering content digitally. Physical distribution is fading, and that's why GameStop's sales are starting to meander and its high-margin resale business is losing steam. If GameStop can be saved, it will be behind the curtain of a private equity firm that doesn't have to live up to quarterly expectations. Sycamore Partners or any other firm up for the challenge can try to keep GameStop relevant without having to shell out quarterly dividends or spend money on buybacks in a thinly veiled attempt to prop up profits on a per-share basis. It doesn't surprise me that GameStop has potential suitors, but it also won't surprise me if it walks away without a deal and keeps fading. If GameStop has a chance to avoid Circuit City's mistake, it better not blink. Monster Tree Service Awards Territory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania Matt Motyka Brings Nations First and Fastest-Growing Tree Service Franchise to Lancaster and Surrounding Territories June 19, 2018 // Franchising.com // LANCASTER, Pa. - Monster Tree Service, the nations first and fastest-growing tree service franchise, is expanding to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Recently featured by SUCCESS Magazine, Thrive Global, and Franchise Times, the Monster Tree Service franchise continues to build on its rapid three-year franchise system growth. Business entrepreneur Matt Motyka has purchased the rights to a Monster Tree Service territory in Lancaster. Motyka was recently awarded the territory and plans to launch in late June. Motyka is a Pennsylvania native, born and raised in northeastern Pennsylvania. He has experience both in small business ownership and in corporate banking. I am so excited to be on board with Monster Tree Service, says Motyka. Im looking forward to once again being a small business owner. Together with my wife, Nicole, and general manager, Bill Laporte, Im looking forward to giving back to my community through our wide array of services, including tree and limb removal, plant healthcare, tree maintenance and more. Josh Skolnick, CEO and Founder of Monster Tree Service, is confident Motyka will be a tremendous asset to the Monster Tree Service franchise. Matt is an ideal Monster Tree Service franchisee, says Skolnick. He has experience with small business ownership, a tremendous head for numbers and an entrepreneurial spirit that cant be stopped. He has a knack for understanding the needs of his community, and I am confident he will thrive as the newest member of the Monster family. We are thrilled to have him on our team. Monster Tree Service is the only franchise tree company capitalizing on the under-served $17 billion tree service industry. Monster Tree Service has achieved consistent year-over-year, five percent growth since 2009, resulting in a $10+ million business. Because its a high-upside opportunity, and a recession-proof business, Monster Tree Service expects to achieve $100 million in sales by 2021. Monster Tree Service is growing rapidly, and Im glad to be joining the team, says Motyka. This franchise is absolutely perfect for me. It combines my love of business with my love of nature. Im really looking forward to being able to work outside and get my hands dirty. I know Ive made the right choice in Monster Tree Service as the business model has proven to be profitable, and the franchise is full of hard-working, genuine people. I hope to build a business that my wife and I could one day pass down to our son. I cant wait to get started. For more information about Monster Tree Service, please visit http://www.whymonster.com/. To learn more about CEO Josh Skolnicks vision for Monster Tree Service, please visit https://www.monsterfranchising.com/vision-story. About Monster Tree Service Founded in 2008 in Fort Washington, PA by Founder and CEO Josh Skolnick, Monster Tree Service is the first and only national franchise brand serving the $17 billion tree care industry. Over the past decade, Skolnick has aggressively built Monster Tree Service into a thriving national franchise system working day and night to build the company into a $10+ million business with 26 franchise partners in 17 states operating 58 active territories (with dozens of others in development) throughout the country. Each Monster Tree Service franchised outlet offers full-scale tree pruning and removal services, including: tree pruning and trimming, tree removal, stump grinding, shrub maintenance, emergency services, plant healthcare, and various secondary services. In stark contrast to various mom and pop style tree service companies, all Monster Tree Service franchise owners are dedicated to Making the world a more beautiful place, one tree at a time by providing homeowners with unparalleled service completed by certified professionals. Monster Tree Service is committed to educating all customers on the natural conditions, diseases and infestations that impact the health of their plants/trees and treating all issues with an environmentally friendly, Do Not Harm approach. Its all part of the Monster Tree Service vision to partner with homeowners across the country to make their trees healthy, strong, and vital. For more information about Monster Tree Service, please visit http://www.whymonster.com/. Media Contacts: Graham Chapman 919-459-8157 gchapman@919marketing.com SOURCE Monster Tree Service ### Comments: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus A hundred residents of the Tindouf camps have been demonstrating since last Saturday (June 16) in Rabbouni camp, to demand the opening of an independent investigation into the suspicious death of young opponent Brahim Ould Salek Ould Breika, who reportedly succumbed to the torture of Polisario militiamen in the infamous Dheibya prison, near Rabbouni. Upon arrival in Rabbouni, not far from the home of the Polisario leader Brahim Ghali, the angry demonstrators, as shown in a video footage relayed by several media, were the target of a heavy-handed intervention by the armed militia of the Front who fired several shots into the air and used batons to disperse the protesters. The day after the young opponent died on January 13, his family members refused to bury him and demanded an autopsy. They later on sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres requesting that those responsible for the crime be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Contrary to the suicide thesis put forward by the Polisario torturers who claim that Brahim Ould Salek Ould Breika hanged himself with an electric wire of an air-conditioner, the family members assert that he had been tortured to death and that they have robust evidence supporting their version. The 30-year old Brahim Ould Salek Ould Breika, father of a girl, was a trader and an active militant of the Movement of March 5th. he was serving a prison sentence for his alleged membership of a criminal gang specialized in theft. In a statement, the Sahrawi Association for the Defense of Human Rights (ASADEH) strongly denounced the suspicious death of the young opponent, reiterating its unconditional solidarity with the family of the victim and its support for their legitimate claims to know the true causes of the death of their loved one. In this connection, ASADEH has decided to launch international legal proceedings against Polisario leaders and Algerian officials who have not lifted a finger to put an end to the serious human rights violations committed, with their blessing, on Algerian territory. WhatsApp will no more support older phones and Operating systems News oi-Sandeep Sarkar WhatsApp has also issued a definitive deadline about when it will stop the support completely. WhatsApp is one of the leaders when it comes to instant messaging services around the globe. The messaging platform is used by millions of users every day. WhatsApp is used not only for messaging but also for sharing images, audio, videos, and documents. Apart from this, the messaging platform can also be used for video-calling services that are also used by a number of users around the globe. In addition to all of this, the company has now also introduced UPI-based mobile payment service in India. Facebook acquired WhatsApp back in 2014 and was available for different platforms many of which are not functional anymore. The list includes the Nokia's Symbian OS, BlackBerry's BBOS and Blackberry 10 along with a number of Android versions and iOS version which were released almost a decade ago and are devoid most of the modern features that are offered in a smartphone now. However going forward the company will be making an official announcement that will end the support for the older platform either partially or completely. The list of the operating system for which WhatsApp has to end the support with immediate effect includes 1. Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread and older 2. Windows Phone 8.0 and older 3. iPhone 3GS/iOS 6 4. Nokia Symbian S60 5. BlackBerry OS and BlackBerry 10 WhatsApp has also issued a definitive deadline about when it will stop the support completely. As per the company users will not be able to create a new account on the platforms for which WhatsApp is ending the support; however, the services will keep on for a little while longer. Also, some features might stop working all together as the company is not actively developing for these operating systems anymore, the list is as follows: 1. Nokia S40 (will work until December 31, 2018) 2. Android Gingerbread 2.3.7 and older (until February 1, 2020) 3. iOS 7 and older (until February 1, 2020) For the users using the above-mentioned devices, we would recommend that they should consider going with a new device to enjoy the uninterrupted services. 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 Mi A2 listing reveals alleged price and release date News oi-Abhinaya Prabhu Xiaomi Mi A2 could be the international variant of the Mi 6X. Xiaomi Mi A2 is one of the highly anticipated smartphones. Amidst the confusion regarding the release of the smartphone in the global market, we have been coming across several leaks related to the device. Lately, the benchmark listings of the device hitting the tech headlines on a consistent basis. Now, we have interesting details regarding the device. Now, there are reports suggesting that the listing of the device was spotted on a Swiss website digittec.ch. This listing reveals the key specifications of the smartphone. It also reveals that the device could go on sale starting August 8, 2018. Not stopping with this, the listing also reveals the possible pricing of the smartphone. Xiaomi Mi A2 pricing leaks Going by the same, the 32GB variant of the Xiaomi Mi A2 is believed to be priced at 289 euros (approx. Rs. 22,800). The 64GB variant of the Mi A2 is said to be priced around 329 euros (approx. Rs. 26,000). The high-end variant among the trio with 128GB storage space is likely to be priced around 369 euros (approx. Rs. 29,000). What to expect? From the description and specifications revealed by the listing on the Swiss website, we believe that the Mi A2 could have similar specs as the Mi 6X. However, the company hasn't revealed any official confirmation regarding the Mi A2's launch in the global markets while the Mi 6X was announced in China in April. Notably, the Xiaomi Mi 6X was launched with a 5.99-inch FHD+ display with an aspect ratio of 18:9. the smartphone makes use of a Snapdragon 660 SoC coupled with a 3010mAh battery supporting Quick Charge 3.0. The company touts that this processor can offer 20% better performance than the Snapdragon 636 SoC. There is a dual-camera module at its rear with a 20MP primary sensor with f/1.75 aperture and a 12MP secondary camera with Sony IMX486 sensor with a similar aperture and 2X lossless optical zoom. The selfie camera is a 20MP sensor with Sony IMX376 sensor. Having said that the Mi A2 could be the international variant of the Mi 6X, we can expect the device to have similar specifications. In fact, this is what we saw last year with the Mi A1, the Android One smartphone from the company. 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 Mi Max 3 with a massive 5400 mAh battery certified on TENAA News oi-Vivek Xiaomi Mi MAX 3 is likely to run on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 Octa-core chipset. Xiaomi recently launched the Xiaomi Redmi Y2, the selfie-centric smartphone in India for a starting price of Rs 9999. And now, the company might launch one more smartphone aka, the Xiaomi Mi MAX 3. The smartphone is currently listed on TENAA with different model numbers like M1804E4A, M1804E4T, and M1804E4C for the different RAM and storage variants. Though the leaked specifications do not reveal the actual smartphone name. The specifications do hint that the leaked smartphone will be the successor the Xiaomi Mi MAX 2 aka the Xiaomi Mi MAX 3. Leaked Design Looking at the TENAA listing, the smartphone has a full metal unibody design with a rear-facing fingerprint sensor along with a dual camera setup. Leaked Specifications According to TENAA, the smartphone has a 6.99-inch IPS LCD display with an FHD+ (2160 x 1080px) IPS LCD screen protected by 2.5D curved tempered glass on the top. The display resolution is similar to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro. As this phone has more screen real-estate, the smartphone will have less than 400 ppi. Under the hood, the smartphone is powered by an Octa-core chipset with 1.8 GHz (might be the Qualcomm Snapdragon 636) with either 3/4/6 GB of RAM and 32/64/128 GB of onboard storage with a micro SD card for additional storage expansion. In terms of optics, the smartphone has a 12 MP RGB shooter (with 1.4-micron pixel size) and a secondary camera for portrait shots. There is an 8 MP front-facing selfie camera, which is expected to offer face unlock and other AI features. The smartphone has a massive 5400 mAh sealed battery with a USB type C port with Qualcomm Quick charge 3.0 capability along with a dedicated 3.5 mm headphone jack. The smartphone runs on the latest Android 8.1 Oreo OS with custom MIUI 9.5 OS and just like other Xiaomi smartphones, the Xiaomi Mi MAX 3 is eligible to receive MIUI 10 software update in the future. Conclusion Overall the Xiaomi Mi MAX 3 seems like a great upgrade over the Mi MAX 2. All these specifications will make into the smartphone, as TENAA never goes wrong. But, the company is yet to make an announcement regarding the launch event in China and India. Finally, going by the specs, the entry-level model will cost at least Rs 15,000 and the high-end variant with 6 GB RAM and 128 GB storage is expected to cost upwards of Rs 20,000. 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 Vistara launches Indias first Robot RADA News oi-Priyanka RADA will be placed at Vistara's Signature Lounge at Delhi Airport's Terminal 3 from July 5, 2018, to assist customers using the lounge before they board their flights. Airline Vistara today said that it has created a unique robot using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. The Robot RADA will answer customer's queries and entertain them, Vistara said. During its initial stage, RADA will be placed at Vistara's Signature Lounge at Delhi Airport's Terminal 3 from July 5, 2018, to assist customers using the lounge before they board their flights. 'RADA' will be further developed over a period of time in terms of functionality and features for future use cases, after gauging customer feedback, Vistara informed. Vistara's Chief Information and Innovation Officer, Ravinder Pal Singh: "We thought of inventing a robot that can help us enhance the customer experience by gradually taking over the routine, mundane tasks. The basic premise of the thought was to develop a simple and extremely cost-effective practical robot that can engage in basic human interaction to begin with, and can further be developed to perform more complex tasks, as consumer habits continue to evolve in the technological age where humans and machines will complement and create an evolved harmonious evolution." At present the robot can scan boarding passes and further provide information on the terminal, departure gates, weather conditions of the destination city, real-time flight status as well as information about Vistara's products and services, Vistara informed further. It greets customers and interacts with them using basic hand movements, and is capable of moving around in the lounge on predefined pathways. Additionally, it can engage with kids and adults alike by playing games and other multimedia content such as songs and videos. According to Vistara 'RADA' is built on a chassis of four wheels, enabling it to rotate 360 degrees, and it has three inbuilt cameras for cognitive interaction. Vistara's Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Leslie Thng said: "With RADA, we aim to change the way people interact and fly with an airline. We will be developing 'RADA' based on customer feedback and equipping it with the most effective features in the time to come. Our steadfast focus remains to be on delighting customers across all touchpoints, and we're confident that 'RADA' will help us take the 'new feeling' to the next level. Best Mobiles in India "Whether the Bright-line Cut-off Rule and the Adversarial Expert Explanation of Adaptive Functioning Exacerbates Capital Juror Comprehension of the Intellectual Disability" | Main | "Does Watching TV Sports Lower Crime Rates?" June 19, 2018 Georgia Supreme Court rules individual has essentially no procedural rights before being placed on state's child abuse registry I saw yesterday a notable ruling by the Georgia Supreme Court in Georgia Department of Human Services v. Steiner, No. S18A0281 (Ga. June 18, 2018)(available here). As I read the case, a 13-year-old's written statement that an older individual (age 52) hugged her and twice "started to hump me a way a dog would" led to his placement on the Georgia child abuse registry. Upon getting a subsequent notice of his placement on the registry, Steiner challenged the (lack of) procedures on various grounds, and prevailed in lower courts. But on appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, Steiner loses and the majority opinion gets started this way: The Georgia Department of Human Services, Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) appeals from the decision of the Lamar County Superior Court finding that Georgias central child abuse registry is unconstitutional, both on its face and as applied to appellee Christopher Steiner. The trial court also found that DFCS failed to prove that Steiner committed an act of child abuse by a preponderance of the evidence as required to maintain Steiners listing in the registry. This Court granted DFCSs application for discretionary review. We hold that Steiner failed to demonstrate a constitutionally protected liberty or property interest sufficient to trigger the due process protections that he claims were violated by operation of the registry, and because the Act was constitutionally applied to Steiner, he lacks standing to bring his facial challenge on that ground. We further hold that the child abuse registry is not criminal in nature, and that the superior court therefore erred in finding it to be so. And because an abuse investigators determination about whether a report of child abuse is supported by the evidence is not a judicial function, the superior court erred in finding that the statute requiring the investigator to report such cases to DFCS for inclusion in the child abuse registry violates the separation of powers provision of the Georgia Constitution. Finally, because at least some evidence supported the administrative hearing officers conclusion that DFCS had proved an act of child abuse as defined for purposes of the child abuse registry, the superior court erred in reversing the administrative law court. We reverse. June 19, 2018 at 03:49 PM | Permalink Comments Having read through the ruling this looks less alarming than one might think. Really, the case was badly argued by the plaintiff. "We hold that Steiner failed to demonstrate a constitutionally protected liberty or property interest sufficient to trigger the due process protections that he claims were violated by operation of the registry..." Yet as the opinion makes clear this is because Steiner didn't assert any. Note that this doesn't mean I agree with much of what is in the ruling, it is nonsense but it's difficult for me to feel sorry for the guy when his entire--and I mean his entire argument--is that the state thinks he's a bad person. Next time, try harder. Posted by: Daniel | Jun 19, 2018 8:35:51 PM BTW the liberty interest that he should identify to strike down this stupid law is freedom of association. For the screening aspect of the Georgia law applies not only to child care workers it also applies to /volunteer/ organizations. One may or may not have an economic liberty interest in working in the child care field but one most certainly has an associative right to volunteer with whoever one likes. "The registry may only be used for the following purposes: conducting child abuse investigations; screening applicants for childcare-related employment, licensing, or volunteer activities;..." By focusing on the volunteer aspect of this code one does an end run around Smith and the entire economic harm argument. All he has to do now is go out and find any group that works with kids--like the Boy Scouts--apply to volunteer and he now has a case. Posted by: Daniel | Jun 19, 2018 8:46:49 PM This case--after reading Daniel's comments--seem inconequential. Although the idea of yet another registry (an abuse registry??) is at its root a punishment and thus un-American and un-Constitutional, a badly argued case, plus a registry that only involves a narrow area of human life, matters little. But registries tend to expand. Too bad the guy didn't argue his case more effectively Posted by: restless94110 | Jun 19, 2018 10:10:20 PM The lawyer profession is completely anti-family, feminist, and in total quackery. That is one reason to crush it, and to start over again. Family is an effective source of moral authority compared to the worthless big government of the lawyer profession. Government is a wholly owned subsidiary of the criminal cult enterprise that is the lawyer profession. The American lawyer profession is history's biggest bunko, fraud scheme and criminal enterprise. In PA, you must get clearance to sell hotdogs at a high school football game to raise money for uniforms. Then, Jerry Sandusky, a serial child rapist, with hundreds of victims, would have passed this clearance with flying colors, for decades, until his conviction. These feminist judges should be impeached by the Georgia legislature. To deter the feminist lawyer. Posted by: David Behar | Jun 19, 2018 11:36:32 PM From anti-family feminist lawyer profession, to hotdog clearance, to Jerry Sandusky... I can't tell if Behar actually believes what he says, is a satirist who never breaks character, or is a bot that just puts together random words. The mysteries of the internet! Posted by: Anonuser879 | Jun 20, 2018 1:06:44 AM Hi, Anon. That is just an ad hominem remark. Posted by: David Behar | Jun 20, 2018 7:44:29 AM Hello, I am a victim of the Georgia Child Abuse Registry. I submitted my appeal today. My 16 yr old daughter asserted that I hit her and called DFCS. Note that my daughter has a history of self-harm that she has been professionally treated for. She was upset with me because took her out of the college and dorms (she is academically gifted and was only an hour away from home so I checked on her often) because of bad conduct and other unsafe measures she got into... brought her home for her safety. DFCS called the police and they did not find reason to arrest me. Next thing I know is I got a letter telling me that I'm on the child abuse registry. Surely some people on this registry belongs there but being put on there without a way to defend myself is totally wrong. I am disabled with recent replacement knuckles in both hands... how could I have hit her? Posted by: Indira | Nov 28, 2018 5:15:36 PM Post a comment GREENWICH For Randy Feda, becoming the general superintendent of construction for the New Lebanon Elementary Schools new state-of-the-art building was a lot like coming home. First, his commute was reduced by an hour: from going to New York City to driving just 10 minutes from his home from Old Greenwich. And since he knows many people in town, his new job also gives him a chance to catch up and work with friends and acquaintances. But most of all, Feda came back to the elementary school he attended in the early 1970s. Now, hes building a new school for children who learn in the same exact classrooms he learned in 40 years ago. As the projects superintendent, he sees his job as a way of giving back to the public school system that educated him from New Lebanon through Greenwich High School. Before joining Gilbane Building Co. for this project, Feda did construction management in New York City for 12 years. Although he has worked on some projects in Greenwich, including mixed-use buildings and homes, Feda had never tackled anything like a school. So when Gilbane told him that hes be working on a project in Fairfield County, a new school in Greenwich called New Lebanon, he was surprised. I was like, Geez, I went to school there, Id love to be on the project, he said. It was weird to be able to build a school where I went to school. While the school itself has stayed the same since his time there, the needs of the community and the building standards have changed. The outdated New Lebanon school is so overcrowded the kindergartners have moved off-site and music lessons are held in the foyer. Fedas job involves overseeing the project to make sure it is built to plans and specifications, whether thats examining the parts being installed or performing checks for quality control. He spends 90 percent of the day in the field, but he also has to do computer work and daily reports. Fedas also the go-to if any problems arise, making sure to take resolve them efficiently. He hasnt just overseen the building, however. He is the face of the construction, New Lebanon Assistant Principal Klara Monaco said. Twice, Feda has delivered presentations to the students. The first time, Feda addressed topics guaranteed to interest kids: big trucks and explosions. Walking into an auditorium full of 265 kids and staff is daunting, but he really got into it, Monaco said. The kids were so engaged, we had to cut them off because it could have just kept going on and on. The kids asked many important questions, Monaco said, because at the time they were hearing the blasts (which Feda timed around testing) and seeing a variety of trucks clearing the land. Monaco said Feda loved chatting with the kids, and he kept everybody entertained. When he was a child, Feda said he loved construction, and he knows kids today do, too. Seeing their faces and how happy they are when they see these types of things, and that Im able to do that for them, brings a great joy to me, Feda said. I love making children smile. For him, its all about the children: giving them a school with the facilities they want and putting smiles on their faces as they watch the construction of their new building. During Safety Week, Feda addressed the students again. Standing next to a police officer, both in full uniform, Feda told the kids what workers do to be safe at a construction site and taught them rules about trespassing and private property. The kids absolutely were enthralled, leaning in, Principal Barbara Riccio said. That was a wonderful experience, the children were paying complete attention. Its not just during Safety Week. Riccio said Feda is always looking out for the safety of the New Lebanon students and staff. For Riccio, considering the ease with which students approach Feda and the emphasis he places on safety, the kids relate to Feda for a simple reason: because he is a father. And while his building wont directly affect his teenage children, Feda said he is building it for the children of the Byram community. The kids are so excited, he said. Itd be great to have the whole school in one building. I take great pride in it, its just wonderful to do. jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.com When is an invitation to talk politics with rank-and-file union members not an invitation? State Sen. George Logan says it happened last weekend when he attended an SEIU District 1199 candidates event at the request of a member of the healthcare-workers union, where the first-term Republican expected to make his election pitch. But when he got there, Logan was barred from speaking with the workers gathered in a Hamden union hall. On Tuesday, Logan charged that the union was biased against Republicans. Union officials said that he had not previously filled out a questionnaire on his political philosophy. Logan says he could have written it while waiting for several Democrats, including those seeking to challenge his incumbency, to take their turns in front of SEIU members. Logan, whose district includes Ansonia, Beacon Falls, Bethany, Derby, Hamden, Naugatuck and Woodbridge, said one of the SEIU members invited him two or three weeks earlier for the meet-the-candidates event. They gave me the impression that the invitation didnt count, Logan said. I get invited to meet with many groups and have never experienced anything like that before. He said he was given a questionnaire on the spot and recalled there was plenty of time to fill out the quiz. It became clear to me that there was no desire to speak with me. I dont serve any particular party. I am here to help my district and the state of Connecticut. I was more than willing to take all the hard questions. Union President David Pickus said that the other candidates at the meeting had previously completed the questionnaire and scheduled appearances. All candidates whether Republican or Democrat are required to fill out a questionnaire before attending a member interview, he said in a statement. When Sen. Logan completes the questionnaire we look forward to having him meet with our members at a scheduled time. Republican State Chairman J.R. Romano, in a statement, said that union officials and Democrats are working in tandem to keep other messages from reaching the rank-and-file. By silencing Republicans, Democrats and union leaders are doing what they always do, trying to protect state employees wildly unaffordable benefits, even when it means union members outside of state government are the ones who suffer as a result, Romano said. kdixon@ctpost.com Twitter: @KenDixonCT Sony is working on a new Xperia Home launcher Intriguing comments about the politics and persons around FIRST STEP Act and federal criminal justice reform efforts | Main | Georgia Supreme Court rules individual has essentially no procedural rights before being placed on state's child abuse registry June 19, 2018 "Whether the Bright-line Cut-off Rule and the Adversarial Expert Explanation of Adaptive Functioning Exacerbates Capital Juror Comprehension of the Intellectual Disability" The title of this post is the title of this new paper on SSRN authored by Leona Deborah Jochnowitz. Here is its abstract: This paper examines a sample of Capital Jury Project (CJP 1) cases with available trial transcripts in which jurors were presented with mitigating intellectual disability evidence and may have been confused by issues of proof, definitions, and extralegal factors. It tests the hypothesis that jurors receptivity to mitigating intellectual disability (ID) was limited by their difficulties with the adversarial mental proof and clinical definitions needed to establish it. Further the juror decision-making may have been obscured by distractions from extralegal factors, unrelated to the evidence like premature decision-making and heuristic shortcuts, pro-death bias, and racial prejudice. It also examines whether the bright line cut-off rule, followed in some sample states prior to the Supreme Court decision in Hall v. Florida (2014), exacerbated jurors understanding of the disability, and encouraged popular stereotypes and misconceptions about intellectual disability. In Kentucky, a state with the bright line cut-off rule, at the time these cases were decided, jurors were confused about a range of IQ scores and intellectual declines during developmental years. IQ was perhaps not above what we consider a moron? I think they were contending that he had an IQ of 70 or 76 or so, had been tested as high as the 80s I recall. (CJP KY death case #531, juror #725). Even in non-bright line sample States like South Carolina, with no ID exemption at the time, jurors misunderstood the range of numerical IQ evidence. The study concludes that juror assessment of intellectual disability (ID) is variable. Some jurors view ID as a more organic sympathetic disorder than other mental disorders, and they seem to understand it in practical, lay terms. Yet, capital juror decision making is marred by extra-legal factors that impair consideration of the mitigating evidence. The study concludes that juror misunderstanding regarding mitigating evidence has stubbornly persisted throughout the history of the Capital Jury Project and arises from shortcomings in human cognition which impede jurors moral consideration of intellectual disability evidence. In light of these flaws, it may be impossible to avoid the unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed. This study suggests that mildly intellectually disabled persons were indeed executed because jurors misunderstood the ID evidence and were persuaded by extralegal racial biases and premature decision making. June 19, 2018 at 11:08 AM | Permalink Comments http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ (if you click that link and still don't understand, click this one) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism_Generator Posted by: Daniel | Jun 19, 2018 12:45:02 PM More lawyer quackery. These are tests of education being misapplied for the purpose of determining culpability. Quackery should be an impeachable offense for all the Justices of the Supreme Court, being a fraud. Atkins had a lucrative business running drugs at age 9. He lured and shot a competitor. These abilities are just beyond those of the Justices of Supreme Court. They are to stupid to match the high level of skill of Atkins. He did not attend school because each day in school would have cost him $hundreds in lost earning in the lucrative drug dealer business. He was brighter than all the Justices on the Supreme Court. They are all extremely stupid people, who cannot read the plain high school level English of the constitution. Atkins fell behind in book learning, and scored poorly on a test of education attainment and ability to do school work. Posted by: David Behar | Jun 19, 2018 11:47:05 PM To misquote Shakespeare, is the problem in our stars or in ourselves. My own experience with mental health experts at trial is that many of them are unable to explain their conclusions to the jury or, to in any halfway concise manner, to link their test results and the real world acts of their clients to their conclusions. A direct exam that should take no more than 20-30 minutes often takes over two hours as the expert wants to discuss (or the lawyer wants them to discuss) in detail everything that went into their opinions. Similarly, when legislators, lawyers, and judges try to define what makes a person too mentally ill to be executed, they typically end up writing very complicated statutes and instructions that confuse the issue that the jury is to decide, Given that the law on mental health issues is not as clear cut as the folks who have pushed this issue wish it were, and that they and their experts simply refuse to talk to jurors in plain English, it should not be a surprise that juries aren't buying the defense evidence in these cases. Posted by: tmm | Jun 20, 2018 2:30:04 PM Post a comment By Vasia Orion | Published on 2018/06/18 Terrible things are happening in the hospital setting of jTBC's "Life", and we seem to have a death in the family of hero Ye Jin-woo (Lee Dong-wook). The power play is on, with different characters showing different motivation behind their work in what should be a place of healing with no room for personal gain or ego. Advertisement Our hero opens his narration by giving us a taste of what his work is all about. "'Aren't you dead tired?' is the question I get asked the most. 'Why did you choose this road?' comes next. Because I studied the ways of saving people from death", he says. Our good doctor may be focused on saving lives, but others are busy clashing. Lee Sang-yeop (Uhm Hyo-sup) warns of the potential deadly dangers of overworked doctors, an interest Goo Seung-hyo (Cho Seung-woo) mocks as insincere. What is undoubtedly the main point of the teaser, however, is the involvement of Ye Seon-woo (Lee Kyu-hyung), Jin-woo's younger brother, in potentially sinister affairs. The man can be heard telling his older sibling that he shouldn't have talked about something, while someone else urges someone to stop wasting their energy and do their work. It's our hero's narration which brings about the worst news, however. We are told of someone being brought in as a DOA (dead on arrival). Jin-woo continues "On this night, there were two. One of them died after being cut by the words of a junior they trusted". His closing words set to an empty home and him holding a black outfit are "It must have been a hard day. Your last day, when I said such harsh things". What did Seon-woo know that led to his death? More importantly, this teaser gives us a clearer look at what we can expect from "Life", and a murder mystery is definitely a focus I can get behind. It looks like Jin-woo will have a lot of inner and outer demons to fight for the truth, and for the honor of his hospital. I can't wait to dig into the series starting July 23rd. Written by: Orion from 'Orion's Ramblings' Sources (1) Published on 2018/06/19 | Source Added episodes 27 and 28 captures for the Korean drama "Shall We Live Together" (2018) Advertisement Directed by Yoon Chang-beom Written by Park Pil-joo Network : KBS With Yoo Dong-geun, Jang Mi-hee, Han Ji-hye, Lee Sang-woo, Park Sun-young, Yeo Hoe-hyun,... 50 episodes - Sat, Sun 19:55 Also known as "Marry Me Now" Synopsis The story explores the relationships between generations in a family; between parents, parents and children, and all the process by which all of them learn to relate to each other. Broadcast starting date in Korea : 2018/03/17 More Tom Farnham stands behind food cooked in the Havre Eagles Club for the annual Community Christmas Dinner. A benefiit for Farnham to help with medical expenses is scheduled for Saturday at the Eagles. A benefit and auction will be held Saturday evening for long-time Havre Eagles Club Manager Tom Farnham, who had been at a rehabilitation center in Great Falls. Farnham who is known for having organized many fundraising events for other Havre residents and organizations at the Eagles club, fell while on his way to work and hit his head on the pavement. A brain hemorrhage was detected by a CT scan at Northern Montana Hospital and Farnham was airlifted to Benefis Hospital in Great Falls. He then was treated at a rehabilitation center where he worked on his motor skills and walking again; he is now back at home in Havre. "He has been back home just about two weeks," Farnham's wife, Val Farnham said, adding that he seems to be coming along really well. "He is now able to take short walks without his walker ... and he is going back to work part-time, doing some office work," she said. "He does a lot for everyone else," community member Roxana Mangold said. "We want to help him with his medical bills." The benefit has been planned to help offset the cost of medical bills and will be held at Havre Eagles Club. Doors will open at 4 p.m. with dinner starting at 5 p.m. The dinner will feature a choice of barbecue pork or shredded chicken with baked beans and potato salad. T4he price will be $10 for adults and $5 for children 10 and younger. The event also has both silent and live auctions with treats made by local bakers. "We are looking for crafts, homemade items," Mangold said. "We are trying to get homemade pies for the pie auction ... a few people are making cinnamon rolls." A few restaurants including Murphy's Irish Pub, Andy's Supper Club and Char's Family Dining are donating, she added. The organizers are also trying to work with some local businesses and crafters to get some additional donations. To donate, people can call Roxana at 390-4640 or Teresa at 945-1445. Donations can also be dropped off at the Havre Eagles Club. Press release Big Sandy student Bailey Gasvoda was named last week to the Electric Cooperative Youth Leadership Council, a select group of students from among the thousands who traveled to Washington, D.C., as part of the annual Electric Cooperative Youth Tour, which concluded Friday. Gasvoda is sponsored by Hill County Electric Cooperative, which is headquartered in Havre. Gasvoda was chosen by Beckie Frediani, Montana Youth Tour director, chaperones and peers. The Youth Leadership Council is an additional opportunity offered to one student from each state participating in the Youth Tour. Gasvoda is sponsored for a return trip to Washington, D.C., in July, where she will gather with 44 other delegates to learn more about electric cooperatives, have the opportunity to participate in leadership seminars, and develop her speech-writing and presenting skills. Gasvoda also will attend and play an active role in the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association Annual Meeting in March in Orlando. Youth Leadership Council participants are among the best and the brightest students from across the nation, said Dave Wheelihan, Montana Electric Cooperatives Association CEO. As part of the Washington, D.C., Youth Tour, these students gain a first-hand understanding of the legislative process. In addition to this, when a delegate is selected to represent her state at the YLC, they step into even larger leadership roles that carry on after the conclusion of the Youth Tour. Montanas electric cooperatives are proud to provide this additional opportunity to our future leaders, and we congratulate Bailey on her achievement. The Electric Cooperative Youth Tour has brought high school students to Washington, D.C., for more than 50 years. Students apply and are selected for this program by their local electric cooperative. A total of nearly 50,000 students have participated in this program since its creation. For more information, visit http://www.youthtour.coop/. Montana's lieutenant governor was in Havre Monday for the grand opening of a Democrat campaign office and to tout the Democratic candidates up for election this year. The Hill County Democratic Central Committee hosted the opening of the Democratic regional field office in Havre at 5 p.m, where Lt. Gov. Mike Cooney and candidates spoke to the people who were in attendance, with organizers reporting 62 came to the event. The Montana Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and the Hill County Democratic Central Committee opened the regional field office at 417 1st Street in Havre and Monday had a grand opening event with food and drinks for the community. The Hill County Republican Central Committee has not yet set a grand opening for its headquarters. Cooney said that he was so thrilled to be in Havre and thanked everyone who had come out. "This is just the beginning," Cooney said. "Today, I want everyone to say to themselves, 'This is the first day of the next election.' We are going to do everything that we can to get good Democrats elected." Cooney said that the Democrats have many great candidates this year and that it is important to keep the local candidates in mind for the election. "These folks tend to get lost in the excitement of these big races," Cooney said. "We cannot afford to let that happen." He said he and Gov. Steve Bullock had many discussions and the governor is very concerned about what will happen if changes don't happen in the Legislature. Cooney said that Bullock has not been afraid to fight bad legislation and that if two more seats in the Legislature are lost "there won't be a way to fight them." "Elections are not won by these candidates ... elections are won by each of you," Cooney said. "You need to commit yourself to make sure you talk to all of your friends, and we need to start tonight. Every day talk to somebody new and let them know why it is important that they vote for these people." "We can't outspend the Republicans," he added. "They will out spend us, they have way more money than us, but we have never depended on outspending the Republicans. We've always beat them by outworking them." "We say that the upcoming election is the most important election, but it is probably true," Cooney added. "This is Gov. Bullocks final legislative session as governor. He is not ready to just get out of office quietly. ... To him, this is not the swan song. This is where he wants to begin to make sure that when he leaves office, he and I, have left Montana in better shape that what we were handed. We need a Legislature willing to work with us to get us there." Paul Tuss, Democratic candidate for the state Senate, said that the party has never had a building like this or a crowd like this. Tuss, who is facing incumbent Sen. Russ Tempel, R-Chester, in the general election, added that he didn't want this to be the only time people are welcomed to the field office because the party needs good volunteers to make sure people are getting to the polls. "All of this is representative of what is happening in this country," Tuss said. "You can feel it; I can feel it in this room; I know that you can, too. What's happening in this country and what's happening in the state, people have had enough." "What people want isn't crazy things," Tuss added. "When I knock on doors, what people are telling me what they want is quality schools, they want to protect (Montana State University-Northern), they want infrastructure that works, they want to make sure the rural hospitals remain open. What's crazy about that? Unfortunately the majority party of the Legislature for seven sessions now have made those issues partisan." Tuss continued that this Senate seat was once U.S. Sen. Jon Tester's seat in the state Senate, and that the party needs to take it back for the Democrats. He added that he was confident that the party was going to win and, with the help from the community, strive to make a change. Doug Kaercher spoke on his campaign for the Public Service Commission seat. Kaercher said that one of the main reasons that he decided to campaign for the PSC seat was that he was unhappy with what happened last October in Havre, when Havre experienced a large amount of snow that damaged many power lines and took down many trees. Kaercher said that it was not handled by the PSC properly and that he wanted to thank NorthWestern Energy for the company's hard work during that time. "I am a certified mediator and I tend to run a little bit more on the consensus basis and I like to be a collaborator," Kaercher said. "I want to make sure that when we go out there we go looking for the best rates for the consumers, we do it on a fair and affordable basis." Kaercher, who faces Republican Randy Pinocci of Sun River in the general election, also added that he and his opponent are two completely different people, and he needed everyone's support, as do the other candidates. Dan Nelson of Fort Benton, candidate for House District 27, said that he has always felt more independent until recently. Current events have him siding more with the Democratic party in the past year, he said, He said that he had no plan to run for the seat until meeting Tuss when he was campaigning through Fort Benton and was inspired to run for office. Nelson, who is facing fellow Fort Benton resident Republican Joshua Kassmier in the general election, said he was born during World War II and he comes from a construction family background. He has lived all over the state and worked as a teacher and a school administrator for most of his career. Given his background, Nelson said, he feels that he has a good understanding of rural Montana and the middle class. Havre Daily News/Ryan Welch Nelson added that 1 percent of the United States have the wealth of 40 percent of the nation, which is the highest divide world-wide. In recent years, he said, there has been more of a divide between the rich and the poor with the middle class slowly disappearing. Nelson said he hopes to promote the middle class in Montana and help promote rural parts of the state. Rep. Jacob Bachmeier, D-Havre, who faces challengers Libertarian Conor Burns and independent Bob Sivertsen in the general election for the seat in House District 28, said he wanted to thank everyone for their support and future support for the candidates, as well as the The Montana Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee for helping with establishing the regional office. Bachmeier said that this election will be won by the volunteers, and through hard work, great staff and great volunteers the Democrats are sure to win the elections. "This is a great year for Democrats," Bachmeier added. Press release The Havre-Hill County Library will host the Montana Conversations program An Evening with Montanas Poet Laureate with Lowell Jaeger Wednesday, June 27. The program will be at the library at 7 p.m. The presentation is free and open to the public. Funding for the Montana Conversations program is provided by Humanities Montana through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Montanas Cultural Trust, and private donations. At Jaegers readings, people can expect humor, serious reflection, and examination of the human condition in all its marvelous complexity. He enjoys interacting with audiences. He enjoys sharing the stage with other Montana poets. In between reading from his own work, he enjoys reciting from memory the poems of Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur and others. Poetry can be employed in a variety of ways to stimulate thoughtful reflection and discussion. Jaeger is a trained and experienced discussion facilitator. Its all about encouraging people to think and share. Its all about learning from each other and respecting diverse perspectives. These conversations are of proven value to an amazing array of community meetings and organizations. People are encouraged to give it a try; discover whats possible when people get together, share ideas, listen, think, grow. Poet William Stafford said of Lowell Jaegers poems, He has gone inside the feelings and thoughts that mark our part of the century. He makes me realize how serious and focusedand engaged poetry can be. Jaegers poems spring from direct experience with his subject matter people of all walks of life, especially the people of Montana with whom Lowell has rubbed elbows for the past 30 years. Poet Denise Levertov, who chose Jaegers poem Ernesto di Fioris Soldier for the Grolier Poetry Peace Prize, called Jaegers poems vivid and compelling brave in (the poems) wide-eyed acceptance of life as it is. Poet Kathleen Spivak praised Jaegers poems as Clear, magnificently expressed, Lowell Jaegers poems are poignant in their honesty. And poet Marvin Bell said of Jaegers work, We are indicted by experience, and this is its honest language. Lowell Jaeger serves as Humanities Division Chair at Flathead Valley Community College where he has taught writing courses for the past 30 years. He is a national trainer of discussion facilitators for the Center for Civic Reflection, an organization which promotes civil civic discourse. For more information, people can call the Havre-Hill County Library at 265-2123. Bear sightings are increasing in the area, with the second bear seen in two weeks, this time on the plains 2 miles south of Kremlin. Steve Dees reported to the Hill County Sheriffs Office and Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks that he spotted the bear about 8:30 a.m. Monday. He told the Havre Daily News it appeared to be a brown bear, but FWP Game Warden Shane Reno said, after investigating and looking at its tracks, that it was an adult black bear with reddish-brown fur. Reno and the other game warden who responded to the call were unable to locate the bear, although many residents in the area had taken pictures and spotted the bear throughout the day. Reno said that they were able to locate bear tracks and the bear may or may not still be in the area. He added it is possible that this was a one-time occurence and the bear has already moved on to a different location. A black bear also was spotted in the south end of Beaver Creek Park June 7, leading the park to remove trash bins and implement a pack-in, pack-out policy south of Lions Campground. At that time, Greg Limon, a representative of FWP, said that while bear sightings are not common in this area, bears will travel to new locations in search of food, shelter or security. A press release issued by FWP after the Beaver Creek Park sighting said that many times bears are attracted to campgrounds and homes due to the available food and the garbage that is left out. When bears are given access to garbage and other food sources they can become conditioned and potentially dangerous, and that once a bear is trained to look for food in a particular area it is often impossible to untrain them. The release urged people to secure their garbage inside garages, secure sheds or vehicles; to bring pet food in at night; to clean up livestock food, and to bring in bird feeders and clean up spilled seeds. Doing these things will decrease the possibility of food-training bears and other wildlife. The release encouraged outdoor enthusiasts and the communities on the Hi-Line to Be Bear Aware. Online: FWP Be Bear Aware pages: http://fwp.mt.gov/fishAndWildlife/livingWithWildlife/beBearAware/. Lifelong education in 2018 has never been more of a two-way dialogue between employer and employee. The onus lies with employees to take more of an interest in their own professional development to ensure they dont fall behind, as much as it falls on employers to provide support, guidance and advice wherever possible to future-proof their own employees. Smith has seen three types of employers. The first is focused on the here and now they refuse to invest in the skills of their employees because the future is uncertain and a longterm focus will only result in a loss of time, money and resources as employees rapidly move to the next employer. The second is a traditional approach whereby there is continual investment in employees via internal training and upskilling. The third flips the traditional notion and is more of a hybrid. It has the employees themselves self-driving their careers. The employer doesnt prescribe training for them but instead provides support, which, rather than monetary support, may take the form of flexible work options to allow for study. The employee is in the driving seat; they are selecting what they want to do and the employer is supporting them while allowing them to pick their own paths, Smith says. The paper reported that in late January, Takara Belmont said it had acquired 97 percent of shares in Ngu A Chau, a leading producer of hair care products in Vietnam, for JPY900 million ($8.2 million ). With the acquisition, Takara Belmont, which entered Vietnam in 2013 by establishing a plant making dental equipment, has made the first step into the local beauty market. Founded in 1921 and venturing into the hairdressing & beauty field 10 years later, Takara Belmon owns the Lebel brand, which holds the second biggest share of Japans hair care market. Ngu A Chau has a plant and a network of over 200 distribution agencies for its KANAC and other brands of hair care products, which account for about 10 percent of local market share in the field. It is also the first company in Vietnam meeting international standards set for good manufacturing practice in 2011, meaning their products are qualified for export. Following the merger, Takara Belmont said it would maintain the Vietnamese partners name and brand, but appointed a new leader board to help apply Japanese technology in the production. President and CEO of Takara Belmont Hidetaka Yoshikawa was quoted by the newspaper as saying that the company aims at turning Ngu A Chaus brands into the top ones not only in Vietnam but also in Southeast Asia. Menard, and Shiseido, meanwhile, have consolidated their foothold in Vietnam after years of serving local customers. After 14 years in Vietnam, Menard has 26 cosmetics stores and spas in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Hai Phong, alongside a nationwide distribution network. Le Thanh Huong, director of Menard Vietnam, said revenue growth of her company far exceeds the annual growth rate of the local cosmetic market, making Vietnam an important market in Menards development strategy. Menard owns two production plants in Japan serving domestic demand and exports to the Europe and Vietnam. About 99 percent of Menard products sold in Vietnam are made in Japan. Shiseido, one of the worlds oldest cosmetics companies, established its Vietnamese branch nearly a decade ago to develop a distribution system it had built in the country since 1997. In 2012, Shiseido Vietnam ended its distribution contract with the Vietnamese company Thuy Loc. All of the companys products now can only be purchased at Shiseido Vietnams official stores and legal agents. By opening a flagship store on adayroi.com, an e-commerce site run by VinGroup, the company is a pioneer of luxury brands in Vietnams online market, which mostly attracts the participation of small- and medium-sized firms. Vietnamnews RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) Glial cells surround neurons and provide support not unlike hospital staff and nurses supporting doctors to keep operations running smoothly. These often-overlooked cells, which include oligodendrocytes and astrocytes, are the most abundant cell types in the central nervous system. But these cells do more than support neurons. They also actively influence them, University of California, Riverside, researchers report. The researchers focused on astrocytes star-shaped cells that greatly outnumber neurons in mice, and found that when these cells overproduce a protein called ephrin-B1, the ability to retain memory weakens. We examined mouse learning behaviors and found that overproduction of this protein in astrocytes can lead to impaired retention of contextual memory and the ability to navigate in space, said Iryna Ethell, a professor of biomedical sciences in the School of Medicine, who led the research. We think that astrocytes expressing too much of ephrin-B1 can attack neurons and remove synapses, the connections through which neurons communicate. Such synapse loss is seen in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimers disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and multiple sclerosis. Study results appear in the June 20 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. When Ethell and colleagues examined mouse cell behavior in a petri dish, they found astrocytes were eating up synapses when ephrin-B1 was overexpressed, suggesting that glial-neuronal interactions influence learning. The overproduction of ephrin-B1 can be a novel mechanism by which unwanted synapses are removed in the healthy brain, with excessive removal leading to neurodegeneration Ethell said. While the research was done on a mouse model, the results are applicable in humans whose astrocytes also produce ephrin-B1. Astrocytes tend to increase ephrin-B1 production during traumatic brain injury which is what led Ethell to pursue the current research. In the lab, the researchers artificially increased levels of ephrin-B1 in mice and then tested them for memory retention. They found that the mice could not remember a behavior they had just learned. In cell culture studies, they added neurons to astrocytes that overexpressed ephrin-B1 and were able to see synapse removal, with the astrocytes eating up the synapses. Excessive loss of synapses is a problem, Ethell said. The hippocampus, the region of the brain associated primarily with memory, is plastic. Here, new neuronal connections are formed when we learn something new. But the hippocampus has a limited capacity; some connections need to go to make space for new connections new memories. To learn, we must first forget. In contrast to an ephrin-B1 increase, when this protein decreases (or is down-regulated) it results in more synapses and better learning. The astrocytes, in this case, are not able to attach to the synapses. But you dont want to remember everything, said Amanda Q Nguyen, a Neuroscience Graduate Program student working in Ethells lab, and a co-first author of the research paper. Its all about maintaining a balance: being able to learn but also to forget. Advice the researchers have for the public is simple: keep the brain that is, the neurons active. Reading and solving puzzles is a good start, Ethell said. Next, the researchers will work on understanding why some astrocytes remove synapses but other astrocytes do not. They also plan to study the role that inhibitory neurons play in the brain to keep it running smoothly. What we know for sure is that targeting just neurons for study is ineffective, Ethell said. Its the glial cells, too, that need our attention. The star-shaped astrocyte is truly a star when it comes to regulating learning and memory. Ethell, a member of UCRs Center for Glial-Neuronal Interactions, and Nguyen were joined in the research by Jordan Koeppen (co-first author), Angeliki M. Nilolakopoulou, Michael Garcia, Sandy Hanna, Simone Woodruff, and Zoe Figueroa of UCR; and Andre Obenaus of UC Irvine. The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health. The University of California, Riverside (www.ucr.edu) Although inflammation can arise from infection or injury, chronic inflammation can occur in older age due to ageing processes in the immune system. Higher levels of inflammation in older age has been linked to lower bone density, according to a new study carried out at the University of Southampton. Scientists from the Universitys Medical Research Council Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit (MRC LEU) examined the relationship between levels of inflammation in early old age and bone density at the spine and the hip. The relationship between levels of inflammation and change in bone density over the next 5 years was also explored. The study, published in Osteoporosis International, showed that higher levels of adiponectin was related to lower bone density at the spine and hip, and lower levels of interleukin-10 (IL-10) was associated with faster decline in bone density at the spine. Adiponectin and IL-10 each modify the pro- and anti-inflammatory balance. Lead author, Nicholas Fuggle, researcher at the University of Southampton, said Low bone density increases the risk of osteoporosis which affects so many older people and is extremely debilitating. This study highlights the importance of inflammatory markers in the development of osteoporosis. We hope that this study will help us develop potential ways of combatting the condition which will lead to improvements in quality of life. Professor Cyrus Cooper, Director of the MRC LEU, said: Poor bone health in older age is a leading cause of disability worldwide and has huge economic costs for society. These results will inform the development of lifecourse intervention strategies to promote better musculoskeletal health in later life. The study involved 365 men and women (aged 59-71 years when inflammation was assessed) from the Hertfordshire Cohort Study and was funded by the Medical Research Council. The work was funded and supported by the Medical Research Council of the UK; NIHR Biomedical Research Centres Southampton, Birmingham and Oxford; Arthritis Research UK; British Heart Foundation; and International Osteoporosis Foundation. The paper, Relationships between markers of inflammation and bone density: findings from the Hertfordshire Cohort Study, is published in Osteoporosis International, DOI: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00198-018-4503-z. University of Southampton Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy says 450 more family hubs will be rolled out before the end of the year Hotels are not an appropriate first response to homelessness, Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy has said - despite more than 1,700 homeless families still being accommodated in commercial hotels. The minister said that a further 450 family hub spaces will be rolled out in 2018 in an effort to combat the issue. Yesterday, the Herald revealed that 96 commercial hotels were being used as emergency accommodation. Deadline These are understood to include B&Bs and other forms of emergency, first-response accommodation. This comes just about a year since a deadline was set by his predecessor in the Department of Housing, Simon Coveney (inset), to have all homeless families out of hotels. Speaking yesterday, Mr Murphy said there had been progress but more needed to be done. "Hotels are not an appropriate first response," Mr Murphy said. "No family should be in a hotel. That's why we have the hub programme. "We also have to recognise that every family has unique circumstances and we have to tailor their needs appropriately to make sure that, as we look after those families and get them into a sustainable pathway for care, we do it in the best way for them," he said. Mr Murphy defended the work of his department in the year since he took on the position as minister, saying that 2,000 families have moved out of homelessness in that time. Mr Murphy said in that space of time 500 family hub spaces have been created for families across the city. He said that this figure will be almost doubled across the rest of this year. "In that period of time we've delivered more than 500 additional family hub spaces and there's another 450 family hub spaces to come in the coming months out towards the end of this year," he said. Caring "We have to make sure that our first response to people when they enter emergency accommodation is the most compassionate and caring response, and one that's tailored to make sure that in that crisis we're meeting people's needs adequately," he added. However, despite the minister pointing to progress, Dublin Region Homeless Executive chief Eileen Gleeson said last week that the figure for those entering homelessness was on the rise. According to official figures, in the minister's time in office the number of homeless families has jumped from 1,429 families in July 2017 to 1,712 for the end of April - a rise of almost 300 families. 'Prices here were up 12.7pc in the first three months of the year.' (file photo) Property prices in Ireland are now rising at the fourth fastest rate in the world. The new data comes as employers' body Ibec said the housing market is now dysfunctional and it is damaging the country's economic prospects. Experts said prices here will go on rising until supply ramps up to meet demand. New figures from the Knight Frank global house price index for the first quarter of the year show Irish property prices are rising rapidly. Prices here were up 12.7pc in the first three months of the year. This was behind Hong Kong, where they were up 14.9pc; Malta, which saw rises of 13.6pc; and Iceland, which reported rises of 13.2pc in the three months to March. Shortage The compilers of the index said a shortage of supply was a common reason why prices were rising so quickly in Hong Kong, Malta, Iceland and Ireland. An added factor in this country was the strong economic growth. Knight Frank said in its report: "In Ireland's case, its burgeoning economy explains its strong performance. Ireland has been Europe's fastest-growing economy for four consecutive years." Meanwhile, a new report into housing by Ibec has called for moves to boost supply. Ibec boss Danny McCoy wants Government intervention to drive down the cost of development land. Measures should include increasing the amount of zoned land, improved targeting of infrastructure funds to enhance site accessibility and more efficient use of publicly-owned landbanks. However, the prospect of ramping up the supply of housing is increasingly unlikely after the influential think-tank, the ESRI, slashed its projections for the construction of new homes. It has also said the Central Bank should consider making the banks hold more money in reserve to guard against excessive lending. The group's recommendations raise the prospect of house buyers finding it more difficult to get a mortgage while the number of new houses on the market lags previous expectations. It is expecting just 18,700 new homes to be built this year, compared to a previous forecast of 25,000. The dramatic reduction comes after the Central Statistics Office said last week that the Department of Housing's figures on new homes were overstated. The ESRI also cut its forecast for new homes built in 2019 to 23,200 from 31,000. However, analysts at bodies ranging from stockbrokers Davy to estate agents Savills have said that 35,000 extra units a year will be needed. Dr Conor O'Toole, senior research officer at the ESRI, said the country was further away from meeting the demand for houses than had been previously thought. He said that while lending risk is being managed "much better" by the banks compared to the Celtic Tiger, this could "quickly unravel". He said there was no case for loosening the Central Bank's mortgage caps, and that in fact the bank should consider tightening the amount of money available through more methods. He said asking banks to hold more money in reserve "may be an approach that's prudent" given the state of the market. "Using these other levers and tightening those may be an appropriate way to manage the cycle going forward," Dr O'Toole said. He was speaking after Central Bank deputy governor Sharon Donnery told an audience last month that there were "compelling" arguments for introducing such a measure at an early stage, before lending becomes excessive. Ryanair has no plans to stop selling alcohol on its early morning flights, despite calling for a 10am airport booze ban. The airline has asked for an alcohol ban to be put in place at airports after a group of Irish holiday- makers forced an Ibiza- bound flight from Dublin to divert to Paris on Saturday. Ryanair serves a range of alcoholic drinks on its morning flights, but will not impose a ban as "very little alcohol is actually sold on board". The airline added that it has a "zero tolerance" policy toward alcohol and disruptive behaviour. "Cabin crew have full discretion when it comes to selling or refusing to sell alcohol to passengers on board," it said. Dublin Airport Authority yesterday described Ryanair's proposal for a 10am booze ban as "highly draconian". A spokesperson said intoxicated passengers are not a significant issue at the airport, and there is no proof that those travelling on the flight to Ibiza had been drinking at the airport. Frustrations They added a ban "would affect all passengers because of the behaviour of a very, very small minority". Ryanair passengers aired their frustrations on Joe Duffy's Liveline yesterday. Conor Leydon, from Cork, said he was on board a flight from Cork to Malaga when an intoxicated passenger was sick over his head and on to his laptop. He said the man was clearly drunk when he boarded. However, Ryanair said in response that it does not allow intoxicated passengers on its aircraft. In some airports in the UK, Ryanair customers flying to Alicante or Ibiza are no longer allowed to bring duty-free alcohol on board and are asked to place it in the hold or leave it behind. Irish passengers flying to Ibiza, Alicante and Malaga are allowed to bring duty-free alcohol on to the aircraft but not drink it. Ryanair has said that if unruly passengers become a "recurrent issue", this policy may be revised. Speaking on Cork's Red FM, one of the men taken off the Ibiza-bound flight said Ryanair's decision was over-the-top. "To be taken off for drinking a naggin is an over-reaction," said Niall Harrington, from Cork. Viet Nam's natural rubber exports in the first five months of this year reached a volume of 424,000 tones worth US$620 million, up 17.4 percent compared to the same period in 2017. The production of natural rubber was more than 1.08 million tons in 2017, accounting for 8.3 percent of the worlds total production. The rubber sector earned US$2.25 billion from the export of rubber latex and US$1.9 billion from the export of rubber wood products. By MINH HAI Translated by Kim Khanh Diabetes diagnosis leads to life changes for teenager During a trip to Hawaii this past Spring, Amber Wykstra noticed her 15 year-old son, Cooper, was drinking a lot of water. I mean a lot, she said. He was also using the bathroom more than usual and, even though he was exercising, Wykstra said she had noticed her son was losing weight a bit faster than normal. Wykstra's husband was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 12, so she started seeing red flags. When we arrived home from our red-eye flight, my husband did a blood test and found that his (Cooper's) sugar was critically high, she said. We immediately ... Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang's Regular Press Conference on June 19, 2018 2018/06/19 Q: According to reports, on June 18, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized China's economic and trade policies and pledged tough measures in response in his address to the Detroit Economic Club. What is your comment? A: The Spokesperson of the Commerce Ministry has made clear China's solemn position on the relevant trade issue. It must be pointed out that the US side is calling white black and making groundless accusations against China in order to get away with its unilateral and protectionist behaviors. Acting in a wayward way, the US side chose to abandon its previous consensus with China and reignite the trade war. Its actions betrayed the trust of everyone, hurt the interests of the people and business communities on the two sides, and worked against the benefits of the people around the world. Though a trade war is not something we want, we are definitely not afraid of one. We will continue to take effective measures to firmly safeguard the interests of our nation and our people and resolutely uphold the economic globalization and the multilateral trading system. No matter what happens outside China, we will continue to move forward our reform and opening-up endeavors, pursue high-quality economic growth, and accelerate the building of a modern economic system, following our set pace and always placing the people at the center of all our efforts. Our advice for the US is that it should come back to its senses and stop saying or doing anything that benefits none. That would be the only way out of the current issue. Q: Chairman Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing this morning. This is his third visit to China. What is your expectation for his visit? What is your comment? A: Chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK Kim Jong Un is visiting China from June 19 to 20. We hope that his visit will help deepen China-DPRK relations, strengthen bilateral strategic communication on major issues, and promote regional peace and stability. Q: Last Friday, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that Russia is for the cancellation of all unilateral sanctions against the DPRK and the modification of the UN Security Council's sanctions against the DPRK. What is your comment? A: China consistently opposes the so-called unilateral sanctions imposed outside the framework of the UN Security Council. This position is quite clear-cut. Meanwhile, China believes that the sanctions of the Security Council themselves are not the end. All parties should support and coordinate with the diplomatic efforts to realize denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula through talks and move forward the political settlement of the Korean Peninsula issue. Q: Does the Foreign Ministry believe that a trade war between China and the US has officially begun? A: As we said before, China does not want a trade war and certainly is not afraid of fighting one. If a trade war is waged against us, we will definitely safeguard our legitimate and lawful rights and interests. Q: Why is Kim Jong Un's visit not a state visit? Why are there reports before he wraps up his visit? What practice is China following in releasing the relevant information? A: The press release says that Chairman Kim Jong Un is visiting China. It surely makes sense to release the information in this way. As to the timing for the press release, it is decided on a case-by-case basis. Q: Afghan President Ghani announced on June 16 that the Afghan government will extend its ceasefire with the Taliban and is prepared to have full talks with the Taliban on the ceasefire issue. Meanwhile, the Taliban said they have no intention to extend the ceasefire. What is your comment? A: We have noted relevant reports. China commends these efforts made by the Afghan government in promoting peace and welcomes its decision to extend ceasefire. China calls on the conflicting parties in Afghanistan to realize national reconciliation and peace through dialogue and political talks. China firmly supports the "Afghan-led and Afghan-owned" peace and reconciliation process. We stand ready to work with the international community in consistently playing a constructive role for an early realization of peace in Afghanistan. Q: President Trump said yesterday that he will move to create "a space force" as the sixth military branch. Considering that his advisers criticized China and Russia for militarizing the space on his campaign trail, what is China's comment on this US decision? Are you afraid that it may trigger an arms race in the space? Does China support signing international conventions on banning the militarization of the outer space? A: We have noted relevant reports. Outer space is all humanity's property. China always advocates the peaceful use of outer space and opposes the placement of weapons and an arms race in outer space. In particular, we oppose turning outer space into a battlefield. We hope that all parties could work together to ensure that outer space will forever be peaceful and tranquil. Q: When Chairman Kim Jong Un visited Dalian last time, China said that it was the DPRK side who raised the request to visit. How about this time? A: I know you would like to have more information on Chairman Kim Jong Un's visit. So please keep following the news. The Chinese side will release relevant information in a timely manner. Everything will be clear by then. Q: Recently, the French Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and Armed Forces issued an assessment report on the Belt and Road Initiative, which suggested that France should take a more active part in this Initiative and play an important guiding role at the EU-China level. What is your comment? A: China has noted the relevant report released by the French Senate. We appreciate and welcome the willingness demonstrated by the French side to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative. The Belt and Road Initiative is an open and inclusive initiative for international cooperation. As it follows the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, all participating countries can play their roles and gain benefits from it. When it comes to specific cooperation, we accommodate the comfort level of all parties, remain open and transparent and abide by the universally acknowledged international norms and rules. We are willing to explore the specific ways to conduct cooperation with France and other European countries under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, effectively synergize development strategies, expand converging interests and better achieve mutual benefit and win-win outcomes. Q: Firstly, is Chairman Kim Jong Un's visit directly related to the DPRK-US summit in Singapore? Will he meet with President Xi Jinping and inform President Xi of the DPRK-US summit? What is the purpose of his visit? Secondly, two Japanese airlines changed "Taiwan" to "Taiwan, China'' on their official websites. In response, the Taiwanese authorities lodged stern protests to the two companies through the "Taipei Representative Office in Japan". They claimed that the mainland suppressed Taiwan in the international space, which aroused repulsion from the people in Taiwan. What is your response? A: Please keep closely following Chairman Kim Jong Un's visit to China. The Chinese side will release relevant information in a timely manner and we will get a clearer picture by then. With regard to your second question, we have made clear our position many times. There is only one China in the world and Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan have always been parts of China. This is an objective fact, a common sense as well as the general consensus of the international community. The foreign enterprises operating in China should respect China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, abide by China's laws and respect the national feelings of the Chinese people. This is the basic requirement for any foreign company doing business in China. I urge the Taiwanese authorities to refrain from attempting to kick against the pricks and hold back the trend of history. Q: On June 18, a 6.1-magnitude earthquake that shook the western Japan prefecture has killed four people. Has China sent messages of condolences to the Japanese side? A: We have noted that an earthquake has struck western Japan. We send our condolences to the victims and sympathy to the bereaved families and the injured. Q: The US has announced that it is considering imposing tariffs on an additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. It's seen by many analysts as being unprecedented in scale and scope. It means that the vast majority of two-way trade between China and America would be hit by punitive import taxes. I just wonder if you could give us the Chinese Foreign Ministry's view on the significance of taking that large-scale step and how seriously you would view that action if the US does go ahead with it? A: In brief, our advice for the US is that it should come back to its senses and stop saying or doing anything that benefits none. Q: The US and the ROK have decided to suspend their joint military exercises which were scheduled in August this year. What is your comment? A: We have responded to this question before. Today I can give you a formal reply once again. Suspending joint military drills on the part of the US and the ROK is a positive and constructive step. China welcomes it. We hope that all relevant parties can continue to meet each other halfway and make further efforts to realize the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and advance the political settlement process of the Korean Peninsula issue. Q: Can you tell us will Chairman Kim Jong Un meet with President Xi Jinping and also following the summit in Singapore, what additional steps in the short term does China want to see the DPRK and the US proceed with? A: Please keep following the news. The Chinese side will release relevant information in a timely manner. Black bears more likely to wander into yards this time of year This year's spotty acorn crop makes it more likely black bears could wander into yards near forests searching for food. What to do for that and more. Things are never as bad as they seem. Theres always a brighter spot if you just look for it, always something to be thankful for, a way of making yourself feel better because things arent as they seem. As in the new book Tomorrow Will Be Different by Sarah McBride, theres always a chance to make a change. Though she was ten years old the first time she heard the word transgender, Sarah McBride knew from an early age that she was really a girl. Problem was, everyone around her saw her as a boy, and she didnt want to disillusion them because she didnt want to disappoint them. And so, McBride tamped down a feeling of homesickness inside herself and she tried to be a boy by dating girls, joining a fraternity at college, and doing guy things that felt wrong. It wasnt til the end of her time as student body president at American University that she took the leap and came out, publicly, as a woman. It was a relief, she says, and though there was some initial shock, her friends and family never stopped loving her. For that, she acknowledges her fortune; a high percentage of her LGBTQ peers arent so lucky. Not long after this major life-changer, McBride was accepted for a dream come true, landing an internship at the Obama White House. Shed been fascinated by politics since she was small and was a campaign volunteer in her home state of Delaware. Starting in the Office of Public Engagement, she was quickly engaged; activism, as McBride learned, was something she could sink her teeth into, as a trans woman. Happier than shed ever been, McBrides life continued to rise: she fell in love with Andy, whom shed met at a party, though she didnt see him again until he emailed her months later. He was trans, too a homegrown Wisconsin boy with a sense of humor, and she adored him. The future was bright. And then things changed again Theres a message inside Tomorrow Will Be Different and its not the activism one that you think is there. Oh, theres no denying that author Sarah McBride is an activist and shes been a big part in making change, not only at state-level but nationally. Shes a history-maker and a shaker. But this book isnt just about that. Oh-so-subtly, McBride makes readers brains itch. LGBTQ teens can be fragile, and youll watch closer after reading this book. Health care isnt just an issue for the middle-class, and youll understand better now. Politics arent just something to rant about, and in the midst of all this, believe it or not, you may be better off than you think you are. This book forces a different way of looking at things, but you might not initially notice that as youre crying over the rest of this memoir. So bring tissues while you read and let your brain itch. Let Tomorrow Will Be Different sink in because things can always be better than they seem. Tomorrow Will Be Different by Sarah McBride c.2018, Crown Archetype $26.00 / $35.00 Canada 288 pages Patrick Volkert co-owns Hunters Nightclub in Wilton Manors, the nightclub that unarguably is a leader in South Floridas gay scene. Situated in the middle of The Drive, Hunters has been voted best bar by readers of SFGN for three years in a row. The club has 27 employees, Volkert said, all of which are offered health insurance. Volkert, though, does not do the hiring at Hunters. No, I stay out of that, Volkert said. The 58-year-old Miami native said hes simply too much of a softie to make personnel decisions. Im a pushover, he admitted. When they come to me I cant say no. So Volkert stays behind the scenes helping with financials and letting others run the floor. General manager Bruce Howe, Volkert said, is more inclined to let employees and patrons know when they are out of line. And then theres Mark Hunter, an accomplished ballroom dancer and the third stakeholder at Hunters. Patrick and Mark were a couple for many years, owning nightclubs in Chicago and California. Now just business partners, the men bought Hunters in 2013, ordered a complete renovation and built its street cred by helping local non-profits and sponsoring recreational teams. Sunday Tea Dance is a big night with DJ Richie Rich running sound. The dance floor section of the club has it all. Lights, fog, dancers, a big screen projector and music help to get your feet shuffling. Climb the stairs to get a glimpse of those sweaty dancers from Sals Starlight Lounge. The lounge is named after the late Studio 54 bartender Sal DeFalco, who helped Hunters open. A visit to the lounge during high tea is one way to fulfill Hunters' promise of Spirits Elevated. The CVB is Richard Grays baby. He said so in a telephone conversation with the Mirror Magazine last week. The Convention and Visitors Bureau has many functions, Gray said. He should know. Gray is the vice president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale CVB and leads its world renowned LGBT department. The budget for marketing and promoting to LGBT travelers is over $1 million. The CVBs mission, Gray said, is to bring business to Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale is one of the few places the gay community is holding its own, Gray said. Gray travels globally on behalf the CVB and knows where to travel and where not to travel. He was recently in Portland, Oregon, while another trip took him to the Middle East aboard Emirates airlines. The LGBT community in Fort Lauderdale is thriving, Gray said. Although he said the trend appears to be fewer and fewer gay bars, greater Fort Lauderdale is still attracting a large number of gay tourists. Gray launched his LGBT bureau in 1996. The CVB, Gray said, is primarily funded through bed taxes collected by the Broward County government. Broward County, Gray said, is one of the few majority, minority counties in America. There are more African American and Hispanic than white households in Broward County, Gray said. Over 100 languages are spoken here, Gray said. One of the successes of the CVB is its annual Southern Comfort Transgender Conference, returning this September. The conference further proves Grays point of greater Fort Lauderdale being a welcoming destination to all. We want all travelers to feel welcome and comfortable here, Gray said. Its like an oasis in a really conservative state. Transgender travelers can find more information about the conference at www.sunny.org/tlgb And still our Indian government announces ceasefire with such enemy ! Now we need rulers who will allow Indian security forces to wipe out jihadi terrorists along with Pakistani establishments that are threat to our country ! Editor, Hindujagruti New Delhi : Pakistan violated the ceasefire on the international border (IB) in Jammu around 480 times this year, a rise of more than 400 per cent over the 111 violations last year. The incidents included firing at Indian posts, shelling on villages and sniping at jawans, in which 11 BSF personnel were killed. BSF officials said Pakistani forces violated the ceasefire almost thrice a day this year even though they were responding aggressively to the provocations and despite the DGMOs of India and Pakistan agreeing on May 29 to fully implement the ceasefire pact of 2003 in letter and spirit. The officials cited the absence of a government in Islamabad as one of the reasons for Pakistans misadventures. Cross-border firing on the IB and even the LoC, which is managed by the army, has increased because Pakistan Rangers and military are not accountable to any leadership and local commanders have taken matters in their hands, an officer said. Intelligence alerts have suggested that ceasefire violations will continue till Pakistans general election on July 25. Sources said the ISI has also become active in the region and was using non-state actors to snipe at BSF jawans, which was sometimes supported by Pakistan Rangers. BSF chief KK Sharma has advocated heavy retaliatory firing, forcing Pakistan to seek truce a dozen times in the last two years. However, officials said Pakistani forces dont honour their word and start firing within hours of a flag meeting or a call between the two sides. Source : TOI Photographer Clyde Butcher is known for his sweeping, evocative black-and-white photos of Floridas Everglades. But when he first arrived in the Sunshine State almost 40 years ago, he looked around and couldnt find anything to photograph. Flat. No mountains. No waterfalls. Boring. I didnt do anything for almost the first two years, he said. Butcher, who had previously lived in California and photographed landscapes there, wasnt impressed by Florida as a creative subject. But in 1982, he made a trip to St Petersburg and visited the Salvador Dali museum, where a collection of the Spanish artists work was on display. He inspired me, Butcher said with a grin, adding that Dalis work led him to do some creative, outer-space type stuff. Not long after that, Butcher picked up his camera and began shooting photos of Floridas cypress stands, of swamps and secluded beaches. Butchers latest work is an homage to the surrealist master. It brings Butchers career in Florida full circle. The new exhibit features photographs of the places in Spain where Dali lived, shot by Butcher, a photographer renowned for his pictures of the Florida Everglades. (AP) The Dali Museum in St Petersburg commissioned Butcher to travel to Spain to capture Cadaques, Portlligat, Figueres and Cap de Creus areas where Dali spent his early years, and where he died. The result is the exhibit Clyde Butcher: Visions of Dalis Spain, and its a stark, moody show of the rugged, rocky landscapes of Spains Costa Brava. In the shows 41 photographs, viewers can see what inspired Dali no small feat given his fantastical and often outrageous artistic imagination. Butchers photos are almost a starting point for Dalis paintings across the hall in the museum. You can see how certain rocks perched on cliffs look like the skulls that Dali painted, for example, and how light and shadows influenced Dalis visions. Butcher, who has been called the Ansel Adams of the Everglades because of his large-scale, sharp monochromatic landscape images, started his photography career in California. Going to Spain, he said, reminded him of California. It was like I was back in Monterey, Point Lobos. It felt like home. We lived in Newport Beach on a sailboat, said Butcher, during a media tour of the exhibit. Clyde Butcher wearing his signature cowboy hat watches as Peter Tush, Museum Curator of Education, gives a description of one of his photographs. (AP) His images from Spain are similar in scale to his Florida works, and he draws parallels between his photos and Dalis paintings. Im probably quite similar actually. My pictures are created so you can walk into them. He created these experiences with his paintings, that they were very similar. That inspired me to do that weird stuff. It got me to look at nature in a different way. One of the first photos a visitor sees in the new exhibit is a wide picture of an inlet in Cadaques, with a small, lone wooden sailboat on the beach. I think I was there every day, about four and five times, back and forth, to the same spot. A lot of times you find a nice spot, but the lights not right, the skys not right, he said. That obsession of light and sky, of shadows and clouds, consumed Butcher while he was in Spain. One day, it was just blue sky. Blahhhh, he said. The next day we woke up and it was nice and storming, and I said, its a good time to go, he said. Clyde Butcher and Peter Tush, Museum Curator of Education, enter a gallery during the opening of the Clyde Butcher, Visions of Dali's Spain exhibit. (AP) In many of his Florida photos, Butcher uses a large-format view camera, in which the lens forms an inverted image on a ground glass screen directly at the plane of the film. In Spain, he went digital, using a Sony camera. Butchers assignment in Spain happened prior to his March 2017 stroke. Hes now almost fully recovered and is back to doing events. The exhibition is on display at the Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, till November 25. Follow @htlifeandstyle for more After months of speculations over his health, here is some good news for fans of Bollywood actor Irrfan Khan. The actor, who revealed he was diagnosed with neuroendocrine tumour in March this year, has told Bombay Times how the trips to hospitals made him realise the unpredictable nature of life. The statement offers hope and relief to fans who have been concerned about Irrfans health. The tabloid quoted Irrfan as saying, I had been in a different game, I was travelling on a speedy train ride, had dreams, plans, aspirations, goals, was fully engaged in them. And suddenly someone taps on my shoulder and I turn to see. Its the TC: Your destination is about to come. Please get down. I am confused: No, no. My destination hasnt come. No, this is it. This is how it is sometimes. The suddenness made me realise how you are just a cork floating in the ocean with UNPREDICTABLE currents! And you are desperately trying to control it. In this chaos, shocked, afraid and in panic, while on one of the terrifying hospital visits, I blabber to my son, The only thing I expect from ME is not to face this crisis in this present state. I desperately need my feet. Fear and panic should not overrule me and make me miserable, he added, That was my INTENTION. AND THEN PAIN HIT. As if all this while, you were just getting to know pain, and now you know his nature and his intensity. Nothing was working; NO consolation, no motivation. The entire cosmos becomes one at that moment just PAIN, and pain felt more enormous than GOD, Irrrfan further said. The National Award-winning actor added, This realisation made me submit, surrender and trust, irrespective of the outcome, irrespective of where this takes me, eight months from now, or four months from now, or two years. The concerns took a back seat and started to fade and kind of went out of my mindspace. For the first time, I felt what freedom truly means. It felt like an accomplishment. As if I was tasting life for the first time, the magical side of it. My confidence in the intelligence of the cosmos became absolute. I feel as if it has entered every cell of mine. Time will tell if it stays, but that is how I feel as of now. Irrfan had shared the news of illness on Instagram earlier. On the work front, Irrfans film, Blackmail, released while he was out of the country for his treatment. A Vishal Bharadwaj directorial that also stars Deepika Padukone has been postponed for now because of the actors health. The filmmaker has said he would rather wait for Irrfan to get back on his feet than go for recasting for the movie. Currently, Irrfan has Karwan and Puzzle lined up for release. Follow @htshowbiz for more Indian armed forces are synonymous with unbridled stories of incredible valour and heroism. Not surprisingly, Bollywood filmmakers have always taken inspirations from army-men. In the latest instance, we have learnt that a film tentatively titled, Arun is set to be made on the life of late Arun Khetarpal. He was a second lieutenant of the Indian Army and a posthumous recipient of the Param Vir Chakra at 21. He attained martyrdom during the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971. While Sriram Raghavan will be directing Arun, writer Ritesh Shah of Pink (2016) fame is busy penning the script of the film. When I heard the story of Arun Khetarpal, it just blew my mind. He is the youngest recipient of the Param Vir Chakra. But I regret the fact that I wasnt aware of him and his bravery. What he did and the kind of life he lived was absolutely exemplary and unbelievable, says the films producer, Dinesh Vijan. Vijan, who also directed Raabta in 2015, feels Arun involves a lot of passion since we all are moved by it. At this point, commerce and business arent on my mind at all, he says. The script of the film is likely to be finalised in six weeks, and only then will makers start their hunt for the actor to play Khetarpal. I feel whoever plays him should have the same passion and belief. We are doing loads of research right now. I feel its a huge responsibility with an extremely inspirational message. Sriram is one of the purest directors around, and Ritesh is as passionate, so I feel its the perfect team, says Vijan. Although six months of prep will be needed before the film goes on the floors, makers feel they should start filming between April-June next year. Its too early to talk about its release but such a film should ideally release on Independence Day or Republic Day, adds Vijan. BOLLYWOOD AND INDIAN ARMY: COMING UP SOON Sidharth Malhotra: He is set to play the Kargil war hero Vikram Batra in a biopic. Vicky Kaushal: He will be seen as a Para Commando in the Special Forces in Uri, a film based on the September 2016 attacks in Uri, Kashmir. Akshay Kumar: He plays an army man in Kesari, a war drama based on the Battle of Saragarhi in which an army of 21 Sikhs fought against the Afghans in 1897. Follow @htshowbiz for more Deadly dust storms sweeping over the densely-populated north Indian plains are part of a new normal of disruptive weather events worsening the countrys already-lethal air pollution and causing disruption in the $2.3 trillion economy. In recent months, dust clouds and storms have killed hundreds of people, destroyed thousands of homes and farmers crops and led to flight cancellations. The government in New Delhi, a city of more than 20 million people, ordered a halt to construction activities as the airborne sand significantly worsened north Indias air quality, far outside the winter months that usually herald the regions descent into a months-long toxic haze. Its definitely a new normal -- the frequency and intensity of these storms is unprecedented, said Sunita Narain, director general of New Delhis Centre for Science and Environment, who added that recent weather is related to desertification, deforestation and an over-extraction of groundwater. In India, extreme weather events can quickly lead to dozens of deaths and cause economic hardship, with the World Bank estimating that environmental degradation costs India roughly $80 billion each year. At the same time, soaring levels of tiny, deadly particulate matter have prompted concern about a brewing public health emergency in the politically-gridlocked capital, where doctors warn of rising lung cancer and heart disease cases. Economic threat In 2018 alone, there have been 50 severe storms across 16 Indian states that have led to more than 500 deaths, compared to 22 storms between 2003 and 2017, and only nine between 1980 and 2003, the CSE said. Nearly 5,000 houses collapsed, while livestock were killed and crops were ruined across the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and others, according to a report by the CSE. Flights were cancelled across north India on airlines including Air India, Indigo and Spice Jet, said Kapil Sabharwal, a spokesman for New Delhis airport. The worsening air pollution across north India in the summer has also prompted renewed concerns that its no longer just a winter phenomenon, but a year-long public health crisis. In March, April and May, air monitoring stations in Delhi recorded just one day of satisfactory air quality, data compiled by the Central Pollution Control Board show. Poor air quality also poses a threat to Delhis economy. When there is such visible pollution, the danger is certain steps may be taken that hamper business continuity, said Seema Arora, deputy director general of the Delhi-based CII-ITC Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Development, citing past bans on the entry of trucks carrying non-essential goods into the capital. Such actions can result in a huge amount of impact, especially for small and medium businesses Political fallout Any response to worsening pollution levels has been complicated by gridlock in Indias capital, where New Delhis political leaders have sparred with their own bureaucracy and representatives of the national government. Delhis Aam Aadmi Party, led by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal -- a political opponent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- has been holding a hunger strike in the waiting room of the states lieutenant governor. They allege administrators in Delhis bureaucracy have boycotted their work, including combating pollution, while bureaucrats claim AAP lawmakers assaulted Delhis chief secretary. The political crisis has drawn in a variety of opposition leaders, including the chief minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee, who tweeted that they had urged the prime minister to resolve the problems immediately. Still, Narain said all parties managed to unite to implement a ban on construction in the national capital. It has transcended politics, she said, adding she has met with Delhis lieutenant governor and chief minister. The policies are moving. Air pollution is something thats reached the highest level. Elaborate arrangements for security, healthcare and sanitation are being given final touches at Dehraduns sprawling Forest Research Institute (FRI) the venue where PM Narendra Modi will lead a crowd of some 50,000 yoga enthusiasts on International Yoga Day (June 21). Modi will reach Dehradun on June 20 by a special plane flying him from New Delhi and will land at the Jollygrant airport at 9 pm. He will be taken to the Raj Bhavan, where he will spend the night. The next morning at 6.30, he will reach the FRI ground along with chief minister Triverndra Singh Rawat and Union minister of state for Ayush Shripad Naik. Modi will practise yoga along with 50,000 yoga enthusiasts before flying back to New Delhi. Chief secretary Utpal Kumar said that theres overwhelming response to International Yoga Day. Making arrangements for such a big event is no doubt very challenging, he admitted adding that officials making preparations for the crucial occasion are charged up. Giving details of the arrangements the top official said nothing is being left to chance. All aspects of arrangements from security, to the availability of potable water to electricity and healthcare and sanitary measures, are being ensured at the venue, he said. All security agencies involved including the police and the Special Protection Group (SPG) etc are leaving nothing to chance, he said referring to the agency (SPG) which looks after the security of the PM. Speaking about medical facilities he said that around 25 ambulances, along with as many medical experts, will be stationed at the venue. He discounted reports suggesting that 50,000 people gathering at the sprawling FRI ground with leafy forests teeming with bird and animal life will end up damaging its fragile environment. The forest and wildlife on the FRI campus will remain unharmed as we have a system in place for both pre and post event cleanliness, Singh said. We also appeal to those who will participate in the event to help maintain cleanliness at the venue. Officials supervising the arrangements at the FRI ground said that on June 21 a fleet of buses will be pressed into service to provide easy transportation to people. In fact, we appeal to them to use buses to reach FRI instead of using their own vehicles, Singh said. According to him, only the yoga exercises approved under the Common Yoga Protocol (CYP) will be practised at the venue on International Yoga Day. Hem Arya, who contested the 2017 assembly election from Nainital as an independent after quitting the BJP, on Tuesday joined the Congress on Tuesday. His wife Neema, a member of the Nainital zila panchayat also joined Congress at the party office in Haldwani. State Congress president Pritam Singh welcomed Hem Arya and Neema into the party fold and said they would work at the grassroots for the betterment of people. Congress is a democratic party and we believe in the betterment of all. Hem Arya would be encouraged to help people though the political system, Pritam Singh said. Hem Arya said that he was returning to his roots as his father too had been in the Congress. I am a soldier of the Congress party and I will not stake claim to any seat and would obey the orders given by the party high command, he said. He said he joined the Congress after being influenced by the partys people-centric policies. Hem Aryas entry into the Congress is being seen as a move by the party to strengthen its base in Nainital as well as influencing some members of the zila panchayat. However, Hem Aryas entry has already created a sort of rift within the Congress ranks. Party leader Sarita Arya who had unsuccessfully contested the 2017 assembly elections from Nainital minced no words saying Hem Arya had been a part of the RSS. Denied party ticket, Hem Arya had rebelled against the BJP and contested unsuccessfully from Nainital. Sanjeev Arya, who had joined the BJP after quitting the Congress ahead of the polls, won the seat defeating the nearest rival Sarita Arya who is also the president of Uttarakhand Mahila Congress. Leader of Opposition in the Delhi assembly Vijender Gupta, who was on an indefinite hunger strike against the non-performance of the Arvind Kejriwal government, was on Tuesday shifted to GB Pant Hospital due to failing health, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders said. Vijender Gupta being taken to the hospital. He was on indefinite hunger strike with us for the last five days. May God bless (Delhi chief minister) Arvind Kejriwals wisdom, the partys member of Parliament from West Delhi Parvesh Sahib Singh tweeted. Gupta along with Singh, MLA Manjinder Singh Sirsa and suspended Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLA Kapil Mishra started their indefinite hunger strike on June 15 over the acute water shortage in several areas of the national capital. The BJP leaders also said they were protesting against the sit-in by Kejriwal and his deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia, health minister Satyendar Jain and labour minister Gopal Rai at Lt Governor Anil Baijals office. The AAP leaders started the sit-in on June 11 to press for their demands, including a direction to Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers to end their alleged strike and action against those who have struck work. They also asked for the Centre to approve the AAP governments proposal to deliver ration to the poor at their houses. Sisodia and Jain, who were hospitalised during their hunger strike, were discharged on Tuesday. Sisodia said he is recovering fast and will resume work from Tuesday if doctors allowed him to do so. Kejriwal is continuing his protest at Baijals office along with Rai. Eight days of wait to meet Honble LG. Dy CM and UD minister shifted to hospital due to bad health. Honble LG could not find eight minutes in eight days for the people of Delhi, the chief minister tweeted on Tuesday. The Delhi high court disapproved the sit-in led by Kejriwal at the LGs office and asked the AAP government who had authorised their protest. And, the Supreme Court on Tuesday refused an urgent on a plea seeking its direction to declare as unconstitutional the sit-in of Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues. Ever since Jitender Mann alias Gogi made a daring escape from police custody in July 2016, he is suspected to be involved in at least six murders, including the two by him and his gang on Monday. Gogi is most notorious for his enmity with jailed gangster Sunil alias Tillu, but he also shared a rivalry with Mukul, a resident of Alipurs Tajpur village who was gunned down in north Delhis Sant Nagar on Monday morning. In 2015, Gogi had allegedly killed Mukuls maternal uncle Deepak alias Raju for having an affair with his cousin. According to MM Oberoi, special commissioner of police (special cell), Mukul had been actively pursuing the murder case and hence was on Gogis target. Mukul was under such threat that he never moved around without his friends. Even the Mahindra Scorpio car in which he was travelling during the attack on Monday was bulletproof, said an investigator. Gogis rivalry with Tillu, meanwhile, dates back to 2014 when they lent muscle support to rival candidates in student politics at a college in outer Delhis Alipur. Since then, at least 14 members of the two gangs have died in the bloody battle between the two rivals, police said. The police heaved a sigh of relief when the two gangsters were arrested separately within a spate of a few months in 2015-16. While Sunil alias Tillu continues to be lodged in Sonipat Jail, Gogi had other plans. In July 2016, Gogi gave police the slip while being taken to a court in Haryanas Bahadurgarh. A dozen of his gang members intercepted the Haryana Police, threw chilli powder on policemen and fled with Gogi. He is currently carrying a reward of Rs 2 lakh on his head. On Monday, 26-year-old Gogi was allegedly among the five men who arrived at north Delhis Sant Nagar in a Toyota Fortuner and rained bullets on four residents of Alipurs Tajpur village. Apart from a passerby woman and a motorcyclist, the attack left dead two men. Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal on Tuesday wrote to Arvind Kejriwal asking him to urgently meet IAS officers to address the concerns from both sides in his first communication to the chief minister since he began a sit-in protest at his office. Baijal wrote to Kejriwal in response to his deputy Manish Sisodias request for a meeting between the government and bureaucrats to end the impasse. The L-G requested the CM to urgently meet the officers at the Secretariat so that apprehensions and concerns of both sides can be suitably addressed through dialogue in the best interest of the people of Delhi, a statement from Baijals office said. It said Baijal had earlier advised the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government to make efforts to restore trust between the elected government and the officers. The L-G stated that he was glad that the CM had tweeted an appeal to the officers assuring them of safety and security in their interactions with the elected government, the statement added. The L-G observed that he has been informed that the officers have also welcomed the appeal and they are awaiting the CMs presence at the Secretariat to hold discussions. Kejriwal and Sisodia, along with health minister Satyendar Jain and labour minister Gopal Rai, began a sit-in protest at Baijals office on June 11 over their demands, including a direction to Indian Administrative Service or IAS officers to end their strike. IAS AGMUT (Arunachal, Goa, Mizoram and Union Territories) Association tweeted earlier on Tuesday that they are waiting for a formal communication from Kejriwal on his assurance of providing security to them. They reiterated that they were not on strike and were ready for a meeting in Delhi Secretariat. The IAS officers said on Monday they were open to formal discussions to end the impasse in Delhi, a day after Kejriwal assured them their safety and dignity. I wish to assure them that I will ensure their safety and security with all my powers and resources available at my command. I have given similar assurances earlier also to many officers who have been meeting me privately. I reiterate it, Kejriwal said on Sunday. (With PTI inputs) Portland, Oregon will rename a stretch of Stark Street over LGBT icon Harvey Milk. The city voted on June 14 to rename a 13-block area of road which once was a major neighborhood of the local LGBT community, according to Gay Star News. The city council vote was unanimous, with no dissenting votes. It sends a signal that we are an open and a welcoming and an inclusive community, said Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler in the meeting. It signals that these are values that we hold deeply. Over a dozen people testified on behalf of the project during the meeting. At the end, members of the council revealed a Southwest Harvey Milk Street sign to pose with. The vote comes during Pride month and right around Portlands June 17 Pride parade. Salt Lake City and San Diego also have streets named after Milk, according to Gay Star News. In San Francisco, where he served on the Board of Supervisors as the first openly gay elected official, Milk has a terminal in the citys airport named after him. Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and Health Minister Satyendar Jain, who were hospitalised during their hunger strike at Lieutanant Governor Anil Baijals office, were discharged on Tuesday. Jain was admitted to LNJP hospital on Sunday night after his condition had deteriorated. Sisodia was rushed to the hospital on Monday after the ketone level in his urine rose sharply and his sugar level dropped. Medical Superintendent of the LNJP Hospital J C Passey said, Both the ministers were discharged around 10 am. Their health parameters, including ketone level in urine are normal now. Sisodia said he is recovering fast and will try and resume work from today. Good Morning!! With Doctors care and your blessings, I am recovering fast. Yesterday, my ketone level was 7.4 & BP reached 184/100, which was leading to renal failure. But now everything is under control. If doctors allow Ill try to be back to work today only, he tweeted. On Saturday, a team of doctors had examined Sisodia and Jain. While Jain went on indefinite fast at the L-Gs office last Tuesday, Sisodia had been on a hunger strike since Wednesday. Meanwhile, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, who is still on a sit-in protest at Baijals office along with Rural Development Minister Gopal Rai, tweeted Eight days of wait to meet Honble LG. Dy CM and UD minister shifted to hospital due to bad health. Honble LG could not find eight minutes in eight days for the people of Delhi. Good morning Delhi Eight days of wait to meet Honble LG. Dy CM and UD minister shifted to hospital due to bad health. Honble LG could not find eight minutes in eight days for the people of Delhi. Hope he finds some time today Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 Kejriwal, along with his colleagues, have been at Baijals office since June 13, demanding a direction to IAS officers to end what the AAP describes a strike and approval of the doorstep ration delivery scheme. Two board meetings of government agencies and preparations for the impending monsoon were some of the works that were slowed down because of the sit-in by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues, and the ongoing protest by the bureaucracy. As the sit-in protest entered its eighth day, work at the Delhi Secretariat continued at a snails pace. Cabinet meetings, usually held on Tuesdays, havent taken place in four weeks. A government report accessed by Hindustan Times stated the last Cabinet meeting was held on May 22. Besides, no Cabinet meeting has been scheduled for this week yet. The report also stated that as of June 14, around 180 files are pending with seven ministers of the Delhi cabinet, of which 81 were important files pending for more than a week. While two files were pending with Kejriwal, 24 were with Sisodia, four with Rai, 17 with Jain and the remaining were with the four others. While Kejriwal, Rai, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and PWD minister Satyendar Jain were staging the protest at the L-G office, transport minister Kailash Gahlot, environment minister Imran Hussain and social welfare minister Ranjendra Pal Guatam were occasionally found working. An AAP functionary said Gahlot and Gautam played a vital role in amassing the crowd for the rallies on Wednesday and Sunday. During this time, Hussain called for meetings, even as bureaucrats refused to turn up. Gahlot had around 21 files of the transport department with him. On Monday, he cleared and returned them to the officials. The files included important works such as allotment of depots for cluster buses, wages for cluster bus drivers etc. A government spokesperson said that a meeting on reviewing monsoon preparedness is also due. The meeting will now be held on June 25 and the fresh target of finishing all monsoon-related work is June 30, he said. Important meetings were also cancelled since the ministers were not available. Sanjay Kumar, Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, said, A battle of prestige is playing out in Delhi. The sooner it is resolved, the better it is for the people. Two passersby and two residents of outer Delhi were killed and at least nine men injured in a shooting and a related road accident in north Delhis Sant Nagar on Monday morning. The attack was carried out against four residents of outer Delhis Tajpur village by wanted criminal Jitender Mann alias Gogi, said MM Oberoi, special commissioner of police (special cell). Carrying a reward of Rs 2 lakh on his head, Gogi physically led the attack in which at least two dozen rounds were fired, a survivor told police. Police identified the dead as Sant Nagar resident Sangeeta Sharma, 37, a 20-year-old motorcycle rider Rajkumar, the 17-year-old prime target Mukul and Gogis gang member Sanjeet. Mukul was identified as the nephew of Deepak alias Raju, who was allegedly an associate of Gogis rival and jailed gangster Sunil alias Tillu. How the bloody gunbattle unfolded: SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Theres a reason we call the Capital Dilli dilwalon ki. It accepts people from all over the world with open arms. The sentiment is shared by those who have sought refuge here, and have made it a home away from home. The city, its lanes, and its ways have a strong hold on the lives of these refugees. Yes, there is pain. Yes, there are scars... but Delhi has given us a chance to rebuild our lives, says a grateful Shabber Kyamin, a Rohingya from Myanmar. As more and more people from different lands settled here, Delhi, too, was introduced to their cultures, and some of its areas became synonymous with them Majnu Ka Tila with Tibetans, Old Delhi with Afghanis, and Jamia Nagar with Rohingyas. So clearly, Dilli hai sabki! It feels like home Majnu Ka Tila that houses the Tibetan community is more like Little Tibet in the heart of the Capital. Thousands of refugees have settled down here, running their businesses successfully, gaining popularity for their culture from fashion to food. My parents shifted from Tibet to Delhi... perhaps in 1962. They tell me several stories of how people left Tibet in hordes... when they came down here, they started a small eatery and now its one of the most popular restaurants in the area, says Sanya Wangdue (name changed), who also owns a guest house in the area. This is like our own country now. Weve never faced any discrimination or hostility. I dont know if it wouldve been possible for us to start life anew in any other country, says Sanya. Sydega, a refugee from Kabul, Afghanistan lives in Hauz Rani, Khirki Extension. (Photo: Rajessh Kashyap/HT ) The Warrior from Afghanistan In the bylanes of Khirki Extension, amid rubble, we find Sydeqa. She fled Afghanistan amidst attacks on her life. She is trained in combat and weapon handling, and perhaps the tools she acquired as a warrior allow her to combat with the struggles of her new life. She is hoping to get refugee status in a few months. I am thankful to this country for providing me home and safety. I live with my husband and a new born baby, she says, adding that she does miss the little things but realises they came at a cost. Vahan Eid saat din tak manayi jaati thi, yahan bas teen din ki hoti hai, but due to targeted attacks, common people lived under threat. Kabhi barood gir jata tha... The 35-year-old is relieved that her baby is far away from the war-torn environment, but she wishes for a stable income. Yahan Afghanon ke liye kaam nahin hai. My husband earns on a daily basis and that, too, if he finds work, she says. However, Nooran Qasim, who came to India in 2009, works at an Afghani restaurant in Old Delhi, and loves the city and the somewhat successful career. I love to be here everyday when I wake up. Dilli sabki hai... yahan bahut communities hai, toh acceptance high hai. Patrick, a human rights activist from Democratic Republic of Congo, lives in south Delhis Nehru Place. (Photo: Rajessh Kashyap/HT ) The activist from Congo Then there is Patrick. He tells us that he lives in Nehru Place. He was a human rights activist back home in the Democratic Republic of Congo, thrown into jail for his activism. When he came out, papers to go to India were shoved into his hands and now hes here. It has barely been two weeks since the UN awarded him refugee status after four years of living in Delhi. India saved my life and I am grateful for it. It is my refuge and I am looking for a better future here, says Patrick, a native French speaker having to learn English and the bare bones of Hindi. He works as a hairdresser, but only by appointments, and also plays in a band. His struggle lies in having left behind a family, scattered across the world. He has no idea where they are. Shabber Kyamin came to India from Myanmar in 2005, and now runs a mobile shop in Delhi. When not all hope is lost No one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying leave, run away from me now, I dont know what Ive become, but I know that anywhere is safer than here, says Shabber Kyamin, a Rohingya from Myanmar, who left his place of birth in 2005, shares the last verse of a Warsan Shire poem describing what he went through. The conditions were deadly there. What one could see is genocide, ethnic cleansing and politically targeted groups. We had no option [but to leave]. I came alone, but now Im married and have two kids. I run a mobile accessory shop and have my own small business in Rajasthan... All I can say is that Im thankful to this country, this city. Shabber got the refugee status a few years back. In Delhi, more than 800 Rohingyas got the refugee status. He also works with Rohingya Women Rights Initiative. We are trying to uplift the our community in terms of health, education and shelters, adds Shabber. Follow @htTweets for more On the face of it, there are many reasons for India and China to put the tensions associated with last years military standoff at Doklam behind them and to build a closer relationship that can translate into reality the dream of the 21st century being an Asian century. Both countries have much to worry about in terms of the dramatic and drastic changes that are occurring as the US cedes its dominant role on the global stage and adopts protectionist measures that are affecting global trade. Despite India not signing on for Chinas Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has indicated it is willing to work more closely with New Delhi on regional and global issues. In New Delhi, the government would prefer to normalise relations with Beijing in the run-up to the general election next year. Some in the West even believe India has toned down its enthusiasm for the so-called Quad or quadrilateral security dialogue with the US, Japan and Australia to keep relations with China on an even keel. In such circumstances, it is not surprising to hear Chinas ambassador to India, Luo Zhaohui, proposing concepts such as trilateral cooperation between China, India and Pakistan at a seminar in New Delhi. The envoy noted that China and India cannot afford another Doklam-like situation and that they could benefit more from a closer alignment of their positions on international issues since Prime Minister Narendra Modis neighbourhood first policy closely mirrors President Xi Jinpings policies. Scratch a little deeper, however, and it becomes evident that much more work will have to be done to achieve such a vision. The traditional Chinese vision of an Asian century still puts the country at the top, with little wiggle room for the resolution of contentious issues such as the dispute in the South China Sea. In such a vision, India is rarely perceived as an equal. Then there are the irritants that have considerably damaged bilateral relations in recent years, including Chinas blocks on the designation of Pakistan-based terrorists such as Masood Azhar at the UN Security Council and Beijings opposition to New Delhis bid to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group. China has shown it can work more closely with India on terrorism such as the issue of blacklisting Pakistan at the Financial Action Task Force but for the forseeable future, Pakistan will continue to be the elephant in the room as far as bilateral ties are concerned. Clearly, China will have to walk the talk if this is to be a partnership of equals. Finding accommodation has been a recurring problem for Delhi University (DU) students, especially those not from Delhi. Though a majority of outstation students come from states like Haryana, Punjab, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, a significant number are also from the southern states and some from foreign nations. Since DU is home to a large number of all-girls colleges, there are nearly 3,283 hostel seats available for girls, with only 1,067 seats for male students. Hostel seats are allotted on the basis of merit, that is, Class 12 marks. We do not open hostel admissions for Delhi-NCR students, said Anita Vishen, warden of Hindu College Girls Hostel. Students who are currently residing in hostels said they get spacious rooms and a safe and secure environment. Wi-Fi facility is available at 17 college hostels and one university-run hostel. Living with friends is a great experience if you want to make the most of college life and hostel is the most convenient option The only drawback is that it gets quite hot since there in no AC or cooler. So for students accustomed to ACs, the heat may be a bit troubling, says Akashneel Sarma, a second-year student from Guwahati staying at a hostel in St Stephens College. Do not expect a lavish lifestyle I have learnt to live without an AC, heater or even a refrigerator, says Utkarsh Lal, a Lucknow resident and a first year Zoology student at Hindu College who stays at the college hostel. Here is a list of on-campus accomodation that students can apply for: Living on the campus FOR GIRLS Lady Shri Ram College for Women Lajpat Nagar-4 Phone: 011-26435549, 26460400, 26460413. Lajpat Nagar-4 Phone: 011-26435549, 26460400, 26460413. Miranda House Patel Chest Marg, North Campus Phone: 011-27666983, 27667437, 27667367 Patel Chest Marg, North Campus Phone: 011-27666983, 27667437, 27667367 Indraprastha College for Women (2 hostels) 31, Sham Nath Marg Phone: 011-23954085, 23962009 (2 hostels) 31, Sham Nath Marg Phone: 011-23954085, 23962009 Daulat Ram College for Women University of Delhi, 4, Patel Marg, Maurice Nagar Phone: 011-27666982, 27666770 University of Delhi, 4, Patel Marg, Maurice Nagar Phone: 011-27666982, 27666770 Keshav Mahavidyalaya H-4-5 Zone, Road No. 43, Pitampura, near Sainik Vihar Phone: 011-27018805 H-4-5 Zone, Road No. 43, Pitampura, near Sainik Vihar Phone: 011-27018805 Maharaja Agrasen College (for women only) Vasundhara Enclave, east Delhi Phone: 011-22610565, 22610552 Vasundhara Enclave, east Delhi Phone: 011-22610565, 22610552 International Students House for Women Dhaka complex Phone: 011-27605395, 27603872/82, 27603825 Dhaka complex Phone: 011-27605395, 27603872/82, 27603825 Under Graduate Hostel for Girls Dhaka complex Phone: 011-64678192 Dhaka complex Phone: 011-64678192 Sri Guru Gobind Singh College of Commerce Pitampura Phone: 011-27321109/27321528 Pitampura Phone: 011-27321109/27321528 Lady Irwin College Sikandra Road Phone: 011-23711222 Sikandra Road Phone: 011-23711222 Shaheed Rajguru College of Applied Sciences for Women Vasundhara Enclave Phone: 011 -22623503 Vasundhara Enclave Phone: 011 -22623503 Sri Guru Teg Bahadur Khalsa College North Campus Phone: 011-27666641, 27666220 FOR BOYS Hansraj College Mahatma Hansraj Marg, Malkaganj Phone: 011-27667747, 27667458 Hansraj Marg, Malkaganj Phone: 011-27667747, 27667458 Kirori Mal College North Campus Phone: 011-27667861 FOR BOTH BOYES & GIRLS St. Stephens College University Enclave Phone: 01127667271 University Enclave Phone: 01127667271 Ramjas College University Enclave Phone: 011-27667706 University Enclave Phone: 011-27667706 Shri Ram College of Commerce North Campus Maurice Nagar Phone: 011-27667905 North Campus Maurice Nagar Phone: 011-27667905 Hindu College University Enclave Phone: 27667184 University Enclave Phone: 27667184 Sri Venkateswara College Benito Juarez Road, Dhaula Kuan Phone: 011-24112196, 24118590 Benito Juarez Road, Dhaula Kuan Phone: 011-24112196, 24118590 Deen Dayal Upadhyaya College Sector 3, Dwarka Phone: 011-25099381 Sector 3, Dwarka Phone: 011-25099381 Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies PSP Area IV, Dr. K.N. Katju Marg, Sector 16, Rohini Phone: 011-27573447/011-27573446 The Delhi University teachers association (DUTA) on Monday decided to withdraw the evaluation boycott after over a month of protest. Teachers led by the DUTA had been boycotting evaluation process since May 8 to oppose a University Grants Commissions notification on the formula to calculate reservation in teaching jobs that teachers fear would impact the representation of SC/ST candidates in colleges. The DUTA had always tried to ensure that examination results are declared on time so that the interests of students are not hurt, said DUTA president Rajib Ray. DUTA said it has decided to take forward its agitation through alternative modes in the interest of students. It appeals to all teachers to contribute their best in ensuring that the results are declared on time, DUTA said in a statement. The UGCs order, which followed an Allahabad high court directive that was upheld by the SC, rules that to calculate quotas for SC and ST, every university department be considered a separate unit. At present, the university is treated as a single unit. However, the government has already a SLP to roll back the new system but teachers say it had resulted in the appointment process being put on hold. DUTA had on Sunday claimed that VC Yogesh Tyagi, in a meeting with some representatives, had assured them the university will try to get all working ad-hoc faculty continued in the new session subject to the impending SC hearing of 2 July, 2018. The VC had not responded to text and call seeking his comment DU registrar Tarun Das, however, said no assurance was given or could be given by the VC regarding continuation of ad-hoc teachers in the new session. The Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry was working on a proposal to make professional skill learning a part of courses like BA and BCom in an attempt to improve students prospects of getting employed, HRD minister Prakash Javadekar said on Monday. Under the initiatives, universities and colleges will be able to offer a new set of undergraduate programmes in Arts, Science and Commerce streams that will provide 1,000 hours of additional courses on soft skills and the information communication technology (ICT). The upcoming undergraduate programmes, likely to be named as BA (professional), BSc-(professional) and BCom (professional), might be introduced from the next year. Students clearing their Class 12 examinations will be eligible for admission to the programmes based on their marks. Addressing a press conference, Javadekar said students who take admission in traditional BA, BSc and BCom programmes often face problems in securing a job as the curriculum of these courses doesnt offer professional skills that they must acquire by the time they graduate. Introduction of the BA(professional), BSc(professional) and BCom(professional) courses will enhance the employability of the graduates, he said. He added that out of the 1,000 hours of additional courseware to be earmarked for the proposed undergraduate programmes, 250 hours will be reserved for equipping students with soft skills and another 250 hours for lessons on ICT. The minister also said that the much awaited National Education Policy (NEP) will be announced soon. A zero draft of the national education policy is now ready. A four-hour long presentation was made before me only yesterday (Sunday) by the committee which has drafted it. We will now share it with the peer groups and give it a final shape to make it public after due procedures, he said. Forged as an alliance of extremes, the PDP-BJP alliance was meant to bridge the chasm between Muslim-majority Kashmir and predominantly-Hindu Jammu region. But, the power-sharing pact was rocked by spasms of flashpoints and conflicts, pushing the allies to brink. Here are the key turning points in their 40-month-long rule: The release of Masarat Alam: In March 2015, a few months after PDP-BJP coalition came to power, then chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed ordered the release of hardline separatist leader Masarat Alam. His olive branch to secessionists invited the BJPs backlash.Under intense pressure, the state government arrested Alam and charged him with sedition and waging war against the state. Modis snub: Addressing a public rally in Srinagar in November 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an economic package of Rs 80,000 crore but delivered a testy political message to Mufti, saying I dont need advice or analysis from anyone on Kashmir. He cold shouldered PDPs overtures for a political message and need for dialogue with Pakistan. Death of Mufti M Sayed: In January 2016, Mufti passed. That put his daughter Mehbooba at the helm but changed the dynamics of the coalition and also led to internal upheavals in PDP with a powerful section resenting the ties with BJP. Killing of Burhan Wani: In July 2016, the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani, the poster boy of Kashmirs local militancy, plunged Kashmir into a violent turmoil. Widespread clashes leading to killings of around 100 people and a shutdown for most of the summer pushed PDP-BJP government to the edge and stoked a fresh wave of armed insurgency in the Valley. Also read: LIVE: J&K Governor NN Vohra forwards report to President for imposition of Governors rule in state Fracas over Article 370: In July 2017, Mehbooba upped the ante against the court petitions by BJP supporters demanding abrogation of special constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir and also the Permanent Resident Act (35A) a provision that empowers the states permanent residents. She rallied the opposition National Conference behind her, saying there will be no one to shoulder the Indian flag in Kashmir if the Article 370 was tinkered with . Her stand raised the BJPs hackles. NIA raids: In July 2017, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested seven separatist leaders including Syed Ali Geelanis son-in-law Altaf Shah in alleged militancy funding case. Later two youth besides son of Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin, Syed Shahid Yousuf and a businessman were also arrested a development that didnt go well with PDP. The Centres interlocutor: In October 2017, the Modi government appointed former Intelligence Bureau director Dineshwar Sharma, as its representative to initiate and carry forward a dialogue with key stakeholders. On his recommendation, the Mehbooba government announced amnesty for hundreds of first-time stone-pelters a move that backfired and drew criticism from BJP. Kathua rape and murder case: In January 2018, the rape and murder of an eight-year-old nomadic girl in Kathua in Jammu region took a political and communal turn when the right-wing Hindu Ekta Manch demanded the release of accused. A livid Mehbooba forced the BJP to sack two of its ministers who had supported the agitation in favour of the accused. The episode widened the cracks in coalition. Jammu and Kashmir was set for a spell of governors rule after chief minister Mehbooba Mufti resigned on Tuesday in a rapid turn of events after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended its almost 40-month-old alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and withdrew its support to her government. Late on Tuesday, Governor NN Vohra sent a recommendation to the ministry of home affairs for imposition of Governors rule in the state. The move which will require the formal assent of President Ram Nath Kovind, who is travelling in Europe and Latin America and was on Tuesday night on a flight from Greece to Suriname. An MHA spokesperson confirmed that the ministry had received the Governors report. The end of the BJP-PDP coalition, on a day of intensive political action in New Delhi and Srinagar, came two days after the Union government decided to resume counter-insurgency operations in Kashmir, suspended for a month for Ramzan. Coming a year ahead of national and state elections, it presages a new period of uncertainty in Indias most sensitive state, wracked by almost three decades of militancy. BJP president Amit Shah first met national security advisor Ajit Doval, a key policy maker on Kashmir, on Tuesday morning, said a BJP leader familiar with the meeting. They discussed the situation in the state. Shah and other top national BJP leaders then met all the BJP ministers in the Jammu and Kashmir state government and the partys state unit president, who had been called to the capital on Tuesday afternoon. Ram Madhav, BJP general secretary and the partys key negotiator on Kashmir affairs, then held a press conference where he claimed that BJP had formed government with PDP to respect the electoral mandate of 2014. The election had thrown up a hung assembly with the PDP winning a majority of the seats in the Kashmir Valley and the BJP in the Jammu region. Madhav said the Narendra Modi government at the Centre had supported the state on both law and order and economic development; and had even appointed an interlocutor on Kashmir Dineshwar Sharma , a former director of the Intelligence Bureau But he state government has failed in addressing the core issues in Kashmir, Madhav said. The security scenario has deteriorated, causing serious concern about the protection of basic fundamental rights of life, free speech. Daylight murder of a respected editor like Shujat Bukhari in the heart of Srinagar city is an indicator to the deterioration of the situation and the extent of radicalisation, he said, referring to the June 14 murder of the senior journalist by suspected terrorists. Madhav also accused the government of being unresponsive to the needs of Jammu and Ladakh, adding that the situation made it untenable for the BJP to continue in government. Mehbooba Mufti was busy handling government files at her office in the civil secretariat when she was told of the BJPs decision. A person familiar with the matter said it was the Jammu and Kashmir chief secretary who broke the news to her. Taken by surprise, she had a quick meeting with close aides, and subsequently held a press conference. We did not form this alliance for power. I submitted my resignation to the Governor and told him that we are not looking to explore any other alliance, she said in Srinagar. One cant treat Jammu and Kashmir as enemy territory a muscular policy cant succeed here. Explaining her remarks, a key aide to Mufti said on condition of anonymity, The BJP wants to appears hardline on security for its base in Jammu and elsewhere in the country because they thought they were being seen as ineffectual. They wanted us to be more strident. But we were losing ground. There were contradictions. The arithmetic of the Jammu and Kashmir assembly does not lend itself to an easy alternative. The 87-member house has 28 MLAs from PDP, 25 from BJP, 15 from the National Conference, 12 from the Congress, and the rest from smaller groups and independents. NC leader Omar Abdullah was quick to accuse the BJP and PDP of pushing the state to the precipice. We didnt have the mandate in the last election, we dont have it now. We have not approached anyone (for a tie-up) nor are we going to, he said, demanding early elections in the state; the people must have a chance to choose their government, he said. Congress president Rahul Gandhi tweeted, The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically and destroyed years of UPAs (United Progressive Alliances) hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance and hatred always fails. Senior Congress leader and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said he had always maintained the alliance had been a Himalayan blunder and ruled out support to the PDP. With neither the PDP nor the NC staking a claim for forming another government , the doors for an elected executive within the current configuration immediately seemed closed. 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 Bharatiya Janata Partys decision to exit the Jammu and Kashmir government apparently came as a big surprise to chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leaders and government officials said. Mehbooba, who soon resigned as chief minister, was busy handling files at her office in the civil secretariat when she was told of her erstwhile allys decision. People familiar with the matter said it was the Jammu and Kashmir chief secretary who broke the news. Rumours of an exit had started spreading right from Monday evening when all the BJP ministers were called to New Delhi for a meeting with party president Amit Shah. However, both the PDP and BJP leaders had brushed aside questions on the government possibly falling as speculation. Soon after Mehbooba heard the news, she asked her private secretary, Hashmat Ali Khan, to call three PDP ministers to her chambers. The first to arrive was minister for rural development and Panchayati Raj, Abdul Rehman Veeri, the legislator from south Kashmirs Bijbharea constituency and the seniormost PDP minister in the government. And after a brief meeting with the ministers, Mehbooba left for her official residence at Gupkar. Many senior ministers followed. By then the news had gone public. Also read: Live updates of J-K political developments The PDP leadership crafted a strategy for the partys response to the withdrawal of support. Mehbooba then faxed her resignation to Governor Narendra Nath Vohra from her residence. A legislator from north Kashmir, who was in the chief ministers office when the news was delivered, said it came as a total surprise. The chief minister was busy giving assurances to us. There was not an iota of any doubt that the BJP would pull out from the government and neither was such an atmosphere prevalent at the CMs office. The chief minister even gave me an assurance about our developmental projects, the legislator, who declined to be identified, told the Hindustan Times. An official at the CMs office said earlier in the day, Mehbooba had been busy with routine work and met some delegations. The decision took everybody by surprise as nobody had imagined the government would fall like this. A senior PDP leader close to Mehbooba also confirmed that the party leadership and the chief minister had no inkling that the BJP would withdraw its support despite Mondays rumours. For all of us, it was a big surprise. Only ten days ago, the J&K chief minister had a detailed meeting with the Union Home Minister, he said. Amid growing restlessness over seat sharing for the 2019 elections among the allies of the BJP-led NDA in Bihar, a senior BJP leader on Monday said the party would contest from all Lok Sabha seats it won last time in the state. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) general secretary Rajender Singh said there would be no compromise on the sitting seats. BJP would contest all seats it won last time and the seats being represented by the party in the Lok Sabha, he said. In 2014, the BJP had won 23 of 40 Lok Sabha seats and its allies -- Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) and Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) -- had won six and three seats, respectively. Interestingly, the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had contested 2014 polls on its own and won only two of the 40 seats. After Singh said that the party would not share its winning seat with allies, particularly the JD-U that joined hands with the BJP only last July to form government in the state, JD-U spokesperson Sanjay Singh said if the BJP was confident to win all seats, it did not need any allies. Sanjay Singh advised the BJP leader to avoid making such statements in public ahead of the general elections. There are reports of growing differences among constituents of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) over seat sharing for the 2019 polls. Citing lack of coordination in the BJP-led NDA, RLSP chief and Union Minister Upendra Kushwaha earlier this month demanded a decision on distribution of seats among the allies for the parliamentary elections. Soon after, the LJP of Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan also said that it would not compromise on the seats held by it and supported the contention of Kushwaha. Two senior JD-U leaders -- Pawan Verma and K.C. Tyagi -- also claimed that Nitish Kumar would spearhead the NDA challenge next year, and later other party leaders said that the party would contest 25 of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar as it did in 2009 as an ally of the NDA. Such demands may spell trouble for the NDA in Bihar with regard to seat sharing. Apparently, the BJP is keen to play the big brother in the backdrop of its better-than-expected performance in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. The BJPs withdrawal from the PDP-led government in Jammu and Kashmir sparked off a war of words between the erstwhile allies. While the BJP blamed the PDP for failing to control the deteriorating law and order situation in the Valley, citing it as the reason for pullout, the PDP said a muscular security policy wont work in the state and reconciliation is the key. The Opposition has meanwhile called it opportunistic politics by both the PDP and BJP. The PDP-BJP alliance in Jammu and Kashmir was described by late PDP founder Mufti Mohammed Sayeed in 2015 as a meeting of the north pole and south pole, but three years down the line, things have taken a completely different turn. Keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and in order to control the prevailing situation in the state, we have decided that it is time the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor, BJP general secretary Ram Madhav told a hurriedly called press conference in New Delhi. He said continuing in the alliance with the PDP had become untenable. PDP chief and Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti maintained that Jammu and Kashmir was not an enemy territory as being perceived by some. We had always said a muscular security policy will not work in J&K, reconciliation is the key, she told reporters after an hour-long meeting with her ministers and party workers at her residence in Srinagar. We believe there is no alternative to the PDPs healing touch agenda under which talks should be held with Pakistan, people of Jammu and Kashmir, more and more routes (across the Line of Control) should be opened, she added. The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance has set fire to Jammu and Kashmir; the damage will continue under Presidents rule, Congress president Rahul Gandhi tweeted. The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 19, 2018 Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said the BJP had committed a Himalayan blunder by forming a government with the PDP. He said the BJP, a national party, should not have allied with PDP, a regional player. Regional parties should have been allowed to form an alliance among themselves, he told reporters in Delhi. The alliance has devastated the state, be it economically or socially, and has left Jammu and Kashmir in a state of ruins, he said. The Left parties said the coming together of the BJP and PDP after the 2014 assembly polls was itself opportunistic. Such coalition should not have happened. These two parties have no similarities. They coming together was an opportunistic move to be in power, CPI(M) General Secretary Sitaram Yechury said. The BJP unit in Jammu and Kashmir said the decision of the BJP to pull out of the government was a well thought decision. It is a well thought decision in the given circumstances as continuation of the alliance anymore would have hurt national interest, chief spokesperson of J&K BJP, Sunil Sethi, told reporters in Jammu. It was highly unfortunate that our partner was always trying to tie over hands from taking strong measures against enemies of the nation. Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal slammed the BJP for pulling out of its alliance with the PDP and alleged that the party had ruined the state. 3 years lost in the valley, 3 years that saw huge civilian & army casualties, 3 years later the valley is worse-off from where it stood then. This is what happens when you put politics over people. I will not allow Delhi to suffer because of dirty politics of Modi Govt Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 National Conference working president Omar Abdullah said while he was not surprised by the BJPs decision, its timing took him by surprise. Clearly, over the last month or a month-an-a-half, we have seen a marked and very significant deterioration in the situation in the state and that perhaps is one of the reasons, but beyond that I do not want to speculate as to what was the reason for the BJP, the NC leader told reporters in Srinagar after meeting Governor NN Vohra. Opposition parties said on Tuesday Bharatiya Jananta Partys decision to pull out of the alliance with Mehbooba Muftis PDP government in Jammu and Kashmir was an opportunistic move ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha elections. BJP leader Ram Madhav announced at a press conference in Delhi on Tuesday that the party was pulling out of the Jammu and Kashmir coalition government because the alliance had become untenable. Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal said on Twitter that BJPs move to form the alliance with PDP and break the coalition government three years later were both acts of political immorality. The Congress party also ruled out forming an alliance with PDP in the state, said news agency PTI quoting Ghulam Nabi Azad. An opportunistic BJP First an opportunistic alliance with PDP Now an opportunistic breakaway Both acts of political immorality Kaise Desh badlega ? Kapil Sibal (@KapilSibal) June 19, 2018 Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister and National Conference leader Omar Abdullah reacted by saying, And so it has come to pass........ (sic) Also read: Live updates on developments in J-K BJP ally Shiv Sena said shortly after BJPs announcement that the alliance was anti-national and unnatural and it wouldnt have lasted. This alliance was anti-national and unnatural. Our party chief had said this alliance wont work out. Had they continued with it they would have had to answer in 2019 Lok Sabha election, party spokesperson Sanjay Raut told news agency ANI. And so it has come to pass........ Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) June 19, 2018 Aam Aadmi Party chief and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal too hit out at BJP, writing on Twitter: After ruining it, BJP pulls out of Kashmir. The BJP-PDP coalition government, formed in 2015 after assembly elections threw up a hung assembly, was divided on a range on issues. The alliance came under strain after the gang-rape and murder of a nomadic Muslim girl in Jammus Kathua region in January this year. The two parties were also split on the issue of extension of the ceasefire announced by Centre during the holy month of Ramzan. While chief minister Mehbooba Mufti supported the extension, Union home minister Rajnath Singh announced on Sunday that the ceasefire will be discontinued and security operations in the state will resume. (With agency inputs) When Mehbooba Mufti took oath in April 2016, she became the states first woman chief minister and one of Indias most powerful women. She was sworn in almost three months after her father and predecessor Mufti Mohammad Sayeed died, taking over after weeks of indecision and amid apprehensions that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that he founded would split, with legislators deserting it. Mehbooba managed to gain control over the PDP, strengthening her position mainly by bringing many relatives into the party. She even inducted her cinematographer brother Tasaduq Mufti into politics and appointed him the states tourism minister. As Mehbooba Mufti, 59, resigned on Tuesday after the BJP put an end to their difficult relationship, her big challenge once again is keeping her flock together and preventing defections from the PDP. Her journey as chief minister at the head of a government that included the BJP, a party with deep ideological differences with her own on key issues, was bumpy. The PDP pressed for dialogue with separatists, the BJP backed a stringent policy against separatism. Mehbooba Muftis biggest test came months after she took over the top post, when 21-year-old Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani was killed by security forces in south Kashmirs Bumdoora. Amid violent protests and a five-month-long shutdown in the Kashmir Valley that followed, there were calls for the chief ministers resignation. Some from her own cabinet colleagues, who demanded that she break the PDPs alliance with the BJP, afraid of losing support in the partys core constituency south Kashmir, where it won most of its 28 assembly seats. Accused of fetching no benefit for Kashmir through her partnership with the BJP, which leads the central government, Mehbooba attributed the withdrawal of cases of stone-pelting against more than 10,000 youth and more than 60,000 daily wage workers being given regular employment to support from the Centre. But she made little headway with a list of demands, including failing to convince the BJP leadership to initiate dialogue with Pakistan and separatists. She attempted to sell last years appointment of former Intelligence Bureau chief Dineshwar Sharma as an interlocutor and this years suspension of military operations during the month of Ramzan as big political achievements. She was taken aback when the suspension wasnt extended, and the Centre announced on Sunday that operations will be resumed. This morning, the chief minister was signing files at the civil secretariat when she was told that the BJP had decided to pull out of the government. She called some ministers to her office, and, after a brief meeting, left for her official residence. Addressing a press conference after handing over her resignation to the state governor this evening, Mehbooba Mufti said: We cobbled the alliance thinking that we can get Jammu and Kashmir out of the mess by shaking hands with a big and powerful party at the Centre. The basic motive for this was reconciliation, dialogue with people, confidence-building measures and good relations with Pakistan. The biggest apprehension at the time was about our special status or article 370 and 35 A. We defended 35 A in court and defended 370 too. Besides the confidence-building measures, we withdrew cases against 11,000 youngsters, we managed a unilateral ceasefire, and (ensured) an offer of dialogue by none other than the home minister, she added. The PDP has 28 seats in the 87-member Jammu and Kashmir assembly. A party needs 44 legislators to form the government. In 2015, when Mufti Mohammad Sayeed said yes to the BJP, the second-largest party with 25 seats, rivals had predicted a quick end to the partnership between the ideological opposites. They celebrated the break-up today with an I told you so. The Governors rule in Jammu and Kashmir was imminent after the three-year-old state government collapsed on Tuesday with the BJP pulling out of its alliance with the PDP. The Union Home Ministry was awaiting a report from Jammu and Kashmir Governor N N Vohra after that necessary formalities related to the imposition of the central rule would be initiated, officials said. Home Minister Rajnath Singh held a high-level meeting at his residence with Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba, and senior officials of the Intelligence Bureau and his ministry to assess the ground situation in the sensitive state. Read: Live updates of the political developments in Jammu and Kashmir Jammu and Kashmir has come under the Governors rule on seven occasions before in the past four decades. In case the scenario for the imposition of the Governors rule emerges for the eighth time, as the prospects of formation of a new government appears unlikely, it will be for the fourth time that the Jammu and Kashmir will be placed under the central rule during N N Vohras tenure as the Governor. Vohra, a former civil servant, became the Governor on June 25, 2008. The BJP pulled out of its alliance with the PDP, saying it has become impossible to continue in the government in view of the growing radicalism and terrorism in the state. BJP general secretary Ram Madhav made the surprise announcement after the party high command summoned its Jammu and Kashmir ministers for emergency consultations in New Delhi. A few hours later, Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti submitted her resignation to Governor N N Vohra in Srinagar. Todays announcement comes barely two days after the Home Ministry had said that it would not extend the suspension of operations against terrorists in the state. The Centre had announced the suspension of operations at the beginning of the holy month of Ramzan on May 17 and had said the decision was being taken in the interests of the peace loving people of the state, in order to provide them a conducive atmosphere during the fasting month. According to officials, there were 18 incidents of terror between April 17 and May 17 this year and the figure rose to above 50 during the suspension of operations. The suspension of operations saw brutal killings which included that of an army soldier by militants, attacks on civilians propagating moderate approach and gunning down of veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari, who was a strong voice of peace, they said. A division bench of the high court in Jabalpur has asked all former chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh who are occupying government accommodation for life to vacate them within one month. Former chief ministers Kailash Joshi, Uma Bharti, Babulal Gaur and Digvijaya Singh are likely to be affected by this order. Of the four, Uma Bharti is a minister in the Union government, Babulal Gaur is an MLA and Digvijaya Singh is a Rajya Sabha MP. Kailash Joshi is the only person who does not hold any office. The order was given on Tuesday by Chief Justice Hemant Gupta and Justice A K Shrivastava on a petition filed by a law student Raunaq Yadav challenging the April 24, 2017 order of the state government that allowed all ex-CMs of the state to retain government accommodation for life and enjoy perks similar to that of a cabinet minister. The petition had said that the state government had passed an ordinance to amend the MP Ministers (Salaries and Allowances) Act, 1972 to allow ex-CMs to continue living in government accommodation. The petition argued that this ordinance was against existing laws and also a waste of public money. The petition also pointed out that the Supreme Court in an order (Uttar Pradesh vs Lok Prahari case) had held that allowing a former chief minister to retain government accommodation was wrong. Apart from the state government, former chief ministers Joshi, Bharti, Gaur and Singh were also made respondents. In the last hearing, the state in its reply said the same matter was pending before the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, the high court was informed that the SC had rejected the petition challenging the UP vs Lok Prahari case, and therefore relying on the SC precedence in this case all the former CMs were asked to vacate their government accommodations. Congress leader and senior advocate Vivek Tankha said that though he had not read the judgment, but if the high court has relied on the precedence of Uttar Pradesh, all of them would have to vacate their government accommodation, and it does not matter whether they are MPs or ministers. With the tourist influx in Shimla seeing a drastic decline in the wake of recent water scarcity, hotels have slashed the tariff by 20 to 30% to pull the tourists back. Tourism in Shimla was adversely affected after residents had taken to streets to protest against the water scarcity. Environmentalists and social activists had even resorted to appealing the tourists on the social networking sites to avoid visiting Shimla until the water situation improved. The state government had to shut down government-run schools and postpone the international summer festival in Shimla that draws a number a locals and tourist, owing to the acute water shortage. The said festival was slated to take place on The Ridge between June 1 and June 4, but there is no announcement on the revised dates. Decline in influx The tourism business has reportedly seen a dip of 60% at the time when Shimla usually witnesses heavy tourist flow. A month after the water crisis hit Shimla , the hospitality industry is still struggling to recoup the loss. Hoteliers in Shimla are now offering special packages to attract tourists. The widely reported water scarcity resulted in negative publicity of the town. Tourism, which is the backbone of hotel industry in the hill states like Shimla, took a terrible hit due to the unfortunate episode of water shortage, said Hotel and Restaurant Association of North India, Sanjay Sood. Most of the hoteliers and restaurateurs are now offering 20-30% discount on stay and food. Its not only the hoteliers, but other stakeholders too have suffered losses, he added. Monkeys drinking water from public taps in Shimla. (Deepak Sansta/HT) Shimlas loss is Ukhands gain The tourists are preferring Nainital and Mussoorie over Shimla nowadays, Sood said. Meanwhile, few hoteliers in Shimla have also asked the government to reconsider the bed-and-breakfast scheme launched in state under the Incredible India campaign. Most of the homestays under this scheme not only violate the guidelines laid by the central government, but many of them are being run illegally, said a hotelier Anil Walia. Homestay owners are not paying taxes under the scheme and some of them are charging exorbitant tariffs. We want the government to set a level playing field for all, he added. Hoteliers have also demanded the government to assess the tourist-inflow capacity of the town, so that more facilities for the visitors could be planned accordingly. Water crisis over Chief minister Jai Ram Thakur, who also holds the tourism portfolio, has confirmed that the water situation in Shimla has improved significantly over the past one week. Water supply in Shimla had once dipped to 19 MLD, but with the supply of 42 MLD water today, the situation has improved. As of now, there is no water crisis, he said. Jai Ram said his government had drawn a long-term plan to meet water requirement of the Shimla town. Jammu and Kashmir is in crisis because politics was put over people, said Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday, reacting after the states alliance government resigned. Kejriwal said the situation had got worse in Jammu and Kashmir in three years of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Peoples Democratic Party government. Three years lost in the valley, three years that saw huge civilian and army casualties, three years later the Valley is worse-off from where it stood then. This is what happens when you put politics over people. I will not allow Delhi to suffer because of the dirty politics of the Modi government, said Kejriwal on Twitter. 3 years lost in the valley, 3 years that saw huge civilian & army casualties, 3 years later the valley is worse-off from where it stood then. This is what happens when you put politics over people. I will not allow Delhi to suffer because of dirty politics of Modi Govt Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 Didnt BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened? he said separately. Kejriwal has alleged Prime Minister Narendra Modis government for IAS officers of the Delhi government allegedly striking work. The BJP quit the ruling coalition in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday and called for federal control over the state, citing a deterioration in security. Eleven Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ministers of the Jammu and Kashmir government will meet party president Amit Shah in Delhi on Tuesday for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections and after security forces in the state suspended a unilateral ceasefire against militants. The party has to chalk out a strategy and that is why we have been requisitioned to Delhi, said deputy chief minister Kavinder Gupta said when he was asked about agenda of the meeting. The BJP governs the state along with the Peoples Democratic Party, but their alliance strained in April after the gang-rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl from the nomadic Muslim community of Bakarwals in Jammus Kathua district. Two BJP ministers in the state government led by chief minister Mehbooba Mufti were dropped in a cabinet reshuffle after they took part in a rally demanding that the Central Bureau of Investigation take over the Kathua case. Shahs meeting with the state BJP leaders comes after the central government announced on Sunday said it was discontinuing the suspension of military operations in Jammu and Kashmir as the holy Islamic month of Ramzan was over, and announced the full resumption of cordon-and-search and search-and-destroy operations in the state to prevent terror attacks. The ceasefire the first such truce in the troubled state in more than 17 years had been announced at the appeal of chief minister Mufti. A man was arrested on Tuesday for making a hoax bomb threat call to IndiGos call centre for its Jaipur-Mumbai flight. The call was received around 5:30 am from Mohit Kumar Tank, a resident of Jaipur. He was detained by the police and is being interrogated. After the call,IndiGo officials reported the matter to Bomb Threat Assessment Committee. The authorities carried out an investigation and declared the call as specific bomb threat. The flight landed safely in Mumbai at 6:55 am. IndiGo call centre received a call at around 5:30 am this morning from an unidentified person mentioning a bomb threat to 6E 218 operating a Jaipur-Mumbai flight. We immediately reported the matter to Bomb Threat Assessment Committee (BTAC) and followed all laid down security protocols. The authorities concerned carried out the investigation and declared the call as specific bomb threat. Following the clearance by the authorities, operations will be resumed as normal, the airlines said in a statement. Sources at the airport said that Tank, a choreographer with a dance reality show, had made the call fearing that he wont be able to reach the airport on time to catch. The airline later called up this particular passenger who had missed the flight and assured him that he would get a ticket for the next flight. As soon as he reached the Jaipur airport, CISF questioned him and he confessed to have made the call. He was handed over to the Sanganer police for further interrogation, an official said. Sanganer police sub-inspector Jaiprakash confirmed the incident and said Tank was being interrogated. All the major newspapers in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday left the space devoted to editorials blank as a protest against the murder of senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari in Srinagar. The editorial spaces of English dailies such as Greater Kashmir, Kashmir Times, Kashmir Reader and Rising Kashmir were all blank, so was the case with vernacular newspaper such as Tamili Irshad and the Daily Aftab. The collective decision was taken after the powerful Kashmir Editors Guild (KEG) met on Monday evening immediately after the Eid vacations. The editorial is the heart of a newspaper. Since our voices have been silent since the murder, we decided to show our protest. There was a proposal of suspending publications for a day but newspapers are the voice of people , so we decided to publish without editorial to make our point, said KEG spokesperson Shafat Kira. Rising Kashmir editor-in-chief Shujaat Bukhari, 50, was assassinated three men outside his office at press colony in Srinagar on June 14. His two personal security officers were also killed in the attack. The killing of Bukhari, who also edited papers such as Buland Kashmir and Sangermal, sent shockwaves across the country and triggered widespread condemnation. The blank editorials in Jammu and Kashmir came a day after scores of people marched on the streets of Srinagar against the murders. Editors, correspondents, photojournalists and journalism students walked hand in hand with tapes covering their mouths from Press Enclave to city centre Lal Chowk to protest what they called was an assault on the freedom of expression. We want to send this message across that whatever the circumstances our freedom to express wont be subdued by this murder. We wont let this incident stop us from doing our work whatever the difficulties or fear. We have faced this situation before and even if there are more obstacles we wont remain away from performing our professional duties, said a protester. We have to talk about people, about truth and we will do that. Shujaat sahib has taught us this and we will not remain behind, he said. Jammu and Kashmir Police blamed the attack on terrorists and released pictures of four persons and have arrested one. Militant organizations like Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba condemned the killings and blamed Indian agencies for the murder. The only man arrested in connection with the murder after being captured on cameras stealing the pistol of one of the slain security guards has not provided any clues yet and may not be connected to the three main suspects. Six days after a Left Democratic Front (LDF) legislator allegedly assaulted a man in front of his mother in a road rage case, the Kerala government on Tuesday transferred a police officer who was said to have refused to entertain their complaint . The administration also directed Kollam superintendent of police B Asokan to probe the incident involving former minister KB Ganesh Kumar. Replying to a submission in the state assembly, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said Asokan has been instructed to submit a report at the earliest. Opposition leaders have been raising the issue in the house for the last two days, alleging that the government is trying to shield the legislator. The incident occurred last Wednesday, while the MLA was heading towards a house in Pathanapuram to pay his respects to the family of a deceased person. The man, 22-year-old G Ananth Krishnan, and his mother, Sheena, were returning from the same house. However, as the road was too narrow for both to pass at the same time, a quarrel for right of way erupted between the two. According to Krishnan, an enraged Kumar and his driver stepped out of their vehicle and assaulted him. Sheena alleged that she was verbally abused by the legislator when she tried to intervene. Krishnan, who had to be admitted to a hospital after the incident, said the local police inspector refused to step in even though he was present at the spot. Also, he agreed to register his complaint only after the MLA filed one of his own, he added. Later, Sheena directly approached the local court and submitted her statement under Section 164-B of the Indian Penal Code. Although we are under tremendous pressure to withdraw the case, we will not budge. We will take the case to its logical conclusion. We later heard that the MLA has a history of road-rage cases, which should not be permitted in a state like Kerala, said Krishnan, an engineering graduate. But Kumar tried to underplay the incident, stating that it was only natural to face such allegations when you are in politics. Kumar was forced to quit the Oommen Chandy government five years ago, after his wife filed a complaint of domestic violence against him. Later, his party the Kerala Congress (B) crossed over from the Congress-led United Democratic Front to the ruling LDF. Incidentally, veteran Marxist and former chief minister VS Achuthanandan had fought a legal battle spanning over two decades to prosecute Kumars father, R Balakrishna Pillai, in a corruption case. Today, both Pillai and Achuthanandan hold plum positions in the state cabinet. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Tuesday pulled out of its alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir, saying it has become impossible to continue in the government in view of growing radicalism and terrorism in the state. It has become untenable for the BJP to continue with the alliance in Jammu and Kashmir, BJPs general secretary Ram Madhav at a press conference in Delhi. He said the decision was taken after consulting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah. Below are the highlights: 9.30pm: Supreme Court advocate and BJP leader Ajay Agrawal writes a letter to Jammu and Kashmir Governor NN Vohra, requesting him to immediately cancel order of withdrawal of prosecution in thousands of cases relating to stone pelters,saying security forces were the victims in these cases, reports ANI. 8.20pm: After concluding his consultations with all major political parties in Jammu and Kashmir, Governor NN Vohra has forwarded his report to President Ram Nath Kovind for imposition of Governors rule under Section 92 of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir. A Raj Bhawan spokesperson has confirmed the same. 8.05pm: Congress leader P Chidambaram says, Hope that muscular, militaristic policy does not come back under guise of governors rule in Jammu and Kashmir. 7.26pm: The Union Home Ministry is awaiting a report from Governor NN Vohra after which necessary formalities related to the imposition of the central rule would be initiated, officials told PTI. Home minister Rajnath Singh has held a high-level meeting at his residence with Home secretary Rajiv Gauba, and senior officials of the Intelligence Bureau and his ministry to assess the ground situation in the state. 7:19pm: PDP holds emergency meeting, say TV reports. 6:50pm: Opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to Jammu and Kashmir; the damage will continue under Presidents rule, tweets Congress president Rahul Gandhi. The opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance set fire to J&K, killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically & destroyed years of UPAs hard work. The damage will continue under Presidents rule. Incompetence, arrogance & hatred always fails. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) June 19, 2018 6:36pm: J&K BJP took this step in the interest of the country. Local leadership, deputy chief minister and state ministers were taken into confidence. BJP will continue to do whatever is necessary for benefit of the state: UP CM Yogi Adityanath. 6:15pm: The Shiv Sena called the BJPs decision to part ways with PDP a political move. Sena leader Sanjay Raut said the coming together of the PDP-BJP to form the government in the state was unnatural and unholy. 5:40pm: The situation in Jammu & Kashmir has deteriorated completely in the past three years due to naked opportunism and greed for power displayed by the BJP, tweets CPI(M)s General Secretary Sitaram Yechury. The people of Jammu & Kashmir have suffered heavily due to the confused and ham-handed policies at centre and state. It has brought the situation to a sorry pass, which was unimaginable three years ago. No Spin and PR by Modi can alter this fact. Sitaram Yechury (@SitaramYechury) June 19, 2018 5:30pm: Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal slammed the BJP over its decision to pull out of its alliance with the PDP and said the Valley is worse-off from where it stood three years ago. 3 years lost in the valley, 3 years that saw huge civilian & army casualties, 3 years later the valley is worse-off from where it stood then. This is what happens when you put politics over people. I will not allow Delhi to suffer because of dirty politics of Modi Govt Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 5:09pm: I submitted my resignation (as J&K CM) to the Governor and told him that we are not looking to explore any other alliance: Mehbooba Mufti. 5:05pm: We did not form this alliance for power. This alliance had a bigger motive- unilateral ceasefire,PMs visit to Pakistan,withdrawal of cases against 11,000 youth: Mehbooba Mufti. 5:04pm: We cant treat Jammu and Kashmir as enemy territory, muscular policy wont succeed here, says Mehbooba Mufti. 5:03pm: The basic aim of Agenda of Alliance was reconciliation,says Mehbooba Mufti. 5:02pm: After withdrawal of support from the BJP, I have sent my resignation to the governor: Mehbooba Mufti. 4:59pm: Mehbooba Mufti is addressing a press conference. 4:50pm: Meeting of home minister, national security advisor, home secretary and joint secretary of Jammu& Kashmir & other officers underway at home ministers residence in Delhi, reports news agency ANI. 4:41pm:Highest number of civilians and army jawans were killed during BJP-PDP rule in Jammu and Kashmir, says Congress Ghulam Nabi Azad. 4:36pm: AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi said the BJPs decision to pull out of the PDP-led Jammu and Kashmir government and the expected imposition of governors rule wont bring normalcy in the state. There will not be normalcy after Governors rule is imposed... There will be further repression. The BJPs ... actual agenda is to scrap Article 370. No Kashmiri will approve of it, PTI quoted Owaisi as saying. 4.30pm: On the NCs offer of support to PDP in 2014, Abdullah says, It was a one-time offer, it expired the day BJP and PDP joined hands. Abdullah adds, We are not celebrating this break up. We are mourning the demise of democracy in this state. 4.26pm: Unfortunate that the BJP didnt take the PDP into confidence about their decision, says Omar Abdullah. If they (BJP) are citing radicalisation as the reason, they are much responsible as PDP is. Both the parties have pushed the state to this precipice, says the former chief minister. 4.24pm: Only the BJP can tell you what compelled them to pull out of the alliance. I am not surprised that the alliance broke down, only the timing of it has surprised me. I was expecting it later in the year, not now, says Omar Abdullah. 4.22pm: We have asked for fresh elections and that is what we have asked the governor for. At the earliest, the people should be given the chance to choose a government for themselves, says Omar Abdullah. 4:20pm: Omar Abdullah addresses a press conference. I have just come from Raj Bhawan where I met the governor. We didnt have the mandate in the last election, we dont have it now. We have not approached anyone nor are we going to, he says. 3:48pm: Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister and National Conference leader Omar Abdullah met Governor NN Vohra in Srinagar, reports news agency ANI. 3:35am: Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee says the PDP-BJP coalition was destined to break as it was an unholy alliance. This was an unholy alliance and it was expected to break from day one. They had betrayed the people of the state and supporters of the respective parties. They sought votes on opposing agendas, PCC president G A Mir was quoted as saying by news agency PTI. 3:20pm: We can only put our heads together and discuss in the party meeting at 4 pm: Rafi Ahmad Mir, PDP spokesperson. 3:12pm: No question of forming alliance with PDP in Jammu and Kashmir, says Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad. Whatever has happened is good. People of J&K will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined Kashmir & have now pulled out, maximum number of civilian & army men died during these 3 years. That question does not arise (on forming alliance with PDP): GN Azad, Congress pic.twitter.com/rcfVelHdnT ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 3:09pm: PDP leader Naeem Akhtar says Mehbooba Mufti has submitted her resignation to the chief minister. 3:06pm: We tried our best to run the govt with BJP. This had to happen. This is a surprise for us because we did not have any indication about their decision: Rafi Ahmad Mir, PDP spokesperson tells news agency ANI. 3:00pm: J-K chief minister Mehbooba Mufti to resign shortly after BJP pulls out of alliance govt, says PDP. 2:57pm: Governors rule should be imposed to improve situation in the state: Madhav. 2:55pm: Keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and in order to control the prevailing situation in the state, we have decided that the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor, Madhav says. 2:54pm:Fundamental rights of people in Kashmir are under threat. Even press freedom and freedom of speech is at risk, says Madhav. A 38-year-old cattle trader was lynched and a 65-year-old man severely injured by a mob allegedly on suspicion of cow slaughter in Hapurs Bajhera Khurd village, 50km from Delhi-UP border, on Monday. The incident took place when chief minister Yogi Adityanath was holding a meeting with BJP MPs and MLAs in Ghaziabad and the police were on high alert. The village is barely 10km from Dadris Bisada where 55-year-old Mohammad Ikhlaq was lynched in 2015 on suspicion of consuming cow meat. Eyewitnesses said the men Qasim, 38, and Shamiuddin, 65 were spotted by villagers of Madhpura Mustafabad and a mob soon gathered. Shamiuddin had gone to Madhpura to get fodder for cattle. Qasim met him there. It is possible that my brother was attacked because he was spotted with Qasim, a cattle trader, Mohammad Yaseen, Shamiuddins brother, told HT at Dev Nandini Hospital in Hapur. They beat them and dragged them for nearly a kilometre to a temple complex. The duo was further assaulted after a rumour circulated among villagers that the men were trying to slaughter cows, Yaseen said. Ekadashi Giri, a priest of the temple in Bajhera, said, One of the men was lying near the temple complex, while the other was further dragged and dumped near the main gate of the temple. The mob was armed with sticks. They were screaming at the two men and accusing them of having tethered cows in order to slaughter them, Shahid, of Madhpura, said. The police handed me one cow and a calf. They took away the animals on Tuesday, Sudheer Rana, a local, said. Police said they rescued the men from near the temple and rushed them to the hospital. Qasim succumbed to injuries. My brother bought cattle and sold them in markets of Asoda and Gulaothi. Around 2.30pm, we got a call informing us about the incident, Qasims brother, said. Police denied that the men were attacked over cow slaughter rumours. They claimed the attack was a fallout of a road rage incident. According to the FIR filed by Yaseen, the motorcycle Qasim and Shamiuddin were riding on collided with the bike of a youth from Bajhera. The accident led to an altercation and a mob attacked Qasim and Shamiuddin. The FIR was filed at Pilkhuwa police station. There were rumours of cow slaughter, but we did not find any cow or weapon used for slaughtering animals with the two victims, Sankalp Sharma, superintendent of police, Hapur, said. The next Maharashtra chief minister will be from the Shiv Sena, its chief Uddhav Thackeray said on Tuesday, as he continued to play hardball with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) its ally in the state and the Centre which is attempting to convince the Sena about teaming up ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. The next chief minister of Maharashtra will be from Shiv Sena; I am determined and moving ahead with this resolve. Uddhavs comments come just weeks after BJPs national president Amit Shah met him in Mumbai on June 6 to mend ties. Speaking at his partys 52nd foundation day, Uddhav sent out mixed signals he continued to criticise the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but did not talk on the issue of the alliance, or comment on his son and Senas youth wing chief Aadityas remark earlier in the day that the party would go solo; he welcomed the BJPs decision to pull out of its alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party in Jammu and Kashmir, but also attacked the Centre for suspending security operations in the state during Ramzan. We welcome the decision to pull out of the J&K government, but it took three years to come to this decision. Over 600 soldiers have died during this time. If terrorists dont have a religion, why announce the unilateral ceasefire in Kashmir during Ramzan? Pakistan has never announced a ceasefire during Diwali, Navratri or Ganpati, Uddhav said. He, however, was clear when he said he will not join the third front, which is being formed to take on the BJP. Thackeray also mocked the BJPs membership drive while kicking off his own partys membership drive, with an aim to get a crore members. I dont believe in membership drives through missed calls, it should happen in person. The BJP had carried out a membership drive where people could enroll by giving a missed call. On the third front, Uddhav sent out a clear message to Sharad Pawar and the other political parties that he would not be a part of it. Now, like-minded parties are coming together, but like-mindedness is not that our party should come to power, or we would get this portfolio. Like-mindedness is to know what the people of the country want and work towards it. I would come together for such a cause, but which is the party that has this aim? he asked. Do not be disappointed if you have had no luck with spotting a Royal Bengal Tiger in the wilderness of Corbett Tiger Reserve. If things go according to plan, tourists could enjoy tiger safari in the reserve by next year. Uttarakhand chief minister TS Rawat has approved the proposal of establishing the safari in the Savalde Eco Tourism Zone of Dhela range that falls in the buffer of the reserve. The plan is to create a semi-natural area with a chain-link fence in the forest to house 20 to 25 tigers. Tourists, who struggle to spot a tiger in other ranges of the reserve, could easily see the big cats here. The purpose is to divert tourism from the famous Dhikala zone and other adjoining areas of Bijrani, Jhirna and Sona Nadi to the Dhela range. The Central Zoo Authority (CZA) and the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) have already given in- principle approval to the project. India does not have a tiger safari yet, despite having the worlds highest tiger population at 2,226. Corbett is visited by nearly 3 lakh tourists in its tourism period that lasts for seven months, November 15 till June 15, generating a revenue of over Rs 8 crore. It has 240 tigers, according to the All India Tiger Estimation of 2015. Conservationists have a different take on the Corbett tiger safari proposal . K Ullas Karanth, noted wildlife biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, does not support the safari culture in the country. I am totally against such tiger safaris around national parks or tiger reserves. If people want to see tigers, they can go to well-run zoos in urban centres. Those coming to remote reserves should see wild nature, not captive cats. Karanth said. Do we have a roadmap dealing with the consequences like tourist pressure? How will this safari impact the countrys flagship species tiger? asked Prateek Panwar, a member of the state wildlife board. Uttarakhands forest department has started an intensive drive to look for snakes and monkeys in the sprawling Forest Research Institute (FRI) in Dehradun ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit on International Yoga Day on June 21. Dehraduns district magistrate SA Murugeshan asked the forest department last week to keep the ground safe and clear the area of snakes. I had ordered to keep the venue free from snakes, monkeys and dropping trees and branches. For which, the forest department was asked to take necessary steps, Murugeshan said. Dehraduns divisional forest officer (DFO) Rajeev Dhiman said the departments staff is scanning the area for the wild animals. We dont want any inconvenience for the participants as the campus has a dense forest. We have so far caught and released two snakes, Dhiman said. He said no monkeys were spotted near the ground where the event would take place in the presence of the Prime Minister. Two teams with three forest staff have been deployed at the venue to guard the area until the event is over. The premier institute has a dense forest cover and its campus is spread across nearly 450 hectare with a plinth area of 2.5hectare. It is well connected with that of the Mussoorie forest division and the Indian Military Academy (IMA) and Tons River form its boundary. It comes under the Dehradun forest division. And that is the reason leopards are also spotted on the campus besides snakes. In March 2015, a leopard killed a 16-year-old on the FRI campus and a few other incidents of attacks were also reported. Over 50,000 enthusiasts have already registered for the event as Uttarakhands chief secretary Utpal Kumar is reviewing the preparations every day for the event to be held at FRI on Thursday. The United Nations declared June 21 as the International Day of Yoga in 2014 after Modi called for the day to be adopted as a global celebration of yoga, an ancient practice that began in India more than 5,000 years ago. Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister and National Conference leader Omar Abdullah on Tuesday demanded early elections in the state after the BJP pulled out of the PDP-led government, forcing chief minister Mehbooba Mufti to resign. Abdullah spoke to the media after calling on Governor NN Vohra following the fall of the PDP-BJP government in the troubled state. Today, suddenly around 2.30 pm, news came that the BJP has severed its political relationship with the PDP. I have met the Governor just a little while back. I told him that in the 2014 elections, the National Conference did not have the mandate to form a government and today also we dont have the mandate, he said. We have neither been approached nor have we approached any party for support to form a government in the state. The Governor has no option but to impose Governors rule and improve the situation so that a democratic government is formed in the state after holding fresh elections, said Abdullah. Also read: LIVE: Alliance with BJP was not for power, says Mehbooba Mufti after she quits as CM of Jammu and Kashmir Abdullah said he had assured the National Conferences support to the Governor but added that the Governor and his administration must ensure that early elections are held to put an elected government in place. As a responsible political party, we will work for peace in all the three regions of the state. Asked about the possible reasons for the BJPs pullout from the government, the National Conference leader said: I cant speak for the BJP. They alone can explain what prompted their decision. Yes, I was surprised by the timing of the BJP decision. I expected this to happen later this year, but it happened sooner because of the deterioration in situation. Asked whether the BJP had embarrassed the PDP by taking a unilateral decision, Abdullah said: Whether PDP is embarrassed or not they would know, but I feel the BJP should have taken the PDP into confidence. But different parts function differently. They (BJP) claim radicalisation and obviously they have better access to information than us. We believe that both these parties have together pushed the state down the precipice. Abdullah said that Governor Vohra, with his vast experience, can help pull the state out of the current crisis. Asked about his partys earlier offer of support made to the PDP, he said: That was a one time offer and after they joined hands with the BJP, that offer ended. Asked if his party was happy about the development, he said: We do not celebrate this break-up. We are mourning the demise of democracy in the state. Would he ask the Governor to keep the state Assembly in suspended animation or seek its dissolution? Abdullah replied: That is the prerogative of the Governor and of nobody else. Addressing the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in Athens, President Ram Nath Kovind laid out a vision that India and the EU could work together on. India is committed to an international order marked by robust, rules-based multi-lateral institutions, by multi-polarity in international governance, and by investment and connectivity projects that are viable, sustainable, respect the sovereignty and territory of nations, he said. His remarks on connectivity summed up Indias objection to Chinas One Belt One Road project, a key part of which passes through Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. This is the type of world India wants to hold up as a pillar of stability, and as a growing provider of developmental assistance to friendly countries. I am sure this is the type of world that Europe wants to nurture as well, President Kovind said. India and the EU are united in their commitment to the 2015 Paris Agreement. Addressing climate change and ensuring secure, affordable and sustainable supplies of energy are our priorities, the President said. Talking about terrorism, he said Pockets of instability and extremism can be found in the region to your east and our west. They are a worry for both Europe and India. Promotion of terrorism by state and non-state actors; extremism in a variety of forms and rooted in sense-less hate, he said. He added India and the EU should prevail over the world to strengthen multi-lateral platforms such as the financial action task force. He said in Indias world view peace is not just as the absence of conflict but as a reflection of sustainable development and of any effort that anticipates and prevents strife and suffering. Prisoners in Haryana will now have an opportunity to get shifted to open jails. An open prison is a place for which certain types of convicts are eligible as they are not locked up but remain under supervision. They are allowed to get employment and live with their families as a part of rehabilitation process. The idea is to provide prisoners an opportunity to reintegrate into the society after their release and help them become economically self-dependent. What is open jail An open jail is a place where inmates are not locked up but remain under supervision Such camps will be set up in the vicinity of the regular prison under the control of respective superintendents of regular prison Prisoners are allowed to get employment and live with their families as a part of rehabilitation process Accommodation, including electricity, water supply and other basic amenities, will be made available by the government A prisoner will have to arrange food, clothing and other requirements of daily routine for himself and his family on his own A home department spokesperson said the state government has formulated Haryana Prisoners Open Air Camp Rules, 2018 for shifting prisoners to open camps (prisons) in the state. The spokesperson said the government on the recommendations of the director general, prisons, would establish as many such camps as necessary in the vicinity of the regular prison under general directions and control of the respective superintendents of the regular prison. The spokesperson said the accommodation, including electricity, water supply and other basic amenities, for housing prisoners would be made available and suitable number of family accommodations would also be provided as per the requirement in the open camps. A prisoner shifted to the camp would arrange food, clothing and other requirement of daily routine for himself as well as for his family out of his own earnings. He would also maintain his bank account himself or through his family member and would retain the income generated or earned by him. The spokesperson said that if a prisoner shifted to a camp is employed by the superintendent to perform any work, he would be paid such minimum wages, as fixed by the government, from time to time. A prisoner shifted to camp would keep his family member and no prisoner would be shifted to the camp with whom a family member is not ready to reside. Prisoners not eligible The spokesperson said that inmates not eligible for shifting to the camp included hardcore prisoners; those below 30; not medically fit to do work; undertrial prisoners, civil prisoners; prisoners chargesheeted or convicted in more than one case; those having unexpired sentence of not less than two years; those punished for a major prison offence in the last three years; not a permanent resident or whose family member does not have a permanent residence in Haryana and had no interview (mulaqat) in the last six months. The Justice JK Jain commission has given a clean chit to police and CRPF personnel allegedly involved in firing at agitating farmers in Mandsaur last year, officials familiar with the development said on Tuesday. Five people were killed in police firing on June 6, 2017, at the peak of the farmers agitation in Madhya Pradesh. Another protester also died in a police lathi-charge at Daloda, located about 20 km away. The report, which was delayed by nine months, stated that police firing had become necessary for the purposes of self-preservation and mob dispersal during the violent farmer agitation. It did not place any blame on then collector Swatantra Kumar Singh or superintendent of police OP Tripathi either, only noting that the information network of the police and state administration was very weak. None of the farmers demands loan waiver or higher price for agricultural produce could be met at the district level, the commission reasoned. According to the report, the first incident of police firing occurred at Bahi Pasharvanath in Pipliyamandi, where the mob surrounded eight CRPF men and began pelting them with stones. They then caught hold of two personnel, Vivek Mishra and Udai Prasad, and began beating them while trying to snatch their rifles. Three other constables who came to their rescue met with a similar fate. Repeated warnings issued by the remaining CRPF personnel went in vain. Finally, shorn of all choices, they opened fire killing two protesters and injuring three others. The probe panel, however, said it found no evidence supporting the security personnels claim that the mob tried to set the CRPF constables on fire. The report went on to say that an enraged mob of around 1,500 to 2,000 people then proceeded to the nearby Pipliyamandi police station. They surrounded the building and threatened to burn it down after killing all the policemen there. Tear gas shells and a lathi-charge failed to quell the agitators, who entered the police station and began wrecking the computers. Faced with no choice, the police personnel resorted to firing killing three and injuring three others. However, Justice Jain noted that he did not find any evidence to support the claim that the mob was armed with guns, and had fired at the police. Senior lawyer Anand Mohan Mathur, who represented the victims families, slammed the report. I am absolutely unsatisfied with the report. We were not given an opportunity to expose the various manipulations that took place at the time. I was not even allowed to cross-examine Anil Thakur, the then thana in-charge, he said. The Congress said the report exposed the anti-farmer bias of the BJP government. If neither the police nor the CRPF are guilty, who is responsible for these deaths? it asked in a statement. State Congress president Kamal Nath termed the report as an attempt to save the guilty, and said that the prospect of farmers getting justice was getting dimmer by the day. The farmers also expressed dismay over the report. We no longer have faith in the system. We have been waiting for justice for a year now, but this report has shattered us, said Sandeep, who lost his brother Abhishek Patidar to the incident. However, state home secretary Malay Shrivastava said he was in no position to comment on the document. There are many things mentioned in the report, and we are examining all the aspects, he added. Police in Assam have blamed rats for nibbling on currency notes worth more than Rs 12 lakh stored in an ATM of the State Bank of India in Tinsukia district. Tinsukia Police said it received a complaint from officials of the local branch of the state-run lender on June 14, saying they found notes worth Rs 12,38,000 in shreds in one of its ATMs on the outskirts of Tinsukia town. Prakash Sonowal, Tinsukias additional superintendent of police, said the bank said in its complaint that the ATM was not functional for about 12 days. It was not dispensing cash, he said. An official from Sijuguri police station, who visited the ATM, said the problem was found out after a vault cutting unit arrived from Kolkata to check the malfunctioning machine. The official said the rats could have entered the machine through a small hole meant for wires. The carcass of a rat was found among the shredded notes, the official said adding that the bank officials managed to salvage another Rs 17,10,000 stored in the ATM. The damaged banknotes were of Rs 2000 and Rs 500 denomination, the police said. The police have ruled out any foul play even though the bank officials did not get a wind of it for more than 12 days after the ATM was shut down following technical failure. We have not found the involvement of any bank official or any outsider, the police official said, The official said that the report has been forwarded to the concerned SBI officials. The photographs of the shredded notes inside the ATM have gone viral on Facebook and Twitter. Many have called it a demonetisation Part 2 and a surgical strike by mice. Rebel AIADMK leader and nephew of former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaas close aide Sasikala, TTV Dhinakaran has unveiled a new gambit to both keep his flock of 18 disqualified MLAs together and prove a point that his victory in the RK Nagar bypoll was no luck. His latest move of getting his loyalist, Andipatti MLA Thanga Tamilselvan, one of the 18 disqualified, to withdraw the challenge petition is likely to force a bypoll. This follows the split verdict of a two-judge bench of the Madras high court hearing the petitions, with the decision now resting on the third judge. But Dhinakarans stance is likely rooted in the near-mythical status the AIADMK holds in Andipatti, the constituency of both MG Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa. Dhinkaran, who has floated Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam (AMMK) to counter the official All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, hopes to have Tamilselvan contest on an AMMK ticket and win, thus strengthening his claim to be the real inheritors of MGR and Jayas legacy. Dhinakaran, who has already won in Jayalalithaas RK Nagar assembly constituency by a huge margin, is looking to repeat that in Andipatti a strategy to keep his cadres energised. Tamilselvan has announced his intention to withdraw his petition in the high court, even as other MLAs continue to push for a legal resolution to their disqualification. I am unable to serve my Andipatti people who voted for me in the previous assembly election. As the judicial proceedings are dragging on, I have decided to withdraw my petition. This would enable the Election Commission to order polls for the Andipatti, which is vacant. I explained the decision to TTV Dhinakaran on Thursday and got the green signal from him, MLA Tamilsevan told HT. Dhinakaran responded to his decision, saying, Just like I won in RK Nagar, we will make Tamilselvan win by a huge margin in Jayalalithaas and MGRs Aandipatti constituency as well. Meanwhile, local media reports have claimed the AIADMK camp led by chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami and O Panneerselvam is working out a counter-strategy of trying to lure some of the disqualified MLAs by offering positions. Tamilsevan denied these reports. I was never assured a ministers post. If everything was cordial (with the EPS-OPS camp), then why would I have been disqualified? I have decided to withdraw (the petition) for other reasons, he said, without specifying those reasons. Kadhirkamu, another disqualified MLA, who represents Periyakulam, said, If there are bypolls for Andippatti, AMMK will win by a huge margin. However, we 17 MLAs have hopes in the judiciary and we are waiting for the third judges verdict. Kadhirkamu made it clear he has no intention to follow the footsteps of Tamilselvan. Under governors rule in Jammu and Kashmir, New Delhi will embark on a hardline security-centric policy with the scaling up of counter-insurgency operations, especially in the four districts of South Kashmir Shopian, Kulgam, Anantnag and Pulwama that have become the hotbed of militancy in the last two years, officials familiar with the plan said. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended its almost 40-month alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Tuesday and chief minister Mehbooba Mufti resigned, paving the way for direct Central rule to be overseen by governor NN Vohra. Trust deficit, governance deficit and soft separatism these were the three main complaints against Mehbooba Mufti when the BJP decided to pull plug on its alliance government in Jammu and Kashmir, said a person familiar with the thinking of the Union government. Although the second term of governor Vohra, 82, is ending on June 27, he is expected to continue in office, at least until the completion of the Amarnath yatra, which passes through South Kashmir districts. The annual pilgrimage to the cave shrine ends on August 26. Security for the Amarnath yatra was a paramount concern when the government decided on Monday not to extend the month-long Ramzan halt on counter-insurgency operations. It was felt that without resuming operations against militants, the Amarnath yatra cannot be secured. Now, under the governors rule the security forces are expected to step up pressure against militants, said a home ministry official on the condition of anonymity. A Union minister said the government will adopt a more aggressive approach not only inside Kashmir but also along the Line of Control and the International Border as well. The government is conscious of the fact that increased operations may lead to retaliation from the other side, and ensuring peaceful Amarnath yatra was an important assignment, said the minister, who requested anonymity. The minister claimed that the security forces had inflicted serious damage on the establishment on the other side of the Line of Control, and the challenge before the government was to deal with those who create trouble on this side of the border through locals. Data available with security forces shows that 144 militants are active in South Kashmir. Among them, 131 are locals and 13 are foreign terrorists. Between January 1 and May 31, around 90 new recruits joined the ranks of militants in South Kashmir; in 2017, 109 new recruits joined militancy. In 2017, security forces killed 144 militants in the region. A former army commander, who has served in Kashmir, said security forces will have more freedom in launching operations against militants. The army and other security forces will find it easier to operate under the governor. The Unified Command will be under the governor, instead of the CM. This means political sensitivity wont come in the way of operations. Take an example, if the army wants to do a hinterland operation in South Kashmir, a PDP government would be far more cautious. I am not saying there were restrictions earlier but there will more freedom now, said the retired commander on condition of anonymity. Formalities of announcing governors rule in the state are being completed in the Union home ministry. Union home minister Rajnath Singh met with officials to discuss the key requirements for J&K in the absence of an elected government in the state. The Rajasthan high court on Tuesday allowed a 15-year-old girl who was allegedly raped, to terminate her 22-week pregnancy after a medical board submitted that the foetus had a medical condition due to which it had very little or no chance of survival. In its report, the medical board of Dr SN Medical College, Jodhpur, stated that the foetus had anencephaly or absence of a major portion of the brain, skull, and scalp. Continuing with the pregnancy may also endanger the mothers life, it said. There is no chance of survival of the infant, which suffers from intrinsic defect, and the mothers life may also be endangered, a division bench of justices Sandeep Mehta and Dr Pushpendra Singh Bhati said allowing the termination of pregnancy. The court gave the order after the girls parents filed a written consent on her behalf that they were ready to take the risk of medical termination of pregnancy. At present, she is carrying a foetus of 21 weeks and 5 days. As per section 3 of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971, a pregnancy exceeding 20 weeks cannot be terminated except with the consent of the pregnant woman. In case of minor, the permission has to be given by her guardian. The girl, through her mother, had filed a petition seeking permission to medically terminate her pregnancy. She also prayed that the state government and other respondents be directed to pay her a compensation of Rs 50 lakh for her own welfare and welfare of her (to be born) ward. During the hearing, the bench apprised the minor and her parents, who were present in the court, of the intrinsic risk to the petitioners life in case of medical termination of pregnancy at this advanced stage. However, they firmly expressed that they were prepared to take the risk. The girls parents have filed a written consent on her behalf that they are ready to subject the petitioner to medical termination of pregnancy, the bench said. Five people, including a one-year-old, were killed and 11 others were injured after a fire broke out in two hotels in Lucknow on Tuesday, officials said. The injured include four minors aged between five and 15. The condition of at least three injured people is said to be critical. At least 86 guests were rescued by firefighters. Many vehicles in the parking areas of the hotels were also damaged. Senior superintendent of police (SSP), Lucknow, Deepak Kumar said the fire broke out in SSJ International and Viraat International. Kumar said the fire started from the basement of SSJ International at around 5.30am apparently due to a short circuit and flames soon engulfed the adjoining Viraat International. The SSP said over a dozen people rescued from the blaze were sent to the civil hospital where five people, including a child named Maher were declared brought dead. He added that they reportedly suffocated to death. Besides Maher, the others deceased who could be identified included Santosh Mane from Pune, Priyank Sharma from Aligarh and Ganesh Prasad from Patna. Kumar said Mahers mother Rani (25) was also critically injured with around 85% burns and was undergoing treatment in civil hospital. The SSP said a preliminary probe suggested that fire fighting equipment was installed in both hotels but the staff was not trained to use it. An FIR has been lodged against hotel owners, Arpit Jaiswal of SSJ International and Surendra Jaiswal of Viraat International, as well as the employees for negligence and putting human lives to danger, said the SSP. Chief minister Yogi Adityanath expressed his condolences to the families of the deceased and announced an ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh each to the families of the deceased and 50,000 each to those grievously injured in the blaze. A pastor was allegedly assaulted and handed over to the police by Bajrang Dal activists in Meerut on Monday. Police said Deependra Prakash, who is affiliated to a Methodist church in Mulhera village, has been charged with trying to convert 16 people to Christianity. At least 16 affidavits of people willing to convert were recovered from Prakashs possession. He has been sent to jail, confirmed Meerut superintendent of police (rural) Rajesh Kumar. Police said Prakash had approached Sanjeev Panwar, former general secretary of the Sardhana Bar Association, and presented 16 affidavits for notarisation on Monday. However, local Bajrang Dal leaders caught wind of the matter, and soon, a group of right-wing activist led by office-bearer Milan Son reached the lawyers chamber. It was when they found that the affidavits concerned religious conversions that the pastor was assaulted and handed over to the police. We have instructed our activists to form teams and keep a sharp lookout for missionaries operating in the village. We will not take such activities lying down. Anybody trying to convert people by force should be ready to face the consequences, said Bajrang Dal state convenor Balraj Singh. Sources said that although Panwar was initially detained too, he was let off with a warning after lawyers staged a protest in front of the police station. A case has been registered against Prakash under relevant sections of the law. Sagar Thakar alias Shaggy, the 24-year-old mastermind behind the call-centre scam that duped more than 6,500 people in the US of millions of dollars, was granted bail after 14 months by a Thane sessions court on Monday. Thakar was arrested in April 2017. On October 4, 2016, more than 75 people, including floor managers, accountants and even an investor were arrested in Thakars call centre on Mira Road in a raid that included 200 personnel from the Thane crime branch and the Thane rural police. It was found that Thakars employees impersonated officials belonging to US Internal Revenue Service and Department of Treasury and threatened American loan-defaulters with tax fraud or tax evasion if they did not pay up. In the process, they extorted millions of dollars. Thakkar had roped in his childhood friends to form a network of floor managers, who ran the multi-million dollar con across cities, police sources said. He also hired information technology experts who could operate phone lines. Employees either bought or used some sort of software to obtain contact details from Whitepages (an online telephone directory similar to the yellow pages). According to the police, the accused extorted an Indian equivalent of over Rs500 crore from more than 6,500 Americans. Two other suspects, Tapesh Gupta and Thakars sister, Reema are still at large. One of Thakars relatives, requesting anonymity, said that while in prison, he spent his time learning law and languages such as Marathi and Hindi. He is now fluent in Hindi. We used to pray for him in our home. But earlier, we were shocked to know that even though the police did not find sufficient evidence against him, his bail applications were rejected. He cooperated with their investigation and had even come to Gujarat with them. According to a police officer from the Thane commissionerate, during his earlier court hearings, Thakars lawyer defended him saying the investigation was completed with his help but the prosecution argued that he should not be granted bail because he was the mastermind behind the racket. Shaggy did help us with the investigation and has assured us that he would come to the police station as and when it is required. Cut-offs for most of degree courses at coveted colleges in the city have increased by 1% to 2%. Colleges affiliated with University of Mumbai (MU) released the first merit lists on Tuesday. Second and third lists will be issued on June 22 and 27. Science faculty courses witnessed the highest cut-offs this year. Cut-off for BSc increased anywhere between 1% to 5%, with St Xaviers College posting one of the highest cut-offs for the course (89%) . Similarly, cut-offs for BSc IT and BSc Computer Science in sought-after colleges increased anywhere between 2% and 14%. On the other hand, cut-offs for commerce courses remained more or less the same this year. Whiles percentage to secure admission to the course dropped in some colleges by 1% or 2%, it increased by a few others by similar margin. Other commerce courses, such as Bachelor of Management Studies (BMS), BCom Accounting and Finance (BAF), BCom Banking and Insurance (BBI) and BCom Financial Markets (BFM) witnessed a similar trend. HR College, Churchgate, registered one of the highest cut-offs for BCom (95%) and BFM (94.6%). Last year, cut-off for the courses were higher. Similarly, NM College, Vile Parle, posted one of the highest cut-offs for BMS and BAF 95.8%. The minimum score for Bachelor of Mass Media (BMM), a self-financed course in Arts faculty, increased by 2% on average across top colleges, with Mithibai College, Vile Parle, posting one of the highest cut-offs at 94.2%. The college also recorded one of the highest cut-offs for BA (95.24%). The minimum score for the BA didnt change much as compared to last year, though it swung 1% to 3% in both the directions in some colleges. There must be students whose names will appear in multiple colleges. Most of the in-house Science students secure their admission, before cancelling it to seek admission to professional courses. One has to wait for second and third merit lists to figure out trends,, said Vidyadhar Joshi, vice principal, VG Vaze College, Mulund. A large multidisciplinary team of scientists, equipped with advanced underwater robotics and an array of analytical instrumentation, will set sail for the northeastern Pacific Ocean this August. The team's mission for NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) is to study the life and death of the small organisms that play a critical role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and in the ocean's carbon cycle. More than 100 scientists and crew from more than 20 research institutions will embark from Seattle for NASA's Export Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing (EXPORTS) oceanographic campaign. EXPORTS is the first coordinated multidisciplinary science campaign of its kind to study the fates and carbon cycle impacts of microscopic plankton using two research vessels and several underwater robotic platforms. The research vessels, the R/V Revelle and R/V Sally Ride, operated by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, will sail west 200 miles into the open ocean. From these seaborne laboratories, researchers will explore the plankton, as well as the chemical and physical properties of the ocean from the surface to half a mile below into the twilight zone, a region with little or no sunlight where the carbon from the plankton can be sequestered, or kept out of the atmosphere, for periods ranging from decades to thousands of years. "By employing two ships we'll be able to observe complex oceanographic processes that vary both in space and time that we wouldn't be able to capture with a single ship," said Paula Bontempi, program manager for Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry at NASA Headquarters. Phytoplankton are tiny, plant-like organisms that live in the sunlit upper ocean. They use sunlight and dissolved carbon dioxide that enters the upper ocean from the atmosphere to grow through photosynthesis, which is one way that ocean organisms cycle carbon. As primary producers, phytoplankton play an important role in removing atmospheric carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. When phytoplankton are consumed by plankton or die, their remains sink and some fraction of their carbon is exported to depth. While the major export pathways of how carbon moves through the ocean are known, the magnitude of the carbon flows in the different oceanic pathways and their dependence on ecosystem characteristics are poorly known. Scientists on the EXPORTS team are investigating how much carbon moves through the ocean within the upper sunlit layer and into the twilight zone and how ocean ecological processes affect carbon fate and sequestration. This information is needed to predict how much carbon will cycle back into the atmosphere over what time scales, or how much carbon is exported to ocean depths. "The carbon humans are putting into the atmosphere is warming Earth," says Mike Sieracki, program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean Sciences. "Much of that carbon eventually finds its way into the ocean and is transported to the deep ocean, where it is sequestered and will not return to the atmosphere for a long time. This project will help us understand the biological and chemical processes that remove the carbon, and establish a foundation for monitoring these processes as the climate changes." Seven years in the making, the 2018 campaign has been a huge undertaking, said David Siegel, EXPORTS science lead from the University of California, Santa Barbara. "The impact the EXPORTS data will have for understanding how our planet is changing will be significant," Siegel said. "NASA's ocean color satellite record shows us these ecosystems are highly sensitive to climate variability. Changes in phytoplankton populations affect the marine food web since phytoplankton are eaten by many animal species big and small. The stakes are high." The long-term removal of organic carbon from the atmosphere to the ocean depths is known as the biological pump, which operates through three main processes. First, carbon-laden particles from the ocean's surface sink through gravity, as happens with dead phytoplankton or feces produced by small animals called zooplankton. Second, zooplankton migrate daily close to the ocean's surface to feed on phytoplankton and return to the twilight zone during nighttime. Third, physical processes in the ocean, such as the large global overturning circulation of the oceans and smaller-scale turbulent eddies, transport suspended and dissolved carbon to great depths. NASA's satellites provide a variety of measurements of the ocean's uppermost layer, such as temperature, salinity and the concentration of a pigment found in all plants called chlorophyll. EXPORTS will provide data on the role of phytoplankton and plankton in the biological pump and the export of carbon, information important to planning observations and technologies needed for future Earth-observing satellite missions. "We've designed EXPORTS to observe simultaneously the three basic mechanisms by which carbon is exported from the upper ocean to depth," Siegel said. "We're trying to better understand the biology and ecology of phytoplankton in the surface water, how those characteristics drive the transport of carbon to the twilight zone, and then what happens to the carbon in the deeper water." Among the many technologies being used is an autonomous platform called a "Wirewalker" that uses wave energy to move instruments along a taut wire from the surface to 1,600 feet (500 meters) in depth while measuring temperature, salinity, oxygen, carbon, and chlorophyll concentration. A 6.5 foot-long (2 meter-long) remote-controlled underwater vehicle called the Seaglider will gather similar measurements, but at depths as much as 3,200 feet (1,000 meters.) On board the ship, samples will be collected for genomic sequencers to assess the composition of the phytoplankton, zooplankton, bacterial and archaeal communities. New microscopic imaging tools also will be used by EXPORTS scientists, including a high throughput microscope called the Imaging FlowCytobot that will provide real-time, high-resolution images of billions of individual phytoplankton. The Underwater Vision Profiler will measure the sizes of sinking aggregate particles and collect images of zooplankton organisms. Mounted on the ship's superstructure will be optical instruments that will measure the ocean's color at very high spectral resolution, from the ultraviolet wavelengths to the shortwave infrared bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. Phytoplankton have distinct spectral "signatures" -- colors of light they absorb and scatter. By identifying those signatures scientists will be able to develop algorithms for future satellite ocean color missions such as NASA's Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission. From space, PACE will use similar optical instruments to distinguish the type and amount of phytoplankton present in the ocean. "What we will learn from EXPORTS will give us a deeper understanding of how plankton species and other microorganisms such as bacteria interact with their environment," said Bontempi. "Not only will we be able to use this information to develop new approaches to identifying and quantifying plankton species from space, we'll be able to predict how much carbon will cycle back into the atmosphere and how much will be transported to the ocean depths for the long term." For more information about EXPORTS, visit: http://oceanexports.org/ Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Kandivli resident Milind Lavate, who was arrested by the Mumbai crime branch on Monday with fake government ID cards and VIP passes for Mantralaya and other central government offices, has cheated many people across India, officers said. Among these, is a Delhi-based builder, whom Lavate cheated of 6crore by promising him a loan of 600 crore. The accused posed as a senior government officer and convinced the builder that he can help him get a huge loan, using his influence in the government. The builder fell for it and paid Lavate a percentage of the loan in advance as his fees, a police officer said. Read more: 47-yr-old used fake govt ties to dupe people, arrested Police arrested Lavate from Dindoshi area in Goregaon (East) after they received a tip-off. Officers said Lavate has targeted people from Delhi, Haryana, Gurgaon and Pune. During interrogation, the accused could not answer properly about the fake ID and VIP passes in his possession. So he was taken to the crime branch office and arrested, the officer said. Deputy commissioner of police (crime branch) Dilip Sawant, said, The Delhi crime branch was on the lookout for Lavate. He had also cheated a businessman in Andheri and several others in Mumbai. Police are on the lookout for a suspect who supplied Lavate with fake passes and IDs. A 10-year-old delayed projectlaying fifth and sixth rail lines between Thane and Divawas in focus in a review meeting chaired by Railway Board chief Ashwani Lohani. Lohani asked officials of the Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation (MRVC), which is constructing the lines between Thane and Diva, to complete the project within the set deadline of March 2019 and not to set a new deadline. Over the years, deadlines for the project have been repeatedly missed and new deadlines have been set. The project, which was sanctioned in 2008, is a part of Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP 2B) and is crucial for the Central Railway (CR) as it will be a key factor in segregating the outstation and local train rail corridor and thus improve the speed/frequency of trains. CR officials raised the concern that deadlines for the project have been repeatedly missed and local trains are repeatedly delayed due to this, which also impacts on the punctuality of the suburban railway section. The first deadline was December 2015, which was later revised to December 2017. Now, it is March 2019. The initial cost of the project was stated to be 130 crore. However, the present cost is nearly 420 crore. Lohani directed MRVC officials to complete the project within the set deadline and asked the body not to set a new deadline. Expedition of approval for the suburban railway projects at railway board will also be done. The Thane-Diva stretch is crucial as a lot of outstation and local trains pass by through it. The work on the project has been very slow and that is the reason the issue was raised in the review meeting. It has been asked to complete the work within the deadline, said a senior central railway official who did not wish to be named. Currently there are six railway lines between Kalyan and Diva and Lokmanya Tilak Terminus (LTT) and Thane. However, between Thane and Diva there are only four lines, which results in intercrossing of local and outstation trains. The segregation of lines used by local and outstation trains is important to improve the speed and frequency of suburban trains and make the journey slightly better. Passenger associations have stated that despite raising the issue with railway authorities, nothing concrete has been done. We met the MRVC chairman four months ago over the issue. There are lakhs of commuters who travel every day and get delayed because of this. However, the response we got from the railway authorities was that a technical error has delayed the project and the work will be completed in March 2019. Indian Railways should take serious action and make the officers accountable for the delay in the project, Lata Mishra, vice-president, Railway Pravasi Mahasangh. Discussions on fifth and sixth line between Kurla and Parel stations and review of work of Parel Terminus was also done at the meeting. The Parel Terminus will completely segregate the outstation trains from the local trains and many local trains will be terminated there. Work on increasing of speed of passenger outstation trains as well as goods trains is going on. Lohani also inspected the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) on Monday. He directed the railway officials to put up boards displaying certain meeting points categorised by numbers at the station, which would help passengers to convey their location to friends and relatives when necessary. While inaugurating the childline help desk at the CSMT Terminus, Lohani asked railway officials to conduct workshops and classes on gender sensitisation of motormen and station masters as they deal with commuters on a regular basis. The state is in a spot over the appointment of the new director general of police (DGP) after current DGP Satish Mathur retires on June 30, as officers in the fray are either nearing their retirement age or not on the governments list of probables. Mumbai police commissioner Datta Padsalgikar (1982 batch) is the frontrunner for the coveted position. While Padsalgikar will retire in August, the state may give him an extension of three months. An extension is given under the Death Cum Retirement Benefit Rules in exceptional cases such as general elections or natural calamities, with permission from the Centre. None of the DGPs has served less than three months in the recent past. Sanjay Barve (VCMD, Maharashtra State Security Corporation) and Thane police commissioner Parambir Singh are the frontrunners to occupy Padsalgikars post. If the government picks Singh, it will have to downgrade the post of police commissioner to the rank of ADG. In such a case, Barve may be appointed as head of the anti-corruption bureau (ACB). It will be a tough call for the state. SP Yadav (DG, legal and technical), who is next in seniority to Padsalgikar, will retire in September. Sanjay Pandey (DG, home guards), who was at loggerheads with the state and moved court against it too, is next in seniority to Yadav, but the government is not keen on his appointment. If denied the opportunity, Pandey may move court against the decision, citing a Supreme Court ruling that stated the top three officers must be considered for the post of DGP. Following him are two director generals Sanjay Barve and Bipin Bihari (DG, police housing). Barve is keen on the post of Mumbai police commissioner, said an official who is in the know of things. Two officers in the race had previously faced serious charges in two high-profile cases of criminal conspiracy and housing scam, but they came clean in the inquiry. To avoid altercation and technical glitches, the state approached Jaiswal (1985 batch), who is on Central deputation in the cabinet secretariat to return to state. But he has not responded to the offer. He is keen in serving Central agencies like RAW, said an official from the CMO. According to an IPS officer, Jaiswal met officials from the CMO and discussed the option of returning to state service after Padsalgikars retirement. There is a buzz in the bureaucracy that the state may keep the post of DGP vacant, on the lines of Gujarat, which is awaiting a DGP for more than one-and-a-half years. However, the government officials have struck down the possibility. Transfers and promotions are done in April or May. The delay is reportedly because of differences between the CM, DGP and former additional chief secretary SK Shrivastava over a few names, said the officer. The periodic elections to the legislative council from the teachers and graduates constituencies are a great way to judge support for various political parties from the intellectuals of society. I remember some years ago Maharashtra Navnirman Sena president Raj Thackeray had thrown a tantrum when a candidate he had authorised to contest the seat had refused to do so. Although the candidate had had at least a years notice in advance from Raj, he chose to bow out when he discovered no graduate was willing to associate with the MNS, least of all register as a voter for the party. Although the MNS and the Shiv Sena have similar DNA that, however, has not been the case with the Sena which has held the graduates seat for three decades. But that could also be because both Pramod Navalkar and Dr Deepak Sawant, who is now vacating the seat, did not have the image of rabble rousers and could convincingly draw voters to their side. It was also said another reason for that was because they never sought votes from graduates who might be inimical to the party and registered only those they were sure of voting for them. I found it a little difficult to believe that voters in the graduates constituency could be manipulated into voting for any political party this way until last week when Nitesh Rane allegedly, in a tweet, exposed the manipulation of the voters list where one name had appeared not just twice or thrice but six times as a registered voter for the graduates constituency. He claimed that the repeat voter was none other than the wife of Uddhav Thackerays closest aide Milind Narvekar. Now if this kind of over registration was being illegally done, I would have thought the Sena would have been more careful about choosing that particular name to register over and over again. Because Narayan Ranes running battle with Uddhav Thackeray was always about Narvekars alleged lack of respect for older Sena leaders and he was just waiting to pounce on the man sooner or later. Rane is currently a Rajya Sabha member on a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ticket but he is also putting up his own candidate for the seat from his newly formed Swabhiman Party as is the BJP who might be able to attract more graduates than the Sena. So I can understand the partys need to manipulate the seat which was first won by Navalkar in the 1980s with active Congress support. Navalkar was a socialist who was also able to earn the confidence of many more intellectuals than a rabble rousing typical Shiv Sainik might. But now, squashed between all these political parties playing for their ego, is Deepak Pawar, fighting as an independent and hoping to influence the graduates into giving him a shot at representing them in the legislative council. It is a long shot, however. The Congress and NCP might support the PWP candidate as a quid pro quo for the PWPs support to the NCP in an earlier election and both the Sena and the BJP as well as Rane have plenty of resources to win the election. But as Pawar told me, he is hoping to persuade graduates to understand that the Shiv Sena has been stuck with only one issue in three decades Marathi asmita and not moved beyond that in any concrete terms; and certainly not made a difference to their lot in life for voting the party for three decades. Every time the number of registered graduates comes down. Last time it was 90,000. This time it is 74,000 whereas a city like Mumbai should have at least 10-15 lakh graduates. Which shows less and less of them are willing to associate with some of these parties who are only in an ego battle with each other. I am looking to fight for jobs for graduates, better living conditions for those without housing. It is not only the Marathi manoos who needs to be represented. There are graduates from all over the country living here. Those are lofty goals but the dream to breach the Sena and BJP defences might be not so impossible either. I remember many years ago fellow journalist Kapil Patil, associated with teachers, breached the Congress-NCP defences and startled everyone by winning a teachers constituency seat as an independent. He is recontesting this time with the support of practically all other parties but the Sena and BJP. Teachers had been bold enough then to give him an opportunity and he has not disappointed them in taking up their causes. Will graduates need more persuasion? With Maharashtras ban on various plastic products coming into effect from this weekend, the state environment agency has started punitive action against manufacturers of plastic bags. The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) said it has forced 19 large-scale plastic bag manufacturing units to shut in the past two weeks. The units were located in Pune and in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) Kalyan, Ambernath, Thane and Dombivli. The units have been fined Rs5,000 each as a preliminary offence for continuing to manufacture plastic bags. The MPCB has also seized five trucks carrying 50 tonnes of plastic from Daman. Directions have been issued by the state environment department and the MPCB to plastic bag manufacturers in the state to stop production. Our teams have been deployed across major cities to inspect such units. Once the ban comes into effect, units violating the states notification will be pulled up and closure notices will be issued, said P Anbalagan, member secretary, MPCB. Based on Bombay high court orders, the storage of plastic bags is allowed for the next three months. The manufacturing units or private companies have to ensure that plastic is recycled but manufacturing or transportation of these banned products is strictly prohibited. On March 23, the state government promulgated a notification confirming the ban under the Maharashtra Plastic and Thermocol Products (Manufacture, Usage, Sale, Transport, Handling and Storage) Notification, 2018. Anbalagan added that MPCB will tie up with other state government departments, municipal bodies, and police personnel to ensure strict implementation of the ban. We have been told that CCTV cameras have been installed at several locations by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to spot the use of plastic bags and other banned products. We will discuss similar strategies with other municipal corporations in the state, said Anbalagan. A meeting is slated later this week with the state environment minister as to how MPCB will plan penalties from this weekend for first-time offenders. Environment minister has called a meeting with all implementing agencies on Friday where instructions will be given on how to enforce the notification, said Anbagalan. Plastic ban manufacturers said they were worried about government officials wrongly interpreting the ban order. The extension of the ban was for the common man carrying plastic and not on manufacturing. However, our concerns arise out of the misinterpretation of the notification by the implementing authorities, said Akhilesh Bhargava, chairperson (environment), All India Plastics Manufacturing Association (AIPMA). Anbalagan said that the state environment department and MPCB had developed an app called Plastic Bandi, available for on Google Play store that displays all details about the ban. After having conducted 3,046 mass marriages, the states charity commissioner has asked Ganpati mandals across the state to provide for the education of children from farming families who have scored more than 85% in their Secondary School Certificate (SSC) examination. The appeal was made at a meeting organised by the charity commissioner on Tuesday and attended by prominent mandals across the city and by members of Brihanmumbai Sarvajanik Ganeshostsav Samanvay Samiti (BSGSS). It has been observed that just because the fee for a particular course is higher, a lot of students compromise on their choice of educational stream. However, if the student has worked hard and scored good percentage, then he/she shouldnt compromise on their career, and in this case, Ganpati mandals will help them this year, said Shivkumar Dige, charity commissioner. Dige added that around 5 to 10 students will be selected from 35 districts for the scheme after a scrutinisation process. Depending on the amount collected through the drive, which begins tomorrow, the amount to be given to these students will be decided. BSGSS also raised the issue of mandals in the city who are unable to file change reports or register themselves with the charity commissioner because of proximity issues. Therefore, they requested for a special drive be conducted in the city. We requested the charity commissioner to conduct a drive because the mandals in the city were facing a lot of problem to work as per the proper procedure laid down under Maharashtra Public Trust act. After the discussion, the commissioner has asked the deputy charity commissioner to look into the registration problems, said Naresh Dahibavkar, president, BSGSS. The charity commissioner told us about how it was necessary for us to donate 10% of the profit for charity. So, since the bigger mandals like us have anyways been helping others through various causes, now even smaller mandals will help those who belong to lower strata of society as well. We have been asked to deposit the money in a specified bank account designated for this cause, said Swapnil Parab, secretary, Lalbaug Sarvajanik Utsav Mandal, Ganesh Galli. The Mumbai crime branch on Tuesday arrested a man from Jogeshwari, whose two associates posed as courier boys and strangled an 80-year-old woman in Ahmedabad last year. They also stole her gold ornaments worth 56,000. The accused, a contract killer, has been identified as Iftiak Ali Khan. During investigation, Ahmedabad police learnt that there was some property dispute between the victim and her son in-law, Ramesh Patel. The latter had given contract of 5 lakh to Khan to kill his mother-in-law. Later, Ahmedabad police arrested Patel and the two attackers Mohammad Latif Fakir, 34, and Sher Ali Sayyad, 33 on charges of murder, robbery and conspiracy while Khan was wanted in the case. Khan, a native of Nagpur, lived in Meghwadi area of Jogeshwari. He used to supply sand at construction sites in Mumbai. Patel, also in the business of supplying construction material in Gujarat, often visited Virar for purchasing sand and thus knew Khan, said a crime branch official. During interrogation, Ramesh confessed to hiring Khan to kill his mother-in-law, the official added. Khan took the money and laid a plan with Fakir and Sayyad. The duo then went to Ahmadabad in December last year. After a recce, they entered the residence of Patels mother-in-law on the afternoon of December 21, posing as courier boys, and strangulated her to death. They also stole her gold bangles and chain to make it look like robbery was their motive, said police inspector, Srimant Shinde. The duo was arrested by Ahmedabad police after the interrogation with Patel. Unable to trace Khan in Mumbai, Ahmedabad police informed the Mumbai crime branch about his role. After getting a tip-off , the police arrested him on Tuesday morning when he came to visit his sister in Jogeshwari, said Shinde. He will be handed over to the Ahmedabad police, he added As the Shiv Sena celebrates its 52nd foundation day on Tuesday, its leaders reiterated that the party would come to power on its own merit in Maharashtra in the upcoming Assembly elections. The party was founded on June 19, 1966, by Bal Thackeray, and emerged from a movement for preferential treatment for Maharashtrians when it comes to job opportunities, over migrants in Mumbai . Inaugurating the foundation day function at Nesco grounds in Goregaon (east), Sena leader and Yuva Sena chief Aaditya Thackeray said the party would contest on it own in the upcoming state polls and win. Till now, we have not tested our own strength. We kept contesting and were happy with what we got. But this will not go on anymore. We have decided that we will contest alone, win on our own strength and get a single-party government, Aaditya said, urging party workers to be prepared as elections are round the corner. Palghar was the beginning, he added. Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray will address party workers later in the evening. Though the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Sena are contemplating a pre-poll alliance, Thackeray is likely to reiterate the partys stand of contesting solo in the upcoming Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. A senior Sena leader, on condition of anonymity, said: Thackeray will remain firm on his stand, despite the BJPs repeated overtures and a visit by BJP president Amit Shah to Matoshree to mend ties. The Senas mouthpiece Saamana, which has been highly critical of the BJP in its recent editorials, also repeated the partys stance on Tuesday: The Shiv Sena will form a government on its own strength; it also has the power to determine who will sit on the seat of power in Delhi. The chief accountant of the real-estate firm which duped more than 25,000 investors in a 500-crore cryptocurrency scheme earlier this month surrendered himself to the Thane crime branch on Tuesday. Sachin Shelar, 40, chief accountant of Flintstone firm for the last few years, had fled to Dubai along with the CEO and mastermind, Amit Lakhanpal, after getting wind that police were looking for him. We questioned Shelars family many time but they were not cooperating. It was on Tuesday when he finally came to the Thane crime branch and surrendered, said a police officer from Thane commissionerate. Shelar, who is said to be close to Lakhanpal, is a resident of Shivaji Chowk in Dombivli. We have recovered hardware from Shelar which he intended to destroy. We are investigating how money was transferred to him and what he did with it after the transactions, the officer said. The officer said this was the second arrest they had made in this case. Earlier, we arrested the technical head of the firm, Taha Kazi, a Mumbra resident. There are three other suspects, including a woman, who are on the run. On 4 June, the Thane crime branch busted the cryptocurrency racket run by the Flintstone firm and discovered that Lakhanpal had fled to Dubai, where he is said to be hiding now. On Saturday, the Thane crime branch also lodged a case related to the Gain BitCoin scam at Khadakpada police station in Kalyan, following a mans complaint that he was cheated of 22.5 lakh by the company. The mastermind behind this scam, Amit Bhardwaj, has already been arrested by the Pune police. Leave aside the blame game. Lets consider the fallout from the BJPs decision to walk out of the alliance it had with Mehbooba Mufti in Jammu and Kashmir. The possibility of an alternative regime emerging from the current assembly is remote. Together, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the National Conference (NC) and the Congress have the numbers to sew up a partnership. But theyd be daunted to take the plunge in the prevailing security situation in the Valley. The NCs Omar Abdullah has already ruled out the possibility. He said the mandate his party lost in 2014 hasnt been regained with Mehboobas fall for his party to form an alternative regime. In that sense, Project Democracy (at the core of which is popularly mandated governance) is in a shambles in the troubled state. So are the nascent efforts at setting up an intra-Kashmir dialogue. It was under Atal Bihari Vajpayees National Democratic Alliance (NDA) that the credibility of elections in Jammu and Kashmir was re-established in the 2002 assembly polls. The former prime ministers jamhooriyat, insaaniyat, Kashmiriyat framework for peace and dialogue resonated with Mehbooba and her late father, Mufti Sayed, but not as much with his successor in the BJP dispensation. I remember vividly the then foreign minister Jaswant Singhs riposte to Pervez Musharraf in the run-up to the failed 2001 Agra Summit: What he [Musharraf] calls the core dispute [of Kashmir] is at the core of our nationhood From that perspective, the abortive PDP-BJP experiment has hemorrhaged the non-denominational secular state status our Constitution makers had willed us to negate Jinnahs two-nation theory feeding on a Hindu-Muslim binary. The BJPs traditional base is in the Hindu-dominated Jammu and the PDPs in the Muslim-majority Valley. The saffron party may still manage to salvage its ground. The same cannot be said about the PDP whose South Kashmir citadel is now a hotbed of militancy. Regardless of a chunk of its constituency overlapping with the Hurriyats, the PDP broadly is a pro-India force in the Valley. The space it has ceded there cannot easily be reclaimed by any regional or national party. The enfeebling of Mehbooba could further strengthen separatism. Thats the danger. Optically and politically, things could become difficult for Delhi on the domestic and international front if Governors Rule is imposed and there is no elected regime in place. With no buffer in the volatile province, the NDA would have no one but itself to blame for the mess thats Kashmir. If the divorce with the PDP is part of some perceptional battle the saffron party strives to win before the 2019 polls, a test it will need to immediately pass is the peaceful conduct of the Amarnath yatra. The question is whether thats doable under the police leadership and bureaucracy inherited from the Mehbooba dispensation. Bipartisan Kashmir watchers are also talking about the Governors office: the advisability,or otherwise, of a new incumbent at the hub from where the state will be administered through centrally-appointed advisors. The foremost task of the occupant of Raj Bhavan would be to reduce the gap that has grown between the army and the people. Perhaps a retired general with humanitarian aura could pull that off. Lt. Gen (Retd) Ata Hasnains name is in circulation. Its a good name. From Hollywood to Holy Vows -- The Nun Who Kissed Elvis Contact: Kevin Wandra, 404-788-1276, KWandra@CarmelCommunications.com SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 / Standard Newswire / -- Dolores Hart was a young, successful actress in Hollywood in the 1960s, with 10 highly successful movies to her credit. Then, she made a shocking decision: Hart left the glitz and glamour of Hollywood and entered a contemplative monastery.Now, 55 years later, Mother Dolores gives a fascinating account of her life, with co-author and lifelong friend Richard DeNeut, in the paperback edition of THE EAR OF THE HEART: An Actress' Journey from Hollywood to Holy Vows.So, who was Dolores Hart? And what made this bright and beautiful Hollywood phenom, who beat out other young actresses to star opposite Elvis Presley in Paramount's 1957 Loving You, leave a promising, glamorous career for a hidden life?In her book, we learn the full details of Dolores Hicks' complicated and colorful childhood growing up in Chicago, her meteoric rise to Hollywood fame as Dolores Hart, her five-year courtship with and engagement to Don Robinson, and her mystical journey toward God, serenity and, yes, love.We learn that she entered the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, at the peak of her career, not in order to leave the glamorous world of acting she had dreamed of since childhood, but in order to answer a mysterious call she heard with the "ear of the heart." While contracted for another film and engaged to be married, she abandoned everything to become a bride of Christ.Maria Shriver, bestselling author of Just Who Will You Be, remarks about Mother Dolores' book: "Mother Dolores Hart is a remarkable woman with a remarkable story one of love, devotion and faith.""The story of Dolores Hart teaches us to seek God regardless of where we are: in a summer storm, in prayer or even in front of a camera," says Raymond Arroyo, New York Times bestselling author, host of The World Over Live, and EWTN news director.For more information, to request a review copy or to schedule an interview with Mother Dolores Hart, please contact Kevin Wandra (404-788-1276 or KWandra@CarmelCommunications.com ) of Carmel Communications. Pandit Agarwal, an aide of underworld don Chhota Rajan, was arrested by the crime branch of the city police in the murder case of Deven Shah, a city-based builder. The arrest was made in the late hours of Tuesday. Agarwal will be brought to Pune from Delhi where he was detained initially, according to Sameer Shaikh, assistant commissioner of police, crime 1. "We caught him in Delhi. He will be brought to Pune. We will share further details tomorrow," said ACP Shaikh. Shah was shot dead outside his Prabhat road residence around 11:30pm on January 13. An initial case was registered against two assailants at the Deccan Gymkhana police station. The initial arrests in the case were of Ravindra Chorge and Rahul Shivtare. Later, a man named Surendra Pal was arrested by the local police for aiding the two. The case was later transferred to the Pune police crime branch, headed by Pankaj Dahane, deputy commissioner of police, crime. The prime suspect in the case was identified as Sunil Rathore who was booked under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) in the last week of March for plotting the builder's murder. He was booked along with five others. While the police are on the lookout for Rathore, the arrest of Agarwal may shed light on the details of the motive behind the fatal attack. After local bodies minister Navjot Singh Sidhus strict action against illegal colonies and the suspension of eight officials of the building branch of the municipal corporation here created a controversy with a few MLAs from the city expressing resentment, the chief ministers office (CMO) has intervened to bury the hatchet. The major embarrassment for the party and the government came when Jalandhar (West) MLA Sushil Kumar Rinku joined the protesters and mounted a JCB earthmover to stop the demolition of an illegal colony near Deol Nagar on the Kala Sangha road here. Wont allow any thief MLA to encroach upon govt land: Sidhu Even as the Congress high command is trying to settle down the differences between the MLAs and local bodies minister Navjot Singh Sidhu, the minister continued to take a tough stand saying that he will not allow any chor MLA to encroach upon the government land.A one-time settlement policy doesnt mean that anyone can encroach upon the government land. Is this a joke or a jungle raj? ki koi vi ik-adha chor MLA uth ke sarkari jagah gher lave (That any thief MLA can encroach upon the government land), Sidhu told this reporter over the phone. Referring to the action of Jalandhar (West) MLA Sushil Kumar Rinku climbing a JCB machine and stopping the demolition of a colony near Deol Nagar, Sidhu said that it came to the fore that Rinku has a partnership on that 7.5- acre government land. Rinku has been describing it as an anti-people drive, he should tell me whether people were living there where the MC carried out the operation. It was only a boundary wall, which was constructed on the government land to get the benefit under the one-time settlement policy, he said. Sidhu said that he has been receiving videos from various people showing that there is huge encroachment in the Jalandhar (West) area, represented by Rinku. I will verify the facts and the drive will be continued, he said. Meanwhile, about the meeting with Jalandhar MLAs, Sidhu said that he has got some work in Delhi and will meet them after returning from Delhi. Following instructions from the party high command, member of Parliament Santokh Singh Chaudhary, all the four MLAs of the city Rinku, Pargat Singh (Jalandhar Cantonment), Avtar Henry Junior (North) and Rajinder Beri (Central) and mayor Jagdish Raja held a meeting and decided to meet Navjot Sidhu in a day or two to settle the differences. Deputy commissioner Varinder Kumar Sharma, commissioner of police Parveen Kumar Sinha and MC commissioner Basant Garg were also present in the meeting. Highly placed sources said that the meeting of MLAs was held after the administration informed them of serious repercussions for disrupting public servants from carrying out their duty. A political adviser to the CM, who is organising the meeting of MLAs and the MP with Sidhu, pledging anonymity, said that they have to bring the situation under control as the resentment expressed by the MLAs has already dented the image of the state government. The differences must be settled as the image of the chief minister is at stake, he said. Asked about the proposed meeting with Sidhu, Rinku, a highly vocal leader, who was the first to oppose Sidhus move, said that they have decided to meet Sidhu to share their problems with him. MLA Beri, who was also one of the opponents of Sidhus action, said that they will request to bring out a one-time settlement policy for regularisation of illegal colonies and buildings. MLA Pargat Singh, who was the one to accompany Sidhu during the operation, said that the MC commissioner has informed him and other MLAs that Sidhu is coming for surprise checking. Sidhu is minister of local bodies and he has done what was right for the welfare of the city. The operation was carried out even in my constituency, but residents are happy, he said. Mayor Jagdish Raja said that their main demands will be zoning of the city and declaration of a one-time settlement policy at the earliest. Punjab Congress president Sunil Jakhar said that the meeting of MLAs with Sidhu, the government will try to sort out the problems being faced common men and discuss action against illegal colonisers. This the high time that the government should tighten the noose around encroachments, which have gone on unchecked. Our aim is to check illegal construction, Jakhar said. A day after an 18-month-old boy was mauled to death by stray dogs at a park in Sector 18, his parents refused to allow doctors perform the postmortem till a case is registered against the municipal officers tasked with curbing canine population. They also met the deputy commissioner with the same demand. Meanwhile, the municipal corporation (MC) has decided to give a compensation of Rs 3 lakh to the family, even as the parents claimed neither the mayor nor any other municipal officer had visited them after the incident. I wont allow my sons postmortem till a case is registered against MC officers tasked with curbing dog menace. Aayush was playing in a park with his elder siblings when a pack of four dogs attacked and mauled him on Monday noon. The mother, Mamta, who works as a domestic help, had left the kids there while she had gone to work in nearby houses. The family lives in Maloya. The childs body is kept at the mortuary in the Government Multi Specialty Hospital, Sector 16. The Sector-19 police station in-charge is compelling us for postmortem, but I have refused, alleged Mamta. I first want a case registered against the civic body officers concerned. However, station house officer (SHO) Davinder Singh claimed he has received no complaint. Parents meet DC Earlier, in a written representation to deputy commissioner Ajit Balaji Joshi, Mamta and her husband, Mundar, sought strict action against the officers and also demanded compensation from the UT administration. Joshi told them that for any legal action, they need to get an FIR registered. He also assured a compensation of Rs 1 lakh from the deputy commissioner relief fund, said Avinash Sharma, an activist who accompanied the parents. MC offers Rs 3 lakh Meanwhile, MC commissioner KK Yadav said 3-lakh compensation has been approved for the family and the file has been sent to UT administrator VP Singh Badnore for final nod, which is expected by Tuesday. The MC has no policy in this regard. Mayor Davesh Moudgil said in the next House meeting, he will table a draft policy for a compensation of 3 lakh in case of such incidents. We have to depend on the UT administration for the approval, he said. In 2015, too, the MC had given Rs 3 lakh to the family of a five-year-old Manimajra girl who died after being bitten by a rabid dog. Actor Prabhas is currently shooting for his upcoming trilingual Saaho in Abu Dhabi, also starring Shraddha Kapoor. In a recent interview with Filmfare middle east, the actor has revealed that shooting for Saaho has been great so far. He also revealed that there are 11 important characters in the film besides him and Shraddha. The film also stars Neil Nitin Mukesh, Lal, Arun Vijay, Jackie Shroff, Mandira Bedi and Chunky Pandey. He also mentioned that Shraddha plays a very important character. She doesnt just come for songs in the film, but the story also progresses from her point of view a lot and her character becomes stronger in the film. He also added that he was surprised in Shraddha. In Hindi she used to take a couple of takes, but in Telugu she would just do it well, he said laughing out loud. Prabhas and Shraddha bonded well over food when the two worked together in Hyderabad. When asked about his favourite Bollywood female actors, he said, Deepika, Katrina and Alia. Prabhas was also asked about his experience shooting for a trilingual and he explained how it was difficult to get the emotion right thrice in row. We start a scene, and once we get it right it is bang on and done. But then the director mentions, now Hindi, and yeah... that is difficult, he confessed. Saaho is produced under the banner of UV Creations and the film is being directed by Sujeeth. This is Prabhas first release after the blockbuster film Baahubali. Follow @htshowbiz for more ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop Join us comrade! tourists are warmly greeted, as they climb into a vintage car that is no longer produced for a visit back in time to a country that no longer exists. As a symbol of the former Yugoslavia, the Yugo car is back in vogue on Belgrades streets. Like in other places once stranded behind the detested Iron Curtain, the Serbian capital has found a unique way to cater for a surge in interest and even nostalgia for life under communism. On a three-hour tour, visitors see some of Yugoslavias most significant sites, seated in one of the once ubiquitous Yugos, ending up at the Museum of History of Yugoslavia which holds dictator Josip Broz Titos mausoleum. People come to experience rides in an iconic car and it is something they cannot experience anywhere else in the world actually, said Jovana Stojiljkovic, who manages the Yugotour travel agency. The last Yugo cars were produced a decade ago, but, Stojiljkovic says, they are still a hit among tourists for the Rise and Fall of a Nation tour, on which most clients are foreigners. Its something similar to a Trabant (East German car) tour in Berlin, she says. Jovana Stojiljkovic, manager of the Yugotour agency, poses by a Yugoslav era popular car Zastava 101. (AFP) Made in Yugoslavia For vintage car aficionados, Belgrade has a lot to offer, with sightings of American Chryslers or Ford limousines not uncommon. And for the handful of Made in Yugoslavia makes of car, thousands still rumble around on Balkans roads more than 25 years after Yugoslavias collapse. As well as the Yugo, the small Fica and Zastava 101, all produced at the Zastava plant in the central town of Kragujevac, were the pride of communist Yugoslavia. They were highly popular due to their low price. But the Yugo car was also often the butt of jokes over its design and unreliability. It even appeared in the 1995 Hollywood blockbuster Die Hard With a Vengeance with Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson. Now it is tourists from all over the world climbing into the Yugos, which in their heyday were exported from Yugoslavia to 74 countries, including Egypt, India and even the United States. Described by the communist authorities as the deal of the century for the US market, the Yugo had only limited success there, however. Tourists ride in a Yugoslav era popular car Zastava 101 in Belgrade. (AFP) View of history When Stojiljkovic was born in 1992, Yugoslavia had already fallen apart in a series of bloody wars and most of its republics were already independent states. But by the age of 25, she had launched a career in preserving the memory of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) and telling its story, coinciding with a wave of Yugonostalgia among some for a period viewed as having enjoyed peace and relative prosperity before the onset of the conflicts. Dennis Bertelsen, a 38-year-old Dane on a weekend visit to the city, was among the hundreds of thousands of tourists descending on Belgrade it hosted one million last year, 8,35,000 of whom were from abroad, according to official figures. With his three friends, he said he took the tour to get a view of the history and what actually had been the development and downfall of Yugoslavia. The itinerary includes passing by the famous Hotel Jugoslavija on the Danube river bank, one of the countrys most luxurious at the time. Guests included US presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter as well as Britains Queen Elizabeth II. The hotel has been out of service since it was hit in a 1999 NATO bombing campaign to force the then Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his troops from Kosovo but the building still has a mythical status. Jovana Stojiljkovic, manager of the Yugotour agency, checks a Yugoslav era popular car Zastava 101 in Belgrade. (AFP) Commercialisation Polish student Dominik Wojciechowski came across the tour while researching the Fica car for his photo-art project on so-called Yugonostalgia, a feeling still present in all the countries that emerged after Yugoslavias collapse, although much less in Croatia where a national sense of being Croat is ultra dominant. I am interested in this process of commercialisation of Yugonostalgia and how people today are trying to preserve knowledge of Yugoslavia, while the older generation even (attempts) to return to these times, the 25-year-old said. For him, the most impressive part of the tour was a 30-floor twin tower called Genex, or Western Gates of Belgrade, still among the tallest in the city. You stand below it and look up how big it is and feel this grandiosity of Yugoslavia and how powerful it was, he said. Most tourists know very little about Yugoslavia, its 22 million people and dictator Tito who led it from the end of World War II until his death in 1980. A decade later, the federation comprising six republics Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia collapsed in a series of wars that claimed more than 1,30,000 lives. Although Stojiljkovic never lived in Yugoslavia she said she nevertheless knows a lot about it. I have heard all the stories from my parents, their friends and the rest of my family, so based on their experience it was a really nice time, they had a good time, she said. And she herself is now the proud owner of two Fica cars, which, she said, was to show to the rest of the world what they meant to us. Follow @htlifeandstyle for more A heartrending audio recording surfaced on Monday of immigrant children crying inconsolably for their parents at a detention centre as a defiant President Donald Trump and his officials continued to defend the policy to separate them from families crossing into the United States illegally. They asked for their papi (Spanish for father), mami (mother) or a relative and some had telephone numbers that they pleaded with consular officials to call. ProPublica, an investigative news publication that obtained the recording, called one of the numbers. It was the hardest moment in my life, the relative, an aunt, said. Imagine getting a call from your six-year-old niece. Shes crying and begging me to go get her. She says, I promise Ill behave, but please get me out of here. Im all alone, the aunt added. The nearly eight-minute recording shook a nation already reeling from images and news reports about children, some as young as two, being ripped from their parents and taken to detention centres, which are beginning to be described by critics as cages. The recording played in White Houses news briefing room by one of the reporters before the start of the daily briefing at which Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the department that oversees immigration and border security, aggressively defended the policy and flatly denied what was happening to these children amounted to child abuse. We have high standards. We give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. There are videos, there are TVs, Nielsen, secretary of the department of homeland security, said. Akemi Vargas, 8, cries as she talks about being separated from her father during an immigration family separation protest in front of the Sandra Day O'Connor US District Court building, in Phoenix. (AP Photo) Nielsen, who has been in the crosshairs of the president, proceeded to lay the blame at the doorsteps of Democrats, arguing falsely as her boss that they should work with Republicans to fix loopholes in the nations immigration laws. Critics have called that a cynical attempt to leverage the plight of these children to give Trump the tough immigration measures he has long advocated. The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. You look at whats happening in Europe, you look at whats happening in other places. We cant allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch, Trump said in a speech before the audio-recording began popping up. Trump had also tweeted claiming earlier in the day falsely once again that Germany was witnessing a surge in crimes because of faulty immigration policies. The US president is under increasing pressure from all quarters on his administrations child-separation policy, within the party and outside, with all the surviving former first ladies weighing in among a whole host of leading personalities. Rosalyn Carter, the wife of former Democratic president Jimmy Carter, became the newest and last of living former first ladies on Monday to make a rare policy intervention joining Laura Bush, wife of George W Bush, and Michelle Obama, wife of Barack Obama, to publicly oppose the Trump administrations policy. When I was the first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand. I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstance beyond their control, Carter said in a statement cited in the US media. Crocodiles may be one of the deadliest hunters in the animal kingdom, but in a small village in Burkina Faso it is not unusual to see someone sitting atop one of the fearsome reptiles. People in Bazoule, around 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the capital Ouagadougou, share their pond with more than 100 of the razor-toothed creatures. We got used to the crocodiles when we were young, swimming in the water with them and all that, said Pierre Kabore, just a few metres (yards) away from a crocodile feasting on chicken provided by the village. Now we can always approach them and sit on them -- and if you have the courage, you can lie on them too. Theres no problem, they are sacred crocodiles. They dont do anything to anyone. According to local legend, the startling relationship with the predators dates back to at least the 15th century. The village was in the grip of an agonising drought until the crocodiles led women to a hidden pond where the population could slake their thirst. A boy leans on the back of a crocodile on May 19, 2018 at a pond in Bazoule in Burkina Faso. (AFP Photo) The villagers organised a party to celebrate and thank the reptiles, Kabore said. A celebration known as Koom Lakre is still held every year during which villagers make sacrifices and ask the animals to grant their wishes of health, prosperity and a good harvest. Far from being considered a threat, the crocodiles are deemed to have a mystical connection with Bazoule. Crocodiles are represented as the soul of our ancestors and if one of them dies, they are buried and even given a funeral as if they were human, said Kabore. When a misfortune is about to happen in the village, they cry out. Elders are charged with interpreting the cries, and then make wishes to ward off bad luck. A crocodile is fed with a dead chicken attached to a pole on May 19, 2018 at a pond in Bazoule in Burkina Faso. (AFP Photo) Tourism attraction The unusual contact between man and croc has drawn disbelieving tourists to the village to see for themselves. On their arrival, travellers can buy a chicken which is hung on a stick by a guide and used to entice the crocodiles out of the pond so that visitors can pose with the creatures. It was nice to watch from a distance but sitting on one was a bit freaky, said Thomas Baspin, a young Frenchman who came to visit his grandparents in Burkina Faso. Im glad I did it -- but Im also glad its over! he quipped. Tourism has become a big money-spinner for the impoverished villagers, but a three-year-old jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso is taking its toll. Ouagadougou has come under attack three times, most recently in March, when jihadists attacked the military headquarters and French embassy. We could have more than 10,000 visitors per year but at the moment, theres no more than 4,000 or 5,000, said Raphael Kabore, one of the guides. Global warming is also believed to be having an impact. Rainfall levels are down each year, and the famous pond that is the crocodiles home is shrinking. When it disappears, will the reptiles once more guide their human friends to a new watery home? North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday began an unprecedented third visit to China in three months, with experts saying he is expected to brief the Chinese leadership about his summit with US President Donald Trump last week. Chinese state media announced Kims latest visit ahead of his arrival on Tuesday, breaking from the protocol of publicising his earlier trips only after they were over, and reported he would stay for two days. We hope this visit can help to further deepen China-North Korea relations, strengthen strategic communication between both countries on important issues and promote regional peace and stability, Chinas foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a regular news briefing. Kim met President Xi Jinping in Beijing in March, the first time he had travelled abroad after assuming power in 2011. Next, he came to the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian in May, when he again met Xi to discuss ties, providing a photo-op of the two leaders taking a stroll on the beach. On June 12, Kim met Trump in Singapore for what was touted as the most high-profile political summit in recent years. The summit marked the first meeting between a top North Korean leader and a serving US president. Trump and Kim signed a joint statement that committed the US to providing security guarantees to North Korea in exchange for Pyongyangs commitment to complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. However, the document was criticised for being short on specifics, such as a timeframe for denuclearisation or the steps to be taken by North Korea to wind up its nuclear programme. Trump also said the US would stop annual joint military exercises with South Korea, which according to Chinese state media has been denounced by Pyongyang as rehearsals for a northward invasion. Kims trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China remains North Koreas most important diplomatic and economic backer and has welcomed the suspension of the US-South Korea military drills. Kim may discuss details on implementing the agreement signed in Singapore as North Korea needs assistance on denuclearisation and China is an indispensable part of a peace treaty on the Korean Peninsula, Zhang Huizhi, vice dean of the Northeast Asian Studies College at Jilin University, told state-run Global Times tabloid on Tuesday. China will want the US and North Korea to find a peaceful way to resolve tensions and avoid conflict, and they also share the goal of denuclearisation, but their primary interest is maintaining leverage and influence in and over North Korea, said Paul Haenle, director of the CarnegieTsinghua Center for Global Policy. Ideally for China, a US-North Korea long-term deal would undermine the political rationale in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo for continued US military presence, radars and troops on the peninsula and in Japan, he added. Chinas dual suspension proposal North Korea stopping weapons tests and the US and South Korea stopping military drills has worked out, and the current situation on the Korean Peninsula is favorable for both sides, Zhang said. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un met with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday at the start of a two-day visit at which hes expected to discuss his next steps after last weeks nuclear summit with US President Donald Trump. Kims visit to Beijing is his third since March, highlighting Chinas crucial role in efforts by the U.S. and others to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. The US has long looked to China to use its influence with North Korea to bring it to negotiations, but the visit comes as ties between Beijing and Washington are being tested by a major trade dispute. State broadcaster CCTV showed Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, being welcomed by Xi with full military honors at the Great Hall of the People, the seat of the legislature in the heart of Beijing. In their ensuing talks, Xi affirmed the outcome of the Kim-Trump summit in Singapore. Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, then hosted Kim and Ri at a welcoming banquet, CCTV reported. Chinas official Xinhua News Agency announced the North Korean leaders visit shortly after he apparently landed Tuesday morning, dispensing with the secrecy shrouding previous trips to China by Kim and his father and predecessor, Kim Jong Il. On the younger Kims first visit to China as leader, he took an armored train as his father had. His first two trips were not announced until after he had safely returned to North Korea. Chinese President Xi Jinping is exerting a lot of influence from behind the scenes, said Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. I expect they will talk about the path going forward and where priorities should lie, Glaser said. Those priorities, from Chinas perspective, would be to ensure that Beijing is included in any peace treaty talks and in creating an environment on the Korean Peninsula that will make it unnecessary for US troops to remain. Security was tight Tuesday morning at Beijing airport, where paramilitary police prevented journalists from taking photos. A motorcade including sedans, minibuses, motorcycles and a stretch limo with a golden emblem similar to one Kim used previously was seen leaving the airport and later entering the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, where senior Chinese officials meet with visiting leaders. A similar convoy of vehicles was seen heading in the direction of the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing on Tuesday afternoon. Police motorcycles accompany a motorcade believed to be carrying North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Beijing, China on June 19. (REUTERS) Kim was diplomatically isolated for years before making his first foreign trip as leader in March to meet with Xi in Beijing. This is his third visit to China, North Koreas main ally and key source of trade and economic assistance. Following his summit with Trump in Singapore, Kim was expected to meet with Chinese leaders to discuss progress in halting his countrys missile and nuclear weapons programs in exchange for economic incentives. Kim is likely hoping to get Chinas support for relief from punishing UN sanctions. Chinas foreign ministry refused to provide details on Kims visit other than to say that Beijing hopes it will help deepen relations between the countries. Geng Shuang, a ministry spokesman, said at a regular briefing Tuesday that the visit would strengthen our strategic communication on major issues to promote regional peace and stability. Geng said Beijing supported Russias calls last week for unilateral sanctions on North Korea ones that arent imposed within the United Nations framework to be canceled immediately. China always stands against the so-called unilateral sanctions outside the Security Council framework. This position is very clear and we believe sanctions themselves are not the end, Geng said. While Beijing and Moscow have supported UN restrictions, they bristle at Washington imposing unilateral sanctions to pressure North Korea. The Singapore meeting resulted in a surprise announcement of a US suspension of military drills with its South Korean ally, a goal long pursued by China and North Korea. That move is seen as potentially weakening defences and diplomacy among Americas Asian allies, while bolstering China and Russia. The US has stationed combat troops in South Korea since the Korean War, in which China fought on North Koreas side and which ended in 1953 with an armistice and no peace treaty. A car believed to be carrying North Korean leader Kim Jong Un drives down Chang'an Avenue towards Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China on June 19. (REUTERS) South Koreas Foreign Ministry said Kims visit to China highlights the constructive role Beijing could play in disarming North Korea. Ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-duk also downplayed concerns that improving relations between China and North Korea could result in loosened Chinese sanctions against North Korea. Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor at Renmin Universitys School of International Studies in Beijing, said it was significant that Chinese state broadcaster CCTV announced Kims visit before his return home. This is an improvement. This shows that China is moving toward a healthier and more normal direction in relations with North Korea, Cheng said. He added that the frequency of Kims visits three so far this year was unprecedented. Yang Mu-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said Kims visits show the recent chill in the two countries ties over Kims development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles had fully lifted. I believe that indicates that the blood alliance between the North and China has been completely restored, Yang said. Washington has long pressed Beijing to use its influence to compel North Korea into negotiations, but Kims visit comes as a dispute over the large trade imbalance between China and the US has been escalating, moving them closer to a potential trade war. That could make it less attractive for China to use its influence over North Korea to help the US achieve its objectives of denuclearization. The potential comprehensive trade war will make the cooperation between China and US in North Koreas nuclear issue more complicated, Cheng said. There will be a big question mark over whether China and the US will continue this cooperation. The families of those killed in the 1985 terrorist bombing of Air India flight 182, the Kanishka, are troubled by plans of a leading pro-Khalistan group in Canada to organise an event at a Toronto memorial for the victims on the eve of the anniversary of the tragedy. The march to mourn the victims of Air India 182 is being organised by the Shiromani Akali Dal Amritsars Canada East unit, a group that has openly espoused Khalistan. Leading the effort is pro-Khalistan figure Sukhminder Singh Hansra, who said that even though solidarity and statements have been issued many times before, this year, for the first time, the organisation is holding a formal candlelight vigil at the memorial at Humber Bay in Toronto. This was the memorial visited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his 2015 trip to Canada. Bal Gupta, chairman of the Air India 182 Victims Families Association, voiced disquiet at the development. He said, It will be upsetting to the families, theres no doubt about it. It doesnt sound right basically, he said, adding it could possibly be a case of guilty conscience. Hansra, though, said this collective effort on behalf of the community has a different objective. We believe that the misinformation about the bombing is haunting Sikhs. Therefore we need to be on record that we too mourn the loss of lives. He was a leading figure in the move last December to ban Indian officials from gurdwaras across Canada. He is considered among the main grassroots organisers of the pro-Khalistan movement in Canada. Hansra said the Sikh community is facing stigma for the past 33 years over the bombing that claimed 329 lives. He sought a new commission of inquiry with absolute powers to again investigate the bombing. Hardliners, including Hansra, have supported a conspiracy theory claiming the bombing was a false flag operation to malign the Khalistan movement. However, retired Supreme Court judge John Major, who headed a commission of inquiry that submitted its report in 2010, has been categorical that the mastermind of the plot was Babbar Khalsa International leader Talwinder Singh Parmar, a contention that wasnt disputed during the trial. Victims family members such as Gupta, who lost his wife Ramwati in the bombing, dismiss the alternate theory: The trial was quite clear who did it. Gupta isnt pleased with this attempt by groups with agendas to insert themselves into the day of remembrance. Families will attend a commemoration event on the morning of June 23, the anniversary, at Queens Park in Toronto, the site of the first-ever memorial in honour of the victims, before the evening vigil at the Humber Bay memorial. The night the Saudi government declared an end to its ban on women driving, Aziza Alyousef was elated. The retired professor was inundated with celebratory calls and messages after years of fighting for the freedom. She couldnt wait to get in line for a license. I want to be No. 1, Alyousef told a reporter after the governments announcement in September. Alyousef now awaits the milestone behind bars. She was detained last month, along with some of the most outspoken womens rights advocates in the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom. With days to go before the ban is lifted, nine of the 17 people arrested remain in prison, accused of aiding enemies of the state. Their names were splashed across the front page of a local newspaper, branding them as traitors. Theyve been anonymously accused of being agents of Qatar, which is feuding with Saudi Arabia. The public prosecutor says those in custody have admitted to charges including cooperating with individuals and organizations hostile to the kingdom and providing financial and moral support to hostile elements abroad. Authorities havent provided more details on what that means. The Saudi governments Center for International Communication didnt respond to requests for comment. For years, officials justified banning women from driving by saying Saudi society wasnt ready. While Islam doesnt prohibit itand, indeed, women drive regularly in every other Muslim-majority country in the worldsome Saudis believe it leads to moral corruption. There is genuine excitement in some circles as the big day, June 24, approaches. Social media is full of women posing proudly with their new licenses. Women who want to drive say theyre sick of paying for Ubers or relying on male relatives, who arent always around. I need to drive, said Haya Aldosari, 35, who tried a driving simulator at a recent exhibition in Riyadh. Even if our customs and traditions say no, I must. But while many womens lives are expanding in the kingdom, the space between the goals in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salmans Vision 2030 program and the reality on the ground is often vast. The young prince has promised to diversify the economy and loosen social restrictionsBloomberg Economics estimates that allowing women to drive could add $90 billion to economic output by 2030but at the same time, he is tightening the noose on the kingdoms limited civil society. The crackdown follows the usual path of a group in power keeping people on message: Youre either with us or against us. The government has closed any kind of space thats left for people to safely voice their concerns, said Hala Al-Dosari, a Saudi researcher in the United States. Instead of seeing them as allies, the new government viewed them as hostile, she said. She believes authorities want people to fall in line, not push for more change. Indeed, the women targeted have been fighting for more basic freedoms than the right to drive, including the end to guardianship, the Saudi legal system that requires women to have the approval of a male relative to travel outside the country or get married. Alyousef, who is about 60 years old, was one of the most visible and best-known advocates for women. An Associated Press photo of her driving during a 2014 protest, with a black scarf wrapped around her face, was published by newspapers and websites around the globe. For years, she served as an accessible point of contact for Saudi women in difficult situations, fielding messages about restrictive families or workplaces, offering advice and help where she could. In 2016, she submitted a petition to the government calling for the end of guardianship. At occasional salons in her home in Riyadh, Saudi intellectuals would discuss politics and womens empowerment over tea and cardamom-spiced coffee. With bright eyes, sweeping hand gestures and strong opinions, Alyousef rarely minced words. Whats going on is slavery, she said during a small gathering last July, when the discussion turned to guardianship. She dismissed changes such as high-level business and government appointments for women. This is window dressing, she said. After the announcement that the driving ban would be lifted, Alyousef and other activists celebrated their breakthrough. Then the mood changed. One by one, they started receiving calls from authorities warning them to stay silent. Alyousef got the message. Her once-lively Twitter account went dormant. Loujain AlHathloul, another prominent activist in her 20s, went quiet for a while but then started tweeting again. In March, she was detained in the United Arab Emirates, forced onto a two-hour flight back to Riyadh, then interrogated for three days at Al Hair prison, a maximum-security facility where Islamic militants are held, according to people familiar with the matter. After her release, she and her family members were banned from leaving the country, the people said. She stopped tweeting. Then, about a month ago, she was arrested again. Facebook: Vogue Arabia The arrests have sent a chill through Saudi Arabias intellectual elite. People who once talked freely with foreign journalists are now cancelling meetings, saying theyre worried about the risk. At a recent gathering in the Saudi capital Riyadh, a Saudi businessman called the arrests shameful, though he acknowledged that in public he beats the drum for the government, painting a rosy picture of the kingdom. It is clear the Saudi leadership wants to end all independent political activism, said Kristin Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. Both the timing of the arrests and the smear campaign accompanying them suggest an effort to paint the new reality of women driving in nationalist colors. Even some of Prince Mohammeds supporters say he risks spoiling some of the goodwill he has been building up. A lot of good reform is being done despite what cynics say but mistakes are inevitable and this sure looks like one, tweeted Ali Shihabi, head of the Arabia Foundation, a pro-Saudi think tank in the U.S. Women are unlikely to push for change in public now, observers say. The future is state feminism led by the government, said Al-Dosari, the researcher. Vogue Arabia recently featured a coiffed princess behind the wheel of a red Mercedes-Benz convertible on its cover, calling her a driving force. The cover was criticized for ignoring the non-royal women who had protested on the streets at great risk. [The government] will keep pushing for reforms that will allow women to be workers and consumers, Al-Dosari said. Whatever will allow more spending. To contact the author of this story: Vivian Nereim in Riyadh at vnereim@bloomberg.net. South Korean and US officials confirmed on Tuesday the suspension of scheduled joint military drills, making good on a pledge by President Donald Trump during his summit with North Koreas leader. Seoul, which has tens of thousands of US troops on its soil to help protect it from its hostile northern neighbour, said the suspension would affect the large-scale Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises slated for August. South Korea and the US plan to continue discussions for further measures, the Souths defence ministry said in a statement, adding that no decisions have been reached for other ensuing drills. Some 17,500 US military personnel were due to take part in the Freedom Guardian drills. We are still coordinating additional actions. No decisions on subsequent war games have been made, Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said in confirming the suspension. There is no impact on Pacific exercises outside of the Korean Peninsula. White said US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton would meet later this week at the Pentagon to discuss the issue. Last week, Trump made the surprise announcement that the US would halt war games with its South Korean security ally -- without making clear when the freeze would begin. The US leader raised eyebrows by describing the exercises as provocative -- a term used by the North. US and South Korean forces have been training together for years, and routinely rehearse everything from beach landings to an invasion from the North, or even decapitation strikes targeting the North Korean regime. Pyongyang typically reacts furiously. Following drills last year, the North fired ballistic missiles over Japan, triggering global alarm. Trumps decision raised concern in Japan, which hosts tens of thousands of US troops and has eyed the diplomatic outreach to Pyongyang with deep suspicion. But officials were sanguine on the announcement today, with Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera saying Trumps move would not affect US-Japan exercises. In talks with Secretary Mattis, we confirmed that we will implement drills between Japan and the US, he told reporters. Foreign Minister Taro Kono added that Tokyo understood the drills were being halted as a way to press Pyongyang to negotiate in good faith. I understand that if North Korea stops negotiating with good will, the joint drills will resume, he said. Choi Hyun-soo, a South Korea defence ministry spokeswoman, added: We are expecting a corresponding measure from North Korea in response to the suspension of the joint drills. At their landmark Singapore summit, Trump and North Koreas Kim Jong Un signed a joint statement in which Pyongyang committed to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. But critics have pointed to the vague wording of the non-binding document and raised fears that the summit could weaken the international coalition against the Norths nuclear programme. Pompeo, who has stressed that sanctions will remain in place until North Koreas complete denuclearisation, said he plans to meet Kim for follow-up talks. South Korea said sanctions against the North could be eased once it takes substantive steps towards denuclearisation, seemingly setting the bar lower than Washington for such a move. But Pompeos office said both allies remain committed to the goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation. President Donald Trump vowed on Monday that the United States would not become a migrant camp as he faced mounting pressure to stop families being separated as a deterrent to illegal immigration. The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility, Trump said in remarks delivered at the White House. It wont be. You look at whats happening in Europe, you look at whats happening in other places, we cant allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch. About 2,000 children have been separated from their parents or guardians over six weeks, according to US authorities, since the Trump administration announced that all migrants illegally crossing the Mexican border would be arrested, regardless of whether the adults were seeking asylum. Since children cannot be sent to the facilities where their parents are held, they are separated from them. Trump has repeatedly said he wants family separations to end, but has refused to take responsibility for them -- instead blaming Democrats, the minority party in Congress, whom he accuses of blocking legislation on the broader issue of illegal immigration. He doubled down on that claim on Monday in a series of tweets, and again in remarks before a meeting of the National Space Council. If the Democrats would sit down instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly. Good for the children, good for the country, good for the world, he said. We have the worst immigration laws in the entire world. Were stuck with these horrible laws. Theyre horrible laws. Whats happening is so sad, is so sad. And it can be taken care of quickly, beautifully, he said. But just remember, a country without borders is not a country at all. We need borders, we need security. We need safety. We have to take care of our people. W illesden might be described as the old lady of north-west London suburbs, a faded star now intent on staging a comeback. The area has some elegant pockets, as well as rougher corners where it meets Neasden and Harlesden. Grand houses stand in close contrast to council blocks. Most homes are Edwardian or Thirties. Vitally, you get more for your money here than in nearby Maida Vale or Queens Park, but the price gap is narrowing. Its a good location for young professionals working in the finance sector as the Jubilee line cuts through this part of London, meaning you dont have to live in the City or Canary Wharf to be early in the office. Gladstone Village is a new micro-neighbourhood where Willesden meets Dollis Hill. Housing association Octavia Living is selling four-bedroom houses priced from 995,000. Flats will be available later. Call 020 8208 8355 for more details. New flats from 450,000 have been unveiled at Shoot-Up Hill. Call Hamptons on 020 3151 7649. Beat NW10 Over at Willesden Green, Notting Hill Housing has 16 flats from 400,000 at Beat NW10. Call 020 3815 1234. Appointment 19 June 2018 EVEN Hotel Miami Airport, which is slated to open October 2018 as the EVEN brands first property in the Southeastern United States, announces the appointment of Armando Hernandez as Chief Wellness Officer. EVEN Hotels is InterContinental Groups newest lifestyle brand and is the first and only hotel brand created with wellness at its core. Equal to a general manager role at a traditional hotel, Hernandezs responsibilities include overseeing operations at the new property, as well as sales, marketing, and food & beverage. Additionally, as Chief Wellness Officer, he will also ensure the brand pillars Eat Well, Rest Easy, Keep Active and Accomplish More are manifested throughout the guest experience. Hernandez has a notable career track with more than 20 years in the hospitality industry. Through his leadership, Hernandez has achieved remarkable outcomes in revenue growth, employee retention and guest satisfaction results. His management experience began at Tecton Hospitality, where he spent 11 years as General Manager between properties such as Best Western South Miami, The Betsy Ross Hotel, The Strand Ocean Drive and Howard Johnson Plaza Hotel & Conference Center, all properties located in South Florida. In 2010, Hernandez went on to work for Hospitality Ventures, serving as General Manager for Ramada Hialeah-Miami Airport North where he exceeded the house profit by 44.81% in 2012. Hernandez then joined Trust Hospitality in 2015 as General Manager of Best Western on the Bay and was responsible for a $4 million property renovation, rebranding decisions, facility upgrades, providing strategic operational insight in driving room sales, and occupancy growth and profits for the hotel. During this time, he maintained a 49% flow-through rate for the 118-room property. We are delighted to have Armando Hernandez leading EVEN Hotel Miami Airport, the first of the IHG brand to enter South Florida. Through his management, Hernandez will also ensure a strong brand presence in the market, paving the way for further development in the U.S, said Noel Epelboim, CEO of Epelboim Development Group. With his managing experience and exceptional track record as an accomplished leader, we are confident that he will help grow the brands development while maintaining a passionate environment a wellness-centric lifestyle amid team members and guests. EVEN Hotel Miami Airport broke ground earlier this year and is expected to open its doors in October 2018. The unique brand was designed to help travelers Eat Well, Rest Easy, Keep Active and Accomplish More. EVEN Hotels offers wellness-minded travelers more options to maintain their wellness routine while away from home. Supplier News 18 June 2018 Infor, a leading provider of industry-specific cloud applications, today announced the success Kennenbunkport Resort Collection has had since their go-live of Infor Hospitality Management (HMS) in 2017. With nine diverse, yet luxurious, properties, Kennenbunkport Resort Collection selected Infor HMS because of the unified system that provides a single and holistic view of their organization. After deciding Infor HMS, the teams at Infor and the resort began to plan the implementation strategy and train for the go-live day - where eight properties successfully went live at the same time. In total, the teams have transitioned 239 rooms between the nine hotels, including integrations between other systems like Digital Alchemy, Windsurfer, Duetto, Merchant Link, and Micros. "When we began looking for a new back office system to better support our needs at the resort, we instantly knew it was going to be a fit after meeting with the team at Infor. The team understood our extremely unique needs, and after time it felt like a friend was helping us implement this new software," said Heather Strout, Director of Revenue Management and Project Manager for the implementation, Kennenbunkport Resort Collection. "As a seasonal business, it is absolutely critical that we get everything right during our peak season. With one busy season under our belt using Infor, we could not be happier with the support and outcome of our selection." Infor HMS provides a centralized, unified look at guests and business performance and offers tools and features to help hotels reach high-value customers through the right channel-and with the right room at the right price, regardless of their size. Supported by powerful analytics, the solution also helps users quickly comprehend statistical information and gain real-world insights through data they are already collecting. "In today's world, hotels need to have technology on the backend that is supporting a high-touch, guest-centric environment, whether it's a large global chain, or small independent hotel," said Stewart Applbaum, executive vice president, Infor. "Infor solutions are designed to meet the unique needs of the hospitality industry - from ever-changing room rates to managing guest preferences. For a seasonal operation such as Kennenbunkport, having organization-wide visibility and support is critical to provide the best guest experiences possible." About Infor Supplier News 19 June 2018 Atlanta, GA -- ReviewPro, the world leader in Guest Intelligence solutions for the hospitality industry, doubles down to expand its already strong presence in the US by setting up offices in Atlanta, Georgia. This new office is the home of the company's customer success team that will support both North & South American based clients. The ReviewPro team is housed in the Shiji US headquarters. Shiji acquired a majority stake in ReviewPro in December 2016. In the last year, ReviewPro has significantly increased its market share in the US. A partial client list includes Red Lion Hotels, Hard Rock, Loews Hotels, and Viceroy Hotel Group. The North American market is the fastest-growing market for the world leader in Guest Intelligence, providing its Guest Experience Improvement Suite to 40,000 hotels globally. ReviewPro has stolen market share from the local players like Revinate and Medallia by offering hotel brands the opportunity to identify and prioritize operational and service improvements, enhance the guest experience, boost online reputation, and ultimately increase profits. RJ Friedlander, Founder and CEO at ReviewPro, commented "Customer support is particularly important for the demands of the US market, and we are excited to establish a local support team for new clients as well as our existing US based clients." Opinion Article 19 June 2018 Founded back in 2014, BevSpot is a promising Boston-based startup company that is delivering on a promise to make life easier for bars. Now, moving on to the next logical progression, the company has expanded its domain by launching BevSpot Food, an expanded service suited to restaurants, distributors, and suppliers. Complex at its core, BevSpot is simple in practice, allowing owners and staff to take control of critical elements of their business from any device. The potential for this kind of innovation is mirrored in the funding key investors have made in the new company. To date, BevSpot has garnered more than $17 million in successive rounds of funding. The merits of the startup have been lauded by TechCrunch and many others. For this report, I had the unique opportunity to connect with co-founder Rory Crawford. Here is the gist of our interview in which we discussed BevSpot. Advertisements Phil Butler: Since I've some experience in the restaurant business, the first thing I thought of on learning about the BevSpot platform was the capability for "food cost" reduction. Can you briefly tell us about the innovative thought process involved in developing such a complete tool? Rory Crawford: We have always been very focused on making sure our product development process involves our customer as much as possible. When we began to develop our Food software, we visited our customers' kitchens, freezers, offices to observe their processes and better understand their challenges. We took that learning and built the product in a way that would be applicable to any food business anywhere in the world. We iterate on a weekly, and sometimes daily, basis to build product very quickly with real-time customer feedback. This collaborative and iterative process, combined with amazing customer support, enabled us to develop a truly innovative and highly valuable product in a fraction the time of traditional development cycles. Phil Butler: The BevSpot Food Program Management Software is technology to track everything from inventory to spoilage and even customer preferences. Just how "smart" is the software for predicting customer preferences? Do you think there's a "big data"analytics future for your product in the future? Rory Crawford: I often think the word "data" and "big data" can sound intimidating to a person trying to run a business. What has always excited me most about this industry is that "small data" has the potential to be amazingly beneficial. It can be the difference between a business' success and failure. BevSpot is "smartest" in the way in which it converts complicated information into extremely simple and actionable insights. For instance, it will tell a customer what their top-selling and least profitable drinks are. This is extremely simple data but is difficult for operators to access this data on a regular basis without our product. BevSpot will even make recommendations on how the user can improve those few items to drive significant profits. The magic of BevSpot is delivering this extremely simple and impactful data to the user in a manner that they can use to improve their business immediately. Over time, we will make increasingly exciting analytics applications on our industry data, but our approach will be the sameconvert complicated information represented by large datasets into extremely simple, actionable, and impactful insights that can improve businesses. Phil Butler: It's obvious the Bevspot software will help restaurateurs get an angle on efficiency but do you have any case studies or figures on "how much" clients can improve their bottom line? Rory Crawford: One of the best things about our product is that it tracks this data for the customer so that everybody in the business can see the improvements. Across our entire customer base, we have seen an average of 4% improvement in program profitability and a 25-50% improvement in cash efficiency through inventory reduction. These are extremely impactful results for restaurants. Phil Butler: Can this software be utilized for operations outside the food and beverage area? Rory Crawford: Food and beverage operations are our core focus. Any processes associated with these processes, such as vendor relations or accounting processes, can benefit from BevSpot as well. But we are deeply focused on improving the core food & beverage operations of our customers. Phil Butler: What is the next step for BevSpot? Rory Crawford: More effort, innovation, and value for our customers. We always say we are 99.9% away from where we want to be as a product and company. We will continue to work closely with our customers to understand their challenges and use our tech-first approach to help them improve their businesses. Summing Up BevSpot now has hundreds of customers taking advantage of the efficiencies Crawford's company delivers. From a technology and startup standpoint, making technologies that streamline inventory efficiency satisfies the "Holy Grail" for success. That is, BevSpot solves a significant point of pain for food and beverage businesses. What's most fascinating for me is the fact Crawford's company seems to have become the thought leader inventory management for these niches of the hospitality industry. It will be interesting to see BevSpot in markets outside the U.S. Improving June 19th is a symbolic day in history since it's the day U.S. Army ships forced Texas landowners to free the last of their slaves in 1865. This move is viewed as the last day of slavery in the United States and is now dubbed Juneteenth. In light of the day, Pharrell and Black-ish creator Kenya Barris have announced their collaboration in creating a musical about the Independence Day. For us, this project isnt about numbers; its about humanity, Kenya said. Slavery is Americas recessive gene and its time we all dealt with it and what better way to have an audience swallow this dose of medicine than with amazing music and raw, honest, jaw-dropping comedy? Not many details have been shared about the plot, we do know that the musical will follow two families - one set in modern times while the other is set during the Civil War. Pharrell will compose the musical content under his I Am Other production company. Kenya did have his hit ABC series discuss the topic briefly in season fours premiere - check it out below. DJ Whoo Kid is undoubtedly one of the most legendary mixtape DJ's of our time. Over the course of his career, he's hosted mixtapes for some of hip hop's titans. Whoo Kid's been on board with the G-Unit movement from damn near it's inception and worked with each member on their own mixtapes. Today, he joins forces with Young Buck and Raekwon for their new track, "NY Shit" for an exclusive HNHH Premiere. DJ Whoo Kid taps Young Buck and Raekwon for the new song, "NY Shit." Buck makes his way from Cashville to NYC and links up with Raekwon to deliver a heavy New York banger that delivers a hint of nostalgia for any fans of G-Unit's mixtape run. In an exclusive quote to HNHH, Young Buck explains that although he's Nashville, NYC holds a special place in his heart. "NYC is like my second home, and I wanted to give back to the streets on this one. Whoo Kid and I went back into our classic mixtape mode for this one." He said. Young Buck's been going hard. At the tail end of 2017, he delivered his latest mixtape, 10 Street Commandments and followed up with a video for "Run Off." However, it seems like he has more in store for the future. Earlier this year, it was revealed that Buck's next project will be executive produced by 50 Cent and Dr. Dre. Prior to that, he released his single, "Can't Lose" ft. Twanee and a few days a go, he released the visuals for the song. Keep your eyes peeled for more moves from Young Buck. Quotable Lyrics My Puerto Ricans in the Bronx got bricks like Chapo I bring terror to n***as squads like my name Fat Joe I'm a project n***a, Marcy n***a my hat low My Queens n***as have you sayin' 'what you do that fo'?' Hours after the death of XXXTENTACION, there are new reports on another death in the hip hop community. Pittsburgh's Jimmy Wopo was among two men who were shot in a Pittsburgh shooting. Both men were transported to the hospital. Wopo was confirmed to be in critical condition while the other victim was reportedly in stable condition at the time. Unfortunately, Jimmy Wopo died shortly after. KDKA reports Jimmy Wopo was shot earlier today in a drive by shooting. The police said that both victims were taken to the hospital after a double shooting in the Hill District. Unfortunately, Wopo died in the hospital shortly after. Jimmy Wopo's manager confirmed the news on Facebook. "I lost my brother today and its the worst feeling in the world. He was destined for greatness and he wanted the best for his friends, family and community. We lost a great person today, but just know I will do everything in my power to make his memory live on forever. Love you bro #LongLiveWopo" he wrote. Jimmy Wopo was not only making buzz in his city but was gearing up to be the next out of Pittsburgh. Prior to his manager confirming the news, Juicy J and Pusha T both mourned the buzzing rapper death on Twitter. R.I.P. Jimmy Wopo. Another great artist gone too soon. XXXTENTACION may have been troubled but his talent was undeniable. Over the past few months, he's made a concerted effort to be a better person; something he's documented on social media regularly. He was constantly trying to show love to the kids in some form or another. He was one of the few artists from the younger generation who was really able to connect with the older generation and the younger generation. Following news of his death, both Kanye West and J. Cole paid their respects to the rapper. J. Cole and Kanye West took to Twitter to pay their respect to XXXTENTACION. J. Cole previously shared his thoughts about XXXTENTACION on No Jumper's vlog and revealed how much he loved his music. "This got me fucked up. RIP X. Enormous talent and limitless potential and a strong desire to be a better person. God bless his family, friends and fans." wrote J. Cole. Kanye West revealed that XXXTENTACION was an inspiration to him. 'Ye shared a photo of X on Twitter and wrote, "rest in peace I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing." Along with Kanye West and J. Cole, many other prominent figures in hip hop paid their respects on social media including Meek Mill, 2 Chainz, Lil Yachty, Tekashi 6ix9ine and more. Our thoughts are with XXXTENTACION's family. What an incredibly sad day for hip-hop. Just hours after XXXTentacion was senselessly gunned down in his home state of Florida, fellow Pittsburgh rapper & T.G.O.D affiliate Jimmy Wopo was also shot & killed on the streets of his home town as well. Jimmy Wopo was reportedly shot in a double drive by shooting Monday afternoon. The police said that both victims were taken to the hospital but where Jimmy Wopo was said to be in critical condition after being shot in the face and the other man was in stable condition. Unfortunately, Wopo didnt make it through & was pronounced dead at the hospital. Immediately following the news of his passing, several fans & fellow peers took to social media to pay their respects and condolences, including Wiz Khalifa, Juicy J, Pusha T, and many more. We rounded up some of the reactions from the hip-hop community as they learned about the second death of the day. R.I.P Jimmy Wopo. Ramriddlz just finished up his European tour dates that saw him hit up Stockholm, London, Manchester, Madrid, Milan and more. During his little tour, he must have indulged in a lot of fine cheese since his latest track is all about the dairy product. Been getting cheese in Europe, all kinds of fromage, UK cheese, Mozzarella, parmigiana reggiano, Stockholm Swiss, and thats what was on my mind when I made this," he told Fader. The Jaegen & Kenny Beats produced track is a nice tune nonetheless and although Ram may claim it's all about cheese, the lyrical content clearly has more context. "Last year I was cheesed, I was pissed poor / This year getting cheese, getting big dope/ Diamonds do the disco." Just last night Ram came through with a graphic filled video for the tune that you can watch below. Comment what you think and let us know if you're looking for a new tape courtesy of the man. Some might remember Rick Ross being sued a couple of years ago because of his use of the name "Mastermind." A legal battle was initiated in 2015, a virtually unknown rapper who bears the name filed a lawsuit against Ross, Def Jam Records, and Universal Music Group. The allegations included trademark infringement, unjust enrichment, and misappropriation of the name in question. In 2013, Ross released his sixth studio album and named it "Mastermind." The plaintiff, independent artist Raul Caiz, claimed to have been active under this name for 20 years and had the moniker trademarked. Songs by the independent artist were already in rotation on the radio. He asserted that Ross' use of the name caused confusion in the market, an impediment to his career. The record debuted at the top spot on Billboard 100. Then a tour of the same name was announced. Ross began calling himself "Mastermind" during interviews, shows, and appearances. Others started using the nickname to refer to Ross from then. In December 2016, a judge sided with Ross and his affiliates, after which Caiz motioned for an appeal. Last week, a jury overturned the original decision made by the judge and awarded the plaintiff his requested amount of $2 million. [via] On Monday, hip-hop lost one of its brightest and most talented young artists when XXXTentacion was senselessly gunned down in his vehicle right outside Miami. According to TMZ, police say that the suspects were black males wearing hoodies and that the shooter was wearing a red mask. Since the description was revealed, fans have been online putting their detective hats on and trying to figure out who the culprits were, and many believe its local rappers Soldier Kidd and Soldier Jojo. The two have been sharing various photos on social media, one of which shows them with a red mask in their car, and another which indicated that they were minutes away from Xs location, with a gun in tow. Soldier Kidd posted a Boomerang photo on his Instagram Monday, which showed that he had picked up food from a nearby eatery in Deerfield Beach, not too far from where XXX was shot. Soldier Kidd tagged Hook Fish and Chicken, which happened to be just 6-8 minutes away from the motorcycle shop X was at prior to getting shot at. When you pause the boomerang photo, you can see the two had a gun with them at the restaurant as well. Well since these rumors were starting to pick up, the Florida rapper decided to hop on social media and address the allegations. Of course he denied having any part of Xs death, but the evidence is pretty telling if indeed true. Man we all got love for the Florida nigga. I got love for Broward. I don't even know who the man was. We out here handling business. We out here getting money bro. We aint go no time for none of this shit thats going on. But listen, all my condolences go to the mans family and what not, Soldier said. I aint have nothing to do with it. Check out the response (below) and be sure to swipe right to see all the hints and details thats making him out to be the possible shooter. Its pretty crazy. The 2018 MTV Movie & TV Awards are going down right now at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, California, which are being hosted by comedian Tiffany Haddish. So to kick off the night right, Tiffany put together a hilarious opening monologue that captured & made fun of this years biggest pop culture events, including Black Panther, Girls Trip, and even a pregnant Cardi B. However, it was her roast session on some celebrities in attendance that gave the crowd the most laughs. For the first part, Haddish inserted herself into Black Panther's ceremonial scene, while working in her Girls Trip castmates Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifah into the edited clip as well. Haddish then took the stage in a white gown inspired by Cardi's pregnancy-revealing look on Saturday Night Live while putting a parody spin on her hit smash "Bodak Yellow." "These is rented/these is not my size/these toes turning blue she hilariously spits. Lastly, Haddish went on to close the opening monologue by roasting a handful of the celebrities in attendance, which got the most laughs from the crowd. She compared the Kardashian family to the Star Wars franchise, cracking, "They make a ton of money, a new one's always popping up and theyre ruled by a bossy overlord who sleeps in a mask and she loves black men." She also roasted Zendaya, Nick Jonas, Chris Pratt, the cast of Stranger Things and Seth Rogen. "I like you Seth," Haddish joked. "You're my favorite bearded white man since Abraham Lincoln. However everyone looked to be in good spirits about the roast session, including Kim Kardashian who was seen laughing out loud about her & her mother's comments. Watch the funny opening monologue (below). Wendy Williams is the talk show host known for stirring the pot when it comes celebrity gossip. Her who-cares attitude and sometimes savage remarks have gotten her in hot water more times than once. Back in February, Wendy had to take some time off air due to Graves disease. The 53-year-old took three weeks off due to flu-like symptoms that saw her faint on-air. More recently, Wendy was spotted out with her son Kevin and many have taken to social media, pointing out how bulged Wendy's eyes appear in the photographs. According to Dr. Ranjeet Singh, who spoke with Hollywood Life, her bulging eyes are directly connected to her disease. Graves is an autoimmune disease that is the most common cause of hyperthyroidism in the USA, Dr. Singh said. When Hyperthyroidism is paired with Graves, it can lead to eye inflammation, causing swelling of the tissues behind the eye sockets, and the eyes to bulge. Not all people with Graves develop eye inflammation though, it occurs in roughly a third of cases, but, when it does occur, a patient should ensure they undergo evaluation with an ophthalmologist as soon as possible, as if left untreated, it can lead to serious vision problems and even blindness in some cases. As of now, Wendy is still maintaining her TV schedule. Although she her symptoms are obvious, she's seemingly still going strong. In the months leading up to XXXTentacion's untimely passing, further information was being revealed about the alleged abuse that Geneva Ayala sustained at the hands of X. At the time of some of the alleged incidents, Geneva was pregnant, which led many to turn off of XXXTentacion in a heartbeat. X and Geneva were planning on going to trial shortly and, due to such unfortunate circumstances, the case will likely never be resolved now. While some would expect the alleged victim to be celebrating X's death, the two were very close and his murder is obviously something difficult for her to work through. Being tagged in numerous disrespectful threads on social media pertaining to XXX, Geneva spoke out to her followers about yesterday's events, letting her true thoughts be known. In any situation, it is unfair to put words in somebody's mouth. In order to dispell any rumors about how she was reacting to the news of XXXTentacion's death, Ayala put her emotions into words on Twitter. She wrote, "i know yall dont fuck w me, but this isnt about me. just please stop tagging me in disrespectful threads and arguments. i honestly dont care for any of the hype. i lost someone close to me. leave me alone." The writer and self-described "camgirl" elaborated, "i didnt lose my life. he did. its permanent. im still here. like how do you think that makes me feel? everyone expecting me to be relieved or happy?! no, im broken." Hopefully, people begin to pay more respect to Geneva and the rest of X's family and friends as they have lost a loved one, which is never easy to do. RIP X. Geneva Ayala, most famously known as XXXtentacion's ex-girlfriend and abuse accuser, has racked in $6000 in donations overnight on her GoFundMe page. The massive surge in contributions was apparently prompted by the rapper's untimely death. The page was originally created in October 2016 to help Ayala pay the medical bills. Here is Ayalas description of her injuries found on her GoFundMe page: theres two fractures in my left eye socket due to an aggressive hit, along with nose and jaw fractures. since these bones are fractured theyre piercing into the back of my eyeball causing damage to an optical nerve and my eye itself. the left side of my face has lost some sensation, i cannot feel my upper lip on the left side, and same for my upper teeth on the left side. and as for my left eyes vision, its diminishing as the days go by. its crucial i get the surgery otherwise my eyeball will die and the nerve connecting my lip/cheek and teeth will eventually die as well. id appreciate anything, this is a very strenuous obstacle that has been put into my hands. also could use money towards my living situation and food. thank you. Ayala seems to have a complex relationship with the public. X's fans were particularly harsh on her, going as far as causing her campaign to be shut down within a week of its creation. The page had raised $8K at the time of its deactivation, including a $5K donation from X himself. It was then reactivated in June 2018. The total amount of contributions currently sits around $32K and continues to grow by the minute. We are not aiming to rehash the details of the allegations. Amidst all the noise on social media following the woman's loss, Ayala asks to be left alone. We hope she can soon find peace and some space to grieve. [via] SEGUIN Dozens of half-built engines, more than twice the size of a car engine, stand in a row. They slowly roll ahead on a conveyor belt, stopping periodically as workers run quality checks, install fuel lines and tighten bolts with power wrenches. These engines, ranging in size from nine to 18 liters, are used in generators, oil and gas operations and industrial applications. Nearly three out of four of them are heading out of the country to foreign markets. The Caterpillar plant, its engines and the 2,000 people who work here are reminders of the stakes involved as the trade conflict between the United States, China and other countries escalates with new rounds of tariffs and retaliatory actions. Caterpillar is part of a broader heavy machinery and equipment manufacturing industry in Texas that employs about 90,000 people and shipped more than $40 billion in industrial machinery to international buyers last year, making it the states second leading export after petroleum and accounting for 16 percent of all Texas exports. Many of our Texas member companies are multinational, they operate all over the world, said Tony Bennett, chief executive of the Texas Association of Manufacturers as he considered rising trade barriers. We will not go unscathed. Fears are growing about the impact of a wider trade war with adversaries and allies alike as the Trump administration moves to alter U.S. trade policies, slapping steep tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum on which manufacturers across Texas and the United States rely and threatening to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. Stock and commodity markets around the world sold off Tuesday, a day after President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on an additional $200 billion in Chinese products, and up to $400 billion if China retaliates. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average fell for the sixth straight session, shedding 287 points or about 1 percent to close at 24,700, while oil also lost more that 1 percent to settle at $65.07 a barrel. Caterpillar shares lost nearly 4 percent. Caterpillar is considered a bellwether of the global economy because of its vast international reach and last year earned more than half of its $45 billion in revenues from foreign sales. Caterpillar spokeswoman Rachel Potts said the company is assessing the potential impact of changing trade policies and lobbying the Trump administration to reconsider recent moves that could make it harder for U.S. companies to sell into foreign markets. Right now, is there a level of geopolitical uncertainty in the world that could impact us? Yes, Potts said. Are we engaged on all of those talks? Yes. The Trump administration has done much to create that uncertainty, last week announcing it would go forward with that 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods from tires to ship turbines to can sealing machines starting in July. China immediately retaliated, readying tariffs of a similar scale on U.S. agricultural and other products These moves came just weeks after the Trump administration added Canada, Mexico and the European Union to the list of trading partners getting hit with tariffs on steel, again provoking retaliatory actions. For the time being, the brewing trade war is expected to have a small impact on the U.S. economy, which is driven by domestic spending. Exports account for about 13 percent of the goods and services produced in the United States, according to the Commerce Department. Still, trade disruptions could hurt specific industries, such as those that import lower-cost foreign steel, raise prices for consumers and slow the economic expansion. And few states have as much at stake in the trade conflict as Texas. Texas sells more goods in international markets that any other state, exporting some $265 billion in products in 2017, according to the Commerce Department. Texas also imported one-sixth of all foreign steel coming into the United States, also more than any other state, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. Canada, Mexico and China are Texas top export markets, and already the prospect of deteriorating trade relations is creating uncertainty that is leading companies to delay investments and hiring, said Bennett of the Texas Association of Manufacturers. If youre exporting out of Texas, particularly to Mexico and Canada, you cant really make any plans for plant expansion, plant location, Bennett said. It puts everybody in a holding pattern and is not an efficient way of doing business in a global economy. Caterpillar employs about 4,000 employees in Texas, spread across more than 20 facilities in the state, including San Antonio and Schertz. The Seguin plant, built in 2010 for $170 million, is one of the largest employers in this city of 29,000. The Guadalupe County Appraisal district estimates that in 2018 the Seguin Independent School District could bring in as much as $1.5 million in taxes from the plant, accounting for about 5 percent of the $31 million in property taxes Seguin ISD said it would collect for its 2017-2018 budget. Seguin has come to rely heavily on manufacturing, with city data showing 27 percent of its workforce in manufacturing. Other major manufacturers include German automotive parts manufacturer Continental AG and Seguin agriculture equipment maker Alamo Group. rdruzin@express-news.net | Twitter: @druz_journo WASHINGTON - More than 300,000 miles of natural gas transmission lines crisscross the United States, fueling electricity and industrial plants and heating homes, while also providing an alluring target for hackers looking to disrupt the American economy. Now those pipelines are at the center of a debate in Washington about the future of the power grid, as Energy Secretary Rick Perry argues that an increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threat makes relying on natural gas to the exclusion of coal and nuclear plants a disaster waiting to happen. You have a greater reliance on natural gas than youve ever had before, Bruce Walker, assistant secretary of electricity and energy reliability, said in an interview. Because of the interdependence on the gas infrastructure, if you take out a pipeline you can also take out 10 to 15 [power] generators. The administrations concern about cybersecurity comes as the White House considers next steps in its bid to halt the closure of coal and nuclear power plants, which have come under increasing economic pressure from the huge glut of cheap gas coming out of shale fields in Texas and other states, as well as increasingly efficient renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. RELATED: Perry, citing cyber threat, says Trump is right on coal nuclear closures That has set the administration and Perry in direct conflict with natural gas producers, many of whom believe the administration is raising the issue of cyber security of gas pipelines to justify bailing out a coal sector that President Donald Trump has promised to revive. They are certainly using every argument they can come up with to try and justify it, said one pipeline executive, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of talks with the White House. The challenge is we dont want to advertise all the measures we're taking to deal with the threat. Youre trapped. The president is considering unprecedented use of his national security powers to order power grid operators to buy electricity from a list of struggling coal and nuclear plants for two years to forestall any further action toward retirement, decommissioning, or deactivation of such facilities, according to Department of Energy memo. Lobbyists for oil and gas companies are fighting to head off such action, arguing in meetings on Capitol Hill that pipelines are as well protected from cyber threats as any U.S. industry and the administrations talking points amount to another attempt to bail out the coal sector. To single out gas infrastructure, it misses the point. All the energy sector is being targeted by bad actors, said Todd Snitchler, director of market development at the American Petroleum Institute. The oil and gas industry takes our cybersecurity very seriously. Its being managed all the way up to the board level. Cyber attacks are a constant threat for energy companies, with power utilities and oil and gas companies routinely targeted by hackers working for everyone from foreign governments to organized crime. In April hackers briefly shut down a data network used by a variety of pipeline companies, including Energy Transfer Partners of Dallas and the Tulsa company Oneok. No gas deliveries were interrupted, the companies said, but the attacks shone a light on the industrys vulnerabilities. RELATED: Trump orders Perry to prepare immediate steps to keep coal, nuclear plants online Chris Bronk, a professor of information technology at the University of Houston, said pipeline operators are improving, but they have not reached the cybersecurity sophistication of large oil companies such as Exxon Mobil or large banks, which early on recognized the threat hackers posed to their business. But, he added, any system is vulnerable and making economic decisions based on cyber threats is a losing battle. Anything can be hacked, he said. Ive never seen thinking like this in any other case. Nobody ever came to me and said we need to keep VHS (tape cassettes) going because digital TV might get hacked. The Department of Energy says it is increasing its efforts to help the the energy sector in protect itself from cyberattacks, recently creating the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response. While Energy Department officials concede all energy networks are vulnerable to hackers, they said pipelines provide a potential weak spot to hackers looking to disrupt the power grid. When youre looking at the portfolio of generation, it would better for us to have fuel on site regardless of what type it is, Walker, the assistant secretary said. It eliminates one aspect of the vulnerability. james.osborne@chron.com Twitter: @osborneja State Sen. Carlos Uresti announced Monday that he will step down from office Thursday, saying it was the statesman thing to do four months after his criminal conviction. Uresti is scheduled to be sentenced next Tuesday after being found guilty in February by a federal jury on 11 felony charges in connection with his involvement in a now-defunct San Antonio oil field services company that defrauded investors. Uresti has indicated that he will appeal his conviction. He could have remained in office until exhausting his appeals. In an interview Monday, Uresti said he was in shock immediately after the verdict when he vowed not to resign. After mulling the issue with friends and family, he said, he realized that stepping down is the right thing to do for my family, for me and for my district. Uresti timed his resignation to Thursday because its the 21st anniversary of his first election to state office. Its been two decades, and I never thought it would go by so quickly, he said. He added that he planned to serve only 10 or so years but became enamored with meeting people and finding ways to prevent child abuse. Its an unceremonious end to Urestis political career of more than two decades, first in the state House and then the state Senate. The San Antonio Democrat has headed a mini-political dynasty on the South Side, with brothers state Rep. Tomas Uresti and Albert Uresti, Bexar Countys tax assessor-collector, following him into public office. But less than two weeks after Urestis conviction, Tomas Uresti was defeated for his seat by Leo Pacheco in the Democrats March primary. Carlos Uresti, 54, said he is asking Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special election in November to fill the vacant Senate District 19 seat. His term was set to end in January 2021. The district has had somewhat of a disadvantage as this has been going forward, and I think people deserve to have their voice, and have a strong voice, said former U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego, a Democrat who has entered the race to succeed Uresti. The sooner that happens, the better. Democratic state Rep. Roland Gutierrez, who also is vying for the seat, said in a statement that Urestis resignation means one of the saddest, most embarrassing stories of Texas politics finally comes to an end. He used the statement as a fundraising call for his campaign. Republican Pete Flores, who lost to Uresti in 2016, on Monday announced that he will run again for the seat. Uresti was convicted of defrauding investors in FourWinds Logistics, which bought and sold sand used in fracking for oil production before the company collapsed in 2015. He served as the companys outside general counsel, held a 1 percent ownership interest and recruited investors. The lawmaker has maintained his innocence, but his indictment and subsequent conviction cast a long shadow over his career. During the last year, some of the media has been unfair, inaccurate or sensational when it was hurtful, not necessary or simply not true, Uresti said in announcing his resignation. Nonetheless, I know what I did and what I did not do. It has always been my intention to do what was right for the constituents of District 19 and for Texas, he added. To the extent any of you feel I let you down, please grant me forgiveness. Uresti is staring at a prison sentence that could range from eight to 12 years, some attorneys have told the San Antonio Express-News. Plus, prosecutors say he could owe more than $3 million in restitution to his victims. The decision to voluntarily leave office has nothing to do with hoping that the judge will look favorably on him at sentencing next week, Uresti said. Uresti still stands to pocket a hefty government pension that likely will be more than $80,000 a year. A state law that took effect last year bars lawmakers convicted of certain felonies from receiving their government pension, but it doesnt apply to Uresti because his FourWinds crimes arent covered by the law. He was convicted of securities fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, among other charges. Meanwhile, Uresti is scheduled to stand trial in October in a separate case in which hes accused of splitting $850,000 in bribe payments with a county judge in Reeves County over a medical services contract at a jail in West Texas. Uresti has denied the charges. San Antonio attorney Mikal Watts, one of Urestis lawyers in the Reeves County case, called the resignation a sad day marking the end of a brilliant public service career. Watts said he is hopeful that Urestis conviction will be overturned on appeal. Watts was barred by Senior U.S. District Judge David Ezra from representing Uresti in the FourWinds case because of a conflict of interest, a ruling that will be part of the appeal. When the story is finally written, his good deeds will wildly outshine the painful event of being convicted based on the crimes of (FourWinds CEO) Stan Bates, Watts said. Bates pleaded guilty to eight felonies, including securities fraud and money laundering, rather than stand trial with Uresti and FourWinds consultant Gary Cain. The jury also found Cain guilty of nine felonies. He is scheduled to be sentenced June 27. Bates sentencing is set for Aug. 6. Two months ago, Uresti surrendered his license to practice law in lieu of facing disciplinary action from the the State Bar of Texas. He had been an attorney for more than 25 years. This month, Uresti got court approval to sell his longtime law office building at 924 McCullough Ave. for slightly less than $1 million. More than half the proceeds are slated to go to his victims. Uresti also is in the process of selling his Helotes home, Watts said. Its listed for $1.7 million. Uresti cant sell any of his assets without court approval. Calls for Urestis resignation, from both sides of the political aisle, followed his February conviction. Uresti, though, vowed to keep his Senate seat during his appeal. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick removed Uresti from committee assignments. Uresti had served as vice chairman of the Health & Human Services Committee and had posts on the Education, Finance, and Veteran Affairs & Border Security panels. Uresti chose not to testify during his nearly five-week trial. Prosecutors, though, played for jurors recordings of interviews that Uresti gave to the Express-News. The newspaper first chronicled Urestis involvement in FourWinds in 2016. The FourWinds case revealed that Uresti had a sexual relationship with a female client and later got her to invest with the company. The married Uresti disputed the affair, however. The client, Denise Cantu, had hired Uresti to represent her in litigation after the deaths of two of her children in a 2010 vehicle wreck. Uresti brought Watts into that case and secured Cantu a $2.5 million settlement. Uresti later advised Cantu to invest some of the money with FourWinds, a risky startup. He told her the investment was guaranteed and good as gold and that she could get her money back if she wasnt satisfied, she testified during the trial. She ended up losing $800,000 of her $900,000 investment. Uresti received a $27,000 commission on her investment even though he never registered as a securities broker, one of the crimes he was found guilty of in February. His consulting company also stood to get a cut of the profits earned by the investors he brought in, which the investors testified was not disclosed to them. Cantu testified that Uresti was her counsel but became her friend, financial adviser and ultimately lover. The pair exchanged sexually explicit text messages. A week after Urestis conviction, his wife, Lleanna, filed court papers to end their nearly six-year union. In a resignation statement, Uresti said his biggest achievement in office was forming the Blue Ribbon Task Force to combat child abuse and passing laws that helped to protect children from abuse and neglect. Patrick Danner is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD Ginger Carlton has spent the past year preparing the youth group she leads in Katy for something thats akin to an olympics of faith and service. The nationwide Evangelical Lutheran Church in Americas Youth Gathering only happens once every three years and Carlton and the teens she guides did not want to miss it. Theyve been looking forward to this ever since they were in junior high, Carlton said. The last event was held in Detroit. Three years before that, the gathering was in New Orleans. Each time, high schoolers from the U.S. and overseas come together for a week of prayer, music, service and fellowship. This year, Carltons group does not have to travel far. The gathering is coming to Houston. More than 30,000 students are expected to attend the event, which starts Monday and continues through July 1. Carlton leads teens at Living Word Lutheran Church in Katy. This summer 23 students will accompany her at the conference, including her 16-year-old daughter Lauren, who will be a junior next year. My church friends and I have been talking about this for a while, Lauren said. Were really excited about going into the community and meeting new people, making bonds. Im just excited about the whole experience. To prepare for the event, the teens at Living Word completed a year-long curriculum created by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, one of the largest Christian denominations in the U.S. with more than 3.5 million members in more than 9,300 congregations. More Information For information on the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Youth Gathering , visit www.elca.org/YouthGathering. See More Collapse They met twice a month to discuss a range of topics, including homelessness, mental health, immigration, healthy relationships and social justice. We tie it all back to the Bible, Carlton said. Her students have also created a covenant for their time in the gathering. Their pledge is to have an open heart, an open mind and open ears. Across the Caribbean, teens at Reconciliation Lutheran Church in Puerto Rico made a similar vow. Their mandate was to respects others. Were trying to open our minds and hearts so God can make his way to us, the youth groups leader Jafet Carreras said. Ariana Torres, one of the students in Puerto Rico, looks forward to seeing Houston for the first time. Its going to be a life-changing experience, she said. Another student from her group, Alondra Quinines, cant wait to hear the music. Thats something that really touches me, she said. Its one of the ways that I connect with God. This will be the first time that any of the Puerto Rican students attending the event will see Houston, and for some, it will be a first time to fly. Seeing all of those people praying, blessing and singing together is going to be truly wonderful, said student Jonathan Pagan said. One of the adult leaders of the group, Kheyla Estrada, attended past gathering events. Its the most impressive expression of faith, she said. Thats part of the events goal, program director Molly Beck Dean said. She explained that attending the gathering is a milestone for the teens. Its a rite of passage, she said. These kids have been excited about this for a long time. They bring a lot of energy to a city. Soon, the city will see an army of teens volunteering around town, wearing bright orange T-shirts, Dean said. She hopes their enthusiasm is infectious for Houstonians. Theyll probably get some random hugs and high-fives from the kids, she said. Dean attended her first gathering at age 17. It was a really transformative time for me, she said. Dean had considered a career in youth ministry before the event. The gathering was one of those things that really solidified everything for me, she said. Its not often that, as an adult, you get to go back to an experience that was informative to you. Students come from all over to attend, she said. They are exposed to different perspectives, students and adults from various backgrounds. For a lot of the kids, this will be their first time on a plane or their first time in a major city, Dean said. What does Houston hold as a new experience? Part of the goal is to put thoughts and beliefs to the test. Teens may find themselves questioning what theyve been taught, debating issues or learning how someone else lives and thinks. How can you grow from that? Dean asks. Its often during challenging times that we experience the most growth as people. Afterall, the theme of the gathering this year is This Changes Everything. Carlton is preparing her students to get out of their comfort zone. She likes that the theme is vague. You have to discover what your this is, she said. Are you going to find your passion, your purpose, your calling, your community? For each kid, their this is different. Whats there thats really going to change your heart and your mind? She said that one day of the conference students will spend with their synod, gathering with their bishop for worship and meeting others in the group. Another day is devoted to service. Groups of 10,000 teens a day will embark into Houston for community service projects. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has partnered with local organizations to create hundreds of volunteer projects. There is also a day on the schedule for the Community Life event at NRG stadium, where all the students gather for games and activities, as well as Bible study and prayer. Each night, participants meet for a mass gathering at NRG Stadium. The line-up includes inspirational speakers, house bands and top Christian recording artists. Speakers from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America include presiding bishop Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton, executive director of the domestic mission Rev. Stephen P. Bouman and pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber. Michael Rinehart, bishop of the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, expects the 30,000 students to make a positive impact on Houston. They will experience this beautiful, diverse and thriving city and the city will experience them, he said. Rinehart said the volunteering element of the gathering is particularly significant. When people serve, when they give of themselves, something happens inside, he said. We get turned inside out. We become other-focused. Reinforce this with prayer, Bible study, song, hope, love and joy, and you have an unbeatable combination. Rinehart attended the Gathering for the first time as a high school student in 1976 in New Orleans. It had a profound effect on my life, he said. He explained that the teens are not tourists. They are learning to make a difference in the world in some small way, he said. Six months after the back-t0-back slayings of a Missouri City couple, police are turning to the public for help, offering up a $5,000 reward for information in the unsolved murders. Rachel Delarosa and her boyfriend Robert Cerda were found dead late last year, but authorities still don't have any suspects in the case. The couple vanished on Dec. 11, 2017, after they were last spotted leaving a gas station together. In the weeks since the Trump administration instituted a zero-tolerance policy that seeks to criminally prosecute anyone who crosses the border unlawfully and effectively causes children to be separated from their families, criticism has poured in from advocacy groups, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and a host of political luminaries who are no longer in office. Now, in the span of about 24 hours, all four living former first ladies have added their voices to the chorus of public critique, calling the practice immoral, disgraceful and a humanitarian crisis. Even the current first lady, Melania Trump, took the somewhat unusual step of issuing a statement that appeared to align somewhat with her predecessors, while also avoiding assigning partisan blame. Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform, her office said in a statement Sunday. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. The rare public show of unity between several former first ladies drew a response Monday afternoon from Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, who acknowledged that calling attention to this matter is important and said the situation at the border is a very serious issue that Congress needs to fix, according to a transcript of her remarks. Asked about the criticisms, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said a prior administration was to blame. Frankly, this law was actually signed into effect in 2008, she said. Though the administration officials have called on lawmakers to close loopholes, no law actually requires that families be separated at the border. President Donald Trump ordered the stiffer effort last month and it is the zero tolerance policy that results in immigrants in the country illegally being taken into federal criminal custody, at which point their children are considered unaccompanied alien minors and taken away. Heres a look at what each former first lady has said and how each of their husbands dealt with immigration during their time in office. Rosalynn Carter In a statement released by the Carter Center on Monday, Carter condemned the Trump administrations approach. The practice and policy today of removing children from their parents care at our border with Mexico is disgraceful and a shame to our country, Carter said. In 1980, her husband, Jimmy Carter, initially offered so-called open arms to tens of thousands of Cuban refugees many fleeing communism. He later abandoned the offer in favor of a program designed to reduce the influx of refugees and exclude those who had been imprisoned in Cuba for serious nonpolitical crimes. Separately, Carter increased the number of Southeast Asian boat refugees who were allowed to resettle here after the Vietnam War. Hillary Clinton At first, Clinton, the former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic nominee for president, offered only a very brief comment on the Trump administration policy. YES! she wrote, signaling her agreement with a tweet by her husband, Bill Clinton, who said on Twitter on Fathers Day that children who had been separated from their parents should not be a negotiating tool. Then, in a series of tweets Monday, Hillary Clinton offered additional thoughts, calling situation at the border a humanitarian crisis. Every parent who has ever held a child in their arms, every human being with a sense of compassion and decency, should be outraged, she wrote. We should be a better country than one that tears families apart, turns a blind eye to women fleeing domestic violence, and treats frightened children as a means to a political end, Clinton added. During her husbands administration, an anti-immigrant backlash arose in response to the number of Mexicans streaming across the border. Bill Clinton was at first caught flat-footed to the new political dynamics and had a mixed record on the issue, but by the end of his presidency had helped pass some pro-immigrant legislation, said Frank Sharry, executive director of Americas Voice, a pro-immigrant advocacy organization. Laura Bush In an opinion article published on Sunday by The Washington Post, Bush nodded to her Texas roots in urging politicians in Washington to do better to fix this. I live in a border state, she wrote. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. She added, It is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents and to stop separating parents and children in the first place. However, it was her husband, George W. Bush, who initiated the zero tolerance approach for illegal immigration on which Trumps policy is modeled a point Sanders alluded to Monday. In 2005, Bush began Operation Streamline, a program along a stretch of the border in Texas that referred all unlawful entrants for criminal prosecution, imprisoning them and expediting assembly-line-style trials geared toward rapid deportations. The initiative yielded results and was soon expanded to more border sectors. Back then, however, exceptions were generally made for adults who were traveling with young children, as well as juveniles and people who were ill. In general, Bush had a moderate approach to immigration, said Mary Fan, a former federal prosecutor in California who is now a law professor at the University of Washington. Fan, who was a prosecutor during the Bush years, said the former president let law enforcement working at the border use discretion in deciding which immigrants were worth prosecuting. Michelle Obama On Tuesday, Obama, who succeeded Laura Bush as first lady, retweeted her predecessors opinion article and said simply, Sometimes truth transcends party. But her husbands administration was also heavily criticized for how officials responded to its own immigration crisis. Indeed, Barack Obama earned the nickname deporter in chief for expelling more people than any other president in history. During Obamas second term, Central American migrants, including many unaccompanied children, began surging across the border. Obama administration officials recently told The New York Times that they considered the possibility of separating parents from their children, but said they quickly decided against it. Instead, they decided to vastly expand the detention of immigrant families and open up new facilities along the border, in which children and their parents could be held together. In the meantime, officials began publicly warning parents that their children would be deported if they entered the United States illegally. Eventually, images emerged of young children many dirty and some in tears who were being held with their families in makeshift detention facilities. Then came legal challenges, and soon afterward Obama administration officials decided to release the families pending the resolution of their asylum cases. On other immigration issues, Obama took a looser stance. In 2012, he took executive action to protect young people who were brought to the United States as children, in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. He also eventually shifted the priorities for deportation so that officials focused on removing convicted criminals, foreigners who posed national security threats and people who recently crossed the border. It was a huge sea change from 2 million deportations to lets just focus on bad actors,' Sharry said. The Trump administration has tried to end DACA, and, in contrast to Obama, is treating all people who have crossed the border without authorization as subject to criminal prosecution. This article originally appeared in The New York Times NASHVILLE, Tenn. A team of political activists huddled at a Hardees one rainy Saturday, wolfing down a breakfast of biscuits and gravy. Then they descended on Antioch, a quiet Nashville suburb, armed with iPads full of voter data and a fiery script. The group, the local chapter for Americans for Prosperity, which is financed by the oil billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch to advance conservative causes, fanned out and began strategically knocking on doors. Their targets: voters most likely to oppose a local plan to build light-rail trains, a traffic-easing tunnel and new bus routes. Do you agree that raising the sales tax to the highest rate in the nation must be stopped? Samuel Nienow, one of the organizers, asked a startled man who answered the door at his ranch-style home in March. Can we count on you to vote no on the transit plan? In cities and counties across the country including Little Rock, Arkansas; Phoenix; southeast Michigan; central Utah; and here in Tennessee the Koch brothers are fueling a fight against public transit, an offshoot of their long-standing national crusade for lower taxes and smaller government. At the heart of their effort is a network of activists who use a sophisticated data service built by the Kochs, called i360, that helps them identify and rally voters who are inclined to their worldview. It is a particularly powerful version of the technologies used by major political parties. Now Playing: Billionaire David Koch Stepping Down From Business and Political Roles Koch, who co-owns Koch Industries with his brother Charles, is stepping down due to health issues. The billionaire had been struggling with his health for the past few years, even doing a stint in the hospital in the summer of 2016. Unfortunately, these issues have not been resolved and his health has continued to deteriorate. As a result, he is unable to be involved in business and other organizational activities. The Koch brothers are also well-known conservatives and have contributed millions of dollars in support of the Republican Party over the years. Video: Wibbitz In places like Nashville, Koch-financed activists are finding tremendous success. Early polling here had suggested that the $5.4 billion transit plan would easily pass. It was backed by the citys popular mayor and a coalition of businesses. Its supporters had outspent the opposition, and Nashville was choking on cars. But the outcome of the May 1 ballot stunned the city: a landslide victory for the anti-transit camp, which attacked the plan as a colossal waste of taxpayers money. This is why grass roots works, said Tori Venable, Tennessee state director for Americans for Prosperity, which made almost 42,000 phone calls and knocked on more than 6,000 doors. Supporters of transit investments say they reduce traffic, spur economic development and fight global warming by reducing emissions. Americans for Prosperity counters that public transit plans waste taxpayer money on unpopular, outdated technology like trains and buses just as the world is moving toward cleaner, driverless vehicles. Most American cities do not have the population density to support mass transit, the group says. It also asserts that transit brings unwanted gentrification to some areas, while failing to reach others altogether. Public transit, Americans for Prosperity says, goes against the liberties that Americans hold dear. If someone has the freedom to go where they want, do what they want, Venable said, theyre not going to choose public transit. The Kochs opposition to transit spending stems from their long-standing free-market, libertarian philosophy. It also dovetails with their financial interests, which benefit from automobiles and highways. One of the mainstay companies of Koch Industries, the Kochs conglomerate, is a major producer of gasoline and asphalt, and also makes seat belts, tires and other automotive parts. Even as Americans for Prosperity opposes public investment in transit, it supports spending tax money on highways and roads. Stopping higher taxes is their rallying cry, said Ashley Robbins, a researcher at Virginia Tech who follows transportation funding. But at the end of the day, fuel consumption helps them. David Dziok, a Koch Industries spokesman, said the company did not control the activities of Americans for Prosperity in specific states and denied that the groups anti-transit effort was linked to the companys interests. That notion runs counter to everything we stand for as a company, he said. Our decisions are based on what is most likely to help people improve their lives, regardless of the policy and its effect on our bottom line, he said. Koch Industries has opposed steel tariffs, for example, even though the company owns a steel mill in Arkansas, he said. The groups Nashville victory followed a roller-coaster political campaign, including a sex-and-spending scandal that led to the mayors resignation. But the results also demonstrate that the Kochs political influence has quietly made deep inroads at the local level even as the brothers have had a lower profile in Washington. (This month, Koch Industries said David Koch would step away from his political and business roles because of declining health.) These are outside groups, said Nashvilles new mayor, David Briley, in an interview. They dont represent Nashvilles interests or values. A Nationwide Effort The Nashville strategy was part of a nationwide campaign. Since 2015, Americans for Prosperity has coordinated door-to-door anti-transit canvassing campaigns for at least seven local or state-level ballots, according to a review by The New York Times. In the majority, the Kochs were on the winning side. Americans for Prosperity and other Koch-backed groups have also opposed more than two dozen other transit-related measures including many states bids to raise gas taxes to fund transit or transportation infrastructure by organizing phone banks, running advertising campaigns, staging public forums, issuing reports and writing opinion pieces in local publications. In Little Rock, Americans for Prosperity made more than 39,000 calls and knocked on nearly 5,000 doors to fight a proposed sales-tax increase worth $18 million to fund a bus and trolley network. In Utah, it handed out $50 gift cards at a grocery store, an amount it said represented what a proposed sales tax increase to fund transit would cost county residents per year. Theres nothing more effective than actually having a human conversation with someone on events that affect them on a day-to-day basis, Akash Chougule, policy director at Americans for Prosperity, said in an interview. Its a great opportunity for us to activate people in their own backyards, and were among the first to do it in a sustained, permanent way. The paucity of federal funding for transit projects means that local ballots are critical in shaping how Americans travel, with decadeslong repercussions for the economy and the environment. Highway funding has historically been built into state and federal budgets, but transit funding usually requires a vote to raise taxes, creating what experts call a systemic bias toward cars over trains and buses. The U.S. transportation sector emits more earth-warming carbon dioxide than any other part of the nations economy. The Trump administration had initially raised hopes of more funding for transit by advocating a trillion-dollar infrastructure push. However, when that proposed plan was made public it reduced funding for transit-related grants. On the Ground in Nashville Nashvilles idea to invest in transit got off to a strong start. Introduced in October by Megan Barry, who was mayor at the time, it called for 26 miles of light rail, a bus network, and a 1.8-mile tunnel for buses and trains that would bypass the city centers narrow streets. The $5.4 billion proposal, the costliest transit project in Nashvilles history, was to be funded by raising the sales tax city residents pay by 1 percentage point, to 10.25 percent, and raising other business taxes. A coalition of Nashville businesses urged voters to endorse the spending as vital to a region projected to grow to almost 3 million people by 2040, an increase of 1 million. It will be far-reaching, it will serve every part of our city north, south, east, and west and it will help to shape our future growth and development, said Barry, who enjoyed approval ratings near 70 percent. A poll by her team found that close to two-thirds of voters would support raising taxes to pay for transit. The vote was set for May 1. But then in late January, Barry, who is married, acknowledged a nearly two-year affair with the former head of her security detail after a series of exposes, including reports of steamy texts, overseas trips and inappropriate spending. In March she resigned, and later pleaded guilty to theft. Barry did not respond to requests for comment. Americans for Prosperity kicked its campaign into high gear. Secret Weapons The team that gathered at Hardees in March, two weeks after Barrys resignation, was led by Venable and Nienow of Americans for Prosperity. Other canvassers that morning included a local Tea Party leader and a lawyer-turned-fantasy-novelist who writes about a young witch who pushes back against an authoritarian government. Central to the work of Americans for Prosperity is i360, the Kochs data operation, which profiles Americans based on their voter registration information, consumer data and social media activities. The canvassers divided the neighborhoods into walkbooks, or clusters of several dozen homes, and broke into teams of two. There are rules: No more than two people at a door (to avoid appearing threatening). No stepping on lawns (homeowners dont like it). And focus strictly on the registered voter. If anyone else answers, say a polite thanks and move on. Its the concept of opportunity cost, Nienow said. Their data zeroed in on people thought to be anti-tax or anti-transit and likely to vote. On a laptop in her SUV, Venable tracked, in real time, the progress of the four pairs working that day. By 4:30 p.m. they had knocked on 230 doors and connected with 66 people, a success rate of 29 percent. Excellent, she said. Everything we do is very scientific, very data-based, very numbers-based, said Chougule, the Americans for Prosperity policy director. We are able to see who are the people that are most likely to engage on this issue, who are the people most aligned with us that we need to get out, and who are the people whose minds we can change. Another weapon in the Koch arsenal is Randal OToole, a transit expert at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington that Charles Koch helped found in the 1970s. Declaring transit dead and streetcars a scam, he has become a go-to expert for anti-transit groups. Crisscrossing the country, he speaks at local events and writes opinion pieces. At a forum in Nashville in January hosted by a conservative radio host, OToole gave an impassioned speech. I think of light rail as the diamond-encrusted Rolex watch of transit. Its something that doesnt do as much as a real watch can do. It costs a lot more. And it serves solely to serve the ego of the people who are buying it, he said, meaning city officials. Public transit critics have long raised fears that rail projects are a conduit for crime, and OToole himself has made that argument: Teenagers swarm onto San Francisco BART trains to rob passengers, he warned in a blog post last year. But in Nashville, OToole made a different argument, namely that transit is for hipster millennials and would be a conduit for gentrification, forcing people to move further away to find affordable housing. In another line of attack, he also argues that ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are the future of transportation, not buses and trains. Why would anybody ride transit when they can get a ride at their door within a minute that will drop them off at the door where they want to go? he said in an interview. Asked whether low-income people could afford to use Uber instead of a bus, he said that subsidizing their rides would still be more cost-effective. Raj Rajkumar, director of Carnegie Mellon Universitys Mobility21 research center, which focuses on transportation issues, said studies have shown that mass transit reduces congestion and pollution. But he also said there is some truth in concerns that transit could bring gentrification. To offset that, he said, transit plans should be paired with measures to increase affordable housing. Still, in most places and over the long run, buses and trains are the most effective and cleanest way of moving large numbers of people large distances, he said. Ride-sharing can help people on shorter trips, Rajkumar said, or getting to and from a train station. But if youre going 30 miles, Uber is less suitable. I dont think Uber and Lyft can really replace public transit, he said. A Money Trail, Undisclosed The scale of the Kochs anti-transit spending is difficult to gauge at the local level, because campaign finance disclosure standards vary among municipalities. But at the state and national level, the picture gets clearer. Last year Americans for Prosperity spent $711,000 on lobbying for various issues, a near 1,000-fold increase since 2011, when it spent $856. Overall, the group has spent almost $4 million on state-level lobbying the past seven years, according to disclosures compiled by the National Institute on Money in State Politics, a nonpartisan nonprofit that tracks political spending. Broadly speaking, Americans for Prosperity campaigns against big government, but many of its initiatives target public transit. In Indiana, it marshaled opposition to a 2017 Republican gas-tax plan meant to raise roughly $1 billion to invest in local buses and other projects. In New Jersey, the group ran an ad against a proposed gas-tax increase in 2016 that showed a father giving away his babys milk bottle, and also Sparky the family dog, to pay for transit improvements among other things. Save Sparky, the ad implores. In Nashville, Americans for Prosperity played a major role: organizing door-to-door canvassing teams using iPads running the i360 software. Those in-kind contributions can be difficult to measure. According to AFPs campaign finance disclosure, the group made only one contribution, of $4,744, to the campaign for canvassing expenses. Instead, a local group, NoTax4Tracks, led the Nashville fundraising. Nearly three-quarters of the $1.1 million it raised came from a single nonprofit, Nashville Smart Inc., which is not required to disclose donors. The rest of the contributions to NoTax4Tracks came from wealthy local donors, including a local auto dealer. Both NoTax4Tracks and Nashville Smart declined to fully disclose their funding. I Knew We Were Going to Win After Barrys resignation, Nashvilles pro-transit movement struggled. Its messaging became muddled, strategists said, with supporters claiming that the plan would do everything: create jobs, benefit the environment and even boost the health and wellness of residents. Ultimately, the pro-transit camp failed to fend off criticism that the plan benefited a gentrifying downtown at the expense of more distant lower-income and minority areas. If everyones going to pay for it, everyone needs to benefit, said the Rev. Jeff Obafemi Carr, who threw his support behind the opposition campaign and mobilized African-American voters. After the vote, the Americans for Prosperity crew celebrated its victory at the Nashville Palace, a country music venue. I knew we were going to win, Venable said. But I wasnt taking my foot off the gas for a second. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Natalia Sylvester began writing her latest book more than five years ago, well before Donald Trump took office with a promise to crack down on illegal immigration, well before the current crisis of asylum-seeking families being separated at the border. Yet, in many ways, Everyone Knows You Go Home is prescient, tackling issues of family division, the arduous journey of crossing from one country into the next and the sacrifices we make in exchange for a better future. In the novel, which is told through dual timelines, Sylvester follows the story of newlyweds Martin and Isabel, who are married on Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). On their wedding day, the couple is visited by the spirit of Martins father, Omar. Only Isabel will communicate with Omar, who returns over the years on their anniversary, hoping that he can help unravel the hidden history of Martins family. The present-day thread follows Martin and Isabel as they create a home and take in their nephew, Eduardo, who has crossed the border as an unaccompanied minor. The other thread starts in 1981 when Omar and his wife first crossed the border as well. Sylvester, a native of Peru who came to the U.S. with her family as a young child, said she was fascinated with the idea of family secrets, why we keep them and how those kept with the best intentions can sow trauma. Her first book. Chasing the Sun, was chosen as the Best Debut book in Latinidads Best Books of 2014. The author, who will be appearing at Brazos Bookstore on Friday, spoke with the Houston Chronicle about her work and how it reflects the current immigration debate. More Information Author appearance What: Natalia Sylvester will be at the Brazos Book Store, along with poet Jasminne Mendez When: 7 p.m. Friday Where: Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet St. Information: Call 713-523-0701 to reserve books on the day of the signing. See More Collapse Q. The theme of family secrets is fascinating, but it also seems like your book is about the ways we are connected and separated. What other themes do you explore? A. Its a story about the in-between spaces that we get caught in. My experience as an immigrant was different from my characters. I was born in Peru and my family came here when I was 4, and we moved around quite a bit when I was little. We lived in Miami, and we moved around in terms of the city, in terms of different homes, and then we lived in central Florida, and then we moved to the Valley. We lived in Mission, and my father worked in McAllen. But when I was little I remember feeling very aware, even at a young age, that migration means not just coming from another country but then to carry all these different borders and migration within the space that you now inhabit. And I felt very often even just talking to my mother, who was the one who really did the majority of the work in trying to make sure that all the paperwork that comes with trying to be in this country once you migrate, all the anxiety that comes with it. And I know that my mom tried to protect me from that. But it was something that I still noticed as a child anyway. For me, the way she often would tell me how that even if she were to go back to Peru, its changed. Its no longer the same place that she left. What does the idea of home become when its a place that youve left and then go back to? And then the new home that you arrived to, that you migrated to, also isnt a place where you necessarily feel that you fit in, whether its culturally or because the language or because in a lot of instances, too, they dont necessarily welcome you with the most open arms. That was something I saw from a very young age, and so it was just all these different things that I was trying to explore in this book. That in-between space I mentioned became very interesting to me. Its almost like a place that you can become locked in as you try to find a home. So its something that happened with Omars journey and my own journey became pretty apparent early on. Q. Many of us who come from other countries feel like we inhabit those in-between places, where you are not quite one thing or the other and might end up feeling almost like a ghost. Was that a reason you wanted to include a supernatural being? A. Its funny because I didnt think of mine as a ghost so much as a spirit. Its a small thing, but I can totally see that; I agree with you about in the in-between-ness of not being here nor there, of not being fully there. With that comes the idea of invisibility, of are we being seen in our entirety? Or are there parts of us that become invisible to others because they dont see us as being fully human or they can only see one part of our identity to define us or theyre also just not able to look past their own preconceived notions? Thats something that I felt and that I was trying to to explore specifically with Omars path. He made this incredibly long and hard and difficult journey only to be turned away. To me that very much parallels the ways we treat immigrants today, and I dont mean even just today as in 2018 because a lot of people will assume Im writing this in reaction to whats going on. I started writing this years ago, in 2013 or 2012. These are things that have always been happening, and these are things that anyone who has lived in this country as an immigrant felt deeply. Just because right now it happens to be at this critical point in which finally everyone is taking notice which is obviously a good thing and it can no longer be ignored. But the fact of the matter is that it went ignored for so long. Thats why weve gotten to this point. It went ignored by those who werent affected by it because certainly those in our community, within the community, have been speaking out and trying to fight for more visibility and more immigrant rights for generations. Q. You said you started writing this several years ago but certainly now the topic of immigration and families and that right to be safe, to be allowed to enter, is especially relevant. How do you think your book fits into the current discussion as to whats happening now? You have an unaccompanied minor in your story so thats certainly relevant right now. A. I tend tend to push back against the mindset because when we say something is relevant right now it implies that it has a timer on it, that it will one day not be as relevant or that it was previously not as relevant. The fact of the matter is that its always been important. A lot of the struggles have always been happening, and the only thing that makes it seem more relevant now is that the people are paying attention because its reached that horrible crisis point. But the seeds were always planted, and the seeds were allowed to grow largely unintended and unregulated by people who had the privilege to not pay attention. So Im glad that I can help bring those things to light. People often will say things like this humanizes immigrants. I just feel like that is such a strange way to look at people who are already human, to say that they need someone to humanize them. People saying that should become more in touch with their own humanity rather than ask us to prove ours to begin with. Q. This isnt just a story about immigrants. This is the story of the United States of America. This is very much an American story. A. Some of the moments that I got the most joy out of writing were those that reflected my own experiences and the experiences of those close to me, or people who have shared their stories little moments of joy and of triumph whether theyre big or small, something as simple as going to a homecoming or having your family over for Sunday dinner or celebrating your young child. Struggling to find a gift for them and knowing you cant afford it, so you make something out of what you have and you hope that theyll see it for the beauty and love and thought you put into it. When I look back at my own experience and, yes, I can see the struggles. I can see a lot of the pain and hurt that came with it. But what I see more than that is all the beauty and the triumphs and the small heroic acts of my family and the families around me that in making a life here, youre also nurturing all this joy to those around you, and youre celebrating that. For me thats why it also tied in with Dia de los Muertos because it is also about celebrating life, even for a holiday that is about death and even for book that has a lot of death, its really more about the life we bring and that we carry and that we share with one another. Q: Youve been outspoken about whats happening now with the separation of families. Recently you were tweeting out the #FamiliesBelongTogether hashtag. Why do you think its important for you personally to speak out on this? I just feel like how can anyone not? I think that there are things that people like to pretend and say are very nuanced and complicated. But I dont think that the decision of whether the child belongs with their parents is a nuanced one. Everything else that comes as a result, that falls behind can be nuanced. The thing that I feel is uncompromisable is that they belong together. We can talk policy and laws all we want and we should. But this is the unbreakable part: We will not tear these families apart. Right now we dont have an administration that cares, all they care about is enforcing the law laws that are put in place historically in very unjust ways and that historically have discriminated against people of color. And so its heartbreaking but not a surprise to see whats happening. That there are families being ripped apart for the sake of enforcing unjust laws. The Trump administration is detaining immigrant children in 17 states, including more than 2,000 taken from their parents after they crossed the U.S. border illegally, officials said Tuesday as the president's family-separation policy ignited an intensifying backlash from the public and from lawmakers. Customs and Border Patrol field supervisors have discretion to let children under age 5 stay with their parents, Brian Hastings, an official with the agency, said on a conference call with reporters. He didn't say how many children under 5 are being separated from parents. President Donald Trump showed no sign Tuesday that he would back down from his "zero tolerance" procedure for handling immigrant families in the face of bipartisan criticism from members of Congress. Lawmakers are scrambling to draft legislation that would prevent his administration from taking children from immigrant parents caught crossing the border illegally. The detentions have exploded into a political crisis for Republican lawmakers who are trying to hold control of Congress in elections less than five months away. Steve Wagner, the acting assistant secretary at the Administration for Children and Families, said the agency's Office of Refugee Resettlement is housing 11,786 immigrant children, most of whom entered the country unaccompanied by caregivers. "We must always arrest people coming into our Country illegally," Trump said in a tweet. "Of the 12,000 children, 10,000 are being sent by their parents on a very dangerous trip, and only 2000 are with their parents, many of whom have tried to enter our Country illegally on numerous occasions." Images and accounts of the thousands of children being held in temporary centers after the arrest of their parents have sparked a firestorm of dissent that's expanded to include Republican governors and party luminaries such as former first lady Laura Bush. Even a spokesman for the French government said the separations were "shocking" and showed different "model of civilization" between the U.S. and Europe. Business groups including the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable also have called for an end to the family separations. "This practice is cruel and contrary to American values," Chuck Robbins, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems and head of the Business Roundtable's Immigration Committee, said in a statement. Trump is scheduled to meet Tuesday afternoon with House Republicans at the Capitol. His policy has prompted a flurry of proposals from lawmakers to put an end to the practice of separating families. All 49 Senate Democrats are rallying behind a proposal by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein to prohibit children from being separated from their parents within 100 miles of the U.S. border except for instances of abuse, neglect or other specific circumstances. Republican lawmakers have dismissed the Democratic plan, but in a rare rebuke of Trump they also are calling for an end to the policy and are sorting through multiple proposals being offered in the House and Senate. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said a group of GOP senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida and James Lankford of Oklahoma, is working on a narrow bill to keep families together during expedited reviews of the children's status, which they plan to present at Tuesday's GOP lunch. He warned against trying to add other immigration-related provisions, saying attempts at wider legislation have repeatedly gotten tied up by differences within the party and fallen apart. "The bottom line is it would make sure that families stay together through the entirety of the legal proceedings and that they get an expedited hearing in front of an immigration judge to see if they qualify for any immigration benefits like asylum," Cornyn told reporters. House Republicans were already locked in intra-party negotiations over two bills that would authorize funds for Trump's border wall, eliminate some categories of legal immigration and protect some young immigrants from deportation. A provision to allow children to stay with their parents while they're in custody was added to both proposals. These two House bills -- one sponsored by Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte and another that represents a compromise between GOP ideological factions -- are slated for a floor vote Thursday. Democrats were not included in this negotiation and probably won't vote for either bill, making it more difficult to pass with only GOP votes. Republican leaders haven't indicated whether they'll get behind stand-alone legislation to block the family separations, and Trump has indicated he wants a broader package of changes to immigration law, including money for a border wall and restrictions on legal immigration and refugee admissions. Marc Short, the White House liaison to Congress, deflected a question about whether Trump would sign legislation dealing only with the family separation issue, calling it "hypothetical." "The entire issue at the border is unsustainable, that has been our point, that we need this addressed now, so no, it is absolutely not sustainable," he said. The administration has given varying rationales for the policy. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said it was implemented to serve as a deterrent to people trying to get into the U.S. illegally. Trump has claimed the administration was just following the law and falsely blamed Democrats for blocking changes. Some congressional Republicans have blamed a 1997 court settlement, though no previous administration has undertaken a similar policy. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the administration made no apologies for splitting families at the border and said it was a consequence of the government's prosecution of immigrants apprehended illegally entering the U.S. "Parents who entered illegally are, by definition, criminals," Nielsen said Monday at a briefing. "If an American were to commit a crime anywhere in the United States, they would go to jail and they would be separated from their family. This is not a controversial idea." - - - Bloomberg's Anna Edgerton and Steven T. Dennis contributed. This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents. Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites - the little branches in brain cells that transmit messages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and - especially in young children - wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain. "The effect is catastrophic," said Charles Nelson, pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School. "There's so much research on this that if people paid attention at all to the science, they would never do this." That research on child-parent separation is driving pediatricians, psychologists and other health experts to vehemently oppose the Trump administration's new border crossing policy, which has separated nearly 2,000 immigrant children from their parents in recent weeks. The American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association have all issued statements against it - representing more than 250,000 doctors in the United States. Nearly 7,700 mental-health professionals and 142 organizations have also signed a petition urging President Donald Trump to end the policy. "To pretend that separated children do not grow up with the shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds is to disregard everything we know about child development, the brain, and trauma," the petition reads. Nelson has studied the neurological damage from child-parent separation - work that he said has often reduced him to tears. In 2000, the Romanian government invited Nelson and a team of researchers into its state orphanages to advise them on a humanitarian crisis that the country's previous policies had created. For decades, Romania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had banned birth control and abortions, and imposed a "celibacy tax" on families with fewer than five children. Ceausescu believed that ratcheting up the country's birthrate would boost Romania's economy. Instead, the government ended up opening massive state-run orphanages to deal with more than 100,000 children whose parents couldn't afford to raise them. At those orphanages, Nelson said, "we saw kids rocking uncontrollably and hitting themselves, hitting their heads against walls. It was heartbreaking. We had to make up a rule for ourselves as researchers that we would never cry in front of the children. Whenever one of us felt ourselves tearing up, we would walk out of the room." As the children grew older, Nelson and his colleagues began finding unsettling differences in their brains. Those separated from their parents at a young age had much less white matter, which is largely made up of fibers that transmit information throughout the brain, as well as much less gray matter, which contains the brain-cell bodies that process information and solve problems. The activity in the children's brains was much lower than expected. "If you think of the brain as a lightbulb," Nelson said, "it's as though there was a dimmer that had reduced them from a 100 watt bulb to 30 watts." The children, who had been separated from their parents in their first two years of life, scored significantly lower on IQ tests later in life. Their fight-or-flight response system appeared permanently broken. Stressful situations that would usually prompt physiological responses in other people - increased heart rate, sweaty palms - would provoke nothing in the children. What alarmed the researchers most was the duration of the damage. Unlike other parts of the body, most cells in the brain cannot renew or repair themselves. The reason child-parent separation has such devastating effects is because it attacks one of the most fundamental and critical bonds in human biology. From the time they are born, children emotionally attach to their caregiver and vice versa, said Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center. Skin-to-skin contact for newborns, for example, is critical to their development, research shows. "Our bodies secrete hormones like oxytocin on contact that reinforces the bond, to help us attach and connect," Fortuna said. A child's sense of what safety means depends on that relationship. And without it, the parts of the brain that deal with attachment and fear - the amygdala and hippocampus - develop differently. The reason such children often develop PTSD later in life is that those neurons start firing irregularly, Fortuna said. "The part of their brain that sorts things into safe or dangerous does not work like it's supposed to. Things that are not threatening seem threatening," she said. Research on aboriginal children in Australia who were removed from their families also showed long-lasting effects. They were nearly twice as likely to be arrested or criminally charged as adults, 60 percent more likely to have alcohol-abuse problems and more than twice as likely to struggle with gambling. In China - where 1 in 5 children live in villages without their parents, who migrate for work - studies have shown on those "left-behind" children have markedly higher rates of anxiety and depression later in life. Other studies have shown separation leading to increased aggression, withdrawal and cognitive difficulties. "If you take the moral, spiritual, even political aspect out of it, from a strictly medical and scientific point of view, what we as a country are doing to these children at the border is unconscionable," said Luis Zayas, a psychiatry professor at the University of Texas at Austin. "The harm our government is now causing will take a lifetime to undo." --- Video Embed Code The Post's Michael E. Miller explains how shelters for immigrant children recently separated from their parents are different from other detention facilities. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post) Embed: --- Video Embed Code Video: The Post's Michael E. Miller explains how shelters for immigrant children recently separated from their parents are different from other detention facilities.(Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post) Embed code: F-Secure has on 18 June 2018 signed an agreement to acquire all the outstanding shares of MWR InfoSecurity, a privately held cybersecurity company operating globally from its main offices in the UK, the US, South Africa and Singapore. Today businesses are challenged by a dynamic advanced threat landscape in which attackers continuously use well-designed technology to circumvent traditional protection. Security perimeters are no longer enough to protect organizations, and developing better security capabilities on their own is out of reach for many organizations. Due to the shortage of skilled cyber security experts in-house there is a huge demand for both products and services to proactively search for newly emerging threats, detect and respond faster and especially stop future incidents. F-Secures combination of man and machine an approach shared by MWR InfoSecurity uniquely positions the company to support businesses to fight advanced attacks with its cyber security products and services. F-Secure CEO Samu Konttinen, said, The acquisition brings MWR InfoSecuritys industry-renowned technologies to F-Secure making our detection and response offering unrivaled. Their threat hunting platform (Countercept) is one of the most advanced in the market and is an excellent complement to our existing technologies. Im thrilled to welcome MWR InfoSecuritys employees to F-Secure. With their vast experience and hundreds of experts performing cyber security services on four continents, we will have unparalleled visibility into real-life cyber attacks 24/7. This enables us to detect indicators across an incredible breadth of attacks so we can protect our customers effectively. As most companies currently lack these capabilities, this represents a significant opportunity to accelerate F-Secures growth. With close to 400 employees, MWR InfoSecurity is among the largest cyber security service providers serving enterprises globally. MWR InfoSecurity has highly skilled experts in offensive techniques who understand the attacker mindset and is well-known in the industry for its technical expertise and research. Its threat hunting platform Countercept provides extensive proactive attack detection and complements F-Secures existing strengths. Additionally, F-Secures portfolio will be enhanced by MWR InfoSecuritys suite of managed phishing protection services (phishd). As cyber criminals increasingly target companies through their employees, its crucial to enable company personnel to identify and avoid these email borne attacks. Weve always relied on research-driven innovations executed by the best people and technology. This approach has earned MWR InfoSecurity the trust of some of the largest organizations in the world, says MWR InfoSecurity CEO, Ian Shaw who will join F-Secures Leadership Team after closing of the transaction in July. We see this approach thriving at F-Secure, and we look forward to working together so that we can break new ground in the cyber security industry. @Technuter.com News Service SAN ANTONIO-A Bexar County sheriffs deputy is accused of threatening an undocumented immigrant with deportation and of sexually assaulting her 4-year-old daughter. Sheriff Javier Salazar said 47-year-old Jose Nunez, a 10-year veteran who serves as a detention officer, was charged Sunday with super aggravated sexual assault of a child. According to Salazar, the girls mother took her daughter to a local fire station overnight after the girl cried out to her for help. Deputies responded, and by 4 a.m., after an initial investigation, Nunez was arrested. Authorities believe that the assaults had been going on for months and perhaps years, Salazar said, adding that the girls mother was allegedly blackmailed by the deputy to place her in fear so she would not report the assaults. Salazar said the mother is an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala and that Nunez allegedly said that if she went to authorities, he would report her. Folks like this are creatures of habit and opportunity, Salazar said. I dont know that he was purposely targeting the undocumented community. Certainly what was appealing was the vulnerability of that community because they are less apt to report things. Salazar said investigators are working to ensure that the mother is given protected status as a witness in the case. The sheriff also encouraged any other members of the undocumented community to come forward and report similar crimes against them. The relationship between Nunez and the victim was not given. Salazar said the assaults, which would also be investigated by Internal Affairs, occurred at the girls residence. Jenny Hixon, director of education for Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, said the organization blames Senate Bill 4 for adding to immigrants fears about coming forward to police. This is obviously a clear example of what happened with SB 4 creating an environment where they feel they dont have rights anymore, Hixon said. SB 4 punishes local officials who implement policies that limit immigration enforcement or prevent police from questioning the immigration status of anyone they detain or arrest. It also requires county jails to uphold requests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hold detainees suspected of being eligible for deportation. The sheriff did not have any information on whether Nunez has committed prior offenses, but said he did not believe any existed. Officials believe that there may be other victims. Salazar urged anyone with additional information about Nunez in connection with the assault on the girl, or other possible assaults, to contact the Sheriffs Office. Nunez is now on paid administrative leave for 10 days. After that, he could go on unpaid leave, Salazar said. My objective is to separate this person from the agency as soon as possible, Salazar said. If convicted, Nunez faces a minimum of 25 years in jail, Salazar said. San Antonio Express-News Staff Writer Chris Quinn contributed to this report. aluna@express-news.net | Twitter: @alexluna801 | jbeltran@express-news.net | Twitter: @JBfromSA State and local officials have agreed on a temporary plan to reduce flooding risks in communities between Lake Conroe and Lake Houston by strategically lowering the levels of the two reservoirs. The plan is intended to help prevent a recurrence of the catastrophic flooding that struck Kingwood, Humble and other northeast Harris County communities after Hurricane Harvey, when billions of gallons of water released from the Lake Conroe dam hurtled toward homes and businesses downstream. Hundreds of owners of flooded property sued the San Jacinto River Authority, which manages Lake Conroe, alleging that the releases were reckless and that affected residents didnt get adequate notice. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality informed the river authority and the city of Houston on Friday that it would permit the lake-reduction plans, using enforcement discretion under its authority to regulate water rights in the state. Houston and Conroe have legal rights to certain amounts of drinking water from Lake Conroe. The board of the river authority voted in April to reduce the level of Lake Conroe in the spring and fall historically the rainiest seasons in the Houston area but concluded that it could not proceed without state approval. The city of Houston, meanwhile, has begun reducing the level of Lake Houston in advance of predicted heavy rains. The state authorization is good news for owners of homes and businesses in communities near Lake Houston, said Houston City Councilman Dave Martin, whose district includes the Kingwood area. Its one of the best moves that we can possibly ask for, said Martin. Martin said the Coastal Water Authority, which manages Lake Houston, lowered the reservoirs level by 18 inches starting June 13, in advance of predicted rainstorms. Martin said the lake is now rising after several days of intermittent rainfall. Proactively releasing water, while its not the greatest answer to a flood situation, if we monitor it closely, it can help us, Martin said. Lake Conroe property owners, however, say the benefits of the tactic are unproven, and they argue that reducing the lake level would limit access to boat docks and potentially waste a precious commodity fresh water in a state that regularly endures droughts. Conflicting demands The plan calls for lowering Lake Conroe from its normal level, 201 feet above mean sea level, to 200 feet in April and May and to 199 feet in August and September. Lake Houston was impounded in 1954, followed by Lake Conroe in 1968, to supply drinking water to Houston and other communities in a rapidly growing metropolitan area. The dispute over the plan to lower the lake levels reflects the tension between this central purpose and other uses such as recreation and flood control. The proposal from Houston and (the river authority) highlights the difficulty of balancing the states long-term need for reliable water supplies with the short-term goal of protecting public health and safety while emergency measures are implemented to reduce flood risks, the city and the river authority said in a news release announcing the decision. Both agencies noted that the strategy is temporary intended to provide relief until the completion of a project to dredge part of the San Jacinto Rivers West Fork, which connects Lake Conroe and Lake Houston. The $50 million dredging project, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is set to begin in a few weeks. Litigation: Lake Conroe dams releases cause flood of lawsuits Mike Bleier, the president of the Lake Conroe Association, which represents property owners around the lake, asked the river authority board in May to reverse its vote to reduce the lake level. The decision to do so was made emotionally to support flood victims downstream rather than with supporting documentation of the facts, Bleiers written presentation said. In a recent interview, Bleier said the association could accept reducing the lake level to 200 feet in the spring and fall for a maximum of two years, which would provide time for more permanent solutions to be developed. But the planned reduction to 199 feet in August and September is excessive, he said. Property owners want to be able to utilize the lake all year round and have it be at a safe level, said Bleier. Businesses rely on summer boat traffic, whether its buying life preservers or buying gas thats part of our economy. On Sunday, Bleier emailed members of the association to inform them of the TCEQs decision. For all of us on Lake Conroe, this is not good news, he wrote, adding that litigation to prevent the lake level reductions would likely be an uphill (and extremely expensive) battle. Comments from lakeside property owners compiled by Bleier include concerns that lowering the lake would make docks inaccessible, harm a program to restore native plants and weaken the areas economy. In his May presentation to the river authority board, Bleier also noted that releasing water from Lake Conroe (and, ultimately, into the saltwater Gulf of Mexico) when the lake is at or below its stated pool elevation of 201 feet is simply a waste of the worlds greatest commodity - clean water. The U.S. Drought Monitor map for June 12 developed before the weekend rainfall showed that most southeastern Texas counties were experiencing moderate or severe drought conditions. Permanent solutions Mark Micheletti, a member of the river authority board, said the proposed lake levels take into account any natural drop due to evaporation and lack of rain; if these conditions caused the lake to drop to its targeted levels at the time the reductions were scheduled, no action would be needed. But if drought conditions occurred after a water release, the levels could drop even further. Lake Conroe dropped by a record six feet during a 2011 drought. The lake reduction plan is among several ongoing efforts to protect Lake Houston-area communities, where an estimated 16,000 homes and 3,300 businesses flooded during Harvey. Other initiatives include the upcoming dredging project and the pursuit of federal funds to purchase gates that would enable more effective releases of water downstream from Lake Houston. Read more: Gov. Abbott announces San Jacinto River flood relief Gov. Greg Abbott, who promised help for the area during a March visit, appointed two Kingwood residents Micheletti and Kaaren Cambio to the San Jacinto River Authority board and instructed the agency to add a flood control division. Micheletti said he understands the concerns of Lake Conroe property owners who, he says, would like to be able to enjoy the lake in the way they always have. In the long term, he said, flood-control initiatives such as new detention areas could make the lowering of the lake level unnecessary. He added, Id like to bring the upstream and downstream communities together to achieve more permanent solutions. SANTA FE Nearly a month after a 17-year-old gunman opened fire on Santa Fe High School, killing 10 and wounding 13, most flags around town remain at half-staff. It is difficult to find an electrical pole or large tree without yellow and green ribbon around its base. At Runge Park, located in the heart of this rural Galveston County community, colorful cups pushed into chain-link fencing spell Santa Fe Strong. More political messages, however, could start pushing their way into town this weekend. A group of statewide gun advocates plan to hold a rally in favor of arming teachers at Runge Park on Saturday, June 23. The Carry for our Kids assembly was planned days after the shooting, according to the This is Texas Freedom Force, which planned the event. The planned rally stands in contrast to protests held after the February shooting near Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. There, a sizable number of students and victims families began calling on lawmakers to restrict the sale of assault rifles and to make it more difficult for folks with criminal histories, mental health issues and dishonorable military discharges to obtain firearms. Their actions spurred national protests, including several student walk-outs in the spring and a March for Our Lives event that drew hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., and scores of others in cities across the country. OPPOSITION: Texas lawmakers weigh arming teachers, other safety measures Brandon Burkhardt, president of This is Texas Freedom Force, which organized the Carry for Our Kids event, said restricting gun sales and use is not a viable solution. He noted that law enforcement responses can take too long in active shooter situations and waiting for help to arrive no longer is the best course of action. Santa Fe ISD policy only allows members of its police department to carry firearms inside school buildings. Other school staff with a Texas handgun license may store a firearm inside a locked car in a school parking area, and staff may use firearms so long as they are part of a district-approved activity supervised by property authorities. Otherwise, district policy states that all weapons, including firearms, are prohibited on district property. Other school districts, including Huffman ISD in the northwest greater Houston area, have approved plans to allow some teachers to carry guns on campus. Huffman ISDs Board of Trustees opted for a guardian plan, which allows local school boards to dictate training standards, evaluations and policies that enable some teachers to be armed at school. Huffman ISD officials plan to create specific policies for their plan this summer. Another program established by state law allows schools to select one staff member per 500 students to have a gun on campus. Those selected, known as school marshals, must complete 80 hours of training, undergo a psychological evaluation, hold a license to carry a firearm and be monitored by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement. Burkhardt said he would like to see Texas expand laws that allow teachers to carry guns on campus. If a teacher meets all requirements of the school marshal program, he or she should be able to carry a gun on campus without being selected or limited by school administration, he said. CJ Grisham, president of Open Carry Texas who is scheduled to speak at the rally, said if some teachers at the school had the option of being armed at the time of the Santa Fe High shooting, they could have worked with the school resource officers on site to slow the shooter. He said the point of the rally is to prevent similar school shootings. He also pushed back on potential criticism about the timing and location of the rally. Why should our narrative have a time frame when the gun control narrative doesnt? Grisham said. We want to stop these shootings. When is the best time to talk about stopping them? Had we been pushing gun control, these people wouldnt argue that its too soon. They just dont agree with our point of view. This is Texas Freedom Force has organized rallies statewide over the past few years, notably to protest the removal of Confederate statutes and monuments in San Antonio. Burkhardt said some ex-law enforcement officers and military veterans will provide security at Carry for our Kids, along with local law enforcement officials. They will not, however, be dressed in fatigues or carry large firearms. For this occasion, most of our security guards will conceal carry and wear street clothes, Burkhardt said. We did that on purpose to make sure community doesnt feel threatened or worried about whats taking place. Santa Fe City Manager Joe Dickson said the Santa Fe Police Department, the Galveston County Sheriffs Office and the FBI were aware of the rally. As I understand, they do encourage their members to bring weapons and be sure to follow all the laws and regulations concerning the carry, whether concealed or open, he added. Danika McLeod, a 17-year-old senior at Santa Fe High school whose brother, Kyle, was killed at the school, said she is not completely opposed to the idea of arming some teachers. She said allowing a small group of school staff to carry firearms, as long as their identities are unknown to students, they go through extensive training and background checks, could allow for faster responses. That might have helped because I know in the classroom next to Kyles, there was a teacher who had training but he didnt have a gun, McLeod said. He said if he had, he would have gone out there and killed (the shooter). She does not believe guns are the cure-all, however. She traveled to Dallas on last week to speak at and participate in a die-in protest to bring awareness to gun violence. McLeod said she wished the Carry for Our Kids rally organizers had worked with Santa Fe students to host a discussion rather than a one-sided protest. If they would have asked, Hey, how do you feel about this? we could explain, McLeod said. Were smart kids. We can coherently tell you what we want. Others said they would welcome thoughtful discussions about whether to arm teachers. At Runge Park on Friday, Edward Orduna, who graduated from Santa Fe High decades ago, said he hoped the rally could be a jumping off point. If its a peaceful one and they listen to both sides, pros and cons, I dont see a problem with it, Orduna said. But its never like that. Its just now you have to question their motives. Are they doing it for that fact or are they doing it to throw in their own agenda? Nearby, Erin Workman, who spent part of the morning at target practice with her boyfriend, said she did not have enough information to form an opinion on whether some teachers should be able to carry guns on campus. She, too, welcomed discussions on the subject but said she worries those could be in short supply Saturday. I think awareness is good. I just dont know if a rally is the way to do it, Workman said. I feel like in a rally situation, everyones just screaming and not listening. LEFT OUT? School police want a voice in plans to improve campus security Grisham and Burkhardt said several groups, including Open Carry Texas and the This is Texas Freedom Force, will have booths at the event where attendees can discuss the issue with gun advocates. Still, he said, the purpose of the event is to highlight those groups efforts to stem the spate of school shootings at the state level. We wanted to have an honest conversation to let people know there are two sides of the story, Burkhardt said. Just because theyre hearing one side, we dont want people to think thats the only solution they have. shelby.webb@chron.com Now Playing: Two men are at large after a Tuesday morning police chase through northeast Houston, authorities said. Video: METRO Video Two men are at large after a Tuesday morning police chase through northeast Houston, authorities said. The pursuit began around 1:30 a.m. on Cavalcade near the Eastex Freeway, when officers tried pulling a driver over for traffic violations. Today we celebrate Juneteenth, the day when Union General Gordon Granger stood on the balcony of Galvestons famous Ashton Villa and announced the Civil War was over, the Confederacy had lost, and slaves in Texas were free to chart their own destiny. In Houston, that included founding schools. One of the first classrooms relied on a religiously inspired catechetical method in which questions were asked out loud and students would answer. One question, however, earned the ire of local media at the time: To whom are you indebted for your freedom? Answered by: To the Yankee soldiers. EDITORIAL: Today we celebrate freedom not only for people, but for the spirit of a nation It didnt take too long for that story of liberation to be replaced by a new narrative of the Lost Cause. Streets were renamed after Confederate figures, statues were erected in their honor and a whitewashed history about the Civil War was propagated throughout our city, culture and classrooms. No monument better embodies this deceptive retelling than the 1959 Children of the Confederacy plaque in the state capitol, which makes the bizarre and utterly inaccurate claim that the war between the states was not a rebellion nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery. A movement is growing within state government to remove the plaque, and theres little reason to wait. Earlier this month, The Texas Observer obtained emails from the State Preservation Board indicating that Gov. Greg Abbott could have it taken down immediately, if he so desired. Texans finally find ourselves at a moment when the misleading debris of history is being cleaned away, revealing the true nature of our state and heritage. If we want to be a place that values our freedom, Texans must be eager to celebrate that cause and those who fought for it, and cast aside the figures who vaingloriously sought to obscure and deny the truth. EDITORIAL: Celebrate Juneteenth at Emancipation Park That means commemorating historic figures such as Houston Mayor Thomas Scanlan, who integrated City Hall during Reconstruction, and early black leaders such as Jack Yates. It means educating students about the full Civil War story, including the cruelty and pervasiveness of slavery and the tales of Texas German-speaking abolitionists. It means confronting the two Confederate monuments in our own city a topic that Mayor Sylvester Turner acknowledged on Twitter this week he has the power to address. For so long, the healing in this country has been impeded by lies and distortions. As it was for the former slaves in Texas, the truth has been delayed. As a result, freedom has not been completely realized. Its a vital message on Juneteenth, and every day: Telling the truth about our history is the only way to move past it. Black woman in handcuffs There seems to be an international push these days toward making the purchase of sex (but not its sale) illegal. In the 16 years since Sweden criminalized buyers of commercial sex, Norway, Denmark, Canada and most recently, northern Ireland have followed suit. And now England is considering similar legislation, according to VICE. What adherents to this approach don't understand is that such laws only make working conditions much more dangerous for sex workers and do very little to curb the demand for commercial sex. As I illustrate in my book, Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law, many sex workers are careful to screen clients before they meet with them, asking for detailed information about who they are and where they work. As Maddy, a high-end escort in Washington, D.C. whose clients are corporate executives and top government officials, told me, " I never see clients I haven't screened. I find out where they work, and I can verify that they actually are who they say they are." Advertisement As Maddy and other sex workers note, laws criminalizing buyers would make such screening much more difficult -- what buyer is going to readily divulge such culpable information -- and thus jeopardize their ability to work safely. And indeed, that appears to be what has happened in Sweden. Since 2000, studies show, sex workers there have a much more difficult time negotiating safe sex (i.e. sex with condoms) and assessing dangerous clients. They've also lost many low-risk clients, leaving them exposed to more violent clientele -- both on the streets and indoors. The irony is that Sweden's approach has actually increased the overall number of sex workers in that country and did not reduce trafficking in the region at all, according to the Swedish government's own reports. By contrast, countries that have decriminalized sex work and regulated it to some degree (such as the Netherlands and New Zealand) report no increase in the sex trafficking of minors and illegal immigrants. At the same time, sex workers in those countries are better able to protect themselves -- from physical harm and sexually transmitted diseases. Because they don't fear being arrested, they have more time to negotiate safe sex and they are more comfortable working with police to target traffickers and abusive clients. In decriminalized environments, sex workers are also able to work with colleagues who know where they're going and who they're meeting with, an important safeguard -- without fear of being arrested. As I blogged about before, police in the United States often arrest sex workers who work together and charge them with trafficking each other, even when they are working together by choice. Advertisement As one British researcher told VICE, the current push in the United Kingdom to criminalize buyers is reminiscent of the solicitation laws passed there in the late 19th century, which resulted in the convictions of 7,415 sex workers but only 165 pimps. As Julia Laite,a lecturer in British history at Birkbeck, University of London, said: What really bothers me is that these people present the idea of criminalizing buyers as a brand-new, feminist, revolutionary idea. Really, the idea is very old. It wasn't originally considered feminist; it was far more connected to the moral reform movement. Imperial Valley News Center President Donald J. Trump is Achieving a Safe and Secure Future in Space Washington, DC - "This is a giant step toward inspiring future generations and toward reclaiming Americas proud destiny in space." ~ President Donald J. Trump FURTHER SPACE DEVELOPMENT: President Donald J. Trump signed Space Policy Directive 3 directing the United States to lead the management of traffic and mitigate the effects of debris in space. Space Policy Directive 3 provides guidelines and direction to ensure that the United States is a leader in providing a safe and secure environment as commercial and civil space traffic increases. As space becomes increasingly contested, the demand for the Department of Defense to focus on protecting U.S. space assets and interests also increases. At the same time, the rapid commercialization of space requires a traffic management framework that protects U.S. interests and considers the private sectors needs. The new Directive seeks to reduce the growing threat of orbital debris to the common interest of all nations. The Directive articulates the policy of the United States to pursue and utilize both Government and commercial sector technologies to track and monitor space debris. The Directive requires updates to the U.S. Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices and new guidelines for satellite design and operation. The new Directive sets guidelines for the United States to manage space traffic more effectively by spearheading new data sharing initiatives. The United States should continue to provide basic space situational awareness data and basic space traffic management services free of direct user fees. The Department of Commerce will make space safety data and services available to the public, while the Department of Defense maintains the authoritative catalogue of space objects. The United States will maintain and expand its leadership in space by increasing its capabilities and developing standards and best practices. This effort will: Improve space situational awareness data standards and information sharing; Leverage U.S. standards and best practices to shape international norms; and Streamline processes and reduce regulatory burdens that inhibit commercial growth, enabling the U.S. commercial sector to lead the world in space. A RENEWED VIGOR FOR SPACE: The new Space Policy Directive builds on the Presidents efforts to reinstate the United States leadership role in space. Leading health organizations collaborate with industry on new initiative to combat growing diabetes and cardiovascular disease threat Arlington, Virginia - The American Heart Association (AHA) and the American Diabetes Association (ADA) today announced the start of a new multi-year collaborative initiative supported by founding sponsors Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly and Company (Lilly), and Novo Nordisk. The initiatives goal is to help people with type 2 diabetes reduce their risk of disability and death due to cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke. Additional support for the initiative is provided by national sponsor, Sanofi. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death and a major cause of disability for this population. Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to have cardiovascular disease, which includes heart disease, heart failure, heart attack and stroke, than people without diabetes. The combined risks have a significant impact shortening life expectancy by an average of 12 years for adults at age 60 with both conditions. Type 2 diabetes, which accounts for 90-95 percent of all diabetes cases, occurs when blood glucose (sugar) levels rise higher than normal because the body doesnt respond to the hormone insulin properly. It is estimated that more than 30 million American adults have diabetes, including about 7.2 million who are undiagnosed. In people with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular risk remains high even when blood sugar levels are controlled, leaving many unaware of the danger. The new initiative will enhance consumer awareness, patient education, healthcare provider training, and quality improvement measures for clinics, practices and hospitals treating people with type 2 diabetes. Together, the AHA and ADA bring strong credentials to this effort, with more than 30 million volunteers, members and healthcare professionals with a combined 170 years of expertise. The AHA is the worlds leading voluntary organization working to build lives free of cardiovascular disease and stroke. The ADA is the nations leading voluntary health organization working to prevent, cure and improve the lives of those affected by diabetes. Diabetes is a significant threat to the cardiovascular health of many Americans, said Nancy Brown, Chief Executive Officer of the American Heart Association. As we work toward our goal to improve Americans health, this collaboration aims to unite the healthcare community with a comprehensive approach to caring for, educating, treating and empowering patients with diabetes to improve their cardiovascular health and their quality of life. Diabetes is the most expensive chronic health condition in the U.S., totaling $327 billion in overall annual costs in 2017; moreover, one in every seven healthcare dollars is spent directly treating diabetes and its complications, said Tracey D. Brown, Chief Executive Officer of the American Diabetes Association. Reducing cardiovascular disease risk among people with type 2 diabetes can improve quality and length of life, and it can help to reduce our national healthcare expenses. This collaboration codifies a critical collective mission to improve and enhance the lives of the more than 30 million Americans with diabetes. The longer people live with type 2 diabetes, the higher their risk of developing cardiovascular disease and, potentially, additional health concerns and risk factors. These are challenges the AHA, ADA and industry collaborators are ready to combat together. This new collaboration has the potential to improve the lives of millions living with diabetes who are at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease and reduce the impact of these conditions on our health care system, said Thomas Seck, M.D., Vice President of Clinical Development and Medical Affairs Primary Care at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Boehringer Ingelheim and our Alliance partner Lilly are proud to launch this important initiative, which is a testament to the critical shifts needed in diabetes care to properly address the life-threatening consequences of diabetes and heart disease. As a founding partner of this initiative, were excited about joining together with the ADA and AHA to launch this initiative to help people with diabetes learn more about the critical link between diabetes and the risk of cardiovascular disease, said Todd Hobbs, M.D., Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Novo Nordisk. Addressing cardiovascular risk is an important part of overall diabetes management, and were hopeful that the collective power of the AHA, ADA and industry will change the trajectory of type 2 diabetes and bring about meaningful change for the people living with diabetes and those who love, support and care for them. Alessandro Doria, MD, PhD, MPH, Receives the American Diabetes Associations 2018 Edwin Bierman Award Arlington, Virginia - Alessandro Doria, MD, PhD, MPH, has been selected to receive the American Diabetes Associations (ADAs) 2018 Edwin Bierman Award. This award recognizes a leading scientist who has made outstanding contributions in the field of diabetes-related macrovascular complications and related risk factors. Dr. Doria will be recognized with this honor during the ADAs 78th Scientific Sessions, June 22-26, 2018, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. Dr. Doria will deliver the Edwin Bierman Award Lecture, titled Leveraging Genetics to Improve Cardiovascular Health in Diabetes, on Monday, June 25. Currently an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, as well as Senior Investigator in the Section on Genetics and Epidemiology and Co-Director of the Molecular Phenotyping and Genotyping Core at the Joslin Diabetes Center, Dr. Doria is a world-renowned expert in the genetic epidemiology of coronary heart disease in diabetes. With more than 100 original publications, Dr. Dorias research has paved the way for innovative diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. The overarching concept of his research has been that the risk of coronary heart disease in people with diabetes is determined by a synergism between exposure to the diabetic environment and permissive genetic factors. He has persistently worked to identify these genetic factors and turn this knowledge into novel approaches to prevent, stop or reverse the macrovascular complications of diabetes. I would like to congratulate Dr. Doria on this achievement, and thank him for his contributions to our understanding of vascular complications of diabetes, said the ADAs 2018 President of Medicine and Science Jane E.B. Reusch, MD. His tremendous body of work has made a lasting impact in the sphere of diabetes and its associated complications. Dr. Doria also serves as Associate Editor of the ADAs journal Diabetes and is a dedicated mentor to young researchers in the fields of epidemiology, genetics and macrovascular complications. The American Diabetes Associations 78th Scientific Sessions, to be held June 22-26, 2018, at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, is the worlds largest scientific meeting focused on diabetes research, prevention and care. During the five-day meeting, more than 16,000 health care professionals from around the world will have exclusive access to more than 3,000 original diabetes research presentations, participate in provocative and engaging exchanges with leading diabetes experts, and can earn Continuing Medical Education (CME) or Continuing Education (CE) credits for educational sessions. The program is grouped into eight theme areas: Acute and Chronic Complications; Behavioral Medicine, Clinical Nutrition, Education and Exercise; Clinical Diabetes/Therapeutics; Epidemiology/Genetics; Immunology/Transplantation; Insulin Action/Molecular Metabolism; Integrated Physiology/Obesity; and Islet Biology/Insulin Secretion. Felicia Hill-Briggs, PhD, ABPP, President of Health Care and Education, will deliver her address, The American Diabetes Association in the Era of Health Care Transformation, on Saturday, June 23, and Jane E.B. Reusch, MD, President of Medicine and Science, will present her address, 24/7/365 Lifetime with Diabetes, on Sunday, June 24. In total, the 2018 Scientific Sessions includes 375 oral presentations; 2,117 poster presentations, including 47 moderated poster discussions; and 297 published-only abstracts. Join the Scientific Sessions conversation on social media using #2018ADA. White House Press Secretary on the Visit of Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands Washington, DC - President Donald J. Trump will welcome Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands to the White House on July 2, 2018. President Trump looks forward to reaffirming the strong bonds of friendship between the United States and the Netherlands, which reach back over four hundred years. The President and Prime Minister will discuss trade and investment between the United States and the Netherlands. They will also discuss shared defense and security goals, both within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and globally. Political and Religious Prisoners Held by the Russian Government Washington, DC - The United States is deeply concerned by the growing number of individualsnow more than 150identified by credible human rights organizations as political and religious prisoners held by the Government of the Russian Federation. We are especially concerned about the welfare of four Ukrainians unjustly imprisoned who are currently on hunger strikeOleh Sentsov, Stanislav Klykh, Oleksandr Shumkov, and Volodymyr Balukh. We are likewise troubled by the case of Oyub Titiyev, a human rights activist prosecuted on trumped-up drug charges in Chechnya, whose pre-trial detention was recently extended. In retaliation for peaceful religious practice, Russian authorities have detained Jehovahs Witness Dennis Christensen without trial since May 2017. Five Church of Scientology leaders have also been subjected to detention without trial since June 2017, as well as over a dozen Muslim followers of Turkish theologian Said Nursi. We call on Russia to release all those identified as political or religious prisoners immediately and cease its use of the legal system to suppress dissent and peaceful religious practice. The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve equal treatment under the law and the ability to exercise their rights without fear of retribution. You'd be hard pressed to find any entrepreneur in Silicon Valley--or otherwise--who is in favor of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico. Tech entrepreneurs and other business leaders early this week issued strong rebukes against the policy, which recently came to light after lawmakers and human rights organizations protested the policy. Some have turned to social media to voice their concerns, while others have made substantial donations to groups working to assist those faced with the threat of deportation. Airbnb, whose leadership has been particularly vocal in their criticism of the Trump administration, took a strong stance against the administration's impact on the families of undocumented immigrants on Monday. Founders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk released a statement on Twitter, calling for the end of the separation of families. "Ripping children from the arms of their parents is heartless, cruel, immoral, and counter to American values of belonging," reads that statement. "The U.S. government needs to stop this injustice and reunite these families. We are a better country than this." Politico confirmed Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg both donated an undisclosed amount to an online fundraiser run by Malorie Lucich McGee, plus Charlotte and Dave Willner who initially aimed to raise $1,500 for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services based in San Antonio, Texas. That organization is working to pay the bonds necessary to get parents out of detention and reunite families, as well as ensure legal representation for the children in Texas' immigration courts. The campaign has since raised over $4.3 million, and the goal has been hiked to $5 million. On Twitter, Jeff Lawson the CEO of Twilio, a cloud communications platform based in San Francisco, took his disdain for the policy even further. "Separating families is basically collective punishment, which is explicitly forbidden by the Geneva Convention. If this were a war in the traditional sense, the U.S. president would be guilty of war crimes. Consider that," Lawson wrote. Amazon's Jeff Bezos has been vocal about his stance toward immigration, as his father--a Cuban immigrant--came to the U.S as a teenager. He reiterated this message in a tweet on Sunday. Alongside his wife MacKenzie, Bezos donated $33 million to TheDream.us, which helps undocumented students brought to the U.S. as children pay for a college education. He has called for protections to be returned to Dreamers, according to Business Insider. And while Microsoft has received ample criticism for working with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement--and trying to then scrub that fact from a blog post--its President, Brad Smith, over the weekend, also issued a rebuke of the policy. On LinkedIn, he wrote: Would you want to work there? Getty Images Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek. How many weeks since we had the joy of watching a Manhattan lawyer yelling at and threatening staff in a deli, just because they happened to speak to each other in Spanish? Well, here we have a Dunkin' Donuts that might have rewarded that lawyer. You see, a Baltimore branch of the chain featured a sign near the counter. It made for fascinating reading: If you hear any of our staff SHOUTING in a language other than ENGLISH Please call 443-415-7775 immediately with the name of the employee to receive a coupon for FREE Coffee and a pastry. Ah. Oh. So it's OK for staff to shout in English, but not, say, in Spanish? Or Polish? How about Welsh? What about English with a heavy Scottish accent? And what if the customer is from abroad and doesn't realize that Baltimore-accented English is, in fact, English? Then there's the whole business of shouting versus speaking. Dunkin' Donuts can be a noisy place. What if someone is speaking loudly because they want to be heard and somebody -- perhaps clutching a Noise Level Meter -- deems this shouting? The sign was first spotted by WBAL-TV producer Gillian Morley, who posted it to Twitter. This sign is being displayed at a @dunkindonuts in Baltimore. General manager posted a sign asking customers to report employees not speaking English. Even offering a reward. #shocking pic.twitter.com/1kUr0lcYuY -- Gillian Morley (@GillianMorley_) June 18, 2018 Some might think that a general manager of anything who'd think this even vaguely sensible ought not to be a general manager of anything. Still, I asked the corporate Dunkins what they thought of it. A spokeswoman for the chain replied: Dunkin' Donuts and our franchisees share the goal of creating a welcoming and hospitable environment for all guests. The franchise owner has informed us that the sign was posted by their general manager based on her own personal judgment to ensure those standards are being met. While her intent was to address a customer service and satisfaction issue, the franchisee determined her approach was inappropriate and confirmed the sign has been removed. How many customers would be satisfied to see such a sign, especially in our racially troubled times? How could it possibly be welcoming and hospitable if guests are encouraged to snitch on staff -- and, who knows, get them fired -- for the blessed reward of a free coffee and pastry? What sort of hospitality would staff be willing to offer if they know their boss wants customers to spy on them? I asked Dunkin' Donuts for the corporate view of the sign itself and this approach to customer service. Sadly, I didn't get a reply. Or a free coffee and pastry. Who knows what the full backstory to this might be? But whatever issue you might have with your staff, co-opting customers suggests that you've lost that managing feeling. Yes, a franchisee can determine the environment presented in their store. It's the job of management -- not customers -- to ensure that happens. Sometimes, too, the corporate controllers can admit when a local store has it wrong. This happened in the case of Starbucks, with an infamous incident in Philadelphia that led to a complete policy change as to the use of bathrooms. In 2018, clothes are not merely a fashion choice: They're roving billboards denouncing sexual harassment. We Wear the Pants is a fashion collaboration between Gabriella Meyer and Marta Goldschmied featuring 30 or so laser-etched news articles about sexual harassment on a denim jacket and a pair of jeans. It also includes a T-shirt with the slogan "Wanted: women who wear the pants." Meyer is the founder of Denimcratic, a Chicago-based bespoke fashion brand made out of upcycled denim. Goldschmied is a fashion designer and co-founder of Made Gold, a denim company she left after she experienced sexual harassment herself, as reported in a New York Times article introducing the collection. Since the official launch of the line on Thursday, it has already sold 25 percent of its inventory, with 10 percent of each purchase going to the National Women's Law Center. "The response has been so positive, it's really helped me heal," says Golschmied in an emailed statement to Inc. "It made me feel like a part of the dialogue and like I have the power to hopefully create some change around how women are treated in the workplace." "We Wear the Pants collection is really focused on gender equality and aiding women seeking legal help in regards to hostile work environments," adds Meyer. The standalone three-piece collection from the two designers is currently only sold online. It will also be available in three pop-up stores, one in L.A. that is opening this summer, and two others in New York and Milan that will launch in September for Fashion Week. The first production run, consisting of 65 jeans and 55 jackets, was sponsored by Turkish company ISKO Denim, which will also put up the financing for the pop-up stores. Tonello, a laser-engraving company, and Metalbottoni, which made the buttons, are also part of the collaboration. To be sure, "political fashion" is not a new thing. There are myriad examples throughout history: from women ditching dresses in favor of pantsuits to Vivienne Westwood's 2005 "I am not a terrorist" T-shirt line protesting controversial anti-terror laws in the U.K. In 2016, hot pink pussycat hats became a feminist symbol, and they are a frequent sight at just about any protest. Meyer says they decided to hone in on companies and associations faced with sexual harassment allegations to illustrate how the problem is a systemic institutional issue and not the product of "a few bad seeds." "Even in the articles where you can see the person facing these allegations, the article envelops the company's response to the allegations, and how they chose to handle it," she adds. Uber, for example, which reportedly fostered a culture that facilitated sexual harassment under the leadership of ousted CEO Travis Kalanick, is featured prominently in the design. The $375 jacket also depicts a photo of Bill O'Reilly around the waist area, and the $250 jeans flaunt Larry Nassar's photo on the left butt cheek. In social media, some users were quick to question why women would want to wear the names and faces of alleged sexual harassers in their bodies. Others complained about the steep price tag and the fact that the jeans sizes only run up to size 10. "In terms of pricing, laser technology is new and certainly not cheap," says Meyer. "Our hope is that with the success from the first round of production will help us to pay for the next. And of course with that, we will be expanding in our size range, as we want to be inclusive of all body types." Last March, I attended the Heart Series Conference and had the chance to speak with leaders of truly inspiring brands, such as Clifbar. Suzanne Lerner, President and Co-Founder of Michael Stars, gave me a look into the brand's roots and commitment to its values. LM: So let's start with who you are and your origin story. SL: My name is Suzanne Lerner and I am a co-founder of Michael Stars and currently its president. We started the company in 1986 as a simple screen-printed T-shirt company that did posters--with incorrect French writing. And everybody bought it--Fred Segal then Harrod's, then Barney's and Bloomingdale's--the whole world. LM: So we're here at the Heart Series Conference, connecting with businesses and brands that "do good" as part of their mission. Talk to me about why Michael Stars is so heart-centered, and why conferences like this one are so important to you. SL: I was born this way, raised in a liberal family that cares about others. My family was always into giving back. I was just raised like that. I attended high school on the west side of Chicago. I did something called Operation Wingspread. It got 15 African-American and 15 white kids from the suburbs together doing projects in the inner city of Chicago; it got us learning about each other. We were completely transformed. I also used to go volunteer on the south side at Cook County Hospital, so I was always like this. I went to college and dropped out. I didn't want to be a doctor, nurse, lawyer, or any of those kind of things. I was working, and then ended up going to Europe. And I kept going back and I traveled for five years. From 1973 to 1977 I lived overseas; I worked everywhere around the world, from Australia to Nepal. I met this woman that ran a small export business in India and she introduced me to some people who wanted to start a clothing line. I ended up moving to Los Angeles to learn the business. I reached out to people and they mentored me. I still try to mentor as much as I can because that's how I learned. I worked for a clothing line for two years. It went out of business, and then I started my own line. We've always believed in giving back. LM: How did you and co-founder Michael Cohen get connected? SL: He walked into my share room with these screen-printed, ugly sweatshirts...with shoulder pads--and I asked him for a date. He was very handsome and funny. We went out and that was it. We just started doing things together. A week later he got screen prints on T-shirts and I had the share room. We started doing it together--and it led to marriage. And we lived it, breathed it and loved it. We really believed our employees were family. And sometimes we kept them too long. And when the business got really hurt by the recession, we had to let people go and it actually invigorated the company. It's quite amazing. When it happened, it was such a terrible thing to do. LM: That's hard. You're such a prolific brand. You've been around for 30 years, but there's so much competition in e-commerce right now. What do you think allows you to maintain your position in the market? SL: We hired a digital marketing and advertising company and the results with retargeting ads have been unbelievable. I was increasing by four percent year-to-year, and now I'm increasing 35 percent. The business is exploding online now. So I think that it's the marketing, how I present the products and who I am as a company. I think more and more people are finding out about what I represent, what the company represents and our partnerships. LM: The box model is so hot right now. Tell me about your partnership with Stitch Fix. SL: Stitch Fix is a lux box and the partnership has been unbelievable. We're doing big business for Stitch Fix and we've just become better now. People still want a special brand, they still want to be able to say they wear a brand. I think there aren't as many authentic brands out there anymore. They're all getting sold off and they're losing their power by producing cheaper products because they need those margins. I'm not doing that and my customers are still getting great fashion that will still be relevant a year from now, not something they're going to throw away. LM: What is your favorite piece that you've ever created or that you wear? SL: My favorite piece that I wear is a sweater with leather sleeves in a great color. It's just such a great sweater and we can keep doing it in a different color. LM: What is the are the key takeaways that you want readers to know about your brand? Microsoft removed an online mention of its work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the agency comes under fire for separating families at the U.S. border with Mexico, Bloomberg reports. In a blog post from January, Microsoft executive Tom Keane wrote about contracts Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service has with the U.S. Air Force and ICE. The post mentions Azure's ability to help the agency handle "sensitive and unclassified data" and use tools to help with facial recognition and identification. Over the weekend, lawmakers and human rights groups criticized the policy of separating parents from their children at the border. On Monday, the portion of the post that mentions ICE was missing. After Bloomberg inquired about the removal of the section, it was back online. "An employee edited the blog after seeing commentary in social media. This was a mistake, and as soon as it was noticed the blog was reverted to previous language," a Microsoft spokesman told Bloomberg. After restoring the language in the post, the company issued a statement announcing its opposition to the separation policy, emphasizing that it is not working with ICE on anything related to it. "We urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families," a Microsoft spokesperson said. With the news that the Trump administration is considering levying a whole new round of tariffs on Chinese goods--on top of the $50 billion introduced in March--the time is now to consider how the world's most populous country will react. A hint: It doesn't look good for you. "We have so many U.S. clients that are selling to Chinese consumers, and if one company in their industry sneezes, they might all catch a cold," noted Dan Harris, an analyst and author of the China Law Blog, who focuses on legal matters related to doing business in China. In particular, Harris is concerned that tariffs on Chinese goods could negatively impact Chinese consumer sentiment vis-a-vis American brands, leading them to bypass those products for foreign competitors. "These tariffs could give companies in other markets a real competitive advantage against the U.S.," Harris added. The U.S.'s most recently introduced tariffs of 25 percent--set to take effect on July 6--encompass a wide array of Chinese goods, including industrial products such as aerospace, information, and communication technology, robotics, and industrial machinery. Late last week, China announced its own round of retaliatory tariffs, which target $34 billion worth of U.S. goods including soybeans, electric cars, orange juice, and salmon. And on Monday, Trump threatened an additional round of tariffs of 10 percent on up to $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, should Beijing proceed with its countermeasures. While China's tariffs don't overtly impact many technology companies, at present, industry trade groups are concerned that they could extend to tech products in the future. "Tariffs go against the interest of the American people," said Michael Petricone, senior vice president of government and relations at the Consumer Technology Association, a trade group, in a statement emailed to Inc. on Friday. "The economy will respond to the president's tariff agenda by increasing the cost of goods that people use everyday, harming the U.S. economy and sinking the stock market." The administration, for its part, says that tariffs are necessary to punish China for what it has deemed unfair and predatory trade practices, including currency manipulation and intellectual property theft. Trade representative Robert Lighthizer has described the tariffs as a defensive move, stating: "China's government is aggressively working to undermine America's high-tech industries and economic leadership through unfair trade practices and industrial policies." Here's a look at four ways those tariffs, and any retaliatory action by Beijing, could impact tech entrepreneurs: 1. Costs for component parts made in China could surge. Although China's retaliatory tariffs don't target American tech products per se, many firms that rely on the Chinese market to manufacture their goods could get pinched. Dozens of companies--including Amazon and Microsoft--use Chinese semiconductors as the processing power behind items such as smartphones and car consoles, for example. Tariffs on semiconductors could therefore lead to increased costs for those businesses in the months to come. "A lot of semiconductor design houses are in Silicon Valley. They might be controlling the 'value add' part of production, but in terms of the mechanics, a lot of it happens in China. These tariffs are going to really hit them," noted Adams Lee, an international trade attorney with the Seattle-based law firm Harris Bricken. "Big companies will find ways to absorb the cost or pass it on to customers. Startups don't have the margin to take on the extra 25 percent." Circuit Interruption Technology is one company on notice. Rick Hampton, the co-founder and chairman at his Rogers, Minnesota-based firm, has suggested that a 25 percent tariff on certain electrical components imported from China could seriously impact the 24-person business, as CIT sources the lion's share of its relays at a factory in China. Last year, CIT generated around $15 million in revenue, selling to makers of everything from school buses to thermostats. "We are anticipating that we will lose half of our business, [and] there would be up to a 50 percent layoff," Hampton told Inc. in a phone call last month. 2. Anti-American sentiment could take the shine off U.S. brands. China Law Blog's Harris notes that there is a precedent for China boycotting foreign brands, and warns that the same thing could happen to American companies that sell to the Chinese market. When Norway gave the Nobel Peace Prize to pro-democracy dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010, for example, Norwegian salmon exports to China plummeted. "The really big companies will probably do fine, but for some midsize companies, China could be 40 percent of their business," suggested Harris. Still, major technology brands aren't exempt from the potential side effects of new tariffs. On Monday, Google announced that it would invest $550 million in the Chinese e-commerce titan JD.com in an effort to expand its footprint in the Asian market and better compete with Alibaba. But Richard Liu, founder and CEO of JD.com, has warned that a brewing trade war could seriously hurt U.S. companies, since Chinese interest in imported goods is poised for a downturn. "If it's a long-term trade war, it will be horrible," he told CNBC. "It would hurt a lot of American brands." Harris meanwhile suggests that sales of products made by Apple could decline in the weeks to come--although it's unclear whether the company will be spared from tariff-related fireworks. "There are plenty of very good, Chinese-made cell phones that are considerably less expensive than the iPhone," he said. "If 90 percent of the reason you're buying the iPhone is to show prestige, and all of a sudden people are mad at the U.S., then how valuable is that prestige really?" 3. Added red tape could drive costs higher for tech companies in China. U.S. companies with a physical or operational presence in China are concerned that it could soon become difficult to continue doing business there, should the Chinese government introduce new regulations in response to tariffs. Firms including Intel, Boeing, Caterpillar, and Qualcomm all generate a significant portion of sales in China, for instance, and could be negatively impacted by new red tape, analysts say. "The Chinese government has a full tool belt to work with, and tariffs are just one of many possible tools they could use," said trade attorney Lee. As a result of tariffs, "technology companies are likely to see extra administrative burdens, inspections, and audits--all things that create more costs." Fred Crosetto, the founder and CEO of Ammex, a disposable glove distributor based in Kent, Washington, has raised similar concerns. Ammex has seen its Chinese business grow by nearly 70 percent year over year, and by 2020, the company expects that market could account for 40 percent of its $110 million in annual sales. With new tariffs, however, "the Chinese government would make it exceptionally hard on American companies in the short term and probably the long term, too," Crosetto told Inc. last year. 4. Intellectual property theft could spike. The Office of the United States Trade Representative has called out China for failing to protect U.S. intellectual property, accusing the nation of stealing trade secrets, pirating information online, and forcing the transfer of American technology to Chinese partners. Indeed, the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property has estimated that annual costs from the losses of IP range from $225 billion to $600 billion, at least some of which is attributable to China. Yet analysts suggest that increased tariffs on Chinese goods could exacerbate the problem rather than solve it. "That issue isn't going away, and in some ways, it might make it harder to get China to improve their IP protections," said Harris Bricken's Lee. "China may be happy with the idea of conceding on tariff issues--as long as they don't have to change how they conduct their business on IP." Actor Will Ferrell is set to star in a new Netflix film based around the Eurovision Song Contest. According to Deadline, the comedy is also written by the Anchorman actor alongside writer Andrew Steele. In the past, Ferrell and Steele worked on Casa de mi Padre and the Lifetime parody A Deadly Adoption. The 50-year-old actor was previously spotted at this year's Eurovision contest in Lisbon; Ferrell's Swedish wife first introduced him to the event back in 1999. Eurovision's popularity has expanded across the world since its inception in 1956, with this year's contest reaching over 186m viewers. 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 Ferrell's Eurovision-inspired film will mark his second movie with Netflix; he produced the comedy Ibiza starring Gillian Jacobs which was released last month. Since Netflix made a multi-picture deal with Adam Sandler, the streaming platform has been signing a plethora of top comedians to its roster including Chris Rock, Amy Schumer and Jerry Seinfeld. Ferrell was most recently seen in the hit comedy Daddy's Home 2 and will star in Holmes and Watson - a comedic take on Arthur Conan Doyle's mystery series. Amazon also recently bought a documentary series about the global economy from Ferrell and Anchorman director Adam McKay. There is no release date set for Ferrell's Eurovision-inspired feature. Rising rap star Jimmy Wopo has died in a double drive-by shooting in Pittsburgh, his manager has confirmed. Wopo, 21, was identified as one of the victims on Monday evening (18 June) within hours of another tragic incident which saw 20-year-old rapper XXXTentacion killed in South Florida. CBS Pittsburgh reports that two people were rushed to hospital later confirming one had succumbed to their wounds. Wopo's manager Taylor Maglin confirmed news of his client's death on Facebook. I lost my brother today and its the worst feeling in the world," he wrote. "He was destined for greatness and he wanted the best for his friends, family and community. We lost a great person today, but just know I will do everything in my power to make his memory live on forever. Love you bro #LongLiveWopo. He added: "Jimmy unfortunately passed away and I ask at this time you keep his family in your prayers during this difficult time. He had such a bright future and I cant believe hes gone." Real name was Travon Smart, Wopo was considered an emerging rap talent following the release of a music video for his track "Elm Street" which amassed over six million views on YouTube in 2016. Investigators state that Wopo was shot at close range with two bullet holes reportedly seen in the drivers side window of the vehicle. The other victim is in stable condition. According to KDKA, a witness saw the victims' vehicle being followed before it pulled alongside and fired two shots before fleeing. 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 Rappers Wiz Khalifa and Pusha T have paid tribute to Wopo on social media with the former writing "Rest up bro" on Instagram alongside a photo of the young rapper. The death of XXXTentacion has shocked the music industry after it was announced the up-and-coming rapper died in South Florida after he was shot during an apparent robbery. The 20-year-old rapper, whose real name was Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy, was originally from Plantation, Florida. However, the successful rappers career was not without controversy, he had a criminal record and a history of domestic abuse allegations overshadowing his success. Recommended XXXTentacion shot dead Even before the rapper, who pronounced his rap name Ex-Ex-Ex ten-ta-see-ohn, had his start on social media with his viral song Look at Me, hed spent time in juvenile detention for gun possession charges. Just a year later, XXXTentacion was again serving time - for armed robbery and aggravated battery. In 2016, XXXTentacion was accused by his then-girlfriend Geneva Ayala of abuse and charged with aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness-tampering. According to a transcript of the victim testimony, the woman suffered a pattern of abuse at the hands of the rapper, with whom shed had a romantic relationship. Despite the widespread outrage and contention over the rapper, XXXTentacions debut album 17 was still considered a success when it was released. In August of 2016, XXXTentacion was arrested in a separate case where he was charged with armed home invasion, robbery, and aggravated battery with a firearm. The rapper died Monday in a drive-by shooting (Getty) After pleading no contest to the charges, the rapper was ordered to serve six years of probation and was released from jail in September 2016. 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 Despite the history of abusive behaviour, after being featured in XXL magazines 2017 Freshman Class alongside other artists to watch, XXXTentacions second album ? was met with public acclaim - premiering at No. 1 on Billboard when it released in March 2018. It is thought that the rappers persona as a criminal may have gained him fans - in 2017, Pitchfork revealed that Google searches for the rapper spiked after his domestic abuse arrest. Poetry's life of grime: Why young rappers are the natural successors to Tennyson Show all 4 1 /4 Poetry's life of grime: Why young rappers are the natural successors to Tennyson Poetry's life of grime: Why young rappers are the natural successors to Tennyson 186160.bin SAM HOFMAN Poetry's life of grime: Why young rappers are the natural successors to Tennyson 186161.bin SAM HOFMAN Poetry's life of grime: Why young rappers are the natural successors to Tennyson 186162.bin SAM HOFMAN Poetry's life of grime: Why young rappers are the natural successors to Tennyson 186163.bin SAM HOFMAN Seeming to play into this unlikely popularity, XXXTentacion used his mugshot as the cover art of his single Look at Me and continued to engage in abusive behaviour, including punching a concert-goer at a show in Salt Lake City. The same songs music video was also the subject of debate after a scene depicted the rapper lynching a young white boy. Video shows rapper XXXTentacion hitting a woman over the head However, not everyone was supportive of the image that XXXTentacion was promoting - he was one of the first musicians to be removed under Spotifys hateful conduct policy, which was ultimately reversed and reinstated. At the time of his death, the rapper, whod plead not-guilty to the charges, was awaiting trial for the domestic violence incident involving his pregnant girlfriend and faced significant jail time. As news of his death spread, musicians, fans, and industry professionals began sharing tributes to the young rapper whod been killed in a drive-by shooting while motorcycle shopping in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Whens it gonna start getting dark 'round here? Billy Joel asks a packed-out Old Trafford as the Manchester rain-clouds dispersed ahead of a show from the most capable of entertainers who immediately assured the 50,000-strong crowd he was there to deliver. Hordes of fans have travelled far and wide to see the New Yorker's sole UK show; kitted out in memorabilia emblazoned with his name. With 12 albums amassed over a five-decade career, Joel tears through his back catalogue and proves himself to be a musician just as revered as his pal and musical peer, Bruce Springsteen. The 69-year-old plonks himself behind a snazzy rotating baby grand piano, never missing an opportunity to dish out some comedy in between tracks (I used to like that number, he quips to the chuckling assemblage after announcing his age). He has the set-list to back such bravado up. Hulking his way onto the stage at 8pm - sans support act - the goateed showman launches into a lively rendition of 1978 single My Life before leading listeners through a time portal of tracks from his heyday. Selected picks range from the frantic (Pressure) to the upbeat (Dont Ask Me Why), with time set aside for the ballads the crowd were clearly waiting for: New York State of Mind is performed to the backdrop projection of his three children in celebration of Fathers Day, while the audience sing the affecting tones of Shes Always a Woman in unison, their arms draped around the shoulders of the parent, lover or friend they are accompanied by. There are frequent lulls as Joels passion for British music sees him perform brief covers of tracks he stated he wishes hed written - Bohemian Rhapsody, A Hard Days Night and then Your Song" by Elton John whom, he assures fans, is still his friend despite bullshit press reports. Diehard fans, while swept away by the detours, decry their presence in place of absent tracks (Goodnight Saigon" and "Miami 2017 to name just two). He regularly throws the choice to the audience, offering up two songs and performing the one with the most feverish response. Winners Vienna, The Longest Time and Downeaster Alexa are all welcome additions to an evening of air-tight musicality played with confidence by Joel and his backing band, including long-time saxophonist Mark Rivera. Joel performs for two-and-a-half hours - a whole one hour longer than the majority of concerts played by acts half his age. Having left the stage following a grandiose double-bill of Scenes from an Italian Restaurant and the harmonica-led Piano Man - both highlights - he returns and ditches the keys for the guitar, launching into a run of 80s hits including We Didnt Start the Fire and Uptown Girl. Darkness may have descended upon the stadium by evenings end but the audience vacates the stadium with their lives lit up by one of the great: one fire Billy Joel definitely started. Follow Independent Culture on Facebook The Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy on immigration, which has led to parents being separated from their children, has been met with an outpouring of donations to help reunite undocumented families. More than 100,000 people have donated to the Reunite an immigrant parent with their child campaign on Facebook, helping to raise more than $4 million (3 million) since it launched on Saturday, 16 June making it the largest ever single fundraiser on Facebook. Californian couple Charlotte and Dave Willner set up the campaign after seeing an image of a young child crying at the US-Mexico border. Picture: (John Moore / Getty Images) "We are collectively revulsed at what's happening to immigrant families on our southern border," the Facebook campaign page states. "In times when we often think that the news can't possibly get worse, it does we learned last night that 2,000 children (many of them infants and toddlers) have been separated from their parents in just six weeks under President Trump's 'zero tolerance' policy. People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Show all 16 1 /16 People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Washington, DC, U.S., February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants AUSTIN, TX - FEBRUARY 16: Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school student Kathia Suarez holds up a sign as she protests with others outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. LM Otero/AP People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school senior Vicky Sosa holds a sign outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. In an action called "A Day Without Immigrants," immigrants across the country are expected to stay home from school, work and close businesses to show how critical they are to the U.S. economy and way of life. LM Otero/AP Among the high-profile donors to the campaign are Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company COO Sheryl Sandberg. The original fundraising target was just $1,500, which would have been used to help reunite the parents with the child in the photo. All proceeds will go to RAICES, a Texas non-profit that offers legal services to undocumented immigrants and refugees. "We do not have the words to thank Charlotte and Dave Willner. Thanks is inadequate for the work these funds will make possible. We know it will change lives," RAICES said in a statement on its Facebook page. "We've been occasionally crying around the office all day when we check the fundraising totals. This is such a profound rejection of the cruel policies of this administration. Take heart." Children with over-controlling parents more likely to struggle in school due to an increase in bad behaviour, a study has found. Researchers at the University of Minnesota said so-called helicopter parenting could negatively impact a childs emotional wellbeing, leaving them less able to control their impulses and cope in social situations. Instead, they suggest that children who learn to handle challenging situations without the interference of parents will have more success later in life. Our research showed that children with helicopter parents may be less able to deal with the challenging demands of growing up, especially with navigating the complex school environment, said lead author Nicole Perry, from the University of Minnesota. Children who cannot regulate their emotions and behaviour effectively are more likely to act out in the classroom, to have a harder time making friends and to struggle in school. The study, published by the American Psychological Association in the journal Development Psychology, examined the parenting and behaviour of 422 children and their parents in the US and Switzerland. At the age of two, mothers and their children were invited into the laboratory and asked to play with a selection of toys for four minutes and then put them away over the next two minutes. The 10 Best parenting apps Show all 10 1 /10 The 10 Best parenting apps The 10 Best parenting apps 10ireward.jpg The 10 Best parenting apps 10babycenter.jpg The 10 Best parenting apps 10babymonitoralarm.jpg The 10 Best parenting apps 10nctbabychange.jpg The 10 Best parenting apps 10webmd.jpg The 10 Best parenting apps 10nightnight.jpg The 10 Best parenting apps 10natgeogworldatlas.jpg The 10 Best parenting apps 10letterbox.jpg The 10 Best parenting apps 10dinnerspinner.jpg The 10 Best parenting apps 10toddlerlock.jpg The sessions were recorded and researchers rated to what degree the mother tried to take over the task. Then, at the age of five, the team looked at the childrens responses to an unfair share of sweets, and their ability to solve a puzzle under time pressure. Finally, at the age of 10 the children were quizzed on their attitudes to school and teachers as well as emotional issues. The research discovered that helicopter parenting at the age of two was associated with bad behaviour and poorer emotional wellbeing by the time children reached the age of five. Recommended Millennials on track to have worse health in middle age than parents Meanwhile, those better able to regulate emotions at this age were more likely to have better social skills and be more productive at school by the age of 10, the study said. Children who developed the ability to effectively calm themselves during distressing situations and to conduct themselves appropriately had an easier time adjusting to the increasingly difficult demands of pre-adolescent school environments, said Dr Perry. Our findings underscore the importance of educating often well-intentioned parents about supporting childrens autonomy with handling emotional challenges." Tory rebels insist they can win a fresh Commons showdown to secure a meaningful vote to block a no-deal Brexit, after attempts to find a compromise with Theresa May were abandoned. The two sides were said to be at loggerheads late on Tuesday, setting the scene for a nailbiting vote designed to guarantee the UK cannot crash out of the EU without an agreement. The Independent was told that Theresa May had called in some of the rebels to persuade them personally to back down with the government increasingly confident that its arm-twisting was succeeding. But one backbencher behind the revolt dismissed the claim that it was poised to fail because some of its supporters were being turned. That is a classic whips operation, he said. Theres no evidence that the people who said they would vote with us are peeling away. Anna Soubry, another leading rebel, insisted they would not be cowed, despite huge public pressure, tweeting: Death threats becoming routine & making many of us more resolute. And she quoted Winston Churchill to rebut allegations that she is a traitor, saying: The first duty of a member of parliament is to do what he thinks in his faithful and disinterested judgement is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain. Defeat would be hugely damaging for Ms May, triggering fury among her pro-Brexit MPs who insist no deal must remain an option and allegations of weakness. 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 The vote will be on Grieve 2, a reworked amendment to the EU withdrawal bill put forward by Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general. It would force ministers to give MPs a vote on the next steps if they accept, by 21 January 2019, that there is no prospect of an agreement with the EU. A rebellion was aborted last week only when the prime minister partially agreed to the rebels demands for MPs to have that decisive vote to prevent a no-deal exit. They were stunned when the amendment was later altered, so that MPs would only be able to debate a no-deal outcome rather than change the governments course. The new Commons clash was set up when the House of Lords backed the Grieve proposals on Monday evening by a whopping majority of 119 votes. One former cabinet minister said the result was touch and go, with around 14 Tories required to join the revolt to defeat the prime minister. There were signs of a growing number of Labour MPs ready to vote with the government after five did last week, plus one currently suspended from the party. One who abstained last week told The Independent that opposition to the amendment was growing on the Labour benches, despite whips pressure. For me this is now also about the House of Lords they are meant to be an advisory chamber, but they are attempting to tell us what to do, he said. On the likely result, he added: No one can give an accurate figure because not everyone has been spoken to yet. No 10 refused to compromise further, a spokesman saying: We cannot accept the amendment on a meaningful vote agreed in the Lords. Agreeing to amendable motions would allow parliament to direct government on its approach to exiting the EU, binding the prime ministers hands and making it harder to secure a good deal for the UK. A group of Amazon shareholders is asking CEO Jeff Bezos to stop selling and marketing pattern-recognition technology to governments after civil liberties groups warned of the potential for abuse. Earlier this year, a group of advocacy organisations led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a report detailing how Amazon was marketing its Rekognition tool to American law enforcement agencies. In addition to touting the technology as helping to find suspects by allowing law enforcement to sift through images of faces, Amazon has said it could be used to preemptively identify persons of interest and prevent crimes. A letter signed by 19 shareholders - and provided to The Independent by the ACLU - urges Mr Bezos to halt the tools expansion until those concerns can be addressed. Furnishing police and sheriffs departments with the tool would bolster government surveillance infrastructure technology and could drive down Amazons value, the letter warned. It also echoed concerns about the potential for misuse. While Rekognition may be intended to enhance some law enforcement activities, we are deeply concerned it may ultimately violate civil and human rights, the letter said. We are concerned the technology would be used to unfairly and disproportionately target and surveil people of colour, immigrants, and civil society organisations. Outside of the United States, authoritarian regimes in other countries could use the tool to intimidate democracy advocates, the letter warned. 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 Experience has shown repressive governments tend toward incarceration and torture of identified people who are opposing repressive practices, and the surveillance technologies will tend to harden this circle of repression, the document said. A representative of Amazon declined to comment on the record. Jeff Bezos reveals why he's spending million of dollars to go to space Shareholders of major technology companies have increasingly been broadcasting their concerns about the financial and reputational damage of privacy violations. In a tense Facebook shareholder meeting last month, one investor accused the company of a human rights violation for failing to steward a reservoir of consumer data that was revealed to have ended up in the hands of consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Water companies have been slammed by the industrys regulator for failing to prepare for cold weather which left thousands of customers without water for days. Ofwat said 200,000 customers experienced disruption for four hours or more and 60,000 for at least twelve hours, with some experiencing far longer outages following the Beast from the East which brought snow and icy conditions to much of the UK earlier this year. Water companies failed to provide support during and after the cold snap, causing significant hardship for customers, the watchdog said. People in every region of the country experienced interruptions to water supplies with those in the South East, the West Midlands and Wales worst hit. Ofwat said there was considerable variation in the quality of response provided by companies. Severn Trent, South East, Southern and Thames Water customers received the worst service, according to the regulator. It said that frontline staff worked hard to fix problems but senior executives at some companies did not have adequate plans to deal with a chill followed by a rapid thaw. The companies should have been prepared because there had been several weather warnings from the Met Office and the conditions were severe but not unprecedented, Ofwat said. In 2010-11, for example, the UK experienced colder temperatures and the thaw was more extreme. Water pipes and other infrastructure come under the most strain when temperatures drop below freezing and then rise rapidly. Ofwat chief executive, Rachel Fletcher said there was no excuse for this level of failure. She added: Four companies have three months to satisfy us that they will be ready to perform at the level customers deserve the next time there is bad weather. We will take action if they dont rise to this challenge. We expect every water company to take action on the back of this review and the industry as a whole to transform how it works together in situations like these. Water is an essential service. Water companies must be prepared for whatever the weather brings. Universities could be fined for giving vice-chancellors unjustifiably high salaries under new rules from the regulator. Institutions will be forced to publish the full details of their bosses pay packets to the sectors regulator, the Office for Students, and theyll have to justify six-figure salaries and benefits. If a university fails to comply, or fails to make a convincing case for the salaries, then significant financial penalties could be imposed on them, the Office for Students has warned. Universities will have to provide the ratio between vice-chancellor pay and the pay of other staff, as well as the number of employees with a salary of more than 100,000 a year. It comes after vice-chancellors salaries and expenses have been in the spotlight in recent months. Sir Michael Barber, chair of the Office for Students, told The Independent that the regulator will look for packets that stick out like a sore thumb when deciding whether to intervene in the coming months. His comments came just days after it was revealed a Bentley-driving vice-chancellor, who has defended high salaries of university leaders, was awarded a 66,000 pay rise in the last academic year. George Holmes, head of the University of Bolton, was paid 290,215 in 2016-17, up from 224,300 the year before a rise of nearly 30 per cent. Speaking to The Independent, Sir Michael called on universities to be conscious of pressures on public sector pay, as well as challenges communities face, and to act with restraint. When justifying salaries under the new requirements, universities will need to explain what their boss has achieved and how their performance was judged by the remuneration committee. Sir Michael said: We believe that transparency and the requirement to justify the vice-chancellors pay and the ratios will put pressure on universities to act responsibly. But secondly, it may be that when we get that information some vice-chancellors pay will stick out like a sore thumb. Like a modest size university, and you are regional and you are not playing globally, and your pay is the same as a top university competing in the global market for research. So some things will stand out like a sore thumb. And if they do, we have powers to intervene university by university. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 14 October 2021 A red deer stag during rutting season in Bushy Park, Richmond, south west London, which is home to over 300 red and fallow deer PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters 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 His comments come after a voluntary code of practice set up by the Committee of University Chairs was condemned as woefully inadequate earlier this month. A vice-chancellor must not be a member of its university remuneration body, the guidelines said. They were introduced after the University and College Union revealed that many vice-chancellors either sit on, or attend, the committee that sets their salaries. Sir Michael told The Independent: Vice-chancellor pay is a very visible part [of a university] and you can do a lot of reputational damage. So they should be very conscious of the context we are in of the downward pressure that has been on public sector pay for several years now and of all the challenges that some communities are facing and people should act with restraint. Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of the Office for Students, added: Students and taxpayers need to be confident that our university leaders are paid appropriately and deliver value for money. High levels of pay that are out of kilter with pay levels elsewhere and which cannot be justified are unacceptable. The Independent has contacted Universities UK a representative organisation for higher education institutions for comment. The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has announced the government is to review reclassifying cannabis for medicinal use in the wake of challenges by families whose childrens life threatening epileptic seizures were banished by cannabis products. Earlier this month, days after having his supply of anti-epileptic cannabis oil confiscated at Heathrow customs, 12-year-old Billy Caldwell was in hospital suffering his first seizures for months. Last year Billy became the first person to receive an NHS prescription for medical cannabis, through his GP in Northern Ireland, but the Home Office intervened forcing his mother, Charlotte, to go to Canada earlier this month. Now Billy and six-year-old Alfie Dingley, another boy with epilepsy whose family has been campaigning for medicinal cannabis legalisation, have been granted emergency licenses for cannabis products with future cases to be reviewed by a panel of medical experts. A change in status could put the drug in line with heroin which can be prescribed where doctors deem it necessary. An Isis supporter plotted to behead Theresa May and bomb Downing Street in a suicide attack in the heart of London, a court has heard. Naa'imur Zakariyah Rahman allegedly believed he was carrying an explosive device ready for the atrocity when he was arrested in November, but had in fact been handed a replica by a spy posing as a fellow extremist. In conversations with the informant he knew as Shaq, Mr Rahman allegedly revealed his plan to bomb the gates to Downing Street and force his way past police with pepper spray. The 20-year-old is accused of telling how he might use a guard as a human shield to enter the prime ministers official residence and take her head off with a knife before being killed by security forces. Mr Rahman allegedly believed he was in contact with senior Isis members in Syria, where his own uncle had been killed in a drone strike while fighting for the terrorist group, and recorded a pledge of allegiance to be broadcast after his death. Prosecutor Mark Heywood QC told the Old Bailey that Mr Rahman considered the military and MI5 buildings as targets before settling on Downing Street, and was fully prepared to die. Before his arrest prevented it, he was, he believed, just days away from his objective, which was no less than a suicide attack, by blade and explosion, on Downing Street and, if he could, upon the prime minister, Theresa May, herself, he said. The plot is said to have been targeted at the prime minister while she was inside 10 Downing Street (PA) Mr Rahman is also accused of helping his friend Mohammad Aqib Imran, 22, to join Isis in Syria by recording a sponsorship video. Mr Heywood read the court a Telegram chat message in which Mr Rahman was allegedly snared by an MI5 agent posing as a fake Isis emir [leader]. "Can you put me in a sleeper cell ASAP? the defendant allegedly asked in September. "I want to do a suicide bomb on Parliament. I want to attempt to kill Theresa Maymy objective is to take out my target. Nothing less than the death of the leaders of Parliament. The court heard Mr Rahman praised the Manchester Arena bomber, saying he did well by massacring 22 people including children, and voiced his excitement at the prospect of reaching paradise with 72 wives. In October, he allegedly met a contact known as Abu Waleed an MI5 agent - in a London shopping centre and told him he planned to use a suicide belt, drone, improvised explosive device and poison. The court heard that the following month Abu Waleed introduced Mr Rahman to another member of the network called Shaq, an undercover police officer, to help him obtain a blade and suicide vest. Mr Rahman allegedly told him: If you can put a belt on me, I'd actually want to do that. Jurors were shown covert video footage of a meeting in Shaq's car in a PC World car park in Brixton on 6 November. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 16 October 2021 Boris Johnson, Sir Keir Starmer, Priti Patel and Lindsay Hoyle pay respects to Sir David Amess at Belfairs Methodist Church, in Leigh-on-Sea, the site of his death EPA UK news in pictures 15 October 2021 A person lays flowers at the scene near the Belfairs Methodist Church in Eastwood Road North, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, where Conservative MP Sir David Amess has died after he was stabbed several times at a constituency surgery. A man has been arrested and officers are not looking for anyone else PA UK news in pictures 14 October 2021 A red deer stag during rutting season in Bushy Park, Richmond, south west London, which is home to over 300 red and fallow deer PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters 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 Mr Rahman could be seen telling how he would get past Downing Streets gates, make a 10-second sprint for the door of Number 10, with his main objective to take her head off. He later carried out reconnaissance around Whitehall, prosecutors said, walking past the entrance to Downing Street and the site of the Westminster attack at the gate of the Houses of Parliament in March 2017. Mr Rahman also bought a rucksack in Argos which he gave to a spy to be fitted with explosives, it is alleged. On 28 November, Shaq handed the defendant back his bag and jacket claiming they were both fitted with powerful explosives, as well as a replica pepper spray device, a set of plastic gloves and a blue holdall bag. Asked if he was ready, Mr Rahman allegedly replied: Yeah. Do you know? Now I've seen everything it feels good. He was stopped by police minutes later still carrying the items, allegedly telling a police officer: I'm glad it's over. I'm glad I'm arrested. Mr Rahman had allegedly consumed propaganda from Isis, al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadi ideologues, meeting Mr Imran as he planned travelling to join Isis in Syria. The pair had discussed their fear of spies and not being able to trust anyone, the court heard. Mr Imran, who was arrested on the same day, had allegedly set about assembling money and acquiring a fake passport for his trip from another MI5 role-player via Telegram. Mr Rahman, from Finchley in north London, has denied two counts of preparing terrorist acts. Mr Imran, of Sparkbrook in Birmingham, has pleaded not guilty to preparing terrorist acts and possessing a terrorist document on his Kindle. The trial continues. Additional reporting by PA Austerity is forcing cash-starved councils try to balance the books by selling off public buildings and parks at a rate of more than 4,000 a year, new research suggests. English councils deprived of funds by central government are trying to make ends meet by disposing of 20,651 public buildings or spaces in five years, according to an estimate by the charity Locality. The charitys report, The Great British Sell Off , said this equalled an average loss of 4,130 public buildings or spaces a year among them assets that might once have been libraries, swimming pools or youth centres. The research was published as Locality launched its Save Our Spaces campaign to protect such assets and keep them in community ownership. Locality chief executive Tony Armstrong said: This is a selloff on a massive scale. More than 4,000 public buildings and spaces are being sold off a year thats more than four times the number [951] of Starbucks in the UK. They are owned by the public and theyre being sold off for short-term gain to fill holes in council budgets. Among the buildings affected in the past five years is the Grade II-listed former administrative headquarters of Liverpool City Council, built in 1866, which was sold last year to a Singapore-based luxury hotel developer for 10.2m. The Italian and French renaissance-influenced Municipal Building had been put up for sale in October 2016, at a time when Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson was talking of the need to deliver 90m of savings over three years because of central government cuts. The council said the sale would allow it to cut its maintenance overheads, and promised to ensure that any buyer used the building in a way that would create jobs and contribute to Liverpools economy. In Oxford, the city council sold the former Temple Cowley swimming pool for 3.5m in 2014, and last year approved developers plans to bulldoze the building and replace it with 48 homes, half of them affordable. It said the Temple Cowley pools had become outdated and too expensive to run. But despite the opening of a new 9.2m leisure centre one-and-a-half miles away, local campaigners bemoaned the loss of facilities that they said included the only diving pool in Oxfordshire and a low-chlorine pool that benefited asthmatic children. Mr Armstrong said: We know that many of the buildings being lost have valuable community uses. Every one of us can think of a local public building or outside space we love and use from libraries to lidos and town halls to youth centres. Many hundreds of local community groups are stepping up and fighting for community ownership, but they urgently need support and help with startup costs if they are to compete with the commercial developers. World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Show all 15 1 /15 World Architecture Festival 2017 winners World Architecture Festival 2017 winners INSIDE winner office Airbnb's European headquarters in Dublin won best office interior. Created by Heneghan Peng Architects the judges were impressed with the "clarity and richness of the theatre concept, layered horizontally and vertically to enabled both intimate and collective social encounters", creating a "highly agile working environment both for its current use and future potential re-uses". World Architecture Festival 2017 winners INSIDE winner residential SJB Architects won best residential interior for their Cleveland Rooftop in Sydney, Australia. This apartment is a new structure spanning between two original rooftop elements. Judges commented that this project "finely balances the public and private realm and does so with a high degree of design rigor". World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Display Buildings completed winner Alison Brooks Architects' landmark installation, The Smile, won a the display buildings completed category prize during the festival. Designed as a temporary installation for the London Design Festival, the judges described the smile as a small build with a big impact, a simple and powerful concept which overcomes big technical challenges to deliver a delightful installation. World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Production, Energy & Recycling completed winner Slash Architects and Arkizon Architects took home a prize for their The Farm of 38 30. The simple and sophisticated design, detailing ad execution was deemed to be "beautifully expressed" by judges, who commended the Turkish project for public and private experiences that are well integrated". World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Sport completed winner The U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis by HKS Architects was heralded the winner of the completed sport buildings category setting a precedent for large scale sport stadiums. This project provides a great venue for sporting and cultural events, while also offering plazas, parks and an observation platform connecting with the surrounding urban environment. World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Shopping completed winner The Victoria Gate shopping centre by ACME in Leeds combines retail and leisure spaces anchored by a department store, and was applauded for its sensitive reinterpretation of the area's existing 19th century arcade. The project "contributes greatly to the urban fabric of the city," said judges World Architecture Festival 2017 winners House completed winner Vo Trong Nghia Architects won The House completed buildings award for Binh House in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The house serves as a multi-generational family home and sets a new benchmark for dense urban living. World Architecture Festival 2017 winners House Future Project winner New Zealand practice Monk Mackenzie won the prize for their Queenstown House project, a six bedroom house for the client to live throughout the year, which is designed to sit securely in the landscape and bridge a seasonal flood zone. Judges praised the "bold gesture" of the building, which appears to hover over the ground like a bridge, at once blending into its setting and exposing itself to the extraordinary views that surround it, whether in sunshine or snow World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Infrastructure Future Project winner Sanjay Puri Architects were heralded winners for The Bridge, India. Judges were impressed with the approach to local tradition of brick making, expressed in this project in a very contemporary way World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Higher Education & Research completed winner The Maersk Tower, part of the University of Copenhagen was awarded best completed higher education project. Judges said "by lifting the building up and creating a vertical tower the architects have found an answer to the need for expanding the campus while providing a valuable and beautiful external landscaped space." World Architecture Festival 2017 winners INSIDE Interior of the Year Fabricwood, an installation for a designer furniture store in Singapore nabbed the World Interior of the Year prize. The project consists of a 20m by 7m sail made of lightweight plywood, which stretches across the space like a terse fabric. The inspiration for the design came from a clear understanding of the brand, culture and aspirations for the company. World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Best Use of Colour The best use of colour prize went to Fitzroy Crossing Renal Hostel in Australia, a project where judges found theu se of colour to be "sensitive, elegant and well balanced". The building provides long-term a accommodation facility for aboriginal people from outlaying communities receiving renal dialysis. World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Directors Special Award Due to the high standard of category winners presented in the first two days of the festival, the jury decided to confer a Directors Special Award to Superlofts Houthaven in Amsterdam by Dutch practice Marc Koehler Architects. A new co-housing concept that aims to create a global network of local building cooperatives, judges said the concept was a game changer a replicable and transferable model which could extend in terms of scale World Architecture Festival 2017 winners Future Project of the Year The proposed design for the new Sydney Harbour Fish market won for the "great transformation it offers the area" commending it for its vision beyond the brief. The projects success has stemmed from engagement from local authorities, developers and land owners. World Architecture Festival 2017 winners World Building of the Year The judges believed the Post-earthquake house by students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in Guangming village was extraordinary in terms of the scope of ambition, exemplified in the addressing of profound problems facing ordinary people. Locality, which supports local community organisations, discovered the apparent scale of the selloff by submitting freedom of information requests to every council in England. It then extrapolated national totals from the figures supplied by the 55 local authorities that gave annual totals for the financial years 2012-13 to 2016-17. In the financial year 2016-17, Locality discovered, there were an estimated 4,165 sales, compared with 3,742 in 2015-16. In its report, Locality said: While selling some land and buildings for private use is appropriate, the danger is that this becomes the only option for councils unaware of the longer-term benefits of community ownership. In 2016 the chancellor made it permissible for the proceeds of the sales of public buildings and spaces to be used as revenue to run the council. With a backdrop of austerity facing local authorities, many are using this as an opportunity to make short-term financial gain at the cost of losing some of the countrys most valuable assets. The report found that only 41 per cent of English local authorities, less than half, had community asset transfer (CAT) policies aimed at helping local groups acquire council assets at less than market value in the interests of promoting economic, social or environmental wellbeing. This was despite 95 per cent of the councils surveyed expecting the sales of publicly owned buildings and spaces to play an increasingly important role in local authority administration in the next five years. As part of its campaign, Locality is calling for Theresa Mays government to help fund the protection of local buildings and parks by investing 200m over five years in a community ownership fund that would help groups acquire assets being disposed of by councils. The charity said in its report: The majority of councils do not have a policy to consider community ownership as an alternative option to a selloff. We want to see community ownership prioritised. Selling these buildings and spaces on the open-market to the highest bidder means they are often lost to the community forever, and that the deeper value to local people will never be realised. In these circumstances the community have no real influence over what the space will be used for, and so-called fire sales of public assets to remote private owners can mean empty, boarded-up properties, which can lead to social, economic and environmental decline. The report added: It is often the poorest places that are most reliant on these types of spaces. Losing them can have a devastating impact on local people and communities. Years of austerity and lack of investment have decimated local services and left many of the places people rely on shuttered up, under threat or falling into disrepair. In calling for national government money to help keep local buildings and spaces in community ownership, the charity stressed: This isnt about buildings of historical or architectural value, although many of them are, and it isnt about protecting green space for the sake of it. This is about people all of us and our local communities. These buildings and spaces are often at the heart of the community, where local people meet, access services and find support. They are where we can connect with our neighbours, give help and be supported by others, and where we can come together to shape our own areas. They are spaces where everyone belongs and where lives are transformed. A spokesman for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: Councils will have 90.7bn to spend on local services over the next two years. They are responsible for managing their own finances and making the right decisions for the communities they serve. All local authorities must properly consider the risks and opportunities before making commercial decisions. We are working with local government to develop a funding system for the future based on the needs of different areas. The Government seems so hamstrung by dogma around Brexit and immigration that it is failing to act decisively to ensure Britains fruit farmers will get the supply of foreign workers they need to survive, it has been suggested. Nick Marston, chairman of producers organisation British Summer Fruits (BSF), said the resulting uncertainty had left his members extremely worried about Brexit. Mr Marston, representing producers who supply 97 per cent of the homegrown strawberries and other berries sold in UK supermarkets, said the government had to act now on the issue of foreign seasonal fruit pickers because British farmers were already in the grip of a labour shortage. Recommended British fruit farmer cuts hundreds of jobs over Brexit uncertainty A survey of the BSF membership, published on Tuesday, found that nearly all of them (96 per cent) have had trouble finding enough seasonal workers and 63 per cent expected the labour shortage to be even worse next year. In a possible irony given Britains vote to leave the EU, Mr Marston told The Independent that the labour shortage had been created mainly by the economic success of east European nations that joined the union in 2007. Romania, for example, is now experiencing 25-year record lows in unemployment, meaning far fewer people needed to seek seasonal fruit picking work in Britain. Mr Marston said other countries like Germany and Spain had adapted by tapping into new labour markets through the use of seasonal work permit schemes for non-EU nationals. But, he said, Theresa Mays government had yet to recognise the need for permits to attract temporary farm labourers from outside Europe, and was proving slow in publishing details of a post-Brexit seasonal agricultural workers scheme for EU nationals. I wonder whether at the moment they are not almost hamstrung by the dogma of Brexit and the need to reduce net migration, Mr Marston said. This isnt about net migration. It is about people who would come here, work, and then go home on a strictly controlled permit scheme. But at the moment, perhaps, it has almost been conflated with net migration in the minds of Number 10. Quite frankly, at the moment, our growers are extremely worried about Brexit, and all their concerns revolve around the availability of labour. By comparison, he said, Several European countries which have big horticultural industries, including Germany, Spain, Portugal and Poland, have already introduced a seasonal agricultural workers permit scheme for non-EU nationals. For instance the Germans this year have 60,000 permits for Ukrainians to go and work in Germany. But there doesnt seem to be any immediate recognition [from the UK government] of a need for a scheme for non-EU nationals of the kind that competing nations already have in place. What we are pressing the government for, he added, Is a level playing field with competing berry growers across Europe. Brexit Concerns Show all 26 1 /26 Brexit Concerns Brexit Concerns Brexit will put British patients at 'back of the queue' for new drugs Brexit will put British patients at the back of the queue for vital new drugs, the Government has been warned forcing them to wait up to two years longer A medicines regulator has raised the alarm over a likely decision to pull out of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), as well as the EU itself. ealth Secretary Jeremy Hunt dropped the bombshell , when he said he expected the UK would quit the EMA because it is subject to rulings by the European Court of Justice. Getty Images Brexit Concerns London to lose status as 'gateway to Europe' for banks One of Germanys top banking regulators has warned that London could lose its status as gateway to Europe for the banking sector after Britain quits the European trading bloc. Andreas Dombret, who is an executive board member for the BundesbankGermanys central banktold a private meeting of German businesses and banks earlier this week in Frankfurt that even if banking rules were equivalent between the UK and the rest of the EU, that was still miles away from [Britain having] access to the single market, the BBC reports. Jason Hawkes Brexit Concerns Exodus The number of financial sector professionals in Britain and continental Europe looking for jobs in Ireland rocketed in the months after the UK voted to leave the European Union Shutterstock Brexit Concerns Brexit is making FTSE 100 executives richer Pay packages of many FTSE 100 chief executive officers are partly tied to how well share prices are doing rather than the CEOs performance -- and some stocks are soaring. ritish equities got a boost since the June vote because the likes of Rio Tinto, Smiths Group and WPP generate most sales abroad and earn a fortune when they convert these revenues back into the weakened pound. Sterlings fall also made UK stocks more affordable for overseas investors. Rex Brexit Concerns Theresa May: UK to leave single market Theresa May has said the UK "cannot possibly" remain within the European single market, as staying in it would mean "not leaving the EU at all". Getty Brexit Concerns Lead campaigner Gina Miller and her team outside the High Court Getty Brexit Concerns Raymond McCord holds up his newly issued Irish passport alongside his British passport outside the High Court in Belfast following a judges dismissal of the UK's first legal challenges to Brexit PA wire Brexit Concerns SDLP leader Colum Eastwood leaving the High Court in Belfast following a judges dismissal of the UK's first legal challenges to Brexit PA wire Brexit Concerns Migrants with luggage walk past a graffiti on a wall as they leave the 'Jungle' migrant camp, as part of a major three-day operation planned to clear the camp in Calais Getty Brexit Concerns Migrants leave messages on their tents in the Jungle migrant camp Getty Brexit Concerns The Adventist Development and Relief Agency (Adra) which distributes approximately 700 meals daily in the northern Paris camp states that it is noticing a spike in new migrant arrivals this week, potentially linked the the Calais 'jungle' camp closure - with around 1000 meals distributed today EPA Brexit Concerns Migrant workers pick apples at Stocks Farm in Suckley, Britain Reuters Brexit Concerns Many farmers across the country are voicing concerns that Brexit could be a dangerous step into the unknown for the farming industry Getty Brexit Concerns Bank of England governor Mark Carney who said the long-term outlook for the UK economy is positive, but growth was slowing in the wake of the Brexit vote PA Brexit Concerns The Dow Jones industrial average closed down over 600 points on the news with markets around the globe pluninging Getty Brexit Concerns Immigration officers deal with each member of the public seeking entry into the United Kingdom but on average, 10 a day are refused entry at this London airport and between 2008 and 2009, 33,100 people were detained at the airport for mainly passport irregularities Getty Brexit Concerns A number of global investment giants have threatened to move their European operations out of London if Brexit proves to have a negative impact on their businesses Getty Brexit Concerns Following the possibility of a Brexit the UK would be released from its renewable energy targets under the EU Renewable Energy Directive and from EU state aid restrictions, potentially giving the government more freedom both in the design and phasing out of renewable energy support regimes Getty Brexit Concerns A woman looking at a chart showing the drop in the pound (Sterling) against the US Dollar in London after Britain voted to leave the EU Getty Brexit Concerns Young protesters outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster, to protest against the United Kingdom's decision to leave the EU following the referendum Getty Brexit Concerns Applications from Northern Ireland citizens for Irish Passports has soared to a record high after the UK Voted in favour of Leaving the EU Getty Brexit Concerns NFU Vice President Minette Batters with Secretary of State, Andrea Leadsome at the National Farmers Union (NFU) took machinery, produce, farmers and staff to Westminster to encourage Members of Parliament to back British farming, post Brexit Getty Brexit Concerns The latest reports released by the UK Cabinet Office warn that expats would lose a range of specific rights to live, to work and to access pensions, healthcare and public services. The same reports added that UK citizens abroad would not be able to assume that these rights will be guaranteed in the future Getty Brexit Concerns A British resident living in Spain asks questions during an informative Brexit talk by the "Brexpats in Spain" group, about Spanish legal issues to become Spanish citizens, at the town hall in Benalmadena, Spain Reuters Brexit Concerns The collapse of Great Britain appears to have been greatly exaggerated given the late summer crowds visiting city museums, hotels, and other important tourist attractions Getty Brexit Concerns The U.K. should maintain European Union regulations covering everything from working hours to chemicals until after the government sets out its plans for Brexit, said British manufacturers anxious to avoid a policy vacuum and safeguard access to their biggest export market Getty Ever since the Brexit vote, there have been repeatedly-voiced fears that less fruit would be grown or that it would left to rot in the fields because there was no-one to pick it. In February environment secretary Michael Gove agreed there was a compelling case for a seasonal agricultural workers scheme (Saws) for EU nationals, and said the government would announce details shortly. Mr Marston, however, told The Independent: The government has said details of a permit scheme would be announced shortly but that was in February, and no permit scheme has yet been announced. I am confident the government will do it. What is important, though, is that we understand the details of that scheme and when it will be in place. At the moment, faced with uncertainty and until a scheme is announced, all we have is uncertainty - growers are starting to reduce their investment, reduce their future plans for production and, in increasing numbers, looking to farm overseas where they know they will get labour. BSFs membership survey found that uncertainty about where they would get their seasonal workforce meant that 78 per cent of producers were planning to grow less fruit, and 14 per cent were looking at shifting some or all of their operation outside the UK. Mr Marston said this was a great shame, because the UK berry industry is a big success story for British agriculture. It has grown by between 8 and 15 per cent per annum in the last 15 years, from 380m a year in retail value to over 1.2bn. Mr Marston explained that it was a myth that there was a ready pool of British unemployed who could fill the gap left by the lack of foreign seasonal workers. He said: We actually have low levels of unemployment nationally, and even lower levels in rural areas where the farms are located. For example, in 2017 the National Farmers Union did a survey. The berry growers in Herefordshire require about 3,900 people every spring, but there were only about 800 jobseekers listed for the whole Herefordshire labour market. In its addition to its membership survey, the BFS commissioned a YouGov poll of British consumers. The BSF said the results showed that some UK shoppers were blind to the threat of price rises and shortages posed by Brexit. The poll found that 19 per cent, nearly one in five UK consumers thought Brexit would somehow increase the availability of British strawberries. There is, Mr Marston said, Absolutely no chance of Brexit increasing the availability of British strawberries. Unless steps are put in place to provide growers with access to seasonal labour, the availability will reduce substantially. A government spokesman said: "We are working hard to ensure the labour needs of the agriculture sector are met once we leave the EU. We have been clear that up until December 2020, employers in the agricultural and food processing sectors will be free to recruit EU citizens to fill vacancies and those arriving to work will be able to stay in the UK afterwards. We are determined to get the best deal for the UK in our EU negotiations, not least for our world-leading food and farming industry which is a key part of our economic success. Theresa Mays government is being forced to grapple with the thorny issue of drug legalisation, amid two cases where children would have suffered if their families were unable to access supplies of medical marijuana. The issue has prompted the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt to admit the government has not got the law right on cannabis. The former leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, has gone further, saying current British law is not only inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date, but that the government should look to Canada, which is on the cusp of legalising the drug for recreational use in additional to medical use. Labour has said they would make medical cannabis legal in Britain, and as the pressure mounts, there is now the prospect of a change in legislation for the first time since the drug was upgraded from a class C drug to class B by Gordon Browns government in 2009. Cannabis around the world Show all 13 1 /13 Cannabis around the world Cannabis around the world Morocco Farmers destroy cannabis plantations under Moroccan police supervision in the northern Moroccan Larache region, pictured here in 2006 AFP/Getty images Cannabis around the world Colorado Growing business: Cannabis on sale at River Rock Wellness Sam Adams Cannabis around the world Oakland Oaksterdam in Oakland, California, is the world's only university dedicated to the study and cultivation of cannabis Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images Cannabis around the world Seattle A cannabis smoker marks the start of the new law by the Space Needle in Seattle Getty Images Cannabis around the world China Cannabis growing wild in China, where it has been used to treat conditions such as gout and malaria Cannabis around the world Uruguay Uruguay has voted to make the country the first to legalize marijuana AFP/Getty Cannabis around the world Colorado A groundswell of support from the public led to full legalisation in Colorado Getty Images Cannabis around the world Berlin A man smokes licenced medicinal marijuana prior to participating in the annual Hemp Parade, or 'Hanfparade', in support of the legalization of marijuana in Germany on August 7, 2010 in Berlin, Germany. The consumption of cannabis in Germany is legal, though all other aspects, including growing, importing or selling it, are not. However, since the introduction of a new law in 2009, the sale and possession of marijuana for licenced medicinal use is legal. Sean Gallup/Getty Images Cannabis around the world UK The UK latest figures show 2.3 million people used cannabis in the last year AP Cannabis around the world Amsterdam Tourists visiting Amsterdam will not be banned from using the citys famous cannabis cafes Getty Images Cannabis around the world Merseyside These 25 cannabis plants, seized in Merseyside police, could have generated a turnover of 40,000 a year Cannabis around the world San Francisco April 20, 2012: People smoke marijuana joints at 4:20 p.m. as thousands of marijuana advocates gathered at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California. The event was held on April 20, a date corresponding with a numerical 4/20 code widely known within the cannabis subculture as a symbol for all things marijuana. Reuters Cannabis around the world Spain A cannabis users' association will pay the town of Rasquera more than 600,000 a year for the lease of the land In the UK, Home Office guidance says: It remains illegal for UK residents to possess cannabis in any form, which includes growing plants. The penalty for dealing, producing and trafficking the drug can be up to 14 years in prison, as well as unlimited fines. Despite the law, the drugs widespread use means several police forces have confirmed they are beginning to stop targeting low level offenders. The only cannabis-based medicine licensed for prescription in the UK is Sativex, a mouth spray which is used to treat pain, bladder control problems and other symptoms of multiple sclerosis. But is a more liberal legal position about to be ushered in? On Tuesday, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, announced a review into the medical uses of cannabis. We take a look at how have other countries dealt with the changing medical and social environment around the pros and cons of marijuana. Uruguay We begin with the tiny South American nation, as they became the first country in the modern era to legalise recreational use of cannabis in 2013. The legislation came into being in an effort to combat drug-related organised crimes and health issues. Legal marijuana is now carefully controlled by a small number of chemists who distribute an affordable high quality product which is said to provide an excellent high. Sales of the drug remain frustrated by banks fear of handling money from marijuana-related accounts, as the drug largely remains illegal across the globe. Portugal Portugal effectively decriminalised possession of any drug in 2001, even heroin and cocaine, so long as the amount does not exceed a ten-day personal supply. Since then, drug issues in the country have been treated more as medical concerns than a criminal justice issue. Since the law took effect, HIV infections have fallen dramatically and drug-related deaths have decreased to among the lowest in the EU. Among Portuguese adults, there are three drug overdose deaths for every 1,000,000 citizens. Comparable numbers in other countries range from 10.2 per million in the Netherlands to 44.6 per million in the UK, all the way up to 126.8 per million in Estonia. The EU average is 17.3 per million. In addition, the country has among the worlds lowest use of substances such as synthetic marijuana, bath salts and spice. Spain Next door, Spain has also adopted a fairly liberal attitude to the personal consumption of marijuana. It remains illegal to sell it for commercial purposes, but since the 1990s the drug has been decriminalised and it may be grown on private property for use in a private space. Non-profit-making cannabis clubs are a popular means of growing and smoking cannabis in Spain. In Catalonia, the regional government has launched a limited programme to allow prescriptions of Sativex to sufferers of multiple sclerosis and cancer. Medical marijuana programmes do not exist elsewhere in the country. Switzerland Possession of personal supplies of cannabis was decriminalised to a flat fine of 100 Swiss francs in 2012, and following the rule change some regions began to permit the cultivation and use of cannabis. However, the fine system has almost stopped, as last year the federal court ruled the law had been wrongly administered. As a consequence, regional police departments have begun stopping prosecuting people for possession of small quantities of the drug. USA The US 'war on drugs' has cost in excess of a trillion dollars (Getty) In 1969, the then-US president, Richard Nixon, formally announced a war on drugs designed to eradicate drugs and imprison offenders. After almost 50 years and well over $1trn spent on anti-drug efforts, some US states have made efforts to relax cannabis laws. Medical cannabis is now legal in some form in at least 29 states with California leading the way in 1996. Despite state rulings, federal crackdowns punctuated the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations. Since 2014, states which have legalised medical cannabis have received a degree of protection at federal government level after an amendment prevented the US Justice Department from spending funds on interfering with state medical cannabis laws. As of 2018, eight US states have adopted laws to legalise recreational use of marijuana. They are: Maine, Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada and Alaska. Earlier this year, sales of the drug for recreational use began in California, with Massachusetts set to follow in July. Netherlands In the Netherlands, cannabis remains illegal, but was decriminalised for personal use in 1953. Since 1976, the drug has been available for recreational use in coffee shops, and possession of up to five grams for personal use was decriminalised, though police may still confiscate it. This often happens at border checks. There are five varieties of medical cannabis available through pharmacies in the Netherlands and it is regulated by a branch of the government - the Office for Medicinal Cannabis. Official crime figures for the Netherlands show a downward trend, however this year the Dutch Police union warned the country was beginning to resemble a narco-state, as organised crime has increased. Norway Recent changes in Norway have seen significant relaxing of laws pertaining to both medical and recreational cannabis. In 2016. medical cannabis became available through special approval in Norway. Though the drug remains illegal except for medical purposes, in 2017, the Norwegian parliament announced cannabis would be decriminalised for personal use. In addition, the government has said it would provide medical treatment to users rather than fines and imprisonment. Despite being decriminalised, those caught with up to 15 grams the amount considered to be for personal use receive a fine. Those caught with more than one kilo can expect serious jail terms. Sweden Cannabis in Sweden is illegal, and currently the drug has no recognised medical usage. Canada Canada has provided access to legal medical cannabis since 1999. Current laws allow licensed producers to grow, manufacture and sell cannabis products for medical use, and individuals may also grow their own cannabis for medical purposes. Over 200,000 Canadians are registered as users of medical marijuana. The Canadian market for medical cannabis is projected to exceed a value of C$1bn (570m). In 2017, legislation to legalise the drug for recreational use was passed by Canada's House of Commons, then the Senate in March 2018. When the law comes into effect later this year, the sale of the drug will be taxed and provinces will have the power to regulate means of sales. Annual sales are estimated to be C$4bn (2.29bn). France Along with the UK, France has among the strictest laws on Cannabis in western Europe. This week, the French government has cracked down on sales of what is essentially hemp, after a legal loophole allowed shops to start selling THC-free strains of the drug. Long queues formed outside recently set-up shops, prompting the government to take action. Limited prescriptions for medical cannabis derivatives have been available since 2013, and can only be supplied when all other medications have failed. Terrorists will never succeed in dividing Britain, leaders have vowed at a service to mark a year since the Finsbury Park attack. Relatives of victim Makram Ali joined survivors, Muslim leaders and politicians, including the home secretary Sajid Javid and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, at commemorations at Islington Town Hall. Before a minutes silence was marked, the mayor of London spoke against all forms of terrorism in the wake of the far-right attack and a wave of atrocities inspired by Isis. Recommended Finsbury Park mosque reveals vile threats one year after attack Terrorism is terrorism, no matter the target and regardless of what motivates the sick and twisted perpetrators who carry out these evil crimes, Sadiq Khan said. When Londoners face adversity, we stand up for our values, we stay strong, and we remain united. This is our city, this is our way of life, and those who seek to divide us should know this: you will never succeed. Mr Khan and Mr Corbyn were among the targets of Darren Osbornes original plan to ram a van into Muslim demonstrators at a pro-Palestinian march in central London on 18 June last year. Darren Osborne was jailed for life for the terror attack (Reuters) (Metropolitan Police/Reuters) Asked during his trial if he wanted to kill the Labour leader, who did not attend last years event, Osborne replied: Oh, yeah. It would be one less terrorist on our streets ... If Sadiq Khan had been there it would have been even better, it would have been like winning the lottery. Osborne, a 48-year-old unemployed alcoholic from Wales, was unable to reach the Al-Quds Day protest because of security measures and drove on to Finsbury Park, speeding into a crowd of Muslims gathered near the Muslim Welfare House shortly after midnight. He killed Mr Ali, a grandfather who had collapsed shortly before and was being helped by bystanders, and injured 12 other people, before telling survivors: Ive done my job, you can kill me now. Mr Corbyn, a local resident and MP, said the communitys solidarity and strength was a testament to Mr Alis memory. He praised the actions of Imam Mohammed Mahmoud, who stopped survivors beating Osborne. Imam Mahmoud did a brilliant and wonderful job in making sure that hatred of racism didnt turn into violence and anger on the streets that night, Mr Corbyn said. He helped to ensure that we came together as a community, because that is the only response there can ever be to the racists that seek to divide us. The chief executive of the Muslim Welfare House told The Independent how community leaders feared riots on the night and sought to calm people and send them home. Sajid Javid, Jeremy Corbyn, Sadiq Khan, relatives of Makram Ali and others at the commemorations (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images) It was very chaotic and a large number of people gathered just outside, Toufik Kacimi recalled. We wanted to avoid the cycle of violence. Speaking at Tuesdays commemorations, Imam Mahmoud said the community had united against hatred, bigotry and the rhetoric of the far right and we stand not just as one London but as one UK. He said his thoughts were with Mr Alis family and the victims who suffered horrific injuries at the hands of this cowardly attacker, adding: The family of Makram Ali and those who were injured have endured with patience over the last year. Their actions deserve respect. Their actions inspire all and command respect due to their dignity on that day. There was a strong uniformed police presence in Upper Street, a usually busy shopping and business hub, which was shut to traffic for the intimate memorial. Banners which read United Against Terror, Turn To Love and London United could be seen as members of the community and local officials gathered. On Thursday, Mr Alis family, victims and community leaders will meet Theresa May at Downing Street. Imam Mahmoud said he would use the meeting to call for a National Day against Islamophobia, telling ITV News: Platforms are being offered to notorious Islamophobes even within parliament these developments are worrying and theyre dangerous. Finsbury Park attack Show all 14 1 /14 Finsbury Park attack Finsbury Park attack Police officers attend to the scene after a vehicle collided with pedestrians in the Finsbury Park, killing one person and injuring eight Reuters Finsbury Park attack The incident is being treated as a potential terror attack Reuters Finsbury Park attack A man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder Reuters Finsbury Park attack Police cordon off a street in Finsbury Park AFP/Getty Images Finsbury Park attack A man prays in the street after the attack Reuters Finsbury Park attack Men gather and pray together in the street in the aftermath of the attack AFP/Getty Finsbury Park attack Reuters Finsbury Park attack PA Finsbury Park attack Onlookers gather near a police cordon EPA Finsbury Park attack Forensic investigators arrive at the scene PA Finsbury Park attack A forensic tent stands next to a van PA Finsbury Park attack A police officer talks with residents AFP/Getty Images Finsbury Park attack Onlookers watch proceedings at the security cordon AFP/Getty Finsbury Park attack Local residents react at the scene AFP/Getty Images The prime minister reiterated vows not to allow Britain to be divided by terrorism. Last years cowardly attack which targeted innocent worshippers leaving Finsbury Park Mosque was an attack on all of us, Theresa May said in a statement. We are a country of many faiths, and freedom of worship and respect for those of different faiths is fundamental to this countrys values, and these values will never be broken by vile extremism. The bravery and spirit of the community that apprehended the attacker that night sent a clear message that terrorism will never succeed. And as we remember the victims of this attack, and Makram Ali who tragically lost his life, we should take strength that it is Londons diversity and multitude of communities that makes it one of the worlds great cities. Cressida Dick, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said her thoughts were with Mr Alis family and everyone affected by the horror of 19 June 2017, adding: Our strength is our unity. Osborne was jailed for life with a minimum of 43 years in February, after a court heard he had been radicalised within weeks after watching a drama on the Rochdale grooming scandal and consuming online posts by Tommy Robinson, Britain First and other far-right figures. Robinson and Britain Firsts leaders Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen have subsequently been jailed for unrelated crimes but the Muslim Welfare House has continued to receive vile hate mail and threats. A homeless person dies every two weeks in London, figures have revealed, prompting urgent calls for the government to carry out a review into rough sleeper deaths and improve mental health support. A survey of outreach services by charity St Mungos reveals 158 rough sleepers died in the capital between 2010 and 2017 a figure campaigners have branded nothing short of a national scandal. Analysis of data shows a steep increase in the proportion of people dying who have mental health issues, which rose from 29 per cent in 2010 to 80 per cent in 2017. The outreach survey also shows 70 per cent said access to mental health services had become harder over the last five years. It comes after the number of people sleeping rough in England hit a record-high earlier this year after a 73 per cent increase over the last three years. Petra Salva, director of rough sleepers at St Mungos, told The Independent she believed the figures were an underestimation, with some being missed altogether" because the government does not record homeless death statistics at a national level and local authorities are not required to record them. Anecdotally, our team knows there is an increased risk in people dying when they sleep rough. Often when I come into work I am told it happened today of another death. And we know that a lot of them are preventable, she added. We know that people with mental health needs whether diagnosed or undiagnosed are likely to end up sleeping rough for longer and thats mainly because the help isnt fast enough. The truth is that theres not enough help out there. Weve definitely seen a correlation between cuts to mental health services and the rise in homeless deaths. Were not getting to people quickly enough some people are being missed altogether. Theres a misconception that its a lifestyle choice, and that people choose to live like this. A report published by the charity today shows 64 per cent of outreach services said access to emergency accommodation for people sleeping rough had got harder compared to five years ago. Seven in 10 meanwhile said access to mental health services for people sleeping rough had got harder compared to five years ago. Recommended Number of homeless people dying more than doubles in five years More than half (63 per cent) of respondents were aware of someone who had died while sleeping rough in their local authority area in the last year - yet only 23 per cent had any experience of a review being carried out in their area following the death of someone sleeping rough. Responding to the findings, Howard Sinclair, St Mungos chief executive, said: This is nothing short of a national scandal. These deaths are premature and entirely preventable. Rough sleeping has been rising dramatically since 2010 and we are pleased the government is finally recognising and responding to increasing need. The forthcoming strategy presents a vital opportunity to make sure no one else dies as a result of sleeping rough. He called on the Prime Minister to follow through on her commitment to end rough sleeping by making sure all parts of the public sector play their part, especially the health, justice and welfare systems. We also know that there are things the government can do today to help stop this scandal, including reviews into deaths, removing the threat of funding reform for homeless hostels, and quicker decision-making around immigration for people stuck on the streets, he added. Official government data shows that on any given night in autumn last year, 4,751 people were recorded sleeping on the streets, a figure that has more than doubled since 2010. Campaigners have described the rise as a catastrophe following continual rises since 2010, urging that evidence shows how the problem can be fixed and calling on the government to take swift action to tackle the problem. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters 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 A spokesperson for the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government said: Nobody should ever have to sleep rough and every death on our streets is one too many. We are determined that those living on the streets, as well as people at risk, get the help they need now. Only earlier this month we announced a 30m funding package to help the worst affected councils boost the immediate support they are able to offer. In total, we are investing more than 1.2bn to tackle all forms of homelessness, and are working with charities, including St Mungos, who sit on the Secretary of States Rough Sleeping Advisory Panel, on our forthcoming strategy that will help us end rough sleeping altogether by 2027. A popular young man fatally stabbed himself in the chest mistakenly believing the vest he wore was stab-proof, his inquest heard. Jordan Easton was in the kitchen at one of his friends parents on 23 August last year just five days after his 22nd birthday when he turned a knife on himself to demonstrate the stab-proof nature of the abdominal protection he had on. He suffered a chest stab wound, and was taken to the University Hospital of North Tees, in Stockton. Teesside assistant coroner Karin Welsh said: Despite the best efforts of the medical professionals, they were unable to save him. Although his injuries were self-inflicted, there was no evidence Mr Easton intended to harm himself. A police investigation was launched, but no further action was taken. Detective Superintendent Ted Butcher, from Cleveland Polices major investigation team, confirmed various witnesses and Jordans family had been spoken to. Family of stabbed burglar bring birthday tributes to scene of death He agreed with the coroners assertion that while Jordan may have had his issues in the past, he seemed to have settled down. DSI Butcher confirmed that all the witnesses gave consistent accounts about what happened subsequently borne out by toxicology and other reports. Mr Easton had died after a boisterous act, added DSI Butcher. Jordans devastated mum Alison Price told the inquest she found it hard to believe the concept that Jordan would consciously do that. Single stab to the heart killed teen in Oxford Street fight Show all 2 1 /2 Single stab to the heart killed teen in Oxford Street fight Single stab to the heart killed teen in Oxford Street fight Pg-4-oxfordst-pa.jpg PA Single stab to the heart killed teen in Oxford Street fight Pg-4-teenager-gettyjpg.jpg Getty Images She said: Its more possible if it was bravado, showing off in front of lads, but where a mother and a young girl were, its out of character for him. I cant absorb it. Recording a verdict of misadventure, Ms Welsh blamed the tragedy on the foolishness of youth. I cant begin to imagine what you are going through, she told his grieving relatives. Mr Eastons friends paid tribute to a one-of-a-kind kid and a character. Everyone on the estate got on with him and loved him, said one childhood friend. Trinity Mirror One in three teachers are providing pupils with basic hygiene products such as toothpaste and soap amid soaring child poverty rates, a new study shows. Eight in ten primary school teachers have said they had seen a rise in the numbers of children coming to school unwashed or not looking presentable in the last five years and have found themselves intervening at an increasing rate. A survey carried out by UK charity In Kind Direct also revealed nearly one in five (18 per cent) of teachers say they have to resort to doing this every single week, with the problem starkest in London where 50 per cent do this weekly and in the North East, where the figure stands at 29 per cent. It comes as child poverty rates have surged in recent years, with one million more children in working households now growing up in poverty than did so in 2010, largely because of cuts to in-work benefits and public sector pay freezes. Nicola Finney, head teacher at St Pauls Primary School in Stoke on Trent, told The Independent around 18 per cent or nearly one in five of her pupils families were receiving products from the school, as growing numbers of households are falling on hard times. Ive worked in primary schools for 12 years and Ive definitely seen an increase over the last five years. It can range from seeing a child wearing the same shirt for a few days, or noticing that they havent washed when they get changed for PE. We wont stand by if we know people are in need, she said. Its not always an impact on families that are on benefits it can be self-employed families or those made redundant. More and more households are falling on hard times. Its becoming part of my year on year budgets. We try to look at the budget very carefully to put that money aside to allocate towards these products. Staff are even buying extra bits to distribute it to families when they go shopping. I didnt come into the profession to see children suffer. If we can help in any way thats what we will do. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 14 October 2021 A red deer stag during rutting season in Bushy Park, Richmond, south west London, which is home to over 300 red and fallow deer PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters 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 Responding to the findings, Dr Richard Woolfson, a child psychologist, said: Childrens self-esteem is greatly affected by the reaction of those around them and if they are stigmatised, ridiculed or rejected by their peers because of poor basic hygiene, their sense of self-worth will quickly nose-dive. Thats why hygiene poverty has such a devastatingly negative effect on a childs psychological development, not just on their health but also on their confidence, self-esteem, social relationships and class work. Government figures published earlier this year showed the number of children in poverty across the UK had surged by 100,000 in 12 months, with 4.1 million children living in relative poverty after household costs - the worst figures since the financial crisis. A Government spokesman said: We want all children to have the very best chances in life. We know that the best route out of poverty is through employment, and since 2010 an extra three million people are now in work and 300,000 fewer children are living in absolute poverty. Meanwhile, we spend around 90bn a year on working-age benefits, including for those on low incomes. We continue to support the countrys most disadvantaged children through free school meals. Additionally, 2.5billion funding is given to schools through the Pupil Premium to support their education. British citizens of Indian, Ghanaian and Pakistani descent have been hit by the governments hostile environment immigration policy forcing the Home Offices Windrush scandal taskforce to step in, The Independent can reveal. In dozens of cases of alleged discrimination, people born in Commonwealth nations who have lived in the UK for decades have been left stranded abroad or threatened with deportation. Charities said growing numbers from outside the Caribbean had approached them in need of support with immigration issues and warned that the Windrush fiasco was the tip of the iceberg. Labour MP Virendra Sharma, who chairs the Indo-British all-party parliamentary group, said: The treatment of these hard-working and British citizens is appalling. While thousands were asked to come to UK to help rebuild after the war, the Home Office is showing them nothing but disdain when they are heroes. I want this government to show respect for those who helped the UK off its knees and an amnesty for the Windrush generation, whichever country they are from. In one case, 73-year-old Indian grandmother Raj Rani Bhanote, who has lived in the UK for 55 years, was stranded in the US for four days after being blocked from boarding a plane back to Britain. Ms Bhanote was questioned by British Airways check-in staff as she tried to board a flight from Arizona after visiting relatives. They claimed not to recognise the stamp on her Indian passport, designed to prove her right to remain in the UK. Staff contacted the Home Office, which claimed she was not a British resident, and she was not allowed to board the aircraft. It took four days for the governments Windrush taskforce to intervene so she could return home. Ms Bhanote, who has three children and four grandchildren in the UK and worked as a post office assistant, told The Independent she felt terrible, adding: I spoke to someone on the phone who refused to speak to my family and could not understand why they were behaving in such a disrespectful manner towards me. Her son, Arun Bhanote, has since written to his MP to request an investigation by the Home Office into what he described as racist maladministration and xenophobic calamity. Satbir Singh, chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), said the case was a disturbing but sadly all-too-common occurrence. Cases like this show just how incredibly complicated, rigid and inhumane our immigration system has become, he said. Its a relief that the Windrush taskforce was able to help in this case, but it also shows the need for such remedies to be available to everybody who faces poor decision-making either at the Home Office or at the border. It comes as the government announced that a day celebrating the Windrush generation and their descendants was to be held annually, after it emerged a large number of British Caribbean nationals had been wrongly targeted by immigration officials in the UK. But Alessandra Sciarra, from Lewisham Refugee and Migrant Network, which supports migrants and refugees in south London, said they had seen at least a dozen cases of non-Caribbean Commonwealth citizens encountering similar issues in the past six months. They extend to people from different countries; its much more widespread. Windrush is just the tip of the iceberg, she said. Ms Sciarra said one of their cases involved a 65-year-old Indian man who was born in Uganda and became a British protected person after fleeing persecution to the UK in 1972. Despite living here since, working and building a family, and never encountering any issues with his immigration status, he has recently been unable to find work due to issues with his documents. In the 46 years he has been living in the UK, he has integrated successfully into his community in Lewisham. His wife and adult children were all recognised as British citizens, she said. But recently Mr Khan lost his job and began looking for employment again just prior to retirement. He faced numerous issues in this process, as many employers asked him for a proof of his right to reside and work in the country. Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said one of her constituents, of Ghanaian descent who has been in Britain for over 50 years, had recently contacted her after had been threatened with deportation. The Labour MP said: The Windrush scandal goes way beyond the people that stepped off Empire Windrush or even all those from the Caribbean. Everyone from the Commonwealth who came here before 1973 could get caught up in the scandal, including deportation or detention. These are not isolated mistakes. They are a product of the governments hostile environment policy, and Theresa Mays instruction to deport first, appeal later. Until these end, the scandal will not go away. The Home Office declined to disclose the exact number of non-Caribbean cases the taskforce was dealing with. Keith Vaz, Labour MP for Leicester East, said his office received on average three cases a week or around 150 a year from Indian nationals who have lived in the UK for more than a decade but are now denied their rights and in some cases threatened with deportation. It is not just Windrush cases, he said. There is a systemic failure on the part of the Home Office to deal with cases promptly. Delay is being used as a substitute for decision-making. There are a lot of people who are from India who have been in this country for 20 years, but are being held in a long queue being made to sign on and cannot work, but are actually entitled to stay here. As a result, people can stay for a very long time as long as 20 years and still not know precisely where they stand. Some inevitably get removed without anyone intervening. They live in a subculture of society and so are reluctant to come forward, but actually they do have the right to stay. Mr Vaz raised concerns that the Home Office had diverted resources from dealing with immigration cases from the Indian subcontinent in order to set up the Windrush taskforce. Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Show all 15 1 /15 Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' arriving at Tilbury Docks from Jamaica, with 482 Jamaicans on board, emigrating to Britain. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaican immigrants being welcomed by RAF officials from the Colonial Office after the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' landed them at Tilbury. PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner who arrived in Britain in 1948 on the first Windrush ship to dock in Tilbury, Essex, speaking at his home in Leeds PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner in Leeds shortly after he arrived in Britain in 1948 on the first Windrush ship to dock in Tilbury, Essex PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Gardner was 22 years old when he boarded the ship in Kingston, Jamaica, with his brother Gladstone before they and hundreds of Caribbean migrants called on to rebuild post-war Britain disembarked the ship in Tilbury Docks PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner (right), during his RAF service in 1947 PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The son of Ruth Williams, a Windrush-generation immigrant, wants to the leave the country after threats of deportation. According to his mother, Mr Haynes applied for British citizenship in 2016 but was rejected, despite Ms Williams having lived in the UK almost permanently since arriving from St Vincent and the Grenadines in 1959. Ruth Williams, 75, said she felt "betrayed" by Britain after the Home Office twice turned down applications for her 35-year-old son, Mozi Haynes, to remain in the country. Ms Williams is understood to have cancer and said she relies heavily on her son for support. PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The British liner 'Empire Windrush' at port in 1954. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Ruth Williams, 75, with her British passport. "I feel betrayed and a second class citizen in my own country," she said. "This makes me so sad and the Home Office must show some compassion. "I am unwell and almost 75, I live on my own and I need my son to stay here. I need my family around me and I cant face being alone. He has applied to the Home Office and been refused twice." PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK From the top, hopeful Jamaican boxers Charles Smith, Ten Ansel, Essi Reid, John Hazel, Boy Solas and manager Mortimer Martin arrive at Tilbury on the Empire Windrush in the hope of finding work in Britain. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaicans reading a newspaper whilst on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' bound for Tilbury docks in Essex. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK After half a century in Britain, Anthony Bryan decided it was time to go abroad. But the decision set off a nightmare that saw him lose his job, detained twice and almost deported to Jamaica. AFP/Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaica-born Anthony Bryan poses outside his home in Edmonton, north London. Now 60 and a grandfather, Bryan thought the issue could be resolved swiftly, as he legally moved to Britain with his family as part of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants after World War II. In 1948, the ship Windrush brought the first group of migrants from the West Indies to help rebuild post-war Britain, and many others followed from around the Commonwealth. A 1971 law gave them indefinite leave to remain, but many never formalised their status, often because they were children who came over on their parents' passports and then never applied for their own. AFP/Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Three Jamaican immigrants (left to right) John Hazel, a 21-year-old boxer, Harold Wilmot, 32, and John Richards, a 22-year-old carpenter, arriving at Tilbury on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush', smartly dressed in zoot suits and trilby hats. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Newly arrived Jamaican immigrants on board the 'Empire Windrush' at Tilbury in 1948. Getty Responding to the case of Ms Bhanote, a British Airways spokesperson said: We are sorry to hear that the situation caused distress to our customer, but our colleagues in Phoenix and the UK Immigration Department were unable to confirm the validity of the travel documents held by the customer. We wanted to do everything possible to avoid our elderly customer making the nine-hour journey to London, to then be denied entry to the UK. So we rebooked her for travel a few days later, at which point the Home Office had provided an approval letter. The Home Office said Mr Bhanote had indefinite leave but that it had not been possible to determine her status in time for her to board the flight, and that it had worked closely with her son to determine her status. Ministers should back moves to abolish the House of Lords following a major government defeat on the governments key Brexit legislation, according to Labour MP Frank Field. Mr Field, who was one of a handful of Labour MPs to back leaving the European Union, has today tabled a bill aiming to scrap the Lords and replace the upper chamber with a smaller senate. He suggests a smaller group of senators around one third of the Lords membership could represent the balance of regions and political parties elected to the Commons. His remarks follow a vote in the Lords on Monday evening to give parliament a meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal reached between Theresa Mays government and Brussels. The move sets the stage for a major confrontation between the prime minister and pro-EU rebels on the Conservative backbenches on Wednesday when the EU (Withdrawal) Bill returns to the Commons. If passed by MPs it would represent a significant blow to Ms Mays political authority and require the government in the absence of any Brexit deal agreement by the end of 21 January 2019 to make a statement setting out how it proposed to proceed and allow MPs a vote. Mr Fields bill has little prospect of becoming law unless it secures government backing. He has now urged ministers to show their support as he claimed there was widespread anger among the public at the actions of peers in the upper chamber. I shall lobby the prime minister and the leader of the house [Andrea Leadsom] for the government to give us time to get it through, he told the Press Association. Why shouldn't the Government do something popular? The Lords needs to be reformed. We rarely do reform unless there is urgency of needs. Here is the urgency of needs. On Sunday, Mr Field also wrote in the Daily Telegraph that to defy the Commons once is a misfortune and that to defy it twice is an act of insurrection. Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines Show all 10 1 /10 Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines The Sun, March 9 2016 This wholly false headline merited the first ruling by IPSO (the press regulator) under clause 1 of the revised Editor's Code of Practice. Clause 1 makes specific reference to newspapers printing "headlines not supported by the text" Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines Daily Mail, November 4 2016 In perhaps the most notorious front page of the past few years, the Mail derides the High Court judges who ruled that parliament must have a vote on whether to trigger article 50 and start the Brexit process Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines Daily Express, November 4 2016 In the Express' take on the same story, they manage to incorporate the Union Jack, allude to First World War propaganda, invoke memories of Churchill and, of course, state "Brexit means Brexit" Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines The Sun, March 29 2017 The Sun marked the day on which Mrs May triggered article 50 by projecting a huge and terrible pun on to the Cliffs of Dover Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines The Sun, April 4 2017 Referencing their notorious eurosceptic headline from 1990 (See: Up Yours Delors), the Sun stokes the flames of the brief Gibraltar dispute, a dispute in which Spain, the supposed aggressors, only joined to note that there was "no need for it" Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines Daily Mail, April 19 2017 This headline followed Mrs May's snap election announcement, which gave the Mail hope that dissenting opinions on Brexit would disappear Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines Daily Mail, December 14 2017 In recent months, the Mail has often forgone catchy headlines in favour of rambling rants, this is an early example aimed at Tory Brexit rebels Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines Daily Mail, January 31 2018 This headline (?) takes aim at the Lords over their repeated amendments to the EU Withdrawal Bill Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines The Sun, June 12 2018 On the day that the EU Withdrawal Bill is to be debated in the Commons, the Sun offers two choices to MPs, desperately including all conceivable imagery that might make Brits feel patriotic, which apparently includes the Loch Ness Monster Brexit: 10 of the most ridiculous headlines Daily Express, June 12 2018 On the same day, the Express lets MPs know what the consequences of the vote may be The Commons must act, he added. One of the many good side effects of Brexit should be the abolition of the upper house and its replacement by a much smaller senate. Our departure should be the starting gun for a renaissance across the whole of public life as a new pride in being British, or English as it is now more often expressed, sweeps across our affairs." Downing Street said the government had set out its position on Lords reform earlier this year when the Prime Minister called for restraint in the appointment of new peers following proposals to reduce the size of the upper chamber. Britain will be locked out of EU policing and security databases after Brexit, the blocs chief negotiator has confirmed. Michel Barnier said the UK would also lose access to the European arrest warrant and that UK representatives would no longer have a role in managing agencies such as Europol and Eurojust. In a speech in Vienna Mr Barnier said the British government needed a dose of realism about what would be possible on security cooperation after the UK leaves the bloc. Recommended EU making preparations for possibility of Brexit being postponed The chief negotiator said EU security cooperation was based on trust, but said: This trust doesnt fall from the sky, there is no magic wand. This trust is founded on an ecosystem If you leave this ecosystem you lose the benefits of this cooperation. Mr Barnier said the EUs position had been developed after talks between the 27 other member states in recent weeks. It is particularly hard to speak about what will no longer be possible, but I have to speak the truth, he told the audience at the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in the Austrian capital. The UK decided to leave the EU, I regret profoundly the decision, but it is a democratic decision and we have to respect it. Now we are working towards an orderly withdrawal. It is particularly hard to speak about what will no longer be possible, but I have to speak the truth Michel Barnier, EU chief negotiator If we want to build a new relationship, we need a basis of good will, a basis of confidence between us but we also need more realism about what is and what is not possible. Turning to Britain, he added: They try to blame us for the consequences of their choice. Once again, we will not be drawn into this blame game. It will mean wasting time, and we dont have time. The European Commission says expedited extradition could still be possible between the EU and UK but that it would have to be organised differently. Mr Barnier also said the EU was open to exchanging security information with the UK but that this could not be based on access to EU-only or Schengen-only databases. The new bilateral system could make use of liaison officers and would be a reciprocal arrangement, Mr Barnier said. The bloc also says any cooperation with the UK on the issue would be conditional on Britain remaining subject to the European Court of Human Rights and its convention which Theresa May has previously toyed with leaving. UK data protection rules would also have to stay aligned with those of the EU, a document spelling out the plan says. Proposals laid out by European Commission officials say the agreement would have a guillotine clause that would terminate the agreement if these conditions were not adhered to. 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 You cannot expect member states to continue cooperating with the UK without these safeguards, the negotiator added. This is not a bureaucratic issue; this is about the lives and liberties of our citizens. Theresa May has repeatedly said the UK wants to stay in Europol and have access to the European arrest warrant after Brexit. A spokesperson for the Brexit department said: Keeping citizens in the UK and EU safe is an absolute priority. We have set out our commitment to this and how we can continue to work together and maintain current operational capability. We are proposing an internal security treaty to deliver this. We recognise we will be a third country, but we start from a unique position of complete alignment. Any drop in the breadth and quality of cooperation would have a direct impact on public safety and on our collective ability to deliver justice across Europe. Clearly this remains a matter for negotiation. William Hague has urged Theresa May to consider legalising cannabis as he claims the war on the drug has been comprehensively and irreversibly lost. The remarks from the former foreign secretary heap political pressure on the prime minister amid an escalating row in the cabinet over the governments approach to medical cannabis and growing outrage over a 12-year-old epileptic boys use of the drug. The intervention from Mr Hague Tory leader between 1997 and 2001 also comes after Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, suggested a different way was required after cannabis oil was confiscated from Charlotte Caldwell. Ms Caldwell had purchased the drug in Canada to treat her son, Billy, who was rushed to Chelsea and Westminster hospital on Friday evening in a critical condition having suffered multiple seizures. It led to Sajid Javid, the home secretary, granting a 20-day emergency licence of the oil. Lord Hague said the case of Billy Caldwell demonstrated that current policy is revealed to be inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date. He said Mr Javids decision to return the medicine to the 12-year-old boy at the weekend meant the Home Office had implicitly conceded that the law has become indefensible. It must now be asked whether Britain should join the many other countries that permit medical-grade marijuana, or indeed, join Canada in preparing for a lawful, regulated market in cannabis for recreational use as well," he added. Recommended May at odds with cabinet ministers over medicinal cannabis Writing in The Daily Telegraph, he joined those who have called for a change in approach over cannabis, claiming the idea the narcotic can be driven off the streets and out of peoples lives by the state is nothing short of deluded. He continued: Its time to acknowledge facts, and to embrace a decisive change that would be economically and socially beneficial, as well as rather liberation for Conservatives in showing sensible new opinions are welcome. First of all, as far as marijuana, or cannabis, is concerned, any war has been comprehensively and irreversibly lost. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters 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 Everyone sitting in a Whitehall conference room needs to recognise that, out there, cannabis is ubiquitous, and issuing orders to the police to defeat its use is about as up-to-date and relevant as asking the Army to recover the Empire. This battle is effectively over. Urging the prime minister to be bold, he added: And while not advocating the recreational use of any drugs at all, I think it is right that people of all persuasions should now focus on sorting out a failed policy and an unsustainable law, and replacing both with new ideas that might just command respect and success. Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said Labour supported the legal prescription of cannabis oil for medical purposes, saying: Children have been put at risk and experienced extraordinary suffering because this government drags its heels and refuses to grant cannabis oil licences. Billy Caldwell's mum welcomes UK allowing cannabis oil epileptic son But asked about the law Mrs May was more cautious, saying: Do we need to look at these cases and consider what we've got in place? Yes. But what needs to drive us in all these cases has to be what clinicians are saying about these issues. There's a very good reason why we've got a set of rules around cannabis and other drugs, because of the impact that they have on people's lives, and we must never forget that. 12-year-old Billy Caldwell & his mother Charlotte Caldwell (Getty) A spokeswoman for the Home Office added: There is strong scientific and medical evidence that cannabis is a harmful drug which can harm people's mental and physical health and can damage communities. The government is clear - we must prevent drug use in our communities and help those dependent on drugs to recover, while ensuring our drugs laws are enforced. The government has no intention of reviewing the classification of cannabis and it will remain a class B drug. Classification is completely separate to scheduling regulations. Any debate within government about the efficacy and therapeutic use of cannabis-based medicines emphatically does not extend to any review regarding the classification of cannabis and the penalties for the illicit possession, cultivation and trafficking of cannabis will remain the same. Home secretary Sajid Javid has announced that the government will carry out a review of the scheduling of cannabis for medicinal use. Mr Javid said the commission would first have experts look at the evidence for the medical benefits of cannabis, and then government advisors recommend what products might be rescheduled. But he underlined that there is no question of the government legalising cannabis for recreational use, saying penalties for unauthorised supply and possession will remain in place. The issue has been thrust to the forefront of political debate after the mother of 12-year-old Billy Caldwell, who had cannabis oil to treat his epilepsy which was confiscated from her at Heathrow, demanded a change in the law. Mr Javid told MPs: It has become clear to me since becoming home secretary that the position we find ourselves in currently is not satisfactory. It is not satisfactory for the parent, its not satisfactory for the doctors and its not satisfactory for me. Ive now come to the conclusion that it is time to review the scheduling of cannabis. Mr Javid explained that part one of the commission will review evidence for the benefits of a range of cannabis based medicines and be taken forward by professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer. Nick Hurd announcing an expert panel to look into medicinal cannabis cases Her work will inform which cannabis-based medicines should be considered in part two of the commission, which will be led by the advisory council on the misuse of drugs. The council is to then provide ministers with an assessment of which products, if any, should be rescheduled. It has become clear to me since becoming home secretary that the position we find ourselves in currently is not satisfactory. It is not satisfactory for the parent, its not satisfactory for the doctors and its not satisfactory for me Home secretary Sajid Javid Mr Javid said: If the review identified that there are significant medical benefits, then we do intend to reschedule. We have seen in recent months that there is a pressing need to allow those who might benefit from cannabis based products to access them. He said in the period that the commission carries out its review, requests for urgent access to cannabis for medicinal use will be considered by a panel of experts, announced by the government yesterday. The home secretary also announced he had authorised a licence to be issued on Tuesday for six-year-old Alfie Dingley, after his mother said she had been waiting three months for Theresa May to fulfil a personal assurance he would be allowed to receive cannabis oil. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 15 October 2021 A person lays flowers at the scene near the Belfairs Methodist Church in Eastwood Road North, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, where Conservative MP Sir David Amess has died after he was stabbed several times at a constituency surgery. A man has been arrested and officers are not looking for anyone else PA UK news in pictures 14 October 2021 A red deer stag during rutting season in Bushy Park, Richmond, south west London, which is home to over 300 red and fallow deer PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters 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 Earlier this week, Mr Javid intervened to grant a 20-day licence for Billy Caldwell to be treated with cannabis oil, after he suffered seizures following the confiscation his of supplies, brought by his mother from Canada. Labours shadow home secretary Diane Abbott welcomed Mr Javids statement, saying: We agree that this is the right time, if not long overdue, to review the scheduling of cannabis. Billy Caldwell was rushed to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Friday night in a critical condition having suffered multiple seizures, after his supply was taken from his mother on 11 June. Following Mr Javids intervention, he received treatment and was discharged on Monday afternoon, leaving Ms Caldwell calling for an urgent review of the law. On Tuesday, ex-Tory leader William Hague called for the legalisation of the recreational use of cannabis in the UK, and said it was time for bold action on the part of the government. Downing Street has rubbished calls from former Conservative leader William Hague to legalise the recreational use of cannabis. Theresa Mays spokesman said there are no plans to legalise or decriminalise the drug and underlined serious harm medical studies show it causes, after Lord Hague said the UK needs a bold rethink of the law. But it comes as home secretary Sajid Javid prepares to make a commons statement, which The Independent understands will relate specifically to patients who need cannabis for medicinal use. The issue has been thrust to the forefront of political debate after the mother of 12-year-old Billy Caldwell, who had cannabis oil to treat his epilepsy confiscated from her at Heathrow, asked for urgent meetings with both health secretary Jeremy Hunt and Mr Javid this week. After Lord Hague wrote an article saying the war on cannabis had been lost and that legalisation should be considered, Ms Mays spokesman said: The harmful effects of cannabis are well known and there are no plans to legalise it. He went on: In terms of decriminalising cannabis, there are no plans in that respect. The evidence is very clear cannabis can cause serious harm when it is misused. For example, the NHS has set out that cannabis use carries the risk of psychotic illness and can impair the health of unborn babies. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters 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 He highlighted that both the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Kings College London have said cannabis is highly addictive and can lead to serious health problems. But it does appear that the case of Billy Caldwell has led to a potential shift in how the government treats medicinal cannabis. Earlier this week, Mr Javid intervened to grant a 20-day licence for Billy to be treated with cannabis oil, after he suffered seizures following the confiscation his of supplies, brought by his mother from Canada. On Monday the government then announced a new expert panel to consider the use of medicinal cannabis in individual cases, with the goal of streamlining decisions in cases like Billy Caldwells. Nick Hurd announcing an expert panel to look into medicinal cannabis cases The Independent now understands that the government may reconsider specific rules around medicinal cannabis, and whether any change could be made that allows doctors to proscribe it for patients who need it for treatment. Billy Caldwell was rushed to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Friday night in a critical condition having suffered multiple seizures, after his supply was taken off his mother on 11 June. Following Mr Javids intervention he received treatment and was discharged on Monday afternoon, leaving Ms Caldwell, 50, calling for an urgent review of the law. Canadas House of Commons has voted to legalise cannabis, moving the country one step closer to becoming the only G-8 nation to allow recreational use. The vote now moves the legislation back to the countrys Senate, which had already approved a version of the bill. While a number of American states have legalised adult use of marijuana, Canada would break new ground in lifting a prohibition nationwide. The substance is still banned under federal law in the US. Prime minister Justin Trudeau has vowed to forge ahead with the legalisation effort despite resistance from conservative legislators and calls to delay a vote to allow further study. We have been talking about this since well before we formed government, Mr Trudeau told reporters last month. We have been working with our partners across the country to make this happen and we are going to be moving forward this summer on the legalisation of cannabis. Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry Show all 8 1 /8 Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry 5591453.jpg Sam Adams Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry 5591446.jpg Sam Adams Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry 5591448.jpg Sam Adams Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry 5591452.jpg Sam Adams Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry 5591449.jpg Sam Adams Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry 5591450.jpg Sam Adams Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry 5591451.jpg Sam Adams Mile high city: Inside Denver's billion-dollar marijuana industry 5591454.jpg Sam Adams An earlier version of the bill cleared the Senate despite warnings from conservative members that authorising marijuana would lead to a cascade of unintended consequences. Trump says he really supports senate marijuana legislation Legalisation should be a last resort if incremental approaches to address cannabis-related harms fail, Senator Judith Seidman said earlier this month. Instead, the government has chosen to conduct a grand experiment on the Canadian public, an experiment that cannot be undone. A sheriffs deputy in South Texas has been accused of sexually assaulting the four-year-old daughter of an undocumented immigrant. Jose Nunez, a 47-year-old detention officer with the Bexar County Sheriffs Office, is accused of threatening the young girls mother with deportation if she were to report him, authorities said. On Sunday, the Bexar County sheriff, Javier Salazar, said investigators arrested Mr Nunez on a charge of super aggravated sexual assault of a child. Mr Salazar said: The details of the case are quite frankly heartbreaking, disturbing, disgusting and infuriating all at the same time. Mr Nunez, a 10-year veteran of the Bexar County Sheriffs Office who worked at the county jail, was arrested early on Sunday while he was off-duty after the mother, who is from Guatemala, took her daughter to a local fire station to seek help. The sheriff said authorities believe Mr Nunez is related to the child victim. 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 Salazar said the young girl had been experiencing physical pain and made an outcry which sparked her mothers decision to go to the fire station. He said the little girl is now safe. The abuse was likely to have occurred for several months and maybe even years and there may have been other victims, Mr Salazar said. The mother of this little girl is an undocumented immigrant, my understanding is that this suspect utilised that to his advantage to place the mother in fear that she would be deported if she did report it, the sheriff said. Mr Salazar said the criminal charge carries a minimum 25-year sentence. He said investigators were working to make sure the mother is given protected status pending the outcome of the case, but chose not to comment on the residence status of the child. My objective is to separate this person from the agency as soon as possible, Mr Salazar said. Super aggravated sexual assault of a child happens if the victim is under the age of 14. It also occurs if there are other factors such as serious bodily injury or if a deadly weapon is present. Immigrant rights groups have argued Texas Senate Bill 4, which was passed in May last year, has fostered a feeling of fear among undocumented immigrants about approaching local law enforcement to report crimes. While the laws supporters say it is designed to protect people by enforcing laws already in place, it also allows local authorities to investigate whether a person is legally in the US. The law punishes local officials who implement policies which limit immigration enforcement or stop police from questioning the immigration status of people they detain or arrest. The Texas Senate Bill 4 has been the subject of several legal challenges, but it continues to remains in effect. Mr Nunez is due in court on Monday afternoon. A US senator has claimed reports of migrant children being separated from families and caged had been over-stated before admitting he was no expert and that it may be as bad as suggested. Republican Pat Toomey said the numbers of families split up had been exaggerated significantly. He told national radio host Hugh Hewitt: There are serious challenges at the border like, Does the person claiming to be the parent, is that person actually the parent? But in an immediate vault face, the one-time businessman admitted he had no idea of either the situation or the detail. Border Patrol Processing Center in McAllen, Texas (US Customs and Border Protection) Mr Toomey spoke out after being questioned about the Trump administration's zero-tolerance immigration policy which has see some 2,000 children taken from their family or guardians in just six weeks as they attempted to illegally cross into the US from Mexico. Under the initiative, adults are taken for criminal prosecution, while under-18s are kept in wire-cage holding facilities. One in Texas has been nicknamed La Perrera - 'dog kennel' in Spanish - after pictures emerged of the grim conditions. Former First Lady Barbara Bush has compared the system to Americas infamous internment camps where citizens of Japanese heritage were imprisoned during the Second World War. This is not my area of expertise, admitted Mr Toomey when Mr Hewitt quoted the number of youngsters held as part of the policy. Im going to have to drill down into this and address it. And maybe youre right. Maybe this is happening with a higher frequency than Ive been aware of, and it is certainly, its just not the right thing to be doing. And he admitted the policy could lead to a humanitarian and political crisis for Donald Trump in a similar way to how Hurricane Katrina led to crisis for George W Bush. Yes. I suppose it could, he said. I mean, I think clearly, the country is focused on this. Clearly, its a horrendous situation if a small child is being taken away from the childs actual mother. So I think weve got to solve this problem. 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 comments came not long after Mr Trump defended the policy and refused to call a pause. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," he said during a meeting at the White House on Monday. Under Attorney General Jeff Sessions' new "zero-tolerance" immigration policy, everyone who attempts to cross the border even those seeking asylum are being prosecuted. Because of the way that policy is enforced, almost 2,000 children have been separated from their parents in six weeks. Experts, mental health groups, and human rights organizations all say this could cause serious, lasting harm to children and their parents. Here's how forced family separation affects people for the rest of their lives. Babies ripped from parents' arms. Tent cities. Mass trials. Suicides. Reports about what's happening to children and families who arrive at the US-Mexico border have shocked many, from White House reporters to conservative religious leaders. A Honduran woman told attorneys that her daughter was pulled from her as she was breastfeeding. After being separated from his wife and 3-year-old son, a Honduran man took his own life in a Texas jail cell. Colleen Kraft, the president of the American Academy for Pediatrics, recently described seeing a blotchy-faced toddler sobbing and pounding on a playmat, terrified because she'd been forcibly separated from her mother. "We knew what was wrong, but we were powerless to help," Kraft wrote. At issue in these accounts is a policy enacted by the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, which Attorney General Jeff Sessions has described as "zero tolerance." US authorities are now detaining and prosecuting anyone who attempts to cross the border illegally even those seeking asylum because they're fleeing violence, some of whom are being blocked from reaching official ports of entry. Within families, the parents are charged with a crime but children are not, which leads them to be separated. Almost 2,000 children were taken from their families between April 19 and May 31 as a result of the policy. In some cases, the kids are too young to speak. Sessions described this policy as a deterrent. "If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law," he said in a speech to law-enforcement officials in Scottsdale, Arizona. "If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border." But this policy could cause irreversible harm and psychological damage for the rest of people's lives, according to experts. Some consequences could even be passed on to future generations. Forced family separation has been condemned as harmful, inhumane, and counter to accepted human rights by many groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and the United Nations human rights office. "The administration's policy of separating children from their families as they attempt to cross into the United States without documentation is not only needless and cruel, it threatens the mental and physical health of both the children and their caregivers," the American Psychological Association said in a statement. Supplies are stored at a Brownsville shelter where child migrants are kept 'A problem of the government's own making' There are more than 10,000 unaccompanied children in US facilities and detention centers right now; some have been separated from their parents, while others arrived at the border alone. But Sessions' zero-tolerance approach means that for the first time, an official policy calls for the splitting of families. According Homeland Security numbers obtained by The Associated Press, officials had separated 1,995 children from 1,940 adults by the end of May. By now, more than 2,000 kids likely freshly traumatized have probably been added to the US' already overwhelmed system for dealing with young immigrants. Almost 1,500 boys between the ages of 10 and 17 have been crammed into one shelter inside a former Walmart in Brownsville, Texas. Jacob Soboroff, a reporter who visited that facility, described the boys as "incarcerated" because they were eating in shifts, had just 40 square feet of living space, and spent only two hours outside each day. The Trump administration is currently building "tent cities" near the border to hold the many undocumented kids who arrive in the US. "Before, their cases would have been dealt with as a family," Megan McKenna, senior director of communications at the nonprofit Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), told Business Insider. "It's a problem of the government's own making." This isn't the first time families have been separated at the border. But now, doing so is the rule, not the exception. After families are separated, parents get dealt with by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as they are being charged with a crime. Since the children are not charged, their cases get managed by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). In many cases, families who get separated aren't given any information about where other family members are being held or how to contact each other. "They just have no understanding of what's happening to them or when they're going to see their family again, and we can't tell them when they're going to see their parents again because we don't know either," said McKenna, whose organization tries to match children with attorneys. "It's extraordinarily damaging to the child." 'Irreversible harm' Jodi Berger Cardoso, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Houston, researches the effects of trauma on immigrants and their children. "What they are doing to these children and parents is inhumane," Cardoso told Business Insider. "If we just look at the research evidence, anyone can see that these tactics will have long-term consequences for children and families." Dr. Lisa Fortuna, medical director for child and adolescent psychiatry at Boston Medical Center, told Business Insider that "in situations of stress, the only way that children can cope is if they have a caregiver with them that's taking care of them and that's there to protect them." The removal of a caregiver can create acute distress that harms a child's ability to cope and self-soothe, which can lead to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In vulnerable developing brains, that can be especially harmful. A child traveling with a caravan of migrants from Central America sits at a camp near the San Ysidro checkpoint "What we find from a neurobiological sense is that the circuitry in the brain that is a fear response can be actually harmed," Fortuna said. In other words, the parts of the brain that manage fear responses the amygdala and hippocampus develop differently in traumatized children. That can alter their emotional experiences for the rest of their lives, Fortuna explained, and put a child "at higher risk for ongoing anxiety, depression, PTSD as they get older." Those factors, in turn, hurt their future educational outcomes and sense of well-being, and can cause behavioral problems. For that reason, Fortuna wrote in an amicus brief for an ACLU case that family separation can cause "irreversible harm" for children. Even when kids are separated from parents in a non-forceful way, research suggests those children have a higher risk of anxiety and depression. Lessons from families of the past: multi-generational damage Previous times in history when families were separated have illustrated these long-lasting psychological consequences. "Historically when things have happened like this from the literature when you have this accumulation of trauma and you break up families, you have a direct negative impact on the children, the caregivers, and potentially intergenerational bad effects," Fortuna said. The US and Canada have a long history of separating Native Americans from their families. Researchers have linked the experience of Native Americans who were pressured to relocate away from tribes and family groups in the 1950s to problems with substance abuse and depression. Depression and juvenile behavior issues even persisted through the next generation as well. In Australia, as many as 100,000 children from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were removed from their families from the late 1800s through 1960s and placed with white families or in government institutions to assimilate them into majority culture. Data shows that people who were forcibly separated from their families as children experienced significant, long-lasting negative impacts: they were almost twice as likely to be charged with a crime as adults, 60% more likely to have alcohol use disorders, and more than twice as likely to have gambling problems. Surveys found that even the children of people who'd been separated from their parents in Australia had more than double the average risk of emotional and behavioral difficulties. Using children to control parents mirrors domestic abuse behaviour Laurie Heffron, an assistant professor of social work at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, works with immigrants and women who have experienced domestic and sexual violence. She said that using children to manipulate adults' decisions as Sessions' policy is intended to do "is an eerie mirroring" of a "textbook strategy of people who abuse their partners." In domestic abuse situations, one partner often uses control of children as a way to "manipulate their partner, maintain control over their partner, or coerce their partner," Heffron said. "Except now it's children being manipulated and being used as pawns to control a whole community of people, a whole population of people who are trying to seek safety." This is particularly troubling for Heffron, since a central motivation for many of the immigrant women she's worked with has been to find a safe place to raise their children, away from violence inside or outside their home. 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 Compounded trauma In addition to the lasting negative impacts of family separation, immigrant families detained at the border face three other sources of trauma that can compound the psychological damage. First, many of these families have already suffered hardship in their home countries, which is what caused them to leave. "Children are being persecuted by gangs, either through forced recruitment, extortion, and or violence," Cardoso said. "Women have a high risk for interpersonal violence that includes physical and sexual violence." Second, many immigrants encounter violence and trauma on the dangerous journey to the US. "On top of whatever reason people have left their homeland... are migration-related experiences that may be oftentimes negative, which could include physical or sexual abuse or violence or exploitation or human trafficking," Heffron said. Cardoso found in her research of one group of unaccompanied children (who hadn't been forcibly separated from parents) that those kids had experienced an average of eight traumatic life events a clinical category that includes experiences like kidnapping, sexual assault, and witnessing violent crimes. About 60% of those kids met the criteria for PTSD and 30% for depressive disorder. The average age in that sample was 14. And third, jail-like detention can trigger "self-harm, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, depression, traumatic stress, anxiety, et cetera," according to Heffron. "What we know about folks who've experienced trauma is they need to feel safe," she said. Currently we're doing the opposite of that. Not only are people not feeling safe emotionally because they're separated from their families, they're oftentimes not feeling safe physically because of the conditions of detention. We also hear allegations and there are reports of physical maltreatment and sexual violence in immigrant detention centers." Are immigrants really being deterred? As KIND has documented, the zero-tolerance policy is one of many aimed at making it harder for immigrant families to seek asylum in the US and deter them from trying. When White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was asked by NPR whether taking children from their parents to deter immigration was cruel, he responded: "I wouldn't put it quite that way The children will be taken care of put into foster care or whatever. But the big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long." The research contradicts Kelly's claim that the children will be fine, and it's also unclear whether this policy works as a deterrent. So far, reports from the border indicate that it isn't deterring immigrants, since many experts say that people fleeing violence in their home countries are continuing to do so. "We've heard from families that have said they would rather risk the plight of coming to the United States and possibly being detained than face sure harm or even death in their home countries," McKenna said. "It's a policy that's just not going to be effective because it's not addressing the core reasons of why these families and these children are coming to the United States. It's just this pervasive violence that's perpetrated by the gangs and narcotraffickers which control communities." Family separation also violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which specifically states that "a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will." "I think we should be a society that understands that we need to take care of children. If they come to our borders and they are families, we can't harm them," Fortuna said. "We have to deal with policy and immigration issues, I understand that, but it cannot be policy that harms people directly, intentionally." Read more: This chart is easy to interpret: It says we're screwed How Uber became the world's most valuable startup These 4 things could trigger the next crisis in Europe Read the original article on Business Insider UK. 2016. Follow Business Insider UK on Twitter. What is happening at the border? In April, attorney general Jeff Sessions announced that the administration would begin pursuing a zero-tolerance policy towards adults who illegally cross 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, Mr Sessions said in announcing the new policy. If you dont like that, then dont smuggle children over our border. Thanks to a 1997 court settlement, legal precedent dictates that children must be detained in the least restrictive setting possible while cases are processed. A subsequent ruling found that rule applies to both unaccompanied minors - those who cross alone - and those who cross with their parents. Under those guidelines, children who cross the border fall under the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Trump administrations zero tolerance policy, in mandating prosecutions and putting parents into criminal proceedings, splits families. I dont want children taken away from parents, and when you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally - which should happen - you have to take the children away, Mr Trump said during a speech this week. Federal data shows that nearly 2,000 immigrant minors were separated from their families at the border over a six-week period spanning mid-April and May. New numbers released on this detailed 2,342 children being separated from their families from early May through to early June. Some of those dates cross over. Immigration has always been a defining issue for Donald Trump, but the recent surge in migrant children who have been separated from their families after crossing Americas southern border has spurred a growing crisis. The issue has dominated the political arena in recent days. The rhetoric has gotten heated, with detractors invoking some of historys gravest human rights abuses as they accuse the administration of unconscionable cruelty. Heres an explanation of what is truly going on. What is happening at the border? In April, attorney general Jeff Sessions announced that the administration would begin pursuing a zero-tolerance policy towards adults who illegally cross the border. Thanks to a 1997 court settlement, legal precedent dictates that children must be detained in the least restrictive setting possible. A subsequent ruling found that rule applies to both unaccompanied minors - those who cross alone - and those who cross with their parents. Under those guidelines, children who cross the border fall under the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Trump administrations zero tolerance policy, in mandating prosecutions and putting parents into criminal proceedings, splits families. I dont want children taken away from parents, and when you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally - which should happen - you have to take the children away, Mr Trump said during a speech this week. Federal data shows that nearly 2,000 immigrant minors were separated from their families at the border over a six-week period spanning mid-April and May. New numbers released on this detailed 2,342 children being separated from their families from early May through to early June. Some of those dates cross over. What has the Trump administration said? As the criticism mounts, spurred on by images and audio of children funnelled into shelters away from their parents, the Trump administration has vigorously pushed back on the motion they are to blame. The president has repeatedly sought to blame Democrats, claiming - falsely - that a law they championed is at fault. Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said over the weekend that We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period, and she again sought to deflect blame during a combative press conference this week. She faulted the 1997 court decision and a Bush-era human trafficking law that barred swiftly returning unaccompanied minor children to their home country, unless they came from Mexico or Canada, and blasted Congress for not fixing loopholes. Congress and the courts created this problem, and Congress alone can fix it, Ms Nielsen said. What have the critics said? Inhumane. Cruel. Government-sanctioned child abuse. Few of the Trump administrations policy choices have generated a comparable amount of outrage. Elected officials of both parties, human rights advocates and child welfare experts have excoriated Mr Trump and his cabinet for what they describe as a stain on Americas global reputation. The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Raad al-Hussein called for an immediate end to the separation of families, saying that inflicting such abuse on children is unconscionable. Amnesty Internationals Americas director called the spectacularly cruel practice nothing short of torture. Colleen Kraft, the president of the American Academy of Pediatricians, warned of a form of child abuse after visiting a Texas shelter. American political discourse has been dominated by the issue in recent days. Democrats have been particularly ferocious in their criticism, with Rep Elijah Cummings of Maryland decrying child internment camps. But it has not been restricted to liberals. Former first lady Laura Bush, wife of former Republican president George Bush, wrote an op-ed saying the calling for an end to an immoral policy that she said breaks my heart. Two Republican governors ended National Guard deployments to the border. Among the words used by Republicans in Congress: ugly and inhumane (Rep Fred Upton), totally unacceptable (Rep Mario Diaz-Balart), and horrible (Rep Mia Love). Could the Trump administration reverse the policy? While there are rules governing how the Trump administration can treat immigrant children, the new development of large numbers of families being shattered at the border is firmly within the administrations control. It is true that the law and court precedent dictate how the federal government must treat minor children who cross the border. Altering those legal requirements would indeed require an act of Congress. But it is also true that the current situation flows directly from the Trump administrations shift towards a more stringent response to illegal border crossings. Congress and the courts may have created restrictions on how immigrant kids can be treated, but the Trump administration created the zero tolerance policy. It is a judgment on the part of the administration how to implement that court decision. And this implementation of the court decision that says children need to be separated from their parents because their parent is being prosecuted - that has never happened before, former top immigration official Doris Meissner told NPR. Administration officials have also been fairly transparent about seeking to deter illegal crossings with a harsher policy. Asked directly by Laura Ingraham of Fox News if trying to deter people from bringing children, or minors across the border was part of what the separation is about, Mr Sessions responded in the affirmative. Yes, hopefully people will get the message, he said. What happens now? There is tremendous political pressure to do something. Given the Trump administrations longstanding focus on fortified immigrant enforcement - the president has continued to blast illegal immigration, warning of migrants who infest the country - it seems unlikely the administration will reverse course on its zero tolerance policy. Senate Democrats have signed onto a straightforward bill to halt the family separations, but that has a slim chance of winning approval in the Republican-controlled Congress. A compromise immigration bill touted by Republican leadership would undo the legal protections enshrined by the 1997 ruling. But that legislation could also face an uphill fight, and it does not mandate an end to the tougher prosecutorial policy embraced by the administration. Seeking to break through the impasse, Senate Republicans announced they were backing a bill to allow immigrant families to remain together while their cases are processed. But top Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer of New York swiftly rebuffed that plan, saying it would be preferable for Mr Trump to act. As the Trump administration continues to defend its new zero tolerance policy on immigration, audio has reportedly revealed the cries of immigrant children hours after they are separated from their families at the US border. Mami! one child can be heard crying in the seven-minute audio. Papa! another screams. Well, we have an orchestra here, says a man identified as a Border Patrol agent. Whats missing is a conductor. The audio reportedly comes from inside a US Customs and Border Protection detention facility, where migrant children are held as their parents face prosecution for crossing the border illegally. Under the Trump administration's new zero tolerance policy, all adults caught crossing the border illegally are required to face criminal charges a process that inevitably separates them from any children they bring with them. Nearly 2,000 children have been separated from their parents since the zero tolerance policy began in April, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). More than 100 of them were under the age of four. The new audio captures the reactions of 10 of these children after they were separated from their families, according to ProPublica, which published the recording on Monday. The children can be heard sobbing and calling out for their parents. One girl, identified as six-year-old Alison Jimena Valenica Madrid, can be heard reciting the number of an aunt in the US and begging detention centre employees to call her. The aunt later told ProPublica that receiving the anguished call was the hardest moment in my life. Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece, said the woman, who is also applying for asylum in the US. Shes crying and begging me to go get her. She says, I promise Ill behave, but please get me out of here. Im all alone. DHS did not respond to The Independent's request for comment. Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Show all 14 1 /14 Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Immigrant children, many of whom are separated form their parents, are housed in Texas' tent city Reuters Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the US-Mexico border Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Undocumented migrants ride on the top of a freight train referred to as the beast, or La Bestia Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border A cage inside a US Customs and Border Protection detention facility in Texas Reuters Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US Border Patrol Academy All new agents must complete a months-long training course at the New Mexico facility before assuming their posts at Border Patrol stations, mostly along the US-Mexico border Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US-Mexico border fence A group of young men walk along the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border fence in a remote area of the Sonoran Desert Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US-Mexico border fence in the US Man looks through US-Mexico border fence into the US in Tijuana, Mexico Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US-Mexico border fence US Border Patrol agent Sal De Leon stands near a section of the US-Mexico border fence while stopping on patrol on in La Joya, Texas Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US Border Patrol Academy US Border Patrol instructor yells at trainees after their initial arrival to the academy Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Memorial service in Guatemala Families attend a memorial service for two boys who were kidnapped and killed in San Juan Sacatepequez, Guatemala. Crime drives emigration from Guatemala to the United States, as families seek refuge from the danger Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Arrests on the border Undocumented immigrants comfort each other after being caught by Border Patrol agents near the US-Mexico border Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Detention holding facility A boy from Honduras watches a movie at a detention facility run by the US Border Patrol Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Mexican farm workers Mexican migrant workers harvest organic parsley at Grant Family Farms in Wellington, Colorado Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Mexican family in Arizona A Mexican immigrant family sits in the living room of their rented home in Tuscon, Arizona. The family that Arizona's new tough immigrant law had created a climate of fear in the immigrant community. Getty The UNs top human rights official has likened the situation at the border to child abuse, and the American Association of Paediatricians has said it could cause irreparable harm. Former Republican First Lady Laura Bush decried the practice in an editorial over the weekend, comparing it to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. But Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen continued to defend the zero tolerance policy at a White House press briefing on Monday. She claimed the children in DHS custody were being being well taken care of and receiving meals, medical care, and educational services. The secretary blamed Congress for the family separations, saying the administration was only enforcing existing laws that require children to be released quickly from DHS custody laws that do not apply to their parents. "This administration did not create a policy of separating families at the border, she said. What has changed is that we no longer exempt entire classes of people who break the law. US child immigration detention centre features Donald Trump mural: 'By losing a battle you find a new way to win the war' Congress is currently considering several immigration bills, including a Democrat-sponsored initiative that would prohibit separating families unless agents suspect abuse or child trafficking. A White House-backed bill would end the Diversity Visa Program and reduce the number of family-based immigration visas, while offering a path to citizenship for people brought to the country illegally as minors. Congress is expected to vote on the measures later this summer. In the meantime, only Mr Trump has the power to unilaterally reverse the zero tolerance policy an option Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said he would not be taking. "We want to fix the entire system, Ms Sanders said. We don't want to just tinker with it." A former CIA employee has been charged with allegedly stealing a massive amount of classified information and providing it to an organisation believed to be Wikileaks. Joshua Adam Schulte, 29, was charged in a 13-count indictment for allegedly leaking US government hacking tools that he allegedly stole while in Virginia and elsewhere in 2016. Although the organisation in question was not named in the indictment nor the news release by the US Department of Justice, but Wikileaks published the information beginning in March 2017. Recommended The spy turned lawyer exposing sexual harassment in the CIA Mr Schulte had previously charged with the receipt, possession, and transportation of child pornography, but the indictment broadens the case to accuse him of illegally gathering classified information, damaging CIA computers, lying to investigators and numerous other offences. In January 2018, lawyers in the child pornography case said Mr Schulte was the subject of an investigation into Wikileaks release of a trove of CIA data called Vault 7. It is believed to be one of the largest unauthorised leaks of classified information in history. "[Mr Schulte] utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims. As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of classified Information, FBI official William Sweeney Jr said in the news release about the indictment. Julian Assange announces WikiLeaks will publish CIA cyber weapons The indictment states Mr Schulte allegedly altered a CIA computer system to grant himself access to delete his activity on the system and lock other users out. Mr Schulte has also been accused of lying to the FBI about his alleged activities, theft of government property, illegal gathering of national defence information that could put citizens at risk, and transmitting a harmful computer programme. The indictment calls for the forfeiture of any property Mr Schulte obtained directly or indirectly from any foreign government, party, or military force as a result of the supposed crimes. "When all the evidence is clear, he's hardly the villain that the government tries to make him out to be, said Sabrina Shroff, Mr Schultes lawyer. Prosecutors said charges could be brought against Mr Schulte this July. If convicted, he could face decades in federal prison. World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty The US government has all but acknowledged the leak from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence. President Donald Trump told a television host then: "I just want people to know the CIA was hacked, and a lot of things taken. Mr Trump has repeatedly promised to crack down on leaks during his time in office and to wit, Mr Schulte is the fourth person charged with allegedly leaking classified information in the 18 months of the presidents term. Last June, Reality Winner, a contractor with the National Security Agency, was charged with allegedly leaking a report detailing methods used by Russian government agents to target state election officials. She is set to go to trial in October. Former FBI agent Terry Albury pleaded guilty in March to leaking a report to The Intercept about how the bureau handles informants. Last month the former head of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee James Wolfe, which is investigating along with the FBI alleged collusion between Mr Trumps 2016 campaign staff and Russian officials, was charged with three counts of lying to the FBI about allegedly passing classified information on to at least one member of the media. Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to create a space force to establish American dominance outside the Earths atmosphere. The US president told a meeting of the National Space Council that we dont want China and Russia and other countries leading us and announced his intention to reclaim primacy in the extra-terrestrial arena with a new branch of the military. It is a plan Mr Trumps defence secretary, James Mattis, has opposed in the past. Last year he told Republicans in Congress that at a time when we are trying to integrate the [Department of Defences] joint warfighting functions, I do not wish to add a separate service that would likely present a narrower and even parochial approach to space operations. General David Goldfein, the US Air Force chief of staff, also spoke out against creating a new space branch. Gen Goldfeins Air Force currently oversees most US space-related military activity. Air Force secretary Heather Wilson similarly opposed the move, saying it would add unnecessary bureaucracy. Mr Trump said the creation of a space force was part of the process of reclaiming Americas heritage as the worlds greatest space-faring nation, which he claimed was great for the psyche of our country. On Monday he said: When it comes to space, too often, for too many years, our dreams of exploration and discovery were really squandered by politics and bureaucracy, and we knocked that out. We dont want China and Russia and other countries leading us. The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons and to tame new frontiers. But our destiny, beyond the Earth, is not only a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security. When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space. So important. Donald Trump attacks Angela Merkel for giving sanctuary to refugees The US is a member of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which bars the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space and only allows for the use of the Moon and other celestial bodies for peaceful purposes. Creating a space force would require the budgetary approval of Congress, which has been divided on the idea. Thankfully, the president cant do it without Congress because now is NOT the time to rip the Air Force apart. Too many missions at stake, Democratic senator Bill Nelson said on Twitter. Mr Trump painted the creation of a space force as a part of his renewal of Americas space-faring destiny, saying in his speech a characteristic mixture of prepared rhetoric and unplanned stream-of-consciousness that the US would now do more than plant our flag and leave our footprints. We will establish a long-term presence, expand our economy, and build the foundation for the eventual mission to Mars which is actually going to happen very quickly, he said. Americans will also return to the Moon, 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 He said his administration would modernise regulations governing activity in space, and suggested the effort would spur on the private sector. He added: You know, Ive always said that rich guys seem to like rockets. So all of those rich guys that are dying for our real estate to launch their rockets, we wont charge you too much. Just go ahead. If you beat us to Mars, well be very happy and youll be even more famous. But you know what? If as long as hes as long as its an American rich person, thats good. Okay? Additional reporting by agencies The Trump administration has asked the US Supreme Court to allow officials to withhold funding from cities that do not cooperate with federal immigration officials, in the latest foray in the administrations battle with these so-called sanctuary cities. The Justice Department asked the Court to limit an injunction from a federal judge that has temporarily blocked the department from withholding grant money from sanctuary cities across the country. The administration argued that the injunction should only apply to Chicago, where the challenge to its policy originated. The nationwide injunction, the Justice Department argued, is a sweeping remedy that threatens irreparable harm to the government and the public. Recommended US mayors cancel meeting with Trump over war on sanctuary cities The government respectfully requests a stay only as to the nationwide scope of the injunction which bars application of the two conditions not only to Chicago, but also to all other grant applicants that are not parties to this case, wrote Solicitor General Noel Francisco in an application to the Court. At issue is the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, which provides federal funding to local law enforcement agencies. The Trump administration announced last year that all grant receipts must meet two demands: Notifying federal agents when suspected immigrants are released from jail or prison, and allowing federal agents to interview these people while they are in custody. Sarah Huckabee Sanders rejects sanctuary cities, saying the White House supports 'the law' Chicago refused. The city sued the Justice Department, claiming that implementing these policies would irreparably damage officers' relationships with immigrant communities. In September of last year, US District Judge Harry Leinenweber ruled that the city would likely be successful in its case. He barred the Trump administration from withholding the grant money from Chicago and nationwide. The injunction against imposition of the notice and access conditions is nationwide in scope, there being no reason to think that the legal issues present in this case are restricted to Chicago or that the statutory authority given to the Attorney General would differ in another jurisdiction, Mr Leinweber wrote. People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Show all 16 1 /16 People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Washington, DC, U.S., February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants AUSTIN, TX - FEBRUARY 16: Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school student Kathia Suarez holds up a sign as she protests with others outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. LM Otero/AP People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school senior Vicky Sosa holds a sign outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. In an action called "A Day Without Immigrants," immigrants across the country are expected to stay home from school, work and close businesses to show how critical they are to the U.S. economy and way of life. LM Otero/AP The injunction was upheld by 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in April. The appeals court has since said it would reconsider the scope of the injunction, but the Trump administration wants the ban lifted before then. According to filings by Justice Department lawyers, the injunction has prevented them from issuing this years grants on time. The delay, they wrote, imposes particular burdens for localities with relatively small budgets, and disrupt[s] state grant-making processes under which states issue sub-awards of grant funds. The Supreme Court will likely ask Chicago for a response before deciding whether or not to rule on the issue. US President Donald Trump has threatened to place tariffs on $200bn worth of Chinese goods in a rapidly escalating trade dispute between the two countries. The Trump administration announced last week it would place a 25 per cent tariff on $50bn of Chinese goods as punishment for alleged intellectual property theft. China responded by promising its own tariffs on an equivalent amount of American products. On Monday, Mr Trump directed US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to identify $200bn worth of Chinese goods on which to impose tariffs if Beijing carried out that promise. Recommended US ambassador to Canada receives death threat as trade war looms The amount was twice the $100bn in tariffs the president had previously suggested for retaliation. He threatened to add another 10 per cent tariff on $200bn more products if China increased their tariffs again. China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology, the president said in a statement. Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong. He added: But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world. Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Show all 22 1 /22 Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Donald Trump's international Presidential trips French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump talk as they leave the Army Museum at Les Invalides in Paris AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump arrive for the group photo at the G7 Taormina summit on the island of Sicily in May 2017 Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Mr Trump was pressed on the subject at the G7 summit in Italy Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump gives a speeech at the Warsaw Uprising Monument on Krasinski Square Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May during a ceremony at the NATO headquarters before the start of a summit in Brussels, Belgium Reuters Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Montenegro's Prime Minister Dusko Markovic is seen to the right of Donald Trump at a Nato summit in Brussels REUTERS Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Pope Francis meeting with US President Donald J. Trump EPA Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Pope Francis poses with US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump arrives at Palazzo del Quirinale ahead of the meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella Ufficio Stampa Presidenza della via Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump is seen during a joint press conference with the Palestinian leader at the presidential palace in the West Bank city of Bethlehem AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas meets US President Donald Trump PPO via Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with US President Donald Trump prior to the President's departure GPO via Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands after delivering a speech at the Israel Museum AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump lay a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance as White House senior advisor Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump watch on during a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump visit to Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem accompanied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu GPO via Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump takes his seat before his speech to the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia Reuters Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, US President Donald Trump and US First Lady Melania Trump look at a display of Saudi modern art at the Saudi Royal Court in Riyadh AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud take part in a signing ceremony at the Saudi Royal Court in Riyadh AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips King Salman presents Donald Trump with The Collar of Abdulaziz al-Saud Medal at the Royal Court Palace on 20 May AP Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump is welcomed by Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud upon arrival at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump walk on the South Lawn prior to their first foreign trip Getty Images Experts have warned of a possible trade war as Mr Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping go back and forth on the issue. Many of Mr Trumps fellow Republicans have criticised the tariffs, claiming they will hurt American businesses. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, urged the administration to focus on Chinas discriminatory and market-distorting practices after the tariff announcement last week. "Ill-conceived trade actions that weaken the American economy, alienate allies, and invite retaliation against American businesses, farmers and ranchers, undermine our nation's ability to successfully confront China's unfair trade policies, Mr Hatch said in a statement. Mr Trump was met with similar criticism after announcing tariffs on steel and aluminium from the European Union, Canada and Mexico last month. The move shocked the US allies, which all said they would impose tariffs of their own on US goods. Mexico has since placed tariffs on $3bn worth of American products like pork, steel, and cheese. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced tariffs on $12.8bn worth of US goods this month, and the European Union announced tariffs on $3.4bn worth of US imports like steel, bourbon, peanut butter, cranberries, and orange juice. Most of the states hardest hit by the new tariffs are those that supported Mr Trump in the 2016 election, experts have said. Several American governors have announced that they will move to keep state resources from helping to support President Donald Trumps zero-tolerance immigration policies that have resulted in thousands of children being taken from their parents after entering the United States. The governors of Massachusetts, New York, and Colorado have all announced that they will suspend either state resources or their states national guard forces from helping to enforce the controversial policies, which have resulted in at least 2,000 children being taken from their parents after crossing the border, according to reports. Of those, one governor Charlie Baker, of Massachusetts is a Republican, while the other two Andrew Cuomo, of New York, and John Hickenlooper, of Colorado are Democrats. Governor Baker directed the National Guard not to send any assets or personnel to the Southwest border today because the federal governments current actions are resulting in the inhumane treatment of children, Mr Bakers communications director said Monday, according to local media. Mr Bakers government had announced earlier in the month that its national guard would be deployed along the US southwestern border in response to an influx of migrants arriving on the border, many of them seeking asylum from violent and dangerous conditions in their home states. Of these three states, however, only New York has a land-based border, with Canada. Mr Cuomo indicated in a statement that the states forces would not participate in the Trump administrations response to the crisis along the border which has resulted in stark imagery of children in cages in facilities in Texas. People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Show all 16 1 /16 People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Washington, DC, U.S., February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants AUSTIN, TX - FEBRUARY 16: Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school student Kathia Suarez holds up a sign as she protests with others outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. LM Otero/AP People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school senior Vicky Sosa holds a sign outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. In an action called "A Day Without Immigrants," immigrants across the country are expected to stay home from school, work and close businesses to show how critical they are to the U.S. economy and way of life. LM Otero/AP Mr Hickenlooper, for his part, signed an executive order barring state resources from going towards helping the Trump administrations efforts at the border, which have resulted in family separations in large part because immigration enforcement must criminally prosecute immigrants arriving at the US border illegally even if they present credible fear arguments, and ask for asylum. US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristjen Nielsen has insisted that US border policy does not lead to criminal prosecutions of individuals who arrive at US border points of entry, and only applies to individuals crossing the border along other parts of the border. The administration, in general, has argued that these immigration policies are necessary to deter an influx of immigrants, and that the policies only serve to enforce existing US laws and that Congress should reform the laws if they would like to see different treatment of arriving immigrants. President Donald Trump has defended his administration's "no-tolerance" immigration policy that has led to the separation of immigrant families seeking shelter in the United States, saying that America "will not be a migrant camp" to house the world's immigrants. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," Mr Trump said Monday during a meeting with his space council in the White House. The president's defiant comments come amid increased scrutiny of a recent policy change announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, which instructs American immigration forces to prosecute undocumented immigrants arriving at the US border illegally to be slapped with criminal charges even in instances where those arriving immigrants claim credible fear as a qualifier as they seek asylum from dangerous and violent circumstances in their own country. The concerns around those policies have been heightened recently after it was reported that as many as 2,000 immigrant children were taken away from their parents by immigration officials, and put into shelters that in some cases have been described as cages for the detention of the children. In some cases, immigrants were misled by US officials and told their children were being taken for naps, baths, or a change of clothes before later realising that heir children had been taken without notice. Mr Trump, during his remarks Monday, cast blame for those circumstances on Democrats, even though the president's administration unilaterally announced the new "no-tolerance" policies, and even though previous administrations have practised discretion in their approaches to family detention and charging migrants who cross the border claiming credible fear in their home countries. "I say it very strongly, it's the Democrats' fault," Mr Trump said. People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Show all 16 1 /16 People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Washington, DC, U.S., February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants AUSTIN, TX - FEBRUARY 16: Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school student Kathia Suarez holds up a sign as she protests with others outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. LM Otero/AP People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school senior Vicky Sosa holds a sign outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. In an action called "A Day Without Immigrants," immigrants across the country are expected to stay home from school, work and close businesses to show how critical they are to the U.S. economy and way of life. LM Otero/AP "If the Democrats would sit down instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly," Mr Trump continued later in his remarks, arguing that Democrats are using their votes in Congress to push back on immigration votes even though Republicans control both chambers of Congress. "Good for the children, good for the country, good for the world." As immigrant groups and advocates cried foul about the treatment of families at the American border, top members of the Trump administration have circled the wagons alongside the president in recent days, and have argued that the new policies are a reflection of American law, and that the US does not have standing policies promoting family separation. "We will not apologise for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does for doing the job the American people expect us to do," Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said Monday. "Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards". Separately, Ms Neilsen tweeted Monday that immigrants arriving at American ports of entry and seeking asylum will not face any change in policy, and that children will only be removed from their parents in those instances if it is believed that the child is at risk if they remain with the adult who they were with when they arrived at the border. Democrats may see the latest outrage over Donald Trumps immigration policy and believe it is a chance to make headway ahead of the crucial Congressional elections in November but things will not be so simple. There is no doubt that Republicans are divided. Images of children being separated from their parents and placed in cages created by metal fencing at the US border will always be difficult to argue for. A number of Republicans past and present have spoken about the cruel nature of the zero tolerance policy over illegal crossings, and Democrats are keen to highlight the inhumane nature separating parents and children. There are also the status of two immigration bills in Congress that are set to be discussed this week. Mr Trumps muddled comments over the weekend that he would not sign a moderate bill, that were later walked back by the White House, did not help. Beyond immigration, Mr Trumps trade tariff spat with China, as well as Canada, the EU and Mexico, has made it difficult for Republicans in districts and seats whose residents will be directly affected by such moves, let alone the wider implications for the US economy. In terms of voting in November, where the Democrats are looking to take back both the Senate and the House of Representatives, Democrats lead the generic ballot. Those numbers are based on polls asking which party voters would support in the midterm elections, with the Democrats holding an average lead of 47.3 per cent to Republicans 39.8 per cent. Although the latest polls do not possibly reflect the latest sentiments over what is happening on the border. Democrats have pointed to the generic ballot as a reason for optimism about gathering momentum ahead of November. And it is true that they have been in the lead for more than a year. But the generic ballot is not always indicative of a final result, given the swings that can happen district to district. Donald Trump blames Democrats for children being taken from families at Mexico border There are other signs of positivity for Democrats, a wave of women candidates are making headway at the primaries to decide those going forward to the election in November. While many may have been inspired to run for office by the policies of Mr Trump, a number of candidates have sought to make clear that they are not just running an anti-Trump platform. So far, Democrats have nominated women in just under 50 per cent of their open House primaries, 73 out of 150 races, according to the Cook Political Report. A move towards diversity will likely help Democrats in November. Ian Russell, a former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee deputy executive director told Politico that women are winning primaries at an unprecedented rate 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 Its not just opposition to Trump that is causing it, he said. Thats part of it, no question, but its also a sign that Democrats see the importance of women in our general election prospects. It is true that Democrats need to offer voters more than an anti-Trump message, as the president remains the Republicans most potent weapon. While his administration saying it will not apologise over the border policy will do little to halt the outpouring of criticism, Mr Trump has proven he can weather such storms. In a recent Monmouth University poll, just 43 per cent of all adults surveyed approved of the job Mr Trump is doing, but a whopping 86 per cent of Republicans approved. While the result of the 12-14 June poll will do little to help moderate Republicans keep hold of toss-up seats, the GOP will likely need to make the most of the presidents numbers if it is to hold on to control of Congress. As for the immigration debate, a 14-15 June Ipsos poll for The Daily Beast of 1,000 people 27 per cent of the overall respondents agreed that it was appropriate to separate parents and children to deter others from crossing, while 56 per cent disagreed. Yet, Republicans leaned slightly more in favour, with 46 per cent agreeing with the statement and 32 percent disagreeing. Mr Trump doubling down on the policy plays to that base, and whether it is divisive or not, the GOP needs to keep hold of those voters. This is because the Republican Party is increasingly becoming the Donald Trump party. Last weeks primaries showed a glimpse of that, with Mark Sanford, one of Trumps most outspoken Republican critics in Congress, suffering the most striking defeat as Mr Trump backed his opponent. Mr Sanford is one of the last members of the class of 1994, where the Republicans had major success in the midterms. Now, both parties have to contend with Mr Trump ahead of November. Republicans are tied to his agenda, while the Democrats have to make sure they offer a message that is not just anti-Trump. Donald Trump has claimed that immigrants crossing the border illegally will infest America without strong laws, as the outcry over a policy of separating families at the border continues to build. The family separations are part of a zero tolerance policy of dealing with illegal border crossings, where all adults are prosecuted leaving any children to be housed in detention centres while cases are processed. The policy was announced last month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions but is not codified in US immigration law, particularly that relating to seeking asylum. Images of children fenced in, in wire mesh cages, and audio of screaming young boys and girls being separated from their parents has led to a backlash from Democrats and some within Mr Trumps own Republican party. Democrats have hurled charges of barbaric treatment of children and decrying what they have labelled harsh and demeaning language the president as used, with Mr Trump falsely blaming them for not helping Congress deal with the issue of the separations. He returned to that accusation in his morning tweet: Democrats are the problem. They dont care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They cant win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters! Mr Trump has constantly sought to contrast what he claims are soft Democrat positions with his hardline, and controversial, stance on immigration, often using hyperbole. The reference to the MS-13 gang is a callback to his election promise to rid the country of members of the violent group, which has its origins in Central America. That promise was a central pillar of his 2016 election campaign. Later, during remarks to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, Mr trump again sought to blame Democrats for what he called loopholes in the law that require families detained for entering the country illegally either to be separated or released. These are crippling loopholes that cause family separation, which we dont want, he said, adding he wanted Congress to give him the legal authority to detain and deport families together. Given the presidents promises on immigration, Trump administration officials such as Mr Sessions and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have said they will not apologise for following the law and it is up to Congress to being new legislation to change the rules. More than 2,300 children were separated from their parents from 5 May to 9 June, according to Department of Homeland Security figures. With potentially hundreds more separated thanks to a policy that started in mid-April. CNN political analyst Brian Karem presses White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on family separations at the US-Mexico border Mr Trump travelled to Congress on Tuesday evening to discuss wider immigration reform with Republicans. Ahead of that visit two top conservatives announced they would be introducing bills to stop the practice of the separations. Senator Ted Cruz of border state Texas introduced legislation that the White House said it was reviewing, and Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a leader of the conservative Freedom Caucus, also introduced a measure. Both bills were offered as alternatives in case broader GOP immigration legislation heading for a vote this week fails, as is likely. This becomes a backup proposal, Mr Meadows told reporters at the White House. Two Republican bills are currently having the finishing touches to them by Mr Trumps party. The first is a hard-right proposal, the second the more moderate plan negotiated by the partys conservative and centrist wings, with White House input. Only the latter would open a door to citizenship for young immigrants brought to the US illegally as children, and reduce the separation of children from their parents when families are detained crossing the border. Leaders released a schedule for next week that included possible consideration of immigration legislation. President Trump sought to link an end to the family separations to passage of a wider bill on immigration during his appearances on Tuesday, prompting Democrats to accuse him of using children as hostages. Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Show all 14 1 /14 Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Immigrant children, many of whom are separated form their parents, are housed in Texas' tent city Reuters Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border A two-year-old Honduran asylum seeker cries as her mother is searched and detained near the US-Mexico border Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Undocumented migrants ride on the top of a freight train referred to as the beast, or La Bestia Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border A cage inside a US Customs and Border Protection detention facility in Texas Reuters Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US Border Patrol Academy All new agents must complete a months-long training course at the New Mexico facility before assuming their posts at Border Patrol stations, mostly along the US-Mexico border Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US-Mexico border fence A group of young men walk along the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border fence in a remote area of the Sonoran Desert Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US-Mexico border fence in the US Man looks through US-Mexico border fence into the US in Tijuana, Mexico Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US-Mexico border fence US Border Patrol agent Sal De Leon stands near a section of the US-Mexico border fence while stopping on patrol on in La Joya, Texas Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border US Border Patrol Academy US Border Patrol instructor yells at trainees after their initial arrival to the academy Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Memorial service in Guatemala Families attend a memorial service for two boys who were kidnapped and killed in San Juan Sacatepequez, Guatemala. Crime drives emigration from Guatemala to the United States, as families seek refuge from the danger Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Arrests on the border Undocumented immigrants comfort each other after being caught by Border Patrol agents near the US-Mexico border Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Detention holding facility A boy from Honduras watches a movie at a detention facility run by the US Border Patrol Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Mexican farm workers Mexican migrant workers harvest organic parsley at Grant Family Farms in Wellington, Colorado Getty Undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border Mexican family in Arizona A Mexican immigrant family sits in the living room of their rented home in Tuscon, Arizona. The family that Arizona's new tough immigrant law had created a climate of fear in the immigrant community. Getty Tensions high in Congress, with the border issuing affecting a House hearing on an unrelated subject when protesters with babies briefly shut down proceedings. Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, teared up as he pleaded with Republicans on the panel to end what he called internment camps for those crossing the border. We need you, those children need you and I am talking directly to my Republican colleagues we need you to stand up to President Donald Trump, he said. Criticism of the policy has come from all sides. All five living US first ladies including Laura Bush, wife of Republican President George W Bush, and Melania Trump have made clear feelings over the policy. Ms Bush, who has been the first lady of the state of Texas as well, called the policy cruel while Ms Trump said she hates to see children separated from their parents. Internationally, Frances government spokesman called the images of the children in detention centres shocking and that the policy shows the US and Europe now has different values on certain issues.. We do not share the same model of civilisation, clearly we dont share certain values, Benjamin Griveaux told France 2 television. Mexicos foreign minister Luis Videgaray called the separations cruel and inhumane and urged the United States to reconsider the practice. This is a clear violation of human rights and puts children, including those with disabilities, in a vulnerable situation, Mr Videgaray told a news conference in Mexico City. Mr Trump claimed on Tuesday that Mexico do nothing to help the situation on the border. Among the 21 identified cases of Mexicans separated from their parents was a 10-year-old girl with Down Syndrome who was being held in McAllen, Texas, MrVidegaray said, with her mother being taken to another place. Most of the children are from Central America, especially Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Honduras has called for Washington to end the separations, and El Salvador said the policy puts childrens health at risk and could cause psychological scars. Despite Mr Trump and his surrogates claims, the administration actually has unilateral ability to rescind the policy. The presidents claim that its Democrats law is false. There is no clause in current US immigration law or court precedent that compels family separation. The Obama and Bush administrations had been housing children, as Trump officials have claimed, but those were unaccompanied minors who had fled the violence of their home countries and crossed the border without any adults. The previous administrations were also arresting people travelling in families, but it was not immediate and parents had the chance to formally apply for asylum for which you have to be in the US to do per the law and could remain in the country while waiting for their hearing. This is what was referred to as the catch and release policy Mr Trump has vilified. The Democrat leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer said legislation to end the separations was not the way to go as the Trump administration could change the policy on its own. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders justified the policy late last week by describing it as biblical: It is very biblical to enforce the [particular immigration] law, that is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible. Several church groups have criticised the policy as needlessly harmful to children. But the issue will likely dominate the airwaves and other media until a solution is found. The attorneys general of 21 states called on Jeff Sessions in a letter released on Tuesday to stop endangering children by separating them from their families. Put simply, the deliberate separation of children and their parents who seek lawful asylum in America is wrong, said Hector Balderas, the attorney general in the border state of New Mexico. This practice is contrary to American values and must be stopped. Update: Man arrested by Florida police over fatal shooting of XXXTentacion. A police description of suspects has reportedly been revealed after US rapper XXXTentacion was shot dead in Florida in an apparent attempted robbery. The 20-year-old rising star real name Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy was pronounced dead on Monday evening at a Fort Lauderdale hospital, the sheriff's office said. He was gunned down at a Deerfield Beach motorcycle dealership. According to TMZ, police radio described the suspects in the shooting as two black males wearing hoodies. Witnesses reportedly told police a Louis Vuitton bag was taken from Onfroy's vehicle. Broward County's public information office refused to confirm a media report that suggested the shooter was wearing a mask. The sheriff's office said it was investigating the killing by "two armed suspects in an apparent robbery". A statement said "at least one of the suspects fired a gun striking Onfroy" and "both suspects fled in a dark-color SUV". Both suspects fled in a dark-coloured SUV, the Broward County Sheriff's Office said in a statement. Onfroy's lawyer told ABC News detectives believed his client was shot in a random robbery after he visited a bank, where he possibly withdrew money. Earlier, two rappers - Soldier Kidd and Soldier JoJo - were forced to deny any involvement in Onfroy's death after social media posts showed them with takeaway food from a Hook Fish and Chicken food outlet, one of which is just over four miles from the murder scene. However, the company has another three outlets in the county, all of which are much further from the motorcycle dealership. On Instagram Live, Soldier Kidd said he was at his house "all day, popping Xanax and s*** like that". Soldier Jojo posted a video to the social media platform responding to allegations over any involvement: "We respect everybody, straight up. We ain't with none of that s*** man, I respect that man for who he is, and RIP to that man." XXXTentacion spoke of his 'tragic death' in Instagram video before being killed XXXTentacion had been at RIVA Motorsports, sheriff's public information officer Keyla Concepcion said. He was in a black BMW i8 and preparing to leave before 4pm when two armed suspects approached him. At least one of them fired, and then both suspects fled the scene in a dark SUV, Ms Concepcion said. No arrests have been made. Stephanie Martinez, a 29-year-old mother who lives in the neighbourhood, was with her children when she heard three shots. She drove to the end of the street and saw the rapper's body in the car. "He has his mouth open and his hand out. Two people went over and checked his pulse," said Ms Martinez, who also saw blood. "It's just weird because he should've had security and stuff with him." On Twitter, his peers expressed shock and sadness. Kanye West said: "Rest in peace ... I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing." Diplo posted a photo of the two together and said, "Thanks for inspiring me." Travis Barker tweeted: "I'm at a loss for words... speechless #RIPXXXTentacion Loved collaborating with you. You were a true artist ..." The entertainer, who sported dreadlocks and a number of facial tattoos, was a rising star and notched a No 1 album in March with his second release "?" and had a top 10 hit with "Sad!" but was facing trial on charges of aggravated battery of his pregnant girlfriend. XXXTentacion racked up huge streaming numbers. On Spotify, his "Sad!" had more than 270 million streams and was on its Top 50 chart this week in the US and globally. He also has several songs that were declared platinum, including "Changes," "Roll in Peace" with fellow rapper Kodak Black and "Look at Me!" In an interview with XXL magazine, which named him as an up-and-coming artist last year, the rapper cited Nirvana, the Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur among his musical influences. "Obviously, I'm one of the greatest of this generation, the upcoming generation, as far as artistry... And I say that humbly," he said in a video interview with the outlet last year. But much of his brief career had been mired in controversy. In 2016, he was arrested on charges including home invasion for a 2015 incident, and less than a month later was arrested on charges that he attacked his girlfriend, who was pregnant at the time, and was jailed, and later faced more charges including witness tampering. 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 Regarding a June 2017 attack at a San Diego concert, the following messages were posted on XXXTentacion's Twitter account: "Security and venue set me up, I got sucker punched and knocked out, it is what it is." A subsequent tweet said: "Next time make sure you kill me so I can't talk (expletive)." He was released from jail on house arrest late last year and was released from house arrest earlier this year to allow him to tour. Wyatt Rubin, 21-year-old fan, jumped in his car and headed to the scene of the shooting on Monday as soon as he heard, playing the rapper's songs like "Jocelyn Flores" and "King" on the drive over. "He was just maturing as a person and as an artist... it couldn't have come at a worse time," Mr Rubin said. "A lot of it was really beautiful music, progressive music." In an interview earlier this month with the Miami New Times, XXXTentacion described his upbringing, which included seeing his mother infrequently and being raised by friends, other family and babysitters. His mother would buy him clothes, phones and other gifts. He told the paper he used violence so she would engage with him. "I used to beat kids at school just to get her to talk to me, yell at me," he said. XXXTentacion was initially one of two artists Spotify removed from its promoted playlists in May in accordance with its new policy on hateful music and conduct. But after a backlash in the music industry, Spotify backpedalled and said it would no longer attempt to police conduct and restored XXXTentacion to its playlists (although they did not do the same for R Kelly). While he made headlines for his legal woes, he connected to millions of fans musically. Among the topics he spoke about was depression and he addressed it in his music. In one video posted to social media, he said: "If worse things come to worse, I (expletive) die a tragic death or some (expletive), and I'm not able to see out my dreams, I at least want to know that the kids perceive my message and were able to make something of themselves." He continued later: "I appreciate and love all of you and I believe in you all; do not let your depression make you, do not let your body define your soul, let your soul define your body. Your mind is limitless... you are worth more than you can believe." Anyone with information is asked to contact BSO homicide detectives Walt Foster or John Curcio at (954) 321-4210, or Crime Stoppers at (954) 493-8477. Tips that lead to an arrest are eligible for a reward of up to $3,000. Additional reporting by AP. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, where he will likely brief Chinese President Xi Jinping on his summit with U.S. President Donald Trump last week, as Washington and Seoul agreed to suspend a major joint military exercise. This is Kim's third trip to China this year, coming a week after he met Trump in Singapore for historic talks. Trump agreed to work with Kim toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, committed to provide the North's regime with security guarantees and pledged to end "war games", which Pyongyang and Beijing have long seen as provocative. South Korea and the Pentagon announced they would halt the annual Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August. In an unusual move, Chinese state media announced Kim's visit and said he would stay for two days. Previously China would only confirm Kim had visited after he had left the country. No other details were provided. A Kim trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China is North Korea's most important diplomatic and economic backer but has been angered by Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests. Police tightened security along Beijing's main Changan Avenue, which leads to the Great Hall of the People where Chinese leaders normally meet visiting heads of state, and also outside the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where Kim stayed with his wife during his March visit to Beijing. Outside the east gate of the Great Hall, where foreign leaders are officially welcomed, authorities had erected a screen running the full length of the road, cutting off the view behind it. China has welcomed the warming of ties between Washington and Pyongyang, and offered to help. Beijing has been particularly pleased by Trump's announcement to suspend military drills, which China has long pushed for under its "dual suspension" proposal, whereby North Korea stops weapons tests and the United States and South Korea stop military drills, so both sides can sit down for talks. "South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August," according to a South Korean defence ministry statement. A Pentagon statement confirmed the suspension and added that there would be a meeting between the secretaries of defence and state as well as Trump's national security adviser on the issue this week. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops participated in the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than live field exercises that use weapons, tanks or aircraft. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. The decision to halt military exercises in South Korea has bewildered many current and former U.S. defence officials, who only learned about it when Trump made his remarks after the Singapore meeting. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said on Tuesday there would be no changes to joint drill plans between the United States and Japan, both of which also engage in regular deterrence exercises against North Korea. "The United States is in a position to keep its commitment to its allied nations' defence and our understanding is there is no change to the U.S. commitment to the Japan-U.S. alliance and the structure of American troops stationed in Japan," Suga said in a regular briefing. The Pentagon has yet to publicly release the cost of previous and future joint military exercises with South Korea, a week after Trump cited their "tremendously expensive" cost as a reason for halting them. Spending data for previous military exercises in Korea and elsewhere, however, suggest that the cost of a single exercise would be in the low or perhaps tens of millions of dollars in a U.S. military budget this year of nearly $700 billion. In response to repeated requests for cost data, Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Logan, said: "We are currently evaluating the costs of the exercises." Calculating the cost of military exercises is a complicated process, often requiring data from different branches of the military and spread over several budgets over different years. Troops who would have been involved in the exercises would still require training and certification, which would still cost money, said Abraham Denmark, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence for East Asia under President Barack Obama. "To me, the idea of this as a cost saving measure doesn't really make much sense," Denmark said. Reuters Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, has promised unwavering support for North Korea during Kim Jong-uns visit to Beijing, a week after his historic meeting with Donald Trump. Mr Kim is in China for a two-day visit and will likely discuss the historic summit in Singapore, when he became the first of the Kim dynasty to meet a sitting US president. Mr Xi lauded the positive outcome of the meeting, state media reported, and the concerted efforts of the relevant countries, as he rolled out the red carpet for the third time this year for the North Korean leader. State television quoted him as saying: No matter the changes in the international and regional situation, Chinas party and governments resolute position on being dedicated to consolidating and developing Sino-North Korea relations will not change. The Chinese peoples friendship for the North Korean people will not change, and Chinas support for socialist North Korea will not change. Following the summit, during which Mr Trump conceded that the US and South Korea would end joint Freedom Guardian military exercises, China suggested it may relax stringent economic sanctions on Pyongyang. It had implemented the restrictions following a UN resolution passed in response to the Norths missile and nuclear tests. Chinas official Xinhua News Agency announced the North Korean leaders visit shortly after he apparently landed on Tuesday morning, dispensing with the secrecy shrouding previous trips to China by Mr Kim and his father and predecessor, Kim Jong-il. On the younger Kims first visit to China as leader, he took an armoured train as his father had. His first two trips were not announced until after he had safely returned to North Korea. Mr Xi is exerting a lot of influence from behind the scenes, said Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. 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 I expect they will talk about the path going forward and where priorities should lie, she said. Those priorities, from Chinas perspective, would be to ensure that Beijing is included in any peace treaty talks and in creating an environment on the Korean Peninsula that will make it unnecessary for US troops to remain. In a press conference after his summit with Mr Kim, Mr Trump suggested that at some point in the future he would like to remove the roughly 30,000 American service personnel stationed in South Korea. Mr Kims visit to Beijing came a year to the day after the death of Otto Warmbier, the US student who was detained in North Korea on suspicion of stealing a propaganda poster. He was sentenced in March 2016 to 15 years in prison with hard labour after making a lengthy televised confession and appeal for mercy. He disappeared from public view after that, but then was released and arrived in Cincinnati on 13 June last year. He died six days later. Doctors said he had suffered severe brain damage, but could not pinpoint the cause. North Korea denied torturing him. Additional reporting by agencies A man has reportedly died after attempting to climb partway down a waterfall to pose for a dramatic photograph. Mobile phone footage showed Ramjan Usman Kagji slipping and falling 170ft into the river below the famous Gokak Falls in the Indian state of North Karnataka on Saturday. Mr Kagji and his brother, Faruq, who has since been arrested, were allegedly drinking with friends during a picnic at the tourist destination. Eyewitnesses said visitors tried to stop the brothers, from nearby Ghataprabha, clambering near the edge of the cliff, but were told they were not afraid of anything, according to the Times of India. A team of divers were dispatched to look for the body and police have tightened security to stop tourists from approaching the waterfall. A police officer told the New Indian Express: Both brothers Ramjan and Faruq were under the influence of alcohol when the incident happened. While Ramjan fell to his death, Faruq was stopped by the locals. He has been arrested and a case has been filed against him. World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty We are planning to erect poles along the edge of the falls so that people may not risk their life to view the waterfalls, the officer said. The Ghataprabha dam may release water this month end and waterfalls will come back to its glory. This will attract a large number of tourists and we want to put the safety measures in place before that. We will hold talks with the Gokak Mills authorities and the City Municipal Council heads to implement the plan. Police records reportedly revealed 19 people have died at the site in the last five years, including suicides and accidental falls. Thailand has carried out its first execution in nine years in a move human rights campaigners condemned as deplorable. Theerasak Longji, 26, was executed by lethal injection on Monday, six years after being convicted of aggravated murder for stabbing a 17-year-old 24 times in order to steal his mobile phone. The brutal killing drew widespread anger in Thai society, and his conviction was upheld in the appeal and supreme courts. Theerasaks execution comes as Thailands army chief-turned-premier Prayut Chan-ocha prepares to travel to the UK and France on a highly-anticipated official visit. The last executions to take place in Thailand were of two drug traffickers. They were put to death in August 2009, after a period of no executions since 2003, according to Amnesty International. Theerasak was the seventh convict to be executed by injection since Thailand switched methods in 2003 from a firing squad. Thailand has executed 326 people since 1930, according to the country's Department of Corrections. The department said Monday that Theerasak was executed to be an example to those who think of committing serious crimes. Even though many countries have abolished the death sentence, there are still many other countries that still use it such as the US and China who focus on the protection of society and citizens to not become victims of crimes over the priority of the human rights of those who had violated the law, the statement said. Thailand is shockingly reneging on its own commitment to move towards abolition of the death penalty and the protection of the right to life Katherine Gerson, Amnesty's Thailand campaigner The Department of Corrections hopes that this execution will serve as a reminder to those who think of committing serious crimes or violating the law to stop and consider this sentence. Amnesty International said the execution was a major setback for the country. This is a deplorable violation of the right to life, said Katherine Gerson, Amnesty Internationals Thailand campaigner. Thailand is shockingly reneging on its own commitment to move towards abolition of the death penalty and the protection of the right to life, and is also putting itself out of step with the current global shift away from capital punishment. The Thai prime minister already faced pressure over his human rights record on his forthcoming trip to Europe. Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Gorsak Kong Tawan (centre), 13, dances while he is carried on the shoulders of a relative Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures A woman smears thanaka bark paste, believed to have protective properties, on the head of one of the princes Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Danusorn and Gorsak rest at an altar made for them at their home after the procession Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures August, eight, is joining the monkhood because he wants to be a good person Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Relatives dress August in imitation of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, inside Wat Klang Thung temple Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures The first day of the ceremony begins with the boys having their heads shaved by their families Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Boys with their heads smeared with thanaka bark wait to pray inside a temple Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures The boys are believed to have semi-divine status and are not allowed to touch the floor or walk for themselves Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Phuwadol Kong Tawan, 11, Gorsak and Danusorn pray for a merchant at a local market during the procession Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Poy Sang Long is Mae Hong Sons most famous and colourful festival, held over the first weekend of April Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures The second day brings general merrymaking and a spectacular parade, with music and dancing Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Each boy is accompanied by three attendants: one to carry him, one to shelter him and one to guard him Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Gorsak is carried by a relative after using the toilet at their home in Mae Hong Son Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures After being ordained, the boys stay in the monastery for a period of weeks or months at a time during school holidays Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures They will learn the tenets of Buddhist teaching and the self-discipline required of a monk Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures The morning after entering the Buddhist novicehood the boys take part in an almsgiving walk through the town Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Once accepted, the boys take vows, change into orange Buddhist robes and become full novices Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures The ritual morning almsgiving is a spiritual obligation that bonds local people with Buddhism Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Boys play with their mobile phones and tables while staying at the Wat Klang Thung temple Reuters Buddhist novices in Thailand: in pictures Ten-year-old Danusorn Sdisaithaworns ordination will bring honour to his family Reuters Human Rights Watchs Asia director Brad Adams said in a statement released on Monday: Prime minister Theresa May and President Emmanuel Macron should strongly express their deep concerns about the deteriorating state of human rights under military rule in Thailand. They should make clear to General Prayut that there will be no return to business as usual until Thailand holds free and fair elections, establishes a democratic civilian government, and improves respect for human rights. General Prayut has vowed to transform Thailand's government into a rights-respecting one and has scheduled general elections for 2015. But, four years later, the promised polls have yet to take place and the junta continue to be criticised by human rights groups for enforcing censorship and blocking public discussions about the state of human rights and democracy. Along with the UK, France has among the strictest laws on Cannabis in western Europe, but despite this, huge queues have formed over the past few weeks at Pariss new Cofyshop the first place in the country to apparently sell legal cannabis. The premises, one of several to have popped up across the French capital in June, takes advantage of a new legal grey area following a clarification that national law allows for sales of low-THC, high-CBD strains of the drug. THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), is the main psychoactive constituent compound found within marijuana, while researchers believe CBD (cannabidiol) may function as a mild antidepressant, or even as an antipsychotic. Recommended How legalising cannabis has worked out for other countries The shops products are said to contain just 0.2 per cent THC, meaning it has a negligible effect on the mind of the user. In addition the wares on offer are labelled do not smoke, as legally what they are selling people is simply hemp. Its money for (new) rope. But the French government has admitted it has been caught on the hop by the rapid proliferation of businesses offering the low dosage product. Agnes Buzyn, the health minister, said the shops were a threat to public health because they were encouraging drug use. She said they existed because they were exploiting a legal loophole which she pledged to close, adding that the government would find a way to put them all out of business within weeks. Were not fighting like mad to ensure that the French stop smoking [tobacco] for them to start smoking cannabis, she said. "We will have to review the legislation and review how we put this all in order," she told French radio station RTL. "It is true that the 0.2 percent legislation is perhaps a little vague." The Paris Narcotics Brigade (BSP) has asked drugs investigators to begin a preliminary investigation to "verify whether the legal conditions of sale of certain forms of cannabis are being respected", Le Parisien reported this week. The report also quotes Joaquim Lousquy, the 29-year-old entrepreneur behind Cofyshop, who admitted the difficulty of identifying low THC strains, dubbed le weed light, with regular marijuana. Our grass does indeed have the same smell and the same appearance as that with THC," he said. "The police cannot tell the difference. Cannabis around the world Show all 13 1 /13 Cannabis around the world Cannabis around the world Morocco Farmers destroy cannabis plantations under Moroccan police supervision in the northern Moroccan Larache region, pictured here in 2006 AFP/Getty images Cannabis around the world Colorado Growing business: Cannabis on sale at River Rock Wellness Sam Adams Cannabis around the world Oakland Oaksterdam in Oakland, California, is the world's only university dedicated to the study and cultivation of cannabis Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images Cannabis around the world Seattle A cannabis smoker marks the start of the new law by the Space Needle in Seattle Getty Images Cannabis around the world China Cannabis growing wild in China, where it has been used to treat conditions such as gout and malaria Cannabis around the world Uruguay Uruguay has voted to make the country the first to legalize marijuana AFP/Getty Cannabis around the world Colorado A groundswell of support from the public led to full legalisation in Colorado Getty Images Cannabis around the world Berlin A man smokes licenced medicinal marijuana prior to participating in the annual Hemp Parade, or 'Hanfparade', in support of the legalization of marijuana in Germany on August 7, 2010 in Berlin, Germany. The consumption of cannabis in Germany is legal, though all other aspects, including growing, importing or selling it, are not. However, since the introduction of a new law in 2009, the sale and possession of marijuana for licenced medicinal use is legal. Sean Gallup/Getty Images Cannabis around the world UK The UK latest figures show 2.3 million people used cannabis in the last year AP Cannabis around the world Amsterdam Tourists visiting Amsterdam will not be banned from using the citys famous cannabis cafes Getty Images Cannabis around the world Merseyside These 25 cannabis plants, seized in Merseyside police, could have generated a turnover of 40,000 a year Cannabis around the world San Francisco April 20, 2012: People smoke marijuana joints at 4:20 p.m. as thousands of marijuana advocates gathered at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California. The event was held on April 20, a date corresponding with a numerical 4/20 code widely known within the cannabis subculture as a symbol for all things marijuana. Reuters Cannabis around the world Spain A cannabis users' association will pay the town of Rasquera more than 600,000 a year for the lease of the land Mr Lousquy has reportedly franchised the idea with 150 other traders. Speaking to English-language French website The Local, Mr Lousquy played down the effects of the products, saying: The effect is nothing, before perhaps realising he was making a poor sales pitch, and adding: Well, its small anyway, but it will probably help most people feel relaxed. What did Donald Trump claim? In an early morning (US time) tweet on Monday, the president said: The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture! Italys new far-right interior minister has announced a census of the countrys Roma community and set the stage for deportations of the ethnic group. Matteo Salvini, the leader of the far-right League party, said those Roma found to have Italian nationality would unfortunately be allowed to stay in the country while others would be expelled. The new anti-Roma policy is one of the first acts of Mr Salvinis interior ministry; his party formed a coalition government at the start of June with the anti-establishment Eurosceptic Five Star Movement. Ive asked the ministry to prepare a dossier on the Roma question in Italy, the minister told broadcaster TeleLombardia. He added that the dossier would involve a census of Roma in Italy which would see who, how, how many. He added: Unfortunately, you need to keep Italian Roma in Italy. The country is estimated to be home to between 100,000 and 180,000 Roma. The ministers actions drew criticism from human rights groups and opposition politicians. The way is short from a census to a concentration camp. Salvini apparently decided to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the racial laws, Chiara Gribaudo, a deputy from the centre-left Democratic Party said, referencing the Mussolini era. The way is short from a census to a concentration camp Chiara Gribaudo, Democratic party deputy The interior minister does not seem to know that a census on the basis of ethnicity is not permitted by law, said Carlo Stasolla, president of Associazione 21 Luglio, a group that campaigns for Roma rights. Responding to anger at his comments, the minister tweeted: Someone is talking about being shocked. Why? I am thinking of those poor children taught to steal and break laws. 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 Roma have faced active persecution in Europe for centuries; hundreds of thousands were killed in a genocide by Nazi Germany, amounting to between a quarter and half of the population. The formation of the new Italian government has seen the country take an anti-foreigner turn across policy areas. Last week, Mr Salvini closed Italys ports to a refugee rescue ship carrying passengers, including pregnant women, children and those needing medical attention. The moves come as Austrias right-wing chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who is in coalition with the far-right FPOe party, called for an anti-migration axis to be formed with Austria, Germany and Italy. In Germany, chancellor Angela Merkel is facing a dispute with her own interior minister over whether and how to harden the countrys welcoming approach to refugees and migrants. In the US too, Donald Trump faced criticism for his policy of separating the children of undocumented migrants from their mothers and for the use of cages to hold people. France has condemned Donald Trumps policy of separating asylum seekers and migrants from their children at the US border, saying the countries do not share certain values. Some 2,000 children have been separated from their parents at the frontier with Mexico since Mr Trumps administration introduced its zero tolerance policy of charging undocumented arrivals with a criminal offence, official figures showed. The children are held in detention centres including a former warehouse in McAllen, Texas, where hundreds of youngsters are kept in cages created from metal fencing. Their parents are separately held in federal prison. The policy has provoked widespread backlash from charities, politicians from both of the US main parties, former first ladies including Laura Bush, and church groups. Recommended Trump attacks Angela Merkel for giving sanctuary to refugees Mr Trumps administration has blamed Democrats and Congress for failing to act to stop it, but it is generally held that the president is able to unilaterally end the separations. Senator Lindsey Graham, a supporter of Mr Trump, has said the billionaire could stop this policy with a phone call. Benjamin Griveaux, a French government spokesman, said the European Union and France which gifted the US the Statue of Liberty in the 19th century do not share the same model of civilisation as America. Clearly we dont share certain values, he added in an interview with France 2 television. Images of children in cages were shocking, Mr Griveaux said. In audio secretly recorded and passed to ProPublica, children can be heard screaming and crying for their parents while a US Border Patrol agent mocks their distress. Well, we have an orchestra here, the man is heard to say. Attorney general Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, have defended the administrations approach to law enforcement as biblical. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves, Mr Sessions said, citing Romans. Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, said the government had high standards for its child detention centres, adding we give them meals and we give them education and we give them medical care. Emily Thornberry insists UK must stand up to 'bully' Donald Trump Mr Trump defended the separations by placing his policy in contrast to the approach taken in Europe over the last few years. The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility, he said on Monday. You look at whats happening in Europe, you look at whats happening in other places we cant allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch. Europes migration crisis has increasingly defined regional politics. In Italy, a far-right and anti-establishment government now holds power and is blocking migrant landings, and in Germany, where the chancellor, Angela Merkel, has opened the door to those fleeing hunger and conflict in the Middle East and Africa, her coalition is fighting for survival over the issue. Ms Merkel has committed to help Italy deal with the influx but faces domestic pressure, with her junior coalition partner having given her until a 28 June summit to get a migration deal with other EU countries on the matter. Germanys interior minister, Horst Seehofer, has called for migrants to be turned away at the border, which Ms Merkel opposes. 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 Trump seized on the divisions on Monday, tweeting that crime in Germany is way up because of immigration, though statistics showed that was not true. Later, he claimed children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country. CHANGE THE LAWS! he added, in a challenge to Congress. His administration has maintained that immigration reform is the only way to end the separations of families. Frances president, Emmanuel Macron, has called for reform of the way the EU deals with migrants and refugees, suggesting the creation of asylum centres where applicants claims would be processed in their home countries. Last Friday, during a summit with Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, Mr Macron said EU regulations requiring asylum seekers to apply in the first country they reach, and stay there while their claims are decided which have particularly affected Italy and Greece were not working. He cited an initiative of his government last year to establish protection missions which pre-screened asylum-seekers in Chad and Niger to prevent citizens risking the sea journey. Additional reporting by agencies Israel has not responded to reports in US media that it was behind an airstrike in Syria which killed more than 50 regime-allied troops in the east of the country. Sunday night's attack on the town of al Hari in Deir Ezzor, near the border with Iraq, killed 52 fighters, including 22 members of an Iraqi Shia militia, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said. Syrian state news blamed the US-led coalition fighting Isis for the casualties and Damascus has demanded an explanation for the targeting from Washington. Baghdad, too, condemned the attack on Iraqi paramilitary forces, calling it support for Isis. Syrian military video shows air defences trying to intercept Israeli missiles US Central Command denied responsibility, however, saying in a statement there were no strikes by US or Coalition forces in that area during the time in question. Instead, unnamed US officials told AFP and CNN that the strike was carried out by the Israeli air force a move that would represent several new developments for Israeli involvement in neighbouring Syrias civil war. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) did not comment on the strike, as per its usual policy. If the IDF was indeed behind the attack, it is the first time Israel has targeted Iraqi Shia forces in the country, and hundreds of miles away from the area it normally operates in, which already has a heavy US, Russian and Syrian air force presence. "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Show all 20 1 /20 "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria A child injured by an IED explosion in Raqqa Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Children riding a bicycle among destroyed buildings in Raqqa Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Entire neighbourhoods in Raqqa are damaged beyond repair Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Satellite image showing the house where seven members of the Badran family were killed in a Coalition strike on 18 July 2017, before the strike CNES/Airbus DS "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Satellite image showing the house where seven members of the Badran family were killed in a Coalition strike on 18 July 2017, after the strike CNES/Airbus DS "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Members of the Badran family killed in three separate Coalition air strike on 18 July and 20 August 2017 in Raqqa Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria The city of Raqqa in northern Syria has become hardly recognizable to those who try to return after months battle between US-backed forces and the Islamic State terrorist group for control of it. The city has no running water or electricity and homes, business and public squares are mere rubble and debris Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Satellite image showing the houses where 16 members of the Fayad family and neighbours were killed in Coalition strikes on 12 October 2017, before the strike CNES/Airbus DS "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Satellite image showing the houses where 16 members of the Fayad family and neighbours were killed in Coalition strikes on 12 October 2017, after the strike CNES/Airbus DS "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Fayad Mohammed and his daughters Wafa, Fadda and Tamam; Ammar al-Faris; Reem al-Maddad, Yusra Abd-al-Aziz, and baby Razqiya Habib; Jasim Hamal and Salem Hamad. They were among the 16 civilians killed in Coalition air strikes on 12 October 2017 in Raqqa Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Men wait by the side of the road for casual labour in Raqqa. Many end up clearing partially destroyed or damaged buildings, a very risky endeavour as many building were mined by IS and civilians are frequently killed and injured by mines Amnesty "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Satellite images showing the Aswad familys building before it was destroyed in a Coalition air strike which killed eight civilians, five of them children, on 28 June 2017 CNES/Airbus DS "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Satellite image showing the Aswad familys building after it was destroyed in a Coalition air strike which killed eight civilians, five of them children, on 28 June 2017 CNES/Airbus DS "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Amal Othman, 13, and her brothers Ammar, 8 and Mahmoud, 17; and Jamal Aswad, 41 four of the eight victims killed in a Coalition air strike on 28 June 2017 in Raqqa Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Low-income district west of the Jezra intersection on the western outskirts of Raqqa city destroyed by the Coalition shelling started in June 2017 Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Satellite image showing the houses where 16 members of the Fayad family and neighbours were killed in Coalition strikes on 12 October 2017, before the strike CNES/Airbus DS "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Satellite image showing the houses where 16 members of the Fayad family and neighbours were killed in Coalition strikes on 12 October 2017, after the strike CNES/Airbus DS "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Ali Hassan Nafa; Mahdia Hashish and her husband Hussein Ali; Hussein Hashish, Mohammed Hashish and Hussein Ibrahim Hashish, and Mohammed Ali Hashish Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Harat al Badu, a built up area in central Raqqa, next to the stadium. It was the scene of the final battle in the city between SDF/Coalition forces and IS Amnesty International "War of Annihilation" devastating toll on civilians in Raqqa, Syria Map showing where the Badran, Hashish, Aswad and Fayab families were living before the coalition air strikes Unosat /Amnesty International We will take action and are already taking action against efforts to establish a military presence by Iran and its proxies in Syria both close to the border and deep inside Syria. We will act against these efforts anywhere in Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday at a cabinet meeting. Though formally neutral on Syrias complex civil war, Israel is believed to have carried out more than 100 strikes in the south and west of the country in the last few years to prevent weaponry shipments to Lebanese militant organisation Hezbollah, which, along with troops belonging to Shia militias from Iran and Iraq, fights alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assads troops. As the tide of the seven-year-old war has slowly turned in Assads favour, tensions between Iran and Israel have ratcheted up, with Israeli officials warning they will not accept a permanent Iranian military presence in Syria. Recommended US plans to deport American Isis suspect in Iraq back to Syria Last month, the hostility between the two regional powers came to a head when Israel launched its most intensive attack on Iranian positions to date after what the IDF said was the first ever direct Iranian rocket attack on its troops in the occupied Golan Heights. The confrontation, in which at least 23 people were killed, marked the most significant military skirmish between the two enemies amid a backdrop of escalating regional tensions. Strike on Syrian army base kills 18 people In Syrias east, US-led coalition, Russian and Syrian planes carry out airstrikes against Isis targets. While the US uses a de-confliction line to avoid run-ins with the other parties, in May it is believed a US strike killed at least 12 pro-government fighters. The bloodiest incident occurred in February, when at least 100 pro-government forces, including Russian mercenaries, were killed in a US-led coalition airstrike in Deir Ezzor. Taliban fighters have raised the ire of their leaders after taking selfies with Afghan soldiers and government officials during a three-day ceasefire. The Islamic militants face disciplinary action for fraternising with regime troops and citizens during a temporary stop in hostilities to mark the end of Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr holiday. Afghanistans government said it would continue the widely welcomed unilateral ceasefire for another 10 days, although it added security forces would defend themselves if attacked by the Taliban, which ordered its fighters to take up arms again on Sunday night. Taliban insurgents left their hideouts and visited towns and cities during the ceasefire, leading to unprecedented scenes of them embracing, crying and posing for photographs with regime soldiers. But the Talibans leadership, including supreme commander Haibatullah Akhunzada, was unimpressed, according to a senior official from the jihadist group. Last night, an emergency meeting was called and all the commanders were informed and directed to take strict disciplinary action against all those Taliban members who visited citizens and took pictures with the Afghan authorities, the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. The Taliban's ceasefire, which did not extend to US-led foreign forces, was the first of its kind. The group's leaders had told fighters to avoid public gatherings during Eid in case they were targeted in attacks. The Taliban's offer to halt fighting came two days after the government declared an unconditional ceasefire of its own. Omar Zakhilwal, Afghanistan's ambassador to neighbouring Pakistan, described the move as an "important step towards prospects for peace". However, some Taliban attacks were planned during the ceasefire in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, said another Taliban commander, also speaking anonymously. Last month anti-war activists in Afghanistan set off on a peace march to Kabul, walking up to 35km (20 miles) to call for an end to conflict. The marchers spent the fasting month of Ramadan crossing harsh, sun-baked countryside, their numbers swelling and ebbing at different points along the route. Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear Show all 16 1 /16 Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2001 Afghans at the Killi Faizo refugee camp desperately reach for bags of rice being handed out to the thousands who escaped the bombardment in southern Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. (Chaman, Pakistan, December 4, 2001) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2002 Mahbooba stands against a bullet-ridden wall, waiting to be seen at a medical clinic. The seven-year-old girl suffers from leishmaniasis, a parasitical infection. (Kabul, March 1, 2002) All photos Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2003 A mother and her two children look out from their cave dwelling. Many families who, fleeing the Taliban, took refuge inside caves adjacent to Bamiyans destroyed ancient Buddha statues now have nowhere else to live. (Bamiyan, November 19, 2003) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2007 Students recite prayers in a makeshift outdoor classroom in the Wakhan Corridor, a mountainous region in northeastern Afghanistan that extends to China and separates Tajikistan from India and Pakistan. (Northeastern Afghanistan, September 2, 2007) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2007 Bodybuilders in the 55-60 kg category square off during a regional bodybuilding competition. Many Afghan men, like others around the world, feel that a macho image of physical strength is important. (Kabul, August 6, 2007) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2008 A woman in a white burqa enjoys an afternoon with her family feeding the white pigeons at the Blue Mosque. (Mazar-e-Sharif, March 8, 2008) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2009 Addicts inject heroin while trying to keep warm inside the abandoned Russian Cultural Center, which the capital citys addicts use as a common gathering point. Heroin is readily available, costing about one dollar a hit. (Kabul, February 9, 2009) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2009 An elderly man holds his granddaughter in their tent at a refugee camp after they were forced to flee their village, which US and NATO forces had bombed because, they claimed, it was a Taliban hideout. (Surobi, Nangarhar Province, February 7, 2009) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2009 Seven-year-old Attiullah, a patient at Mirwais Hospital, stands alongside an X ray showing the bullet that entered his back, nearly killing him. Attiullah was shot by US forces when he was caught in a crossfire as he was herding sheep. (Kandahar, October 13, 2009). Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2010 US Army Sargeant Jay Kenney (right), with Task Force Destiny, helps wounded Afghan National Army soldiers exit a Blackhawk helicopter after they have been rescued in an air mission. (Kandahar, December 12, 2010) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2010 An Afghan National Army battalion marches back to barracks at the Kabul Military Training Center. (Kabul, October 4, 2010) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2014 Eid Muhammad, seventy, lives in a house with a view overlooking the hills of Kabul. He and millions of other Afghans occupy land and housing without possessing formal deeds to them. (Kabul, November 21, 2014) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2014 Razima holds her two-year-old son, Malik, while waiting for medical attention at the Boost Hospital emergency room. (Lashkar Gah, Helmand Province, June 23, 2014) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2014 Young women cheer as they attend a rally for the Afghan presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani. (Kabul, April 1, 2014) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2014 Burqa-clad women wait to vote after a polling station runs out of ballots. (Kabul, April 5, 2014) Paula Bronstein Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 2015 Relatives, friends, and womens rights activists grieve at the home of Farkhunda Malikzada, who was killed by a mob in the center of Kabul. Farkhunda was violently beaten and set on fire after a local cleric accused her of burning a Quran. (Kabul, March 22, 2015) Paula Bronstein While many war-weary Afghans welcomed the ceasefires and the fraternisation between the combatants, some have criticised the government ceasefire, which allowed the Taliban to flow into cities, although the militants said they were withdrawing. Abdul Rahman Mangal, spokesman for the Maidan Wardak provincial government, next to Kabul, said the Taliban attacked two security checkpoints in the Saidabad district in the early hours of Monday. The attacks left casualties, he added. Clashes were also reported in Faryab in the north-west and Laghman, to the east of Kabul. Nangarhar, on the border with Pakistan, was hit by two bomb blasts over the weekend, one of which was claimed by Islamic State. The number of displaced people around the world reached a record high of 68.5 million last year, the UN has revealed in a damning new report that also shows a dramatic drop in the willingness of wealthy nations to welcome refugees. Intractable conflicts in Syria, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Myanmar were among the greatest drivers of movement, forcing people to leave their homes and in some cases their countries. The UNHCR said the number of refugees those who fled across state borders rose by 2.9 million from 2016, the greatest increase seen in a single year in the history of the UNs refugee agency. Recommended Refugee boat blocked by European countries arrives at Spanish port Yet at the same time, the number of people successfully resettled under UN refugee programmes dropped by more than 40 per cent to just 100,000, amid a growing backdrop of nationalism and isolationism across the developed world. The UN report, released on the eve of World Refugee Day, shows that there were 25.4 million refugees in the world in 2017, and another 43.1 million internally displaced people. Combined, they make up one in every 110 people on the planet. Just over 16.2 million were freshly forced from their homes in 2017 alone, meaning that a new person became displaced every two seconds. And the number of asylum-seekers, trapped in limbo awaiting the outcome of their claims, rose above 3 million. But the global scale of the problem is not being matched by an international response, according to the UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi. Vast numbers of refugees are living in just a handful of countries closest to conflict zones, with the likes of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Uganda and Bangladesh taking people in at far higher rates than the global average. We are at a watershed, where success in managing forced displacement globally requires a new and far more comprehensive approach so that countries and communities arent left dealing with this alone, Mr Grandi said. Mr Grandi also highlighted the helplessness of those who had no choice but to flee their homes. Of the global displaced population, a staggering 53 per cent are children. Their number, the UN said, includes many who are unaccompanied or separated from their families. And among the specific case studies highlighted by the report were the Rohingya, 655,000 of whom fled Myanmar for neighbouring Bangladesh in the space of just three months from late August 2017. A senior UN official has previously described violence towards the Rohingya by the Myanmar army as a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. The government of Myanmar has for generations refused to acknowledge the Muslim minoritys right to citizenship in northern Rakhine state, insisting they are illegal immigrants from neighbouring states. Nowhere is the link between statelessness and displacement more evident than for the Rohingya community of Myanmar, for whom denial of citizenship is a key aspect of the entrenched discrimination and exclusion that have shaped their plight for decades, Mr Grandi said. Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Show all 12 1 /12 Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Ahmed Nabeel, 19, was born in the camp and now works as a welder Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Three boys sit on a wall watching what is going on in the camp Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Piles of rubbish are a direct result of US president Donald Trump cutting funds to UNRWA Life in a Palestinian refugee camp A young girl runs down one of the main streets to the marketplace Life in a Palestinian refugee camp A boy pretends his cigarette cards are Jordanian dinar Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Mohammed Saeed, 12, helps the elderly cart their shopping back to their homes Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Unrest in the camp, where many are living below the poverty line Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Alleyways where waste is left attract rats and cause illness Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Ibrahim Bassam, 11, spends his time playing with friends in mounds of rubbish Life in a Palestinian refugee camp A deserted marketplace Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Muhand Salem, 22, a university student studying mechanical engineering, one of very few scholarships available to refugees Life in a Palestinian refugee camp Nabeel Salem, 62, arrived in the camp at the age of 12 and still recalls his father telling him not to pack too many of his clothes and toys because they wouldnt be there long The UN report does conclude with what Mr Grandi calls a reason for some hope, however, pointing towards a shared agreement currently being drafted by the UN in response to the global refugee crises. Dubbed the Global Compact on Refugees, it would see displaced people resettled more equitably and put in place basic standards for things like healthcare access from the moment refugees cross into another country. Today, on the eve of World Refugee Day, my message to member states is please support this, Mr Grandi said. No one becomes a refugee by choice; but the rest of us can have a choice about how we help. Victor Lugger was preternaturally calm for a person who was about to have his second baby in two weeks. The first, Jacques, had been born just 10 days before our meeting; his second, a new opening from the Big Mamma restaurant group, was to come into the world the following day. Riding a wave of success that he and his partner Tigrane Seydoux have enjoyed with their series of Italian eateries in Paris, Lugger was all set to launch La Felicita, billed as the largest restaurant in Europe, at 4,500 square meters. Housed in the tech incubator Station F, which also boasts supersize credentials as the worlds largest startup campus, La Felicita actually comprises five different eateries, including a 1,000 square meter outdoor space, and three bars. As my 12-year-old daughter remarked, calling it the biggest restaurant in Europe is kind of cheating, as its more like a food court than a single restaurant. Lugger and Seydouxs big adventure began five years ago, when the two HEC business school grads decided they wanted to start a company together. They considered opening a creperie chain but quickly turned to Italian cuisine due to their love of Italy. The first two years we spent in Italy scouring products, understanding the roots of the cuisine, Lugger explained. While they were searching for a hook, someone suggested that if they could simply build an authentic Italian trattoria, a place that serves good, inexpensive food with a smile, it would be a success. Big Mamma co-founder Victor Lugger (Sono Motoyama) At that point we thought, hes right. In the restaurant business if you do cheap and good, its already a lot. So we said, how can we re-create that in Paris? Their answer has been to source products from Italy, hire an almost all-Italian staff and cook everything themselves in their six restaurants including roasting their own coffee, making fresh pasta and gelato, brewing beer and even raising their own cattle. They offer very reasonable prices, too, with wood-fired pizzas starting at 5. Lugger conceded that his restaurants might not have the best food or the cheapest prices, but they probably offer the best value for money. Meet the real Neapolitan: How one Naples pizza chain is sticking firmly to tradition Show all 4 1 /4 Meet the real Neapolitan: How one Naples pizza chain is sticking firmly to tradition Meet the real Neapolitan: How one Naples pizza chain is sticking firmly to tradition Pg-38-Neapolitan-1.jpg Meet the real Neapolitan: How one Naples pizza chain is sticking firmly to tradition Pg-38-Neapolitan-2.jpg Meet the real Neapolitan: How one Naples pizza chain is sticking firmly to tradition Pg-38-Neapolitan-3.jpg Meet the real Neapolitan: How one Naples pizza chain is sticking firmly to tradition Pg-38-Neapolitan-4.jpg They are inexpensive but good, agreed Big Mamma fan Codi Ferrari, a 26-year-old American social media manager who has lived in Paris for eight years. And its in a cool atmosphere so you feel like youre getting a more gastronomic experience even though its not expensive. Finally, theres a place that just makes a damn pizza the way it should be without breaking the bank for 20 minutes of pleasure. Bernard Boutboul, director of the restaurant consulting group Gira Conseil, attributes Big Mammas success to several factors. He points out that Lugger and Seydoux attended a business, not a hospitality school, and have therefore been able to think about restaurants in a different way. They found ways to buy better-quality products more cheaply and to create a real experience for clients thanks to young Italian employees who make Italy come alive, he said. La Felicita also has three bars (Sono Motoyama) In addition, choosing Italian cuisine was a very good idea, because France, which has 14,000 pizzerias, is, along with the United States, the largest per capita consumer of pizzas in the world. After traditional French restaurants, pizzerias are by far the most popular restaurant concept in France, with the French eating 745 million pizzas in 2017. As Lugger put it, Everyone in the world adores Italian cuisine, because its extra fresh, its a cuisine you can eat every day and its extremely welcoming. You can open a pub in Paris, and Ill go every two weeks; you can create a great French restaurant, and Ill go every two weeks, because you cant eat a blanquette or a choucroute every day. But you can eat pasta and pizzas and fresh salads every day. The French got through 745 million pizzas in 2017 (Sono Motoyama) Indeed, at a pre-opening party crowded with cool press and sexy guests, according to signs designating where you had to queue up, hundreds of Parisian hipsters mobbed the former train depot, with its eclectic decorations and two vintage trains that will serve as bars. As a DJ spun a pop music mix, guests sampled tender, smoky grilled bistecca fiorentina and freshly made truffled ravioli, not to mention Italian wine, prosecco and cocktails. But most popular, judging by the hour-long wait guests were willing to submit to, were the pizzas. If your stomach is starting to grumble at the thought of all that wood-fired goodness, not to worry. Lugger confided that London will soon get its chance to taste a Big Mamma pie; he let drop that in July he will be moving with his wife and two children to London, to open a restaurant in Shoreditch by the end of 2018. He said, I love London, Ive always loved London, so voila. The adventure continues. Travel essentials Getting there easyJet offers nonstop flights between all London airports and Pariss Charles de Gaulle Airport from 40, one way. Staying there Timhotel Place d'Italie is a modern hotel in the 13th arrondissement where Station F and La Felicita are located. A minute from the Metro and a short walk to the bustling Buttes-aux-Cailles neighborhood. Doubles from 83, room only. More information en.parisinfo.com A baby born on a Paris train on 18 June was awarded free rail travel on the network until he turns 25. The mother went into labour at around 11am on the busy RER A line that runs from east to west Paris. After stopping at the Auber station in central Paris, the train was evacuated and further trains were halted in both directions on an especially busy section of the commuter line for 45 minutes as a consequence of the new arrival. Recommended Baby born midflight gets free flights for life Approximately 15 people assisted with the birth, including emergency workers, police and railway staff. The RATP congratulates the mum and intends to offer the child free travel on its network until he is 25 years old, a spokesperson told AFP. The tiny tot wasnt the first to be born while travelling. Last year, a passenger travelling from Dammam in Saudi Arabia to Kochi in India gave birth on the flight. Fortunately, a trained paramedic was aboard and, coupled with the quick actions of the cabin crew, the baby was successfully delivered before the plane touched down. Recommended Premature baby delivered by cabin crew during flight In 2012, a bus driver in Hackney helped a woman give birth on the number 106 bus. Vently Hewitt, who had been a bus driver for 12 years, pulled over, escorted 20 passengers off the bus and assisted paramedics with their equipment, resulting in the arrival of a baby boy less than 30 minutes later. A baby born 15 weeks prematurely on a Royal Caribbean cruise in the middle of the Caribbean in 2015 spent 78 days at Miami Childrens Hospital before returning to his family home in Utah. Lufthansas chief executive has confirmed the giant German airline is in talks with the budget carrier, Norwegian. Carsten Spohr was quoted by Suddeutsche Zeitung as saying: In Europe, everyone is talking to everyone. Theres a new wave of consolidation approaching. That means we are also in contact with Norwegian. Norwegians share price rose 10 per cent on Monday to close at 274 Norwegian krone (25.44), valuing the airline at over 12bn krone (1.1bn). The share price is lower than its recent peak in April, when IAG British Airways parent company revealed it has taken a 4.6 per cent share in Norwegian. The world's 10 worst airlines Show all 10 1 /10 The world's 10 worst airlines The world's 10 worst airlines 10. Jet AirHelp, has assessed more than 30 airlines using scores for quality of service, on-time performance and responses to claims for compensation. Here follows the lowest ranked airlines, starting with Jet Airways, 35% of whose flights were delayed in 2018 Getty The world's 10 worst airlines 9. Aerolineas Argentinas 15% of Aerolineas Argentinas flights were delayed in 2018 Getty The world's 10 worst airlines 8. Iberia 16% of Iberia flights were delayed in 2018 Getty Images The world's 10 worst airlines 7. Korean Air 36% of Korean Air flights were delayed in 2018 Getty The world's 10 worst airlines 6. Ryanair 14% of Ryanair flights were delayed in 2018 EPA The world's 10 worst airlines 5. Air Mauritius 31% of Air Mauritius flights were delayed in 2018 Getty The world's 10 worst airlines 4. easyJet 21% of easyJet flights were delayed in 2018 AFP/Getty Images The world's 10 worst airlines 3. Pakistan International Airlines 39% of Pakistan International Airlines were delayed in 2018 Getty The world's 10 worst airlines 2. Royal Jordanian Airlines 13% of Royal Jordanian Airlines flights were delayed in 2018 Getty The world's 10 worst airlines 1. WOW Air 25% of WOW Air flights were delayed in 2018 Getty IAG has since made two bids to buy the entire airline. Both have been rebuffed by the board of Norwegian. Willie Walsh, chief executive of IAG, has since said that the carrier was not a must-have target. Concerns have been raised about the finances of Norwegian at a time of rising oil prices and increased flight disruption. As speculation grew about the Lufthansa interest, Norwegian made no additional comments beyond its previously released statement, which confirmed it had received enquiries from several parties following the IAG approach. Conflicting theories have emerged about the reasons for the Lufthansa approach. Acquiring Norwegian would give the German airline a significant foothold in the UK, access to valuable slots at Gatwick and a fleet of modern Boeing 787 jets. Norwegian could dovetail well with Lufthansas budget brand, Eurowings, which has a rapidly expanding long-haul market helped by the collapse last October of Air Berlin. But there is also speculation that the main aim of the German airline is to up the price that arch-rival IAG might possibly pay for Norwegian including a premium to keep Lufthansa off its home turf. The US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, kicked up a storm when he invoked a line from the Bible to defend the Trump administrations policy of separating thousands of parents and children during immigration investigations. Sessions quoted a line written by the apostle Paul to a small community of Christians living in Rome around 55AD to defend the Department of Justices approach. He said: "I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order." Sessions used the Bible because one of the most vocal opponents of the crackdown on asylum cases has been the Catholic Church. Its no surprise that Sessions appealed to Romans chapter 13 verse 1 in response: not only did he hope to undermine Catholic authority by using the Bible against them, he cited a statement so broad that one might use it to defend anything a government does, good or bad. 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 problem for Sessions is that the historical situation in which Paul wrote his letter to the Romans does far more to undermine his policy than to support it. The actual date and origin of the letter is not totally certain, but scholars think it was sent to the Christian community in Rome around 55AD. This was a few years after the Roman Emperor Claudius exiled Romes Jewish community in 49AD. That Jewish community included many people who had become Christians and were connected to other Christians in Rome. Paul himself was a Jew who had become a Christian. After his conversion he began travelling around the Mediterranean, starting Christian communities, and instructing them how to live. Shortly before Paul wrote his letter to the Christians in Rome, many of the Jewish people who had been forced to leave Rome began to return, the city now safe for them again after the death of Claudius. Paul wrote the letter in part because he was worried that things would go badly when these Jewish Christians tried to integrate back in with the non-Jewish Christians in Rome. Paul feared their earlier exile by the emperor would keep them from being welcomed back. It is for this reason that Paul spends so much time in his letter discussing the way Jews and non-Jews should live with one another (see, for example, chapters 24, 911 and 14). Paul argues that the Romans should openly welcome those Jewish members who had been forcibly removed some time ago; the church should return them to their places within the community and honour them. Perhaps these Jewish people were not completely unknown to the Christians left in Rome, but they were returning after a long absence. They were, for all intents and purposes, immigrants entering a host community that wasnt sure it could trust them and probably didnt want them around. Paul is vehement about one thing that those who remained in Rome should not do: conclude they were any better or different than these Jewish migrants. That is why Paul famously says that all Romans and Jews have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Paul marvels that anyone would pass judgement on your brother or sister (14.10), for each of us will be accountable to God (14.12). In the 21st century American context, Pauls statements serve to emphasise the similarities between immigrants and non-immigrants, not any differences between them. Sessions argued that the current approach protects the lawful. He also suggested the policy was an extension of the revocation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, which had suspended immigration enforcement against undocumented migrants brought to the US as children. Defending the end of DACA in September 2017, Sessions said a failure to enforce immigration laws strictly had put our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism. This particular point makes Romans an even worse defence of the policy Sessions is pursuing. Just before the line Sessions recently quoted from Romans 13, Paul wrote that, "If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." And just a few lines after requiring respect for the government, Paul sums up his point by encouraging the audience to: Love your neighbour as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbour; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. Recommended Trump reveals he regrets hiring Jeff Sessions as Attorney General Pauls familiar language about loving ones neighbour like Jesus of Nazareth before him alludes to Leviticus 19, verse 18. While few people today know the content of Leviticus 19, Christian and Jewish audiences in the first century AD would have known it. That texts also commands people to create a system of economic care for migrants from potentially dangerous foreign countries at their own financial expense: "When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner." The command to love a foreigner and to let them freely gather food that belongs to you puts us a long, long way from Sessions arguments about obeying governments to ensure safety for Americans. The logic of Pauls words might have sounded helpful to Sessions in isolation, but the letter they come from undermines nearly everything Sessions wants them to support. Casey Strine is a lecturer in Ancient Near Eastern History and Literature at the University of Sheffield This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. I voted to Remain, largely because I did not think that UK elected representatives were any more economically literate that the unelected leaders of the EU. But I grow tired of threats from Barnier, Juncker and co the latest is that the UK will be locked out of Europe's policing and security databases after Brexit (also Galileo, and more). Rather than kowtowing to the EU and going out of our way to find solutions they'll reject out of hand, why not make the UK the low-tax zone of Europe? Slash the corporation tax to 15 per cent, income tax maxed at 30 per cent, introduce tax breaks and state assistance for new businesses... the list could go on. In short, attract the global business into Europe's second-largest, 65 million-strong economy. We'll probably have a recession, but we'll make it because, like life... trade will find a way. Darko Kapor Edgware UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 17 October 2021 Members of the Essex Bangladeshi Welfare Association pay their respects by floral tributes laid at the scene where Sir David Amess MP was killed at Belfairs Methodist Church, in Leigh-on-Sea Reuters UK news in pictures 16 October 2021 Boris Johnson, Sir Keir Starmer, Priti Patel and Lindsay Hoyle pay respects to Sir David Amess at Belfairs Methodist Church, in Leigh-on-Sea, the site of his death EPA UK news in pictures 15 October 2021 A person lays flowers at the scene near the Belfairs Methodist Church in Eastwood Road North, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, where Conservative MP Sir David Amess has died after he was stabbed several times at a constituency surgery. A man has been arrested and officers are not looking for anyone else PA UK news in pictures 14 October 2021 A red deer stag during rutting season in Bushy Park, Richmond, south west London, which is home to over 300 red and fallow deer PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters 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 Stop targeting people like me and hit the corporations How to pay for the extra resources that the NHS needs? Higher taxes yes, but I am fed up with the older population being cited as the target. I'm a fit and healthy 74-year-old and have paid all of my taxes and NI contributions for 57 years, and will do so until my demise why should I pay more when large corporations and rich people avoid paying theirs? I've paid my dues. Doug Flack Derby I want my own magic money Tree Now we know for sure Theresa May does have a Magic Money Tree, taking some fruit for the DUP and now for the NHS. Unfortunately, those who are just about managing can't have their own tree it is only available to governments. Derek Thornhill Gloucester Why do we even need austerity now? I am no economist, but as I understand it governments raise the money they need through taxation. Our government tells us that unemployment is very low so most people are in work and presumably paying the tax that is due, so why do we need austerity? Doesn't this mean that it is as good as it gets? Where else do they get the extra money from without raising tax? Chris Elshaw Address supplied Please move Question Time to before bedtime Concurrent to the discussion of a replacement for Question Time host David Dimbleby, could the BBC also consider an equally important issue of rescheduling the televising of this program, (currently after the 10pm news, when most self-respecting citizens are veering towards bedtime)? An intelligent, current affairs program deserves a prime-time viewing slot, equal to some of the more inane Have I Got News for You-type panel shows. Henry Carlton London, N14 The internet as we know it is under threat This week the draft EU Copyright directive reaches a crucial stage with the Legal Affairs Committee of the European parliament voting on its content; we should be alarmed, because as it stands this law will break the internet as we know it, and will remain our law, when we leave the EU. Two articles are especially bad. Article 11 will require anyone using snippets of journalistic online content to first get a (usually paid-for) license from the publisher. While this law is aimed at new media organisations, such as Google and Facebook, it will hit media monitoring groups, fact checkers and crucially, ordinary bloggers. Effectively, it will act as a tax on links, which are, of course, the very essence of the internet. Article 13 will require internet platforms to take measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, to prevent copyright infringement. This will hit freedom of expression, undermining legal use, such as parodies and memes. It will also hit community projects, such as Wikipedia, and code-hosting sites which carry opensource software. The necessary surveillance software is likely to overreact blocking perfectly legal new content. The freedom of the internet matters to us all; we must defend it. Otto Inglis Edinburgh Id rather pay to stay in the EU In reply to J Longstaffs conundrum (Letters, 18 June): I dont look forward to living in a soulless post-Brexit country that turns its back on our neighbours, rejects compassion and arrogantly refuses to address world problems in a co-operative spirit. In fact, Id pay 1000 year to avoid it. Richard Greenwood Bewdley Every relationship, however special, needs the oil of a shared interest to lubricate it through the difficult times. So it may be a relief to Theresa May that she and Donald Trump have a hobby in common to grease themselves though the tricky moments when the president arrives for his delayed visit in little less than a month. The hobby is state-sponsored child abuse. Their precise modes of practising it are markedly different, Trumps being actively wicked and Mays passively cruel to the verge of sheer and literal madness. But if an individual behaved towards a child as both in their singular ways are doing, any halfway competent social services department would take the child into care and refer the parent to the police. On the face of it, Trumps legalised kidnapping of Hispanic immigrant children on his southern border is much the more chillingly and obviously disgusting. It is genuinely hard to find words capable of adequately expressing the rage and revulsion anyone in the same postcode as normality must feel at the sights and sounds of babies being pulled from their mothers breasts, and toddlers howling in petrified perplexity as they watch their parents being bundled off to penitentiaries. Ordinarily, and by and large extraordinarily, no temptation demands resistance like the one to compare an outrage to the Nazis. The reductio ad Hitlerum is the idlest and most self-defeating ploy in the entire analogy playbook. Yet this is so unconscionably beyond the ordinary, by every modern standard known to a western democracy, that resistance is futile. When Laura Ingraham, a thoroughbred in the capacious Fox News stable of Trump apostles, describes the barbed wire-ringed detention centres the semi-glorified kennels from the perimeters of which tiny children have been heard screaming as essentially holiday camps, how are you not to be reminded of the Third Reich films elegantly portraying the concentration camp as an earthly paradise? Screaming children heard crying for parents at US detention centre after being separated at border under Trump policy, in distressing audio recording Seventy-three years after Goebbels commissioned such a film of the Theresienstadt camp, and 73 years after US soldiers joined the British in liberating the survivors of paradise, the irony of a US president savaging a German chancellor for being too humane towards alien ethnic groups speaks with brutal poignancy for itself. Trumps barely veiled attack on Angela Merkel for welcoming the desperate and persecuted, with ritual whopper duly appended (that the influx is causing German crime figures, currently at a 30-year low, to soar), is designed to vindicate the enforced separation of parents and children his legendarily bigoted Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, so imaginatively sources to scriptural teachings. While the world looks on through its fingers in mesmerised disbelief at what America is becoming, it wont bother gracing this shrunken little islands version of governmental child abuse with a glance. But Britains burgeoning irrelevance on the global stage does nothing to shrink the size of the cannabis oil abomination. Each day brings another parental account of the terror and agony of watching a severely epileptic child nudged closer to death by monumental cowardice and gargantuan imbecility. Reflecting on his defeated efforts as coalition deputy PM to change the law, Nick Clegg describes the refusal to sanction cannabis with even a minuscule THC component for therapeutic use as boneheaded. God love him for the restraint. Boneheaded suggests no more than the average level of bovine dimness we are schooled by experience to expect from our rulers. This is something else. This is the point, or beyond the point, at which hypocrisy and idiocy mutate into criminal negligence. A government that profits, via tax revenues, from licencing the manufacture and export of almost half the planets stocks of medical cannabis products simply will not acknowledge the unmistakable benefits of medical cannabis products. Joseph Heller could scarcely have dreamed of such cultivated insanity. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 16 October 2021 Boris Johnson, Sir Keir Starmer, Priti Patel and Lindsay Hoyle pay respects to Sir David Amess at Belfairs Methodist Church, in Leigh-on-Sea, the site of his death EPA UK news in pictures 15 October 2021 A person lays flowers at the scene near the Belfairs Methodist Church in Eastwood Road North, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, where Conservative MP Sir David Amess has died after he was stabbed several times at a constituency surgery. A man has been arrested and officers are not looking for anyone else PA UK news in pictures 14 October 2021 A red deer stag during rutting season in Bushy Park, Richmond, south west London, which is home to over 300 red and fallow deer PA UK news in pictures 13 October 2021 Police officers detain a man as Insulate Britain activists block a roundabout at a junction on the M25 motorway during a protest in Thurrock Reuters 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 So it is that the Today programme now devotes a daily portion to another story of a child enduring 20, or 50, or 100, or more seizures a day, with the real and mounting chance of death, because a far more effective drug with fewer recorded side effects than any Big Pharma conventional treatment contains far too little THC to give a weevil the munchies. When a Jehovahs Witness denies a child a life-preserving intervention, such as a blood transfusion, social workers and the courts step in to countermand fatally maniacal religious conviction. When the government does the same, it does so in the name of legislation so luminously deranged that William Hague hardly one of lifes natural stoners, and never knowingly nicknamed Billy the Bong reverses his previous objections to argue powerfully for the legalisation of cannabis. To stand on the sidelines watching the needless physical suffering of a child one has the power to end in the few hours it takes to pass emergency legislation may be less morally repugnant than wilfully inflicting irreversible psychological suffering, as Trump is doing, for purely political ends. But the distinction between active and passive cruelty is so thin as to be effectively meaningless. Child abuse is child abuse is child abuse is child abuse is child abuse. It is a monstrous crime against both the individual and humanity. If those enforcing the strict letter of atrociously immoral law on either side of the Atlantic can persuade themselves they are merely obeying orders, historys verdict on that defence could not be clearer. A High Court dispute arising out of an alleged failure to count votes in elections for positions on the national executive of the Irish Country Women's Association (ICA) has gone to mediation. The case has been adjourned to allow that process to take place. The action was initiated by Patricia Madden, who joined the ICA 39 years ago and says the organisation is in breach of its constitution when it failed to count ballots cast by its membership in advance of its AGM last May. She also claimed the ICA should have declared the winners of the election at the AGM for positions on its national executive board including National President, National Secretary and National Treasure for a term of office that runs from 2018 to 2021. Up to 30 other members have been given permission by the court to be joined as co-plaintiffs to the action. Ms Madden's application for various injunctions is opposed by the ICA. The ICA accepts there are issues in relation to the election which need to be addressed. It has proposed holding fresh elections for the positions. When the matter returned before Ms Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh at the High Court on Tuesday the judge suggested that the dispute goes to mediation. Following talks between the parties, Ms Madden told the court that the dispute should go to mediation. The parties want the process to commence as soon as possible and were seeking to have a mediator appointed. The Judge welcomed the fact that the parties have agreed to mediate the dispute, which she hoped is successful. The matter was adjourned to early July. Port of Cork chairman John Mullins and Tanaiste Simon Coveney at the development in Ringaskiddy yesterday. Photo: Clare Keogh Corks new 80m container terminal is aimed at future-proofing the port and kick-starting the regeneration of the citys docklands. The Port of Cork said the project is a key element in boosting economic growth in the south-west region and the expansion of Cork city. The container terminal will initially offer a 360-metre quay with 13-metre depth alongside and will enable larger ships to berth in Ringaskiddy. It also includes the construction of a 13.5-hectare terminal and associated buildings as well as two ship to shore gantry cranes and container-handling equipment. The project will become fully operational by 2020. Port of Cork chairman John Mullins said it was a vital development for the facility. The Port of Corks redevelopment at Ringaskiddy is a key growth enabler for both Cork city and region as well as the national economy and will enable the port to deliver more efficient container handling facilities, replacing the existing container terminal at Tivoli, and securing the Cork container terminal as an international gateway for trade well into the future, Mr Mullins said. The transfer of port-related activities from the city and Tivoli will create a real opportunity for Cork dockland sites to be redeveloped in the near future, he added. Dockland regeneration has been identified as a key element in the plan to increase the size of Cork city. The port said the new terminal is the largest single investment in its history. This development will secure the future for the Port of Cork, and ensure the trade gains are translated into significant economic benefits for the people of Cork and the Munster region, as well as the national economy, Port of Cork chief executive Brendan Keating said. Capvest has also just sold the Mater Private healthcare group Seamus Fitzpatrick's private equity firm Capvest has exited its investment in Norwegian consumer foods business Scandza. The Mayfair-based firm acquired the business in 2013 and has sold out to management and a consortium of local investors. Management already had a stake in the business alongside Capvest. Scandza makes products including crisp brand Sorlandschips and dairy brand Synnove Finden. Capvest has previously invested in food businesses in the region including frozen food business Findus and poultry company Scandi Standard. It is also active in the food sector here with Valeo Foods, which owns brands including Kelkin, Robert Roberts and Batchelors. It has recently acquired the confectionery division of Finnish business Raisio, adding brands like Fox's Glacier mints and Poppets to its portfolio. Valeo has a turnover of 800m, and supplies 90 markets globally from its 13 manufacturing faculties across Ireland, the UK and continental Europe. In addition, Capvest has just sold the Mater Private group, which encompasses facilities in Dublin and Cork as well as a number of smaller healthcare assets, to investment fund InfraVia Capital Partners. Mater Private chief executive John Hurley said the deal would allow the group to "develop our facilities and services and significantly expand our services to meet the needs for Ireland growing population". The sector is seen by some observers as being ripe for consolidation. Philip Doyle, principal of the State-backed Irish Infrastructure Fund, said recently that "the private hospital space in Ireland is fragmented, and there is an opportunity for a capable investor to consolidate these assets to deliver economies of scale and deliver improved health services more efficiently". The Mater stake was one of two remaining assets - alongside the Valeo stake - in a Capvest fund entitled Capvest Fund II. The private equity firm recently executed a deal allowing investors to cash out of the fund and have their stakes bought by American private equity firm Harbourvest Partners. Investors were also offered the chance to roll their interests over into a new vehicle which Capvest continued to manage. Belturbet man Fitzpatrick was ranked 161st on the 'Sunday Independent' 2017 Rich List, with a personal wealth of 97m. Nama retains control of pivotal sites in the capital, including the Irish Glass Bottle land in Ringsend Nama will deliver a 4.5bn surplus over its life - around 1bn more than its own latest estimates, according to Investec. Last year the State's bad bank redeemed the last of its 32bn startup costs, so the balance left when it is wound up will be returned to taxpayers and in effect goes to reduce the overall costs of the bank bailout. At current projections, the Nama surplus combined with recoveries from AIB, Bank of Ireland and Permanent TSB will take the final bailout bill well below the 30bn mark. Investec Ireland yesterday predicted the organisation will wind up posting a total surplus of 4.5bn - boosted by the rise in house prices. Investec's Philip O'Sullivan's upgraded Nama projections have been consistently borne out to date. The revised figures were contained in Investec's latest quarterly update on the economy, which highlighted a 13pc year-on-year increase in house prices in April amid an ongoing "disconnect between housing output and demand". Last week Nama, which is working on the redevelopment of key areas of Dublin's docklands with the likes of Ballymore Properties and Kennedy Wilson, revised its own final profit forecast to 3.5bn, a 17pc increase on its previous estimate of 3bn. But Investec has adopted a far more optimistic stance, arguing the organisation stands to deliver a much greater surplus to the State by the time it closes its doors in 2020. Hefty increase in house prices and Nama's profitable business model underpins this view, fuelling debate over whether the agency has adopted a too conservative approach and will end up overshooting its own estimates. Last year the agency raked in 2.56bn from selling loans and property, enabling the organisation to repay the final 2.6bn of its 30.2bn senior debt. It remains a powerful player in the housing market funding the construction of tens of thousands of homes. Investec Ireland's chief economist Philip O'Sullivan, pointed out Nama stands to benefit from "further write-backs from its 1.4bn stock of provisions as property values climb" and highlighted its net interest margin - a measure of profitability - reached a "remarkable" 7pc in 2017. But others in the market argue Nama has sold its most valuable real estate portfolios and is now dealing with secondary sites, and point out the agency has little to gain from underplaying its final profit targets. Yet Nama retains control of pivotal sites in the capital, including the Irish Glass Bottle land in Ringsend, Dublin, which can accommodate 3,500 homes. There is little prospect though of the agency continuing into the next decade with Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe insisting last week that he has no plans to extend Nama's life beyond 2020, when it is due to be disbanded. That's despite some calls for the agency to be restructured as a national housebuilding authority. Germany's Lufthansa has waded into the mix for Scandinavia's Norwegian Air as potential buyers, including Aer Lingus owner IAG, continue to circle the carrier. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr told German newspaper 'Sueddeutsche Zeitung' that the airline has been in contact with Norwegian, just weeks after IAG - headed by former Aer Lingus boss Willie Walsh - confirmed that it had snapped up a 4.6pc stake in the under pressure low-cost carrier. IAG, which also owns British Airways, Iberia, Vueling and Level, has previously said that it's interested in making a full offer for Norwegian. But Mr Walsh has also warned that he will not engage in a bidding war for the airline. "In Europe, everyone is talking to everyone," Mr Spohr told the newspaper over the weekend. "There's a new wave of consolidation approaching. That means we are also in contact with Norwegian." Asked if Norwegian would fit with the Lufthansa group, Mr Spohr said: "Takeovers are always a question of strategic value, the price and anti-trust. There are no easy answers." Last month, Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary denied the airline had made an approach last year to buy up to 20pc of Norwegian. Norwegian CEO Bjorn Kjos said last month that contact had taken place between the two carriers, but Ryanair insisted no such contact had occurred. Mr O'Leary has frequently predicted the demise of Norwegian. Shares in Norwegian, whose Norwegian Air International unit is based in Dublin, soared 11pc in early trading yesterday in Oslo. After the failures of Air Berlin and Monarch last year, airline executives have predicted more consolidation this year in Europe, especially as rising oil prices make life tougher for carriers with weaker finances. Mr Spohr said earlier this month that Lufthansa would grab more takeover opportunities if they arose and that carriers were all in contact with each other. "There are no negotiations or in-depth talks and it is open whether anything will come of it," said a source with knowledge of the contact between Lufthansa and Norwegian. Strategically speaking, Norwegian would fit well with Eurowings, Lufthansa's low-cost brand, the source added. "The advantage is that it's a functioning flight operation with low costs," the source said. After taking over parts of Air Berlin last year and acquiring the remaining stake in Brussels Airlines to expand its Eurowings brand, Lufthansa has also eyed Alitalia, though the sale process is being held up by political turmoil. (Reuters) China's threat to impose duties on US oil imports will hit a business that has soared in the last two years, and which is now worth almost $1bn (861m) per month. In an escalating spat over the United States' trade deficit with most of its major trading partners, including China, US President Donald Trump said last week he was pushing ahead with hefty tariffs on $50bn of Chinese imports, starting on July 6. China said last Friday that it would retaliate by slapping duties on several American commodities, including oil. Investors expect the spat to come at the expense of US oil firms, pulling down the share prices of ExxonMobil and Chevron by 1pc to 2pc since Friday, while US crude oil prices fell by around 5pc. "This escalation of the trade war is dangerous for oil prices," said Stephen Innes, head of trading for Asia/Pacific at futures brokerage OANDA in Singapore. "Let's hope cooler heads prevail, but I'm not overly optimistic," he added. The dispute between the United States and China comes at a pivotal time for oil markets. Following a year and a half of voluntary supply cuts led by the Middle East-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), as well as the non-Opec producer Russia, oil markets have tightened, pushing up prices. The potential drop-off in American oil exports to China would benefit other producers, especially from Opec and Russia. A cut in Chinese purchases of US oil may also benefit Iran's sales, which Washington is trying to curb with new sanctions it announced in May. "The Chinese may just replace some of the American oil with Iranian crude," said John Driscoll, director of consultancy JTD Energy Services. "China isn't intimidated by the threat of US sanctions. They haven't been in the past. So in this diplomatic spat they might just replace US crude with Iranian oil. That would obviously infuriate Trump," he said. China's aggressive riposte to Trump took some in the industry by surprise. US crude exports to China have been rising sharply, thanks to a production surge in the past three years that was a welcome alternative to make up for the cut in supplies from Opec and Russia. "We're caught by surprise that crude oil is on the list," said an official with a Chinese state oil major, asking not to be named as he was not authorised to speak to media. "We were actually preparing to raise imports according to an earlier government line," he added, referring to a Beijing policy enacted earlier this year to help reduce the US trade deficit with China. Shipping data in Thomson Reuters Eikon shows that US crude oil shipments to China have soared in value recently, jumping from just $100m per month in early 2017 to almost $1bn per month. The threatened tariff would make US oil more expensive versus supplies from other regions, including the Middle East and Russia, and likely disrupt a business that has soared recently. "With Trump's politics, we're in a world of re-aligning alliances. China will not just swallow US tariffs," John Driscoll added. "This is tit-for-tat petroleum diplomacy," the consultant added. "The Opec/non-Opec cartel is the big beneficiary of all this oil diplomacy, as it will squeeze global spare oil capacity and likely push up crude prices." (Reuters) Chris Pratt offered fans life advice as he was honoured with the Generation Award (Francis Specker/PA Wire) Chris Pratt offered fans nine pieces of life advice as he was honoured with the Generation Award at the MTV Movie And TV Awards. The Jurassic World actor, 38, picked up an accolade previously given to stars including Will Smith and Robert Downey Jr at a ceremony in Los Angeles. During his acceptance speech broadcast on Monday, Pratt thanked his family before listing his advice for life. Congrats to our @MTV Generation Award honoree @prattprattpratt who gave us one of the best GIFs of our generation #MTVAwards pic.twitter.com/RTQkM8XZmk Movie & TV Awards (@MTVAwards) June 19, 2018 He began: Number one: Breathe. If you dont, you will suffocate. Number two: You have a soul. Be careful with it. From there, he offered fans tips on religion, using the toilet and looking after dogs. He said: Number three: Dont be a turd. If you are strong, be a protector. If you are smart, be a humble influencer. Strength and intelligence can be weapons, so do not wield them against the weak. That makes you a bully. Be bigger than than that. Number four: When giving a dog medicine, put the medics in a little piece of hamburger and they wont even know theyre eating medicine. Number five: It doesnt matter what it is. Earn it. A good deed. Reach out to someone in pain. Be of service. It feels good and its good for your soul. Expand Close Chris Pratt accepts the Generation Award (Matt Sayles/Invision/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Chris Pratt accepts the Generation Award (Matt Sayles/Invision/AP) Video of the Day Pratt added: Number six: God is real. God loves you, God wants the best for you. Believe that; I do. For his seventh piece of advice, Pratt told the audience how to go to the toilet at a party. He then added: Number eight: Learn to pray. Its easy, and it is so good for your soul. For his ninth and final rule, the actor told fans they are imperfect but designed by a powerful force. He said: Nobody is perfect. People will tell you that you are perfect just the way that you are, you are not! You are imperfect. You always will be, but there is a powerful force that designed you that way, and if you are willing to accept that, you will have grace. And grace is a gift, and like the freedom that we enjoy in this country that grace was paid for with somebody elses blood. Do not forget that. Dont take that for granted. The producer of a Hollywood film being shot in Scotland has described the Argyll and Bute area as phenomenal. Love You To Death, starring Scottish former Late Late Show presenter Craig Ferguson and actress Kathie Lee Gifford, is being filmed at various locations including Lochgilphead town centre, Inveraray and Cairndow. The films 140 cast and crew have been accommodated at Drimsynie, Lochgilphead, and producer Matthew Weiner praised the area and its people. He said: Our experience of filming in Argyll and Scotland as a whole has been phenomenal, we have never felt so welcomed and supported as Americans. Every view is a postcard! In particular I would like to thank Argyll and Bute Council, Creative Scotland Screen Commission and all the people in Argyll who welcomed us along the way. Filming in Lochgilphead has been one of our highlights. Its a beautiful, historic lochside town which services film so well. I cannot thank the people of Lochgilphead enough for their hospitality. As a New Yorker, I will be going home without a question in my head that I will be returning to Scotland and Argyll. Expand Close Sunrise at Kilchurn Castle, on the banks of Loch Awe, Argyll and Bute (Jane Barlow/PA) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Sunrise at Kilchurn Castle, on the banks of Loch Awe, Argyll and Bute (Jane Barlow/PA) Argyll and Bute Film Office and roads team, along with Creative Scotland, helped facilitate the production. In the film Giffords character Annabelle is a lonely widow who goes on her travels with her husbands ashes to visit places the couple saw and loved in films. Video of the Day While visiting Loch Fyne, she meets Scotsman Craig Ferguson and her plans change dramatically. The filming follows Hollywood blockbuster Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom which was filmed at Glen Mallan Jetty in Arrochar. Local councillor Aileen Morton added: Im thrilled to hear how much the cast and crew of Love You To Death have enjoyed being in Argyll and Bute, and Ive heard there was a real buzz about Lochgilphead when the filming was taking place there. And as much as its great fun to have these productions taking place on our doorstep, there are also real economic benefits attached. We will continue to welcome productions such as this and encourage anyone who is looking for a beautiful and welcoming film location to choose Argyll and Bute. Tiffany Haddish attending the 2018 MTV Movie and TV Awards held at the Barker Hangar in Los Angeles (Francis Specker/PA Wire) The 2018 MTV Movie And TV Awards are under way in Los Angeles. Superhero blockbuster Black Panther and Netflixs sci-fi favourite Stranger Things led the way in nominations ahead of the ceremony, with seven each. Comedian Tiffany Haddish is on hosting duties for the event, and starred in a Black Panther-inspired sketch to open the show. As well as presenting duties, Haddish is up for two awards which are voted for by fans. This is the second year in a row the awards have featured television categories, as well as having gender-neutral prizes. Up for Best Movie are Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther, Girls Trip, IT and Wonder Woman, while Best Show nominees are 13 Reasons Why, Game Of Thrones, Grown-ish, Riverdale and Stranger Things. Michael B. Jordan, Seth Rogen, Zendaya, Kristen Bell and Common are also slated as some of the presenters. .@michaelb4jordan on his 'Best Villain' nomination for Killmonger in @theblackpanther and what to expect from 'Creed II.' Don't miss him at the #MTVAwards TONIGHT at 9/8c on @MTV! pic.twitter.com/NcRFKq77IL Movie & TV Awards (@MTVAwards) June 19, 2018 Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom actor Chris Pratt will be honoured with the Generation Award. Video of the Day Previous winners of the prize include Adam Sandler, Will Smith and Sandra Bullock. Lena Waithe, the first black woman to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series for her work on Master Of None, will be honoured with the Trailblazer Award. Authorities say rapper-singer XXXTentacion has been fatally shot in Florida (Miami- Dade Corrections and Rehabilitation Department via AP) Kanye West has led the tributes to rapper XXXTentacion, who has been shot dead at the age of 20. XXXTentacion, whose real name is Jahseh Onfroy, was attacked in what police suspect was a robbery in Miami, Florida, on Monday. He was leaving RIVA Motorsports in Deerfield Beach shortly before 4pm local time when he was approached by two men, with at least one of the suspects shooting him, Broward Sheriffs Office said. Anyone with information is urged to contact #BSO homicide detectives Walt Foster or John Curcio at (954) 321-4210 or @crimestoppers2, anonymously, at (954) 493-TIPS #XXTENTACION. pic.twitter.com/J97xZ9cHHz Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) June 18, 2018 As news of his death was confirmed, West, DJ Diplo and hip-hop star Juicy J all tweeted their condolences. Along with a picture of the dead rapper, West wrote: Rest in peace I never told you how much you inspired me when you were here thank you for existing. American DJ Diplo shared a picture of himself with XXXTentacion with the words: Thanks for inspiring me. And Juciy J wrote: R.I.P. Xxxtentacion. Video of the Day R.I.P. Xxxtentacion juicy j (@therealjuicyj) June 18, 2018 Broward Sheriffs Office confirmed XXXTentacions death on Twitter, saying in a statement: The adult male that was taken to the hospital has been pronounced dead. The adult male victim has been confirmed as 20 year old Jahseh Onfroy aka rapper #XXXTentacion. Police received a call at 3.57pm local time and XXXTentacion, born in Plantation, Florida, was taken to hospital but later pronounced dead. More than 100 extra Irish troops are being deployed with Unifil, the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon, to fill a gap left by the withdrawal of Finnish and Estonian soldiers from the mission. This will bring the overall number of members of the Defence Forces based in Lebanon to 467, which is the biggest deployment there since 2011. It will increase the size of the Irish contribution to peace operations overseas to around 700 personnel and, as most of them are drawn from the Army, will represent about 10pc of the strength of that part of the military organisation. Writing in the Irish Independent today, Minister with responsibility for Defence Paul Kehoe confirmed the Government plans to provide more peacekeepers to help the Lebanese authorities. The minister is expected to bring a memorandum before the Cabinet shortly to outline his proposals to deploy an additional 107 Defence Forces personnel, primarily privates and non-commissioned officers (NCO) with a small number of officers. Ireland's contribution to the mission currently stands at some 380 personnel, who are part of a joint Irish/Finnish battalion in the area around At Tiri, with two military posts on the 'Blue Line', which separates Lebanon and Israel. The Estonian contingent is also involved there. The Finnish government says its troops are being withdrawn because of other national commitments and will leave in November. The Estonians will pull out at the same time. After examining several options, Department of Defence officials are in discussion with the Czech authorities to replace the Finns and Estonians. In the meantime, the Irish offered to fill the gap for a year from November and send out an extra two companies with the next contingent when the existing battalion hands over after a six-month deployment. The decision is seen as a major boost to the prospects of privates and NCOs gaining overseas experience. A man is putting a planned 5m sale of lands in Co Meath at risk by claiming adverse possession over part of them, a developer has claimed before the Commercial Court. The lands near Dunshaughlin, which are zoned residential, were bought in late 2016 as investment lands from a fund by Colum Peters, Brian Peters and Noel Clarke, Colum Peters, a developer, of County Club, Dunshaughlin, said in an affidavit. He claims they became registered owners in January 2017 and an adverse possession claim by Patrick Delaney, former owner of the lands, which was lodged with the Property Registration Authority of Ireland (PRAI), is holding up a sale of the lands along with other lands. The three purchasers have brought proceedings against Mr Delaney and their counsel Brian Murray SC told Mr Justice Robert Haughton on Monday there was agreement to mediate the dispute. His side also wanted the case transferred to the Commercial Court so it would be fast-tracked if the mediation does not resolve the dispute, he said. Raymond Delahunt BL, for Mr Delaney, said their concern was to minimise costs and he urged the outcome of the mediation be awaited before any entry of the proceedings in the Commercial Court. The plaintiffs application was preemptive as the mediation parameters had yet to be agreed, the PRAI claim was not yet decided, and his side was anxious not to get embroiled in litigation on several fronts, he said. The judge said he would enter the proceedings in the Commercial Court list but would make only minimalist directions pending the result of the mediation. In his affidavit, Colum Peters said Mr Delaney had owned the lands but sold them in September 2005. Mr Delaney's claim was that, on the same day he sold the lands, he went back into adverse possession of them and has had adverse possession since. There was "no factual basis whatsoever" for the adverse possession claim, Mr Peters said. Even if there was, Mr Delaney could not, in law, be in adverse possession as against the plaintiffs because they had acquired the lands from a mortgagee in possession, Promontoria (Aran) Ltd, he said. A squatter's rights cannot affect an existing mortgage, it was claimed. It was in the context of preparing contracts for the sale of the lands his side discovered in May 2018 Mr Delaney had lodged an application with the PRAI, he added. A 14-year old boy with cerebral palsy who sued over the circumstances of his birth at Sligo General Hospital has settled his High Court action for 5 million. Mr Justice Kevin Cross praised the parents of Conor Maxwell for the care they have given their son and the judge said the settlement will now help, "as far as money can" in the future care of the boy. Conor's counsel Des ONeill SC, along with Doireann OMahony BL, told the court Conor has spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy and cannot communicate. Counsel said Conor is happy as far as they understand but has difficulty communicating and also with his vision. Mr O'Neill said the settlement was as a result of mediation between the sides. Conor of Carrickmackeegan, Ballinamore, County Leitrim had, through his mother Evonne Maxwell, sued the HSE over the circumstances of his birth on August 13, 2003. Ms Maxwell was admitted to Sligo General Hospital in labour two weeks before her due date. It was claimed the management of Ms Maxwells labour was incompetent and as a result, the baby was exposed to significant hypoxia-ischaemia. The baby was monitored by continuous CTG but the cardiogram was allegedly abnormal from the beginning. These decelerations it was alleged were indicative of hypoxia in the baby, but their significance was allegedly not appreciated. The CTG, which it was claimed was clearly abnormal and called urgently for intervention but was repeatedly misinterpreted. Conor was born at 07.17 am on August 13, 2003 and required resuscitation and in the hours after his birth developed severe breathing difficulties and had seizures. It was claimed there was an alleged failure to exercise the competence, diligence, care, and judgement to be expected in the management of the labour and delivery. It was further claimed there was an alleged failure to understand, interpret and react to an abnormal cardiogram. The labour, it was claimed was allowed to continue when it was allegedly unsafe to do so and there was an alleged failure to intervene and perform a caesarean. Conor it was alleged could have avoided nearly two hours of hypoxia-ischaemia had a proper standard of care been provided. Conor was referred for neurosurgical opinion due to concerns about hydrocephalus and a wait and watch approach was adopted. Approximately twelve days after his discharge from hospital Conor was readmitted because he was irritable and unwell. He was diagnosed with E. coli meningitis and treated with antibiotics. His condition deteriorated over the following days and he was transferred to Our Ladys Childrens Hospital, Crumlin, Dublin where he underwent shunt placement for hydrocephalus. Mr O'Neill said liability was admitted in the case in relation to negligence and breach of duty but a full defence was submitted in relation to causation. Counsel said the issues around causation were substantial and experts on the HSE would contend when the baby was first discharged from hospital, he was well. Approving the settlement Mr Justice Cross congratulated Conor's mum Evonne and dad, Jason Kellett for the way they have cared for their son. The judge said it was a good settlement and he wished the family all the best for the future. In a statement afterwards, solicitor David O'Malley who represented Conor Maxwell called on the Minister for Health to bring in a duty of candour for all medical negligence claims. He said Health Minister Simon Harris needed to act now. A homeless man who repeatedly stole toothbrushes from Boots despite being arrested several times has been sentenced to 18 months in prison. Mareks Treinovskis (32) went into the Grafton Street branch of Boots pharmacy eight times last year to steal electric toothbrushes and razors worth a total of 4,323, a court heard. None of the toothbrushes were ever recovered. However after one theft, gardai apprehended Treinovskis outside the Grafton Street store and seized almost 400 worth of stolen Gillette razors from him. Passing sentence at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court today, Judge Melanie Greally asked the investigating garda if anything particular had drawn the accused to the Grafton Street branch of Boots. The garda replied that Treinovskis kind of figured out that the security guard at the Grafton St store did not start work until 11am, and that all of the thefts had taken place between 8:30 and 9am. Treinovskis pleaded guilty to four counts of theft carried out between February 20 and September 25, 2017. A further four counts were taken into consideration. The investigating garda told Tom Neville BL, prosecuting, that Treinovskis was first arrested in April last year after being identified on CCTV carrying out two separate thefts of Braun electric shavers and an electric toothbrush. He was remanded on bail but continued to steal Oral B electric toothbrushes and razors from the store three more times before being arrested again last September. Treinovskis was again charged and remanded on bail but carried out three further thefts of toothbrushes at the store until he was arrested a final time and went into custody last November. He has 56 previous convictions, all of which were dealt with at District Court level, including theft, criminal damage and road traffic matters. Aoife O'Halloran BL, defending, said Treinovskis had stolen the goods to feed his heroin addiction. She said her client had arrived in Ireland from Latvia during the Celtic Tiger and had worked in construction for eight years. Ms O'Halloran said Treinovskis had been drinking with friends a number of years ago and had been offered a joint which he thought was cannabis, but turned out to have been laced with heroin. Since then, she said, Treinovskis had struggled with heroin addiction on and off but was now clean of all drugs and attending a treatment programme at Merchants' Quay. The court heard that Treinovskis has a young daughter with whom he has intermittent contact although he would like to remedy this. Judge Greally accepted that Treinovskis had had a good work record and good relationships, but that his addiction to heroin had rendered all of that part of his past. She said although Treinovskis claimed to be drug free, she had no evidence to support this. Treinovskis was sentenced to 18 months on all counts, backdated to November 11, 2017. Martin Sherlock was convicted following a four-day trial after just over five hours of deliberations. A Meath man convicted of raping a woman he met on dating app Badoo was caught through "ingenious detective work" on the part of investigating gardai, a court has heard. Martin Sherlock (30) and the woman had arranged to meet but she told him they could not have sex without a condom. She started to feel uncomfortable during other sexual activity and said he did not stop when she said "no". The woman decided the only way for him to leave was to let it happen. Prosecuting counsel Eilis Brennan BL told the Central Criminal Court that the key issue in the case was that the victim had said no to sex without a condom. The woman said she thought Badoo was "a way to meet boys". The upset woman contacted a friend after the incident and after discussing it with him, contacted gardai. Sherlock, of Athlumney Wood, Navan, Co Meath, had pleaded not guilty to raping the woman at her Dublin home on August 14, 2015. He had admitted stealing the woman's mobile phone. He has no previous convictions. Sherlock was convicted following a four-day trial after just over five hours of deliberations. The court heard Sherlock has since lost his job and his wedding plans have been cancelled. Expand Close Martin Sherlock arrives at court. Photo: Collins / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Martin Sherlock arrives at court. Photo: Collins Gardai arrested Sherlock following a "sting" operation in which gardai arranged to meet him as he was selling a phone through DoneDeal. Sherlock was arrested and, on being asked about the woman by gardai, replied: "I know she said no but we had already started." Gardai were able to recover the woman's phone that he had sold. Nothing had been removed from the phone apart from the WhatsApp application. The woman, in her victim impact statement, outlined how the offence had adversely affected her life. She said she had been asked to source her medical records in relation to her mental health, which she found difficult and was offended that it mattered to the case. She said she wondered whether she had ruined Sherlock's life by reporting the offence, but said she was now glad she had done it. The woman said she felt "so stupid and such an idiot" when she found out he had been living with a girlfriend. The court heard testimonials from family members and from Sherlock's fiancee who described him as a "caring, kind, generous and shy man". Sherlock's fiancee said she had known him since 2011 and he had contributed to their relationship "in every way a partner should". She said she had been "utterly shocked" when she found out about the case. Mr Justice Patrick McCarthy adjourned finalisation of sentence until July 2 and remanded Sherlock in custody. Blaise O'Carroll SC, defending, said Sherlock was "profoundly sorry" for the events and wished to apologise to the woman. A key witness in the Gareth Hutch murder case gave what a senior garda described as an explosive statement about the killing when she was interviewed at her home, a court heard. Detective Sergeant Enda OSullivan said the statement was unbelievable and his immediate priority had been to get the woman and her two teenage daughters to safety when he heard it. He was giving evidence at the Special Criminal Court in the trial of two men and a woman who are accused of murdering Mr Hutch in a north inner city flats complex car park. Jonathan Keogh (32) along with his sister Regina Keogh (41) and Thomas Fox (31) have denied the murder of Mr Hutch on May 24, 2016. Expand Close Jonathan Keogh and Thomas Fox. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Jonathan Keogh and Thomas Fox. Mr Hutch (36), a nephew of Gerry "The Monk" Hutch, was shot dead outside Avondale House flats on North Cumberland Street. It is the State's case Mr Keogh, of Gloucester Place, Dublin 1, threatened to kill Mr Hutch the evening before the shooting. It is alleged that Mr Fox, of Rutland Court, Dublin 1, and Ms Keogh, of Avondale House, were instrumental in planning the murder, and Mr Keogh and another man were the shooters. Today, Det Sgt Enda OSullivan, who gave evidence previously, was cross examined by Sean Guerin SC, for Mr Keogh, about a statement given by Mary McDonnell of Avondale House. The court has heard two suspects were seen on CCTV coming from her flat on the morning of the murder. Det Sgt OSullivan said he viewed CCTV which included footage of two suspects coming from the direction of Ms McDonnells flat. On May 25, he viewed more footage from earlier on the morning of May 24 of two individuals going into the flat. Mr Guerin asked if the only new information from that footage was how long the suspects had been there. Det Sgt OSullivan said one of the people was seen carrying a plastic bag with him on the way up and he believed the guns were contained in that bag. Expand Close Regina Keogh also denies murder charges / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Regina Keogh also denies murder charges The court heard the gardai obtained a warrant and searched the home of Mary McDonnell on May 25, which had been declared a crime scene. Det Sgt OSullivan said he was having general conversation with Ms McDonnell about her family and the neighbourhood. She told us where she likes to sit and she sees and hears everything from that spot on the couch beside the window that overlooks Avondale House, Det Sgt OSullivan said. This, he said, led into the conversation that led to her talking about the fight between Gary Hutch and Jonathan Keogh the night before the murder. He denied that this meant someone asked her what she could and could not see. Det Sgt OSullivan could not recall anything that was said to her by his colleagues. He said she was asked to go back to Mountjoy Garda Station to make a statement but she declined and said she wanted to make the statement in her apartment. Ms McDonnell was not a suspect at that stage, and he did not know whether she had been in the apartment, he said. Mr Guerin said in her statement the day before, Ms McDonnell had said she was in the apartment when her attention was drawn by one of her children to the noise of the shooting. Det Sgt OSullivan said they were still investigating and he did not take anything at face value. Mr Guerin said Det Sgt OSullivan had reasonable suspicion that the two suspect shooters had been in Ms McDonnells apartment for around three hours on the morning of the murder and still he said she was not a suspect. Mr Guerin asked why he would not suspect someone who had sheltered shooters in her home and who lied to the gardai about what happened there. If I had made that decision she would have been arrested, Det Sgt OSullivan said. He said he looked into her history and that of the address and there were no obvious links to criminality. Mr Guerin said it was incredible that Det Sgt OSullivan would not have suspected her and would show extraordinary gullibility on his part. Det Sgt OSullivan said by the time she made her statement, other matters overtook everything else and his main priority was the safety of Ms McDonnell and her children. At the end of her statement, she had disclosed serious information which Det Sgt OSullivan wanted to verify and when those details were provided, he had immediate concerns for their safety. He asked Ms McDonnell to come to Mountjoy Garda Station because he wanted to bring her to a place of safety, he said. It was actually unbelievable, the content of what she said, I struggled myself to believe it and wanted to verify it, Det Sgt OSullivan said. It was an explosive statement, to say the least. In the general conversation, he said, they had discussed another murder weeks earlier at Sunset House and how people were nervous in the area about this supposed gang feud and what it was doing to the local community. North Central has been absolutely destroyed by this gang feud, its the only part of Dublin where both sides are living side by side, Det Sgt OSullivan said. He denied he and his colleagues tried to encourage Ms McDonnell to have fears about living there but he did encourage her after not to return to Avondale House. Everyone in the community knew she was in a a very serious predicament and she was exposed, he said. No notes were taken by anyone in the general conversation they had before her statement, he said. Mr Guerin said this was an extraordinary failure of basic garda competence and procedures. Det Sgt OSullivan disagreed. Mr Guerin put it to him that when she said she felt safe in her home, he told her: Dont you believe Gareth felt the same way? Read More His cross-examination continues tomorrow. A man accused of being the world's biggest facilitator of child pornography has lost an appeal aimed at halting his extradition to the United States. Eric Eoin Marques is wanted by the American authorities on charges including conspiring to distribute and advertise child pornography and advertising and distributing child pornography. The FBI believes he is the owner and administrator of an anonymous hosting site known as Freedom Hosting. The charges against Mr Marques, with an address at Mountjoy Square, Dublin 1, relate to images on more than 100 "anonymous websites" described as being extremely violent, graphic and depicting the rape and torture of pre- pubescent children. He was arrested by gardai in 2013 on foot of a formal request from the US. He has opposed his extradition and has brought a number of separate but related actions against his proposed extradition, including a challenge against the DPP's decision not to prosecute him in Ireland for offences he is wanted for in the US. His lawyers argued the Justice Minister needed to know the reasons why the DPP decided not to prosecute before the minister could properly exercise his discretion before making an order for Mr Marques' surrender. His application was dismissed by the High Court and he appealed that ruling to the Court of Appeal, which yesterday dismissed the appeal and said the High Court was entirely correct in its decision. The case will return before the court on Friday when lawyers for Mr Marques may seek to have the case appealed to the Supreme Court. The mother of a six-year-old child, who broke an arm while "gallivanting" around a seating bay in a Dublin restaurant, has withdrawn a 60,000 personal injury claim against the franchise of the Eddie Rockets eatery. Belinda OConnor, mother of Darragh OConnor, of Moatview Drive, Priorswood, Dublin, withdrew the claim against Sunspel Limited after Judge Terence OSullivan had viewed a CCTV video of the incident in the Eddie Rockets City Diner in Swords, Co Dublin, three years ago. Barrister Philip Fennell, who appeared with Stephen Mackenzie Solicitors for Sunspel, told the Circuit Civil Court Tuesday that a full defence denying any negligence to the claim had been entered on behalf of the defendant. Judge OSullivan, after viewing the video prior to anyone giving evidence on the childs behalf, said the boy, then aged six, was under the control of his parents at the time. I have seen what went on. The child was gallivanting around behind his mother and had ended up in another seating position, Judge OSullivan said. He told counsel for the boy - now nine - and his mother that while the group of five had been directed to sit in a seating bay for four persons they had not been directed by Sunspel to have the child sit on the edge of the seat facing outwards at right angles to the group. Judge OSullivan said it was bizarre to blame Sunspel, of Phibsboro Place, Dublin, for having caused the child to fall out of the bay because he had been permitted to sit in that particular way. The boy had initially been sitting on the inside and had climbed behind his mother to the edge. The court had been told the boy fell from an overloaded bench seat after staff had directed five people to sit in a booth area designed for four. Judge OSullivan said the case was not one destined to succeed based on what he had seen on the CCTV and clearly had just an accident. He was concerned that the childs mother could face an order for legal costs. He said he appreciated the child had suffered a bad injury and felt the boys counsel should take further instructions in relation to the matter. Shortly afterwards, when told the claim was withdrawn, Judge OSullivan said he felt this was the sensible thing to do, Sunspell did not seek an order for its legal costs against the boys mother. Earlier the claim, initially taken against Eddie Rockets Limited, was amended to substitute the name of the proper defendant, Sunspel Limited. THIS is the computer programmer and former UCD student who raped one woman and sexually assaulted two other women within the space of 10 days. Patrick Nevin (36) met the women through the dating application Tinder. Nevin pleaded guilty to two of the charges before the Central Criminal Court this morning. The defendant, with a most recent address at Meadowlands Court, Mounttown, Dun Laoghaire, was remanded in custody pending the production of a forensic psychiatrist's report. The defendant pleaded guilty to the rape of a woman at Bellewstown, Co Meath on July 12, 2014. He also admitted to sexually assaulting a second woman at an unknown place in Co Meath on July 16, 2014. Wearing a white t-shirt, jeans and black bomber jacket, Nevin stood when the charges were put to him. He replied "guilty" to both counts. Ms Justice Eileen Creedon remanded Nevin in custody until the end of July for facts and sentencing. Last year, a jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court found Nevin guilty of sexually assaulting an English language student at the UCD campus at Belfield on July 23, 2014. In that case, the jury heard the pair met on the dating app, Tinder. The victim, who was from Brazil, gave evidence that Nevin touched her thighs, forced her to kiss him, hit her on the back of the head, called her a "f*cking b*tch" and pulled down the top part of her dress and exposed her breast. The 36-year-old had denied the sexual assault, claiming the English language student "freaked out" and "started crying" when he tried to kiss her. He told gardai he believed they were "hooking up" but she said that she never told him she wanted to meet up for sex. However, after one and a half hours of deliberations, the jury of six men and six women returned with a verdict of guilty CONVICTED rapist Patrick Nevin seven months ago settled a 60,000 personal injuries claim in the Circuit Civil Court but at the time could not be identified due to outstanding rape and sexual assault charges against him to which he pleaded guilty to on Tuesday. The 36-year-old assaulted three women he had met on the dating app Tinder over a 10-day period in July 2014. It can now be confirmed that, on November 7 last year, Nevin attended the civil court handcuffed to a prison officer but did not go into court. He stood in a corridor while his barrister negotiated with his the legal team for taximan Irfan Ahmed and AM Taxi Rental Group, both of whose addresses were given as c/o Liberty Insurance, Dublin Road, Cavan. Nevin (36) of Meadowlands Court, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin had sued Ahmed and the taxi rental company for 60,000 damages arising out of a road traffic accident. Circuit Court President, Mr Justice Raymond Groarke, was told in November last that following talks outside the court the case had been settled and could be struck out with an order for Nevins legal costs against both defendants. As the father-of-two had been facing a new rape charge and one of sexual assault, on which reporting restrictions existed at the time, he could not be identified even in the civil proceedings. Liability had been conceded by the defendants insurers and the case had been listed for half an hour as an assessment of damages only. The court had been told at the morning call-over that there were ongoing talks between the parties. Nevin had been described in pleadings as a software consultant with a date of birth of 14th July 1981. In his pleadings he claimed that on Saturday 14th June, 2014 at about 12:30am his car had been stationery at traffic lights outside Trinity College, College Green, Dublin, when he was rear ended by Ahmeds taxi. He alleged he had been extremely shocked and shaken and initially had no physical complaints but had neck and shoulder pains and a headache when he awoke the following morning. A few days later he had attended his GP who had noted he had tenderness of his neck and shoulder and discomfort in his lower back. No details of the settlement had been disclosed in open court but the order for costs to the plaintiff indicated the settlement in the 60,000 case had been made in his favour. Earlier today the former UCD student, who, within the space of 10 days raped one woman and sexually assaulted two others, all of whom he had met through the dating site Tinder, pleaded guilty in the Central Criminal Court to rape and sexual assault. He was remanded in custody for a forensic psychiatrists report. Nevin met the women through the dating application Tinder. Nevin pleaded guilty to two of the charges before the Central Criminal Court this morning. The defendant pleaded guilty to the rape of a woman at Bellewstown, Co Meath on July 12, 2014. He also admitted to sexually assaulting a second woman at an unknown place in Co Meath on July 16, 2014. Wearing a white t-shirt, jeans and black bomber jacket, Nevin stood when the charges were put to him. He replied "guilty" to both counts. Ms Justice Eileen Creedon remanded Nevin in custody until the end of July for facts and sentencing. Last year, a jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court found Nevin guilty of sexually assaulting an English language student at the UCD campus at Belfield on July 23, 2014. In that case, the jury heard the pair met on the dating app, Tinder. The victim, who was from Brazil, gave evidence that Nevin touched her thighs, forced her to kiss him, hit her on the back of the head, called her a "f*cking b*tch" and pulled down the top part of her dress and exposed her breast. The 36-year-old had denied the sexual assault, claiming the English language student "freaked out" and "started crying" when he tried to kiss her. He told gardai he believed they were "hooking up" but she said that she never told him she wanted to meet up for sex. However, after one and a half hours of deliberations, the jury of six men and six women returned with a verdict of guilty. The tax inspector in charge of the case against Independent TD Michael Lowry has accepted that he never met with the politician to discuss the investigation against him. It is the State's case that Mr Lowry's company, Garuda Ltd, received 248,624 (372,000) in commission from Norpe OY, a refrigeration company based in Finland, in August 2002. It is alleged that Mr Lowry arranged for this payment to be made to a third party, Kevin Phelan, residing in the Isle of Man, and therefore it didn't appear in the company accounts for that year, nor did he declare it as income. It is further alleged that the accounts were then falsified in 2007 to reflect that the payment was received in 2006. Tim Lester, a tax inspector, who headed up the criminal prosecution against Mr Lowry and Garuda agreed with Michael O'Higgins SC, defending the TD, that attempts were made to meet his client to conduct an interview. He accepted that a number of attempts were made and Mr Lowry suggested potential dates for meeting but he ultimately never questioned him. Mr Lester said that once the investigation commenced and summons had been issued, he was advised that he should not interview Mr Lowry. He confirmed that the file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions on September 30, 2013 and a supplementary report was submitted on November 14, 2013. Mr Lester confirmed that an individual's obligation to pay tax arises when money is earned. He accepted a suggestion from Mr O'Higgins that the prosecution are not in a position to show when the commission of 372,000 was accrued and agreed that there is no documentation to reflect the receipt of the 372,000. Mr O'Higgins said he accepted that if documents were missing, it does not absolve an obligation to pay tax but added that with no invoice relevant to the payment it is impossible to determine when the money is earned. Read More Mr Lester agreed with Patrick Treacy SC, defending Garuda, that an unsigned CT1(corporation tax) form was submitted to Revenue on October 3, 2003 and later processed. He accepted that a faxed copy of this CT1 form, signed by Mr Lowry, and sent by his company to his accountants, BBT, on October 2, 2003 was an exhibit in the case. Mr Lester agreed that Garuda is not charged with filing incorrect corporation tax for 2002, rather it is charged with filing an incorrect corporation tax for 2006. In re-examination by Remy Farrell SC, prosecuting, Mr Lester confirmed that he carried out enquiries as to what happened when the 372,000 left Norpe OY. He identified a deposit advice from a bank on the Isle of Man that showed that Stg 248,624 was received by the Glebe Trust by order of Norpe OY. Read More Mr Lester identified a letter dated November 2, 2010 and addressed to a K Phelan of Omagh, in Tyrone, asking Mr Phelan to confirm the relationship he had with Norpe OY and enquiring as to why Stg 248,624 was paid into the Glebe Trust by Norpe. Mr Lowry (64) of Glenreigh, Holycross, Co. Tipperary, has pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to four charges of filing incorrect tax returns on dates between August 2002 and August 2007 in relation to a sum of Stg 248,624 received by his company, Garuda Ltd, and one charge in relation to failing to keep a proper set of accounts on dates between 28 August, 2002 and August 3, 2007. He further pleaded not guilty on behalf of Garuda Ltd to three similar charges in relation to the company's tax affairs and one charge of failing to keep a proper set of accounts on the same dates. The prosecution has closed its case before Judge Martin Nolan and the trial continued in legal argument in the absence of the jury of eight men and three women. The son of former President Patrick Hillery has resigned from his post as a psychiatrist in the HSE in protest at the state of mental health services which left him "ethically compromised". Dr John Hillery worked in the mental health and intellectual disability services for nearly 30 years. He described how in his own case the lack of a respite service for young men with autism, who suffer behavioural distress, left him with no option but to prescribe them medication to relieve this. It is the only way to provide some relief for their family who were caring for them and trying to cope without a break. "Most of my colleagues are finding themselves in ethically compromising situations on a regular basis," he warned. He cited a lack of investment and staffing, combined with a "bureaucracy gone mad" attitude in the HSE, for making it more difficult for doctors to deliver the care patients need. He referred to the recent decision of three child psychiatrists in the south-east to also quit. They revealed how they were working in a building with just a chair, barely blinds on the window and "snails on the walls". Dr Hillery, who was addressing the Family Carers Ireland conference Life After Care, also questioned the Government's priorities. The proposal to build a Metro link to the airport in Dublin is at risk of being at the expense of vulnerable people who are sick and disabled and desperate for support. More than a decade after the Vision for Change document, which set out a blueprint to develop mental health services, its budget remains around half of what was recommended. The HSE said since the establishment of its mental health division in 2013 there have been have been tangible service improvements. Since 2013 mental health expenditure has increased from 709m to 867m, an increase of 22pc. HOUSE hunters will find it harder to get a mortgage and tougher to find a home after an influential think-tank dramatically slashed its projection for new builds. The State-backed ESRI is now expecting just 18,700 homes to be built this year, compared with a previous forecast of 25,000. The ESRI also cut its forecast for homes to be built next year from 31,000 to 23,200. The massive shortfall of about 14,100 properties comes amid the controversy over 'phantom homes', after it emerged last week that Department of Housing figures on new homes were hugely overstated. Analysts at bodies ranging from stockbrokers Davy to estate agents Savills have said that 35,000 extra units a year will be needed. Dr Conor O'Toole, senior research officer at the ESRI, said: "We had expected housing completions of 25,000 units this year, up to 31,000 next year. If you take into account the level shift with the new CSO data... our figures would be closer to 18,700 units this year." He said that the ESRI "certainly welcomed" the new, more accurate data and it gave an "important insight" - but that the country was further away from meeting the demand for houses than had been previously thought. In its Quarterly Economic Commentary for Summer 2018, the ESRI said the Central Bank should consider making banks hold more money in reserve to guard against excessive lending. The recommendations raise the prospect of house buyers finding it more difficult to get a mortgage, while the number of new houses on the market lags previous expectations. Dr O'Toole said that while lending risk was being managed "much better" by the banks, compared with the Celtic Tiger, this could "quickly unravel". He said there was no case for loosening the Central Bank's mortgage caps, and that in fact it should consider tightening the amount of money available via methods other than the mortgage caps. He said asking banks to hold more money in reserve "may be an approach that's prudent" given the current state of the market. "Using these other levers and tightening those may be an appropriate way to manage the cycle going forward," Dr O'Toole said. The think-tank also said there was no scope for a giveaway Budget this year, because of the Government's spending commitments for the National Development Plan, which is designed to boost this country's infrastructure. ESRI research professor Kieran McQuinn said the Budget should be neutral and increases in spending should be matched by increases in the tax take. "You really would want to be very wary about stimulating the economy through for instance any changes in personal tax rates or any change in tax rates generally," he said. "If you do want to reduce personal taxation rates... we think those should be offset by increases in taxation elsewhere so that the overall package is neutral." Prof McQuinn said he thought the planned 'rainy day fund' was a good idea in principle. The fund, set to be introduced by Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe, will be used to set aside money that can boost the economy in the event of a downturn. The ESRI echoed recent warnings on Ireland's exposure to turbulent geopolitical events. "Growing political uncertainty in Italy, the exact nature of Brexit and the possibility of international trade wars could all have an adverse impact on the global economy," it said. "The Irish economy, given its highly open nature, is especially vulnerable to these developments." Ms McNulty said she looked on the site this morning and say while the product has changed, but warned that RTEs Miriam OCallaghan is now being used to sell two other products. Photo: RTE RTE broadcaster Miriam OCallaghan confirmed today that she has nothing to do with a beauty line that is using her name to market their products. Ms O'Callaghan told RTEs Liveline that the product is a scam and she has engaged her lawyers to have the ads taken down immediately. Speaking on Liveline today, caller Vicki McNulty of Galway explained how she had ordered anti-wrinkle cream from what was advertised as the RTE presenters new skin care line: TryVix. Basically the webpage was saying that Miriam O'Callaghan was leaving RTE to develop and market this wonderful anti-aging cream so I got curious,said Ms McNulty. I read the article and it showed pictures of Miriam with other colleagues from RTE, well-known colleagues and there were testimonials and at the bottom of the page they said they were sending out free samples of the product. Although the advertisement said she would only have to pay for shipping, weeks later Ms McNulty began to receive unexplained transactions on the account she used for purchase. Expand Close Liveline caller Vicki McNulty of Galway explained how she had ordered anti-wrinkle cream from what was advertised as the RTE presenters new skin care line: TryVix. Photo: RTE / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Liveline caller Vicki McNulty of Galway explained how she had ordered anti-wrinkle cream from what was advertised as the RTE presenters new skin care line: TryVix. Photo: RTE Last week, Ms McNulty received a letter from the Financial Crime Unit of Bank of Ireland to discuss transactions on the account. She was then asked by the Crime Unit if she had recently purchased a product of 99 and the transaction was cancelled and future transactions from that account were blocked. With this particular type of website, normally theres a box that you tick at the very bottom, which I didnt see to unsubscribe from receiving the product or which disallows them from debiting different amounts from your account, Ms McNulty explained. Ms McNulty said she looked on the site this morning and say while the product has changed, but warned that RTEs Miriam OCallaghan is now being used to sell two other products. I just thought because they were using a very well-known TV presenter Miriam OCallaghan that other people may fall for this, she said. Expand Close Ms McNulty said there was webpage saying that Miriam McCallaghan was leaving RTE to develop and market this wonderful anti-aging cream so I got curious. Photo: RTE. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Ms McNulty said there was webpage saying that Miriam McCallaghan was leaving RTE to develop and market this wonderful anti-aging cream so I got curious. Photo: RTE. So just if anyone is interested in buying any of those products tell them to stay away from them. Vera Twomey-Barry from Aghabullogue. co. Cork pictured with her daughter Ava, who suffers from Dravet's Syndrome. Pic: Daragh Mc Sweeney/Provision AN IRISH health campaigner has been honoured with an invitation to address the UK House of Commons on the legalisation of medicinal cannabis. Vera Twomey will speak before a powerful health committee in Westminster alongside other campaigners from England, Scotland, Wales and Europe. The submissions are aimed at persuading the UK Government to allow cannabis to be sourced within the UK for medicinal purposes on a special license system. "I couldn't believe it when I was first contacted and asked if I would speak at the House of Commons," the Cork mother said. "I never thought I would ever be asked to do something like this." "But if it helps any other family who find themselves facing the plight that we did, then I am glad to do it." The issue of legalising medicinal cannabis in the UK has become extremely high profile over recent months. Last week, a Northern Ireland family had a supply of medicinal cannabis - secured for their sick child - taken off them at an airport. The medicines were later returned to them. Expand Close Ava and Vera Twomey / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Ava and Vera Twomey Vera made national headlines with her determined campaign to secure access to medicinal cannabis in Ireland for her daughter, Ava (8). Ava suffers from Dravet's Syndrome. The condition, which is effectively immune to more traditional medical treatments, is the most drastic form of epilepsy and leaves Ava facing life-threatening seizures. At one point, Ava was suffering up to 16 seizures a day, however, Ava's condition has dramatically improved with the use of medicinal cannabis. Her seizures have now effectively stopped. The Cork mother waged a determined two year battle to secure a special license for Ava to get access to medicinal cannabis treatment in Ireland. Until the license was granted, she brought Ava to the Netherlands where such medicinal cannabis treatments are readily available. The family finally secured a license to provide medicinal cannabis to Ava in Ireland - but then had to battle to secure a commitment from the Government for the medicine costs to be defrayed. It was costing the family 5,000 every 12 weeks to pay for special medicinal cannabis treatments for Ava. "Ava turned to me (recently) and said: 'I love you.' That took us eight years to achieve - eight years to get her well enough to say that." Vera became a high profile campaigner for access to medicinal cannabis treatments by undertaking a walk from her Cork home to Dublin to protest outside the Dail. The Cork mother also took her campaign to Europe. She has received multiple awards for her health campaigning work. A prisoner dubbed Spider-Man by fellow inmates because he has repeatedly climbed on to the roof of different jails to collect drug parcels has fallen 40 feet and broken at least three different bones during his latest escapade. The convict, who cannot be named as he is currently before the courts on serious charges, fell from the roof of the S Block of Cloverhill Prison in the early hours of Tuesday morning, following a 10-hour stand-off with staff. Sources confirmed to the Sunday World how the 26-year-old climbed on to the roof of the F Block, adjacent to a recreation area in the prison, at 3.30pm on Monday to retrieve parcels of uncollected drugs from the roof. After being spotted by officers, the inmate refused to come down and is believed to have begun ingesting various parcels of unidentified drugs. Sources say officers repeatedly pleaded with the inmate to come down before negotiators were brought in with a view to securing his safe descent. As the 10-hour drama continued, a number of officers climbed on to the roof in a bid to get to the inmate, only for him to threaten that he would throw himself off the roof if they came too close. Ultimately the inmate did come down, but did so by plummeting on to a grass area beneath the roof after losing his footing at 1.30am in the morning. The inmate was rushed to hospital, where he remains after sustaining at least three broken bones. Previously, the same inmate was responsible for sparking a major security alert in Mountjoy Prison when he climbed on to the roof of the north inner city Dublin jail to collect drugs that were thrown up on to security netting. On that occasion the inmate also consumed drugs that had been dropped on the roof during the stand-off. The inmate previously served a three-and-a-half year sentence for producing an article and has been locked up since last year. He has multiple previous convictions. Both Mountjoy and Cloverhill have in recent years erected expensive systems of netting around its walls in a bid to prevent drugs being thrown into the exercise yard. Despite such measures, drugs do get into prisons, with dealers using inventive methods to bypass security measures. In June of 2014, dozens of prisoners were left like zombies after consuming narcotics from a drone that crash-landed in Wheatfield Prison in west Dublin. The majority of drugs that were on the 2,000 drone made it into the jail after it came down in an exercise yard. The drone got caught on anti-helicopter wires, put in place to prevent any airborne escape attempts using larger aircraft. Sources yesterday confirmed that criminals are using ever more inventive methods of getting drugs into Irish prisons, but they said that every effort is being made to combat this. Serial Rapist Paul Moore pictured in Dublin after his release from prison SERIAL rapist Paul Moore is back on the streets of Dublin. Our exclusive photographs show the 52-year-old sex offender walking the streets of the capital after being released following his latest jail term. In the space of 25 years Moore has: Raped a woman in 1995 - he was sentenced to seven years in prison. Raped another woman, a musician, in 2001. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. Engaged a woman in conversation in Gardiner Street near his apartment in January 2015 before sexually assaulting her. Engaged another woman in conversation at St Mary's Place North, 500 metres from his door, in May 2015, before sexually assaulting her. He received a 15-month sentence for the Gardiner Street and the St Mary's Place attacks. Engaged another victim in conversation on a Dart train before sexually assaulting her in August 2014. He was sentenced to three years in prison, with 18 months suspended. A report from the Probation Service has said that Moore, who owns an apartment in Mountjoy Square, expressed no remorse, had proved resistant to all efforts to rehabilitate him and posed an indefinite danger to adult females. In March last year, he was handed down an 18-month sentence for his last known attack sexually assaulting a young woman on a Dart train in 2014. He sat next to her and tried to start a conversation, before touching her breasts and pulling at her trousers. PREDISPOSITION Gardai examined CCTV footage of the incident but Moore was not recognised until two years later. Expand Close Paul Moore back on the streets of Dublin / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Paul Moore back on the streets of Dublin In the meantime, he had sexually assaulted two women in separate incidents near his apartment in the city centre. In 2015, he was jailed for 15 months for these attacks. In that case, Judge Martin Nolan noted Moore has a predisposition to violence towards women, which manifests as rape and sexual assault. His other offences include raping the musician in 2001, for which he received 10 years, and raping another woman in 1995, for which he received seven years. Last year, Judge Melanie Greally said Moores inability to desist from offending, no matter what punishment was imposed, was a matter of real concern to the court. She said the legal system did not allow for preventative detention regardless of how compelling the argument might be. When sentencing him for the attack on the Dart, Judge Greally ordered that Moore keep to a curfew from 10pm to 8am for the next 10 years. He must also remain alcohol and intoxicant-free when in public and address his alcohol use. Moore pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to sexually assaulting the woman on August 28, 2014. Judge Greally suspended the final 18 months of a three-year sentence on strict conditions. When he was being sentenced in March last year, a copy of the Herald was produced in court with a report on Moore on the front page. Judge Greally said, youd want to be living on planet Mars to be unaware of publicity this case has attracted and that Moores inability to stop offending was a real concern to the court. TRACKED Moore is now living back at the Mountjoy Square apartment. We tracked him yesterday as he left his home at around 9.40am before walking briskly into the city centre. On his way he stopped to ask a young woman the time. At Liberty Hall, a young woman stopped him and asked him for directions, which he provided. A short distance later he asked a passing stranger for a cigarette and smoked it as he walked up the quays toward OConnell Bridge. He then went into a city centre betting shop for a short time before making his way to the Bank of Ireland at College Green. He was there as the doors opened at 10am and spent 20 minutes inside before walking back toward his apartment, stopping another stranger for a cigarette. The almost life-sized wooden E-Type Jaguar, recently made famous by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sold today for 4,000 in a massive two-day sale at Heritage Hotel, Killenard Picture: Michael Donnelly. A nearly life-size wooden replica of the classic E-Type Jaguar used by Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on their wedding day has been sold for 4,000 today. The Harry and Meghan style Jag comes complete with a sculpted front grill, multi-spoke wheels and even includes a working wooden steering wheel on a rolling chassis. The wooden vehicle is two-thirds life size and was just one of the many items from Dublins Cafe en Seine, to be auctioned off today at the Heritage Hotel Killenard. The two-day sale features 3,000 items from Cafe en Seines decorative Paris 1900s style interiors including mirrors, statues and giant urns. Niall Mullen, who hosted the biggest auction in the history of the state last year for the disposal of the contents of the Central Bank, said: The car is true in every detail, its an amazing folly and a stunning copy of the real thing." Mr Mullen said anything decorative or a bit quirky is attracting big money, including a set of 1940s petrol pumps converted into a cocktail cabinet that sold 7,500 and a pair of 12 ft-high bronze cranes which went for 4,500. "Cafe en Seine's bronzes have been making well above their guide price, while the petrol pumps are a very unusual sculptural piece, and won the Late Late Show's antiques restoration competition this year," Mr Mullen said. Other unusual antiques that caught buyers eyes today included an original Elverys enamel sign from the late 19th century went for 1,000 while a painting by Belfast artist Brian Ballard fetched 5,500. Expand Close The almost life-sized wooden E-Type Jaguar, recently made famous by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sold today for 4,000 in a massive two-day sale at Heritage Hotel, Killenard. Picture: Michael Donnelly. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The almost life-sized wooden E-Type Jaguar, recently made famous by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle sold today for 4,000 in a massive two-day sale at Heritage Hotel, Killenard. Picture: Michael Donnelly. The auction will conclude tomorrow and is in partnership with Victor Mee auctioneers and includes other items from Mercantile Group venues. Mr Mullen said: Tomorrow's sale includes many of the large statues and bronzes from Cafe en Seine such as Coming Through the Rye (est value 4,000/5,000) by American sculptor Fredirick Remington whose Bronco Buster statue resides in the White House Oval Office. "The Cafe's bars, fireplaces, mirrors, Art Nouveau panelling and other interior items also go under the hammer tomorrow. "Everything must go and there is no reserve. We take absentee and online bids and we are happily welcoming lots of eager bidders. CAROL Nolan has quit Sinn Fein after she opposed the party's policy on abortion. Offaly TD Ms Nolan had been suspended from the party for three months after she voted against the holding of the abortion referendum. Sinn Fein's policy was to support repealing the Eighth Amendment. Ms Nolan has today handed in her resignation. At the weekend Sinn Fein members at the party's ard fheis voted to amend its policy so that its TDs can support legislation allowing for abortion up to 12 weeks. The party leadership can now to set policy on the issue informed by the best available medical advice. A second motion calling for Sinn Fein TDs to have a free vote on abortion like Fine Gael and Fianna Fail was heavily rejected. Ms Nolan announced her resignation in a statement this afternoon. She said: "I feel that as a pro-life republican woman that I no longer have a place in this party which doesn't recognise or show genuine respect for the pro-life views of members. "It was disappointing that at the Ard Fheis which took place in Belfast at the weekend, the party's delegates voted against the motion to allow members to have a conscience vote on the issue of abortion." Ms Nolan said she feels that it's "unethical to force TDs who are strongly opposed to abortion to vote against their conscience. "Every TD in Leinster House is directly responsible for the laws that they enact, if a TD votes for abortion they are responsible for all abortions that happen in this state. "I do not want to have any hand, act or part in bringing about the end to the life of an unborn child, the most vulnerable in our society." She added: "It is not for politicians or society in general to decide who lives or dies. "Every life is precious and every child deserves the chance to live." Ms Nolan said she doesn't think abortion is the solution to any crisis, adding: "how can it be when it takes the right to life away from the unborn? "I cannot and will not support abortion and for that reason I have made a decision to leave Sinn Fein." She said she will continue to represent constituents as an Independent TD. Her resignation brings the number of Sinn Fein TDs down to 22. Sinn Fein Leader Mary Lou McDonald said she regrets Ms Nolan's resignation saying it is "disappointing but not surprising". Ms McDonald said: "Sinn Fein made every effort to give its members space and latitude to articulate a position contrary to the partys position in the recent referendum campaign on Repeal of the Eighth Amendment. The people have spoken on this issue. The Sinn Fein Ard Fheis has democratically agreed the partys position to support the forthcoming leglislation. Ms McDonald added: I wish Carol and her family well. More to follow... TAOISEACH Leo Varadkar has paid tribute to the thousands "unknown heroes" who were criminalised for being gay in Ireland before the ban on same sex activity was finally lifted 25 years ago. And Mr Varadkar and other politicians remembered Declan Flynn the young man killed in Dublin in 1982 for being gay. The Dail and Seanad today debated an all-party motion which has offered a "sincere apology" to those who were convicted under the law that was repealed in 1993. Justice minister Charlie Flanagan apologised in the Seanad to members of the gay community affected by the old legislation. The Taoiseach opened the debate in the Dail. He said he wanted to pay special tribute to "the unknown heroes, the thousands of people whose names we do not know, who were criminalised by our forbears". Mr Varadkar said there were "men and women of all ages who tried to live and love and be themselves in a society where their identity was feared and despised, and who were aliens in their own country for their entire lives. "We cannot erase the wrong that was done to them. "What we can say is that we have learned as a society from their suffering. "Their stories have helped change us for the better; they have made us more tolerant, more understanding and more human." He also raised the case of Declan Lynch. He said: "I was just a child when Declan Flynn was murdered in Fairview Park, his only crime that he was gay. "He was brutally attacked by five young men, one a teenager, who shouted Hide behind a tree. We are going to bash a queer. "He died from asphyxia after been given an horrific beating. "When the Oireachtas makes something a crime, some people believe they have a license to punish those they believe are committing it. "These were young men who had grown up in a society which hated and feared homosexuality. They took the law into their own hands. And all too often, people allowed the law to do its bashing for them. "A year after Declan Flynns death there were huge protests in Dublin, organised by a coalition of groups who were horrified at the sentence given to his attackers, and a movement was mobilised in Ireland. "The same year we had the first Pride parade in Dublin. "People would no longer remain silent. Pride as we know now is a festival of diversity and inclusion. "We shouldnt forget, it did not start out that way. And pride festivals in many parts of the world today are still very much protests. And protesters get attacked." Mr Varadkar also paid tribute to long-time gays rights campaigner Senator David Norris. He said that so much has changed in Ireland and pointed to the marriage equality vote in 2015. Mr Varadkar also said, "Last year I had the privilege of being elected Taoiseach, something that would have been unimaginable when I was born, and would have seemed impossible even a few short years ago. "There are many people who helped change minds and change laws and their contribution should also be remembered. People who fought for me and other gay people long before we fought for ourselves," he added. RYANAIR has no plans to stop selling alcohol on board its early morning flights, despite calling for a pre-10am airport drink ban. The airline this week called for an alcohol ban to be put in place at airports after a group of holidaymakers forced an Ibiza-bound flight from Dublin to divert to Paris on Saturday morning. It also suggested airports consider implementing a two-drink limit per passenger. But Ryanair, which serves a range of alcoholic drinks on its morning flights, said it would not impose a ban itself as "very little alcohol is actually sold on board". The airline added it had a "zero-tolerance" policy towards alcohol and that "cabin crew have full discretion when it comes to selling or refusing to sell alcohol". Yesterday, Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) described Ryanair's proposed pre-10am booze ban as "highly draconian". A spokesperson said intoxicated passengers were not a significant issue, and there was no proof those travelling on the flight to Ibiza had been drinking at the airport. The DAA said a booze ban "would affect all passengers because of the behaviour of a very, very small minority of airline travellers". In some UK airports, Ryanair customers are no longer permitted to bring alcohol bought in the airport on board the aircraft. Ryanair said if unruly Irish passengers become a "recurrent issue" then this policy may have to be revised. Last year, the UK's Civil Aviation Authority reported a 600pc increase in disruptive passenger incidents between 2012-2016, with most "involving alcohol". Citing the report, Ryanair said it was unfair airports could profit from the unlimited sale of alcohol while leaving "the airlines to deal with the safety consequences". The airline insists it does not allow "intoxicated" passengers on board. However, yesterday Ryanair passengers aired their frustrations on Joe Duffy's 'Liveline' radio show on RTE. Caller Conor Leydon recalled the time a drunk passenger vomited on his head during a Ryanair flight from Cork to Malaga. A spokesperson for Ryanair said: "We operate strict guidelines for the carriage of customers who are disruptive or appear to be under the influence of alcohol." Meanwhile, Ryanair pilots may strike later this summer after extending a ballot for industrial action in a row over who gets first call on workplace perks. The pilots want the length of their time in the job to decide who gets first call on entitlements including holidays, as well as promotions and transfers between bases. The Irish Airline Pilots Association has given its members up to early July to cast their votes in a ballot that was due to close today. Sources revealed a strike could take place later this summer. In an update sent to members last night, seen by the Irish Independent, the union's Executive Council said a secret ballot was due to close today, with the count shortly afterwards. PCJS activist shot dead in Rangamati UNB, Rangamati : An activist of Parbatya Chattagram Jana Samhati Samiti (PCJS, MN Larma) was shot to death by miscreants at his residence at Milonpur in Baghaichhari upazila on Sunday evening. The deceased was identified as Suren Bikash Chakma alias Daktar. Locals said a group of criminals stormed the house of Suren around 7:30pm and opened fire at him from a close range. The assailants left the place after ensuring his death. Officer-in-Charge of Baghaichhari Police Station Amir Hossain said they heard about the incident. To breastfeed or not to breastfeed, that is the question. It is a question that, without fail, causes heated discussions. I was at a dinner party once where a husband said he wished his wife had tried harder with breastfeeding their child, and not given up so easily. He ended up with a full glass of red wine dripping down his face and a week sleeping in the spare room. Its a very contentious issue and one that causes women to react very strongly, whichever side they fall on. But, whatever your opinion, breastfeeding is not for everyone and women who dont choose to breastfeed should not be made to feel guilty, or less of a mother, because of it. For this very reason, the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) in the UK has just taken an initiative to encourage midwives to respect the decision of women who choose not to breastfeed. While it still contends that babies should be breastfed for the first six months of life, the RCM has told its members not to try to force any woman to breastfeed and to give all new mothers appropriate support if they make an informed decision to bottle feed. A lot of women who choose not to breastfeed feel judged and suffer from a sense of failure and guilt for not giving their baby breast milk. But the reality is that some women really struggle to get the baby to latch on, or suffer from mastitis, or worse. After spending a week or more sobbing in pain and frustration at every feed, these women are entitled to give up. Happy mother equals happy baby, so if the mother is suffering, the baby will too. Deciding to bottle feed your baby is not a decision anyone takes lightly and if its right for you, then no one should make you feel bad about it. In 2015, the National Perinatal Reporting System recorded that only 58pc of babies in Ireland were receiving breast milk on discharge from hospital. The Health Service Executive recorded that only 35pc of babies were receiving some breast milk at three months. Only 55.4pc of babies are being fed by their mothers by the time of the first visit by a public health nurse, a few days after discharge from hospital. This compares with 99pc in Norway. So, why are the Norwegians all breastfeeding and not the Irish? 99pc of new mothers initiate breastfeeding at the hospital in Norway and 80pc still do it after six months. What are the Norwegians doing that we arent? First of all, breastfeeding in public places in Norway is not considered awkward or even unwelcome, like it can be here. Norway also has a generous parental leave and support for new mothers. When they go back to work, mothers are given two-hour breaks at home or at the office to breastfeed or pump. Thats all wonderful for the breastfeeding women of Norway, but for those few who cant manage breastfeeding, or just dont want to, they feel ostracised. Not only is bottle feeding frowned upon, but access to formula is strictly limited. As Irish women have shown recently at the polls, they want choice. And, in this case, the choice to breast or bottle feed should be up to the individual not an overbearing midwife or society frowning upon an overwhelmed new mother. Here in Ireland figures show significant variations in breastfeeding rates between urban and rural areas, and between wealthier and more deprived parts of Dublin. Breastfeeding rates in affluent areas of Dublin are more than three times higher than in counties Donegal and Louth, while the youngest mothers and those in lower socio-economic groups were least likely to be breastfeeding on discharge from hospital. There are many reasons why Irish women opt out of breastfeeding they want their partners to be equally involved in the childcare, theyre exhausted, theyre struggling with breastfeeding technique or theyre going back to work, and companies here are not offering two-hour lunch breaks so mothers can nip home and breastfeed their babies. As Dr Laurence Grummer-Strawn, of the World Health Organisations Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, explains: Many people understand the importance of breastfeeding, but too often they assume that responsibility can be placed entirely on the mother. They dont give consideration to the political, social and environmental factors that actually shape breastfeeding. How can we, as a society, encourage women to breastfeed? Breastfeeding in a Healthy Ireland is the current national action plan for the development of policy, practice and research on breastfeeding. It aims to improve exclusive and non-exclusive breastfeeding duration rates by 2pc per annum up to 2021. It plans to achieve this by implementing national standards for better healthcare and better maternity care, including lactation consultants within hospitals and communities. There is a fine line between encouraging breastfeeding and breastfeeding zealotry. The most important thing is the baby is fed and the mother is not distressed or in pain. Every woman wants the best for her baby. We need to support women and help them to make decisions that are right for them and their babies, without judgment. Meghan Markle in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle for her wedding to Prince Harry in Windsor, Britain, May 19, 2018. Jonathan Brady/Pool via REUTERS Meghan attends a garden party at Buckingham Palace, with Camilla the Duchess of Cornwall and Prince Charles, in London, Britain May 22, 2018. Dominic Lipinski/Pool via Reuters Britain's Prince Harry and his wife Meghan attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace, their first royal engagement as a married couple, in London, May 22, 2018. Dominic Lipinski/Pool via Reuters Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Queen Elizabeth II (not pictured) visit Chester Town Hall on June 14, 2018 in Chester, England Queen Elizabeth II stands with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex during a ceremony to open the new Mersey Gateway Bridge on June 14, 2018 in the town of Widnes in Halton, Cheshire, England The couple were married at the St Georges Chapel in Windsor Castle (Jane Barlow/PA) The Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive at Horse Guards Parade, central London, during the Trooping the Colour ceremony, as the Queen celebrates her official birthday Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex during Trooping The Colour on the Mall on June 9, 2018 in London, England Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are set to walk down the aisle in May (Niall Carson/PA) Britain's Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are keen to learn about Ireland's culture and meet our future leaders during their visit here next month, sources have revealed. The newlyweds are set to fly into Dublin on July 10 to carry out their first official engagement here since they tied the knot last month. Their mini-moon is set to last just one night, with the newlyweds scheduled to leave Dublin again on July 11, a Kensington Palace spokesperson confirmed. "The Duke and Duchess are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and experiencing its rich culture, as well as meeting the people who are shaping the country's future," a source told the Irish Independent last night. It will mark their first official trip abroad together since their May 19 wedding. Further details about their trip to Dublin are expected to be confirmed in the coming days. Meghan has strong links to Dublin, having visited a number of times before she met her husband. The couple visited Northern Ireland in April. This comes shortly after Prince Harry's father, Prince Charles, and his wife Camilla enjoyed a visit to Cork last week. During their stay they met Tanaiste Simon Coveney, browsed at the delicacies available in the English Market and attended a civic reception at Cork City Hall. Doireann Garrihy has opened up about being the target of playground bullies when she was in school. The radio host (25) revealed she was targeted by a group of girls as a teenager who made fun of her appearance. Still not sure why they targeted her, Doireann speculated it may have been because they saw her as a "challenge". I dont know how I wouldve coped being a teenager nowadays with social media and everything. I was really badly bullied online in secondary school by a group of girls. "I still don't know what their reasons were, I think because I was confident and wasnt afraid to speak up they saw it as a challenge, like lets take her down a peg. "They used to write to each other about me online, but theyd never say my name. I remember on my 16th birthday I had really bad skin," she told Irish Country Magazine. "(My sister) Aoibhin did my makeup and I thought she did a really good job which she hadn't. Well she did but there was just one spot in particular that was so bad. "Anyway, one of them wrote to the other saying did you see her skin last night?, and I remember sitting at the computer and the tears just streaming down my face. Read More Doireann is now a presenter on SPIN 103.8 and also has her own sketch show The Doireann Project on RTE Player. The Castleknock native has high ambitions for herself and would love to host her own chat show one day. Expand Close L-R are Ailbhe, Aoibhin, Doireann and Clare Garrihy on board the 'Star of Doolin' when it arrived at Doolin Pier in Co Clare this week. Pic: Arthur Ellis. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp L-R are Ailbhe, Aoibhin, Doireann and Clare Garrihy on board the 'Star of Doolin' when it arrived at Doolin Pier in Co Clare this week. Pic: Arthur Ellis. Video of the Day "It would be great to have a chat show like the Graham Norton Show. I just love the way everyone's on the couch at once and they're all from totally different backgrounds, totally different walks of life, totally different ages, but they're all laughing at the same jokes. "Graham gets them to the place before they were famous, just having the chats," she said. Mike Tindall and Zara Phillips at the 2016 Marks & Spencer Ireland Marie Keating Foundation Celebrity Golf Classic. Picture: Kieran Harnett The Duke of Cambridge (right) hugs Mia Tindall, daughter of Mike and Zara Tindall, at the Gloucestershire Festival of Polo at Beaufort Polo Club in Tetbury, Gloucestershire Zara and Mike Tindall's daughter Mia (left) with her cousins Savannah Phillips and Isla Phillips(right) at the Gatcombe Horse Trials at Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire Zara Phillips, daughter of Princess Anne, walks her dogs with her boyfriend Mike Tindall, who plays for the England rugby team at the Gatcombe Horse Trials, Glos August 8, 2004 in Tetbury, England. (Photo by Carl De Souza/Getty Images) Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall attend the Rugby For Heroes Charity Gala Dinner at Twickenham Stadium on May 9, 2012 in London, England. (Photo by Stuart Wilson/Getty Images) Zara Phillips, the eldest granddaughter of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, arrives for her wedding to England rugby player Mike Tindall at Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, Scotland, on July 30, 2011. AFP PHOTO / BEN STANSALL Mike Tindall, Zara Tindell and their daughter Mia Tindall pose for a photograph during day three of The Big Feastival at Alex James' Farm on August 28, 2016 in Kingham, Oxfordshire. (Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images) England rugby player Mike Tindall (L) and his new wife Britain's Zara Phillips, granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, leave after their wedding ceremony at Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, Scotland, on July 30, 2011. AFP PHOTO / DYLAN MARTINEZ/POOL WINDSOR, UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 19: MIke Tindall and Zara Tindall arrive at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle before the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle on May 19, 2018 in Windsor, England. (Photo by Gareth Fuller - WPA Pool/Getty Images) Congratulations are in order for Zara and Mike Tindall who have welcomed their second child into the world. Zara, the daughter of Britain's Princess Anne, gave birth to a baby girl on Monday, weighing 9lbs 3oz, according to a spokesperson for the family. The couple, who wed in 2011, already have a four-year-old daughter, Mia. They tragically lost a child in 2016 when Zara was pregnant, weeks after announcing they were expecting again. Expand Close England rugby player Mike Tindall (L) and his new wife Britain's Zara Phillips, granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, leave after their wedding ceremony at Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, Scotland, on July 30, 2011. AFP PHOTO / DYLAN MARTINEZ/POOL / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp England rugby player Mike Tindall (L) and his new wife Britain's Zara Phillips, granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, leave after their wedding ceremony at Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, Scotland, on July 30, 2011. AFP PHOTO / DYLAN MARTINEZ/POOL A spokesperson for Buckingham Palace stated: "Mrs Michael Tindall was safely delivered of a baby girl on 18th June, at Stroud Maternity Unit. Mr Tindall was present at the birth. The weight of the baby was 9lbs 3oz." Last month, a heavily pregnant Zara stole the show at her cousin Prince Harry's wedding with her animated expressions during the ceremony. The pair frequently visit Ireland to support the Marie Keating Foundation. (L-R) Prince Andrew, Earl of Wessex, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, Sophie, Countess of Wessex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex arrive by carriage to Royal Ascot Day 1 at Ascot Racecourse on June 19, 2018 in Ascot, United Kingdom. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images) Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (R) helps the Queen's Bloodstock and Racing Advisor, John Warren, as his binoculars slipped off of his shoulder, on day one of the Royal Ascot horse racing meet, in Ascot, west of London, on June 19, 2018 Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, (L) and his wife Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (R) arrive with Britain's Sophie, Countess of Wessex, on day one of the Royal Ascot horse racing meet, in Ascot, west of London, on June 19, 2018 Britain's Prince Harry (R) and his wife Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex arrive on day one of the Royal Ascot horse racing meet, in Ascot, west of London, on June 19, 2018 Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, (R) and his wife Britain's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (C) talk with the Queen's Bloodstock and Racing Advisor, John Warren on day one of the Royal Ascot horse racing meet, in Ascot, west of London, on June 19, 2018 Meghan and Prince Harry attend Royal Ascot Day 1 at Ascot Racecourse on June 19, 2018 in Ascot, United Kingdom (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images) Meghan Markle chose a hat by renowned Irish designer Philip Treacy for the opening day of the Royal Ascot races. Ms Markle and her husband, Britain's Prince Harry, received a rapturous applause as they arrived at the prestigious event this afternoon. The pair joined Queen Elizabeth, Princess Anne and Prince Andrew, Prince Charles, his wife Camilla and Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice at the event. The former Suits actress chose a monochrome hat by Irish designer Treavy fopr the event, teamed with an embroidered cream coat and chic black accessories. This comes just hours after Kensignton Palace confirmed that the newlyweds are set to fly into Dublin on July 10 to carry out their first official engagement here since they tied the knot last month. Their mini-moon is set to last just one night, with the newlyweds scheduled to leave Dublin again on July 11, a Kensington Palace spokesperson confirmed. "The Duke and Duchess are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and experiencing its rich culture, as well as meeting the people who are shaping the country's future," a source told the Irish Independent last night. It will mark their first official trip abroad together since their May 19 wedding. Further details about their trip to Dublin are expected to be confirmed in the coming days. Meghan has strong links to Dublin, having visited a number of times before she met her husband. The couple visited Northern Ireland in April. This comes shortly after Prince Harry's father, Prince Charles, and his wife Camilla enjoyed a visit to Cork last week. Video of the Day During their stay they met Tanaiste Simon Coveney, browsed at the delicacies available in the English Market and attended a civic reception at Cork City Hall. Boris Becker's creditors have been granted more time to pursue his assets, as government officials from the Central African Republic (CAR) issued conflicting statements about the former Wimbledon champion's diplomatic status. Becker is claiming diplomatic immunity in his ongoing bankruptcy proceedings, as the country's sporting, cultural and humanitarian attache to the European Union. Charles Armel Doubane, the CAR foreign minister, told a newspaper that his signature was required in order for a diplomat to be appointed and "I never signed such documents". However, he was contradicted by the CAR embassy in Brussels, which said Becker is one of its diplomats and had an office there. "The embassy sees no reason to comment on Mr Becker's private insolvency. It does not affect the sincere efforts of Mr Boris Becker for our country," it said. Kim Jong in China to discuss next steps on nukes Kim Jong Un makes third visit to China in wake of Trump summit. PID photo AP, Beijing : North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is making a two-day visit to Beijing starting Tuesday in which he's expected to discuss with Chinese leaders his next steps after his nuclear summit with U.S. President Donald Trump last week. Kim's visit to Beijing, while expected, is one way for China to highlight its crucial role in U.S. efforts to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. The U.S. has long looked to China to use its influence with North Korea to bring it to negotiations, but the visit comes as ties between Beijing and Washington are being tested by a major trade dispute. Chinese President Xi Jinping "is exerting a lot of influence from behind the scenes," said Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Glaser said it was predictable Xi would want to be briefed by Kim directly about the North Korean leader's talks with Trump. "I expect they will talk about the path going forward and where priorities should lie," Glaser said. Those priorities, from China's perspective, would be to ensure that Beijing is included in any peace treaty talks and in creating an environment on the Korean Peninsula that will make it unnecessary for U.S. troops to remain. Security was tight Tuesday morning at the Pyongyang airport, where another flight was unexpectedly delayed, and later at the Beijing airport, where paramilitary police prevented journalists from shooting photos. A motorcade including sedans, minibuses, motorcycles and a stretch limo with a golden emblem similar to one Kim used previously was seen leaving the airport. Roads near the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, where senior Chinese officials meet with visiting leaders, were closed and the same motorcade was later seen heading into the compound. A ring of police vehicles and black sedans surrounded the perimeter of the guesthouse, where Kim stayed on his first visit earlier this year. A similar convoy of vehicles was seen leaving the state guesthouse in the direction of the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing on Tuesday afternoon. Kim's presence in Beijing and the schedule of his visit, including any meetings with Xi, have not been confirmed. Kim was diplomatically isolated for years before making his first foreign trip as leader in March to meet with Xi in Beijing. This is his third visit to China, North Korea's main ally and key source of trade and economic assistance. Following his summit with Trump, Kim was expected to meet with Chinese leaders to discuss progress in halting his country's missile and nuclear weapons programs in exchange for economic incentives. China's foreign ministry refused to provide details on Kim's visit other than to say that Beijing hopes it will help deepen relations between the countries. Geng Shuang, a ministry spokesman, said at a regular briefing Tuesday that the visit would "strengthen our strategic communication on major issues to promote regional peace and stability." Geng said Beijing supported Russia's calls last week for unilateral sanctions on North Korea - ones that aren't imposed within the United Nations framework - to be canceled immediately. "China always stands against the so-called unilateral sanctions outside the Security Council framework. This position is very clear and we believe sanctions themselves are not the end," Geng said. While Beijing and Moscow have supported U.N. restrictions, they bristle at Washington imposing unilateral sanctions to put pressure on North Korea. The Singapore meeting resulted in a surprise announcement of a U.S. suspension of military drills with its South Korean ally, a goal long pursued by China and North Korea. That move is seen as potentially weakening defenses and diplomacy among America's Asian allies, while bolstering China and Russia. The U.S. has stationed combat troops in South Korea since the Korean War, in which China fought on North Korea's side and which ended in 1953 with an armistice and no peace treaty. South Korea's Foreign Ministry said Kim's visit to China highlights the "constructive role" Beijing could play in disarming North Korea. Ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-duk said Seoul and Beijing share a "strategic goal" in achieving the "complete denuclearization" of the Korean Peninsula and that progress in nuclear diplomacy has been facilitating high-level contacts between North Korea and its neighbors. Noh also downplayed concerns that improving relations between China and North Korea could result in loosened Chinese sanctions against North Korea, saying that Beijing has repeatedly stated its commitment to U.N. Security Council resolutions against the North. Chinese state media's treatment of Kim's visit departed from past practice of not announcing his travels until Kim returned home. Analysts said Beijing appeared to be trying to normalize such visits. Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor at Renmin University's School of International Studies in Beijing, said that unlike previous visits, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV announced Kim's visit before his departure. Chinese President Xi Jinping has told North Korean leader Kim Jong Un he hopes Pyongyang and Washington can fully implement the outcomes of last weeks nuclear summit. State broadcaster CCTV said Mr Xi told Mr Kim that through the concerted efforts of the relevant countries, negotiations regarding issues on the Korean peninsula are back on track and the overall situation is moving in the direction of peace and stability. The summit last week between Mr Kim and US President Donald Trump in Singapore marked an important step toward the political solution of the Korean peninsula nuclear issue, Mr Xi was quoted as saying in the meeting at the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing. Expand Close Xi Jinping walks with Kim Jong Un during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing (CCTV/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Xi Jinping walks with Kim Jong Un during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing (CCTV/AP) Mr Xi said China hopes North Korea and the US can implement well the outcomes achieved at the summit. He said China would as always play a constructive role in the process. In a joint statement at last weeks summit, Mr Kim pledged to work towards the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula in exchange for US security guarantees. Mr Trump also agreed to suspend military exercises with South Korea in what was seen as a major win for North Korea and its chief allies China and Russia. Mr Kims two-day visit to China, which began on Tuesday, had not been announced in advance but was expected as part of the communist neighbours tradition to report to each other on major developments. The visit is Mr Kims third to China since March, highlighting Beijings crucial role in efforts by the US and others to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme. The US has long looked to China to use its influence with North Korea to bring it to negotiations, but the visit comes as ties between Beijing and Washington are being tested by a major trade dispute. Mr Kim and his wife, Ri Sol Ju, were welcomed by Mr Xi with full military honours. Mr Xi and his wife, Peng Liyuan, later hosted their guests at a banquet, CCTV reported. Expand Close Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan with Kim Jong Un and his wife Ri Sol-Ju (CCTV/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan with Kim Jong Un and his wife Ri Sol-Ju (CCTV/AP) Chinas official Xinhua News Agency announced the North Korean leaders visit shortly after he apparently landed on Tuesday morning, dispensing with the secrecy shrouding previous trips to China by the North Korean leader and his father and predecessor, Kim Jong Il. On the younger Mr Kims first visit to China as leader, he took an armoured train as his father had. His first two trips were not announced until after he had returned to North Korea. He is probably hoping to get Chinas support for relief from punishing UN sanctions. At a regularly scheduled briefing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Beijing supported Russias calls last week for unilateral sanctions on North Korea ones that arent imposed within the United Nations framework to be cancelled immediately. China always stands against the so-called unilateral sanctions outside the Security Council framework. This position is very clear and we believe sanctions themselves are not the end, Mr Geng said. While Beijing and Moscow have supported UN restrictions, they bristle at Washington imposing sanctions on its own to pressure North Korea. Expand Close Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump at the summit in Singapore (Evan Vucci/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump at the summit in Singapore (Evan Vucci/AP) Mr Trumps surprise announcement in Singapore of a US suspension of military drills with its South Korean ally fulfils a goal long pursued by North Korea and its primary backers China and Russia. That move is seen as potentially weakening defences and diplomacy among Americas Asian allies, while bolstering China and Russia. The US has stationed combat troops in South Korea since the Korean War, in which China fought on North Koreas side and which ended in 1953 with an armistice and no peace treaty. South Koreas Foreign Ministry said Mr Kims visit to China highlights the constructive role Beijing could play in disarming North Korea. Chinese President Xi Jinping has welcomed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on a visit to Beijing. State broadcaster China Central Television showed Mr Kim in talks with Mr Xi at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. In a two-day visit, Mr Kim is expected to discuss his next steps with Chinese leaders after last weeks nuclear summit with US President Donald Trump. Expand Close A motorcade believed to be carrying Kim Jong Un leaves Beijing Airport (Andy Wong/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A motorcade believed to be carrying Kim Jong Un leaves Beijing Airport (Andy Wong/AP) Security was tight at Pyongyang Airport and later at Beijing Airport, where paramilitary police prevented journalists from taking photos. Roads near the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, where senior Chinese officials meet visiting leaders, were closed and the same motorcade was later seen heading into the compound. A ring of police vehicles and black saloon cars surrounded the perimeter of the guesthouse, where Mr Kim stayed on his first visit earlier this year. A similar convoy of vehicles was later seen leaving the state guesthouse in the direction of the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing. Expand Close A stretch limousine arrives at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing (Kyodo News/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A stretch limousine arrives at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing (Kyodo News/AP) The visit, while expected, is one way for China to highlight its crucial role in US efforts to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme. The US has long looked to Beijing to use its influence with North Korea to bring it to negotiations, but the visit comes as ties between China and Washington are being tested by a major trade dispute. Mr Kim was diplomatically isolated for years before making his first foreign trip as leader in March to meet Mr Xi in Beijing. Expand Close Kim Jong Un with Xi Jinping at an earlier meeting in Dalian, China (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Kim Jong Un with Xi Jinping at an earlier meeting in Dalian, China (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service/AP) This is his third visit to China, North Koreas main ally and key source of trade and economic assistance. After his summit with the US president, he is meeting Chinese leaders to discuss progress in halting his countrys missile and nuclear weapons programmes in exchange for economic incentives. Theresa May is facing a showdown with pro-European Tory MPs after the Lords overwhelmingly backed plans to give parliament a "meaningful vote" if no deal is reached with the EU. The British government was defeated by 119 votes after a Conservative peer tabled an amendment that ministers believe will undermine Brexit by tying the Prime Minister's hands in negotiations. The defeat sets up a clash between the government and pro-European MPs led by Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general, when the EU (Withdrawal) Bill returns to the Commons tomorrow. About 14 Tory MPs are prepared to rebel against the government, which is refusing to accept the Lords amendment because it believes it would effectively enable parliament to direct talks. Last week, Mrs May headed off a rebellion by making "personal assurances" to a dozen rebels that she would address their concerns over parliament being given a meaningful vote. But when the final amendment was tabled it made clear that the Commons would only be able to pass a motion saying that it had "considered" the matter, which critics said rendered the meaningful vote "meaningless". In the Lords yesterday, Viscount Hailsham - the former Conservative Cabinet minister Douglas Hogg - tabled an updated version of the amendment by Mr Grieve that was rejected by the government. Lord Hailsham was embroiled in the MPs' expenses scandal after he charged the taxpayer to clean the moat at his house. David Cameron elevated him to the Lords in his dissolution honours list despite having to withdraw a previous nomination on the advice of a watchdog body. During angry exchanges in the Lords, which were watched by Mr Grieve, Lord Hailsham claimed Brexit was a "national calamity". He told peers: "This government has sought to prevent a meaningful vote in every possible way. I want to ensure that parliament does have a meaningful vote and I don't want to see that left to chance." Lord Robathan, a pro-Brexit Tory peer, accused his colleague of wishing to "destroy Brexit" and said his intervention was all about "sabotaging" the UK's departure from the EU. One peer was overheard calling him an "idiot" as he made the comment. Lord Howard, the former Conservative leader, said that the amendment would "confer upon parliament a negotiating power which has always resided in the hands of the executive in our country". Despite the warnings, 22 Tory peers backed Lord Hailsham's amendment, a rebellion which is likely to embolden MPs in the Commons. The Prime Minister said that she had been listening to the concerns of critics but the legislation must not restrict her freedom in talks with Brussels. "As we keep faith with people who voted to leave the European Union, and many of those who didn't but are now saying 'let's just get on with it', we need to make sure we are putting this legislation into place," she said. "As we do that, of course we have been listening to concerns about the role of parliament, but we need to make sure that parliament can't tie the government's hands in negotiation and can't overturn the will of the British people." Mr Grieve insisted rebels would only accept a "meaningful vote" and not the "slavery clause" offered by the government. Nigel Evans, the pro-Brexit MP, said he was "staggered" by Mr Grieve's remarks. He told BBC Radio 4's 'The Westminster Hour': "I don't want to fetter my Prime Minister while she's negotiating the best deal for Britain." ( Daily Telegraph, London) Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021] Meghan Markle's father has said he expects his daughter will want to have children soon, and his daughter broke down in tears when he confessed he would not be attending her wedding to Prince Harry. Thomas Markle said he told Ms Markle the bad news in an emotional phone call just days before she was due to walk down the aisle in Windsor Castle's St George's Chapel. The 73-year-old watched the wedding from California, where he was recovering from heart surgery. In an interview with ITV's 'Good Morning Britain', Mr Markle said: "They were disappointed. "Meghan cried, I'm sure, and they both said 'Take care of yourself, we are really worried about you'." He added: "I absolutely wanted to walk my daughter down the aisle." Adding that he was recovering well from his surgery, which saw him have three stents fitted, Mr Markle said he was "honoured" that the Prince of Wales took on the job of walking Meghan down the aisle instead. "I can't think of a better replacement than someone like Prince Charles," he said. Mr Markle's operation came shortly after allegations that he had staged photographs with paparazzi. He said he had apologised to both Harry and Meghan, adding: "I realised it was a serious mistake. It's hard to take it back." The retired TV lighting director confessed he had cried as he watched the royal ceremony on television, describing his daughter as "beautiful". "It was incredible watching her," he said. "I was very proud. I was very upset that it wasn't me (walking her down the aisle) but the whole world was watching my daughter. I was very happy about that. The unfortunate thing for me is I'm a footnote in one of the greatest moments in history." Asked about her choice of husband, Mr Markle told the programme he thought Harry was "great" and "an interesting guy". He said that he expected his daughter and Harry would want to try for children soon. He said: "She's wanted children for a long time and when she met Harry and she spoke about how much she loves him, there's got to be a child in the making, somewhere soon." Mr Markle added: "As long as they're happy and they have a great life and have some beautiful children and do good things in the world, I can't ask for more." He also revealed he had spoken with the Duke of Sussex about Donald Trump and Brexit. He said: "Our conversation was I was complaining about not liking Donald Trump, he said 'give Donald Trump a chance'. I sort of disagreed with that." Mr Markle said he also asked his future son-in-law about Britain's 2016 decision to leave the EU and got the impression Harry is comfortable with Brexit. "I think he was open to the experiment," he said. Police officers at the scene where three men died on a railway line in south London yesterday. Photo: PA Three men in their 20s have died after being struck by a train in south London as it was revealed spray cans were found near their bodies. Police are describing the deaths close to Loughborough Junction station as "unexplained". All three were pronounced dead at the scene. Officers are now trying to determine how the three people came to be on the tracks, having been called just before 7.30am yesterday, and were seen taking photographs of graffiti as part of their enquiries. The bodies were found on an elevated section of track with an electric third rail, between Brixton and Denmark Hill. A British Transport Police spokesman said they were called by Network Rail "following a report of multiple bodies being found". Aerial footage showed two covered bodies on stretchers and a third being tended to by officers in forensic suits. Trains could be seen slowly passing through the area on an elevated railway, inches from the bodies and members of the emergency services. Sources said the incident could have happened overnight, when freight trains run, as the bodies were not spotted until around 7am. Freight trains carry out a lot of the infrastructure work on Britain's railways, usually overnight when the passenger pathways are clear. "Police and paramedics from the London Ambulance Service attended the scene, however three people were sadly pronounced dead at the scene," the spokesman added. "Officers remain at the scene where they are working to identify the deceased and inform their families. "A number of enquiries are also under way to establish the circumstances of how the people came to be on the tracks." Mayor of London Sadiq Khan sent his condolences to the relatives of those found on the tracks. He said: "My heart goes out to the families of the three people killed at Loughborough Junction station. "City Hall is in close contact with the British Transport Police, who are urgently investigating this incident." Detective Supt Gary Richardson, from British Transport Police, said: "My team are now working hard to understand what happened and how these three people came to lose their life on the railway. My thoughts are with the family and friends of these three people. "At this time, we are treating their death as unexplained as we make a number of immediate enquiries. I would ask anyone who was near to Loughborough Junction and saw something which they think might be relevant, please contact us as soon as possible." ( Daily Telegraph, London) Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021] North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is making a two-day visit to China during which he is expected to discuss his next steps after his nuclear summit with Donald Trump last week. Security was tight on Tuesday morning at Pyongyang Airport and later at Beijing Airport, where paramilitary police prevented journalists from taking photos. A motorcade including minibuses, motorcycles and a stretch limo with a golden emblem similar to one Mr Kim has used previously was seen leaving the airport. Expand Close A motorcade believed to be carrying Kim Jong Un leaves Beijing Airport (Andy Wong/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A motorcade believed to be carrying Kim Jong Un leaves Beijing Airport (Andy Wong/AP) Roads near the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, where senior Chinese officials meet visiting leaders, were closed and the same motorcade was later seen heading into the compound. A ring of police vehicles and black saloon cars surrounded the perimeter of the guesthouse, where Mr Kim stayed on his first visit earlier this year. A similar convoy of vehicles was later seen leaving the state guesthouse in the direction of the Great Hall of the People in central Beijing. Expand Close A stretch limousine arrives at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing (Kyodo News/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A stretch limousine arrives at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing (Kyodo News/AP) Mr Kims presence in Beijing and the schedule of his visit, including any meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, have not been confirmed. The visit, while expected, is one way for China to highlight its crucial role in US efforts to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear programme. The US has long looked to Beijing to use its influence with North Korea to bring it to negotiations, but the visit comes as ties between China and Washington are being tested by a major trade dispute. Expand Close Kim Jong Un with Xi Jinping at an earlier meeting in Dalian, China (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Kim Jong Un with Xi Jinping at an earlier meeting in Dalian, China (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service/AP) Mr Kim was diplomatically isolated for years before making his first foreign trip as leader in March to meet Mr Xi in Beijing. This is his third visit to China, North Koreas main ally and key source of trade and economic assistance. After his summit with the US president, he was expected to meet Chinese leaders to discuss progress in halting his countrys missile and nuclear weapons programmes in exchange for economic incentives. Chinas foreign ministry refused to provide details on Kims visit other than to say that Beijing hopes it will help deepen relations between the countries. President Donald Trump, second from right, and first lady Melania Trump, right, welcome Spains King Felipe VI, second from left, and Queen Letizia, left, to the Oval Office (Susan Walsh/AP) President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump have welcomed Spains King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia to the White House. King Felipe described his first Oval Office meeting with the president as a great end to a perfect visit. Today, President Trump and the First Lady welcomed King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain to the White House. pic.twitter.com/65dEjyA1r8 The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) June 19, 2018 The royals were in the US to mark the 300th anniversaries of the founding of New Orleans and San Antonio, stopping in both cities with historical ties to Spain before arriving at the White House. Expand Close President Donald Trump, left, and Spains King Felipe VI, right, walk along the Colonnade (Susan Walsh/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp President Donald Trump, left, and Spains King Felipe VI, right, walk along the Colonnade (Susan Walsh/AP) Mr Trump called it really a tremendous honour to have the royal couple in the Oval Office. The president also praised the outstanding relationship between the US and Spain over the years and, I think, especially right now. Excellent trade relationship, military relationship. Just about everything you can have. So we love Spain. Trade was expected to figure prominently in their talks. The first lady recently resumed her schedule of public appearances following surgery last month to treat a benign kidney condition. Legalisation of the drug was a 2015 campaign promise of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. (stock photo) Canadian politicians has passed a bill legalising cannabis for recreational use. The bill passed in the House of Commons on Monday by 205 votes to 82 and will move on to the Senate, which can delay, but not block the new legislation. Lastly, it must receive royal assent by the governor-general before becoming law. Legalisation of the drug was a 2015 campaign promise of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has admitted to smoking a joint five or six times with friends including since being elected as an MP. The Canadian government is probably looking at a date of implementation somewhere toward the beginning of September, perhaps mid-September, according to MP Bill Blair. Once enacted, the new law will allow for Canadians over the age of 18 to buy a gram of cannabis for about Can$10 (6.50) or less from authorised private and public retail stores or by post. Each province and territory will be responsible for setting up distribution and personal possession will be limited to 30grams -- one ounce -- per person. While nine US states and the capital Washington have legalised recreational use of the drug, Canada will be the first G7 Country to do so. The first step towards ending the Canadian pot prohibition that has been in place since 1923 began with legalising medical use for the drug 2001. Although President Trudeau initially had a target of July 1 2018 to legalise recreational use as well, he said despite setbacks the government will move to legalise the production, sale and consumption of marijuana before facing the electorate again in 2019. Canadian Health Minister Ginette Petitpas showed strong support for home cultivation of marijuana last week following the governments rejection of 13 out of 46 amendments relating to the bill last week. Ms Petitpas said the government would follow its expert panels recommendation to allow for the growth of up to four pot plants for personal use in households: It is already possible for Canadians to grow cannabis for medical purposes and we absolutely believe the legislation should be consistent when it comes to recreational cannabis. Based on consumption data from last year, Statistics Canada has estimated that the market will be worth Can$5.7 billion (3.7 billion). As for cannabis tax haul, Finance Minister Bill Morneau has estimated a total of $400 million (260 million), although Ottawa has agreed to retain only 25 per cent of the total raised and put the rest into provincial government coffers. The daughter of a notorious US serial killer has offered her DNA to gardai in a bid to help solve cold case murders that took place during a period when her father visited Ireland. Jenn Carson, whose father was Michael 'Bear' Carson, also known as the 'San Francisco Witch Killer' spoke to Dave Fanning on RTE Radio 1's Ryan Tubridy Show today. Michal Carson, along with his second wife Suzan, were convicted in 1984 of three brutal murders in California but they are suspects in almost a dozen other murders both in the US and in Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The pair travelled to Europe in the late 1970s and visited Ireland in 1978 and 1979 and Jenn Carson has offered to give her DNA to gardai in a bid to solve cold case murders in Ireland in that period. "I don't think I can solve these cold cases but I have offered to give my DNA to any cold cases. I know that you have four cold cases in Ireland within the time period and one of them is a little bit similar to the modus operandi so I would be glad to give my DNA to your police in Ireland or other European or US forces during the 1978 to 1983 period. Jenn told Dave Fanning that the father she grew up with was a "caring, hippie, stay-at-home dad" but after he met Suzan he changed. "There was the obsessive relationship between the two, there was extremist beliefs and there was the dropping of acid, not experimentally but every day they were using LSD which I think caused some brain damage. I truly believe both people had psychopathic tendencies where they did not feel empathy and they did not feel remorse." While police pursued them they discovered a manifesto left behind the pair in 1982 called 'Cry for War' which called for all witches to be killed as well as plans to kill US President Ronald Reagan. The pair were eventually arrested in 1983 and both were sentenced a year later to 75 years to life behind bars. Jenn Carson now works with the children of prisoners, to help them cope with the loss of a parent in these circumstances. She also told Dave Fanning about her last visit with her father in prison. "I went to see him as a young adult to say goodbye and confront him. There was absolutely no remorse. My father was not in there any more, that it was a different person and I walked away." People in custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, held in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas. U.S. Photo: Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP Donald Trump has dug in his heels over his controversial "zero-tolerance" immigration policy that has seen thousands of children forcibly separated from their parents at the Mexican border. Mr Trump pointed to Europe, which he claimed had become a "migrant camp", and said that would not happen to the United States under his leadership. Speaking at the White House, the US president said: "The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. You look at what's happening in Europe, and in other places, we cannot allow that to happen. Not on my watch." Mr Trump spoke amid an uproar among Democrats and Republicans as images of children being held in wire mesh cages, and toddlers crying as they were separated from their mothers, emerged from the border. He said criminals were using children like a "Trojan horse" to get into America, that "a country without borders is not a country at all", and that people coming in were bringing "death and destruction". He added: "They are thieves and murderers and so much else." Expand Close Mothers and children wait for assistance at a humanitarian centre in the border town of McAllen, Texas. Photo: AFP/Getty Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Mothers and children wait for assistance at a humanitarian centre in the border town of McAllen, Texas. Photo: AFP/Getty Images Criticising the more open immigration policies of his European Nato allies, Mr Trump wrote on Twitter: "Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!" He specifically mentioned Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, saying immigration was why "the people of Germany are turning against their leadership" and falsely claiming "crime in Germany is way up". Mr Trump went on to attack Democrats in Congress, blaming them for the separation of families at the border because they had created "horrible laws" and had been "weak and ineffective". 'Zero tolerance' The "zero-tolerance" policy was introduced by Jeff Sessions, Mr Trump's attorney general, in April. It means all adults caught crossing the border illegally are detained and prosecuted, rather than being released while they await proceedings. Their children are removed and held in separate facilities. Over a six-week period, at least 2,000 children have been separated from their parents. Hundreds of children are being held at a converted former Walmart store in Texas. Another detention centre in Texas has been nicknamed "La Perrera" - "the dog kennel" in Spanish. Democrat politicians who were allowed to tour it saw one cage with 20 children inside. Children were sleeping on the floor on thin mattresses with foil sheets as blankets. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat senator, said: "I witnessed loads of kids massed together in large pens of chain-linked fence separated from their moms and dads. Shameful." Michelle Brane, director of the Women's Refugee Commission, said she found an unaccompanied four-year-old in a detention centre. She said: "The girl was so traumatised that she wasn't talking. She was just curled up in a little ball." Another young boy was silent in his cage, clutching a photocopy of his mother's identity card. Amnesty International said the treatment of children "meets the definitions of torture under both US and international law". It said: "This is a spectacularly cruel policy where frightened children are being ripped from their parents' arms and taken to overflowing detention centres which are effectively cages." Mr Sessions said if a border wall was built then "we won't face these terrible choices". But Laura Bush, the former first lady, said the separation of families was "cruel, immoral and breaks my heart". She compared it to the "shameful" internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. Melania Trump, the first lady, also appeared to question the treatment of migrants at the Mexico border, saying the United States should "govern with heart". ( Daily Telegraph, London) Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021] US won`t be made a migrant camp Donald Trump said, US will not be a \"refugee holding facility\". President Donald Trump vowed on Monday that the United States would not become a "migrant camp" as he faced mounting pressure to stop families being separated as a deterrent to illegal immigration. "The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility," Trump said in remarks delivered at the White House. "It won't be." "You look at what's happening in Europe, you look at what's happening in other places, we can't allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch." About 2,000 children have been separated from their parents or guardians over six weeks, according to US authorities, since the Trump administration announced that all migrants illegally crossing the Mexican border would be arrested, regardless of whether the adults were seeking asylum. Since children cannot be sent to the facilities where their parents are held, they are separated from them. Trump has repeatedly said he wants family separations to end, but has refused to take responsibility for them-instead blaming Democrats, the minority party in Congress, whom he accuses of blocking legislation on the broader issue of illegal immigration. He doubled down on that claim on Monday in a series of tweets, and again in remarks before a meeting of the National Space Council. "If the Democrats would sit down instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly. Good for the children, good for the country, good for the world," he said. "We have the worst immigration laws in the entire world." "We're stuck with these horrible laws. They're horrible laws. What's happening is so sad, is so sad. And it can be taken care of quickly, beautifully," he said. "But just remember, a country without borders is not a country at all. We need borders, we need security. We need safety. We have to take care of our people." New Department of Homeland Security data shows that 2,342 children have been separated from their parents or guardians since early May, when the administration said it would arrest and charge all migrants illegally crossing the Mexican border, regardless of whether they were seeking asylum. Since children cannot be sent to the facilities where their parents are held, they are separated from them. In heartbreaking audio released by transparency group ProPublica, several Central American children separated from their parents are heard desperately sobbing and wailing, some so hard they almost cannot breathe. "Mommy! I want to go with dad," a young girl is heard crying out. The United Nations slammed the practice as unconscionable, while rights group Amnesty International blasted a "spectacularly cruel" policy which has resulted in frightened children pried from their parent's arms and taken to overflowing detention centers. "This is nothing short of torture," said Amnesty's Americas director Erika Guevara-Rosas. US public opinion appears divided along partisan lines on the family separations, with two-thirds of all American voters opposed, but 55 percent of Republicans supporting the policy, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll. A Republican-led Congress is drafting legislative options to address the crisis, with possible votes later this week. "Some in the administration have decided that this cruel policy increases their legislative leverage. This is wrong," said Republican Senator Ben Sasse, an occasional Trump critic. "Americans do not take children hostage, period." A disgusted Republican Senator John McCain tweeted: "The administration's current family separation policy is an affront to the decency of the American people, and contrary to principles and values upon which our nation was founded. The administration has the power to rescind this policy. It should do so now." And Democrats stepped up their opposition, as lawmakers conducted a second straight day of visits to processing and detention facilities, including a converted Walmart supermarket in Texas housing some 1,500 immigrant children. Lawmakers spoke of children being held behind chain-link fencing inside the centers. "I went into these facilities yesterday. They are cages," House Democrat Mark Pocan said Monday. The Democratic fury was loud and unsparing. "President Trump's family separation policy leaves a dark stain on our nation," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. "Ripping vulnerable little children away from their parents is an utter atrocity that debases America's values and our legacy as a beacon of hope, opportunity and freedom." Pelosi was among 14 House Democrats who visited Casa San Diego, a southern California facility housing 62 children, many of whom had fled gang violence from Central American nations like Honduras. "President Trump, do the decent thing, pick up the phone, stop this unconscionable policy," congresswoman Judy Chu said. Amid the outcry, independent investigative news organization Pro Publica published audio obtained from inside a US Customs and Border Protection facility in which children are heard wailing. "I don't want them to stop my father," a distraught girl's voice can be heard, as others cried in the background. "I don't want them to deport him." The United States withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday accusing it of a "chronic bias against Israel," a move that activists warned would make advancing human rights globally even more difficult. Standing with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley slammed Russia, China, Cuba and Egypt for thwarting US efforts to reform the council. She also criticized countries which shared US values and encouraged Washington to remain but "were unwilling to seriously challenge the status quo." The United States is half-way through a three-year term on the main UN rights body and the Trump administration had long threatened to quit if the 47-member Geneva-based body was not overhauled. "Look at the council membership, and you see an appalling disrespect for the most basic rights," said Haley, citing Venezuela, China, Cuba and Democratic Republic of Congo. Haley also said the "disproportionate focus and unending hostility toward Israel is clear proof that the council is motivated by political bias, not by human rights." Washington's withdrawal is the latest US rejection of multilateral engagement after it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. It also comes as the United States faces intense criticism for detaining children separated from their immigrant parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein on Monday called on Washington to halt its "unconscionable" policy. Rights groups have criticized the Trump administration for not making human rights a priority in its foreign policy. Critics say this sends a message that the administration turns a blind eye to human rights abuses in some parts of the world. Diplomats have said the US withdrawal from the body could bolster countries such as Cuba, Russia, Egypt and Pakistan, which resist what they see as U.N. interference in sovereign issues. Among reforms the United States had been seeking was to make it easier to kick out member state with egregious rights records. Haley said the US withdrawal from the Human Rights Council "is not a retreat from our human rights commitments." Read More Twelve rights and aids groups, including Human Rights First, Save the Children and CARE, wrote Pompeo to warn the withdrawal would "make it more difficult to advance human rights priorities and aid victims of abuse around the world." "The US's absence will only compound the council's weaknesses," they wrote. Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Human Rights Program, said Trump's "misguided policy of isolationism only harms American interests and betrays our values as a nation." Jewish rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Center applauded the US withdrawal and urged other countries to do the same. Reuters reported last week that talks on reforming the council had failed to meet Washington's demands, suggesting the Trump administration would quit. The council meets three times a year to examine human rights violations worldwide. It has mandated independent investigators to look at situations including Syria, North Korea, Myanmar and South Sudan. Its resolutions are not legally binding but carry moral authority. Speaking before the US announcement, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres "is a strong believer in the human rights architecture of the UN and the active participation of all states." When the Council was created in 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush's administration shunned the body. Under President Barack Obama the United States was elected for a maximum two consecutive terms on the council by the U.N. General Assembly. After a year off, Washington was re-elected in 2016 for its current third term. In March 2011, the UN General Assembly unanimously suspended Libya's membership in the council because of violence against protesters by forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. But UN officials said no member has withdrawn. Haley said a year ago Washington was reviewing its membership and called for reform and elimination of a "chronic anti-Israel bias." The body has a permanent standing agenda item on suspected violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories that Washington wanted removed. The council last month voted to probe killings in Gaza and accused Israel of using excessive force. The United States and Australia cast the only "no" votes. "The UN Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel," said Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth. Donald Trumps envoy says the US is leaving the UN Human Rights Council (Evan Vucci/AP) The United States is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council, the US ambassador to the world body said, calling it an organisation that is not worthy of its name. Ms Haley is President Donald Trumps envoy to the United Nations. She said a year ago she made clear the US would stay in the council only if essential reforms were achieved. .@SecPompeo: The United States which leads the world in humanitarian assistance, and whose service members have sacrificed life and limb to free millions from oppression and tyranny -- will not take lectures form hypocritical bodies and institutions. pic.twitter.com/A93lHmVD4h Department of State (@StateDept) June 19, 2018 She said it was clear those calls for change were not heeded. Ms Haley is decrying the membership of countries like China, Cuba and Venezuela that are themselves accused of rights violations. She says the council also has a chronic bias against Israel. But Ms Haley says that if the council does reform, the United States would be happy to rejoin. Ms Haley announced the withdrawal at the State Department alongside US secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a three day official visit to Singapore late last month. The trip was his first since November 2015, and followed quick visits to Indonesia and Malaysia. The three-nation tour, touted to be part of Indias Act East Policy, laid clear emphasis on closer Southeast Asian trade and business ties. The bilateral visit touched on discussions surrounding defense, space, and skill development as well as attracting greater investments from Singapore-based companies. Modi also attended an India-Singapore Enterprise event organized by Enterprise Singapore, a government body promoting the establishment of companies in Singapore. Regional hub for Indian businesses The interaction with the owners of Indian businesses assumes significance as an estimated 8,000 Indian companies have registered in Singapore since 2000. Large business groups in India set up holding companies in Singapore to manage their Asian and international investments; the country is an international financial center and provides easier financing and refinancing schemes. Singapore FDI into India According to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows from Singapore contributed 17 percent of the total FDI in India since 2000. This includes investments made by domestic companies as well as Singapore registered entities, most of which are regional operations of Indian firms. Data from Singapore, on the other hand, shows the FDI inflow to be half this estimate it does not include investments routed through holding companies based in the country. Moreover, Singapore calculates its overseas investment based on a minimum 10 percent direct ownership of shares or voting power by a Singapore investor. Major sectors in India that receive FDI inflow from Singapore are: financial services, telecommunications, drugs and pharmaceuticals, computer software and hardware, and trading. The balance about 48 percent comprise sectors not clarified by the DIPP. Singapore-India tax treaty, trade pact To reduce tax liabilities and improve trade flows, both countries have a Double Taxation Avoidance Treaty (DTAA); India and Singapore signed the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) in 2005 and Singapore is also party to Indias trade agreement with ASEAN. The DTAA targets shell companies to prevent tax evasion and the CECA offers tariff reduction on select products exported from Singapore to India. Modis latest trip followed announcement of further reduction in tariffs and other trade relaxations by Singapores Ministry of Trade and Industry. Indian companies registered in Singapore Several Indian startups, although operating in India, have registered holding companies in Singapore to benefit from increased funding opportunities, business and tax friendly environment, and stable economic policies. One of these companies is Flipkart, an e-commerce company that is registered in Singapore as Flipkart Private Limited (FPL). Founded in 2007, it was registered in Singapore in 2011 as India did not permit 100 percent FDI in the online retail of multi-brand goods and services. This policy was amended in January 2018. ZipDial (mobile marketing), InMobi (mobile advertising), Capillary Technologies (software products), and Tonbo Imaging (defense) are among several Indian startups that have recently registered in Singapore. In addition to startups and large business groups, Singapore serves as a hub for several international trading and logistics companies due to its strategic location, excellent shipping connectivity, and low cost trade financing. For example, Mercator, a large Indian shipping company, registered its coal, dry cargo, and offshore business in Singapore in 2015. Singapores incentives for foreign companies Singapore functions as a gateway for Indian companies expanding their trade and investment into ASEAN as it is, both, an international financial center and a shipping and aviation hub for the Asia-Pacific. Here we lay out key incentives promoting Indian investments into the Singapore economy. The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs is holding an oversight hearing on subsistence in Native communities on Wednesday. Alaska will be well represented at the proceeding. The witness list includes a representative of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission , as well as an official from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who works on subsistence in the state. Subsistence has always been a major issue in Alaska, where federal law recognizes the priority of Native rights , as confirmed in the landmark Katie John litigation . State law, however, remains in conflict and efforts to address the disparity have proven unsuccessful. But the situation at the federal level can be just as murky. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a long-running dispute involving John Sturgeon , a non-Native man who was kicked out of national preserve in Alaska for hunting moose. "I hope the court will again rule for Mr. Sturgeon, reject the flawed reasoning of the Ninth Circuit, and protect the subsistence rights of Alaskas first peoples and other rural residents under Katie John, Murkowski said in a statement Katie John was an Alaska Native elder whose fight to preserve her subsistence way of life led to a landmark federal appeals court ruling. She passed away in May 2013 at the age of 97. Photo: Chris Arend / Ahtna, Incorporated According to Murkowski, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals went too far with its ruling last October. The decision cited the Katie John precedent in holding that the federal government had a right to prevent Sturgeon from using his hovercraft to hunt moose. In contrast to Murkowski's stance, tribal interests -- including the community of the late Katie John -- support the federal government's role. They believe the state of Alaska is using Sturgeon's case to undermine their rights, long after her original subsistence victory "The states motion for clarification makes it clear that it seeks to relitigate the Katie John public lands issue," the tribal interests wrote in a brief to the 9th Circuit . "But it may not bootstrap on to Mr. Sturgeons case to do so because the prior litigation is binding on both the state and Mr. Sturgeon." Oral arguments in the case, known as Sturgeon v. Frost , are expected in the fall. Native interests have not yet filed any briefs with the Supreme Court. Dr. Jennifer Hardin, Ph.D. Subsistence Policy Coordinator, Office of Subsistence Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Anchorage, AK The Honorable Roy Brown Chairman, Northern Arapaho Business Council, Fort Washakie, WY Ms. Mary Sattler Peltola Executive Director, Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, Bethel, AK Ms. A-dae Romero-Briones, J.D., LL.M. Director of Programs, Native Agriculture and Food Systems, First Nations Development Institute, Longmont, CO Wednesday hearing before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs takes place at 2:30pm Eastern in Room 628 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building. The witness list follows: Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Notice: Oversight Hearing on Keep What You Catch: Promoting Traditional Subsistence Activities in Native Communities. (June 20, 2018) Tribes and treaty rights U.S. Supreme Court Decision: Washington v. U.S. (June 11, 2018) U.S. Supreme Court Documents: 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Decisions: US v. Washington (May 19, 2017) US v. Washington (June 27, 2016) Join the Conversation Related Stories People flying between India and the rest of the world through United Arab Emirates (UAE) mega hubs like Dubai and Abu Dhabi will soon be able to get a free transit visa to spend up to two days there. The UAE government has decided that to grant free transit visas for first 48 hours to transit passengers and this visa can be extended for up to 96 hours by paying 50 Dirham (about Rs 930). The date from which this will be allowed is yet to be announced, say Indian travel industry majors. UAE is already the single biggest international destination for Indian travellers. Almost a quarter of all international travel to and from India happens on mega UAE carriers like Emirates, flyDubai and Etihad. Jet Airways, in which Etihad has a 24% stake, also serves as a feeder to Etihads long haul flights to Abu Dhabi. ap/representational image Anywhere up to 75% of people flying on Gulf, including UAE, carriers are only transiting through those hubs between India and rest of the world. So the decision to grant free 48-hour transit visas is expected to further increase the number of visitors to UAE. Karan Anand of travel major Cox & Kings said: The move by UAE to exempt transit passengers from all entry fees for the first 48 hours is significant. Travellers who have onward connections can now stay in the UAE and enjoy a range of attractions that the various Emirates have to offer. In fact, this will give a boost to Dubai and Abu Dhabi which are promoting its attractions aggressively in the Indian market. Many new attractions are opening up in these destinations and as Dubai gears up for the 2020 Expo, these measures will boost tourism inflows. bccl/gettyimg/representational image Indian travel majors are awaiting the date from which this change will be implemented. In terms of flying people in and out of India, Emirates is the biggest international airline. The Jet-Etihad combine is the biggest airline in terms of international travel to and from India. According to Dubai Tourism statistics, Dubai attracted over 2.1 million Indian tourists in 2017 15% more than the previous year. India is the number one source market for the emirate, said a senior official of a travel major. Similarly, in 2017 Abu Dhabi attracted over 3.60 lakh Indian tourists, 11% more than previous year 2016. ap/representational image Emirates such as Ras Al Khaimah and Sharjah have also stepped up promotion in the Indian market. This is aided by more flight connections from India to the UAE, said the official. Gulf nations are going all out to woo Indian travellers and are relaxing visa norms. UAE grants visa on arrival to Indian Nationals with a valid US Visa. Oman will also do the same to Indians who reside in or hold an entry visa to US, Canada, Australia, UK, Japan and the Schengen States. Last August, Qatar had allowed Indians and nationals of 46 other countries to stay for up to 60 days there without a prior visa. Not many would have thought this to happen in Afghanistan. A Sikh man is entering the Parliament in Afghanistan to represent country's tiny Sikh and Hindu community. Avtar Singh Khalsa will enter Afghanistan's next parliament, where he says he hopes to serve the entire country. Few Afghans are as invested in the government's quest for peace and stability as the dwindling Sikh and Hindu minorities, which have been decimated by decades of conflict. The community numbered more than 80,000 in the 1970s, but today only around 1,000 remain. ap Khalsa, a Sikh and longtime leader of the community, will run unopposed for a seat in the lower house of parliament that was apportioned to the minority by presidential decree in 2016. After the October election, he will be a solitary voice among 259 legislators, but hopes his 10 years of service in the Afghan army can help him secure a seat on the defence and security committee. ap "I don't only want to serve my Sikh and Hindu brothers. I have to be able to serve all the Afghan people, no matter which ethnicity or group they belong to." The 52-year-old father of four has lived most of his life in Kabul. He also served as a senator representing the minority, which has long had a seat in the upper house of parliament. ap Sikhs and Hindus have been driven out of many areas by heavy fighting. They have suffered widespread discrimination in the conservative Muslim country. Khalsa will join parliament at a time when Afghanistan is struggling against a resurgent Taliban and an Islamic State affiliate. But Khalsa said he will continue to fight for his community's survival. "I don't care if I lose my whole family and I get killed for this cause. I will struggle until I get their rights." Here's what Kareena, Karisma gifted Randhir Kapoor for Father's Day Right after the release of Veere Di Wedding, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Taimur left for a family vacation to London. Joining them only a day later was Saif Ali Khan and the family has since been spending some fun and quality time in London. The couple was also spotted hanging out with Rhea Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor and joining the clan, Karisma Kapoor and her children, Samaira and Kiaan are also in the city. With such a party in UK, the Kapoor sisters had a grand plan for father Randhir Kapoor for Father's Day. The two gifted Randhir Kapoor with a holiday in Switzerland and the full family will be heading to the destination today. Randhir Kapoor joined the daughters in London on Father's Day and the grand Swiss holiday begins today for the family. A source close to the family reported, "Kareena left for London after the release of Veere Di Wedding. She was joined by Saif for their ad shoot. Both, Lolo and Bebo, wanted to do something special for their father. So, they gifted him this holiday. He will travel through London and the family will then head to Switzerland. The clan will spend some quality time together in Interlaken and Gstaad." Kareena is back in the city for an appearance and reports say she will fly back in a day. Let's hope for some fun pictures of the family vacation coming our way soon. Private lender ICICI Bank has appointed Sandeep Bakhshi as whole time director and Chief Operating Officer (COO), the bank said in a statement to exchanges. Chanda Kochhar to continue as managing director and chief executive officer (CEO) of the bank but will be on leave till the internal inquiry is completed, it added. BCCL "In line with the highest levels of governance and corporate standards, Chanda Kochhar has decided to go on leave till the completion of the inquiry as announced on May 30, 2018. The board has noted and accepted this. During her period of leave, the COO (Bakhshi) will report to the Board," the bank stated. Bakhshi has been the managing director and CEO of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company since August 1, 2010. Prior to this role, he was the deputy managing director of ICICI Bank. icicifoundation.org Kochhar, who was made the CEO of ICICI Bank, the second largest private sector lender is facing allegations related to a Rs. 3,250 crore loan granted to the Videocon Group in 2012. It is alleged that Kochhar's husband Deepak Kochhar and her family members benefited from these dealings. Videocon's Venugopal Dhoot had an investment in NuPower Renewables founded by Mr Kochhar. The bank had then rejected the accusations of nepotism and reposed "full faith" in the managing director. The government has transferred 791 cases against MPs/MLAs to 12 fast track courts set up for speedy trial, law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said on Monday. The minister, who was briefing the media on the government's achievements in the last four years, said 12 fast track courts have been set up in 11 states by the government on the direction of the apex court for speedy trial of cases against lawmakers. Interestingly, the Election Commission has demanded debarring convicted MPs/MLAs from contesting elections. bccl/representational image Earlier this year, the government had told the Supreme Court in an affidavit that 1,765 MPs and MLAs, or 36 per cent of parliamentarians and members of legislative assemblies, were facing criminal trial in 3,045 cases. The total strength of lawmakers in Parliament and assemblies is 4,896. The apex court had directed the government to transfer all these cases to the fast track courts for the trials to be completed within a year. bccl/representational image The Centre in its affidavit before the Supreme Court had placed statewise figure of cases pending against lawmakers. The purpose of setting up FTCs was to exclusively hear these cases on a day to day basis. The highest number of cases against lawmakers is in Uttar Pradesh followed by Tamil Nadu, Bihar, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. ap/representational image The government has set up a total of 727 FTCs which includes courts to expedite trials of cases against women, SC/STs, children and senior citizens. The number of FTCs have increased from 281 during 2015 to 727 in 2018, the minister said. The FTCs for MPs/MLAs are in Delhi, Andhra, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, UP, Bihar and West Bengal. Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar University has awarded more than maximum marks to several candidates in results of session 2017-18 declared so far. Meanwhile, the university administration has not been able to declare complete results of a majority of the courses. And in those which have been declared, a large number of errors have surfaced. On Monday, marksheets showing marks such as 70 out of 50 were widely shared on social media. Representational Image The university had failed to complete results declaration by the targeted date of June 15. The deadline for declaration of the remaining results has been extended by 15 days. The university administration claimed to have declared results for more than 70 courses out of the total 86 so far. Students complained that in a majority of the courses, the results declared are incomplete. A large number of mark sheets have errors related to name, parents name, marks awarded and other details. According to her mark sheet uploaded on the universitys website, BSc part 1 student Bharti Verma has been awarded 70 marks out of 50 in physical education. Another student, Nisha Prajapati, has been awarded 68 marks out of 50 in the same subject. Anjali Dhaked has received 67 marks. Result of a BSc part 3 student mentions that he has received 38 marks in mathematics as aggregate of three papers out of total 150. To pass the course he had to score 53 marks. But his mark sheet mentioned that he has secured second division marks. A BSc part 1 student has been awarded 57 marks out of 200 in mathematics. The minimum marks required to qualify the exam is 70. But the student has passed the exam according to the online mark sheet. TOI Former National Students Union of India general secretary Amit Singh said, Following lack of proper management, the university administration is declaring results in haste. University officials want to somehow close the session to avoid any questioning from university chancellor (governor of Uttar Pradesh) Ram Naik. In several courses only 20-30% of students have received their results. A large number of results declared have errors in them. Now students will be forced to pay for correction of these errors. When students can be awarded more than maximum marks, they can also be awarded lower marks by mistake. A large number of students are complaining that they wrote their exams well but have been declared to have failed or awarded just passing marks. The university administration has failed to fulfill its basic duties, Singh added. University public relations officer GS Sharma said, Cases of errors in results have surfaced. Some of them have been corrected. All such cases will be sorted out in a time-bound manner. Bharti Airtel on Monday issued a too little, too late clarification to a customer who asked the company to change her service representative from a Muslim guy to a Hindu. It all started on Monday, 18th June when a customer named Pooja Singh reached out to Airtel on Twitter to seek assistance. When the customer was attended by a Muslim representative to help her, she demanded that her concerns should be addressed only by a Hindu employee of the company. @airtelindia pathetic Airtel DTH customer service.I raised complaint for reinstallation of DHT.but assigned service engineer miss behaved with me. His words are "Tum Phone Rakho Dobara call mt krna " his number is+91 79-85195094. This is how Airtel is looting it's customer. Pooja Singh (@pooja303singh) June 18, 2018 Pooja wanted to register a complaint of "misbehaviour" by one of the employees of the telecom company when she was contacted regarding an issue with her DTH connection. Her concerns were attended by Airtel employee named Shoaib, but Pooja was quick to ask for a change. Dear Shohaib, as youre a Muslim and I have no faith in your working ethics because Kuran may have different version for customer service, thus requesting you to assign a Hindu representative for my request. Thanks Pooja Singh (@pooja303singh) June 18, 2018 Though the team was quick to change the representative, it is not what Twitter expected out of Airtel. Following this reply from Airtel, a lot of users were infuriated in the sense that how could Airtel, a global brand tolerate and accept such misconduct basis religion. The company's response was considered as an 'acceptance' of bigotry and hatred by several online users, including former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. Dear @Airtel_Presence this conversation is genuine (Ive seen the timeline myself). I refuse to pay another penny to a company that condones such blatant bigotry. Im beginning the process of porting my number to another service provider & canceling my DTH & Broadband. pic.twitter.com/BZxJOaEsN6 Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) June 18, 2018 But he wasn't the only one who felt that way. 1. 5 5 https://t.co/38dFsl2yCN Ravish Kumar (@RavishReal) June 18, 2018 2. Heights. Why they would fire shoaib? Crazy PrestituteMuktBharat (@FreedomfrmMedia) June 18, 2018 3. Pooja is so Hindu, she doesn't use Petrol/diesel in her car as it comes from Muslim countries, runs it only on Gobargas. Mehek (@MehekF) June 18, 2018 4. Pooja is so Hindu, she doesn't use twitter cuz Twitter's second biggest shareholder is Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Firoze (@Firoze_) June 18, 2018 5. Be careful! Pls see your ophthalmologist soon !! U are blinded by hatred !!! U couldnt even spell his name right in a reply, !! N its the Quran BTW !! Agar nafrat se dimaag nahi kharaab hua hota toh shayad education mein basic spellings toh pata hi hoti!! Gauahar Khan (@GAUAHAR_KHAN) June 18, 2018 6. Hi Gaganjot, tujhe waheguru ki kasam, iske number pe azaan wali callertune laga de plz. https://t.co/u6lDsZCbhV Rofl Gandhi (@RoflGandhi_) June 18, 2018 It's critical for organizations to take a stand! As Ellie Wiesel said "We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." We all know that kids can be a handful and drive parents up the wall. But sometimes their innocent mistakes can cost their parents a fortune. Screengrab Case in point: Couple from Americas Kansas City has been charged with a monstrous bill of $132,000 ( 90 Lakhs) after their son knocked over a glass on display at a community centre. The Kansas City Star quoted the letter sent by an insurance company. The childs mother, Sarah Goodman, said the incident happened during a wedding reception last month, according to KSHB. The artwork, 'Aphrodite di Kansas City' was on display at the centre. Surveillance video shows the child hugging the sculpture, before it fell, all in a matter of seconds. We heard a bunch of commotion and I thought, 'Whose yelling at my son?' Goodman explained. This glass mosaic torso is laying on the ground and someone is following me around demanding my personal information. Screengrab "Maybe my son hugged a torso because he's a loving, sweet nice boy who just graduated from preschool," she added to local newspaper The Kansas City Star. Bill Lyons, the artist behind the masterpiece examined the damage and said that it cannot be repaired. He also added that he should be reimbursed for the amount of time he spent creating it and its absolutely worth it. Clarifying the matter to CNET, an official said all the city did was to file an insurance claim, as per policy. "We are NOT seeking payment from the family... Our carrier is simply wanting to contact their insurance provider. If we do not seek payment from their carrier, taxpayers' money will be used to compensate the artist," Overland Park communications manager Sean Reilly said. San Jose: Rally to Stop Trump Policy that Separates Immigrant Children from Parents by Text R.R./Photos Jack Owicki Tuesday Jun 19th, 2018 4:57 AM On June 14, hundreds of immigration and childrens rights advocates rallied in San Jose, California in protest against the Trump administration policy that separates children from their parents along the US border. The administrations zero tolerance policy provides for the arrest of all adults caught trying to enter the United States without documentation, including those seeking asylum. [Photos by Jack Owicki, free for reuse by non-profit organizations, please credit the photographer.] On June 14, hundreds of immigration and childrens rights advocates rallied in San Jose, California in protest against the Trump administration policy that separates children from their parents along the US border. Many people joined rallies across the country that Sunday for the same reason. A New York Times investigation estimated that more than 700 children, including 100 under the age of 4, had been taken from their parents on the US/Mexico border between October, 2017 and April of this year. The paper cited federal Department of Homeland Security officials as their source. Other sources reported that the new Trump policy has resulted in the dividing of nearly 2,000 children from their parents between mid-April and the end of May of this year. While parents are held in jail, their children are sent to separate detention facilities. Online videos show immigrant children being held in concrete-floored cages at detention centers. The administrations zero tolerance policy provides for the arrest of all adults caught trying to enter the United States without documentation, including those seeking asylum. 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. Amazon flexes muscles, Seattle backs down on business tax AP : Amazon balked and Seattle is backing down. City leaders said they plan to repeal a tax on large companies such as Amazon and Starbucks as they face mounting pressure from businesses, an about-face just a month after unanimously approving the measure to help pay for efforts to combat a growing homelessness crisis. The quick surrender showed the power of Amazon to help rally opposition and aggressively push back on taxes at all levels of government, even in its affluent home city where the income gap is ever widening and lower-income workers are being priced out of housing. It has resulted in one of the highest homelessness rates in the U.S. Amazon and other businesses had sharply criticized the tax, and the online retailer even temporarily halted construction planning on a new high-rise building near its Seattle headquarters in protest. Mayor Jenny Durkan and seven of nine City Council members said Monday they worked with a range of groups to pass a measure last month that would strike a balance between protecting jobs and supporting affordable housing. But a coalition of businesses is working to get a referendum on the November ballot to overturn the tax. In a statement Durkan and the council members said "it is clear that the ordinance will lead to a prolonged, expensive political fight over the next five months that will do nothing to tackle our urgent housing and homelessness crisis." They said they would move forward to repeal the so-called head tax. A special council meeting is scheduled Tuesday, where a vote is expected. They didn't provide a backup funding plan. It marks the latest Amazon move against city, state and national taxes. The company recently said it would block Australians from purchases on its international websites after the nation planned to impose a 10 percent consumption tax on online retailers for goods shipped to Australia. The tax debate comes as 20 cities vie to lure the company's second headquarters and as it expands its workforce in Boston and Vancouver, British Columbia. Cities have offered lavish tax breaks and incentives to lure the company and its promise of adding tens of thousands of high-paying jobs. Critics have said it is wrong for profitable company to push for public money, especially considering the added costs to infrastructure and services the new headquarters would bring. Seattle's tax would charge companies about $275 per full-time worker each year and raise roughly $48 million a year for affordable housing and homeless services. It would target businesses making at least $20 million in gross revenue and take effect in January. The liberal city spent $68 million on homelessness in 2017 and plans to spend $78 million this year. Just days after Durkan signed the ordinance into law, the No Tax On Jobs campaign, a coalition of businesses, announced it would gather signatures to put a repeal referendum on the November ballot. The campaign has raised about $285,000 in cash contributions, with more employers, including Amazon and Starbucks, pledging nearly $200,000 in additional support. The coalition is glad the "Seattle City Council has heard the voices of the people loud and clear and are now reconsidering this ill-conceived tax," said John Murray, a spokesman with the No Tax on Jobs campaign. Councilwoman Teresa Mosqueda, one of four sponsors of the tax, said she could not support repealing the tax without "a replacement strategy to house and shelter our neighbors experiencing homelessness." "We cannot wait months or until next year for another proposal or process while people are sleeping in our parks and on our streets," she said in a statement. Councilwoman Kshama Sawant said on Twitter that the repeal "is a capitulation to bullying by Amazon" and other big business" and called it a "backroom betrayal" that didn't involve her office. The clash over who should pay to solve a housing crisis exacerbated by Seattle's rapid economic growth was marked by weeks of raucous meetings and tense exchanges that didn't abate after the tax was approved. Opponents called the Seattle measure a tax on jobs and questioned whether city officials are spending current resources effectively. Others praised the tax as a step toward building badly needed affordable housing. A former Suncorp executive has taken the role of chief strategy and customer officer at MetLife Australia. Gerard McDermott joined MetLife Australia from EML where he was workers compensation group executive. Prior to that he was head of general insurance at BT Financial Group and held senior leadership roles at Suncorp spanning 11 years, the most recent being executive general manager for personal insurance distribution. We believe Tokio Marine is an ideal owner given its experience in the region, and that this is a good outcome for the associated employees, customers and other stakeholders, said IAGs chief executive, Peter Harmer. The firm is also selling its dominant stake in AAA Assurance Corp, based in Vietnam, to a different overseas buyer but it did not disclose the sale price for this deal. It still has minority stakes in insurance businesses in Malaysia and India but these remain under review. The withdrawal from Asia comes after IAG launched a strategic review of its operations in the region, citing limited expansion opportunities. Despite years of investments, the region has proved difficult for IAG to crack and the insurer posted an underwriting loss in Asia of $4.63 million in its fiscal first half of 2018. A spokesperson for IAG said the asset sales would be completed by June 2019 and the profit from the sales would be treated as an unusual item and will therefore be excluded from its cash earnings and dividend calculation purposes. Related stories: IAG invests in potential disrupter IAG looking to insurance, and beyond, for its future It will be recalled that in February Chubb several units of which have collectively issued about 80 policies to Weinstein and his family since the 90s filed a lawsuit, arguing that defence costs from the molestation-linked cases arent covered. Weinsteins camp, in a countersuit filed last month, noted having paid the group of insurers over $1 million worth of premiums for what his lawyers described as a wide variety of liability claims, according to a Reuters report. The countersuit also cited unlimited coverage for the insureds legal defence. Bill Cosby ruling Just this month the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that insurer AIG should foot the bill as far as the defamation lawsuits being faced by Bill Cosby are concerned. The civil cases allege that Cosby who has been convicted of aggravated indecent assault defamed his accusers when he said the women were lying about their sexual misconduct complaints. The ruling does not relate to legal costs for sexual assault lawsuits. Related stories: Harvey Weinstein launches legal battle against Chubb Specialty insurance line predicted to surge by 2019 Because he cant pay $228 in traffic fines, Seti Johnson faces revocation of his North Carolinas drivers license, which means he wont be able to drive to the job he hopes to get soon. For Sharee Smoot, the amount keeping her off the road is $648. In a federal lawsuit filed May 30, attorneys for the two say North Carolinas practice of revoking drivers licenses of people who cant pay their traffic fines and court costs is unconstitutional because it violates the rights to due process and equal protection under the 14th amendment. This revocation scheme disproportionately punishes impoverished residents in violation of federal law, taking away crucial means of self-sufficiency and further pushing them into poverty, the motion for a preliminary injunction states. The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. Torre Jessup, commissioner of the state Division of Motor Vehicles, is named as the defendant. North Carolina law requires automatic revocation of licenses for nonpayment of a traffic ticket 40 days after a court judgment. The groups are suing because the law doesnt require a hearing to make sure the driver can pay the fine and court costs. The statements by Smoot and Johnson describe a cycle of fines and attempts to catch up on their debts as they try to hold on to their jobs and support their families. Last year, Johnson said he paid more than $700 in fines, court costs and late fees on previous tickets. His drivers license was reinstated, but he fell behind on rent payments and had to move in with his mother. But before he paid the $700, he was issued another ticket for not paying. He was convicted in April of a lesser crime failure to notify the Division of Motor Vehicles of an address change and sentenced to pay a $100 fine and $208 in court costs. He paid $100 that day, but was charged an additional $20 for an installment plan and set-up fee even though the bill says the entire amount is due within 40 days. He said he doubts hell be able pay the remaining debt within 60 days of May 22, as hes required to do to keep his license. I value taking care of my responsibilities, he writes. But that is hard to do when I am required to pay hundreds of dollars in fines and court costs and my drivers license is revoked when I do not have the money to pay. No one should have to live with the burden of their license revoked because they cannot pay off their traffic tickets. Smoot writes that she was making $9 an hour while working at a group home when she was sentenced to pay $308 for driving while her license was revoked in 2016. She was assessed a $50 late fee for not paying within 40 days. She and her 9-year-old daughter moved in with her grandmother in 2017 to save money. Smoot said she stopped attending school part-time at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte because she couldnt afford it. In 2017, she was issued another ticket for driving while her license was revoked and ordered to pay $235. That grew to $285 with a late fee; an order for her arrest was issued for not paying the fines, and she was charged a $5 arrest fee. She said her car was repossessed, and she lost her job because she didnt have transportation to work. I have been forced to make the difficult choice of staying home, losing my job and not being able to take care of necessities for me, my daughter and my grandmother, whose I also pay, or continuing to drive illegally and risk more punishment, she writes. A spokeswoman for the state Transportation Department, which oversees the state Division of Motor Vehicles, said officials were reviewing the lawsuit. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits North Carolina A federal appeals court in New York says a lawsuit alleging the use of sound cannons by police constitutes excessive force can proceed toward trial. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that it agreed with a lower court judge who concluded that the New York Police Department and its officials were not entitled to immunity. The lawsuit stems from the NYPDs use of sound cannons known as Long Range Acoustic Devices during 2014 protests over the police chokehold death of Eric Garner. The device manufacturer says they emit a series of sharp beeps to disperse crowds. An attorney for six plaintiffs says the sound left his clients with migraines and hearing damage. A spokesman says the citys Law Department is reviewing the decision. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits Reduction of corporate tax for financial institutions Dr. M Abul Kashem Mozumder and Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque : Admittedly corporate sector is an important part of economy. Private enterprises or companies are quixotically clinging to profits that concern them much . But the private organizations like NGOs, voluntary organization are non-profitable trying to play a role as civil societies. Corporate financial institutions mostly private banks 'serves a diverse range of clients, ranging from small- to mid-sized local businesses with a few millions in revenues to large conglomerates with billions in sales and offices across the country. Commercial banks offer the following products and services to corporations and other financial institutions': Loans and other credit products - this is typically the biggest area of business within corporate banking, and as noted earlier, one of the biggest sources of profit and risk for a bank. Treasury and cash management services are used by companies for managing their working capital and currency conversion requirements. Equipment lending - commercial banks structure customized loans and leases for a range of equipment used by companies in diverse sectors such as manufacturing, transportation and information technology. Commercial real estate - services offered by banks in this area include real asset analysis, portfolio evaluation, and debt and equity structuring. Trade finance - involves letters of credit, bill collection and factoring. Employer services - services such as payroll and group retirement plans are typically offered by specialized affiliates of a bank. Notwithstanding its importance in our dynamic economy criticism has become scathing on lowering corporate tax for banks, financial institutions. The Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) has been instrumental in slating the move to lower corporate tax rate for banks, insurance and financial institutions by 2.5 percent in the proposed national budget. Dr Debapriya Bhattacharya, a distinguished fellow of the CPD, said "This will give wrong signal, the government should not give such facility to the owners of banks and financial institutions without stopping the anarchy which is going in the banking sector. We think policy makers in the domain of budget preparation should rethink about lowering of corporate tax for reckless and whimsical banking sector. Among our banks those who have already earned bad name under the manipulation of all black cats at the apex should not be given any tax privilege. This would become outrageous. The government may well be advised to give priority to needed reforms to modernize the country's tax system .The move to reduce corporate tax may lead to loss of revenues worth about Tk 1000 crore and is highly unlikely to increase liquidity (CPD in its analysis of the National Budget for FY 2018-19). Our concern is that the financial institutions suffer from image crisis. Governance shortage has become acute. Financial institutions should think that money being deposited in their banks is oublic money. Clients are the main shareholders. So while giving any mega loans in the relam macro enterprise banks must take decision rather circumspectively. We have a plenty of stories about banks in the grips of criminal syndicates. Hallmark-Sonali Bank Loan Scam was a scam perpetrated by the largest State Owned Commercial Bank (SOCB) by giving a loan of BD Taka 3400 crore (almost USD 454 million) using scam documents between 2010 and 2012. The loan scam occurred when one branch of Sonali Bank illegally gave out $454 million in loans, including nearly $344 million to Hallmark Group, a textile business. Tanvir Mahmud, Hallmark's managing director, connived with a branch manager to issue fraudulent letters of credit to fictitious companies (Wikipedia). In a board meeting number of 316, 317, 318 and 319 were approved a higher loan. For instance the bank was approved 117 crore taka in a board meeting no. of 317 without acceptance of other board members.}. Basic bank had paid 45 lac 31 thousand taka to the lawyer of Barrister Kamrujamman for operating their legal suit at the very beginning of that case which was unusual for other lawyer because normally lawyer gets at best 4 to 5 lac taka in total. (Navid Tasmin) Pribes about the scams have been going on for a long time without any commensurable results. On the other hand the government is aware about discipline in banking institutions. In terms loan repayment and bringing loan defaulters under code of conduct. To cite a report: Bangladesh Bank (BB), the regulatory body of the country's banking sector, has recently taken drastic actions against two banks over allegations of serious violation of banking norms in running their businesses. It has removed the Managing Director and CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of NRBC Bank and barred him from holding any position in any other bank or financial institution for the next two years. Similarly, the central bank has removed the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Farmers Bank over allegation of some gross violations. These punitive actions against the banks' management are apparently a warning to the whole industry. After a long silence, BB has thus played an effective regulatory role. This deserves appreciation. Only when the regulators conduct strong monitoring and take stern action against violation of rules and regulations, the financial industry remains under control and any financial debacle can be averted. Absence of such vigilance from regulators resulted in many financial scandals and fraudulent activities in the country's banking sector. Whenever the central bank failed to take stern action against banks involved in financial scandals like the Hall Mark, Bismillah, and Basic Bank scams, a section of people attributed the failure to so-called political influence and intervention. This in many cases was intended to cover up the failure of the central bank. True, political influence is a common phenomenon in the developing world and it is not unusual even in the developed world where such malpractice takes place in a sophisticated way through lobbyists. However, such political influence should not be considered as a big impediment to performing regulator's role. Rather, the regulators should learn the acumen of performing their due role by way of tactfully counter-manoeuvring the challenges of political influence and other unnecessary obstacles. Political influence is rampant in our country but at the same time, bank management's incompetence or inability also sometimes gets immunity in the name of political influence and intervention. Now that Bangladesh Bank has acted as an effective regulator, one hopes that the central bank will continue to keep it up and will even toughen its stance while performing its regulatory role. The BB should exercise its prudence while taking any punitive measure against any bank or financial institution. This is required because if any legal flaw is found, action taken by the BB may be overruled by the court. In that situation, the central bank's role will be questioned and its regulatory role will also be undermined. Nevertheless, ambiguity may arise over the interpretation of some sections of the Bank Company Act and various circulars issued by the BB from time to time. The roles of the Managing Director (MD), and board of directors of the bank in its day-to-day affairs, particularly in sanctioning loan, have also not been unambiguously spelt out, which may create confusion or ambiguity. The banking industry of the country is highly developed with the presence of more than 50 banks and hundreds of non-banking financial institutions. However, roles and responsibility of the management team, MD and CEO and the board of directors in running banks' day-to-day affairs, particularly in sanctioning loan, have not been defined properly. Loan proposal is originated by the branch, evaluated by the CRM (Credit Risk Management) Team, and then submitted to the MD and CEO or Board of Directors for approval depending upon their respective delegation. So the existing practice reveals that persons at different levels of the bank, from top to bottom, are involved in sanctioning loan. In that situation, question may arise why only MD and Chairman will be punished and others will be spared. In response, some may argue that the officers or CRM have followed whatever MD or Chairman of the Board had instructed, but this should not be an acceptable explanation. Irrespective of the position, no one should carry out an order of the superior if it is not found compliant with the rules and regulations. Unfortunately, the financial industry in our country lacks this standard practice. In his banking career, this writer has experienced many instances where MD has just asked CRM Head to look into a credit proposal to find its viability and in response; CRM Head submitted the proposal with recommendation for approval without studying its viability. This is a very difficult situation because it creates a dilemma in holding the concerned officer accountable as the Chairman may say the bank board has approved loan proposal based on the MD's recommendation. Similarly, the MD can say he approved the loan proposal in line with CRM recommendation. If CRM or the MD is asked why they have recommended such loan proposal, they will come up with counter-argument saying that they have done so because they have been asked by the Chairman to do so. Due to lack of proper guidelines in approving loans and due to the absence of specific rules determining the role and responsibility of executives at different levels of a bank, including the MD and the board, such blame game arises which provides a safe passage to the main culprits. MODERN BANKING: In the face of such ambiguous situation prevailing in the country's banking industry, Bangladesh Bank should first emphasise on streamlining the entire loan operation system in the banks. In modern banking, board of directors does not directly approve any loan proposal. However, they continuously assess risks associated with sanctioning loan. And for proper assessment, they develop specific guidelines incorporating risk parameters. The MD will be solely responsible for implementing policy and guidelines developed by the board of directors. He will exercise adequate control at every level of loan management - from loan originating office to the approving level - to meticulously comply with guidelines and parameters approved by the board. Loan proposal will be evaluated, assessed and approved within the given guidelines and parameters by the management team at different levels of the bank including credit committee, senior credit committee, risk committee and so on. If any deviation or violation of the board-approved guidelines and parameters is detected, the concerned department or person will be held accountable and responsible. At the same time, the MD will be held responsible for his failure to exercise control over a department involved in the loan approval process and accordingly punitive measure will be taken. The board will closely monitor whether their guidelines and parameters are being meticulously complied with while approving loans. If the board fails to provide appropriate guidelines and parameters or fails to ensure compliance, its members will be held responsible and accordingly, punitive action will be taken against the defaulters. The entire process of loan sanctioning should be brought under computer technology so that the system does not allow deviation from given parameters. If such deviation or violation occurs, an exception report will be automatically generated and distributed to the concerned authorities including the board of directors. The roles and responsibility of board of directors, MD and CEO and management team and demarcation of each stake holder's duty should be made in black and white. Probable consequence or punishment for each violation should also be clearly specified in the written procedure. The concerned body should be made aware of this procedure and will provide written acknowledgement so that no scope of any denial or ignorance remains. These changes are required not only in the credit and loan operations but also in other areas including international trade (foreign exchange), operation department, FCD (Financial Control Department) and IT (Information Technology). Banker's accountability and responsibility can then be properly defined and the bank itself, and Bangladesh Bank as regulatory body will be able to enforce their actions against the violators what will thus restore and establish sustainable discipline in the country's financial sector. Bangladesh bank must be playing role in the creation of conations conducive to the maintenance of rules and regulation. All public and private banks should be brought under Bangladesh Bank. "Bangladesh Bank should consider establishing effective presence in the country's financial industry so that any market player thinks twice before violating any rules. (Dr. M Abul Kashem Mozumder, Pro-VC, BUP and Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque, Retired Professor, Chittagong University) Kaplansky Insurance, a Needham, Mass.-based, independent and locally owned agency, has acquired Kelleher & Mackey Insurance Agency (K&M) in Quincy, Mass. Following the acquisition, K&M will be merging into Kaplanskys new Weymouth, Mass., location. The addition of K&M marks the 29th acquisition for Kaplansky and further strengthens the agencys presence in the Northeast. In the future, it plans to continue to pursue additional agency acquisitions, according to a company press release. Kaplansky Insurance operates 13 locations throughout Massachusetts. Source: Kaplansky Insurance Topics Mergers Massachusetts The Maine Supreme Court has ruled that employers in the state are not required to reimburse employees for their use of medical marijuana under the Maine workers compensation system because federal law preempts state law. This decision vacates a previous Appellate Division ruling in this matter and marks the first time the Maine Supreme Court has been called on to consider the relationship between the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and the Maine Medical Use of Marijuana Act (MMUMA). The case came about after Gaetan H. Bourgoin sustained a work-related injury and was issued a certification to use medical marijuana for chronic back pain. He successfully petitioned the state Workers Compensation Board for an order requiring his former employer, Twin Rivers Paper Company LLC, to pay for the medical marijuana. Twin Rivers initially opposed the petition, arguing that an order requiring it to pay for Bourgoins medical marijuana is barred by the CSA even if his use of medical marijuana were permitted by the MMUMA. Following a hearing, however, the hearing officer granted Bourgoins petition in a written decision issued in March of 2015. Twin Rivers appealed to the Appellate Division, which affirmed the hearing officers decision in August of 2016. The Maine Supreme Court then granted Twin Rivers petition for appellate review and concluded that in the narrow circumstances of this case, where an employer is subject to an order requiring it to subsidize an employees acquisition of medical marijuana, there is a positive conflict between federal and state law. As a result, the Maine Supreme Court decided the CSA preempts the MMUMA as applied in this case and vacated the decision of the Appellate Division. Prosecuted or not, the fact remains that Twin Rivers would be forced to commit a federal crime if it complied with the directive of the Workers Compensation Board, Maine Supreme Court Associate Justice Jeffrey L. Hjelm stated in the opinion document. Federal Versus State Law Nearly half a century ago, U.S. Congress enacted the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970. Subchapter I of the Act constitutes the CSA, which establishes laws related to drug control and enforcement. The CSA classifies substances subject to that legislation into five schedules that are differentiated based on three factors: their respective potential for abuse, the existence or absence of their currently accepted medical use, and risks they pose even when used under medical supervision, the decision document explained. Marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug, which is the category of substances U.S. Congress has determined have a high potential for abuse, do not have a currently accepted medical use for treatment and pose unacceptable safety risks even under medical supervision. This means federal law bars the prescribed use of marijuana and any other Schedule I drug even in a state with local laws allowing the medical use of marijuana. Although the CSA requires the U.S. Attorney General to periodically update the schedules of controlled substances, marijuana has remained a Schedule I drug ever since the CSA was enacted in 1970, the decision document stated. Because marijuana is a Schedule I substance, the CSA makes it a crime to knowingly or intentionally manufacture, distribute, or dispense, or possess with intent to manufacture, distribute, or dispense marijuana, as well as to knowingly or intentionally . . . possess a controlled substance. Additionally, a federal prosecution can be directed against a principal, which is defined as any individual who commits an offense against the United States or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures its commission, the decision document said. Therefore, the Maine Supreme Court stated in its decision that if Twin Rivers complied with the administrative order by subsidizing Bourgoins use of medical marijuana, it would be engaging in conduct that meets all of the elements of criminal aiding and abetting. The penalty for violation of the CSA, at minimum, is a mandatory fine of $1,000. It may also include as much as one year of incarceration, with a greater sentence if certain aggravating factors are present, such as a prior conviction for any drug offense. On the other hand, the Maine Medical Use of Marijuana Act allows a qualifying patient such as Bourgoin to possess a limited amount of marijuana for medical use. The written certification by a medical provider, which is effective for one year, is based on the professionals opinion that the qualifying patient is likely to receive therapeutic benefit from the medical marijuana used to treat a medical condition. These conflicting federal and state laws, and their embodiment of competing policies and underlying conclusions about the efficacy of marijuana as a legitimate therapeutic substance, frame the narrow issue that is central to this case: given this network of statutes, can Twin Rivers be required to pay for Bourgoins acquisition and use of marijuana conduct that is proscribed by federal law but allowed by the state because a MMUMA certification had been issued to him? Hjelm wrote in the opinion. Maine Supreme Court Decision Hjelm went on to state that compliance with both [federal and Maine law] is an impossibility. This is because if Twin Rivers complied with the hearing officers order and knowingly reimbursed Bourgoin for the cost of the medical marijuana as permitted by the MMUMA, it would engage in conduct made criminal by the CSA because Twin Rivers would be aiding and abetting Bourgoin in his purchase, possession and use of marijuana, Hjelm wrote in the opinion. Conversely, if Twin Rivers complied with the CSA by not reimbursing Bourgoin for the costs of medical marijuana, it would violate the MMUMA-based order of the hearing officer. Through its enactment of the MMUMA, the Maine Legislature has exempted qualifying patients and other specified individuals from state prosecution that otherwise could arise from the medical use of marijuana, Hjelm wrote. The Legislature, however, does not have the power to change or restrict the application of federal law that positively conflicts with state law. Associate Justice Joseph M. Jabar wrote in a dissenting opinion, however, that he does not believe the CSA preempts the MMUMA in this case, as there is no state law in Maine that requires the employer to possess, manufacture or distribute marijuana. In other words, compliance with both the federal law and the Workers Compensation Board order is possible he wrote. He argued that the Maine Supreme Courts primary legal theory in this case that because the employer would be aiding and abetting Bourgoins possession, the CSA preempts the MMUMA is unpersuasive because the government would not be able to prove the employer would be acting with the specific intent necessary to establish the offense of aiding and abetting. This is because he believes the employer would not be an active participant in Bourgoins use and possession of marijuana and is instead only reimbursing him for his medical expenses as ordered by the WCB. I do not agree that mere knowledge constitutes active participation in the commission of a crime he wrote, adding that it is speculative to anticipate a federal prosecution of an employer who reimburses an employee for medical expenses pursuant to a WCB order mandating it to do so. That said, the Maine Supreme Court stated that as long as marijuana remains a Schedule I substance under the CSA, an employer ordered to compensate an employee for medical marijuana costs would be required to commit a federal crime defined by the CSA. Because the MMUMA requires what federal law forbids, the authority ostensibly provided by the Maine law is without effect,' the Maine Supreme Court ruled. It therefore vacated the decision of the Appellate Division and remanded to the Workers Compensation Appellate Division with instructions to vacate the decision of the hearing officer and remand for denial of the petition for payment of medical expenses and services. States that have legalized medical marijuana have taken different approaches when it comes to reimbursement under workers compensation. In many sates, reimbursement is being done quietly and on a voluntary basis. Some states have laws explicitly stating that an employer or workers compensation insurer is not required to pay for medical marijuana. In a discussion with Claims Journal, Brian Allen, vice president of government affairs for Mitchell, and Mark Pew, senior vice president of PRIUM, a division of Genex Services LLC, provided insight on workers compensation cases involving medical marijuana reimbursement and on the federal governments marijuana law enforcement. Related: Topics USA Workers' Compensation Commercial Lines Business Insurance Cannabis Drugs Maine Two former Iowa Workforce Development judges may sue the agency for wrongful discharge after the Iowa Supreme Court made significant rulings in their cases on June 15 that could have broad implications for other state workers. Susan Ackerman sued in January 2015, making eight allegations including retaliation, defamation, emotional stress, breach of contract and wrongful discharge. She appealed to the Supreme Court after a judge dismissed the wrongful discharge allegation. The judge concluded that state employees under contract have avenues to address their grievances through the contract and cannot seek monetary damages in a lawsuit. But the states highest court ruled for the first time in Iowa that workers under contract have the same right to file a lawsuit as any other worker. The court said nothing in Iowa law says a contractual employee surrenders the right to bring a claim for wrongful conduct. Its a good decision for employees in Iowa, said Ackermans attorney Wes Graham. He said Ackerman is relieved that after years of legal battles shell get her allegations against the state before a jury. Ackerman, an American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union member, worked as a judge hearing unemployment appeals cases for 15 years. After Teresa Wahlert was appointed director of the IWD by Gov. Terry Branstad in 2011, Ackerman and other judges said they were subjected to political pressure to decide cases in favor of businesses over workers. After Ackerman and other judges testified at an Iowa Senate Government Oversight Committee hearing in August 2014 about the problems at the agency, she began receiving poor work performance ratings. She was fired in January 2015 after the agency accused her of insurance fraud. A judge dropped the charges, however, finding Ackerman was subjected to retaliatory vindictive treatment by the state. Joseph Walsh, who led the agencys unemployment appeals bureau, filed a whistleblower lawsuit in April 2014. He was fired after he opposed efforts by Branstad and Wahlert to make his job a political appointment, switching it from a merit position, which had job protections, to non-merit, which allowed them to fire him for any reason. Walsh notified the U.S. Department of Labor that the state was violating laws requiring judges to be insulated from political pressure. He was laid off by the agency, which claimed it was because of budgetary issues. He sued for retaliation. His lawsuit was dismissed by a judge who said Walsh should pursue his complaints through administrative channels. The Supreme Court reversed the judge, clarifying that state employee whistleblowers have a right to sue in court or pursue an administrative remedy regardless of whether theyre merit or non-merit employees. Walshs attorney Megan Flynn said the ruling has broad implications for workers who believe they have been wronged by their employer. Some employees may feel the district court is a better place for light to be shed on their claims, Flynn said. Walshs lawsuit now goes back to district court for a jury trial. A spokesman for the Iowa attorney generals office declined comment except to say that the attorneys representing the state in the cases were analyzing the decisions. The Supreme Court upheld the dismissal in a third case filed against IWD by a long-time unemployment hearing judge. Marlon Mormann filed a lawsuit in May 2015 alleging age discrimination after a promotion he applied for was filled with a younger staffer. Wahlert later acknowledged that she had expressed concerns that Mormann was nearing retirement. His lawsuit was dismissed by a judge who said he waited too long to file it. The Supreme Court agreed. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits Legislation Iowa A Kansas mother says an insurance company wants her family to pay $132,000 after her 5-year-old son accidentally knocked over a sculpture at a city community center. Sarah Goodman tells the Kansas City Star the incident happened last month at Overland Parks Tomahawk Ridge Community Center while her family was attending a wedding reception. Goodman says she didnt see the artwork hit the ground but her son suffered minor injuries when it fell. She says the sculpture was unprotected at the crowded center. City spokesman Sean Reilly says the work was on loan to the city and that it was obligated to file a claim with its insurance company for the damage. Goodman says her children were well-supervised and she wasnt negligent. She hopes her insurance company can resolve the issue. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Kansas Health insurers in Minnesotas individual market are proposing mostly decreased premium rates for 2019, with average proposed decreases ranging from 3 percent to more than 12 percent for consumers, according to data released Friday by the Minnesota Department of Commerce. The Star Tribune reports the four largest providers in the individual market are proposing decreases ranging from 7 percent to about 12 percent. The proposed rates are preliminary; they will be reviewed by the Commerce Department and finalized later this year. The rate proposals are a sign of stability in a market thats seen premium spikes under the federal Affordable Care Act. They also reflect a newfound profitability for insurers in the market, as well as the impact of a state-funded reinsurance program that offsets costs for consumers with unusually high medical expenses. That program, enacted in 2017 and in effect for 2019, offsets 80 percent of a persons total annual medical claims costs between $50,000 and $250,000. State law authorizes up to $542 million for the reinsurance program in 2018-2019. Minnesotans can breathe a little easier knowing that their health care rates will likely go down next year, House Speaker Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, said in a statement. Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton said the proposed rate reductions are good news for many people but that insurance is still too expensive for many Minnesota families. Last year, over 349,000 people went without health insurance, because prices are still way too high, Dayton said. Minnesota taxpayers should not have to keep subsidizing insurance companies to hold down health care costs. We need a marketplace solution. He urged the next governor and Legislature to allow families access to lower-cost quality health coverage. He had proposed a plan to do that, but Republican lawmakers rejected it. The individual market primarily serves people under age 65 who are self-employed or dont get insurance coverage from their employer. About 162,000 Minnesota residents were buying coverage in the market this spring through the MNsure exchange or directly from some carriers. The Commerce Department said the actual change in rates for individual consumers could vary based on health plan specifics, age and geography. Still, questions remain on the federal level about the future of the Affordable Care Act. Last week, President Donald Trumps administration said it would no longer defend key parts of the act. But officials with Minnesotas health insurance exchange have advised consumers to look at the proposed rates to see how much they could save through available tax credits. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Carriers Minnesota Language in a confidential severance agreement Tesla Inc. is using as part of the biggest job cut in its history is likely to deter dismissed employees from going public with worker safety concerns, according to employment-law experts. A proposed severance agreement Tesla presented to one of the more than 3,000 workers dismissed last week required acknowledgment that the employee had the opportunity to raise any safety concerns, safety complaints, or whistleblower activities against the company, and that if any safety concerns, safety complaints, or whistleblower activities were raised during your employment, they were addressed to your satisfaction. The document obtained and reviewed by Bloomberg News also barred the former worker from sharing business-related information; required that the ex-employee assist Teslas defense against claims; released any claims made against Tesla; and dictated that any disputes under the agreement will be handled in individual arbitration. I do think the agreement will chill valid employee complaints, said Brishen Rogers, a law professor at Temple University. A reasonable worker would just keep their mouth shut, rather than risk losing their severance pay. Tesla uses the language about safety matters to ensure that issues get addressed, according to a spokesman, who added that employees who dont believe those words apply to their case should come forward and share their concerns. Tesla declined to say how many of the employees it dismissed last week were presented with severance agreements using the language or how many accepted it. Sensitive Subject Worker safety has been a sensitive subject for Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, who addressed the topic during the companys annual meeting earlier this month. He also lobbed a fresh set of criticisms at the United Auto Workers over the weekend on Twitter. The union has had paid trolls & far left shills to trash Tesla & me in press & social media, Musk wrote in one post, and said in another that the companys non-disclosure agreements dont prevent workers from talking about labor conditions. The document, which would provide the employee about two months of severance pay, includes a clause stating that it doesnt in any way limit or prohibit the employee from cooperating with or filing a charge with a government agency. But the rest of the document makes it less likely that fired workers would actually speak up about issues like safety, or be taken seriously if they did, labor law experts say. The implication is, if you went to OSHA and you said, Heres something new I want to tell you about a safety concern at Tesla, and then OSHA asks the company to respond to that allegation, the company is going to say, That employee told us that they raised everything,' said Sharon Block, the executive director of Harvard Universitys Labor and Worklife Program. The language requiring workers to assist Tesla in legal disputes is also potentially problematic, said David Lopez, the incoming co-dean of Rutgers law school. It doesnt say you have to perjure yourself, said Lopez, the former general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under the Obama administration. But you question if youre a witness in this situation, and you have adverse information whether youd have confidence to testify adversely to the company, or whether youd think that that would potentially put you in jeopardy. Safety Focus Some employment lawyers say the language offered by Tesla doesnt depart much from whats become standard in such situations. The agreement probably goes into greater detail about safety issues because theyve been a subject of controversy for the company, said Paul Secunda, who directs Marquette Universitys Labor & Employment Law Program. It might be because of some history with safety issues that they want to make sure that theyre not leaving unresolved safety issues with severed employees to be resolved later theyre trying to make this as final as possible, said Secunda, who previously worked on severance agreements as an attorney for companies. When youre an attorney working for a company like Tesla, what youre trying to figure out is what kind of legal exposure does Tesla have, and what kind of certainty, predictability, and closure are you seeking to buy through these severance agreements, he said. Because you dont want to have to deal with these in the future. Under Scrutiny Tesla has been under heightened scrutiny over the past year following a series of media reports critical of its safety practices. In April, Californias Division of Occupational Safety and Health opened at least two inspections of the automaker. In a complaint issued in April, a regional director for the National Labor Relations Board alleged that Tesla managers have illegally tried to stop employees from discussing safety concerns with a union or each other. Tesla has denied the allegations, which are among those being considered by an administrative law judge at a trial that began June 11. This month Carlos Ramirez, who last year worked as a director of environmental, health, safety, and sustainability at Tesla, filed a lawsuit alleging that he was terminated because he complained about unsafe conditions and refused to participate in activity that would result in a violation of the law. The lawsuit claims that Tesla made allegedly untrue statements to the state and the public based on incorrect incident rate statistics and safety records, echoing allegations published by the Center for Investigative Reporting. In a statement, Tesla denied Ramirezs allegations and said he was terminated because of an onslaught of complaints about his behavior, including bullying, inappropriate comments about women, and attempts to intimidate co-workers. Ramirezs attorney declined to comment. Copyright 2021 Bloomberg. Topics Tesla The Mississippi Highway Patrol is paying $500,000 in a lawsuit over a fatal wreck that happened when a state trooper was driving fast on a dark highway without his blue lights flashing. The crash happened about 1:30 a.m. on May 7, 2017, killing Kaelin Kersh, 22, a Mississippi State University track athlete who had just graduated. She was a front-seat passenger in a Toyota Corolla that was struck by a patrol car on Highway 182 near Starkville. A lawsuit was filed by Kershs survivors and two women who were in a car with her when it was struck by a patrol car. The suit says the trooper, Kyle Lee, was speeding. The driver of the Corolla, Noel Collier, 21, of Madison, and another passenger, Tanequa Alexander, 22, of Ridgeland, were hospitalized with injuries. They were also Mississippi State University students at the time, the school said. Circuit Judge Lee Coleman ordered the Highway Patrol to put the $500,000 into a court account, the Starkville Daily News reported. The money was paid June 6 and will be divided among those who filed suit. The state tort claims act says $500,000 is the maximum amount a government entity would have to pay in a lawsuit. The state bowed out and tendered to the tort limit, Trent Walker, an attorney representing the Kersh estate, told the Commercial Dispatch. Now the next step will be to figure out who gets how much. Walker said the plaintiffs will try to agree on how to divide the money. Shortly after the wreck, a Highway Patrol spokesman said the trooper was eastbound on Highway 182 when the Toyota Corolla entered the highway. The spokesman, Master Sgt. Criss Turnipseed, said the trooper whose name was not released at the time was on the way to verify a report of another vehicle leaving the highway when the crash happened. Theres dispute about how fast Lee was driving when the crash occurred. Walker previously told the Commercial Dispatch that the accident report said Lee was traveling 68 mph in a 45 mph zone. However, Walker dash camera footage from Lees patrol car showed the trooper was going 100 mph when the crash happened. Mississippi legislators this year passed, and Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed, House Bill 1202, which requires emergency responders to turn on flashing lights when going more than 30 mph faster than the speed limit. It is called the Kaelin Kersh Act, and it becomes law July 1. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits Auto Mississippi EPIC Insurance Brokers and Consultants has named Brian Chu in Southern California as a vice president. Chu will be based in EPICs Downtown Los Angeles office, reporting to Jim Gillette, president of EPICs Pacific South region. He will be responsible for new business development; the design, placement and management of property/casualty and workers compensation insurance programs, and providing risk management strategies and solutions for mid-market and large clients across a range of industries. Chu comes from Crystal & Co., which was recently acquired by Alliant Insurance Services. EPIC is a retail property/casualty and employee benefits insurance brokerage and consulting firm. Topics California Mesa police say a self-driving vehicle was among five cars involved in a collision, but no serious injuries were reported. The driver of the Waymo vehicle told authorities that the car wasnt in autonomous mode at the time of Saturday nights crash. Witnesses say a car failed to stop for a red light and crashed into a Waymo vehicle as it was making a left turn. Police say the car then struck three other cars before stopping. Self-driving vehicles recently came under fire in March when an Uber vehicle in autonomous mode with an operator behind the wheel fatally struck a woman in Tempe A Waymo vehicle was struck by a red light runner last month in Chandler. Parent company Google brought the self-driving Waymo project to Chandler. Related: Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Auto Personal Auto Arizona Autonomous Vehicles We have updated our privacy policy to be more clear and meet the new requirements of the GDPR. By continuing to use our site, you accept our revised Privacy Policy. Stop wastage of public money, make city roads usable CAPITALs potholed and dilapidated roads, lanes and by-lanes are causing acute sufferings to commuters as they find movement from one place to another quite uncomfortable. With the condition of the roads, lanes and by-lanes deteriorating by the day, commuters see no respite from sufferings, reported a local daily. Poor maintenance, use of substandard materials in construction together with unplanned and uncoordinated road digging are the reasons behind the present situation. Repeated complains fell on the authorities' deaf ears. The capital's two city corporations pay no attention. The ever busy Gulistan-Jatrabari Road and its link roads developed potholes at several points for which it became a one-way road while the other side is closed to traffic near Bangabhaban as this point remains submerged under sewage leaking from DWASA's sewerage line. The Gabtoli to Sadarghat Road remained virtually unusable for motorized vehicles over the last seven months as it developed potholes. The Bashabo to Nandipara Road also remained unusable for over six months since DWASA did not repair it after laying drainage pipelines. Senior officials of the two city corporations said out of 2,500 km of roads they maintain 400 km had been dug up by different agencies. It is a matter of concern when travelling in roads denotes an increase in costs. Rickshaws and other common moods of transport charge double or even triple fares. Due to the dilapidated roads people can even suffer from additional health related costs as they may face an accident at anytime. Meanwhile the authorities concerned play the blame game as usual as City Corporation officials maintain that the roads repair is the responsibility of the PWD, the RHD as well as the Ministries concerned. But why it is not the responsibility of DSCC or DNCC to maintain roads built by other government organisations is not clear--especially as both the City Corporations have a clear jurisdiction over any public area in Dhaka city. We think, it is time to stop this blame game process and delegate the power of repairs to one single authority. Temporarily fixing roads which continually break down is an utter wastage of public money. Investors have many options for gaining exposure to oil as an investment. These methods come with varying degrees of risk and range from direct investment in oil as a commodity, to indirect exposure in oil through the ownership of energy-related equities, ETFs or options contracts. Each of these investment types can be acquired through an online brokerage account, or directly through a broker. Key Takeaways Crude oil is an essential commodity that provides energy and petroleum products to the global market. Investors can speculate on the price of oil directly by trading in oil derivatives or the USO exchange traded product, which tracks the price of WTI crude. Investors can also play the oil markets in a more indirect manner by investing in oil drillers and oil services companies, or ETFs that specialize in these sectors. Oil as an Asset Oil is an economically and strategically crucial resource for many nations due to its basis for much of the energy that we consume. Countries like the United States maintain large reserves of crude oil for future use. The measure of these oil reserves acts as an indicator for investors; changes in the stock levels of oil are reflections of trends in production and consumption. In the spring of 2020, oil prices collapsed amid the economic slowdown. OPEC and its allies agreed to historic production cuts to stabilize prices, but they dropped to 20-year lows. Oil and gas investors look for specific economic indicators to help them understand future movements in the petroleum industry. Like any commodity market, oil and gas companies, and petroleum futures are sensitive to inventory levels, production, global demand, interest rate policies, and aggregate economic figures such as gross domestic product. Aside from supply and demand factors, another force driving oil prices has been investors and speculators bidding on oil futures contracts. Many major institutional investors now involved in the oil markets, such as pension and endowment funds, hold commodity-linked investments as part of a long-term asset-allocation strategy. Others, including Wall Street speculators, trade oil futures for very short periods of time to reap quick profits. Some observers attribute wide short-term swings in oil prices to these speculators, while others believe their influence is minimal. Investing in Oil Directly One direct method of owning oil is through the purchase of oil futures or oil options. Futures are highly volatile and involve a high degree of risk. Additionally, investing in futures may require the investor to do a lot of homework as well as invest a large amount of capital. Another direct method of owning oil is through the purchase of commodity-based oil exchange-traded funds (ETFs). ETFs trade on a stock exchange and can be purchased and sold in a manner similar to stocks. For example, as of Sept. 24, 2021, buying one share of the U.S. Oil Fund (USO) at $51.82 would give you exposure to less than one barrel of oil priced at $73.97 per barrel. The fund's investment objective is to provide daily investment results corresponding to the daily percentage changes of the spot price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil to be delivered to Cushing, Oklahoma. Investing in Oil Indirectly In addition, investors can gain indirect exposure to oil through the purchase of energy-sector ETFs, like the iShares Global Energy ETF (IXC), and to energy-sector mutual funds, like the the T. Rowe Price New Era Fund (PRNEX). These energy-specific ETFs and mutual funds invest solely in the stocks of oil and oil services companies and come with lower risk. Other ETFS that track the oil and gas drilling sector are the SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (XOP), the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production Index Fund (IEO), and the Invesco Dynamic Energy Exploration & Production Portfolio (PXE). What The Experts Have to Say: What Is a Stock Savings Plan? In a stock savings plan, certain Canadian provinces provide tax credits to residents who purchase initial public offerings (IPOs) of local companies. Stock savings plans are designed to encourage middle and high-income earners to invest in provincial economies to promote the growth of local businesses. There are also stock savings plans in other countries, but they are slightly different. For example, the term "stock savings plan" describes a type of dollar-cost averaging (DCA) investment program used in Hong Kong. Key Takeaways In a stock savings plan, certain Canadian provinces provide tax credits to residents who purchase initial public offerings (IPOs) of local companies. While similar plans exist in several countries, the best-known stock savings plans are in Canadian provinces, such as Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. The tax advantages of a stock savings plan for investors are apparent, but there are other benefits as well. By far, the most important disadvantage of a stock savings plan for investors is the lack of diversification. Understanding Stock Savings Plans While similar plans exist in several countries, the best-known stock savings plans are in Canadian provinces, such as Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. Canadian provinces have their own unique stock savings plans. The Quebec Stock Savings Plan (QSSP) was launched in 1979, and it is the plan for the Canadian province of Quebec. This particular plan provides tax benefits to Quebec residents who buy new issues of stock from local Quebec companies. In March 2012, stocks of Nemaska Lithium, an exploration and development company in Quebec's James Bay Region, were listed as "valid shares" and qualified for the province's stock savings plan. Another major Canadian stock savings plan is the Alberta Stock Savings Plan (ASSP)a program that went live, effective February 1, 1986. Generally speaking, stock savings plan participants may allocate up to 10% of their earnings to purchasing qualified stocks. Interested investors should first contact qualified broker-dealers to make sure they are eligible to contribute to the program. If so, the dealer would arrange a plan in the investor's name and secure eligible shares on the investor's behalf. That broker-dealer would be responsible for maintaining the account, recording all transactions, and providing investors with annual statements. The statements report items such as acquisition costs, the maximum potential tax credit for eligible shares purchased, and the disposition cost of all shares withdrawn from a plan during the year. Stock savings plan participants may only invest in eligible shares of corporations, which must acquire certificates of eligibility. A corporation may obtain such documentation by applying to its corresponding Provincial Treasurer. The company must also satisfy specific criteria. If a certificate is granted, it will classify the corporation as either an emerging, mature, or expanding company, depending on its current assets and revenue profile. Eligibility criteria place substantial limits on which companies qualify for stock savings plans. Benefits of Stock Savings Plans The tax advantages of a stock savings plan for investors are apparent, but there are other benefits as well. Canada is one of the most stable and prosperous countries in the world. So, Canadians can avoid the political risks of investing in less stable countries by making local investments in stock savings plans. The companies covered by stock savings plans are local, tend to be small, and are often new. That combination means investors have more influence over the companies. Stock savings plans also provide benefits for provincial governments. Although they lose tax revenue by giving tax breaks to stock savings plans, they also get more money because of increased investment in the economy. More investment means more capital, which raises labor productivity. In a market economy, labor earns its marginal product, so higher productivity leads to increased wages. Higher wages also directly increase income tax revenues for provincial governments. More income can also reduce the demand for welfare programs and lower government expenses. Criticism of Stock Savings Plans By far, the most important disadvantage of a stock savings plan for investors is the lack of diversification. For example, Alberta's economy is heavily reliant on the oil industry. It follows that the local investments required to take advantage of Alberta's stock savings plan also depend on oil prices. The collapse of oil prices in early 2020 profoundly impacted oil investments, far more so than the stock market as a whole. Furthermore, the fact that stock savings plan investments are concentrated in the local economy creates additional risks. If the local economy does poorly, investors might lose their jobs and have to sell their local investments when market prices are low to pay for expenses. Such situations make it difficult to pursue a buy and hold strategy with a stock savings plan. What Is the Yale School of Management? Yale School of Management (Yale SOM) is Yale University's graduate business school. Yale School of Management offers both MBA and Ph.D. level programs and is known for, among other things, its focus on finance and ethics. The school introduced a new kind of integrated curriculum that combines a brief period of foreign study with organizational and employee analysis. Key Takeaways The Yale School of Management (Yale SOM) is Yale University's business school, located in New Haven, CT. The stated mission of the Yale School of Management is to educate leaders for business and society. Yale SOM offers full-time and executive MBA degrees, one year masters degree in systemic risk, global business and society, asset management, and advanced management. It also offers Ph.D.-level study in management fields. For the academic year 2021-2022, the total tuition and fees are $76,770. (Tuition at Yale School of Management is $74,500. There is an additional program fee of $2,270.) Yale School of Management is one of the smaller business schools in America, with nearly 100 faculty and roughly 350 slots in its MBA program. Understanding the Yale School of Management Yale School of Management is located in New Haven, Conn. The first class to attend the school arrived in 1976, after receiving a donation to establish the program in 1971. The schools mission is shaped by three main objectives: Be the business school that is most integrated with its home university Be the most distinctively global U.S. business school Be recognized as the best source of elevated leaders for all sectors and regions Yale School of Management Programs Yale School of Management offers several different programs for graduate studies. In addition to the standard two-year master of business administration (MBA), the school also offers an executive MBA program for working students; a master of advanced management for graduates of business schools that are members of the Global Network for Advanced Management; master's degree in asset management; masters degree for systemic risk; a masters degree for global business and society; a Ph.D. program; and executive education programs. The doctoral program at Yale School of Management is a full-time, in-residence program intended for students who plan scholarly careers involving research and teaching in management. Yale School of Management Admission Standards Yale School of Management is one of the smaller business schools in America, with nearly 100 faculty and roughly 350 slots in its MBA program. Admission is competitive; around 25% of applicants are accepted for its MBA class for the 2021 in-coming class, a figure which varies somewhat year-to-year. Notable Yale School of Management alumni include Jane Mendillo, D. Ellen Shuman, and Sandra Urie. Yale School of Management Tuition and Fees For the academic year 20212022, the total tuition and fees are $76,770. (Tuition at Yale School of Management is $74,500; there is an additional program fee of $2,270.) Other expenses are budgeted based on a single student assuming a modest lifestyle and shared housing: Room, board, and personal expenses: $24,284 Textbooks and photocopies: $1,000 Health insurance: $2,698 Total estimated living expenses: $27,982 Total Single Student Budget: $104,752 Tuition at Yale School of Management is slightly higher than at other highly-ranked business schools. The annual MBA tuition at Harvard Business School is $73,440 (excluding fees and living expenses); At The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the annual MBA tuition is $72,000 (also excluding fees and living expenses). Connection to Yale University Yale School of Management strives to be the graduate business school most connected to its home university. The two schools offer ten joint degree programs: Asset Management Law Environment Global Affairs Medicine Public Health Architecture Drama Divinity MBA/PhD Nearly 15% of the Yale School of Management students pursue joint degrees. Students are also required to fulfill a global studies requirement to graduate. This requirement can be filled by taking an international experience course, a week-long global networks course, utilizing a global virtual team, a global social entrepreneur course, a global social enterprise course, or an international exchange with a partner school. Yale School of Management FAQs What GPA Is Required to Get Into Yale Business School? The median undergraduate GPA for Yale School of Management's Class of 2022 is 3.65 (based on a 4.0 grading scale, where GPA appears on the transcript). What Is Yale Business Schools Ranking? According to U.S. News and World Report's 2022 List of Best Business Schools, Yale's business school is ranked number nine in the U.S. Stanford's University business school is the top-ranked business school in the U.S., followed by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Does Yale Have an Online MBA Program? While the school has different online learning programs for students, there is no online-only MBA degree. Here's a link to the online programs the school offers. Yale School of Management Executive Educations collection of online executive programs ranges from courses on Corporate Sustainability Management, Decision Making, Digital Marketing. Who Is the Dean of Yales School of Management? Kerwin Charles is the Indra K. Nooyi Dean of the Yale School of Management, as of July 1, 2021. The Bottom Line Yale University's Yale School of Management offers an MBA degree, in both full-time and executive formats, as well as one-year masters degree programs in systemic risk, global business and society, asset management, and advanced management. The school also offers advanced PhD-level study in management fields. The school is located in New Haven, Conn.; the program was established in 1971 and the first class to attend the school arrived in 1976. For the academic year 2021-2022, the total tuition and fees are $76,770. (Tuition at Yale School of Management is $74,500. There is an additional program fee of $2,270.) Kerwin K. Charles is the Indra K. Nooyi Dean of the Yale School of Management and the Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management. 50 jobs are to be created in the next two years in a major business expansion by recruitment firm Sanderson. A 3m investment has seen the business move to a larger head-office in Dublin, in addition to a new Limerick office opening this month. The company has announced that further expansion is also planned, with work underway on sourcing and staffing additional regional offices by the end of 2020. Sanderson launched in Ireland in 2015 when Managing Director Donal ODonoghue went into business with the owners of Resource Solutions Group (RSG plc), who have operated the Sanderson brand in the UK since 1975. The firm currently employs 25 people in Ireland and it plans to make up to a dozen new appointments to its Dublin office this year. Mr ODonoghue said: Turnover is growing at around 30%, year on year, as industry increasingly relies on professional recruitment support in the search for talent Sanderson Ireland specialises in selection and recruitment of middle and senior level appointments across five main professional disciplines: accounting and finance, sales and marketing, human resources, supply chain and procurement, and IT and change management. Some of its clients include Aviva, Coca-Cola, Sky, Kelloggs and AIB. Sanderson offices operate in Bristol, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Leeds, Manchester, Reading and Southampton, and now in Limerick. - Digital Desk By Padraig Hoare Shares in Norwegian Air soared almost 14% yesterday after German carrier Lufthansa became the latest to be linked with a bid for the low-cost, long-haul airline. Norwegian launched Corks first ever transatlantic flight to Providence, Rhode Island on the US east coast last July. It was quiet about Lufthansas confirmed interest. Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr said his company was in takeover discussions with Norwegian, raising the possibility of a shootout between rival interested parties. Lufthansa has been in contact with Norwegian and whether an agreement is reached will depend on the price on offer and the strategic value the purchase would add for the German carrier, said Spohr. Potential restrictions by cartel authorities will also be a factor, he said. Aer Lingus owner International Airlines Group (IAG) has been rebuffed with two bids, Norwegian said in recent weeks, claiming they did not value the company highly enough. IAG, which also owns British Airways, Iberia and Vueling, bought 4.6% in Norwegian in April, and while boss Willie Walsh said his firm remains interested in the low-fares airline, he said IAG would not become involved in a bidding war. A spokesman for Norwegian said the firm had no comment on Lufthansas interest, only confirming it has received enquiries from several parties, adding that it affirmed the airlines business model. Norwegian has racked up heavy costs in recent months. It said in April that it was suspending its year-round routes such as Cork, Shannon and Edinburgh to Providence for the winter months, instead concentrating on the March-October schedule for 2019. This is despite a sustained effort by political and business leaders in Cork, who heavily lobbied the White House for a licence to be granted to Norwegian to operate its transatlantic flights, including the history-making Cork route. Founder and chief executive of Norwegian Bjorn Kjos said at its annual shareholders meeting last month that at the right price, anything is for sale. Additional reporting Bloomberg By Ann O'Loughlin A severely disabled child with cerebral palsy has secured some 2.5m total payments so far under a settlement of proceedings concerning his birth at the National Maternity Hospital. In approving the latest 1.67m payment for the seven-year-old boy, described as extremely ill, the president of the High Court Mr Justice Peter Kelly said it is regrettable there is no State funding for building hospices for children. Having chaired a hospice for some years, he was aware they provide a service of "great value" to families. The child's parents initially received considerable respite from the Laura Lynn childrens hospice but that is down to 15 days a year due to pressures on the hospices services from families in a similar position, he was told. Noting both parents have given up their careers to care for their son at home and have not left Ireland since he was born, the judge said he wanted to pay tribute to and thank them on their son's behalf. It was an extraordinary experience and "restores faith in humanity" to see the sacrifices people are prepared to make, he said. The boy was made a ward of court after his case over alleged negligence in the circumstances of his birth at the NMH in July 2010 settled last year with an interim payment of almost 800,000. The case settled on the basis of an agreed liability finding of 70/30 in favour of the child. The 1.67m payment approved on Tuesday is to meet the boy's care needs over the next three years after which his future needs will be assessed. Denis McCullough SC, for the boy, said there was a considerable issue on liability and some evidence, including from his sides obstetric experts, meant it was not possible to say whether damage suffered by the child in utero could have been suffered before his mother got to the hospital. There were circumstances surrounding the mother's labour in the hospital that seemed to indicate that was not the case but there was "considerable doubt" and a "considerable issue" on liability, he said. The child was born in a seriously damaged condition and is severely disabled with cerebral palsy, microcephaly and uncontrolled epilepsy. The hospitals paediatric neurologist had described his as the worst case of cerebral palsy she had ever seen. The boy lives at home with his parents and younger sibling, is totally dependent on nurses and his parents for 24-hour care, is confined to a wheelchair and fed through a tube. He is myopic and was non-verbal up to recently when he has begun to babble, regarded as a "breakthrough". The boy's mother, who showed the judge photos of the child and outlined a normal day in his life, said no amount of money can change her son's life or take away his daily struggles for survival but it can give him "a better quality of life that he truly deserves". The parents believe technology is the way forward for him and hope in time he will "find his own voice". "We all adore him very much." Th family have experienced a long and emotional journey and hope no child will have to wait for the support they deserve, she said. She also thanked their extended family and lawyers. Mr Justice Kelly, approving the settlement, said he would be open to approving a payment out for a new home for the family as their existing home is "materially substandard" to the child's needs. By Ann O'Loughlin A 14-year old boy with cerebral palsy who sued over the circumstances of his birth at Sligo General Hospital has settled his High Court action for 5 million. Mr Justice Kevin Cross praised the parents of Conor Maxwell for the care they have given their son and the judge said the settlement will now help, "as far as money can" in the future care of the boy. In a statement outside court solicitor David O'Malley, who represented Conor Maxwell, called on the Minister for Health to bring in a duty of candour for all medical negligence claims. He said Health Minister Simon Harris needed to act now. Conor's counsel Des ONeill SC along with Doireann OMahony BL told the court Conor has spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy and cannot communicate. Counsel said Conor is happy as far as they understand but has difficulty communicating and also with his vision. Mr O'Neill said the settlement was as a result of mediation between the sides. Conor of Carrickmackeegan, Ballinamore, County Leitrim had through his mother Evonne Maxwell sued the HSE over the circumstances of his birth on August 13, 2003. Ms Maxwell was admitted to Sligo General Hospital in labour two weeks before her due date. It was claimed the management of Ms Maxwells labour was incompetent and as a result, the baby was exposed to significant hypoxia-ischaemia. The baby was monitored by continuous CTG but the cardiogram was allegedly abnormal from the beginning. These decelerations it was alleged were indicative of hypoxia in the baby but their significance was allegedly not appreciated. The CTG, which it was claimed was clearly abnormal and called urgently for intervention but was repeatedly misinterpreted. Conor was born at 07.17 am on August 13, 2003, and required resuscitation and in the hours after his birth developed severe breathing difficulties and had seizures. It was claimed there was an alleged failure to exercise the competence, diligence, care, and judgement to be expected in the management of the labour and delivery. It was further claimed there was an alleged failure to understand, interpret and react to an abnormal cardiogram. The labour, it was claimed, was allowed to continue when it was allegedly unsafe to do so and there was an alleged failure to intervene and perform a caesarean. Conor it was alleged could have avoided nearly two hours of hypoxia-ischaemia had a proper standard of care been provided. Conor was referred for neurosurgical opinion due to concerns about hydrocephalus and a wait and watch approach was adopted. Approximately twelve days after his discharge from hospital Conor was readmitted because he was irritable and unwell. He was diagnosed with E. coli meningitis and treated with antibiotics. His condition deteriorated over the following days and he was transferred to Our Ladys Childrens Hospital, Crumlin, Dublin where he underwent shunt placement for hydrocephalus. Mr O'Neill said liability was admitted in the case in relation to negligence and breach of duty but a full defence was submitted in relation to causation. Counsel said the issues around causation were substantial and experts on the HSE would contend when the baby was first discharged from hospital, he was well. Approving the settlement Mr Justice Cross congratulated Conor's mum Evonne and dad, Jason Kellett for the way they have cared for their son. The judge said it was a good settlement and he wished the family all the best for the future. By Gordon Deegan A female call centre worker here has been awarded 45,000 after being subject to ongoing and sustained sexual harassment by her boss over five months. The woman felt that she had no choice but to resign from her post in January 2017 due to the sexual harassment and her employers failure to deal with her Team Leaders sexual harassment. Documenting the shocking sexual harassment between August 2016 and January 2017, the woman told the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) that she suffered a recurrent jaw dislocation injury resulting in her Team Lead, Mr A making comments of a sexually suggestive nature. The Technical Support Agent said that Mr A told her I wonder how that happened, I know what happened and was laughing and joking about her injury and she told the WRC that her bosss comments were suggestive that her injury had been caused as a result of her having been sexually promiscuous. On another occasion, Mr A told here she had amazing eyes when she asked him a work-related question. The woman continued to ask the question and Mr. A said: Im sorry Im not even listening to you, I just cant stop looking at your eyes. The following day, Mr A told the woman that she could go and sit in his car with him. She declined and he Mr A approached her on a number of occasions and asked her if she wanted to go outside with him. On October 1st 2016, the woman was having her lunch on a bench outside and Mr A sat down beside her. The woman got up and left for the canteen and sat a table there and was followed by Mr A who sat at the same table. On another occasion, the woman claimed that she was subject to physical sexual harassment where Mr. A twice placed both of his hands on her waist in the workplace. On another occasion when Mr A learned that the woman didnt have a boy-friend, he started winking at her and said he couldnt wait for the staff party. On October 9th 2016, Mr A saw the womans payslip containing her home address and said to her is there where you live? A work colleague had witnessed Mr A picking on the woman and placing a banana on her head and making lewd and inappropriate jokes about her tattoo. The woman made a formal complaint against Mr A with her bosses and an investigation carried out by a female Business Partner. The allegations were put to Mr A and he stated that he could not recall the incidents and that while in hindsight, they might look bad, they were only a 'joke'. The investigation upheld five complaints; was unable to substantiate two of the complaints and overturned one. The WRC report states that the employer employs a significant number of employees across four locations in Ireland, providing tailored solutions to businesses. The woman worked at the call centre at weekends and was studying on a full time basis at a local third level institution. The womans roles and responsibilities included taking calls from customers regarding mobile phone bills and technical queries from customers regarding their mobile phones. In his ruling, WRC Adjudication Officer, Enda Murphy said that he found the complainant to be very credible in relation to the alleged treatment which she claims occurred on the material dates in question. Mr Murphy said that he was satisfied that a number of these incidents of harassment and sexual harassment were extremely serious in nature in terms of the impact and effect they had on her personally and her working environment. It is clear that these incidents of inappropriate, offensive and unwelcome behaviour had the effect of violating the Complainants dignity and subjecting her to a hostile and intimidating workplace. Mr Murphy also found that the employer failed to deal with the Complainants complaints of harassment and sexual harassment in an appropriate manner or to put appropriate measures in place either during or following the investigation to address or remedy this treatment. Mr Murphy was also critical of the employer's failure to take any disciplinary action whatsoever against Mr. A in the immediate aftermath of the investigation notwithstanding the fact that five of the allegations of harassment and sexual harassment had been upheld. Mr Murphy also found it inexplicable that the employer failed to put even the most basic of measures in place in order to separate the Complainant and Mr. A in the workplace following the conclusion of the investigation. Mr Murphy also hit out at the employers decision to reprimand the woman for unacceptably high level of absence while she was victim of sexual harassment. Mr Murphy said: I find that this course of action was totally unwarranted and unjustified especially in circumstances where it should have been manifestly clear to the employer that six of the eight days on which she was absent occurred during the period within which she was being subjected to the harassment and sexual harassment by Mr. A. Mr Murphy said that he found the employers conduct amounted to an undermining of the relationship of trust and confidence between the parties, was unreasonable in the circumstances and entitled the Complainant to claim that she was constructively dismissed. Mr Murphy also found that Mr A manufactured a false Facebook message from the woman where she threatened to get him fired and that it was used in an intimidatory manner by him to try and discredit the Complainant following the conclusion of the investigation. Facebook message was manufactured In his ruling, Mr Murphy has ordered that the employer pay the woman 35,000 for the distress suffered by the Complainant and the effects of the discrimination, harassment, sexual harassment and discriminatory constructive dismissal on her. Mr Murphy also ordered the employer to pay an additional 10,000 for the distress suffered by the complainant and the effects of the victimisation on her. Mr Murphy also ordered that all staff within the company who have staff management functions receive appropriate training in its Dignity and Respect at Work Policy and that this training is kept under review in light of development/best practice in the area. JCD man killed as BNP leader's motorcade met road crash One killed and 11 others injured in a road accident in Daudkandi upazila of Cumilla while a microbus and two motorcycles of motorcade of BNP standing committee member Dr Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain were hit by a Dhaka-bound bus on Tuesday. Staff Reporter : An activist of Bangladesh Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD), student wing of BNP, was killed and about 12 others were injured when Dr. Khandakar Mosharraf Hossain, Standing Committee Member of BNP 's motorcade met a road crash on the Dhaka - Chattogram Highway in Cumilla on Tuesday. The body was identified as Raihan, an activist of Daudkandi Jatiyatabadi Chhatra Dal (JCD) unit. The accident occurred when the BNP leaders and activists were going to attend a marriage ceremony of UP Chairman Mujibur Rahman's son. They boarded a micro-bus from Daudkandi. Suddenly, a Shyamoli Paribahan passenger bus hit three microbuses and two private cars of the motorcade at Amirabad U-turn area of the Dhaka-Chattagram Highway. Raihan died on the spot while 12 others including Daudkandi unit JCD President Al-Amin were injured. Of the injured, 10 were taken to Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH). Daudkandi Highway Police Station Officer-in-Charge (OC) Abul Kalam Azad told the Media that Khandakar Mosharraf Hossain was not injured in the accident. The government will have around 800m for extra spending or tax cuts in the budget. The summer economic statement says the overall budget package will be worth 3.4bn. By Ann o'Loughlin Over 200,000 held in bank accounts opened by a person using an alias and who registered a company that purported to sell luxury yachts are the proceeds of crime, the High Court has ruled. The Criminal Assets Bureau, which in 2016 obtained orders freezing the monies, said the money was lodged in accounts used in an international money laundering scheme. Deming the monies in the accounts as the proceeds of crime Ms Justice Carmel Stewart noted the complexity and sophistication of the money laundering scheme CAB, represented by David Dodd Bl, said the bank accounts were opened by a person using the alias 'Darren H Barnett' with personal details acquired through 'identity theft.' From its investigations CAB discovered that in 2010 'Barnett' fraudulently obtained the UK passport number attributed to another person. That number was used to obtain a PPS number in this jurisdiction. Using the PPS number 'Barnett', in 2012, opened several accounts with various banks in Dublin. In a sworn statement CAB said monies from various international locations were lodged to the Dublin based bank accounts. These included a lodgement of US$269,000 into one of the accounts from a Dubai based entity. The transaction was listed as being "frozen Atlantic Salmon". Gardai had made a request for mutual assistance from the authorities in the United Arab Emirates about the company that lodged that money. No response has been received, the sworn statement added. When opening the accounts the court heard Barnett gave a false home address in Dublin 22. The court also heard that 'Barnett' also registered a company with the CRO called Harglena Global. Its business was listed as being the sale of vehicles and yachts, including luxury yachts. There was also an attempt to register the firm with Revenue for tax and VAT purposes. The CAB said that there was "no evidence" that the company was a legitimate business. Harglena Global had operated a website between 2012 and 2016, which has since been taken down. An address in Blanchardstown in Dublin was given as Harglena's registered address. The CAB established that the business address belonged to another unrelated company. The CAB was also satisfied that the persons living at the location 'Barnett' cited as being his home address when opening the bank accounts had no connection with that person and knew nothing about him. At the High Court, counsel said all efforts have been made by CAB to serve documents on 'Barnett', in relation to the freezing orders but the bureau was unable to trace the person using the alias. Counsel said Barnett had instructed a firm of solicitors when the freezing orders were made. However, that firm informed the bureau that it no longer represented him. In her ruling, Ms Justice Stewart said she was satisfied, based on evidence put before the Court by CAB officers that the cash was the proceeds of crime. In all the circumstances the Judge said she was satisfied to make an order in respect of the monies under Section 3 of the 1996 Proceeds of Crime Act. Update 3.15pm: A HIQA investigation has found that some children are being left at potential risk because of system failures at Tusla. The health watchdog began investigating the Child and Family Agency after the Children's Minister ordered an inquiry in 2017 after Maurice McCabe was falsely accused of seriously abusing a child. Staff shortages and underperformance among its personnel have also been highlighted in the report. Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald says it's proof that things need to change. She said: "Taoiseach all of this happens on your watch. "The diagnosis is clear; Tusla, as it stands, is not fit for purpose. "What we now need are solutions to ensure the children at risk are properly protected." Update 1.45pm: Hiqa report criticises Tusla staffing levels A hard-hitting report criticising staffing levels at Tusla has been published by Hiqa. The health watchdog has been investigating system failures and serious staff shortages at the Child and Family Agency. The inquiry was ordered by the Children's Minister in February 2017, after Maurice McCabe was falsely accused of seriously abusing a child. Fianna Fail's Spokesperson on Children and Youth Affairs has not read the report yet, but she says children here are being failed and someone needs to take responsibility. Deputy Anne Rabbitte is warning Tusla needs to be fit for purpose. Deputy Anne Rabbitte "One of the reasons we had this failing the first day was this was a paper trail," she said. "A lot of Tusla don't actually have IT systems up and running, they don't have a central database. "If a child is at risk in Galway and the family decide to move to Dublin, bar just sending over a letter, it's not done instantly. There's no way of tracking the children. Why would a social worker want to come and work for an organisation when they don't have the key infrastructure to let them do their job? Litany of failures laid bare in report on Tusla By Michael Clifford and Daniel McConnell Update 7.16am: Major deficiencies in staffing and systems at Tusla, the States child and family agency, meant serious child abuse allegations were not properly handled, a damning new report will conclude today. The report, which runs to more than 300 pages, will detail how the agency mishandled the allegations relating to Garda whistleblower Sergeant Maurice McCabe but also examines wider governing and resources issues within the agency and its capacity to react to suspected child abuse. The statutory report into the embattled agency is to be brought to the Cabinet by Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone. The Irish Examiner understands that the report, conducted by the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa), will find that Tusla is suffering from serious staffing problems which severely hampered its ability to deal with ongoing or historical allegations. As a result of those deficiencies, the agency is unable to properly react when some cases of suspected child abuse are referred to it, the report will state. Despite the hard-hitting findings , sources have told the Irish Examiner that the report stops short of blaming any individual official but rather concentrates on agency-wide failures. The report was ordered in February 2017 in the wake of the revelations that Sgt McCabe had been completely erroneously catagorised as a suspected child abuser in internal files which were also forwarded to the gardai. When the error was first reported through the Irish Examiner, Ms Zappone ordered Hiqa to conduct a statutory inquiry. The final report was delivered to the minister over the weekend and is expected to be presented to the Cabinet today. Among the findings are a number which deal with problems over the recruitment and retention of sufficient specialist staff to deal with referrals. In particular, problems have been identified in retaining social workers. The Hiqa report is understood to find that while the agency can sufficiently address children at immediate risk, those at ongoing risk including children at risk as a result of a historic case are not receiving the requisite attention. The report is also highly critical of the reporting and governance structures that led to the catastrophic error in relation to Sgt McCabe. Among the findings of the report is one that the agency was aware in 2013 that a major error had occurred the previous year, yet Sgt McCabe was not informed of the situation. Damning investigation sparked by mishandling of McCabe case He only became aware of what had occurred when a letter was sent to him in December 2015 asking him to attend a meeting to examine whether he was a risk to children. He responded by seeking his file, which was only finally made available to him 12 months later. Sgt McCabe then found that, in addition to the erroneous file created about him, additional files on his children were opened on the basis that they could be at risk. In the event that the family did not discover the series of errors, files on the McCabe offsprings would have remained open long into the future portraying them as at risk. The terms of reference for the Hiqa inquiry stated that it should take all necessary steps to avoid the potential for overlap with the tribunal of inquiry established to inquire into certain protected disclosures. The Disclosures Tribunal sitting in Dublin Castle heard evidence last July that the error in relation to Sgt McCabe occurred after a visit to a counsellor in July 2013 from a woman who had made an allegation against McCabe in 2006. This woman, known as Miss D, is the daughter of a garda colleague whom McCabe had been involved in disciplining. She had alleged that McCabe had touched her inappropriately in 1998, but an investigation comprehensively dismissed the allegation, describing it as horseplay if it occurred at all. After her 2013 visit, the counsellor mistakenly mixed up her case with a completely separate one which involved suspected child rape. The erroneous file was maintained in Tusla, and went through a series of reporting structures without it ever being detected. By Declan Brennan Update 5.55pm: A man previously convicted of sexually assaulting a student has pleaded guilty to carrying out sex attacks on two other women he met on the Tinder dating app. The trial of Patrick Nevin (36) for the rape of a woman in a parked car at a location in Co Meath in July 2014 was due to begin at the Central Criminal Court this morning. Nevin and the woman had met on the dating programme Tinder and the attack took place on their first date. Nevin's last-minute plea of guilty followed a legal ruling on Monday morning which would allow the prosecution to introduce evidence from two other women of Nevin attacking them on a first date. In 2001, Nevin was also found guilty of viciously attacking his then girlfriend after flying into a jealous rage. That trial heard she returned to the home they shared together to find he had killed her two dogs. Patrick Nevin, pictured in 2001 after his conviction for assaulting his then girlfriend. The former UCD student was convicted by a jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court last December of sexually assaulting one of these women, a Brazilian student, after driving her to the UCD campus in south Dublin on July 23, 2014. He had denied the offence. This morning Nevin pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to rape of one woman at Bellewstown, Co Meath on July 12, 2014, and to sexual assault of a second woman at an unknown place in Co Meath on July 16, 2014. He was facing trial later this year in relation to the third victim. The three attacks over an eleven day period all followed similar modus operandi, a fact that allowed Ms Justice Eileen Creedon to rule that the jury would have been allowed to hear evidence of all the complainants. All attacks took place when Nevin had met up with the women after talking to them first online. In each case, Nevin picked the women up in his car on a first date and drove them to a secluded spot. The father of two is in custody since his conviction last December but has former addresses at Meadowlands Court, Mounttown Rd., Dun Laoghaire and Dundalk, Co Louth. He will be sentenced on July 26, 2018, when victim impact reports will be given to the court. Patrick McGrath SC, defending, asked the court to order a report from a forensic psychiatric for the sentencing hearing. At a hearing earlier this year another court heard that Nevin has a previous conviction for rape from Denmark. He was a minor in 1999 when he was convicted of rape and aggravated rape. During legal argument last week Nevin's lawyers asked the court to order media organisations to remove reports of previous trials and offending. Ms Justice Creedon ruled against the defence application, saying that the court was not satisfied there was a real risk of an unfair trial if the material was not taken down. As part of second legal issue prosecuting counsel submitted that the evidence of all three assaults was relevant to the case as there was a similar methodology used. Ms Justice Eileen Creedon said that the court had to strike a balance between the probative value of such evidence and it's prejudicial effect. She said that because of the similarity in the modus operandi she would accede to the request to include the evidence. Evidence of the two offences which Nevin pleaded to today will be heard at the sentencing date next month. The evidence of the Brazilian woman, now aged 35, was heard during the trial last December. She had just arrived in Ireland and wanted to meet Irish people to practice her English. After some weeks of communicating with Nevin on the Tinder dating programme and on Whatsapp, she arranged to meet him. He told her he would take her to a place that had the best coffee in Dublin but Nevin later told gardai that he saw the date as a hook up for sex. Nevin picked her up in his car, a blue BMW, and drove her to a secluded field on UCD campus. The woman said that his demeanour then changed completely and he became aggressive. She said he became like a monster. She said that he attacked her and she was in fear of her life and thought Nevin was going to rape her. After the jury in the December trial left the courtroom, Nevin told his lawyers I don't accept that verdict. In his closing speech Paul Burns SC, prosecuting, had told the jurors that they might feel the woman was naive, foolish and awfully stupid but that did not give anyone the right to attack her. He said that simply agreeing to meet someone does not make them fair game. He said the complainant was not looking for sex and at no stage did she show an interest in meeting the man for sex. Everyone has the right to say no to sexual advances. No-one is entitled to force themselves on another, he said. He said there was no reason for the woman to lie and it was highly unlikely that a woman would travel here, three years after the events in question, to mislead or make false allegations. He asked why someone would subject themselves to what she had undergone in the courtroom, unless she was telling the truth. Earlier: Man admits sex attacks on a number of women he met on dating app A 36-year-old man has pleaded guilty to carrying out sex attacks on two women he met on Tinder. Patrick Nevin pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court this morning to rape of one woman at a location in Bellewstown, Co Meath on July 12, 2014. He also pleaded guilty to sexual assault of a second woman on July 16, 2014. Last December the UCD graduate was convicted by a jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court of sexually assaulting a Brazilian woman on UCD campus, south Dublin on July 23, 2014. He is due to be sentenced for that. Nevin, with former addresses at Meadowlands Court, Mounttown Rd, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin and Dundalk, Co. Louth, carried out the three attacks in an eleven day period and all attacks took place when Nevin had met up with the women after talking to them first online. In each case Nevin picked the women up in his car on a first date and attacked them after driving them to a secluded spot. Nevin was due to stand trial this week for the Bettystown attack but after a legal ruling on Monday which allowed the prosecution to introduce evidence of the other allegations, he changed his plea to guilty. This morning he entered the plea to the rape offence and to the sexual assault offence, for which he was due to stand trial later this year. He will be sentenced on July 26, 2018. Last December's trial heard that the Brazilian woman had just arrived in Ireland and wanted to meet Irish people to practice her English. After some weeks of communicating with Nevin on the Tinder dating programme and on Whatsapp, she arranged to meet him. He told her he would take her to a place that had the best coffee in Dublin but the man later told gardai that he saw the date as a hook up for sex. He picked her up in his car, a blue BMW, and drove her to a secluded field on UCD campus. The woman said that he then changed completely, becoming aggressive and sexually assaulting her. A report on homelessness has suggested that one in five offers of social housing was rejected last year. The study from the Dublin Regional Homeless Executive says 112 offers of permanent social housing were refused in 2017. Suspended Sinn Fein TD Carol Nolan has reportedly quit the party over its change in abortion policy after officially handing in her resignation letter this morning. Ms Nolan and fellow Sinn Fein TD Peadar Toibin had come under intense pressure in recent weeks to make a decision over whether to stay in the party or leave as both hold pro-life views that are in opposition to the party's new official abortion policy position. This pressure led to Ms Nolan being suspended for three months over her decision to vote against Sinn Fein's abortion policy in the Dail earlier this year, and intensified further over the weekend when the party chose to fully support unrestricted abortion access in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. And while the Irish Examiner understands Mr Toibin is still considering whether to stay or quit the party, Ms Nolan officially resigned from the party this morning in a formal letter to Sinn Fein headquarters. Ms Nolan's decision to quit the party means she will now be an Independent TD, and reduces Sinn Fein's TD numbers to 22. It will also put Mr Toibin under increasing pressure to explain what action he is likely to take in response to the party's liberalising abortion policy. In a statement this afternoon, Ms Nolan said: "I have decided to as of today, June 19, to resign from Sinn Fein. I feel that as a pro-life republican woman that I no longer have a place in this party which doesn't recognise or show genuine respect for the pro-life views of members. "It was disappointing that at the ard fheis which took place in Belfast at the weekend, the party's delegates voted against the motion to allow members to have a conscience vote on the issue of abortion. I want to thank all of the 24 cumann who put forward motions on the need for a conscience vote on the abortion issue. "I feel that it is unethical to force TDs who are strongly opposed to abortion to vote against their conscience. Every TD in Leinster House is directly responsible for the laws that they enact, if a TD votes for abortion they are responsible for all abortions that happen in this state. "I do not want to have any hand, act or part in bringing about the end to the life of an unborn child, the most vulnerable in our society. "It is not for politicians or society in general to decide who lives or dies. Every life is precious and every child deserves the chance to live. I don't believe that abortion is the solution to any crisis, how can it be when it takes the right to life away from the unborn?" "I cannot and will not support abortion and for that reason I have made a decision to leave Sinn Fein. I want to assure the constituents that I represent in Offaly-North Tipperary that I will continue to work hard on their behalf and that I will continue to represent them as an Independent TD in Dail Eireann. "I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank them and my loyal supporters for their relentless support over the past few months," Ms Nolan said. Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald said Ms Nolan's decision to resign from the party was "disappointing but not surprising". I very much regret Carols decision to resign from Sinn Fein. Her resignation is disappointing but not surprising. "Sinn Fein made every effort to give its members space and latitude to articulate a position contrary to the partys position in the recent referendum campaign on the repeal of the eighth amendment. The people have spoken on this issue. The Sinn Fein ard fheis has democratically agreed the partys position to support the forthcoming leglislation. I wish Carol and her family well," Ms McDonald said. ABC News(WASHINGTON) -- An informational State Department Facebook Live session Tuesday morning quickly prompted a barrage of mocking responses to two agency employees giving parents advice on obtaining passports for their children. The live event, hosted by the Bureau of Consular Affairs to answer "your questions about traveling with kids," came amid the uproar over a Trump administration policy that has led to children being separated from parents apprehended crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. The video, on what normally might have been a non-controversial topic, quickly generated backlash from social media users, who cast the online event as tone deaf and trolled the State Department in a series of posts. ABC News has reached out to the State Department for comment. "do you guys just have terrible PR timing, or are you actively trolling the thousands of families who traveled to the US and had their children taken away?" one Twitter user wrote in response to a tweet promoting the session. "This is perfect timing. Are you simulcasting in spanish?" another Twitter user wrote. Audio of a so-called "orchestra" of young migrant children fighting through tears and crying "Mami" and "Papa," which was first obtained by ProPublica, was released on Monday, prompting emotional responses from Democrats and Republicans alike. The recording was captured last week and given to Jennifer Harbury, a civil rights attorney who confirmed its authenticity to ABC News. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. BNP demo for Khaleda`s release tomorrow Staff Reporter : The BNP will stage countrywide demonstration on Thursday demanding unconditional release of its jailed ailing chairperson Begum Khaleda Zia and her proper treatment. BNP Senior-Joint Secretary General Ruhul Kabir Rizvi announced it at a press briefing at the party's Nayapaltan central office on Tuesday. He said the demonstration would be held at Metropolitan cities including Dhaka city and district headquarters across the country. Gazipur City Corporation areas would be out of the demonstration programme for mayoral polls. On June 14, BNP submitted a Memorandum to Deputy Commissioners in all districts across the country for Khaleda's release before Eid-ul-Fitr and her better treatment. Khaleda Zia has suffered a mild stroke on June 5 in the abandoned central jail in old Dhaka. Since then the party demanding her better treatment at the city's United Hospital, but the government offer her Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University and the Combined Military Hospital in the city. Khaleda Zia refused to take treatment from those hospitals. She is wanting treatment only the United Hospital. The Taoiseach has marked 25 years since Ireland decriminalised homosexuality by hailing the thousands of "unknown heroes" who once lived under fear of prosecution. Highlighting the transformation in Irish society in recent times, Leo Varadkar, Ireland's first openly gay premier, said his election would have been "unimaginable" decades previously. "There are many people who helped change minds and change laws and their contribution should be remembered," he said. "People who fought for me before I did so myself." He added: "In this country we were too silent on too many issues for far too long. It was the voices of the brave few who gave us all hope and who changed things for everyone." Mr Varadkar was speaking in the Dail in Dublin as his administration backed a motion asking for the Irish parliament to apologise to all those convicted of homosexuality before the law changed in 1993. Leo Varadkar tells the Dail 'we remember those who paved the way for this change'. pic.twitter.com/R7R8y1gkHA RTE News (@rtenews) June 19, 2018 The Taoiseach referenced historical research that showed that between 1940 and 1978 an average of 13 men a year were jailed for homosexual offences in the state. Between 1962 and 1972 there were 455 convictions, he said. "I was born in 1979 and in the three years before that there were 44 prosecutions in this country. It's not that long ago," he said. Taoiseach: 'I was born in 1979 and in the three years before that there were 44 prosecutions [due to the criminalisation of homosexuality] in this country. It's not that long ago.' pic.twitter.com/AUIxLNvun2 RTE News (@rtenews) June 19, 2018 "Homosexuality was seen as a perversion, and trials were sometimes a cruel form of entertainment. Others saw it as a mental illness including the medical profession at the time. "For every one conviction there were a hundred other people who lived under the stigma of prosecution, who feared having their sexuality made public, and their lives destroyed." Mr Varadkar expressed his administration for assassinated San Francisco politician Harvey Milk. "Last summer, I was in San Francisco and I visited the memorial in City Hall in honour of Harvey Milk," he said. "Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to office, and he was assassinated 40 years ago by those who were offended by everything he stood for. "His picture now hangs in the Taoiseach's office. Milk believed that hope is never silent." Mr Varadkar also recounted the notorious 1982 murder of openly gay man Declan Flynn in a Dublin park, and contrasted it with events 33 years later when Ireland voted to legalise gay marriage. "I was just a child when Declan Flynn was murdered in Fairview Park, his only crime that he was gay," he said. "The 22nd of May 2015 - a date I will never forget - it was the day of the marriage referendum - the bench where Declan Flynn was killed, at Fairview Park, was covered with flowers and notes. "We think of him today on this anniversary, and of the new Ireland that we live in." Taoiseach Leo Varadkar: 'A year after Declan Flynn's death there were huge protests in Dublin ... and from that a movement was mobilised in Ireland.' pic.twitter.com/eRBsufgamN RTE News (@rtenews) June 19, 2018 The Fine Gael leader singled out a number of high-profile campaigners and politicians who advocated change in the 1980s and 1990s. But he added: "Today the people I want to pay a special tribute to are the unknown heroes, the thousands of people whose names we do not know, who were criminalised by our forebears. "Men and women of all ages who tried to live and love and be themselves in a society where their identity was feared and despised, and who were aliens in their own country for their entire lives. "We cannot erase the wrong that was done to them. "What we can say is that we have learned as a society from their suffering. "Their stories have helped change us for the better; they have made us more tolerant, more understanding and more human. "This evening we mark the anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Ireland and the progress made since. "We have come a long way, we remember those who suffered and we acknowledge that we still have more to do. "There is always more to do, whether it's promoting LGBT equality on other parts of this island and around the world, combating bullying or working to improve sexual health. "Harvey Milk reminded us of the challenge we face in society to 'break down myths, and destroy the lies and distortions'. "He understood why it needed to be done. We do it for ourselves, we do it for others, and, most of all, we do it for the young." Aoife McArdles experience doing a video for U2 and a Super Bowl ad have been useful for her first feature film, writes Esther McCarthy. A PASSION for both movies and music and a conviction that both were intertwined helped foster Aoife McArdle as a filmmaker. From the northern town of Omagh, with neither the background in nor the means to finance short films, she started to make music videos for musician friends. It revealed a natural flair for storytelling, and now shes worked with some of the biggest artists on the world stage. Theyre all narrative shorts that I wrote, she tells me. It was my way of getting to make a film. It is a hard world to break into, if youre not from that background or if youre from a small town. Obviously I did go to film school but the way I broke into it was via being interested in music and having some mates that played music. I used their music as a soundtrack and their lyrics as a voiceover, essentially. I work against the song and add a new narrative to it that wouldnt have been there before, necessarily. Always as an avenue to become a filmmaker, but an interest in film and music has always been hand in hand for me. Her work, comprised of short stories rather than performance videos, was soon gaining the attention of U2, Bryan Ferry and James Vincent McMorrow, who have all worked with her. In recent years, she has applied a similar approach to commercials, and an advert she made for Audi ended up going viral after it was first screened during last years Super Bowl. The Audi one was about gender equality which is obviously a really important subject matter for me. It was about a girl and her father and I think it really connected with a lot of people, especially fathers. They dont want their daughters to grow up in a world where they dont get equal opportunities. And it was wonderful working with this little girl, she was terrific. But the irony was not lost on McArdle that hers was the only female-directed advert screened during the Super Bowl that year. I think its changing now and I really hope it continues to change but yeah, Im very used to being the only woman on a bid, the only woman pitching, the only female director in a room. Its great to see that the issues been highlighted in the last year and we are seeing inroads made to correcting that wrong. Its all about women seeing other women being directors and cinematographers too. Its important to celebrate the ones we have so that young women know it is possible for them. McArdle brings her trademark verve and style to her first feature film, Kissing Candice. Featuring actress Ann Skelly in the title role, it tells of a volatile teenage girl who crosses paths with a violent local gang. Most of the projects Ive done have had a bigger budget than the feature. That aspect of it was a little shell-shocking! But at the same time, it was an opportunity to work intensively with actors over a more sustained period than I had before. Every first feature, every low-budget feature, theres a certain amount of compromise and sacrifice but at the same time I just really tried hard to make something visceral and thrilling. Really I just always wanted to make an Irish dystopian youth film that was dark but also quite fun and irreverent. Essentially its trying to immerse you in a very thrilling, experiential world of being young. Because its a film about young people for young people, it should have an edge and be challenging. Its all about escaping. Her long-held goal has been realised and the writer/director is currently developing her second feature. Her debut looks remarkably assured and slick on screen, and her vast experience in commercials and music videos has stood to her. When I was starting out I used to shoot and edit all of my own work, because I had to. That was a brilliant schooling for everything else. Kissing Candice opens at selected cinemas on June 22 and at Triskel in Cork on June 24 Irish Examiner columnist Suzanne Harrington and Cailin Aine Ni Toibin - the current Miss Universe Ireland - debate whether or not Miss Universe should be axed. YES: 'The argument that beauty pageants act as career-launchers is redundant in the digital age' Suzanne Harrington says a contest that judges women in swimsuits on narrowly-defined aesthetic values is outdated and irrelevant ACCORDING to Miss Universe (thats Miss, not Ms), the mission of the organisation is to provide the tools which help women to be their personal best. Self-confidence is the key. Every woman should have the confidence to stand up in any situation and declare: I am secure and thats what makes me beautiful! Lets unpack that tool box and see how it makes women secure and therefore beautiful. For a start, these tools only work on women selected from within a narrow age, size, and face range so this mission statement applies not to every woman, but to only to a small handful of women within a rigidly defined aesthetic. No uglies need apply, no matter how high-achieving, no matter how charming or confident. The web page continues with its pseudo-empowerment schtick, containing images of a scientist and a boxer, and says that Miss Universe is run by women for women. Except from 1996 to 2015, it was co-owned by Donald Trump, who moved freely amongst contestants, telling them how terrific they were, how beautiful. Let that thought slither all over you for a moment. But thats just an unpleasant aside. The point is this while the women competing against each other (young, super-groomed, and wedged within the narrow window to which we ascribe beauty) are undoubtedly accomplished, clever, ambitious, and well-meaning, the format women competing against each other based on looks, no matter how much the organisers would have you believe its all about brains and personality is dead. Suzanne Harrington Its a bit like the idea of monarchy. While most of the individuals involved are, one presumes, perfectly nice, and have lately been making significant attempts to modernise, the fact remains that the institution itself is significantly past its kill-by date. No amount of rebranding can alter this. Neither institution, each based on inherited fortune social or facial has a place in supposedly meritocratic modern life. Its not that human beings in this instance young women dont enjoy prancing around being gorgeous, but we no longer require anyone to be selectively funnelled through the dated machinery of a beauty pageant. We have Instagram for that democratic, accessible narcissism and voyeurism for all. The argument that beauty pageants act as career-launchers is redundant in the digital age. They are as relevant as fax machines. Much has been made of Miss America modernising by dropping the swimwear contest part of the competition, so that women are no longer required to parade before an audience in bikinis and high heels, as though auditioning for Spearmint Rhino. This has been presented as progress. There have been no such announcements to end the bikini parade at Miss Universe. This, in the era of #MeToo, #TimesUp, #EffYourBeautyStandards. The insanity of this anachronism was highlighted last year when women competing for the title of Miss Peru, instead of telling the audience the size of their tits and ass via a measuring tape, instead recited statistics about their countrys gender violence. In bikinis. This is not to say that women should not be safe and free to walk anywhere in bikinis not just down a runway in front of cameras. Of course they, we, all of us should. This is not to criticise the intentions of any woman, beautiful or otherwise. This is not to diss the celebration of beauty, the power of it, the ownership of it quite the opposite. But no matter how hard I try, I cannot equate an institution like Miss Universe with the advancement of women. Ladies, you are goddesses. Own your power. Harness it, and be fierce. NO: 'It has taught me so much about myself and has instilled in me a self-belief that certainly wasnt there prior to entering' Cailin Aine Ni Toibin, who is the current Miss Universe Ireland, says it showcases female strength and that it should not be axed MISS Universe is, first and foremost, a celebration of women. It gives a women a platform, from which they can inspire, address key issues within society, and represent their country. All women are strong, independent, and talented, in different ways. Miss Universe showcases all of the positive attributes that women possess, namely intelligence, compassion, beauty, elegance, and confidence. Why would you want to axe a competition that does so much good work, in supporting and providing a sisterhood to women around the world? As the reigning Miss Universe Ireland, I can safely say that partaking in the competition is one of the best things Ive ever experienced. It has taught me so much about myself and has instilled in me a self-belief that certainly wasnt there prior to entering. When you apply to enter Miss Universe, one of the questions on the application form is Why do you want to be Miss Universe Ireland? This time last year, as I sat down to fill out the form, I thought long and hard about what it would mean to be Miss Universe Ireland. As an international competition, Miss Universe would provide me with the perfect opportunity to embody all the strength that it is to be a woman and to make a difference in the world, which is something that has always been a goal of mine. Cailin Aine Ni Toibin From an early age, I have been passionate about breaking down the stigma surrounding mental health. I suffered from anxiety throughout my teenage years and I still experience moments of angst, as I progress into adulthood. I knew that I wanted to work closely with a mental health charity to help people through what I had learned from my personal experiences and to encourage them to seek help and support. Pieta House was a natural fit for me. The work that they do, each and every day, is inspirational and they have helped countless individuals to overcome mental illness and to start a conversation around the lack of support for mental health sufferers in Ireland. Throughout my reign as Miss Universe Ireland 2017, I have continued to help individuals to improve their mental health, through coping mechanisms. In working with Pieta House, I have been fortunate enough to meet so many wonderful individuals, each of whom I can relate to completely. In a world where people are constantly tearing each other down and looking for faults, it is so refreshing to be part of an organisation that does the complete opposite and champions women. My confidence has soared from competing in Miss Universe. There is nothing more exhilarating than stepping out onto the stage and feeling strong, and beautiful in your own skin. To be given the opportunity to highlight key societal issues and to then be able to bring about change is an honour and a responsibility that I dont take lightly. To summarise, Miss Universe should not be axed. To axe something that brings so much joy, celebration, and encouragement into the lives of others would be a real shame. Women are capable of truly amazing things, once they are given support and guidance from those around them. Miss Universe is a vehicle for change. It has, and will, continue to inspire and empower for many years to come, of that Im certain. It has taught me so much about myself and has instilled in me a self-belief that certainly wasnt there prior to entering Grainne McGuinness offers some more consumer advice. This week she discusses being wary of gift cards. There was potential good news for consumers last week, as the Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation Heather Humphreys announced Government approval for a bill which will introduce a minimum expiry date of five years for gift vouchers. I believe [this] can make a real difference to consumers, Ms Humphreys said. At the moment, Ireland doesnt have clear rules on the expiry dates of gift vouchers, which time and time again results in needless confusion and frustration. In some cases, individual vouchers arent even clear about their own cut-off point. Research undertaken by the National Consumer Agency in 2013 found that almost half of those surveyed had let a gift voucher expire at some point without using it. It is extremely frustrating if a person, or somebody close to them, has paid in cash for a voucher only to be told it is no longer valid a relatively short time afterwards. While many retailers do honour vouchers in these instances, others do not. This simply isnt fair and needs to change. Most consumers would agree with the minister and welcome the new rules but the bad news is they are unlikely to be put in force until the end of the year at the earliest. Meanwhile we are entering peak wedding season, one of the many occasions when vouchers are a popular choice with people who give gifts. I honestly believe those who give vouchers or gift cards should consider giving cash, for weddings and other presents. The recipients know from the voucher how much you have spent anyway and cash avoids all the downsides of vouchers. It is totally flexible and you very rarely hear of people misplacing euro notes. However, if you prefer a voucher, take steps to ensure that the receiver gets to use its full value. The first thing to do is pass on any terms and conditions. Give the recipient any information you get on the expiry date or charges that may apply. Terms and conditions should also say if the bearer has to use the voucher all in one go. When buying the gift voucher, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission suggests using a debit or credit card to pay for it. This may give you extra protection if something goes wrong such as the business closing down. If it does, the buyer may be able to request a chargeback from their card company because the service paid for was not provided. There are a number of reasons why a sale can be charged back to the seller, and these are set out under the rules of the various credit and debit card schemes. If you receive a voucher as a gift, you can also take steps to make sure the donors kindness does not go to waste. The best advice is to spend the voucher or gift card soon as soon as possible. That way you minimise the risk of potential problems, including the voucher expiring, retailers going out of business, losing the voucher or forgetting you have it. If you cannot spend it immediately, store it somewhere safe and set a reminder in a calendar or on your phone, giving you a decent time before it is due to expire. If the expiry date is not clear or there is no expiry date written down, call and find out what the expiry date is. Dont assume there is none. Consider making a note of where you have put the voucher with the reminder. Retailers do not and generally will not replace lost vouchers. It is the same as losing cash. Ms Humphreys also intends to take on the issue of fees. I know the issues of fees is a bone of contention to consumers, she said. I am aware of cases where fees of as much as 3 per month apply to gift vouchers after 12 months. This means that a voucher for 25 can rendered completely worthless after 20 months. The Bill will deal with fees as well as expiry dates. Check when fees kick in and aim to have it spent by then. Gift cards can often turn into a present for the retailer, a few simple steps can avoid this and make sure it benefits the intended recipient. DEAL OF THE WEEK Pinergy is running an exclusive online offer until June 30, incentivising consumers to become energy efficient by kitting out homes that sign up for Pinergys smart meters with 20 free LED bulbs and 20 credit. The company says that 55% of households in Ireland are not monitoring their energy consumption or adjusting their usage. Pinergy say this highlights an opportunity for Irish households, as energy costs represent a significant annual expenditure. Our latest research shines a light on the huge opportunity that is now available for many households around the country to see energy in a new way, by using smart technology meters to more effectively monitor and manage their overall energy consumption and expenditure, Enda Gunnell, CEO at Pinergy said. Pinergys latest consumer promotion is a real incentive to kick-start consumers into taking positive action right now, as they embark on this smart energy journey. To avail of Pinergys promotion, go to pinergy.ie/seethedifference. Pinergy is running an exclusive online offer until June 30, incentivising consumers to become energy efficient by kitting out homes that sign up for Pinergys smart meters with 20 free LED bulbs and 20 credit. Rupert Everett stars in and directs his unflinching account of the last days of Oscar Wildes life, writes Esther McCarthy. DEATH looms large in The Happy Prince, Rupert Everetts account of the final days of Oscar Wilde. Haunted by ill health and detractors and debt collectors, the film is a gritty depiction of an undignified ending, worlds away from the glamour of Wildes heyday or the witty, sparkling characters who populate his masterpieces. Written and directed by the British actor and with him starring as Wilde, the star is almost unrecognisable onscreen in a fatsuit and underneath layers of latex and pale make-up. During one particularly unnerving scene as he expresses sorrow for being estranged from his two sons, Wilde throws up all over himself. Its a startling depiction of a man in his final hours, and Everett says he wouldnt have it any other way. He has witnessed too many friends with Aids and other illnesses pass to romanticise death. Death isnt pretty. I know its a little bit shocking that scene, but the thing I was hoping to put across, and partly from my own experience of friends dying with Aids and things, was that thing that happens with friends where you know someone as an ordinary, functioning human being. And then you have to get to know them as not exactly an animal, but going through a much more physical and demeaning and dying. I very much wanted to try and paint that into the picture in some way, which is why I had him vomiting. I know its a little bit shocking but the thing thats so interesting is how friends adapt. You think youd never be able to cope with something like that but then when it happens, somehow you can. Its the thing you think youll never be able to deal with and then you can. Its part of the magic, and maybe thats not the right word, of the deathbed experience. Its easy to forget that Everett, now 59, lived at a time when a HIV diagnosis was almost a guaranteed death sentence, and he lost many friends to the disease. We make death into such an alien thing, but its part of the process, and I think its a great eye-opener for the people around the dying person. Its a great privilege to be around somebody dying. It pushes you onto another level. Everett has had a lengthy professional and personal relationship with the writer who inspired him. As a young actor he performed many of Wildes plays on stage and five years ago he played Wilde in David Hares play about Wildes scandal and affair with his young lover Bosie, The Judas Kiss. He is thrilled, he says, to be bringing his film to Wildes country of birth. Ive been through most of the haunts with a toothcomb already. And I have to continue on the campaign trail tomorrow! But its such a thrill to be having a premiere here and for people to be coming. I did The Judas Kiss at the Gaiety and it was just fantastic. He has also been heartened by the positive responses to the film, his directorial debut. Its amazing. When people hate things you want to just kill yourself. So its really nice that other people seem to be appreciating in general the movie. Also its incredibly exciting to bring it here to Dublin, where Im staying in a hotel just around the corner from Speranzas house, his mothers house. This for me is really really important and terribly moving and charged. Still, getting the film made was no easy feat. Everett, by his own admission, is no longer the big star who delivered the put-downs with aplomb in smash hits such as My Best Friends Wedding, or starring opposite the likes of Julia Roberts and Madonna. The Happy Prince, set largely in Paris during Wildes final days, and following his trial and prison terms for gross indecency with men, shows how the once-celebrated writer ended up crucified by a society that once worshipped him. But Everett had a challenge raising the finance to get the film made. It was just endless. It took about ten years and it was always one step forwards, two steps back, really, he tells me. Its a period that I personally respond to and that I love very much. I think its difficult to get films made and it was quite expensive. Also I was probably not in my most successful mode, I was a bit past my sell-by date. All those three things came into play. The real life Oscar Wilde Irish actor Colin Morgan plays Wildes temperamental young lover Bosie in the film, while Colin Firth stars as Reggie Turner, the writer friend who tried to protect Wilde in his latter years. It was Firth, says Everett, who proved key to getting the film off the ground. Weve worked together many times over the years and weve become very good friends. Luckily for me, he took part in the film, because without him, we would not have got all the money together. You know about film financing? It depends on whos in the film you dont get the money without the names. It would not have been made without him. Fortunately he very kindly stayed with me and took part, showed up. Now, he says, hes been bitten by the directing bug and is developing other projects. I could be unbitten as well. You have to be realistic. Im quite old. The discovery I really made was how tenacious I was. I would definitely like to try and keep going and do another project. The Happy Prince opens Friday Poverty and marginalisation are deeply rooted and change will not happen overnight but tangible results will be realised in time, with the right interventions, says Anastasia Crickley. With Ireland reporting on its progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to the United Nations next month, up to 400 delegates meet at the World Community Development Conference 2018 in Maynooth from June 24- 27 to consider community development as a response to social and economic inequality, poverty, climate justice, rights realisation and other global challenges. One of its organisers, the International Association for Community Development, argues that there can be no sustainable development without community development. Another, Community Work Ireland, suggests that the vibrant, inclusive, and participative civil society essential for reaching SDG commitments is created and supported by community development. Echoing and reinforcing these concerns the other key organiser, the Department of Applied Social Studies at Maynooth University has, for nearly 40 years, prepared practitioners for empowering practice which focuses on a just and equal world where rights are recognised and realised. All support former President Mary Robinson, the opening keynote speaker for the conference, in her objective of seeking to empower communities to mitigate the dangers of climate change and to drive sustainable development in some of the worlds poorest regions. Another keynote speaker is activist and academic Lynne Segal. In her most recent book on Radical Happiness, she wrote of how the markets of misery leave many behind and measure well-being in ways which put the onus on increasingly marginalised individuals in private spaces. She calls for a return to our collective dreams of a better future for all. But are these aspirations realistic or achievable? Is todays world capable of being changed even partially from the bottom up? What has community development contributed in Ireland and elsewhere, what might it contribute, and what is it anyway? There is no doubt but that community workers are realistic both nationally and in global engagements. They know that many of the issues which hold back communities cannot be resolved by local work only. They recognise the intersectional nature of poverty and oppression which multiplies forms of injustice and rights abuse experienced by women, children, and men, and systematically ignores and undermines the diversity of cultures and peoples that form part of our world. For example, the experience of racism and oppression is different if you are a woman, sometimes violently and dangerously so. As a community worker and community development educator all my life, and one who as part of that has worked against racism locally and globally, I know that there are no simple answers, one size does not fit all. Poverty is an enduring feature globally which is being deepened by neo-liberal economic systems and structures. Community workers themselves also come from different backgrounds, cultures, and concerns. Community work contributes to society cohesion and progress but cannot do this if reduced to a delivery mechanism for imposed actions or instrumentalised as an alternative provider of what should be state services. To echo globally understood and nationally recognised definitions community development has both task and process dimensions. It is about working collectively for change linked to rights, justice and equality through applying the principles of participation, empowerment and collective decision-making in a structured and co-ordinated way. Community development involves an analysis of social and economic situations and collective action for change based on that analysis. It is centred on a series of principles that seek to go beyond consultation to participation and beyond capacity building to consciousness raising and empowerment. It recognises the changing and often hidden nature of structural inequalities based on race, class, gender, and disability, to name a few. It seeks to be transformative rather than conforming; empowering rather than controlling. Community work is not a process that takes place in a short timeframe, as it works to address deeply rooted inequalities and marginalisation. It takes varying lengths of time to achieve tangible results. Community work has a long tradition in Ireland and its contribution is visible and tangible. Muintir na Tire, based on local parish structures, played a very significant role in the modernisation of rural Ireland. Initiatives like that of Connemara West in Letterfrack, which courageously purchased the old industrial school at its closure, continues to enhance life there including through the students participating in the globally renowned third-level furniture college. Supported by community development groups Fatima, in Dublins south inner city successfully negotiated a regeneration programme and St Michaels Estate Resource Centre, Inchicore, continues to shine a collective light of resistance against violence towards women and for decent housing. Community work and community work methods have been key to the success of emerging strategies for Traveller rights and inclusion; for womens involvement and for the rights of migrants and refugees, and asylum seekers seeking refugee recognition in Ireland. The work of Pavee Point, not least with Traveller women as health workers in their own communities, is recognised throughout Europe. The Migrants Rights Centre Ireland equally contributes to global as well as local campaigns through engagement with the shaping of the UN Compact on Migrants. While many of the recent changes for women in Ireland were not community development initiatives but rather led by broad groupings, there is no doubt but that community development over the past 30 years has created the conditions for active engagement and participation by women in issues that affect our lives. Conference contributors from all of the world will give testimony to the contribution of community development to the changes that face their countries including post-conflict and post-war. Work with indigenous peoples in Guatemala and Colombia; work to empower women and communities to achieve the rights to participate in Liberian society; and organisations led by local communities in these countries will demonstrate how this is a truly global way of working. Other contributors will speak of initiatives in Nepal, Vietnam, Mongolia, Mauritius, Nigeria, and Uganda. All of these speak to a world-wide discipline and a discipline which has also been shaped by thinkers from various backgrounds globally as well as by the womens movement of the mid-twentieth century. The history of community development globally, it has to be said is located in and linked to both the resistance movement and colonisers attempts to maintain influence in the post-colonial period. However one of the foremost influences is the shaping of community development is the work of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian philosopher and educationalist. In effect, the key influence globally is not reducible to the global north dominating the global south but rather key ideas from the global south inform empowerment and liberation in the global north. These are challenging times for community development everywhere. After huge cuts and assimilation into other structures in ways that denied autonomy to organisations, community development is now successfully included in policy frameworks and programmes in Ireland. However, many previously independent organisations are implicitly controlled by local authorities who have an important role for communities, but may at times be part of the problem, for example on Traveller accommodation issues. They are also challenging times globally as civil society in Gaza struggles to assert peoples rights; the Rohingya languish in refugee camps in Coxs Bazaar, Bangladesh, and other places; the Black Lives Matters movement in the US contests racial profiling; and, closer to home, women in Northern Ireland seek not to be left behind in the fight for reproductive rights. However, the present time, though challenging does provide some opportunities for change and there is an atmosphere of hope that such change, here, and elsewhere which is concerned with equality, rights and justice can be well supported by community development. For this to happen, those involved need knowledge, skills, and values based practice. Good intentions are not enough on their own. This requires education, such as is provided by the Department of Applied Social Studies in Maynooth; support and reinforcement as is provided for and by community workers nationally by Community Work Ireland and internationally but the International Association for Community Development. The upcoming conference will provide a unique space for the critique, debate and discussion required to progress what is an old tradition in Ireland and globally, by a young and unique inclusive profession which also provides roots for participation and progress for all. Anastasia Crickley is with the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Maynooth University. Gaza `on brink of war`: UN Chief Al Jazeera news : UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip places the besieged enclave on the "brink of war", as he urged Israel and Hamas to recommit to a 2014 ceasefire. The UN chief said in a report obtained by news agencies that he is "shocked" by Israel's use of live fire since border protests began in Gaza on March 30. He said its military has "a responsibility to exercise maximum restraint" except as a last resort. The report was sent to the council last week in advance of a meeting on Tuesday on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The killing of children, as well as of clearly identified journalists and medical staffers by security forces during a demonstration are particularly unacceptable," Guterres said. "They must be allowed to perform their duties without fear of death or injury." Israel has not yet responded to the accusations. Guterres also told the Security Council that he "unequivocally condemns the steps by all parties that have brought us to this dangerous and fragile place" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He warned that actions by Hamas and other Palestinian groups not only risk Palestinian and Israeli lives but "efforts to restore dignity and the prospects of a livable future for Palestinians in Gaza", citing rockets fired at Israel and attempts to breach the Gaza-Israel fence by some protesters. Since weekly mass protests began along the Israel-Gaza border on March 30, at least 130 Palestinians have been killed and 13,000 others wounded by Israeli army fire. The overwhelming majority of the dead and wounded have been unarmed, according to Gaza health officials. Two Palestinian journalists were killed while covering the protests in April and a 21-year-old medic was shot dead in early June. Guterres renewed his call for an independent investigation of the shooting deaths in Gaza. Israel, which says Hamas has used the protests as cover for attacks on the border fence, has rejected the appeal and argued that the use of force is justified to defend its borders. The marchers have pressed demands for a right of return for Palestinian refugees to their families homes which they were forced to flee 70 years ago. More than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in the 1948 war over Israel's creation. Two-thirds of Gaza's two million residents are internally displaced people. Guterres reiterated that "there is no viable alternative to the two-state solution," with Israel and Palestine living side by side in peace and with Jerusalem as the capital of both states. But he said that "only by changing the reality on the ground - by recognising and addressing the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, ensuring that all sides recommit to the 2014 ceasefire understandings, and supporting Egyptian-led efforts to restore control of the legitimate Palestinian government in Gaza - can we preserve the possibility of a viable, independent and fully representative Palestinian state and avert another disastrous, lethal conflict." Even the USs first lady has questioned the policy. It has caused uproar in an election year, with the midterms to be held in November, says Jennifer Epstein. US president Donald Trumps policy of separating immigrant children from parents who illegally cross the Mexican border threatens to balloon into an election-year headache for Republicans. He is struggling to explain and defend a practice questioned even by his wife. First Lady Melania Trump, herself an immigrant, made a rare foray into policy matters, with a statement that the US must be a country that governs with heart. Kirstjen Nielsen, the US Homeland Security secretary, took to Twitter to clarify the administrations handling of undocumented immigrant children. We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period, Nielsen said in one tweet, a statement that contradicts the president. Trump has acknowledged the policy exists, but has refused to accept responsibility for it, instead pinning the blame on Democrats. Melania and Donald Trump Several prominent Democrats, meanwhile, spent Fathers Day crisscrossing the Rio Grande Valley in Texas to meet with US border authorities and tour detention centres for apprehended children, including a former Walmart store thats been converted into a shelter for nearly 1,500 immigrant boys. A delegation to McAllen, Texas, was led by senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. Merkley hasnt ruled out running for president in 2020, while Van Hollen is in charge of Senate Democrats 2018 campaign committee. What the president has discovered is this policy, which he put in place six weeks ago, is creating an uproar among the American people, Van Hollen said. This is something that transcends politics. This is about moms and dads imagining their children being taken from them. Julian Castro, the former San Antonio mayor who served as housing and urban development secretary in the Obama administration, joined protesters at a border patrol processing centre in McAllen, where temperatures hit 36C at mid-afternoon. It amounts, essentially, to state-sponsored child abuse that is traumatising young children by taking them away from their parents, not letting them know when theyre going to see their parents again, keeping them in conditions that we wouldnt want any of our children in, Castro said. He, too, is considered a potential 2020 presidential contender. Trump administration officials say the policy is intended to deter undocumented immigrants from making the trek to the US border with their children. But the president has repeatedly blamed Democrats, citing an unspecified law that he says requires children to be taken from parents who cross the border illegally. White House officials are unable to cite any part of US law that dictates the separations, which were initiated in April, after US attorney general Jeff Sessions announced zero tolerance for unlawful border crossings. Adults apprehended after crossing the border outside an official port of entry are to be arrested and prosecuted under Sessions decree, which leads to their children being removed. Previously, border authorities often issued notices to appear in court to families apprehended crossing the border who claimed asylum, and then released them. Trump has derided that practice as catch and release, arguing that many of the immigrants never appear for court proceedings. Republicans in the US Congress and the administration have pointed to a 1997 court settlement, regarding the treatment of immigrant children in federal custody, for legal justification of Sessions new policy. The US separated about 1,995 children from their parents, and detained them, between mid-April and May 31, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for their care. On Friday, Trump hinted in a tweet that the policy is intended as political leverage to force Democratic lawmakers to agree to changes to immigration law containing elements they oppose, including the construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border. The Democrats are forcing the break-up of families at the border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda, Trump said on Twitter. Any immigration bill must have full funding for the wall, end catch and release, Visa lottery and chain, and go to merit-based immigration. Go for it! WIN! Representative Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, who joined Merkley and Van Hollen in Texas, said that he thinks Trump believes the policy is popular with his political base. While he thinks its something that works well for that 35% that still adore him, it doesnt work well for their party in November, he said. I think theyre way miscalculating. Former first lady Laura Bush wrote, in an op-ed published by the Washington Post: This zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. Democrats have refused to consent to the border wall or to the restrictions to legal immigration Trump has demanded, and instead hope to block family separations with standalone legislation. Today marks the sixth anniversary of Wikileaks founder Julian Assanges effective house arrest in London. He cannot move around in public, because he fears he will be arrested and extradited to America a daunting prospect, since a UN special rapporteur described Chelsea Mannings treatment by that countrys justice system as torture. Assange is divisive. Hawks wish him nothing but misfortune and a stretch in jail. According to journalist John Pilger, a leaked official memo says: Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. Hell be eating cat food forever. The unit will combine education, research, and practice to tackle clinical problems such as newborn brain injury, infant seizures, allergy, eczema, and sleep issues while seeking to enhance the long-term wellbeing and development of children. The 1,400msq facility boasts 32 rooms, including state-of-the-art assessment rooms for clinical studies, seminar rooms, clinical skills rooms, tutorial rooms, offices, and laboratory spaces. It will host both paediatric academic training and the paediatric clinical research arm of the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI)-funded Infant perinatal research centre. President of UCC, Prof Patrick OShea, told guests at the opening that the best universities are the ones that partner with the best hospitals: In academia, we sometimes say theres no difference between academia and the real world, but in the real world, there is. And, in theory, theres no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is. Thats why the combination of education, research, and practice is absolutely critical for excellence. The co-location of education, clinical research, and patient care for paediatrics is a first in Ireland, and its not just going to be the best in Ireland, its going to be the best in the world. "We may act locally, but we think globally and in everything we do, we want to be the best in every way. Developing this, not just for the good of the hospital or the good of UCC but for the good of people is really important, he said. Infant director, Prof Geraldine Boylan, said the new unit is unique: Its an integrated unit that also provides much-needed infrastructure for the Infant research centre. Teaching, research, and clinical care have to co-exist if were going to make any improvement in performance and better outcomes for patients. Prof Boylan said Infant has more than 100 staff and deals with unexpected events and vulnerable patients: Infant is a research centre that is open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week we have to be. Since our establishment, we have grown exponentially, and as a result this new infrastructure was urgently needed. We had to expand our footprint. Opening the unit, Tanaiste Simon Coveney said too often the focus is on the challenges facing the health system instead of its successes, and that such centres will avoid a magnet effect that would pull children with healthcare needs to the capital: In the future, when we have a fantastic new, shiny, national childrens hospital completed, all roads should not lead to Dublin. We need to provide high-quality infant care and childrens healthcare in other centres as well. We need to be caring for children here in Cork and in other Irish cities in a way that ensures that we can keep, I hope, as many of our children out of the National Childrens Hospital as we possibly can. Funding for the unit comes from a multimillion-euro investment by UCC, SFI, and a significant philanthropic donation. Britains Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, were so taken with the farms that they stayed over the allotted time during a tightly scheduled visit to Kerry on Friday. When the Princes great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria visited Killarney almost 160 years ago, she went back to Kensington Palace with highly polished furniture inlaid with yew pictures of Killarney scenes which had been made in a local furniture school. Some of that furniture so admired by Victoria is still to be seen in Muckross House and Kensington Palace. The royals last weekend seemed more taken with the simple straw-made furniture display by west Limerick man Pat Broderick in the Muckross farms. Charles asked to join in the sugan or traditional straw-rope-making by Mr Borderick in front of the largest farmhouse. He took so long that officials approached farm manager Toddy Doyle to try to hurry him along. Camilla sat on a traditional chair and pronounced them very comfortable and wonderful. Charles joked that you wouldnt want hay fever, spending longer than scheduled examining the mats and other items. He was presented with two harvest knots love knots in the shape of hearts made from the straw. Those left with him in his car. Mr Doyle said the visit and the royal couples obvious interest in the farms, was a great boost, given the farms are celebrating 25 years just this week. Prince Charles was very taken with the straw. I explained how straw now is much shorter and it is difficult to get the long straw necessary for furniture making. We have had to send for seeds to Devon, said Mr Doyle. As well as chairs, Charles was looking for a basket to put eggs in. Meanwhile, a meeting of Kerry County Council in Tralee has been asked for the cost of the visit. Sinn Fein councillor Toireasa Ferris said there was no criticism implicit in her request for this information. However, just as she asked for the cost of renovations of the council chambers, she sought the cost of the visit to the council. Chief executive Moria Murrell insists no services would suffer through the visit. Works on national roads ahead of the visit had already been approved by Transport Infrastructure Ireland and any extra work done was done around the edges. Jason Fitzgerald hopes to stand in the four-seat Ireland South constituency in 2019, but stressed that he is not targeting the seat of sitting MEP Brian Crowley, who has been unable to attend parliament since 2014 due to ill health. He is instead hoping to take a second seat for Fianna Fail. Mr Fitzgerald made his pitch at Fianna Fails Cork North West AGM on Monday. He said his experience of dealing with Europe on behalf of Irish Farmers with Designated Lands (IFDL), of which he is chairman, had shown him that Europe was prepared to engage with community groups. I set up the IFDL in 2014 with the aim of sorting out anomalies between Europe and officials in this country in terms of designated lands, he said. Mr Fitzgerald said they had brought about positive changes for farmers: Last December the 25m Hen Harrier Programme opened for applications, a scheme funded through the Rural Development Programme and targeted at farmers with designated land. He said he believed one of the biggest failings in the system is that not enough community groups are facilitated to go to Europe and share their problems. Mr Fitzgerald said that if he did ultimately run for Fianna Fail, he would hope to fully utilise the EU and avail of initiatives that are out there, which he felt was not always currently the case. He ran unsuccessfully for Renua in Cork North West in the 2016 general election. He said had he moved to Fianna Fail because the party had greater grassroots involvement. Whether Fianna Fail endorses him as an Ireland South candidate remains to been seen. A Fianna Fail spokesperson said it will consider and decide a strategy for the constituency in due course. In the 2014 European Election, Mr Crowley topped the poll for Fianna Fail in Ireland South, garnering 27.42% of the vote. However, the party failed to take a second seat, which was attributed to failure to manage Mr Crowleys vote-getting ability. Mr Crowley has yet to confirm whether he intends to run in 2019. Separately, Fine Gael senator Colm Burke has been selected to contest the next general election for his party in Cork North Central, securing 236 of 302 first preference votes at a selection convention on Monday. Mr Burke, who defeated three other candidates, will defend on behalf of his party, the seat vacated by Dara Murphy. Mr Burke said a key issue for him will be ensuring Cork gets a new hospital, as already pledged by the Government. Eric Eoin Marques is wanted by the American authorities on charges including conspiring to distribute and advertise child pornography and of advertising and distributing child pornography. The FBI believes he is the owner and administrator of an anonymous hosting site, known as Freedom Hosting. He was arrested by the gardai in 2013, on foot of a formal request from the US. He has brought a number of separate, but related actions against his proposed extradition, including a challenge against the Department of Public Prosecution (DPP)s decision not to prosecute him in Ireland, for offences for which he is wanted by the US authorities. His challenge against that decision was also dismissed. In 2017, he brought fresh proceedings, aimed at halting his extradition to the US. His lawyers argued that the Minister for Justice needed to know the reasons why the DPP decided not to prosecute, before the minister could properly exercise his discretion in making an order for Mr Marquess surrender. The court was also asked to determine if the reasons given by the minister, in a decision made in June 2017, ordering Mr Marquess extradition, were adequate. His application was dismissed by the High Court last November, and he appealed that ruling to the Court of Appeal. The minister opposed the application. In its judgement yesterday, the Court of Appeal, comprising Mr Justice Michael Peart, Mr Justice Alan Mahon, and Mr Justice John Hedigan, dismissed the appeal. Giving the courts decision, Mr Justice Peart said the High Court was entirely correct. Noting that while extradition is a process of international co-operation in the criminal sphere between sovereign states, it was not a criminal proceeding and involves no finding of guilt or innocence. The judge said that Mr Marques had no entitlement to require the minister to obtain from the DPP the reasons for deciding not to prosecute him in Ireland. He had no right to a refusal of his extradition because the DPP had made a decision not to prosecute him, and no right to even require the minister to consider exercising that office-holders power to refuse his extradition, the judge said. The court was also satisfied that the reasons given by the minister to allow Mr Marquess extradition were clear. Nothing more was needed to be explained in regard to that decision, the judge added. In all the circumstances, the judge said, the court was satisfied to dismiss the appeal. The case will return before the court on Friday, when lawyers for Marques may seek to have the case appealed to the Supreme Court. More Sylhet areas go under water Army team working to protect villages Staff Reporter : Flood in Sylhet region following breach in embankments on Koshiara river bank on Monday worsened the situation in Beanibazar Upazila while inundating more areas of Uttarbagh union of Rajnagar Upazia in Moulvibazar district. Breach in Mono dyke also inundated 20 to 25 villages in the locality. A team of army personnel is at work to stop the gushing water from entering the locality by dumping sand bags and soil and other materials to strengthen the dyke. Water Development Board sources said flood situation in the Moulovi Bazar district aggravated as heavy rain water is coming from the source of Mono River from inside India. Water level started rising in rivers Koshiara, Monu and Dholai from last week carrying rain water from India on the upstream. From June 12 a embankment on river Monu and Dholai have broken at least 1t 19 points causing floods at Kulaura, Komolgonj and Rajnagar upazila of the district. It has inundated Moulovi Bazar town and parts of the sadar upazila. Large parts of the MOulovi Bazar town are still under knee deep water. Most part of Habigonj district also remained paralyzed by flood water coming down from Moulovi Bazar and upstream areas. Communication in most part of Moulovi Bazar area remained snapped as local roads have gone under water disrupting movement. UNB adds: Some 40,000 residents of the district's Beanibazar upazila have been marooned in flashfloods amidst alarming rise of water levels in Surma, Kushiara and Sonai rivers. According to sources, at least four upazilas in the district have their communication system cut off from the rest of the country. Beanibazar Upazila Nirbahi Officer Kazi Arifur Rahman said breaching of dikes in the Kushiara River in five spots has increased the level of damage inflicted by the floods. Hiron Mahmud, project implementation officer, said that no flood relief shelters have been established so far, but estimated that over 40,000 people have been marooned in the region. Paresh Chandra Das, local agriculture officer, said that Aus paddy in 940 hectares out of a total 2,327 hectares of arable land has been damaged, causing an estimated loss of Tk 6.5 crore. Upon investigation, it was found that the areas of Dubag Bazar, Mewa Point, Kakardia and others were inundated, alongside the upazila's villages of Ramda, Sridhara, Chandgram, Tajpur and many more. Meanwhile, Education Minister and local MP Nurul Islam Nahid visited the flooded areas in the region and distributed relief among the affected people. Upazila administration sources said that 15 MT rice and 300 packets of dry food have already been distributed from their end, with many more to follow. Social Welfare Minister Rashed Khan Menon also visited the flood-affected areas in Moulvibazar district and was reported to have distributed relief, accumulated from his personal fund and a locally-sourced aid fund. He said that the government has enough aid materials for distribution and in their disaster management trust fund. The government has also taken steps for post-flood rehabilitation for everyone affected by the calamity. Known as the Black Widow, the 66-year-old died last February in a north Dublin hospice five months after being taken to hospital upon becoming unwell. She took with her the secret as to who she hired to murder her husband, Tom Nevin, at their home in Jack Whites Inn, near Brittas Bay, Co Wicklow, in March 1996. Some gardai consider a hitman, who was living in the area at the time, to have been a chief suspect, but that individual passed away nine years ago. The inspector of prisons compiled a report on the circumstances surrounding her death, as mandatory, but Nevin is not named. Inspector Helen Casey said the 66-year-old woman had been committed to prison on April 11, 2000, on a life sentence. Following a review by the Parole Board and a subsequent decision by the Minister for Justice, Nevin was scheduled for reviewable temporary release (RTR) in July 2016. But the report said prison officials could not find any place for Nevin to go to: Due to issues in securing appropriate accommodation the release did not take place at that time and she remained in prison. Ms Casey said that having examined the prison records, (Nevin was in Dochas Womens Prison), the deceased became ill on September 20, 2016. Nevin was admitted to the nearby Mater Hospital where she was diagnosed with a terminal illness. She was there for three days and was given RTR to stay for the purpose of hospital/medical care. On November 7, Nevin was taken to an acute post care unit while undergoing medical treatment. She stayed there until August 21, 2017 when she again received RTR for pre-release/resocialisation. She was provided with supported accommodation, said the report and remained there until a further admittance to hospital on November 6, 2017. The deceased remained in hospital until December 4, 2017 when she was transferred to a hospice care facility, where she remained until her death on February 10, 2018, the report said. Ms Casey said prison records showed that the deceased satisfied the terms of her RTR and that there were no significant matters that required further investigation. She said the cause of death would be a matter for the coroner. He said the higher level exam was challenging in places but good students should have been well able to find six questions to answer well. Mr Keaney particularly liked the fact that many questions focused on a single topic from the syllabus, rather than featuring several different areas of study. He cited a full question on dairy and beef farming as an example. In addition, he said, experiment questions were straightforward as they were based on those which most classes would have covered, and there was a nice genetics question. Mr Keaney thought an ordinary level genetics question could have had a more practical or agriculture-related topic instead of asking about mitosis. On behalf of the Irish Agricultural Science Teachers Association (IASTA), Danielle Murphy said students found the higher level exam fair with no surprises. She said most questions were accessible and there was wide choice within the exam. This would have been good news for those who do not study biology, a subject which would have been helpful to answering the first question. Ms Murphy said it was followed by one of the most fair second questions of recent years about soils. While a question that referred to the sheep welfare scheme might have thrown some students, being more applicable to the subjects new curriculum that will not be first examined until 2021, she said that it was still accessible if students remained calm. Ms Murphy also mentioned a lack of diagrams, photos and colour on the higher level exam, when compared to other papers and even the ordinary level exam in the subject. In the afternoon, the accounting exams taken by around 7,300 students were considered fair and student friendly by Teachers Union of Ireland subject spokesman Ger Hughes. He said higher level students would have found plenty of choice in their paper, which was well balanced. However, , he said, time constraints would have been an issue as is usual with Leaving Certificate accounting. While the inclusion of a flexible budgeting question might have been an attempt by examiners to ease the timing problems often felt by students, Mr Hughes felt it was a surprise topic that might have required some flexibility by candidates. The ordinary level accounting paper was quite like those of previous years and student friendly, Mr Hughes said. The move comes nearly three weeks after An Bord Pleanala announced its decision to give Indaver Ireland the go-ahead for a controversial 160m 240,000 tonnes-per-annum waste incinerator at Ringaskiddy in Cork Harbour. Harbour resident Sue Walsh, who together with husband Nick owns leading blind manufacturing company Acme Blinds, said they will be pledging support as a company. She said as employers, they were concerned about how people live and work, and they had seen, first hand, while living abroad, the positive effects of cleaning up the San Francisco harbour area. Myself and Nick have a keen interest in all things maritime and weve seen how other harbours have been transformed, Sue said. Cork Harbour is at a turning point now in terms of its development, it will be expanding over the next few years, and for me, to build an incinerator there is such a retrograde step. I think Cork Harbour has to be protected so that people can both live and work in the area. Nick said he was of the view that the site in Ringaskiddy was the wrong one. Cork Harbour is unique, he said. I am a sailor and I think putting it between Cobh and Spike Island is not the right decision. Both Cobh and Spike Island are major tourist destinations. Spike Island was voted Europes number one tourist attraction last year. Sue, who is a member of environmental lobby group Chase (Cork Harbour Alliance for a Safe Environment), is encouraging companies to join the campaign as Chase needs to raise between 150,000-200,000 to fund a judicial review of the planning decision. So far, close to 58,000 has been raised through a GoFundMe page. Sue said a number of companies in Cork City have already pledged support, including Phelans Pharmacy, who have agreed to allow one of their shop windows, fronting onto Grand Parade, to act as an information point for city dwellers. The Cobbler shoe repair shop has also pledged support. Cronins Bar in Crosshaven is selling campaign t-shirts and there are plans to expand sales to other outlets. A meeting will take place in the Spailpin Fanach pub on South Main St in Cork City tonight, where items on the agenda include: Organising an awareness-raising campaign in Cork City, including building a support group and a fundraising network, and getting a committee together to manage fundraising for the judicial review. An application for leave to apply for judicial review must be made within three months from the date when grounds for the application first arose. Sue said they are particularly keen to get companies involved. The harbour is there for everyone to enjoy and we want to bring the issue into the city, she said. And we want to encourage businesses to get involved. Tonights meeting gets under way at 7pm. Chase GoFundMe: ie.gofundme.com/no-incinerator-in-cork-harbour The three attacks over an 11-day period followed similar modus operandi Patrick Nevin would talk to the women online, pick them up in his car on the first date, and drive them to a secluded spot and attack them. The 36-year-olds trial for the rape of a woman in a parked car in July 2014 was due to begin at the Central Criminal Court yesterday. His last-minute plea of guilty followed a legal ruling on Monday morning which would allow the prosecution to introduce evidence from two other women of Nevin attacking them on a first date. Yesterday morning, Nevin pleaded guilty to the rape of a woman at Bellewstown, Co Meath, on July 12, 2014, and to sexual assaulting a second woman at an unknown place in Co Meath on July 16, 2014. The former UCD student was convicted by a jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court last December of sexually assaulting a third woman a Brazilian student after driving her to the UCD campus in south Dublin on July 23, 2014. In 2001, Nevin was jailed for seven years after killing his girlfriends two dogs and then threatening to kill her. Nevin asked Jennifer Arkins how she would like to die by choking or by stabbing when he subjected her to a terrifying ordeal of choking, hitting her with a brick, kicking her in the head, punching her, and spitting in her face. Ms Arkins suffered a fractured skull and serious cuts and bruises to her face. Nevin also has a previous conviction for rape from Denmark. He was a minor in 1999 when he was convicted of rape and aggravated rape. It has now also emerged that Nevin settled a 60,000 personal injuries claim in the Circuit Civil Court seven months ago but at the time could not be identified due to outstanding rape and sexual assault charges against him. Nevin has been in custody since his conviction last December but had addresses at Meadowlands Court, Mounttown Rd, Dun Laoghaire, and Dundalk, Co Louth. He will be sentenced on July 26, when victim impact reports will be given to the court. During legal argument last week, Nevins lawyers asked the court to order media organisations to remove reports of previous trials and offending. Ms Justice Creedon ruled against the defence application, saying the court was not satisfied there was a real risk of an unfair trial if the material was not taken down. As part of a second legal issue, prosecuting counsel submitted that the evidence of all three assaults was relevant to the case, as a similar methodology was used. Ms Justice Eileen Creedon said the court had to strike a balance between the probative value of such evidence and its prejudicial effect. She said because of the similarity in the modus operandi she would accede to the request to include the evidence. Evidence of the two offences to which Nevin yesterday pleaded guilty will be heard at the sentencing date next month. The evidence of the Brazilian woman, now aged 35, was heard during the trial last December. She had just arrived in Ireland and wanted to meet Irish people to practice her English. After some weeks of communicating with Nevin on the Tinder dating programme and on Whatsapp, she arranged to meet him. He told her he would take her to a place that had the best coffee in Dublin but Nevin later told gardai he saw the date as a hook-up for sex. Nevin picked her up in his car, a blue BMW, and drove her to a secluded field on UCD campus. The woman said that his demeanour then changed completely and he became aggressive. She said he became like a monster. She said he attacked her and she was in fear of her life and thought Nevin was going to rape her. In his closing speech, Paul Burns SC, prosecuting, had told the jurors they might feel the woman was naive, foolish, and awfully stupid but that did not give anyone the right to attack her. He said simply agreeing to meet someone does not make them fair game. He said at no stage did the complainant show an interest in meeting the man for sex. Everyone has the right to say no to sexual advances, said Mr Burns. No-one is entitled to force themselves on another. Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe is likely to implement measures in a bid to avoid the economy overheating. Today, the Cabinet is set to agree a summer economic statement (SES) which will outline the deficit the Governments plans to target next year and the budgetary package that will accommodate reaching that target. However, the Irish Examiner has learnt that Mr Donohoe will eschew the ability to use the full amount of so-called fiscal space as it is deemed to not be appropriate given how strong economic growth is at present. In recent weeks, various bodies including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council (IFAC) have warned about the danger of the economy overheating. The European Commission put economic growth at 7.3% for 2017 as the economy expanded at a solid pace, supported mainly by domestic activity. This was up from 4.8% rate of growth predicted in the commissions autumn economic forecast and marks the fastest growth rate in the EU for 2017. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the Government is seeking to avoid the mistakes of the past, and seek to reduce down debt. Minister Donohoe will deal with that in detail tomorrow and also in the Dail, he said. The general principle we will be applying is that no matter what the fiscal rules may be, it is just common sense and good housekeeping that next year wed keep reducing the deficit and not increase borrowing. Because at the current stage we are at in our economic cycle, more borrowing and a bigger deficit and a bigger debt does not make sense. We dont want repeat the mistakes of the past. Asked if the total envelope of spending is still at the 3.2bn level, he said it is, but issued a heavy caveat on it. It is, yeah, in that ball-park, but a lot of it is already committed, as you know, he said. The Government will instead frame budgetary policy to reduce borrowing and support steady and sustainable improvements in employment and living standards, it is understood. Mr Donohoe is to say his goal is to position the economy to minimise risk and maximise opportunity. We are being prudent to ensure we are able to manage risk so that we can continue to improve living standards, improve public services, invest in the future and deliver lasting prosperity, he will say. The SES will identify a fiscal space framework, as has been the case in previous years. Within this framework, it will identify the economic and fiscal consequences of different levels of expenditure and taxation. This will shape the decision being made by the Government on what the appropriate budgetary stance is for the country for 2019. Of the 3.2bn overall envelope, 2.6bn has already been pre-committed to expenditure measures. We must be careful to base spending commitments on sustainable revenue. That is why we are setting aside some of the historically high levels of corporation tax for the purpose of creating the rainy day fund, Mr Donohoe will say. When completed, the new container will provide a 360m-long quay, with 13m water-depth, enabling larger ships to berth in Ringaskiddy. The project also includes the construction of a 13.5 hectare terminal, two ship-to-shore gantry cranes, and new container-handling equipment. The requirement for the development of new facilities at Ringaskiddy was identified in the Port of Corks Strategic Development plan in 2010. It will accommodate current and future container shipping, which can be serviced by modern and efficient cargo-handling equipment. The Port of Corks redevelopment at Ringaskiddy is a key growth enabler for both Cork city and region, as well as the national economy, and will enable us to deliver more efficient container-handling facilities, said Port of Cork chairman John Mullins. Once opened, all container traffic currently using the Tivoli docks will be redirected to Ringaskiddy. The transfer of port-related activities from the city and Tivoli will create a real opportunity for Cork docklands sites to be redeveloped in the near future, said Mr Mullins. The Ringaskiddy development is the most significant single investment in marine infrastructure and superstructure in the history of the Port of Cork company. The project is being funded by the Port of Cork, Allied Irish Banks, the European Investment Bank, and the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF). Port of Cork chief executive Brendan Keating said the project would secure the future of the port and ensure that the trade gains are translated into significant economic benefits for the people of Cork and Munster, as well as for the national economy. The Port of Cork will construct a public marine leisure amenity at Paddys Point and has also committed a 1m community fund for the Ringaskiddy area, for the development of an enhanced public-realm scheme. Donal Murphy, the head of infrastructure and credit investments at ISIF, said it was an important investment for ISIF, which has demonstrated its commitment to investing in key infrastructure throughout Ireland on a commercial basis. It is the latest investment from our Connectivity Fund, which was established with proceeds from the sale of the States shareholding in Aer Lingus, said Mr Murphy. He said the project would also enhance Irelands transport-and-supply-chain links with major EU markets and help Irish exporters to access these markets post-Brexit. Conor Morgan, of AIB Corporate Banking, said that his company was delighted to provide this financing for the strategic development. As a key infrastructure deal supporting the growth of the Irish economy, the project increases future capacity at the port and brings major strategic value to the city of Cork and the Munster region, Mr Morgan said. European Investment Bank vice-president, Andrew McDowell, said his bank was providing the Port of Cork with a 30m loan over 18 years to help it complete the project. Mr McDowell said that it was important to ensure alternative transport routes, given export growth and ongoing uncertainties related to Brexit. The Port of Cork awarded the contract for the project to BAM Civil Ltd, which is part of the multi-national construction group, Royal BAM Group, of the Netherlands. People in Passage West have hit out at what they claimed was a lack of public consultation over the plan, which could start as early as next month, and have now launched a petition relating to it. Irish Water wants to improve the water quality in the harbour area and late last week notice of intended temporary road closures was advertised, including a 24-hour closure of a section of the R610 from July 2 to August 31. Annette Foley of the Passage West Pharmacy said that while the community realised the works needed to be conducted, the lack of public consultation had annoyed many and left businesses facing uncertainty over how to work around any difficulties it may cause. It isnt nimby-ism, she said. It is genuine concern from the community as a whole. She said tourism and business would be affected, while she had to contact some of her customers to reassure them they would still receive their medication through the delivery service operated by her pharmacy. Submissions with regard to the proposed closures can be received until 5pm tomorrow. One resident, Andrew Wood, said what was outlined was unacceptable and was effectively going to divide the village in two. Irish Water said that in partnership with Cork County Council it was working to end the decades-long practice of discharging untreated sewage into Cork Lower Harbour and clean up the harbour through its investment in the Cork Lower Harbour Main Drainage Project. It said every day the equivalent of 20,000 wheelie bins of raw sewage is released into Cork Lower Harbour from the communities living around it. We recently completed the laying of the sewer on Back St, Passage West, through the use of directional boring instead of open trenching, reducing the length of time required for the road closure on Back St significantly, from 12 weeks to five weeks, a spokesman for Irish Water said. Unfortunately, the works in the Strand Road cannot be completed using this method. The safest way to complete these works with the least impact is to close the road. The spokesman said the proposed road closures, if granted by the local authority, will cause inconvenience for residents and businesses but added that there would ultimately be major benefits for local communities. The Government is working with the Construction Industry Federation (CIF) to ensure there are enough tradespeople to keep up with increased housing demand. However, the minister, Eoghan Murphy, has said technology now means the same number of people are not needed on building sites: New technology is going to help us deliver the houses that we need without having the same amount of people. Figures released last week reveal that fewer than 15,000 new houses were built last year. The CSOs New Dwelling Completions index shows that the number of homes being constructed is well short of the annual demand of between 30,000 and 35,000 which the Government say is needed. Asked whether a scheme to entice builders and those with a trade back to Ireland is now required, Mr Murphy said: We certainly have a lot of construction workers that left the country after the crash to seek work abroad. We have 116bn investments under Project Ireland 2040 between now and 2027, a huge amount of construction projects not just in housing but also when it comes to schools, road building and everything else. He said a new working group has been set up involving the Department of Housing and the CIF to monitor staff in the sector. Obviously, we still need people with skills and my department as well as Richard Brutons [education] department are running a number of different courses and funding courses that will help give people the skills to work on those sites. We are not talking about the quantity of people that we had back in the day. Mr Murphy also hit out at Sinn Fein for threatening to table a motion of no-confidence in him, describing it as an unnecessary distraction and potentially reckless behaviour. Our focus as a Government is on fixing the housing sector and getting thousands of homes built. That is what is happening and we need to do that with the Oireachtas working with us so our focus can be on measures that will help build homes and not on unnecessary distractions. Meanwhile, a number of councillors are seeking to remove minimum social and affordable housing targets from the development of more than 8,000 homes in Dublin. South Dublin councillors are to meet today and tomorrow to finalise plans for the strategic development zone of the Conburris which stretches from Clondalkin to Lucan. The original Sinn Fein proposal which passed earlier this year set a minimum of 2,110 social and affordable homes on the 39-hectare site. However, a number of councillors including members of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail want this stipulation removed. The council owns 22% of the residentially zoned land. When added to the Part V social/affordable element of the private land this gives 32%, which is the basis of the targets in the green material alteration, which they claim is too high. With more and more viewers tuning into sites like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, streaming has revolutionised the way millions consume films and television series. Figures from the global data company, Parrot Analytics, reveal that Netflixs Stranger Things takes the top spot as the most popular streaming show in this country in the first half of this year. The hit series that has won a slew of awards about supernatural events in a small town in Indiana is led by Winona Ryder, but a shaven-headed waif called Eleven who escapes a sinister research facility steals the show. Another sci-fi hit, Star Trek: Discovery, came second in the rankings. The Grand Tour, Amazons spectacular revved-up car show with an eye-watering budget, has proved to be a smash hit with Irish audiences. The new vehicle, which is fronted by the departed Top Gear hosts, scored a peak viewership of 613,000 demand expressions in the first half of the year. The series was more like Top Gun than Top Gear with an opening sequence in which the hosts zoomed across the desert in tricked-out Ford Mustangs, accompanied by a procession of cars, bikes, and fighter jets. The figures were compiled by Parrot Analytics which measures demand for all digital original series across global markets. The data science company monitors consumer interest through what it terms demand expressions across a range of streaming platforms, on social media, blogs, piracy networks, and other sources. The Handmaids Tale, which swept the boards at the Emmys, is at No 4 on the table. The Hulu series is based on Margaret Atwoods iconic 1985 novel about a brutally patriarchal society on land where the United States used to be. The disturbing drama is set in the dystopian country of Gilead, formerly the United States, after the government was overthrown and replaced by a totalitarian theocracy. Women are completely stripped of their rights, including permission to read, and their children are abducted. The few remaining fertile ones, thanks to years of unchecked pollution and STDs, are rounded up and forced to serve as titular handmaids to the leaders, and are even renamed after their owners. Netflixs The Crown is the streaming sensation on everybodys watch list. The drama, which follows the political rivalries and romance of Queen Elizabeth IIs reign and the events that shaped the second half of the 20th century, is No 7 in the rankings of the most watched original digital series this year in Ireland. 13 Reasons Why, which tells the story of a 17-year-old girl named Hannah who dies by suicide, is No 5 in the rankings. In the Netflix drama, Hannah leaves behind 13 audio cassette tapes for 13 of her classmates on which she explains exactly why she blames them for her death. Black Mirror is another huge sci-fi hit for Netflix and is the 6th most-watched original digital series in Ireland in the first six months of the year. Marvels Jessica Jones, Netflixs superhero TV series, is at No 8 while the streaming giants crime series, Mindhunter, is at No 9. Netflixs prison drama, Orange is the New Black, which was one of its first major original series, is at No 10 in the rankings. A scene from Orange is the New Black Top digital downloads - 1. Stranger Things - 2. Star Trek: Discovery - 3. The Grand tour - 4. The Handmaids Tale - 5. 13 Reasons Why - 6. Black Mirror - 7. The Crown - 8. Marvels Jessica Jones - 9. Mindhunter - 10. Orange is the New Black The report, which runs to more than 300 pages, will detail how the agency mishandled the allegations relating to Garda whislteblower Sergeant Maurice McCabe but also examines wider governing and resources issues within the agency and its capacity to react to suspected child abuse. The statutory report into the embattled agency is to be brought to the Cabinet by Childrens Minister Katherine Zappone. The Irish Examiner understands that the report, conducted by the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa), will find that Tusla is suffering from serious staffing problems which severely hampered its ability to deal with ongoing or historical allegations. As a result of those deficiencies, the agency is unable to properly react when some cases of suspected child abuse are referred to it, the report will state. Despite the hard-hitting findings , sources have told the Irish Examiner that the report stops short of blaming any individual official but rather concentrates on agency-wide failures. The report was ordered in February 2017 in the wake of the revelations that Sgt McCabe had been completely erroneously catagorised as a suspected child abuser in internal files which were also forwarded to the gardai. When the error was first reported through the Irish Examiner, Ms Zappone ordered Hiqa to conduct a statutory inquiry. The final report was delivered to the minister over the weekend and is expected to be presented to the Cabinet today. Among the findings are a number which deal with problems over the recruitment and retention of sufficient specialist staff to deal with referrals. In particular, problems have been identified in retaining social workers. The Hiqa report is understood to find that while the agency can sufficiently address children at immediate risk, those at ongoing risk including children at risk as a result of a historic case are not receiving the requisite attention. The report is also highly critical of the reporting and governance structures that led to the catastrophic error in relation to Sgt McCabe. Among the findings of the report is one that the agency was aware in 2013 that a major error had occurred the previous year, yet Sgt McCabe was not informed of the situation. He only became aware of what had occurred when a letter was sent to him in December 2015 asking him to attend a meeting to examine whether he was a risk to children. He responded by seeking his file, which was only finally made available to him 12 months later. Sgt McCabe then found that, in addition to the erroneous file created about him, additional files on his children were opened on the basis that they could be at risk. In the event that the family did not discover the series of errors, files on the McCabe offsprings would have remained open long into the future portraying them as at risk. The terms of reference for the Hiqa inquiry stated that it should take all necessary steps to avoid the potential for overlap with the tribunal of inquiry established to inquire into certain protected disclosures. The Disclosures Tribunal sitting in Dublin Castle heard evidence last July that the error in relation to Sgt McCabe occurred after a visit to a counsellor in July 2013 from a woman who had made an allegation against McCabe in 2006. This woman, known as Miss D, is the daughter of a garda colleague whom McCabe had been involved in disciplining. She had alleged that McCabe had touched her inappropriately in 1998, but an investigation comprehensively dismissed the allegation, describing it as horseplay if it occurred at all. After her 2013 visit, the counsellor mistakenly mixed up her case with a completely separate one which involved suspected child rape. The erroneous file was maintained in Tusla, and went through a series of reporting structures without it ever being detected. Three Engrs get bail Court Correspondent : The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Court of Dhaka on Monday granted bail to three engineers of Biman Bangladesh Airlines in a case filed about the technical glitch of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's flight to Hungary. Magistrate Pranab Kumar Hui passed the order after hearing on Monday. The accused engineers are Biman Bangladesh Airlines Engineering Officer Nazmul Haque, Technical Officer Siddiqur Rahman and Junior Technician Shah Alam. Earlier on May 15, the court summoned three officials of Biman Bangladesh Airlines to appear before the court. On December 6 last year, Inspector Mahbub Alam sought their withdrawal from the main case and permission of filing a prosecution case in this regard. On April 4, Dhaka's Metropolitan Session's Judge Md Kamrul Hossain Mollah accepted the petition and acquitted all the 11 accused in the case. The eight other officials are SM Rokonuzzaman, Samiul Haque, Lutfor Rahman, Milon Chandra Biswas, Zakir Hossain of Biman's Engineering and Technical Department, Debesh Chowdhury, Chief Engineer (Production), SA Siddique, Chief Engineer (Quality Assurance) and Billal Hossain, Principal Engineer. The VVIP flight carrying Hasina made an emergency landing on November 27, 2016 at Ashgabat International Airport in Turkmenistan after finding technical glitch in the aircraft carrying the PM. On December 20 night last year, Wing Commander (Retired) MM Asaduzzaman, Director of Engineering and Material Management of Biman, filed the case against nine employees under the Special Powers Act with Airport Police Station. Two more Biman officials were included later in the case. The afternoon required almost 18,000 students to follow up on practical projects completed earlier this year for material technology (wood). The higher level written woodwork exam was one of the nicest and fairest in many years, said Patrick Curley, Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) subject spokesman. He commended the excellent graphics and emphasis on skills and techniques typically used by students in woodwork rooms and in preparing their projects. A higher-level question about the intarsia technique of making pictures from contrasting solid woods would have been very popular, he predicted, as would an ordinary level option to answer about wood-turning in the making of a tea-light holder. Junior Cert technical graphics provided what Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland subject spokesman Seamus Cahalan thought was a very difficult exam for higher level students to complete. Other than a question about an ellipse, Mr Cahalan said the questions in the longer section were too long and complicated. He said that even strong students would have struggled to finish the paper due to what he said were unnecessarily repetitive parts at the end of many questions. While drawing the ellipse and the parabola in the final question were both straightforward, he said too much work was required in the remaining parts for the marks that would have been given. Mr Cahalan thought short questions in the first section worth 30% of marks were realistic and fair, but a number of obstacles on the long questions made it difficult for students to demonstrate their knowledge and skills. Teachers Union of Ireland subject spokesman Gavin Berry said the first sections of the higher and ordinary level exams were fine, examining a wide range of students skills. He was much less critical than Mr Cahalan of the second section at higher level as he felt that, other than a tricky third question, it was a decent enough test. At ordinary level, Mr Berry said, the second long question based on an art shop logo in the shape of a painters palette was quite technical. However, otherwise, he thought, it too was quite a good exam. Mr Cahalan thought ordinary level students had some tough questions, saying that a number of questions featured a lot of dimensions to try and decipher or to find themselves. A computer-aided design question was very fair, but he thought the design question was very difficult. Tuesday, June 19th, 2018 (12:00 pm) - Score 2,760 After deploying in London and Leeds, BT has today announced the first roll-out of 12 InLinkUK smart kiosks in Glasgow (Scotland), which claim to offer ultrafast 1Gbps capable free public WiFi, free UK phone calls, USB device charging and a range of other digital services to help people in the vicinity. The first kiosk went live on Buchanan Street and others will soon follow around the city centre. Overall a total of 150 kiosks have now been rolled out to parts of London, Leeds and Glasgow. The InLinkUK kiosks reflect a partnership between BT, Intersection (LinkNYC) and advertising company Primesight. The plan is that they will eventually replace over 1,000 pay phones in major cities across the UK. Funding for the kiosks is extracted via revenues from advertising on the large 55 HD digital displays. Neil Scoresby, BTs GM for Payphones and InLinkUK, said: Todays launch in Glasgow brings the fastest free public wi-fi in the UK to Scotland. Residents and visitors alike are set to benefit from this new state-of-the-art phone box, where they can also make calls for free, access local information and even charge their phone when out and about. Unfortunately BT has not provided any evidence to substantiate their claim of offering the fastest free public wi-fi in the UK (difficult to prove). Some speed testing conducted last year (here) unsurprisingly revealed that real-world performance actually came in well below the headline claims of up to 1Gbps (sub-100Mbps is a more viable expectation). Wireless broadband signals and network congestion are of course notoriously difficult things to tackle in a real-world environment but this shouldnt overshadow the fact that BTs kiosks still offer a useful set of features. The real speeds may struggle to hit a Gigabit but theyre still impressively fast for a free public WiFi hotspot. Since the first InLink was installed in June last year, more than 100,000 people have subscribed to the services free wi-fi, using enough data to download the equivalent of over 12 million songs. The InLinks have also saved users more than 352,000 in free calls, with 33,000 calls being made on average every week. UPDATE 1:09pm We understand that planning consent for more kiosks has already been approved by local councils in Birmingham, Newcastle, Southampton, Gateshead and Sheffield, as well as the London borough of Kensington & Chelsea. IMF has large brain, 'tiny conscience' The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has a 'tiny conscience' and must do more to protect low-income and vulnerable individuals from bearing the brunt of austerity policies, says a report by Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. "To date, the IMF has been an organisation with a large brain, an unhealthy ego, and a tiny conscience. If it takes social protection seriously, rather than making a tokenistic commitment to minimal safety nets, it can show the world that it has actually learned from its past mistakes," said Alston. He said, taking action to help those who are least well-off financially has so far been little more than an afterthought in the work of the IMF around the world, according to a statement received from Geneva on Tuesday. "But if it is to respond effectively in the years ahead to the challenges of a world in which both globalisation and liberal democracy continue to come under attack, the IMF will need a different mindset," said Alston. The UN expert said IMF is the single most influential actor on the international stage, not only in relation to fiscal and monetary policy, but also in terms of social protection. "However, despite impressive rhetoric from its Managing Director, Christine Lagarde, its practice has lagged far behind what it has preached." He said, the Fund needs to move beyond its obsession with the 'targeting' of social protection benefits to the poorest of the poor. "There is increasing evidence that targeting often fails to reach the poorest, and that benefits often end up being given to those who are relatively well-off." The UN expert, presenting the report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, said making social protection only about those who are most vulnerable also erodes political support from the middle classes and the rich for the welfare systems. "Beyond internal diversity, the IMF has a dismal record in terms of consulting with civil society organisations in the countries in which it works, as well as with other international organisations with relevant expertise, such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the UN children's fund (UNICEF)," Alston said. He said, taking external voices into account makes it less likely that the advice the IMF gives to governments ends up undermining democratic decision-making in the countries in which it works, a problem that has plagued the institution throughout its history. Alston said the IMF is on the right track, but it will be a mammoth task to change the direction of this 'oil tanker' of an institution and ensure that the benefits of globalisation no longer accrue overwhelmingly to the wealthy, and that its downsides are not suffered entirely by low-income earners and the vulnerable. Tuesday, June 19th, 2018 (10:36 am) - Score 1,394 The European Parliament will tomorrow vote on a reformed Copyright Directive, which among other things features provisions mandating online platforms to install automated upload filters that many fear could result in significant over-blocking of lawful content (censorship) and restrictions on news linking. The proposed content recognition technologies appear to form part of the proposed Article 13, which makes intermediaries (instead of just end-users) liable for uploads by their users and seems to circumvent the existing E-Commerce Directive. It would essentially require businesses to implement automated filters that scan for and then block copyrighted videos, photos, music, text or code in user submitted content. Article 13.1 Information society service providers that store and provide to the public access to large amounts of works or other subject-matter uploaded by their users shall, in cooperation with rightholders, take measures to ensure the functioning of agreements concluded with rightholders for the use of their works or other subject-matter or to prevent the availability on their services of works or other subject-matter identified by rightholders through the cooperation with the service providers. Those measures, such as the use of effective content recognition technologies, shall be appropriate and proportionate. The service providers shall provide rightholders with adequate information on the functioning and the deployment of the measures, as well as, when relevant, adequate reporting on the recognition and use of the works and other subject-matter. On the surface this no doubt sounds like a wonderful idea to some and we cant blame Rights Holders for seeking to defend their property, while also ensuring a fair return for the creators of such content. The problem is that such automated filters tend to be dumb tools that will act aggressively in order to protect the operator against assuming any legal liability for something a user has shared (a natural consequence of the proposed law). The challenge is already evident when considering the millions of copyright takedown notices that rights holders issue against Google and other websites today, which are themselves often auto generated. Many such requests end up being rejected because they accidentally target legal content or comment, including those uploaded by the creators themselves (e.g. last year Reddit rejected 81% of notices and WordPress 78%). Over the weekend the YouTube channel for a major French political party, Front National, was also taken offline because of a decision made by the companys automated filtering system, which is a touch ironic since the admittedly somewhat far right party is also known to be a supporter of the aforementioned copyright reform. The party later described YouTubes decision as completely false arbitrary, political, and unilateral. Automated filters simply dont care if you have permission to upload something or not and they fail to understand context, as well as your right to freedom of speech or the creation of internet memes. As a coalition of 70 Internet and computing luminaries (e.g. Vint Cerf, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Jimmy Wales etc.) recently put it in an open letter to the EU.. Open Letter by 70 Internet Pioneers (EFF) By requiring Internet platforms to perform automatic filtering all of the content that their users upload, Article 13 takes an unprecedented step towards the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users. Europe has been served well by the balanced liability model established under the Ecommerce Directive, under which those who upload content to the Internet bear the principal responsibility for its legality, while platforms are responsible to take action to remove such content once its illegality has been brought to their attention. By inverting this liability model and essentially making platforms directly responsible for ensuring the legality of content in the first instance, the business models and investments of platforms large and small will be impacted. The damage that this may do to the free and open Internet as we know it is hard to predict, but in our opinions could be substantial. In particular, far from only affecting large American Internet platforms (who can well afford the costs of compliance), the burden of Article 13 will fall most heavily on their competitors, including European startups and SMEs. The cost of putting in place the necessary automatic filtering technologies will be expensive and burdensome, and yet those technologies have still not developed to a point where their reliability can be guaranteed. The last point about the cost and complexity of introducing such a system to smaller businesses is a very valid point (its easy for the big boys but virtually unworkable for many smaller businesses). Admittedly the proposed law does pay some lip service to this issue by vaguely requiring the measures to be appropriate and proportionate, but that hardly qualifies as a well-structured safeguard. Unfortunately Article 13 isnt the only sting in the tail, we also have to worry about the scope of Article 11 (individual member states can choose how A11 is implemented), which could result in a situation where you cant link to a news story or use a snippet of news content without first getting paid permission from the source. This would make starting a news website incredibly difficult, potentially even impossible, and the admin alone in such a vast online world is the stuff of nightmares. More to the point such a change could discourage the distribution of news among people and websites (i.e. less traffic for news sites, not more = shrinking business). Bigger sites, such as Google and Facebook, would of course be able to use their power to negotiate favourable rates but smaller organisations would have no such clout. A tax on linking may also enable some sites or organisations to effectively silence their critics via the backdoor, resulting in yet more censorship. This is just plain crazy. On the other hand Article 11 might still allow links to the domain for a site, just not the news article itself (unless you pay), which is silly. The small bit of good news is that there is a lot of opposition to these measures from consumer groups, digital rights activists and more broadly. You can even voice your opposition to these measures via the https://saveyourinternet.eu website. But the rules may yet pass into law. The EP is due to vote on all this between 20th and 21st June. The result could then become law during early July or by late September 2018, if the summer recess obstructs. Anybody thinking that Brexit will stop this should be cautious because, regardless of what the EU decides tomorrow, the UK may have to implement it before we leave and in any case the current Government supports many of these measures. We hope that politicians wake up to the very real dangers of what they could pass tomorrow, ideally before its too late. UPDATE 20th June 2018 Were saddened to report that, despite significant opposition, the European Parliaments Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) has this morning approved Articles 11 (link tax) and 13 (upload filter) of their Digital Single Markets (DSM) copyright proposals. A deeply depressing day for the internet and those of us who use it. The new directive will now go to a full plenary vote in front of the European Parliament during early July but this is often little more than a rubber stamping process, given by those who do not appear to understand the full ramifications of what they are about to introduce. Unfortunately weve also seen this before, with some of the more technically unworkable aspects of GDPR. Motorola Solutions is "building the Salesforce.com of public safety", its global head of software Andrew Sinclair has told iTWire. The company has been working to build a software portfolio that can support end-to-end workflows encompassing areas including 000 style answering and dispatch systems, records management, and situational awareness with a "focus on outcomes and dollar value". Sinclair noted a gradual shift towards the use of cloud infrastructure for such systems, especially where AI is involved, eg for image recognition. In the past, public safety organisations have tended to select various point solutions and then develop custom integrations, leading to long lead times. Today, those organisations recognise the need for tight integration, for example, when a 000 call taker, dispatcher and responder can all benefit from being able to see the history of emergency calls from that address. It's all about making responders and other services such as hospitals better prepared, Sinclair explained. So 000 and dispatch systems are increasingly sold together. Feedback from Motorola Systems' local customers is that they want integration, support for maintaining the chain of evidence, and measurable performance improvements. Because different jurisdictions have different requirements, "we have regional teams around the world", said Sinclair. For example, New Orleans needs its flood detection capabilities to integrate with the rest of its public safety system. A major trend in Australia and New Zealand is the adoption of mobile devices that make information accessible on the spot. Victoria Police, for example, is saving 30 minutes a day per officer by using apps from Gridstone (a Melbourne-based company that's now a Motorola Solutions subsidiary). "Gridstone's been at the forefront" of app development for public safety, including functions such as form filling, e-citations, data lookup (licence plates, addresses and so on), dispatching, and more. Other clients include the NSW, Queensland and Hong Kong Police, as well as SES Victoria. Motorola Systems ANZ managing director Steve Crutchfield noted that public safety and commercial customers increasingly wanted to consume these technologies and capabilities on an as-a-service basis. For example, Brisbane City Council's fleet of 1200+ buses is co-ordinated via Motorola Systems' technologies delivered as a service. The Australian market is very forward leaning, Crutchfield observed, so Motorola Services executives visit the country regularly. The saga of Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE Corporation does not seem to be over yet, with the US Senate delivering a punch in the face to President Donald Trump with the passage of legislation that reinstates a seven-year ban on the company. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was expected to try and get the ZTE sales ban stripped out of the final version of the bill. The House has already passed a version of the bill that does not contain the sales ban. The US has a system whereby unrelated legislation can be tagged together before being voted on and the ZTE ban reinstatement was tagged on to the National Defence Authorisation Act, which specifies the yearly budget and expenditure of the Department of Defence. ZTE agreed to a deal with the US Department of Commerce on 8 June, saying it would pay a fine of US$1 billion and and overhaul its management in order to lift a ban on doing business with American suppliers. Apart from the fine, ZTE also agreed to place US$400 million in escrow against any future infringements. The ban came about in April because the company had not adhered to part of an agreement it reached with the US after it was found to have violated sanctions on exporting equipment to Iran and North Korea. It agreed to pay a fine and also make staff changes; the latter part of the agreement was not carried out and it was then hit with a seven-year ban on importing components from American companies. Trump is to meet Republicans in the House on Tuesday evening (Wednesday AEST) and the following day with Republicans in the Senate; the changing of the bill is expected to figure at both meetings. The reinstatement of the sales ban was led by Senators Tom Cotton (Republican Arkansas), Marco Rubio (Republican Florida), Chuck Schumer (Democrat New York) and Chris Van Hollen (Democrat Maryland). ZTE resumed trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange last Wednesday. Its shares plunged nearly 40% when trading began, knocking off about US$3 billion from the company's value. The Federal Government's new Temporary Skills Shortage visas, which have replaced the 457 visas that were being used to bring in technology and other workers from outside the country, appear to be taking a very long time to be processed if at all, sources tell iTWire. Processing times for the TSS visas are claimed to be between 11 and 17 days, but people in the industry say that there is an interminable wait, with one source saying that applications lodged in April had not yet been processed. Additionally, applications for the old 457 visas, made before they were stopped, are also being delayed, with one source telling iTWire that the time being taken now was between 10 and 11 months compared to the four-to-six-week turnaround that been common when it was in use. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a major source of workers in the IT industry, expressed disquiet over changes to the visa system in May last year. No-one who spoke to iTWire about the visa issues was willing to go on the record, citing fears of retribution from the government. One source, who has been bringing people to work in Australia for nearly two decades, said that even three months after applying for a visa, they were still waiting. This source said that inquiries made on the Immigration website only elicited the following response: "This application has been received by the department and will be assessed." It also said that the processing would take between 11 and 17 days but that the time may change during the processing period. iTWire has seen a screenshot of the response from the Immigration Department. Companies seeking a TSS visa have to advertise in local media or job sites first, to ensure that there are no local candidates who are suited to fill the role in question. One source asked: "How can the SMEs like us who are dependent on getting skilled people on time survive if we are made to wait indefinitely?" A representative of a company that had obtained between 500 and 600 visas for overseas workers in 2017 said it had taken only between a week to a month to get each visa. But after the TSS came in, not a single application had been processed, this individual said. The delay appeared to be due to a lack of staff, with the reduction in staff numbers being due to an expected drop in visa applications. The delay was not confined to any one trade or any country, the sources said. One said that it appeared as though the government wanted to have only companies that fell into the category of Accredited Sponsors to apply. According to an immigration website: "Accredited Sponsorship status is granted to those larger Australian employers that possess a significant, regular and ongoing need for visa sponsorship and is currently approved for a five-year duration (similar to Standard Business Sponsorship). Applications lodged by Accredited Sponsors receive preferential treatment by the immigration department resulting in faster turn-around times." However, this source said, smaller companies would never fit into this bracket. Cash-flow was also becoming a problem, this source said, as people lived on commissions which were generally paid after visa processing was complete and the visa was delivered. The people iTWire spoke to also said that the delays could be a reflection of the government's attitude towards migrant workers, which they described as not exactly welcoming. Contacted for comment, a spokesperson from the Department of Home Affairs said: "The processing times for the TSS visa are considerably shorter than for the former subclass 457 visa. "Seventy-five percent of TSS applications decided in April 2018 were finalised in 11 days and 90% of applications were finalised in 18 days. "A range of factors can affect visa processing times including application volumes, the decision-readiness (completeness) of applications received and integrity concerns. "Subclass 457 nomination and visa applications lodged together prior to TSS implementation in March 2018 are being assessed under the framework applicable at the time of application." As the Huawei issue builds towards a showdown in Australia, one thing has become abundantly clear: none of the American intelligence agencies have any evidence to prove, even remotely, the claims that are being against the Chinese telecommunications giant. Huawei is not the only company the US Government has been pursuing; Washington has also taken aim at Kaspersky Lab, the well-known Russian security firm. But in the case of Kaspersky, the government's case was bolstered by stories in the mainstream press in October last year that made claims about spying by the Russian firm. Technically, these stories had plenty of holes but then such things are overlooked in the hysteria of "Russia hacked the DNC". It is logical to assume that if any of the American intelligence agencies had any similar way of casting aspersions on Huawei, they would have done so. Leaking to the media is a way of life among spooks; American businesses are supported by intelligence agencies and vice versa. The absence of any evidence against Huawei means that the US Government which, make no mistake, is the entity driving the push against the company's involvement in 5G in Australia has had to depend on innuendo. But it has always had a loud megaphone and, aided by willing media outlets who ask few questions but play the role of stenographers with glee, the myths about Huawei are now almost as accepted as Holy Writ. Huawei has, uncharacteristically, hit back publicly in the last fortnight or so, with its Australia chairman John Lord fronting the ABC on a couple of occasions and other company officials joining him in a bid to lobby politicians. Despite this, it is quite clear that Australia will follow the US and not give Huawei a role in the 5G rollout. Politicians in Australia have shown a remarkable lack of backbone when it comes to dealing with orders from Washington and this time it will be no different. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is geared towards one thing, and one thing, only and that is his political survival. Given a choice between logic and American desires, it is quite easy to conclude which option he will take. Supermarket group ALDI has become the latest Australian business to suspend the use of its online recruitment system following the data breach at the human resources outfit PageUp People. ALDI has warned those who have used the system that any information they submitted could have been compromised. Several companies have stopped using PageUp People's site altogether after the breach announcement, among them Monash University. In an email sent to those who have used its online recruitment system, ALDI said on Tuesday that the information exposed may include names, addresses, phone numbers, work history and email addresses. PageUpthe breach on 6 June. Set up in 1997, the company claims to have "2.6 million active customer employee users in over 190 countries", according to its website. The company initially said the breach was due to a malware infection. But a statement on 12 June said, "Advanced methods were used to gain unauthorised access to PageUps IT systems in Australia, Singapore and the UK," indicating that whoever gained access had gone deeper into company systems than originally indicated. "When we were informed of the incident we immediately suspended our use of PageUp while the matter was investigated," ALDI Australia's corporate finance and administration director, James Buonpane, said. "Since this time we have been working with government bodies and privacy and information security experts to understand the impact of the incident." Buonpane said while people who had used online recruitment systems at other companies which also used PageUp People's systems would send users emails similar to those sent by ALDI, the data that was affected could be different depending on the business involved. In a related development, the Australian Cyber Security Centre, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and non-profit security provider IDCARE issued a joint statement on Monday, saying that there was a possibility that no Australian information had been exfiltrated. The statement said that PageUp believed "that certain information pertaining to staff members, applicants and referees was accessed by an unauthorised third party". IDCARE managing director David Lacey said the direct risk of identity theft was unlikely, adding that there were other risks likely to be more relevant to affected individuals, "including the possibility of phishing emails, telephone scam calls, and specific risks to individuals concerned about their contact information, physical address, and employment details (and applications) becoming known to third parties". PageUp People's website is hosted by Amazon and appears to run on Microsoft's IIS Web server. There have been many cases where data was left unsecured in AWS buckets and leaked as a result, though this may not have happened in PageUp's case. The HR services provider has among its Australian clients the Commonwealth Bank. the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Telstra, NAB, Coles, Aldi, Medibank, Australia Post, Target, Reserve Bank of Australia, Officeworks, Kmart, Linfox, AMP, Asahi, Sony, Newcrest, the University of Tasmania and Lindt. The directors of the au Domain Administration, the body responsible for the au namespace, have moved to shield chief executive Cameron Boardman, by agreeing not to allow a resolution calling for him to step down at a forthcoming special general meeting to be considered. An auDA spokesperson told iTWire in response to queries on Tuesday that Cameron Boardman would not have to face a vote. "...the directors resolved that the requested resolution of a 'Vote of no confidence in Cameron Boardman (CEO)' not be considered at the SGM, as the resolution is not in the best interest of the company," the spokesperson said. "The appointment of the CEO is a matter for the board as it is with any other company." In April, some auDA membersfor an SGM to seek a vote of no-confidence in Boardman and the removal of Chris Leptos, Sandra Hook and Suzanne Ewart as directors. auDA took the matter toto try and get the SGM held at the same time as the AGM, but was told toon 28 July. Asked about the sudden surge in membership numbers auDA had 319 members in April when the push for an SGM began and reported that 955 new members had signed up in June the spokesperson said this was in keeping with one of directives from the government review. "..recommendation 11, specifically stated: That auDA diversify its membership base in the short term with a focus on extending its membership to stakeholders that are underrepresented," the spokesperson said. Several members have alleged that members are being signed up willy-nilly, with staff of several domain registrars being made members and having their membership dues paid by auDA. But the auDA spokesperson denied this. "Allegations of branch stacking have no basis and auDA rejects this claim as people are joining auDA quite knowingly." A driverless electric shuttle, linking Australias first innovation district with nearby public transport stops, has launched in Adelaide. The five-year Flinders Unversity trial is the first time autonomous buses have operated on public roads in South Australia. Dubbed the Flinders Express (FLEX), the vehicle will initially provide "first milelast mile" shuttle services between the nearby Clovelly Park Train Station and Tonsleys Main Assembly Building, then connections to bus stops on the major South Road artery and businesses within the Tonsley precinct. A former Mitsubishi car manufacturing site in Adelaides southern suburbs, the Tonsley Innovation District has been transformed into Australias first innovation precinct and has quickly become a hub for advanced manufacturing and other future-facing industries. The French-designed Navya Arma electric shuttle can carry up to 15 passengers at speeds of up to 40km/h, but will be limited to 30 km/h during the trial, and be managed by an on- board chaperone informing users of the technology and ensuring safety. The project last year received $1 million from the South Australian Governments $10 million Future Mobility Lab Fund, and is also funded by industry partners. Within a year, the shuttle will run to the nearby Flinders Medical Centre and the universitys Bedford Park campus before using main arterial roads around the entire Bedford Park precinct. Workers, students or visitors travelling to Tonsley by traditional bus or train can can book a ride online at the Flinders University website. Flinders University head of Civil Engineering, Professor Rocco Zito, said demonstrations and trials of driverless vehicles that involved the community were a good way of building acceptance of the new technology. Our aim is not to prove the technology but rather expose the public to this new type of transport service and learn from their responses and reactions to help driverless vehicles gain general acceptance, he said. In order for driverless vehicles to become an integral part of our transport system we need to trial these vehicles in real operating conditions and encourage public participation and feedback. Its not a question of if this technology will be on roads, but when. The three-stage, $4 million driverless shuttle project is a partnership between Flinders University, the RAA, Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure and industry supporters Cohda Wireless, Renewal SA, SAGE Automation, Telstra, UPG, ZenEnergy and public transport operator Keolis Downer. The vehicle will be docked within a six-bay solar recharge garage soon to be built near the Mitsubishi Administration building, which will also be available to the public who want to recharge their electric vehicles. South Australia has had previous involvement with autonomous car research and in 2015 held the first driverless car trials in the Southern Hemisphere. And the state hosts a number of autonomous car companies, including Cohda Wireless and its V2X (Vehicle to everything) technology and RDM Group, which opened its Asia-Pacific headquarters in Adelaide last year. In what should come as no surprise, the Federal Government has awarded the contract for building the sub-sea cable between Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Sydney to the Vocus Group. In January, Vocus announced that it had entered into a deal with the Federal Government to undertake a scoping study on design, construction and procurement for the cable system. The deal was originally awarded to Chinese firm Huawei Telecommunications. The Solomon Islands then changed its mind after the intervention of the spy agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Australian taxpayers will foot most of the $200 million cost of the cable, with the Solomons and the PNG making small contributions. In a statement on Tuesday, Vocus Group said the sub-sea cable would use advanced multi-terabit technology to improve the Papua New Guinea's international connectivity and introduce high-speed international telecommunications cables to the Solomon Islands. An agreement on the first stage of the cable was signed last week by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Solomons counterpart, Rick Houenipwela. The cable is due to be completed in late 2019. The Australian Government has also contracted Vocus to build a domestic sub-sea network within the Solomon Islands, to extend the benefits of the cable beyond Honiara to the outer provinces where the majority of the Solomon Islands population lives. Vocus Group managing director and chief executive Kevin Russell said: We are pleased to build on our strong relationship with the Federal Government and undertake this critical infrastructure project on their behalf. "In this digital age, we all rely heavily on access to fast, reliable and affordable connectivity. Extending this to our international neighbours for the first time will provide significant economic and social benefits. Our recent experience constructing world-class domestic fibre infrastructure, including the sub-marine North-West Cable System and Australia Singapore Cable, means Vocus is extremely well placed to partner with the Federal Government to complete this important project." Some background: The landing points for the project are Port Moresby, Honiara and Sydney. The first phase included a scoping study and consultation with external stakeholders, including the governments of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. A comprehensive program of survey, manufacture and deployment activities will now commence. The Vocus network connects Australia and New Zealand to Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States. It is one of Australias most connected networks, with more than 30,000km of fibre connecting more than 5000 buildings. The North-West Cable System, completed by Vocus in September 2017, comprises 2100km of sub-sea cable, between Darwin and Port Hedland. The system can deliver speeds of up to 40Gb/s to both connected INPEX and Shell facilities and serves to increase the reach and resiliency of the Vocus Australian telecommunications network. The Australia-Singapore Cable is a 4600km, 40Tb/s sub-sea cable linking Australia to Singapore through Jakarta and Christmas Island, scheduled for completion in Q1 of FY19. Vocus is the only Australian telecommunications company in the last four years to complete an international sub-sea cable build connecting Australia. Photo and graphic: courtesy DFAT and Vocus Richwood, TX (77531) Today Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 54F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 54F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph. Shippers that send goods through the Port of Montreal, and other Canadian ports, should be wary that underlying their apparent efficiency is a union contract system that Madeleine Paquin, president and CEO of Logistec, believes could create problems due to its inflexibility and inability to create work practices in tune with a modern port. Reddit Email 262 Shares ProPublica has obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children can be heard wailing as an agent jokes, We have an orchestra here. New York (ProPublica) The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening. Many of them sound like theyre crying so hard, they can barely breathe. They scream Mami and Papa over and over again, as if those are the only words they know. The baritone voice of a Border Patrol agent booms above the crying. Well, we have an orchestra here, he jokes. Whats missing is a conductor. Then a distraught but determined 6-year-old Salvadoran girl pleads repeatedly for someone to call her aunt. Just one call, she begs anyone who will listen. She says shes memorized the phone number, and at one point, rattles it off to a consular representative. My mommy says that Ill go with my aunt, she whimpers, and that shell come to pick me up there as quickly as possible. An audio recording obtained by ProPublica adds real-life sounds of suffering to a contentious policy debate that has so far been short on input from those with the most at stake: immigrant children. More than 2,300 of them have been separated from their parents since April, when the Trump administration launched its zero tolerance immigration policy, which calls for prosecuting all people who attempt to illegally enter the country and taking away the children they brought with them. More than 100 of those children are under the age of 4. The children are initially held in warehouses, tents or big box stores that have been converted into Border Patrol detention facilities. Condemnations of the policy have been swift and sharp, including from some of the administrations most reliable supporters. It has united religious conservatives and immigrant rights activists, who have said that zero tolerance amounts to zero humanity. Democratic and Republican members of Congress spoke out against the administrations enforcement efforts over the weekend. Former first lady Laura Bush called the administrations practices cruel and immoral, and likened images of immigrant children being held in kennels to those that came out of Japanese internment camps during World War II. And the American Association of Pediatricians has said the practice of separating children from their parents can cause the children irreparable harm. Still, the administration had stood by it. President Donald Trump blames Democrats and says his administration is only enforcing laws already on the books, although thats not true. There are no laws that require children to be separated from their parents, or that call for criminal prosecutions of all undocumented border crossers. Those practices were established by the Trump administration. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has cited passages from the Bible in an attempt to establish religious justification. On Monday, he defended it again saying it was a matter of rule of law, We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws. A Border Patrol spokesman echoed that thought in a written statement. In recent days, authorities on the border have begun allowing tightly controlled tours of the facilities that are meant to put a humane face on the policy. But cameras are heavily restricted. And the children being held are not allowed to speak to journalists. The audio obtained by ProPublica breaks that silence. It was recorded last week inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility. The person who made the recording asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. That person gave the audio to Jennifer Harbury, a well-known civil rights attorney who has lived and worked for four decades in the Rio Grande Valley along the Texas border with Mexico. Harbury provided it to ProPublica. She said the person who recorded it was a client who heard the childrens weeping and crying, and was devastated by it. The person estimated that the children on the recording are between 4 and 10 years old. It appeared that they had been at the detention center for less than 24 hours, so their distress at having been separated from their parents was still raw. Consulate officials tried to comfort them with snacks and toys. But the children were inconsolable. The child who stood out the most was the 6-year-old Salvadoran girl with a phone number stuck in her head. At the end of the audio, a consular official offers to call the girls aunt. ProPublica dialed the number she recited in the audio, and spoke with the aunt about the call. It was the hardest moment in my life, she said. Imagine getting a call from your 6-year-old niece. Shes crying and begging me to go get her. She says, I promise Ill behave, but please get me out of here. Im all alone. The aunt said what made the call even more painful was that there was nothing she could do. She and her 9-year-old daughter are seeking asylum in the United States after immigrating here two years ago for the exact same reasons and on the exact same route as her sister and her niece. They are from a small town called Armenia, about an hours drive northwest of the Salvadoran capital, but well within reach of its crippling crime waves. She said gangs were everywhere in El Salvador: Theyre on the buses. Theyre in the banks. Theyre in schools. Theyre in the police. Theres nowhere for normal people to feel safe. She said her niece and sister set out for the United States over a month ago. They paid a smuggler $7,000 to guide them through Guatemala, and Mexico and across the border into the United States. Now, she said, all the risk and investment seem lost. The aunt said she worried that any attempt to intervene in her nieces situation would put hers and her daughters asylum case at risk, particularly since the Trump administration overturned asylum protections for victims of gang and domestic violence. She said shes managed to speak to her sister, who has been moved to an immigration detention facility near Port Isabel, Texas. And she keeps in touch with her niece, Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid, by telephone. Mother and daughter, however, have not been able to speak to one another. The aunt said that Alison has been moved out of the Border Patrol facility to a shelter where she has a real bed. But she said that authorities at the shelter have warned the girl that her mother, 29-year-old Cindy Madrid, might be deported without her. I know shes not an American citizen, the aunt said of her niece. But shes a human being. Shes a child. How can they treat her this way? ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter. Via ProPublica Reddit Email 102 Shares The military conflict now escalating in Yemen threatens the lives of more than 250,000 people in the port city Hodeidah while 8 million more people across Yemen already risk starvation. The country is also facing the worst cholera outbreak in modern history. I am a scholar who has studied Yemen and worked as an Arabian Peninsula foreign affairs analyst for the State Department between 2011 and 2016. Here is what is happening in Yemen, now in the fourth year of a civil war. Origins of the conflict Yemen lies on the southeastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, buffered by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden and bordered by Saudi Arabia and Oman. About 29 million people call Yemen home, and they are the poorest in the Middle East. Portions of the nation have a history of British and Ottoman colonial rule, it was divided into two separate countries and two civil wars on top of the current one have been waged since the early 1960s. To understand the current conflict, which began in January 2014, its necessary to know something about the Huthis. The Huthis are a Zaydi Shiite political movement. Zaydi Shiite Muslims are around a quarter of Yemens population. Zaydis led much of Yemen until the 1962 overthrow of the Yemeni ruler. The government has since repressed their home region economically and culturally. More recently, the government has charged that the Zaydis are proxies for Iran and an existential threat. U.S. Department of State As a result of the popular uprisings unleashed by the Arab Spring, an internationally backed transition removed Yemens autocratic President Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011. The transition consisted of what was called a National Dialogue, inclusive of all parties, that would provide recommendations for reforms, elections and the eventual writing of a new constitution. The Huthis initially participated, but became disillusioned. So in 2014, disappointed that the transition had forced out Yemens president but failed to enact meaningful change, Huthi rebels began moving southward from their northern Yemen stronghold of Saada. They captured the capital of Sanaa in September 2014. This wasnt the first Huthi-government clash. Between 2004 and 2010, there were six rounds of fighting, the last of which briefly saw Saudi intervention. The Huthis, allied for convenience with former President Saleh, quickly overran the capital and moved as far south as Aden in spring 2015. Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Manour Hadi fled to Riyadh. Outside forces intervene Iran has provided aid to the Huthis for some time and has increased its equipping and training of the group since 2011. The Saudis, viewing the Huthis as an Iranian proxy and fearful of an Iranian stronghold on its southern border, began an allied campaign against the group in March 2015. A coalition formed by the Saudis includes major United Arab Emirates participation and American intelligence, refueling and munitions. Washingtons main interest in Yemen stems from its goal of halting terrorism. Yemen is home to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), so Washington seeks stability there in order to counter the AQAP threat. After pushing the Huthis out of Aden in 2015, the war stalled. Former President Salehs attempt to switch to the Saudi side ended in his late 2017 killing by the Huthis. The international community has voiced anger at continued Saudi bombing of civilian targets, leading to a failed bipartisan U.S. Senate attempt in 2018 to halt American military support. Corruption, high unemployment, water shortages and a high reliance on imported food had made Yemen an impoverished country even before the war. The war and subsequent Saudi blockade have only made things worse, crippling infrastructure and disrupting many basic services. The lack of sanitation services and clean water led to a recent cholera outbreak, with over a million infected and more than 2,000 deaths. Meanwhile, south Yemen, where some groups seek southern independence, is a jumbled political mess. U.N. peace efforts seeking a government return and Huthi disarmament have so far not succeeded and fighting has killed over 10,000 civilians. Yemeni government forces, with support from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, recently began an assault on Hodeidah, the Red Sea port city, which the Iranian-backed Huthi movement controls. The assault marks an important point in the over four-year old civil war. Hodeidah, a city of 400,000, is the only entry point for international aid due to a Saudi-imposed blockade. Things may get worse. The war has created a major humanitarian disaster with no foreseeable end. Kelly McFarland, Director of programs and research, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Bonus video added by Informed Comment: Battle for Hudaida could make Yemens humanitarian crisis worse | Al Jazeera English Toronto, ON / TheNewswire / June 19, 2018 Chilean Metals Inc. ("Chilean Metals," "CMX" or the "Company") (TSX.V:CMX, OTCQB: CMETF, SSE:CMX, MILA: CMX) has contracted Precision GeoSurveys to conduct detailed Magnetics and Radiometrics surveys over three of the Company properties in the Cobequid Highlands including over the recently acquired Trident Prospect at Bass River. This will be followed by IP surveys over the areas defined by interpretation of the Magnetics and Radiometrics to be high priority areas of interest for Cobalt and Base metals. "We are very positive about our properties in the Cobequid Highlands and the potential for a major Cobalt and/or base metals discovery. We have just completed Phase 1 of drilling at the Bass River Castlereagh prospect and samples have now been submitted to ActLabs for analysis. We expect to receive assay results around mid July. We have also submitted drill core samples from historic drilling done on the combined Bass River project as much of the previous drill core was not sampled for Cobalt, Precious or Base Medals. These assay results will be integrated with data from the magnetics, radiometrics and IP surveys to define drill targets. We expect to conduct Phase 2 of drilling at Bass River on the "Trident" target commencing in the second half of Q2" commented Mick Sharry Chilean President. About Chilean Metals, www.chileanmetals.com/ Chilean Metals Inc. is a Canadian Junior Exploration Company focusing on high potential Copper Gold prospects in Chile & Canada. Chilean Metals Inc is 100% owner of five properties comprising over 50,000 acres strategically located in the prolific IOCG ("Iron oxide-copper-gold") belt of northern Chile. It also owns a 3% NSR royalty interest on any future production from the Copaquire Cu-Mo deposit, recently sold to a subsidiary of Teck Resources Inc. ("Teck"). Under the terms of the sale agreement, Teck has the right to acquire one third of the 3% NSR for $3 million dollars at any time. The Copaquire property borders Teck's producing Quebrada Blanca copper mine in Chile's First Region. Chilean Metals Inc is the 100% owner of four Copper, Cobalt & Gold exploration properties in Nova Scotia on the western flank of the Cobequid-Chedabucto Fault Zone (CCFZ); Fox River, Parrsboro, Lynn and Bass River North respectively. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF Chilean Metals Inc. "Terry Lynch" Terry Lynch, CEO Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The Qualified Person for Chilean Metals Inc., as defined by National Instrument 43-101, is Mick Sharry, M.Sc. Consultant Forward-looking Statements: This news release may contain certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical fact, that address events or developments that CMX expects to occur, are forward looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects", "plans", "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "projects", "potential" and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could" or "should" occur. Forward-looking statements in this document include statements regarding current and future exploration programs, activities and results. Although CMX believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include market prices, exploitation and exploration success, continued availability of capital and financing, inability to obtain required regulatory or governmental approvals and general economic, market or business conditions. Investors are cautioned that any such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. 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. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Panoro Minerals Ltd. (TSXV:PML) (Lima:PML) (Frankfurt:PZM) (Panoro, the Company) is pleased to report additional assays results for six drill holes from its 100% owned Cotabambas porphyry copper-gold-silver project located in southern Peru. The drillholes have intersected additional oxide and primary sulphide mineralization at the Maria Jose 1 & 2 Targets and the Petra Target. The intersection of skarn mineralization at the Petra Target has been newly identified. Additional drilling is planned in these areas in 2018. The drill results are from the recently completed first phase of the 2018 drill program to further test the Maria Jose 1 and 2 and Petra David Targets following up on the discoveries made during 2017. The six drillholes include four drill holes at the Maria Jose 2 Target, 1 from the Maria Jose Target and 1 from the Petra David Target. Luquman Shaheen, President and CEO states, The 2018 drilling to date has intercepted additional near-surface oxide copper mineralization at both Petra and Maria Jose adding to the potential to include a heap leach and SX/EW component to the Cotabambas Project. The underlying primary mineralization requires additional drilling to target the higher grade areas intercepted in 2017. The interception of skarn mineralization is a new component to the geologic potential within Cluster 1. The potential for connection with the Cluster 2 Skarn mineralization opens a new corridor for exploration potential. The drill permit expansion to include Cluster 2 is well advanced and we expect to have final approval soon. The Company has expanded the mapping and sampling campaign in this area to define additional drill targets. Maria Jose 1 Target The 2017 drill campaign identified a potential copper oxide blanket over an area of 420 m by 150 m. A total of 663 m of drilling in three drillholes was completed in 2017. The oxide blanket was intercepted from surface to125 m depth with grades varying between 0.23% Cu and 0.28% Cu. In 2018, drillhole CB-188 was collared 150 m to the southwest of drillhole CB-180, and oriented to the northeast. CB-188 intersected 130.3 m of oxide copper averaging 0.20% Cu, 0.03 g/t Au and 1.65 g/t Ag, including one interval of 20.3 m grading 0.33% Cu, underlain by 125.7 m of primary copper mineralization, grading 0.25% Cu, 0.02 g/t Au and 1.03 g/t Ag, including one interval of 24 m averaging 0.35% Cu. The Maria Jose Target mineral potential remains open for additional drilling in multiple directions. Maria Jose 2 Target The 2017 drill campaign identified three parallel mineral bodies over an area of 550 m by 250 m. The potential copper oxides blanket was intercepted to 75 m depth and the primary copper mineralization to 350 m depth, with grades varying between 0.20% Cu to 0.40% Cu. The copper mineralization was intruded by quartz monzonite dikes from 10 to 50 m width, expanded and hosted mainly in andesite volcanics. This mineralization was identified with 3,573 m of drilling distributed in 11 drillholes. During the 2018 drilling campaign, four additional drillholes were completed, three stepping out to the north and one to the south. To the north, drillhole CB-184 intersected two copper oxide blankets of 10.3 m and 6.4 m width grading 0.20% Cu and 0.23% Cu, respectively. Drillhole CB-186 intersected copper oxide mineralization from surface to 44.7 m depth averaging 0.22% Cu, and a second interval of 35.9 m of primary copper mineralization averaging 0.29% Cu, 0.07 g/t Au, and 1.85 g/t Ag, including two intervals of 10.1 m and 7.2 m, grading 0.51% Cu and 0.30% Cu, respectively. To the south, drillhole CB-189 intersected primary copper mineralization at different intervals to 522.4 m depth and the mineralization remains open. In Maria Jose 2 the mineralization potential remains open to the south and at depth for additional drilling. Petra Target In 2017, 8 drillholes were completed at the Petra-David target confirming copper oxides mineralization continuity over an area of 600 m by 150 m along a structural control in northeast direction, hosted in quartz monzonite porphyries and diorite rocks. In 2018 the exploratory drillhole CB-185 was collared 200 m to the southeast of previous drillhole CB-172 in Petra. CB-185 was oriented to the northwest intersecting 10 m of copper oxide blanket averaging 0.22% Cu, 0.03 g/t Au and 1.77 g/t Ag, underlain by an interval of primary copper mineralization of 23 m grading 0.27% Cu. At depth, two intervals of skarn type mineralization were intersected in a package of marbled limestones. The first interval of 4.0 m width include massive magnetite with andradite garnets averaging 0.35% Cu, 0.02 g/t Au, 3.95 g/t Ag, including 1.3 m grading 0.94% Cu, 0.04 g/t Au and 6.55 g/t Ag and a second interval of 1.0 m width with the similar mineralogy grading 0.38% Cu, 0.33 g/t Au, and 21.22 g/t Ag. The potential of skarn is open to the west towards the Guaclle target for additional drilling. Previous drilling at the Guaclle target has also intersected skarn mineralization indicating a potential connection with the skarn mineralization mapped at the Chaupec Target in Cluster 2. Additional mapping, rock chip and soil sampling has commenced in this area to define additional drillholes to be completed during 2018. A location plan can be found here. The following table details the more significant intersections: Drillhole From (m) To (m) Metres (m) Cu % Au g/t Ag g/t Mo % Zone CB-184 7.7 18.0 10.3 0.20 0.01 1.32 0.0005 Oxides " " 43.1 66.2 23.1 0.17 0.02 1.44 0.0004 Oxides Include 45.2 51.6 6.4 0.23 0.03 2.01 0.0005 Oxides " " 285.1 342.0 56.9 0.14 0.04 0.88 0.0017 Primary CB-185 23.1 33.2 10.1 0.22 0.03 1.77 0.0029 Oxide " " 94.5 141.0 46.5 0.21 0.02 1.56 0.0036 Primary Including 107.0 130.0 23.0 0.27 0.03 1.89 0.0029 Primary " " 228.7 232.7 4.0 0.35 0.02 3.95 0.0009 Skarn Including 229.3 230.7 1.3 0.94 0.04 6.55 0.0019 Skarn " " 239.0 240.0 1.0 0.38 0.33 21.22 0.0010 Skarn CB-186 0.0 44.7 44.7 0.22 0.04 1.78 0.0004 Oxide Including 5.5 18.7 13.2 0.26 0.06 1.90 0.0003 Oxide Including 30.5 33.5 3.1 0.41 0.06 3.31 0.0004 Oxide " " 117.3 153.2 35.9 0.29 0.07 1.85 0.0029 Primary Including 119.0 129.0 10.1 0.51 0.09 3.94 0.0028 Primary Including 141.0 148.2 7.2 0.30 0.15 1.38 0.0028 Primary " " 209.5 262.3 52.8 0.15 0.02 0.96 0.0028 Primary Including 226.5 237.5 11.0 0.22 0.03 1.21 0.0042 Primary CB-187 No significant intersections CB-188 3.8 130.3 126.5 0.19 0.03 1.65 0.0006 Oxide Including 110.0 130.3 20.3 0.33 0.03 2.07 0.0014 Oxide Including 121.5 130.3 8.8 0.39 0.03 1.78 0.0016 Oxide " " 130.3 255.9 125.7 0.25 0.02 1.03 0.0029 Primary Including 130.3 192.3 62.1 0.30 0.01 1.06 0.0024 Primary Including 168.3 192.3 24.0 0.35 0.02 1.21 0.0023 Primary CB-189 80.8 94.1 13.3 0.19 0.02 1.41 0.0005 Oxide " " 164.8 188.3 23.5 0.15 0.02 0.95 0.0051 Primary " " 243.4 262.9 19.5 0.17 0.02 0.87 0.0046 Primary " " 320.8 326.8 6.0 0.32 0.18 1.77 0.0047 Primary " " 383.2 478.0 94.8 0.20 0.03 1.50 0.0033 Primary Including 402.6 442.5 39.9 0.27 0.05 2.46 0.0049 Primary Including 420.7 435.9 15.2 0.39 0.06 2.62 0.0033 Primary " " 489.5 524.6 35.2 0.21 0.04 1.75 0.0011 Primary Including 509.5 522.4 13.0 0.31 0.06 3.15 0.0018 Primary The first phase of the 2018 drilling campaign was focused in Cluster 1, in the igneous rock environment and a total of 2,172 m has been completed. The second phase will be initiated in August in Cluster 2 and the Chaupec Skarn Target. About Panoro Panoro Minerals is a uniquely positioned Peru focused copper exploration and development company. The Company is advancing its flagship project, Cotabambas Copper-Gold-Silver Project and its Antilla Copper-Molybdenum Project, both located in the strategically important area of southern Peru. The Company is well financed to expand, enhance and advance its projects in the region where infrastructure such as railway, roads, ports, water supply, power generation and transmission are readily available and expanding quickly. The region boasts the recent investment of over US$15 billion into the construction or expansion of four large open pit copper mines. Since 2007, the Company has completed over 80,000 meters of exploration drilling at these two key projects leading to substantial increases in the mineral resource base for each, as summarized in the table below. Summary of Cotabambas and Antilla Project Resources Project Resource Classification Million Tonnes Cu (%) Au (g/t) Ag (g/t) Mo (%) Cotabambas Cu/Au/Ag Indicated 117.1 0.42 0.23 2.74 0.001 Inferred 605.3 0.31 0.17 2.33 0.002 @ 0.20% CuEq cutoff, effective October 2013, Tetratech Antilla Cu/Mo Indicated 291.8 0.34 - - 0.01 Inferred 90.5 0.26 - - 0.007 @ 0.175% CuEq cutoff, effective May 2016, Tetratech Preliminary Economic Assessments (PEA) have been completed for both the Cotabambas and Antilla Projects, the key results are summarized below. Summary of Cotabambas and Antilla Project PEA Results Key Project Parameters Cotabambas Cu/Au/Ag Project1 Antilla Cu Project2 Process Feed, life of mine million tonnes 483.1 118.7 Process Feed, daily Tonnes 80,000 20,000 Strip Ratio, life of mine 1.25 : 1 1.37 : 1 Before Tax1 NPV 7.5% million USD 1,053 520 IRR % 20.4 34.7 Payback years 3.2 2.6 After Tax1 NPV 7.5% million USD 684 305 IRR % 16.7 25.9 Payback years 3.6 3.0 Annual Average Payable Metals Cu thousand tonnes 70.5 21.0 Au thousand ounces 95.1 - Ag thousand ounces 1,018.4 - Mo thousand tonnes - - Initial Capital Cost million USD 1,530 250 Project economics estimated at commodity prices of; Cu = US$3.00/lb, Au = US$1,250/oz, Ag = US$18.50/oz, Mo = US$12/lb Project economics estimated at long term commodity price of Cu = US$3.05/lb and Short term commodity price of Cu = US$3.20, US$3.15 and US$3.10 for Years 1,2 and 3 of operations, respectively. The PEAs are considered preliminary in nature and include Inferred Mineral Resources that are considered too speculative to have the economic considerations applied that would enable classification as Mineral Reserves. There is no certainty that the conclusions within the updated PEA will be realized. Mineral Resources are not Mineral Reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. Luis Vela, a Qualified Person under National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this press release. On behalf of the Board of Panoro Minerals Ltd. Luquman Shaheen. PEng, PE, MBA President & CEO FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, CONTACT: Panoro Minerals Ltd. Luquman Shaheen, President & CEO Phone: 604.684.4246 Fax: 604.684.4200 Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Web: www.panoro.com Renmark Financial Communications Inc. Laura Welsh Tel.: (416) 644-2020 or (416) 939-3989 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. www.renmarkfinancial.com CAUTION REGARDING FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS: Information and statements contained in this news release that are not historical facts are forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation and involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks relating to metal price fluctuations; risks relating to estimates of mineral resources, production, capital and operating costs, decommissioning or reclamation expenses, proving to be inaccurate; the inherent operational risks associated with mining and mineral exploration, development, mine construction and operating activities, many of which are beyond Panoros control; risks relating to Panoros ability to enforce Panoros legal rights under permits or licenses or risk that Panoros will become subject to litigation or arbitration that has an adverse outcome; risks relating to Panoros projects being in Peru, including political, economic and regulatory instability; risks relating to the uncertainty of applications to obtain, extend or renew licenses and permits; risks relating to potential challenges to Panoros right to explore and/or develop its projects; risks relating to mineral resource estimates being based on interpretations and assumptions which may result in less mineral production under actual circumstances; risks relating to Panoros operations being subject to environmental and remediation requirements, which may increase the cost of doing business and restrict Panoros operations; risks relating to being adversely affected by environmental, safety and regulatory risks, including increased regulatory burdens or delays and changes of law; risks relating to inadequate insurance or inability to obtain insurance; risks relating to the fact that Panoros properties are not yet in commercial production; risks relating to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates, interest rates and tax rates; and risks relating to Panoros ability to raise funding to continue its exploration, development and mining activities. This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect the forward-looking information and statements contained in this news release. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in the forwardlooking information. The forwardlooking information contained in this news release is based on beliefs, expectations and opinions as of the date of this news release. For the reasons set forth above, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Panoro does not undertake to update any forward-looking information and statements included herein, except in accordance with applicable securities 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. VANCOUVER, June 19, 2018 /CNW/ - Tajiri Resources Corp. (the "Company") (TSX VENTURE: TAJ) reports that subject to TSX Venture Exchange approval it will raise by way of non-brokered private placement up to CDN$2,000,000 by issuing 14,285,714 units at a price of $0.14 per unit. Each will consist of one common share and one common share purchase warrant. Each warrant will entitle the holder to purchase an additional common share at CDN$0.25 for a period of 36 months from the closing date; provided that in the event the closing price of the Issuer's common shares on the Exchange is equal to greater than $0.50 per share for ten consecutive trading days at any time following four months after the date of Closing, the Issuer may, by notice to the Warrant holders (which notice may be by way of general news release), reduce the remaining exercise period of the Warrants to not less than 30 days following the date of such notice. The certificates representing the Warrants will, among other things, include provisions for the appropriate adjustment in the class, number and price of the Warrant Shares issued on exercise of the Warrants upon the occurrence of certain events, including any subsequent subdivision, consolidation or reclassification of the Issuer's common shares, the payment of stock dividends and the amalgamation of the Issuer.4 Warrants may not be exercised if to do so would cause the Subscriber to become a control person of the Issuer (holding 20% or more of the outstanding voting Shares of the Issuer), until the shareholders of the Issuer approve of such change of control at a duly called meeting of shareholders; and the Warrant certificates will contain language to such effect. Fee's may be paid on portions of the offering in the amount of 8% or as individually negotiated between the placing agent and the Company. The funds raised through the placement will be used for exploration and development work at the recently acquired Reo Gold Project, Burkina Faso, West Africa, and related corporate expenses including working capital and administration. The Company hopes to close the offering as soon as possible and begin planning for exploration efforts to begin. In the same fashion. The plan, though preliminary in nature, is to begin with additional trenching at the K4/K5 zone, as well as, on the lesser defined Morley prospect, where historical results have typically returned higher-grade mineralization generalized by hole MRRC001 which assayed 17 metres of 36.4 g/t Au from 2 metres. Following the trenching, several thousand metres of RC and Diamond Drilling would be undertaken on previously untested deep targets at K4/K5, as well as step out drilling at both Morley and K4/K5 to grow the existing mineralized footprint of the two most advanced targets within the Reo licenses. The overall goal will be to illustrate improved size and grade potential for K4/K5 and further define the size potential at the Morley prospect, with success the Company will have immediately provided clear enhancement to the economic potential of the Reo project and paved the way for a targeted resource defining drill effort. On Behalf of the Board, Tajiri Resources Corp. Graham Keevil, President, CEO 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 forward-looking statements based on assumptions and judgments of management regarding future events or results. Such statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to revise or update such statements. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 19, 2018) - Cabral Gold Inc. (TSXV: CBR) ("Cabral" or the "Company") is pleased to announce initial sampling results from two new discoveries, Jerimum North and Jerimum East, along with further results of surface rock sampling at the Morro da Lua and Jerimum Cima targets, Cuiu Cuiu Project, Para State, Brazil. Highlights include :- Seven grab samples returned assay results ranging from 5.5 to 162.4 g/t Au from stockpiles from separate shafts on vein showings discovered earlier this year at the Morro da Lua from stockpiles from separate shafts on vein showings discovered earlier this year at the Morro da Lua Channel samples extend the Jerimum Cima target: including 12.4m @ 1.9 g/t Au, 1.7m @ 15.7 g/t Au and 8m @ 1.1 g/t Au . These are located up to 200m west of historic drilling and significantly extend the strike extent of the Jerimum Cima structure. All intervals are open in terms of width, and the zone remains open on strike . These are located up to 200m west of historic drilling and significantly extend the strike extent of the Jerimum Cima structure. All intervals are open in terms of width, and the zone remains open on strike A new target, Jerimum North was recently discovered 500m north of Jerimum Cima. Initial rock grab samples returned 52.1 g/t , 13.0 g/t, and 10.0 g/t Au , and Another new target, Jerimum East, has been discovered 800m ENE of Jerimum Cima. It returned a value of 152.6 g/t Au from a single grab sample Background The Cuiu Cuiu Project is located in the Tapajos Province of northern Brazil, the site of the world's largest gold rush and Brazil's largest placer-gold belt, having produced an estimated 20-30Moz gold. Cuiu Cuiu was the largest historic placer camp in the Tapajos region, and has been cited by the government as having produced an estimated 2Moz of gold from streams and alluvial workings covering approximately 850ha, essentially bisecting the property. With the alluvial stream deposits largely exhausted, the few remaining artisanal workers are now targeting buried alluvial deposits and are also exploiting saprolite bedrock mineralization. Previous work on the project was very successful in identifying sources for several of the alluvial workings establishing Indicated resources of 5.9MMt @ 0.9 g/t Au (for 0.2Moz) and Inferred resources of 19.5MMt @ 1.2 g/t Au (for 0.8Moz)1 in four deposits. However, the source of many of the alluvial production areas has yet to be determined, and the bedrock to various saprolite workings is yet to be explored. The current program of surface exploration is aimed at following up unexplained alluvial, geochemical anomalies and saprolite mining areas to identify new drill targets. Many of the new targets are returning high grades in initial sampling. Figure 1: The central part of the Cuiu Cuiu property showing the deposits included in the current resource(red) and the primary target zones (yellow) Morro da Lua Morro da Lua is a newly identified target (see press release dated 21st March 2018). It has never been drilled and no results have ever been reported previously. Results from seven composite rock samples collected material adjacent to seven separate shafts. These returned values ranging from 5.5 to 162.4 g/t Au (Figure 2). Ten active artisanal shafts are currently in production or in exploration at Morro da Lua with many other abandoned shafts scattered over an area which extends for approximately 220m E-W and 210m N-S (Figure 3). Individual veins appear to trend E-W and detected beneath thick soil cover 8-12m in thickness. Channel samples taken across two individual veins, each approximately 1m in width, returned grades of 0.3m @ 10.8 g/t Au and 0.3m @ 16.3 g/t Au. An objective for ongoing exploration will be to test for any halo of lower grade stockwork mineralization, and determine the overall width and strike extent of the zone which is currently unknown. Results from 219 infill soil samples recently collected by Cabral at Morro da Lua indicate that a gold-in-soil anomaly extends 1.5km to the east of the current workings. Additional work at Morro da Lua will include deeper auger drill samples through the soil cover to test for indications of gold mineralization in the weathered bedrock along strike. Figure 2: Morro da Lua Prospect. Gradients in the 1VD aerial magnetics are interpreted to represent structural breaks. Contours of soil geochemical data show extension of gold anomalies along strike east to ENE of the prospect area. Figure 3: Morro da Lua shaft positions, grab sampling, and interpreted vein trends. Jerimum Cima Streams draining the Jerimum Cima ("JC") target area reportedly contained some of the richest historic placer gold mineralization at Cuiu Cuiu. The JC target is characterized by a gold-in-soil anomaly extending over an area of approximately 1.2 x 1km. Limited previous drilling returned 39m @ 5.13 g/t Au and 18m @ 1.17 g/t Au. Recent channel sampling west of the previous drilling returned values of 9m @ 2.0 g/t Au including 5m @ 3.16 g/t gold (see press release dated 21st March 2018), and 12.4m @ 1.9 g/t Au, 8m @ 1.1 g/t Au and 1.7m @ 15.7 g/t Au (Figure 4). All of the most recent channel samples are open in width under soil cover to the north. The mineralized zone is currently estimated to be at least 15m in width and remains open to the west. Figure 4: Jerimum Cima - channel sampling results in relation to historical sampling, and example of sheeted veining in sericite alteration envelope. Jerimum North and Jerimum East Exploration in and around the JC target has identified two other new mineralized zones Jerimum North ("JN") and Jerimum East ("JE"), both of which were previously unknown (Figure 5). Rock chip grab sampling of mineralized rock adjacent to an abandoned shaft at JN, which is located 500m north of JC, returned values of 52.1 g/t, 13.0 g/t, and 10.0 g/t Au. Reconnaissance auger drilling has recently been conducted, returning traces of gold in pan concentrates from the colluvial horizon at the base of the soil profile which is on average 6m thick. Programs will continue with laboratory analysis of interface samples across the colluvial-saprolite zones, and reprocessing and extension of ground magnetics grids to trace the extent of the structures. JE is similarly a new target located approximately 800m ENE of the JC target. A grab sample taken from quartz vein material immediately adjacent to a abandoned workings returned 152.6 g/t Au. Similarly, deep auger sampling of soils and evaluation of ground magnetic data are in progress to determine the size of this target. The extent of the mineralization at both JN or JE is currently unknown. Neither target has previously received any surface sampling or drilling. Figure 5: JC target area showing location of newly identified JN and JE targets Alan Carter, President & CEO commented "The presence of high-grade gold values on surface from newly identified targets at Morro da Lua, Jerimum North (JN) and Jerimum East (JE) continues to impress us and highlights the potential for significant untested high-grade gold mineralization at Cuiu Cuiu." The Company expects to report additional surface sample assay results over the coming weeks and months from several areas listed below which will be used to identify and prioritize drill targets during the third quarter of 2018. The MG (Moreira Gomes) Target Area. MG already has an Inferred resource of 8.6MMt @ 1.45 g/t Au. Nearby targets include Machichie, Guarim, Vila Rica and Germano The Central Pau de Merenda Target Corridor. A 1km wide NW-trending zone that already includes an Indicated resource of 5.9MMt @ 0.90 g/t Au and Inferred resources of 8.7MMt @ 1.13 g/t Au at Central. Historic drill results from Pau de Merenda target 2km to the north include 30m @ 1.1 g/t Au, 47m @ 1.8 g/t Au and 9m @ 5.1 g/t Au The JB Target Area. JB currently has a small Inferred resource of 2.1MMt @ 0.87 g/t Au but is open along strike and at depth The Miraboa Target Area. This region has produced a significant amount of gold from streams and exhibits several compelling gold-in-soil and coincident magnetic anomalies but has never been the subject of any drilling or systematic sampling Gold analysis was conducted by SGS method FAA505 (fire assay of 50g charge), with higher grade samples checked by FAA525. The Morro da Lua grab samples were analysed by screen fire assay. Analytical quality is monitored by certified references and blanks. Until dispatch, samples are stored under the supervision the Company's exploration office. The samples are couriered to the assay laboratory using a commercial contractor. Pulps are returned to the Company and archived. Channel sampling is conducted using a hand-trenching tool over exposed faces to maintain a consistent sample. Under the agreement with the Cuiu Cuiu condominium, local artisanal operators can process mineralization to a depth of 30m, unless otherwise negotiated. Shafts generally stop at or above the water-table. Historical drilling results are reports as down-hole length weighted intersections unless otherwise stated. The reported channel samples results are taken at right-angles to the strike of the structure and represent true-widths. Reconnaissance auger drilling is conducted as an initial test with the basal colluvial and upper saprolite samples separately panned for visual checks of gold. A second phase of grid-based auger drilling will be conducted to verify anomalies with split samples from the saprolite interval and geochemical tests of the soil and coarse fractions in the colluvium directly above the interface. About Cabral Gold Inc. The Company is a junior resource company and is engaged in the identification, exploration and development of mineral properties, with a primary focus on gold properties located in Brazil. The Company owns the Cuiu Cuiu gold project located in the Tapajos Region within the state of Para in northern Brazil. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Alan Carter President and Chief Executive Officer Cabral Gold Inc. Tel: 604.676.5660 Dr.Adrian McArthur, B.Sc. Hons, PhD. FAusIMM., a consultant to the Company as well as a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, supervised the preparation of the technical information in this news release. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as such term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-looking Statements This news release contains certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities legislation (collectively "forward-looking statements"). The use of the words "will", "expected" and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements should not be unduly relied upon. This news release contains forward-looking statements and assumptions pertaining to the following: strategic plans and future operations, and results of exploration. Actual results achieved may vary from the information provided herein as a result of numerous known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors. The Company believes the expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct. 1 Micon NI 43-101 resource estimate reported June 7 2018. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 19, 2018) - Lara Exploration Ltd. (TSXV: LRA) ("Lara" or "the Company"), is pleased to report that its final hole of the Phase-1 scout drilling program, hole PDH-18-03, intercepted 130.41m. between 68.05m and 198.46m down hole, with an average grade of 0.88% copper and 90ppb gold, or 0.93 % copper equivalent "CuEq", within a wider zone of 284.71m from surface averaging 0.48% Cu and 48 ppb Au. Miles Thompson, President and CEO of Lara commented: "We are pleased to see the notable trend of increasing grade as the mineralization plunges shallowly under cover and encouraged also to have hit some more massive chalcopyrite veining." Drillhole UTM-N UTM-E From (m) To (m) Interval (m) Cu (%) Au (ppb) CuEq (%) 18-03 9295000 636715 0.00 284.71 284.71 0.48 48 including 56.72 59.85 3.13 0.57 51 and 68.05 198.46 130.41 0.88 90 0.93 and 271.95 280.23 8.28 0.35 31 CuEq values for by-product gold are calculated using a copper price of US$3.29/lb and a gold price of US$1,300/oz. No allowance is made for losses in a normal mining situation. Intervals are down hole intervals and are believed to be close to true width. PDH-18-03 was collared approximately 255m west of 18-02 (results of which were reported in Lara news release of April 24, 2018) on the same section and drilled eastward back towards it as a scissor hole at an angle of -50 degrees. The hole was designed to test an interpreted ground EM conductor and part of the strong soil copper anomaly extending to about 150m to the west of drill hole 18-02. Interpretation of the geological and assay results for drill hole 18-02 had indicated that if the mineralized structures intersected in that hole had a moderate or steep westerly dip, then the copper in soil anomaly would have only been partially drill tested by hole 18-02. Drill hole 18-03 intersected a thick zone of hydrothermal alteration and vein stock works carrying chalcopyrite mineralization from the surface down to 284.71m with a more consistent zone of mineralization above a 0.3% Cu cut-off from 68.05m down to 196.46 m (130.41m) at a weighted average grade of 0.88% Cu and with 90ppb Au. Within this interval there are numerous sub-intervals from about 1m to more than 25m wide with greater than 0.5% Cu. Two intervals of note within this wide zone of copper mineralization are: 156.3m to 157.7m: 1.4m at 22.33% Cu associated with two veins (core lengths of 84cm and 19cm, respectively) of massive chalcopyrite cutting the mafic host. This is the first significant occurrence of massive chalcopyrite veining encountered during the drill program and is coincidental with the deepest drill intersection of the mineralized system made to date; and 169.75m to 198.46m: 28.7m at 0.93% Cu and 107ppb Au associated with a strong zone of disseminated and fracture-vein controlled chalcopyrite. A similar zone of high-grade disseminated copper was noted in drill hole 18-02 at the base of that mineralized zone. That interval assayed 37.71m at 0.72% Cu and 106ppm Au and the true width of that zone is interpreted to be about 30m, a similar width to that intercepted by hole 18-03, considering the new geological interpretation of a moderate west dip for the attitude of mineralized body. The grade increase for copper going down the dip is encouraging but will need to be confirmed by future drilling. Although the host rocks are strongly hydrothermally altered and have narrow (1m to 2m-wide) higher-grade copper mineralized zones between 0.3% and 0.6% Cu above and below the main zone of mineralization, there are only two other zones with over 3m true thickness with grades above the 0.3% Cu cut-off; one at 56.72m with 3.13m at 0.57% Cu, the other at 271.95m with 8.28m at 0.35% Cu. A shear or thrust zone, 10m to 20m wide, with strong biotite alteration and quartz veining occurs approximately 30m below the base of the mineralization. The controls for the emplacement of the mineralization are still not known with any certainty, although it would appear that the gabbro intrusive had been more susceptible to brittle fracturing than the enclosing meta-volcanic rocks and this fracturing facilitated the ingress of the mineralizing fluids. The presence of incipient zones of brecciation and hydraulic fracturing logged over only a few centimeters to no more than two meters in down hole intervals in the cores of this hole and in cores of the previous holes, is suggestive that the part of the system tested by this scout drilling program is related to a more distal part of a major hydrothermal alteration system that could be interpreted to be at greater depth in this system. Other deposits in the Carajas that have been developed in a brittle fracture regime, like Vale's Sossego deposit, are more characterized by wide (tens of meters) hydrothermal breccia zones, where chalcopyrite occurs as breccia matrix cement or as major veins up to several meters wide. Geological plans and a cross section for 18-03 also incorporating the previous hole 18-02, as well as the historic drill hole F-74 are posted on the Company's website at www.laraexploration.com. The section shows that the gabbro body is in the order of 180m to 200m thick and has a low angle (30-40 degrees) dip to the west. The contacts with the mafic to intermediate meta-volcanic country rocks are not discernable in cores or outcrop because of the intense alteration (chlorite, biotite, actinolite and epidote) that commonly forms a fine-grained mass that renders the original coarse-grained gabbro rock similar to a fine grained mafic-intermediate volcanic rock. The attitude of the main mineralized zone at 0.3% Cu cut-off appears to mimic that of the gabbro intrusive. Drill hole 18-03 has intersected the mineralization at between 150m and 200m down dip from the surface and the inference is that the mineralized zone remains open to depth. This will need to be confirmed by subsequent drill programs. Insufficient drilling has been conducted to date to determine the width of the body of the copper mineralization. The earlier drill holes 17-01 and 17-02 indicate that copper mineralization extends to approximately 100m to the south of the central drill hole 18-02 to 18-03 cross section and anomalous copper values analysed in mafic saprolite grab samples suggest it could be as much as 150m to 200m to the south in places where the near surface mineralization is mapped as being hosted by intensely hydrothermally altered leucogranite. No drilling has tested the north sector, but rock grab and chip sampling of outcrops of relatively fresh hydrothermally altered mafic rocks exposed in the creek from 100m to 130m to the north of the central section have returned anomalous copper values from a few hundred to a maximum of 2768ppm Cu. A grab sample of saprolite from a weathered mafic rock at 150m to the north also returned an anomalous copper value of 1625ppm Cu. These approximate limits are roughly coincident with the outline of the 500ppm Cu-in-soil anomaly contour. The copper mineralization occurs as chalcopyrite, as disseminations and as vein filling in a stock-work-like fracture vein set, with the higher grades usually closely associated with zones, centimeters to meters-wide, of strong K-feldsparmagnetite alteration that is flanked by wider zones of biotite and chlorite alteration in the gabbro and mafic meta-volcanic host rocks. Sampling methodology, Chain of Custody, Quality Assurance and Quality Control All the rock channel and drill core sampling were carried out by or under the supervision of the Company's Vice-President Exploration and the chain of custody of the samples and drill core from the project area to the Company's sample preparation facility in Canaa dos Carajas was continuously monitored. Sample intervals for channel sampling varied between 2m and 4m and for drill core the sampling interval varied from a little less than 1m to a maximum of 1.5m being guided by the degree of copper mineralization and rock types. Blank and certified reference materials were inserted approximately every 20th sample and the company routinely reanalyses laboratory pulps and crushed rejects for a number of samples from previous sample batches with each new sample batch. The samples were delivered to SGS-Geosol in Parauapebas where they were crushed and pulverized. Sample pulps are dispatched to by SGS-Geosol to their own analytical laboratory at Vespasiano, near Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais State, Brazil. The pulps are subjected to Agua Regia digestion with copper and 36 other elements being determined by ICP. Gold was determined by fire assay fusion and an atomic absorption (AAS) finish on a 50-gram charge. Copper values above 1% Cu are determined by fusion with sodium peroxide with an ICP OES finish or by multi-acid digestion with an AAS finish with check analyses by XRF on lithium tetraborate-ammonium nitrate fused samples. SGS-Geosol routinely runs, and reports, results for a number of certified copper and gold standards and blank samples with each sample batch. Check assays for copper and gold determinations are routinely carried out on a number of reject material samples from SGS-Geosol at a second commercial laboratory in Parauapebas. Michael Bennell, Lara's Vice President Exploration and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM), is a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects and has approved the technical disclosure and verified the technical information in this news release. About Lara Lara is an exploration company following the Prospect Generator business model, which aims to minimize shareholder dilution and financial risk by generating prospects and exploring them in joint ventures funded by partners. The Company currently holds a diverse portfolio of prospects and deposits located mostly in Brazil and Peru. Lara's common shares trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "LRA". For further information on Lara Exploration Ltd. please consult our website www.laraexploration.com, or contact Chris MacIntyre, VP Corporate Development, at +1 416 346-7660. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. -30- VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Riverside Resources Inc. ("Riverside" or the "Company") (TSX-V:RRI) is pleased to announce results from exploration work on its 100%-owned La Silla Gold Project (the Project) located 75 km northeast of Mazatlan in Sinaloa, Mexico. Riverside geologists collected 52 chip, channel and grab samples over the past month during a focused exploration program with assay results ranging from <0.05 up to 19.9 g/t gold and from <0.05 up to 200 g/t silver. Five of the samples returned greater than 1 g/t gold (see Table 1 below for highlighted samples). The new sampling program appears to have extended the strike length of known veins, while also identifying new vein structures at the La Silla Project (see Figure 1). Riverside acquired the La Silla Project through the Mexico Government lottery process (see press release November 17, 2015) by consolidating two large mining concessions covering an area of 2,305 hectares (~23km2). Riversides initial exploration program of mapping and rock-chip sampling obtained assay results ranging from <0.05 up to 7.24 g/t gold and <0.05 up to 148.4 g/t silver (see press release June 29, 2016). The current exploration program completed by Riverside expands on the previous work done at the Project, as Riverside refines targets in preparation for potential drilling in the near future. Riversides President and CEO, John-Mark Staude, stated: We are pleased with the recent sampling results at La Silla and are developing a stronger understanding of the gold and silver mineralization and their controls. The Ciruelo and El Roble veins show extensive strike and we are working to define high quality drill targets. Riverside is in discussions with prospective partners and will continue further exploration work as the Company evaluates its options for forwarding the project. The recent work focused on extending known areas of mineralization and further exploring the concessions for new showings, abandoned workings and potential structures that might host additional gold mineralization. The Ciruelo Vein is located within the northern concessions and consists of an east-west striking vein located along the contact between andesitic volcanics and overlying porphyritic dacites similar to the El Gallo District to the north operating with McEwen Mining in Sinaloa. The structure/vein is typically 1 to 3 m wide and has been sampled over a distance of 1.5 km remaining open for further strike length. Numerous shallow, old workings are found on this structure where local gambosinos (illegal miners) have accessed and processed small amounts of high-grade gold mineralization. The vein shows a pinch-and-swell form with larger 30 m breccia blowout areas similar to major Sierra Madre Occidental vein. The alteration envelope is typically from several to tens of meters in width comprising predominantly silicification with some argillic alteration. The best precious metal values are associated with green quartz veins, which have become a priority target where sample values have reached up to half an ounce gold. Figure 1: Map of the Ciruelos Vein Figure 2: Schematic Cross-Section looking West of the Ciruelos Vein The El Roble Vein located on the southern portion of the Project was also explored and consists of north-northwest trending veins within andesitic volcanics similar to various significant mining districts in the area including San Dimas, Tayoltita and El Concheno mines. Prospecting and sampling the area of the El Roble Vein identified two complementary and possibly cross-cutting veins south of the historic drilling. The El Roble Vein was drilled in 2003 by Meridian Gold* where historical drill intercepts included (DDH001) 15 metres of 6.9 g/t gold and 33 g/t silver, as well as (DDH003) 1.5 metres of 5.33 g/t gold and 26 g/t silver. One of the two new target areas, the El Roble 2 Vein, strikes north-northeast and appears to intersect the El Roble Vein in the areas of the past drilling. The El Roble 2 Vein is 0.5 to 4 m wide and was sampled four times over a 500 m strike length with one sample returning 1.8 g/t gold. The veining at this location comprises several smaller 30 cm wide parallel quartz stringer veins showing argillic alteration, silicification and green quartz with orange-brown carbonate. A second target area was found near the geological boundary between andesites and overlying dacites. This area is noted to be on strike with the east-west striking veins of the adjacent Sinaloa Mine property to the immediate east. Riversides most recent work returned one grab sample of 19.9 g/t gold and 200 g/t silver in addition to anomalous copper, lead and zinc. The sample is believed to show that the veins from the Sinaloa Mine extend onto the property providing a new exploration opportunity for the El Roble area. *Disclosure Note: The above-described exploration work programs and the analytical results that were reported by Meridian Gold on the La Silla Project are considered to be historical. The reliability of the historical data is uncertain but is considered to be relevant by Company management. It is the Companys intention to verify, wherever reasonably possible, the most significant historical data; however, there is a risk that the Companys confirmation work or future drill testing may produce results that substantially differ from the historical results. Table 1: Highlighted Rock Chip and Channel Samples Sample ID Gold (g/t) Silver (g/t) Interval Width (m) RRI50312 2.1 27.0 1.5 RRI50315 9.4 196.0 1.0 RRI-2351 2.4 113.0 1.5 RRI-2366 1.0 14.0 2.0 RRI-2369 1.6 40.1 2.0 RRI-2389 1.8 2.7 1.0 RRI-2399 19.9 200.0 1.0* *Disclosure: Samples RRI50312 & 50315 are from sampling conducted in late 2017 and not previously reported. All samples are chip or channel samples except for *RRI2399, which was a grab-sample. Qualified Person and QA/QC: The scientific and technical data contained in this news release pertaining to the La Silla Project was reviewed and/or prepared under the supervision of Freeman Smith, P.Geo., an independent qualified person to Riverside Resources Inc. who is responsible for ensuring that the geologic information provided in this news release is accurate and who acts as a qualified person under National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Rock samples collected were taken to the Bureau Veritas Laboratories in Hermosillo, Mexico for fire assaying for gold. The rejects remained with Bureau Veritas in Mexico while the pulps were transported to Bureau Veritas laboratory in Vancouver, BC, Canada for 45 element ICP/ES-MS analysis. A QA/QC program was implemented as part of the sampling procedures for the exploration program. Standard samples were randomly inserted into the sample stream prior to being sent to the laboratory. About Riverside Resources Inc.: Riverside is a well-funded exploration company that is driven by value generation and discovery. The company more than $2,500,000 in cash, less than 45M shares issued and a strong portfolio of gold-silver and copper assets in North America. Riverside has extensive experience and knowledge operating in Mexico and leverages its large database to generate a portfolio of prospective mineral properties. In addition to Riversides own exploration spending, the Company also strives to diversify risk by securing joint-venture partnerships and spin-out entities to advance multiple assets simultaneously and create more chances for discovery. Riverside has additional properties available for option, with more information available on the Companys website at www.rivres.com. ON BEHALF OF RIVERSIDE RESOURCES INC. "John-Mark Staude" Dr. John-Mark Staude, President & CEO For additional information contact: John-Mark Staude President, CEO Riverside Resources Inc. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Phone: (778) 327-6671 Fax: (778) 327-6675 Web: www.rivres.com Raffi Elmajian Corporate Communications Riverside Resources Inc. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Phone: (778) 327-6671 TF: (877) RIV-RES1 Web: www.rivres.com Certain statements in this press release may be considered forward-looking information. These statements can be identified by the use of forward looking terminology (e.g., "expect, estimates", "intends", "anticipates", "believes", "plans"). Such information involves known and unknown risks -- including the availability of funds, the results of financing and exploration activities, the interpretation of exploration results and other geological data, or unanticipated costs and expenses and other risks identified by Riverside in its public securities filings that may cause actual events to differ materially from current expectations. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. 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. Victoria, British Columbia (FSCwire) - Erin Ventures Inc. (" Erin ") [TSXV: EV] announces that it has granted options to purchase an aggregate of 3,175,000 common shares at a price of $0.10 per share (the Options ). Of this amount, Options to purchase 2,600,000 common shares will expire in five... Read More Spains new Socialist government is determined to remove the remains of Francisco Franco from a vast mausoleum near Madrid and turn it into a place of reconciliation for a country still coming to terms with the dictators legacy. We dont have a date yet, but the government will do it, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said late Monday during his first television interview since being sworn in on June 2 after toppling his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy in a confidence vote. He recalled that a non-binding motion approved last year in parliament called for Francos remains to be exhumed from the massive Valley of the Fallen mausoleum some 50 kilometres (30 miles) northwest of Madrid and the site turned into a memorial of the victims of fascism. Spain cant allow symbols that divide Spaniards. Something that is unimaginable in Germany or Italy, countries that also suffered fascist dictatorships, should also not be imaginable in our country, Sanchez added. Earlier on Monday Socialist party spokesman Oscar Puente said the mausoleum should be transformed into a place of reconciliation, of memory, for all Spaniards, and not of apology for the dictatorship. Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist from the end of the countrys 1936-39 civil war until his death in 1975, when he was buried inside a basilica drilled into the side of a mountain at the Valley of the Fallen, one of Europes largest mass graves. Built by Francos regime between 1941 and 1959 in part by the forced labour of political prisoners in the granite mountains of the Sierra de Guadarrama, the monument holds the remains of more than 30,000 dead from both sides of the civil war, which was triggered by Francos rebellion against an elected Republican government. Franco, whose Nationalist forces defeated the Republicans in the war, dedicated the site to all the fallen of the conflict in an attempt at reconciliation, but only two graves are marked those of Franco and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the far-right Falangist party which supported Franco. Uncomfortable past The mausoleum features a 150-metre-tall (500-feet) stone cross and other symbols of Francos National-Catholic ideology, and is seen by many as a relic of the dictatorship. Fresh flowers can still be found on top of Francos and Riveras tombs. Many on the left are repulsed by its existence, comparing it to a monument glorifying Hitler. Others, often on the right, insist the Valley of the Fallen is an innocuous piece of history whose critics have twisted its true meaning. The Socialists included the removal of Franco and Riveras remains in a proposed law they presented in December 2017 when they were in opposition. The proposed law also called for the creation of a truth commission and for politically motivated court rulings taken during Francos dictatorship to be annulled. Sanchez unveiled it at a highly symbolic spot near the eastern port of Valencia where more than 2,000 Republican supporters are believed to have been shot dead by Francos forces. If we ignored an uncomfortable past, we cant build a comfortable future, he said at the time. Genocidal dictator Rajoys Popular Party, a successor to the Popular Alliance founded in 1976 by former Franco ministers, accuses the Socialists of needlessly raking over the past. It opposed attempts to exhume Francos remains when it was in power. The Socialist party has accustomed us to leading these cultural battles which do nothing to help coexistence, said Andrea Levy, a top Popular Part official. Centrist party Ciudadanos said it was open to moving Francos remains, while anti-establishment party Podemos, which supported the no-confidence motion that brought the Socialists to power, hailed the initiative. Top Podemos official Pablo Echenique said it was wrong for the remains of a genocidal dictator to rest in a giant mausoleum while there are tens of thousands of dead in mass graves. He was referring to the estimated 114,000 bodies of the victims of Francos forces during the civil war and the first years of his rule that are still in unmarked graves across Spain. 46 Shares Share A new study found several senior academic surgeons had published papers in what used to be termed predatory journals. The newer, gentler term is solicited publishing, but it defines the same pay-to-play, low-quality publications. Surgeons from the University of California, San Diego examined 110 emails sent to the senior author from 29 publishers during a six-week period and early 2017. Nearly all were requesting manuscript submissions. The 29 publishers represented 113 different surgery journals most of which had existed for two years or less. Only 12 were indexed in PubMed, and of the 9 that mentioned a self-reported impact factor, the median was 0.24 which means they had less than one citation per article in the last two years. The median publication fee for the 88 journals posting the information was $755. Emails from the publishers contained a mean of 9.6 grammatical errors, possibly because more than half had addresses in foreign countries, and of those with U.S. addresses, 30 percent were residential. Of emails received, 81 percent proposed topics unrelated to the recipients practice or field of interest. The UCSD investigators attempted to contact the senior authors of the 117 papers from academic institutions and not surprisingly received just 14 responses. Eight of these senior authors claimed they had not published in a journal that solicited publications (either they were untruthful or perhaps worse, had no idea that the journal was one that solicited manuscripts) and six admitted they knew they had published in a fringe journal. Two papers involved work that was funded by the National Institutes of Health. In their discussion, the authors wondered why academic surgeons would publish in journals with low or no impact factors or not indexed in PubMed and pointed out the studies might never be cited. I can answer that. The goal is to publish somewhere anywhere not necessarily to achieve high numbers of citations. That 117 papers from U.S. academic centers were published in bogus journals is embarrassing. We are in the midst of a lingering Twitter debate about my last post calling for the abolishment of mandatory research involvement as part of the training of all residents. Some academics didnt get it. I didnt say everyone should stop doing research. What I said was it shouldnt be required of every resident. Academic programs can still involve their residents in research, but lets hope the research is worthy of publication in legitimate journals. Skeptical Scalpel is a surgeon who blogs at his self-titled site, Skeptical Scalpel. Image credit: Shutterstock.com By Lee Kyung-min An increasing number of Koreans are protesting a government policy granting refugee status to foreigners after Jeju Island's local government introduced an "asylum seeker-friendly" policy to help them find jobs, a humanitarian initiative deemed an "undue favor" by jobless Koreans. Over 200,000 people have signed a petition on the Cheong Wa Dae website demanding the government scrap or revise laws governing refugee status and the visa waiver program on Jeju Island. "I think it is highly doubtful whether granting refugee status to foreigners and providing financial support would contribute to the public safety of Korea and economic prosperity of the island," one petitioner wrote. "I have to doubt whether the group of people are really desperate enough to seek the status. The government should evaluate criteria and strengthen requirements." The harsh sentiment came after the Jeju branch of the Korea Immigration Service announced early this month that it will implement policies to help Yemeni asylum seekers, a substantial number of whom came to the island over the past few months to escape the ongoing civil war that began in 2015. They came here via a visa waiver program under which foreigners can stay for 30 days being given a visa on entry. All nationals but those from 11 countries suspected of being sponsors of terrorism are eligible for the program implemented in 2002 to promote the economy and attract foreign spending on the resort island. The immigration office's measure reflected recommendations from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) and human rights advocacy groups that called for greater protection for the displaced from conflict-ridden, war-ravaged countries in line with the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention, it is a United Nations multilateral treaty that defines a refugee, outlines the rights of individuals who are granted asylum and the responsibilities of nations that grant asylum. Korea adopted the treaty in 1992. The convention is based on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes the rights of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries. The declaration stipulates that a refugee may enjoy rights and benefits in a state in addition to those provided for in the Convention. However, public sentiment soured after the immigration office decided to allow job-seeking efforts on the island, activities previously deemed illegal and subject to punishment including deportation. The public including many young and jobless people have little compassion due to fierce competition in certain sectors of the job market, compounded by continued reports about hiring irregularities at banks and state-run firms in which children of the rich and powerful were given favors in getting highly coveted jobs. Jeju's policy initially sought to acknowledge the financial hardship of the Yemenis staying in Korea, most of whom have no way of making a living after the 30-day visa expires. A total of 519 Yemenis have filed for refugee status as of May, an over 12-fold increase from 42 last year, and seven in 2016. No one sought the status in 2015. Most of the displaced that came to Korea this year had been in Malaysia, where they can stay for up to 90 days without visas. They came to Korea aboard a direct flight connecting a city in Malaysia with Jeju that was newly added last December. Meanwhile, the petition came amid growing concern over foreigners' misuse of the Jeju-operated visa waiver program to stay in Korea illegally as many disappear after arriving on the resort island. Law enforcement authorities suspect they remain here illegally or cross over to the mainland to seek work. Police earlier detained a number of Chinese brokers for allegedly helping such people get jobs in return for about 10 million won ($9,800) per person. The number of foreigners coming to Jeju on the visa waiver program is rising, from 232,000 in 2012 to 629,700 in 2015. A substantial portion of them become illegal aliens after they overstay the 30 days. According to municipal government data, the number increased to 9,846 last year, a near ten-fold increase from 992 in 2012. Authorities suspect the number will surpass 11,000 by the end of the year. The best bang for your buck! This option enables you to purchase online 24/7 access and receive the Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday print edition at no additional cost * Print edition only available in our carrier delivery area. Allow up to 72 hours for delivery of your print edition to begin. Print edition not available for Day Pass option. Tripoli, Jun 19 (AFP) The bodies of five migrants were recovered while more than 100 were rescued after their boat sank off the coast of Libya today, an officer from the country's navy told AFP. Libyan rescuers took three hours to reach the sinking rubber dinghy, officer Rami Ghommeidh said. A survivor said they had been close to an Italian vessel which had refused to save them. "When we got closer to the Italian rescuers, they wouldn't rescue us so we waited there" for the Libyan navy, he said. Panic ensued as the passengers sought to clamber on board the Libyan ship as their own boat was quickly filling with water. "While trying to climb up the side of the rescue boat, three women and two little boys fell into the water and drowned," he said. Ghommeidh did not identify the victims, confirming five people died and the 117 survivors included women and children. They were taken to the capital Tripoli after being rescued "around eight nautical miles off the coast of Abu Kammash", an important petrochemical complex and oil terminal close to the Tunisian border, the officer said. Libya is a key departure point for thousands of migrants hoping to reach Europe, although hundreds drown each year attempting the sea route. So far this year around 40,000 people have survived the crossing, while more than 800 are recorded as dead or missing by the United Nations refugee agency. (AFP) AQS (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Beijing, Jun 19 (PTI) Nepal Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli has arrived here on a five-day visit during which a host of key projects under China's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, including a rail link connecting Tibet with Nepal, are expected to be finalised. During his stay here, Oli is scheduled to hold talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and several other top Chinese officials. Speaking at reception organised by the Nepal Embassy after his arrival, Oli was quoted as saying by the Nepalese media that in addition to railways, Nepal and China are also committed to developing multidimensional connectivity networks of roadways, airways, communications and energy. Oli's visit comes after his trip to India soon after his election as Prime Minister and followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's return visit to Kathmandu. Oli's visit assumes significance as he is expected to attract Chinese investments in a host of infrastructure projects for his country, including a railway line connecting Tibet with Nepal. Oli, during his brief tenure in 2016 widened China-Nepal ties by signing the transit trade treaty with China to reduce the dependence of his land-locked country on India at the height of Madhesis agitation and sought expansion of road links through Tibet besides extension of China's railway to Nepal through the Himalayas. Ahead the visit, China had aired concerns over the reports of cancellation of Chinese companies to build West Seti Hydropower Project. There are some twists and turns on economic cooperation facing China and Nepal and Oli may discuss these issues, Zhao Gancheng, director of the Shanghai Institute for International Studies' Center for Asia-Pacific Studies, told the Global Times ahead of Oli's visit. Nepal cleared China's state-owned Three Gorges International Corp to build a long-delayed hydropower project on the West Seti River in 2015. It is scheduled for completion by 2022. However, Kathmandu announced in May that Nepal would build the 750-megawatt hydroelectric plant, effectively scrapping the USD 1.6 billion deal with China, the report said. China is also expecting its company Gezhouba Group Corporation (CGGC) to get back the contract to build 1200 MW Budhigandaki Hydropower Project, which was cancelled by the previous Nepalese government. China has been investing heavily in Nepal in the last few years to enhance the connectivity and infrastructure. More importantly, it has mooted to the Oli government to build India-Nepal-China economic corridor through the Himalayas. The two projects among others are expected to figure in the Oli's talks with Xi. China has undertaken 15 projects in Nepal, including four hydropower plants, and the country's second international airport at Pokhara, with 14 others in the pipeline, Hong-Kong based South China Morning Post reported recently. "Prime Minister Oli will take up construction of 400-kilovolt cross-border transmission line 800km of its route will lie in China and 80km in Nepal, right up to capital Kathmandu via the Nepal-China border," the report quoted Energy Minister Barshaman Pun as saying. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body) Jun 18, 2018, 5:56pm ET NTSB to observe Tesla's investigation of Model S fire The incident did not involve any deaths or injuries, so the agency is not pursuing a formal investigation. The National Transportation Safety Board has apparently taken an interest in the recent Tesla Model S battery fire. The electric sedan was allegedly driving down Santa Monica Blvd when its battery ignited "out of the blue" without any accident or other damage. The accident did not cause any deaths or injuries. The NTSB has consequently taken a soft approach, observing Tesla's own internal investigation rather than launching a formal federal inquiry. Participating in Tesla's review "will provide the agency with an opportunity to learn more about fires in all types of battery-powered vehicles," NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson told Bloomberg. Tesla has argued that its cars are 10 times less likely to catch fire than a gasoline-fueled vehicle. The company has nonetheless promised to find out what happened in the California incident, described as an "extraordinarily unusual occurrence." UAE-based Lamprell, a major provider of fabrication, engineering and contracting services, said it will join hands with Asyad Holdings to set up a joint venture company in the kingdom as part of its regional expansion strategy. A key player in the kingdom, Asyad Holdings brings significant regional knowledge and forms part of a group of companies managing a diversified portfolio of businesses, including working on major projects in Saudi Arabia. The establishment of Lamprell Saudi Arabia is core to the Emirati group's growth strategy where its primary focus to date has been the investment into the joint venture between Saudi Aramco, Bahri and Hyundai Heavy Industries to develop a major maritime yard in the Arabian Gulf, known as International Maritime Industries. It comes in line with the firm's investment plans for Saudi Arabia and its aim to boost presence in the kingdom. Lamprell said it was also pursuing other opportunities to gain a stronger foothold in Saudi Arabia. Among other things, one objective is to qualify as a contractor to Saudi Aramco on their long-term agreement (LTA) programme. The LTA programme is where contractors undertake offshore engineering, procurement, construction and installation projects in the oil and gas sector. A key component of all LTA projects is Saudi Aramco's In-Kingdom Total Value Add (IKTVA) programme, which is designed to encourage and increase local investment by the LTA contractors. Unveiling its new strategy in Saudi Arabia, Lamprell said it is taking steps to achieve IKTVA commitments by developing its in-Kingdom capabilities and by partnering with strong local businesses. A key component of its plans to reach the IKTVA goal is through the formation of Lamprell Saudi Arabia, said a senior official. "We are uniquely positioned to build our business in Saudi Arabia with the complementary opportunities of investment in the International Maritime Industries yard and our LTA bid to Saudi Aramco," remarked Christopher McDonald, the chief executive of Lamprell. "We are committed to developing our local capabilities and we are looking to realise these opportunities by aligning with strong partners in-Kingdom. We are therefore pleased to gain the support from Saudi investors, both as a major shareholder through Blofeld Investment Management and as our local partner in our Saudi joint venture," noted McDonald. According to him, the region has some of the strongest fundamentals in the oil sector and has demonstrated resilient production throughout the market downturn with an exceptional growth strategy going forward. Lamprell said Blofeld Investment Management, a private family fund based in Saudi Arabia, has increased its shareholding in the company to 10.08 per cent. The key investment by Blofeld, a company owned by the same investor from Saudi Arabia which owns Asyad Holdings, and partnership with major Saudi businesses will help boost the company's strategic exposure in the region, said the top official. "Much of Lamprell's effort over the past two years focused on building a presence in the region and we are pleased to see our strategy supported by local partners," he added.-TradeArabia News Service Bethlehem City Council will vote Tuesday night on whether a developer can to clear the way for a new 50-unit luxury building near the city's Main Street business district. Estimated at $15 million, the project is planned to occupy 143 W. Broad St., located on the sliver of land tucked between Route 378 and the Colonial Industrial Quarter. Skyline West LLC, the company behind the proposal, includes former ArtsQuest leader Jeff Parks and the father-sons development team of Dennis, Garrett and Brandon Benner. Tuesday's council vote comes after the city's Historical and Architectural Review Board earlier this month recommended city council deny permission to demolish a home on the property to make way for the project, according to board Chairman Fred Bonsall. HARB is only an advisory committee so city council could disregard the recommendation and approve the project. "Does city council follow our recommendations? About 99 percent of the time," Bonsall said earlier this month. "You're giving them advice, but they are the deciding vote." The house, which dates back to 1905, was built as part of the residential expansion of Bethlehem at the turn of the century, according to historic officer George Donavan. The house is a Colonial Revival style, according to a historic property survey completed in the 1970s, and its neighbors were demolished during the construction of Route 378, Donovan said. Should council greenlight the demolition through the approval of a certificate of appropriateness, Council President Adam Waldron said the project would still need to be rezoned. Pending Tuesday's vote, that would take place at council's second July meeting. The developers are seeking to have the city zoning map amended so the entire property is within a limited commercial district. The project would also have to undergo HARB consideration again, this time for the aesthetic of the building and its materials. After this, the project would be sent to the planning commission for approval. Waldron said. If council votes against the Skyline West project, development of the project will not proceed. The proposed five-story building is billed by its developers as "the first multi-family market-rate housing project in Bethlehem's Historic District in over 30 years," according to a news release. Parks, the Musikfest founder and former president of ArtsQuest who is a partner on the project, said in May the building will infuse more downtown residents onto the streets of Main Street. "We need to show there's some life in the downtown," Parks said, citing the sale of Moravian Book Shop to Moravian College as a sign of tough times. His partners, the Benners, own one property that would be developed into the new building and are looking to buy an adjacent 1.3 acres from the Bethlehem Redevelopment Authority. "We hope to be able to start construction sometime in late fall of this year and be available for rental sometime in the third quarter of 2019," Parks said in January. Taking the SAT is a rite of passage for college-bound Pennsylvania high schoolers. Each year, the Pennsylvania Department of Education releases a list of the average SAT score for every public high school in the state. We took a look at the 2017 average SAT scores -- the most recent available -- for students who were expected to graduate last year and compiled it into a search tool. The tool below allows you to compare the SAT score of any two Pennsylvania public high schools, including charter schools. A perfect score is 1,600 -- 800 for reading and writing and 800 for math. Pennsylvania's average state score for 2017 was 1,032. Scores may not add up exactly due to rounding. Loading... Loading... While some schools have moved away from relying on the SAT during the admissions process, it remains a key element of most college applications. SAT scores are highly tied to student demographics. If your parents attended college and earn a high income, you're much more likely to score well on the test, according to College Board data. The College Board cautions against comparing a school's earlier year's scores to the 2017 scores because the format of the SAT changed in March 2016. To see SAT scores for all Pennsylvania public high schools for 2017 and earlier, click here. Help us perfect this tool; if any schools are missing, please let us know. Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Pennsylvania State Police were continuing a death investigation on Tuesday afternoon involving a 20-year-old Quakertown woman who died Monday morning at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Salisbury Township. Lt. Kreg Rodrigues, who heads up criminal investigations for Bethlehem-based Troop M, said police personnel were back on a property at 7245 McFettridge Road in Lower Milford Township from where the woman was taken to the hospital. An autopsy was performed Tuesday morning. The Lehigh County Coroner's Office on Tuesday afternoon identified the woman as Alexus N. Quay and said the cause and manner of her death are pending "further forensic studies." The coroner's office on Monday night released limited details, saying the woman was pronounced dead at 9:23 a.m. Monday at the hospital. The office initially listed her name as Jane Doe prior to notifying her family. Police and the coroner's office are working with the Lehigh County District Attorney's Office and its homicide task force. District Attorney Jim Martin's spokeswoman, citing the ongoing investigation, wouldn't confirm the address where the woman was found. The spokeswoman wouldn't say why the homicide task force was involved. No one is in custody, Rodrigues said, and the probe has not extended beyond investigating the death. The home is on a "fairly large" property in the township near Limeport, he said. He wouldn't say if anyone else was home when medical personnel first responded on Monday morning. When asked if there were any obvious signs of a crime, Rodrigues wouldn't comment. He wouldn't say if the death was considered suspicious. "There's no status change" from Monday, he said or the overall situation. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Sheldon Krock (Image via Pennsylvania Megan's Law registry) Robert Pierce has enough severe injuries and horrible memories to never forget the August 2016 crash on Route 22 that claimed his longtime girlfriend. On Tuesday, Pierce testified about his last moments with Renee Tenasse before the pickup truck they were traveling in struck another car, partially ejecting Tenasse and killing her. Pierce and Tenasse were two of seven people in the pickup truck being driven by Sheldon Krock that night. The 54-year-old Krock, who lived in Easton at the time of the crash, went on trial this week on charges including homicide by vehicle and DUI. He has been held in Lehigh County Jail in lieu of $200,000 bail while awaiting trial. Prosecutors say Krock caused the crash in Hanover Township, Lehigh County, that involved four vehicles and left one person dead and a dozen people hurt. Pierce suffered severe injuries to his right foot and ankle, a fractured knee and damage to his hip, he testified on Tuesday. Krock allegedly struck a Chevrolet Cruze with his Ford F-150 pickup truck. That impact caused the truck to roll several times and hit a Mazda sedan, and the Mazda then struck a Volvo sedan. At the time of the crash, Krock, a registered sex offender, was free on bail in a prior DUI. He pleaded guilty in that case in November 2016, and was sentenced to three to six months in county prison, records show. The trial comes after Krock initially pleaded guilty in October in exchange for a sentencing deal with a maximum of nine-and-a-half years in state prison. Krock pulled that plea in January. Pierce walked into court Tuesday afternoon on crutches; he said he has suffered complications since having pins inserted in his damaged ankle, including an infection that won't go away. The day of the crash, Pierce, Tenasse, her three children and Pierce's nephew were picked up by Krock and brought to his house in Easton. Pierce said they grilled food, and he and Krock drank some beers. That night they all loaded into Krock's F150 pickup and headed back to Allentown, where Pierce and Tenasse lived together. Krock was driving, Pierce and Tenasse were sitting in the front seat, and Pierce's nephew and the three kids were in the back. Krock began swerving in his lane, and Pierce said he asked Krock to either stop or pull over and let Tenasse drive. "He was going pretty fast," Pierce said. Tenasse, who was sitting between Krock and Pierce up front, said she didn't want to die, according to Pierce. "After that, everything changed," he said. Pierce said he had turned to talk to his nephew, and when he faced forward, the truck was airborne. The next thing Pierce said he remembers, the truck was on its roof and people pulling him out of the truck. Pierce said he kept asking what happened to Tenasse. Witnesses testified they had to extricate her from the crash and, although a trooper and EMS personnel performed CPR, she died at the scene. Defense attorney Amy Sonin said Pierce didn't divulge Tenasse's statement in the truck until this year. Pierce has lived in western Pennsylvania since the crash, including two months in a hospital for treatment and his surgeries. Truck driver Michael Johnson Sr. has been haunted by the crash since witnessing it that night. Johnson was driving his regular route transporting cement from Keystone Cement in Bath to Maryland. Johnson testified cars were passing him in the right lane of Route 22, before the road narrowed to a single lane near the Fullerton Avenue exit and that he had several car-lengths of space in front of his truck. Johnson saw Krock's truck collide with the Chevrolet, leading the truck to roll over several times and land on its hood. "I've never seen anything flip so bad from hitting a car,"he testified on Tuesday. Johnson got out of his truck and ran to the pickup truck on its hood. "I heard the little ones screaming in there terrible," he said. "I never heard kids scream so bad." Johnson said he helped other people get the passengers out and stayed with Pierce. "I just can't get closure to it. Seldom a day goes by that I don't think about it," Johnson said. "I just can't get it out of my head." Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. A 43-year-old Bangor man died Monday morning after crashing a 2000 Kawasaki Z9E motorcycle into a guardrail and then being thrown off the bike in Lower Mount Bethel Township, Pennsylvania State Police report. The crash happened about 11:50 a.m. on Lower South Main Street about a half-mile north of Good Road, police said. Michael Hennessy was riding north "at a high rate of speed," police said. The bike went off the road and struck the guardrail and Hennessy was ejected, police said. He died at the scene from his injuries, police said. Anyone who saw the crash is asked to call the Belfast barracks at 610-759-6106. Police were assisted by the Lower Mount Bethel Fire Company and fire police, the Washington Township Fire Department, Blue Valley Rescue Squad, Suburban EMS and the Northampton County Coroner's Office. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. The first council estate to be built in Portlaoise in a decade has been officially opened by Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy. Conniberry Way on the Old Knockmay Road has 33 homes on a compact 2 acre site with a small green at its centre. The new tenants, individuals and families young and old, were chosen as the most in need from the council's housing list. Over 1,000 names still remain on that list but no other estate is yet under construction in Portlaoise. On Monday morning June 18 Minister Murphy arrived with Minister Charlie Flanagan to cut the ribbon. Wishing the residents happiness in their homes, he urged them to keep in touch with local politicians to keep them working for you. We face serious challenges, the worst is homelessness. We have a housing shortage but we are fixing this problem, with 6bn of a warchest to do it, he said. Asked by the Leinster Express if cities would gobble up much of that money, Minister Murphy said each local authority had its target. Under Rebuilding Ireland we have dedicated targets for each local authority as to where the 3.800 houses will be built spread out across the country. This year 4,400 new social housing homes will be built and that's significant progress, he said. Minister Flanagan noted that Portlaoise is chosen for an urban regeneration project, and said the town's sudden growth to 25k brings a challenge and opportunity. Almost 12,000 people leave Laois to work, mostly in Dublin, we have to ensure that Portlaoise has a quality of life, as well as housing we must provide education, health, environment and heritage services, he said. Portlaoise Parish Priest Monsignor John Byrne blessed the estate. "that these well designed and constructed houses will become homes filled with peace and harmony". Laois County Council CEO John Mulholland quoted the poem 'The Old Woman of the Road', noting that the 'hearth' is replaced with a photo voltaic solar panel in the new A rated homes. He is confident that Laois' target of 627 new homes by 2021 can be met, by a combination of building new council estates like Conniberry, Part V homes in new private estates allocated for social tenants, turnkey developments by private developers for the council, homes from approved housing bodies, and renovating vacant and derelict houses. At the same time we are targeting dereliction and regenerating towns, he said. Below: Christina, Brooklyn and Jessica Shortall - pictured outside their new home. The council's next housing project in Portlaoise is to rebuild derelict private estate Hepburn Court but another official opening will be several years away. Compulsory Purchase Orders on the final few houses in that estate are not yet complete. Once done, with a field behind it and halls beside it, there will be up to 3 acres owned by the council for more new council houses. Cllr Willie Aird, Leas Cathaoirleach said that the council does not own one acre of land in Portlaoise. The buck stops with Laois County Council as the housing authority so we have to be the front runners in providing land to make sure we have projects coming on stream, he said. Sheelagh Coyle is a community rep on the Housing SPC committee. This is a tiny drop in the ocean, everything needs to be speeded up, she said. Conniberry was first planned in 2005 when the council bought the site for over 1 million. Plans were shelved during the bust. It was resurrected in 2014 and redesigned. It was built by Laois company Michael Kelly & Sons Ltd in 20 months for 4.7 million, averaging 181k per house, and 2.5 weeks construction time per house. It has one 4 bed house, 10 two bed homes including bungalows for disabled access, and 22 three bed homes. All are A rated energy efficient with a yearly heating bill expected to be only 250. New tenant Trisha Flanagan's daughter Caoimhe, 3, helped Minister Murphy cut the ribbon. It's going to be a great little neighbourhood. My little son Jay is making friends fast. I was renting privately before, now I am no longer in fear of the rent going up, said Ms Flanagan. Below: Trisha Flanagan with her daughter Caoimhe outside their new home. Her new neighbour Christina Shortall has four children and was previously also renting a house, with the help of a rent allowance. "The houses are so warm and lovely, I hope we all get to know each other now and we all get along. It's nice to be able to see the green for the children to play, and they are so close to the schools and town," she said. The Minister took a tour of a house afterwards. "These are some of the best designed homes I've seen in the country. A incredible amount of storage which is great for any family, the finish is just brilliant, and you can see they will be very energy efficient. Really impressive," he said. Below: 1: Cllr Willie Aird speaking at the official opening of Conniberry Way. 2: Minister Murphy visiting Cllr Aird's farm at Nutgrove, Portlaoise, with Minister Charlie Flanagan. Laois has opened her arms to dozens of nationalities in recent years, including the African community, with one in ten Laois people now beiong non nationals. Nw the whole Laois community is being invited to an afternoon of culture and fun in Portlaoise, and to get to know their new neighbours, at the first Laois Africa Culture Day. The afternoon is being held on Saturday June 30 from 12 noon until 3pm, at Kavanagh's Courtyard on Main Street Portlaoise. The public will be invited to sample African cuisine, to learn about traditions, costumes and jewellery, and enjoy music and dancers. Bolaji Adeyanju from Mountmellick is organising the day, backed by a small team of helpers. We will feature local musicians and dancers who are from both Laois and Kildare. There will be African poetry readings too, he told the Leinster Express. He explained why he decided to hold the day. I have found that the level of integration here is low, and I thought this was the best way to encourage communities to get to know each other. This is not about the African community getting together, but really about introducing ourselves to locals, he said. Originally from Nigeria, Bolaji lived in Cork and then Dublin for many years before moving to Laois with his family three years ago. He, works in AIB Bank in Kildare. The exciting display of African dancers and musicians who have performed in the Portlaoise St Patricks Day parade in recent years is also organised by him . There is such openness and friendliness in Laois, i would not swap Laois for Dublin now, I lived in Dublin for nine years and I did not know my neighbours, Bolaji said. It is easy to talk about racism but I have not encountered any in Laois. People here are trying and willing to get to know us, the organiser said. Below: A Congalese Women's group performing in the Portlaoise St Patrick's Day parade Offaly TD Carol Nolan has resigned from Sinn Fein in the wake her opposition to the eight amendment. Dep Nolan, who won a seat in the Offaly-North Tipperary constituency for the first time in 2016, had been suspended from the party earlier this summer after over her stance the 8th amendment referendum. Her suspension was due to expire on Thursday of this week, June 21. "I have decided to as of today 19th June to resign from Sinn Fein. I feel that as a pro-life republican woman that I no longer have a place in this party which doesn't recognise or show genuine respect for the pro-life views of members." "It was disappointing that at the Ard Fheis which took place in Belfast at the weekend, the party's delegates voted against the motion to allow members to have a conscience vote on the issue of abortion. I want to thank all of the 24 cumainn who put forward motions on the need for a conscience vote on the abortion issue." "I feel that it is unethical to force TDs who are strongly opposed to abortion to vote against their conscience. Every TD in Leinster House is directly responsible for the laws that they enact, if a TD votes for abortion they are responsible for all abortions that happen in this state. I do not want to have any hand, act or part in bringing about the end to the life of an unborn child, the most vulnerable in our society." "It is not for politicians or society in general to decide who lives or dies. Every life is precious and every child deserves the chance to live. I don't believe that abortion is the solution to any crisis, how can it be when it takes the right to life away from the unborn?" "I cannot and will not support abortion and for that reason I have made a decision to leave Sinn Fein. I want to assure the constituents that I represent in Offaly/ North Tipperary that I will continue to work hard on their behalf and that I will continue to represent them as an Independent TD in Dail Eireann. I want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank them and my loyal supporters for their relentless support over the past few months," she concluded. The Cadamstown native voted against legislation paving the way for the referendum and also actively campaigned for a 'No' vote. That was in direct contrast to the decision taken by the party to advocate for a 'Yes' vote. At the weekend, Sinn Fein delegates voted to allow the Ard Comhairle to agree its position on legislation for abortion. It remains to be seen what impact her resignation will have on the party which was heading into the next General Election with two TDs in Laois and Offaly which is being reduced to a five seat constituency. Dep Brian Stanley retained his Dail seat after first being elected in the Laois Offaly five seater in 2011. Sinn Fein Leader Mary Lou McDonald has said she regrets the resignation of Offaly TD Carol Nolan from the party. The Dublin TD described Dep Nolan's decision to resign as "disappointing but not surprising." The TD resigned, citing the party's position on the recent 8th Amendment referendum as a bridge too far for her as "a pro life republican woman." She had earlier been suspended from Sinn Fein having voted against legislation allowing for that referendum to take place in May. Her suspension was due to expire this week. SEE ALSO: Carol Nolan makes statement after resigning from Sinn Fein Speaking this afternoon McDonald said: I very much regret Carols decision to resign from Sinn Fein. Her resignation is disappointing but not surprising." "Sinn Fein made every effort to give its members space and latitude to articulate a position contrary to the partys position in the recent referendum campaign on Repeal of the 8th Amendment," she added. The people have spoken on this issue. The Sinn Fein Ard Fheis has democratically agreed the partys position to support the forthcoming leglislation. I wish Carol and her family well. Dep Nolan has indicated her intention to continue in the current Dail as an independent representative but she has not yet made a statement regarding her intentions for the next general election. Her decision leaves Sinn Fein with just one seat into the reuinited Laois and Offaly heading into the next General Election. Dep Brian Stanley retained his seat in Laois when the constituency was split before the 2016 poll. It remains to be seen if the party will select another candidate for the reunited five seat constituency. Laois TD and Minister for Justice and Equality, Charlie Flanagan TD, today expressed his strong support for an All-Party motion which acknowledged the harm done by criminalisation of consensual same-sex relationships and offered an apology to those who were criminalised for their sexuality. Speaking in the Seanad where the motion was introduced, the Minister announced Government support for the motion. Today Ireland is celebrated around the world for the value which its citizens place on equality, following the same sex marriage referendum, and in recognition of the diversity in our current Cabinet. It is doubtless incomprehensible to many, especially to many young people in Ireland today, that there are members of our society who still feels the effects of such discrimination in their daily lives and yet, that is the case. "There are people who still feel the isolation, the hurt and the stigma created by those laws, which denied the LGBTI community the ability to live openly or without fear, which denied them the ability to engage actively in civil and public life, and which suggested that society did not value or even tolerate them, simply because of their sexual orientation. As Minister for Justice and Equality, I extend a sincere apology to all of those people, to their family, and to their friends. To any person who felt the hurt and isolation created by those laws, and particularly to those who those who were criminally convicted by the existence of such laws, he said. The motion coincides with the 25th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality through the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 1993, which was passed by the Houses of the Oireachtas on 24 June 1993. The Act decriminalised consensual same-sex sexual activity between adult males. 25 years ago this week, an important step was taken which changed the lives of many people in Ireland. The enactment of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1993 sought to repeal Victorian-era laws which criminalised members of our society, forcing them to conduct their personal and private lives in secret. Homosexual men in Ireland were ostracized, and criminalised, simply because of their sexual orientation. These laws caused immeasurable harm. Nothing that can be said here today can undo the unjust suffering and discrimination that the homosexual community experienced in the years prior to decriminalisation. As a Government, we must acknowledge those wrongs, and seek to improve lives for all members of our society so that they can live freely and without fear of discrimination. I am delighted to support the motion in this House today, which at its heart, offers an apology to all those affected by the criminalisation of consensual same-sex acts in Ireland prior to 1993. This motion is reflective of the Governments commitment to ensuring that Ireland is a society for all people, an equal society, and a fair society, he said. The Taoiseach has also announced that he will host a State event on 24 June 2018, to mark 25 years since decriminalisation. The all-party motion was first debated in the Seanad and then the Dail. The Taoiseach addressed the Dail and Minister Flanagan concluded the debate in the Lower House. Over the last few hours, we have had an important and timely discussion in both Houses of the Oireachtas," he told TDs. Many members have made moving and personal contributions. The fact that the Taoiseach was able to speak on this issue in such a personal way is quite a profound reflection of the changes that have taken place in Ireland since 1993. Ensuring a free and fair society is an ongoing responsibility for Government and for these Houses. Human rights must be established, and protected. As Minister for Justice and Equality, I, alongside Minister Stanton, and my Government colleagues pledge to work to ensure that all members of our society feel that they are valued and that the legislation in place will protect all against discrimination. We can and should learn lessons from the last 25 years of how a society can advance, and become a more inclusive and diverse society, one which we can all be proud of, he said. MOTION REGARDING THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DECRIMINALISATION OF SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIPS Seanad Eireann Tuesday, 19 June 2018 Speech by Minister for Justice and Equality, Mr. Charlie Flanagan T.D. A Cathaoirleach, I want to thank Senator Nash for bringing forward this motion today and, indeed to thank him for his ongoing work on these issues and for the constructive way he has worked with my office to bring us to this point. I would also like to thank the members of the Seanad for giving time and consideration to this important issue. This is a special day in these Houses and I feel privileged to be the Minister for Justice and Equality at this time and to be in a position to support this motion, to recommend that Government support it, and to have worked with Senator Nash to advance matters. 25 years ago this week, an important step was taken which changed the lives of many people in Ireland. The enactment of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1993 sought to repeal Victorian-era laws which criminalised members of our society, forcing them to conduct their personal and private lives in secret. Homosexual men in Ireland were ostracized, and criminalised, simply because of their sexual orientation. These laws caused immeasurable harm. Nothing that can be said here today can undo the unjust suffering and discrimination that the homosexual community experienced in the years prior to decriminalisation. As a Government, we must acknowledge those wrongs, and seek to improve lives for all members of our society so that they can live freely and without fear of discrimination. I am delighted to support the motion in this House today, which at its heart, offers an apology to all those affected by the criminalisation of consensual same-sex acts in Ireland prior to 1993. This motion is reflective of the Governments commitment to ensuring that Ireland is a society for all people, an equal society, and a fair society. In 1977, a Senator in this House, Senator David Norris, took a significant High Court challenge against the laws which criminalised homosexuality in Ireland. This was a brave, first step towards the decriminalisation of homosexual relationships, and is one which is widely recognised as the critical step that led to the 1993 Act. That case lead to the judgment of the European Court on Human Rights which found that the laws against homosexuality in Ireland were in direct contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights. The impact and significance of that challenge cannot be underestimated. All these years later, it is entirely appropriate that this debate should be taking place in the Upper House with Senator Norris set to give what I know will be a memorable speech. I wish to thank Senator Norris for his leadership on this issue. I am sure that his determination to fight against such injustice was instrumental in ensuring freedom for the LGBTI community in Ireland today. The Senators courage in standing up for human rights, and the support provided to that challenge by former President Mary Robinson, has certainly been marked in this nations history. I would also like to thank Senator Nash for his collaboration since the introduction of the Private Members Convictions for Certain Sexual Offences (Apology and Exoneration) Bill, out of which arose this motion today. In consultation with the Taoiseach and the Attorney General, I have been working with Senator Nash to identify legislative solutions. There are significant practical and legal difficulties but we are working to find resolutions, including through consultations with the UK Home Office. I hope to be back in this House reporting progress before long. But back to the motion that is before us now. This motion recognises the great harm caused to many people by the criminalisation of these relationships in Ireland. These laws were clearly discriminatory in nature, and were also a direct infringement on the personal and private lives of those who they affected. Immeasurable hurt and immeasurable harm was caused to many people in our society, to their families, and to their friends. Decriminalisation was a huge step in Irelands ability to progress towards equality for the LGBTI community within Ireland. Today Ireland is celebrated around the world for the value which its citizens place on equality, following the same sex marriage referendum, and in recognition of the diversity in our current Cabinet. It is doubtless incomprehensible to many, especially to many young people in Ireland today, that there are members of our society who still feels the effects of such discrimination in their daily lives and yet, that is the case. There are people who still feel the isolation, the hurt and the stigma created by those laws, which denied the LGBTI community the ability to live openly or without fear, which denied them the ability to engage actively in civil and public life, and which suggested that society did not value or even tolerate them, simply because of their sexual orientation. As Minister for Justice and Equality, I extend a sincere apology to all of those people, to their family, and to their friends. To any person who felt the hurt and isolation created by those laws, and particularly to those who those who were criminally convicted by the existence of such laws. Successive Governments have slowly but steadily worked to make Ireland a more equal and inclusive society since decriminalisation in 1993. Some of that progress is captured in this motion. Many legislative measures have been introduced which have sought to improve the lives of all members of society, so that they may marry regardless of sexual orientation, so that they may be recognised by their chosen gender, so that they may enjoy equal rights to family relationships, and to address discrimination in all forms. Such progress can only be welcomed. However, that does not mean that there is not more work that must be done. The motion before you today also reflects our desire to continue to ensure that the laws in this country fully recognises sexual and gender minorities and that people in our society are free to fully express their identities without fear, and without discrimination. My hardworking colleague, Minister of State Stanton, is absolutely committed to advancing equality measures and, indeed, he has begun work on an LGBTI Strategy. The past cannot be undone. It is the responsibility of this Government and those that follow in our footsteps that we continue to progress, that we continue to promote equality for all, and that our policies and our actions strive to ensure that human rights are protected. It is of the highest importance, that our citizens can live in freedom and participate fully in our society, and that those who continue to face discrimination and violence are protected. Again, I would like to thank the Members of the House for their attention here today. I believe that this cross-party motion is a historic and important step for Ireland, which I am proud to support on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the decriminalisation of same-sex intimate relationships in Ireland. I again commend Senator Nash, and his colleagues Senator Bacik, Senator O Riordan, and Senator Humphries for their work. And, finally, I congratulate Senator Norris for his steadfast dedication to equality and human rights. Thank you, Cathaoirleach. Unbeaten MTK MMA star Mounir Lazzez has sealed a fight deal with Middle East giants Brave Combat Federation. With this move, the Dubai-based welterweight (6-0) nicknamed Sniper - is relishing the chance to raise his profile even further and will immediately target titles with his new organisation. On the new agreement, Lazzez said: "Brave Combat Federation is one of the biggest promotions on the planet and its growing every month with shows all around the world." "In a short time, its become one of MMAs best promotions and its beginning to attract the worlds most talented fighters. Im so happy to join up with them," he stated. "I feel its the best move. With MTK Global behind me, I feel I have the right people to go to for advice with every single step in my career as we head for the top," noted Lazzez. "MMA in the Middle East is growing so quickly. People are starting to recognize the local fighters and get behind them. Well see that more and more and will soon be represented in the UFC," remarked the unbeaten MTK MMA star. Eventually, I plan to bring the UFC to Dubai, he added. Lazzez, who originally hails from Tunisia, already boasts an impressive highlight reel of knockouts and stoppage wins.-TradeArabia News Service On June 22 and 23 Finlay Volvo will celebrate Swedens Midsommer with a range of activities and offers instore. Midsommar is a traditional celebration in Sweden to mark the longest day of the year. To celebrate, Volvo are offering a 10% reduction across selected models of the Volvo S90, V90, S60, V40 and V40 Cross Country. For a limited time, Volvo are also offering 2.9% PCP on all models except the XC90. The XC90 is available with 3.9% PCP. Apart from Christmas, Midsommar is the most important holiday in the Swedish calendar. For some, Midsommar is the most important. Typical Midsommar celebrations involve crowns of flowers in your hair, dancing around a pole, singing songs while drinking flavoured schnapps and enjoying pickled herring. Finlay Volvo, Dealer Principal at Gary Finlay said: "We would love to see all our customers come and join in our Midsommer celebrations. We will have lots of activities and special offers to mark the occasion. Come down and see our award winning range of SUVs, we will also have offers on the XC60 and XC40 which recently won World Car of the Year and European Car of the Year respectively. One lucky person will also win a VIP trip to Sweden to celebrate Midsommar where they do it best. Customers who test drive a S90 will be in with a chance to win a VIP trip to celebrate Midsommar next year in Sweden. * The 10% reductions and PCP rates are available on selected models until September 30 2018. For more information click here now The stalled Maynooth Educational Campus project is expected to restart by the end of March 2019 and be completed by June 2020. The two schools at the campus had an original completion date of May 2019. Thats according to Kildare and Wicklow Education Board officials speaking this morning at a KWETB meeting in Wicklow. Work at the Education Campus has stalled in recent weeks following an appointment by the High Court, on June 5, of a liquidator in relation to the Sammon Group. But this morning, officials outlined that work is currently ongoing to get ready to accept tenders for the project. The build is expected to formally go to tender by November 8, with an expected resumption of work by the end of March next year. It is expected that the work will take 12 months to complete. Local Cllr Teresa Murray made a call that the matter be taken out of the hands of the KWETB and that the Department of Education take responsibility for it. She explained how the project had been subjected to a litany of delays in the past. Maynooth Post Primary School asked for an extension in 2009, and were nearly 10 years later. The staff, students and parents are exasperated. There are children who are in Maynooth Community College, that will never see a building. And really and truly, the parents never wanted two schools in Maynooth. "They only ever wanted one. This situation was foisted on them. Cllr Reada Cronin And she believed that an amalgamation was the only answer to the situation. Her view on the Department taking responsibility for the school was backed up by Cllr Reada Cronin. People in Maynooth are absolutely furious about this situation, she said. Its been a debacle from start to finish. She said the new school had been promised long before her own children were thinking of going to secondary school, and now her eldest is doing her Leaving Cert. And she agreed that people in Maynooth only wanted one school, to avoid any sense of rivalry. Read more: New contractor needed to complete Maynooth Education Campus after builder collapse 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. An Garda Siochana and The Construction Industry Federation are taking a proactive role to crime prevention in the construction industry, which has historically has been targeted by criminals, with the launch of the Secure It, Keep It campaign. Building sites are by nature easy targets for criminals due to the types of materials, tools and machinery on site. Construction crime can involve thefts from vehicles, burglary, unauthorised taking of vehicles, criminal damage and trespassing. Speaking at todays media briefing in Kinsale, Chief Superintendent Con Cadogan said, "The main objective of the Secure It Keep It campaign is to create and maintain awareness both within the industry and with the general public as to the importance of site security, and the security of plant machinery, construction equipment, tools and materials. We are appealing to everyone involved to go to the Garda website and take the Construction Site Checklist Challenge. In particular, I would appeal for everyone to mark their tools and equipment in some way. Recently, Gardai seized power tools from a car boot sale in the West Cork Division that had been stolen in Dublin. Thankfully the tools had the owners name engraved on them and they have since been returned. An Garda Siochana is very active in monitoring online marketplaces as well as car boot sales etc. for the sale of stolen goods. Here are a few simple tips to help keep your site more secure: Set up CCTV if you are going to be on site for a prolonged period Good security lighting Fences or hoardings are effective and should be used whenever possible Keep the number of gates to site entrance to a minimum Localised temporary security alarms should be used. Control access to the site. Visitors must sign in and vehicle registration numbers given Cash should not be kept on site when possible Machinery should be left in a well-lit part of the site with the keys removed. Security locks and ground fixings are great for extra security Keep a record of engine numbers chassis number, vehicle ID numbers etc. Store your tools in a secure area. Mark all of your tools with a unique identification number, photograph them and keep a record of it. Report all thefts and suspicious activity on sites to An Garda Siochana SIPTU has called for a major review of waste collection and its return to control by the local authority sector following a Prime Time programme, broadcast last night (Monday, 18th June) which revealed widespread illegal practices within the industry. SIPTU Public Administration and Community Organiser, Adrian Kane, said: The Prime Time programme on widespread illegal activities within the waste industry should serve as a wake-up call for the country. From the information revealed it is clear that Ireland is failing to meet the challenge to dispose of waste in a coherent and environmentally safe manner. What we have instead is a largely unregulated and environmentally dangerous industry. While the programme high-lighted some very serious and flagrant cases of illegal dumping it failed to examine the structural reasons why illegal practices are so endemic within the industry. These are due to the cut-throat nature of the business and a legacy of 30 years of privatisation which has led to some of the poorest terms and conditions for workers within the economy. Operators driven by the need for economic survival regularly circumvent the law and precariously employed workers do not feel in a position to report illegal practices. He added: The long-term way to ensure the goal of a clean environment and to establish decent conditions for workers within the industry is to bring waste collection and disposal back within the control of the state and local authority sector. SIPTU Sector Organiser, John Regan, who represents waste collection workers employed by the Bord na Mona subsidiary, AES, in the midlands, said: Initially, we are demanding an immediate review of the entire waste industry as well as the establishment of a Government led forum which would take into account the views of all the stakeholders including the public, workers, waste operators, employers and crucially the local authorities. A Sectoral Employment Order within the industry would be an important first step. This would ensure minimum pay and conditions for workers, including the operation of a pension scheme and sickness benefit. That workers in an industry which exposes them to hazardous situations and the risk of infection do not have adequate sickness benefit standards is completely unacceptable. Fleadh na Riochta, the festival of the kingdom is taking place in Glangevlin, Co Cavan this weekend, June 22- 24. The Summer Solstice frames the celebrations, as the community bring friends and local talent together for a weekend of song, dance and music. The festival opens with traditional music from Gary Curley, Kevin Loughlin and friends in Glan Bar on Friday Night, June 22. The bonfire sits idle as the weekend grows with activity. Saturdays Family Fun Day at Curravagh National School celebrates the ongoing campaign to Stand With Glan. Celebrity chef Neven Maguire will raise the schools fifth Green flag for their commitment to biodiversity at 1pm. The afternoon will include a series of workshops, from local artist, Jim Fee, the Under 17 County Cup Winners, and the Geo parklands. With bouncy castles, face paining and a few surprises it promises to be a great day out. The mummers workshop, offers a hint of whats to come with the bonfire pageant. The bonfire, beginning at 10.30pm, will call on all to Stand with Glan. It will be followed by music, song and dance from Glenfarne Ceoltas. Sunday Morning, June 24 at 11.30am a Fleadh Mass will remember all those past and present. At 2pm Jim Nolan will lead a bi-lingual guided walk where you can learn about the enigmatic Sean Eamoinn Ruairi on this Geopark Trail. The afternoon offers a competitive dash as the car treasure hunt heads east at 5.30pm. Each year it draws large numbers to decipher the trail of clues that will bring you around the Cuilcagh region. Manorhamilton Ceoltas will close the festival with traditional music from Leitrim, Cavan and Fermanagh in Glan Bar. The climax of the festival is Saturday nights bonfire celebration. This procession could be one of the last to see the beech tree crest of the school children dance with the beat of their community. It is a timely reminder of why we must stand, and hope that some will stand with us and together we can do enough to keep our school doors open and our community thriving for another year. www.standwithglan.ie Also read: 'Save the Glan' follows Leitrim schools in seeking new families Michael Ring TD, the Minister for Rural and Community Development, officially launched the ambitious new five year strategy for Public Libraries in the LexIcon Library, Dun Laoghaire recently. Our Public Libraries 2022 Inspiring, Connecting and Empowering Communities is a progressive strategy which aims to improve access, use and visibility of the library as a community hub, and develop the library as a focal point for community and cultural development. Minister Ring highlighted the vision for the Strategy, which was guided by the public consultation process, as one of public libraries as attractive and welcoming spaces where all members of the community can access knowledge, ideas and information, and where people can reflect, connect and learn. Minister Ring continued: The overall aim is to position the public library as an invaluable community resource, and increase active library membership from 16% of the population to 30% by end-2022. Acknowledging the valued role of the librarian in delivering the broad range of services now available, the Minister said Library staff have been leaders in driving change in our public libraries. I commend your commitment, passion and enthusiasm. The five year strategy is a joint initiative of the Department of Rural and Community Development, the County and City Management Association (CCMA) and the Local Government Management Agency(LGMA). Tom Enright, Chief Executive of Wexford County Council added As Chair of the Library Development Committee, which has responsibility for overseeing the implementation of this strategy, I look forward to working in partnership with all local authorities, the Department of Rural and Community Development, the Local Government Management Agency and all stakeholders in its delivery. Over the next five years, I am confident that the measures undertaken with the implementation of the Strategy will deliver an enhanced library service, more integrated, more visible and more accessible in the local community. Mary Quinn, Director of Service, Leitrim County Council welcomed the new strategy, describing it as very positive news for library users throughout Leitrim. The abolition of library fines is an important step in removing barriers, thereby improving access to the broad range of services delivered by your local library service. In late 2017, Minister Ring allocated 3.75million from the Department of Rural and Community Development, supplemented by approximately 1.25 million from local authorities, to support the implementation of this 5-year strategy. This investment is designed to enhance and modernise public library services through the introduction of self-service technology, which will enable library users to take out and return books without staff assistance. Emma Clancy, Leitrim County Librarian, explains that the roll out of self-service technology in our libraries will enable our skilled and experienced library staff to assist library users and guide people to the many excellent services offered by our libraries. The strategy is available on the Departments website www.drcd.gov.ie Gardai are appealing for information following the theft of a digger on the outskirts of the city. The JCB 537 (similar to the one pictured) was stolen in the Ballysimon area early on Monday morning. Its understood the machine was recently painted by its owners and gardai are anxious to locate it. We are interested in hearing from anyone who may have information regarding this, or if this machine was offered to you for sale, or if you live or were in the area and you feel you may be able to help with our enquiries, said a garda spokesperson. CCTV has been obtained as part of the investigation and inquires have been conducted in the Ballysimon area. Gardai at Roxboro Road station are investigating the theft and they can be contacted at (061) 214340. Egypt plans to stop importing liquefied natural gas (LNG) by the end of the 2017/18 fiscal year ending in June as it speeds up production at recently discovered gas fields, a media report said. Egypt said previously that it would halt imports by the start of 2019, reported Emirates news agency Wam, citing Reuters. Petroleum Minister Tarek El Molla was quoted by Reuters as saying the country will save $250 million per month by no longer importing LNG. CELEBRATED Limerick historian Sharon Slater has received a top civic honour from metropolitan mayor Sean Lynch. Sharon, who is the Limerick Leaders resident historian, was joined by her family and friends at City Hall on Wednesday last as she was afforded a special mayoral reception. The prolific historian has written a number of books focusing on Limericks past, and has also maintained the popular Limericks Life website, which she noted has seen 600 articles published to it since its inception earlier this century. Cllr Lynch said Sharon, a former person of the month winner, has worked tirelessly both now and over the years in local history research on Limerick. He said her web site represents a treasure trove of Limerick history from rare images to untold stories of Limerick people. She recently joined the Limerick Leader team, where she puts together the Limerick Chronicle each week, a newspaper which is still the oldest title in the Republic of Ireland, and marks its 250th anniversary this year. Among the many books Sharon who lives in Corbally has penned include The Little Book of Limerick in 2013, Limericks Merchants Traders and Shakers in 2015, and a Stitch in Time a history of Limericks clothing factory last year. She also teamed up with the Limerick Chamber for its 200th anniversary book in 2015. All this, and she is not even a Limerick native! But speaking at the reception, she said: I have Limerick in my heart and it has been home to me for 21 years. If I were in a family, it would be time to get the key to the house. So am I a local? If a local has a passion for the city, if a local wants to see the city improve into the future, if a local has put their blood, sweat and tears into the story of the city, then yes, I am a local. Among the people present at her reception were Limerick council historian Dr Matthew Potter and Liam Irwin of Mary Immaculate College, as well as her sons Stephen and Peter, and her wife Susan. The honour that the mayor has given me tonight is not just for me, it is for all of you and for all the people who have encouraged me to continue, for all of those who gave their time for interviews, and all of those who have gone before me who have created the information mountain on which I stand, she said. Cllr Lynch awarded Sharon a piece of Limerick lace, and said the reception was in honour of her tireless efforts to present, promote and preserve Limericks history. THE future for business in the Mid-West lies in autonomous and artificial industries, according to a key stakeholder group representing interests in the region. The Mid-West Action Plan for Jobs Implementation Committee told Minister Pat Breen that the future of the region is "autonomous and artificial" after he attended a meeting of the stakeholder group. "The Mid-West region is leading the way in a number of emerging disruptive technologies including the autonomous vehicle through the presence of global leaders such as Jaguar LandRover, Analog Devices, DELL, Intel and General Motors; while artificial intelligence will impact on all businesses in every sector," said Orlaith Borthwick, programme manager for the Mid-West Action Plan for Jobs. "Our regional opportunity is to ensure that we remain at the forefront in delivering innovations and talent in these growth areas, she added. "We are delighted that Minister Breen could join us to hear from our local authorities, our indigenous business base, our multinational industries, our higher education institutions and several others about our future vision for this region. "The Mid-West Action Plan for Jobs has provided to framework to facilitate collaboration and cooperation; allowing a collective vision and set of strategic objectives to differentiate and lead the region into future growth. "We are committed to working together for the betterment of our region and the people who live here. Noting that companies either innovate or evaporate Minister Breen, who visited Mid West Action Plan for Jobs at Takumi Precision Engineering in Limerick, expressed his belief that regional economies need to adopt the same philosophy to ensure their economic longevity. The employment creation record of the Mid-West in recent years is a leading example to regions across the country in how public and private stakeholders can work collaboratively to deliver impactful change," he said, noting the collaboration in the public and private sectors in Limerick, Clare and Tipperary. "Since the launch of the Mid-West Action Plan for Jobs, under the chairmanship of Barry OSullivan, an additional 16,600 are in employment; in the first half of 2017 alone over 7,000 extra people were at work. "I was delighted to learn greater insights into what is working in the region, including recent successes in emerging growth sectors including the BioEconomy Foundation and Emerald Aero Cluster, both recently funded under the first round of the Enterprise Ireland Regional Enterprise Development Fund," he added. Launched in 2015, the Regional Action Plans for Jobs were recently subject to a Refresh and Refocus by Minister Heather Humphreys, with the Minister reiterating the governments commitment to regional economic growth opportunities. By Imran Inamdar, TwoCircles.net Nearly two years ago, TwoCircles.net had highlighted the dismal state of Urdu-medium schools in Maharashtra. It is an issue which we had discussed six years ago too. One can say that little has changed since but the marks scored by two girls in Class 10 from these institutes show that there has never been a dearth of potential in these schools. Zoha Afreen Khan, a student of Rahmaniya Urdu High School, Achalpur from Amravati district has scored 99.8% marks and topped the Amravati division while Sahrish Riba, a student of Anjuman Urdu High School Khamgao from Buldhana district managed to score 99%. What is even more encouraging is that both these girls want to become doctors and help the most marginalised communities of the country. Support TwoCircles Fifteen-year-old Zoha, who is fluent in English, Urdu, Hindi and Marathi, is the eldest daughter of her parents. Her father is an Urdu teacher and her mother is a housewife. Speaking with Twocircles.net, Zoha credited her success to her parents and teachers. She said that proper guidance of teachers and the love and care of her parents gave energy to students. It helped her a lot in achieving such a feat. Informing about her future plans, she said, I want to be a doctor and work in rural areas so that I can help people in need. I always read in newspapers that Adivasis never receive timely medical assistance. It makes me disheartened to read such news and so after becoming a doctor, my main focus will be to work for and in Adivasi communities. Shariful Hasan, the father of Zoha, said his daughters performance has always been excellent. Studying 6-8 hours daily has been her routine from the beginning. Whenever she lost a single mark during her home exams, she took it seriously and worked hard on it. Commenting on her future plans, Hasan said, My daughters career is my top priority. I will do my best to make her dreams a reality. Badruddin Merchant, Chairman, Rahmaniya School, lauded Zoha for achieving this feat. She is a very talented and an extremely hard-working student. I thank Allah, her parents and teachers for guiding her. Merchant further claimed that Zoha is the first Urdu medium student from the state to score such high marks. Sahrish Riba, who scored 99% in her exams, thanked Allah for awarding such an honour. My parents helped me a lot by motivating me. I studied for nearly eight hours every day throughout the year. Memorising my lessons and clearing all potential doubts was my daily routine. I had completed my syllabus by January and revised all my subjects several times before board examinations. Sahrish whose father Muzammil Sayed is a teacher at an Urdu High School wants to become a gynaecologist to provide medical assistance to marginalised women of the society. The marginalised communities, especially women, suffer the most during medical emergencies and they are often unable to get any timely treatment. I want to work towards addressing this issue, she said. By Nikhat Fatima, TwoCircles.net Many non-Muslims may have visited mosques as part of a tourist attraction and admired the mosque for its architecture and the history behind it without actually knowing what happens in a mosque apart from the namaz/ prayer. For the first time in Hyderabad and maybe even in India, the trustees of the Masjid-e-Quba initiated a unique program called Open Mosque just after Eid ul Fitr by inviting men and women from different faiths to pay a visit to the mosque to get an idea of what goes on inside a mosque. Masjid-e-Quba, located at Nanalnagar, Hyderabad, is a large structure equipped with air coolers, chandelier and a cellar and can easily accommodate 1,200 people. It has been built by Syed Akthar and designed by architects Naseer Aziz and Zaheer Ahmed in an Egyptian-Arabian style. Support TwoCircles As if to extend the celebrations of Eid ul Fitr, the management of the mosque set up this program on 17th June, Sunday, wherein a guided tour of the mosque and later presentations on Islam, its basic tenets, clearing the misconceptions people have regarding Islam was given by volunteers. The welcome at the registration desk was done with a warm greeting, applying attar and handing the visitor with a rose and dates, after which a volunteer first took the visitor to the place where ablution/ Wadhu is done and explaining the importance of the ritual and the procedure. The visitor is then taken to the gallery which had books on Islamic teachings in English and the local language and displays on the 5 pillars of Islam, on doomsday, death, and the hereafter all which every Muslim believes in. The displays were also on topics such as terrorism and womens rights both of which are always in the news for the wrong reasons. The volunteers explained in detail on all of these topics and answered the questions/ doubts patiently to the men and women who were all inside a mosque for the first time and grappling with so much of knowledge about Muslims and Islam. Our main purpose of initiating this program is to clear all the misconceptions people of different faith to have about Islam and a Masjid, said Syed Akhtar, one of the trustees of the mosque. In these hard times, it is important to let people of other faith know what a mosque is and what we do here. We want them to understand Islam is all about peace and co-existence with people from all other faiths. A mosque is a place where all activities concerning Muslims take place. It is not just for prayers. Children are taught to read and learn the Quran; Muslims gather at the mosque to perform the Nikah, the final prayers of the dead person called Namaz-e-Janaza are also performed here, people discuss their problems and seek a solution by consulting the elders in the mosque in the light of the judicial tenets of Islam. In short, it is a place wherein all social activities used to take place. And we want to revive this practice of our beloved prophet who used to also conduct meetings with foreign delegates at the mosque. The prophet used to allow Christians and the Jewsthe two faiths that existed thenin the mosque. One of the trustees added that they want to revive this practice. As soon as the Azaan, the call to prayer sounded and the afternoon prayer was over, the meaning and process of Namaz were explained to the visitors. Visitors welcome the initiative Simrat and Tarun Deep, two visitors, said this was the first time they had entered a mosque and they did not know much about what took place in a mosque, now they knew and appreciated the program very much. Another person, Sitaram who lived in the same locality and had always seen the mosque from outside had come inside for the first time. He said he learnt more about Islamic beliefs and that Islam teaches kindness, humanity and compassion towards all living beings. Gita Ramaswamy, a feminist and womens rights activist, felt visiting a mosque to dispel the doubts people may harbour is fine but to build communal harmony we need to work beyond this. Copies of the Holy Quran were distributed along with other literature on Islam. The trustees said they want to continue this activity and reach out to more people at this time being the first time only about 2 dozen people from other faiths had visited. All the visitors were treated to the Eid delicacy Sheer khurma before leaving the mosque. After a deer's ribs were pierced by an arrow, bone grew over the shaft and arrowhead. Deer aren't usually considered especially badass, but one white-tailed deer in North Carolina turned out to be a lot more metal than expected. A close encounter with a hunter left the deer with several broken ribs and part of an arrow embedded in its body. Remarkably, the animal survived, and bone grew around the shaft and arrowhead lodged in the creature's side. The deer lived with the arrow inside its body until years later, when another hunter killed the animal, cut the deer open, and discovered its amazing secret. The man later mounted the skeletal oddity, and in February 2017, the Utah Conservation Officers Association (UCOA) shared a photo on Facebook. [27 Oddest Medical Case Reports] In the image, the arrow lies diagonally across five of the animal's ribs, encased almost entirely in layers of bone. As the tough tissue formed over the arrow, it acted as a splint for the damaged rib cage, strengthening the deer's injured body, UCOA representatives reported in the post. Prior to its demise, the deer looked "natural and healthy," Robert Stegall, current owner of the mounted ribs, told the outdoor-lifestyle website Wide Open Spaces. Stegall's father shot the deer a four-point buck in Anson County, North Carolina, about 30 years ago, Wide Open Spaces reported. Stegall recounted that his father didn't suspect that there was anything unusual about the deer until he removed its hide and noticed the bone-wrapped arrow in the animal's ribs. Stegall's father eventually mounted and framed the rib cage portion, and in 2017, he presented the piece to his son as a birthday present, Stegall said. While the sight of a rib cage bolstered by a bone-encased weapon is unnerving, it's not unusual for bone to grow around structures that invade a body, Yara Haridy, a doctoral student at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, told Live Science in an email. "I have seen bone grow over a variety of foreign objects, usually teeth," Haridy said. For example, if a predator bites an animal and a tooth becomes lodged in a bone, that bone can cover the embedded tooth as it heals. When the deer was injured, several of its ribs were probably fractured; this likely caused massive bleeding, so a large blood clot formed not only over the broken bones, but also over the arrow, Haridy explained. "The blood clot then becomes the outline for a 'soft callus' to form, made of cartilage. Later, this cartilage is replaced by bone, making a hard callus," she said. Another way that bone can wrap around a foreign body is through metaplastic ossification, a pathological process that can occur after trauma. In this case, other types of tissue transform into bone. It's hard to say for sure which of these processes took place inside the deer without cutting into the bone tissue and analyzing it, "but both are good candidates," said Haridy, who recently tweeted the image of the deer's ribs. Original article on Live Science. Marijuana use may affect how much pain people feel and the dose of painkillers they need following a traumatic injury, such as an injury from a car accident, a new study suggests. The study found that, after experiencing a traumatic injury, marijuana users reported higher levels of pain, and needed higher doses of opioid painkillers, compared with patients who didn't use marijuana. The researchers stressed that the findings are preliminary, and more studies are needed to confirm the results. But if the results are confirmed, the study could have implications for treating pain in marijuana users a population that may be growing due to increased legalization of the drug, the researchers said. [Mixing the Pot? 7 Ways Marijuana Interacts with Medicines] The findings suggest "marijuana users in need of pain control deserve special consideration when selecting the dosage and frequency of narcotics [painkillers]," said study lead author Kristin Salottolo, a clinical epidemiologist at the Swedish Medical Center's Trauma Research Department in Englewood, Colorado. The study was published June 19 in the journal Patient Safety in Surgery. Marijuana and pain The researchers started the study after treating trauma patients in Colorado who used marijuana routinely, and "were noted to have poor pain control and required higher than normal amount of narcotics," Salottolo told Live Science. "We wanted to see if this anecdotal observation held up" in a scientific study, she said. The study researchers analyzed information from about 260 people who were involved in motor vehicle accidents between January and April 2016 and who were admitted to trauma centers in Colorado and Texas. Of these patients, 21 percent (54 patients) reported using marijuana recently or tested positive for marijuana on a drug test, and 6 percent (16 patients) reported daily or near-daily marijuana use. (Marijuana use was reported four times more frequently in Colorado, where the drug is legal for medical and recreational purposes, compared with Texas, where the drug is illegal for both purposes.) About 9 percent of participants tested positive for prescription or "street" drugs other than marijuana, including amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, cocaine, methamphetamine and opiates. Patients who used marijuana but not other drugs consumed 7.6 milligrams of opioid medications a day while in the hospital, on average, compared with 5.6 milligrams for patients who didn't use marijuana or other drugs. What's more, when asked to report their level of pain on a scale of 0 to 10 (with 0 being the lowest pain and 10 being the worst), marijuana users had a daily pain score of 4.9, on average, compared with 4.2 for non-marijuana users. These effects were less pronounced in patients who used other drugs in addition to marijuana, the study found. More awareness Dr. Anne Wagner, medical director of the UCHealth Burn Center in Aurora, Colorado, who was not involved in the study, agreed with the findings. Wagner and her colleagues have also conducted research on burn patients that found that those who are heavy marijuana users require "much higher doses of opioids" compared with patients who don't use marijuana. Using higher doses of narcotics to control pain can lead to many other problems for example, it means that marijuana users frequently end up with longer hospital stays than non-marijuana users, because "we don't want to discharge them on massive doses of narcotics," Wagner told Live Science. In addition, marijuana users may experience marijuana withdrawal, including symptoms of nausea and vomiting, which, in turn, could prevent them from getting proper nutrition and interfere with healing, Wagner said. The findings may seem surprising at first, because some studies suggest that marijuana use can help with certain types of pain, such as chronic pain. But Wagner noted that the marijuana helps only if patients can take it, and because the drug is still illegal at the federal level, hospitals typically cannot allow patients to take it. Wagner said more work is needed to figure out how to best treat trauma patients who are marijuana users, including whether a drug called dronabinol, which contains a synthetic form of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), can help with symptoms of marijuana withdrawal, and what dose of this drug works best. Wagner added that more awareness is needed about the potential effects of marijuana on trauma patients. "I really think a lot of people think [marijuana is] very harmless," Wagner said. "I don't think they're at all aware about how much it's going to affect them in their recovery" from injury, Wagner said. The study researchers noted that their findings are limited in part because the study was relatively small, and was retrospective, meaning it analyzed data that was collected previously. The researchers are planning a larger study that follows patients forward in time to further investigate the link between marijuana use and pain and opioid use in trauma patients. Editors note: This story was updated on June 19 to include quotes from the study author. Original article on Live Science. Men's testes were once thought to be free of bacteria, but a small new study from Italy suggests that microorganisms may live naturally in this part of the male reproductive system. What's more, the findings suggest that this so-called testicular microbiome may be different in men with a type of infertility called azoospermia, who have no measurable sperm in their semen, than it is in fertile men. Still, the findings are very preliminary, and much more research is needed to confirm if the testicular microbiome actually affects sperm production, the researchers said. But if the findings hold up, studies on the testicular microbiome might one day lead to the development of new therapies for men with azoospermia, who currently have few treatment options, experts say. [Trying to Conceive: 12 Tips for Men] "These findings are actually surprising, because almost all medical textbooks mention that [the] human testes is a microbiologically sterile microenvironment," said study lead author Massimo Alfano, a senior scientist at the Urological Research Institute at the IRCCS Hospital San Raffaele in Milan. But with new technologies, "for the first time ever, we [have] been able to quantify the bacterial DNA" in the testes, Alfano told Live Science. "If confirmed and expanded, these results could support future therapies for male factor infertility" such as those based on restoring a proper "testicular niche," Alfano said. The study was published May 30 in the journal Human Reproduction. Testicular microbiome About 1 percent of all men, and 10 to 15 percent of men with infertility, have azoospermia, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Couples in which the man has azoospermia cannot become pregnant naturally, because there is no sperm in the man's ejaculate, said Dr. Sarah Vij, a urologist at the Cleveland Clinic who was not involved with the study. "Those are the men that we really want to be able to help the most," Vij said, referring to men with azoospermia. "Some of those men [with azoospermia] have no options to have a biological child." The most severe form of azoospermia is "non-obstructive azoospermia," which means the condition results from poor sperm production, rather than a blockage that prevents sperm from getting into the semen. The only treatment option for non-obstructive azoospermia is a surgery that attempts to retrieve sperm from the testicular tissue, which is not always successful, Vij told Live Science. For the new study, the researchers analyzed testicular tissue from 10 men with non-obstructive azoospermia, as well as testicular tissue from five men without azoospermia who produced normal amounts of sperm. Among the men with azoospermia, half had successful surgeries that retrieved sperm, while half had unsuccessful surgeries that didn't retrieve any sperm. The researchers found that the men without azoospermia had small amounts of bacteria in their testes, and these bacteria belonged to four main groups, called Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria. The men with azoospermia had more bacteria overall in their testes, but their testicular microbiome was less diverse: The researchers found only two groups of bacteria Actinobacteria and Firmicutes in these men. What's more, the men who didn't have sperm retrieved during surgery had even less diversity in their microbiome, which was dominated mainly by Actinobacteria. Avoiding surgery? "I definitely applaud what they've done," Vij said of the study. "I think it has potential significance." Currently, doctors do not have a way to predict which men with azoospermia will have successful sperm retrieval from surgery, Vij said. But the new findings raise the question of whether the testicular microbiome might help predict successful sperm retrieval. "If the microbiome can enable us to predict who is going to have success, we could probably spare some men surgery," she said. In addition, if the findings are confirmed, it's possible that the testicular microbiome "could help guide future therapies for men, to give them another option" besides surgery, Vij said. Still, even if future studies confirm the results, there are many more steps needed before the findings could be meaningful for patients. For example, the current study used testicular biopsies to describe the microbiome, but these procedures are invasive. "We have to figure out a way to assess the microbiome noninvasively, to have meaning" for patients, Vij said. Additional studies would also need to examine whether changing the microbiome could have an effect on sperm production, she said. In 2016, early research also suggested that women's fallopian tubes and ovaries may have microbiomes. Original article on Live Science. CalFire A vegetation fire broke out near Montbretia Way, a residential street in San Ramon, at about 3 p.m. Tuesday. Aerial footage taken of the fire shows a helicopter releasing fire retardant on charred hills above a suburban neighborhood. A San Ramon Fire Department spokesperson was not immediately available for comment. A 58-year-old man was arrested Sunday on suspicion of assault in what appears to be two separate unprovoked attacks in San Francisco when he allegedly kicked a homeless man and broke the nose of another man on Muni, authorities said. Samuel Youmtoub of San Francisco was booked into San Francisco County Jail on two counts of aggravated assault in both cases, according to the San Francisco Police Department. The first incident occurred about 3:35 p.m. on May 24 near the intersection of Leavenworth and McAllister streets, police said. A 38-year-old homeless man was lying on the sidewalk when Youmtoub viciously kicked him in the face, authorities said. Surveillance from a nearby Muni stop captured the attack on video, police said. The victim, who was not identified, lay motionless after the attack and was transported to the hospital with serious injuries, police said. Youmtoub, meanwhile, walked to United Nations Plaza. Surveillance footage shows a man wearing a dark colored suit, a black beanie and glasses kick the man twice before walking away from the scene. The footage drew international attention. Attacks against homeless people like the one caught on surveillance footage May 24 are not uncommon in the Bay Area, said Kelley Cutler, a human rights organizer with San Franciscos Coalition on Homelessness. Folks that are forced to live on the street, its very risky. Its dangerous, Cutler said. So people are targeted pretty often actually. When you look at how our society treats people who ... experience homelessness, our priority is not valuing this population. Cutler added that its unclear whether the number of attacks against the homeless has increased in San Francisco specifically. The National Coalition for the Homeless released a report tracking the number of crimes against homeless people in 2014 and 2015. In 2015, nationwide, there were 77 victims of attacks against people experiencing homelessness 27 of the victims from those attacks were killed. After Youmtoub attacked the homeless man, he was captured on Muni surveillance video five days later at about 3:05 p.m. aboard a bus at Eighth Street near Mission Street, police said. The video footage allegedly shows him grabbing a 28-year-old man by his hair and repeatedly slamming his face into a steel handrail. The victim, who was not identified, apparently suffered a broken nose. He was a Muni patron, and authorities dont typically classify victims as homeless, said Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department. In the first attack, the victims status was apparent from the circumstances of the attack, he added. Youmtoub also fled the scene in the second incident, police said. Authorities said both attacks appeared to be unprovoked, and neither the victims nor the suspect knew each other. On Sunday, a Tenderloin Station police officer was walking on Market Street about 12:40 p.m. when he spotted Youmtoub walking near U.N. Plaza, police said. The officer and her partner recognized Youmtoub from the surveillance footage and immediately took him into custody. He is being held on a $120,200 bail. Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani Bruce Springsteen defined Asbury Park as a working-class crucible in the imaginations of millions of fans. Now a real estate developer is hoping the rock star can attract attention to its luxury condo project on the Jersey shore. Springsteen performed Monday night at Asbury Lanes, a bowling alley and music venue recently reopened by the commercial real estate lender and developer iStar Inc. "I walk down the boardwalk now, I feel like the Ghost of Christmas Past," he told a cheering crowd that included New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. "But that's OK, because it's fun to watch Asbury's future unfold in front of me." IStar has ambitious plans for the city's waterfront. In addition to the music venue, it is launching sales on oceanfront condos with prices at the top of the local market. The two projects represent its attempts to find "a creative way to tie the past and the future together," Chief Executive Officer Jay Sugarman said in an interview. "We never wanted to lose what Asbury has been, but we wanted to make it clear where Asbury could go," he said. It's been a long wait, for both the city and Sugarman's company. IStar's condo project, the Asbury Ocean Club, sits on a site first approved for redevelopment in 1984. Two previous builders got construction projects out of the ground, only to abandon their efforts. IStar took control in 2009 when a developer fell behind on its loans. The aftermath of the financial crisis was hard on iStar too: A mistimed bet on commercial real estate loans left it with a large portfolio of land that it has spent years selling off. But Sugarman kept the company's property in Asbury Park, acquired more and set to work building a pair of townhouse projects and a boutique hotel. Today, it owns 35 acres (14 hectares) in the city and has spent more than $300 million on its efforts, which included reopening Asbury Lanes at the end of May. For the Lanes, iStar hired concert promoter the Bowery Presents to book national acts. Sugarman, who said his company is the world's largest owner of bowling alleys, directed designers to fabricate a plexiglass wall at the end of the lanes so bowlers can watch the pin-setting machines in action. "There's something very tangible and human about throwing something and knocking something down," he said. The Ocean Club project, a bolder bet, will feature 130 condo units on top of a 54-room hotel, with asking prices starting at $900,000 for an 800-square-foot (74-square-meter) one-bedroom and stretching to $6 million for each of two penthouse apartments. "That's pretty high," said Peter Reinhart, director of the Kislak Real Estate Institute at nearby Monmouth University. "Most people aren't going to be primary residents. You have to ask, how deep is that market?" Sugarman said he's confident there'll be plenty of interest in the Ocean Club condos as well as in iStar's future residential projects. He's hoping the progress he has made so far will give high-end homebuyers, as well as development partners, confidence that the city's comeback will last. "You're not betting or gambling on whether something will happen -- it's already happened," Sugarman said. "There will be more of it. But with these last pieces that we've put in place, it feels like it's sort of the tipping point." A UISD assistant principal will soon take over the reigns at United Independent School District's Cuellar Elementary. The UISD school board voted to appoint Andrea Sanchez as principal at the school. She is currently an assistant principal at Antonio Gonzalez Middle. Sanchez will replace Melissa D. Shinn, who was recently named principal at Trautmann Elementary School. Show business documentaries about Sammy Davis Jr. and Gilda Radner will headline the 38th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the longest-running Jewish film fest in the world. The festivals lineup was announced on Tuesday, and as always, its a big deal. The Jewish Film Festival is long not quite like a season, but like a time of the year and a mood, not unlike the holidays. Like two whole Hanukkahs in one, it stretches well over two weeks and takes place in all parts of the Bay Area, so basically you have no excuse: They make it very easy for you to see these movies. Love, Gilda, Lisa DApolitos film about comedian Gilda Radner, takes the opening night spot. Its thoroughly entertaining, says Jay Rosenblatt, the festivals director of programming. It has a lot of poignancy, amazing clips and you realize what a loss it was, to have her die so young. DApolito will be there at the Castro on opening night, and so will Laraine Newman, from the original cast of Saturday Night Live. Sammy Davis, Jr.: Ive Gotta Be Me, a documentary by Sam Pollard, will close the festival, a choice that brings up an obvious question: Really? Sammy Davis? Isnt he a showbiz cliche? Going into the film, most people might have that bias, says Rosenblatt. But what the film does is break through those preconceptions to show a complicated and complex man who was on the forefront of civil rights. Davis, who converted to Judaism following a crisis in his life, also lost one eye in a car accident. Documentarian Liz Garbus (The Execution of Wanda Jean) will be honored with the festivals Freedom of Expression Award, in a ceremony that will include an onstage conversation with Garbus and Bonni Cohen (An Inconvenient Sequel). The conversation will be preceded by a screening of Garbus pilot for the TV series The Fourth Estate, an inside look at the New York Times as it covered the first 100 days of the Trump administration. More Information The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival The 38th installment of the Jewish film fest runs July 19-29 in S.F.; July 21-26 in Palo Alto; July 26-Aug. 2 in Albany; Aug. 3-5 in Oakland; and Aug. 3-5 in San Rafael. https://jfi.org/sfjff-2018 See More Collapse There are two centerpiece films. The dramatic centerpiece is To Dust, a dark comedy by Shawn Snyder about a grieving cantor (Geza Rohrig), obsessed with his newly dead wifes decomposition, who takes a biology class from a science teacher (Matthew Broderick). That sounds can we be honest here? pretty horrible, but it won the audience award at Tribeca, so it must have something going for it. Its very original, very unexpected, one of the most unusual buddy films Ive ever seen, says Rosenblatt. You know how some films grow on you? I dont know if its for everyone, but most people will appreciate it. The centerpiece documentary is The Waldheim Waltz, about Kurt Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary-general whom everyone considered a great guy until he ran for president of Austria in 1986. Thats when it came out that, in 1942, he was a senior officer in the SS and was involved in the expulsion of Jews from Greece. The Waldheim documentary is one of a trio of films in the Bless My Homeland, Forever series, all dealing with Austrias troubled past. The others are Murer: Anatomy of a Trial, a dramatic film about the 1963 trial of Franz Murer, known as the Butcher of Vilnius, and a 1924 silent film, The City Without Jews, about a town that deports all its Jews and then wants them back. Lost and forgotten, this prescient film, dating to almost 10 years before Hitlers rise to power, was found in a Paris flea market in 2015. This will be its international premiere. In addition to the bookend films and centerpieces, there are a number of interesting programs, including Hands On/Hands Off: Anatomy of a Feminist Film Movement. It will consist of two modern documentaries and a screening of the 1933 classic Baby Face, starring Barbara Stanwyck. We wanted something archival, a little older to ground it, says Rosenblatt. Its an interesting film, because its also about female empowerment shes an abuse survivor who takes power into her own hands. Among the many other films worthy of mention, heres one : Roberta Grossmans Who Will Write Our History. A combination drama and documentary, its the story of people in the Warsaw Ghetto who, during World War II, banded together to collect evidence of their experience and bury it, so that history would know the truth about what happened there. All told, the festival will be showing 67 films from 23 countries. These include three programs of shorts the Jewish Film is now an Academy Awards qualifying festival. That means that the shorts that win at the festival will automatically be looked at by the motion picture academy for Oscar consideration. The Jewish Film Festival takes place from July 19 through Aug. 5, in a variety of venues throughout the Bay Area. Not every film plays everywhere, so check the festivals website to see what plays where and when. Mick Lasalle is The San Francisco Chronicles film critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle Levy Park Conservancy is presenting a free double feature on June 29 with Moana sponsored by Texas Childrens Hospital and Gremlins 2: The New Batch from Alamo Drafthouse. Moana will start at 8 p.m. with Gremlins 2: The New Batch at 10 p.m. Disneys Moana is a sweeping, computer-animated feature film about an adventurous teenager who is inspired to leave the safety and security of her island on a daring journey to save her people. Inexplicably drawn to the ocean, Moana (voice of Aulii Cravalho) convinces the mighty demigod Maui (voice of Dwayne Johnson) to join her mission, and he reluctantly helps her become a way finder like her ancestors who sailed before her. Together, they voyage across the open ocean on an action-packed adventure, encountering enormous monsters and impossible odds, and along the way, Moana fulfills her quest and discovers the one thing shes always sought: her own identity. Six years after the original 1984 Gremlins, everybodys favorite tiny "Woolly Bullies" return to take "a bite outta the Big Apple" in Gremlins 2: The New Batch. Mogul Daniel Clamp (John Glover) decides to build a Chinatown Trade Center, which involves evicting the Chinese restaurant thats home to Gizmo and the original Mogwais. What he doesnt bargain for are Gremlins. Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates and Howie Mandel, the voice of Gizmo, return, joined by Christopher Lee as Dr. Catheter. Directed by Joe Dante. Humor, horror and devilish fun combine for a PG-13 rating. Family Movie Night is on the last Friday of each month. The crowd is invited to dress in Hawaiian attire. No outside furniture is allowed, but blankets or park chairs can be used. Levy Park is located at 3801 Eastside St. in Houston. Attendees can enjoy food and beverage service from Micos Rolled Ice Cream, Coffee Q and Balls Out Burgers from 5 to 10 p.m. Wine and beer is available through Levy Park Conservancy from 6 p.m. to midnight. The Fort Bend County Fair is accepting entries for contestants for the Fair Queen Scholarship Contest. The number of entries accepted will be limited to 20 contestants and registration deadline is June 30. A mandatory orientation meeting will be held on Sunday, July 15, at 2 p.m. in Building W at the fairgrounds, 4310 Texas 36 S. "The honor of wearing the crown is a tradition, said Lisa Reyes, co-chairperson of the Queen Scholarship Contest. These young ladies become great friends and learn so much during their run to be queen, it is rewarding to see the contestants transformations. As a committee, we want each candidates experience to be unique yet beneficial to them for any future endeavors they choose to take. Reigning queen Marissa Salazar has been busy attending events and representing the fair as its ambassador. Last year a new pre-determined scoring format debuted that included an essay and networking event. New this year is the registration deadline and limitation of the number of entries. The scholarship contest is for females between the ages of 15 and 19 who live in Fort Bend County. The competition is based on a personal interview, the essay, a networking event, community service and participation. Winners receive scholarships and prizes for their efforts, as well as the opportunity to serve as a community ambassador for the Fort Bend County Fair for the coming year. The 2018 Fort Bend County Fair Queen will be crowned on Sept. 28. Visit fortbendcountyfair.com for more information. The 2018 Fort Bend County Fair will run from Sept. 28 to Oct. 7. The Supreme Court decided Monday to again take up the case of a hunter who sued the National Park Service for stopping him from shooting moose from a hovercraft in Alaska. The case may seem provincial for the highest court in the land - and that is exactly the point, according to supporters of Anchorage, Alaska businessman and sportsman John Sturgeon. Narrowly, the case concerns the use of certain vehicles on federal waters in Alaska. More broadly, Sturgeon's supporters and detractors say, it may have wide implications for Alaska's relationship with the federal government - and whether the 49th state should be treated differently from those in the Lower 48. What happened: In 2007, three Park Service officers found Sturgeon and his hovercraft in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve in east central Alaska while he was hunting for moose. Trying to kill that animal wasn't the problem; the hovercraft was. Park Service rules prohibited such loud vehicles on park premises. But Sturgeon's lawyers would eventually argue that those rules for the other U.S. states do not apply in Alaska, where the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) sets more specific policies. That 1980 law allowed for accommodations such as commercial fishing and the use of snow machines and airplanes on federal conservation areas in the state. More broadly, Washington Post Supreme Court reporter Robert Barnes wrote in a profile of Sturgeon two years ago: "It might be difficult for those in 'America,' as some Alaskans refer to the Lower 48, to divine such an outcome from a case that many who know the court were surprised the justices decided to accept. "The distinctly underwhelming question - were federal officials legally justified in enforcing the hovercraft ban in the Alaskan preserve? - was deemed by the federal government's lawyers to be 'not in itself one of surpassing significance.' All agree that the answer lies in a statute that applies exclusively to the 49th state. "But Sturgeon's petition landed at a court whose conservative members increasingly are on alert for signs that federal bureaucrats are bursting through the limits of their statutory authority. "And it comes amid an ongoing siege in Oregon, where armed protesters are taking an unlawful but dramatic stand over the federal government's management of its vast Western landholdings. "Nowhere are the concerns more pronounced than in Alaska, where 60 percent of the land - an area bigger than California - is under federal control." In 2016 the Supreme Court unanimously agreed, overturning a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that had gone against Sturgeon. But that decision did not settle whether he could hovercraft his way back into parks. The extent of the state's independence from federal bureaucrats is even more relevant during Donald Trump's presidency. On Monday, the court agreed to rehear the case. Alaskans - at least those representing them in Congress - are sick of other politicians telling them not to drill in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In the GOP tax bill, Trump and Republicans in Congress permitted drilling in the ecologically sensitive area in the remote northeast corner of the state over the strenuous objections of Democrats and their environmental allies. Some of those same groups worry a victory for Sturgeon could cripple the Park Service's other enforcement powers in the resource-rich state. Republican Lisa Murkowski, the senior senator from Alaska, was glad to see the Supreme Court take up the case again. "Alaskans needed the Supreme Court to take this case in order to secure our right to reasonable access to Alaska's lands and waters and undo the damage threatened by the Ninth Circuit," she said in a statement. As the Trump administration and its supporters scrambled Tuesday to defend the separation of families at the border, late-night comics spent Monday night alternately mocking and excoriating them for confining hundreds of undocumented children in cages inside a large abandoned Walmart in South Texas. The skits targeted everyone from President Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has denied the policy of family separation at the border even exists, to "Fox and Friends" host Steve Doocy. On Monday, Doocy, noting he was "from a farm community," said he saw not "cages" confining the children but "chain-link fences - it's more like a security pen to me." Stephen Colbert satirized the defense of the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" family separation policy in a skit called "The Devil's Advocate." "Hello. Lucifer here," Colbert said on his CBS show. "You know, imprisoning children has been getting a lot of bad press lately. But prison: Is that really the worst place for kids? I mean, have you been to a Chuck E. Cheese? Some people refer to these facilities as cages, but on the other hoof, you see, I'm from a rural part of hell, and to me they look more like pens where they make Thomas Jefferson fight Charles Manson." Going after Nielsen, Colbert simply used her own words against her as she attempted to double down on justifying the administration's actions. On Sunday, Nielsen tweeted, "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period." "Then why are you locking up kids in an abandoned Walmart? Question mark. Exclamation point. Colon. With your head up it," Colbert said. Nielsen also told a group of sheriffs in a speech Monday, "We will not apologize for doing our job," and, "We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are in fact a family." "Yes, who can tell if these weeping toddlers are part of a family?" Colbert said. "They might not even be toddlers. They might be adults with shoes on their knees." "Yes, they're not gonna apologize," he continued. "What would that even look like? 'Yes, we've taken your children hostage. Sorry!'" On "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah," Noah devoted significant time to mocking immigration hard-liners who, in interviews with Fox News or CNN, offered positive descriptions of the conditions in which children are being held, saying they have plenty of food, clothes, toiletries and recreation. They are "being treated much better than most of the conditions I'm being told they left," CNN commentator Andre Bauer said. "That's not really the point," Noah said. "The point is, the federal government is effectively stealing kids away from their parents. Like, if some guy in an unmarked van took your kids from the park, the last thing you'd be worried about as a parent is how nice the van was or whether they had the good candy." (The show, being prerecorded, missed Laura Ingraham's description of the detention centers as "essentially summer camps" during her Fox show.) Noah did rip into Fox's Doocy over his comments about the cages being more like a "security pen" apparently reminiscent of a farm community. "Wow. I never thought I would hear a positive spin on detaining children," he said. "Look, I'm a cage-half-full kind of guy, you know. After all, what is a chain-link fence if not a wall made of silver linings?" Noah attacked Trump for backing away from the policy and trying to blame the Democrats for it. On "Late Night with Seth Meyers," Meyers called Trump's blame-shifting an attempt to "gaslight the country" into believing the Democrats created laws that require family separation for illegal border crossers. There is no such law on the books. During, Meyers's segment, he played a clip of Trump's comments he made to reporters Friday in which Trump said he "hates the children being taken away." "The Democrats gave us the laws," Trump said. "Now, I want the laws to be beautiful, humane, but strong." "Beautiful, humane and strong," Meyers repeated. "Trump's laws are starting to sound like the Tinder profile of a Russian scammer trying to catfish you." At the end of his segment, however, Meyers cut the comedy, calling for the resignation of any official who supports the "monstrous and morally repugnant" policy and saying any lawmaker who doesn't speak out is "complicit." --- Video Embed Code Video: Late show hosts slammed President Trump, the Justice Department and Homeland Security over their controversial immigration policy, which has resulted in the children of undocumented immigrants being separated from their parents.(The Washington Post) Embed code: Four years after hackers stole personal information from over 22 million people through the Office of Personnel Management, a fraud scheme exploiting that data has come to light in southeast Virginia. Two people have admitted in Newport News, Virginia, federal court they used the stolen identities to take out fake loans through a federal credit union. The case appears to be the first involving OPM data to be publicly revealed by the Justice Department. Kariva Cross, 39, pleaded guilty Monday to conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. Marlon McKnight, 40, pleaded guilty last week to the same charges. Both are from Bowie, Maryland, according to prosecutors, but have ties to the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Left unexplained is how Cross and McKnight obtained the OPM information. Government officials traced the hack to China, and a Chinese national was accused in California last year of using the same type of malware. Cross and McKnight were not accused of any hacking-related crimes. A spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia would not elaborate on how the two defendants got access to OPM data. The three would take out car and personal loans at Langley Federal Credit Union in the names of the victims, many of whom prosecutors say were based in Colorado and exposed through the OPM hack. Then they would pose as the car owners and cash loan checks or get wire transfers from the accounts they set up. The case began when a victim identified as "K.B." got a past due balance on a vehicle loan and contacted the bank, according to court documents. The fraudsters had the victim's Social Security number and driver's license information. Asked how they might have gotten the information, "K.B." revealed he or she was a victim of the OPM hack. A third woman, Erica Latin-Hunter, admitted in March she let her name be used as the supposed owner of a Nissan SUV sold to K.B. She then cashed checks against a loan made in K.B.'s name. Experts said it was unlikely that the people charged in the case had anything to do with the OPM breach. Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at the cybersecurity firm CA Veracode, said the information may have surfaced on the dark web, where criminals could have purchased it for as little as $20 to $30. He said there must have been a "telltale sign" that enabled investigators to confirm that it came from the OPM breach and not another data compromise. "It seems like there was a two- to three-year lag on seeing the crime, investigating it, catching and then indicting people, so maybe we'll start to see more of these coming now, with more prosecutions in the pipeline," Wysopal said. Charges were dismissed against three others who said they were unaware of the source of funds that ended up in their bank accounts, according to court filings. MEXICO CITY - In one case, a 10-year-old Mexican girl with Down syndrome was taken from her mother after an illegal border crossing and sent to a Texas shelter, Mexican officials say - even though her father, a legal U.S. resident, lived an hour down the highway. In another, a handful of Mexican children were shipped to Texas and Pennsylvania holding facilities while their mothers, who had entered the United States with them illegally, were moved to detention facilities near Seattle, officials said. The Mexican government offered a rare glimpseTuesday of the migrant families caught up in the Trump administration's controversial policy to separate parents from their children as part of more aggressive prosecution of illegal immigrants. The practice has been met with growing anger and condemnation outside the United States. Foreign governments have warned about long-term psychological damage to the children and vowed to work through their consular networks to swiftly reunite families. In Mexico's first public response to the "zero tolerance" policy, Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray called the family separations "cruel and inhumane." He said Mexico has lodged complaints at the highest levels of the Trump administration, including with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, as well as with the United Nations. "The government of Mexico cannot remain indifferent to a situation of this nature," Videgaray said. There was no immediate response to a request for comment from the Department of Homeland Security about the cases cited by the Mexican government. Outrage has been spreading quickly over a policy that has left migrant children in desert tent camps and in chain-link cages. A spokesman for the French government called the images of these children "shocking" and said Europe does not share the same values as the Trump administration. On Monday, the government of El Salvador and the U.N. secretary general also criticized the policy. "I want to express, in the name of the government and people of Mexico, our most categorical and energetic condemnation of this cruel and inhumane policy," Videgaray said at a news conference here on Tuesday. Mexico's network of 50 consulates in the United States has been working since the policy was first announced to find separated children and get them back to their families, he said. So far, fewer than 25 of the over 2,000 migrant children who have been taken from their parents - or about 1 percent - are Mexican, he said, noting that the vast majority have come from the Central American countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Most of the Mexican children have already been deported. Mexican officials say they are concerned about a number of Trump administration immigration policies, including the increasing numbers of detentions and deportations this year of undocumented immigrants. They also say they oppose the recent decision by Attorney General Jeff Sessions tomake it harder for people suffering from gang violence or domestic abuse to get asylum in the United States. "The increase of the anti-immigrant policies [of the Trump administration] has been systematic," Carlos Sada, a deputy foreign secretary in charge of North America, said in an interview. Videgaray highlighted the "particularly painful case" of a 10-year-old Mexican girl with Down syndrome who was taken away from her mother last week and is in a shelter in McAllen, Texas, along with her twin brother. The father is a U.S. resident living about 60 miles away, in Brownsville, Texas, he said. Videgaray urged U.S. authorities to reunite the girl with her father as soon as possible. Sada said Mexican authorities have been told the girl has not been released because U.S. officials are "still evaluating the father." In another case, a dozen Mexican children were taken from their mothers, who were detained in Seattle after crossing the U.S. border, officials said. Seven of the children have been sent back to relatives in Mexico, but the other five have been dispatched to detention centers across the country, Sada said. Mexican officials said that parents often do not have a way to communicate with their children when they are being held in separate detention centers. "We know many cases where the parents simply can't talk to their kids," Videgaray said. Trump lashed out at Mexico on Tuesday, saying the country does "nothing for us" to stop illegal immigration into the United States. In recent years, the rampant violence and poverty in Central American nations has driven people by the thousands to seek refuge or a better life in the United States. In the first year of the Trump administration, the number of apprehensions of border crossers - a proxy for overall numbers of illegal entrants -fell sharply. But illegal crossings have been rising again this year, angering Trump and leading to more severe policies intended to deter people from entering the United States. Nielsen, the DHS chief, has said that releasing parents who bring children illegally across the border would be like giving them a "get out of jail free card." The Trump administration has said it has kept the migrant children in government care while it carries out background checks on those seeking to take custody of them. The new policy of seeking to prosecute all those caught entering illegally - which results in the separation of adults from their children - has been greeted by rejection around the world. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned Monday that "children must not be traumatized by being separated from their parents." A spokesman for the French government, Benjamin Griveaux, told a French television station that Europe and the United States "do not share the same model of civilization; clearly we don't share certain values." The government of El Salvador, the homeland of many of the separated children, said in a statement Monday that the Trump administration's policy is exposing boys and girls to "extremely adverse conditions that surely will have long-term consequences on their physical health and psychological development." Videgaray, the Mexican foreign minister, said Central American officials would convene in Mexico in the coming days to formulate a further response to the Trump administration, with the goal of "ending this policy that violates the human rights of girls and boys, no matter their nationality." Texas politicians often boast about the state's cheap real estate, but not much thought is given as to who can actually afford it. On Wednesday, the National Low Income Housing Coalition released new figures on the gap between renters' wages and the cost of rental housing in the U.S. In Texas, renters need to make roughly $19 an hour to afford a two-bedroom rental home, or an annual income slightly more than $40,000. If they were making minimum wage, or $7.25 in Texas, they would need to work 107 hours a week to afford the same home. MANAGUA, NICARAGUA - Amid the deepening political crisis in Nicaragua, opposition leaders from a key city that had once cradled President Daniel Ortega's socialist revolution on Monday announced that they do not recognize Ortega's leadership and that they would create a commission to self-govern the city. The town of Masaya, about 15 miles south of the capital city of Managua, was a bastion of support for Ortega and his Sandinista rebels who overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. For the past few weeks, Masaya has been controlled by protesters, a warren of citizen-manned roadblocks and barricades, with city hall abandoned and police hunkered down in their barracks. Those protest leaders now say they don't recognize Ortega's government, which they blame for the deaths of more than 200 people over the past two months. Instead, a five-member "junta of national salvation" will govern Masaya, seeking to administer a city, including cleaning up trash and restocking food in a city of blocked streets. "What we are doing is making it official," Yubrank Suazo, a coordinator of the protest movement in Masaya, said of the new governing commission. "In fact, Masaya has not recognized this government for weeks." The events in Masaya represent the ever-growing divide between Ortega, in his third consecutive term, and vast swaths of Nicaragua, as violence spreads. Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, have held near-total power for years but protests in April over changes to social security quickly morphed into a nationwide movement demanding democracy and justice, and grew more emphatic after police and pro-government militias responded with violence against protesters. On Saturday, in one of the deadliest incidents since the unrest began, gunmen set fire to a building in the Carlos Marx neighborhood of Managua and burned alive a family of six, including two young children, who were trapped inside, according to neighbors and witnesses. "I managed to get out of the room and from a balcony on the second floor, I threw myself into the street," said Cinthia Velasquez, one member of the family, who survived the fire. Velasquez said she woke to noises early Saturday morning and looked outside to see masked gunmen accompanied by police. The men broke down a gate, locked the family inside, and started firing and hurling Molotov cocktails inside, she said. Her father, Oscar Velasquez, a 47-year-old Protestant pastor who made a living selling mattresses, died in the blaze, along with his wife, Maritza Lopez, and their son, his wife, and two children, ages 3 years old and 3 months old. "We couldn't save them because when people began to leave their houses to help, police shot at us," said Nahun Dona, a neighbor who saw the fire. Relatives and neighbors said they do not know why government forces attacked the family. The neighborhood is a stronghold of protesters and filled with barricades. Some speculated that police wanted the building as a sniper post and the family refused to move. Foreign Minister Denis Moncada Colindres denied that security forces were involved in the fire and attributed the crime to "criminal groups that are prowling the neighborhood." But such ongoing violence, and roving bands of pro-government militiamen accused of other killings and kidnappings, has frustrated attempts at dialogue. On Monday, leaders of student protesters and civil society groups in Managua said they were walking away from the negotiating table with Ortega's government, because Ortega had not invited the United Nations, European Union and human rights groups into the discussion. "We cannot keep talking with this government, which does not have political will in terms of human rights," said Azahalea Solis, a civil society member involved in the talks, according to the La Prensa newspaper. Last week, protesters across Nicaragua held a one-day national strike. In some places, such as the city of Leon, protesters have said they would remain on strike indefinitely until Ortega and Murillo step down. In Masaya, which has been the scene of street battles between police, militiamen and protesters, some 20 people have been killed in recent weeks, according human rights groups. A public hospital in the city has been wrested from government control. Each night, residents using bullhorns call on a top police commander and his men to surrender and leave town, according to residents. "Masaya is on strike, there is no presence of the central government, nor of the municipal government, and it's logical that facing so much repression and death the population does not feel represented," said Alvaro Leiva, director of the Nicaraguan Association for the Defense of Human Rights. At a Monday afternoon press conference, a group of protest leaders in Masaya announced the creation of the five-member municipal governing commission, but did not name the members. They blamed Ortega's government for the violence and said that security forces have the city surrounded. "We proclaim to the world, we are partisans for peace," said Cristian Fajardo, one of the protest leaders. "We don't want war." The crowd that had gathered chanted "for our martyrs, justice!" and "long live the capital of the resistance!" Morgan County Sheriff ARRESTS, CITATIONS Thomas E. Calhoun, 49, of 13761 High St., Petersburg, was booked into the Morgan County jail at 9:28 p.m. Saturday on a domestic battery charge. Mary N. Adams, 37, of 1033 Sheridan Drive was booked into the Morgan County jail at 1:33 a.m. Sunday on charges of driving under the influence. Jacksonville Police ARRESTS, CITATIONS Denver H. Nelson, 24, of 428 S. East St. was booked into the Morgan County jail at 1:15 p.m. Sunday on a charge of driving while license is revoked or suspended. Pike County Sheriff ARRESTS, CITATIONS Danielle E. Coultas, 18, of Nebo was arrested at 12:31 a.m. Sunday on charges of burglary, theft and criminal trespass. Corey W. Lawson, 38, of Hull was arrested at 7:17 p.m. Saturday on a domestic battery charge. Laura K. Chamberlain, 24, of Pittsfield was arrested at 3:14 a.m. Saturday on a charge of driving under the influence. Jeffery L. Payne, 52, of Memphis, Tennessee, was arrested at 6:39 p.m. Thursday on charges of burglary and criminal damage to property. Michael E. Howland, 43, of Nebo was arrested at 2:49 p.m. June 12 on a warrant accusing him of failing to appear in court for a sentencing hearing on a possession of methamphetamine charge. Emma S. Kaufmann, 19, of Indianapolis, Indiana, was arrested at 2:54 p.m. June 8 on charges of possession of a controlled substance, possession of alcohol by a minor, possession of drug paraphernalia, possession of cannabis and illegal transportation of alcohol. Jillian E. Labrecque, 26, of Indianapolis, Indiana, was arrested at 2:54 p.m. June 8 on charges of possession of a controlled substance, possession of cannabis, driving while license is revoked or suspended, speeding, illegal transportation of alcohol and possession of drug paraphernalia. David J. McDaniel, 28, of Indianapolis, Indiana, was arrested at 2:54 p.m. June 8 on a possession of cannabis charge. Spencer A. Miller, 19, of Pleasant Hill was arrested at 9:50 p.m. June 8 on a possession of alcohol by a minor charge. Rachelle R. Gress, 21, of Griggsville was arrested at 9:28 p.m. June 7 on domestic battery and criminal damage to property charges. Cassandra L. Thompson, 26, of Winchester was arrested at 6:07 p.m. June 7 on charges of possession of methamphetamine, driving while license is revoked or suspended and violation of hypodermic needle laws. Cole W. Sidwell, 29, of Pleasant Hill was arrested at 10:23 p.m. June 6 on charges of driving while license is revoked or suspended, resisting arrest and fleeing to elude. Samantha L. Appelberg, 33, of Lewistown was arrested at 1:40 p.m. June 5 on a petition to revoke bond. David M. Sampley, 63, of Pittsfield was arrested at 1:20 a.m. June 5 on charges of domestic battery, aggravated battery and criminal sexual assault. Kennard R. Scranton, 33, of Lewistown was arrested at 2:06 p.m. June 5 on a petition to revoke bond. Aaron M. Coats, 29, of Springfield was arrested at 1:30 p.m. June 4 on charges of burglary and obstructing justice and on an unspecified in-state warrant. Charles L. Goewey, 40, of Nebo was arrested at 2:44 p.m. June 4 on charges of aggravated battery and obstructing justice. Scott County Winchester Police ARRESTS, CITATIONS Clay R. Manley, 47, of Winchester was arrested at 1:05 a.m. Sunday on charges of operating an uninsured vehicle, having no valid registration, driving while license is suspended and unlawful display of a license plate. Compiled by David C.L. Bauer, Samantha McDaniel-Ogletree In the early weeks of January 1942, relying on an old World's Fair guidebook to find his way, Reinhard Hardegen brought his German U-boat near the mouth of New York Harbor. A Kapitanleutnant at the time, holding the equivalent rank of a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, he was close enough to shore that, standing on his submarine's bridge in the dark of night, he could watch the Ferris wheel turn above Coney Island, spot the headlights of cars and see the distant glow of skyscrapers in Manhattan. "I cannot describe the feeling with words," he later wrote in a memoir, "but it was unbelievably beautiful and great. . . . We were the first to be here, and for the first time in this war a German soldier looked out upon the coast of the U.S.A." That same night - by then, the morning of Jan. 15, 1942 - Lt. Hardegen and his crew fired torpedoes at the Coimbra, a British tanker ship carrying oil off the coast of Long Island. Thirty-six crew members were killed as the ship sank into the sea, its bow pointing out of the water like a buoy that, Lt. Hardegen declared, marked the way to New York City. In two patrols along the East Coast, Lt. Hardegen - who went on to achieve the rank of lieutenant commander - sank about two dozen merchant ships, part of a German military campaign to sever the supply chain between the United States and Britain. He became a hero in Germany, where Adolf Hitler personally awarded him the country's highest military honor, but later disavowed any support for the Nazi party, became involved in German state politics and returned to the United States to speak with veterans groups and meet with the families of his wartime victims. He was 105, and considered the last surviving captain of an Unterseeboot, when he died June 9, apparently in Germany. Christian Weber, president of the Bremen State Parliament in Germany, confirmed the death but did not provide additional information. A onetime navy aviator, Cmdr. Hardegen joined the German submarine division after a plane crash left him with a shortened leg and chronically bleeding stomach. He had to conceal his injuries to enter the U-boat force, according to a 2009 account in the Virginian-Pilot, but soon rose to command a submarine that sank several vessels off the western coast of Africa. In December 1941, days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war on the United States and began its U-boat campaign, dubbed Operation Drumbeat. Cmdr. Hardegen was given command of U-123, and on Jan. 12, 1942, about three weeks after departing from the German base in France, his submarine sank the British freighter Cyclops near Nova Scotia, killing 99 crew members. It was the first of nearly 400 Allied ships sunk during the campaign, according to historian Michael Gannon's book "Operation Drumbeat" (1990). The loss of supplies "constituted a greater strategic setback for the Allied war effort than did the defeat at Pearl Harbor," he wrote, adding that for the United States, "in terms of raw resources and material . . . [it] constituted the costliest defeat of World War II." By Gannon's count, about 5,000 people were killed by the U-boat attacks, which diminished in the second half of 1942 as merchant vessels began traveling in armed convoys, and as American forces utilized advanced radar and sonar technologies to hunt the submarines. Cmdr. Hardegen was credited by Gannon with sinking or crippling 19 ships; other sources credit him with downing about two dozen. In the absence of mandatory blackouts, Cmdr. Hardegen was able to spend weeks at sea targeting tankers and freighters illuminated by the glow of city lights. He later told the Charlotte Observer that he was "very surprised" at the lack of maritime defenses - "no blackouts, no dimming, nothing" - and was among several German naval commanders to describe America's Atlantic coast as a "shooting gallery." The waters off Cape Hatteras, in North Carolina, became known as "Torpedo Junction" for the U-boats that preyed there, and sailors' bodies regularly washed up on shore. Cmdr. Hardegen, however, said he did his best to mitigate losses and assist survivors. In accounts that Gannon later corroborated, he said he approached one lifeboat to give the survivors buckets of food, along with a knife; on another occasion, he stopped a neutral Swiss ship and ordered it to pick up survivors from a sunken merchant vessel. "Everyone stood at the railing, waved and wished us a good homecoming," Cmdr. Hardegen wrote in his captain's log. "Let's hope that they tell this at home and effectively dampen the atrocity propaganda about us." While most U-boat attacks occurred miles away from shore and far from major cities, Cmdr. Hardegen terrorized the Florida coast on April 10, 1942, when he fired a torpedo into the SS Gulfamerica in shallow waters off Jacksonville Beach. Within minutes, flames erupted from the tanker and residents ran to the beach. Cmdr. Hardegen was close enough to see their faces, according to a subsequent account in the Orlando Sentinel, and positioned his submarine between the beach and the crippled ship to fire shells from his deck cannon, sinking the Gulfamerica. Nineteen crew members were killed, and civilians clambered aboard rowboats to rescue the survivors. "All the vacationers had seen an impressive special performance at Roosevelt's expense," Cmdr. Hardegen wrote in his log. "A burning tanker, artillery fire, the silhouette of a U-boat, how often had all of that been seen in America?" Cmdr. Hardegen recalled nearly being sunk by a destroyer near St. Augustine, Florida, but returned to Europe to fanfare from Hitler, who awarded him the Knight's Cross with oak leaves and invited him to a private dinner. "I said, 'It would be better to have more air forces and submarines, and fewer tanks,' " Cmdr. Hardegen told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1999. "He was angry. He said he knew better. I told him he looked too much to the land, and he didn't like that." Cmdr. Hardegen said he was chided for his remarks but believed it was his duty to speak his mind. "I was not a Nazi," he said. "I did my duty for my country, not for Hitler." The son of a high school teacher who wrote biographies of naval heroes, Reinhard Hardegen was born in Bremen on March 8, 1913. He entered the Navy in 1933 and became a submarine instructor in late 1942, after his meeting with Hitler. He later became chief of U-boat training and was transferred to command of an infantry unit near the close of the war. Cmdr. Hardegen spent one year in British captivity during peacetime, apparently because of a mix-up with an SS officer who shared his last name, and eventually founded an oil company in Bremen. In a twist of fate, he briefly worked for Texaco, which owned one of the oil tankers he had damaged during the war. For two decades, he also served in the Bremen State Parliament as a member of the Christian Democratic Union party. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available. Cmdr. Hardegen made a well-publicized return to the United States after the publication of "Operation Drumbeat," saying he wanted to "show Americans that the enemies of yesterday are friends of today." His car - he reportedly drove until he was 100 - bore a license tag reading "U-123," but he said he had otherwise moved far past military life. "Now I sink putts," he told the Journal-Constitution. "Not ships." The FBI announced Tuesday that investigators have linked a single man to a series of rapes committed in hotels in Washington and its suburbs over an eight-year period. Authorities say DNA collected from victims and crime scenes in D.C., Maryland and Virginia shows one man is responsible, but they have not yet been able to identify him. The assaults occurred between 1998 and 2006. The U.S. attorney's office for the District of Columbia, in an unusual move, used the evidence to obtain an indictment, charging the unknown John Doe with two counts of rape in 2003 incidents. The indictment was filed May 1 and announced on Tuesday. Washington has a 15-year statute of limitations for rape, which means the charges were about to expire. There is no statute of limitations for rape in Virginia and Maryland, meaning those cases can be charged and tried anytime a suspect is identified. Authorities said DNA has linked the man to six attacks in Maryland and Virginia, and he is a suspect in other assaults. The assailant's DNA profile does not appear to be in vast databases collected by law enforcement. The D.C. Superior Court indictment alleges that on May 11, 2003 the man sexually assaulted a worker at the Renaissance Hotel on Ninth Street Northwest, at Mount Vernon Square. The indictment says the man entered a guest room while the woman was already inside, attacking her and stealing her necklace. On May 23, 2003, the indictment alleges, the same man entered a room at the Jefferson Hotel, at Scott Circle, and sexually assaulted a victim who was over 60 years old. The new avocados rolling out to Costco stores in the Midwest this week don't look like the future of fresh produce. But they're quietly testing technology that could more than double the shelf life of vegetables and fruits. That technology, developed by the Goleta-based start-up Apeel Sciences, consists of an invisible, plant-based film that reinforces the avocados' own skin. The company hopes to expand to stores nationwide - as well as to a range of other produce, from nectarines to asparagus. Experts say the product, which has quadrupled shelf life in a lab setting, has the potential to make foods less perishable - with huge boons for consumers, the environment and the food industry. Fresh fruit and vegetables account for more than 40 percent of wasted food in the United States, according to the food waste coalition ReFED. Apeel and other companies are working on technologies that could help slash those figures, and enable produce to travel farther and with less refrigeration, improving quality, selection and carbon footprint. "Already, we're able to bring avocados to places that didn't have access to top-quality before, or that often ran out," said James Rogers, Apeel's chief executive. "It's so rewarding to me personally to bring this fruit to places that wouldn't normally have that access." Apeel works much like the skins and peels on many types of produce. Made from cellular material extracted from plants, the semipermeable film adheres to the outside of the avocado and slows the rate at which it loses water and carbon dioxide and absorbs oxygen. Fresh produce spoils as it respires, which is why packers and distributors chill produce or spray it with coats of wax. Unlike wax, Apeel is designed to optimize water and oxygen exchange, boosting quality and shelf life, Rogers said. Consumers won't pay more for Apeel produce, he added, because retailers who use it save money by reducing their losses from spoilage. "The way we're set up, it's more expensive for them not to use the product," Rogers said. Few dispute the notion that waste represents an enormous cost to the food industry. According to ReFED, the U.S. wastes roughly 63 million tons of food each year, 40 percent of that in grocery stores and restaurants. ReFED estimates that reducing fruit and vegetable waste would represent an $18.2-billion opportunity for retailers. Extending shelf life, experts say, could also avoid wasting water and fertilizer on food that consumers will never eat. "The opportunity for Apeel is in addressing the 42 percent of overall waste that's fruits and vegetables," said Chris Cochrane, the director of ReFED. "And that could be incredibly significant." Down the line, Apeel's technology could have other benefits: improving the selection of fresh produce or reducing the need for refrigeration. The company has experimented with a film for tomatoes, which are typically picked and shipped long before ripeness to arrive fresh at stores. A longer shelf-life could mean they remain on the vine, absorbing flavor and nutrients, far longer. Apeel has received significant funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a film for cassava, a staple crop in Africa. Many African countries lack reliable, refrigerated supply chains, which causes them to lose large portions of their harvests. In a news release announcing the grant, the Gates Foundation said Apeel could "protect crops from bacteria, fungi, and insects; reduce crop destruction; and possibly extend the foods' shelf life without refrigeration." Rogers has argued that Apeel can help address hunger and increase farmers' profits. The company is currently awaiting regulatory approval in Nigeria and Kenya. Closer to home, he said, Apeel will let farmers ship niche products - such as finger limes - to more distant and profitable markets. Experts said Apeel's promises have potential, even if it's too early to evaluate them. "I think we'll have to wait and see if all these things pan out," said Kathleen Merrigan, the head of the Food Institute at George Washington University and the former deputy secretary of agriculture under the Obama administration. "But we know that all Americans need to increase their fruit and vegetable intake. Anything that makes that supply chain more efficient and cost effective is great." For now, Apeel is focused on shipping its avocados to more stores - and expanding the range of fruits and vegetables that use its technology. Within the year, Rogers said, he hopes to have Apeel avocados in Costco stores nationally. The company has also developed skins for strawberries, bananas, mangoes, peaches, pears, nectarines, green beans, citrus fruits and asparagus. It expects citrus and asparagus will be the next Apeel products on the market. Dozens of other companies are working on their own "shelf life extension solutions" - though none with the quite the funding of Apeel. According to Crunchbase, the company has received $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz and DBL Partners, as well as the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations. One promising initiative called FreshPaper uses sheets of treated paper, placed in salad bags and produce bins, to inhibit bacterial and fungal growth, ReFED's Cochrane said. And a Canadian company has developed a spray for retailers to extend the shelf life of produce, said Carol Culhane, a food technology consultant. "It's become a bit of a movement," Culhane said. "We're getting to a turning point - so many companies are beginning to say 'we need to do something about this.'" From California to Texas, Colorado to Tennessee and even north to Canada, people reacted to the U.S. policy of separating immigrants from their children by opening their wallets this week donating millions of dollars online to a San Antonio-based legal defense group. Spearheaded by a California couple whose initial goal was a modest $1,500, a Facebook fundraiser raised about $6.4 million in less than a week for RAICES, a nonprofit agency that provides legal aid to immigrants and refugees and runs a small shelter here. RAICES own fundraising efforts, powered by the Action Network, an online mobilization tool, had raised nearly $2.5 million for its immigrant bond fund and had surpassed its initial goal of $819,000 for its fund to represent unaccompanied children from Mexico and Central America. It was not immediately clear whether that was part of the Facebook fund but if it was a wholly separate effort, as it appeared, the total was more than $9.5 million by Tuesday evening. The organizations small staff did not return requests for comment made by phone, email and Twitter. One official at RAICES it stands for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services told USA Today on Monday that the donations have absolutely blown us away. Jennifer Hixon, RAICES director of education, outreach and development, told the paper that the nonprofit plans to speak about its plans for the funds Wednesday. Weve rapidly reached out to other organizations doing complementary work in Texas to set up a network to cover all the federal courts, develop a database with all separated families, and a pro bono referral network to ensure representation for every family, said Hixon, who also runs RAICES shelter and handles volunteers. This feels outrageously ambitious, she added, but we kind of feel like this is the moment to do the big things. The donations have been part of a crescendo of criticism against the Trump administrations attempt to deter illegal immigration by routinely prosecuting undocumented border crossers as criminals, rather than treating the cases as civil misdemeanors. Most are now jailed, requiring they be separated from children accompanying them. The agency needs additional attorneys and staff compassionate, sincere people with expertise as well as support systems, said Maria Antonietta Berriozabal, a former San Antonio city councilwoman and founder of the activist Pro Immigrant Coalition. Berriozabal said she was thrilled with the spike in fundraising but not altogether surprised. People have heard the crying of the children and people have seen their faces, Berriozabal said. People have seen the pain on parents faces and people want to do something. The responses by donors she has read on Facebook indicate their feelings of helplessness in the face of inhumane policies but also illustrate the nations compassion, she added. Everyone prays, but thats not enough, Berriozabal said. Local activists are planning a Vigil for Humanity at 6 p.m. Sunday in front of San Fernando Cathedral, she said. Kate Mendez, who works for a social service agency in Greenville, South Carolina, was among those waiting to participate in a RAICES webinar for volunteers Tuesday that hadnt materialized half an hour after its scheduled start as of 1:30 p.m. She wanted to help and had hoped to get a firsthand account of what was happening on the ground on the structural level, Mendez said, calling the family separations barbaric at worst, not thoughtful at best. The USA Today story called the Facebook fundraising for RAICES the largest single fundraiser ever on the site. It reportedly got contributions from the social media networks founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and its top executive, Sheryl Sandberg. Initiated by Charlotte and Dave Willner, a Silicon Valley couple, on Saturday morning, it had already received $5 million from more than 125,000 individuals by early Tuesday and showed no signs of stopping, Charlotte Willner said through a spokeswoman. The average donation was about $50. RAICES own campaign, called RAICES Family Reunification and Bond Fund: FREE Our Families, explained the immediate legal needs of those immigrants separated from their children after apprehension. Parents separated from their children at the border (and other immigrants placed in detention) cant get released from ICE custody to reunite with their families until they pay the full amount of their immigration bond, its website said. Bonds are set at a minimum of $1,500, and are usually in the range of $5,000 to $10,000, even for asylum seekers without any criminal history. Unlike in the criminal system, bail bond companies either do not help people in immigration proceedings or impose very strict requirements, like private ankle monitors (which families have to pay to rent). RAICES online discussion board for its Families Together: Pro Bono and Post Release Project continued to get supportive comments from people nationwide and beyond. Late Tuesday, it received this note: Im a retired Florida family lawyer and retired family court judge now living in Vancouver, Canada. I am willing to help however I can and am willing to travel. I am at your service. Elaine Ayala is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | eayala@express-news.net | Twitter: @ElaineAyala The school bus driver involved in a fatal 2016 crash that left six children dead in Chattanooga has been booked on a felony charge of aggravated statutory rape. Suspect Was Out on Bond Prior to Statutory Rape Arrest According to the Tennessean, Johnthony K. Walker, 25, was booked into Davidson County Jail at 9:45 pm Thursday on a felony charge of aggravated statutory rape of a 14-year-old. He is being held at the Hill Detention Center, a maximum security facility, on a $350,000 bond. Walker was previously found guilty on six counts of criminally negligent homicide, 11 counts of reckless aggravated assault, and seven counts of assault for a fatal school bus crash that killed six children in November 2016. He was also found guilty of reckless endangerment, reckless driving, and distracted driving. While Walker had been sentenced to 4 years in prison, he was free on bond pending an appeal prior to his latest arrest in Nashville. Walker will appear in court on Monday. Bus Accident Statistics The following information was provided by the U.S. Department of Transportation: There were 4,311 large trucks and buses were involved in fatal crashes in 2015, which was an 8 percent increase from the previous year. From 2005 to 2015, intercity buses accounted for 13 percent, and school buses and transit buses accounted for 41 percent and 33 percent, respectively, of all buses involved in crashes that were fatal. Between 2014 and 2015, the number of buses involved in crashes that caused fatalities increased from 236 to 261, which is an increase of 11 percent. Contact an Experienced Bus Accident Attorney If you or your child have been injured in a bus accident, contact Thomas J. Henry. Our team of experienced bus accident attorneys are available to evaluate your claim 24/7, nights and weekends. Thomas J. Henry has the financial resources and the track record of winning that you need in a law firm. Contact us today for a free case review. Our firm has offices in Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston, serving clients across Texas and nationwide. Editors Note: This content is made possible by Thomas J. Henry Personal Injury Law. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of The San Antonio Express-News' or mySanAntonio.com's editorial staff. Learn more about our advertising products at www.hearstmediasanantonio.com. Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Politics By Legislator Anker's Office Published: June 19 2018 On June 4, Legislator Anker administered the oath of office to the newly-elected officers. Mount Sinai, NY - June 19, 2018 - On Monday, June 4, Suffolk County Legislator Anker attended the On Monday, June 4, Suffolk County Legislator Anker attended the Mount Sinai Civic Association to administer the oaths of office for President Ann Becker, Vice President and Corresponding Secretary Brad Arrington, Membership Secretary Jennifer Roth, Recording Secretary Lisa Pfeffer and newly elected Treasurer Monica Stone. Being involved in your local civic organization is the key to maintaining happy and healthy communities, said Legislator Anker. As a longtime member, it was my pleasure to administer the Oath of Office to the Mount Sinai Civic Officers. Established in 1916, the Mount Sinai Civic is involved in zoning issues, land preservation, traffic calming, safety issues and educating residents about political, educational and social activities. Local News, Crime By Long Island News & PR Published: June 19 2018 On March 9, 2000, a body was discovered in a wooded on the shoulder of Northern State Parkway in Dix Hills. A picture of the shirt worn by an unknown 2000 homicide victim (left), and a facial reconstruction image of the victim (right). Dix Hills, NY - June 19, 2018 - State Police in Brentwood continue to investigate the 2000 murder of an unidentified male subject in Dix Hills, NY. On March 9, 2000, the body of an unidentified white or light-skinned Hispanic male was discovered in a wooded area on the eastbound shoulder of the Northern State Parkway in Dix Hills. The remains were located by highway contract workers in a black plastic garbage bag. The victim had been shot in the face and torso and his date of death is estimated to have been between January 2000 and March 2000. The victim is described as approximately 35-45 years old, 510, and 140 lbs. The man was clothed in Levis blue jeans, a navy blue bathing suit, olive colored Levis short sleeve shirt and olive colored t-shirt with a multi-colored picture and the words New Jersey. The victim has no visible tattoos or scars. To date, the victim in this investigation has never been identified and the case remains an open homicide. A facial reconstruction image was created in hopes of identifying the man. The victims date of death is estimated to have been between January and March of 2000. Suffolk County Crime Stoppers is offering a $5,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest of the person or persons responsible for the crime. Nature & Weather, Local News, Health & Wellness By Long Island News & PR Published: June 19 2018 Wadsworth Center Laboratory and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Aim to Improve Diagnosis of Lyme Disease and Develop New Treatments. Albany, NY - June 19, 2018 - Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced a new, groundbreaking public-private research collaboration to advance the diagnosis and treatment of tick-borne diseases. The New York State Department of Health Wadsworth Center Laboratory and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. - a leading biotechnology company that invents life-transforming medicines for people with serious diseases, will collaborate to potentially develop improved diagnostics, prophylactics, and therapeutics for the diagnosis and treatment of tick-borne diseases, starting with Lyme disease. "This public-private collaboration harnesses the expertise of a world-leading biotech company to tackle one of the most pressing public health issues of our time," Governor Cuomo said. "Together, Regeneron and the Wadsworth Center Laboratory have the potential to advance health research, develop life-saving treatments for Lyme disease, and address major gaps in our knowledge of tick-borne illnesses. New York is proud to help bolster our world-class, life sciences industry while investing in a safer, healthier Empire State for all." Tick-borne diseases, particularly Lyme disease, are among the fastest growing infectious diseases in the United States. When diagnosed correctly and treated, most Lyme disease patients recover within two weeks. However, proven diagnostic tests for Lyme disease have been mostly unchanged for the past 40 years and can have limitations when used at certain times during the course of illness, leaving patients and their providers frustrated, which may lead to missed opportunities for treatment. Regeneron and the Wadsworth Center Laboratory will jointly research how the causative agent of Lyme disease, the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, replicates when a human is bitten by a tick carrying the bacterium, and how the host's immune response is activated. This information will potentially advance the development of improved diagnostics, prophylactics, and new therapeutics. Over the course of five years, Regeneron will invest up to $48 million in this research and the state will reimburse 50 percent of Regeneron's research costs up to a total reimbursement of $24 million through the New York State Life Sciences Initiative. Additionally, up to $6 million will be provided to Wadsworth Center Laboratory through the Life Sciences Initiative. The groundbreaking collaboration between Regeneron and the Department of Health's Wadsworth Center Laboratory builds on Governor Cuomo's $750 million commitment to support construction of a new worldclass, stateoftheart Wadsworth Center Laboratory public health laboratory in the Capital Region that will promote collaborative public-private research. Redesigned as "A Lab for The 21st century," Wadsworth will function as a magnet for future private sector investments where employees, visiting researchers, company executives, and academic partners cross paths to accelerate innovation and value creation. As one of the world's largest public health research laboratories, this modern facility and committed co-investment will serve as a flagship project for the state, signaling a strong and long-term commitment to the Capital Region's life sciences industry. The Wadsworth Center Laboratory serves a vital role in the Department of Health's efforts to protect and promote the health of New York residents. Building on more than a century of excellence as the state's public health laboratory, the Wadsworth Center Laboratory continues as a premier biomedical institute that merges clinical and environmental testing with fundamental, applied and translational research. Today, laboratory scientists use both classical and contemporary approaches to study environmental and biological questions related to human health and disease, which will support the collaboration with Regeneron. Regeneron is a science-driven, world-leading biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Tarrytown, New York that discovers, develops and manufactures innovative medicines. Regeneron was established as a biotech start-up in 1988 in New York City, and the following year, under the leadership of then-Governor Mario Cuomo, Empire State Development invested $250,000 to support the company's growth. Within years, the state realized a 300-percent return on that investment. Regeneron is now the largest biotech company in New York State and one of the largest in the world, with several approved treatments and a robust pipeline of compounds all developed in New York laboratories. Regeneron is progressing several important potential infectious disease treatments, all of which were built and tested using the company's proprietary VelociSuite platforms. Regeneron's Rapid Response capability speeds development of potential treatments by using their VelociGene and VelocImmune technologies to quickly develop fully human antibodies specific to a particular pathogen and create a genetically humanized model to test and validate these antibodies. The company recently delivered its investigational Ebola treatment, REGN-EB3, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo for potential use in the ongoing outbreak. ESD President, CEO & Commissioner Howard Zemsky said, "Empire State Development is proud to incentivize this innovative partnership between Regeneron and the Wadsworth Center Laboratory that both advances human health and spurs the growth of a world-class life science research cluster in New York." Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker said, "The Department's Wadsworth Center Laboratory is home to some of the nation's premier research scientists, and by partnering with a first-class organization like Regeneron, we are taking a significant step forward in developing a more accurate and efficient test to diagnose and ultimately treat these devastating diseases. Governor Cuomo understands the important role research plays in improving the health and well-being of New Yorkers." "As a proud New York biotech company, we appreciate the continued commitment of Governor Cuomo's administration to make New York the ideal location to progress innovative life science research," said Leonard S. Schleifer, M.D., Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Regeneron. "We are looking forward to expanding the potential impact of our infectious disease program and collaborating with the Wadsworth Center Laboratory on potential solutions for tick-borne diseases, which are increasing in incidence and can be extremely difficult to diagnose and treat." Senator Sue Serino, Chair of the Task Force on Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases said, "Since taking office, I have heard from countless New Yorkers who have suffered gravely as a result of an inaccurate Lyme Disease diagnosis and lack of advancement in this field. Last year, Senator Kemp Hannon and I held a joint hearing to help the state improve its response to the Lyme and tick-borne disease epidemic. At that time, we urged the state to lead the way and make a significant investment in this critical area. As Chair of the Senate's Task Force on Lyme and Tick-Borne Diseases, I am proud that the voices of so many who have been suffering in silence for far too long are finally being heard. I thank the Governor for giving this issue the attention it deserves and I look forward to the day when false negatives and inaccurate results are a thing of the past and patients in New York can receive the effective, quality care they deserve." Senator Neil D. Breslin said, "The growth of health care treatments and services have become key economic drivers for New York's economy. The Governor's focus on expanding these industries provides a major boost to the Capital Region by supporting our academic institutions, attracting top scientists, and advancing treatments for diseases like Lyme that impact so many of our residents. I look forward to the continued development of treatments through this new collaboration, and thank Regeneron for working with the state of New York to provide stronger communities for the next generation." Assembly Member Patricia A. Fahy said, "The Governor's comprehensive Life Sciences initiative is drawing world-class researchers Upstate to be part of the transformative health advances that are being discovered right here in the Capital Region. I am proud of the life-changing R&D that Wadsworth and Regeneron have already accomplished, and by partnering on this latest endeavor, New Yorkers across the state will reap the benefits of newly developed diagnoses and treatments." Assembly Member John T. McDonald III said, "Lyme Disease and tick-borne diseases are ongoing healthcare concerns especially in New York State. I applaud this public-private partnership that advances the research surrounding these diseases and will hopefully provide innovative solutions to this issue. The Governor's new investment to support the partnership between Regeneron and Wadsworth Center Laboratory will take these efforts even further by leveraging the assets found in the Capital Region to develop new, potentially life-saving treatments for tick-borne illnesses. I proudly support projects that aim to keep the health of all New Yorkers a top priority." Albany County Executive Daniel P. McCoy said, "I commend Governor Cuomo for investing in the development of new treatments for Lyme disease here in the Capital Region at the Wadsworth Center. By supporting New York State's growing life science research cluster, this partnership will help create jobs, develop new life-saving health services and support an improved quality of life for our residents." Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan said, "As summer approaches, New Yorkers are reminded of the dangers of tick-borne illnesses. This collaborative public-private partnership will bring together world-class scientists and health researchers to uncover new treatments and preventative measures at the Capital Region's premiere public health laboratory. Thank you to Governor Cuomo for supporting this critical public health project and investing in Albany's Wadsworth Center Laboratory." New York State's $620 Million Life Science Initiative In the FY 2018 state budget includes a $620 million initiative to spur the growth of a world-class life science research cluster in New York, as well as expand the state's ability to commercialize this research and grow the economy. The Governor's multi-faceted initiative includes, $100 million to expand the Excelsior Jobs Program Tax Credit to the life sciences industry, $100 million for a life sciences research and development refundable tax credit program, and $320 million in other forms of investment. To support the development of wet-lab and innovation space, the initiative includes state capital grants for operating support and investment capital for early stage life science companies that leverage an additional match of at least $100 million from the private sector. The Life Science sector encompasses the fields of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, biomedical technologies, life systems technologies, and includes organizations and institutions that devote the majority of their efforts to the various stages of research, development, technology transfer and commercialization. Every day, firms in this sector are developing new medical and pharmaceutical breakthroughs that have the potential to save lives, whether through new therapies or the early detection of diseases like autism and cancer. These firms are also making significant advancements in the realms of agriculture and environmental biotechnologies, helping create a cleaner and more sustainable future. [June 19, 2018] Vonage Expands Advanced Omnichannel Cloud Contact Center Solution to Vonage Business Cloud Customers HOLMDEL, N.J., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Vonage (NYSE: VG), a business cloud communications leader, today announced an expansion of its contact center footprint. The Company now offers its advanced omnichannel contact center product suite, Vonage CX Cloud, to businesses of all sizes using its cloud-native unified communications platform, Vonage Business Cloud (VBC). Vonage CX Cloud is an integrated platform with NICE inContact CXone, the market-leading cloud customer experience platform that has been available to businesses using the Vonage Enterprise unified communications solution since 2013. Vonage CX Cloud now delivers best-in-class customer contact solutions to both large enterprises and SMBs, enabling them to provide an exceptional agent and customer experience through the latest technology. Vonage business customers can customize Vonage CX Cloud through leading-edge intelligent technologies powered by Nexmo, the Vonage API platform. Some examples of enhanced capabilities using Nexmo APIs include: Real-time sentiment analysis, which offers real-time insight into caller sentiments and emotions, enabling better decision-making, customer support and outcomes. Enhanced self-service capabilities like chatbots or visual IVRs that bring resolution to customers quickly and seamlessly by providing the tools via traditional voice or embedding these interactions in mobile apps or websites. Customers with a need for increased Quality of Service (QoS) have the option of adding SmartWAN, Vonage's award-winning SD-WAN solution, to Vonage CX Cloud, offering businesses enhanced reliability and a streamlined unified communications system to keep offices connected and running smoothly while maintaining the highest voice quality possible. "Vonage CX Cloud is a robust contact center solution that provides businesses the tools to create modern, meaningful, and memorable customer experiences," said Omar Javaid, Chief Product Officer for Vonage. "We're excited to continue our partnership with NICE inContact, ad extend to our Vonage Business Cloud customers a solution that enables them to interact with their customers with the highest levels of reliability, flexibility and engagement." "More and more businesses are replacing dated premises PBXs with cloud-based unified communications every day," according to Sheila McGee-Smith, Principal Analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. "Vonage CX Cloud offers Vonage Business customers a feature-rich, omnichannel cloud contact solution that far exceeds the call center functionality that is available with legacy PBX systems and is more in keeping with the digital interaction demands of today's consumers." Core capabilities of Vonage CX Cloud include: Flexible, reliable, fast and intelligent customer communications tools that ultimately lead to better customer satisfaction; Integration with Vonage's UCaaS solution allowing better customer service though seamless communications between agents and back office users; Omnichannel routing not only connecting customers to the right agent on their preferred channel, at the right time, but allowing agents to work with customers on multiple channels simultaneously; Enhanced analytics to drive better visibility for supervisors to coach, train and keep agents engaged in their work, reducing agent attrition; Improved overall productivity through intelligent workflow tools that allow businesses to create smart integrations that streamline agent effectiveness while driving effective customer experience designs; The power to scale quickly and easily in response to business needs such as seasonality, new product introduction or other unplanned interaction volume changes; and The ability to quickly and simply augment an existing contact center with cutting-edge services and intelligent technology, providing a better customer experience at a lower cost. "We are thrilled to reinforce our long-standing partnership with Vonage to deliver a truly unique cloud contact center solution for their business customers, whether small companies or large organizations," said Paul Jarman, CEO of NICE inContact. "Businesses today are quickly learning that by combining the power of a leading customer experience platform with a proven unified communications solution, their contact center can deliver the best possible customer experience, every time." Attendees of Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas can learn more about the advanced Vonage CX Cloud solution during the Unlock the Value of an Advanced Contact Center Solution session in the Vonage pavilion on Thursday, June 21 at 11:40am PT from Brian Gilman, VP Product Marketing, Vonage; Colter Hammer, Contact Center Practice Director, Vonage; and Ashish Seth, VP Product and Alliances, NICE inContact. About Vonage Vonage (NYSE:VG) is redefining business communications. True to our roots as a technology disruptor, we've embraced technology to transform how companies communicate to create better business outcomes. Our unique cloud communications platform brings together a robust unified communications solution with the agility of embedded, contextual communications APIs. This powerful combination enables businesses to collaborate more productively and engage their customers more effectively across messaging, chat, social media, video and voice. The Company also provides a robust suite of feature-rich residential communication solutions. Vonage Holdings Corp. is headquartered in Holmdel, New Jersey, with offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Israel. Vonage is a registered trademark of Vonage Marketing LLC, owned by Vonage America Inc. (vg-a) View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/vonage-expands-advanced-omnichannel-cloud-contact-center-solution-to-vonage-business-cloud-customers-300668482.html SOURCE Vonage [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Friendly's closed its location at 471 Center St. near the Massachusetts Turnpike Exit in Ludlow on Tuesday as the Wilbraham-based company continues to shrink its footprint. The landlord, the Springfield-based Colvest Group, also owns the vacant Joy's Restaurant next door. Joy's is currently being offered for lease. "We are evaluating," said Colvest president Frank Colaccino. Colvest could remodel the existing buildings or demolish them and build new, he said. "It's a busy location," he said. "Exit 7 is very desirable." Friendly's notified Colaccino on Monday of its desire to shut down in Ludlow. Friendly's has 230 restaurants, down from 260 in 2016. About half are company-owned and half are franchised. The Ludlow restaurant was company owned. Friendly's closed locations in South Hadley, Gloucester and at the Westfield Shops earlier this year. Friendly's also opened two locations in 2017: at the Apex Center in Marlborough and in Merrimack, New Hampshire. Friendly's previously said it hopes to add five to 10 new stores by 2019. And last month the company announced plans to remodel locations into a more fast-casual format where folks order their food at the counter and have it brought to their table. Friendly's renovated its Manchester, Connecticut, location and work is underway in Windsor, Connecticut. But Colaccino, who rents to a wide variety of restaurant and retail tenants, said the Ludlow Friendly's had remained largely unchanged for decades. "They needed a revamp there," he said. He has no other Friendly's locations in his portfolio. Brothers S. Prestley and Curtis Blake founded Friendly Ice Cream Co. here in Springfield in 1935 after their mother, worried that they wouldn't find jobs in the Great Depression, helped them go into business for themselves. The brothers grew the business and the number of restaurants for years before selling. Today, Friendly's restaurants are owned by Sun Capital Partners Inc. of Florida. The Wilbraham ice cream plant and retail ice cream business delivering ice cream, ice cream cakes and frozen novelty treats to supermarkets is owned by dairy giant Dean Foods. The nearest Friendly's locations are 1855 Boston Road in Wilbraham and 529 Memorial Dr, Chicopee, MA 01020 On Thursday, Springfield's Fort Street from Main Street to East Columbus Avenue, will be closed as the Student Prince restaurant brings back its popular street-long ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. This is the second year that local organizers and ALS activists will come together to create the event in downtown Springfield to fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The challenge will raise money for the Massachusetts ALS Foundation and specifically to honor local friends who have been stricken with the disease. Registration opens at 4 p.m. and participants can also register online.The ice buckets deluge at 5:45 p.m. "So many of us involved in this effort personally know a victim of ALS. When Governor Baker filed legislation last year making the Ice Bucket Challenge Week an annual event, we took it as a special challenge to us here in Springfield, now, to raise money for our friends with ALS. With just a few weeks of planning last year, we were able to fill Fort Street with people. We raised over $25,000", said event organizer, Bill Sampson. ALS has many costs and challenges that patients and their families endure beyond what is covered by insurance. These problems were what spurred a conversation at The Student Prince that got the ball rolling for the event, which came together quickly. "This started when a group of us were gathered at The Student Prince, wondering what we could do to help some very dear friends who have ALS. These friends are vibrant members of the Greater Springfield community who are used to giving help, not receiving it. We are keeping their names private at this time. We know that with ALS Massachusetts help, we will be able to assisit them in ways that we and their families are not equipeed or trained to. All the money we raise will stay here to help them and as a legacy to them, others," Sampson continued. For additional information, reach Sampson via phone at (413) 896-3742. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File) By The Associated Press It's called the Cradle of Liberty because it's where the American Revolution was energized, and it remains one of the most famous buildings in Boston. Now, Faneuil Hall has become one of the latest icons embroiled in debate over whether it should be renamed because of its ties to slavery. It's named for Peter Faneuil, a merchant and slave owner who paid for the building as a gift to the city. Across the country, parks, buildings and even a residential college at Yale University have been renamed to erase connections to slavery. Harvard Law School abandoned its shield in 2016 because it was based on the family crest of an early benefactor who owned slaves. But is the effort to rename Faneuil Hall justified? Don't Edit (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File) A history of dissent Faneuil Hall, completed in 1742, was a meeting place for colonists before and during the Revolution. Over the centuries, it played host to others seeking radical societal change, including abolitionists and women's suffragists. It has been a marketplace, an armory and a banquet hall, and to this day remains a site for political and civic events, including ceremonies to swear in the foreign-born as new U.S. citizens. Don't Edit (Photo courtesy National Park Service) Who was Peter Faneuil? He was the son of French Huguenot parents who originally settled in New York, and when they died he moved to Boston to live with his uncle, Andrew Faneuil, according to the National Park Service, which oversees the city-owned building. Peter inherited the majority of his uncle's estate and business and became one of the richest men in the city, trading in fish, tobacco, rum, molasses -- and humans. According to an inventory of his estate after his death in 1743, he owned five slaves. He proposed the building as a marketplace in 1740 and offered to fund its construction. The National Park Service doesn't try to hide Faneuil's slavery ties, mentioning it extensively in an online biography. Don't Edit (Kristin LaFratta/MassLive) Who wants the name change and why? Kevin Peterson of the New Democracy Coalition has been pushing for a new name for about a year. "For African-Americans in Boston, Faneuil Hall stands as an affront to their civic sensibilities," he said in a letter to Mayor Marty Walsh. Merely mentioning Faneuil's links to slavery on a website, he contends, is not enough. "It is not enough to simply acknowledge the legacy of slavery as we seek to move toward racial healing," he said. "We don't need words, we need actions." Peterson proposes renaming the building after Crispus Attucks, a black man killed during the 1770 Boston Massacre, generally considered the first casualty of the American Revolution. Don't Edit (Kristin LaFratta/MassLive) What's the reaction? Walsh does not back the change. "Over the years, Faneuil Hall has become a place where good things have happened: historic speeches such as Frederick Douglass' call for the end to slavery, the signing of forward-thinking legislation like the Affordable Care Act, and where hundreds of people take their oath of citizenship every year," the mayor said in a statement. "What we should do instead, is figure out a way to acknowledge the history so people understand it. We can't erase history, but we can learn from it." Don't Edit Don't Edit (Gin Dumcius/MassLive) Owen Stanwood, an associate professor of Colonial-era history at Boston College, understands those who want the name changed. "I think the urge to try to understand the links that prominent Americans and Bostonians have with the slave trade is a good thing," he said. But instead of a renaming, he said, he would like to see more on-site information about Faneuil's past. "Most people don't know who he was, and understanding who he was opens the door to what kind of place Boston was in the 18th century," he said. BIG WELLS, Texas (AP) -- At least five people were killed and several others hurt Sunday as an SUV carrying more than a dozen people during a suspected "smuggling event" crashed while fleeing from Border Patrol agents in South Texas, authorities said. The SUV carrying 14 people went out of control at more than 100 mph and overturned on Texas Highway 85, ejecting most of the occupants, Dimmit County Sheriff Marion Boyd said. "From what we can tell the vehicle ran off the road and caught gravel and then tried to recorrect," Boyd said, adding that "caused the vehicle to turn over several times." Four victims were dead at the scene, Boyd said. He said at least one and possibly two others died at a hospital. The Border Patrol said in a statement Sunday night that two other vehicles had been traveling alongside the SUV earlier in the day. An agent suspected they were conducting a "smuggling event," according to the statement, which did not elaborate. The border agent stopped one of the vehicles and another agent stopped a second one. Multiple people from both vehicles were arrested. The third vehicle kept going when agents encountered it, and a sheriff's deputy took over the chase prior to the fatal crash, the border patrol said. The incident comes amid heightened tensions over the treatment of immigrants at the southern border. The Trump administration has said tougher immigration policies -- even separating children from their parents -- are needed to deter immigrants from coming to the country illegally. Over a six-week period ending in May, about 2,000 children had been separated from their families, administration officials said Friday. Most of the occupants in the SUV were believed in the country without legal permission. Boyd said the driver and one passenger were believed to be U.S. citizens. The driver was among those hospitalized, and a deputy who assisted the Border Patrol with the chase found the driver sitting upright in his seat and took him and the passenger into custody. "This, I think, is a perfect example, of why are borders need to be secured," Boyd said. Some injured were taken by helicopter to San Antonio, about 90 miles (144.83 kilometers) northeast. Dimmit County is directly north of Webb County and east of Maverick County, which border Mexico. "Our deepest sympathies go out to the families of those who died in the crash," The Border Patrol said in the statement. SPRINGFIELD -- A Hampden Superior Court jury has awarded $1.9 million in damages to a former Baystate Medical Practices pediatrician born with cerebral palsy who claimed he was fired over his disability and age. Dr. Francis J. Duda, 73, filed the employment discrimination lawsuit in September 2015, according to court records. The jury trial, held before Judge Michael K. Callan, began June 5. "We're delighted," said attorney Tani E. Sapirstein, who represented Duda. The lawsuit sought damages for lost wages and emotional distress, legal costs, and damages for discrimination based on age and handicap. Sapirstein said the jury's award included $773,000 in compensation and $1,146,000 in punitive damages. The jury found in Duda's favor on the disability claim but not on the age claim, Sapirstein said. "We are disappointed with the verdict," said Vanessa L. Smith, vice president and chief general counsel for Baystate Health. "Baystate Medical Practices did not terminate Dr. Duda because of his disability or his age. We are considering our options with regard to an appeal." Smith said the health system supports its employees "regardless of disability." "We work collaboratively with employees with disabilities to provide accommodations to assure they can fill their job responsibilities. At the same time, in order to assure quality care to our patients, all employees are required to meet our standards of care," she said. According to his complaint, Baystate disciplined Duda in March 2014 for "issues concerning documentation," and put him on a remediation plan. Despite being able to "fully perform all of the essential functions of his position with reasonable accommodation," the complaint says, Baystate fired Duda in January 2015. The suit alleged that Baystate "failed to engage in the mandatory interactive process" before firing Duda. Sapirstein said she hopes the jury's verdict will send a message to Baystate about its treatment of disabled employees. "The point of the punitive damages under the anti-discrimination law is to punish egregious conduct and prevent it happening in the future," Sapirstein said. Duda was one of several doctors -- as well as Baystate Pediatric Associates and Holyoke Pediatric Associates -- named in a 2008 wrongful death lawsuit. That case was dismissed in 2015, according to court records. Before filing his employment discrimination lawsuit, Duda filed a claim with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. The commission dismissed the case in July 2015, his lawsuit states. Sapirstein said the MCAD dismissal was a necessary procedural step to file the suit, and was not a decision on the case's merits. According to state records, Duda has been licensed to practice medicine in Massachusetts since June 1992. He graduated from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in 1971. His general certification is in pediatrics, with a subspecialty in pediatric pulmonology. State records show Duda has made no payments on any malpractice claims in Massachusetts, and that he has never been disciplined by the Board of Registration in Medicine. Staff writers Jack Flynn and Dan Glaun contributed reporting. LONGMEADOW -- The town's Adult Center offers programming such as exercise classes, health care services and a computer lab. But of the town's 4,500 senior residents, only about 100 use the Adult Center per day in an average month. James Leyden, executive director of the Longmeadow Council on Aging, is hoping that number will "drastically increase" with the construction of the new $14 million Council on Aging facility, which was approved at Town Meeting in May and on a debt exclusion vote last week. "The need came about because we're currently not in the appropriate building for the type of services we want to offer," Leyden said. "We're not in a senior center, we're in an elementary school." Leyden estimates groundbreaking could be roughly one year from now. The whole project could be completed in about two to three years. The senior center at the Greenwood Center off Maple Road has outgrown the current space, Leyden said. For starters, it has an "unwelcoming" layout -- it's in a small wing of a former elementary school, and there's no front desk to greet guests who walk in. Rooms are labeled, but the small signs with "Computer Lab" or "Office" can be tough to find for elderly visitors. Doors are marked with laminated signs for chair yoga or other activities, but most still look like classrooms, with old carpeting and chalkboards. Leyden said there needs to be a more welcoming, modern space in order to bring in more users. "Our issue with this building is it's not as attractive compared with newer senior centers in the area," Leyden said. He cited the one in Holyoke, which was designed by the same architects now planning the Longmeadow facility. The new Council on Aging will have twice the square footage as the current space, a full gymnasium, larger room layout and the ability to expand on current program offerings. It will be built as a stand-alone structure on the same Greenwood Park Center property. The new facility will also allow for collaboration with organizations like the town's parks and recreation department to offer more activities for the public. The new building will also be available for multipurpose public use -- people of any age will be able to use the facility, Leyden said. The senior center was shot down at three previous town meetings, most recently in 2016. Leyden said previous rejections were largely due to issues with the proposed location or with other town projects taking financial priority that year. Leyden became director a year ago. He said that in that time, plans for the new center have "moved fast -- but in a positive way," he said. "The support and enthusiasm from community activists really spearheaded the project," he said. "There are other people (aside from me) who deserve a lot of the credit." Ripping the Trump administration's policy of separating families at the border as 'immoral,' Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey signed onto a letter with 21 of her counterparts in other states demanding an immediate end to the practice. The letter, addressed to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, calls the policy "inhumane" and "draconian." "Put simply, the deliberate separation of children and their parents who seek lawful asylum in America is wrong," the attorneys general wrote. "This practice is contrary to American values and must be stopped. We demand that you immediately reverse these harmful policies, as it is in the best interests of the children and families affected," they added. The Trump administration policy calls for a "zero tolerance" approach that includes the separation of children from parents who enter illegally at the US southern border. The policy, which also applies to asylum seekers, puts adults into the custody of the US Marshals Service and children in facilities run by the US Department of Health and Human Services. According to the Associated Press, roughly 2,000 children were separated between April and May. "What the Trump administration is doing is immoral and reprehensible," Healey, a Democrat who has launched multiple lawsuits against the administration, said in a statement. "It's unimaginable that the President would try to play politics by tearing babies from their mothers and leaving toddlers stranded and crying," she said. "As a matter of basic humanity, and for the good this country represents, the Trump Administration needs to immediately end this horrible policy." BELCHERTOWN A 23-year-old North Reading man is the third charged in connection with the April 29 Amherst fire that hospitalized a man with serious injuries and heavily damaged a six-unit apartment building on Main Street. Conor Murnane, a 2018 UMass graduate, was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, wanton destruction of property over $250 and unlawful possession of fireworks, according to Amherst Police Chief Scott P. Livingstone. Fellow 2017 UMass graduate Laban K. Christenson, 23, of Waltham, was charged last week, as was Andrew Ho, 21, of Hyannis, and a current UMass student. The three are charged in relation with fireworks which were lit in the apartment, causing a fire, in which the victim was left in the back bedroom sleeping. Christenson and Ho are charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, wanton destruction of property over $1,200, burning wood, unlawful possession of fireworks and a miscellaneous fire violation Ho also faces a charge of disconnecting smoke detectors. Ho and Christenson denied the charges last week and return to Eastern Hampshire District Court in Belchertown Aug. 6. Murnane, who also denied charges at his arraignment Tuesday, will return Aug. 6 as well. Snapchat videos allegedly helped police and fire officials identify the three men who allegedly ignited fireworks inside the Main Street apartment. According to the police report, a man is seen in a video holding a Roman candle style firework inside Apartment 5. There are six apartments in the 285 Main St. building. According to the report, the three allegedly lit the fireworks between 1:19 and 1:48 a.m. April 29 and left the apartment at 1:48 leaving one man sleeping in a backroom apartment. He was in "critical condition with life-threatening injuries," according to the report. He was taken to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield and then transferred to the Connecticut Burn Center at Bridgeport Hospital and was released about a week later. He lives in Pennsylvania and was visiting the night of the fire. "As the male party held the firework, it exploded multiple times while aimed at different parts of the room," the report stated. Ho identified the man as Laban Christenson, according to the report. Ho also admitted to lighting the fireworks as did Christenson, according to the police report. Also, according to the report, Ho also admitted to removing smoke detectors. "Their egregious conduct of igniting multiple Roman candle style fireworks, from within the multi-family dwelling; which is inherently filled with combustibles; and thus by leaving the apartment within a close proximity of the ignition of said firework after disconnecting the smoke detectors only compounded the likely that substantial harm would result (cause a fire) and by doing so showed a general disregard for those likely and harmful consequence," according to the police report. "Their actions indirectly did cause serious physical bodily harm to the victim by means of a dangerous weapon -fire." SOUTHWICK - Two town police officers were treated at Baystate Medical Center Sunday after displaying symptoms similar to exposure to fentanyl or other opioids while responding to a fatal overdose. Detective Sgt. Robert D. Landis and Officer Marc S. Siegel were treated and released following the incident. "We were in the room for a time and Mark started feeling the effects, then I realized I was too," said Landis. "We self-administered Narcan and asked for an ambulance." Narcan is a nasal spray that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. Landis said both men administered a second dose of Narcan to themselves in the ambulance. Landis said fentanyl and other opioids can quickly become airborne and pose a threat to anyone who comes in contact with the substances. He said first responders or family and friends of known opioid users should take precautions. Police Chief David Ricardi posted information on the Southwick Police Facebook page as a precaution and he and Landis both said response to these situations must be investigated. "Our department is currently re-evaluating our procedures for responding to an overdose situation. We are asking that all citizens understand that a situation involving any form of opioids is very dangerous and should be approached with an extreme degree of caution. Simply being in the same room as the victim could be deadly," Ricardi stated. "The officers noticed that they began having respiratory distress and became disoriented." Landis said a similar situation occurred in Holyoke last month where first responders to an overdose experienced respiratory problems from exposure to opioids. "There has to be a new thought process for assessing the scene of an overdose," said Landis. Landis and Siegel responded to a home on Berkshire Avenue about 10:30 a.m. Sunday to investigate a report of an unresponsive male. There they found the 29-year-old male had died, most likely from an opioid overdose, police said. Landis and Siegel returned to work Monday. Landis credited the Southwick and Agawam Fire Departments and Baystate Medical Center for their quick action. He also praised Ricardi and Officer Michael Wescott for being proactive in regards to having Southwick officers carry Narcan. "Having it on scene when we started to feel the effects and the ability to administer it to ourselves really made a difference," said Landis. SPRINGFIELD -- The Springfield Arson & Bomb Squad continues to investigate the cause of a three-alarm fire at a Mulberry Street condominium complex Tuesday morning that displaced 24 residents and sent three to area hospitals. Two of the injured suffered smoke inhalation and another suffered a minor burn on the arm, Dennis Leger, aide to Commissioner Bernard J. Calvi, said. The fire broke out at the 101 Mulberry St. complex, known as Mulberry House, shortly after 6 a.m. Approximately 130 residents were evacuated, including a number of residents who were rescued by aerial ladders and ground ladders, Leger said. The fire began in the bedroom of unit 119, located on the first floor, Leger said. It extended throughout the unit and out a door into the hallway before it was brought under control. All 20 units on the first floor and two more on the second floor were left uninhabitable, Leger said. Calvi took command of the fire scene and struck a second alarm when firefighters arrived on scene about five minutes after it was reported. A third alarm was eventually struck. The Western Massachusetts Chapter of the American Red Cross is aiding those displaced. The Mulberry House condominium complex, which has 120 units, overlooks the Springfield Cemetery. It was build in the 1960s as a luxury condominium complex. SPRINGFIELD -- High-voltage power lines crashed down in Monday night's thunderstorm, causing a small brush fire and leaving East Forest Park residents in the dark. Firefighters responded to the call of arcing power lines near Pennsylvania Avenue and South Branch Parkway at about 8:30 p.m., said Dennis Leger, aide to Fire Commissioner Bernard J. Calvi. When they arrived they found the live lines arcing on the pavement. The lines, which were knocked down by a fallen tree limb, also ignited brush on the side of the road, causing a small fire, Leger said. Firefighters extinguished the blaze, cordoned off the area and closed nearby roads until crews from Eversource arrived to disconnect the power and repair the lines. A total of 418 East Forest Park homes remain without electricity. Crews are on the scene and predict power will be restored by 1 a.m. Tuesday, said Ana Alfaro, Eversource spokeswoman. The brush fire was small and caused no damage, Leger said. HARTFORD -- A 22-year-old Springfield, Mass. man waived his right to be indicted and pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud stemming from an ATM "jackpotting" scheme. Argenys Rodriguez is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Vanessa L. Bryant on Sept. 26, at which time he faces a maximum term of imprisonment of 30 years, according to a release issued by John H. Durham, United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut. Rodriguez is released on a $250,000 bond pending sentencing. Law enforcement agencies and ATM manufacturers have been investigating malware attacks on ATM machines in Connecticut and elsewhere, according to court documents and statements made in court. As part of the scheme, known as "jackpotting," people dressed as legitimate repair technicians install malware on an ATM and others then proceed to extract all of the cash from the machine. On Jan. 27, Citizens Bank investigators contacted police after they observed what appeared to be a jackpotting attack on an ATM in Cromwell. Responding police found Rodriguez and Alex Alberto Faijin-Diaz near an ATM that had been compromised with the malware and was spitting out $20 bills. The two men were found to be in possession of approximately $5,600 in cash, but the investigation revealed a total of $63,200 had been taken from the ATM on that date. The investigation further revealed that on Jan. 22. Rodriguez, Fajin-Diaz and others illegally obtained $63,820 from a Citizens Bank ATM in Rhode Island. Fajin-Diaz, 32, a citizen of Spain, pleaded guilty to the same charge on June 12 and awaits sentencing. He has been detained since his arrest on Jan. 27. The ongoing investigation is being conducted by the Connecticut Computer Crimes Task Force, U.S. Secret Service, Connecticut State Police, Chief State's Attorney's Office, Middlesex State's Attorney's Office, Cromwell Police Department, Middletown Police Department and Greenwich Police Department. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Ray Miller. Sira Naturals, Inc. could get the first marijuana business license in Massachusetts. The five-member Cannabis Control Commission, the agency charged with overseeing the state's legal marijuana industry, is scheduled to vote Thursday on whether to give the company a tier 3 cultivation license. A tier 3 cultivation license means they can grow between 10,001 and 20,000 square feet of marijuana. A licensed cultivator can cultivate, process and package marijuana, and transfer and deliver marijuana products to marijuana establishments, but not to consumers. Massachusetts voters broadly legalized recreational marijuana use for adults 21 and over through a ballot question in November 2016. Medical marijuana was approved by voters in 2012. Sira Naturals operates a medical marijuana cultivation facility in Milford. The company has applied for two licenses: Cultivation and manufacturing. The space they have in Milford spans 30,000 square feet, and 10,000 square feet are already in use growing medical marijuana, according to Sira Naturals CEO Michael Dundas. Sira has not yet applied for a retail recreational license, though the company has medical marijuana dispensaries in Cambridge, Somerville and Needham. The company is waiting for those communities to create zoning for recreational marijuana, and in the meantime, they're open to selling their product on a "case by case basis" wholesale to companies that receive a retail marijuana license, Dundas told MassLive. The Cannabis Control Commission's Thursday meeting, set for 2 p.m. at 50 Milk Street in downtown Boston, does not include votes on any retail licenses. Retail pot shops are widely expected to open in July 2018, though the exact date, and how many will actually be open, remains unclear, since the process involves cities and towns signing off. While the July 1 date has been frequently mentioned in media reports, "the July 1 date has always been somewhat of an artificial, aspirational benchmark date," Dundas said. "It's still going to take several more weeks and perhaps months before we see this industry up and on its feet," he said. UPDATE, Monday, June 18, 2018, 7:30 p.m.: Over 16,000 customers in Massachusetts are without power. A new story has been posted >> Thousands are without power as a storm, with 55 mile per hour winds, approaches New England. The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency reports 3,822 customers without power across the state with a concentration of outages in Northwestern Massachusetts as of 6 p.m. In Leyden, 42 percent of customers are without power, MEMA reports. In Franklin County 634 were without power. The National Weather Service reports the storm was moving east at 55 miles per hour. Tornado warnings were issued for central Franklin and Hampshire counties. The NWS is warning people that flying debris could injure people outside in the storm. Anyone in the storm's path should head to a basement or room in the lowest floor of a sturdy building and stay away from windows, the NWS said. WEST SPRINGFIELD - The Ride to Remember, the annual bike ride from Springfield to Boston to pay tribute to fallen police officers, has scheduled a major fundraising event Thursday evening at the Morgan Road Pavilion featuring the local band Trailer Trash. The event is planned from 5 to 10 p.m. at the pavilion, 429 Morgan Road. Tickets are $20 and all proceeds will go toward this year's Ride to Remember, said organizer John Delaney. Children under 12 are admitted free. The event will feature music, food and drinks, and raffles. All money will go toward costs associated with putting on the Ride to Remember, he said. "It costs money to provide food, hydration, transportation, and swag for all the riders," Delaney said. "This supports all of that." The Ride to Remember, now in its 6th year, goes from downtown Springfield to the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill in Boston, a distance of a little more than 100 miles. It is scheduled for Sept. 8. Formed in 2012 to honor Kevin Ambrose, a Springfield police officer murdered on duty in June of that year, the ride has expanded to honor all fallen officers who died in the line of duty. Money raised from the ride each year has been used to fund the Massachusetts Fallen Officers Memorial at the State House. It also raised $150,000 that was used toward the construction of playing fields at Mary Lynch School in honor of fallen Springfield police officers Michael Schiavina and Allain Beauregard. This year, Delaney said, the money raised will also go toward the Massachusetts Fallen Firefighters Memorial, which is also at the State House. The firefighters memorial will be dedicated on Sept. 11. As a change this year, the riders will wear a newly designed shirt, Delaney said. Traditionally, all riders wore the same jersey featuring blue and white as primary colors, and race marshals wore yellow. This year, as a tribute to the firefighters memorial, the jersey will be mostly red with traces of white and blue, and the marshals will wear white, he said. When the pack of riders is in full swing on the day of the ride, Delaney said people will see a stream of red, white and blue pedalling across the state. Initially the Ride to Remember was only open to police and those in public safety. Since 2016 it has been open to anyone willing to give it a try and to pay the $300 registration fee. Last year there were 360 riders. Delaney said he would like it to be 400 to 500 this year. For more information on the ride or to register, go www.ridetoremember.bike Where to buy tickets for the concert: A group of Berkshire County veterans oppose plans to install a statue of W.E.B. Du Bois in front of the Great Barrington library, saying the scholar's association with Communism disqualifies him from public acclaim. Marine Corps veteran Andy Moro, who chairs the Republican Town Committee, told the Berkshire Edge the statue would be an insult to veterans. He sent a letter to the editor of the online publication. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington in 1868. He was the first black man to earn a Ph.D. from from Harvard. He co-founded the NAACP in 1909, championed world peace and Pan-African causes, and is best known for The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of 14 influential essays. Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963, but not before joining the Communist Party at the age of 93. Library trustee president Patrick Hollenbeck recently invited Moro and others to voice their concerns in person. At the meeting, the Berkshire Edge reports, Moro said Du Bois had praised Soviet leader and killer Joseph Stalin as a "great man." Another opponent said his great-grandfather had come from Lithuania, a nation invaded by Russian communists. Others said public property should not be used to honor Du Bois. Justin Jackson, assistant professor of history at Bard College at Simon's Rock, was one of several to present another point of view. Jackson said Du Bois had a lifelong interest in socialism and Marxism, had criticized Communism, and was curious about Stalinism before the authoritarian leader's crimes became well-known. Du Bois in 1951 was indicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act while running a peace information center in New York. From 1949 to 1955, He was vice chair of the Council on African Affairs, an organization under surveillance by the FBI. Du Bois only joined the Communist Party after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the McCarran Act, requiring party members to register with the federal government. After that act of civil resistance, Du Bois moved to Africa, Jackson said. Du Bois is Great Barrington's most famous native son. The town is home to the Du Bois Center at Great Barrington, a nonprofit dedicated to exploring the African-American experience. The statue will need to be privately funded, and it won't be built without approval by the Board of Selectmen. A local group pushing to save Worcester's Notre Dame des Canadiens Church from the wrecking ball said it plans to appeal a judge's decision to deny a preliminary injunction that would have halted demolition of the 1929 building. Save Notre Dame Alliance said in a statement Tuesday that after reviewing Worcester Superior Court Judge James Reardon Jr.'s decision not to grant the injunction, the 13 plaintiffs named in the case believe that Reardon's interpretation of the law is incorrect. The group will appeal the ruling to the Massachusetts Appeals Court. The alliance argued that the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act was violated because there was never a state review to seek alternatives to demolishing the building. Plaintiffs have retained the services of the Boston environmental law firm McGregor & Legere, PC to represent them in their appeal. "Should the defendants proceed with destructive demolition before the appeal is decided, they do so at their own risk," the group wrote in a brief statement. Lawyers for developer CitySquare II Development Co. said the project had previously been approved after an environmental review and that the state approved the addition of the church to the property. The developer's lawyers contend the church, located at 5 Salem Square, was purchased with private money, not state funding, and therefore not subject to MEPA review. Reardon disagreed with the group behind saving the church, noting it is not clear if any privately purchased real estate comes under MEPA jurisdiction. The judge further states the project has been reviewed by the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, including the portion including the church. Records show the inclusion of the church property into the project did not require MEPA approval, the judge wrote citing letters from the state. Donald Trump has declared war on black and brown immigration. It's his favorite rant using the immigration in Europe by Muslim refugees as an example of the terrible crimes caused by these people, an accusation the New York Times has proven false. Now he's separating kids from their parents. This anti-immigration policy didn't start with Trump. Obama was referred to as the deporter in chief. I have several things to say about this. Stop creating immigrants. Stop bombing Muslim countries to bits; stop blaming them for the terrorism we created. Stop funding Israel's policy of torturing Palestinians. Do something about the millions of Muslim refugees living in camps outside their countries because of the chaos and violence we cause everyday. Stop using other Western Hemisphere countries as our sweat shops. Stop stealing land from their people to give to our multinational agri businesses. Stop supporting their cruel dictatorships. Stop helping to coup their leaders who actually try to help their people: Madura of Venezuela, Arristide of Haiti, Allende of Chile, Rousseff of Brazil to name a few. The USA has been behaving like the Conquistadors of Spain, and then we wonder why there are so many displaced people. The Iran-Contra hearings of the 80s revealed the enormous role the CIA plays in the drug trade that's caused so much turmoil to the south. Funny how two of the countries we have devoted so many troops to, Afghanistan and Columbia are our two biggest suppliers of cocaine and heroin. The US has to examine it's own behavior before we pounce on immigrants. One more point. As far as I'm concerned, Trump, his brother and sister and all his children except for Tiffany could be called "anchor babies". Did their mothers marry rich Americans so they could stay in this country? Charlotte Burns, Palmer U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, pressed President Donald Trump's pick to take over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Tuesday for clarification on her role in crafting the administration's controversial policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their families at the border. Warren and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Bown, D-Ohio, sent a letter to CFPB Director nominee Kathy Kraninger seeking answers on how she, as the Office of Management and Budget's program associate director for general government programs, impacted budgetary or policy decisions related to the Justice Department's "Zero-Tolerance Policy for Criminal Illegal Entry." Noting that Kraninger manages seven executive branch agencies in her role at OMB, including the Department of Homeland Security and DOJ which announced the controversial policy in April, the senators asked whether she was involved in providing "policy and management guidance" on the Zero-Tolerance policy, helped implement it or worked with DHS on related budgetary and funding issues. "The American people deserve to know what role you have played in developing and implementing this appalling process," they wrote. Warren and Brown asked for a list of meetings she attended related to these budgetary or policy decisions, analyses and recommendations, as well as topics discussed at any such meetings. They further requested: emails and other documents related to Kraninger's communications with DOJ and DHS officials related to development and implementation of the Zero-Tolerance policy and the separation of children from their parents; communications she may have had with the White House related to the policy; and any final or draft OMB analyses, recommendations or budgetary or decisions in which she was involved related to the policy, among other things. Warren, who helped create the CFPB, pledged to put a hold on Kraninger's nomination and to fight it "at every step until she turns over all documents about her role" in relation to the policy. Trump nominated Kraninger on Monday to head the consumer financial watchdog agency. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April that the administration would take a "zero tolerance" approach to illegal immigration, directing all U.S. attorneys who serve in districts along the United States' southern border with Mexico to criminally prosecute all cases of attempted illegal entry or illegal entry that are referred by DHS. The policy reportedly led DHS to separate about 2,000 children from their parents, as children are not allowed in adult criminal detention facilities. The children were placed in the custody of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to reports. Kathy Kraninger helps oversee the agencies that are ripping kids from their parents. Now @realDonaldTrump wants her to run the @CFPB. I will put a hold on her nomination & fight it at every step until she turns over all documents about her role in this.#FamiliesBelongTogether pic.twitter.com/wrW7oXP3Eo Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 19, 2018 Warren is just one of several Massachusetts Democrats who have spoken out against the practice. DHS has rejected claims that it has a blanket policy to separate families at the border, stating Monday that it will separate adults and minors under certain circumstances, including: when it's unable to determine the familial relationship, when it determines a child may be at risk with the parent or legal guardian or when a parent or legal guardian is referred for criminal prosecution. The agency further noted that it only refers to the Department of Justice "those adults who violate the law by crossing the border illegally and are amenable for prosecution." Members of Massachusetts' congressional delegation urged support Tuesday for legislation to stop the Trump administration's controversial "zero tolerance" policy, which has reportedly resulted in about 2,000 undocumented immigrant children being separated from their parents at the United States' southern border. Massachusetts Democrats announced that they have signed on to companion bills filed in the U.S. House and Senate, known as the "Keep Families Together Act," that seek to bar the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from separating children from their parents except in extraordinary circumstances, limit criminal prosecutions for asylum seekers, increase child welfare training and establish public policy preferences for family reunification. U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, a Springfield Democrat and co-sponsor of the House bill, slammed the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" approach to immigration as "cruel and inhumane" and called for legislative action. "President Trump could stop these forcible separations with one phone call to the Department of Homeland Security. But he continues to play politics with the lives of people seeking asylum in the United States," the congressman said in a statement. "I believe this policy is wrong, does not reflect our country's basic values and should end immediately. Families belong together." The "Keep Families Together Act" would prevent DHS from separating children from their parents unless parental rights have been terminated, a child welfare agency has issued a best interest determination or officials have approved separation due to trafficking indicators or other concerns of risk to the child, according to lawmakers. It would require an independent child welfare official to review any such separations and return the child if no harm is present, as well as mandate all Customs and Border Protection agents to complete child welfare training on an annual basis. Further, the legislation seeks to: delay prosecutions for asylum seekers and create an affirmative defense for them; establish a presumption that detention is not in the best interests of families and children; impose financial penalties on officials who violate the prohibition on family separation; require a report on the separation of families every six months; and charge DHS with developing policies and procedures allowing parents and children to locate each other and reunite if they have been separated. U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, in turn, signed on as co-sponsors of their chamber's version of the legislation introduced earlier this month. Pointing to reports that the administration expects to take hundreds of children at the border "every day for the next two months," Markey called Tuesday for passage of the Democrat-backed bill. The senator, a vocal critic of the administration's immigration policy, added that "it would take Donald Trump basically the same amount of effort to end the heinous family separation policy as it did to pardon Joe Arpaio." "This is unconscionable. If Trump refuses to end this, Congress must by passing the (Keep Families Together Act" today," he tweeted, using the hashtag: #KeepFamiliesTogether. Health and Human Services expects to take in 250 children at the border today. And tomorrow. And every day for the next two months. This is unconscionable. If Trump refuses to end this, Congress must by passing the #KeepFamilesTogether Act TODAY.https://t.co/Wb6SnkgcXG Ed Markey (@SenMarkey) June 19, 2018 Warren also criticized the White House for not taking action to stop the controversial family separations. "(President Donald Trump) could pick up the phone and stop the separation of families seeking refuge in the US. Instead, he continues to hold thousands of kids hostage to try and get Congress to pay for his stupid wall. This is his policy, and he can stop it," she tweeted. The senator further pressed the president's pick to take over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Tuesday for clarification on her role in crafting the administration's policy of separating undocumented immigrant children from their families at the border. U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy III, a Brookline Democrat who attended a rally on the U.S.-Mexico border over Father's Day weekend, meanwhile, spoke out against the Trump administration's policy during a Tuesday morning event at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. Kennedy acknowledged that addressing undocumented immigration is "a legitimately hard issue," but argued it's unacceptable for the U.S. government to target young children. He, however, offered that he's encouraged by the public's reaction to the controversial policy. "If there is a silver lining to this, which I'm not so sure there is, but if there is one, it's that there's a sense of outrage that is building across this country, which again, is not partisan," he said, noting that Republicans have also introduced legislation to end the practice. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April that the administration would take a "zero tolerance" approach to illegal immigration, directing all U.S. attorneys who serve in districts along the United States' southern border with Mexico to criminally prosecute all cases of attempted illegal entry or illegal entry that are referred by DHS. The policy reportedly led DHS to separate about 2,000 children from their parents, as children are not allowed in adult criminal detention facilities. The children were placed in the custody of the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, according to reports. DHS has rejected claims that it has a blanket policy to separate families at the border, stating Monday that it will separate adults and minors under certain circumstances, including: when it's unable to determine the familial relationship, when it determines a child may be at risk with the parent or legal guardian or when a parent or legal guardian is referred for criminal prosecution. The agency further noted that it only refers to the Department of Justice "those adults who violate the law by crossing the border illegally and are amenable for prosecution." "When adults, with or without children, unlawfully enter this country, there must be a consequence for breaking our laws," DHS officials said. BOSTON -- The Massachusetts House on Tuesday started what is expected to be two days of debate on a major health care bill. The Senate passed a health care bill in November that included myriad proposals for lowering health care costs. The House has framed its bill not as a cost containment bill but as one that helps community hospitals remain financially viable. "It's about creating a foundation for some of these low-cost alternative health care facilities in our Gateway Cities," said House Majority Leader Ron Mariano, D-Quincy. The centerpiece of the House bill is a one-time fee on large hospitals and insurers that would provide funding for three years to community hospitals and community health centers. Community hospitals generally receive lower insurance reimbursement rates than larger hospitals and are more likely to be struggling financially. The Senate bill deals with the issue by limiting the variation in prices that insurers are allowed to pay and also penalizing high-spending hospitals. Mariano said the House system of assessments and direct payments is better for hospitals like Holyoke Medical Center, where 80 percent of their patients are public payers. "No matter what we do to the commercial rate in insurance, there is not enough commercial money going into a hospital like Holyoke," Mariano said. Spiros Hatiras, CEO of Holyoke Medical Center, said he is happy with either the Senate or the House bill. "The Senate side seemed to be more of a systemic or permanent solution," Hatiras said. "The one on the House side will fix the issue for awhile and hopefully by then we'll have other things in place to continue to make sure it doesn't get back to where it is now." Hatiras said the House proposal would provide money more immediately. But the Senate bill would provide a longer-term solution. "Either way, it is a solution," Hatiras said. Today, community hospitals are being forced into a "death trap" with private insurers paying them less than the cost of care, Hatiras said. Hospitals that are geographically isolated or part of a large network can negotiate with insurers. But smaller hospitals with local competition have no leverage to negotiate for higher rates. "In Holyoke, when we push back and say what you're paying us is unfair, they say, fine, don't be in our network," Hatiras said. The House bill, like the Senate bill, also includes a huge range of other provisions, addressing things like out-of-network billing, telemedicine, transparency in drug pricing and facility fees. The House is considering 173 amendments to the bill, H.4617, on Tuesday and Wednesday. The final version of the House bill will have to be reconciled with the Senate bill before it goes to Gov. Charlie Baker for his signature. Sen. Jim Welch, D-West Springfield, Senate Chairman of the Committee on Health Care Financing, said he thinks lawmakers will be able to agree on a final bill before the legislative session ends July 31. "There's quite a few areas in both bills that are very similar, some good ideas that we definitely need to move forward on," Welch said. "There's some areas that we differ on. When the House finishes their bill, we can go to conference and iron some of those things out." Gov. Charlie Baker declined to comment on the assessments that are included in the House bill. He said he did not want to talk about specifics of the bill until he knows what the final bill will look like. "There's stuff in that bill we would like to see happen. There's stuff that gives us some concern," Baker said. "I tend not to comment on this stuff until it actually gets a little clearer with respect to what it's going to look like." The Pentagon announced Monday that it will suspend all planning of a forthcoming military exercise with South Korea, following a pledge from President Donald Trump last week after his historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. A Pentagon spokeswoman, Dana White, said the decision is "consistent with President Trump's commitment" to the North Koreans and made "in concert" with the South Korean government. It applies solely to the August exercise Ulchi-Freedom Guardian, in which about 17,500 U.S. troops gathered with South Korean counterparts last year in an exercise that focused heavily on computer-simulations to defend against a North Korean attack. Trump said last week after meeting with Kim in Singapore that he would end "war games" carried out with the South Koreans. He called them "very provocative," and said that he would suspend them while the United States negotiates with North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program "unless and until we see the future negotiation is not going along like it should." The decision was seen by many critics as a significant concession made by the president, and Trump has repeatedly defended it since by saying that they are expensive and a lot of money will be saved. "Holding back the 'war games' during the negotiations was my request because they are VERY EXPENSIVE and set a bad light during a good faith negotiation. Also, quite provocative. Can start up immediately if talks break down, which I hope will not happen!" Trump wrote on Sunday. But the Trump administration has declined to provide any figures that back that assessment, and it's likely the U.S. military could carry out other training outside South Korea instead. The Pentagon did not go beyond suspending the next exercise on Monday, saying that it is still coordinating additional actions and no decisions have been made on future exercises. The issue will be addressed later this week at the Pentagon in a meeting involving Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and White House national security adviser John Bolton, White said. The suspension of Ulchi-Freedom Guardian will not affect any Pacific exercises outside the Korean Peninsula, the Pentagon said, permitting the U.S. military to continue training with Japan and other partners in the region. The U.S. military carries out a couple other military exercises annually with the South Korean military, most notably springtime exercises known as Foal Eagle and Key Resolve. Foal Eagle involves field maneuvers with about 11,500 U.S. troops and 290,000 South Koreans typically participating. Key Resolve is a command and control exercises that relies on computer simulation, and involves about 12,000 U.S. troops and 10,000 South Koreans. The U.S. government canceled military exercises with South Korea in the 1990s while attempting to negotiate with North Korea, but they were ultimately reinvigorated when Pyongyang balked at allowing inspectors to look at their nuclear sites. (c) 2018, The Washington Post. Dan Lamothe wrote this story. BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) -- An audio recording that appears to capture the heartbreaking voices of small Spanish-speaking children crying out for their parents at a U.S. immigration facility took center stage Monday in the growing uproar over the Trump administration's policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. "Papa! Papa!" one child is heard weeping in the audio file that was first reported by the nonprofit ProPublica and later provided to The Associated Press. Human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury said she received the tape from a whistleblower and told ProPublica it was recorded in the last week. She did not provide details about where exactly it was recorded. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she had not heard the audio but said children taken into custody by the government are being treated humanely. She said the government has high standards for detention centers and the children are well cared for, stressing that Congress needs to plug loopholes in the law so families can stay together. The audio surfaced as politicians and advocates flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border to visit U.S. immigration detention centers and turn up the pressure on the Trump administration. And the backlash over the policy widened. The Mormon church said it is "deeply troubled" by the separation of families at the border and urged national leaders to find compassionate solutions. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, reversed a decision to send a National Guard helicopter from his state to the Mexican border to assist in a deployment, citing the administration's "cruel and inhumane" policy. At the border, an estimated 80 people pleaded guilty Monday to immigration charges, including some who asked the judge questions such as "What's going to happen to my daughter?" and "What will happen to my son?" Attorneys at the hearings said the immigrants had brought two dozen boys and girls with them to the U.S., and the judge replied that he didn't know what would happen to their children. Several groups of lawmakers toured a nearby facility in Brownsville, Texas, that houses hundreds of immigrant children. Democratic Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico said the location was a former hospital converted into living quarters for children, with rooms divided by age group. There was even a small room for infants, complete with two high chairs, where two baby boys wore matching rugby style shirts with orange and white stripes. Another group of lawmakers on Sunday visited an old warehouse in McAllen, Texas, where hundreds of children are being held in cages created by metal fencing. One cage held 20 youngsters. More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility, which is divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. In Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for people trying to enter the U.S., Border Patrol officials say they must crack down on migrants and separate adults from children as a deterrent to others trying to get into the U.S. illegally. "When you exempt a group of people from the law ... that creates a draw," said Manuel Padilla, the Border Patrol's chief agent there. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, speaking to reporters during a tour of San Diego immigration detention facilities with Rep. Juan Vargas and other House Democrats, said family separation is a "heartbreaking, barbarian issue that could be changed in a moment by the president of the United States rescinding his action." "It so challenges the conscience of our country that it must be changed and must be changed immediately," she said during a news conference at a San Diego terminal that is connected to the airport in Tijuana, Mexico, by a bridge. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas announced late Monday that he was introducing emergency legislation intended to keep immigrant families together. "All Americans are rightly horrified by the images we are seeing on the news, children in tears pulled away from their mothers and fathers," Cruz said. "This must stop." President Donald Trump emphatically defended his administration's policy Monday, again falsely blaming Democrats. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," he declared. "Not on my watch." --By Nomaan Merchant and Anita Snow, Associated Press. Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Steve LeBlanc in Boston contributed to this report. BOSTON -- A day after the Supreme Judicial Court struck down a proposed tax hike on income over $1 million, a state senator announced plans to revive it. Sen. Jason Lewis, D-Winchester, announced that he will introduce a legislative amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution that would be identical to the amendment the SJC struck down - a 4 percent surtax on income over $1 million with the money earmarked for education and transportation. The SJC ruled Monday in a 5-2 decision that the "fair share amendment" or "millionaire's tax" was unconstitutional because it included two unrelated topics, which is not allowed by state law in an initiative petition. It would both raise taxes and earmark the money for transportation and education. A legislative amendment to the Constitution is not subject to the same restrictions as an initiative petition. A legislative amendment, which must be introduced by a lawmaker rather than members of the public, requires a vote of 50 percent of the Legislature in two consecutive sessions before it can go to the ballot. Lewis said he plans to file his legislative amendment at the beginning of the next session, in January 2019. The earliest it could get on the ballot would be in 2022. "Income inequality is at unacceptable levels in Massachusetts and, at the same time, our transportation infrastructure is woefully inadequate and our schools are struggling to provide a quality education to every student," Lewis said in a statement. "If we don't act boldly and comprehensively to address these issues, then we will put the future of our communities and state economy at risk." The Supreme Judicial Court on Monday effectively threw the battle over taxes in Massachusetts back to the state Legislature. The SJC struck from the ballot a proposed constitutional amendment that would have raised taxes on income over $1 million. The amendment would have brought in an estimated $1.9 billion more annually in additional taxes, earmarked for transportation and education. In the long-term, it will be up to lawmakers whether to try to find that money elsewhere, through raising other taxes. In the short-term, lawmakers are negotiating with business groups and liberal advocacy groups over several other ballot questions, including one that would lower the state sales tax, and those negotiations just got more urgent. A proposal by the Retailers Association of Massachusetts to lower the sales tax from 6.25 percent to 5 percent could cut nearly $1 billion out of the state budget, according to figures by the Beacon Hill Institute, a business-friendly think tank. After Monday's court ruling, state lawmakers would actually have to cut that amount out of their budget, rather than relying on potential new revenue. Asked what would happen to the state budget if the sales tax reduction passes, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jeffrey Sanchez, D-Boston, said, "I don't even want to think about it," adding that it "would be pretty devastating." "People are working hard right now trying to figure out how that doesn't make it to the ballot," Sanchez said. House Speaker Robert DeLeo, D-Winthrop, said House leaders plan to continue negotiating on the remaining ballot questions. "We have to look at in particular the loss of the sales tax revenue," DeLeo said. "That would mean over $1 billion to us, so that concerns me greatly." Business groups supporting the sales tax cut have been negotiating with labor and other groups who have been pushing for ballot questions to raise the minimum wage and mandate paid family leave. Participants have said they are near a deal on paid family leave, but not on the minimum wage or the sales tax reduction. However, Jon Hurst, president of the Retailers Association of Massachusetts, has indicated in the past that he might be willing to take the sales tax question off the ballot if the SJC struck down the income tax hike on millionaires. Hurst was noncommittal Monday. "The Retailers Association of Massachusetts remains prepared to take the sales tax reduction to the ballot this fall," Hurst said in a statement. "At the same time, we remain open to negotiating a balanced legislative resolution that will give our Main Street businesses, and seniors and low-income families a helping hand." Lewis Finfer, co-director of Massachusetts Communities Action Network and one of the leaders of the liberal coalition, said recently that advocates for raising the minimum wage will not concede to the demands of business groups on the level of wages for tipped workers, establishing a lower wage for teenagers and the elimination of time-and-a-half pay on Sunday. Raise up Massachusetts said Monday, "While we determine our next steps, the Raise Up Massachusetts coalition remains strongly committed to winning a $15 minimum wage and paid family and medical leave for all Massachusetts workers this year, in the Legislature or on the ballot." In the long-term, advocates and lawmakers who want to change the tax structure and raise new revenue will have to find another way to do it. Senate President Harriette Chandler, D-Worcester, said she is "terribly disappointed" in the SJC decision. "At a fundamental level, this decision impedes the fight for economic equity, as well as the investments we need to make improvements to our schools, our rails and our roads," Chandler said. "As I have said since January, without this Fair Share Amendment, we will need to be creative and take a hard look at potential revenues from new sources to address the very real challenges we face as a Commonwealth." Sen. Karen Spilka, who now chairs the Senate Ways and Means Committee and will take over the Senate presidency in July, also said she supports the goal of the ballot question in imposing higher taxes on wealthy individuals. She said income inequality and the "opportunity gap" "remain serious threats to Massachusetts' continued prosperity." "I believe in Massachusetts' bold vision of leadership, and that includes the notion that the wealthiest among us are able to contribute a little bit more to ensure a thriving Commonwealth for all of our residents," Spilka said Under state law, any new tax bill must originate in the House. DeLeo said he will look at those questions when preparing for next year's budget, beginning with estimates of tax revenues in December. He declined to offer predictions about whether new taxes would be on the table. "Anything and everything will be discussed," DeLeo said. Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, has generally opposed new taxes. Baker reiterated Monday that the state will have to move ahead using "the current tools that are available to us." "I think (the court decision) means that we have to move ahead, continue to invest in our Commonwealth, invest in our infrastructure, and invest in education as we have been on terms that are consistent with the current tools that are available to us, which are pretty good," Baker told reporters. Baker said his administration has already spent more than the Patrick administration on capital spending for public transportation and on K-12 education. Baker had not taken a position on the constitutional amendment. His potential Democratic opponents in the 2018 governor's race, Jay Gonzalez and Bob Massie, supported it. Gonzalez said the SJC decision "doesn't change the fact that we desperately need additional state revenue to invest in our broken transportation system and in our education system that is leaving too many of our young people behind." He said as governor, he will propose "another progressive way to generate meaningful revenue," but he did not say what that would be. Massie was one of the few progressives in the state to criticize the court itself. "Today, we witnessed what happens when the monied interests of the wealthiest in the state band together to elect a governor who can then pack the Supreme Court with pro-business judges and suppress the will of the people," Massie said. Of the five justices who struck down the amendment, four were appointed by Baker and one by former Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat. Of the two who dissented and supported putting the amendment on the ballot, Chief Justice Ralph Gants was appointed by Patrick and Justice Kimberly Budd was appointed by Baker. Massie called on the Legislature to try again with another constitutional amendment. "The task now falls on Speaker DeLeo and the rest of the Legislature to create a progressive income tax amendment here in the state that we can once again bring in front of the public, who will most assuredly pass it," Massie said. U.S. Rep. Richard Neal took issue Tuesday with Trump administration policies that he argued will continue to grow health insurance premiums while offering Americans inadequate coverage. Neal, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, criticized the U.S. Department of Labor for finalizing a rule to expand the availability of association health plans, which let small businesses and self-employed workers collectively buy health insurance as if they were a single large employer. The congressman cast the rule as "a continuation of Republicans' sabotage of our nation's health care system," arguing that it will force Americans to pay more for worse insurance. Critics have argued that association health plans offer fewer protections than those available through the Affordable Care Act and could weaken the controversial health care law. "These garbage association health plans provide inadequate coverage, threatening the health and economic security of America's families," Neal said in a statement. "As people buy into these shoddy plans, insurance costs rise across the board for everyone else." The Springfield Democrat, who initially spoke out against Trump's executive order allowing association health plans in October, accused the president and congressional Republicans of "deliberately and aggressively causing Americans to pay higher costs for their health coverage." Neal noted that the DOL rule comes as the Department of Justice refuses to defend key ACA provisions, and just six months after Trump signed a GOP-backed tax bill into law that eliminated the Obamacare penalty for those who fail to obtain health care coverage -- something which he argued has caused insurance premiums to "skyrocket across the nation." Families, he argued, can't afford the "repercussions" of such efforts to undermine their access to care. Neal further pointed to a new analysis from the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund Tuesday that estimates the average ACA annual benchmark plan premiums for a family of four could rise by nearly $2,000 in 2019 as a result of the GOP tax law's repeal of the individual mandate. The analysis suggested that the spike in health care premiums costs would more than offset the average tax cut benefit to the bottom 80 percent of families in 2019. The congressman said the analysis appears to confirm Democrats' argument that the GOP tax law will hurt middle class Americans more than it will help them. "Our Republican colleagues ... cared more about giving more to the well off through massive tax cuts than caring about insuring American families and allowing them to have affordable health insurance," he said in a conference call. Neal added that while Republican policies "force Americans to pay more for less," Democrats are fighting to expand and fight for access to affordable and quality health care. Labor officials announced Tuesday that the department's new rule will expand access to "affordable health coverage options for America's small businesses and their employees through association health plans. The administration argued that the policy, which stems from Trump's "Promoting Health Care Choices and Competition Across the United States" executive order, will help "strengthen negotiating power with providers from larger risk pools and greater economies of scale." DOL noted that, despite critics' concerns, the rule "includes important safeguards" and consumer protections. Mendelsohn shares Tang Prize for leadership in developing targeted therapy Targeted cancer therapy pioneer John Mendelsohn, M.D., researcher and former president of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, will share the 2018 Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science for his leadership in developing antibodies to block cancer-promoting growth factor receptors on the surface of cancer cells. In announcing the award on June 19 in Taiwan, the Tang Foundation noted the three awardees launched the field of targeted therapy attacking tumors based on their genetic and molecular aberrations -- with their research to understand the role of tyrosine kinase proteins and to design ways to block their activity. Their work led to a thorough understanding of the fundamental principles of cell growth and cancer development, the Tang Foundation noted in its announcement, and the therapies they developed fundamentally changed the practices of cancer clinics. Mendelsohn, president of MD Anderson from 1996 to 2011, is a professor of Genomic Medicine and director of the Zayed Institute for Personalized Cancer Therapy at MD Anderson, as well as the L.E. & Virginia Simmons Senior Fellow in the Division of Health and Technology Policy at Rice University's Baker Institute. The honor cites Mendelsohns role in conceiving the approach of using antibodies to target the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), which is overexpressed or mutated to a cancer-promoting form in a variety of cancers. Then at the University of California at San Diego, working with colleague Gordon Sato, Ph.D., Mendelsohns team conducted preclinical research and developed the anti-EGFR antibody cetuximab (Erbitux), which went on to approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of colon cancer and head and neck cancer. This first tyrosine kinase-targeting antibody was a trail-blazer which has spurred many others to follow, the Tang announcement notes. Its an honor to be recognized by the Tang Foundation with colleagues who opened such an important chapter of cancer research, Mendelsohn said. By highlighting the vital connection between basic research and progress in the clinic, the Tang Foundation encourages the progress we need in scientific, translational and clinical research to continue to improve cancer treatment. The Tang prizes, announced in 2012 by Taiwanese entrepreneur Samuel Yin, have been awarded every two years since 2014. Also honored in Biopharmaceutical Science with Mendelsohn this year are: Tony Hunter, Ph.D., professor of Biology at the Salk Institute, who discovered tyrosine phosphorylation, found that the Src oncogene is a tyrosine kinase, and demonstrated the role of tyrosine phosphorylation in uncontrolled cancer growth. Brian Druker, M.D., director of the Oregon Health Sciences University Knight Cancer Institute, who advocated for and led the successful clinical trial of imatinib (known commercially as Gleevec) for chronic myelogenous leukemia, the first successful small-molecule tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Tang prizes are awarded in four categories: Biopharmaceutical Science, Sustainable Development, Sinology (the study of Chinese language, history, customs and politics) and Rule of Law. Winners receive a medal and diploma and share a cash award of approximately $1.33 million and a $330,000 research grant. by Tanya Gazdik , June 19, 2018 In what is becoming an all-out trade war with China, U.S. industries including automotive are ultimately going to be hurt as much as they are helped. The tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports will include the Buick Envision small crossover. It is among the handful of autos imported into the U.S. from China. With the Trump administration planning to impose 25% duties on products including motor vehicles, each of the crossovers could be subject to levies of about $8,000. Trump is also fighting with Canada, Mexico and the European Union over steel and aluminum and has threatened to impose duties on European cars. One automotive analyst called the trade moves by the Trump administration "willful stupidity" adding "it is madness, as the industry is so globally interconnected from a supply chain and manufacturing standpoint." advertisement advertisement Two Buick owners one current and one former both told me unequivocally they would not pay $8,000 more for a Buick or any car for that matter. Other cars potentially subject to U.S. tariff include Volvo S60 sedans, which the Chinese-owned Swedish automaker started importing to the U.S. in 2015. Although the U.S. imported only 58,437 passenger vehicles from China last year, a tiny fraction of the 8.27 million shipped to America from the rest of the world, according to the U.S. Commerce Departments International Trade Administration, important automotive parts will also be affected, including electric-vehicle batteries. Equipment covered by the new duties include petroleum, diesel and electric cars, vans and buses. It also covers cargo trucks (both on- and off-highway), firefighting vehicles, concrete mixers, tractors and works trucks. The duties cover China-made ball bearings and insulated ignition wiring sets and capacitors, according to WardsAuto. The list of goods subject to the 25% tariff beginning early next month also includes a variety of components for sterilization and medical imaging equipment. So, healthcare costs will also go up. All of this is even before the forthcoming tariffs the Chinese will impose as a result. China has no choice but to fight back forcefully to firmly safeguard the interests of the nation and its people and uphold economic globalization and the multilateral trading system, says a ministry statement. China said it would respond to the U.S. with tariffs of its own next month, striking American agricultural products, cars, and seafood, CNN Money reported. The tariffs on U.S. soybeans could cost Iowa farmers as much as $624 million. Those farmers are going to suffer financially they will delay automotive purchases as a result. However, the tariffs did gain some support from an unlikely source, U.S. Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer, who called them "right on target. "China is our real trade enemy, and their theft of intellectual property and their refusal to let our companies compete fairly threatens millions of future American jobs," Schumer said in a statement. Another auto executive expressed the sentiment that the tariffs would help level the playing field. I dont like the idea of Chinese-built cars or other products being sold in the USA, he said. I would pay double for the same product built in the USA, if I had a choice. And thats the catch. There are many products that are almost exclusively built in China. So instead of paying more for a U.S.-made equivalent, U.S. consumers are going to have to pay more for the Chinese product since it will still be the only one available. Who benefits from that? Sometimes, I go scrounging for romantic love stories and end up writing about the millennial-induced culture more often than ever. Not that I don't enjoy it, I enjoy it thoroughly but sometimes you need to go back to your roots to realise the struggles that lie ahead of some people, who take time to find actual true love. No, I don't mean a bad break up between two people, where one is trying to get over the other; I mean, something more old school and organic. And talking about old school, I found the perfect love story to share with all of you, from the depths a chaotic poetry, called Mumbai. (c)Thinsktock/Getty Images Humans of Bombay recently did a beautiful story on a man, who was raising his kids after losing his wife, unaware of the fact that love was going to find him and change his life forever. Being a child of a single father, I understand the challenges of single parenting, when you're incomplete and vulnerable at all times. It's like a splinter in the brain, trying to refresh your memory of the fallen spouse while simultaneously reminding you of your responsibilities, constantly. But this man didn't give up on his responsibilities, neither did he give up on love and found the woman who could complete him, in every sense of the word. (c)Facebook/Humans Of Bombay This is his story, extracted from Humans of Bombay : I've been a widower for many years -- I lost my wife when I was in my 30s. After that my life was about my two beautiful daughters, educating them and making sure that I doubled up as both their mother and their father. I was happy knowing that my life was for my daughters and that I would never find 'love' again -- but life has a strange way of surprising you when you least expect it. I met her in my neighbourhood when I was 49 and we immediately bonded over the loss of our spouses -- turns out she became a widow very young too. That kind of pain is something only those who have been through it will understand... and we understood each other so easily; we just fit. So with the blessings of both our families, we got married in a simple temple ceremony. I'm 60 today, and we have a 8 year old son. I know, I know I'm old enough to be his grandfather, but I'm trying my best to be young and active with him. Even my daughters dote over him! It's a happy life -- my older daughter's a journalist and the younger one's studying to be a computer engineer. I'm a proud father and a happy husband . At 60, I feel like my life has just begun! (c)Thinkstock/Getty Images Well, indeed! Life begins only when you want it to begin and only when you feel like living again and so was the case for this man, who made the best he could with his life, after he lost his wife but found something more content, in the bargain. It's true, two people who have gone through the same thing can understand each other way better and we couldn't be more grateful for how things actually work out at times! Here's to many more grounded and earthy stories I'd like to find from time to time. For now, kudos to this beautiful unpredictability called life! Indian banks have come under a lot of fire recently as cases of high-profile loan defaulters have blown up in the media. From Nirav Modi to Vijay Mallya, many prominent Indian businessmen have defaulted on large loan payments leading to the seizure of their properties and businesses here in India. While it's a matter of grave concern, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor shared an interesting take on the current scenario of large loan defaulters in India through a witty tweet: Received on whatsApp: What changed before and after Independence in India? Before Independence: People who looted us came from Britain. After Independence: People who looted us go to Britain. Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) June 19, 2018 A perfect way to summarise the current situation in India, isn't it? Bringing back black money and stopping the defaulters from running away, aren't topics that the Modi government is comfortable talking about and while it's true that the government is taking measures to stop the rot, it's already too late. After Tharoor's tweet, many on Twitter were quick to point out an earlier tweet of Mallya, who referred to Tharoor as an old friend in one of his earlier tweets. Sir when you going to London? Like your friend https://t.co/iH7yDzqccy Phoenix (@Plonkerite) June 19, 2018 And some even conspired that it was a sly dig at Congress President Rahul Gandhi's numerous trips to London. That's also another reason why @RahulGandhi is generally spotted in London most of the times. Maybe Tharoor has come to his conclusion basis Rahul's frequent London trips Seema Trivedi (@SeemaTrivedi6) June 19, 2018 At a time when the government is forced to write-off corporate bad loans, these tweets help provide the much needed comic relief. This year saw children scoring some really insane and unimaginable numbers in the CBSE board exams. In fact, most kids made getting 98% and 99% look like a cakewalk. Bulandshahr's Sudeeksha Bhati is one of them, who topped her district by securing 98% in Humanities. But that does not even begin to define what an inspiration she is for all of us. Sudeeksha is one of the few girls from her village, who was lucky enough to get a chance to study. She is also the first person from her family to complete her education. Most importantly, she is someone who knows how difficult it is to get an education when you can barely make ends meet. But, Sudeeksha's story also proves that no dream is too big or hard to achieve, if you set your mind on it and work dedicatedly towards it. In fact, it is her hard work and dedication that earned Sudeeksha a full-time scholarship in one of the most reputed colleges in the US. Twitter Reportedly, Sudeeksha's father, a tea-seller earns nearly Rs. 72,000 per year and can barely manage family expenses. In fact, she overcame a lot of hurdles to reach where she is today. She said, I was expelled from a private school when I was nine years old because my father could not pay the fees. I then took admission in the village primary school. This did not go down well with my family and relatives, as it was against the custom in my community to send a girl child to study. So, any thoughts of watching his daughter study in a reputed college in the US did not occur to him, even in his wildest dreams. But now, Sudeeksha will pursue her Undergraduate studies in Entrepreneurship at the Babson College in Massachusetts. She said, The realization that hard work pays off has further motivated me to be focused and aim higher. I am happy that my achievement today is a source of happiness for my family and my school. Reuters (For Representation) Sudeeksha has received a full scholarship of Rs. 3.83 crores approx. But this is not a miracle, Sudeeksha has worked hard towards it. To begin with, she was associated with the Voice of Women, an initiative to educate people to send their daughters to school. She also attended summer programs like Duke TIP (in India) and Pennsylvania School for Global Entrepreneurship (Lehigh University, USA). BCCL Sudeeksha is one of the students from the Vidyagyaan leadership Academy, an organization to support rural meritorious underprivileged children and was established in 2009 by the Shiv Nadar Foundation in UP. Until last month, Sudeeksha was a regular student waiting for her CBSE class 12 results. Today she is a role model and an inspiration for every kid in India, all thanks to her extraordinary achievement. We are extremely proud of her. Source: Times Now Base metals on the London Metal Exchange ended trading broadly lower on Tuesday June 19, led by a 2.2% drop in aluminium prices, while nickel and zincs three-month prices dipped 2.1%. Read more here in our live futures report. Here is how prices looked at the close of trading: BHP has agreed to sell its Cerro Colorado copper mine to Australian private equity fund EMR Capital for an initial $230 million in cash, the company said. Meanwhile, UC Rusal has started to export bauxite mined at Dian-Dian in Guineas Boke province. Production curtailments at major Chinese producer Ningxia Tianyuan will continue to support the manganese flake and ferro-chrome markets, market participants have told Metal Bulletin. The recent uptrend in prices persisted across the Chinese, European and United States vanadium markets, owing to low availability. Read more in our Global Vanadium Wrap. Chiles National Economic Prosecutor's Office (FNE) is investigating the sale of a 24% stake in SQM, the countrys largest lithium producer, to Chinese miner Tianqi. Pilbara Minerals has made the first shipment of direct shipping ore (DSO) from its wholly owned Pilgangoora lithium-tantalum project in Australia. And Norway has joined a growing list of countries requesting dispute consultations with the US at the World Trade Organization, regarding duties on certain imported steel and aluminium products. PORT AUSTIN A popular local restaurant in downtown Port Austin is considered a total loss following a fire late Monday afternoon. According to Port Austin Fire Chief Don Zimmerman, firefighters were called around 4:45 p.m. to The Stock Pot restaurant on Lake Street after a patron saw smoke coming from the building. Firefighters discovered the blaze between The Stock Pot and another business, The Landing Tavern, which sits just a few feet away to the north. "When we got out there, The Landing and The Stock Pot both looked to be on fire," said Zimmerman. Zimmerman said The Stock Pot was a total loss, estimated to be around $500,000. The Landing suffered burn damage to one side as well as smoke and water damage, while the Sportsman's Inn to the south of The Stock Pot also took on some water and smoke damage. He said the two businesses will probably be shut down for at least a few days for cleanup efforts. At this time, officials are unsure of how the fire originated. "We really can't tell," Zimmerman said. "We don't know if it started in between the buildings on the outside, or if one of the buildings started the other building on fire. There's just no rhyme or reason why it would have started in the front corners there's nothing there." Insurance investigators will be on scene this week to figure out the cause. Zimmerman indicated nothing looked suspicious about the fire. About 60 firefighters from five departments were on scene until 8:30 p.m. Local businesses brought over water and ice as they fought the blaze in the extreme heat. There were no injuries. The Stock Pot is owned by Kevin and Bonnie Goretski. The Landing and Sportsman's Inn are owned by Dave and Liz Williams. Zimmerman said the fact that the fire occurred during the day when the town was full of people to quickly detect the fire may have helped save the adjacent businesses. "Honestly, it could have been a lot worse," he said. "We could have lost all three of those buildings." Port Austin firefighters were assisted on scene by the Kinde, Caseville, Sigel, Bad Axe and Elkton fire departments. Also on scene were officials from the Michigan State Police, Michigan DNR, Huron County Sheriff's Office, Port Austin Police Department and Thumb Ambulance. EAST HAMPTON In the face of demands that nearly $700,000 be allocated for education, the Board of Finance Monday deferred action on the town budget. The proposed spending package has twice been defeated at referendum. A small but determined group of education supporters who attended the boards meeting Monday said it will be defeated again unless additional funding for education is allocated. But the board took no action on the budget, because both Chairman Michael Rose and Vice Chairman Richard Brown were absent, the result of medical emergencies, according to Acting Chairwoman Janine Jiantonio. Earlier this month, the Town Council voted to allocate the largest share of a $700,000 Education Cost Sharing grant to reduce a projected tax increase. The dozen or so education supporters argued the ECS money should be allocated for operations, because by its very name, the money is intended for education, and ought to be used only for education. The ECS grant should be used for education and nothing else, parent Heather Philips said. However, Director of Finance Jeffrey M. Jylkka said Tuesday, The ECS money has been allocated to education, and, as a result, taxes needed to support the ($30.5 million) education budget were reduced. The boards action meant there was $716,000 less than had to be funded by taxes, he explained. Any allocation of additional funding for education cannot take place until the town has adopted a complete operating budget for the coming year. That means approving the general government budget, which would then be married up to the previously approved education budget. The town last year adopted bifurcated voting, which means residents vote separated on the town and the education budgets. During budget deliberations in April, the Republican-dominated finance board sharply reduced the size of the proposed increase in education spending. The Board of Education had proposed a 3.73 percent increase in spending. But the finance board slashed the budget by $670,000, reducing the increase to 1.5 percent. Central to the argument of education supporters (a number of whom described themselves as supporters of the town, and not just education) is the loss of as many as eight teachers. Despite calls from some finance board members to reduce administrative staff, Superintendent of Schools Paul K. Smith said he would have to lay off that many teachers to accommodate the reduction in funding. Smith is now seeking funding to retain three of the eight at-risk positions. Democrat Barbara Moore renewed her suggestion Monday that the ECS grant (approved by the General Assembly in the closing hours of the legislative session last month) be divvied up, with a third going to education. She said $240,000 would accommodate Smiths request. Education supporters pressed for the board to adopt the proposal as a reasonable compromise. Resident Douglas Lockhart seized upon that idea. We need to open our ears and listen to the public, he said. Thats what this great America is all about - compromise. Easily the most persuasive speaker of the evening was 12-year-old Hunter Soltanpanah, who will be entering eighth grade in the fall. He came before the board with a trenchant appeal for adding funds for education. When the first budget was defeated, Smith said the town budget contained capital funding for new safety locks in the school and tablets and Chrome books for students and teachers. Hunter dismissed that argument. Whats more important to you, some locks or Chrome books or teachers? Think about it: Do locks, teachers or do the Chrome books teach hands on how to use grammar? he said. I always thought this was a fair town. I guess I was wrong. Why would you take away the education of the people who will inevitably help you when youre older? Do you want someone who is dumb because they were crammed into a 40-person class and learned nothing? Hunter added. Dont vote yes until the budget has a line item for education other than Chrome books and locks. Please put in a line item to restore the eight teachers you cut, he said. By state law, only the Board of Education can make specific cuts in the education budget. The board of finance can set a bottom-line number but cannot dictate where the resulting cuts can be made. Reporter Jeff Mill covers East Hampton, Cromwell and Portland for the Middletown Press. Contact him at jeff.mill@hearstmediact.com. US Says it Will Pay the Family of the 10 Afghans Killed in a Failed Drone Strike and Help Them Relocate to US A sailor deployed to Eastern Africa has died in a "non-combat related incident," the Pentagon announced Tuesday. Petty Officer 1st Class Matthew I. Holzemer, a Tennessee native, died June 17 at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, officials said in a release. Holzemer was a hospital corpsman and he had been assigned to Naval Branch Health Clinic Naval Air Station Kingsville, Texas, Navy spokesman Lt. Christina Sears told Military.com. Officials have not released any details about his death. Holzemer had been deployed in support of Special Operations Command Forward-East Africa, officials said. Camp Lemonnier, the only permanent U.S. military base in Africa, is home to Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, among other units. Holzemer's death is under investigation, officials said. -- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck. Army Lt. Gen. Austin S. "Scott" Miller gestured over his shoulder Tuesday to his son, Army 2nd Lt. Austin Miller of the 82nd Airborne Division, to emphasize just how long the U.S. has been fighting the "generational" war in Afghanistan. As a lieutenant colonel, Miller went to Afghanistan for the first time shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. "This young guy sitting behind me -- I never anticipated that his cohort would be in a position to deploy [to Afghanistan] as I sat there in 2001 and looked at this," Miller said. "I cannot guarantee you a timeline or an end date" for when the estimated 16,000 U.S. troops now in Afghanistan would be able to withdraw, Miller said at his Senate confirmation hearing to become the ninth commander of U.S. and NATO forces since the 9/11 attacks. Under questioning by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Miller, who is expected to receive a fourth star upon confirmation, repeatedly fell back on the overriding need to protect the U.S. against another major terrorist attack to justify the continuing U.S. presence in Afghanistan. "I've learned a lot in the last 17 years," said Miller, currently commander of Joint Special Operations Command. "I've learned there are groups that want nothing more than to harm Americans." "I've learned," he continued, "these groups thrive in ungoverned spaces. I've also learned that when we maintain pressure on them abroad, they struggle to organize and build the necessary means to attack us." Miller added that he thought military pressure was required to bring about the political reconciliation between the struggling central government in Kabul and the Taliban. "I know this is having an effect on elements that would attack us," Miller said. "This is about protecting U.S. citizens, when you go right to the heart of the issue." Miller's brief outline of his goals in succeeding Army Gen. John Nicholson as overall commander later this summer was met with varying degrees of skepticism from both sides of the aisle during the hearing. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, cited a long list of generals and Defense Secretaries who had previously come before the Committee to speak of having "turned the corner" in the war in Afghanistan in terms of the progress being made. "We supposedly have turned the corner so many times that it seems we're going in circles," Warren said. "Unfortunately you are not the first commander to come in here to express cautious optimism. After 17 years of war, what are you going to do differently?" Miller said he would first have to get on the ground in Afghanistan to make an assessment, but he pledged that he would not speak of turning a corner "unless there is one." Miller did not dispute Warren's assessment that Afghanistan was still "in crisis" amid rampant political corruption and widespread drug trafficking, coupled with "unsustainable" losses by the Afghan security forces and steady gains of territory by the Taliban. According to the Pentagon, about two-thirds of Afghanistan's population remains in areas under Afghan government control and the rest lives in areas that are either contested or held by the Taliban. Miller said that the core problems of Afghan governance would have to be addressed while maintaining military pressure to meet the U.S. objective of forcing the Taliban into negotiating for a political settlement. Miller also warned that a "precipitous and disorderly withdrawal" would result in negative outcomes for U.S. national security. He said that without more training and advising for Afghan security forces, ISIS and al-Qaida could even rise as terror threats to the U.S. itself. "What does winning look like?" Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, asked Miller. Miller responded that it was a stable Afghan government and a "hardened" Afghan military able to prevent territory from being used as "safe havens" for terrorist attack. When Graham asked if the situation in Afghanistan were "getting better or worse," Miller said he didn't know, fully. "I'm not able to judge the better or worse at this stage," he said. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, referred again to Miller's son, Lt. Austin Miller, to make the point that the U.S. must remain engaged in lengthy wars to protect the homeland. Cotton noted the possibility that Lt. Miller would have a young private report to his platoon next year who was born after the 9/11 attacks. "That's a pretty shocking fact, isn't it?" Cotton said. Miller agreed, but added that "I go back to that national interest, that vital national interest" to prevent another attack on the homeland. "That's why we're in Afghanistan," he said. Cotton asked whether Miller could have imagined in 2001 that he would be deploying again to Afghanistan in 2018. "Senator, I did not," Miller responded. "I recall conversations with people who were out for Christmas in 2001," Miller said of his deployment to Afghanistan that year. "[They were] talking about how they were doing this so their kids did not have to." Miller, a 1983 graduate of West Point from Hawaii, said he was bringing to Afghanistan years of experience in ground combat but would have to get updated on the air war and the status of the Afghan Air Force. He was among the first U.S. troops to enter Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. He returned to Afghanistan in 2010 in charge of training and equipping local forces and police, and in June 2013 was in Afghanistan in command of Special Operations in the country. His awards include the Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service medal, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star with combat 'V' device and two oak leaf clusters, and the Purple Heart with oak leaf cluster. Miller was wounded as a Delta Force captain in the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" battle of Mogadishu, and again in Iraq in 2003. -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. B-1B Lancer flight operations are set to resume this week after a stand-down of bomber missions that lasted nearly two weeks, Air Force Global Strike Command officials said Tuesday. The stand-down of the fleet gave officials time to "thoroughly evaluate the egress components and determine potential risks before returning to flight," AFGSC said in a release. Earlier this month the command grounded the fleet over safety concerns related to the Lancer's ejection seats. The stand-down was a result of the emergency landing a Dyess Air Force Base B-1 made May 1 at Midland Airport in Texas. "We have high confidence that the fleet's egress systems are capable and the fleet is ready to return to normal flight operations," said Maj. Gen. Thomas Bussiere, 8th Air Force Commander, in a statement. Related content: Bussiere oversees the bomber force, AFGSC said. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson on Monday confirmed speculation that the Dyess B-1 had to make an emergency landing last month after an ejection seat didn't blow. The B-1 crew "were out training," Wilson said during a speech at the Defense Communities summit in Washington, D.C. Aboard the aircraft she said, we an instructor pilot and "a brand-new crew." "And the indicator light goes off that they have a fire," she said. "They go through their checklist of everything they're supposed to do. The next thing on the checklist is to eject....they start the ejection sequence." Only "the cover comes off, and nothing else happens," she said, referring to the weapons systems officer's ejection hatch. "The seat doesn't fire. Within two seconds of knowing that that had happened, the aircraft commander says, 'Cease ejection, we'll try to land.'" The incident occurred around 1:30 p.m. May 1. Local media reported at the time the non-nuclear B-1B was not carrying weapons when it requested to land because of "an engine flameout." Weeks later, images surfaced on Facebook purporting to show a burnt-out engine from the incident. Photos from The Associated Press and Midland Reporter-Telegram also showed the B-1B, tail number 86-0109, was missing a ceiling hatch, leading to speculation an in-flight ejection was attempted. The back ceiling hatch, which hovers over either the offensive or defensive weapons systems officer depending on mission set, was open, although all four crew members were shown sitting on the Midland flightline in photos. Unidentified individuals told the popular Facebook group Air Force Amn/Nco/Snco that the offensive weapons system officer attempted a manual ejection, but the ACES II seat did not blow, leading the crew to make an emergency landing instead. Officials on Tuesday said the investigation into the incident is still ongoing. Wilson praised the aircrew for their attempts to land while the back-seat airman was sitting on a seat that could still blow with just one bit of turbulence from the aircraft. "The courage it took and the values represented by that aircraft commander who decided we're going to try for all of us to make it rather than sacrifice the one guy who can't get out. Those are the men and women who choose to wear the uniform of the U.S. Air Force," Wilson said. Currently, B-1s are deployed to the Middle East for strike operations and to Europe for a series of summer exercises. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana0214. The Army has narrowed its search for a site to base its newest command -- the headquarters that will lead the service's ambitious modernization strategy -- down to five major U.S. cities. For the past three months, Army officials have been visiting major cities that represent centers of innovation and academia to find a home for the service's Futures Command. Army Col. Patrick Seiber, spokesman for Futures Command task force, confirmed to Military.com that Austin, Boston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Raleigh, North Carolina are now the final five sites under consideration, down from a starting list of 15 candidates. Rumors had been circulating for weeks that the Army had narrowed its list; Bloomberg reported June 4 that Raleigh and Boston were among the finalists. The cities of New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles are no longer candidates. Army Secretary Mark Esper is expected to choose the winning city by the end of June. Under Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy first announced in March the service was considering 30 cities for Futures Command HQ. Army leaders want Futures Command in a city that has a strong presence of industrial innovation as well as academic leaders willing to work with Army leaders on the service's bold modernization strategy. The Army announced its plan build a future force in October. The Army's vision for modernization will ultimately replace all of its "Big Five" combat platforms from the Cold War with modern platforms and equipment. These systems include the M1 Abrams tank, Bradley fighting vehicle, Black Hawk helicopter, Apache attack helicopter and Patriot air defense system. The Army had named six modernization priorities: long-range precision fires, next generation combat vehicle, future vertical lift, a mobile network, air and missile defense and soldier lethality. For each priority, special cross-functional teams of experts have been assembled to pursue change for the Army. Futures Command will be led by an Army four-star general and will begin operations in July, Army officials have said. -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan have reached a new record for this year, marking the highest number of airstrikes in Operation Freedom's Sentinel for any month since October. Fighter, attack and remotely piloted aircraft together dropped nearly 600 weapons in the month of May, according to the recent strike report from Air Forces Central Command. And more bombs were dropped over the 61 days of April and May than over the entirety of 2015, the data shows. "U.S. air operations in May put tremendous pressure on every branch of the Taliban's network," said Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, combined force air component commander and the commander of AFCENT. Related content: "We struck Taliban leadership with precision strikes, and consistently pummeled their revenue-producing facilities, weapons caches and staging facilities," Harrigian said in a release Monday. Overall, U.S. aircraft flew 726 sorties in Afghanistan last month, with 73 of those sorties including at least one weapon release, AFCENT said. Airstrikes have been on the rise and will continue to increase in frequency, Operations Freedom's Sentinel and Resolute Support leaders have said in recent months. For example, more than 4,360 weapons were dropped in the country over 2017, up from 1,330 the previous year. "We've used airpower -- dropped more munitions this year than any year since 2012," commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan Gen. John Nicholson said in November. President Donald Trump last year announced the U.S. would begin sending more troops to Afghanistan to step up the fight against the Taliban and the Afghan offshoot of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, called Islamic State-Khorasan province, or ISIS-K. Since then, the U.S. has stationed a squadron of A-10C Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft, MQ-9 Reapers for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, along with HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters for personnel recovery and search and rescue at Kandahar Airfield. The aircraft in January joined F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jets, C-130J Hercules mobility airlift, EC-130H Compass Call electronic attack aircraft and other planes supporting these operations from Bagram Airfield. Meanwhile, mobility missions have also been on the rise, AFCENT said. C-130 and C-17 Globemaster III planes airdropped more than 190,000 pounds of equipment and supplies in support of U.S. and Afghan ground forces, officials said in the release. Last month, a C-17 cargo airlifter, based out of Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, made its first combat airdrop over Southern Afghanistan for the first time in nearly a year and a half. "Airmen will continue delivering airpower, developing relationships and working closely with our joint partners and the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces to continue setting the conditions in Afghanistan to bring the Taliban to into negotiations with the Afghan government," Harrigian said. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana0214. An Australian federal court has slapped a fine of USD 9 million on Apple for lying to customers who owned devices affected by Error 53 that disabled users iPhones or iPads after the device was updated or rebooted. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) claimed that Apple misled its customers about warranty rights. Authorised service centres refused to repair or replace devices free of charge if they had been previously serviced by an unauthorised third party. The consumer watchdog took Apple to court in April 2017. The issue first came to light in 2016 when a user, who previously had his home button replaced by a third-party, went to an Apple service centre to fix his cracked screen. The centre refused to fix his phone but over the next few months, many other customers around the world came out with the same problem. According to a report in The Guardian, the ACCC said that at least 275 Apple customers in Australia were facing the Error 53 problem and that nothing could be done about it. The root of the problem was the latest iOS update which ran a mandatory security check and would declare the phone unusable showing only the Error 53 message. Apple released a statement explaining that the message was a security feature which protected the devices fingerprint sensor and even put out a new update which restored all disabled devices. Apple has told the court that staff training would be improved, make relevant changes on its Australian website and enhance systems for ensuring future compliance. The company has also offered to pay compensation packages to about 5,000 affected customers. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More The Centre on Tuesday decided to adopt a two-pronged approach to improve functioning of functioning of public sector banks (PSBs) by ironing out issues of consortium-based lending and identifying good borrowers. A committee under Mr Jayakumar (managing director and chief executive officer of Bank of Baroda) has discussed various aspects of credit flow, particularly to micro, small and medium enterprises, Piyush Goyal, interim Finance Minister, told reporters. Goyal was addressing media after interacting with various bank chiefs from northern and eastern part of the country. He said that bank chiefs have made decision to extend credit to MSMEs and genuine small businesses. One of the thoughts before the PSBs has been that they will have to get into the act of working to support MSMEs and genuine good companies who need working capital finances or loans or investment asset but have had some difficulty in the past, Goyal said. About Rs 27 lakh crore loan is parked with MSMEs, according to banking officials. Bankers, now, have decided to push economic growth on the back of such good borrowers in two stages. In the first stage, (accounts will be taken up of those borrowers) who have borrowings between Rs 200 crore and Rs 2,000 crore In the second stage, accounts of up to Rs 200 crore will be taken up, Goyal said. The interim FM said that PSBs have approximately 4,500 accounts under first category. The accounts, which are mostly consortium based, will be thoroughly studied by bankers over the next two weeks to study genuine borrowers. This will be done to identify accounts that are in the business seeing an uptick, which can be further supported by the banks. He further said that, all the bank chiefs will have a creditors arrangement or agreement to iron out issues in the consortium lending. All bankers will take upon themselves to work as a team It was also decided that bankers will adopt the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Codes (IBCs) 66 percent threshold limit to be binding on the consortium, he said adding, bankers will follow the decision taken 66 percent of the lenders in a consortium. Early this month, Ram Nath Kovind, President, had approved promulgation to IBC Ordinance, 2018 paving way to bring down decision taking threshold for lenders at 66 percent from 75 percent. Goyal further said that sub-committees will be set up by all the banks to have stronger risk assessment mechanism. These committees will help banks to ensure that the processes (defined by banks) are robustly followed and suggest if any upgradation of resources, technologies, human resources is needed, he said. State Bank of India, the countrys largest PSB, has suggested that ex-vigilance expert, former judicial officers or former banker could be part of the committee. PSB chiefs, who addressed the media, said that PSBs want to lead the economic growth and that the signs of revival in the economy should be taken to higher level. The major issue is of flow of credit and asset quality because of which, some of the banks are under prompt corrective action by the Reserve Bank of India, said Rajnish Kumar, Chairman, SBI. Banks that are relatively stronger are willing to take up lending activity of a particular bank which is weak. He said that bankers were working towards improvement of consortium working and multiple banking arrangements to have healthy banking system. Goyal on RBIs power over PSBs Goyal said that the RBI has enough power to oversee the working of a PSB. The government, however, was open to discussion. It is his (Urijit Patel, RBI governor) views with regards to regulation and supervision. We believe that powers are available with the reserve bank (but if) there are any more powers required, government is very open to that (conversation), he said. RBI Governor, Urijit Patel, last week informed a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance that the RBI has inadequate power over PSBs and demanded more power to regulate them. It must be noted that PSBs dont come under the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 and are treated as corporations. Consolidation of PSBs Kumar of SBI said that banks were still discussing the idea to consolidate banks. It was a food for thought which has been given and individual banks will use that and look for the opportunities, he said. The chairman, however, added that banking community unanimously believes that the PSBs are presently fragmented. The size of SBI and the next PSB is huge But like any other issue, this move has pros and cons The issues needs deliberations But there is a unanimity that this type of fragmentation is not good, Kumar said. Govt behind Bad Bank? The interim FM said that government was not behind creation of bad bank and that it may not finance it. A committee headed by Sunil Mehta (non-executive chairman, Punjab National Bank) is studying a proposal to study whether they (bankers) should have an ARC and/or Asset Management Company (AMC) or not The committee is deliberating on it nand discussing with the stakeholders Government is not managing the Asset Reconstruction Company (ARC) It is only facilitating the bankers to talk, Goyal said. Centre had recently suggested having a bad bank like institution which would help banks clean their balance sheet. A bad bank helps banks clear their balance sheets by transferring the NPAs, thereby improving asset quality and balancing assets with liabilities. In January 2017, the Economic Survey had suggested that a centralised Public Sector Asset Rehabilitation Agency (PARA) could be established. He, however, said that government was committed to providing requisite capital to the banks. In the last fiscal, PSBs collectively registered losses of Rs 87,300 crore. Of the 21 PSBs, only two banks posted profits. The net loss posted by state-owned banks was about Rs 85,370 crore in 2017-18 as against a net profit of Rs 473.72 crore in the previous fiscal. The NPA in the banking sector stood at Rs 8.31 lakh crore as of December 2017. Weak financials due to mounting bad loans have pushed 11 banks, out of 21 state-owned banks, under the PCA framework of the RBI. Kochhar was born in Jodhpur, Rajasthan in 1961 where she spent most of her early years. Kochhar joined Jai Hind College in Mumbai for a Bachelors Degree in Arts. After graduating in 1982, she studied cost accountancy from Institute of Cost Accountants of India. She did her Masters in Management Studies from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai. She topped her batch and received the Wockhardt Gold Medal for Excellence in Management Studies. In Cost Accountancy she received the JN Bose Gold Medal for highest marks in that year. Kochhar joined the erstwhile ICICI Limited in 1984 as a management trainee. In the initial years, she handled the basic core function in ICICI at that time, i.e. Project Appraisal and Monitoring. She handled projects in various industries like Petrochemicals, Textile, Paper and Cement. In 1993, when the company decided to venture into the commercial banking sector, Kochhar was deputed with ICICI Bank. She was promoted to Assistant General Manager in 1994 and then Deputy General Manager in 1996. In 1998, ICICI created a Major Client Group to handle the relationships with the top 200 clients of ICICI. She was promoted as the General Manager and was made the head of the Major Clients Group. In the year 1999, she simultaneously started handling the Strategy and e-commerce divisions of ICICI. In July 2000, under the leadership of Kochhar, ICICI Bank entered the retail business and within a short span of around 5 years, the Bank emerged as one of the largest retail financer in India. In April 2001, she took over as Executive Director, heading the retail business in ICICI Bank. In April 2006, she was appointed as Deputy Managing Director of ICICI Bank, with responsibility for both Corporate and Retail banking business of ICICI Bank and from October 2006 to October 2007, she was handling the International and Corporate businesses of ICICI Bank. She was elevated as the Managing Director & CEO of ICICI Bank in 2009. Kochhar is currently a member of various boards which include the Indian Banks Association, IIIT Vadodara, National Institute of Securities Markets and Institute of International Finance. She is also a member of the Prime Ministers Council on Trade & Industry, the Board of Trade and High-Level Committee on Financing Infrastructure. Kochhar, though currently in the news for the wrong reasons, has won many prestigious awards in her illustrious career which include Padma Bhushan. She has also been ranked as most powerful women and professional by multiple publications which include Forbes, Fortune, CNBC TV18, etc. On January 30, a panel headed by Justice BN Srikrishna indicted former MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar for violating the bank's code of conduct in the Videocon loan case. Following the report, the bank's board said it will treat her separation as 'termination for cause' under their internal policies. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More An old hand at ICICI Group, Sandeep Bakhshi, who spearheaded both the life and general insurance arms of ICICI Bank, is now the senior-most official in the group after CEO and MD Chanda Kochhar. On Monday, the private sector lender created a new position of chief operating officer (COO) to bring in Bakhshi from the bank's insurance subsidiary ICICI Prudential Life. This comes after two months of controversy surrounding Kochhar. Bakhshi will take charge of business and corporate functions and report to the board. Meanwhile, Kochhar remains CEO and MD, but will be on leave until an independent enquiry into alleged conflict of interest is concluded at the bank. Kochhar and her relatives are charged with quid pro quo on the loans extended to some corporate borrowers including as Videocon Group. IN PICS | Chanda Kochhar: A look at the illustrious career of the embattled CEO of ICICI Bank Bakhshi, like Kochhar, is an ICICI veteran who joined the institution in 1986. In his 32-year finance career, Bakhshi has gained varied experience in banking and insurance. In his last assignment at the bank, Bakhshi, 58, was deputy managing director and head of retail and wholesale operations. In August 2010, Bakhshi was appointed MD and CEO of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company. A close associate of Kochhar, Bakhshi was deeply involved in the day-to-day functioning of the Bank since he joined. He has experience across retail banking, project appraisals as well as risk management and has handled large corporate clients at the bank. Also Read: COMMENT | Like Kochhar, the ICICI Bank board should go on leave, but permanently Under Bakhshi, the insurers persistency ratio by policy improved from 10.7 percent in FY14 to 49.1 percent in FY18. This means out of every 100 policies, 49.1 percent are in the books being serviced even after the fifth year. While many see him as an outcome-oriented leader who achieves financial numbers with calm nerves, Bakhshi has experienced his share of controversy relating to an FIR filed last year against the insurer's officials over mis-selling of life insurance policies in Rajasthan. In 2005, five of the insurers employees in New Delhi were also jailed for launching a Jehad sales campaign in which they glorified Osama bin Laden and his focused determination in an effort to increase business by likening successful policy sales to kills. With such allegations, he is a poor choice to come as the COO of ICICI Bank...There is less confidence in the board for now, said independent market analyst Hemindra Hazari. A senior banking analyst added, "The FIR on mis-selling may not impact Bakhshi's performance in the bank but maybe he will take time to settle in the bank as maybe a Kannan or someone within the bank could have done. We will still need to wait for his strategy." Hence, Bakhshis appointment is a "step better", yet many questions at the top management and bank's operations have been unanswered. Task ahead for Bakhshi Mired in controversy, ICICI Bank which is the country's third largest bank by assets and largest private lender, has a lot of cleaning up required. Most importantly, to revive the image and investor confidence at the bank. As per a report, at least three foreign investors, including Baillie Gifford and Co, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, Noosa, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, have cut their shareholdings in ICICI Bank. Additionally, areas of non-performing assets (NPAs) or bad loans and deterioration in asset quality, slow corporate and small and medium sector enterprise (SME) credit growth, dwindling profitability will require a major shake-up. The banks March 2018 quarter net profit stood at Rs 1,020 crore, its lowest in the last eight quarters. Gross NPA ratio rose to 8.84 percent in Q4FY18 from 7.89 percent in the year-ago quarter with additions of Rs 15,737 crore to bad loans in the three months. Net NPAs had marginally declined to 4.77 percent and the bank aims to reduce this number to 1.5 percent by March 2020. "While Mr. Bakhshi has strong credentials backing him to lead the bank, the preference of internal candidates to lead various business operations continues at the bank," said a report by Kotak Securities. Bakhshi's journey A mechanical engineer from Punjab and an XLRI alumni, Bakhshi led ICICI Pru Life to become the first listed insurance company in India and undertook a digital transformation that included the tab-based selling concept. Group officials say that ICICI Prudential Life entered the insurance industry at a time when Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) was the sole player in life insurance. At present, the insurance company is among the top three private life insurance companies and largest private sector non-life insurer by premiums collected with a strong presence among high-networth individual (HNI) clients. Apart from the insurance entities where he held top roles, Bakhshi served as an Executive Director of ICICI Bank from May 2009 to July 2010 and as a director on the Bhushan Steel board for three years until 2009. On the personal front, he's a wildlife enthusiast, has cleared the National Defence Academy tests but did not pursue it. Instead, he went on to join computer marketing company ORG Systems in 1983. Representative image live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Indians are now travelling across India in style, thereby giving luxury hotels a much-needed shot in the arm. Once known to spend big during international travel, Indian travellers are now also contributing to the revenue of domestic luxury and branded hotels. Its not just the stay, the domestic leisure travellers are spending a good amount of money within the hotel during the period of their stay too. As per a report by Business Standard, Chinmai Sharma, the Chief Revenue Officer at Taj Hotels asserted that the domestic leisure segment is one of the fastest growing categories in the hospitality chain. She added, Not more than three years ago, the international leisure travellers accounted for as much as seventy per cent of our leisure business and rest came from domestic tourists. The share is now equally split between these two categories. EIH Limited - the flagship company of the Oberoi Group - confirms this trend in their annual report for FY 2017 where it states that the hospitality industry is experiencing increased dependence on domestic leisure and corporate traveller. EIH also expects this trend to continue in the coming years. Radisson Hotel Groups CEO (South-Asia), Raj Rana said that since most international travellers take longer vacations, the average spend per day is lower than a domestic traveller who takes shorter but frequent breaks. Lemon Tree Hotels spokesperson attributes the increase in Indian leisure travellers to an increase in disposable incomes in Indian families and the online agents aggressive marketing offers. The Ministry of Tourism also confirmed that the number of visits by domestic tourists increased by 13% in 2016 due to better connectivity and lower airfares. They expect this trend to continue in the coming years too. Current account deficit (CAD) at 2.5 percent of GDP won't be a worry as the government has the required instruments to deal with any imbalance created due to foreign fund outflow, Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg said today. "2-2.5 percent CAD is not a problem for us.... If there is stability, in the current year capital account (inflows) should be good enough to take care and we may not worry even if it (CAD) reaches 2.5 percent," Garg said. CAD, which is the difference between the inflow and outflow of foreign exchange, jumped to USD 48.7 billion, or 1.9 percent of GDP, in 2017-18 fiscal. This was higher than USD 14.4 billion, or 0.6 percent, CAD in 2016-17 fiscal. With rising oil prices, depreciating rupee and outflow of portfolio investments, there are concerns that CAD might rise in the current fiscal. "Last year, we had USD 160 billion of trade deficit, USD 82 billion services surplus and USD 70 billion remittances. In a way, we are pretty much in balance. "But if oil goes up, this balance gets disturbed and the capital account funds it," Garg said at a CII event here. The price of Indian basket of crude surged from USD 66 a barrel in April to around USD 74 a barrel at present. Asked about monetary policy tightening by the United States, he said India can afford to be "less edgy and concerned" than it was during Taper Tantrum in 2013. "In the last couple of years of monetary easing, you did not see flood of capital flows coming into emerging markets, including India. Unlike what happened in 2007. There is a confidence that the emerging market economies will do well," he said. He added the government needs to be "very careful and watch out" for the situation, but today "we are at a place where we can manage without having the consequences of what we saw in Taper Tantrum." "We have a number of other instruments to use in that case. We have not called upon them to use so far. Last time we came out with NRE (non-resident external) deposit. We are sitting on reserves which are highest ever at USD 415 billion. The place where we are is possibly not the kind of situation where we were in 2013," he said. Observing that the fund flow from portfolio investors depend on factors like yields and exchange rate, he said "we still are in good shape. CAD between 2.5-3 percent is something not in our control. It depends on way the oil would behave. "But we are definitely in a place where we can take care these things, unlike 10 years ago when we didn't have fire power. I think on macro front we need to be vigilant, but we can take care," he added. On managing fiscal deficit, he said the government has worked in a very prudent and sound manner. India would shortly achieve the targeted 3 per cent fiscal deficit level and it will be more permanent and sustainable in nature, Garg said. Engineers walk past a cooling system plant under construction inside Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT) at Gandhinagar, in the western Indian state of Gujarat, April 10, 2015. India's push to accommodate a booming urban population and attract investment rests in large part with dozens of "smart" cities like the one being built on the dusty banks of the Sabarmati river in western India. Picture taken April 10, 2015. REUTERS/Amit Dave - GF10000057728 The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) today unveiled plans for a first-of-its-kind conference in India to welcome the country as its newest member. The inaugural EBRD-FICCI Business Forum in Mumbai on Friday is themed around 'Mobilising private sector finance in the EBRD region and how Indian companies can benefit'. The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) partnered event is backed by the Export-Import Bank of India (EXIM) with the aim of bringing together government officials, EBRD experts, and investors and prominent business people to highlight the multilateral bank's efforts to mobilise private sector finance in the economies where it invests, and what the opportunities are for the Indian private sector. We are very proud to have India on board as a shareholder. The membership was unanimously approved by our existing shareholders, said EBRD president Suma Chakrabarti, before he left for India to address the forum. India has a very diversified economic base and therefore very diversified companies, which can fulfil investment needs of our countries of operation, he said. In the past, EBRD has worked closely with India and in countries like Russia, Turkey, Romania, and Ukraine. Chakrabarti feels that India's membership, which is now its final stages of completion, will open up further investment prospects in markets in Central Asia, Egypt and Jordan. These markets are not very well known to Indian companies. The advantage of membership is that Indian companies and the Indian government immediately get free access to all of EBRD's knowledge political, commercial, market and economic knowledge, he explained. London-headquartered EBRD is a multilateral development bank set up in 1991 after the fall of the Berlin Wall to promote private and entrepreneurial initiative in emerging Europe. It invests in 38 emerging economies across three continents, according to a set of criteria that aim to make its countries more competitive, better governed, greener, more inclusive, more resilient and more integrated. Its Indian-origin president described India's entry as the bank's 69th member as a personal high point for him, as he nears the end of his second term in office. He said, In my term as EBRD president, India the country of my birth becoming a shareholder is a high point for me personally". "Also, it is a very good thing for global governance that India, a leading member of the G20, is now a member of this institution which is slightly different from the others because of our private sector focus and mandate. It makes us quite special, and having India on board is special as well," he said. Under Chakrabarti, EBRD had also concluded a joint declaration on the India-led International Solar Alliance (ISA) last year. With India now a member, this declaration is expected to get a further boost in terms of mobilising more finance for solar energy and taking forward solar energy policy and reforms. The Business Forum in Mumbai will include plenary sessions dedicated to discussing investment opportunities and economic prospects for the region for EBRD's operation. The bank has worked with leading Indian companies, such as Tata, Mahindra, SREI and Jindal, on investments in its regions, with the value of such joint projects worth an estimated 1 billion euros. It now hopes to introduce itself to even more Indian companies to explore newer investment opportunities. With India now taking a shareholding in EBRD, it is expected that the scope of these joint initiatives will be further enhanced. While India will not be a recipient of EBRD financing, it will benefit from the bank's expertise and support in the region. We did a mapping exercise which shows that many Indian companies want to go to these countries of operation and need a safe and sound partner, something the EBRD provides, said Chakrabarti. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More ICICI Bank Executive Director Narayanan Srinivasa Kannan is a man of all seasons. The ICICI lifer has handled a variety of responsibilities in his 27-year career, including finance, treasury, corporate law, operations, infrastructure management, and the strategic solutions group. And now Kannan takes on yet another role. The 52-year-old will replace Sandeep Bakhshi as CEO and Managing Director of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance. Bakhshi is moving to ICICI Bank as its Chief Operating Officer and Wholetime director as a part of attempts by the country's largest private lender to limit the damage stemming from the quid pro quo controversy surrounding its MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar. Known for being conservative and media-shy, Kannan was appreciated in the bank for his ability to have a complete overview of issues, and to be able to comprehensively look at different angles. Kochhar once called him a banker who had a well-rounded perspective on any issue. "From the risk point of view, from the profitability point, compliance and business...It is the ability to have a very well-rounded perspective of an issue. Finance is not just finance, but more a strategic position," Kochhar had told a daily in 2013. Kannan is going to need that well-rounded perspective in his new responsibility. He will be leading the life insurance unit at a time when competition is intensifying between the top three private life insurance companies -- ICICI Prudential Life, HDFC Life and SBI Life. Kannan's efforts to maintain the insurer's top line and bottom line growth at par with the industry's growth will be a key aspect to watch out for. ICICI lifer A postgraduate in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, Kannan is also a Chartered Financial Analyst from the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India, and a Honours graduate in Mechanical Engineering from National Institute of Technology (formerly Regional Engineering College), Tiruchirappalli. He started his career in 1991 as a project officer in ICICI group and has since taken on multiple roles in the group, including crucial roles in the bank that saw him steadily rise through the ranks. In 2005, Kannan moved to the life insurance business and was its executive director till 2009. Company insiders said that he was among the key people there, having helped build the team and provided strategic inputs for driving the product portfolio. In 2009, Kannan moved back to ICICI Bank as chief financial officer and executive director. He handled finance, infrastructure and treasury operations in his long stint, and had the responsibility of managing the day-to-day administration of risk management, compliance and internal audit functions. The President of ICICI Foundation for Inclusive Growth also reported to him. Kannan held the position till October 2013 and has since been an executive director at the bank. Being a corporate expert Kannan is known to be in the good books of the ICICI Bank's board, including Chanda Kochhar. This is probably why when the Bank needed someone dependable to take over the life insurance business, it was Kannan they turned to. 8 | Infosys | Market Cap for the week ended October 30: Rs 4,51,753.23 crore crore | Loss during the week: 26,152.79 crore. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More As IT major Infosys completed 25 years of its listing on the stock exchange, a former senior official of the firm paid rich tributes to the co-founder N R Narayana Murthy for creating the "dream" company. "I don't think the country is going to see one more Infosys again because Infosys has been a dream company for many generations," says ex-Chief Financial Officer V Balakrishnan. The Bengaluru-headquartered company, he said, created the middle class aspiration in the country and made them think global. Balakrishnan saw it as an extraordinary story of how a few people with little background came together, built a global company and ran it in a legal and ethical manner, still creating enormous amount of wealth and share it with all stakeholders. "I think all this had been possible because of one iconic leader -- Murthy who had created the dream of Infosys which attracted the best talent to come and work and make their company much bigger," he told PTI. Balakrishnan also said Infosys, which last week celebrated the silver jubilee of its listing in 1993, to some extent institutionalised the Capital market. When Infosys was listed two-and-half decades ago, the Indian capital market was not institutionalised. With global aspiration, the then small company set benchmark for disclosures and value system and enhanced the profile for the whole corporate world in India, according to him. "If you look at the SEBI's recommendations on corporate governance, most of them had been followed (earlier) by Infosys, which was later mandated by the regulator to all companies to follow. So, it improved the whole profile of the corporate world in India, and enhanced corporate governance standards", Balakrishnan said. Infosys put value before profits, and Murthy always demonstrated leadership by example which attracted a good team of people which came and made the dream much bigger, he said. As long as Infosys sticks to its core value system, and governance standards, it would continue to do well, he said. Infosys as a company, Balakrishnan said, has tremendous amount of goodwill of investors and stakeholders, and "everyone wants the company to perform well." The company has done extraordinarily well in the last many years and created tremendous amount of wealth for investors. "I don't see why it (the same thing) will not happen for the next 25 years. Key thing is they should not lose their sight on core value system and principles," he added. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Railways consultancy firm RITES will open its initial public offering for subscription on June 20, with a price band of Rs 180-185 per share. It would be the first state-owned company to hit the IPO market in FY19. The issue will close on June 22. The equity shares are proposed to be listed on BSE as well as NSE. Elara Capital India, IDBI Capital Markets & Securities, SBI Capital Markets and IDFC Bank are book running lead managers to the issue. Link Intime India is the registrar. Here are 10 key things you should know before subscribing the issue:- Company Profile RITES is a wholly owned government company, a Miniratna (Category I) Schedule 'A' public sector enterprise. It is a leading player in the transport consultancy and engineering sector in India and the only company having diversified services and geographical reach in this field under one roof (Source: IRR Report). It has an experience spanning 44 years and has undertaken projects in over 55 countries including Asia, Africa, Latin America, South America and Middle East regions. It is the only export arm of Indian Railways for providing rolling stock overseas (other than Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia). It is a multidisciplinary engineering and consultancy organisation providing diversified and comprehensive array of services from concept to commissioning in all facets of transport infrastructure and related technologies. In India, its clients include various central and state government ministries, departments, instrumentalities as well as local government bodies and public sector undertakings. About the Public Issue The issue consists of offer for sale of 2.52 crore equity shares by the government. Its 12 lakh equity shares are reserved for eligible employees. The offer will constitute 12.60 percent of the post-offer paid-up equity share capital of the company. Bids can be made for minimum 80 equity shares and in multiples of 80 shares thereafter. Fund Raising The government is targetted to raise about Rs 453-466 crore through the share sale, at a price band of Rs 180-185 a share, respectively. The paid-up share capital of RITES currently stands at Rs 200 crore. Objects of the Issue RITES will not receive any proceeds from the offer and all the proceeds will go to the selling shareholder which is the Government of India. Hence, the objects of the offer are (i) to carry out the disinvestment of 2.4 crore equity shares held by the selling shareholder in the company, equivalent to 12 percent of the paid up equity share capital of the company as part of the net offer, and 12 lakh shares that will be reserved for employee reservation portion, and (ii) to achieve the benefits of listing the equity shares on the stock exchanges. Competitive Strengths > Company provides comprehensive range of consultancy services offerings and has a diversified sector portfolio in the transport infrastructure space; > It has large order book with strong and diversified clientele base across sectors. "As of March 31, 2018, order book stood at Rs 4,818.7 crore, which includes 353 ongoing projects of value over Rs 1 crore each; The order book in consultancy services business stood at Rs 2,572.09 crore, leasing services Rs 140.65 crore, export sales Rs 697.74 crore and turnkey construction projects Rs 1,408.2 crore. > It has technical expertise housed in various business divisions within company with specialised domain knowledge across each of the market segments; > It has experienced management personnel and technically qualified team; > RITES is the preferred consultancy organisation of the Government of India including the Indian Railways. > It has strong and consistent financial performance supported by robust internal control and risk management system. Financials The company has been consistently profitable over the last five years and has paid dividends regularly to the equity shareholders. As per the restated financial information, its total income has grown at a CAGR of 9.61 percent and profit grew at a CAGR of 11.61 percent during FY13-17. Shareholding The government currently holds 100 percent stake in the company. After this public offer, promoter will hold 87.40 percent of the post offer paid-up equity share capital of company. Management Rajeev Mehrotra is the Chairman and Managing Director of the Company since October 11, 2012. He holds a Bachelors Honors degree in Accountancy and Business Statistics from Rajasthan University and is qualified as a Fellow Member of the Institute of Cost Accountants of India. He has over 34 years of experience, out of which he has over 10 years of experience at the board level in company. He has also worked with the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation Limited, Faridabad and Power Finance Corporation Limited, New Delhi in various capacities. Dividend Policy The dividend paid by the company during the last five fiscals and the current financial year till the date of this RHP:- Risks & Concerns Here are some risks and concerns highlighted by brokerage houses:- > The company depends on the Ministry of Railways (MoR) for a significant portion of its business including equipment, technical staff etc. > The companys current order book may not necessarily translate into future income. > The company faces certain competitive pressures from the existing competitors and new entrants in both public and private sector. > The government has significant influence over actions which may restrict company's ability to manage business. Any change in government policy could have a material adverse effect on financial condition and results of operations. > It is dependent on the line of credit provided by the government and other funding agencies provided to countries that it operates in. > The company is subject to inherent risks associated with external suppliers, contractors and sub-contractors being involved in its projects. > The company is in the process of winding up its subsidiaries, namely RISL, RITES (AFRIKA) and RMAC (Saudi Arabia). > Revenues and profits are difficult to predict and can vary significantly from quarter to quarter. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More ICICI Bank share price fell as much as a percent in morning on Tuesday after the news that the board appointed Sandeep Bakhshi as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the bank priced in. The stock had rallied 3.6 percent on Monday. "The board of directors on Monday decided to appoint Sandeep Bakhshi, as Wholetime Director & Chief Operating Officer designate, ICICI Bank. His appointment as COO will be for a period of five years, subject to regulatory approvals," the bank said in its statement. Bakhshi will take over as the COO from June 19, 2018, or on the date of regulatory and other approvals, whichever is later, it added. The bank said he will be responsible for handling all the businesses and corporate centre functions at the bank. "All executive directors on the board of ICICI Bank and the executive management will report to him." Bakhshi will report to Chanda Kochhar, who will continue in her role as MD & CEO of the country's largest private sector lender. In line with the highest levels of governance and corporate standards, Kochhar has decided to go on leave till the completion of the enquiry against her in the Videocon loan matter as announced on May 30, 2018. Kochhar and her family members are facing allegations of quid pro quo and conflict of interest with respect to a loan extended to the Videocon group. Last month, the bank had announced an independent enquiry into the allegations against Kochhar following a complaint from a whistle-blower. Bakhshi has been the Managing Director & CEO, of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company, since August 01, 2010. The bank board also recommended to the board of directors of ICICI Prudential Life Insurance Company to appoint N S Kannan as the Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the company subject to regulatory and other approvals. "COO role strikes us as unnecessary in the long term," Jefferies said while retaining its Buy call on the bank with a target price of Rs 380 per share. "Valuations are cheap at current levels." Sandeep Bakhshi's deep association should aid a smooth transition, it believes. The research house feels operating environment has been improving & the bank is able to arrest fresh non-performing loans formation. Another global brokerage firm Citi also maintained its Buy call on ICICI Bank with a target price of Rs 390, saying the appointment of Bakhashi significantly reduced the uncertainty among all stakeholders regarding management. IDFC Securities, too, retained Buy rating with a target price of Rs 370 as it feels new COO reinstilled confidence in management. "Arrangement seems win-win for both ICICI Bank and ICICI Prudential Life Insurance. The likelihood of Mr Bakshi being selected as new CEO is very high." At 09:42 hours IST, the stock price was quoting at Rs 290.80, down Rs 1.70, or 0.58 percent on the BSE. June 19, 2018 / 03:39 PM IST Market Closing: Benchmark indices closed sharply lower on Tuesday, following weakness in the global peers on US-China trade tensions. The Sensex fell 261.52 points to 35,286.74 and the Nifty slipped 89.40 points to 10,710.50. HPCL, UPL, Reliance Industries, Indiabulls Housing Finance, Maruti, Tata Motors and L&T were under pressure while GAIL and Bajaj Finance gained more than a percent. Nifty Midcap index lost more than 220 points. CG Power, Firstsource Solutions, SAIL, Rain Industries, NMDC, Adani Enterprises, CESC, Indiabulls Real, Reliance Capital, Tata Global, Edelweiss, IGL, LIC Housing Finance, Venkys and Motilal Oswal declined up to 5 percent. Vakrangee rallied 5 percent. Mahindra Lifespace surged 11 percent. Liberty Shoes gained 9 percent while Bata and Relaxo Footwear rose over a percent. United Spirits, UCO Bank, Petronet LNG and Glenmark Pharma were other gainers. Patanjali (Image: Facebook) The Uttar Pradesh government today gave its nod to Patanjali Ayurveda Pvt Ltd to transfer its land to its subsidiary company in Greater Noida for setting up a Rs 6,000-crore mega food park. The state government decision enables the Haridwar-based firm to meet the Centre's June 30 deadline to fulfil its various conditions, including acquisition of land, for its final nod to set up the food park. A decision to allow Patanjali to transfer its land to its subsidiary firm was taken at a state Cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath here, an official spokesperson told mediapersons. The decision comes against the backdrop of the pressure of Patanjali group which had threatened to shift its food park out of the state at a time when it was trying to showcase its investor-friendly image. A day after the group had threatened to cancel the project, BJP president Amit Shah met Ramdev under the party's 'Sampark for Samarthan' campaign and Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had called up Ramdev and Patanjali Group CEO Acharya Balakrishna personally to assure them of all possible help and co-operation. Along with its request for transfer of land to its subsidiary company, Patanjali had also asked for a government subsidy of Rs 150 crore for setting up the food park even though the subsidiary company had no land in its name. As the deadline was about to expire, the Centre decided to give 15 days more time till June 30 to Patanjali Ayurved for meeting conditions like acquisition of land, required for the final nod for setting up the proposed mega food park. As the earlier deadline to meet the required conditions was to expire on June 15, the Uttar Pradesh government had requested the Union Food Processing Ministry to give more time to the leading FMCG firm and extend the deadline till June 30. "Since the company is already taking action and requested for 15 days extra time to meet the conditions, the ministry will grant the time as requested," Food Processing Secretary JP Meena had said. The company had proposed to invest up to Rs 6,000 crore to set up a plant over 425 acres of land along the Yamuna Expressway through its step-down firm Patanjali Food and Herbal Park. The conditions that were to be complied with include acquisition and transfer of land in the name of Patanjali Ayurved's subsidiary. Patanjali wanted to transfer 91 acres of this land to its subsidiary, Patanjali Food and Herbal Park Noida Pvt Ltd, for setting up a mega food park. The permission had earlier been withheld as the infrastructure and industrial development policy of 2012, under which land had been allocated to Patanjali along the Yamuna Expressway in 2016, did not allow for land to be subleased. On June 6, Patanjali had said that its mega food park would produce goods worth Rs 25,000 crore annually on full capacity running. It is envisaged to create 10,000 direct jobs. Patanjali is presently investing in mega food park projects, including those in Nagpur (Maharashtra) and Tezpur (Assam). live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Brokerages welcome the management revamp at ICICI Bank but await more clarity on a probe into nepotism allegations against CEO Chanda Kochhar and possible succession. Mumbai-based lender on Monday named group veteran Sandeep Bakhshi as interim head, and said Kochhar would go on leave till the completion of a probe into alleged conflict of interest over loans given to Videocon whose founders had an interest in a renewable company founded by her husband. Kotak Securities says it sees the development as an important step to address a key concern that has been a headwind to the stock in recent months. While Bakhshis appointment is a step better, still too many questions left unanswered, fund manager who holds ICICI shares says. Morgan Stanley says Bakhshi will likely be a front-runner for the CEO job as Kochhars current term ends in early 2019, although board could also look for external candidates. Despite being inexpensive, ICICI stock could continue to lag peers in the near term given the uncertainty around top management, Morgan Stanley says. Moneycontrol News Retired Supreme Court judge BN Srikrishna has been appointed by ICICI Bank to look into charges of corporate misconduct against the bank and its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Chanda Kochhar. But this is not the only task that is keeping the former Supreme Court judge busy. Bellur Narayanaswamy Srikrishna, 77, is also heading a committee that is reworking data privacy laws in India. The committee could ask foreign companies to localize data storage, an attempt to ensure that data on Indian operations is stored in India only. "Like we keep diabetes and blood pressure in check, controls are needed for data," Srikrishna was quoted as saying in a Mint report. Srikrishna was also the chairman of the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission (FSLRC), which changed India's financial regulatory architecture. Born in Bengaluru, Srikrishna is an alumnus of Government Law College in Mumbai. He began his career in the Bombay High Court in 1967. He has also served as Chief Justice of the Kerala High Court from 2001 to 2002. He was appointed as Supreme Court judge in 2002, and retired in 2006. But what sets Srikrishna apart the most is the fact that he headed the well-known 'Srikrishna Commission', which investigated the 1992 Bombay riots. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Indian pharma companies may finally find a way to mount the wall that prevented them from making the most of the lucrative market in China. The Chinese government is said to have assured its Indian counterpart of expediting the process of drug approvals in less than 12 months, a major impediment for Indian drug makers entry to world's second largest pharmaceutical market. Currently it takes around five years to get an approval in China, while Indian drug regulator approves drug product within 3-6 months. They (the China Food and Drug Administration, or CFDA) are very clear about expediting entry of Indian generic pharmaceuticals, said Dinesh Dua, Chairman of Pharmaceuticals Export Promotion Council (Pharmexcil) the agency under Department of Commerce for promotion of pharmaceutical exports. They will follow the dossier whatever written in the Drug Master File (DMF), and if everything is found alright they will then expedite approval without ifs and buts, Dua said. Dua said Pharmexcil had meetings with CFDA, Chinese Chamber of Commerce and other industry bodies. Soon a delegation from CFDA is expected to visit India to provide more clarity and educate industry on expectations of the Chinese drug regulator. The ground work has started, China is our top focus for exports, Dua added. Multi-billion dollar opportunity Currently presence of Indian drug makers in Chinese market is miniscule. Commerce Ministry data shows that India exported around USD 27.11 million worth of pharmaceutical products to China during FY17, while its total Indian pharma exports during the same period stood at USD 16.84 billion. On contrast India imported close to USD 2 billion worth of active pharmaceutical ingredients and intermediates in FY17 from China. Dr Reddys manufactures and sells drugs in China through joint venture with Canadas Rotam group. Cipla has exited two ventures in the past, and has been looking to re-enter the market with respiratory portfolio. Sun Pharma and Torrent Pharma too have exited the market. Granules India manufactures APIs through JV in China. According to the International Trade Administration (ITA) of the US Department of Commerce, Chinese pharmaceutical market is forecasted to grow from USD 108 billion in 2015 to USD 167 billion by 2020. Generic drug sales constitute about 64 percent or USD 68 billion of total sales. Total public and private healthcare expenditure reached USD 640 billion in 2015 and is expected to almost double to USD 1.1 trillion by 2020. A study done by IMS Health and Pharmexcil on Enhancing Indian Exports of Pharmaceutical products to China had suggested India companies to form joint ventures with local companies to avoid tariff and quota issues, to gain more focus and control of product distribution and service in China. The study also suggested for setting up of a local Indian CDSCO (Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation) office in China having Indian representatives for all policy and regulatory recommendations; and increasing understanding on differences that exists in provincial procurement of hospital medicines. "Chinese are opening up their market, they have a separate track to approve products filed from US FDA approved facilities," said Sriram Shrinivasan , Leader, Global Life Sciences Emerging Markets & Generics, EY. "There is rush among Chinese companies to acquire US FDA compliant manufacturing sites, India with largest number of US FDA compliant facilities outside US should take advantage of the opportunity," Shrinivasan said. Chinese market is currently dominated by MNC pharma companies. Regulatory restructuring China had undertook a massive restructuring of its drug regulator early this year to improve oversight and raise quality standards of drugs sold in the country. The drug regulator which was insisting on local bio-equivalence studies and technology transfers had done away with those policies to speed up approvals. Now China accepts data from clinical studies conducted outside the country, specifically US and EU to support marketing applications for medicines. To enhance quality standards CFDA is giving fast track approvals to products filed from US FDA compliant facilities wherever in the world. Its even pushing Chinese companies to comply with US standards. Another major entry barrier is the exorbitant fee charged by China for registering a product. China imposes USD 145,960 for registering a product, while India levies an extremely low registration fee of USD 1,000 per product for Chinese pharmaceutical companies. To be sure there wasnt any assurance from China on reducing the registration fee. DG Shah, Secretary General of industry lobby group Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA) points out to another non-tariff barrier wherein Chinese authorities take 3-5 months to clear a consignment of imported drugs, while pharmaceutical products typically expire by 18 months. These are indirect barriers that China erected to forestall entry of India companies to ensure the cost of filing was humongous, thats the reason why nobody want to get into China, Dua said. China early last month had lifted import duties on as many as 28 medicines, including certain cancer drugs as it tries to ease the financial burden of patients and their families. Chinese Ambassador to India Luo Zhaohui called it good news for Indias pharmaceutical industry and medicine exports to China. I believe this will help reduce trade imbalance between China and India in the future, he tweeted. To be sure it wasnt India specific exemption, but Indian drug makers are widely seen to benefit from the move as they supply and market much of those products across the world at substantially lower cost and high quality. Interestingly the Chinese government announcement came just a few days ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping bilateral summit at Wuhan that was intended to reset the ties after they have hit rock bottom during Doklam standoff between June and August of last year. The Chinese side, as part of certain confident building measures, is said to have promised to address widening trade deficit with India, which has touched USD 63.12 billion in 2017-18. India is asking China for greater market access to sell its pharma products with a view to bridge the trade deficit. The official email account of CBI Joint Director Rajiv Singh, who heads the banking fraud division, has been blocked, News18 reports. Singhs division was responsible for probing the Rs 13,000 crore bank fraud case against diamantaire Nirav Modi. Singh's account was used to send bulk emails and investigative agencies are probing whether sensitive information relating to the Nirav Modi case was leaked. Sources said his account was accessed from a location in Shimla, after which Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) alerted the CBI. Agencies are now probing the possibility of Singhs account having been hacked. His desktop computer has been seized. Suspicious activity on his email account was first noticed on May 16, after which CERT of the Ministry of Information Technology blocked his account. Investigative agencies are asking why Singh did not immediately report the suspicious activity. The CBI Joint Director had last month been repatriated to his home cadre of Tripura. However, Singh's transfer is not connected to the Nirav Modi case, CBI sources told News18. Absconding jeweller Nirav Modi is the main accused in the Rs 13,000 crore (about USD 2 billion) Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case. It was earlier reported that Nirav Modi had travelled from London to Brussels using an Indian passport on June 12. To avoid authorities, he chose to travel to Brussels via rail rather than air travel. This is despite the fact that his passport had been revoked on February 24. The CBI approached Interpol on June 11 for issuing a Red Corner Notice (RCN) against Nirav Modi. This was because the charge sheet in the case had not been filed until recently. Experts believe he may have used this window of opportunity to travel between London and Brussels. Meanwhile, Indian authorities in Belgium are said to have informed Belgian banks about the cases against Nirav Modi. An unprecedented rodent invasion in an SBI ATM in Assam caused a loss of cash amounting to Rs 12.38 lakh. Located in Assams Tinsukia district, the ATM was out of order from May 19 up until June 11, when the technicians arrived. As per a report by India Today, most of the shredded currency were notes of Rs 500 and Rs 2000. The company hired to run the ATM is a Guwahati-based organisation, FIS. The cash was deposited one day before by the company after which the ATM went out of order, according to reports. We have been able to salvage about Rs 17 lakh, a bank official confirmed on a local news channel. An FIR has been filed with the Tinsukia police to probe further into the matter. The suspicious timing of the ATM not functioning along with the length of time for which it was out of order has caused some to question the incident. May 20 and June 11 is a significant period of time for an ATM to be out of service. People are suspicious as to why it took so long for the mechanics to arrive, said a local. State Bank of India (SBI) For all aspiring bankers awaiting admit cards for the SBI PO exams, 2018, the wait is over. State Bank of India (SBI) has released the admit cards for the preliminary examination for recruitment of Probationary Officers (POs). The admit card can be downloaded by visiting the Preliminary Online Exam Call Letter link available from SBIs website. Registered candidates can download the admit card from June 18, 2018, to July 08, 2018. The preliminary exam will be held on the 1st, 7th, and 8th day of July 2018. The results will be declared on July 15, 2018. Candidates are required to enter their registration number or roll number and password or date of birth in DD-MM-YY format to download the admit card. Since a large number of applicants appear for the exam, the site can be slow to respond, especially when it experiences heavy traffic. Hence, candidates are advised to try downloading the admit card during non-peak hours. The registration number and password are generated at the time of successful registration with the site and sent to each candidate at their registered email address. Candidates should take proper care while entering date of birth and key in the details exactly as mentioned on the application form. SBI is conducting the exam for recruitment of around 2000 Probationary officers in three phases. The first phase is the preliminary exam which will be followed by the main exam for all shortlisted candidates to be held tentatively on August 04, 2018. All candidates who are selected in the main exam will then be asked to appear for the third phase of selection comprising of group exercises and interview. Based on the performance in the second and third phase of selection, a final merit list will be drawn approximately by November 01, 2018. The Changing Markets Foundation has released Talking Trash: The Corporate Playbook of False Solution report on the worlds worst plastic waste offenders. The report states that the companies involved are actively taking steps to obstruct and undermine legislative solutions aimed at tackling an unprecedented global plastic waste crisis. The Foundation is on a mission to expose irresponsible corporate practices and drive change towards a more sustainable economy. The report focused on companies who actually took the step of announcing the amount of plastic they produce. Lets take a look at the worlds worst offenders for plastic pollution who are producing metric tonnes of plastic packaging annually as of 2020. (Image: Reuters) Civic problems plaguing the city for years could soon be a thing of the past with the Karnataka government today saying it would make the metropolis plastic free and take steps on a 'war footing' to protect lakes from pollution. Deputy Chief Minister G Parameshwara said the government would take effective and strict measures to make Bengaluru free from plastic. Parameshwara, who is Minister in-charge for Bengaluru city related subjects, also said work would be taken up on a "war footing" to protect city lakes from pollution and clear those that are already polluted. "Legislators suggested a plastic ban to make Bengaluru plastic free. Efforts are on for it. All effective and strict measures will be taken to make city plastic free," he said. The Deputy Chief Minister today chaired an over six hour long meeting with MLAs and Parliamentarians of Bengaluru, along with officers, the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, to discuss and take suggestions on city issues. He noted that most lakes in Bengaluru were getting polluted, a few have gone to "irreparable" stage and others were beginning to get polluted. "To see to that lakes in Bengaluru don't get polluted further and those that are polluted are cleared, we have decided to take up work on a war footing," he said. The meeting discussed garbage clearance, he said, adding, there was a proposal to convert waste to energy. "There is already a proposal for two waste to energy units... I will soon clear it on behalf of the government. At a later stage, it will be set up in all six garbage processing units around the city. This will in a way solve the garbage issue," he added. Also discussed was flooding during rainy seasons and measures to be taken in this regard to find a permanent solution, Parameshwara said. Potholes and damaged roads need to be fixed permanently and chief engineers of eight zones of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), the city civic body, will be made responsible for this. Also discussed was traffic management and coordination between city civic body, BBMP and traffic police, along with parking and measures to be taken to regulate parking in the central city area. The Deputy Chief Minister said issues related to water supply to Bengaluru city from Cauvery river also came up during the meeting. "The quantum of Cauvery water which we are allowed to use, we have almost reached," he said. The minister said the fifth stage of supplying Cauvery water has to be taken up and alternatives, like bringing water from Yettinahole and impounding it to Tippagondanahalli reservoir that earlier used to supply water to Bengaluru city, are also being thought of, he said. Parameshwara aid there was also a plan to bring water from Linganamakkito Bengaluru and technical experts had been asked to come out with a draft project report. "A feasibility study has to be made... it is still in a conceptual stage," he added. Parameshwara said he has also cleared BBMP's budget of over Rs 10,000 crore for this year. He pointed out that earlier 110 villages around the city were brought under BBMP limits, but not enough development work has happened there and added that a "special package" would be unveiled for the development of these villages. AAP The Aam Aadmi Party today attacked Congress president Rahul Gandhi for criticising Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal over his sit-in at the Lieutenant Governor's office. Talking to reporters here, AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh said that Gandhi is speaking the "language of BJP", challenging him to ask his Delhi unit's leaders to go on hunger strike for even two days. Earlier in the day, Gandhi tweeted, "Delhi CM, sitting in dharna at LG office. BJP sitting in dharna at CM residence. Delhi bureaucrats addressing press conferences. PM turns a blind eye to the anarchy; rather nudges chaos and disorder. People of Delhi are the victims, as this drama plays out." Another AAP leader Saurabh Bharadwaj asked the Congress president that instead of listening to Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC) chief Ajay Maken, he should talk to his elected Puducherry chief minister. Kejriwal, along with his colleagues, have been at Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal's office since June 13, demanding a direction to IAS officers to end what the AAP describes a "strike" and approval of the doorstep ration delivery scheme. June 20, 2018 / 05:18 PM IST Governor Vohra holds meetings with top officials After assuming charge as the head of the Jammu and Kashmir government today, Governor NN Vohra held meetings with top civil administration and police officials at the Civil Secretariat. "Immediately after receiving President of India's approval, Governor NN Vohra issued the Proclamation to impose Governor's Rule in the State under section 92 of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir today," a Raj Bhawan spokesman said. The Governor held discussions with Chief Secretary BB Vyas and identified the major tasks which shall require to be dealt with on a strict time-bound basis, beginning from today. He was accorded a ceremonial welcome and guard of honour by a police contingent as he arrived at the Civil Secretariat to take charge of the administration. Vohra later chaired a meeting of top officials both from civil administration and police to gear up the state administrative machinery to function with speed, efficiency and accountability. Governor's Rule was necessitated in the state following resignation by Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti in the wake of BJP pulling out of the coalition government. BJP national president Amit Shah The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has decided to pull out of the alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti also submitted her resignation to the Governor shortly after BJP announced withdrawal of support. The BJP decision was taken as the "situation worsened in the state" and the relationship with the PDP became "untenable", said national general secretary Ram Madhav. Speaking at a press conference at the party headquarters in Delhi, Madhav said the decision to withdraw support was taken as it became untenable for BJP to continue in alliance with PDP in Jammu & Kashmir. Keeping in mind the larger interest of India's security and integrity, the fact is that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India, and in order to control the situation prevailing in the state, we have decided that the rein of power in the state be handed over to the Governor, Madhav said. Madhav said terrorism, violence and radicalisation has increased in the Valley. Speaking about the recent murder of senior journalist and Rising Kashmir editor Shujaat Bukhari, Madhav said fundamental rights have come under threat in the Valley. The BJP sought Governors rule in the state to "stabilise and improve" the situation in the state. The two parties had together held power in the Indias northern-most state since 2014. Madhav said the BJP had decided to support the PDP in 2014 after the Assembly election delivered a fractured mandate and added that the BJP had received support in the Jammu region while voters had voted for the PDP in the Kashmir Valley. Madhav said the party had spoken to deputy chief minister Kavinder Gupta, who belongs to the BJP, along with other leaders of the party before taking the final call. J&Ks deputy chief minister said BJP ministers had already submitted their resignation to Governor Narinder Nath Vohra. Former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah today called on Jammu and Kashmir Governor N N Vohra in the wake of BJP pulling out of its coalition government with the PDP in the state. "Omar Abdullah has gone to meet the Governor," NC provincial president Nasir Aslam Wani told PTI. Wani said Omar will address a press conference upon his return from the Raj Bhawan to explain the party stand on the present situation to the public. "We had a party meeting before Omar sahib went to see the Governor and we will be meeting again later in the day," he added. June 18, 2018 / 05:39 PM IST Open to discussions: IAS officers after Kejriwals assurance on security IAS officers of the Delhi government today welcomed Arvind Kejriwal's assurance that he would ensure their safety, saying they are open to formal discussions with the chief minister on the matter. The officers said that they look forward to "concrete interventions" for their security and dignity, a move that may break the four-month-long impasse between the AAP dispensation and the bureaucrats following an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by some ruling party MLAs at the chief minister's residence in February. The association of officers of the AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union territories) cadre said that they continue to be at work with "full dedication" and "vigour". "#DelhiAtWork #NoToStrike Officers of GNCTD welcome Hon'ble CM's appeal. We reiterate that we continue to be at work with full dedication & vigour," the association tweeted. "We look forward to concrete interventions for our security & dignity. We are open to formal discussions with Hon'ble CM on this matter," it said. PDP chief and Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti today raised the bogey of Article 370 and unilateral ceasefire, saying the muscular security policy will not work in the state and reconciliation is the key. "I am not shocked as this alliance was never for power. PDP never believes in power politics and we worked for the people," she told reporters after an hour-long meeting with her ministers and party workers at her residence. Mehbooba maintained that Jammu and Kashmir was not an enemy territory as being perceived by few. "We had always said muscular security policy will not work in J-K, reconciliation is key," she said. She began her press conference by raising Article 370, under which the state enjoys a special status, and said "...we have safeguarded Article 370 and 35-A (of the Constitution) and we will continue to do that". "We have been able to withdraw 11,000 cases against the stone pelters," she said while listing her side of the story after the BJP pulled out of its alliance with the PDP in the state. She also mentioned about the unilateral ceasefire during Ramazan announced by Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Lahore in 2015. Mehbooba, who submitted her resignation to the governor this evening , said her party will continue to strive for dialogue and reconciliation in the state. "I have told the governor we will not go into any other alliance," she said. After Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his Andhra Pradesh counterpart N Chandrababu Naidu, Naveen Patnaik too has once again raised the demand of special category status for Odisha, citing its backwardness and high percentage of ST and SC population. Though Patnaik did not attend the 4th Governing Council Meeting of the Niti Ayog held at New Delhi on Sunday, he apprised Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the state's demands including that of special category status for it through a letter. The letter dated June 16 was made available to the media yesterday. Nitish Kumar and N Chandrababu Naidu had vociferously reiterated demand for special category status for their state at the meeting of NITI Ayog chaired by the Prime Minister. Bringing back the demand for special category status by Patnaik is being seen politically as a potent weapon for the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) ahead of the ensuing Odisha assembly and the general elections in 2019. Patnaik, in the letter, has pitched for the special category status citing high percentage of ST and SC population in Odisha. "With high percentage of population belonging to the Schedule Tribes and Scheduled Castes and the state facing frequent natural calamities, Odisha deserves to be accorded 'special category status' to fast-track its ongoing development and may be treated at par with North-Eastern and Himalayan states for the sharing pattern of Centrally Sponsored Schemes," Patnaik said in the letter. The demand for a special category status for Odisha is almost four decades old. It began in 1979 when Nilamani Routray was heading the Janata Party govenrment in Odisha. Non-Congress parties, mostly Janata Dal and its modified version - the Biju Janata Dal (now ruling the state), continued to make demand for the special category status for Odisha. The subsequent Central governments, however, have been rejecting Odisha's demand. According to former state Finance Minister Panchanan Kanungo, Odisha's demand was partly fulfilled when A B Vajpyee was the Prime Minister. The Centre had then provided for special allocation for the poverty prone KBK (Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput) region. Like provision for the SCS states, the Centre was providing funds in the ratio of 90:10 ratio under Centrally Sponsored Schemes for the KBK region. This facility, however, was withdrawn after the fall of the Vajpeyee government, Kanungo said. Patnaik, during his 18-year tenure as the chief minister of Odisha, has dashed several letters to the prime ministers beginning from Vajpayee till Narendra Modi to accord Special Category Status to Odisha. Apart from passing an unanimous resolution favouring SCS for Odisha in the assembly, the BJD government has also undertaken a massive signature campaign in Odisha to further intensify its demand. The signature of about one crore people (of the state's 4.11 crore population) was sent to erstwhile President Pranab Mukherjee seeking his intervention. In a bid to make the signature campaign non-political, Patnaik had invited freedom fighter Purushottam Nayak to put the first signature on the memorandum. Nayak was followed by another ageing freedom fighter Bhabani Patnaik (92). Patnaik's signature came only at third place. Besides these measures, the ruling BJD had also organised a public meeting in the national capital to mount pressure on the then UPA government in 2013 and ahead of the 2014 general elections, seeking SCS for Odisha. Former Minister and BJD vice-president Debi Prasad Mishra said, "Odisha satisfies all conditions to be a special category state except that it has no international border with any country. No positive step appear to have been taken by the Government of India so far. Varroc Group lines up Rs 900 crore for acquisitions & global expansion The Aurangabad-based company said it has signed a binding agreement to buy a company in Turkey for Euro 42 million (Rs 336 crore) Swaraj Baggonkar June 19, 2018 / 02:24 PM IST Foreign exchange earnings totaled USD 24 billion in January-October 2019, with a growth (year-on-year) of two percent. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Exterior lighting equipment major Varroc Engineering has lined up investments of nearly Rs 900 crore for acquisitions and setting up of manufacturing plants in India and abroad. The Aurangabad-based company, which is coming out with its IPO next week, said it has signed a binding agreement to buy a company in Turkey for 42 million euros (about Rs 336 crore) which makes lighting equipment and generates an annual turnover of 50 million euros. Varroc's two more plants are coming up in Brazil and Morocco each at a total cost of 63 million euros (about Rs 504 crore). And another one is being set up at Halol, Gujarat at a cost of Rs 35-40 crore where the company would serve the lighting needs of Hero Motocorp from September onwards. In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Tarang Jain, managing director, Varroc Group said: "We have signed a binding agreement in Turkey. It's a 42-million euro acquisition. Good part about this acquisition is that our OEMs also want us to be in Turkey. So going to 100-million euro turnover wont be a problem. There will be further investment in Turkey also." "We are putting up two more plants, in Brazil and Morocco to support VW and Renault-Nissan. In return, they will support us in US and European markets. Morocco, where we would invest 33 million euros and in Brazil we would do 30 million euros, put together would generate 100-million euro revenue in 3-4 years. Investment will be made over three years," added Jain. There are presently 36 facilities of the company globally, including 26 in India. With the addition of four more, the total count would rise to 40 in the coming months. About 65 percent of the company's revenues comes from outside the country. In addition, Varroc is getting into its 17th product in the two-wheeler parts space. In the light of implementation on Bharat Stage VI emission norms the company is getting into manufacturing of electronic fuel injection systems. "We are getting into electronic fuel injection system, which will be our 17th product with a partnership with an Italian company. We will make catalytic converters to comply with emission norms too", added Jain. IPO Varroc Engienering is coming out with an initial public offering (IPO) which opens next week. The company will be raising Rs 1,955 crore and has set a price band of Rs 965-967. Its issue opens on June 26. The primary objective is to allow its private equity investor Omega TC Holdings Pte and Tata Capital Financial Services who hold 13.7 percent stake, to exit the company. Tarang Jain would be diluting 1.3 percent of his own stake in the company. Tata Opportunities Fund entered the company in March 2014 with an investment of Rs 300 crore, said Jain. The promoter stake will remain at 85 percent after the IPO. Very soon, you will be able to send SMSes straight from your desktop browser. Google has started rolling out desktop browser support for its Android Messages app, which enables users to send as well as view messages on their Android smartphone. Along with SMS, users will also be able to send emojis, images, stickers, gifs through the app. The California-based tech company began rolling out the updates starting Monday and stated that it will continue to do so across the week. The service has been launched by Google in order to compete with the iMessage service offered by rival Apple. Technically known as Rich Communication Services (RCS), Googles engineers began working on the service since February this year. With Android Messages, we're creating a messaging experience that's available on multiple devices, lets you share whatever you want to share and makes it easy to take action on your messages with Google AI, the company stated. Follow the below steps in order to use the service: 1. Download Android Messages app on to your Android smartphone. Heres the link to download the app. 2. Go to messages.android.com on your desktop web browser 3. Open Android Messages app on your phone 4. On the app, tap the More options menu at the top right corner and select Messages for web. 5. Scan the QR code which appears on your desktop screen. And you are good to go. In addition to this, the company also stated how to search for and send gif files using the app. Users can also use the newly launched Smart Reply feature using the app. For the unaware, Smart Reply is a service by Google which automatically suggests quick text or emoji responses to your messages. All you have to do is click on the machine generated reply, and the app will automatically send it as your reply. Other features include previewing links within conversations and copying one-time passwords with a single tap. The company has promised to rollout the features incrementally, which means everybody will not be receiving the feature at once. Messages for web is starting to roll out today, with the rest of these features coming to the Messages app over the next week. You can try them out by updating your app to the latest version or by downloading (Android) Messages, the post added. Union minister Arun Jaitley along with senior ministerial colleagues and officials on Monday discussed the future course of action for debt-laden Air India, weeks after its strategic disinvestment proposal failed to attract any bidders, sources said. The meeting was attended by Piyush Goyal, who has been temporarily given the charge of finance ministry, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu, Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari and other senior officials. According to sources, the meeting, chaired by Jaitley through video conferencing, took stock of the developments related to debt-laden Air India and discussed the way forward. The report prepared by consultancy EY, the transaction advisor for Air India's proposed strategic disinvestment, was discussed. The report has listed out the reasons for the disinvestment failing to elicit any initial bids as the deadline ended on May 31, sources said. When asked about today's meeting and whether any decision was taken with respect to Air India, Civil Aviation Secretary R N Choubey said the Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) would issue a statement on the matter. Last week, a source had said the government was considering listing of debt-laden Air India after the proposal for 76 percent strategic stake sale failed to attract any bidders. In a major setback, the government on May 31 said that no initial bids were received for the proposed stake sale in Air India and that various options would be explored for the airline's future. The government proposed to offload 76 percent equity share capital of the national carrier as well as transfer the management control to private players, as per the preliminary information memorandum. The transaction would have involved Air India, its low cost arm Air India Express and Air India SATS Airport Services Pvt Ltd. The latter is an equal joint venture between the national carrier and Singapore-based SATS Ltd. Congress In an anti-poaching measure, the Gujarat Congress has sent 34 members from Ahmedabad and Patan districts to unknown cities in Rajasthan just days before the elections for the Panchayat President and Vice-President posts. In a similar incident last year, the party had packed away 44 MLAs to a resort in Bengaluru during the Rajya Sabha polls to avoid being poached by the BJP. The members of the panchayats in Ahmedabad and Patan districts are slated to select their President and Vice-President on June 20, 2018. As per a report by The Indian Express, the Congress has confirmed that the candidates for these two posts would be brought back on the last day of filing nominations and the others, on the day of the elections. The report quoted the Ahmedabad District Congress Committee (ADCC) chief Khodaji Thakor as saying, We are in hiding in Rajasthan for a week due to fear of the BJP poaching our representatives using saam, daam, dand, bhed (persuasion, bribe, punishment, and threats). On being asked, he refused to reveal his location. In Gujarat, the election of the office bearers in district panchayats is held once every 30 months. Currently, both the posts are being held by Congress incumbents. The BJP spokesperson, Bharat Pandya claimed that the Congress was levying baseless charges against the BJP only because it is unable to keep its flock together. During the 2017 Rajya Sabha elections, Congress had sent its 44 MLAs to a resort in Bengaluru to avoid alleged poaching by BJP. In the panchayat elections though, Congress is confident of winning. Manish Doshi, Congress spokesperson said, We are going to retain power in both Ahmedabad and Patan districts despite BJP playing every trick to defeat us. With the elections in two days, it will be interesting to see if BJP attempts poaching and how the Congress battles it. Karnataka Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy Just a month ago, Karnataka got a new government as well as a new chief minister, HD Kumaraswamy, who had promised the farmers of the state to waive off all debts, including loans given by nationalised banks, if he was voted to power. However, Kumaraswamy needs over Rs 53,000 crore to fulfil his promise, which is a challenge. Waiving off such a huge amount can be detrimental to fiscal management of the state. But the farmers are in dire need of credit as they are caught between good monsoon and lack of fresh credit as the sowing season begins. Most institutional lenders have said fresh loans will be given only when the previous arrears are dealt with. Hence, farmers across Mandya, considered the epicentre of the Karnataka farmers movement, will hit the streets today to raise fresh demands to waive off their loans, reports Mint. Every bit of information that was sought from us has been submitted to the deputy commissioners office. However, there seems to be absolutely no movement on the loan waiver promise, Somanahalli Suresh, a farmer leader from Mandya, said. Farmers are also saying the government should at least direct lending institutions to give fresh credit to help them go in for sowing, even if the farm loan waiver takes more time. No relief for farmers Karnataka farmers held several protests last year demanding a complete loan waiver and the then government granted a partial loan waiver of Rs 8,165 crore, which was announced by former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. However, it did not help in reducing the debt burden of the community. Meanwhile, the rain fury in many parts of Karnataka and neighbouring states has added to the troubles of the community. Although Kumaraswamy had set a deadline of 15 days after coming to power to fulfil his loan waiver promise, the farmers have not yet received any financial relief. Seeking Centres help Kumaraswamy had requested the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led central government last week to foot half the costs of the proposed farm loan waiver to help reduce the burden on the states coffers. My government is ready to help farmers in crisis. Around 8.5 million farmers in Karnataka have outstanding loans, due to drought and crop failure. The state government is ready to waive off the loans of these farmers, but seek 50 percent backing of the Union government, Kumaraswamy had said in New Delhi. On Monday, Kumaraswamy wrote to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh seeking higher allocation for disaster relief. As far as the state disaster relief fund (SDRF) allocation is concerned, Karnataka has been allocated only Rs 1,527 crore for a five-year period from 2015-16 to 2019-20, whereas other states such as Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat have been allocated Rs 8,195 crore, Rs 6,094 crore, Rs 4,847 crore and Rs 3,394 crore, respectively. Hence, the state government had requested for enhancement of SDRF allocation to Rs 3,050.72 crore, he wrote. The Income Tax Department today filed a review petition in the Madras High Court challenging an interim verdict asking it to provide copies of prosecution sanction order and its complaint to the family members of former union minister P Chidambaram, facing charges of not disclosing some foreign assets in their tax returns. In another related development, the department also filed a counter to the petitions filed by Chidambaram's wife Nalini, son Karti and daughter-in-law Srinidhi and a firm, challenging the complaints filed on May 11 in a court here for alleged non-disclosure of assets in the 2016-17 returns. The department has initiated prosecution for 'non-disclosure' of a property at Cambridge in the UK and with regard to certain investments in Nano Holdings LLC in the USA by the petitioners. Passing the interim order on the petitions on June 12, the first bench comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice P T Asha had directed the I-T Departmant to furnish copies of the sanction order for prosecution against them under the black money act and the prosecution complaints lodged in a court here. The petitioners, including Chess Global Advisory, a company linked to Karti, have challenged the prosecution, contending that the person who issued the sanction for prosecution was not the competent officer and the court in which the prosecution complaint had been filed was also not the competent forum. In its review petition, filed on June 14, the department contended that the sanction order was an administrative order and had been filed along with the complaint in the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) court. It would be served on the assesses (petitioners) by the court concerned as per the procedure contemplated under the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) on their appearance pursuant to the summons, the I-T Department said. It further submitted that the request of the assesses vide a May 14 letter to the Income Tax authorities to furnish the documents was rejected by an order on May 21. They have not filed any petitions against the rejection order and the interim application filed by the assesses are beyond the scope of writ petition. The I-T Department in its counter said that as per Section 55 of the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Act, 2015, the Principal Commissioner of I-T was one of the authorities whose sanction was required for launching prosecution. As amended later, the Principal Director of Income Tax or Principal Commissioner of Income Tax was one of the I-T authorities authorised to sanction prosecution. The powers of the Principal Director of the I-T are co-terminus with that of the Principal Commissioner. Hence, the contention of the petitioners that the Principal Director was not the competent officer had no merits, the counter said. On the petitioners' argument that they had filed revised return of income disclosing the assets, it said the object of the black money act was not only assessment of total undisclosed foreign asset and income of an assessee, but also true and full disclosure of such assets to be disclosed voluntarily by a resident assessee in the returns. It was consequent to the receipt of the I-T notice seeking details about the properties abroad that the petitioners filed the revised return, it submitted. Even if the revised return replaces the original return for the purpose of assessment, the proceedings and events resulting in providing the cause of action leading up to the revised return do not get obliterated, the counter said. The benefit under sect 139(1) under the I-T Act related to revised return was not available to the petitioners, who "deliberately omitted" to submit details of foreign assets, it claimed. On the argument that the CMM court was not the competent forum, the counter said as per rules no court inferior to that of a metropolitan magistrate or magistrate of first class shall try any offence under the black money act. Since the prosecution complaint had been filed before the CMM court, the contention was not tenable on merits, it added. Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel gestures as she addresses the audience during a news conference at National Palace in Mexico City, Mexico June 9, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso - RTS16G03 German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted French President Emmanuel Macron today to hammer out reforms that can stop the "disintegration" of the European Union, torn by populist forces and deep discord over immigration. The two leaders of Europe's biggest economies will seek to thrash out a compromise between Macron's bold vision for sweeping EU change and Germany's stance that is more cautious, especially when it comes to finance. Merkel and Macron have both stressed that, as US President Donald Trump openly challenges the EU with a trade war and over security and climate policy, the bloc must learn to stand its ground on the world stage. The ministerial retreat at Meseberg castle near Berlin aims to agree a joint Franco-German stance ahead of a key June 28-29 summit on the EU's post-Brexit future, at a time when populists and eurosceptics are rapidly gaining ground. As outspoken pro-Europeans, Merkel and Macron both face harsh opposition from nationalist and right-wing populist forces at home, and in the governments of Italy, Austria and several eastern European countries. Ahead of the meeting, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire warned that "Europe is in a process of disintegration. We see states that are turning inward, trying to find national solutions to problems that require European solutions. "It is essential to propose a new European project on immigration, on economic issues, on financial issues to consolidate Europe in a world where you have the United States on one side, China on the other and we are trapped in the middle." The question of how many migrants the bloc can absorb came back to the fore strongly when last week Italy and Malta both turned back a rescue vessel carrying 630 refugees, which was eventually accepted by Spain. The move sparked a clash between France and Italy as immigration also triggered a domestic crisis for Merkel, a leader already weakened by her decision in 2015 to keep open German borders to a mass influx of more than one million refugees. Merkel now faces a dangerous mutiny from her hardline Bavarian Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who has vowed to defy her and order police to shut German borders to most asylum seekers by early July absent an EU accord. Merkel, arguing that the issue must be resolved at the EU level, has pledged to reach deals with transit and arrival countries in the narrow two-week window ending with the Brussels summit. "Turning away migrants at our borders at the heart of Europe will lead to negative domino effects that could hurt Germany and put into question European unity," she has warned. Trump chimed into the debate with a Twitter taunt yesterday, charging that "the people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition". Merkel and Macron agree that overburdened Mediterranean countries need financial support or incentives, and that the EU's Frontex border force must receive more funding, while Paris also advocates the creation of asylum processing centres in Africa. While migration looked to be the most urgent issue, a host of other tricky topics were on the agenda yesterday -- from eurozone finance and investment to common defence. Macron last year outlined his vision for a stronger, more united Europe as a forceful reply to what was known as the National Front, a far-right party he defeated at the polls. But he was long left waiting for a response from Berlin as Merkel, weakened by poor September election results, was occupied by half a year of arduous coalition talks. When she finally gave a reply several weeks ago, it fell short of many of Macron's core demands. She dashed Macron's hopes for a joint eurozone finance minister and budget, mindful of German public fears that their tax money be squandered on what voters see as fiscal irresponsibility in southern EU states. The Elysee Palace said yesterdya it hoped for "a substantial agreement" on reform of the common currency area, with a specific budget for a "safety net" to save banks in trouble. Merkel has agreed on a common investment budget for the bloc, but says it should be worth several tens of billions of euros, not the hundreds of billions suggested by Macron. Paris and Berlin are also discussing ways to turn the European Stability Mechanism into a more potent firefighter akin to a European IMF, and how to create greater defence cooperation. Germany's Sueddeutsche daily praised the partnership, saying that "with unrest so rife across the EU, Europe can consider itself lucky if it is able to find any common ground at all". "In an unhinged world, France and Germany should be grateful for the ties which still bind them. Uber offices in Queens, New York, US (REUTERS/Brendan McDermid) Google has removed the feature to book an Uber ride from Google Maps on Android, according to several leading technology websites. The feature was pulled by the technology company after months after it was rolled back on Google Maps app for iOS. A Google Maps help page said: You can no longer book Uber rides directly in Google Maps. But you can still look up the route in the Maps app and then request the ride from the Uber app. The feature showing price estimates and displaying the arrival timing of a ride was allowed on Google Maps a while ago. Uber acquired the ability to book rides in the Google Maps app by pulling up the account window and signalling the ride without leaving the app in January 2017. As per a report by The Verge, Google has now officially removed the direct book feature from their Google Maps app. This relegates the ridesharing company back to the same level as its rival companies, like Lyft and Gett. Although a user would still be able to see the estimated cost of different Uber rides in Maps, they would have to go to the actual Uber app to finish their booking process. Alphabets venture capital business has made a large investment in Lyft, which is a rival to Uber. Google has not commented on why the move was undertaken. Donald Trump The US has imposed tariff of 10 percent on USD 200 billion worth of Chinese goods, further escalating economic tensions between the two countries. This comes on top of the existing 25 percent tariff on USD 50 billion worth of Chinese imports. Fears of a global trade war began after US President Donald Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminium imports. A trade war typically stems from a country's protectionist measures, which causes the country's trade partners to strike back with tit-for-tat measures. Also read - What are trade wars and how do they start? Here's a look at how other US trade partners have responded so far: US allies strike back with tariffs on US imports US allies such as the European Union (EU), Canada and Mexico have imposed tit-for-tat measures after Trump refused to exempt them from the steel and aluminium tariff. The EU, Canada and Mexico had initially been given a temporary reprieve from the tariff. Mexico had said it "deeply regrets and disapproves", The Guardian reports. The EU has already retaliated with tariff on US imports such as Levi's jeans, Harley-Davidson motorbikes and bourbon whiskey, which will come into effect in July. Canada, too, has imposed tariff on about USD 12.8 billion worth of US imports, which include a wide range of products. Some of these products are steel, aluminium, yogurt, pizza, whiskey and tablecloth. India hits back with tariff on Harley Davidson bikes India, too, has responded to Trump's tariff on steel and aluminium. India last week placed tariff on USD 240 million worth of US imports, which include 30 products. Also read - Harley Davidson may get cheaper in India if US renews GSP eligibilty The 30 items mentioned include chickpeas, lentils, almonds, apples, some metal products and high-capacity motorbikes including Harley Davidson bikes. The US Senate defied President Donald Trump by voting today to overrule his administration's deal with Chinese telecom firm ZTE and reimpose a ban on high-tech chip sales to the company. Senators added an amendment targeting ZTE into a sweeping, must-pass national defence spending bill that cleared the chamber on an 85-10 vote. The company has been on life support ever since Washington said it had banned US companies from selling crucial hardware and software components to ZTE for seven years, after staffers violated trade sanctions against Iran and North Korea. It was fined USD 1.2 billion for those violations, but earlier this month the Trump administration gave ZTE a lifeline by easing sanctions in exchange for a further USD 1.4 billion penalty on the company. The Senate measure nullifies that action, proposing an outright ban on the government buying products and services from ZTE and another Chinese telecoms firm, Huawei. "We're heartened that both parties made it clear that protecting American jobs and national security must come first when making deals with countries like China, which has a history of having little regard for either," a bipartisan group of senators said. The lawmakers, who introduced the amendment, include top Democrat Chuck Schumer and Republican Marco Rubio. Providing USD 716 billion in funding for national defense for fiscal year 2019 and giving policy guidance to the Pentagon, the bill is not a done deal. The House of Representatives passed its own version of the measure, and the two chambers must now hash out a compromise. "It is vital that our colleagues in the House keep this bipartisan provision in the bill as it heads towards a conference," Schumer and Rubio said. ZTE, which employs 80,000 people, said recently that its major operations had "ceased" after the ban, raising the possibility of its collapse. Its fiberoptic networks depend on US components and its cheap smartphones sold en masse abroad are powered by US chips and the Android operating system. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un today briefed Chinese President Xi Jinping on his historic summit with US President Donald Trump in Singapore, underscoring Beijing's "important role" in the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula. President Xi and Chairman Kim exchanged views on the current development of China-North Korea relations and the situation on the Korean Peninsula, state-run Xinhua news agency reported. Kim's third visit to China since March is taking place amid sharp escalation of rhetoric between Beijing and Washington over tariffs almost spiralling into a trade war. Kim, who visited Beijing twice earlier before his Singapore summit with Trump, arrived by air to meet the top Chinese leadership. Unlike his two visits which were shrouded in secrecy until their completion, China announced the visit just as the North Korean dictator landed in Beijing. "Kim Jong-un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea and Chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) visits China from June 19 to 20," Xinhua said. Xi held a welcoming ceremony for Kim at the Great Hall of the People. The two leaders also inspected the guard of honour. "They agreed to safeguard, consolidate and develop China-DPRK relations, and jointly push forward the sound momentum of peace and stability of the Korean Peninsula to make a positive contribution to safeguarding world and regional peace, stability, prosperity and development," the agency said. Kim praised China's "important role in protecting the Korean Peninsula's peace and stability," state-run CCTV said. North Korea "hopes to work with China and other concerned parties to promote and establish a solid, long-lasting peace mechanism on the Korean Peninsula and make joint efforts to achieve a lasting peace on the peninsula," Kim said. On his part, Xi said that he "wants North Korea and the US to carry out the results of their leadership summit" in Singapore, the report said. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang parried several questions on Kim's visit and its purpose saying details will be released in a timely manner. Kim is visiting China and there is a reason for this, he said. As to why news of the visit was released at this point, he said relevant information will be released according to the specific situation. Geng was not forthcoming when asked whether China will join Russia in calling for lifting of UN sanctions against North Korea in the light of the Singapore summit. "China stands against the unilateral sanctions outside the UNSC. This position is very clear. We believe that sanctions itself is not an end and all parties should support and coordinate with the current diplomatic efforts and dialogue to work hard for denuclearisation and political settlement of the Korean peninsula issue," he said. The UN Security Council imposed a series of economic sanctions against North Korea after it conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, crippling Pyongyang's economy. Since he took over, Trump piled pressure on China to stringently implement the UN sanctions which many believe led to Kim agreeing to scale down his nuclear programme leading up to the summit with Trump on June 12. While announcing the halt of South Korean and US military exercises, Trump has been maintaining that the sanctions will remain. Despite reports of differences, China remains a close ally of North Korea. Officials here say his visit was expected to crystallise the next course of action by him to announce the denuclearisation process and further steps on the Korean peninsula. Trump in the past has said Kim has changed his mind after his talks with Xi. Kim's visit this time here is taking place amid escalating trade tensions between the US and China with the two countries already announcing tariffs up to USD 50 billion each while Trump is threatening more sanctions. For its part, China has been warning of strong retaliation. Sue Mi Terry, a Korea expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Kim's recent engagement in diplomacy with frequent visits to China and meetings with Xi, rather than phone calls, made sense. China was also briefed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the Singapore summit during his recent visit here. After his talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Pompeo stressed the importance of China being a constructive participant in the next steps after the Trump-Kim summit. "There remains hard work" and "difficult days" in denuclearisation negotiations with North Korea, Pompeo had said. During a joint press conference with Pompeo, Wang said China would like the US and North Korea to see the summit as a new starting point from which they can maintain a momentum of dialogue and consultation, accommodate each other's legitimate concerns, and work with other parties to advance the process of denuclearisation and the political settlement of the peninsula issue. "China will continue to play a positive role in this process, Wang added. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing on Tuesday, where he will likely brief Chinese President Xi Jinping on his summit with U.S. President Donald Trump last week, as Washington and Seoul agreed to suspend a major joint military exercise. This is Kim's third trip to China this year, coming a week after he met Trump in Singapore for historic talks. Trump agreed to work with Kim toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, committed to provide the North with security guarantees and pledged to end "war games" with South Korea, which North Korea and China have long seen as provocative. South Korea and the Pentagon announced they would halt the annual Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August. In an unusual move, Chinese state media announced Kim's visit and said he would stay for two days. Previously China would only confirm Kim had visited after he had left the country. "We hope this visit can help to further deepen China-North Korea relations, strengthen strategic communication between both countries on important issues and promote regional peace and stability," China's foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said at a regular briefing. He did not elaborate. A Kim trip to China to discuss his summit with Trump had been widely anticipated in diplomatic circles. China is North Korea's most important diplomatic and economic backer but has been angered by its nuclear and missile tests. Police tightened security along Beijing's main Changan Avenue, which leads to the Great Hall of the People where Chinese leaders usually meet visiting heads of state, and also outside the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where Kim stayed with his wife during a visit in March. Outside the east gate of the Great Hall, where foreign leaders are officially welcomed, authorities had erected a screen running the full length of the road, cutting off the view. South Korea's foreign ministry spokesman said South Korea and China shared the strategic goal of completely denuclearising the Korean peninsula. "Our government hopes China will play a constructive role in resolving this problem," ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-deok told a regular briefing. "We hope Chairman Kim Jong Un's visit will contribute to that." 'DUAL SUSPENSION' China has welcomed the warming of ties between the United States and North Korea, and offered to help. China has been particularly pleased by Trump's decision to suspend military drills with South Korea. China has long proposed a "dual suspension", whereby North Korea stops weapons tests and the United States and South Korea stop military drills, to encourage talks. "South Korea and the United States have agreed to suspend all planning activities regarding the Freedom Guardian military drill scheduled for August," South Korea's defence ministry said in a statement. The Pentagon confirmed the suspension, adding in a statement there would be a meeting of the secretaries of defence and state as well as Trump's national security adviser on the issue this week. Chinese spokesman Geng welcomed the announcement as a "positive, constructive" move. Last year, 17,500 American and more than 50,000 South Korean troops joined the Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills, although the exercise is mostly focused on computerized simulations rather than field exercises. The U.S.-South Korean exercise calendar hits a high point every spring with the Foal Eagle and Max Thunder drills, which both wrapped up last month. The decision to halt military exercises in South Korea has bewildered many current and former U.S. defence officials, who only learned about it when Trump announced it in Singapore, after the summit with Kim. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said there would be no changes to joint drill plans between the United States and Japan, both of which regularly practise to deter North Korea. "The United States is in a position to keep its commitment to its allied nations' defence and our understanding is there is no change to the U.S. commitment to the Japan-U.S. alliance and the structure of American troops stationed in Japan," Suga told a regular briefing. Japanese Minister of Defence Itsunori said the decision to suspend the U.S.-South Korean exercises was "made from the view point of supporting diplomatic efforts between the U.S. and North Korea," but added it was "important to be wary of North Korea actions". "Our view of the threat has not changed. Joint training is an important in maintaining peace and stability in the region," he said. COST OF DRILLS? The Pentagon has yet to publicly release the cost of previous and future joint military exercises with South Korea, a week after Trump cited their "tremendously expensive" cost as a reason for halting them. Spending data for previous military exercises in Korea and elsewhere, however, suggest that the cost of a single exercise would be in the low or perhaps tens of millions of dollars in a U.S. military budget this year of nearly $700 billion. In response to repeated requests for cost data, Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Logan, said: "We are currently evaluating the costs of the exercises." Calculating the cost of military exercises is a complicated process, often requiring data from different branches of the military and spread over several budgets over different years. Troops who would have been involved in the exercises would still require training and certification, which would cost money, said Abraham Denmark, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence for East Asia under President Barack Obama. "To me, the idea of this as a cost saving measure doesn't really make much sense," Denmark said. In an unusual development, earthquake scientists are demanding an earthquake emoji since they feel it might be able to save lives. Currently, among natural disasters, there is an emoji for volcanoes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and cyclones. However, there is no emoji for an earthquake. As per a report by News Week, a group of scientists is campaigning for an earthquake emoji to be added to the standard group of icons available on computers and smartphones around the globe. Chris Rowan, a geologist at the Kent State University, Ohio said, If you have a symbol that everyone uses, then you can communicate that information in a timely manner. According to earthquake scientists, among all natural hazards, a larger number of people are affected by earthquakes than any other disaster. Hence, having a universally accepted icon of describing earthquakes could be beneficial in such events. I still want an earthquake emoji. I dont know what it should look like (seismogram? Shaking building?) but I wants it. Chris Rowan (@Allochthonous) April 16, 2018 While most of us might find it unlikely that we would reach out for our phones and send an emoji if an earthquake occurs, scientists believe otherwise. Rowan had tweeted about having an earthquake emoji in April this year, saying I still want an earthquake emoji. I dont know what it should look like (seismogram? Shaking building?) but I wants it (sic). Soon the scientist community latched on to it and started a campaign seeking submissions from anyone for the new earthquake emoji. Once the emoji is selected by this group of scientists, they would submit the same to the Unicode Consortium. It is a non-profit organisation that oversees the development of new emojis. Rowan added, The real focus here is trying to improve Internet communication and access to information that is sort of percolating on things like Twitter and Facebook. It will be interesting to see what emoji the group finally decides to depict a natural hazard as catastrophic as an earthquake. Shares of Atlas Iron Ltd [ASX:AGO] increased in value another 22.22% yesterday, following news of a takeover bid by Redstone Corporation Pty Ltd. Atlas went into a trading halt yesterday morning, pending the announcement. The companys shares are currently trading at 4.4 cents, up from their close price prior to the trading halt of 3.6 cents. Why has Atlas Irons share price increased? Atlas received a takeover offer yesterday morning from Redstone, a whollyowned subsidiary of Rineharts Hancock Prospecting. Hancock is a privately owned Australian company that is focused on the Pilbara region of Western Australia, particularly with the iron ore sector. The all-cash offer is for 100% of Atlas shares for 4.2 cents, which is a premium of 16.67% to its price of 3.6 cents, prior to the trading halt yesterday morning. Tad Watroba, Executive Director of Hancock, stated that Atlas assets compliment Hancocks portfolio. We see long term synergies between the Atlas assets and the other iron ore interests within the Hancock Group. There is potential to unlock value through the future development of Atlas resources as part of our wider system of operations. If we obtain control of Atlas, we intend to conduct a strategic review to better understand the most appropriate time and means to develop and integrate Atlas into the existing operations of the Hancock Group. This morning Atlas announced that they have issued a notice to Mineral Resources Ltd [ASX:MIN], who made a takeover offer on 9 April. This was under the matching rights regime which allots them three days to make a counter proposal to the Hancock offer. Whats next for Atlas Iron? The offer from Redstone represents a 41% premium to the previous offer from Mineral Resources in April. However, Atlas are expecting the matching right process to lead to a superior offer from Mineral Resources. As for what Mineral Resources will come back with, it is unknown at this point in time. The company have stated that they are considering its options and will advise its intentions in due course, as reported by The Sydney Morning Herald. The Atlas board have advised shareholders to take no action in relation to the Hancock offer, until further advice has been provided by the board. Regards, Dannielle Rawlings, For Money Morning PS: The S&P 300 Metals and Mining Index has doubled since early 2016, which is the biggest recovery since 2009. Our analyst Jason Stevenson believes that you could see huge gains emerge from a select group of mining stocks over the next 12 months and that there is no better time to jump back into the resource market than now. If youre interested in learning more, check out his free report The Top 10 Australian Mining Stocks. Australian Economic News Updates Enjoy a contrarian outlook on the Australian economy and how movements beyond our borders could affect your stocks, retirement fund or the value of your home. Go here for more. Daily Chinese Economy News Chinas economy has been a powerhouse in recent years. But times are a changing and China, for better or worse, is a subject of heated debate. Are there investment opportunities to be still had from China, and how will they affect your wealth at home? Find out here. US Economy News The US economy is drowning under the weight of its public and private debt. But is it too soon to call the end of this financial, military and political empire? Only time will tell. Either way, you need to make sure your investments are on the right side of the trade. Eurozone Economy The Eurozone is in a huge mess right now. Can it hold it together or will, one-by-one, member states leave the Euro and go at it on their own? More importantly, what consequences will this have for Australia and your investments? More on that here. Global Economy News Dont just follow the news on the global economy get an inside peek into whats happening in developed and emerging economies around the world and what it could mean for your investments. Go here for more. This analyst blog is part of our coverage of the 2018 Morningstar Investment Conference. While U.S. municipal bonds are often thought of as constituents of a sleepy sector, the events and market moves of the last 18 months have riled up uncertainty and left many investors asking what lies ahead for their municipal bond allocations. Elizabeth Foos, Morningstar's lead on municipal bond fund coverage, hosted a discussion at the Morningstar Investment Conference around many of these themes, including the broad municipal bond outlook post tax-reform, headline-familiar names, and the nascent role of indexing within the space. Panelists included Jim Murphy, portfolio manager on Gold-rated T. Rowe Price Tax-Free High Yield fund; Melissa Haskell, director of fixed-income research North America at MFS; and Chris Alwine, a principal at Vanguard who spent a decade as head of the firm's municipal bond group. Implications of Tax Reform Legislation Once tax reform passed in late 2017, all three panelists described a glut of issuance that was rushed to market in anticipation of changes to the landscape. Ultimately, December delivered a deluge of supply accompanied by long hours in the office for municipal credit analysts tasked with wading through the resulting pool of options. Haskell estimated that the record 400 billion of issuance in 2017 would drop by roughly 25% in the coming year. Murphy pointed out that in January, the rates sell-off further hindered municipal performance, but broadly speaking, the market hasn't been terribly shaken. There was a bit of demand fall-off from banks and a bit of supply fall-off at the start of the year, but the market has traded pretty well since. Alwine added that many of the bonds brought to market were further out the curve and extended duration in portfolios. Even if these longer municipal securities were hedged to U.S. Treasuries, with rates rising at a clip, basis risk remained a very real concern for actively managed portfolios. Puerto Rico, Illinois, and Tobacco Within the pool of municipal securities, a number of specific bond sectors and names regularly surface as polarizing credits. One of those is bonds associated with Puerto Rico, which many investors shun given the island government's weak sources of cash flows and precarious financial position. Haskell's team owns Puerto Rico, but only insured bonds, having engaged in thorough due diligence on the underlying insurers, complete with sensitivity analysis, to reach a level of comfort that the bonds would eventually pay out. Murphy echoed Haskell in viewing some of Puerto Rico's insured bonds as attractive, depending on the strength of a bond's underlying insurer as well as the initial price level that the bond is introduced into the portfolio. Regardless of haircuts, if the bond was bought at a bargain price and appreciates modestly, there is return to claim. Haskell, Murphy, and Alwine all cited improvements in the outlook for Illinois GO debt and credits associated with the city of Chicago, but with healthy reservations. When it comes to these heavily politically dependent credits, all three panelists described monitoring a variety of factors, including: the existence of a unified government, the ability to raise cash flows through taxes, and a desire to move in a more fiscally responsible direction. Relative to a few years prior, the pressure to remedy the situation in Illinois has improved, and history isnt without examples of turnaround situations. Alwine points out that California once traded at wide spreads, but strong leadership and an improved economy turned that into a success story. Opinions around allocating to tobacco bonds often split market participants, and the panelists were no exception. Haskell and Murphy outlined softening fundamentals for the bonds, underpinned by lower rates of smoking and various policies, such as minimizing the nicotine content of cigarettes and the adoption of vaping. Neither view the sector with particular enthusiasm going forward, but while Alwine agrees with this analysis, he also mentions that it depends upon the price at which the securitized structures are acquired. Though these tobacco bonds will default eventually given deteriorating fundamentals, if the cash flows are reasonable for a period of time, the IRRs on the securities may remain attractive. Reasons for Optimism While the swift pace of challenges to the municipal markets have been fueled by new legislation, political pressures for fiscal reform, and an environment of rising rates, all three panelists emphasize that this also generates opportunity. For example, Alwine mentioned that this situation was impetus for the active municipal team at Vanguard to further develop better systems to track and to manage risk within municipals, and they have since employed these sharpened tools to provide a high-quality and diversified passive municipal vehicle--an offering that was once considered impossible given liquidity concerns and tracking requirements. Furthermore, stress in the municipal markets is necessary for active managers to put their research and discretion to work--a perspective shared by all three panelists. According to Haskell, the "opportunities are out there every day." The weakened outlook has also been impacted by natural disasters which have led to a rise in mortgage delinquencies in Florida and Texas. The silver lining to this unfortunate story is that this should be a temporary downturn in the impacted coastal areas of Florida and Texas," Berson said. "We should see delinquency rates normalize in coming quarters, which will help to boost the national outlook, perhaps back into positive territory." There are some positives There is some more good news; job growth and rising employment rates have offset some affordability concerns. Delinquency rates - aside from those areas affected by hurricanes - are also low. Berson also says that most metros across the country are healthy. "Job growth and incomes remain strong across the country, helping to maintain healthy markets on a regional level," Berson said. "We did, however, see an uptick in the number of local housing markets that slipped from positive to neutral, but that was expected given sustained rapid price increases in those areas. For brokers getting into non-prime for the first time, the space can be intimidating. Thats why they should look for a partner with significant non-prime experience, Smith said. When a broker is looking to get into the space it absolutely makes sense to work with someone whos done it before, he said. New products create new opportunities and were at a pretty rapid pace of change and growth in the space, and theres a lot to be gained with working with an experienced investor in the space. Verus also helps the lenders it works with understand the non-prime space, he said. We offer training and resources that help lenders who sell to us, he said. We make sure to train them so they have the skills to sell the product and underwrite it. An experienced lender knows how to make tough deals work. At the end of the day, our success is dependent on us doing right by our origination partners making sure they have the tools they need. And its worth getting educated in the space, Smith said; Verus estimates that the non-prime market could grow to about $200 billion a year. President Donald Trumps nominee to permanently head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is facing pushback from Democrats, including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whos threatened to put a hold on the nomination. In a tweet today, Warren said that Kathy Kraninger, Trumps nominee to become the CFPBs director, has no track record of helping consumers. Thats bad news for seniors, servicemembers, students and anyone else who doesnt want to get cheated. And it gets even worse. Kathy Kraninger helps oversee the agencies that are ripping kids from their parents, Warren wrote in a separate tweet. Now @realDonaldTrump wants her to run the @CFPB. I will put a hold on her nomination & fight it at every step until she turns over all documents about her role in this. A Midland man was arrested June 12 after allegedly using a sword during the commission of an assault, according to court documents. During the incident, Jared Michael Wilson, 27, barricaded himself in a residence, and SWAT was summoned to the scene, according to a previous Reporter-Telegram article. Wilson was being held Tuesday on a $200,000 bond for a second-degree felony charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Does the NDC have one face ... CHP San Andreas logo View Photos Murphys, CA CHP officials who received a be-on-the-lookout bulletin for a man wanted for an alleged assault with a deadly weapon say they were able to arrest him but not without a fight. According to San Andreas Unit spokesperson Sgt. Gary Soria, on Saturday night in the 7 oclock hour, an officer observed 47-year-old Israel Samuel Davis of Murphys speeding along Highway 4 in the Murphys area and followed him to Jones Street near Scotts Street, where they stopped him outside what turned out to be his residence. Attempting to detain him for the assault charge, which stemmed from an incident about two hours earlier on Six Mile Road near Fair Oaks Lane, the officer saw Davis become combative. Officer Soria recounts that the suspect hit the officer in the face with his hands as he was being handcuffed. After a scuffle, Davis was subdued and after being medically cleared he was booked into the Calaveras County Jail on felony assault with a deadly weapon not a firearm from the earlier incident as well as for felony battery against a peace officer and resisting arrest. He is also facing a misdemeanor resisting arrest charge. Wind energy near San Fransisco View Photos Sacramento, CA A close and crucial vote by a California Senate panel has pushed ahead a contentious proposal to link oversight of Californias electric grid with other western states. Todays Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee vote keeps alive a plan that has sparked debate between environmentalists about the best way to grow renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, which has been greatly expanded in the state. However, that has carried along with it new challenges for grid operators to oversee supply and demand as weather patterns and sunlight vary. Those in favor of the bill argue that regionalizing the grid would make it easier and cheaper to use renewables to meet energy demand across the west. Critics counter that it could allow President Donald Trumps energy appointees to threaten Californias aggressive efforts to broaden the use of renewables. Whether other states grid operators desire to link up with Californias system is unclear. HART -- Hart Mayor Eleazar Castillo told the Hart City Council at its regular meeting June 11 that he had requested that vacant houses inside the city limits be listed on the meeting agenda. He told council members present (Vickie Ethridge, Mary Reyna, Johnny Carrasco, Ezekiel Barron and George Chapa II) that he had been approached by a property owner. This owner owns a house in Hart on Avenue E, and a vacant house on its east side is in disrepair. Castillo plans to speak with a Hart resident about the vacant house in question. He said the individual who approached him as offered to tear down the deteriorating structure at his own cost. Castillo pointed out that the city would first need to go through the process to condemn that structure before it could be demolished without the property owners permission. In other action, the Hart City Council unanimously voted to approve whatever action the Hart Economic Development Corporation decides regarding a donation to the Hart FFA/4H Ag Farm. The EDC ultimately voted to donate $4,000 to the Ag Farm Project, which involves placing livestock pens on school property for students to keep their stock show project animals. According to EDC bylaws, the Hart City Council must approve any action the EDC takes regarding donations. It was reported at the June 11 meeting that Hart Public Utility employees will work 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. during the summer. Reporting on the councils May 14 regular session, Hart City Administrator Adrian Rosas said the citys 2006 trash truck has compactor issues. At that meeting, the council voted to purchase a 2018 Freightliner M-2 chassis with a Champion 32-yard compactor for $179,700. It is expected to be ready for pick up in about 90 days. Rosas says the City of Hart is considering a six-year financial loan to finance the truck. Southwestern Equipment of Justin, Texas, is the company that quoted the price the council settled on. In other action May 14, George Chapa II was appointed to serve on the council. He previously was on the council but did not sign up to run in the May election. Chapa reportedly neglected to file the necessary paperwork. His term will be for one year. Neoma Williams who is editor of The Pulse, Harts digital newspaper, and a Herald correspondent, address the council during its Open Forum in May. She told the Council she should appreciate being notified of special meetings. The Texas Open Meetings Act only requires notification of the press by municipalities for emergency meetings. Williams pointed out that she is notified of Castro County Commissioners and Castro County Hospital District meetings as a matter of courtesy. Hart ISD also notifies her of its meetings -- Texas school districts operate on a more stringent notification basis. It had been the practice of the City of Hart to notify her of special meetings, but this changed in the last few months, and the city secretary has told Williams that the city secretary isnt required to notify her. Williams also told the City Council that using old and new business on their agendas is not legal, and pointed out notice requirements by the State of Texas. Also, the State Attorney General has an opinion that City Administrators report is not adequate for an agenda; more specificity is required. Williams has been told by the City Secretary that old and new will no longer be on the agenda after the June meeting. Alex Carrasco, Hart resident, also spoke in Open Forum. He told the City Council he would like some attention regarding dilapidated and unsightly houses on Avenue D east of Broadway. AMARILLO Texas A&M AgriLife Research hosted a group of about 20 science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, teachers from Region 16 schools recently at the research farm near Bushland. We were interested in showing them the kinds of research we do that involve the STEM disciplines, said Dr. Brent Auvermann, Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center director in Amarillo and leader of the tour. Brenda Foster, Region 16 learning leader-instructional leadership in Amarillo, said the visit was in participation with a Texas Teacher Externship grant provided by the Texas Education Agency and Texas Regional Collaboratives to help teachers gain real-world experiences to engage students in the classroom. I was hooked when Dr. Auvermann said, I use exponentials and matrices every day, Foster said. I want teachers to see the application for the math they teach and sometimes have no idea how or when students will ever be able to use it. Auvermann said the group spent about six hours touring the various research projects and buildings. We looked at biology, physics, some irrigation engineering; we discussed how geometry played a role in our research, he said. The teachers saw sorghum and wheat breeding, irrigation engineering, beef cattle feeding and the biochemistry related to cattle. We looked at entomology and the role bugs play not only in crop damage, but also in serving as vectors or vehicles for diseases getting to our crops. Region 16 encompasses the majority of the Texas Panhandle, with many different soil types, varying climates and availability of groundwater, Auvermann said. From the colder north to the warmer south, from the clay soils of the central Panhandle to the sandy peanut ground of the northwest and southeast, and it is wetter in some areas and much drier in others, he explained. As researchers, weve got to address all these factors in our work. Auvermann said it was important to show the teachers the wide variety of cropping system approaches in agriculture, livestock-related work and even some environmental research about greenhouse gases and dust. The group spent time looking at forage sorghum trials, which historically are used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture Farm Service Agency to update grain sorghum eligibility tables used in management assistance loans and loan deficiency payments based on grain yield and forage types. Another locations discussion involved evapotranspiration, which is water loss due to evaporation from the soil and transpiration by the plant. AgriLife Research and the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agriculture Research Service in Bushland are national leaders in this field of study. The discussion included the mathematics involved in the design of the irrigation system, and how research must determine how much of the water is lost to evaporation and how much goes to transpiration. We want to help producers become better managers of their water, Auvermann said. We would like to shift, as water becomes more and more precious to us, water use out of evaporation and into transpiration, because then it is being used by the plants we are trying to grow. Thats a big chunk of our research out here, moving water use from evaporation into transpiration, allowing us to save the water that used to be evaporating. Auvermann also explained the Internet of Things. He said the center pivot irrigation system can be used as a data collection center, allowing researchers and producers alike to hang a variety of sensors on the center pivot and collect soil moisture, plant growth status, disease status, nitrogen and other data as the equipment moves through the field. In other words, we are moving everything towards high automation, using sensor technology to tell us when action is required, he said. Corina Srygley, a Randall High School teacher from Canyon, said, I didnt realize how technologically advanced farming had become. I remember sitting with my dad when I was young and him being told that someday a computer could run his combine and/or tractor. Now I know that has become a reality. That is amazing. An event like this really has benefits that go both ways, Auvermann said. We need a lot of student workers, and whats the pool from which we are going to draw? Its the Region 16 schools, he said. These teachers are training our future employees, so we are super interested in enriching their educational experience so when they come to us for a job during the summer, they have been exposed to the kinds of things that are important to us. And then on the flip side, I think it benefits the teachers themselves who are interested in professional development and adding to their tool kit, giving themselves more options for working with their students and enriching their students educational experiences, Auvermann said. Tanya Quisenberry, a West Texas Middle School teacher in Stinnett, said she has a limited farming/ranching background, but the AgriLife tour was eye opening as they learned how technology had advanced and how many opportunities it offers students. It also gave me several talking points with students about math, science and technology and how pivotal it is for students to collaborate, be innovative out-of-the-box thinkers, and apply what they learn in class, Quisenberry said. Tulia High School teacher Melissa Rodriguez said the sustainability of the farming and ranching industry hinges on math, science and people willing to take a chance. The folks at AgriLife have a passion for finding new and innovative ways to improve the systems already in place by utilizing technology, Rodriguez said. I learned we should always be moving forward, dreaming, trying, failing and trying again until we find what works. We should be instilling those values in our students; encouraging them to take a chance. China doesn't import enough from the U.S. to match Donald Trump's tariffs dollar for dollar, but President Xi Jinping can still squeeze American companies in other ways in retaliation. American businesses from Apple and Walmart to General Motors all operate in China and are keen to expand. That hands Xi room to impose penalties such as customs delays, tax audits and increased regulatory scrutiny if Trump delivers on his threat of bigger duties on Chinese trade. Shares of all three companies sank Tuesday as part of a broad sell-off in global markets in response to Trump's threat. The total amount of U.S. goods exports to China only amounted to $130 billion last year, meaning Trump's potential tariffs on $250 billion or more of Chinese imports can't be matched, at least directly. But if you measure both exports and sales of U.S. companies inside China, the U.S. has a surplus of $20 billion with China, according to Deutsche Bank AG. Pressuring companies through bureaucratic means "is a practice that the Chinese have used for a long time and our companies are on guard," William Zarit, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in the People's Republic of China, said on Bloomberg Television. "This is definitely a concern." South Korean and Japanese companies have all felt this effect, with their businesses in China hurt as part of a dispute between states. In 2017, following the Seoul government's decision to deploy an anti-missile system that China opposed, China forced South Korean retailer Lotte Shopping to suspend operations at many of its hypermarkets in the country for alleged violations of fire-safety rules. The company eventually decided to pull out of China, but still can't sell all its units and continues to rack up losses. In total due to the dispute, Lotte Group lost an estimated 2 trillion won ($1.8 billion) in the year from March 2017, according to Yonhap News Agency. The backlash also led to boycotts, with consumers shunning cars from Hyundai and cosmetics from Amorepacific Group. Chinese tourists canceled Korean vacations, forcing airlines to scrap flights and hotels to slash rates. The Bank of Korea estimated that 0.4 percentage point was cut from 2017's gross domestic product. Japanese automakers suffered major declines in their China sales in 2012 after the fight over disputed islands in the East China Sea worsened. "The Chinese government can organize a boycott very quickly," said Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "We've seen it repeatedly with the cases of Japan and Korea: They whipped up the propaganda machine and suddenly no one was buying Toyotas anymore." Even before Trump's latest threat, some U.S. companies in China were feeling the pressure. "We're already beginning to see some increased regulatory scrutiny against US companies operating in the market, whether it's increased customs enforcement, local emissions inspections at our companies' factories, stricter enforcement of the advertising law," said Jake Parker, vice president of China operations for the U.S.-China Business Council in Beijing. One advantage of this tactic for Xi is that this time the numbers are on his side, as U.S. investment in China is far larger than the reverse. American companies had $627 billion in assets and $482 billion in sales in China in 2015, compared to just $167 billion in U.S. assets and $26 billion in U.S. sales for Chinese companies, according to a report published Tuesday by China International Capital Corp. analysts Liu Liu and Liang Hong. One sector that's at risk is autos, especially considering the historical precedents from Japanese and South Korean companies. Like other foreign automakers, GM and Ford have invested heavily in local production in the world's largest auto market. China contributed about a quarter of GM's profit last year and about 12 percent of Ford's, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. GM slid as much as 4.1 percent in New York trading Tuesday, while Ford sank as much as 2.7 percent. China is also the biggest market for electric vehicles and heightened hostility from Beijing could further complicate efforts by Elon Musk to conclude negotiations between Tesla and Chinese regulators over a proposed factory in Shanghai. The 15,000 vehicles Tesla sold in China last year brought in more than $2 billion, about 17 percent of total revenue. Tesla fell as much as 6.6 percent in trading Tuesday. Starbucks wants to more than triple its revenue over the next five years from China, which is on track to become the company's largest market within a decade. Starbucks currently has 3,300 outlets, compared with about 12,000 in the U.S. Starbucks fell as much as 1.5 percent in New York trading. One thing that may cause Xi to hold back from a full-scale attack on American companies is concern about the impact it would have on the domestic economy. "China has been trying to avoid an ugly outcome of the U.S.-China trade conflict," said Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura Holdings in Hong Kong, adding that the country left some "wiggle room" for future negotiations. "This year is tough for China as the country will face greater downward pressure on growth in coming months due to the deleveraging campaign and slowdown in some major export destinations." WASHINGTON President Donald Trump further escalated his trade fight with China on Monday, saying his administration was prepared to impose tariffs on another $200 billion worth of Chinese goods and potentially even more if Beijing continues to fight back. Trumps threat, in response to retaliatory measures by China, was the latest volley in a dizzying trade dispute that has pitted the worlds two largest economies against each other and resulted in a seemingly endless game of one-upsmanship. The president called it punishment for what he said was an attempt by Beijing to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage. China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology, Trump said in a statement. Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong, he added, calling Chinas response unacceptable. The president left little doubt that the United States would continue to hit back even harder if China counters, adding another tariffs to another $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. All told, the Trump administration is threatening to impose tariffs on as much as $450 billion worth of goods, including an earlier round a sum nearly as large as the total value of goods China sent the United States last year, which was $505.6 billion. The administration is essentially saying it is willing to bring a substantial amount of commercial activity in the Asia-Pacific to a screeching halt, said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The tit for tat began Friday, when Trump said Washington would move ahead with tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods, including agricultural and industrial machinery. The action provoked an immediate response from Beijing, which said it would place its own tariffs on $50 billion worth of American goods, including beef, poultry, tobacco and cars. On Monday, Trump raised the ante even further, saying that he had directed Robert E. Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, to pursue another $200 billion worth of tariffs. Chinas Commerce Ministry responded swiftly to Trumps threat, issuing a statement on its website that warned that if the Trump administration followed through, China would have to adopt comprehensive measures combining quantity and quality to make a strong countermeasure. The rapid succession of trade threats has left little time for negotiations that could potentially defuse tensions between the two countries. Whether President Xi Jinping of China agrees to bend to Trumps demands remains an open question. With his latest move, Trump has escalated his trade threats to such a level that China can now no longer issue a proportional response. Last year, the United States exported only $130.4 billion of goods to China in total. But trade experts say there are plenty of ways beyond tariffs that the Chinese government could retaliate including slowing approvals for acquisitions made by U.S. companies or stalling products at its ports. And Trumps aggressive challenges may have left the Chinese president with little room to back down without looking weak to his own population. Mr. Trump seems to be counting on the fact that China will soon run out of room to retaliate with its own tariffs on U.S. exports, said Eswar Prasad, a trade expert at Cornell University. This could prove to be a miscalculation since China has other effective levers it can use in a trade war, including disruptions of American businesses sales operations and their supply chains that run through China. The White House imposed the tariffs as punishment for what the administration said was years of unfair trade practices by the Chinese government, including pressuring U.S. companies to hand over valuable trade secrets in order to operate in that country. Trump has been betting that the tariff threats will satisfy his supporters, who cheered his tough-on-China statements on the campaign trail. But Chinas retaliation could come back to bite some groups, especially U.S. farmers, who are bearing the brunt of Chinas tariffs. And it is generating opposition within his own party among business-friendly Republicans who favor free trade and are increasingly concerned about Trumps approach. Lawmakers of both parties have criticized the presidents trade threats, but few have advocated taking direct action against him. Last week, Senate Republicans blocked a vote on legislation introduced by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., which would have given Congress the ability to overturn certain tariffs. Senate leaders said such a bill would have simply been vetoed by the president. The trade conflict with China comes as the administration wages several trade conflicts at once. Rather than forming a coalition of countries to pressure China to change its trade practices, as some foreign leaders and trade officials have urged, the president has put allies on edge with tariffs on metal from Europe, Canada and Mexico and threats to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement. If they do go into effect, the tariffs would greatly increase the disruption for international companies, which are already anxious about the prospect of higher costs on many goods that move between the United States and China. Kip Eideberg, vice president of public affairs and advocacy at the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, which represents major U.S. exporters like Caterpillar and John Deere, said the additional tariffs were terrible news for his industry. It will effectively wipe out all of the gains that our industry has seen from tax reform and regulatory relief, he said. We should be creating more jobs, not wiping them out. The Trump administration had said it intended its initial list of tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese products to have as little impact as possible on U.S. consumers who purchase Chinese-made televisions, clothes and electronics. But ratcheting up the level of tariffs would eventually start to pinch consumers. The tariffs could also damage investor confidence, potentially setting off stock market falls or persuading companies to withhold from investing in new facilities and factories. Already there are signs of strains in the global economy from the broader trade tensions, weakness that China and the United States are both better positioned to weather than other nations. However, theres a chance Trumps tariffs may have a limited impact on Chinas nearly $13 trillion economy, which no longer depends as much on exports and can find other places besides the United States to sell its products. Some U.S. buyers of Chinese goods may simply choose to pay the newly imposed tariffs rather than find new suppliers elsewhere. Brad Setser, a Treasury official in the Obama administration who is now an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Chinas exports to the United States in the listed categories could easily be halved by the tariffs. But they would not disappear entirely, as some Chinese products would still be competitive in terms of cost. Some of the same goods could probably be sold to other countries at slightly lower prices, further limiting the effect on the Chinese economy, Setser said. Moreover, Chinas exports could grow in other areas to offset any drop. The tariffs could have a longer-term effect on China, however. Devised as essentially a pre-emptive strike against Chinas enormous program to bolster high-tech industries, the Trump tariffs could limit eventual sales from Chinas emerging technologies. With the European Union also protesting the program called Made in China 2025, exports to Europe could suffer, too. For both sides, the issue has become far more than a struggle over nuts-and-bolts economics. It has become a battle over which country will dominate the high-wage, high-skill industries of tomorrow. Washington and Beijing alike see those industries as essential to protecting national security and to creating jobs. The Trump administration is pushing hard for curbs on the Made in China 2025 program. Beijing aims to make the country a leader in the manufacturing of advanced products, including computer microchips and commercial aircraft. The Trump administrations statement announcing tariffs managed to mention the Chinese industrial policy program no fewer than five times. But China appears just as determined to preserve the program. And the trade issue has become so prominent that the Chinese public has come to expect that Beijing will push back hard against the Trump administrations trade measures. This pressure will be high, said Tu Xinquan, director of the China Institute of World Trade Organization Studies in Beijing. There is no way to move back. SAN FRANCISCO Apples chief executive, Tim Cook, may be the leader of the worlds most valuable public company, but lately he has had to act a lot like the tech industrys top diplomat. Last month he visited the Oval Office to warn President Donald Trump that tough talk on China could threaten Apples position in the country. In March, at a major summit in Beijing, he called for calmer heads to prevail between the worlds two most powerful countries. In a trade and technology showdown between the United States and China, Apple and Cook have a lot to lose. With 41 stores and hundreds of millions of iPhones sold in the country, there is arguably no U.S. company in China as successful, as high-profile and with as big a target on its back. Since he took over Apple from its co-founder, Steve Jobs, in 2011, questions about whether Cook, 57, could re-create the magic that led to the iPod and iPhone have persisted. For Cook, the analogous breakthrough and potentially his legacy as the heir to Jobs has come not from a gadget, but from a geography: China. Under Cooks leadership, Apples business in China grew from a fledgling success to an empire with annual revenues of around $50 billion just a bit under a quarter of what the company takes in worldwide. He did this while China was tightening internet controls and shutting out other U.S. tech giants. Now, with the Trump administration saying Friday that it would move ahead with tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese products, and China having threatened retaliation, Apple is stuck in the middle. The Trump administration has told Cook that it would not place tariffs on iPhones, which are assembled in China, according to a person familiar with the talks who declined to speak on the record for fear of upsetting negotiations. But Apple is worried China will retaliate in ways that hamstring its business, according to three people close to Apple who declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Apple fears the Chinese-bureaucracy machine is going to kick in, meaning the Chinese government could cause delays in its supply chain and increase scrutiny of its products under the guise of national-security concerns, according to one person close to the company. Apple has faced such retaliation before, another person said, and Reuters reported Ford vehicles are already facing delays at Chinese ports. There is also concern that Apple could face reprisals for legal and regulatory efforts in Washington that have made it difficult for the Chinese tech giant Huawei to sell its phones and telecom equipment in the United States. Apple executives and lobbyists in Beijing and Washington, led by Cook, have been trying to work both sides. They have fostered close ties to the administration of the countrys leader, Xi Jinping, an effort called Red Apple by employees at Apples manufacturing partner Foxconn, after the official color of the Chinese Communist Party. At the same time, Cook has been pleading with the Trump White House to understand that a trade war is bad for the economy and bad for Apple. Cook, who knows a bit of Mandarin, has attended Chinas most important political events in a critical year for Xi. Days after a Chinese Communist Party congress wrote Xis ideas and name into the constitution, elevating him to the same status as Mao Zedong, Cook joined a small group of U.S. and Chinese executives for a meeting where Xi lectured about innovation and reform. Later, Cook attended Chinas World Internet Conference, an effort by Beijing to create a Davos-like conference for technology. There he met Wang Huning, a new member of Chinas standing committee the partys top leadership group and an ideological force behind Chinas deepening authoritarianism. In March, just after an annual meeting of Chinas rubber-stamp Parliament formally abolished presidential term limits, Cook attended a major summit that brings together Chinese policymakers and corporate leaders. Cook has long defended Apples presence in China as a way to help change the country from the inside. Each country in the world decides their laws and their regulations. And so your choice is: Do you participate, or do you stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be? he said at a Fortune event in China in December. You get in the arena, because nothing ever changes from the sideline. Cook has also put in time in the halls of power in Washington. Last month, he visited the White House to meet with Trump and his top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow. Cook began by applauding new corporate-tax rules and reminded Trump that Apple said it would contribute $350 billion to the U.S. economy over the next five years, according to two people familiar with what Cook said. Then Cook switched to explaining why he thought a trade war would reverse the new tax laws progress, the people said. Cook told the president that tariffs were effectively a tax on consumers and that the trade deficit with China is inflated because of flaws in how it is calculated, one of the people said. He was very helpful in making some suggestions, and I might also add he loves the tax cut and tax reform, Kudlow said on CNBC shortly after the meeting. He says Apple is going to be building plants, campuses, adding jobs, lots of business investment. That was the first point he made to President Trump. Trump has also told crowds this year that Apple planned to build multiple factories in the United States. Apple has no plans to do so and has not publicly corrected him. Cook has found Cabinet members more accessible in the Trump administration than the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the talks, and he has seen eye to eye with Kudlow, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and, on some issues, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. He has met with Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, but they tend to disagree on trade issues, this person said, and he has avoided engaging with perhaps the administrations most hawkish member on trade, Peter Navarro, a top adviser to the president. Cook still sees an opening to engage on the trade issue because of disagreement inside the White House, and he doubts that a trade war or Chinese retaliation against Apple ultimately will happen, this person said. Hes willing to put a brave face on and work with the Trump administration because they probably have more at stake than any other tech company when it comes to China and the tariffs, said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst and partner at the investment firm Loup Ventures. The specter of Chinese retaliation against Apple has increased since the administration targeted the Chinese tech company ZTE for breaking U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea. But the administration backed away from stiffer penalties this month and said it would fine ZTE $1 billion and install a compliance team picked by the United States. Other measures targeting Chinas larger telecom champion, Huawei, could lead to new strains. Indeed, congressional pressure this year appeared to quash a deal in which AT&T would sell Huawei phones in America. Apple, meanwhile, has a deal with Chinas biggest telecom company, China Mobile, giving it a direct channel to nearly 900 million subscribers in China. The competition to sell smartphones in the country has become increasingly intense, with a number of other Chinese companies also offering high-end but usually lower-priced phones. Cooks frequent visits to China are part of Apples increased efforts to court Chinas leadership, started in 2016 after the country suddenly removed Apples iTunes Movies and iBooks Store there. Apple set up two research-and-development centers in China, made a $1 billion investment in the Chinese ride-sharing company Didi Chuxing, and created a new position, head of China, that reports directly to Cook. The company appointed Isabel Ge Mahe, who was born in China, to the role. Apple also complied with Chinese orders to store its data on Chinese-run servers and to pull certain apps from its App Store, including The New York Times app and many that allowed Chinese users to get around censorship that blocks sites like Facebook and Twitter. The company has reason to fear retaliation. In 2014, the Obama administration indicted five Chinese military hackers, stoking tensions already high from leaks about U.S. surveillance from the former government contractor Edward Snowden. Months later, Chinese regulators delayed approvals of the iPhone 6 for additional security reviews. Apple executives perceived the moves as retaliation, said people familiar with the matter, which has not been previously reported. Apples primary leverage with the Chinese government is Chinese consumers love for Apple products, said Dean Garfield, head of the Information Technology Industry Council, a trade group that represents Apple and other tech companies. However, Garfield added, Chinese consumers would also love Facebook and Google, two products blocked in China. There are limits, he said. Xi and the National Party will do whats in their interest. Arguments over money and politics are always worse when beer is involved. As tariffs and combative rhetoric entangle the United States in trade fights, a scuffle has broken out at home over the rising cost of the aluminum used to make cans for beer and other beverages. Beer-makers are frustrated over the way prices are set in the U.S. aluminum market and say those who produce and trade the metal are using President Donald Trumps tariffs as cover for artificially inflating its cost. They now want the government to investigate the methodology used to produce the Midwest Premium, an arcane figure that largely determines the cost of buying bulk aluminum in North America. Its become a device to artificially raise the price of aluminum for producers and traders, enriching them at the expense of users like ourselves, said Tim Weiner, senior global commodities risk manager for Molson Coors, which buys roughly 500 million pounds of aluminum a year as it churns out 12 billion cans of beer. The company, maker of Coors Light, Miller High Life and Milwaukees Best, could see its aluminum costs rise $40 million this year, he said. The price increase is comparatively small. An analysis by the Beer Institute, an industry trade group, pegged the cost at a penny a can, or about $350 million a year. But it is an opportunity for brewers to join the rush of industries bending the Trump administrations ear. The National Council of Textile Organizations, for example, is seeking tariffs on Chinese textiles. And Florida tomato growers want to make it easier to bring anti-dumping investigations and potential tariffs on seasonal produce from Mexico. In a letter to the Commerce Department last month, the Beer Institute argued that the Midwest Premium set by S&P Global Platts is subject to possible manipulation and urged the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to prevent and redress any anti-competitive conduct relating to the Midwest Premium. And on Monday, a bipartisan group of 31 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions urging the Justice Department to take action. We understand that purchasers of aluminum are encountering serious pricing irregularities and potential anti-competitive conduct by aluminum producers, merchants, traders, banks and others which we feel warrant investigation by the Department of Justice, said the letter, which was drafted by Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo. Between the start of the year and the end of last week, the premium was up more than 130 percent, to about $485 per metric ton an increase driven in large part by the 10 percent tariff the Trump administration has placed on aluminum imports. The premium is added to the global price set on the London Metal Exchange to reflect the unique factors that influence the cost of aluminum in North America: supply, demand, freight costs, handling fees and other costs including tariffs. S&P Global Platts calculates its snapshot of the Midwest Premium surveying buyers, sellers, traders and end users. The premium establishes the de facto market price, and is referenced in U.S. aluminum contracts signed by companies that make everything from auto body panels to electrical cables to beer cans. Platts says its prices accurately reflect a market roiled by the Trump administration push to restrict imports Canada alone accounts for more than half the aluminum brought into the country and sanctions set up in April against Rusal, the largest aluminum producer in Russia, where 9 percent of imports come from. Theyre responding to the pressure like the pressure of tariffs or the impact of sanctions, said Dave Ernsberger, global head of energy pricing and co-head of content at S&P Global Platts. Theres nothing thats a surprise or thats not transparent about what were doing here. Even if tariffs are driving the premium up, the brewers complain that they should not be hit so hard. Cans are made from roughly 70 percent recycled or scrap material, according to the Aluminum Association trade group, and such metal is not subject to the tariffs. The Midwest Premium is intended to apply only to new aluminum, Ernsberger said. If it is being applied to the scrap-heavy material the brewers are buying, he said they should take that up with their suppliers. Theres no rule anywhere saying that you have to use any price for anything, Ernsberger said. The brewers entreaties and others like them are a result of the administrations willingness to take aggressive actions on trade, in which industries see opportunity. They create powerful incentives for companies to petition the government to make sure theyre not the losers, said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in trade. This is not completely unusual, but the scale of it is fairly unprecedented. There is some precedent for the brewers push. In 2014, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations examined the practices of Wall Street banks involved in the market for physical commodities. The committees report spotlighted Goldman Sachs which then owned a large aluminum warehousing operation and how long wait times for metal from the banks warehouses were accompanied by a surge in the Midwest Premium. Goldman Sachs, which denied affecting the price or supply of aluminum to consumers, subsequently sold its aluminum business. The Midwest Premium declined. Beer companies hope the government can help again. Youve heard the administration tell industries like ours that the tariff is necessary from a policy perspective, and that they really need folks like us to, sort of, take one for the team, said Jim McGreevy, chief executive officer of the Beer Institute. The Midwest Premium, he said, is an issue that we think the government could help us out on. EAST HAMPTON The community is invited to a memorial service for a Morgan mare who made headlines when she, another horse and her owner walked 15 miles through the night to fulfill a commitment he made. In November 2016, Connecticut Draft Horse Rescue of East Hampton welcomed a special animal who had served as the riderless horse (symbolically carrying empty boots reversed in the stirrups) at more than 700 military funerals over the past decade. Melody and her owner, Marine Corps veteran Richard Kowalker, were made famous a few years ago when their trailer was damaged the night before they were due at a funeral for a former WWII Marine. Rick, Melody and a borrowed horse trekked 15 miles on foot through the night to fulfill their commitment. On the evening of June 16, a volunteer found Melody down at night check, according to a press release from Noreen Blaschik. Our vet administered medications and we tried helping her up for several hours. A YouTube video interview of her owner was even played so she could hear her daddys voice. She picked up her head and looked around for him, but then put it down and closed her eyes, Blaschik said. Shortly before midnight, she passed away while she listened to her daddys voice on the video. We know that she will wait for him at the Rainbow Bridge. CDHR was honored to serve and comfort Melody in her final years. She had turned 33 years old this past spring, she said. A memorial service for Melody is planned June 30 at 11 a.m. at the CDHR farm at Autumn Ridge, 113 Chestnut Hill Road, East Hampton. It is open to the public. Kowalker and his family have a matching gift of $50,000 if CDHR can raise that amount in donations. Funds will go toward the construction of a barn at Autumn Ridge which will include a display of his Marine dress blues, military saddle, and newspaper clippings with pictures to remember and honor the lives and service of the pair. Donations to Memorial Fund for Melody the Military Funeral Horse can be sent through donorbox.org or by mail to CDHR, P.O. Box 273, East Hampton, CT, 06424. If silence speaks volumes, Republican candidates for governor published an entire series on the escalating border crisis. The normally verbose candidates were mum on the Trump administrations policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. No social media posts, no press releases and, until Hearst Connecticut Media asked, no public comments. The silence from my Republican opponents is deafening. So lets try again. Where do my fellow candidates for governor stand: with Laura Bush and the kids or with Donald Trump?, Democrat Ned Lamont tweeted Tuesday morning, referencing an Op-Ed in which former First Lady Laura Bush denounced the practice. No one answered Lamonts Tweet. Once asked, some Republican candidates issued statements. Speaking as the mayor of a large, culturally diverse urban center who has dealt with the issue of illegal immigration for more than a decade, there simply has to be a better way to uphold federal immigration laws without breaking up families, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton said in an email. Westport tech entrepreneur Steve Obsitnik read a prepared statement over the phone. I fully support securing the borders, but the separation of children from their parents is unacceptable, Obsitnik said. We need to repeal the law that has enabled this. This law has been on the books for over 20 years, and we need to secure our borders using humane and pro-family methods. Pressed on what he thinks about the forced separations, Obsitnik repeated his prepared statement. Some governors, including Republicans, have pulled or withheld their National Guard support at the border until the zero tolerance policy announced by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on April 6, is revoked. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy called the practice cruel, cowardly and un-American. More than 2,300 children were separated from their parents between May 5 and June 9, according to the most recent data released by the Department of Homeland Security. As a father of five these stories of separated families disturb me greatly, Greenwich hedge fund mogul David Stemerman said in an e-mailed statement. Im glad to hear there is growing bipartisan support to address this issue quickly. Im confident that a balance can be achieved between securing the border and ensuring no young children are ever separated from their parents. Former Trumbull First Selectman Tim Herbst and Madison businessman Bob Stefanowski did not return repeated requests for comment on the issue in time for publication. Democrats were swifter in their response to the national headlines. We cannot let @realDonaldTrump @GOP policies of racism and bigotry continue every CT Trump-Republican must denounce! @CTDems join #Colorado & #Massachusetts to #resist refuse CT support of #Immigration policies separating / incarcerating children, Democrat Guy Smith tweeted Tuesday morning. kkrasselt@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2563; @kaitlynkrasselt WASHINGTON - The Trump administration issued new rules on Tuesday that will help small businesses and self-employed people get health insurance that costs less because it includes fewer benefits and consumer protections, bypassing significant requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The rules, throwing the doors wide open to a controversial type of insurance known as association health plans, accomplishes through executive power what congressional Republicans have tried and failed to write into law over the past two decades. Announced Tuesday morning by Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, the final rules expanding access to such health plans come eight months after President Donald Trump directed the government to foster alternatives to the ACA's insurance provisions and five months after the Department of Labor proposed a draft version. They are the most recent piece in the administration's jigsaw efforts to undercut elements of the ACA through its own powers after the Republican-led Congress failed last year to repeal a broad swath of the sprawling 2010 statute. Acosta's central talking point in the announcement was that the expansion of these plans will "level the playing field" between health insurance rules that apply to large companies and ones that pertain to small businesses. The new rules allow plans to exclude coverage for maternity care, prescription drugs, mental health services and other "essential health benefits" the ACA requires of coverage sold to individuals and small businesses. Acosta emphasized that the rules keep the same "consumer protection and health-care anti-discrimination that currently apply to large companies." In midday remarks before the National Federation of Independent Business, which supports the changes, Trump spoke in his trademark hyperbole, saying, "You are going to save massive amounts of money and have much better health care. It's going to be fantastic . . . You are going to save a fortune." Congressional Democrats and an array of critics across the health-care industry contend the availability of cheaper, skimpier coverage will leave some patients stranded when they get sick. "Finalizing this rule is simply the latest act of sabotage of our health care system by the Trump administration and a back door to expanding junk insurance plans," Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement - part of a flurry of denunciations from Democrats and other opponents. Critics also predict a proliferation of these plans will splinter the insurance market, siphoning off healthy customers and making ACA exchanges more fragile and costly as they are left with a concentration of customers who are sicker and more expensive to treat. Under the regulation, to be phased in for coverage sold from September to April, the association health plans may not charge more or refuse to cover customers with preexisting medical conditions, even though the administration argued in a legal case this month those protections will soon become unconstitutional. But the plans will have more freedom to charge different prices depending on customer's age, gender and location - something ACA coverage cannot do. Association health plans have existed for decades under limited circumstances of small businesses banding together to buy insurance. The plans have not been widespread. They and related ones called multi-employer welfare arrangements have over the years been found to commit fraud and sometimes have become insolvent. The new rules substantially expand the circumstances under which association health plans can be created and purchased. The regulations erase a requirement that any association must already have existed for a purpose unrelated to health insurance. And for the first time, individuals will be able to buy one of the plans. Plans may be sold nationally, in groups of states or a single state, according to senior Labor officials who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity. States will continue to regulate them, although administration officials had asked for suggestions on how to possibly exempt them from state regulation. Acosta said government forecasts estimate the rules will lead 4 million Americans to be covered through association health plans, including 400,000 who are now uninsured. During a comment period after the proposal came out in January, Labor received hundreds of comments, the vast majority opposed to the new rules. Avalere Health, a Washington-based consulting firm, estimated last winter that the rules would lead to lower premiums by 2022 for those with association health plans - averaging $2,900 a year less than in the ACA marketplace for small businesses and $9,700 less compared with the individual market. On the other hand, the analysis showed, the rules would drive up premiums in the individual marketplaces by 3.5 percent, prompting 130,000 more people to become uninsured within five years. On Tuesday, Dawn Sweeney, president of the National Restaurant Association, which has long pressed for broader access to association health plans, said "small restaurant owners from Nevada to North Carolina will now be able to purchase high quality insurance for a more affordable price." The administration also is working to expand a second form of insurance that also sidesteps ACA rules. These "short-term, limited duration health plans" were originally intended as a bridge for people between jobs or other temporary circumstances. The Obama administration restricted them to three months. Trump health officials are finalizing rules that would allow them to be sold for 12 months at a time. WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump pressed Republican senators Monday to add more border-security and wall funding to a homeland-security spending bill, expressing dissatisfaction with a bipartisan compromise struck by GOP senators aiming to avoid a government shutdown this fall. "The president is focused on border security, and he'd like more money. We talked to him that we thought this was a good down payment," Sen. Richard C. Shelby, R-Ala., chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told reporters after meeting with Trump along with Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., who chairs the panel's Homeland Security subcommittee. Shelby said the president did not indicate whether he would be able to live with the committee's agreement. The senators tried to impress upon the president that they needed to reach a bipartisan agreement, which limited what they could do, Shelby said. The senators warned Trump against a government shutdown. Government funding runs out on Sept. 30, and it is uncertain what will happen then if Trump is still pushing for more border money than Congress has agreed to. Trump has repeatedly promised to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, a proposal Democrats have rejected and fought against funding. If the president refuses to sign a spending bill needed to continue government operations, the result would be a partial shutdown just ahead of the midterm elections that will decide control of Congress. "We did talk about a shutdown, that a shutdown's in no one's interest," Shelby said. He said the president did not indicate whether he agreed. "We didn't ask him to agree," Shelby said. In the past, Trump has suggested that he might welcome a "good shutdown." Shelby declined to say exactly how much money the bill commits to the border for the 2019 budget year. The White House had initially requested $1.6 billion for a variety of border-security elements, including building the wall Trump has pushed for - the same amount Congress committed in the 2018 budget year. But White House officials later indicated they wanted more than that, around $2.2 billion. However, that higher request was never formally transmitted to Congress. Shelby said the administration would be getting more than it had last year. But that apparently was not enough for Trump, who at times has demanded $25 billion for the wall. During his presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised the wall would be paid for by Mexico. "I told him we were trying to work to achieve border security, too," Shelby said. "But we want to keep the appropriations process going, and this is a way to keep it going." The meeting about border funding occurred against the backdrop of a roiling debate over the administration's decision to begin separating immigrant children from their families arriving at the border. White House officials insist it is Congress' job to fix the issue through legislation, and the House will be voting on immigration bills this week, though they appear unlikely to pass. But that issue did not arise as Shelby and Capito met with Trump, both senators said. Instead they were focused on funding levels in the annual spending bill for Homeland Security operations, which Capito's subcommittee is scheduled to vote on Tuesday. Senators and House members have been trying to get their annual government-funding process back on track after dysfunction in recent years. They want to avoid presenting Trump with a mammoth spending bill at the end of the fiscal year. Trump vowed in March, after suffering conservative blowback for signing an enormous $1.3 trillion spending bill that busted spending caps, that he would never sign another such bill. I keep trying to write something about the current state of affairs in my country and being too daunted to begin. My words fail me. What wisdom can I possibly offer about migrant children torn from their parents and held in cages? All I have is heartbreak. But the fact that I am stunned and horrified and sickened by what's happening in my nation is no excuse for my silence. If I can't find words of my own, the least I can do is point to words by others. Here are five tweets I've signal-boosted in recent days (the first one of these is a thread -- click through to read the whole): 1. So Im just going to start a thread of all the faith groups/faith leaders condemning either the Trump admins zero tolerance policy that separates families (and/or asylum change), Sessions argument that the Bible supports its enforcement, or both. Here are a few. Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins) June 15, 2018 When crying children are taken from their parents arms, the American Jewish community must not remain silent. We declare: Not here. Not now. Not in our name. This is a state of moral emergency. #FamiliesBelongTogether https://t.co/2IfnoO5h9Q Rabbi Sara Zober (@RebbeSMZ) June 18, 2018 How We Got Here: The Disturbing Path that Leads to Child Prison Camps https://t.co/06tJbQZjff #txlege The Texas Observer (@TexasObserver) June 14, 2018 To "love the stranger" is the single most repeated commandment in the Hebrew Bible. We do not show love by separating parents from children. The idea that this somehow accords with "Biblical" values is an absurd and evil claim. Shame on those who use faith to justify oppresssion Lee Weissman (@JihadiJew) June 17, 2018 If you want to know what you can do to make this better, here's a list of seven groups supporting children at the border that need our help. Donating to organizations like these doesn't feel like enough, but if the choice is between "doing something insufficient" and "doing nothing at all," I believe the former is better than the latter. As we strive to be the healthiest community in Texas, we need to work on becoming the safest community, too. A few days ago, we were saddened by the loss of esteemed pediatrician, Dr. Brandey Ackerman, a devoted wife and mother of three children. Her death brings to 17 the total number of deaths on roads in Midland County since January, which outpaces the number of deaths in 2016 and 2017. How many livestock would we have to lose before we do something about it? We need to work on our city and state laws to ensure that people can enjoy the sport they love, without being afraid for their lives. I know the law has been passed banning the use of cellphones while driving. How often this law has been enforced? Driving around Midland, you cant help but notice people using their cellphone while driving. I will not be surprised if the major cause of car accidents is still distracted driving. The other issue Midland police needs to clamp down on is driving under the influence. There needs to be stricter rules for people who operate a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. We need to create separate lanes for bicycles on the streets, especially on streets most traveled by bicyclists to help provide a safe route for their favorite sport. We also need to have laws about bicycle riding around the city. Bicyclists need to wear helmets, ride in the same direction as traffic, obey speed limits and stop signs and look into their blind spots. I am suggesting creating a park where people can ride their bicycles safely, families can bring their kids for walking and playing and bring their pets and that provides a shady area for people to be able to enjoy the weather. There is no time like today to start working on this project. With all the infrastructure being built around the city, we need to make sure that young families feel welcome and able to enjoy the amenities offered in our town. Dr. Sari Nabulsi, assistant chief medical officer Midland Memorial Hospital Due to ongoing drought conditions, Bexar County Commissioners passed an immediate 90-day burn ban Tuesday to prohibit all open-air burning of brush and trash in the countys unincorporated areas. San Antonio and virtually all of the countys 30-odd smaller cities already operate under all-year burn bans, said Bexar County Fire Marshal Chris Lopez. The current ban will expire Sept. 18 unless commissioners renew it or if unexpected wet weather persuades them to cut it short. Officially, the county is deemed to be abnormally dry on the U.S. Drought Monitor, the lowest of five levels of drought. Fewer than three people per month request permission to perform a prescribed or agricultural burn, he said. Well get some calls from a rancher who has a huge pile of cedar and mesquite that he wants to burn off, or nowadays we might hear from a developer whos clearing land for a project, Lopez said. Some residents still burn their household trash in the open or in metal barrels, Lopez said, either because they cant afford a trash service or just dont want to bother. It is those household trash fires, Lopez said, that have been largely responsible for the various uncontrolled grass fires that the county experiences each year. Violators of the ban can be fined up to $500. Outside burning is still allowed in a metal barrel if it has a metal grate on top that prevents embers from escaping. There currently is no fireworks ban in the unincorporated areas of the county, said Lopez, but the regions two largest fireworks vendors, Alamo Fireworks and Mr. W Fireworks, have reportedly agreed during the ban to voluntarily stop the sale of bottle rocket-like projectiles and missiles with fins, both of which emit sparks and could be a problem in severely dry areas. Everyone who does fireworks, said Lopez, should be on a big wide-open area of asphalt, like a parking lot, or a newly-plowed field, and they should have a five-gallon container of water or fire extinguisher with them. For more details on the burn bans specifics and a daily update on wind and drought conditions, consult the Bexar County Fire Marshals website. bselcraig@express-news.net Police were called in after a body was found after extinguishing a blaze Monday evening at a North Side apartment. Firefighters were called to scene at 6:45 p.m. in the 7900 block of Jones Maltsberger Road, according to San Antonio Police Department spokeswoman Sgt. Michelle Ramos. Homeland Security Investigations is working to determine who is criminally responsible in a human smuggling attempt that ended with five dead following a high-speed chase with authorities in Big Wells. Nina Pruneda, spokeswoman for Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio, said several people are expected to be charged over the next few days in the Western District of Texas in connection with the incident. RELATED: 2 Central Texas men identified as plane crash victims The Department of Public Safety is also investigating the fatal crash, which occurred during a chase by both U.S. Border Patrol and the Dimmit County Sheriffs Office. According to DPS, the rollover occurred at 11:18 a.m. on Texas 85 near mile marker 426 in Dimmit County. Dimmit Sheriff Marion Boyd said the chase reached speeds of more than 100 mph. He added that 12 people were ejected when a SUV rolled over after the vehicle ran off the road, caught gravel and tried to reconnect. The SUV was one of three vehicles spotted by a Border Patrol agent that kept going when agents found them, according to the Associated Press. RELATED: Rising-star rapper, accused of beating pregnant girlfriend, shot dead in Florida Both DPS and Homeland Security confirm that five people died as a result of the incident. Four people were pronounced dead at the scene and four others were airlifted to Brooke Army Medical Center from the scene, according to DPS. One person, who was being flown from the scene to BAMC died during transport, DPS officials said. Six individuals were taken to Dimmit County Regional Medical Center for treatment, according to DPS. As of Monday night, authorities had not released the identities of those who died. jbeltran@express-news.net | Twitter: @JBfromSA Five people, including a man from Eagle Pass, were charged Tuesday with federal offenses in connection with a Sunday accident in Dimmit County that left five dead, according to the U. S. Attorneys Office for the Western District of Texas. All five are charged with transporting undocumented immigrants and conspiracy to transport and harbor undocumented immigrants, resulting in serious bodily injury and death, according to a press release. They face potential maximum penalties of life in prison or death. The fatal accident occurred after Border Patrol agents attempted to stop and inspect three vehicles traveling in a convoy on FM 2644 between El Indio and Carrizo Springs. One of the vehicles stopped, but the other two fled. A Dimmit County sheriffs deputy joined in the pursuit, which reached 100 mph. RELATED: Congressman responds after public demands answers on migrant children: 'Where are the girls?' When the driver of a black Chevrolet Suburban, speeding east on Texas 85, lost control in Big Wells, the vehicle rolled several times and many of the passengers were ejected. Four died at the scene, and a fifth died after being taken to a San Antonio hospital. Charged were Jorge Luis Monsivais Jr., 20, of Eagle Pass; Marcial Gomez Santana, 55, a Mexican citizen; Mariela Reyna, 45, also Mexican; her son, Rudy Gomez, 21, of Hockley; and her daughter, Johana Gomez, 19, of Houston. All five remain in custody. According to the complaint, Monsivais was the driver of the Suburban that crashed, loaded with 13 undocumented immigrants. Seven of them remain hospitalized. One was released to the Border Patrol after receiving medical attention. RELATED: Mugshots: 60 nabbed in TX online child sex crime raid The driver of a 2008 Tahoe, a 17-year-old juvenile, evaded law enforcement before coming to stop. Several people absconded before Border Patrol agents detained the driver and 10 suspected undocumented immigrants, according to the press release. The juvenile driver remains in custody of Dimmit County officials. Of the 23 suspected undocumented immigrants involved, 21 were Mexican and two were Hondurans. Six are still being held as material witnesses. John MacCormack is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | JMacCormack@express-news.net | Twitter: @JohnMacCormack Former Harlandale ISD board member Joshua Cerna was sentenced Tuesday to a year in a halfway house and ordered to pay more than $40,000 in connection with an FBI investigation into millions of dollars in rigged insurance contracts at other area school districts and at the now-defunct Bexar Metropolitan Water District. Cerna, 44, pleaded guilty in September 2016 to a charge of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud, admitting he helped corrupt the insurance company selection process at San Antonio, Edgewood and South San Antonio Independent School Districts. He admitted that with insurance broker Sam Mullen of the Mullen Group, Cerna and insurance consultant William Haff who advised the districts about group insurance coverage forged a conspiracy that lasted from 2007 through 2015. Cerna turned FBI informant after he was confronted in 2014. Cerna asked U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez for leniency, reminding the judge that he admitted his wrongdoing early on and helped the FBI gather video and audio-recorded evidence. Cerna also said that he recently spoke with his 11 and 13-year-old sons in an effort to teach them theres consequences for ones conduct. As a family, were going to fail, Cerna said. Were going to fail one another. Were going to fail our faith. Cerna could have faced a sentence similar to the 37 months in federal prison the judge handed to Mullen in April. But because of Cernas help in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Roomberg proposed a sentence of eight months of incarceration. They corrupted the contracting process of four different government agencies, Roomberg said. Its always been our position that if youve been convicted of public corruption, you have to go to jail. Cernas lawyer, Chris Gober, asked for a sentence that includes halfway house or house arrest so he could continue to work in his undisclosed new job. Gober told the judge Cerna could pay for the costs and a fine, if need be. The judge ordered Cerna to a halfway house so he can continue working, and to pay the $29,280 cost of housing him there. The judge also fined Cerna $10,000. Cerna must also serve two years of federal supervision after his release from the halfway house. A veteran of local politics, Cerna served 11 years on the Harlandale school board. He also worked as a vice president of government relations at the Mullen Group and used his connections to help bring more business to Mullen and his then-wife, Diane, the chief executive officer. The only way that we would be able to get into any school district was to be able to directly have a relationship with the decisionmakers the school board, the trustees, Cerna testified at a bribery trial in December for former SAISD board trustee Olga Hernandez, who was acquitted. Cerna testified that the relationships sometimes involved campaign contributions, or even gratuities. Their goal was to push districts to buy insurance products that would get the Mullen Group greater returns on commissions, Cerna said. The FBI spent more than seven years investigating the Mullen Group and its contracts at various school districts, and Hernandez was the only school official to be charged. She was accused of accepting several gratuities from the Mullen Group that helped influence her vote, and the feds also alleged she swayed fellow trustees to support the Mullen Group. But in a rarity for federal court, jurors acquitted Hernandez of all charges several months after she had resigned her seat. Haff awaits sentencing. Guillermo Contreras is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | gcontreras@express-news.net | Twitter: @gmaninfedland The Trump administration on Friday unveiled plans to impose additional 25 percent tariffs on Chinese goods worth around 50 billion U.S. dollars, the latest unilateral move to risk provoking a trade war between the world's top two economies that could damage the global economy and trading system. Xinhua reports in its article China hates to be engaged in trade war but will firmly defend national interests that the move drew immediate opposition from the U.S. business community, farm groups, technology associations and pro-trade lawmakers of Trump's Republican party. "American companies want solutions, not sanctions. Tariffs will not solve these problems, but will harm American economic interests and jobs," U.S.-China Business Council President John Frisbie said in a statement. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch also warned that "tariffs will harm American and Chinese businesses and consumers, and will put economic growth in both countries at risk." Since early May, China and the United States have conducted three rounds of economic and trade consultations, trying to settle disputes for a win-win result, and have made positive and concrete progress. However, the chaos and division in the Trump administration have sent mixed messages and demonstrated flip-flops on major trade issues with China. Hardliners in the Trump administration might want to use tariffs to bully China into unilateral trade concessions, in disregard of the consensus recently reached by the two sides. But trade is not a zero-sum game and China will not negotiate with a gun held to its head. China, a responsible and reliable major trading nation, hates to be engaged in a trade war with the United States, knowing that it would be a lose-lose game for both. But this does not mean that Beijing is going to sit quietly in the face of Washington's planned unilateral tariffs. China has to fight back forcefully so as to safeguard the interests of the nation and its people. This is also a clear-cut demonstration of China's firm stance to uphold the rules-based multilateral trading system. In fact, Beijing has been ready for a volatile Washington. In a statement issued in the wake of their most recent trade negotiations in Beijing earlier this month, China made it clear that all outcomes of the economic and trade talks would not take effect if the U.S. side imposed any trade sanctions including raising tariffs. China always means what it says. Shortly after Washington's announcement on Friday, China decided to impose additional duties on U.S. products with the same scale and intensity, as the U.S. latest move violates the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Earlier this year, the Trump administration had unilaterally imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports as well as imported solar panels and washing machines, based on outdated U.S. trade laws put in place during the Cold War era. These measures sparked strong opposition from America's domestic business community and major trading partners. The European Union (EU), Canada, Mexico and several other countries have recently announced retaliatory measures against U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has also warned that the new U.S. tariffs against imports could interrupt global supply chains and damage a range of countries as well as the operations of U.S. multinational companies, putting the rules-based global trading system in serious jeopardy. The "America First" doctrine and unilateralism seem to be the mantra of the Trump administration's trade policy. Unfortunately, with a zero-sum mentality and a fickle approach to policy, it is hard to see how the United States, with an ever evaporating credibility, can negotiate better trade deals with other countries. For free traders worldwide, it is never an option to accommodate Washington's unilateral and protectionist measures with further concessions as it would only prompt the trade hawks in Washington to demand an even higher price. Now it is time for China, the EU, Canada and other countries to jointly safeguard the multilateral trading system with WTO at its center and to defend the common interests of the wider international community. EL PASO Amid nationwide criticism of the separation of immigrant parents from their children under the Trump administrations zero tolerance policy toward illegal border crossers, more than 1,000 people marched on an immigrant processing center here Tuesday calling for an end to it. Activists sought the minors immediate release and access to the tent city erected last week at the U.S. port of entry in the nearby border town of Tornillo that is housing around 200 immigrant boys in their late teens. The facility currently has 360 beds and could expand to hold more children in the future, said state Rep. Mary Gonzalez, a Democrat from Clint. Our message is, free our children now, said Fernando Garcia, executive director of the Border Network for Human Rights, which organized the rally. His words drew cheers and chants from the crowd. RELATED: What life inside migrant internment camps look like? The group also sent a letter Tuesday to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar that was signed by elected officials, faith leaders and representatives from various organizations. We cannot bear seeing parents, arrived at the country to seek asylum, torn from their children in a heartless attempt to enforce deterrence, the letter said. This is nothing more than inflicting trauma on children and parents at a massive and grotesque scale. We do not accept the subsequent mass incarceration of immigrant children, which follows from those separations, as a policy of our country. The demonstration came two days after Texas political leaders led a Fathers Day protest outside the Tornillo facility, expressing anger at Sessions announced zero tolerance policy that has led to the separation of about 2,300 children from parents seeking asylum in the United States from May 5 to June 9. The El Paso rally included both local residents and people who had traveled here from outside the state. They gathered at Edgemere Linear Park around 9 a.m. with signs that read, No more families torn apart and, Stop hurting children. The out-of-state participants included a contingent from New Mexico and a congressional candidate from New York. For attendee Elva OHara, 55, of El Paso, seeing children detained struck her in a personal way. OHara said that she and her three siblings were placed in a juvenile detention facility in California when she was 8, after their father killed their mother in front of them. Because of that experience, she said,she could identify with what the detained children were going through. The situation that these children are in now is extremely traumatizing and terrifying. They dont know where they are or whats going to happen to them, OHara said. And all they want is their mom or their dad. Nothing else. RELATED: Explainer: Must immigrant parents, children be separated at the border? After marching a mile to the El Paso Processing Center, which also has a training and recruitment office for the Border Patrol, protesters gathered in front of its gates, holding up posters that spelled out CLOSED in large red letters. They led chants of shame and children need their families. A series of speakers criticized the family separations while Border Patrol officers on a nearby rooftop monitored the crowd and appeared to film and photograph the protest. Amber Ramirez, 25, a former immigration paralegal, said she wanted to help the families be reunited and influence change to the countrys immigration policies. Theyre not coming here for any other reason than to save their lives, she said. Additional protests of federal immigration policy are being planned throughout the country for June 30. Lauren Caruba is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | lcaruba@express-news.net | Twitter: @LaurenCaruba A 29-year-old San Antonio man stabbed to death in 2015 sold drugs to and was the lover of the man accused in his death, attorneys said during opening statements as the murder trial of David Asa Villarreal opened Tuesday. Villarreal, who pleaded not guilty, was 29 when he was arrested and accused of killing Aaron Estrada, also 29, on Oct. 16, 2015. Estrada was stabbed multiple times and died in his apartment in the 12000 block of West Avenue on the North Side. Villarreal, who left the scene, was arrested days later in Austin, police have said. The Bexar County medical examiners office said Estrada died from a sharp-force injury and ruled the death a homicide. In her opening statement, prosecutor Kimberly Gonzalez told the jury that Estrada lived with his boyfriend and was a kind and peaceful person, but he didnt always make the best choices. She told the panel that after the stabbing Villarreal went to see a friend, was covered in blood and had a gash on his hand. Hes saying, I did it, I did it, and hes freaking out, Gonzalez said. She told the panel the friend Villarreal went to see called another friend to go check on Estrada. When that friend arrived, they found Estrada in a fetal position on the floor, his two white dogs by his side, and all three were covered in blood. Gonzalez said Estrada had deep puncture wounds from being stabbed seven times on the right side of his throat, the left and back side of his head, and suffered defense wounds on his hands. Investigators found a bloody pair of scissors at the scene, as well as a broken knife. Gonzalez warned the jury it would be hard to hear testimony and see the crime scene photos, but she asked them to find Villarreal guilty of murder. In his opening statement, defense attorney Alex Scharff told the jury that the incident was extremely tragic, but that the killing was done in self-defense. They were close friends. The complainant (Estrada) was Davids drug supplier. They got closer, there was sexual activity, but my client also had a girlfriend, as well, he said. Scharff told the jury as the men grew closer in their relationship, they would do drugs with friends. Estrada put hidden cameras all over the apartment, and Villarreal did not like that, Scharff said. He said Villarreal overheard a conversation between Estrada and a visitor in which he believed the videotaping came up. Afterward, Villarreal confronted Estrada about the recordings, Scharff said. Villarreal interprets it to be about recording people without their knowledge while using drugs, Scharff told the jury, referring to the conversation. Villarreal then told Estrada to turn off everything. Scharff said Estrada went through the motions, but didnt turn anything off, so Villarreal went to the breaker box to cut the power. He said Villarreal heard Estrada in the bedroom and beeping sounds from a gun safe, so Villarreal grabbed a cheap steak knife, and they began wrestling in what Scharff described as a drug-fueled battle. To protect himself, he had to stop the complainant (Estrada), Scharff said, asking the jury to find Villarreal not guilty. The case is being heard in the 186th state District Court, with Judge Jefferson Moore presiding. If convicted, Villarreal, now 32, faces up to life in prison. CORRECTION:This report has been updated to correct the spelling of defense attorney Alex Scharffs name. Elizabeth Zavala is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | ezavala@express-news.net | Twitter: @elizabeth2863 The Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 when General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate Army surrendered at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. But for slaves in some areas of the U.S., especially Texas, the news of their freedom did not come until months later on June 19. That day, now known as "Juneteenth," is celebrated each year with festivals and parades all across the country. Police on Monday arrested a man they said killed a person and attempted to burn the body at a North Side apartment complex. Ernesto Esquivel Garcia, 20, was charged with murder, arson and abuse of a corpse. He was booked into the Bexar County Jail on a $195,000 bond. Outgoing Texas State House Speaker Joe Straus, R-San Antonio, sent President Donald Trump a letter Tuesday requesting Trump immediately end policies that have increased family separations at the border with Mexico. Over the past several days, lawmakers at all levels of government, political candidates and other public figures have railed against the increasing number of children being removed from their parents and placed in separate facilities, part of Attorney General Jeff Sessions' "zero tolerance" immigration policy announced in April that involves arresting and criminally prosecuting all adults trying to enter the U.S. illegally. "Please listen to the growing number of Americans, faith leaders and elected officials from both parties who are voicing our concerns about this growing crisis," Straus wrote. "This is not a binary choice between rampant crime and tearing families apart. In light of the potential harm being inflicted on these children and the ambiguity about their status after they're removed from these facilities, I ask that you please immediately rescind directives that have resulted in the increase in separations of children from their migrant parents." RELATED: Recording of crying children at border adds to outrage On Twitter, Trump blamed the separations on Democratic lawmakers and urged Congress to pass immigration legislation. "Now is the best opportunity ever for Congress to change the ridiculous and obsolete laws on immigration," Trump said in a tweet Tuesday morning. "Get it done, always keeping in mind that we must have strong border security." Straus also called out Trump's decision to blame Democrats as standing in the way of ending the separations. "It is wrong to use these scared, vulnerable children as a negotiating tool," Straus wrote. "Their suffering should also not be used to deter illegal immigration." Straus' letter comes a day after all five living First Ladies, including Melania Trump, spoke out against the policy of family separations. Chase Karacostas is a staff writer for mySA.com. | Chase.Karacostas@express-news.net | Twitter: @ChaseKaracostas Two oil storage tanks are on fire and the National Oil Corp. said it fears the rest of them are in danger. Damage from militant attacks on a crude oil terminal on the Libyan coast was described by a national oil company Monday as catastrophic. United Press International reports in its article Libyan oil depots suffer catastrophic blow that Libya lost two of the five storage tanks at the Ras Lanuf port after militants stormed the facility last week. As a result, the NOC said its storage capacity was lowered from 950,000 barrels to 550,000 barrels. The fire from one of the damage storage tanks is in danger of spreading to three others spared so far. "This incident will result in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in construction costs, and billions in lost sales opportunities," the NOC stated. "Rebuilding the tanks may take years, especially in current security circumstances." The NOC attributed the attacks to a militia led by Ibrahim Jadhran, who opposes the national army. Libya declared force majeure on some crude export contracts last week. Force majeure is a contractual condition related to circumstances beyond the control of the parties involved. "NOC calls again for the immediate withdrawal of Ibrahim Jhadran and his gangs from the port, cessation of military operations and the provision of support and assistance to fire-fighting teams trying to reach the tanks still ablaze," its statement read. The NOC evacuated staff from both Sidra and Ras Lanuf terminals last week. The loss in oil production is around 240,000 barrels per day, about a quarter of the recent production level. Libyan oil production has been hampered by conflicts stemming from civil war that erupted in the wake of the Arab Spring movements earlier in the decade. Intense fighting near export terminals in early 2015 left oil storage depots ablaze and shut in exports for about a month. Libya is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and on the sidelines of a collective agreement to curb production to stabilize a market recovering from the collapse in oil prices in early 2016. OPEC economists said in their latest monthly market report that Libyan crude oil production last year improved 109.5 percent compared to 2016. Secondary sources reporting to OPEC said Libya produced an average of 955,000 barrels per day. Lets start with the easy part. The policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border, delivering them into a bureaucratic labyrinth while their fathers and mothers await trial or petition for asylum, is the wickedest thing the Trump administration has done so far. And you can tell exactly how wicked by observing how unwilling White House officials are to defend the policy on the merits. The true rationale has been clear from the beginning. The cruelty of separation was also deliberately chosen, in the hopes of reducing the number of families trying to make a dangerous border crossing by delivering the ones who get here into a childs nightmare and a parents hell. Its only since the cruelty has become palpable instead of theoretical that the Trump team has fallen back on the claims that their hands are tied, that they dont want to do this, but law and order requires it. What can you do? Honesty is generally too much to expect from this administration, but this is a case where it would be useful for everyone if the Trump White House just admitted that this policy was conceived as a deterrent traumatizing a certain number of families in the hopes of bringing greater order to the border in the long run. That admission would get us closer to the hard problem in migration policy. Some harshness, some deterrence, really is unavoidable in any immigration system that doesnt simply dissolve borders. So policymakers are therefore obliged to choose tolerable cruelties over the intolerable one that were witnessing in action right now. This dilemma was apparent (or should have been) in the Obama years, when a far more pro-immigration administration pursued sweeping amnesties, eventually by executive fiat. Liberals hailed those amnesties while paying less attention to the consequences of the Dreamer amnesty in particular: It created the impression that kids brought to the United States illegally would soon gain legal status, which in turn helped drive a surge in children being sent north without their parents, overwhelming the Border Patrol and saddling the Obama White House with a problem that it ultimately passed along to President Donald Trump. Now because Trump is hated and because hes added extra cruelties, the persistence of that problem the kids living in converted Walmarts or passed off to relatives or foster families and unaccounted for thereafter has suddenly become a source of outrage for liberals. So have the internal roundups carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, which have likewise been dialed up under Trump, but which predated him and earned far less media attention. Some of this wider outrage is understandable, but it doesnt sufficiently reckon with the realities that forced even a liberal White House to run detention centers and pursue deportations. Its not just domestic politics and the (justifiable) fear of backlash; its also that a more generous immigration policy can easily end up requiring more enforcement to prevent a snowballing effect because migrants are responsive to incentives established by receiving countries, not just conditions at home, and often (just ask Angela Merkel) the more you welcome the more will attempt to come. This means that even liberals have an interest in finding the least-cruel way of cracking down. My own view is that workplace enforcement is that less-cruel way. Mandate some version of the E-Verify program, make it harder to hire illegal immigrants, and somewhat more people would leave voluntarily and somewhat fewer would arrive illegally in the first place, reducing the need for ICE raids and the incentives for sudden border surges. E-Verify mandates lead to better labor market outcomes among workers likely to compete with unauthorized immigrants, a 2014 study found, with higher incomes for American-born Hispanics and recent-immigrant citizens. Morally, E-Verify seems vastly preferable to the brutality of family separation and the harsher Obama-era measures that liberals have belatedly discovered. Trump is showing us what the greater cruelty looks like; that makes it a good time to choose the lesser one. Ross Douthat writes a column for the New York Times. /(Picture taken from a Soviet documentary on the liberation of Auschwitz 1945). A survey released on Holocaust Remembrance Day this past spring discovered that many American adults lack a basic knowledge of the Holocaust. It turns out that 41 percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials, cannot identify Auschwitz, the infamous concentration/extermination camp in Poland where 1.1 million persons perished during World War II. Additionally, more than half of all Americans think Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany through force. He didnt. He was democratically elected. The survey, commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, was especially striking to me because I teach a course on the social history of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the deliberate effort by Nazi Germany to murder every single Jew in Europe. In the end, more than 6 million Jews perished, along with millions of Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, political opponents of Nazism, Jehovahs Witnesses and others. If there is one consistent comment I hear from students, it is that prior to my course, they had rarely been taught about the Holocaust. The good news is that the survey found that 93 percent of respondents said students should learn about the Holocaust in school. But what if you are not a student? How do you learn about the Holocaust? Here are four simple suggestions: Visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio. It is free to the public and is located at the southeast corner of Wurzbach Parkway and Northwest Military Highway. Check out Holocaust books from the San Antonio Library. Elie Wiesels Night and Anne Franks The Diary of a Young Girl are both excellent. Watch good documentaries and movies. Alain Resnais Night and Fog is one of the greatest documentaries ever made, and its only 32 minutes. Schindlers List is superb. Surf the web with caution. Holocaust deniers are abundant and many sites are just not very good. However, the website for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (www.ushmm.org) is the premier online source for reliable information on the Holocaust. There is one other way to learn more about the Holocaust, although it takes time and money go to where it happened. This is not especially easy since South Texas is a long way from Europe. But with some financial planning and scheduling, there is no substitute for putting your feet on the ground where the Holocaust happened. In recent years I have been fortunate to visit extermination camps in Poland, concentration camps and euthanasia centers in Germany, and many Jewish ghettos. You dont visit Auschwitz. You experience it. Sometimes these experiences are quite powerful. Last month, accompanied by a close friend of nearly 60 years, I arrived at the Wobbelin concentration camp, just outside the small town of Ludwigslust, Germany. Wobbelin was a subcamp of the much larger Neuengamme concentration camp. Wobbelin was only open in the spring of 1945. Most of the prisoners who died at Wobbelin were intentionally starved to death. At Wobbelin we attended the 73rd anniversary of the camps liberation, which was on May 2, 1945. Of the many people we met, two men had a special status. Both were 92-year-old Polish Jews who had survived Auschwitz and Neuengamme before their liberation at Wobbelin. They were there to give testimony to what they had endured, but they were not hateful. They spoke passionately and specifically about the horrors of the camp, but also candidly about the new Germany and how it has reckoned honestly and forthrightly about the years of the Third Reich. I was struck by their lack of spite and their desire to celebrate life. It was a vitalizing experience to be with two men who had survived the atrocity of the Holocaust, not only physically but spiritually as well. The lessons of the Holocaust go beyond the idea that if we do not remember it, we risk repeating it. One lesson might be, as Anne Frank put it, In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. Roger C. Barnes is professor of sociology at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. Heres what the Justice Departments report by its inspector general says about the FBIs investigation of Hillary Clintons email use. Five FBI officials involved in the investigation evidenced clear bias against presidential candidate Donald Trump, among them Peter Strzoks breathtakingly stupid statement to another official that well stop him from becoming president. The five didnt influence the conclusions reached, which were reasonable and not the result of bias against Trump. In fact, Strzok had advocated a more aggressive investigation of Clinton. FBI director James Comey acted in violation of FBI and Justice Department policies and norms in publicly rebuking candidate Clinton in announcing the FBIs conclusions about her email use. And again, when, 11 days before the election, he let it be known that the investigation had been reopened because of previously unexamined emails, only to conclude days later too late that they did not warrant altering the conclusion not to prosecute. Boiled down, then, this report points to the fact that what were arguably the most impactful actions in the investigation Comey meddling in the election by going public with criticism of a major partys presidential nominee and then reopening the investigation were ones that helped Trump by hurting Clinton. In other words, while all of us should expect that investigators keep their biases to themselves, these apparently werent acted upon, according to the inspector general. And, if this report points to evidence of deep-state skullduggery, Clinton, not Trump, has the biggest beef. The president and his supporters, however, are not reading the report this way. They are cherry-picking the report to discredit the FBI and the Justice Department. The reason is clear: to prejudice public opinion against Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation of possible Russian collusion by the Trump campaign in the election and obstruction of justice. Mueller reportedly wants to complete his report by the end of summer. And the Trump camp is preemptively attacking what it fears the conclusions are. But, heres an idea. Instead of drawing premature conclusions about the Mueller investigation from a report not about it, we wait for that report. Then, everyone can dispassionately review the evidence and reach our own conclusions about whether there was wrongdoing, whether criminal prosecution or impeachment are warranted and whether there is a plot against Trump. Patience. We know, in these fevered times, thats a lot to ask. GABRIELLA DEMCZUK /NYT We are hopeful that the ongoing reimagining of the Alamo serves the purpose of separating history and myth, but note another reimagining happening way over in Virginia that already serves that purpose. And just in time for July Fourth. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Monticello, home to Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, will no longer ignore history when it comes to telling his story. It will include Sally Hemings story to round out the historical narrative about one of our iconic founders. Recently while at my sons home, I had a chance to go through Khizr Khans book on the Constitution (This Is Our Constitution: Discover America with a Gold Star Father). Its a very good book; unfortunately, a study of our Constitution with its 26 amendments is incomplete without trying to understand how our government currently works. Over the years, Congress and the Supreme Court have altered different articles in the document with laws and rulings. Thus if one searches the document for tariffs, he/she will find that Congress in Article 3, Section 8, Clause 1 is the branch that has the power regulate commerce with foreign nations. But in 1928, the unruly houses of Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which enacted broad tariffs and worsened the Great Depression. This ultimately resulted in Congress transferring this power to the president and upsetting the balance of powers the framers intended. This is not the only incidence of the executive branch getting extra weight in governance. Most of our recent occupants of the White House have acted with restraint when exercising their added powers; however, we are currently experiencing abuses of these powers that are dangerous to us and the entire world. Laws can be changed to reinstate the proper balance. Katherine Hess Limits of caring Re: So why should I care about that? Larry P. Johnson, Another View, June 2: Mr. Johnson has stated an enigma: So many of us Americans live in a bubble, insulated from the hardships and realities faced by our neighbors. We dont want to know about their pain or their problems. If our neighbors problems are only temporary, they are not in the least bit mysterious, puzzling or difficult to understand. Newspapers and TV news are full of reporting that describes the hardships and tragic realities faced by our neighbors. So, why is it that we dont seem to know about their pain or their problems? A painful reality is that we live in a society dependent on government programs that insulate us from those hardships and those tragic realities. A likely reason we dont become involved is our reliance on the governments ability to tax us for the funding needed to temporarily change things until our neighbors are back on their feet. Just like the devastating 1936 Johnstown Flood, when the government levied a temporary sales tax earmarked to help the victims and the community to recover. And the recovery worked; the victims and the town have totally recovered. But 82 years later, the sales tax is still in effect and escalating even through the floods victims are no longer alive. The lesson should be obvious government funding to help our neighbors get back on their feet no matter how temporary the funding may seem, never is. The poor are always better off in a nation with the most rich than in a nation with the fewest rich. Robert C. Wilmore Treat root causes Like medicine in this country, immigration policy and the application of that policy, more often than not, treat the symptoms and not the cause. Recently, medicine has at least attempted to address the cause of chronic conditions out of the dire need for cost control. But immigration, in almost all of its forms, has yet to meet its reckoning in this regard. To address the need for immigration, one must realistically look at the source of the cause to reduce the symptoms. One attempt to address the cause was the North American Free Trade Agreement. But the idea of free trade alone led to resentment and repercussions. For example, when American manufacturing moved to Mexico, it eliminated good-paying jobs in the U.S. But here again, we were merely treating the symptoms; NAFTA did not address the cause. The roots are within the countries where political dissent is quashed and governments refuse to address the needs of their people. The founding and the practice of American democracy should stand as an example in the minds of those fleeing these countries. Without the courage to address the causes, the cycle repeats itself with each generation. World organizations such as NATO and the like, combined with diplomatic action and the will of the people, can implement democratic ideals within these countries. The discombobulation of immigrant policy here at home may be at least partially mitigated. The resolution of immigration problems is imperative. Jerry Kempe Fix your countries It is the immigrant parents fault, and the children are the ones who suffer. They are breaking our laws and have been advised about the consequences. We fought for our independence from Mexico and England when these countries were much more powerful than us; why dont they band together and fight for justice in their own country? Of course, it is much easier to run across, seek political asylum and get all the benefits at the expense of the American taxpayers. Stop blaming President Donald Trump and the GOP. The Democrats just want the vote; they dont care about the people. We have to start somewhere to stop the flow of people breaking our laws. Tillie Hamilton Guns dangerous The newspaper recently reported on the death of an off-duty Border Patrol agent, Javier Vega, in 2014. As tragic as his death was at the hand of someone attempting to rob him, if Vega had not had his weapon and attempted to draw it to exchange gunfire, he may have lost only property, not his life. And there was a recent report of an off-duty FBI agent who accidentally dropped his firearm while dancing, shooting another dancer when the gun discharged after hitting the floor. Guns are dangerous. Charles A. Schmidt Kia has announced a recall for 500,000 vehicles due to concerns that the vehicles airbags may not inflate in the event of a crash. Kia Airbag Recall an Expansion on an Already Existing Recall According to USA Today, the recall is being combined with a previous recall expansion by Kia and Hyundai, with the two automakers recalling nearly 1.1 million vehicles in all. The defect has been linked to at least four deaths. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened an investigation into the defective Hyundai and Kia airbags in March. At the time, the agency had received six reports of front-end crashes in which airbags failed to properly inflate. The recalls currently affect the following vehicles: 2010-2013 Kia Forte 2011-2013 Kia Optima 2011-2012 Kia Optima Hybrid 2011-2012 Kia Sedona 2011-2013 Hyundai Sonata 2011-2012 Hyundai Sonata Hybrid The automakers are currently working towards a repair. What Kinds Of Injuries Can Happen When an Airbag Fails? Injuries caused by a defective airbag include: Cuts and lacerations Fractures and broken bones Traumatic brain injuries Neck and spinal cord injuries Hearing loss Blindness Death According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 576 people were killed in automobile crashes where a front airbag did not deploy between 2001 and 2006. Of these victims, 360 would have benefited from frontal airbag protection. Over the past decade, there have been multiple widespread recalls on vehicles containing defective and dangerous airbags. Takata Corp. (2013 present) 21 deaths have been attributed to airbags manufactured by Takata, which are present in 42 million vehicles across 19 different brands Hyundai and Kia (2018 to present) Four deaths have been linked to airbag failures in 425,000 Hyundai and Kia vehicles, including the popular Sonata and Forte models. Fiat Chrysler (2016) Several deaths and injuries were linked to a software defect, causing airbag deployment and seatbelt failure GM Chevy Cruze (2014) Thousands of vehicles were recalled due to a manufacturing flaw that could prevent airbags from deploying in an accident GM SUV (2014) More than one million GM SUVs were recalled after faulty wiring could keep side airbags from deploying in the event of a collision Contact an Experienced Defective Airbag Injury Attorney If you or a loved one suffered an injury due to a defective or faulty airbag, contact Thomas J. Henry. Our experienced vehicle recall lawyers are available 24/7, nights and weekends to provide you with a free case review. If an airbag or vehicle manufacturers negligence caused your airbag injury, you may be entitled to recover damages to cover medical costs, pain and suffering, and lost wages. Our firm has offices in Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston, serving clients across Texas and nationwide. Contact us today for a free legal consultation. Editors Note: This content is made possible by Thomas J. Henry Personal Injury Law. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of The San Antonio Express-News' or mySanAntonio.com's editorial staff. Learn more about our advertising products at www.hearstmediasanantonio.com. Japan was clearly marginalized in the run-up to and during the June 12 summit between the U.S. and North Korean leaders in Singapore. The dynamics suggest that Tokyo will not play any significant role in the follow-up negotiations. Nikkei sia Review reports in its article North Korea talks deepen Japan's dilemma that there is no way to obfuscate these hard facts with any political or diplomatic sleight of hand. President Donald Trump promised Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that Japanese interests in the region would not be ignored. Such interests were possibly mentioned in the Trump-Kim dialogue. But if so, with what degree of priority or weight? Regardless, Japan should not just wring its hands in futile despair. Instead, Tokyo should use the momentum and debate generated by the Trump-Kim talks as an opportunity to build a new national consensus on some fundamental questions The long-running national angst over North Korea's abduction of Japanese nationals is of great political and emotional importance in Japan. But it is of no consequence to the U.S. Trump has generally dismissed human rights concerns that have dogged North Korea's regime. American security appears to be his sole focus. Nor are Japanese abductees of concern to any other country. Even South Korea, which also has abductees being held in North Korea, is uninterested. It is politically impossible for Japan to entirely give up on the abductees. But the issue should not be allowed to dominate Japanese strategic calculations. East Asia is on the cusp of a major strategic shift. There is no room for political sentimentality. At present, Japan does not figure highly in North Korean calculations. Pyongyang clearly believes that if it can deal directly with the U.S. and South Korea, Japan will have no choice but to follow or be isolated. Indeed, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has met with Trump, South Korea's President Moon Jae-in, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. He has dispatched Kim Yong Nam, North Korea's official head of state, to Moscow. Tokyo's immediate priority should be to secure a meeting between Abe and Kim. The latter is reported to be willing to meet Abe. If such a meeting comes about -- which is not to be taken for granted -- giving too much prominence to abductees will only hand the initiative to Kim. Abe will be reduced to the position of supplicant: asking for a favor and promising aid if the favor is granted. South Korea under Moon is eager to promote economic ties with the North, as was clear in the April 27 Panmunjom Declaration's endorsement of North-South declarations adopted in 2000 and 2007. The latter spells out North-South economic cooperation in detail. In any case, if the U.S.-North Korean talks progress, Japan may be compelled to provide aid to the North. After the Trump-Kim Singapore summit, North Korea has been recognized as a de facto nuclear weapon state and a legitimate interlocutor of the U.S. At present, Japan has no real option but to rely on American leave and favor. This is not a sustainable position for a major country. Tokyo's longer-term order of business should be to broaden its options within the U.S.-Japan security alliance. This would not require any loosening of the alliance, which would be a disaster, not just for Japan but for all of East Asia. In regional eyes, the fundamental and irreplaceable purpose of the U.S.-Japan alliance is to anchor the U.S. in East Asia. No other U.S. alliance can perform this function. Broadening options within the alliance will require a level of leadership, creativity and agility that has up to now been absent from Japanese diplomacy. It means moving away from dependency to a genuine partnership. Abe has already taken significant steps in this direction. More needs to be done. In this effort, his drive to revise the war-renouncing Article 9 of Japan's Constitution to place the legal status of the Self-Defense Force on a clearer footing, while desirable, is only a distraction from the core issue. More fundamentally, Japan needs a new consensus on the meaning of Japanese nationalism in the 21st century. This requires a national debate on issues that most Japanese do not even want to think about. Denial is a luxury Japan can no longer afford. The choices are not between defining Japanese interests almost solely in terms of American interests, or the militaristic nationalism of the early Showa era of the early 20th century. As long as Japan refuses to confront history squarely, the country's extreme right will be able to occupy political space by default. This constrains Japanese strategic thinking and keeps Tokyo's diplomatic initiatives hostage to China and South Korea. A second fundamental issue is whether Trump's "America First" attitude is an aberration that will pass with a new administration; or an extreme symptom of a new national mood that may subside somewhat but will persist over the long term. Wishful thinking is another luxury Japan can no longer afford. Follow-up negotiations between the U.S. and North Korea are not going to be about complete, irreversible and verifiable denuclearization, as initially expected. That may be discussed, but the talks will really be about arms control. That is not the same thing. The focal point of future discussions will be how to maintain deterrence at lower levels of tension and less risk of miscalculation. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that America's main concern is to deal with Pyongyang's long-range missiles that can directly threaten the U.S. mainland. That leaves Japan vulnerable. Of course, Japan is already vulnerable to medium-range North Korean missiles. But if the U.S. reaches agreement on long-range missiles, it will not be a return to the status quo ante. If the U.S. is not directly threatened by a North Korea that is now recognized as a de facto nuclear weapon state, the credibility of American extended deterrence will inevitably be questioned. In extreme circumstances, would San Francisco be sacrificed to save Tokyo? The U.S. would undoubtedly try to reassure Japan that it will. If the Japanese people believe American reassurances only because they have no other option except to believe, that is only a form of self-delusion. The credibility of U.S. extended deterrence over Japan will in any case be questioned by Pyongyang and, more importantly, by Beijing when China acquires a credible second-strike capability. Can a nuclear weapon state be deterred by conventional means? Even the U.S. does not seem to think so. The 30-year old U.S.-Japan Nuclear Cooperation Agreement is unique in allowing Japan to reprocess nuclear material, a privilege the U.S. has granted to no other country. Why? What is at stake is existential. For centuries, a central element of Japanese and Korean national identity has been refusal to accept permanent subordination in the Chinese regional order, in Japan's case at least since the 16th century when Toyotomi Hideyoshi, having unified Japan, invaded Korea in defiance of that order. Subordination also must mean an inexorable loosening of, and an eventual end to, the U.S.-Japan alliance. But a five-way nuclear balance in East Asia between the U.S., China, Japan, and the two Koreas would establish a stable multipolar regional order that preserves maneuver space for everyone. South Korea and even Australia have already been openly debating their own nuclear capability in their respective alliances with the U.S. It is time for such a debate in Japan. For Japan -- the only nation that has suffered a nuclear attack -- it will be a wrenchingly painful debate. But it cannot be avoided for much longer. The choice is Japan's alone. But the outcome will determine the future of East Asia. THE Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (Zec) has effectively shut the doors on opposition parties, saying they could only raise complaints over the quality of the voters roll and other election-related matters after the July 30 general elections. Addressing journalists in Harare yesterday, Zec chairperson Priscilla Chigumba said political parties had no choice, but to participate in the July 30 polls and raise their complaints later as the election date cannot be changed. Chigumba said her commission had started running copies of the voters roll for the successfully-nominated candidates, adding that complaints related to data on the voters roll would only be raised after the elections. Whether the candidates scrutinise the voters roll, whether they see any anomalies in it, whatever the anomalies are, whatever legal recourse they have will not stop an election. I want that to be very clear, nothing stops the election, she said. Let me put the law into perspective, first thing to take note is once the President has proclaimed the election date, there is nothing short of an earthquake that can stop the election. Opposition parties have since last month been piling pressure on Zec to release a physical copy of the voters roll so they could check if voters details were properly captured to minimise the number of turned away voters on election day. Chigumba said the public would only access the voters roll 48 hours after it has been released to the nominated candidates, following which the roll will then be gazetted. If there are 3 000 councillors, on the day of gazetting, each councillor should get a free copy at our expense, Members of Parliament each should get a copy. So you can get an idea of the numbers of copies we are currently running. After the gazetting and having provided all of our candidates with these copies the 48-hour rule should kick in ordinarily bearing unforeseen things like lack of Zesa in our provinces, but we do print these voters roll here at the head office, she said. MDC Alliance spokesperson Welshman Ncube said Chigumbas remarks confirmed opposition fears that the elections would not be free and fair. We have always said that Zec was not ready for the elections, he said. (President) Emmerson (Mnangagwa) could not have proclaimed the election date before the roll was ready. If there is no final voters roll, then the election was called prematurely. We cannot have a situation that after four or five days after nomination, the voters roll is not out. There is nowhere in the world, even in a Banana republic you can have that. As for Chigumba to give us lessons on legal remedies, she is not the ideal person. Anything can be challenged as long as it violates the Constitution, he said. Observers have often accused Zec of deliberately delaying the release of the voters roll to deny opposition parties an opportunity to scrutinise it ahead of the polls. Electoral Resource Centre director Tawanda Chimhini said: For lack of a better word, it is very tragic. If Zec is preparing for an election, it should prepare for a free and fair election, not one that will be challenged. Refusing to share details on the voters roll, refusing inspection of the voters roll so that people can give feedback is an admission that Zec does not want any form of oversight and accountability. It shows the election commission is not ready and serious about running national elections. He added: How can they prepare to go for an election that will be contested? What is the rush? What type of an election are they preparing to run? We went to court and obtained a court order for them to release the voters roll used for inspection, but Zec has defied a court order because it wants to run an election without accountability. An election should not be an election for the sake of an election. The dispute surrounding the 2013 polls was pertaining to the voters roll and we are repeating the same mistake. If they can tell us today that this is the final voters roll without having been inspected; then they can as well tell us that this would be the final results and we have nothing to do about it. Zimbabwe has had a bad record of handling electoral issues, with some cases spilling into the next election calendar before being resolved by the courts. Founding MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai died in February this year, with his 2002 election petition against former President Robert Mugabes victory still to be resolved by the courts. Last week, the Nelson Chamisa-led MDC Alliance accused Zec of deliberately delaying the release of the voters roll as a ploy to disenfranchise opposition candidates and their supporters on polling day. At the weekend, British ambassador to Zimbabwe Catriona Laing took to Twitter, urging Zec to release the voters roll urgently. @UKinZimbabwe have spoken to a number of candidates today, none of whom has been given a copy of the voters roll. This is very disappointing the roll is an exceptionally important part of this election. @ZECzim must issue roll urgently to ensure #freeandfairelections, Laings tweet read. Laing, who will be leaving Zimbabwe in November following her re-assignment to Nigeria, yesterday said Zimbabwes economic potential depended on its ability to hold free and fair elections. She said the UK government was keen to support Zimbabwe reclaim its position in the economic, democractic and human rights spheres. NewsDay Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Alliance has called for the disbanding of the current Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) saying the body is incompetent, subjective and biased in favour of the ruling Zanu PF. MDC Alliance principal and aspiring candidate for Harare East constituency, Tendai Biti, accused ZEC of lying and seeking to reinvent the word lie following his partys problems in accessing the voters roll ahead of the July 30 harmonised elections. The current Election Management body, ZEC must rank is the most subjective, most biased and most incompetent in the history of elections in Zimbabwe. Above all, this is a body that lies and is reinventing the word lie. This body must be disbanded forthwith, said Biti. MDC Alliance Chief Election Agent, Jameson Timba who went to ZEC to collect the voters roll on behalf Nelson Chamisa was upset at being advised to collect the copy of the roll after two days. To my utter shock I was asked to fill in a form and come back in 48 hours to collect it. Surprisingly a copy was given to a foreign government whose nationals are not on our roll and do not vote in our elections. Surely logic says priority for distribution of the National roll should have been given to the 23 Zimbabweans who will be contesting for the presidency, said Timba. Zimbabwe Democracy Institute (ZDI) director, Dr Pedzisai Ruhanya accused ZEC of being captured by the ruling Zanu PF and the military. Justice Priscilla Chigumba, the chair of ZEC is a disgrace and captured by ZANU PF or military. It should be noted that Zimbos wont swallow a cooked and manufactured electoral process and outcome designed to legitimised unrepentant electoral thieves, said Ruhanya. https://twitter.com/PedzisaiRuhanya/status/1008991626704965632 The issue of the voters roll is currently the contentious issue in Zimbabwe with opposition parties accusing ZEC of seeking to rig elections through manipulation of the voters register. Revelations by the British embassy that they were served with the searchable national voters roll having in a matter of couple of hours have only worsened things as the opposition now accuse ZEC of prioritizing foreign diplomats at the expense of contesting candidates. 263Chat Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News - The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has began sensitisation of Nigerians on the collection of PVCs - The association kicked off its first rally in Ogun state - CAN informed Ogun residents on the importance of having their PVCs before the 2019 general elections The Ogun state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) on Tuesday, June 19, held a rally to sensitise residents of the state on registration and collection of their Permanent Voters' Cards. The rally which took place in an open park at Pansheke, Abeokuta was organised by the association ahead of the 2019 general election. Speaking on the essence of the rally, CAN said it aims to sensitise Christians and their family members in the state to go and register and collect their permanent voter cards. READ ALSO: Why I will not hold talks with aggrieved nPDP leaders - President Buhari Punch reports that the association told residents that having their PVCs will enable them vote in 2019 general elections. Before hitting the ground running, the association visited the palace of the Alake of Egbaland before moving to the park where prayers were offered for Nigeria. READ ALSO: See photos of Mgbeodinma Samuel who allegedly killed his wife Gloria Onyedikachi Obinna 4 months after they got married Most of the sensitisers were wearing T-shirts with the inscriptions Your vote is your power and Get your PVC now. Also some officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and National Orientation Agency (NOA) in the state were on ground to enlighten the citizens on what to do concerning the PVC. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that a pastor had threatened members of his church over negligence in the collection of their PVC. Pastor Philip Igbinijesu of the Word Assembly declared that any member of his church without a Permanent Voters Card will not be allowed to partake in the church's communion. The pastor said those who do not have voters card should sit down when other members are taking the communion in church. INEC official at Abuja court on Legit.ng TV Source: Legit By Gaius Publius, a professional writer living on the West Coast of the United States and frequent contributor to DownWithTyranny, digby, Truthout, and Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius, Tumblr and Facebook. GP article archive here. Originally published at DownWithTyranny A shadow from a chain link fence falls across the Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (source) Planned Parenthood, via its Action Fund (PAC), is one of the cornerstones of the Democratic coalition, both in standing up for the Democratic Party and being stood up for by the Democratic Party. The national Action Fund has come under fire in intra-Party disputes. It endorsed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders while admitting that both [are] good on reproductive health. Thats certainly a choice they get to make. In addition, they made sure Sanders came under their fire when he called Planned Parenthood (meaning the Action Fund, not the health care organization) part of the establishment: Planned Parenthood and other progressive groups are calling out Bernie Sanders for referring to them as part of the establishment, saying the Vermont senator needs to show a more explicit commitment to womens reproductive health. Its a little ridiculous to call an organization Congress and Republican presidential candidates have spent six months attacking establishment especially when Planned Parenthood health centers are out there every day ensuring millions of often marginalized Americans have access to basic reproductive health care, Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Action Fund told POLITICO in an email. Notice the switch in terms: The Action Fund, which was criticized for its political leanings in an intra-Party dispute, claimed Sanders didnt show enough of support for the non-political health care part of the organization all while the Action Fund, in its Clinton endorsement, was praising Sanders as just as good on reproductive health issues as Clinton. (The deciding factor for them was that Clinton pushes harder. Again, thats their choice to make.) Sanders, of course, had to say, unnecessarily, that he would defend Planned Parenthood (the non-political health care arm) against attack, a statement that was widely taken as walking back his criticism. If youre a Sanders supporter, you likely noted in all of this the good part of PP (the clinics) and the less good part (the political arm). The health care part of the organization emerged from this dispute still known-good, while the the highly political Action Fund remained part of the problem, at least from a Sanders supporters perspective. The political arm, which controls political spending, is indeed part of the well funded Democratic Establishment Sanders was right in that assessment and acts to protect the Establishment against the real progressive insurgency that the Sanders 2016 campaign represented. Planned Parenthood Fights Unions in Colorado Now come two illustrations, however, about the health care part of the organization that threaten to tar its own reputation as known good. They are presented briefly below. Both involved Planned Parenthood in Colorado, and both involved an attempt at unionization within Planned Parenthood clinics. For background on the Planned Parenthood union-busting story, read this good report at The Intercept. For now, this is all you need to know: Colorado Planned Parenthood executives, with help from President Donald Trumps labor board appointees, are fighting their health center workers unionization efforts in a case that could set a precedent for workers rights nationwide. Ugly stuff shades of Walmart and Amazon, in fact. First consider this plea from Mimi Yedinak, a Planned Parenthood clinic worker, writing on Facebook. (The following was printed as a single Facebook paragraph. Ive taken the liberty of adding paragraph breaks where appropriate since many infrequent Facebook users have trouble creating paragraphs for themselves.) Mimi Yedinak June 14 at 2:17pp Friends- today is my last day working for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. Many people are not aware that this past year PPRMs clinic workers voted to create a union in order to improve issues like working conditions, wages and hours. Since we made this vote, PPRMs management have only pushed back in order to keep us from accessing our basic employee rights. Last night they sank to an incredible low. Some of my coworkers showed up to a PPRM fundraising event wanting to educate major donors about where their money is going and to encourage donors to specify that their money goes towards patient care and NOT towards anti-union activity (the agency has hired an anti-union lawyer whose hourly rate costs roughly the same price as an out-of-pocket medication abortion). Instead of giving my colleagues an opportunity to inform donors, PPRM called the police on its own employees and threatened to have them arrested, including a loyal abortion provider who has been involved with this cause for over 30 years. If you truly want to stand with Planned Parenthood then stand with its clinic workers and PLEASE get the word out to anyone you can (other donors, media, etc.) about how PPRM is treating its employees. Contact PPRM directly to let them know you support us and share this info with anyone who gives money to PPRM. Ive given the last two years of my life to this cause that I love so much and to see my colleagues bullied like this by the agency they have worked so hard for breaks my fucking heart. Stand up for the employees on the ground-floor like me, rather than those at the top who are fine with kicking us out of fundraisers and threatening us with unnecessary police force. Dont let PPRM silence its employees. #prochoice #propatient #prounion #standwithpp #droptheappeal Stand up for the employees on the ground-floor like me, rather than those at the top who are fine with kicking us out of fundraisers and threatening us with unnecessary police force. Sounds like every bad-actor organization you know. Next, note that the unionization issue seems to have escalated into the political sphere, with the local Action Fund getting involved. David Sirotas wife Emily is running for the state legislature in Colorado. He recently tweeted this: My wife @EmilyForCO demanded Planned Parenthood execs stop working with the Trump admin to bust PP workers' union. PP execs then immediately decided to spend $50,000 to try to punish her & defeat her. Please donate here to help her fight back: https://t.co/KVYGwi2A4t David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 16, 2018 Seems she criticized the anti-union actions of local Planned Parenthood clinic executives, and the PP RRs Action Fund started spending money, apparently $50,000 to date, to try to defeat her. Keep in mind that Emily Sirota is a strong pro-choice advocate, and this is a Democratic primary. Youd think theyd have better ways to spend $50,000, given to them in good faith to carry on the real fight, not the fight to keep clinic workers wages low. Ryan Grim tweeted his support for Emily Sirota in this dispute: Planned Parenthood is spending $50k to beat a pro-choice woman after she supported Planned Parenthood workers trying to unionize. For a state legislative seat. https://t.co/mHEbUgIv7L Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) June 17, 2018 To which David Sirota replied: Planned Parenthood execs claim they don't have money to raise Planned Parenthood workers' wages, and are now busting their workers' union. Yet, those same execs somehow have $50,000 to spend against a pro-choice woman who is speaking up for their workers. https://t.co/0XbFqnshKR David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 17, 2018 This shows to too many what the Democratic Establishment is made of. Note again that this isnt just the local Action Fund acting. The local PAC is defending vigorous Walmart-like anti-union behavior by the clinic. How Will the Democratic Establishment Respond? How Will Voters Respond? The 2018 elections are fast approaching and Democratic leaders are betting the farm that they can run and win as not Trump. Of course, thats their choice to make. But will it work if stories like these keep popping up? Two key questions emerge as this unfolds. How will Democratic leaders respond to this story, if they respond at all? And how will voters respond to stories like these for examples, stories about widespread Democratic Party support for the comically corrupt Joe Crowley in his primary race against an actual and viable progressive challenger, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Its possible to brand yourself by your advertising, and many have made money selling that service. Its also possible to brand yourself by your deeds for that, no help is needed. If the Democratic Party continues to brand itself as what caused many voters to rise up against it in the last election, what will its future be? By David William Pear, a progressive columnist writing on economic, political and social issues. His articles have been published by OpEdNews, The Greanville Post, The Real News Network, Truth Out, Consortium News, Global Research, and many other publications. David is active in social issues relating to peace, race relations and religious freedom, homelessness and equal justice. David is a member of Veterans for Peace, Saint Pete for Peace, CodePink, and International Solidarity Movement. Originally published in the Greenville Post The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (i.e. North Korea) cannot trust the United States of America. The US does not keep its promises, honor its treaties and obey international laws. This is not opinion; it is the history of the US, beginning with the many broken promises and treaties with the Native Americans. The US has broken promises and treaties in every corner of the globe. The US ignores the UN Charter, which is a treaty. It flouts international law, which is based on treaties. The US habitually starts asymmetrical wars, which is aggression and the worst of all war crimes. It destroys nations, leaving millions of people dead, dying, and in misery. Libya was once a prosperous nation. Muammar Gaddafi was an eccentric dictator, but he had a love for Libya and its people. Under Gaddafi the people enjoyed a high standard of living, economic freedom, and gender equality. Education and medical care were free. Having a home and food was considered a human right. Libyas oil wealth benefited the people. Gaddafi was attacked and vilified by the US for decades. After the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001 Gaddafi cooperated with the US in the War on Terror. That is not to say that the War on Terror was a good thing, but Gaddafi was being US friendly. In further efforts to establish friendly relations with the US, Gaddafi denuclearized in 2003. President George W. Bush praised Libya for denuclearizing and suggested Libya as a model for North Korea. In 2011 President Obama wantonly destroyed Libya and conspired in Gaddafis assassination. Obamas Secretary of State gloated afterwards we came, we saw, he diedha,ha,ha. Even if North Korea completely and forever denuclearizes Kim Jong-un can never be assured that one day the US wont try to do the same thing to North Korea that it did to Libya. North Korea can never put its trust in the US, because the US has proved itself untrustworthy over and over again. Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program since the early 1990s. After the First Gulf War in 1991, Saddam Hussein cooperated with the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors right up until the US invasion in 2003. The weapons inspectors advised against the invasion and recommended that the inspections be continued. President George W. Bush invaded anyway based on known lies t hat Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapons program. After the invasion and destruction of Iraq, 1625 weapons inspectors spent the next 2 years searching Iraq and found no weapons of mass destruction. The US continues to accuse Iran of having a nuclear weapons program even though the IAEA certifies that it doesnt, and all 16 US intelligence agencies have said that Iran has not had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003. Facts do not matter to the US. It creates its own reality. Based on its own unreality, the US can invent any reason it wants to impose sanctions and invade asymmetrical countries. Iraq denuclearized, Libya denuclearized and Iran denuclearized. The US invaded Iraq based on the unreality of the existence of nuclear weapons. Libya was invaded based on the invented unreality that the invasion was for human rights. The US has imposed sanctions on Venezuela because it does not consider it democratic enough. The US has imposed sanction against Russia because of its alleged invasion of Ukraine, after a US instigated putsch. If North Korea completely denuclearizes and the US removes all economic sanctions, there is no way to guarantee that some future US president wont accuse North Korea of secretly harboring a nuclear program. Or the US can invent a false flag event or use a red-herring to impose economic sanctions. A red-herring is an issue that distracts from the real issue. Economic sanctions are financial weapons of mass destruction that kill hundreds of thousands of people. The US can always find a red-herring excuse for imposing sanctions, as it has with Venezuela. With Venezuela the real issue is not democracy. Venezuela has regular elections, while the USA backs many dictators and absolute monarchs all over the world. The real issue is that Venezuela nationalized its oil wealth to benefit its own people, costing Exxon and other US oil corporations billions of dollars in profits. Human rights in North Korea is a red-herring, which the US propaganda mills keep grinding out. North Korean defectors are paid a reward up to $860,000 depending on their intelligence and propaganda value. Tales of North Korean human rights abuses are not based on facts, but are rumors based on rumors and propaganda. The US does not care about human rights. The only thing the US foreign policy cares about is its empire and taking care of US corporate interests around the world. Otherwise the US would do something about Saudi Arabias human rights abuses. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy and the most brutal regime in the world. The US is an accomplice to Saudi Arabias genocidal bombing and blockade of Yemen, which is starving millions of civilians. Saudi Arabia beheads or crucifies over 100 prisoners every year. One never hears a peep out of the US State Department about human rights in Saudi Arabia. The US never squawks about human rights in Columbia, Egypt, Honduras, Israel, Rwanda, Turkey, Ukraine, or its own atrocious human rights record. The US has 5% of the worlds population and 25% of the worlds prisoners; yet it constantly harps about North Korea allegedly having a gulag of 200,000 political prisoners. The US has made a political issue of the tragic death of Otto Warmbier, yet the Hamilton County, Ohio coroner report says it found no evidence that he was tortured while a prisoner in North Korea. The US is using his death for propaganda, and not because it cares about an individual life. The US has killed millions of civilians in its illegal wars of aggression, bombed thousands of hospitals, schools and civilian infrastructures over the past 70 years. The US has black sites where it tortures victims that it has abducted and imprisoned secretly and illegally. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Torture Report is evidence that the US has tortured to death prisoners in black sites and at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Between 1948 and 1987 South Korea was ruled by US puppet dictators, such as Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-Hee. They killed, tortured, and imprisoned without trial hundreds of thousands of South Koreans they considered dissidents. South Korea still enforces it repressive National Security Act, which is a violation of human rights. The law criminalizes political views it considers unpatriotic. Peace activists risk being thrown in prison. It is a crime in South Korea to associate with anyone even suspected of being a communist or sympathetic to North Korea. South Korea has thousands of political prisoners under the National Security Act. North Koreas missiles are another red herring issue. It is not against international law for a country to have missiles, even intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM). Every country has the right to have missiles for self-defense, launch satellites and explore outer space. Actually it is not against any international law for a country who is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to have nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003, which it had every legal right to do. North Korea has missiles and nuclear weapons because the US has been threatening it with invasion and nuclear weapons since 1953. North Korea is a poor country, and it is economically less costly for self-defense to have nuclear weapons and missiles than to maintaining a modern air force and keep up the conventional arms race with South Korea. The threat of war in Korea has its roots in Washington and not in Pyongyang. It is the USA that is the aggressor. The US is a savagely violent and aggressive nation with the ambition of an empire that rules the world. It demands that other nations submit to its will. The US does not hesitate to use overwhelming violence against small nations to enforce its hegemony. It will punish them until they submit or until they are so utterly destroyed that they are an example to other countries that even think about disobeying US dictates. During the Korean War the US killed 3 million Koreans. The US killed another 5 millionSouth East Asians during the Vietnam War. Millions have been killed in the War on Terror. Civilians are the main victims. The power of the US is so enormous that if it were not so tragic it would be laughable when the US claims that it is being threatened by North Korea. North Korea is a nation of 25 million peasants, with a Gross Domestic Product of approximately $20 billion, and a military budget of $6 billion. It is not a threat to the national security of the US, with its high-tech military and a budget that exceeds $1 trillion dollars per year. A war with the U.S. would be madness. Kim Jong-un and his government are not insane, but the many US war mongers and war criminals such as John Bolton are. The US has a long history of war madness, most recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. It is nuclear madness for the US to move NATO to Russias border. In the US instigated putsch in Ukraine, the Obama administration admittedthat it was willing to risk a nuclear war with Russia. The Pentagon insanely plans for limited nuclear wars and winnable nuclear wars. The US has an insane first strike policy, which means that other nuclear powered adversaries have to keep their nuclear arsenal on a hair-trigger alert. The risks of a nuclear accident are enormous. The US has pushed the doomsday clock to 2 minutes until Armageddon. North Korea is not paranoid to fear the US and prepare its defenses accordingly. North Korea is well aware of the USs use of total warfare against its adversaries. Total warfare means that nobody including the enemys civilian population is off limits, and that nothing, including civilian infrastructure is exempt from destruction. Total warfare also means that international laws, treaties and the norms of civilized warfare do not restrain the US. North Korea was a victim of US total warfare in the 1950s. It wants to avoid a repeat of that war by having a credible deterrent for self-defense. Most Americans are unaware of the war crimes that the US committed during the Korean War, but almost every Korean knows, in both the North and the South. On rare occasions a mainstream media outlet such as The Washington Post will have an article such as The U.S. War Crime North Korea wont Forget. More often the alternative media is the best source of historical truth. Jay Jason has written an excellent article on US war crimes: Negotiations? Third World Nations be Aware! Americans Napalmed and Bombed Out All 38 North Korean Cities!. The US bombed Korea with 635,000 tons of high explosive. The US perfected napalm during the Korean War and dropped 32,500 tons of it on Korea. When the US eventually ran out of targets it bombed North Koreas irrigation dams, which flooded croplands causing mass starvation of civilians. The US used germ warfare against North Korea and China. The U.S. dropped insect and animal vectors with black plague, smallpox, cholera, encephalitis, anthrax and other deadly diseases. Dave Chaddock wrote an excellently researched book on the subject: This Must Be the Place: How the U.S. Waged Germ Warfare in the Korean War and Denied It Ever Since. David Swanson interviewed Dave Chaddock on Talk Nation Radio. Jeff Brown, author of China Rising, Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destination has created an online library for researchers of US biological warfare: Bioweapon Truth Commission Global Online Library. The definitive work proving that the US used germ warfare in Korea is the 1999 book by Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman: The United States and Biological Warfare, Secrets of the Early Cold War and Korea. It was the captured pilots confessions of participating in germ warfare that led the CIA to come up with the ludicrous fiction of U.S. prisoners being brainwashed. Brainwashing is a myth, but it was popularized by US propaganda and the Hollywood film The Manchurian Candidate in order to cover up US germ warfare. Some in the CIA must not have gotten the memorandum that brainwashing was a fiction. From 1953 to 1973 the CIA launched a secret human experiment program on mind control, named MK-Ultra. Some of the experimental participants volunteered, and others where experimented on without their permission. The CIA used everything from torture, electric shock treatment and drugs to try and reproduce the alleged brainwashing of Korean War prisoners. It never succeeded, and often the results were tragic. CIA scientist Frank Olson fell or was pushed from a New York hotel window after he unknowingly took LSD in a CIA experiment. The mainstream propaganda media keeps screaming that North Korea cannot be trusted to keep its word. Yet it was the US that violated the 1953 Korean War armistice agreement by nuclearizing the Korean peninsula. In 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower equipped US forces in Korea withdual capability (nuclear) weapons, such as the Honest John and the 280 mm. cannon, in violation of section 13 (d). The US had at least 950 nuclear weapons in South Korea until President George H. W. Bush said that he withdrew them in 1991. The US still has plenty of nuclear weapons in the air and on the sea that it constantly uses to threaten North Korea. Photo: Honest John Tactical Nuclear Missile, Wikipedia During the Korean War General Douglas MacArthur wanted to use 30 nukes on North Korea and China. President Truman fired him, but not because MacArthur wanted to use nukes. Truman wanted a responsible general in charge of nuking North Korea and China. Truman preauthorized MacArthurs replacement, General Matthew Ridgeway, to use nuclear bombs at his discretion. Ridgeway avoided World War Three by not using them, although Truman had sent him nuclear bombs to Okinawa for that purpose. It was Truman that used atomic bombs on Japan for the sole reason of demonstrating US power to Joseph Stalin. Truman divided Korea in 1945 so that the US could establish a colony in the South. Truman intervened in the Korean Civil War beforethe United Nations authorized it, and he publicly threatened to use the atomic bomb in the Korean War. Truman startedthe Cold War with his 1947 Truman Doctrine, which would later nearly result in the destruction of the planet in a nuclear holocaust. Fast forward to the 1990s. The Soviet Union collapses and there is a pause in the Cold War. North Korea has lost Russia as its most important sources of foreign aid and one of its major markets for exports. Between 1994 and 1998 North Korea is hit with a series of draughts and floods. The combinations of crop failures and the loss of Russian aid created famines and starvation in North Korea. The US propaganda accuses North Korea of starving its people in order to stay in power, while the US is imposing economic sanctions that causes more starvation. US intelligence agencies predicted that North Korea would soon collapse because of the sanctions. But the US had an immediate concern with North Koreas nuclear program. The Clinton administration had a very tense confrontation with North Korea in 1994 over North Koreas nuclear program, much like the fire and fury of 2017. The US accused North Korea of working on nuclear weapons. North Korea has to import almost all of its oil and claimed that it was developing nuclear power for electricity. North Korea has a legal right to nuclear reactors just as Japan, South Korea and every other country have. War was averted when North Korea and the Clinton administration negotiated an agreement called the Agreed Framework. Under the Agreed Framework North Korea agreed not to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, open itself to extensive IAEA inspection and to freeze its nuclear program. In return the Clinton administration promised to compensate North Korea with the delivery of oil for electric generation and the construction of two light water nuclear reactors, which produce electricity but not weapons grade plutonium. The US also agreed to the suspension of military exercises, and the normalization of diplomatic relations. If the Agreed Framework sounds familiar, it should. It is now where we are heading after the Kim Jong-un and Trump summit in Singapore. What went wrong with the Agreed Framework? First, Clinton came under heavy criticism by Republicans and hardliners. They accused him of appeasement and caving in to blackmail. Clinton responded that the US would never have to deliver on its promises, because North Korea was on the verge of an economic disintegration of its regime. The US dragged its feet on the delivery of oil to North Korea and delayed the construction of the promised light water reactors. Second, the US Congress refused to fund the US obligations under the Agreed Framework. Congress also refused to lift the economic sanctions against North Korea. North Korea responded that it would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and resume its nuclear program if the US did not fulfill its obligation. Clinton could not keep his promise even if he wanted to, just as Trump may not be able to keep any of his promises to North Korea. The final breakdown of the Agreed Framework came in 2002 when President George W. Bush declared that North Korea was an Axis of Evil. He accused North Korea of secretly working on a nuclear bomb in violation of the Agreed Framework and stopped the delivery of oil and the construction of the two light water nuclear reactors. In response North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and began working on its nuclear program, which it had every right to do under international law. Conclusion The US has been threatening the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea with nuclear weapons, conventional weapons and financial weapons of mass destruction since 1953. It is a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for a nuclear power country to threaten a non-nuclear power country. North Korea had a legal right to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty because of US threats. North Korea developed nuclear weapons and ICBMs for self-defense against the US and its colony South Korea. North Korea is not in violation of international law by having nuclear weapons and missiles. The US has threatened North Korea with fire and furry if it does not denuclearize. To avoid an attack by the US, North Korea offered to negotiate its denuclearization in return for promises by the US of non-aggression. North Korea can never trust promises of the US. What one president agrees to another can take away, just as Trump violated Obamas Iran Nuclear Deal and Bush reneged on the Agreed Framework of 1994. Trump also reversed Obamas opening with Cuba. The US has a long history of breaking treaties and violating international law. The US invaded Afghanistan with flimsy evidence that Afghanistan was harboring terrorists that were responsible for the attacks on the US of September 11, 2001. Afghanistan had agreed to cooperate with the US if the US would provide it with evidence that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9-11. The US refused and invaded Afghanistan anyway. The US invaded Iraq based on known lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, when he did not. The U.S. has committed military aggression against at least 23 countries in the past 30 years. The US abused the UN authorized mission of the right to protect civilians in Libya. Libya had a high standard of development until the US and its coalition destroyed the country and caused the assassination of its leader Muammar Gaddafi. The US then purloined Libyas arsenal of weapons and shipped them by a CIA rat line to Syria to overthrow the legal government of Bashar al-Assad. The US covertly backed terrorists in Syria in 2011 and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. The US now is openly invading Syria and flouts the UN Charter and international law. The US has declared that Venezuela is a threat to the national security of the US. It is such a ridiculous charge that Obama could not keep a straight face when he made the declaration in 2015. Obama mumbled that his true motivation was that Venezuela was not democratic enough. The real reason for US sanctions against Venezuela is that it is a socialist country that nationalized its oil for the benefit of the Venezuelan people. The US was caught red handed in a 2002 failed coup detat against the democratically elected Hugo Chavez. The coup failed because the people of Venezuela rose up against the coup plotters. The US is nowopenly calling for another military coup in Venezuela and is funding anti-democratic opposition groups. General Wesley Clark has publicly stated that a high ranking officer in the Pentagon told him shortly after 9-11 that the US planned to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran. After 17 years the US has not changed its plans. Once a country gets on the US list to take-out it can never get off; the US is relentless even if it takes years or decades. Countries that nationalize their natural resources or keep out US capital are on the list for regime change. Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran and North Korea are at the top of the list. In his 2002 Axis of Evil speech George W. Bush put North Korea 8thon the list that General Wesley Clark spoke about. The US is just biding its time. First it plans to take-out Iran. Then it will try to finish off with the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. A young Clonmel man is celebrating his new lease of life following life-saving surgery in Belgium earlier this month. 25 year-old Evan Hickey from Roaring Springs, Old Bridge, underwent three hours of keyhole surgery at the Saint Pierre University Hospital in Brussels on June 1 to remove a cyst from his brain that was also pressing on his optic nerve. The operation was a success and he is expected to make a full recovery within a year, to the understandable relief of Evan himself, his parents Honra and Joe, brother Andy, family and friends. "I feel like I have my life back again, which is very nice. It feels really good to have come through it", he says. Above - Clonmel man Evan Hickey with Dr. Hrayr Shahinian, who performed the successful brain surgery in Brussels. The urgency and necessity for the operation was underlined by Dr. Hrayr Shahinian, the renowned brain surgeon who travelled from the Skull Base Institute in Los Angeles to perform the operation. As well as having developed hydrocephalus on the brain, the cyst had grown, and Evan was told he could have died within six months to a year if it hadn't been operated upon. A week before the operation he had a seizure when he was having blood tests taken at St. James Hospital in Dublin, which was another indication that the tumour was growing. "I knew it was going to damage me, I could feel it. I was not going to leave it in my head", he says. Above - Evan Hickey (centre) with his brother Andy (right) and friend Philly McCarthy However, what he describes as "the dark days" since he became ill almost two years ago are now firmly behind him and Evan is looking forward to the future. Evan and his family are also grateful for the remarkable response to the fundraising appeal for the surgery, and which raised 170,000 in the space of just a couple of months (Read more in tomorrow's print edition of The Nationalist). As NATO forces trained across the Baltic states and Poland in exercise Saber Strike 2018, Lithuania hosted arms control inspectors from Russia and Belarus. From 11-14 June, five inspectors visited various units of the Lithuanian Armed Forces. They also met with Croatian troops participating in exercise Saber Strike, as part of NATOs multinational battlegroup in Lithuania. The visit was carried out within the framework of the Vienna Document, an agreement on military transparency reached among the 57 member nations of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2011. Designed to promote mutual trust and transparency, the Vienna Document commits OSCE members to accept a number of inspection visits by other members each year, in order to verify there are no undeclared military capabilities or activities of concern. NATO strongly supports efforts to build confidence and transparency on military activities. Allies respect the letter and spirit of the Vienna Document, and NATO regularly updates its schedule of military exercises online. The NATO Secretary General, Mr. Jens Stoltenberg will travel to London on Wednesday, 20 and Thursday, 21 June 2018. During his visit, the Secretary General will meet the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, The Right Honourable Mrs. Theresa May, the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, The Right Honourable Boris Johnson and the Secretary of State for Defence, The Right Honourable Gavin Williamson. The Secretary General will also deliver a speech at Lancaster House. Media Advisory Thursday, 21 June (Local time) 10:30 Speech by the Secretary General Lancaster House 16:45 Joint press conference with the Prime Minister Outside Downing Street The press opportunity and the speech will be available live on the NATO website. Still and video imagery of the visit will be available on the NATO website after the event. Follow us on Twitter (@NATOPress, @NATODepspox and @jensstoltenberg). (Natural News) No doubt the billionaire founder of PayPal, Elon Musk, is enjoying the fruits of his labor, that being the development of the worlds first real interactive online service accommodating the online interaction between merchant and buyer. Its not like hes living in poverty or anything, nor would we expect him to. He devised something of value to hundreds of millions or even billions of people, and he sold that something of value for a lot of money. Good for him. Hes what we used to call a shining example of The American Dream. But that dream was built on an economic model known as capitalism the very same model that brought an end to Medieval European feudalism which, for a thousand years, kept people poor, dependent, and unable to escape their cycle of poverty. Why, then, would this stellar example of capitalism embrace an economic model that has failed everywhere its been tried and which continues its record of failure today? That would be socialism. In recent days Musk, current CEO of Tesla maker of electric cars that spontaneously combust took to Twitter (where else?) to declare his adherence to an economic model that would have never delivered the riches he currently enjoys. Could it be due to his reliance on government funding in order to get his venture off the ground? Perhaps. After tweeting last week that socialists have no sense of humor, Musk wrote, Those who proclaim themselves socialists are usually depressing, have no sense of humor & attended an expensive college. Fate loves irony. Those who proclaim themselves socialists are usually depressing, have no sense of humor & attended an expensive college. Fate loves irony. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 15, 2018 When he was challenged to identify his own beliefs, he responded, A socialist. Socialism is socialism is socialism He then wrote: By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all. By the way, I am actually a socialist. Just not the kind that shifts resources from most productive to least productive, pretending to do good, while actually causing harm. True socialism seeks greatest good for all. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 16, 2018 How can that be true when every instance of socialism witnessed since the concept was devised involves some deranged crackpot authoritarian leader confiscating wealth from the haves and redistributing it to the have-nots (until the haves run out of resources and theres nothing left to give away)? Could it be that Musk is just running around in social and political circles that require him, as a really rich guy, to be apologetic about it while pretending like he feels bad about developing a billion-dollar enterprise? (Related: Elon Musk pushing carbon tax con that will pad his own pockets with billions.) Because thats what it looks like. Musk also tweeted this out: There is considerable confusion between wealth as consumption & wealth as labor allocation. By latter measure, anyone in govt whose budget exceeds $1B is a billionaire. Government is the largest corporation. [emphasis added] Thats good as far as Musk is concerned, considering hes built an empire worth billions based on billions in government (read taxpayer subsidies). As reported by The L.A. Times: Tesla Motors Inc., SolarCity Corp. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., known as SpaceX, together have benefited from an estimated $4.9 billion in government support, according to data compiled by The Times. The figure underscores a common theme running through his emerging empire: a public-private financing model underpinning long-shot start-ups. He definitely goes where there is government money, Dan Dolev, an analyst at Jefferies Equity Research, told the paper. Thats a great strategy, but the government will cut you off one day. Because it must. And for the record, socialism is a failed economic model, no matter how academically you try to make the case for it. Even if Elon Musk, the government money addict, proclaims otherwise. Think not? Take a peek at Venezuela and see how that latest socialist experiment is working out. Catch more Elon Musk news at ElonMuskWatch.com. J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel. Sources include: Breitbart.com LATimes.com NewsTarget.com (Natural News) In what can only be described by reasonable people as pathetic political manipulation, seven Democratic lawmakers showed up at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility over the weekend and demanded access. The group of seven New Jersey Reps. Bill Pascrell, Frank Pallone and Albio Sires, as well as fellow New York Reps. Jarrold Nadler, Hakeem Jeffries, Carolyn Maloney and Adriano Espaillat made their obnoxious, unannounced visit on Fathers Day, of course, for maximum political effect. As reported by Fox News, the pathetic display included demands to see families being detained at the New Jersey-based facility along with one member literally banging on a door, while another physically held a door open. We have gotten the door open at the Elizabeth, NJ ICE detention center and refusing to let it close until we are given access to the detainees, Nadler tweeted. Fox News noted further: The Fathers Day episode was the latest in a series of similar trips by Democratic lawmakers to immigration detention centers, which are part of a broader effort to draw attention to the family members who have been separated by federal authorities while illegally crossing the border from Mexico into the United States. Pascrell at one point complained on Twitter that ICE officials were making the lawmakers wait for nearly an hour after telling them they would be accommodated in about five minutes. He then complained that ICE was following protocol forcing the group to go through security because everyone does (which is procedure). Whats more, the facility granted the delegation access despite the fact that the rules state only friends and family of detainees can come in and then only during visiting hours. Now theyre asking us to empty our pockets like were common criminals? We are duly elected Members of Congress and we want access, he arrogantly tweeted. The Congressman came unannounced but ICE accommodated their request and they were allowed to visit and meet with several detainees, said ICE in a statement. Where were they during the Obama years? Earlier this month immigration officials and local police denied Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley who represents Oregon entry to a facility in Texas, with one employee telling him to please go away. At the New Jersey facility, Pallone said, Were here to stand against the Trump admins policies that have led to a sharp increase in detained immigrants and separated families. (Related: Amazon caught selling portable concentration camps to imprison children at the border cue HYSTERIA.) Whats disgusting about all of this is that its phony. Whats taking place at the U.S.-Mexico border, largely, has been going on for years. It happened during the Obama administration as well, but these hypocrite Democrats werent about to protest then becauseObama. In fact, as Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas admitted recently, the situation during Obamas administration was intentionally downplayed and kept quiet (thanks to a largely compliant Pravda media), even though some kids were literally being kept in cages while others were handed over to criminal human traffickers. Where were these Democrats then? Nowhere to be found. So if this has been taking place for some time, why are Democrats feigning outrage now? Part of the reason is hammer Trump on another issue (though Trump was elected, in large part, by promising to do exactly what hes doing on the border). But Democrats and their partners in the Pravda media have manufactured this crisis now because they cant acknowledge or report how good the country is doing under Trump. Record low unemployment (including for minorities and women). Satisfaction with the direction of our country is at a 12-year high. The stock market continues to grow, fattening retirement accounts for average Americans. U.S. economic growth is leaving the world behind. Thats all due to Trump and, to some extent Republican, policies and leadership. Since the Democrats wont credit him and the Pravda media cant because of Trump Derangement Syndrome, theyve come together to manufacture a child migrant crisis that doesnt exist. Read more about what goes on at the border at InvasionUSA.news. J.D. Heyes is also editor-in-chief of The National Sentinel. Sources include: WSJ.com TheNationalSentinel.com FoxNews.com Donald Trump has criticised his European allies over the refugee crisis, claiming that the people of Germany are turning against Angela Merkels leadership. The Independent reports in its article Trump attacks Angela Merkel for giving sanctuary to refugees that the US president claimed refugees and migrants has strongly and violently changed European culture and said the continent had made a big mistake in giving sanctuary to those fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. Without specifically naming the German chancellor but instead pointing the blame at Germanys leadership he said: The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture! Mr Trump is wrong to say that crime in Germany has increased: the latest figures released last month show it has now reached a 30-year low. Ms Merkel is embroiled in a domestic political row with her conservative allies over how to handle new refugee arrivals, with one of her most senior ministers calling for a more restrictive policy. The chancellor bought time on Monday by getting her interior minister Horst Seehofer to agree to pause the rollout of a harsher policy until after a meeting of European leaders in Brussels later this month. The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Mr Seehofer, a Bavarian conservative who has the backing of his local state government, wants refugees who have already registered in another country to be turned away at Germanys borders. The chancellor, however, reportedly wants any change in refugee or migration policy to be conducted at a European level, fearing that Germany going it alone could result in a free-for-all of countries enacting a patchwork of contradictory approaches. Migration is set to be a major discussion point at the European Council meeting on 28 and 29 June, with the issue a major priority of Austrias right-wing government, which holds the rotating presidency of the pan-EU body. Ms Merkels Bavarian allies are generally more right-wing than other Germany conservatives, but the party also has regional elections coming up in the autumn: it fears losing ground to the far-right AfD party, which had MPs elected to the Bundestag for the first time in 2017. Bavaria is also in the southeast of Germany and is thus one of the main entry points for refugees arriving overland in the country through the Balkans. The US presidents intervention could be useful domestically for Ms Merkel because of his unpopularity: just 11 per cent of Germany has a favourable view of Mr Trump, according to research by pollster Pew for the Germany public broadcaster DW. Earlier this month German MPs called for the US ambassador to their country, Richard Grenell, to be expelled, after he said he told a far-right news website he wanted to strengthen right-wing movements in his host country. After last weeks G7 summit in Canada, Ms Merkels office released a photograph of the chancellor squaring off against an embattled-looking Mr Trump, backed by other world leaders. Mr Trumps intervention in European politics comes as he faces criticism at home for a hardline immigration policy, having long been an advocate of building a wall along the entire US-Mexican border. Meanwhile, pictures have emerged recently of US officials keeping undocumented migrants in cages, with questions also being raised over the apparently routine separation of children from their parents at the border. (Natural News) Finding water is a constant struggle for people living in hot and dry climates. While some places are blessed with the occasional downpour of rain, others arent as fortunate. But according to doctoral candidate Theresa Laverty, this task can become easier if you keep your eyes and ears peeled for bats. Having spent 18 months observing various bat species inhabiting South Africas northern Namib Desert, Laverty gained a good feel of the environment and how bats react to it. Writing for TheConversation.com, she explained that freshwater is extremely hard to come by in this coastal desert. The Namib Desert is nearly absolutely rainless, save for the occasional brief yet heavy thunderstorms. Yet, over a dozen different bat species call this arid landscape home. This is unsurprising, given how bats are built. For one, they can fly, meaning they can easily cover large areas of land to seek out freshwater ponds dotting the Namib Desert. In fact, Laverty notes that bats may visit multiple ponds in a single night. Then there are their wings these thin membranes of skin lack any of form of insulation, making bats prone to dehydration. As such, bats are more likely to target ponds containing high-quality water. Even the most desert-adapted species need water. Water quality affects them directly when they drink and indirectly when they consume insect prey, many of which spend part of their lives growing in water, explains Laverty. This makes bats excellent indicators of water quality. Worth noting is the fact that, during her time in the Namib Desert, Laverty personally witnessed bat activity decrease around springs that had elevated levels of salt. Of course, just how much and how well bats can stomach salty water is still unknown. But previous research has shown that as surface waters become increasingly salty, bat populations dwindle. (Related: Wind turbines kill almost 1 million bats per year, because they confuse them with trees.) Moreover, Laverty has acknowledged that the numerous bat species respond to water chemistry differently. For example, one study found that several desert-dwelling bat species in Israels Negev Desert preferred natural bodies of water over artificial ones. This, the researchers proposed, may be due to the bats having no tolerance for artificial or lower-quality bodies of water. Regardless, bats may still be one of the best ways to find safe drinking water. You dont have to see them to find them either. To find high-quality surface waters, people could observe bat activity levels using acoustic detectors to record bats echolocation calls, states Laverty. Although mostly inaudible to humans, people can typically identify bats to the species level by their calls. Choosing a bat detector Tuneable or heterodyne bat detectors: The cheapest and most widely available bat detectors. These work by adapting bat calls into a sound that we can hear. The conversion process also enhances the little differences in the calls of different species. While easy to use, tuneable bat detectors can only be tuned in to one frequency with every use. The cheapest and most widely available bat detectors. These work by adapting bat calls into a sound that we can hear. The conversion process also enhances the little differences in the calls of different species. While easy to use, tuneable bat detectors can only be tuned in to one frequency with every use. Time expansion bat detectors: While these can only capture a second or so of bat calls, time expansion bat detectors produce high-quality recordings played back at a lower frequency and rate. Moreover, theyre capable of registering multiple frequencies. While these can only capture a second or so of bat calls, time expansion bat detectors produce high-quality recordings played back at a lower frequency and rate. Moreover, theyre capable of registering multiple frequencies. Frequency division bat detectors: Just like time expansion bat detectors, these can simultaneously detect a variety of frequencies. The catch is that frequency division bat detectors split the frequency of bat calls to make them audible to human ears. This makes it more challenging to differentiate between bat calls, but theyre less expensive than time expansion bat detectors. If youd like to read up on more news relating to bats, feel free to visit PetHealthDaily.com today. Sources include: TheConversation.com ScienceDirect.com Bats.org.uk (Natural News) The universes brightest signals are extraterrestrial in origin, Australian scientists have confirmed. Their report, published in Monthly Notices at the Royal Astronomical Society, was able to detect three specific radio emissions which definitely came from space. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) were first recorded a decade ago. These are pulses of light that are the brightest scientists have ever seen. However, their origin has always been a mystery. FRBs have been linked to everything from alien communication to errors in measurement to interference from Earth. In fact, these signals were thought to be little more than anomalies after a famous 2015 controversy showed scientists supposedly receiving alien messages only to find out these were just interference from their own microwave. However, this new report puts an end to all the controversy: These bizarre signals are not coming from our planet. This was confirmed after data were gathered from a giant telescope located 40 km outside of Canberra. Three such FRBs were recorded using the Molonglo radio telescope. This specific telescope features an enormous focal length, having a collecting area of 193,750 square feet (18,000 sqm) and a field of view of around eight degrees of the sky. The telescope is able to produce 1000 TB of data every day. Conventional single dish radio telescopes have difficulty establishing that transmissions originate beyond the Earths atmosphere, said Dr. Chris Flynn of the Swinburne University of Technology. The Molonglo telescope was re-engineered to be able to gather more data. Professor Anne Green of the University of Sydney added, it is very exciting to see the University of Sydneys Molonglo telescope making such important scientific discoveries by partnering with Swinburnes expertise in supercomputing. Green is referring to the new software which allowed the scientists to sift through all the data collected from Molonglo and pinpoint these three FRBs. The Ph.D. student at Australian National University, Manish Caleb, who designed the software said, because of the telescopes characteristics, were 100 percent sure the bursts came from space. We have scientifically confirmed that FRBs are extraterrestrialwe expect Molonglo will do this for more bursts. Dr. Flynn agreed, stating, local radio interference shows up in several of Molonglos beams. Cosmic signals never show up in more than three. Thats how we knew these signals were cosmic. The telescope data confirmed that all three FRBs came from space, but only one could be localized to a specific galaxy. Figuring out where the bursts come from is the key to understanding what makes them, said Caleb. Only one burst has been linked to a specific galaxy. Extraterrestrial messages of what? Despite confirming their origin, scientists still do not know what they mean. One hypothesis is that these bursts could be remnants of alien space probes or even alien megastructures. In order to leave a trail that bright or long-lasting, it is surmised that the transmitter would need to have a surface area twice the size of Earth. This would require not only more advanced technology, but massive construction effort. Still, the stutter heard from the star KIC 8462852 would need an almost inconceivably-sized alien megastructure. The only reason a civilization would need to build a structure that size, scientists said, is for interstellar travel. The raw power required to leave such a focused radio stream would be enough to propel a one million ton ship over vast distances. Thats big enough to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances, cited Manasvi Lingam of Harvard University. Such a ship would need radio beams to push its sails. These beams then leave traces in space which are detected by human technology as bright pockets in the sky. To that end, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researcher Avi Loeb stated, science isnt a matter of belief, its a matter of evidence. Deciding whats likely ahead of time limits the possibilities. Its worth putting ideas out there and letting the data be the judge. Sources include: DailyMail.co.uk News.com.au Independent.co.uk (Natural News) The American Medical Association (AMA) is a powerful organization that defines medical education and medical practice in the U.S. The organization creates policies for all physicians to follow and they can threaten a doctors medical license if they do not follow along. In 2018, the AMA has decided to support gun control as a public health issue. First established in 1845, the AMA determined, most importantly, medical ethics. This includes protecting a patients right to informed consent before any medical treatment or procedure takes place. Today, the AMA fails to enforce its informed consent policy, allowing pediatricians to get away with vaccinating kids without providing the vaccine insert to parents. If informed consent was enforced, then parents would see the lack of safety data for vaccines. Parents would see exactly what vaccines are doing to their sons and daughters, and doctors would honor parents questions, concerns, and decisions not to vaccinate. Over the years, the AMA established rules for what constitutes a medical education. AMA policy makers soon dictated what medicine was, establishing chemical interventions as the only model of evidence-based medicine. The AMA has a dark history of suppressing effective herbal medicine, chiropractic care, homeopathy, cancer cures, and alternative therapies for healing. Its not surprising that the AMA is all in for the current CDC vaccine schedule, advocating dozens of vaccine doses for children, even though reports of vaccine damage continue to pour in to the VAERS reporting system. (Related: More children harmed by vaccines than from gunshots, government statistics reveal.) If public health continues to decline due to the AMAs inane vaccine policies, why would anyone trust that they know what they are talking about when it comes to curbing gun violence? Even worse, why would the AMA spend resources instructing doctors to push for gun control policies, when childrens brains are being altered by the psychiatric drugs that the AMA pushes? AMAs new gun control push turns doctors against patients Many physicians arent going to follow suit with this insidious gun control agenda, because many doctors are gun owners too, and they want to respect the privacy of their patients. Many physicians arent going to be a police state enforcer, turning in their patients because they own a scary-looking rifle or a 14 round high capacity magazine. Physicians should be smart enough to know that assault is an action, not an object. Naming a class of firearms as assault weapons doesnt make these objects more dangerous. Notwithstanding, there will still be those doctors who bow down to the AMA and become snitches for the Marxist gun control agenda. Claiming that they are improving public health by removing firearms from the streets, these lackey doctors will do the heroic work of turning in their high risk patients who own firearms. All the while, these doctors will prescribe psychiatric drugs that provably cause violent behavior and suicide. Then they will turn around and inject children with brain-damaging aluminum and pump them full of antibiotics which cause gut dysbiosis and ultimately changes brain chemicals. AMA President Dr. David O. Barbe spoke to association members at a recent meeting, decrying that physicians must not back down from addressing gun violence. Among their policies for addressing gun violence, the AMA calls for ensuring that schools remain gun free zones with no actionable plan to protect students from attacks. Not surprisingly, the AMA is also opposed to conceal and carry reciprocity, where private, well trained individuals carry concealed handguns for personal and public protection. The AMA also supports gun confiscation through gun buy-back programs and wants physicians to identify high risk individuals, so these individuals can be barred from owning a firearm or have their guns taken away immediately. Crime prevention sounds noble, but one physicians definition of high risk will differ from anothers. Individuals who have not committed a crime could be declared high risk by a paranoid, gun-illiterate physician. The doctor could have the individuals guns confiscated by law enforcement, without due process of law and all based on his biased suspicion. Which beliefs and attitudes make a person high risk? Are doctors who push pills even capable of making that judgment? Dr. Barbe believes that high capacity magazines, which are defined as having more than 10 rounds of ammunition, are part of the problem. The AMA also calls on Congress to ban assault-style rifles, such as the Armalite-15. According to Dr. Barbe, only government officials and military service people are allowed to possess magazines with more than ten rounds. Only authority can carry rifles that can be fired semi-automatically. Why wont the AMA focus on the real triggers that lead to violence? Every day, physicians are treating suicide victims, victims of domestic partner violence, and men and women simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, Barbe said. It doesnt have to be this way, and we urge lawmakers to act. While Dr. Barbe seems well-intentioned, targeting the tool and the innocent owner is no way to reduce violence. Just because suicide and domestic violence incidences are going up, doesnt mean we should start blaming an inanimate object and an innocent population that abides by the law. If Dr. Barbe really cared, the AMA would investigate what actually triggers people to commit violence against themselves and others. The AMA should be focusing on the issues of the human heart and the circumstances that lead people to commit acts of violence. Blaming law abiding people (who can help protect against violence) is no way to address the problem. The AMA should investigate the brain damage that occurs after vaccination, following aluminum uptake into the brain. The AMA should investigate gut dysbiosis, a modern day health problem that triggers changes in the human brain. The AMA should investigate their own blind support for psychiatric medications, which have a track record of exacerbating violent or erratic behavior in certain people. (Additional reading: Every mass shooting over last twenty years has one thing in common and it isnt guns.) Read MedicalExtremism.com for more coverage of extreme, dangerous medicine. Sources include: Guns.com NaturalNews.com AMA.org NaturalNews.com NaturalNews.com (Natural News) Researchers have found a new way to measure the photosynthesis levels of marine plants. A Cosmos Magazine article details how they employed underwater microphones that can pick up the sound of oxygen released by the plants. Like their terrestrial counterparts, algae seaweed and other aquatic plants generate oxygen during the photosynthetic process. Because they are underwater, the oxygen is expelled into the water. The higher the level of photosynthesis, the more oxygen is released. Small amounts will dissolve into the water without a fuss, but large amounts of oxygen form bubbles beneath the leaves of marine plants. Once these bubbles get big enough, they will slip free of the confining leaves and head upwards. Their size will keep the bubbles from dissolving before they reach the surface. Previous methods of measuring the oxygen content in seawater did not account for these bubbles. Marine researchers have been unknowingly miscalculating the level of photosynthesis in large bodies of marine plants for many years. Oxygen production is often used by researchers as a way to indirectly measure the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that marine plants remove from the oceans and ultimately, the atmosphere. (Related: Seaweed could save Californias coastline by reducing ocean acidification.) Sonar-like method monitors the rate of oxygen bubble release by marine plants The new detection method is similar to sonar, explained researcher Jean-Pierre Hermand of the Free University of Brussels. It will keep track of the rate at which the plants release oxygen bubbles into the water. Hermand said the new method can measure oxygen production across the vast length and breadth of a seagrass meadow or a kelp forest. Algae seaweed like seagrass and kelp play important roles in marine ecology and the reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. However, their numbers have been rapidly dwindling over the past century. The heat wave of 2010-2011 destroyed 20 percent of the seagrass in Western Australian waters. Not only will 9.9 million tons of CO2 remain in the atmosphere, but the dead seagrass will release more than 23 million tons of CO2 over the next four decades. Meanwhile, the kelp forests in the seas off Tasmania have also been grievously reduced. New method could keep watch over vital coral reefs Hermans American colleague, Simon Freeman of the U.S. Navy, reported that a sufficiently sensitive passive microphone can pick up the sounds made by oxygen as it bubbles to the surface. He is thinking of using it to monitor coral reef health. Coral cannot coexist alongside algae. The presence of the latter will prevent the former from returning to a location. In an earlier paper, Freeman related the results of a six-month study in Hawaii, where they used acoustics to observe coral reefs in 23 locations. Most sounds in healthy reefs were low-frequency ones, while areas with dead corals and plenty of algae had lots of high-frequency sounds. The high-frequency sounds were mainly heard during the day. This led Freeman to theorize that the sounds were caused by oxygen bubbles released by algae in dead coral reefs. While the bubbles resisted dissolution, they did deform and vibrate as they escaped, releasing bell-like sounds on their way up. Freemans team tested their theory by growing algae in a tank, shining grow lights on the plants, and listening to the sounds of the oxygen bubbles. The sounds made by the oxygen bubbles were identical to the ones they heard in Hawaii. This discovery suggests a simple way to keep an eye on important coral reefs like the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Marine researchers could set up listening posts that listen for increasing levels of high-frequency sounds generated by oxygen-producing algae. Keep an ear out for interesting discoveries about marine plants and coral reefs at Ecology.news. Sources include: CosmosMagazine.com SGMeet.com California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is among a coalition of Democratic attorneys general who demanded Tuesday that the Trump administration end a "zero tolerance" policy that has resulted in children being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Led by New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas, 21 top state prosecutors from California to Massachusetts sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Tuesday, calling the policy inhumane and draconian. The letter raises concerns about the violation of children's rights and constitutional principles of due process and equal protection. "The U.S. Justice Department is ignoring its legal and moral obligation for the sake of a political agenda at the expense of children and the efforts of state law enforcement officials combating crimes like human trafficking, drug trafficking and gang violence which operate across international borders," Balderas said in a statement. The attorneys join a chorus of church leaders and lawmakers from both parties who also have called the separations inhumane. Nearly 2,000 minors have been separated from their families since Sessions announced the policy in April. If a person doesn't arrive at an appropriate port of entry to claim asylum, the crossing is deemed illegal and prosecuted even if the person does not have a criminal history. With the adult detained and facing prosecution, any minors accompanying them are taken away. U.S. officials have argued that the children are well cared for and that the government has high standards for the detention centers where they are being housed. They have said the separations result from legal loopholes but insist immigrants who arrive illegally won't simply be released. In their letter, the attorneys general argue that the fundamental rights of children are expressed in state, federal and international laws with an aim to protect their best interests. They say any process should first seek to protect those interests. "The notion that the government should intrude into the rights of a parent to be with their child has historically been met with extremely high levels of scrutiny," the letter reads. The only attorneys general from states along the U.S.-Mexico border to sign the letter were Balderas and Becerra. Both are frequent critics of President Donald Trump and have been outspoken on other immigration issues. The U.S. Coast Guard and San Francisco Fire Department officials saved a man in distress in the Bay waters near Lands End and also prevented a sailboat from capsizing Monday afternoon. According to fire spokesman Jonathan Baxter, around 2:15 p.m., fire officials received a report of a damaged sailboat with four people aboard nearly capsizing in the Mile Rock area. In addition, they learned that a man had been thrown overboard and was in distress, Baxter said. Coast Guard officials, with help from firefighters, were able to assist the man in the distress, as well as the rest of the boaters. The man suffered injuries not considered life-threatening. He and the other boaters were taken to Marin County for evaluation, according to Baxter. The boat was brought upright and is being towed to safety. A Richmond man is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole after investigators say he sexually assaulted a high school girl in Palo Alto along a jogging trail in March. On Monday, NBC Bay Area learned how the girls quick thinking stopped a predator from harming her even more. Suspect Eduardo Chavarria, 29, wrote an apology letter to the victim, saying in part, "I promise never to do that again." During the attack on a trail near Tesla headquarters, Chavarria pulled the teen off the trail, threw her over his shoulder and took her into some nearby bushes, according to a police report. He then bound the victim's hands behind her back using duct tape and used the same tape to cover her entire face, the police report says. Finally, Chavarria put a gun to the teens head and sexually assaulted her, telling her not to speak, "or he would shoot her," police said. But the girl came up with the idea to repeatedly tell her attacker that she had an infection and needed medication, hoping it would stop him from going even further and raping her. Thats when police say Chavarria untied the girls hands and fled. She later ran to another jogger on the trail for help. Those who frequent the trail and the general area shocked to hear about the attack. "Ive never heard of anything like that happening here, especially in broad daylight," Aarthi Padmanavhan said. "It was shocking, really shocking, because I walk every day here, and Ive never seen any such people at all," Gopakumar Pillar said. "All are like, office-going people." Police in the East Bay also are investigating Chavarria for a similar attack in Oakland weeks before the one in Palo Alto. When investigators searched his home, they found a number of fake documents, such as a Social Security card and permanent resident card with Chavarrias name on them. Leaders in Santa Clara County on Tuesday are slated to announce their response to a controversial question on the 2020 census asking people about their citizenship. The concern among those frustrated with the question is that it could lead to fewer people being counted. California's attorney general has already sued the federal government, arguing that undercounting could shift federal funding and congressional seats out of the Golden State. One South Bay supervisor wants to counter the citizenship question by making sure anyone who can vote does. The voter outreach and census question push-back effort comes as part of an outreach program marking the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. The United States Department of Justice wants to include the citizenship question to enforce minority protections under the Voting Rights Act. The 1950 census was the last one that included the citizenship question. If people do not answer the citizenship question, the United States Census Bureau may fill in the missing data using other government records. The announcement from South Bay leaders is expected to take place at 9 a.m. at the Santa Clara County Building. Cleanup continues across parts of New England after a powerful storm caused major damage and knocked out power to thousands on Monday. Tornado warnings were issued on three separate occasions for parts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Hundreds of lightning strikes were reported across the region, and what looked like funnel clouds were spotted in several areas. "I look out my window. Winds start picking up. Visibility drops to five feet at most. It was just completely gray. Wind starts howling," recalled Brendan Ryan. Trees and wires were reported down in many areas across Massachusetts, from the western part of the state to the North Shore. One tree came crashing down in Haverhill while a couple was in front of their home, creating a scary moment for the elderly couple. While they are OK, their home is not. The tree caused extensive damage, crashing through the ceiling and down to the kitchen floor. George Brown, a friend of the couple's, shot cell phone video from the couple's roof showing the large tree inside the house. Brown said the couple has been there 80 years and they don't want to leave their home. The couple was too upset to go on camera. Haverhill firefighters inspected the damage, walking around with flashlights on Monday night. The American Red Cross was on scene to assist the couple. They planned to stay with neighbors while they figured out what to do next. There were also a number of trees and wires down in Westford, where Old Lowell Road was blocked to traffic late Monday night. Crews said they will be working around the clock to clear the roadway. Tree branches also littered Roberts Road, where a tree limb could be seen lying on power lines. Police blocked the area and many other roads throughout Westford that were similarly damaged. A falling tree nearly split a home on South Chelmsford in half. Crews said fortunately no one was hurt. About 100 people were displaced when the roof of their apartment building in Springfield partially collapsed during a heavy thunderstorm. The city's code enforcement division condemned the buildign and cut the power. The landlord and Red Cross were workign to find the residents temporary shelter. In Methuen, heavy rain and strong winds knocked down a tree, leaving a messy tangle of branches, leaves and power lines. Police said the tree came crashing down onto a car while a woman was inside. Luckily, the woman was able to get herself out and wasn't badly hurt. The heavy winds and rains also knocked down trees and power lines in Manchester and Keene, New Hampshire and in western and southern Maine. Keene's city manager said about six to eight homes were damaged. Goffstown, New Hampshire saw a good amount of damage as well. Police were forced to shut down Saint Anselm Street after a power pole began leaning and got too close to a home. On Interstate 89 north, a large downed tree blocked two lanes, causing a traffic backup. The strong winds also ripped down a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont. By Tuesday morning, there were still some scattered outages, with more than 11,000 customers without power in New Hampshire and about 1,100 customers in Massachusetts. Those numbers were down from the more than 100,000 people who had reported power outages in the two states on Monday night. The Illinois Governors race has already gone into the toilet-- literally. Incumbent Republican Governor Bruce Rauner is attacking his opponent Democrat JB Pritzker for disconnecting the toilets in the mansion next to Pritzker's larger Gold Coast mansion. By yanking the toilets, Pritzker received a $230,000 tax break. The ad titled The Porcelain Prince shows actors playing the roles of plumbers removing the toilets from a mansion as an actor playing Pritzker watches and takes a seat on one of the removed toilets. The Pritzker campaign has responded with a new television ad attacking Rauner, noting he owns nine homes and appealed his property taxes 22 times. Now hes attacking someone else for the same thing, the ad states. A spokesperson for Rauner argued he "does not files appeals for his condo." "The condo association does it automatically for everyone, Will Allison told NBC 5. Pritzker has not denied he received tax breaks or removed the toilets to reduce his tax bill. He also owns numerous homes. The National Assembly of Armenia, responding to the Armenian prosecutor generals motion, voted to strip the Yerkrapah Volunteer Union Chairman, NA Republican Party of Armenia Faction MP Manvel Grigoryan, of immunity from prosecution. As many as 81 MPs voted for stripping him of immunity from prosecution, ARKA reported. The national security service officers searched the territories belonging to Grigoryan and found guns and armament. They also found a collection of expensive cars and a private zoo here. Authorities have been continuing to search for two men who they say escaped from a southeastern Illinois county jail over the weekend with a third man who's been captured. The White County sheriff's office says men matching the descriptions of 24-year-old Zachery Shock and 61-year-old Johnny Tipton were spotted Sunday night on Illinois 1 between the rural communities of Norris City and Omaha. Officers using a drone and search dogs weren't able to find them. Shock was awaiting trial for murder, while Tipton faced possession of stolen property charges. The sheriff's office says Shock, Tipton and 28-year-old Justin Bray used a pipe to break through an outside wall early Saturday of the jail in Carmi near the Indiana border. Bray was caught Saturday in an oil field tank. [NATL] Top News Photos: Pope Visits Japan, and More South Korea on Tuesday presented a united front with the United States on a decision to call off a major military drill, one week after President Donald Trump's surprise announcement that he would suspend such exercises with the longtime Asian ally. Shortly after the U.S. and South Korean militaries formally announced the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises slated for August had been called off, Seoul's Defense Ministry said the decision was necessary to support ongoing talks both countries have with North Korea. "South Korea and the U.S. made the decision as we believe this will contribute to maintaining such momentum," said Choi Hyun-soo, the ministry's spokeswoman. The announcement was widely anticipated following Trump's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last week. Trump said after the summit in Singapore that he would suspend the U.S. military's "war games" with South Korea unless and until the talks on ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program break down. His statement appeared to catch both South Korea and the Pentagon by surprise, but they presented a united front in canceling the upcoming exercise. Dana White, spokeswoman for the U.S. Defense Department, said planning for the summer drills had stopped, but no decisions have been made on any other military exercises with South Korea. Joint exercises with Japan and other countries in the Pacific will continue. Choi echoed that nothing has been decided on other exercises. She was unwilling to provide a straightforward answer when asked whether there had been any discussions between the allies' militaries on suspending the drills before Trump's sudden announcement. "We consider the ongoing denuclearization negotiations with North Korea as crucial, so as long as those negotiations continue, the decision by the governments of South Korea and the United States will be maintained," she said. Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera showed understanding for the move but stressed the need for the two countries to continue their other joint drills. He called U.S.-South Korean exercises "important pillars" for maintaining regional peace and stability. Plans for U.S.-Japan exercises are unchanged, he added. In Beijing, a foreign ministry spokesman said the suspension of U.S.-South Korean drills was a "positive and constructive move." During the tensions created by North Korean weapons tests in recent years, China had called for a "dual suspension" in which the North would stop its nuclear and missile tests and Washington and Seoul would halt their military exercises to lower animosity and lead to talks. "We support this, we hope the relevant parties will move in the same direction to make greater efforts to promote the peace and denuclearization process for the peninsula," Geng Shuang said in a regular briefing. Kim traveled to China Tuesday to meet with President Xi Jinping. Xi said he hopes Pyongyang and Washington can fully implement the outcomes of last week's nuclear summit and that China would "as always play a constructive role" in that process. Last year's Ulchi Freedom Guardian went on for 11 days in August and involved about 17,500 U.S. and 50,000 South Korean troops. Also participating were other nations that contributed forces during the 1950-53 Korean War, including Australia, Britain, Canada and Colombia. The summertime military exercises usually coincide with a nationwide civilian defense drill in South Korea in which citizens take shelter in buildings and subway stations at the sound of air-raid sirens. Presidential spokesman Kim Eui-keum said the civilian drill could be held as planned, suspended or modified to reflect "changing circumstances." The other major U.S. military exercises with South Korea Key Resolve and Foal Eagle took place earlier this spring. They historically include live-fire drills with tanks, aircraft and warships and feature about 10,000 American and 200,000 Korean troops. The drills were delayed this year because of North Korean participation in the Winter Olympics in South Korea in February. Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Mari Yamaguchi and Chris Bodeen contributed to this story. Connecticut State Colleges and Universities President Mark Ojakian plans to present a new consolidation plan to the Board of Regents on Thursday. The Students First plan would consolidate all 12 community colleges in Connecticut into one accredited institution by 2023. It would save $17 million when fully implemented. His last plan drew sharp criticism from faculty members and students and was most recently rejected by the Regional Accreditation Commission in April. Ojakian said the biggest difference with the new plan is the extended timeline. He wants to slowly phase in the changes over the next five years, with the goal of having one single accredited institution by 2023. If approved by the Board of Regents, the first change students will see is through the application process. It will be one application for all 12 community colleges, as well as one website. It will be the same process for any student enrolling in classes or applying for financial aid. Ojakian said students will have the same experience, if not better when they need help. Well be able to devote more resources to things like student advisors, student success centers, student tutoring centers that will allow students to not only enroll in school, but stay in school and complete in a timely way, said Ojakian. Under the new plan, CSCU would hire three regional presidents in spring 2019 and keep the department chairs in place instead of eliminating them. The Board of Regents meeting is Thursday, June 21 at 10 a.m. If approved, President Ojakian said they will move forward with the consolidation plan and revisit the single accreditation proposal with the Regional Accreditation Commission closer to 2023. A woman who was injured in a boating accident on Candlewood Lake in New Fairfield Tuesday has died, according to officials from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, and the boater who is accused of hitting her and fleeing the scene has been arrested. Department of Energy and Environmental Protection officials said they were called to search for a missing person in the water at Candlewood Lake around 2:15 p.m. When DEEP crews arrived. the woman had been pulled from the water by a Good Samaritan and she was taken to Danbury Hospital with serious injuries. DEEP has identified the woman as 38-year-old Wanda Tirado, of Waterbury and said she was pronounced dead at Danbury Hospital at 11:15 a.m. Tirado was a swimmer from the involved vessel, according to DEEP. DEEP officials said that during the investigation state Environmental Conservation police determined a vessel had left the scene. That boater, identified as 65-year-old Gary Morrone of Oakville, was arrested. Morrone was charged with reckless operating of a vessel, failure to help a collision victim, and failure to immediately notify law enforcement of injury. He was released on a $10,000 bond and is due in court on July 3. State EnCon Polices Boating Accident Investigation Unit is investigating. The Chief Medical Examiner will perform an autopsy. The state is offering free lifeguard training to those who qualify in an effort to fill open jobs at all eight of Connecticuts lifeguarded state beaches. Chris Collibee, a spokesperson for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, told NBC Connecticut that they plan to make sure lifeguards will be available on busy summer weekends and holidays, but those heading to state beaches on weekdays should not expect lifeguards if the state is unable to fully staff all positions soon. "If high school kids or college kids dont have a job at this point, and youre looking for a good job and youre a good swimmer, we offer training to be a lifeguard," Collibee said. The lifeguard training will be free for the first time, Collibee added, in an effort to fill the remaining 10 to 20 open lifeguard jobs statewide. The advertised pay is $10 to $14 per hour, according to their job postings online. Collibee said DEEP is particularly concerned about lifeguard staffing at the state parks at Silver Sands in Milford, Indian Wells in Shelton, and Sherwood Island in Westport. For more information about becoming a lifeguard and to apply, click here. Gubernatorial hopeful Bob Stefanowski, just one day after being certified to appear on the August primary ballot, made it a point to attack three of his GOP opponents for their use of public financing for their runs. He even vowed to propose to eliminate the Citizens Election Program for the governors race. I dont mind it for the state legislators. It's part-time jobs. Its not a ton of money, Stefanowski said at his Branford headquarters. But for a full-time gubernatorial candidate in a state thats essentially bankrupt to be asking for $20,000 a day to buy bumper stickers and yard signs, I dont know how you get yourself comfortable with that. I couldnt do it. Stefanowksi, making his first ever run for any kind of public office, has run an unconventional campaign by Connecticut standards. He effectively ignored many Republican campaign norms, like lobbying delegates to the states convention, attempting to woo the likes of party insiders. Instead, Stefanowski attended local Republican Town Committee meetings, and pounded the pavement collecting petition signatures to achieve ballot access. On Monday, he became the first Republican to ever qualify for the gubernatorial primary in that fashion, and he feels even better about his chances in the primary. Right now, Ive got 16,000 signatures from registered Republicans, going into a race thats probably 25-30,000 votes. We can go back to those people. They already signed my ballot. Again, weve been an unconventional campaign from the start and its really worked well for us to date. Stefanowski spent his professional career working as an executive for General Electric and for UBS in London. He also worked in private equity. He says that career, managing a $500 billion balance sheet, and overseeing up to 10,000 people, makes him uniquely qualified to be governor compared to the other Republicans running. The Madison resident touts his humble roots in New Haven as another qualifying factor. He says his business background is what can pull Connecticut out of the economic doldrums, though his rhetoric is loftier than the math that follows it. He proposes gradually phasing out the states income tax, the General Funds largest single source of revenue of more than $9 billion annually. Stefanowski says growth in the private sector and increased spending by consumers will lead to a better state economy. When people have more take home pay, hopefully theyre going to save some of that, but theyre also going to buy goods and services, Stefanowski says. However, he doesnt have a complete answer when it comes to replacing the revenue that the income tax provides to the state. By saying increased spending will lead to prosperity, thats relying heavily on the states use taxes like sales in order for the state to generate more revenue. Stefanowski says increased corporate growth as a result of other business tax cuts will lead to more people buying homes, cars, and doing more shopping which will fill the states coffers. Corporations will start to add people coming in. Well have a larger tax base because wont be fleeing the state like they are right now. As for another tax issue thats popped up on the campaign trail, Stefanowski says he does not favor imposing any taxes on endowments on institutions like Yale University. He says a quote attributed to him back in February, where he apparently endorsed the concept, was a throwaway line. Stefanowski clarified his position saying any endowment tax, was never part of my formal plan. As for the rest of the race, Stefanowski is relying on donors to fund his race, and says that path provides him more credibility than others running for the Republican nomination. He says he can discuss being fiscally responsible with taxpayers money in ways the other Republicans simply cannot. One of the reasons Ive been successful in business, is Ive walked the talk and I do what I say. I think when you begin being hypocritical, its going to hurt you at some point. When Jaclyn Piscitelli bought her New Britain home in 2016, she needed to make a few improvements in order to pass inspection. Among them, fixing the stone steps out front. Piscitelli said her realtor recommended a contractor to do the work. Piscitelli hired him to resurface the steps. They came out great, she said. But the work didnt last. Piscitelli said just about a year after the work was completed, she noticed the stone was in bad shape. Just cracks at first, but very deep cracks, she said. Piscitelli told NBC Connecticut reached out to the contractor in January by email. He told her he would come by the following week to take a look. But Piscitelli said the contractor didnt come. She said she contacted him four more times in the following months. Piscitelli said he responded twice, but never showed up. Finally, Piscitelli reached out to NBC Connecticut Responds in early May. You guys get things done. Because of that, I figured it was worth a shot. I had nothing to lose, she said. Our consumer team reviewed Piscitellis contract. It said the work was guaranteed for one year from the date of completion. Piscitelli notified the contractor of the issues within that time frame. Responds reached out to the contractor on her behalf and received an emailed response the same day. It said, Of course we will take a look. Piscitelli said a week later, she had a letter in her mailbox from the contractor. He apologized for the delay and said he would not be working in the area for a while. The letter included a check for $850, the cost of the original job. I feel so grateful. So grateful. Knowing that somebody else has your back that can step in and just act as a voice for you when no one else is listening," Piscitelli said. The contractor did not respond to our follow up request for comment. A North Texas Congressman was confronted by his constituents at a town hall he hosted Monday night. U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess (R, TX-26) hosted a town hall at Denton High School, as he has done on a regular basis. Several constituents confronted Burgess over his stance on undocumented children being separated from their parents who will face prosecution for entering the U.S. illegally. Children, mothers and fathers are being kept in chain link cage-like structures inside the countrys largest immigration detention center as part of the Trump administration's 'zero tolerance policy' on illegal border crossings. It is a policy that is the object of a growing bipartisan outcry. Burgess spoke with NBC 5 prior to the town hall, saying people who do not come to the U.S. legally will face consequences, 'pretty harsh consequences' as we've seen in the past couple of weeks. The auditorium at the high school filled up quickly. Organizers had to do a coin toss to help select 22 people to speak because so many others wanted an opportunity to address Burgess. "They are not U.S. citizens but they are human beings and we're scared for them," Gretchen Veling of Keller said. "What are you going to do for these babies and what are you going to do for your citizens who are afraid for these babies?" Veling received a standing ovation from many in the audience when she told Burgess she believed her representatives would take the president to task on issues. "I appreciate you're critical of the leadership in this country, but where in the hell is the leadership in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador," Burgess asked before being booed and shouted down by some in the audience. NBC 5 asked the congressman several times whether he supported the policy of separating children from their parents. "No one supports separating children, but no one supports people coming in without the value of having the law behind them," he responded. "There are proper ways to do it. People understand that." When asked how he feels seeing pictures of children alone in shelters, Burgess said, "I would never place a child on top of a train and say 'travel 500 miles and I hope things work out for you.' That's what's been wrong in this equation." Burgess was referring to the infamous freight train known as 'La Bestia' [The Beast] that travels through Central America into Mexico and one that is used by undocumented migrants as they journey North. Burgess said he is flying back to Washington D.C. on Tuesday morning and feels confident one of two bills being introduced in Congress this week will resolve the situation on the border. Dozens of people were hospitalized Monday after being exposed to carbon monoxide at a produce processing center in Southeast Houston. KPRC in Houston reports the carbon monoxide came from a gasoline-fueled piece of equipment used in an enclosed space inside Hardie's Fresh Foods. A total of 29 people were treated at three hospitals, Houston firefighters said. Eleven people were listed in serious condition. Common signs of carbon monoxide exposure include nausea, headache and dizziness, Blake White, Houston Fire Deputy Chief told KPRC. Prolonged exposure to the toxic gas can be fatal. Hardie's declined KRPC's requests for a response. Officials haven't immediately identified the contractor operating the machinery and whether any criminal charges may be merited. The center can't be reopened until an industrial hygienist provides approval that it's safe. Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia visited San Antonio Sunday to celebrate the city's tricentennial and its roots as a Spanish colonial village. The royal couple attended a welcoming ceremony hosted by Mayor Ron Nirenberg and other city officials at the Spanish Governor's Palace before touring Mission San Jose, a National Historic Site founded in 1720 on the banks of the San Antonio River, several miles to the south of the Alamo, and then visiting a historical exhibit. An evening dinner with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was also planned. On Monday, the royal couple was expected to visit the tricentennial exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art. On Tuesday, the king and queen will travel to Washington D.C. to meet with President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump at the White House. What became San Antonio originally was founded as Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) on May 1, 1718, by Spanish Franciscan missionaries backed by the Spanish monarchy and government during the colonization of New Spain. According to the National Park Service, Mission San Jose, was named for Saint Joseph and the Marques de San Miguel de Aguayo, the governor of the Province of Coahuila and Texas at the time. After more than 60 years, "imposing complex of stone walls, bastions, granary, and magnificent church was completed by 1782" and was largely impregnable to raids. The mission fell into disrepair, but was restored as a WPA project in the 1930s. It was named a State Historic Site in 1941 and a National Historic Site later that same year. Mission San Jose is one of five San Antonio missions that comprise the only UNESCO World Heritage site in Texas. The other sites are Mission Concepcion, Mission San Juan Capistrano, Mission Espada and Mission Valero (the Alamo). Mission San Jose, still an active parish, holds public mass on Sundays. Iraqs Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) spokesman, Safeen Dizayee said on Sunday that Erbil will not allow hostile action to originate from the regions soil against Iran. Ekurd.net reports in its article Iraqi Kurdistan not to allow hostile action against Iran from its soil that his remarks came in response to the recent crossing of some Kurdish rebel groups into Iranian Kurdistan. Erbil is looking at the importance of it relations with the nation and government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Dizayee said as quoted by the Iranian news agency of Tasnim. According to Tasnim, Dizayee expressed gratitude for the support Iran provided to the Kurdistan Region in various fields including the humanitarian aid, saying the KRG considers its relations with Iran as of immense importance. Dizayee said both Iran and KRG have formed a mutual committee and that Erbil cautioned the armed groups on the border to not use the Kurdistan Regions territory for hostile action against Iran and Turkey. His comments came eight days after clashes erupted between the fighters of an armed Iranian-Kurdish group and Iranian soldiers on June 9 near the Kurdish city of Oshnavieh in the province of West Azerbaijan in Iranian Kurdistan. They engaged in clashes after Peshmerga of Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) were ambushed by the Iranian forces, the AVA Today reported. The media outlet said that nine Iranian soldiers were killed and another 17 wounded. The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran KDPI (PDKI) has engaged in an armed struggle with the government of Iran since 1980s accusing Tehran of violating the rights of the Kurds in the country. Iran accuses the armed group of separatism. Kurdish armed groups, such as Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), KDPI and Komala, have been in conflict with the Iranian government for decades, and are seeking greater autonomy for the areas inhibited by ethnic Kurds. These armed Kurdish groups are widely spread across the 60-kilometer border with neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review an appeal from a 45-year-old Dallas man on Texas death row for killing a supervisor at an Amarillo state prison shoe factory. Attorneys for Travis Trevino Runnels had appealed after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2016 rejected arguments that he had deficient legal help at his trial for the 2003 slaying of 38-year-old Stanley Wiley at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice Clements Unit in Amarillo. Wiley's throat was slashed with a knife. He'd worked in the prison system for nearly nine years. Runnels was serving 70 years for a 1997 aggravated robbery conviction from Dallas and apparently was angry about being assigned janitor duty at the shoe factory. He wanted to work at the prison barber shop. The driver of an extended cab pickup surrendered Monday night following a pursuit that ended up in downtown Los Angeles. The pursuit started in the Huntington Park area near the 101 Freeway at Glendale Boulevard. The suspect was allegedly wanted for a stolen vehicle and for stripping parts. NBC NewsChopper4 Bravo and Gil Leyvas were overhead when the suspect arrived in downtown Los Angeles. LAPD took over the pursuit from the California Highway Patrol at approximately 11 p.m. CHP originally took over from the Huntington Park Police Department, who originally signaled for the stop. The driver was selectively obeying traffic laws and keeping speeds at a reasonable level when Newschopper4 picked up the chase. At approximately 11:15 p.m., the driver started driving the wrong way on a one-way street. When police did not follow the suspect down the one-way streets, the driver began to repeat the dangerous practice. The suspect eventually jumped out of his moving vehicle and appeared to rush into a parking structure near the corner of Hope Street and 8th Street with police in hot pursuit. The truck slowly continued to roll for several hundred feet unmanned before police secured the vehicle and confirmed no one else was in the pickup truck. The pursuit ended at approximately 11:30 p.m. with initial reports on the scene that the suspect had been arrested. Nearly $100,000 has been raised in two days for a Colorado family dealing with an unspeakable tragedy following a road rage shooting that left a 13-year-old dead, and a mother and a second younger son in critical condition and "fighting for their lives." The GoFundMe account set up to help the family of Meghan Bigelow has drawn nationwide attention. After sending in a donation, Leann Parkinson wrote, "I am heart broken over this senseless act, the whole world is praying for your family." Abby McMaster of Erie, Colorado, created the page, along with the Bigelow's family and friends, to ask for help with "raising money for this incredible family as they are experiencing such are tragic time and have a long road of recovery ahead of them." A 12-year-old boy told police he saw a driver open fire on his family during a road rage confrontation in Colorado, which killed his older brother and critically wounded his mother and younger brother, authorities said Friday. Police arrested Jeremy Webster, 23, hours after the shooting that killed a 13-year-old boy and also wounded a bystander not related to the family. Webster acknowledged shooting four people in a suburban Denver parking lot and told officers he "has mental health issues," according to a search warrant, which did not specify his mental status. [[238427591, C]] The 12-year-old, who was not injured, told police that his mother and another driver were involved "in some type of road rage incident" near a business complex in the city of Westminster. He said the driver followed the family's car into the parking lot and argued briefly with his mother before opening fire, according to the warrant filed in court Friday. Other witnesses told police that they saw Webster park his black Toyota Corolla behind the woman's vehicle in the middle of the lot. They said Webster shot the woman, then turned and shot two of her children "multiple times," according to the warrant. Police have not identified the victims. The mother, 41, and brother, 8, were in critical condition, while the bystander was less seriously wounded, authorities said. The man was shot while driving with his 9-year-old daughter in a pickup truck, but she was not hurt, the warrant said. The 12-year-old boy told police that his mother took a photo of the driver's license plate on her phone before they got out of the car. Authorities used the photo to look up the vehicle's owner and compared it to witness descriptions. Webster was arrested Thursday evening when police spotted his car traveling on a freeway near Colorado Springs. In the warrant to search Webster's car and home, Westminster Police Detective Matt Calhoon wrote that Webster agreed to speak with police. "Jeremy stated that he has mental health issues and just (started) a new prescribed medication today," the warrant said. "Jeremy admitted that he used his Glock 19 handgun to shoot the above people and that he secured the firearm in the trunk of his vehicle after the shooting." Webster faces charges of first-degree murder, first-degree assault and attempt to commit a felony. He is being held in jail without bond, according to online records. Jail records do not indicate if Webster has an attorney to speak on his behalf. Webster was born in New Jersey and does not have a criminal history in Colorado, according to court and law enforcement records. It's not clear how long he has lived in Colorado. He is due in court Monday. The family of the mother and children requested privacy, police said. The United States announced Tuesday it was leaving the United Nations' Human Rights Council, with Ambassador Nikki Haley calling it "an organization that is not worthy of its name." It was the latest withdrawal by the Trump administration from an international institution. Haley, Trump's envoy to the U.N., said the U.S. had given the human rights body "opportunity after opportunity" to make changes. She lambasted the council for "its chronic bias against Israel" and lamented the fact that its membership includes accused human rights abusers such as China, Cuba, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo. "We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights," Haley said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, appearing alongside Haley at the State Department, said there was no doubt that the council once had a "noble vision." But today we need to be honest," Pompeo said. "The Human Rights Council is a poor defender of human rights." The announcement came just a day after the U.N. human rights chief, Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents. But Haley cited longstanding U.S. complaints that the 47-member council is biased against Israel. She had been threatening the pull-out since last year unless the council made changes advocated by the U.S. "Regrettably, it is now clear that our call for reform was not heeded," Haley said. Still, she suggested the decision need not be permanent, adding that if the council did adopt reforms, "we would be happy to rejoin it." She said the withdrawal notwithstanding, the U.S. would continue to defend human rights at the United Nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office called the U.S. decision "courageous," calling it "an unequivocal statement that enough is enough." The move extends a broader Trump administration pattern of stepping back from international agreements and forums under the president's "America First" policy. Although numerous officials have said repeatedly that "America First does not mean America Alone," the administration has retreated from multiple multilateral accords and consensuses since it took office. Since January 2017, it has announced its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, left the U.N. educational and cultural organization and pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. Other contentious moves have included slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum against key trading partners, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv. Opposition to the decision from human rights advocates was swift. A group of 12 organizations including Save the Children, Freedom House and the United Nations Association-USA said there were "legitimate concerns" about the council's shortcomings but that none of them warranted a U.S. exit. "This decision is counterproductive to American national security and foreign policy interests and will make it more difficult to advance human rights priorities and aid victims of abuse around the world," the organizations said in a joint statement. Added Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch: "All Trump seems to care about is defending Israel." On Twitter, al-Hussein, the U.N. human rights chief, said it was "Disappointing, if not really surprising, news. Given the state of #HumanRights in today's world, the US should be stepping up, not stepping back." And the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank close to the Trump administration, defended the move, calling the council "notably incurious about the human rights situations in some of the world's most oppressive countries." Brett Schaefer, a senior fellow, pointed out that Trump could have withdrawn immediately after taking office but instead gave the council 18 months to make changes. Haley has been the driving force behind withdrawing from the human rights body, unprecedented in the 12-year history of the council. No country has ever dropped out voluntarily. Libya was kicked out seven years ago. The move could reinforce the perception that the Trump administration is seeking to advance Israel's agenda on the world stage, just as it prepares to unveil its long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan despite Palestinian outrage over the embassy relocation. Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, is visiting the Middle East this week as the White House works to lay the groundwork for unveiling the plan. Israel is the only country in the world whose rights record comes up for discussion at every council session, under "Item 7" on the agenda. Item 7 on "Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories" has been part of the council's regular business almost as long as it has existed. The United States' current term on the council ends next year. Although the U.S. could have remained a non-voting observer on the council, a U.S. official said it was a "complete withdrawal" and that the United States was resigning its seat "effective immediately." The official wasn't authorized to comment publicly and insisted on anonymity. That means the council will be left without one of its traditional defenders of human rights. In recent months, the United States has participated in attempts to pinpoint rights violations in places like South Sudan, Congo and Cambodia. The U.S. pullout was bound to have ripple effects for at least two countries at the council: China and Israel. The U.S., as at other U.N. organizations, is Israel's biggest defender. At the rights council, the United States has recently been the most unabashed critic of rights abuses in China whose growing economic and diplomatic clout has chastened some other would-be critics, rights advocates say. There are 47 countries in the Human Rights Council, elected by the U.N.'s General Assembly with a specific number of seats allocated for each region of the globe. Members serve for three-year terms and can serve only two terms in a row. The United States has opted to stay out of the Human Rights Council before: The George W. Bush administration opted against seeking membership when the council was created in 2006. The U.S. joined the body only in 2009 under President Barack Obama. Associated Press writers Jamey Keaten and Edith M. Lederer contributed. What to Know Sen. Bill Nelson will meet with federal officials and get a firsthand look at the shelter, one of three centers in South Florida. The federal government spends tens of millions of dollars a year to accommodate up to 1,200 unaccompanied minors in Miami-Dade. One of Florida's U.S. Senators was among a group of lawmakers that were denied entry Tuesday to a Homestead facility housing some of the nearly 2,000 children that have been separated from their families since the Trump administration's "zero-tolerance" policy on undocumented immigration. Sen. Bill Nelson was expecting to meet with federal officials and get a firsthand look at the shelter, one of three centers for undocumented children in South Florida, but said he and a group that included Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz were denied entry. "They are now embarrassed and don't want us to check on the comfort and welfare of these children," Nelson told reporters outside the facility. "This is absolutely ridiculous, I am ashamed that the administration is doing this." The Democratic lawmakers showed up to see the conditions of the children inside and to see how many were separated from their families at the border. Wasserman Schultz said they were told they could enter earlier in the day by the company contracted to run the facility. "They are trying to cover up and not let the American public see what's really going on here. Are they abusing these kids? Are they sleeping on the floor? Are they in cages like we've seen when video has been shot?" Wasserman Schultz said. "This is an absolute outrage and we will continue to pressure them and press for this until we are allowed into this and other facilities across the country." Nelson, who is seeking re-election this November, has been an outspoken critic of the President's decision to separate families and filed legislation to prohibit Homeland Security officials from continuing the policy. Nora Sandigo, whose nonprofit organization is trying to help at least 70 of those children who ended up in South Florida in the past couple months, said some of the kids are babies. "It is cruel, it is inhumane and it is evil," Sandigo said. "They are alone, they are suffering so much, they are crying cause they do not understand the laws of the country." During a discussion on immigration Monday, Wasserman Schultz said there are hundreds of kids at the Homestead facility. "Im just learning that this Homestead facility has reopened and now has over a thousand kids," she said. The federal government spends tens of millions of dollars a year to accommodate up to 1,200 unaccompanied minors in Miami-Dade and most of them are contracted to be at an emergency shelter in Homestead. It's unknown if any of the recently separated children are at the facility. But the feds issued an emergency contract last month that doubled the capacity from 500 to 1,000. "Why am I having to learn about this from immigration advocates? Because this is a secretive administration that knows that they are doing something immoral and wrong," Wasserman Schultz said. A funeral will be held for fashion designer Kate Spade this week in Kansas City, where she was born. The Kansas City Star reports that services for Spade are planned for 3 p.m. Thursday at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Redemptorist Church. Her father, Frank Brosnahan, says it's the same church where Spade's grandparents wed. Spade was found dead by suicide on June 5 in her New York City home. She was 55 and had a teenage daughter and husband. Spade was working as an accessories editor at Mademoiselle magazine when she launched her company with husband Andy Spade in 1993. In lieu of flowers, the family has asked for donations to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or a Kansas City animal shelter. Here is information on suicide prevention from the National Institute of Mental Health. If you are in crisis, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting Home to 741741. New Yorkers could very soon be able to enjoy beer and hard cider ice cream. However, it will only happen if Gov. Cuomo signs a bill that was passed by the Assembly on Monday, the New York Post reports. The legislation, which was passed by the Senate last week, will legalize the beer and hard-cider ice cream in New York. The Post reports the legislations purpose is to boost the Empire States growing number of craft breweries and farms. New York already has legalized ice cream that tastes like wine. Containers, the Post reports, would have to be labeled and can only contain up to five percent alcohol. Only those 21 and over can purchase it if legislation passes. What to Know Cuomo tweeted VP Pence Tuesday welcoming him to NY, while urging him to look at the Statue of Liberty and remember all that she represents" His tweet included a letter where he opposes the current administration's policy of separating families at the border Cuomo called the policy "inhumane" and a "moral outrage" The scenes of migrant children being separated from their parents at the southern border due to the current administrations child separation policy have taken over the political landscape, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo being one of the most recent politicians to voice his opposition. The Democrat tweeted at Vice President Mike Pence Tuesday, welcoming him to New York while urging him to look at the Statue of Liberty and remember all that she represents. As Governor and as a father, I urge you to end your Administration's inhumane policy separating families at the border, Cuomo said in the tweet, which included an open letter to Pence condemning the mistreatment of immigrant families. Welcome to New York, @VP. While you're here I hope you get a chance to look at the Statue of Liberty and remember all that she represents. As Governor and as a father, I urge you to end your Administration's inhumane policy separating families at the border. pic.twitter.com/ITZQeV42ma Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) June 19, 2018 I write to you as the Governor of New York but also, like you, as the father of three. I cannot bear to imagine the pain and suffering the parents at the border face when their children are taken from them, a portion of Cuomos letter reads. He also urged Pence to end the policy: If the parents anguish does not compel you to end this policy, then the childrens plight must. He called it a moral outrage and an assault of American values. This policy makes it very clear you have forgotten what made America great, Cuomo says. Under the current policy, all unlawful crossings are referred for prosecution a process that moves adults to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service and sends many children to facilities run by the Department of Health and Human Services. Under the Obama administration, such families were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, which did not require separation. Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May. This is not the first time Cuomo has stood up in support of immigrants. Earlier this month, Cuomo asked for a federal investigation into the conduct of immigration officials after an Ecuadorean pizza shop worker was detained while trying to make a delivery to an Army garrison in Brooklyn. Pence was in New York Tuesday to attend an event with Republican Congressman John Katko and tour the Nucor Steel plant in Auburn. Across the street from the Katko event, Pence was met with dozens of people protesting the separation of immigrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border. In a conference call following his open letter post, Cuomo said the state is intending to bring a lawsuit against the federal government regarding the policy contending that there is a violation of the constitutional rights of the parents, there is a violation of the 1997 Flores settlement that underscore family unity and that the government conduct is "outrageous." Top Tri-State News Photos What to Know Schulte took classified info that "concerned, among other things, the intelligence gathering capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Agency." Prosecutors said last month that they expected to bring charges by July. If convicted, he could face decades in prison. A former CIA employee was charged Monday with stealing classified national defense information from the agency that emerged publicly in March 2017, when WikiLeaks began releasing some of the CIA's hacking tools. Joshua Adam Schulte, of Manhattan, was charged in a 13-count superseding indictment returned by a grand jury. He was expected to be arraigned on the charges on Wednesday. According to the indictment, Schulte stole the classified information in 2016 in the Eastern District of Virginia and elsewhere and then transmitted it to an organization that purports to publicly distribute classified, sensitive and confidential information. The organization was not identified in court papers. The indictment also charged Schulte, 29, with the receipt, possession and transportation of child pornography. Schulte already was detained on the child pornography charges. The indictment said Schulte in March and June of 2016 altered a computer system operated by the U.S. Intelligence Agency to grant himself access to the system, enabling him to delate records of his activities and deny others access to the system. In January, a prosecutor said Schulte was the target of an ongoing investigation into the theft of tools that were used by the CIA to spy overseas. WikiLeaks began releasing some of the CIA's hacking tools in March 2017. The U.S. government has all but publicly acknowledged the embarrassing leak from the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence. President Donald Trump told a television host then, "I just want people to know the CIA was hacked, and a lot of things taken." According to the indictment, Schulte took classified information that "concerned, among other things, the intelligence gathering capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Agency." From March 2017 through last November, Schulte tried to cover up his crimes by making false statements during an interview with the FBI, the indictment said. The indictment sought the forfeiture of any property Schulte obtained directly or indirectly from any foreign government, party or military force as a result of the crimes. Prosecutors said last month that they expected to bring charges by July. Schulte's lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, said in May that her client was "deeply saddened" that he might face espionage-related charges. On Monday, she said: "When all the evidence is clear, he's hardly the villain that the government tries to make him out to be." In a release, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence "can pose a grave threat to our national security, potentially endangering the safety of all Americans." William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the New York FBI office, said Schulte "utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims. As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of classified Information." The CIA referred questions about the charges to the Justice Department, which issued the release. Schulte faces various new charges, including illegal gathering of national defense information, illegal transmission of lawfully possessed national defense information, unauthorized access to a computer to obtain classified information, theft of government property, causing transmission of a harmful computer program, information, code or command. Included among the charges was an allegation that he engaged in criminal copyright infringement from September 2015 to last August by making publicly available on a computer network thousands of copyrighted movies, television shows and audio recordings. If convicted, he could face decades in prison. Associated Press Writer Deb Riechmann contributed to this report. Delaware's governor said he will not deploy National Guard troops to assist with the growing crisis along the United States-Mexico border until President Donald Trump does an about-face on separating immigrants from their children. Hours later, his counterparts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey followed suit refusing to be in the business of splitting up migrant families. In a series of tweets Tuesday, Democratic Gov. John Carney said he "can't in good conscience send Delawareans to help" given a Trump administration policy that has torn apart families seeking asylum when attempting crossing the border. Under normal circumstances, we wouldnt hesitate to answer the call. But given what we know about the policies currently in effect at the border, I cant in good conscience send Delawareans to help with that mission. Governor John Carney (@JohnCarneyDE) June 19, 2018 Carney's announcement was followed up by similar sentiments from Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. "While Pennsylvania proudly sent troops to help Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico in the last year to assist with disaster relief and Governor Wolf believes we need to protect our borders from real threats, he opposes state resources being used to further President Trump's policy of separating young children from their parents," Wolf spokesman J.J. Abbott said. Meanwhile, Murphy preemptively signed an executive order Tuesday afternoon banning state resources from being used to separate families of immigrants. "Ever since our founding and even before our nation has been a beacon for families seeking freedom and yearning for a better life. President Trump has turned this promise on its head by doubling-down on his inhumane and cruel policy of separating families," Murphy said in a statement. It has no basis in law or Scripture, no matter how many times the President, the Vice President, or anyone who tries to defend this policy tries to spin it. This is a matter of human rights, human dignity, and basic humanity. As of Tuesday afternoon, neither state had received a new federal request to dispatch troops to the border. The separation policy has drawn outrage from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and sparked a national uproar about the treatment of undocumented immigrants. Trump strongly defended the practice, which has been in the works since February 2017, saying the U.S. "will not be a migrant camp." He also inaccurately said Democratic lawmakers were holding up legislation to change the policy. In fact, the Trump administration changed longstanding practices and it remains within the president's power to reverse course. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also has said, "We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does, for doing the job that the American people expect us to do." From May 5 to June 9 when the zero tolerance rule was fully-enforced, more than 2,230 families were apprehended at the border, a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told NBC News. Of those families, 2,342 children were taken from their parents' custody. Many children were taken to temporary detention facilities, including one inside an old Walmart in South Texas. News outlets have been barred from widely touring these centers and from filming inside of them. But the federal government issued video showing children inside of cages reminiscent of prison cells. In April, Trump called for National Guard help in securing the nation's southern border. Some bordering states have agreed to help, but support from other states has been anemic. Carney said his office received a new request on Tuesday to send troops. Carney is not alone in refusing to assist with security effort because of the separation policy. The governors of Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Connecticut all have done the same. These governors include Democrats and Republicans. "If President Trump revokes the current inhumane policy of separating children from their parents, Delaware will be the first in line to assist our sister states in securing the border," Carney said. Russia plans to propose increasing oil production by the OPEC+ deal members by 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd), the Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said. "The market is growing, (oil) demand is growing and we already see a balance in the market," Novak said. The minister did not say how much Russia may increase its production, adding that it depends on each companys capacity. He also said that it would be reasonable to introduce increases in the third quarter when oil demand is highest and to meet in September to see how the market has reacted. Russias energy minister reiterated that OPEC should consider a 1.5 million-barrel-a-day increase to output quotas because the market is almost balanced. Novak stressed that high seasonal demand could translate into a supply deficit next quarter if OPEC and its allies dont move to raise production. Russias push for a big ramp-up contrasts with the more modest increase being debated by OPEC ahead of this weeks summit. Members are discussing a proposal to deliver 300,000 to 600,000 barrels a day of additional oil to global markets over the next few months, according to people briefed on the talks. Russias proposed 1.5 million-barrel increase would be allocated proportionally among all members of the group. That means only about two-thirds of the volume would likely flow to the market because countries including Venezuela and Mexico are unable to raise output. Earlier, Bloomberg wrote that Iran, Venezuela and Iraq intends to block a proposal to increase oil production. But Novak said that he had no official information that some countries would block a decision to boost output. A senior analyst of 'Uralsib Capital', Alexei Kokin, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that the format of OPEC + found itself in an unexpected situation, when the total oil production by 2.8 million barrels per day is below the quotas established in 2016. "The decision to cut production is overfulfilled by at least 1 million barrels - none of the members of the agreement expected this. Even if we raise the total production by 1.5 million barrels per day, it will still be 1.3 million barrels a day lower than it should be, according to quotas," he drew attention. Nobody could have expected that Venezuela's output will decline to that low, that oil production will decline both in Mexico and Angola. In fact, only Russia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are able to increase production substantially," Alexei Kokin said. In this regard, the problem of OPEC + is not how the market will react to the increase of quotas, but how to achieve the growth of total production after its fall. "Novak is guided by the demand estimates in the second half of the year, given by the IEA or OPEC, his proposal is reasonable enough, as it will help to avoid a deficit, but it is unclear how to do it. The US Department of Energy does not see any risk of supply shortages and rising prices, some analysts say that consumption growth in China, India and other countries will start to decline by the end of the year due to high oil prices and trade wars. So it is likely that Novak's offer will not be taken literally," the senior analyst of 'Uralsib Capital' said. The expert added that it is hardly worth considering this proposal as the beginning of Russia's soft exit from the deal. "I would say that Novak's statement is not an attempt to abolish quotas, just to increase them, which indicates the desire to transfer interaction between producing countries to a permanent regime," Alexei Kokin concluded. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Hotel as Vice President Mike Pence spoke amid national outrage over the separation of migrant children from their parents along the U.S.-Mexico border. Pence touched down in Philadelphia early Tuesday evening to attend a fundraiser at the Rittenhouse Hotel with Scott Wagner, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania. Outside the event, hundreds of protesters descended on Center City during the Stop Separating Families rally to oppose President Donald Trumps immigration policy. Several laid out children's shoes in solidarity with the families being torn apart at the border. The crowd chanted "City of brotherly love says no," and "Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants are welcome here" during the protest. One woman also walked through the crowd for at least an hour with a speaker playing the sounds of a baby crying. Tensions began to rise later during the protest when a federal security detail car tried to move down Walnut Street. Some of the protesters blocked the car and police stepped in, leading to a confrontation, officials said. The crowd chanted, "Our streets" for about 15 minutes until police were able to move them. Police say one person was arrested during the incident. They set out childrens shoes. Protesting the seperation of kids from their parents happening at the border @NBCPhiladelphia pic.twitter.com/mhMqNUCOcc Miguel Martinez-Valle (@MiguelMValle) June 19, 2018 An unapologetic Trump doubled down on his policy earlier in the day, declaring that the U.S. "will not be a migrant camp" on his watch. But images of sobbing children held in fenced cages fueled a growing chorus of condemnation from both political parties and even four former first ladies. The children are being held separately from parents who are being prosecuted under the administration's "zero-tolerance" policy for illegal border crossings. [[485964571, C]] Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro joined other attorneys general throughout the country in signing a letter opposing the practice. "The family separation policy is un-American and violates the core principles and values of our nation, Shapiro said in a statement after sending a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. President Trump has the sole authority to rescind his policy and should stop using children as leverage in political battles. Delaware Gov. John Carney also denied a request to send National Troop guards down to the border. In a series of tweets Tuesday, the Democratic governor said he "can't in good conscience send Delawareans to help" given a Trump administration policy that has torn apart families seeking asylum when attempting to cross the border. Carney's announcement was followed up by similar sentiments from Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who signed an executive order in the afternoon banning state resources from being used to separate families of immigrants. Tuesday night's event benefits the Republican Governors Association, and Pence and Wagner both spoke. The association did not release details on how many people attended the private event or how much they paid to get in. Wagner is challenging the re-election bid by Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, who began June with a nearly 10-to-1 cash advantage after Wagner spent heavily to win a three-way Republican primary last month. Hundreds Gather to Protest Pence in Philly Amid Outrage Over Separation of Immigrant Families The fundraiser was closed to the public and media, but NBC10 covered the demonstration. Follow us for complete coverage. Breweries in Santa Barbara and El Dorado Hills made the best beer in California for 2018, according to officials with the California State Fair. Judges sampled more than 1,500 entries from 230 breweries this year in the competition considered the third largest in the U.S., state fair officials said. Only those beers that are brewed and available for sale in the state of California were eligible. Captain Fattys Brewery in Goleta earned the Best in Show honor for a Berliner-Style Weisse called "Kalliope." Brewery of Year was awarded to the Mraz Brewing Company in El Dorado Hills. Beer aficionados can sample the best of the best at a special Best of California Brewfest on Saturday, July 21 at the California State Fair. Several San Diego breweries were awarded first place ribbons in various categories. Eppig Brewing was honored as top International Lager for its Natural Bridge: Special Lager. Rip Current Brewing earned top marks for its Bock category entry of Breakline Bock and first place in the Dopplebock category with Delaminator Doppelbock. Karl Strauss Brewing Company was recognized for the best German-Style Wheat Ale with its Windansea Wheat. Vistas Owl Farm Unique was named the best Herb & Spice Beer for its entry Ginger Bloom. Temeculas Garage Brewing Company was honored with the first-place finish in the Honey Beer category for its Green Tea-Bird beer and first in Sweet Stouts for Marshmallow Milk Stout. Burgeon Beer Company in Carlsbad beat out 32 entries in the Coffee Beer category to earn first place for Dutchmans Pipe. Inland Wharf Brewing Company in Murrieta won first in the British Strong Ales category for its Barleys Revenge beer. Pizza Port Ocean Beach won first place for Athenas Beer in the American Porter & Stout category. Carlsbads Culver Beer Company finished first in the Belgian Strong Ale category with Tiger Ride. Burning Beard Brewing Company in El Cajon was recognized for its Klausbier session beer. See the entire list of results for the state fair's beer competition here. An unapologetic President Donald Trump defended his administration's border-protection policies Monday in the face of rising national outrage over the forced separation of migrant children from their parents. Calling for tough action against illegal immigration, Trump declared the U.S. "will not be a migrant camp" on his watch. Democrats have turned up the pressure over the policy, and some Republicans have joined the chorus of criticism. Former first lady Laura Bush has called the policy "cruel" and "immoral" while GOP Sen. Susan Collins expressed concern about it and a former adviser to Trump questioned using the policy to pressure Democrats on immigration legislation. In a guest column for the Washington Post Sunday, Mrs. Bush made some of the strongest comments yet from a Republican. "I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart," she wrote. She compared it to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which she called "one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history." Former first lady Michelle Obama later shared Mrs. Bush's post about the op-ed on Twitter, writing, "Sometimes truth transcends party." Former first lady Rosalynn Carter released a statement Monday calling the "policy and practice" of separating children from parents at the border "disgraceful and a shame to our country." Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weighed in Monday, calling the administration's "zero tolerance" policy "a moral and humanitarian crisis." Speaking at an awards lunch for the Women's Forum of New York, Clinton said what was happening to families at the U.S.-Mexico border is "horrific." "Every human being with a sense of compassion and decency should be outraged," Clinton said. Hillary Clinton commented on migrant children being separated from their families at the border today during a speech at the Womens Forum of New York, saying in part, every person with a sense of compassion and decency should be outraged. Underscoring the emotional tension, first lady Melania Trump, who has tended to stay out of contentious policy debates, also waded into the issue. Her spokeswoman said that Mrs. Trump believes "we need to be a country that follows all laws," but also one "that governs with heart." "Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform," spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said. President Trump continued to cast blame on Democrats Monday, tweeting: "Why don't the Democrats give us the votes to fix the world's worst immigration laws? Where is the outcry for the killings and crime being caused by gangs and thugs, including MS-13, coming into our country illegally?" Later, he again blamed Democrats during an event. President Donald Trump and some congressional Republicans have been claiming a law is forcing the Trump administration to separate migrant children from their parents at the border. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen refused Monday to apologize for enforcing immigration laws that result in the separation of children from their parents. Speaking to reporters in the White House briefing room Monday, she rejected criticism accusing DHS of inhumane and immoral actions and repeatedly deflected blame to Congress. "Congress and the court created this problem, and Congress alone can fix it," Nielsen said. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defended the practice of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that her department is merely following laws. Speaking at a White House briefing Monday, Nielsen said the issue has been growing for years, the product of loopholes that have created an open border. Nielsen said the immigration crisis that has led to families being separated is not new to the Trump administration. She said the issue has been growing for years and is the product of loopholes that have created an open border. Nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new "zero-tolerance" policy that refers all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. U.S. protocol prohibits detaining children with their parents because the children are not charged with a crime and the parents are. As of Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services has 11,785 minors in its care, a number that jumped by 500 in the past two weeks and that includes all minors at all shelters and facilities in the unaccompanied alien children program, a department official told NBC News. [NATL] Photos Show Children Kept in Cages With Foil Sheets in South Texas Border Patrol Facility The current holding areas have drawn widespread attention after journalists gained access to one site Sunday. At a McAllen, Texas, detention center hundreds of migrant children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets. On an audio recording released Monday by Propublica, children can be heard wailing inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility as a Border Patrol agent jokes, We have an orchestra here. The audio was posted by the news outlet Monday but its origin has not been independently verified by NBC News. At the current pace, the number of migrant children being held would hit 20,695 by the beginning of August. Nielsen said that releasing parents with their children amounts to a "get out of jail free card" policy for those in the country illegally. She said she has not seen the photos or the audio released Monday from border detention centers. Trump asserted Monday that children "are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth" as a way to enter the United States. He tweeted: "Has anyone been looking at the Crime taking place south of the border," calling it "historic." The signs of splintering GOP support come after longtime Trump ally, the Rev. Franklin Graham, called the policy "disgraceful." Several religious groups, including some conservative ones, have pushed to stop the practice of separating immigrant children from their parents. On Friday, the U.S. Government began bringing migrant children separated from their parents to a new tent city detention center in Tornillo, Texas. This footage was shot outside the facility. Former Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci said Monday on CNN that it "doesn't feel right" for the Trump administration to blame Democrats for separating parents and children at the southern border as a way of pressuring Democrats into negotiating on a Republican immigration bill. Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said she favors tighter border security, but expressed deep concerns about the child separation policy. "What the administration has decided to do is to separate children from their parents to try to send a message that if you cross the border with children, your children are going to be ripped away from you," she said. "That's traumatizing to the children who are innocent victims, and it is contrary to our values in this country." Trump plans to meet with House Republicans on Tuesday to discuss pending immigration legislation amid an election-season debate over one of his favorite issues. The House is expected to vote this week on a bill pushed by conservatives that may not have enough support to pass, and a compromise measure with key proposals supported by the president. The White House has said Trump would sign either of those. Democratic Rep. Beto O'Rourke led protestors in a Father's Day march to the new "tent city" in Tornillo, Texas, that will house migrant children separated from their parents upon arrival in the United States. This pressure is coming as some White House officials have tried to distance themselves from the policy. "Nobody likes" breaking up families and "seeing babies ripped from their mothers' arms," said presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway. Conway rejected the idea that Trump was using the kids as leverage to force Democrats to negotiate on immigration and his long-promised border wall, even after Trump tweeted Saturday: "Democrats can fix their forced family breakup at the Border by working with Republicans on new legislation, for a change!" Asked whether the president was willing to end the policy, she said: "The president is ready to get meaningful immigration reform across the board." To Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the administration is "using the grief, the tears, the pain of these kids as mortar to build our wall. And it's an effort to extort a bill to their liking in the Congress." [NATL] Protestors Pressure Trump Administration to Reunite Migrant Children With Their Families Schiff said the practice was "deeply unethical" and that Republicans' refusal to criticize Trump represented a "sad degeneration" of the GOP, which he said had become "the party of lies." The House proposals face broad opposition from Democrats, and even if a bill does pass, the closely divided Senate seems unlikely to go along. The House moderates will lose all credibility if they accept this sham of a bill, which is extreme and drastically cuts immigration in ways unacceptable to the Senate and the American people," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement on Monday. "It holds Dreamers and kids who have been separated from their parents hostage in order to cut legal immigration and enact the hard rights immigration agenda. If the House moderates really want to get something done on immigration, they should not be duped by their leadership for a bill that they know isnt going anywhere. Trump's former chief strategist, meanwhile, said Republicans would face steep consequences for pushing the compromise bill because it provides a path to citizenship for young "Dreamer" immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. Steve Bannon argued that effort risked alienating Trump's political base and contributing to election losses in November, when Republicans hope to preserve their congressional majorities. Jill Colvin of the Associated Press contributed to this report. What to Know The FBI says they now know more than ever about the man who raped five hotel housekeepers in the D.C. area in 2002 and 2003. Authorities used DNA to create an age-progressed composite sketch of the man. D.C. prosecutors were able to use the rapist's DNA to secure an indictment before the end of the 15-year statute of limitations. The FBI says DNA evidence proves that a single man raped five housekeepers at D.C.-area hotels more than 15 years ago and they need help from the public to find him. DNA evidence definitively linked the man to six violent attacks, and he is suspected in three similar attacks dating back to 1998. An age-progressed composite sketch based on the man's DNA shows how officials believe he looks. Although federal and local officials do not yet know the name of the attacker, the U.S. Attorney's Office for D.C. used DNA evidence to secure an indictment on May 1 related to attacks in D.C. hotels in 2003. This marks the first time D.C. prosecutors have indicted a DNA profile. D.C. has a 15-year statute of limitations for sexual abuse, and the charges in the two attacks in D.C. were about to expire. The "D.C.-area hotel rapist" is an African-American man who stands between 5-foot-7 and 5-foot-10 and has a medium to stocky build, D.C. prosecutors said. He has black hair, brown eyes and a medium to dark complexion. He is now in his late 30s to late 40s. FBI He preyed on women as young as 18 and old as 68 in Northwest D.C.; Arlington, Virginia; Silver Spring, Maryland; and Greenbelt, Maryland. In the majority of the cases, the rapist entered hotel rooms and attacked women working as housekeepers. U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie Liu said officials hope the DNA evidence, sketch and indictment can finally bring the cold case to a close. Working with the public and our law enforcement partners, we are hopeful that we finally will be able to hold this serial rapist accountable for his brazen crimes," Liu said in a statement. "DNA evidence has enabled us to push this case forward and we are hopeful that this DNA profile, and the community, can help us finally achieve justice. Despite the passage of time, we have never forgotten these victims." The FBI provided photos of a gold ring and a box cutter the rapist left behind. FBI D.C. prosecutors say the following attacks in D.C., Maryland and Virginia have been linked to the same man: Sunday, May 26, 2002, at approximately 6:50 a.m. An 18-year-old woman was sexually assaulted in the offenders vehicle on the 4000 block of Penwood Street in Hyattsville, Maryland, after having been picked up from the 3400 block of Rhode Island Avenue in Northeast D.C. The vehicle was described as a small black four-door car, unknown make and model. Sunday, December 1, 2002, at approximately 2:30 p.m. A 31-year-old female housekeeper was sexually assaulted in a hotel room at the Hilton Hotel on Colesville Road in Silver Spring, Maryland. During the assault, the offender brandished a red-handled box cutter, which was recovered on the scene. The box cutter had the name Debbie handwritten on it. Sunday, May 11, 2003, at approximately 3:15 p.m. A 27-year-old female housekeeper was sexually assaulted in a hotel room at the Renaissance Hotel on 9th Street in Northwest D.C. The offenders ring came off during the assault and was recovered on the scene. Friday, May 23, 2003, at approximately 10:30 a.m. A 68-year-old female housekeeper was sexually assaulted in a hotel room at the Jefferson Hotel on 16th Street in Northwest D.C. The offender bound the victims hands with a necktie during the assault. Friday, June 6, 2003, at approximately 10 a.m. A 29-year-old female housekeeper was sexually assaulted in a hotel room at the Holiday Inn Hotel on Jefferson Davis Highway in Arlington, Virginia. The offender brandished a cord during the assault. Monday, June 9, 2003, at approximately 12:28 p.m. A 22-year-old female housekeeper was sexually assaulted in a hotel room at the Marriott Courtyard Hotel on Golden Triangle Drive in Greenbelt, Maryland. Thirty D.C.-area hotels with unionized staffs have something new for workers: panic buttons. Working alone in empty rooms, hotel housekeepers often face sexual assaults and harassment. Last year, 30 hotels in the D.C. area with unionized staffs provided workers with panic buttons. The attacker should be considered armed and dangerous. Anyone with information for law enforcement is asked to call D.C. police at 202-727-9099. Tips can be sent anonymously to 50411. A combined reward of as much as $45,000 is offered by the FBI and local police departments. If you recognize this person, if this box cutter or ring are familiar, if you have seen these items before, we need you to call law enforcement and provide the information," FBI Special Agent in Charge Matthew J. DeSarno said in a statement. "The public's assistance is vital in solving this case. Stay with News4 for more details on this developing story. Montgomery County police are hoping to find a rape suspect through science. The department hired a technology company to create a sketch of the suspect using the suspect's DNA. News4's Chris Gordon reports. Local groups are celebrating a historic milestone in the eradication of slavery Tuesday. The celebration, Juneteenth, commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. On this day 150 years ago, Union Gen. Gordon Granger and 2,000 federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to enforce the emancipation of slaves. In 2003, D.C. passed legislation that made Juneteenth a District holiday, according to the National Juneteenth Holiday Campaign. In honor of Juneteenth, the National Museum of African American History and Culture's Sweet Home Cafe is holding a meet-and-greet with celebrity chef Carla Hall and serving up her "tangy chow chow." A community learning event hosted by ONE DC will also be held at 5 p.m. Tuesday at the African American Civil War Museum. The governors of Maryland and Virginia ordered the recall of members of the National Guard they sent to the U.S-Mexico border and vowed not to deploy other resources until a federal policy of separating immigrant children from their families is rescinded. Gov. Larry Hogan said Maryland would recall the four members of the National Guard he sent to the U.S.-Mexico border. Later Tuesday, Gov. Ralph Northam said Virginia also would recall four soldiers and pull a helicopter from the border. Hogan tweeted that Washington has failed repeatedly to deliver needed immigration reform. The governor says Congress and President Donald Trump's administration "must step up and work together to fix our broken system." Hogan says immigration enforcement efforts "should focus on criminals, not separating innocent children from their families." Northam said in a statement that Virginia has a "responsibility to stand up to policies or actions that run afoul of the values that define us as Americans." When Virginia deployed these resources to the border, we expected that they would play a role in preventing criminals, drug runners and other threats to our security from crossing into the United Statesnot supporting a policy of arresting families and separating children from their parents," he said. One week later, and there's still no word on a winner in Maine's Democratic primary for governor. In the nation's first statewide election to use ranked choice voting, results are coming in slowly. "We're willing to wait a little bit more time, if necessary, to get a better result and ensure we have a better process," said Kyle Bailey, campaign manager for the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting. Bailey's campaign led a referendum effort to implement RCV in Maine. Instead of choosing one ballot, voters rank their choices under RCV. If none of the candidates receive a majority of votes, instant run-off elections calculate voters' second and third choices until one candidate gets above 50 percent. In the Republican primary, instant run offs were avoided because businessman Shawn Moody won more than 50 percent of the vote in a four-way race. But there were seven candidates on the Democratic side, and candidates Janet Mills and Adam Cote are just a few percentage points apart. To tabulate the run offs, the Maine Secretary of State needs all of the ballots in one centralized place. Last week, a courier service drove to every single municipality in Maine, picking up ballots or thumb drives with ballot information. The Secretary of State had hoped to have results by Tuesday, but a computer glitch set them back. Their computers were not reading thumb drives from five Maine towns, so state police had to drive to those towns and pick up hard copies of ballots. Now, they are hoping to have results Wednesday morning. "This [timeline] is probably going to be typical," said Kristen Muszynski, spokesperson for the Secretary of State. "Unless we make a major change to the process, this is how it's going to have to be handled." In an escalating trade war with China, an American crustacean is caught in the cross hairs. Lobster has landed on the list of American goods now facing a 25-percent tariff from the Chinese government. "It's a very big deal for my company," said Stephanie Nadeau, the owner of the Lobster Company in Arundel, Maine. She said 70 percent of her lobster exports go to Asian markets. Now, she worries she can't compete with Canadian lobster. "The Canadian lobsters look the same, act the same, but now cost 25-percent less," she said. The new tariffs are retaliation against the United States for imposing a 25-percent tariff on certain Chinese goods. "The tariffs are not great news for our industry," said Matt Jacobson, Executive Director of the Maine Lobster Marketing Collaborative. "China is a market we have invested in and we hope a solution can be found." China has become an important export market for Maine lobster in the last decade. An emerging middle class in China can now afford the luxury item, and it has become a popular dish for the Chinese New Year celebrations every winter. "What used to be a traditional slow time in Maine lobster business, January, February and March, is actually the busiest time of year in China," said Nadeau. "It has enabled me to employ more people on a year-round basis." Nadeau said if Chinese customers buy less American lobster due to the new tariffs, there could be an excess of lobster supply. That would drive prices down, and jeopardize Maine jobs. Maine's Congressional delegation saw this coming. Senators Collins and King, and Representatives Pingree and Poliquin held a summit with US Trade Representatives two weeks ago, and told them that they feared retaliatory tariffs from China would put Maine's lobster industry in a pinch. In a statement, the Congressional delegation says it will reach out to the USTR again, outlining concerns with these latest Chinese tariffs. They go into effect July 6. Authorities in Maine are searching for a woman who was last seen leaving a hospital on Thursday. Thirty-six-year-old Katy Kinney was last seen leaving Maine Medical Center around 11 a.m. on June 14, Portland police tell WCSH. Kinney reportedly has been living in Gorham since moving to the state a year ago. She was last seen wearing pajama pants, slippers and a tank top. She's described as being about 5'4". Anyone with information on Kinney's whereabouts is asked to call police. Russia's military carried out a charitable action in Sheikh al-Bakur district, Syrian city of Aleppo, the Russian Centre for Reconciliation of Opposing Sides in Syria said "People received food sets and more than a ton of fresh-baked bread," the statement posted on the center's website says. Over the past day, 168 people have returned to Homs province, and 116 people to the Eastern Ghouta. Authorities in Maine say two people were killed in a crash over the weekend. Police say the crash happened Sunday night in Sanford. Investigators say 20-year-old Blake Deslauriers, of Springvale, was speeding when the vehicle left the road, went airborne and struck a tree. Deslauriers and his passenger, 37-year-old Danielle Harrison, of Sanford, were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash. Vermont is less than two weeks away from ushering in a new era of legalized marijuana, months after Republican Gov. Phil Scott authorized rules passed by the state legislature in January. Ahead of that change, members of law enforcement are preparing to adapt. Vermont State Police just sent a training bulletin to troopers, as the state readies for the legalization of recreational marijuana July 1. "Its going to be a change," Capt. Jim Whitcomb of the Vermont State Police observed Tuesday. The new law removes the civil penalty for possession of an ounce or less of pot for folks 21 and up, and takes away the criminal penalty for growing a handful of plants at home. The document recently sent to troopers lays out what it all means for them, and reminds them that good partnerships with their local states attorneys should really help navigating many situations. The force is also expecting operational changes, Whitcomb noted. "We are looking at potentially purchasing items like scales for cruisers," he said. "Our K-9s are now not being trained to indicate marijuana and thats across the board in Vermont." Laura Subin with the Vermont Coalition to Regulate Marijuana sees the new law as a modest criminal justice reform step, and said she expects police should have fewer reasons for searches of property. "I really hope that this will be a positive change," Subin told necn. "There is a culture that harassed people for being marijuana users. And I also think that people of color and poor people suffered way more than others in the era of prohibition." Many acts will still be against state rules for the tens of thousands of regular marijuana users in Vermont: including selling pot, using it around kids, and driving high. "Were going to be aggressive in our pursuit of impaired operators, and that does not change," Whitcomb said. State police added that adapting to the new era of legal marijuana goes beyond the recently-distributed training bulletin. They expect their policies and approaches will continue to change, as case law is developed. Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo announced on Tuesday that she would not be sending National Guard units from the state if asked to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border because of President Donald Trump's family separation policy. On her Twitter account, the Democratic governor wrote "The Trump Administration's family separation policy is immoral, unjust, and un-American." "I have not yet been asked, but if I am, I will not deploy units from the Rhode Island National Guard to the southern border to support the Administration's policy that is ripping families apart," she continued. She finished by writing "the President alone can end family separation. I'm standing with all good-hearted people in our nation and calling on President Trump to end this inhumane policy." Raimondo's announcement mirrored Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker's decision, which was announced the day before. President Donald Trump was scheduled to meet with congressional Republicans on Tuesday as outrage over the administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy continued to heat up. Nearly 2,000 migrant children were separated from their parents during a six-week period in April and May following U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' announcement of the policy, which refers all cases of illegal entry for criminal prosecution. [ Check out our corporate guide to addressing IoT security. ] HPE's pledge to pump billions of dollars into developing edge systems shines a light on the company's ambition to be the leading end-to-end computing infrastructure provider. CEO Antonio Neri made the investment announcement at the company's Discover conference Tuesday in Las Vegas, in his first appearance at the company's annual event as chief executive. He took over the CEO role from Meg Whitman in February. Neri said that HPE will use the funds to advance the development of "intelligent edge" products, services and engineering initiatives. Edge-network computing, he said, presents opportunities for enterprises as they decentralize their data capture and analytics capabilities to capitalize on the flood of information generated by IoT and mobility technology. Neri noted that Gartner predicts that by 2022, 75 percent of enterprise- generated data will be created at the edge. The edge is where most of your data is being created; we live in a time where data lives everywhere and so will your clouds, said Neri. We believe the enterprises of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data driven I believe this next revolution requires an edge-to-cloud architecture." HPE will use the $4 billion to advance the development of edge products, services and engineering initiatives throughout the organization, in areas including connectivity, security, automation and AI, Neri said. Aruba Networks will play a central role in these initiatives, Neri said. HPE acquired Aruba in 2015 for $3 billion, to accelerate its efforts in wireless management software, integrated security, analytic tools and other technology to maximize the potential of Wi-Fi. Edge computing is the next big opportunity HPE's investment comes at a time when IT providers as well as enterprises see growth opportunity in edge technology. "The edge is the next big opportunity for all of use," Neri said. Industry analysts agree. "We're going to see increasing growth at the edge," said Crawford Del Prete, executive vice president officer, at IDC, speaking in a live HPE broadcast from the Discover conference. "We cant process data fast enough by moving it across the internet," he said, noting that that applies particularly to autonomous automotive systems that need to recognize objects in split seconds. HPE already has a loyal following among data center managers, and competes with Dell EMC for the top spot in the enterprise server market. In the first quarter of the year, HPE generated $3.3 billion in server sales, capturing 19.9 percent of the revenue generated in the market, coming in a close second to Dell EMC, which had $3.6 billion in sales and 21.5 percent revenue market share, according to IDC. HPE shipped 400,958 servers in the quarter to Dell EMC's 555,792, IDC said. HPE expands from a strong base in the data center That strength in the enterprise server market, as well as its broad storage portfolio, puts HPE top of mind to volume technology buyers in enterprises as the company moves beyond the data center to the hybrid cloud, edge networks and the mobile world. HPE's ambitions to be an end-to-end computing-infrastructure provider can be seen its move to add Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services capabilities to its GreenLake pay-per-use offerings, providing a turnkey, managed service to deploy public and on-premises clouds. The announcement about the expansion of the GreenLake service was made a few hours before Neri took to the Discover stage. In addition, HPE has been working to add automation and intelligence to its systems for a while. For example, last November the company said it was adding an AI-based recommendation engine to the InfoSight predictive analytics platform for flash storage, taking another step toward what it calls the autonomous data center, where systems modify themselves to run more efficiently. In his keynote, Neri said InfoSight will be brought across the company's complete product portfolio. HPE already has a lead in converged systems for the edge network. Last year at Discover it announced its EdgeLine Services Platform (ESP), a software foundation layer on which the company and its partners can build and plug in apps to manage data from a variety of different sources. The software runs on the company's converged EdgeLine devices. By adding analytics to edge devices, companies can get insights to improve customer experiences as well as their own bottom line, Neri said. Edge computing, particularly in the Internet of Things, is used to help construct smart buildings and cities, more efficient factory floors and retail experiences, and it's a big opportunity for vendors like IBM, Cisco, GE and HPE. Leadership in IoT is up for grabs There is growing competition among the players to stake claims in IoT. "There really isnt an end-to-end IoT solution," said Peter Havart-Simkin, a research director at the IoT Group within Gartner's Technology and Service Provider research group. "There are no dominant players and as far as Gartner is concerned this is the top of the hype cycle," Havart-Simkin said, in an interview before Neri made the investment announcement. There are more than 1,800 companies that claim to be involved in IoT-related technology, Havart-Simkin said, and a shakeout is coming. HPE's investment puts it in a position to not only survive the shakeout, but snap up smaller companies with innovative edge-related technology. Youth council gives youngsters a civic voice NEWBURY Youth Council has elected a new junior mayor and deputy mayor. Daniel Parnell has been appointed junior mayor and Charlotte Beaven will assist him as deputy. Both have both been attending monthly meetings of the youth council since last year. The youth council, supported by Newbury Town Council, allows young Newburians a voice on local issues and meets at the town hall. In recent months, it has been looking into work experience for under-16s and student travel. Daniel, a Year 13 student at Trinity School, said: I joined the Newbury Youth Council as a way to be more involved in the community. I saw it as an exceptional opportunity to enable change and work with local people about local issues. It is this passion for helping out others and working within the community that has led me to wanting to undertake public service once my studies have finished. Charlotte, who is hoping to study veterinary science at university, said she was excited to take up her post, which would enable her to become more involved in the community. She is currently enrolled at Newbury College. At its next meeting, on July 12 (7pm), the youth council will welcome Newbury MP Richard Benyon, for a talk on The Life of an MP. Anyone wanting to attend should contact Gillian or Kym on (01635) 35486 or email towncouncil@newbury.gov.uk Romilla Arber invites you to rise to the challenge and discover the healthy properties of natural foods Why eat real bread? What is real bread? For a start real bread has three or four ingredients in it. Industrially-produced bread can have as many as 30, most of which you will not be able to pronounce, let alone recognise as food ingredients. Real bread is made using traditional methods and is allowed to rise and prove at natural temperatures. It is not over-enhanced with excess yeast either, which can have a bloating effect on the stomach. We run some great bread-making courses at Honesty Cookery School. While I am on the subject of eating real food, I read with interest recently about research conducted in France about the link between processed food and cancer. The study is ground-breaking in that it looked at the medical records and eating habits of 105,000 adults, a very large number when compared to previous research of this type. The study showed that a 10-per-cent rise in ultra processed food consumed was linked to a 12-per-cent increase in cancers. The rise in breast cancer was particularly striking. The study was conducted in France, one of the few countries in the world that is happy to warn its population against eating highly-processed food and which is also fiercely protective of its food culture. I am really pleased that as part of this research the study has sought a way of differentiating between those processed foods that are not too bad for you and those that are. After all, processed food by strict definition can include cheese, yoghurt, anything that is not raw or minimally processed. Ultra processed foods by contrast are food-like substances that are made to appear like food items, but are really formulations created by the use of additives and chemical substances. They probably do start off with some food involved and they end up looking like food, but it is what happens in between and what is added during the processing that causes the problems to our health. I would put industrially-produced bread in this category. Anyway, make your stand against ultra processed food by making or buying real bread. Once you start doing this you will probably start to question the choices you make about other food and start to read ingredient labels a little more carefully and ultimately enjoy all the health benefits that this will bring you. As George Orwell wrote in the Road to Wigan Pier: A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. Wise words. Here James Allen offers some suggestions that are not too heavy on the pocket but offer a lot of flavour The Chateau Le Peyrat La Chapelle, Castillon Cotes de Bordeaux I thought I would start with a look at the actual value of wine in the bottle you have just bought. The diagram above from Bibendum, published last year, illustrates the point I want to make. There is a sweet spot in the 10 to 15 bottle range where you get a really significant value of wine without having to spend a minor fortune on the bottle. So next time youre choosing some wine, consider trading up just a notch. Penley Estate Phoenix Cabernet Sauvignon, Coonawarra, Australia - 15.99 The Naked Grape, Hungerford If you can stop gazing at the beautiful intricate label, this wine just knocks you for six when you taste it. The balance of flavour, tannin and fruit is superb. What a joy. West Cape Howe Old School Chardonnay, Western Australia - 15.99 The Naked Grape, Hungerford The days of balanced oaked Chardonnay are well and truly back and if there ever was a wine to show you that these styles are easy and refreshing to drink, then this is it. All the way from the other side of the world and yet this tastes as though it was just straight from the barrel yesterday. Chateau Le Peyrat La Chapelle, Castillon Cotes de Bordeaux 2015 - 10.50 Hayne Hanson & Clark, Whitchurch A blend of 85 per cent Merlot with 15 per cent Cabernet Franc, this discovery from Castillon is a great find. Mid ruby colour, aromas recall floral red berries with a touch of earthy spice. Palate is medium bodied, with good intensity of ripe fruit flavours, supple texture and a clean, satisfying finish. Chateau Martignan, Medoc 2016 - 11.90 Hayne Hanson & Clark, Whitchurch A lovely wine gives immediate pleasure. The chateau is located in Civrac-en-Medoc, at the top of the Medoc, north of Saint-Estephe, where 60 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon and 40 per cent Merlot grapes have been blended to give a wine of great liveliness and finesse. Mid ruby hue, aromas are delicate and attractive, with notes of sweet red cherries. Medium bodied, this wine dances over the palate, being silkily textured and fresh to the finish. Bodegas Lavaque Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina - Introductory offer of 8.79 The Naked Grape, Hungerford Black in colour, this wine looks like its going to massively powerful, but the core of fruit is soft and juicy with a very fine blackcurrant and sweet jam flavour. An Argentine Malbec which is hard to beat for value and flavour. Fabre Montmayou Reservado Cabernet Franc 2015 - 15.99 Laithwaites, Theale This superb red, made from the grape most favoured by Cheval Blanc, uses all hand picked Cabernet Franc from Lujan de Cuyo. Aged for a year in French oak, its an elegant, complex red that will make fine drinking over the next few years. Decant to allow the flavours to unfurl. El Coto Rioja Crianza - 11.95 Innathome, Newbury The nose is fresh and pronounced with excellent fruit concentration. The palate is clean and well balanced, with a core of strawberry fruit combined with subtle vanilla flavours from American oak. The finish is juicy and long. Montes Alpha Colchagua Carmenere - 12.95 Innathome Newbury Deep ruby red with striking violet nuances at the rim. Intense aromas of ripe red and black fruits on the nose, along with jam and pastry. Toasted notes from the French oak deliver great character and complexity with a light touch of vanilla and coffee, which intermingle very well with aromas of violets and sweet spices. The palate is smooth, with silky tannins and tremendous volume. Framingham Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc - 14.95 Innathome, Newbury Smoky aromatics, with flint, bitter lemon citrus, grapefruit and tropical hints. The palate is rich, slightly chewy, with good mouthfeel, texture and harmony. Flavours of yellow citrus, currant, papaya. Chateau Sainte Marguerite, Cuvee Symphonie, Cru Classe Rose - 19.99 The Naked Grape, Hungerford Yes, its 20, but this is stunning. Being one of only a handful of Cru Classe wines from Provence, this wine has a head start over all the others. Organic practices contribute to the magical multi-level palate of floral juicy summer fruits. A glorious Rose. Tehran ruled out negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump over Tehrans military capabilities and regional influence, Iranian government spokesman Mohammad Bagher Nobakht said. "There are no grounds or logic to talk to such a person. Public opinion would not welcome that either," ISNA news agency cited Nobakht as saying. On Saturday, over 100 activists associated with the moderate and reformist camps in Iranian politics welcomed Trumps deal with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un envisaging a complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. In a statement published by Iranian media, the activists urged Tehran to start direct negotiations with Washington with no preconditions to resolve decades of enmity between the two countries dating to Irans 1979 Islamic Revolution. Contributed / Griffin Hospital DERBY Griffin Health, in Derby, is proud to announce it has joined with one of the nations most innovative training program for medical assistants, the National Institute for Medical Assistant Advancement, to offer affordable, cutting-edge training to those seeking a career in health care. Applications are being accepted now for the class that will begin this September. Griffin is committed to improving the health of our community and providing a wide range of educational opportunities, said Adam M. Dworkin, Vice President of Operations for Executive for Griffin Faculty Physicians in a news release. This program offers a rewarding career for graduates and a great starting point for those who want to pursue a clinical career in healthcare. We hope that many of our students will ultimately decide to work at Griffin following graduation. BRIDGEPORT Mayor Joe Ganim has a complicated recent history of promising tax relief then claiming he cannot deliver it. Still, the mayor, a Democrat running for governor, on Monday said if elected he would slightly increase the rebates offered through the states tax relief program for elderly/disabled renters. My thoughts are the (rebate) is $700 for an individual, (it would) go to $750, Ganim said during a campaign stop at a Bridgeport low-income senior and disabled housing complex, Sycamore Place Apartments. And $1,000 for a couple. Its up to $900 right now. In bringing up the subsidies, Ganim also sought to mock his partys gubernatorial nominee, Ned Lamont, a Greenwich businessman and millionaire who, the New Haven Independent reported, did not know about the rebate when asked during a campaign stop in that city last week. It highlights that whole out of touch thing, said Ganim, who is awaiting word from state officials whether he gathered enough petition signatures to force an August primary with Lamont. Lamont, according to the Independent, reportedly indicated he would support the rebate program were he elected governor. Were currently balancing the budget on the backs of people who can least afford it, Lamont told the website. Echoes of Ganims mayoral campaign If Ganims campaign rhetoric about increasing a benefit for beleaguered taxpayers rings familiar, it echoes some broken promises Ganim made in 2015 when the then-former mayor, who held office from 1991 to 2003, successfully convinced Bridgeport voters to return him to City Hall. At that time, Ganim campaigned on increasing the tax credits the city provides the elderly and the disabled through a so-called circuit breaker property tax relief program. As mayor, I will immediately take the initiative to have the city more than double and expand the current program to raise the amounts of tax credits as relief for senior citizens and the disabled, Ganim said in September 2015. That never happened. Ganim, in that same campaign, had also pledged on his lawn signs to stop raising taxes. But the 2016-17 municipal budget the first he and the City Council passed upon Ganims return to office increased the citys taxrate from 42.19 mills to 54.37 mills, one of Connecticuts highest. The mayors subsequent two budgets have not increased the tax rate beyond 54.37 mills. Ganim on Monday blamed that 2016 tax increase and his inability to make good on his senior/disabled tax relief pledge on the $20 million deficit his administration has said it inherited in 2015 from predecessor Mayor Bill Finch: We talked when we first got in (about tax relief) and ran into the Finch deficit debacle. Diverted to rainy day fund But when the council voted on the 2016-17 budget, members had set aside $2 million in contingency to provide some form of targeted tax relief. Ultimately, the extra money was instead sunk into Bridgeports rainy day fund. Ganims finance chief, Ken Flatto, in an interview Monday, recalled that the rainy day account at the time needed to be bolstered in order to avoid a financially damaging downgrade to Bridgeports credit rating. Flatto also argued that while the Ganim administration never increased the local circuit breaker program, the city has continued to offer a related state tax break to seniors and the disabled despite the fact Connecticut reduced how much it reimburses municipalities for the lost taxes. Asked if voters in the governors race could trust him to keep his pledge to increase the states renters rebate, Ganim said, Yes. We know the status of the state budget. At least we think we do, he said. Its not a rosy financial situation, but this amount in a $22 billion (state) budget is doable. The World Health Organization (WHO) this week has released the new ICD 11 or the 11th edition International Classification of Diseases this week that officially classifies gaming disorder as a condition. Gaming disorders, it says can cause additive behaviours. Image Credit: Golubovystock / Shutterstock Smartphones and technology is making inroads into the lives of children and the youth and has sparked concerns. There have been a lot of efforts on the parts of digital giants including Apple to pry people away from their smartphones but most of them ironically use those very smartphones and their apps to become more mindful of time away from the phone and digital media. Reports have shown that a vast number of people play video games that can be seriously addictive. Over the past 6 months for example, over 30 million Britons played some video game or another. Game sales over the last year has been to the tune of $3.4 billion say the industry sources. The new classification from WHO thinks that gaming can be classified as a disorder that could become addictive. They have classified it as a diagnosable condition. The ICD-11 that is set to be released describes gaming disorder as, impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences. The Society for Media Psychology and Technology, a division of the American Psychological Association as well as the American Psychiatric Association believes that rather than a disorder, gaming has more moral concerns. Some of the experts from both associations say that there are no clearly defined diagnostic criteria or symptoms of the condition. The WHO says that the diagnosis of gaming disorder would be applicable to gamers who have a broken connection with their family and friends owing to their gaming habits and those who have indifference towards life occurrences in general and academics as a result of gaming for at least 12 months. It is coded as 6C51 in the ICD-11. Three specific features to be noted are impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests and daily activities and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences. Negative consequences include impairment of personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning. There could be continuous, episodic or recurrent occurrence of the gaming behaviour. They have defined both online and offline gaming behaviors. The WHO says that very few people (0.3 to 1 percent of the general population) are actually suffering from this disorder but it is a mental ailment pattern and needs attention and specific management. The statistics came from a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in November 2016. The APA also included this disorder in the appendix of the 2014 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) along with other conditions such as caffeine use disorder. Leading health and well-being company Humana Inc. and Walgreens, a provider of trusted pharmacy services and care in communities since 1901, are teaming up to provide easier access to primary care and other services for seniors, as part of the companies' ongoing and shared commitment to the health and well-being of the Kansas City community. The collaboration will establish a senior-focused neighborhood approach to health that brings together primary care, pharmacy, in-person health plan support and other services for Medicare beneficiaries. The companies indicated they could possibly look to expand their collaboration into other markets over time. Through the joint effort, Partners in Primary Care, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Humana, will operate senior-focused primary care clinics inside two Walgreens stores in the Kansas City, Missouri area. The conveniently located clinics, scheduled to open this fall, will be approximately 2,500 square feet, and will complement Walgreens pharmacy services, as well as the four Partners in Primary Care centers that opened in Kansas City in 2017. All of the clinics serve seniors participating in a number of Medicare plans. Partners in Primary Care offers care services that go beyond addressing acute and immediate health issues, and focuses on developing long-term relationships with patients living with chronic conditions. The parties will also work together to provide in-store health navigation in select Walgreens in the Kansas City metro area. Humana representatives will be available in these stores to assist Humana Medicare members, and other customers, with information and assistance in accessing a range of health-related services. From conducting diabetes education to identifying local community support groups and finding a new senior fitness class, a holistic approach to customers' health will be available at no cost, and close to home. The collaboration builds on both companies' commitment to helping seniors live healthier lives, and it extends Humana's and Walgreens health care services and consumer support capabilities in the area. Humana currently offers health-related programming and resources to its more than 65,000 Medicare Advantage and Medicare stand-alone Part D Prescription Drug plan members in the area. Walgreens supports more than 75,000 Medicare beneficiaries in the Kansas City community through more than 50 neighborhood pharmacies and other points of care. "At Humana, we're continually working to create a simpler, better experience that encourages people to engage in their health in close alliance with their doctors, and we're pleased to partner with Walgreens in this endeavor to help individuals in the Kansas City area achieve their best health," said Bruce Broussard, Humana president and CEO. "This unique partnership supports Humana's multi-faceted approach to health care in this community and is a continuation of our senior-focused care strategy which is centered on integrating care through clinical programs that intersect health and lifestyle." The co-location of primary care clinics as part of the partnership complements Walgreens expanded pharmacy services and expertise, digital tools and resources, and numerous programs and initiatives aimed at helping seniors in the community. It is another way in which Walgreens is working to bring affordable health care services to customers to provide a differentiated patient experience. "We continue to develop new and innovative models to bring health care services closer to our customers, and deliver the trusted care our communities have come to expect from Walgreens," said Stefano Pessina, executive vice chairman and CEO, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. "With this new initiative, we can expand the care for seniors that our pharmacists and other team members have provided for decades. I am confident that this collaboration will be a great example of the power of strategic partnership in providing better health care services in the communities we both serve." Walgreens and Humana will also look to extend certain services and resources across online and digital channels, to provide more 24/7 access. The two Partners in Primary Care Clinics will operate inside Walgreens stores at 2630 NE Vivion Rd., Kansas City, MO and 9300 E Gregory Blvd., Raytown, MO. The US Senate has voted to block transfers of the F-35 fighter jet to Turkey in a move that could ultimately hold up the sale of 100 planes worth close to $10bn. A bipartisan clause added to the National Defense Authorisation Act would prohibit the transfer of F-35s to Turkey until the secretary of defence submits a plan to remove Turkey from participation in the programme, which includes allocating production of parts to each country. US senators made the intervention given concerns over Turkeys stated intent to install the Russian S400 air defence system, which Pentagon officials are concerned would put the secrets of the F-35 and the data it collects at risk. The bill, which must still be passed by the House, could undergo further changes in the reconciliation process and is not expected to become law until later in the summer. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yldrm harshly criticized a U.S. Senate decision to block F-35 sales to Turkey. "The decision is an unfortunate development," Hurriyet Daily cited Yldrm as saying. "Turkey is not without alternatives. Such attempts are regrettable and goes against the soul of strategic partnership," the PM added. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, in turn, said that Turkey will purchase Russias S-400 missile systems and this issue is closed. He stressed that Turkey is not planning to give up this deal despite the decision of the US Senate. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier said that Ankara will not abandon the purchase of Russian S-400 systems despite US Senate decision to block F-35 supplies to Turkey. An associate professor of the Faculty of International Relations of the TOBB University of Economics and Technology (Ankara), Togrul Ismail, speaking with Vestnik Kavkaza, noted that the US therefore continues to increase political confrontation with Turkey. "First of all, it was a political decision in the framework of the US prejudiced attitude towards Turkey. The production of the F-35 is a joint project with participation of the Turkish defense industry. Thus, the US is obliged to transfer the produced planes to Turkey, but they refuse to do it in order to force Ankara to fulfill what the US considers necessary for them - both in the Middle East, as well as in relations with Russia and other countries," he said. The political scientist expects that Ankara will challenge this illegal refusal to cooperate in international institutions. "Turkey will most likely seek taking international decisions with regard to the United States and Washington's violation of international agreements on cooperation. I think that certain measures will be taken against the US within the framework of bilateral relations as well," Togrul Ismail said, adding that in conditions of unreliability of the US s a partner in military-technical cooperation, Turkey may increase contacts in this sphere with Russia. "Turkey is an independent state capable of making a decision on cooperation with any states. Russian-Turkish relations are increasing in this sense. Despite the fact that Russia and Turkey are pat of different military structures (Turkey is a member of NATO), our military-technical cooperation is developing. Russia and Turkey, being two strong regional states, should cooperate, and the more connections in the most diverse areas we have, the more stable, safe, and in the end - prosperous our life will be," the associate professor of the Faculty of International Relations of the TOBB University of Economics and Technology (Ankara) concluded. Researchers at the University of Waterloo may have discovered a new, pesticide-free way to limit mosquito populations in some area and reduce the spread of the West Nile virus. Waterloo researcher Brad Fedy discovered that introducing hungry minnows into bodies of water where mosquitoes breed results in the minnows feeding on mosquito larvae, which dramatically decreases the number of adult mosquitoes capable of carrying the disease. The best strategies to limit mosquitoes start at the larval stage. Unfortunately, in North America, control efforts are largely limited to larvicides, which require a repeated application and have potentially negative ecological impacts, said Fedy. Addressing the problem with minnows provides many benefits in that it is low-maintenance, cost-effective, better for the environment in many cases, and our health. The study took place over three years and introduced minnows into ten treatment reservoirs. Researchers monitored an additional six non-treated reservoirs. Treatment ponds demonstrated suppressed levels of mosquito larva over each season compared to controls with a model-predicted 114 per cent decrease in larva density within treatment ponds. There are many potential advantages to using indigenous fish species as an alternative for larval control including lowered environmental impact, decreased costs regarding time and financial inputs, and the potential for the establishment of self-sustaining fish populations, said Fedy. This isnt a complete solution to the dangers of West Nile, but it should be considered as part of any plan to protect the health of vulnerable populations. Fedy and his team discovered the method while researching sage grouse populations in the intermountain west. Sage grouse populations suffer adverse impacts from mosquitoes transferring viruses like West Nile and investigated ways to mitigate those negative impacts. What they discovered could also improve human health. Source: https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/study-finds-pesticide-free-way-combat-mosquitos-and-west Intravenous (IV) acetaminophen is no more effective than oral acetaminophen for patients undergoing colorectal procedures, Mount Sinai researchers report in a first-of-its-kind study. These findings suggest that eliminating use of IV acetaminophen, which is much more expensive than its oral counterpart, may result in very significant cost savings for hospitals with no impact on the patient experience or outcomes. The study, published in the July issue of Anesthesiology, found that IV acetaminophen, as currently used, does not meaningfully decrease opioid use after surgery, especially when compared to patients who are given oral acetaminophen (sold under the brand name Tylenol and others). "With any new drug that is introduced to the U.S. market, it is very important to monitor how it is used and if this results in the desired outcomes. Our study results do not support routine use of IV acetaminophen," explained lead investigator Jashvant Poeran, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Population Health and Health Science Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Scientists from the Department of Population Health and Health Science Policy and the Department of Anesthesiology at the Icahn School of Medicine looked into this topic because there is increasing pressure to reduce opioid use in patients hospitalized for surgery, while also minimizing pain. Non-opioid pain medications such as IV acetaminophen are a common substitute for opioids, but it was unclear how effective this drug was for surgery patients. IV acetaminophen was introduced in the United States in 2010, and there has been a spike in use since then. The cost of IV acetaminophen increased by 300 percent in 2014, prompting scrutiny of its use. It is much more expensive than other nonopioid alternatives and its oral counterpart. The Mount Sinai team analyzed data of 181,640 patients undergoing open colectomy surgery in 602 hospitals across the United States from 2011-2016. This procedure was selected because these patients don't always tolerate oral medication well. Among the patients studied, researchers found that IV acetaminophen was used in a minority (25.1 percent) of cases, of which nearly half received only one dose, on the day of surgery. In these patients, IV acetaminophen use was not associated with clinically significant reductions in opioid utilization. By comparison, oral acetaminophen appeared equivalent or superior, especially in patents receiving more than one dose on the day of surgery. These results suggest IV acetaminophen is not always used in the most appropriate way, as one dose may not be enough to affect opioid utilization. The study goes on to show that IV acetaminophen may not be any more effective than its oral counterpart and therefore does not support routine use of this intravenous drug. Researchers say there may be a place for IV acetaminophen among those who cannot tolerate oral medication, but follow-up studies should be done to figure out what the most effective dosing regimen is. "It is important that we that we identify optimal dosing strategies and patients that are most likely to benefit from this relatively new drug. Especially among patients undergoing colorectal surgery, there may be a group of patients that do not tolerate oral medications," said Dr. Poeran. "This may be less of an issue among patients undergoing other types of surgery, such as hip and knee replacement surgery, and these results further emphasize a more targeted approach in determining who benefits most." "A wide variety of non-opioid adjuvants are available for use, but our knowledge of what works best in whom is still in its infancy," added Andrew Leibowitz, MD, Professor of Anesthesiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Chair of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine for the Mount Sinai Health System. "Intuitively, greater effectiveness is expected with more different classes of medications administered while also decreasing side effects of any one of them. This, however, might not be true so research like this is necessary and very important." The study team is currently addressing this same question in other types of surgery, such as hip, knee and shoulder replacement, and anticipates more findings in the near future. While the current study demonstrates limited effects of IV acetaminophen, benefits may be more pronounced in other surgeries with a different patient population. The study of a Quebec family with an unusual gene provides novel insight into how our brain is built and, according to the McGill led team of scientists, offers a better understanding of psychiatric disorders such as depression, addictions, and schizophrenia. Very little is known about how the human brain wires itself. Mouse studies conducted by Cecilia Flores, Professor in McGill's Department of Psychiatry, have previously shown that the gene, DCC, helps dopamine-producing cells in the developing adolescent brain make specific connections. Building upon this work, a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience by Professor Flores and Marco Leyton, who is also a professor in the Department of Psychiatry, shows that DCC seems to have the same effects in humans. By scanning the brain of 20 family members who share an altered copy of DCC, the researchers found less connectivity between the areas where dopamine neurons originate (the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area) and their target sites, such as the striatum and frontal cortex. One of these target sites - the striatum - was also smaller. "It's very interesting because we were able to show that this DCC gene alteration induces similar changes to the brain in both mice and humans," says Cecilia Flores. Because the brain systems affected by the gene influence responses to rewards, it was not surprising to see that the family members with the DCC mutation also have lower impulsivity traits and are less likely to smoke cigarettes. Indeed, an increasing number of studies, including those by Professor Flores' team, link DCC to psychiatric conditions. "Because the gene affects the brain's dopamine pathways, which are implicated in schizophrenia, addiction and depression, our study potentially helps us understand how these disorders arise. The version of the gene inherited by the Quebec family is probably protective, but other versions of the gene seem to increase risk. Our study helps us to understand why. It also provides clear evidence that a single gene has large effects on how the human nervous system is wired," says Professor Leyton, senior author of the study. BMW has unveiled the all-new 2019 8-Series luxury performance coupe after much of teasing and testing. You could be forgiven for thinking the BMW 8-Series was already available because there have been so many "spy shots" as well as teasers released by the German luxury automaker over what now feels like a very long time. Here's a detailed image gallery of the BMW 8-Series. To be fair, some of the previous publicity surrounding the 8-Series has been to do with the race car version, but now the production model is finally unveiled before the 2018 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans race. Engineers have been road testing prototypes and development cars in public view for more than a year now, with both coupe and soft-top variants being caught on camera as recently as just last month. BMW's latest known outing for the car was in Aprilia, Italy, which is thought to have involved final analysis of the car's chassis and powertrain settings. Also Watch: Mercedes-AMG GLC Coupe! Perhaps the biggest news is that it won't be utilizing some kind of souped-up, modern six-cylinder engine, but employs the services of a V8 that will put out 523 horsepower and 750 Nm of torque. With the 4.4-litre biturbo eight speed automatic engine, BMW can push 8 from 0-100 kmph in 3.7 seconds. Markus Flasch, the BMW 8 Series Project Manager, said in a press release: "The thing that always impresses when test driving the new BMW 8 Series Coupe is its adaptability. Whether a driver expresses his or her wishes with regard to comfort and sportiness using the accelerator pedal or by pressing a button, the vehicle immediately adapts perfectly to each setting." The 8 Series will be closely related to the 7 Series sedan in the same way the 4 and 3 series are related. The road car will go on sale from November after no fewer than three concepts having been revealed to whet our appetites for the new BMW flagship coupe over previous months. While Dubai Police is known for its fleet of exotic and expensive patrol cars, it is not the only country to have such cars in its fleet. Italian cops use cars like Lamborghini and Ferrari in its patrol car fleet, while the U.S has Ford Explorer Hybrid in the fleet. However, all of them are the official police vehicles, purchased by the forces themselves. But a strange case has come to light from Japan, leaving us all excited. A local resident of the Toshigi Prefecture in Japan has donated the Nissan GT-R Sportscar, fondly called as the Godzilla, to the local police department to use as a patrol car. The chief of police accepted the donation and arranged a special ceremony to honor one-of-the-kind police car. Residents of Tochigi, Japan: meet the new addition to your police forces fleet, the #Nissan GT-R patrol car. pic.twitter.com/h4feGe7Rtv Nissan Motor (@NissanMotor) June 15, 2018 The uber-fast sportscar, known for its ability to drift was given the police colors by adding red blinkers atop the roof, LED strobes on the bumper and a black and white livery like the rest of the Toshigis police patrol cars. The Nissan GT-R can produce massive 565-horsepower of output and can go 0-100 kmph in just 2.7 seconds, which means the criminals in Japan are in a big, big trouble. Also Watch: Sunil Chhetri Interview! Just so you know, the Dubai police fleet has cars like Ferrari LaFerrari, Bugatti Veyron, Lexus RC F, McLaren 12C, Mercedes SLS AMG, Bentley Continental GT, Ferrari FF, Mercedes G63 AMG, and Audi R8. FCA India, which manufactures the Jeep Compass in its Ranjangaon facility near Pune, has announced the Jeep Compass Bedrock variant which is a limited edition model made to commemorate its 25,000 sales milestone. This comes within a year of the Jeep Compass SUVs launch in the Indian market. The Bedrock limited edition of the Jeep Compass will be available in the Sport trim, which comes with the 2.0-litre turbocharged diesel engine making 173 PS of power and mated to a six-speed manual transmission, in two-wheel drive configuration. The variant has been priced at Rs 17.53 lakh (ex-showroom, Delhi). Kevin Flynn President and Managing Director, FCA India said, We are proud of what we have achieved with the Jeep Compass in less than one year of it being in the market. With the Jeep Compass, FCA India has secured its best sales within a 12-month period, in the last 10 years. We are celebrating our 25,000 sales milestone with Indian customers by giving them the Jeep Compass Bedrock Limited Edition. The Jeep Compass Bedrock Limited Edition will come with elements like a reverse parking camera, 16-inch gloss black alloy wheels, side step for ingress, Bedrock-branded seat covers, black roof rails, premium floor mats, Bedrock decals and the Bedrock monogram. The Bedrock limited edition will be available in three colours Vocal White, Minimal Grey and Exotica Red. The Ranjangaon plant is one of FCAs four Global manufacturing and export hubs. The Company has exported over 8000 Jeep Compass SUVs to seven automobile markets including destinations such as Japan, Australia, the UK and Ireland. Flynn added, The Jeep brand has gained a considerable amount of recognition in India and we thank our customers who have placed their faith in our brand and products so far. The FCA team has been working tirelessly to strengthen that faith by providing them with a top notch after-sales service experience, which is backed by our Mopar promise. Currently, FCA India has 65 sales and service outlets across India and claim to increase the count to 70 in this calendar year. With just about every vehicle manufacturer coming up with a steady stream of new SUV models, it could be easy to forget that Suzuki was producing and selling affordable SUVs long before it became fashionable. The Japanese automaker is now looking to reassert itself into the conversation with a new generation of its small, tough off-roader, the Jimny. And it's ramping up the anticipation with the release of the first official images of the all-new model. It's entirely possible Suzuki wasn't planning to reveal any official images at this point, but after a set of unofficial images from a presentation were leaked on the internet last week the company has now put these official renderings on its global website. 2019 Suzuki Jimny interior. (Image: Suzuki) Although the website doesn't reveal much that wasn't already known by the public after the recent leaks, it does confirm the fact this is something of an evolutionary redesign and not a radical overhaul to take the Jimny in any sort of new direction. In fact, some observers might revel in the fact the new Jimny will be a slightly retro design when compared to much of the competition. Although there will be an extensive palette of funky, youthful exterior colors, the unashamedly boxy shape remains and it will also be one of very few SUVs to still store the spare wheel on the rear tailgate. Also Watch: Mercedes-AMG GLC Coupe! On the inside there's plenty of similarity with the current model, but there will be at least one or two very important changes. Amid the refreshed switchgear and new instruments housed in retro, boxy binnacles, there will now be a touchscreen infotainment system sitting on top of a new center console. Back in 2015 Suzuki announced it was going to be introducing five new vehicles in five years. Time is now getting on and it's clear the new Jimny will be the first of the proposed five, so the company will have to get a move on if the other four are to come to fruition inside that timescale. Although full details such as engine specifications are yet to be revealed, it's clear the new Jimny will stay true to more than two decades of tradition of being a rugged, compact, capable and affordable SUV and not be morphing into some sort of soft-roader. India touts itself as a secular state, one where all religions are recognized and can peacefully co-exist. Secularism, in fact, is considered the bedrock of Indian democracy. But how often does it exist in reality? In 2017, Pew Research Center released analysis of 198 countries ranking India as fourth worst in the world for religious intolerance. But you don't even have to go as far as a research report. A look at your own social media timeline pretty sums up how bigotry has been on the rise in our country. And the worse part is, too often, no one blinks an eye. Only last evening, Pooja Singh, an Airtel DTH customer took to Twitter to complain about an executive. When Shoiab, a customer care executive from Airtel responded, she was more furious. Pooja demanded a "Hindu representative" from Airtel because she said she had "no faith" in a Muslim man's "working ethics". Pooja Singhs comment may be receiving a lot of flak from both the public and the popular, including stars like Gauhar Khan, but Singhs comment is just one in many of a series of thinly-veiled hate statements from people who very vocal on social media about their hate-infused opinions. In April, a man had posted a screenshot on Twitter showing how he had cancelled his ride because he did not want a Muslim cab driver. Cancelled @Olacabs Booking because Driver was Muslim. I don't want to give my money to Jihadi People. pic.twitter.com/1IIf4LlTZL Abhishek Mishra (@Abhishek_Mshra) April 20, 2018 Ola had responded to the incident stating that they did not discriminate between their drivers or passengers based on religion. Similarly, Airtel has also issued a statement saying how they do not differentiate between customers, employees and partners on the basis of caste or religion. We would urge you to do the same. Only recently Michelin star chef Atul Kocchar learnt bigotry is bad for business after he was sacked following a dig he took at actor Priyanka Chopra for her tweet over a Quantico episode that portrayed Hindu nationalists as terrorists. It's sad to see that you have not respected the sentiments of Hindus who have been terrorised by Islam over 2,000 years. Shame on You (sic), the chef had tweeted on June 10. Often, this bigotry extends to innocuous things like the name of a movie. Just last week a movie with an urdu name Raazi with more or less same visuals, optics, theme was released. Time for Bollywood to officially name itself as Urduwood. https://t.co/YqIR6DGNLW Kalpana Agarwal (@kalps1616) May 21, 2018 In rise of these Islamophobic tweets, there is always a section of people trying to back it up, by sharing situations they claim to be similar in nature. If this views acceptable then why my views are not acceptable ? pic.twitter.com/170MWQuBpn Abhishek Mishra (@Abhishek_Mshra) April 22, 2018 #BoycottMarriott #BoycottJWMarriott won't work, we need to #BoycottMuslim. We need to promise ourselves that we will never give a job to a Muslim in India, we will never buy anything from a Muslim, we will cancel booking if Uber driver is a Muslim. Wake up before it's too late Kautilya (@Kaut06174091) June 13, 2018 How is it that each time I call Airtel customer service, only a Muslim answers? Has@airtelindia stopped employing Hindus? @Airtel_Presence Tufail Ahmad (@tufailelif) June 24, 2017 But more than the bigotry, what is (no longer) surprising in all of this is that-- many often justify it, instead of condemning it. When inside a temple, break the walls of rules. When outside a mosque, adapt culture and wear a curtain. Hypocrisy Mubarak pic.twitter.com/37uO2KaarM Sonam Mahajan (@AsYouNotWish) June 18, 2018 So here's a question for all of us: Is it really 2018? Garfield, the famously cynical, Monday-hating, lasagne-loving cat, just turned forty. The beloved cartoon character was published first on this day, June 19, in 1978 by creator Jim Davis and has since been charming audiences, young and old, with his Machiavellian wit, Sunday charm and feline cunning. As the fat cat turns 40, here's a look at his life so far. Origins The Garfield comic strip was initially launched on 41 newspapers in the US in 1978. As revealed in various interviews, creator Jim Davis named the popular character after his grandfather James Garfield Davis. The cynical and drawling cat also draws some physical traits from him. The character of Garfields human, Jon Arbuckle, is influenced by Davis himself. In fact, some early versions of the strip had even established Jon as a cartoonist. Garfield is a lethargic feline who lives with his human in Muncie, Indiana, which is also the hometown of Davis, though the fact is rarely stated in the comic series. The cartoon strip was initially supposed to focus on Odie, the dog who is part of the strips cast. At the time, dogs made popular comic characters. However, Davis decided to go with the cantankerous cat, with the rationale that it may work well with cat lovers. With Garfields growing popularity, Davis soon released several Garfield books, all of which received a warm responses and high sales. In 1981, Davis started Paws Inc., a company dedicated exclusively to draw, write and produce consequent helpings of the comic series and designing Garfield related merchandise and products. By 1982, the comic strip had reached 1000 newspapers and within one year, Garfield made his first TV appearance. In fact, the cat announced his first TV special from the cover of People magazines November issue where he appeared as Americas #1 personality. In 1984, he appeared on his first television commercial for American Express, along with Davis. Evolution In its four decades of existence, Garfield has gone through several physical changes. In its earliest version, the cat was fatter than its current avatar, looked more scraggly and walked on all four. Later versions increased the anthropomorphic element of the character, giving it a two-legged gait and a slimmer body with more refined outlines. According to his website, Garfield was made two-legged and given bigger feet on the advice of animator Charles Shulz (credited with the creation of Peanuts). Davis had been struggling with animating the cat with four small feet for the TV special, Here Comes Garfield. With two legs, the animated Garfield was easier to produce and could move, punch and shove Odie and eat lasagne with greater ease and visual congruence. In an interview to The Gazette, Davis, who claims to be an out and out optimist, said that the Monday-hating cat was initially meant to be a soft-core rebel but that the image became tamer with the entry of other hyper-rebellious characters such as Bart Simpson (from the Simpsons) and others. Davis recently said that though the cat is often given curt dialogues and gruff mannerism, giving the impression of being anti-establishment, in reality the strip will never engage with politics in terms of its content and humour. Success By 1986, the comic was the fastest growing strip in the world, appearing in 1800 newspapers in 22 countries across the world. Today, with the comic strip appearing in over 2,500 newspapers, Garfield holds the Guinness World Record for being the most syndicated comic strip of all time. The cartoon spawned a total of 12 such Specials and two consecutive TV series. Davis has earned four Emmy awards for the Garfield TV specials, the first of which was in 1985. Davis won it for the cartoons second TV special titled Garfield on the Town. By 1988, the strip and the successful TV specials made way to the first Garfield TV series, Garfield and Friends. In 2009, a CGI Garfield show titled The Garfield Show was aired on Cartoon Network in 2009. On his tenth birthday, Garfield was gifted his own variety of the marigold flower, developed specially to match the colour of his coat. He has also appeared on a talk show with Barbara Bush, wife of former US President George Bush, where the two read some of his popular stories for a national audience. Controversies Though Garfield has never directly engaged with politics and his maker has made clear his apolitical nature, the cat was in the eye of a political hate-storm in 2010 after a strip, released on Veterans Day reportedly made fun of the day and called it National Stupid Day. Davis later had to apologise for the contentious cartoon starring a spider, about to be killed by Garfield. Another controversy that recently surrounded the fictional cat was about its gender. Many have over the years wondered about the sex of the anthropomorphic cat, with the questions reaching a crescendo in March 2017, two years after an innocuous comment by Davis, claiming that Garfield had no gender and that his appeal was more of a universal cat. The controversy led to a Wikipedia war and finally Davis cleared the air with the announcement that Garfield indeed was male. Davis proved it by stating that the fictional cat had a girlfriend, Arlene, who was also a part of the strips cast. I don't see @Garfield in pop culture enough anymore. Time to start bringing it back. These books were my favorite books as a kid. #HiBozo #Hunk pic.twitter.com/3RamR1pgcP Planes of Hyland (@PlanesofHyland) May 18, 2018 Legacy Though hes acerbic and lazy, Garfield has done his bit for the betterment of society by being the spokescat (ahem) of several health and literacy campaigns. He appeared on Muncies moving van libraries to attract children to read. In 1997, he became the spokescat for the Literacy Volunteers of America with Davis releasing a book titled Read. Brains Get Hungry Too. In 1999, he appeared as part of the National Institute of Healths campaign Sleep Well Do Well, in which he promoted the importance of a good nights sleep to American parents and children. So is Garfield a hero? If he were, hed probably not care! Happy birthday to the orange renegade. HCM CITY Vietjet will give away one million discounted tickets between Wednesday and Friday to celebrate its two newest international routes from Ha Noi to Osaka (Japan) and Nha Trang to Siem Reap (Cambodia). The airfares, priced from zero ong upwards, will be available from noon to 2pm at www.vietjetair.com. They will be applicable for all domestic and international routes with the flight period starting from August 14 to December 31. However, the travel period for the Nha TrangSiem Reap route starts from September 21 and the Ha NoiOsaka route starts from November 8. The Ha Noi Osaka route will operate a return flight everyday, taking over four hours per leg. The flight will depart from Ha Noi at 1.40am and arrive in Osaka at 7.50am (local time). The return flight takes off at 9.20am (local time) in Osaka and lands in Ha Noi at 1.05pm. Meanwhile, the Nha TrangSiem Reap route will have a return flight everyday, taking around 1 hour and 20 minutes per leg. The flight will leave Nha Trang at 7.25am and arrive in Siem Reap at 8.45am. The return flight will depart at 9.25am in Siem Reap and lands in Nha Trang at 10.45am. VNS Nine years ago, in the small village of Ittanwali about 48 kilometers from Lahore, Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman, shared a bowl of water with farmers. She had been harvesting falsa berries with these farmers. This set in motion a history of conflict and turmoil for the Christian woman. A conflict erupted because some of the Muslim women on the farm felt it was sacrilegious for Muslims to share the cup with a Christian. As the exchange between Asia Bibi and the women charged up and turned ill-tempered, the situated escalated to the charge of blasphemy, on account of the allegations made by a few women on the field of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Despite the reported inconsistencies in witness testimonies and fragmented evidence, appallingly, Asia Bibi was arrested, imprisoned and was convicted under the Blasphemy Law of Pakistan and was sentenced to death. The exact words that led to Bibis prosecution under sections 295-B and C of the Pakistan Penal Code have not been disclosed as this was an accusation of blasphemy, and to repeat the words would be to perpetuate blasphemy. Since then, the name of this Christian woman, a laborer and mother of five children, has become synonymous with Pakistans harsh blasphemy laws. Several newspapers and human rights advocates reported that she had been paraded on the streets and was also brutally gang-raped in Nankana Sahib, a district in Punjab Province. Pakistan is notorious for its use of the Blasphemy law, which dates back to the reign of Gen. In 1986, Muhammad Zia ul Haq amended it by adding the clause to punish blasphemy against Prophet Mohammed with "death, or imprisonment for life. In 2014, the Lahore High Court upheld her death sentence. Nonetheless, the execution was stayed in July 2015, when the Pakistani Supreme Court agreed to hear her appeal that had to take place in October 2016. Unfortunately, the appeal had to be adjourned after one of the three judges, Justice Iqbal Hameed-ur-Rehman, recused himself by quoting a conflict of interest. Despite international outcry, Asia Bibi has had no success, with the appeal adjourned indefinitely in 2016. Numerous petitions have been filed across the globe and the pleas to stop her execution have received worldwide support. From human rights activists and organizations to lawyers have criticized her imprisonment and sentence and attacked Pakistan's blasphemy laws calling them the instruments to "settle personal disputes. In a 2014 report, Amnesty International condemned the imprisonment of Asia in harsh tones declaring the Blasphemy laws of Pakistan as inconsistent with its international obligations of to ensure the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of thought, conscience and religion. For years now, people all over the world are trying to seek justice for Asia in their own ways. In February, Romes ancient Colosseum was lit in red as hundreds thronged outside the Roman symbol of martyrdom to condemn the death penalty against Asia and to hear her daughter and husband address the event. Blasphemy carries a maximum penalty of death, yet the law legitimizes no standards for evidence, no necessity to prove intent, no punishment for false allegations and most importantly, indeed, no guidance on what actually constitutes blasphemy. For nine years now, Asia Bibi has been languishing in prison. In the first ray of hope for Asia Bibi, last month, a top Pakistani judge confirmed that she will soon get the opportunity to have her appeal heard at the Pakistani Supreme Court. Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Police have killed three top Jaish-e-Mohammed militants, including its operational commander, in an encounter in Pulwama's Tral on Tuesday evening. The encounter broke out after security forces launched a cordon-and-search operation in the area following specific intelligence inputs, a police official said. Earlier, the police had said that two unidentified militants, belonging to Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), were believed to have been killed in an encounter in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. Soon, officials confirmed that a Jaish commander has also been killed in the encounter. "Encounter going on at Hyena Tral, 3 (three) important JEM Terrorists trapped, 2 (two) apparently neutralised. Good luck to our boys fighting (sic)," Director General of Police (DGP) S P Vaid wrote on Twitter earlier. The encounter broke out after security forces launched a cordon and search operation in the area in south Kashmir's Pulwama district following specific intelligence inputs, a police official said. He said the gunfight was going on when last reports came in, adding further details were awaited. Lucknow: In a tragic incident, five people were killed and three others were seriously injured after a major fire engulfed two hotels in the Charbagh area of Lucknow. Initially, five people were reported to have been injured. However, as the fire spread, it came to light that five people died in the incident, while three sustained grievous injuries. More than half a dozen fire tenders were rushed to the spot to contain the situation. "Five people have died and more than 50 people were rescued from the building. Cause of fire is yet to be ascertained. If we find any lapse on hotel's part during our investigation, we will take strict action against the people concerned," said IG Lucknow S Pandey. According to reports, the fire started from the basement of SSJ International Bar and Hotel due to short circuit and spread to other floors and the adjacent building, which houses another hotel. Within minutes, Hotel Viraat International was also up in flames. The fire started from the basement of SSJ International Bar and Hotel and spread to Hotel Viraat (News18) Eye-witnesses claim that both the hotels did not have proper fire-fighting arrangements. Till now five people have died while three were admitted to Civil Hospital in a serious condition with 90 to 100 percent burns. The condition of two more people was stated to be critical and they were referred to SIPS Burns Specialty Hospital for treatment. Lucknow SSP Deepak Kumar also reached the spot and led the rescue operations himself. Speaking to News18, Kumar said, According to eye-witnesses account, the flames and smoke were first seen at around 5:30 am. The police got information around 6:05 am. Proper investigation will be done in the matter and those responsible will definitely face the action." Prima facie it seems that the fire started at the basement and then it moved upwards. Short circuit might be the reason, but anything concrete can only be stated after a proper investigation, he added. However, one of the rescued tourists News18 spoke to said, "We heard a loud explosion-like sound in the morning and when we came out, there was fire and smoke everywhere. Nobody was there to guide us. We managed to get out by ourselves. No one from the hotel staff was present." Meanwhile, UP Cabinet and Tourism Minister, Rita Bahuguna Joshi also reached the spot and stated that proper investigation will be done in the matter. It is a sad incident and our focus was on rescue and relief operations. Many tourists are adjusted in other hotels nearby, while the ones with the injuries have been admitted to various hospitals for treatment. Magisterial investigation will be done to ascertain the reason behind such tragedy, she said. Washington: A group of 52 Indians, mostly Sikhs, has been held at a detention centre in the US State of Oregon for being part of a large contingent of illegal immigrants seeking asylum, an American lawmaker has said. The Indians form the largest group of detainees in the total 123 illegal immigrants being held at a facility in Sheridan. The detention centre was recently visited by a group of Democratic lawmakers from the Oregon State, who later told the media about the alleged inhuman condition of the illegal immigrants. The immigrants are seeking asylum in the US. The detainees from India is the largest group of detainees being held in Sheridan, wrote Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici on her blog post. She along with several other Democratic lawmakers from the State visited the detention centre Saturday. "Through our Punjabi translator, we learned that these men were planning to request asylum because they faced severe religious persecution in India. Most are Sikh or Christian. Instead they were incarcerated in a federal prison," she said. "They said they came to the United States for religious freedom, but they felt as if they were 'going crazy' because they are being confined in small cells for up to 22 hours a day," the Congresswoman said. The Indian detainees pointed out that the other non-immigrant prisoners get far more time out of cells, she said. Most of the detainees at the federal facility are asking for asylum because they experienced violence or persecution in their home countries, Bonamici said. Several had travelled to the border with a wife and a child or children; none knew where their family members are, she said. "This is a shameful hour in US history. I don't care what your stance on immigration is, no one should favour ripping children out of their parents' arms ...." Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer told reporters after visiting the detention center. He alleged that President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have doubled down on their anti-immigrant, xenophobic agenda with the administration's new "zero tolerance" policy on immigration. "The administration is criminalising families who are fleeing abuse and violence and separating children as ICE detains or deports their parents," he said in a statement. According to the local daily 'The Oregonian', of the total detainees, 52 have identified themselves as Sikhs or Christians from India. They alleged that they fled from their country because of religious persecution from the Hindu majority. The Indians told the delegation that their Hindi and Punjabi translators were the first outsiders they've been able to talk to since they were imprisoned weeks ago, the daily reported. The Congressional delegation included Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden. "As the child of parents whose families found refuge in America from the terrors of Nazi Germany, I strongly believe Donald Trump's cruel and callous treatment of human beings seeking asylum flies in the face of America's core humanitarian values," Wyden said. "Trump's choice of zero tolerance for the refugees we met today and for the others imprisoned around the country this Father's Day weekend makes zero sense and shows zero understanding of American values. "What I saw and heard today highlights the urgency of reversing Trump's mean, dangerous and damaging actions returning America to our unique role as a beacon of hope that welcomed our immigrant ancestors and creating the future we want for our children," he said. These 123 detainees are among the more than 1,600 people that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is holding in federal prisons across the US as it enforces Trump's "zero-tolerance policy" on immigration, the lawmakers said in a joint statement. The men come from 16 different countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Cameroon, China, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, India, Mauritania, Nepal, Peru and Russia, as well as from Congo and Eritrea, it said. The Congressional delegation were told that that detainees are being held upwards for 23 hours a day with three men bunked in each cell. The prison does not have the resources to house ICE detainees alongside pre-trial inmates who are normally held in the facility. The delegation was also told that incompatibility between BOP and ICE telephone systems was preventing ICE detainees at the BOP facility from accessing legal services. According to lawmakers, the detainees described stress as they sit in cells day after day without knowing when they will get a hearing, or get a lawyer, or what comes next. "Several men had been separated from their children, and experienced the added stress of not knowing what happened to their families. "Under Trump's 'zero-tolerance policy', the men's children were taken away at the border one man said an ICE official told him, 'it's not my choice; the decision came from above' and the fathers still don't have any information about their location, condition or well-being," the lawmakers said. Chennai: Valarmathi, a student activist from Tamil Nadu, was arrested on Tuesday by Salem police for protesting against the state governments eight-lane national highway project. Sources said she was arrested after she tried to disrupt a meeting between revenue and police officials on the proposed project. The activist was earlier booked under the Goonda Act a few months ago but the Madras High Court quashed her detention. Valarmathi is the second activist to be arrested within two days. On Monday, social activist Piyush Manush, a native of Salem and the founder of Salem Citizens Forum who is known for his fight on anti-environmental issues was arrested for allegedly instigating people to oppose the project. Manush had been previously detained in 2016 on charges of criminal intimidation when he protested against the construction of a bridge. Actor Mansoor Ali Khan was also arrested on Sunday for his provocative speeches in Salem district. The actor threatened to kill eight people if the eight-lane highway project is taken forward. He believes if the project is implemented, it will affect the livelihood of the public at large. While three arrests have been made so far, the state government continues to defend its actions. Fisheries Minister D Jayakumar said, The state government is not against the people of Tamil Nadu and the voice of the people will be heard. Any government project will be implemented only with the consent of the people. The state has been calm and there is no law and order problem here. Some people are trying to disrupt the peace. If the people have a problem, they should take a representation to the government and not take law into their own hands. The minister attacked the DMK saying the state was ruled by all DMK family members earlier and now under the AIADMK rule, peoples voice will be heard. The political opposition, however, lashed out at the Chief Minister Edapadi K Palaniswamis government. DMK MP, Kanimozhi, tweeted, Edapadis keen interest to see the Salem 8 lane project completed would put any ruthless dictator to shame. Shoot to kill. Arrest, NSA. No protests in Tamil Nadu. Hail Palaniswami. The Chennai-Salem Greenfield Corridor project is expected to reduce the travel time between Chennai and Salem from 6 hours to 3 hours and 30 minutes. The total land required for the project is 2791 hectares comprising agricultural and residential plots. Palaniswami had said in the state Assembly that the project will require only 1,900 hectares to widen the highways. Bhopal: The principal bench of Madhya Pradesh High Court on Tuesday ordered the state to get the government bungalows occupied by former chief ministers vacated within a months time. This is line with a recent Supreme Court order wherein it asked former UP CMs to vacate their state-allotted bungalows, rescinding an amendment brought in by the state. The MP HC, in its order, pronounced the amendment unconstitutional in which the state government had provisioned residences and allowances to former CMs. A law student, Raunak Yadav from Jabalpur, had earlier moved the court against the government bungalows allotted to the ex-CMs in the state. As a result, former CMs like Babulal Gaur, Kailash Joshi, Uma Bharti and Digvijaya Singh would lose the sprawling mansions allotted to them. All four are occupying sprawling B-Type bungalows which are spread over one to one-and-a-half acre land in posh Bhopal localities. Among the former CMs, it was only Congress Motilal Vora who had vacated his government bungalow in 2016 following an eviction order from the MP government. Recently, in the light of Supreme Court order, former UP CMs like Narayan Dutt Tiwari, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Kalyan Singh, Mayawati, Rajnath Singh and Akhilesh Yadav had to vacate their government allotted bungalows in the state capital of Lucknow. The SC, in an earlier order, had clarified that former chief ministers are not entitled to government bungalows for life. Former Madhya Pradesh CM Kailash Joshi, while talking to News18, claimed that he was not aware of any such order. If any such order has been passed, we would look into it, said Joshi. Congress Vichar Vibhag head Bhupendra Gupta claimed that their former CM Motilal Vora had vacated the government bungalow on his own, rather it was the BJP leaders who were clinging onto their residences. The Congress would abide by the state government orders on this, he said. New Delhi: The BJP-led central government has now asked the armed forces in Jammu and Kashmir to resume its operations against terrorists in the Valley. Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh said that while the forces had exercised exemplary restraint during the month-long Ramzan ceasefire, terrorists continued to attack civilians. A day after Singh announced the end of the ceasefire, two terrorists were killed in Bandipora early on Monday. A number of militants have been killed in Kashmir last year, including Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders Bashir Ahmad Wani, Abu Dujana, Abu Ismail and Hizbul Mujahideen commander Sabzar Bhat and Jaish-e-Muhammad commander Khalid. Here's a list of the most wanted men in Kashmir as of now. Zakir Musa, Al-Qaida The Al-Qaida man is on the top of the forces list. After his split from Hizbul, Musa launched the Kashmir chapter Ansar Ghazwat-ul Hind of Al-Qaida. In a very short span, Musa has become popular among Valleys youth and cadre of other terror groups. Many militants, including the once chief of Lashkars operations in Kashmir, Abu Dujana, joined him at various stages, and possibly lent him help in the form of weapons and ground network. Forces want to eliminate him because he has been spreading propaganda for an Islamic caliphate in Kashmir and beyond, an ideology that is rapidly gaining ground among Valleys youth. Riyaz Naikoo, Hizbul Mujahideen The chief of Hizbul Mujahideen, Naikoo, and an A++ category militant, Naikoo at 29, is one of the most experienced Hizbul commanders and at present its head of operations in Kashmir. He took over from Yaseen Ittoo after his death in an encounter. Naikoo, who is from Durbug, Awantipora, is considered tech savvy. In a recent militant funeral, he appeared in public to counter Zakir Musas anti-Pakistan propaganda. He has been booked by police in several murder cases, including that of policemen. To bolster his moderate image he had earlier released an 11-minute video asking Kashmiri Pandits to return to the Valley. Naikoo overlooks at the massive Over Ground Worker (OGW) support for Hizb, the oldest terror group in the Valley. Zeenat-ul-Islam, Lashkar-e-Taiba Zeenat took over the Lashkar leadership after Abu Ismail was gunned down late last year. The 28-year-old is a resident of Sugan Zanipura, Shopian, and was recruited in 2015. He is considered one of the main accused in the Shopian attack in February that left three soldiers dead. Known as an IED expert, he is a former member of Al-Badar terror outfit. He was once arrested in 2008 where he is said to have confessed to being an over ground worker (OGW). He was eventually released four years later and is said to have gotten married too before joining the Lashkar module. Naveed Jatt, Lashkar-e-Taiba A Lashkar-e-Taiba militant, Jatt, also known as Abu Hanzulla, pulled off a daring escape earlier this year from a government run hospital in Srinagar earlier this year. Two policemen were killed after a group of militants attacked the hospital where Jatt and five other prisoners were brought for a checkup. Jatts name is now doing the rounds as one of the accused in the murder of veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari. He is said to be a native of Multan in Pakistan and was arrested in 2014. Jatt is also accused of being involved in a number of attacks during the 2014 general elections which led to the death of a teacher. The Bihar School Examination Board BSEB will be releasing the Bihar Board Result 2018 or BSEB Class 10 matric results 2018 on June 26 (tomorrow) at 11:30 am, Board officials have confirmed said. The BSEB Bihar School Examination Board will publish the Bihar Board Class 10 results 2018 or Bihar Matric Result 2018, Bihar Class 10 Matric Result 2018 on its official website biharboard.ac.in. The Bihar School Examination Board BSEB conducted the Bihar Board Class 10 Matric exams 2018 from February 21 to February 28. The practical examinations were held from January 22 to January 24. The students can also check their Bihar Class 10 Matric Results 2018, BSEB Bihar Class 10 Results 2018, Bihar Board Class 10 Results 2018 on this website as well bihar.indiaresults.com or examresults.net Students need to follow the steps to check Bihar BSEB Class 10 Matric Results 2018 or BSEB Class 10 Matric Results 2018: * Log on to the Bihar School Examination Board BSEB website biharboard.ac.in * Click on the Bihar BSEB Class 10 Matric Results 2018 or BSEB Class 10 Matric Results 2018 * Enter your roll number and the Bihar board Class 10 matric results 2018 will appear * Click on 'Save' to download the result * Students can take a print out for further reference Total Number of students appeared: 17,58,797 Number of Centers: 1426 Number of students passed: 12,11,617 Prerna Raj scored 91.4% from Simultala Awasiya Vidyalaya in Jamui district, topped the Bihar 10th Result 2018 with 457 points. Toppers in Bihar 10th Result 2018 : 1. Prerna Raj 2. Shikha Kumari 3. Anupriya To check BSEB Class 10 Results 2018 result, students also can check their Bihar BSEB Matric Class 10 Results 2018, Bihar Board Class 10 Result 2018 via SMS: Ahmedabad: The Gujarat Congress has moved about three dozen of its local leaders to neighbouring Rajasthan to make sure that there are no defections ahead of the Panchayat elections in Ahmedabad and Patan districts. The move is an age-old manoeuvre mastered by the Congress after it successfully managed to pull it off during the 2018 Karnataka Assembly elections and 2017 Karnataka Rajya Sabha elections. District panchayat members of Ahmedabad and Patan were packed off to an undisclosed location in Rajasthan for a couple of days. Out of the 34, only the nominees for the post of panchayat president and vice president came back on Tuesday morning to file their nominations. The others are expected back late on Tuesday as voting for the two top office bearers of these district panchayats will take place on Wednesday. Speaking to News18, Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) president Amit Chavda confirmed that the panchayat members were in Rajasthan but said, They have not been sent to any resort. It is just that the BJP has been making desperate attempts to use all kinds of unfair means to win over the majority of members in the Ahmedabad and Patan district panchayats. We cannot remain mute spectators and let the BJP forcibly try to gain control of district panchayats ruled by the Congress, he said. Kanjibhai Desai, president of the Patan District Congress Committee told News18 that all the 36 Congress party members of the Ahmedabad and Patan district panchayats have either returned or will return back to their respective districts by Tuesday night. There is simply no question of any ethics as far as the BJP is concerned. Our members have been threatened, they have been offered huge sums of money and other allurements to vote in favour of the BJP nominees. Despite this, none of our members will vote for the BJP on Wednesday, Kanjibhai said. The BJP has labelled these allegations as baseless, stating that the Congress is not able to keep its flock together and has hence come up with these accusations of poaching. It has become a habit for the Congress party to level such allegations against the BJP every time. The truth is that the Congress is not able to keep its elected representatives together. The BJP will win these two district panchayats, he stated. In the Ahmedabad district panchayat, the Congress has 18 members in the 34-member house, while in the Patan district panchayat, the Congress had won 22 of the 32 seats when elections were held. Later, though, its strength was reduced to 16 after a few elected representatives defected to the BJP. Many believe Balwantsinh Rajput, who defected to the BJP ahead of the Ahmed Patel Rajya Sabha election, was instrumental in getting Congress members over to the BJP. Lucknow: Doorbin laga kar bhi dekho toh nahi dikhenge Shia (Even if you wear binoculars you wont be able to find Shias). This remark allegedly made by Azam Khan, who was part of Akhilesh Yadavs cabinet in Uttar Pradesh, still rings in the ears of Shias in Lucknow who tell the story of being a minority within the minority in the Muslim community. However, now with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)s Yogi Adityanath sitting in the seat of power in Uttar Pradesh, the Shia community is asserting its presence, said Bukkal Nawab, founder of Rashtriya Shia Samaj and the only Muslim member in the BJPs executive body in Uttar Pradesh. For the BJP, Shias hold an important place. When the saffron party comes to power, Shias are hopeful that their time has come, Nawab said. The MLC, who was with the Samajwadi Party earlier, has also painted his house saffron in a show of allegiance. He added, There is only one Muslim minister in the central government, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, and he is a Shia. Even the Yogi government has just one Muslim minister who is also a Shia Mohsin Raza. The president of the National Minorities Commission, Ghayroul Hasan Rizvi, is a Shia Muslim. This is the mahatva (significance) of Shias when the BJP comes to power. Nawabs organisation was founded five years ago but registered in 2017. With the BJP in power, Shias are hopeful that their issues will be addressed, he said. The Shia discourse under BJP According to community leaders, there are seven crore Shias in the country. For an objective view of their condition, Yasoob Abbas, a Shia leader and member All India Shia Personal Law Board, demands setting up of a commission on the lines of the Sachar Commission. Abbas said, We have made this demand to other governments also but we are hopeful that the BJP government will look into the issues of unemployment and lack of education among Shias. We have written to the authorities to set up a Sachar-like commission and report on our condition. He added, In the previous government, Azam Khan was not sensitive to the demands of Shias; he was not their friend. But for some reason, we have hope that the BJP will change things for Shias. The alignment of the Shia community towards the BJP is not new. While former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee won the Lucknow parliament seat five times, home minister Rajnath Singh has made his presence felt at gatherings and funerals of Shia clerics. In the 2017 elections, Shia clerics started an alliance with the Sufis and campaigned against the Samajwadi Party, thus benefitting the BJP. Shia cleric Maulana Kalbe Jawad Naqvis cousin Shamil Shamsi, who heads Husaini Tigers, started the Shia Gau Raksha Dal with an aim to expand to other states for the cause of cow protection. In 2016, the same group announced a bounty of Rs 15 lakh on televangelist Zakir Naik. A solution for Shia leadership? The community feels it was not given importance during the stints of previous governments in Uttar Pradesh. It is not so common to find a Shia vice-chancellor in a university, said the V-C of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti Urdu, Arabi, Farsi University, Professor Mahrukh Mirza. He feels there is a leadership crisis in the Shia community that can be resolved only with the BJP in power. The people who portray themselves as representatives of Shia Muslims, in his opinion, have vested interests and do not enjoy an influential following in the community. Mirza said, If the Shia leadership has to be honed, then it will be because of BJP government in power. The leadership issue cannot be solved by any other party and that is because the intellectual and leadership space of Muslims in other parties is occupied by Ahle-Sunnat. They are well entrenched in the system that Shias dont stand a chance to lead. The BJP government, he said, has to invite the Shias who matter and have a following to be able to get support. We will then practice a form deception, called Taqiyya, where Shias will not publicly support BJP but will vote on secret ballot for the party. However, Justice Haider Abbas Razi, who retired as a senior judge from Lucknow High Court, countered the charges and said: The Shias seen close to power are the ones with vested interest. The BJP government also knows this and uses their opportunism to create the Shia-Sunni divide. They will get those people who can speak divisive language. They get close to power but hold no power among the Shia public. Cultural similarity, but no Shia unity Bukkal Nawab added that there are cultural and historical reasons because of which Shias are close to the BJP. Shia nawabs were inclusive; Asafuddaulah gave equal land to Idgah and Ramlila and the nawabs also played Holi. The concept of ghat is exclusive to Hindus but last year in Lucknow, Shias got their first ghat Mahdi Ghat where the community holds celebrations for Shabbe Baraat. Abbas added that according to a legend in Lucknow, Dinesh Sharma, deputy chief minister of UP, was born after his mother prayed to the third Imam of Shias. But Razi dismissed these claims too. He said, In the past, some Shia leaders such as Congress leaders Syed Sibte Razi, who became the governor of Assam, and former UP minister Ammar Rizvi, were given space. The situation for Shias largely deteriorated after the Partition. They became the minority within the minority and felt politically neglected, which was reaped for politics. Some Shias trying to come out of political oblivion have also found a challenge in the lack of unity within the community on some issues, for instance, the Ram Mandir. While on one hand, the chairman of National Minorities Commission is trying to build a consensus on the Ram Mandir by meeting Muslim intellectuals, on the other, Abbas stands with the All India Muslim Personal Law Board. The State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV) has decided to push ahead with restructuring the banking system, applying stricter measures to effectively prevent cross-ownership at commercial banks. Photo tinnhanhchungkhoan.vn HA NOI The State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV) has decided to push ahead with restructuring the banking system, applying stricter measures to effectively prevent cross-ownership at commercial banks. The SBV recently announced it is drafting a circular in a move to discourage cross-ownership among banks and encourage transparency in the capital contribution sources of shareholders. Under the draft circular, a revision of Circular No 06/2015/TT-NHNN, banks must bring their ownership thresholds in line with limitations stipulated in Article 55 of the Law on Credit Institutions before June 30 next year. Under the law, individuals are not allowed to own more than 5 per cent of the charter capital of a bank, while the permitted ratio for an institutional shareholder should not be more than 15 per cent, save for some cases such as ownership in distressed or equitised banks and ownership by a strategic foreign investor. The central bank will impose harsh penalties on banks that fail to meet the deadline. Penalties include disapproval of the banks proposals regarding top positions, such as members of the board of directors and supervisory board and the CEO. Non-compliant shareholders will also have their dividend rights and right to serve on the board of directors suspended, in addition to being prohibited from increasing their stake in their respective banks. Besides the cross-ownership among banks, the Government has also take measures to prevent cross-ownership between banks and subsidiaries. Under the Law on Credit Institutions, which was passed by the National Assembly and came into effect on January 15 this year, bank leaders are prohibited from taking up senior positions in other businesses. The revised law has so far contributed in reducing cross-ownership between banks and subsidiaries as many banks have recently reshuffled their leadership at their respective 2018 annual general meetings of shareholders to comply with the new central bank regulation. Banking expert Can Van Luc said many bank leaders had to resign from their positions as chair of the board of directors or CEO of business firms to continue managing banks. A number of business owners also had to give up chairmanship positions at banks to comply with the new law. They were the most obvious examples of the decrease in cross-ownership, Luc said. He said cross-ownership in banks has also been put under control as a result of their listing in stock markets. Stock market listing means information, especially those related to internal management and the ownership rate of shareholders, must be made public and subjected to close monitoring by the State Securities Commission. However, experts suggested that a close supervision is still needed as some individuals can take advantage of loopholes in the law. Finance and banking expert Nguyen Tri Hieu said that while the new law had a good impact on transparency in the area of ownership, State agencies must still monitor activities closely as some individuals who do not take leadership positions in banks may still have governing powers. VNS New Delhi: After the IMA put out a letter rubbishing most of the claims made by the Centres Ayushman Bharat health scheme, the body has been asked to meet CEO Indu Bhushan and the Deputy CEO Dinesh Arora on Friday. Extending an olive branch of sorts, Arora told News18 that they would sort out any genuine concerns as they believed in democracy and dialogue. The IMA, Indias largest voluntary organisation of doctors and hospitals, had raised concerns over the lack of money allocated to the scheme, called National Health Protection Mission (NHPM), saying that only a fraction of Rs 1.5 lakh crore required has been allotted. This amount is roughly one sixth of what has been removed from a legitimate health budget, which, the IMA statement had said, was one billion dollars in the first year of the Modi government. However, Arora dismissed most of these concerns, saying a token amount of Rs 2000 crore had already been given to the NHPM to set the ball rolling. They also had a blanket understanding from the expenditure department to cover whatever costs arose during the course of implementing the scheme. The IMA also said that the scheme would lose Rs 400 crore to the private health insurance companies, though Arora said he wasnt sure what the body meant by this. The IMA, scathingly, had dismissed insurance driven healthcare model as a failed experiment, citing the large gaps in coverage in the United States, where it has been used. The current policy change in India will only end up strengthening the insurance business, said the body. However, Arora reiterated that the governments long term goal was to move towards a trust model -- where the government itself provides coverage -- and only those states that could not sustain this would retain the insurance model. Already, 12 states have worked out a trust model for the scheme. The money allotted for the National Health Protection Scheme would have better served the nation if every Government District Hospital had been strengthened with an infrastructure of Rs 2 crores each. the IMA statement had added. Strengthening government hospitals and other facilities is what Arora called supply side financing, where the Centre and the states already spend Rs 1.25 lakh crore. Arora said that the NHPM was the first time a policy focused on demand side financing, as addition to existing health care efforts. National accounts say that one third of the beds in all hospitals lie vacant. Let us utilise those first. Were already working on supply side financing, as the NHM budget has increased and it comes along with comprehensive primary health care, said Arora. One of the IMAs concerns had been raised by private hospitals to the NITI Aayog, earlier -- that the rates were so low they were abysmal and impracticable. Most of them do not cover even 30 % of the cost of the procedure. No hospital can work on these rates without seriously compromising patient safety. In the garb of cost cutting the Government is exposing the people to danger in the hospitals, said the statement. However, any attempts to raise the treatment package rates has been thoroughly squashed by the Union health ministry. At a press conference on June 11, the health secretary Preeti Sudan had told the press that the rates, after much review, had been frozen, a claim reiterated NHPM officials. New Delhi: The BJP decided to pull out of the PDP-led coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. The move comes only few days after the Union minister of home affairs, Rajnath Singh, announced an end to the ceasefire in the Kashmir Valley, which was instituted for the month of Ramzan. The Centre had called off the Ramzan ceasefire a day after Eid, citing provocative action from militants after cessation of operations by security forces. The call to implement such a ceasefire was the second in the troubled history of Jammu and Kashmir. In November 2000, then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajaypee had declared a unilateral ceasefire in Kashmir for the holy month of Ramzan. The ceasefire was then extended for five more months before finally ending it on May 23, 2001. The announcement had followed a unilateral ceasefire by militant group Hizb-ul-Mujahideen in July 2000 that resulted in failed talks with then Union Home Secretary Kamal Pande. The militant outfit withdrew its truce within two weeks after the government of India refused to accept its demand, mainly the inclusion of Pakistan in talks on Kashmir. However, in the backdrop of simmering tensions in Kashmir and after the failure of an already tried ceasefire in 2000, the 2018 ceasefire also didnt bear good results. The number of terror-related incidents more than doubled during the Ramzan ceasefire. Recruitment by militant groups and grenade attacks also witnessed a spike. What worsened the ceasefire were the killings of Shujaat Bukhari, the editor of Rising Kashmir, and Aurangzeb, an Indian Army soldier. A repeat of ceasefire on the lines of the year 2000 also seemed to bring Hurriyat leaders on board, which, however also didnt bear fruits. This is not the first time that differences have cropped up between the alliance partners. Earlier, the PDP reportedly threatened to pull out of the coalition over the issue of two BJP ministers rallying behind the Hindu Ekta Manch, which was demanding a CBI inquiry into the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district. The BJP had asked both the ministers to resign from cabinet. The two parties formed a coalition government with PDP leader Mehbooba Mufti as chief minister in 2015 after elections threw up a hung assembly, but they were ideologically divided on a range of issues. New Delhi: Congress leader and former chief minister of Jammu & Kashmir Ghulam Nabi Azad said he had warned Prime Minister Narendra Modi that the alliance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was a Himalayan Blunder. The statement came as the BJP pulled out of the alliance with the PDP in Jammu & Kashmir, calling it untenable. I had cautioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi that a BJP-PDP alliance will be a Himalayan blunder. We are happy that the Centre has accepted its mistake, Azad said. His colleague Kapil Sibal took to Twitter, calling the BJP opportunist. First an opportunistic alliance with PDP Now an opportunistic breakaway Both acts of political immorality Kaise Desh badlega? he asked. Congress spokesperson Priyanka Chaturvedi said the BJP had ruined the state and made the people of J&K victims of their opportunistic alliance. Currently protesting at the L-G office, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal slammed the BJP government for using deteriorating situation as the reason to pull out. Didnt BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir, he tweeted. AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi said both the BJP and the PDP are equally responsible to the bitter separation in Jammu and Kashmir. I feel sorry for the people of KashmirI have no sympathy for the PDP. This should be a lesson for both the PDP and the National Conference. This is very unfortunate, the BJP cannot run away from failing to deliver. The BJP is equally responsible. They feel they are losing ground. Paris: India will construct a war memorial at Villers Guislain, a town around 200 km from Paris, to honour the valour and sacrifice of the thousands of its soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought for peace in the World War I. The announcement was made by External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj in France. "India will construct an Indian Armed Forces Memorial at Villers Guislain," she said. She added that this would be the second such memorial in Europe. During the World War I, Villers-Guislain had witnessed a fierce battle in which the British Indian cavalry regiments were heavily involved. The town was liberated on September 29, 2018. Swaraj, who arrived here from Rome yesterday on the second leg of her four-nation tour, addressed the Indian diaspora at a reception organised in her honour. She said that Indians in every part of the world carry India and its civilisational ethos in their heart. She also handed over certificates of appreciation to Indian community organisation and individuals who have contributed to the Swacch Bharat Kosh. The minister also attended a ceremony held to name the Indian Culture Centre in the memory of Swami Vivekanand. A bilateral Letter of Intent was signed between India and France in her presence on cooperation in the field of conservation of pre-historic ornate caves and rock shelters. The document signed between the Ministry of Culture of India and the Ministry of Culture of France will aid conservation efforts at the Bhimbetka caves in India and the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in France. Swaraj also visited the India House, Maison de l'Inde, which is a hostel for Indian students in the University City of Paris.She addressed the Indian students and unveiled a plaque at the India Hostel to commemorate the golden jubilee of the landmark building. "Bridging the gap between India and France through people-to-people connect! EAM @SushmaSwaraj with the Indian students staying at Maison de l'Inde or Indian hostel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary," Ministry of External Affairs Spokesman Raveesh Kumar tweeted. Bridging the gap between India and France through people-to-people connect! EAM @SushmaSwaraj with the Indian students staying at Maison de l'Inde or Indian hostel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. pic.twitter.com/5LDWk3HV9F Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) June 19, 2018 Swaraj also released a publication, 'States of India' which is meant for increasing awareness of the business climate in various states of India and would prove to be a handy guide for French investors. Later, the minister left for Luxembourg for a two-day visit. She is the first external affairs minister from India to visit Luxembourg. New Delhi: Major newspapers in Kashmir on Tuesday have left their editorial spaces blank in protest against the killing of Shujaat Bukahri, an eminent journalist and the Editor-in-Chief of Rising Kashmir. Bukhari was shot dead by unidentified gunmen on 14th of June outside his office in Press Enclave in Srinagar. The decision to leave edit spaces blank was taken on Monday at a meeting of The Kashmir Editors Guild (KEG). One of the senior members of the KEG, who also is an editor of a magazine, while wishing to remain anonymous confirmed it to News18 over phone. It was unanimous decision taken by all the members of the KEG and the message was conveyed to almost all the newspapers in the valley. The reason behind leaving the edit spaces blank is to convey a message to the government that attacks like these on the press cant continue, he said. According to this KEG member, almost 11 newspapers in the valley Urdu and English alike have left their editorial spaces blank. The hands which write these editorials have been snatched from us. It feels like our ink has dried. Hence was imperative we convey a message and register our protests. Shujaats killing is an attempt to censor, weaken and ultimately silence the role of the media in Kashmir, he said. Similar blank editorials were also printed by Bukharis Rising Kashmir, the newspaper he had founded as well. Shoaib Hamid, who edits the edit page for Rising Kashmir said that newspapers plans to register their protests against Bukharis killing by publishing a blank editorial, is to make the killers of Bukhari know that a free and responsible press cant be silenced. Shujaat Bukharis murder is an attack on most of us. We will continue protest. In fact we at Rising Kashmir are planning to write scathing editorials on the violence in Kashmir, Hamid said. He also said that other members of the society across all professions should also protests against Bukharis killing in their own way. The blank editorial in newspapers is also to send a message that we will not let the freedom of speech be crushed, he said. Hamid, however, also rued that Bukharis killing should not been looked as an attack on press but also an attack on any sane voice which wants peace in Kashmir. Editor-in-Chief of Kashmir Reader, Haji Hayat Mohammad Bhat also echoed same views. As responsible journalists we have to question, and protest against this brutal killing. Thats what we have done, he said to News18 over phone. Yesterday, journalists in Srinagar had organised a silent march to protest against the assassination of Shujaat Bukhari. The march started from Press Enclave, locally known as Press Colony, where Bukhari was killed. It is also where most Kashmir-based newspapers have their offices. Bhopal: As the clamour around farmers' loan waiver grows and the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh approaches, families of farmers who lost their lives in the Mandsaur police firing last year, have once again voiced their discontent with the administration's dispensation of justice. "We had high hopes that the six deceased farmers, including my son, would get justice. But that has not been delivered to us. If the judge, who is referred to as the God of justice, failed to ensure justice to us, then we have left everything to the almighty now," were the dejected words of Alka Patidar, mother of Abhishek Patidar, a teen who was among the six farmers killed in Mandsaur last year. The statement of the aggrieved mother comes after Justice (Retd) JK Jain submitted a report to the Madhya Pradesh government, assigning clean chit to the police personnel who opened fire on the farmers on June 6, 2017. The report, a copy of which is with News18, has clearly given a clean chit to the police. The report mentions that it was required and justified to open fire on the mob to bring things under control. The report, which has already been submitted to the state government, is being examined by the government. The MP Cabinet is yet to take a call on the tabling of its bills in the upcoming Monsoon Session of the assembly, which begins from June 25. The report claims that the situation was volatile in Mandsaur city, Daloda and Malhargarh towns and the law and order was crumbling. Despite prohibitive orders in force, the violent mob kept protesting aggressively. Tear gas shells were lobbed on the protesters, which proved ineffective. Even lathicharge failed to deter protesters, who were quite prepared to harm the police. The lives of policemen present inside the thana in Piplayamandi were at risk. They had no other option but to open fire in self defence and disperse the mob, which prompted them to fire shots. Based on evidence presented before the commission, it seemed that the act of firing was required and justified, the report states. However, the report also claims that the farmers' agitation turned violent due to weak intelligence of the district administration and police. The shots should have been fired on the legs as per the norms but this was not adhered to by the cops, observes the report. The firing had killed five while six others had sustained injuries. Afterwards, the state government had announced an ex-gratia of Rs one crore each, to the next of kin of those killed in the firing and Rs five lakh each to those injured. The report also observes that whatever steps were taken by the district administration prior to the incident, were not sufficient. Moreover, due to an apparent lack of communication between the farmers and government officers, the district administration was unaware about the demands and problems of the farmers. However, there was no mention of adverse remarks in the report on the then Mandsaur Collector and SP, who were suspended after the incident. The report was submitted to Addl Chief Secretary (General Administration) Prabhanshu Kamal a few days ago. He has forwarded it to Principal Secretary (Home) Malay Shrivastava for further action. The commission was to submit the report within three months of its formation, but its tenure was extended four times. Meanwhile, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party seemed clueless about the submission of the report. We dont have any information about this report. Perhaps this report would be tabled in the assembly during the upcoming Monsoon Session, BJP spokesperson Rahul Kothari told News18. Congress spokesperson Pankaj Chaturvedi termed this as another misdeed of Kisan Hatyari government of MP. If farmers are killed and state government gives clean chit to the police, then its highly condemnable, he said, adding that the Congress would press hard that the report is tabled in the assembly. Lucknow: In a fresh attack on the Centre, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati on Tuesday said the Narendra Modi government was not reducing fuel prices even when they were lowered in the international market. Terming the government anti-farmer, the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister alleged that the government was only concerned about the profits of big industrialists. Mayawati, who issued a statement, said: The cut in the excise duty will cause a heavy dent to the economy. It is clear from this that the government is not worried about millions of poor, unemployed and the farmers. Today, big businessmen are busy doing embezzlement of millions of rupees and are then fleeing away to foreign countries, while the government is playing role of a mute spectator. Speaking on the issue of dynamic pricing of petro products in accordance with the international market, she said: The fuel prices are increased as per the international prices but they are not decreased accordingly, which results in burden on the common people of the country. Today, the Centre is commercialising public welfare, which is not justified. The poor, farmers and unemployed are being compelled to engage in criminal activities. The BSP chief further said the party had nothing to do with the problems of the common people and instead, its leaders were busy meeting celebrities under the Sampark For Samarthan programme. Thiruvananthapuram: The death toll in rain-related incidents in Kerala has gone up to 56, said Revenue Minister E Chandrasekaran in Kerala Assembly on Tuesday. The government has decided to provide Rs four lakh as ex-gratia to the kin of the deceased while Chandrasekaran also informed the House that 28,700 persons have been shifted to relief camps so far. The damage due to rain was reported from almost all districts of the state. At Payam in Kannoor, nine houses were gutted because of the heavy flooding. A major landslide in Kattippara near Thamarassery in Kozhikode district claimed 14 lives. The Kozhikode district administration has also issued a travel ban on Thamarassery Ghat in the wake of heavy rains that continues to lash the district. Meanwhile, Kozhikode District Collector U V Jose has ordered an inquiry into the charge that construction of an illegal check dam near Kattipara added to the intensity of the landslide. Minister Chandrasekaran, who visited the landslide-hit areas at Kattipara, warned of severe action against those indulged in unauthorised constructions in ecologically fragile zones. A team of 96 persons from the National Disaster Response Force have been deployed intwo teams in the state. Officials at the state Control room for Disaster Management in Thiruvananthapuram said the flood situation has improved in the state with water receding from almost all areas. New Delhi: The government has decided not to go ahead with Air India stake sale in an election year and will provide required funds for its operations, a senior official said on Tuesday. The decision comes less than 3 weeks after the proposed 76 per cent strategic stake sale in debt laden national carrier failed to attract any bidder. Air India will very soon get funds from the government for its day to day operations and will even place orders for a couple of aircraft, the government official said. "Its not a good time to privatise Air India. We will work to bring private hands onboard to make airline more efficient, and also look at cost-cutting and asset monetisation," a government source told CNN-News18, adding that rising fuel price is the main reason for lack of interest in Air India. The decision was taken at the high level meeting convened by Union Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday. The meeting was attended by Piyush Goyal, who has been temporarily given the charge of finance ministry, Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu, Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari and other senior officials of finance and civil aviation ministries. "The airline is posting operational profits. None of the flights go empty. With all the cost efficient mechanism in place, we will continue improving its operational efficiency. There is no need to rush in for disinvestment as of now," the official said. The government is looking at turning around the company to ensure that it makes profits on overall basis before going in for listing. "Certain conditions have to be met before listing a company. Once Air India fulfils those, we will go in for an initial public offering and subsequent listing," the source said. As per Sebi norms, a company has to post profit in previous three financial years before it can list itself in the stock exchanges. "The focus is on improving operational efficiency. We will continue to boost employee morale, starting from the top level, to better the functioning of the airline. Funds would be provided as and when required," the source added. The government had originally proposed to offload 76 per cent equity share capital of the national carrier as well as transfer the management control to private players. The buyer would have had to take over Rs 24,000 crore debt or the carrier along with over Rs 8,000 crore of liabilities. However, the stake sale failed to attract any bidders when the bidding process got completed on May 31. (With inputs from PTI) New Delhi: In what is being seen as a nascent step towards formally entering electoral politics, Shaurya Doval, son of National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, has launched a campaign aimed at development in Uttarakhand. Sources have told News18 that Doval Junior is in contention to contest from Pauri Garhwal seat, which is currently held by former Union Minister Maj General BC Khanduri. The Doval family comes from the Pauri district in the Gharwal division of Uttarakhand. Khanduri is now well past the 75-year age limit set by the current party leadership for contesting elections. The former chief ministers daughter Ritu Khanduri won the last state Vidhan Sabha elections contesting on a BJP ticket from an assembly segment in the LS constituency represented by her father. Shaurya, who also runs the think tank India Foundation, launched the campaign in Dehradun on Monday Bemisaal Garhwal under the banner of Buland Uttarakhand. It will focus on the overall development of Garhwal, which includes agriculture, education, new employment opportunities, health, tourism, Garhwali culture, sports, child welfare and many other areas, he said. Shaurya, however, refused to comment on reports of his being nominated by the BJP to contest the 2019 general elections form Pauri. The purpose of the campaign, he said, was to tap and develop the regions potential through self-help groups and activities. Hoping that the said campaign would turn into a mass movement, he said, Several activities, including career counselling for students, mobile clinics for villagers and women in specific, skill development for farmers, mushroom farming and idea generation for milk producers have already begun under the campaign. He added that several mobile clinics had been added in various blocks, including Pokhari, Kaljikhal, Jakholi, Dasholi and Pauri. Shaurya made his foray into politics last year and stamped it by attending a series of BJP events and rallies, including a working member committee meeting in Haldwani. Early in 2017, he campaigned for Satpal Maharaj and later on participated in a state foundation programme led by CM Trivendra Singh Rawat. HA NOI Despite the imposition of anti-dumping duties on colour-coated steel products by Indonesian authorities, Vietnamese steel producers should not worry about the possibility of losing competitiveness, according to the Viet Nam Steel Association (VSA). Recently, Indonesia officially announced the application of anti-dumping duties on colour-coated steel imports from Viet Nam, from 12.01 per cent to 28.49 per cent in five years. Concerns have been raised that this tax imposition will cause difficulties for Vietnamese enterprises, and may cause them to lose the market. However, the VSA said that with large demand in this market, domestic producers will still be able to compete with rivals. According to VSA, 60 per cent of made-in-Viet Nam colour-coated steel products are exported to Southeast Asian markets including Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar. The Indonesian Anti-Dumping Committee (KADI) said that from July 2015 to June 2016, Indonesia imported more than 224,000 tonnes of colour-coated steel, of which about 196,000 tonnes came from Viet Nam and China, accounting for 87.5 per cent of the countrys total steel imports. VSA Chairman Ho Nghia Dung said that the taxed enterprises are Nam Kim, Hoa Sen and Ton ong A. He attributed the anti-dumping measure to Indonesian suspicion that Vietnamese steel enterprises imported raw materials from China for production. He said "With tariffs ranging from 12 per cent to more than 28 per cent, exports will be more difficult. It is likely that businesses will have to reduce exports to the market. However, it is not likely that they will lose this market, because it has a huge demand for galvanised steel sheets," Dung said. "Businesses have expanded market to include Europe and the United States, and promoted exports to Southeast Asian countries, he added. However, the VSA Chairman also urged domestic enterprises to improve their competitiveness, especially in the context of integration and application of safeguard measures as much as today. In recent years, steel production has been one of the industries most subjected to trade lawsuits. By the end of 2017, out of a total of 124 trade defence cases against Vietnamese exports, there were up to 30 steel-related cases, mainly focusing on anti-dumping investigations. Therefore, the steel industry needs to create a closed production chain from local input supply to finished products and invest in advanced production technology to reduce production costs and help businesses develop in a stable and sustainable fashion, Dung said. In particular, to prevent traditional markets from being narrowed, VSA said that businesses need to invest in overseas markets where there is a shortage of local steel producers like Africa, South America, Cambodia, Laos and Malaysia. It is forecast that demand for steel in Indonesia and the Philippines will increase. Countries in ASEAN-6 (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei) are expected to post a positive growth rate in steel consumption to reach over 90 million tonnes by 2019. This is a good sign for Vietnamese steel enterprises if they continue to promote exports to these markets According to Ton ong A Joint Stock Company, tariff barriers and non-tariff barriers are challenging for exporters, especially in the steel industry. By 2018, Ton ong A targets to export 800,000 tonnes of steel products, so the company must ensure the quality of products is in accordance with international standards by using high quality raw materials from Tier 1 suppliers. VNS Lucknow: After pressure from the Patanjali Group to shift land for its Food Park out of the state, the Uttar Pradesh government has agreed to allow the group to transfer as much land as it wants to its subsidiary company in Greater Noida. The cabinet, which met on Tuesday, has also decided to add the name of Patanjali Ayurveda to the allotted land, while keeping the other terms and conditions the same. Speaking to the media, cabinet minister and spokesperson of UP government Sidharth Nath Singh said, The decision on allowing Patanjali Ayurveda Pvt Ltd to shift its land to its subsidiary in Greater Noida was taken in todays cabinet. Also, the cabinet has decided to add the name of Patanjali Ayurveda to the allotted land. Rest all the terms and conditions remain unchanged. Earlier, the permission to shift land was withheld as the infrastructure and industrial development policy of 2012 did not allow for land to be subleased. Around 455 acres of land had been allocated to Patanjali along the Yamuna Expressway in 2016 under this policy. The Centre had threatened to cancel the project if Patanjali was unable to secure a no-objection certificate from the UP government and extended its deadline to June 30, 2018, after the state pleaded on Patanjalis behalf. The Patanjali Group locked horns with the UP government over the issue as it wanted to transfer 91 acres of this land to its subsidiary, Patanjali Food and Herbal Park Noida Pvt Ltd, for setting up a mega food park. Earlier this month on June 5, Patanjali had threatened to pull out of the project from Uttar Pradesh. A day after the group threatened to cancel the project, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath intervened in the matter and called up Ramdev. He also spoke to CEO of Patanjali Group, Acharya Balakrishna, and assured him of all possible help. The UP cabinet also decided to constitute the Shri Kashi Vishwanath Special Area Development Board, which will undertake the beautification of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple area with a budget of approximately Rs 413 crore, apart from giving the nod to the proposal for the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor. Motihari, Bihar: RTI activist Rajendra Singh, who had exposed many scams, including irregularities in police recruitment, PDS shops and toilet building scheme, was shot dead in broad daylight in Bihar's East Champaran district on Tuesday. Singh was shot by assailants near Mathbanwari Chawk close to Piprakothi Police Station when he was riding his motorcycle. He was killed on the spot. Rajendra had reportedly escaped three such attacks in the past. The activist had earlier requested senior police officers to provide security, citing threat to his life but his petition remained under process. He was best known for his work in unearthing discrepancies in the functioning of LIC office, irregularities in teachers and police recruitment. Rajendra also brought to light the misuse of government funds meant for building toilets and houses under Indira Awas Yojna. Based on his investigation, many FIRs were lodged in the local court with some cases even being put on trial recently. The opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal has meanwhile accused Chief Minister Nitish Kumar of failing to maintain law and order in the state and demanded a high level inquiry into Singh's killing. Senior party leader Alok Mehta told reporters in Patna that anyone standing up against corruption and wrongdoing was being targeted in the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government. New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused an urgent hearing on a plea seeking its direction to declare as "unconstitutional" the sit-in of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues inside the lieutenant governor's office. Kejriwal and his ministers have been staging a sit-in at L-G Anil Baijal's office since June 11 evening to press for their demands, including a direction to IAS officers to end their "strike" and action against those who have struck work. A vacation bench comprising justices S A Nazeer and Indu Malhotra said the plea would be listed for hearing after the summer vacation. Lawyer Shashank Sudhi, appearing for petitioner Hari Nath Ram, sought the urgent hearing of the plea, saying a constitutional crisis has been created due to "the unconstitutional and illegal" protest by the chief minister inside the L-G's office here. Moreover, the citizens are "left high and dry", he said. Sudhi said the Delhi High Court, which had heard the matters on the issue yesterday, has now posted them for hearing on June 22 and that the city is facing an "emergency situation" in which citizens are facing the severe water crisis. "We will list it on reopening of the court," the bench said, while declining the request for urgent hearing. Besides seeking a declaration of the sit-in as unconstitutional, the plea also sought initiation of perjury proceedings against either the chief minister or the office of the lieutenant governor (L-G) on the ground that one of them is lying. The chief minister has been claiming that the IAS officers are on strike, but the L-G's office has asserted that the officers are very much on the job, the lawyer said. The high court had virtually disapproved the sit-in led by Kejriwal at the LG's office and asked the AAP government who had authorised such a protest. New Delhi: The Delhi Polices Crime Branch filed the chargesheet in the alleged rape of a 10-year-old in a madrassa in Uttar Pradeshs Ghaziabad. The incident had taken place in April. DCP Ram Gopal Naik confirmed to CNN News 18 that the chargesheet has been filed by his team on Tuesday. He, however refused to reveal further details. According to Delhi Police sources, the accused has been chargesheeted under the sections of rape, drugging and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. The crime branch has also chargesheeted the cleric of the madrasa where the incident allegedly took place. The cleric has been chargesheeted under the POCSO Act, sources said. The minor girl went missing on April 21. She went out to buy something from the shop at 1 pm. Since then she has not come back home. I suspect she was misled and taken away by someone, her father told the police in his complaint. Acting on the complaint, the Delhi Police began investigation. Though the girls phone number was switched off, the police traced her to the madrassa from where she was recovered on April 22, a day after the alleged incident. The investigation was initially being handled by the local police. They had apprehended the accused, who was said to be a minor at that time. The case was later transferred to the crime branch. The accused who was sent to a correctional home, later turned out to be a major after his ossification report confirmed the same. The girl in her statement to the magistrate said she had received a call from one of her friends to meet. When she went downstairs, she met her friends brother who told her that the friend couldnt come and that she would have to come along with him to meet her. When she resisted, the accused allegedly threatened her. She went with him to the madrassa where she was kept captive. New Delhi: The state of Jammu and Kashmir is heading towards Governors Rule with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulling out of the alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). As NN Vohras term is about to end, there are other faces that can find themselves in the race for the post. However, according to sources, the change in Jammu and Kashmir Governor in the wake of threat to Amarnath Yatra is highly unlikely. While it looks like Vohra will get an extension for at least three months till the Yatra ends, the speculations around a new Governor are also rife. Lieutenant General (Retired) Syed Ata Hasnain Former Commander of Srinagar-based Chinar Corps Lieutenant General (Retired) Syed Ata Hasnain could be among the favourites to be the new Governor of Jammu & Kashmir. General Hasnain has a legacy of connecting with the common masses. General Hasnain had, as General Officer Commanding in Jammu and Kashmir in 2010-2011, been at the forefront of Operation Sadbhavana, which in a way helped bring a relative calm to the Valley. As a Brigadier, Hasnain served as Commander, 12 Infantry Brigade, on the Line of Control in Uri of north Kashmir. Having commanded 19 Infantry Division in Baramulla, Lieutenant General Hasnain was posted as General Officer Commanding 15 Corps in October 2010. Dineshwar Sharma The Centres special representative on Jammu and Kashmir Dineshwar Sharma is also touted to be in the race for the new Governor in Jammu and Kashmir. Former Intelligence Bureau (IB) chief Dineshwar Sharma, who was appointed as the governments special representative to carry forward a dialogue with all sections of the people in Jammu and Kashmir, is a 1979-batch IPS officer of the Kerala cadre and was appointed as Director, IB, in December 2014 for a fixed two-year term. Sharma has earlier worked with Ajit Doval when the latter was IB chief. He headed the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau of Uttar Pradesh when Home Minister Rajnath Singh was the Chief Minister. Rajiv Mehrishi Rajiv Mehrishi, the1978 batch Rajasthan Cadre IAS officer, who has worn many caps during his nearly four-decade journey as a bureaucrat, is also seen as the next possible Governor of Jammu and Kashmir. Mehrishi is the current Comptroller and Auditor General of India (C&AG) and Chairman of United Nations Board of Auditors. AS Dulat Amarjit Singh Dulat, former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing, had time and again hinted that the PDP-BJP coalition would not survive 2018. Many political pundits in Kashmir say that Dulat could be the next Governor. AS Dulat has worked in Kashmir for several years having served as the Intelligence Bureau's (IB) special director in Srinagar during former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayees tenure. Not only did he supervise the intelligence network during this period, but he was also advisor on Kashmir in the PMO during Vajpayees tenure. He went on to write an insightful book titled Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years, providing details about how Vajpayee handled this challenging state, and 'The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace'. Fashion houses have been rushing to drop fur and mohair from their collections lately, as sustainability and animal welfare become increasingly important issues for consumers. So will leather be next? More and more shoppers are eschewing leather footwear for vegan alternatives, sending leather prices tumbling in the US, Bloomberg reported this week. And while animal rights ethics undoubtedly play a role in the trend, there is no denying that vegan shoe options are more sophisticated and on-point than ever before. Here are three brands to keep on your leather-free radar this year. Hugo Boss Fashion heavyweight Hugo Boss doubled down on its sustainable fashion initiative this month with the launch of a new Boss Menswear shoe fabricated using Pinatex, a natural-based material made from pineapple leaf fibers. The shoe, which is 100% vegan, is colored with natural plant-based dyes. Birkenstock Peta2, the youth organization of animal rights association PETA USA, voted niche footwear brand Birkenstock the "Most Vegan-Friendly Shoe Company 2017" back in April, and it is easy to see why. The German company, known for its cork sandals, has an extensive dedicated "vegan collection" featuring sandals made using synthetic and natural products for men and women. Kat Von D Celebrity tattoo artist and beauty mogul Kat Von D is preparing to take on the footwear industry this year, with her new vegan shoe line. Dubbed "Von D Shoes," the line is set to launch at some point in 2018, offering fashion fans 28 different styles spanning furry moon boots to towering platforms. The line will be completely vegan and cruelty-free, with pieces handmade in Italy in sizes 5 through 12. On Saturday, Opposition politics unveiled yet another unusual visual. Strange bedfellows huddling together to declare support to Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, who is on a sit-in against the Centre. The most striking oddity of the frame was that it included West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her bete noire CPM leader and Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan along with Andhra CM Chandrababu Naidu and Karnatakas HD Kumaraswamy. The photo-op has underlined two parallel narratives. After the Bengaluru display of Opposition unity at the Kumaraswamys swearing-in, the four non-BJP CMs arrival in Delhi to back their beleaguered colleague and Aam Aadmi Party chief is a measure of their collective determination to take on the BJP at national level. While it should be worrying for the saffron party, there are also fault lines that should cheer up BJP. The absence of Congress, the TRS and BJD in the solidarity show has added a sour note exposing fissures in the anti-Modi grouping. What is the political implication of arch Bengal rivals -- CPM and the Trinamool Congress -- coming under the same frame? There is no love lost between West Bengal unit of the CPM and Mamata Banerjee ever since she dislodged its government; the Marxists accuse her of playing communal politics enabling the BJP to usurp the Left space in the state. The state unit has been pressing for an alliance with the Congress to take on the TMC that the powerful Kerala lobby has been opposing much to the delight of Banerjee. However, CPM Hyderabad Congress has since approved tactical alliances with secular parties, including the Congress. Pinarayi Vijayans photo-op with Banerjee may not be to the liking of the Bengal comrades as it enhances the TMC chiefs profile. Interestingly, Banerjee and Vijayan did not exchange any pleasantries at the Bengaluru venue but two days later she surprised political observers by sending greetings on his 74th birthday via Twitter. In the last one month this is the third time CPM and TMC leaders shared a common platform, after Kumaraswamys swearing-in where Mamata, Yechury and Vijayan shared the podium and last week Yechury and TMC law maker Dinesh Trivedi were seated in the same table at Rahul Gandhis Iftar party last week. The bonhomie is bound to create some unease in West Bengal where the cadres of both the parties are engaged in violent clashes. With Banerjee assuming a pro-active national role eyeing PM post, her stock is expected to rise in the home state making revival of the CPM very difficult. Party sources admitted that even a subtle projection of Banerjee as potential PM candidate would pump the Bengali psyche and help the TMC sweep the Lok Sabha polls trouncing the CPM, BJP and the Congress. However, a party leader who refused to be quoted said media is reading too much into these stray photo-ops. The CPM is supporting Kejriwal on the issue of federalism and that it has no bearing on Bengal politics. The TMC cannot win elections by just these shows. She will be judged by her performance and governance, not a photo-op, he said. Nevertheless, fault lines in the Opposition were visible with Telengana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, who was talking about the need for Federal Front and his Odisha counterpart Navin Patnaik, skipping the Delhi show while a confused Congress is yet to get its act together. After sacrificing its political interests in Karnataka for the sake of greater Opposition unity, the Congress slipped in Delhi as it declined to join the four CMs in backing Kejriwals fight against Modi government. Though political secretary to Congress president Ahmed Patel had a quiet meeting with Mamata Banerjee on Sunday, the Congress is wary of Kejriwals politics. The party suspects that Kejriwal has sympathisers in the RSS and that what he is doing is only dramawazi to cover up governance deficit. Unlike the regional satraps, the Congress has to factor in its pan-India interests. The AAP tried to derail Congress prospects in Punjab, Goa, and Karnataka and its plans to contest Rajasthan and Haryana polls will end up helping BJP, party insiders fear. Sources said the Congress also did not want to antagonize the powerful bureaucracy which is at loggerheads with the AAP government in Delhi by aligning with Kejriwal. However, some in the party feel that the high command could have delinked Kejriwal as a political rival from the wider issue of Opposition unity and federalism that the Modi government has been trampling upon. The party could have taken a nuanced stand and asked its Puducherry chief minister Narayanaswamy, who is also facing heat from a hyperactive governor Kiran Bedi, to join the four CMs. That way the Congress could have maintained a distance with the AAP even while remaining in the pole position of the emerging anti-BJP coalition; that is the art of managing contradictions. (The author is a senior journalist and political commentator. Views are personal.) New Delhi: The BJP decided to pull out of the PDP-led coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. The decision comes within days of the Centre deciding not to extend the Ramzan ceasefire in the Valley. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue the alliance with PDP. Keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and in order to control the prevailing situation in the state, we have decided that the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor," BJP's Jammu and Kashmir in-charge Ram Madhav said. Ram Madhav further said that the "situation in the Kashmir Valley is not right today, there is terrorism and the freedom of press is in danger after the killing of Shujaat Bukhari ji." "Terrorism, violence and radicalisation have risen and fundamental rights of the citizens are under danger in the Kashmir valley. Despite support from the Central govt, PDP failed to control the situation," he added. The PDP has called an emergency meeting to discuss the issue at 4pm on Tuesday. Mehbooba Mufti is expected to chair the meeting. Senior PDP minister Naeem Akhtar said CM Mehbooba Mufti will submit her resignation to the Governor shortly. Former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah took to Twitter to react to the BJP's decision to withdraw from the alliance with PDP "And so it has come to pass......." And so it has come to pass........ Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) June 19, 2018 BJP leaders and ministers met the top party leadership earlier in the day amid reports of straining of ties. National Security Adviser Ajit Doval also met Shah on Monday. This is not the first time that differences have cropped up between the alliance partners. Earlier, the PDP reportedly threatened to pull out of the coalition over the issue of two BJP ministers rallying behind the Hindu Ekta Manch, which was demanding a CBI inquiry into the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district. The BJP had asked both the ministers to resign from cabinet. On Tuesday, the BJP had called its cabinet ministers in Jammu and Kashmir to New Delhi for consultation with the party leadership. State BJP president Ravinder Raina and other ministers met party leaders, including national president Amit Shah and general secretary Ram Madhav, on Tuesday and Wednesday. While Mehbooba Mufti wanted the ceasefire to be extended, the Centre decided against it in view of the situation in the Valley. The Centre had called off the Ramzan ceasefire a day after Eid, citing provocative action from militants after cessation of operations by security forces. The brutal murder of veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari and abduction and killing of army jawan Aurangzeb are said to have prompted the decision. In a series of tweets, Union home minister Rajnath Singh announced that security forces had been directed to resume operations. It was expected that everyone will cooperate in ensuring the success of this initiative. While the Security Forces have displayed exemplary restraint during this period, the terrorists have continued with their attacks, on civilians and SFs, resulting in deaths and injuries, he said. The calling off of the ceasefire has restricted space for PDP to manoeuvre a narrative for its coalition with the BJP. Jun 19, 2018 18:06 (IST) Dismissing a possible alliance between the Congress and PDP, Ghulam Nabi Azad blamed the BJP for going into an uneasy alliance and then pulling out of it. "The initiative (for this alliance) was taken by no less than the Prime Minister of India to have a Government because we had approached the PDP (after the 2014 Assembly Elections). I had approached and I am very happy that Omar Saheb seconded that proposal of having a greater alliance, greater alliance of PDP-NC and Congress Party and I had assured on behalf of the Party that there will be support of Mufti Saheb for full term but let them keep away and keep off from the BJP. But it was on the instance of PM Modi, whose party directly or indirectly threatened the PDP that it will not get full assistance, should they go for some other alternative. I had cautioned PM Modi that should he form a Government in alliance with PDP in J&K, you will be committing a Himalayan blunder which they laughed to it and today I have been proved right that they had done a Himalayan blunder by having a coalition Government with Regional Party in J&K. HA NOI MobiFone has sent messages to its customers announcing that the operator stopped providing services with e-wallet Vimo from June 7. Vimo e-wallet is run by Vimo Technology Joint Stock Company. It is a mobile payment service for electricity, water, internet and telephone bills and money transfer. Representatives of Vimo e-wallet told Thanh Nien (Youth) newspaper that the deal had allowed MobiFones customers, who use feature phones, not smartphones, to use Vimo by using USSD code 234#. However, few MobiFone subscribers used the Vimo wallets. Therefore, to cut operating costs, the two sides decided to halt the service. For customers who do use Vimo wallet via USSD, they need to download the Vimo application on smartphones to continue accessing the service. Customers who use smartphones can continue to use the service without any changes. VNS New Delhi: It was in February 2015 that former chief minister of Jammu & Kashmir, the late Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, said that the alliance between the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the meeting of the North and South Pole. Cut to 2018, the BJP on Tuesday, announced that it was pulling out of the alliance with the PDP because it had become untenable. During the campaign before the 2014 elections, the BJP and PDP had pitched themselves as each others rivals. While PDP said a vote for them would mean BJP was out and the latter called the government a baap-beti sarkaar. They still came together a year later which is when fissures in the alliance started to come to the fore. After taking oath as CM of the coalition government, Sayeed thanked Pakistan for allowing the elections to be conducted in a peaceful manner. The statement, of course, did not go well with the opposition and Sayeed soon became the persona non grata for BJP. The alliance hit a low point in 2016 when the state saw massive protests following the death of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani. The valley had practically been on the edge and witnessed several instances of violence. Earlier this year, the PDP reportedly threatened to pull out of the coalition over the issue of two BJP ministers rallying behind the Hindu Ekta Manch, which was, in support of the accused, demanding a CBI inquiry into the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district. The BJP had asked both the ministers to resign from cabinet. A highlight of the alliance was Article 370, which the PDP said will not be touched and even said that the BJP had agreed to the same. However, state BJP leaders have said time and again that the special status of J&K is not a sacred cow who cannot be touched. Chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, meanwhile, went as far as to state that there will be no one in Kashmir left to shoulder the tricolour if J&Ks special status was meddled with. The terms of engagement as part of the alliance included enhanced people-to-people contact on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC). The BJP-ruled central government has time and again, not supported the idea. Mehbooba, on the other hand, has for long followed a peace-driven approach and the agenda of the alliance included following on the path of dialogue like former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee did in the spirit of Insaaniyat, Kashmiriyat aur Jamhooriyat. The BJP government has maintained that terror and talks could not go together. The alliance agenda further said that all political stakeholders will be included in the dialogue, irrespective of their ideologies. The BJP government has, however, snubbed the Hurriyat, with BJP leaders accusing many of the separatists of colluding with Pakistan. Leaders in the Hurriyat and interlocutor Dineshwar Sharma too failed to find a common ground for any plausible dialogue. BJP had in 2016 warned the PDP over its soft stand on separatists and had called for stringent action. Another major point was the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). Both parties had agreed that they had different views on the topic, but as part of the agenda, the coalition government will examine the need for de-notifying disturbed areas which will help the central government take a final view on the continuation of AFSPA in the state. BJP, however, has reiterated that the controversial rule could not be scrapped off from the state until peace returns. Other major promises that were made in the agenda included transfer of two hydro power projects from National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) to the state. That is yet to see the light of the day. The alliance has failed to make any solid progress on the promises it made while coming together, despite a group of ministers having been constituted to oversee its implementation. New Delhi: Days after the Centre announced it would not extend the Ramzan ceasefire in the Valley, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has called its cabinet ministers in Jammu and Kashmir to New Delhi for consultation with the party leadership. State BJP president Ravinder Raina and other ministers are expected to meet party leaders, including national president Amit Shah and general secretary Ram Madhav, on Tuesday and Wednesday. Shah is scheduled to visit Jammu on June 23. Sources said the meeting appeared to have been convened following differences between the ruling PDP and BJP over the issue of the ceasefire. While J&K Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti wanted it to be extended, the Centre decided against it in view of the situation in the Valley. The Centre had called off the Ramzan ceasefire a day after Eid, citing provocative action from militants after cessation of operations by security forces. The brutal murder of veteran journalist Shujaat Bukhari and abduction and killing of army jawan Aurangzeb are said to have prompted the decision. In a series of tweets, Union home minister Rajnath Singh announced that security forces had been directed to resume operations. It was expected that everyone will cooperate in ensuring the success of this initiative. While the Security Forces have displayed exemplary restraint during this period, the terrorists have continued with their attacks, on civilians and SFs, resulting in deaths and injuries, he said. The calling off of the ceasefire has restricted space for PDP to manoeuvre a narrative for its coalition with the BJP. However, this is not the first time that differences have cropped up between the alliance partners. Earlier, the PDP reportedly threatened to pull out of the coalition over the issue of two BJP ministers rallying behind the Hindu Ekta Manch, which was demanding a CBI inquiry into the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua district. The BJP had asked both the ministers to resign from cabinet. New Delhi: IAS officers on Tuesday said they were waiting for a formal communication from Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal for a meeting at the secretariat here to end the impasse following the alleged assault on the chief secretary earlier this year. Their statement comes a day after Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia requested Lieutenant Governor (L-G) Anil Baijal to hold a meeting between the government and the bureaucrats to end the ongoing deadlock. The officers are waiting for a formal communication for a meeting with the chief minister following his assurance over ensuring safety and dignity of bureaucrats, the IAS AGMUT Association said. Sources, however, said Baijal may not convene the meeting as the L-G office had already asked the AAP government to sit with the officers and end the stalemate following the alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash in February. "#DelhiAtWork #NoToStrike In the context of Honble CM's assurance, we await formal communication for a meeting with him in the Delhi Secretariat. We reiterate that we continue to be at work," the association tweeted. Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues have been holding a sit-in at the L-G office demanding a direction to officers to end their "strike" and have the doorstep ration delivery scheme approved. The chief minister tweeted, "We wrote a letter to Hon'ble LG yesterday seeking meeting of all stakeholders. We r awaiting response from Hon'ble LG. Hon'ble LG awaiting green signal from Hon'ble PM, who has to take the decision Whole Delhi waiting for Hon'ble PM to decide fast." Yesterday, the Delhi government and the IAS officers expressed their readiness for talks to end the impasse. Sisodia had written to Baijal requesting him to call a meeting between AAP ministers and the bureaucrats to resolve the issue. The chief minister had also assured the officers on Sunday that he would ensure their safety and security. The officers had yesterday welcomed Kejriwal's assurance about their safety, saying they were open to formal discussions with the chief minister on the matter. "I hope LG calls a meeting soonest to resolve this issue. (sic)," Kejriwal had tweeted after Sisodia's letter. The officers had said that they looked forward to "concrete interventions" for their security and dignity, a move that may break the four-month-long impasse between the AAP dispensation and the bureaucrats following the alleged assault on Prakash by some ruling party MLAs at the chief minister's residence New Delhi: PDP chief and Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti tendered her resignation on Tuesday evening and launched a scathing attack against alliance partner BJP, saying the partys muscular security policy will not work in Kashmir and reconciliation is the key. BJP, in a sudden announcement on Tuesday afternoon, pulled out of the PDP-led alliance in Jammu and Kashmir, blaming PDP for failing to control the situation in Kashmir. "I am not shocked as this alliance was never for power. PDP never believes in power politics and we worked for the people," Mufti told reporters after an hour-long meeting with her ministers and party workers at her residence. She maintained that Jammu and Kashmir was not an enemy territory as being perceived by few. "We had always said muscular security policy will not work in J&K, reconciliation is key," she said. Mufti began her press conference by raising the issue of Article 370, under which the state enjoys a special status, and said "...we have safeguarded Article 370 and 35-A (of the Constitution) and we will continue to do that". "We have been able to withdraw 11,000 cases against the stone pelters," she said while listing her side of the story after the BJP pulled out of its alliance with the PDP in the state. She also mentioned the unilateral ceasefire during Ramzan announced by Home Minister Rajnath Singh and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Lahore in 2015. Mehbooba, who submitted her resignation to Governor NN Vohra, said her party will continue to strive for dialogue and reconciliation in the state. "I have told the governor we will not go into any other alliance," she said. The BJP decided to pull out of the PDP-led coalition government in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday. The decision comes within days of the Centre deciding not to extend the Ramzan ceasefire in the Valley. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue the alliance with PDP. Keeping in mind that Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India and in order to control the prevailing situation in the state, we have decided that the reins of power in the state be handed over to the governor," BJP's Jammu and Kashmir in-charge Ram Madhav said. Ram Madhav further said that the "situation in the Kashmir Valley is not right today, there is terrorism and the freedom of press is in danger after the killing of Shujaat Bukhari ji." Bhopal: Under fire after his elderly mother dragged him to court accusing him of evicting her from an ancestral house in Bhopal, Leader of Opposition in MP assembly, Ajay Singh termed it a BJP conspiracy. Singh said that he would go ahead with the no-confidence motion in the state assembly during the upcoming Monsoon Session. Singh who was in Shahdol district on Tuesday, said that these rumours were an attempt by the BJP to divert attention from the no-confidence motion which he plans to present in assembly soon. I and my brother Abhimanyu are being targeted by the BJP, said the senior Congress leader and the son of late union minister Arjun Singh. The senior MLA said he would submit the no-confidence motion with the assembly secretariat on Wednesday. The monsoon session of MP assembly starts on June 25. When we know the advocate who appeared against me in the court is affiliated to which party, curtains would automatically come down on the conspiracy. On being asked whether his sister Veena Singh is also involved in the conspiracy against him, Singh responded in the affirmative saying it was quite obvious. Lashing out at BJP, Singh said the last time that the Congress moved a no-trust motion against the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government in 2013, the BJP made the Deputy Leader of Opposition switch sides and join them. When I contested the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP made one Congress MLA switch over at the eleventh hour and all this is happening all over again. Incidentally, Maihar MLA Narayan Tripathi, who had switched over to Congress from the Samajwadi Party in 2013 had again switched loyalties and joined the BJP in April 2014, days ahead of the Lok Sabha elections when Singh was pitted against BJPs Ganesh Singh from Satna Parliamentary constituency. Eventually, the BJP candidate had defeated Ajay Singh by over 8,500 votes. Earlier on Tuesday, Singhs 83-year-old mother Saroj Kumari had moved a JMFC court in Bhopal accusing her sons Ajay and Abhimanyu, of evicting her from their family house in Bhopal and not extending any financial support to her since 2011 when her husband passed away. Kumari was accompanied in court by daughter Veena and NRI industrialist Sam Verma. New Delhi: Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Tuesday sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi's intervention in the settlement of Rs 31,000 crore food account for procurement of wheat and paddy, which he said was wrongly taken over by the erstwhile state government instead of being adjusted between state and central governments. The Chief Minister raised the issue during his meeting with Modi, an official release said. The Rs 31,000 crore included Rs 12,000 crore principal and Rs 19,000 crore interest, the Chief Minister said, pointing out that the sum was on account of non-adjustment of accounts for procurement done by state agencies for FCI from 2003-2004 onwards. Singh said he had been pursuing the matter since taking over as Chief Minister and it was now pending for decision with the Finance Ministry. He said the state was facing a high annual interest payment liability and the total interest payoff might touch Rs 65,000 crore, which was untenable for it. The Chief Minister also reiterated his demand for a special package for development of the border areas of Punjab, which he had been pushing in view of the state having an active international border with several thickly populated areas located close to it. Amarinder lamented that the criteria for allocation of funds for Border Areas Development was unfavourable for Punjab and requested Modi's support in correcting the "anomaly", the release said. He also made a strong plea to the Prime Minister for central financial assistance for t celebrations of the 550th Anniversary of Prakash Utsav of Sri Guru Nanak Dev ji, beginning November 2019. He pointed to the Memorandum already sent by the state government to the Prime Minister for financial assistance of Rs.2,145 crore and for dedicating some national projects in the memory of the First Guru, it said. The Chief Minister urged the Prime Minister to constitute an organising committee at national level for commemorating the event in a befitting manner. Pointing out that 100 years of Jallianwala Bagh massacre would be observed on April 13, 2019 at Amritsar, and the Prime Minister chairs the Jallianwala Bagh Trust, Amarinder said he had sent a request seeking grant of Rs 100 crore for development of surrounding areas and related facilities in that city. Taking up the issue of problems of farmers,The Chief Minister reiterated his request for a National Debt Waiver Scheme, besides making the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojna 100% centrally funded, it said. During the meeting, the Chief Minister also demanded procurement of alternate crops such as Maize, Pulses and Oilseeds by central agencies. Seeking early clearance of Shahpur Kandi Project on Ravi river which was being taken up as a project of National Importance on 90:10 funding pattern, the Chief Minister said it would help utilise waters of the river more effectively and improve the efficiency of Ranjit Sagar Dam. The Punjab Government has signed an agreement with Jammu & Kashmir but the revised estimate was pending with Government of India for approval, he informed the Prime Minister, the release said. Samsung is reportedly preparing to exclusively release a Galaxy Note 9 variant with 512GB onboard storage in certain markets such as South Korea and China, the media reported. "Android 8.1 Oreo coupled with the latest version of 'Samsung Experience' is set to ship straight out of the box, with all of this being backed by a 4,000mAh battery," PhoneArena reported late on Sunday. Also Read: OPPO RealMe 1 Silver Limited Edition Goes For Sale Today on Amazon: Price, Specifications And More As of now, it is unclear if any changes other than the inbuilt storage capacity will be made to the top-end variant. The upcoming flagship Note device could make its way to other markets as well, according to tech website SamsungMobile.News. The device is expected to come with 6GB RAM alongside Samsung's own Exynos 9810 Octa-core chipset. Also Read: Google Removes Option to Book Uber Rides Inside Google Maps When it comes to the camera department, a variable aperture sensor is likely to be included next to a secondary telephoto lens. An 8MP selfie sensor is rumoured to be placed on the front. Previous Samsung Galaxy Note smartphones have featured MicroSD slots so users can expect it to return this time. Notably, it is not known when the South Korean giant would host an "Unpacked" event for the smartphone's unveiling. The company is also expected to launch the Samsung Gear S4 smartwatch alongside. Also Watch: Tech and Auto Show | Ep 40 | OnePlus 6, Ford EcoSport S, Xiaomi Redmi Y2 and More San Francisco: Tesla Inc Chief Executive Elon Musk accused an employee of "extensive and damaging sabotage" to the company's operations in an email sent on Monday to company employees. Musk said an employee had made code changes to the company's operating system and exported "large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties," according to the email, which was obtained by Reuters. The company is investigating whether the employee "was working with any outside organizations," the email said. "As you know, there are a long list of organizations that want Tesla to die," Musk wrote, listing Wall Street short-sellers, oil and gas companies, and car company rivals. A company spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment. The accusations of sabotage come a week after Musk announced layoffs for 9 percent of the company's workforce. Although Musk said the reorganization does not impact production associates and is not expected to delay manufacturing targets, thousands of employees lost their jobs. Tesla has struggled to ramp up production of its Model 3 sedan, which is intended for mass production and critical to helping the company achieve long-term profitability. Tesla's stock price slipped 53 cents to $370.30 in after-hours trading. Washington: President Donald Trump told Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook that the US government would not levy tariffs on iPhones assembled in China, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing a source familiar with the negotiations. The newspaper reported that Cook traveled to the White House last month to warn Trump of the potentially adverse effects of Trump's trade policies on Apple in China but did not specify precisely when Trump made the commitment to Cook. Apple and the White House were not immediately available for comment. A list of tariffs proposed in April largely excluded consumer electronics. But last week, Trump unveiled a revised list that included several categories of chips, raising fears that tariffs could impact the US technology sector. Google claims that a new deep learning model designed by it and its UC San Francisco, Stanford Medicine, and The University of Chicago Medicine colleagues has predicted the 'inpatient mortality' with an accuracy of 95 percent. Machine learning, which was previously applied to actions like traffic predictions, translations and like has, in a recent attempt, been used for healthcare by a Google team. The clinical predictions by the computer system came out to be astonishingly accurate, as they predicted if the patient will stay long in the hospital with an 86 percent accuracy and further unexpected readmissions with a 77 percent accuracy, marking 'statistical significance' in the area. In addition to making the predictions, the deep learning models were also used to recognise the patient's condition. Google gives an instance for this: "if a doctor prescribed ceftriaxone and doxycycline for a patient with an elevated temperature, fever and cough, the model could identify these as signals that the patient was being treated for pneumonia." In a blog, Google calls its program a "good listener" for its capability to gather the patient's data including their ongoing treatments and notes. Also read: Adobe-Microsoft Integration: Adobe Scan Can Now Turn Business Cards Into Phone Contacts The new program aims to eliminate the discrepancies caused by different Electronic Health Records (EHR) found in individually customised EHR systems of hospitals. In essence, the patient data differs from one hospital to another. To solve this, the deep learning mechanism reads all the data points from the patient's EHRs and then decides which data can be used to predict the outcome. The program also identifies the specific data set which it used the make the prediction. Google protected the data used for this observation with security measures including "logical separation, strict access controls, and encryption of data at rest and in transit". As of now, Google says that the entire idea is still in its early age and that the test simply suggests how machine learning can be used to improve healthcare. Watch: Honor 7C Review | Premium Looks in a Budget SOC TRANG A new office of the Investment Promotion and Enterprise Support Centre of Soc Trang provinces Business Incubator was inaugurated on June 18. The office is located at No. 479A, Le Duan street, commune 9 in Soc Trang city. Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Le Thanh Tri, chairman of the Peoples Committee of the Mekong Delta province, said the pilot project, Business Incubator, funded by the Government of Canada through the Small- and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) Development Project, has been effectively implemented in Soc Trang to support local enterprises and start-ups. The office will serve as a contact point for organisations in the province and across the country to facilitate the development of a local start-up ecosystem in the coming years. Since 2011, the Canadian government has provided CAD$10 million in financial assistance to Soc Trang province through Global Affairs Canada to implement the SME Development Project, said Charlene Lawrence, first secretary of the Embassy of Canada in Viet Nam. The project has greatly contributed to supporting the growth of local enterprises and developing a better business climate and start-up ecosystem in the province. At the event, the provincial Investment Promotion and Enterprise Support Centre inked a memorandum of understanding with six partners, including start-up businesses, colleges and state agencies, paving the way for cooperation in supporting and developing the local start-up community in the province in the time ahead. VNS Paris: Like most politicians, French President Emmanuel Macron seems to enjoy pressing the flesh and posing for selfies when on public outings. Just don't call him by a nickname. A cheeky teen who dared greet him with a breezy "How's it going, Manu" during an official outing near Paris on Monday was left red-faced after receiving a sharp dressing-down from the 40-year-old centrist. "No, you can't do that, no, no, no, no," Macron told the youngster who was waiting with a group of school friends to meet him during his visit to the Mont Valerien fort near Paris, where hundreds of French Resistance members were executed during World War II. "Sorry, Mr President," the teenager said, looking abashed. But Macron was not about to let matters rest there. Admonishing the junior high school student, he said: "You're here, at an official ceremony and you should behave. You can play the fool but today it's the Marseillaise, the Chant des Partisans (French Resistance song), so you call me 'Mister President' or 'Sir'. Ok? There you go." Delivering his coup de grace, Macron told the teen, who had begun by singing a few lines from the Socialist anthem The Internationale a dig at the president's pro-business reforms to "do things in the right order". "The day you want to start a revolution you study first in order to obtain a degree and feed yourself, ok? And then you can lecture others," he said. The exchange, which was captured on camera, was widely shared on social media. It comes as Macron who adopted a regal, top-down style on taking office himself faces criticism for his at-times blunt language. In an official video shared by his office last week he complained that the French were spending a "crazy amount of dough" on social security. Macron's critics held the video up as evidence that the man they call the "president of the rich" lacked empathy with the poor. Last year, Macron also raised the hackles of the left by calling protesting opponents of his labour reforms "slackers". Beijing: Beijing on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of "blackmail" and warned it would retaliate in kind after the US president threatened to impose fresh tariffs on Chinese goods, pushing the world's two biggest economies closer to a trade war. Trump said on Monday he had asked the US Trade Representative to target $200 billion worth of imports for a 10 percent levy, citing China's "unacceptable" move to raise its own tariffs. He added he would identify an extra $200 billion of goods for a possible total of $450 billion, or most Chinese imports "if China increases its tariffs yet again". "Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States," Trump said in a statement. Last week, he announced 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports, prompting Beijing to retaliate with matching duties on US goods. The US leader warned Friday of "additional tariffs" should Beijing hit back with tit-for-tat measures. "The trade relationship between the United States and China must be much more equitable," he said in explaining his latest decision. "I have an excellent relationship with President Xi (Jinping), and we will continue working together on many issues. But the United States will no longer be taken advantage of on trade by China and other countries in the world." China's commerce ministry immediately responded by saying the US "practice of extreme pressure and blackmail departed from the consensus reached by both sides during multiple negotiations and has also greatly disappointed international society". "If the US acts irrationally and issues a list, China will have no choice but to take comprehensive measures of a corresponding number and quality and take strong, powerful countermeasures." The news hit stock markets in Asia, where Shanghai shed three percent in the morning, Hong Kong lost more than two percent and Tokyo was one percent lower. Trump is moving forward with the measures after months of sometimes fraught shuttle diplomacy in which Chinese offers to purchase more American goods failed to assuage his grievances over a widening trade imbalance and China's aggressive industrial development policies. China had offered to ramp up purchases of American goods by $70 billion to help cut its yawning trade surplus with the United States, whereas Trump had demanded a $200 billion deficit cut. - 'Unacceptable' - The China trade offensive is only one side of Trump's multi-front battle with the United States' economic partners as he presses ahead with his protectionist "America First" agenda. Since June 1, steel and aluminium imports from the European Union, Canada and Mexico have been hit with tariffs of 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively. "This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive $376 billion trade imbalance in goods," Trump said of China's retaliatory tariffs. "This is unacceptable." Two decades ago, China's economy was largely fueled by exports, but it has made progress in rebalancing towards domestic investment and consumption since the global financial crisis erupted last decade limiting the damage trade tariffs could inflict on Beijing. Still, strong exports this year have lifted the economy, which is now showing signs of losing steam under the weight of Beijing's war on debt, launched to clean up financial risks and rein in borrowing-fuelled growth. "China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology," Trump said in a statement. "Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers and farmers who have done nothing wrong." Initially, 545 US products valued at $34 billion will be targeted by China, mimicking the Trump administration's tariff rollout. These include major American exports to China such as soybeans, which brought in $14 billion in sales last year, and are grown in states that supported Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Politically important exports like other agricultural products and automobiles also made the list. Beijing also drew up a second list of $16 billion in chemical and energy products to hit with new tariffs, though it did not announce a date for imposing them. Beijing: Chinese state media say North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will make a two-day visit to Beijing starting Tuesday following his groundbreaking summit with President Donald Trump in Singapore last week. Security was tight Tuesday morning at the Beijing airport where paramilitary police prevented journalists from shooting photos. A motorcade including sedans, minibuses, motorcycles and a stretch limo with a golden emblem was seen leaving the airport in vehicles that were not apparently carrying flags. The state media reports did not say if Kim had already arrived in Beijing. Roads near the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, where senior Chinese officials meet with visiting leaders, were being closed Tuesday morning and a motorcade with motorcycle escorts was seen heading into the compound. A ring of police vehicles and unmarked cars surrounded the perimeter of the guesthouse where Kim stayed on his first visit earlier this year. Kim has made two recent visits to China, North Korea's main ally and key source of trade and economic assistance. Following his summit with Trump, Kim was expected to meet with Chinese leaders to discuss progress in halting his country's missile and nuclear weapons programs in exchange for economic incentives. China did not announce past visits by North Korea's leader until Kim returned home. The Singapore meeting resulted in a surprise announcement of a US suspension of military drills with its South Korean ally, a goal long pursued by Beijing and Pyongyang. That move is seen as potentially weakening defenses and diplomatic ties among U.S. allies in Asia, while bolstering rivals such as China and Russia. The US has stationed combat troops in South Korea since the Korean War, in which China fought on North Korea's side, ended in 1953 with an armistice and no peace treaty. The more than 28,000 US forces serve as a military tripwire against North Korean aggression. The next major exercise with South Korea is known as Ulchi Freedom Guardian; last year's version was held for 11 days in August and involved about 17,500 U.S. troops. Islamabad: In a setback to bigwigs, Pakistan's election commission on Tuesday rejected the nomination papers of former Prime Ministers Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chief Imran Khan for the NA-53 constituency of Islamabad. The nomination papers of Abbasi and his covering candidate Sardar Mehtab Khan for NA-53 were rejected by the returning officer after the candidates failed to fill the affidavit as per the requirements, Dawn reported. According to the returning officer, Abbasi had not submitted complete tax returns with his documents either. The candidates have vowed to challenge the decision in the election tribunal on Wednesday. Khan's nomination papers for the same constituency were rejected on account of being incomplete. His nomination papers were challenged earlier this month by Pakistan Justice and Democratic Party candidate Abdul Wahab Baloch, who contended that Khan did not fulfil the criterion under articles 62 and 63 on the issue of Sita White and her daughter Tyrian. Although the returning officer rejected Baloch's objections against Khan's candidature, he turned down the PTI chief's papers saying he had submitted an incomplete affidavit as approved by the Supreme Court. The officer said that Khan had not filled a column in the affidavit in which he was required to describe his performance as a Member of National Assembly (MNA). Khan had served as MNA from NA-56 Rawalpindi. There had been resentment in his constituency as he allegedly never visited it during his five-year term despite living in Banigala only a few kilometres away, the paper said. Khan is also contesting from four other cities including Karachi, Lahore, Mianawali and Bannu. His nomination was accepted from three places but rejected from Mianawali on technical grounds. The nomination papers of Pakistan's former military ruler Pervez Musharraf was also rejected by the returning officer on the ground that he was barred for life from contesting elections by the Peshawar High Court in 2013. Musharraf, 74, had filed his nomination papers from the northern district of Chitral (NA-1) in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The ex-dictator had filed a plea in the Supreme Court against the ban imposed on him to contest elections by the Peshawar High Court in 2013. The apex court had allowed him to file his nomination paper on the conditions that he appears in person on June 13. Last week, the Supreme Court withdrew the permission it conditionally granted to the ex-dictator after he failed to appear before it in person, and postponed the hearing in the case for the indefinite period. The apex court also left the matter of nomination papers to the returning officers. Returning Officer Muhammad Khan rejected Musharraf's nomination papers citing court's order, officials said. Meanwhile, Musharraf's lawyer moved an application to withdraw his nomination papers for the NA-247 constituency in Karachi, where he was summoned by an election officer to appear by the evening. All aspirants can file an appeal against the rejection of their nominations by June 22, and election tribunal will decide the appeals by June 27. The revised lists of candidates will be published on June 28 whereas the last date for withdrawal of candidature is June 29. The final list of contesting candidates is scheduled to be published on June 30. Washington: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will announce on Tuesday that the United Sates is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council, a Trump administration source told Reuters. The United States is half-way through a three-year term on the main U.N. rights body and had long threatened to quit if it was not reformed, accusing the 47-member Geneva-based body of being anti-Israel. Reuters reported last week that activists and diplomats said talks with the United States on reforms had failed to meet Washington's demands, suggesting that the Trump administration would quit. Washington's withdrawal would be the latest US rejection of multilateral engagement after it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. The United States is facing intense criticism for detaining children separated from their immigrant parents at the US-Mexico border. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein on Monday called on Washington to halt its "unconscionable" policy. The United States boycotted the Human Rights Council for three years under President George W. Bush before rejoining under Barack Obama in 2009. Haley said a year ago that Washington was reviewing its membership of the Human Rights Council, and called for reform and elimination of a "chronic anti-Israel bias." The body, set up in 2006, has a permanent standing agenda item on suspected violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories that Washington wants removed. The council last month voted to probe killings in Gaza and accused Israel of excessive use of force. The United States and Australia cast the only "no" votes. Israel's ambassador in Geneva castigated the council for "spreading lies against Israel." Sorry! This content is not available in your region HA NOI HCM City expects its project on international credit evaluation to be highly effective, contributing to the prestige, reputation and expansion of financial resources for the development of the city. This was said by Le Thanh Liem, standing deputy chairman of the municipal Peoples Committee, at a meeting with the working team of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Standard & Poors (S&P) Ratings Service in HCM City on Monday. The project is part of a memorandum of understanding signed by the city authorities and IFC at the end of last year. Liem said an international credit rating for the city was a new issue and the city hoped that IFC and S&P would continue to promote coordination and implementation of the project as scheduled. Sharing the upcoming orientation of the citys socio-economic development, Liem emphasised that credit rating for the city would help investors and international financial organisations evaluate the capacity, potential as well as financial resource flows serving the citys socio-economic development programme. According to Kyle Kelhofer, IFC country manager for Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos, this is the most favourable time for the city to receive an international credit rating and become a role model for the mobilisation of financial resources for the development of other localities in the country. The implementation of the international credit rating project is also significant in supporting other developmental programmes and projects, especially in the area of financial management and policymaking. At the meeting, representatives of S&P and HCM City discussed issues related to the co-ordination of project implementation and both the sides agreed that the city would publicly announce its credit rating result. VNS Dear Newsie Readers, Newsie has now permanently ceased it's services as of Friday 20th December 2019. Newsie has been an owner-funded operation since day one. Coming up to three years old, while we still firmly believe Newsie has a place in the New Zealand media landscape, the cost in both time and money has become too burdensome for the owners to continue alongside other ventures. With the current government looking to restructure public broadcasting, and seemingly supporting NZME buying a ring-fenced Stuff, the time seems right to call it a day. Should it happen, the combination of NZME and Stuff will ensure New Zealands national media will die a death by a thousand opinion-based articles. Newsie has always tried to stick to balanced news, to inform readers of the facts of a situation, amid being largely ignored by government. Hopefully, one day someone else will take up the challenge to fight the good fight. The good news, however, is that there were no job losses as a result of Newsie closing. Thanks to careful structuring, everyone involved in Newsie will retain their current positions. We hope you all have a happy Christmas and new year. Stay safe, and stay out of the news. The team at Newsie HA NOI The State Bank of Viet Nam (SBV) has asked banks to provide enough switchboard operators and improve technical infrastructure to process complaints efficiently. The SBV said it found through monitoring that the hotlines of some banks were not operating effectively, making it very difficult for customers and cardholders to request assistance in emergency cases. This has been a cause for concern and has been reported in different forms of mass media. In order to ensure the quality of services, the State Bank has required banks to address the issue to promptly receive and handle the inspection and complaints of customers. Banks must take the initiative in explaining and promptly responding to opinions expressed on mass media regarding the quality of card payment services to avoid pulling down consumer trust in the quality of payment services offered by banks and the development of non-cash payment regulations by the Government and the State Bank, the SBV said. The SBV made the issuance in the context of recent outbreaks in card fraud. In many cases, cardholders have a hard time contacting the bank switchboard to request for account lockout after finding out that their accounts had been hacked, resulting in loss of money. There have also been cases where customers have complained about difficulties in contacting the switchboard to ask for emergency card lock after losing their card either by their own doing or as a result of a machine failing to eject their card. VNS FBI tried to frame Roger Stone as part of Russia collusion hoax, but Stone didnt take the bait The Spygate scandal continues to grow as new details are revealed almost daily, showing just how deeply former President Obama corrupted and politicized the nations federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In a video released on Sunday, former Trump confidant Roger Stone of Infowars talked about what appears to be another FBI informant attempt to create fake Russian ties inside the campaign of then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. In the video, Stone says he has sent a letter to House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., informing him of the infiltration attempt and providing details. Stone said that in May 2016, when it looked like Trump would indeed be the shoo-in Republican nominee, he was approached by a man who claimed to be Henry Greenberg saying he had valuable information on the Clintons. The former Trump campaign aide said that he and Greenberg spoke for about 20 minutes when the man said the information on the Clintons was expensive it would cost $2 million. Stone said he declined, noting that he didnt have that kind of money and even if I did, I dont pay for political information. He said Greenberg laughed about that and noted that he didnt want Stones money, he wanted Donald Trumps money. Trump doesnt pay for information either, Stone said, which ended the meeting. Stone says he has since learned that Greenberg is actually a Russian national who is a longtime asset an informant for the FBI. Imagine that. A known FBI asset According to the letter sent to Nunes by Grant J. Smith, Stones attorney, Based on information recently uncovered about Mr. Greenbergs true identity which has been provided to the HPSCI (House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence), he has a well documented extensive criminal background and for years acted as an FBI informant. (Related: Not a single Democrat has so far denounced Obamas Spygate violation of the Trump campaign because Leftists advocate secret police tactics.) A spy, in words Deep State actors, Democrats, and former Obama officials dont like to use. The Washington Post noted that then-Trump campaign communications official Michael Caputo, who set up the meeting, texted Stone afterward. How crazy is the Russian? wrote Caputo, according to the message which was reviewed by the Post. Stone replied that Greenberg wanted big money and that the meeting was a waste of time. The Russian way, Caputo responded. Anything at all interesting? No, Stone said. Two years later, the brief meeting has become part of special counsel Robert Muellers never-ending witch hunt into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia though it is imminently clear by now that most of the contact between outlier Trump campaign officials and Russia happened because the FBI set it up the same FBI that was corrupted by Obama and used as a political weapon against a rival presidential campaign. Regarding Greenberg, the Post noted further: Interviews and additional documents show that Greenberg has at times used the name Henry Oknyansky. Under that name, he claimed in a 2015 court filing related to his immigration status that he had provided information to the FBI for 17 years. He attached records showing that the government had granted him special permission to enter the United States because his presence represented a significant public benefit. The paper noted that theres no evidence indicating that Greenberg was working on behalf of the FBI when he made contact with Caputo and Stone, but given the nature of his meeting and the fact that we know the FBI used others to spy on the Trump campaign, what other rational explanations are there? And of course, Mueller doesnt even appear to be interested in this exchange. Stone and Caputo are confident, given the news about other spies and given the abject bias among FBI officials against Trump that was exposed by Justice Department IG Michael Horowitzs report, they were being targeted by the Deep State. Theres no good reason not to believe them. Watch: Read more about this ongoing farce at DeepState.news. J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel. Sources include: WashingtonPost.com InfoWars.com TheNationalSentinel.com HA NOI State Bank of Viet Nam has tightened regulations on corporate bond purchase by credit institutions and foreign banks branches. Under Circular No. 15/2018/TT-NHNN issued on Monday, which revises Circular No. 22/2016/TT-NHNN dated June 30, 2016, the central bank prohibits them from buying bonds for the purpose of restructuring the issuers existing loans, effective from August 2 this year. The central bank also stipulates that for corporate bond purchase, credit institutions and foreign banks branches must have an internal credit rating system besides the system to rate the bond issuers. They are also required to issue internal regulations on the purchase of corporate bonds in accordance with the current legal regulations. Accordingly, internal supervision regulations on corporate bond purchase, especially bonds issued for the purpose of implementing programmes and projects in areas of potential risk as identified by the assessment of credit institutions and foreign banks branches, must be established to detect risks and violations to ensure the recovery of principal and interest of corporate bonds. Credit institutions and foreign banks branches must also issue internal regulations on specifying the areas of potential risks as well as their credit and investment policies on the areas. It is estimated that some 75 per cent of corporate bond buyers in Viet Nam are commercial banks, which makes these bonds no different from bank loans. Bui Quang Tin, professor at the HCM Banking University, told the au tu (Vietnam Investment Review) that some companies sold bonds to banks to restructure their existing loans rather than raise new capital, which defeated the original purpose of bond issuance. According to Tin, outside investors, especially individual investors, usually have no access to a firms business activities. Viet Nam does not have an independent credit rating agency, which makes bond investment risky, as investors do not know which issuer can pay back their bonds. To attract more international investors, Tin suggested setting up a credit rating agency, as well as diversifying bond offers to the market. Besides, financial experts also believed that a streamlined legal framework will pave the way for more corporate bond issuers as fixed-income products, such as bonds, are still attractive to investors, thanks to its safety and lower risks. - VNS A new dance studio has opened its doors in the neighborhood. The fresh addition to Fairmount Park, called Move2Center Studio, is located at 3618 SW Alaska St. This new offering practices Nia, defined as a holistic movement practice combining elements of martial arts, dance and relaxation techniques, according to the business' website. 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 Funded by Canada's leading banks and insurance companies, CBGF will provide Canadian entrepreneurs with access to the long-term, patient, minority capital they require to grow. TORONTO, June 19, 2018 /CNW/ - The Canadian Business Growth Fund (CBGF) today announced the launch of its fund and the start of its national mandate to help Canadian entrepreneurs access the capital they need to drive growth and expansion for their high potential mid-market businesses. The challenge of accessing growth capital was highlighted in a report from the Minister of Finance's Advisory Council for Economic Growth, which recommended the creation of a private sector-led growth fund to provide investments in established and high-growth Canadian businesses while contributing to a vibrant, innovative and diversified economy. In response, Canada's leading banks and insurance companies came together to form the CBGF, an independent evergreen investment fund with an initial capital commitment of $545 million, projected to increase to $1 billion in future years. CBGF seeks to invest between $3 million and $20 million in dynamic mid-market companies with $5 million or more in annual revenue, a demonstrated growth trajectory, and a clear vision for accelerated growth. The fund supports Canadian companies with patient, minority capital that keeps entrepreneurs in control of their businesses. In addition to capital, CBGF has deep experience in business growth strategies and corporate finance, as well as a talent network that can help entrepreneurs overcome critical knowledge and talent gaps as their businesses expand. "While many Canadian entrepreneurs have identified growth as their company's primary objective, they find it difficult to secure the funding they need to grow while maintaining control of their businesses," explains George Rossolatos, Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Business Growth Fund. "Our goal is to help entrepreneurs scale up their mid-market businesses as a patient, minority capital partner. We've spent the last several months developing our strategy, honing our unique value proposition and building a talented team and network that is uniquely positioned to help Canadian entrepreneurs think big and grow. We're excited to get started." "Growth capital is good for Canada and helps drive economic activity, productivity and employment," said CBGF Chair, Dale Ponder. "With access to more growth capital, Canadian businesses have an even greater opportunity to achieve scale and become leaders in their fields. CBGF will strive to promote greater confidence and entrepreneurial spirit in the development of businesses in Canada." CBGF is supported by Canada's leading banks and insurance companies. Initial participants include BMO Financial Group, CIBC, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, TD Bank Group, ATB Financial, Great-West Life, HSBC Bank Canada, Manulife, National Bank of Canada, Sun Life Financial, Canadian Western Bank and Laurentian Bank of Canada. About CBGF The Canadian Business Growth Fund (CBGF) provides long-term, patient, minority capital to ambitious entrepreneurs to fund growth and expansion of mid-market businesses with investments between $3 and $20 million. An evergreen investment fund with capital commitments of $545 million, CBGF is committed to long-term partnerships with the companies it invests in. As part of its mission to drive growth, CBGF connects business leaders and sector experts to help its partner businesses achieve their full potential. For companies seeking investment opportunities, please contact Logan Philp, Director of Business Development. SOURCE Canadian Business Growth Fund For further information: Aby Bueno, Broad Reach Communications, 416-858-3135, [email protected] HA NOI Arriving in Ha Noi in the hot summer, a lot of Hanoians will recommend you go straight to Trang Tien Street to get an ice cream. The popular ice cream has become a specialty the city after more than 60 years of sales. Trang Tien ice cream came into being in 1958 after peace returned to Viet Nam in 1954 from the first Indochinese. It was a landmark for local people because since that time they had only ever had the availability of expensive ice cream, recalled Hanoian Nguyen Thi ao, 75. The ice cream is not simply loved by people but its also a unique symbol closely connected to the collective memory of Hanoians, she said. Worth it: Adults and children wait in line for their turn to buy the ice creams. I will never forget the flavours of Trang Tien ice cream such as com (green rice flakes), au xanh (green bean), and sua dua (coconut juice and milk). They helped to create a trade mark that is alive until now, she said, noting that its not only enjoyed by her, but also by children, workers, State employees and the elderly. Despite things having changed over the years 35 Trang Tien is now surrounded by shops selling ice cream from the US, Italy and other countries the way to buy a Trang Tien ice cream is still unchanged: people stand in line as they did in the subsidised economic periods, ao recalled. Compared with the past, Trang Tien now sells various varieties of ice cream, but ao said she likes cinnamon ice cream cones, and the coconut and milk ice cream. The sweet flavour of the ice cream mixed with the crisp of the cone is an excellent combination, she said. Brain breeze: Fresh Trang Tien ice cream sells very well in summer. I often have a passionate feeling that is hard to describe when I eat it, said ao, adding that compared with other ice creams, the affordable prices of the Trang Tien one between VN7,000 and 8,000 each lure masses of people, including foreign visitors. One of the producers for Trang Tien ice cream, Le Thanh Hoa, said her company uses traditional materials with charming favours such as com from Vong Village on the outskirts of the ccity, pure green bean powder, condensed milk from Vinamilk and imported ingredients such as cocoa powder and milk powder from New Zealand. By applying handicraft production without using preservatives, our products are always tasty because they are fresh, with characteristic flavours. It is the secret keeps our product selling well, even in the winter, Hoa said. Sweet tooth: Ice cream cones are among the most delicious on offer. Ho Hong Lam, 35, from Ho Chi Minh City, said he travels to Ha Noi on business twice a year, and despite being very busy, he always tries to visit 35 Trang Tien to enjoy an ice cream there. In the past I asked my father why it carried the name Trang Tien, my father said the ice cream was produced on the street of the same name in downtown Ha Noi. I still remember when I first enjoyed an ice lolly there more than 30 years ago. It bewitched me with its fragrant cooling of my tongue as I licked it bit by bit with an aim to prolong my craving and interest." In the past, my parents were very poor so they only brought us to Trang Tien a few times a year to buy us such ice creams, nowadays my cousins children can eat them as much as possible, said Lam. He noted that the ice cream here is not only tasty and fragrant but still ensures food hygiene with an affordable price. I like waiting in the line for an ice lolly, said Lam. VNS TICONDEROGA, N.Y. (AP) -- A volunteer firefighter in upstate New York has been charged with arson. Ticonderoga Fire Chief Matthew Watts tells The Post-Star that he is "embarrassed" to confirm that a firefighter is the suspect in a barn fire early Monday. Volunteer firefighter accused of setting fire in Ticonderoga https://t.co/ROhpiVDFeN pic.twitter.com/bvpQMu5kZr MyNBC5 (WPTZ) (@MyNBC5) June 19, 2018 No people or animals were hurt, but the barn was destroyed. Eight fire companies were at the scene, including one from Addison, Vermont. The defendant, who's 18 years old, has been suspended. Authorities withheld his name because of his youthful offender status. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- An Oneida County man admitted Monday in federal court in Syracuse that he was part of a drug trafficking organization that distributed more than 5 kilograms of cocaine. Jeffrey Rivera, 34, of Utica, pleaded guilty to "conspiring to possess with intent to distribute and to distribute more than five kilos of cocaine," according to the U.S. Department of Justice. One kilos of cocaine has a street value of about $25,500 to $37,500 depending on where it's bought in New York state, according to narcoticnews.com. That would mean five kilos of cocaine would cost roughly $127,500 to $187,500. Local police sources say the street value of five kilos of cocaine in Central New York costs roughly $28,000 to $36,000. That would mean five kilos is worth an estimated $140,000 to $180,000. Rivera now faces up to life in prison, a mandatory 10-year prison sentence, a fine up to $10 million and a supervised release that could last anywhere from five years to life. In court Monday, Rivera admitted he "obtained quantities of cocaine from co-conspirators within the organization and distributed, or arranged to distribute cocaine to others," the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a news release. His plea came the same day he was set to go on trial. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, New York State Police-Community Narcotics Enforcement Team, the Oneida County Sheriff's Department, the city of Rome Police Department, city of Utica Police Department, and the village of Yorkville Police Department investigated the case. Chief U.S. District Judge Glenn T. Suddaby is scheduled to sentence Rivera on Oct. 25. The sweetest month of the year is around the corner: July is National Ice Cream Month. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan designated July as National Ice Cream Month and the third Sunday of the month as National Ice Cream Day. He recognized ice cream as a fun and nutritious food that is enjoyed by 90 percent of the nations population. In the proclamation, Reagan called for all people of the United States to observe these events with appropriate ceremonies and activities. To pay homage to this food celebration here are fun facts and of course, a couple of recipes. Did you know? Rocky Road, ice cream was created after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to give people something to be happy about during the rocky times of the Great Depression. Hawaiian Punch was created in 1934 and originally was intended to be an ice cream topping According to the international Dairy Foods Association, the ice cream industry in the U.S. contributes more than $39 billion to the national economy and creates more than 188,000 jobs in communities across the country. Haagen-Dazs, the premium ice cream brand, is a made up name to sound Danish and upscale. It takes an average of 50 licks to finish one scoop of ice cream. Dolley Madison created a sensation when she served ice cream at her husband James presidential inaugural ball. More ice cream is sold on Sunday than any other day of the week. Until 1800, ice cream remained a rare and exotic dessert enjoyed mostly by the elite. The U.S. enjoys an average of 48 pints of ice cream per person, per year, more than any other country. Chocolate syrup is the most popular ice cream topping. About 9 percent of all the milk produced by U.S. dairy farmers is used to produce ice cream. Immigrants at Ellis Island were served ice cream as part of the welcoming to America Vanilla continues to be Americas flavor of choice. Speaking of flavor, I asked my Facebook friends, What is the most odd ice cream flavor you have tried? The responses are overwhelming and surprising: garlic; lobster, bacon and maple; goat cheese and blackberry; green tea; asparagus; corn; tomato; basil with crumbled glazed walnuts; malt with cheddar cheese chunks; black pepper and lavender; candy cap mushroom; avocado; cucumber; sunflower; salted Oreo; mascarpone basil; lemon garlic; charcoal; olive oil; licorice; beet; foie gras topped with salted caramel; blue cheese and pear; pistachio and garlic; pickle; egg and bacon; toasted sesame oil; thyme basil; tar; salt and pepper; cornbread; candied salmon; cotton candy; seawater; secret breakfast which is made with bourbon and corn flake cookies; black olive. Ice cream flavors are only limited by the imagination. Manufacturers, chefs, ice cream shop owners and home cooks are always coming up with new combinations full of personality. Its as if their creations are saying, can you top this? No matter what your age, ice cream is a treat, especially on a hot summer day. Some dont stray from the basic flavors such as chocolate or vanilla yet others, me included, are curious to try new-fangled flavors such as those mentioned by my Facebook friends. To get ready for ice cream season, I added Italian Cooking School: Ice Cream by the editors of Phaidon Press. (2016, $15.95) to my collection. It is the latest to join The Silver Spoon series where prior books featured pizza and pasta. The Silver Spoon is the classic volume of Italian cuisine, originally published in 1950, titled Il Cucchiaio dArgento. It is a leading authority in Italy and is one cookbook every Italian passes on to their children. About a decade ago, it was published for the first time in English. Recipes in most of the ice cream cookbooks on my shelf are more complex than this one. Before the recipes are presented, different types of cold desserts are explained as are the ingredients, the process, and equipment needed. From indulgent ice creams such as pistachio with wild strawberries, mint chocolate, to these recipes below for pineapple ice cream and Malaga wine ice cream; and refreshing sorbets such as cherry, or prosecco to novel frozen and chilled desserts like the recipe for greyhound ice pops, an adult treat (recipe at https://bit.ly/2sZTyON ) , and coffee granita with cream, you will be churning cool treats this summer. Gelato AllAnanas (Pineapple ice cream) 1 large fresh pineapple 1 8- ounce can pineapple chunks in syrup 1 tablespoon confectioners sugar 1 cup heavy cream, softly whipped Slice the top off the pineapple, then remove the skin, core, and tougher parts. Put the pineapple flesh and chunks in syrup into a blender or food processor and blend together. Add the confectioners sugar and stir. Refrigerate for 4 hours. Put the mixture into an ice cream maker and churn for about 30 minutes, or according to manufacturers directions. Fold in the whipped cream. Transfer the ice cream to a mold and freeze for about 3 hours, until solid. Tip: you can use the pineapple shell to serve the ice cream. After slicing off the top off the pineapple, halve it lengthwise. Carefully scoop out the flesh without breaking the skin, remove the core and tougher parts and proceed as above. Transfer the ice cream to the pineapple shell instead of the mold. I plan to add coconut flakes to this recipe to see if I can recreate one of my favorite flavors I always enjoy at a roadside ice cream stand. Gelato Al Vino Di Malaga (Malaga Wine Ice Cream) 1 cup milk 1/3 cup superfine (caster) sugar teaspoon vanilla extract 2 egg yolks 2/3 cup Malaga wine cup heavy cream To decorate: 1 orange, very thinly sliced Maraschino cherries Wafers In a heavy saucepan, combine the milk, sugar, and vanilla and bring to a boil. Remove pan from heat. In a double boiler, without any heat, whisk the egg yolks and then add the wine in a thin stream. Continue whisking and gradually add the hot milk mixture. Place the double boiler over low heat and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens. This will take at least 20 minutes. Alternatively, use a heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water. Remove from heat and let the custard cool, still stirring constantly. Using an electric mixer, whip the heavy cream to stiff peaks, and then add it to the custard. Refrigerate for 4 hours. Pour mixture into an ice cream maker and churn according to manufacturers directions. Transfer the ice cream to the mold and freeze for about 3 hours, until solid. When ready to serve, unmold the ice cream onto a serving dish and decorate it with orange slices, cherries, and wafers. What chef would you like me to interview? Which restaurant recipes or other recipes would you like to have? Which food products are you having difficulty finding? Do you have cooking questions? Send them to me: Stephen Fries, professor and coordinator of the Hospitality Management Programs at Gateway Community College, at gw-stephen.fries@gwcc.commnet.edu or Dept. FC, Gateway Community College, 20 Church St., New Haven, 06510. Include your full name, address and phone number. (Due to volume, I might not be able to publish every request. For more, go to stephenfries.com.) CULINARY CALENDAR The Wonder of the Cocktail, June 20-22. Foxwoods Resort Casino, 1-800-FOXWOODS. Wine and spirits tastings, master class seminars, a chefs dine-around tasting, poolside cocktail party and a grand tasting. For event schedule and prices visit https://webtixs.foxwoods.com/SE9 International Wine and Craft Beer Tasting: Compassionate Care Awards Gala, June 21, 6 p.m., Woodwinds, 29 Schoolground Road, Branford, 203-782-4330, $75, https://bit.ly/2J0BcHK. Features a delicious variety of wine and beer from many vendors, buffet dinner, silent auction, and DJ. Ramen 101 Cooking Class, June 23, 6:30-9 p.m., Chefs Emporium, 449 Boston Post Road, Orange, Tickets: call 203-799-2665. $59. Learn how to make one of the latest food trends. Learn how to prepare three variations of a traditional Ramen noodle soup. For other classes including children and teen classes visit https://bit.ly/2kwz1hm. Consiglios Cooking Demonstration and Dinner: June 28, 6:30 p.m., Consiglios Restaurant, 165 Wooster St., New Haven, 203-865-4489 (reservations required), $75 (beverages, tax and gratuity not included). Learn how to make Focaccia topped with figs, pinenuts, caramelized onions and Gorgonzola; shredded Brussels sprout salad; macaroni and Fontina, bay scallops and pesto bread crumbs; and burnt caramel pots de creme. / MILFORD - An employee who was fired from the Golden Corral, returned later in the day and threatened to shoot up the place, police said. According to Officer Joseph Dempsey, the incident happened around closing time - at 10 p.m. Saturday - at the Turnpike Square restaurant. American voters oppose 66 - 27 percent the policy of separating children and parents when families illegally cross the border into America, according to a new Quinnipiac University National Poll. Republican voters support the separation policy 55 - 35 percent, the only listed party, gender, education, age or racial group to support, the poll found. American voters also support 79 - 15 percent allowing immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children, so-called "Dreamers," to remain and ultimately to apply for citizenship. All listed groups support Dreamers, ranging from 61 - 28 percent among Republicans to 94 - 5 percent among Democrats. "When does public opinion become a demand that politicians just can't ignore? Two- thirds of American voters oppose the family separation policy at our borders," Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll said in a release announcing the results. "Neither quotes from the Bible nor get-tough talk can soften the images of crying children nor reverse the pain so many Americans feel." "And if you are a Dreamer, voters say, 'We have your back,'" Malloy added. The wall American voters oppose 58 - 39 percent building a wall along the border with Mexico. The only listed groups to support the wall are Republicans 77 - 17 percent and white voters with no college degree 52 - 44 percent. Immingrant citizenship Illegal immigrants currently living in the U.S. should be allowed to stay and eventually apply for citizenship, 67 percent of American voters say. Another 8 percent say they should be allowed to stay, but not become citizens, and 19 percent say they should be forced to leave. Among Republicans, 48 percent say illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay and apply for citizenship, while 9 percent say they should be allowed to stay, but not become citizens, and 36 percent say they should be forced to leave. All other listed groups support by wide margins a path to citizenship. Legal immigration to the U.S. should be increased, 30 percent of American voters say, as 17 percent say it should be decreased and 49 percent say it should be kept the same. To read the complete poll results, click here NEW HAVEN The business development arm of media giant Comcast is contributing $700,000 in cash and in-kind services to help bolster District New Haven as new technology business hub. Paul Savas, vice president of the western New England region for Comcast Business, said about 60 percent of the total value of the companys donation will involve outfitting Districts Innovation Center with ultra-high-speed Internet for business, a cloud-based telephone system and other important technology services. The remaining 30 percent of the companys donation will be in cash, which translates into about $230,000. The design for the Innovation Center is being worked on and Savas said no opening date has been scheduled yet for that portion of District New Haven. By taking part in this, were looking to help provide the city and the region with a really solid talent base as the technology sector grows, Savas said. District New Havens Innovation Center also will benefit from $850,000 in funding over the next five years that is coming from CTNext, a subsidiary of the the states quasi-public technology investment agency. The Innovation Center will receive $50,000 this year and $200,000 in each of the next four years from CTNext. How that money will be used at the Innovation Center will be overseen by the Elm City Innovation Collaborative, which also is being funded by CTNext Elinor Slomba, implementation manager for the Elm City Innovation Collaborative, said the contributions from Comcast and the state support our mission to build on New Havens strengths as a city that nurtures innovative companies and hubs. Its amazing to see a project of this magnitude flip the switch and open for business, Slomba said in a statement. District New Haven opened earlier this year after $25 million worth of renovations over two years, converting the former Connecticut Transit bus garage at the corner of James and State streets into a technology hub. Digital Surgeons, the anchor tenant for the technology hub, moved its new home in February. Digital Surgeons helps client companies switch their marketing and promotion from traditional channels such as print and broadcast advertising to digital, social and mobile channels. A co-working space opened in District New Haven in May. District New Haven is the brainchild of David Salinas, who co-founded Digital Surgeons and spearheaded the renovation effort. Salinas also founded the District Innovation and Venture Center, a non-profit that is based at the District New Haven campus. As a result of (Comcasts) investment, we have been able to rally the support of additional partners and vendors and will be announcing education and workforce development programming in critical areas starting with Software Engineering and Data Science, Salinas said in a statement explaining part of the Innovation Centers purpose.. Savas said in addition to Comcasts investment, the media giant will produce and air public service announcements promoting the education and workforce effort at the Innovation Center. luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com The ultimate target of the Party is to serve the peoples interests, said General Secretary of the Communist Party of Viet Nam Nguyen Phu Trong. VNA/VNS Photo Tri Dung HA NOI The ultimate target of the Party is to serve the peoples interests, said General Secretary of the Communist Party of Viet Nam Nguyen Phu Trong. Trong made the statement yesterday when talking about the controversial Law on Special Administrative-Economic Units as he met with citizens in Ha Nois Thanh Xuan, Ha ong and Cau Giay districts. No one would be so unwise and naive to hand the land to those foreigners who can cause trouble in the country, he said. The meeting aimed to inform citizens about outcomes of the recent fifth meeting of the 14th National Assembly, which ended last Friday. The Party leader said the building of special administrative-economic units aimed to attract more foreign investors and pilot new mechanisms to spur economic growth. However, we should be cautious because it is a new, tough, sensitive, important matter, he noted, adding that the National Assembly had postponed the vote on the draft law until the next meeting. On people protesting the draft law, the Party chief said those taking advantage of the situation to sabotage the Party, State and regime, and harm national interests must be strictly punished. He called on voters and people nationwide to keep calm, be vigilant and trust the leadership of the Party, State and Government. On the cyber security law, he said many countries around the world have this regulation. He stressed the need to have the cyber security law to protect cyber security, the interests of the people as well as the regime amidst the development of technology. The National Assembly recently approved the cyber security law with 86.86 per cent of votes. On anti-corruption, the Party chief agreed with voters opinions that all people must be involved in this fight. The draft law on anti-corruption discussed at the fifth meeting of the 14th NA has two new points corruption in the private sector and asset declaration, he said, asking citizens to continue giving their opinions on the bill. The Party chief also agreed with the need to promote the role of the Viet Nam Fatherland Front, increase supervision of people and the role of press in national building and safeguarding and the fight against corruption. During the talk with the Party leader, most citizens lauded the results of the legislative meeting, which, they said, reflected reform and democracy. They raised concerns over issues like traffic safety, firefighting, environmental protection, food safety and hygiene and salary and social insurance policies. Many agreed with the policy of building special administrative-economic units. However, they said, the process required cautious, comprehensive study. They applauded the NAs decision to postpone the adoption of the draft Law on Special Administrative-Economic Units, saying the decision reflected the legislatures response to public concern. VNS Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc speaks at a meeting with voters in Tien Lang District in the northern city of Hai Phong on Monday. VNA/VNS Photo Thong Nhat HAI PHONG Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc clarified concerns over the draft Law on Special Administrative Economic Zones and the Law on Cybersecurity during a meeting with voters in Tien Lang District in the northern city of Hai Phong on Monday. The PM said that the National Assembly and Government had listened to public feedback and decided to postpone the approval of the draft Law on Special Administrative Economic Zones. Explaining the draft law, he said Special Administrative Economic Zones had been included in the 2014 Constitution, adding that the model had been implemented successfully in many countries. The target of the draft law was to attract more investment and create growth, PM Phuc said, noting that the building process of the draft law had been open for opinion. However, demonstrations have been held in several cities about several legal regulations of both new laws. Regarding the Law on Cyber Security, the PM said other countries had issued similar laws. The PM stressed that protesters had damaged property and stopped officials from carrying out their duties, while blocking traffics and affecting daily life and the investment environment in the country. The media should work to counter wrongful allegations, especially on social media, to ensuring public security and safety. He also urged the public to stay calm and vigilant, and trust in the leadership of the Party and State. VNS ANSONIA For the Amato clan of Ansonia, scouting truly is a family affair. Brothers James, Ryan and Cameron Amato all have followed in their father Jims footsteps, each having soared to attaining the highest rank in scouting: Eagle Scout. The latest brother to achieve the rank is Cameron Amato, 18, who will be honored during a Court of Honor Ceremony Saturday at the familys home. Both Ansonia Mayor David Cassetti and Shelton Mayor Mark A. Lauretti will be on hand. Cameron and his brothers were members of Boy Scout Troop 55, Shelton, and Cub Scout Pack 5, Ansonia. Jim and Dodi Amato said they couldnt be more proud of their sons accomplishments. This trifecta puts the cap on 17 years of Amato family involvement in Housatonic Councils Cub Scout Pack 5 (Ansonia) and BSA Troop 55 (Shelton), said Dodi Amato. And just like when his father made Eagle Scout in 1987 with Troop 102, Naugatuck, CameronAmato also organized a toy drive to benefit area kids for his Eagle Scout project. According to Dodi Amato, Cameron Amato joined forces with Club Corvette of Connecticut and Connecticut State Police Troop G and collected more than 200 toys last November to benefit the children of Bridgeport and surrounding areas. All the toys were delivered to Troop G in Bridgeport last December. Like father, like son, Dodi Amato said her husband also ran a toy drive in the late 1980s in Naugatuck and collected and delivered the toys to disadvantaged children in Whitley City, Kentucky. James Amato, 22, achieved Eagle Scout in 2014, followed by brother Ryan, 20, who achieved the Eagle Scout rank in 2016. James Amato, who works for FedEx, renovated three rooms in the Assumption Church rectory, repainting and making repairs to the ceilings, enabling two of the rooms to be used for overnight guests of the church and a third as a community room. Ryan Amato, a junior at the University of Connecticut studying creative writing, completed a book drive for his Eagle Scout project, which benefited Read to Grow, based in Branford. He collected 1,800 childrens books. Cameron Amato will attend Housatonic Community College this fall to study graphic design. All their projects were designed to give back to a community, said Dodi Amato. They have camped and hiked together for years while in Scouts, and the whole family attended the high adventure trip to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they rafted, rappelled and rambled all over the area and even zip-lined over a 750-foot gorge. Cassetti said hes proud of all the Amato boys accomplishments through scouting. The apple doesnt fall far from the tree, Cassetti said. Cameron and his brothers have been instilled with sound values and principles and have taken their cue from their dad. Mr. Amato has led by example. He must be very proud and so are we. jean.sos@snet.net 2030 Water Resources Group- Vietnam Terms of Reference Country Lead Vietnam July 15, 2018 June 30, 2019 I. Background 2030 Water Resources Group The 2030 Water Resources Group (2030 WRG www.2030wrg.org) is a public-private-civil society partnership that supports governments accelerate reforms with the aim of ensuring sustainable water resources management for the long-term development and economic growth of their countries. 2030 WRG aims to accelerate water sector transformation with regard to water security for long-term economic growth, environmental as well as domestic needs and shared prosperity, with a focus on improved demand-side management involving public, private and civil society stakeholders across agriculture, industry and urban development. As of January 1, 2018, the Water Global Practice of the World Bank hosts 2030 WRG which has had been previously hosted by the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group. 2030 WRG Vietnam Engagement 2030 WRG conducted a short scoping assessment in 2016 to understand the key stakeholders in Vietnam, the political economy of the country, and willingness of government to engage with private sector, leading to the decision to develop a new engagement in the country. On the basis of this initial assessment, the team met with key government officials and other stakeholders, including MONRE and MARD, who articulated the need for an analysis of Vietnams water resources, particularly the water-economic growth nexus. 2030 WRG commissioned a high-level overview assessment of the Vietnam water sector, with the aim of identifying water demand reduction solutions to drive economic growth (across sectors including agri, industry, urban). To guide this assessment, a Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group of 12-15 members across government, private sector, and civil society was convened by 2030 WRG. In addition to technical details of the overall water resources situation, the assessment covered an analysis of key solution areas/ interventions optimizing the use of water to further economic growth, leading to the identification of potential workstreams for 2030WRGs engagement in Vietnam. The list of workstreams was subsequently validated through stakeholder consultations. II. Assignment Description Establish Multi Stakeholder Platform for Vietnam: The Country Lead will serve as the focal point for 2030 WRG-Vietnam, as part of the World Bank Water Global Practice. S/he will build momentum in convening stakeholders to discuss around sustainable water resources management in Vietnam. S/he provides coordination and network leadership towards building the Multi-Stakeholder Platform (MSP) and the respective work-streams (WS) that are focused and goal oriented. The current undertaken Hydro-Economic Analysis (HEA) will build common ground towards establishment of the MSP and WS. Roll-out 2030 WRG work-streams (WS): Based on HEA, WSs will be identified, established and rolled-out. These thematic initiatives should be championed via the MSP and led by the public sector, private sector and CSO. Catalyzing funding and coalition building is key-focus for establishment of the work-steams. The Country Lead will be responsible for the setup and progress of several work streams. Initial identified areas are: o Agricultural Water Use Efficiency, with a particular focus on rice sector o Design of water sector incentives, including irrigation o Water pollution management o Water governance, including river basin council development Stakeholder engagement: The Country Lead is expected to pro-actively engage different types of stakeholders, such as: o Public Sector: Close collaboration and engagement with relevant ministries, including but not limited to MONRE, MARD, MOPI, MOIT, MOF, MOC etc. as well as other relevant entities (e.g. Prime Minister/ Deputy Prime Ministers Office, National Assembly) o Private Sector: Relationship building and identification of partnership/ implementation options with key private sector entities, for example, agribusiness/ food processing and production, construction, finance, manufacturing sector, urban, and others. o Civil Society and Academia: Engagement with credible civil society organizations and partners from academia. The Country Lead will work closely with the Water GP of the World Bank and other water-related GPs and provide regular updates to the Country Management Unit, as needed. S/he will closely work together with the 2030 WRG Program Coordinator Vietnam, the 2030 WRG Regional Asia Lead, and identified consultants working at the workstream level. The Country Lead will report directly to the 2030 WRG Regional Asia Lead. The Country Lead will join regular calls of the 2030 WRG Team across the globe and provide input and leadership for 2030 WRG engagement in Vietnam. III. Roles and Responsibilities Drive strategy for the overall results of the 2030 WRG Vietnam partnership feeding into the result matrix. Focal point and representative of 2030 WRG Vietnam towards government, private sector civil society and (international) donors. Focal point and representative of 2030 WRG Vietnam within World Bank Group. Engage and lead active dialogues with existing and potential partners including the organization of events and meetings. Lead partnership coordination by facilitating multi-stakeholder meetings and support development of work streams. Catalyze funds to build coalitions around key initiatives focusing on water resources management. Represent 2030 WRG in various multi-disciplinary or water focused fora or networking events locally, regionally and internationally. Lead overall communication of the team with external partners and internal task teams. Participate in procurement of services to enhance the work of the 2030 WRG as a user of service. Manage media relations and publicity work in Vietnam to promote the 2030 WRG. IV. Contract After a probation period for four months, the Country Lead will be hired for maximum of 150 days until June 30th, 2019 with a possibility for extension. V. Qualification The qualification of the Country Lead shall be the following: Advanced degree in Economics, Business Management, Engineering or Environmental Science; At least 10 years of experience in program management or business development in multi-stakeholder environment, of which at least 2 years should be international experience; Experience in working with, having knowledge of and relationships with stakeholders (i.e. networks across public sector, private sector and civil society) in Vietnam; Excellent understanding of Vietnamese government policy and regulations as well as the overall features of the Vietnamese/ regional private sector are highly desired; Experience working with and managing consultants; Entrepreneurial attitude with ability to identify and develop new opportunities outside of immediate scope of work; Results oriented, and ability to monitor and report on a project cycle basis; Strong interpersonal skills and ability to develop and maintain effective relations within internal and external stakeholders; Excellent organizational, team player, multi-tasking skills with strong sense of initiative and responsibility; Excellent written and presentation skills; Strong negotiation skills; Fluency in English and Vietnamese. VI. Competencies: Lead and Innovate Ability to develop innovative solutions in partnership with stakeholders, driving a shift from traditional/ conventional approaches to sustainable/ cutting-edge solutions. Knowledge and Experience in Development Arena - Translates technical and cross-country knowledge into practical applications and contributions to country and sector strategies; interacts with clients at the policy level. Policy Dialogue Skills - Anticipates needs and requests in the field and conducts independent policy discussions on subjects such as climate change and resilience/adaptation with Integrative Skills - Understands relevant cross-sectoral areas how they are interrelated; able to undertake cross-sectoral work in lending and non-lending operations. Water Policy and Strategy Good understanding of water policies and strategies and their role in delivering outcomes to end users/customers. Water Institutions Good understanding of water resources management sector institutions and how they are best organized to deliver services to end users in a sustainable manner. Water Resources Management - Extensive experience in water resources planning, management and development, with depth in at least one subtopic; ability to mitigate risk or overcome difficult challenges and provide policy-related decisions and advice. Deliver Results for Clients - Achieves results and identifies mission-driven solutions for the client. Collaborate Within Teams and Across Boundaries - Initiates collaboration across boundaries and broadly across Global Practices and the World Bank Group (WBG), and brings differing ideas into the forefront. Create, Apply and Share Knowledge - Creates, applies and shares knowledge from across and outside WBG to strengthen internal and/or external client solutions. Make Smart Decisions - Recommends and takes decisive action. Work Independently - Meets commitments and accepts accountability with minimum supervision. Please submit your CV, motivation letter and list of references to rkhemka@ifc.org by no later than July 6, 2018. Only short-listed candidate will be contacted. After this year's Miss Louisiana Pageant, which is under way in Monroe, the aspiring young women will no longer appear in revealing bathing suits. In 2018 "contestants will compete in interview, swimsuit, talent, evening wear and on-stage questions as they always have," pageant representative Darris Waren wrote in a text message. But, he acknowledged, the 2018 pageant will be the last to include a swimsuit contest. The writing was on the wall for the Miss Louisiana swimsuit competition two weeks ago when the Miss America Pageant announced that it would eliminate the swimsuit and evening gown competitions from its televised Sept. 9 showdown. Furthermore, Miss America announced that it would longer describe itself as a pageant. Heretofore it will be a competition with an emphasis on female empowerment. In a June 5 press release, the Miss America organization declared that contestants "will no longer be judged on outward physical appearance. This change in format signals the end of the swimsuit portion of the competition. In its place, each candidate will participate in a live interactive session with the judges, where she will highlight her achievements and goals in life and how she will use her talents, passion, and ambition to perform the job of Miss America." The changes followed a scandal in late 2017, when executives of the Miss America organization stepped down after the discovery of crude email comments about past Miss American contestants. Since the Miss Louisiana Pageant is a preliminary to the Miss America Competition, it stood to reason that the state competition would follow suit, dropping the strutting swimsuit contest. "The Miss America organization had made changes for future competitions that do not include a swimsuit competition," Waren wrote. "As part of the Miss America organization we will be required to follow those changes. Change is not always easy, but at this time they have made the decision to move in this direction and we will support them." The Miss Louisiana organization did not comment on the (apparent) need to eliminate the evening gown contest in 2019 or the possibility that it may drop the word pageant from its self-description. The organization did not explain why the contest would continue unchanged this year. From Thursday (June 21) to Saturday (June 23) The Miss Louisiana Pageant 2018 will unfold nightly at 7:30 p.m. in Monroe LA. To watch the proceedings live in New Orleans, tune into WUPL-TV channel 54 or KWBJ-TV, channel 39 in Houma. Doug MacCash covers art, music, and culture in New Orleans. Contact him via email at dmaccash@nola.com. Follow him on Twitter at Doug MacCash and on Facebook at Douglas James MacCash. As always, please add your point of view to the comment stream. Investigators on Monday (June 18) released surveillance images of a man and woman suspected in a French Quarter robbery that led to gunfire last week. According to police, the victim, a 30-year-old man, was headed to his hotel about 3 a.m. June 11 when an unidentified man approached from behind and grabbed him in the 1100 block of Chartres Street. The man then demanded the 30-year-old's property. After the 30-year-old complied, the robber fled with an unidentified woman, headed toward Frenchmen Street. However, when the victim realized the robber had taken his cellphone, the victim began chasing after the pair, police said. According to the NOPD, the robber then took out a handgun and fired shots toward the 30-year-old. 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 No injuries were reported in the robbery and shooting, police said. Police initially said the woman fired at the victim, but on Monday said the robber shot at the victim. In the images released by police, the wanted man appears to be gripping a gun. The victim could not provide a precise location of the robbery last week, but investigators have since determined where the robbery occurred and found surveillance video of the crime, the NOPD said Monday. Anyone with additional information on the robbery and shooting is asked to call NOPD 8th District detectives at 504-658-6080 or Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111 or toll-free at 1-877-903-STOP. A man armed with a handgun robbed a Mandeville bank Monday afternoon (June 18) and then fled in a bank employee's car, according to the Mandeville Police Department. The robbery occurred just before 2 p.m., when the gunman entered Florida Parishes Bank at 2909 U.S. 190. The man took an undisclosed amount of cash and then drove away in the employee's car, authorities said. Shortly afterward, investigators canvassing the area found the stolen car in a parking lot. St. Tammany Parish sheriff's deputies used dogs to continue searching the area around the abandoned vehicle but did not find the robbery suspect, according to Mandeville police. Anyone with information on the bank robbery is asked to call the Mandeville Police Department at 985-626-97211 or Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111. Two Ohio firefighters have been suspended for making pornographic videos at a municipal fire house, Cleveland.com reported. Deann Eller, 42, who was recently promoted to lieutenant, and Arthur Dean were placed on paid administrative leave from the Akron Fire Department Monday (June 18) pending an internal investigation. In a joint statement, Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan and Fire Chief Clarence Tucker said the firefighters were not assigned to work at the same firehouse and were in a long-term relationship, the website reported. Horrigan and Tucker said the investigation is ongoing and that there will be "prompt and appropriate action" upon completion of the probe, according to Cleveland.com. Police are not investigating the incident as crime. An ongoing social media conflict prompted two sisters to shoot at two other women Monday night (June 18) in the Read Boulevard West area of New Orleans East, according to New Orleans Police. One woman was injured, police said. Leroniequa Mitchell, 23, and Lerionte Mitchell, 21, went to the 4900 block of Knight Drive around 7:20 p.m. to meet the two victims. The meeting was planned, according to NOPD, because the four women were feuding. Once there, Leroniequa Mitchell took out a pistol and fired it more than once at the victims, striking a 24-year-old woman in the side and arm, according to police. Leroniequa Mitchell then held the gun against the other woman and threatened her. Lerionte Mitchell threatened to kill both victims, NOPD said, and implied she also had a gun, but the victim did not report seeing it. The two women then fled the scene. According to her warrant, Leroniequa Mitchell and the woman she shot had previously been in a relationship. The victim told police the dated for three years and had lived together. They broke up about a year ago, accorder to her warrant. The victim told police their relationship had not been violent. 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 NOPD initially reported the shooting in the 4900 block of Camelot Drive but later updated the location, Washington said. Both Lerionte and Leroniequa Mitchell were booked into Orleans Justice Center jail Tuesday morning, according to online court records. Leroniequa Mitchell was booked on two counts of attempted second-degree murder and one count of discharging a firearm during a violent crime, court records show, and Lerionte Mitchell was booked on two counts of accessory to attempted second-degree murder. The two women appeared in court Tuesday afternoon, where Orleans Parish Magistrate commissioner Albert Thibodeaux set Lerionte Mitchell's bond for $40,000 and assigned a public defender to her case, court records show. Thibodeaux set Leroniequa Mitchell's bond for $425,000 and assigned a public defender to her case. Note: This post was updated Wednesday morning (June 20) to include new information from court documents. An Indiana teen who sued Louisiana State Police, claiming his constitutional rights were violated during a 2015 arrest in the French Quarter, will get a new trial after a federal judge said lawyers for the defendants unlawfully declined to pick a potential juror based on his race. Lyle Dotson sued former State Police Col. Michael Edmonson and the troopers who arrested him -- Rene Bodet, Calvin Anderson, Tagie Journee and Huey McCartney - in U.S. District Court in New Orleans in 2016. Dotson said in his lawsuit the troopers arrested and detained him on Oct. 7, 2015, on Toulouse Street near Bourbon Street, and accused him of following an undercover narcotics officer. McCartney used his personal cellphone to take pictures of Dotson while he was handcuffed, according to the lawsuit. Dotson objected to the photograph, and McCartney said Dotson kicked him, according to the lawsuit. Dotson was booked in the Orleans Parish jail on a charge of battery on a police officer, and was held in jail for 36 hours, according to his lawsuit. Those charges ultimately were dismissed and the case was expunged. Dotson took his civil case against the troopers to trial on Jan. 24, 2018. After a four-day trial, the jury found McCartney violated Dotson's rights by continuing to detain him after reasonable suspicion for the stop had ended. They ruled in favor of the three other troopers. However, Dotson's attorneys, Jim Craig and Emily Washington of the Roderick and Solange McArthur Justice Center, and Elizabeth Cumming, requested a new trial. They argued that the troopers' lawyers' decided to strike a black teacher as a juror in the case, in a violation of constitutional law. 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 Dotson, who is black, was on an architecture tour with a group of students and professors from Ball State University at the time he was detained. His father Olon Dotson, an associate professor of architecture at the school, led the trip. Gregory Fahrenholt and Andre Gaudin, who represented the troopers at trial, struck the prospective juror because a "scholastic connection" could lead him to identify with Dotson's father, according to court records. Dotson's lawyers said in their motion for a new trial that they objected, and pointed to prospective white jurors who fit the same description and who were accepted as potential jurors. The troopers' lawyers said in a response motion that to prove "purposeful discrimination," Dotson had to prove a pattern of discrimination was present in jury selection. "The Defendants in the instant case made a single peremptory challenge, which can hardly be considered evidence of a pattern," the lawyers wrote. U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan granted Dotson a new trial this week against all four troopers. In her ruling, Morgan said the trooper's lawyers strike of the potential black juror "evinced purposeful racial discrimination." In a statement, Craig said, "We look forward to a new trial where we will continue to seek justice for Lyle." The incident started as a traffic stop, and ended with the death of a police officer and an 11-year-old girl who got out of the pickup truck armed with a shotgun. The girl shot the officer who had approached the truck and was talking with her father, she was then shot by the officer's partner. The scenario was a virtual simulation, and on Monday (June 18) the officer's partner was Pageant Atterberry, a communications director with the Wayne County Sheriff's Department in Detroit, Mich. who stopped by the Meggitt Training Systems' booth. The simulation, the FATS 100P portable virtual training system, is on display as part of the National Sheriffs' Association Conference at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Atterberry, with her gun drawn, watched as the traffic stop escalated: The child, gripping the gun with both hands as she waves it around, pointing it at the officer and yelling that she didn't want her father taken to jail. The father, pleading with officers not to hurt the child. Her partner, trying to calm the child. Then multiple shots from the girl's shotgun sent the officer to the ground. Seconds later Atterberry fired her simulated weapon at the girl. "I'm not on the street, but the training is necessary for everyone I believe. This is very life-like it really had me thinking not only just logically, but it's very emotional," Atterberry said. "In my situation I had to shoot a little girl." The simulated exercise was over in less than five minutes, but the lessons law enforcement officers are to learn from such virtual training scenarios are meant to last through out their careers. "It's phenomenal training," said Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon, who said his department uses an older version of the Meggitt simulator but is looking to upgrade." We use it to train both our officers and civilians. We allow civilians to come in and see what it's like to be an officer on the street, to make that split-second decision because a lot of people don't realize that officers are in life-threatening situations, and these scenarios are very often repeats of circumstances that have occurred." The scenario that Atterberry experienced happened in North Carolina, where two officers were shot, one was killed, because of their reluctance to shoot the young girl, Napoleon said. After the recent rash of school shootings earlier this year, Meggitt representative Jay Ayala said the company has received an increase in request from law enforcement agencies for simulator training software that included school intruder content. Ayala, a former Atlanta police officer, said the simulations allow departments to prepare for the possibility of mass shooting without the logistics of having to shut down a school or another building to use as a training site. "Active shooter training is very logistically heavy to practice," he said. "It is very intensive, and it takes a lot of time and money. Using a simulator cuts all of that by 90 percent. All you have to do now is go downstairs and turn on a computer and run officers through scenarios." 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 simulator program is two-fold, there's an application that trains solely for marksmanship and another that centers on judgmental use of force. The simulation is typically conducted in a low lighted room with a life-size scenario projected onto an entire wall or screen, Ayala said. While the FATS100P portable system on display this week has only one screen, some more immersive models have up to five screens in which a trainee is totally surrounded, he said. "What we do is put you in a stressful situation, and force you to make a decision," Ayala said. "The whole point is to introduce officers to as much experience as possible and have them learn from their own mistakes and make sure they do things according to policy and state and federal laws at the end of the day." The newer generation of simulators have better graphics and more advanced technology that allows for more variations than the older models, Ayala said. The simulation programs allow the instructor to review and deconstruct the reactions of the trainee, including how long it took them to react to a certain situation and where the shots landed frame by frame. The portable training system is powered by computer software that uses high definition videos displayed on a screen for an interactive exchange that can escalate or de-escalate based on the actions and reactions of responding officers. The weapons used in the simulation are made to look and feel like real guns but are powered by compressed air. St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff Mike Tregre, said his department has used the virtual simulator for officer training for several years and include it as part of the Sheriff's Office citizen's training academy. Tregre described the simulator training as "rough and real." "These conditions are as close to real life as you can get," he said. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office also uses a version of the Meggitt system simulator for its deputy, spokesman Lt. Jason Rivarde said. "It allows us to put a deputy in a stressful situation where they have to make life or death decisions without having to put them in harm's way," he said. "Realistic training for us is vital to training our deputies." Over a dozen wide-eyed children were gathered around Chuck Perkins as he recited his poetry during the Jazz at Congo Square: Kids' Poetry & Music Program on Monday (June 18) at the Cita Dennis Hubbell Library in Algiers. With rhyme and rhythm, the local radio talk show host entertained and educated as he recited poems about the culture of New Orleans. "I infuse some history, in particular New Orleans history, into my program designed specifically for young audiences," says Perkins, who hosts "The Conscious Hour" from 10 to noon every weekday on WBOK 1230AM. One might think poetry a bit beyond the understanding of 5- and 6-year-old kids. But Perkins, with his smooth, deep voice, held their attention. After a poem about Jazz great Louis Armstrong, 5-year-old Fletcher Miller-Sherman piped up, "I know who Louis Armstrong is, my dad told me about him!" The event was one of many sponsored by the New Orleans Public Library as part of their Summer Fun & Reading Challenge. For a list of June events and online sign-up for the reading challenge, check out the library's website. More than a decade ago, Louisiana stopped issuing new oyster leases in an attempt to avoid lawsuits when oyster beds are damaged by coastal restoration projects. But as the state embarks on its most expensive coastal restoration project to date, its plan to mitigate for oyster fishery losses includes opening new coastal waters for fishers to move their crop out of harm's way. As the state plans to build the $1.4 billion Mid-Barataria sediment diversion in Plaquemines Parish, state officials hope that lifting the oyster moratorium will encourage oyster leaseholders to find new areas -- away from the project -- to set up shop, said Cole Garrett, executive counsel for Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. "This is one of many things that we're looking at to address a dynamic and changing coast," he said of lifting the moratorium. As it's currently designed, the diversion would allow 75,000 cubic feet per second of Mississippi River sediment and water to flow through a controlled opening in the West Bank levee near Ironton. The sediment would feed Barataria Bay marshes in attempts to reduce land loss rates and sustain wetlands damaged by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report. But the project has garnered opposition from oyster fishers, who point out that their crop cannot swim away from inhospitable conditions. Louisiana is the top producer of oysters in the nation, harvesting more pounds of oysters per year than any other state, according to a 2016 report. From 2000 to 2014, about 50 percent of the nation's oyster landings were located in Louisiana. In 2016 alone, oyster landings in the state were valued at more than $68 million, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration commercial fisheries statistics. [enhanced link] In addition to supporting a valuable industry in the state, eastern oysters filter water and their reefs help curb coastal erosion and provide habitat for other organisms. But eastern oysters require a particular ratio of freshwater to saltwater to thrive, which ranges from 5 to 15 parts per thousand (ppt for short). If the water is fresher than 5 ppt, the oysters become stressed and die. If the water is saltier than 15 ppt, predators and disease become greater threats. Coastal erosion and sea level rise have the potential to shift the areas where oysters can grow. So, too, can diversions, which are controlled openings in the Mississippi River levees that direct the river into adjacent wetlands to sustain and encourage marsh growth. Perhaps the most infamous diversion among fishers is the Caernarvon freshwater diversion in the Breton Sound Basin, located on the east bank of the Mississippi River near Braithwaite in Plaquemines Parish. [enhanced link] The Caernarvon diversion led to the state's oyster lease moratorium in 2002, after a jury awarded oyster leaseholders a $1 billion settlement for damages to oyster beds. The Louisiana Supreme Court reversed that judgment two years later, finding that the state was not liable for damages to the oyster leases because of a "hold harmless" clause written within the vast majority of the fishers' leases, according to court documents. The clause absolved the state of liability for loss or damage to leases as a result of coastal restoration projects, according to the court decision. The hold harmless clause has since been added to all of the state's oyster leases, Garrett said. Still, the moratorium has remained in place. Environmental news in your inbox Stay up-to-date on the latest on Louisiana's coast and the environment. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Because of the moratorium, oyster fishers have turned to coastal landowners to expand their operations. Private landowners have leased water bottoms to oyster fishers in areas where their property washed away. [enhanced link] Still, more than 400,000 acres of state-owned water bottoms are leased for oyster production. The state's leases go for $3 per acre per year, pumping more than $1.2 million annually into state coffers. In 2016, legislation passed that established a framework to lift the moratorium. It's expected to take another six months before oyster fishers can apply for new leases, Garrett said. When the moratorium is lifted, about 670,000 acres of state-owned water bottoms could be available and suitable for lease, according to a 2015 legislative auditor report. That could generate an additional $790,000 for the state, assuming all newly-available water bottoms are leased. [enhanced link] The moratorium has been "stifling" for fishers looking to advance and grow their operations, said John Tesvich, chair of the state's Oyster Task Force. He called the move to lift the moratorium "a big relief for the industry." But mitigating for planned diversions is not as easy as moving oyster leases, Tesvich said. Oyster leases in the state are designated for 15-year terms and producing oysters requires "a significant investment," he said. To grow their crop, many fishers buy cultch, a hard material laid down on water bottoms to furnish a point of attachment for young oysters. If oyster fishers are forced to move away from the spot where they've built up productive oyster beds, Tesvich asked, how will they recoup their business costs? Before the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion project in St. Charles Parish became operational in 2002, lawmakers authorized spending up to $7.5 million to move oysters beds that would be impacted, according to the Department of Natural Resources. The payments ranged from $400 up to $300,000 and were determined by the cost of purchase and placement of cultch material on a replacement lease. Buyouts could be considered for the areas expected to be impacted by future diversions, said Patrick Banks, assistant secretary of the Office of Fisheries for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. But since the "hold harmless" clause has been included in all oyster leases in the state, that option is less likely, he added. But liability shouldn't be the state's only factor in deciding whether to buyout fishers, Tesvich said. "Just because you're not liable doesn't mean you shouldn't take care of your residents," he said. "Liability is different from what is the right thing to do." HCM CITY For the medical officers of the first Vietnamese delegation to a UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan , the initial anxiety has been replaced with pride and confidence after receiving intensive training ahead of their one-year duty. Wearing blue helmets, with red Vietnamese blood flowing in our hearts, we are ready for the African trip, to contribute to world peace, said an assured Major Bui uc Thanh, who will lead the Field Hospital Level 2 No 1 the Vietnamese medical unit on its way to South Sudan this July. The event, according to Vietnamese leaders, marks the impressive growth of the blue helmet force and reaffirms the Vietnamese Governments commitment to international integration and contribution to international humanitarian and peace efforts. The military officers who will carry out this honourable but challenging duty have displayed unending efforts to achieve their mission, living up to their reputation as Uncle Hos army on the global stage. The field hospital level 2 the optimal version of field hospitals in mid-term deployment was a task assigned to the Military Hospital 175 based in HCM City . Four months after receiving the order in July 2014, the field hospital took shape, with medical officers picked with meticulous consideration from military hospitals across the southern region. However, as this is the first time Viet Nam has created a field hospital of this scale, everything was new. Major Thanh recalled the first days of the hospital, while the recruitment process was taking place. The civil wars in Africa filled our minds with concern, as well as the United Nations strict requirements. We must pick each individual from a pool of several hundred to make up the core framework of the hospital, he told the Vietnam News Agency. According to Major Thanh, the key criteria for recruitment are the officers virtues, professional skills and foreign language proficiency. In the beginning, English was the biggest challenge for the trainees as the United Nations demanded a proficiency of at least IELTS 5.5, while most Vietnamese nurses, doctors and technicians struggled with the language. Once the list of officers is compiled, they were sent to take intensive English classes with the support of the Australian embassy. Aside from the challenging language training course, the medical officers also received exhaustive training on medical knowledge, survival skills and quick responses to unexpected incidents, as their working environment will be in hostile field conditions. Vietnamese medical officers of the field hospital to be deployed in South Sudan are carrying out a mock examination and treatment of an injured patient. VNA/VNS Photo Xuan Khu Field trips lasting several days and nights in the deepest reaches of tropical forests are one of the most physically and mentally straining exercises for medical officers. Foreign experts drew up various scenarios for us to learn how to navigate in case of getting lost, as well as to know how to make a fire or locate water sources, how to identify edible plants, and how to make traps to catch animals in the forest. We were taught various methods to avoid being ambushed or to escape from captivity, and how to recognise the tell-tale signs of mine-ridden areas so that we can circumvent them, Major Thanh said. Basically, we were taught everything that could help ensure our survival in all conditions. As this is Viet Nams first international medical mission, preparations, training, and assessment were overseen strictly by the UNs book. For nearly four years, the defence ministry, Military Hospital 175 and the field hospitals medical officers were learning as they go with little experience and no precedents to fall back on. There are so many procedures and requirements different to Vietnamese standards. In many cases, even after the officers have finished their own training, they still couldnt pass the UNs assessment and were asked to be re-trained, said Major Colonel Nguyen Hong Son, director of the Military Hospital 175. Some were disqualified in the tests, and we needed to recruit new members and the training started from zero again. Ready to go Ensuring the safety of medical officers overseas is the number one priority of the Ministry of Defence and Military Hospital 175. The harsh conditions in Africa are the least of our problems. The continent is rife with dangers, from unanticipated accidents to surprise attacks from opposition forces and multiple rebel groups. Sometimes the reason for attacks is simply hunger, they need our food. And then there are concerns of diseases like Ebola, Major Colonel Son said. Having come to South Sudan himself to survey the conditions, Major Thanh recalls the scorching heat, constantly sitting around 40 degrees Celsius, with spikes of up to 54 degrees Celsius, which only gets reduced by torrential downpours that last for days. Poor infrastructure and incessant conflicts between factions are also the grim reality that will face Vietnamese medical officers in the region. Safety protocols were all devised based on this survey trip and the UNs recommendations. All required machinery and basic amenities have been prepared and transported to South Sudan ahead of the mission. After four years of strenuous training, we want to make it clear to the world that Vietnamese medical officers are outstanding and can meet the UNs demands. Field hospital level 2, with its 73 medical officers, is ready to carry out its mission starting this July, Major Colonel Son stressed. In the last inspection of the field hospital, Colonel General Nguyen Chi Vinh, Deputy Minister of Defence, said that the field hospital is ready and will serve as the premise for future Vietnamese field hospitals and army engineer forces participating in UN peacekeeping efforts. The medical officers of the field hospital, after years of hard training, are more than prepared, as Senior Lieutenant Phan Thi Van Huyen, a technician at the hospital, said. I think this is the most meaningful time in my life. I am set up and ready to go at the call of the motherland. VNS Purchases made via links on our site may earn us an affiliate commission A hat believed to have been worn by Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo has sold for $325,000 at auction, according to the BBC. It had been expected to sell for less than $50,000. The sale, held Monday (June 18), was made 203 years to the day of the 1815 battle, which ended in defeat for the self-declared French emperor at the hands of English and Prussian forces. It also ended the Napoleonic Wars, which were financed in part by the sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States by Napoleon in 1803. A European collector of historical pieces submitted the winning bid. That collector's name was not disclosed. The bicorne -- or two-cornered hat -- is one of an estimated 120 worn by Napoleon over the course of his military career but one of just 19 known to exist. It was reportedly salvaged from the battlefield by a Dutch officer and bears tell-tale signs that it belonged to the French emperor. For example, according to the BBC story, Napoleon didn't like certain trimming on the hat and always had it removed. He also requested reinforcements at certain points where he had the habit of holding it. According to the BBC story, he always had 12 such hats in service, each of which was broken in by a valet and retired after three years. Following his historic defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon was held in exile on the island of St. Helena. It was at this point that a group of New Orleanians -- including Dominique You, a pirating colleague of Jean Lafitte -- hatched a plan to rescue him and install him at former New Orleans Mayor Nicholas Girod's house at 500 Chartres St. in the French Quarter. Napoleon died before the rescue could be realized, but the house -- now one of New Orleans' most famous restaurants and bars -- still goes by the name Napoleon House. In addition, the Cabildo in New Orleans -- which is part of the Louisiana State Museum system -- has in its collection one of only four bronze death masks of Napoleon known to exist. The exercise is as old as the Republic, but the first thing you need to understand about redistricting is that hot-water cornbread is as ubiquitous in north Louisiana as etouffee is in the south, says Rick Gallot, the Ruston Democratic representat ONG THAP The Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta province of ong Thap needs VN657 billion (US$28.8 million) for a resettlement housing project to relocate thousands of households in erosion-prone areas. More than 5,900 households living on landslide sites in the province should be relocated to safe places, according to the provinces Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. Of the figure, there are about 2,440 households in urgent need of relocation. The resettlement housing project is waiting approval from the Prime Minister to build 12 new residential areas and clusters, Deputy Director of the provincial Peoples Committee Vo Thanh Ngoan said. Since the beginning of this year, nine landslides have damaged 163km of land along Tien Rivers bank in the province, and caused losses of over VN172 million ($7,530). Thanh Binh District, Hong Ngu Town and Cao Lanh City have been the most affected by erosion. Ngoan said erosion incidents were more common in areas along riverbanks and around islets, as well at places where the river is divided and river sections with unstable streams. The province plans to deal with eroded areas along Tien Rivers bank in Thanh Binh Districts Binh Thanh Commune and Chau Thanh Districts An Hiep Commune. This would include building an embankment between Thanh Binh Districts Binh Thanh Commune and Cao Lanh Districts Phong My Commune, and implementing the second phase of project on extending a 460m section of embankment in Hong Ngu Districts Thuong Thoi Tien Commune. The province has asked the districts peoples committees to install warning signs and raise awareness about erosion prevention among local residents. An inspection team will implement solutions to prevent erosion at the affected locations. The provinces Department of Natural Resources and Environment will also monitor sand exploitation in an effort to prevent riverbank erosion. Between 2005 and 2017, the province had 25 eroded sites along the Tien River, covering an area of 305ha, according to a report from the department. The province provided VN350 billion ($15.3 million) in funds to move locals from landslide areas to new residential areas. VNS Roseburg, OR (97470) Today A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low near 45F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%.. Tonight A steady rain this evening. Showers continuing overnight. Low near 45F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 80%. Vice President ang Thi Ngoc Thinh met with 200 voters in Vinh Long City in the Mekong Delta province of Vinh Long on Monday. Photo baovinhlong.vn HCM CITY Vice President ang Thi Ngoc Thinh met with 200 voters in Vinh Long City in the Mekong Delta province of Vinh Long on Monday to brief them about the fifth session of the current National Assembly term and listen to their demands and suggestions. Thinh apprised them about important economic, social, military and security issues at the national and provincial levels. She told them about bills that would come up for voting at the next session. The voters expressed their support for some important issues, especially the Cyber Security Law, saying it would serve as the legal foundation to ensure information and cyber security. They voiced concern over the Law on Special Administrative - Economic Zones, saying before passing it, the Government should further consult experts, cadres and the public. Speaking about the Anti-Corruption Bill, they proposed confiscation of all assets instead of the 40 per cent stipulated in the bill. They wanted the use of harmful substances to produce foods and their trade to be attract the provisions of the Criminal Law to deter offenders. VNS Japanese prosecutors have called for the death penalty for Yasumasa Shibuya, a Japanese man who is accused of murdering a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl in Chiba prefecture on March 24 last year. Photo Kyodo TOKYO Japanese prosecutors have called for the death penalty for Yasumasa Shibuya, a Japanese man who is accused of murdering a 9-year-old Vietnamese girl in Chiba prefecture on March 24 last year. On the final day of the trial yesterday, prosecutors asserted that Shibuya, 47, committed a cold-blooded, heinous and cruel crime, and demanded the highest penalty for him. However, defence lawyers argued the defendant was innocent and the evidence was not strong enough to charge him. The Chiba Court announced it will issue a ruling on July 6. Shibuya is accused of murdering Le Thi Nhat Linh, a third grader living in Matsudo town. Linh disappeared shortly after leaving her home on foot for her school on March 24, 2017. Her body was found two days later in Abiko, Chiba. She is thought to have been choked to death, based on marks found on her neck. Shibuya was arrested on April 14, 2017 on suspicion of dumping Linhs body. The same day, Japanese police served a new arrest warrant on the man, charging the suspect with murder and abandonment of the victims body, after tests results showed that DNA taken from Shibuya matched those of samples found on the victims body. Shibuya was head of the parents association at the elementary school in Matsudo where the victim attended. He lives about 300 metres from the victims home. VNS Wall Streets front-line regulator intends to keep pushing big banks to improve their ethics. The new president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, John C. Williams, on Monday gave his backing to his predecessor's campaign to clean up bank culture. I do commit to continue the New York Feds leadership on this in future years, he said at a New York Fed conference on bank governance. More than four years ago, after a number of big scandals on Wall Street, William C. Dudley, who was until Sunday the president of the New York Fed, started the initiative to improve the culture at large financial institutions. Mr. Dudley succeeded in getting top bankers to participate in regular discussions about how they could overhaul the culture of their institutions, and in some cases, boards of major banks have started to focus on the issue of employee conduct. But some of his more ambitious ideas have not been taken up. Mr. Williams, previously the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, did not specify the policies that he might pursue to try to bring about a lasting improvement in bankers ethics. Instead, his main message on Monday was that bankers and regulators must be careful not to relax their efforts at a time when banks financial performance looks strong. Good times such as these, Mr. Williams said, can create the circumstances that lead to scandals. He said: First, theres a risk of complacency setting in an if it aint broke, dont fix it mentality. Second, in a strong economy, the hard numbers that we tend to focus on when examining profits, losses, capital and liquidity can look like everythings coming up roses, even when an uncomfortable reality lies beneath. And, finally, culture is a long-run investment that takes many years to develop and requires constant reinforcement to preserve. If you let it erode, you cant go to the market and obtain a new culture overnight. Mr. Williams can use the New York Feds bully pulpit to press for changes, but putting new measures into effect might prove hard. Mr. Dudley favored an industry database of banker misconduct, similar to the one for brokers, that banks could consult before hiring. He recently said legal issues made such a register difficult to set up. Frances McDormand, the actress who won an Academy Award this year for her performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, introduced much of the world to a new idea when she accepted her Oscar. I have two words to leave you with tonight: inclusion rider, she said. Throughout Hollywood, the concept of an inclusion rider a special clause in the contract of a lead actor or actress or prominent director that insists on a guarantee of gender and ethnic diversity among the cast and crew has become increasingly popular since then. The Oscar winners Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Brie Larson have said they would insist on one, as have the director and producer Ava DuVernay and others. But what if inclusion riders took the leap from Hollywood to Wall Street? What would happen if the biggest pension funds and university endowments the financial industry equivalent of A-list actors were to insist that they would invest only in private equity, venture capital or hedge funds that have certain hiring practices to address the diversity gap? Wall Street investment funds have a long of history of being the antithesis of diverse. Only 9 percent of senior executives in private equity are women, according to the industry research firm Preqin. Fewer than 2 percent of private equity firms are run by women. About 2 percent of all funding for venture capital went to companies with all-female founding teams, and just 12 percent to teams with at least one woman. HA NOI The Ha Noi City Peoples Committee is working on the second phase of the demolition of the illegally constructed 19th floor of a building at 8B Le Truc Street , in Ba inh District. The second phase of handling violations at 8B Le Truc building has faced new problems, which need to be resolved thoroughly. According to the Phuong Bac Group Joint Stock Company - the unit which completed the first phase of the demolition, the breakdown of the unallowed area will undoubtedly affect the structure, safety and sustainability of the building. The building was licensed for 18 stories, but the investor illegally built the 19th floor. Phuong Bac company has completed demolishing the 19th floor in the first phase. However, the investor also adjusted the height of the floors so the authorities have to continue the second phase. Due to the complexity of the architecture and structure of the building, the demolition in the second phase will require the removal of most of the pillars and beams of the building. Therefore, the company has suggested the city authorities assign the task of the second phase of demolition to the buildings design unit because only the design unit fully understands the core structure of the building. If the second phases dismantlement project is assessed as absolutely safe, then Phuong Bac company will have enough grounds to complete dismantlement measures to submit to relevant agencies for approval. But nearly two years since the demolition began, the design unit has still not come up with the second phases plan to ensure safety. Phuong Bac company said that the second phases dismantling has a high risk level, while destroying the whole building will waste social resources. At present, there is no legal document that allows the authorities to demolish the whole building. On the other hand, most of the areas from the 18th floor and below have been purchased. The second stage of dismantling will therefore face opposition from the people who have deposited on the apartments. For the above reasons, the Phuong Bac company has requested to thoroughly handle the illegally-constructed 8B Le Truc building to save money and ensure the interests of people involved. If the work doesnt affect security and national defence, the company has proposed investors to buy back the whole area that should not have been built but already been sold to customers and the money collected should be put it into the State budget instead of dismantling. The second phases dismantling wastes social assets and causes risks to peoples safety, including construction workers, residents living around the building, and road users. In addition, the company requires investors to pay the full cost of the first phases demolition and fund the maintenance of tower cranes, cage hoists and other equipment used since the end of first phase. During the rainy season, the storage of tower cranes and hoists causes risks, the company proposed to dismantle the tower cranes and cage hoists for maintenance. On the above recommendations, Vice Chairman of the Ha Noi Peoples Committee Nguyen The Hung has assigned the Department of Construction to co-ordinate with Ba inh District to re-check the process of handling violations. The 8B Le Truc buildings developer was Le Truc Garment Joint Stock Company. VNS In his years in public education, Alain E. Kaloyeros was one of New Yorks biggest success stories, parlaying his expertise in nanotechnology to become one of the states most powerful and highest-paid employees. As the former president of New York Polytechnic Institute, Dr. Kaloyeros became the unlikely architect of many of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomos economic development efforts in the state, including the governors marquee project, the so-called Buffalo Billion. But on Monday, Dr. Kaloyeros found himself in another unlikely scenario: standing trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accused of manipulating a bidding process to steer lucrative state contracts to two developers whose executives had made large donations to the governors election campaigns. Those contracts were supposed to go to the winners of a fair and open competition, but that didnt happen, David Zhou, a prosecutor, said in his opening statement. That did not happen, he added, because Dr. Kaloyeros made sure that the fix was in. TRENTON Trenton is a capital city of more than 84,000 people that can often feel like two urban areas rolled into one. On State Street, beyond the State House with its golden dome, sit clean brick buildings that house deep-pocketed lobbying firms and a cafe where state employees in business suits were having lunch at outdoor tables on Monday afternoon. Yet a short drive in nearly any direction reveals boarded-up houses, sagging roofs, vacant lots and cracked roads. Signs pledging to buy homes in any condition for cash hang from the utility poles. In this bleak landscape, Art All Night has been a bright spot an annual 24-hour art show featuring the paintings of children alongside works by the citys growing artists community. A point of local pride, it has also been the centerpiece of an effort to revitalize downtown and repurpose its warehouses as art galleries, studios and event spaces. That light was dimmed over the weekend when the festival became the site of a mass shooting early Sunday leaving one dead and around two dozen injured in what the authorities described as a showdown between rival gangs. It was our worst nightmare, said Lauren Otis, the executive director of Artworks Trenton, the nonprofit that produces the event, now in its 12th year. It was horrible. Its something that would be inexplicably horrible wherever it happened, but to have it happen in what was the most diverse event in Trenton, perhaps in New Jersey, at an event that was so popular it was tragic. It eviscerated us. Ripping children away from their parents is the most cinematically cruel part of the Trump immigration policy, but it is not the most telling part. The most telling part is what happened to Ludvin Franco. Franco was an unauthorized immigrant who had been working in this country for over a decade. His wife, Anne, is from a Pennsylvania Dutch family that has been in this country for generations. They were married in 2013 and have three American children, Max, Javier and Valentina. In the spring of 2017, Franco got in a minor traffic accident near his Pennsylvania home. A few weeks later as he was leaving for work, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement swarmed him, took him away and deported him to Guatemala. He watched the delivery of his third child through the screen of his cellphone, 3,200 miles away. This is an example of ICE going after a perfectly productive member of society. I got the anecdote from a series of reports that Deborah Sontag and Dale Russakoff did for ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer. They found that 64 percent of the immigrants arrested by ICE in the agencys Philadelphia region had no prior criminal conviction. Michael Cohen, the presidents personal lawyer and longtime fixer, has recently become the most notorious influence peddler in America, but he is only one man in an army of shadow lobbyists whose power has been growing for years. Much of Mr. Cohens headline-making behavior is outrageous even by K Street standards. But one of the many alleged misdeeds for which he is reportedly under investigation knowingly failing to register as a lobbyist, a felony is routine in Washington. There are thousands of unregistered lobbyists operating off the books thanks to loophole-ridden disclosure rules and lax enforcement of the federal laws on lobbying. Unless these rules are tightened, people less infamous than Michael Cohen will continue courting officials of both parties on the behalf of private interests, out of public view. Federal lobbying is governed by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. It requires that people who receive more than $5,000 a quarter from lobbying provide basic information about their activities and clients. But there are gaping loopholes in the law. One of its provisions says that you are required to register as a lobbyist only if you spend at least 20 percent of your time over three months directly contacting more than one public official. Ethics officials loosely interpret that 20 percent rule to include only attempts to persuade. Routine information gathering doesnt count as lobbying, so if you set up a meeting with a member of Congress, but doing so required only a five-minute text-message exchange, did that count toward the 20 percent threshold? You can meet with a cabinet secretarys aide to discuss policy, but who can say if that meeting was to persuade, rather than to collect information? Its a subjective call within an entire system dependent on self-reporting. Watching President Trump blame Democrats for his administrations inhumane practice of snatching immigrant children from their parents at the border evokes nothing so much as an abusive husband blaming his wife for the beatings he delivers: Why do you make me do this? I hate doing this! If youd only be reasonable and listen to me, things wouldnt have to be this way. As anyone paying even minimal attention to politics knows, this immoral policy is not the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime, to quote one randomly spelled and capitalized tweet out of three to that effect in a little over 12 hours. Its not really Republicans fault, either at least not yet. Both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations began efforts to curtail the flow of people across the southern border, but neither went so far as to pursue a zero tolerance approach that tore apart families en masse. Congress has not passed any bills requiring the practice since then. This bit of nastiness belongs entirely to Mr. Trump he has made a choice to torment undocumented families and his attempt to pass the buck is dishonest and gutless. In other words, its what weve come to expect when Mr. Trump finds himself in an uncomfortable spot. But the horror show at the border has gotten awkward for Mr. Trump. When the normally fawning Rev. Franklin Graham and other conservative religious leaders start publicly questioning this presidents inerrancy, you know Mr. Trump has really distinguished himself in his iniquity. Even the first lady felt moved to publicly distance herself from her husbands cruelty, calling for a nation that governs with heart. Things have gotten so radioactive that, at a Monday briefing, the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, found it easiest to fall back on incoherence, alternating between blaming Congress for the situation and denying that any such situation existed. Perhaps recognizing the growing political hazard, the president is headed to Capitol Hill Tuesday evening to try to drag Republican House members deeper into his dumpster fire. Marc Short, his legislative affairs director, has said that the president will explain to Republican lawmakers the logic and history behind the decision to split up families. The policy is incredibly complicated, and it is one we need to do a better job of communicating, Mr. Short said. Apparently there are some people close to Donald Trump with the capacity for shame. Not decency or courage, of course, but at least furtive recognition that theyre complicit in something vile. Over the last few days, stories of bureaucratic sadism have poured forth from Americas southern border. The Associated Press described a Texas warehouse where hundreds of children wait in a series of cages with up to 20 people inside. The New York Times reported on a mother deported to Guatemala without her 8-year-old son. In The Washington Post, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics described a shelter for toddlers where staffers arent allowed to hug or hold the bereft children. ProPublica obtained a recording of small children wailing for their parents in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, while a Border Patrol agent joked, Weve got an orchestra here. As outrage has built nationally, several people associated with the White House stepped forward to dissemble. Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the Department of Homeland Security, sent out a series of tweets denying that the administrations policy was in fact the administrations policy. We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period, she lied. Melania Trumps spokeswoman put out a slippery statement distancing the first lady from the presidents actions and sowing confusion about their cause. Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform, the statement said, as if her husband were not responsible for the separations. A restrictive law on voting in Kansas championed by Kris W. Kobach, the secretary of state, was struck down on Monday by a federal judge who said Mr. Kobach had failed during a trial to show evidence of widespread voter fraud. The ruling was a blow to Mr. Kobach, a Republican who has emerged as a national figure on voting limits, a candidate for governor of Kansas and an ally of President Trump in part by claiming that large numbers of noncitizens have cast ballots in American elections. Experts on election law say that there is no evidence that voter fraud is a pervasive problem. For Kansas voters, the decision means that in elections this fall, people will not be required to provide proof of their citizenship in order to register to vote, as required under a Kansas law passed in 2011. Federal District Judge Julie A. Robinson of Kansas, who presided over the trial earlier this year in which Mr. Kobach represented himself, said in her 188-page ruling that while there was evidence of a small number of noncitizen registrations in Kansas, it is largely explained by administrative error, confusion, or mistake. WASHINGTON Federal prosecutors have charged a former software engineer at the center of a huge C.I.A. breach with stealing classified information, theft of government property and lying to the F.B.I. The engineer, Joshua A. Schulte, 29, of New York, had been the main suspect in one of the worst losses of classified documents in the spy agencys history. Government investigators suspect that he provided WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization, with a stolen archive of documents detailing the C.I.A.s hacking operations, but they had not initially charged him in that crime. The breach, known as the Vault 7 leak, was a major embarrassment to the C.I.A. and set off a furious hunt to identify who was behind the 2017 disclosure. NIELSEN: I think that they reflect the focus of those who post such pictures and narratives. The narratives we dont see are the narratives of the crime, of the opioids, of the smugglers, of who are people killed by gang members, of American children who are recruited and then when they lose the drugs theyre tased and beaten. So we dont have a balanced view of whats happening, but whats happening at the border is the border is being overrun by those who have no right to cross it. As I said before, if you are seeking asylum, go to a port of entry. You do not need to break the law of the United States to seek asylum. REPORTER: People are being turned away from ports of entry. NIELSEN: That actually is incorrect. We have limited resources, we have multiple missions at C.B.P. and what we do is based on the very high standards we have, if we do not have enough bed space, if we do not have enough medical personnel on staff, if we do not have enough caretakers on staff, then we will tell people that come to the border that they need to come back. We are not turning them away. We are saying we want to take care of you in the right way, right now we do not have the resources at this particular moment in time, come back. [cross talk] REPORTER: Thank you very much. Are you intending for this to play out as it is playing out? Are you intending for parents to be separated from children? Are you intending to send a message? NIELSEN: I find that offensive. No. Because why would I ever create a policy that purposely does that. REPORTER: Perhaps as a deterrence? NIELSEN: No. The way that it works [cross talk] NIELSEN: That is not the question that you asked me. But the answer is, it is a law passed by the United States Congress. Rather than fixing the law, Congress is asking those of us who enforce the law to turn our backs on the law and not enforce the law. It is not an answer. The answer is to fix the laws. REPORTER: Will the administration refrain from its current policy if Congress were to pass something that is close to what you want, or will it continue to require the separation of parents from children until the president gets exactly what he wants? NIELSEN: If Congress closes the loopholes, some of which many of which are closed in the two bills that we hope are taken up this week by the House, then they close the loopholes and the families will stay together throughout the proceedings. Thank you. WASHINGTON Democrats and Republicans jostled for political points on Monday as they pressed the Justice Departments inspector general for the first time over his exhaustive examination of the F.B.I.s handling of its investigation into Hillary Clintons use of a private email server. But over two hours of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, it became evident that there was little that the inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, could say to sway either side in their long political fight over what occurred at the F.B.I. in the run-up to the 2016 election. Republicans raised doubts about key conclusions of Mr. Horowitzs report, saying that they believed political bias among bureau officials may have improperly shaped its decision not to recommend charges against Mrs. Clinton. Democrats insisted that whatever F.B.I. officials had intended, their actions only served to harm Mrs. Clintons candidacy and potentially cost her the election. Mr. Horowitzs 500-page report, released Thursday after a yearlong investigation, found ample evidence of personal political bias by top F.B.I. officials working on the Clinton investigative team and said it cast a cloud over the F.B.I. and its work. Mr. Horowitzs report found that actions by James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, had likewise harmed the bureau. But Mr. Horowitz said he found no evidence that F.B.I. officials political views influenced prosecutorial decisions in the Clinton case that he reviewed, though he expressed deep concern about their apparent openness to the idea. QUANG NAM Police in the central province of Quang Nam have detained six Taiwanese citizens on suspicion of fraud and asset appropriation, online newspaper Vietnamplus.vn reported. Chung Shao Teng, Chang Seng Ping, Chang Chia Pin, and Bian Zong Xun, as well as Chang Fu Lung and Lo Yu Hsuan, were detained by Quang Nam Police in coordination with authorities from HCM City and Tay Ninh Province after an investigation was conducted in response to a complaint made by a resident of Ai Nghia Town in Quang Nams ai Loc District to police on June 6 that he had lost VN1.9 billion (US$83,000) as a result of swindling and appropriation committed through a phone call. Along with the six Chinese-Taiwanese citizens, six Vietnamese suspected of being members of the fraud ring were also detained. Huynh Hoang An and inh Chi Quyen, residents of Chau Thanh District in the southern province of Tay Ninh, oan Van Quan from Trang Bang District in Tay Ninh Province, and Nguyen Minh Truong of the Go Dau District in Tay Ninh, were arrested in connection to the swindling scheme, along with Tran Huynh Phuc, a resident of Son Tra District of a Nang City, and Le Van Suu from Huong Son District in Ha Tinh Province. The police said the Taiwanese suspects contacted their Vietnamese accomplices over the internet to search for personal information of potential Vietnamese victims. They then called the victims via VOIP service and tricked them by posing as law enforcement officials investigating criminal cases who called to warn them that their saving accounts had been hacked and used for money laundering. The victims were then told to transfer money to bank accounts of law enforcement agencies, which turned out to be owned by the suspects. The victims were told to keep the phone calls secret. Many people fell victim to the scheme, as the total amount of money appropriated by the gang was over VN6.9 billion (US$300,000), the police reported. VNS WASHINGTON Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller spent years on the political fringe in the nations capital as high-decibel immigration hard-liners, always warning about the dangers of open borders but rarely in a position to affect law or policy. Now, Mr. Sessions, the attorney general and former senator from Alabama, and Mr. Miller, the presidents top policy adviser and former Senate aide to Mr. Sessions, have moved from the edges of the immigration debate to its red-hot center. Powerful like never before, the two are the driving force behind President Trumps policy that has led thousands of children to be separated from their parents at the nations southern border. It was Mr. Sessions who ordered prosecutors to take a new zero tolerance attitude toward families crossing into the United States, part of his plans to reshape the countrys law enforcement priorities to limit immigration. It is Mr. Miller who has championed the idea inside the White House, selling Mr. Trump on the benefits of a policy that his adversaries have called evil, inhumane and equivalent to child abuse or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. WASHINGTON The Pentagon announced on Monday that it was suspending a major military exercise with South Korea that President Trump had criticized as a waste of money. The decision to cancel at least for now the large-scale, long-planned Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise set for August had been expected after Mr. Trumps surprise announcement in Singapore that he was ending joint military exercises as an inducement for North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. Consistent with President Trumps commitment and in concert with our Republic of Korea ally, the United States military has suspended all planning for this Augusts defensive war game, the Pentagon spokeswoman, Dana W. White, said in a statement released on Monday night. We are still coordinating additional actions, Ms. White added. No decisions on subsequent war games have been made. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went to the cradle of Americas car industry on Monday and issued a tough warning to allies and adversaries alike, saying that trading relationships with even close partners were out of whack and accusing China of engaging in an unprecedented level of larceny. Its the most predatory economic government that operates against the rest of the world today, Mr. Pompeo said of China during a speech in Detroit. This is a problem that is long overdue in being tackled. The blistering remarks suggested that the Trump administration now that the Singapore summit meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, is over is further ramping up its efforts to push back against Chinese trade practices. On Friday, a day after Mr. Pompeo said he had good and constructive discussions on trade with top officials in Beijing, the administration moved ahead with tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods, which China immediately matched. China was not Mr. Pompeos only target on Monday, and his decision to issue his global warning before the Detroit Economic Club suggested that a sweeping investigation into car imports could result in even more tariffs. The Trump administration has already imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum from its closest trading partners, and Mr. Pompeo said that asymmetric trade relationships with Canada, Europe, Japan and Mexico needed to change. WASHINGTON The Trump administration is poised to issue a sweeping rule that makes it easier for small businesses to band together to create health insurance plans that skirt many requirements of the Affordable Care Act, offering lower costs but also fewer benefits. The final rule is to be unveiled Tuesday, administration officials and congressional aides said. President Trump has said millions of people could get cheaper coverage from the new association health plans. But consumer groups and many state officials are opposed, saying the new plans will siphon healthy people out of the Affordable Care Act marketplace, driving up costs for those who need comprehensive insurance. The new entities would be exempt from many of the consumer protections mandated by the Affordable Care Act. They may, for example, not have to provide certain essential health benefits like mental health care, emergency services, maternity and newborn care and prescription drugs. As many as 11 million Americans could find coverage under the new health plans, the Labor Department said in drafting the rule, which carries out an executive order signed by Mr. Trump on Oct. 12. WASHINGTON As Republicans try to keep their midterm election strategy focused on the economy, tax cuts and falling unemployment, President Trump sent his clearest signal yet on Monday that he intends to make divisive, racially charged issues like immigration central going into the campaign season. Facing bipartisan criticism over his administrations family separation practice on the border, Mr. Trump renewed the sort of bald and demagogic attacks on undocumented immigrants that worked well for him politically in his 2016 presidential campaign. He inveighed against the death and destruction thats been caused by people coming into this country and vowed that the United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. Republicans typically handle immigration gingerly in an election year, as they try to appeal to Hispanic voters, independents and moderates across divergent districts. But with more Americans still opposing the tax measure than supporting it, Mr. Trumps allies believe that trying to link Democrats to crimes committed by undocumented immigrants and gangs like MS-13 will do more to galvanize Republican voters and get them to the polls in November than emphasizing economic issues. People dont turn out to say thank you, said Corey Lewandowski, one of the presidents top political advisers. If you want to get people motivated, youve got to give them a reason to vote. Saying build the wall and stop illegals from coming in and killing American citizens gives them an important issue. BEIJING North Koreas leader, Kim Jong-un, arrived in Beijing on Tuesday amid an escalating trade conflict between China and the United States, one that gives him an opening to play the powers against each other as Washington presses him to dismantle his nuclear arsenal. This could be regarded as an intuitive response to Trumps escalation of the trade war, Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said of Chinas invitation to Mr. Kim. The surprise trip, just a week after his landmark summit meeting in Singapore with President Trump, is the North Korean leaders third visit to China since March. His two-day trip was announced by Xinhua, Chinas official news agency, as Mr. Kim was arriving on Tuesday morning; his previous stops in China were not made public until after they were over. For his first one, in March which was also his first trip abroad, and his first meeting with a head of state, since becoming the Norths leader Mr. Kim arrived in Beijing aboard an armored train, and he spent two days in the capital for talks with President Xi Jinping. In May, Mr. Kim visited the port city of Dalian, also spending time with Mr. Xi. The modern dance tree has abundant roots, and two of its thickest and oldest belong to Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Their Denishawn company and school in Los Angeles, which lasted from 1914 to 29, toured the world with a new spirit of dance barefoot and weighted, exotic and spiritual. They were celebrities of their day. Their costumes were often extravagant and the opposite of Coco Chanels dictum: Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off. That was the cue, at least for St. Denis, to add another bauble. As for their students? One was the beautiful, young Louise Brooks. Another, more important for the art form, was the pathbreaking choreographer Martha Graham. St. Denis, known as Miss Ruth and drawn to the mysticism of Asian culture, sought a spiritual connection in her work; Shawn championed American virility in male dancers. Married in 1914, they separated in 1930; the next year, Shawn bought Jacobs Pillow farm in western Massachusetts, and three years later, formed Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers. That performance, in July 1933, is considered the beginning of the Jacobs Pillow festival. The pre- and post-macular degeneration works of eight artists, including Mr. Hollerbach, Lennart Anderson and Hedda Sterne, are the focus of The Persistence of Vision, a new exhibition at the University of Cincinnati. It explores the versatility of artists shown in early and late works as they adapted their styles to vision loss and, in cases like Mr. Hollerbachs, experienced a personal renaissance. The late works are gorgeous, said Brian Schumacher, a curator of the show at the Philip M. Meyers Jr. Memorial Gallery within the university, where Mr. Schumacher is an assistant professor of design. They stand on their own as viable and legitimate and beautiful works of visual art. Mr. Hollerbachs response to his disease was a turn toward playfulness perhaps a reflection of a relentless optimism that had helped him survive Nazi labor camps, where he was confined as a teenager during World War II. His work continues to reflect a bend toward social justice and his fascination with everyday life through crowded New York street scenes, including the citys homeless. On a Sunday afternoon in his studio, Mr. Hollerbach held a plastic cup up to within an inch of his face. Thats blue isnt it? he asked himself. Yes it was, and he would go on to create water in a crowded beach scene. It was a back and forth process as he placed the canvas on a flat table to apply the acrylic paint so it wouldnt run. I cant really see what I am doing, he admitted, adding, I will look at it later. He placed the canvas back on the easel and took a long squint at it. Mr. Hollerbach didnt seem overly impressed. But thats the freedom of it, he said, as he continued painting. Warhol was a myth when he was alive, and hes even more of a myth now, said Donna De Salvo, deputy director and senior curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. To humanize Warhol and get people to actually look at what he made is not as easy as it might sound. Now Ms. De Salvo is tackling that challenge in Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again, the first Warhol retrospective organized by a United States museum since 1989, opening on Nov. 12. An earlier show, at the Museum of Modern Art, came two years after Warhols death, at 58, and focused on his most famous Pop images of celebrities and disaster scenes from the 1960s. Mr. Louiss second autobiographical novel, History of Violence, which is being released in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on Tuesday, goes further in its condemnation of institutional discrimination. It begins not long after Mr. Louiss arrival in Paris in 2012 to study social sciences at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure. After a convivial Christmas Eve spent with friends Mr. Louis wandered home to his Paris apartment in the early hours of the morning. On the way back Mr. Louis was sweet-talked by a young man of Algerian descent whom he decided to invite up to his apartment. In the book Mr. Louis describes how for the next few hours he suffered all manner of human violence, including rape, a gun held to his head and near strangulation, before finally managing to flee his assailant. Mr. Louis decided to write History of Violence after the experience of lodging a complaint with the French police concerning his rape and near murder. I still have the report that was printed out for me to sign, he said. I didnt recognize anything of what Id said in it because the police sifts what it thinks is important and what isnt. Mr. Louis objected to what he called the obsessive racism of the police, which, he felt, made his assailants ethnic identity a unique focal point of the inquiry. There was also a clash of sexuality he said: The concept of gay cruising was utterly foreign to the heterosexual policeman who interviewed me. He thought that what had happened to me was partly my fault for inviting a stranger into my apartment at night. Despite the trauma Mr. Louis still suffers from the attack, he does not want his alleged assailant, who is currently on parole awaiting trial, to go to prison. He would prefer some form of rehabilitation and subsequent reinsertion in society. I grew up in a milieu where I learned about what prison does, he said. My cousin went to prison and my grandfather. I know that prison doesnt solve any problems. It does the opposite by making people more violent than they already are. So when the police told him that it was likely his assailant would be incarcerated for 10 or 15 years he tried unsuccessfully to withdraw his complaint. The police told me once a crime has been committed it belongs to the state, he said. Whats that mean when your story doesnt belong to you anymore but belongs to the state? In History of Violence, Mr. Louis noted that it was his close friends, the French writers Geoffroy de Lagasnerie and Mr. Eribon, who had persuaded him to lodge a complaint hours after the attack. Mr. Eribon, 64, is the author of Returning to Reims, a memoir about his own working-class upbringing and coming out as a gay man, which helped lead Mr. Louis to become a writer. While sympathizing with Mr. Louis about the need for less draconian French prison sentences, Mr. Eribon continues to believe that incarceration in a case like this is the only option. I think there has to be some sort of solidarity with other gays who could otherwise just as easily be targets for the same man, Mr. Eribon said in a recent telephone interview. HA NOI Fees for about 88 healthcare services will be adjusted on July 15 as per a newly-issued circular, the Ministry of Health said. The adjustment will be applied to examination, bed, and technical service fees such as X-ray, MRI, CT scanner, and PET CT fees at all hospitals and clinics. Under the circular, examination fees will drop by 15 to 20 per cent, or about VN4,800 to 5,900 (US$0.21 to 0.26), at hospitals and clinics nationwide. Bed fees will be reduced by 2 to 10 per cent, depending on hospital class. However, beds for patients who in intensive care departments or those undergoing organ transplant or stem cell transplant procedures will increase slightly to VN687,100 (US$30) from VN677,100 (US$29.60) to per day. Other services will see a sharp reduction in fees, such as amygdala cutting whose rates will fall to VN2 million (US$87) from VN3.6 million (US$157). The circular also limited the fixed number of patients in each examination room to 65 per day. Should any clinic or hospital exceed that number, a medical insurance agency will be required to pay only 50 per cent of examination fees. Furthermore, if the situation lasts for three consecutive months, the examination fees for the patients in excess of the limit will not be paid. VNS Over the last couple of weeks, public outcry over the separation of children from their parents at the United States-Mexico border has intensified, sparking conversations about the toll of migration on minors. These books, including a novel in which a mother and son are divided when she is placed in a detention center, explore this issue. [ Click here to read our roundup of books on the immigration policy debate. ] Image TELL ME HOW IT ENDS An Essay in Forty Questions By Valeria Luiselli 128 pp. Coffee House Press. (2017) This slim book is organized around the 40 questions unaccompanied child migrants are made to complete when they arrive in the United States; Luiselli worked as a volunteer interpreter at a federal immigration court in New York City in 2015, translating her interviews with the children from Spanish to English. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end, Luiselli writes. According to our reviewer, Luisellis interrogation of our immigration system, which connects the current situation of immigrant children with the United States foreign intervention and immigration policies in the 1980s and 1990s, does not offer easy answers. If there is anything that Luiselli wants to dismantle, he writes, its our veneer of understanding. Mr. Diaz declined to comment on the universitys decision. Last month, in a statement provided through his literary agent, Nicole Aragi, Mr. Diaz said he took responsibility for his past behavior. I am listening to and learning from womens stories in this essential and overdue cultural movement, he said. We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries. M.I.T.s conclusion of its internal inquiry comes on the heels of a similar decision by the Boston Review, which recently announced that Mr. Diaz would remain in his position as the magazines fiction editor. During his 15-year tenure as fiction editor, we have never received any complaints about Junots conduct, either from our staff or from writers, editors Deborah Chasman and Joshua Cohen wrote in a letter announcing the outcome. Their statement prompted an outcry on social media. The board of directors for VIDA, a nonprofit feminist organization that advocates for women in the literary arts, published a letter denouncing the reviews decision, which received hundreds of signatures. The Boston Reviews three poetry editors, Timothy Donnelly, B.K. Fischer and Stefania Heim, quit in protest. It was painful to leave but we couldnt stay where we felt deprived of a vote and a voice, especially on such an important issue, the editors said in a joint statement to The Times. We believe that editors can make a significant difference by creating safer and more equitable spaces in the literary world. We think gatekeepers in publishing have a responsibility to their readers and their writers to set a precedent of accountability and real transparency so that women and especially women of color can be heard. Of all the messy #MeToo controversies that have upended the publishing industry, including allegations against best-selling authors like Sherman Alexie and James Dashner, the debate about Mr. Diaz has become perhaps the most contentious and divisive within the literary world. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, Mr. Diaz has been celebrated as a daring and stylish writer who broke boundaries with his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. He received a MacArthur genius grant in 2012. In January 2017, he was one of five prominent novelists invited to meet with President Barack Obama to discuss literature, politics and media over lunch. The controversy over his treatment of women erupted this spring, after he published an essay in The New Yorker detailing how he had been raped as a child, in which he described how the ensuing shame and trauma led him to have troubled relationships with women. The essay was widely praised as a brave and honest account of his painful past, but others saw Mr. Diazs account as an effort to pre-empt allegations that he had mistreated women. In his new book, he set himself the challenge of writing political poems in the guise of love poems. Each one is distinct: Some are sermons, some are swoons. They are acrid with tear gas, and they unravel with desire. In some poems, the assassin of the title is that most prolific killer of all, time itself. Others address Donald Trump directly Mister Trumpet, Humpty-Dumpty, failed landlord with a people of color/Complex. Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times Hayes revisits lifelong obsessions: the cage of masculinity, the gulf between fathers and sons (Christianity is a religion built around a father/Who does not rescue his son. It is the story/of a son whose father is a ghost). There are paeans to the beauty of Jimi Hendrix and Prince. One sonnet addresses Seven of the ten things I love in the face/of James Baldwin. But his inquiry also deepens and turns more daring. One narrator addresses the president: Trumpet I cant speak for you but men like me/Who have never made love to a man will always be/Somewhere in the folds of our longing ashamed of it. Theres a saying attributed to Flannery OConnor, that to be a painter, you must first love the smell of paint. Hayes loves language; he loves the round vowel and crisp consonant. He loves to stuff a line full of sound (the lunk, the chump, the hunk of plunder), to write for the ear as well as the eye. His words call to be read aloud, to be tasted. The collection may be, as one sonnet puts it, a record of my raptures, but its also a chronicle of ambivalence, attuned always to the scent of rot at the heart/Of love-making. And nothing so invites ambivalence for this poet as America: It is not enough/To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed. The sonnet has long been a home for Hayes; its the form he has returned to most often. As a person raised by a soldier and a prison guard it would make sense that I would like boxes and structure a little too much, he has said, half-jokingly. His highly contained poems invariably comment on the idea of containment. From the new book: I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame. I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone. Theres a direct line between the sonnet and the body in Hayess work. Just as the sonnet, derived from the Italian sonetto for little song, can contain, in its courtly way, immensities of experience and feeling so does the body, until the point of breaking. These poems play with different registers, but they return to lamentation, to annihilating grief for all the black people Im tired of losing, one narrator says. All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson,/Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago,/Baltimore. THE PERFECT WEAPON War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age By David E. Sanger 357 pp. Crown. $28. New technologies of destruction have appeared throughout history, from the trireme and gunpowder in past centuries to biological and nuclear weapons in more modern times. Each technology goes through a cycle of development and weaponization, followed only later by the formulation of doctrine and occasionally by efforts to control the weapons use. The newest technological means of mayhem are cyber, meaning anything involving the electronic transmission of ones and zeros. The development of cyber capabilities has been rapid and is continuing; doctrine is largely yet to be written; and ideas about control are only beginning to emerge. David E. Sangers The Perfect Weapon is an encyclopedic account of policy-relevant happenings in the cyberworld. Sanger, a national security correspondent for The New York Times, stays firmly grounded in real events, including communication systems getting hacked and servers being disabled. He avoids the tendency, all too common in futuristic discussions of cyber issues, to spin out elaborate and scary hypothetical scenarios. The book flows from reporting for The Times by Sanger and his colleagues, who have had access, and volunteer informants, that lesser publications rarely enjoy. The text frequently shifts to the first-person singular, along with excerpts from interviews Sanger has had with officials up to and including the president of the United States. The principal focus of the book is cyberwarfare the use of techniques to sabotage the electronic or physical assets of an adversary but its scope extends as well to other controversies that flow from advances in information technology. Sanger touches on privacy issues related to the collection of signals intelligence a business that has been around since before Franklin Roosevelts secretary of war, Henry Stimson, talked about gentlemen not reading each others mail. He also addresses social media and the problems of misuse that have bedeviled Facebook, including usage by foreign governments for political purposes. These other topics are to some extent a digression from the main topic of cyberwarfare. Intelligence collection and electronic sabotage are different phenomena, which in the United States involve very different legal principles and policy procedures. But Sanger takes note of such differences, and the books inclusiveness makes it useful as a one-stop reference for citizens who want to think intelligently about all issues of public policy having a cyber dimension. The combining of that dimension with other security topics, like nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, is a strength of the book. In an earlier work, Confront and Conceal, Sanger told the story of the electronic sabotage of Irans nuclear program by means of a computer worm known as Stuxnet. A point of interest in his new book is what he has to say about any similar efforts against North Korea, as the Trump administration intensifies attempts to take advanced weapons out of the North Koreans hands. Sanger ponders whether the serial failures of North Korean ballistic missile tests in 2016 reflected a Stuxnet-like attack on that program. He strongly suggests that there was such an effort but is unable to offer hard evidence, only a few possible hints in official comments. Looking beyond missiles, Sanger notes that North Koreas backwardness generally makes it an unpromising target for cyberwarfare. In the words of a senior official of the United States Cyber Command, How do you turn out the lights in a country that doesnt have enough power to turn them on? THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS By Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar 360 pp. Touchstone. $27. The ancient, sometimes mystical connection between maps, people and knowledge is central to Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadars The Map of Salt and Stars, a double tale of voyage and exile that moves between contemporary war-torn Syria and the caravansaries and khans of its lost past. Maps are mentioned on almost every page: not just making them but the decisions that making them involves, what lands they cover and what lands they leave out. In present-day Manhattan, the immigrant family of a young woman named Nour, reeling from the death of its patriarch, decides to relocate to their maternal home city of Homs, a refreshing reversal of the familiar tale of leaving an unstable country and heading to America. Despite their initial doubts and fears, Nour and her sisters accompany their mapmaking mother back to her hot and rainless country, where her tears finally stop falling. Image Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar Credit... Neha Gautam Nours story of displacement is interwoven with the fantastical, speculative tale of another young woman, Rawiya, who runs away from her Syrian village centuries earlier. Seeking out a legendary mapmaker, Al-Idrisi, she joins him as his apprentice on a long voyage. The two stories unfold gracefully, mirroring and overlapping. Both Nour and Rawiya cut their hair, finding freedom and protection in their disguise as boys. Although more could have been made of gender transgressions within an Islamic context, Joukhadar is excellent at interweaving the short sections of her storytelling, always holding taut the narrative thread. Amazon began marketing a facial recognition system, called Rekognition, to law enforcement agencies as a means of identifying suspects shortly after the tool was introduced in 2016. The system which analyzes images and video, and compares them with databases of photographs to pick out individuals has been used by the Police Department in Orlando, Fla., and the Sheriffs Department in Washington County, Ore. But recently, Amazon came under criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of more than two dozen civil rights organizations for selling the technology to police authorities. The A.C.L.U.s argument: The police could use such systems not just to track people committing crimes but also to identify citizens who are innocent, such as protesters. Now, some Amazon shareholders are joining those appeals. In a letter addressed to the companys chief executive, Jeff Bezos, a group of investors explained why they want a halt to Rekognition sales to the police: Such government surveillance infrastructure technology may not only pose a privacy threat to customers and other stakeholders across the country, but may also raise substantial risks for our company, negatively impacting our companys stock valuation and increasing financial risk for shareholders. In addition to our concerns for U.S. consumers who may be put in harms way with law enforcements use of Rekognition, we are also concerned sales may be expanded to foreign governments, including authoritarian regimes. Amazon had no immediate comment on the letter. In a blog post published shortly after the initial call by the A.C.L.U. to ban the sale of Rekognition to the police, Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at Amazon Web Services, wrote: We believe it is the wrong approach to impose a ban on promising new technologies because they might be used by bad actors for nefarious purposes in the future. The world would be a very different place if we had restricted people from buying computers because it was possible to use that computer to do harm. The same can be said of thousands of technologies upon which we all rely each day. Through responsible use, the benefits have far outweighed the risks. Tech companies recently have come under scrutiny for their work with the government. In April, Google employees protested the companys work on a Pentagon project that used image recognition to improve military drone operations. They said the tech giant should not be in the business of war. In response, Google said it would not renew the contract for that particular piece of work, known as Project Maven, and has since created a set of principles to guide its artificial intelligence projects. The new guidelines prohibit work that could cause injury or violate human rights but do not rule out all forms of defense work. Microsoft has come under scrutiny for its involvement with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is itself part of broad criticism this week about the governments separating families at the United States borders. The software giant drew criticism for temporarily deleting a January blog post that described how the company was proud to support work with ICE. The agency was using Microsofts Azure cloud services to utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification. Good Tuesday. Want this in your inbox every morning? Sign up here. How inclusion riders could jump from Hollywood to finance Women remain rare in the upper echelons of financial firms. So the biggest pension funds and university endowments the financial equivalent of A-list movie actors should consider imitating Hollywoods inclusion riders, Andrew argues in his latest column. That means only backing investment firms that are working to address the diversity gap: Virtually every major investment firm seeks money from the big pension funds and college endowments. If those big pools of money demanded, as part of their investment, specific hiring and development requirements, the movement could create a new generation of genuinely diverse investors. Something else from the column: Andrew also reports that Goldman Sachs is creating a $500 million fund to back female-led investment firms. One important detail about the new initiative: its focus remains on the bottom line. While it was not clear whether the operations in question were at its assembly plant in Fremont, Calif., its battery plant near Reno, Nev., or elsewhere, this new disruption comes as Tesla is racing to streamline operations on the assembly line that produces the Model 3. Mr. Musk is counting on the midsize Model 3 to drive revenue higher, stabilize Teslas finances and enable the company to begin generating profits. He has said that Tesla will make money in the second half of the year if it is able to produce 5,000 or more Model 3s a week, a level that he predicted would be reached by the end of the month. At the companys shareholder meeting this month, Mr. Musk said the company had increased its output to about 3,500 Model 3s a week, up from around 2,000 a week in early May. Tesla seemingly has no shortage of customers ready to buy the car. It took $1,000 deposits from nearly 400,000 people even before it began making the Model 3 last summer. A large portion of those customers, however, were expecting to buy a basic version that is priced at $35,000 but has not yet gone into production. For now, the company is making versions that sell for $50,000 and more. What versions they are producing are almost as important as how many they are producing a week, said Rebecca Lindland, a senior analyst at Kelley Blue Book, an automotive research firm. Theyve been talking about a mainstream car that anybody can afford but what theyre making are still luxury cars that most buyers cant afford. The merchandise has never been more plentiful or easier to find. Tote bags that say United from H&M. T-shirts emblazoned with I Am Proud from Levi Strauss & Co. An inflatable, rainbow-colored whale from Target a Pride Narwhal. Pride month has drawn a wide range of big-name retailers offering thematic merchandise timed to the celebration of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. But some retailers, including H&M, the European fast fashion retailer Primark, Target and Levi Strauss, manufacture their merchandise in countries where it is either illegal to be gay or where persecution is commonplace. Primark, which has hundreds of stores across Europe and the United States, has seen a backlash from some L.G.B.T.Q. advocates. It is selling pride-themed items like rainbow fanny packs and sequined caps. SAN FRANCISCO On bike and on foot, people hit the hilly paths of the Presidio, the national park on a former Army base in San Francisco, many of them heading toward the northwest corner of the park overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Tour buses pull up at a visitors plaza here, disgorging passengers who gawk at the view while buying souvenirs and snacks. But just inland, its a decidedly quieter scene. The only sound is the song of sparrows as wind ripples long grasses on what was once a parade ground. Here at Fort Winfield Scott, clay-roof Mission Revival buildings dating to the early 20th century once barracks for soldiers who operated artillery defense of the Pacific coastline stand largely empty. HCM CITY HCM City Party Committee Secretary Nguyen Thien Nhan yesterday asked city authorities to offer more financial assistance and new policies for the press for continued communication, especially to promote National Assembly Resolution No. 54 to pilot a special mechanism and policy for the development of HCM City. At a forum on journalism and publishing to mark the 93rd Viet Nam Revolutionary Press Day, Nhan said the press including print newspapers, television channels, radio stations, and online news sites, should suggest solutions, not just offer criticism, for the citys development. Journalists should observe, analyse, and seek solutions to the citys shortcomings from people, experts and scientists, he said. The press should also continue strengthen the fight against bureaucracy, corruption, waste, and social evils, he added. They should commend outstanding individuals who do good things to inspire the public, he added. The city plans to set up a press centre and meet journalists periodically to exchange information about the citys issues, Nhan said. Than Thi Thu of the citys Party Committee said the press should encourage innovation and creativity among all the citys residents. The citys agencies should also improve awareness about the role of the press and provide information for sufficient and timely communication for residents to have a better understanding and support for Party resolutions and National Assembly Resolution No 54. The head of the city Department of Information and Communication, Duong Anh uc, said the press has an important role in the implementation of Party resolutions and National Assembly resolution No 54. The forum was held to discuss solutions on how best to achieve communication about achievements and policies of the country and the city. Many publishers who attended the forum said that policies for the publishing sector should be issued to help them improve their services. Science conference On the same day, the city Department of Science and Technology organised a scientific conference Journalism for Science and Technology Development and Community Service. The departments representative said that communication about science and technology had contributed to the citys development. Many science and technology programmes, including a ecosystem for startup, international co-operation and markets, have been communicated well within the community. Information is also needed about assistance for small and medium-sized enterprises to improve competitiveness. Journalist Bui Viet Ha of Kham Pha (Discovery) magazine said the Department of Science and Technology plans to carry out a tour for the press throughout the city about science and technology used in enterprises and organisations as well as startups. Nguyen Khac Thanh, the departments deputy head, said the department will set up a network between managers, researchers, enterprises and journalists to strengthen communication about science and technology. VNS Wall Streets focus returned on Tuesday to a fast escalating trade war and the damage it could do to business confidence and economic growth. Global stock benchmarks and commodity prices fell. The trigger for the drop was the statement by President Trump on Monday that his administration was prepared to impose tariffs on a further $200 billion of Chinese goods, and that there could be even more penalties if Beijing fought back. The United States and China have already announced plans for tit-for-tat tariffs on $50 billion worth of imports each. With the latest threat from Mr. Trump, the White House is warning that it could impose trade restrictions on as much as $450 billion of imports from China, a figure that is nearly equivalent to the total value of goods that China sold to the United States last year. On Tuesday, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Geng Shuang, said the United States was abandoning all the consensus that has been achieved, changing its mind constantly. NASHVILLE, Tenn. A team of political activists huddled at a Hardees one rainy Saturday, wolfing down a breakfast of biscuits and gravy. Then they descended on Antioch, a quiet Nashville suburb, armed with iPads full of voter data and a fiery script. The group, the local chapter for Americans for Prosperity, which is financed by the oil billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch to advance conservative causes , fanned out and began strategically knocking on doors. Their targets: voters most likely to oppose a local plan to build light-rail trains, a traffic-easing tunnel and new bus routes. Do you agree that raising the sales tax to the highest rate in the nation must be stopped? Samuel Nienow, one of the organizers, asked a startled man who answered the door at his ranch-style home in March. Can we count on you to vote no on the transit plan? In cities and counties across the country including Little Rock, Ark.; Phoenix, Ariz.; southeast Michigan; central Utah; and here in Tennessee the Koch brothers are fueling a fight against public transit, an offshoot of their longstanding national crusade for lower taxes and smaller government. A gleaming, glassed-in kitchen anchors the dining room at Leonelli Taberna, the first of three culinary ventures run by the chef, Jonathan Benno, in the newly renovated Evelyn hotel. A sweep of bar and nicely set tables in a bright room with brown accents are ready for the chefs take on Italian food. Hes offering flatbreads with spreads, croquettes, antipasti, bruschettas and assorted salumi to start. Pastas, which Mr. Benno said would be modestly sized, include his lasagna, which was on the menu when he was at Lincoln Ristorante, his previous job. The same goes for his eggplant parmigiana, presented as a side dish. Among the main courses are rotisserie chicken, pork chops and a burger, and also a whole black sea bass for two and a Florentine T-bone, also for two. In a couple of weeks, the bakery hes running, Leonelli Focacceria e Pasticceria, will open in the front of the hotel, with a street entrance. And in the fall, Benno, a fine-dining Mediterranean restaurant behind the Taberna, will make its debut. (Monday) Evelyn Hotel, 7 East 27th Street (Fifth Avenue), 212-451- 9495 , leonellirestaurants.com. Opening Areppas Food Carts The Venezuelan cafe near Sutton Place specializing in that countrys corn cakes, called arepas, has sprouted three food carts. Theyre named for the restaurant at 954 Third Avenue (57th Street), which spells the specialty with a double p. The carts offer four kinds of arepas, with meat or vegetable fillings. Celestino Diaz, one of the owners, donates a portion of each sale to help feed hungry children in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America. 54th Street and Broadway, 26th Street and Fifth Avenue, 79th Street and Central Park West, areppas.com. Castell The rooftop terrace on the 21st floor of the new AC Hotel is opening as this bar and lounge with a Spanish accent. The hotel's ground floor restaurant, Boqueria, also evokes Spain. At Castell, the featured cocktails are martinis. Other drinks are grouped according to style, like shaken or stirred. On the culinary side are toasts, snacks like crispy sea-salt potatoes, salads and larger dishes, including chicken skewers and a flatiron steak. (Wednesday) 260 West 40th Street (Eighth Avenue), 929-284-3741, castellnyc.com. Black Square Are chefs and restaurateurs running out of ways to torture pizza? This pizzeria offers several topping options, including the standard tomato-and-mozzarella Margherita, and a choice of shapes square (whole or by the quarter) or round. It also serves a black pizza, its crust colored with cuttlefish ink. The partners behind this spot, which is decorated in black-and-white, are Johnny Wooh and Chris Reda, who developed Gansevoort Market, and Peter Litschi, who was at Robertas. There is outdoor seating and a full bar. The menu also includes salads and a toss of crispy artichokes and sunchokes. 44 Ninth Avenue (14th Street), no phone, blacksquarepizza.com. Journalists get curious and they start asking questions. One day James Estrin decided that he wanted to know what goes on behind the kitchen door of a fancy restaurant , the sort of place where people dress up for the meal and the pork chop costs $55. Mr. Estrin has been a staff photographer for The New York Times since 1992, and told me he wanted to document the work that goes into delivering that sort of experience. Not so much the food, he said. I wanted to see the people and the culture they share, backstage. I sent him to Craft, which the chef Tom Colicchio opened in 2001, on East 19th Street in Manhattan. Craft is by no means a theatrical restaurant. There is no open kitchen to draw a guests attention, and Mr. Colicchio does not generally stride the dining room accepting accolades and air-kissing models, bankers and those who gather around them. In fact, he is often not in the restaurant at all. The food his cooks make is simple and simply served, with a minimum of narrative fuss. The staff limits its attentions to the needs and wants of its customers. Among them, there is no preening. That takes a lot of work. Simplicity in a restaurant, Mr. Colicchio has written, does not mean simplistic. Quite the opposite. Indeed, every aspect of a meal at Craft reflects a near-fetishistic desire for perfection, from the quality of a stock or a sliced tomato to the spotless gleam of a wineglass that has been polished three times. The restaurants 84 employees share this desire individually and as a team. They work as an orchestra or a military platoon does, with each member dependent on the other for success: 22 hours a day, seven days a week. Mr. Estrin spent six days at Craft, at various hours of the day and night, photographing its employees at work. What surprised him about the experience, he said, was the sheer physicality of the labor, and the precision of it. Also, the camaraderie. It was amazing to me, he said, the degree to which each role in the restaurant depends on someone else doing a job perfectly, and how if someone doesnt, everything falls apart. This years list of the Worlds 50 Best Restaurants was revealed in Bilbao, Spain, on Tuesday, and the No. 1 spot went to the chef Massimo Botturas Osteria Francescana, in Modena, Italy. Last year, the top honor was awarded to Eleven Madison Park in New York, owned by the chef, Daniel Humm, and his business partner, Will Guidara. The restaurant received the fourth place spot this year. Regardless of where we stand on the list, we feel incredibly honored and humbled to be part of this community of chefs, Mr. Humm and Mr. Guidara said in a statement. El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain, which was in the top spot several years ago, retained its second-place ranking from last year. Mirazur, in Menton, France, came in third. Work force providers were supposed to begin being reimbursed by the city on the quality of the jobs the providers connect people with, rather than being paid by the number of placements. That effort has also been delayed, because the city is just now implementing a system that can qualitatively measure data across its work force programs. James Patchett, the president of the citys Economic Development Corporation, insisted that the jobs the city is creating will help low-income and underskilled New Yorkers. Mr. Patchett cited an investment in the City University of New York to double the number of computer science faculty. Active negotiations are ongoing as part of a $30 million plan to make New York the center of the cybersecurity industry, which will help businesses locate here and will include boot camp-style training for potential employees. And the City Council is reviewing a plan to create a technology training center at Union Square with space for tech companies to grow and to access talent that will be trained in the same building. Its a very aggressive plan and we are absolutely on track, Mr. Patchett said in an interview. He also pointed to developments at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where he and other city officials gathered last month to herald the renovation of half a million square feet of space. Technology and manufacturing firms are among those expected to fill the raw white space and to create 1,000 jobs paying $50,000 or more. Over the last year, 130 jobs such as food manufacturer, electronics technician and warehouse manager have been created because of city investments at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, 80 of which were filled through the on-site Workforce1 Career Center. The expansion created 100 jobs, positions that align with the terminals starting median wage of $42,000, according to a city analysis of tenants. Summonses for unlawful possession of marijuana, a noncriminal violation, can come with fines up to $100, though city officials said the fine amounts were ultimately up to judges and could change depending on someones criminal history. Defense lawyers say the real impetus for marijuana enforcement is often not an arrest or summons itself, but rather the opportunity for police officers to stop and search people and check for open warrants in other cases. They said the fact that the new policy preserves officers authority to search people they stop for smoking marijuana suggests that the Police Department believes smokers merit closer scrutiny than people, for example, who are caught drinking in public something they say there is little evidence to support. Beyond the arrests based on someones criminal history, people caught smoking in public would also be arrested if they did not have identification or were smoking in a way that created an immediate threat to public safety, said Rodney Harrison, the Police Departments chief of patrol. He said, for example, that officers would be given discretion to arrest people who are smoking around children in a park or smoking while operating heavy machinery. To protect against unsafe driving, people caught smoking in the drivers seat of a car would also be arrested. Chief Harrison said that officers could make a case for arresting someone in a place that has been the subject of repeated public complaints about marijuana smoke. He said every arrest has to be approved by a precinct supervisor. He said the police had to arrest people caught smoking while on parole or probation because it represented a violation of the terms of their release. The number of people held in city jails on state parole violations has increased in recent years, a trend that runs counter to the citys goal of closing Rikers Island. The district attorneys in Manhattan and Brooklyn both said recently that they planned to stop prosecuting many marijuana cases, creating the potential for a patchwork of different policies across the citys five boroughs. The citys new policy was intended to create a more consistent strategy. And the Brooklyn district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, who appeared alongside the mayor at Tuesdays news conference, voiced support for the exceptions in the citys new policy. But the Manhattan district attorney, Mr. Vance, said in an interview that while the new policy was a step forward, continuing to arrest people on the basis of their criminal records stands in contrast with the overarching goal of increasing fairness at the same time as maintaining public safety. The rotavirus and HPV vaccines were contentious subjects and might never have reached the market without Dr. Mahmouds determination, said Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, an executive vice president at Merck & Co., and former head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She joined Merck after Dr. Mahmoud retired but described him as a lifelong mentor. Dr. Mahmoud championed those vaccines because he recognized their potential to save lives, she said. Globally, cervical cancer and rotavirus infections kill hundreds of thousands of women and children every year. The problem with a rotavirus vaccine was that another company had already developed one but then had to take it off the market because it was found to increase the risk of bowel obstruction in infants. Opponents argued that it would take a large study and a huge investment of time and money to test Mercks candidate vaccine, and then to overcome public fears. Everyone wanted to kill it, Dr. Gerberding said. Adel said, Not only are we going to do it, but were going to make our study even larger to prove it works and is safe. Dr. Mahmoud took a similar approach to the HPV vaccine, which also had its detractors. Some doubted that it would work. Others thought parents would reject it, fearing that vaccinating young girls would somehow encourage them to start having sex. That fear was based on the viruss being sexually transmitted and the view that the vaccine was most effective if given before girls become sexually active. Frances Walker-Slocum, who overcame childhood burns that left her arm impaired to become a pioneering classical pianist and the first black female tenured professor at Oberlin College and Conservatory, died on June 9 in Oberlin, Ohio. She was 94. Her death was announced by Oberlin, where she had taught from 1976 until she retired in 1991 and was named a professor emerita. Miss Walkers playing has sweep and impetuosity, John Briggs wrote in The New York Times in a review of her debut concert at Carnegie Recital Hall in Manhattan in 1959, which included works by Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Chopin. She was known professionally as Frances Walker at the time. In a week when down has seemed up and up appears to be down, a federal-court decision in Kansas protecting the right to vote has arrived as a cool and bracing tonic. Judge Julie A. Robinson, an appointee of President George H. W. Bush, didnt do anything fancy in the 188-page opinion she issued on Monday. She just methodically analyzed the evidence that the Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach, submitted in a March trial to show that a substantial number of noncitizens have tried to vote or voted in Kansas. Judge Robinson presided over the trial in a case brought by the A.C.L.U. Mr. Kobach was defending a 2013 Kansas law that required people to prove their citizenship with a document like a birth certificate or a passport when they register to vote. After the 2013 law went into effect, more than 31,000 people, about one in seven, were barred from registering because they didnt produce the accepted forms of proof of citizenship. Mr. Kobachs job at the trial was to show that the threat of noncitizen voting was so significant that the Kansas law was necessary to protect the integrity of the states elections. His experts estimated the number of registered noncitizens to be in the thousands and opined that they represented a widespread problem. Judge Robinson found that at most 39 noncitizens successfully registered to vote between 1999 and 2013, when the new law went into effect. While there is evidence of a small number of noncitizen registrations in Kansas, it is largely explained by administrative error, confusion or mistake, Judge Robinson concluded, adding that Mr. Kobach insists that these numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. This trial was his opportunity to produce credible evidence of that iceberg, but he failed to do so. OTTAWA Canada is set to become the first G7 country to legalise cannabis after lawmakers on Monday passed a bill that would allow free consumption of the mind-altering drug. Passed by 205 votes to 82 in the House of Commons, the legislation must still pass the Senate which could delay, but not block it and receive royal assent by the governor general before becoming law, likely by September. Legalising weed was a 2015 campaign promise of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has acknowledged smoking a joint with friends "five or six times" including since being elected as an MP. The Liberal governments pointman on the pot file, Bill Blair, said at the weekend it was "probably looking at a date of implementation somewhere toward the beginning of September, perhaps mid-September." Uruguay approved the recreational usage of marijuana five years ago and nine US states and the capital Washington have done so too, but Canada will be the first G7 country to take the step. An initial July 1 target was set for ending the pot prohibition that dates back to 1923, although it was effectively legalised for medical use nearly two decades ago. Despite setbacks, Trudeau has insisted his government would move to legalise the production, sale and consumption of the psychoactive drug before facing the electorate again in 2019. Last week, the government rejected 13 out of 46 amendments to the bill proposed by the Senate after several months of study, with Trudeaus health minister rising to defend home cultivation of cannabis and branded pot swag. "Canadians are allowed to make beer at home, or wine," Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor said at the time. "It is already possible for Canadians to grow cannabis for medical purposes and we absolutely believe the legislation should be consistent when it comes to recreational cannabis." The government, she said, would follow its expert panels recommendation to allow at-home cultivation of up to four pot plants for personal use. As for the proposed advertising restrictions, she said the bill already contains limits such as a requirement for plain packaging. Cannabis trendsetter? Once the law is enacted, Canadians over the age of 18 (19 in some regions) will be able to buy a gram of pot for about Can$10 or less, from a patchwork of authorised private and public retail stores or by mail order, with each province and territory responsible for setting up distribution. Personal possession will be limited to 30 grammes. Statistics Canada has estimated that the market will be worth Can$5.7 billion (US$4.5 billion), based on last years consumption data. Finance Minister Bill Morneau estimated the cannabis tax haul will be about Can$400 million, but Ottawa has agreed to retain only 25 per cent of these monies, with the rest going into provincial government coffers. In an interview with AFP last month, Trudeau said the world was closely watching Canadas pot plans and predicted other countries might follow suit. "There is a lot of interest from our allies in what were doing," he said. "They recognize that Canada is being daring... and recognise that the current regime (of prohibition) does not work, that its not preventing young people from having easy access to cannabis." The prime minister argued that creating a regulated market would take the drug out of the hands of crime groups and "better protect communities and children." Yet he added the allies he spoke with ahead of a recent G7 summit in Quebec "are interested in seeing how things go... before they try it," without specifying which nations. AFP But thats not even close to all there is. The states also argue that if the individual mandate is unconstitutional, the rest of the A.C.A. must fall, too. They audaciously claim that the mandate is too central to the act for the rest of it including provisions as disparate as requiring restaurant owners to post calorie counts and expanding drug coverage under Medicare to operate without it. The Justice Departments response may be even more audacious. In a court filing, the department refused to defend the statute a rarity and expressed its support for a ruling in the states favor. Most shockingly, the Justice Department accepted part of the states argument that other key parts of the A.C.A. must fall with the mandate. Specifically, the department argues that two key insurance reforms the requirements that insurers must accept everyone regardless of health condition at relatively equal rates must go down with the ship. The Justice Departments argument is based on an established legal principle called severability, under which courts ask whether if one provision of a statute is struck down, the rest should fall with it. But in this case, the Justice Department gets that principle exactly backward. An unbroken line of Supreme Court cases makes clear that the touchstone of severability is congressional intent. In a decision handed down by the Supreme Court just months ago, Justice Samuel Alito explained quoting a long-established precedent for severability that for a court to conclude that other provisions of a statute must fall, it must be clear that Congress would not have enacted those provisions which are within its power, independently of those that are to be struck down. In other words, what would Congress have done had it known a provision of the statute would be eliminated? These guessing-game questions about congressional intent are irrelevant in this context because it was Congress, not a court, that did the eliminating. Moreover, in doing so, Congress expressly left the rest of the statute in place including the insurance protections the Justice Department now says, in the name of congressional intent, must fall. We dont have to ask what Congress intended because we can see what Congress did. Game over. On Monday, the Supreme Court announced it would not stop South Dakota from killing a man who may have been sentenced to death because he is gay. Some of the jurors who imposed the death penalty on Charles Rhines, who was convicted of murder, have said they thought the alternative a life sentence served in a mens prison was something he would enjoy as a gay man. During deliberations, the jury had often discussed the fact that Mr. Rhines was gay and there was a lot of disgust about it, one juror recalled in an interview, according to the court petition. Another said that jurors knew he was gay and thought that he shouldnt be able to spend his life with men in prison. A third recounted hearing that if the jury did not sentence Mr. Rhines to death, if hes gay, wed be sending him where he wants to go. The justices rejected Mr. Rhiness plea to hear his bias claim, allowing his death sentence to stand despite disturbing evidence that it may have been the result of anti-L.G.B.T. animus. As usual, the court gave no explanation for its decision not to review the case. But its silence sent a deeply troubling message about the value placed on the lives of L.G.B.T. people. No one is safe. Just this week we learned of Jose Luis Garcia, a grandfather and authorized resident since the 1980s, who was handcuffed and taken by federal immigration officers while he watered his lawn in front of his home in Southern California. We also learned of Elsa Johana Ortiz Enriquez of Guatemala, who traveled through Mexico and crossed the border into the United States with her 8-year-old son, Anthony, only to be arrested and then separated in the most horrifying of ways: After pleading guilty to unlawful entry, Ms. Ortiz was put on a plane back to Guatemala while her son was transferred to a shelter for migrant children. If you live in a city like Los Angeles, the odds are that the victims of these policies are your neighbors and co-workers, the classmates of your children and the families who worship with you. You cannot pretend this is not happening here, now, and to people you know. Some people in the Trump administration have defended the zero-tolerance policy which has separated some 2,000 children from their parents by pointing to Scripture and blaming their political opponents. Mr. Trump himself is worse yet openly using the childrens suffering as a bargaining chip to get funding to build his wall. The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda, he tweeted, before demanding that they agree to an immigration bill that pays for the wall. He capped his tweet with a rallying cry apparently aimed at supporters of his immigration policies: Go for it! WIN! In 2010 the latest year for which data in Colombia are available the effective tax rate paid by the top 1 percent of income earners was 11.5 percent, a bargain compared with the 23 percent paid by the top 1 percent in the United States during that same year. The new president has called for national unity, and Colombians should give him the benefit of the doubt. While it may be hard for him to completely escape the influence of former president Alvaro Uribe, whose support was instrumental in his election since he was mostly unknown to the public a year ago, he may move to the center nonetheless. Some of his key allies in Congress, such as the Liberal Party, may block his intended changes to the Constitution to alter presidential term limits, weaken the judiciary or alter significant aspects of the peace deal, which is what most center-left voters fear Uribe wants him to do. However, his successful adaptation of trickle-down economics to Colombian and, indeed, Latin American politics should remain a cause for concern. Colombia endures more inequality than most other countries in the world, and its economy is beholden to the interests of local oligopolies that control the financial sector and other key industries. These industries, like many in the United States, successfully produce studies and reports casting economic facts in a light thats convenient to their own interests, but not often to the public at large. Unlike in the United States, however, misinformation about basic economic facts is rarely met by vigorous opposition from citizen organizations at the intersection of academia and public policy. The Observatorio Fiscal, an organization I lead at Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, is trying to fill this gap by modeling itself after American organizations like the Tax Policy Center and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But our task is enormous and we cannot do it alone. More like-minded organizations are needed to offer the public perspectives on economic and policy issues that benefit the average citizen, not just those who can pay their way into positions of influence and power. Crucially, the charitable giving culture that supports these initiatives and that Americans seem to take for granted is nearly absent from Colombia, perhaps because our decades-long war has torn apart the social fabric. Colombians who believe in the social democratic principles of the countrys Constitution need to come together to defend them, with their voices as well as with their wallets. Americans can help too. At a time when populism and misinformation are a global threat to democracy and equal opportunity, we are all in this together. Thats the presidents leverage, and leverage, along with his crude take on muscular leadership, is his motivation for doing this. This is the art of the deal with human collateral. And in one sense its familiar. Politicians commonly gum up important nominations, tie up precious funds or let bad situations fester to get what they want. Theres a parlance for this. We say that they are holding something or someone hostage. But the expression is figurative, and the practice tends not to include chain link fences, makeshift blankets and cries in the night. Thats Trumps new spin on it. It could be a big political mistake. Sure, his most fervent supporters and the most stubborn tribunes of his fugitive greatness Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter are rallying behind him. Yes, 58 percent of Republicans in a CNN poll said that they supported his current zero tolerance treatment of migrant families. But that disquieting number is nonetheless well below his usual approval ratings from members of his party. And Senate Republicans, showing more independence and defiance than they typically do, signaled on Tuesday afternoon that they wanted to pass legislation to end quickly the separation of families who cross illegally into the country. Theyre no doubt worried about the prospects of Republican senators, like Ted Cruz, who are up for re-election in November. Cruz had already denounced what the Trump administration was doing. What these Republicans perhaps also understand is that how we approach immigration, legal and illegal, is about more than the economy, though thats an important part of the equation, and more than security, though thats vital. In a country of immigrants that has proudly held itself up as an exemplar, its about morality. Its about values. Few aspects of American policy define us in the eyes of the world as sharply as our treatment of immigrants does. Few define us as sharply, period. We can be tough, yes. But cruel? Thats not in our interests, not if we care to maintain the global sway that we have. Not if we want to hold on to who we are or mean to be: people of generosity and mercy. Not if were invested in that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan so poetically evoked. He and other presidents, both Republicans and Democrats, saw America as a beacon. They trafficked in inspiration. Trump traffics in fear. Thats where the hostages come in. If theyre young and innocent, so be it. That only ratchets up their utility. Mr. Ince has been challenging President Erdogan for a public debate. Let us debate on any television network you choose, he says. The loquacious Mr. Erdogan, who is omnipresent on Turkish television, stayed quiet until Saturday, when he responded with characteristic haughtiness. He has no shame, inviting me on television, Mr. Erdogan said, adding that Mr. Ince would try to get ratings thanks to us. Mr. Ince retorted, He says I want to get ratings, but even the weather forecasts are watched more than his interviews. In May, in a speech in the parliament, Mr. Erdogan tried to dismiss Mr. Ince as a poor person. The opposition leader responded by asking an important question: We got the same salary at the same time. How come you became so rich and I am poor? (Mr. Erdogans salary as prime minister between 2003 and 2014 wasnt a lot more than what members of parliament received. As president he gets paid three times more, but Mr. Ince was referring to the corruption charges against his inner circle.) Under Mr. Erdogan, polarization between social and ethnic groups has increased in the past several years. His challenger is offering the vision of reconciliation and an end to discriminatory hiring practices by the Turkish state. The state will have no business if a candidate is Alevi or Sunni, Turkish or Kurdish, Mr. Ince said at a public meeting last week. There will be no discrimination whether one is wearing head scarf or not, whether one is a woman or a man. Mr. Ince is also changing the misconception that his secularist partys base is anti-religious by appearing at public rallies with his sister who wears a head scarf. He stood up against the relentless propaganda by the A.K.P. against the pro-Kurdish Peoples Democratic Party, and visited its leader and presidential candidate Selahattin Demirtas in prison. The recent fall in the value of the lira exacerbated economic anxieties in the country. Mr. Ince has offered the vision of strengthening a production-based economy, developing agriculture and offering better conditions for local and foreign investors, apart from educating Turkish youth in both their mother tongue and global languages to compete with the world. Mr. Ince provided examples of moral leadership long before he was in the fray. In the summer of 2016, the Turkish parliament approved a constitutional amendment stripping its members of immunity from prosecution. The bill was pushed by the governing A.K.P. and its ultranationalist allies to target the members from the Peoples Democratic Party. I think I saw it first shortly after it was put in, and it took me a little bit to connect it, to think, Well, what is that and what holiday is this? I really had no idea what it meant. I didnt feel it was very attractive. Later, I got a phone call from someone who said, Did you notice theres a blue line in Warwick? And is that a statement about Black Lives Matter? So it made me wonder. There were lines that were painted in other communities. And we started getting phone calls, of course. The village board felt that it was an important thing, because our police force does a great job. And it was very simple. Its going to eventually fade. It was just a tip of the hat. I first saw the blue line showing of support on the internet, and I was touched when I saw it. I didnt expect it. That blue line has been interpreted in different ways by different people. There are many people, good thinking people, that were outraged. And there are a lot of good thinking people who felt, well, this is a way that we can say thanks to our active police force. Warwick is this town that wants to be adorable, wants to be this beautiful place that people want to come to. And all of a sudden, weve got this ugly line down the middle of the road. The reason that I say that its clearly Blue Lives Matter is because of the political context in this country, the fact that the Black Lives Matter movement has been gaining some traction. Why do we need to suddenly stand up and say, We support our police? What was the intent of the blue line? To show appreciation for law enforcement, local law enforcement, without any of the other things being dragged in. I dont think they were looking beyond Warwick when they did that. And why? Why did they have to? [woman playing guitar] (SINGING) Things I never told you haunt and choke me every day. Want to give it up and let it go. Warwick is mostly white. Theres not many times when I see any minorities really around. I personally have had good and bad experiences with the police. More so when I was a little younger, I experienced a lot more run-ins with the police. Getting taken out of the car for no reason. It only has to go badly once. Thats what comes to mind when I saw the line, is that I just felt like it was dismissive. This is a problem. Even my friends dont generally talk about issues of race, what theyve noticed, whats going on in the country, whats going on around them. I think people are still very uncomfortable about addressing race. This is only a manifestation of something deeper in our psyche around race. And its there whether the blue line surfaced or not. There is a national discussion currently being had about this. And from where were standing, the blue line takes a side in that argument. I decided to write a petition. Not all of them, but there are police officers doing terrible things. And we cant just stand behind any act committed by any police officer simply because they wear the uniform. And thats what I was trying to draw attention to. One of the comments on my petition actually sprung another petition. It was racially charged. That was hard to see. I dont know what will come of that. I think most police officers, the vast majority of them, are trying to do a good job. And we should stand by them and honor them. No. Who put this out? It says, Black people are killing each other, so the police have to do it, too. That makes no sense to me. See, the thing is, I could not support the letter that is for the blue line. There are almost 600 supporters. That horrifies me. I didnt think there were that number of people in Warwick who would support a letter like this. Oh, boy. [laughing] [church bell ringing] [dinging] [interposing voices] Get the blue line back. Thats it. [interposing voices] This afternoon, we made a determination to take away the blue line and to repaint it the colors of our nation. To change it was to be more inclusive. Excuse me. If you cant hold your mouth, you can leave. Mr. Mayor, I am ashamed of what you did today. Yeah! [CHEERING, APPLAUSE] You disrespected the Warwick P.D. and all of the police officers living here. That wasnt the intent. That wasnt Excuse me. Dont put words in my mouth. If you dont like it, you can walk out those doors. It can be corrected! I wrote a letter in opposition to the blue line. All my cousins and uncles are New York City policemen. I am just like you. [interposing voices] Please, please. Hey! Im kind of done with that! Im done with the rudeness! Let the man speak! Were not against the police! We have a context, a national context, where the Blue Lives Matter is in opposition to Black Lives Matter. [interposing voices] You perceive it your way! We perceive it our way! We dont agree! Lets have a quick dose of truth here. Lets talk truth. Police are being assassinated in this country at unprecedented rates. This is due to a lie that would have us think that police are hunting down young minority males for sport. Black Lives Matter is built on this lie. And the radicals objection to the blue line was because it challenges the Black Lives Matter lie. Since January 1, there have been almost 750 black-on-black assassinations in Chicago. But these deceitful radicals want to focus on the less than 1% of instances where a police officer engages and kills one such often armed and dangerous thug. Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, was a vicious thug engaged in a violent assault. This shows how these radicals sit nice and comfortably in Warwick and make lazy, ill-informed condemnations of our police. You dont get off scot-free here. Its time to confront you and shut you down. You have incited a war against our police. This kind of liberal. This kind of radical. What is that? Youre talking to your neighbors. And so are black people! in Warwick, please. Have any of you ever felt threatened by a cop? You said you felt that that line was offensive and that you felt threatened by that line. Were coming together. [interposing voices] (NEWSCASTER) The Warwick community now a village divided. Tonights board meeting erupted into shouting and anger. Warwick is 91% white, home to many in law enforcement. For now, the line stays. The controversy continues. When youre talking about an issue like Black Lives Matter, its unfortunate that people can look at the name of it and somehow think that its offensive when youre literally just saying that black lives matter. It seems like such a basic thing that, unless youre awful, theres no reason for you to feel like it isnt true. People were saying at the meeting that, you know, Black-on-black crime! Its crime. And when the particular people theyre talking about do kill other black people, or whatever, they go to jail for it. Im not a supporter of Black Lives Matter. Im a supporter of All Lives Matter. My son is a New York City police officer. I never know, when he leaves, am I ever going to see him again. We were taught that if you were told to stop by a police officer you stopped. In some of the instances, where unfortunately people were killed, they were given a chance to comply. They didnt comply. What did you think the police were going to do? A snippet of a cell phone video of which you probably dont see the whole thing from start to finish, just the snippet, should not be the end of a police officers career. You werent there. Youve had no training. You dont know what the police officers are up against. Dont be an armchair cop. Sometimes it just feels like people are being willfully obtuse. Theres still this group that doesnt necessarily get a fair shake, because people were willing to forego the entire picture in order to support this idea of what the police are. Its just been a generally pretty difficult time for a lot of people, so I think perceptions have changed. And not just me, but I feel like people see each other differently. My mom is very tied to the police station. Theyve known me since before I could probably speak. We have blue painters tape across our car supporting police. After leaving the meeting and seeing just reflecting on how the meeting went and how it kept running in circles and running in circles, I was like, Thats not We cant approach it that way. The next day, thats when we decided to go about it the complete opposite way. We wanted to present a proper, more mature way of going about things, as opposed to what some of the other people were doing. More civilized. Right. The mayor, hes trying really hard to sit down with people on both sides of this issue and figure out a way to resolve things. Unfortunately, theres a really loud and small group, but very hostile. There are people who support the same things they support in a very different way, and I think that they will get what they want. We have been through quite a week. Definitely not the Warwick community that were so famous for. There were a series of meetings where people disagreed, but then also saw the common ground. There was an understanding that its O.K. to reinstate the blue line. But the question is, if there is people in our community that do have fears, that should be part of that discussion. I grew up in the city of Newburgh, which isnt far from Warwick. Growing up, seeing that with the black community treated themselves definitely made me have a huge bias. When all the Black Lives Matter stuff was coming out, Im like, Oh, wow, I got no sympathy for you, you guys are treating yourself like animals. Look at you. Until this came about. She was actually responsible for really opening my eyes to it. Shes like, I have a black family, I was raised by a black family. And the Black Lives Matter was started by three people who are saying that they werent being heard. And they felt there was injustices in the criminal justice system. Am I in the same camp as Don and Nicole? No. But I dont have to feel as strongly about the thing theyre passionate about in order to work with them on it. As we move forward, were going to continue to disagree. But we have to realize that we are all different, and that conversation has to continue. [applause] There are going to be people who say that the line is coming back, and that still sends a terrible message. And I hope that they see that the problems that they have with the police that make them have a problem with the line were trying to address those. What we get out of it is so much more than stripping paint off the road. We kind of wanted to make community outreach not the people like me and him who love the police, but the people who are a little bit afraid or unsure. Apprehensive. This is a program that was developed to help police and residents build relationships. Its meant to take place in small groups of 10 to 12 people. We have the dialogue started. We have the ear of the people who are in charge of making those sorts of changes possible. And we have the attention of people who didnt even really believe it was necessary. We didnt have that before. We just had a line. As a point of information, just to be updated, so the line will be allowed to fade away. Then we transition to the statue? Its basically going to be a three-tier thing, where etched on one side is going to be the oath. Then in the middle is an etching, the blue line [inaudible]. So youre going to bring the blue line to the statute? Yeah. Thats our plan, yeah. To me, the blue line is a controversial issue, and it will always remain so, especially in Warwick. The blue line literally honors every fallen officer, and its out of respect that I want that blue line there. If you choose not to visit, you dont have to see the blue line. Then the people who choose to visit and actually support our police Don, keep in mind that when that whole crisis happened, we couldve dug in and said, No return to the blue line. We got controversy around that from people I know. We got some negative stuff from that. But we didnt, and it was an act of trust. And Im asking you to remember that. I think its still far from being resolved. The deeper conversations havent really continued in a way that they need to continue. That concerns me. There has to be more people in our community a part of that conversation, because none of us speak for the whole community. I used to think that Warwick as a whole was generally more forward thinking, but I had my suspicions. At least it feels like, somewhat, concerns are being heard. I think were at a crossroads right now. Were at a point where we can accelerate our forward movement, but we also could very likely slide back. To be able to grow, you have to be realistic. You have to look at whats still lacking in the community, what work still needs to be done. I think that the line will fade, and I dont think theyll paint another. And thats fine. But hopefully with that and after this whole election thats been very divisive to our country, hopefully there will be healing. And then lines wont matter. [music] Whats the right painkiller prescription to send home with a patient after gallbladder surgery or a cesarean section? That question is front and center as conventional approaches to pain control in the United States contribute, in the opinion of some experts, to a culture of overprescribing that aggravates the nations epidemic of opioid overuse and abuse. Last year, Marty Makary, a surgeon, researcher and professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, wondered why the answer wasnt clearer. Even he admits that for most of his career he gave painkillers out like candy. So he took an innovative approach toward developing guidelines: matching a right number of opioid painkillers to be prescribed for each of many procedures a substitute for the one-size-fits-all recommendations that doctors have usually followed. This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday. Most congressional Republicans have made clear that they are not willing to oppose President Trump on principle. A few of them may tweet the occasional criticism. But they rarely take any steps to restrain his behavior. They are too afraid. They are afraid of Republican voters, most of whom strongly support Trump. Defying Trump, the members of Congress understand, could cost them their jobs. But the Trump policy of separating migrant children from their parents presents those congressional Republicans with an unusual dynamic. It is less popular with Republican voters than most Trump policies but still supported by a majority of those voters. According to a recent CNN poll, nearly 60 percent of Republicans approve of it, while an overwhelming majority of Democrats and independents oppose it. HAMBURG, Germany Most people can agree that international affairs should not be conducted by tweet especially when the tweeter in question is Donald Trump. Among other reasons, its easy to dismiss the presidents mercurial rage and flagrant insults as little more than temper tantrums. But thats a mistake. Mr. Trumps anger at Americas allies embodies, however unpleasantly, a not unreasonable point of view, and one that the rest of the world ignores at its peril: The global world order is unbalanced and inequitable. And unless something is done to correct it soon, it will collapse, with or without the presidents tweets. While the West happily built the liberal order over the past 70 years, with Europe at its center, the Americans had the continents back. In turn, as it unravels, America feels this loss of balance the hardest it has always spent the most money and manpower to keep the system working. The Europeans have basically been free riders on the voyage, spending almost nothing on defense, and instead building vast social welfare systems at home and robust, well-protected export industries abroad. Rather than lash back at Mr. Trump, they would do better to ask how we got to this place, and how to get out. A Gloster Meteor has flown again in the USA for the first time in decades, with the initial testflight of Gloster Meteor T.7 WA591 at Hampton Roads Executive Airport yesterday afternoon. The World Heritage Air Museum, based at City Airport in Detroit, Michigan acquired this vintage British jet from her previous owners, the Classic Air Force Trust in Coventry, England. As most readers will know, the T.7 is a tandem-seat trainer variant of the Meteor jet fighter, the first operational Allied jet of WWII famous for its wartime exploits knocking down German V-1 cruise missiles. WA591 rolled off Glosters production line at Hucclecote in mid-1949. She served with the Royal Air Force at various domestic training establishments including Stradishall, Driffield, Finningley, and the College of Warfare at Manby, before retiring from flight to become a ground instruction airframe with No.5 Maintenance Unit at RAF Kemble in 1965. She closed her RAF service as a gate guard at RAF Woodvale, near Liverpool, but eventually ended up on the gate at the now-closed British Aerospace Factory at the former RAF Woodford airfield by the mid-90s. An enterprising fellow named Collin Christopher Rhodes acquired her in 1993 for restoration to airworthiness with The Meteor Flight. Following 16 years of hard work in cramped conditions at Yatesbury, and a lot of capital investment, WA591 took to the skies again at Kemble on June 14th, 2011, when she became the oldest active jet aircraft in the world. She subsequently joined the Classic Air Force and appeared on the air show circuit a number of times in the following years, until Classic Air Forces primary owner, Mike Collett, decided to part with the bulk of his fleet of airworthy historic aircraft in 2015. Getting WA591 to the USA took about a year to sort out, but she arrived at Norfolk, Virginia on April 27th, after an ocean voyage from Liverpool. After clearing customs three days later, the partially disassembled airframe was trucked the short distance by road to Hampton Roads Executive Airport, where she went into a hangar for reassembly. With assistance from volunteers, the team from WHAM had the Meteors wings back on by May 1st. She was a whole aircraft again a few days after that, and then the sometimes problematic process of FAA Certification began. The Meteors last flight prior to her arrival in the USA, took place in late March this year (a short hop from Coventry to Liverpool), and she had always been maintained in immaculate condition following her nearly two-decades-long restoration in the UK, so it wasnt surprising that she received her airworthiness certificate in fairly short order on June 9th. After some preparations and taxi tests, the aircraft flew for the first time at around 3:30pm on Monday, June 18th. This was a marvelous moment, and one to be much celebrated. Dean Heald sent WarbirdsNews some great photographs capturing the event, which we now share with you here. According to Dean, following its test flight the Meteor flew to Elizabeth City in North Carolina. She will apparently stay in Elizabeth City until Thursday, and then begin making her way across country to her new home in Michigan. WA591 is scheduled to attend EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2018 this July, alongside two of her contemporary British stablemates from the World Heritage Air Museum, deHavilland Venom FB.54 (N747J, ex-Swiss AF J-1747) and Vampire T.55 (N115DH, ex-Swiss AF U-1206), where the trio will help celebrate the Royal Air Force Centenary. We look forwards to seeing the Meteor on the air show circuit for many years to come, and congratulate her owner, Marty Tibbitts and his World Heritage Air Museum for their foresight in bringing this rare treat to American skies. WarbirdsNews would particularly like to thank photographer Dean Heald for his marvelous contributions to this article. Trump later said this was a joke. Sorry, no U.S. president should make such a joke, which, alas, was consistent with everything Trump has said and done before: He prefers the company of strongmen and, as long as they praise him, does not care how leaders anywhere treat their own people including how they treat people risking their lives to model their countries on ours (or at least on what they thought was ours). While this approach may buy us some time with North Korea, it is hurting us and our friends in many other places because its being taken as a free pass for dictators everywhere not just to crush their revolutionaries or terrorists but even their most mild dissenters. It leaves no space for even loyal opposition. Take Egypt. On May 31, Human Rights Watch reported that the Egyptian police had carried out a wave of arrests of critics of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in dawn raids since early May 2018. Those arrested included Hazem Abd al-Azim, a political activist; and Wael Abbas, a well-known journalist and rights defender; as well as Shady al-Ghazaly Harb, a surgeon; Haitham Mohamadeen, a lawyer; Amal Fathy, an activist; and Shady Abu Zaid, a satirist. I got to know some of these young people during the Arab Spring. They are not violent, radical Islamists. They are wonderful, peace-loving, rule-of-law-seeking Egyptians eager to work with any Egyptian leader who wants to build a more open, tolerant, consensual Egyptian political and civil society. Harb, an enormously decent British-educated surgeon, was imprisoned merely for tweeting mild criticism of Sisis crackdown on dissent. The state of oppression in Egypt has sunk so low that al-Sisis forces are arresting well-recognized activists as they sleep, simply for speaking up, said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. The message is clear that criticism and even mild satire apparently earn Egyptians an immediate trip to prison. Sisi should hang his head in shame for arbitrarily jailing good young people like this and the U.S. Congress should be taking up their cause if our president and secretary of state are too cynical to do so. The same is true in Turkey today under the leadership of a real bum, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I realized the other day that almost all my Turkish journalist friends had been either jailed, fired or exiled by the caliph-tyrant Erdogan. FRONT PAGE A headline with an article on Saturday about President Trumps reaction to a Justice Department inspector general report described incorrectly Mr. Trumps trip back from Asia. He began reacting to the report after returning to the United States from a conference in Singapore, not North Korea. The Here to Help section on Saturday included incorrect instructions for a seated half spinal twist pose in yoga. The pose requires focus and flexibility, but not the pliability of a cobra. (Thats a different pose.) Correct instructions can be found online in our Yoga for Everyone guide at nytimes.com/spotlight/guides. NATIONAL An article on Monday about Turning Point USAs Young Womens Leadership Summit, a conservative conference, misspelled the surname of a woman who attended the event. She is Maggie Anders, not Andrews. The article also described incorrectly the March for Our Lives. It was a demonstration against gun violence, not gun control. An article on June 7 about a petition to rename Bostons Faneuil Hall misstated the occupation of a tourist who was asked to comment on the proposal. Matt Birch, the tourist, is an online editor, not a social media editor. From where Mr. Miller sits, illegal immigration is driven by a belief among people outside the United States that those who make it across the border will be allowed to stay indefinitely. The success rate is the predominant factor that drives illegal migration, he told us. By instituting a zero-tolerance policy, Mr. Miller said, the administration is sending a message that should reduce the flow of illegal immigration into the country. He conceded that the policy has not reduced the immigration numbers, but said, Itll take a few months of sustained effort. 2. Anything less than zero tolerance at the border creates what Mr. Miller calls perverse incentives for lawbreakers. Mr. Miller used the example of speeding laws in the United States. Imagine, he said, if the police decided that speeding laws didnt apply to people who have a child in the back seat. Could you imagine what the consequences of that would be? Well, one thing, a lot more child endangerment, he said, comparing the situation to the lack of enforcement of illegal border crossings under prior administrations. 3. Continuing policies in place during the Obama administration would cause what Mr. Miller called a vicious cycle that would increase illegal immigration. Mr. Miller said a giant hemispheric shift in migration patterns was driving people toward the United States, which he said must respond with tighter borders. He said Obama-era policies would allow the number of immigrants to spiral upward endlessly. Using a favorite phrase, Mr. Miller said: So you have to turn the ship. And so again, its a whole-of-government approach. This image has become a powerful representation of the Trump administrations crackdown on immigration: a 2-year old girl sobbing, as U.S. border patrol agents searched her mother. If you cross the border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you. And that child may be separated from you as required by law. The Trump White Houses tactic of systematically separating migrant families is a dramatic shift. There have been cases of families being separated under the previous two administrations. But its always been the exception, not the rule. That said, Trumps crackdowns are happening against the backdrop of more than a decade of stepped-up enforcement at the Southern border. In 2005, President George W. Bush launched Operation Streamline along the Texas border. He was responding to a spike in apprehensions there. The program called for criminally prosecuting all migrants. Were going to get control of our borders. Were making this country safer for all our citizens. The idea of zero tolerance took root under Bush, and its what Trump has used to model his policy after. The Bush-era program meant that migrants who were caught in certain border states were put through the criminal system, not civil immigration courts. It made exceptions for adults traveling with children, but others were ushered through mass trials aimed at deporting them quickly. Its a practice thats still around today. One of the things we committed to do was end catch and release by the end of fiscal year 2006. Under this policy, migrants were held until their deportation hearing. And that meant an increase in beds at private detention centers. In 2014, President Barack Obama declared a crisis at the Southwest border after a surge of unaccompanied minors, mostly from Central America. We now have an actual humanitarian crisis on the border that only underscores the need to drop the politics and fix our immigration system once and for all. During that child migrant crisis, the Obama administration also focused on deporting people quickly and put some through criminal proceedings. But it chose to hold families together in administrative, not criminal detention. The Obama administration also set up makeshift overflow facilities. And we saw similar images back then, of adults and children behind chain-link fences draped in thermal blankets. Now, Trump is reportedly taking it a step further and considering makeshift tent cities to detain minors caught at the border. The Trump administration says its now merely enforcing the letter of the law. But images of children in detention have made it hard to sell it in political terms, and humanitarian ones, too. The nations top cellphone carriers Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint all said Tuesday that they would sharply limit arrangements that give marketers and other businesses access to cellphone customers location data, after disclosures that the information was used to track people without their consent. Verizon announced its change in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, who has been investigating location privacy issues. He had asked Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile to audit their relationships with companies that buy and sell access to consumer location data, known as location aggregators. As a result of this review, we are initiating a process to terminate our existing agreements for the location aggregator program, Verizons chief privacy officer, Karen Zacharia, wrote in the letter. Some data sharing, such as for fraud prevention and call routing, will continue, she wrote. An AT&T spokesman, Michael Balmoris, said the company would end work with the data companies as soon as practical in a way that preserves important, potential lifesaving services like emergency roadside assistance. But in Richmond, the decision to remove the name of James Ewell Brown Stuart, a cavalry general, and replace it with Mr. Obamas has poignant resonance. A city of 223,000 people, Richmond was the former capital of the Confederacy, and its streets, public plaques, and monuments reflect the history of the period. A city commission is expected this year to present recommendations about what to do with monuments to such figures as Jefferson Davis or Gen. Robert E. Lee, Mayor Levar Stoney said Tuesday. He said the school was the only one in the city named after a Confederate figure, and that the move to rename it reflected the progressiveness and diversity of the city, which is 48 percent black. Richmond has always been front and center in the growth of the South, he said. Mayor Stoney said that the vote corrected a serious contradiction in having students, mostly of color, attend a school named after a figure who fought to preserve slavery. The process took several months. Teachers, parents and community members were invited to attend public meetings and submit online suggestions. Student assemblies were held. Seven options were eventually drawn up, including Wishtree, named after a childrens book that celebrates diversity; Northside, reflecting the neighborhood; Barbara Johns, a civil rights activist; and Henry Marsh, the citys first African-American mayor. In the end, the students themselves were asked to pick three choices, which whittled the list down to Wishtree, Northside and Barack Obama. The school board made the final pick, reflecting the recommendation of Mr. Kamras, who served as the education adviser for Mr. Obamas campaign in 2008. He said the city would consider whether other schools should be renamed as well. Kenya Gibson, the sole school board member who voted against the renaming, said she had wanted more time to discuss the possibility of naming the school after a local civil rights leader. But she still supported the result. During April and May, federal authorities separated at least 1,995 children from parents facing criminal prosecution for unlawfully crossing the border, the Trump administration announced on Friday. Photographs and an audio tape of crying children caught in the administrations dragnet stoked new outrage this week, leading members of both parties to express concern. Mr. Trump and two members of his cabinet have forcefully defended the zero tolerance policy, with the president repeatedly making the false accusation that only the Democrats, the minority party, were to blame for it. The law does not require the authorities to separate children. The issue, which turns on federal immigration policy, might have been largely a question left to leaders in Washington, not governors. But the Trump administrations request for National Guard troops earlier this year has thrust the matter into the state-level debate as well. President Trump called in April for the National Guard to be deployed to the border, saying that thousands of troops were needed to stanch illegal crossings, even though they are at a 46-year low. In recent days, Democratic governors from states like Colorado, Delaware, New York and Rhode Island have expressed deep opposition to family separation, and many declared they would not help at the border. For many of the governors, the defiance which was being embraced by left-leaning constituents in their states was largely symbolic, since they had not been planning to send large numbers of soldiers in the first place, if they had been asked at all. Under normal circumstances, we wouldnt hesitate to answer the call, said Gov. John Carney, Democrat of Delaware, who said he had declined a request on Tuesday to send troops to the border. But given what we know about the policies currently in effect at the border, I cant in good conscience send Delawareans to help with that mission. Democrats appeared frustrated at times as they accused Republicans of using the report to try to discredit Mr. Mueller. The report has nothing to say about the ongoing work of the special counsel, said Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, who holds the top Democratic slot on the Judiciary Committee. Their argument is based on innuendo, and not on the facts, and certainly not on this report. Mr. Nadler and others noted that the F.B.I.s actions during the presidential election almost uniformly harmed Mrs. Clintons candidacy. The former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, was unusually frank and public in his remarks about Mrs. Clinton, even as he hewed closely to the rules and did not reveal that his agents were also investigating the Trump campaign. Mr. Horowitzs report found no evidence that political bias influenced key investigative decision-making, but he offered Democrats no relief from criticism that the text messages had raised questions about the credibility of the investigation. They werent just speaking about a generic election that they cared about, Mr. Horowitz said. It just so happened that the people they were speaking about had a connection to the investigations they themselves were working on. Mr. Strzok has said he is willing to testify about his text messages and his role in the investigation. No date has been set. Mr. Strzok was removed from the special counsels investigation when the text messages were discovered. He was reassigned to the human resources department, and his lawyer confirmed on Tuesday that he was escorted from F.B.I. headquarters as part of ongoing internal proceedings. He still works for the bureau, according to the lawyer, Aitan Goelman. Ms. Page has left the F.B.I. While Democrats say the inspector generals report closed the book on the question of Mrs. Clintons investigation, Mr. Trump and his allies are looking to the future. They argue that Mr. Muellers inquiry was born out of investigative bias. The F.B.I. is oath-bound to remain neutral and enforce the law impartially and fairly, said Representative Scott DesJarlais, Republican of Tennessee. How can we accomplish this when there are agents that are actively biased against our sitting president? In the weeks since the Trump administration instituted a zero tolerance policy that seeks to criminally prosecute anyone who crosses the border unlawfully and effectively causes children to be separated from their families, criticism has poured in from advocacy groups, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and a host of political luminaries who are no longer in office. Now, in the span of about 24 hours, all four living former first ladies have added their voices to the chorus of public critique, calling the practice immoral, disgraceful and a humanitarian crisis. Even the current first lady, Melania Trump, took the somewhat unusual step of issuing a statement that appeared to align somewhat with her predecessors, while also avoiding assigning partisan blame. Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform, her office said in a statement on Sunday. She believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart. WASHINGTON Lawyers for James A. Wolfe, the Senate intelligence staff member accused of lying about his contacts with reporters, asked a federal judge on Tuesday to order President Trump to stop commenting on the case or risk compromising Mr. Wolfes right to a fair trial. In their motion, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, the lawyers, Benjamin Klubes and Preston Burton, noted that after Mr. Wolfes arrest on June 7 that Mr. Trump told reporters the government had caught a leaker, calling him a very important leaker. The president, who has complained vociferously about leaks to journalists, said the arrest could be a terrific thing. He added: Im a very big believer in freedom of the press, but Im also a believer that you cannot leak classified information. But Mr. Wolfe, the longtime security director for the Senate Intelligence Committee, has not been charged with disclosing classified information. He faces three counts of making false statement to F.B.I. agents, by denying that he had spoken to four reporters, including Ali Watkins, a reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Wolfe and Ms. Watkins had a three-year personal relationship that ended last year. With the unveiling last month of the B-17F Flying Fortress Memphis Belle at the National Museum of the U.S.Air Force, Airman Magazine published a fascinating article on the B-17, her crew, along with some fascinating insight into the methods behind the detailed restoration. There was also the mention of one of the Belles crewmen, waist gunner SSgt. E.S.Miller, who wasnt able to make the triumphant return to the USA in 1943 to take part in the Memphis Belles War Bonds Tour. The new exhibit at the Air Force Museum shines a light on his service for the first time. We thought our readers would be interested in this piece, although we have added a lot of images to supplement its telling Through the cockpit windscreen, Capt. Robert Morgan saw flashes of light from the wings and engine cowling of a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 at his 12 oclock and closing at an incredible rate. Each wink of light from the fighters wing root meant another 20mm cannon shell was heading directly at his B-17F Flying Fortress at over 2,300 feet per second. Having no room to dive in the crowded formation of B-17 bombers of the 91st Bomb Group, he pitched up. The Luftwaffe fighters shells impacted the tail of the aircraft instead of coming straight through the windscreen. Over the intercom Morgan heard his tail gunner, Sgt. John Quinlan, yelling that the aircrafts tail was shot to pieces and what was left was in flames. It was January 23, 1943. Morgan and his nine crewmen aboard the Memphis Belle had just fought their way through a swarm of Luftwaffe fighters, dropped their bombs on a Nazi submarine base in the coastal city of Lorient in occupied France and were fighting to survive the return trip to the Eighth Air Force base in Bassingbourn, England. Morgan began calculating if the crew should bail out and become prisoners of war before the tail tore completely off the bomber trapping the crew in a death spiral culminating in a fiery crash. A moment later, Quinlan reported that the fire in the tail had gone out. The Memphis Belle and her crew would survive the mission; the crews eighth and the bombers ninth. They would have to survive 17 more missions to complete the required 25 to rotate home. All would be flown during a period of World War II when the Luftwaffe was at the height of its destructive powers. Against all odds, the Memphis Belle crew flew those missions, their last to once again bomb the U-boat pens at Lorient on May 17, 1943, before returning safely to England for the final time. Bottles of Champagne were uncorked and radio operator Tech. Sgt. Robert J. Hanson collapsed onto the flightline and kissed the ground. For the Belle herself, it was only mission 24 and the plane had to fly once more with an alternate crew on May 19. The B-17 and its crew would be the first to return alive and intact to the U.S. [Ed. Another aircraft and crew had been slated to do so, a couple of months previously, but sadly that story ended in tragedy. B-24D Liberator Hot Stuff crashed in Iceland on her flight back to the USA, taking the lives of half her original crew, plus several senior officers aboard, one of whom was Gen.Frank Andrews the man then slated to lead the Normandy invasion effort, rather than Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.] Memphis Belles crew were welcomed home as the heroes they were and immediately embarked on a 2-month, nationwide morale tour to sell war bonds. The tour was also to encourage bomber crews in training that they too could make it home. It made celebrities of both the Belle and its crew. Ironically, the two and a half months of press conferences, parties and glad-handing officers and politicians was about the same amount of time during the Belles combat tour that 80 percent of the 91st Bomb Groups B-17s and their crews were lost to German fighters and anti-aircraft fire. Eighty percent losses means you had breakfast with 10 men and dinner with only two of those 10, Morgan said in an interview after the war. During the totality of the air war over Europe more than 30,000 U.S. Airmen aboard heavy bombers, like the B-17, would be killed. Seventy-five years to the day after that 25th mission, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force honored the bravery of those bomber crews, some of the first Americans to take the fight to the Nazis in WWII, when they unveiled for public display the largely restored B-17F 41-24485 Memphis Belle as part of a three-day celebration, May 17-19, 2018. According to the museum curator in charge of the Memphis Belle exhibit, Jeff Duford, the weekend included more than 160 WWII re-enactors showcasing their memorabilia, WWII-era music and vehicles, static displays of other B-17s, flyovers of WWII-era aircraft and presentations of rare archival film footage. The Memphis Belle is now the centerpiece of an exhibit documenting the strategic bombing campaign over Europe. The Memphis Belle is an icon that represents all the heavy bomber crewmen who served and sacrificed in Europe in World War II, Duford said, In many ways the Memphis Belle is the icon for the United States Air Force. You look at the U.S. Marines, they have this wonderful icon of the flag being raised over Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima and everyone recognizes that. It symbolizes service and sacrifice and tenacity and teamwork. Well, the Air Force has that symbol too, and its this airplane. It demonstrates teamwork. The crews had to work together. The planes in formation had to work together. The formations had to work together with the fighter escorts. The service and sacrifice of the young men still leaves Duford awestruck even after working on the Belle project for a decade. How does one climb inside of this aircraft knowing that they are probably not going to come home? And they dont do that one time; two times; three times; 10 times they have to do it 25 times, said Duford. Once they got inside the airplane, they had no place to run. There were no foxholes to be dug. The skin on those airplanes is so thin that a bullet or flak fragment would go through it like a tin can because thats essentially what it was. The odds were that every 18 missions, a heavy bomber was going to be shot down. So when you think the crew had to finish 25 missions to go home, statistically it was nearly impossible. It was one-in-four odds that a heavy bomber recruit would finish their 25 missions. Those other three crew members wouldve been shot down and captured, killed or wounded so badly they couldnt finish their tour. The fact the Memphis Belle crew survived their tour was of great value to the U.S. Army Air Forces in maintaining support for the daylight strategic bombing campaign over Europe, which was still, in fact, an experiment. Back then, there was no book on high altitude strategic bombing. The generals didnt know any more than we did. They had to figure bombing strategy as we went along, said Morgan in a book he would write after the war, The Man Who Flew the Memphis Belle. The B-17 was named the Flying Fortress, because it was bristling with .50 caliber machine guns covering every angle of attack by German fighters, save one. The theory was that all that defensive firepower would be amplified by heavy bombers flying in tight formations, called boxes, enabling them to protect each other from attacking fighters. While the German Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf fighters sometimes paid a price for attacking the formations, they soon developed tactics that exploited a design weakness in B-17Fs, like the Memphis Belle. While twin .50 caliber machine guns in top and belly turrets and the tail and single .50 cal. gunners protected the bomber, the 12 oclock position was covered by a lone .30 caliber machine gun no match for the German fighters. Because the bomber formations had to fly straight and level to initiate their bombing run, the Luftwaffe fighter pilots began attacking the formations head on. The ensuing carnage was ghastly. The secret to the B-17 was the capability of flying in tight formations, so tight that the wings were often almost touching, wrote Morgan. We were able to put out an amazing amount of firepower but, I also positively feel that was a bit of divine intervention for our crew. While the addition of Allied fighter escorts helped fend off some German attackers, the fact that the B-17s had to fly at 25,000 feet or lower to maintain any semblance of accuracy on target put them in the range of the deadly German 88mm anti-aircraft gun. No amount of machine guns or friendly fighters could counter the dense flak approaching targets while flying straight and level. Bomber crews had to just grit their teeth and pray. They felt like they were a great crew. They were tightly knit, confident and dedicated to what they were doing, said Duford. However, being in those formations, flying straight and level with enemy anti-aircraft and fighter aircraft, there certainly was a little bit of luck for them too. Luck, both good and bad, was also a factor in the Belle crew, despite not being the first crew to complete 25 missions, being the one to return to the U.S. for a bond and morale tour. The Belles selection for the morale tour was the result of a film project about the strategic bombing campaign that was the brainchild of USAAF Gen. Hap Arnold and a Hollywood director, William Wyler, who had volunteered to serve his country in the best way he knew how. It was hoped that a film documenting a bomber crew as they successfully completed a combat tour would calm new recruits, who were hearing stories of the carnage overseas, and assuage the doubts of the public, press and politicians that strategic bombing was a failure. Wyler, an immigrant who was born in the Alsace region of modern-day France when it was part of the German Empire prior to World War I and who would go on to win three Best Director Academy Awards, including one for Ben-Hur, was commissioned as a major and headed to England with a film crew to document the fight in skies over Europe. Wyler and his cameraman flew with B-17 combat crews and began filming missions of a B-17F of the 401st Bomb Squadron of the 91st Bomb Group named Invasion II. His staff also began interviewing and making publicity photographs of the crewmembers, as they drew closer to completing 25 missions. However, on April 17, 1943, the reality of war spoiled the Hollywood ending during their 23rd mission to Bremen, Germany. Invasion II crashed after being hit by flak over Borhmen, Germany, setting the cockpit and wing on fire. The crew managed to bail out, but all became prisoners of war. Wyler regrouped and found a plane and crew with the 324th Bomb Squadron that was also close to completing their combat tour. The Memphis Belle, named for Morgans girlfriend, Margaret Polk of Memphis, Tennessee, and its crew took center stage. While the crew of Hells Angels completed their tour on May 13, 1943, four days before the Belle, there was no film of that plane and crew. Consequently, it was the Belle and its crew that would fly mission 26 back to the U.S. and receive a heros welcome. Wylers film, Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, would be released and distributed by Paramount Pictures the following year. It was a film that came with a high price tag. One of Wylers cinematographers, 1st Lt. Harold J. Tannenbaum, a veteran of World War I, was killed in action during the filming when the bomber he was in was shot down over France on April 16, 1943. [Ed. Tannenbaum was in B-24 41-23983. Some crew members were blown clear of the aircraft when it exploded, and managed to parachute to safety. Apparently, Tannenbaum managed to bail out too, but failed to properly fasten his parachute on and he sadly fell to his death.] Until the end of the war, the Belle was used as a training aircraft, but instead of being torn apart for scrap like most of the other 12,700 B-17s built during the war, the city of Memphis, Tennessee, put the aircraft on display for nearly 50 years. The historic aircraft came to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in October 2005, when work began on a careful, multi-year conservation and restoration effort including corrosion treatment and the full outfitting of missing equipment. Casey Simmons arrived shortly after the Memphis Belle as a restoration specialist for the museum. From the beginning, it was apparent that priority one in the restoration was getting it right. His first assignment was to fabricate a glycol heater that was missing from inside the left wing. No visitor to the museum would ever see it. I know its there and thats cool because its going to get all the parts that it needs to be a complete aircraft, said Simmons. When you dont have the part you try and find a part from another airplane or you go to the blueprints and make the part completely from scratch. While the museum has other B-17s in its collection, the Memphis Belle requires a whole other level of patience and dedication. Other restoration projects are typically a general model of a certain aircraft. So it represents a lot of them. This one is a specific aircraft, so you have to get it right; exactly to the rivet, said Simmons. The museum specialist did not try to restore the Belle to how it rolled off the Boeing line, but utilized films, photos and records from its time in combat to bring the B-17F back to fighting trim, scars and all. There are certain damage spots on the Memphis Belle that were fixed over time, so we have to make sure that those show up on the aircraft the way they were, said Simmons. If they put five rivets in an area as opposed to the standard four that are supposed to be there, we have to get that correct When you go through video footage, old film footage, or photographs, and you do find a little glimpse of what youre looking for, thats a big moment. We have to get it right for those bomber crews. The bravery of those bomber crews continued after all the whoopla back home died down. Even Morgan was eager to get back in the fight. While on a morale tour stop in Wichita, Kansas, Morgan caught a glimpse of the future of strategic bombing, the still secret B-29 Superfortress. He volunteered immediately to train on the new bomber and earned command of his own squadron of B-29s that deployed to Saipan in the Pacific Theater. On November 24, 1944, his 869th Squadron of the 497th Bomb Group was the first, other than Doolittles Raiders in 1942, to bomb Tokyo. He would go on to complete another 24 combat missions in the B-29 before the end of WWII. He retired from the U.S. Air Force Reserve in 1965 as a colonel. While the restoration and display of the Memphis Belle will ensure the story of the dedication, bravery and airmanship of its 10 crewmembers that returned home safely in 1943 honors all the Airmen that fought in WWII, Duford is particularly enthusiastic that the exhibit will allow Museum of U.S. Air Force visitors to learn the story of the little known 11th crewmember of the Memphis Belle. As much as any Airman, he embodied the spirit and sense of duty shared by all the heavy bomber crews. Its the story of one of the waist gunners, Emerson Scott Miller, said Duford. You dont see him in any of the war bond photos and you dont see his name listed as one of the Memphis Belle crew members. He came overseas as a technician repairing the autopilot systems on B-17s. He was safe. He didnt have to fly the missions, but he decided he wanted to do more and volunteered to fly in combat. He joined the Memphis Belle crew after they had flown about nine or 10 of their missions. So he had flown 16 of his missions when the rest of the Memphis Belle crew completed their 25th. Capt. Robert Morgan really wanted Scott Miller to come back on the war bond tour, but Miller hadnt finished his 25th mission, so he had to stay. While the Belle crew was celebrated and famous and there were parties for them, Scott Miller was still flying in combat. Fittingly, Miller finished his 25th mission aboard another B-17 on July 4, 1943, but for him, there were no parades, no press conferences, no meeting movie stars and no special duties. We got in touch with Scott Millers family, said Duford. They donated a trunk full of artifacts, and so Scott Miller has a place in the exhibit and his story will be told He could have just simply done his duty repairing those autopilot systems and gone home safe. But he put his life on the line and then was forgotten. Now hes going to be remembered now and for generations to come. Here is a great series of images of the Belle shortly after her completion. WASHINGTON A sweeping new rule issued Tuesday by the Trump administration will make it easier for small businesses to join forces and set up health insurance plans that circumvent many requirements of the Affordable Care Act, cutting costs but also reducing benefits. President Trump, speaking at a 75th-anniversary celebration of the National Federation of Independent Business, said the new rule would allow small businesses to escape some of Obamacares most burdensome mandates by creating new entities known as association health plans. Youre going to save massive amounts of money and have much better health care, Mr. Trump said to cheers from the audience of small-business owners. Its going to cost you much less. As a result, he said, youre going to save a fortune. Alexander Acosta, the labor secretary, said the rule would give small businesses access to insurance options like those available to large companies, starting as soon as Sept. 1. Millions of people could benefit, he said. WASHINGTON President Trump intends to campaign Monday for Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, according to Republican officials familiar with the plan, putting his presidential prestige on the line for one of his earliest supporters a day before the states closely contested Republican runoff election. In a gamble that he can lift Mr. McMaster to the nomination at the 11th hour, Mr. Trump intends to join Mr. McMaster for a rally in the Columbia area hours before the polls open in the state. And this Saturday, Vice President Mike Pence will campaign with Mr. McMaster, who is locked in a close race for the Republican nomination with John Warren, a former Marine and political newcomer. The White Houses last-minute intervention amounts to political payback for the governor, who was among the first statewide Republican elected officials to support Mr. Trump. Mr. McMaster has been an outspoken ally of the president ever since. He has argued that Mr. Trump should receive a Nobel Peace Prize for his negotiations with North Korea, and this week he defended Mr. Trumps hard line on immigration and the separation of children from their families at the border. There is always an argument for staying, which is that the United States will be in a better position to help defend Israel, Mr. Abrams said. But this council is hopelessly compromised, so leaving is the right choice. The withdrawal comes as the Trump administration faces condemnation by rights groups and governments worldwide for its decision to separate children from their families at the border. On Monday, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for human rights, called for an immediate end to the practice, describing such a tactic as inflicting abuse on children and unconscionable. Mr. Trump has turned decades of American foreign policy on its head by attacking or undermining much of the rules-based order that the United States established after World War II. Previous administrations viewed the interlocking network of alliances, trade rules and international organizations as beneficial to the United States. But Mr. Trump has ripped up the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal both of which were negotiated under the strong influence of world powers. He has also imposed tariffs on the United States closest allies and left the Group of 7 summit meeting this month in chaos and recriminations after he denounced Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada as very dishonest & weak. The Trump administration has made clear that it will not countenance the level of criticism and what it describes as slanted resolutions by the Human Rights Council that have historically been directed at the United States and Israel. On her first day as ambassador, Ms. Haley warned that for those who dont have our back, were taking names. Rob Berschinski, a senior vice president at Human Rights First, another nonprofit organization, conceded that no one believed the human rights council was perfect. But, he said, leaving it is a mistake. Countries like China, Russia and Venezuela will applaud this decision because we are freely giving up leverage over them that we previously had, Mr. Berschinski said. With Ms. Bowser poised to become the citys first mayor in 16 years to win a second term, the relatively sleepy election might be a welcome reprieve for the new mother. Representative Gwen Moore, Democrat of Wisconsin, recalled the pressure of being a single mother on the campaign trail without a nanny or a babysitter. I had my 8-year-old son going door-to-door with me when I first ran for the Assembly, Ms. Moore said. Ive taken my kids to fund-raisers, and they didnt like the cocktail shrimps; they just wanted some Doritos. Ms. Bowser will not be the citys only elected official with a young child. Councilwoman Brianne K. Nadeau gave birth to a girl last year, and Robert C. White Jr., an at-large councilman, has a 21-month-old daughter which he cited as a reason for declining to run against Ms. Bowser this year, despite being seen by some as a strong contender. Becoming the first council member to give birth while in office, Ms. Nadeau said in a statement, has really driven home the challenges that parents face in the District. It is a sentiment that Donna F. Edwards, a former Maryland congresswoman who is also a single mother, empathizes with. The first piece of legislation she helped get passed was an amendment in an appropriations package that provided dinners at school for low-income students in Maryland a program that had never been proposed and approved by her states delegation. I dont think its because they thought children should go hungry. I just think it was not something that ever occurred to them, said Ms. Edwards, whose son was about to head to college when she was first elected. Ms. Edwards ran for the Senate in 2016 but lost in the primary. Had she won the seat, she would have been the second single mother to serve in that chamber. Several politicians who are also mothers said that becoming a single parent may refocus some of Ms. Bowsers policy efforts, whether that be improving Washingtons public schools or creating additional programs to engage youths after school. It might not have been the most opportune time for the State Department to hold a Facebook Live chat on how to travel with children. In the midst of the Trump administrations crackdown on the southern border that has separated crying children from their parents and incited a national uproar, the State Departments consular affairs unit held a question-and-answer session via Facebook on Tuesday intended for American families going abroad. Join us for our #FamilyTravelHacks chat!, the Facebook post caption reads. Ask us your questions about applying for U.S. passports for your kids, document requirements, and tips to make sure your vacation this summer goes smoothly. The responses spoke volumes. Do you recommend cage training for children to get them used to arriving in the US?, Facebook user Matt Schneider commented. How long should I leave them alone in a cage to get them used to being imprisoned alone? HONG KONG Rescuers in Indonesia were searching on Wednesday for more than 160 people who were missing after a ferry sank in a lake during a major holiday, officials said. Indonesias National Disaster Management Agency said Wednesday on Twitter that 166 people were still missing from the sinking late Monday afternoon in Lake Toba, a popular sightseeing spot on Sumatra Island. Eighteen people had been rescued and one body had been recovered, the agency said. Indonesia is the worlds most populous Muslim-majority nation, and the accident occurred during Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Millions of Indonesians have been traveling home to celebrate the holiday, known there as Idul Fitri. SRINAGAR, Kashmir Indias governing party ended an alliance with a powerful regional party in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday, leading to the resignation of a top official and plunging the disputed mountainous territory into fresh turmoil over its leadership. Ram Madhav, the general secretary of the governing party, the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, said that it was severing a three-year alliance with the top political group in Kashmir, the Muslim-majority Peoples Democratic Party. Terrorism, violence and radicalization have risen, and the fundamental rights of the citizens are under danger in the Kashmir Valley, Mr. Madhav told reporters in New Delhi on Tuesday, adding that the alliance had not helped to curb a deteriorating security situation in Kashmir. He said power in the area would be passed to the states governor. Shortly after the announcement, Mehbooba Mufti, the top official in Jammu and Kashmir and the head of the Peoples Democratic Party, resigned from her post as chief minister. TURMAKHAND, Nepal Not long ago, in rural western Nepal, Gauri Kumari Bayak was the spark of her village. Her strong voice echoed across the fields as she husked corn. When she walked down the road at a brisk clip, off to lead classes on birth control, many admired her self-confidence. But last January, Ms. Bayaks lifeless body was carried up the hill, a stream of mourners bawling behind her. Her remains were burned, her dresses given away. The little hut where she was pressured to sequester herself during her menstrual period and where she died was smashed apart, erasing the last mark of another young life lost to a deadly superstition. I still cant believe shes not alive, said Dambar Budha, her father-in-law, full of regret, sitting on a rock, staring off into the hills. In this corner of Nepal, deep in the Himalayas, women are banished from their homes every month when they get their period. They are considered polluted, even toxic, and an oppressive regime has evolved around this taboo, including the construction of a separate hut for menstruating women to sleep in. Some of the spaces are as tiny as a closet, walls made of mud or rock, basically menstruation foxholes. Ms. Bayak died from smoke inhalation in hers as she tried to keep warm by a small fire in the bitter Himalayan winter. BANGKOK An American citizen who was arrested at a peaceful demonstration in Vietnam this month said on state television that he regretted breaking the law and that he would not join such protests again. Will Nguyen, 32, an American graduate student in Singapore, has been held since June 10, when he was grabbed and beaten by the police at an anti-China protest in Ho Chi Minh City. Two videos posted on YouTube show him being dragged down the street by plainclothes officers holding his legs and an arm. One man comes up and strikes him. Another places an orange covering over Mr. Nguyens head. How do Australians feel about President Trump and the state of the world? Not good, on both counts, according to the Lowy Institutes annual poll of Australians, which was released Wednesday. The poll shows theyre also not pleased with Chinese investment, immigration rates to Australia, or their countrys response to climate change. Here are a few key findings that provide a summary of the countrys mood and political direction on global issues. Beyond his seeming impatience with working-class French citizens and their views of his reforms, he has shown a tendency to portray himself as a Jupiterian president, or the president as monarch. It is an image of the French presidency as an august office, above the fray, that was favored by General de Gaulle and almost every other president until Mr. Macrons immediate predecessor, Francois Hollande. Mr. Macron also aspires to be a postmodern president, the self-appointed harbinger of Frances future, yet his tone and language alternates between elevated intellectual conceits and provocative street talk, sometimes sounding scornful, even patronizing. From Mr. Macrons point of view, he is just making it clear where he stands; it is up to those listening to decide whether they want to join him. Macron is part of a generation that knows how to juggle between different modes of communicating, but always with the intention of conveying his message, said Jerome Fourquet, a longtime observer of the French presidency and the director of opinion and business strategies for IFOP, a major polling organization. In Mr. Fourquets view, Mr. Macron can sound like an American politician when he tells the French that they have to be willing to go where the jobs are and be resourceful and entrepreneurial. But such a message can come across as oddly dissonant because, unlike American politicians, he rarely expresses empathy and has no qualms about sounding like a teacher scolding students. He is also still very French in his desire to have everyone treat him with deference. Theres this Anglo-Saxon culture that he mixes with the French culture of the meritocracy, Mr. Fourquet said. The meritocracy is, I have studied, thus, I deserve to be where I am, and so broadly speaking, that means the world is divided between those who know, who explain to those who do not know, Mr. Fourquet added. BERLIN It was supposed to be the day when President Emmanuel Macron of France received a long-awaited response from Germany on his big ideas on how to rekindle Europe as a force for liberalism in the world. And he did, sort of. But his meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany on Tuesday was overshadowed by the urgent issue of how to put out the growing number of populist fires over migration on the Continent including in Germany itself. Ms. Merkel, faced with a rebellion by Bavarian conservatives that nearly brought down her government on Monday, is staring at a 10-day deadline to reach the kind of European accord on limiting migration that has eluded the European Union for many years. On Tuesday she came one small step closer. When Mr. Macron was asked whether he would take back asylum seekers who were first registered in France if Germany refused them at the border, as demanded by the Bavarians, Mr. Macron obligingly said he would. I confirm, he said. Italian news organizations noted on Tuesday that whenever Mr. Conte was about to step out on the international stage, as he did in Berlin on Monday, Mr. Salvini managed to steal the limelight. The interior ministers comments on the Roma drew the first significant grumblings from his coalition partners, and Mr. Di Maio scrambled to have his voice heard. Italians have priority, said Mr. Di Maio, who is minister for labor and economic development. Its fine to deal with problems related to immigration, but lets start working on the problems of millions of Italians who can no longer eat. The Roma, also known as Romanies or Gypsies, are a people of South Asian origin who migrated centuries ago to Europe, where they have often suffered severe discrimination. Some have lived in itinerant communities, largely isolated from the societies around them, while many others have settled and integrated. Carlo Stasolla, the president of the Associazione 21 Luglio, which works to end the marginalization of Roma groups in Italy, said in an interview on Tuesday that if Mr. Salvini wanted to conduct a census of the Roma, he need only read the annual reports that his association has been publishing for the last three years. He would learn, Mr. Stasolla said, that six out of seven Roma pay taxes, most own homes or pay rent, and that only about 26,000 live in camps, segregated areas that were created by previous right-leaning governments, or in informal settlements, he said. He said that more than 50 percent of the countrys Roma population, estimated at between 120,000 and 180,000 people, were Italian citizens. A large percentage of the rest were from Romania or from the former Yugoslavia, and are considered stateless, so they cant be expelled, he said. Beyond Mr. Salvinis threats, Mr. Stasolla voiced concern that the governments stated agenda for the Roma which includes closing irregular camps and removing children from Roma parents who do not send them to school was moving toward xenophobic and populist positions that could violate fundamental human rights. LONDON Britains home secretary, Sajid Javid, ordered a review on Tuesday of the nations policy on the medical use of marijuana, days after a 12-year-olds cannabis-based epilepsy medicine was confiscated at Heathrow Airport, prompting a national discussion as the boy fought life-threatening seizures and politicians procrastinated. The boy, Billy Caldwell, suffers from status epilepticus, a kind of seizure that can last for hours. When a seizure takes hold he sometimes starts to turn blue. And without treatment, one could be fatal. Over the weekend, Mr. Javid authorized the use of the medicine to treat him. The spectacle of one boys agonizing battle against an inflexible bureaucracy has made Prime Minister Theresa Mays response look flat-footed, while prompting a wider debate about legalizing the drug itself for recreational use. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, William Hague, a former leader of Mrs. Mays Conservative Party, argued that by retreating and allowing the cannabis oil to be used, the government had implicitly conceded that the law has become indefensible. South Sudan. Syria. Afghanistan. Myanmar. Somalia. The mention of these nations conjures images of violent conflict and of humanity on the move. Many in the affluent West are fearful of a world in which they imagine refugees from these countries are flooding into Europe and the United States at record rates. Those anxieties have driven governments to tighten borders and slash refugee resettlements. But in reality, the vast majority of the worlds refugees have not gone very far and are largely living in neighboring countries, a fact reasserted in an annual report from the United Nations refugee agency this week. The report said 68.5 million people worldwide were classified in 2017 as having been forcibly displaced because of conflict and persecution, the highest number since the end of World War II. Among them are 25.4 million refugees those who have fled to another country to escape war or persecution in their own country and who receive special protections under international law. AL HUDAYDAH, Yemen The battle for Al Hudaydah, the Yemeni port city and lifeline to a nation threatened with famine, intensified on Tuesday as warplanes from a Saudi-led, Western-backed Arab coalition pounded targets citywide in an effort to drive out Iran-allied Houthi rebels. Fighters exchanged fire over mine-infested ground at the disused international airport south of the city. Houthi tanks fired shells to defend a key coastal road. Rebels dug trenches into approach roads, in anticipation of a fight for the city center. Even with all that, the port kept operating. Dock workers hastily unloaded three ships sent by the United Nations World Food Program that contained enough food for six million people for one month, a spokeswoman, Bettina Luescher, told reporters in Geneva. The sheer amount was a reminder of how the fate of Al Hudaydah has become tied to the fate of millions of vulnerable Yemenis. The stream of trucks that trundles from the Red Sea port account for about 70 percent of imports in a country where two-thirds of the 29 million people rely on international aid. Aid groups warn that any interruption to that movement would cut supplies to eight million people on the edge of starvation, and cause a sharp rise in food prices for other Yemenis, potentially tipping them into danger. United States immigration agents are seizing children from parents at the southern border. Italys new populist coalition is forcing refugees to turn elsewhere. An anti-migrant backlash now threatens to fracture Germanys government. And through it all, the worlds population of displaced people keeps rising. In a new sign of the collision between surging flows of refugees and the growing hostility in affluent host countries, the United Nations refugee agency reported Tuesday that the total number of forcibly displaced people rose by almost three million people in 2017, to 68.5 million. It was the sixth consecutive year that the figure hit a post-World War II record. The total figure, contained in the agencys annual global trends report, includes refugees, asylum seekers and the internally displaced that is, people forced from their homes who have not fled their countries. Refugees accounted for most of the increase. Ravaged by seven years of war, Syria led with the highest total of displaced people. 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The city does not have a governor or voting representation in Congress. Read more Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, a Democrat, faces a challenge from Ernest E. Johnson and James Butler. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the long-serving delegate to the House of Representatives, faces a challenge from Kim R. Ford, a former Obama administration official. Voters will also vote on Initiative 77, which would end an exemption that allows businesses to pay tipped workers, like restaurant servers and bartenders, less than minimum wage. If it passes, employers would be required to pay all their employees a minimum wage of $15 an hour by 2025. Washington is a Democratic stronghold and the winner of the Democratic primary has usually gone on to win the general election. The only Republican running for any office in the city is attorney Michael Bekesha, who is running for a seat on the city council. LIAM STACK We are very pleased to be able to deliver this opportunity to our tribal members and provide real and direct benefits through our treaty settlement, Nga Potiki chairman Colin Reeder said. We welcome Westpac as a long-term partner to Nga Potiki. The scheme hopes to see Nga Potiki contributing equity as a co-owner with tribal members to buy their first homes. Westpac NZ will provide lending to the member, who will need to satisfy the banks normal criteria. As equity builds in the property, the member will be able to buy Nga Potiki out of the arrangement, Nga Potiki Housing project co-ordinator Victoria Kingi explained. Westpac NZ CEO David McLean emphasised Westpacs commitment to growing New Zealanders financial wellbeing, saying the bank is keen to contribute to innovation that helps more New Zealanders into affordable homes. We think this is a great initiative from Nga Potiki that helps their members overcome the barrier of needing a large deposit and lowers their loan servicing cost, said McLean. As the owners income or equity rises they can then take on a greater stake until they own the whole property. Gauri Lankesh case: HC seeks report on 'police torture' of 4 accused Bengaluru oi-PTI The Karnataka High Court has directed two magistrate courts to submit a report on allegations of custodial torture of four accused in the Gauri Lankesh murder case and non-compliance of judicial procedures. The allegations are "serious in nature" and the Registry of the High Court has been directed to communicate the order to the magistrates of the first and third additional chief metropolitan magistrate (ACMM) courts, Justice K N Phaneendra said when the matter came up for hearing on Monday. "They should submit a report on the allegations within 10 days from the date of receipt of this order," he said. In an affidavit, advocate NP Amrutesh alleged that Amol Kale, one of the accused in the case, was beaten, slapped and punched on his cheek by police officers while in custody. The magistrates also failed to comply with procedures mandated by the Supreme Court regarding persons in police custody, he claimed. The advocate is representing Kale, Sujith Kumar, Amit Ramachandra Degvekar and Manohar Edave, arrested in connection with the killing of the veteran journalist. The counsel for the accused also alleged that the magistrate did not order a medical examination even after being informed on June 14 about the torture meted out to one of the accused by the police. "Instead, the magistrate only recorded injury marks on his body," he said. The counsel further said similar complaints regarding custodial torture of the other accused were also made on May 31 before the magistrate of the third ACMM, which was neglected. Hence, he prayed for a court direction to authorities concerned to conduct a medical examination of the accused and a probe into their illegal detention and torture by the police. He also sought Rs 25 lakh as compensation for each of the accused, besides a direction to the magistrate to record their statements in in-camera proceedings. On June 12, the high court had issued notices to the Karnataka government, state police chief and police officials concerned in the matters. It had also directed the police to ensure that the accused were not ill-treated. Gauri Lankesh, a Left-leaning journalist and a strong Hindutva critic, was shot-dead from a close range by motorcycle-borne assailants in front of her house on September 5 last year. PTI For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 13:58 [IST] No, L K Advani did not says he regretted handing over country to Modi-Shah Advanis former aide Kulkarni bats for Rahul Gandhi as PM India oi-Staff By Oneindia Staff Writer BJP veteran L K Advani's former aide Sudheendra Kulkarni said India needs a leader who can solve "big problems" such as the Kashmir issue and therefore he would like to see Congress chief Rahul Gandhi as the future prime minister. Listing disputes with Pakistan and China, he said Prime Minister Narendra Modi has "failed" to solve the big problems. Speaking at a panel discussion in Mumbai, Kulkarni praised Gandhi, saying he is a "leader with good heart". He said dialogue is the only solution to solve the long-standing dispute with Pakistan, and normalising ties with the neighbouring country is key to India becoming a great nation. "We must state what is required for solving the problem with Pakistan. And which is why I made a suggestion that I would like to see Rahul Gandhi as future prime minister," he said at the event organised by All India Professionals' Congress. The event was attended by senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid, whose book 'Spectrum Politics' was launched there. Kulkarni added: "(Rahul Gandhi) is young and he is idealist. He is a man with compassion. No political leader in recent times had spoken the language of love, affection and compassion." Ahead of the 2019 general elections, Kulkarni said Gandhi should visit neighbouring countries such as Pakistan, China and Bangladesh and emerge with ideas to solve the "big problems". "Like Rajiv Gandhi did when he was in the opposition... He went to Afghanistan. Similarly, Rahul ji should go to Pakistan, China, Bangladesh and emerge as a leader with new ideas on how to solve big problems that Modi ji has failed to solve," Kulkarni said. He described himself as a "well-wisher" of the Congress and pitched for a dialogue between the party and the RSS notwithstanding their differences. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 7:17 [IST] Induction of Congress MLAs into BJP is death of Parrikar's legacy, says outgoing Goa deputy CM Swaraj, Parrikar, Ananth Kumar: BJP has lost some of its tallest leaders recently Back to work: What transpired at the Goa Cabinet meet chaired by Parrikar India oi-Vicky Nanjappa Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar chaired his first Cabinet meeting after coming back from medical treatment in the US as the Cabinet cleared a slew of proposals, including releasing ailing aged prisoners. Parrikar spent nearly three months in the US where he underwent treatment for a pancreatic ailment and returned home last week. Among other decisions, the Cabinet recognised US state of Hawaii as the "sister state to Goa". Talking to reporters after the meeting, Parrikar said even during his US stay, he was in touch with the state administration on a regular basis and participated in all key decisions. "I was absolutely in touch with the state for all decision-making purposes. Every decision was referred to me through e-mail and I used to approve it personally from the US," the 62-year-old BJP chief minister said. "I had a detailed idea of what was happening in Goa," he said, indirectly referring to the Congress allegations that key files were not cleared by him but "someone else". The main opposition party, in fact, hadfiled a formal complaint with the Goa Police's Crime Branch, alleging that "someone else", and not the chief minister", was clearing files. The Cabinet today passed a resolution recommending Governor Mridula Sinha to pardon the aged prisoners who are ailing behind bars. "The Governor had requested me to consider the cases of genuine prisoners who are aged and ailing behind bars. Accordingly, we decided to recommend to the Governor to pardon remaining years of sentence of three prisoners who really deserve leniency," Parrikar said. Among the prisoners is 91-year-old Gurudas Naik who has spent more than ten years behind bars. The other two to get relief are Mario Jose D'Silva (73) and Shivaya Parihar (73). In another significant decision, the Cabinet approved the draft of an agreement to be signed between Goa and State of Hawaii of the USA which will promote both the regions of the world as "sister states". Parrikar said all the necessary approval has been obtained from the external affairs ministry to sign such an agreement with the island state of America. As per the agreement, Goa and Hawaii will recognise that cooperation between the two states will contribute to improving the standards of living of their respective people. "The cooperation would be in the fields of trade, tourism, sports, technology, pharmaceutical, cashew wine business, cultural, culinary and educational exchanges, yoga, ayurvedic and ancient Hawaiian Lomi massage, agriculture, skill development, fisheries and art and culture," he said. The Cabinet also gave approval for summoning the monsoon session of the legislative assembly from July 19, said Parrikar. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 5:51 [IST] Who was Sadanand Singh? The veteran Congress leader died at 76 Bihar court's unique condition to rape accused to get bail: Wash clothes of 2000 women Bihar judge who asked molestation accused to wash clothes of 2000 women restrained from work Not giving up demand for special status for Bihar: Chief Minister Nitish Kumar Bihar class 10th exams: 200 answer sheets go missing a day before results India oi-Vikas By Vikas A day before Bihar class 10th results are to be decalred, 200 answer sheets have gone missing. Reports say that a bag containing 200 answer sheets of Bihar Class 10th Matric 2018 examination has gone missing from Balika Inter school in Gopalaganj. The school authorities have registered a complaint and the police have launched an investigation into the matter, reported ANI. Bihar Board class 10th results will be released on June 20 (Tommorrow). The Bihar Board Class 10 examinations were held by the Bihar Board between 21 February and 28 February. Close to 18 lakh students will receive their class 10 result on Wednesday. As per the tradition, the result will be announced by the State Education Minister and the Board Chairman and will be hosted online, thereafter. Students who appeared for the Bihar 10th exam will be able to check their results on the official BSEB website, biharboard.ac.in, or even on biharboardonline.bihar.gov.in. Last year, the Bihar 10th results were declared on June 22nd and the pass percentage was 50.12%. Bihar Class 12th results were declared earlier this month. NEET All India topper Kalpana Kumari had topped even the class 12 exams in Science stream. Lakhimpur Kheri violence: SC says it is unsatisfied with action taken by UP govt Govt yet to decide on 12 names reiterated by SC collegium for appointment as judges Cauvery row: 'HDK meeting PM was a waste of time', says TN Minister D Jayakumar India oi-Madhuri Tamil Nadu Minister D Jayakumar on Tuesday said that Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Cauvery row was a waste of time. Speaking to media, Jayakumar said,''There is clear direction from SC on Cauvery row. Karnataka Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy meeting Modi was a waste of time. Whether it is Kumaraswamy, Narayanasamy or some other Swamy, we have Cauvery management board & it is the ultimate Swami.'' The Karnataka government had earlier opposed any move to form Cauvery Water Management Board. It had suggested the formation of Cauvery Decision Implementation Committee. On February 16, the Supreme Court had directed the government to form the CMA within six weeks, in a verdict that marginally increased Karnataka's share of Cauvery water, reduced the allocation for Tamil Nadu and sought to settle the protracted water dispute between the two states. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 13:02 [IST] Centre favours an Army veteran as J&K Governor: Here are the two names India oi-Vicky Nanjappa The focus has shifted right back to Jammu and Kashmir with the BJP pulling out of the alliance. So far no party has come forward to stake a claim to form the government and the NC has made it clear that it did not have the mandate. This ideally would mean that President's rule would be in place. The big question is who will be the Governor of the state in the existing scenario. The current Governor in Jammu and Kashmir is Narinder Nath Vohra. His term comes to an end on June 25, but until a new Governor is appointed, his term would be extended. Sources say that the Government is in favour of appointing a person from an Army background as the next Governor of Jammu and Kashmir. The name that is on top is that of Syed Ata Hasnain. The other name doing the rounds is that of G D Bakshi. Sources say that the favourite to get the post of Governor is Syed Ata Hasnain. He has very good knowledge of Kashmir and has handled the crisis back in 2010 well, which earned him praises. Who is Syed Ata Hasnain: Syed Ata Hasnain was commissioned into the 4th Battalion, The Garhwal Rifles, from the Indian Military Academy, Dehradun. As a Brigadier, he served in Jammu and Kashmir as Commander, 12 Infantry Brigade, on the Line of Control, near the town of Uri. He later commanded 19 Infantry Division in Baramulla, Jammu and Kashmir, as a Major General, serving under the overall direction of XV Corps. As a Lieutenant General, Hasnain has been posted as General Officer Commanding (GOC), XXI Corps, in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. In October 2010, he returned to the XV Corpos in Kashmir as the GOC. He held several meetings to redress grievances and concerns of commons citizens, and to bring the Army closer to them. He conceived and operationalised the "Hearts Doctrine" which focused on people as the centre of gravity in Kashmir. His contribution towards improving the security scenario in Kashmir was the balance he brought between the employment of hard power in counter infiltration and counter terrorist operations and military soft power. Who is G D Bakshi: Major General Gagandeep Bakshi was born in Jammu. He is from the Jammu and Kashmir Rifles. A veteran of many skirmishes on the Line of Control and of counter-terrorist operations in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab, he was awarded the Vishisht Seva Medal for commanding a battalion in operations in Kargil. Bakshi is a combat veteran of many skirmishes on the LC and Counter-Terrorist operations in J&K and Punjab. He commanded his battalion in active operations in Kargil and was awarded the Vishist Seva Medal. Later he commanded a brigade in Counter-Terrorist operations in the very rugged mountains of Kishtwar and was awarded the Sena Medal for his distinguished services. He subsequently commanded the reputed Romeo Force during intensive Counter-Terrorist operations in the Rajouri-Punch Districts of J&K in the wake of Operation sarp vinash and succeeded in pacifying the area. He has served two tenures at the highly prestigious Directorate General of Military Operations (during Op Pawan and Op Vijay) and was the first BGS (IW) at HQ Northern Command where he dealt with Information Warfare and Psychological Operations, according to an entry in the Wikipedia. Why is there so much hatred against farmers: Arvind Kejriwal slams PM on Lakhimpur Kheri incident Delhi crisis: Tejashwi Yadav extends support to Kejriwal, slams BJP, LG India oi-Oneindia Staff By Oneindia Staff New Delhi, June 19: After chief ministers of four states governed by opposition parties and Shiv Sena leaders expressed their solidarity with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) over the Delhi deadlock, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Tejashwi Yadav came out in support of the team Arvind Kejriwal. Speaking to news agency, ANI, the former deputy CM of Bihar accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of "halting developmental work from Bihar to Delhi". He added that the saffron party "can take any step for political gain." The son of former Bihar CM, Lalu Prasad Yadav, questioned the role of Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal as he is yet to meet the Delhi CM, in spite of his sit-in protest at the office of LG which entered its ninth day on Tuesday. "If anyone who has stopped developmental work, be it in Bihar or Delhi, it is the BJP. BJP can take any step for political gain. What is the reason for Lt Governor not meeting Delhi CM?: Tejashwi Yadav, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader," tweeted ANI. If anyone who has stopped developmental work, be it in Bihar or Delhi, it is the BJP. BJP can take any step for political gain. What is the reason for Lt Governor not meeting Delhi CM?: Tejashwi Yadav, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader pic.twitter.com/vpgspY5TVl ANI (@ANI) June 18, 2018 While two of Kejriwal's protesting colleagues--deputy CM Manish Sisodia and health minister Satyendar Jain have been shifted to hospital because of their failing health caused by their hunger strike--the Delhi CM is still at the protest venue, refusing to budge an inch till he meets the LG and presents his demands to him. Meanwhile, the LG has turned his home into his 'temporary office' from where he is said to be attending to his files. On Monday, the Delhi High Court rapped Kejriwal and his AAP colleagues for protesting at the LG's office which has almost brought the national capital to a standstill. Some of the main demands raised by the AAP members in this latest protest are--end the strike of IAS officers who are allegedly not cooperating with the Delhi government, the LG's permission for a doorstep delivery system and the grant of full statehood to Delhi. While the BJP and the Congress criticised the AAP for its protest, the CMs of four states--West Bengal's Mamata Banerjee, Andhra Pradesh's Chandrababu Naidu, Karnataka's Kumaraswamy and Kerala's Pinarayi Vijayan--showed solidarity with the AAP and asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to resolve the Delhi "constitutional crisis" during their recent visit to the national capital on the sidelines of the NITI Aayog meeting. Early on Tuesday morning, Kejriwal tweeted to express his frustration over the LG's refusal to meet him and his colleagues. "Good morning Delhi Eight days of wait to meet Hon'ble LG. Dy CM and UD minister shifted to hospital due to bad health. Hon'ble LG could not find eight minutes in eight days for the people of Delhi. Hope he finds some time today," tweeted Kejriwal. Good morning Delhi Eight days of wait to meet Honble LG. Dy CM and UD minister shifted to hospital due to bad health. Honble LG could not find eight minutes in eight days for the people of Delhi. Hope he finds some time today Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 8:05 [IST] International Yoga Day: How Modi made yoga a global spectacle India oi-Vikas By Vikas Yoga has been a part of Indian culture for thousands of years and over the years this ancient practice has spread to many parts of the globe. Yoga is not just a form of exercise that strengthens the body, it is a form of practice that heals mind, body and soul. It would not be right to give credit to a single person for make yoga popular across the world, as there have been several yogis, such as BKS Iyengar, Baba Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and many others, who took this ancient form to masses. What Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government should be given credit is for their efforts to get yoga recognised by the United Nations. It was after PM Modi's address to the UN General Assembly on September 27, 2014, that UN adopted June 21st as International Day of Yoga. The idea of International Day of Yoga was first proposed by Modi during his speech at the UNGA, on 27 September 2014. In his UNGA speech, Modi said, "Yoga is an invaluable gift of India's ancient tradition. It embodies unity of mind and body; thought and action; restraint and fulfillment; harmony between man and nature; a holistic approach to health and well-being. It is not about exercise but to discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and the nature. By changing our lifestyle and creating consciousness, it can help in well being. Let us work towards adopting an International Yoga Day." Following this initial proposal, the UNGA held informal consultations on the draft resolution entitled "International Day of Yoga", on 14 October 2014. On 11 December 2014, India's Permanent Representative Asoke Mukherji introduced the draft resolution in UNGA. The draft text received broad support from 177 Member States who sponsored the text, which was adopted without a vote. This initiative found support from many global leaders. A total of 177 nations co-sponsored the resolution, which is the highest number of co-sponsors ever for any UNGA resolution of such nature. The first yoga day celebration was held at Raj path and all arrangements were manged by ministry of AYUSH. First yoga day was celebrated on June 21, 2015. All over the world, almost 21 yoga asanas were performed by dignitaries from 84 nations and accompanied by Prime Minister Modi. This celebration owns 2 Guinness World Records. The first record was for being the world's largest yoga class and featured by 35,985 people and the second one was for having maximum number of participating nationalities that is 84. How Nirav Modi flew? Did the Interpol sleep over the CBI notice? India oi-Vicky Nanjappa Absconding diamond jeweller Nirav Modi managed to travel across several countries even after information about his passport being revoked by the Indian government was flashed in the Interpol central database on February 24, the CBI has said. The agency said it had shared the information about the revocation of his passport in the 'diffusion' notice issued through the Interpol on February 15. "After the passport was revoked/cancelled by External Affairs Ministry, we had updated this information in the diffusion notice. The information that passport of Nirav Modi has been revoked was provided in the Interpol central database, available to all the member countries, on February 24," CBI spokesperson Abhishek Dayal said. In its intimation to the Interpol, the CBI gave details of all the five passports issued by the government to Nirav Modi. These passports are linked with each other, but their numbers changed because of renewal or the booklets becoming full. According to the information shared by the UK, after the information was flashed in the Interpol central database, Nirav Modi travelled from Heathrow Airport in London to Hong Kong on March 15, from JFK Airport in New York to Heathrow on March 28 and from Heathrow to Charles De Gaulle, Paris on March 31, sources said. The information was provided in response to the 'diffusion' notice issued by the CBI through Interpol, they said, adding once the database is updated, it is on the member countries to share information about the movements of the suspect and the agency can only request them to share it. The sources said that no credible information about the location of Nirav Modi is available with the agency. The spokesperson said after the 'diffusion' notice was issued by the Interpol on the request of the CBI, the agency followed it up with the Interpol coordination agencies of six countries, where Modi was suspected to have fled. The agency requested these countries directly to share information about his whereabouts and movements. It sent reminders to the Interpol coordination agency of the UK on April 25, May 22, May 24 and May 28, agency sources said, adding that similar reminders were also sent to the agencies of the USA, Singapore, Belgium, the UAE and France. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 7:26 [IST] In Chinas tribute-lateral offer, Govt, opposition stand united India oi-Staff By Oneindia Staff Writer India said that matters related to India-Pakistan relations are purely bilateral in nature and that there is no scope for involvement of any third country, reacting to Chinese envoy Luo Zhaohui's comments endorsing trilateral cooperation among India, China and Pakistan to resolve such issues. The opposition Congress party also condemned the Chinese ambassador's statement. Endorsing the idea of trilateral cooperation between India, China and Pakistan under the aegis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Luo said it could "in the future" help resolve bilateral issues between New Delhi and Islamabad and help maintain peace. In response to queries on the comments made by the Chinese Ambassador to India on a possible trilateral summit between India, China and Pakistan, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said India had not received any such suggestion from the Chinese government. "We have seen reports on comments made by the Chinese Ambassador in this matter. We have not received any such suggestion from the Chinese government. We consider the statement as the personal opinion of the Ambassador. Matters related to India-Pakistan relations are purely bilateral in nature and have no scope for involvement of any third country," he said. Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari said the Government of India should also strongly condemn the "unwarranted suggestion" of the Chinese Ambassador and that all issues between India and Pakistan would be resolved as per the Shimla Agreement. The Chinese Ambassador said "some Indian friends" had suggested trilateral cooperation comprising India, China and Pakistan under the aegis of the SCO, which was a "very constructive idea". "Security cooperation is one of the three pillars of the SCO. Some Indian friends suggested that China, India and Pakistan may have some kind of trilateral cooperation under the SCO," he said in his keynote address on 'Beyond Wuhan: How Far and Fast can China-India Relations Go' at an event organised by the Chinese Embassy here. Responding to a question on whether a trilateral meet between the Asian neighbours will help in solving the India-Pakistan dispute, he said he personally considered it "a good and constructive idea". For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 5:42 [IST] No cause for panic, new media rules will benefit all: Javadekar Javadekar launches National Digital Library of India on National Reading Day India oi-Oneindia Staff By Oneindia Staff New Delhi: Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar has launched a new digital initiative National Digital Library of India (NDLI) on the occasion of National Reading Day. NDLI is a project of the Ministry of Human Resource Development under the aegis of National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) with the objective making digital educational resources available to all citizens of the country to empower, inspire and encourage learning. NDLI developed by IIT Khadagpur is the Single Window Platform that collects and collates meta data from premier learning institutions in India and abroad, as well as other relevant sources. It is a digital repository containing textbooks, articles, videos, audio books, lectures, simulations, fiction and all other kinds of learning media. Speaking on the occasion, Javadekar said, "A new era of Digital India has begun. We dedicate this Digital Library to the Nation." He said that the National Digital Library is a 24x7 ubiquitous knowledge resource that is accessible to anyone with internet access and it is built to enable the rise of Digital India. The Minister said that anybody can access the digital library anytime and anywhere absolutely free of cost and will contribute greatly to the Government's commitment towards "Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat". The minister explained that NDLI is a digital library that makes quality learning resources available to all learners and has 1.7 crore content from more than 160 sources, in over 200 languages, everywhere and 30 lakh users are registered on NDLI as on date and our target is to increase the users 10 times in a year. He said that NDLI platform is collaborative in nature and extended his regards to contributing institutions which have made available their digital repositories for integration with NDLI. Javadekar added that apart from website, NDL is also available on the Mobile app. NDLI Mobile app is enabling access to rich digital content of libraries across the country and even foreign repositories to users even in the remotest of areas. He further said that the App, which has been downloaded over 6.70 lakh times, is currently available for both iPhone and Android users. Users can search for content using various parameters like subject matter, source, content type and more. Right Now the app is available in three languages - English, Hindi and Bengali. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 20:17 [IST] Curfew in Ahmedabad extended till 6am on May 21; Night curfew to continue in 36 cities for another 3 days Man seeks divorce on grounds that wife has 'manly voice', court junks plea India oi-Vikas By Vikas A man from Ahmedabad approached a court seeking divorce on grounds that his wife has facial hair and manly voice. The family court has, however, junked his plea even as the man contended that he was duped and not informed about voice and facial hair before marriage. The wife, in her reply to the plea, said she had some facial hair due to hormonal reasons, and they could be removed through treatment, said a PTI report. As per man's peition, the woman was wearing a veil when he first met her before the marriage. In some parts of India asking a woman to remove veil before marriage is considered against tradition. The man contended that he was duped by the woman's family, as before the marriage he was not aware that she had facial hair and manly voice. Her husband was citing false reasons to get a divorce as he wanted to kick her out of the house, wife alleged. After the wife's lawyer made the submissions, the man didn't turn up for further proceedings, prompting the court to dismiss his petition. OneIndia News with PTI inputs For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 9:06 [IST] MBBS, BDS admission: Exception made for these 8 government colleges India oi-Chennabasaveshwar By Chennabasaveshwar The Supreme Court made an exception by allowing eight government medical colleges in three states, which were barred by the Centre for certain deficiencies, to enroll 800 students in MBBS and BDS courses for academic year 2018-19. The court fixed the accountability on the chief secretary and principal secretary in-charge of medical education of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand for rectifying the deficiencies pointed out by the Medical Council of India (MCI) within the stipulated time-line given by the respective state governments. A vacation bench of justices S Abdul Nazeer and Indu Malhotra asked the MCI to carry out an inspection after three months to verify if the state governments had rectified the deficiencies pointed out by it. "We hereby direct that in view of the undertakings submitted by the principal secretaries of the three states, permission is granted to the said government medical colleges for admission to the MBBS course for the current academic year, 2018-19," the bench said. It added that the seats in these colleges would be included in the seat matrix, for which counselling is scheduled to take place on June 19. "The MCI shall carry out an inspection after three months to verify that the state governments have in fact carried out compliance to rectify the deficiencies pointed out. If the deficiencies are not removed within the period specified, the principal secretary of each of the states will be held personally responsible for non-compliance with the orders passed by this court," the bench said. It, however, clarified that the order passed in the present case should not be treated as a precedent and added that it was passed considering the peculiar facts and circumstances of the case as otherwise, over 800 seats in government medical colleges would have been wasted. The court kept the petition pending for compliance and listed it for further hearing on September 25. The eight government medical colleges which were barred from admitting students for 2018-19 are -- Anugrah Narayan Magadh Medical College, Gaya, Vardhman Institute of Medical Sciences, Pawapuri, Nalanda and Government Medical College, Bettiah -- all in Bihar -- which have a total of 250 seats. The Mahatma Gandhi Medical College at Jamshedpur, Jharkhand was also denied permission to admit students by the Centre. The four medical colleges in Uttar Pradesh that were denied permission are -- Government Allopathic Medical College at Banda, Government Medical College at Saharanpur, Government Medical College and Super Speciality Hospital at Azamgarh and Rajkiya Medical College at Jalaun district. During the hearing, the three states gave undertakings that they had either rectified the deficiencies -- mostly related to shortage of faculty staff -- or would remove the shortcomings within a fixed time-line. At one point of time, the bench asked senior advocate Ranjit Kumar, who was appearing for Bihar, that with insufficient infrastructure, how could the colleges impart medical education. "They will be treating human beings, not animals. With this kind of infrastructure, how will they impart medical education? There is a verdict of this court, in which it has been said that half-baked doctors are graduating from government medical colleges," it said. Additional Solicitor General Maninder Singh, appearing for the MCI, said an exception could be created for the colleges on the condition that officials would be held personally accountable for removing the deficiencies. He added that a one-time exception could be given, provided that the colleges strictly adhered to the time-line, so that the seats did not go waste. On June 14, the court had issued notice and asked the Centre and the MCI to suggest a way out of the crisis, so that hundreds of medical seats were not wasted. It had said the letters of permission in respect of medical colleges run by state governments had a special significance as the seats in these institutes were given to students purely on merit and for a nominal fee. "Any refusal of letter of permission is bound to reflect in reduction of seats available to meritorious candidates. However, at the same time, the adherence to the requirement of having requisite faculty, facility and infrastructure, as laid down by the MCI from time to time, must be scrupulously observed," it had said and sought an undertaking from the chief secretary of each of the three states for removing the shortcomings. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 6:53 [IST] Meet Mohini Patankar, a passionate runner, now finalist of Mrs India Worldwide -2018 India oi-Madhuri A 31-year-old Mohini Patankar, who hails from Bengaluru, has been selected in Haut Monde Mrs India Worldwide-2018 Grand Finale (a beauty pageant for married Indian women across the Globe) which will be organised on 22nd September in Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, Delhi. The pageant Mrs India Worldwide 2018 is organized, with an aim of transforming married women, who are not professional models, into successful Fashion Icons and to help them establish their own identity as a professional and as an entrepreneur. Another highlight of this event is that the selected contestants will go on a special trip to Greece for the finale, where they will be groomed by the top industry experts. Mrs India Worldwide 2018 started its 8th edition in the month of April. The auditions happened in various cities of India and orientation happened in Gurugram. Meanwhile, the grooming session will be held in Greece, Europe for 10 days. Around 86 participants from India have been selected for Mrs. India Worldwide 2018 and also from various parts of the world like Australia, USA, Dubai, Singapore etc. Patankar, whose family is originally from Pune, has been married for 9 years and has two kids. In an interview with OneIndia, Patankar said that her passion is running. She has so far won more than 40+ running competition. Patankar currently owns an event management firm - Good Vibes Events and Experiences and has conducted various running events. She also loves singing, dancing and has staged many performances. Her hobbies include Yoga, singing and dancing. Speaking about her journey towards this international title, Patankar said, "The experience towards the title is amazing. You break your own glass ceiling. There is so much to learn and experience. I am really expanding my horizon, making new friends, and various tasks give us a glimpse of social impact." "This platform is helping showcase my beauty, talent and live my dreams. The introvert in me is really transforming into a confident lady. I am making so many good friends on this journey. Even though we are competing for the same crown, we are learning so much for everyone," she also said. Patankar also has a message for people who are cought in the humdrum of daily life: "Health is wealth and through this platform, I want to propagate the same in this busy lifestyle. Through my running and fitness events, I want to spread this message." To know more about her: My FB Profile: https://www.facebook.com/mohini.patankar.16 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mohinipatankarmrsindiaww2018/ For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 18:31 [IST] This is why Modi decided to lead nation from Ranchi on International Yoga Day Send pics of preparations of International Yoga Day: MP Governor India oi-Chennabasaveshwar By Chennabasaveshwar Governor of Madhya Pradesh Anandiben Patel has directed all the universities of the state to send photos of the preparations of International Yoga Day. The universities have been asked to send the names of the students and teachers who will be participating in the event till 4 pm today. Anandiben Patel has given standing instructions requiring educational institutions to send a report to Raj Bhavan comprising details including photographs, number of participants and a CD of the function. Patel has also instructed universities and colleges to hold seminars, debates, competitions and other events on International Yoga Day, reported CNN News18 on June 18. The Congress has objected to the governor's action. Congress Rajya Sabha MP from Madhya Pradesh Vivek Tankha tweeted, "Constitutionally a governor has no role or power to reach out directly. Governor only works on aid and advice of cabinet, barring very few exceptions. Pls don't lay down wrong precedents, Madam Governor." MP Gov tells colleges to observe yoga day,send photos,videos as proof. Constitutionally a Gov has no role or power to reach out directly. Gov only works on aid & advice of cabinet - barring v few exceptions. Pls dont lay down wrong precedents Madam Gov Vivek Tankha (@VTankha) June 19, 2018 Pulling out of alliance with the PDP has larger implications; PDPs leniency towards radicals India oi-Vinod By Vinod New Delhi: With the Bharatiya Janata Party pulling out of the alliance, the party has not only addressed the issue that has been plaguing ever since it joined hands with the PDP in the state government. Actually it is being argued that forming the government was not only necessary to give message to the people of the country that the party was committed to the democratic process but to show the commitment to the international community. The BJP has been able to give message to the party workers in the state that it will not compromise and it also addressed its core support base across the country as the alliance with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir was harming the BJP. Senior BJP leaders are of the view that this was the best possible option and now let the governor take a call on it. Sources said that in fact chief minister Mehbooba Mufti wanted to continue with the alliance but she was lenient on stone peters; was putting pressure on the government to initiate talks to separatists; and not allowing the security forces free hand to Pakistan-sponsored terrorist. Moreover, misinformation was also communicated that local recruitment is high which is absolutely wrong. High placed sources said that over 50 students have been successful in NEET examination this year, 32 student have made it to JEE (Advance) and many in the civil services examination so they are definitely not into terror business. They are coming from across the border. Security forces were causing damage to Pakistan posts across the border but terrorist sneaked into this side were not dealt with sternly so such decision became imminent. Meeting of the top RSS leaders with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Party President Amit Shah has sealed the decision on the issue as reports from the remote areas were not positive on Kashmir. National Security Advisor Ajit Dobhal's meeting with Shah on Tuesday has sealed the issue for all goods. Sources in the BJP said that it was a big relief for the BJP leaders and workers as the BJP in the state government was made accountable without any authority with the CM being the sole authority in the state. The BJP sources said that to the BJP was over now on the other hand political parties like PDP will have the daunting tasks of keeping their folks together to save their political existence. BJP sources said that the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister was not cooperating with the alliance partner and outcome was not proportionate to the BJP's efforts. The government was not only lenient on stone pelters but it wanted all cases to be withdrawn against them. Besides that the government failed to spend the money allocated to it. It could hardly spend Rs 35,000 crore out of Rs 1 Lakh crore given to it. BJP national general secretary and in-charge of the Jammu and Kashmir matters Ram Madhav said that the government was behaving in partitioned manner as the two other regions of the state - Laddakh and Jammu - were neglected by the government. Sources said that it was important to take such decision to deal with the present scenario where common citizen was getting killed. Union minister of state in PMO Jitendra Singh said, "The Central government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has done lot for the state that none has done in the past two-three decades and the Center facilitated equitable distribution of funds for all region." Madhav said that it has become untenable to continue with the government as an ally so the BJP decided to pull out from the government. The BJP leaders rules out the possibility of the party aligning with any other political outfit in the state. The government wants to keep the power of running the state in its hands with the help of governor while alliance with any party will stop them doing so. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 19:33 [IST] Sonia ji unwell, Rahul Gandhi should take over as Congress chief: Siddaramaiah as party preps up for CWC meet Rahul write to Shujaat Bukharis father, expresses solidarity India oi-Staff By Oneindia Staff Writer Congress president Rahul Gandhi wrote to the family of slain journalist Shujaat Bukhari, saying his killing was a grim reminder that progressive voices were constantly at the risk of being silenced by extremist elements. "I am shocked at the cold-blooded killing of Shujaat Bukhari outside his office. One of the few moderate voices in an atmosphere torn apart by narrow political considerations, his loss is a grim reminder that progressive voices are constantly at the risk of being silenced by extremist elements," he said in a letter to Rafiuddin Bukhari, the father of the slain journalist. Gandhi said he lauded Bukhari's courage to continue with his work, despite an earlier attempt on his life. "In the true spirit of journalism, his moderate views were critical for a nuanced understanding of the Kashmir question. A firm votary of a political dialogue with Pakistan, his commitment towards a credible peace process will be remembered," he said. "I offer my sincere condolences to the team at Rising Kashmir and wish you success in carrying on the excellent work done by you," the Congress chief added. Bukhari (50), along with his two personal security guards, was shot dead by three motorcycle-borne assailants outside his office here on June 14. A special investigation team (SIT) under the supervision of the Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police, central Kashmir has been constituted to probe the killing. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 8:05 [IST] Why is there so much hatred against farmers: Arvind Kejriwal slams PM on Lakhimpur Kheri incident Desh Ke Mentor: What is Delhi govt's ambitious programme and how it works? Signs of truce: Why IAS officers are happy with Kejriwal India oi-Staff By Oneindia Staff Writer IAS officers of the Delhi government welcomed Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's assurance that he would ensure their safety, saying they are open to formal discussions with the chief minister on the matter. The officers said that they look forward to "concrete interventions" for their security and dignity, a move that may break the four-month-long impasse between the AAP dispensation and the bureaucrats following an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by some ruling party MLAs at the chief minister's residence in February The association of officers of the AGMUT (Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Mizoram and Union territories) cadre said that they continue to be at work with "full dedication" and "vigour". "#DelhiAtWork #NoToStrike Officers of GNCTD welcome Hon'ble CM's appeal. We reiterate that we continue to be at work with full dedication & vigour.," the association tweeted. "We look forward to concrete interventions for our security & dignity. We are open to formal discussions with Hon'ble CM on this matter," it said Kejriwal had yesterday assured the bureaucrats that he will use all the powers and resources at his command to ensure their safety and security and called them part of his family Sharing his statement on Twitter, Kejriwal had said, "I am told that IAS Officers Association has expressed concerns about their safety in a press conference today. I wish to assure them that I will ensure their safety and security with all powers and resources available at my command. It is my duty." Kejriwal, along with his colleagues, have stayed put at the lieutenant governor's office since Monday, demanding that LG Anil Baijal should direct the IAS officers to end their "strike" Kejriwal had said that he and his colleagues will not leave the LG's office until their demands were met. However, the IAS officers maintained that the bureaucrats were not on strike Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who has been on hunger strike since June 13 at the LG's office, was today taken to hospital after his health deteriorated, Kejriwal said. Later in the day, Sisodia tweeted, "Happy for discussions with our officers. Del govt committed to provide them safe n secure environment. However, LG is head of both ?services? and ?security?. So, meeting shud take place in his presence so that assurances related to those subjects cud be given (sic)." "Thats precisely why we have been sitting at Raj Niwas for so many days requesting Hon'ble LG to call all stakeholders and end this impasse (sic)," he said in another tweet Health Minister Satyendar Jain was late last night hospitalised after his condition deteriorated. He was taken to the LNJP Hospital where his condition is stable, doctors said According to the AAP government, the IAS officers have been on "strike" and were boycotting meetings with ministers since the alleged assault on the chief secretary. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 5:46 [IST] Toe our line or pay with your life: The reason why ISI killed Shujaat Bukhari India oi-Vicky Nanjappa The killing of senior journalist, Shujaat Bukhari was done at the direct insistence of the ISI, investigations have revealed. The investigators have picked up a couple of motives behind the killing, but added that the ISI was sending out a larger message and that was, " toe our line." While Bukhari had always advocated for peace, the ISI was upset with him for not towing Pakistan's line on Kashmir. In recent times, the ISI through its terrorists in the Valley has been exerting immense pressure on the journalists in Kashmir to tow Pakistan's line. Bukhari was however clear that he would continue to seek peace in the Valley, but refused to back Pakistan on the Kashmir issue. Investigators have also traced tussle that Bukhari is alleged to have with United Jihad Council chief and Hizbul Mujahideen boss, Syed Salahuddin a month back. Salahuddin had called Bukhari and insisted that he needs to take Pakistan's side on the Kashmir issue. He was also trying to influence the writings so that there is an anti-India/pro-Pakistan tilt. Bukhari however rejected the Salahuddin's suggestion. Investigators and sources in the Intelligence Bureau tell OneIndia that there was no specific information relating to the plot. However there was information coming up suggesting that the ISI wanted to send out a loud message to the journalists in Kashmir who were pro-India. Investigators also say that the manner in which the killing was carried out, it became clear that the ISI wanted the message to be loud and clear. It was a targeted killing no doubt and could have been carried out by a hit-man. However the ISI launched its Lashkar-e-Tayiba operatives led by Naved Jutt. The terrorists also used an AK-47 for the killing, which again was a clear sign that they wanted to spread panic. The narrative from Kashmir is extremely crucial for Pakistan as it always aims at making the Kashmir issue an international one. If the locals in Kashmir who are influenced by journalists do not take Pakistan's side, then it becomes a losing battle for them. The killing of Bukhari, one of the most noted journalists and voices in Kashmir was without a doubt a message to all other journalists in the valley-' toe our line or pay with your life.' AAP leaders to visit Ram Lalla shrine before Ayodhya yatra, first list of UP candidates soon AAP to contest all seats in UP assembly polls, not in talks for any alliance: Sanjay Singh Will Delhi LG meet AAP leaders? Well, Kejriwal is hopeful of breaking the impasse today India oi-Oneindia Staff By Oneindia Staff New Delhi, June 19: Early on Tuesday morning, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, who is on a sit-in protest at the Lieutenant Governor's office, expressed "hope" of breaking the political deadlock in the national capital soon. After greeting "good morning" to his followers on Twitter, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) convener demonstrated his disappointed that in spite of their eight-day long protest, LG Anil Baijal is yet to meet him and his protesting colleagues. However, the Delhi CM ended his message with a positive note stating that he was hopeful that the LG would find some time to meet them on Tuesday. "Good morning Delhi Eight days of wait to meet Hon'ble LG. Dy CM and UD minister shifted to hospital due to bad health. Hon'ble LG could not find eight minutes in eight days for the people of Delhi. Hope he finds some time today," tweeted Kejriwal. Good morning Delhi Eight days of wait to meet Honble LG. Dy CM and UD minister shifted to hospital due to bad health. Honble LG could not find eight minutes in eight days for the people of Delhi. Hope he finds some time today Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 19, 2018 The latest round of protest by the AAP started on Monday last week, when Kejriwal and three of his colleagues decided to sit inside the office of the LG still Baijal met them. It has been eight days now, the LG seems to be in no mood to meet the protesting AAP leaders and end the political crisis in Delhi. Some of the main demands raised by the AAP members in this latest protest are--end the strike of IAS officers who are allegedly not cooperating with the Delhi government, the LG's permission for a doorstep delivery system and the grant of full statehood to Delhi. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress criticised the AAP for its protest, the CMs of four states--West Bengal's Mamata Banerjee, Andhra Pradesh's Chandrababu Naidu, Karnataka's Kumaraswamy and Kerala's Pinarayi Vijayan--showed solidarity with the AAP and asked Prime Minister Narendra Modi to resolve the Delhi "constitutional crisis" during their recent visit to the national capital on the sidelines of the NITI Aayog meeting. After Kejriwal extended an olive branch to the dissenting IAS officers, reports suggest a meeting is likely to take place between the bureaucrats and AAP leaders. Kejriwal, however, wants the LG to be a part of the meeting, if it takes place. The AAP has accused the ruling BJP for orchestrating the latest scuffle involving the LG and its top leaders over several controversial issues. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 9:42 [IST] 'Will win next Maharashtra elections on our own': Shiv Sena India oi-Vikas By Vikas In a strong message to the BJP, the Shiv Sena has said that it would contest the next Maharashtra Assembly elections on its own, adding that the party would play a crucial role even in the 2019 General Elections. Today (June 19) is Shiv Sena's 52nd Anniversary and in the party's mouthpiece Saamna, the Uddhav Thackeray-led party launched a scathing attack on its ally BJP. "Shiv Sena's journey has never been easy. Even today there are many obstacles in our path. However, despite all the hindrances we are confident of winning the next Maharashtra Assembly Elections solo. We also are sure of the fact that we will play a major role in the upcoming general elections," the Saamna editorial read. Amid growing rift between the BJP and the Shiv Sena, Amit Shah had met Uddhav Thackeray earlier this month. Both parties projected the outcome of the meeting differently. At Matoshree, Shah and Thackeray's closed-door meeting lasted two hours. Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and Thackeray's son Aaditya attended a part of it, but senior leaders from both parties were kept out. The BJP dubbed the meeting as 'positive', while Sena said that they have put forth their greivances with the BJP to Shah. The editorial also cornered the Centre over Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 which seeks to give illegal migrants from "minority communities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan" -- Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsi and Christians - an easy and short path to Indian citizenship. "The culture and the identity of Assam are in danger. The Centre is trying to bring in foreign elements in the state, this way the people of the state will have to compromise on their rights," the editorial added. It further slammed the intensions of private developers 'renaming' areas in Mumbai. The Sena chief in the past has objected to alleged change of names of places like Worli and Malabar Hills in Mumbai. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 12:54 [IST] 7 Indians kidnapped in Libya; govt in touch with Libyan authorities to rescue them: MEA Two ships with 39 Indians on board not yet allowed to unload cargo by China: India Funds of Indians in Swiss banks rise to Rs 20,700 cr, highest in 13 years; customer deposits down for 2nd year 52 Indians detained in US crackdown on illegal immigrants International pti-PTI A group of 52 Indians, mostly Sikhs, has been held at a detention centre in the US State of Oregon for being part of a large contingent of illegal immigrants seeking asylum, an American lawmaker has said. The Indians form the largest group of detainees in the total 123 illegal immigrants being held at a facility in Sheridan. The detention centre was recently visited by a group of Democratic lawmakers from the Oregon State, who later told the media about the alleged inhuman condition of the illegal immigrants. The immigrants are seeking asylum in the US. The detainees from India is the largest group of detainees being held in Sheridan, wrote Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici on her blog post. She along with several other Democratic lawmakers from the State visited the detention centre Saturday. "Through our Punjabi translator, we learned that these men were planning to request asylum because they faced severe religious persecution in India. Most are Sikh or Christian. Instead they were incarcerated in a federal prison," she said. "They said they came to the United States for religious freedom, but they felt as if they were 'going crazy' because they are being confined in small cells for up to 22 hours a day," the Congresswoman said. The Indian detainees pointed out that the other non-immigrant prisoners get far more time out of cells, she said. Most of the detainees at the federal facility are asking for asylum because they experienced violence or persecution in their home countries, Bonamici said. Several had travelled to the border with a wife and a child or children; none knew where their family members are, she said. "This is a shameful hour in US history. I don't care what your stance on immigration is, no one should favour ripping children out of their parents' arms ...." Democratic Congressman Earl Blumenauer told reporters after visiting the detention center. He alleged that President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have doubled down on their anti-immigrant, xenophobic agenda with the administration's new "zero tolerance" policy on immigration. "The administration is criminalising families who are fleeing abuse and violence and separating children as ICE detains or deports their parents," he said in a statement. According to the local daily 'The Oregonian', of the total detainees, 52 have identified themselves as Sikhs or Christians from India. They alleged that they fled from their country because of religious persecution from the Hindu majority. The Indians told the delegation that their Hindi and Punjabi translators were the first outsiders they've been able to talk to since they were imprisoned weeks ago, the daily reported. The Congressional delegation included Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden. "As the child of parents whose families found refuge in America from the terrors of Nazi Germany, I strongly believe Donald Trump's cruel and callous treatment of human beings seeking asylum flies in the face of America's core humanitarian values," Wyden said. "Trump's choice of zero tolerance for the refugees we met today and for the others imprisoned around the country this Father's Day weekend makes zero sense and shows zero understanding of American values. "What I saw and heard today highlights the urgency of reversing Trump's mean, dangerous and damaging actions returning America to our unique role as a beacon of hope that welcomed our immigrant ancestors and creating the future we want for our children," he said. These 123 detainees are among the more than 1,600 people that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is holding in federal prisons across the US as it enforces Trump's "zero-tolerance policy" on immigration, the lawmakers said in a joint statement. The men come from 16 different countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Cameroon, China, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, India, Mauritania, Nepal, Peru and Russia, as well as from Congo and Eritrea, it said. The Congressional delegation were told that that detainees are being held upwards for 23 hours a day with three men bunked in each cell. The prison does not have the resources to house ICE detainees alongside pre-trial inmates who are normally held in the facility. The delegation was also told that incompatibility between BOP and ICE telephone systems was preventing ICE detainees at the BOP facility from accessing legal services. According to lawmakers, the detainees described stress as they sit in cells day after day without knowing when they will get a hearing, or get a lawyer, or what comes next. "Several men had been separated from their children, and experienced the added stress of not knowing what happened to their families. "Under Trump's 'zero-tolerance policy', the men's children were taken away at the border one man said an ICE official told him, 'it's not my choice; the decision came from above' and the fathers still don't have any information about their location, condition or well-being," the lawmakers said. PTI Chinese envoy to India open to India-China-Pak trilateral summit on SCO sidelines International oi-Shubham By Shubham Chinese Ambassador to India Luo Zhaohui on Monday, June 18, backed the idea of a trilateral summit among India, Pakistan and China on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to better their relations and achieve a higher degree of regional cooperation. Speaking at a seminar in New Delhi titled 'Beyond Wuhan: How Far and Fast Can China-India Relations Go', Luo said the suggestion that came up from the Indian side about holding a trilateral summit between India, China and Pakistan on the sidelines of the SCO was "constructive". India and Pakistan were inducted as full-fledged members of the SCO at the Astana Summit in June 2017 and they attended the 18th summit of the grouping as full members in Qingdao in China earlier this month. Both China and Russia, the two biggest members of the forum, welcomed the two South Asian countries' entry into the body and hoped that this would help them resolve their disputes. The Qingdao summit took place just over a month after Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Chinese coastal city of Wuhan for an informal talk to set things in order between the two large neighbours in various fields, including the border disputes. India and China found themselves in a serious military showdown over Doklam for two and half months in 2017 and the Modi-Jinping summit was the first major one following the tussle which was at a distance from leading to a war. Citing an analogy, Zuo said China, Russia and Mongolia also had a similar summit in the past and there was no reason that India, China and Pakistan couldn't do it. Stressing that all parties gained from peace at the borders, Luo said that India-China relations couldn't stand another Doklam-like incident and sought in a tweet a "mutually acceptable solution through Special Representatives' Meeting while adopting confidence building measures". The Chinese envoy also presented a four-point vision for the future of Sino-India cooperation and it featured: signing a treaty of friendship and cooperation; negotiating a bilateral free trade agreement; improving connectivity and working for early solution to the boundary issues. Luo, who tweeted that a new bilateral trade target has been set up for $100 billion by 2022, also stressed on people-to-people contact for bettering friendship and mutual understanding. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 9:54 [IST] Nepal PM visits China: India should worry less about zero-sum game, say Chinese experts International oi-Shubham By Shubham India should not worry about its influence on neighbour Nepal diminishing and instead focus on "benign trilateral interactions", analysts were cited as saying by China's Global Times ahead of Nepali Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli's five-day visit to China starting Tuesday, June 19. According to the analysts, India's influence on Nepal's "inconsistent economic cooperation" with China couldn't be ignored and New Delhi, instead of feeling its interests getting threatened by China's growing influence in the Himalayan country, should part ways with its zero-sum game in the region, the Times report said. Oli's visit to China, his second as the prime minister of the country and first in his current term which started in February, has caused concerns in the Indian circles for the premier is seen as more China-friendly in his approach and the two countries have given their bilateral relations a shot in the recent times. Hu Zhiyong, a scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of International Relations told Global Times that Nepal depends heavily on India for its economic health while India feels concerned over the development of China's ties with Nepal and suspects that Beijing is challenging New Delhi's dominance in the region. The Global Times also cited a report carried by the Times of India on June 14 saying the confirmation of plans for a CNEC (China Nepal Economic Corridor) as part of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) "would further reduce Nepal's reliance on India and shift the balance of influence toward China in an area of military importance". Oli, during his visit to China in 2016, signed a transit treaty with the host and sought an expansion of road links through Tibet besides extending China's railway network to Nepal through the Himalayas. India also vowed to improve all sorts of communication - road, railway, waterways - with Nepal during Oli's visit to New Delhi in April this year though observers felt India was running far too behind in the race with China. But the Chinese analysts were in favour of India joining the party to allow the effects of the BRI to be felt across the region. According to Hu: "China should also take India into consideration when developing ties with Nepal. Benign trilateral ties would benefit the implementation of the Belt and Road initiative in the region," the Global Times added. Not everything smooth between China and Nepal Although India is feeling worried with the growing ties between China and Nepal, the Global Times report cited analysts who said that not everything was going smooth in the two countries' relations and Oli's latest visit to China may see discussion on those distracting issues. In 2015, Nepal cleared China's state-owned Three Gorges International Corp to build a hydropower project on the West Seti River which was scheduled to be completed by 2022 but last month, Kathmandu announced that the responsibility of building the plant would be taken up by Nepal herself and the $1.6 billion deal with China was scrapped. It was a second such instance when China was denied an opportunity to build a plant in Nepal, the Global Times cited a Reuters report. Prior reports on Kim Jong-uns 3rd visit to China today show he's a confident leader now International oi-Shubham By Shubham North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un was set to visit China on Tuesday, June 19, for a two-day visit, Japanese and Chinese news reports said. This will be Kim's third visit to the neighbouring country since March this year and exactly a week after his historic summit with US President Donald Trump. Kim is expected to brief Chinese President Xi Jinping about his meeting with Trump and also discuss a possible negotiating strategy. Kim is said to have a successful meeting with Trump in Singapore last week where he reiterated Pyongyang's commitment to denuclearisation as against the US's guaranteeing it security. Though observers were sceptical about the joint declaration that the two leaders came after the summit, yet hopes were high about peace in the Korean Peninsula. However, the significance of Kim's third visit to China is that it has been reported about prior to his arrival - something that didn't happen during his first two times. In March end, Kim visited Beijing secretly in a train after Trump accepted Pyongyang's indirect offer to hold direct talks. In early May, Kim's personal plane - one from North Korea's Air Koryo - was spotted in the coastal city of Dalian in East China, giving rise to speculations and it was later confirmed that the North Korean leader made his second secret trip to China amid the growing uncertainty in the run-up to the summit with Trump. The prior acknowledgement that Kim was set to make his third visit to China by air confirms that the leader is now more confident about foreign engagements and is no more shy to talk to the relevant powers on how to proceed on the peace roadmap. China is North Korea's closest ally in the region and Kim has visited it at every crucial juncture to seek guidance and assistance on how to deal with the Americans and their allies. China, although is a foe to the US, has fully supported the North Korea-US talk for it helps its own interest of seeing a peaceful neighbourhood, something which was being threatened by the North's reckless nuclear ambitions. It has also suggested the UN Security Council to consider easing economic sanctions on North Korea even though Trump said that they would remain as long as Pyongyang had the weapons. The U president, however, has sought to end war games with South Korea in the Korean Peninsula besides hinting at removing American troops stationed in the South in the future. South Korea and Japan, the other US ally in the region, though are not convinced about the move. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 8:32 [IST] Collapse of Kabul will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history: Donald Trump Trump eyes a space branch of military; is Star Wars 2.0 imminent? International oi-Shubham By Shubham Eyeing a lead in the outer world, US President Donald Trump on Monday, June 18, said he was seeking setting up of a new branch of the military to work on space, reports said. Expressing his plans to have an independent "Space Force", Trump said it was not enough to have "merely" a presence in the space for the US but also to ensure that the Americans dominated it. He said this before a meeting of the National Space Council, a body within the executive office of the US President which was disbanded in 1993 but reinstated by Trump last year. Envisioning a bright future for the US space programme, Trump sought steps like resending personnel to the moon and also landing a manned mission in Mars. He defined space as a part of the national security and cautioned that he did not want Russia and China taking a lead over the US in this matter. It can be mentioned here that the race for space was an important component of the Cold War between the US and Russia in the past. Today, the Chinese have also shown considerable progress in space initiatives and perhaps that has left the Trump administration with the eagerness to do more. The US is a member of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which prevents it from positioning weapons of mass destruction in the space and allows its use only for peaceful purposes. China and Russia have already expressed their disappointment over the 1967 treaty for they feel it is inadequate and sought a fresh agreement to ban weaponisation of the outer space. Trump's latest plan will certainly alarm China Trump's latest remarks that could spark a serious race are most likely to draw criticism from China. In December 2017, China warned against weaponisation of the outer space after Trump revealed his plan to China asserted its long-standing position of preventing the weaponisation of outer space on Tuesday, a day after US President Donald Trump announced plans to renew manned missions to the moon and the Mars, sparking fears of a revival of the "Star Wars" programme. Trump signed the "Space Policy Directive 1" to lay the foundation for future manned missions to the moon and the Red Planet months after China revealed its plan for achieving "robotic and human settlement" on Mars by 2020. Criticism within US against Trump's plan While there have been support in the US establishment for Trump's ambitious space plan, there are also opposing voices that feel that creating a separate space branch would harm the US Air Force which looks after most of the space-related military activity at the moment. The critics are now banking on the Congress to stall the American president's space plans. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 9:01 [IST] Cheetah reintroduction: MP's Kuno National Park to get 10 from Africa in November Re-introducing cheetahs in India: What are its advantages and is this a first? In Pics: Interesting facts you did not know about lions Worlds oldest Sumatran orangutan dies at 62; survived by 11 children; 54 descendants International oi-Shubham By Shubham She crossed the 'retirement age' two years ago. Now, Puan - the world's oldest Sumatran orangutan - died at Perth Zoo on Monday, June 18, at the ripe age of 62. She is survived by 11 children and 54 descendants who live across the world. Australian zoo authorities informed this on Tuesday, June 19. Puan, who was referred to as the "grand old lady" of Perth Zoo, had been a resident of the zoo since 1968 when she was gifted by Malaysia. Sumatran orangutans are critically endangered species who rarely reach the age of 50 in the jungle, the zoo authorities said, a BBC report said and Puan's greatness lies in the fact that she helped spread her species globally, doing a favour to its global survival. "She did so much for the colony at Perth Zoo and the survival of her species," primate supervisor Holly Thompson was quoted as saying. "Her genetics count for just under 10 per cent of the global zoological population." Puan was born in 1956 and made a space for herself in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest verified Sumatran orangutan on the planet. Puan's chief zookeeper penned an obituary in The West Australian newspaper to pay a tribute to her on Tuesday, the BBC report added. There are less than 15,000 Sumatran orangutans living in the world at the moment, as per the World Wildlife Fund. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 11:32 [IST] Maharashtra MHT CET Result 2021 will be announced by Oct 28 Mumbai drugs case: Anti-drugs officer alleges he is being spied on Drugs case: Aryan Khan speaks to parents via video call from jail; gets Rs 4,500 via money-order Mumbai records zero COVID-19 deaths for first time since pandemic began Lalu admitted to hospital due to chest pain and low haemoglobin Mumbai oi-Chennabasaveshwar By Chennabasaveshwar Former Bihar CM Lalu Prasad Yadav has been admitted to Mumbai's Asian Heart Institute due to chest pain and low haemoglobin. Lalu Prasad Yadav was admitted for the second time at Asian Heart Institute. Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief was admitted to the same hospital last month. Lalu Prasad Yadav admitted to Asian Heart Institute in #Mumbai due to chest pain & low hemoglobin pic.twitter.com/nHxtyTPFfN ANI (@ANI) June 19, 2018 Prasad (69), who had undergone a bypass surgery a few years ago, had sought an appointment with renowned heart surgeon Ramakant Panda at the institute. The former Bihar chief minister, convicted in fodder scam cases, has been granted a six-week bail by the Jharkhand High Court. (With PTI inputs) For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 19:02 [IST] How to Book Sabarimala Virtual Q Tickets Online 2021? Know Date, Price and Other Details As BJP leaders continue fast, their vital parameters have dipped New Delhi oi-Staff By Oneindia Staff Writer Vital health parameters of the BJP leaders, who have been on a hunger strike at the Delhi Chief Minister's office for four days, dipped today, but they decided to continue their protest till Arvind Kejriwal resumed work. Delhi BJP president Manoj Tiwari met the fasting leaders -- MLAs Vijender Gupta, Manjinder Sirsa and Jagdish Pradhan, West Delhi MP Parvesh Verma, and rebel AAP MLA Kapil Mishra. "People of the city are watching the political melodrama being played by the Chief Minister and are dejected. It is an irony that opposition BJP's MP and MLAs are on dharna fighting for water supply in the city, while the Chief Minister is arrogantly involved in ego clash with the authority," Tiwari said. The BJP leaders sat on the dharna on June 13 demanding that Kejriwal and his ministers, staging sit-in at the Lieutenant Governor's office, resume work and address the water crisis faced by Delhi people. Four days ago, barring Pradhan, they started hunger strike. Kejriwal, along with his colleagues, have been at Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal's office since June 13, demanding a direction to IAS officers to end what the AAP describes a "strike" and approval of the doorstep ration delivery scheme. While at the Delhi secretariat, Tiwari also visited the offices of some IAS officers and claimed that they were working, and not on strike. He visited the offices of the Home Secretary and the Finance Secretary at the Secretariat. Vijender Gupta said that health parameters of leaders on hunger strike have dipped but they have refused hospitalisation as advised by doctors. "We were asked to end fast. Ambulances are parked to take us to hospital but we have refused to go," he said. Gupta today moved a plea against the ongoing sit-in by the chief minister and his ministers. The Delhi High Court held a mirror to CM Kejriwal and his ministers by expressing "displeasure" over their dharna, Gupta said. "Kejriwal team is confused about the purpose of their dharna. It doesn't know if it is fighting for statehood or the IAS officers or delivery of ration or any other issue," he said. He said Kejriwal and his ministers should abandon the path of "confrontation" with the Centre, L-G and IAS officers and keep the interest of Delhiites in their mind. Pravesh Verma said that Kejriwal must pay heed to the concerns of the IAS officers. He must take appropriate steps by respecting their concerns. The Delhi High Court today asked the AAP government who had authorised the sit-in led by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal at the lieutenant governor's office and observed that strikes or dharnas are held outside and not inside someone's workplace or residence. The observation by a bench of Justices A K Chawla and Navin Chawla came while hearing two petitions, one against Kejriwal's protest and another against the alleged strike by IAS officers of the Delhi administration. The Prime Minister, Peter ONeill, has condemned attempts by the Opposition for trying to politicise unrest in the Southern Highlands Province over the past week.PM ONeill said now is the time for parties involved in the court decision that preceded the unrest to work together.Yesterday, I organised for the Leaders of the Southern Highlands to meet, particularly those involved in the election dispute, so we can work together to manage expectations of our people in the province, the Prime Minister said.The disputed parties were at the National Court in Waigani when the unrest took place, so they could not be on the ground to manage the reaction of supporters.Importantly, the two leaders involved in the court challenge will talk with their supporters.Southern Highlands is a province where we have had similar problems in the past.We have seen election-related violence, we have had failed elections and a State of Emergency, and this was even when the previous National Alliance government was in power.We know who as involved in this situation and we will allow the relevant authorities to bring to justice those who were involved with this situation.Our Government will never condone this sort of behaviour, and we will enforce the State of Emergency so that we properly address the law and order issues that are on the ground and charge those responsible.The Prime Minister said he also takes note of the unfortunate behaviour of the National Opposition following the unrest.Every time there is an incident around the country, the opposition always calls for my resignation.They should know that the only way to beat me is to go to elections and try to beat me on the floor of Parliament.We have a situation where public and private assets have been damaged by an unruly mob, and the Opposition is siding with these individuals to make their own political gain.What kind of Opposition do we have that they would not condemn such behaviour, but would use it to attempt to stir up emotions for their own political interests.We need strong political leadership for both sides of the Parliament, to work together for the common good of our country.Our Government, regardless of the behaviour of the Opposition, is working with all relevant parties in the Southern Highlands Province to restore normalcy.We are working with provincial leaders and restoring calm and normalcy in Mendi and affected areas in Nipa.All districts are now resolving the issues with no further reports of unrest in the other three districts.I want to thank the police and the military for the work they have done on the ground to calm emotions and to prevent further unlawful actions.I call on all Leaders, especially those in the opposition, to let State agencies do their job independently, and not to interfere or try to further politicise this process.Political interference is one of the main reasons we are seeing activities such as last week, and this continues to undermine the criminal justice system of our country.Too often we see situations arise, and instead of allowing the law and justice process take its course, politicians get involved and interfere, or start offering compensation and undermine the legal process.This has to end.It is a pity that almost one year into the new Parliament, we are yet to see any substantial policy framework from these people who claim to be the alternative government.This lack of policy is simply because the Opposition have no policies for the country.We have had NA-led Governments in the past and all they could do is waste money.This includes the NADP and RESI program and community colleges where the peoples money was simply squandered, and still they are to answer what happened to this money spent by the National Alliance government. Papua New Guinea Prime Minister, Hon. Peter ONeill CMG MP, will travel to China this week for an Official State Visit ahead of Papua New Guineas hosting of the APEC Leaders Summit in November.The long-standing invitation for the visit will strengthen trade and enhance jobs, with a number of new agreements to be signed.China is a leading trading and close development partner of Papua New Guinea, and there a number of new initiatives that we are working on together, the Prime Minister said.I look forward to meeting with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang, followed by engagement between senior business leaders from both countries.As a developing country, we need to further integrate our economy to the global economy.Our engagement with China will further open up Papua New Guineas trade and investment opportunities.China is playing a very important role globally, it is the second largest economy in the world, and we cannot sit back and isolate our economy.The rest the world, including Australia and the United States, are doing business with China.Increased global trade creates jobs in our country for our people, and creates opportunities for our small businesses.While in China, the Prime Minister said Papua New Guineas delegation will also expand engagements with the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).The AIIB is an investment bank that is focused on making infrastructure investment in the region, and it provides opportunities for cheaper access to funding for our country.It has members including Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea is the first Pacific country to become a member.Chinas One Belt One Road initiative further offers great potential for Papua New Guineas interaction in the global economy.We are the last country at the end of that supply chain, and we have to look at what we can continue to export into China.We look forward to advancing discussion on this initiative and the opportunities it might provide for our economy.China is a huge market for Papua New Guinea, and we have to secure this access for our country into the future.The Prime Minister highlighted the development trajectory of China in recent decades, and said there is a lot to be gained for Papua New Guinea in learning from this experience.We have to remember, that China is still a developing country, and the only country in the history of humanity who have been able to move around 500 million people out of poverty to start entering the middle classes.We have a lot to learn from Chinas experience, this is experience that we can apply in our own country as we develop our Nation.PM ONeill said the combined group traveling will be a significant Public and Private Sector delegation, with the authority to deal with high levels of Government.The Government delegation is 19 people, so not a large delegation, that will be joined by the business delegation.We will be taking an Air Niugini charter aircraft, and this will be the first time a commercial aircraft of our National Carrier will be taking a direct flight to China.We have done this so that we can extend invitations to private sector companies, who are doing business in China to attend the visit.The private sector will pay their own way on the charter, and are taking up most of the cost of the visit, and so will reduce expense to the state.In September, Air Niugini will start bookings for the first commercial flight to China, so this is a good trail run to test logistical arrangements for Air Niugini.Finally, the Prime Minister said he welcomes the opportunity to discuss 2018 APEC planning with the Government of China.President Xi Jinping was the first APEC Leader to confirm that he will attend the APEC Leaders Summit in Port Moresby this year, the Prime Minister said.We look forward to receiving President Xi and his delegation in November, and Papua New Guinea has invited the President for a State Visit in the days before the APEC Summit.The visit will take place from 21 to 25 June, and include Government-to-Government meetings in Beijing, and business and investment engagement in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Guangzhou. Our website uses cookies to improve your experience. Learn more Ministry of Communications and Information Singapore via Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing Tuesday morning for his third visit to China in less than three months -- just one week after his historic summit with President Donald Trump in Singapore. Kim will likely meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping and debrief him on the results of the his meeting with Trump. The visit comes on the same day Washington and Seoul announced that they would suspend a joint military exercise in August, a move that will likely please the Chinese. We hope the visit will help deepen China-North Korea relations, said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang at his daily press briefing Tuesday. [We hope the visit will] strengthen strategic communication between the two sides on major issues to promote peace and stability in the region. In a departure from his previous visits, Chinese state media announced that Kim would be visiting Beijing for two days just after he arrived in Beijing Tuesday morning, but offered no further details. On previous visits by North Korean leaders, including those of Kims father Kim Jong Il and grandfather Kim Il Sung, the news of the visits were not announced until after the they had left the country. When asked why the visit was announced during Kims stay this time, Geng merely said that specific circumstances around each visit have their own specific arrangements. Security measures were in full force around the Chinese capital as Kims motorcade was filmed by Reuters cameras speeding across town on Changan Avenue and entering the Diaoyutai Guesthouse compound, where he had stayed on his previous March visit. Screens were also erected outside the Great Hall of the People to block the view of the entrance from the street. Kim previously met with Xi on two secret meetings in late March in Beijing and in early May in the coastal city of Dalian. Prior to the Singapore Summit, Trump had complained that the North Koreans attitude changed after Kim and Xi met in Dalian. Beijing has long advocated a "dual suspension" or "freeze-for-freeze" approach -- whereby North Korea halts its missile and nuclear testing and the U.S. and South Korea halt their joint military exercises -- for the easing tension on the Korean Peninsula. Both Pyongyang and Beijing have long seen the joint drills as provocative. In pledging to halt what Trump called the wargames during the Singapore Summit -- even calling them provocative -- the president appeared to have inadvertently given what Beijing had sought for a long time. Meanwhile, South Korea Foreign Ministry spokesman Noh Kyu-duk said Tuesday that South Korea welcomed Kims visit to China and said the governments of South Korea and China shared the same strategic goal of completely denuclearizing the Korean peninsula. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Opalesque Industry Update - Macquarie Capital, the corporate advisory, capital markets and principal investment arm of Macquarie Group, today announced the appointment of Greg Callman as Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Energy Technology to lead the firm's efforts related to energy storage and distributed solutions. Mr. Callman joins Macquarie Capital from Tesla, where he was Global Director of Business Development and Market Entry for Energy Products. At Tesla, Mr. Callman developed the commercial approach that grew the company's US storage business from pilot projects to a portfolio that today includes a 52MWh PV-paired battery that provides dispatchable renewables on Kauai, an 80MWh standalone battery that provides peaking capacity in Southern California, and the first fleet commercial/industrial systems to combine front and behind the meter applications. Mr. Callman also established Tesla's energy storage businesses in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand from the ground up. In total, he has been instrumental to more than 500MWh of projects across residential, commercial and utility segments, including landmark projects such as a 129MWh system in South Australia that helps to stabilize the grid. In addition to storage, Mr. Callman drove the development of Tesla's Supercharger business in both North America and Europe, which has enabled the deployment of 10,000 charging stalls globally. Based in San Francisco, Mr. Callman will develop projects and products globally on a wide range of energy solutions, including battery storage, microgrids, electric vehicles, distributed energy, and consumer energy. His appointment comes during a time of rapid innovation and commercialization of energy storage and distributed solutions, fueled by increases in energy consumption, a growing demand for renewable power, and the accelerating adoption of new technologies such as electric vehicles and home batteries. "Macquarie Capital is an established leader in advising and investing with companies offering innovative energy solutions, and storage will play a pivotal role in the future of energy," said Michael Silverton, Head of Macquarie Capital Americas. "Greg is an authority in energy solutions with a track record combining innovation and operational and commercial success." Macquarie Capital has also driven innovation in energy storage. In 2017, Macquarie Capital, Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) and CIT closed a first-of-its-kind project, financing of battery-based energy storage systems. The financing backed a 50MW fleet of behind-the-meter, battery storage systems located in grid-constrained pockets of the West Los Angeles Basin. Macquarie and AMS have been jointly developing the portfolio. Macquarie Capital also invested in the first solar-to-battery project structure in South Korea to receive private investment. The project combined an existing 3MW solar farm and the construction of a 6.5MW hour energy storage system. "Storage has a transformational role to play through the next decade, including shifting control to consumers and businesses on both the availability and cost of power," said Mark Dooley, Global Head of Green Energy at Macquarie Capital. "The addition of Greg Callman will help position us at the front of that transformation, better enabling us to deliver fast-evolving financial solutions to clients and partners in a rapidly changing industry." Storage is one element of Macquarie's leading global renewables franchise. The firm is the leading investor in renewable generation assets across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Australia, which was furthered by the firm's 2017 acquisition of Green Investment Bank from the UK Government, now called the Green Investment Group, a dedicated green investment business that has led over $20 billion of investment into green infrastructure assets and projects. Recent notable transactions of GIG include the development and construction of the 650MW Markbygden ETT wind farm in Northern Sweden, the largest single-site onshore wind farm in Europe, and the development and construction of the world's largest new build biomass power station in the UK. Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. From FlaglerLive President Trump and Melania Trump signing a 'Be Best' initiative the day after Sen. Senator Jeff Merkley was barred from examining a children's detention center in Brownsville, Texas. (Image by White House Photo) Details DMCA I don't read the Marquis de Sade to beef up on hope for mankind. I know what I'm in for if I pick up "The 120 Days of Sodom." For the same reason I know what I'm in for when I pick up the daily papers: I can't be expecting Eckhart Tolle when I've been living the American translation of, so far, the 513 Days of Sodom. In that sense, it'd be futile to criticize President Trump for being the Marquis de Trump. There are differences in the sadism derby though. Sade didn't dare publish many of his works, or was imprisoned when he did. Trump advertised his sadism in full-page ads in the New York press when, before their trial, he called for the murder of five teenagers accused of raping a Central Park jogger 30 years ago. I say "murder" because that's what it would have been: they were innocent and were proven so, though only after serving 13 years in prison. Trump, an admirer of extra-judicial mass killers like the Pilippines' Rodrigo Duerte, had exercised his First Amendment right to pretend to be judge and executioner for a day. But despite the five men's exoneration and another man's confession, Trump called the multi-million dollar settlement a "disgrace" and still judged the five guilty. Evidence means nothing to him. Nor does limiting his impeccable credentials for sadism to adults. (George W. Bush and Barack Obama did their share of unpardonable crimes against adult undocumented immigrants. They exempted children.) Using that great Alabama humanitarian Jeff Sessions as his conduit, he's been ordering children of undocumented immigrants separated from their parents at the border, whether the parents are committing illegal acts or not. In one reported case, a child was taken from her mother as she breastfed. In another, a mother and son, 18 months old, escaped Honduras seeking asylum in the United States. Mother and son were separated and detained. That's how we're dealing with "huddled masses yearning to be free" now, with what Sessions-Trump call a "zero-tolerance" policy at the border, due process be damned. Asylum seekers are not criminals. The children of undocumented migrants, no matter their parents' record or intentions, are by definition innocent. But they're being separated from their parents and imprisoned in gulag-like detention centers along the border in practices unheard of in the civilized world. As always when children are the victims of an unaccountable police state, brutality and sexual abuse shadow the victims where they go, as the ACLU is documenting in a lawsuit, though we don't have to go that far to define the mere premise of children's arbitrary detention as torture. Dress up the jail as a spotless former Walmart with Pokemon posters on the wall and Moana playing on a movie screen. It's still a prison. Reporters were herded through one such converted Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, on June 14, one of 100 such "shelters" in 17 states imprisoning 11,000 children. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon tried visiting the Walmart prison 10 days earlier. He was barred from going in. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE -- America's acronymized homage to Kafka -- suddenly had a public relations nightmare to add to the more literal nightmares it was inflicting on imprisoned children. Real nightmares it can deal with: that's ICE's specialty. PR nightmares are a different story. ICE got to work prepping the Brownsville prison for prime time, cleaning it up, warning its inmates not to interact with visitors, and invited the media. It briefly reminded me of the way George Pullman would herd reporters though his company town for his workers near a manufacturing plant in Illinois, a Potemkin village of luxury that couldn't keep up the illusion of brutal repression within. Or you could compare the Walmart-type prisons to the detention camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II, though in both the Pullman and Japanese cases children were never separated from their parents. That special reinvention of an American specialty had to await the Trump era. Separating children from their parents was a slave-broker specialty, justified then on the assumption that parents and children were property, not human beings. Sessions had as first-hand knowledge as is possible to have these days, when he worked as Alabama's attorney general in Montgomery and had lunch in restaurants along Commerce Street where just a few generations earlier brokers with names like W.A. Grant, F.H. Bock and Cameron & Benson had lined the way, their signs advertising "Slave Investor/Auctioneer," their sales pitches boasting of the children's potential as workers, breeders, and more subtly, concubines. The zero-tolerance policy at the border doesn't enslave children but it achieves the same ends: it dehumanizes parents and children and treats both as surplus merchandise warehoused in prisons, without a say, without rights. To which Sessions the Montgomery street-walker had this rejoinder: "If you're smuggling a child, we're going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. If you don't want your child separated, then don't bring them across the border illegally." That was before he doubled down on rhetorical derangement by quoting the Apostle Paul as legal precedent. None of it is justified by public safety concerns: neither children nor parents are a national security threat. None of it is legal under international law. But if Trump can ban Muslims from the country on fabricated pretenses, nothing is stopping him from doing the same to migrant children with the wrong skin color. Again, maybe we should not be surprised. Trump is only exercising his cruel and usual inhumanity. But Congress and the courts are letting him get away with what used to be only a fantasy. We're days away from the Supreme Court confirming it with its endorsement of the Muslim ban. He now is, in fact, judge and executioner, with the other two branches' complicity. That's Trump's America, where the lamp beside the golden door shows the way to the dungeon for all those who don't put up or shut up. And we have at least 938 days of Sodom to go. Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. After (Image by faul) Details DMCA I KNEW this would happen! After its pro-GOP decision in the case Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, I awaited a pro-Democratic decision on a case attacking Democratic gerrymandering in Maryland, Benisek v. Lamone. According to the New York Post, "[T]he court in an unsigned opinion decided not to immediately block a Democrat-drawn US House of Representatives district challenged by Republican voters, but allowed the case to proceed." According to the New York Times: "In a brief unsigned opinion, the court said the challengers had waited too long to seek an injunction blocking the district, which was drawn in 2011." The Ohio decision validated its practice of purging voters from registration lists if they don't vote for three consecutive federal elections. Anyway, the Wisconsin gerrymandering case Gill v. Whitford was also undecided, instead referred back to a trial court "to allow the plaintiffs to try again to prove that their voting power had been directly affected by the way state lawmakers drew voting districts for the State Assembly," again, according to the Times. Another case questioning the validity of gerrymandering, this time in North Carolina, is on schedule for SCOTUS's fall term. Will Justice Kennedy still be there to decide that? If so, will he finally make up his mind? A decision he wrote in 2004 considered both sides of the issue but left it at that. There was, he wrote, no "workable standard" for determining the constitutionality involved. But my main point is that the Maryland decision works in favor of Democrats and the Ohio decision definitely benefits the GOP. But Ohio Republicans will benefit more, since their swing state will lean more Republican, while things in Maryland will stay the same, ceteris paribus. And the electoral votes are 18 versus 10, respectively, if the status quo in these two instances persists into election 2020. I knew, though, that there would be some kind of nod in the direction of the blue party. Some birdseed, some scant leftovers, a crust of bread. SOURCES; click here click here click here Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. Republic of China prosecutors claim Julian Lin at Roll Call Live podium in Washington was part of an elaborate political hoax (Image by Taiwan Civil Government) Details DMCA Taiwanese attorney Fan Ren-yu has issued a statement on behalf of Roger and Julian Lin protesting their May arrests for political fraud. The Lins are leaders of Taiwan Civil Government, an advocacy group opposed to the Republic of China in-exile now ruling Taiwan, and are being held incommunicado, in solitary confinement with no bail. The harsh detention conditions of the Lins has sparked social media concern about the fairness of the ROC courts. Taiwan Civil Government has been spending large sums of money in the past few years to break out of the strategic ambiguity that clouds Taiwan's sovereignty, and leaves a once-temporary Chinese regime still ruling, seven decades after World War II. The ROC was installed by the United States military so TCG wants American help to rid the island of the exiled Chinese government. TCG spending includes numerous offices around Taiwan, international junkets, parades and large rallies, operation of a paramilitary unit, advertising, federal litigation in the United States, and aggressive lobbying activity in Washington. To obtain a fraud conviction ROC prosecutors need to prove the expenditures and effort was merely an elaborate ruse to separate donors from their money. All the money that TCG poured into Washington opened doors and the group was gaining rapid traction at the time of the arrests. Julian Lin was becoming a recognized spokeswoman of a new future for Taiwan, speaking at Washington political gatherings, leading delegations to international events, and enjoying the ear of Kellyanne Conway, Counselor to President Donald Trump. Fan Ren-yu denied the political fundraising activities of TCG were unlawful. Fan said, "The donor's regret afterwards is not a constitutive element of fraud." Fan argues if Roger Lin and his wife had spent the fundraising proceeds, they should be in the scope of encroachment and not facing fraud charges, instead the Lins should be dealing with private civil actions not public criminal charges. Prosecutors are claiming the Lins had amassed millions of dollars in cash and bank accounts controlled by Julian Lin by deception. TCG members disagree saying the money was the group's war-chest. " The Taiwan Civil Government is registered in America as Taiwan Civil Government Foundation. In Taiwan, it is an institution outside the system. It is impossible to open an account in a financial institution in Taiwan. Therefore, Roger Lin and his wife deposited the funds of the foundation in cash and kept it in the house. The cupboard is not inappropriate in the law, nor does it constitute a problem of money laundering. It is even more irrelevant to the constitutive elements of fraud." Fan also offered up a peek at the defense to come. The Lins will use their criminal trial to advance their attack on the ROC, challenging jurisdiction of the court to hear an internal matter of a foundation registered in the United States. The Lins are not novices in the courtroom, having brought two federal lawsuits in Washington, one seeking US passports for Taiwan residents and the other sought to overturn the ROC imposed "Nationality Act" of 1946 which deprived island residents of their Japanese citizenship. The courts were sympathetic to the Lin arguments but determined the passport case was political not legal while the nationality case was a moot issue. ROC prosecutors have kicked a beehive while Washington insiders watch, wonder, and wait. Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. Donald Trump's national-security adviser believes that the White House approach to North Korea is not efficient and productive. Famous for his radical views, Bolton argues that direct nuclear talk, International economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure against Kim regime are not the working strategies. He asserts that "sanctions might have made a difference 15 years ago, before North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon, but they won't today." He counts these strategies as wasting of time and urges for striking North Korea. Bolton persuades China to not support the regime in North Korea. He also said it is ridiculous if President Jae-in believe that his administration is able to protect the security and independence of South Korea without the presence of U.S. forces. He maintained that the South Koreans are practically incapable and helpless to protect their own people and country. So, United States obviously has already South Korea's agreement before using force against North Korea. Thus, it is not surprising that in South Korea, many say John Bolton is the key player in the sudden problems in the diplomatic process. According to The Washington Post, Chung Dong-young, former unification minister and currently a lawmaker believes, "there are several land mines on the way to the summit between North Korea and the U.S., one of those land mines just exploded: John Bolton." It seems that the hostility between John Bolton and South Koreans is escalating. We should wait to see how far Bolton can make use of his influence on Trump against South Korea. Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. The separation of children from their parents just because they are seeking asylum as immigrants to our nation is cruel beyond belief. It is immoral, violates international laws and betrays American values. This policy is being justified by outright lies by President Trump, his cabinet and his supporters in both Congress and the partisan Republican media. We are facing the most severe domestic moral crisis in my lifetime simply for political purposes. At the core of the issue, we have to decide if America is going to be an evil nation or not. When you create unbelievable levels of emotional pain for parents just because they want to become part of the American Dream, you betray our national American values. When you intentionally inflict lasting emotional, mental and physical damage on children, it is much worse. This is evil. It is not misguided policy. It is purely evil. No excuses justify such actions. They are not required by any largely imaginary border crisis. There are problems with the immigration process for sure. It often is slow, confusing and cumbersome. We do want the right people to enter and we want to keep criminals out. For most immigrants, our current processes achieve those goals. Of course, no system is ever going to be perfect. Being cruel to children is not going to help improve our immigration system. We cannot do that by making child abuse a systemic part of our immigration system. Abusing children as a policy of our national government disgraces all Americans. It is not a rational policy. It borders on psychotic behavior. It is deeply, morally wrong. There is no American law that requires that we separate the children of immigrants seeking asylum from their parents. President Trump is lying intentionally when he makes that false statement over and over again. Democrats never passed a law that required such actions. This is why no earlier Presidential Administration has ever adopted such a systematically cruel immigration policy. Not entering at approved ports of entry when seeking asylum has seldom been viewed by law as a serious crime. It is a misdemeanor instead of a felony. Often it a violation of our immigration law that arises out of a lack of understanding of our complicated immigration system. We have to realize that many of these asylum seekers are facing death from criminal gangs in their home countries and are seeking safety for their families in America. Does our nation turn them away to die? Do we destroy their families first and abuse their children before we turn them away to be killed by criminals? Is that the America we live in? Do evangelical Christians really support political leaders who would adopt such policies in the name of the American nation? Is this what Jesus would do? As a Christian and an American, I do not think this is morally right. The "border wall" is a simplistic idea that will not work. It will make some contractors insanely rich at the expense of taxpayers. We need more immigrants to pick crops in rural areas. We need them to pay into Social Security and Medicare to help keep it solvent. We need more manpower devoted to processing asylum seekers and technology to locate the small minority of real, dangerous criminals crossing the border illegally. We need rational, humane immigration policies. We need to reclaim our morality when it comes to asylum seekers and their children. Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. See original here Outrage is growing over the Trump administration's separation of children from their parents along the U.S.-Mexico border. On Monday, ProPublica released audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children estimated to be between the ages of 4 and 10 years old are heard crying "Mama" and "Papi" after being separated from their parents. In another part of the audio, a Border Patrol agent is heard joking, in Spanish, "Well, we have an orchestra here. What's missing is a conductor." Video footage released by the U.S. Border Patrol Monday shows migrant children in concrete-floored chain link cages, in an old warehouse in McAllen, Texas. A new Quinnipiac Poll shows roughly two-thirds of U.S. voters oppose separating children from their parents at the border. About 7 percent of Democratic voters support the Trump policy, while 55 percent of Republicans support it. We speak with Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Democratic congress member from Washington state. She has just helped announce a march on Washington and cities nationwide on June 30 against family separation. She is vice ranking member of the House Budget Committee and vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. On June 9 she visited a detention center in her home state and spoke with some of the 200 asylum-seekers held at the Sea-Tac Bureau of Prisons facility. This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. JUAN GONZALEZ: And I'm Juan Gonza'lez. Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers from around the country and around the world. Outrage continues to grow over the Trump administration's separation of children from their parents along the U.S.-Mexico border. On Monday, the news outlet ProPublica released audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility in which children, estimated to be between the ages of four and 10 years old, are heard crying "mama'" and "papa'" after being separated from their parents. A warning, the audio is disturbing. CHILD: [crying] Papa'! Papa'! WORKERS: [Spanish] CHILDREN: [crying] [Spanish] CHILD: [crying] Papa'! Papa'! AMY GOODMAN: In part of the audio, a Border Patrol agent is heard joking in Spanish, "Well, we have an orchestra here. What's missing is a conductor." Video footage released by the U.S. Border Patrol Monday shows migrant children in concrete-floored chain link cages, in an old warehouse in McAllen, Texas. JUAN GONZALEZ: A new Quinnipiac Poll shows roughly two-thirds of U.S. voters oppose separating children from their parents at the border. About seven percent of Democratic voters support the Trump policy, while 55 percent of Republicans support it. Ahead of today's meeting with Republicans to discuss compromise legislation on a hard-line immigration bill, President Trump continued to blame Democrats for his policy that has led to the separation of at least 2,000 children in recent weeks. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. It won't be. You look at what is happening in Europe. You look at what is happening in other places. We can't allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch. If the Democrats would sit down instead of obstructing, we could have something done very quickly. Good for the children, good for the country, good for the world. It could take place quickly. We could have an immigration bill. AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, during a White House press briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the administration was only strictly enforcing immigration law. Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. From Greg Palast Website Movie Still from The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Image by Greg Palast) Details DMCA The Supreme Court decision blessing the purge of half a million voters in Ohio is NOT the last word. On Monday, the renowned law firm of Mirer Mazzocchi Julien of New York will serve a 90-day notice on Jon Husted, the Secretary of State of Ohio, of our intent to file suit in federal court unless we receive complete information on each of the hundreds of thousands of voters removed from the voter rolls. We have already filed a demand for information on Kris Kobach, the e'minence grise behind Ohio and other mass purges nationwide, to open his purge program files to us. We are joined in this demand by the ACLU of Kansas. What we can do As I explained in my prior report, the Supreme Court did not authorize Ohio to remove voters who skipped an election. Rather, failing to vote was merely one of Ohio's excuses to send a postcard to these voters. Not returning the postcard was taken, absurdly -- insanely -- as evidence the voter had moved away. I discovered this nasty trick for Rolling Stone -- a plain evil system I call Purge by Postcard. The implications of the Supreme Court decision are unimaginably horrid, as at least two dozen states (not just Ohio) are using "evidence" that a voter has moved -- "proven" by the failure to respond to a piece of junk mail. The purge could be massive: A half-million in Ohio will undoubtedly lead to millions nationwide. Normally, a Supreme Court verdict is the final word, the last rodeo. But there is hope. Jeanne Mirer, our principal attorney, explained that the civil rights groups lost at the Supreme Court on a matter of law: In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Ohio may assume a lapsed voter has moved if they failed to return a postcard. But what if the facts say otherwise? Just the Facts, Ma'am It's really simple to find out if failure to return a postcard is evidence you've moved: ask the voter. Call them up, knock on their door: Mr. Webster, have you moved to Virginia? Greg Palast with Donald Webster, a voter targeted for purge (Image by Greg Palast) Details DMCA Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Congress Switchboard: 202-224-3121 "Rob Kall shows us that the high-tech information revolution set the stage for a political and social evolution, the connectivity of which has the capacity to transform everything, everywhere. We have only to say 'yes' to tap [into] the power of this interconnection, participating in it from where we stand." Dennis Kucinich, former U.S. Representative (D-OH) and 2004 and 2008 Democratic presidential primary candidate Progressive Content Not Found Sometimes, authors delete their progressive content after publishing. To see if the progressive content was renamed or re-published, please click here. Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. From Reader Supported News Make no mistake: Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions' assault on immigrant families and their "tactic" of separating parents from their children are right out of the Nazi playbook. It's no accident US immigrations officials are telling parents they're taking kids to "bathe," then making them disappear ... and then telling their parents they will never see them again. This ghoulish reminder of Auschwitz shames us all. It should also terrify us. And make us ACT! However removed we may think we are, WE are next, and so are our children. This regime loves torture and dictatorship, and aspires to both. Thugs like these have nothing of value to offer, so they rule with hate, fear, and scapegoating. Many of these families are coming to our borders legally seeking asylum. Some families under assault are not even immigrants, they are merely of Hispanic origin or appearance. There's no immigrant "crisis" in the United States any more than there was a "Jewish Question" in Hitler's Germany. Hitler needed an object of hate to become absolute ruler. Jews comprised 1% of the German population. They were handy. Hitler spared a Jewish family doctor and a Nobel prize-winning cancer researcher (Otto Warburg) just as Trump might spare Jared Kushner and Michael Cohen. But however much hate and terror this regime needs to generate, Trump will do it. Like Adolph, Donald can't rule without making America hate again. Immigrants and Muslims are where he started. Hispanics, blacks, Iranians, Asians, "globalists," not to mention gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, people with disabilities ... it's all the same. Their -- OUR -- time will come. The regime's real need is to hide its complete inability to govern. And to divide and distract the population. Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. Last Wednesday and Thursday were the most theological days I can remember. It all revolved around the Trump administration's practice of separating children from their immigrant parents, including tearing nursing infants from the breasts of their mothers and the attendant prospect of "baby jails." To begin with, the Roman Catholic Bishops' Conference condemned such policy as clearly immoral. Even evangelical Trump supporter, Franklin Graham, called the Trump policy "disgraceful." In response, Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, offered his best imitation of the "Islamist" theocrats his type loves to vilify. Instead of invoking U.S. law, the Constitution, or legal and historical precedent, the nation's leading law enforcement agent decided to justify Trump policy theologically. He claimed that the apostle Paul would endorse it, since the program comes from government, which Sessions declared enjoys ipso facto divine authority. Sharia Law, anyone? More specifically, the AG referenced Romans 13. He said, "I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13 to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order." The next day, Mr. Trump's press secretary, Sarah Sanders followed suit averring that "It is very biblical to enforce the law." Such theological debate invites comment. The first response is that Paul obviously could not have meant that all government legislation reflects the will of God. That would mean not only that the U.S. slave system was divinely approved, but that the decrees of Genghis Kahn, Hitler, and Stalin enjoyed divine approbation. Even closer to home, the Sessions interpretation of Romans 13 would mean that Jesus himself, Paul, and all the great Christian martyrs -- not to mention religiously-motivated champions of civil disobedience like Martin King and Mohandas Gandhi -- were all condemned by God. On the contrary, all of them (including Gandhi), drew inspiration from the example of biblical prophets who made a point of disobeying laws which routinely claimed divine origin. In fact, Jesus' defense for breaking the most inviolable law of his time, the Sabbath Law, was that law's very purpose was to serve human beings. Laws contradicting such humanitarian intent, he implied, have no authority at all. So, what, then, did Paul mean by his words, "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God"? Try this: " Authority means the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. " All such power comes from God and God's law. " Government legislation reflecting God's law must be obeyed. " Obviously, all other laws must be disobeyed. " According to Jesus' teachings, God's law is to treat others as you would like to be treated with special care for the poor, widows, orphans, and immigrants. Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. AG Jeff Sessions Cites The Bible To Defend Separating Immigrant Families | TIME AG Jeff sessions cites The Bible to defend separating immigrant families. Subscribe to TIME ? ? po.st/SubscribeTIME Get closer to the world of ... (Image by YouTube, Channel: TIME) Details DMCA Attorney General Jeff Sessions using the bible to defend Trump's immigration policies separating children from their families Where else in the world, besides America, would we see a frightened, screaming child wrenched away from the arms of his, her parent then taken away and placed in some detention facility while the parent is hauled off as an illegal alien? I'd guess nowhere else. It is simply unconscionable. Yet for the Trump crowd such officially sanctioned behavior is just applying the law. One would think an adult or even a teenager could readily understand ripping a frightened, screaming child from their parent by Trump's immigration officials is contemptible. Not so to the Trump mob. Over the weekend there was Trump's Attorney General Jeff Sessions saying of the practice, " I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good on themselves and protect the weak and lawful". But it wasn't just Sessions. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders got into the act mouthing something similar with, "It is very biblical to enforce the law." To which I'd like to add what about human compassion enforcing the law at least recognizing keeping families together is necessary and it's the compassionate thing to do. Slavery and separating families was supposed to have ended over 150 years ago. Is Trump and his minions trying to reestablish a new form of this horror? Of course Repubs and Dems across the board are appalled at the administrations cruelty. Maybe some wacko Trump supporters will still support the "legality" of these immigration policies being hard hearted as they seemingly are incapable of showing any empathy toward these separated families i.e. putting themselves in the shoes of these children and theirfamilies being separated. Trump and his administration has no pattern to what it does. In one instance it will begin to forge an agreement with Kim Jong-Un's North Korea to begin the process to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula by Trump ending the war games with South Korea and Japan off the Korean Peninsula admitting they're provocative. But this after he reneges a month earlier on the P5&1 nuclear agreement with Iran which has infuriated his western allies who want to keep it. With the current administration It's as if sanity emerges from time to time then callous disregard and stupidity enters the picture and one can't believe what they're seeing. The "Dubya" Bush crowd resorted to torture as we saw in the videos of US military personnel using it on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. Those videos drew revulsion from many most? people in the US. But even the Bush mob knew their resorting to torture was a self inflicted wound they had to reconcile with the American people. So they prosecuted a few low level military personnel and the US officer in charge of the detention center as the "few rotten apples" that had to held accountable even though they wouldn't come clean admitting they authorized the torture. As bad as the corporate MSM usually is in this country mostly as a complicit enabler to official Washington's policies and actions their showing border police ripping frightened, screaming children from the arms of their parents just won't be explained away by Trump administration flaks spouting some biblical righteousness. No, Trump and his minions don't seem to recognize the revulsion its caused in the American people to their policy of separating families. They may be committing political suicide and it's self inflicted but so what. Cite some bible verse and that's all that's necessary. Hello. If the MSM showed pictures of our drone attacks killing and maiming innocents in our war zones as it once showed pictures of innocent Vietnamese people being set aflame by napalm bombs being dropped by American planes during the Vietnam war-which contributed to the rise of massive demonstrations against the war on campuses across the country- then maybe the American people would show as much revulsion to our endless wars as it's doing now with Trump's separation of children and their families at the border with Mexico. Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here. There's no other imperial tradition like it. For two millennia, dynasty after dynasty rose and fell, spread and shrank, reaching into Southeast Asia and far out into the steppes of Eurasia, its commercial fleets -- 3,500 ships in the fourteenth century -- voyaging as far as Africa. It's true that ours is a remarkably westernized and, more recently, Americanized version of history that has left little place for the tale of imperial China, but what a history it had. It wasn't known as the "Middle" or "Central Kingdom" for nothing. And now, of course, it's back, a new "dynasty," even if it goes under the more modern rubric of a "communist" state. The latest version of imperial China has a growing military and plans to create a trillion dollar "One Belt, One Road" infrastructural grid of pipelines, rail lines, highways, and other links of every sort across significant parts of Southeast and South Asia, as well as the former Central Asian "stans" of the Soviet Union and Iran, a future grid that's meant to reach all the way to Europe. At least in the expansive dreams of China's new rulers, such a network of infrastructure would bind a vast world of trade and wealth to Beijing. It's a vision that should take your breath away and, as TomDispatchregular Michael Klare writes today, it has indeed done so in at least one key precinct of this world of ours: the Pentagon. There, China's One Belt, One Road vision is being greeted not with enthusiasm but with anxiety and consternation. The military of the reigning superpower, the last one, the only one, is increasingly unnerved by the latest version of a Chinese dynasty and responding in ways that should make all of us anxious. Klare describes the obvious dangers that could flow from an American urge to militarily contain the latest version of the Middle Kingdom, as a new great power rivalry rises on a planet that's been bereft of them for more than a quarter of a century. Unfortunately, when you're looking at the long record of China and the shorter but distinctive one of that last superpower, history can't offer us any clues about one thing: What does it mean to have a new and rising power on a planet that shows every sign of itself going down? What does it mean for two powers to face off, both of whom stand a significant chance of seeing some of their major coastal cities flooded and destroyed in the century or less to come? What exactly is the point of it all? Tom Girding for Confrontation The Pentagon's Provocative Encirclement of China By Michael T. Klare On May 30th, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced a momentous shift in American global strategic policy. From now on, he decreed, the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), which oversees all U.S. military forces in Asia, will be called the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). The name change, Mattis explained, reflects "the increasing connectivity between the Indian and Pacific Oceans," as well as Washington's determination to remain the dominant power in both. What? You didn't hear about this anywhere? And even now, you're not exactly blown away, right? Well, such a name change may not sound like much, but someday you may look back and realize that it couldn't have been more consequential or ominous. Think of it as a signal that the U.S. military is already setting the stage for an eventual confrontation with China. If, until now, you hadn't read about Mattis's decision anywhere, I'm not surprised since the media gave it virtually no attention -- less certainly than would have been accorded the least significant tweet Donald Trump ever dispatched. What coverage it did receive treated the name change as no more than a passing "symbolic" gesture, a Pentagon ploy to encourage India to join Japan, Australia, and other U.S. allies in America's Pacific alliance system. "In Symbolic Nod to India, U.S. Pacific Command Changes Name" was the headline of a Reuters story on the subject and, to the extent that any attention was paid, it was typical. That the media's military analysts failed to notice anything more than symbolism in the deep-sixing of PACOM shouldn't be surprising, given all the attention being paid to other major international developments -- the pyrotechnics of the Korean summit in Singapore, the insults traded at and after the G7 meeting in Canada, or the ominous gathering storm over Iran. Add to this the poor grasp so many journalists have of the nature of the U.S. military's strategic thinking. Still, Mattis himself has not been shy about the geopolitical significance of linking the Indian and Pacific Oceans in such planning. In fact, it represents a fundamental shift in U.S. military thinking with potentially far-reaching consequences. Consider the backdrop to the name change: in recent months, the U.S. has stepped up its naval patrols in waters adjacent to Chinese-occupied islands in the South China Sea (as has China), raising the prospect of future clashes between the warships of the two countries. Such moves have been accompanied by ever more threatening language from the Department of Defense (DoD), indicating an intent to do nothing less than engage China militarily if that country's build-up in the region continues. "When it comes down to introducing what they have done in the South China Sea, there are consequences," Mattis declared at the Shangri La Strategic Dialogue in Singapore on June 2nd. As a preliminary indication of what he meant by this, Mattis promptly disinvited the Chinese from the world's largest multinational naval exercise, the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC), conducted annually under American auspices. "But that's a relatively small consequence," he added ominously, "and I believe there are much larger consequences in the future." With that in mind, he soon announced that the Pentagon is planning to conduct "a steady drumbeat" of naval operations in waters abutting those Chinese-occupied islands, which should raise the heat between the two countries and could create the conditions for a miscalculation, a mistake, or even an accident at sea that might lead to far worse. In addition to its plans to heighten naval tensions in seas adjacent to China, the Pentagon has been laboring to strengthen its military ties with U.S.-friendly states on China's perimeter, all clearly part of a long-term drive to -- in Cold War fashion -- "contain" Chinese power in Asia. On June 8th, for example, the DoD launched Malabar 2018, a joint Pacific Ocean naval exercise involving forces from India, Japan, and the United States. Incorporating once neutral India into America's anti-Chinese "Pacific" alliance system in this and other ways has, in fact, become a major twenty-first-century goal of the Pentagon, posing a significant new threat to China. For decades, the principal objective of U.S. strategy in Asia had been to bolster key Pacific allies Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, while containing Chinese power in adjacent waters, including the East and South China Seas. However, in recent times, China has sought to spread its influence into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region, in part by extolling its staggeringly ambitious "One Belt, One Road" trade and infrastructure initiative for the Eurasian continent and Africa. That vast project is clearly meant both as a unique vehicle for cooperation and a way to tie much of Eurasia into a future China-centered economic and energy system. Threatened by visions of such a future, American strategists have moved ever more decisively to constrain Chinese outreach in those very areas. That, then, is the context for the sudden concerted drive by U.S. military strategists to link the Indian and Pacific Oceans and so encircle China with pro-American, anti-Chinese alliance systems. The name change on May 30th is a formal acknowledgement of an encirclement strategy that couldn't, in the long run, be more dangerous. Girding for War with China To grasp the ramifications of such moves, some background on the former PACOM might be useful. Originally known as the Far East Command, PACOM was established in 1947 and has been headquartered at U.S. bases near Honolulu, Hawaii, ever since. As now constituted, its "area of responsibility" encompasses a mind-boggling expanse: all of East, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as Australia, New Zealand, and the waters of the Indian and Pacific Oceans -- in other words, an area covering about 50% of the Earth's surface and incorporating more than half of the global population. Though the Pentagon divides the whole planet like a giant pie into a set of "unified commands," none of them is larger than the newly expansive, newly named Indo-Pacific Command, with its 375,000 military and civilian personnel. Before the Indian Ocean was explicitly incorporated into its fold, PACOM mainly focused on maintaining control of the western Pacific, especially in waters around a number of friendly island and peninsula states like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Its force structure has largely been composed of air and naval squadrons, along with a large Marine Corps presence on the Japanese island of Okinawa. Its most powerful combat unit is the U.S. Pacific Fleet -- like the area it now covers, the largest in the world. It's made up of the 3rd and 7th Fleets, which together have approximately 200 ships and submarines, nearly 1,200 aircraft, and more than 130,000 sailors, pilots, Marines, and civilians. Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. Historical Determinants of U.S. Foreign Policy: Dealing with Issues All Presidents have had to look over their shoulders at domestic politics when determining foreign policy. But usually those looks are in the context of determining restraints on what the particular President would like to do. And so, there were McKinley and the invasion of Cuba; Wilson and entry into World War I; Roosevelt and the entry into World War II; Truman and the UN/the Marshall Plan/NATO, and the Korean War; Kennedy and Cuba; Johnson and Viet Nam; Reagan/Bush 41 and bringing the 75 Years War Against the Soviet Union to a successful conclusion; Clinton and Yugoslavia; Bush 43 and Afghanistan/Iraq; Obama and trying more quietly to promote US imperial interests while at the same time trying to clean up messes left behind. But in all of these cases, Presidents were attempting to persuade sectors of the U.S. public to support a given foreign policy or were fighting opposition to that policy. Trumpite Determinants of Foreign Policy With Trump and the Trumpites, we have something entirely different. First of all, Trump knows little about foreign policy (just like he knows little about the operations of most sectors of the U.S. government). Second of all, he has no connections with the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Nor does he care to make any such connections. Just look at his picks for the most important foreign policy positions in his cabinet, for the CIA, and for the National Security Council. Third, and perhaps most important of all, Trump's foreign policy decisions for the most part are not governed by aspects of/problems with foreign policy and its effects on the foreign and domestic interests of the United States. Rather, they are very much related to what in the foreign policy arena Trump promised on the campaign trail. Of course, for the most part those promises either made little sense in terms of what U.S. foreign policy has been since the end of World War II or made little sense, period. But they all served Trump's electoral agenda, and now the nation is dealing with them. The Present U.S. Foreign Policy Myth First on the grand scale, there is the myth of the great benevolence of U.S. foreign policy for the world since the end of World War II, the establishment of the interdependent world-wise economy, of the promotion of democracy, of the maintenance of the "defense of Europe," of what its promoters supporters call "The American World Order," which its many supporters refer to as the best thing since sliced bread. Well, it is based on myth: from the ignoring of the time and money spent on winning The 75 Years War Against the Soviet Union, to the undermining of democracy in so many countries from Guatemala (1954) to Chile (1973) to Venezuela (currently); to the myth of the "defense of Western Europe" against a Soviet Union which was hardly going to go to war against the world's greatest military power after losing 26 million people in World War II and having 2/3rds of its economy destroyed; to the domination of the world's economy by the U.S. dollar, which by itself is enormously profitable to the U.S. banking system; to the 700-plus U.S. military bases around the world, which no one never seems to mention; to a central focus of world-wide U.S. military and intelligence policy: the prevention of the peaceful development of socialism in any country, to the extent possible. And so, it hasn't been so great for many of the world's peoples. But it has made the U.S. Inc. a very profitable enterprise for many U.S. and many other wealthy people in other countries. Indeed, it is the grandest imperial enterprise the world has ever known, without the necessity of occupying territory in order to achieve it. Trump's Campaign Foreign Policy Donald Trump's Latest Chinese fashion Import (well, may be arrested, yet). (Image by Loco Steve) Details DMCA But then along comes Trump. He is running in the primaries against the cream of the current Republican political establishment. He is a nobody, politically. And so he has to distinguish himself. And he does it to a fare-thee-well, as is well known, with his xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric. He rails against the members of NATO as short-changers of the U.S. The rails against the European Union, supports Brexit, is sympathetic to far-rightist European politicians (France) and governments (Poland, Hungary, Turkey). He goes back and forth on China. But he turns on the United States' closest economic and military allies in the G-7. As for Russia, Trump wants to bring the election-meddler (in the U.S. and a variety of European countries) back diplomatically, into the G-8. And so on and so forth. On the Child-Separation-at-the-Border-Policy And then there is what is currently going on at the border with Mexico (so say nothing of Trump's larger "build-the-wall-it-will-solve-all-problems" policy). The Trumpites, in this case led by both Trump himself and the violently xenophobic Stephen Miller, are engaging in behavior, with the children, that is publicly turning off even some Republicans. For the practice of intentional cruelty is similar to, for example, the practice in the early days of Nazi Germany enforced by members of Hitler's private army (until July, 1934 when it was absorbed into the national Army), the Sturmabteilung (SA), of forcing Jews, on their hands and knees in the street, to clean paving stones with toothbrushes. It happens that there is a clear warning from Trump on the use of intentional cruelty, a la Miller: "enemies of mine, beware. If you think what I did at the border was cruel, you ain't seen nothin' yet." Further, what the Trumpites don't realize (or maybe they actually do and want it, for down the road), they are in the process of creating an incubator for future terrorists. Finally, of course the tactic is a superb Trumpian WMD, Weapon of Mass Distraction (as the Mueller/Southern District of New York [see Mike Cohen] ring gets ever-tighter). Of course, Trump, practicing the Roy Cohn/Lee Atwater "always attack; never defend" response, blames the situation on a mythical law and the Democrats. Of course, it there were such a law, it would have to be ambiguous and he could easily issue an executive order ending the whole thing. An executive order you might say? Wasn't he against executive orders because Obama used them on major issues? Well, yes, but he wasn't against them when he issued the Muslim Ban. Foreign Policy by the Bible: Dominionism in Action Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. "My focus remains on my job and duties as a board member." - Ref Rodriguez A month after this indictment, Partnerships to Uplift Communities accused Rodriguez of transferring "more than $285,000 in public funds from the charter school network he co-founded to two businesses with which he had personal ties." State investigators had previously found that this same charter school operator had previously "showed an alleged conflict of interest in the awarding of millions of dollars in food contracts" while Rodriguez served on its governing board and as treasurer of the group. Recently, Rodriguez was forced to recuse himself from a vote on extending the Inspector General's contract since both of these matters were referred to this office. However, his three charter industry allies, Monica Garcia, Kelly Gonez and Nick Melvoin, all voted against renewing the contract. On March 16, Rodriguez says that he only had "two glasses of wine" while visiting the Yard House in Pasadena. Still, security felt that the LAUSD Board Member was "displaying aggressive behavior" was "acting loud" and refused "to leave the restaurant." Police were called and Rodriguez was taken into custody. His conduct during the arrest is available for the public to witness as it was captured by a bodycam attached to one of the officers. What message does the actions of Ref Rodriguez send to the students of the LAUSD? What about his fellow Board members, none of which have called for his resignation? The message is clear; loyalty to political affiliation trumps everything else. You can lie on government forms as long as you are pushing a favorable political agenda. A public servant can be targeted because he might expose wrongdoing by your allies. Public drunkenness and other acts of moral turpitude should be ignored as long as the offender provides a reliable vote. Ref Rodriguez claims that he is working for "our children and community." In reality, he continues to erode the expectations our children should have of elected officials. This damage is much worse than any good a board member can accomplish. He must resign now! ____________________________________________ Carl Petersen is a parent and special education advocate, elected member of the Northridge East Neighborhood Council and was a Green Party candidate in LAUSD's District 2 School Board race. During the campaign, he was endorsed by Network for Public Education (NPE) Action and Dr. Diane Ravitch called him a "strong supporter of public schools." His past blogs can be found at www.ChangeTheLAUSD.com. Opinions are his own. Global 5G Markets (2020-2025) | 97% CAGR Growth Predicted over 5 Years Global 5G Markets (2020-2025) https://www.researchbymarkets.com/sample-request/20040 https://www.researchbymarkets.com/report/global-5g-markets-2020-2025-20040.html https://www.researchbymarkets.com/inquiry/20040 https://www.researchbymarkets.com/aboutus The fifth-generation of mobile technology (5G technology) is expected to cater to the demand and business frameworks needed by and beyond 2020; but it is not without its disruptions. 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According to a Netscribes research, the global 5G market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of around 97% over a five-year period and will reach a value of USD 251 billion by 2025.Request Sample Pages for this report:Key Growth FactorsThe main driver of 5G is the ever-increasing demand for an enhanced mobile internet experience, clubbed with smartphone adoption among users. 5G technology will address rising bandwidth requirements, demand for advanced application services and improved acceptance of the Internet of Things (IOT).Threats and Key PlayersWell-defined 5G standards and a clean regulatory environment will help realize the full potential of 5G services. Inadequate spectrum and infrastructure would be the key hindrance for developing nations in the effort to adopt 5G services.View complete TOC and List of Tables & Figures:Top 10 global key service provider companies covered in the study include:o China Mobileo Verizon Communicationso AT&To Vodafoneo Nippon Telegraph and Telephoneo Sprint Corporationo Deutsche Telekomo Telefonicao America Movilo China Telecommunications CorporationWhat's covered in the report:o Drivers for 5G adaptation, trends, and challenges in the present telecommunication industryo Total number of global and regional SIM cellular connections and SIM M2M cellular connections across 5G, 4G, 3G, 2Go Global and regional data usage for both SIM cellular connections and SIM M2M cellular connections across 5G, 4G, 3G, 2Go Global and regional data traffic for both SIM cellular connections and SIM M2M cellular connections across 5G, 4G, 3G, 2Go Potential 5G Global LandscapeWhy buy?o Get a broad understanding of the global 5G market, the dynamics of the market and the current state of the industryo Understand SIM Cellular Connection and SIM M2M Cellular Connection advancements/ decay across 5G, 4G, 3G, and 2G generationso Recognize major competitors' business and market dynamics, and respond accordinglyRelated Definitions:Classic SIM Connection A subscriber identification module (SIM) is an integrated circuit(IC) that is designed to securely store the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number and its related key, which are used for identification and authentication of subscribers on mobile telephony devices (such as mobile phones and computers). SIM cards are used on GSM phones, and they are required for newer LTE-capable handsets.Machine-to-Machine (M2M) SIM Connection- Refers to the technologies that enable devices/ machines and sensors or "things" within (The Internet Of Things) to communicate with each other - and with other Internet-enabled devices and systems.Inquire more about this report:Contact Us:Research By MarketsMs. Lia Seth | Client Relations DirectorEmail: enquiry@researchbymarkets.comAbout Us:Research By Markets is an online Market Research Report Repository.Our repository contains reports segmented by Geography and Industry. We cover all major Industry Verticals - Information Technology, Semiconductor, Electronics, Manufacturing, Food & Beverages, Telecommunications, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Automotive, BioTechnology, Energy & Power, Banking and many more.Research By MarketsE-3, Ganga Homes,Behind Bank Of India,Viman Nagar,Pune 411 014.Maharashtra, India Agricultural Lubricants Market worth 2.48 Billion USD by 2022 Agricultural Lubricants Market https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=262710114 https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Purchase/purchase_report1.asp?id=262710114 https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=262710114 The global Agricultural Lubricants Market is projected to grow from an estimated USD 1.96 Billion in 2016 to USD 2.48 Billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 4.8% from 2017 to 2022.Download PDF Brochure @The objectives of this study are: To estimate and forecast the agricultural lubricants market, in terms of value and volume To provide a detailed segmentation of the agricultural lubricants market on the basis of type, application, and region To identify emerging trends and opportunities in the agricultural lubricants market To analyze the market with focus on high growth applications and fastest-growing segments To analyze the factors that drive and restrain the growth of the agricultural lubricants market To provide a comprehensive competitive landscape of the market and profile the key market players with respect to their market shares/ranking To analyze and forecast segments of the agricultural lubricants market and present an overall view of the marketFor company profiles in the report, 2016 has been considered as the base year. In cases wherein information is unavailable for the base year, the years prior to it have been considered.Research MethodologyThe research methodology used to estimate and forecast the global agricultural lubricants market began with capturing data on key vendor revenues through secondary sources, such as Hoovers, Bloomberg, Chemical Weekly, Factiva, and various other government and private websites. Vendor offerings have also been taken into consideration to determine the market segmentation. After arriving at the overall market size, the total market was split into several segments and subsegments, which were later verified through primary research by conducting extensive interviews with key personnel, such as CEOs, VPs, directors, and executives. Data triangulation and market breakdown procedures were employed to complete the overall market engineering process and arrive at the exact statistics for all segments and subsegments of the market.The agricultural lubricants market has a diversified ecosystem of upstream players, including raw material suppliers, along with downstream stakeholders, vendors, and government organizations. Companies operating in the agricultural lubricants market include Chevron (US), ExxonMobil (US), Fuchs Petrolub (Germany), Shell (The Netherlands), Total (France), BP p.l.c. (UK), and Phillips 66 (US) among others.Direct Purchase @Target Audience Manufacturers, Dealers, and Suppliers of Agricultural Lubricants Government and Research Organizations Applications Companies Operational in Material R&D Associations and Industrial Bodies Investment Banks Consulting Companies/Consultants in Chemical and Material SectorsScope of the report: This research report categorizes the agricultural lubricants market based on type, application, and region, and revenues as well as analyzes trends in each of the submarkets.On the basis of Type: Mineral Oil Lubricants Synthetic Lubricants Bio-based LubricantsOn the basis of Region: Asia Pacific North America Europe Middle East & Africa South AmericaInquire before buy @About MarketsandMarketsOur 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve.MarketsandMarketss flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets.Contact:Mr. RohanMarkets and MarketsUNIT no 802, Tower no. 7, SEZMagarpatta city, HadapsarPune, Maharashtra 411013, India1-888-600-6441Email: sales@marketsandmarkets.com Europe Cervical Cancer Diagnostics Market By Test Type (Pap smear & HPV DNA) https://www.renub.com/europe-cervical-cancer-test-market-patients-by-screening-type-pap-smear-hpv-dna-united-kingdom-france-germany-italy-spain-sweden-switzerland-norway-netherlands-989-p.php https://www.renub.com/contactus.php www.renub.com Access full Research:Get Free Customization in This ReportCervical cancer is one of the most serious public health issues in Europe. Despite introduction of vaccination in 21 European countries, still more than 23 Thousand women have died from cervical cancer across all over Europe. Cervical cancer incidence rate in Europe was 10.2 per 100,000 women population. Germany, France and United Kingdom are top three dominating countries in the Europe cervical cancer market in 2017. Cervical cancer generally occurs in women over 30 years. It is mostly caused by the Human papillomavirus (HPV) virus. Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer prevailing in women and the seventh in terms of overall cancer incidences.Increasing cervical cancer incidence rate is one of the key factors that drive the cervical cancer screening market. Rapidly increasing female population, growing prevalence of HPV infections and increasing awareness about cervical cancer screening programs is also expected to drive the cervical cancer screening market in the near future.Request a free sample copy of the report:Renub Research report titled Europe Cervical Cancer Diagnostics Market & Forecast, By Test Type (Pap smear and HPV DNA), Countries (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and Netherlands) provides a complete analysis of Europe Cervical Cancer Screening Market. The covers European Countries Cervical Cancer Test Market Screened Population & Mortality.By Test Types Pap smear Screening Tests is gaining popularity in EuropeThe report studies the market and population of the following cervical cancer screening tests: Pap smear Tests and HPV DNA Tests. Pap smear and HPV DNA tests are more popular with the developed countries such as Germany, United Kingdom and France.By Country Germany holds the largest share by population and market in Cervical Cancer TestThe report studies the market/screened population of Nine big European countries (United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway and Netherlands) which provides a complete country-wise analysis of Europe Cervical Cancer Screening Market.Cervical Cancer Diagnostics Market Pap Smear Tests Market HPV DNA Tests MarketCervical Cancer Test Population Pap Smear Test Population HPV DNA Test PopulationCervical Cancer Mortality Population of All 9 CountriesAll the 9 Countries Studied in the Report are as Follows1. United Kingdom2. France3. Germany4. Italy5. Spain6. Sweden7. Switzerland8. Norway9. NetherlandsContact 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 Kunsh Technologies proud to offer a World Class PhoneGap App Development Services https://www.kunshtech.com/ Originally developed by Nitobi Software and further adopted by Adobe in 2011, PhoneGap is gradually becoming a popular mobile app development framework.Apache Cordova fame this open-source framework has proved its significance to develop mobile apps with JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS3 to target different platforms like Android, iOS and Windows.Leading app developers at Kunsh Technologies also rely over this technology to create apps with a single code base and using the Web standards. These apps are also wrapped in a Web View container and compiled for any of the native platforms. Here, developers do not need to program in the native code. Instead, they can create the hybrid apps to access the native device resources like data, sensors and network status through standard API calls.According to Kunsh Technologies CEO, Darshan Shah, The introduction of PhoneGap Developer app has lowered the barrier of entry for creating PhoneGap applications,Now, you can immediately preview your app on a device without any SDK platform installation, registration devices or even compiling code, he shared further.Research suggests that most .NET Developers use Visual Studio for creating cross platform app development. But fortunately, more options are made available to them under technological advancements so that they do not have to rely over any Microsoft based IDE. The PhoneGap Developer App release during 2014 emerged again as a gradually popularizing technology to lead the entire app development world with a faster pace.This new tool was introduced by the Adobe Systems Inc. for streamlining and speeding up previewing and testing with the open source PhoneGap cross-platform development software. Now, the developers can install this app and see how their coding changes reflect instantly on a paired device.According to an experienced PhoneGap Developer at Kunsh Technologies, The PhoneGap developer apps usage gives access to the office APIs of this framework and let us use the tool for now targeting the iOS and Android devices along with their app development team working on Windows Phone support.Even you can develop an iOS app on Windows and soon, an OS X based Windows Phone APP, he added further.Here, the developers just need to install PhoneGap command-line interface (CLI), which is a desktop app and then an appropriate mobile app from Google Play or Apples App Store. Furthermore, no additional software is used to install here.An experienced and well-recognized firm in the field of mobile app development, Kunsh Technology is successfully running its development and design operations since years. The firm responsibly develops hybrid and native apps on different app development platforms like Android, iOS and Windows and successfully serving its clients since years.For more details, mail us at info@kunshtech.comOr visit719A, Sakar 9, Near Old RBI, Ashram Road, Navrangpura, Ahmedabad 380009 Opportunities for the global ethylene vinyl acetate market to reach $9.9 billion by 2023 Insights that Matter www.lucintel.com According to a new market report published by Lucintel, the future of the ethylene vinyl acetate market looks attractive with opportunities in the packaging, solar, agriculture, wire & cable, footwear, and automotive industries. The global ethylene vinyl acetate market is expected to reach an estimated $9.9 billion by 2023 with a CAGR of 4.8% from 2018 to 2023. The major growth drivers for this market are growth in the various end use industries, and growing demand from packaging sector, especially in food and medical applications, due to its non-toxic nature.In this market, solar, packaging, footwear, and agriculture are the major end use industries. Lucintel forecasts that solar will remain the largest and highest growth segment over the forecast period supported by growth in solar photovoltaic cells installation in Asia pacific region, especially in China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.Within the ethylene vinyl acetate market, film will remain the largest application during the forecast period due to increasing awareness about the use of solar energy, which is augmenting the demand for EVA film in photovoltaic cells. Lucintel predicts that the demand for ethylene vinyl acetate for film is likely to experience the highest growth in the forecast period due its growing demand in the areas of solar photovoltaic cells, packaging, and agriculture.Asia Pacific is expected to remain the largest market by value and volume and will experience the highest growth over the forecast period supported by growth in the various end use industries, such as packaging, footwear, solar photovoltaic cells, and wire & cable. China is the largest market for ethylene vinyl acetate due to its high consumption in footwear, solar, automotive, and wire & cable supported by the high domestic demand.Emerging trends, which have a direct impact on the dynamics of the industry, include increasing demand for EVA in the medical industry and expansion of the solar industry. E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Hanwha Chemical, ExxonMobil Corporation, Formosa Plastics Corporation, LyondellBasell Industries NV, Arkema S.A., Celansese Corporation, USI Corporation, Lotte Chemical Corporation, and Versalis S.p.A. are among the major manufactures of ethylene vinyl acetate.Lucintel, the leading global strategic consulting and market research firm, has analyzed growth opportunities in the global ethylene vinyl acetate market by application, by end use industry, by density, and region. Lucintel has prepared a comprehensive research report entitled Growth Opportunities in the Global Ethylene Vinyl Acetate Market 2018-2023: Trends, Forecast, and Opportunity Analysis. This Lucintel report serves as a catalyst for growth strategy as it provides comprehensive data and analysis on trends, key drivers, and directions. The study includes a forecast for the global ethylene vinyl acetate market by application, by end use industry, by density, and region as follows:By Application [Volume (Million Pounds) and $M shipment analysis for 2012 2023]: Film Foam Adhesives OthersBy End Use Industry [Volume (Million Pounds) and $M shipment analysis for 2012 2023]: Packaging Solar Agriculture Wire & Cable Automotive Footwear OthersBy Density [Volume (Million Pounds) and $M shipment analysis for 2012 2023]: Very low density EVA Low density EVA Medium density EVA High density EVABy Region [Volume (Million Pounds) and $M shipment analysis for 2005 2023]: North America Europe Asia Pacific The Rest of the WorldThis 261-page research report will enable you to make confident business decisions in this globally competitive marketplace. For a detailed table of contents, contact Lucintel at +1-972-636-5056 or helpdesk@lucintel.com. Lucintel offerings include Chemical Market Research Reports, Chemical Industry Analysis Report, Opportunity Screening and Analysis, Strategic Growth Consulting and Capital Investment Analysis.Lucintel, the premier global management consulting and market research firm, creates winning strategies for growth. It offers market assessments, competitive analysis, opportunity analysis, growth consulting, M&A, and due diligence services to executives and key decision makers in a variety of industries. For further information, visitLucintel LLCLucintel, 8951 Cypress Waters Blvd., Suite 160, Dallas, TX 75019Ph: +1-972-636-5056 Fax: +1-877-883-5140marketing@lucintel.com PV Cleaning Solutions: Sunbrush Mobile Presents Two New Innovations at the Intersolar Exhibition 2018 http://www.sunbrushmobil.info www.sunbrushmobil.info www.mbc-isarrauschen.de Lachen, Bavaria, 18 June 2018: The Sunbrush Mobile Co. (SBM), provider of cleaning solutions for photovoltaic systems, is presenting two innovations at the Intersolar Exhibition 2018. The compact Sunbrush mobile rapid is the ideal solution for cleaning rows of closely positioned solar modules. The improved Sunbrush mobile compact cleaning system now comes with a dust guard, which shields it from environmental damage. Both systems are on display at the SMB Stand 354 in Hall A3.When it comes to photovoltaics, desert regions and regions near the equator have something in common: The rows of PV modules stand closer together because the sun shines in at a steeper angle.This is a good thing as it makes for a higher yield, but only as long as the modules are free of dust and other impurities, which are unfortunately common in these regions. In the development of PV systems, the narrow lanes between the rows of PV modules are usually not taken into consideration, which has up until now made it difficult to maintain and wash the solar panels. For this very purpose, Sunbrush Mobile Co. developed the rapid machine, a compact cleaning machine that can be mounted on a mini excavator with a quick-change system.The Sunbrush mobile rapid has the patented Washtronic, which holds the brush pressure at the desired setting. Due to its small size the rapid cleaning system can be deployed in PV parks with narrow lanes. In addition to that, it can be used in standard PV parks as well as those with tracker systems, which makes the system extremely flexible. The operator of a mini excavator can use the Sunbrush mobile rapid to clean solar panel tables of up to six meters in height without having to make an empty trip, as the system can be rotated 180 degrees to clean the neighboring tables on the return trip. Solar tracker systems mounted on crossbars can also be easily cleaned. The rapid is easy to transport and can be loaded onto a standard trailer along with the mini excavator. The water tank can be hung onto the dozer blade and thereby carried along.Sunbrush Mobile Compact with enclosed gearbox and optimized hydraulic steering.The Sunbrush, proven and tested over many years, has been further improved by SBM. The new model has a closed construction and a protected machine head, thus guaranteeing protection from sand, dust, and moisture. As a consequence, the cleaning solution requires less maintenance. Moreover, the manufacturer has refined the design of the hydraulic steering to make the operation easier and more precise. The machine is also more compact, with a reduced width and height that gives the operator an optimal field of vision over the module to be cleaned.With our optimized steering, we can clean even on uneven ground. The improved protection of the components has, of course, a positive effect on the lifespan of the machine even as it operates under hard environmental conditions, explains Franz Ehleuter, the founder and manager of Sunbrush Mobile GmbH. who is also responsible for the technology of the product. We are leaders in this area of technology who offer a Made-in-Germany level of quality and engineering performance. Our machines have already been employed in the Atacama Desert in Peru and Chile, the driest place on earth! The cleaning solutions from Sunbrush Mobile have proven themselves even under the harshest conditions. This is the kind of reliability that customers all over the world can build on.Sunbrush Mobile ConceptHeavy dirt build-up on photovoltaic cells can reduce the yield by as much as 30 percent. Sunbrush mobile was developed to remove dirt, bird droppings, and dust from roof and open-field installations. The solar cleaning system, with its mobile cleaning brushes, can use lime-free rainwater or tap water treated with Sunbrush Blue additive or, as in desert regions, no water at all. The cleaning devices can also be used to clear away snow in winter. The cleaning solutions can be mounted on any available utility vehicle and are easily operated using a joystick. Sunbrush Mobile is a flexible system solution comprised of hydraulically propelled cleaning brushes of varying length and a water tank with pump, which can be mounted on the back of a utility vehicle for wet cleaning projects.The Sunbrush Mobile GmbH develops, produces and distributes machines for photovoltaic systems and building facades. The company, founded by Franz Ehleuter in Lachen in the Allgau region of Bavaria, operates a test center in-house and has the necessary engineering capabilities to develop the system. The innovative design organization serves customers all over the world. Sunbrush Mobile cooperates with the Institute for Energy and Drive Technology at the Ulm University of Applied Sciences. All component and finishing production take place in cooperation with machine building companies located in the Allgau region of Bavaria. All SBM products are covered by the German and European utility model. Well-known solar module manufacturers have approved of the use of all SBM brushes on their products. More information can be found under:Sunbrush mobil GmbHFranz EhleuterHauptstrae 2487760 LachenTelefon: +49 (0) 8332 24343-0E-Mail: info@sunbrushmobil.infoStephan WildMBC IsarrauschenFreibadstr. 30D-81546 MunchenTelefon: +49 (0)1512-7556465E-Mail: stephan.wild@mbc-isarrauschen.de Automotive Seat Parts Sales Market Size, Key Players, Growth, Analysis and Forecast 2018 http://bit.ly/2JNCLJl http://bit.ly/2JY4Ug5 https://www.radiantinsights.com/catalog/automotive http://www.radiantinsights.com/ This report studies the global Automotive Seat Parts market status and forecast, categorizes the global Automotive Seat Parts market size (value & volume) by key players, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top players in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia India and Other regions (Middle East & Africa, Central & South America).The global Automotive Seat Parts market is valued at million US$ in 2017 and will reach million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of during 2018-2025.Download Free Sample Report @The major players covered in this report Lear Corporation Grupo Antolin Brose Fahrzeugteile AUSTE GRAMMER TS TECH NHK SPRING Faurecia Johnson Controls DURA Automotive Systems IFBAutomotiveBrowse Full Research Report with TOC @Geographically, this report studies the key regions, focuses on product sales, value, market share and growth opportunity in these regions, covering United States Europe China Japan Southeast Asia IndiaWe can also provide the customized separate regional or country-level reports, for the following regions: North America United States Canada Mexico Asia-Pacific China India Japan South Korea Australia Indonesia Singapore Rest of Asia-Pacific Europe Germany France UK Italy Spain Russia Rest of Europe Central & South America Brazil Argentina Rest of South America Middle East & Africa Saudi Arabia Turkey Rest of Middle East & AfricaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into Frames Foam Pads Trim Covers Electronic and Pneumatic Systems AccessoriesOn 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 Passenger Vehicles Light Commercial Vehicles Heavy Commercial VehiclesExplore all Report of this category @About Radiant InsightsRadiant Insights is a platform for companies looking to meet their market research and business intelligence requirements. It assists and facilitate organizations and individuals procure market research reports, helping them in the decisions making process. The Organization has a comprehensive collection of reports, covering over 40 key industries and a host of micro markets. In addition to over extensive database of reports, experienced research coordinators also offer a host of ancillary services such as, research partnerships/ tie-ups and customized research solutions.Media Contact:Company Name: Radiant Insights, IncContact Person: Michelle ThorasPhone: (415) 349-0054Toll Free: 1-888-928-9744Address: 201 Spear Street 1100, Suite 3036,City: San Francisco; State: California; Country: United StatesEmail: sales@radiantinsights.comwebsite: Decrypting a Mattress for a Smooth Buying Experience https://www.nubliss.com), https://www.nubliss.com/memory-foam-mattress.html https://www.nubliss.com Online buying culture has swept the nation with a storm. From a tiny pin to a high-end car, everything under the sky is now just one click away. Consumers are offered numerous means of payment modes, from cash to EMIs, and heavy discounts to sweeten the deal but making a huge investment is still a ponder-worthy decision. It took e-commerce giants years to cultivate a culture unfamiliar to the market, which solely depended on feel-try-buy practice. What turned out to be a real challenge was pitching consumers the idea of buying a mattress online.At first, the online mattress industry met with a lot of resistance from consumers as well as the offline players. Alluring text and tall claims fell short to get the desired result for early players. Gimmicks like heavy discounts and freebies were not able to get attention from consumers. Redesigning the approach and integration of free trial period helped in earning the trust.However, we still believe that consumers should understand the basics before taking a dive into a huge financial commitment.Some of the points to take into consideration while Buying Online:1. Type of Foam: Three types of foam are available in the market- Memory, Latex, and PU. Memory foam is a bouncy material known for taking the shape of your body while sleeping. The moderately bouncy Latex is made using natural material and offers optimal comfort while sleeping. Both these foam types offer proper circulation of air and zero-partner disturbance for sound sleep. PU foam is not a preferred choice when it comes to sleeping like a king. This foam type is good for creation of a base or layering as it offers next-to-zero dispersion of heat as well as negligible circulation of air.2. Quality of Foam: After zeroing upon the type of foam, the next step should be researching about the quality. One cannot determine the quality of foam by feeling or trying the same, you need to check for certifications. Plus, it is impossible to feel or try the foam when purchasing online. As the mattress plays a vital role in a persons life and affects healthy as well, it becomes vital to offer a quality product. These certifications act like a seal of trust as the foam is manufactured adhering to international parameters and regulations. Look for certifications by CertiPur-US in the case of a memory foam or LGA in the case of latex foam. These certifications test the mattress foam as per dynamic load performance. The mattress foams are tested on the grounds such as loss of height, hardness and elasticity.3. Height Matters: Optimum height for a mattress is 6 inches and it can go up to 10 inches, as per the number of layers and comfort levels. Many brands offer 4 inches thick mattresses that are not designed to offer proper spine support. A 6-inch or above mattress offers optimum support to the spine as well as creates optimum pressure on the pressure points. Before buying a mattress, one should check the exact height of the mattress.4. Foam Thickness: One fact that a consumer should remember that it is impossible to create a mattress entirely using memory foam. To give a base to memory foam, other types of foam base are integrated. Mostly, a memory foam mattress will comprise a layer of memory foam and a thick layer of high-performance PU foam. In a thoughtfully crafted mattress, one will find 1-2 inches of memory foam accompanied by PU foam. It is a commonly asked question- Why 1-2 inches of memory foam? Sleep researchers and scientist have concluded that 1-2 inches of memory foam is best to cradle your body, relieve the spine off stress and create optimum pressure on aching muscles or joints.5. Skin-friendly Cover: If you think that a mattress cover holds no importance, then please think again. A mattress cover is not only designed to keep the mattress safe but also protect the user from the harmful effects of allergies and related. In general, the mattress cover is scientifically crafted to minimise allergic reactions as well as keeps dust mites at bay. It is advisable to check the certification of the cover to ensure that you are buying a product that can deliver what is promised.6. Feature Packed: Online mattress companies are in a hoard to offer a feature-packed product at the best possible price. Now you can choose from features such as cooling gel memory foam or natural latex or a layer of green tea infused foam. Memory foam infused with cooling gel keeps the body cooler by a few degrees on a hot summer day. The tiny beads of cooling gel are Phase Changing Material (PCM) that absorbs heat by changing the semi-solid phase. The heat produced during the sleep is quickly absorbed by the gel beads. The movement of air in the memory foam sweeps away the heat from these gel beads.Apprehensions of Indian Consumers when Buying a Mattress OnlineOnline market is flooded with new as well as old players. Every brand has rolled out versions loaded with not-to-be-missed features. Old players have the experience and years of trust to back-up their claims. But it is not easy to sell the same old product at non-economical price tags. New entrants are powered by one single ambition to roll out a mattress that is features packed and offered at an unbelievable price.The main factor on which new brands fail is establishing trust. Consumers in India have recently started investing big time online on essential products. This move has opened the floodgates of opportunities for new brands but is restricted by the trust factor. The same is established by new brands by offering Cash on Delivery (COD) option to the consumers. Brands have tied up with trusted delivery partners that facilitate the same.Also, consumers can check companys registration details in the government database. After an in-depth research, a consumer can call customer support and observe how the brand responds to queries. Plus, check for reviews by genuine customers on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.How to be 100% Sure About the Quality?When purchasing online, you miss out on the opportunity to feel or test the product in person. Dont be disheartened as new mattress brands are offering 100+ nights free trial with every purchase. So just buy a mattress and test the same till the time your body agrees with it. If you face any issues, you are free to return the product and avail 100% refund. Moreover, the companies are offering 5 to 10 years of warranty to ensure that the customers investment is not at risk.A rapidly growing mattress brand- Nubliss (has a unique approach to when selling a mattress. The brand tries its level best to ensure that the customer has all the information to make an informed choice. For this purpose, they have created a dedicated website that displays all technical details about the mattress. Online sale of Nubliss mattress () allows the brand to eliminate middlemen and pass the monetary benefits to customers.To gain the trust of customers, the company offers 101 nights free trial to users on every purchase. The policy was crafted in lieu of the fact that a persons body requires at least 10 to 15 days to adjust to a new mattress. This allows the body to take the final call on a long-term investment. Plus, the mattress is designed according to the Indian weather conditions. Infused with cooling gel, the mattress keeps your body temperature lower upto 4 degrees.Nubliss started its operations some 5 months back and has received a great response from informed customers in tier 1 cities but also from tier 2 and tier 3 cities. Customers have started trusting the brand as an expert in the field and often approach the brand with day-to-day queries related to sleep cycle.Nubliss is Indias first memory foam mattress with a cooling gel that is perfected for Indian conditions. It is also Indias first and only brand to be certified by CertiPUR-US the gold standard in the world for mattresses. This means that the mattress is approved for durability and quality through rigorous independent testing. Also, they are offering 10 years warranty and 101 days trial period which no other brand in India has offered till now.Plot No. 129, level 1, Sector 39, Gurugram, Haryana, 122003Web:Email Id: allears@nubliss.comContact: +919205138595 Global cementitious shipping market to be clouded by China-US trade war https://www.cwgrp.com/research/research-products/product/276-world-cement,-clinker-slag-sea-based-trade-forecast-through-2023 www.cwgrp.com In 2017, the total number of cement carriers topped 360 units, with the total dead weight tonnage surpassing 2.7 million, the highest figure recorded since 2010. According to CW Researchs 2018 update of the World Cement, Clinker & Slag Sea-Based Trade Report, this rising trend was boosted by a growing demand for cement carriers in key domestic trade markets.2017 also recorded an increase in the transportation cost of almost all types of dry bulk cargo, causing the Baltic freight index to grow to its highest value over the last four years. Rising shipping expenses were also boosted by an increase in Chinas commodity imports, primarily of coal and iron ore.Despite an initially positive outlook for 2018, the dry bulk market is likely to be shaken by international trade conflicts that could have large-scale repercussions.The optimistic outlook for the dry bulk market in 2018 was interrupted by an unexpected trade war between the US and China, observes Raluca Cercel, Associate with CW Group. The consequences of the import tariffs imposed by the US are already being felt in the shipping market, and as a response, China has recently announced the intention to extend its tariffs on imports from the US to several more agricultural products, including soybeans.ASIA-PACIFIC BOOSTING GLOBAL SEABORNE TRADEThere are currently more than 360 active specialized cement carriers operating around the world. These vessels move about 25 million tons of cement per year internationally in markets such as Japan, Greece, and Indonesia. Apart from specialized cement carriers, cementitious materials are also shipped via general dry bulk carriers, with Greece, Japan and China accounting for more than half of the global fleet.Most cement carriers are concentrated in Asia-Pacific, a trend that can be explained by the size of cement trade in the area, furthered by environmental regulations related to cement spillage, as well as unfavorable weather conditions that make it difficult to unload and unload cement from general bulkers.Although specialized carriers can be chartered, major cement producers often operate their own, in an effort to improve logistic efficiency. LafargeHolcim, Heidelberg Cement, and Cemex account for a combined share of almost 20 percent of this segment.In 2018, new capacity can be expected to emerge in the cement seaborne trading market, including the conversion of bulk carriers.****For more information, placing an order, or interview inquiries, please contact Liviu Dinu, Market Services & Marketing Consultant, CW Group, by phone at +40-744-67-44-11, or e-mail at ld@cwgrp.com.ABOUT THE REPORTThe World Cement, Clinker & Slag Sea-based Trade Report provides an in-depth and data-oriented analysis of trade-related development and analyzes the historical trade flows and prices, changes in exports and imports the past years from a regional perspective with a focus on key markets. The report also projects key cement and clinker supply-demand gaps that will sustain world cement trading in for the next few years. Key exporters, their facilities, and traders are profiled, as well as key ocean-going cement carrier operations and their vessels. Examined trade flows include gray cement, clinker, white cement, and slag, as well as a discussion of fly ash trade, in bag, big-bag, or bulk form. The report projects main flows through 2023 expected to be shipped by ocean going vessels and also includes prevailing cement trade prices and bulk/dry cargo shipping rates.More information about the report can be found here:ABOUT CW GROUPThe Greenwich (Conn.), USA headquartered CW Group is a leading advisory, research and business intelligence boutique with a global presence and a multi-industry orientation. CW Group is particularly recognized for its sector expertise in heavy-side building materials (cement), light-side building materials, traditional and renewable power & energy, petrochemicals, metals & mining, industrial minerals, industrial manufacturing, bulk cargo & shipping, among others. We have a strong functional capability, grounded in our methodical and quantitative philosophy, including due diligence, sourcing intelligence, feasibility studies and commodity forecasting.CW GroupPO Box 5263, Greenwich, CT 06831, USALiviu Dinu (inquiries@cwgrp.com) German Billionaire says "The EU is experiencing a crisis of existence. Everything that could go wrong went wrong" Ralf Dodt, who has a net worth in excess of US$8 billion and is the sole owner of Millhouse Capital is well known at Bloomberg, Reuters, DPA, Sputnik, and many other media's. In the European Union and USA Ralf Dodt and his company Millhouse Capital is accused of links to president Vladimir Putin, especially because Mr Dodt officiallyy declared that no one will stop him to support Russia against this hysterical mendacious of the EU and USA.Speaking to the reporter Jaques van de Graaf German Billionaire Ralf Dodt says the European Union is an failed project, the Euro and the EU itself is history. It's only a matter of time when the EU is totally split ! Everything that could go wrong went wrong because of the wrong decisions mainly of Chancellor Merkel. She is the driving force within the EU and with her megalomania and blind fanatism against Russia and wrong decisions towards Ukraine. She is the all guilty for the disastrous political situation within the EU he said.Is there a downfall of the democracy ?The democracy is fallen already. If there would be a real democracy then the EU politicians would let decide the citizens in referendum about sanctions against Russia, immigration of criminals, flooding the western world with islam, Ukraine etc. Because those politicians know exactly that the citizens will vote against their decisions they don't allow a referendum.The western media's are not free and independent, they are influenced and manipulated by the governments, even blackmailed to publish only stories that will influence the citizens the way the politic wants. If it is forbidden the police to mention that the rape victim was an victim of an refugee, is that democracy ? If the citizens will read 4 years long that Russia is bad, that Russia wants to attack the EU then sooner or later more and more people will believe that, is that democracy ?Merkels blind hate and stupid fanaticism against Russia, supported by the Federal Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen, brings Germany and the EU to the edge of an war against Russia ! If this will happen then the whole mankind will lose because this will end into the 3rd Worldwar. Europe will be the battlefield of the USA / NATO but the whole mankind will die.They preaching democracy but acting like dictators ! To use sanctions against Russia as a political weapon is the most weakest behaviour of a government ! This destroys trust, business activities and the economy of all involved countries and only the ordinary citizen have to suffer ! I have absolutely no trust more in the EU leaders and in their domestic and foreign policy !The current E(uropean) U(nion) is not the place anymore to be ! Democracy is only a word for the EU politicians and nothing else. They only think about themself and how long they can stay in this positions as president or chancelor ! What kind of democracy is it that everyone who is pro Russia is automatically contra EU and USA !? Does exist only black and white in this democratic EU world ?What do you think about Merkels refugee politic ?The refugee integration and refugee politic of Merkel went wrong as well. With her stubbornness not to stop the immigration of more and more so called refugees, Germany and EU would have much less rape victim, murder, robbery and theft ! Merkel personally is guilty for many murdered and raped women because she personally has decided to let immigrate those criminal individuals into the EU. The EU citizens would not have to live in fear like they do now. And nevertheless even now Merkel wont give up to let in more of those criminals. Is that wise poltic, stupidity or even Megalomania !?Most of those so called refugees are not war refugees but radical islamic fundamentalists and poverty refugees. They enter the EU countries either to spread terror or to get money. In Germany many german citizens must fight for their rights, lots of them have 2 and even 3 jobs because they have not enough money to live they, but refugees get new build flats and houses, get monthy more money than germans and even needn't to work for that.If you are anti Refugees you are immediately a rightradical individual. That he is only concerned of his family that is not of importance. If a political party wants to regulate by limitation the immigration then they are a rightradical party. Is that the right refugee politic, is that democracy ?One main goal the all EU politicians is to scare the citizens and then they work with people's fear. They work with people's fear to manipulate them better. An scared human is better to control and you can influence him with all informations / lies you want him to believe.Do you see any succeed in the Ukraine by support of the EU and USA ?The so called "peace-loving western world" has tacitly watched as a coup in Kiev (paid by the west) against Yanukovych democracy in Ukraine revealed ! It has tacitly watched as Kiev continued to bring his ground forces to bring the rebellious eastern Ukraine back on track ! It has tacitly watched how right radical battalions set up and sent to war were - they have tacitly watched so long, until the triumphant Kiev had to suffer defeat after defeat. Only then responded that "peace-loving world", with more support for the Ukrainian government by money and arms.The ruling so-called Ukrainian government is not worthy to be called government at all. Ukraine is now a vassal state of the US and EU, and therefore, of NATO. The puppet government in Kiev is used as mouthpiece to provoke Russia. For that they get financial help from their western allies, he said.Is that a "peace-loving world" ? Is that a "peace-loving EU" ? The malicious mendacious government with their warmonger and criminal so called president Poroshenko in Kiev tries with all power to provoke a war with Russia and gets support from USA, EU and NATO (North Atlantic Terror Organisation) and everyone who support this criminals in Kiev / Ukraine is a criminal himself ! That's the only success the EU and USA have reached in the Ukraine, a destroyed country, a totally over-indebted country, poor citizens, and a emigration of 1 citizen per half minuteWith this behavior they are responsible for destabilizing Ukraine. If a puppet government doesn't look after its own citizens and risks millions of lives by escalating tensions with Russia, it can only be viewed as a destabilizing force, not only for Ukraine, but the entire world,Have you suffered losses through the sanctions against Russia ?No, I don't have suffered losses through the sanctions against Russia. First of all, none of my companies is situated in the EU and therefore the sanctions doesn't touch me.Secondly I will not support any sanctions against any country only because of the will of some countries. In 2014, the US, the EU and several other countries imposed their anti-Russian sanctions. Their goal was absolutely clear: to harm the Russian economy so that the Kremlin radically changes its foreign policy course.The sanctions against Russia / Crimea are nothing else than a stupid political weapon. Russia gets blackmailed with sanctions by the EU and USA to follow the western rules and to be a weak "slave" and the political pressure should get a result that Russia gets weak again. That's the revenge of western megalomaniac politic idiots because Russia didn't accept to have lost the cold war and grews to an world power again, Mr. Dodt concluded.DvisionsManagement & CareerArt and cultureDie PresseJaques van de GraafHainburger Strae 331030 Wienjaques.van.de.graaf@Safe-mail.net Retailing Market In United Arab Emirates Market Trends, Segmentation, Analysis Forecast | Euromonitor - 2022 Retailing, Retailing Market , Retailing Market Growth, Presses Release, Retailing Manufacturers, Retailing Status, Retailing Mark https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/946939-retailing-in-the-united-arab-emirates https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/946939-retailing-in-the-united-arab-emirates http://www.wiseguyreports.com Description :In line most retailers expectations in the country, 2017 continued to be impacted by lower oil prices, regional and global macroeconomic factors impacting consumer confidence and expenditure patterns. Whilst many retailers report that growth tends to pick up during the last quarter of the year, mid-year months such as June and August were highly unsatisfactory. Further, key retail seasons such as Ramadan and back to school aligned across the same time during the year, further impacting sales duEuromonitor Internationals Retailing in United Arab Emirates report offers insight into key trends and developments driving the industry. The report examines all retail channels to provide sector insight. Channels include hypermarkets, supermarkets, discounters, convenience stores, mixed retailers, health and beauty retailers, clothing and footwear retailers, furniture and furnishing stores, DIY and hardware stores, durable goods retailers, leisure and personal goods retailers. There are profiles of leading retailers, with analysis of their performance and the challenges they face. There is also analysis of non-store retailing: vending; homeshopping; internet retailing; direct selling, as available.Request For sample Report @Product coverage: Non-Store Retailing, Store-based Retailing.Data coverage: market sizes (historic and forecasts), company shares, brand shares and distribution data.Why buy this report?* Get a detailed picture of the Retailing market;* Pinpoint growth sectors and identify factors driving change;* Understand the competitive environment, the markets major players and leading brands;* Use five-year forecasts to assess how the market is predicted to develop.Euromonitor International has over 40 years experience of publishing market research reports, business reference books and online information systems. With offices in London, Chicago, Singapore, Shanghai, Vilnius, Dubai, Cape Town, Santiago, Sydney, Tokyo and Bangalore and a network of over 800 analysts worldwide, Euromonitor International has a unique capability to develop reliable information resources to help drive informed strategic planning.Complete Report Details @Table Of ContentRetailers Use Active Sales and Promotion To Drive Revenue GrowthHealthy and Organic Food Products Increase Share of Shelf SpaceInternet Retailing Sees Milestone DevelopmentsBrick and Mortar Retailers Embrace Digital TrendsVat To Impact Retail PerformanceOperating EnvironmentInformal RetailingOpening HoursSummary 1 Standard Opening Hours by Channel Type 2017Physical Retail LandscapeCash and CarrySeasonalityPayments and DeliveryEmerging Business ModelsMarket DataTable 1 Sales in Retailing by Store-based vs Non-Store: Value 2012-2017Table 2 Sales in Retailing by Store-based vs Non-Store: % Value Growth 2012-2017Table 3 Sales in Store-based Retailing by Channel: Value 2012-2017Table 4 Sales in Store-based Retailing by Channel: % Value Growth 2012-2017Table 5 Store-based Retailing Outlets by Channel: Units 2012-2017Table 6 Store-based Retailing Outlets by Channel: % Unit Growth 2012-2017Table 7 Sales in Non-Store Retailing by Channel: Value 2012-2017Table 8 Sales in Non-Store Retailing by Channel: % Value Growth 2012-2017Table 9 Grocery Retailers: Value Sales, Outlets and Selling Space 2012-2017Table 10 Grocery Retailers: Value Sales, Outlets and Selling Space: % Growth 2012-2017Table 11 Sales in Grocery Retailers by Channel: Value 2012-2017Table 12 Sales in Grocery Retailers by Channel: % Value Growth 2012-2017Table 13 Grocery Retailers Outlets by Channel: Units 2012-2017Table 14 Grocery Retailers Outlets by Channel: % Unit Growth 2012-2017Table 15 Non-Grocery Specialists: Value Sales, Outlets and Selling Space 2012-2017Table 16 Non-Grocery Specialists: Value Sales, Outlets and Selling Space: % Growth 2012-2017Table 17 Sales in Non-Grocery Specialists by Channel: Value 2012-2017Table 18 Sales in Non-Grocery Specialists by Channel: % Value Growth 2012-2017Table 19 Non-Grocery Specialists Outlets by Channel: Units 2012-2017Table 20 Non-Grocery Specialists Outlets by Channel: % Unit Growth 2012-2017Table 21 Mixed Retailers: Value Sales, Outlets and Selling Space 2012-2017Table 22 Mixed Retailers: Value Sales, Outlets and Selling Space: % Growth 2012-2017Table 23 Sales in Mixed Retailers by Channel: Value 2012-2017Table 24 Sales in Mixed Retailers by Channel: % Value Growth 2012-2017Table 25 Mixed Retailers Outlets by Channel: Units 2012-2017Table 26 Mixed Retailers Outlets by Channel: % Unit Growth 2012-2017Table 27 Retailing GBO Company Shares: % Value 2013-2017Table 28 Retailing GBN Brand Shares: % Value 2014-2017Table 29 Store-based Retailing GBO Company Shares: % Value 2013-2017Continued.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. Financial Cards and Payments Market In Vietnam Market Trends, Segmentation, Analysis Forecast | Euromonitor International - 2022 Financial Cards and Payments, Financial Cards and Payments Market , Financial Cards and Payments Market Growth, Presses Release, https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2593999-financial-cards-and-payments-in-vietnam https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2593999-financial-cards-and-payments-in-vietnam http://www.wiseguyreports.com Description :Together with a young and rapidly growing urban population, the growth of internet retailing is a favourable environment for financial cards. Young consumers are quicker to adapt to new payment methods such as using financial cards and are making the switch from cash to card transactions. To tap into this strong potential market, banks and industry players constantly launch promotion campaigns to encourage customers to use their cards more and to attract new card owners. Discounts and zero-interEuromonitor Internationals Financial Cards and Payments in Vietnam report establishes the size and structure of the market for ATMs cards, smart cards, credit cards, debit cards, charge cards, pre-paid cards and store cards. It looks at key players in the market (issuers and operators), number of cards in circulation, numbers transactions and value of transactions. It offers strategic analysis of sector forecasts and trends to watch.Request For sample Report @Product coverage: Financial Cards in Circulation, M-Commerce, Transactions.Data coverage: market sizes (historic and forecasts), company shares, brand shares and distribution data.Why buy this report?* Get a detailed picture of the Financial Cards and Payments market;* Pinpoint growth sectors and identify factors driving change;* Understand the competitive environment, the markets major players and leading brands;* Use five-year forecasts to assess how the market is predicted to develop.Euromonitor International has over 40 years experience of publishing market research reports, business reference books and online information systems. With offices in London, Chicago, Singapore, Shanghai, Vilnius, Dubai, Cape Town, Santiago, Sydney, Tokyo and Bangalore and a network of over 800 analysts worldwide, Euromonitor International has a unique capability to develop reliable information resources to help drive informed strategic planning.Complete Report Details @Table Of ContentMore Favourable Environment for Financial CardsA Large Proportion of Financial Cards Remain UnusedVietnam Remains A Mainly Cash-based SocietyDebit Cards Remain the Most Popular Type of CardRobust Outlook for Financial Cards in VietnamMarket IndicatorsTable 1 Number of POS Terminals: Units 2012-2017Table 2 Number of ATMs: Units 2012-2017Table 3 Value Lost to Fraud 2012-2017Table 4 Card Expenditure by Location 2017Table 5 Financial Cards in Circulation by Type: % Number of Cards 2012-2017Table 6 Domestic versus Foreign Spend 2017Market DataTable 7 Financial Cards by Category: Number of Cards in Circulation 2012-2017Table 8 Financial Cards by Category: Number of Accounts 2012-2017Table 9 Financial Cards Transactions by Category: Value 2012-2017Table 10 Financial Cards by Category: Number of Transactions 2012-2017Table 11 Consumer Payments by Category: Value 2012-2017Table 12 Consumer Payments by Category: Number of Transactions 2012-2017Table 13 M-Commerce by Category: Value 2013-2017Table 14 M-Commerce by Category: % Value Growth 2013-2017Table 15 Financial Cards: Number of Cards by Issuer 2012-2016Table 16 Financial Cards: Number of Cards by Operator 2012-2016Table 17 Financial Cards: Card Payment Transactions Value by Operator 2012-2016Table 18 Financial Cards: Card Payment Transactions Value by Issuer 2012-2016Table 19 Forecast Financial Cards by Category: Number of Cards in Circulation 2017-2022Table 20 Forecast Financial Cards by Category: Number of Accounts 2017-2022Table 21 Forecast Financial Cards Transactions by Category: Value 2017-2022Table 22 Forecast Financial Cards by Category: Number of Transactions 2017-2022Table 23 Forecast Consumer Payments by Category: Value 2017-2022Table 24 Forecast Consumer Payments by Category: Number of Transactions 2017-2022Table 25 Forecast M-Commerce by Category: Value 2017-2022Table 26 Forecast M-Commerce by Category: % Value Growth 2017-2022SourcesSummary 1 Research SourcesProspectsHeadlinesProspectsCredit Cards Remains A Small CategoryCommercial Credit Cards Remain NicheCo-branded Cards and Zero-interest Instalments Are Among the Most Popular Promotional SchemesCompetitive LandscapeVietcombank Maintains Its LeadershipBetter Marketing and Customer Relation Management Needed in the Social Media AgeCategory DataContinued.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. Intraoperative Neuromonitoring (IONM) Market - Transformation Phase 2017-2025 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=B&rep_id=2591 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=T&rep_id=2591 https://www.tmrresearch.com/intraoperative-neuromonitoring-market Global Intraoperative Neuromonitoring (IONM) Market: OverviewOn account of the increasing care toward patient safety, the demand for intraoperative neuromonitoring has continued to rise at a steady pace. The burden of healthcare costs on patients and their desire to avoid readmission have upped the adoption of intraoperative neuromonitoring around the world. Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IONM) uses electrophysiological techniques such as electromyography (EMG), electroencephalography (EEG), and evoked potentials to effectively monitor the integrity of neural structures such as spinal cords, nerves, and certain parts of brain. IONM is mostly conducted to provide functional guidance to surgeons besides reducing risk to patients suffering from iatrogenic damage.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Intraoperative Neuromonitoring (IONM) Market: Key TrendsAs per findings of the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly 80% of disorders leading to disabling conditions are neurological. Intraoperative monitoring has thus become imperative in neurosurgery as it offers early warning with regards to sensory & motor functions during a surgery. It has therefore enabled surgeons yield better results by eliminating post-operative neurophysiological deficits. Safer surgery consequently results in reduced risk and intervention time. On account of these benefits the demand for intraoperative neuromonitoring has surged exponentially across the healthcare sector.This, coupled with, favorable reimbursement scenario especially in developed nations is augmenting market prospects for the future. Also the market players are focusing on strategic collaborations to expand their footprint and offer innovations. These calculated steps witnessed in the global intraoperative neuromonitoring market will act in favor of its growth in the coming years.Global Intraoperative Neuromonitoring (IONM) Market: Market PotentialRecently, SpecialtyCare renowned as a leading provider of surgical services, perfusion, and intraoperative neuromonitoring acquired Sentient, a prominent IONM provider in October 2016. With this transaction SpecialtyCare was able expand their leadership as one of the most comprehensive providers of patient-centered outsourced IONM services to hospitals, surgeons, health systems, and surgery centers.Request TOC of the Report @Following the acquisition, SpecialtyCare has increased the overall number of intraoperative neuromonitoring associates to support cases in the U.S., which is also its existing market, besides expanding coverage across the Atlantic States. Such mergers and acquisitions will have a positive impact on the market in letting it expand its distribution network across markets yet to be explored. Leading players in the global intraoperative neuromonitoring market are also looking to extend strategic collaboration with counterparts across emerging nations to expand their overall footprint.Global Intraoperative Neuromonitoring (IONM) Market: Regional OutlookRegionally, opportunities witnessed by the intraoperative neuromonitoring market in North America are highly lucrative. Besides this, considerable growth potential exists for the market in Europe as well. Considering improving reimbursement scenario across North America and Europe, these regions are expected to remain at the global markets fore also in the coming years. Besides this, a majority of developed countries have clearly defined procedure and codes for patients and insurance companies, which have made reimbursement processes easier and more convenient. Such well-defined guidelines has resulted in better outcome, thus benefiting hospitals and patients alike and accelerating the pace of gains for intraoperative neuromonitoring market in turn.A large number of neurological centers in the U.S. are recommending the use of intraoperative neuromonitoring in order to bridge the manpower gap and cater to the rising demand. Hospitals are encouraging physicians besides the doctorate-level IONM providers to get trained and certified from institutions such as the American Board of Nuclear Medicine. With the healthcare system making an effort to encourage the use of IONM, its demand is expected to surge further in the coming years. In addition, the market is expected to witness rising opportunities in Asia Pacific in the near future.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Intraoperative Neuromonitoring (IONM) Market: Competitive LandscapeSome of the most prominent enterprises operating in the global intraoperative neuromonitoring market are Biotronic NeuroNetwork, Natus Medical Incorporated, SpecialtyCare, NeuroMonitoring Technologies, LLC, Accurate Monitoring, Medtronic, Sentient Medical Systems, and NuVasive Inc.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.com Airway Management Devices Market - Potential Growth Approaches 2025 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=B&rep_id=2576 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=T&rep_id=2576 https://www.tmrresearch.com/airway-management-devices-market Global Airway Management Devices Market: OverviewThe global airway management devices are medical devices used for patients have obstructed airways or are at the risk of being obstructed. These devices find applications in a variety of clinical settings such as emergency and pre-hospital settings, operating rooms, and out-of-hospital care. Over the past few years, they have gained wide application in managing supraglottic airways and in endotracheal intubation. The proper use of airway management devices is necessary in various preoperative settings to ventilate patient and significantly improve post-operative outcomes, especially in critical care settings.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The increasing prevalence of respiratory diseases and growing number of patients with difficult airways in emergency departments is continuously boosting the evolution of the market. Medical device manufacturers are developing devices that need least expertise to operate, improves the rate of successful intubation, and are designed innovatively.Global Airway Management Devices Market: Key TrendsThe rising prevalence of various types of respiratory diseases, particularly Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and associated morbidity and mortality worldwide is a key factor driving the airway management devices market. A growing number of patients undergoing anesthesia before surgical procedures need continued ventilation, stimulating the uptake of airway management devices.Constant advances in endotracheal intubation in clinical practice has boosted the airway management devices market. The growing number of cases of children suffering with various lung diseases has propelled the demand for airway management devices. Increasing awareness related to the need for airway ventilation in preoperative settings and the advent of devices with enhanced success rate in emergency care are expected to open up exciting opportunities for market players.Request TOC of the Report @Global Airway Management Devices Market: Market PotentialRoyal Philips, a major Dutch company delivering healthcare technology solutions, announced in May 23, 2017 that it has inked a deal with RespirTech, which will help the company to consolidate its presence in respiratory care. The Minnesota-based company provides airway management devices for patients suffering from chronic respiratory conditions, such as COPD, cystic fibrosis, and bronchiectasis. The portfolio sold to Philips shall include a clinical support program aimed at providing respiratory care for patients at home settings. Further, the company said this will further add to its other service plans for respiratory care. One of the key offerings of RespirTech is inCourage Airway Clearance Therapy, a vest device to help patients in respiration at home. The vest therapy can be successfully applied in clearing airways for a wide range of respiratory conditions and neuromuscular diseases. The solution is helpful to patients whose abilities to cough are severely compromised and further help them avoid serious respiratory complications. RespirTech also produces ClearChest, a single patient-use comfort vest and bands intended for hospital settings. The contract will enable Royal Philips to make airway management easier and more effective for patients at home settings and will help in treating respiratory conditions. Such strategic mergers bode well for the airway management devices market as these will be helpful in improving patient outcomes.Global Airway Management Devices Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, North America is one of the major markets for airway management devices. The growth in the regional market is driven by substantial governmental initiatives and stricter implementation of clinical guidelines by healthcare organizations for proper ventilation and management of airways of patients. The growing prevalence of various respiratory conditions indicating blocked airways and constant device innovations by medical device manufacturers to improve clinical guidelines are expected to fuel this regional market. On the other hand, Asia Pacific is expected to offer lucrative avenues to market players. The impressive growth of the regional market is attributed to the emergence of countries, such as China and India, acting as cheap manufacturing hubs and intensive R&D funding across the region.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Airway Management Devices Market: Competitive AnalysisSeveral companies are opting for strategic collaborations and investing into product development activities. Leading players are developing innovative products and making mergers and acquisitions to gain a competitive edge over others. Major players vying for a significant share in the airway management devices market are Medline Industries, Smiths Medical, Ambu A/S, Teleflex Incorporated, Mercury Medical, Intersurgical, and Medtronic.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 The First Luxury Modular Condo in Manhattan Uses a MEP Design by New York Engineers New York Engineers www.ny-engineers.com New York, NY - June 19, 2018 - The first real estate project of its type, Idylls situated at 193 Henry Street is a modular condo in Manhattan which was assembled in just six days. The mechanical, electrical and plumbing installations for this Manhattan lower east side construction were designed by New York Engineers.Key facts about this project-Among 6 floors in Idylls, the first floor will be used for retails and upper five floors are private two bedroom condominiums, priced above 2 million USD each. The project is developed by Daniel Wise, a music producer who has also purchased properties at 201-203 to develop condos similar to Idylls, also with an MEP design from New York Engineers.New York Engineers founding principal Michael Tobias stated We have strategically designed MEP for this condo. One of its kind Idylls is our achievement in terms of modern mechanical, electrical and plumbing services.Michael added Modular construction is often associated with basic dwelling units, but projects like Idylls prove that the concept is also viable in the high-end market. Keep in mind that modular construction affects not only architectural and structural designs but building systems in general. Mechanical, electrical and plumbing installations must be designed according to NYC codes as usual, but they must also be laid out to be compatible with the modular construction process. The best recommendation is working with an MEP design company experienced in modular buildings.About New York Engineers-Headquartered in New York, USA New York Engineers operate nationwide and internationally offering mechanical, electrical, plumbing, sprinkler, and fire protection engineering services, as well as building condition assessment and commissioning, energy modelling, engineering design reviews and much more. To know more about New York Engineers, visit their websiteNew York Engineers- 275 West 39'th Street, 2'nd Floor, NEW YORK, NY 10018 Rugged Mobile: One-Stop Destination for Rugged Mobile Phones, Tablets http://www.ruggedmobile.co.za Rugged Mobile is a South-Africa based company that specialises in the supply of extremely durable Mobile Phones, Notebooks and Tablets which are known to offer unmatched toughness.These Phones and Tablets serve a wide variety of uses. The Mobiles, Tablets and Smartphones offered by the company are highly functional and durable.What is a rugged mobile? There are usually three common tests which determine the durability of a device. The three most frequently-done environmental specification tests are military standard (MIL-STD), temperature range, and IP ratings.Some Popular Rugged Mobile Tablets and Notebooks supplied by Rugged Mobile:1. ALGIZ 8X: This rugged ultra-mobile Tablet is light-weight and offers powerful field computing solutions for its users. It is highly reliable and offers great support even in some of the toughest conditions. It offers user-friendly features along with high-speed processing power. It is powered by an Intel Pentium core processor and helps in improving the efficiency and functionality of the Tablet. The main features of the Tablet include: Weight: 990 g Dust-resistant Water-proof Can resist temperatures as high-60 degree Celsius and as low as -20 degrees Celsius.2. ALGIZ RT 7: It is a perfectly ergonomic, extremely rugged 7- inch Tablet that offers excellent heavyweight field performance. The main features of the Tablet include: Weight: 650 g Dust resistant Water resistant Resist temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius and as low as -20 degrees Celsius.3. ALGIZ 7: It is a super rugged ultra-mobile Tablet equipped with multiple connectivity problems. It is small-sized, lightweight, and operates with an Intel atom processor. It is ideal for use in the most challenging environments. The main features of the Tablet include: Water resistance Dust resistant Weight: 1.1 kg Resistant to temperatures as high as 60 degrees Celsius and as low as -20 degrees Celsius.4. ALGIZ 10X: This rugged Tablet runs on advanced technology and is resilient to some of the harshest environmental elements. It also runs on an Intel quad-core processor and also offers the option of a full HD projected touchscreen. The main features of the Tablet include: Weight 1.3 kg Dust resistant Water resistant Resist temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius and as low as -20 degrees Celsius.For further information, refer to:About the company:Rugged Mobile is a South-African company that supplies extremely durable Tablets, Notebooks and Mobile phones which run on an advanced technology.Contact:186 Smit Street, Fairland, JohannesburgGauteng, 2195, South AfricaTel: 011 476 4779 Growing Preference for Mobile Apps in Canada Anticipated to Drive Market Growth Steadily https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1805983 https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/mobile-apps-canada-may-2018-report.html There is no doubt in the fact that mobile is constantly changing the life of people by changing the way people work. But then again, it is also true that in the present times mobile has no relevance without mobile apps. Market Research Hub (MRH) has recently added a new research report to its massive repository, which offers a comprehensive analysis of the Mobile Apps market, covering the behaviors, preferences and habits of the consumer. The study is titled as Mobile Apps - Canada - May 2018 in which historical analysis has been offered for the period 2013-17 and future projections have been offered for the period 2018-2024.Click here for Free Sample Report@In this study, the primary focus is to provide a better understanding of the mobile app market and how consumers use apps in Canada. The findings are based on the results of this latest research and will help navigate a mobile app market that is unlike any other consumer product today, with the goal of uncovering opportunities for growth in this fast-paced industry. Readers can expect holistic and comprehensive analysis of the Canada mobile apps landscape, which can be used for formulating effective business and product strategies.Browse Full Report with TOC@Research Key Components and Market SnapshotInitially, the report begins with mobile apps market overview and executive summary sharing key details with market-related data such as issues and opportunities, market factors as well as challenges. In addition, the report also offers a detailed competitive landscape, highlighting the launch activity and innovation; advertising and marketing activity of some of the leading players in the regionToday, there are literally millions of mobile apps available to consumers who own a smartphone or tablet. Mobile apps are the best creation allow users to run specific pieces of software. These software applications allow users to do everything from chatting with friends and ordering cabs, to paying bills and playing video games. In Canada, app usage is generally higher on smartphones than tablets. The confluence of high demand, evolving innovation and a low willingness from consumers to actually pay for apps creates a unique, dynamic market. Opportunities present in this market include-Mobile apps connect peopleApp usage differs on smartphones and tabletsPreference for mobile apps is high than computer websitesStill, there are some of the major issues in this market, such as most of the consumers arent willing to pay for mobile apps, device storage space can be a hurdle for app downloads; security and data tracking are concerns for app users.Moving further, the major sections of the study covers key players strategies and how they are innovating to remain competitive in this market. Presently, new companies are thinking app-first. Also, consumers are looking for content in their apps due to this app makers are trying to upgrade according to the demand.About Market Research HubMarket Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports of different sector like telecommunication market research 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 Global Birch Wood Market 2018 - Industrial Timber & Lumber, Challinor Wood Products Global Birch Wood Market https://bit.ly/2lj2bzX https://bit.ly/2M4XdlJ www.apexmarketreports.com Apex Market Reports, recently published a detailed market research study focused on the Birch Wood Market across the global, regional and country level. The report provides 360 analysis of Birch Wood Market from view of manufacturers, regions, product types and end industries. The research report analyses and provides the historical data along with current performance of the global PP Pipe industry, and estimates the future trend of Birch Wood on the basis of this detailed study. The study shares Birch Wood performance both in terms of volume and revenue.The market research report explores the Birch Wood Market across the globe along with major regions and countries. The research report provides a detailed study on each and every aspect of Birch Wood Market. The research report studies the entire value chain from raw material to end user industries. The report also shares import/export statistics along with production and consumption for all major regions and countries. Moreover, the research study classifies the Birch Wood Market based on major product types, application and end users industries of Birch Wood. Besides, the report also covers geographical segmentation for Birch Wood Market. The report further provides production, capacity, price per region, gross margin, production cost, for all major regions and countries listed in report.Get Free Sample Copy of Report Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of This ReportIndustrial Timber & LumberChallinor Wood ProductsSF GateThe competitive landscape of the global market for Birch Wood is determined by assessing the major industry participants, production capacity, production capacity utilization rate, Birch Wood Markets production chain, pricing by each manufacturer and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Birch Wood Market globally.Inquire Before Buying @The Global Birch Wood Market 2018 is further analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Birch Wood production volume, data pertaining to demand and Birch Wood supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. The report provides upstream and downstream analysis covering major raw material used in manufacturing of Birch Wood along with detailed manufacturing sources. The report also shares list of major raw material manufacturers along with their manufacturing locations. Detailed raw material price trend analysis along with manufacturing cost analysis is also incorporated into the report. Various methodical tools such as investment returns, feasibility, SWOT analysis and market attractiveness analysis has been implemented in the research study to present a comprehensive, detailed study of the industry for Birch Wood across the world.About UsApex Market Reports offers elevating market research globally. We have collection of various syndicated reports of different categories. Apex Market Reports provides you to best services, weather youre searching for new trends in market or competitive scenario in emerging market.Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezCorporate Sales Specialist155 North Wacker Drive, Suite 4250Chicago, IL 60606Phone: +17739042683Email id - sales@apexmarketreports.comWebsite - Data Center Colocation Market 2018 Global Leaders: Cyxtera Technologies, Equinix, Fibernet, NTT Communications, Cogent Communications, CoreSite Realty, Rahi Systems, AT&T https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4005 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/data-center-colocation-market-4005 Market Research Future published a research report on Global Data Center Colocation Market Research Report- Forecast 2023 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market HighlightsThe study reveals that data center colocation is trending in North America region. The big data and its usage are very crucial for the generating revenue for the business. The numbers of cloud providers are investing in data center colocation to provide the services to many organizations. The growing demand of outsource IT services is also boosting the need of this market. The increasing demand of data center colocations market is due to the various upcoming application where cloud infrastructure-as-a-service does not fulfill its requirements of the companies.The study indicates that the internet of things accompanied with big data provide the opportunities for growth of Data Center Colocation Market. The companies are investing in data center colocation to provide the new and upgraded solutions that support IoT strategy. The growing need of colocation, the companies are into partnerships with major player, owing to increase their geographic reach.The global data center colocation market is estimated to be 14 % of CAGR and is expected to reach at USD ~63 Billion by the end of forecast period.Get Sample of Report @Key Players:The prominent players in the global Data Center Colocation Market are Equinix, Inc. (US), Fibernet Inc. (US), Keppel Data Center Pte Ltd. (Singapore), NTT Communications Corporation (Japan), AT&T Inc. (US), Cogent Communications (US), CoreSite Realty Corporation (US), Cyxtera Technologies, Inc. (US), Digital Realty Trust, Inc. (US), DuPont Fabros Technology, Inc. (US), Rahi Systems Inc (US), and Verizon Communications, Inc. (US) among others.Segments:The global data center colocation system market has been segmented on the basis of type, deployment type, end -users and region.Global Data Center Colocation system Market by Type: Retail colocation Wholesale colocation OthersGlobal Data Center Colocation system Market by Deployment Type: Cloud On Premises OthersGlobal Data Center Colocation system Market by End-User: BFSI IT and telecom Government and defense Healthcare OthersGlobal Data Center Colocation system Market by Regions: North America Europe APAC Rest of the WorldRegional Analysis:The regional analysis of data center colocation market is being studied for region as Asia pacific, North America, Europe and Rest of the World. North America is one of the leading region across the world in terms of largest share in data center colocation market. The data center colocation providers are coming up with the new and planned expansions to provide the better service in North America, while the Asia Pacific region is emerging to reach the highest CAGR due to the lower the operational cost, reduce latency, to target medium-sized local businesses.Get Complete Report @Intended Audience IT companies Data center colocation service vendors Training and education service providers Cloud providers Governments Solution providers Intellectual property core and licensing providers Technology standards organizations Technology investors Research institutes, System IntegratorsAbout 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.Media Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Market Research on Quillaia Extracts Market 2017 and Analysis to 2027 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=24260 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/quillaia-extracts-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com With increasing trend towards naturally and organically derived ingredients, plant extracts have gained significant importance in the recent times. Quillaia extracts are derived from aqueous derivation or chromatographic separation of milled inner bark, branches of Quillaia Monlia or from the woods of pruned stems. With the advent of evolution in the food & beverage industry, there is the enormous inclination among manufacturers towards the extracts derived from natural source. Thus naturally derived quillaia extracts market is expected to record significant growth in the recent times. Due to their foaming and emulsifying properties, their primary application is found in food & beverages and cosmetics industry. Quillaia extracts are also significantly used in fragrance and flavours industry for the enhancement of flavours as well as in healthcare sector owing to their prominent health benefits.Request to view Sample Report:With FDA approval to the quillaia extracts in the food & beverage industry, the market for quillaia is expected to record upwelling growth in the forthcoming years. Quillaia extracts market offers a broad array of application due to its peculiar properties such as stabiliser, foaming agent, emulsifier and flavouring agent. Moreover, quillaia extracts also finds its application in the treatment of bronchitis, skin allergies among others. Quillaia extracts also contribute significantly in the personal care industry, as it encourages hair growth and find its use in hair tonic preparations significantly contributing towards growth of global quillaia extracts market. Moreover, adoption of versatile use of extracts among the manufacturers, provides an opportunistic platform for the manufacturers to invest in the growth of the quillaia extracts market.However, certain constitutes of quillaia extract have harmful health effects, which may lower the blood calcium level leading to kidney stones. Quillaia extracts are also poorly absorbed when administered orally resulting in serious health consequences. This might restrict the adoption of quillaia extract, thus, hampering the growth of quillaia extracts market. As quillaia extracts market is still in an emerging phase, deficient knowledge among the consumers regarding its applicability may encumber the growth of quillaia extracts market.Read Report Overview @The global quillaia extracts market is categorised into seven regions, namely, Western Europe, Eastern Europe Middle East and Africa (MEA), Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), , Japan Latin America and, North America. Europe accounts for major share of quillaia extracts market. As manufacturers seek for natural ingredients offerings in their products, due to increase inclination of consumers towards products made from natural ingredients. North America accounts for significant share in the global quillaia extracts market. In Asia Pacific region, India and China are considered to be opportunistic markets for quillaia extracts due to increase in preference of the consumers towards naturally or organically-derived products. As quillaia extracts are approved for human consumption in Japan, its growth is expected to further escalate during the forecast period in this region.Some of the prominent players identified in the global quillaia extracts market includes:Garuda International, Inc.Naturex S.AIngredion InternationalStan Chem International LtdDesert King InternationalBaja Yucca CompanyChile Botanics S.AAbout UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Marjoram Extracts Market Trends and Segments 2016-2026 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=24266 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/marjoram-extracts-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Marjoram is a culinary and medicinal herb in the mint family. As with the rising demand in food and beverages industries and pharmaceutical industry, the demand of marjoram has increased in the past years. Marjoram is used in tea, medicines and even oil is extracted from it, with the increasing demand of health conciseness in developing and developed nations and the rising demand for the herbal product have positively impacted the demand of marjoram industry. The augmenting market for herbal plant products which are used in making capsules, finished medicines and healthcare products around the world has eventually led to an anticipation of positive CAGR for herbal plant products in coming years, therby driving the marjoram market.Download PDF Brochure @Marjoram extracts is used as a natural flavor. Marjoram Extracts has a wide lists of properties and health benefits which come with its consumption. It is sweet pine and tangy in flavor which can be stored in the refrigerator for several days. Marjoram leaves and flowers when dried is widely used as a mixture for food processing industry. Some of the health associated benefits which human body gets on its usage are that it maintains blood sugar level. Moreover, it helps in curing cold, toothaches, measles, fever inflammation, headaches and also provides relief from the spasm in the respiratory system. Oil extracts of Marjoram are used as an antiseptics which heals the external wound and protects it from becoming septic. Marjoram is increasingly used in tea which provides a relief from symptoms such as digestions, gallstones, stomach cramps, poor appetite and liver diseases. With such benefits associated with consumption of Marjoram has led to rising demand in FMCG and pharmaceutical companies around the globe.And some of the side effects which are noted are lung condition, ulcers, allergy, and diabetes which becomes a barrier to the growth of marjoram, and the use of marjoram is opposed by various regulatory bodies in many countries.Read Report Overview @Marjoram is produced in European countries, but it is mostly consumed mostly in the Asian countries due to the growth of food and beverages industries. This study conducted was even taken into consideration of regions like North America and Middle Eastern and Africa countries. APEJ is the leading region in terms of consumption of marjoram followed by European and North America due to the increase in production of medicines and healthcare products. With an increase in the health consciousness among the new generations and the rise in the usage of herbal plant products have led to the growth of Marjoram Extract.Global Marjoram Extract Market: Key playersCG HerbalsHealing Solutions Essential OilsNative American Nutritionals Essential OilsRocky Mountain OilsPlant Therapy Essential OilsAura Cacia Essential OilsPrime Natural Essential OilsMountain Rose Herbs Essential OilsAbout UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Global Bridge Crane Market Forecast 2018-2025 Henan Mine, Terex, Tianjin Hoisting, Weihua Bridge Crane Market https://www.qyresearchstore.com/report/global-bridge-crane-market-2148 https://www.qyresearchstore.com/ Recently added detailed market study "Global Bridge Crane Market" examines the performance of the Bridge Crane market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Bridge Crane market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Bridge Crane market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Bridge Crane Market 2018 report includes Bridge Crane market Revenue, market Share, Bridge Crane industry volume, market Trends, Bridge Crane Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report. It shows manufacturing capacity, Bridge Crane Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2025.Firstly, the report covers the top Bridge Crane manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Market Forecast Report on Top Manufacturers companies are Eilbeck Cranes, Konecranes, Terex, EMH, SPANCO, Baumer, Morris, Gorbel Inc, O'Brien, GH Cranes, DESHAZO, Weihua, Zhuzhou Tianqiao, Wuxi Hongqi, RHM, ERIKKILA OY, Smarter Group, Henan Mine, Orit, Tavol Group, Tianjin Hoisting.To Get Sample Report Click Here: https://tinyurl.com/y9rbfkkdBridge Crane Market By Application are Factory & Plant, Production Line, Warehouse, OtherBridge Crane Market By Type are Single-Girder Bridge Cranes, Double-Girder Bridge Cranes, OtherFurther, the Bridge Crane report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Bridge Crane industry, Bridge Crane industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Bridge Crane Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Bridge Crane research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Bridge Crane market revenue worldwide.Finally, Bridge Crane market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About US:"QYResearchStore.com" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us:3626 North Hall Street (Two Oak Lawn),Suite 610,Dallas, TX 75219, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Web:Email: sales@qyresearchstore.com Glucoamylase Market Growth with Worldwide Industry Analysis to 2027 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=24272 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/glucoamylase-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Glucoamylase is an enzyme preparation which decomposes starch into glucose by ripping off glucose units from the non-reduced end of the polysaccharide chain. They are derived from submerged fermentation of a specially selected producer strain of Asp.niger. To sustain an optimum enzyme activity, glucoamylase should be stored in cool, dry place in a strongly closed container. When appropriately kept, this product can be expected to lose less than 10% of its activity in twelve months for powered form and six months for liquid preparation.Request to view Sample Report:Glucoamylase is an important industrial enzyme and is widely used in starch saccharification, brewing, and the distilling industry. Glucoamylase can be derived from a wide variety of sources including plants, animals, and microorganisms. Most of the production of glucoamylase is carried out using liquid fermentation process. Further, the techniques of solid state fermentation, are also been employed for its production and recently this technique is gaining renewed interest from researchers for its production.The major driver driving the global glucoamylase market is the health benefits of glucoamylase. Glucoamylase is a type of enzyme that can break down the starches into glucose which are absorbable and usable. Few of the health benefits of glucoamylase are it helps in irritable bowel syndrome, digestive upset & gastrointestinal issues, helps fast aiding of the digestive organs, and also can help in reducing food allergies.Obtain Report Details @Another important factor is the autoimmune conditions of the enzyme. Studies have proved that glucoamylase combined with other enzymes lowers the autoimmunity responses and can influence the immune system in a beneficial way.The glucoamylase market is segmented by regions into North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Middle East & Africa (MEA) and Japan. North America is anticipated to account for the largest share in global glucoamylase market and is expected to maintain its dominance during the forecast period. The US is the single largest market for the specialty enzyme. Further Europe is expected to account for the second largest share in the global glucoamylase market. Growing concerns about health care and cosmetics have led to the demand for specialty enzymes increased in the recent years. Further, the demand for glucoamylase is increasing due to the introduction of new drugs that are used in the enzyme replacement therapy.The key players in the global Glucoamylase market are Novozymes, Genencor, Amano Enzyme, DSM, AB Enzyme, Verenium, Shandong Longda, VTR, SunHY, YSSH, BSDZYME, Challenge Group, Jinyuan, and Sunson. To ensure product differentiation and to gain a considerable share of the market, major vendors are adopting creative strategies and are constantly developing innovative products. Most of the major Glucoamylase manufacturers concentrate on capitalizing their funds to maintain applications and technical marketing groups are appointed to serve the ever-changing needs of consumers.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Outdoor LED Smart Lighting Solution Market 2018 Global Leaders: Acuity Brands, General Electric, Osram Licht AG, Honeywell International, Cooper Industries, Digital Lumens, Lutron Electronics Company https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2702 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/outdoor-led-smart-lighting-solution-market-2702 Market Research Future published a research report on Outdoor LED Smart Lighting Solution Market Research Report- Forecast 2022 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2022.Outdoor LED Smart Lighting Solution Global Market - OverviewLighting industry has evolved during 21st century. Various developments have been observed in the last decade which includes switching from incandescent bulbs to CFL then to LED lights. Outdoor smart lighting solution helps in safety and security of users as well as can be a great option for sports, recreation and social events. This technology has also come up with wireless solutions wherein user can operate and control the switching timings, luminescence and colour from his android device or PC. Also the companies are working on developing an intelligence system that will deliver high-quality cost-effective illumination. The lighting solution is not only environment-friendly but also maximises its efficiency by saving the energy up to 80%. These outdoor LED smart lighting can be installed in outdoor as well as commercial locations such as offices, hospitals, highways, industries, etc.Get Sample of Report @Outdoor LED Smart Lighting Solution Global Market - Segmentation Segmentation by component: software, hardware and service. Segmentation by communication technology: wired and wireless. Segmentation by application: street lighting, landscape light, stadium, parking, waterways and others.Outdoor LED Smart Lighting Solution Global Market - Regional AnalysisThe regional analysis of outdoor LED smart lighting solution market is studied for North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World. Evolution of internet of things (IoT) has driven the market of outdoor LED smart lighting solutions. North America is expected to show dominance in outdoor LED smart lighting solution market due to high adoption of smart and connected lighting technology, and increasing effort to minimize the hazardous impact of electricity consumption on the environment. However, emerging economies of Asia Pacific and rest of the world are expected to witness growth opportunities in the global market. Europe is also one of the major contributor to the outdoor LED smart lighting solution market owing to the adoption of the smart LED solutions in different application segments including commercial, industrial, outdoor and residential segment.Key PlayersThe prominent players in the Outdoor LED Smart Lighting Solutions Market are Philips Lighting Holding B.V. (Netherlands), Acuity Brands, Inc. (U.S.), General Electric (U.S.), Osram Licht AG (Germany), Honeywell International Inc. (U.S.), Cooper Industries, Inc. (U.S.), Schneider Electric SE (France), Digital Lumens, Inc. (U.S.), Streetlight. Vision (France), Lutron Electronics Company, Inc. (U.S.), among others.Industry NewsApril 18, Echelon Partnered with Allied Telesis to Deliver Solutions for Smart Cities and Smart Buildings. Echelon Corporation signed an agreement with Allied Telesis Inc. wherein Allied Telesis will be authorized to implement its outdoor lighting solutions into its smart city and smart campus projects. This will result in transforming LED streetlights into smart city networks that can form a basis of future smart city applications.April 18, Wipro Lighting launched Internet of Lighting. Wipro has launched its Internet of Lighting (IoL) solutions for smart indoor & outdoor lighting at the Light Show. Due to advancements in internet of things (IoT) and big data, smart and connected digital lighting solutions have come into existence bringing both intelligence and functionality into lighting systems. Wipro has tied-up with Cisco for Power over Ethernet (PoE) based lighting which will enhance user experience and deliver desired outcomes for customers. It has also collaborated with pureLi-Fi, Scotland to deliver high-speed and secure data transmission through LED.March 18, Spark is continuing their IoT deployment across New Zealand. New Zealand based company Sparknz has announced that its long-range low-power network will be implemented for commercial use in 60% area of the country. Businesses and local councils will be able to use smart lighting technology to remotely manage street lights, monitor them and turn them on or off as per requirement. This will eventually lead to respond faster to community requests and events as well as make changes in daylight that will ensure safer streets for travel.Get complete Report @Intended Audience Investors and consultants System Integrators Government Organizations Research/Consultancy firms Technology solution providers LED Manufacturers Smart Lighting Solution 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.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.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 Natural Fragrance Chemicals Market to Undertake Strapping Growth During 2017 - 2025 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/natural-fragrance-chemicals-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=38843 http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Natural fragrance chemicals are aroma compounds physically received from plants, fruits, and spices through extraction, distillation, and expression. Fragrance chemicals that are obtained through natural resources are called natural fragrance chemicals. These naturally obtained chemical substances do not include any levels of toxicity. Natural fragrance chemicals are preferred over synthetic fragrance chemicals due to the rise in consumer awareness about the benefits of using natural products. However, these chemicals are expensive compared to synthetic fragrance chemicals. Also, they possess non-toxic properties.Read Report Overview @Natural Fragrance Chemicals Market: Drivers and RestraintsDemand for natural fragrance chemicals is expected to rise, due to the rise in trend of using natural-based ingredients, especially in personal care and other consumer products. Natural fragrance chemicals are intensely associated with product identity due to their capability to trigger emotions. Therefore, it is one of the primary reasons that directly affects consumer inclination toward natural fragrance chemical based cosmetic and personal care products. This shift in consumer preference toward naturally obtained fragrances is anticipated to drive the natural fragrance chemicals market during the forecast period. Implementation of government regulations on synthetic products is anticipated to boost the natural fragrance chemicals market during the next few years. However, the usage of synthetic fragrance chemicals for large volume applications, which offer relatively better performance with lower cost, is expected to hamper the natural fragrance chemicals market during the forecast period.Almost all natural fragrance are physically acquired from plants without modifying their chemical structures. Natural fragrance chemicals can be obtained from several natural sources. For instance, a natural apricot scent may comprise natural aromatics from a range of plants (excluding apricot).The natural fragrance chemicals market is expected to expand due to the rise in usage of natural fragrance chemicals by personal care and household manufacturers in various affordable consumer products such as shower gels, soaps, perfumes & deodorants, and creams & lotions. Middle-class consumers, especially from emerging economies, are increasingly realizing the benefits of using natural fragrance chemicals in consumer products. This is estimated to offer lucrative opportunities for the natural fragrance chemicals market during the next few years.Request to view Sample Report:Natural Fragrance Chemicals Market: Region-wise OutlookIn terms of geography, the global natural fragrance chemicals market can be segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. Europe held substantial share of the global natural fragrance chemicals market due to the increase in consumption of natural-ingredients based personal care products. The region is also anticipated to benefit from the presence of numerous leading players. The natural fragrance chemicals market in Asia Pacific is also expected to witness rapid growth in the next few years due to the rise in disposable income of consumers, especially in emerging economies such as China and India. Increase in demand for personal care and household products is also projected to boost the natural fragrance chemicals market in Asia Pacific in the near future.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Transparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Global Aluminum Cans Market Forecast 2018-2025 Sarten, Nussbaum, Grupo Zapata, DS container Aluminum Cans Market https://www.qyresearchstore.com/report/global-aluminum-cans-market-2113 https://www.qyresearchstore.com/ Recently added detailed market study "Global Aluminum Cans Market" examines the performance of the Aluminum Cans market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Aluminum Cans market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Aluminum Cans market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Aluminum Cans Market 2018 report includes Aluminum Cans market Revenue, market Share, Aluminum Cans industry volume, market Trends, Aluminum Cans Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report. It shows manufacturing capacity, Aluminum Cans Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2025.Firstly, the report covers the top Aluminum Cans manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Market Forecast Report on Top Manufacturers companies are Ball, Crown, EXAL, Ardagh Group, DS container, CCL Container, Colep, Nussbaum, Massilly Group, TUBEX GmbH, Grupo Zapata, TAKEUCHI PRESS, Arnest Russia, Alltub Group, Sarten, Matrametal Kft., James Briggs, Asian Aerosol Group, Eurospray, Bharat Container.To Get Sample Report Click Here: https://tinyurl.com/y8z6e23wAluminum Cans Market By Application are Food Packing, Beverage Packaging, Pesticide Packing, OtherAluminum Cans Market By Type are Cylindrical Cans, Cuboid Cans, Irregular FormFurther, the Aluminum Cans report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Aluminum Cans industry, Aluminum Cans industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Aluminum Cans Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Aluminum Cans research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Aluminum Cans market revenue worldwide.Finally, Aluminum Cans market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About US:"QYResearchStore.com" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us:3626 North Hall Street (Two Oak Lawn),Suite 610,Dallas, TX 75219, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Web:Email: sales@qyresearchstore.com Flat Glass Market Segmentation, Industry trends and Development to 2025 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-367 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-367 www.futuremarketinsights.com Most of the building materials and components are designed to do their jobs and never be seen. Glass is seen by people every day and never given a second thought to it. Without glass, luxury and modern high-rise living wouldnt be possible. Glass has made life better by reaching unimaginable heights and enjoy the view then and there. Flat glass is one such component which is used on a large scale. It is a crucial component to the industrial as well as scientific sectors. Flat glass is used in a variety of end products which include facades and windows for buildings, solar panels, windows and windscreens among others. It is the second largest sector in the glass industry in the European Union. The key users of glass include the automotive industry, building and construction industry to a large extent. Flat glass plays a crucial role in mitigating the effects of climate change, energy conservation through high performance architectural glass products and in reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Owing to its significance, flat glass has large number of end use segments which also includes healthcare, optical, aerospace, electronics and telecommunication.Request for sample Report:The key drivers for the growth of flat glass market include the building and construction spending and advances in the solar panel production. In addition, changes and advances in the motor vehicle sector also contribute to the growing flat glass market. Growth of flat glass market also depends on growth emerging markets characterized by growing population, foreign investment and rising middle class and disposable incomes. Asia Pacific is the fastest and largest growing market globally. Japan is expected to contribute to fuel the demand of flat glass based on recovery of domestic building and construction sectors.The key players in the lightweight materials market are: Asahi Glass, Nippon Sheet Glass, Guardian Industries, and Saint-Gobain. This research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data and statistically-supported and industry-validated market data and projections with a suitable set of assumptions and methodology. It provides analysis and information by categories such as market segments, regions, product types and distribution channels.Visit For Table of Contents: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: Global Cable Tie Guns Market Forecast 2018-2025 Fisters, Electriduct, Panduit, Klein Tools Cable Tie Guns Market https://www.qyresearchstore.com/report/global-cable-tie-guns-market-2092 https://www.qyresearchstore.com/ Recently added detailed market study "Global Cable Tie Guns Market" examines the performance of the Cable Tie Guns market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Cable Tie Guns market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Cable Tie Guns market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Cable Tie Guns Market 2018 report includes Cable Tie Guns market Revenue, market Share, Cable Tie Guns industry volume, market Trends, Cable Tie Guns Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report. It shows manufacturing capacity, Cable Tie Guns Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2025.Firstly, the report covers the top Cable Tie Guns manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Market Forecast Report on Top Manufacturers companies are Panduit, Greenlee, Electriduct, 8milelake, Thomas & Betts, Apex Tool Group, Eastwood, Electra-Force, Greenlee Textron, Elenco, Paladin, Klein Tools, Gardner Bender, Performance Tool, Fisters, RUBICON, AVERY DENNISON, VECTECH.To Get Sample Report Click Here: https://tinyurl.com/yajkuhb8Cable Tie Guns Market By Application are Cable, Tube, Bags, OthersCable Tie Guns Market By Type are Manual Cable Tie Guns, Automatic Cable Tie GunsFurther, the Cable Tie Guns report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Cable Tie Guns industry, Cable Tie Guns industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Cable Tie Guns Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Cable Tie Guns research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Cable Tie Guns market revenue worldwide.Finally, Cable Tie Guns market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About US:"QYResearchStore.com" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us:3626 North Hall Street (Two Oak Lawn),Suite 610,Dallas, TX 75219, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Web:Email: sales@qyresearchstore.com Global Chip-less RFID Market 2018 - Alien Technology Corporation, Confidex Company LTD, IMPINJ INCORPORATION Global Chip-less RFID Market https://bit.ly/2Mzr32B https://bit.ly/2I5jj4W www.apexmarketreports.com Apex Market Reports, recently published a detailed market research study focused on the Chip-less RFID Market across the global, regional and country level. The report provides 360 analysis of Chip-less RFID Market from view of manufacturers, regions, product types and end industries. The research report analyses and provides the historical data along with current performance of the global PP Pipe industry, and estimates the future trend of Chip-less RFID on the basis of this detailed study. The study shares Chip-less RFID performance both in terms of volume and revenue.The market research report explores the Chip-less RFID Market across the globe along with major regions and countries. The research report provides a detailed study on each and every aspect of Chip-less RFID Market. The research report studies the entire value chain from raw material to end user industries. The report also shares import/export statistics along with production and consumption for all major regions and countries. Moreover, the research study classifies the Chip-less RFID Market based on major product types, application and end users industries of Chip-less RFID. Besides, the report also covers geographical segmentation for Chip-less RFID Market. The report further provides production, capacity, price per region, gross margin, production cost, for all major regions and countries listed in report.Get Free Sample Copy of Report Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of This ReportAlien Technology CorporationConfidex Company LTDIMPINJ INCORPORATIONHoneywellINTERMEC INCThinfilmToppan Forms CO. LTDThe competitive landscape of the global market for Chip-less RFID is determined by assessing the major industry participants, production capacity, production capacity utilization rate, Chip-less RFID Markets production chain, pricing by each manufacturer and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Chip-less RFID Market globally.Inquire Before Buying @The Global Chip-less RFID Market 2018 is further analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Chip-less RFID production volume, data pertaining to demand and Chip-less RFID supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. The report provides upstream and downstream analysis covering major raw material used in manufacturing of Chip-less RFID along with detailed manufacturing sources. The report also shares list of major raw material manufacturers along with their manufacturing locations. Detailed raw material price trend analysis along with manufacturing cost analysis is also incorporated into the report. Various methodical tools such as investment returns, feasibility, SWOT analysis and market attractiveness analysis has been implemented in the research study to present a comprehensive, detailed study of the industry for Chip-less RFID across the world.About UsApex Market Reports offers elevating market research globally. We have collection of various syndicated reports of different categories. Apex Market Reports provides you to best services, weather youre searching for new trends in market or competitive scenario in emerging market.Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezCorporate Sales Specialist155 North Wacker Drive, Suite 4250Chicago, IL 60606Phone: +17739042683Email id - sales@apexmarketreports.comWebsite - Flexible Colored PU Foams Market Potential and Niche Segments, Geographical regions and Trend 2015 - 2025 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-368 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-368 www.futuremarketinsights.com Polyurethane foam is a diverse and large segment of global polyurethane market. Polyurethanes are said to be a part of our day to day life. Foams play a significant role in commercial and industrial sector ranging from automotive to refrigeration. Based on the variants foams available in the market and increasing area of applications for flexible colored PU foams, the market is expected to experience growth in the near future. Foams are differentiated as flexible and rigid foams. The properties that rigid foam posses are hardness, resilience, compression properties, abrasion resistance, whereas flexible polyurethane foam posses properties such as dry heat resistant, water resistant, oxygen, ozone resistant and remain flexible at low temperature. Few critical characteristics for the use of polyurethane foam in the industrial sector are chemical resistant, oil and grease resistant, flame resistant, noise reduction and fungus, mildew, mould resistant.Request for sample Report:The rigid polyurethane foams have outstanding thermal insulation properties, which makes its use as an insulator in commercial and domestic appliances such as hot water systems and refrigerators. The flexible polyurethane foam is extremely comfortable and finds wide range of applications in the furniture seating and automotive industry.The factors that drive the flexible colored PU foams market include the growing demand from the automobile and construction industry coupled with the rising demand from the interior and furniture sector. The demand for colored PU foams in the packaging sectors is expected to rise in the near future. Furniture and interiors are expected to be the largest consumers of flexible colored PU foams as it is used in luxury couches, chairs mattresses and carpets on a large scale. However, the volatile raw material prices are expected to pose a challenge to the growing flexible colored PU foams market. In addition, environmental regulations are expected to hinder the market growth owing to issues related to use of diisocynate in the production process.Liquid resin blends and isocyanates are expected to contain hazardous components that may lead to health hazards. Isocyanates are said to be skin and respiratory sensitizers. In addition, amines, glycols and phosphate that exist in the spray polyurethane foam also may hamper the health of humans to some extent. Certain regulatory and health safety information is made available in the U.S. through organization such as Polyurethane Manufacturers Association (PMA) and Centre for the Polyurethane Industry (CPI). Others information sources are the raw material manufacturers and polyurethanes systems.The key segments included in the flexible colored PU foam industry include North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Rest of the World (RoW). Due to high growth in the interior and furniture market, North America is expected to dominate the flexible colored PU foam market followed by Europe. Owing to the developments in the construction industry, Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing market for flexible colored PU foam market. Owing to the benefits such as CFC free, HCFC free and non-Ozone Depleting Potential foams (non-ODP), a rising demand for bio based PU foams from North Africa and the Middle East is expected to open more opportunities for the flexible PU foams market.The key market players in the flexible colored PU foam market include: BASF SE, Carpenter Company, Bayer Material Science AG, Huntsman Corporation, Recticel SA, INOAC Corporation, Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, The Dow Chemical Company, Rogers Corporation Stepan Company and Era Polymers Pty Ltd among others. Era Polymers Pty Ltd is an Australian distributor which offers a full range of ozone friendly foams that are CFC and HCFC free.Visit For Table of Contents: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: Optaglio reunites laser and electron beam to enhance document protection Hologram difraction gratings created through combining laser and e-beam www.optaglio.com Optaglio has introduced its first holograms created with a combination of technologies, applied separately so far. Combination of technologies should prevent counterfeiters from easy identification what measures were used for hologram creation. It is a part of long-term Optaglio effort to keep holograms the most secure anti-counterfeit technology available.It is no revolution. Some companies tried to combined laser and electron beam some ten years ago. The results were quite disappointing, but the technologies are much more advanced now, said Tomas Karensky, the Senior Research Manager in Optaglio. We invited university experts to help us with the laser part because our primary focus is e-beam. The first results are more than satisfactory. Experts questioned were not able to identify precisely what technologies were used for master hologram creation.Optaglio applies a combination of technologies to the design of its current holograms to enhance or change some visual illusions and features. In the next phase of the project, focused graphical design for combined holograms will be created. The psychological laboratory will also be included to ensure that unique hologram features correspond to user abilities to identify them. Such comprehensive protection elements should be available by the end of this year.Optaglio was founded in 1994 by a group of scientists from Czech Academy of Science. It has always been more a research organisation than a traditional manufacturer. In 2015, all Optaglios research and development activities were concentrated into Optaglio Labs in Lochovice, Czech Republic. During the last year, technical research activities were supplemented by behaviour research laboratory and a systematic approach to hologram designing.Optaglio is the global leader in high-resolution e-beam lithography security holograms. During almost 25 years of our history, we have delivered billions of holograms to governments, card manufacturers, security printing companies, premium brand producers and other organizations in more than 50 countries around the world.In 2015, a large scientific centre and production facilities were opened in Lochovice, Czech Republic. The company currently employs almost 100 people in the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic.Optaglio, certified to relevant international standards, operates under strict 24/7 security supervision. Our comprehensive security system covers people, processes, data and facilities. The company is a member of International Hologram Association (IHMA) through which it registers all its security devices and holograms in the central security register, in London.More information is available onOptaglioObora 20LochoviceCzech Republicpetr.hampl@optaglio.cz Stranded? Jumpstart your car on your own! Romoss JS12 Jump Starter ? The Perfect Companion for your Car Syntech OverviewSyntech was established in 2002. Our product ranges are sourced from a variety of international manufacturers. We distribute a number of top brands and distribute an extensive range of computer-related products throughout sub-Saharan Africa.Our objective is to create solutions. We have developed our product range by offering complete solutions with several focused products that cater for individual reseller requirements. Our long-standing relationships with our suppliers ensure that we provide products which have been developed in accordance with market demands. Our distribution-orientated business structure and advanced logistics system ensure that all our clients can expect and be assured of cost-effective solutions being delivered on time.SyntechUnit 1 4 Tanzanite St Montague Park Cape Town 7441CAPE TOWNKimberley Blake - Marketing Managerkimberley@syntech.co.za+27 (0) 21 514 5300Unit 14 Tanzanite StMontague ParkCape Town7441 Biotechnology Market Estimated over USD 765.7 Billion in 2026 Polaris Market Research https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/biotechnology-market/request-for-free-sample/ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/biotechnology-market/ Biotechnology Market is anticipated to reach over USD 795.7 billion by 2026. The rise of certain key subjects in the biotechnology market is expected to drive development in this industry to a lucrative degree. In general, biotechnology is the utilization of biological procedures for industrial and other purposes, specifically, the genetic management and the manipulation of microorganisms for the production of antibiotic drugs, hormones, and medical devices.Get Sample Copy of This Report @Strong government (and its partnered offices) strategies along with manufactured science is a noteworthy development affecting the growth in this segment. Strong economies of Europe and North American region are checking and subsidizing engineered science R&D activities. Multiple surveys of manufactured science which are headed by researchers are being upheld by the governmental bodies in North America that are directed for spreading awareness of the concerning engineered science.The biotechnology market is receiving global growth owing to advancement in technology in biology segment and the increasing use of artificial intelligence which is expected majorly to boost the global market significantly. The key players are putting continuous efforts and investments in order to understand, diagnose and treat cancer and recommend appropriate clinical trials.Favorable government policies associated with synthetic biology is a major growth impacting driver in this sector. Developed economies such as U.S., Germany, and UK are funding and monitoring synthetic biology R&D initiatives. The optimization of sequencers and their software, as well as the participation of governments and collaborations between key companies and medical specialists, will be of utmost importance for the success of DNA-sequencing technology. Increase in demand for healthier therapeutics and symptomatic arrangements on standards of red biotechnology, DNA sequencing, and recombinant innovation is expected to fuel the market development.Key Findings from the study suggest Asia Pacific market is anticipated to develop at lucrative pace because of changing medicinal services framework in this region that drives the demand for biotechnological items. Decreasing expenses and ascend in a number of services in this market are presumed upon to drive the segments with lucrative opportunities. Owing to innovative headways and boundless utilization of this field in different parts of human services, the health segment is projected to display solid advancements in coming years. Introduction of technically propelled items and availability of different biotechnology-based projects are attributive to drive the development of this sector over the forecast period. Continuous introduction of new biotechnological items for human services that are engaged in diagnosis conclusion and biopharmaceutical improvement is evaluated to push the market. Advancements in information reconciliation devices through distributed computing platform encourage enormous cutting-edge sequencing information.Have Questions? Request a sample or make an Inquiry before buying this report by clicking the link below:Polaris Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. We provide unmatched quality of offerings to our clients present globally. The company specializes in providing exceptional market intelligence and in-depth business research services for our clientele spread across different enterprises. We at Polaris are obliged to serve our diverse customer base present across the industries of healthcare, technology, semi-conductors and chemicals among various other industries present around the world.Polaris Market Research30 Wall Street8th FloorNew York City, NY 10005United States Growth trend in production of German machinery industry on ten-year peak after long stagnation Production German machinery industry 2008 - 2018 April http://www.quest-trendmagazine.com/en/machinery-industry/production-and-sales/production-and-sales-of-machinery-industry.html http://www.quest-trendmagazine.com/en/machinery-industry/production-and-sales/production-and-sales-of-machinery-industry-since-2000.html http://www.quest-trendmagazine.com http://www.quest-technomarketing.com Production in the German mechanical engineering industry has shown a slight growth trend of 3.6% per year since the beginning of 2017 up to April 2018. This growth trend replaced a five-year period of stagnation during which production only increased by 0.7% per year.The slight growth trend of production marked with 105.5 index points in April 2018 its highest value since the outbreak of the global economic crisis ten years ago. The growth trend is recorded by the Quest Trend Magazine as moving annual average.Sales in the German mechanical engineering industry have been growing at a rate of 3.2% per year since 2014. In April, the sales trend reached 20.3 bn.The Quest Trend Magazine analyses the economic development of the machinery industry according to three aspects: reliable trends derived from long-term developments; connection of these trends with the current situation; finally use of official statistics ensuring highest possible representation.The report to produktion and sales of German machinery industry is available in English onA further report discovers that the relatively slight growth trends of production and sales are combined with ever increasing fluctuations since the world economic crisis. The link to this report isThe Quest Trend Magazine analyzes the growth expectations of the machine-builders to 2020, the worldwide export markets of the German machinery industry, the majority of its automation-relevant sectors and many aspects of its automation technology at the machines.About Quest Trend Magazine:Quest Trend Magazine publishes trends in automation from the users's point of view mainly in machinery industry, automotive and F&B industry. The economic backdrop of these trends is highlighted as well.The trends in automation technology are based on market surveys by Quest TechnoMarketing. The economic backdrop is analyzed by Quest Research, a department of Quest TechnoMarketing.About Quest TechnoMarketing:Quest TechnoMarketing, Bochum, London, is specialized in market surveys and marketing for the automation technology for more than 20 years and the publisher of the Quest Trend Magazine.Thomas QuestQuest Trend MagazineDibergstr. 6444789 Bochum, GermanyPhone +49 234-34777Fax +49 234-33 22 02Email: media@quest-trendmagazine.comInternet:Quest TechnoMarketingThomas QuestDibergstr. 6444789 Bochum, GermanyPhone +49 234-34777Fax +49 234-33 22 02Email: media@quest-technomarketing.comInternet: Automotive Airbag Market expected to increase considerably to US$ 181,694.9 Mn By 2026 Automotive Airbag Market https://marketresearch.biz/report/automotive-airbag-market/request-sample/ https://marketresearch.biz/report/automotive-airbag-market/ https://marketresearch.biz http://theautomarket24.com/ MarketResearch.biz announces publication of its most recently generated research report titled, "Global Automotive Airbag Marketwhich offers a holistic view of the global automotive airbag market through systematic segmentation that covers every aspect of the target market. The first five-year (2017-2021) cumulative revenue is projected to be US$ 115,383.2 Mn, and is expected to increase considerably to US$ 181,694.9 Mn, over the latter part of the five-year forecast period (2022-2026).Automotive airbag is a part of safety system installed into vehicles to protect driver and passengers from serious injury or trauma in case of vehicle collision or vehicle accident. Airbags are made up of cushion type flexible fabric material that inflate when the vehicle collides or meets with an accident. Common raw material used for air bag manufacturing is nylon 66 yarn.Request for Free Sample Report Here:Global Automotive Airbag Market: Market DynamicsIncreasing government initiatives towards implementation of road safety acts and regulations is a major factor driving growth of the global automotive airbag market. This factor is expected to further drive growth of the target market to a significant extent over the forecast period. In addition, increasing number of road accidents across the globe is another factor boosting demand for automotive safety systems in the global market.Increasing awareness among individuals regarding advantages of automotive airbag systems in event of vehicle crash or accident is further fueling growth of the global automotive airbag market. The current trend in some developed countries is deployment of pedestrian airbags in vehicles, which protects individuals when it gets hit by another vehicle. This factor is expected to propel growth of the global market to a considerable extent over the forecast period.Major factors hampering growth of the global automotive airbag market are high cost of airbag system and high replacement cost of airbags. In addition, technical glitches such as non-deployment of airbags at certain speed of car, faulty airbag systems, faulty sensors, etc. are other factors further restraining growth of the global market.However, development of cost-effective airbag systems coupled with advancement in sensor technology are factors expected to create lucrative opportunities for major manufacturers operating in the global market over the forecast period. Moreover, major manufacturers are providing pre-installed airbag system in passenger cars, owing to mandatory government car and passenger safety regulations.Global Automotive Airbag Market: Market ForecastThe comprehensive research report comprises a complete forecast of the global automotive airbag market based on factors affecting the market and their impact in the foreseeable future. According to the forecast projections, revenue from the global automotive airbag market is expected to expand at a CAGR of 9.5% during the forecast period.Global Automotive Airbag Market: Segmental SnapshotThe market report has been segmented on the basis of product type, sales channel, vehicle type, and region. The product type segment includes front airbag, side airbag, curtain airbag, and others. Sales channel segment includes original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and aftermarket. Vehicle type segment includes passenger cars and commercial vehicles. The regions covered in the market analysis are North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa.By product type: The front airbag segment is estimated to register a CAGR of over 9%, thereby accounting for highest revenue share among the product type segments, over the forecast period.By sales channel: The original equipment manufacturer (OEM) segment is estimated to account for highest revenue share among the sales channel segments, and is expected to register a CAGR of over 9% over the forecast period.By vehicle type: The passenger cars segment is estimated to account for highest revenue share among the vehicle type segments, and is expected to register highest CAGR over the next 10 years.By region: The market in Asia Pacific accounted for highest revenue share in the global automotive airbag market in 2016, and is expected to record highest CAGR between 2017 and 2026.Browse Complete Report's Table of Content Here:Global Automotive Airbag Market: Competitive AnalysisThe research report on the global automotive airbag market includes profiles of major companies such as Autoliv Inc., Takata Corporation, DENSO CORPORATION, Robert Bosch GmbH, Daicel Corporation, TOYODA GOSEI Co., Porcher Industries SA, ZF Friedrichshafen AG, Continental AG, Key Safety Systems, Inc., and Hyundai Mobis Co., Ltd.Automotive Airbag Market: Global Industry, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2017-2026 report has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. This report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global automotive airbag market forMarketResearch.biz is a specialized market research, analytics, and solutions company, offering strategic and tactical support to clients for making well-informed business decisions. We are a team of dedicated and impassioned individuals, who believe strongly in giving our very best to what we do and we never back down from any challenge. MarketResearch.biz offers services such as data mining, information management, and revenue enhancement solutions and suggestions. We cater to industries, individuals, and organizations across the globe, and deliver our offerings in the shortest possible turnaround time.Contact Us:Lawrence John420 Lexington Avenue, Suite 300New York City, NY 10170,United StatesEmail ID: inquiry@marketresearch.bizTel: +1-347-826-1876Website:Referral Website: CAN FD components with various form factors The CAN FD-product line from esd electronics comprises interfaces with various form factors suitable for many different CAN FD app esd electronics has once more extended its CAN FD product line. With the new boards, the CPCIserial-CAN/402-4-FD, the mezzanine boards XMC-CAN/402-4-FD and PMC-CAN/402-4-FD, the CAN-PCIe/402-FD- and the CAN-PCIeMini/402-2-FD as well as the module CAN-USB/400-FD, interfaces for various form factors are available.Due to the high data security the CAN-Bus increasingly becomes an established standard beyond automotive applications. CAN FD allows velocities of up to 10 Mbit/s as well as data transmission rates of up to 64 Byte.The new board CPCIserial-CAN/402-4-FD (according PICMG 2.0 CompactPCI) has four high-speed CAN FD interfaces conforming to ISO 11898-2. All of the interfaces are accessible at the front panel via a 25-pole DSUB plug. Likewise, the mezzanine boards XMC-CAN/402-4-FD and PMC-CAN/402-4-FD are equipped with four CAN FD ports. They are able to send CAN frames back-to-back and can handle full bus load.The interface board CAN-PCIe/402-FD comes in various versions. It is available either as PCIe or PCI and provides one or two CAN FD interfaces. Furthermore esd electronics offers a low profile version and an option without electrical isolation. The independently operating CAN FD networks are according to ISO 11898-1:2015.The extremely compact size of the PCIe-Mini/402-2-FD is ideal for use of CAN FD interfaces in MiniPCs, hat rail mounted PCs and embedded systems. This card is an Add-In PCI Express Full-Mini-board and provides two CAN FD interfaces. For notebooks and laptops there is an external component available, the CAN-USB/400-FD, which offers two CAN FD interfaces via USB.All of the esd electronics CAN FD interface boards are controlled by the high performance esd Advanced CAN Core, "esdACC", implemented in an Altera-FPGA. With the esdACC the boards support Bus Mastering. Write cycles in the direction of the host memory can be realized, regardless of the CPU or the system's DMA controller. This reduces the host load and overall latency. The boards support MSI (Message Signaled Interrupts) and are equipped with a switchable internal CAN termination. Using MSIs make these boards perfect for hypervisor environments. The CAN messages are linked to a high resolution 64-Bit hardware timestamp.esd electronics develops and manufactures hardware and software for the automation industry. Special focus is given to custom-specific solutions particularly for companies in the field of automotive and machine industry, medical technology as well as aerospace. esds production scheme ranges from small-scale production to on-time supply of larger series. Training courses and workshops complement the companys development capabilities.esd' s engineering performance draws on years of experience in dealing with PowerPC systems on basis of PPC4xx, MPC8xxx/52xx/750 and Multicore QorIQ. Designs based on ARM processors and 8/16-bit microcontrollers are being developed by esd likewise. Integrating CAN, PROFIBUS, PROFINET, EtherCAT and Wireless functionalities are among esd' s main areas of expertise. Developments with extended requirements such as rugged environment or ex-protection will be considered by esd.esd electronics gmbhVahrenwalder Str. 20730165 HannoverGermanyPhone: +49-511-372980Fax: +49-511-37298-68E-Mail: info@esd.eu TIME to exhibit at Elex Show Coventry 2018 TIME to exhibit at Elex Show www.pitacs.com Find us at Stand D32 at this years Elex Show at the Ricoh Arena in Coventry on 20th & 21st September 2018.We will be showcasing our range of electrical products including TIME LED, TIME Electrical Cables and TIME Cable Clips.Check out the latest offering from TIME LED, grab an exclusive first-hand look at Elex Show of the new additions to our domestic and commercial lighting range.TIME LED is available from hundreds of electrical wholesalers across the UK. Our current collection includes LED filaments featuring our best-selling dimmable candle, a range of GU10 singles and multipacks, folding work lights, LED Panels and much more.Our entire TIME Cables and accessories range complies fully with British, European and International standards. All cable products are BASEC and HAR certified with a proven track record for quality and availability. Come and check out the quality of our cable and clips at Stand D32.TIME Cables and TIME LED are part of Pitacs Limited, one of the UKs leading electrical cable and flex distributors.All of our products are available on a next day delivery service to your premises or to site.The event runs across both two days 10am 4pmRICOH ARENA COVENTRYPHOENIX WAYFOLESHILLCOVENTRYCV6 6GESee @Elexshow for more information.Pitacs Limited is now one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of heating products and electrical cables in the UK as well as supplying over 38 countries across the world.Pitacs LimitedBradbourne PointBradbourne DriveTilbrook, Milton KeynesBuckinghamshireMK7 8AT UKT: +44 (0)1908 271155E: info@pitacs.comW: The uk assignment help provide you the helpful service. https://assignmenthelps.co.uk Scientists are inspecting in school and University; they are apportioned different exercises and obligations. 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For more information visit:uk assignment help is the most reliable writing service providing by our company to all the students in UK."Assignment Help UK"12 Avondale Road, Luton, LU1 1DJ, UKPhone Number: +44 1234860536 Human Capital Management & Payroll Market Overview, Demand, Size, Growth & Forecast 2022- Worldwide Analysis ReportsWeb http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012063687/sample http://www.reportsweb.com/buy&RW00012063687/buy/1000 http://www.reportsweb.com/global-human-capital-management-and-payroll-market-industry-analysis-and-outlook The use of HCM and payroll applications helps extensively in decision-making and offers a clear picture of the overall resources of an organization. Human Capital Management (HCM) is defined as the process of acquiring, training, managing, retaining employees for them to contribute effectively in the processes of the organization. Some features of human capital management systems include performance reviews, goal management and compensation planning, as well as the automation of time collection and absence management. The human capital management software along with information technology makes the task easy and more efficient to manage workforce acquisition, management, and optimization of people in the organizations.Sample Copy Available atThe term "payroll" actually refers to the list of employees that receive compensation from a company. However, most companies generally use the term to refer to the money that is paid to the employees or the records that detail how much each employee has made. Payroll may also refer to the company, department, or software that is used to process paychecks and taxes or to the process of calculating and distributing employee paychecks. Payroll software is being installed by companies as it is economical and improves the efficiency of the compensation and review processes.The global HCM and payroll market is set to experience favorable growth driven by factors such as increased spending on HCM and payroll, rising workforce of organizations, growing internet penetration, increased spending on cloud infrastructure and rising accessibility to mobile applications. The major trends observed in this market include rising demand for integrated HCM solutions, implementation of automation and robotics and rise in the adoption of digital HR technology. However, the growth of this budding market is constrained by challenges such as data security and privacy concern, rapid technological changes and economical and political risks.The report "Global Human Capital Management (HCM) & Payroll Market: Industry Analysis & Outlook (2018-20212) " analyses the development of this market, with focus on the Americas market. The major trends, growth drivers as well as issues being faced by the market are discussed in detail in this report. The four major players: SAP SE, Intuit Inc., Automatic Data Processing Inc. and Sage Group Plc. are being profiled along with their key financials and strategies for growth.Place Direct Purchase Order Here:Table of Contents:1. Overview1.1 Human Capital Management1.2 Payroll2. Global HCM & Payroll Market2.1 Global HCM & Payroll Application Market Forecast by Value2.2 Global Human Capital Management Market Forecast by Value2.3 Global Human Capital Management Market by Deployment Type2.3.1 Global Public Cloud HCM Market Forecast by Value2.3.2 Global On-Premise HCM Market Forecast by Value2.4 Global Human Capital Management Market by Segment2.4.1 Global Core HR Market Forecast by Value2.4.2 Global Workforce Management Market Forecast by Value2.4.3 Global Recruiting Market Forecast by Value2.5 Global Payroll Application Market Forecast by Value2.6 Global Payroll Application Market by Deployment Type2.6.1 Global On-Premise Payroll Market Forecast by Value2.6.2 Global Public Cloud Payroll Market Forecast by Value3. Regional Market Analysis3.1 The Americas3.1.1 The Americas HCM & Payroll Application Market Forecast by Value3.1.2 The Americas Human Capital Management Market Forecast by Value3.1.3 The Americas Payroll Application Market Forecast by Value4. Market Dynamics4.1 Growth Drivers4.1.1 Increased Spending on HCM & Payroll4.1.2 Growing Internet Penetration4.1.3 Rising Workforce of Organizations4.1.4 Increased Spending on Cloud Infrastructure4.1.5 Rising Accessibility to Mobile Applications4.2 Key Trends & Development4.2.1 Implementation of Automation and Robotics4.2.2 Increased Outsourcing of Payroll Services4.2.3 Growing Demand for Integrated HCM Solutions4.2.4 Increased Adoption of Cloud Based HCM Software4.2.5 Rise in the Adoption of Digital HR Technology4.2.6 Increased Recognition of Artificial Intelligence4.3 Challenges4.2.1 Data Security and Privacy Concern4.2.2 Rapid Technological Changes4.2.3 Economical and Political Risks5. Competitive Landscape5.1 Global Market5.1.1 Revenue and Market Cap Comparison5.1.2 Global HCM Market Share by Company5.1.3 Global Payroll Application Market Share by Company6. Company Profiles6.1 SAP SE6.1.1 Business Overview6.1.2 Financial Overview6.1.3 Business Strategies6.2 Intuit Inc.6.2.1 Business Overview6.2.2 Financial Overview6.2.3 Business Strategies6.3 Automatic Data Processing Inc.6.3.1 Business Overview6.3.2 Financial Overview6.3.3 Business Strategies6.4 Sage Group Plc.6.4.1 Business Overview6.4.2 Financial Overview6.4.3 Business StrategiesFor more information about this report:Contact Info:Name: Sameer JoshiEmail: sales@reportsweb.comOrganization: ReportsWebPhone: +1-646-491-9876ReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.Pune, India Childcare Software Market 2018 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2023 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3100711-2018-global-childcare-software-industry-depth-research-report https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3100711-2018-global-childcare-software-industry-depth-research-report The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Childcare Software industry market by types, applications, players and regions. This report also displays the 2013-2023 production, Consumption, revenue, Gross margin, Cost, Gross, market share, CAGR, and Market influencing factors of the Childcare Software industry in USA, EU, China, India, Japan and other regionsMarket Analysis by Players: This report includes following top vendors in terms of company basic information, product category, sales (volume), revenue (Million USD), price and gross margin (%).SofterWareLadder SoftwareProcare SoftwareHi MamaJackrabbit TechnologiesLedger SoftwareKindertalesPersonalized SoftwareChildcare SageSmartCareINursery.net LimitedConnect Software SolutionsAstec SolutionsKonvervEntLogics TechnologiesR&I Software SolutionsKigaRooAVI.DATOgustChenlongYikangBeiying NetworkRequest a Sample Report @Market Analysis by Regions: Each geographical region is analyzed as Sales, Market Share (%) by Types & Applications, Production, Consumption, Imports & Exports Analysis, and Consumption Forecast.USAEuropeJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaSouth AmericaSouth AfricaOthersMarket Analysis by Types: Each type is studied as Sales, Market Share (%), Revenue (Million USD), Price, Gross Margin and more similar information.Cloud BasedInstalled-PCInstalled-MobileMarket Analysis by Applications: Each application is studied as Sales and Market Share (%), Revenue (Million USD), Price, Gross Margin and more similar information.Nursery SchoolFamilyOthersTable of Content1 Childcare Software Market Overview1.1 Product Overview of Childcare Software1.2 Classification of Childcare Software1.2.1 Type 11.2.2 Type 21.2.3 Type 31.2.4 Type 41.3 Applications of Childcare Software1.3.1 Application 11.3.2 Application 21.3.3 Application 31.3.4 Application 41.4 Global Childcare Software Market Regional Analysis1.4.1 USA Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.2 Europe Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.3 Japan Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.4 China Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.5 India Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.6 Southeast Asia Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.7 South America Market Present Situation Analysis1.4.8 South Africa Market Present Situation Analysis1.5 Childcare Software Industry Development Factors Analysis1.5.1 Childcare Software Industry Development Opportunities Analysis1.5.2 Childcare Software Industry Development Challenges Analysis1.6 Childcare Software Consumer Behavior Analysis2 Global Childcare Software Competitions by Players2.1 Global Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Players2.2 Global Childcare Software Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Players (2017-2018)2.3 Global Childcare Software Price (USD/Unit) by Players (2017-2018)2.4 Global Childcare Software Gross Margin by Players (2017-2018)3 Global Childcare Software Competitions by Types3.1 Global Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Types3.2 Global Childcare Software Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Type (2013-2018)3.3 Global Childcare Software Price (USD/Unit) by Type (2013-2018)3.4 Global Childcare Software Gross Margin by Type (2013-2018)3.5 USA Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.6 China Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.7 Europe Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.8 Japan Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.9 India Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.10 Southeast Asia Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.11 South America Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.12 South Africa Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type4 Global Childcare Software Competitions by Applications4.1 Global Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Applications4.2 Global Childcare Software Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Applications (2013-2018)4.3 Global Childcare Software Price (USD/Unit) by Applications (2013-2018)4.4 Global Childcare Software Gross Margin by Applications (2013-2018)4.5 USA Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Applications4.6 China Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Applications4.7 Europe Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Applications4.8 Japan Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Applications4.9 India Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Applications4.10 Southeast Asia Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Applications4.11 South America Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Applications4.12 South Africa Childcare Software Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Applications5 Global Childcare Software Production Market Analysis by Regions5.1 Global Childcare Software Production (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Regions5.1.1 USA Childcare Software Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.2 Europe Childcare Software Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.3 China Childcare Software Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.4 Japan Childcare Software Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.5 India Childcare Software Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.6 Southeast Asia Childcare Software Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.7 South America Childcare Software Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.8 South Africa Childcare Software Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.2 Global Childcare Software Production Value (Million USD) and Share by Region (2013-2018)5.3 Global Childcare Software Price (USD/Unit) by Region (2013-2018)5.4 Global Childcare Software Gross Margin by Region (2013-2018)6 Global Childcare Software Sales Market Analysis by Region6.1 USA Childcare Software Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.2 Europe Childcare Software Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.3 China Childcare Software Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.4 Japan Childcare Software Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.5 India Childcare Software Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.6 Southeast Asia Childcare Software Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.7 South America Childcare Software Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.8 South Africa Childcare Software Market Consumption Present Situation AnalysisContinuedAccess Complete Report @ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRES:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Biopsy Devices Market Registering a Strong Growth by 2020 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/2820 Cancer is a disease characterized by abnormal growth of cell. These abnormal cells can infect other normal cells and tissues. Cancer cells can reach to other part of the body through blood and lymph system. There are more than 100 types of cancer and most of them are categorized by the organ, such as colon cancer and melanoma. Biopsy is a medical test performed to examine and remove cancerous tissue from the body. When a patient is suspected to having cancer, biopsy is used to extract tissues sample for diagnosis of the disease. There are various types of biopsy used in diagnosis of cancers, such as shave biopsy, skin biopsy, incision & excision biopsy, fine needle aspiration, core needle biopsy and vacuum-assisted biopsy. Shave biopsy is performed with a scalpel blade or a curved razor blade to remove small fragment of skin for diagnosis of the disease. Fine needle aspiration biopsy is used to investigate superficial lumps or masses. A fine needle inserted into the body mass for isolation of infected cell and tissues for diagnosis of cancer.In terms of geographic, North America is the largest market for global biopsy devices market followed by Europe and Asia. In North America, the U.S. holds the major share of biopsy devices market due to increasing prevalence of cancer. This increasing prevalence of cancer requires biopsy procedures for diagnosis and treatment of the disease. In Europe, Germany, France and the U.K. are the largest countries for global biopsy devices market.Vacuum assisted biopsy procedure is the fastest growing biopsy procedure. This is one of the most important diagnostic methods for the diagnosis of breast cancer. Lack of screening test for specific cancer, rising number of cancer patients and increased research and development activities in the field of biopsy devices are some of the major drivers for global biopsy devices market. According to National Cancer Institute (NCI), every year about 460 per 10,000 people are suffering from cancer.However, stringent regulation and standards for the use of biopsy, clinical issues in core needle biopsy, increase complaints to breast cancer screening procedure are some of the key restraints for the global biopsy devices market. Moreover, high cost of biopsy devices is also impeding growth of global biopsy devices market.Request Sample Report @Some of the major companies operating in the biopsy devices market are The Boston Scientific Corporation, COOK Medical, CareFusion Corporation, DTR Medical, Devicor Medical Products, Inc., Gallini Srl, Hologic, Inc., and Cardinal Health, Inc.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.Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: himanshu.t@persistencemarketresearch.com Consumer Electronics Market predicted to witness significant growth over 2018-2024 Global Market Insights https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/2383 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/consumer-electronics-market https://www.gminsights.com/toc/detail/consumer-electronics-market https://www.gminsights.com http://algosonline.com/technology Asia Pacific is touted to be one of the largest markets for consumer electronics, driven by the extensive changes in macroeconomics, such as the expanding middle class population, rising disposable incomes, changing demographic patterns, and rapid urbanization trends. The substantial surge in household incomes has had a direct relationship with the spending on electronics items, in turn stimulating the sales of consumer electronics products including the likes of tablets, smartphones, home appliances, and other wearable electronics. As per reliable statistics, by 2020, Asia Pacific is expected to witness 903 million TV households, an upsurge of 100 million than that recorded in 2014.It has been further anticipated that the TV households will have an average of 1.21 TV sets per home, significantly leading to more than 1.3 billion sets across the Asia Pacific belt by 2020. It is also prudent to mention that India accounted for a household refrigerator & washing machine user rate of 31% and 10% respectively in 2013. China is another major region standing as a major contributor toward global consumer electronics industry share. Chinas urbanization drive and rising focus on living a high-quality life have been the prominent factors fueling regional consumer electronics market trends. A data bearing testimony to the aforesaid fact Chinas household electric appliances sales reached 1,284 billion yuan in 2013, up from about 715 billion yuan in 2009. Yet another factor to have propelled China consumer electronics industry space is the region being host to renowned industry players including the likes of Midea group and Gree Electric, which are regarded as two of the top pioneers in consumer electronics industry space.Request for a sample of this research report @Companies are now focusing on constant productivity improvements in several product costs as well as structural costs owing to the competitive cost structures. Manufacturers are also relying on collaborations and acquisitions to gain a larger industry share. Automation and digitization trends have been a game changer for practically every business sector, consumer electronics industry bagging the top position in the transformation queue. In fact, it wouldnt be wrong to mention that with these hi-tech features, the product spectrum of consumer electronics market has revolutionized.The industry, over the recent years, has seen a slew of new product launches that runs a gamut from hard-drive equipped TVs to networked home appliances including next-generation refrigerators and washing machines, credits the increasing technology appetite along with the smart trends that have indeed led to a paradigm shift in the consumer behavioral pattern, impacting the consumer electronics industry dynamics. Not to mention, with anticipation of smart notion chiefly characterizing this business fraternity, the consumer electronics industry players are overt to witness a plethora of opportunities in the coming years. The global consumer electronics market, as per industry analysts, stood at USD 1100 billion in 2016.Speaking of the competitive trends in consumer electronics market space, the industry is dynamically charged with participation of globally preeminent magnates such as Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics, Sony Corporation, Nikon, Bose, GoPro, and Sennheiser. Amidst a backdrop where technological advancements are being referred to as the top most success quotient underlining the sales of these products, these players are vigorously expanding their product pallets in sync with the latest smart trends.The industry is further anticipated to witness an interesting change of events with the integration of AI and IOT in the product spectrum. What remains to be seen is how these smart interventions would mold the competitive hierarchy of consumer electronics market in the coming years. All in all, in terms of remuneration, global consumer electronics market is estimated to surpass USD 1500 billion by 2024.Browse key industry insights spread across 340 pages with 296 market data tables & 75 figures & charts from this 2018 report Consumer Electronics Market Size By Product (Audio & Video Equipment [Personal, Professional], Major Household Appliance, Small Household Appliance, Digital Photo Equipment [Personal, Professional]), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa), Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Landscape & Forecast, 2017 2024 in detail along with the table of contents:Table of Contents (ToC) Chapter 4. Consumer Electronics Market, By Product4.1. Global consumer electronics market share by product, 2016 & 20244.2. Audio & video equipment (TV, Laptop, Smartphones, Earphones & Headphones, Speakers)4.2.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20244.2.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.2.3. Market estimates and forecast, by application, 2013 20244.2.3.1. Personal4.2.3.1.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20244.2.3.1.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.2.3.2. Professional4.2.3.2.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20244.2.3.2.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.3. Major household appliance (Refrigerator, Air Conditioner, Washing Machines)4.3.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20244.3.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.4. Small household appliance (Iron Box, Microwave Ovens, Food Processors, Electric Kettle)4.4.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20244.4.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.5. Digital photo equipment (Digital Camera & Camcorder)4.5.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20244.5.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.5.3. Market estimates and forecast, by application, 2013 20244.5.3.1. Personal4.5.3.1.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20244.5.3.1.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.5.3.2. Professional4.5.3.2.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20244.5.3.2.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 2024Chapter 5. Consumer Electronics Market, By Application5.1. Global consumer electronics market share by application, 2016 & 20245.2. Personal5.2.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20245.2.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 - 20245.3. Professional5.3.1. Market estimates and forecast, 2013 - 20245.3.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 - 2024Browse Full TOC of This Report @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: Smart (Connected) Street Lights Market: 2018 Global Key Players Analysis by Philips, Telensa, Silver Spring, Echelon, Osram, Cisco and Trilliant by Forecast to 2023 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5966 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/smart-street-lights-market-5966 Market Highlights:Globally, the Smart/Connected streetlight market is expected to have significant growth over the forecast period. Factors like the emergence of the Internet of things and constant innovation in mobile networks are expected to be driving factor for the development of smart/connected street light market.The smart/connected street lights market is differentiated by components, technology, applications, and end-usersBy component, the smart/connected street lights market is sub-segmented as hardware, software, and services. The hardware comprised of LED arrays, sensors, communication module, and others. The services segment is categorized into professional services and managed services. The professional services include system integrations, training & implementation, and others.Get Sample Report @Depending on the networking technology, the market is sub-segmented into narrowband, medium-band, and broadband technology. The narrow-band technology is further categorized into Sigfox, LoRa, RPMA, and others. The medium band includes PLC, RF mesh, and others, whereas the broadband technology consists of 3G/4G cellular, Wi-Fi, and others.On the basis of application, the market is categorized as environmental monitoring, traffic monitoring, smart parking, street light management, video surveillance, public messaging and others. Lastly, on the basis of end-users, the market is categorized as residential (urban and rural), retail, transportation, automotive, industrial and others.Key Players:Some of the key players of Smart/Connected Streetlight Market include General Electric (U.S.), Koninklijke Philips N.V (The Netherlands), Telensa (U.K.), Silver Spring (U.S.), Echelon (U.S.), Osram AG ( Germany), Cisco system (U.S.) , Trilliant holdings Inc.(U.S.), AxiomTek (U.S.),and Tech Mahindra (India).Regional Analysis:Geographically, the Smart/Connected streetlight market is categorized into four different regions namely North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Rest of the World.Europe is presumed to have significant growth in the smart/connected street lights market. Countries such as U.K, Germany, Norway, and France are leading the market. Their growth is attributed to the increase in different lighting companies focusing on providing smart lighting controls in both private and public areas over the forecast period. Additionally, North America is expected to have significant growth in the market, and the U.S & Canada are the leading countries in the region. The growth is due to the presence of large number of wireless technology providers for enhancing the network connectivity in various connected street lighting applications.Segmentation:The Smart/Connected Street Lights Market is differentiated by components, technology, applications, and end-usersBy component, the smart/connected street lights market is sub-segmented as hardware, software, and services. The hardware comprised of LED arrays, sensors, a communication module, and others. The services segment is categorized into professional services and managed services. The professional services include system integrations, training & implementation, and others.Depending on the networking technology, the market is sub-segmented into narrowband, medium-band, and broadband technology. The narrow-band technology is further categorized into Sigfox, LoRa, RPMA, and others. The medium band includes PLC, RF mesh, and others, whereas the broadband technology consists of 3G/4G cellular, Wi-Fi, and others.On the basis of applications, the market is categorized as environmental monitoring, traffic monitoring, smart parking, street light management, video surveillance, public messaging and others. Lastly, on the basis of end-users, the market is categorized as residential (urban and rural), retail, transportation, automotive, industrial and others.Get Complete Report @Target Audience: Automation companies End-user companies System integrating companies Safety light curtain component manufacturing companies Safety light curtain providers Automation consultants Research organizations and consulting companies Technology investors Technology standard organizations, forums, alliances, and associationsTABLE OF CONTENTS1 Executive Summary2 Scope of the Report2.1 Market Definition2.2 Scope of the Study2.2.1 Research Objectives2.2.2 Assumptions & Limitations2.3 Markets StructureContinues...LIST OF TABLESTable1 Global Smart/Connected Street Lights Market: By Region, 2017-2023Table2 North America Smart/Connected Street Lights Market: By Country, 2017-2023Table3 Europe Smart/Connected Street Lights Market: By Country, 2017-2023Continues...LIST OF FIGURESFIGURE 1 Global Smart/Connected Street Lights Software Market SegmentationFIGURE 2 Forecast MethodologyFIGURE 3 Porters Five Forces Analysis of Global Smart/Connected Street Lights Software MarketAbout 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 Industrial Robotics Market: Electrical and Electronics Segment Will Account For A High Growth by 2024 Global Market Insights https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/1729 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/industrial-robotics-market https://www.gminsights.com/toc/detail/industrial-robotics-market https://www.gminsights.com http://algosonline.com/technology The segmentation of the industrial robotics market by product indicates that collaborative robots are expected to have the highest growth rate over the forecast timeframe. These have a large work envelope and high usage as they allow employees to work alongside and are priced significantly lower as compared to its counterparts. Additionally, the adoption of the collaborative industrial robotics market decreases human idle time by 85% and substantially boosts the efficiency of the overall manufacturing process.Industrial Robotics Market is projected to reach a revenue of over USD 80 billion by 2024. The rapid growth of the industrial sector across the world and the high adoption of automation technologies as a part of the manufacturing process are the major factors propelling the industry growth during the forecast timeframe.The high growth of the industrial sector is largely facilitated by government initiatives promoting the use of locally manufactured goods and equipment. For instance, the Make in India strategy was initiated to increase the manufacturing share in India's GDP to 25% by 2022 while simultaneously promoting the adoption of regionally manufactured products such as food & beverages and electronics as opposed to foreign brands amongst the general population.Request for a sample of this research report @Under this strategy, the government is providing subsidies, financial support, and expertise to regional players such as the capital subsidy of up to 25% for 10 years to boost the manufacturing of electronics. Furthermore, the application of the industrial robotics market technology allows for miniaturization, increased throughput, and reduced lead times and human errors for manufacturers.The high adoption of automation technology is projected to aid in the growth of the industrial robotics market. The usage of these technologies can aid in the reduction of the development time and the exorbitant variable costs such as labor and electricity prices. In regions including Western Europe and North America, the labor costs are very high, over USD 38 hourly wage in Germany.The end-use segmentation of the industrial robotics market indicates that the electrical and electronics segment will account for a high growth. The increase in the disposable income and the economic prosperity stemming from the industrial boom across various regions, primarily in South-East Asia, are contributing to the high proliferation of these devices.Competitive advantage and reduced per-hour cost as compared to human results will augment the North America industrial robotics market growth. Major players are developing affordable, and compact energy-efficient solutions to access a wider customer base. The rise of outsourced manufacturing activities and the increase in SMEs in the Asia Pacific region are contributing to the high industry demand of the in the region.Industrial robotics market players comprise Fanuc Corporation, OTC Daihen, Inc., Epson America, Inc., ABB Group Ltd., KUKA AG, Nachi Fujikoshi Corp., and Kawasaki Heavy Industries. The industrial robotics market is subject to rapid technological changes owing to which players are required to invest heavily in R&D activities and launch products to sustain the growth. For instance, in November 2017, ABB announced the launch of its single arm co-bot with an aim to enhance its collaborative robot product portfolio. The robot is expected to be available for commercial usage by 2018.Browse key industry insights spread across 262 pages with 337 market data tables & 38 figures & charts from the report Industrial Robotics Market Size By Product (Articulated, SCARA, Gantry, Cartesian, Parallel, Cylindrical, Collaborative), By End-Use (Automotive, Metals & Machinery, Rubber & Plastics, Food & Beverage, Electrical & Electronics) Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa), Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Landscape & Forecast, 2018 2024in detail along with the table of contents:Table Of Content (TOC-)Chapter 4 Industrial Robotics Market, By Product4.1 Industrial robotics market share by product, 2016 & 20244.2 Articulated4.2.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region, 2013 20244.3 SCARA4.3.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 20244.4 Gantry4.4.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 20244.5 Cartesian4.5.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 20244.6 Parallel4.6.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 20244.7 Cylindrical4.7.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 20244.8 Collaborative4.8.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 2024Chapter 5 Industrial Robotics Market, By End-use5.1 Industrial robotics market share by end-use, 2016 & 20245.2 Automotive5.2.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 20245.3 Metals & machinery5.3.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 20245.4 Rubber & Plastics5.4.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 20245.5 Food & beverage5.5.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region, 2013 20245.6 Electrical & electronics5.6.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region,2013 20245.7 Others5.7.1 Market estimates and forecasts, by region, 2013 2024Browse Full TOC Report @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: OXAIR MANUFACTURING COLLABORATION TARGETS SUB-CONTINENT www.oxair.com.au Oxair, a leading manufacturer of gas process systems, is setting up a manufacturing base in India in a joint venture that is hoped will give the Australian company a competitive edge supplying medical oxygen generators to hospitals on the Sub-Continent.By teaming up with Chennai-based specialist Agastya Aeroworks PVT Ltd, an Oxair agent that had successfully supplied nitrogen generators and High Pressure 300 Bar Desiccant Dryers to the Indian Navy, as well as Medical Oxygen PSA units to some of the countrys hospitals and medical market, Oxair believes it can gain an advantage in one of the fastest growing healthcare sectors in the world.Known as Oxair Gas Systems India, the company has targeted the end of June 2018 to have its Indian manufacturing plant fully operational and help the countrys vast number of hospitals meet new regulatory requirements, that every hospital must have an alternative supply of oxygen to help prevent the tragedies that have occurred recently where people have died on wards due to a lack of the life-saving gas.Oxairs generating system delivers constant oxygen of 94-95% purity through PSA filtration, a unique process that separates oxygen from compressed air. The gas is then conditioned and filtered before being stored in a buffer tank to be piped directly into to the hospital on demand.Instead of the removal and reliance of transporting in and handling of dangerous conventional cylinders, except as a back-up supply, Indias hospitals will have the opportunity for oxygen on tap, enabling them to be self-sufficient by generating the purest of oxygen for years to come.James Newell, Oxairs CEO, said: We have had a highly successful association with Agastya for eight years and look forward to continuing our relationship with them to realise our future growth plans. India is a massive healthcare market and the countrys hospitals will need the best and most affordable life-saving equipment that money can buy.Manufacturing our oxygen generators for the Indian market in India will eliminate the import duty making our prices hugely competitive. Indias hospitals need a reliable source of oxygen to treat an increasing flow of people, Oxairs PSA units can safeguard against events like extreme weather and late deliveries where patients could be vulnerable to failing supplies.A healthcare facility in India that is already benefitting from an Oxair oxygen generating system and is planning to order another one is the Aarvy Hospital in Gurgaon, which is regarded as being at the forefront of bringing affordable and improved healthcare to the people of that region.Aarvy Hospitals Proprietor, Dr Vikram Singh, described the commissioning of the oxygen plant as a major milestone in the hospitals history that is helping to deliver improved health care for patients. He said: Commissioning this oxygen plant gives the hospital a more robust, reliable and economical means of providing life-saving treatment to our patients.As well as India, Oxairs PSA units have also been installed in the Philippines, Tonga, Indonesia and Africa, providing a reliable and sustainable supply of oxygen, compared to the expense of shipping in traditional cylinders. The PSA system has helped deliver an increased level of good quality healthcare to patients in all these regions.Oxairs PSAs are registered medical devices under ISO 13485, which makes them fully compliant for use in all hospitals and healthcare facilities. Patients lives are dependent on safe and consistent delivery of the highest quality oxygen and it is imperative that hospitals can find a cost-effective and independent solution for producing this life-saving gas.BackgroundOxair is an ISO 9001 certified company focused on the design and manufacture of packaged oxygen Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA) Systems, Oxair manufactures very small, medium to large Oxygen PSA Tonnage plants,Oxair also design and manufacture Nitrogen PSA systems up to 1000Nm3/hr.Our Portfolio also includes designing Nitrogen systems from Air Products Membrane Technology whom we have forged strong links with over the past 20 years for Nitrogen and other gases.In addition Oxair Design and Manufacture Heatless/Desiccant type Regeneration Dryers and filtration packages for a variety of industrial sectors including medical, gold mining, water treatment, oil & gas, food, chemical and biotech.The dryers can be skid mounted or in a lifting frame certified for Off Shore lift if required.We also produce pressure vessels and skid fabrication and process piping, and our designs are focused on customer requirements of reliability, ease of maintenance, safety and plant self-protection.David CheesemanOxair Gas Systems Pty Ltd32 Prosperity Avenue,Wangara,Western Australia 6065AustraliaTelephone: +61 (08) 9303 9305Email: dcheeseman@oxair.com.au Acerola Extract Market Expected to be Worth US$ 17.5 Bn by 2026 http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-2229 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-2229 www.futuremarketinsights.com Future Market Insights delivers key insights on the global acerola extract market in a new publication titled Acerola Extract Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment, 20162026. The global acerola extract market is projected to witness a robust 8.5% CAGR in terms of value during the forecasted period (20162026). The growth of the global acerola extract market is influenced by several drivers and trends, of which Future Market Insights provides useful insights in this report.Globally rising levels of diabetes, obesity, and cardiac issues have shifted consumer focus towards natural, fruit-based, and healthy products. This is well reflected in the recent emergence of superfruits, a term that refers to highly nutritious fruits. Acerola and its derivatives fit well into this context, given the fruits impressive nutrient profile. Apart from Vitamin C, acerola is rich in pectin, pectolytic enzymes, carotenoids, fibre, Vitamin B, proteins, and other salts. Additionally, acerola extract contains relatively low calories and exhibits a fat-free nature, which further enhances its nutritional profile. Acerola extract has found wide opportunities in the cosmetics industry due to its ability to provide several skin related benefits, much of which is centred on its high Vitamin C concentration. It acts as an antioxidant and prevents free radicals that can cause skin aging; brightens the skin tone; and increases the skins ability to retain moisture. These factors are expected to boost acerola extract demand and subsequently boost the global acerola extract market growth in terms of revenue over the forecast period.Request For Sample@Segmentation highlights: The global acerola extract market is segmented on the basis of Product Form (Powder, Liquid) and Application (Beverages, Food Supplements, Meat Preservation, Snacks, Bakery Preservation, Confectionery Products, Others).The Powder segment is anticipated to be valued at US$ 5,057.5 Mn by 2016 end and is projected to expand at a CAGR of 8.6% during 2016 2026; The Food Supplements application segment is anticipated to be valued at US$ 2,102.1 Mn by 2016 end. The Food Supplements application segment is anticipated to witness a CAGR of 8.7% between 2016 and 2026. The Beverages application segment is projected to create absolute $ opportunity of US$ 126.2 Mn in 2016 over 2015Regional market projections: The global acerola extract market is segmented into the seven key regions of North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Middle East & Africa (MEA), and Japan. The North America acerola extract market was valued at US$ 1,728 Mn in 2015, which is likely to increase at a CAGR of 8.1% during the assessed period to reach US$ 2,715.6 Mn by the end of 2021. Increasing use in pharmaceutical applications is driving the North America acerola extract market. The APEJ acerola extract market is expected to be valued at US$ 2,835.6 Mn by the end of 2026. Increasing supply chain and production facilities in APEJ are anticipated to drive revenue growth of the market.Vendor insights: The global acerola extract market report features some of the leading companies operational in the worldwide market. Companies profiled in the report include Natures Power Nutraceuticals Corp., Niagro, Naturex, Nutrilite (Amway), Duas Rodas Industrial, Diana Naturals, Nichirei Corporation, iTi Tropicals, NutriBotanica, Vita Forte Inc., Florida Food, Inc., Optimally Organic, The Green Labs LLC, Blue Macaw Flora, and Amazonia Exportacao E Representacao. Top market companies are focussing on expanding their supply chain network globally and are producing and supplying products in partnership with local players to enhance their sales and distribution network.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Ride-on Trowel Market with Growing At CAGR Of 5.4% by 2026: Top Key Players (Multiquip, Wacker Neuson, Allen Engineering, Dragon, Bartell, Dynamic, MBW, Shenhua, Masterpac) Ride-on Trowel Market https://www.marketprognosis.com/sample-request/14238 https://www.marketprognosis.com/buyReport/14238 https://www.marketprognosis.com/enquiry/14238 https://marketprognosis.com Marketprognosis.com Publish a New Market Research Report On Ride-on Trowel - Global Market Outlook (2017-2026) which contains global key players survey information and forecast to 2026.Overview of the Global Ride-on Trowel Market:The Global Ride-On Trowel market is accounted for $66.26 Million in 2017 and is expected to reach $106.56 Million by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 5.4% during the forecast period. Advanced trowelling technologies suitable for high-tolerance concrete floors and demand for non-overlapping machines among contractors are some of the factors propelling the growth of the market. However, lack of operator comfort and high maintenance of sophisticated machinery are hindering the market growth.By Steering, Hydrostatic segment lead the global market. This model can be easily operated with smooth running and adjust the tempo of the engine system that looks like cars automatic transmit. A computer regulator continuously monitors the speed of the engine which regulates the hydraulic burden at the similar time. This electro-hydraulic steering idea is with two joysticks which assist proper indicator and without fatigue working.Get a Sample Copy of this Report @Regionally, Asia pacific region dominated market during the forecast period. The countries like India & Japan are also a prominent market for market due to the existence of automobiles industries that has been established to meet wide-range of masses consumption demand.Major Key Players:1 Multiquip2 Wacker Neuson3 Allen Engineering4 Altas Copco5 Dragon6 Parchem Construction7 Bartell8 Dynamic9 MBW10 Shenhua11 Masterpac12 Roadway Shanghai Dragon Construction Equipment Co. and More..Purchase this report online with 140 Pages, Top Key Players Analysis and List of Tables & Figure @Market Segment by Steerings:1 Mechanical2 HydraulicMarket Segment by Blade Diameters:1 362 46/483 Above 48Market Segment by Fuels:1 Electric2 Petrol3 DieselAny Query? Ask to our Expert @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 2026?3 What are the technologies & innovation trends, how will they evolve by 2026?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 Ride-on Trowel Market.About us:We at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:Market PrognosisPlot. No: 435, Sadanand Chs, B-Cabin Road,Ambernath (E). 421501India.sales@marketprognosis.com+1 973 241 5193 2018-2025 Portable 3D Measuring Arms Report on Global and United States Market ; Including Key Players- CimCore, Baitella, MITUTOYO https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1815437 https://www.researchmoz.us/2018-2025-portable-3d-measuring-arms-report-on-global-and-united-states-marketstatus-and-forecastby-playerstypes-and-applications-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/2018-2025-portable-3d-measuring-arms-report-on-global-and-united-states-marketstatus-and-forecastby-playerstypes-and-applications-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "2018-2025 Portable 3D Measuring Arms Report on Global and United States Market,Status and Forecast,by Players,Types and Applications" to its huge collection of research reports.SummaryThis report studies the Portable 3D Measuring Arms market status and outlook of global and United States, from angles of players, regions, product types and end industries; this report analyzes the top players in global and United States market, and splits the Portable 3D Measuring Arms market by product type and application/end industries.The global Portable 3D Measuring Arms market is valued at XX million USD in 2017 and is expected to reach XX million USD by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.The Asia-Pacific will occupy for more market share in following years, especially in China, also fast growing India and Southeast Asia regions.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @North America, especially the United States, will still play an important role which cannot be ignored. Any changes from United States might affect the development trend of Portable 3D Measuring Arms.United States plays an important role in global market, with market size of xx million USD in 2017 and will be xx million USD in 2025, with a CAGR of XX.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key regions, with sales, revenue, market share (%) and growth Rate (%) of Portable 3D Measuring Arms in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesNorth AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificSouth AmericaMiddle East and AfricaThe major players in global and United States market, includingBaitellaCimCoreCrippa S.p.a.Nikon MetrologyRPS Metrology S.r.l.FAROfratelli rotondiAlicona ImagingHEXAGON MANUFACTURING INTELLIGENCEKREON TechnologiesMITUTOYOView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @On the basis of product, the market is primarily split into6-axis7-axisOthersOn the basis on the end users/application, this report coversMechanicalAutomotiveOthersTable of Contents2018-2025 Portable 3D Measuring Arms 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 DisclaimerBrowse Report @2 Portable 3D Measuring Arms Market Overview2.1 Portable 3D Measuring Arms Product Overview2.2 Portable 3D Measuring Arms Market Segment by Type2.2.1 6-axis2.2.2 7-axis2.2.3 Others2.3 Global Portable 3D Measuring Arms Product Segment by Type2.3.1 Global Portable 3D Measuring Arms Sales (Units) and Growth (%) by Type (2013, 2017 and 2025)3 Portable 3D Measuring Arms Application/End Users3.1 Portable 3D Measuring Arms Segment by Application/End Users3.1.1 Mechanical3.1.2 Automotive3.1.3 Others3.2 Global Portable 3D Measuring Arms Product Segment by Application3.2.1 Global Portable 3D Measuring Arms Sales (Units) and CGAR (%) by Application (2013, 2017 and 2025)3.2.2 Global Portable 3D Measuring Arms Sales (Units) and Market Share (%) by Application (2013-2018)3.3 United States Portable 3D Measuring Arms Product Segment by Application3.3.1 United States Portable 3D Measuring Arms Sales (Units) and CGAR (%) by Application (2013, 2017 and 2025)3.3.2 United States Portable 3D Measuring Arms Sales (Units) and Market Share (%) by Application (2013-2018)4 Portable 3D Measuring Arms Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1 Global Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1.1 Global Portable 3D Measuring Arms Market Size and CAGR by Regions (2013, 2017 and 2025)4.1.2 North America4.1.3 Asia-Pacific4.1.4 Europe4.1.5 South America4.1.6 Middle East and Africa4.1.7 United StatesAbout 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: Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2018 2023 https://www.marketstudyreport.com/request-a-sample/1098692/?utm_source=OPR-SL https://www.marketstudyreport.com/check-for-discount/1098692/?utm_source=OPR-SL https://empowerednews.net/author/gminsights/ https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/global-north-america-europe-and-asia-pacific-south-america-middle-east-and-africa-power-over-ethernet-device-market-2018-forecast-to-2023/?utm_source=RR-SL https://www.marketstudyreport.com https://www.marketstudyreport.com/blog/ Worldwide Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market report of 2018 provides a detailed market overview as well as industry analysis for / of companies, manufacturers and distributors covering data on gross margin, cost structure, consumption value, sale price and more.Global infrared thermal imaging camera market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 3.8% by 2023, according to a new report published by Gen Consulting Company. The report segments the market and forecasts its size, by volume and value, on the basis of application (military, medical, industrial, etc.), and by geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, MEA and South America).The report covers forecast and analysis for the Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera market on a global and regional level. The study provides historic data of 2013-2017 along with a forecast from 2018 to 2023 based on both output/volume and revenue. The study then describes the drivers and restraints for the Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera market along with the impact they have on the demand over the forecast period. Additionally, the report includes the study of opportunities available in the Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera market on a global level.The report has been prepared based on the synthesis, analysis, and interpretation of information about the global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera market collected from specialized sources. The competitive landscape section of the report provides a clear insight into the market share analysis of key industry players. Company overview, financial overview, product portfolio, new project launched, recent development analysis are the parameters included in the profile.Get Sample Copy of this Report:Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market is a detailed report, which presents a combination of industry knowledge and research expertise based on regions too. This report delivers the market trends along with the market size for every individual sector. The report commences with the Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera markets overview and provides detailed information on the historical data pertaining to the market coupled with information about the present scenario. Additionally, the report incorporates the various drivers as well the factors impeding the growth of this market during the forecast period. The report, provides the opportunities in the market and their substantial impact on the major players dominating the market.The following part of the report elaborates the detailed segmentation of the Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera market. Valuable data and information related to the key segments along with their sub-segmentation have been established via this market research report. Size along with the revenue share coupled with insightful forecasts for the major segments and the other significant sub-segments have been detailed via this report. The trends affecting the Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera market in developing regional sectors have additionally been elaborated in this study. The current findings and recommendations the analysts suggest for the future growth of the Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera market have also been evaluated in this report. The key industry players that have contributed to the Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera market have also been detailed in this report.The report has been prepared based on the synthesis, analysis, and interpretation of information about the global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera system market collected from specialized sources. The competitive landscape section of the report provides a clear insight into the market share analysis of key industry players. Company overview, financial overview, product portfolio, new project launched, recent development analysis are the parameters included in the profile.The study provides a decisive view on the Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera system market by segmenting the market based on applications. All the application segments have been analyzed based on present and future trends and the market is estimated fromEnquire For Discount on Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market Research Report @The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, types and applications. All the segments have been analyzed based on present and future trends and the market is estimated from 2018 to 2023. Relevantly, the report and company profiles specify the key drivers that are impacting the demand in global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera market.Key Applications- Military- Medical- IndustrialKey Regions- North America- Europe- Asia Pacific- Middle East and Africa- South AmericaKey Vendors- request free sample to get a complete list of companiesFor More Info on Market Research @Part 1. Exclusive SummaryPart 2. Methodology2.1 Research Methodology2.2 Geographic Scope2.3 Years ConsideredPart 3. Introduction3.1 General Information3.2 Fields of Application3.3 Manufacturing Process3.4 Raw Materials3.5 Cost AnalysisPart 4. Competitive Landscape4.1 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market, by Volume 2013-20184.1.1 Overview4.1.2 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market, by Volume, by Company4.1.3 Top 3 Companies by Volume Share4.2 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market, by Revenue 2013-20184.2.1 Overview4.2.2 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market, by Revenue, by Company4.2.3 Top 3 Companies by Revenue SharePart 5. Market Dynamics5.1 Market Drivers5.2 Challenges5.3 Market TrendsPart 6. Segmentation by Application6.1 Overview6.2 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market by Application (Volume)6.3 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market by Application (Revenue)Part 7. Supply by Region7.1 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Volume by Region7.1.1 North America7.1.2 Europe7.1.3 Asia-Pacific7.1.4 Middle East and Africa7.1.5 South America7.2 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Revenue by Region7.2.1 North America7.2.2 Europe7.2.3 Asia-Pacific7.2.4 Middle East and Africa7.2.5 South AmericaPart 8. Consumption Pattern8.1 North America8.1.1 Overview8.1.2 by Application8.1.3 by Country (U.S., Canada, etc.)8.2 Europe8.2.1 Overview8.2.2 by Application8.2.3 by country (Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, etc.)8.3 Asia-Pacific8.3.1 Overview8.3.2 by Application8.3.3 by Country (China, Japan, India, Korea, Australia, Indonesia, etc.)8.4 Middle East and Africa8.4.1 Overview8.4.2 by Application8.4.3 by Country (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, UAE, etc.)8.5 South America8.5.1 Overview8.5.2 by Application8.5.3 by Country (Brazil, Argentina, etc.)Part 9. Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market Forecast9.1 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market Size 2018-20239.2 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Supply by Region 2018-20239.2.1 North America9.2.2 Europe9.2.3 Asia-Pacific9.2.4 Middle East and Africa9.2.5 South America9.3 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Consumption 2018-20239.4 Global Infrared Thermal Imaging Camera Market by Application 2018-2023Part 10. Key Vendors10.1 Company Profiles10.2 Market Share10.3 FinancialsPart 11. Industry Activity11.1 M&As, JVs and Partnership11.2 Other DevelopmentsPart 12. Appendix12.1 Abbreviations12.2 DisclaimerRelated Reports: -Global (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa) Power Over Ethernet Device Market 2018 Forecast to 2023PoE (Power over Ethernet) describes any of several standardized or ad-hoc systems which pass electrical power along with data on twisted pair Ethernet cabling. This allows a single cable to provide both data connection and electrical power to devices...Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study Report4 North Main Street,Selbyville, Delaware 111875USAPhone: 1-302-273-0910US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email:sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:Blog:Industry News: news.marketsizeforecasters.comConnect with us:Google+ | LinkedIn | Twitter Allergic Rhinitis Drugs Market share forecast to witness considerable growth from 2018 to 2026 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/1201 Allergic rhinitis or hay fever is an IgE-mediated disorder caused by allergens such as mold or tress, animal, dander, house dust mites, weed pollens, and grass. It can occur in two different forms namely, seasonal and perennial, which in turn causes mild or moderate to severe inflammation inside the nose. Some of the major symptoms of allergic rhinitis include nasal congestion, rhinorrhea, sneezing, nasal itching, and itchy eyes, or it can be associated with asthma as well. Allergic rhinitis and sinusitis are linked to each other, as allergic rhinitis blocks the nose, which in turn blocks the sinuses. In 2015, according to World Allergy Organization, over 400 million people suffered from allergic rhinitis worldwide. Moreover, in the U.S., 10-30% adults and around 40% children were affected by allergic rhinitis.Request Sample Copy of this Business Report @Introduction of new drugs is expected to drive growth of the marketManufacturers are developing a variety of drugs and nasal sprays for the treatment of allergic rhinitis. This in turn, is expected to fuel growth of the allergic rhinitis drugs market in the near future. For instance, in March 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Odactra drug, manufactured by Catalent Pharma Solutions Limited, the first allergen extract to be administered under the tongue (sublingually), to treat house dust mite (HDM)-induced nasal inflammation (allergic rhinitis), with or without eye inflammation (conjunctivitis), for people aged between18 and 65 years. In 2016, Aralez Pharmaceutical Inc. launched Blexten, for the treatment of symptoms related to seasonal allergic rhinitis (SAR) and chronic spontaneous urticarial (CSU) in Canada. Moreover, in January 2017, Pediapharm Inc. launched an innovative allergy medication Rupall, in a tablet and oral form, which is a first prescription antihistamine with three indications namely, symptoms associated with seasonal allergic rhinitis (SAR), perennial allergic rhinitis (PAR), and chronic spontaneous urticaria (CSU), for people aged 2 years and above suffering from the allergy.Click To Continue Reading On Allergic Rhinitis Drugs MarketAbout 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 Global Digital Forensics Market Projected Valuation of More than US$ 2,300 Mn by 2027 Market Research Reports Search Engine https://www.mrrse.com/sample/4542 https://www.mrrse.com/digital-forensics-report https://www.mrrse.com/ An insightful study, titled Digital Forensics Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012 2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017 2027) has been freshly broadcasted to the vast research repository of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE). This 401 page research study provides detailed comprehensions and forecasts future growth of the global market with an in-depth study of the factors impacting revenue growth throughout the mentioned forecast period. Further, a deep analysis on the major players from diverse regions is also present in the reportRequest For Sample Report @The global digital forensics market includes various types of forensics such as computer forensics, mobile forensics, network forensics, database forensics, and forensic data analysis. Among these, the computer forensics market was seen leading the global market till 2016, as computers were used widely by digital forensics teams to collect critical evidences from digital data and identify the culprits responsible for a particular crime. While the use of computer devices remains the same in the corporate sector, the mobile devices market keeps growing given an increase in the demand for mobile phones all over the world. This has also impacted the digital forensics market, with mobile devices being widely used now to gather useful evidence from digital data.According to Market Research Reports Search Engine analysis, mobile device forensics has taken over the market with a projected valuation of more than US$ 2,300 Mn by 2027, up from just about US$ 507 Mn in 2017. The mobile device forensics market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.4% during the period of study.Cyber criminals employ a combination of sophisticated technologies to be successful in their target crime missions. Cyber criminals target individuals as well as businesses and rewards achieved are much greater with security protocols being somewhat lax at the other end. Not only this, cyber criminals use multiple channels and mislead security by a series of attacks that takes off the attention of security personnel from the main crime site. Moreover, rising information security concerns by individuals and businesses are expected to increase in the digital forensics market. The information provided by people on various social media platforms has increased, which has led to a rise in concerns regarding the safety of critical and sensitive personal information.Digital transformation is also a major driver of the market, which will eventually reform some of the business activities that will transform business processes and provide new revenue models using digital technologies, which includes information security, forensics technologies, data governance, cyber security, big data, cloud technologies, social media and mobility and IoT technologies. Manufacturing and retail industries are an early adopter of digitalisation. Digital forensics tools have been the most commonly embraced platform for tracing hacks, recovering data from damaged or erased hard drives, gathering and maintaining digital evidence and in investigation analysis. Increasing technological transformation across various industries will positively impact the growth of the digital forensics market.To know the latest trends and insights prevalent in this market, click the link below:As the cloud is a convenient and cost-effective way to store critical business data, its adoption is increasing among SMEs and large enterprises worldwide. Consequently, the demand for cloud security solutions such as cloud network forensics is also growing. As on-premise security solutions are expensive, their adoption is limited among SMEs due to budget constraints, limited resource availability, and the lack of expertise to address security problems. Cloud-based network forensic solutions scan the data traffic before it reaches the network, providing better protection and reduced bandwidth congestion. Cloud-based network forensics solutions do not require any hardware or software and can be controlled remotely, making them cost-effective for end users. These solutions also respond faster to new security threats and unauthorised access.About Market Research Reports Search EngineMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research Reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY 12207(United State)Telephone: +1-518-730-0559(toll free no)Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite: Global Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Market 2018 ; Analysis Including Key Players- bioMrieux, Siemens, Qiagen, Abbott https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1816139 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-hepatitis-b-and-c-diagnostics-market-professional-survey-report-2018-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/global-hepatitis-b-and-c-diagnostics-market-professional-survey-report-2018-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Market Professional Survey Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics 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, coveringRoche DiagnosticsAbbottSiemensQiagenbioMrieuxBio-Rad Laboratories,Meridian BioscienceVista DiagnosticsBiogate LaboratoriesJ.Mitra & Co. LtdSiemens MedicalGeneral BiologicalsTo 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 intoImmunodiagnosticsNucleic acid test (NAT)By Application, the market can be split intoHepatitis BHepatitis CBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Table of ContentsGlobal Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Market Professional Survey Report 20181 Industry Overview of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics1.1 Definition and Specifications of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics1.1.1 Definition of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics1.1.2 Specifications of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics1.2 Classification of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics1.2.1 Immunodiagnostics1.2.2 Nucleic acid test (NAT)1.3 Applications of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics1.3.1 Hepatitis B1.3.2 Hepatitis C2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Hepatitis B and C DiagnosticsBrowse Report @3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Major Manufacturers in 20173.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Major Manufacturers in 20173.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Major Manufacturers in 20173.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Major Manufacturers in 20174 Global Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Overall Market Overview4.1 2013-2018E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2013-2018E Global Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2017 Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2013-2018E Global Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Sales and Growth Rate Analysis4.3.2 2017 Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Sales Analysis (Company Segment)4.4 Sales Price Analysis5 Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Regional Market Analysis5.1 North America Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Market Analysis5.1.1 North America Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Market Overview5.1.2 North America 2013-2018E Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Local Supply, Import, Export, Local Consumption Analysis5.1.3 North America 2013-2018E Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Sales Price Analysis5.1.4 North America 2017 Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Market Share Analysis5.2 China Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Market Analysis5.2.1 China Hepatitis B and C Diagnostics Market OverviewAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on Blogger at: Intravenous Immunoglobulin Market to Gain a Stronghold by 2020 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/2830 The term immunoglobulin refers to the breakdown of blood plasma that contains antibody. IVIg is a blood product which is administered intravenously. It contains polyvalent IgG antibodies which are extracted from the plasma of more than thousand of blood donors. Individuals who are unable to produce adequate amount of antibodies, such as patients with common variable immunodeficiency, Wiskott Aldrich Syndrome, X-linked agammaglobulinemia and other forms of hypogammaglobulinemia, get benefit from IVIg to maintain the appropriate level of antibodies in the body.The global market of IVIg is categorized based on plasma protein and by therapeutic area. The plasma protein segment is further sub-segmented in polyvalent IVIg, albumin, Factor VIII, hyperimmunes (IM&IV) and Factor IX. Polyvalent IVIg sub-segment holds the largest market share in global IVIg market. Moreover, the therapeutic area segment includes immune deficiencies, autoimmune diseases and acute infections. The immune deficiency sub-segment comprises major diseases, such as, hypogammaglobulinemia (primary immune deficiencies), X-linked agammaglobulinemia and acquired compromised immunity conditions (secondary immune deficiencies), featuring low antibody levels. The autoimmune disease sub-segment includes immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) and Inflammatory diseases.In terms of geography, North America is the largest market for IVIg followed by Europe and Asia. In North America, the U.S. represents the largest market for IVIg. In Europe, Germany, France and the U.K. covers the major share of IVIg market. Asia represents the fastest growing market for IVIg, due to increasing aging population. Elderly people are more susceptible to antibody deficiency diseases.Globally, IVIG market is witnessing a strong growth due to increasing number of patients with bleeding disorders, rising geriatric population and increasing number of Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP) patients. Moreover, increasing investment in healthcare sector is also supporting in growth of IVIg market. In addition, increasing number of patients suffering with autoimmune diseases and other pathological conditions are also supporting growth of IVIg products in the market.However, stringent regulations hamper the growth of the IVIg market. Several government associations have imposed strict guidelines for appropriate usage of IVIg products. For instance, Canadian Blood Services and National Advisory Committee on Blood and Blood Products of Canada provide practice guidelines on the usage of IVIg products in hematological diseases.In addition, high treatment cost also impedes growth of IVIg market. Some patients cannot afford IVIg products, due to high cost of their treatment. IVIg products are very expensive as the materials required to produce them cost more and the manufacturing process requires a significant amount of blood samples from donors. The collection of large amount of blood samples is a very complex and tedious process. Furthermore, high risks of side-effects associated with IVIg treatment also restrain growth of the IVIg market. Some of the major side-effects of IVIg treatment are headache, migraine, dizziness, fever, nausea, vomiting, fast heart rate, itching, high blood pressure, cough and abdominal pains. These side-effects inhibit the acceptance of IVIg products by many patients.Request Sample Report @Some of the key players operating in IVIg market are Baxter International Inc., Beijing Tiantan Biological Products Co., Ltd., Biotest AG, China Biologic Products, Inc., CSL Limited, Guizhou Taibang Biological Products Co., Ltd., Shanghai RAAS Blood Products Co., Ltd., Octapharma AG, Grifols, S.A, Hualan Biological Engineering Inc., OMRIX Biopharmaceuticals Ltd. and Kedrion S.p.A.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.Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: himanshu.t@persistencemarketresearch.com Security Paper Market Projected to Reach $22.72 Billion at 8.1% CAGR Till 2026 | Top Key Players - Sequana, Fedrigoni, Goznak, Document Security Systems, Security Paper Mill, Pura, Sequana, De La Rue Security Paper Market https://www.marketprognosis.com/sample-request/14240 https://www.marketprognosis.com/buyReport/14240 https://www.marketprognosis.com/enquiry/14240 https://marketprognosis.com Marketprognosis.com Publish a New Market Research Report On Security Paper - Global Market Outlook (2017-2026) which contains global key players survey information and forecast to 2026.Overview of the Global Security Paper Market:The Global Security Paper market is accounted for $11.25 Billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $22.72 Billion by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 8.1%. Factors such as growing awareness about the frauds in consumer groups, increasing demand for reprinting the official documents, rising usage of security features such as holograms, water marks etc., and growth in band protection are fuelling the market growth. Furthermore, increase in the anti-counterfeiting technologies and technological advancements provide abundant growth opportunities for the market during the forecast period. However, rising digitization is hampering the market growth and strict government regulations are hampering the market growth.Security Paper is used to authenticate or identify a document as original. Security papers are used to reduce and control the piracy and fraudulence practices. It is one of the simplest ways of detecting counterfeiting, forgery, alteration and other forms of document fraud. It is widely used for printing currency, legal, and government document.Get a Sample Copy of this Report @Based on Security feature, hybrid paper segment is projected to be the fastest-growing segment due to the need for safeguarding security documents from anti-counterfeiting technologies. It can be used in any kind of security records and to reduce the risks with the security features such as holograms, watermarks and threads. By Application, bank notes segment is expected to grow at a highest CAGR during the forecast period. The growth of this segment can be attributed to printing and reprinting of currency notes, increasing demand of photocopying official documents and circulation of money.Geographically, Asia-Pacific is dominating the market during the forecast period due to increased usage of security paper, strong population growth, rising awareness of counterfeiting in the countries such as India and China.Major Key Players:1 Sequana Group2 Fedrigoni Group3 Goznak4 Document Security Systems, Inc.5 Security Paper Mill, Inc.6 Pura Group7 Sequana Group8 De La Rue PLC9 Fortress Paper Ltd and More.Purchase this report online with 167 Pages, Top Key Players Analysis and List of Tables & Figure @Market Segment by1 Security Features Covered:2 Threads3 Holograms4 Hybrid Papers5 Watermarks6 Micro-printing7 UV Fibers8 Heavy Stock9 Tear Resistant10 Chain Bolt (Single-Ended Type) (CBS1) and Other Security FeaturesAny Query? Ask to our Expert @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 2026?3 What are the technologies & innovation trends, how will they evolve by 2026?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 Security Paper Market.About us:We at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:Market PrognosisPlot. No: 435, Sadanand Chs, B-Cabin Road,Ambernath (E). 421501India.sales@marketprognosis.com+1 973 241 5193 Global Gene Expression Market 2018 ; Attractiveness, Analysis and Key Players- Illumina, Inc. (U.S.), PerkinElmer (U.S.), https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1816163 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-gene-expression-market-professional-survey-report-2018-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/global-gene-expression-market-professional-survey-report-2018-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Gene Expression Market Professional Survey Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies Gene Expression in Global market, especially in North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan and India, with production, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions, from 2013 to 2018, and forecast to 2025.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringThermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. (U.S.)QIAGEN N.V. (Germany)Illumina, Inc. (U.S.)Bio-Rad Laboratories (U.S.)Agilent Technologies (U.S.)PerkinElmer (U.S.)To 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 intoKits & ReagentsDNA ChipsOthersBy Application, the market can be split intoDrug Discovery & DevelopmentClinical DiagnosticsBiotechnology & MicrobiologyOthersBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Table of ContentsGlobal Gene Expression Market Professional Survey Report 20181 Industry Overview of Gene Expression1.1 Definition and Specifications of Gene Expression1.1.1 Definition of Gene Expression1.1.2 Specifications of Gene Expression1.2 Classification of Gene Expression1.2.1 Kits & Reagents1.2.2 DNA Chips1.2.3 Others1.3 Applications of Gene Expression1.3.1 Drug Discovery & Development2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Gene Expression2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Gene Expression2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Gene Expression2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Gene ExpressionBrowse Report @3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Gene Expression3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Gene Expression Major Manufacturers in 20173.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Gene Expression Major Manufacturers in 20173.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Gene Expression Major Manufacturers in 20173.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Gene Expression Major Manufacturers in 20174 Global Gene Expression Overall Market Overview4.1 2013-2018E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2013-2018E Global Gene Expression Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2017 Gene Expression Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2013-2018E Global Gene Expression Sales and Growth Rate Analysis5 Gene Expression Regional Market Analysis5.1 North America Gene Expression Market Analysis5.1.1 North America Gene Expression Market Overview5.1.2 North America 2013-2018E Gene Expression Local Supply, Import, Export, Local Consumption Analysis5.1.3 North America 2013-2018E Gene Expression Sales Price Analysis5.1.4 North America 2017 Gene Expression Market Share Analysis5.2 China Gene Expression Market Analysis5.2.1 China Gene Expression Market OverviewAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on Blogger at: +18.9% CAGR of Europe Microfluidics Market Outlook 2018: Vendors are PerkinElmer Inc., Dolomite Microfluidics, Abbott, Abaxis, Illumina Inc. and More Till 2025 http://databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=europe-microfluidics-market http://databridgemarketresearch.com/toc/?dbmr=europe-microfluidics-market http://databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/europe-microfluidics-market/ http://databridgemarketresearch.com/speak-to-analyst/?dbmr=europe-microfluidics-market http://databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-microfluidics-market/ The Europe Microfluidics Market 2018 Market Research Report is an expert and top to bottom investigation measure, share, development, development, standpoint and figure to 2025 on the momentum condition of the Europe Microfluidics industry. The report gives an essential review of the business including definitions, groupings, applications and industry chain structure.Europe Microfluidics Market is expected to reach USD 6,618.5 million by 2025 from USD 1,670.7 million in 2017, at a CAGR of 18.9% in the forecast period 2018 to 2025. The new market report contains data for historic years 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.Request for Free Sample Report @Europe Microfluidics Market, By Components (Microfluidic Chips, Micropumps, Microneedles, Others), By (Polymer, Glass, Silicon, Other), By Sector (Industrial, Healthcare), By End User (Hospitals, Industrial R&D, Research Laboratories and Academia), By Country (Germany, France, U.K., Spain, Italy, Russia, Netherlands, Turkey, Belgium, Switzerland, Rest of Europe) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Market Definition: Europe Microfluidics MarketMicrofluidics is the study of behavior of fluids, precise control, manipulation fluids which are geometrically constrained.Complete report on Europe Microfluidics Market Research Report 2017-2024 spread across 350 Pages, profiling Top companies and supports with tables and figuresKey Questions Answered in Europe Microfluidics Market Report:-Our Report offers:- What will the market growth rate, Overview and Analysis by Type of Europe Microfluidics Market in 2024? What are the key factors driving, Analysis by Applications and Countries G Europe Microfluidics Market? What are Dynamics, This Overview Includes Analysis of Scope, and price analysis of top Vendors Profiles of Europe Microfluidics Market? Who are Opportunities, Risk and Driving Force of Europe Microfluidics Market? Who are the opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in Europe Microfluidics Market? Business Overview by Type, Applications, Gross Margin and Market Share What are the Europe Microfluidics Market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Market?Request for Detaild TOC:Top Key Players: PerkinElmer Inc. Dolomite Microfluidics Abbott Abaxis Illumina Inc. Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. Agilent AVIVA Biosciences Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. Cepheid Rain Dance Technologies, Inc. HP Inc. Fluxion Bioscience Akonni Biosystems, Inc.Avail 10% Instant Discount on Purchase of this report Mail us on: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comMajor Market Drivers and Restraints: Increase in demand of point-of-care testing Advancement in Biochips Increased applications Alternative technologies Low acceptability due to high costsEurope Microfluidics Market Major Factors:The major factors contributing to the growth of the market includes increased demand of POC testing, wide range of applications in different sectors, benefits associated with incorporation of microfluidics and high return on investments are some of the key driving factors in the Europe microfluidics market.For more insightful information visit @Key Points: Europe Microfluidics Market The microfluidic chips segment is dominating the Europe microfluidics market with the market share 56.0%. The healthcare segment is dominating the Europe microfluidics market with 66.8% market share, growing at the highest CAGR 19.2% in the forecast period 2018 to 2025.Key Drivers: Europe Microfluidics MarketSome of the major factors driving the market for Europe microfluidics market are increased demand of POC testing, wide range of applications in different sectors, benefits associated with incorporation of microfluidics and high return on investments.Customize report of "Europe Microfluidics Market" as per customers requirement also available.Europe Microfluidics Market Competitive Analysis:The microfluidics market is highly fragmented and is based on new product launches and clinical results of products. Hence the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, clinical trials, market initiatives, high expense on research and development, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of microfluidics market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America.Market Segmentations:Europe Microfluidics Market is segmented on the basis of Component Material Sectors End-Users GeographyMarket Segmentations in Details:On the basis of Component into microfluidic chips, micropumps, microneedles and others.On the basis of Material into polymer, glass, silicon and others.On the basis of Sectors into industrial and healthcare.On the basis of End-Users is segmented into hospitals, research laboratories & academia and industrial R&D.On the basis of geography Germany France U.K. Spain Italy Russia Netherlands Turkey Belgium Switzerland Rest of EuropeSpeak to Author of the Report@Other ReportGlobal Microfluidics Market Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Global Microfluidics Market, By Components (Microfluidic Chips, Micropumps, Microneedles, Others), By (Polymer, Glass, Silicon, Other), By Sector (Industrial, Healthcare), By End User (Hospitals, Industrial R&D, Research Laboratories and Academia), By Geography (North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa)- Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Report Access:About Data Bridge Market ResearchData Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com Global Insurance Agency Software Market 2025 ; Attractiveness, Analysis and Key Players- AllClients, Agency Matrix, QQ Solutions https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1766137 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-insurance-agency-software-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/global-insurance-agency-software-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Insurance Agency Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies the global Insurance Agency Software market size, industry status and forecast, competition landscape and growth opportunity. This research report categorizes the global Insurance Agency Software market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.This report focuses on the global top players, coveredVertaforeApplied SystemsEZLynxACSITCHawkSoftQQ SolutionsTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Sapiens/Maximum ProcessingZywaveXdimensional TechAgency MatrixJenesis SoftwareAgencyBlocAllClientsImpowersoftInsurance SystemsBuckhillInsuredHQZhilian SoftwareMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoCloud-BasedOn-PremiseView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Market segment by Application, Insurance Agency Software can be split intoSmall BusinessMedium-sized BusinessLarge BusinessThe study objectives of this report are:To study and forecast the market size of Insurance Agency Software in global market.To analyze the global key players, SWOT analysis, value and global market share for top players.To define, describe and forecast the market by type, end use and region.To analyze and compare the market status and forecast between China and major regions, namely, United States, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India and Rest of World.To analyze the global key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends and factors driving or inhibiting the market growth.To analyze the opportunities in the market for stakeholders by identifying the high growth segments.To strategically analyze each submarket with respect to individual growth trend and their contribution to the marketTo analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the marketTo strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their growth strategies.In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Insurance Agency Software 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.Browse Report @Key StakeholdersInsurance Agency Software ManufacturersInsurance Agency Software Distributors/Traders/WholesalersInsurance Agency Software 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 Insurance Agency Software market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.Table of ContentsGlobal Insurance Agency Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Insurance Agency Software1.1 Insurance Agency Software Market Overview1.1.1 Insurance Agency Software Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Insurance Agency Software Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.2.1 United States1.2.2 Europe1.2.3 China1.2.4 Japan1.2.5 Southeast Asia2 Global Insurance Agency Software Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Insurance Agency Software Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Vertafore3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Insurance Agency Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2 Applied Systems3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business OverviewAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on Blogger at: Photonic ICs Market Detailed Analytical Overview by 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/18070 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/18070 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Photonic ICs Market: Market OverviewThe Photonic ICs are also known as integrated optoelectronics devices or planer light wave circuits. The rising need for the high transmission capacity of the optical fibers is the primary parameter responsible for the popularity of the photonic ICs in the industry applications. The data generated at the organizational operations is increasing day by day with the globalization of the businesses, with the deployment of photonic ICs in the systems the operations speed of a large amount of data is increasing drastically. The photonic ICs are formed using the integration of the variety of material systems which includes electro-optic crystals such as silica on silicon, lithium niobate, Silicon on insulator, semiconductor and various polymers materials. These are used to make semiconductor lasers such as GaAs and InP.The demand for the Photonic ICs is rising day by day with the increasing request of the compact hardware solutions in the circuits. The Photonic ICs are widely used by the manufacturers as well as system designers to combine the various electronic components such as electronic components, optical amplifiers, multiplexers, lasers, modulators, etc. The Photonic ICs are easily leading to the size reduction of the components and reduction in the cost of the products.Photonic ICs Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe fact that with the deployment of the Photonic ICs is resulting in the compact size of the equipment and cost reduction this factor is the prime factor responsible for the growth of the global market for the Photonic ICs. The manufacturers and users both are mostly focused on the price factor and the photonic ICs helps in cost reduction for both is contributing to the increasing popularity of the photonic ICs.The photonic integrated circuits are one of the major components responsible for the increased optical performance and reliability. The Photonic ICs also results in the less power consumptions by devices. On the other hand, the lack of awareness about the photonic ICs is one of the major restraining factors for the growth of the global Photonic ICs market.Request Sample Report @Global Photonic ICs Market: Market SegmentationGlobal Photonic ICs Market can be divided into three segments, based on raw materials used, components, and applications.Segmentation on basis of raw material used in Photonic ICs market:The segments in Photonic ICs market by raw material used include:Indium PhosphideGallium ArsenideLithium NiobateSiliconSilicon-on-InsulatorOthersSegmentation on basis of Components for Photonic ICs Market:The major segments of Photonic ICs market on basis of components include:LasersModulatorsDetectorsAttenuatorsMultiplexers/De-MultiplexersOptical AmplifiersSegmentation on basis of Applications of Photonic ICs Market:The major segments of Photonic ICs market on basis of application include:BiomedicalQuantum computingOptical Signal ProcessingOptical CommunicationSensorsGlobal Photonic ICs: Regional OutlookThe global Photonic ICs market is divided into seven regions as North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan, and Middle East and Africa. Among the given regions, North America is dominating the global market for Photonic ICs due to the higher presence of Photonic ICs vendors as well as users in this region followed by Western Europe, Eastern. The developing regions such as APEJ and Japan are predicted to grow at the highest CAGR owing to the rapid industrialization and technological adaptation in developing countries present in this region such as India and China. These countries are more focused on reducing the manufacturing cost of the electronic equipment as well as developing products at lower cost for the customers. The photonic ICs market in MEA region is expected to grow at moderate CAGR.Request to View TOC @Global Photonic ICs: Competitive LandscapeSome of the key vendors of the Photonic ICs includes APIC Corporation, Infinera Corporation, NeoPhotonics Corporations, PhotonIC Corporation, etc. These players are consistently focused on developing new and advanced ICs for improvising the applications portfolio.ABOUT US:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.CONTACT:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Global Residential Interior Door Market Growth, Size, Trends, Manufacturer, Region, Key-Players, Future and Forecast till 2025 https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1831536 https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/global-residential-interior-door-market-research-report-2018-report.html The market for Residential Interior Door is growing with the expansion of this Industry Sector Worldwide. Market Research Hub (MRH) has added a new report titled Global Residential Interior Door Market Research Report 2018 which offer details about the current trends and analysis, as well as scope for the near future. This research study also covers information about the production, consumption and market share based on different active regions. Furthermore, an anticipated growth at a double-digit CAGR for the Residential Interior Door sector is highlighted in the report which indicates a prosperous future.Click here for Free Sample Report@This report studies the global Residential Interior Door market status and forecast, categorizes the global Residential Interior Door 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.Residential interior door is covered the interior door used in residential such bedroom and living room, bathroom and so on. This report covered the sliding doors, pocket doors, folding doors, flush doors, barn doors, panel doors by type and steel, wood, Glass doors by material.The main consumption regions are concentrated in the Asia, Europe and North American. The residential interior doors consumption has great relationship with the local real-estate development level and currently, in Malaysia, the consumption level is not very high because of the low GDP growth rate.The residential interior door will have a good future; the price fluctuation has relationship with the raw material. The technology will more mature and the industry is more dispersion. The installation rate of residential interior door is becoming more and more.The global Residential Interior Door market is valued at xx million US$ in 2017 and will reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of xx% during 2018-2025.The major manufacturers covered in this reportMasoniteJELD WenSandorGianni PanelStanford DoorDoor WorldGolden AeroHormannP C HendersonAndersenReliance HomeCr LaurenceAshworthCOMEDGE BMTHillaldam Coburn Sliding DoorsGeographically, this report studies the key regions, focuses on product sales, value, market share and growth opportunity in these regions, coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaWe can also provide the customized separate regional or country-level reports, for the following regions: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 intoWoodGlassCompositeOthersOn 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, includingBedroom and Living RoomBathroomOtherBrowse Full Report with TOC@Table of ContentsGlobal Residential Interior Door Market Research Report 20181 Residential Interior Door Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Residential Interior Door1.2 Residential Interior Door Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Residential Interior Door Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Residential Interior Door Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Wood1.2.4 Glass1.2.5 Composite1.2.6 Others1.3 Global Residential Interior Door Segment by Application1.3.1 Residential Interior Door Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Bedroom and Living Room1.3.3 Bathroom1.3.4 Other1.4 Global Residential Interior Door Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Residential Interior Door 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 Residential Interior Door (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Residential Interior Door Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)2 Global Residential Interior Door Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Residential Interior Door Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Residential Interior Door Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Residential Interior Door Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Residential Interior Door Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Residential Interior Door Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Residential Interior Door Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Residential Interior Door Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Residential Interior Door Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Residential Interior Door Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Residential Interior Door Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Residential Interior Door Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 China Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.8 Japan Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.9 Southeast Asia Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.10 India Residential Interior Door Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)Continued. @@About Market Research HubMarket Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports of different sector like retail market research 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 LiDAR for Automotive: Market 2018 Segmented by Manufacturers (Continental AG, Delphi Automotive, First Sensor AG, Infineon AG, Innoviz, LeddarTech, Quanergy Systems, Texas Instruments) and Forecasts to 2025 Qy Research Groups https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/request-sample/726197 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/send-an-enquiry/726197 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/check-discount/726197 LiDAR for Automotive Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the LiDAR for Automotive industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global LiDAR for Automotive market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global LiDAR for Automotive market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. 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It provides overview and forecast of the global LiDAR for Automotive market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall LiDAR for Automotive 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 LiDAR for Automotive 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 LiDAR for Automotive 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. Cellular Imaging Market Registering a Strong Growth by 2020 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/3217 Cellular imaging is a technology used to detect and analyze organelles and macromolecules with the help of microscopy and computer programming. It also helps in measuring properties of cells including shape, size and protein presence. Cellular imaging also helps in knowing biomolecules nature. Confocal laser scanning microscopy, fluroscence resonance energy transfer and multiphoton are some of the advanced cellular imaging techniques which helps in understanding molecular and functional systems in the cell. Hospitals, academic institutions, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies uses cellular imaging systems as an important tool for drug discovery, research and diagnosis. Cellular imaging also helps in generating high throughput mode to discover the biomarkers and drug target candidates. Microscopic and macroscopic techniques are two types of intravital cellular imaging technologies.North America is the largest market for cellular imaging followed by Europe due to increasing incidence of cancer and rising number of R&D activities. Asia is expected to experience high growth rate in next few years due to rising government investments for cell based research activities. In addition, growing demand for outsourcing of drug discovery services is also fuelling the growth of cellular imaging market in Asia.In recent times there is increased use of cellular imaging due to increasing cancer treatment and diagnostics. Improved accuracy of cellular analysis, cellular imaging and rise in government funding for cell based research activities are some of the key factors driving the growth of global cellular imaging market. In addition, growing healthcare and medical spending is also fuelling the growth of cellular imaging market. However, huge capital requirements and lack of skilled personnel for carrying out the high content screening process are some of the major factors restraining the growth of global cellular imaging market.Availability of less number of skilled and knowledgeable professionals poses major challenge for the global cellular imaging market. Adoption of cell analysis for cell identification and cell signaling pathways and rising number of contract research organization are some of the key opportunities for the global cellular imaging market.Request Sample Report @Some of the major companies operating in global cellular imaging market are Agilent Technologies, Inc., Beckton, Dickinson and Company, Danaher Corporation, Olympus Corporation, GE Healthcare, Promega Corporation and Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.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.Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: himanshu.t@persistencemarketresearch.com License Plate Cameras: Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players Zavio, GeoVision, VIVOTEK, RECONYX, Speco Technologies, KT&C, Axis Communications, Bosch, COP-USA Qy Research Groups https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/request-sample/734218 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/send-an-enquiry/734218 https://www.qyresearchgroups.com/check-discount/734218 License Plate Cameras Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the License Plate Cameras industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global License Plate Cameras market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global License Plate Cameras market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the License Plate Cameras players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.License Plate Cameras Market Players: Zavio GeoVision VIVOTEK RECONYX Speco Technologies Korea Technology and Communications (KT&C) Axis Communications Bosch COP-USA Digital Watchdog AvigilonGet Sample Copy of This Report Now @On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into License Plate Capture Cameras License Plate Recognition CamerasBy Application, the market can be split into Residential CommercialMajor 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 License Plate Cameras market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall License Plate Cameras 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 License Plate Cameras 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 License Plate Cameras 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. Web Werks Is Now An SAP-Certified Provider Of Hosting Services www.webwerks.in Mumbai, India 19th June 2018 | For organizations planning to outsource the hosting of their environments running SAP solutions, they now have new option SAP hosting services provided by Web Werks Data Centers.Indias largest data center service provider today announced that it is now one of the only SAP-certified providers of hosting services in India. Many enterprises have already chosen Web Werks Data Centers to host and manage their mission-critical, SAP solution-based environments.As a SAP-certified provider of hosting services, Web Werks received certification from SAP AG for its ability to deliver hosting services with high-quality operational standards. To achieve this certification, Web Werks had to undergo an extensive audit by SAP. This audit was conducted to validate if Web Werks infrastructure and processes conform to SAPs high standards and are suitable to host mission-critical environments running SAP applications."Achieving this certification displays our commitment to supporting mission-critical IT environments for enterprise customers and reinforces our position as a premier provider of managed IT hosting services in India, said Nikhil Rathi, Director, Web Werks Data Centers India."Now, enterprises in India running SAP solutions can confidently choose to host their mission-critical SAP solution environments with Web Werks.Web Werks was evaluated on a wide range of criteria, including its services portfolio in support of SAP solutions, quality of its data centers, network and connectivity, managed back-up and disaster-recovery capabilities, IT service management support and delivery processes, application hosting services, and administration and project management skills.This certification confirms Web Werks ability to deliver high-quality hosting services in support of SAP applications. To pass the certification audits, providers must meet high standards, demonstrating the maturity of their service management processes, proficiency of their employees, data-center capabilities and security, as well as redundancies and their back-up and disaster-recovery capabilities. SAP customers can benefit from comprehensive and innovative service offerings from Web Werks, which will help them meet their technical and security requirements in a hosted environment.Please Note: SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.About Web WerksWeb Werks Data Centers have been leaders in India for the past two decades and are located in 3 countries with more than six geographically located data centers. Offering Reliable hosting services on Dedicated Servers, Cloud, Virtualization, Co-location and Disaster Recovery Services along with 24x7 Rapid Action Support and 99.995% Uptime Guarantee.Web Werks Data Centers are validated with ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2013, ISO 20000-1 and Uptime Institute Certified. The data centers are Carbon Neutral contributing towards Global Go-Green concepts. Web Werks is also now SAP certified provider of Infrastructure, Hosting and Cloud Operations Services.Web Werks is also PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, TIA-942 and SSAE16, SSAE18 SOC 2 Type 1 compliant. This certification affirms how we treat security, confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of our customers data. Web Werks in India is the first Asian data center to hold OIX-2 and host an OIX-1 IXP Mumbai-IX. In addition to this, fulfill all the requirement for being a full OpenIX supporter. Web Werks is also Cloud empaneled by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India (MeitY).Awarded with 'Maharashtra IT Excellence Award 2018' by Government of Maharashtra, 'Retailer of the Year for Best Cloud Data Centers and Internet Exchange', 'Great Indian Workplace Award (GIWA) 2017', HostReview's Readers' Choice Awards 2017, 'National Choice Award - Best Cloud Data Centers and Internet Exchange 2018'. We have collaborated with more than 1000+ organizations globally. Few of our prestigious clients are Microsoft, Canon, Google, Godrej, TATA, Facebook, Akamai, Netflix and many more. Our client list also incorporates Government sectors such as Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Limited, Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation, Nabard, SIDBI and so on.For more information, kindly visit,Media Contact:Priti Shettipriti.shetti@webwerks.in+91-8828335555Web Werks Data Centers, incorporated in 1996 is now one of the leading TIER III & TIER IV Data Center service providers in India and have been leaders for the past two decades located in 3 countries with more than six geographically located data centers. Offering Reliable hosting services on Dedicated Servers, Cloud Hosting Services, VPS, Co-location and Disaster Recovery Services along with 24x7 Rapid Action Support and 99.995% Uptime Guarantee.Web Werks Data Centers9th Floor, Sigma IT park, Sector 8, Rabale,Navi MumbaiPriti Shetti Biostimulants Market- Global Opportunity Analysis And Industry Forecast (2017-2022) Global Biostimulants Market, By Crop Type, 2017- 2022 https://www.meticulousresearch.com/download-sample-report/?cp_id=3140 https://www.meticulousresearch.com/product/biostimulants-market-2022/ https://www.meticulousresearch.com/download-sample-report/?cp_id=3140 Global Biostimulants Market is expected to reach USD 3,040.3 million by 2022, supported by a CAGR of 12.7% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2022, according to a publication from Meticulous Research. The global biostimulants market is mainly driven by the growing need to increase crop yield and quality, growing organic farming and demand for organic food, and wide range of benefits of biostimulants in crop production.Download Free Sample PDF @Moreover, growing awareness about environmental safety with the use of biostimulants has further led the growth of biostimulants market globally. However, lack of education and awareness among farmers, and various challenges faced by new entrants and small players restrains the growth of biostimulants market. Also, unavailability of standardized regulatory framework for biostimulants and scientific & technical challenges for development of biostimulants challenges the growth of this market to some extent.Geographically, Europe holds the major share in the global biostimulants market, followed by North America and Asia-Pacific region which is primarily attributed to the rising concern over harmful chemicals on environment, increasing demand for organic food, rapid development & innovation in biostimulants, and presence of large number of biostimulants providers. However, Asia-Pacific region possesses lucrative growth potential for the biostimulants market and is expected to witness a fastest growth during the forecast period. This is mainly attributed to its large area under agriculture cultivation, rising need to increase crop yield and quality with the growing population, increasing demand for organic foods, and various government initiatives to develop and increase application of biologicals in the region.The key players in the global biostimulants market are BASF SE, Valagro SpA, Biolchim S.p.A., Marrone Bio Innovation, Monsanto Company (Part of Bayer), Trade Corporation International (Part of Sapec Group), Plant Health Care PLC, Syngenta (Subsidiary of ChemChina), Biostadt India Limited, Andermatt Biocontrol AG, BioWorks, Inc., Novozymes, Inc., Koppert B.V., Italpollina S.p.A., Micromix Plant Health Ltd., Arysta LifeScience Corporation (Subsidiary of Platform Specialty Products Corporation), FMC Corporation, and Agrinos AS.Browse in-depth Report on:Scope:Market by Active Ingredients:Acid BasedHumic AcidAmino AcidFulvic AcidExtract BasedSeaweed ExtractOther Botanical ExtractsMicrobial AmendmentsTrace Minerals and VitaminsOthersMarket by Mode of ApplicationFoliar SpraySoil TreatmentSeed TreatmentMarket by Formulation:SolidLiquidMarket by Crop Type:Row CropsFruits and VegetablesTurfs and OrnamentalsOthers.Download Free Sample PDF @About Meticulous ResearchMeticulous Research is founded in 2010 and incorporated as Meticulous Market Research Pvt. Ltd. in 2013 as a private limited company under the Companies Act, 1956. Since its incorporation, the company has become the leading provider of premium market intelligence in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa.Contact us :Viren ShrivastavaAVP- Global Sales and MarketingMeticulous ResearchEmail: viren@meticulousresearch.comDirect Lines: +1-646-781-8004 (North America)+44-203-868-8738 (Europe)+91 744-7780008 (Asia-Pacific)Office No-402, 4th Floor, Pushpak Business Hub, Wakad, Pune-411057 Impressive Growth of Global Oil and Gas Accumulator Market Will Grow At CAGR Of 3.65% Between 2017-2021 : TECHNETICS, Airmo, General Electric, Accumulators https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1476414 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-oil-and-gas-accumulator-market-2017-2021-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/global-oil-and-gas-accumulator-market-2017-2021-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Oil and Gas Accumulator Market 2017-2021" to its huge collection of research reports.About Oil and Gas AccumulatorOil and gas is one of the biggest sectors in the world in terms of revenue generation. The industry includes a majority of the national oil companies that generate billions of dollars, which contributes significantly toward the economic development of any country. Several industries are dependent on the oil and gas sector, which require either the final petroleum product or general oil and gas services. This industry is responsible for providing thousands of jobs, and its success or failure has a huge impact on several industries. An accumulator is a pressure storage reservoir, which stores a specific amount of fluid that is under pressure. This fluid is later released to perform a specific operation in the hydraulic system.Technavios analysts forecast the global oil and gas accumulator market to grow at a CAGR of 3.65% during the period 2017-2021.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global oil and gas accumulator market for 2017-2021. To calculate the market size, the report considers the number of active rig count across the world.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:AmericasAPACEMEATechnavio's report, Global Oil and Gas Accumulator Market 2017-2021, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendorsBosch RexrothEatonFreudenberg Sealing TechnologiesNIPPON ACCUMULATORPARKER HANNIFINView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Other prominent vendorsAirmoAccumulatorsGeneral ElectricHANNON HYDRAULICSHydac InternationalRoth IndustriesTECHNETICSMarket driverIncrease in oil rig countFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challengeUncertainties associated with low crude oil pricesFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trendIoT in accumulatorsFor a full, detailed list, view our reportBrowse Report @Key questions answered in this reportWhat will the market size be in 2021 and what will the growth rate be?What are the key market trends?What is driving this market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in this market space?About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on Blogger at: ePayment System Market Trending Technologies, Company Overview, Recent Developments, Strategies, Global Evaluation, Top Manufacturers Forecast 2025 ReportsWeb http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012090603/sample http://www.reportsweb.com/global-epayment-system-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025 http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012090603/discount http://www.reportsweb.com/buy&RW00012090603/buy/3300 The latest Research on Global ePayment System Market added to Reportsweb Database. The current growth status in each of the regions along with an analysis of growth in these regions in the future is presented in the report.ePayment is referred to as a financial transaction or exchange that occurs between sellers and buyers on an online platform. This kind of financial exchange is typically carried out using a financial digital device which is backed by an intermediary or a bank. ePayments can be done using credit cards, debit cards or even bank transfers. They are instant payments and offer convenience to both the parties (sellers and buyers) by saving time.The credit cards segment in the payment modes category is anticipated to grow at a significant rate owing to higher adoption since past several years across regions in the globe.Get Free Sample of Report at -In 2017, the global ePayment System market size was xx million US$ and it is expected to reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, with a CAGR of xx% during 2018-2025.This report focuses on the global top players, coveredpureLiFiVelmenniOledcommPhilipsVLNCommWiproGELVX SystemNakagawa LabsLightPointe CommunicationsMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoSoftware PlatformsServicesMarket segment by Application, split intoeCommerceSupermarketGroceryOthersBrowse Complete Report at Few points from Table of Contents:1 Industry Overview of ePayment System2 Global ePayment System Competition Analysis by Players3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 pureLiFi3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 ePayment System Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2 Velmenni3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 ePayment System Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3 Oledcomm3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 ePayment System Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)4 Global ePayment System Market Size by Type and Application (2012-2018)5 United States ePayment System Development Status and Outlook6 EU ePayment System Development Status and Outlook7 Japan ePayment System Development Status and Outlook8 China ePayment System Development Status and Outlook9 India ePayment System Development Status and Outlook10 Southeast Asia ePayment System Development Status and Outlook11 Market Forecast by Regions, Type and Application (2018-2025)12 ePayment System Market Dynamics13 Market Effect Factors AnalysisGet discount on report at -List of Table and FiguresFigure China ePayment System Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Japan ePayment System Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Southeast Asia ePayment System Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure India ePayment System Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Table Global ePayment System Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (%) Comparison by Product (2013-2018)Figure Global ePayment System Revenue Market Share by Type in 2017Figure Software Platforms Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)Figure Services Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)Figure Global ePayment System Market Share by Application in 2017Purchase Complete Report atContact Info:Name: Sameer JoshiEmail: sales@reportsweb.comOrganization: ReportsWebPhone: +1-646-491-9876ReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.533, 5th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Medicated Confectionery Market Size, Share, Statistics, Trends, Strategy, Segmentation Analysis and Forecast to 2023 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5332 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/medicated-confectionery-market-5332 Market Overview:Medicated confectionery is growing tremendously over the past few years. The hay fever seasons during the winters, springs, and summers majorly drive the growth of the medicated confectionery market. Moreover, growing cases of allergies among the children in the U.K is boosting the growth of the market.Medicated confectionery is a type of confectionery valued with active ingredients having medicated attribute such as reduction in throat irritation, cold, cough, respiratory congestion, allergies, and others. They are available in different types in the market such as hard candies, pastilles, chewing gums, and others. Growing incidence of allergies and other issues caused due to air pollution is driving the growth of the market.Smoking bans in the U.S., the U.K, and Western Europe is also anticipated to influence the growth of throat sweets and breathe fresheners. Moreover, growing awareness among the population regarding speedy treatment for minor ailments or augmentation is boosting the growth of the market. Continuous initiatives by the key players to enhance the product quality through flavor, packaging, functionality, and others is influencing the growth of the medicated confectionery market. However, fluctuating prices of raw materials may hamper the growth of the market. Nevertheless, all these factors are projected to contribute to the estimated CAGR of 3.2% of the medicated confectionery market during the forecast period, 2017-2023.Receive a Sample Copy @Major Key Players:Mondelez International (U.S.)Ricola (Switzerland)Perfetti Van Melle (Italy)Wrigley Jr. Company (U.S.)Nestle (Switzerland)Procter & Gamble Co (U.S.) andReckitt Benckiser (U.K)Downstream Analysis:The global medicated confectionery market is segmented into type, function and distribution channel.On the basis of the function, the medicated confectionery market is segmented into throat irritation, respiratory congestion, allergies, and others. Among all, throat infection segment is observed to be dominating the market. However, the allergies segment is anticipated to be the fastest growing segment over the estimated period.On the basis of the type, the medicated confectionery market is segmented into hard candies, pastilles, chewing gums, and others. Among them, the hard candies segment is anticipated to be dominating the market and projected to have a substantial growth over the forecast period.Based on the distribution channel, the medicated confectionery market is segmented into store-based and non-store based. Among them, the store-based distribution channel is dominating the market and is projectedAccess Report Details @Regional Analysis:Medicated Confectionery Market is segmented into Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and rest of the world (RoW). North America is leading the medicated confectionery market followed by Europe. The low temperature in the regions of the U.S. and Canada majorly drives the need for medicated confectionery among the population.Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing region over the forecast period. India, China, and Australia are the major contributors in this region. Brazil is anticipated to grow at a decent rate in consumption of medicated confectionery over the forecast period.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 Automotive Heat Exchanger Market Will Grow To Reach $38.56 Billion by 2026 | Global Key Companys Denso, American Industrial Heat Transfer, Hanon Systems, Banco, Constellium, Climetal, G & M Radiator, MAHLE GmbH Automotive Heat Exchanger Market https://www.marketprognosis.com/sample-request/14121 https://www.marketprognosis.com/buyReport/14121 https://www.marketprognosis.com/enquiry/14121 https://marketprognosis.com Marketprognosis.com Publish a New Market Research Report On Automotive Heat Exchanger - Global Market Outlook (2017-2026) which contains global key players survey information and forecast to 2026.Overview of the Global Automotive Heat Exchanger Market:The Global Automotive Heat Exchanger Market is accounted for $19.13 Billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $38.56 Billion by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 8.1% during the forecast period. Growing demand for automotive components, increasing HVAC usage in automotive & residential and rising demand for production of passenger and commercial vehicles are some of the key driving factor for the market growth. However, future emission norms pose a threat for EGR and intercoolers and rise in complexity of automotive heat exchangers can hamper the market.Get a Sample Copy of this Report @On the basis of Vehicle Type, the passenger cars segment commanded the largest market share due to the increase in manufacture of passenger cars worldwide, huge demand for SUVs & premium vehicles and high performance expectation from personal vehicles is driving the passenger car segment. Moreover, the global demand for passenger cars is larger than that for commercial vehicles.Regionally, Asia Pacific is anticipated to dominate the market due to high demand of automobiles and increasing automobile manufacturing sector in countries such as Japan, China, and India are some of the factors that are boosting the automotive heat exchanger market in this region. Europe is anticipated to have highest attribute due to the stringent emission rules laid down by European Commission in the automotive industry.Major Key Players:1 Denso Corporation2 American Industrial Heat Transfer, Inc.3 Hanon Systems4 Banco Products Ltd.5 Constellium6 HRS Process Systems Limited7 Climetal8 G & M Radiator9 MAHLE GmbH10 AKG Thermal Systems and More.Purchase this report online with 192 Pages, Top Key Players Analysis and List of Tables & Figure @Market Segment by Vehicle types:1 Light Commercial Vehicles2 Medium & Heavy Commercial Vehicles3 Passenger Cars4 Conventional (ICE) Vehicles and Other Vehicle TypesMarket Segment by Electric Vehicles:1 Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEVs)2 Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV)3 Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEVs)Market Segment by Off-Highway Vehicle Types:1 Construction Equipment2 Agricultural EquipmentMarket Segment by Design Types:1 Tube Fin2 Plate Bar and Other Design TypesAny Query? Ask to our Expert @This study answers to the below key questions:1 What will the market size be in 2026 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 Automotive Heat Exchanger Market.About us:We at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:Market PrognosisPlot. No: 435, Sadanand Chs, B-Cabin Road,Ambernath (E). 421501India.sales@marketprognosis.com+1 973 241 5193 Demand Analysis of Automotive ADAS Market in China Market Will Grow At CAGR Of 34.63% Between 2017-2021: DENSO, Panasonic, Aisin Seiki https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1476412 https://www.researchmoz.us/automotive-adas-market-in-china-2017-2021-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/automotive-adas-market-in-china-2017-2021-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Automotive ADAS Market in China 2017-2021" to its huge collection of research reports.About Automotive ADASAn advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) helps the driver avoid potential collisions by controlling the vehicle when the user is unable to respond in time. All safety features alert the driver of imminent collisions and prompt him/her to take control of the vehicle. It assists the driver by automating or enhancing vehicle systems to ensure safety and offer a better driving experience. Automotive vehicle production values in China are considered for market sizing. The forecast is based on the trends, drivers, and challenges faced by the Chinese automotive industry.Technavios analysts forecast the automotive ADAS market in China to grow at a CAGR of 34.63% during the period 2017-2021.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the automotive ADAS market in Chinat for 2017-2021. To calculate the market size, the report considers the number of vehicles that has one or more ADAS features embedded in to it. The technology based segmentation represents the penetration of each ADAS feature out of the total number of ADAS vehicles in the market.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:AmericasAPACEMEATechnavio's report, Automotive ADAS Market in China 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 vendorsBoschContinentalDelphi AutomotiveDENSOMobileyeValeoView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Other prominent vendorsAisin SeikiAutolivCalsonic KanseiHyundai MobisMagnaPanasonicVisteonZF Friedrichshafen AGMarket driverMade in China 2025 planFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challengeHigh cost pressure faced by OEMs to offer ADAS at competitive pricesFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trendAdvanced camera technology to grow faster than other sensorsFor a full, detailed list, view our reportBrowse Report @Key questions answered in this reportWhat will the market size be in 2021 and what will the growth rate be?What are the key market trends?What is driving this market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in this market space?About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on Blogger at: Point-of-Care Testing Market 2018 Global Analysis,Research,Review,Applications and Forecast to 2022 Point-of-Care Testing 2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/1706520-global-point-of-care-testing-market-by-product-glucometers-bge-analyzers https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/1706520-global-point-of-care-testing-market-by-product-glucometers-bge-analyzers WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On Point-of-Care Testing Market 2018 Global Analysis,Research,Review,Applications and Forecast to 2022.Point-of-Care testing can be defined as the medical diagnostic testing performed outside the clinical laboratory near to the place where the patient is receiving treatment. This type of testing is performed by non-laboratory personnel and the results are used for clinical decision making. The Point-of-Care tests have immense potential to improve global health, and to eventually reduce public and national spending on health.The Point-of-Care testing devices have now found applications in a large number of medical conditions. Due to its increased usage in the field of critical care settings to deliver decentralized, patient-centric healthcare to the patients, the projections for the global Point-of-Care testing market is expected to witness a rapid growth. It is predicted that by 2022, the global Point-of-Care testing market will reach U$$ 30 Billion.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comGlobal Point-of-Care Testing Market, by Product (Glucometers, BGE Analyzers, Pregnancy Tests, Infectious Diseases, etc.), Outlook 2022, the global Point-of-Care testing market is anticipated to witness a rapid growth during 2017-2022. This report provides a detailed analysis of the current and future market scenario of the global Point-of-Care testing market with a brief outlook of the IVD industry. The report provides insight about the major drivers, such as increasing awareness about POCT, technological advancements, increasing FDA approvals, for the global Point-of-Care testing market.Furthermore, few challenges, such as product recalls and lack of regulatory standards, hindering the growth of the global Point-of-Care testing market have also been mentioned in the report. In addition, the report also highlights various opportunities available for growth of the global Point-of-Care testing market. Various trends and developments in the industry have also been cited in the report.The global Point-of-Care testing market has been segmented on the basis of type of product. The major types of Point-of-Care testing present in the market include glucose monitoring kits, blood gas and electrolyte analysers, pregnancy & fertility testing kits, cardiac markers, infectious diseases testing kits, coagulation monitoring kits and drug-of-abuse testing kits amongst others. According to the report, glucose monitoring kits accounted for the largest share in 2017 due to rising prevalence of diabetes & technological advancements in self-monitoring of blood glucose. Based on geography, the report divides the market into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World. In 2017, North America accounted for the largest share.The last section of the report discusses about the prominent players in global Point-of-Care testing market. A brief business overview and financial information about each of these players has been provided, along with their product portfolios. The recent developments of every player have also been presented in the report. Overall, the research contains exhaustive information that will help clients in formulating market strategies and assessing opportunity areas in the global Point-of-Care testing market.Complete Report Details @Table Of Contents Major Key Points1. Analyst View2. Research Methodology3. In Vitro Diagnostic Market Overview3.1 Introduction3.2 What is In Vitro Diagnostics?3.3 Market Size and Growth4. Point-of-Care Diagnostics: An Overview5. Market Dynamics5.1 Market Drivers5.1.1 High Prevalence of Infectious and Lifestyle Related Diseases5.1.2 Rising Use of Home Based Point-of-Care Diagnostics5.1.3 Government Initiatives5.1.4 Technological Advancements5.1.5 Rising FDA Approvals5.1.6 Lack of Skilled Lab Personnel5.1.7 Rising Awareness about POCT5.2 Market Restraints5.2.1 Product Recalls5.2.2 Lack of Regulatory Standards5.2.3 Data Management & Connectivity5.3 Market Opportunities5.3.1 Physical Robotic Telepresence5.3.2 Smart Virtual Assistant in Association with Mobile Devices6. Point-of-Care Testing Market Outlook 20227. Point-of-Care Testing Market, By Product7.1 Introduction7.1.1 Glucose Monitoring Kits7.1.2 Blood Gas and Electrolyte Analyzers7.1.3 Pregnancy & Fertility Testing Kits7.1.4 Cardiac Markers7.1.5 Infectious Diseases Testing Kits7.1.6 Drug-of-Abuse Testing Kits7.1.7 Others8. Point-of-Care Testing Market, By Region8.1 Introduction8.1.1 North America8.1.2 Europe8.1.3 Asia Pacific8.1.4 Rest of the World9. Industry Trends and Developments9.1 Portable Ultrasound Providing Care on Site9.2 Microfluidics Technology Crowding the POCT IndustryContinuedFor 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. Fiber Optics Market Research Covers by Key Driving Forces, Segments, Applications and Top Manufacturers 2025 ReportsWeb http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012089918/sample http://www.reportsweb.com/global-fiber-optics-market-research-report-2018-2025 http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012089918/discount ReportsWeb.com has announced the addition of the Global Fiber Optics Industry 2018 Market Research Report The report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification.The market, however, will show a positive movement, although growing moderately in the years to come. The increasing demand for mobility and connectivity in consumer electronics and testing services will act as the key driving force behind the escalated demand for Global fiber optics market research report 2018. Along with this, the rising deployment of safety systems in automobiles will also influence their uptake over the next few years.Get a FREE Sample copy atThis report on the Global fiber optics market research report 2018 offers a detailed overview of this market and discusses the predominant factors affecting the markets growth. The impact of Porters five forces on the market over the next few years has also been discussed at length in this study. It further forecasts the size and valuation of the Global fiber optics market research report 2018 for the forthcoming years.The type of the product, application, and the geographical reach of the Global fiber optics market research report 2018 have been taken as the main parameters for the markets analysis in this research report, which further performs an evaluation of the industry chain that is supporting this market. It also offers accurate information regarding various aspects of this market, such as the manufacturing capacity, efficacy in the utilization of the available production capacity, manufacturing chain, and the industry policies influencing the markets growth.This report studies the global Fiber Optics market status and forecast, categorizes the global Fiber Optics market size (value & volume) by manufacturers, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top manufacturers in United States, Europe, China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and other regions.The global Fiber Optics market is valued at million US$ in 2017 and will reach million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of during 2018-2025.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, coveringUnited StatesEUChinaJapanSouth KoreaIndiaThe major manufacturers covered in this reportCorningFurukawa ElectricOptical CablePrysmianSterlite TechnologiesYOFCFujikuraFUTONG GroupGeneral CableOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoSingle-Mode FiberMultimode FiberOtherOn 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, includingHouseholdIndustrialCommercialOtherComplete report is available atTable of Contents:1 Fiber Optics Market Overview2 Global Fiber Optics Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Fiber Optics Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2018)4 Global Fiber Optics Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2012-2018)5 Global Fiber Optics Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Fiber Optics Market Analysis by Application7 Global Fiber Optics Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Corning7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Fiber Optics Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Corning Fiber Optics Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Furukawa Electric7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Fiber Optics Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Furukawa Electric Fiber Optics Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Optical Cable7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Fiber Optics Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Optical Cable Fiber Optics Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview8 Fiber Optics Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Fiber Optics Market Forecast (2018-2025)13 Research Findings and ConclusionGet Discount atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.533, 5th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Worldwide Specialty Fertilizers Market Significant Profits Estimated to be generated by 2023 with Leading Key Players Update https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5276 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/specialty-fertilizers-market-5276 Market Overview:Specialty fertilizers consists of wide grouping of products having different characteristics. It consists of one or more primary nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium), secondary nutrients (calcium, magnesium, sulphur), micro nutrients (iron, zinc, copper, manganese, etc.), bio stimulants, water soluble, surfactants, and adjuvants, among others. Even though, secondary and micro-nutrients are needed in lower quantities, they are important for optimum crop production and crop quality. The product range may include single nutrient fertilizer, coated nitrogen for controlled release, and multi nutrient soluble, among others. The product is generally designed to cater the specific need of the crop.Specialty fertilizers helps in providing required nutrients to plants, consequently improving plant health and enhancing crop productivity. One of the major driver for the product is to increase crop productivity to cater to the growing demand for food, across the globe owing to continuously rising population. Furthermore, changing farming practices and advancement in technology has resulted in growing acceptance of modern farming and protected agriculture which has accelerated the growth of the specialty fertilizers market. In addition, limited availability of arable land owing to soil erosion and land pollution had led to increase in the demand for specialty fertilizers to enhance crop productivity. However, inclination of consumers towards organic foods may hinder the growth of the market. However, introduction of organic specialty fertilizers may provide growth opportunity to the manufacturers of specialty fertilizers.Receive a Sample Report @Latest Industry Updates:Jan 2018: Crystal Crop Protection Pvt. Ltd. entered into an agreement to acquire a specialty chemicals plant from Cytec India Specialty Chemicals & Materials Pvt. Ltd.Jun 2017: Sumitomo Corporation of Japan collaborated with Roshni Crop Sciences Pvt. Ltd. to launch Folier Blend super fertilizer in India. The product contains micro-nutrients such as cobalt, manganese, zinc, boron, among others.Jan 2017: K+S completed the acquisition of Huludao Magpower Fertilizers Co., a China based company. Through this acquisition, the company aims to expand the specialty business and expand business in South-East Asian market.Sep 2016: Plant-Prod has launched specialty fertilizer which is water soluble for large scale plantation of medical marijuana. The product will enhance bud size following the leaf growth phase.Aug 2016: Compass Minerals acquired full ownership in Produquimica Industria e Comercio S.A. (Produquimica), a Brazil based company which is a manufacturer and distributor of specialty plant nutrition.Aug 2015: Sumitomo Corporation completed acquisition of specialty fertilizer business in France from Sipcam Oxon Group. The acquisition will support the company to expand its product portfolio.Competitive Analysis:With the growing demand for specialty fertilizers, the key manufacturers are focusing on new product development as well as on acquisition to capitalize on the growing market opportunity. For instance, K+S acquired Huludao Magpower Fertilizers Co. to expand business in emerging economies of Asia Pacific. In addition, Compass Mineral acquired Produquimica Industria e Comercio S.A. to strengthen its product portfolio and to expand business in Brazilian Market. Continuous innovation and further expansion of business in untapped market will help companies to generate revenue.The key players profiled in Specialty Fertilizers are as Mosaic Company (U.S.), Agrium Inc. (Canada), Yara International (Norway), Haifa Chemicals (Israel), Atlantic Gold Corp (Canada), Art Wilson Co. (U.S.), and Eurochem (Switzerland) among many others.Market Segments:The global Specialty Fertilizers market has been divided into type, crop type, distribution channel, and region.On The Basis Of Type: Nitrogen Fertilizers, Phosphate Fertilizers, Potash Fertilizers, and OthersOn The Basis Of Crop Type: Cereals & Oilseeds, Fruits & Vegetables, Turf & Ornamentals, and OthersOn The Basis of Distribution Channel: Store based, Non-store basedOn The Basis Of Region: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and ROW.Access Report Details @Regional Analysis:The global specialty fertilizers market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and rest of the world (RoW). Asia Pacific region dominates the market and is forecasted to grow at significant rate. The two populous countries, India and China are majorly contributing to the growth of specialty fertilizers market in this region. China is holding the majority share in specialty fertilizers market followed by India in Asia Pacific. North America accounts for second largest share of specialty fertilizers. The stringent environmental regulations in North American and European regions are expected to hinder the growth of the market. In rest of the world, South America is accounts for the majority share.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 Fintech Software 2018 Market Segmentation,Application,Technology & Market Analysis Research Report to 2022 Fintech Software Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3236285-global-fintech-software-market-2018-2022 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3236285-global-fintech-software-market-2018-2022 WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On Fintech Software 2018 Market Segmentation,Application,Technology & Market Analysis Research Report to 2022.The analysts forecast the global fintech software market to grow at a CAGR of 7.39% during the period 2018-2022.FinTech software is used by financial companies such as payments bank, retail and institutional banks, insurance providers, and other non-banking corporations to maintain account processing, customer profiles, account information, eligibility evaluation, and other financial activities related to marketing, branding, and promotion.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comCovered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global fintech software market for 2018-2022. To calculate the market size, the report presents a detailed picture of the market by way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography: Americas APAC EMEAThe report, Global Fintech Software 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 Accenture IBM Microsoft Oracle Red Hat SAPMarket driver Need to improve business efficiency For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge Data privacy and security concerns For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend Rising demand for data integration and visual analytics For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey 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?Complete Report Details @Table Of Contents Major Key PointsPART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARYPART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORTPART 03: RESEARCH METHODOLOGYPART 04: MARKET LANDSCAPE Market ecosystem Market characteristics Market segmentation analysisPART 05: MARKET SIZING Market definition Market sizing 2017 Market size and forecast 2017-2022PART 06: FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS Bargaining power of buyers Bargaining power of suppliers Threat of new entrants Threat of substitutes Threat of rivalry Market conditionPART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPEPART 08: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY END-USER Segmentation by end-user Comparison by end-user Banking Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Insurance Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Securities Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunity by end-userPART 09: REGIONAL LANDSCAPE Geographical segmentation Regional comparison Americas Market size and forecast 2017-2022 EMEA Market size and forecast 2017-2022 APAC Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunityPART 10: DECISION FRAMEWORKPART 11: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES Market drivers Market challengesPART 12: MARKET TRENDS Rising demand for data integration and visual analytics Growing interest among organizations in supply chain visibility Adoption of cloud-based servicesPART 13: VENDOR LANDSCAPE Overview Landscape disruption Competitive landscapePART 14: VENDOR ANALYSIS Vendors covered Vendor classification Market positioning of vendors Accenture IBM Microsoft Oracle Red Hat SAPContinuedFor 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. Business Intelligence Software Market, Business Developments, Emerging Trends, Key Regions, Types, Applications and Forecast to 2025 ReportsWeb http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012070018/sample http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00012070018/discount http://www.reportsweb.com/buy&RW00012070018/buy/3300 ReportsWeb Adds Global Business Intelligence Software Market offers an up-to-date analysis of the market with regards to the innovations, current competitive landscape and latest trends and drivers, to provide new predictions for the forecast period.This report studies the global Business Intelligence (BI) Software market size, industry status and forecast, competition landscape and growth opportunity. This research report categorizes the global Business Intelligence (BI) Software market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.Get sample copy of this report:Companies Profiled in this report includes: SAP, Microsoft, SAS, Oracle, IBM, Qlik, Tableau Software, Information Builders, Teradata, MicroStrategy, Yellowfin International, Zoho, Jaspersoft, Sisense, Phocas, Domo, Sysomos, ZAP BI, Salesforce, Datapine, Javelin Group, SquareBusiness Intelligence (BI) solutions enable business users to access business data volumes and analyze them to generate insights, though they do not have data science and analytical skills. Business intelligence software is a type of application software designed to retrieve, analyze, transform and report data for business intelligence. The applications generally read data that have been previously stored, often, though not necessarily, in a data warehouse or data mart.Get Discount of this report:Growing data analytics adoption globally is expected to drive the market growth. Many firms globally include data generated from enterprise applications along with newly generated cloud based and social network data. Business intelligence tool helps in analyzing the data and making more informed business decisions.The study objectives of this report are:To study and forecast the market size of Business Intelligence (BI) Software in global market.To analyze the global key players, SWOT analysis, value and global market share for top players.To define, describe and forecast the market by type, end use and region.To analyze and compare the market status and forecast between China and major regions, namely, United States, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India and Rest of World.To analyze the global key regions market potential and advantage, opportunity and challenge, restraints and risks.To identify significant trends and factors driving or inhibiting the market growth.To analyze the opportunities in the market for stakeholders by identifying the high growth segments.To strategically analyze each submarket with respect to individual growth trend and their contribution to the marketTo analyze competitive developments such as expansions, agreements, new product launches, and acquisitions in the marketTo strategically profile the key players and comprehensively analyze their growth strategies.Table of Content:Global Business Intelligence (BI) Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Business Intelligence (BI) Software2 Global Business Intelligence (BI) Software Competition Analysis by Players3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 SAP3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Business Intelligence (BI) Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2 Microsoft3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Business Intelligence (BI) Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3 SAS3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Business Intelligence (BI) Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)4 Global Business Intelligence (BI) Software Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018)5 United States Business Intelligence (BI) Software Development Status and Outlook6 Europe Business Intelligence (BI) Software Development Status and Outlook7 China Business Intelligence (BI) Software Development Status and Outlook8 Japan Business Intelligence (BI) Software Development Status and Outlook9 Southeast Asia Business Intelligence (BI) Software Development Status and Outlook10 India Business Intelligence (BI) Software Development Status and Outlook11 Market Forecast by Regions, Type and Application (2018-2025)12 Business Intelligence (BI) Software Market Dynamics13 Market Effect Factors AnalysisComplete Report:Contact Info:Name: Sameer JoshiEmail: sales@reportsweb.comCompany Name: ReportsWebWebsite: Reportsweb.comPhone: +1-646-491-9876About ReportsWeb:ReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.533, 5th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Free Space Optics Communication Market Progresses for Huge Profits by 2025 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/1558 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/free-space-optics-communication-market-1558 Free space optics is an optical communication technology, which is responsible for transmitting light beams in free space for broadband communications. This optical communication technology offers various advantages including, high-speed data transmission rate, installation, and protected data transfer. The technology is utilized in deep-space probes, satellite links, for aircraft communication as well as for communication in UAVs and remote areas.Proliferation of internet usage is one of the major factors driving growth of the global marketMajor factors driving growth of the global free space optics market is, increasing internet traffic. Factors such as utilization of high-bandwidth applications, expanding online video content, and rising number of mobile internet users will lead to rise in the global IP traffic during the forecast period. Adoption of smartphones is increasing, which is leading to increasing mobile advertising, including SMS & MMS advertising, mobile web, mobile video & television, and several online advertising channels; and increasing demand for on-demand services such as videos, online messaging applications, video chat, and voice calls, at anytime and anywhere. These are powerful tools for effective real-time communication. Hence, increasing demand for real-time communication will proportionately increase demand for free space optics communication. For instance, according to Coherent Market Insights analysis, as of 2017, over 53% of internet traffic was generated by mobile, traffic which is increased from 41% in 2016.Sample Copy of This Report @Moreover, development of advanced wireless technologies, which includes Z-Wave and ZigBee, has further increased the internet traffic as they are responsible for providing easy connectivity to a wide range of devices, in order to offer faster data transfer and better bandwidth with lesser chances of data loss. These are few major factors driving the global market growth.Global Free Space Optics Communication Market: RestraintMajor factor expected to hinder global market growth is degradation of signals, due to environmental interference. Free space optics communication can be interrupted due to fog and atmospheric turbulence. Occurrence of fog can hamper the characteristics of the light wave being transmitted by absorption, scattering, and reflection of the light wave. Atmospheric turbulence can cause sparkling, which can further increase the bit-error rate. These are some factors restraining growth of these free space optics communication market.Global Free Space Optics Communication Market: Regional InsightsThe global free space optics communication market is segmented on the basis of regions into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa. The market in Asia Pacific is expected to exhibit the highest CAGR during the forecast period. This growth is attributed to increasing number of internet users in this region along with growing 5G pilot projects in the region. According to Coherent Market Insights analysis, in 2017, Asia Pacific accounted for over 50% of internet users in the world, of which China accounted for the largest share in the regional market, accounting for around 26% share of global internet users. This in turn, is expected to boost adoption of better wireless infrastructure. For instance, China Telecom Corporation Ltd. established a new 5G base station in Lanzhou, in December 2017, to expand 5G pilot projects in China. Moreover, government initiative plays a major role for growth of the 5G infrastructure in Asia Pacific region. For instance, China government is expected initiate commercial rollouts by 2020. With 3,4003,600 MHz band, the countrys first trials will be conducted in 2020. The 3,3003,400 MHz, 4,4004500 MHz, and 4,8004,990 MHz bands are also under consideration. For high internet speeds, China government has plans on using spectrum around 25 gigahertz and 40 gigahertz frequencies. This in turn, is expected to boost growth of regional market over the forecast period.Get More Information @Global Free Space Optics Communication Market: Competitive BackgroundMajor players operating in the free space optics communication market are Koninklijke Philips N.V., General Electric Co., Bytelight, Inc., Panasonic Corp., Purelifi Ltd., LVX System, Oledcomm, Lightbee Corp., Outstanding Technology Corp., Ibsentelecom Ltd., and Supreme Architecture Inc.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 Painting Tools Market to exceed 1.9 billion units by 2024 Painting Tools Market https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/1843 https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/1843 https://www.gminsights.com Construction applications is projected to surpass USD 10 billion by 2024. Rising population, ongoing industrialization, expanding foreign investment funding across developing economies will fuel the Painting Tools Market . Globally, construction industry is projected as one of the most lucrative industries in the coming years and is forecast to have 4.5% growth rate in next five years.Painting Tools Market size is estimated to surpass USD 14 billion by 2024; according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. Growing urbanization along with increasing infrastructure spending is anticipated to drive painting tools market growth. Increase in government spending in tourism, commercial & building renovation coupled with rise in retail industry has positively influenced the product demand. Rising demand for corrosion resistant and attractive textures in residential & commercial building are the preliminary factors driving painting tools demand. Increasing architectural paint & coatings application in commercial buildings to enhance aesthetic appearance will boost product penetration.Request for a Sample copy of this Report @Rise in the global purchasing power parity from USD 13,100 in 2013 to USD 15,800 in 2015 provides a positive outlook for consumer goods industry. Increasing application of coatings on consumer electronics products will stimulate demand. High painting tools market price trend along with limited consumer awareness regarding the product usage may hamper business growth.APAC painting tools market is set to witness growth over 6% through 2024. Infrastructural advancement in China, Japan and India positively stimulates product penetration in the regional industry.Brushes are the largest selling and widely recognized product. Global production of paint brushes surpassed 440 million units in 2016. Plastic handle brush are extensively used in emerging countries, while high quality wooden handle is more popular in North America and Europe.Rollers accounted more than 25% painting tools market demand in 2016. Construction industry is the major consumer of rollers as it provides enhanced paint layoff and reduce bristle loss. Offering unique design to the walls is among the key factor driving product demand in modern wall designs.Make an Inquiry for Purchasing this Report @Demand from automotive industry contributed over USD 550 million in 2016. Rising demand for luxury vehicles including Cadillac, Infiniti, Maserati Ghibli, Jaguar, Range Rover, Rolls-Royce, Porsche and Bentley has encouraged vehicle manufacturers to utilize spray guns for vehicle coatings. Additionally, appealing finishing of vehicles is accredited to usage of modern coating tools including trowels and sanding coat equipment.Global painting tools market share is fragmented owing to presence of large number of industry players. Mergers and acquisition plays a crucial role in gaining industry share.Prominent manufacturers in painting tools market include Gordon Brush, Braun Brush, Purdy, Anderson Products, Mill-Rose Company and Milton Brushware. Other significant manufacturers are Allway, Nespoli Group, Harbor Freight, EPOS Egypt, Shawky Brush & Roller Factory, Makinah, Dura Paints, MAAN and Nour Egypt.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone:1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb: Organic Fertilizers Market is Forecasted to Reach a Figure of US$ 10.23 Billion by 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/11950 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/11950 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Belgium will continue to be the largest exporter of organic fertilizers, with total exports totalling 1.15 million tonnes in 2015. Netherlands and the U.S. will be the other two key exporters. In terms of imports, France continues to be the largest market globally.Global organic fertilizer demand was pegged at 17 million tonnes in 2016. In terms of value, the market was valued at US$ 5.57 billion. Persistence Market Research projects the market to grow at 7% CAGR through 2025 and reach US$ 10.23 billion.Key DriversGovernment initiatives and subsidies promoting the use of organic fertilizers. For instance, in the EU, government is promoting organic sector via conversion subsidies and large subsidies on agricultural inputs.Rising awareness among consumers about organically produced food will continue to provide growth opportunities. From a US$ 15 billion market in 1999, the global organic food and drink market has grown to become a US$ 80 billion market in 2014.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Organic fertilizers dont cause the same level of damage to the environment as conventional fertilizers. This is promoting their adoption among end-users.While Persistence Market Research maintains a positive outlook on the global organic fertilizer market, premium prices for organic fertilizers are a key impediment to adoption.Organic Fertilizer Market TrendsIntegrated nutrient supply system (INSS) is being adopted by farm owners, as the lower nutrient content alone is insufficient to supplement the demand for nutrients in plant growth.Considering the fragmented nature of organic fertilizers market, leading players are focusing on strengthening their distribution partnerships in local markets.Manufacturers in Europe are focusing on expanding their customer base in high-growth regions, including Latin America and North America.Non-profit organizations are playing a key role in promoting the use of organic fertilizers.According to Persistence Market Researchs analysis, demand for animal-based organic fertilizers is higher than plant-based variants. While 6.84 million tonnes of plant-origin organic fertilizers were sold in 2016, animal-origin organic fertilizer volume was pegged at 10.15 million tonnes.Use of organic fertilizers remains highest in the farming of cereals and crops. This application segment accounted for over 70% revenue share of the market in 2016. By volume, demand from cereals and crops was estimated at 12.53 million tonnes in 2016.Historically, solid organic fertilizers have remained sought-after, and the trend is expected to remain unchanged during the forecast period 2017-2025. While solid organic fertilizers are projected to grow at 6.2% CAGR, liquid organic fertilizers growth rate is estimated to be 5.1%.Europe & Asia Pacific Collectively Account for over 60% Revenue ShareEurope is the largest market for organic fertilizers, followed by Asia Pacific. While Europe will continue to be the largest market for organic fertilizers, it will lose 2.3% revenue share to APAC during the forecast period. North America, the third largest market for organic fertilizers, is expected to account for 21.8% revenue share of the market by 2025-end.Request Report for Table of Contents @In its report, Persistence has profile key players in the organic fertilizers market, including Italpollina SpA, ILSA S.p.A, BioStar Renewables, Sustane Natural Fertilizer Inc., True Organic Products Inc., California Organic Fertilizers Inc., The Fertell Company, Purely Organics LLC, Pupuk Kaltim, and Qingdao Sonef Chemical Co., Ltd.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 Alcoholic Beverages Market Share and Growth Rate 2025 - Miller Coors, Diageo, Treasury Wine Estates, Jose Cuervo, Constellation Brands, Beam-Suntory, Mast-Jaegermeister, Bacardi, Pernod Ricard http://databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=global-alcoholic-beverages-market http://databridgemarketresearch.com/speak-to-analyst/?dbmr=global-alcoholic-beverages-market https://databridgemarketresearch.com/inquire-before-buying/?dbmr=global-alcoholic-beverages-market https://databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-alcoholic-beverages-market/ The global alcoholic beverages market is consolidated due to the presence of limited number of players concentrated in few countries. These major players have adopted various organic as well as inorganic growth strategies such as mergers & acquisitions, new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, and others to strengthen their position in this market.Get Free Sample Report @Report Analysis:The Global Alcoholic Beverages Market accounted for USD 1,272.85 billion in 2017 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.6% during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025. The upcoming market report contains data for historic years 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.Global Alcoholic Beverages Market, By Product Type (Beer, Wine, Spirits), By Packaging (Plastic Bottles, Glass Bottles, Tins), By Distribution Channel (Modern Trade, Convenience Stores, Specialty Stores, Online Retailers, Hotels/Restaurants/Bars, Commercial Stores), By Geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Europe, South America, Middle East & Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Top Players: E & J Gallo William Grant & Sons Boston Beer Miller Coors Diageo Treasury Wine Estates Jose Cuervo Constellation Brands Beam-Suntory Mast-Jaegermeister Bacardi Pernod Ricard Edrington Group Brown-Forman Pabst Brewing Anheuser-Busch Carlsberg China Resource Enterprise Accolade Wines Vina Concha y Toro Torres Heineken The Wine Group Craft Brew Alliance Inc. Molson Coors Brewing Co. Haelwood International Holdings Plc Bundaberg Brewed Drinks Pty Ltd Among others.This report consists of below pages: No of pages: 350 No of Figures: 60 No of Tables: 220Have Any Query? Ask Ours Expert @Report Definition:This market report defines the market trends and forecast the upcoming opportunities and threats of the alcoholic beverages market in the next 8 years. Alcoholic beverages are the fermented drinks which contains the chemical properties of ethanol. They are flammable and colorless liquid such as beer, spirits and wine. These are made by allowing the sugars in berries, fruits, grains and others to go through decomposition or fermentation. The percentage of alcohol in drinks can be maximized by the distillation process. In this process, vodka, whisky, brandy, rum is produced, which usually contains 40 percent of pure alcohol. Beer is known to be the finest member of malt family of alcoholic beverages which comprises of malt, ale, stout liquor. Its alcoholic content ranges from about 2 percent to 8 percent. Wine is produced by fermenting the juices of apple, grapes and other fruits under the rigorous temperature control in large vats. Generally, unfortified grape wines consist from 8-14 percent alcohol whereas, fortified wines to which brandy or alcohol is added contains 18-12 percent alcohols. According to Government of Canada, the market size of alcoholic beverages in Canada grew to USD 15,852.7 Million in 2012 from USD 15,720.4 Million in 2011.This states that there is rise in the demand of premium alcoholic beverages. Another factor that helps in driving the alcoholic beverages market is new product launches and innovations related to alcoholic beverages. Diageo, a U.K. based company launched new range of product innovations across its brand portfolio, which includes Guinness, Smirnoff, Pimms, Captain Morgan, Gordons and CIROC.Report Drivers and Restraints: Growing demand for premium alcoholic beverages New product launches and innovations as well as change in consumer preference Increase in disposable income of customers High cost of premium or super premium products Intensification of non-alcoholic beverages market, owing to health concerns Increasing government regulation and taxesInquiry Before Buying @Report Segmentation:The global alcoholic beverages market is segmented based on product type, packaging, distribution channel and geographical segments.Based on product type, the global alcoholic beverages market is segmented into: Beer Wine Spirits OthersBeer is sub segmented into: Ale Hybrid LagerWine is sub segmented into: Fortified SparklingSpirits is divided into: Vodka Rum Whiskey OthersOn the basis of packaging, the global alcoholic beverages market is segmented into: Plastic Bottles Glass Bottles Tins OthersOn the basis of distribution channel, the global alcoholic beverages market is segmented into: Modern Trade Convenience Stores Specialty Stores Online Retailers Hotels/Restaurants And Bars Commercial Stores OthersBased on geography, the global alcoholic beverages market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies such as: North America South America Europe Asia-Pacific Middle East & AfricaSome of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Brazil among others.Frequently Asked Questions: What will the market size be in 2025? What are the key factors driving the global market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key players in the market? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key players? What will be the growth rate in 2025? Which strategies are used by top players in the Global Alcoholic Beverages Market?View Full Report @About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Sopan GedamData Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com MARKET DYNAMICS OF GLOBAL TECHNICAL TEXTILE WITH MARKET TRENDS, PORTER FIVE FORCE ANALYSIS, COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE | FREUDENBERG GROUP, ROYAL TENCATE NV, KIMBERLEY CLARKE, LOW &BONAR, SRF LTD. Technical Textile https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1692368 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-technical-textile-market-analysis-by-type-woven-textiles-nonwoven-textiles-enduser-segments-packtech-mobiltech-meditech-geotech-buildtech-by-region-by-country-2018-edition-forecast-to-2023-report.html/toc Press Release - 19 June 2018Research and Development News --. .Latest Update "Global Technical Textile Market: Analysis By Type (Woven Textiles, Non-Woven Textiles), End-User Segments (Packtech, Mobiltech, Meditech, Geotech, Buildtech), By Region, By Country (2018 Edition) Forecast to 2023" with Industries Survey | Global Current Growth and Future.' 'A comprehensive research report created through extensive primary research (inputs from industry experts, companies, stakeholders) and secondary research, the report aims to present the analysis of Global Technical Textile Market By Type (Non-Woven Technical Textiles and Woven Technical Textiles), By End User Segments (Packtech, Meditech, Mobiltech, Geotech, Buildtech, Others), By Region (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the world) and By Country (U.S., Canada, Germany, Mexico, France, Italy, China, India) for the historical period of 2013-2017 and the forecast period of 2018-2023.. . Get Sample Report_' 'According to Azoth Analytics research report Global Technical Textile Market: Analysis By Type (Woven Textiles, Non-Woven Textiles), End-User Segments (Packtech, Mobiltech, Meditech, Geotech, Buildtech), By Region, By Country (2018 Edition) Forecast to 2023", the global market is projected to display a robust growth represented by a CAGR of 4.9% during 2018 2023.The Packtech segment witnessed growth at a noteworthy rate over the past few years on the heels of rising awareness related to the usage of biodegradable fabric for packaging, rising demand for reusable packages along with rising environmental concerns. Amongst the regions, Asia-Pacific accounts for the largest regional share in the global technical textile market in 2018. Key factors driving the robust growth rate of Asia-Pacific region include rising healthcare expenditure, rising disposable incomes, rapid infrastructural development and urbanization etc.The report titled, Global Technical Textile Market: Analysis By Type (Woven Textiles, Non-Woven Textiles), End-User Segments (Packtech, Mobiltech, Meditech, Geotech, Buildtech), By Region, By Country (2018 Edition) Forecast to 2023 has covered and analysed the potential of Global Technical Textile Market and provides statistics and information on market size, shares and growth 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 technical textile market. Additionally, the report also highlights market entry strategies for various companies across the globe.Scope of the Report- Global Market (Actual Period: 2013-2017, Forecast Period: 2018-2023)By Value and By VolumeBy Type - Woven Technical Textiles, Non-Woven Technical TextilesBy End User Segment - Packtech, Mobiltech, Meditech, Geotech, Hometech- Regional Markets North America, Europe, APAC, Rest of the World (Actual Period: 2013-2017, Forecast Period: 2018-2023)By ValueBy Type - Woven Technical Textiles, Non-Woven Technical TextilesBy End User Segment - Packtech, Mobiltech, Meditech, Geotech, Hometech- Country Analysis - U.S., Canada, Mexico, Germany, France,Italy, China, Japan(Actual Period: 2013-2017, Forecast Period: 2018-2023)By ValueBy Type - Woven Technical Textiles, Non-Woven Technical TextilesBy End User Segment - Packtech, Mobiltech, Meditech, Geotech, Hometech. . More Clear Details get Table of Contents_' '- Other Report HighlightsMarket Dynamics Drivers and RestraintsMarket TrendsPorter Five Force AnalysisCompetitive LandscapeCompany Analysis - Freudenberg Group, Royal Tencate NV, Kimberley Clarke, Low &Bonar, SRF Ltd., 3M, Ahlstrom-Munksjo, TWE Group GmBH, Asahi Kasei Corporation,DowDuPont- Customization of the ReportThe report could be customized according to the clients specific research requirements. No additional cost will be required to pay for limited additional research.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 GLOBAL HEALTH BEVERAGE MARKET 2018-22 | COMPANY ANALYSIS COCA COLA COMPANY, PEPSI CORPORATION, NESTLE, DR. PEPPER SNAPPLE, BRITVIC, ORGANIC VALLEY, THE HAIN CELESTIAL GROUP Health Beverage https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1692370 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-health-beverage-market-analysis-by-type-of-beverage-bottled-water-juices-probiotics-energy-drinks-ready-to-drink-tea-and-coffee-others-by-subtypes-by-sales-channel-online-offline-by-region-by-country-2018-edition-forecast-to-2022-report.html/toc Press Release - 19 June 2018Research and Development News --. .Latest Update "Global Health Beverage Market - Analysis By Type of Beverage (Bottled Water, Juices, Probiotics, Energy Drinks, Ready to Drink Tea and Coffee, Others), By Sub-Types, By Sales Channel (Online, Offline), By Region, By Country (2018 Edition): Forecast to 2022" with Industries Survey | Global Current Growth and Future.' 'A comprehensive research report created through extensive primary research (inputs from industry experts, companies, stakeholders) and secondary research, the report aims to present the analysis of Global Health Beverage Market - By Type of Beverage (Bottled Water, Juices, Probiotics, Energy Drinks, Ready to Drink Tea and Coffee, Others), By Sales Channel (Online, Offline), By Region and By Country (U.S., Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, India, China.Also, the report assesses the sub-segments of the health beverage market. The bottled water segment has been further categorized into Still, Spring, Sprinkle, Others. Similarly, Juices segment has been categorized into Fruits, Vegetables, Fruits & Vegetable Blend and Probiotic Drinks into Dairy Based and Juice Based categories.. . Get Sample Report_' 'According to Azoth Analytics research report Global Health Beverage Market - Analysis By Type of Beverage (Bottled Water, Juices, Probiotics, Energy Drinks, Ready to Drink Tea and Coffee, Others), By Sales Channel (Online, Offline), By Region, By Country (2018 Edition): Forecast to 2022 the global health beverage market is projected to display a robust growth represented by a CAGR of 7.80% during 2017-2022.Bottled Water segment contributed maximum revenue in the market and is expected to continue the leadership in the forecast period on the back of rising awareness regarding the rising prevalence of water borne diseases, lack of availability of clean tap water across various developing nations coupled with increasing number of tourists. Among the Sales Channel, online segment is expected to witness the fastest growth rate on the heels of rising internet penetration and number of smartphone users across the globe. Amongst the regions, Asia Pacific accounts for the largest regional share in the global health beverage market in 2018. Key factors driving the robust Asia Pacific market include large population base, increasing disposable income coupled with rising health consciousness across the region.The report titled Global Health Beverage Market - Analysis By Type of Beverage (Bottled Water, Juices, Probiotics, Energy Drinks, Ready to Drink Tea and Coffee, Others), By Sales Channel (Online, Offline), By Region, By Country (2018 Edition): Forecast to 2022 has covered and analysed the potential of Global Health Beverages Market and provides statistics and information on market size, shares and growth 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 health beverages. Additionally, the report also highlights market entry strategies for various companies across the globe.Scope of the Report- Global Health Beverages Market (Actual Period: 2012-2016, Forecast Period: 2017-2022Global Health Beverages Market Size and GrowthBy Type of Beverage- Bottled Water, Juices, Probiotic Drinks, Energy Drinks, Ready to Drink Coffee and Tea, othersBy Sub TypeBottled Water: Still, Spring, Sprinkle, OthersJuices: Fruits, Vegetables, Fruits & Vegetable BlendProbiotic Drinks: Dairy Based and Juice BasedEnergy DrinksReady to Drink Coffee and Tea: Coffee, TeaBy Sales Channel Online, OfflineRegional Markets North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World (Actual Period: 2012-2016, Forecast Period: 2017-2022)- Health Beverages Market Size and GrowthBy Type of Beverage- Bottled Water, Juices, Probiotic Drinks, Energy Drinks, Ready to Drink Coffee and Tea, othersBy Sub TypeBottled Water: Still, Spring, Sprinkle, OthersJuices: Fruits, Vegetables, Fruits & Vegetable BlendProbiotic Drinks: Dairy Based and Juice BasedEnergy DrinksReady to Drink Coffee and Tea: Coffee, TeaBy Sales Channel Online, OfflineCountry Analysis - U.S., Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, India, China- Health Beverages Market Size and GrowthBy Type of Beverage- Bottled Water, Juices, Probiotic Drinks, Energy Drinks, Ready to Drink Coffee and Tea, othersBy Sales Channel Online, Offline. . More Clear Details get Table of Contents_' '- Other Report HighlightsSegment Wise Market Share-By CompanyMarket Dynamics Drivers and RestraintsMarket TrendsCompany Analysis Coca Cola company, Pepsi Corporation, Nestle, Dr. Pepper Snapple, Britvic, Organic Valley, The Hain Celestial Group- Customization of the ReportThe report could be customized according to the clients specific research requirements. No additional cost will be required to pay for limited additional research.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 Bio Vanillin Market Headed for Growth and Global Expansion by 2025 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/1561 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/bio-vanillin-market-1561 Vanillin is a white crystalline powder with sweet aroma and flavor of vanilla. It is majorly found in the vanilla beans extract and is used as aromatic component and flavoring agent in the food and beverages industry. As a flavoring agent, it is used in confectionary, dairy and bakery products and as a fragrance ingredient, it is most widely used in the cosmetics and perfumes. In addition to its flavor and fragrance quality, bio vanillin is also used as an intermediate in chemical and pharmaceutical industries. For instance, in pharmaceutical industry, it has been used in the production of various drugs such as IL-dopa and IL-methyldopa.Sample Copy of This Report @Market DynamicsIncreasing consumer preference towards natural ingredients in food and beverages and in personal care products is a major factor driving growth of the market. Bio vanillin is natural substitute to synthetic vanillin as it contains low calories and various antioxidants. Rising awareness, regarding these factors, is propelling demand for bio vanillin over synthetic vanillin, thereby aiding in growth of the market. Furthermore, production of bio vanillin through biotechnological processes involves reduced emission of greenhouse gasses and lesser amount of toxic by-products, as compared to synthetically produced vanillin. Thus, increasing environmental concerns is anticipated to fuel growth of the global bio vanillin market during the forecast period. However, high production cost of bio vanillin as compare to synthesized vanillin by chemical processes, is a major factor adversely affecting growth of the market.Among the end-use industries, food and beverages segment dominated the global bio vanillin market in 2017. This is majorly attributed to growing demand for high quality, environment friendly, and natural flavoring ingredients in various food and beverages products including ice cream, chocolates, and cakes.Market OutlookIn terms of revenue, Europe dominated the global market for bio vanillin in 2017. Rising awareness regarding adverse effects of consuming artificial flavoring ingredients such as carvacrol, is fuelling demand for natural flavoring agents in food and beverages, thus, supporting growth of bio vanillin market. Carvacrol is an artificial flavoring ingredient and is associated with circulatory and respiratory depression coupled with cardiac failure. According to the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA), artificial flavors and artificial food colors (AFC), have potential to increase learning disabilities and behavior disorders. Moreover, key players are focusing on promoting use of natural extracts and flavors for the production of healthy food and drink products by showcasing their products through various international trade shows such as Ingredients Russia. This in turn is expected to boost the bio vanillin market growth. Ingredients Russia is a leading trade exhibition on food additives. The trade exhibition takes place annually in Moscow, which reflects the development trends in food and beverages industry and promotes innovative high-tech products in domestic and international market.Asia Pacific is expected to be fastest growing region during the forecast period. This is majorly attributed to steady growth of the food and beverages industry in emerging economies such as India and China. According to the data provided by India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), in 2016, the food processing industry in India contributed 14% to the GDP of the country and according to the Department of Industrial Policies and Promotion (DIPP), India received around USD$ 7.54 billion worth of Foreign Direct Investment through the food processing sector during 2000 to 2017. Furthermore, according to the UNFPA, one in four people in Asia Pacific region will be over 60 years old by 2050 and the total geriatric population (aged over 60) is anticipated to reach up to 1.3 billion people by 2050. The steadily rising geriatric population in the region is fuelling the growth of pharmaceutical industry which in turn, is expected to support growth of bio vanillin market. As, bio vanillin is extensively used in the pharmaceutical industry as a flavoring agent in medicines to eliminate the foul taste and odor and is also used as a key intermediate in the processing of therapeutic drugs, used in the cancer treatment.View More Information @Key Players and Business StrategiesMajor players operating in the bio vanillin market include Solvay S.A., Apple Flavors & Fragrances Group Co. Ltd., International Flavors & Fragrances Inc., Evolva Holding S.A., Omega Ingredients Ltd., Givaudan S.A., Camlin Fine Sciences Ltd., Comax Manufacturing Corporation, Watkins Incorporated, and Borregaard LignoTech AB.Strategic collaborations, mergers and acquisitions, and product innovation are the key strategies adopted by major players operating in the bio vanillin market to retain their market share. For instance, in December 2013, Solvay S.A. announced to double its natural vanillin production capacity in Melle, France. The capacity extension was done majorly to cater to growing demand for natural ingredients and to enhance the capacity of its food and fragrances segment.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 Protective Clothing Market - Global Industry Insights, Trends, Outlook, and Opportunity Analysis, 20182024 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/308 Protective clothing are personal protective equipment designed to protect the wearers body from susceptible harm and infection. Protective clothing includes high-visibility vests, footwear, respiratory aids, gloves, helmets, harnesses, and eye protection gear. These clothing find application in various working environments that are deemed hazardous for legs and feet, such as dampness, falling objects, cuts, slips, chemical spillages, and abrasive materials. In order to prevent such hazards, there is an increased use of oil and chemical resistant soles on shoes and boots, safety boots with steel toe caps, leggings, and gaiters. This has augmented growth of protective clothing market across the globe.Request For Sample Copy of this Research Report :Gloves, based on the chemical compatibility are being used while working with chemicals exhibiting a high acute toxicity and highly concentrated corrosive materials. In construction industry, fall arresting systems such as body harnesses, lifelines, and other accompanying equipment are used when fall hazards cannot be controlled by railings, floors, and nets. Protective clothing is used in the healthcare industry to prevent transmission of microorganisms such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and Staphylococcus aureus.Protective clothing is used in the construction, chemicals, and oil & gas industries, owing to properties such as inherent non-flammability, high durability, and excellent dimensional stability resistance to chemicals and heat. In the chemicals industry, it is used for protection against liquid chemicals such as sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid, and also hazardous gases. It is also used for protection from flame, welding, heat, and sparks from molten metal. In the mining industry, protective equipment such as waterproof suits, breathing masks, and helmets are widely used. Protective clothing made from polyamides, offers various benefits such as protection against flames, high mechanical strength, excellent thermo stability, high chemical resistance, and protection against gas emissions.Protective Clothing Market Outlook Increasing Safety Concerns and Hazard Prevention Expected to Fuel DemandHazardous work environment and stringent regulations for employee safety has rapidly amplified the consumption of protective clothing globally. Laws such as The Construction (Head Protection) Regulations 1989, The Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002, The Control of Lead at Work Regulations 2002, The Ionising Radiations Regulations 1999, The Noise at Work Regulations 1989, The Control of Asbestos at Work Regulations 2002, and others have inadvertently boosted growth of the protective clothing market. The Asia Pacific region is expected to possess maximum potential for elastomeric coating manufacturers. The market in the region is projected to witness relatively high growth in terms of value, over the forecast period. Growing population coupled with rapidly increasing manufacturing and allied industries is expected to fuel demand for protective clothing in the region, which in turn is anticipated to enhance the protective clothing industry.High initial price of the protective clothing is expected to be one of the restraining factors for the growth of the protective clothing market over the forecast period. Innovation in products and expansions in different geographies are some of the key strategies adopted by the top players in the protective clothing market. In 2016, Honeywell announced investment of US$ 100 million for expansion of the Asia Pacific regional headquarters and R&D facilities in Shanghai. This would complement the companys network of R&D facilities across the globe. Some of the major companies operating in the market globally are 3M Company, Kimberly Clark Corp, Ansell Limited, Lakeland industries, Honeywell International Inc., Royal Ten Cate, Sioen Industries NV, and E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company.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 Boron Carbide Market Report 2018: Segmentation by Product (Powder, Grains, Paste, Others) by Application (Abrasives, Nozzles, Armour/Nuclear, Others) Boron Carbide Market https://bit.ly/2t4jU2j http://marketreportscompany.com/report.php?report=chemicals-and-materials/global-boron-carbide-market-report-2018/40137 https://bit.ly/2t4jU2j Global Boron Carbide market research report provides company profile for American Elements, Bhukhanvala Industries Pvt., China Mudanjiang Chenxi Boron Carbide,Ltd, 3M, ABSCO Limited, Advanced Abrasives Corporation and Others.This market study includes data about consumer perspective, comprehensive analysis, statistics, market share, company performances (Stocks), historical analysis 2012 to 2017, market forecast 2018 to 2025 in terms of volume, revenue, YOY growth rate, and CAGR for the year 2018 to 2025, etc. The report also provides detailed segmentation on the basis of product type, application, end user and regional segmentation. The regional segment is further bifurcated on country level.Boron carbide (chemical formula approximately B4C) is an extremely hard boron carbon ceramic, and covalent material used in tank armor, bulletproof vests, engine sabotage powders, as well as numerous industrial applications. With a Vickers Hardness of >30 GPa, it is one of the hardest known materials, behind cubic boron nitride and diamond.Request for Free sample copy of ready Report @Report Coverage:Top Manufactures/vendors of Boron Carbide market:3MABSCO LimitedAdvanced Abrasives CorporationAmerican ElementsBhukhanvala Industries Pvt.China Mudanjiang Chenxi Boron Carbide,LtdOthers (Note: We can profile additional players without any additional charges)Boron Carbide Product Type:PowderGrainsPasteOthersApplication of Boron Carbide:AbrasivesNozzlesArmour/NuclearOthersRegions covered in Boron Carbide Market Research Report:North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy and Others)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia and Others)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia and Others)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Others)(Note: We can provide country or region specific report on request; please contact us for your specific requirement)The Global Boron Carbide Market analysis report covers detailed value chain analysis of Global Boron Carbide Market. The value chain analysis helps to analyze major upstream raw materials, major equipments, manufacturing process, downstream customer analysis and major distributor analysis.The report also covers in-depth description, competitive scenario, wide product portfolio of prime players active in this market and business strategies adopted by competitors along with their SWOT analysis. The report also provides Porter analysis, PESTEL analysis and market attractiveness which helps to better understand the market scenario on macro and micro level. Side by side, it also explicitly provides information about mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and all the other important activities occurred in the market during current and past few years. The Global Boron Carbide Market report explores manufacturers competitive scenario and provides market share for all major players of this market based on production capacity, sales, revenue, geographical presence and other major factors. The report also covers import/export data across all major regions covered in this report. Moreover, we can exclusively provide information about import/export data across any particular country as per requirement.How helpful this report will be? Boron Carbide Market share (regional, product, application, end-user) both in terms of volume and revenue along with CAGR from 2018 to 2025 Key parameters which are driving this market and restraining its growth What all challenges manufacturers will face as well as new opportunities and threats faced by themEnquire before Buying @...Table of Content:1 Market Overview1.1 Boron Carbide Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Powder1.2.2 Grains1.2.3 Paste1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Abrasives1.3.2 Nozzles1.3.3 Armour/Nuclear1.3.4 Other........................Continue (What does Report Include?Historic Data: What was the Boron Carbide Market data (Size, competition, company share, YoY growth rate, etc.) from 2013 to 2018.Current Market Status: A comprehensive analysis of current market Size, trends, growth drivers, industry pitfalls, challenges and opportunities for players.Market Forecast: Report will comment and provide details about market growth and forecast till year 2025.Customization: We can provide following things 1) On request more company profiles (competitors) 2) Data about particular country or region 3) We will incorporate the same with no additional cost (Post conducting feasibility).Contact UsJason Smith,Sales Manager, Global Business Development,Website: marketreportscompany.comEmail: jasonsmith@marketreportscompany.comContact us: +1-888-220-3424Address: 20 N State Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60602 United States Synthetic Rope Market - Global Industry Insights, Trends, Outlook, and Opportunity Analysis, 20182024 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/316 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/synthetic-rope-market-316 Ropes are made from natural and synthetic materials, or materials produced from metals such as steel. The raw material used for synthetic ropes is petrochemicals along with small amounts of polymeric materials. As compared to conventional ropes, synthetic ropes are more durable and lightweight. Nylon ropes are generally made from long extruded mono-filaments and are made water repellant by altering few of its properties.Request For Sample Copy of this Research Report :Synthetic ropes are widely used in multiple crane applications, owing to properties such as bend fatigue durability, high strength-to-weight ratio, and robust spooling capabilities. The main advantage of using synthetic ropes over steel cables, is the reduced weight of synthetic material, which is of high prominence in applications such as cranes and other applications in the marine sector. Synthetic ropes provide neutral torque with no spinning, are quick and easy to install, and are easy on sheaves and boom top plates. They also provide minimum kinking and diving damage, corrosion resistance, same line pull and load chart as that of wire ropes, reduced wear effect on drums and sheaves, reduced bird caging and barber poling issues, no greasing required, and no popping of core or wire.Synthetic ropes are used in marine and fishing industries, owing to its light weight, reduced knocking up and making down time, easy handling, floating properties, along with no requirement for re-lubing. Polypropylene ropes offer numerous benefits such as excellent insulation capacity, floatable on water, resistant in chemically active environments, zero absorption. They also operate in high temperature ranging up to 80C, and are available in variety of colors. Aramid rope is used as a substitute for steel cable, owing to characteristics such as lower weight and chemical resistance to rusting. Synthetic ropes are used in the transportation industry for binding purposes in transport by roads, sea or by air, whereas, in the oil & gas industry, it is used in drilling lines, anchor lines, marine riser tensioner lines, and tubing lines.Synthetic Rope Market Outlook Need for Waterproof and Durable Materials Expected to Boost DemandLightweight and high strength characteristics have helped rapidly increase consumption of synthetic ropes globally. Asia Pacific is expected to be the most potential market for elastomeric coating manufacturers. The market in the region is projected to witness relatively high growth, in terms of value, over the forecast period. Rapidly growing urbanization coupled with modern construction and infrastructural needs in emerging economies such as India and China, has propelled growth of the synthetic rope market in the region. According to IBEF, the Indian infrastructural industry is expected to reach total revenue of US$ 5 billion by 2020. India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF) is a trust established by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Department of Commerce in collaboration with the Government of India, with the purpose of promoting and creating international awareness of goods manufactured in India.Fluctuating prices of raw material is expected to be one of the restraining factors for growth of the synthetic rope market, over the forecast period. Business expansions in different geographies and new product development, are some strategies adopted by the top players in the synthetic rope market. In June 2016, Bridon International limited and Bekaert, collaborated to form The Bridon-Bekaert Ropes Group. This has increased the companys reach to 17 countries and has added to the global reach and expertise of the company in the synthetic rope market. Some of the major companies operating in the global synthetic Rope Market are Samson Rope Technologies, Cortland Limited, WireCo World Group, Marlow Ropes, Cortland Limited, and Bridon International Limited.For More Information: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 Genome Engineering Market Necessity And Demand 2018 to 2025 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/1262 Genome engineering is a technique in which a DNA is inserted, deleted, modified or replaced in the genome of a living organism. Research and development activities are conducted in genome engineering for the development of novel technologies. For instance, in 2017, Synthego Corporation launched a CRISPR Pioneers Program to expand genome engineering research. Researchers are majorly focusing on developing treatments for cancer and rare diseases with the help of genome engineering tools such as CRISPER. Many genome technologies are under trial for treatment of such diseases, and are expected to receive approvals in the near future.Request Sample Copy of this Business Report @Market DynamicsDevelopment of novel technologies in genome engineering field is expected to significantly drive growth of the global genome engineering market in the near future. For instance, in 2017, Merck KGaA Germany-based companydeveloped a new genome editing tool dubbed 'proxy-CRISPR', providing access to previously inaccessible microenvironments of the genome by modification of chromatin modifications. In 2017, Benson Hill Biosystems, Inc.an agricultural technology companylaunched its latest CRISPR 3.0, to increase innovators access to gene editing. CRISPR 3.0 is a latest innovative genomics tool, which is expected to improve crop performance. Development of such novel technologies by major key players is expected to create a conducive environment for growth of market.Click To Continue Reading On Genome Engineering MarketAbout 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 Advanced Driver Assistance System Market to grow at over 13% CAGR from 2017 to 2024 https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/2461 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/adas-market https://www.gminsights.com/toc/detail/adas-market Image sensors dominated the industry share contributing over 33% of the ADAS market revenue in 2016. Evolution of modern computer vision analysis system with effective object identification will support the product penetration. Strong outlook for image sensors in auto high beam, blind spot detection, lane departure warning systems, night vision and surround view systems will support the business growth.Global ADAS market share is led by park assist systems due to increasing adoption particularly from aftermarket. Faster parking and reduced curb strikes are among key properties supporting the product demand. Rising demand from passenger and commercial vehicles particularly for forward collision warning functions has enhanced the industry growth.Request For Sample Of This Research Report @Shifting preference for sensing systems in automobiles to avoid road accidents has enhanced the Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) demand. As per WHO, global road traffic deaths reached 1.25 million in 2015. Increasing consumer awareness pertaining to travel safety and security will propel the industry growth. Stringent government regulations for vehicle safety to ensure public health security will support the product demand.Effective safety functions in steering, braking, monitoring and warning are key properties driving the industry demand. In addition, increasing adoption of ADAS to enhance economy and comfort with functions including monitoring blind spots and parking assistance will support the product demand.Inclination towards advanced safety systems among OEMs to differentiate their brand and gain competitive advantage will drive the ADAS market growth. Rising demand from autonomous cars owing to its significant benefits including reduced traffic, increased safety and improved transportation service will propel the industry growth.Expensive costs associated with sensors and other components has influenced the ADAS price trend. Inter-sensor communication concerns resulting in software failure may hamper the industry growth. Moreover, lack of consumer awareness pertaining to product benefits and functionality particularly in developing countries may restrain business growth.HCVs are anticipated to witness growth over 14% up to 2024. Necessity for speed constraints to ensure safety among HCVs has enhanced the product scope. Regulatory compliance promoting advanced sensor usage including lane departure warning systems and AEBs will fuel the industry demand.OEMs dominated the global ADAS market share and are anticipated to remain dominating in forecast timeframe due to increasing adoption of safety standards. Increasing preference for safety systems among manufacturers to improve brand identity and ensure travel security will support the demand. OEMs are focused on strategic partnerships and collaborations with technology providers including sensors and other semiconductor suppliers.Europe ADAS market will witness CAGR over 14% up to 2024. Government regulations mandating installation of safety systems in vehicles will support the industry growth. Institutional initiatives including Euro NCAP to promote driving assistance systems will drive the product penetration. In addition, presence of key automobile manufacturers provides a positive outlook for the regional demand.Autoliv, Bosch, Continental, Delphi Automotive, Denso, Harman International, Hyundai Mobis, Mobileye N.V., Nvidia Corporation and TRW Automotive are the key players in the ADAS market. Mergers & acquisitions, new product launches, collaborations and supply agreements are among major strategies adopted by industry participants. For instance, in 2017, Delphi announced the acquisition of NuTonomy, an autonomous driving start-up to enhance its market foothold.Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) Market Size By Technology (Adaptive Cruise Control, Automatic High Beam Control, Autonomous Park Assist, Blind Spot Detection, Driver Monitoring, Forward Collision Warning, Front Lighting, AEB, Night Vision, Head Up Display, Lane Departure Warning, Park Assist, Surround View System, Traffic Sign Recognition, Tire Pressure Monitoring System), By Sensor (LiDAR, Infrared, Ultrasonic, RADAR, Image Sensor), By Vehicle (PCV, LCV, HCV), By Distribution Channel (OEM, Aftermarket), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Poland, China, Japan, India, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa), Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017 2024Chapter 4. ADAS Market, By Technology4.1. Global ADAS market share by technology, 2016 & 20244.2. Adaptive cruise control4.2.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.2.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.3. Automatic high beam control4.3.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.3.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.4. Autonomous park assist4.4.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.4.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.5. Blind spot detection4.5.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.5.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.6. Driver monitoring4.6.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.6.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.7. Forward collision warning4.7.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.7.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.8. Front lighting4.8.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.8.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.9. AEB4.9.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.9.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.10. Night vision4.10.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.10.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.11. Head-up Display4.11.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.11.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.12. Lane departure warning4.12.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.12.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.13. Park assist4.13.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.13.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.14. Surround view system4.14.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.14.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.15. Traffic sign recognition4.15.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.15.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 20244.16. Tire pressure monitoring system4.16.1. Market estimates and forecasts, 2013 20244.16.2. Market estimates and forecast, by region, 2013 2024Browse Full TOC @Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.4 North Main StreetSelbyville, Delaware 19975 USA Banana Flakes Market Report 2018: Segmentation by Product (Organic, Conventional, Others) by Application (Household, Food & Beverage Industry, Others) Banana Flakes Market https://bit.ly/2yn2Vgy http://marketreportscompany.com/report.php?report=food-and-beverages/global-banana-flakes-market-report-2018/40159 https://bit.ly/2yn2Vgy Global Banana Flakes market research report provides company profile for Orchard Valley Foods Limited, Z Naturals, Rabeler Fruchtchips, Johs.Thoms, P&G Food Industries, Bardakci Group, Diana Foods, Ingredient, Van Drunen Farms and Others.This market study includes data about consumer perspective, comprehensive analysis, statistics, market share, company performances (Stocks), historical analysis 2012 to 2017, market forecast 2018 to 2025 in terms of volume, revenue, YOY growth rate, and CAGR for the year 2018 to 2025, etc. The report also provides detailed segmentation on the basis of product type, application, end user and regional segmentation. The regional segment is further bifurcated on country level.A banana is an edible fruit botanically a berry produced by several kinds of large herbaceous flowering plants in the genus Musa. In some countries, bananas used for cooking may be called plantains, distinguishing them from dessert bananas. The fruit is variable in size, color, and firmness, but is usually elongated and curved, with soft flesh rich in starch covered with a rind, which may be green, yellow, red, purple, or brown when ripe.Request for Free sample copy of ready Report @Report Coverage:Top Manufactures/vendors of Banana Flakes market:Bardakci GroupDiana FoodsIngredientVan Drunen FarmsOrchard Valley Foods LimitedZ NaturalsRabeler FruchtchipsJohs.ThomsP&G Food IndustriesOthers (Note: We can profile additional players without any additional charges)Banana Flakes Product Type:OrganicConventionalOthersApplication of Banana Flakes:HouseholdFood & Beverage IndustryOthersRegions covered in Banana Flakes Market Research Report:North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy and Others)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia and Others)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia and Others)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Others)(Note: We can provide country or region specific report on request; please contact us for your specific requirement)The Global Banana Flakes Market analysis report covers detailed value chain analysis of Global Banana Flakes Market. The value chain analysis helps to analyze major upstream raw materials, major equipments, manufacturing process, downstream customer analysis and major distributor analysis.The report also covers in-depth description, competitive scenario, wide product portfolio of prime players active in this market and business strategies adopted by competitors along with their SWOT analysis. The report also provides Porter analysis, PESTEL analysis and market attractiveness which helps to better understand the market scenario on macro and micro level. Side by side, it also explicitly provides information about mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and all the other important activities occurred in the market during current and past few years. The Global Banana Flakes Market report explores manufacturers competitive scenario and provides market share for all major players of this market based on production capacity, sales, revenue, geographical presence and other major factors. The report also covers import/export data across all major regions covered in this report. Moreover, we can exclusively provide information about import/export data across any particular country as per requirement.How helpful this report will be? Banana Flakes Market share (regional, product, application, end-user) both in terms of volume and revenue along with CAGR from 2018 to 2025 Key parameters which are driving this market and restraining its growth What all challenges manufacturers will face as well as new opportunities and threats faced by themEnquire before Buying @...Table of Content:1 Market Overview1.1 Banana Flakes Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Organic1.2.2 Conventional1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Household1.3.2 Food & Beverage Industry1.3.3 Others........................Continue (What does Report Include?Historic Data: What was the Banana Flakes Market data (Size, competition, company share, YoY growth rate, etc.) from 2013 to 2018.Current Market Status: A comprehensive analysis of current market Size, trends, growth drivers, industry pitfalls, challenges and opportunities for players.Market Forecast: Report will comment and provide details about market growth and forecast till year 2025.Customization: We can provide following things 1) On request more company profiles (competitors) 2) Data about particular country or region 3) We will incorporate the same with no additional cost (Post conducting feasibility).Contact UsJason Smith,Sales Manager, Global Business Development,Website: marketreportscompany.comEmail: jasonsmith@marketreportscompany.comContact us: +1-888-220-3424Address: 20 N State Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60602 United States North America Specialty Food Ingredients Market Overview, Product Type and Opportunities to 2022 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1379274 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1379274/north-america-specialty-food-ingredients-market-research-reports/toc http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ The Latest Research Report North America Specialty Food Ingredients Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2022 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. MarketResearchReports.bizSpecialty Food Ingredients refer to the raw material of food which added in a small amount. In our report Specialty Food Ingredients include Flavors and Colors, Texturants, Functional Food Ingredient, Sweeteners, Preservative and Enzymes etc.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Specialty Food Ingredients 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 coversKerry GroupsDuPontCargillADMDSMGivaudan FlavorsFirmenichSymriseIngredionTate & LyleCHR. HansenIFFBASFTakasagoNovozymesMarket Segment by Countries, coveringUnited StatesCanadaMexicoGet Sample Copy of this report @Market Segment by Type, coversFlavors and ColorsTexturantsFunctional Food IngredientSweetenersPreservativeEnzymesOthersMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoBeveragesSauces, dressings and condimentsBakeryDairyConfectionaryOthersThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the North America Specialty Food Ingredients market.Chapter 1, to describe Specialty Food Ingredients 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 Specialty Food Ingredients, 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 Specialty Food Ingredients, for each country, from 2012 to 2017;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 2012 to 2017;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, Specialty Food Ingredients market forecast, by countries, type and application, with sales, price and revenue, from 2017 to 2022;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);Chapter 13, to describe sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers etc.Chapter 14 and 15, to describe Specialty Food Ingredients Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data sourceRequest For TOC Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Specialty Food Ingredients Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Flavors and Colors1.2.2 Texturants1.2.3 Functional Food Ingredient1.2.4 Sweeteners1.2.5 Preservative1.2.6 Enzymes1.2.7 Others1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Beverages1.3.2 Sauces, dressings and condiments1.3.3 Bakery1.3.4 Dairy1.3.5 Confectionary1.3.6 Others1.4 Market Analysis by Countries1.4.1 United States Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.2 Mexico Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.3 Canada Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Kerry Groups2.1.1 Profile2.1.2 Specialty Food Ingredients Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Kerry Groups Specialty Food Ingredients Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.1.4 Business Overview2.1.5 Kerry Groups News2.2 DuPont2.2.1 Profile2.2.2 Specialty Food Ingredients Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 DuPont Specialty Food Ingredients Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2.4 Business Overview2.2.5 DuPont News2.3 Cargill2.3.1 Profile2.3.2 Specialty Food Ingredients Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 Cargill Specialty Food Ingredients Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3.4 Business Overview2.3.5 Cargill News2.4 ADM2.4.1 Profile2.4.2 Specialty Food Ingredients Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 ADM Specialty Food Ingredients Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4.4 Business Overview2.4.5 ADM News2.5 DSM2.5.1 Profile2.5.2 Specialty Food Ingredients Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 DSM Specialty Food Ingredients Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5.4 Business Overview2.5.5 DSM NewsAbout usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.ContactMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Global Composite Forming Equipment Market 2018 with Top Manufacturers : Buhler, Frech, Simhope, HMT Qyresearchreports https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1769367&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/report/global-composite-forming-equipment-market-professional-survey-report-2018.htm/toc http://www.qyresearchreports.com Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Composite Forming Equipment Market Professional Survey Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.The contours of the global Composite Forming Equipment market is being shaped by a wide spectrum of trends spanning technological advances, government regulatory framework, and key competitive dynamics. The study offers insights and evidence-backed opinion to understand these contours. To this end, it analyzes various regional and global factors impacting the business landscape and emerging demand dynamics. Business executives, policy makers, and budding entrepreneurs can peruse through the findings to gain clear insights to help themselves in impactful strategy formulation. Recently emerging paradigms pertaining to preferences and inclinations of end-use industries and target consumers in the global Composite Forming Equipment market are covered in the analyses. The study takes a closer look at prevailing and emerging business risks the global Composite Forming Equipment market. It further strives to offer a broad perspective on several recent strategic moves being made by top players, such as such as mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, and collaborations.Have Any Query? Ask Our Expert @This report studies Composite Forming Equipment 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, coveringBuhlerToshiba MachineFrechUBE MachineryToyo Machinery & MetalColosio SrlBirch Machinery CompanyZitai MachinesSimhopeHMTOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoMechanical TypeAutomatic TypeProgrammable TypeBy Application, the market can be split intoAutomotiveConsumer ProductMedicalIndustrialAircraftOthersThe report the global Composite Forming Equipment market is prepared with the help of comprehensive primary research and gleaning through a wide spectrum of secondary sources, including company annual statements and industry journals. Combining the vast volumes of data obtained through secondary research with prominent statistical methods helps to draw out pertinent qualitative insights on dynamics of the global Composite Forming Equipment market. The breadth of primary research the analysts making the report have engaged with is imparting an unparalleled credibility to the findings on Composite Forming Equipment market. It further takes a critical look emerging trends underpinning the attractiveness of key segments. The study also offers balanced views on disruptive trends that may change the course of the global Composite Forming Equipment market.Read Complete Table of Content @Table of Contents1 Industry Overview of Composite Forming Equipment1.1 Definition and Specifications of Composite Forming Equipment1.1.1 Definition of Composite Forming Equipment1.1.2 Specifications of Composite Forming Equipment1.2 Classification of Composite Forming Equipment1.3 Applications of Composite Forming Equipment1.4 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 Composite Forming Equipment2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Composite Forming Equipment2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Composite Forming Equipment2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Composite Forming EquipmentList of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Composite Forming EquipmentTable Product Specifications of Composite Forming EquipmentTable Classification of Composite Forming EquipmentFigure Global Production Market Share of Composite Forming Equipment by Type in 2017Figure North America Composite Forming Equipment Market Size (Million USD) (2013-2025)Figure China Composite Forming Equipment Market Size (Million USD) (2013-2025)Figure Europe Composite Forming Equipment Market Size (Million USD) (2013-2025)Figure Southeast Asia Composite Forming Equipment Market Size (Million USD) (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: Commercial Drone / UAV Market Analysis, Share, Trend Industry Report, 2024 Global Market Insights https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/115 https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/115 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/unmanned-aerial-vehicles-UAV-commercial-drone-market https://www.gminsights.com Commercial Drone Market is projected to grasp USD 17.0 billion by 2024. The increasing application of the drones for the commercial purposes is anticipated to be one of the major factor driving the market growth. Since the advent of commercial UAVs, they have been utilized for video and photography. However, due to the relaxation by regulatory bodies such as U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) on the use of drones for commercial drones, their adoption among the different industry sectors, such as agriculture, real estate, architecture & construction, delivery and media has increased rapidly.The increasing venture capital investment in drone technology, affordability and accessibility of the drones, along with the advancement in the design and integrated data intelligence are also contributing towards the growth of the market. In addition, strong Chinese market and growing demand for the drones in the commercial applications from the developing countries is fostering the market growth. However, security and privacy issues associated with the use of drone and stringent government regulations on the use of commercial use of drones are hindering the growth of the market.Request for a sample of this research report @Agriculture sector is the most lucrative market for commercial UAVs market space. As the benefits of drones are becoming more apparent to farmers, their adoption is increasing for different agricultural applications to facilitate higher precision and consistency. The relatively low price of the UAVs with advanced imaging capabilities and sensors are enabling farmers to increase their yields and reduce cost of production. Players operating in the agriculture and digital farming market are developing modern agriculture focused drones with sophisticated precision and accuracy. For instance, in February 2017, Drone AG, a drone-assisted precision farming firm, entered into a partnership with Aerobotics, a South African data analytics firm, to provide weather-proof agricultural drones along with a cloud-based farm management software. These drones use high-end DJI components and can quickly cover large areas even in adverse weather situations.North America is the dominating region in the market owing to the relaxation on the use of UAVs for commercial applications by the FAA. The rising adoption of drones for covering events through aerial photography, filming, and video is also driving the market growth. The existence of large number of players such as 3D Robotics, PrecisionHawk, Aeryon Labs, with the support of government initiatives and policies also support the growth of the market. For instance, the U.S. government in 2017 introduced a program to drive the testing of commercial UAVs to include night time operations, flights flown over people and flights beyond VLOS. The program will accelerate the adoption of UAVs into the NAS and test UAVs detection and tracking, with reducing few limits on their use.Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @The Asia Pacific region is anticipated to grow with the highest rate during the forecast timespan due to the supportive government policies and initiatives for the driving the adoption of UAVs for commercial purposes and rising awareness for drone applications. The market is also aided by the rising adoption of drones by the enterprises and customers in fields such as retail, agriculture, and construction. Furthermore, the existence of considerable number of UAV manufacturers in the Asia, particularly in China, such as Xiaomi and DJI, is aiding to the market.Some of the prominent vendors of the commercial drone market are Parrot, DJI, 3D Robotics, Yuneec International, AeroVironment, PrecisionHawk, Bae Systems, Airobotics, Airware, DroneDeploy, senseFly, Cyberhawk, Hoverfly Technologies, Ehang Inc, and Intel Corporation. Market players are adopting several strategies such as merger and acquisition, partnership & collaboration, customization, and geographical expansion to increase their market share. For instance, DJI completed the acquisition of the Hasselblad, a Sweden based camera company, with the sole purpose to strengthen its position in the commercial drone market space.Browse key industry insights spread across 350 pages with 210 market data tables & 30 figures & charts from the report, Commercial Drone/Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Market Size By Product (Fixed Wing Drone, Rotary Blade Drone, Hybrid Drone), By Mode of Operation (Remotely Operated, Semi-Autonomous, Autonomous), By Application (Aerial Photography, Agriculture, Emergency Management, Inspection & Monitoring, Remote Sensing & Mapping, Wildlife Research & Preservation), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, UAE, Israel, South Africa), Growth Potential, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017 2024 in detail along with the table of contents:Glimpse of Table of Content (ToC)Chapter 1. Methodology & Scope1.1. Methodology1.1.1. Initial data exploration1.1.2. Statistical model and forecast1.1.3. Industry insights and validation1.1.4. Scope, definition and research parameters1.2. Data Sources1.2.1. Primary1.2.2. SecondaryChapter 2. Executive Summary2.1. Commercial drone industry 360 synopsis, 2013 - 20242.1.1. Business trends2.1.2. Regional trends2.1.3. Type trends2.1.4. Mode of operations trends2.1.5. Application trendsChapter 3. Commercial Drone Industry Insights3.1. Introduction3.2. Industry segmentation3.3. Industry landscape, 2013 - 20243.4. Industry ecosystem analysis3.5. Market evolution3.6. Market news3.7. Commercial drone regulations3.7.1. U.S.3.7.2. Canada3.7.3. U.K.3.7.4. Germany3.7.5. France3.7.6. Italy3.7.7. Spain3.7.8. Australia3.7.9. China3.7.10. India3.7.11. Japan3.7.12. South Korea3.7.13. Brazil3.7.14. Mexico3.7.15. Argentina3.7.16. UAE3.7.17. Israel3.7.18. South Africa3.8. Pricing analysis3.9. Technology & innovation landscape3.9.1. AI in drones3.9.2. Nano & Mini drones3.9.3. 3D printing of drones3.9.4. Cloud computing-based services3.9.5. Advanced material in manufacturing of drones3.9.6. Drones taxies or passenger drones3.9.7. IoT drones3.10. Commercial drone use cases3.10.1. Agriculture3.10.2. Photography & Filming3.10.3. Construction3.10.4. Real estate3.10.5. Retail3.11. Industry impact forces3.11.1. Growth drivers3.11.1.1. Venture capital investment in drone technology3.11.1.2. Increasing use cased of drones in civil applications3.11.1.3. Increasing affordability and accessibility of drones3.11.1.4. Advancement in design and integrated data intelligence3.11.1.5. Strong Chinese market and growing demand from developing economies3.11.2. Industry pitfalls & challenges3.11.2.1. Stringent government regulations3.11.2.2. Security & privacy issues3.12. Growth potential analysis3.13. Porter's analysis3.14. PESTEL analysisAbout 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: Smart Machines Market Worth will Reach US$ 258.5 Bn by 2024 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/8872 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/8872 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Persistence Market Research (PMR) delivers key insights on the global smart machines market in its upcoming report titled, Smart Machines Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2016-2024. In terms of value, the global smart machines market is projected to register a healthy CAGR of 18.8% during the forecast period. This is attributed to various factors, regarding which PMR offers vital insights in detail.On the basis of a component, the global smart machines market has been segmented into hardware, software, and service. Demand for smart machines is enhanced by increasing need to process and analyze big unstructured data among different sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, aerospace, and defense. On the basis of machine type, the global smart machines market has been segmented into robots, autonomous cars, drones, wearable electronics and others.A Sample of this Report is Available upon Request @On the basis of technology, the global smart machines market has been segmented into cloud computing, big data, internet of everything (IoE), robotics, cognitive technology and effective technology. Affective technology segment is expected to expand with a substantial CAGR over the forecast period. Various enterprises working on cognitive computing are facing glitches and errors in technology. This, in turn, is encouraging adoption of affective computing. Cognitive computing technology enables emotions linking to a robot, assisting the robot in making rational decisions and performing more complex tasks.Smart machines are deployed to enhance networked resources and implement distributed intelligence in manufacturing industries. Integration of devices provides more accessibility. Smart machines can be easily connected to a broader network of connected devices, enabling users to share data on numerous devices. This ensures users to connect/access their devices from anywhere and anytime. This is expected to fuel demand for smart machines in various industries. The market in Australia is expected to witness substantial growth in adoption rates of smart machines over the next five years. Autonomous robots are expected to find applications in agriculture and commercial sectors to overcome the lack of labor in the country. Australia-based companies have also been investing significantly in advanced technologies such as IoT.Smart machines are programmed to make intelligent decisions in a time efficient manner. They are built to learn from their interactions and their precision increases over time. Hence, new developments in operational intelligence are encouraging companies to adopt systems that are smarter and efficient. Narrative Science Inc., a company that offers analytical solutions uses its virtual assistant Quill, which is programed using natural language processing to provide relevant solutions.This report covers trends driving each segment and offers analysis and insights of the potential of the smart machines market in specific regions. The markets in Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific are expected to register high growth rates between 2016 and 2024. MEA is a small but significant market for smart machines as governments in the Middle East countries are investing in this sector to digitize government services. The market in Europe is expected to gain substantial market share in terms of revenue. This is attributed to increasing demand for smart machines from the automobile and manufacturing industries in countries such as Germany and France. The APAC accounted for the highest market share in 2015 and is expected to gain 232 BPS by an end of 2024.Access Report with Table of Contents @Key players in the global smart machines market include Apple Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corporation, BAE Systems, Creative Virtual Ltd., Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc., IBM Corporation, Narrative Science Inc., Rethink Robotics, ABB Limited, Rockwell Automation, Inc., and General Electric Co. others.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Airport Automated Security Screening Systems Market Global Industry Insights, Trends, Outlook, and Opportunity Analysis, 2018-2026 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/sample/193203 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/discount/193203 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/market-insights/airport-automated-security-screening-systems-market https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com https://www.industrychronicle.com Worldwide Market Reports added Latest Research Report titled Airport Automated Security Screening Systems Market Global Industry Insights, Trends, Outlook, and Opportunity Analysis, 2018-2026 to its Large Report database.Airport screening systems are used at the airport for security purposes. Earlier, handheld metal detectors or walk-through metal detectors and X-ray systems were used in airport for screening process. However, with the increasing security threats and the inability of the metal detectors to detect non-metallic objects and explosives are forcing many airports to implement advanced imaging technologies and procedures to screen passengers and baggage for explosives and non-metallic weapons.Increasing security threats is one of the major reasons that is driving growth of airport automated security screening market. The airport authorities are gradually increasing the need for implementing effective passenger security screening systems across the globe to prevent threats such as hijacking and placing explosives in an aircraft. Another major trend that gained traction in the market is biometric technology and this factor is expected to drive growth of market over the forecast period.However, high initial capital requirement for the infrastructure is a factor that is expected to hinder growth of airport automated security screening systems market.Request for Sample Copy of Research Report:Key Developments in Airport Automated Security Screening Systems MarketKey players are adopting various strategies such as mergers, acquisitions, new product launches, expansions, collaborations, partnerships, approvals, and joint ventures to retain its position in the market. On March 8, 2018, OSI Systems, Inc. announced that Albanian Customs and State Police, facilitated by the OSI Systems turnkey scanning program, seized 1,350 pounds of cocaine being smuggled into Albania. The narcotics were hidden in a false floor of a produce shipment and were detected by Rapiscan Systems Eagle scanning systems operated by the Companys S2 Albania subsidiary.On March 28, 2018, Smiths Detection released its first checkpoint scanner with innovative Computed Tomography (CT) technology, following approval by ECAC for EDS CB C2. Moreover, on April 11, 2018, CEIA, a premier provider of high-performance security metal detectors announced the availability of the new CEIA PD240CB Hand-Held Metal Detector (HHMD) that features a superior detection range for weapons and minimum metal targets.Request for Discount @Some of the key players operating in the airport automated security screening systems market include CEIA, L-3 communications, Rapiscan Systems, Spellma, Astrophysics, Golden Engineering, ADANI, Smiths Detection, American Science & Engineering, Glenbrook Technologies, Voti, PerkinElmer, Surescan Corporation, National X-Ray Corp, SAIC, Mil-Spec Industries Corp, and Mekitec US LLC.Browse more detail information about Laser Doppler Flowmeter Market Report at:** If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.About WMRWorldwide Market Reports is your one-stop repository of detailed and in-depth market research reports compiled by an extensive list of publishers from across the globe. We offer reports across virtually all domains and an exhaustive list of sub-domains under the sun. The in-depth market analysis by some of the most vastly experienced analysts provide our diverse range of clients from across all industries with vital decision making insights to plan and align their market strategies in line with current market trends. Worldwide Market Researchs well-researched inputs that encompass domains ranging from IT to healthcare enable our prized clients to capitalize upon key growth opportunities and shield against credible threats prevalent in the market in the current scenario and those expected in the near future.Contact Us:Mr. ShahWorldwide Market Reports1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154,U.STel: +1 415 871 0703Email:sales@worldwidemarketreports.comVisit our website for more details:Visit our new website for latest News: Data Center Construction in Southeast Asia 2018 Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 8.17% and Forecast to 2022 Data Center Construction in Southeast Asia 2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3236217-data-center-construction-market-in-southeast-asia-2018-2022 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3236217-data-center-construction-market-in-southeast-asia-2018-2022 WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On Data Center Construction in Southeast Asia 2018 Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 8.17% and Forecast to 2022.The analysts forecast the Data Center Construction Market in Southeast Asia to grow at a CAGR of 8.17% during the period 2018-2022.Data center construction is a set of processes used to construct a data center physically. It combines construction standards and data center operational environment requirements.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comCovered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the Data Center Construction Market in Southeast Asia. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the software, hardware, and services related to data center construction in Southeast Asia.The market is divided into the following segments based on countries: Indonesia Malaysia Singapore ThailandThe report, Data Center Construction Market in Southeast Asia 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 AECOM M+W group Nova Mission Control PWS (Malaysia) Currie & BrownMarket driver Rise in IoT solutions For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge Lack of construction expertise For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend Increasing investment in data center efficiency For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey 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?Complete Report Details @Table Of Contents Major Key PointsPART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARYPART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORTPART 03: RESEARCH METHODOLOGYPART 04: MARKET LANDSCAPE Market ecosystem Market characteristics Market segmentation analysisPART 05: MARKET SIZING Market definition Market sizing 2017 Market size and forecast 2017-2022PART 06: FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS Bargaining power of buyers Bargaining power of suppliers Threat of new entrants Threat of substitutes Threat of rivalry Market conditionPART 07: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY CONSTRUCTION COMPONENTS Segmentation by construction components Comparison by construction components Consulting and other services Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Mechanical components Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Electrical components Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Integrating software Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunity by componentsPART 08: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPEPART 09: REGIONAL LANDSCAPE Countries segmentation Regional comparison Singapore Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Malaysia Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Thailand Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Indonesia Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Others Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunityPART 10: DECISION FRAMEWORKPART 11: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES Market drivers Market challengesPART 12: MARKET TRENDSPART 13: VENDOR LANDSCAPE Overview Landscape disruption Competitive scenarioPART 14: VENDOR ANALYSIS Vendors covered Vendor classification Market positioning of vendors AECOM M+W group Nova Mission Control PWS (Malaysia) Currie & BrownContinuedFor 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. Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Market Report 2018: Segmentation by Product (Roller Chain, Silent Chain, Others) by Application (PC (Passenger Car), LCV (Light Commercial Vehicle), HCV (Heavy Commercial Vehicle), Others) Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Market https://bit.ly/2M4XPrg http://marketreportscompany.com/report.php?report=automotive/global-automotive-timing-chain--belt-market-report-2018/40114 https://bit.ly/2M4XPrg Global Automotive Timing Chain & Belt market research report provides company profile for Schaeffler AG, Cloyes Gear & Products, Maroblox, Joh. Winklhofer Beteiligungs, Engine Parts, BorgWarner Automotive, SKF, Aisin Automotive Casting, Tsubakimoto Europe, Egon von Ruville and Others.This market study includes data about consumer perspective, comprehensive analysis, statistics, market share, company performances (Stocks), historical analysis 2012 to 2017, market forecast 2018 to 2025 in terms of volume, revenue, YOY growth rate, and CAGR for the year 2018 to 2025, etc. The report also provides detailed segmentation on the basis of product type, application, end user and regional segmentation. The regional segment is further bifurcated on country level.A timing belt, timing chain or cambelt is a part of an internal combustion engine that synchronizes the rotation of the crankshaft and the camshaft(s) so that the engines valves open and close at the proper times during each cylinders intake and exhaust strokes. In an interference engine the timing belt or chain is also critical to preventing the piston from striking the valves. A timing belt is usually a toothed belt a drive belt with teeth on the inside surface. A timing chain is a roller chain.Request for Free sample copy of ready Report @Report Coverage:Top Manufactures/vendors of Automotive Timing Chain & Belt market:BorgWarner AutomotiveSKFAisin Automotive CastingTsubakimoto EuropeEgon von RuvilleSchaeffler AGCloyes Gear & ProductsMarobloxJoh. Winklhofer BeteiligungsEngine PartsOthers (Note: We can profile additional players without any additional charges)Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Product Type:Roller ChainSilent ChainOthersApplication of Automotive Timing Chain & Belt:PC (Passenger Car)LCV (Light Commercial Vehicle)HCV (Heavy Commercial Vehicle)OthersRegions covered in Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Market Research Report:North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy and Others)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia and Others)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia and Others)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Others)(Note: We can provide country or region specific report on request; please contact us for your specific requirement)The Global Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Market analysis report covers detailed value chain analysis of Global Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Market. The value chain analysis helps to analyze major upstream raw materials, major equipments, manufacturing process, downstream customer analysis and major distributor analysis.The report also covers in-depth description, competitive scenario, wide product portfolio of prime players active in this market and business strategies adopted by competitors along with their SWOT analysis. The report also provides Porter analysis, PESTEL analysis and market attractiveness which helps to better understand the market scenario on macro and micro level. Side by side, it also explicitly provides information about mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and all the other important activities occurred in the market during current and past few years. The Global Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Market report explores manufacturers competitive scenario and provides market share for all major players of this market based on production capacity, sales, revenue, geographical presence and other major factors. The report also covers import/export data across all major regions covered in this report. Moreover, we can exclusively provide information about import/export data across any particular country as per requirement.How helpful this report will be? Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Market share (regional, product, application, end-user) both in terms of volume and revenue along with CAGR from 2018 to 2025 Key parameters which are driving this market and restraining its growth What all challenges manufacturers will face as well as new opportunities and threats faced by themEnquire before Buying @...Table of Content:1 Market Overview1.1 Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Roller Chain1.2.2 Silent Chain1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 PC (Passenger Car)1.3.2 LCV (Light Commercial Vehicle)1.3.3 HCV (Heavy Commercial Vehicle)1.4 Market Analysis by Regions........................Continue (What does Report Include?Historic Data: What was the Automotive Timing Chain & Belt Market data (Size, competition, company share, YoY growth rate, etc.) from 2013 to 2018.Current Market Status: A comprehensive analysis of current market Size, trends, growth drivers, industry pitfalls, challenges and opportunities for players.Market Forecast: Report will comment and provide details about market growth and forecast till year 2025.Customization: We can provide following things 1) On request more company profiles (competitors) 2) Data about particular country or region 3) We will incorporate the same with no additional cost (Post conducting feasibility).Contact UsJason Smith,Sales Manager, Global Business Development,Website: marketreportscompany.comEmail: jasonsmith@marketreportscompany.comContact us: +1-888-220-3424Address: 20 N State Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60602 United States GE Healthcare Mention in the Liquid Chromatography Devices Market Followed by Thermo Fisher Scientific, Perkinelmer, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Gilson, Phenomenex and Among others Liquid Chromatography Devices Market http://databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=global-liquid-chromatography-devices-market http://databridgemarketresearch.com/toc/?dbmr=global-liquid-chromatography-devices-market http://databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-liquid-chromatography-devices-market/ http://databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/europe-liquid-chromatography-devices-market/ New research report of Global Liquid Chromatography Devices Market Overview By Type (Normal-phase liquid chromatography, Reversed-phase liquid chromatography, Ion Exchange Chromatography, Size exclusion liquid chromatography), By Application (Biomedical Analysis, Food Product Analysis, Oils and fats Analysis, Others), By End Users (Research Laboratories (clinical research laboratories, food safety laboratories) , Diagnostics Centers, Forensic, Others), By Geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Europe, South America, Middle East and Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Request for Free Sample Copy of Report @:Data Bridge Market Research added new report Liquid chromatography devices market accounted to USD 5.1 billion in 2016 growing at a CAGR of 6.2% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2024. The upcoming market report contains data for historic years 2015, the base year of calculation is 2016 and the forecast period is 2017 to 2024.Major market drivers and restraints: Global Liquid Chromatography Devices Market Increasing investments in R&D by the companies Advantages of liquid chromatography in providing accurate results Increasing awareness and importance of liquid chromatography tests in various drug approvals High initial investments Extensive requirements to develop equipments generating pressure above 20,000 PSIGlobal Liquid Chromatography Devices Market Overview:By Type the market for liquid chromatography devices is segmented into normal-phase liquid chromatography, reversed-phase liquid chromatography, ion exchange chromatography, size exclusion liquid chromatography.By application the liquid chromatography devices market is segmented into biomedical analysis, food product analysis, oils and fats analysis, others. On the basis of end-users the liquid chromatography devices market is segmented into Research Laboratories, Diagnostics Centers, Forensic, Others. Research laboratories are further segments into clinical research laboratories, food safety laboratories.Request for Table of Content @:On the basis of geography, liquid chromatography devices market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies such as North America & South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa.Some of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Brazil among others. In 2017, North America is expected to dominate the market.Global liquid chromatography devices market give a brief analysis of following points: Macro Indicator Analysis Market Overview Market Dynamics Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities and Challenges Market sizing and growth analysis Market forecasting to 2024 Market Competitive Landscape Product Launches and Pipeline Analysis Value Chain Analysis Market Mergers, Acquisitions and Agreements Company ProfilesFull Report:Related ReportEurope Liquid Chromatography Devices Market Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Global Lactose-Free Market Type (Lactose-Free, Lactose-Reduced Products), Application (Milk, Cheese, Yogurt, Baby-Foods, Ice-Cream), Distribution Channels (Supermarkets/Hypermarkets, Online Stores, Retails Stores), Geography Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Report Access:About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Vehicles Take the Smart Route; Technology to Help Accelerate Speedy and Timely Medical Aid https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=837 https://www.factmr.com/report/837/emergency-medical-services-vehicles-market https://www.factmr.com/checkout/837/S https://www.factmr.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/factmr/ Emergency medical services are the lifeline of any economy and the provision of prompt and timely medical care is the foundation of global healthcare services. An integral part of medical care are EMS vehicles that provide emergency medical aid to people in need by transporting patients to hospitals in advanced vehicles fitted with the basic medical equipment. Over the years, EMS vehicles have witnessed a surge of technological advancements that have brought in more sophistication in emergency critical care.Request Sample Report@Some of the recent innovations incorporate smart technology that extends the life of EMS vehicles, reduces unexpected downtime, and facilitates remote repairs and maintenance of EMS vehicles in real time. These advanced EMS vehicles come with enhanced functionality and ease of use; and are designed to provide optimal emergency medical aid in a speedy and timely manner, while adhering to patient safety and comfort. Cloud services underpin the backend functionality of these superior EMS vehicles and enable medical staff to continuously monitor vehicle performance on a daily basis.In-vehicle Equipment to Acquire a Facelift with Increasing Technological InnovationSome of the recent EMS vehicles launched in the global market come with features such as hands-free decontamination solutions and equipment that facilitates more sophisticated and deep disinfection. Advanced processes used to disinfect these new-age EMS vehicles also ensure that no harmful substances are released into the environment thereby bringing in more biodegradability into EMS vehicles.EMS technology is also undergoing rapid transformation in the wake of smart devices and cloud computing. Besides autonomous EMS vehicles, technical advances in emergency medical services vehicles include wireless communications, operator assisted navigation technology, vehicle collision prevention technology, etc.EMS Vehicles Play a Crucial Role in Protecting Public Health and SafetyOver the years, emergency medical services have emerged as an integral facet of the healthcare ecosystem of every nation. In this context, the provision of mobile critical medical aid has acquired a deeper significance. EMS vehicles are being deployed more than ever not only to address the emergency medical issues of people the world over, but are also used to safeguard the general health and wellbeing of citizens. For instance, in the recent opioid crisis, data collected by EMS vehicles was used by public health officials to study the rate of occurrence of specific overdoses and predict the next possible occurrence. Medical institutions work closely with paramedics to connect survivors to rehabilitation centers, and EMS vehicles play an important role in the provision of these services.Emergency medical services also play a critical role in trauma care. Every year, thousands die in road mishaps and accidents throughout the world. Trained EMS professionals assist the transportation of patients to pre-designated trauma centers through EMS vehicles fitted with the latest emergency medical equipment.View Full Report with TOC@EMS vehicles are also used in preventive care. EMS organizations are involved in creating public awareness of injuries and illnesses for instance, the dangers of heatstroke that have resulted in the deaths of infants and toddlers being left unattended in cars. Logistics has a major role to play here and EMS vehicles are kept on alert with the latest life-saving equipment to respond to critical medical emergencies as well as to facilitate preventive care programs organized by community organizations.Use of EMS Vehicles Extends Far Beyond Basic Emergency Medical Services and This is Just the Tip of the IcebergEMS vehicles are no longer mere ambulances with blaring sirens that rush to the assistance of patients in need. EMS vehicles are used in road accident rescue operations; to facilitate home births; and to transport stroke and heart attack patients to hospitals quickly. EMS vehicles also facilitate advanced critical life support and are used in mobile blood donation units. The use of EMS vehicles as advanced critical life support ambulances is witnessing rising adoption across the global healthcare industry. A recent study on the EMS vehicles market by Fact .MR reveals the steadily rising demand for EMS vehicles in advanced critical life support as evinced by a robust growth rate of 7.2% in terms of value during the period 2018 2028.Buy this Report@About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@factmr.comWeb:Follow Us on Linkedin: Automotive Stamping Market Report 2018: Segmentation by Product (Hot Stamping, Cold Stamping, Others) by Application (Single Tool Station, Progressive Stations, Others) Automotive Stamping Market https://bit.ly/2lkeigc http://marketreportscompany.com/report.php?report=automotive/global-automotive-stamping-market-report-2018/40111 https://bit.ly/2lkeigc Global Automotive Stamping market research report provides company profile for MacRodyne Hydraulic Presses & Automation, Santec Group, Jier North America, Ridgeview Industries, Bliss-Bret Industries, Schuler, AIDA Global, Orchid International, Eagle Press & Equipment, Hyundai Rotem and Others.This market study includes data about consumer perspective, comprehensive analysis, statistics, market share, company performances (Stocks), historical analysis 2012 to 2017, market forecast 2018 to 2025 in terms of volume, revenue, YOY growth rate, and CAGR for the year 2018 to 2025, etc. The report also provides detailed segmentation on the basis of product type, application, end user and regional segmentation. The regional segment is further bifurcated on country level.Stamping (also known as pressing) is the process of placing flat sheet metal in either blank or coil form into a stamping press where a tool and die surface forms the metal into a net shape. Stamping includes a variety of sheet-metal forming manufacturing processes, such as punching using a machine press or stamping press, blanking, embossing, bending, flanging, and coining. This could be a single stage operation where every stroke of the press produces the desired form on the sheet metal part, or could occur through a series of stages. The process is usually carried out on sheet metal, but can also be used on other materials, such as polystyrene.Request for Free sample copy of ready Report @Report Coverage:Top Manufactures/vendors of Automotive Stamping market:SchulerAIDA GlobalOrchid InternationalEagle Press & EquipmentHyundai RotemMacRodyne Hydraulic Presses & AutomationSantec GroupJier North AmericaRidgeview IndustriesBliss-Bret IndustriesOthers (Note: We can profile additional players without any additional charges)Automotive Stamping Product Type:Hot StampingCold StampingOthersApplication of Automotive Stamping:Single Tool StationProgressive StationsOthersRegions covered in Automotive Stamping Market Research Report:North America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy and Others)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia and Others)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia and Others)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Others)(Note: We can provide country or region specific report on request; please contact us for your specific requirement)The Global Automotive Stamping Market analysis report covers detailed value chain analysis of Global Automotive Stamping Market. The value chain analysis helps to analyze major upstream raw materials, major equipments, manufacturing process, downstream customer analysis and major distributor analysis.The report also covers in-depth description, competitive scenario, wide product portfolio of prime players active in this market and business strategies adopted by competitors along with their SWOT analysis. The report also provides Porter analysis, PESTEL analysis and market attractiveness which helps to better understand the market scenario on macro and micro level. Side by side, it also explicitly provides information about mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and all the other important activities occurred in the market during current and past few years. The Global Automotive Stamping Market report explores manufacturers competitive scenario and provides market share for all major players of this market based on production capacity, sales, revenue, geographical presence and other major factors. The report also covers import/export data across all major regions covered in this report. Moreover, we can exclusively provide information about import/export data across any particular country as per requirement.How helpful this report will be? Automotive Stamping Market share (regional, product, application, end-user) both in terms of volume and revenue along with CAGR from 2018 to 2025 Key parameters which are driving this market and restraining its growth What all challenges manufacturers will face as well as new opportunities and threats faced by themEnquire before Buying @...Table of Content:1 Market Overview1.1 Automotive Stamping Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Hot Stamping1.2.2 Cold Stamping1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Single Tool Station1.3.2 Progressive Stations1.4 Market Analysis by Regions........................Continue (What does Report Include?Historic Data: What was the Automotive Stamping Market data (Size, competition, company share, YoY growth rate, etc.) from 2013 to 2018.Current Market Status: A comprehensive analysis of current market Size, trends, growth drivers, industry pitfalls, challenges and opportunities for players.Market Forecast: Report will comment and provide details about market growth and forecast till year 2025.Customization: We can provide following things 1) On request more company profiles (competitors) 2) Data about particular country or region 3) We will incorporate the same with no additional cost (Post conducting feasibility).Contact UsJason Smith,Sales Manager, Global Business Development,Website: marketreportscompany.comEmail: jasonsmith@marketreportscompany.comContact us: +1-888-220-3424Address: 20 N State Street, Chicago, Illinois, 60602 United States Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Market Investment, Future Growth and Major Key Players 2025 | CFAT, XJ Group, Wuxi Longmax, Noark, Kingshore, Weidmuller and Others https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1786897 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-smart-pv-array-combiner-box-sales-market-report-2018-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/global-smart-pv-array-combiner-box-sales-market-report-2018-report.html https://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Market Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies the global Smart PV Array Combiner Box market status and forecast, categorizes the global Smart PV Array Combiner Box market size (value & volume) by key players, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top players in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia India and Other regions (Middle East & Africa, Central & South America).In 2017, the global Smart PV Array Combiner Box market size was xx million US$ and it is expected to reach xx million US$ by the end of 2025, with a CAGR of xx.x % between 2018 and 2025.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The major players covered in this reportCFATXJ GroupWuxi LongmaxNoarkKingshoreWeidmullerSchneider ElectricTOPBANDEatonJinting SolarKebiteTBEAHuasheng ElectricEASTSungrowFIBOXGolden HighwaySurpass Sun ElectricGuanya PowerTemaheng EnergyCoronaTongqu ElectricEhe New EnergyJingyi Renewable EnergyGeographically, this report studies the key regions, focuses on product sales, value, market share and growth opportunity in these regions, coveringUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaThe regional scope of the study is as follows:North AmericaUnited StatesCanadaMexicoAsia-PacificChinaIndiaJapanSouth KoreaAustraliaIndonesiaSingaporeRest of Asia-PacificEuropeGermanyFranceUKItalySpainRussiaRest of EuropeCentral & South AmericaBrazilArgentinaRest of South AmericaMiddle East & AfricaSaudi ArabiaTurkeyRest of Middle East & AfricaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoDC Smart PV Combiner BoxAC Smart PV Combiner BoxOn 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, includingResidentialNon-ResidentialUtility-ScaleGet Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Table of ContentsGlobal Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Market Report 20181 Smart PV Array Combiner Box Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Smart PV Array Combiner Box1.2 Classification of Smart PV Array Combiner Box by Product Category1.2.1 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 DC Smart PV Combiner Box1.2.4 AC Smart PV Combiner Box1.3 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Market by Application/End Users1.3.1 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales (Volume) and Market Share Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Residential1.3.3 Non-Residential1.3.4 Utility-Scale1.4 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Market by Region1.4.1 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Market Size (Value) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 United States Smart PV Array Combiner Box Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 Europe Smart PV Array Combiner Box Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 China Smart PV Array Combiner Box Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Smart PV Array Combiner Box Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Smart PV Array Combiner Box Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Smart PV Array Combiner Box Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value and Volume) of Smart PV Array Combiner Box (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2025)2 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box (Volume and Value) by Type2.2.1 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.2.2 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.3 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box (Volume and Value) by Region2.3.1 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.3.2 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box Revenue and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.4 Global Smart PV Array Combiner Box (Volume) by Application3 United States Smart PV Array Combiner Box (Volume, Value and Sales Price)3.1 United States Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Value (2013-2018)3.1.1 United States Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.2 United States Smart PV Array Combiner Box Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.3 United States Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)3.2 United States Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)3.3 United States Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)3.4 United States Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)4 Europe Smart PV Array Combiner Box (Volume, Value and Sales Price)4.1 Europe Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Value (2013-2018)4.1.1 Europe Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.1.2 Europe Smart PV Array Combiner Box Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.1.3 Europe Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)4.2 Europe Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)4.3 Europe Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)4.4 Europe Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)Browse Detail Report @5 China Smart PV Array Combiner Box (Volume, Value and Sales Price)5.1 China Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Value (2013-2018)5.1.1 China Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)5.1.2 China Smart PV Array Combiner Box Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)5.1.3 China Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)5.2 China Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)5.3 China Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.4 China Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)6 Japan Smart PV Array Combiner Box (Volume, Value and Sales Price)6.1 Japan Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Value (2013-2018)6.1.1 Japan Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)6.1.2 Japan Smart PV Array Combiner Box Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)6.1.3 Japan Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)6.2 Japan Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)6.3 Japan Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)6.4 Japan Smart PV Array Combiner Box Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)Continue...About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @ School Furniture in North America 2018 Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.89% and Forecast to 2022 School Furniture in North America Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3236279-school-furniture-market-in-north-america-2018-2022 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3236279-school-furniture-market-in-north-america-2018-2022 WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On School Furniture in North America 2018 Market Expected to Grow at CAGR 4.89% and Forecast to 2022.The analysts forecast the School Furniture Market in North America to grow at a CAGR of 4.89% during the period 2018-2022.School furniture consists of desks, tables, and lab furniture. With the advances in education sector, school furniture is evolving to serve the new and unique demands of schools and students. Applications are transferring from classrooms to recreational spaces, libraries, and physical activity centers.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comCovered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the school furniture market in North America. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the B2B and B2C sales of various school furniture.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography: Americas APAC EMEAThe report, School Furniture Market in North America2018-2022, 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 Fleetwood Group Herman Miller HNI KI SteelcaseMarket driver Growing demand for modern, luxury furniture For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge High transportation cost coupled with freight loss For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend Growth in demand for eco-friendly furniture For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey 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?Complete Report Details @Table Of Contents Major Key PointsPART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARYPART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORTPART 03: RESEARCH METHODOLOGYPART 04: MARKET LANDSCAPE Market ecosystem Market characteristics Market segmentation analysisPART 05: MARKET SIZING Market definition Market sizing 2017 Market size and forecast 2017-2022PART 06: FIVE FORCES ANALYSIS Bargaining power of buyers Bargaining power of suppliers Threat of new entrants Threat of substitutes Threat of rivalry Market conditionPART 07: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY PRODUCT Segmentation by product Comparison by product Seating Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Storage Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Lab equipment Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Other furniture Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunity by productPART 08: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPEPART 09: REGIONAL LANDSCAPE Geographical segmentation Country comparison US Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Canada Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Mexico Market size and forecast 2017-2022 Market opportunityPART 10: DECISION FRAMEWORKPART 11: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES Market drivers Market challengesPART 12: MARKET TRENDS Growth in demand for eco-friendly furniture Rising sales of school furniture through e-commerce platform Increased focus of vendors on furniture suitable for STEM education Evolving integrated furniture for schools Growth in demand for international educationPART 13: VENDOR LANDSCAPE Overview Landscape disruption Customer landscapePART 14: VENDOR ANALYSIS Vendors covered Vendor classification Market positioning of vendors Fleetwood Group Herman Miller HNI KI SteelcaseContinued..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. Aluminum Oxide Market Strategies and Key Opportunities | 2024 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/aluminum-oxide-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=3091 www.transparencymarketresearch.com/ Global Aluminum Oxide Market: OverviewAluminum oxide (Al2O3), more commonly known as alumina, is extensive used in a variety of industrial manufacturing applications and various engineering processes. When occurring as crystalline form, aluminum oxide most closely resembles properties of natural corundum, with the characteristic property of remarkable hardness. Being extremely hard, aluminum find wide applications as abrasive materials and its marked resistance to any acid or base at high temperature makes it suitable for manufacturing refractories. Driven by large number of emerging applications of aluminum oxide in the ceramic and electronics industry, the market is evolving. Its high thermal conductivity and ductility makes it popular to be used for instrumentation of thermal test machines. The market is also witnessing emerging wide demand in pharmaceutical industry and in medical transplants due to excellent biomaterial property.View Report Preview:Common available forms of aluminum oxide are powder, pellets, tablets, sputtering targets, and nanoparticles; of these, nanoparticles have gained wide adoption compared to bulk materials. This is attributed to its enhanced properties such as high electrical conductivity, ductility, and hardness of its alloys. Other popular applications in the medical sector include in making dental cements and in hemodialysis.The report offers in-depth insights into the current dynamics, analyzes regulatory framework, and elaborates on emerging applications, key product innovations, recent research and development activities, and competitive landscape. The comprehensive market overview helps stakeholders to identify lucrative growth avenues and zero in on imminent investment pockets in various regions.Global Aluminum Oxide Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe global aluminum oxide market is primarily driven by myriad applications in various industries such as ceramic, pharmaceutical, medical, and electronics. Owing to its unique physical and chemical properties, the aluminum oxide is witnessing extensive demand in a number of industrial manufacturing applications, thereby boosting the market. The spiraling demand for aluminum oxide in the ceramic industry as porous ceramics materials to enhance their thermal conductivity is expected to catalyze the market in the coming years. The emerging demand for aluminum oxide in the medical industry as transplants is projected to fuel the market throughout the forecast period. The marked biomaterial acceptance of aluminum oxide has propelled its demand for implants in various surgeries.A large number of applications of aluminum oxide as nanomaterials is expected to significantly accentuate the market in the forthcoming years. However, marked health concerns arising due to its exposure is a key factor likely to impede the market to an extent. Although aluminum oxide does not have carcinogenic effect, short-term exposure is known to cause respiratory tract infection and inflammation of eyes, while long-term exposure may affect our central nervous system. Nevertheless, constant improvements are being made to explore promising applications in the medical and biotechnology industries as implantable biomaterials. This is anticipated to open up exciting growth prospects for market players in major regions. In addition, advancement in manufacturing technology has led to newer applications in the ceramic industry, opening up lucrative growth avenues through the forecast period.Global Aluminum Oxide Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, North America and Asia Pacific are prominent markets for aluminum oxide. A large number of current and emerging applications of aluminum oxide in the pharmaceutical and medical industries is fuelling the Asia Pacific market. A major chunk of the consumption of aluminum oxide materials comes from countries such as India and China. The substantial growth of the North America market, on the other hand, is attributed to a wide range of applications in the ceramic industry.Request to view Sample Report:Companies mentioned in the reportSome of the major players operating in the aluminum market are Sasol Limited, Nivaka Pharmaceuticals Industries, MTC Wesgo, Snam Abrasives Pvt. Ltd., Tirupati Industries, Khambhalay Abrasive, Chemicals India Company, and Almatis.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Collaborative Robots Market forecast to witness phenomenal growth opportunities by 2024 https://www.gminsights.com/request-toc/upcoming/2662 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/collaborative-robots-market https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/2662 https://www.gminsights.com http://algosonline.com/news The U.S. is expected to witness large growth and revenue shares owing to the rapid adoption of the automation and robotics technology. Presence of major manufacturers of these systems and increasing investment power of companies to implement these systems in their environment, drive the collaborative robots market growth. Furthermore, the region also accounts for high labor cost and unavailability of efficient laborers for performing complex operations. India, China, and Japan in the Asia Pacific region is witnessing a high demand for these machines in the recent years.The collaborative robots market growth in China is due to the presence of a large number of manufacturing companies such as consumer electronics and e-commerce companies, which implement these systems in a number of tasks such as assembly, transportation, sorting, and packaging of products.Collaborative Robots Market size is driven by the increasing demand for robotics and automation technology in several industry verticals such as e-commerce, retail, and manufacturing sectors. Companies are increasingly implementing automated technologies as a replacement for human labor as they are affordable, easily trainable, and flexible as compared to humans, driving the collaborative robots market.The prices of sensors are declining continuously due to the high penetration of sensor manufacturers and their varied uses ranging from high-end to low-end applications, cutting down the total cost of manufacturing these technologies. The ease of training and the deployment of these systems as compared to traditional and bulky equipment is fueling the collaborative robots market growth.Request for an in-depth table of contents for this report @A major trend in the industry is the implementation of these systems as human co-workers. The collaboration of human and machines aids in the easier performance of critical operations, simplification of program integration, and standardization in mechanical and electrical operations. By implementing simple interfaces, the technology allows low-skilled personnel to perform tasks such as vehicle painting, placing of components, and packing without having in-depth knowledge and training in machine operations.The emergence of SMEs all over the world is creating high opportunities for the collaborative robots market growth. These machines are highly efficient in these manufacturing companies by performing complex operations such as assembly, loading/unloading, packaging, sorting, dispensing, and polishing, which provide massive savings in terms of human efforts and the time for performing these operations. For instance, the SMEs in India have been provided by several provisions such as tax exemptions, loans at low rates by Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs), and high reductions in the basic fees required for establishment and renovation of start-ups and SMEs.The technologies are highly susceptible to cyber and physical security threats.Malfunctioning and power surges can lead to injuries and loss of human life. However, these problems can be overcome while manufacturing by implementing efficient security systems that limit the force and power of clamps to prepare for the worst-case scenarios, increasing collaborative robots market growth. Hand guiding these robots while performing complex operations on floors is an issue hindering the collaborative robots market growth. The systems move on commands received from controller units, which are sometimes missed, resulting in incorrect operations and damages to the products. These systems require regular technical upgrades, mandating companies to expend large financial funds and negatively impacting the collaborative robots market demand. SMEs and start-ups most often have limited funds and cannot afford timely system upgrades and repairs.Browse Full Research Report On Collaborative Robots Market @The emergence of gripper technology is driving the collaborative robots market growth as these components can mimic the versatility of a human hand. Such integrations are used in highly complex industrial operations such as manufacturing and production work. The implementation of AI with this technology is an emerging industry trend. AI aids in improving the sensing and collection of data in unstructured environments by using the high computing power. It also helps in increasing the flexibility in navigating new environments and performing new tasks.The above 10 kg load capacity segment in the collaborative robots market is expected to account for the highest demand over the forecast period. The growth of this segment is credited to the high capacity of carrying loads, which reduce the number of cycles for performing loading, unloading, and transporting operations. Additionally, they also deliver higher bulk outputs as compared to the low payload capacity devices. The implementation of this segment requires a lesser number of similar systems as they can perform the task of two or more systems. The 5-10 kg load capacity systems are growing steadily in the collaborative robots market owing to their use in small manufacturers or warehousing companies, which do not have large bulks of products and complex operations.The pick and place application in the collaborative robots market holds high growth potential growth shares and is expected to dominate in the coming years. The high demand for this segment is due to the ease in loading/unloading operations, reduction in human involvement in picking and placing of bulk products, and time-saving as these machines are faster than human laborers. The assembly application segment in the collaborative robots market is expected to gain large revenue and growth shares over the forecast years. This growth is attributed to the easy programming of these systems to carry out assembly operations. These machines can be easily guided and controlled by humans to ensure an effective performance by assembling the correct products in their appropriate places.Make an inquiry for buying this report @Players in the collaborative robots market include ABB Ltd., KUKA AG., Robert Bosch GmbH, Fanuc Corporation, Rethink Robotics, Omron, and Universal Robots. Several players are adopting new product developments and innovations, mergers and acquisitions, collaborations, and partnerships to sustain a high industry competition and provide advanced technologies to consumers. For instance, in February 2018, Fanuc Corporation announced the acquisition of Life Robotics, a manufacturing company specializing in these systems. This acquisition strengthens the growth in the collaborative robots market by implementing elbow-less systems of Life Robotics that consumes less space.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog: Antimony Trioxide Market Poised for an Explosive Growth in the Near Future https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/antimony-trioxide-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=3485 www.transparencymarketresearch.com/ Antimony trioxide is the one of the major compounds of antimony. Antimony oxide is mainly produced by two ways either by oxidation of antimony or by the process of re-volatilizing of crude antimony trioxide. The method of production is mainly dependent on the composition of ores. Antimony trioxide has the ability to react both as acid as well as base making it suitable in various end user applications. Antimony trioxide reacts with mineral acids to give the corresponding salts. The major applications of antimony trioxide include flame retardants, polymerization catalyst in manufacturing of PET, as an additive in brake linings of automobiles and to certain extent as a coating for certain grades in titanium dioxide pigments. The flame retardant application of antimony trioxide is expected to dominate the market for antimony trioxide. Countries such as China, Russia, South Africa and Kyrgyzstan are the major producers for antimony trioxide. The major consumers for antimony trioxide are developed regions especially Europe and the U.S. With growth in flame retardant market across the globe the market for antimony trioxide also expects a positive trend in next few years.View Report Preview:The antimony trioxide has limited self fire-retardant properties. However antimony trioxide acts as an effective synergist for halogenated compounds or polymers containing halogens. The other major application for antimony trioxide is flame retardant in plastics and rubber. These flame retardant plastics are chiefly used in electronics applications. As the processing of antimony trioxide with plastics do not require any specialized treatment, majority of electronic companies prefer such treated plastics for electronic end products. The growth of electronic sector especially in personal computers, LCD monitors, printers or house hold television sets will act as a major boost for antimony trioxide market. Moreover, the market for cables and insulations will aid the market for antimony trioxide further growth. The flame retardant rubber is used in coal mines area where there is a high probability of fire exposure. The antimony trioxide is also used in flame retardant textiles, which are used in protective clothing, mats and curtains. The other applications include opacifying agent for glass and in manufacturing of complex organic pigments. However, due to availability for better products in these applications it limits the scope for antimony trioxide for these sectors. Antimony trioxide is also used as a catalyst in manufacturing polyethylene terephthalate (PET).As the demand of antimony trioxide is based on its flame retardant application, the growth in flame retardant market will advance the need for antimony trioxide. The increase in electronics industry in developing and developed nations is anticipated to be the greatest end user industry for antimony trioxide. The developing nations across Asia Pacific and RoW are expected to be the fastest growing market for antimony trioxide in the next six years. Moreover, due to the rapid economic development of these countries and increased disposable income of the citizens of these countries has led to further magnification of the total customer base in these countries for applications in electronic consumables and house hold electronic products. The augmentation of electronic sector especially in personal computers, LCD monitors, and other electronic equipments in developed regions will help the market of antimony trioxide to flourish further. As antimony trioxide is used as a catalyst in PET manufacturing, the demand for PET in bottles and containers across globe will aid the market for antimony trioxide to certain extent.Request to view Sample Report:Some of the key players in the antimony trioxide market include Sherwin-Williams Company, Almatis GmbH, Minmetals and Great Lakes Chemical Corporation among others.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reportsContact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Chemical Pulp Market to Achieve Significant Growth in the Near Future https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/chemical-pulp-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=3526 www.transparencymarketresearch.com/ Global Chemical Pulp Market: OverviewChemical pulps are man-made fiber of cellulose that are at the backbone of the paper industry, finding application in the production of printing and writing paper via white pulps, whereas brown pulp is used to manufacture packaging paper and paperboard. The superior quality of paper can also be produced from chemical pulping, utilizing programs such as deposit control, washing, cooking, and bleaching. Owing to its usefulness, the demand in the global chemical pulp market is expected to escalate at a robust rate during the forecast period of 2016 to 2024.View Report Preview:This report on the global chemical pulp market offers comprehensive analysis of all the major factors that will favor or challenge the growth of the demand in the near future. Prepared using proven research methodologies, the report aspires to serve as a dependable decision-making document for the stakeholders of the chemical pulp market. A number of leading vendors operating in the chemical pulp market have also been profiled in the report in order to represent the competitive landscape, and highlight the opportunities of new entrants.Application-wise, the global chemical pulp market can be segmented into paper and board production and textile. Based on product type, the market can be categorized into white, brown, and specialty. On the basis of processing method, the market can be bifurcated into sulfite pulp process and sulfate pulp process. Geographically, the report takes stock of all the important regions such as Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America.Global Chemical Pulp Market: Trends & OpportunitiesThe prosperity of packaging industry is having a pied piper effect on the global chemical pulp market. With rapid urbanization and flourishing ecommerce, the demand for packaged items has escalated in the recent past and the trend is expected to continue throughout the forecast period, providing traction to the chemical pulp market. The sectors that primarily utilize chemical pulp produced paper packaging are pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, and personal care. Chemical pulp are also used to manufacture nano cellulose. Specialty pulp find application in the textile industry and in the production of hygiene products.Relative ease of production, easy access to raw materials, efficient production, and growing number of large-scale producers are some of the other factors that are expected to augment the demand in the global chemical pulp market. On the other hand, volatility of raw materials and growing popularity of substitutes such as synthetic paper is expected to hinder the growth rate of the market during the forecast period.Global Chemical Pulp Market: Regional OutlookVast populated countries such as India and China serve the maximum demand from Asia Pacific, which is the most lucrative region for the vendors in the chemical pulp market. Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, and Philippines are also emerging into profitable country-wide markets in Asia Pacific market for chemical pulp. Personal care and hygiene products pose the maximum demand for chemical pulp coming from North America and Europe, as these products do not pose any environmental concerns.Request to view Sample Report:Companies mentioned in the research reportThe global chemical pulp market is marked by the presence of both small and large players. In order to gain ground over their competitors, prominent players constantly invest in research and development activities to produce products of improved quality as well as promote their products to targeted customers. Dow Chemical Co., AkzoNobel NV, Clariant International AG, SNF Floerger, Nalco Holding Co, Kemira Oyj, BASF SE, Shell Chemicals, ERCO Worldwide, Ashland Inc, Bayer AG, Solvay SA, Buckman Laboratories International Inc., and Cytec Industries are some of the key companies currently operating in the global chemical pulps market.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Wealth Management Market - Business and Innovation Trends 2018-2024 https://www.gminsights.com/request-toc/upcoming/2650 https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/wealth-management-market https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/2650 https://www.gminsights.com http://algosonline.com/news The North American market is the dominating region in the wealth management market and this trend is expected to continue during the forecast period. The growth is attributed to the rise of high net worth Individuals. Furthermore, higher disposable incomes of the population have also fostered the market growth.Wealth Management Market size is growing at a high pace due to the reduction in the brokerage fees across the fintech industry. For instance, 20 years ago, the transaction charges for 100 shares at a full-service brokerage firm such as Merrill Lynch would be USD 80 to USD150, which will now be substantially lower at 1/100th of the cost. In addition, the explosion in the capabilities of the access points, such as smartphones and other mobile devices, has resulted in the widespread adoption of wealth management services. For instance, it offers customers with personalized product offerings. Furthermore, online wealth management platforms have provided businesses with the opportunity to maximize their customer base, which is hard to resist in a competitive market.Request for an in-depth table of contents for this report @The technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have enabled the platforms to provide services such as risk management and investment planning. For instance, most of the traditional platforms can analyze the static data but machine learning can analyze the customers financial data and provide the relevant information. It can perform predictive analysis in real time and can detect rogue investors working in unison. AI-based wealth management platforms have found their applications in hedge funds as they have moved away from the traditional model and adopted a predictive model with AI algorithms.Blockchain is another technology, which found its applications in the wealth management market by introducing the real-time settlement models and reducing the transaction costs dramatically. This reduction in transaction fees will affect the industry as transaction fees are the major sources of income.The wealth management market is characterized in different product portfolios such as transaction management, portfolio management, revenue management, client management, and financial investment planning & reporting. Transaction management solution accounts for the majority share in the market. Transaction management helps in keeping track of transactions through its lifecycle phases such as initiation and execution, reconciliation, settlements, and corporate actions. Process simplification, cost reduction, and reduction in paperwork are major factors leading to the widespread adoption of this service.Browse Full Research Report On Wealth Management Market @The major challenges in the wealth management market are inadequate technical expertise among the professionals and the lack of awareness. The highly volatile market conditions are also one of the daunting challenges affecting the market growth.The Middle East region is expected to grow substantially due to supportive government policies. For instance, the efficient tax system of the UAE coupled with sustainable economic model makes it a lucrative wealth management destination for High Net-Worth Individuals (HNWIs)). The attractive investment opportunities, stability across the region, and the low tax environment are some of the key factors for the market growth.The Asia Pacific market is also expected to grow at a substantial rate due to the rising innovations in the fintech sector. Firms and wealth management companies have increased the use of social media and are using mobile applications to offer customized product offerings to their clients. For instance, Citibank has partnered with Thomas Reuters to provide customers with various stock market insights. They are also leveraging on data analytics for prospecting clients by tracking the customer database and browsing data. browsing data.Make an inquiry for buying this report @Some of the major vendors in the industry are Accutech Systems, Appcrown, Apsida360, BaseVenture, Globacom Technologies, IQCIO, Marstone, MMxCHANGE, Thomas Gold Solution, Dorsom, Objectway, Comarch, FIS, Profile Software, and WealthBot. The companies operating in the market are focusing on partnerships and collaboration strategies to expand the customer base and get an edge over competitors. For instance, in October 2017 InvestEdge, a cutting-edge wealth management solutions provider partnered with the Applied Finance Group (AFG), an equity research and consulting firm. Through this partnership, AFGs smart compliance tools will also be available through the InvestEdge ecosystem.About Global Market Insights:Global Market Insights, Inc., headquartered in Delaware, U.S., is a global market research and consulting service provider; offering syndicated and custom research reports along with growth consulting services. Our business intelligence and industry research reports offer clients with penetrative insights and actionable market data specially designed and presented to aid strategic decision making. These exhaustive reports are designed via a proprietary research methodology and are available for key industries such as chemicals, advanced materials, technology, renewable energy and biotechnology.Contact Us:Arun HegdeCorporate Sales, USAGlobal Market Insights, Inc.Phone: 1-302-846-7766Toll Free: 1-888-689-0688Email: sales@gminsights.comWeb:Blog: Polishing Powders Market to have Good Business Opportunities in the Coming Years https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/polishing-powders-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=3610 www.transparencymarketresearch.com/ Global Polishing Powders Market: OverviewPolishing powders are a crucial requirement in the finishing of a wide range of products. They are vital in smoothing the etch marks and wear patterns caused by the manufacturing process and providing an aesthetic, smooth finish to the manufactured product. Apart from enhancing the aesthetic properties of the manufactured product, polishing powders can also be designed to impart other benefits such as durability and resistance to physical as well as microbial contaminants. Most polishing powders are chemically inert, but some application-specific products may contain chemically active substances.View Report Preview:Due to the constant need for polishing operations in the finishing stages of manufacturing in various industries, the global polishing powders market is likely to grow smoothly in the coming years. The almost universal need for polishing powders has also created a plethora of end use industries for the polishing powders market, which is likely to remain a key driver for the global polishing powders market in the coming years.Global Polishing Powders Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe prime driver for the global polishing powders market is the large number of its end use segments and the steady growth of several end users. The construction industry has become a key consumer in the global polishing powders market in recent years due to the rising demand for premium flooring options such as marble. The rising disposable income of consumers following the 2008-09 economic crisis has resulted in a steady rise in the demand for residential housing, while rising commercial construction has also played a key role in the growing demand from the global polishing powders market.The rising demand from the booming automotive industry is also a major driver for the global polishing powders market. The finishing of the exterior as well as interior surfaces of cars has always been a key part of automotive design due to the significant aesthetic appeal it holds. The rising demand for premium cars has led to steady demand from the polishing powders market in recent years. The presence of established car brands in North America and Europe has driven the demand from the polishing powders market in these regions, while the strengthening automotive industry in emerging regions, especially Asia Pacific, holds strong promise for the polishing powders market in coming years. The rising use of polishing powders to strengthen automotive glasswork is also a key driver for the global polishing powders market.The consumer electronics and medical devices industries are also likely to play an important role in the development of the global polishing powders market in the coming years. Along with the use of technologically sophisticated glasswork to ensure durability of screens, polishing powders have also become important for the consumer electronics industry. The rising demand for handheld electronics such as smartphones and tablets is a key driver for the global polishing powders market. The rising incorporation of antimicrobial ingredients in medical device coatings is another major demand avenue for the global polishing powders market.Request to view Sample Report:Global Polishing Powders Market: Geographical and Competitive DynamicsThe booming construction industry in Asia Pacific is likely to ensure clear dominance of the region in the global polishing powders market in the coming years. The rising use of premium flooring options in rapidly developing urban centers in countries such as India, China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Australia is vital for the global polishing powders market. The rapidly expanding automotive industry in China is also likely to benefit the Asia Pacific polishing powders market significantly in the coming years.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Global Bluetooth Beacon and iBeacon: North America Anticipated to be the Most Attractive Regional Market Through 2025 Market Research Reports Search Engine https://www.mrrse.com/sample/4006 https://www.mrrse.com/bluetooth-beacon-and-ibeacon-market https://www.mrrse.com/enquiry/4006 https://www.mrrse.com/ A latest research report titled as Global Market Study on Bluetooth Beacon and iBeacon: North America Anticipated to be the Most Attractive Regional Market Through 2025 has been recently added to the vast portfolio of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) online research offerings. This report is a professional and in-depth analysis on the present state and future prospect for the global market. It provides valuable information to the industry insiders, potential entrants or investors. It includes an exhaustive enquiry with the reliability of logic and the comprehensiveness of contentsClick here For Free Sample Report @According to the research study, the global Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon market is anticipated to grow at a noteworthy rate to reach a significant value by the end of the assessment year. The Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon market experienced a sluggish growth initially during 2012-2016 period. However, it gained enormous steam after 2016 and is projected to grow at a gigantic CAGR of 91.4% throughout the period of assessment, 2017-2025. By the end of the assessment year, the global market for Bluetooth beacons and iBeacons is estimated to reach an enormous valuation of more than US$ 37 Bn from a mere US$ 207 Mn in 2017. This enormous growth can be attributed to various key aspects such as implementation of beacons in retail stores to engage customers, consistency in growth of smartphones and related technologies and increasing sue of beacons in industries for enhancement of safety. As per the research report, the players involved in this market can focus on expanding their reach in Asia Pacific and North America region in the coming years.North America region to be highly lucrative for Bluetooth beacon and iBeaconsNorth America region is anticipated to be highly lucrative region for the growth of Bluetooth beacons and iBeacons in the coming years. The region reflected high potential in terms of growth and revenue generation in this market since past couple of years. In the coming years, it is likely to dominate the global market over other regions. The Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon market in North America is projected to grow at an exponential CAGR of 90.6% throughout the period of assessment to reach a high valuation of more than US$ 14 Bn by the end of the forecasted year from a value of US$ 82 Mn in 2017.United States has highly contributed to the growth of the Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon market in North America region, followed by Canada. By technology, the iBeacon segment dominated the global market by reflecting a higher market share and value. By the end of 2025, this technology segment is projected to show a value higher than US$ 10 Bn. The retail end users segment in the North America Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon market is expected to show high prominence in the coming years. However, the non-retail end user segment in this region is expected to grow at a comparatively higher pace in the near future.Browse Full Report with TOC@Asia Pacific to soar at super speed in the Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon marketAsia pacific region has shown higher potential in the growth of this technology market. It is the third largest region with respect to revenue size. The Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon market in Asia Pacific region is valued at about US$ 40 Mn in 2017 and is estimated to reach a higher valuation of more than US$ 8 Bn by the end of the assessment period.China country is the major contributor of growth of the Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon market in Asia Pacific region, followed by Japan. Technology wise, eddystone segment is projected to grow at a higher pace in this region, with a CAGR of 96.9%. The iBeacon technology segment is expected to be the largest segment in terms of market value and is projected to grow at a significant rate in the years to come. The retail and non-retail segments in the end user category both have given significant contribution. The Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon technology has been rapidly adopted in these segments; the retail segment has an upper hand with respect to market value whereas the Bluetooth beacon and iBeacon technology in non-retail sector in Asia Pacific is expected to grow at a higher pace in the future.Enquire about this Report @About Market Research Reports Search EngineMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research Reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY 12207(United State)Telephone: +1-518-730-0559(toll free no)Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite: Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Market Set for Rapid Growth and Trend by 2025 | Global Key Players (ABB Ltd.,Azbil Corporation,BuildingIQ, Inc.,C3 IoT,Cylon Controls Ltd.,Daikin,Daintree Networks) https://www.businessindustryreports.com/sample-request/88513 https://www.businessindustryreports.com/enquiry/88513 https://www.businessindustryreports.com/buy-now/88513/single Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Market 2018 Industry Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) industry. This report studies Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) 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 Sample Copy of this Report -The Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) market 2018 research provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) market analysis is provided for the international markets including development trends, competitive landscape analysis, and key regions development status. Development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures are also analyzed. This report also states import/export consumption, supply and demand Figures, cost, price, revenue and gross margins.Complete report on Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Industry 2018 Market Research Report is spread across 110 pages and provides exclusive vital statistics, data, information, trends and competitive landscape details in this niche sector. Inquire more or share questions if any on this report @Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players including ABB Ltd. Azbil Corporation BuildingIQ, Inc. C3 IoT Cylon Controls Ltd. Daikin Daintree Networks Echelon Corporation The report also focuses on global major leading industry players of Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) market providing information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials and equipment and downstream demand analysis is also carried out. The Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) market development trends and marketing channels are analyzed. Finally the feasibility of new investment projects are assessed and overall research conclusions offered.With tables and figures helping analyze worldwide Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) market, this research provides key statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.Order a copy of Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Market Report 2018 @Market segment by Type, the product can be split intoHardwareServiceMarket segment by Application, split intoOffices (government and private)Retail storesInstitutions (schools, colleges and universities)HospitalsShopping malls and hotelsOthersMajor Points from Table of Contents:1 Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Market Overview2 Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2013-2018)5 Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Market Analysis by Application7 Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Market Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) Market Forecast (2018-2025)13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixAuthor ListDisclosure SectionResearch MethodologyData SourceAbout usBusinessIndustryReports.com is digital database of comprehensive market reports for global industries. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined - we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.Media ContactBusiness Market ReportsPune Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940 Electronic Trial Master File (eTMF) Market: Western Europe Projected to be the Second Largest Region in Terms of Market Share Market Research Reports Search Engine https://www.mrrse.com/sample/4062 https://www.mrrse.com/etmf-market https://www.mrrse.com/enquiry/4062 https://www.mrrse.com/ A latest research report titled as Electronic Trial Master File (eTMF) Market: Western Europe Projected to be the Second Largest Region in Terms of Market Share: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017-2027) has been recently added to the vast portfolio of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) online research offerings. This report is a professional and in-depth analysis on the present state and future prospect for the global market. It provides valuable information to the industry insiders, potential entrants or investors. It includes an exhaustive enquiry with the reliability of logic and the comprehensiveness of contentsClick here For Free Sample Report @According to the research report on global electronic trial master file (eTMF) market, it is expected to show exponential growth during the period of forecast, 2017-2027. The global market had witnessed high growth since the period 2012-2016 and this trend is likely to enhance in the coming years, till 2027. The global electronic trial master file (eTMF) market is estimated to reach a value more than US$ 190 Mn by the end of the assessment year from an estimate of US$ 51.7 Mn in 2017. This market valuation is supported by a high CAGR of 14.0% during the period of forecast. The high growth of the global electronic trial master file (eTMF) market can be attributedto growing number of clinical trials across the globe and government regulations keeping the eTMF mandatory for clinical trials.North America to show higher lucrativeness for growth of eTMF marketThe North America region is expected to show high market attractiveness during the forecast period. Electronic trial master file (eTMF) market in North America is projected to grow at a high CAGR of 13.5% throughout the period of assessment to showcase an estimation of more than US$ 125 Mn by the end of the assessment period. The market in this region has been growing consistently showing high revenue generation since 2016. In 2017, the North America eTMF market reflected a higher revenue of about US$ 35 Mn and dominated the market in other regions that reflected a revenue not even close to US$ 15 Mn. The main aspect driving the growth of the eTMF market in North America is the business benefits associated with eTMF that are spurring its adoption. For instance, in 2016, Veeva Systems conducted a survey, in which it was said that improving inspection readiness (67%), speeding study start-up (53%), and providing remote oversight of the eTMF (48%), are the most cited business benefits driving the adoption of eTMF among sponsors.Browse Full Report with TOC @United States sub region in North America is expected to highly contribute to the growth of the market in the region, followed by Canada. The revenue from United States is expected to reach a high valuation of more than US$ 100 Mn by the end of 2027, thus supporting the dominance of the North America region in the electronic trial master file (MRRSE) market in the coming years.Asia Pacific excluding Japan to show high potential for growth in the electronic trial master file marketSeveral key players are focusing on the Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region in order to tap the emerging economies in this region. The main advantage of this region is its high potential for growth as compared to matured economies. Several end use industries are showing interest in this region owing to which the supply side players are focusing their attention on APEJ to gain business expansion. Electronic trial master file (eTMF) market in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region is expected to grow at the highest pace in the coming years to register a stellar CAGR of 17.6% and is estimated to reach a valuation of about US$ 18 Mn by the end of the period of assessment, thus becoming the third largest region in the eTMF market after Western Europe.Enquire about this Report @About Market Research Reports Search EngineMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research Reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY 12207(United State)Telephone: +1-518-730-0559(toll free no)Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite: Ovarian Cancer Drugs Market - Growth, Trends and Demands Research Report and Forecast 2024 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/164 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-customization/164 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/ovarian-cancer-drugs-market-164 Ovarian cancer drugs market supported by growing aging population in the U.S and U.KAn alarming rise in number of ovarian cancer cases reported in the recent past, inadvertently creates a highly conducive environment for growth of the ovarian cancer drugs market. According to estimates released by the American Cancer Society, in 2016, around 22,280 new cases of ovarian cancer were diagnosed, leading to 14,240 deaths in the U.S. The Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program of the National Cancer Institute data stats that there in an increase in all new cancer cases, with ovarian cancer accounting for 1.3% of incidence rate, and accounting for 2.4% of all related deaths in the 2016. The number of new ovarian cancer cases are 11.9 per 100,000 women each year and the total deaths are 7.5 per 100,000 women yearly.Request to download and view Sample Report:According to World Cancer Research Fund International data on the basis of highest rate of ovarian cancer by country: Fiji, age standardized rate per 100,000 is 14.9, followed by Latvia and Bulgaria with age standardized rate per 100,000 is 14.2 and 14.0, respectively. The U.K stands tenth, with age standardized rate per 100,000 pegged at 11.7. Around 58% of ovarian cancer cases are diagnosed in less developed countries, with the least incidence rate in Africa and Asia. In the U.K., around 46% of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer, survive their disease for the following five years or more. According to Australian Government, Cancer Australia, it is estimated that in 2017, there would be 1,580 new ovarian cancer cases, with an estimated 2.5% ovarian cancer cases among all new cancer cases in the country. This would result in an estimated 1,047 deaths in 2017. Thus, the ovarian cancer drugs industry is expected to gain significant traction in the more developed regions over the following few years.Ovarian cancer is one of the most dreadful cancers among all different cancers in females. Cancer which is grown in an ovary, results in abnormal cells growth that have the tendency to invade or adversely affect the other parts of the body.Only a few vague symptoms show up in the initial stages. Further symptoms manifest as the cancer grows. These symptoms include inflating, pelvic ache, abdominal puffiness, and loss of appetite. As this is an ovarian cancer, the cancer can spread to adjoining areas such as abdomen layers, lining of the bowel and bladder, lymph nodes, and liver.The disease is relatively rare, though risk is higher among women who have ovulated more over their lifetime, which can also include females who have never borne a child and those who began ovulating at a very young age. Around 10% of ovarian cancer cases are related to inherited genetic risk. Women with mutations in the breast cancer genes have a 50% chance of developing the disease. The most common ovarian cancer that accounts for 95% of cases, is ovarian carcinoma.Ovarian cancer drugs market taxonomyThe global ovarian cancer drugs market is segmented on the basis of chemotherapy drugs, end user, and geography. On the basis of chemotherapy drugs, the ovarian cancer drugs are divided into Carbloplastin, Cisplatin, Docetaxel, Paclitaxel and other medication includes Cyclophosphamide, Doxorubicin, Gemcitabine, Oxaliplatin and Topotecan.Request a Customization:On the basis of end user, the market is classified into hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, clinics, and others.Current scenario in ovarian cancer drugs market: High prevalence of ovarian cancer among women over 60 years in the U.S. and U.K.Regional segmentation of the global ovarian cancer drugs market by Coherent Market Insights comprises North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa. North America accounts for the largest market share, mainly due to presence of major players and adoption of advanced medical technologies in countries such as the U.S. and Canada. According to American Cancer Society, an estimated 22,440 women would receive a new diagnosis of ovarian cancer and around 14,080 women will die from ovarian cancer in 2017 in the U.S. alone. Ovarian cancer is the fifth most prevalent cancer among women, which accounts for high percentage of deaths when compared to other cancer related to reproductive system cancer. It is stated that 1 in 75 women are at risk of contracting ovarian cancer and fatalities related to the disease is pegged at 1 in 100. Prevalence of ovarian cancer is usually low among women under 40 years of age. According to American Cancer Society, most of the ovarian cancer case are reported among women aged 60 years and above. According to Cancer Research UK, in 2014, 7,378 new cases of ovarian cancer were reported in the U.K., of which around 53% of cases diagnosed were among females aged 65 years and above.Combinational drug approach a novel approach in the ovarian cancer drugs marketKey players operating the ovarian cancer drugs market include Bristol Myers Squibb Company, Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline plc, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Novogen, Inc., Genentech Inc., Aetera Zenteris Inc., Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH and F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd. Major companies in this market are constantly working towards introducing innovative products and lowering production costs in order to enhance profitability. Roches blockbuster drug Avastin (bevacizumab) used in combination with carboplatin and paclitaxel is being used to treat ovarian cancer. Introduction of such drugs would further fuel growth of the ovarian cancer drugs industry in the near future.To know more about the Ovarian Cancer Drugs Market, click the link below: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.1001 4th Ave,, #3200, Seattle, WA 98154#3200 Global Sciatica Market 2018: Industry Key Players, Share, Trend, Applications, Forecast to 2023 Sciatica Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4767 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/sciatica-market-4767 Market Synopsis of Global Sciatica MarketMarket ScenarioSciatica is characterized by pain going down the leg from the lower back due to irritation of the lumbar or sacral nerves. Sciatica is triggered by activities like heavy lifting and jerky movements. However the condition can also develop gradually. Typically, sciatica symptoms occur on one side of the body although in some cases the pain can be on both sides. The other symptoms of sciatica are weakness or numbness in the affected leg, burning or tingling down the affected leg, and constant pain on one side of the rear. The causes of sciatica are spondylolisthesis, muscle spasm in the back or buttock, spinal stenosis, piriformis syndrome, pelvic tumours, pregnancy and others. However, spinal disc herniation is the primary cause of sciatica in about 90% of the cases. Other uncommon causes are lumbar degenerative disc disease, osteophytes and arthritis of the spine.View Reports Sample @Sciatica generally resolves on its own in about 90% of the cases. However it can result in severe pain which may need surgical intervention. Surgery may be required if complications occur such as bowel or bladder problems. Sciatica affects 40% of people at some point in their life time. Sciatica is most common during people's 40s and 50s, and men are more frequently affected than women.The market drivers for global sciatica market are rise in demand due to growing population, increasing screening, rising cases of geriatrics, rising safety and success of drug treatment, the extricating nature of the pain and others. The market restraints are the complications of surgery such as risk of bleeding, infections, pain, high cost of sciatica treatment, and others.The global sciatica market is expected to reach USD 18.9 billion by 2023, and the market is projected to grow at a CAGR of ~ 8.0 % during the forecast period 2017-2023.Intended Audience Global Sciatica manufacturers & suppliers Research and development (R&D) companies Hospitals and clinics Academic institutes and universitiesSegmentsThe global sciatica market has been segmented on the basis of types, drug treatment, devices and end user.Based on the types, the market has been segmented as L4 nerve root sciatica, L5 nerve root sciatica, S1 nerve root sciatica and others.Based on the drugs, the market has been segmented as anesthetics, pain killers, muscle relaxants, antidepressants, steroids and others.Based on the non-drug treatment, the market has been segmented as physiotherapy, acupuncture, stimulation devices, surgery and others.Based on the end user, the market has been segmented as hospitals and clinics, research and academics and others.Regional AnalysisThe Americas accounts for a significant market share owing to high expenditure on the healthcare especially of the U.S. and Canada. Additionally, greater number of orthopedic procedures due to greater healthcare penetration in the U.S. and Canada drives the sciatica market. The high concentration of the major hospitals in the developed countries of this region coupled with good reimbursement rates is adding fuel to the market growth. Moreover, the large share of surgical procedures especially the sciatica treatment in the returns of hospitals favors the market. A large number of medical devices companies in the U.S. is also a cause for the faster development of sciatica market in the US.Europe is the second largest market in the world due to the growing medical devices industry and healthcare penetration. The European market growth is led by countries such as Germany and France. Germany is expected to be the fastest growing market over the assessment period due to its large medical devices industry.Asia Pacific region is expected to grow rapidly where China and India are likely to lead the market due to faster growing healthcare sector and larger unmet needs over the forecast period. The South East Asian countries such as China, India, and Malaysia are projected to contribute highly to the market growth. The growing penetration of healthcare industry in the Asia Pacific region is expected to drive the future sciatica market in the region.Gulf nations such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE are estimated to drive the Middle East & African market. Other Middle Eastern nations to watch out for are Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. The African region is expected to witness a poor growth owing to poor economic and political conditions, and poor healthcare development. Other regions are expected to be laggards due to poor social development and tribal identities such as sub Saharan Africa.Request Full Report @Key Players in the Global Sciatica MarketSome of the key players profiled in the report are Endo Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, Novartis AG, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, Neurotech, Nidd Valley Medical, Omega Laser Systems Ltd., Omron Healthcare, Inc., Sanofi 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 Antibacterial Drugs Market: is anticipated to rise at a CAGR of from 2017 to 2025 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=1567 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=1567 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=D&rep_id=1567 www.transparencymarketresearch.com/ Antibacterial Drugs Market: SnapshotAntibacterial drugs are the chemical substances which are derived from bacterium to cure bacterial infections. The global antibacterial drugs market is driven by the rapidly growing antibacterial resistance and demand for new broad spectrum agents. The same market is likely to face two challenges such as deficiency of return on investment and expiry of patented drugs. The global antibacterial drugs market also exhibits a robust pipeline and market penetration of generic drugs. This market identifies opportunities in Spanish market through investments by the major players. Additionally, an economic growth in Latin America would bring a positive impact on the global antibacterial drugs market.Enteral Segment Held Lead among Routes of AdministrationIn terms of routes of administration, the global antibacterial drugs market has been segmented into enteral, parenteral and others. The enteral segment is expected to witness the largest market share in 2016 and is expected to grow by a remarkable rate during the forecast period. The parenteral segment claimed the second largest market shared in 2016 although it is estimated that the market share of parenteral segment will decline during the forecast period, owning to a global trend of switching over parenteral route of administration to enteral route. The others segment (such as topical, inhalation) is expected to claim the least market share in 2016 although the market share is estimated to rise during the forecast period, due to increasing number of skin infections, conjunctivitis, inflammation in the middle ear etc.Get PDF Brochure of Report:Retail Stores and Drugs Stores Exhibit High Demand for Antibacterial DrugsThe global antibacterial drugs market has been further segmented into hospital pharmacies, drug stores and retail pharmacies and online sales, in terms of distribution channel. The retail stores and drug stores segment is anticipated to experience the largest market share in 2016 and this segment will grow by a significant rate during the forecast period, due to the increasing number of retail drugs stores, and the availability of antibacterial drugs through retail pharmacies and drugs stores. The hospital pharmacies segment is estimated to encounter the second largest market share in 2016 although the market share will decline during the forecast period, owing to the worldwide trend of hospital consolidations. The online sales segment is expected to face the least market share in 2016, although it will grow by a significant rate during the forecast period, owing to the global emerging trend of e-pharmacy.Get Sample Copy of The Report:North America Emerged as Leading Contributor but Europe to Report Higher GrowthGeographically, the global antibacterial drugs market is categorized into five regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East and Africa. The North America region is the leading contributor to the global antibacterial drugs market and will grow by a significant rate during the forecast period, due to the high infections rate, high diagnosis and treatment rate. Compared to the North America region, the Europe will grow by much faster rate during the forecast period, owing to the continuous inventions of antibacterial drugs in Europe. The Asia Pacific region is expected to claim the third largest share and this region will grow by the fastest rate among five regions, because of the huge patient pool and growing number of infected cases. The tendency of self-medications of antibacterial drugs is currently exhibited in Middle East and Africa and Latin America region.Prominent key players are Bayer AG, Pfizer Inc., Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline Plc. (GSK), Merck & Co., Inc., AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb Company, Novartis Ag, and Allergen Plc. In August 2016, Pfizer entered into an agreement with AstraZeneca to acquire the development and commercialization rights to its late-stage small molecule anti-infective business, primarily outside the U.S. GlaxoSmithKline Plc. acquired GlycoVaxyn AG, a specialist vaccine biopharmaceutical company. The acquisition will allow GlaxoSmithKline Plc. to share the innovative biological platform technology used for the development of therapeutic vaccines in treating bacterial infections in January 2015.Get Discount About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reportsContact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Global Market 2018: Key Players Arzon Solar (Amonix), Isofoton S.A., Magpower, Semprius Inc., Soitec https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3236333-global-concentrated-photovoltaic-cpv-market-research-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/enquiry/3236333-global-concentrated-photovoltaic-cpv-market-research-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/checkout?currency=one_user-USD&report_id=3236333 https://www.wiseguyreports.com Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) IndustryDescriptionWiseguyreports.Com Adds Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) -Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities and Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecast To 2023 To Its Research DatabaseThis report studies the global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) market status and forecast, categorizes the global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) 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).Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) is a photovoltaic technology that generates electricity from sunlight. Contrary to conventional photovoltaic systems, it uses lenses and curved mirrors to focus sunlight onto small, but highly efficient, multi-junction (MJ) solar cells. In addition, CPV systems often use solar trackers and sometimes a cooling system to further increase their efficiency. Ongoing research and development is rapidly improving their competitiveness in the utility-scale segment and in areas of high insolation. This sort of solar technology can be thus used in smaller areas.Owing to the cost of solar cells steadily are declining, Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) is facing great crisis. Because the industry is still in the leading stage of technology, a project need to raise a lot of money, what is more, industry gross margin is smaller. So, after 2013, there are large enterprises choose to close, exit, transfer business from Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV). However, these players still keeps a very positive wait-and-see attitude towards Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV).By comparing the IHS statistics CPV installation data, as well as interviews with the industry experts, we think that there will be a phase of outbreak of growth in Central America, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, etc. in the next few years.The global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) market is valued at 640 million US$ in 2017 and will reach 1130 million US$ by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of 7.5% during 2018-2025.Request for Sample Report @The major manufacturers covered in this reportArzon Solar (Amonix)Isofoton S.A.MagpowerSemprius Inc.SoitecSolar JunctionSilexSuncore PhotovoltaicSunpower CorporationZytech SolarSolFocusGeographically, 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 AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoLCPVHCPVOn 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, includingCommercialUtility-ScaleOthersLeave a Query @Table of ContentsGlobal Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Market Research Report 20181 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV)1.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 LCPV1.2.4 HCPV1.3 Global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Segment by Application1.3.1 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Commercial1.3.3 Utility-Scale1.3.4 Others1.4 Global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) 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 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)...7 Global Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Arzon Solar (Amonix)7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Arzon Solar (Amonix) Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Isofoton S.A.7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Isofoton S.A. Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Magpower7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Magpower Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 Semprius Inc.7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 Semprius Inc. Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 Soitec7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 Soitec Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2015-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 Solar Junction7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 Solar Junction Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 Silex7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 Silex Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.8 Suncore Photovoltaic7.8.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.8.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.8.2.1 Product A7.8.2.2 Product B7.8.3 Suncore Photovoltaic Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.8.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.9 Sunpower Corporation7.9.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.9.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.9.2.1 Product A7.9.2.2 Product B7.9.3 Sunpower Corporation Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.9.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.8 Zytech Solar7.10.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.10.2 Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Product Category, Application and Specification7.10.2.1 Product A7.10.2.2 Product B7.10.3 Zytech Solar Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.10.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.11 SolFocusBuy 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 Fibrous Dysplasia Market 2018: Key Players-Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc, Amgen Inc, AVEO Pharmaceuticals Inc, Bayer AG and Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Inc upto 2023 Fibrous Dysplasia Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4780 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/4780 Market ScenarioFibrous dysplasia is a rare and chronic bone disorder in which fibrous tissue develops in place of normal bone, weakens the affected bone, and deform or fracture it. As per reports from The Johns Hopkins University, the exact cause of fibrous dysplasia is unknown, but it is believed to be due to a chemical irregularity in a specific bone protein. This bone protein abnormality may arise due to a gene mutation present at birth, although it is not known to be an inherited disorder.It often results in uneven growth of bones, pain, brittle bones, and bone deformity. In fibrous dysplasia, the most commonly affected bones includes femur (thighbone), tibia (shin bone), ribs, skull, facial bones, humerus (the bone of the upper arm), pelvis, vertebrae in the spine (less often).View Reports Sample @The fibrous dysplasia market growth is majorly attributed to the increasing prevalence of the bone disorders. Moreover, some cases of fibrous dysplasia leads to cancer, which is likely to drive the market growth.Currently, no cure is available for fibrous dysplasia. However, present treatment methods helps to prevent complications, such as recurrent bone fractures to help make the condition less severe.According to reports from International Osteoporosis Foundation, Each year an estimated 1.5 million individuals suffer a fracture due to bone disease. The risk of a fracture increases with age and is more in women. Furthermore, globalization in healthcare has increased the market growth. Established market players in the developed countries leads the globalization by pushing new products and services into developing countries and emerging economies.However, high cost of the current treatment methods and lack of alternative methods for the treatment of fibrous dysplasia may slow the market growth during the forecast period.The global fibrous dysplasia market is expected to grow at a CAGR of ~6.2 % during the forecast period 2017-2023.Intended Audience Pharmaceutical Companies Research and Development (R&D) Companies Government Research Institute Academic Institutes and Universities Medical Research Laboratories Market Research and Consulting Service Providers Potential InvestorsSegmentationsThe global fibrous dysplasia market is segmented on the basis by diagnosis, by treatment, and by end user.On the basis of diagnosis, it is segmented into X-rays, CT scans, MRI, bone scan, biopsy, and others.On the basis of treatment, it is segmented into medications, surgical, and others. The medications is further segmented into bisphosphonates, intravenous (IV) pamidronate, calcitonin, raloxifene, and othersOn the basis of the end user, it is segmented into hospitals & clinics, research centers, and others.Regional AnalysisThe Americas dominate the global fibrous dysplasia market owing to well-developed technology, increasing patient with bone disorders, high healthcare spending, and increasing government support for research & development. Furthermore, increased R&D activities and the concentration of major companies have fuelled the growth of the market in this region.Europe holds the second position in the global fibrous dysplasia market owing to the government support for research & development and availability of funds for research. This is expected to continue to drive the European market over the forecasted period.Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market owing to the presence of rapidly developing healthcare technology, increasing patient population, and high healthcare expenditure. Moreover, increasing demand for new treatment methods in countries such as India is likely to emerge as the fastest growing market across the globe. Furthermore, increasing demand for quality devices in the healthcare is projected to lead to the use of advanced equipment, which, in turn, may increase the market growth of the fibrous dysplasia in the region.On the other hand, the Middle East & Africa holds the least share of the global fibrous dysplasia market due to limited screening, ignorance of diseases, and poor access to treatment, especially, in African region. Majority of the market of this region is held by the Middle East due to a well-developed healthcare sector and huge healthcare expenditure.Report with Discount Available @Key PlayersSome of key the players in the market are Novartis AG, Pfizer Inc, Amgen Inc, AVEO Pharmaceuticals Inc, Bayer AG, Bellicum Pharmaceuticals Inc, MediaPharma srl, Merck & Co., Inc, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc, Oncolys BioPharma Inc, United Therapeutics Corp 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 Bioactive Fillings Market, Global Key players-Septodont, Inc., DePuy Synthes, Medtronic, Stryker, Zimmer Biomet and SCHOTT AG during 2017 to 2023 Global Bioactive fillings Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/937 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/937 Market Synopsis of Global Bioactive fillings MarketMarket ScenarioBioactive fillings are surface reactive glass-ceramic biomaterials and have interaction with biological tissues. Bioactive fillings have biocompatibility and bioactivity and thus have a high application as implant material in the human body to repair and replace diseased tissue. Bioactive fillings reacts with the biological tissues in two phases. In the first phase, alkali metal ions are leached from the glass and replaced with hydrogen ions and in the second phase, the Si-O-Si bonds in the silica matrix undergo hydrolysis, yielding a gel-like surface layer rich on Si-O-H groups. In the ultimate stage, calcium phosphate-rich layer forms over the surface of the filling, sealing any further leaching. Bioactive fillings, interact with the body, and have been used in orthopaedics for decades. Bioactive fillings are made from compounds such as silicon oxide, calcium oxide, and phosphorous oxide, and has antimicrobial effect due to the release of calcium and phosphate ions which have an antibacterial activity and also tend to neutralize the local acidic pH. Bioactive fillings prolong the life of fillings because their antibacterial effects and replacement of lost minerals.View Reports Sample @The market drivers for global bioactive fillings market are rise in demand due to growing population, technological advancements, greater emphasis on restorative procedures, rising safety and success of bioactive fillings treatment, and others. The market restraints are poor mechanical weakness, low fracture resistance, poor load-bearing capacity and mechanical strength, possible toxicity, high cost of bioactive fillings treatment, rejection of the bioactive fillings and others.The global bioactive fillings market is expected to reach USD 6.8 billion by 2023, and the market is projected to grow at a CAGR of ~ 9.2 % during the forecast period 2017-2023.Intended Audience Global Bioactive fillings manufacturers & suppliers Research and development (R&D) companies Hospitals and clinics Academic institutes and universitiesSegmentsThe global bioactive fillings market has been segmented on the basis of material, applications and end user.Based on the material, the market has been segmented as silicon dioxide based, calcium oxide based, phosphorus pentoxide based, and sodium oxide based.Based on the applications, the market has been segmented as orthopedic, dental, tissue engineering and others.Based on the end user, the market has been segmented as orthopedic hospitals, dental hospitals, research and academics and others.Regional AnalysisThe Americas account for a significant market share owing to high expenditure on the health care especially of the U.S. and Canada. Additionally, the greater number of restorative procedures in the U.S. and Canada drives the bioactive fillings market. The high concentration of the major hospitals in the developed countries of this region coupled with good reimbursement rates is adding fuel to the market growth. Moreover, the large share of surgical restoration segment procedures in the returns of hospitals favors the market. The large number of medical devices companies in the U.S. is also a cause for the faster development of bioactive fillings market in the US.Europe is the second largest market in the world due to growing medical devices industry and healthcare penetration. The European market growth is led by countries such as Germany and France. Germany is expected to be the fastest growing market over the assessment period due to its large medical devices industry and its large research base.Asia Pacific region is expected to grow rapidly. China and India are likely to lead this market due to fast growing healthcare sector and large unmet needs over the forecast period. The South East Asian countries such as China, India, and Malaysia are projected to contribute highly to the market growth. The growing penetration of healthcare industry in the Asia Pacific region is expected to drive the future bioactive fillings market in the region.Gulf nations such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE are estimated to drive the Middle East & African market. Other Middle East nations to watch out for are Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. The African region is expected to witness a poor growth owing to poor economic and political conditions, and poor healthcare development. Other regions are expected to be laggards due to poor social development and tribal identities such as sub Saharan Africa.Report with Discount Available @Key Players in the Global Bioactive fillings MarketSome of the key players profiled in the report are Septodont, Inc., DePuy Synthes, Medtronic, Stryker, Zimmer Biomet, SCHOTT AG, Aap Implantate AG, GNI GROUP LTD., Arthrex, Inc., Baxter, 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 Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market 2018 - 2023 with SWOT Analysis regarding upcoming Changes and Technology Adaptations in Global Healthcare Sector Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5343 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/5343 Market Research Future published a half-cooked research report on global Merkel cell carcinoma market. The Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.40% during forecast period.Merkel cell carcinoma is a rare and aggressive type of skin cancer with a high risk of recurrence and metastasis. Most recurrences occur within two years after the diagnosis of the primary tumor. The main cause of the disease is Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCV). Majority of the geriatric population is affected by the disease. Moreover, the risk of developing the disease increases with long exposure to the sun. Thus, factors like increasing prevalence of Merkel cell carcinoma and growing geriatric population are estimated to be the major drivers for the market growth during the forecast period. According to a study published in the Current Dermatology Reports journal in 2014, the annual incidence of MCC was 0.6 per 100,000 people. Moreover, according to the United Nations Population Fund, the total geriatric population is expected to increase from 12.3% of the global population in 2016 to 22.0% of the global population by 2050. Moreover, increasing expenditure in R&D by the key market players, rising mortality rate by MCC, and growing healthcare expenditure are some of the factors that boost the market growth during the forecast period. However, the high cost of therapeutics and related side effects, lack of awareness, and low per capita healthcare expenditures in the middle and low-income countries is estimated to restrain the market growth during the forecast period.The Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market Is Segmented:on the basis of diagnosis, treatment, and end users. On the basis of the diagnosis, the market is categorized into physical examination, sentinel node biopsy, imaging tests, and others. The imaging tests segment is sub-segmented into X-ray, computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and others. On the basis of the treatment, the market is segmented into surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and others. The chemotherapy segment is sub-segmented into etoposide, cisplatin, and others. On the basis of the end user, the market is segmented into hospitals & clinics, diagnostic centers, research organization, and others.Key Players In The Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market:Pfizer Inc. (U.S.), Merck & Co., Inc. (U.S.), OncoSec Medical Incorporated (U.S.), Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (U.S.), General Electric Company (U.S.), Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc. (Germany), CANON MEDICAL SYSTEMS CORPORATION (Japan), Philips Health Care (The Netherlands), AstraZeneca (U.K), Mediso Ltd. Endomagnetics Limited (Hungary), and others are some of the major players in the Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market.Get Premium Sample Copy of Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market Report spread across 90 Premium Pages, 11+ Companies and Supported with 33 Tables and 42 Figures is Now Available atRegional Analysis:The Americas dominate the Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market owing to the presence of developed economies like the U.S. and Canada, a well-developed healthcare sector and high per capita healthcare expenditures. Moreover, the presence of the major market players within the region boosts the market growth.Europe is the second largest Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market, which is followed by Asia Pacific. Availability of funds for research, huge patient population, and government support for research & development is estimated to drive the market growth within the region. Apart from this, increasing number of patients suffering from skin cancer provides favorable backgrounds for market growth within the region. According to the Cancer Research U.K, 15,906 new cases of melanoma cancer were diagnosed in 2015, within the region.Asia Pacific is the fastest growing region for the market due to the presence of economies like India, Australia, and China along with the presence of developing healthcare sector in the market. Increasing prevalence of skin cancer, growing geriatric population, and rising healthcare expenditure boost the market growth within the region.On the other hand, the Middle East & Africa has the least share in the Merkel cell carcinoma market due to the presence of poor economies and stringent government policies, especially in the African region. Majority of the market of this region is held by the Middle East due to a well-developed healthcare sector and huge healthcare expenditure by the developed economies like Qatar, Dubai and others.Table of Content for Merkel Cell Carcinoma MarketChapter 1. Report PrologueChapter 2. Market Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope of the Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 LimitationsChapter 3. Research Methodology3.1 Introduction3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research3.4 Market Size EstimationChapter 4. Market Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restrains4.3 Opportunities4.4 Challenges4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4.6 Technology Trends & AssessmentChapter 5. Market Factor Analysis5.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis5.1.1 Bargaining Power of Suppliers5.1.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers5.1.3 Threat of New Entrants5.1.4 Threat of Substitutes5.1.5 Intensity of Rivalry5.2 Value Chain Analysis5.3 Investment Feasibility Analysis5.4 Pricing AnalysisLIST OF TABLESTable 1 Merkel Cell Carcinoma Synopsis, 2016 2023Table 2 Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market Estimates and Forecast, 2016 2023, (USD Million)Table 3 Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market by Region, 2016 2023, (USD Million)Table 4 Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market by Diagnosis, 2016 2023, (USD Million)Table 5 Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market by Treatment, 2016 2023, (USD Million)Table 6 Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market by End User, 2016 2023, (USD Million)LIST OF FIGURESFigure 1 Research ProcessFigure 2 Segmentation for Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma MarketFigure 3 Market Dynamics for Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma MarketFigure 4 Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market Share, By Diagnosis 2016Figure 5 Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market Share, By Treatment 2016Figure 6 Global Merkel Cell Carcinoma Market Share, By End User, 2016ContinuedApply for Discount atAbout 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 FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comMRFR has the distinguished objective of providing the optimal quality research and granular research to 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 answer your most important questions.Our Research Analysts are eager to share their knowledge and assist you in refining market research parameters, choosing right market studies, and evaluating both the market scope and the research methodologies of varied segments.We bridge the gap between our clients and their clients by identifying and decoding just the target group, while generating leads with the highest accuracy.Years of research into diverse fields of work has ingrained within us, a proficiency so distinguished that our industry-specific specialists identify with your business ideas and feel the pulse of your challenges and opportunities. This enables us for providing assistance, through our consulting and strategic consulting services, in informed managerial decision making. In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industries, WantStats Research and Media often conducts industrial visits for its research analysts. Relevant inputs from various established market participants, help our clients make significant contribution in respective markets are a huge motivation for all of us to endlessly furnish quality. We depend greatly on profound insights into complex realms of our study.Pune, India Mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis & treatment Market 2018 Research, Analysis and Forecasted Healthcare Industry with Upcoming Trends and Expectations by 2020 Mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis & treatment Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/3950 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/3950 The report for Global Mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis & treatment Market by 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 a deeper insight of the market and industry performance.Mitochondrial myopathies are associated with mitochondrial diseases which are caused by certain nuclear DNA deletions and mutations. Mitochondrial myopathies affect mitochondria which is responsible for energy production within a cell associated with mitochondrial disease. Thus, they cause low energy and free radical production which results in a variety of symptoms.The factors such as rising number of screening services for mitochondrial disorders, growing number of mitochondrial myopathy cases, increased government funding and incentives for rare genetic diseases are driving the market for mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis & treatment. However, poor treatment options and absence of curative treatment have constrained the market.Considering all these factors, Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market is expected to reach $ 33.6 million by the end of 2020, this market is projected to growing at a CAGR of ~ 9.82 % during 2017-2020.Key players of Global Mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis & treatment Market:Key players profiled in the report are Centogene AG, GeneDx, Ixchel Pharma, Khondrion BV, Mitobridge, NeuroVive Pharmaceutical AB, Reata Pharmaceuticals Inc., Stealth Biotherapeutics and others.Get Premium Sample Copy of Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market Report spread across 61 Premium Pages, 11 Companies and Supported with 17 Tables and 13 Figures is Now Available atSegments:The Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market is segmented on the basis of type, diagnostic tests and therapy. Based on type, the market has been segmented as mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes (MELAS), progressive external ophthalmoplegia (PEO), myoclonic epilepsy with ragged red fibres (MERRF), mitochondrial neurogastrointestinal encephalopathy syndrome (MNGIE), KearnsSayre syndrome (KSS), mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDS), Pearson syndrome, Leigh syndrome, neuropathy, ataxia, and retinitis pigmentosa (NARP). Based on the diagnostic tests, the market has been segmented as genetic tests, muscle biopsy and biochemical test. Based on the therapy, the market has been segmented as supportive therapy and targeted therapy.Regional analysis:The Americas account for the maximum market share due to favorable reimbursement scenario and greater expenditure on healthcare. The Americas mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis & treatment market is expected to reach USD 116.7 million by the end of 2025 at the CAGR of 19.39% during 2017 to 2025. The faster market uptake of new technology in the US is also an important driver of the market for global mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis & treatment. Europe is the second largest market due to large disposable income and rising awareness. Asia Pacific region is expected to have the most future potential and it is estimated to be led by China and India. The Asia Pacific mitochondrial myopathy diagnosis & treatment market is expected to reach USD 4.4 million by the end of 2020 at the CAGR of 9.94% during 2017 to 2020. The Middle East & Africa market is led by the gulf nations particularly Saudi Arabia and UAE. The regions of Africa are expected to witness a moderate growth due to poor economic and political conditions and poor healthcare penetration.Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market Table of Contents1 Introduction1.1 Definition1.2 Scope of Study1.3 Research Objective1.4 Assumptions & Limitations1.4.1 Assumptions1.4.2 Limitations1.5 Market Structure2 Research Methodology2.1 Research Process2.2 Primary Research2.3 Secondary Research3 Market Dynamics3.1 Introduction3.2 Drivers3.2.1 Rise In Number Of Mitochondrial Myopathy Incidence Rate And Growing Number Of Screening services.3.2.2 Government Funding And Incentives For Rare Genetic Diseases3.3 Restraints3.3.1 Poor Treatment Options And Absence Of Curative Treatment3.3.2 Lack Of Awareness And Diagnosis Of The Rare Mitochondrial Disorders3.4 Opportunities3.4.1 Faster Market Uptake And Low Marketing Cost3.4.2 Research And Development3.5 Challenges4 Market Factor Analysis4.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis4.1.1 Threat From A New Entrant4.1.2 Bargaining Power Of Buyer4.1.3 Bargaining Power Of Supplier4.1.4 Threat From Substitute4.1.5 Intensity Of Competitive Rivalry4.2 Pipeline Analysis4.2.1 Introduction4.2.2 KH1764.2.3 Elamipretide4.2.4 RTA 4084.2.5 IXC 1034.2.6 NV5564.3 Mega Trends10 List of TablesTable 1 Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market: Pipeline Analysis 23Table 2 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market, By Type, 2014 -2020 (Usd Million) 34Table 3 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market, By Type 2021 - 2025 (Usd Million) 35Table 4 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market, By Diagnostic Test, 2014-2020 (Usd Million) 38Table 5 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market, By Diagnostic Test, 2021-2025 (Usd Million) 38Table 6 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market, By Therapy, 2014-2020 (Usd Million) 4011 List of FiguresFigure 1 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market: Market Structure 11Figure 2 Research Process of Mrfr 12Figure 3 Forecast Indicators 14Figure 4 Porters Five Forces Model 19Figure 5 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market by Type, 2016, 2021 & 2025 (Usd Million) 34Figure 6 Global Mitochondrial Myopathy Diagnosis & Treatment Market by Diagnostic Test, 2016, 2021 & 2025 (Usd Million) 37 Toc ContinuedCheck Discount @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 FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comMRFR has the distinguished objective of providing the optimal quality research and granular research to 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 answer your most important questions.Our Research Analysts are eager to share their knowledge and assist you in refining market research parameters, choosing right market studies, and evaluating both the market scope and the research methodologies of varied segments.We bridge the gap between our clients and their clients by identifying and decoding just the target group, while generating leads with the highest accuracy.Years of research into diverse fields of work has ingrained within us, a proficiency so distinguished that our industry-specific specialists identify with your business ideas and feel the pulse of your challenges and opportunities. 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We depend greatly on profound insights into complex realms of our study.Pune, India 3D Printing Medical Devices Market Size, Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook, Application Development Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2022 https://www.researchnreports.com/request_sample.php?id=10620 https://www.researchnreports.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=10620 https://www.researchnreports.com/enquiry_before_buying.php?id=10620 This market research report gives an in-depth idea about the global 3D Printing Medical Devices market. It highlights the recent market scenario, growth in the past few years, and opportunities present for manufacturers in the future. In this research for the completion of both primary and secondary details, methods and tools are used. Also, investments instigated by organizations, government, non-government bodies, and institutions are projected in details for better understanding about the market.Get Sample Copy of this Report@:This 3D Printing Medical Devices market research is an intelligence report with meticulous efforts undertaken to study the right and valuable information. The data which has been looked upon is done considering both, the existing top players and the upcoming competitors. Business strategies of the key players and the new entering market industries are studied in detail. Well explained SWOT analysis, revenue share and contact information are shared in this report analysis.Get Discount on this Report@:For a stronger and more stable business outlook, the report on the global 3D Printing Medical Devices market carries key projections that can be practically studied. The research on the global 3D Printing Medical Devices market will be useful to investors, regularity authorities, and policy makers, state the analysts. Independent research institutions, commercial entities, and non-profit organization in this sector can also benefit from the report.For More Information / Ask your queries@:To achieve this, the research segments and sub-segments the global 3D Printing Medical Devices market by using many criteria. The growth predictions for each of these segments are included in the report. Finally, the research directs its focus towards the possible strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that can affect the growth of the global 3D Printing Medical Devices market. The feasibility of new projects is also measured in the report by the analysts.The study presents an evaluation of the factors that are expected to inhibit or boost the progress of the global 3D Printing Medical Devices market. The global 3D Printing Medical Devices market has been examined thoroughly on the basis of key criteria such as end user, application, product, technology, and region. An analysis has been provided in the report of the key geographical segments and their share and position in the market. The estimated revenue and volume growth of the global 3D Printing Medical Devices market has also been offered in the report.Table of ContentsGlobal 3D Printing Medical Devices Market Research ReportChapter 1 3D Printing Medical Devices Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic Impact on IndustryChapter 3 Global Market Competition by ManufacturersChapter 4 Global Production, Revenue (Value) by RegionChapter 5 Global Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by RegionsChapter 6 Global Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 Global Market Analysis by ApplicationChapter 8 Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11 Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12 Global Market ForecastAbout us:We provide global consulting that can transform businesses and give you an experience of innovative solutions and outcomes.Research N Reports helps clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. We have successfully guided businesses throughout the world with our market research reports. We are uniquely positioned to lead digital transformations, thus creating greater value for clients by presenting growth opportunities in the global market.Our profound experience provides a clear and confident vision to help clients navigate the future. Research N Reports techniques encompasses both qualitative and quantitative modes to provide customized and highly flexible tailored research studies so that you get information that is just the best-fit to make informed strategic organizational decisions. Research N Reports helps clients decode the future to be more successful and innovative.Contact us:Sunny DenisU.S. Address10916, Gold Point, Dr,Houston, TX - 77064E-mail:sales@researchnreports.comPhone:+1 888-631-6977 Jun 19, 2018 New University of Nottingham research proves that advanced materials containing molecules that switch states in response to environmental stimuli such as light can be fabricated using 3D printing. Advanced material containing photochromic properties. (Image: University of Nottingham) The research, led by Dr Victor Sans Sangorrin from the Faculty of Engineering and Dr Graham Newton from the School of Chemistry, is supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the German Academic Exchange service (DAAD) and the University of Nottingham. "This bottom-up approach to device fabrication will push the boundaries of additive manufacturing like never before. Using a unique integrated design approach, we have demonstrated functional synergy between photochromic molecules and polymers in a fully 3D-printed device. Our approach expands the toolbox of advanced materials available to engineers developing devices for real-world problems," explains Dr Sans. To demonstrate their concept, the team developed a photoactive molecule that changes from colourless to blue when irradiated with light. The colour change can then be reversed by exposure to oxygen from the air. Blue cube made from advanced material containing photochromic molecules. (Image: University of Nottingham) The researchers then 3D-printed composite materials by combining the photoactive molecules with a tailor-made polymer, yielding a new material that can store information reversibly. Dr Newton, said: "We can now take any molecules that change properties upon exposure to light and print them into composites with almost any shape or size. In theory, it would be possible to reversibly encode something quite complex like a QR code or a barcode, and then wipe the material clean, almost like cleaning a whiteboard with an eraser. While our devices currently operate using colour changes, this approach could be used to develop materials for energy storage and electronics." The study findings have the potential to vastly increase the functional capabilities of 3D printed devices for industries such as electronics, healthcare and quantum computing. The research is published in the academic journal, Advanced Materials. Posted in 3D Printing Application Source: University of Nottingham Maybe you also like: ANCA Associated Diseases/Vasculitis Market Value Projected to Expand by 2025 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=42074 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/anca-associated-diseases-vasculitis-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Vasculitis is an autoimmune disease in which the body comes under attack from its own immune system, especially neutrophils, and in some cases it is also caused by reactions to medicines. It is a term for a group of rare diseases that are characterized by a condition that destroys blood vessels through inflammation. It can range from mild to life threatening and short term to long term. Vasculitis is caused by leukocyte migration and can affect arteries and veins in the body. It is found in both sexes and people of all ages. Antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) is a type of vasculitis. AAV is a group of three diseases including eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis, granulomatosis with polyangiitis, and microscopic polyangiitis.AAV can affect small and medium blood vessels including arteries, veins, and capillaries in the body. It can cause poor blood flow to organs such as lungs, kidneys, nerves, and skin. AAV causes inflammation of blood vessels as it blocks or closes the path for blood flow, which can lead to aneurysms. The symptoms of vasculitis include shortness of breath, reddish spots on the skin, numbness, and sores. Vasculitis of the kidneys may produce no symptoms at first. However, it can lead to a serious condition. Vasculitis can be treated with immunosuppressive drugs, and its early detection and treatment can prevent permanent damage. The primary treatment for vasculitis includes the use of glucocorticoids. The dosage and the length of the treatment depends on the severity of the disease, history, and condition of the patient.Rise in incidences of metabolic disorders and circulatory diseases and changing lifestyle are likely to increase the prevelance of this disease, driving the ANCA Associated Diseases/Vasculitis Market. However, lack of awareness is likely to restrain the ANCA Associated Diseases/Vasculitis market in the near future.Request to View Brochure of Report -The treatment of AAV is divided into two phases. The first phase of treatment is induction of remission and the second phase of treatment is maintenance. The antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) treatment market can be segmented based on route of administration of drug, distribution channel, and region. Based on the route of administration of drug, the antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) treatment market can be classified into parenteral, oral, nasal, and topical. The parenteral route segment accounts for a dominant share of the ANCA Associated Diseases/Vasculitis market due to higher availability and stability of the drug in the injectable form and immediate response. In terms of distribution channel, the antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) treatment market can be categorized into retail store, pharmacy, and e-commerce. The e-commerce segment is expected to account for a prominent market share by 2025 due to user convenience and increase in awareness about self-medication.Based on region, the antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) market can be split into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the ANCA Associated Diseases/Vasculitis market owing to increased awareness and high incidences of circulatory diseases and changing lifestyle. Europe is also a prominent region of the market due to advancement in health care technologies in the region. In addition, Asia Pacific is a rapidly expanding region of the Antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis (AAV) treatment market because of changing lifestyle, rise in population following an urban lifestyle, and significant expansion in the economy of this region.Some of the key players engaged in developing vasculitis therapeutics ANCA Associated Diseases/Vasculitismarket are Novartis AG, GlaxoSmithKline plc, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., RNL BIO Co., Ltd., Human Genome Sciences, Inc. Johnson & Johnsons, and Genentech, Inc. among others.View Report -About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Screen Protector Market 2018 to 2023 by Global Key Leaders: OtterBox, ZAGG, 3M, BELKIN, Tech Armor, MOSHI, XtremeGuard, Halo Screen Protector Film , PowerSupport, intelliARMOR https://www.reportsandinsights.com/sample-request/global-screen-protector-market-by-manufacturers-forecast-to-2023 https://www.reportsandinsights.com/reports/global-screen-protector-market-by-manufacturers-forecast-to-2023 www.reportsandinsights.com Reportsandinsights.com Presents Global Screen Protector Market Size, Status and Forecast 2023 New Document to its Studies Database. The Report Contain 108 Pages with Detailed AnalysisDescriptionA screen protector is a layer of protective film to avoid scratches, wear, or contamination on the screen surface of an electronic product. Now screen protectors are widely used for mobile phones, tablets, laptops, LCD TVs, handheld video game devices, cameras, GPS unit, e-book readers and other electronic items. Especially after the emergence of intelligent mobile phone, screen protector has been widely used.Get a Sample Report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Screen Protector in global market, especially in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, types and applications.Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversOtterBoxZAGG3MBELKINTech ArmorMOSHIXtremeGuardHalo Screen Protector FilmPowerSupportintelliARMORCrystal ArmorSpigenAir-JBodyGuardzSimplismNuShieldiCarezScreen CaresPanzerGlassMomaxNillkinAmplimBenksDEFFZupoolCapdaseCROCFOLKindweiMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversPETTempered GlassOtherMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoMobile PhonesTabletsGet Complete Report @Table Of Contents Major Key PointsGlobal Screen Protector Market Size, Status and Forecast 2023Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Screen Protector Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 PET1.2.2 Tempered Glass1.2.3 Other1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Mobile Phones1.3.2 Tablets1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 United States Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.2 Canada Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.2 France Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.3 UK Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.4 Russia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.5 Italy Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.2 Japan Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.3 Korea Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.4 India Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 OtterBox2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 OtterBox Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 ZAGG2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 ZAGG Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 3M2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 3M Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 BELKIN2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 BELKIN Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Tech Armor2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 Tech Armor Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 MOSHI2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 MOSHI Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 XtremeGuard2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 XtremeGuard Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Halo Screen Protector Film2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 Halo Screen Protector Film Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 PowerSupport2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 PowerSupport Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 intelliARMOR2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 intelliARMOR Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 Crystal Armor2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 Crystal Armor Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 Spigen2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 Spigen Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 Air-J2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Type 12.13.2.2 Type 22.13.3 Air-J Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 BodyGuardz2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Type 12.14.2.2 Type 22.14.3 BodyGuardz Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.15 Simplism2.15.1 Business Overview2.15.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.15.2.1 Type 12.15.2.2 Type 22.15.3 Simplism Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.16 NuShield2.16.1 Business Overview2.16.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.16.2.1 Type 12.16.2.2 Type 22.16.3 NuShield Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.17 iCarez2.17.1 Business Overview2.17.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.17.2.1 Type 12.17.2.2 Type 22.17.3 iCarez Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.18 Screen Cares2.18.1 Business Overview2.18.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.18.2.1 Type 12.18.2.2 Type 22.18.3 Screen Cares Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.19 PanzerGlass2.19.1 Business Overview2.19.2 Screen Protector Type and Applications2.19.2.1 Type 12.19.2.2 Type 22.19.3 PanzerGlass Screen Protector Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)..CONTINUEDAbout UsReports and Insights is initiated by a group of like-minded vibrant young industry professionals who have come together with a singular mission to develop a one-stop-shop for the best-in-class insightful, market research & intelligence reports spanning various industry verticals, segments that would provide global corporates, start-ups with quality actionable insights enabling them to strategically understand, develop and grow their market position.CONTACT US :Reports and Insightssales@reportsandinsights.comPh: +1 424 2554 365 (US) Dental Restoration Products Market 2018 Global Key Leaders: Danaher Corporation, DENTSPLY Sirona, Zimmer Biomet Holdings, 3M Company, Ultradent Products, Young Innovations https://www.reportsandinsights.com/sample-request/global-dental-restoration-products-market-research-report-2018 https://www.reportsandinsights.com/reports/global-dental-restoration-products-market-research-report-2018 www.reportsandinsights.com Reportsandinsights.com Presents Global Dental Restoration Products Market Size, Status and Forecast New Document to its Studies Database. The Report Contain 119 Pages with Detailed AnalysisDescription:This report studies the global Dental Restoration Products market status and forecast, categorizes the global Dental Restoration Products 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.Get a Sample Report @The major manufacturers covered in this reportStraumann AG (Switzerland)Danaher Corporation (U.S.)DENTSPLY Sirona, Inc. (U.S.)Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Inc. (U.S.)3M Company (U.S.)Ultradent Products, Inc. (U.S.)Young Innovations Inc. (U.S.)Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. (Japan)GC Corporation (Japan)Henry Schein, Inc. (U.S.)Dentatus USA Ltd. (U.S.)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 & AfricaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoDental ImplantsDental ProstheticsOthersOn 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, includingDental Hospitals and ClinicsDental Academic and Research InstitutesForensic LaboratoriesGet a Complete Report @Continued.....Table of ContentsGlobal Dental Restoration Products Market Research Report 20181 Dental Restoration Products Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Dental Restoration Products1.2 Dental Restoration Products Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Dental Restoration Products Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Dental Restoration Products Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Dental Implants1.2.4 Dental Prosthetics1.2.5 Others1.3 Global Dental Restoration Products Segment by Application1.3.1 Dental Restoration Products Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Dental Hospitals and Clinics1.3.3 Dental Academic and Research Institutes1.3.4 Forensic Laboratories1.4 Global Dental Restoration Products Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Dental Restoration Products 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 Dental Restoration Products (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Dental Restoration Products Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Dental Restoration Products Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)2 Global Dental Restoration Products Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Dental Restoration Products Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Dental Restoration Products Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Dental Restoration Products Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Dental Restoration Products Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Dental Restoration Products Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Dental Restoration Products Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Dental Restoration Products Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Dental Restoration Products Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Dental Restoration Products Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global Dental Restoration Products Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Dental Restoration Products Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Dental Restoration Products Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Dental Restoration Products Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Dental Restoration Products Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America Dental Restoration Products Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe Dental Restoration Products Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 Asia-Pacific Dental Restoration Products Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.8 South America Dental Restoration Products Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.9 Middle East & Africa Dental Restoration Products Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)..CONTINUEDAbout UsReports and Insights is initiated by a group of like-minded vibrant young industry professionals who have come together with a singular mission to develop a one-stop-shop for the best-in-class insightful, market research & intelligence reports spanning various industry verticals, segments that would provide global corporates, start-ups with quality actionable insights enabling them to strategically understand, develop and grow their market position.CONTACT US :Reports and Insightssales@reportsandinsights.comPh: +1 424 2554 365 (US) Professional/Digital mobile radio (DMR) Market Size will Grow Profitably in the Near Future https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=42311 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/professional-digital-mobile-radio-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com A professional mobile radio (PMR) system is a wireless communication system that is used in emergency services, public works organizations, fire and police departments, transportation, and companies with vast vehicle fleets and an expansive network of on-field staff. It is one of the most convenient means of communication today. It provides advanced features such as broadcast calls, group calls, emergency calls, and prioritization of users that help in the well-organized functioning of enterprises and government establishments. PMR is widely used as a convenient means of communication by enterprises and government establishments. Rise in need to improve efficiency of radio communications systems and public safety organizations is primarily driving the adoption of PMR systems. Convergence of public and private long-term evolution (LTE) networks with PMR technology has led to the expansion of the global professional mobile radio market. Moreover, increase in demand for reliable and cost effective PMRs is expected to fuel the expansion of the market during the forecast period. The professional mobile radio market is expected to expand to US$ 15,779.5 Mn in 2026 from US$ 36,285.7 Mn in 2017, expanding at a CAGR of 9.8%.Professional mobile radio systems are designed for mission critical communication operation in different sectors. Professional mobile radio is a rapidly expanding and dynamic area. Professional mobile radios are built on digital and analog technology. Although in more recent times, the demand for digital technology-based mobile radios has increased significantly. The professional mobile radio market is expected to expand significantly in the near future due to rise in importance of efficient mission-critical operations and the expansion of long term evolution (LTE) network, which is leading to higher demand for LTE-integrated PMR devices.Get PDF Sample of This Report @Demand for reliable and cost-effective PMR devices and increasing usage of PMR devices in public safety and mission critical applications in government organizations have led to the expansion of the global professional mobile radio market. With technological advancements, there has been multi-pronged development, especially in digital PMR systems. Integration of PMR systems with high-speed cellular networks is expected to boost the expansion of the PMR systems market. However, rise in adoption of LTE and increase in concerns regarding cross border security issues are projected to hamper the expansion of the professional mobile radio market.Based on technology, the professional mobile radio market can be segmented into digital technology and analog technology. The project 25 (P25) sub-segment of the digital technology segment accounted for a significant market share globally in 2017. The sub-segment is projected to maintain its leading position over the forecast period. Moreover, this segment is estimated to expand rapidly during the forecast period due to a large user base in North America and Asia Pacific. The digital mobile radio (DMR) sub-segment is also estimated to expand at a significant pace over the forecast period due to increase in application of DMR in various end-use sectors.View Our Report @In terms of application, the public safety segment accounted for a major share of the professional mobile radio market and is estimated to maintain its leading position over the forecast period. Rise in adoption of PMR systems in the military and defense sector, fire department, and emergency & medical services sector is expected to propel demand during the forecast period. In terms of application, the public safety sector is one of the most favored application areas of professional mobile radio devices and is evolving steadily due to increase in number of users in various end-use industries.The global professional mobile radio market is expected to expand at a rapid pace during 20182026. North America is anticipated to contribute a significant amount of revenue to the professional mobile radio market during the forecast period due to a large number of existing customers. Asia Pacific is anticipated to follow a similar trend during 20182026. Further, the market in Middle East & Africa is projected to expand at a significant CAGR growth after South America and Asia Pacific.Attracted by this steadily expanding market and underlying demand, many players are driven to invest in the professional mobile radio devices market. System and software developers, integrators, and professional services providers across industries are strengthening their position in the professional mobile radio market. Product innovation and upgrade of research and development are constantly taking place in the professional mobile radio market. For instance, in October 2014, Motorola Solutions introduced MOTOTRBO SL300 digital portable radio, a reliable push-to-talk communication device. Prominent players identified in the professional mobile radio market and profiled in the study include Sepura PLC. , Motorola Solutions, Inc., Harris Corporation, Jvckenwood Corporation, Tait Communications, Codan Radio Communications, Hytera Communications Corporation Limited, and Raytheon Company.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Transparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Global Refinery Catalyst Market is dominated by JGC C&C, Honeywell International Inc, Haldor Topsoe A/S, Filtra Catalysts and Chemicals Ltd. Global Refinery Catalyst Market Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025 http://databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=global-refinery-catalyst-market http://databridgemarketresearch.com/speak-to-analyst/?dbmr=global-refinery-catalyst-market http://databridgemarketresearch.com/inquire-before-buying/?dbmr=global-refinery-catalyst-market Refinery Catalyst Market By Type (FCC Catalysts, Hydrotreating Catalysts, Hydrocracking Catalysts, and Catalytic Reforming Catalysts), By Ingredient (Zeolites, Metals, and Chemical Compounds), By Geography (North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025The Global Refinery Catalyst Market is expected to reach USD 8.7 billion by 2025, from USD 7.1 billion in 2017 growing at a CAGR of 4.5 % during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025. The upcoming market report contains data for historic years 2015 & 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.Download PDF sample copy of this research report@Top Competitors:Some of the major players operating in the global refinery catalyst market are:-JGC C&C, Honeywell International Inc, Haldor Topsoe A/S, Filtra Catalysts and Chemicals Ltd., Exxon Mobil Corporation., Criterion Catalysts & Technologies L.P., Clariant, China Petrochemical Corporation., Chempack, BASF SE, Axens, Arkema, Anten Chemical Co, Albemarle Corporation, W. R. Grace & Co, NESTE , Advameg, Inc. , Business wire among others.To Avail 10% Discount On This Report Mail Us on: - sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comMarket Definition:This market report defines the market trends and forecast the upcoming opportunities and threats of the refinery catalyst market in the next 8 years. Refining catalysts is that chemical compound which increases the rate of organic reaction without any change in chemical component. They are mainly used by petroleum refineries to enhance manufacturing quantity and functional efficiency. Refinery catalysts are used for methods such as catalytic reforming, hydro treating and cracking, FCC, and catalytic reforming. It plays a vital role in giving the fuel standards, emission standards, and improving selectivity and conversion. FCC catalysts are used to change the heavy atmospheric residues and vacuum distillates into parts of motor fuels. It is also beneficial in the conversion of petroleum refinery naphthas into high-octane liquid products during the petroleum refining processes.Speak to our experts @Competitive Analysis:The Global Refinery Catalyst Market is highly fragmented and the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of refinery catalyst market for global, Europe, North America, Asia pacific and South America.Inquire before Buying @Key Questions Answered in Global Refinery Catalyst Market Report:-What will the market growth rate, Overview and Analysis by Type of Global Refinery Catalyst Market in 2025?What are the key factors driving, Analysis by Applications and Global Refinery Catalyst Market?What are Dynamics, This Overview Includes Analysis of Scope, and price analysis of top Vendors Profiles of Global Refinery Catalyst Market?Who are Opportunities, Risk and Driving Force of Global Refinery Catalyst Market?Who are the opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in Global Refinery Catalyst Market?What are the Global Refinery Catalyst Market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Market?About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com Network Security Market Size will Grow Profitably in the Near Future https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=579 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=T&rep_id=579 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/network-security-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com The global market for network security is witnessing constant growth, thanks to the increasing visualization of servers resulting in the adoption of innovative and new network security solutions. In addition, the rise in the use of network security solutions by medium- and small-sized businesses across the globe is expected to accelerate the development of the overall market in the next few years. The growing demand for workforce mobility, which is projected to offer improved security solutions in order to protect PDAs, laptops, and smart phones from cyber-attacks and malwares is further anticipated to contribute towards the markets growth.The research study offers a detailed overview of the global network security market, providing information related to the market dynamics, which are likely to impact the growth of the market in the near future. In addition, the growth drivers, barriers, latest trends, opportunities, and challenges in the global market have been highlighted to offer a strong understanding of the market.Get PDF Sample of This Report @The tremendously rising use of mobile devices and the rising demand for integrated security solutions are some of the important factors that are anticipated to fuel the growth of the global network security market in the next few years. In addition, a significant rise in the regulatory compliance requirements is likely to accelerate the growth of the overall market in the next few years. The growing popularity of Software as a Service-based network security solutions is considered as a major factor encouraging the growth of the overall market.On the flip side, the absence of efficient security solutions and complexity of network infrastructure are estimated to hamper the growth of the global network security market. Additionally, threats arising from open-source network security solutions and technical defects are some of the other factors predicted to inhibit the markets growth in the next few years. Nevertheless, a significant rise in the number of DDoS attacks and the rising number of mergers and acquisitions are estimated to contribute towards the growth of the market.Get ToC of This Report @The global market for network security can be categorized on the basis of product type into intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IDP), next generation hybrid solutions, low end hybrid solutions, high end hybrid solutions, and virtual private network (VPN) gateways. The increasing need to implement network security, owing to the increasing use of mobile phone is accelerating the market growth. In addition, new products and the rising number of applications are likely to encourage growth in the near future. The share, size, and the projected growth rate of each segment have been included in the scope of the research study.Furthermore, on the basis of geography, the global network security market can be divided into four segments. As per the research study, North America is projected to witness progressive growth throughout the forecast period. Technological advancements in this field and innovations are some of the key factors that are estimated to boost the growth of the network security market in North America in the next few years.View Our Report @The global network security market is predicted to witness progressive growth throughout the forecast period. The growing emphasis on technological developments and new product development are anticipated to offer promising opportunities for market players in the next few years. Some of the leading players operating in the network security market across the globe are Enterasys, WatchGuard, Fortinet Inc., Symantec, Juniper Networks Inc., Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., NFR, Avaya, IBM ISS, Nokia, Alcatel, Assured Digital, CyberGuard, NetScreen, ISS, Lucent, McAfee, Fortress, SonicWall, Network Associates, Cisco Systems Inc., Computer Associates, Nortel, and Intrusion.Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Transparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Global Nursing Pads Market Developments and Forecast 2022 - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth and Global Trends https://www.researchnreports.com/request_sample.php?id=9281 https://www.researchnreports.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=9281 www.researchnreports.com This study report on global Nursing Pads market throws light on the crucial trends and dynamics impacting the development of the market, including the restraints, drivers, and opportunities. The report talks about the competitive environment prevailing in the Nursing Pads market worldwide. The report lists the key players in the market and also provides insightful information about them such as their business overview, product segmentation, and revenue segmentation. Further, the report studies the market share held by the key players and forecast their growth during the next couple of years. The report also looks at the latest developments among the key players in the Nursing Pads market such as partnerships, mergers, and acquisitions.Get Sample copy of this report now at:The Global Nursing Pads 2018 Market Research Report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Nursing Pads market. The report provides a basic overview of the Nursing Pads industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure.Development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures are also analyzed. This report also states import/export consumption, supply and demand figures, cost, price, revenue and gross margins. The report then analyzes the global Nursing Pads market size (volume and value), and the sales segment market is also discussed by product type, application and region.Further, the key geographical segments of the global Nursing Pads market have been discussed in the research study. The key factors that are boosting the growth of the key segments have been offered in the study. A detailed study of the competitive landscape of the global Nursing Pads market have been given, presenting insights into the company profiles, financial status, recent developments, mergers and acquisitions, and the SWOT analysis. This research will give a clear idea to the readers about the overall market scenario to further decide on this market project.The global Nursing Pads market is anticipated to register a significant CAGR over a forecast period. The increasing prevalence of the diseases globally is expected to boost the demand and drive the global market. The increasing research and development activities for the new drugs and new combinations of drugs, is also anticipated to drive the market. The strong initiatives taken by the various state governments and regulatory bodies such as U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reduce the prevalence of diseases throughout the world, is likewise expected to fuel the demand and has become the one of the factor that drives the global market over a forecast period.Now get discount at:However, the possible side effects of the may hamper the demand and restrain the growth of the global Nursing Pads market. The availability of pure quality of drugs in the Southeast Asia and Saharan African countries leads to the inadequate treatment, which may pose a threat to the demand of and restrain the growth of the global market during the study period.Geographically, the global market is segmented into: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa and Latin America. Currently, North America is contributing foremost share to the global Nursing Pads market in terms of value and is anticipated to register a significant CAGR over the research period. Moreover, Europe is also subsidizing moderate market shares due to the advanced medical facilities and availability of the drugs in the market.Asia-Pacific is the most lucrative market due to the highest prevalence of diseases in the region and expected to show a robust growth in the global market. Middle East & Africa is at a nascent stage and is projected to register a decent growth throughout the forecast period. Overall, the global market is expected to show substantial growth over the estimated period.The report also includes a thorough overview of the competitive landscape and regulatory framework of the global Nursing Pads market. This will offer readers a perfect understanding of the state of competition, threats, major opportunities, and the major rules, regulations, plans, and policies impacting the market.About Research N Reports:Research N Reports is a new age market research firm where we focus on providing information that can be effectively applied. Today being a consumer driven market, companies require information to deal with the complex and dynamic world of choices. Where relying on a sound board firm for your decisions becomes crucial. Research N Reports specializes in industry analysis, market forecasts and as a result getting quality reports covering all verticals, whether be it gaining perspective on current market conditions or being ahead in the cut throat Global competition. Since we excel at business research to help businesses grow, we also offer consulting as an extended arm to our services which only helps us gain more insight into current trends and problems. Consequently, we keep evolving as an all-rounder provider of viable information under one roof.Contact:Sunny Denis(Sales Manager),(Research N Reports)10916, Gold Point Dr,Houston, TX, Pin 77064,+1-8886316977,sales@researchnreports.com, Hinged Labels Market: Quantitative Market Analysis, Current and Future Trends https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/hinged-labels-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=41816 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=T&rep_id=41816 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Global hinged labels market: IntroductionHinged labels are also called as extended content labels. These are the labels which use the hinged pattern to increase the amount of printable surface required to feed product information. In these type of labels, the top surface is peeled off to reveal two additional printable panels. Also, hinged labels use repositionable adhesives in order to view interior of the label, then it can be resealed. Sometimes, it is required to put label on the front of the container, and not on the sides which possibly causes additional application problems and reduces shelf appeal.Hinged labels can fit in the front area of the container and allow necessary information to be printed on the all panels of the labels. Hinged labels are ideal for providing additional information as in case of drugs. Hinged labels finds useful applications in pharmaceutical industry, food & beverage industry, and in international retail where there is a need for multiple translations. Overall the outlook for the global hinged labels market is expected to be positive during the forecast period, which is attributed to increasing need for informative products.Read Report OverviewGlobal hinged labels market: DynamicsThe global hinged labels market is expected to grow on the backdrop of increasing need of providing abundant information about the product. Many products which are available in the market, are regulated by the government agencies, and sometimes, they require companies to pack lots of information on the packaging. Hinged labels are great fit for many products which use small containers and bottles, otherwise the need for regulatory information force manufacturers to use larger containers, which is not economic.This factor is expected to drive the global hinged labels market growth during the forecast period. Hinged labels are produced to increase packaging space to convey in-depth information. Hinged labels are useful for various industries including pharmaceutical, personal care & cosmetics and other such industries. Hinged labels are not just limited to regulations though, but they are also an effective marketing tool for branding and promotions.PDF Brochure For Future AdvancementsIt boost the hinged labels market growth. Hinged labels are useful for incorporating multiple languages, promotional items, cross promotional products, instant redeemable coupons, instructions and other such things. Hinged labels are cost reducing and space saving solution for packaging industry. These factors are expected to drive the growth of the global hinged labels market during the forecast period. Hinged labels are available in various types, including pressure sensitive labels, roll fed labels and cut & stack. These factors are anticipated to fuel the global hinged labels market during the forecast period.Global hinged labels market: Regional outlookIn terms of value and volume, the APEJ region is expected to drive the global hinged labels market during the forecast period due to presence of many industries in the region. APEJ is a home to various pharmaceutical and food industries, which require to pack lots information onto the packaging. The North America and Western Europe are expected to witness lucrative growth in the global hinged labels market. Latin America is expected to witness below average growth in the hinged labels market due to economic downturn in the region.Download and View Report TOC, Figures and TablesEastern Europe hinged labels market is expected to observe lucrative growth due to presence of flourished cosmetic industry in the region. MEA is expected to witness average growth in the hinged labels market. Japan is expected to witness steady growth in the hinged labels market over the forecast period.Global hinged labels market: Key playersFew of the key players operating in the global hinged labels market are Quality Assured, Resource Label Group, Star Label Products, Advanced Labels NW, Labels West, and Edwards Label, Inc., among others.About UsTransparency Market Research is a global 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. Our experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Transparency Market Research90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Overlaminates Market: An Insight On the Important Factors and Trends Influencing the Market https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/overlaminates-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=41825 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=T&rep_id=41825 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Global overlaminates market: IntroductionOverlaminates are used to prevent damage to your asset. Overlaminates are widely used to protect the surfaces of graphics, warning & critical information labels, medical forms, and signatures. Overlaminates are anticipated to witness an increase in preference for protection of printed decals, during the forecast period, as the need for custom-printed products grows. Overlaminates are designed to protect and prolong the life of graphics and images.Product customization has emerged as a key trend across the world, fueled by the advent of high quality printing equipment. Overlaminates are made up of various types including polypropylene based, thermal transfer printable and silicone release coated. High quality printing and graphics have assumed a crucial role in customization these days, with customers desiring personalized designs for a unique appearance. Therefore, customization is practiced in key industries, such as electrical & electronics, and the automotive industry.Read Comprehensive Overview of ReportThey are also available in various thicknesses. Manufacturers of overlaminates are focused on additional features for enhanced appearance, such as a selection of pearlescent and glittering starlight decorative overlaminates, to cater to their clients requirements. Apart from enhancing the appearance of the product, overlaminates also prevent scratching or scraping of the surface. Therefore, the global overlaminates market is expected to have a largely positive outlook, over the forecast period.Global overlaminates market: DynamicsThe global overlaminates market is growing on the backdrop of increasing printing and graphics industry across the globe. The global graphic printing industry has undergone significant transformation in the last decade, generating higher demand for custom printed products. In addition to decals and prints on the surfaces of vehicles and electronic devices, overlaminates are also used to protect the surfaces of labels. The availability of overlaminates in various thicknesses in the market is expected to drive the global overlaminates market during the forecast period.PDF Brochure For Future AdvancementsChanging consumer requirements and expectations regarding product differentiation and appearance are the two key factors expected to play a pivotal role in the growth of the global overlaminates market during the forecast period. In addition, constant innovation has led manufacturers of overlaminates to include additional features such as UV stabilizers, to enhance the life of graphics. The desire for custom printed products is one of the global consumer trends which is here to stay well beyond the forecast period. Therefore, there are no key challenges to the growth of the market. However, there is plenty of scope for growth of the market in the emerging economies, where evolution in consumer trends is bringing a significant change in the way the consumer goods sector operates.Global overlaminates market: Geographic OutlookThe North America overlaminates market is expected to dominate the global overlaminates market, during the next decade. This is attributed to a mature consumer base for overlaminates in the region. The Western Europe overlaminates market is expected to follow the North America overlaminates market closely. Asia Pacific region presents lucrative opportunities for the growth of the global overlaminates market. The Middle East & Africa region is expected contribute significantly to the growth of the global overlaminates market during the forecast period, especially the automotive sector GCC countries.Download TOCGlobal overlaminates market: Key PlayersFew of the key players operating in the global overlaminates market are 3M Company, Arlon Graphics, LLC., Acpo ltd., STA, LLC, UPM Raflatac, Catalina Graphic Films, Inc., and DUNMORE Corporation, among others.About UsTransparency Market Research is a global 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. Our experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Transparency Market Research90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Microwavable Cups Market: Quantitative Market Analysis, Current and Future Trends https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/microwavable-cups-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=41840 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=T&rep_id=41840 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Microwavable Cups Market A historical analysisCups have been long preferred as one of the ideal on-the-go food consumption formats. Rapid urbanization in emerging economies such as India and China, coupled with increase in per capita disposable income has resulted in fast growth in the consumption of case-ready meals, on-the-go. Manufacturers of disposable cups cater to the rising demand for convenient solutions for food consumption, especially considering the fast-paced lifestyle of modern consumers and consumer convenience.Conventional food cup manufacturers used to produce cups that could be reheated in a microwave, to a certain extent. However, they refrained from making any specific guarantees, due to varying abilities of microwave ovens. The need for microwavable versions was only realized once the consumption of case-ready meals and on-the-go snacks increased across the globe, fueled by a shift in the lifestyles of consumers. The rise in consumption of convenience foods and snacks such as macaroni, gourmet food, and soup, among others has led to the growth in demand for microwavable cups market.Browse report detailsConventional cups may consist of an inner-layer of thin plastic, which, if not FDA-approved, is unsafe for microwavable foods. This creates absolute need for microwavable cups which ensure food quality and yet remain heat-resistant. The same trend is expected to continue well beyond the forecast period. Thus, microwavable cups market is expected to witness substantial demand.Global microwavable cups market Key PlayersSome of the key players operating in the global microwavable cups market are The Kraft Group, LLC, Interpress Technologies, Inc., Greiner Packaging GmbH, KeepCup, and Capitol Cups, among others.PDF Brochure For Future AdvancementsKey Trends and developments in the microwavable cups market Brands such as Nissin are using customization as a key strategy for consumer engagement. In August 2015, Nissin introduced their first microwavable cup noodles, having an additional customization feature, which enabled the customers to customize their cup with healthier meal choices. The new meal allows the noodles to be microwaved in under 2 minutes.In February 2015, Greiner Packaging GmbH won an award for its innovative packaging solution for Saga-Foods Zrt, which is a Hungary-based food processing company. The company was developing a new packaging concept for Frankfurter sausages. They developed the K3 cup with a resealable In-mold Label (IML) lid. The packaging used a combination of PP/EVOH, which creates a barrier effect. This enabled the cups to be placed directly in a microwave for heating.Interpress Technologies, Inc. offer plastic cups and bowls, for applications with moderate moisture barrier requirements and for microwavable applications. The cups have a printed paper overwrap, and are also available in a high barrier EVOH blend for applications with additional barrier requirement.Download TOCMicrowavable Cups Market: What lies ahead?The global microwavable cups market is anticipated to grow with increased adoption of on-the-go food habits, among consumers, especially in the emerging economies, and countries in Africa, which have been witnessing a high rate of urbanization and rise in per capita disposable income. Furthermore, as the consumption of case-ready meals increases, and more consumers prefer eating out to dining-in, the microwavable cups market is expected to witness substantial increase in demand.About UsTransparency Market Research is a global 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. Our experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Transparency Market Research90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Ultra-high Barrier Films Market: Worldwide Industry Analysis and New Market Opportunities Explored https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/ultra-high-barrier-films-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=41855 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=T&rep_id=41855 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Ultra-high barrier films The journey so farThe global packaging industry has undergone significant transformation in the last two decades, setting high standards for product quality and integrity year-on-year. Advancement in technology, particularly in fields such as food processing, pharmaceutical drug formulation, and electronics, has led to increasing demand for packaging and protective solutions which enhance the shelf-life of the product and maintain its integrity, with a low rate of permeation.The same demand has led to the introduction of several protective and high-barrier protective solutions. Aluminium foil is at the pinnacle of performance, when it comes to high barrier applications. However, due to the presence of pinholes, the performance is degraded. The high-barrier industry has been around for nearly seven decades. High-barrier had its beginning with foil substrates. Companies such as Mill Print and Standard Packaging achieved high-barrier performance by extruding polyethylene, and laminating to foils.Read Report OverviewHigh-barrier films are produced using materials such as Ethylene Vinyl Alcohol (EVOH), Cyclic Olefin Copolymers, Amorphous PET, Polyacrylonitrile, and Nanocomposites, among others. In todays times, high-barrier coatings are also used. Some of the prominent barrier materials used are PVdC, PVOH, SiOx, and Al2O3. For ultra-high barrier applications, a combination of both films and coatings are used. Demand for ultra-high barrier films is expected to go up with further advancement in technology, especially from the food & beverage, pharmaceutical, and electronics industries.Global ultra-high barrier films market: Key PlayersSome of the key players operating in the global ultra-high barrier films market are Avery Dennison Israel Ltd, Sigma Technologies Int'l, LLC, Cosmo Films Limited, Jindal Poly Films Limited, Perlen Packaging AG, Honeywell International Inc., Toray Plastics (America), Inc., Taghleef Industries L.L.C., Klockner Pentaplast Europe GmbH & Co. KG, Amcor Limited, Celplast Metallized Products Limited, and Ester Industries Ltd., among others.PDF BrochureSome of the companies which supply the technology and materials for the production of ultra-high barrier films are Exxon Mobil Corporation, E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, Plantic Technologies Ltd., and Huntsman International LLC., among others.The road aheadThe ultra-high barrier films market is anticipated to be positively influenced by evolving consumer preferences, and R&D in advanced packaging technologies. Development of high performance materials and coatings will continue to enhance the way ultra-high barrier films perform.For instance, nanotechnology was used to enhance the functionality of ultra-high barrier films, by increasing their transparency and stretchability. The features greatly benefit the food, medical, and other packaging market today.Ultra-high barrier films also have immense opportunity for growth in the field of flexible electronics. The production of flexible electronics with roll-to-roll (r2r) production compatibility will have a significant impact on the electronics and computing industry.Download TOCKey Product LaunchesIn January, 2017, Cosmo Films Limited, which is an India-based specialty films manufacturer, launched new transparent and metalized films. The companys new transparent barrier films can be wrapped over coffee & tea, perfume boxes, and chewing gum, among others.In July 2017, to cater to the rising demand for creative materials solutions with high barrier performance, particularly for enhanced shelf-life and e-commerce applications, Toray Plastics (America), Inc. introduced two new ultra-high barrier PET films.About UsTransparency Market Research is a global 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. Our experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Transparency Market Research90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Construction Equipment Market: Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/construction-equipment-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=110 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=CR&rep_id=110 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com In the latest research report by Transparency Market Research (TMR), which is a market intelligence company, leading players operating within the construction equipment market are studied in much detail. Hitachi (Japan), John Deere (U.S.), Volvo (Sweden), Liebherr (Switzerland), Terex (U.S.), Zoomlion (China), Komatsu (Japan), Caterpillar (U.S.), and Sany (China) are the key companies operating within the construction equipment market which have been studied in the report.The report discusses the strategies employed by these companies along with their expansion formula. The business and financial overview of the companies along with their recent developments are also discussed in the report. The study is therefore extremely informative and empowers new entrants as well as those established with powerful decision making abilities so that they can make profitable and smart decisions..Read Report OverviewAs per Transparency Market Research, the global construction equipment market was worth US$ 192.3 bn in 2017. On the basis of type, the material handling equipment is expected to witness fast paced growth. On the basis of geography, the global construction equipment market is led by Asia Pacific, with China and India at the forefront.Brazil is another country which holds promise of growth. The rapid infrastructure development in all of the nations mentioned above will be the key factor behind the growth of this market. China is having several construction projects in its kitty including development of educational institutions, railway networks, development of roads, water systems, and others. This is expected to be the primary factor behind the growth of the market in China as well as in Asia Pacific.PDF Brochure For Future AdvancementsTrend of Lease-based Equipment Lending to Drive DemandAs per the lead author of this report, the growing lease-based equipment lending trend is one of the major reasons behind the accelerated demand for construction equipment. The growing investments by governments of emerging nations for infrastructure development, including hospital development, road development, railway projects, and school and university construction or developments will bolster the demand for construction equipment market to a great extent.Thus, it is no surprise that among all the regions such as America, Europe, and Africa, and the Middle East, it is Asia Pacific which is leading and shall continue to do so for the next few years. Due to the presence of several developing economies that are growing at a robust pace such as India, China, Japan, Indonesia, and Malaysia, this region holds immense growth opportunities for the construction equipment market.A Custom ReportVolatility in Pricing of Raw Materials to Impact Growth of MarketThe report focuses on market drivers as well as those factors that act as obstacles. One of the key factors posing a challenge to the growth of the construction equipment market is the strict emission control norms implemented worldwide. The volatility in the pricing of raw materials will also act as a challenge. Moreover, the increasing cost of the construction equipment will also hurt the growth of the market.The study presented here is based on a report by Transparency Market Research (TMR), titled Construction Equipment Market - Global and China Forecast, Market Share, Size, Growth and Industry Analysis, 2011 2017.About UsTransparency Market Research is a global 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. Our experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Transparency Market Research90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Automotive Heater Core Market to expand at a CAGR of 2.9% by 2028 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=782 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=D&rep_id=782 https://www.factmr.com/report/782/automotive-heater-core-market https://www.factmr.com About Automotive Core Heater MarketExpansion and innovation-driven efforts of major players in the automotive heater core market are likely to create lucrative avenues for the market growth. Advent of technologies, such as incorporation of ceramic positive temperature coefficient (PTC) components as core elements of heater core have resulted in silent operations and reduced energy waste in heating systems of vehicles. A moderate 2.9% CAGR has been foreseen for the automotive heater core market by a recent Fact.MR report.Get Sample copy of this Report @With the advent of hybrid and electric passenger cars, automotive heating systems are perceiving continuous developments. Heater core in vehicles are on the cusp of becoming a component of the past, as manufacturers focus on reversing refrigerant flow via air-conditioning systems for transmuting the evaporator core into condenser. This would further provide ample heat for passenger compartments.Aftermarket to Pave Lucrative Opportunities for Automotive Core Heater MarketAutomotive heater core failures, although less prevalent, are a key concern among automaker and consumers alike. Known as essential compact radiators, automotive heater cores witness failure on account of corrosion and pressure on cooling system. Replacement or repair of automotive heater core is a challenging and expensive activity, as they are located inside passenger compartment. Aftermarket automotive heater cores produced currently are relatively less expensive than their OEM counterparts, and are better designed to function as OEM-produced heater cores.Get Discount of this Report @Aftermarket vendors take immense efforts in maintaining the material quality and structure of automotive heater cores, along with using new foams for every product manufactured, similar to that of OEM-approach. This has paved lucrative opportunities for automotive heater cores in the aftermarket.Automotive Heater Core Perceives Rise in Demand from Electric VehiclesNew production plants apropos of high voltage heater manufacturing are being opened by leading manufacturers, in order to cater demand from hybrid and battery electric vehicles. Eberspaechers new electric heaters production plant in Tianjin is a prime example of such installments. The company seeks reinforcing its domestic footprint by this new production plant, while expanding its capacities to tap rapidly expanding Chinese passenger car industry, particularly for battery electric vehicles.Integral components of electric heaters such as PTC ceramics for heater core will be manufactured in the plant. Such new installations with regard to automotive heating system will significantly rub off on development and sales of automotive heater core in the forthcoming years, thereby augmenting the market growth.Major stakeholders in the automotive heater core market such as BorgWarner, and Eberspaecher are taking expansion and innovation efforts for capitalizing on the growing penetration of electric vehicles. BorgWarner, global leading company in clean & efficient technology solutions for electric, hybrid and combustion vehicles, has recently announced its plan on supplying advanced high-voltage positive temperature coefficient (PTC) heating technology to a well-known electric vehicle manufacturer.This innovative automotive heating technology incorporates ceramic PTC components as its core elements, which contributes to reduced energy waste and noise-less operation of HVAC systems in vehicles. Advent of such technologies are likely to underpin automakers in designing and developing next-generation, efficient & clean vehicles.View Report @About usFact.MR is focused on offering transformative intelligence that inspires breakthroughs and innovation. We believe that the right decisions at the opportune time are integral to achieve extraordinary success. We are here to help you with your strategic decision making. And, how do we that? By tapping into the vast labyrinth of data to bring you intelligence that inspires.ContactMr. Rohit Bhisey11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852Tel: +353-1-6111-593Website:E: sales@factmr.com Zeolite Market 2018 Expected to Observe CAGR of More than 4.1% Through 2026 | Global Leading Players - Clariant, Tricat Group, BASF SE, Tosoh Corporation, KNT Group, Union Showa K.K. (USKK) https://marketprognosis.com/sample-request/14271 https://marketprognosis.com/discount-request/14271 https://marketprognosis.com/enquiry/14271 Market Scenario:According to Market Prognosis, the Global Zeolite market is accounted for $26.01billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $37.26 billion by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 4.1%. Some of the factors favouring the market growth are increasing demand for detergents, increasing disposable incomes and changing standard of living, rising demand of Zeolites from refinery industries, technological advancements and strict regulations imposed by the government with respect to protect the environment, rising demand for Zeolites from various end users. However, huge raw material prices, availability of enzymes, metals, and other chemical compounds as alternatives to zeolite catalysts and huge transportation costs are restricting the market growth.Zeolites is a crystalline, microporous aluminosilicates which consists of a group of hydrated aluminosilicates of alkali or alkaline earth metals, generally of three-dimensional crystalline frameworks of tetrahedral structures like lithium, barium, sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. They are used in various applications which include water treatment, construction, detergents etc. It has excellent high melting point, high resistance to oxidization, high pressure resistance properties.Synthetic Zeolites commanded the highest market share owing to its extensive usage for separation and adsorption in oil & gas, detergents and water treatment. On the other hand, detergents have acquired largest market share and the growth of this can be attributed to detergents having ability to remove dirt and rising demand for detergents from builders owing to its increased cleaning property. Asia Pacific is leading the market and the factors favouring the growth of this region are rising government infrastructure expenditures in countries such as India and China, increasing demand for zeolites from petrochemical industry in China. Europe is expected to lead the market owing to the booming manufacturing base of refrigerants and detergents in countries which include France, Germany and Belgium.Detailed Sample Copy of Updated Analysis @Top Industry Players:Some of the key players in global Zeolite market include Clariant, Tricat Group, BASF SE, Tosoh Corporation, KNT Group, Union Showa K.K. (USKK), Yingkou Zhongbao Molecular Sieve Co., Ltd, Anhui Mingmei MinChem Co., Ltd, Zeox Corporation, Dalian Haixin Chemical Industrial Co., Ltd, Arkema Group, UOP LLC, Interra Global Corporation, Zeochem AG and Grace Catalysts Technologies.What 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 advancementsRequest Discount on this repots @Market Segments:Product Types Covered: Synthetic zeolite Natural zeoliteApplications Covered: Detergent builders Catalyst Adsorbents Other ApplicationsRegions Covered: North America US Canada Mexico Europe Germany UK Italy France Spain Rest of Europe Asia Pacific Japan China India Australia New ZealandInquiry Before Buying @About Market PrognosisWe at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:Market Prognosis435, Sadanand Chs,B-Cabin Road,Ambernath(E). 421501Contact No: +1 973 241 5193Email: sales@marketprognosis.com Carboxymethyl Cellulose Market Will bring in revenues over US$ 2,500 Mn by 2028 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=789 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=D&rep_id=789 https://www.factmr.com/report/789/carboxymethyl-cellulose-market https://www.factmr.com About Carboxymethyl Cellulose MarketThe uptake in adoption of carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) as an effective fat-replacer in ready-to-eat and processed foods, abreast rising consumer awareness about consumption of healthy food, will sustain future growth of the CMC market. Inclination of food manufacturers toward carboxymethyl cellulose over egg proteins for preparation of bakery food items such as cakes is likely to be a key growth determinant for the market. Carboxymethyl cellulose aids in minimizing fat concentration in myriad foods, particularly in bakery & confectionary products.Get Sample copy of this Report @Future prospects of the carboxymethyl cellulose market are likely to be positive, as surge in the popularity of pharmaceutical specialty drugs fuel adoption of CMC, states a new Fact.MR report. The report envisages the carboxymethyl cellulose market to record a modest 4.6% volume CAGR over the forecast period, 2018 to 2028. Worldwide sales of carboxymethyl cellulose will bring in revenues over US$ 2,500 Mn by 2028-end. The FDA-approved disintegrant for pharmaceuticals, CMC improves the dissolving capability of medicines, thereby enhancing their meant effect, which in turn has been driving CMC demand in the pharmaceutical industry.Relative Affordability of CMC as Thickening & Stabilizing Agent in Food & Beverages Continues to Sustain its DemandDemand for processed food & beverages will continue to rise, as fast-paced lifestyle of consumers and new business models keep transforming the overall food retail industry. CMC has been seeking extensive employment in the food & beverages industry as thickening and stabilizing agent, gaining popularity as a cost-effective alternative to other cellulose derivatives. Manufacturers are incorporating carboxymethyl cellulose as cold stabilizers in frozen food & beverage products, thereby cutting down high expenditure on other expensive cold stabilizers.Get Discount of this Report @Metal nanoparticles production is another key application of carboxymethyl cellulose as a stabilizing agent, for instance CMC is used in ice packs to retain the lower freezing point. The report estimates the function of CMC as thickener to remain sought-after among end-use industries, trailed by its function as stabilizer in terms of value as well as volume.Carboxymethyl Cellulose Market: Preeminence of APEJ to EndureLucrativeness of the carboxymethyl cellulose market in Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) will continue to remain higher than other regional segments incorporated in the report. CMC demand in APEJs food & beverage industry will remain robust, underpinned by the occupancy of relatively higher consumption base. Additionally, relatively higher incidence of chronic ailments in the region have led to increased demand for pharmaceuticals, thereby paving avenues for carboxymethyl cellulose. Nearly two-fifth value share of the carboxymethyl cellulose market will be held by APEJ by 2028-end.Inclining consumer preference toward gluten-free and low-fat food has augured well for the carboxymethyl cellulose market. Protein solubility extension and texture enhancement attributes of CMC is sought-after among food manufacturers, with ice creams being top application area.Food and beverages industry will spearhead the carboxymethyl cellulose market, with oil drilling industry on the trail, says the Fact.MR report. Carboxymethyl cellulose is utilized in oil drilling application for protecting mud wells by acting as mud stabilizer, and water retaining agent. High viscosity and degree of substitution are other key attributes of carboxymethyl cellulose, which have led their adoption in oil drilling industry.View Report @About usFact.MR is focused on offering transformative intelligence that inspires breakthroughs and innovation. We believe that the right decisions at the opportune time are integral to achieve extraordinary success. We are here to help you with your strategic decision making. And, how do we that? By tapping into the vast labyrinth of data to bring you intelligence that inspires.ContactMr. Rohit Bhisey11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852Tel: +353-1-6111-593Website:E: sales@factmr.com Airport Catering Trucks Market Projected to Register 5.7% CAGR through 2028 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=800 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=D&rep_id=800 https://www.factmr.com/report/800/airport-catering-trucks-market https://www.factmr.com About Airport Catering Truck MarketThe airport catering truck market continues to witness steady growth, as growing demand for aircraft ground support creates sustained opportunities for stakeholders. Airport authorities and airline companies continue to invest in infrastructure development, which in turn is augmenting demand for airport catering trucks around the globe, finds a new study.Get Sample copy of this Report @Driven by increasing development of airports across developed and emerging economies, the airport catering trucks market is likely to expand at a CAGR of 5.7% in terms of value, reveals a new study compiled by Fact.MR. In terms of volume, the report expects over 3 billion airport catering trucks to be sold by 2028.Developed Economies Continue to be at the Forefront of DemandWith growing expenditure on aviation infrastructure in developed counties of North America and Europe, the sales volume of airport catering trucks is expected to remain concentrated in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Russia. North America region is at the vanguard of global demand, followed by European countries surging popularity of air travel in developing countries is complementing demand.Growing emphasis on enhancing airport infrastructure, coupled with increasing number of airports in emerging economies of India and China has been instrumental in driving sales in these regional markets. China is likely to ramp up demand for airport catering trucks the Government of China plans to develop 136 new airports by 2025. Sales are also likely to be resurgent in Oceania and India.Get Discount of this Report @Pricing Pressures Continue to Fuel Demand for Non-refrigerated Trucks vis-a-vis Refrigerated VariantsRefrigeration has always been a major factor of concern, when it comes to transportation of food products. Refrigeration incurs high costs, which consequently increases the overall pricing of airport catering trucks. Preference for airport catering trucks without refrigeration has conventionally remained higher owing to pricing pressures, and the status quo is likely to remain unaltered during the period of assessment, 2018-2028.Hybrid Airport Catering Trucks Sales Nearly 19x of its Electric CounterpartThe report finds that hybrid catering trucks continues to remain the preferred option among end-users. Hybrid airport catering truck market valuation is about 19 times more than electric catering trucks. With increasing end user demand for flexibility in fuel consumption and economy, coupled with engine robustness and power, hybrid airport catering trucks continue to be an economically-feasible option for end-users. However, with increasing environmental concerns and environmental safety regulations laid by EPA (Environment Protection Act) regarding carbon dioxide emissions, electric catering trucks are expected to witness significant demand and are poised to expand at a higher value CAGR, albeit from a low base.The report finds that participants are focusing on launching electric catering trucks to fulfil their increasing demand. In addition, manufacturers are aiming to consolidate their position in the airport catering trucks business, particularly in the emerging economies given their significant potential for growth. Some of the leading players include Alvest Group, Global Ground Support Equipment LLC, Mallaghan Engineering Ltd., DOLL Fahrzeugbau GmbH, Eagle Industries DWC-LLC, Jiangsu Tianyi Airport Special Equipment Co., Ltd., Cartoo GSE, WEIHAI Guangtai Airport Equipment Co., Ltd., and Sovam.View Report @About usFact.MR is focused on offering transformative intelligence that inspires breakthroughs and innovation. We believe that the right decisions at the opportune time are integral to achieve extraordinary success. We are here to help you with your strategic decision making. And, how do we that? By tapping into the vast labyrinth of data to bring you intelligence that inspires.ContactMr. Rohit Bhisey11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852Tel: +353-1-6111-593Website:E: sales@factmr.com Web Performance Market: 2018-2026 Top Key Players by | Micro Focus International plc, IBM, Cloudflare, New Relic, Akamai Technologies, CDNetworks https://marketprognosis.com/sample-request/14268 https://marketprognosis.com/discount-request/14268 https://marketprognosis.com/enquiry/14268 Market Scenario:According to Market Prognosis, the Global Web Performance Market is accounted for $2.95 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $7.74 billion by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 11.3% during the forecast period. The expansion of the e-Commerce industry and rising dependence of enterprises on web based solutions and services are some of the factors that are predicted to drive the growth of the global web performance market. However, the lack of consciousness about the web performance solutions and high deployment costs are major factors that could pretence as a hindrance in the growth of global web performance market. Moreover, demand for mobile web based performance solutions and large-scale acceptance of web performance solutions in extremely synchronized industries are providing ample opportunities to the growth of the market in the near future.Web performance examines and monitors websites to assure that the most significant content is displayed as quickly as possible, pages are loaded at a consistent speed and it is correlated to web performance optimization. It is measured manually or automatically but it turns into difficult to co-ordinate different customers visiting web site at the same time. The benefit of using performance monitoring tools is that it assists to control the performance of web applications in real time without delay.Detailed Sample Copy of Updated Analysis @Top Industry Players:Some of the key players profiled in the Web Performance Market include Micro Focus International plc, IBM, Cloudflare, Inc., New Relic, Akamai Technologies, Inc, CDNetworks, Dynatrace, F5 Networks, Inc, CA Technologies, Netmagic Solutions, Cavisson, Neustar, Inc, ThousandEyes, Inc and Zenq.What 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 advancementsRequest Discount on this repots @Market Segments: On the basis of component, in the solutions segment, the web performance testing subdivision is predicted to have the major market size during the forecast period. This solutions test the websites and web applications during the development phase. It includes speed testing and load testing of the websites and web applications. Load testing necessitates testing the websites under high web traffic to give safe and secure verification. By geography, North America is expected to have the largest market size in the web performance market during the forecast period due to the transformation in their mode of business, shifting from the traditional approach to online platforms to boost the e-Commerce industry. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market owing to the increasing awareness among enterprises about the web customer experience, especially among organizations from the healthcare sectors, Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) and Information Technology.Organization Sizes Covered: Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Large EnterprisesComponents Covered: Services SolutionsDeployment Types Covered: Cloud On-PremisesEnd Users Covered: Logistics And Transportation Automotive Government Healthcare Manufacturing Retail Other End UsersInquiry Before Buying @About Market PrognosisWe at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:Market Prognosis435, Sadanand Chs,B-Cabin Road,Ambernath(E). 421501Contact No: +1 973 241 5193Email: sales@marketprognosis.com Medical Superabsorbent Polymers Market will be sold to the medical industry worldwide by 2028 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=739 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=D&rep_id=739 https://www.factmr.com/report/739/medical-superabsorbent-polymers-market https://www.factmr.com About Medical Superabsorbent Polymers MarketHigh exudate- and liquid-absorption capacity of superabsorbent polymers have swelled their adoption for applications in the medical industry. The industrys inclination toward sustainability and use of green products has led scientists to put efforts for developing eco-friendly medical superabsorbent polymers, thereby paving new growth avenues for stakeholders. With the GHDI in developing nations on the rise, expensive medical treatments and surgeries have gained interest of consumers, which in turn has augured well for sales of medical products including bandages, surgical pads and wound dressings.Get Sample copy of this Report @Excellent water retention and absorbency of superabsorbent polymers have been leveraged for product development in the medical sector, particularly in wound management. Efficient exudate absorption, and faster healing process are key attributes of medical superabsorbent polymers that have driven their popularity. This Fact.MR report foresees the market for medical superabsorbent polymers to record a splendid CAGR between the forecast period 2018 and 2027. Worldwide sales of medical superabsorbent polymers are poised to bring in nearly US$ 8,300 Mn revenues by 2027-end.Medical Superabsorbent Polymers: Hospitals Contribute Significantly to Demand as Medical Waste Management Gains Higher EmphasisEnd-use of medical superabsorbent polymers continues to remain high in hospitals. Operation theatres (OTs) form an integral part of hospitals, wherein the consistent flow of patients entail the requirement for a wide range of surgical procedures. This makes it imperative for hospitals to keep their OTs clean and hygienic. Minimizing the clean-up time prevails as a major concern among hospitals worldwide. Time-effective and safe management & disposition of suction canister waste is a primary task linked with surgery clean-ups.Traditional suction canister solidifier take over 30 minutes for proper handling and disposing of waste. New technologies are therefore being developed using superabsorbent polymers, which remarkably trim the time taken for complete solidification and disposal of liquid medical waste. These technologies are demonstrating high penetration into hospitals worldwide, thereby complementing their dominance in the medical superabsorbent polymers market.Innovation Remains a Cornerstone for Nonwoven Medical Superabsorbent Polymer ManufacturersGet Discount of this Report @Non-woven medical superabsorbent polymers will remain preferred by end-users over their woven counterparts, as they offer relatively higher absorbency and flexibility. The report projects a robust increase in sales of non-woven superabsorbent polymers, with manufacturers making heavy investments in the development of innovative products and technologies such as P&Gs new line of bladder leak undergarments that offer maximum protection. Call of softer diapers has further led to technological innovations such as thermal-bonded non-woven superabsorbent polymers. Such innovations will rub off on demand and supply of non-woven superabsorbent polymers in the near future.Advanced Wound Care Continues to hold Bulk Shares of the Market, Report SaysThe report projects revenues from medical superabsorbent polymers application in advanced would care to hold bulk shares of the market in the period of forecast. Faster healing process and recovery time coupled with high liquid absorption capacity of medical superabsorbent polymers bode well for enhanced therapeutic efficiency requirement in advanced wound care.Led by the United States, North America is envisaged to spearhead the medical superabsorbent polymers market, driven by inflating Baby Boomers population that creates the need for adult incontinence products in hospitals, clinics, and ambulatory surgical centers. Immense focus on hygiene factor, and robust expenditure on medical products will remain key demand determinants for medical superabsorbent polymers in North America.Airlaid technology is primarily preferred by medical superabsorbent polymers manufacturers, as it imparts the materials with better mechanical properties and reduced weight. Various technologies such as laminate and wet laid technology for manufacturing of these polymers, with an aim of delivering better results pertaining to quantity and quality.View Report @About usFact.MR is focused on offering transformative intelligence that inspires breakthroughs and innovation. We believe that the right decisions at the opportune time are integral to achieve extraordinary success. We are here to help you with your strategic decision making. And, how do we that? By tapping into the vast labyrinth of data to bring you intelligence that inspires.ContactMr. Rohit Bhisey11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852Tel: +353-1-6111-593Website:E: sales@factmr.com Alkyl Polyglucoside Market is Expected to Rise at a value CAGR of 8.0% throug 2028 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=747 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=D&rep_id=747 https://www.factmr.com/report/747/alkyl-polyglucoside-market https://www.factmr.com About Alkyl Polyglucosides MarketGrowing demand from homecare and laundry detergents industry will drive the alkyl polyglucosides market to over 973,000 tons in global sales by 2028, finds a new study. The broader trend towards greener substitutes continues to boost the use of alkyl polyglucosides as the preferred industrial surfactants.Get Sample copy of this Report @Global demand for alkyl polyglucosides is also riding on the coattails of the broader shift towards sustainable and eco-friendly surfactants. The preference for sugar surfactants continues to be greater than bio-surfactants, owing to issues with foam quality, appearance, and shelf life. Sugar surfactants have optimal cleaning efficiency and low irritability, which has given a fillip to adoption in several end-use industries. Sensing the opportunities and evolutions in demand, manufacturers are focusing on launching novel sugar-based surfactants.The report finds that Europe continues to lead the global alkyl polyglucosides market, with total demand pegged at nearly 151 thousand tons in 2017. European pharmaceutical, personal care, paints, and textiles industries are making a gradual albeit noticeable shift towards sustainable materials. This has induced a deviation from surfactants sourced from non-biodegradable petrochemical sources. Adoption of alkyl polyglucosides is witnessing growth on back of two dimensions both government mandates and consumer awareness have been instrumental in driving adoption.Get Discount of this Report @The report finds that in addition to sustainability, demand for alkyl polyglucosides is also driven by their excellent cleaning properties. The receptivity of the sugar surfactants in general, and alkyl polyglucosides in particular, has garnered positive reviews from end-users, and the positive word-of-mouth is also contributing to greater sales. The report predicts that these factors will continue to push sales of alkyl polyglucosides during the assessment period.According to the report, demand for capryl and decyl is significantly higher than other product types. Capryl and decyl are widely used in homecare and laundry detergents end-use industry on account of their superior performance and biodegradable nature. The report estimates global demand for capryl to reach 160,522 tons in 2018.Alkyl polyglucosides serve a broad range of primary functions, including but not limited to, cleansing agents, emulsifying agents, foaming agents, and wetting agents. End-user demand for alkyl polyglucosides as emulsifying agents to remain at the forefront during the assessment period.The key participants in the alkyl polyglucosides are focusing on augmenting production capacity to meet the rising global demand. Alkyl polyglucosides are replacing petroleum based surfactants in many end-use industries, creating gaps in the supply-demand equation. Manufacturers are also focusing on reducing cross-regional volume flows by setting up production facilities at strategic locations. BASFs proposed sites at Jinshan, China and Cincinnati, USA are aimed at helping the company meet the burgeoning demand for alkyl polyglucosides.The report finds that overall surfactants market remains highly fragmented, on account of product maturity and presence of a large number of players. The foray of niche suppliers who have launched specialized products in the market has further led to fragmentation in the market. While AkzoNobel, BASF, Clariant, Huntsman, and Stepan are among the leading players in the European market, BASF, Stepan, and Huntsman have a strong presence in the US.Fact.MRs outlook on the alkyl polyglucosides market remains positive, with demand expected to grow at 8% CAGR during 2018-2028.View Report @About usFact.MR is focused on offering transformative intelligence that inspires breakthroughs and innovation. We believe that the right decisions at the opportune time are integral to achieve extraordinary success. We are here to help you with your strategic decision making. And, how do we that? By tapping into the vast labyrinth of data to bring you intelligence that inspires.ContactMr. Rohit Bhisey11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852Tel: +353-1-6111-593Website:E: sales@factmr.com Vertical Lift Module Market Rising at 10.3% CAGR with Mecalux, Conveyor Handling Company, Stanley Vidmar, Green Automated Solutions, Lista https://marketprognosis.com/sample-request/14265 https://marketprognosis.com/discount-request/14265 https://marketprognosis.com/enquiry/14265 Market Overview:According to Market Prognosis, the Global Vertical Lift Module (VLM) Market is accounted for $970.21 million in 2017 and is expected to reach $2350.27 million by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 10.3%. Rising focus on worker security and safety, rising warehouse rentals, benefits of utilizing vlm compared to traditional Common wall fixed systems and increasing need to optimize warehouse floor space are some of the key factors propelling the market growth. However, Availability of Used VLMs in the Market is restricting the market growth.Vertical Lift Module (VLM) is a storage system that consists of two parallel columns each of which is divided into permanent shelf locations that can hold a single storage module such as a tote or tray. It store items on trays and deliver them in a way that minimizes physical effort and counter with the touch of a button on a control device. These systems provide improve worker ergonomics, floor space savings, increase labor productivity, and help control ongoing processes.Detailed Sample Copy of Updated Analysis @Top Industry Players:Some of the key players in global Vertical Lift Module (VLM) Market include Mecalux, Conveyor Handling Company, Stanley Vidmar, Green Automated Solutions, Lista, Weland Lagersystem Kardex, Icam S.R.L, System Spa, Ferretto, Haenel, Constructor Group, Toyota Industries, Automha and Autocrib.What 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 advancementsRequest Discount on this repots @Market Segments:Amongst delivery type, Single-Level Delivery segment dominated the global market and is expected to maintain its dominance over the forecast period, due to rising demand for faster storage and recovery of heterogeneous goods, Europe will be the major revenue contributor to the Vertical Lift Module market throughout the forecast period, owing to cutting edge technologies and they emphasis to promote and launch a new product.Storage Types covered: Refrigerated Storage Non-Refrigerated StorageLoad Capacities of VLMs Covered: Up to 60 Ton Up to 40 Ton Up to 20 TonFunctions Covered: Sortation Consolidation Storage Order Picking Batch PickingDelivery Types covered: Dual-Level Delivery Single-Level DeliveryEnd- Users covered: E-Commerce Food & Beverages Automotive Semiconductor & Electronics Healthcare Chemicals Aviation Metals & Heavy Machinery Other End UsersInquiry Before Buying @About Market PrognosisWe at Market Prognosis believe in giving a crystal clear view of market dynamics for achieving success in todays complex and competitive marketplace through our quantitative & qualitative research methods.We help our clients identify the best market insights and analysis required for their business thus enabling them to take strategic and intelligent decision.We believe in delivering actionable insights for your business growth and success.Contact us:Market Prognosis435, Sadanand Chs,B-Cabin Road,Ambernath(E). 421501Contact No: +1 973 241 5193Email: sales@marketprognosis.com Eco Friendly Bottles Market: Present Scenario and the Growth Prospects with Forecast 2022 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=31181 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/report-toc/31181 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/eco-friendly-bottles-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com http://www.techyounme.com/ The global eco friendly bottles market has risen at a rapid pace in recent years in response to the growing support to environmental causes from governments and the masses alike. The eco friendly bottles market has been driven by the eagerness of key competitors to cash in on the growing support to environmentalism, which has led to consistent innovation, as well as steady government support. The steady prevalence of these drivers is likely to enable rapid growth of the eco friendly bottles market in the coming years.According to Transparency Market Research, the global eco friendly bottles market was valued at US$2.5 bn in 2017 and is likely to rise to US$3.7 bn by 2022, exhibiting a strong 8.1% CAGR therein.eco friendly bottles marketThe global eco friendly bottles market employs a number of materials in order to produce high-quality eco friendly bottles. Currently, polylactic acid is the dominant material segment of the global eco friendly bottles market and is likely to dominate the markets proceedings in the coming years due to its widespread usage. Polylactic acid accounted for 35.3% of the global eco friendly bottles market in 2017 with a valuation of US$902.3 mn. The segment is expected to rise to US$1,322.8 mn by 2022 at a strong CAGR of 8%.Get PDF Sample of Report @North America to Dominate Eco Friendly Bottles Market due to Increasing Mass ParticipationThe leading regional contributor to the global eco friendly bottles market is North America, which is likely to retain its dominance through the forecast period thanks to the widespread distribution of environment-friendly infrastructure in the developed region and the steady government support for expansion of the same. The eco friendly bottles market in North America was valued at US$617.2 mn in 2017 and is expected to rise to US$1,123.4 mn by 2022, exhibiting a solid 12.7% CAGR from 2017 to 2022.Europe to Retain Steady Share, Asia Pacific except Japan Set to RiseEurope is also an important contributor to the global eco friendly bottles market and is likely to remain a key region for technological development as well as sales expansion for the eco friendly bottles market. Like in North America, the eco friendly bottles market enjoys solid government support in Europe, where environmental conservation has been a valued tenet of most governments. The Europe market for eco friendly bottles accounted for more than 32% of the global markets revenue in 2017.Download TOC@The Asia Pacific except Japan market for eco friendly bottles could emerge as a significant player in the coming years, with the market expected to create an absolute opportunity of US$252.2 mn over the 2017-2022 forecast period. The Japan market for eco friendly bottles is also set to rise to a strong valuation of US$228.2 mn by 2022, exhibiting a steady 6.2% CAGR upon its 2017 valuation.Global Eco Friendly Bottles Market: Competitive DynamicsLeading players in the global eco friendly bottles market include EcoXpac A/S, One Green Bottle, Earthlust, Ecologic Brands Inc., SKS Bottle and Packaging Inc., Cascade Designs Inc., Pachamama, and Pepsi-Cola Metropolitan Bottling Company.View Report@About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Research Blog: Military Radar Market: Industry Insights, Trends and Forecast upto 2024 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=2411 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/report-toc/2411 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/military-radar-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com http://www.techyounme.com/ Radar systems are crucial in the detection of bombs and landmines that are not visible to the naked eye. One of the key products in high demand within the global military radar market are lightweight radars due to their immense potential in domestic defense. Additionally, the global military radar market is currently being driven heavily by an increase in spending by countries to beef up their border and domestic defenses.Several current affairs in the world regarding civil unrest and terrorism are prompting multiple countries to amplify their defensive arrays, of which military radars form an irreplaceable component. However, the growing number of wind turbines being implemented in the world are a key hindrance to the use of military radars, as the movement of turbine blades can significantly degrade radar reception.The global military radar market is expected to reach US$9.36 bn by the end of 2024. It is projected at a CAGR of 2.4% within a forecast period from 2016 to 2024, in terms of revenue. By the end of 2016, the global military radar market is expected to reach US$7.78 bn.Get PDF Sample of Report @North America to Continue Leading Demand for Military RadarsGeographically, the global military radar market can be segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America, and the MEA region. In 2015, North America held the leading share in the global military radar market. This region holds the leading volume of defense related sanctions, boosting the overall demand for radar in national defense forces.The U.S. has one of the most powerful military forces in the world and is a key contributor to the revenue generation within the global military radar market. Both the U.S. and Canada have invested significantly in the radar technology and are likely to continue doing so over the next few years.North America was followed by Asia Pacific in terms of geographical share in value in the global military radar market, for 2015. The growth in this region is owed to the booming volume of defense activities carried out by nations such as China, India, South Korea, and Japan.Download TOC@APAC nations are currently facing serious issues on the infiltration front which is the key reason for the high defense budget allocations in the region. The global military radar market is thus consistently supported by the substantial purchases of military radar systems made by the emerging nations.Airborne Military Radars Continue to be in High DemandThe global military radar market is segmented into ground-based, naval, airborne, and space-based radars on the basis of types. Out these, the global military radar market was led by the airborne military radars segment in 2015. The segment was valued at US$2.34 bn in 2015 which was the dominant share in the global military radar market at the time.View Report@The high demand for airborne military radars is expected to continue growing owing to the increasing risks of air strikes and airborne terrorist infiltration. The segment is likely to continue on a high rate of pioneering research and development activities and innovative approaches.The leading players in the global military radar market till 2015 included Lockheed Martin Corporation, Raytheon Company, The Boeing Company, Northrop Grumman Corporation, BAE System PLC, Saab Sensis Corporation, Harris Corporation, ASELSAN A.S., Terma A/S, DRS Technologies Inc.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Research Blog: Industrial Controls System Market: Industry Insights, Outlook and Forecast upto 2021 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=4886 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/report-toc/4886 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/industrial-controls-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com http://www.techyounme.com/ The global market for industrial controls system has been covered under the scope of this report. An industrial control network is a system of interconnected equipment used to monitor and control physical equipment in industrial environments. Industrial controls improve product quality, plant efficiency, as well as facilitate uniform production in industries.These are the main reasons for increasing investments in the industrial controls system market. Increasing need of software in industrial automation, rise in infrastructure investments in emerging markets and increasing need for process automation among diverse industry verticals are the major factors responsible for the growth of the global industrial controls system market globally. Moreover, growing application of software in industrial control devices is set to increase scalability of SCADA, DCS and PLC systems in industrial environments.Get PDF Sample of Report @The global industrial controls system market is segmented by region in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Rest of the World (RoW). North America led the global Industrial Controls System Market in 2014 and is also expected to maintain its dominance in 2021 as well in this market. The growth in North America is primarily attributed due to an increase in demand for safer and reliable process automation in different sectors, such as power plants, oil & gas and water & wastewater among others.Asia Pacific held the second largest share of the global industrial controls system market in 2014 followed by Europe and RoW respectively. The growth of the industrial controls system market in Europe can be attributed to the increase in demand for modernization of oil & gas, water & wastewater, and power infrastructures among others. Power and oil & gas industries were major contributors in RoW, in 2014.The industrial controls system market is segmented on the basis of types into supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distributed control system (DCS) and programmable logic controller (PLC). Distributed control system (DCS) is holding the maximum market revenue share in 2014 and is expected to remain so during the forecast period from 2015 to 2021. The increasing industrial infrastructure investment and expansion of power and oil & gas project activities globally is spurring the demand for this segment.Download TOC@In addition, increasing need of software in industrial automation, rise in infrastructure investments in emerging markets and growth in demand for process automation among different industry verticals are the major factors that are driving the industrial controls system market globally. By components, the global SCADA market has been segmented into a programmable logic controller (PLC), human machine interface (HMI), remote terminal unit (RTU), SCADA communication system, and others.The industrial controls system market is further segmented by application into power, water & wastewater, oil & gas, manufacturing, chemicals, automotive, food & beverages, pharmaceuticals and others (including aerospace, defense, mining and material, etc.). The global industrial controls system market is dominated by power sector segment.View Report@High gap in demand and supply of industrial control devices in developing countries such as India and China among others is expected to drive the demand of PLC, DCS and SCADA products in power sector. Chemicals segment was the second largest application sector in the industrial controls system market globally. Rising demand for bulk production of chemical materials is boosting the application of industrial control systems in the chemical industry.Some of the leading players in the global Industrial Controls System Market covered in the report are Siemens AG (Germany), ABB Ltd (Switzerland), Omron Corp (Japan), Emerson Electric Co (U.S.), Rockwell Automation, Inc. (U.S.), Honeywell International, Inc (U.S.), Alstom SA (France), Omron Corp (Japan), General Electric Co (U.S.), Yokogawa Electric Corporation (Japan) and Schneider Electric SE (France) among others.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Research Blog: Fiber based Packaging Market: Trends, outlook and Opportunity Analysis 2025 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=33275 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/report-toc/33275 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/fiber-based-packaging-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com http://www.techyounme.com/ The global fiber based packaging is witnessing steadfast growth over the past few decades owing to the numerous applications of fiber based packaging across several end-use industries. The fiber based packaging market is primarily driven by the growth of the packaging industry and shift in consumer preference for eco-friendly packaging solutions.Further, easy availability of raw material for the manufacture of fiber based packaging products and government statutes in favor of naturally sourced packaging solutions is fuelling the growth of fiber based packaging market.A report by Transparency Market Research (TMR) projects the global fiber based packaging market to expand at a CAGR of 3.8% in terms of revenue between 2017 and 2025. At the pace, the markets valuation of US$284 bn in 2016 will become US$383.5 bn by the end of 2025.Get PDF Sample of Report @Corrugated Packaging to Register Leading Revenue Contribution through 2025The report segments the global fiber based packaging market by packaging type into corrugated boxes, cartons, partition & inserts, bottles & cup carriers, trays, plates, clamshells, display packaging, and bags and sacks. Of these, corrugated boxes segment dominate the market with an estimated share of more than 45% in the overall market by value. This is because corrugated boxes are ideally suited for primary and secondary packaging needs and are mainly used in transit packaging across several industry sectors.Cartons hold significant share in the market as they are widely preferred for primary packaging in food and beverages, cosmetics and personal care, pharmaceuticals, etc.On the basis of material, the global fiber based packaging market has been segmented into corrugated, boxboard/carton board, molded pulp, kraft paper. Of them, corrugated segment accounts for more than 50% market share by value.Download TOC@By end-use industry, the fiber based packaging market has been segmented into food packaging, beverages packaging, tobacco packaging, healthcare packaging, personal care & cosmetics, homecare & toiletries, electrical & electronics, e-commerce packaging, chemical & fertilizer, and other industrial packaging. Amongst them, the segment of food packaging holds dominance with close to 40% share in the overall market by value.The global fiber based packaging market has been segmented into virgin and recycled by material source. Recycled fiber segment is likely to dominate accounting for almost three-fourth revenue contribution to the market. The segment is likely to expand at a CAGR of 3.9% in terms of value over the forecast period.In terms of levels of packaging, the fiber based packaging market can be segmented into primary packaging and secondary packaging. Of the two, secondary packaging dominates accounting for more than 50% revenue contribution to the market.View Report@Middle East and Africa to Register Leading CAGR through 2025The global fiber based packaging market has been segmented into five regions, namely North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific is expected to register the leading revenue contribution of US$182,318.8 mn by the end of the forecast period. Europe is a significant market that currently holds 22.6% of the global fiber based packaging market vis-a-vis revenue.However, the Middle East and Africa is projected to register the leading CAGR of 5.8% over the forecast period. The region is expected to display rapid growth among other key regional markets over the forecast period.Key players in the global fiber based packaging market include International Paper Company, DS Smith plc, Huhtamaki Oyj, Smurfit Kappa Group plc., Sonoco Products Company, WestRock Company, Georgia-Pacific LLC, Pratt Industies Inc., Reynolds Group Holdings Ltd., U.S. Corrugated Inc., UFP Technologies Inc., ESCO Technologies Inc. Ltd., Brodrene Hartmann A/S, KapStone Paper and Packaging, Mayr-Melnhof Karton AG, Rengo Co. Ltd., Mondi Group, Stora Enso, AR Packaging Group AB, and BillerudKorsnas AB.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Research Blog: A Portland area attorney has managed to secure a sweet deal on a four-bedroom house in Clackamas -- rent set at $1,550 a month in perpetuity, a lawsuit claims. The market rate for similar homes in the "excellent" neighborhood is more than 50 percent higher, surpassing $2,300 per month, according to the suit filed by the landlord against lawyer Kevin Preston. The 2,300-square-foot house also has 2.5 bathrooms, a triple-car garage and a yard. It's a half-mile from Clackamas High School, on a quiet residential street of manicured lawns. The discrepancy between Preston's rent and the going rate has only widened in the three years since Preston moved in, the suit says. Section 29 on the third page of the single-spaced lease says "lessee shall have the right to extend this lease on an annual basis, upon the same terms and conditions as this agreement." Landlord Angela M. Bell bought the home as an investment, said Breckenridge Cartwright, the attorney representing her in the lawsuit. She knew Preston because he had represented her and her late husband years earlier in forming a limited liability corporation, the suit says. Preston stopped representing the family corporation before he moved into the house in 2015, the suit says. Bell didn't realize the lease contained the highly unusual clause freezing the rent until after signing it, Cartwright said. Preston now believes he can live in the home at $1,550 a month for decades to come if he so chooses, Cartwright said. "Why would you move if you have rent control forever?" Cartwright said. Preston responded to a request for comment with a written statement. "I don't comment on pending litigation, but will say that we very much disagree with the characterization of the facts set forth in the complaint," he wrote. Preston said his attorneys plan to "vigorously defend" him in the lawsuit and that forthcoming court papers will "speak for themselves." He didn't respond to a follow-up question, asking if he indeed believes the rental contract states that he can live at the home for as long as he wants at that price. Preston has been licensed as a lawyer in Oregon since 2000. According to a page featuring him on his law firm's website, he has practiced law in a variety of areas, including real estate, commercial finance transactions and business sales. Cartwright said his client asked Preston to sign a lease created by her property manager, but Preston declined. "He instead drafted this lease, and then rushed her through the signing of it," Cartwright said. The suit also says Preston wrote other favorable terms into his lease, including that he didn't have to put down any money for a security deposit. The suit says Bell could try to sell the property, but Preston appears to be claiming that the lease agreement would remain in effect under a new owner. Cartwright said Bell probably would have trouble finding a buyer willing to accept that. Bell is asking a judge to terminate the rental agreement. The suit was filed earlier this month in Clackamas County Circuit Court. -- Aimee Green Gov. Kate Brown declared an emergency in two Oregon counties due to drought conditions, she announced in a press release. Both Baker and Douglas counties were declared emergencies after a winter that left the region with low snowpack and low stream flows, both of which could spell trouble as fire season approaches. Douglas County is the first county west of the Cascades to be declared an emergency. Klamath, Grant, Harney, and Lake counties had previously been declared drought emergencies. "All signs point to another record-breaking drought and wildfire season for Oregon," Brown said in a statement. "That means we must continue our urgent work to build communities that are ready for the challenges of climate change. I have directed state agencies stand ready to help and work with local communities to provide assistance." Conditions in the affected counties aren't expected to improve, Brown said in her statement, and will likely have significant impacts on agriculture, livestock and natural resources. The governor's declaration gives state and county officials flexibility with water management that they otherwise would not have. -- Kale Williams kwilliams@oregonian.com 503-294-4048 Jay Leno in Vancouver, where he recently filmed an episode of the CNBC series, "Jay Leno's Garage." Photo: MJ Ambriz Jay Leno comes to the Northwest fairly often, whether he's performing at a casino or appearing at a special event kicking off the Portland Art Museum "The Shape of Speed" exhibit. But Clayton Paddison of Vancouver didn't go see the comedian when Leno told jokes at Ilani Casino Resort in April, or talked cars at the museum on June 16. Instead, Leno came to visit Paddison. In early May, Leno and a 25-person mobile filming unit arrived at Paddison's house to film a segment for the TV series, "Jay Leno's Garage." "They got here at 7 a.m. and were done by about 1 p.m.," says Paddison, who has turned his lifelong love of cars into a hobby, and a side business, Paddison Pre-war & Model T. During the visit, Leno and crew checked out Paddison's garage, and Leno got behind the wheel of another of Paddison's vintage autos, a 1927 Buick Master Six that Paddison was restoring for a client. The in-person visit grew out of Paddison making contact with Leno two years ago. "As a fellow auto enthusiast, I've always admired Leno's collection," Paddison says. The 33-year-old Portland native has seen episodes not only of "Jay Leno's Garage" on CNBC, but the online version on YouTube, "which is geared for us car nerds," as Paddison says. "It's like reading an old technical manual. You can dig into it for hours." Don't Edit Clayton Paddison and Jay Leno. Photo: MJ Ambriz The two have a mutual friend, Paddison says, who lives in Southern California. After hearing the friend say something like, "There are two people on this planet that should be in the same room for an hour, and that's you and Leno," Paddison recalls, he wrote the longtime host of "The Tonight Show" a letter. Yep, a hand-written letter, not an email. "That will get his attention," Paddison remembers thinking. It did. "The day after it was delivered, my phone rings, and it's Leno," Paddison says. "He called me personally." The two talked, and Leno was interested in getting a look at the 1927 Ford Model T that Paddison had assembled from parts, working with a limited budget. "If you're willing to bring it down," Paddison remembers Leno telling him, "we'd love to shoot it for an episode of the web series." Don't Edit Paddison drove from the Northwest to Los Angeles in summer 2016. "I spent all day at the garage, and they put the episode together," Paddison says. YouTube viewers liked it, and so did Leno, apparently. This spring, Paddison got a call from one of the producers of "Jay Leno's Garage," who asked, "How far are you from Portland?" Paddison recalls. "About 20 minutes, up in Vancouver," he replied. Don't Edit The "Jay Leno's Garage" van in Vancouver. Photo: MJ Ambriz "We'd like to shoot a segment of the CNBC show at your shop," the producer said. "You guys realize that it's a two-car garage at my house," Paddison told the producer about the specifics of Paddison's "shop." Don't Edit Clayton Paddison, second from left, with Jay Leno and crew members at Paddison's home. Photo: MJ Ambriz The producer was unfazed, Paddison recalls, which led to Paddison and his family, including his wife, Julia, and the couple's three sons, scrambling to get ready. "We spent the next month getting the house painted," Paddison says, "and organizing the garage." Don't Edit Don't Edit The "Jay Leno's Garage" crew at work. Photo: MJ Ambriz So when Leno and the crew filming "Jay Leno's Garage" showed up in early May, Paddison was ready. The two talked cars at Paddison's garage, and took the Buick out for a spin, as the camera crew recorded the action. Don't Edit Jay Leno and Clayton Paddison at Paddison's home. Photo:MJ Ambriz Paddison, like his wife, has a fulltime job. But having the hobby and side business of restoring and consulting on vintage autos is, as Paddison says, his "passion." "It makes play money, so I can have my own cars, and lets me help people" who share his love of pre-war vehicles, Paddison says. Don't Edit Clayton Paddison, with Jay Leno behind the wheel: Photo: MJ Ambriz He's not sure when his segment will air on "Jay Leno's Garage" on CNBC, Paddison says, "but from what they told me, it should be sometime this summer." For now, Paddison says he had fun entertaining his famous visitor. "Jay is really just a car guy like the rest of us, but his knowledge base is really deep, and there isn't much you can get him on," Paddison says. "The cool part is, we both learned things we didn't know...that is when you know the conversation is good!" Don't Edit Jay Leno greeting friends and neighbors during his Vancouver visit to Clayton Paddison's house. Photo: MJ Ambriz Beyond that, Paddison says, "Leno is actually a very personable, kind and welcoming person." Paddison adds, Leno was "very down to earth," and "quick to approach and introduce himself to my family and friends who were present to watch the filming. I was able to spend a good amount of time talking one-on-one about cars, history and collecting with him. It was fun, because we both seemed to be on the same page, same level. It was a really great experience." You can find other web episodes of "Jay Leno's Garage," at this link. Don't Edit Don't Edit Don't Edit Clayton Paddison and Jay Leno. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Clayton Paddison and Jay Leno, outside Paddison's house. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Jay Leno behind the wheel. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Clayton Paddison, left, and Jay Leno. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Jay Leno in Vancouver. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Don't Edit Jay Leno in Vancouver. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Clayton Paddison and Jay Leno on the road, in the vintage Buick Paddison is restoring. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Clayton Paddison, second from left, with Jay Leno and members of the "Jay Leno's Garage" crew. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Jay Leno, taking a close look at the vintage Buick at Clayton Paddison's house. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Clayton Paddison says the "Jay Leno's Garage" crew was making a Northwest trip when they filmed a segment at his house. Photo: MJ Ambriz Don't Edit Photos: The Oregonian Portland's Chinatown dates back to the 1870s, making it one of the oldest in the country. Much has changed in recent years, with gleaming new development coming to the historic district and the Chinese community largely shifting to 82nd Avenue on the east side. But the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood has managed to retain its distinctive character. Sunset magazine recommends Portland's Chinatown, once the second-largest in the U.S., for its "mix of divey Chinese lunch spots and new restaurants, mod art galleries and century-old brick buildings." The new restaurants and mod galleries are indeed appealing, but it's the century-old buildings that truly have stories to tell. That is where the Portland Chinatown Museum comes in. To help spread the word about the city's newest museum, which had its "soft opening" earlier this month, The Oregonian/OregonLive dug into its own archives. The photos below showcase the neighborhood's fascinating history. Don't Edit Chinese immigrants began arriving in Oregon in the 1850s, with many working as miners in the southern and eastern parts of the growing territory. By 1900, Oregon had more than 10,000 Chinese residents, and Portland's Chinatown was flourishing. Don't Edit A Chinatown street in 1900. Portland's Chinatown, writes the National Park Service, "developed around SW 1st and 2nd Avenues and SW Washington and Alder Streets, an area considered undesirable by European Americans due to constant flooding from the Willamette River." Don't Edit A family business in Portland's Chinatown in the early 1900s. Chinese immigrants had built many thriving businesses in Portland, but by the early 1900s rising xenophobia in the U.S. -- exemplified by the Chinese Expulsion Acts -- was hitting the immigrant community hard. "In Oregon," The Oregonian wrote in 2016, "Chinese residents were prohibited from voting, holding public office, attending public schools, serving on juries, entering professions and becoming naturalized citizens." Don't Edit A building in Portland's Chinatown in the 1880s. What makes Chinatown special? Part of it is architectural aesthetics. "The Chinese made alterations to the buildings to reflect their cultural traditions," the National Park Service writes. "It was not unusual to see iron balconies, wooden awnings and curved, brightly-colored canopies over business doorways." Don't Edit Don't Edit Courtesy Oregon Historical Society Portland native Leah Hing, whose herbalist father ran a shop in Chinatown, was one of the first Chinese-American women to earn a pilot's license. She worked as a mechanic at the Portland Army Air Base during World War II. This photo is part of the exhibit "Beyond the Gate: A Tale of Portland's Two Historic Chinatowns," which was at the Oregon Historical Society in 2016 and is coming to the Portland Chinatown Museum. Don't Edit A Portlander in the 1970s explores one of several tunnels found beneath streets in Portland's Old Town. This one is under 23 NW 3rd Ave. One of the reasons Portland in the late 19th century and early 20th century was called "Forbidden City of the West": Terrifying stories circulated of drunken men getting conked on the head at saloons, dropped through trapdoors and dragged through secret tunnels to the river. They woke to find themselves serving as oceangoing slave crew. This was called "Shanghaiing." Remnants of some of those "Shanghai tunnels" are still down there under Old Town Chinatown. Don't Edit Part of an old "Shanghai tunnel" in the basement of Mama Mia's Trattoria at 439 SW Second Ave. How bad was the Shanghaiing problem in Portland? One estimate put the number of people "Shanghai'd" each year at around 3,000. "Except," points out Atlas Obscura, "that it almost certainly didn't happen. Fantastic legends abound, but the level of truth in most of these stories remains extremely questionable. While the tunnels were certainly used as housing for immigrant workers and for some more illicit purposes such as opium dens and drinking during Prohibition, they were not in fact used for 'Shanghaiing,' despite their name." Don't Edit One of Portland's Shanghai-tunnel tours begins in front of Hobo's Restaurant. Portland historian Barney Blalock says a few men probably did get Shanghai'd in Portland back in the day, but that it surely didn't involve the tunnels under Old Town Chinatown. Those were busy being used for other, more profitable purposes. "They were built by Chinese back in the days when Chinatown was the center of gang activity related to the different tongs," Blalock wrote in a 2013 blog post. "The gambling dens, brothels, and opium parlors of Chinatown were connected to separate labyrinths, with steel doors, trapdoors leading to secret stairways, and tunnels for escape into far alleyways. These were security measures designed for dealing with both rival tongs and police raids." Don't Edit Portland police officers search a gambling den in the 1940s. Illegal gambling thrived in Chinatown (and other Portland neighborhoods) in the first half of the 20th century. The underground industry was known as the "Red Vice Kingdom." There were periodic efforts to shut down the gambling dens, but many of them were protected by the police. At 110 Southwest Third Avenue in the 1930s, to offer just one example, a storefront bore the inscription, "Hop Lee, Merchant Tailor." You would not find a tailor there -- at least not one who worked on the premises. Gamblers walked through that front room (empty, save for a lookout/fake tailor), down a dark hallway and into a kitchen. At the back of the kitchen they'd find a door that looked like it was for a pantry. It was a heavy, steel-reinforced door, and you had to ring a buzzer to gain admittance. Inside was a craps table and three blackjack tables. A sign on the wall said the place closed at 1 a.m. That was only a suggestion. The operation was two blocks from the central police station. Don't Edit Don't Edit Immigrants brought practices and traditions with them from China, often turning them into successful businesses. The photo above shows Chinese herbs preparations from contents kept in cigar boxes. Don't Edit In the 1950s, Wayne Fong was a Portland underworld figure reportedly working with a drug syndicate in China. Fong, wrote The Oregonian in a description of the above photo, "is said to be associated in the operation of this night spot, reputedly a gambling establishment." Don't Edit Wayne Fong became an object of public fascination in 1954 after the disappearance of 16-year-old Diane Hank, who was babysitting his children when last seen. Through coverage of Wayne's and his wife Sherry's trials, appeals and retrials over the next four years, Portland newspaper readers learned about the dangers of Chinatown: heroin and prostitution, miscegenation and violence and the loss of innocence. In the photo above, Wayne and Sherry are being arrested for Hank's murder. Sherry has turned away from the news photographer's camera. The Fongs ultimately overcame the murder charges -- Hank's death most likely was the result of accidental barbiturate poisoning. But Wayne was soon arrested again, and in 1958 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for dealing heroin. He died behind bars in 1976. -- Read more about the Diane Hank case Don't Edit "Baby contest" participants in 1952 included 3-year-old twins Jean and John Lai. A "Chinese baby contest" was staged in 1952 as part of Chinatown's Dragon festival. "Colorful costumes worn by youngsters are authentic Chinese design," The Oregonian wrote. "Most children were solemn, few cried." The festival proved immensely popular. "Outside, in a street barricaded to traffic," the newspaper added, "dozens of concession booths and carnival attractions kept the jam-packed crowd of visitors occupied." Don't Edit While in Portland in 1975 for the National Convention of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, publisher S.K. Lai announced that his San Francisco-based Chinese Times would begin also publishing in English. The newspaper was the largest Chinese-language publication in the U.S. "Many modern Chinese-Americans need an interpreter to even talk to their parents," Lai said. "The Times must keep up with the times." Don't Edit Don't Edit Rickashaw Charlie's was a popular restaurant and nightclub in Chinatown for years. "Why an 'a' has been inserted in 'Rickashaw' is beyond me and I forgot to ask the co-owner who showed me around, Lefty Hansen, a matinee idol-type with an ingratiating manner," an Oregonian critic wrote shortly after the restaurant opened in 1966. "He was very proud of the 'rickshaw-kind' dining booths and of the occidental-oriental blended motif of the Coolie Lounge, which has night-club entertainment." Don't Edit Rickashaw Charlie's "featured a mix of Cantonese and American food, and the lounge was the place for stiff drinks and live piano nightly," The Oregonian's Grant Butler recently wrote of the defunct restaurant's 1960s and '70s heyday. "Rickashaw Charlie's became embroiled in scandal in the 1980s, when it was the focus of a cocaine-trafficking investigation, and the cozy relationship between owner Robert Lee and Portland Police Chief Penny Harrington and her husband made headlines. Lee sold the business in 1986 to pay legal expenses after he was convicted of conspiring to deal cocaine." House of Louie took over the space, but it closed earlier this year after 30 years there, leaving Chinatown without a single dim sum restaurant. Don't Edit For years Fong Chong & Co. was the place to go for "good barbecue" and hard-to-find Asian food products, from dried banana flower and fish bladders to Japanese instant noodles. The store's customers, Harold Fong said in 1966, are "Americans and Chinese, from all over." Don't Edit By the 1970s, Chinatown wasn't what it used to be. With an air of resignation, Fong Chong & Co. proprietor Harold Fong showed a reporter around the neighborhood. Wrote the visitor: " 'Now,' [Harold Fong] says, with an ironic chuckle that is barely a whisper, 'two stores.' Palms up, to explain: that's life. 'Chinatown now.' He shifts his feet to face me directly. 'What did you expect to find?'" Don't Edit "Few Portlanders have had more impact than this man of Japanese ancestry, banished as a teenager from his American home during World War II," The Oregonian's Gordon Oliver wrote after Bill Naito died in 1996 at age 70. Naito, who avoided an internment camp during World War II by moving in with relatives in Salt Lake City, graduated from Reed College and the University of Chicago. In the 1960s he moved into property development, especially of neglected historic buildings in Old Town. Said former Portland Development Commission director Patrick LaCrosse: "The glass was always half full to him." Don't Edit Don't Edit Years before Donald Trump became president and instituted a crackdown on illegal immigration, law enforcement targeted Portland's Chinatown. In the photo above, an immigration officer carrying handcuffs chases a suspected illegal immigrant. The suspect and 39 others were arrested in the coordinated raid in Old Town Chinatown. Don't Edit Firefighters battle a fire at Hung Far Low Restaurant in 1980. A three-alarm fire in 1980 gutted the beloved, 52-year-old Hung Far Low restaurant at 112 N.W. Fourth Ave. The accidental fire, The Oregonian reported, "was sparked when a gas burner in the kitchen was left on under a wok-style fry pan by a workman." The restaurant was closed and empty when the fire started. Don't Edit Just 18 hours after firefighters had put out a fire at Hung Far Low restaurant in 1980, a second blaze broke out in the building. Officials said damage from the fires added up to more than $200,000. Don't Edit The Hung Far Low restaurant launched in 1928 at Northwest Fourth Avenue and Couch Street and quickly became a local favorite. "The food is nourishing, tasty, plenty," wrote a newspaper critic in 1966 while trying to capture the Chinatown attitude with his prose. "Even you can afford it. The service isn't automaton, but you won't starve waiting. The place isn't jazzy, but it's clean and comfortable." The restaurant decamped in 2005, but the iconic sign remains on the 1916 building. Don't Edit The famous Hung Far Low sign. Titillating? It's Cantonese for "Red Flower Restaurant." Don't Edit Don't Edit Tuck Lung was a popular Chinese grocery and restaurant in Chinatown. "Tuck Lung serves Chinese lunches from noon to 5 p.m., Mondays through Saturdays," The Oregonian wrote in 1966. "It is the only place in town that daily serves Hom Bow (steamed bun with barbecue pork filling), Dull Sah Bow (steamed bun with sweet black bean paste), Dim Sum (Chinese meatball wrapped in noodle skin) and Har Gow (shrimp and mushroom filling)." Don't Edit In 1978, the Tuck Lung grocery and restaurant moved down the street to a new building at Northwest Fourth and Davis. Tuck Lung closed in 1993 and the building is now vacant, though redevelopment plans are being considered. Don't Edit "Portland's Skid Road is transforming into Old Town, where the byword is coexistence," The Oregonian wrote as the district's transformation began to take shape. "Among the area's elite, slummers and bereft, the trend is toward tidying up." Don't Edit Crowds gather at the dedication of the Portland Chinatown Gateway in 1986. Don't Edit Mayor Bud Clark, the Portland Development Commission's Pat LaCrosse and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association's Gene Chin place a time capsule near the Chinatown Gate. Don't Edit Don't Edit In 1994, a court agreement brought down the Cindy's Adult Books sign behind Chinatown's gateway. "At last," the Oregonian wrote, "it is safe to take a picture of your family in front of the China gate." Don't Edit AP This Oct. 4, 2013, photo, shows the entry to Portland's Chinatown. The vacant lot where the building housing Cindy's Adult Books had been became the home of the controversial Right to Dream Too homeless camp, which was relocated last year to the industrial eastside. Don't Edit "The lion dance," The Oregonian wrote in 1986, "symbolizes luck and prosperity." In the photo above, dancers prepare for a Chinese New Year celebration in Chinatown. Don't Edit In 1975, Colburn, Sheldon and Kaji Architects received an "award of intent" in part for its "influence in saving the historic facade of Alco Hotel in Old Town." "The character of a city is a fragile thing," awards juror Hugh Hardy said. "If you take away too much of the past, its character never can be replaced." Don't Edit Old Town Chinatown's efforts to remake its public image took time to bear fruit. The Burnside Street Fair, The Oregonian wrote in 1979, "attracted few customers, as a spectator in a Northwest Couch Street window observed. Some businesses extended their hours, and food and crafts were sold by vendors [at the fair]. The sponsor was Burnside Consortium, which includes service agencies, residents and businesses." Don't Edit Don't Edit Before the short-lived Burnside Street Fair, there was Autumnfest. In 1976, three girls took in live music at the festival in Old Town. The following year, Dorothy Lawson McCall, mother of former Oregon Gov. Tom McCall, served as grand marshal of Autumnfest's parade. She represented "the past," she said with a laugh. Don't Edit In 1981, Portland firefighters battled an Old Town blaze involving an antique trolley. The trolley was on display behind locked gates in an alley linking Northwest Couch and Davis streets. "Flames reached 100 feet high," The Oregonian reported. Don't Edit Built in 1910-11, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association Building at 315 N.W. Davis Street has served as a Chinese school, museum and social hall for decades. A renovation was undertaken in the early 1980s, shortly before the above photo was taken. The CCBA is still located in the building, which the organization calls "a shared resource for all Chinese people, no matter where they come from." Don't Edit Teal Oka-Wong, 19, is congratulated by runners-up Judy Hong (left) and Sandra Leong after being crowned Miss Chinatown of Oregon 1981 at the Red Lion Motor Inn at Jantzen Beach. Don't Edit A "duckling dance" was part of a 1980 celebration marking the start of remodeling of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association's hall on Northwest Davis Street. Don't Edit Don't Edit The photo above shows a film crew working on a false building front at 127 N.W. Third Ave. in Portland. The facade was part of a street set for the 1990 movie "Come See the Paradise," starring Dennis Quaid. The area around Northwest Third Avenue and Davis Street stood in for Los Angeles' World War II-era Little Tokyo district. Don't Edit In 1989, actors and film crew for "Come See the Paradise" shot scenes between Davis and Everett streets along Northwest Third Avenue in Portland. The street had been made to look like 1940s Los Angeles. Don't Edit Portland's Chinatown in 1994. "The neighborhood once known as Portland's Skid Road is changing," The Oregonian wrote in 1994. "Once a crime-ridden enclave for the down-and-out, the Old Town/Chinatown community has become the rarest of neighborhoods -- a place where people of all backgrounds have learned to live and work together." Don't Edit Kuang Zhen Yan designed Portland's Classical Chinese Garden, now known as Lan Su Chinese Garden. The walled garden opened in 2000. Don't Edit The pond in Portland's Chinese garden offers a reflection of one of the property's buildings. In 1999, The Oregonian's Randy Gragg wrote about the work on Portland's garden being done in Suzhou, China. "With the concentration and dexterity of surgeons, some 50 artisans dressed in mechanics smocks and worn sports jackets are quietly carving, molding and assembling thousands of intricately crafted architectural details -- what will be the parts to Portland's classical Chinese garden." Don't Edit Don't Edit Tourist Constantine Gilca, from Romania, stands on the bridge between the Hall of Brocade Clouds and the Flowers Bathing in Spring Rain at Portland's Chinese Garden. Don't Edit Ivy Lin in front of the Suey Sing Association in 2008. Filmmaker Ivy Lin, who grew up in Taiwan, made a documentary about the history of Portland's Chinatown and the efforts to preserve its identity and memories. The film, called "Pig Roast & Tank of Fish," premiered at the 2008 Northwest Film & Video Festival. Don't Edit In 2009, star chef Andy Ricker opened the upscale restaurant Ping in Chinatown. GQ magazine soon called it one of the U.S.'s best new eateries. Ricker eventually left the restaurant to concentrate on his Pok Pok franchise, and Ping, though popular, closed in 2013. Don't Edit The view from Ping's main window. The Oregonian honored Ping as its "Rising Star" restaurant in 2009. Don't Edit A 100-feet-long dragon carried by 21 people was paraded from Portland's Chinatown to the Oregon Historical Society in celebration of the Lunar New Year in 2016. The dragon was a gift to the city from Taiwan, sent to commemorate the 1986 dedication of Portland's Chinatown gate. Don't Edit Don't Edit The 2016 parade from Portland's Chinatown to the Oregon Historical Society also celebrated the opening of two exhibits at OHS that detailed both the Chinese American experience and Portland's historic Chinatowns. Don't Edit The 100-feet-long dragon stopped traffic and brought out spectators during its 2016 trek across downtown Portland. Don't Edit Restore Oregon "Every year nonprofit Restore Oregon releases a list of places it feels are the 'most endangered' in the state -- landmarks with historic or cultural importance in need of some restoration and rehabilitation," The Oregonian's Jamie Hale writes. In 2014, the list included the 2-story Wong Laundry Building. Don't Edit Restore Oregon The Wong Laundry building at 221 N.W. Third Ave. opened in 1908. Restore Oregon writes that it "played a significant role for the city's burgeoning Asian-American population." The Wong family operated a laundry at the site from the 1930s until 1975 when the building suffered from a devastating fire after someone poured kerosene into an exterior laundry chute. Don't Edit Restore Oregon Restore Oregon has called the Wong Laundry Building "a significant historic structure in imminent danger of being lost to hard times, development pressures, demolition or neglect." Don't Edit Don't Edit Moovel COO Sadhana Shenoy and CEO Nat Parker at the company's headquarters in Old Town Chinatown. The Overland Warehouse, at Northwest Fourth and Davis, was built in 1889 to store dry goods. Soon thereafter it served as a bunkhouse for Chinese laborers. It was owned for a time by the Suey Sing Society, a Chinese benevolent association. As Chinatown struggled economically late in the 20th century, the building housed a strip club, the windows on the top floor boarded up. But the Old Town Chinatown district is now on an upswing, and the rehabbed Overland/Suey Sing building is an example of the change. In 2017, it became home base for Moovel, a high-tech subsidiary of Daimler. Don't Edit Rock-patterned walkways at Portland's Lan Su Chinese Garden draw visitors into Chinatown's rich legacy. -- Douglas Perry Don't Edit Portland Chinatown Museum The photography exhibit "Made in Chinatown USA: Portland" opened this month at the new Portland Chinatown Museum. Photographer Dean Wong says the exhibit depicts "what's left of Portland's Chinatown ... To me it's like the Alamo, you know. This is our last stand." Don't Edit More Want to dive deeper into Portland's endlessly fascinating history? Read on... -- Portland gloried in its sexy, secret gambling dens in the 1930s: Take our walking tour -- Why a Portland vice scandal in the 1950s riveted the nation -- 1970s Portland was smutty, corrupt and dance-crazed -- Portland in the 1980s: Drug gangs, skinheads loomed ... and also something special -- Portland in the 1990s: dirty, weird, a place to disappear -- Iconic Portland photos from the 19th century to 1940s -- Photos of North Williams Ave. through the years -- How the Hawthorne district remade itself while retaining its character, history Not every police agency provides a log of its responses, and few do it with the finesse of the Forest Grove Police Department. Every week, we post the goings on as provided by this community 25 miles west of Portland, not because it's earth-shatteringly important, but because it provides a glimpse into the world of modern small-town policing. During the week, Forest Grove police officers were engaged in more than 445 activities, both reported and self-initiated. June 8 * A caller reported a man riding a bicycle in a residential area giving off an "aggressive vibe." Officers located no one matching the description. * A woman reported that her roommate was spraying something in the house that was making her sick. Officers detected nothing abnormal in the house and advised the roommates to discuss the situation with each other. * A night shift officer stopped a suspicious, possibly inebriated man struggling with his pants along the side of the road. The man was determined to be high on methamphetamine. He requested officer assistance in securing his trousers. This was not something the officer was inclined to assist with, and the man was advised to find a different solution. June 9 * After an investigation into a home burglary the previous day, officers arrested a man who had previously been warned about returning to the property. He was charged with stalking, criminal mischief, burglary, and unlawful entry of a motor vehicle. * A woman called to provide information about a man believed to be responsible for the murder of a Forest Grove woman in March. * A caller reported the theft of a CD player out of his unlocked car. June 10 * A patrol officer stopped a vehicle for erratic driving and discovered the driver had an outstanding warrant. He was arrested. * TriMet reported a man who was unresponsive on the bus. Officers were able to wake the man and, on identification, learned he had an outstanding warrant. He, too, was arrested. * Police were called when a family located their cat deceased, possibly killed with a BB or pellet. Officers are investigating. June 11 * Officers responded to a local church where a man was reportedly seen pointing a long gun toward the building. Police located a man using a pressure washer near the location. * A realtor reported that a model house had been broken into and graffiti tagged on the concrete. Police are investigating. June 12 * A man reported that several trees on his property were damaged over the course of a week. As officers had little by way of suspects, the man installed security cameras to catch the culprit. Video surveillance revealed the perpetrator to be a beaver. No arrests were made. * Police received multiple reports of large groups of children meandering and milling around town, specifically blocking intersections near food trucks and coffee stands. All were advised that it was the last day of school. Officers provided extra patrol around many of the schools as they dismissed for the summer. * Police responded to a location where an SUV crashed into a tree. Officers learned a neighbor had forgotten to shift the vehicle into park and it rolled down the street. June 13 * Officers responded to a bar where a woman was reportedly screaming, had punched someone in the face, and was now attempting to fight the bartender. Officers located a woman matching the description a few blocks away and, after a short investigation, arrested her for harassment. * A caller reported that a man was circling the caller's vehicle, acting strangely and in a sexual manner near a shopping center in the middle of the night. Officers located a man who had previously been trespassed from the location. He was arrested. * A night shift officer spotted a suspicious vehicle associated with a suspect in several armed burglaries parked at a local hotel. Police set up a perimeter and executed a search warrant at the location where they indeed found the suspect. He was taken into custody without incident. June 14 * A caller reported that they had loaned a suitcase to a friend for a trip to Hawaii but that the friend had been disinvited and now refused to return the suitcase. Officers advised it was a civil matter, but suggested waiting for cooler heads before attempting to resolve the issue. * A woman reported that she had been assaulted in her sleep and found subliminal messages in soapy water about the attack. Officers believe she was experiencing mental health issues and assisted her in contacting a care provider. * Police responded to a three-vehicle crash at a busy intersection east of town in which a vehicle had stopped for a pedestrian but a following vehicle failed to stop in time. Two people were transported to the hospital, all three vehicles towed, and one driver cited for following too closely. -- Samantha Swindler @editorswindler / 503-294-4031 sswindler@oregonian.com For more than a decade, two felony convictions have followed Rosalee Anderson every time she's tried to rent an apartment. Most of her applications were rejected. The places that would rent to her anyway did so for a reason -- the apartments were in rotten shape, she said, with mold that sickened her daughter. Even the housing authority Home Forward initially rejected her application to live in public housing on the basis of the felonies, one for identity theft and one for delivery of heroin. That despite Anderson's clean record in the years since, many of which she's spent as a gang outreach worker helping to keep others from making similar mistakes. "I've changed my whole life around," she said. The city of Portland has a plan to help low-income renters wipe some criminal convictions from their record with the goal of removing a barrier to housing. The proposal, which Mayor Ted Wheeler is bringing before the city council on Wednesday, is expected to cost $50,000 for one year, and it's expected to reach about 300 households. In Oregon, violations, misdemeanors and low-level felonies can be expunged, according to the Oregon State Bar, and only after 10 years without another conviction. Prosecutors and victims may object to the expunction. The Portland Housing Bureau would contract with Metropolitan Public Defender, a local public defense firm, to comb through renters' criminal history for convictions eligible for expungement. The firm would also hold six legal clinics to find during the year where renters can meet with attorneys. The attorneys might also help wipe other blemishes from their records, including charges that might have been dropped, outstanding warrants, debts or pending evictions. "We get more people than you could possibly imagine with just traffic stuff, but they missed one court date," said Aliza Kaplan, the interim director of the Community Law Division at Metropolitan Public Defender. A similar program at Home Forward is in its second year. It began when the housing authority found past convictions prevented some of its clients from using Section 8 vouchers in a competitive rental market. In other cases, it left residents no choice but to remain in public housing after they might otherwise have been able to move on, freeing up space for others. "They're stable, they're ready to find employment, get in a higher skill level or a higher paying job, and their criminal background can get in the way," said Executive Director Michael Buonocore. "There's a lot of ways, big and small, that it affects people's lives." Ron Garcia, president of the Rental Housing Alliance Oregon, a group of rental owners, said the proposal feeds into a narrative that landlords are the cause of the region's housing problems. And, he said, it will do little to relieve the broader shortage of affordable homes. "Those that would otherwise qualify are left looking for still other vacancies," he said in an email. "It seems to follow that this policy does nothing to solve the housing crisis, but in fact creates additional demands that pressure the market even further into an upward cycle of rent hikes." Though not included in the current proposal, the city is also considering a "ban the box" approach to rental applications, said Wheeler spokesman Michael Cox. Portland in 2016 banned many employers from asking about an applicant's criminal history until after making a conditional job offer. Similarly, landlords could be prohibited from asking about criminal background on applications. Anderson, now 34 years old and 11 years removed from her last conviction, is in Home Forward's program. She's had outstanding fines waived with the consent of prosecutors. Fines must be paid or waived before a conviction can be set aside, and that's often a significant barrier for low-income offenders. Her past gives her credibility in her work, which includes mentoring gang-impacted youth in Gresham and intervening when gang violence breaks out to try to prevent retaliation. But she worries that her employer, a nonprofit that was willing to look past her record, could lose funding for the gang outreach program, putting her out of a job. And she's in a program to prepare to one day buy a home, but mortgage lenders also don't look kindly on felony convictions. "It's like having a shackle on me," she said. "I can go so far, but it still comes back. It stops me from moving on with my life." -- Elliot Njus enjus@oregonian.com 503-294-5034 @enjus A Father's Day beef over a steak dinner on the Oregon coast devolved into homophobic slurs, rocks hurled through a restaurant window and a man behind bars, according to police, employees and the family at the center of the fracas. Warren Eric Duncan, 31, is accused of vandalizing the Pier 101 restaurant in Lincoln City as a heated row Sunday night spilled out into the parking lot, where his partner's father and mother were waiting by the car. He was arraigned on one count of criminal mischief, a felony, and released from jail Monday, records show. Jonathon Underwood, Duncan's partner of four years, said a server's bigoted comments triggered an unfortunate chain reaction. "That's when Eric snapped and flipped out," Underwood, 24, told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an interview Monday. "We were treated so horribly." Ryan Sarina, an operations manager for McGraths Fish House Restaurants, which owns Pier 101, offered a different account. "Mr. Duncan was upset over a steak," he said. The couple, who live in Springfield, had decided to take Underwood's parents out to the coast for Father's Day and had stopped at the seafood spot on U.S. 101 about 7 p.m. During dinner, the family sent back a couple of ribeye steaks because they had too much fat on them, said Dorothy Underwood, Jonathon's mother. The restaurant's top sirloin, a leaner cut offered to the table instead, wasn't to their liking either. Underwood said his parents eventually left to their car while he and Duncan went to the bar to settle up the bill. What happened next is a matter of dispute. According to Underwood, a male server with a ponytail tried to take away their meals, which were in to-go containers. Sarina said restaurant staff told him Duncan became furious when he learned the steaks ordered at dinner wouldn't be free. A restaurant manager told the two men they had to leave and began to escort them out, Sarina said. As the two men were being led to the front entrance, the ponytailed server walked by and called them a homophobic slur, according to Underwood. "He said it in a regular voice. The manager behind us, I know she heard it," Underwood said. The slur angered Duncan, said Underwood, who had to restrain him. Underwood said the server used the homophobic insult against them a second time, escalating the already tense situation. Sarina would neither confirm nor deny whether a restaurant employee used such language. "Under anger did someone use a word they shouldn't have? That's to be determined," he said. Sarina said employees told him Duncan, who is black, began calling the restaurant a "racist dump" and making threats, claims that Underwood denies. At one point, someone threw a punch. The brouhaha wound up in the parking lot. Officers soon responded to reports of rocks being thrown through the front window of the restaurant, court records show. Witnesses later told police Duncan had pitched the projectiles, and officers arrested him. The incident remains under investigation, said Lincoln City Police Chief Jerry Palmer. Palmer said criminal charges may be filed against other people in the case, though he would not elaborate on who. Underwood, who was staying in Lincoln City with his parents for a second night Monday, said he was still in a state of disbelief over what happened. "I felt we were attacked. I really did." -- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh skavanaugh@oregonian.com 503-294-7632 II @shanedkavanaugh A 27-year-old man shot by a police officer near Aumsville was indicted Monday on suspicion of ramming the officer's patrol car, injuring a civilian riding with the officer and trying to escape during the encounter. Joshua B. Biles faces charges of third-degree assault, second-degree criminal mischief, reckless endangering and attempting to elude a police officer. Biles survived the June 8 shooting and was later booked into the Marion County Jail. He was released from the jail last Wednesday due to lack of space and ordered to appear in court Wednesday for an arraignment, court records show. He must also stay away from the Aumsville police officer who shot him and the injured passenger. The encounter began around 1:30 a.m. when Officer Ryan Bambrick tried to pull Biles over near Stayton Road and Bates Road. At some point, Biles fled the scene, was shot and arrested, authorities said. Bambrick, who state records show has been with the police agency since last year, wasn't injured. A Marion County grand jury determined Bambrick was justified in shooting Biles, according to the county district attorney's office. Stormie Morlan, who was the passenger in the patrol car, sustained non-life-threatening injuries during what the district attorney's office described as a police ride-along. She confirmed Monday she was hurt when Biles hit the patrol car, but declined to comment further to The Oregonian/OregonLive. More information on the incident hasn't yet been released. Oregon State Police, which is investigating the shooting, declined comment and referred questions to the Marion County District Attorney's Office. The district attorney's office declined comment citing the ongoing criminal case. -- Everton Bailey Jr. ebailey@oregonian.com 503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey Troopers have publicly identified a Grants Pass woman who died under mysterious circumstances early Saturday after the vehicle she was driving skidded off the road and plunged into Hellgate Canyon, a popular recreational stretch of the Rogue River northwest of Grants Pass. Hailee Fox, 21, died at the scene of the crash, according to the Oregon State Police. Her passenger, 24-year-old Grants Pass resident Rodrigo Herrera, was taken to a hospital for treatment of unspecified injuries. The two were a couple, according to an online crowdfunding page. Oregon State Police said their preliminary investigation indicated that a woman, since identified as Fox, made a 911 call at 12:50 a.m. to report that a man had been assaulted and was in need of medical attention on Galice Road, which runs parallel to the Rogue River northwest of Grants Pass. She apparently stayed on the phone as she began driving to the hospital. When troopers arrived at the scene, however, they found a male, since identified as Herrera, lying in the middle of Galice Road. They also found skid marks where a car had left the road, crashed through a low stone wall and plunged into the adjacent canyon. Firefighters rappelled into Hellgate Canyon and discovered a Honda Civic and Fox, who had suffered fatal injuries. A state police spokesman said authorities are still investigating how Herrera ended up in the road. The incident remains under investigation, and additional information about its circumstances have not been released. The Oregonian/OregonLive Ted Sickinger and Jim Ryan of The Oregonian/OregonLive staff contributed to this report Oregon's state technology workers are scrambling to fix a problem that is preventing thousands of government employees from corresponding with members of the public via email. Several private email providers have blacklisted the state email domain Oregon.gov after a state employee apparently clicked on a phishing email earlier this month that allowed a hacker to access the state's computer system. "The malicious link hijacked the state-owned PC and generated over eight million spam emails from an Oregon.gov email address," state officials wrote in an email explaining the situation to employees on Friday. Now, private citizens with certain email providers can't receive emails from state employees. The state posted notice of the situation on Gov. Kate Brown's homepage. Through her spokesman Bryan Hockaday, Brown declined to say whether the state's cyber security is adequate. Hockaday would only respond to questions by email, and wrote that Brown does have concerns about the current situation. So what can members of the public do if they need to communicate with state government employees? Amy Williams, a spokeswoman for the Department of Administrative Services, wrote in an email that one option is to use "an alternate email address with a provider who is not listed below." Williams also recommended that members of the public include their phone numbers when emailing the state. Here is the email Oregon officials sent to state employees on Friday: Agency Directors, Late last week, a state employee appears to have clicked on a phishing email. The malicious link hijacked the state-owned PC and generated over eight million spam emails from an Oregon.gov email address. This happened over the weekend and was caught on Monday. Unfortunately, we did not catch it before external mail providers downgraded the Oregon.gov sender reputation score a score that shows how mailbox providers view your IP address. As a result of this incident, mail from Oregon.gov has been blacklisted by certain providers, including: @outlook.com @msn.com @hotmail.com @live.com What does this mean? Mail from any state employee with an @oregon.gov email address sent to any of the email domains listed above will not be received. What are we doing? DAS IT is working closely with Enterprise Technology Services and the Enterprise Security Office, who are going through proper channels to restore the Oregon.gov sender reputation score. Unfortunately, this will take some time to resolve. We will keep you updated as we know more. In the meantime, this is a good opportunity to remind staff of the importance of information security. This short video on Phishing provides guidelines on how to protect employees and the computer assets we rely on every day. The video is part of the Enterprise Security Office's information security awareness video series, which provides a variety of resources on information security. -- Hillary Borrud 503-294-4034; @hborrud Audit: Oregon's cyber security shortfalls leave state data vulnerable to hackers Update: 11:35 a.m. June 19 The Oregon Supreme Court on Monday certified the ballot title for an initiative that would require gun owners to store the weapons with trigger locks, cables or in a locked container. Supporters of the proposal can now begin gathering the more than 88,000 signatures they must submit by July 6 in order to get it on the November ballot. Relatives of two people killed in the 2012 Clackamas Town Center shooting are among the chief petitioners. The campaign has a website, oregonsafegunstorage.com. In addition to regulating gun storage, Initiative Petition 44 would require firearm owners to supervise children using guns and report lost or stolen firearms to the police within 24 hours. Anyone who ignored the gun storage requirements would be liable for injuries caused with the weapons, unless the injury resulted from self-defense or defense of another person. The ballot title for Initiative Petition 44 reads: "Requires firearms be locked during storage/transfer, loss reported, minors' use supervised; imposes penalties/liabilities." The court issued its ballot title decision after receiving only the initial filings from the National Rifle Association and other gun rights and hunting groups. They had appealed on Thursday for the court to change the ballot title written by a lawyer in the office of Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum. "The Court concluded that the ballot title certified by the attorney general substantially complies with the statutory requirements for ballot titles contained in (state law)," acting deputy state court administrator Phil Lemman wrote in an email Monday afternoon. The Supreme Court is still considering whether to change the ballot title for another gun control proposal, Initiative Petition 43. Members of the same gun rights and hunting groups had earlier appealed for the court to modify the attorney general's ballot title for that initiative, which would ban the sales and manufacture of a broad range of semi-automatic firearms and high capacity magazines in Oregon. Initiative Petition 43 would also require current owners of the weapons to pass a criminal background check and register with the state in order to keep their firearms. The Portland-area clergy backing the proposal realize they will face an incredibly tight timeline to gather the necessary 88,184 signatures by July 6, so they are planning a "Signing Sabbath Weekend" June 29 through July 1. The court does not have a set deadline to finish its review, but Lemman wrote that state law does require the justices to act "expeditiously to ensure the orderly and timely circulation of the petition." This story has been updated to reflect the following clarification: The Oregon Supreme Court did hear from the gun rights and hunting groups that asked for changes to the ballot title for Initiative Petition 44, to the extent the groups outlined their arguments in initial filings last week. -- Hillary Borrud 503-294-4034; @hborrud Voters will get to weigh in this November on an initiative that would ban all taxes on food in Oregon, after it qualified for the ballot on Monday. The signature gathering effort was largely paid for by grocery companies, which had poured more than $2 million into the campaign as of a month ago. On Monday, the Oregon Secretary of State's office announced supporters of Initiative Petition 37 submitted more than 121,000 valid signatures, several thousand more than they needed. The news comes nearly three weeks before the July 6 deadline for initiative campaigns to submit enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot. The Initiative Petition 37 campaign turned in nearly 176,000 signatures at the end of May. Two years ago, grocers were among the largest contributors to the campaign that defeated the corporate tax initiative Measure 97. Some of the criticisms of the measure were that it would disproportionately hit the low-margin grocery business and drive up costs as the tax multiplied across the supply chain. The union-backed group behind Measure 97, Our Oregon, has raised concerns that the food tax ban might be too broad and perhaps even prevent the state from changing other taxes such as the bottle deposit, OPB reported. -- Hillary Borrud 503-294-4034; @hborrud Petitioners for Oregon initiative to ban taxes on food turn in signatures Two pedestrians were injured Monday in Southeast Portland after a driver in a reported stolen SUV crashed into a wooden pole. The three people inside the white SUV ran away and were gone by the time officers arrived to the crash near Southeast 119th Avenue and Clinton Street, according to Portland police. The crash was reported around 2:40 p.m. The two pedestrians were injured after being hit by the struck pole, police said. They were taken to a hospital with apparent minor injuries. A search for the people inside the SUV is ongoing. This story will be updated as more information becomes available. -- Everton Bailey Jr. ebailey@oregonian.com 503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey The mountain goat herd at the Oregon Zoo is growing again. For only the second time in 15 years, a baby mountain goat was born at the zoo. New mom Montane gave birth Friday. Just a month ago, Montane's herdmate Sassy gave birth to Finnegan. Visitors can see the 3-day-old goat at the zoo's Cascade Crest habitat just past the zoo's main entrance. "It was up on its feet right away, though a little wobbly" said Amy Cutting, who oversees the zoo's Great Northwest area. "Mountain goat kids are extremely precocious and nurse within the first few hours. We were glad to see the pair figuring things out pretty quickly." New Montane nuzzles and grooms her kid, born on Friday at the zoo. The keepers will give it a name once they have spent a bit more time with it. Caregivers don't know whether the new kid, weighing about 6 pounds at birth, is male or female yet. According to Cutting, Montane was an orphan rescued by Idaho wildlife officials, and she observed and learned from Sassy how to take care of young kids. As with all mountain goat kids, the newborn is learning to climb and balance in order to navigate their sparse and rocky alpine environment. -- Elena Palenova Portlanders should get ready to ditch their drinking straws -- the plastic ones, at least. Citing the effects on animals and the environment from millions of tons of plastic waste, the Portland City Council is poised to pass a resolution Wednesday restricting use of plastic straws and other single-use plastics. The resolution directs the city Bureau of Planning and Sustainability to by October 1 devise a plan to cut down on use of the straws and other non-recyclable plastics that are used once and thrown out. It cites statistics and studies showing the harm on the environment, and particularly marine habitats, from plastic waste. Plastic straws are one of the most common forms of waste, it said, and cannot be recycled. An outright straw-ban is not mentioned in the resolution. If the Portland City Council adopts the resolution, the city will join Seattle, San Francisco, Berkeley, Boulder and Vancouver, British Columbia as other big -- and liberal-leaning -- cities to move away from use of plastic straws. -- Gordon R. Friedman 503-221-8209 A Portland woman said her brother was injured Sunday evening in an unprovoked attack after a man repeatedly uttered homophobic slurs at them. Katelin Durnal said she, her cousin, her brother and his girlfriend were walking past the man as he was camping in a vacant storefront near Northwest 21st Avenue and Everett Street when he apparently keyed in on her and her cousin's rainbow-colored attire. The group had attended the Pride Parade in downtown Portland hours earlier. Durnal said she was wearing a rainbow crown, ribbon and rainbow-colored nails. The group was leaving dinner when the man sitting in the storefront yelled a slur at them. "We didn't hear what he said at first, so we turned toward him," said Durnal, 25. "Within seconds he was on his feet, in my brother's face and punching him." Durnal said the man hit and choked her brother, the only male in their group and kept saying the slur. The man also yelled, "have a gay day," as he punched and elbowed him, Durnal said. Durnal said none of them identify as LGBTQ, but the group had gone to the parade as allies of the community and to celebrate with friends. "We were shocked," she said. "We did nothing to him, but it was clear he was reacting this way because he perceived us as gay." Durnal said the man grabbed her as she helped pull him off her brother. She pushed him away. As Durnal narrated what was happening to a 911 dispatcher, he gathered his belongings and began to walk away. Durnal said she followed him, staying about half a block behind as he briskly walked away. The man kept repeating homophobic slurs and was upset 911 had been called, Durnal said. Police caught up to them near Northwest 19th Avenue and Flanders Street and arrested him. Durnal said the officers told her they'd been looking for the man because he was suspected in two other attacks in the area that weekend. Police identified him as Justin Watling, 25. Watling was booked Sunday into the Multnomah County Detention Center on suspicion of second-degree intimidation, fourth-degree assault and attempted strangulation, jail records show. He was released Monday. The intimidation accusation is a bias crime offense in Oregon. Court records show Watling described himself to court staff at the jail as homeless for seven years and living in the Portland area for a little more than a year. He reported being diagnosed with schizophrenia and not having medication. Durnal said her brother was sore, but not badly hurt. The blows mostly landed on the side of his head, she said. She said she's glad the damage wasn't worse and glad Watling was arrested. "His use of that language around us was disturbing, but he could have attacked anyone without warning and that's what's really troubling," Durnal said. "I'm hoping he gets the help he needs so other people aren't put in danger." -- Everton Bailey Jr. ebailey@oregonian.com 503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey More than a dozen protesters spent the night camped out at Portland's ICE headquarters, where they have been holding a 24-hour vigil. The group plans to remain at the site for the foreseeable future. "We went from five of us in one tent camping under the stars to a little tent city," said Hanna Tashjian, 25, who lives in Southwest Portland. The vigil, Tashjian says, began after a Father's Day rally held at the same location Sunday. "We were just here. The building is still here. And we didn't want to go home. Not now." Protesters are taking shifts at the Portland headquarters after the Trump administration's policy of separating families looking to enter the country, either without seeking documentation or by seeking asylum, at the southern U.S. border. Protests have also been taking place near Oregon's Federal Correction Institution in Sheridan, where the government crackdown led to 123 asylum seekers being held at the prison. Back in Portland, protesters have blocked the entrance to ICE offices, preventing employees of the Immigration and Customs office from entering or leaving in vehicles. "'Modern day Gestapo' is kind of a popular phrase now and sounds almost hyperbolic," Tashjian said. "Until you see what's going on." "A lot of people are outraged and don't know what to do," she said. "We're just trying to do something about it." Five tents have been erected at the site. Dozens of food trays and cases of bottled water sit under cover nearby. The group will hold a vigil at 8:30 p.m. "The community has to stand up and say we do not want this in our cities, in our states, in our nation," Tashjian said. "If we don't stand up and respond together, who's going to?" Beth Nakamura 503-221-8218 Twitter: @bethnakamura Instagram: @bethnakamura Tim Boyle, one of the state's wealthiest residents, cut a check to the Oregon Department of Transportation for $146,000 to clean up trash on Portland highways. The money allows the state to clean up litter along U.S. 26 and Interstate 405 on five days a week instead of three. It's unclear if the state will hire additional employees to clean the highways or contract with inmate work crews or other laborers. State transportation officials and Boyle, Columbia Sportswear's CEO, announced the litter plan in a joint release Tuesday. "The image of our state is that it is green and clean," Boyle said in a statement. "Our highways should be free from litter, just like our natural spaces." Cleanup work will occur on the entire stretch of I-405 and along U.S. 26 from the 405 interchange to the Murray Boulevard exit. Boyle's corporate headquarters and the popular employee store are just off the highway at the Murray exit. It appears to be the first time a private donor has written a check to the state for this type of project. "ODOT sincerely appreciates Tim Boyle's generosity and willingness to improve our community," Rian Windsheimer, ODOT's regional manager for the Portland area said in a statement. "The litter problem has gotten worse along our highways and we are eager to put this gift to good use." Boyle is not adopting the highway, a popular program where community groups or individuals volunteer to cleanup highways in their city or on rural roads. According to the press release, the inner-metro area highways are too difficult to reach for volunteer work crews. Boyle's money allows for a one-year "pilot project." After the year, the state will see if it will be able to expand the litter patrols to other parts of the highway system. The state will install highways signs designating the pilot area, including two signs that read "Columbia Sportswear." But Boyle is financing the plan personally, not the company. Both the state and Boyle say the proposal is about the prevalence of litter in the area and not related to homelessness issues in the region. Boyle made waves in April when he gave $1.5 million to help create a new 100-bed homeless services center. That gift came on the heels of a separate threat to move dozens of workers out of downtown Portland because workers felt intimidated by homeless people nearby. Littering is illegal in Oregon. Violators face a Class A misdemeanor and a fine of up to $6,250 depending on the severity and potential jail time. -- Andrew Theen atheen@oregonian.com 503-294-4026 @andrewtheen Businesses have grown accustomed to renting software, paying for it month-by-month through a subscription. An Oregon startup, Rigado, thinks businesses may feel the same way about buying electronics hardware. Rigado provides wireless equipment and software that businesses can use to, say, track inventory in a warehouse. Affix a wireless tag to a widget and Rigado's technology - a combination of electronics gear and back-end software - will monitor its location until it's sold. Rigado, whose offices are split between Portland and Salem, said Thursday that it had raised $15 million to hire engineers and salespeople to develop and deploy its technology. The company said it was capitalizing as the Internet of Things - a catchall term for connected devices and appliances - moves from a nifty concept to a practical business tool. "We're moving from pilots and proof-of-concepts into large-scale production," said Kevin Tate, Rigado's chief marketing officer. Rigado started in 2010, founded by former engineers in Garmin's Salem office. Tate and Rigado chief financial officer Greg Rau are Oregon tech veterans who have worked together at a succession of organizations, from Unicru to StepChange to Upstart Labs and Chirpify. Rigado now employs 50 altogether, including 40 in Oregon. With Thursday's funding, Tate said, the company expects to grow as much as 50 percent in the next year. Rigado hasn't disclosed 2017 financial results but data supplied to business listing services suggest its revenue was around $11 million last year. The company raised $5.2 million in seed funding in 2017. Thursday's funding comes from Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group, joined by Rogue Ventures, FusionX Ventures and the Oregon Venture Fund. Madrona has invested in several of Oregon's most prominent young tech companies, including Jama Software and Opal. Businesses often prefer subscription services because, Tate said, because they don't have a justify a big up-front expense. They pay for technologies as they use them and upgrade as needed. As Rigado began expanding its technology, integrating software with its wireless hardware, Tate said the company concluded the same logic applied. "It really is like a subscription to an infrastructure," he said. -- Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699 Two shots are fired, two victims lay injured or dead, others scramble screaming for help - that was the scene at Gladwin High School late last week where officers from various departments trained for the unthinkable. Gladwin Police officer Jim Volant and Michigan State Police trooper Shane Noble ran several trainings in the high school Thursday, with actors playing victims. Gladwin police, Gladwin County Sheriff deputies, MSP, DNR and Gladwin County EMS took part in the training as responders. The scenarios included one officer going in alone, two officers, then three. The scenarios also included authorities working with Gladwin County EMS. "The goal is to find the threat and take it out," Volant said, noting the other priority is getting the wounded to EMS." Volant said he wanted input from the officers and a small group of people observing the scenarios. For the training, no real weapons were allowed. The shooter, played by Beaverton Police officer Steve Cingano, and the responding officers used blanks and plastic guns. "I don't like playing the bad guy," Cingano said after the training. Yet, Cingano's skill set kept the officers on their toes as he moved around from class room to class room or sometimes stayed in the same class room, keeping the situation as real as it could be. About 9 a.m. two shots are fired, victims lie in the hallway surrounded by strewn clothing. "We are in lockdown mode," a loud voice rings through the school. "Repeat, we are on lockdown mode." There are more shots, two officers rush into the front of the school with weapons drawn and a woman runs up to them yelling, "Help." The officers make their way down the hallway where they take the shooter out. "That's good guys 10, bad guy zero," said Gladwin Police officer Tim Yuergens, following several trainings. "In a perfect world, we would have four or five officers," Volant said. "But every time a round is fired by the bad guy, that's one more victim. Time is of the essence." Noble said there may be only one officer first on the scene, and that officer is going in alone. "We can't sit and wait," Noble said. When school officials questioned Noble about the Feb. 23, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, where an officer remained outside as the shooter was inside killing people, he said, "That never should have happened." Authorities agreed, that handling a school shooting or a situation like it - goes against everything they are taught. "They have to flip a switch and all their training goes out the window," Volant said, noting they must immediately focus on the shooter and not the victims. "They have to walk toward and shooter with guns drawn. They have to turn the hunter into the hunted." MSP Detective Sgt. Craig Johnson agrees, it is a difficult switch to flip. "This was advantageous to the officers and the community," Johnson said. "This goes against everything officers know, when they have to walk by someone asking for help, someone with a gunshot wound. "The goal is to eliminate the shooter and two, treat the wounded," Johnson said. "This was a good training." Gladwin Schools Superintendent Rick Seebeck was elated for the training. He said anything that can be done to keep student and faculty safe is a win. Gladwin Elementary School Principal Josh Pahl said no one knows when there will be a school shooting and waiting until it happens is not the right time to train. "I think this benefits everyone," Pahl said. Volant thanked all the role players, saying they made the exercise real for all the officers that came through. One of the actors, Gladwin High School nurse, JoAnne Clagg said she thought the officers did a great job. "We wanted it to be as real as possible," Clagg said of she and the other actors. "The more real, the more kids are saved. I really just wanted to try to throw them off a bit, so they won't be as thrown off if the real thing happens." Clagg's step-daughter went to school in California, where there was a school shooting last month. She said her step-daughter was absent that day. Because of the trauma, her step-daughter and family moved to Gladwin County. Seebeck was impressed with how the officers and actors handled themselves. He said the training is part of a three-day workshop. The training was the first day and all the school staff will meet with the authorities, to work together and discuss what was learned from the training. While the trainings had moments of intensity, the phone calls from Gladwin Police officer Mary Wroth, from outside the building, to her husband, Volant, inside the building lightened the mood - every time. She called to see if it was good to send in more officers -- Volant's phone played Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Woman." Downtown Midland was filled with more than 100 people on Tuesday protesting the Trump administration's decision to separate immigrant families at the border, detaining children separately from their parents. The protest, led by members of the Women of Michigan Action Network, local church leaders and other activists in the community began at 1 p.m. in front of Rep. John Moolenaar's office. Chants of "families united should never be divided," echoed down Main Street as the Midland County Courthouse re-dedication ceremony took place. Speeches were delivered by protesters denouncing the separation of immigrant children at the border on the corner of McDonald and Main streets. The group then marched down Main Street and chanted across the street during a speech and prayer delivered by the Rev. Wallace Mayton as part of the courthouse re-dedication event, before dispersing and walking back toward McDonald Street. The Women of Michigan Action Network tallied a turnout of over 371 people who took part in the protest. Moolenaar, R-Midland, "wants to secure our borders, and he believes that parents who break the law and enter the country illegally should remain with their children while the judicial system works," said spokesperson David Russell in a statement released to the media. Moolenaar was not in his office Tuesday, and posted on Facebook that his "office is closed today for federal workplace rights and responsibilities training that is required of all House of Representatives' offices. ... The Midland office will re-open on Wednesday." More than 2,300 children were taken from their parents at the border between May 5 and June 9, according to statistics released Monday by the Department of Homeland Security. In the last three months, illegal immigration on the U.S. southern border exceeded 50,000 people each month, said Department of Homeland Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen on Monday. Since this time last year, there has been a 325 percent increase in Unaccompanied Alien Children and a 435 percent increase in family units entering the country illegally. "(I'm here) to stop this horrible thing of separating parents from their children," said Sandy Clark at the rally. "It's wrong, it's horrible and it starts at the top." Jeff Havens, running for the seat of Midland City Commissioner for District 5, spoke up during the rally as well, voicing resentment of political leaders' inaction on the immigration issue. "This silence is about collaboration," Havens said. "These are people who think this is OK." Many people at the courthouse event voiced disgust for the protest interrupting the re-dedication ceremony. Some protest members did not agree with chanting over the event, while others shouted "Pray for the children!" during the prayer portion of Mayton's address. "It is our obligation to protect these children," said Carolyn Mahaffey, one of the protest organizers. "It needs to be fixed and it can be fixed." To the editor: On behalf of the Board of Directors of Personal Assistance Options, I would like to extend a special thank you to all those who shared our passion and mission for supporting individuals with different disabilities by participating in our 12th Annual Celebrity Art Gala fundraiser on May 17 on the suite level lobby of Dow Diamond. The Gala featured a live auction of artwork created by pairing local "celebrities" with artists from the Great Lakes Bay Region as well as many silent auction items, a bistro-style buffet and the opportunity to watch a home game from the landing and adjacent suite. All proceeds go towards our programs that support individuals with different disabilities to live as independently as possible in our community. PAO would like to recognize the following local "celebrities," artists, businesses and community members for their contributions to this event. To the "celebrities" for your humor and commitment to serving our community in many different ways; Realtors Badger Beall (Ayre Rhinehart), Matt Rapanos (Century 21), Kevin Crampton (Modern Reality), and Heather McLaughlin (Coldwell Banker). Builders/Developers Alex Rapanos (Midland Towne Center Storage), Jason Webb (Affordable Housing), Mike Rapanos (Rapanos Apartment Rentals), and Chris Moultrup (Three Rivers Corp.). To the talented and gifted artists from the Great Lakes Bay Region: Kathy Morley (Morley Photography), Adam Wernecke (Aurowerks Graphics), John Martinez, Jonathan Martinez, Billy Budd, Mike Martinez, Madison Martinez, and Jay Leahy (all from The ART Club Hub). Corporate and personal sponsorships: Arbury Insurance Agency, Duncan and Kathryn Stuart, Mark and Lisa Gandy, Jeff and Kristin Gandy, Kevin and Jenny Kendrick, Benjamin F. Edwards & Co., Poznak Dyer Kanar Garchow Schefsky PLC, Chemical Bank, Defined Employee Management, Saginaw Bay Underwriters, Defined Employee Management Group LLC, Midland Daily News, John and Sandy Bartos, Midland Ford, Ted Skinner, The 501 Group, Pumford Construction, Gavin and Associates, Warner Norcross & Judd LLP, The Heffel Family, Andrews Hooper Pavlik PLC, Tom Webb, and Quick Reliable Printing. Thank you to the staff of the Great Lakes Loons for their assistance in helping this event run smoothly. And a special thank you to Mike Furlo for being our professional auctioneer. His ability to keep the audience entertained through his sense of humor and talents as a professional auctioneer were greatly appreciated. Supporting individuals with different disabilities based on their personal needs and goals to become participating members in our community is an essential part of what we do and we are forever grateful to those who help us with this endeavor. KATHY ALLEN Executive director, Personal Assistance Options A federal judge ruled on Monday that Kansas cannot require a person to prove their U.S. citizenship before they are allowed to vote, reports the New York Times. The rejection of this restrictive voting law was a direct jab at the Kansas secretary of state, Republican Kris W. Kobach. According to NPR, Chief District Judge Julie A. Robinson ruled that Kobach had failed to prove that a substantial number of non-citizens were registered to vote in Kansas. This was a major blow to Kobach, whose entire political career is built on spreading fear about voter fraud, and who is currently a candidate in the Kansas gubernatorial race. He is also a close buddy of Trumps due to his claims that non-citizens vote in U.S. elections, which match up with Trumps own immigration policies. However, the Times notes that experts on election law say that there is no evidence that voter fraud is a pervasive problem. Ultimately, this ruling means that for the first time since 2013, citizens in Kansas will not have to prove they are U.S. citizens before registering to vote. Judge Robinsons 118-page ruling decided that the Kansas law was unconstitutional because it violated the 14th Amendment and the National Voter Registration Act. Kobach was one of the main driving forces behind the creation of this restrictive voting law. He claims that since 1999, there have been 127 non-citizens who have either attempted to or succeeded in registering to vote, while 43 of them were actually able to register and only 11 voted in an election. Kobach referred to these figures as the tip of the iceberg but after reviewing the case, Judge Robison concluded, There is no iceberg; only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error. Celia Llopis-Jepson from the Kansas News Service reported for NPR that during the trial, Kobach denied allegations of voter suppression and put experts on the stand to present polls and surveys that they say show almost all Kansans have easy access to documents like birth certificates. However, during the trial, the League of Women Voters of Kansas stated that they faced challenges in helping register young local voters due to the law. At a Washburn University voter registration drive, 400 people attempted to register to vote but only 75 were actually registered after weeks of work. Judge Robinsons ruling comes just two months after she held Kobach in contempt of court for disobeying her orders to notify thousands of potentially ineligible voters that they were officially registered and able to vote. Judge Robinson also disapproved of Kobachs decision to represent his own office in the trial. She wrote that Kobach chose to represent his own office in this matter, and as such, had a duty to familiarize himself with the governing rules of procedure, and to ensure as the lead attorney on this case that his discovery obligations were satisfied despite his many duties as a busy public servant. On top of striking down his restrictive law, she also ordered Kobach to complete six hours of legal education that must pertain to federal or Kansas civil rules of procedure or evidence. Happy Juneteenth! June 19 marks what many black Americans celebrate as the actual end of slavery in the United States in 1865, which did not occur until over two years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This is not something you necessarily hear about in history classes, but Kenya Barris is setting out to change that. This years holiday comes with the news that the Black-ish creator will be teaming up with Pharrell Williams to write a musical based on the holiday tradition. Barris and Black-ish producer and writer Peter Saji will write the plays libretto, while Williams will write and compose the music. Williams and Mimi Valdes will produce through Williams company I am OTHER, along with Saji. The acknowledgment and celebration of Juneteenth as an American and possibly international holiday is something that I would put in the life goals column for me, said Barris in a statement (via Deadline). The musical is expected to center on two black families, one living in modern-day America and the other in the Civil War era. Beyond that, no plot details were revealed. If that sounds familiar to you, its probably because youve seen the Black-ish season four premiere which had, well, that exact premise. The episode, titled Juneteenth, featured Dre giving one of his classic history lessons to his white co-workers after Jack and Diannes play commemorating Columbus Day sets him off. The episodewhich featured musical numbers from the Johnson family, Aloe Blacc, an animated cameo from The Roots and a few Hamilton references seems to have been a jumping-off point for the forthcoming stage musical. Thats a great sign, as Juneteenth was Pastes top TV episode of 2017, with our own Matt Brennan calling it a bona fide masterpiece of the form, and possibly the finest half hour of broadcast comedy Ive seen since I started writing about television. Slavery is Americas recessive gene and its time we all dealt with it and what better way to have an audience swallow this dose of medicine than with amazing music and raw, honest, jaw-dropping comedy? added Barris, no stranger to tackling uncomfortable topics through comedy. I dream about projects like this, said Grammy award-winning producer Williams. Kenya and Peter are geniuses and Juneteenth will change culture and change history. We couldnt sign up fast enough. We are thrilled to collaborate with them. Noting that since the Black-ish Juneteenth episode the holiday has been recognized an Apples iCal, the team seems to have high hopes that Barris life goal is an attainable one. Check out the scene from Black-ish below for a taste of what the forthcoming musical might look like, and see Barris Instagram post announcing the project further down. Activists are organizing nationwide protests on June 30 to combat Trumps zero-tolerance policy that is separating immigrant families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, as Vox points out. The main rally will take place at 11 a.m. local time on June 30 in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., with sister marches all across the country. The Families Belong Together protests are being organized and led by MoveOn and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Both organizations are partnering with multiple organizations all across the nation to organize the protests and spread the word. JUST ANNOUNCED NATIONAL PROTEST JUNE 30 THE WHITE HOUSE And a city near you! Sign up to host an event here: https://t.co/jEUtcPPAPG#FamiliesBelongTogether Families Belong Together (@familiesbelong) June 19, 2018 Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal announced the protest on MSNBC and her website on Monday. On MSNBC, she said, The end game is really to say, This is about Trump. Ultimately, these marches are about protesting the inhumane misconduct against these children and revealing that this is Trumps policy, no matter how many times he blames it on the Democrats. Jayapal said, We see the outrage, and we see that this has to be taken right to the White House, right to Donald Trump, to stop the family separations. Families Belong Together was created on June 14 when cities across the nation called for an end to the zero-tolerance policy. The June 30 protest comes in the midst of nationwide backlash against the policy that continues to separate children from their parents. According to an NPR report from DHS, between May 5 and June 9, about 2,300 families were separated. This number adds to the 10,000 children already in custody, according to a May headcount. These children are experiencing extreme trauma, which could lead to future health problems, and they are being held in cage-like detention centers. The nations only images of their living conditions is government video and photos. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday to keep district lines in Wisconsin and Maryland that were challenged by residents for partisan gerrymandering, reports The Washington Post. These controversial district maps will be used in the upcoming midterm elections, and justices sidestepped the question of whether or not these maps are legal. The first case involved voters in Wisconsin who argued that the district maps were drawn to favor Republicans. The second case included voters in Maryland where the incumbent is not running for re-election in the upcoming midterms. The challengers stated the map of one district was drawn to elect a Democrat. The court ruled to keep the current district lines in both states. According to CNN, the Maryland case did challenge an individual district but the case was still in the preliminary stage and the challengers received an unsigned opinion from the court. The opinion read: Even if we assume contrary to the findings of the District Court that plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their claims, the balance of equities and the public interest tilted against their request for a preliminary injunction, Basically, the Supreme Court stated the challengers lacked evidence that the district lines had caused irreparable harm. The Maryland case was pending in a lower court until the Supreme Court announced their decision. The case will now proceed in the lower court. In Wisconsin, the challengers wanted the court to look at the entire state map as a whole and how it has been impacted by gerrymandering. The court ruled that they must assess the districts one at a time and the challengers must present them district by district. But according to the Associated Press, Chief Justice John Roberts is seemingly giving the Wisconsin case a second chance. Normally, when the court finds that a challenger doesnt have grounds to sue, they dismiss the case. Yet Roberts wrote that the Supreme Courts role is to vindicate the individual rights of the people appearing before it and this is not the usual case. The Wisconsin case was sent back to three federal judges to see if they can modify their case to prove that they have grounds to sue. Justice Elana Kagan wrote: Courts and in particular this court will again be called on to redress extreme partisan gerrymanders. I am hopeful we will then step up to our responsibility to vindicate the Constitution against a contrary law. The Supreme Court constantly monitors how electoral maps are drawn in each state and are in charge of policing racial gerrymandering. However, the court has never found that a states partisan district lines were extreme enough for them to be policed as well. The Wisconsin and Maryland decisions were a technical approach to the partisan gerrymandering issue, and ultimately a way to avoid dealing with it before midterms. The decision faced backlash from the American Civil Liberties Union, who called the courts decision a missed opportunity. Sachin Chheda the director of the Fair Elections Project which organized the Wisconsin lawsuit said, there is no vindication for the states rigging of the maps and disenfranchising of our voters here. We know as well today as we did when we started that our democracy is threatened and we need to return the power to the people. The president of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said the court failed to provide long-awaited resolution and clarity on what constitutes unlawful gerrymandering. However, even if the Wisconsin case doesnt make it back to the Supreme Court, there is another gerrymandering case pending Supreme Court review from North Carolina. The state is a midterm battleground state, with Republicans holding 10 of 13 districts. The challengers are prepared and have plaintiffs challenging each district as instructed by the court in the Wisconsin case. Caught in a fury of criticism surrounding its current zero-tolerance immigration policy (you know, the one where children are being illegally ripped from their parents arms at the border and stored at internment camps), the Trump administration is having a particularly blunderous week. On Tuesday, word began swirling that the administration is planning to pull the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Councilas early as todaya move that will surely not help in relieving the White House of its ongoing chaos. Bloomberg reports that U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will make the announcement official at 5 p.m. Tuesday from the State Department in Washington, D.C. The impending withdrawal stems from the administrations long-held distaste for the cohorts supposed anti-Israel slant, CNN reports. The decision also follows recent pleas on behalf of the U.S. and Haley for the removal of countries from the council that could be seen as human rights violators themselves, in addition to requested reform on the treatment of Israel. So the U.S.s departure isnt entirely a surprise: Haley warned at a meeting last year that the U.S. would cut ties with the council if substantial changes werent soon installed. When the Geneva-based council was created in 2006, John Bolton, then the American ambassador to the U.N. and currently the U.S. National Security Advisor, opposed its inception. The administrations announcement also follows the Human Rights Councils most recent meeting, during which the U.N.s high commissioner called the Trump administrations policy of detaining children at the border unconscionable. On that note, at least, the U.N. and U.S. are somewhat on the same page: A nationwide protest against the administrations policy is scheduled for June 30. Surveillance footage from inside two Erie area taverns showed an off-duty city police officer downing at least 13 drinks in the five hours before a fatal crash in February 2017. Now that officer, 10-year Erie cop Cheryl Frey, 47, was found guilty on all charges by an Erie County jury on Monday, following a five-day trial, as GoErie.com reports, adding: Frey is now facing a mandatory minimum of three years on convictions, including homicide by vehicle while DUI, aggravated assault by vehicle while DUI, homicide by vehicle, involuntary manslaughter and two counts of DUI. Frey had a blood-alcohol content was 0.232 percent -- or nearly three times the legal limit of 0.08 percent - when her northbound Subaru Crosstrek crossed into the opposing lane of traffic and struck a southbound Honda Civic, killing its driver, on Route 99. However, the driver of the Honda, 57-year-old Wade A. Schulze, had a BAC of 0.11 percent, and Frey's defense argued he played a significant role in the crash. In fact, Frey pulled out of an earlier plea deal in the case, arguing that she was the "proximate cause" of the crash - an argument the jury ultimately rejected. On the witness stand, Frey testified she had no memory of the crash. Typically when drinking, she testified her ex-boyfriend would drive. But this time, the ex-boyfriend left Frey with the keys shortly before the crash, the surveillance video showed. "I'm a city of Erie police officer. I don't drink and drive," Frey told the jury according to GoErie.com. "I pull people over for that." But on the fateful night, she did drive. Now she will learn her fate when she is sentenced for her crimes in August. After seven years of ladling soups and serving quiche and coffee, Agia Sophia Coffee & Books in Harrisburg is closing. The shop at 225 Market St. sits across from the Whitaker Center and is operated by the Orthodox Christian Charities of Greater Harrisburg, Inc., a non-profit that emphasizes fellowship and community service. Frank Bifano, president of the board of directors, said the coffeehouse will close July 27. "Sales revenue have really dropped because of competition. We've tried to do innovative things. We developed soup recipes, and even with soups and the specialty quiches and Greek pastries and all that business, sales have declined significantly," he said. The group donates to about 10 different local charities. Bifano said while they are a non-profit they need to cover rent and employee costs. When Agia opened in 2011 it concentrated on coffee drinks, smoothies and muffins, but the staff was looking to bump up the offerings and began adding items such as biscotti, quiche and bagels. It also began to focus on homemade soups, growing its rotating selection to more than 100 types. Many of the recipes are vegan or vegetarian in following the church's fasting days on Wednesdays and Fridays. On those days, members are not permitted to eat meat. The restaurant will continue to serve its regular menu until the last day of business, Bifano said. In addition, he said, OCCGH will continue its partnerships with the local charities. A Harrisburg institution is celebrating seven decades of business this summer built on its mouth-watering pizzas and hospitality. In July 1948, Donato, Sr. and Liana Giusti opened the Subway Cafe, where thousands have stopped at the two-story brick building with its tall neon sign for the old-world pizzas. The couple took over the restaurant at 1000 Herr St. and unknowingly built a landmark. Generations of Harrisburg diners have delighted in the Subway's thin-crust pizzas made with homemade sauce and provolone cheese along with fishbowls of beer. For the restaurant's 50th anniversary in 1998, the late Paul Beers, a local historian, said, "'The Subway is a good old-time place. It's good stuff." Everyone from steelworkers to railroaders to politicians frequented the restaurant which Beers said survived the introduction of fast food in a section of Harrisburg once crowded with bars, luncheonettes and clubs. The Giustis converted the bar into a restaurant. It was one of the first places in town, along with Magaro's, to introduce pizza, which sold for $1. Donato manned the tiny kitchen and Liana worked up front as hostess. Through the years the couple weathered many hardships including floods from Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972. (There's also a sign on the restaurant's wall indicating the level from the 1936 flood.) In 2004, the family sold the Subway to Fotios and Christina Lamnatos, who have maintained the restaurant's reputation, atmosphere and menu. A woman sentenced to nearly 19 years in prison for allegedly locking three small children in an unheated room for months and nearly starving them to death claims in a recent court motion that her jail sentence represents "cruel and unusual punishment." Brandi Weyant, 39, and her husband Joshua Weyant, were sentenced last month after pleading guilty to multiple crimes including aggravated assault, conspiracy, false imprisonment unlawful restraint and child endangerment. Their victims, ages 4, 5, and 6, were so malnourished and mistreated that two of them nearly died, prosecutors said. One girl taught herself to regurgitate her food so she could eat it again to ease her hunger pains, Nicole Smith, a former Children & Youth Services caseworker, testified at the sentencing hearing last month. Smith said the kids were kept in conditions reminiscent of a Nazi concentration camp. Prosecutors said the kids ate paint off the wall because they were so hungry. Neither of the Weyants were biologically related to the children but Joshua Weyant had custody of the kids after dating their mothers. Nine days after the hearing, an attorney for Brandi Weyant appealed her sentence by Judge Scott A. Evans, which carried a minimum of 18.75 years and a maximum of 37.50 years in prison. Her attorney, Bryan DePowell, argued the sentence was excessive, violated the sentencing code and was "too harsh a punishment." The court, DePowell contends, ignored several mitigating factors on Weyant's behalf, including that she had no prior criminal record, was the victim of domestic violence at the hands of her husband and co-defendant, and that she finished courses for her high school diploma and was participating in counseling behind bars. DePowell also argued that his client did not pose a threat to the public. "The conduct is in large part, a failure on Ms. Weyant's part to intervene," the motion said. "Thus it is clear that a reasonable reduction...would not endanger the public and would support her ability to be successfully rehabilitated and reintegrated into society." DePowell said having her sentences run consecutively, instead of concurrently, was "particularly problematic." Overall, he said her sentence was "clearly unreasonable under the sentencing code," and that at her current age "this nearly 19-year sentence represents s good portion of her life." Jennifer Gettle, the state's attorney, filed a response to DePowell's motion last week that said the sentencing guidelines already consider prior criminal acts. It was one of two factors used to determine her sentencing range, Gettle argued, so considering it again would be giving "credit for the same factor twice." Gettle also pushed back at Weyant's "vague claims" of being the victim of domestic violence. "Neither the police investigation, nor the pre-sentence report supported that bald allegation," Gettle wrote in her motion. "In fact...the child victims indicated that this defendant was arguably the primary perpetrator of the physical abuse of the children (i.e. slamming their fingers/hands in the window sills of the home.)" Prosecutors also disagreed that Weyant's crimes would not indicate a risk to the public. Instead, Gettle argued that the crimes exhibit "particular depravity toward our most vulnerable." She said there was no explanation of abuse; no financial struggle, no evidence of substance abuse; no significant mental health factor. "The conduct of the defendants appears to be simply, cruelty," Gettle wrote. "As such, this clearly indicates they would present a danger to the public and containment is imperative." As far as the consecutive sentences, Gettle said the charges were separate and distinct crimes against three separate victims and the resulting sentences all within the standard range (as opposed to the aggravated range.) "A defendant is not entitled to 'volume discounts' for multiple criminal acts that occur out of one larger criminal episode," Gettle wrote. "There is nothing in the sentence that suggests vindictiveness." Instead, she argued, the court could have imposed the maximum sentence and deviated from the guidelines given the facts of this case, but the court did not. Once Evans rules to either grant or deny Weyant's appeal, either party could appeal the decision to the Superior Court. Motions for/against appeal of Brandi Weyant prison sentence by PennLive on Scribd Lancaster police this week filed criminal homicide charges in connection with the death of a man who died after being stabbed in 2009. Police charged Carl Lamont Hunter Sr., also called "Low," in connection with the Dec. 18, 2009 death of Michael Evans. Police said they have been unable to locate Hunter for many years. They said he was wanted on a drug-related warrat issued in 2009, but police haven't found him, even after efforts to publicize the warrant. His last known address was in the 600 block of West Walnut Street in Lancaster. Evans died at the hospital after being stabbed at a home in the 400 block of West Lemon Street, police said. Police are asking anyone with information about Hunter to contact Det. Matt Odenthal at 717-735-3352, or to email him at odentham@lancasterpolice.com. Information can also be given to Lancaster Crime Stoppers at (800) 322-1913, or by texting LANCS and the message to 847411. Callers can remain anonymous and do not have to give their names. HARRISBURG - The Harrisburg School District will remain in state-run recovery for at least another year, and a top recommendation of that program is hiring a full-time chief financial officer and business manager. And the state secretary of education strongly reiterated that point to the school district in a letter this month. Pennsylvania Secretary of Education Pedro Rivera sent a letter to the Harrisburg School District June 6 stating, "Due to the critical financial challenges facing the district, it is imperative that the district hire full-time and permanent employees to fill these crucial rolls." The district is looking at a budget with a $5 million shortfall and property taxes hiked to the maximum allowable by law, which was done with James Snell working as the part-time chief financial officer and Bilal Hasan filling the roll as acting business manager. Hiring highly-qualified, full-time people to helm the district's finances was a top recommendation of the plan all along, and Rivera reiterated in his letter that it needs to happen sooner rather than later. School Board President Judd Pittman said tonight the district is beginning the search, and he hopes to have a full-time team in place soon, adding he is going to push for them to come up with a long-term financial plan to right the ship. "What was outlined in the recovery plan and what was outlined in the secretary's letter is that we need to move forward with hiring permanent people," Pittman said. The school board tonight approved hiring Snell for another three months on a part-time basis for $100 per hour to not exceed 30 hours per week or 120 hours per month. Pittman said he hopes by the end of that extension, a full-time CFO can be hired. He added is is pleased with the work Hasan has done, but the district needs to have someone permanent in that role. The school district is currently in state-led recovery - or Act 141 -- for distressed schools as it struggles to boost dismal test scores and improve finances. As the resignation of state-appointed Chief Recovery Officer Audrey Utley becomes effective June 30, Rivera informed the district through his letter that when Utley's replacement is named, that replacement will be tasked with developing a comprehensive update of the school's recovery plan. And at the top of that list in recovery is hiring of a highly-qualified, full-time chief financial officer and business manager, which the secretary of education said are critical measures due to the school's financial challenges. Utley said Monday night the secretary of education determined the district will remain in recovery for at least one more year. In its five years in recovery so far, she said the district has completed 81 percent of its goals and 19 percent are in progress. The secretary's letter and extension of recovery come as the school district is set to approve a budget next week with a $4.8 million shortfall - to be covered with its dwindling $30 million fund balance. The district has projected expenses of $154.9 million and projected revenue of $149.9 million. The proposed budget also includes raising taxes 3.6 percent and cutting about 50 jobs, half of which are teaching positions, for roughly $4 million in savings. To make matters worse, over the last two years, the district hired 37 teachers who were not properly budgeted. District officials say this will no longer happen since they have installed "position control" to bridge the gap between hiring teachers in vacant positions and knowing the amount of money available to do so. The over hiring cost the district $4 million, which is close to the projected shortfall. Pittman said it's hard to say if that could have been prevented with a full-time CFO and business manager in place, but filling those roles will bring stability and leadership, which should prevent these issues in the future. "There is something to be said about having a CFO who is here five days per week and can provide the right guidance and guardrails for our employees" Pittman said. "We need to make sure we have stability in all of our positions, especially at the leadership level." After the district hires a full-time chief recovery officer and business manager, there are a few steps the district must meet before it can exit recovery, according to Rivera. One step is the district must achieve financial stability by maintaining a positive fund balance of at least five percent of its annual revenue for three successive years and conclude two successive years with positive annual financial results. The district must also be able to show five-year projections of future budgets. These will be difficult steps to take since projections in three years show the $30 million fund balance being completely depleted. The maximum tax hike is possible fin the years to come, and so are cuts to some programs. The secretary's letter also indicates the state's fiscal staff is meeting with the district's business office to discuss the district's financial issues. The final budget is up for approval June 28. Pedro Silva claimed he worked for PennDOT when he tried to tow away a car parked in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Well, he didn't really work for that state agency. And on Tuesday, a state Superior Court panel refused to overturn Silva's conviction for impersonating a public servant and the 3- to 6-month prison term that went with it. Silva's case is odd. President Judge Emeritus Correale F. Stevens wrote in the state court opinion that it began in July 2016 when Silva knocked on the door of Tampa Street resident Lisa Marie Acevedo. Silva, 38, told Acevedo that neighbors had been complaining about her aunt's parked Jeep Cherokee that had not been moved for months. He told Acevedo he worked for PennDOT and was going to tow the Jeep, Stevens wrote. Silva never showed a badge or anything else identifying himself as a PennDOT employee, the judge noted. Acevedo went to get registration paperwork for the Jeep and returned with her husband to find Silva had tied the Jeep to his pickup truck with a rope. That's when Silva also told Acevedo's husband that he worked for PennDOT, investigators said. They said Silva then got on the phone and pretended to talk to someone in a PennDOT district office, Acevedo called the police as her husband untied the Jeep. Silva told the couple he was going to the "district office" and drove away. He was arrested on charges of attempted theft by unlawful taking, attempted theft by deception and impersonating a public servant. Philadelphia County Judge Lucretia Clemons imposed the jail term after convicting Silva on the impersonation count during a nonjury trial last year. On appeal to the state court, Silva argued there wasn't enough evidence to convict him on the misdemeanor impersonation charge. He noted that during his confrontation with the Acevedos he was wearing a jeans and a red shirt, never showed any badge was driving an ordinary pickup truck, not a tow truck. "Therefore, (Silva) argues, one could not possibly infer the requisite intent where it was impossible for the (Acevedos) to have believed he was a PennDOT employee," Stevens wrote. "We disagree." Stevens noted Silva repeatedly told the couple he was a PennDOT official, and even faked a phone call to try to support that charade. There is no doubt, then, that Silva "acted with the intent to induce Ms. Acevedo and her husband into believing he was a PennDOT employee," the judge wrote. A Franklin County man is facing charges after police say he had a long-term, online relationship with a teenage girl from Florida. Nickers Beauchamps, 27, of Waynesboro, was arrested Monday in Harrisburg. Residents in Clay County, Florida, discovered illicit photographs on the victim's phone in April, according to state police. Detectives then interviewed the victim, who told police she had been in the relationship with Beauchamps. Detectives in Clay County, with the help of Pennsylvania Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and state police's computer crime unit, were assigned to investigate. Beauchamps was located and interviewed on June 13, and troopers also executed a search warrant on his cell phone. Beauchamps is charged with sexual abuse of a child, possessing child pornography, and criminal use of a communication facility. He is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on June 26, and is currently in the Franklin County Prison in lieu of $150,000 bail. A state appeals court panel refused Tuesday to overturn a jury's $12.8 million verdict against a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary in a medical product liability case involving surgically implanted mesh. That decision, contained in an 82-page opinion by Judge Victor P. Stabile, binds Ethicon Inc. to pay those damages to a woman who claims a mesh device implanted in body left her with multiple medical problems, including chronic pain during sexual intercourse. The Superior Court ruling comes two years after a Philadelphia County jury agreed with Patricia Hammons that her ailments were linked to the Prolift Kit mesh system New Jersey-based Ethicon marketed. Prolift uses mesh that is implanted in the abdomen to hold in place internal organs that prolapse and threaten to come out of the patient's rectum or vagina. Hammons blamed her medical problems on surgery she had to implant Prolift mesh in her body in 2009. She sued Ethicon in 2013 after undergoing three surgeries to remove the mesh because of the problems her doctors said it was causing. Stabile cited trial testimony by medical experts who said the design of the Prolift mesh was defective and was certain to cause medical issues. He noted one expert testified the mesh was too heavy and that it and plastic used in the kit causes inflammatory reactions. Hammons also insisted Ethicon didn't provide adequate warnings of potential harm, the judge noted. Stabile added that Hammons initial surgeon testified that he would not have recommended Prolift to Hammons had Ethicon adequately informed him of the risks. In denying Ethicon's appeal Stabile rejected the firm's claims that Pennsylvania courts don't have jurisdiction in the case, that Hammons waited too long to file her suit, and that the evidence didn't support the damage verdict. Although Ethicon argued that Hammons missed a 2-year statute of limitations to lodge her complaint, Stabile agreed with her that the clock didn't start ticking toward that deadline until she concluded Prolift was the cause of her problems in 2011. Stabile also cited testimony that Ethicon was aware that Prolift "failed frequently." As early as 2006, internal company documents women who underwent surgery to deal with Prolift problems would face "disaster," he noted. Even Prolift's designers voiced concerns to the company about the safety of the type of mesh that was being used, the judge observed. "Ethicon recognized Prolift's risks but nevertheless continued to sell the product without adequate warnings," he wrote. Ethicon can appeal the Superior Court ruling to the state Supreme Court. The Hammons case is one of several where Ethicon has experienced costly legal defeats over Prolift. In April, for instance, a jury in the state of Indiana awarded $35 million in damages. A New Jersey jury issued a $15 million damage award against the company in December. Officials at a UPMC hospital failed to report a drug-using worker to federal authorities and so can be sued because he allegedly gave hepatitis C to patients at other hospitals where he worked later, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. The high court rendered that ruling against UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside Hospital in an opinion by Justice David N. Wecht. UPMC appealed to the Supreme Court after the state Superior Court found that patients injured by former radiology technician David Kwiatkowski's actions can sue over UPMC's failure to report Kwiatkowski's drug abuse to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Wecht wrote that Kwiatkowski would inject himself with fentanyl, refill the syringe with saline or some other substance and place it back in rotation for use in injecting patients. Years after he was dismissed from UPMC, Kwiatkowski's practice of putting contaminated syringes back in use caused him to infect patients at hospitals in Kansas and New Hampshire, attorneys for those patients claim. Kwiatkowski worked at UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside in Allegheny County in 2008 as a temp worker through Maxim Healthcare Services Inc., which Wecht found cannot be held liable for Kwiatkowski's later actions. In May 2008, a UPMC staffer saw Kwiatkowski take a syringe from an operating room and hide it in his clothes, Wecht noted. Hospital officials confronted Kwiatkowski and found he had three empty fentanyl syringes. Another syringe of morphine was found in his locker and Kwiatkowski tested positive for drug use. UPMC immediately barred Kwiatkowski from working in its system. "However," Wecht wrote, "UPMC failed to report the (drug) diversion to the DEA, despite its obligations to do so" under federal law. Two years later, Kwiatkowski allegedly transmitted a strain of hepatitis C with which he was infected to patients at a Kansas hospital by using their syringes to first inject himself. In 2012, more than 30 patients at a New Hampshire hospital where Kwiakowski subsequently worked also were found to have that strain of hepatitis C, Wecht noted. "Thereafter, many patients whose paths had crossed Kwiatkowski's path at various hospitals were urged to be tested for hepatitis C," the justice wrote. He noted Kwiatkowski is serving a 39-year prison term after pleading guilty in 2013 to federal crimes relating to his conduct. Patients who are suing UPMC took their case to the state courts after an Allegheny County judge dismissed the hospital network as a defendant in the case. The Superior Court reinstated UPMC and Maxim as defendants in the suits in 2016, triggering the appeal to the Supreme Court. Wecht cautioned that his court's ruling in the UPMC case applies only to that dispute and does not set a father-reaching precedent. He also cited UPMC's argument that it did report Kwiatkowski's conduct to the state attorney general's office and "we do not discount its potential relevance later in this litigation." In freeing Maxim from the case, Wecht observed that while UPMC's duty to report Kwiatkowski to the DEA "is the public policy clearly embodied in federal law," that law is silent as to whether the same duty applied to staffing agencies. Chief Justice Thomas G. Saylor agreed with the decision to free Maxim from the case but argued that UPMC should receive the same consideration. He contended the court majority was improperly expanding the civil liability umbrella for Kwiatkowski's criminal conduct. An early-stage startup, INTRO Technology, incorporated in Estonia, seeks to disrupt the property market in the BRICS countries. INTRO has already brought its innovative services to the Russian market; now, the team is set to conquer China. INTROs solution for the real estate market looks like a sweet dream of a Silicon valleys child. Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Property Market is an ultimate combo for a fundraising campaign in late 2010th. However, the project was born far away from LA and it followed real market demand. Since 2010ish, the real estate bubble has been growing rapidly in the BRICS economic space.The first bubble burst in Russia in 2015, followed by a nearly 30% drop in property prices. While foreign investors were leaving the sinking ship of Muscovite properties, the INTRO team found its one-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Seed investment for a BI-system based on big data analysis was provided by the major Russian development Gosstroy in late 2016. A year later, a BI-system named INTRO Analytica was released to the market. Today, the system monitors all construction projects and property deals in 40 Russian cities, serving the interests of 30 top-tier developers. INTROs path to its first success was thorny. The team struggled through unstructured public databases on construction, cadastre and property registration. The solution came with the governments initiative to transfer the land registry into blockchain. The startup was quick to saddle the trend and introduced its own concept of a blockchain-based property register. The ambitious activity gathered lots of attention, both in Russia and abroad. In late 2017, INTRO Analytica was selected for a business acceleration program in the IIDF, Europes largest venture fund and accelerator for IT projects. In February 2018, experts from EWDN and crunchbase included INTRO Analytica in the list of the top-5 most promising startups in Central and Eastern Europe. Eventually, the team signed a partnership contract with the Russian Association of Property Developers and was invited to all of the biggest events of the industry. Not bad for one-year-old startup. But the INTRO team still dreams bigger. Smart and Sexy Property Contacts We have always seen INTRO Analytica as an intelligent core for other services related to the real estate deals. Being able to access all property market data in two clicks, would you resist the temptation to trade properties and invest in construction? said Denis Vechkanov, the CEO of INTRO Technology. So the team went further and developed an online marketplace for property trade and investment named INTRO Sale. Its beta-version was already released in February 2018 for closed testing by some 200 professional property brokers. INTRO Sale also provides smart contracts for property sales. The blockchain-based contract fixes the obligations of the parties and can charge penalties. Freezing a deposit for property booking, the smart contract protects a property seller from careless reservations. In turn, a buyer is protected from the sale of the booked property to any other party by binding fines. The first smart contract in the system was signed on May 4th, between a real estate broker of the Etagi agency and the developer of the White River residential complex. The buyers payment was frozen by the terms of contract until the Russian regulatory authority confirmed the property rights registration. Then the amount was transferred to the developers account. INTRO Blockchain presented this product to the BRICS business association during a trip to Shanghai and Beijing later, in May 2018. The trip was an attempt to touch the ground before international expansion. Chinese investors listened to INTROs pitch with enthusiasm, but remained cautious. INTRO is now in talks with the Chinese startup hub and venture fund ZGC Innotown. The serious intentions of the Chinese are proved by an acceptance to the acceleration program in a Sino-Russian IT-incubator in July-August 2018. In the meantime, INTRO is expanding its business network across the global blockchain community. We have received a positive feedback from many blockchain experts and entrepreneurs. The collaboration with them resulted in new concepts of smart contracts for property market. In particular, we are now working on contracts for co-investment in off-plan property, property purchase by installment payments and property timeshare contract, said development team leader Dmitriy Pogorelov. The timeshare contract has already found its first potential client. We are now negotiating with the developers of a residential complex in the Dominican Republic. The company wants to integrate both smart contracts and their physical enforcement based on Slock.IT API, explained Pogorelov. If the project is completed, the property owners will be able to access the apartment only in a time period designated by a smart contract. Hotels and private rentiers across the globe may also find it useful. For correspondence Harju maakond, Tallinn, Lasnamae linnaosa, Punane tn 56, 13619 INTRO Technology OU Media Contact Company Name: INTRO Technology Contact Person: Alexander Kolesnikov Email: Send Email Phone: +74955067874 Country: Estonia Website: https://introa.io WILLIAMSTOWN - A Monday afternoon siege between police and a Harrisburg homicide suspect is over. Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo told PennLive shortly before 6 p.m. that Charles Williams, 41, has surrendered to police seeking to arrest him in connection with a March 24 homicide in Harrisburg. Williams is accused of shooting 20-year-old Jawan Washington, outside of the Double D's Bar on South 19th Street. When officers arrived here to serve warrants on Williams earlier Monday, Chardo said, the suspect retreated into a home on Maple Lane here, opening a stand-off that included the call-out of the Dauphin County Crisis Response Team. Staff writer Joe Elias contributed to this report. It's hard to decide what's worse about the appalling tragedy unfolding at America's southern border: That a U.S. presidential administration is indiscriminately ripping families apart and cloaking its brutality in some perversion of Christian teaching, or that the Trump administration simply can't decide which lie to tell to justify it. On Sunday, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted that "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period." Meanwhile, senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller was quoted in Sunday's edition of The New York Times saying that the separations were the product of a "simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry. Period." Meanwhile, President Donald Trump kept up his insistent, and easily debunked, lie that Democrats were at fault for a policy his own White House had implemented with much fanfare this spring. "I say very strongly, it's the Democrats' fault," Trump said during a White House event on Monday, The Washington Post reported. "They're really obstructionist. . . . The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. It won't be. You look at what's happening in Europe; you look at what's happening in other places. W can't let that happen in the United States, not on my watch." The fact of the matter is, however, that this is entirely on Trump. As The Post notes, it was the president himself who decided on criminally prosecuting all illegal border-crossers, including those with young children. It was his administration who declared the children unaccompanied minors once they're separated from their parents, turning them over to the custody of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. And it's the Trump administration, as The Post reports, that has "also begun interpreting a 1997 legal agreement and a 2008 bipartisan human trafficking bill as requiring the separation of families. Neither George W. Bush or Barack Obama took this posture." Attorney General Jeff Sessions himself has publicly acknowledged that this is the case: "The previous administration wouldn't prosecute illegal aliens who entered the country with children," he said last Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind. And it was Sessions himself who injected his own funhouse mirror reading of the Bible into this debate. telling reporters at that same event that he "would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes." White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders continued the farce, telling reporters at a briefing that "is very biblical to enforce the law." Putting aside the fact that Romans 13 has been used to justify a range of abuses from slavery to white supremacy and that the Bible is filled with admonitions to be kind to the poor and welcoming to strangers, there's also the small matter of the United States being a democratic republic and not a theocracy. Thus, Sessions' argument really isn't germane to the matter at hand. At all. Meanwhile, clearly sensing how politically toxic this issue has become, leading Republicans, including the former First Lady Laura* Bush, are joining Democrats in calling for an end to the mandatory separation policy. "What the administration has decided to do is to separate children from their parents to try to send a message that, if you cross the border with children, your children are going to be ripped away from you," U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, saiid during an appearance Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation." "That is traumatizing to the children, who are innocent victims. And it is contrary to our values in this country." The New York Times' Ross Douthat, who will never be confused for a bleeding heart liberal, acknowledged Monday that some degree of cruelty is inevitable when people are taken into custody for illegally crossing the border. But not like this. "The policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border, delivering them into a bureaucratic labyrinth while their fathers and mothers await trial or petition for asylum, is the wickedest thing the Trump administration has done so far," he wrote. And "you can tell exactly how wicked by observing how unwilling White House officials are to defend the policy on the merits," he continued. If you've ever felt that blind panic when you lose sight of your child, even for a minute, in a large crowd. Or heard their anguished cries when your child is filled with unalloyed terror, then you have some vague idea of the suffering the administration is needlessly, and cruelly, and in the most ungodly way possible, inflicting on migrants. The policy, at its heart, is the inevitable byproduct of Washington's complete paralysis on finding anything approximating a compromise on immigration reform. And, as Douthat notes, it would be better if the administration simply owned the fact that it's engaging in organized terror to force the most favorable terms it can obtain from an eventual agreement. But it continues to dissemble on what is plainly obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes. That this cruelty, this terror, this abuse puts us more in the line of the dictators we once professed to abhor. It's not who we are as a country. At all. No budget wars in Pennsylvania this summer, folks. Gov. Tom Wolf and legislative leaders have reached agreement on a $32.7 billion spending plan for state government that fits the Merriam-Webster definition of an election-year budget. The plan, as pushed through the state House Appropriations Committee Tuesday, contains no new tax or fee increases, and officially, at least, holds spending growth for 2018-19 to 2.2 percent over last year's enacted budget. It contains modest spending increases for public schools and universities, and two high-profile initiatives: $60 million for targeted spending on school safety improvements. A small stream of new funding ($4.5 million) for home visits and other supports to families whose lives have been turned upside down by opioid addiction. The other objective achieved, of course, is the measure of election-year cover provided to Wolf, the senators and representatives who will go home this summer with a completed budget to concentrate on re-election in what could be an extremely volatile political year. That's a striking difference from 2015 and 2017, when Wolf and lawmakers found themselves forced to operate the state for months at a time without adopted budgets due to fights over spending and policy priorities. The school funding package includes $100 million more for the main regular education subsidy to the state's 500 public school systems, up about 1.7 percent from the current fiscal year, to $6.1 billion. It also contains $30 million in new funds for vocational education programs, to $92 million; $20 million more for pre-k programs, to $192.3 million; and an additional $15 million for special education costs, to $1.13 billion. Lawmakers have also agreed to a flat, 3 percent increase in funding for the 14 state-owned universities, the four state-related universities including Penn State, Pitt and Temple, and community colleges. The added money both for K-12 and higher education drew special notice from Rep. Joe Markosek, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. "That's so important," the Allegheny County lawmaker said, "and that hasn't always been done in the last few years." Other highlights cited by legislative leaders were incremental increases in funding for home- and community-based services for low- and moderate-income seniors, as well as adults with intellectual disabilities. Leaders said they were helped in this year's negotiations by the reality that, unlike last year, they weren't starting with a $1.5 billion deficit to plug. That deficit, last year, was eventually plugged with a package that included a bond issue floated against the state's share of the national tobacco settlement, a leasing of the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex, and a massive expansion of legal gambling. This time around, by contrast, projections show the 2017-18 fiscal year ending with a surplus of about $20 million. The new budget is also helped, however, with more than a little accounting magic. The new spending plan relies on a series of one-time accounting maneuvers allowing the state to cover hundreds of millions of dollars of medical assistance program costs outside of the regular budget. In one example, the budget calls for the use of about $200 million in surplus funds from a state-run medical malpractice insurance service to pay for medical assistance programs. Lawmakers' prior attempts to grab that money have been blocked by the courts, but they intend to make a fresh run at it this year. If that effort fails again, House staffers said, the Wolf Administration will either have to fund those costs through other internal budget transfers or seek a supplemental appropriation. Other off-book medical assistance funding is expected to be covered by surplus funds remaining from a now-defunct gross receipts tax on certain health care providers, and anticipated revenue from court settlements. The general fund bill passed the House Appropriations Committee without opposition, setting the stage for full House consideration as early as Wednesday. If it passes there, it would go to the Senate and then on to the governor for his signature. Wolf quickly signalled his approval. "I am thankful to the leaders of all four caucuses that worked with me to negotiate this responsible and bipartisan budget proposal," the governor said in a statement issued by his press office. "This budget makes smart investments in education, safety and human services and continues the progress we've made to restore fiscal stability to the commonwealth's finances." Djeneba Doumbia gently rubs hair grease along the finished braids of her customer. In the booth next to her, Coumba Maiga snacks on a baby carrot before intertwining the strands of her customer's black hair. Around Coumba African Hair Braiding, braiders' hands move gracefully, creating a masterpiece a client desires. A few stand while others sit behind their salon chair because some braiding styles take hours at a time. Their booths were stationed close together in a circular pattern even though open space surrounded them. It was like they were back in Africa as braiders spoke amongst each other in their African dialect. Those conversations were about licensing Saturday afternoon as they chimed in English at times, often a harsher tone when mentioning licenses to braid hair- something they've always done. Braiding was taught to them in Africa, whether by mom, grandmother or friend, and growing up, they practiced the skill on their cousins and siblings. "It's easy to know how to braid. We braid each other hair. We don't have to go to school," said Marian Bouare. Maiga and Bouare laughed at the fact that a $4,000 class only would teach them the proper way to wash hair and not contribute to the art they learned from their home country. It came as second nature to them, but in 2006, Pennsylvania required hair braiders to obtain a license. Maiga spent about $16,000 to send her braiders to school then, and she said braiders are licensed and the shop has its up-to-date permit now. Still, Maiga would be happy if the licensing requirement was eliminated, an action proposed by Gov. Tom Wolf. The problem wasn't the license, itself, but the English and writing it took to attain the license. "Some people don't know how to write; some people don't know how to speak," Maiga said. After classes, a braider pays a $93 exam fee and $10 for the license whereas renewal is biennial at $67. In Pennsylvania, there are 29 braiders licensed yet there are at least six hair braiding shops in Harrisburg and surrounding areas, employing at least two braiders. Only one licensed hair braider has been disciplined since 2006. In that case, the individual was practicing on a lapsed license. But, there were more than 3,700 incidents of unlicensed practice of cosmetology, in which cosmetology is all hair-related occupations and not just natural hair braiding, says Wanda Murren, the press secretary for the Department of State, which oversees the Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs. "We have no way of determining whether any of these involved natural hair braiding without looking at each one," Murren said. Murren calls the Bureau of Professional and Occupational Affairs and Bureau of Enforcement and Investigation complaint-driven agencies who investigate every violation they are aware of. Complaints arise from the public, media reports or law enforcement. Wolf's proposal follows an internal report within the state department to review job licensing in comparison between Pennsylvania and its regional states. The report found that Pennsylvania is one of only four states in the regional comparison to require hair braiders get a license. In the northeast region, only three of 13 states require a hair braiding license. Twenty-five other states have exempted hair braiding from cosmetology, the last of which was Vermont when its governor signed legislation a few weeks ago, according to the Institute for Justice, a public interest firm who litigates and lobbies against irrational barriers into occupations, such as braiding. The group has challenged state braiding laws across the nation by suing 13 states and lobbying in 15 others on behalf of braiders, says Lee U. McGrath, senior legislative counsel with the institute. The Institute for Justice conducted a study calculating the number of braiders in states without a licensing requirement. The study didn't evaluate Delaware or border states of Pennsylvania, but Florida has 6,097 braiders and Texas has 1,943 braiders in comparison to the 29 documented braiders in Pennsylvania. McGrath said licensing isn't necessary because hair braiding is safe with no dangers to consumers. "There's no need for the government to tell braiders to wash their hands and sanitize their tools," he said. "It's common sense." He calls braider reputation integral in determining the quality of hair braiding rather than the government's "paternalistic hand." Cutting out the license, according to a press release from Wolf, would strengthen the workforce. "The governor's goal is that Pennsylvania residents have access to good paying, middle class jobs and that we shouldn't be creating unnecessary barriers at the state level," said Sarah Galbally, secretary of policy and planning to the Wolf administration. Wolf suggested the repeal of 13 job licenses to less restrictive requirements, including licensing for auctioneers, barbers, cemetery brokers, campground membership salesperson, orthotist, oriental medicine practitioner, rental listing referral agent and vehicle factory representative. The hair braiding license was the only one he called for a complete elimination of. Galbally said as long as an individual isn't doing other forms of cosmetology, there is no need for a hair braiding license. His proposal, alone, can do nothing to eliminate the braider license. It would take legislative action to repeal the bill that's been in place for over a decade. Okechi for Hair sits almost diagonally across the street from Coumba African Hair Braiding; however, the hairstyles aren't the only differing aspects of the salons. Its owner Darlene Wise doesn't have braiders at her shop, but favors licensing for all cosmetologists, even hair braiders. For sanitation reasons, there is a public risk when someone only knows how to braid and is not aware of contagious diseases, she said. "As a cosmetologist, I had to go to school before I could perform in a salon," Wise said. "So, I feel as though people that braid should have to go get some type of training before they are able to come to a salon and consider themselves professionals." Health official: 'It is sobering even one child has been directly impacted by COVID-19' Written by Brad Lane Jun 8, 2020 A true reflection of the American West, the state of Wyoming is stacked with big canyon walls, towering peaks, and a dense collection of hydrothermal features found nowhere else in the world. On the west side of the state, Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks can provide a lifetime of adventure, including several great Wyoming campgrounds. Spread throughout the remainder of the state, other spots for exploration like national forests, state parks, and massive reservoirs, offer more great places to camp in Wyoming. The type of adventures you want to have in Wyoming will determine the best campground for you. Whether you want to go see some geysers from the Norris Campground in Yellowstone, or you want to windsurf at the North Fork Campground at Buffalo Bill State Park, every campground in Wyoming provides a sanctuary for those with an adventurous spirit. The most popular time to camp in Wyoming is during the summer, but the autumn is arguably the best time to go, with cooler weather and fewer crowds at places like Yellowstone. For ideas on where to stay, see our list of the best campgrounds in Wyoming. Note: Some businesses may be temporarily closed due to recent global health and safety issues. 1.5k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard The White House is doubling down, with plans to implement even harsher immigration policies this year, even as the backlash grows to the Trump administrations practice of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. According to a new Politico report published Monday, Trump aides are planning to intensify the immigration crackdown ahead of this years midterm elections as a way to gin up votes. The report notes that Trumps team is planning additional crackdowns on immigration before the November midterms. More from the report: Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and a team of officials from the Justice Department, Department of Labor, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of Management and Budget have been quietly meeting for months to find ways to use executive authority and under-the-radar rule changes to strengthen hard-line U.S. immigration policies, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former administration officials and Republicans close to the White House. The goal for Miller and his team is to arm Trump with enough data and statistics by early September to show voters that he fulfilled his immigration promises even without a physical border wall or any other congressional measure, said one Republican close to the White House. In other words, not only is the family separation practice a stunt meant to make Trump look tough, but he apparently plans to go even further as a way to drive turnout this fall. In fact, as the report adds, one of the ideas being developed is a move that would allow the Trump administration to dodge limits on the amount of time these children are kept in government custody. As Politico reported: In one of the most closely watched plans under discussion, the Department of Homeland Security has proposed a new rule that former Obama administration officials and immigration advocates worry could be used as an end run around a 1997 court settlement that limits the length of time migrant children can be kept in government custody. Trump is handing the midterms to the Democrats To be clear, the most important part of Trumps new policy is the inhumane way it treats migrant children and families. Despite the lies being told by the administration, no president has ever done this. The most important reason to halt the practice is that the United States of America has a moral obligation to. But politically, its becoming fatal for Republicans. In fact, Trump could be handing the midterm elections to the Democrats as a Quinnipiac poll released Monday shows a whopping 66 percent of Americans oppose the cruel crackdown at the border. That number is likely to grow as more footage from the border is seen by the world. Not only is Trump cementing himself as a morally bankrupt president who lacks even the most rudimentary sense of compassion, but he is bringing the entire Republican Party down with him. Asian Activities Report for October 11, 2011 includes: Allied Healthcare Group (ASX:AHZ) says today that its investee company Coridon Pty Ltd has successfully completed pre-clinical efficacy testing of its prototype Herpes Simplex Virus 2 vaccine with outstanding results; Universal Biosensors, Inc. (ASX:UBI) has commenced a new research and development project for Cilag GmbH International to determine the feasibility of an innovative blood glucose product to be used in the field of diabetes; Kalgoorlie Mining Company Limited (ASX:KMC) reports that recent drilling of the East Lode at the Bullant gold mine has intersected a spectacular high grade gold zone; Midas Resources Limited (ASX:MDS) will commence aircore drilling on a gold target south of the Intrepid Prospect at the Company's Lake Carey Project in Western Australia. 1.6k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard As the backlash to the Trump administrations child separation policy grows, Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris of California called for the immediate resignation of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. I think she should resign, the Democratic senator said. I think she is not equipped based on her conduct, based on the procedures and the policies she is promulgating. Video: The potential 2020 presidential candidate let loose on Trumps Secretary of Homeland Security: I think she should resign. I think she is not equipped based on her conduct, based on the procedures and the policies that she is promulgating. I dont think she is equipped to do the job the way that it needs to be done, which is that there should be values that are at play that are consistent with who we say we are as Americans. The government should be in the business of keeping families together, not tearing families apart. Not tearing children from their parents. Cases thats weve heard of a child being breastfed and taken from their mother. The horrible case of this father, right before Fathers Day, who ended up committing suicide after his toddler was taken from him. This is unnecessary. It is something the administration visited upon themselves and they need to end it. She has not had the courage or the ability to stand up and say, you know what? I have the discretion and Im going to exercise discretion in the right way that is reflective of the values of who we are as Americans. She needs to go. Sen. Harris is right: Nielsen needs to go The policy of breaking up families at the border, leaving thousands of kids in what amount to concentration camps, is cruel enough, but Secretary Nielsen doubled down on Monday. We will not apologize for the job we do or for the job law enforcement does for doing the job that the American people expect us to do, she said. Illegal actions have and must have consequences. No more free passes, no more get out of jail free cards. But thats where shes wrong. The American people do not support this policy, as a new poll released by Quinnipiac showed today. Its inhumane and it flies in the face of American values. As Sen. Harris said on Monday, the secretary has a choice. She could use her authority as head of the DHS to end this practice today, instead of appeasing her compassionless boss but she refuses to. Worse, she is touting it. Kirstjen Nielsen needs to end this policy, or immediately resign. 1.8k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard By Sarah N. Lynch and Susan Cornwell WASHINGTON (Reuters) Democrats staged an impromptu congressional protest and moderate Republicans and key U.S. business groups pressed President Donald Trump on Tuesday to stop separating immigrant children from their parents as an opinion poll showed most Americans oppose the policy. The family separations and detentions of children at the southern U.S. border, highlighted by the videos of youngsters in cages and an audiotape of wailing children, have sparked an outcry at home and strong condemnation abroad. Trump, who has made a tough stance on immigration a centerpiece of his presidency, has staunchly defended his administrations actions. He has cast blame for the separations on Democrats, although his fellow Republicans control both chambers in Congress and his own administration implemented the current policy of strict adherence to immigration laws. On Tuesday the president again tried to blame Democrats for what he called loopholes in the law that require families detained for entering the country illegally either to be separated or released. These are crippling loopholes that cause family separation, which we dont want, he said in remarks to the National Federation of Independent Business, adding he wanted Congress to give him the legal authority to detain and deport families together. The president has sought to link an end to the family separations to passage of a wider bill on immigration, prompting Democrats to accuse him of using children as hostages. Two of the top U.S. business groups, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, decried the separation policy on Tuesday and called for its immediate cessation. This practice is cruel and contrary to American values, Cisco Systems Inc Chief Executive Chuck Robbins, who chairs the groups immigration committee, said in a statement. The separations nearly 2,000 children were separated from their parents between mid-April and the end of May have been blasted by Democrats, some Republicans, medical professionals, rights activists and clergy. They began after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in April that all immigrants apprehended while crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally should be criminally prosecuted. Parents who are referred by border agents for prosecution are held in federal jails, while their children are moved into border shelter facilities under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a Department of Health and Human Services agency. A Reuters/Ipsos national opinion poll released on Tuesday showed fewer than one in three American adults support the policy. The June 16-19 poll found that 28 percent of people polled supported the policy, while 57 percent opposed it and the remaining 15 percent said they do not know. The images that have sparked widespread condemnation, of children in wire cages, are of a border patrol processing center in McAllen, Texas. LEGISLATIVE POSSIBILITIES Three Republican senators Ron Johnson, Ted Cruz and John Kennedy called on Trump on Tuesday to allow families to stay together if they have crossed the border illegally, while lawmakers pursue legislation on wider immigration reform. Cruz, who ran against Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, plans to introduce a bill this week that would prohibit the separations along with other reforms. What I would do until we pass Teds bill is to continue to arrest and prosecute people for breaking the law, but allow their children to stay with them, Kennedy said at a news conference with Johnson and Cruz. Trump planned to meet with Republican lawmakers later on Tuesday before votes expected this week on immigration legislation. He is focused on winning congressional funding for a wall he has long wanted to build along Americas southern border with Mexico, and Democrats have long said they will resist that. One House bill would limit, but not fully prohibit family separations, fund Trumps wall and give legal protections to young adults, known as Dreamers, who were brought to the country as children when their parents entered the country illegally. Details were still in flux. The bill is opposed by Democrats, who object to another provision that would cut legal immigration levels, and by conservative Republicans who are backing a rival bill that takes a harder line on immigration. In the Senate, Cruz said his bill would build temporary shelters where immigrant families could stay together in cases where there was no threat to the childrens safety, double the number of federal immigration judges and speed handling of asylum applications. Decrying internment camps, Democrats and their supporters disrupted a high-profile U.S. congressional hearing about an FBI probe on Tuesday. With the sound of a young child crying in the background, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, broke from traditional protocol and started reading from a statement, saying these (migrant) children are not animals. His Republican colleagues tried to shout over him Out of order! On Tuesday, the attorneys general of 21 states called on Sessions in a letter to stop endangering children by separating them from their families. In the latest condemnation from abroad, the U.N. refugee agency has told Washington it is very concerned over the family separations, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told Reuters. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Susan Cornwell; Additional reporting by Tim Ahmann, Amanda Becker, Makini Brice, Doina Chiacu and Lisa Lambert in Washington, Richard Lough in Paris and Tom Miles in Geneva; Writing by Doina Chiacu and Dan Burns; Editing by Frances Kerry) 736 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard House Democrats have sent a letter demanding hearings in all relevant committees on Trumps policy of separating children from their parents at the border. Here is the letter that was written by House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Nita Lowey (D-NY), Commerce-Justice-Science Subcommittee Ranking Member Jose E. Serrano (D-NY), Labor-Health and Human Services-Education Subcommittee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), and Homeland Security Subcommittee Ranking Member Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA): Dear Chairmen Frelinghuysen, Culberson, Cole, and Yoder: In recent days, we have witnessed heartbreaking images of children separated from their families as a result of the Trump administrations family separation policy. These images have shocked the conscience of Americans across the political spectrum. It is now obvious that family separation is not required by any federal law or regulation. Instead, the separation of more than 2,300 children from their families is the direct result of President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions zero tolerance policy of prosecuting all border crossers including families who may have valid asylum claims and families who have turned themselves in voluntarily. Further, after making statements directing asylum seekers to enter the country through ports of entry, there have been confirmed reports of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers denying entry to asylum seekers, citing a limitation on processing capacity. While we have been heartened that several prominent Republicans have criticized the Trump administrations approach to family separation, it is time for action. Instead of blithely deferring to the Trump administration or issuing empty condemnations, Congress should exercise its Constitutional prerogatives and conduct rigorous oversight of this cruel policy. As you know, the Appropriations Committee has a unique role in providing resources for the Department of Homeland Security, which detains asylum seekers, the Department of Justice, which is executing the Trump-Sessions prosecutions of asylum seekers, and the Department of Health and Human Services, which cares for the minor children who have been separated from their parents. We urge you to immediately schedule a joint hearing to provide oversight on the use of federal funds for the Trump-Sessions policy of prosecuting asylum seekers and the resulting family separations and to examine the impact on minor children who have been separated from their parents. The ongoing separation of families and subsequent detention of minor children is immoral and unacceptable. It is time for Congress to act, beginning with a hearing on these critical issues. Thank you for your prompt attention to this important matter. House Democrats are doing all that they can to turn up the heat The demand for hearings places the Republican majority in a no-win situation. If they deny the request, they will be siding with Trump and a wildly unpopular policy. If they hold hearings, they will be shining a light on the policy, forcing the Trump administration to go on the record, and they will also have to make their positions clear on the issue. Republicans have no way out of this. The action that Democrats referred to in their letter goes beyond investigation. Contrary to the White House lie, Congress cant change the policy implementation by Trump. They can pass legislation prohibiting child separations, but Trump would have to sign that bill or it would need to have a veto-proof majority to pass. What Congress could do to send a loud and clear message to Trump by voting to cut off the funding for the policy. Hearings are a way of turning up the heat, and the Republicans accountable for a policy that they are too cowardly to publicly condemn. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. By Sarah N. Lynch and Mark Hosenball WASHINGTON (Reuters) U.S. Senate Democrats on Monday pressed Justice Department officials about whether some FBI agents may have leaked damaging information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to Rudy Giuliani, now an adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, shortly before the 2016 election. In response to questions from Democrats during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Chris Wray said his office was aggressively investigating a number of leaks, but offered no details. Mondays Senate hearing followed publication last week of a report by FBI Inspector General Michael Horowitz that concluded that former FBI Director James Comey made a serious error of judgment when he announced he was reopening an investigation into candidate Hillary Clintons use of a private e-mail server a few weeks before the election. Comey became a controversial figure in the 2016 election, drawing accusations from Republicans and Democrats that his handling of an investigation into Clintons emails influenced the campaign. The 500 page Horowitz report also concluded that Comey did not exhibit any political bias in his actions or try to influence the election and did not contest the FBIs decision not to prosecute Clinton for the email affair. At Mondays hearing, Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy asked Horowitz if his office had investigated the leaks of FBI personnel who were actively taking steps to sway the election to Mr. Trump in his report on the FBIs handling of an investigation into Clintons use of email server. Thats correct We are not able to speak to you about work that might be ongoing, Horowitz replied. Sources familiar with the matter confirmed last Friday that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitzs office was still probing possible leaks to Giuliani or other Trump supporters. At Mondays Senate hearing, FBI Director Wray said he was unaware of any ongoing leaks to Giuliani, who now represents the president in Special Counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation.The hearing was the first of two scheduled this week to examine the Horowitz report. Democrats have repeatedly raised questions about leaks to Giuliani because of public comments he made before the election. Two days before Comey reported to Congress in October 2016 that the FBI was reopening the probe to review the newly discovered Clinton emails, Giuliani appeared on Fox News and predicted some pretty big surprises about Clinton. Horowitzs report said that a group of retired FBI agents was briefed on the Clinton email investigation on October 21, 2016, days before Comeys announcement. The report also discusses widespread problems with leaks to the media and said senior FBI officials were afraid that some officials in the bureaus New York field office were behind some of the leaks. Comey has previously said he commissioned an internal probe into the leaks. Trump fired Comey as head of the FBI in May 2017, prompting the appointment of a special counsel now pursuing the Russia probe. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Mark Hosenball; editing by John Walcott and) 408 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday,cFBI Director Christopher Wray testified that he did NOT agree with President Donald Trumps comments that the investigation being carried on by special counsel Robert Mueller is a witch hunt. Wray sat before the Judiciary Committee beside Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz while both men took questions from senators about the Inspector Generals report on the FBIs handling of the Clinton and Trump investigations. Not only has President Trump been claiming for months that Muellers investigation into the Trump campaigns ties to Russia is a witch hunt but he also in recent days has been using the Inspector Generals report to support his baseless assertions. Because the Inspector Generals report found a small amount of anti-Trump bias on the part of a small number of FBI agents, Trump stated that the report completely discredits the Mueller probe. Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont asked the FBI Director about these claims by the president. The Special Counsel investigation has already resulted in an indictment of 20 individuals and three Russian companies, Leahy said. Do you have any reason to believe that this investigation has been discredited? Senator, as I said to you last month and as I said before, I dont believe Special Counsel Mueller is on a witch hunt, Wray replied. This is not the first time that Wray has been supportive of the investigation that is being carried on by the special counsel with the help of the FBI. He has consistently said in the past that there was no bias against Trump within the FBI, and that there had been no interference into the investigation. For example, in February we reported that: FBI Director Christopher Wray sent a statement to the agencys employees saying he stands with them after a document written by congressional Republicans alleging bias against President Donald Trump at the FBI and the Justice Department in the Russia investigation was made public. Last September we reported that: FBI Director Christopher Wray said he has not detected any whiff of interference into the ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. It is important that Wray stand behind the FBI and behind Mueller at this time, while President Trump and his TV lawyer Rudy Giuliani have been attacking them constantly. Trump wants to take away the publics confidence in the nations top law enforcement agency which is unconscionable since these are the people who risk their lives to keep America safe. Wray was appointed by Trump to his position after former FBI Director James Comey was fired. And now Wray has shown that he has the courage and integrity that is typical of FBI agents, by standing up to the president and saying very clearly that there is no witch hunt. America would be much better off if Republicans in Congress would display the same kind of courage and integrity that is being demonstrated by Christopher Wray to the American people. 1.1k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Everyone with a working heart and functioning conscience is disturbed to distraction about the Trump administration policy of separating children from their parents. The lost children made that even more upsetting. The Trump admin has likely lost track of nearly 6,000 unaccompanied migrant children, thousands more than lawmakers were alerted to last month, according to an exclusive by McClatchy based on a review of federal data. The report by Franco Ordonez and Anita Kumar states that while federal officials acknowledged losing nearly 1,500 unaccompanied minors arrived on the southern border alone, those numbers were only a snapshot of a three- month period during the last fiscal year. It gets much worse. There is a lot more, said a field specialist who worked in the Office of Refugee Resettlement until earlier this year and was tasked with reaching out to sponsors and children to check on their well-being. You can bet that the numbers are higher. It doesnt really give you a real picture. But to come up with the 1,475 cases, the administration reached out to only 7,635 children and their sponsors. It placed more than 42,497 unaccompanied children with sponsors in fiscal year 2017. HHS told McClatchy it didnt have the data of unaccounted children in a reportable format. But based on its own estimates that 14 percent didnt return calls, some 5,945 unaccompanied children are likely unaccounted for. The numbers would be even higher in fiscal year 2016, which included the end of President Barack Obamas final term when the administration placed more than 52,000 children with sponsors. While children were placed with sponsors during the Obama administration, its important to note that separating children deliberately was not a policy of Obamas. Separating children on purpose is the result of the zero-tolerance immigration policy the Trump administration has implemented. This is what the outrage is about, because separating children from their parents is inhumane and has been denounced even by some conservative religious figures. The outcry over the lost children was originally about HHS losing track of 1,475 children who crossed into the United States from Mexico by themselves and were placed with sponsors, over three months of 2017. Deputy HHS Secretary Eric Hargan issued a statement and fact sheet at the time saying the departments Office of Refugee Resettlement attempted to follow up on the 2016 release of unaccompanied children by contacting their families, a step he said was not required of the department. The Trump administration claimed that children whose sponsors didnt respond to phone calls were not lost, but that the Office of Refugee Resettlement is no longer legally responsible for the children once they are homed with a sponsor. The bottom line is that immigration policy is hard and it cant be solved easily, and most certainly cant be solved by ignorant people who dont bother to learn history or learn why previous administrations handled things the way they have. The Trump administration is blocking asylum seekers from presenting at legal ports of entry to ask for help. So They have to cross the border to ask for help as they flee from violence and poverty. When they do, their children are torn away from them because they are now criminals. The Trump administration, party of family values, has now lost likely near 6,000 children. There is no horrible law requires that children be separated from their parents once they cross the Border into the U.S. This is a Trump order regarding how to implement existing immigration law. Trump could stop it any time he wanted to. 620 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard The United States government may be facing massive numbers of lawsuits over the new policy of separating children from parents who are arrested by U.S. Border Patrol. This is because not only may the act of separation give rise to legal liability, but there may be additional liability if the parents are not reunited with their children on a timely basis. On Monday Buzzfeed reported that once arrested adult migrants have completed their sentences for illegal entry, the U.S. government has no way to ensure that they are reunited with their children. According to Buzzfeed: Two months after the Trump administration began separating children from their parents along the US-Mexico border, immigration authorities cannot say what procedures exist to reunite children with their parents after the parents illegal-entry cases have been resolved but their immigration case is still pending. In March, we reported on a new lawsuit that had been filed by detained immigrants separated from their children: Migrants separated from their children after they were detained for illegally entering the United States have filed a class action lawsuit claiming there are hundreds of parents in the same situation, and that the Trump administration is violating their due process rights. The lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and filed in U.S. District Court in southern California. In that case a woman from Brazil was prosecuted on a misdemeanor charge of entering the country illegally and served a 25-day sentence in jail, while her 14-year-old son was sent to a facility in Chicago. After serving her sentence she was transferred to immigration detention in Texas and had still not been able to reunite with her son. It is clear that there is the potential for massive legal exposure here. The Buzzfeed report shows that U.S. immigration and law enforcement officials do NOT HAVE ANY IDEA how, when or if parents will actually be reunited with their children. There can be very long delays while the parents are waiting for an immigration judge to make a decision on their immigration case. A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Danielle Bennett, admitted there was no government policy or program for bringing children back to their parents. The logistics of the reunification are made on a case-by-case basis, Bennett said. She also said that ICE has no information on the number of children who had actually been reunited with their parents, or if any had. We dont know of any successful reunifications, she said. The ACLU case for the Brazilian woman in California has not been resolved, but there is reason to believe that there will be more lawsuits filed and there is a good chance they will be successful if parents are not able to be reunited with their parents. It appears that Stormy Daniels attorney Michael Avenatti is now turning his attention to what he has called Trumps draconian policy by offering his legal services to represent the aggrieved parents. On Monday, Avenatti posted on Twitter: We are already mobilizing resources on the ground for this fight. By days end, we expect to have at least 20 detained mothers and children as clients. If anyone knows of a parent that has their child taken from them at the border and not returned, please have them contact me as I am entering this fight. Given Avenattis track record of success, not only in court but in swaying public opinion in his favor, it appears that this issue will not be going away any time soon, and there will be more bad legal news for the Trump administration for a long time in the future. 1.1k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Republican Gov. Larry Hogan has announced that he is pulling the states National Guard troops off of the border until Trump stops separating migrant children from their parents. The Washington Post reported, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Tuesday ordered a helicopter and its crew to return from New Mexico and vowed not to deploy any National Guard resources to the border until the Trump administration stops separating migrant children from their parents as part of their criminal prosecution efforts. Hogan made his decision amid rising national fury over the issue, as well as calls from state Democrats including gubernatorial candidates like state Sen. Richard S. Madaleno Jr. to take forceful action. Hogan joins Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker as the second Republican to pull National Guard resources from the border in protest of Trumps policy of taking away kids from their parents at the border. The details have been appalling a nation as 5-year-olds are being locked in cages and leaked audio revealed terrified kids crying for their parents. Nearly all Republicans in Congress have lacked the spine to stand up to Trump on this issue, but a few Republican governors, in notable blue states, have distanced themselves from their president and partys policy. The child separation policy is a stain on every Republican Trump has enacted a policy that follows every single elected official and candidate who has an (R) beside their name. The only way that Republicans can distance themselves from what Trump is doing is to denounce it. Governors like Baker and Hogan have done so as a matter of political survival. A Republican in a blue state who supports this policy wont be a governor for very long. There is a rebellion brewing within Trumps party about the human rights violations that the Trump administration is engaged in on the border, but that rebellion isnt coming from Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. Instead, a few Republicans with a conscience are calling for an end to this disgrace to everything that the United States of America stands for. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. 114 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard By Michelle Price WASHINGTON (Reuters) Two U.S. Senate Democrats have written to President Donald Trumps nominee to head up the U.S. consumer watchdog agency, seeking documents to determine whether she had a role in the administrations policy of separating children from their illegal immigrant families. Trump on Monday formally nominated Kathy Kraninger, a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), drawing criticism from Democrats and consumer advocates, and dividing Republicans. The letter from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown dated June 18 could drag Kraninger into the controversy over the administrations policy of detaining children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. The policy has caused a national uproar and divided Republicans, potentially threatening Kraningers nomination. Brown and Warren said they want information on what role Kraninger played in the administrations cruel policy to separate children from their families. The senators said she has been involved in overseeing policies implemented by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Justice Department. OMB representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In April, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a zero tolerance policy in which all those apprehended entering the United States illegally from Mexico would be criminally charged. That has led the government to separate children from their parents. Democrats have accused the administration of barbaric treatment of children, while Republicans are moving tentatively toward legislation that would curb, if not entirely halt, the practice. Kraninger has helped prepare the presidents annual budget request for the DHS and Justice Department, including ongoing policy and management guidance and overseeing the implementation of policy options, Warren and Brown said. The senators were seeking to determine her role, if any, in implementing the zero tolerance policy, they said. (Reporting by Michelle Price; additional reporting by Roberta Rampton in Washington; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe) By Lesley Wroughton and Steve Holland WASHINGTON (Reuters) U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will announce on Tuesday that the United Sates is pulling out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, a Trump administration source told Reuters. The United States is half-way through a three-year term on the main U.N. rights body and had long threatened to quit if it was not reformed, accusing the 47-member Geneva-based body of being anti-Israel. Reuters reported last week that activists and diplomats said talks with the United States on reforms had failed to meet Washingtons demands, suggesting that the Trump administration would quit. Washingtons pullout would be the latest U.S. rejection of multilateral engagement after it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. It also comes as the United States faces intense criticism for detaining children separated from their immigrant parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein on Monday called on Washington to halt its unconscionable policy. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric declined to comment until a U.S. decision was announced, but added: The Secretary-General is a strong believer in the human rights architecture of the U.N. and the active participation of all states. When the Human Rights Council was created in 2006, U.S. President George W. Bushs administration shunned the body. Then under President Barack Obama the United States was elected to the body for a maximum two consecutive terms on the council by the U.N. General Assembly. After a year off, Washington was re-elected in 2016 for its current third term. In March 2011, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously suspended Libyas membership in the council because of violence against protesters by forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. But U.N. officials said no member has withdrawn. Haley said a year ago that Washington was reviewing its membership and called for reform and elimination of a chronic anti-Israel bias. The body has a permanent standing agenda item on suspected violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories that Washington wants removed. The U.N. Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel, said Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth. The council last month voted to probe killings in Gaza and accused Israel of excessive use of force. The United States and Australia cast the only no votes. Israels ambassador in Geneva castigated the council for spreading lies against Israel. (Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols at the United Nations and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and James Dalgleish) Consolidates Tenure on the Highly Prospective Ida Shear Zone Perth, June 19, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Intermin Resources Limited ( ASX:IRC ) ("Intermin" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the consolidation of tenure making up the Yarmany Gold Project, 65km west of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia (see Figures 1 and 2 in link below). The Company is currently conducting a self-funded 55,000m drilling program targeting resource growth and new discoveries on major geological structures in the world class Western Australian goldfields.HIGHLIGHTS- New tenure pegged making up the Yarmany Gold Project, 65km west of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in the Western Australian goldfields- Project area now covers 320km2 of greenstone belt including two new Exploration Licence applications contiguous with the Company's 100% owned Yarmany and Area 54 prospects- Yarmany is located on the highly prospective Ida and Reptile shear zones in close proximity to all required infrastructure- Data compilation and target generation underway for initial drilling upon final granting of applications expected in the first half of 2019 (see Note 1 below)Commenting on the acquisition, Intermin Managing Director Mr Jon Price said:"The consolidation of the Yarmany tenure is in line with the Company's strategy of acquiring quality assets on major geological structures contiguous with existing landholding and in close proximity to supporting infrastructure. The area has had limited work completed in the last 20 years and was consolidated through pegging at very low cost. ""The Company now holds a commanding position in the Yarmany project area of over 320km2 and has commenced data compilation and target generation for initial drilling upon final granting of the applications. We see great opportunity for Yarmany to join Teal, Anthill and Blister Dam as a key growth project for Intermin in this world class gold producing region. "OverviewThe Yarmany project area comprises 5 granted tenements and 5 applications. ELA15/1655 (220 km2) and ELA 16/510 (18 km2) are recent applications and cover newly available ground contiguous with the Company's 100% owned Yarmany and Area 54 prospects. Intermin now holds a dominant position overlying the Ida and Reptile Shear zones and covering over 320km2.Previous geochemical work completed (Delta Gold in 1992-2001 and others) identified numerous anomalies, many of which have yet to be followed up. The Iguana - Jamaica and Lizard gold mines along strike of the Company's tenure were developed between 2000 and 2009 producing 68,000 ounces of gold grading 3g/t and have current resources of 201,000oz (see Note 2 below). Intermin has commenced data compilation and target generation for drilling in early 2019 upon final granting of applications (see Note 1 below).Notes:1. See Forward Looking Statement on Page 42. See ASX announcement from EGS dated 14 June 2018To view figures, please visit:About Horizon Minerals Limited Horizon Minerals Limited (ASX:HRZ) is a gold exploration and mining company focussed on the Kalgoorlie and Menzies areas of Western Australia which are host to some of Australia's richest gold deposits. The Company is developing a mining pipeline of projects to generate cash and self-fund aggressive exploration, mine developments and further acquisitions. The Teal gold mine has been recently completed. Horizon is aiming to significantly grow its JORC-Compliant Mineral Resources, complete definitive feasibility studies on core high grade open cut and underground projects and build a sustainable development pipeline. Horizon has a number of joint ventures in place across multiple commodities and regions of Australia providing exposure to Vanadium, Copper, PGE's, Gold and Nickel/Cobalt. Our quality joint venture partners are earning in to our project areas by spending over $20 million over 5 years enabling focus on the gold business while maintaining upside leverage. Since 2009, millions of monthly readers rely on and trust PoliticusUSA for real independent liberal news. We arent owned by a corporation, we dont take any special interest money. We have no shareholders, and we are here to deliver you the unfiltered truth that the mainstream media and their corporate owners dont want to talk about. PoliticusUSA is completely independent, and our goal is to bring you the news with truth and integrity. We are committed to keeping the news free to every reader, but we could use your help. For as little as $1, you can support PoliticusUSA, and keep delivering the message to the corporate media that both sides dont do it. The facts still matter, and truth rises above all. Please give today, and if you cant donate subscribe to our newsletter. 169 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard By Lesley Wroughton and Steve Holland WASHINGTON (Reuters) The United States withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday accusing it of a chronic bias against Israel, a move that activists warned would make advancing human rights globally even more difficult. Standing with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Haley slammed Russia, China, Cuba and Egypt for thwarting U.S. efforts to reform the council. She also criticized countries which shared U.S. values and encouraged Washington to remain but were unwilling to seriously challenge the status quo. The United States is half-way through a three-year term on the main U.N. rights body and the Trump administration had long threatened to quit if the 47-member Geneva-based body was not overhauled. Look at the council membership, and you see an appalling disrespect for the most basic rights, said Haley, citing Venezuela, China, Cuba and Democratic Republic of Congo. Haley also said the disproportionate focus and unending hostility toward Israel is clear proof that the council is motivated by political bias, not by human rights. Washingtons withdrawal is the latest U.S. rejection of multilateral engagement after it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. It also comes as the United States faces intense criticism for detaining children separated from their immigrant parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Raad al-Hussein on Monday called on Washington to halt its unconscionable policy. Rights groups have criticized the Trump administration for not making human rights a priority in its foreign policy. Critics say this sends a message that the administration turns a blind eye to human rights abuses in some parts of the world. Diplomats have said the U.S. withdrawal from the body could bolster countries such as Cuba, Russia, Egypt and Pakistan, which resist what they see as U.N. interference in sovereign issues. Among reforms the United States had been seeking was to make it easier to kick out member state with egregious rights records. Haley said the U.S. withdrawal from the Human Rights Council is not a retreat from our human rights commitments. Twelve rights and aids groups, including Human Rights First, Save the Children and CARE, wrote Pompeo to warn the withdrawal would make it more difficult to advance human rights priorities and aid victims of abuse around the world. The U.S.s absence will only compound the councils weaknesses, they wrote. Jamil Dakwar, director of the American Civil Liberties Unions Human Rights Program, said Trumps misguided policy of isolationism only harms American interests and betrays our values as a nation. Jewish rights group the Simon Wiesenthal Center applauded the U.S. withdrawal and urged other countries to do the same. Reuters reported last week that talks on reforming the council had failed to meet Washingtons demands, suggesting the Trump administration would quit. The council meets three times a year to examine human rights violations worldwide. It has mandated independent investigators to look at situations including Syria, North Korea, Myanmar and South Sudan. Its resolutions are not legally binding but carry moral authority. Speaking before the U.S. announcement, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is a strong believer in the human rights architecture of the U.N. and the active participation of all states. When the Council was created in 2006, U.S. President George W. Bushs administration shunned the body. Under President Barack Obama the United States was elected for a maximum two consecutive terms on the council by the U.N. General Assembly. After a year off, Washington was re-elected in 2016 for its current third term. In March 2011, the U.N. General Assembly unanimously suspended Libyas membership in the council because of violence against protesters by forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. But U.N. officials said no member has withdrawn. Haley said a year ago Washington was reviewing its membership and called for reform and elimination of a chronic anti-Israel bias. The body has a permanent standing agenda item on suspected violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories that Washington wanted removed. The council last month voted to probe killings in Gaza and accused Israel of using excessive force. The United States and Australia cast the only no votes. The U.N. Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel, said Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth. (Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols at the United Nations and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and James Dalgleish) On June 16, the Armenian security service announced it had detained General Manvel Grigoryan, the member of the National Assembly, Armenias parliament, and a decorated Hero of Armenia, along with a mafia boss, Artur Asatryan, also known as Don Pipo. At the time of his detention, Grigoryan was immune from criminal prosecution as a member of Parliament. Armenian Prosecutor General Arthur Davtyan said Grigoryan was charged with illegal possession of firearms. He also requested an extraordinary meeting of the National Assembly asking the lawmakers to revoke Grigoryans immunity and to approve his criminal prosecution. The initial reaction of the generals political allies in the Armenian Republican Party to the detention of one of the country's leading figures was one of outrage and denial. The general has been decorated as a hero for his leading role in the creation of Armenian voluntary army, which fought against neighboring Azerbaijani forces for the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabach region. One of the partys leaders, Eduard Sharmazanov, deputy chairman of the National Assembly and Republican Party press secretary spoke to Radio Free Europe after visiting Grigoryan in detention. He called the case against the general unacceptable, illegal, unconstitutional and fabricated. We have settled on the verdict of misleading, because of a later comment from Sharmazanov. As you will see, he has yet to revise his initial accusation that charges were fabricated. On June 17, newly elected Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan went live on Facebook pointing to more accusations against Grigoryan. I would like to clearly state that the detention of Marvel Grigoryan is tied not only with the possession of the large amounts of illegal weapons and ammunition. It is also connected with suspicion that he was involved in appropriation and theft of the aid intended for the army, Pashinyan said. The prime ministers accusations were confirmed by the Armenian security service, which published a video of the search of a house owned by Grigoryan in the city of Echmiadzin. Along with an arsenal of hundreds of firearms, rockets and thousands of packs of ammunition, the video showed stacks of paper boxes marked as humanitarian aid and packed with canned food, first aid supplies and clothes. Security service personnel showed handwritten letters to soldiers from children who had collected and donated the aid for the soldiers. The video also showed Grigoryans collection of vintage cars and his private zoo, with exotic animals kept in small cages. He was illegally appropriating the food the school students have been collecting for the soldiers and feeding it to his animals the bears, the tigers and others, Prime Minister Pashinyan said. The security services video provoked a wave of public outrage in Armenia. On the evening of June 17, the generals son, Karen Grigoryan, announced on Facebook his resignation as mayor of the city of Echmiadzin. Republican Party members publicly condemned Grigoryan's actions, calling them unacceptable and disgusting. They also stated that they respect the presumption of innocence, but if the charges brought against him (are) proved according the law, he must be held accountable. One indication of the strong feelings in Armenia: Somebody edited Grigoryans Wikipedia page, adding the word traitor to his career achievements, while Hero of Corruption was added in next to the picture of the Armenian Order of Hero he had been awarded. On June 19, Armenias National Assembly revoked Manvel Grigoryans parliamentary immunity and approved his criminal prosecution, with the approval of almost all the generals supporters in the Republican Party. Sharmazanov has shifted his opinion, saying: If all of this turns out to be true, I think this has no justification that is my opinion. Still, he has not publicly taken back his initial statement that the charges were fabricated, even as the generals defense rests on the notion. Later on June 19, Grigoryans legal team said he rejects all accusations, including any knowledge of the goods and weapons stocked on the premises of the property he claims he barely visits twice a year. The VOA Armenian Service contributed to this report. Victor Erices El Sur (The South, 1983), shimmers and quivers like the cinematic jewel it is, or like the brilliantly flashing silver star on the heroines ring finger. So its distressing and almost anti-climactic to realize that its an unfinished film. Perhaps its better for the viewer never to know this, but then wed have to avoid all writings and discussions and interviews, as included on this Criterion Blu-ray. In the end, we must console ourselves with a work whose haunting near-perfection becomes the source of its perfection. The basic elements of the story are simple, even if their effect isnt. The entire film is narrated as the memory of an adult woman, Estrella (voiced by uncredited Maria Massip), who recalls two specific periods in her childhood, when she was eight and 15. Shes 15 (and played by Iciar Bollain) when the film opens in whats labeled Autumn 1957, and she awakens to the sounds of a dog barking distantly and her mothers voice calling out for her husband Agustin, the girls father. In the half-light from the window, Estrella finds her fathers golden pendulum in a box under her pillow, and her narrating voice says that she knew her father would never return this time. One could write a whole story about this scene alone, which right away intrigues the viewer with mystery, the ache of loss, a touch of the magical and sinister, and the shadows of a bygone era. Shadows must be understood literally, for the photography by Jose Luis Alcaine is one of the films aesthetic glories and would be worthy of its own coffee-table book. Its no exaggeration to say that virtually every shot is a ravishing wonder that plays with light and shadow in exquisite increments, inciting obvious comparisons to Rembrandt, Velazquez and Vermeer in its manner of posing people in light sources. Yet these images live and move, thanks to the passage of time within them or to the occasional grace of dollies and traveling shots that bring us fully into the evanescence of memory. In an interview, Alcaine says Erice was surprised by his tonal choices when he first saw the rushes, and compared it with the films of Eric Rohmer. Erices own interview states that he wanted this first part of the film, set in Northern Spain, to be subdued and autumnal and wintry, as a kind of darkling splendor, so as to contrast with the explosion of color when the story moves to Seville in the South the part never filmed. Erice and Alcaines collaboration was detailed and intimate, as witness the composition in the scene, for example, where Estrella writes in her diary as her voiceover discusses this diary. Directly to the right of Estrellas concentrating face is a large seashell, about the size of her head, whose elegant earth-toned fractal seems to symbolize the function of memory spiraling inside her brain as she writes her cursive secrets, just as we associate such shells with the distant roar of the sea that calls its unknowable secrets to the ear. Shadow (sombra) is a key word in the film in literal and metaphorical ways. One of many striking shadow scenes involves the father emerging like a spectre from the endless black at the back of the church as Estrella runs toward him in her equally spectral white dress. Another scene at a movie theatre involves a fictional film within the film, whose title means The Flower in Shadow, as we watch a clip from a pastiche of the eras black and white Spanish melodramas. The fictional films title may refer metaphorically to Estrella as the gawky, gangling blossom whose life is yet in shadow and which will later be recalled under memorys shadow, and all of this means that Estrella is being subliminally identified with the film actress who holds the father spellbound in the dark. Later, at the same theatre, Estrella sees a similar poster for Alfred Hitchcocks Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which also focuses on a teenage girl who glimpses the world of adult secrets. Thus do films speak to each other, overtly and subtly. Meanwhile, life in 1950s Spain carried on under the twin shadows of history and of the dictator Francisco Franco, the living emblem of Fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War that virtually defined Spains history in the 20th Century. The only character who refers to this explicitly is Milagros (Rafaela Aparicio). The fathers childhood nanny, shes a stout, earthy, pragmatic peasant who visits with a breath of Southern air, along with the fathers mother (Germaine Montero), for a sequence about Estrellas First Communion. The eight-year-old Estrella of these scenes is played by Sonsoles Aranguren, a non-professional and utterly convincing actress plucked by Erice out of the same girls school from which hed earlier selected Ana Torrent to star in his first masterpiece, Spirit of the Beehive (1973). Milagros refers to the chasm that exists between Estrellas father and his own father, as unseen a presence in the film as Franco or God. She describes them both as lost in a tunnel without knowing the way out, and the reason is politics or as she puts it with feminine contempt, words and the fallout from the Civil War. She asserts that whether youre good or bad, right or wrong, comes down to which side wins. She implies that people take sides for personal, familial, psychological reasons theyre unable to renounce, and that political doctrines lack substance, and it all belongs to the unfathomable craziness of how men run the world. She washes her hands of it and goes about her jolly way, clutching her rosary and praying to Our Father and since shes Catholic, sometimes Our Mother. So much for the films overt political discourse. Lets return to that first theatre scene for an example of how even the most trivial and inconsequential details reveal a world. Estrella approaches the ticket window and asks the motherly woman in that dark cage for a program. Shes not buying a ticket, so the woman asks if the girl knows its against the rules. Yes, answers Estrella forthrightly, and the woman clicks her tongue and sighs at the scandals of youth, then hands over a program and they discuss it. This seems very Spanish. They live in a world where eyes seen and unseen, from God on down, watch sternly for anyone straying from the web of trivial rules that guide all transactions, ready to punish transgressors, and also a world in which rules must be broken, sometimes on a daily basis. If Estrella had professed ignorance or wheedled or equivocated, the woman might have held righteously onto the slip of paper in the absurd conviction of obeying rules. Instead, because both acknowledged what was happening, this nod of respect to the rules being broken allowed them to collaborate in the breaking with no further ado. Its a perfect moment, and as deep as a well. While its unnecessary for viewers of this film to be familiar with Spirit of the Beehive, knowledge of it adds richness for the similarities and differences. That film, set in 1940, was also informed by the Civil War without discussing it and also focused on the viewpoint of a little girl. That lonely girl, who felt distant from her parents, found magic and consolation when she saw Boris Karloff in James Whales Frankenstein (1931), causing her to identify with and fall in love with the monster. By contrast, Estrella feels very close to her parents, especially her father, and many scenes are tableaus illustrating vivid memories of their connection, with the scenes often bracketed by fade-ins and fade-outs as one memory leads to another and the narrative voice clarifies the order and correlations. The magic in this film lies not so much in the movies, although they are there, as in the fathers power to divine for water and other things via his pendulum. Some of the films most sacred and hushed moments, some of its most achingly painting-like, depict the father passing his knowledge of the pendulums ways to Estrella. Does Estrella imagine or invent the sequences in which her father writes and receives letters from the actress he knew in another time, another world? Is the movie straying into the fathers subjectivity for moments of his anguish at his lost youth in the South, or are we to understand these scenes as Estrellas intuitive fabrications, something she has divined? These questions might have been answered if filming hadnt been halted halfway through the production, after the northern scenes were finished and it was time to move to the south. The interviews give conflicting reasons. Erice states that his producer, Elias Querejeta, said that further funding wouldnt be forthcoming from TV financers as expected, so they had to salvage what they had, with its ending that promises the teen Estrellas visit to the South. As with so many scenes of Estrella, this one has Erice directing the actress to stare with audacity into the camera, at once making us complicit in her memories and presenting a kind of mystery that seals her behind glass. The second half of the plot, with its own set of characters including Estrellas half-brother, is indicated in the short story by Adelaida Garcia Morales that inspired the film, and which is included as a thoughtful, indeed crucial bonus booklet. The story was more than a convenient inspiration, for the author was Erices wife. Elvira Lindos liner notes offer an appreciation of the story on its own terms, comparing it to Henry James The Turn of the Screw or Daphne Du Mauriers Rebecca for showing how being immersed in the subjective reality of a person in distress can produce a dose of fantasy that makes it difficult to discern what is real and what is invented. This Criterion Blu-ray brings not only a marvelous film to our attention, then, but a marvelous story. El Sur isnt a case, like Erich Von Stroheims Greed (1925) or Orson Welles The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), where a longer film was completed and then severely cut down to a version that still strikes us as a masterwork. A half-finished film was fashioned into its own warm, translucent self and greeted with rapture by critics and audiences, and deservedly so. The titular reference to a place we never see turns that locale into a phantasmal state of mind, an anxiety of influence, a promise more teased than fulfilled, as with Roman Polanskis Chinatown (1974), which ended up never going to Chinatown. Also appearing in the film are Lola Cardona as Estrellas mother, who features in a rich scene with bright red yarn and who is rewarded for her devotion to her daughter by being barely remembered by her; Aurore Clement as the actress within the fictional film; Francisco Merino as her co-star; Maria Caro as the housekeeper; and Jose Vivo as the ancient, friendly, weary waiter in the hotel scene who remarks that all weddings are the same. Besides Erices interview, in which he discusses his unending disappointment over the unfilmed material with a restrained emotion almost painful to behold, the extras include a half-hour making-of and a one-hour TV roundtable in which tweedy, beardy, smoking Spanish critics bring up Erices affinities with Jean Renoir, Nicholas Ray, Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu and other great humane aestheticians and philosophical moralists of cinema, as well as the associations with painting and other arts. In a career pushing 60 years, Erice has made three features, all masterpieces, and several shorts. The last feature is El Sol del Membrillo (1992), a documentary about an artists creation of a painting, whose title has been variously translated as The Quince Tree Sun (an out-of-print Region 1 DVD by Facets Video) and Dream of Light. Wikipedias list of his works as a writer includes two 1967 books with intriguing titles: Oscuros suenos de agosto (which means dark or obscure dreams of august) and El proximo otono (the next autumn), either of which could have served as alternate titles for El Sur. As nearly as research and professional memory can reveal, this 1983 film has never been available on video in Region 1, and here it is at last on Criterion Blu-ray, following last years BFI release in the UK. We wont ask what took so long. As whenever were exposed to beautiful cinema, were simply grateful. When Moscow-based artist Kate NV last released an album 2016s Binasu it was a tribute to retro Japanese pop, pulling golden-age-of-Tokyo-inspired beats and synths into the 21st century: indulgent, laid-back future funk for modern escapists. New project FOR shows us a different side of NV. She strips away the gloss and calculated exuberance, and in its place offers music to consider. NV paints with weighty droplets, globs of synthesizer notes that evoke vintage Sesame Street segments and dilapidated music boxes even as their minimalism gives them a purely modern quality. It makes for an uncanny feel to the albums ten tracks, a stripped-down version of Boards of Canada-style constructed nostalgia: FOR is meant to remind you of something, but not necessarily anything you actually experienced. The Japanese influences that informed Binasu still linger on FOR, but not in the same billowing layers. Instead, they are subtle, intertwined with the observations NVs music makes of her own city, boiled down into sonic elements both basic and artificial, floating in empty orbit, but painstakingly ordered to maximize the impact of every single note. So composed, the music sounds almost alien, colored with a sense of detachment. If urban Tokyo inspired NV to fill Binasu with a sense of life and light, she presents urban Moscow as marked by silence, humanity hushed against a backdrop of sparing mechanical noise. Negative space ends up being the primary charm of FOR. Teetering on the border of eerie and sweet, the album somehow comes together, a cohesive tribute to grayer environs not often captured in music. It helps that closing track WHO wraps up the entire album with an ethereal resonance and a hint of birdsong, the clouds clearing at last. Even the subdued beginning of the album, though, has heart to it, and, upon a close listen, masterful textural complexity made almost inaudible purposefully so. NVs philosophy on FOR seems to be that people will listen more closely if you speak softly enough. As opening track YXO EAR begins, gentle foreground notes conceal a whole world of even quieter backing effects. More urgent tracks follow: A TWO and OAK lend woodsy xylophone sounds to the mix, and though they raise the stakes with driving melodies and denser textures, they ultimately maintain a lower volume. HOW returns the album to a reflective place with soothing drones rolling at the pace of deep breaths. The climax builds steadily and still seems to come out of nowhere, all the sounds peaking and then collapsing in a percussive pile. NVs vocals on YOU offer an intimacy and a new element to tweak and distort among the synths. The next four tracks are largely new twists on the same styles until WHO closes the work. It takes a close and discerning listen to pull apart the ways in which FOR shows Kate NVs genius, but the time spent to do so is worthwhile. Round and smooth, each song has a simple aural sensuality that makes even a surface-level assessment pleasing, but understanding the variety inherent in the patterns NV allows for an even more satisfying experience passing through the sphere she has created, looking through her very specific lens on life in Moscow. Formed in Madison, Wisconsin as the musical culmination of a decade of friendship and playing in punk bands, Claire Nelson-Lifson and Tyler Fassnacht (Fire Heads) began writing the first of Proud Parents jangly, garage infused pop tunes in Claires living room. Shortly thereafter Heather Sawyer (the Hussy) joined on drums and vocals, turning the songwriting duo into a trio, and they quickly garnered a devout following both locally and regionally, and gained a reputation throughout the Midwest as a live power pop force to be reckoned with. With Maggie Denman now in the ranks on bass, the band has been gaining a swift and sure following in its hometown, issuing a smattering of tapes before unleashing its full-length debut on Dirtnap Records June 22, marking the first time the label has issued a recording from a Madison band. (The label relocated to the Wisconsin capital about a year ago.) The band is at times a throwback to the classic era of college rock, reminiscent of the nerve-y energy of Camper Van Beethoven and the bands emerging from the fertile Athens, Georgia music scene in the 1980s. Hypnotoad summons images of a male/female version of the Replacements circa Hootenanny. Ducktales blazes with an intensity rarely seen since the early glory days of Milwaukees Violent Femmes (though the Femmes blazed with acoustic, no electric instruments). Still, despite these touchstones, Proud Parents never feel derivative. Instead, theres something refreshing lurking in each of these songs, something youthful, joyous and undeniably infectious. The new self-titled release was recorded and mixed by Bobby Hussy (the Hussy, Cave Curse, Fire Heads, TIT) and touches on themes of isolation, thrives on flourishes of humor and unexpected musical twists and turns along the way. TOUR DATES 7/7 Minneapolis, MN Eagles 34 7/8 Omaha, NB Oleavers 7/9 Lawrence, KS Haunted Kitchen 7/10 Fayetteville, AR Backspace 7/11 Dallas, TX 3 Links 7/12 Austin, TX Beerland 7/14 New Orleans, LA Circle Bar 7/15 Hattiesburg, MS Looney Bin 7/16 Nashville, TN the Cobra 7/17 St. Louis, MO the Sinkhole 7/18 Champaign, IL Memphis on Main 7/20 Madison, WI Crystal Corner (release show) 7/21 Milwaukee, WI Quarters Rock n Roll Palace 25 2021 - 200 , Cookies . cookies. Ukraines national postal operator Ukrposhta has launched an exclusive express delivery channel for goods from JD.com in China, one of the worlds largest retailers. The JD-UKRPOSHTA channel will deliver goods in an average of 14 days, while the standard delivery time with JD can be up to 45 days. ') } // --> ') } else { console.log ('nompuad'); document.write('') } // --> Customs clearance of goods arriving in Ukraine via the JD-UKRPOSHTA channel, in accordance with Ukrainian legislation, is carried out in express format. ') } else { console.log ('nompuad'); document.write(' ') } // --> ') } else if (width >= 425) { console.log ('largescreen'); document.write('') } else { console.log ('nompuad'); document.write('') } // --> Global trends of e-commerce show that people want to get original quality goods as soon as possible, said Alexander First, first deputy director general of operational activities at Ukrposhta. We offer our customers new solutions and strategic partnerships with the international platform of the Chinese online giant JD. In addition to the existing shipping delivery channel, Ukrposhta, together with JD, has launched a new express delivery channel, JD-UKRPOSHTA. Now, online shopping will be even more affordable and Ukrainians will be able to buy goods in this popular worldwide venue. Food editor and chief critic Eating all of the chicken livers just as fast as I can. Ali Rosen's Cherry Tomato Tart from her new cookbook Bring It, Tried and True Recipes for Potlucks and Casual Gatherings. Provided. Donald Trump is presiding over a sunset to democracy that is spreading across the world, eradicating much of the spirit of globalism that once was a beacon to freedom, free trade and democratic values. The crest of this wave -- the battle over a nation's ability to choose who will be able to settle within its borders -- is also sweeping across traditional democracies as never before, with newly elected governments in such longstanding bulwarks of freedom as Germany and Italy suddenly poised on the brink of resistance to a continuing influx of immigrants, largely from the Middle East and Africa. This movement has gained power and affirmation by the Trump vision of preservation of frontiers and traditional domestic values. As Trump told a White House gathering on Monday, the transformation of the American immigration system should be "something maybe even for the world to watch," adding that "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility. ... We want a safe country, and it starts with the borders. And that's the way it is. ... A country without borders is not a country at all." The European Union, of course, is for the moment at least, a continent largely without borders, and indeed Trump pointed out that "if you look what's happening in Europe ... we can't allow that to happen to the United States." The welcoming of others -- or, like Europe, maintaining a free flow of people -- is one key element of globalism. But nationalism is beginning to rear an ugly head in many of these regions that still espouse democracy, but are apparently seeking to move closer to a nationalist model. The central question is how far down the road toward nationalism can a country go before it moves first out of a globalist model and then ultimately away from democratic values entirely. This seems to be the direction the watchdog group Freedom House is suggesting much of the world is moving. Just 39% of the world's population is living under freedom. Clearly that message is beginning to resonate across traditional democracies, even among America's allies. Freedom House's latest report observed that in the past year, "71 countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties, with only 35 registering gains." While Freedom House does not break down attitudes toward free movement of immigrants, it did point out that last year, "basic tenets - including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law - came under attack around the world." And it concluded that "the United States retreated from its traditional role as both a champion and exemplar of democracy." None of this is to say, of course, that we are doomed. Nor that Donald Trump alone is entirely to blame for the sweep of the spiral away from democracy. This decline has been en route for a dozen years, according to the Freedom House monitors, and there have been moments of progression when some countries have seen their democratic forces return, at times potently. In France, the arrival of Emmanuel Macron and his entirely new party named "La Republique en Marche!" with its trademark exclamation point, has been a rallying point for democratic forces even beyond his country's borders. Still, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who two years ago threw open her country's borders as the first tsunami of refugees washed across Western Europe and has in total welcomed more than 1.4 million people since 2015, is facing a tough battle with her coalition partners. On Monday, just as Trump was falsely holding her up as an example of a country riven by immigrant-related crime (Germany's crime rate last year was the lowest since 1992), she won a brief reprieve from a threat by her conservative coalition partner to begin turning back asylum-seekers at the German frontier. In Italy, another NATO member, a democracy and a first-line destination for immigrants seeking to win admission to Europe from the Middle East or Africa, a new populist, euroskeptic government led by the hard-right League Party in coalition with the like-minded Five Star Movement is setting up to block all new ad hoc immigration. This past weekend, Italy barred over 600 immigrants who ultimately won entrance to Spain, where they arrived late Sunday. "In the Mediterranean there are other countries that can intervene," said Interior Minister Matteo Salvini. "We cannot allow half of Africa to be brought to Italian soil." What has brought many of these nations' rulers under the same umbrella as that carried by Donald Trump is a very different reality. In many of Europe's struggling economies, particularly Italy, with the highest youth unemployment in Europe, there are simply not enough jobs for young people who, fearful of being eternally dependent on their parents as new sources of labor to fill jobs at ever lower wages, have gravitated to nationalist parties prepared to take up their battle. In this case, nationalism and globalism are not so far removed. As World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab warned in January, "Globalization has to be combined with social caution. Now what we see is that the people who have been left out and who have suffered more from globalization and not profited from it start to have thoughts of rebellion." While many of these countries still hew to democratic norms, they are en route to displacing the globalism that has been so characteristic of the European Union with a nationalism that in the case of Italy is becoming, to an increasing degree, euroskeptic. In some respects, such forces are not dissimilar to the sentiments that impelled Britain to vote to remove itself from the European Union, which many there have since come to regret, but which Trump continues to support. Right next door to the United States, ironically, Mexico is facing a similar conundrum. Its likely next president is a leftist populist with decidedly anti-globalist tendencies but who expects to win his mandate, it seems, by appealing to his nation's passion for up-from-nothing leaders. "I am just like you, I came from the bottom, and now I am here to represent you in this historic moment," Andr-s Manuel L-pez Obrador told a crowded campaign rally. Indeed, he sounds very much like Donald Trump, though their backgrounds are at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. Of course, there are other aspects of globalism that Trump appears prepared to cast aside, swapping globalism for nationalism. He has little appetite for America's role as a global policeman, though other members of NATO would hate to see the United States depart. Equally, he has little patience for the international trading system that has sustained a global, reasonably democratic economy for at least the 23 years that the World Trade Organization has been in existence. With numerous countries on four continents still adhering to the rule of democracy, populism is beginning to chip away increasingly at the fringes. For much of the rest of the world, democracy continues its accelerating spiral downward. The role of America and Donald Trump's pivot inward is doing little to halt such a desperately fraught challenge. Jermaine Massey called 911 one afternoon in March to request that authorities escort him from his fiancee's Upstate home before he did "something stupid." Massey explained he was afraid he might harm someone. He told the dispatcher he suffered from bipolar disorder and was "a little bit schizophrenic." "I feel like Im going to kill my whole family," the 35-year-old Massey said during the 911 call. Greenville County Sheriff's Office deputies found him sitting behind the home, holding a large knife. They drew their weapons and repeatedly told Massey to drop the knife, body camera footage showed. Massey, still holding the knife, paced around the yard and stabbed at the air. Deputies hit him with Tasers several times with no effect. Then, about five minutes into the encounter as Massey lunged toward deputies with the knife raised, they fired 11 shots, killing him. A solicitor earlier this month cleared the four deputies involved of any wrongdoing following a State Law Enforcement Division investigation. Some mental health advocates say Massey might still be alive had the deputies gone through Crisis Intervention Team, or CIT, training. The 40-hour course offered by the National Alliance on Mental Illness started in Memphis in 1988. It's now recognized around the country as best practice for officers to de-escalate situations with people suffering from mental illness or experiencing a crisis. "It's hard to say what the outcome would've been, but I really believe it would've been a different outcome had they been trained," said NAMI South Carolina Executive Director Bill Lindsey, who called the video "disturbing." Under a law passed last year, the state's roughly 16,000 officers must receive training on mental illness to be recertified for their jobs every three years. Officers can satisfy the requirement with a two-hour online course annually, according to the state Criminal Justice Academy. The more comprehensive CIT training is not required by law. "It teaches law enforcement how to enter a situation in a manner thats different," Lindsey said of the training. "Law enforcement is, rightly so in a lot of cases, taught to come in with their hand on their gun and a posture that would command authority. But if somebody is already ramped up and wired, you need to do something to get them down." Demand for CIT Studies have estimated that 10 percent of police contacts involve a person with a mental illness. To help prepare for such situations, some South Carolina law enforcement agencies for years have trained their officers on the topic. As a result of the law passed last year, a two-hour online course provided by the Criminal Justice Academy addresses de-escalation techniques, warning signs and intake procedures, academy spokeswoman Florence McCants said. The academy doesn't keep count of how many officers go beyond that requirement and receive voluntary CIT training, but Lindsey said his organization teaches 3,000 officers a year. Twenty-eight sessions planned for 2018 will be the most NAMI S.C. has juggled since 2004, when it began leading the course that's also offered as two- and four-hour classes. NAMI receives $170,000 annually from the state to provide CIT training for free. The organization has asked for an additional $100,000 to meet demand. During the 40-hour training, officers learn about medications and side effects, how to recognize signs of psychiatric distress, verbal de-escalation, listening skills and safe restraint tactics. Some officials say the presentations from speakers touched by mental illness are especially illuminating. CIT teaches officers to slow down, said Seth Stoughton, a University of South Carolina law professor and former police officer. Law enforcement officers previously taught to repeatedly shout commands learn that doing so can overwhelm a person experiencing a crisis, making them more likely to lash out, he said. In Charleston County, Sheriff Al Cannon began to get all deputies CIT certified a few years ago, a decision that "grew out of the soul searching that law enforcement is doing around the country." Deputies are likely to encounter people with mental health issues everywhere, particularly in jail, he said. "I think were all better off ... having officers recognize a little more rapidly what they are dealing with," Cannon said. For the Greenville Police Department, a tragedy prompted officials' commitment to CIT. The agency is now considered a leader in the state for having trained about 150 of its 200-officer force. In 2010, the family of Andrew Torres, a 39-year-old man with schizophrenia, called Greenville police to escort him to treatment. A struggle broke out, and officers repeatedly shocked Torres with their Tasers. He died of cardiac arrest. Capt. Stacey Owens, who coordinates the agency's CIT training, said officers are now more equipped to "think outside of the box." They've learned to ask questions such as what medication a person takes or whether they have a counselor or family member to speak with. It's a different set of tools for law enforcement. "Before the training, all that wasn't available," Owens said. 'A wake-up call' When Massey called for help on March 19, he told a 911 dispatcher that he'd been having violent thoughts. A child's voice could be heard in the background. In bodycam videos released earlier this month, deputies repeatedly asked for Massey to put down a knife after finding him sitting on the back steps of the home. A deputy deployed a Taser within one minute of them arriving on scene. Massey didn't speak. He appeared to hold the blade of the knife to his chest. "Jermaine, not worth it," a deputy said. "Don't do it, bud." Later, he stood up with the knife and walked back and forth, grunting and screaming. Deputies again deployed their Tasers. "Talk to us, Jermaine," one deputy said. Seconds later, the video showed Massey lunge toward deputies as he held the knife in the air. They estimated he was 10 to 15 feet away as they fired 11 shots, according to a SLED report. Massey was pronounced dead at an area hospital. A toxicology report stated he had a blood-alcohol content of 0.157 percent and the preoperative sedative midazolam in his system. A deputy who spotted Massey near his home several hours before the shooting stopped to ask if he was drunk. He said no, that he'd only had one Bud Light. Investigators didn't find documentation of mental illness in Massey's medical records, and relatives said he was never diagnosed or seen by professionals, according to the SLED report. As someone diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Paton Blough was reminded of his own experiences when watching footage of Massey's shooting. He's now a mental health advocate in Greenville and a NAMI S.C. board member, but Blough's past includes six arrests during manic episodes. Half of those arrests were violent, and in one instance, he said police jolted him with a Taser. Blough said he wished the deputies who eventually shot Massey would've talked with him longer before they initially deployed their Tasers. "It made me more mad when I was drive-stunned tased in the back of a police car," he said of his own experience. "I would like to think there could have been a different outcome." Greenville County Councilman Ennis Fant was among those who called on the Sheriff's Office to undergo CIT training after authorities released audio of Massey's 911 call in the spring. Fant said he was troubled that Massey was shot within minutes of deputies arriving on scene. "That call I think was a wake-up call," Fant said. The Sheriff's Office has since announced plans to send deputies to two CIT training sessions this year, and Lindsey said officials are inquiring about more classes. Currently, 84 personnel are CIT certified at the agency that employs 460 deputies. The Sheriff's Office intends to eventually put all road patrol deputies and dispatchers through the training, Lt. Jimmy Bolt said. For advocates such as Blough, the resulting conversation around CIT suggests Massey's death might not have been in vain. Editorials represent the institutional view of the newspaper. They are written and edited by the editorial staff, which operates separately from the news department. Editorial writers are not involved in newsroom operations. Political Editor Schuyler Kropf is The Post and Courier political editor. He has covered every major political race in South Carolina dating to 1988, including for U.S. Senate, governorship, the Statehouse and Republican and Democratic presidential primaries. South Carolina's two Republican U.S. senators have staked out their views on the Trump administration's handling of the child and family crisis on the Mexican border. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said Tuesday he stands behind Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen amid growing controversy over separating migrant children from their parents. U.S. Sen. Tim Scott said he disagrees with the practice now in place. "I do not support a policy of categorically separating children from their parents at the border," Scott said in a tweet Tuesday. I do not support a policy of categorically separating children from their parents at the border. Without a doubt, we must secure our border, eliminate loopholes that encourage illegal immigration, and resist attempts to return to catch and release. (1/2) Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) June 19, 2018 He added, "Without a doubt, we must secure our border, eliminate loopholes that encourage illegal immigration, and resist attempts to return to catch and release. "The path that led us to this point is a complicated one, with multiple laws and court decisions muddying the waters, and Congress needs to come together to find a path forward," he added. "We can and must do better." Sign up for updates! Get the latest political news from The Post and Courier in your inbox. Email Sign Up! Scott's statement came after Graham tweeted his support for how the administration, specifically the Department of Homeland Security leadership, is handling the matter. "I strongly stand behind @DHSGov Secretary Nielsen and her effort to solve a long-standing problem," he tweeted. "She is hard-working, incredibly smart, and passionate. She is the right person at the right time. Her resignation would only serve to make this problem more difficult to solve," Graham said. Graham's support comes as at least 10 Democratic lawmakers have called on Nielsen to resign. I strongly stand behind @DHSGov Secretary Nielsen and her effort to solve a long-standing problem. https://t.co/qPk82NBc4O Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) June 19, 2018 Meanwhile, Republicans on Capitol Hill frantically searched on Tuesday for ways to end the administration's policy of separating families after illegal border crossings, ahead of a visit from President Donald Trump to discuss broader immigration legislation. I do not support a policy of categorically separating children from their parents at the border. Without a doubt, we must secure our border, eliminate loopholes that encourage illegal immigration, and resist attempts to return to catch and release. (1/2) Tim Scott (@SenatorTimScott) June 19, 2018 Jamie Lovegrove is a political reporter covering the South Carolina Statehouse, congressional delegation and campaigns. He previously covered Texas politics in Washington for The Dallas Morning News and in Austin for the Texas Tribune. Political Reporter Caitlin Byrd is a political reporter at The Post and Courier and author of the Palmetto Politics newsletter. Before moving to Charleston in 2016, her byline appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times. To date, Byrd has won 17 awards for her work. REDDING, Calif. - Redding Police say they are searching for the suspect in a shooting in south Redding. Police say they found the victim, Christopher Clark of Redding, 36, in the living room of a home on Harrison Avenue Monday afternoon. He was suffering from gunshot wounds to the chest and abdomen. He was taken Mercy Medical Center where he underwent surgery for life-threatening wounds. Police say witnesses identified the suspect as 22-year old Anthony Warren Chambers, formerly of Concord, California, but now residing as a transient in Redding. Chambers fled the scene and is currently at large. At the time of the shooting Chambers was wanted by the Anderson Police Department for fleeing from police and discarding a firearm on June 11th, 2018. Chambers had also been arrested on June 5th, 2018 for possession of ammunition by a prohibited person and possession of methamphetamine. He was released June 6th, 2018, on his own recognizance pending a court date in July. As a result of the Harrison Avenue shooting, Redding Police Department Investigators obtained a warrant for the arrest of Chambers. The warrant charges attempted murder, assault with a firearm, using a firearm in the commission of a felony, possession of a firearm by a prohibited person, and possession of ammunition by a prohibited person. Chambers may face additional charges as the investigation continues. Chambers is aware of his wanted status and should be considered armed and dangerous. He sometimes uses the names James Chappman or Anthony Chapman. A current picture of Chambers and a possible vehicle associated with him are attached to this press release. Pictures will also be available via Redding Police Department social media pages. Anyone with information regarding the shooting, or the whereabouts of Anthony Warren Chambers, is asked to contact the Redding Police Department at (530)225-4200. Former Calvo-Tenorio administration senior aide Troy Torres on Tuesday afternoon publicly released a recorded phone call, during which Lt. Gov. Ray Tenorio's Chief of Staff Jadeen Tuncap, who also is deputy chairwoman of the Guam Election Commission, told Sen. Dennis Rodriguez Jr. that his former campaign manager was arrested on drug charges. In a press conference, Torres claimed the call was made to the Democrat lawmaker before Torres had even been arrested. He also alluded to two earlier phone calls that occurred before the recorded call. In one of the calls, Tuncap allegedly told the senator that a raid was going to take place. Another call allegedly was made after police had executed the search warrant at Torres' Mangilao home. Torres has twice asked the GEC to investigate Tenorio, Tuncap and other officials stemming from the events related to his arrest, but the commission has twice decided the issue isn't under its jurisdiction. Tenorio is running for governor and so is Rodriguez, who still has to hurdle the Democratic primary in August. Tenorio is running unopposed in the Republican primary. In the recorded phone call, Tuncap told Rodriguez, "I think possession and conspiracy," describing what she said she gathered from an apparent phone call from the Guam Police Department. "I don't have it in detail; they just called me to let you know he was arrested. You know how that is, they question them throughout the day right? ... but um, yeah, he was arrested ... so he's confined, so if anything he'll be magistrated depending on what the AG comes up (with), those will be the charges, but ... at the very least it's possession," Tuncap says in the recorded phone call. The attorney general's office hasn't charged Torres, but issued a notice for him to appear in three years. The administration previously has denied any role in Torres' arrest, or having any advance notice. However, Torres has said his arrest was politically motivated. He left the Calvo-Tenorio administration and would later end up managing the campaign for Rodriguez. The governor's office quickly released a statement that doesn't deny the phone call, but questions Rodriguez's decision to record it. Statement from Adelup Here's the statement from the governor's office: "A professional and confidential courtesy was extended to a trusted elected official (Sen. Rodriguez) concerning an employee at his office. Upon receiving the call, he requested that he be kept updated on the matter. "We have two concerns with the recent allegations: "1. That the senator is recording his personal phone calls without the other party's knowledge. "2. That the senator has chosen to leak confidential information to a person who is subject of an open criminal investigation. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Error! There was an error processing your request. "Earlier this year, the same senator released a GMH report that was entrusted to him in confidence, exposing the people's only public hospital to potential civil liability," the governor's office stated. The 'Port 7' At the press conference Tuesday, held in the government-owned Guam Museum, Torres also alleged that the Calvo-Tenorio administration was behind what he termed the "Port 7," a group of Port Authority of Guam employees who were "made to take the fall for a charge of corruption and fraud" brought against them based on a workers' compensation matter. Former Port Marketing Manager Bernadette Meno and six other staffers were terminated or suspended for their alleged role in a workers' compensation irregularity at the Port. "From that point on, there was a witch hunt that ensued in order to shut them up," Torres said. He believes Meno and former Port Manager Vivian Leon were about to uncover issues involving Guam YTK, and "how that was going to be used to make millions of dollars for the Calvos that's why the scandal at the port happened." The Guam YTK issue is before the Supreme Court of Guam and involves the Port challenging a $15 million arbitration award and interest in favor of Guam YTK and against the Port. Officials accused of corruption Torres also listed off more than a dozen government officials including the governor, lieutenant governor, first lady and Cabinet members he accused of corruption. He also named Police Chief Joseph Cruz and members of the Mandana Drug Task Force, accusing them of setting him up, planting evidence and having him arrested. Torres replayed an interview with Lt. Gov. Tenorio denying any involvement or direction of investigations. "We do not plant evidence. That's absolutely unethical, criminal. The reality is we work hard for the people of Guam," Tenorio stated. The former senior aide said he also is providing details of the corruption he alleges to "anti-corruption authorities," but would not disclose any additional information as to who he is sharing the information with. Torres was previously seen walking to the FBI office in Tamuning. Torres: Aguon campaign behind 'fake emails' Torres also clarified that it was Sen. Frank Aguon Jr.'s campaign that "designed those fake emails" between Sen. Rodriguez and Gov. Eddie Calvo. "It was (Aguon's) office who gave us those IP addresses to try and implicate Adelup," Torres stated. The Aguon campaign has previously denied being the source of the emails, but a staffer received the forwarded emails before sending it forward to others. John wrote here about the class action lawsuit that accuses Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. The plaintiffs have moved for summary judgment, arguing that they should prevail based on facts not genuinely in dispute. One fact not genuinely in dispute is that Harvards own researchers found statistical evidence that the Universitys undergraduate application process discriminates against Asian-Americans. In 2013, the Harvard Office of Institutional Research found that Asian-Americans would comprise 43.4 percent of the admitted class if they were judged purely on their academic merit. Asian-American representation at Harvard is only about half that number. No college I know of judges all applicants purely on their academic merit, and its not race discrimination to consider other factors. However, Harvards researchers found that, even after accounting for the schools preferences for the children of alumni and recruited athletes, Asian-American representation fell significantly short of the expected level. During his deposition, Mark Hansen, a former Harvard researcher, was asked, Do you have any explanation other than intentional discrimination for your conclusions regarding the negative association between Asians and the Harvard admissions process? Hansen responded, I dont. The findings of the Harvard researchers are confirmed by Duke University Professor Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness for the plaintiffs. He reviewed six years of admissions data. Because recruited athletes, children of alumni, and those who find their way onto the Dean and Directors List are admitted at exceptionally high rates, Arcidiacono excluded them from his analysis. This enabled him to compare applicants who were similarly situated except for their race and their qualifications. His pool contained around 95 percent of applicants and more than two-thirds of admitted applicants. Arcidiaconos analysis showed the same discriminatory phenomenon the Harvard researchers had found. Asian-Americans are admitted at significantly lower rates than can be explained by grades, test scores, extracurricular activities, teacher recommendations, guidance counselor recommendations, and alumni interviews. Where Asian-Americans fall short is where the discrimination occurs in the personal qualities ratings. These are given not by people who know the applicants, or at least have talked to them, but by the Harvard admissions office. White applicants receive significantly higher ratings than Asian-Americans and Black and Hispanic applicants receive higher ratings than Whites. The low personal ratings Asian-Americans receive are inconsistent with what Harvards own officials say about the personal qualities of this group. For example, Harvards Dean of Admissions, William Fitzsimmons, who has read every applicant file for more than 30 years, denied that Asian-Americans have fewer attractive personal qualities than other applicants. He testified that he did not believe Asian-Americans fall short of White applicants in terms of leadership, friendliness, outgoing nature, etc. The testimony of Harvards Director of Admissions, Marlyn McGrath, was the same in this regard. So was the testimony of officials from elite high schools with a very high percentage of Asian-American students. And one of Harvards own expert witnesses, the former president of Brown University, described the view that Asian-Americans are less well-rounded than other groups of applicants as balderdash. Still, Harvard contrived to give comparatively low personal qualities to Asian-American applicants. These ratings depressed the rate at which these applicants were admitted. This is classic discrimination. Imagine if Harvard systematically rated African-American applicants lower on personal qualities than other groups, resulting in Blacks being rejected in higher percentages than objective factors like grades, scores, and extracurricular activities indicated they should be. No one would doubt that this was racial discrimination. By the same token, there should be no doubt that Harvard has engaged in racial discrimination against Asian-American applicants. Unfortunately, the plaintiffs drew a liberal judge nominated by President Obama to hear their case. Any appeal would be to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which is dominated by liberals. However, Harvards discrimination is so blatant and so offensive that I hold out some hope that the plaintiffs will succeed. Perhaps the fact that Whites benefited from the discrimination will help the Asian-American plaintiffs, though, of course, the racial characteristics of the beneficiaries of discrimination shouldnt matter. A trial is scheduled for October of this year, assuming summary judgment is not granted either side. In my view, the case should be decided in favor of the plaintiffs without a trial, based on facts not genuinely in dispute. I am at the special Fifth District endorsing convention. It will be called to order in the next few minutes. Erin Golden previews the convention and coming primary contest here in todays Star Tribune. DFL Vice Chair Keith Ellison is the incumbent congressman, but he is contending for the DFL nomination for Minnesota Attorney General. Has any major party candidate ever run for such an office with a record of support for cop killers and cop killer wannabes, as Ellison has throughout his career? Joanne Chesimard a/k/a Assata Shakur is probably the most prominent of his cop killer causes. She is the first woman to make the FBIs Most Wanted list. But I digress. Observing the delegates gather, I can see that the contest for the convention endorsement seems to have come down to state representative Ilhan Omar and state senator Patricia Torres Ray. If I were a betting man, Id bet that its Time for Ilhan, as the title of the new documentary has it. She is the first first-term state legislator ever to achieve international renown. I will update this post with the convention result later this afternoon. We have just received word that a tornado watch is in effect until 9:00 p.m. (Central) tonight. Nothing symbolic about that. UPDATE: The contest at the convention had in fact boiled down to two candidates, Torres and Omar. The convention endorsed Omar on the second ballot. All the candidates proceed to the multicandidate DFL primary on August 14. I dont understand the DFL, but Im pretty sure that Omar has to be considered the strong favorite to emerge as their candidate for Congress in this strongly Democratic district. The leftist hate cult known as the Southern Poverty Law Center has settled defamation claims by two of the SPLCs many victims. The Quilliam press release datelined Montgomery announces: MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA The Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc. has apologized to Quilliam and its founder Maajid Nawaz for wrongly naming them in its controversial Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. In a public statement, the SPLCs president, Richard Cohen, explained that Mr. Nawaz and Quilliam have made valuable and important contributions to public discourse, including by promoting pluralism and condemning both anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism. Watch Mr. Cohens complete statement. The SPLC also agreed to pay a $3.375 million settlement, which Quilliam and Nawaz intend to use to fund work fighting anti-Muslim bigotry and Islamist extremism. With the help of everyone who contributed to our litigation fund, we were able to fight back against the Regressive Left and show them that moderate Muslims will not be silenced, said Nawaz. We will continue to combat extremists by defying Muslim stereotypes, calling out fundamentalism in our own communities, and speaking out against anti-Muslim hate. Quilliam and Mr. Nawaz were represented by Tom Clare, Libby Locke, and Megan Meier of Clare Locke LLP, a boutique law firm specializing in defamation litigation. To see the settlement agreement negotiated with the SPLC, click here. Or promises to, anyway. Peter Strzoks lawyer says there is no need to subpoena him, he will testify voluntarily before the House Judiciary Committee and any other committee that will have him. And he wont plead the Fifth, either: The FBI agent who was removed from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election for sending anti-Trump texts intends to testify before the House Judiciary Committee and any other congressional committee that asks, his attorney said in a letter made public Sunday. Peter Strzok, who was singled out in a recent Justice Department inspector general report for the politically charged messages, would be willing to testify without immunity, and he would not invoke his Fifth Amendment rights in response to any question, his attorney, Aitan Goelman, said in an interview Sunday. *** Goelman said Strzok wants the chance to clear his name and tell his story. He thinks that his position, character and actions have all been misrepresented and caricatured, and he wants an opportunity to remedy that, the lawyer said. Thats a tough sell. Speaking for myself, my opinion of Strzoks character and actions is based entirely on his own words. [Goelman] said there was no question that Strzok regrets sending anti-Trump messages, but added: I think what he was doing is expressing his political opinions in what he thought was a private text conversation, and he regrets that this has been weaponized by people with political motivations to try to discredit the Mueller investigation. Chutzpah has been redefined. Goelman said that Strzok was not willing to use his official position to affect Trumps chances of being elected and that his political conviction that a Trump presidency would be disastrous for American national security is not based on his bias, it was based on information that was available to him, and his perspective on American national security. So this is what he will tell the House Judiciary Committee. No doubt the Democrats will be salivating to find out what informationwas available to him that convinced Strzok that Trump had to be stopped. He said Strzok did not do the one thing that might have helped Clinton and hurt Trump: leak word of the investigation of the Trump campaign. But someone leaked the fact that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign, and the FBI colluded with the CIA to ensure that the fake dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, would be made public shortly before President Trumps inauguration. Will Strzok testify under oath that he wasnt one of the FBI leakers? That actually could be true: the DOJ Inspector Generals report says that there were so many FBI employees talking to reporterscontrary to the Agencys alleged policythat it was not possible to identify the leakers. One way or another, Strzoks testimony should be a major media event. The networks will have incentive to cover it, since Strzok will be denouncing the president and possibly revealing secrets about the FBIs campaign against him. We might even see a mirror image of the Iran-Contra hearings of 1987. The networks covered those hearings and, if I remember correctly, broadcast portions of them live, thinking they might finally discredit the hated Reagan administration. But Lt. Col. Oliver North foiled their plans. As the star witness, he was a hero rather than a villain. When Peter Strzok testifies, it will be the other way around. The press will be on his side, but will Americans buy his story? Doubtful. But one way or another, we could be in for some great theater. John and I have written about the separation of adult illegal immigrants from the children they unlawfully bring with them into this country. I want to direct attention to two articles on the subject that make additional points. Jason Jones and John Zmirak argue that the Mexican government created the problem: These migrants from Central America claim that the chaos in their home countries amounts to persecution. If so, then by international law they must seek refuge in the first safe country. That was Mexico, which didnt offer them asylum, but shipped them north to us. They also note the recklessness of adults who bring their children from Central America through Mexico: The Huffington Post reported that 80% of women and girls from Central America who enter the U.S. illegally suffer rape. If the percentage even remotely approaches that number, then almost anything we can do to discourage immigrants from bringing children through Mexico is worthwhile. Jones and Zmirak also place the issue of separation at the border in the context of sex trafficking: Every year thousands of children get raped, abused, and sold. Right here in America. Many of these kids are immigrants, and a key tactic traffickers use is to pretend that they are their parents. (Emphasis added) Daniel Horowitz picks up on this theme, as well as the matter of drugs and gang violence: We have two choices when it comes to border security and interior enforcement. We can continue telegraphing the message that when you come here with children you are home free. This will continue fueling the drug crisis, growing MS-13, enriching the drug cartels, inducing sex trafficking and terrible crimes at the border, encouraging illegals to kidnap children to gain admission, and causing death and mayhem on both sides of the border. Or we could finally deter this behavior by announcing an end to any immigration requests not processed in a controlled environment through our embassy. Horowitz argues that DACA created the surge of children into the U.S. And why not? The prospect of amnesty must be enormously enticing. This surge of teenage illegal immigrants, in turn, fueled the drug and gang crises. Ironically, gangs like MS-13 create the hellish enclaves that are said to cause immigrants to flee Central America. Horowitz concludes: If you truly feel bad about separating families of both illegal aliens and Americans and all the chain reaction of woe it brings, youd support automatic and immediate denial of entry and deportation for families together. President Trump needs to use his inherent Article II powers to stop entry as well as his delegated authority from Congress under 212(f) of the INA. He needs to announce that because of the drug crisis, nobody will be allowed to enter our country under asylum through the border because it does nothing but empower the drug cartels. All applications must be filed in a U.S. embassy in a safe and controlled environment. Thats the humane thing to do. However, its inconsistent with the agenda of Democratic politicians and the open-borders left. PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 10:10:02 19 June 2018 - Reference is made to the announcement on 16 May 2018 regarding a Letter of Intent with Equinor. AKOFS Offshore, a company owned by Akastor ASA, has today signed a contract with Equinor for provision of year round light well intervention services (LWI) on the Norwegian continental shelf for a period of five years, with an option period of three years. The terms are in line with the previous announcement; the contract value for the initial five-year period is approximately USD 370 million and the work will be performed from the AKOFS Seafarer well intervention vessel with a scheduled commencement first half of 2020. About AKOFS Offshore AKOFS Offshore, headquartered in Oslo, Norway, is a global provider of vessel based subsea well intervention and installation services to the oil and gas industry. In addition to the AKOFS Seafarer, the company is operating two specialized vessels for Petrobras in Brazil on long term contracts. The Skandi Santos has successfully performed subsea intervention and equipment installation work since 2010, and Aker Wayfarer commenced similar operations early 2018. For further information, please contact: Leif Borge Chief Financial Officer Mobile: +47 917 86 291 E-mail: leif.borge@akastor.com Akastor is a Norway-based oil-services investment company with a portfolio of industrial holdings and other investments. The company has a flexible mandate for active ownership and long-term value creation. This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to sectio 5 -12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act. This announcement is distributed by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions on behalf of Nasdaq Corporate Solutions clients. The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein. Source: Akastor ASA via Globenewswire PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 20:28:16 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 379 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Gamehost Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Red Deer, Alberta (FSCWire) - Gamehost Inc. (TSX:GH). has issued a press release with the following headline:Gamehost Announces Regular Monthly Dividend for JuneTo 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 Gamehost 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/Gamehost Inc.Source: Gamehost Inc. (TSX: GH, OTC Pink: GHIFF, WKN: A1H5MC, ISIN: CA36468B1040)Date: June 19, 2018Time: 2:26 PM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Gamehost 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.) New Advancement in technology has led to improvement in stent performance and reduced stent-induced complications to improve quality of life and this is expected to propel the gastrointestinal stent market growth. Gastrointestinal Stents Market PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 09:54:38 Press Information Coherent Market Insights 1001 4th Ave, #3200 Seattle, WA 98154 Mr.Shah CEO 2067016702 email https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ # 643 Words 1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154CEO2067016702 Stents are tubular device used for insertion in lumen such as esophagus, colon or blood vessel. Stents are safe and effective alternative to surgery or repetitive endoscopic procedures. Gastrointestinal stents are used to open bile ducts, esophagus, small bowel, and colon when blocked by large, cancerous tissue growth. Stents can be removable or permanently implantable based on the material used. The role of stenting is decreasing patients digestive tract obstruction. Moreover, advancement in technology has led to improvement in stent performance and reduced stent-induced complications to improve quality of life and this is expected to propel the gastrointestinal stent market growth.Access Full Summary at: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/gastrointestinal-stents-market-1756 Gastrointestinal Stents Market Market DynamicsGrowth of the global gastrointestinal stents market is expected to be fuelled by increasing product launches with novel technology by key players in the market. For instance, in 2013, Cook Medical Inc. received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for biliary stent, adding to the line of controlled-release gastrointestinal tract. Moreover, Evolution biliary stent incorporates patency design, to prevent migration of stent after its insertion. Furthermore, in 2012, Boston Scientific Corporation launched WallFlex, biliary Transhepatic Stent System for the treatment of benign biliary strictures.Increasing demand for minimally invasive procedures is expected to be a major factor driving growth of gastrointestinal stents market size. Gastrointestinal stenting is considered as minimally invasive therapy and is increasingly gaining popularity, owing to its advantages such as low risk of infection, less recovery time as compared to conventional open surgery procedures, and reduced hospital stay.Increasing prevalence of urological and gastrointestinal disorders are propelling demand of gastrointestinal stents during the forecast period. According to Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2015, number of adults diagnosed in U.S. with ulcer in digestive tract are 14.7 million, comprising 6% of the total adult population. Moreover, according to American Cancer Societys estimation for year 2018 suggests that 9,220 new cases of colon cancer are expected to be diagnosed in the U.S. Moreover, increasing number of patients with gastrointestinal tumors is also adding to patient pool that can be subjected to gastrointestinal stent implantation.Request Sample Copy Of This Report: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/1756 Gastrointestinal Stents Market - Regional AnalysisRegional segmentation of Gastrointestinal Stents Market by Coherent Market Insights includes North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. North America held the dominant position in the gastrointestinal stents market in 2017 and is expected to retain its dominance over the forecast period. This is owing to increasing number of intestinal cancer cases and favorable reimbursement policies in the region. For instance, in 2017, American Cancer Society estimated 4,000 to 6,000 cases each year in the U.S. for gastrointestinal stromal tumors.Gastrointestinal Stents Market Competitive AnalysisMajor market players operating in the gastrointestinal stents market are Boston Scientific Corporation, Medtronic plc, Olympus Medical System, Cook Medical, Ella-CS, Endo-Flex, Diagmed Healthcare, Micro-Tech, W. L. Gore & Associates and Taewoong Medical Co., Ltd.Request TOC of the Report @ https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/toc/1756 Gastrointestinal Stents Market TaxonomyBased on product type, the gastrointestinal stents market is segmented into: Biliary Stents, Esophageal Stents,Duodenal Stents, Colonic Stents,.Based on Material, the gastrointestinal stents market is segmented into: Plastic Stents, Metallic Stents,.Based on end user, the gastrointestinal stents market is segmented into: Hospitals, Specialty Clinics, Ambulatory Surgery Centers,.Based on region, the gastrointestinal stents market is segmented into: North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa,.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 CHICO, Calif. - How to improve communication between local law enforcement and citizens and prevent deadly use of force encounters? That is the question a newly formed group hopes to find answers to. Members of 'Concerned Citizens for Justice', say a series of high profile police-involved shooting incidents around the country and here at home motivated them to come together. Individuals say they do not want to see more cases, like the shooting death of Stephon Clark in Sacramento by local police. Nor, the recent officer-involved shooting incident with Butte County Sheriff's deputies in Durham, leaving one man dead. And, they say the 2017 police shooting death in Chico of Desmond Phillips is still foremost on their minds. Members want to work more closely with Butte County law enforcement to improve de-escalation and mental health training, improve community-oriented policing, develop ways to better support local officers and create a citizen oversight board. Citizens oversight job is not to check every detail of police operations but it is their job in a democracy to step forward and make sure that people are being policed appropriately. That there is not an excessive use of force and that the police know how to de-escalate, particularly with difficult people, that's our job as citizens, said Margaret Swick. Group members point to cases such as the officer-involved shooting last year in Chico of Tyler Rushing. They applaud current de-escalation training the Chico police department currently undergoes, but believe more is necessary, especially as the community learns more about the prevalence of mental illness. The community conversation about citizens' oversight of local law enforcement takes place Monday from 6 p.m. until 8:30 p.m., at the Butte County Library, 1108 Sherman Ave., in Chico. The public is invited to attend. PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 13:00:51 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 387 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for GreenBank Capital Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Toronto, Ontario (FSCWire) - GreenBank Capital Inc. (CSE:GBC). has issued a press release with the following headline:GreenBank Acquires 50% of GBC Grand Exploration IncTo view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on GreenBank Capital Inc., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/GreenBank Capital Inc.Source: GreenBank Capital Inc. (CSE: GBC, OTC Pink: GRNBF, FWB: 2TL, WKN: A1W8UJ, ISIN: CA3935762029)Date: June 19, 2018Time: 7:00 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of GreenBank Capital Inc. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.) PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 22:15:20 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 379 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Hinterland Metals Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Val-d'Or, Quebec (FSCWire) - Hinterland Metals Inc. (TSX Venture:HMI). has issued a press release with the following headline:Hinterland Terminates Destiny Agreement and Launches New WebsiteTo 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 Hinterland Metals 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/Hinterland Metals Inc.Source: Hinterland Metals Inc. (TSX Venture: HMI)Date: June 19, 2018Time: 4:15 PM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Hinterland Metals 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: 2018-06-19 16:02:01 Medtronic Will Host a Webcast of Its Diabetes Group Analyst and Investor Briefing on Monday, June 25 from 9 - 10 a.m. EDT DUBLIN - June 19, 2018 - Medtronic plc (NYSE:MDT), the global leader in medical technology, today announced its schedule of notable sessions that will be presented at the 78th Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association, in Orlando, June 22-26. A significant portion of the scientific data being presented focuses on Medtronic's insulin pump systems, including the MiniMed(TM) 670G system, the world's first hybrid closed-loop system. Data will also be presented on the Sugar.IQ(TM) app, powered by IBM Watson technology, as well as managing glucose control using the Guardian(TM) Connect continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system. Scientific Presentations Cognitive Science "Real-World Assessment of Sugar.IQ with Watson: A Cognitive Computing-Based Diabetes Management Solution" - oral presentation by Yuxiang Zhong on Friday, June 22 from 6 - 6:15 p.m. W311, 16-OR. Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) Insulin Pump Therapy Company Exhibit Floor Presentations Medtronic will be showcasing their newest and most advanced technologies at Booth #639, including the MiniMed 670G system as well as the Guardian Connect continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system with the Sugar.IQ intelligent diabetes assistant app. Additionally, Medtronic will host a series of presentations at the booth from Saturday through Monday, providing an opportunity for attendees to learn about the application of Medtronic technologies from experts. A full list of presentations is below: MiniMed 670G System Real World Data & Patient Stories - Saturday, June 23 at 10:30 a.m. and Sunday, June 24 at 1:30 p.m. Digital Therapeutics: Improving Adherence and Outcomes - Saturday, June 23 at 3 p.m. Creating Personalized Treatment Plans Through iPro(TM)2 Professional CGM - Sunday, June 24 at 10:30 a.m. Guardian Connect CGM & Sugar.IQ Insights - Sunday, June 24 at 3 p.m. and Monday, June 25 at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Finally, Medtronic will also be hosting two Product Theater Presentations. The date and time for each presentation is as follows: "The Guardian Connect System: Utilizing predictive alerts and data backed insights to help with diabetes management" - presented by Dr. Timothy S. Bailey and Huzefa Neemuchwala on Sunday, June 24 at 10:15 a.m. "MiniMed 670G System: Increasing time in range with automated insulin delivery" - presented by Drs. Anders L. Carlson and Jennifer L. Sherr on Monday, June 25 at 10:15 a.m. Analyst and Investor Briefing Medtronic will host a webcast to highlight its Diabetes Group on Monday, June 25, from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. EDT. The webcast will feature remarks from Medtronic management, including comments on Medtronic's clinical data, product pipelines, and market outlooks. The live audio webcast can be accessed by clicking on the Investor Events link at http://investorrelations.medtronic.com on June 25. Within 24 hours of the webcast, a replay will be available on the same webpage. This event is not part of the official ADA Scientific Sessions. Sponsored Events Medtronic is also proud to serve as a sponsor for three events at this year's ADA: Women Interprofessional Networking (WIN) ADA Networking Reception - taking place Friday, June 22 from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. EDT at the Orange County Convention Center in the Third Level Foyer 12 th Annual Diabetes Forum - taking place on Monday, June 25 from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. at the Rosen Centre Hotel Annual Diabetes Forum - taking place on Monday, June 25 from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m. at the Rosen Centre Hotel Musings Under the Moon - taking place on Monday, June 25 from 9:30 p.m. - 1:30 a.m. at BB King's Blues Club About the Diabetes Group at Medtronic (www.medtronicdiabetes.com) Medtronic is working together with the global community to change the way people manage diabetes. The company aims to transform diabetes care by expanding access, integrating care and improving outcomes, so people living with diabetes can enjoy greater freedom and better health. About Medtronic Medtronic plc (www.medtronic.com), headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is among the world's largest medical technology, services and solutions companies - alleviating pain, restoring health and extending life for millions of people around the world. Medtronic employs more than 86,000 people worldwide, serving physicians, hospitals and patients in more than 150 countries. The company is focused on collaborating with stakeholders around the world to take healthcare Further, Together. Any forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties such as those described in Medtronic's periodic reports on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Actual results may differ materially from anticipated results. -end- 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: Medtronic plc via Globenewswire PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 18:27:01 Mining On Top: Africa Summit Only 2 Weeks Left! Network, Partner & Foster Business Relationships with Leaders of the Mining World APO (African Press Organization) Nicolas Pompigne-Mognard Nicolas@apo-opa.org or AME Trade Ltd W: ametrade.org/miningontopafrica T: +44 (0) 207 700 4949 E: marketing@ametrade.org or The MOTA Team: W: www.ametrade.org/miningontopafrica/ T: +44 (0) 207 700 4949 E: mota@ametrade.org or Media queries & partnerships: E: marketing@ametrade.org T: +44 (0) 207 700 4949 The 5th Mining On Top: Africa Summit (MOTA 2018) is just round the corner, and yet again, is deeming to be a success with over 100 highly targetted delegates expected to attend the conference. The event will take place at the prestigious Movenpick Hotels & Resorts in Geneva from the 3-4 July 2018. Organsied by AME Trade Ltd., the prestigous conference is proud to be sponsored by industry leaders such as Zimplats, Global Atomic Corporation and PIX4D. VIP's attending the conference include dignitaries, Hon. Winston Chitando, Minister of Mines and Mining Development of Zimbabwe, Ibrahima Gueye, Secretary General, Ministry of Mines and Geology, Senegal, Dr. Morie Manyeh, Minister of Mines & Mineral Resources, Sierra Leone, Mamady Fofana, General Manager, SOGUIPAMI, Guinea and HM Jane Owen, British Ambassador to Switzerland and Lichtenstein. The African mining sector is undergoing unprecendented changes with the rise in commodity prices. Reformations in the mining policies and codes to attract investment and integration of technological innovations within the daily to reduce costs and achieve sustainable goals. These factors cumulatively have led to investment opportunities in several African countries where investors can benefit from low operational costs, untapped resources and a business favourable tax regime (tax deductible costs and losses). Keeping this in mind, MOTA 2018 will be dedicated to connecting African governments to European mining companies and financial investors will be focussing on strengthening relations between all stakeholders, generating long-term value and in identifying the most promising commodities. The theme of MOTA 2018 is: Europe as a partner for African mining. Participants at the event will benefit from: In-depth market knowledge from the industry insights presented by our panel of experts from the industry insights presented by our Networking opportunity with mining, energy and petroleum industry experts opportunity with Interactive two day programme where they will be able to engage in debate and discussions with the decisions makers of the extractive industry where they will be able to engage in of the extractive industry New business connections and future partnerships. Eminent Speakers Participating at MOTA 2018 Speaker Panel Include: Hon. Hassan Baraze Moussa, Minister of Mines of Niger Hon. Winston Chitando, Minister of Mines and Mining Development of Zimbabwe Ibrahima Gueye, Secretary General , Ministry of Mines and Geology , Senegal Secretary General , HM Jane Owen, British Ambassador to Switzerland and Lichtenstein Janvier Nkurunziza, Chief, Commodity Research and Analysis, UNCTAD Steve Letwin, CEO, IAMGOLD Akshai Fofaria, Partner, Pinsent Masons Rudolph de Bruin, Partner, AMED Funds Louis Coetzee, CEO, Kibo Mining Dana Kallasch, Co-Found, Head of Legal and Operations, Commodity Capital Ingo Hofmaier, Partner- Metals and Mining, Hannam & Partners Claude Bejet, Swiss Mining Club Stephen Roman, President and CEO, Global Atomic Corporation Harry Anagnostaras-Adams, Executive Chairman, KEFI Minerals Joel Holiday, Group Exploration Manager, Randgold Resources Rene Zarske, Project Manager- Mining, Southern African German Chamber of Commerce and Industry NPC Gabriele Ruggiero, Key Account Sales Executive, Pix4d Tawana Kupe, Professor, Wits Mining Institute Alexander Mhembere, CEO, Zimplats Daniel Major, Chief Executive Officer, Goviex Uranium Bernard Alyward, CEO, Alufer Mining Angelos Damaskos, Chief Executive Officer, Sector Investment Managers Cobus Visagie, CEO, Africa Merchant Capital Dragan Kilibarda, Head of Trading, TMT Metals Simon Cohen, Base Metals Trader, Danex Resources We look forward to seeing you at MOTA 2018! Distributed by APO Group on behalf of AME Trade Ltd. For more information, please visit MOTA Website. -END- Follow the latest news about MOTA with #MOTASUMMIT on Facebook & Twitter. About AME Trade Ltd: AME Trades business to business events provide vital practical information for companies looking to diversify and realign their business strategies to keep up with fast-moving global trends. Through sector specific and country focused events, we are now one of the leading providers of strategic business intelligence for the African, Middle Eastern and South American regions. Our services include bespoke conferences, trade exhibitions, training workshops and networking functions. Follow AME Trade on social media with #AMETrade: linkedin.com/company/ame-trade twitter.com/ametrade facebook.com/ametrade View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619006 PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 08:30:01 NAXS has made a commitment to JAB Consumer Fund Global Consumer Brands II (the Fund). The Fund co-invests with JAB Holding, a privately held group focused on consumer goods & retail companies with premium brands. Previous transactions by JAB Holding include Keurig Green Mountain, Krispy Kreme, Peets Coffee and Espresso House. The Fund will provide an exposure to recent transactions by JAB Holding, including the announced merger to form the Keurig-Dr Pepper beverage group and the acquisition of the Pret a Manger casual dining chain. Contact information : Lennart Svantesson, CEO Telephone: +46 73 311 00 11 This information is information that NAXS AB (publ) is obliged to make public pursuant to the EU Market Abuse Regulation and the Securities Markets Act. The information was submitted for publication, through the agency of the contact person set out above, at 8:30 CET on June 19, 2018. Attachment PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 00:44:20 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 391 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for New Age Farm Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - New Age Farm Inc. (CSE:NF). has issued a press release with the following headline:New Age Farm Leadership TransitionTo 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 New Age Farm 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/New Age Farm Inc.Source: New Age Farm Inc. (CSE: NF, FWB: ONF, OTC Pink: NWGFF, WKN: A12C9F, ISIN: CA64157D1087)Date: June 18, 2018Time: 6:42 PM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of New Age Farm 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: 2018-06-19 13:00:54 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 406 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Orsu Metals Corporation--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---White Rock, British Columbia (FSCWire) - Orsu Metals Corporation (TSX Venture:OSU). has issued a press release with the following headline:Orsu Metals Doubles the Vertical Extent of Gold Mineralization in the Main Stockwork and Identifies the Southern Stockwork at Zone 23, Sergeevskoe Gold Project, RussiaTo 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 Orsu Metals Corporation, or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Orsu Metals CorporationSource: Orsu Metals Corporation (TSX Venture: OSU, OTC Bulletin Board: ORSUF, WKN: A2DXX6, ISIN: VGG6777T1802)Date: June 19, 2018Time: 7:00 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Orsu Metals Corporation and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.) Rising number of hospitals looking for new opportunities to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs is driving growth of the point-of-care management system market. Point-of-Care Data Management Systems Market PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 13:21:41 Press Information Coherent Market Insights 1001 4th Ave, #3200 Seattle, WA 98154 Mr.Shah CEO 2067016702 email https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ # 781 Words 1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154CEO2067016702 Point-of-care (POC) data management system helps in providing optimal patient care and it maximizes effectiveness, improves clinical workflow, satisfies compliance requirements and reduce cost. POC data management system enables clinicians to make decisions easily, as the patient records are well maintained and point-of-care has the potential to significantly influence health care delivery and to address the challenges of health disparities. The demand for POC data management system is expected to increase, as the healthcare agencies are focused on improving patient safety and care. Moreover, rising number of hospitals looking for new opportunities to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs is driving growth of the point-of-care management system market. POC data management system helps medical professionals to manage patients diagnostic and clinical data easily, which was a tedious task earlier. A typical point-of-care practice involves multiple devices platform from various vendors, which is used by thousands of operators spread over the entire region. These systems are hardware and software based management technologies, which include cloud, web, and premise based mode of delivery.Browse Full Report: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/point-of-care--poc-data-management-systems-market-1751 Point-of-Care (POC) Data Management Systems Market DynamicsPatient care is becoming more computer based and this drift has a direct impact on point-of-care data management systems market. As patient care becomes more and more data driven, the significance of transferring information from the point-of-care devices to the cloud is driving growth of the POC data management systems market. The importance of care is now shifting towards early detection and prevention of diseases. Therefore, government organizations such as the National Institute of Health are investing huge amount of money for the development of microsystem sensors and the low cost imaging technologies for point-of-care testing. Recent advancements in the point-of-care testing are tackling the challenges related to cardiac and stroke patients diagnostics and treatment. For instance, 2010 report of the National Institute of Health showed that 90% of the cancer related death was due to circulating tumor cells (CTCs). Researches supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have recently developed a new microfluidic device capable of effective separation of CTCs from the whole blood. These technologies are likely to boost the market growth. Moreover, advancements in data integration, remote sensing in hospitals, ease of use, and wireless connectivity are major factors that are increasing the demand for POC data management system. However, slow rate of adaptation by users, high cost, and maintenance are the some of the restraints affecting the growth of point-of-care data management systems market.Request Sample Copy Of This Report: https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/1751 Point-of-Care (POC) Data Management Systems Market Regional InsightsOn the basis of region, the point-of-care data management systems market is segmented into North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa. North America accounts for the largest share in the global point-of-care data management systems market, owing to rising adoption of innovative technologies in the region. Furthermore, government funding for research and development of point-of-care devices is also accelerating the growth of point-of-care data management systems market. For instance, in 2016, John Hopkins University researchers were funded US$ 1,579,040 for point-of-care technology to detect sexually transmitted disease.Point-of-Care (POC) Data Management Systems Market Competitive LandscapeThe key players operating in the global point-of-care data management systems market include HemoCue AB, Siemens Healthinners, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Abbott laboratories, Randox Laboratories Ltd., Hedera Biomedics srl, TELCOR, Inc., and Seawar Electronic Ltd. Major players are focused towards adopting strategies such as collaboration to strengthen their product portfolio and retain their position in the market. For instance, in 2016, Philips and Qualcomm announced strategic collaboration for an advanced personalized connected health care system.Request TOC of the Report @ https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/toc/1751 Point-of-Care (POC) Data Management Systems Market TaxonomyOn the basis of component, point-of-care (POC) data management systems market is segmented into: Software, Hardware,.On the basis of mode of delivery, point-of-care (POC) data management systems market is segmented into: Cloud-Based System, Web-Based System, On-Premise Data Management SystemOn the basis of end user, point-of-care (POC) data management systems market is segmented into: Hospitals, Homecare Settings, Physicians, Others,.On the basis of geography, point-of-care (POC) data management systems market is segmented into: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa,.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: 2018-06-19 09:04:01 REDWOOD CITY, Calif., June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PubMatic, the publisher-focused sell-side platform (SSP) for an open digital media future, today announced the launch of PubMatic Cloud for publishers and tech companies looking to implement and control their own programmatic technology. By accessing PubMatic's technology, global infrastructure and demand connections on a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) basis, clients are able to achieve full transparency and achieve greater control over their programmatic monetization. As programmatic trading becomes mainstream, innovations such as header bidding and fraud controls have resulted in gains for publishers. However, it has also contributed to the ballooning of infrastructure costs and overhead to manage integrations with the buy-side and third-party technology vendors as well as continuously evolving technology. The ability to keep pace with innovation has become more challenging for publishers and technology providers alike at the same time as the industry is increasingly turning to programmatic across media channels and brand spend budgets. According to reports, 86 percent of marketers plan to take some portions of programmatic in-house this year as the industry attempts to address the challenges of the 'ad tech tax'. Publishers are in the position of requiring technology to adapt to this changing ecosystem. Both digital content creators and the technology companies that serve them are faced with the choice of continuing to transact via revenue share models or to make significant investments in engineering to build a complete SSP in-house. PubMatic Cloud offers an alternative. With a rich set of APIs in a fully-vetted, configurable solution, PubMatic Cloud provides full transparency and control. Publishers can ramp up a fully-supported and integrated programmatic solution and technology providers can enhance their offerings at a fraction of the cost and time it would take to develop the technology in-house. PubMatic's out-of-the-box SSP offers integrations with over 200 demand-side platforms (DSPs) and other buyers, delivering unparalleled access to demand. Plus, PubMatic Cloud includes the company's robust ad scanning, fraud detection and brand safety tools so clients can ensure quality control. "For over a decade, PubMatic has been fine-tuning our platform, building a global infrastructure, integrating hundreds of demand partners, attracting and retaining engineering talent, incorporating machine learning and more," says Jeff Hirsch CMO & head of US publisher development at PubMatic. "Wanting to replicate that from scratch is like wanting to start your own search engine from scratch. We are able to provide an attractive, alternative pricing model with PubMatic Cloud because we have already aligned our business to be able to ramp up publishers quickly and ensure our clients' ongoing success." To learn more, please visit: https://pubmatic.com/products/cloud About PubMatic PubMatic is a publisher-focused sell-side platform for an open digital media future. Featuring leading omni-channel revenue automation technology for publishers and enterprise-grade programmatic tools for media buyers, PubMatic's publisher-first approach enables advertisers to access premium inventory at scale. Processing over 10 trillion advertiser bids per month, PubMatic has created a global infrastructure to drive publisher monetization and control over their ad inventory. Since 2006, PubMatic's focus on data and technology innovation has fueled the rise of the programmatic industry as a whole. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, PubMatic operates 13 offices and six data centers worldwide. PubMatic is a registered trademark of PubMatic, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Media Contact Johanna Bauman PubMatic VP, Marketing Communications press@pubmatic.com PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 09:02:02 Tom Obermaier to speak on Surfing Uncertainty To Confront Terrorism Financing RDC CEO to Keynote at FinTech FinCrime Exchange (FFE) Regulatory DataCorp, Inc. News Media Contact: Michael Kerman, +1 484.688.5164 mkerman@rdc.com Regulatory DataCorp, Inc. (RDC), the global leader in compliance screening, today announced that its Chief Executive Officer, Tom Obermaier, will be the keynote speaker at the June 19, 2018 meeting of the FinTech FinCrime Exchange (FFE) in London. Detecting and disrupting terrorism financing is the hardest problem confronting FinTech today, said Tom Obermaier, CEO of RDC. Traditional approaches to combat the financing of terrorism have largely focused on disrupting global networks and primarily addressed the raising and transfer of terrorist capital. Times have changed. Decentralization, localization, impetuousness and lethality are the hallmarks today. A premium is now placed on identifying direct uses of funds to direct an attack: a much harder and important mission. My address today will hopefully spearhead the development of cognitive predictive technology in this area, simultaneously conducting three levels of analysis to identify uses before or as they happen. The FFE was established in January 2017 by FINTRAIL and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), and its members meet monthly to discuss these topics and share information and insight on an ongoing basis. The global scope of financial crime and the shared threats underscore the need for a global FFE network, which will give its members not only a trusted place to exchange information, but also access to an increasingly far-reaching network of resources and perspectives. The FFE produces quarterly white papers on financial crime topics relevant to its members and stakeholders in law enforcement, the government and the financial services sector. Massive horizontally-scalable computing platforms, developing AI protocols and improving data science gives the industry a unique opportunity to identify terrorism linkages and patterns that are currently invisible. The potential for a transformative approach to fighting terrorism financing is upon us, added Obermaier. About RDC Regulatory DataCorp, Inc.,(RDC), the Smarter ScreeningTM company, delivers powerful, decision-ready intelligence and world-class risk and compliance protection, allowing global organizations to identify banned/suspect entities, strengthen fraud protection, ensure regulatory compliance, manage supply and distribution risk, and protect their brand equity. With the worlds largest open source risk-relevant database, RDC provides AML/KYC compliance; Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) protection; emerging market intelligence; corruption, fraud and crime protection; and vendor screening and monitoring to a wide range of clients worldwide. Founded by 20 of the worlds leading financial institutions, today RDC is a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company. Learn more about RDC by emailing info@rdc.com or visiting www.rdc.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180619005 RDC CEO TO KEYNOTE AT FinTech FinCrime Exchange (FFE) PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 04:01:03 Shinkowa Pharmaceutical, Provider of World's First Rejuvenative Health Food, Provides Update on Rejuvenation Research Inquiries about this news release Shinkowa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Daizo Shimamura, +81-3-5403-6393 info@shinkowapharma.com Fax: +81-3-5403-6379 * Please make all inquiries by email. Shinkowa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., (Head Office: Chuo-ku, Tokyo, CEO: Megumi Tanaka) whose goal is to achieve productive aging around the world, has acquired all shares of Hakushindo Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. (head office: Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo), an organization that provides research funds to the Project Research Center For Clinical Trials and Preventative Medicine at the Hiroshima University Graduate School of Biomedical & Health Sciences, the organization that has carried out the worlds first clinical study of the long-term oral intake (24 weeks) of nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN). This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180618005 Brand Logo_MIRAILAB Clinical studies on oral NMN intake are currently underway at Hiroshima University Graduate School of Biomedical & Health Sciences: Project Research Center For Clinical Trials and Preventative Medicine. (However, there are no plans for public disclosure of the clinical research results. NMN provided by Shinkowa Pharmaceutical is used in this clinical research.) UMIN trial ID: UMIN000025739 http://rctportal.niph.go.jp/en/detail?trial_id=UMI (Growth hormone increase observed, mitochondrial activity observed, Sirtuin gene expression being assessed) Based on the results of these clinical studies at Hiroshima University Graduate School of Biomedical & Health Sciences: Project Research Center For Clinical Trials and Preventative Medicine, Shinkowa Pharmaceutical intends to develop products based on the newly discovered effects of NMN, and to continue clinical researches in fields where potential effect is demonstrated. With an aim to create a world of productive aging, Shinkowa Pharmaceutical is conducting clinical researches and providing NMN PURE 3000 and other supplements containing NMN through the NMN supplement brand Mirailab. It is unfortunate to see products from other companies that are suspected imitation and counterfeit products carrying NMN in the name and that may not actually contain NMN. We are also aware of product designs and advertisements that give customers a false impression that they are Shinkowa Pharmaceuticals products. We receive inquiries from customers whether these products are our products and whether they contain NMN. As mentioned above, NMN contained in our products are used for the clinical researches at Hiroshima University, a national university in Japan. The products are manufactured and stored under strict control. Products in the following website and NMN PURE VIP 9000 and NMN PURE PREMIUM 6000 are the only products we offer. Please be advised that Shinkowa Pharmaceutical is not related to other products in any way. For questions about our products, please contact us using the information provided below. Shinkowa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Online shop http://mirai-lab.jpn.com/ We are the company that will achieve productive aging worldwide with advancing biomedical science. Company profile Company name: Shinkowa Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. Representative: Megumi Tanaka Location: 2-30-11 Shinkawa, Chuo-ku, Tokyo Business description: Health food and cosmetics distribution and trade URL: http://shinkowapharma.com/ View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180618005 PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 03:54:16 Press Information Published by ACN Newswire +65 6304 8926 e-mail https://www.acnnewswire.com/ # 990 Words ACN Newswire+65 6304 8926 SINGAPORE, June 18, 2018 - (ACN Newswire) - The Board of Directors of Singapore eDevelopment Limited ('SeD'; SGX 40V) wishes to provide shareholders an update on the Group's operations.1 - Review of Core BusinessesSGX Catalist-listed SeD (Stock Code: 40V) has strategically positioned itself as an investment holding company and embarked into new ventures whilst keeping on track with its existing businesses. The Group is involved in incubation of companies and the development of innovative and disruptive technologies and its business has undergone transformation to enable the Group to compete in the new economy so as to generate benefits for its shareholders.2 - Our Business Operations2.1 - International Property DevelopmentThe Group has successfully completed the internal restructuring exercise in relation to the corporate shareholding structure for subsidiaries of the Group engaged or involved in the property development business in North America. Under this restructuring, the Group's indirect holding of 100% of SeD Home Inc. where all our US property assets are, has been transferred to SeD Intelligent Home Inc., an Over-the-Counter (OTC) company in Nevada, USA; resulting in the Group's effective shareholding of SeD Home Inc. being reduced to 99.99%.Our international property development division's main assets are two property development projects: one located north of Houston, Texas (referred to as our 'Black Oak' project) and one located near Washington D.C. in Frederick, Maryland (referred to as our "Ballenger Run" project).Black Oak - Development work for the Black Oak project continues on critical infrastructure and the Group is focused on improving the cashflow of the project by sourcing financing, securing sales contracts, and seeking infrastructure reimbursements from the relevant improvement district. The Group has received several non-binding letters of intent to purchase lots and have progressed to more detailed discussions with potential purchasers. In addition, the Group has been informed by Harris County Improvement District 17 (HCID17) that they are in the advanced stages of fund-raising activities which could potentially result in some infrastructure reimbursements for the Black Oak Project.Ballenger Run - 42 residential lots of the Ballenger Run project were sold in FY2017 generating S$7.6 million in revenue. Thus far, in FY2018, there have been 40 residential lots of the Ballenger Run project sold, generating S$6.0 million in revenue. The Group expects continued lot purchases in 2018 in accordance with the lot purchase agreements signed with NVR Inc. We also expect to complete the sale of the Ballenger Run multi-family parcel in FY2018 as per the agreement signed with Orchard Development Corporation. In addition, we have received letters of intent with interest in purchasing the remaining portion of Ballenger Run, which is the continuing care retirement community parcel.Perth - The Group originally owned three plots of lands in Mandurah City, Perth. As our focus is in the development of Black Oaks and Ballenger Run, the Group is not looking into commencing any development of the lands in Perth. In FY 2017, we sold one plot of land and the Group has offered the remaining two plots of lands for sale in the market.The Group will continue to develop our two main property development projects, Black Oak and Ballenger Run whilst looking for other opportunities to improve the performance of the international property development division.2.2 - Information Technology BusinessOur Information Technology division, HotApp BlockChain Inc. ("HotApp") had seen the successful transition to focus on business to business services. Its multi-level marketing ("MLM") mobile application was revamped with frontend and backend integration to serve global MLM organisations.HotApp has secured a twelve months' retainer contract with Document Security System, Inc. ("DSS") a U.S. New York Stock Exchange-listed company, to provide HotApp's expertise in the enhancement and development of DSS's mobile authentication product serving Fortune 500 companies. DSS specialises in combating counterfeit products through its proprietary technology and we look forward to more collaborations with DSS which is seeking to expand to Asia.HotApp has also been actively participating in blockchain opportunities and has initiated efforts to build blockchain systems architecture as part of the development efforts.HotApp has strengthened its management by appointing Mr Sanjiv Kalita as a nonexecutive Director. Mr Kalita is presently the Chief Executive Officer of the Guppy Group, a next generation credit bureau built on blockchain technology. He is well known in the fintech industry and has helped set up various fintech events including Money 20/20 in 2013. Mr. Kalita has also worked for Intel and Citibank and holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, as well as a BSc and Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University where he majored in Electrical Engineering.Mr Kalita comes with a vast experience in the technology arena and we hope to tap on his expertise and contacts as we expand into new territories.2.3 - Capital ServicesIn May 2017, SeD acquired Hengfai Asset Management Pte Ltd ("HFAM") which is a registered fund management company regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The acquisition includes four funds under management, out of which two of the funds, Global Systematic MultiStrategy Fund ("GSMS") and Global Opportunity Fund ("GOF") are live.GSMS - The Group is pleased to note that GSMS has welcomed onboard, its maiden external institutional investor. This is an encouraging endorsement of our fund's performance and track record. GSMS has achieved a net return of approximately 20% in the financial year ended 31 December 2017 based on calculations by its fund administrator, Maples Fund Services (Singapore) Pte Ltd. GSMS intends to distribute these net returns to its investors according to their respective investment sums.HFAM continues to look out for external investors whilst continuing to build a credible and solid performance track record to draw in funds for management and help its investors generate substantial appreciation in wealth. In line with this, it has also set up feeder funds which will expand its target group of investors to include US accredited investors.Full release can be viewed at http://www.acnnewswire.com/press-release/english/44169/ PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 09:05:02 SEATTLE, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CFN Media Group ("CFN Media"), the leading agency and financial media network dedicated to the North American cannabis industry, today announced publication of an article covering Speakeasy Cannabis Club Ltd. (CSE:EASY) (EASY.CN) (CNSX:EASY) (FFT:39H), a late-stage applicant under Health Canada's Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations (ACMPR) represents a compelling opportunity to invest in Europe's burgeoning cannabis industry. The global cannabis industry could reach nearly $60 billion by 2027, according to Arcview Market Research, driven by the ongoing legalization of cannabis around the world. While North America has pioneered legalization among G20 nations, many parts of Europe have taken a pro-cannabis stance that could yield an enormous long-term market. Investors may want to take a look at companies focused on this area for potential opportunities. Europe's $60B Opportunity The European medical cannabis market could be worth about 50 billion, or about $59 billion, once all markets have implemented legislation and market infrastructure to support cannabis, according to Prohibition Partners' European Cannabis Report. Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands have the most advanced cannabis markets in the region, but the report's authors note that many other markets are following in their footsteps. While many European countries are exploring cultivation, the majority of the region's supply comes from Canada, where cannabis enjoys federal legalization. The good news is that cannabis-based drugs have been seeing steady support, including GW Pharmaceuticals' Sativex, while cannabis flower and oils have been legalized in several countries for patients that suffer from approved medical conditions. Germany became Europe's largest market in March of last year after it introduced new legislation and ten production licenses. The country's system is geared towards partnering with international companies, such as those in Canada, that offer vast experience in a new market. From Germany, these companies could then export to other countries where cannabis has been legalized across the European Union given the trade agreements that are already in place. Speakeasy Looks to Germany Speakeasy Cannabis Club recently announced a memorandum of understanding with HerbaMedica GmbH to export premium cannabis to Germany and European markets. Under the terms of the deal, HerbaMedica will purchase and distribute a fixed amount of product each year from Speakeasy for an initial three year period. HerbaMedica will cover the external costs for the inspection of Speakeasy facilities by Germany authorities. "By having HerbaMedica distribute our products throughout the EU, we gain access to a significant amount of possible clientele," said Speakeasy CEO Marc Geen in the press release announcing the memorandum of understanding with HerbaMedica. "Currently, there are only seven approved cannabis importers to Germany, Speakeasy is excited to be an applicant for this opportunity to join this group of selected few." By taking a craft cannabis approach, the company aims to appeal to Millennial recreational buyers in Canada and patients looking for precise dosing and unique delivery methods in Canada and European markets. Once it secures its license from Health Canada, the company plans to develop a cannabis campus that houses five craft growers with individual identities and genetics on about 300 acres of land in the "Napa Valley of Weed". Looking Ahead Speakeasy Cannabis Club Ltd. (CSE:EASY) (FFT:39H) represents a compelling investment opportunity in the global cannabis industry. In addition to its innovative craft approach, the company's recent deal to expand into Germany and European markets represents a compelling growth opportunity over the long-term. Investors may want to take note as the company moves closer to securing a license to become a licensed producer. For more information, visit the company's website at www.speakeasygrowers.com. Please follow the link to read the full article: http://www.cannabisfn.com/speakeasy-looks-expand-german-market/ About CFN Media CFN Media (CannabisFN) is the leading agency and financial media network dedicated to the global cannabis industry, helps companies operating in the space attract investors, capital, and publicity. Since 2013, private and public cannabis companies in the US and Canada have relied on CFN Media to grow and succeed. Learn how to become a CFN Media client company, brand or entrepreneur: http://www.cannabisfn.com/featuredcompany Download the CFN Media iOS mobile app to access the world of cannabis from the palm of your hand: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cannabisfn/id988009247?ls=1&mt=8 Or visit our homepage and enter your mobile number under the Apple App Store logo to receive a download link text on your iPhone: http://www.cannabisfn.com Disclaimer CannabisFN.com is not an independent financial investment advisor or broker-dealer. You should always consult with your own independent legal, tax, and/or investment professionals before making any investment decisions. The information provided on http://www.cannabisfn.com (the 'Site') is either original financial news or paid advertisements drafted by our in-house team or provided by an affiliate. CannabisFN.com, a financial news media and marketing firm enters into media buys or service agreements with the companies that are the subject of the articles posted on the Site or other editorials for advertising such companies. We are not an independent news media provider. We make no warranty or representation about the information including its completeness, accuracy, truthfulness or reliability and we disclaim, expressly and implicitly, all warranties of any kind, including whether the Information is complete, accurate, truthful, or reliable. As such, your use of the information is at your own risk. Nor do we undertake any obligation to update the items posted. CannabisFN.com received compensation for producing and presenting high quality and sophisticated content on CannabisFN.com along with financial and corporate news. The above article is sponsored content. Emerging Growth LLC, which owns CannabisFN.com and CFN Media, has been hired to create awareness. Please follow the link below to view our full disclosure outlining our compensation: http://www.cannabisfn.com/legal-disclaimer/ Contact: Frank Lane 206 369 7050 flane@cannabisfn.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: CFN Media via Globenewswire Structural Heart Devices Market report categorizes the global market by product type (Heart Valve), by indication, by end user, and by geography Structural Heart Devices Market PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 09:30:40 Press Information Coherent Market Insights Mr. Shah Coherent Market Insights 1001 4th Ave, #3200 Seattle, WA 98154 Mr. Shah CEO +1 02067016702 email https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ # 381 Words Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave, #3200Seattle, WA 98154CEO+1 02067016702 Structural heart diseases refer to cardiac defects, which are congenital (by birth) in nature and also includes the abnormalities developed in valves and vessels of the heart caused by wear or tear due to some disease. Structural heart diseases is a non-coronary abnormality of heart, which does not affect the blood vessels in the heart. Common structural heart condition includes atrial septal defect, patent foramen oval, ventricular septal defect, paravalvular leak, arterial/venous fistulae, and congenital heart disease.Click To Continue Reading on Structural Heart Devices MarketIn 2017, Medtronic plc. received the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for its new CoreValve Evolut PRO valve for the treatment of severe aortic stenosis in symptomatic patients who are at high or extreme risk for open heart surgery. Moreover, the company has launched CoreValve Evolut PRO valve in the U.S. market in the same year. In 2017, Medtronic plc. received CE Mark for its CoreValve Evolut R 34 mm valve and launched it in European market. CoreValve Evolut R 34 mm is the largest sized transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) system available in Europe.In 2015, Edwards Lifesciences Corporation, an U.S.-based company focused on heart valves and hemodynamic monitoring received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for its Edwards SAPIEN 3 valve, a transcatheter aortic heart valve used for the treatment of high-risk patients suffering from severe, symptomatic aortic stenosis. Furthermore, companies operating in the area are looking to expand product portfolio through inorganic growth. For instance, in 2015, CryoLife, Inc., an U.S.-based medical device company acquired the U.S. based On-X Life Technologies Holdings, Inc., a privately held mechanical heart valve company. CryoLife, Inc. entered in mechanical valve market with On-X Life Technologies Holdings, Inc.s products with this strategic acquisition.Request Sample Copy of this Business Report @ https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/insight/request-sample/1559 Key Vendors:Abbott Laboratories, Medtronic Plc., Edwards Lifesciences Corporation, Boston Scientific Corporation, CryoLife Inc., LivaNova Plc., Cook Group Incorporated, Endologix Inc., and W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc.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.Visit Blog: https://healthcaremarketconsulting.blogspot.com/ PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 22:26:21 Press Information Thunder Energies Corporation 1444 Rainville Rd. Tarpon Springs, FL 34689 Brian Buckley Operations Manager 7279403944 email http://www.thunder-energies.com Published by Brian Buckley 7279403944 e-mail http://thunder-energies.com # 424 Words 1444 Rainville Rd.Tarpon Springs, FL 34689Operations Manager7279403944Brian Buckley7279403944 Dr. Ruggero Santilli, CEO of Thunder Energies Corporation, a publicly traded company with stock symbol (OTCQB:TNRG), announces the completion and submission of a grant application to the Department of Energy - Office of Science (SC), for funding opportunity DE-FOA-0001820, titled: FY 2018 Continuation of Solicitation for the Office of Science Financial Assistance Program. Dr. Santilli states: "The Department of Energy, Office of Science's mission is to support scientific discoveries and major scientific methods to advance our understanding of nature, as well as to advance the energy, economic and national security of the United States. SC is the Nations largest Federal sponsor of basic research in the physical sciences and the lead Federal agency supporting fundamental scientific research for our Nations energy future. The grant application deals with research I initiated when I was at Harvard University under five contracts with the Department of Energy. We are seeking funding for the completion of these studies from the DOE that could potentially cover the entire cost of the Nuclear Weapons Detection Station (NWDS) [ https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2017/10/30/1160050/0/en/Thunder-Energies-Corporation-Initiates-Tests-of-the-Directional-Neutron-Source-for-Various-Industrial-Applications.html] . We believe that this new grant opportunity is ideally suited for our technology, as it addresses an unmet need in the detection of fissionable nuclear materials. While waiting for the outcome of this very comprehensive grant submission, we have already started procuring equipment and supplies needed for the manufacturing portion of the development plan." Forward Looking StatementsThe information provided in this presentation is covered by patent applications and other intellectual rights owed by Thunder Energies Corporation that hereby authorize their use without consultation provided authorization for any desired scientific research. Certain statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Rule 175 under the Securities Act of 1933 and Rule 3b-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are subject to the safe harbor created by those rules. All statements, other than statements of fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding potential future plans and objectives of the company, are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Technical complications, which may arise, could prevent the prompt implementation of any strategically significant plan(s) outlined above. The Company undertakes no duty to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this release.Brian BuckleyOperations ManagerThunder Energies CorporationBrian@ Thunder-Energies.com PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 02:01:02 TVSquared Australia Opens as Advertiser Demand for TV Performance Analytics Grows TVSquared Megan Garnett Coyle, +1-347-603-5096 Director of Marketing Communications megan@tvsquared.com TVSquared, the gold standard for TV performance analytics and optimization, has opened TVSquared Australia. The Sydney-based offices will provide ground support for Australias $3.1 billion TV advertising market, which represents one of TVSquareds fastest-growing regions. TVSquared makes TV a performance-marketing channel, enabling more than 700 brands, agencies and networks in 70 countries to measure, optimize and demonstrate TV campaign ROI. TVSquared ADvantage measures the impact of TV spots and provides insights to maximize spend and optimize campaigns for the greatest response whether its search, site visits, app activity, phone, SMS or any other touchpoint. The platform offers multi-country, cross-brand analysis by day, daypart, program, network, genre and creative, and provides buy recommendations for the best response. Praful Desai is heading up TVSquared Australia as Business Development Director. For the last 15 years, Desai has held analytical leadership positions within the Dentsu Aegis Network, most recently as the Head of Data and Analytics for Vizeum Australia. Desai commented: TV not only provides unmatched reach, but it has evolved into a primary driver of digital response. With demand for TV performance analytics at a fever pitch, it was the right time for TVSquared to open its Sydney offices to accommodate the growing number of advertisers that want to make TV work harder and smarter for their brands. With offices in Edinburgh, London, New York, Munich and now Sydney, TVSquared is the premier provider of TV performance analytics for local, national and global advertisers. Recently, the company added real-time spot detection and SearchSync to its product suite. SearchSync detects when a TV spot runs and triggers a dedicated search campaign to secure the top ranking in the minutes following the airing to maximize response. Jo Kinsella, Chief Revenue Officer and EVP, TVSquared: TVSquared has grown exponentially in the last few years, which speaks volumes about the efficacy of same-day TV analytics for driving sales and ROI. Our Australian customer base is pioneering the use of addressable and linear TV and looking to TVSquared to help drive performance and analytics. We are looking forward to continuing to grow our regional presence. About TVSquared TVSquared is the gold standard for TV performance analytics and optimization. More than 700 brands, agencies and networks in 70+ countries use TVSquared to optimize TV-driven response, maximize spend and improve campaign effectiveness by up to 80%. Learn more at www.tvsquared.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180618005 PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 07:34:02 's-Hertogenbosch, 19 June 2018 In the period from 12 June 2018 until 18 June 2018 Van Lanschot Kempen has repurchased 38,243 of its own shares (depositary receipts for Class A ordinary shares). The shares were repurchased at an average price of 25.17 per share for a total amount of 962,482 These repurchases are part of the share buy-back programme for at most 400,000 of own shares, which was announced on 22 February 2018. The total number of shares repurchased to date is 303,931. Van Lanschot Kempen has asked its intermediary ING not to make any repurchases under the share buy-back programme on 27, 28, 29 and 30 June, in connection with the preparation of the half-year financial statements of Van Lanschot Kempen NV and Van Lanschot NV. More information, including a detailed overview of the repurchase transactions under this programme, is available on www.vanlanschotkempen.com/sharebuyback. Media Relations: +31 20 354 45 85; mediarelations@vanlanschotkempen.com Investor Relations: +31 20 354 45 90; investorrelations@vanlanschotkempen.com About Van Lanschot Kempen Van Lanschot Kempen, a wealth manager operating under the Van Lanschot, Evi and Kempen brand names, is active in Private Banking, Asset Management and Merchant Banking, with the aim of preserving and creating wealth for its clients. Van Lanschot Kempen, listed at Euronext Amsterdam, is the Netherlands' oldest independent financial services company with a history dating back to 1737. vanlanschotkempen.com Disclaimer This document does not constitute an offer or solicitation for the sale, purchase or acquisition in any other way of or subscription to any financial instrument and is not an opinion or a recommendation to perform or refrain from performing any action. This document is a translation of the Dutch original and is provided as a courtesy only. In the event of any disparities, the Dutch version will prevail. 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: Van Lanschot Kempen via Globenewswire PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-18 22:25:02 McLean, VA, June 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Vricon, a global leader in 3D data and solutions, today announced that it has more than doubled its year-over-year sales growth rate and set a record pace for new customer acquisition. Vricon serves the global professional geospatial market with world-leading 3D geodata and 3D visualization solutions. With direct access to the world's largest global imagery archive, Vricon uses automated 3D image-processing algorithms inside a state-of-the-art high-performance computing environment to produce its high-resolution 3D data and solutions for government and commercial clients. Use of 3D geodata helps users to see the world as it really exists, explain what they're seeing more clearly, and better convey their findings to decision makers. Vricon has greatly increased and diversified its government-sector portfolio. From early 2017 to today, Vricon increased its support to foreign government clients, who now generate roughly 35 percent of Vricon revenue. Vricon also grew its US Government (USG) client base by 67 percent; USG clients account for slightly less than 50 percent of total Vricon revenue. On the commercial side, "the real excitement is coming in the telecommunications sector," said Eric Von Eckartsberg, Vricon Chief Revenue Officer. "As recently as last year, we expanded into the telco market, where we immediately picked up new clients and quickly grew this nascent opportunity to approximately 11 percent of our 2017 revenue. We anticipate explosive growth in this sector throughout 2018." Vricon's expansion into the telecommunications sector reflects a critical need for telecommunications companies to navigate the rapid changes happening throughout the industry. With an increasing number of connected devices, high-definition content, and new services, the demands on networks are accelerating and growing exponentially; telecommunications companies need cost-effective, next-generation geodata solutions that allow them to design networks that can perform optimally for 4G LTE but can also accommodate the 5G environment to empower smart homes and the Internet of Things. "The company's momentum reflects the growing need for high-resolution, extremely accurate 3D data and solutions," said Magnus Brege, Vricon CEO. "When we launched the company in 2015, we initially targeted the defense community. But other industry sectors quickly recognized the power of Vricon 3D products and solutions to create new opportunities effectively and overcome their challenges. We're also building an international commercial clientele, who now contribute over 7 percent to our revenue and is growing quickly." Vricon, which just celebrated its third birthday, has achieved a number of other timely milestones: By early 2018, Vricon increased sales by 130 percent over the previous 12 months, enabling the company to become debt free. In just the first quarter of 2018, Vricon generated $10 million in revenue. In February 2018, Vricon launched its new Telco Suite, a comprehensive, cost-effective, next-generation solution for the telecommunication sector. In 2017, Esri-the market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software-became a Vricon reseller, opening the door to many new and diverse customers who now can use Esri tools to work with Vricon 3D data to support public safety, energy, and other key sectors. "Vricon's mission is to build The Globe in 3D by producing photorealistic 3D products and digital elevation models with unmatched coverage and delivery timelines," adds Brege. "It's not just a tag line - we're really doing it, as the company's financial and technical achievements demonstrate." About Vricon Vricon serves the global professional geospatial market with world-leading 3D geodata and 3D visualization solutions. Vricon is headquartered in McLean, Virginia. For further information, visit http://www.vricon.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Attachment Craig Brower Vricon 703-283-4588 craig.brower@vricon.com PR-Inside.com: 2018-06-19 22:13:19 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 The Wonderfilm Media Corporation--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - The Wonderfilm Media Corporation (TSX Venture:WNDR). has issued a press release with the following headline:Wonderfilm Creates Winter Wonder with Two Christmas Features Going to Camera This JulyTo 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 The Wonderfilm Media Corporation, or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/The Wonderfilm Media CorporationSource: The Wonderfilm Media Corporation (TSX Venture: WNDR)Date: June 19, 2018Time: 4:13 PM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of The Wonderfilm Media Corporation and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. 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Contributions towards Deccan Herald digital journalism The ultimate owner of all the Deccan Herald properties is The Printers (Mysore) Private Limited and all the contributions reach the account held by The Printers (Mysore) Private Limited. Contributions from readers is to support the cause of good journalism that we at Deccan Herald strive to deliver day in day out. Please note that your support to the Deccan Heralds journalism does not constitute a charitable donation and no exemption can be claimed under Section 80G of the Income Tax Act,1961 of India or elsewhere. Mali said on Tuesday that some of its soldiers were implicated in gross violations after the discovery of some mass graves. The mass graves were discovered in its troubled Central Region plagued by violence between security forces and Islamist militants. The statement from the Defence Ministry followed local media reports that 25 bodies had been found in mass graves after a military crackdown on suspected jihadists and allied ethnic militia in Central Mali. Human rights groups accuse the Malian military of conducting extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, torture and arbitrary arrests against suspected sympathisers of jihadist groups, charges it has promised in the past to investigate. The Defence Ministry confirms the existence of mass graves implicating certain persons in (Malian Armed Forces) FAMA in gross violations that caused deaths in Nantaka and Kobaka in the region of Mopti, a statement posted on the Defence Ministrys website on Tuesday said. It added that the defence minister instructed the public prosecutor to open an inquiry. The ministry reiterates its determination to fight impunity and engage its forces in the strict respect of human rights, the statement added. In April, Amnesty International raised an alarm over reports that six people were found dead in a mass grave in the Mopti region. In February, the government said it was investigating accusations that the army had abducted and executed suspected jihadist sympathisers. The military frequently report having killed several terrorists in its security campaign. The announced investigation is good news, but promises arent enough, Human Rights Watch associate director for West Africa Corinne Dufka said in an email to Reuters. Since 2017, Ive documented over 60 alleged executions by the army of suspects who are buried in at least 7 common graves, none of which have resulted in justice for the families. The West African country has been in turmoil since Tuareg rebels and loosely allied Islamists took over its North in 2012, prompting French forces to intervene to push them back the following year. Growing violence across the country has raised doubts about whether Mali would be able to hold credible elections scheduled for the end of July, in which President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita would seek a second term. (Reuters/NAN) Two year ago, during its 39th meeting, the National Council of Establishment (NCE) resolved that bachelor degree and Higher National Degree (HND) holders should both enter the civil service on Grade Level 08, but federal ministries, departments and agencies are reluctant to implement the resolution except the paramilitary, who have upgraded. Years after the Minna meeting, investigations show many government agencies at the federal and state levels of the civil service, except the paramilitary agencies, are yet to comply with the restoration of parity between graduates of polytechnics and university graduates. The restoration of the parity between graduates of polytechnics and university graduates even in Nigerias paramilitary agencies is far from total, as the dichotomy still exists at the terminal point of their careers. Although some of the paramilitary officers confirmed that all the HND holders on level 07 have been upgraded to level 08 with their degree holder counterparts, HND holders cannot rise beyond Grade Level 14 or 15 without obtaining additional qualifications (including a masters degree) while a degree holder can rise in the service at Grade Level 17 (equivalent of the Permanent Secretary cadre). PREMIUM TIMES reported the communique of the NCE meeting in 2016 which disclosed that one of the resolutions was an entry point salary GL.08 for all candidates possessing Higher National Diploma (HND) from institutions accredited by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE). The NCE resolution only addressed the disparity in entry points between HND and Bachelor degree holders but was silent on the terminal points where there is also a gap between the two qualifications. In a circular in July 2017, the Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazzau, gave approval for the abolition of the dichotomy in all the paramilitary services, in compliance with the NCE resolution. He directed that all officers with HND were to be upgraded to COMPASS 08, which is the Salary Grade Level for holders of Degree certificates at entry point. The nomenclature for the HND holders will start with the Rank of Senior Inspector, the Degree holders are with the rank of Assistant Superintendent II, the minister said in the circular. The Nigeria Customs Service was among the agencies to comply with the resolution. The Comptroller-General of the service, Hameed Ali, in April 2017 approved the removal of the dichotomy in the service. Even at that, the agencies that complied have retained the dichotomy at the terminal point. A latest recruitment by the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC), appeared as if even at entry point, the agency maintained the disparity between university and polytechnic graduates. The latest recruitment advertorial published by the FRSC divided the personnel into three categories. The first category, which is the officers cadre (Assistant Route Commander), is meant for degree holders while the second category, the Marshal Inspectorate Cadre is for the HND holders, for which the agency is asking them to apply for the post of Marshal Inspector 1. HND holders cannot apply for the post in the officers cadre. However, when contacted, spokesperson of the FRSC, Bisi Kazeem, said the agency had regularised the directive to remove the dichotomy between the two sets of degrees. According to Mr Kazeem, while buttressing his point with some documents he made available to PREMIUM TIMES, HND holders have been upgraded to Grade level 08 since 2017 but their terminal point remains Grade level 14. Such officer can use additional post graduate Diploma (PGD) as a bridge to acquiring a Masters degree in the relevant field to qualify them for entry into the officer cadre, Mr Kazeem explained. Those who possess the professional qualifications and membership of professional bodies approved by the National Council on Establishment (NCE) such as Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN), Institute of Chartered Accountant of Nigeria (ICAN), Association of National Accountants of Nigeria (ANAN), in addition to the HND are eligible for conversion into officer cadre and advance beyond SGL 14, he further said. Mr Kazeem said the dichotomy is not in the cadre but in grade level, noting that university degree and HND holders enter on grade level 08 but belong to different cadres. But the national president of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnics (ASUP), Usman Dutse, said the union is not comfortable with parity at the terminal level. It was resolved at the NCE meeting last year that both HND and Degree terminal level would be the same, so we dont know where and how this things were manipulated to come in this direction, We believe there are some personal interest, there are some cabals or a group of individuals that feel this dichotomy should be sustained because of their personal Interest. He asked the federal government to speak out especially as the dichotomy was a major factor causing low student applications to polytechnics. If they would refer back to the meeting of establishment that took place in June last year, that was not the resolution and even the head of service was not in support, so I dont know why they would undermine government policy and decisions and give the type of interpretation that would favour them, Mr Dutse said . According to the president, there is a bill in the National Assembly supporting that the dichotomy should be abolished finally. Once it becomes a law, nobody can violate it and if anybody violates it, actions would be taken. There is need for government to conclude this policy and make sure that the polytechnic graduates are emancipated from this bondage created by some selfish individuals. Mr Dutse said the civil service are the ones widening the gap between the polytechnic and university degrees. The problem is from the civil service, because you know they compete for directorship and polytechnic graduates are very productive. The civil service needs to look at the country and not personal interest, not removing the dichotomy is like oppressing and demoralising the holders, he said. Although, our cry on the qualification was on the salary scale. As long as the salary is the same, the name of the rank in the paramilitary is not really a problem, said the national president of the National Association of Polytechnic Students (NAPS), Mohammed Eneji. Mr Eneji said the agitation for abolishing the dichotomy is ongoing. We believe that in time, we will get this disparity equated, he said. NAPS was at the meeting of the council on establishment that took place in Owerri where it was resolved that every ministry, agencies and departments should begin the implementation process and we thought that by now, the disparity is yet to be breached, he said. He urged the head of service to treat the dichotomy issue as matter of urgency and redirect the ministries for action because justice delayed is justice denied. PREMIUM TIMES tried to get updates from some other paramilitary agencies to confirm if all the officers with HND degrees have been upgraded to level 8. Some of the state directors across the nation said the NCE resolution is still in progress as the circular is yet to be sent out for implementation. Immigration Efforts to get reaction from the spokesperson of Immigration, Sunday James, was not successful as he did not respond to several text messages and calls put across to him. But an official who requested not to be named as he is not authorised to speak with the media said though the dichotomy had been regularised in the Immigration service, the cadres too, remain different. The HND (holder) is on Inspectorate Cadre while the Degree holders are on the Superintendent Cadre but they collect the same salary, the source said. Federal Fire Service For the Federal Fire Service, the Assistant Controller-General of the agency in the FCT, Julius Opetusin, said the question regarding the regularisation was not for his office. Please this question should be directed to the Comptroller-General, Federal Fire Service not me, he said, referring to his boss who did not pick or return calls to his phone. Police The police declined to clarify if the disparity has been resolved. Jimoh Moshood, the police spokesperson, said the question should be directed to the Police Service Commission. Nigerian Mobile Police Officers [Photo Credit: Qed.ng] PSC will know more if it has been regularised as they are in charge of recruitment, he said. But the commission kicked the ball back into the court of the police. They should have done that by now but the police will be in a better position to confirm what is happening with their men. We are not the one paying them salaries, we appoint, promote and discipline. I am not in a better position to confirm this, Ikechukwu Ani, spokesperson of PSC said. Mr Ani said the resolution of the NCE should be binding on the police and paramilitary agencies. The Nigerian government intensified stricter passenger screening and other tougher security measures for all commercial flights earlier this month, following threats of renewed attacks linked to the deadly Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Although no imminent threats were immediately identified by federal authorities, the reported influx of ISIS fighters displaced from Iraq, Syria and other Middle East territories into Nigeria was enough to impose new requirements at airports. The Office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (OSGF) alerted the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and the Nigerian Customs Service (NCS) to a threat issued by ISIS in April, according to a May 25 memo seen by PREMIUM TIMES. Although Africa appears not to be on ISIS immediate focus, the return to Africa of former ISIS fighters from Iraq and Syria, as well as the existence of ISIS-linked groups, such as the technically-suave Abu Musab Al-Barnawi-led Boko Haram faction, calls for increased vigilance in the aviation sector to counter possible new strategies in the ISIS terror campaign, the May 25 memo said. Abu Hassan Al-Muhajir, a spokesperson for ISIS, said in the April 22 message that ISIS was plotting to bring bloodshed to the skies as part of its new global terrorism strategy. The threat was circulated through ISIS propaganda channels in broadcast and online media. A man was said to have taken a knife onto a plane and seated in the aisle, indicating that the threats might be carried out using knives or other sharp objects. The terrorist group claimed responsibility for downing a Russian passenger flight in 2015, killing 224 people. The groups fatal capabilities have been severely degraded over the past year, and it is believed to be holding less than three per cent of its previously held territories in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. The NCS responded to the alert by directing all commands and federal operating units to intensify the screening process of all passengers and luggage and take other measures necessary to forestall any potential security breach, according to a June 13 directive seen by PREMIUM TIMES. It was not immediately clear whether or not the NCAA and FAAN have scaled up screening procedures in compliance with the OSGFs alert, their respective spokespersons did not immediately return requests for comments Tuesday morning. The OSGF did not recommend any specific measures that should be taken to neutralise the threat, and it was unclear whether or not carry-ons, such as notebooks and e-readers, will be added to list of items that can not be carried onto a plane by airport security. Nigeria has recorded several fatal air accidents, but none was ever linked to terrorism. But recent claims that ISIS fighters are entering Nigeria through its West African affiliate frequently unsettle federal authorities, prompting new security measures. The latest alert comes as reports in UK newspapers said ISIS fighters are sneaking into Nigeria to plot devastating attacks. It is feared IS will exploit regular flights between Lagos and London to export more evil to the UK, the UK Sun reported last weekend. The paper quoted a Nigerian Air Force official as confirming that theres a regular exchange programme between the ISIS fighters in the Middle East and Asia and their West African counterparts. Gonen Segev, a former energy minister in Israel, has reportedly admitted contacts with Iran after being arrested in a suspected spying operation, local reports in Israel said. Mr Segev lived in Nigeria on a self-imposed exile after completing jail sentence for drugs offenses in Israel in 2010. He worked as a medical official for Israeli diplomats and other Jewish expatriates around Abuja. He was arrested in Equatorial Guinea last month and was extradited to Israel where he has now been charged with spying for Iran, reports said. It was not immediately clear if Nigeria played any role in his investigation and arrest. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Defence Headquarters both declined comments to PREMIUM TIMES about the development for the most part of Tuesday. Mr Segev was reportedly lured to the Iranian Embassy in Abuja in 2012 under the guise of treating the children of its diplomatic staff, Israels Channel 10 news reported. By taking up assignment with Iranians, Mr Gonen was reportedly hoping to mislead them and ultimately restore his reputation that was tarnished by his jail sentence, Channel 10 said. I wanted to fool the Iranians and come back to Israel a hero, he was quoted as saying during his interrogation. He denied all allegations of wrongdoing and said he did not pass any sensitive intelligence to the Iranians during his contacts with them. Mr Segev was arrested in 2004 for attempting to smuggle 32,000 ecstasy (MDMA) tablets from the Netherlands into Israel. He initially denied the allegations, saying he thought the pills were M&Ms. He was also accused of illegally extending his diplomatic license and credit card fraud. He was convicted in 2005 of drug smuggling, forgery, and fraud. He bagged five years imprisonment with a $27,500 fine. He was released from prison in 2007, after a third of his sentence was cut, due to satisfactory behaviour in jail. Mr Segev, Israeli energy minister from 1995-96, maintained a low-profile since moving to Abuja years ago, and he is not well-known outside the diplomatic and expatriate communities in the capital city. Diplomatic ties between Iran and Nigeria strained recently amidst continuous detention of Ibrahim El-Zakzaky, a foremost Shiite cleric in Nigeria who was arrested in 2015 after Nigerian soldiers raided his compound and killed nearly 400 members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria. The army accused the Shiites of block a major road to be used by army chief, Tukur Buratai. One solider was also confirmed killed in the violence. Nigerian authorities have also thwarted attempts by persons linked to Iran to import assorted arms and ammunition into the country through illegal use of the countrys seaports. The federal government has presented a plan to permanently solve the farmers-herders conflicts in Nigeria which has claimed the lives of thousands over the years. Hundreds of people have been killed in 2018 alone in violence involving nomadic herdsmen in states like Benue, Plateau, and Kaduna. Aside the loss of lives, the federal government has said that Nigeria loses about $14 billion (5.04 trillion) annually to the conflicts. The presentation of the plan was made by the technical adviser to the National Economic Council (NEC), Andrew Kwasari, on Tuesday in Abuja. The presentation event was attended by several public officials including the Minister of Agriculture, Audu Ogbeh; and the Governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom. Mr Kwasaris presentation showed that the plan stemmed from meetings and recommendations by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) and the National Economic Council in 2017. The economic council is headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and includes all state governors as well as some ministers as members. The governments new plan is tagged The National Livestock Transformation Plan. It is built on six key pillars: economic investment, conflict resolution, law and order, humanitarian relief, information education and strategic communication; and cross-cutting issues. According to the plan, the economic investment pillar would support and strengthen the development of market-driven ranches in seven pilot states for improved livestock productivity through breed (genetic) improvement and pasture production, in addition to efficient land and water productivity. The government also said it would rebuild social capital at the community level to promote mutual trust, confidence building and consolidate the peace process, with regards to the conflict resolution pillar. The plan also showed that the law and order pillar would support the strengthening of legal frameworks for improving livestock production, peace and harmony. The fourth pillar, humanitarian relief will focus on rebuilding and reconstructing of common facilities worship places, markets and individual homes that have been destroyed. The fifth pillar would aid information, education and strategic communication on the development of grazing reserves in the frontline states, and mitigate the consequences of these conflicts such as wanton loss of lives, destruction of properties, including schools and facilities. The cross-cutting issues pillar identifies various cross-cutting issues necessary to realise the objectives of the programme, which include monitoring and evaluation; and research to contribute evidence base in programme implementation; as well as gender mainstreaming, the plan showed. Ten key states were identified as the frontline states to receive pilot interventions in line with the recommendations of the FMARD and NEC livestock conference. The states include: Adamawa, Benue, Ebonyi, Edo, Kaduna, Nassarawa, Oyo, Plateau, Taraba and Zamfara. The plan would include creation of large ranches in each of these states. A Ranch Design Plan has also been proposed in models of various sizes clustered in 94 locations in the 10 pilot states. The government intends to transition pastoralism to ranching in order to reduce the struggle for common resources, Mr Kwasari stated in his presentation of the plan. In terms of size, the proposed ranch size models are: Cluster 30, 60, 150 and 300 cows ranch models in a location within the donated gazetted grazing reserves; and a minimum 1000 cows breeder ranch in 7 of the 10 pilot states. The well equipped ranches will, however, not come cheap. Total spending over the 10 year period is slightly in excess of N179 billion, the expert said. FGN-States funding is meant for the first 3yrs in the pilot phase, totaling about N70billion. Some of the benefits of the plan include Expected milk output to be in excess of 200million litres by the 2nd year of the project (but the first year of productivity. Expected milk output of 700m ltrs of milk by the 4th year of the project. Speaking on the plan, the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Audu Ogbeh said: we want to bring this crisis to an end. We will begin action in a matter of days. He said nomadic herding was not sustainable and Nigeria must adopt ranching. He added that there has been a strong partnership between the federal and state governments; a view also espoused by Mr Ortom whose Benue State has witnessed some of the most violent crisis involving nomadic herdsmen. Mr Ortom, however, argued that apart from implementing the new plan, the federal government must ensure that perpetrators of previous killings in the state are arrested and prosecuted. The Police Command in Bayelsa said on Tuesday that it had arrested a suspected gun runner who sold an AK 47 riffle for N500,000 and a Berrata pistol for N250,000. DSP Asinim Butswat, spokesperson of the command, told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Yenagoa that the suspect was arrested in a sting operation on June 16 at a hotel in Ekenfa 3, Yenagoa. Mr Butswat said that the operation was in furtherance of the directive by the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, to police commands to mop up arms and ammunition from unauthorised persons. He said that the police recovered one AK47 rifle and two Barreta pistols from the suspects who sourced the arms from the Republic of Cameroon. He said that police detectives lured the suspected notorious gun runner, who hails from Ekeremor Local Government Area of the state, under the guise of purchasing arms from him. The spokesperson told NAN that the suspected gun runner was arrested with a 34-year-old man from Oboro Town in Delta, who usually introduced him to buyers. The suspect confessed that he usually travelled to the Republic of Cameroon to buy arms and ammunition in a community called Okwa, a border town with Bakassi Peninsula. He also admitted that he sells an AK 47 riffle for N550,000 and Berratta pistol for N250,000 in Nigeria, Butswat said. The police spokesperson said that efforts were underway to recover some of the guns the suspect earlier sold and arrest the buyers. He also appealed to members of the public to provide to the police useful information that might lead to the recovery of arms from unauthorised persons. (NAN) Health experts have urged Nigerians to voluntarily donate blood regularly because the national blood bank is gradually drying up. They said people should not wait until emergencies to donate blood. This was the consensus in Abuja on Tuesday at a press briefing organised by the National Blood Transfusion Service in collaboration with the Trauma Care International Foundation (TCIF). The event was held to educate Nigerians by debunking myths associated with blood donation and transfusion. The organisers also intend to recruit 10,000 new voluntary blood donors across the country. Speaking at the event, the senior executive officer of TCIF, Olajumoke Akisanya, said Nigerians need to cultivate the habit of voluntarily donating blood and discard the various myths surrounding blood donation. Many Nigerians need to be aware that blood donation saves lives, both for the donor and the receiver. Currently Nigeria needs at least 1.8 million units of blood in the blood bank, but the country is far behind, she said. Ms Akisanya said it is important to have surplus blood in the blood bank, especially for pregnant women and people with sickle cell anemia who often need blood transfusion. A sickle cell patient on an average receives 10 to 12 pints of blood per year. There are also others who need urgent blood transfusion. In order to play our part in saving lives, we are organising a voluntary blood donation drive in multiple locations around Nigeria on June 30 from 10a.m to 6p.m. The locations are NBTS offices in Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Lagos, Oyo, Maiduguri, Benin, Owerri and Kaduna. We are also advocating for the institution of a regulatory body that will not only support and promote voluntary blood donation but will be able to enforce and even prosecute those who have made blood and its product a commodity beyond the reach of those in need for commercial gains, she added. Also speaking at the event, the Director, Monitoring and Evaluation NBTS, Olusola Idowu, called for rigorous campaign for voluntary blood donation in the country. Mrs Idowu who represented the National Coordinator NBTS, said the statistics of voluntary blood donors in the country has drastically declined. She said NBTS has 17 centres across Nigeria but the highest unit of blood collected by the centres was in 2015. The highest unit of blood ever collected in NBTS was in 66,799 in 2015. Since then there has been a drop. In 2016, 51, 331 unit were collected and in 2017, 31,896 was collected. This is a far cry from the 1.8 million units needed for emergencies and medical interventions every year in the country, she said. Blood and blood products are vital in medical treatment. According to the World Health Organisation, a large proportion of people require transfusion during the first 24 hours of their treatment. This includes over 234 million major operations performed worldwide every year and 63 million people undergoing surgery for traumatic injuries. Treatments and injuries for which blood transfusion is often needed include of 31 million people on treatment for cancers, 10 million for pregnancy-related complications, 120 million killed in road traffic accidents and the 20-50 million injured or disabled every year. Ms. Idowu said though there are private blood donation centres and hospitals across Nigeria, they cannot effectively fill the vacuum. We need a regulated agency to monitor these centres and we hope when the government signs the bill on NBTS, such mechanism will be put in place. Most of the private blood donation centres have been the ones encouraging donating blood for remuneration as they have turned it into a commercial venture. This ought not to be so, she said. Speaking in a similar vein, Otabor Christopher, the Medical Director of Alliance Hospital, said the importance of blood and blood products cannot be over-emphasised in medical treatments, especially during surgery. You cannot perform any operation without blood, Mr. Otabor, a surgeon, said. As we speak, the number of voluntary donors in the country is hopelessly low. We do not need to wait until an emergency to give blood because such blood cannot be immediately used. The donated blood has to be screened and made sure it is safe. This takes considerable time so as not to infect the receiver with diseases. We need to set up a new set of voluntary donors who will be ready to donate blood regularly. This will go a long way in saving lives. It is a blood that is available that will save a patient in times of emergency, he said. A senator representing Kaduna Central at the National Assembly, Shehu Sani, has lamented the inability of leaders of the All Progressive Congress to address the internal crisis rocking the party in the past three years and has threatened to leave. Many states under the control of the ruling party are embroiled in battles of supremacy amongst its many factions even as the APC prepares for its national convention to elect national leaders. The senator, who has consistently criticised the policies of his own party said the party has been in prolonged crisis since 2015 and listed states like Kaduna, Kano, Bauchi, Kogi, Rivers and many others affected. President Muhammadu Buhari recently appointed a national leader of the party, Bola Tinubu, to head the reconciliation committee that will resolve the internal crises within the party. Months later, nothing much has been heard from the committee. Mr Sani was speaking with journalists during the Sallah celebration at his Kaduna residence on Monday. According to him, the state congresses were held on a very shaky foundation because there was no reconciliation and peace among agrieved members. So, APC stands on the foundation of injustice as it is to its members. It has not treated its members very well, it has failed to live up to its promises and pledges of a transparent internal democracy as a party, he said. Mr Sani said most of the congresses are illegitimate, illegal and lack due process. He alleged that governors simply removed people who they feel are not loyal to them and brought in loyalists and arranged people to endorse and stamp illegality. There was never a congress held in Kaduna and other states, of course, other than the fact that supporters of the government were simply arranged to give it a stamp of approval in the name of affirmation or whatever, he said. The senator, who has been having a running political conflict with his state governor, Nasir El-Rufai, explained that what APC had always condemned the opposition Peoples Democratic Party for in the past for was being practiced by it today. So, for people like me we are not going to tolerate or endorse injustices of any kind. We are talking at the national level, still trying to find a solution to the problem, but if a solution is not found within the next few weeks, you would be told of which party we would be going to. I can tell you confidently that our goods are now at the departure lounge of the APC and we are leaving the party because we cant tolerate the embarrassment, but we are still giving the party time. Its not me that will do it alone, but all people who felt that the party has not treated them well and there was not an attempt to address the issue, he said. On whether he believes he can still retain his position if he dumps the ruling party, Mr Sani expressed confidence. I have confidence in whatever political party I contest, I am going to win my election. I am very much convinced about this. Since those that vote you into the office are the masses and the masses have since abandoned the bandwagon of people hiding under the cover and pocket of Buhari and re-election. According to him, the electorate are being sensitised to vote individuals and not political parties. We are also telling them to vote candidates based on merit and the ability to deliver. I can confirm to you that we are at the departure lounge and that we are waiting for the train to come and pick us and certainly, we are leaving to the next destination without the fear, he said. Mr Sani has also confirmed his governorship ambition but said it all depends on validation by political stakeholders in the state. I am going to contest for the governorship of Kaduna State, but if my stakeholders insist that I return for (to) the Senate, I am going to contest for the Senate. A federal lawmaker, Ali Ndume (APC, Borno) has identified two black spots from which he says Boko Haram insurgents operate in Borno State. He said the insurgents are operating from two bases: the Damboa/Gwoza/ Chibok axis and the Lake Chad axis. He also urged security agencies to intensify efforts on the two locations. He said this while reacting to the recent killings over the weekend in the outskirts of Damboa town in Damboa Local Government Area of Borno State. At least 31 persons were killed and about 48 others injured after suspected Boko Haram suicide bombers on Saturday attacked Abachari village in Damboa local government area, residents and witnesses have said. The suicide bombers, said to be six by the army, reportedly targeted people returning home after a Sallah fair in Damboa. In a statement from Saudi Arabia, Mr Ndume said if the military strikes at the bases, the insurgents would be tamed and possibly rendered harmless. We are appealing to the military to intensify operation on the darkest spots in Borno state where the insurgents are said to be carrying out their operations from. These two spots are reported to be Damboa/ Gwoza axis and the Lake Chad axis. It is suspected and reported that Abubakar Shekau, a factional leader of the sect is operating from the Chibok axis while the Mamman Nurs group operates from the Lake Chad axis, he said. He said that if the military visit the bases of the insurgents with superior firepower, the insurgents would be defeated. They should clear the two bases for us to have peace. These are the two reported and known bases of the insurgents in Borno State, he said. He sympathised with the families of those who were killed in the attack, adding that he has sent a delegation to visit the injured at the hospital and donated an undisclosed amount of money to the victims. 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. SAN JOSE, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- [24]7.ai, a global leader in intent-driven customer engagement solutions, today announced the appointment of Cosimo Spera, Ph.D., a NATO and Mine Fellow, as chief data scientist. [24]7.ai has invested heavily in AI-powered customer engagement solutions to redefine the customer experience. In his new role, Spera, a globally recognized expert in mathematical modeling, predictive analytics, and data science, will be responsible for leading the company's data sciences and AI vision, reporting directly to [24]7.ai Chief Executive Officer PV Kannan. Spera holds a doctorate in mathematics and statistics from the University of Siena, Italy, a doctorate in operation research from M.I.T. and held a post-doctoral position in operation research at Yale University. Prior to joining [24]7.ai, Spera was chief data scientist at SaltGrid where he was responsible for building and leading the data science team, driving the product vision and roadmap, and designing and deploying predictive models for health, safety and the environment. He engaged early customers like Chevron and American Petroleum Institute, to build the first product release in less than six months, with just four developers. He has held leadership roles at Innotas and Zephyr Health as well. "[24]7.ai has invested heavily in artificial intelligence to help companies determine consumer intent and improve customer experience," said Kannan. "Cosimo's deep research background and mathematical modeling expertise is going to help us extend that lead. His passion for building great teams and products will drive innovation that redefines the way companies interact with consumers." "[24]7.ai is a company that truly understands the power of data science and the incredible impact it can bring to real-world business applications," said Spera. "I look forward to leading a world-class global team that is advancing artificial intelligence and driving innovation in the customer experience space." About [24]7.ai [24]7.ai is redefining the way companies interact with consumers. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning to understand consumer intent, the company's technology helps companies create a personalized, predictive and effortless customer experience across all channels. The world's largest and most recognizable brands are using intent-driven engagement from [24]7.ai to assist several hundred million visitors annually, through more than 1.5 billion conversations, most of which are automated. The result is an order of magnitude improvement in digital adoption, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth. For more information, visit: http://www.247.ai. [24]7 and [24]7.ai are trademarks of [24]7.ai, Inc. All other brands, products or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners. Contact Oindrila Hazra Manager, PR and Analyst Relations [email protected] SOURCE [24]7.ai Related Links http://www.247.ai The program's fifth anniversary comes as AbbVie is named as an honoree of The Civic 50. AbbVie has been recognized as one of the most community-minded companies in the United States for five consecutive years, with "Week of Possibilities" serving as a cornerstone of its community giving. In five years, AbbVie Foundation programs have impacted nearly 19 million lives in more than 85 countries around the world in collaboration with nonprofit partners like Heart of America Foundation, KaBOOM! and North Chicago Community Partners. "AbbVie and Heart of America Foundation share a deep-rooted commitment to improving our local communities, and especially to supporting our schools, teachers and students," said Jill Heath, president and CEO of Heart of America Foundation. "We are proud to again partner with AbbVie to provide thousands of students with inspiring, vibrant spaces that encourage a lifelong love of reading and learning." Now a global AbbVie tradition, the "Week of Possibilities" was initiated in 2014 with a focus on projects in North Chicago, Illinois, where the company is based. AbbVie employees expanded their commitment each year, and in 2018 will provide more than 12,000 students in more than 20 schools across the country with refreshed and refurbished learning, meeting and playing spaces. "Week of Possibilities" is powered by the AbbVie Foundation, which provides funding for school renovations, public libraries, computer labs and science labs, playgrounds and housing. "Over the past five years, AbbVie employees have given their time, talent and resources to build strong communities and improve and rejuvenate education spaces. These efforts in our hometown and around the world have achieved tremendous and inspiring results," said Richard A. Gonzalez, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, AbbVie. "I am exceedingly proud of our employees' generosity and dedication to transforming education and strengthening our communities." The condition of students' educational environments has a significant impact on their development and likelihood to succeed. According to Heart of America, studies have shown that poorly maintained schools communicate to children that they are not a priority and these children have lower self-esteem, lower achievement and lower overall participation in school and community affairs. Meanwhile, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) rates the condition of U.S. public schools as "D+", with an estimated $38 billion annual underinvestment in K-12 facilities needed to provide "healthy, safe, and modern learning environments." AbbVie is helping to address this critical need, including the following service projects being completed this year: Near AbbVie's headquarters in Lake County, Illinois , U.S.A., more than 2,600 employee volunteers will renovate classrooms and meeting spaces throughout North Chicago Community High School (NCCHS), with a focus on areas supporting the music, ROTC and athletic programs. Within the NCCHS community, these projects will provide students with engaging learning environments and resources they need to succeed. Volunteers will also begin construction on a home for a local family, assemble food kits and refurbish a playground to benefit students and members of the North Chicago community. Volunteers will also partner with Bernie's Book Bank to process and package 500,000 books to be donated to area students. , U.S.A., more than 2,600 employee volunteers will renovate classrooms and meeting spaces throughout North Chicago Community High School (NCCHS), with a focus on areas supporting the music, ROTC and athletic programs. Within the NCCHS community, these projects will provide students with engaging learning environments and resources they need to succeed. Volunteers will also begin construction on a home for a local family, assemble food kits and refurbish a playground to benefit students and members of the community. Volunteers will also partner with Book Bank to process and package 500,000 books to be donated to area students. In Redwood City, California , U.S.A., AbbVie and Pharmacyclics volunteers will revitalize spaces where students learn and play at two local schools. The media center at Kennedy Middle School will be transformed into a dynamic learning space and meeting hub with new technology, books, furniture and decor, and each student will receive three new books to take home. At Garfield Community School, volunteers will create a beautiful new outdoor playground, installing new play equipment, shade structures, benches and picnic tables for the school's 867 students and surrounding community. , U.S.A., AbbVie and Pharmacyclics volunteers will revitalize spaces where students learn and play at two local schools. The media center at Kennedy Middle School will be transformed into a dynamic learning space and meeting hub with new technology, books, furniture and decor, and each student will receive three new books to take home. At Garfield Community School, volunteers will create a beautiful new outdoor playground, installing new play equipment, shade structures, benches and picnic tables for the school's 867 students and surrounding community. In Tampa, Florida ; Phoenix, Arizona ; Kansas City, Missouri ; Boston, Massachusetts ; Dallas, Texas ; Indianapolis, Indiana ; Santa Ana, California , New York, New York ; Washington D.C ; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ; Denver, Colorado ; Atlanta, Georgia ; Worcester, Massachusetts , AbbVie's field and office-based teams will partner with Heart of America Foundation on additional educational renovation projects to benefit local communities. About AbbVie AbbVie is a global, research and development-based biopharmaceutical company committed to developing innovative advanced therapies for some of the world's most complex and critical conditions. The company's mission is to use its expertise, dedicated people and unique approach to innovation to markedly improve treatments across four primary therapeutic areas: immunology, oncology, virology and neuroscience. In more than 75 countries, AbbVie employees are working every day to advance health solutions for people around the world. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. About The AbbVie Foundation The AbbVie Foundation, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) foundation, is dedicated to having a remarkable impact on the lives of the underserved around the world through a commitment to building strong communities, sustainable health care systems and effective educational programs. For more information please visit www.abbviefoundation.org. About Bernie's Book Bank Bernie's Book Bank sources, processes and distributes quality children's books to significantly increase book ownership among at-risk infants, toddlers and school-age children throughout Chicagoland. Bernie's Book Bank delivers 12 quality books per year to empower at-risk children, ages birth through sixth grade, to read their way to a better life. Since 2009, Bernie's Book Bank has distributed more than 9 MILLION quality books. In cooperation with 25,000+ volunteers, this year Bernie's Book Bank will serve more than 333,000 at-risk children with 12 quality children's books annually. For more information about Bernie's Book Bank, visit www.berniesbookbank.org About Heart of America Foundation The Heart of America transforms spaces into modern learning environments so that students and communities can learn and grow. Over the past 20 years, Heart of America has transformed more than 400 educational spaces and provided over 1.1 million children in need with over 4 million library and take-home books. The national nonprofit has engaged volunteers in more than 1,075,000 hours of service to communities nationwide. For more information, please visit www.heartofamerica.org. About KaBOOM! KaBOOM! is the national non-profit dedicated to giving all kids particularly those growing up in poverty in America the childhood they deserve filled with balanced and active play, so they can thrive. Since1996, KaBOOM! has collaborated with partners to build, open, or improve more than 16,700 playgrounds, engaged more than one million volunteers, and served 8.5 million kids. KaBOOM! creates great places to play, inspires communities to promote and support play, and works to drive the national discussion about the importance of play in fostering healthy and productive lives. To learn why #playmatters and why cities are embracing #playability: visit kaboom.org or join the conversation at twitter.com/kaboom or facebook.com/kaboom. About North Chicago Community Partners North Chicago Community Partners (NCCP) was created in 2008 to help address the significant challenges facing the children and families of North Chicago. During the past eight years, NCCP has evolved from a well-intentioned idea into a highly regarded model for supporting public education in under-funded communities. Through its unique community school model, NCCP now supports the children, families and staff of every public school in North Chicago, pre-kindergarten through grade 12. By leveraging the resources of the broader community, NCCP is able to provide a menu of programs and services that complement classroom instruction, enhance student learning, strengthen school climate, actively engage parents and address the needs of the whole child. SOURCE AbbVie Related Links http://www.abbvie.com Chasing the Dragon-Are You Chem-friendly? (book 1) Candy Flipping - The Sex and Drug Cocktail (book 2) Double Bubble - Inside Britains Prisons (book 3) By Cameron Yorke Things could not have been better! With a new apartment in a smart part of London, a new boyfriend, a successful career as a travel writer, and some exciting documentary production opportunities on the horizon, it seemed Cameron had the world at his feet. Three months later, it had all gone horribly wrong! The boyfriend had left, with the contents of the bank account, and there were problems with the films which had been entered to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in three days time. If he had any chance of recouping his investment his only option was to forge ahead with the plans, attend the festival and sell both films to Television networks. Flying home afterwards, broke, depressed, suffering from prolonged lack of sleep, and still grieving his lost relationship, with neither film sold and no idea how he would support himself, He throws himself into his work, chasing every lead and following up every opportunity for the future whilst desperate to earn an immediate income. This only compounds his problems and he finds himself drowning in a sea of black depression and anxiety, some days finding it difficult to crawl from his bed. Then along comes crystal methamphetamine! Eager to leave the house, and keen to put his disastrous relationship behind him, he figures the best way to get over a man is to get under another! Turning to gay dating site Grindr,pretty soon he has agreed to meet up with a cute Brazilian guy in a pub in North London. Having been in relationships his entire adult life, with little more than a month between each one, he has no experience of the dating scene and how it has changed over the past twenty years. When the date invites him to a party, he has no idea what is in store for him and how this one night will change his life forever! What follows is a foray into a world of experimentation with recreational drugs, which he very quickly realises take away the pain, stress and anxiety and make him feel good again. Once high, all inhibitions are lost. Sex with multiple partners in one night seems normal and in fact feeds his ego, and for a few short hours, gives him back the confidence and self esteem he has been missing for so long, validating his need to be liked, attractive and accepted. From here it is a slippery slope as the drugs start to take over his life, and when a friend suggests he start selling them to supplement his income for a couple of weeks, its seems the most logical idea in the world. This initiates a business which very quickly grows into an enormous juggernaut from which there is no escape, and the story follows Cameron and those around him, in their experiences with cocktails of various drugs, combined with sex, in what has now been labelled Chemsex. Chemsex is a culture which has reached epidemic proportions within gay communities worldwide, and is rapidly ruining thousands of relationships, careers and in fact lives as once high, perception and judgement become impaired, and the bizarre rapidly becomes the new normal. This is a culture which affects normal, successful middle class professionals, and is gaining momentum with lightning speed, for young and old alike The Chemsex Trilogy is broken into three distinct stages: Initiation, experimentation and indulgence with chemsex, demonstrates how quickly normal sane successful people can find themselves sucked into a downwards spiral as boundaries are crossed in the rollercoaster of extreme highs, followed by devastating lows, wracked with guilt and shame of which the only relief is to ingest more drugs, fuck like rabbits, and forget about everything for another six hours. Indulgence, accusation and addiction. This book follows Camerons arrest and interaction with the police, lawyers and the court system, along with gangster type suppliers who create a different kind of pressure in forcing him to sell more and more, under threat of violence towards himself and those close to him. Meanwhile he becomes steadily addicted to drugs and chemsex, as self-medication for his depression. Arrest, sentencing and incarceration. Arrested again with a large quantity of drugs found in his flat, denied bail and remanded into custody, this book tells the real story about coming off the drugs, but also of life inside Britains penitentiaries - the squalid, inhumane conditions, lack of support, monumental taxpayer waste, with a government who has no thought towards prison reform, rehabilitation or reducing reoffending , so that often newly released inmates have no option but to reoffend in order to survive. This series is a memoir and according to the Author, his goal is that it will support victims as a message of hope, but also to let them know they are not alone. It also serves as a self help manual to raise awareness of this culture, not only as a deterrent for those thinking of trying it, but also to help partners, friends and family of victims gain a better understanding of the cycle, the signs, and what they are going through. It has already been used by probation officers in gaining an understanding of the phenomenon which is responsible for the increasing numbers of cases with which they now deal, and it is hoped that eventually the British Government might start to take notice in forming policy, and treat this as an illness rather than solely as a crime, as to date, whilst acknowledging that there is a problem, they have no idea how to tackle it. The proceeds of this series are used to fund a charity The Cameron Yorke Foundation which supports victims of chemsex. All three books in the series can be read on their own or in sequence, and all are available in either paperback or ebook from all good booksellers. books2read.com/ChasingtheDragon books2read.com/CandyFlipping books2read.com/DoubleBubble http://smarturl.it/chemsextrilogy ISBNs Chasing the Dragon 978-1549938269 Candy Flipping 978-1549930614 Double Bubble 978-1973520405 Bookseller: www.amazon.com/author/cameronyorke Cameron A. Yorke is author of - 'The Chemsex Trilogy Chasing the Dragon - Are You Chem-friendly? Candy Flipping - The Sex and Drug Cocktail Double Bubble - Inside Britains Prisons Tales of My travels - Europe Coming soon; The Deported - Citizenship by Criteria Shotguns & Vodka - Living in the Riga TIRANA, Albania, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ditmir Bushati, Albania's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Europe, today welcomed a joint letter from the nation's top religious leaders seeking French and German support for the start of EU accession negotiations. The letter, addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, was signed by the leaders of Albania's Muslim, Autocephalous Orthodox, Catholic, Betashi and Evangelical Christian communities. In a meeting with the five leaders Monday, Mr. Bushati thanked them for their commitment to the European future of Albania and praised them for the "maintenance of religious harmony and strengthening of social cohesion" in the nation. The signatories to the joint letter are: H. Skender Brucaj, Head of the Muslim Community, Archbishop (Prof. Dr) Anastasios of Tirana-Durres and all Albania (Orthodox Autocephalous Church of Albania), Msgr. Gjergj Meta, General Secretary of Albanian Bishops' Conference (Catholic Church), H. Dede Edmond Brahimaj, World Bektashi Headquarters, and Pastor Ylli Doci, Chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Albania. The letter comes in advance of a meeting of the European Council June 28-29 in Brussels. The Council, representing all EU heads of government, is expected to vote on a European Commission recommendation that formal talks towards accession be opened with Albania and Macedonia. The letter appeals to the French and German leaders to support the Commission's recommendations. The text follows: "At this moment of great historical significance, we wish to underscore once again what we recently stated in our joint declaration of 21 April 2018: we Albanians are part of Europe. We are part of a history that stretches back to the origins of Europe. It is a history which goes back thousands of years. Our common cultural and social roots bind us together. We believe that our path towards the European Union represents what has always been the desire of our people, with the values of a free society where everyone is able to exercise their rights, among which the right of freedom of religion and belief is fundamental. We are grateful to God that the history of the Albanian people has revealed a consistent living-out of the value of respect for religious difference, living together harmoniously as one family. "Our path toward the European Union is especially critical for our youth. Albanian young people are among the most Euro-enthusiastic anywhere, and yet they are also among the most frustrated, as they live in close proximity to their European peers and yet are excluded from their peers' opportunities. Your support to Albania's accession process is particularly important at this critical time, when the values of tolerance, solidarity, and human rights are under great pressure because of radicalism, fanaticism, and other sinister ideologies. We together call upon you to recognize the earnest desire of all Albanians, and to support our irreversible commitment to Albania as part of Europe. "With fervent prayers, we reaffirm our commitment to remain steadfast supporters of European values for society with freedom, justice and prosperity for all." Mr. Bushati said Albania's religious leaders exemplified why Albania needs now to move forward on its path towards European integration. "You have given the most meaningful example that we are Europeans and now is the right moment for each of us to follow this example," he said. He singled out the leaders' reference to Albania's young, stating that they in particular are counting on EU integration "so they can build their own futures in their own country, the same as their peers." SOURCE Government of Albania "When we decided to upgrade our SLA production capability, we felt it was time to take our cooperation with 3D Systems to a deeper level. We also needed to expand our capacity so replacing some of the older 3D Systems SLA's with the higher throughput ProX 800 was the natural choice," says Christoph Hansen, head of additive manufacturing, at Sauber. "We are using 3D Systems' SLA solutions predominantly and extensively for wind tunnel testing, but also for tooling for carbon laminating as well as vacuum casting for silicon parts." A Must-Have for Wind Tunnel Testing Wind tunnel testing is essential for the aerodynamic development of a Formula 1 race car. A 60 percent scale model of the car is produced for testing in Sauber's own state of the art wind tunnel located at its headquarters in Hinwil. This model is produced mostly with additive manufacturing - 3D Systems' SLS and SLA 3D printers are used for everything from front wings, brake ducts and suspension covers to engine covers, internal ducts and hand deflectors. "We can't really compare this process to conventional manufacturing because it would be impossible to do it any other way than 3D printing; we require many parts with superior surface quality in a very short time," says Reto Trachsel, head of aero design, at Sauber. "There have been times when the wind tunnel, which is also used by our third party customers, has been running 24/7 and we have been leveraging our 3D Systems' solutions to produce 200 to 300 plastic parts per work day." Racing to the Finish with 3D Printed Tooling Once the development is approved, the final parts are produced, often in carbon fiber using both conventionally manufactured and 3D printed molding. "The Alfa Romeo Sauber F1 Team draws on a variety of 3D Systems' SLA materials to produce tools for different applications. For example, we laminate carbon parts using tools produced in Bluestone material and we use the Xtreme material for vacuum casting tools to produce the sealings," says Hansen. "Why do we 3D print the tools instead of using conventional tooling techniques? The answer is easy we get the design complexity for free! This is absolutely essential for parts like complex duct systems." "It takes a winning team to succeed in Formula One and the 3D Systems partnership with the Alfa Romeo Sauber F1 Team matches the world's most advanced additive manufacturing solutions with cutting edge automotive engineering. By increasing production throughput with the addition of the 3D Systems' ProX 800 SLA systems, Sauber can test more design revisions and push the limits of race car innovation," says Phil Schultz, senior vice president, general manager, on demand solutions and plastics, 3D Systems. "Formula One is the ultimate proving ground for 3D printing and the expertise we continue to acquire can be applied to mainstream passenger vehicles as well as aerospace and other industries." Powering Engineering Services for 3rd Party Customers In addition to using 3D Systems' Additive Manufacturing for its own prototyping and production requirements, Sauber also leverages the 3D printers for its Engineering services. This enables companies all over Europe to benefit from Sauber's expertise, 3D printed precision mock-ups, jigs and fixtures, tooling and serial production. "Sauber Engineering is bringing race track performance to all kinds of companies, large and small. Whether we're optimizing the performance of our own F1 cars or helping our 3rd party customers re-imagine opportunities from prototyping to serial production, we're relying on our expanding arsenal of 3D Systems' additive manufacturing solutions to give us a competitive edge," concludes Hansen. Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements made in this release that are not statements of historical or current facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company to be materially different from historical results or from any future results or projections expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In many cases, forward looking statements can be identified by terms such as "believes," "belief," "expects," "may," "will," "estimates," "intends," "anticipates" or "plans" or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements are based upon management's beliefs, assumptions and current expectations and may include comments as to the company's beliefs and expectations as to future events and trends affecting its business and are necessarily subject to uncertainties, many of which are outside the control of the company. The factors described under the headings "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" in the company's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as other factors, could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected or predicted in forward-looking statements. Although management believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, forward-looking statements are not, and should not be relied upon as a guarantee of future performance or results, nor will they necessarily prove to be accurate indications of the times at which such performance or results will be achieved. The forward-looking statements included are made only as the date of the statement. 3D Systems undertakes no obligation to update or review any forward-looking statements made by management or on its behalf, whether as a result of future developments, subsequent events or circumstances or otherwise. About 3D Systems 3D Systems is the originator of 3D printing and an innovator of future 3D solutions. It has spent its 30-year history enabling professionals and companies to optimize their designs, transform their workflows, bring groundbreaking products to market and drive new business models. This is achieved with the Company's best of breed digital manufacturing ecosystem. It's comprised of plastic and metal 3D printers, print materials, on demand manufacturing services and end-to-end manufacturing software solutions. Combinations of these products and services address a variety of advanced applications- ranging from Aerospace, Automotive, and Consumer Goods to Medical, Dental, and Jewelry. For example, 3D Systems' precision healthcare capabilities include simulation, Virtual Surgical Planning, and printing of medical and dental devices as well as patient-specific surgical instruments. More information on the company is available at www.3dsystems.com. SOURCE 3D Systems Related Links http://www.3dsystems.com YONKERS, N.Y., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- alpha-Encorp today announced that all closing conditions of the $1 million equity financing that was previously disclosed in its most recent Form 10-Q have been met and the financing is now completed. A Form 8-K was filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission describing further details of this transaction as well as certain other corporate developments and is available at www.sec.gov as well as on our web site www.alpha-encorp.com. As part of the agreement the investor received a non-exclusive mandate to represent alpha-Encorp's unique and proprietary technology for the extraction of highly pure lithium at room temperature in China (PRC) for a period of two years. This investment validates management's belief that there are great opportunities for alpha-Encorp's process to be utilized by lithium miners, recyclers, battery producers and automotive manufacturers in China, the world's largest market for lithium. Jerome Feldman, Executive Chairman, commented: "We are very pleased to close this transaction with a strategic investor that can contribute sector expertise and valuable relationships in China, a unique market in today's energy economy. This funding also provides further resources to hire the unique R&D talent that is required for our state of the art research center in Yonkers. These are exciting times for alpha-Encorp and we look forward to sharing progress updates with our investors as we continue to execute toward our vision and in the process create shareholder value." In addition the company announced that it completed the acquisition of the remaining shares of CLC that it did not already own in an exchange of shares. As a result of that exchange CLC is now a 100% subsidiary. About alpha-Encorp alpha-Encorp (OTC: ALPE) is an innovative clean technology company focused on enabling next generation battery technologies by developing and bringing to market high purity lithium metal and associated products produced in a cost effective and environmentally sustainable manner. For more information, please visit http://alpha-encorp.com CONTACT: Thomas Suppanz, 1-914-418-2000 SOURCE alpha-Encorp Related Links http://alpha-encorp.com DELRAY BEACH, Fla., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alterna Equity Partners today announced the successful completion of its investment in Alterna Capital Solutions LLC. Alterna's founder, Robert L. Konrad, Jr., joined forces with Stan Carpenter, ACS' founder and CEO, to create an accounts receivables financing company with $77 million of available capital. ACS' headquarters is in Winter Park, Florida; it initially will have a sales presence on the East Coast staffed from Atlanta, Georgia, and on the West Coast, staffed from San Francisco, California. West PLC provided the legal services in connection with the transaction, including the planning and structuring of the various entities, the private placement of the equity securities, and the documentation and consummation of the senior debt financing. "Alterna is excited to have the opportunity to work with Mr. Carpenter in building a best in class organization and providing an attractive service focused offering for clients," said Alterna Founder Robert Konrad. Alterna Equity Partners, founded by Mr. Konrad in 2006, is a private equity investment firm based in South Florida that makes strategic investments in early stage and established growing companies. Alterna invests in existing and new management teams and assists in the growth and development of its company investments through the introduction of new financial and managerial resources. Its operating businesses oversee more than $1 billion in assets across several funds, portfolio companies and co-investments. Learn more at AlternaEquityPartners.com. Contact Ilona Wolpin (954) 298-8784 [email protected] SOURCE Alterna Equity Partners LLC Related Links http://www.alternaequitypartners.com "The growing recognition of Alzheimer's disease as a public health crisis has led to substantial changes in the way Congress is addressing America's most expensive disease," said Robert Egge, Chief Public Policy Officer of the Alzheimer's Association and AIM Executive Director. "These changes are exemplified by the leadership of Senators Collins and Cortez Masto, whose unrelenting efforts are galvanizing work to harness our nationwide public health infrastructure to improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. The leadership of Senators Collins and Cortez Masto promise noteworthy policy contributions to enhance access to care and support for people affected by Alzheimer's, and to advancements in research." Sens. Collins and Cortez Masto have worked tirelessly to create policies that improve access to quality health care services for the more than 5 million Americans living with Alzheimer's including 28,000 in Maine and 48,000 in Nevada and their caregivers, recently introducing the bipartisan Building Our Largest Dementia (BOLD) Infrastructure for Alzheimer's Act (S. 2076/H.R. 4256) to improve our nation's Alzheimer's public health infrastructure. "For far too long, Alzheimer's disease hid in the shadows, imposing a devastating human and financial cost. One of my top priorities is to continue increasing biomedical research dollars to find a cure, while also focusing legislative efforts to build the infrastructure for care that our communities need to support persons living with dementia and their families. Working with the strong and effective advocates from the Alzheimer's Association, we have been able to celebrate so many advancements in public policy," said Senator Collins. "I am honored to receive the AIM Humanitarian award, along with my colleague Senator Cortez Masto. In the fight against Alzheimer's, we cannot afford a single day off. With our unified efforts, I am optimistic that we can rewrite the story of Alzheimer's for future generations." "I am humbled and honored to receive this year's AIM Humanitarian Award. The experience of losing my grandmother, Katherine, to Alzheimer's motivated me to become an advocate for patients and families touched by this disease," said Sen. Cortez Masto. "In the Senate, I'm fighting to end our chronic underinvestment in Alzheimer's research, treatment, and caregiver support. I am incredibly grateful to have the Alzheimer's Association as a partner in that fight." As co-chair of the Congressional Task Force on Alzheimer's disease, Sen. Collins has been a vital advocate for all those affected by Alzheimer's, leading efforts to pass vital legislation including the National Alzheimer's Project Act (NAPA) and rallying her colleagues each year in support of increased Alzheimer's research funding. Sen. Collins was also instrumental in Medicare's decision to cover comprehensive care planning through a medical visit for people with Alzheimer's and other cognitive impairments. This announcement came after growing bipartisan support in Congress for the Health Outcomes, Planning, and Education (HOPE) for Alzheimer's Act, introduced by Sen. Collins. Sen. Cortez Masto has made Alzheimer's a priority since joining the Senate, drawing from her own family's experience with Alzheimer's and her time as a caregiver to advocate for all those affected by Alzheimer's. During her time as Nevada's attorney general, she was a strong advocate for seniors, and created a senior protection unit to safeguard older Nevadans from identity theft, exploitation, and abuse. According to the 2018 Alzheimer's Disease Facts & Figures Report direct costs to American society of caring for those with Alzheimer's will total an estimated $277 billion, including $186 billion in Medicare and Medicaid payments. And, families of those living with the disease will spend $60 billion on care for their loved ones this year. The Alzheimer's Association continues to push to advance funding and care priorities for those living with Alzheimer's disease, and encourages all elected officials to follow in the steps of Sens. Collins and Cortez Masto by prioritizing legislation and research funding critical to the fight against Alzheimer's. SOURCE Alzheimer's Association FREMONT, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AMAX, a leading manufacturer of high-performance servers for AI and Deep Learning development, announces the launch of the DL-E48A, a reconfigurable single/dual root high-density GPU platform designed for AI training and inference. AMAX will be showcasing the highly anticipated solution at CVPR 2018 (Booth #304), to be held at Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, June 19-21, 2018. The DL-E48A is a high-performance, high-density 8x GPU server platform with first-in-industry remote-configurable single and dual PCIe root complex architectures, enabling ease of hardware optimization for AI and DL training, inference, HPC compute, rendering and virtualization. The platform supports the latest generation of NVIDIA Tesla Volta V100 32GB HBM2 GPU, Mellanox EDR Infiniband and Intel Omnipath fabric to process largest datasets for the most demanding AI and DL applications. Utilizing Intel's Scalable Processor Architecture, the system provides a 56 percent increase in memory bandwidth and a 54 percent bandwidth increase for communication between CPUs (UPI) compared to platforms featuring the previous Intel Processor generation. NVME storage options are available with the DL-E48A, removing storage bottlenecks for ultra-fast data performance. The DL-E48A's software-configurable PCIe architecture allows IT organizations to remotely change the PCIe hardware topology between single and dual root complex architectures in order to optimize machine and cluster performance for specific workloads. Single root complex architectures are ideal for reducing GPU to GPU memory copy latency for improved performance of GPU-intensive DL workloads. Dual root complex architectures offer better performance for CPU-intensive applications and parallel computing tasks. The DL-E48A combines the benefits of both architectures into a single server to give organizations the ultimate versatility using a single platform. "Many AI organizations in the development phase are faced with deciding whether or when single root or dual root complex best suits their applications," said Dr. Rene Meyer, VP of technology, AMAX. "With the DL-E48A, you have a system capable of both, providing companies the ability to test their applications against both architectures to derive best performance. For organizations running multiple applications, the DL-E48A's versatility means being able to configure the root complex architecture on demand or even remotely via software, giving them a single platform that can be well-suited for a wide range of applications." The DL-E48A is a platform of choice for AI development as well as large to hyperscale deployments, and is available for purchase as server units or designed into rackscale solutions and networked clusters. To learn more about DL-E48A or schedule a demo at CVPR 2018, please contact [email protected] or visit www.amax.com. About AMAX AMAX is a global leader in award-winning application-tailored AI/Deep Learning, Cloud and Data Center high-performance computing solutions. AMAX solutions are designed to represent the intersection between high performance and best efficiency for today's highly efficient data center. Founded in 1979 and headquartered in Silicon Valley (with additional locations in China and Ireland), AMAX is a full-service technology solutions provider specializing in innovative server-to-rack level solutions designed to meet today's most rigorous computing challenges. SOURCE AMAX Related Links http://www.amax.com LUBBOCK, Texas, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Abuelo's Mexican Restaurant, famous for its authentic, made-from-scratch, Mexican cuisine, is celebrating the opening of its second location in the Houston area. The newest restaurant is opening at Pinnacle Park, located at 2505 South Gulf Freeway, League City, Texas. The first 50 guests who are lined up on opening day, June 25, will receive a special "Tastes of Mexico" offer book that includes monthly coupons for free entrees from June through December. The books, which include offers valued at more than $125, will be given away starting at 11 a.m. Additionally, a raffle will take place on opening day, and 10 lucky guests will be chosen at random to receive enchiladas for one year*. Abuelo's has consistently been voted the #1 Mexican Restaurant in America by consumers since 2006, as published in the nation's most respected consumer rating magazine. The restaurant's fresh, made-from-scratch menu selections combine authentic standards with the rich, subtle flavors of coastal and interior Mexican cuisine. "Abuelo's is excited about our newest restaurant in League City," said Robert Lin, president of Food Concepts International, Abuelo's parent company. "We are thrilled to continue expanding Abuelo's in the Houston market. We look forward to sharing our distinct flavors of Mexico with guests and being an active member of the local community." Abuelo's League City restaurant will be open from 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Sunday through Thursday, and 11 a.m.-11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. For the latest news, rewards and special offers, join Mi Abuelo's Rewards at www.abuelos.com/MiAbuelos. Also, be sure to follow Abuelo's on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/eatabuelos/ or like them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AbuelosLeagueCity to stay up to date on the latest news and promotions. *Raffle winners will receive a gift card equal to the value of 52 enchilada plates About Abuelo's Since its first opening in 1989, Abuelo's has consistently been on the leading edge of Mexican cuisine, combining menu creativity, outstanding food and beverage quality, colorful plate presentations and superior service in a true Mexican courtyard atmosphere. Abuelo's has received national accolades as the top-ranked Mexican food restaurant and as one of America's top overall restaurant chains in four consecutive biennial surveys by a leading national consumer rating magazine. Owned and operated by Food Concepts International in Lubbock Texas, the company currently has 38 full-service restaurants located in 13 states. For more information, visit www.abuelos.com or Abuelo's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Abuelos. Media Contact: Alexea Candreva SSPR 719-475-0370 [email protected] SOURCE Abuelos Related Links http://www.abuelos.com ROHNERT PARK, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Attending college for the arts can be a daunting financial risk. Despite the high cost of pursuing an art degree, it is common for art professionals to earn less money than other educated fields, making repayment of any student debt difficult. The debt from pursuing an artistic ambition may compel borrowers to pursue a job outside of their interests simply to pay down their student debt. Ameritech Financial, a document preparation service company, says that if students' choices are limited by their student loans, they may find relief in federal repayment programs. Credit: Wayhome Studio/Bigstock "The debts that students accumulate in college shouldn't force them to abandon the interests that brought them into that university to begin with," says Tom Knickerbocker, executive vice president of Ameritech Financial. Many borrowers may feel forced to take a relatively high-paying job outside of their interest to pay off their debt. Many may feel they are forced to abandon their long-term career goals and aspirations in order to pursue this short-term debt. Alternatively, a borrower might seek underemployment with jobs that do not require a college degree and may not teach them the skills that they want to learn to get into the career of their choice, in order to make progress on their repayments instead of on their career. To help keep the borrowers' focus on their career instead of on their debt, such borrowers can seek an income-driven repayment plan (IDR) which can reduce the borrowers' payments to a maximum of 15 percent of their income per month, and may even lead to loan forgiveness after 20-25 years of enrollment in the plan. This can reduce the payments that artists would be required to pay to their student loans. Ameritech Financial is a company that can assist in completing the application documentation for such tasks, allowing a creative professional to take a lower-paying job that might align more with their career goals, instead of one that might force the artist into taking an undesirable profession in order to get rid of student loans. "Many people don't realize that it might be possible for them to lower their payments every month according to their income, which can allow someone to pursue work in the areas that most interest them," said Knickerbocker. "Ameritech Financial may be able to help those who feel they cannot get into their career of choice due to their financial obligations. We here are striving to do what is possible to help federal student loan borrowers by assisting them with the paperwork to apply for federal IDRs." 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 career-in-the-arts-is-difficult.jpg Career in the Arts is Difficult with Student Loans Credit: Wayhome Studio/Bigstock image2.png Related Links Ameritech Financial home page Related Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRza8MbLvuM SOURCE Ameritech Financial LONDON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The head of Anheuser-Busch InBev has said the group is happy to watch the development of the cannabis industry from the sidelines for the time being, despite a recent move into the category from one of its North American peers. The recent legalisation of cannabis in a raft of US states, along with the pending legalisation for medicinal use in Canada, prompted Constellation Brands to spend just over US$190m last year on a stake in Canopy Growth Corp. The Canadian company produces medicinal cannabis, with Constellation saying at the time that the deal formed part of its plan to "identify, meet and stay ahead" of evolving consumer trends. Speaking exclusively to just-drinks late last week, however, A-B InBev CEO Carlos Brito distanced himself from making any immediate move into the sector. "Cannabis is something that we as a company are trying to learn more about," he told editor Olly Wehring. "It's going to be regulated, it's going to be commercialised. But, it's still a very restricted business and, in most places, it's not legal." Brito highlighted an ongoing delay in the legislation to legalise marijuana in Canada. "They're finding lots of issues as they go along the path to legalisation," he said. "The other day, our guys in Canada were saying that some neighbours of stores preparing to sell cannabis have been saying: 'Not here.' "In the US," he conceded, "there's a big tidal wave coming. Most people appear to be in favour of legalisation. "We'll continue to follow it," he said. "But, for now, we don't feel we need to do anything." Read part two of just-drinks' exclusive interview with Carlos Brito About just-drinks.com just-drinks.com is the online news, insight and research portal for the global drinks industry. Our editorial team includes contributors from around the world, while our commentators comprise experts in their respective fields of beer, bottled water, soft drinks, spirits (both brown and white) and wine. Under the direction of managing editor Olly Wehring, we offer an impartial voice and are driven by our passion for the drinks industry. For further information and images please contact James Lawley, Public Relations at Aroq Limited on +44-(0)-1527-573-606, email [email protected] SOURCE just-drinks RALEIGH, N.C., June 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Roundtable Analytics Inc., an AI/ML-based software company focused on improving the operational and financial performance of Emergency Departments (EDs), expanded its team of data scientists with the recent appointment of Michael Hyman, Ph.D., as vice president. Michael (Mike) Hyman has had a distinguished academic career, graduating with honors from the University of North Carolina with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and a minor in chemistry. Pursuing his passion for the application of data science, Mike went on to earn both an M. Stat and Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Florida, one of the premier statistics graduate programs in the U.S. During his studies at UF, he was named a National Science Foundation Fellow, receiving an IGERT award for interdisciplinary training, and shared an office with the future founders of Roundtable Analytics Inc. Prior to joining Roundtable, Mike spent over five years working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, performing statistical and geospatial research and developing the statistical methodology for projects such as the U.S. Census of Agriculture. Previously, during his spare time, Mike organized and completed a charity bike ride across the United States and is delighted to now return to his hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina. "Having Mike join the Roundtable team with me, Tommy Bohrmann, Ph.D., and Nate Holt, Ph.D., brings the whole band back together," said Kenny Lopiano, co-founder of Roundtable Analytics. "Mike is one of those unique stat geeks with strong interpersonal skills and a knack for interdisciplinary collaborations. He's the perfect addition to accelerate the development of our AI and machine learning technology and help support our growing customer base." About Roundtable Analytics Inc. Roundtable Analytics Inc. delivers AI/ML-based predictive analytics that optimize the performance of client Emergency Departments. Securely leveraging each Emergency Department's unique data resources, Roundtable Analytics' OptimizEDTM software platform helps eliminate the risks of suboptimal patient care and financial losses. Funded by a combination of National Science Foundation grants and private equity, Roundtable Analytics launched its simulation and analytics services commercially in 2016. Contact: Tate Holt CEO 1.415.717.6941 www.roundtableanalytics.com SOURCE Roundtable Analytics, Inc. Related Links http://www.roundtableanalytics.com LONDON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- New analysis by Kantar Millward Brown of 2,000 brands measured in the BrandZ global brand equity database shows that fewer than 1 in 10 brands grew between 2014 and 2017. But Amazon, the quintessential disruptive brand, more than doubled its brand value in the same period simply by making people's lives easier and less expensive. Every brand can't be an Amazon, Netflix or Airbnb, but just a 1% change in market share for an established brand can deliver significant growth. To change the odds in their favour, conventional brands must take their lead from the fast-growing disruptors. Marketers need to get out of their comfort zone and add a little disruption to the mix to create new opportunities for growth. The new report, How Disruption Can Fuel Brand Growth, highlights the direction that established brands can take from disruptive brands' playbooks to drive growth, and explores case studies that demonstrate a range of strategies which have led to growth for brands across different categories including CPG, electronics, e-commerce and automotive. Marketers can get started by following the 7 steps below to disrupt and drive brand growth: 1. Get out of the comfort zone Any brand can be disruptive provided it does something different from the norm that creates new value for customers or unlocks its existing potential. 2. Know what needs to change Knowing how people think, feel and behave in relation to a brand can often reveal an immediate opportunity for growth. The challenge for a well-differentiated brand is to identify what will make it more salient and meaningful to potential consumers. 3. Know who values your brand On average, consumers pay 14% more for brands they perceive to be meaningfully different. When it comes to profit, the biggest disruptive growth opportunity may come from targeting the right customers, and then curating perceptions of meaning and difference to drive up the brand's perceived value. 4. Use consumer insights to inspire disruption An established brand that lacks differentiation risks being commoditised. A disruptive idea may come from anywhere but the ultimate test is whether it resonates with the target audience, and this requires brands to have in-depth knowledge of their potential customers. 5. Invest to make a difference Simply spending more will not produce disruptive returns. Investing in a creative idea that fits the brand and the opportunity may be the best way for some brands to disrupt the status quo. And, since marketers are often hostage to the product innovation cycle, developing a new creative approach may be faster. 6. Learn fast to achieve greater returns A brand can have a great product or idea and in-market execution can still fail to disrupt. Marketers need to behave as if they are in perpetual beta and fast feedback is critical to quickly identify opportunities and course correct. 7. Continuously improve marketing effectiveness A brand's success today should be viewed as an opportunity to improve marketing effectiveness while looking for the next disruptive growth opportunity. Marketers need to measure what is happening to the brand and the consumer response in-market. Every brand has the power to disrupt business as usual provided it has a clear idea of what will make the most difference given its status and context. Read the full report here to learn more about growth strategies and for in-depth case studies of conventional brands that have disrupted business as usual to achieve increased sales and improved brand growth. About Kantar Millward Brown Kantar Millward Brown is a leading global research agency specialising in advertising effectiveness, strategic communication, media and digital, and brand equity research. The company helps clients grow great brands through comprehensive research-based qualitative and quantitative solutions. Kantar Millward Brown operates in more than 55 countries and is part of WPP's Kantar group, one of the world's leading data, insight and consultancy companies. Learn more at www.millwardbrown.com. Contact: Global Danielle Hobday [email protected] +44 7717 730335 UK Halina Bromberg [email protected] +44 1926 826852 North America Susan Hickey [email protected] 212-548-4680 SOURCE Kantar Millward Brown Related Links http://www.millwardbrown.com HAMILTON, Bermuda, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Apex Group Ltd. ("Apex"), announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Deutsche Bank Alternative Fund Services ("Deutsche Bank AFS"). Adding $170 billion in assets under administration to the Group's portfolio, the successful final close of the deal has solidified Apex as one of the world's largest fund administrators. First announced in October 2017, the acquisition of Deutsche Bank AFS strengthens Apex's breadth of service, including the addition of depositary and custody services, and builds on the strong working relationship and history of collaboration between the two companies. With the successful close of this transaction, Deutsche Bank AFS employees will be fully integrated into the Apex team, and Deutsche Bank AFS clients will gain immediate access to an additional 18 jurisdictions, as well as Apex's renowned local service delivery model. The transaction reflects Apex's global growth, building on its recapitalization by Genstar Capital last year. The Group also recently announced the acquisition of both M.M.Warburg & CO's Asset Management and Servicing business in addition to private equity fund administrator, Ipes. Once both acquisitions have reached their final close, the Group's total AUA will reach circa $535 billion in assets, positioning it in the top five largest fund administrators globally. This recent stream of acquisitions will enable Apex to deliver a more robust suite of offerings and services to its extensive portfolio of clients across the globe. Peter Hughes, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Apex Fund Services, said: "The close of this deal is an important milestone in Apex's evolution. We are now in a truly unique position to add genuine value to our clients as an independent provider with robust banking capabilities and services. Moving 300 people and a sophisticated technology offering is one of the most complicated undertakings there is. To have achieved this in such a short time is testimony to the hard work and skills of the integration teams on both sides. Using a separate team has meant that no clients have been impacted or lost between signing and closing, while at the same time significant new business has still been won and on-boarded. We now look to replicate this successful process with our other acquisitions as we maintain our growth momentum." David Rhydderch, President, Apex Fund Services, former Global Head of Alternative Fund Services, Deutsche Bank, said: "The similarities between Apex and Deutsche Bank AFS were apparent from the outset. A clear focus on client service means the transition to combine our services has been seamless and as the newly combined Apex Group we remain committed to our goal of prioritizing our clients' needs. We are now focusing on integrating the Warburg business and are confident that both of these acquisitions will generate more innovative ideas, products, and services that will propel us forward as industry leaders." About Apex The Apex Group, established in Bermuda in 2003, is the world's largest independent full fund solutions providers. The Group has 37 offices worldwide and over 1200 employees. Apex has continually improved and evolved its product suite and offers a full service solution to its clients: from fund administration, middle office, custody and depositary to corporate services and fund platforms. Apex now administers the investments of some of the largest funds and institutional investors in the world. www.apexfundservices.com MEDIA CONTACT: Laura Casale, Group Gordon |212-784-5720, [email protected] SOURCE Apex Group Ltd. Related Links http://www.apexfundservices.com AUSTIN, Texas, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Women-owned, Austin-based AI EdTech start-up OneSeventeen Media today announced the launch of its crowdfunding campaign on iFundWomen, a platform "for women-led startups and small businesses." On the leading edge of artificial intelligence and social and emotional learning (SEL), OneSeventeen Media's products, ThinkingApp and reThinkIt!, deliver mental health and behavior management tools for K12 students with the goal of improving school safety. Faced with an urgent need to prevent school shootings, along with the challenges women have in accessing capital, cofounders Beth Carls and Amy Looper are seeking funding "from investors who appreciate that women have game-changing ideas." With an initial goal of $100,000, over 70% of the funds raised will be invested in artificial intelligence, data analytics and content development. Whereas many school safety solutions are reactive, ThinkingApp and reThinkIt! are based on trauma-informed, restorative, social and emotional learning (SEL) principles to provide real-time "emotional digital triage" for students before they escalate damaging behaviors. These tools provide safer learning environments for students. Meeting students in their tech-based comfort zone, ThinkingApp and reThinkIt! employ intelligent machine learning technology to tailor advice to specific children's needs. The platforms assess emotional and mental states, enabling students to process difficult emotions, understand their behaviors, and navigate those of others. Meanwhile administrators receive five times more in-depth, real-time insight into children's behaviors, according to the Company's third-party study. Backed by seven years of evidence-based research, components of the new mobile-based technology resulted in "statistically significant reductions in students' emotional distress." Those same components even helped one Texas school avert a potential shooting due to real-time, actionable insights provided to educators about a troubled student, a nod to the study's observation that students share five times more information via the apps than they do in face-to-face interactions with adults. Additional data showed a 50% reduction for in-school-suspensions, all data that make OneSeventeen's work crucial to today's urgent need for improved school safety. For more information and to deploy ThinkingApp and reThinkIt! in your school, visit www.oneseventeenmedia.com. OneSeventeen Media The first certified Texas B Corp and Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), OneSeventeen Media mobile tools help students figure out life and the people around them. reThinkIt! puts advice at 3rd-12th graders' fingertips anytime, anywhere. It is part live texting with an on-demand virtual mentor/counselor and part AI that tailors real-time advice to a child's specific needs helping them make wiser decisions. ThinkingApp serves PreK-2nd graders and is smartly disguised as a series of engaging, interactive, AI-curated eBook stories meant to transform this age group's misbehaviors. In English and Spanish, both apps help students explore feelings, self-regulation, manners, problem-solving and success tools to help improve school climate, school safety and discipline management. One of the nation's pioneers in AIEd and SEL solutions for K12 students, OneSeventeen Media is a certified Historically Underutilized Business and Women Business Enterprise. SOURCE OneSeventeen Media Related Links http://www.oneseventeenmedia.com "VSAs provide consumers with insight into which vehicles are giving owners a satisfying ownership experience," says AutoPacific president George Peterson. AutoPacific's Vehicle Satisfaction Awards objectively measure owner satisfaction with 40 separate attributes ranging from seating comfort and interior quality to driving performance. "AutoPacific VSAs are unique in their inclusion of importance in the calculations," explains Peterson. "Not only do we measure owner satisfaction, but we also measure how important each attribute was to owners in their shopping process, resulting in a satisfaction score representative of demanding owners." Trucks Most Satisfying Reflecting the booming sales of trucks in the USA, trucks pickups, sport utility vehicles and minivans are much more satisfying than cars. SUVs, both traditional and crossovers, are the most satisfying truck categories. Genesis Reaches Top Luxury brand Genesis, in its second year in the market, wins top luxury brand, edging out second place Lexus and achieving the highest brand satisfaction score to date. "In just two years, Genesis has reached a level of owner satisfaction unattained by more established luxury brands," says Peterson. In addition to the most satisfying luxury brand, Genesis G90 wins the VSA for Luxury Car for the second year in a row. Nissan Claims Most Brand Wins Five Nissan vehicles win VSAs for their respective segments: the Nissan Titan, Murano, Maxima, LEAF and 370Z. "Not only does Nissan have the most brand wins for the second year in a row, the Maxima and Murano have been unbeatable since their redesigns were introduced to the market," says Peterson. The Murano crossover has its 4th win since its 2015 redesign and the Maxima has its 3rd win since its 2016 redesign. New for 2018, this is the first win for the LEAF, winning in the growing Mainstream EV segment, the second win for the Titan and the first win for the 370Z. Two Infiniti crossovers, the QX80 and QX60, are also 2018 VSA winners. Five All-New or Redesigned Vehicles Top Their Segment Of the twenty-six winning vehicles, five were redesigned for the 2018 model year, including the top-scoring Chevrolet Traverse, which greatly exceeds the score of its nearest competitor, Toyota C-HR, a new entry in a highly competitive and growing segment, and Nissan LEAF, a clear winner over competing mainstream EVs. Also winning with their new designs are the all-new Honda Odyssey and Hyundai Accent. "The success of redesigned vehicles speaks to the efforts of product planners and designers who spend years researching and designing in the hopes of hitting the mark with consumers," says Peterson. American and Korean Brands Share Most Satisfying Popular Brand Title GMC is the most satisfying popular brand for the second year in a row, but this year it shares its title with Hyundai and Ram. "Having two strong American truck brands and a Korean brand known for its cars is pretty incredible," says Peterson. Although GMC has won several times, it is the first brand win for Ram and Hyundai. 2018 VEHICLE SATISFACTION AWARD WINNERS Most Satisfying Vehicle Overall: Chevrolet Traverse Highest Satisfaction Premium Brand: Genesis Highest Satisfaction Popular Brand: 3-way tie: GMC, Hyundai, Ram PASSENGER CARS: Luxury Car Aspirational Luxury Car Luxury Mid-Size Car Large Car Mid-Size Car Premium Compact Car Compact Car Mainstream EV Car Economy Car Sports Car Sporty Car Genesis G90 (2nd year) Lexus IS Nissan Maxima (3rd year) Dodge Charger Hyundai Sonata Audi A3 Hyundai Elantra Nissan LEAF Hyundai Accent Nissan 370Z Dodge Challenger (2nd year) LIGHT TRUCKS: Light Duty Pickup Heavy Duty Pickup Mid-Size Pickup Luxury SUV Large SUV Mid-Size SUV Mid-Size SUV Premium Luxury Crossover SUV Luxury Crossover SUV Large Crossover SUV Premium Mid-Size Crossover SUV Mid-Size Crossover SUV Compact Crossover SUV Minivan Minivan Nissan Titan (2nd year) GMC Sierra HD Honda Ridgeline (2nd year) Infiniti QX80 Toyota Sequoia Toyota 4Runner (tie) Jeep Grand Cherokee (tie; 2nd year) Mercedes-Benz GLS Infiniti QX60 Chevrolet Traverse Nissan Murano (4th year) Honda CR-V Toyota C-HR Honda Odyssey (tie) Toyota Sienna (tie) About AutoPacific AutoPacific is a future-oriented automotive marketing research and product-consulting firm. Every year AutoPacific publishes a wide variety of syndicated studies on the automotive industry. The firm also conducts extensive proprietary research and consulting for auto manufacturers, distributors, marketers and suppliers worldwide. Company headquarters are in North Tustin, California, with an affiliate office in the Detroit area. Additional information about AutoPacific and the Vehicle Satisfaction Awards can be found on AutoPacific's websites: www.autopacific.com and www.vehiclevoice.com. SOURCE AutoPacific Related Links http://www.autopacific.com PHOENIX, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Launched in Fall 2015, BW Premier Collection by Best Western is one of Best Western Hotels and Resorts' fastest-growing brands, comprised of an exclusive, carefully curated collection of upscale properties around the world. As part of the "Today's Best Western" campaign, which launched earlier this year, BW Premier Collection by Beset Western is featured in this month's "Behind the Brands" series. With 114* hotels and growing, the soft brand can be found welcoming travelers in prime destinations globally, including: Blake Hotel New Orleans, BW Premier Collection by Best Western in New Orleans, Louisiana Hotel L'Horset Opera, BW Premier Collection by Best Western in Paris, France Mari Vila Hotel Bucharest, BW Premier Collection by Best Western in Bucharest, Romania Hotel Syrene, BW Premier Collection by Best Western in Capri, Italy The Hotel Nagasaki, BW Premier Collection by Best Western in Nagasaki, Japan Hotel 115 Kew, BW Premier Collection by Best Western in Melbourne, Australia Georgian Court Hotel, BW Premier Collection by Best Western in Vancouver, British Columbia Eclectic and unique, BW Premier Collection by Best Western hotels create an atmosphere where creativity, worldliness and individual expression are blended into an experience that is illuminated by the true joy of travel. Each hotel's original identity is preserved and is unmistakably tied to its locale, giving today's travelers inspired and authentic experiences in beautiful destinations. In addition to the independent personality custom to each hotel, guests can enjoy the impeccable service and first-rate amenities that the BW Premier Collection by Best Western brand is known for: Luxurious guestrooms and suites On-site cocktail bars, dining experiences and award-winning breakfast options Premier, deluxe bath amenities Thoughtful and sophisticated design throughout BW Premier Collection by Best Western is not only a world class option for travelers, but for independent hoteliers as well. The brand provides unprecedented flexibility, as a soft brand designed to help owners flourish without the often-strict brand guidelines of the industry. Hotels are encouraged to maintain their personalities in order to provide the authentic, local experiences today's travelers crave. Hotels pay only for the business delivered to them by the brand, and gain access to the brand's award-winning, $1.8 billion global reservation system and 35 million-member strong loyalty program, as well as near immediate access to Best Western's revenue management systems, trade show and sales support, marketing programs and more. "We are pleased with the overwhelming success our soft brand has received from leading independent hoteliers and today's travelers," said Ron Pohl, Senior Vice President and Chief Operations Officer of Best Western Hotels & Resorts. "The unmatched benefits of today's Best Western combined with the exceptional, unique offerings of the hotels themselves, have earned BW Premier Collection by Best Western a prominent spot within our portfolio of brands." "As the brand continues to expand, we will remain focused on quality over quantity to ensure we offer only luxury hotels that epitomize the local flavor and personality of desirable destinations around the world," continued Pohl. Staying at BW Premier Collection by Best Western hotels is even more rewarding this summer, as Best Western Rewards members will receive a $20 Best Western Travel Card after their first stay completed now through September 3, 2018. Go.Get.Rewarded today, with top-ranked, rich rewards and points that never expire from the world's premier hotel loyalty program. For more information on Best Western Hotels & Resorts, please visit BestWestern.com. For more information about the Today's Best Western campaign, please visit youmustbetrippin.com/featured/todaysbw/. About Best Western Hotels & Resorts: Best Western Hotels & Resorts headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, is a privately held hotel brand with a global network of 4,200* hotels in more than 100* countries and territories worldwide. Best Western offers 11 hotel brands to suit the needs of developers and guests in every market: Best Western, Best Western Plus, Best Western Premier, Vib, GLo, Executive Residency by Best Western, BW Premier Collection, and BW Signature CollectionSM by Best Western; as well as its recently launched franchise offerings: SureStay Hotel by Best Western, SureStay Plus Hotel by Best Western and SureStay Collection by Best Western. Now celebrating more than 70 years of hospitality, Best Western provides its hoteliers with global operational, sales and marketing support, and award-winning online and mobile booking capabilities. Best Western continues to set industry records regarding awards and accolades, including 64 percent of the brand's North American hotels earning a TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence award in 2017, Business Travel News ranking Best Western Plus and Best Western number one in upper-mid-price and mid-price hotel brands, and Best Western receiving seven consecutive Dynatrace Best of the Web awards for its leading hotel website. Best Western has also won nine consecutive AAA/CAA Lodging Partner of the Year awards, recognizing the brand's commitment to providing exceptional service and great value to AAA/CAA's nearly 58 million members in the U.S. and Canada. Best Western-branded hotels were top ranked in J.D. Power's 2017 North America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Index Study ranking first in breakfast (food and beverage category) for midscale; and second in overall guest satisfaction. Over 32 million travelers are members of the brand's award-winning loyalty program Best Western Rewards, one of the few programs in which members earn points that never expire and can be redeemed at any Best Western hotel worldwide. Best Western's partnerships with AAA/CAA and Harley-Davidson provide travelers with exciting ways to interact with the brand. Through its partnership with Google Street View, Best Western is the first major company of its size and scale to launch a virtual reality experience for customers, setting a new industry standard and reinventing how guests view hotels. * All Best Western and SureStay-branded hotels are independently owned and operated. * Numbers are approximate, may fluctuate, and include hotels currently in the development pipeline. SOURCE Best Western Hotels & Resorts Related Links http://BestWestern.com SACRAMENTO, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Legislation to lift the veil of secrecy around physician sexual assault and other patient harm today passed its final policy committee, the Assembly Business & Professions Committee, with a 15 1 vote. Survivors of physician sexual assault, including Olympic and Michigan State University athletes abused by team doctor Larry Nassar, and public interest advocates including Consumer Watchdog, testified in support of SB 1448, to require physicians to inform their patients when they are on probation for causing egregious patient harm. The Patient Right to Know Act, by Senator Jerry Hill and co-authored by Business & Professions Committee Chair Assemblymember Evan Low, would require a doctor on probation for one of four reasons sexual misconduct with a patient, overprescribing, criminal convictions, or drug and alcohol use to disclose that fact to his or her patient before an appointment. Last year, the California Medical Association (CMA) killed a broader disclosure bill in the Assembly Business & Professions Committee. The CMA remains opposed to 1448 despite significant amendments taken by Senator Hill to require disclosure only by physicians on probation for the most serious violations. "The nation is reeling from the consequences of people in power turning a blind eye to sexual assault, yet the California Medical Association continues to defend secrecy when doctors harm their patients," said Carmen Balber, executive director of Consumer Watchdog. "The Patient Right to Know Act is lawmakers' chance to say the state of California will no longer hide doctors' sexual abuse, drug use and other patient harm. It's time for transparency and accountability about sexual assault to reach the doctor's office, where patients should feel safest." The Los Angeles Times recently editorialized in favor of SB 1448, saying: "If we've learned nothing else from the #MeToo movement, it is that secrecy around misconduct allows perpetrators to continue hurting people." Read the editorial: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-doctors-probation-20180521-story.htm California law already recognizes patients' right to know by mandating that physician disciplinary information be disclosed online. However, while reporters and consumer advocates may use the online system to investigate a doctor's misconduct, it does not protect the vast majority of patients who have no idea they can look up a doctor's record beyond Yelp reviews, said Consumer Watchdog. "Placing the burden on the public to know about an obscure state government website, have the internet, speak English, then wade through and decipher legal documents about a doctor's history of misconduct, is equivalent to sealing a doctor's disciplinary records to the public. This is why disclosure before a patient's appointment, as required by SB 1448, is so critical to patient safety. Patients will never learn otherwise," wrote Balber in a letter to members of the Assembly Business and Professions Committee. Read Consumer Watchdog's letter to the committee here. In April, Consumer Watchdog called on the Medical Board of California to endorse a Patient Bill of Rights, including disclosure of physicians' probation as mandated in SB 1448. The Patient Bill of Rights would overhaul the Board's failed system of physician oversight in which doctors' records of patient harm are hidden and patient complaints go uninvestigated. View the Patient Bill of Rights here. The Senate Business, Professions & Economic Development Committee held a hearing on Monday to examine the reporting requirements for sexual misconduct complaints about medical professionals. Decades' worth of patient complaints of sexual abuse by USC physician George Tyndall and Olympic team doctor Larry Nassar were not reported to state oversight boards. Consumer Watchdog called on lawmakers to require health facilities to report any allegation of sexual misconduct or other serious patient harm to the Medical Board of California, and to require the Medical Board to investigate these reports. SB 1448 will be considered next in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. It passed off the Floor of the state Senate last month on a 28-3 vote. SOURCE Consumer Watchdog Related Links http://www.consumerwatchdog.org MARION, S.C., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Celebrating the 18th year, Bishop Michael Blue of Marion will host the annual CCFM Conference on June 20-23 at The Florence Center, formerly The Florence Civic Center in Florence, S.C. CCFM Conference 2018, #CCFM2018, this year called "The Summit", is expected to attract thousands of attendees from the Pee Dee Region and beyond. (L) Bishop Michael Blue listens as Bishop T.D. Jakes speaks at the Empowerment Luncheon during CCFM Conference 2017 in Florence, SC (PRNewsfoto/CCFM) Bishop T.D. Jakes preaching to thousands at CCFM Conference 2017 in Florence, SC (PRNewsfoto/CCFM) For the fourth time, Bishop T.D. Jakes of The Potter's House in Dallas will headline the conference. As the pastor of one of the nation's largest churches with 30,000 members, Bishop Jakes is a world-renowned preacher, host of the acclaimed MegaFEST, the International Pastors & Leadership Conference, a New York Times Best-Selling Author, film producer, humanitarian and entrepreneur. On Saturday, attendees will have the opportunity to see and hear Bishop Jakes live during the main session, which is free and open to the public. Also, Jakes will be featured in an Empowerment Luncheon that will be held immediately after the Conference session (For details, go to ccfmnation.org). Other speakers include Evangelist Joyce Rodgers international evangelist of The Church of God In Christ (COGIC); Bishop Joseph Walker, Presiding Bishop of Full Gospel Baptist Church Fellowship, and Bishop Michael Blue, host and presiding prelate. Featured musical guests include Jonathan McReynolds, Wendi Wyatt, Todd Galberth, and The Walls Group. Life enhancing seminars are held in the day sessions, with topics ranging from entrepreneurship/business to mental health, from grief counseling to social media marketing, from youth ministry to community college and 21st Century jobs. Special youth activities K4K2 - are held as well. "CCFM Conference 2018 is designed to offer something for the entire family and for the entire individual," says Bishop Blue. "We want attendees to be inspired but also to gain practical skills applicable to everyday life. And we strive to make the Conference accessible to everyone: admission to all seminars (day) and services (evening) is free. CCFM is YOUR Conference." All CCFM Conference 2018 day and evening worship sessions and seminars are free and open to the public; however, registration is encouraged and includes major benefits. To register for #CCFM2018, or for the Empowerment Luncheon, visit www.ccfmnation.org/registration.html. For information about #CCFM2018, registration, or sponsorship, visit www.ccfmnation.org, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/CCFM2000/, [email protected], or (843) 423-0340. Media Contact: Larrissa Clavon (980) 613-4707 Media Representative The Door of Hope Christian Church (843) 423-0340 [email protected] About the Christian Covenant Fellowship of Ministries (CCFM) The Christian Covenant Fellowship of Ministries exists to build the Body of Christ, developing leaders for the fulfillment of God's Purpose in all sectors of society, all of which are sacred to Him. This network is comprised of over 80 churches across the nation, including The Door of Hope Christian Church of Marion, S.C. where Bishop Blue and his wife Malinda serve as pastors. The CCFM Conference is the fellowship's largest event, hosting thousands annually, with other regional meetings of CCFM affiliates held in various locations throughout the year. SOURCE The Christian Covenant Fellowship of Ministries Related Links http://www.ccfmnation.org WASHINGTON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Blackboard today announced that the Blackboard app has won the 2018 SIIA CODiE Award for Best Higher Education App. Available on iOS and Android mobile devices, the Blackboard app helps students succeed by keeping them organized, informed, and connected to their academics - anytime, anywhere. CODiE Award recipients are the companies producing the most innovative Business and Education technology products across the country, and around the world. Designed to meet the diverse needs of students using Blackboard Learn all around the world, the Blackboard app enables students to react to their academic needs at a moment's notice, no matter where they are truly extending teaching and learning beyond the traditional classroom. The app allows students to quickly see a prioritized list of activities and easily take action, engage with students and instructors through discussion boards, view, complete, and submit assignment and tests, check grades, join virtual classes on the go via Blackboard Collaborate, and more. With the Blackboard app's offline feature, students can also access important course content and information, regardless of internet connection. The Blackboard app is simple, intuitive, accessible, and gives students the information they want, the connections they crave, and the personalization they demand, all on the go. "I am impressed by the level of innovation and creativity demonstrated by the 2018 CODiE award winners. These products are opening doors for learners of all ages by developing and utilizing new technologies to respond to student and educator needs," said Ken Wasch, President of SIIA. The winner announcement was made by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, during the SIIA Annual Conference & CODiE Awards in San Francisco. 40 awards were given for products and services deployed specifically for education and learning professionals. A SIIA CODiE Award win is a prestigious honor as each award winner was first reviewed by expert judges including educators and administrators, whose evaluations determined the finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products, and the scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners. "Blackboard is honored to be recognized by SIIA with this prestigious award," said Jim Chalex, Vice President of Teaching and Learning at Blackboard. "We're proud of the impact our app is having in helping students stay connected and engaged anytime, anywhere. We look forward to continuing to help faculty and institutions keep students engaged in their academic journey, by meeting students where they are most often on their mobile devices." For more information on the Blackboard app, visit http://www.blackboard.com/mobile-learning/blackboard-app.html. More information about the Awards is available at http://www.siia.net/codie. Details about the winning products can be found at http://www.siia.net/codie/2018-Winners. About the CODiE Awards The SIIA CODiE Awards is the only peer-reviewed program to showcase business and education technology's finest products and services. Since 1986, thousands of products, services and solutions have been recognized for achieving excellence. For more information, visit siia.net/CODiE. About Blackboard Inc. Our mission is to partner with the global education community to enable learner and institutional success, leveraging innovative technologies and services. With an unmatched understanding of the world of the learner, the most comprehensive student-success solutions, and the greatest capacity for innovation, Blackboard is education's partner in change. Blackboard Communications Contact: Shawnee Cohn, 240.888.5687, [email protected] SIIA Communications Contact: Benjamin Price, 703.909.4034, [email protected] SOURCE Blackboard Inc. Related Links http://www.blackboard.com NAMPA, Idaho, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Blockchain Assets AI, Inc. (www.blockchainassetsai.com), a Wyoming corporation, announced today its commencement of business operations. Its business model is to create a U.S.-compliant, securitized and asset-backed crypto-token, called the Numeum. Unlike "fiat" cryptocurrencies, which have limited or no intrinsic value, the Numeum, which will be issued by the Numeum Wealth Fund, LLC (subject to SEC oversight), will have an intrinsic value. Its price will be supported by an actively managed asset pool backing this token. As the investment pool will be managed by professional traders and algorithmic trading systems, and the net asset value ("NAV") of this token should be supported. Blockchain Assets AI, Inc. The Company has done extensive research into U.S. securities regulations, employed the services of an experienced securities consultant, and spoken to representatives of the SEC. The Company believes that this U.S.-compliant model will become the template for future U.S.-compliant "ICOs". Jon Fagenstrom, the CEO of Blockchain Assets AI, believes that this model will allow any investor in the tokens to have the ability to experience the development of true value, and to see the price of these tokens appreciate due to increasing intrinsic value. This approach, along with the compliance with U.S. securities regulations, should create demand for the Numeums, if and when the offering of such is deemed "effective" by the SEC. The structure of the Numeum System should allow the "public" to invest into a fund structure operating on the blockchain, that was previously limited to "accredited investor" investment only. The Company is developing its "team", and also looking for Directors/Officers. Blockchain Assets AI, Inc., is conducting a "seed" round, offering 6 percent Cumulative Convertible Preferred Stock in a Regulation D, Rule 506(c) private placement offering. A Form D has been filed with the SEC claiming exemption from registration of these securities. If you are an "accredited investor" (See Regulation D, Rule 501(a) for legal definition), are interested in an investment in this industry sector, and wish more information on this offering, please contact: Blockchain Assets AI, Inc. Attn: Jon Fagenstrom, CEO 307 Sunrise Rim Rd. Nampa, Idaho, 83686 Tel: 208-919-0249 Email: [email protected] www.blockchainassetsai.com Related Files BAAI Offering Summary.pdf SOURCE Blockchain Assets AI, Inc. Related Links http://www.blockchainassetsai.com SANTA ANA, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Linda McMahon, head of the U.S. Small Business Administration and advocate for the nation's 30 million small businesses as a member of President Trump's Cabinet, will visit Orange County on Friday, June 22, 2018. This stop is part of the Administrator's nationwide Ignite Tour focused on listening to business owners; educating about the SBA's services for access to capital, mentoring and federal contracting; advocating for entrepreneurs, and driving small business growth. WHO: SBA Administrator Linda McMahon Small business owner Kristopher Plourde WHEN & WHERE: Friday, June 22, 2018 8:30 a.m. PDT Small Business visit to [AV] Irvine OPEN PRESS 16500 Scientific Way Irvine, CA 92618 WHAT: [AV] Irvine owner Kristopher Plourde was SBA Orange County Inland Empire's 2018 Small Business Person of the Year and 2004 Young Entrepreneur of the Year. He used an SBA loan to purchase a 25,000 square-foot facility for his event planning, design, and production business which has grown from 10 to more than 60 employees. 10:30 a.m. PDT America West Lending Conference OPEN PRESS Hilton Costa Mesa3050 Bristol Street, Costa Mesa, CA 92626 Administrator McMahon will deliver keynote remarks to lenders and bankers at the conference. SBA loans supported over $1.5 billion in lending in 2017 to small businesses located in the Orange County Inland Empire region. WHY: Highlight the SBA's programs that help Orange County entrepreneurs start businesses, grow their companies, and create jobs. For interview opportunities and to RSVP, contact [email protected], (202) 714-3240. About the U.S. Small Business Administration The U.S. Small Business Administration makes the American dream of business ownership a reality. As the only go-to resource and voice for small businesses backed by the strength of the federal government, the SBA empowers entrepreneurs and small business owners with the resources and support they need to start, grow or expand their businesses, or recover from a declared disaster. It delivers services through an extensive network of SBA field offices and partnerships with public and private organizations. To learn more, visit www.sba.gov. Contact: [email protected] (202) 714-3240 Release Number: MA18-15 SOURCE U.S. Small Business Administration Related Links http://www.sba.gov PALM BEACH, Florida, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MarketNewsUpdates.com News Commentary As the Canadian recreational cannabis market approaches its birth with legalization quickly approaching, leaders in the industry are preparing for the inevitable consumer demand through ramped up measures to add strategic locations as well as well as a growing number of mergers and acquisitions. As a whole, Canadians spent north of $5 billion on cannabis in 2017 according to data released by Statistics Canada. That number is projected to increase when recreational cannabis becomes readily available. One of the big reasons that marijuana is no longer being viewed as taboo was publish in an article published by Deloitte, titled "Recreational Marijuana Insights and Opportunities," as it found that the typical recreational marijuana consumers were not looking for a quick high but instead use marijuana for medical needs such as a sleep aid or stress reducer. Active companies in the industry making moves to ready that include: Choom Holdings Inc. (CSE:CHOO) (OTC:CHOOF), Hiku Brands Company Ltd. (OTC:DJACF) (CSE:HIKU), Medmen Enterprises Inc. (OTC:MMNFF) (CSE:MMEN), Newstrike Resources Ltd. (OTC:NWKRF) (TSX-V:HIP), Namaste Technologies Inc.'s (OTC:NXTFF) (TSX-V:N). Choom Holdings Inc. (CSE: CHOO) (OTCQB: CHOOF) BREAKING NEWS: Choom, an emerging, fully-integrated cannabis company, is pleased to announce that it has advanced the build-out of its cannabis retail store network in Alberta and British Columbia. Choom has secured the rights to an additional 7 retail locations in Alberta. Choom has 25 leases in highly strategic and secure locations in Alberta with 24 applications submitted. Choom has also secured 3 additional B.C retail leases, combined with the existing 7, for a total of 10 retail opportunities in B.C. In all cases, the retail opportunities are subject to all necessary governmental and municipal approvals being granted. This number is expected to grow over the coming months as the Company is currently negotiating additional leases with the intention of submitting applications for retail licenses. The following link will bring you to our retail opportunity map: https://investors.choom.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ChoomRetailMap.pdf "This is a significant step towards establishing Choom's strategy to be a leading private cannabis retailer in Canada," states Choom's President and CEO, Chris Bogart, he also adds, "Market share and customer acquisition in the upcoming recreational landscape will be very difficult to come by, these applications are key to Choom's retail strategy. Choom's brand was created exclusively for the recreational market, core to our values is cultivating a great experience for the consumer and part of this strategy is retail distribution. We are committed to pursuing retail licensing opportunities across the country and remain focused on cultivating 'Good Time with Good Friends'." Read this and more news for Choom at: http://www.marketnewsupdates.com/news/choo.html Additional industry related developments from around the markets: Hiku Brands Company Ltd. (OTCPK:DJACF) (CSE:HIKU.CN) and WeedMD Inc. (WDDMF) recently announced that WeedMD has obtained an interim order from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice authorizing the holding of an annual and special meeting (the "WeedMD Meeting") of WeedMD shareholders ("WeedMD Shareholders") to consider the previously announced merger (the "Merger Transaction" or the "Arrangement") between Hiku and WeedMD. As described in the joint Hiku and WeedMD press release dated April 19, 2018, WeedMD will be seeking WeedMD Shareholder approval for the Arrangement under the Business Corporations Act (Ontario) (the "Arrangement Resolution"). The WeedMD Meeting to consider the Arrangement Resolution will be held on Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 10:00 a.m. (Toronto time) at Fogler, Rubinoff LLP, located at TD Centre North Tower, Suite 3000, 77 King Street, Toronto, Ontario. Medmen Enterprises Inc. (OTCQB:MMNFF) (CSE:MMEN.CN) recently announced that the Company opened its newest store on Venice's Abbot Kinney Boulevard on Saturday. With banks of news media cameras surrounding the storefront, Medmen co-founders Adam Bierman and Andrew Modlin cut the ribbon. They were flanked by U.S. congressman Ted Lieu, California state senator Ben Allen, assembly member Reggie Jones-Sawyer and celebrity Rosario Dawson. Lines of customers waited to enter the store. Mr. Lieu, whose district includes Abbot Kinney, welcomed customers and greeted the press. It marked the first known time an active U.S. congressman was featured in the grand opening of a marijuana dispensary. It underscored how mainstream marijuana has become, and how California is leading the way. Newstrike Resources Ltd. (OTCPK:NWKRF) (TSX-V:HIP.V) recently announced its wholly owned subsidiary and licensed producer, Up Cannabis Inc., has joined the newly formed Global Cannabis Partnership as a founding member, and will contribute to its mandate of creating a worldwide social responsibility standard for the safe and responsible production, distribution, and consumption of legal adult-use cannabis. The partnership, announced earlier today at the World Cannabis Congress in Saint John, N.B., includes a wide range of stakeholders including government agencies, licensed producers and affiliate organizations that will focus on the legalized cannabis industry. On June 18, further to Namaste Technologies Inc.'s (OTCQB:NXTFF) (TSX-V:N.V) Jan. 18, 2018, letter of intent that the company has signed a subscription agreement to acquire 10 per cent of the issued share capital of Israeli licensed producer of medical cannabis, Cannbit Ltd., for 2.5 million Israel new shekels or approximately $908,000, which includes a combination of both cash and shares. Subsequently, Cannbit has also signed a binding agreement to complete a merger with a company listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, whereby Cannbit will retain 85-per-cent ownership of the combined public entity, the company believes that its investment will be immediately accretive in nature based on the valuation metrics of the transaction which consequently valued Cannbit significantly higher than what Namaste acquired its 10-per-cent equity stake for. In anticipation of closing this transaction, Namaste has established a supply arrangement with Cannbit to export cannabis to the Canadian market (subject to approval by Health Canada and the Israeli government), and will also engage with Cannbit to expand the company's Israeli-based vaporizer sales platform. DISCLAIMER: MarketNewsUpdates.com (MNU) is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. MNU is NOT affiliated in any manner with any company mentioned herein. MNU and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. MNU's market updates, news alerts and corporate profiles are NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities. The material in this release is intended to be strictly informational and is NEVER to be construed or interpreted as research material. All readers are strongly urged to perform research and due diligence on their own and consult a licensed financial professional before considering any level of investing in stocks. All material included herein is republished content and details which were previously disseminated by the companies mentioned in this release. MNU is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. Investors are cautioned that they may lose all or a portion of their investment when investing in stocks. For current services performed MNU has been compensated forty five hundred dollars for news coverage of the current press release issued above by Choom Holdings Inc. by a non affiliated third party. MNU HOLDS NO SHARES OF ANY COMPANY NAMED IN THIS RELEASE. This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. "Forward-looking statements" describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "may", "future", "plan" or "planned", "will" or "should", "expected," "anticipates", "draft", "eventually" or "projected". You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and MNU undertakes no obligation to update such statements. Contact Information: Media Contact email: [email protected] Phone - +1(561)325-8757 SOURCE MarketNewsUpdates.com "The popularity of craft beer and coffee has grown across all demographics, tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world, 2 nd only to water. We're excited by the potential for Two Roots Brewing to be the first to market, offering products infused with THC & CBD, with the ultimate goal of normalizing the consumption of cannabis-infused products, especially given the recent announcements of potential development from the former Blue Moon founders and Constellation Brands, as well as its investment in Canopy Growth," said Timothy Walters, president of Cannabiniers. "Beer,coffee and tea hold such a widely accepted and even celebrated place in society, so we are thrilled to offer a line of beverages to fit anyone's preferred beverage choice within the rapidly expanding cannabis market that have been responsibly formulated to emulate the effects of alcohol, micro-infused, onset within 5 10 minutes and dissipation in less than two hours." " What Does It Take To Be A Pioneer " Crafted by expert brewers and artisans, Cannabiniers has sourced the first of its manufacture and design technology to enter the United States, to create Two Roots Brewing Co. Two Roots is the only line of craft beer in the United States using this state of the art technology for de-alcoholizing beer. Brewed in California and infused with THC and CBD in Nevada and California, Two Roots initial product offering consists of five styles including Lager, Stout, New West IPA, Blonde Ale, and Wheat; with a "Tribute" style beer that tastes like cannabis to immediately follow. "After two years of research and development, we are thrilled to see our creations on product shelves in July. Our portfolio is continuing to expand and we are proud to be providing the highest quality products made in the USA and changing the perception of consuming cannabis and the entire industry," said Director of Product Development, Kevin Love of Cannabiniers. "We are committed to offering products that consumers are demanding and we are proud of both lines being released." Just last year, Cannabiniers launched the world's first line of cannabis infused coffee, tea and cocoa delivered through a patented, 100 percent compostable flower-based single-brew pod, BrewBudz. Based on consumer trends and feedback from customers, Just Society is the next evolution with flavors of iced teas including: Lemon, Mango, Mint, Raspberry, and Honey; and iced coffees including: Original, Cafe Mocha, Salted Caramel, and French Vanilla. This announcement coincides with Cannabiniers Series B capital raise of their multistate rollout of both Just Society and Two Roots covering a twelve state product release. Investor Inquiries Wholesale Inquiries Nevada Retail Inquiries California Retail Inquiries Justin Mayol, Jeff Paul KC Thompson Renny Bowden Director of Finance V.P. of Sales Sales Director Market Director 909.477.7261 855.436.7876, ext. 701 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] For more information about Two Roots, Just Society and other products developed by Cannabiniers, please visit: www.cannabiniers.com. About Cannabiniers Cannabiniers, located in San Diego, CA, is a foodservice, technology & brand management company focusing on products that are healthy for the consumer and that positively impact the environment. Cannabiniers is revolutionizing the cannabis industry with patented, proprietary, safe and natural flower-based extraction technology and products that will continue the mission of normalizing cannabis use. SOURCE Cannabiniers Caronlab Australia was founded by Lilliane Caron in 1979 as a salon in Australia. Unhappy with waxes already on the market, Caron developed her own line of affordable and easy-to-use home waxing products lines, Waxxxie and Bump eRaiser, to prevent and treat ingrown hairs redness, itchiness and pimples for smooth and healthy-looking skin. "When looking for representation for our products in the U.S. we wanted a strong team of professional people who could help us from the early stages," said Greg Ure, CEO at Caronlab Australia. "For this reason, we chose NPI." NPI is a family-owned global brand management firm that has helped more than 3,500 foreign and domestic brands make their way to big name retailers in the United States. With more than 25 years of experience, Mitch Gould, Founder and CEO of NPI, has sold his clients to virtually every major retailer in the United States including GNC, Vitamin World, The Vitamin Shoppe, Walmart, 7-Eleven, Amazon.com and Whole Foods, to name a few. Gould's expertise in retail distribution has surpassed a billion dollars in sales. "Mitch and Brian Gould along with its NPI professional team helped with the initial launch of our products, development of packaging, FDA requirements, custom clearance issues, secure distribution in Amazon and throughout U.S. retailers," Ure said. "IHM reviews our websites to make sure they were appropriate for the U.S. market, and it provides public relations support so retailers can hear about our products." Jeff Fernandez, NPI's Executive Vice President, is essential to the team because he has the necessary expertise and knowledge of how to bring foreign brands to the U.S. market. His experience comes from successfully managing multi-million-dollar verticals such as the health and wellness, and skincare categories on Amazon and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. as buyer. "No one can match the decades of experience we have in the retail industry, and Jeff is our ace in the hole," added Gould, "he knows exactly what buyers are looking for in products. NPI delivers." For more information on Waxxxie and Bump eRaiser, visit www.waxxxie.com and www.bumperaiser.com.au. For information on NPI, visit www.nutricompany.com Please direct inquiries to: Chloe Sommers, 561-544-0719 [email protected] SOURCE Caronlab Australia SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Carrum Health, the next-generation Center of Excellence platform for self-insured employers, today announced the addition of two new Centers of Excellence, Hoag Orthopedic Institute Surgery Center in Orange County, and Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica. With these expanded locations and services now available via Carrum's groundbreaking bundled payment platform, covered workers at employers throughout Central and Southern California are gaining even greater access to high-quality and high-value hip and knee replacements, spine surgeries and a wide range of other outpatient musculoskeletal procedures. With this addition and existing Center of Excellence Swedish Medical Center, Carrum Health is broadening its relationship with the Providence St. Joseph health system along the West Coast. "Carrum Health is continuously in touch with members to determine which new geographies and procedures we will offer on our platform, and we believe they will see tremendous value from our latest expansion, which makes available more than 80 outpatient procedures via bundled payments at Hoag Orthopedic Institute," said Sach Jain, CEO at Carrum Health. "In addition, we are providing access to some of the highest-rated orthopedic surgeons in the state, including Dr. Andrew Yun, medical director of joint replacement services at Providence Saint John's Health Center." Over three-quarters of California's population now lives within 150 miles of a Carrum Center of Excellence. Both Hoag Orthopedic Institute (HOI) and Providence Saint John's Health Center are expected to attract Carrum members from much of the Central Valley, Central Coast and the Los Angeles area, home to 23 million residents. Providence Saint John's is part of Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH), a seven-state, 51-hospital health care system; another PSJH hospital, Seattle's Swedish Medical Center, also is a Carrum Center of Excellence for orthopedics. Carrum's platform offers employers and their employees a unique way to access high-quality care that improves outcomes and reduces recovery times while also lowering their medical costs. "Carrum Health's bundled payments offer self-insured employers an affordable way to provide higher-value care to employees and their family members who require orthopedic and spinal procedures," said Gabrielle White, executive director of Ambulatory Services & Network Development at HOI. "HOI can now treat the most common musculoskeletal procedures as part of Carrum's CoE program." HOI and St. John's join Carrum's portfolio of nationally ranked hospitals, which includes Scripps Health in San Diego, Stanford Health Care in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle's Swedish Medical Center. "Providence Saint John's Health Center is a leader in the Los Angeles Area in delivering excellence in orthopedic care and joint replacements," said David Tam, M.D., the hospital's chief operating officer. "By working with Carrum to bundle the services needed to provide an outstanding experience for patients, we can lower costs and dramatically increase the value of care. Our surgeons and staff are among the finest in the country, and we look forward to our partnership with Carrum to expand the access for patients from other regions to our hospital." About Carrum Health Carrum Health was founded in 2014 with a mission to "bring common sense to healthcare" through a model that benefits providers, employers and their employees. Through the Carrum's award-winning platform, progressive self-insured employers are connected with regional Center of Excellence providers under bundled payment arrangements that make costs for procedures more predictable and lower. By aligning provider incentives with quality performance, Carrum is driving dramatic improvements in both the patient experience and care outcomes. Both employers and their employees achieve significant cost savings, while top doctors and hospitals recognize increased volume, new revenue streams and substantial payment efficiencies. Headquartered in San Francisco, Carrum Health partners with leading Centers of Excellence hospitals including Hoag Orthopedic Institute Surgery Center, Scripps Health, Stanford Health Care, Providence Saint John's Health Center and Swedish Medical Center. Customers include municipal organizations throughout the State of California as well as Fortune 150 companies. For more information, visit carrumhealth.com. SOURCE Carrum Health Related Links http://www.carrumhealth.com PALM BEACH, Florida, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MarketNewsUpdates.com News Commentary Everywhere you look these days, there's a constant introduction of the newest and innovative CBD (or cannabidiol) oil-infused products. Such products as CBD balms for pain, CBD serums for fine lines, CBD moisturizers for acne... the list goes on. Sales and promotions of CBD products (some combined with small amounts of THC) are exploding. Industry analysts predict the market in the U.S. will reach $1 billion a year by 2020. CBD, one of more than 100 cannabinoids found in marijuana, is made into tinctures, elixirs, balms and other products. The products are touted for just about whatever ails you, and also for beauty, hygiene, stress reduction, and wellness. Active Companies from around the market with current developments this week include: Marijuana Company of America, Inc. (OTC:MCOA), mCig Inc. (OTC:MCIG), Cannabis Science Inc. (OTC:CBIS), Medical Marijuana Inc. (OTC:MJNA), CV Sciences Inc. (OTC:CVSI) Marijuana Company of America, Inc. (OTCPK:MCOA), an innovative hemp and cannabis corporation, is pleased to announce that the company's hempSMART brand has launched its revolutionary new cosmetic product hempSMART Face. Each bottle of hempSMART Face is formulated with 150mg of full spectrum, non-pyschoactive, Cannabidiol (CBD) oil derived from the industrial hemp plant. The newly developed hempSMART topical is a nourishing facial moisturizer that combines CBD oil with a unique blend of ayurvedic herbs and botanicals that is designed to refresh, replenish, and restore your skin cells on your face. The innovative new formula is rich in Omega 3, 6, 7 and 9, along with naturally occurring ceramides and contains synergistic ingredients such as Organic Aloe, Sabi Inchi Oil, Argan Kernel Oil, Macademia Seed Oil, Rose Hip Seed Oil, Pomegranate Seed Oil, Tulsi, Turmeric Oil, Frankinsense, Ashwaganda, Sweet Potato Root Extract, Coconut Oil, and Sea Buckthorn Oil. MCOA's CEO Donald Steinberg commented, "Our team is excited to announce the expansion of the hempSMART brand into the world of cosmetic products. HempSMART will continue to build upon our already established and unique formulations to provide our customers and affiliates with the tools needed to succeed in the wellness industry." Read this and more news for MCOA at http://www.marketnewsupdates.com/news/mcoa.html In the industry developments and happenings in the market this week include: Medical Marijuana Inc. (OTC:MJNA) last week announced it applauds the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for its recent statement on the legality of cannabidiol (CBD) -- which further clarifies that some CBD products, such as hemp-derived CBD products sold by Medical Marijuana, Inc., are legal to distribute freely throughout the United States and do not fall under the regulations of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The statement clarified: "Products and materials that are made from the cannabis plant and which fall outside the CSA definition of marijuana (such as sterilized seeds, oil or cake made from the seeds, and mature stalks) are not controlled under the CSA. Such products may accordingly be sold and otherwise distributed throughout the United States without restriction under the CSA or its implementing regulations." Cannabis Science Inc. (OTC:CBIS) recently announced its latest University Scholarship Expo will begin this weekend at Cali RX, Cannabis Science's flagship location. Cali RX is located at 14006 Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks, California 91423. Another expo will be held at the newest Cannabis Science location, CBIS Nexus RX. Nexus RX is located at 4922 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles CA, that is currently undergoing final renovations and will open for business soon. "As previously stated, these beautiful, state-of-the-art, retail facilities are designed to connect Cannabis Science directly with patients and doctors. Additionally, these facilities provide our company with a platform to contribute to the development of the communities in which we operate," stated Mr. Raymond C. Dabney, Cannabis Science's President, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-founder. "As a good corporate citizen, Cannabis Science, through our partners, intends to offer educational opportunities for people in traditionally underserved communities." mCig Inc. (OTC:MCIG) recently announced an update on its 40-acre industrial hemp project in New York. This spring, NYAcres propagated 80,000 industrial hemp seeds with FarmOn! Foundation in Copake NY projecting 55,000 pounds of processable flower for CBD extraction to sell as an ingredient for white label products demanding hemp oil and promoting its benefits. Since sprouting seeds NYAcres is currently planting 40 acres of industrial hemp outdoors in certified organic fields focused on two varieties of CBD concentrated organic seed strains: Cherry Wine, and Berry Blossom, which yield 12-15 percent CBD concentration. These feminized only seed strains are both 100% hemp and 100% organic and are registered with the Department of Agriculture. CV Sciences Inc. (OTCQB:CVSI) last week announced the June 7, 2018 publication of the toxicology and safety results of an extract from the base raw materials used in its market leading PlusCBD Oil consumer products. The Company contracted respected scientific and regulatory consulting firm, AIBMR Life Sciences, Inc, to conduct the battery of toxicological studies to investigate the safety of oral consumption of the Company's hemp cannabidiol (CBD) oil and to support a Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) Independent Conclusion. The monumental study entitled, "An Assessment of the Genotoxicity and Subchronic Toxicity of a Subcritical Fluid Extract of the Aerial Parts of Hemp" concluded that the test article was non-mutagenic, non-clastogenic and non-genotoxic. The toxicological assessment is the first known published data of its kind since the 1980 Rosenkrantz et al.'s publication with respect to toxicology data on CBD, Cannabichromene and hashish oil. The battery of GLP/OECD compliant studies is a major contribution in advancement of the science of hemp-derived CBD. DISCLAIMER: MarketNewsUpdates.com (MNU) is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. MNU is NOT affiliated in any manner with any company mentioned herein. MNU and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. MNU's market updates, news alerts and corporate profiles are NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities. The material in this release is intended to be strictly informational and is NEVER to be construed or interpreted as research material. All readers are strongly urged to perform research and due diligence on their own and consult a licensed financial professional before considering any level of investing in stocks. All material included herein is republished content and details which were previously disseminated by the companies mentioned in this release. MNU is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. Investors are cautioned that they may lose all or a portion of their investment when investing in stocks. For current services performed MNU has been compensated forty four hundred dollars for news coverage of the current press release issued by Marijuana Company of America, Inc. by the company. MNU HOLDS NO SHARES OF ANY COMPANY NAMED IN THIS RELEASE. This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. "Forward-looking statements" describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "may", "future", "plan" or "planned", "will" or "should", "expected," "anticipates", "draft", "eventually" or "projected". You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and MNU undertakes no obligation to update such statements. Contact Information: Media Contact email: [email protected] +1(561)325-8757 SOURCE MarketNewsUpdates.com SCHAFFHAUSEN, Switzerland, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Acronis, a global leader in hybrid cloud cyber protection currently celebrating its 15-year anniversary, today announced that Charles Ryan, Chairman and CEO of United Financial Group (UFG) Asset Management and a senior advisor to Deutsche Bank AG, joined the Acronis board of directors following a unanimous vote at a recent shareholders' meeting in Zurich. The American banker has a proven capacity to understand global political and economic context and develop businesses with ultimate transparency. As a board member, Ryan will help guide Acronis' global expansion, taking advantage of the company's Singaporean origin and Swiss-owned IP, reinforcing Acronis' position as the most reliable cyber protection vendor on the global market. Ryan co-founded UFG in 1994 and helped it become one of the most successful investment companies in Eastern Europe before Deutsche Bank acquired it in 2006. While he remains Senior Advisor to Deutsche Bank AG, Ryan's primary executive role is running UFG Asset Management, an independent entity that UFG founded in 1996. Today, UFG Asset Management is one of the leading alternative asset managers with over $1.8 billion of assets in hedge fund, private equity and real estate investments. Before founding UFG, Ryan worked as a financial analyst with CS First Boston from 1989 to 1991 and as an associate and principal banker with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London from 1991 to 1994. "Charles is a pioneer in the financial industry supporting global IT projects, and we're excited to welcome him to Acronis' board of directors," said John Zanni, President of Acronis. "His top-level expertise and deep knowledge of international markets will be extremely valuable as Acronis continues to expand its presence around the world." "We were looking for someone who would further strengthen our board. As a truly independent company founded in Singapore, with corporate headquarters in Switzerland, and strong presence in the U.S., we are confident that Charles has the ability to understand our global nature and will have a positive impact on our business," said Serguei Beloussov, co-founder and CEO of Acronis. "Acronis is one of the most dynamic IT companies providing innovative data protection services to businesses around the world. I'm honored to be joining the board," said Ryan. Ryan graduated with honors in with a degree in Government from Harvard College. As an alumnus, Ryan has served on several leadership committees involved with undergraduate life and fundraising. About Acronis Acronis sets the standard for hybrid cloud IT data protection through its backup, active protection against ransomware, disaster recovery, and secure file sync and share solutions. Powered by the Acronis AnyData Engine and set apart by its image technology, Acronis delivers easy, fast, complete and affordable data protection of all files, applications and operating systems across any environmentvirtual, physical, cloud, mobile and applications. Founded in 2003 in Singapore, with global headquarters in Switzerland, Acronis protects the data of more than 5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses in over 150 countries and 20 languages. With more than 100 patents, Acronis products are consistently named best product of the year and cover a range of features, including migration, cloning, and replication. Today, Acronis solutions are available worldwide through a global network of service providers, distributors, and cloud resellers. Learn more at acronis.com. SOURCE Acronis Related Links http://www.acronis.com VANCOUVER, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Choom (CSE: CHOO) (OTCQB: CHOOF) (the "Company" or "Choom") an emerging, fully-integrated cannabis company, is pleased to announce that it has advanced the build-out of its cannabis retail store network in Alberta and British Columbia. Choom has secured the rights to an additional 7 retail locations in Alberta. Choom has 25 leases in highly strategic and secure locations in Alberta with 24 applications submitted. Choom has also secured 3 additional B.C. retail leases, combined with the existing 7, for a total of 10 retail opportunities in B.C. In all cases, the retail opportunities are subject to all necessary governmental and municipal approvals being granted. This number is expected to grow over the coming months as the Company is currently negotiating additional leases with the intention of submitting applications for retail licenses. The following link will bring you to our retail opportunity map: https://investors.choom.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ChoomRetailMap.pdf "This is a significant step towards establishing Choom's strategy to be a leading private cannabis retailer in Canada," states Choom's President and CEO, Chris Bogart. "Market share and customer acquisition in the upcoming recreational landscape will be very difficult to come by, these applications are key to Choom's retail strategy. Choom's brand was created exclusively for the recreational market, core to our values is cultivating a great experience for the consumer and part of this strategy is retail distribution. We are committed to pursuing retail licensing opportunities across the country and remain focused on cultivating 'Good Time with Good Friends'." SAY HELLO TO CHOOMTM Choom was created for and inspired by the Choom Gang; a group of buddies in Honolulu during the 1970's who loved to smoke weedor as the locals called it, "Choom". Now, after four decades, Choom is bringing the spirit of Hawaii to Canada. Choom is focused on delivering an elevated customer experience through our curated retail environments, high-grade handcrafted Cannabis supply, and a diversity of brands for the Canadian recreational consumer. We're planting our flag in the rapidly growing legal cannabis industry in Canada with our own brand of high-grade handcrafted herb. For additional information please visit us at: www.choom.ca "Chris Bogart" President & CEO Cautionary Statement: NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATIONS SERVICES PROVIDER HAVE REVIEWED OR ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. Forward-looking information This news release contains forward-looking information relating to the Company's proposed activities and other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking information relates to management's future outlook and anticipated events or results, and include statements or information regarding the plans to obtain directly or through acquisition cannabis retail opportunities, expected governmental approvals for cannabis retail stores, and the general prospects or plans for a cannabis retail network. 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 information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. These factors include risks and uncertainties associated with the results of diligence investigations, developments in the cannabis sector, delays resulting from or inability to obtain required regulatory approvals and ability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources, reliance on key personnel, regulatory risks and delays and other risks and uncertainties discussed in the management discussion and analysis section of the Company's interim and most recent annual financial statement or other reports and filings, including the Company's Listing Statement, made with the applicable Canadian securities regulators. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward looking information. SOURCE Choom Holdings Inc. LONDON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cision, a leading global provider of earned media software and services to public relations and marketing communications professionals, won a combined 12 AMEC awards at the PR measurement body's 2018 annual awards ceremony. The International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) recognised Cision and PRIME Research for their expertise in measuring and evaluating campaigns for clients including McDonald's, Slimming World, Gumtree, Kellogg's and Mischief PR. PRIME Research, acquired by Cision, is a leading media monitoring and analytics firm that provides real-time monitoring and analysis across digital, print, television, radio, and online channels. Cision and PRIME Research's numerous awards included: Best measurement of a consumer campaign - Gold for Slimming World's New Year Campaign, Silver for Gumtree and Bronze for Kellogg's: Better Starts Best use of integrated communication measurement/research - Gold for Slimming World's New Year Campaign and Bronze for Gumtree Best use of a measurement framework - Gold for Kellogg's: Better Starts, Silver with Mischief PR for This Girl Can: A triumphant 'second album' and Bronze for Slimming World's New Year Campaign Plain English award for simplicity in campaign effectiveness measurement and reporting - Gold for McDonald's International McDelivery Rollout Cision and PRIME Research also took home Silver for best measurement of a business- to-business campaign and best multi-market reporting for work on Airbus's Using Insights to Navigate Through Difficulties project, as well as a Bronze innovation award for new measurement methodologies for the Bulletin Intelligence AccuReach Data Science Project. "It has never been more important for communicators to be able to demonstrate the value of their work," said Abe Smith, president, EMIA, Cision. "At Cision we pride ourselves on providing our customers with the measurement and insights to show ROI on their campaigns and I am ecstatic that the AMEC Awards panel has recognised the fantastic analysis we have produced for our clients." Jenny Caven, head of external relations for Slimming World, added: "Working with Cision to implement the Integrated Evaluation Framework was a watershed moment for us. It has enabled us to focus on what really matters: understanding how our earned media strategy is maximising the quality of media exposure across multiple channels and how this is changing audience perception and contributing to growing membership. "I'm delighted to have been able to share our measurement journey with the audience at this year's AMEC summit in Barcelona. Going on to win further AMEC awards for the second year in a row in 2018 demonstrates that the continued work with Cision in our use and implementation of the Framework is recognised. We've built a success story that can be shared not only with important internal stakeholders but also with the broader communications industry. It's been empowering for our in-house PR team to become part of the community of communications practitioners developing and sharing best practice, for the benefit of us all." AMEC's two-day summit was held in Barcelona last week to celebrate and recognise the effectiveness of communications and measurement internationally. The AMEC Awards is the largest awards scheme of its type for communications measurement and insights, open to media intelligence and insights firms, PR companies, client in-house teams, government teams and not-for-profit organisations. About Cision Cision Ltd. (NYSE: CISN) is a leading global provider of earned media software and services to public relations and marketing communications professionals. Cision's software allows users to identify key influencers, craft and distribute strategic content, and measure meaningful impact. Cision has over 4,000 employees with offices in 15 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. For more information about its award-winning products and services, including the Cision Communications Cloud, visit www.cision.com and follow Cision on Twitter @Cision. Media contacts: Victoria Morrison Cision Head of Field Marketing, Content & Events, EMIA [email protected] Steph MacLeod Kaizo PR [email protected] SOURCE Cision Related Links http://www.cision.com KARLSKRONA, Sweden, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Compuverde today announced that is has been honored with the Software Defined Storage (SDS) Vendor of the Year award from Storage Magazine's 15th annual Storage Awards. These prestigious awards recognize outstanding companies, products and services driving valuable innovation in the IT storage industry. "The Storries" were celebrated at a gala awards ceremony at The Tower Hotel in London on June 14. Click To Tweet: [email protected] Named Software Defined Storage Vendor of the Year by 2018 @STMagAndAwards: https://tinyurl.com/ya5ydyab #SDS Compuverde's software-defined storage solution supports today's next-generation storage needs, going beyond the limitations of legacy IT infrastructure to deliver extreme resilience, performance and cost savings for scale-out virtual environments. Differentiators include: All-in-one platform: The solution provides a single storage platform for unparalleled ease of use, high performance and cost effectiveness. The solution provides a single storage platform for unparalleled ease of use, high performance and cost effectiveness. Comprehensive storage: The combination of file system, block and object store in one offers a variety of options based on data demands, as well as flexibility and agility. The combination of file system, block and object store in one offers a variety of options based on data demands, as well as flexibility and agility. Adaptable scalability: Rapid, linear scaling using nodes/x86 building blocks without the need for special-purpose hardware. Rapid, linear scaling using nodes/x86 building blocks without the need for special-purpose hardware. Reduced complexity: Because there is no single point of failure, there are no expensive bottlenecks to address. This allows businesses to minimize the total cost of ownership and concentrate on core business strategy and new innovation projects rather than IT maintenance. Stefan Bernbo, CEO and founder, Compuverde, said: "At Compuverde we believe in fundamentally changing the storage industry to enable enterprises to scale quickly and cost-efficiently in order to remain competitive. This award is a testament to our dedication to this vision and we are honored to be recognized as an industry leading provider of software defined storage solutions." About Compuverde Compuverde is an established provider of software-defined storage, delivering enterprise-grade general vNAS file systems, hyper-converged virtualization and hybrid cloud support. Founded by a team of storage and software experts in 2008, Compuverde delivers cost-efficient, hardware-agnostic, scale-out solutions to both large consumer brands and industrial business-to-business players. Compuverde is currently deployed worldwide with service providers, telecom, banking, media and insurance companies. Compuverde's patented unified solution offers the most flexible, user friendly and cost-efficient SDS solution in the storage market, and easily scales to hundreds of nodes, exabytes of data and billions of files. Global by demand, Swedish by design. For more information, please visit: www.compuverde.com. Editorial Contact: Peggy Tierney Galvin (831) 440-2405 [email protected] SOURCE Compuverde Related Links http://www.compuverde.com TORONTO and CHICAGO, June 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - On June 12, thousands of BMO employees engaged in the rewarding opportunity of donating their time to hundreds of volunteer projects on BMO Volunteer Day. "Every June, more than 4,000 BMO employees take part in the bank's Volunteer Day," said Darryl White, Chief Executive Officer, BMO Financial Group. "Together, we're a powerful force for positive change. Helping to build resilient communities is one of the ways we're here to help." During business hours, BMO employees across Canada, the U.S. and for the first time, U.K. and Ireland gave their time to a wide range of local charities in more than 100 communities. The contributions included: Toronto : BMO employees worked with more than 250 seniors to help break social isolation and promote improved physical and emotional well-being through Seniors Month Celebration lunches and events. BMO employees worked with more than 250 seniors to help break social isolation and promote improved physical and emotional well-being through Seniors Month Celebration lunches and events. Chicago : Through the American Red Cross, 50 employees volunteered to work with veterans at the Greater Chicago Food Depository, the Jess Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Centre and Fisher House. Through the American Red Cross, 50 employees volunteered to work with veterans at the Greater Chicago Food Depository, the Jess Brown Veterans Affairs Medical Centre and Fisher House. Toronto and Chicago : BMO's Pro Bono Legal Program expanded under Volunteer Day to pair lawyers with non-lawyers to provide free legal services to low-income individuals and vulnerable clients of third-party organizations. BMO's Pro Bono Legal Program expanded under Volunteer Day to pair lawyers with non-lawyers to provide free legal services to low-income individuals and vulnerable clients of third-party organizations. Across Canada : Employees brought BMO's Sustainability Principles to life by leading environmentally-focused projects with 15 charities in support of sustainable communities and agriculture. Employees brought BMO's Sustainability Principles to life by leading environmentally-focused projects with 15 charities in support of sustainable communities and agriculture. Greater Milwaukee : More than 40 employees hosted a literacy fair with the Boys and Girls Clubs where they organized activities ranging from reading and writing to art, puzzles, and learning games. More than 40 employees hosted a literacy fair with the Boys and Girls Clubs where they organized activities ranging from reading and writing to art, puzzles, and learning games. U.K. and Canada : More than 70 employees volunteered with the Alzheimer Society to help better the lives of those living with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. More than 70 employees volunteered with the Alzheimer Society to help better the lives of those living with dementia and Alzheimer's disease. North America , U.K. and Ireland : BMO employees worked with Ronald McDonald House Charities in six cities. In Ireland , volunteers provided relief to families with seriously ill children by providing them with a healthy, home-cooked meal after a long day at the hospital, relieving them of the added worry of having to cook themselves. "I speak on behalf of all my U.S. colleagues when I say that BMO Volunteer Day is a source of great pride for all of us," said David Casper, President and CEO, BMO Harris Bank, and Group Head, North American Commercial Banking. "We all share a genuine commitment to helping others and making a difference in the communities we serve. Giving back is a key element of who we are as an organization." About BMO Financial Group Serving customers for 200 years and counting, BMO is a highly diversified financial services provider the 8th largest bank, by assets, in North America. With total assets of $744 billion as of April 30, 2018, and a team of diverse and highly engaged employees, BMO provides a broad range of personal and commercial banking, wealth management and investment banking products and services to more than 12 million customers and conducts business through three operating groups: Personal and Commercial Banking, BMO Wealth Management and BMO Capital Markets. SOURCE BMO Financial Group SAN DIEGO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Shareholder rights law firm Johnson Fistel, LLP has launched an investigation into whether the board members of Cotiviti Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: COTV) ("Cotiviti") breached their fiduciary duties in connection with the proposed sale of the Company to Veritas Capital. Cotiviti provides analytics-driven payment accuracy and spend management solutions primarily for the healthcare sector in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and India. On June 19, 2018, Cotiviti announced that it had signed a definitive merger agreement with Veritas Capital. Under the terms of the agreement, Cotiviti shareholders will receive $44.75 per share in cash. The investigation concerns whether the Cotiviti board failed to satisfy its duties to the Company shareholders, including whether the board adequately pursued alternatives to the acquisition and whether the board obtained the best price possible for Cotiviti shares of common stock. Nationally recognized Johnson Fistel is investigating whether the proposed deal price represents adequate consideration, especially given Wall Street analysts' projections for Cotiviti future earnings and revenue growth. If you are a shareholder of Cotiviti and believe the proposed buyout price is too low or you're interested in learning more about the investigation or your legal rights and remedies, please contact lead analyst Jim Baker ( [email protected] ) at 619-814-4471. If emailing, please include a phone number. About Johnson Fistel, LLP: Johnson Fistel, LLP is a nationally recognized shareholder rights law firm with offices in California, New York and Georgia. The firm represents individual and institutional investors in shareholder derivative and securities class action lawsuits. For more information about the firm and its attorneys, please visit http://www.johnsonfistel.com . Attorney advertising. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes. Contact: Johnson Fistel, LLP Jim Baker 619-814-4471 [email protected] SOURCE Johnson Fistel, LLP Related Links http://www.johnsonfistel.com LOS ANGELES, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- JND Class Action Administration - A Los Angeles court has preliminarily approved a $16.9 million class action settlement for refunds of telephone taxes collected by the County of Los Angeles, California from August 25, 2005 through November 4, 2008. All individuals and businesses that paid for landline telephone service with a service address within the unincorporated areas of the County of Los Angeles, or mobile service where the billing address was within the unincorporated areas of the County of Los Angeles, and who paid telephone tax on services utilized between August 25, 2005 through November 4, 2008, and haven't already received a refund of those taxes, are eligible to claim a refund. THE DEADLINE TO FILE A REFUND CLAIM IS SEPTEMBER 15, 2018. Claims for telephone tax refunds can be submitted online, at www.LACountyTaxRefund.com, or through the mail. A notice and claim form will also be mailed to current addresses in the unincorporated areas of the County of Los Angeles. Eligible class members have several options to file a claim, which include: (1) claim standard amounts of $27.50 for residential landline telephone service, $46.00 for business landline service, and/or $46.00 for mobile telephone service, with no documentary evidence required; (2) submit samples of bills reflecting the telephone user taxes ("TUT") paid during the class period to receive a refund of the actual TUT paid; or (3) if bills from the class period are not available, submit a sample of recent phone bills reflecting the TUT paid to the County to receive a refund based on recent TUT amounts. In addition, class members who were customers of Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile during the August 25, 2005 to November 4, 2008 time period can provide consent for those carriers to search for TUT payment records. Class members may claim refunds for both landline and mobile telephone taxes. The County of Los Angeles has agreed to a maximum of $16.9 million. Undistributed funds, after attorneys' fees and costs, plaintiff's incentive award, and notice and administration expenses are paid, will revert back to the County of Los Angeles. For additional information, claim forms and detailed instructions on how to make a claim, go to www.LACountyTaxRefund.com or call (833) 807-3690. The lawsuit, Granados v. County of Los Angeles, was brought on behalf of County of Los Angeles, CA taxpayers by the law offices of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP, Chimicles & Tikellis LLP, Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca, LLP, and Tostrud Law Group, PC. The County of Los Angeles disputes the claims made in the lawsuit, but believes it is in the best interest of its residents to settle the matter rather than incur further litigation expenses. SOURCE Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP, Chimicles & Tikellis LLP, Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca, LLP, and Tostrud Law Group, PC SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Genesys (www.genesys.com), the global leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions, is hosting a free 60-minute global webinar on June 27 to share how artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the way organizations achieve key business outcomes. Featured Opus Research analyst Dan Miller will provide insights on how organizations can harness the power of AI to deliver predictive and optimized customer experiences that results in tangible return. What: Technology Insights: How AI is Driving a New Era in Customer Engagement Using AI to tackle targeted business outcomes may sound out-of-this-world to accomplish. By learning how to incorporate AI into an omnichannel engagement strategy, organizations can achieve the sales, marketing and service results businesses want. This can include higher customer satisfaction, increased employee efficiency, decreased costs, better collections and revenue, reduced handle times, and improved first contact resolution (FCR). Learn how companies are leveraging AI and machine learning today to dynamically analyze historical performance data along with customer and employee attributes to predict matches that drive success. Who: Participants in the webinar include: Dan Miller , lead analyst and founder, Opus Research , lead analyst and founder, Opus Research Guillaume Calot , global director of solution strategy, Genesys , global director of solution strategy, Genesys Charlie Godfrey , global solution services director, Genesys Why: Join this webinar to learn how to leverage AI to: Drive successful business outcomes such as improved net promoter score, customer retention, revenue and more. Use historical performance data and customer/employee attributes to predict the best match for targeted business goals. Efficiently analyze and leverage huge amounts of data. When: Wednesday, June 27 60 minutes North America: 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET Latin America: 1 p.m. CDT / 3 p.m. BRT Europe, Middle East & Africa: 2 p.m. BST / 3 p.m. CEST Asia-Pacific: 11 a.m. SGT / 1 p.m. AEST How: Register now to attend this live webinar and/or receive a post-event recording. About Genesys Genesys powers more than 25 billion of the world's best customer experiences each year. Our success comes from connecting employee and customer conversations on any channel. Every day, 11,000 companies in more than 100 countries trust our #1 customer experience platform to drive great business outcomes and create lasting relationships. Combining the best of technology and human ingenuity, we build solutions that mirror natural communication and work the way you think. Our industry-leading solutions foster true omnichannel engagement because they perform equally well across channels, on-premise and in the cloud. Experience communication as it should be: fluid, instinctive and profoundly empowering. Visit genesys.com on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and the Genesys blog. Contacts: Rachel Faulkner Director, PR Genesys [email protected] +1 317-715-8109 Lisa Hawes Sterling Communications [email protected] +1 408-395-5500 SOURCE Genesys Related Links http://www.genesys.com DOWNERS GROVE, Ill., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In little more than a year after Creating IT Futures released CEO Charles Eaton's first book, How to Launch Your Teen's Career in Technology: A Parent's Guide to the T in STEM Education, the organization announced today that all books from the first printing were sold or distributed and an updated, second edition is available now. "People who succeed in technology are problem solvers who care about other people and the overall quality of their lives," said Eaton, who also is executive vice president, social innovation, for CompTIA, the parent organization of Creating IT Futures. "The earlier we can develop and support an interest in tech careers in this next generation of young people, the stronger our industry will become and the more our economy will grow." While Eaton is a regular contributing columnist to publications such as G.I. Jobs, Recruiter Today and ITSP Magazine, T in STEM is his first full book. The guide supports CompTIA's NextUp initiative to interest teens in tech careers. "Funded by CompTIA and managed by Creating IT Futures, NextUp aims to spark curiosity and passion for technology in teens," said Todd Thibodeaux, CEO, CompTIA, who wrote the foreword for T in STEM. "It's tempting to see educators and technical trainers as the answer to launching your teen's career in technology," Thibodeaux added. "But the secret isn't just creating curriculum but creating inspiration. And not just in children, but in parents, too." Eaton elaborated on Thibodeaux's point: "Our research, Teen Views on Tech Careers, shows that, in terms of advice on college and careers, teens rely on parents 2-to-1 over any other source, including teachers and friends." In line with these findings, Eaton provides parents and other readers with practical counsel and resources in the T in STEM guide: Defining the role of a "technologist" in varied businesses and industries at companies large and small around the globe. Busting seven common myths about technology careers, such as "Technology is all about coding and math" and "To work in technology, you need a four-year college degree." Scoping the level and depth of opportunity in the tech-related job market, an industry with more than half a million open positions in the U.S. at any given time. Providing pointers for recognizing traits in young students that suggest they will succeed in technology careers. Identifying "educational pathways", such as makerspaces and boot camps, where motivated parents can place their tweens and teens today that will prepare them for tomorrow and deliver some fun and entertainment in the meantime. Introducing readers to an array of diverse people working as technologists today, who followed a variety of paths to success. The T in STEM second edition also will be available on Kindle, and a new Spanish-language version of the book is available now with a Kindle version, too. Also, the organization's companion podcast, Technologist Talk, makes its formal debut today. Later this month, Creating IT Futures' partner organization, the Technology Student Association, will distribute copies of T in STEM to select chapters. In addition, the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) offers the book through its publication, Library Journal, as well as additional newsletters it distributes, and will showcase T in STEM at its booth at the ALA Conference in New Orleans, June 21-28. Parents, educators and students in middle school through high school may place orders for the print version here, or a Kindle version of the guide here. The Spanish version is available here in paperback, and here for Kindle. Readers may submit reviews of the book on Amazon, or email Celine Dirkes at [email protected]. About CompTIA CompTIA is the voice of the world's IT industry. Its members are the companies at the forefront of innovation and the professionals responsible for maximizing the benefits organizations receive from their investments in technology. CompTIA is dedicated to advancing industry growth through educational programs, market research, networking events, professional certifications and public policy advocacy. To learn more visit CompTIA online, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. About Creating IT Futures Founded by CompTIA in 1998, Creating IT Futures is a 501(c)(3) charity with the mission of helping populations under-represented in the information technology industry and individuals who are lacking in opportunity to prepare for, secure, and be successful in IT careers. Learn more at www.CreatingITFutures.org. Contact: Lisa Fasold Creating IT Futures 630-678-8558 [email protected] SOURCE Creating IT Futures Related Links http://www.creatingitfutures.org NEW YORK, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Credit Suisse AG announced today that, effective at the open of trading on June 26, 2018, it will reduce the Daily Investor Fee Factor for its VelocityShares VIX Short Term ETNs ("VIIX" or the "ETNs") as follows: Current New Daily Investor Fee Factor 0.89% 0.75% The Daily Investor Fee Factor is used to calculate the Daily Investor Fee, which in turn reduces the Closing Indicative Value on each calendar day. The Daily Investor Fee reduces the return (or increases the loss, as applicable) on the ETNs, as set forth in the Pricing Supplement for the ETNs accompanying this media release. On any calendar day, the Daily Investor Fee for the ETNs will be equal to the product of (1) the Closing Indicative Value of the ETNs on the immediately preceding calendar day times (2) the Daily ETN Performance of the ETNs on the calculation day times (3)(a) the Daily Investor Fee Factor divided by (b) 365. Once the Daily Investor Fee Factor is reduced, Credit Suisse AG may not, without the consent of each affected holder as set forth in the Prospectus, increase the Daily Investor Fee Factor. Credit Suisse AG also announced that, with respect to new issuances of VIIX, it will waive the creation fee, effective immediately. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Credit Suisse AG may reinstate the creation fee at any time in the future and if so reinstated, may from time to time increase or decrease such fee without notice to the public. The ETNs are senior medium-term notes of Credit Suisse AG, the return on which is linked to the performance, before fees and expenses, of the S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures Index ER (the "Index"). The Index is designed to provide investors with exposure to one or more futures contracts on the CBOE Volatility Index (the "VIX Index"). The Index targets a constant weighted average futures contracts maturity of one month. None of the other exchange traded notes issued by Credit Suisse AG are affected by this announcement. The ETNs are subject to fees. If the level of the Index decreases or does not increase sufficiently to offset the sum of the Daily Investor Fees (and in the case of Early Redemption, the Early Redemption Charge) over the term of the ETNs, the payment on the ETNs will be less than the initial investment amount of the ETNs at maturity, upon early redemption or acceleration of the ETNs. The ETNs are intended to be trading tools for sophisticated investors to manage daily trading risks. They are designed to achieve their stated investment objectives on a daily basis, but their performance over longer periods of time can differ significantly from their stated daily objectives. The ETNs are riskier than securities that have intermediate or long-term investment objectives, and may not be suitable for investors who plan to hold them for longer than one day. Accordingly, the ETNs should be purchased only by knowledgeable investors who understand the potential consequences of investing in volatility indices and of seeking inverse or leveraged investment results, as applicable. Investors should actively and frequently monitor their investments in the ETNs, even intra-day. An investment in the ETNs involves significant risks. For further information regarding these risks, please see the section entitled "Risk Factors" in the Pricing Supplement. Credit Suisse has filed a registration statement (including a prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, for the offering to which this media release relates. Before you invest, you should read the applicable Pricing Supplement, the Prospectus Supplement dated June 30, 2017 and the Prospectus dated June 30, 2017 that Credit Suisse has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Credit Suisse and the ETNs. You may obtain these documents without cost by visiting EDGAR on the SEC website at www.sec.gov or clicking the hyperlinks below: Pricing Supplement for VIIX dated June 8, 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1053092/000095010318007255/dp92090_424b2-a51.htm Prospectus Supplement and Prospectus dated June 30, 2017: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1053092/000104746917004364/a2232566z424b2.htm Press Contacts Azar Boehm, Credit Suisse AG, telephone +1 212 538 3953, [email protected] Credit Suisse ETNs Telephone +1 800 320 1225, [email protected] Credit Suisse AG Credit Suisse AG is one of the world's leading financial services providers and is part of the Credit Suisse group of companies (referred to here as 'Credit Suisse'). Our strategy builds on Credit Suisse's core strengths: its position as a leading wealth manager, its specialist investment banking capabilities and its strong presence in our home market of Switzerland. We seek to follow a balanced approach to wealth management, aiming to capitalize on both the large pool of wealth within mature markets as well as the significant growth in wealth in Asia Pacific and other emerging markets, while also serving key developed markets with an emphasis on Switzerland. Credit Suisse employs approximately 46,370 people. The registered shares (CSGN) of Credit Suisse AG's parent company, Credit Suisse Group AG, are listed in Switzerland and, in the form of American Depositary Shares (CS), in New York. Further information about Credit Suisse can be found at www.credit-suisse.com. SOURCE Credit Suisse AG Related Links http://www.credit-suisse.com The Rigo token, which is built on top of the RigoBlock platform, allows users to: establish a meritocratic and incentives-based framework for traders, separating the fee logic from the funds and create an incentive mechanism on top of the token. All of these elements will allow the Rigo token to become easily accessible and more cost effective for traders to use, which aims to reshape the $63 trillion dollar asset management industry. TokenMarket will deliver a set of building blocks in order for the RigoBlock project to run smoothly. These include: token issuance and creation, marketing, PR and community management, as well as providing its award winning advisory services to the RigoBlock team. "We are very excited to be working together with TokenMarket to ensure that RigoBlock can be a success," Gabriele Rigo, CEO and Founder of RigoBlock, said. "TokenMarket's experience in this industry is second to none and we are pleased to be working together," Rigo stated. With over 30 successful token sales executed over the past year, TokenMarket will utilise its experience in the market to support RigoBlock during the course of the project. "RigoBlock's project is one that we are pleased to be working with. Its idea of an open source protocol to run on the Ethereum blockchain is forward thinking as well as sensible," TokenMarket CEO Ransu Salovaara stated. "We at TokenMarket are excited to see what the future holds with this partnership and especially the success of the RigoBlock project." The partnership between TokenMarket and RigoBlock allows RigoBlock's idea of creating a protocol on the Ethereum blockchain to be an easier entry to asset management for anyone. The project is set to debut in the coming months and will see TokenMarket and RigoBlock's work come to fruition. About RigoBlock RigoBlock is a blockchain protocol for decentralized asset management. A complete solution to develop applications for asset management (i.e. for the fund management industry). The RigoBlock protocol offers new types of incentives for managers and investors by aligning their interests through the Proof-of-Performance algorithm, by eliminating management fees and performance fees from the funds. RigoBlock graduated from the "Blockchain Business Solution" accelerator program by H-Farm in cooperation with Deutsche Bank. RigoBlock is a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and Cryptovalley Association. About TokenMarket TokenMarket is a premier ICO information portal and advisory firm. It combines its market experience, resources and data assets to create a professionally tailored solution to execute ICOs safely and securely. providing an end-to-end service for token creation, presale and public sale. TokenMarket's ICO advisory service has partnered over 30 token sales including Storj, Populous, Monaco, Civic and Dent, raising over $300 million in total. Following the success of its ICO advisory service, TokenMarket is hosting its own 2-day conference "TokenMarket 2018: Insights Into The Token Economy", which takes place on 28-29 June in Gibraltar. For more information on TokenMarket 2018 visit https://tokenmarket.net/conference-2018/home Media Contact: Lawrence Chiu Reports: [email protected] SOURCE RigoBlock "Detroit Dog Rescue is Detroit's ONLY no-kill shelter in the city of Detroit. Our team is committed to helping the thousands of abandoned, abused and homeless dogs in Detroit through rescue and rehabilitation, education, and outreach," said Kristina Rinaldi, executive director of DDR. "Community involvement like our events with DMCU are essential to saving more lives and providing more resources to our mission." DMCU hosted three adoption events last year, one at each of its branches, and the same is planned this year. The adoption at the Novi Branch, located at 25880 Novi Road, is from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on July 28, and the event at the Clawson Branch, located at 625 N. Main Street, is from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Aug. 25. "Last year, it was inspiring to see so many people take these dogs into their hearts and homes," said Kathie Trembath, president and CEO of Diversified Members Credit Union. "Community involvement is something we take very seriously at DMCU. This is such a worthy cause. We are happy to host an event where our members, and the community in general, can get together with the DDR and find homes for these dogs." DMCU will also be collecting donations at the events. Detroit Dog Rescue is a non-profit 501(c)3. About Diversified Members Credit Union Diversified Members Credit Union is a full-service financial institution with branches in Detroit, Novi and Clawson. DMCU offers a full array of loans, including personal, home and auto; savings and checking accounts; credit and debit cards; and mobile and online banking. Anyone who lives, works or worships in the state of Michigan is eligible for membership. Formed in 1929, DMCU has grown to nearly 25,000 members and more than $400 million in assets. For more information, visit www.dmcu.com, or on Facebook or Twitter. Contact: Samantha Keene Phone: 313.568.5000 ext. 264 Email: [email protected] SOURCE Diversified Members Credit Union Related Links http://www.dmcu.com SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- "The Importance of Cell Line Authentication", a documentary produced by Biocompare in collaboration with an international team of scientific leaders, is now available for viewing. The documentary is focused on misidentified and contaminated cell lines, which are at the crux of the reproducibility crisis plaguing scientific research. Through candid and often passionate interviews, the film lays out the problems caused by misidentified and contaminated cell lines, including scientific results that are not reproducible, misinformation being added to the scientific record, and the wasting of millions of dollars of precious research funding. Solutions are also discussed including testing methodologies and training requirements. Critically, stakeholders, including funders, journals, and institutions, are implored to take further action. The scientists featured in the film come from academia and industry, and all have extensive experience working with cell lines. Some like Stanley Gartler, professor emeritus from University of Washington, Amanda Capes-Davis, chair of ICLAC, and Christopher Korch, professor at the University of Colorado, have been raising awareness and calling for community action for decades. Their perspectives on the problem and recommendations for the future are thought provoking and actionable and should be required listening for all scientists, especially mid-to-late career scientists who have often been averse to authenticating their cell lines. "I hope this brief documentary will help change the complacent attitude of the research community about this problem so that it can be eradicated. This change is urgently needed not just because it is becoming a requirement of journals and granting agencies, but because it is necessary for discovering meaningful and reproducible science," Dr. Korch explains. This 20 minute film makes a strong case for immediate action. The accuracy and reliability of all biomedical research is in jeopardy, and it is clear that cell line authentication is imperative. This documentary also aims to raise awareness of the issue and compel scientists to authenticate their cell lines and help ensure that published results are reliable and can be reproduced. "We're excited to continue producing these documentaries that give us an opportunity to dive into the issue of scientific reproducibility. After our last film on "Antibody Validation Challenges" we felt that Cell Line Authentication was an obvious topic for a follow up. We hope that it helps researchers realize the importance of identifying the cell lines that they are working with," adds Mike Okimoto, Ph.D., Chief Content Officer at Compare Networks. For more information on "The Importance of Cell Line Authentication" please visit https://www.biocompare.com/Reproducibility/Cell-Line-Authentication/ About Biocompare Biocompare, a Division of CompareNetworks, Inc., is the leading resource for up-to-date product information, product reviews, and new technologies for life scientists. Biocompare combines an in-depth knowledge of life science products and new technologies with the power of the Internet to offer scientists the most dynamic, relevant, and innovative resource that enables them to make better product, technology, and service purchasing decisions. Produced by scientists, Biocompare's mission is to provide free, time-saving services to life science researchers, allowing scientists to find and learn about the technologies that drive discovery. Biocompare continually strives to serve the life science community by providing new and improved online services that facilitate product discovery and technology education. For more information, please visit www.biocompare.com. SOURCE Biocompare Related Links http://www.biocompare.com As part of its strategic vision to create a single, unified platform for the construction industry, Dodge introduced Dodge Construction Central in January 2018. At AIA18, Dodge will offer demonstrations of the platform and its suite of capabilities. Integrating research, analytics, and collaboration capabilities into a single platform, Dodge Construction Central also seamlessly connects to CRM and marketing automation systems through enhanced API services to enable access to Dodge data in the systems on which construction businesses run. Learn more at https://www.construction.com/products . Now available to current customers and prospects is a comprehensive suite of new features and benefits on Dodge Construction Central, with additional enhancements rolling out for the balance of the year. Overall capabilities of the platform include: A completely redesigned user interface that streamlines workflow and improves productivity Simple yet powerful personalization and filter features, plus fully customizable dashboards providing quick access to relevant data and analytics Access to the Dodge subcontractor database through Dodge PlanRoom integration, enabling contractors and manufacturers to easily share project information and manage bidding activity Interactive map visualizations that enable users to easily search projects and companies by geographic location, such as enabling general contractors to quickly find subcontractors by service area and assess availability by proximity to the job site Interactive map visualizations that enable users to easily search projects and companies by geographic location, such as An integrated Sweets Activity Dashboard providing manufacturers with streamlined access to Sweets ROI metrics Enhanced API services, allowing customers to access Dodge data within their CRM and marketing automation systems Market (MarketShare), firm (BuildShare), and product (SpecShare) analytics integration In addition to these new capabilities, Dodge customers will continue to benefit from recent innovations such as Basis of Design that were added to Dodge Global Network last year. "Our goal is to empower the design and construction community with the tools they need to improve their daily processes, and leverage deep intelligence to make timely, effective decisions backed by data," said Dodge Chief Executive Officer Mike Petrullo. "Moving to a model where our products and solutions are integrated on one platform will make operations and decision-making much more efficient and streamlined for our clients, and introducing this new UI is a valuable next step in the process. We're excited to give attendees a view into the single platform to demonstrate how they can streamline workflows, increase productivity, facilitate collaboration, mitigate risk and improve their visibility of project and market details that have been inaccessible until now." For architect and design attendees, Dodge will also be demonstrating the capabilities of Sweets extensive building product database of over 100,000 products from over 450 of the most respected manufacturers. Visitors to Booth #1357 can learn more about Sweets, the Sweets app for Revit, Sweets app for AutoCAD, the 2018 Sweets College Scholarship for the next generation of architects, designers and engineers, as well as enter the 2018 Sweetstakes for a chance to win an Eames Chair and Ottoman. Learn more at https://sweets.construction.com/. Also at AIA, highlighting Dodge's analytics and research expertise, Dodge's Senior Director of Industry Insights Research Steve Jones will share his forward-thinking insights as a panelist on Harnessing the Technology Innovation Revolution, on June 21st, at 7:30 a.m., in Room TH204. Jones will also present during the session titled Managing Uncertainty: New Project Planning Guide for Owners & Architects, on June 23rd, at 8 a.m. in Room SA108. The session draws on insights found in the Project Planning Guide, derived from a study developed in conjunction with the AIA Large Firm Roundtable and other sponsors, available for download here. About Dodge Data & Analytics: Dodge Data & Analytics is North America's leading provider of analytics and software-based workflow integration solutions for the construction industry. Building product manufacturers, architects, engineers, contractors, and service providers leverage Dodge to identify and pursue unseen growth opportunities and execute on those opportunities for enhanced business performance. Whether it's on a local, regional or national level, Dodge makes the hidden obvious, empowering its clients to better understand their markets, uncover key relationships, size growth opportunities, and pursue those opportunities with success. The company's construction project information is the most comprehensive and verified in the industry. Dodge is leveraging its 100-year-old legacy of continuous innovation to help the industry meet the building challenges of the future. To learn more, visit www.construction.com. Media Contact: Ryan Chin | AFFECT Public Relations & Social Media | +1-212-398-9680, [email protected] SOURCE Dodge Data & Analytics Related Links http://www.construction.com SAN DIEGO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Raw Organics, a line of infused cannabis products in San Diego, California, started during the cannabis prohibition era in 2011. Dr. Raw's founders, Kyle Dukes and Meghan Muckenfuss, crafted homemade edibles for dispensaries throughout Southern California and then quickly grew the brand to over 100 retail dispensary accounts from San Diego to San Francisco and beyond. The infused products sector of the cannabis industry has grown rapidly in the last three years and will continue to grow exponentially as one of the fastest growing sectors in the industry this year. Dr. Raw Organics partners with BAS Research BAS Research facility Dr. Raw's line of infused cannabis products includes three edibles, three tinctures and three topical balms. Products are formulated using specific ratios of THC and CBD to create the iconic Dr. Raw product formulas: Focus, Balance, and Relax. Dr. Raw products are unique because they are made with ultra distilled cannabis oils to guarantee purity, potency and consistency in Dr. Raw products. The most controversial topic in the California cannabis industry this year is pesticide contamination. Dr. Raw took a stand in 2018 to infuse only pesticide free cannabis oils during a time when most other infused product manufacturers have tested positive for pesticides. "The Dr. Raw Organics coconut oil tinctures are, by far, our best selling tinctures." - Rob, Buyer / Mankind Cooperative, San Diego Dr. Raw is proud to continue offering this same integrity in cannabis products through a partnership with BAS Research, an elite cannabis extraction lab and product manufacturer located in Berkeley, California. BAS Research will provide licensed, pesticide-free manufacturing of all Dr. Raw products beginning in June, 2018. BAS Research has raised $3.5 million to build a state of the art extraction and manufacturing facility in Berkeley, California. BAS Research sets the gold standard for quality in cannabis manufacturing in California through its rigorous testing protocols. Cannabis materials for manufacturing are tested four times throughout production at BAS Research to guarantee purity and potency. Dr. Raw is proud to share these same values for quality in cannabis products through this historic partnership with BAS Research. To learn more about Dr. Raw products find us online at www.drraworganics.com, Facebook and Instagram @dr.raworganics and Linked In @dr-raw-organics. For more information about BAS Research or BASInfused products, visit our website or follow us on Facebook @basresearch, Twitter @bas_research, Instagram @basresearch or LinkedIn @bas-research. Kyle Dukes, Dr. Raw Organics 619-400-7730 [email protected] SOURCE Dr. Raw Organics Related Links http://www.drraworganics.com AUSTIN, Texas, June 18, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- DSST Public Schools (DSST) is the winner of the 2018 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools announced today at the National Charter Schools Conference. The Broad Prize awards $250,000 to the large public charter school system that has demonstrated the best overall academic performance while closing achievement gaps and serving low-income students and students of color. The prize winnings must be used for college-readiness efforts. "On behalf of the 4,500 charter school educators and advocates with me at the 2018 National Charter Schools Conference, I offer DSST Public Schools a well-deserved round of applause for winning the 2018 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools," said Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "DSST Public Schools leaders, teachers, and families should feel proud of the hard work they do together to ensure brighter futures for Denver's kids." DSST Public Schools operates 13 secondary schools that serve 5,300 students in Denver, Colorado, 66 percent of whom receive free and reduced-price lunch and 81 percent of whom are students of color. The 10-member Broad Prize review boardincluding prominent education researchers, policy leaders and practitioners from around the countrychose DSST based on the charter network's strong academic outcomes. Specifically, the review board noted that for the past 10 consecutive years, 100 percent of DSST graduates have been accepted to four-year colleges or universities, and in 2016-17, on average, DSST students exceeded the ACT college readiness benchmark across all available demographic groups. The review board also cited DSST's status as a "diverse-by-design" network as creating an engaging environment for students who reflect the communities in which their schools are located. "DSST is a great example of the much-desired and elusive combination: a network that ensures outstanding results for all types of students while growing to serve more students," said Macke Raymond, Director, CREDO Stanford University and review board member. "They have cracked the code for success." DSST was one of three finalists along with Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools selected by the review board. This marked the fourth year Achievement First was nominated and the first time a previous winner was nominated. DSST was also a finalist last year the first year the network was eligible. Non-profit charter management organizations (CMOs) eligible for the 2018 award operated a minimum of five schools since 2015-16 with at least 2,500 students while serving sizable percentages of low-income students and students of color. CMO data was analyzed by the American Institutes for Research. Organizations cannot apply for the award nor be nominated. The National Alliance, which administers the prize, and The Broad Foundation, which funds the prize, did not play a role in selecting the top three CMOs or the 2018 Broad Prize winner. The $250,000 award must be used for college-readiness efforts. Previous winners of The Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools include Success Academy in 2017, IDEA Public Schools in 2016, Noble Network of Charter Schools in 2015, KIPP Schools in 2014, Uncommon Schools in 2013, and YES Prep Public Schools in 2012. Winners are ineligible for three years following their win. About The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation Founded by entrepreneur Eli Broad and his wife Edythe, both graduates of Detroit Public Schools, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation works to advance the public good in education, science and the arts. The Foundation has created groundbreaking independent institutions in each of its three grantmaking areas, including The Broad Center, which develops leaders to help transform America's urban public schools, the Broad Institute, a global leader in genomics, and The Broad, a museum in downtown Los Angeles devoted to showcasing great contemporary art. For more information, visit www.broadfoundation.org. About the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools is the leading national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the public charter school movement. Our mission is to lead public education to unprecedented levels of academic achievement by fostering a strong charter sector. For more information, please visit www.publiccharters.org. SOURCE National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Related Links http://www.publiccharters.org/ CLEVELAND, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- HMT Associates Inc., a shopper-focused brand activation agency, has been awarded a 2018 Top Workplaces honor by The Plain Dealer. Known for creating strategically-driven marketing solutions that engage and connect consumers to brands through all pillars of brand activation, hmt partners with some of America's most loved brands including Oreo, Ritz Crackers, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Heinz ketchup, and Stonyfield yogurt. "At hmt, our world class team of marketing experts deliver award winning work for our global brands and clients," says Patti Conti CEO. "hmt's team-focused, collaborative environment fosters creativity and entrepreneurial spirit within our staff. It's an incredible honor to be recognized by our employees, and once again be named a top workplace." Leaders of the Top Workplaces noted that workplace culture where employees are highly engaged was a common distinction among the 2018 winners. The list is based solely on employee feedback gathered through a third-party survey administered by research partner Energage, LLC (formerly WorkplaceDynamics), a leading provider of technology-based employee engagement tools. The anonymous survey measures several aspects of workplace culture, including alignment, execution, and connection, just to name a few. "Top Workplaces is more than just recognition," said Doug Claffey, CEO of Energage. "Our research shows organizations that earn the award attract better talent, experience lower turnover, and are better equipped to deliver bottom-line results. Their leaders prioritize and carefully craft a healthy workplace culture that supports employee engagement." About HMT Associates Inc. Headquartered in Cleveland, OH, and founded in 2002, hmt is a shopper-focused brand activation agency dedicated to transforming all the ways consumers experience brands throughout their purchase journey. The award-winning agency has been recognized as a 2018 top agency by Event Marketer Magazine and Chief Marketer Magazine. hmt works with some of the world's most iconic brands including Oreo, Ritz Crackers, Stonyfield yogurt, Oscar Mayer, Swedish Fish and Sour Patch. Connect with #teamHMT on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. http://www.hmtassociates.com. About Energage, LLC Headquartered in Exton, Pa., Energage (formerly known as WorkplaceDynamics) is a leading provider of technology-based employee engagement tools that help leaders to unlock potential, inspire performance, and achieve amazing results within their organizations. The research partner behind the Top Workplaces program, Energage has surveyed more than 47,000 organizations representing well over 16 million employees in the United States. For Inquiries contact: Faith Borland [email protected] 216.369.0109 SOURCE HMT Associates Inc. Related Links http://www.hmtassociates.com According to the Study, 69 percent of candidates say employer brand strength is important or very important when they're evaluating a job offer. Sixty-four percent of job seekers also feel the interview process conveys a fair amount to a lot about the company culture. "Although some companies may not consider their employer brand is being observed during the interview process, the details of the interview coordination and process reveal volumes about operating priorities and corporate values," said an applicant responding to the survey. A positive interview experience, which includes components such as ease of interview scheduling, relevant interview questions and interviewers that are knowledgeable and prepared, has the ability to provide companies with a competitive edge in recruitment. Creating a positive interview experience also means selling candidates on the values and attributes that make the organization great. "This is a very important piece of the selection process, so much that we've recently hired an HR manager to fully focus our hiring processes," said an employer survey participant. The MRINetwork Study revealed favorable factors impacting employer brand include competitive compensation packages (68 percent), work-life balance (47 percent) and advancement opportunities (40 percent), which are prioritized by applicants. Negative factors such as poor work-life balance (63 percent), excessive turnover across the company (60 percent) and excessive management turnover (51 percent) were listed as being most detrimental to employer brand. Job seekers note common behaviors that are a big turnoff during the interview process. Lack of feedback following interviews (62 percent), lack of communication throughout the interview process (47 percent) and discrepancies among interviewers about job duties (36 percent) were listed as the biggest turnoffs. Just as there is potential for candidates to communicate positive experiences about prospective employers, there is the same possibility of negative experiences being communicated and damaging the employer brand. Other top methods for evaluating employer brand are employee referrals (59 percent), company website (56 percent), Glassdoor or similar review sites (38 percent) and employee testimonials (28 percent). Candidates are focused on identifying alignment between how an organization presents itself to the outside world and how its employees view the company. While recognition of a company's external, commercial brand may occur pre-interview, employer brand, which includes the organization's culture and values, is what applicants notice during the interview. The overall impression that candidates take away from the interview process has the most influence on their perception of the organization, making it critically important that the interviewing team is not only on the same page, but fully focused on telling a compelling brand story. About the 2018 MRINetwork Reputation Management Study: The 2018 MRINetwork Reputation Management Study is based on a web-based survey conducted in partnership with Haley Marketing Group. The survey includes a total of 400 candidates and nearly 200 employers responding across the U.S. Parties interested in viewing the most recent report can download the Study at MRINetwork.com/Reputation-Management-Study. About MRINetwork : Management Recruiters International, Inc., branded as MRINetwork, is one of the largest executive search and recruitment organizations in the world. A subsidiary of CDI Corporation, a leading provider of engineering and information technology outsourcing solutions and professional staffing, MRINetwork has approximately 400 offices spanning four continents. Visit MRINetwork at www.mrinetwork.com. For franchising opportunities, visit http://www.mrinetwork.com/franchising/franchising-info/. SOURCE MRINetwork Related Links http://www.mrinetwork.com WHEELING, Ill., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Engis Corporation has been awarded the "2018 Exporter of the Year" by the Illinois Department of Commerce. Engis Corporation's mission is to help companies improve productivity and profitability by bringing the advantages of Superabrasives (Diamond) to industries around the world. Engis systems and components are exported to over 50 countries from its headquarters location in Wheeling, Illinois. By offering localized technical expertise and support, its customers can prevail over the challenges in today's global manufacturing environments. Engis' technical innovations, led by the demand for advanced material processing, enables them to deliver leading edge solutions globally. Their technology advantage ensures that Illinois and the United States are leading exporters in the global economy. Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity Reception The Engis Group of Companies has affiliate offices in United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, and Shanghai China. Founded in 1938, Engis is known worldwide as an innovator in the use of industrial diamond and CBN abrasives in flat lapping, honing, grinding, and polishing applications. www.engis.com 847-808-9400 [email protected] The Governor's Export Awards highlight the significant contributions of exports to Illinois' economy. Illinois companies and organizations receive awards for the following categories: Exporter of the Year, New Exporter, Service Exporter, Agricultural Business Exporter, Export Awareness and Development. Exports are a vital component for our state's economy and an important factor for continued growth. The State of Illinois takes great pride in its export successes. The Governor's Export Awards were established to recognize small and medium-sized businesses and organizations that promote export awareness for Illinois' products and services. Illinois.gov Engis is always looking for Talent! Send resume to [email protected]. Media Contact: Monica Fisher [email protected] 312-480-8365 SOURCE Engis Corporation Related Links http://engis.com DOWNERS GROVE, Ill., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ensono, a leading hybrid IT services provider, partnered with Alert Logic, a leading provider of Security-as-a-Service solutions, to deliver continuous monitoring, threat detection and response for Ensono's managed Amazon Web Services (AWS) clients. Ensono will leverage Alert Logic's managed security service offering built on Alert Logic Cloud Defender suite to deliver increased security and compliance protection for clients' data, workloads and applications based on AWS. This new service offering combines security tools, experts and operational capabilities from Alert Logic with Ensono's existing expertise in AWS managed services and infrastructure security to detect and remediate threats for Ensono's global base of managed AWS clients. Alert Logic deploys supervised machine learning and anomaly detection to power advanced threat detection backed with Security Operation Center analysts who validate escalated threats. When genuine threat is detected, Alert Logic's team of experts will work with Ensono to enforce a response plan. Using intelligence provided by Alert Logic, Ensono's operations and support teams will work directly with its clients to remediate their environment of the threat, furthering Ensono's managed AWS service capabilities and providing clients with 24/7 Security Operations Center support. "This partnership gives customers our advanced security technologies delivered through an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner equaling the best business outcomes," said Bob Layton, Vice President of Global Channels at Alert Logic. "We are teaming up with a company that, like us, truly knows the ins-an-outs of AWS environments, so we can provide businesses with the highest caliber of managed security services." Ensono chose Alert Logic as its security partner because of its ability to monitor, assess, and detect genuine workload threats in real-time. Together, Ensono and Alert Logic will help clients attain the requirements set by various compliance mandates and perform the heavy-lifting security responsibilities clients are to adhere to on AWS, all while lowering their overall cost of security on the AWS platform. "Ensono's mission is to keep businesses running, allowing our clients to focus on their core business. As cybersecurity continues to impact companies of all sizes and across industries, we want to maintain our reputation as a trusted partner for our clients, helping businesses across the globe," said Brett Moss, SVP and General Manager, Hyperscale Cloud at Ensono. "Partnering with Alert Logic in enabling new security services on our AWS offering continues to move us toward a comprehensive, robust cloud security posture built on best-in-class solutions and enhanced by cloud-native tools." Additionally, Ensono Security Director Ben Banks will present at Alert Logic Cloud Security Summit on June 20, 2018. His presentation, "The Observation of Trifles - What Sherlock Holmes teaches us about Machine Learning and Security," will take place at 14:45 BST / 08:45 CT at the Summit in London. For more information about Ensono's managed AWS services, please visit https://www.ensono.com/hybrid-cloud/managed-aws. About Ensono For business leaders managing lots of complexity or disrupting the status quo, Ensono delivers complete Hybrid IT services, from mainframe to cloud, tailored to each client's journey. Whether you're leveraging the power of the cloud or modernizing legacy technologies, you'll be on track to operate for today and optimize for tomorrow. Named a Top 15 Sourcing Service Provider by ISG, some of the world's most successful companies rely on us to help them be great at what they do. Ensono has nearly 2,000 associates globally and is ranked in The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For. Our offices are headquartered in greater Chicago. Visit us at www.ensono.com. About Alert Logic Serving more than 4,000 customers, Alert Logic is the leader in security and compliance solutions that deliver deep security insight and continuous protection at a lower cost than traditional security solutions. Alert Logic, founded in 2002, is headquartered in Houston, Texas, with offices in Austin, Seattle, Dallas, Cardiff, Belfast and London. For more information, please visit www.alertlogic.com. Media Contact: Bridget Devine 312-561-2492 [email protected] SOURCE Ensono Related Links http://www.ensono.com Assyrian Iconographer Honors His Roots An icon of Our Lady of Aradin is seen June 12 in a shrine established for persecuted Christians in the Middle East at St. Michael the Archangel Church in New York City. Iraqi Christian artist Mouthana Butres created the image. He and his family were driven from their home in Iraq by the Islamic State and now live in Lebanon as refugees. ( CNS/Gregory A. Shemitz) BEIRUT (CNS) -- When Islamic State fighters overran Qaraqosh, Iraq, in the summer of 2014, Mothana Butres was able to grab only a single volume from his father's collection of thousands of Syriac books and manuscripts. The handwritten, 600-year-old book of Syriac hymns now inspires much of Butres' work as an iconographer. From a modest walk-up apartment in Zahle, Lebanon, a city not far from the Syrian border, the Syriac Catholic iconographer and refugee creates his sacred art in a sparsely furnished living room. As he works, he sings the hymns he has committed to memory from the sole book he managed to save. Butres is the creator of the Our Lady of Aradin icon, a centerpiece of the first Catholic shrine dedicated to persecuted Christians. The shrine is housed in St. Michael's Church in New York City and was dedicated June 12. "The inspiration when I was working on Our Lady of Aradin was that it was the Virgin Mary who was protecting the Christians," Butres told Catholic News Service. He chose to present Mary in the traditional wedding dress of the Aradin area of Iraq "to represent that the Virgin Mary will always be a part of the Christians in Iraq and that she is the protector of Christians in Iraq and all the Middle East," Butres said. He said that when faced with an ultimatum by Islamic State fighters, Iraq's Christians gave up their land but refused to give up their faith. Iraqi refugee Mothana Butres poses for a photo in Zahle, Lebanon, with a scroll around his neck in this undated photo. He intends to write out the entire Bible in Syriac on a long scroll of leather. ( CNS/courtesy of Mothana Butres) "The people who were persecuted, their blood is a stronger message than anything I could ever convey," he said. But the recent persecution and the oppression suffered by his ancestors led him "to the way I think and the way I do my work." Butres said he believes his icons can be an instrument for intercessory prayer. The prayers of the people who visit the shrine in New York and pray before the icon of Our Lady of Aradin are joined with those of the persecuted Christians. "Based on what Jesus told us, that 'if two people are gathered in my name, I will be among them,'" he said. The Syriac book Butres treasures from his father's library collection also awakened him to the lost practice of writing books by hand, especially in the Syriac language, which is spoken by Christians in certain areas of Syria and Iraq, including Qaraqosh. Syriac also is used in the liturgy of some Eastern churches, including the Syriac Catholic, Syriac Orthodox and Maronite Catholic churches. The language is related to Aramaic, the language of Jesus. "I'm trying to revive the value of the handwritten texts. Books used to be handwritten," Butres said. As part of an ongoing personal project, Butres intends to write out the entire Bible in Syriac on a long scroll of leather just over a foot wide. In three months of work, the tiny, intricate text he has etched extends 16 feet in length and comprises the first five chapters of the Old Testament. "I believe that in writing out the Bible, we can discover it in a new, deeper perspective, more than just reading it," he said. In his icons, Butres often incorporates streams of handwritten text related to the image, which contributes to preserving the Syriac language, heritage and spirituality. The icon of Our Lady of Aradin, for example, includes the Hail Mary in Syriac. Butres' introduction to iconography began at age 12; a deacon at his church in Qaraqosh taught him the ancient art as well as formulas for producing colors and varnishes from natural products, for example, using eggs and wine for shades of red, using beeswax for varnish and using deer musk to give the icon a scent. Prayer and religious formation were part of Butres' daily life growing up in a Syriac Catholic family as one of 16 children. "We were very close to the church," said. "Every day at dusk, we went to the church to pray," he recalled, adding that for "anyone who didn't participate, there was no dinner." The same went for missing Sunday Mass: no lunch and dinner. That pious upbringing fostered vocations, he said. One of Butres' sisters became a Dominican nun. His brother, Nimatullah, is a priest serving the Syriac Catholic Diocese of Our Lady of Deliverance, which is based in Bayonne, New Jersey. Father Butres attended the dedication ceremony for the Our Lady of Aradin shrine in New York. The artistic Butres became a deacon at age 20 and studied theology at Holy Spirit University in Lebanon, earning a bachelor's degree. Butres intended to complete his master's degree in theology, carrying out his research in Qaraqosh, but had to abandon all he had accomplished there when Islamic State attacked his childhood home. That home, overtaken, gutted and ruined by Islamic State, is under repair now. From Lebanon, Butres created the Our Lady of Qaraqosh icon as a gift for his family, intending it as "a protector of the house where she was always present." ATLANTA, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Criminals are becoming more creative in their approach to commit synthetic ID fraud. According to the Federal Trade Commission, 1.7 percent of identity fraud complaints indicated that auto loans or leases had been generated fraudulently1, up from 0.8 percent in 2015. Equifax Inc. (NYSE: EFX), a global information solutions company, is working with Oplogic, a company that provides CRM solutions for automotive dealerships, to help reduce unwanted threats stemming from synthetic ID fraud. Synthetic ID fraud occurs when a criminal combines real (usually stolen) and fake information to create a new identity. The two companies' solutions recently helped stop an auto crime at a Michigan dealership. Driver's Synthetic Identity Verification from Oplogic, powered with Equifax identity validation tools, is helping auto dealers reduce unwanted threats. In the attempted fraud ring scam, a woman visited a dealership with the intent to purchase a vehicle. When she presented her Texas driver's license, the dealership concluded that the license was synthetic after running a license scan in the patented Oplogic Deal Operator CRM system. When the same person made a similar attempt shortly thereafter at a different dealership that uses Oplogic Deal Operator CRM, authorities made an arrest. "The Oplogic Deal Operator CRM combined with Equifax fraud detection and identity validation tools is helping dealerships stop criminals in their showrooms before the crime occurs," said John Parent, President of Oplogic. "This adds a much-needed level of protection for dealers and lenders." Using this system, dealers can identify fraudulent credentials early in the sales process and before the test drive occurs. The process involves the dealership scanning the potential buyer's driver's license using Oplogic CRM software. During the scan, the license is verified against Equifax data and fraud tools to confirm identity. "Fraudulent activity has become more complex over the years, and it continues to cost billions in lost revenue for dealers and lenders," said Ken Allen, SVP, Identity and Fraud, Equifax. "Our data analytics platforms have also become much more sophisticated, and in partnering with leading solution providers such as Oplogic we are making great strides in reducing the number of fraudsters who attempt to create synthetic identities inside the showroom." Equifax has expanded its set of offerings that help mitigate synthetic ID fraud with the addition of FraudIQ Synthetic ID Alerts which are based on patent-pending algorithms that analyze attributes such as authorized user velocity and identity discrepancies to help determine if the identity presented could be synthetic. Please visit our Insights blog and follow us on LinkedIn. About Oplogic Oplogic (formerly Wilson Technologies) was established in 2000, with its headquarters in Metro Detroit Michigan. Oplogic has evolved to be one of the leading automotive solutions for simplifying dealer operations and enhancing customer experience by providing an intuitive "Deal Operator" solution which includes: CRM, Internet Lead Management, Telephony, BDC, Inventory, Desking, F&I, Compliance, Equity and Training Services. These tools standardize and streamline processes which enhance efficiency while building revenue and increasing profits for some of the largest dealer groups in the country. www.oplogic.com About Equifax Equifax is a global information solutions company that uses unique data, innovative analytics, technology and industry expertise to power organizations and individuals around the world by transforming knowledge into insights that help make more informed business and personal decisions. Headquartered in Atlanta, Ga., Equifax operates or has investments in 24 countries in North America, Central and South America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region. It is a member of Standard & Poor's (S&P) 500 Index, and its common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol EFX. Equifax employs 10,400 employees worldwide. 1: "The Faces of Fraud"; September 11, 2017; Automotive News FOR MORE INFORMATION Wyatt Jefferies Media Relations 404-885-8907 [email protected] SOURCE Equifax Inc. Related Links http://www.equifax.com Tongji University Robo-Advisor Lab set to guide the sector as it moves into the next stage of development and into what is being termed as the China's financial robo-advisors era SHANGHAI, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The unveiling ceremony for China's first robo-advisor lab, jointly established by the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology Management (CASTM), Tongji University and Shanghai Timeasset Financial Information Service Co., Ltd. ("Timeasset Financial"), was held on May 23. The lab brought together a number of leading industry experts, among them, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and Tongji University vice chancellor Wu Zhiqiang who has been appointed as general advisor, CASTM executive associate dean and Germany-based Bosch chair professor Huo Jiazhen who serves as the director, and Timeasset Financial chairman Li Yangang and founder of the first artificial intelligence (AI)-based investment decision making system in China who serves as the deputy director. Executives from more than 50 financial institutions attended the unveiling ceremony to witness what is being termed as the beginning of China's financial robo-advisors era. As an advanced form of automation, robo-advisors are part of a new financial service that has arisen over the past two years, which, in a narrow sense, means "a robot can help you allocate assets" and, in a broader sense, "the internet can help you with your asset management", in a way that is, in all respects, at variance with all existing online financial services. Despite what has been considered a late start, China's robo-advisor industry is now here, and the next step is for standards to be put in place, something that is urgently needed. Professor Huo said at the ceremony that CASTM is a scientific and technological management research platform established within Tongji University under the support and guidance of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China and the Shanghai Municipal Committee of Science and Technology. Its management model is based on the one advocated by the Tongji SEM (School of Economics & Management, Tongji University) and the school itself will provide academic support for the lab. The lab's role is to bring together top-level tech professionals who will promote cooperation at all levels - production, education and research - with the mission of creating China's premier think tank platform for the sector. The professor further explained, "The goal in the establishment of the Robo-Advisor Lab is to cater to China's call to promote the deep integration of the internet-based AI and big data industries." Speaking of the responsibilities of the lab after its completion, professor Huo said: "As a third-party think tank platform, the Robo-Advisor Lab will periodically publish robo-advisor industry whitepapers and reports after completing the evaluation and dynamic monitoring of industry developments and technology service providers. The lab also provides complete solutions and system integration services customized for the robo-advisor systems at financial institutions, in addition to career and technology training in the field." Timeasset Financial, as a partner in the creation of the Tongji University Robo-Advisor Lab, has rich experience in the industry. Talking about the original intention of establishing the lab with Tongji University, the Timeasset chairman, Mr. Li, said, "The platform is composed of experts in science, education, research and industry, with the mission of driving industrial innovation and development. As the largest quantitative investment team in China's public offering fund industry, Timeasset Financial's AI investment decision system has moved beyond a traditional quantitative investment approach that relies solely on a single strategy, achieving the technical breakthrough of, what could be termed as, a "quantitative investment strategy in mass production". With the massive surge in AI technology, we should shoulder this mission which calls for innovation and working hand in hand with scientific research institutions with the goal of driving the healthy development of the industry." At the same time, Mr. Li dissected the roadmap for China's robo-advisor sector. He said that the role of AI in the field of finance manifests itself principally in four fields: intelligent language processing, financial search engines, robo-advisors and intelligent investment decision-making. The robo-advisor business originated in the United States and is already quite mature there. The United States is now moving towards the high-end of AI in terms of investment decision-making, much the same as the road taken by the robo-advisor sector. In his view, China's robo-advisor industry is in the ascendant, however has meandered in "conceptual hype" and "copycat approaches" for the past two years. When talking about long-term development, AI-driven investment decision-making technology is the industry's core competitiveness and what needs to be focused on if China's investment institutions are to compete with their overseas rivals. The establishment of the Robo-Advisor Lab has already played an important role in enhancing the overall competitiveness of the sector. SOURCE School of Economics and Management, Tongji University HOLON, Israel, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Regional Dusseldorf District Court entirely dismissed the Regenlab infringement claim against Estar Medical, concludes no infringement of patents Estar Technologies Ltd. (Estar Medical), a leading global developer and manufacturer of innovative medical technologies in the biologics, regenerative medicine and platelet rich plasma (PRP) fields, today announced that on June 5, 2018, the Dusseldorf Regional Court ruled in favor of Estar Medical in the patent infringement lawsuit initiated by Regenlab SA. "We are pleased that the Dusseldorf Court ruled in Estar Medical's favor, agreeing that Estar did not infringe the Regenlab patent. Estar Medical has remained confident in its non-infringement positions since the case was first filed in 2016. It is gratifying to see that confidence affirmed," said Aaron Esteron, CEO at Estar Medical. "We believe that this win further validates our leadership position in the PRP and Cell Therapy market." It should be noted that on March 29, 2018, the European patent Office (EPO) had already issued a preliminary non-binding opinion that the patent asserted in the name of Antoine Turzi and licensed to Regen Lab SA, EP 2073862 B1, is invalid. In its preliminary opinion, the opposition division of the EPO found the Turzi and Regenlab patent to be invalid on the grounds of (i) added matter, (ii) lack of novelty, and (iii) lack of sufficient disclosure. With respect to the prior disclosure issue, the Opposition Division of the EPO found that "it is shown beyond any reasonable doubt that the product was available prior to priority, a prior use had taken place and the features of the product could be investigated." Unless the Opposition Division of the EPO changes its views at an oral hearing, the result will be the complete invalidation and revocation of the Turzi PRP patent in all contracting states of the European Patent Convention. About Estar Technologies Ltd. Founded in 1991, Estar is a global leader and innovator in the biologics, cell therapy and platelet rich plasma arena. Estar's products are globally marketed mainly under the renowned Tropocells and Cellenis brands. Estar has developed a unique and effective technology for the simple preparation of PRP by enabling the physician to easily and effectively separate and concentrate growth factors taken from the patient's own blood for the purpose of building new tissues and effectively accelerate the natural autologous wound healing process. For more information about Estar Medical or its PRP and Cell Therapy technology and products, please visit http://www.estar-medical.com. Contact: Yuval Esteron [email protected] SOURCE Estar Technologies Ltd. (Estar Medical) BEND, Ore., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- EVIO Inc. ("EVIO" or the "Company"), (OTCQB: EVIO), a leading provider of cannabis testing and scientific research for the regulated cannabis industry in North America, is pleased to announce that Felipe Campusano has joined EVIO's board of directors, as independent director. Mr. Campusano graduated from The University of Toronto Faculty of Pharmacy in 2006. Concurrent with the day he received his Ontario license, Campusano purchased his first pharmacy in a remote location of Northern Ontario. Over the course of the last twelve years Felipe has accumulated interest in over 50 pharmacies across Canada. Mr. Campusano is a founding partner and current President of Liver Care Canada, a multidisciplinary network of leading healthcare specialists dedicated to the highest level of care for patients with liver disease. Over the course of three years he has guided the company to over fifteen sites across Ontario and is currently pursuing expansion into additional provinces. Liver Care Canada has helped with the treatment of tens of thousands of patients with various kinds of liver disease. Mr. Campusano is also the founding partner of Cannabis Care Canada, whose name was changed to National Access Cannabis Medical when fifty-one percent was sold to National Access Cannabis (NAC) corporation, a publicly traded company, in 2018. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of National Access Cannabis. "When dealing with medications, accuracy and appropriateness as well as both the patients and healthcare practitioners confidence in that accuracy and appropriateness are fundamental. I believe EVIO can have a very important role to play and I look forward to helping in any way I can," said Felipe Campusano. "We are pleased to welcome Felipe to join our board and look forward to his contributions," said William Waldrop, CEO of EVIO. "He's been very successful operating Canadian pharmacies and his insight into the cannabis industry will be valuable to our business environment, including our new Bioscience division. Felipe's expertise in pharmaceutical business management will strengthen EVIO's ability to generate partnerships with medical and healthcare providers. He has disrupted the pharmaceutical industry with major expansions and with his guidance we look to rapidly grow our presence in Canada." About EVIO Inc. EVIO Inc. is a leading provider of cannabis testing and scientific research for the regulated cannabis industry. The Company's EVIO Labs division operates coast-to-coast providing state-mandated ancillary services to ensure the safety and quality of the nation's cannabis supply. EVIO is on track to have 18 of its state-of-the-art testing facilities by year-end 2018. For more information, visit www.eviolabs.com. Safe Harbor Statement Any statements in this press release that are not statements of historical fact maybe considered to be forward-looking statements. Statements may contain certain forward-looking statements pertaining to future anticipated or projected plans, performance and developments, as well as other statements relating to future operations and results. Words such as "may," "will," "expect," "believe," "anticipate," "estimate," "intends," "goal," "objective," "seek," "attempt," or variations of these or similar words, identify forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements by their nature are estimates of future results only and involve substantial risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to risks associated with the uncertainty of future financial results, additional financing requirements, development of new products, our ability to complete our product testing and launch our product commercially, the acceptance of our product in the marketplace, the uncertainty of the laws and regulations relating to cannabis, the impact of competitive products or pricing, technological changes, the effect of economic conditions and other uncertainties detailed from time to time in our reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, available at www.sec.gov or www.eviolabs.com. CONTACT INFORMATION Cheryl Kramp Director of Marketing EVIO Inc. 888.544.EVIO [email protected] SOURCE EVIO Inc. Related Links http://www.eviolabs.com NEEDHAM, Mass., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Source Creative, the leading global information and archival resource of video ads for advertisers, ad agencies and production companies worldwide, today announced the acquisition of shots, an international source of news, trends and inspiration for advertising creative. The deal with Media Business Insight, shots' parent company, significantly increases the value of Source Creative's offering, adding thousands of new resources to the existing database of TV commercials, music videos, branded content and viral videos. In addition to shots' curated creative content, Source Creative will integrate the platform's news agency including staff writers and editors, creating a new portal to serve timely and original editorial to subscribers. The shots name will remain. Source Creative will also take over shots' long-standing series of industry events following the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Sales representatives for shots will also join the Source Creative team. The acquisition of shots follows that of collaboration and project management toolset Slate in 2016. By incorporating these services with parent company Extreme Reach's cloud platform for TV and video ad workflow and Talent & Rights management, brands, agencies, creatives and production houses will have a single, secure platform from which they can get information and inspiration, manage and share video assets and ensure smooth processes for collaboration, project approvals, production and sharing of creative reels. "Adding shots to Source Creative and Slate means that one platform now provides all the inspiration, information and tools for sharing and collaborating that brand and agency clients and the global creative community can rely on," said James Straker, Managing Director, Source Creative. "We are delighted to welcome shots to our family and to have such a fine team of editors and sales professionals with deep industry contacts join our ranks." "The partnership of shots and Source Creative feels both extremely exciting and completely natural," said Danny Edwards, Editor of shots. "It will allow the combined brands to offer even greater analysis, deeper insight, broader inspiration and truly global editorial coverage of the creative advertising industry. I'm excited to work with Jamie Madge, James Straker and the rest of the team to help create a resource that will be at the heart of the business." "Like pretty much everyone in the industry, I've long been an admirer of shots and the endlessly creative editorial Danny and his team put out, so to finally be joining forces is terrifically exciting," said Jamie Madge, Worldwide Editor for Source Creative. "Over the next few months, I think subscribers to both services can look forward to something really special." The acquisition, announced on the second day of Cannes Lions, will be celebrated at the shots annual, invitation only, beach party on Thursday, June 21st. About Source Creative Source Creative is the world's leading commercial information and archival resource for ad agencies, production companies, advertisers, and other members of the global creative community. Its platform provides subscribers with an unparalleled wealth of data around TV commercials, music videos, branded content and viral videos. A business unit of Extreme Reach, Source Creative is headquartered in Boca Raton, FL and has offices in London, Melbourne and Amsterdam. Extreme Reach is a cloud-based enterprise platform for the brand advertising ecosystem with the core technology essential for the seamless activation of TV and Video campaigns and the management of talent and rights. About shots Launched in 1990, shots is the world's leading commercials title, providing news, insight and inspiration for creatives internationally as well as being the foremost source of news and information for the creative community. Press Contact: Michelle O'Rourke Clarity PR for Extreme Reach [email protected] 646.207.6187 SOURCE Extreme Reach VIRGINIA BEACH, Va., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- EY today announced that David Wolfe, Co-founder and CEO of Leesa Sleep, the leading direct-to-consumer online luxury mattress retailer, received the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 Award in the Consumer Products category in the Mid-Atlantic region. The award recognizes entrepreneurs who are excelling in areas such as innovation, financial performance and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. Wolfe was selected by an independent panel of judges, and the award was presented at a special gala event at The Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner in McLean, Virginia on June 14, 2018. "Being named as Mid-Atlantic Entrepreneur of the Year in the consumer products category is an unexpected honor," said Wolfe. "The recognition reflects the incredible team effort that has propelled Leesa to extraordinary growth in terms of sales and our mission to be a force for good in the world by donating one mattress to a shelter for every ten we sell. To date we have donated almost 30,000 mattresses. Our mission is the driving force behind life at Leesa. Thank you to all involved for selecting Leesa for this important recognition." Since 1986, EY has honored entrepreneurs whose ingenuity, spirit of innovation and discipline have driven their companies' success, transformed their industries and made a positive impact on their communities. Now in its 32nd year, past honorees have included: Howard Schultz of Starbucks Corporation of Starbucks Corporation Pierre Omidyar of eBay, Inc. Jodi Berg of Vitamix of Vitamix Robert Unanue of Goya Foods of Goya Foods Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn and of LinkedIn Andreas Bechtolsheim and Jayshree Ullal of Arista Networks and of Arista Networks Hamdi Ulukaya of Chobani of Chobani James Park of Fitbit of Fitbit J.W. "Bill" Marriott, Jr. of Marriott International, Inc. Lonnie Moulder and Mary Lynne Hedley , PhD, of TESARO, Inc. As a Mid-Atlantic award winner, Wolfe is now eligible for consideration for the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 National Awards. Award winners in several national categories, as well as the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner, will be announced at the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Awards gala in Palm Springs, California, on November 10, 2018. The awards are the culminating event of the Strategic Growth Forum, the nation's most prestigious gathering of high-growth, market-leading companies. Sponsors Founded and produced by EY, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards are nationally sponsored in the US by SAP America, the Kauffman Foundation and Merrill Corporation. In the Mid-Atlantic region, platinum sponsors also include Jones Lang LaSalle and PNC Bank. Gold sponsors include Cooley LLP, DLA Piper, Kelly Benefit Strategies, SolomonEdwards, and the Washington Business Journal and Baltimore Business Journal. About Leesa Sleep, LLC Based in Virginia Beach, Va., Leesa is a direct-to-consumer online luxury mattress company that offers American-made mattresses delivered directly to consumers' doors. From its start, Leesa has measured its own success not just by the bottom line, but by the company's overall social impact. To date, Leesa's One-Ten program has provided more than 26,000 mattresses to those in need. Leesa offers a 100-night risk-free trial, free shipping and no-hassle returns. In 2016, Leesa was recognized as a certified B Corp, joining forces with more than 2,100 companies using business as a force for good. The company currently offers free shipping to the U.S., U.K., Canada and Germany. For more information, visit www.leesa.com. About Entrepreneur Of The Year Entrepreneur Of The Year, founded by EY, is the world's most prestigious business awards program for entrepreneurs, chosen from an independent panel of judges including entrepreneurs and prominent leaders from business, finance, and the local community. The program makes a difference through the way it encourages entrepreneurial activity among those with potential and recognizes the contribution of people who inspire others with their vision, leadership and achievement. As the first and only truly global awards program of its kind, Entrepreneur Of The Year celebrates those who are building and leading successful, growing and dynamic businesses, recognizing them through regional, national and global awards programs in more than 145 cities in more than 60 countries. ey.com/eoy About EY's Growth Markets Network EY's worldwide Growth Markets Network is dedicated to serving the changing needs of high-growth companies. For more than 30 years, we've helped many of the world's most dynamic and ambitious companies grow into market leaders. Whether working with international mid-cap companies or early stage, venture-backed businesses, our professionals draw upon their extensive experience, insight and global resources to help your business succeed. For more information, please visit us at ey.com/sgm or follow news on Twitter @EY_Growth. About EY EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services we deliver help build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. We develop outstanding leaders who team to deliver on our promises to all of our stakeholders. In so doing, we play a critical role in building a better working world for our people, for our clients and for our communities. EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com. This news release has been issued by Ernst & Young LLP, a member of the global EY organization that provides services to clients in the US. For more information, please visit ey.com. Contact: Erica Cooper Company: Leesa Sleep Email: [email protected] SOURCE Leesa Sleep, LLC CANNES, France, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- FCB is off to a strong start at this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, with the FCB Health Network being named "Healthcare Network of the Year" for the first time ever. This accolade is given annually and honors the "healthcare network that obtains the most points" in both award wins and shortlist entries across the Pharma and Health & Wellness categories at Lions Health. Lions Health is the portion of the Cannes Lions Festival dedicated to recognizing "creativity with the power to change lives" by delivering the "insights, ideas, tools and techniques that lead to life-changing outcomes." The award builds on the strong winning streak for the FCB Health Network, particularly Area 23, which includes the agency's recent dominance at the 2018 Manny Awards. At the event, hosted by Med Ad News, Area 23 made history by taking home all three top titles at once "Agency of the Year," "Most Creative Agency" and "Most Admired Agency" for the second year running. Aside from securing one of the Festival's most coveted honors, the FCB Health Network also won notable accolades during the Pharma award ceremony. The list of winners comprises: "Healthcare Network of the Year" FCB Health Network Silver "Battle in the Bone" Area 23 Silver "The World's Smallest Booth" Area 23 Silver FCB Health "5 Million Puffs" Bronze FCB Health "5 Million Puffs" Commenting on the network's unprecedented success, Dana Maiman, chief executive officer and president of FCB Health, attributed the award wins to FCB Health's focus on innovation in the healthcare space. "A few years ago, [FCB Health Chief Creative Officer] Rich Levy and I set a goal for our agencies to raise the bar creatively and develop the most forward-thinking work that challenges norms. Our agencies have not only met this goal they've surpassed it, and continually set the bar higher and higher for themselves. Our strong performance at both the Manny Awards and now Cannes Lions speaks to level of unbeatable talent and caliber of work within the network as a whole, and I am so proud to be a part of it." Rich Levy was onstage with his team to receive one of the evening's top honors. He remarked: "Winning 'Healthcare Network of the Year' is a dream for us. It's surreal. Our aim as a network at FCB Health has always been to create the most impactful, inventive and boundary-breaking work for our clients, and to try to transform healthcare advertising in some way to leave it better than we found it. This honor would not be possible without my partner, Dana, as well the rockstar pioneers at our 17 FCB Health Network agencies across the globe. Congratulations to all of our teams on this incredible recognition." Collectively, the FCB Network notched four Lions on day one, made up of three Silver and one Bronze. Refer to the list below for full information on each win: Cannes Lions Pharma Award Office Campaign Title Client/Brand Category/Media SILVER Area 23 Battle in the Bone Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Pharma Regulated SILVER Area 23 The World's Smallest Booth Eli Lilly and Company Pharma Regulated SILVER FCB Health 5 Million Puffs (Kitchen, Living Room, Garage) Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma Regulated BRONZE FCB Health 5 Million Puffs (Kitchen, Living Room, Garage) Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma Regulated: Healthcare Professional About FCB Health FCB Health is one of the world's most awarded communications networks, focused on creating game-changing marketing solutions for consumers, patients and healthcare professionals. With specialized units covering a wide range of wellness practices, FCB Health employs more than 1,500 people across an extensive global network, delivering multichannel capabilities that include DTC and HCP communications, professional education, branding, scientific services, strategic planning and media services. Its integrated agency offering includes Area 23, Neon, FCBCure, FCB Halesway, ICC, ProHealth, Hudson Global, Trio, Mosaic Group, FCBVio, BX the Branding Experience Group, and Studio Rx. The FCB Health network was named "Agency of the Year" by Med Ad News in 2006, 2009, 2015 and 2017, and by Medical Marketing & Media in 2007, 2010, 2015 and 2017. In seven of the past eight years, an FCB Health company has received "Most Creative Agency" honors, and its Area 23 unit was named "Healthcare Agency of the Year" in 2017 by Cannes Lions, the world's preeminent annual creative awards festival. About FCB Global FCB (Foote, Cone & Belding) is a global, fully integrated marketing communications company with a heritage of creativity and success dating from 1873. Based on a deeply developed understanding of diversified local markets and global cultures, FCB focuses on creating "Never Finished" campaign ideas for clients that reflect a deep understanding of the brand's past, a respect for the present and an anticipation of the future potential. With more than 8,000 people in 109 operations in 80 countries, the company is part of the Interpublic Group of Companies (NYSE: IPG). Learn more at and follow us on Twitter and Instagram (@FCBglobal) and Facebook (FCB Global). SOURCE FCB Health The Player Series replaces the Standard Series and is the new foundational offering and first official step into Fender's electric guitar product lines. Built for players who dream of taking their art to the next level, these guitars have a signature sound and classic look that only Fender's iconic models can provide. The ultimate creative partner, Fender Player Series guitars and basses are the respected and legitimate choice, unlocking infinite creative opportunities for players who choose to pair their individual style with Fender's often imitated, but never duplicated gear; and with every detail considered in the design process, these models are the best builds ever offered in the $649.99-$774.99 price range. "As artists dig deep to find new sounds and means of expression, the guitar continues to be central to so much of this creativity that's happening in music and culture," said Justin Norvell, SVP Fender Products. "We hope to empower the next generation of artists and players by arming them with the best tools to help bring their craft to life. The Players Series guitars embody that coveted Fender sound and form that has made our guitars iconic with so many generations of creators." Respecting Fender's heritage while maintaining an innovative spirit, the Player Series blends authentic Fender tone, sound and style with a modern edge that's versatile enough to handle any style of music. The series sets a new benchmark for quality and performance, with upgraded features, including Alnico pickups for all models, updated body radii, 22 fret necks, upgraded bridges, fresh, bold colors and a revised classic logo for a more traditional look. With 94 SKUs across 21 models and hero colors including Sage Green, Polar White, Tide Pool, Butter Cream, and Sonic Red, artists and players can express themselves in limitless ways. The new line is already being used across genres including punk, jazz, country, rock and more by top artists, such as: Turnstile, Mattson 2, Whitey Morgan, Cherry Glazerr, Melanie Faye, Jeff Gilteman and Saya Gray accompanying each on their musical journey toward exceptional artistry. The Fender Player Series includes the following models: Player Stratocaster Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Stratocaster Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Stratocaster Left-Handed, Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Stratocaster Left-Handed, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Stratocaster HSS, Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Stratocaster HSS, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Stratocaster HSH, Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Stratocaster HSH, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Stratocaster Plus Top, Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Stratocaster HSS Plus Top, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Stratocaster Floyd Rose, Maple Fingerboard $749.99 Player Stratocaster Floyd Rose, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $774.99 Player Telecaster Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Telecaster Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Telecaster Left-Handed, Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Telecaster Left-Handed, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Telecaster HH, Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Telecaster HH, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Jaguar Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Jaguar Bass Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Jaguar Bass Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Jazzmaster Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Precision Bass Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Precision Bass Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Precision Bass Left-Handed, Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Precision Bass Left-Handed, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Jazz Bass Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Jazz Bass Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Jazz Bass Left-Handed, Maple Fingerboard $649.99 Player Jazz Bass Left-Handed, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Jazz Bass Fretless, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $674.99 Player Jazz Bass V, Pau Ferro Fingerboard $774.99 To learn more about the Fender Player Series and the celebration of music, watch the launch video here. Access more information on each model and series product images here. For a step-by-step breakdown and demo of the Player Series, click here. For technical specs, additional information on new Fender products and to find a retail partner near you, visit www.fender.com. Join the conversation on social media by following @Fender. ABOUT FENDER MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS CORPORATION: Since 1946, Fender has revolutionized music and culture as one of the world's leading musical instrument manufacturers, marketers and distributors. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation (FMIC), whose portfolio of brands includes Fender, Squier, Gretsch guitars, Jackson, EVH and Charvel, follows a player-centric approach to crafting the highest quality instruments and musical solutions across genres. FMIC is dedicated to unlocking the power of music through electric and acoustic guitars, amplifiers, pro audio, accessories and digital products that inspire and enable musical expression at every stage, from beginners to history-making legends. SOURCE Fender Musical Instruments Corporation Related Links http://www.fender.com SEATTLE, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Field Roast Grain Meat Co., the original manufacturer of premium plant-based meat and cheese products, today announces an exclusive distribution agreement with Essen Foods. Following a competitive review of distribution partners serving Field Roast in Australia and New Zealand, Essen Foods was selected to streamline the distribution process in these markets due to their vision for the brand and vast experience in as an importer and distributor of American-made food products. "We're so pleased to expand our relationship with Essen Foods by naming them the exclusive distributor for Field Roast products in Australia and New Zealand," stated Dan Curtin, President of Field Roast. "Coming off an incredible first quarter where the brand experienced 81% YOY sales increase overall, this is a strategic decision we've made to create efficiencies supporting our continued growth and look forward to continuing this momentum internationally with the support of Essen Foods." Essen Foods' unmatched network of affiliated cold storage, transport and delivery infrastructure partners will expand distribution for Field Roast grain meat products including Field Roast Sausages, Deli Slices, FieldBurger, Roasts, Loaves and the brand's new frozen set. With this agreement, Essen Foods will also provide Field Roast with regional advertising, in-store marketing support, trade show presence, Australian label compliance and much more. "Essen Foods is delighted have been selected to be the exclusive distributor of Field Roast products," said Yeshaya Brown, Founder of Essen Foods. "We are thrilled to work together in achieving full market penetration of the premium Field Roast product range throughout Australia." Through Essen Foods distribution channels, Field Roast is stocked in a vast network of independently-owned Australian retailers including Vegan Pantry, The Leo's Fine Food & Wine Network, Supabarn, The Cruelty Free Shop, Chapley's IGA Drake's IGA, Ritchies IGA and Foodworks. About Essen Foods Essen Foods is a Melbourne, Australia-based distribution company specializing in ambient, chilled and frozen food items. Canadian-born Yeshaya Brown founded the company in 2007 with a mission to connect consumers of the Southern Hemisphere with his favorite U.S. and Canadian products. The company has since grown to become a powerhouse of frozen food and grocery distribution. Essen Foods is now the trusted sole Australian wholesaler and distributor for a number of premium international brands. Essen Foods distributes to Victoria, NSW, Western Australia, South Australia, The Northern Territory, Queensland, Tasmania and New Zealand. About Field Roast Grain Meat Co. Founded in 1997, Field Roast Grain Meat Co. creates artisanal plant-based meats and cheese, made with real ingredients and traditional food making practices. Its ever-expanding array of products includes roasts, sausages, deli slices, loaves, a frankfurter, a burger, and vegan cheese slices. Field Roast products can be found in thousands of retail stores and over 500 restaurant menus nationwide. Field Roast was honored to be named VegNews Magazine's 2015 Company of the Year. For more information, visit www.fieldroast.com, or join the conversation on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. SOURCE Field Roast Grain Meat Co. Related Links http://www.fieldroast.com Now celebrating its 32 nd year, the program recognizes entrepreneurs in over 145 cities across 60 countries who demonstrate excellence and extraordinary success in such areas as innovation, financial performance, and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. Under Lau and Ansari's leadership, FieldEdge has grown to become a leading SaaS provider in the field service management industry, an Inc. 5000 fastest growing company, and a Glassdoor's Best Places to Work. "Receiving the Entrepreneur Of The Year Award is a great honor for the entire FieldEdge team," said Ansari. "We are incredibly grateful to every FieldEdge employee for their passion and dedication in creating a world-class customer experience and a thriving company culture," said Lau. As Florida award winners, FieldEdge is now eligible for consideration for the EY Entrepreneur Of the Year 2018 National Awards, that will be announced at the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Awards gala in Palm Springs, California, on November 10, 2018. The awards are the culminating event of the Strategic Growth Forum, the nation's most prestigious gathering of high-growth, market-leading companies. For additional information on the program and winners, visit www.ey.com. About FieldEdge FieldEdge is the leading vertical SaaS business that enables contractors to run their small businesses with ease, save time and make more money through targeted marketing and improved resource utilization. FieldEdge has helped thousands of service-based organizations increase sales performance and overall workforce productivity by managing all aspects of their daily operations since 1980. FieldEdge is a hyper-growth software company with a startup culture that is backed by over 35 years of industry-leading knowledge. FieldEdge has offices in Fort Myers, Atlanta, and Toronto. To learn more visit www.fieldedge.com or click here to visit their Glassdoor page. About Entrepreneur of the Year Entrepreneur Of The Year is the world's most prestigious business award for entrepreneurs. The unique award makes a difference through the way it encourages entrepreneurial activity among those with potential and recognizes the contribution of people who inspire others with their vision, leadership and achievement. For over 30 years the Entrepreneur Of The Year program has celebrated those who are building and leading successful, growing and dynamic businesses, recognizing them through regional, national and global awards programs in more than 145 cities in more than 60 countries. About EY EY is a global leader in assurance, tax, transaction and advisory services. The insights and quality services EY delivers help to build trust and confidence in the capital markets and in economies the world over. EY plays a critical role in building a better working world for their people, for their clients and for their communities. SOURCE FieldEdge Related Links http://www.fieldedge.com CARRBORO, N.C., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Fleet Feet, the retail leader in building and supporting thriving local running communities, announced today it has tapped Fish Consulting as its public relations agency of record to lead the brand's communications strategies. Fish plans to help Fleet Feet deepen its visibility among consumers through national media and integrated marketing campaigns. The agency will focus its efforts on highlighting several key brand initiatives, including fit id 3D scanning technology and the Fleet Feet customer experience, The Big Run national 5K event, and Fleet Feet Running Club. "We're thrilled to partner with Fish Consulting as we develop strategies to amplify Fleet Feet's reach with consumers nationwide," said Ellen Donahue, senior director of marketing for Fleet Feet. "We have powerful stories to tell about the efforts of our stores to inspire and empower the runner in everyone, and Fish Consulting's success in storytelling for other brands made them a unanimous choice." Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Fish Consulting offers communications and marketing services primarily to franchises in the foodservice, retail, service, hospitality and healthcare industries, with capabilities ranging from brand building, consumer marketing and media relations to franchisee recruitment, crisis management and cause marketing. "We are honored to have been selected by Fleet Feet as its agency of record," said Lorne Fisher, CFE, CEO and managing partner of Fish Consulting. "Fleet Feet's values, collaborative nature and focus on people are traits that match our own, and we look forward to working together to tell the brand's story in meaningful and impactful ways." Fleet Feet currently stands at 176 locations in 38 states, and has an e-commerce platform at www.fleetfeet.com that fulfills customer orders from the local inventory of its franchises. Fleet Feet officially introduced its partnership with Fish Consulting at its annual national franchise conference, taking place now in Minneapolis, Minn., through June 22. About Fleet Feet Founded in 1976, Fleet Feet is the largest franchisor of locally owned and operated running stores with 176 locations in 38 states and a national headquarters in Carrboro, N.C. Committed to offering expert advice, intelligent products, personalized solutions, robust training programs, and 24 / 7 brand access at fleetfeetsports.com, each Fleet Feet location serves runners based on the belief that Running Changes Everything. Stay inspired, motivated, and connected @fleetfeetsports. About Fish Consulting Fish is proud to leverage its experience in franchising to serve some of the industry's leading concepts including Dunkin' Donuts, Wendy's, The Dwyer Group, FASTSIGNS, FOCUS Brands and Tropical Smoothie Cafe, among others. The agency's support for franchise clients range from brand building, franchisee recruitment and internal communications to crisis communications, cause marketing, local/national media relations and social media management. Fish is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with operations in Washington, D.C., and London. For more information call 954-893-9150 or visit www.fish-consulting.com. For additional franchise insights follow Fish on Twitter @fishconsulting or Facebook. MEDIA CONTACT: Ellen Donahue Senior Director of Marketing [email protected] Andie Biederman Fish Consulting [email protected] SOURCE Fleet Feet Related Links http://www.fleetfeet.com CLEVELAND, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Forest City Realty Trust, Inc., (NYSE: FCEA) today announced that it will webcast its 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders beginning at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, June 26, 2018. The meeting will be held in the offices of Thompson Hine, LLP, Key Tower, 39th Floor, 127 Public Square in downtown Cleveland. The audio-only webcast of the formal business meeting can be accessed by visiting the main Investors page of the Company's website, www.forestcity.net at the time of the meeting. A webcast replay will also be available following the meeting. Owners of Forest City common stock at the close of business on May 7, 2018, are invited to attend the meeting. Stockholders who beneficially own shares held in the name of a broker, bank, trust or other nominee, must bring proof of ownership (e.g., a current brokerage statement) in order to be admitted to the Annual Meeting. Persons who are not Forest City stockholders may attend only if invited by the Board of Directors Stockholders wishing to attend should pre-register prior to the meeting to facilitate prompt access to the Thompson Hine offices. To pre-register, contact Forest City by email at [email protected] or by telephone at (216) 416-3010. If not pre-registered, stockholders are encouraged to arrive early to allow time to clear Key Tower security. The Company will have a table in the Key Tower lobby the day of the meeting to check in attendees and confirm stock ownership. Once checked in, stockholders may proceed to the 39th Floor. About Forest City Forest City Realty Trust, Inc. is a NYSE-listed national real estate company with $8.0 billion in consolidated assets. The Company is principally engaged in the ownership, development, management and acquisition of commercial and residential real estate throughout the United States. For more information, visit www.forestcity.net. SOURCE Forest City Realty Trust, Inc. Related Links http://www.forestcity.net DUBLIN, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Fyffes, the Dublin-based produce company, was recognized by the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Fairtrade Small Producers and Workers (CLAC) for its commitment to buying bananas from many of the region's small producers and its role as the largest Fairtrade banana buyer. The award was presented at the Fairtrade International General Assembly in San Jose, Costa Rica, whose theme this year was "Fairtrade: Thirty Years Creating Value with Producers Worldwide". The event brought together participants from around the world, representing organizations within the global Fairtrade System. The agenda included a "Night of Tribute", during which CLAC recognized organizations and people who have played a fundamental role in the development and strengthening of fairtrade practices. Fyffes was recognized in the "Trader" category, for its valuable trajectory as the largest Fairtrade Banana buyer and its commitment to balanced purchases from small producer organizations and plantations. "This year we are celebrating the 30 years since Mexican coffee producers decided to advocate for better trade conditions to reduce their dependencies on charity and off-farm activities, creating the basis for what is today the Fairtrade Movement," said CLAC Chair Marike Runneboom de Pena in a letter advising Fyffes of its award. Fyffes has received numerous Fairtrade and international certifications. In April, its Sur Agricola de Honduras (Suragroh) melon operation in Honduras received Fair Trade certification from Fair Trade USA, a non-profit organization that sets standards, certifies and labels products that promote sustainable livelihoods for farmers and workers, and protect the environment. Fyffes is also the importer with the world's highest number of Global G.A.P. certified production partners. "Fyffes is honored to have received this important award from CLAC during the Fairtrade International General Assembly," said David McCann, Chairman Fyffes Limited. "This is another recognition of Fyffes commitment to maintaining fairtrade and sustainable business practices, including supporting small producers who are important contributors to economic development in their communities." About Us Fyffes Limited is a leading international importer and distributor of quality tropical produce and mushrooms headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Celebrating its 130th anniversary in 2018, Fyffes is the world's oldest fruit brand. Fyffes has trading, farming and export operations in Europe, North, Central and South America, with long established trading relationships with grower groups in Central and South America. The company's primary activities include production, procurement, shipping, ripening, distribution and marketing of bananas, pineapples, melons and mushrooms. A commitment to the principles of corporate responsibility is at the heart of the Fyffes brand, which has been recognized with numerous international certifications for best practices in social, environmental and general sustainability issues. Fyffes is the number 1 importer of bananas and the leading marketer of organic and Fairtrade bananas to Europe, as well as the importer with the world's highest number of Global G.A.P. certified production partners. Fyffes has been a subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation since 2017. (www.fyffes.com) SOURCE Fyffes Related Links http://www.fyffes.com DALLAS, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- GAINSCO, INC. (the "Company") (Pink Sheets: GANS) today announced that its board of directors approved a special cash dividend of $2.00 per share. The special dividend will be payable on July 11, 2018 to shareholders of record on June 29, 2018. The Company believes that, at its current size, it has more than adequate capital to support its insurance and other operations, and that it is appropriate to return some capital to shareholders through a special cash dividend. GAINSCO, INC. is a U.S. holding company specializing in automobile insurance (through its insurance brand, GAINSCO Auto Insurance), automotive sales and service, auto racing and investments. GAINSCO was established in 1978 as a Texas corporation and is based in Dallas, Texas, with a regional insurance office in Miami, Florida. GAINSCO's primary insurance company subsidiary is MGA Insurance Company, Inc. Company Contacts: Scott A. Marek, Asst. Vice President 972.629.4493 Email address: [email protected] Website: www.gainsco.com SOURCE GAINSCO, INC. Related Links http://www.gainsco.com NEW YORK, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The leading global online business training provider, SiPM Inc. has launched its ground-breaking new e-learning program with application-based training for the next generation of sales executives. The Sales Academy follows the launch of the Procurement Academy and Supply Chain Academy, which are recognized as the industry standard for e-learning training for global procurement and supply chain teams. The new e-learning courses, structured by education professionals based upon the latest learning practices, including cognitive load principles, are eminently practical and give business leaders a new means to nurture and retain top talent across their organisation. Sales Academy e-learning courses directly address a crucial fear held by 6 out of 10 executives that of the loss of sales to competitors due to capability shortfalls. The new course framework gives businesses across all industries and locations a bespoke application-based learning approach. This tool can be used not just to train staff but to help them become more versatile and the organisation as a whole more agile. Thomas Schmitt, Vice-President of Sales explains, "Research found that the human's working memory has limited capacity and should not be overloaded. Often in corporate settings, traditional training methods are not the optimal means of developing employee capabilities. Our second-generation e-learning helps businesses introduce role-based training in which professionals are trained to what is required for their specific role. This system allows employees to experience real work situations while learning and prepares them to face any challenging situation likely to arise in the course of doing their job. The impact is powerful and immediate." "With use of the Sales Academy platform and state-of-the-art Report Management Centre, employees can easily access their courses anytime, anywhere with just a few clicks, and both the employee and managers can monitor performance to identify where improvement is needed. Strengths are enhanced and weaknesses are removed." Sales Academy's engaging approach to sales executive training encourage employees to complete their courses and earn valuable certifications. The course framework is rich in benefits for employers too support is at hand to ensure the highest quality training academy is developed at the lowest cost. Role-based learning means the experience can be tailored so staff are trained to deliver against the specific challenges and strategies of the business itself. Any corporate training academy developed using the Sales Academy e-learning framework is designed to be high impact, which mirrors the effect of classroom learning but with easier real-world applications. Moreover, as each team member gets a learning plan specific to their needs, directed courses allow for more tailored training than could be possible via classroom offerings. In addition to customized Role Based learning plans, a robust Skills Gap Analysis ensures individual strengths and weaknesses are taken into account to provide a truly personalized learning experience to each member of the team. Certification acts both as an incentive and reward, verifying the learner's ability to perform in their sales role and deliver against their performance targets. For employers, the Sales Academy e-learning tool comes with pro-active and ongoing support to ensure the highest possible levels of learner participation and course completion. Raf Verheyden, Managing Partner adds, "Evidence suggests that e-learning outperforms classroom learning in a number of areas, making it a much more valuable tool in the work environment. Whatever the size of the organisation, our academy provides for efficient upskilling to global best practise, a guaranteed learning track at a level unmatched in the market and easy ROI measurement via a real-time dashboard." To find out more about developing sales executive competence with the new e-learning offering from Sales Academy, visit: http://sales-academy.net/ About SiPM Inc., working under the brand names Sales Academy, Procurement Academy and Supply Chain Academy specialises in competence development for corporations and currently works with over 150 blue chip companies. It has over 1,500 course titles and currently supports over 25,000 active learners. The company is headquartered in Belgium and has sales representations across all continents. Media contact: Thomas Schmitt [email protected] +1 484 686 8599 SOURCE Sales Academy Related Links http://sales-academy.net/ ALBANY, New York, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research entitled "Seismic Survey Equipment Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast, 2017- 2025," the global seismic survey equipment market was valued at US$1,261.2 Mn in 2017 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 4.60% from 2018 to 2026, reaching US$ 1,884.1 Mn by the end of the forecast period. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/664869/Transparency_Market_Research_Logo.jpg ) Growth in oil prices after a prolonged slump in addition to growing oil demand expected to be the primary market driver The seismic survey equipment market is primarily driven by the increase in oil prices after experiencing a prolonged slump since June 2014. The increase in oil prices have resulted in the steady rise in exploration and production (E&P) activities by major oil companies. This was mainly due to the strong global demand which is gradually drawing down the excess supplies, according to the World Economic Forum. The increase in exploration and production activity will result in the increase in the number of seismic surveys being carried out which will drive the market growth. Seismic survey is a method which is used to study the subsurface properties and help in locating various minerals and size of oil and gas reservoirs. The equipment used for carrying out the seismic survey is referred to as seismic survey equipment. Request a PDF brochure for Research Insights at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=3943 As the global oil demand rises especially from the developing countries, E&P companies will need to search for newer areas to locate oil underneath the land and sea. This will positively affect the seismic survey equipment market. However, the uncertain nature of oil prices is considered to be a hindrance for the growth of the seismic survey market. The unexpected downturn in oil prices can result in less exploration and production activity and decrease the investments by oil & gas companies. This in turn impacts the seismic survey equipment providers negatively. However, strong demand for oil particularly from the growing economies is expected to fuel the seismic survey market growth. Launching of new product models by key players in the market can be seen as a prevalent trend across regions A key trend in the seismic survey equipment market is the launching of new product models in a bid to gain competitive edge over peers. For instance, in September 2017, Wireless Seismic, Inc., announced the launch of RT3, a seismic recording system having the capability of ultra-high channel count of about more than 2,50,000 seismic channels and features next-generation radio technology of WSI. Also, key players in the geophysical survey space are forming strategic partnerships with peers in order to expand their geographical footprint and increase their client base. For instance, in April 2018, Fairfield Nodal announced the acquisition of Geokinetics Inc. which is a global seismic solutions provider to oil & gas industries. Get a PDF Sample for Industry Insights https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=3943 Hardware segment to be the fastest growing throughout the forecast period Based on component, the global seismic survey equipment market has been segmented into hardware, software, and services. In 2017, the hardware segment was a major revenue generating segment. Hardware for seismic survey includes various detectors such as hydrophones, geophones, and various seismic sources such as Vibroseis, air gun, and dynamite to generate the seismic waves. The hardware segment is expected to expand at a significant CAGR of 4.82% over the forecast period. Download Report TOC at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/report-toc/3943 3D technology segment to be the major revenue generating segment in 2026 Based on technology, the market has been divided into 2D, 3D, and 4D. In 2017, the 3D segment was the topmost revenue generating segment. 3D seismic data is much easier to interpret and understand and hence is widely used for gathering seismic data. The 4D segment is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR of 4.83% from 2018-2026. Offshore segment to grow at a faster pace over the forecast period The seismic survey that is carried out in marine areas is referred to as offshore seismic survey. There are still large arenas underwater that remain unexplored for the production of oil & gas. Hence, considerable investments are being made to carry out offshore seismic survey. For instance, in May 2018, TGS-NOPEC Geophysical Company L.P. completed the data acquisition of 10,000 km 2D long offset broadband multi-client seismic survey in the Egyptian Red Sea. This task was a part of a project which was awarded to TGS and Schlumberger in December 2017. The offshore segment is expected to expand at a significant CAGR of 4.74% over the forecast period. Browse Research Release at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/pressrelease/seismic-survey-market.htm Oil & gas industry to be a major revenue generating segment In terms of industry, the seismic survey equipment market has been segmented into oil & gas, and others. Others include mining industry, construction industry, and energy industry which use seismic survey equipment. The oil and gas segment is a major consumer of seismic survey equipment and is expected to occupy a revenue share of over 90% in 2017. Key players in the market focusing on introduction and development of new products to gain a competitive edge and improve brand positioning Key players in the market are focusing on the introduction and development of new products into the market to gain a competitive edge and improve brand positioning. The key players profiled in the global seismic survey equipment market include CGG, Mitcham Industries, Inc., Geospace Technologies Corporation, Wireless Seismic, Inc., BGP Inc., China National Petroleum Corporation, Schlumberger Limited, Fairfield Nodal, and ION Geophysical Corporation, among others. Request for Multiple Chapters at https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=MC&rep_id=3943 The seismic survey equipment market has been segmented as below: Seismic Survey Equipment Market, by Component Hardware Software Services (Survey design services, consultation services, advisory services, after sales services, and customer support) Seismic Survey Equipment Market, by Technology 2D 3D 4D Seismic Survey Equipment Market, by Location Onshore Offshore Seismic Survey Equipment Market, by Industry Oil & gas Others (Mining, construction, energy, among others) Seismic Survey Equipment Market Analysis, by Country/Region North America Europe Asia Pacific Middle East & Africa & South America Popular Reports by TMR: Electronic Equipment Repair Service Market: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/electronic-equipment-repair-service.html Surface Mount Technology Equipment Market: https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/surface-mount-technology-equipment-market.html About Us Transparency Market Research is a next-generation market intelligence provider, offering fact-based solutions to business leaders, consultants, and strategy professionals. Our reports are single-point solutions for businesses to grow, evolve, and mature. Our real-time data collection methods along with ability to track more than one million high growth niche products are aligned with your aims. The detailed and proprietary statistical models used by our analysts offer insights for making right decision in the shortest span of time. For organizations that require specific but comprehensive information we offer customized solutions through adhoc reports. These requests are delivered with the perfect combination of right sense of fact-oriented problem solving methodologies and leveraging existing data repositories. TMR believes that unison of solutions for clients-specific problems with right methodology of research is the key to help enterprises reach right decision Contact Transparency Market Research State Tower, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany NY - 12207 United States 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 (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/707709/Pillar_Jinbi.jpg ) The Jinbi token will have its own exclusive wallet using Pillar's unique and first to market platform that will provide additional security and transparency to token holders. In addition, Pillar project team members are supporting Jinbi Token as technical experts in blockchain structures and token transaction security. Pillar (https://pillarproject.io) completed a very successful ICO back in July 2017 and is the leading blockchain-powered projects aiming to disrupt the world of data. Set to launch the most secure token wallet later this year, Pillar will be incorporating Jinbi as one of the first asset-backed tokens in its soon-to-be-launched wallet. Jinbi is one of the first tokens to be partnered with a gold mining company. Jinbi is revolutionising the security of gold assets by using blockchain technology and implementing smart contracts. Each token will be assigned gold, meaning that every piece of gold will be accounted for, allowing partners to know where the gold is located and how much each token holds. This provides an easy, safe and simple way to transact. Co-Founder of Jinbi, Andre Rafnsson, said, "Today, people who wish to buy twenty-four carat gold face a number of challenges. For example, where do people go to buy gold and how do they know if it is authentic? Is the gold from a trusted source? How would they store it? How do they get access to it? The list goes on. We live in a complex and challenging environment to purchase twenty-four carat gold. It is a well-known fact that you can buy gold with paper contracts, and you could be subject to counterparty risk. But what if you owned the physical assets and they were under your control? Transparency is what the gold industry needs, and blockchain is the solution to deliver it." There are six key stages to the Jinbi Token (https://jinbitoken.io ) process. Firstly, the business holds a legal off-take agreement with the mining partner for the production of gold. The gold is produced and then refined by a world-leading precious metals company. After this stage, the gold is then insured and stored securely in vaults. International certification agency Bureau Veritas will perform as the third-party auditor. Once approved and verified, the gold is linked to smart contracts which are permanently on the public blockchain. Jinbi Token will be a safe haven crypto asset class with an increasing gold floor. Jinbi Token (https://jinbitoken.io) will also hold quarterly audit inspections on the quantity and quality of gold stored in vaults. By doing this, the company ensures proper and correct accounting is upheld. In addition to this, Jinbi Token will use cryptographic security, meaning only those within the supply chain are able to view the details. Those taking part will be provided with transparency, so they can have a precise understanding of the location of their gold. Andre Rafnsson continued, "Our expectation is to have 150,000 ounces of gold linked to smart contracts by 2019. All bars produced are twenty-four carats with a fineness of 999.5. They will all be delivered brand new and will be stored in various sizes, from 5g to 12.5kg. Once the gold has been allocated, it can then be delivered or stored. "A maximum of 10 million Jinbi tokens will be available to the public. The Jinbi token will be one of the first tokens, other than the Pillar token, to use the new Pillar wallet." Tomer Sofinzon, co-founder of 20|30 and the Pillar Project, and an advisor to Jinbi Token said, "We are proud to partner with the team at Jinbi. It is one of the transformational and revolutionary initiatives ideally suited to the platform we have created. We are looking forward to integrating Jinbi into our wallet to make gold more accessible to all." For more information about Jinbi, please visit https://jinbitoken.io. Links: Jinbi Token: https://jinbitoken.io/ Pillar Wallet: https://pillarproject.io/ Jinbi Token Telegram: https://t.me/JinbiTokenOfficial Jinbi Token Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jinbitoken Jinbi Token Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/jinbitoken Andre Rafnsson is available for an interview upon request. Media information provided by Famous Publicity. For more information, please contact Josh Balmer at [email protected], Mason West at [email protected], or Tina Fotherby at [email protected]. About Jinbi Token Based in the UK and Belarus, Jinbi (https://jinbitoken.io/) is a gold investment platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. By using blockchain technology, Jinbi Token allows individuals to trade gold in a secure peer-to-peer system to share the profitability of gold production. Jinbi has partnered with the team at Pillar Project (https://pillarproject.io/) to store all tokens in the secure Pillar wallet. The business is managed through a team of eight experts with an array of experience in technology and the gold industry. The minimum investment is 0.1 ETH. About the ICO The Jinbi Token pre-sale runs until Thursday June 21 2018, with the main ICO launching on Thursday June 21 2018, which will run until Thursday July 19 2018. There will be a total of 1.25 million tokens available to purchase for the pre-sale. This will take place by sending a combination of a smart contract and an ether address by email, detailing instructions to the investor on how to participate in the sale. The company is aiming to raise $88,000,000.00 across a four-week ICO to the public and will mint a maximum of 8.75 million tokens. Of these, 10 million tokens (equivalent to 80% of the total) will be available to the public, and 2.5 million tokens (equivalent to 20% of the total) will be available to management. All unsold tokens from the pre-sale and the main ICO will be iced for two years using a smart contract. After this period, the tokens may be sold, re-iced or burned dependent on a collective decision made by the Jinbi management team. Full instructions on how to participate in the pre-sale and main ICO can be accessed through the main website (https://jinbitoken.io/buy/). About Andre Rafnsson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andre-rafnsson-4310674/ As Co-Founder of Jinbi, Andre Rafnsson has over 20 years' management experience within the pharmaceutical and medical industry and most recently the biotech sector. He is primarily responsible for investor relations and business development at Jinbi. Andre has a strong interest in physical gold and silver and has been actively investing in the resource industry for the last 10 years. Andre who is fluent in five languages (English, Icelandic, Russian, Danish and Swedish) and has international experience in the EMEA region. About Joseph Crawley LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-crawley-648596157/ As Co-Founder of Jinbi, Joseph Crawley is an experienced manager in base and precious metals, trading and mining. He has also been involved within the commodities, mining and finance sectors for over 10 years. Joseph has previously managed mining projects and JVs in Turkey and Ghana. Joe is responsible for the gold mining operations and corporate strategy for Jinbi. SOURCE Jinbi Token NEW YORK and HONG KONG, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Goldthread, an English-language content platform with a focus on food, travel and culture in China, announced its launch today. Available across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram with a standalone website coming later this year, Goldthread will explore a different theme each month through videos and articles offering immersive experiences into life in China. To heat things up, the first month's theme will focus on spicy food in China. From exploring types of hot pot to the most popular chili plant in Sichuan, Goldthread will examine how spicy flavors have made a lasting impact on China's culture and cuisine. "Together with our audience, Goldthread will explore China through nuanced and thoughtful stories on food, travel and culture," said Victoria Ho, Executive Producer at Goldthread. "Goldthread is for young, globally-curious people who want to discover China's untold cultural stories. Ho, who launched Mashable Asia in 2015, is leading the Goldthread team. Dolly Li, leading content direction, is a former producer at AJ+ who recently won a regional Emmy for a docu-series on Chinese food in America. "This is such a fascinating time to be covering Chinese culture and identity as a video journalist. We have assembled a team of international reporters and artists at Goldthread who grew up speaking many dialects of Chinese, which gives us access to previously unheard stories," said Dolly Li. "Many of us moved to Hong Kong from other parts of the globe for this chance to tell these stories from the places that have shaped our lives, our families, and our heritage." The Goldthread team is a group of experienced creatives who are curious about China and are inviting their audience along for the journey. Goldthread is incubated in Hong Kong by the South China Morning Post, a leading global news company that has reported on China and Asia for more than a century. ABOUT GOLDTHREAD Goldthread is a social first, video-driven platform created for digital explorers, the globally curious, and wanderlusters. We weave the untold stories of Chinese people, places, food and culture from our journeys. We are relentless in our search for the next amazing bite and unforgettable experience. SOURCE Goldthread FELTON, California, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The global Healthcare Biometrics Market is estimated to stretch to US$ 14.5 billion by the completion of the prediction period. The movement of health organization and hospitals to Electronic Health Records [EHR] and electronic general practitioner instruction entrance is estimated to boost the demand for Healthcare Biometrics above the prediction period. The Healthcare Biometrics Market was being estimated to develop by a CAGR of 24.2% during the prediction period. By way of additional Healthcare Information Exchanges [HIE] are constructed through the grid to coordinate care, the demand for expertise to battle information exploitation and unofficial admission is likely to upsurge, thus paying to the development of the Healthcare Biometrics market for the duration of the prediction period. Applications of biometrics are likely to upsurge the safety for nurses, doctors and patients. The stringent new guidelines have enforced as safety measure for the privacy and secrecy of patient data. These guidelines are too likely to motivate the placement of biometrics in healthcare system, thus paying to the development of the market over the prediction period. Developments in the existing machineries and the expansion of versatile verification procedures are likely to simplify commercialization of innovative products. Thus, acceptance of these procedures is likely to intensify in the healthcare area in the nearby years. The Healthcare Biometrics market on the source of Type of Technology could span Single Factor: {Behavioral Recognition [ Voice, Signature], Vein, Fingerprint, Palm Geometry, Iris and Face.} Multifactor, Multi modal. The subdivision of "multi-factor authentication" is likely to develop at the maximum CAGR owing to the demand for safe verification stages from industrialized nations and extensive recognition of multi-factor authentication between healthcare suppliers. Browse 90 page research report with TOC on "Global Healthcare Biometrics Market" at: https://www.millioninsights.com/industry-reports/healthcare-biometrics-market The market for single-factor authentication is sub-divided into contact biometrics and non-contact biometrics. In 2016, contact biometrics was anticipated to constitute the biggest stake of the single-factor authentication market, during the latest past year. On the other hand, the market for non-contact biometrics is likely to develop by the maximum CAGR for the duration of the prediction. The development in this subdivision is credited to the non-invasive type of non-contact biometrics, such as it permits information to be taken even from a remote and also its identification speed. The Healthcare Biometrics market on the source of Type of Application could span Administration of Labor Force. The Healthcare Biometrics market on the source of Type of End User could span Healthcare Organizations and Hospitals. The market on the source of Area with respect to Trades in terms of intake, Profits, Market stake and Development percentage of Healthcare Biometrics could span North America [U.S.A, Canada], Latin America [Brazil, Mexico], Europe [Germany, U.K.], Asia Pacific [ Japan, China], and Middle East and Africa [Saudi Arabia, South Africa]. By the source of geography, North America had dominated the market for more than 40.0% of the shares during 2016 owing to the growing amount of scams and law-breaking happening in the subdivision of healthcare. Additionally, formation of first-hand healthcare amenities; for example hospitals and private clinic may possibly act as a principal motivating power for the development of this market in the area. In contrast, Asia Pacific is likely to register speedy progress owing to increasing government backing, the arrival of IoT together with progress in healthcare IT. Furthermore, the fresh government directed systems and increasing gaps in databank safety are likewise estimated to expedite the progress of the market in the predicted period. The statement revises Trades in terms of intake of Healthcare Biometrics in the market; particularly in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and Middle East & Africa. It concentrates on the topmost companies operating in these regions. Some of the important companies operating in the field of Healthcare Biometrics on the international basis are Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Agnitio, Integrated Biometrics, Cross match, Suprema, MorphoTrust, Fujitsu, Nuance Communications, Inc., Genkey Solutions B.V., Hitachi Ltd., BIO-key International, Imprivata, Inc., 3M, and NEC Corporation. Browse reports of similar category available with Million Insights: eClinical Solutions Market Wireless Health Market Population Health Management Market Dental Practice Management Software Market Technology Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) Face Recognition Fingerprint Recognition Iris Recognition Vein Recognition Palm Geometry Recognition Behavioral Recognition Others Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2014 - 2025) North America U.S. Canada Europe UK Germany Asia Pacific Japan China Latin America Brazil Mexico MEA South Africa Saudi Arabia 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. 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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/ Blog: https://millioninsights.blogspot.com/ SOURCE Million Insights SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hedvig, the company modernizing storage and accelerating enterprise adoption of private and hybrid clouds, today announced that Pittsburg State University, located on the plains of Southeast Kansas with an enrollment of over 7,000 graduate and undergraduate students, has selected the Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform to limit disruption during a disaster and to future-proof its storage infrastructure. Located in the heart of Tornado Alley in the Midwest, Pittsburg State University wanted to ensure that the university wouldn't have to deal with significant periods of downtime anytime a natural disaster occurred. To improve survivability if a tornado strike were to occur, the university began the process to distribute its compute and storage infrastructure. During this process, the university moved half its production VMware compute stack to its disaster recovery site on the other side of campus and purchased used EqualLogic appliances to replicate its storage to the disaster recovery site multiple times a day. However, there seemed to be a significant increase in the failure rate of the spinning disks in the university's old EqualLogic SANs which led the leadership team to take action in regard to the aging condition of some of its most critical IT infrastructure. "We liked what we saw from Hedvig's solution, which offered an elegant, robust, scalable, and flexible distributed storage model," said Tim Pearson, Assistant Director in charge of IT Infrastructure and Security at Pittsburg State University. "Per our request, Hedvig arranged for us to speak with several of their longer-term customers whose use cases were similar to what we wanted to deploy. Some were about our size, and one dwarfed us both in the amount of storage they had and in the number of hosts they had consuming that storage. The most memorable outcome of those conversations was the universally glowing reports we got on Hedvig's support, along with statements about their willingness to let customer needs influence the enhancement process as new versions of Hedvig were developed." The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform combines the power of distributed systems, the simplicity of cloud and a complete set of enterprise capabilities to deliver a modern, high-performance storage system. In addition to satisfying all the university's requirements, with Hedvig's object storage capability, backup integrations, container support, and hybrid-cloud/multi-cloud deployments, Pittsburg State University insured that their solution was future-proof as well. "We're excited that we were able to meet the requirements that Pittsburg State University so desperately needed with our storage platform," said Avinash Lakshman, CEO and founder of Hedvig. "Their decision to select our storage platform is a true testament to not only our technology, but the level of support that goes along with it." For more details on Pittsburg State University's decision to select Hedvig's Distributed Storage Platform, visit: hedvig.io/hubfs/Hedvig-PittStateCaseStudy.pdf. About Hedvig Hedvig provides software-defined storage for enterprises building private, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments. The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform is the only solution designed for both primary and secondary data, making it ideal for legacy, modern, and backup workloads. It consolidates block, file, and object into a single, API-driven platform that keeps pace with ever-growing data needs. Hedvig's patented Universal Data Plane technology forms a distributed, scale-out cluster that transforms commodity servers or cloud computing into a flexible foundation for bare metal, hypervisor, and container infrastructure. Customers like GE, IAG, Scania, State of North Carolina, and LKAB rely on Hedvig as a fundamental enabler of digital business. For more information about Hedvig, visit www.hedvig.io. Media Contact Lisa Cravens Lumina Communications for Hedvig [email protected] 408-680-0563 SOURCE Hedvig Related Links http://www.hedvig.io "We have built a strong reputation for providing high quality services to those we serve," said CESLC's Vice President for Strategic Planning Beth DeLucenay. "We wanted to change our name to reflect our joint efforts. This is a strategic change that allows us to benefit from the strong name recognition of Charles E. Smith Life Communities and to pursue new opportunities for future growth and expansion." A central component of the rebranded company is its new website: www.SmithLifeHomecare.com, which will make it even easier for those looking for home care to learn more about SmithLife Homecare's quality and service. SmithLife Homecare will continue to provide the diverse services its clients expect, meeting a diverse array of demands, and it will continue to hire compassionate and versatile caregivers who understand and are sensitive to clients' needs. "While our services and commitment to the community will remain unchanged, this new name reflects the growth and opportunities we see for the future," said Augustine Home Health Care, Inc. President David Mainguy. "These are exciting changes for our company." About SmithLife Homecare: SmithLife Homecare is a home care service provider that allows our clients to enjoy independence and dignity. A joint venture of Charles E. Smith Life Communities and Augustine Home Health Care, we recognize that many older adults can remain in the comfort of their own homes with just a little bit of extra support. Our caregivers provide a range of services, from personal care and health support to lifestyle services and short-term, interim needs, allowing people to live at home longer. For more information, please visit www.smithlifehomecare.com. MEDIA CONTACT: Liliana L. Lopez Director of Communications 301-770-8341 [email protected] SOURCE SmithLife Homecare Related Links http://www.smithlifehomecare.com/ ROCKVILLE, Md., June 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) will host health care officials from six nations Canada, Brazil, India, Rwanda, Finland and the United Kingdom as well as thought leaders from across the U.S. government and academia on June 19-21 for a three-day conference on maternal mortality. The HRSA Maternal Mortality Summit will examine challenges and seek innovative solutions to reduce maternal mortality in the United States and globally. Attendance is by invitation only. HRSA will provide a free, live webcast of the Summit's plenary sessions for the press and the public. WHAT: HRSA Maternal Mortality Summit. WHO: Experts from Brazil, Canada, Finland, India, Rwanda, United Kingdom, and the United States will participate. Scheduled speakers include Doris Chou from the World Health Organization and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams. WHEN: Tuesday, June 19 to Thursday, June 21, 2018. Plenary sessions will be available via webcast. To learn more about the summit, see the latest plenary session agenda. To watch the Summit via the webcast, please visit: http://services.choruscall.com/links/hrsa180619.html. To learn more about HRSA's efforts on maternal mortality, please visit: https://www.hrsa.gov/maternal-mortality/index.html. 301-443-3376 [email protected] www.hrsa.gov/about/news @HRSAgov SOURCE Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Related Links http://www.hrsa.gov GREENWICH, Conn., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a highly anticipated research report released today by Hunt Scanlon Media, the executive recruiting and talent acquisition sector can expect to see annual double digit growth rates over the next five to 10 year period. This year, the search industry's top 50 U.S. leaders grew by nearly eight percent, topping $3 billion in revenue. According to Hunt Scanlon, 19 firms or nearly 40 percent, grew by double digits. But it is advancing AI technologies fused with a widening global talent shortage that Hunt Scanlon predicts will reshape the sector and drive unprecedented growth in the next decade. Adoption of AI remains in its early stages across the industry, reports Hunt Scanlon, but the research firm predicts that AI and burgeoning new technologies are poised to transform the way recruiters and talent acquisition leaders do business. The capacity to more quickly source and evaluate talent is driving recruitment firms to turn to tech, said the Hunt Scanlon report. "Early adopters of AI and related technologies will be clear winners," said Scott A. Scanlon, Hunt Scanlon Media founding chairman and CEO. "From talent assessment and worker evaluations to background checking, candidate sourcing and retention planning, we see every aspect of the recruiting lifecycle gearing up for revolutionary changes." Hunt Scanlon is hosting a conference on October 24 in New York City to further explore the topic of 'Sourcing Talent with AI' with talent experts from Microsoft, Medidata, LinkedIn, Deloitte Consulting, IBM, and Egon Zehnder among others presenting their findings and predictions. To order the '2018 Hunt Scanlon State of the Industry Report' or to purchase a ticket to the 'Sourcing Talent with AI' event, please email Christopher W. Hunt at [email protected] About Hunt Scanlon Media Hunt Scanlon Media has been informing the senior talent management sector for 30 years. Our global news and intelligence data comes in many forms, including daily newswires, talent leadership reports, newsletter briefings and social media alerts. The privately-held company is headquartered in Greenwich, Conn. CONTACT: Chris W Hunt, 203-252-7302, [email protected] SOURCE Hunt Scanlon Media Related Links http://huntscanlon.com/ LONDON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Now in its 5th edition the Phoenix Forums IEC 61850 Europe conference re-brands and attracts global participation. Taking place 16-18 October 2018 in Berlin, the IEC 61850 Global 2018 draws together 150+ IEC 61850 specialists and implementation leaders for 3 intensive days of global utility implementation reviews. This year's agenda assesses new approaches to achieving multi-vendor multi-edition interoperability within the substation whilst identifying new ways to drive deployment of the standard across the wider smart grid. "IEC 61850 has reached a tipping point, it is now fully accepted and on the investment agenda of the vast majority of European utilities," says Mandana White, Director at Phoenix Forums, organisers of IEC 61850 Global 2018. "What's been interesting this year is to see how fast utilities outside of Europe, particularly in the US and Canada, are starting to embrace it." As a result, this year's programme reflects a more global participation, both on the speaker line-up and in the audience. With all global stakeholders convening in one place to review standardisation activity, share implementation experiences, identify new product development opportunities, and create new partnerships, take-up of the standard globally is set to speed up exponentially, creating economies of scale that will lead to more cost-effective deployments across the wider smart grid. The event begins on Tuesday 16th October with a Fundamentals of IEC 61850 workshop led by Christoph Brunner, Convenor of the IEC working group TC 57 WG10. This is an ideal opportunity for all participants to get to grips with the essential building blocks of the standard, update on its revisions and new editions, and to influence the direction of new standardisation activity. The main conference takes place on Wednesday 17th and Thursday 18th October and involves an intensive programme of utility case-studies, new system and tool development panel discussions, a series of end-user focused round table discussions, two live demo labs of the latest tools and technologies, a display of the latest 61850-enabled products and services, and an evening networking reception open to all participants. Discussions will deep dive into actual experiences of implementation issues surrounding specification, design, installation, testing, operation and maintenance. Optimisation of key features such as GOOSE and R-GOOSE will be addressed, as well as integration with other standards such as CIM, and building system resilience through 61850-specific cyber security. New approaches to driving IEC 61850 to the grid edge and enabling effective integration of DER and EVs will be discussed. Updates from ENTSO-E and EDSO will reveal how TSO and DSO interest groups are supporting the development of the standard to support large-scale cost-effective deployment worldwide. "IEC 61850 Global 2018 is the only truly end-user driven forum for the 61850 community," says Mandana White. "It was launched to give voice to the utility community, to enable in-depth and honest discussions that would lead to new solutions and partnerships and ultimately faster deployments globally. We believe these objectives are being well met and we look forward to facilitating discussions and partnerships that will lead to the deployment of the standard across the wider smart grid". "A very useful time, open exchange of ideas and information. Excellent real-world presentations." - Allan Wales, Distribution Systems Specialist - SP Energy Networks "Excellent opportunity to network in PACS related subject. Very close to implementation sharing of ideas that can contribute to the improvement of the standard, procedures, tools and equipment. Very useful to be updated with the latest TC57 WG10 developments and to refresh concepts through the workshop." -Bruno Miguel Soares, Researcher, Substation of the Future - R&D Nester "Perfect event for meeting colleagues in the IEC 61850 world: vendors for IEDs, tools, test-sets, TSOs, DSOs, engineering companies and IEC group members. It was interesting to see and hear what others are working with and where the standard is moving. I hope to be able to participate again." - Anders Dahl Johnsen, Protection Engineer - Siemens Discussions topics include: IEC 61850 standards update : outlining the updates to Edition 2.1 of IEC 61850-6 to address the challenges of interoperability and make efficient engineering in a multi-vendor, multi edition system a reality : outlining the updates to Edition 2.1 of IEC 61850-6 to address the challenges of interoperability and make efficient engineering in a multi-vendor, multi edition system a reality Tendering and specification process : developing a new tendering and specification process to address the challenges of ensuring interoperability for multi-edition systems : developing a new tendering and specification process to address the challenges of ensuring interoperability for multi-edition systems Edition 1 to Edition 2 transition : determining the optimum transition strategy from Edition 1 to Edition 2 depending on your current substation implementations : determining the optimum transition strategy from Edition 1 to Edition 2 depending on your current substation implementations Engineering configuration tools : addressing current tool limitations and developing methodologies for configuring and testing different features of IEC 61850 functionality : addressing current tool limitations and developing methodologies for configuring and testing different features of IEC 61850 functionality Maintenance testing : successfully implementing testing tools to ensure effective operation and maintenance in a multi-vendor multi-edition system : successfully implementing testing tools to ensure effective operation and maintenance in a multi-vendor multi-edition system Cyber security : ensuring cyber security in the implementation of feature rich multi-vendor multi-edition IEC 61850 that include GOOSE, MMS and other messaging : ensuring cyber security in the implementation of feature rich multi-vendor multi-edition IEC 61850 that include GOOSE, MMS and other messaging GOOSE messaging : IEC 61850 for GOOSE and R-GOOSE for messaging in the LAN and WAN : IEC 61850 for GOOSE and R-GOOSE for messaging in the LAN and WAN Beyond the substation : integrating IEC 61850 with data management systems and the CIM and extending its application to the control centre : integrating IEC 61850 with data management systems and the CIM and extending its application to the control centre IEC 61850 for DER: making the business case for using IEC 61850 as the communication protocol to effectively integrate DER into the power grid Speakers confirmed include: Christoph Brunner , President of it4power & Convenor - IEC TC 57 WG10 , President of it4power & Convenor - Roberto Zangrandi , Secretary General - EDSO for Smart Grid , Secretary General - Gregory Huon , Head of Engineering Governance at Elia & Group IEC 61850 Convenor - ENTSO-E , Head of Engineering Governance at Elia & Group IEC 61850 Convenor - Peter Rumenapp , Team Leader, Control & Automation Technology - Amprion , Team Leader, Control & Automation Technology - Rannveig Loken , Senior Specialist Control and Protection - Statnett , Senior Specialist Control and Protection - Priyanka Mohapatra , Senior Project Manager - SP Energy Networks , Senior Project Manager - David MacDonald , System Monitoring Lead Engineer - Iberdrola , System Monitoring Lead Engineer - Zigor Ojinaga , Industrialisation Project Leader - Iberdrola , Industrialisation Project Leader - Nicholas Etherden , Senior R&D Engineer - Vattenfall Distribution Nordic , Senior R&D Engineer - Anders Johnsson , Power System Specialist - Vattenfall Distribution Nordic , Power System Specialist - Ronald Poosen , Team Leader, Distribution Protection and Substation Automation - Fluvius , Team Leader, Distribution Protection and Substation Automation - Rene Troost , Specialist AM Network Intelligence - Stedin , Specialist AM Network Intelligence - Anne van der Molen , Technology Officer - Stedin , Technology Officer - Sander Jansen , Data Architect - Alliander , Data Architect - Paul Hayes , Smart Networks Engineer - ESB Networks , Smart Networks Engineer - Nikolay Ignatovski , Automation Engineer - Electricity System Operator Bulgaria , Automation Engineer - Mohd Iqbal Ridwan , Principal Researcher, Utility Automation - TNB Research Sdn Bhd , Principal Researcher, Utility Automation - Byung Tae Jang , Principal Researcher - KEPCO , Principal Researcher - Abhinav Sadu , Research Associate - E.ON Energy Research Centre , Research Associate - Charles Newton , President - Newton-Evans Research Company , President - Sebastian Krause , Group Leader Security Audits - GAI NetConsult , Group Leader Security Audits - Gerardo Rebollar , Executive Product Line Leader - GE Energy , Executive Product Line Leader - Leandro Henrique Monaco , Global Product Manager, Electrical Control Systems - ABB Sponsors & Exhibitors confirmed include: Gold Sponsor: OMICRON Silver Sponsors: RTDS Technologies, Triangle MicroWorks, Efacec, Subnet Solutions, COPADATA, Arteche Group Tekvel, DNV GL Live Demo Lab Sponsors: Kalkitech, OMICRON Exhibitors: JPEmbedded, SAE-IT Systems, OPAL-RT , Doble Event dates and location: Conference: IEC 61850 Global 2018 Workshop: Fundamentals of IEC 61850 Location: Leonardo Royal Hotel Berlin Alexanderplatz, Germany Event website: www.iec61850-global.com For more information, interview and media accreditation: About Phoenix Forums Phoenix Forums is an independent conference producer specialised in the smart grid sector. We work hand in hand with engineering professionals to create innovative event concepts and high-quality programmes that inform technical decision makers and enable them to deliver exceptional results. Our approach is entirely market led. We stay exceptionally close to industry developments. Through our regular, rigorous and unbiased process of depth research with TSOs, DSOs, power generators, engineering consultancies, and technology innovators, we stay one step ahead of industry developments and provide live events that act as a catalyst for new ideas, new directions, and new approaches to achieving future energy security. For more information, interview and media accreditation: Mandana White, Director, Phoenix Forums Ltd Tel: +44-(0)-20-8349-6360 Email: [email protected] Phoenix Forums Ltd Central House 1 Ballards Lane London, N3 1LQ. United Kingdom Tel: +44-(0)-20-8349-6360 Email: [email protected] SOURCE Phoenix Forums Bringing to life the panic and fear faced by thousands of parents each year when a child goes missing, a new video, " The Hardest Job in the World ," raises awareness for the critical issue of child safety. This video is the latest effort by Canon U.S.A. to raise awareness about this vital issue as part of its 20-plus year sponsorship of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children's (NCMEC) to help protect children and bring missing kids home. The video content serves as a startling wake-up call to parents as we celebrate the beginning of summer that the risk of child abduction is elevated at a time when kids are outdoors more and often supervised less. "The issues of missing and exploited children can be hard for people to talk about, but the children and families who are facing these tragedies, have no choice. It is critical that we are there to support them," said Callahan Walsh, child advocate for NCMEC. "Sponsors like Canon, who have supported our mission for more than 20 years, help make that work possible." Last year, the FBI cited more than 460,000 reports of missing children nationwide.1 Here are some preventive measures, provided by NCMEC, that parents can use to encourage safety planning and precaution: Teach your children to stay put and not wander away from where they first got lost. If their location becomes too dangerous due to things like severe weather or traffic, encourage them to find a safe space not too far from their first spot. Take a photo of your child prior to each time you enter a public place, such as a ballpark or amusement park. This ensures that you always have a recent picture of them and what they are wearing. Talk to your children about safety and remember that conversations you may have with an older child will differ than those with a younger child. For example, instruct older children to meet you at a designated spot and use their cell phone to contact you or emergency services if they get lost. If your child uses technology for gaming and social media, make sure that your child's third-party apps have location sharing settings turned off, as well as any other features that may share personal information. Ask your child to show you how they use their games and apps. While summer brings fun and playtime outside, it's crucial to be aware of the risks around child safety and help protect your kids. To view "The Hardest Job in the World" and help support NCMEC, please visit canon.missingkids.org. About Canon U.S.A., Inc. Canon U.S.A., Inc., is a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business, and industrial digital imaging solutions to the United States and to Latin America and the Caribbean markets. With approximately $36 billion in global revenue, its parent company, Canon Inc. (NYSE: CAJ), ranks third overall in U.S. patents granted in 2017 and is one of Fortune Magazine's World's Most Admired Companies in 2018. Canon U.S.A. is committed to the highest level of customer satisfaction and loyalty, providing 100 percent U.S.-based service and support for all of the products it distributes in the United States. Canon U.S.A. is dedicated to its Kyosei philosophy of social and environmental responsibility. In 2014, the Canon Americas Headquarters secured LEED Gold certification, a recognition for the design, construction, operations and maintenance of high-performance green buildings. To keep apprised of the latest news from Canon U.S.A., sign up for the Company's RSS news feed by visiting www.usa.canon.com/rss and follow us on Twitter @CanonUSA. For media inquiries, please contact [email protected]. 1Source: FBI National Crime Information Center's Missing Person and Unidentified Person Files Based on weekly patent counts issued by United States Patent and Trademark Office. SOURCE Canon U.S.A., Inc. Related Links http://www.usa.canon.com Micfo expands into the gaming industry through the strategic acquisition of OppoBox CHARLESTON, S.C., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider Micfo today announced the successful acquisition of OppoBox, an ISP specializing in gaming solutions. The strategic acquisition will allow Micfo to expand into the gaming industry and further bolster the company's footprint by four data center markets. "The acquisition of OppoBox represents a major milestone in Micfo's growth strategy," says Amir Golestan, CEO, and founder of Micfo. "Not only is it the first of its kind for our company, it also enables us to move into new markets faster, better serve various pockets of the United States and aligns very well with our long-term goals and product roadmap." With OppoBox's strong presence, Micfo will better serve the Midwest and further expand its offerings into the Southeast United States. The acquisition of OppoBox instantly gives Micfo access to service four new markets, including Birmingham, Detroit, Nashville and Sioux Falls. "This is truly an exciting chapter for our customers and us. We're thrilled to join the Micfo-family and support them with their innovative solutions," said Kevin Chang, OppoBox Managing Director. "The assets and global presence of our two companies form a disruptive market leader of low-latency, highly-scalable cloud and edge platform to deliver on Micfo's purpose of bringing content closer to the audiences." OppoBox will continue to operate independently under the umbrella of Micfo and will benefit from 45 markets they previously did not have access to. Micfo will continue its robust expansion in 2018 by opening more data centers in key markets across the United States and around the world. About Micfo With 49 data center locations, Micfo is an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider operating one of the largest networks of globally-dispersed cloud platforms. Through the thoughtful expansion of its scalable and geocentric infrastructure, Micfo's strategy has been to grow its client base by delivering what it promises and measuring the results of that delivery relentlessly. Press Contact [email protected] SOURCE Micfo PORTLAND, Ore., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- International Trade Systems, a leader in U.S. Customs clearance and freight management solutions, has just announced that they have purchased the Bend, Oregon-based company VelaTrack Inc. International Trade Systems solutions enable customs brokers, importers, exporters, freight forwarders and deconsolidators to improve efficiencies, reduce the risk of non-compliance and increase customer satisfaction. International Trade Systems enables an easy and timely creation of paperwork required for the movement of freight. Its seamless solution assists from the point of origin to destination and across borders. In addition, their system helps customers with paperwork required for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) system. The addition of VelaTrack services enables International Trade Systems customers to have visibility of shipments including the ability to track origin, destination and transit airport events. Customers will now be able to manage estimated times of departure and arrival as well as transshipment schedules. All container events are provided with date and time. This system gathers container events from 40 major U.S. terminals, manages last free days, carrier releases and government holds. "We are pleased to announce that International Trade Systems has purchased VelaTrack and is now able to offer a robust container tracking system to our customers," says Steve Platman, president and CEO of International Trade Systems. "This new service will provide full visibility of our customers' containers from the point of origin to destination." Mark Yamasaki, COO of ITS Customer Integrated Freight Systems, says, "This move will increase our productivity and reduce any potential demurrage or per diem charges." For more information about the company and their freight management solutions, visit its4abi.com. About International Trade Systems International Trade Systems is a leading provider of freight management solutions. The company makes the creation of paperwork required for the movement of freight seamless and timely, from point of origination to the point of destination and across borders, anywhere in the world. For more information, visit its4abi.com. SOURCE International Trade Systems SACRAMENTO, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- An overwhelming majority (84 percent) of California voters would be more likely to support a candidate for governor who has a vision and long-term master plan to address the state's increasing need for senior services and more than half (57 percent) would be willing to support a tax increase to fund it. These are among the key findings of a statewide voter survey conducted June 8-11 and released today by We Stand With SeniorsWill You? "Voters across the political spectrum and demographics clearly understand the state is not doing enough to ensure we can care for our growing senior population and they want something done now, before it's too late," said Shelley Lyford, president and CEO of West Health. "Scaling best practices, expanding senior-specific programs and models of care that are working, and better utilization of existing resources can go a long way to address these critical needs." West Health, along with The SCAN Foundation, launched the nonpartisan, nonprofit We Stand With Seniors campaign earlier this year to educate policymakers about the needs of California seniors. According to the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), the state's 65-and-older population is projected to grow nearly 90 percent. That is four million people by 2030, totaling 8.6 million seniors. "Unless we address the growing needs of our seniors now by developing a master plan for aging, the state will be left with the same broken, fragmented system that is expensive and ineffective for families and taxpayers alike. Often, older adults and their caregivers find themselves slowly robbed of their dignity, choice and independence but with leadership here in California, it doesn't have to be that way," said Bruce Chernof, MD, president and CEO of The SCAN Foundation. Two out of three voters think the state is not doing enough for seniors now (64 percent) nor is it prepared to address their future needs (59 percent). The survey results come as voters prepare to select their next governor in November. And in a state where addressing homelessness and public safety are top priorities among voters (72 percent and 79 percent, respectively), a full 68 percent of voters believe that caring for our older adults, including supporting them with the tools to live, in accordance with their needs, values and preferences, is also a top priority. "The human impacts and financial costs to the state of experimenting with imperfect fixes to address older adults' broad care needs would be significant. Developing a master plan for aging will help California support older adults, caregivers and families," Chernof said. Broad Support for Increased Access to Quality, Affordable Senior Services Spans Political Spectrum, Age and Ethnic Lines At a time of deep political polarization, California voters from all backgrounds agree the state needs to invest in high-quality senior services and the next governor should have a master plan to address the needs of our growing senior population: Supporting a candidate for governor with a vision and plan to address senior needs meets or exceeds 70 percent along the political spectrum, including Republican, Democrat and Decline to State voters. All age groups are more likely to support a gubernatorial candidate with a vision and plan for our growing senior population. Super majorities of voters across racial and ethnic backgrounds (70 percent and higher) are more likely to support a candidate for governor who has a plan to address aging needs. Super Majorities Support Services to Allow Aging in Place Recent surveys show that 87 percent of individuals wish to stay in their homes as they age. California lags behind other states in addressing its aging population's needs across many sectors including workforce, social services, affordable housing and caregiver supports; all of which are critical to enable people to successfully age in their homes and communities. Without addressing issues on a system-wide basis, older adults and families will continue to face challenges to find the services they need to avoid institutionalization and remain in their homes and community. Nearly nine out of 10 voters (88 percent) feel it is important for California to have a master plan to invest in services that allow seniors to age in place. to have a master plan to invest in services that allow seniors to age in place. More than three out of four voters (76.4 percent) are more likely to vote for a candidate who understands and plans to address the need to educate and train the future workforce to innovate new products and services to meet the daily living needs of older adults who want to live at home. More than three out of four voters (78 percent) would be more likely to vote for a candidate who has a vision and long-term master plan for aging if it included support for senior caregivers, such as a tax break, stipend for support or other type of support for caregivers. And 86.4 percent support California investing more in caregiver programs that assist those who care for aging family members. investing more in caregiver programs that assist those who care for aging family members. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of California voters are concerned about their ability to pay for long-term care in the future. voters are concerned about their ability to pay for long-term care in the future. Understanding that the high costs of housing negatively impacts seniors, 78.5 percent of voters are more likely to elect a candidate who has a plan to address senior housing needs. Almost two out of three voters (63.4 percent) feel that California's state government is not doing enough to provide services to help older Californians live independently at home. In the coming months, We Stand With Seniors will continue to educate candidates and policymakers about the need for a master plan for aging in California, and will work with stakeholders to share best practices and develop plans to support the goal of ensuring California seniors can age safely and with dignity. About We Stand With Seniors West Health and The SCAN Foundation's We Stand With Seniors Will You? nonpartisan, public awareness and education campaign focuses on the specific challenges seniors and their families face in accessing high-quality, affordable healthcare, dental care and supportive services and the cost to the state if these challenges are not addressed. Keep up with #StandWithSeniors on Facebook @WeStandWithSeniors and Twitter @WeStandWSeniors. Survey Methodology From Friday, June 8 through Monday, June 11, 2018, J. Wallin Opinion Research conducted a telephone survey of voters throughout the State of California, interviewing 1,000 respondents using live, professional interviewers, speaking Spanish and English languages and calling both mobile and landlines (59.9 percent of this survey was completed on mobile phones). A survey of this size yields a margin of error of +/-3.1percent (95 percent confidence interval). The sample is stratified, meaning that the demographic composition of our results matches the demographic composition of the state's voting population. SOURCE We Stand With Seniors STOCKHOLM, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Itiviti, the leading global provider of multi-asset trading technology and financial infrastructure, today announced a new alliance with Syspower, a leading Taiwanese provider of trading solutions. The partnership will allow Syspower to scale up its existing network with the 700+ brokers accessible through Itiviti's NYFIX network, paving the way for international outreach. Syspower already benefits from a prevalent position in Taiwan. Over the past decade, the firm has built a strong local market presence allowing buy-side and sell-side financial institutions to reach over 500 connections through its FIXNet connectivity network. Syspower decided to turn to Itiviti's NYFIX to address the growing demand from Taiwanese institutions to connect to international trading venues. Itiviti has a strong growth strategy for the NYFIX Marketplace international trading network, leveraging the platform's ability to seamlessly connect with any OMS solutions. This "plug and connect" feature naturally positions NYFIX as the go-to solution for local vendors looking to expand their international footprint at minimal cost. The Itiviti-Syspower partnership is already proving fruitful for the two companies with new clients signed following the availability of the joint offering and prospective business opportunities lining up. "Working with experienced international vendors is second nature for Taiwan firms as we operate in an increasingly globalized marketplace," said Stony Fan, Chairman of Syspower. "The quality of our exchanges with Itiviti from our first meetings and the support our teams received during the whole process were fantastic; getting customers live was a simple, fully managed process. This partnership gives us confidence that we can expand greatly." Philippe Carre, Itiviti Global Head of Business Development commented: "We see a great fit between our expansion strategy in Asia and the growing demand from local technology vendors to extend their reach. Launched early 2017, our NYFIX hub in Asia has helped sustain intense market demand and, under the Itiviti GAP - Global Alliance Program, to onboard a number of key regional partners. making NYFIX the Asian FIX connectivity utility of choice." Ofir Geffen, President Director Asia Pacific and Japan, Itiviti, adds: "We harbor ambitious plans for our Asian development, with half of the Itiviti offices already located in the region - I firmly intend to make it one of our strongest business. It is essential for us to leverage a strong pan-Asian ecosystem of providers to sustain the growth dynamic I am delighted to welcome Syspower as our latest partner." For further information, please contact: Christine Blinke Chief Marketing Officer Itiviti Tel. +46-739-01-02-01 [email protected] About Syspower Syspower is a leading IT service provider with solid industry knowhow, especially in financial category. With fruitful experience in financial industry operations and skillful talents, Syspower has won high reputation and recognition from customers over the years. FIXNet is the leading trading platform operated by Syspower. It provides financial transaction services, including securities and options, which was ranked in the first place in Taiwan's financial trading market. For more information about Syspower, please visit www.syspower.com.tw or write to [email protected]. About Itiviti Itiviti is a market-leading global provider of multi-asset trading technology and financial infrastructure solutions for buy-side and sell-side market participants, including NYFIX, one of the industry's largest FIX-based trading communities. Serving around 2000 clients worldwide, we provide consistent, reliable access to the most up-to-date and innovative order routing, connectivity and trading solutions available. Top-tier trading firms, banks, brokers, exchanges and institutional investors rely on our technology, solutions and expertise to streamline their daily operations, connect to their desired markets, and trade when and where they want. All while being able to comply with global regulation. With global offices in 18 locations covering all major financial centers the merger of Itiviti and ULLINK in March 2018 created a full-service technology and infrastructure provider, covering all asset classes, geographies and regulatory landscapes. For more information, please visit www.itiviti.com or www.ullink.com. Itiviti is owned by Nordic Capital Fund VII. This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com http://news.cision.com/itiviti-group-ab/r/itiviti-partners-with-syspower-of-taiwan-to-expand-nyfix-global-connectivity-footprint-in-asia,c2549154 The following files are available for download: http://mb.cision.com/Main/13830/2549154/860787.pdf Press release in PDF format SOURCE Itiviti Group AB LEHI, Utah, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- JJUMPP, a SaaS company that offers a powerful digital marketing platform for small businesses, has completed a $3 million venture funding round from Arthur Ventures. JJUMPP's marketing platform gives business owners the ability to automate the management and monitoring of customer feedback and engagement, driving more traffic, referrals, and sales to their business. It also saves time by aggregating all the different platforms into a single user interface and automating much of the process. Chad Ingram, CEO "Arthur Ventures is thrilled to partner with JJUMPP at this important juncture in the company's journey," said James Burgum, partner at Arthur Ventures, "The opportunity to empower small business through stronger online presence management is growing exponentially, and JJUMPP is uniquely delivering the right solution to SMBs at the right time in the right way." "Arthur Ventures is such a great fit for us. They understand us and they fully support our vision of empowering small business owners," said JJUMPP CEO Chad Ingram, "This new funding will give us the opportunity to continue to fuel our growth and expand what we are already doing to a much larger audience." Arthur Ventures was also an investor in Infusionsoft, where several JJUMPP team members worked previously, including Chief Revenue Officer Jeff Mask, and Chief Financial Officer Hal Halladay. "This process was seamless and smooth," said Halladay, "It accelerated everything to have a previous relationship of trust with James and Arthur Ventures." JJUMPP focuses on small businesses who don't have time to manage multiple accounts across various search engines and social media channels, or who are overwhelmed by all the available options. At the core of the business is a strong desire to help businesses owners grow their business. "We love helping small businesses and have seen the impact our product makes. They are growing their business and using JJUMPP to do it," said Ingram. To learn more about JJUMPP, visit https://jjumpp.com About Arthur Ventures Arthur Ventures is a leading venture capital firm that partners with business-to-business software & technology companies Beyond Silicon Valley. The firm has partnered in over 20 cities across every region in North America and Western Europe. Arthur Ventures is located in Minneapolis, MN, and Fargo, ND. Learn more at https://www.arthurventures.com Contact: Dave Bascom Head of Marketing, JJUMPP [email protected] 801-407-4379 SOURCE JJUMPP Related Links https://jjumpp.com NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) will host a conference call for investors at 8:30 a.m. (Eastern Time) on Tuesday, July 17, to review second-quarter results. Alex Gorsky, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer and Joseph J. Wolk, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer will host the call. Investors and other interested parties can access the webcast/conference call in the following ways: The webcast and presentation material are accessible at Johnson & Johnson's website www.investor.jnj.com. A replay of the webcast will be available approximately three hours after the conference call concludes. By telephone: for both "listen-only" participants and those financial analysts who wish to take part in the question-and-answer portion of the call, the telephone dial-in number in the U.S. is 877-869-3847. For participants outside the U.S., the dial-in number is 201-689-8261. A replay of the conference call will be available until approximately 12:00 a.m. on July 25, 2018 . The replay dial-in number for U.S. participants is 877-660-6853. For participants outside the U.S., the replay dial-in number is 201-612-7415. The replay conference ID number for all callers is 13680884. The press release will be available at approximately 6:45 a.m. (Eastern Time) the morning of the conference call. About Johnson & Johnson At Johnson & Johnson, we believe good health is the foundation of vibrant lives, thriving communities and forward progress. That's why for more than 130 years, we have aimed to keep people well at every age and every stage of life. Today, as the world's largest and most broadly-based health care company, we are committed to using our reach and size for good. We strive to improve access and affordability, create healthier communities, and put a healthy mind, body and environment within reach of everyone, everywhere. We are blending our heart, science and ingenuity to profoundly change the trajectory of health for humanity. SOURCE Johnson & Johnson Related Links http://www.jnj.com NEW YORK, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The contemporary connected watch brand Kronaby recently announced a partnership with Swedish actor Matias Varela, who has been named the brand's first global brand ambassador. Varela appears in Kronaby's global campaign 'Connected. Not distracted.' With a message that is close to his own heart, Varela challenges us to remain present amidst the digital buzz that competes for our attention. Matias Varela, known for his roles in Netflix's Narcos and for his roles in Assassins Creed and Point Break, is well acquainted with the modern-day challenges of time management and digital overload. "Dividing my time between acting jobs in Hollywood and Europe and family life in Stockholm, it is easy to become hyper-connected, over-stimulated, distracted and alienated from the things that really matter," says Varela. "I want to be present in the moment. My Kronaby eliminates all distractions and is fundamental in helping me achieve a more mindful approach to life." "At Kronaby, we strive to follow our brand vision Technology made human in everything we do. We realign technology to make it work for the user, not the other way around. Since Matias embraces the same philosophy, teaming up with him to share this powerful, potentially life-elevating message, was a no-brainer," says Henrik Jarl, Global Head of Marketing & Communications at Kronaby. Matias Varela is Kronaby's first global brand ambassador. The 37-year-old actor's integrity and down-to-earth attitude represents the modern Scandinavian man, and is the ideal fit for Kronaby. As the face of the connected watch brand, Varela will star in the 'Connected. Not distracted.' advertisements across all media channels, and represent the brand at selected events. Varela's partnership with Kronaby will roll out globally throughout 2018. Kronabys 'Connected. Not distracted.' campaign film, starring Matias Varela: https://youtu.be/pCxdTes5Pmw About Matias Varela Matias Varela is a Swedish actor born on June 23 1980, in Stockholm. He made his acting debut back in 2000 and has since appeared in films such as Assassin's Creed (2016), Point Break (2015) and Easy Money (2010). In 2017 he had a starring role in Netflix's success series Narcos, playing the role as Jorge Salcedo. Upcoming projects includes roles in Heavy, a US production to be released in 2019, and 438 days, a Swedish production also to be launched during 2019. As of 2018 Matias Varela is the global ambassador of the Swedish, connected watchbrand Kronaby. About Kronaby Kronaby is a contemporary connected watch brand from Sweden. The synthesis of world leading engineering, state-of-the-art Scandinavian design and Swiss watchmaking tradition has resulted in a new generation of watches. The collection consists of four classic models Apex, Sekel, Nord and Carat and 44 variants, each with its own characteristics and purposely designed to fulfill the users' objectives for many years to come. Kronaby is available for purchase via www.kronaby.com and in selected stores throughout Europe, US, Canada and Japan. For further information: Valerie Patruno | [email protected] SOURCE Kronaby Related Links http://www.kronaby.com "As consumer needs continue to evolve, LIXIL America's product design and engineering teams are constantly exploring how to incorporate new technologies and innovations into our products," said Jean-Jacques L'Henaff, vice president of design for LIXIL Americas, home to American Standard Brands and DXV. "To be recognized by these illustrious award programs is a truly meaningful affirmation of our extensive research and design efforts." Platinum A' Design Award for the DXV Modulus Collection The winner of a 2018 Platinum A' Design Award, the DXV Modulus Collection of bath fixtures, faucets, furniture and accessories exhibits a versatile combination of modern design and functional geometry ideal for luxury bathrooms in residential and hospitality applications. The modular concept displayed throughout this comprehensive bathroom suite allows for maximum flexibility in installation, bringing high design to any project, including master bathrooms and powder rooms where space may be at a premium. The Platinum A' Design Award is given to the top one percentile of designs that demonstrate an exemplary level of perfection in design. Entries are peer reviewed and anonymously judged by a jury panel of leading academics, important press members and established professionals. The revered Platinum A' Design distinction designates a superior product design that provides value, utility, functionality, aesthetics, efficiency, sustainability and performance. GREEN GOOD DESIGN Award for the VorMax Plus Self-Cleaning Toilet The VorMax Plus self-cleaning toilet from American Standard has been named a 2018 GREEN GOOD DESIGN award recipient. The VorMax Plus toilet cleans and freshens the toilet bowl with LYSOL cleaner during every flush with the innovative VorMax Plus FreshInfuser, which is hidden in an easy-to-access compartment behind the seat. The result is a cleaner bowl that helps prevent stains and buildup, without any extra effort by the user or an unsightly add-on device in the bowl. Presented by The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, the GREEN GOOD DESIGN award distinguishes innovative industrial designs that display forward thinking and progress toward a healthier and more sustainable world. It aims to raise public consciousness of products that contribute to worldwide design invention while incorporating the ideals of energy and resource conservation. "Our most important commitment at LIXIL Americas is designing the next generation of high-performance products that solve the everyday, real-life challenges of the consumer and our many communities," added L'Henaff. To learn more, visit americanstandard.com or dxv.com. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Nora DePalma, O'Reilly DePalma For LIXIL Americas - American Standard, DXV, GROHE (770) 772-4726 [email protected] ABOUT LIXIL LIXIL makes pioneering water and housing products that solve everyday, real-life challenges, making better homes a reality for everyone, everywhere. Drawing on our Japanese heritage, we create world-leading technology and innovate to make high quality products that transform homes. But the LIXIL difference is how we do this; through meaningful design, an entrepreneurial spirit, a dedication to improving accessibility for all, and responsible business growth. Our approach comes to life through industry leading brands, including INAX, GROHE, American Standard, and TOSTEM, as well as specialty brands such as DXV. Over 70,000 colleagues operating in more than 150 countries are proud to make products that touch the lives of more than a billion people every day. Learn more at www.lixil.com, facebook.com/lixilgroup and www.linkedin.com/company/lixil-group. LYSOL is used under license to American Standard 2017. All rights reserved. DXV Modulus, VorMax and VorMax Plus FreshInfuser are registered trademarks of AS Americas, Inc. SOURCE LIXIL Americas Related Links http://www.lixil.com BERKELEY, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mary Furlong and Associates, Executive Producer of the 15th Annual Silicon Valley Boomer Venture Summit, has announced the addition of a new panel discussion on "Joints and Joint Health" at this year's Summit at The Claremont, Berkeley, California. The emergence of natural plant-based alternatives that can both enhance overall wellness and supplement pain management continue to attract consumer interest. This has lead to a national discussion on regulations and effectiveness of these alternatives. As physical mobility is also critical to maintaining an active and healthy lifestyle, the panel will introduce new technology that benefits consumers' overall bone and joint health. The panel participants are: Moderator: John Reinhart , Co-Founder of CNAonline.com and the Innovator's Alliance , a consortium of leading non-profit senior living and aging care services provider organizations. , Co-Founder of and the , a consortium of leading non-profit senior living and aging care services provider organizations. Jeff Amrein , Founder and CEO, Extract Wellness LLC , providing premium100% Kentucky industrial hemp extract products to those seeking natural alternatives to health and wellness. , Founder and CEO, Extract Wellness LLC Carrie Tice , CEO & Co-Founder, Octavia Wellness , delivering easy-to-use products with how-to education for safe and effective cannabis consumption. , CEO & Co-Founder, Octavia Wellness Kathleen Cody , Executive Director American Bone Health , a national nonprofit organization dedicated to educating the public about bone health and fracture prevention. Executive Director American Bone Health Peter Simonson , President and Board Member, Juvent Health , offering a clinically proven non-invasive stem cell therapy to help eliminate joint pain and improve bone health using patented Micro-Impact Platform. , President and Board Member, Juvent Health offering a clinically proven non-invasive stem cell therapy to help eliminate joint pain and improve bone health using patented Micro-Impact Platform. Cynthia Gibson-Horn , Co-Founder, Motion Therapeutics, offering innovative BalanceWear technology products designed for patients with mobility difficulties. "Our summit works to bring awareness of emerging categories of opportunity that enhance the quality of life and the quality of care for our global aging population. We believe this is a first of its kind discussion for and with leaders in the field," said Mary Furlong, CEO of Mary Furlong and Associates and Executive Producer of the Summit. "Our Joints and Joint Health panel discussion will bring insight to the availability of new, impactful solutions that can be both preventative and therapeutic for consumers in the longevity economy." Register here, and follow us on Facebook, @SiliconBoomer, #SVBoomer. Mary Furlong and Associates is Founder and Executive Producer of the event; Lori Bitter/The Business of Aging, is Co-Producer; and Susan Davis, Susan Davis International, is Event Producer. About Mary Furlong & Associates/ Mary Furlong Founded in 2003, Mary Furlong & Associates (MFA) is a strategy, business development, marketing, and public relations strategic communications firm headquartered in San Francisco. Previously, Mary founded SeniorNet in l986, ThirdAge Media in l996. She won the ASA Leadership Award, was profiled as one of Fortune Small Business Top 25, and Time Digital Top 50. In 2011, Mary received an award as one of the top 100 Women of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal and is also the author of "Turning Silver into Gold: How to Profit in the New Boomer Marketplace. For the past 15 years, Mary has produced the industry-leading What's Next Boomer Business Summit and the Silicon Valley Boomer Venture Summit. She has appeared on NBC, CBS, and NPR and is an advisor to the Ziegler Linkage Longevity Fund, LP. For Media Inquiries: Lori Bitter, The Business of Aging [email protected] 415-652-9884 SOURCE Mary Furlong & Associates BOSTON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Harvard Business School (HBS) Executive Education will launch Managing the Future of Work on the HBS campus in Boston from October 21-24, 2018. This new program will prepare executives to develop specific, actionable strategies to build sustainable competitive advantage as the fundamental nature of work changes through rapid technological advances, shifting global product and labor markets, evolving regulatory regimes, and the gig economy. This program will include compelling discussion of case studies, lectures by HBS faculty, influential guest speakers, and discussions with highly accomplished peers, all centered on the challenges of moving beyond outdated workforce development models and redefining the workplace. The program will provide a unique personal case working group experience that will focus on forward-thinking issues. "Strategic decisions depend on the ability to attract, retain, and improve productivity of talent in the workforce," said Joseph B. Fuller, Professor of Management Practice in General Management and faculty cochair of Managing the Future of Work. "Changing workforce demographics and the ferocious competition over the limited population of workers with scarce skills will make that increasingly difficult. Achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage in the future will mean having better, more productive employees with the right skillsets for the jobs of tomorrow." Managing the Future of Work's curriculum will focus on the critical forces that are redefining the nature of work in advanced economies, including the workplace of the future, the "care" economy, the middle skills gap, global talent access, and spatial pressures. Participants will work in small teams to prepare cases from their respective organizations to review, discuss, and present to other participants. "Supported by a groundbreaking curriculum and the latest organizational research, these lessons in the classroom not only give a fresh perspective on the nature of work, they also provide strategic operational frameworks that participants can implement on their own," said William R. Kerr, MBA Class of 1975 Professor of Entrepreneurial Management and faculty cochair of Managing the Future of Work. "As the nature of work continues to evolve, this program will allow participants to step back from daily routines and assess strategies for moving their organizations forward." Managing the Future of Work is designed for people who hire, incentivize, or strategize with operational leaders in larger organizations in advanced economies, including senior leaders and human resources executives. Individual participants are welcome, but management teams are encouraged. As with other HBS Executive Education offerings, Managing the Future of Work will rely on research from leading HBS faculty, collaboration with industry peers, and learnings from real-world case studies from successful, innovative global companies. Program Details: Managing the Future of Work will take place from October 21-24, 2018 on the Harvard Business School campus. Please visit https://www.exed.hbs.edu/programs/mfw for complete curriculum and to apply. Faculty: Joseph B. Fuller, Professor of Management Practice in General Management and faculty cochair of Managing the Future of Work. William R. Kerr, MBA Class of 1975 Professor of Entrepreneurial Management and faculty cochair of Managing the Future of Work. Christopher T. Stanton, Assistant Professor of Business Administration. About Harvard Business School Executive Education: Harvard Business School Executive Education, a division of Harvard Business School, is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston, Massachusetts. In fiscal year 2017, HBS faculty developed and delivered more than 60 Executive Education programs for leading organizations worldwide. Over 10,000 business executives attended programs held on campus in Boston as well as classrooms in Mumbai and Shanghai. With global research centers in nine key regions, HBS faculty continue to develop groundbreaking research, forge powerful alliances with global organizations, and fulfill the mission of educating leaders who make a difference by shaping the practices of business, innovation, and entrepreneurship around the world. Learn more at www.exed.hbs.edu. SOURCE Harvard Business School Executive Education Related Links http://www.exed.hbs.edu BILBAO, Spain, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy , is revealed as The World's Best Restaurant, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna , is revealed as The World's Best Restaurant, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & The 2018 list includes restaurants from 23 countries worldwide and features nine new restaurants: six making their debut and three returning to the list as re-entries Den in Tokyo, Japan , wins the Highest Climber Award, sponsored by Lavazza, rising 28 places to the No.17 spot , wins the Highest Climber Award, sponsored by Lavazza, rising 28 places to the No.17 spot Disfrutar in Barcelona, Spain , is announced as the Highest New Entry, sponsored by Aspire Lifestyles, debuting on the list at No.18 , is announced as the Highest New Entry, sponsored by Aspire Lifestyles, debuting on the list at No.18 Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, USA , is voted by his peers as the winner of the Chefs' Choice Award, sponsored by Estrella Damm of Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, , is voted by his peers as the winner of the Chefs' Choice Award, sponsored by Geranium in Copenhagen, Denmark , wins The Ferrari Trento Art of Hospitality Award , wins The Ferrari Trento Art of Hospitality Award Azurmendi takes home the Sustainable Restaurant Award, sponsored by Dekton by Cosentino French chef Cedric Grolet wins The World's Best Pastry Chef Award, sponsored by Sosa Pre-announced special award winners accepting their accolades include: London -based chef Clare Smyth , winner of the elit Vodka World's Best Female Chef Award 2018 -based chef , winner of the elit Vodka World's Best Female Chef Award 2018 Gaston Acurio from Peru , honoured with The Diners Club Lifetime Achievement Award 2018 , honoured with The Diners Club Lifetime Achievement Award 2018 Californian restaurant SingleThread, winner of the Miele One To Watch Award 2018 Taiwanese chef Jessie Liu , collecting the inaugural 50 Best BBVA Scholarship Global stars of the restaurant world gathered this evening (19 June 2018) for The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2018 awards, sponsored by S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna, held at Palacio Euskalduna in Bilbao, Spain. The awards, which saw 23 countries across six continents honoured with a place on the list, culminated with the announcement of a new No.1, with chef patron Massimo Bottura taking to the stage to collect the award for his Modena restaurant, Osteria Francescana. Osteria Francescana, which previously held the No.1 position in 2016, was joined in the top three by El Celler de Can Roca (No.2), in Girona, Spain, and Mirazur (No.3), in Menton, France. The top spot for Osteria Francescana is testament to Bottura's continued commitment to driving forward the restaurant's unique character. The discreet Modena restaurant serves Bottura's contemporary cuisine, which challenges and reinvents Italian culinary tradition while making use of the finest produce from the Emilia-Romagna region. William Drew, Group Editor of The World's 50 Best Restaurants, said: "We applaud all those involved in this list of inspiring restaurants, which is constantly redrawing and reflecting the global gastronomic map. We are also thrilled to see Osteria Francescana return to the top spot in The World's 50 Best Restaurants ranking this year." Spain boasts seven restaurants on the list, including three in the top 10: El Celler de Can Roca (No.2); Mugaritz (No.9) and Asador Etxebarri (No.10). The USA follows closely with six restaurants on the list, including last year's winner Eleven Madison Park in New York (No.4). France has five restaurants on the list, with two in the top 10: Mirazur in Menton (No.3) and Arpege (No.8) in Paris, and the UK and Italy are represented by four restaurants each. Peru, with three restaurants in the list, includes two in the top seven alone: Central (No.6) and Maido (No.7), both in Lima. Having received the Miele One To Watch Award in 2017, Disfrutar in Barcelona continues its rise by winning the 2018 Highest New Entry Award, sponsored by Aspire Lifestyles, debuting at No.18. Meanwhile Den, in Tokyo, Japan, picks up the 2018 Highest Climber Award, sponsored by Lavazza, having jumped from No.45 to No.17 in just one year. Odette in Singapore is another notable new entry at No.28, having opened less than three years ago. Hisa Franko, Slovenia's first restaurant on the list, debuts at No.48, representing another triumph for Ana Ros, the 2017 winner of The World's Best Female Chef Award. Mikla in Istanbul (No.44) represents Turkey's first restaurant on the list since 2002, and Maaemo in Oslo (No.35) brings Norway back onto the list for the first time since 2003. Lyle's in London is also a newcomer, debuting at No.38. Nihonryori RyuGin, from Tokyo, Japan (No.41), Schloss Schauenstein from Furstenau, Switzerland (No.47) and The Test Kitchen from Cape Town, South Africa (No.50) have all re-entered the list. Dan Barber of Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, USA (No.12), wins the Chefs' Choice Award, sponsored by Estrella Damm. The Chefs' Choice Award is bestowed on an individual believed by their peers to have made the most significant contribution to the industry over the last year and is a testament to Barber's innovative work and commitment to the debate around food ethics. The Ferrari Trento Art of Hospitality Award goes to Geranium from Copenhagen, Denmark (No.19). Co-founder Sren Ledet, an award-winning chef, made the transition from the kitchen to the restaurant floor when founding Geranium and as the sommelier and front of house manager has propelled the restaurant to the highest standards of hospitality. Azurmendi from Larrabetzu in the Biscay region of Spain (No.43) wins the Sustainable Restaurant Award, sponsored by Dekton by Cosentino. Led by head chef Eneko Atxa, Azurmendi previously won this award in 2014 and this year's achievement recognises the restaurant's continual improvements in sustainable practices. These include planting 800 trees around the restaurant and developing a project with local families and bars to turn their organic waste into compost for the region's farmers. French sensation Cedric Grolet receives The World's Best Pastry Chef Award, sponsored by Sosa. Head pastry chef at Le Meurice, Paris, part of The Dorchester Collection, Grolet has this year spearheaded Le Meurice's Pastry Boutique and continues to create waves by integrating gastronomy and art with his unique patisserie and trompe l'oeil fruit creations. The voting process The World's 50 Best Restaurants list is independently adjudicated by professional services consultancy Deloitte. This adjudication ensures that the integrity and authenticity of the voting process and the resulting list of The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2018 is protected. The list is voted for by more than 1,000 international restaurant industry experts and well-travelled gourmets who make up The World's 50 Best Restaurants Academy. The Academy comprises 26 separate regions around the world, each of which has 40 members, including a chairperson. None of the event's sponsors has any influence over the voting process. The World's 50 Best Restaurants channels Twitter : @TheWorlds50Best #Worlds50Best : @TheWorlds50Best #Worlds50Best Facebook : @50BestRestaurants : @50BestRestaurants Instagram : @TheWorlds50Best : @TheWorlds50Best YouTube : Worlds50Best : Worlds50Best Website: theworlds50best.com *** Notes to editors William Reed Business Media Organised by William Reed Business Media, The World's 50 Best Restaurants list has been published since 2002. William Reed Business Media is solely responsible for organising the awards, collating the votes and producing the list. About the host partner: Biscay Biscay, including its Bay, is the largest province of the Basque Country. While it is rooted in tradition, its capital Bilbao has an aura of modernity that astounds those who discover it. Visitors are welcomed to a land where gastronomy has always been the ultimate social experience and food forms the very basis of social fabric: from the daily pilgrimage of groups of friends and families from tavern to tavern to taste the hundreds of different kinds of 'pintxos,' to the rituals of the local gastronomic societies also known as 'txokos'. Biscay is now witnessing the birth of a new generation of Basque cuisine, and food-loving visitors will feel they are finally 'coming home.' About the main sponsor: S.Pellegrino & Acqua Panna S.Pellegrino and Acqua Panna are the main sponsors of The World's 50 Best Restaurants. S.Pellegrino and Acqua Panna are the leading natural mineral waters in the fine dining world. Together they interpret Italian style worldwide as a synthesis of excellence, pleasure and well-being. Other partners Miele Premium Partner, Official Kitchen Appliance Partner and Presenting Partner of #50BestTalks; sponsor of the Miele One To Watch Award elit Vodka Official Premium Vodka Partner; sponsor of the elit Vodka World's Best Female Chef Award BBVA Official Bank Partner; sponsor of the 50 Best BBVA Scholarship Diners Club International Official Credit Card Partner; sponsor of The Diners Club Lifetime Achievement Award Ferrari Trento Official Sparkling Wine Partner; sponsor of the Ferrari Trento Art of Hospitality Award Official Sparkling Wine Partner; sponsor of the Ferrari Trento Art of Hospitality Award Lavazza Official Exclusive Coffee Partner; sponsor of Highest Climber Award The Dalmore Official Scotch Whisky Partner Grana Padano Official Cheese Partner Estrella Damm Official Beer Partner; sponsor of Chefs' Choice Award Official Beer Partner; sponsor of Chefs' Choice Award Sosa Official Ingredients for Chefs Partner; sponsor of The World's Best Pastry Chef Award Beronia Official Wine Partner Dekton by Cosentino Official Worktop Partner; sponsor of the Sustainable Restaurant Award Aspire Lifestyles Official Concierge Partner; sponsor of Highest New Entry Award Cinco Jotas Official Iberico Ham Partner Gin Mare Official Premium Gin Partner OpenTable Official Booking Platform Partner Seafood from Norway Official Seafood Partner Official Seafood Partner Seedlip Official Premium Non-Alcoholic Spirit Partner Calia Official Specialty Grocer Partner Jaen Seleccion Official Olive Oil Partner --- Sustainable Restaurant Association Sustainability Audit Partner Farm Africa Official Charity Partner Official Charity Partner Deloitte Official Independent Adjudication Partner SOURCE The World's 50 Best Restaurants Related Links http://theworlds50best.com RAANANA, Israel, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- MedAware, a developer of AI-based patient safety solutions, announced today that it is working with Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc. to provide a safer prescribing and medication management environment to Allscripts' customers. The partnership will offer point of care interventions to providers, care coordinators and their patients over the advanced dbMotion solution. With a history of introducing innovative healthcare and data-driven solutions, implementing MedAware's advanced machine learning-enabled decision support and patient safety solutions will further Allscripts' commitment to leveraging data and technology to provide better patient care. In order to provide actionable insights at the point of care and after the script was already filled, MedAware monitors patients' clinical records to detect medication-related risks, evolving adverse drug events (ADEs), and to identify patient-specific risk of opioid dependency with unprecedented accuracy. As a result, in live clinical settings, providers mostly choose to revise their prescriptions when they are notified of such risks from MedAware. This level of success is achieved by using the company's patented medication monitoring technology that leverages machine-learning algorithms and outlier detection mechanisms to identify adverse drug events and flag potentially life-threatening prescriptions that are in conflict with the profile of the patient, physician, or institution. "MedAware is excited to collaborate with a leading global EHR vendor so prominently known for its focus on safety and healthcare innovation," said Dr. Gidi Stein, MedAware's co-founder and CEO. "This partnership is a huge milestone for MedAware. We look forward to demonstrating the impact our clinical monitoring technology will have on providing safer patient care and helping to curb the opioid epidemic that continues to devastate families and communities throughout the US." About MedAware MedAware is transforming patient safety and saving lives through AI-empowered clinical decision support solutions. Each year, millions are affected or fatally harmed by adverse drug events (ADEs) and erroneous prescription-related medication errors. By continuously mining data gathered via millions of electronic health records, MedAware's software accurately flags potentially life-threatening medications that are in conflict with the profiles of the patient, physician or institution. The company's unique, real-time approach to identifying and preventing ADEs, opioid abuse, and medication errors saves lives, improves patient safety and outcomes and significantly reduces avoidable risks and costs each day. For more information, please visit www.medaware.com. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Media Contact Finn Partners for MedAware Nicole Grubner [email protected] @nicolegrubner +1-929-222-8011 SOURCE MedAware Related Links http://www.medaware.com/ The Young Chef Competition launched in 2014 to recognize outstanding young chefs throughout the country. Selected candidates and their assistants compete in a 2 hour and 35-minute live cooking competition in front of a panel of esteemed chef judges from across the country, scoring on taste, presentation and kitchen organization. Winners will earn the coveted opportunity to travel to Lyon, France with the Bocuse d'Or Team USA 2019, as they compete to defend their gold win from the 2017 competition. "When I was just starting my culinary training, I was always looking for ways to keep pushing myself and seeking opportunities. Competing in the 2016 Commis Competition changed my culinary career in ways I couldn't imagine. At the time it was something completely outside of my comfort zone, but I was encouraged by my mentors to apply. I ended up winning the competition, which allowed me to train alongside Team USA 2017, and now I am representing my country as the Commis for Team USA 2019! I encourage all aspiring chefs to step outside of their comfort zone for the opportunities that ment'or provides," exclaims Chef Mimi Chen, Commis for Team USA 2019. The third annual Commis competition will also be returning this year to continue to inspire those beginning their culinary careers and to introduce these talents to the world's competition of the Bocuse d'Or. Commis candidates will compete in an hour and a half live cooking competition and will be judged by the same panel of chef judges on excellence in overall taste, presentation and kitchen organization. "The mentors and chefs early in my career were vital in shaping who I am today as a chef. I understand the need and importance of mentorship and wanted to join Chefs Boulud, Keller and Bocuse in helping to form ment'or and inspire the next generation of chefs in the US," says Chef Gavin Kaysen, Team USA Vice President. "The Young Chef and Commis Competitions provide these talented and up-and-coming cooks an unparalleled opportunity to showcase their skills and access our growing network of Culinary Council member chefs." Candidates of both the Young Chef Competition and the Commis competition will be paired with advisors from the ment'or culinary council, including previous Bocuse d'Or competitors to guide them throughout their training. Winners will have the choice of a cash prize or the opportunity to travel to Lyon, France to watch and cheer on Team USA 2019 Chefs Matthew Kirkley and Mimi Chen at the Bocuse d'Or 2019 Finals. Applications are available now at http://www.mentorbkb.org/youngchefs/ and will be accepted through August 6, 2018. More information about the Young Chef and Commis Competitions and other ment'or programs can be found on the ment'or website and on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. About ment'or The ment'or BKB Foundation is a nonprofit that aims to inspire excellence in young culinary professionals and preserve the traditions and quality of cuisine in America. Ment'or is led by Founders Chefs Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller and Jerome Bocuse, as well as an esteemed Culinary Council of over forty renowned chefs. Educational grants and internships are offered to culinary professionals through the Continuing Education Program, $1.2 million in grants have been awarded to date. The Young Chef and Commis Competition series offer yet another opportunity for them to further their careers. Ment'or is also responsible for recruiting, training, and financially supporting the promising young American talents who represent Team USA in the prestigious biennial Bocuse d'Or competition, held in Lyon, France. For the first time in history, Team USA 2017 won the coveted Gold Medal at the Bocuse d'Or. SOURCE mentor BKB Foundation Related Links http://www.mentorbkb.org "This is the first website devoted solely to helping people living with PSVT, providing a resource to allow them to better understand this condition and helping them to take an active role in managing their PSVT in partnership with their healthcare team," said Joseph Oliveto, President and Chief Executive Officer of Milestone Pharmaceuticals. "Bringing this site to life is part of our ongoing commitment to supporting the PSVT community and its members, with the goal of advocating for greater awareness and better care." "There is a sizeable population that stands to benefit from relevant and accessible disease education," said Dr. Thomas F. Deering, FHRS, President, Heart Rhythm Society. "People living with PSVT and their families welcome support at all points in their journeybefore, during, and following a diagnosis of this common arrhythmia." While PSVT is not typically life-threatening, symptoms may be alarming because of the sudden and unexpected onset of episodes combined with a racing heart. Some people experience significant anxiety and fear of the next episode. The episodes themselves may be debilitating and exhausting, leading some to avoid certain activities or withdraw from their normal routines, such as work, driving, or travel.1 "PSVT is undoubtedly a daunting and challenging condition, often delayed in diagnosis or misdiagnosed entirely. In the face of that, people living with PSVT are in need of education and resources to help them become fully informed about their health and ongoing care," said Trudie C.A. Lobban, MBE, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Arrhythmia Alliance. "This is timely subject matter on the heels of the World Heart Rhythm Week, which occurred June 4-10, 2018, but PSVT remains an important topic year-round." The website aims to debunk myths about living with PSVT, addresses frequently asked questions, defines terminology, and delves into the physical and emotional sides of living with this arrhythmia. More importantly, this online resource also provides useful tips on how to outsmart PSVT by arming patients with practical information and knowledge. To learn more, visit OutsmartPSVT.com. The website is intended for educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice. Every individual's medical situation is different, so all patient and caregiver questions should be directed to a healthcare professional. About Paroxysmal Supraventricular Tachycardia (PSVT) Paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia is a condition that afflicts approximately 1.7 million people and results in over 600,000 healthcare claims per year in the U.S. alone.2 During a PSVT episode, patients may feel palpitations while heart rate increases dramatically, sometimes exceeding 250 beats per minute.3 Although the condition is not life threatening, it causes great distress to the patient and can result in a visit to a hospital emergency department where the patient is usually administered intravenous drugs and monitored until the symptoms resolve. About Milestone Pharmaceuticals Milestone, headquartered in Montreal, Canada with a U.S. subsidiary in Charlotte, N.C., is a clinical stage drug development company focused on developing an investigational new drug intended to provide rapid-onset and short-acting treatment of PSVT episodes and other episodic conditions. For more information, visit www.milestonepharma.com. References SOURCE Milestone Pharmaceuticals Related Links http://www.milestonepharma.com PUNE, India, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "Military Navigation Market by Platform (Ammunition, Aviation, Ground, Marine, Unmanned Vehicle, Space), Application (ISR, C2, Combat & Security, Targeting & Guidance, SAR), Component (Hardware, Software, Service), Grade & Region - Global Forecast to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets, the market is projected to grow from USD 8.87 billion in 2018 to USD 12.07 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 6.36% from 2018 to 2023. Increasing preference for the use of UAVs in modern warfare and rising demand for missiles and artillery systems due to geopolitical instabilities and changing nature of warfare are the major factors driving the military navigation market. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660509/MarketsandMarkets_Logo.jpg ) Browse 76 market data Tables and 46 Figures spread through 154 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Military Navigation Market - Global Forecast to 2023" https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/military-navigation-market-123048289.html Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report Based on platform, the space segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Based on platform, the space segment of the military navigation market is estimated to witness the highest growth rate during the forecast period. The growing demand for earth observation, navigation services, and communication satellites is projected to drive the growth of the space segment. The space segment includes activities for monitoring the Earth's surface to obtain valuable information for mapping, mineral exploration, land-use planning, and resource management, among others. Based on application, the intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance (ISR) segment is estimated to witness the highest growth during the forecast period. Based on application, the intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance (ISR) segment of the military navigation market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The growth of this segment can be attributed to the increased requirement for situational awareness (SA) in military operations and rising use of geospatial intelligence. Intelligence is considered a crucial military competency as it acts as a force-multiplier by providing advanced situational awareness to armed forces. Surveillance & reconnaissance involves designing and processing specialized communication protocols for tactical and national intelligence systems. Ask for PDF Brochure : https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=123048289 Based on component, the service segment is estimated to witness the highest growth during the forecast period. Based on component, the service segment of the military navigation market is projected to grow at a higher CAGR than the line fit segment during the forecast period. The anticipated higher growth rate of the service segment is due to the requirement of maintenance training, instructor-led training (ILT), computer-based training (CBT), on-field support, and maintenance & repair services for navigation equipment. The North American market is expected to witness considerable growth during the forecast period. Among regions, the North American military navigation market is projected to witness considerable growth during the forecast period. Factors responsible for the growth of the military navigation market in North America include the growing demand for new UAVs and aircraft. As most of the aircraft navigation equipment manufacturing companies are in the US, North America is considered to be a mature region in terms of adopting military navigation solutions and services. Major companies profiled in the military navigation market report are L3 Technologies (US), Esterline (US), GE Aviation (US), Honeywell International (US), Moog (US), Northrop Grumman (US), Raytheon (US), Rockwell Collins (US), Trimble (US), KVH Industries (US), Safran (France), Cobham (UK), Garmin (Switzerland), Thales (France), and IAI (Israel), among others. Know more about the Military Navigation Market: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/military-navigation-market-123048289.html About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 7500 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledge Store" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Salgarkar MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Visit Our Blog: http://mnmblog.org/market-research/aerospace-defence Connect with us on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets SOURCE MarketsandMarkets "In 2015, our three-year plan was to triple our business with European clients and hire 100 employees in Northern Ireland," said Pinkerton. "We were thrilled to exceed those goals and we're excited to be honored again as a US-Ireland Top 50 company." The 2018 US-Ireland Top 50 celebrates top-performing companies with a focus on transatlantic operations that are bringing business in Ireland to global heights. Over the years, US-Ireland has recognized movie makers, scientists, tech companies, and engineers for their company's accomplishments in both territories. ModSquad is in good company with Amazon, HBO, Mastercard, and Moet Hennessy, to name a few companies recognized this year. Additional Resources About ModSquad ModSquad is a global provider of on-demand digital engagement services, known as ModSourcing: outsourcing modernized. We offer expert-level service in customer support, moderation, social media, and community management. Our Mods engage your customers and communities on a personal level across online, mobile, e-commerce, in-game, application, and social media channels. We service clients in 70 countries, with the capacity to respond in 50+ languages and dialects. CONTACT: [email protected] US: 916.913.4465 UK: 028 2003 2123 SOURCE ModSquad Related Links http://modsquad.com BUFFALO, N.Y., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- M&T Bank announced today a series of new and upcoming services for its small business customers, including a new online business loan application, new business credit cards and a new business cash management platform. "As our community's leading bank for businesses, we understand that today's business owners expect more options, more access, more speed and more security. In anticipation of our customers' evolving needs, we have been working hard, and investing substantially, to provide the solutions they need to run their businesses successfully," said Eric Feldstein, Senior Vice President and head of Business Banking at M&T Bank. Business Online Lending Platform M&T Bank announced today plans to start offering online business loans in mid-2018. The new business online lending platform advances M&T Bank's strategy of leveraging innovative digital technologies that create seamless end-to-end customer experiences. The new service will enable current business clients to apply for loans and lines of credit up to $100,000 through a simple online application. In most cases, customers will be notified of approval decisions the same business day, and loans will be funded within three business days. "With this new online lending technology, we have simplified the process of applying for smaller credit requests, enabling more businesses to access the credit they need online, with swift decision making," said added Feldstein. The new lending platform will offer an all-digital experience, but customers will still be able to work with a Branch Manager or Relationship Manager to guide them through the process for obtaining a business loan. Business Credit Card Program M&T Bank announced today it has launched a new credit card program for businesses that provides customers with flexible access to funds and the opportunity to earn points from purchases, as well as enhanced conveniences. The new suite of cards includes the M&T Business Rewards Credit Card and M&T Business Credit Card, which are both available with a zero percent Annual Percentage Rate (APR) on purchases and balance transfers for 12 billing cycles. The M&T Business Rewards Credit Card offers 1.5 percent cash back on all purchases with no annual fee. There are no foreign transaction fees assessed with either card. The cards will now be available at M&T Bank's more than 750 branches, as well as through a relationship manager, and can be integrated with the M&T's online banking platform, known as Online Banking for Business. They also include "design your card" features, online and mobile account access, fraud protection and the ability to pay using Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. "Our business is built around understanding the needs of our customers and directly providing them with excellent solutions and relationship management. Making this move to offer our own credit cards to small businesses allows us to continue to build on that direct service relationship," added Feldstein. The company previously provided credit cards to businesses through a third-party. For more information on new suite of cards, please visit https://www.mtb.com/business/business-banking/business-financing/credit-cards. Business ACH and Wire Transfers Service ("M&T BizPay") M&T Bank today announced the rollout of M&T BizPay, a new ACH and wire transfer service integrated with M&T Online Banking for Business. The new service creates a more convenient and simpler channel for business clients to quickly pay vendors and perform payroll services, in many cases the same business day. "Today's business owners are busier than ever, and any opportunity to make the process around money transfer or cash flow management more convenient is incredibly important," added Feldstein. "We believe M&T BizPay is one of the best solutions on the market for small- to medium-sized businesses and look forward to introducing it to our clients." For more information on M&T BizPay, please visit https://www.mtb.com/business/business-banking/cash-management/payables/mt-bizpay. To learn more about any of these services, businesses can stop by any M&T branch, contact their Relationship Manager or call 1-800-724-2240. In the last year, M&T Bank has received a number of honors for excellent service to business customers. This recognition includes 10 Excellence Awards from Greenwich Associates for providing exceptional service quality to businesses and "Highest in Small Business Banking Satisfaction in the Northeast Region" from J.D. Power Associates. M&T Bank provides a full range of banking, investment, insurance and mortgage products and services designed for businesses and their owners. The company ranks as one of the 20 largest U.S.-based commercial banks, as well as the 8th largest U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) lender in the nation and number one lender in most of its larger communities, including Baltimore, Md., Buffalo, N.Y., Delaware and Washington, D.C. Additional information on M&T Bank can be accessed at www.newsroom.mtb.com. About M&T Bank M&T Bank Corporation is a financial holding company headquartered in Buffalo, New York. M&T's principal banking subsidiary, M&T Bank, operates banking offices in New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia. Trust-related services are provided by M&T's Wilmington Trust-affiliated companies and by M&T Bank. 2018 M&T Bank. Equal Housing Lender. Member FDIC. SOURCE M&T Bank Related Links https://www.mtb.com ARLINGTON, Va., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Michael Fraser, chief executive officer of ASTHO, issued the following statement today in response to the current federal actions to separate children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. "Our nation's health officers are extremely concerned about the policy of separating children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. All children should have the opportunity to thrive in safe, stable, and nurturing environments. Separating children from their parents exposes them to one of the most serious adverse events imaginable. We know this can have a lasting, long-term impact on the developing brain and the future social and emotional health and well-being of these children. As a non-partisan, consensus-based association of state and territorial public health leaders, ASTHO supports efforts to prevent adverse childhood experiences and encourages policies that promote the health of children and families. Relationships developed in early childhood are the foundation for lifelong health and, as our colleagues from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association have noted, these separations interrupt these bonds and may lead to serious consequences for children who do not heal from this trauma. We are very concerned that this policy will have serious long-term, deleterious effects on children who are not reunited quickly with their caregivers and we call upon the President and Congress to resolve this matter immediately. Partners and stakeholders from various perspectives and political affiliations agree that the time is now to change the family separation policy. In all cases, any adverse consequences of policy must always be balanced by a good that is equal or greater. On that basis, there is little justification for the harm that this practice is inflicting. There are surely more humane ways to resolve immigration policy and enforce our nation's immigration laws than separating parents and children. ASTHO urges the Administration and members of Congress to reconsider the current policy in the interest of protecting and promoting the health and well-being of families." ASTHO is the national nonprofit organization representing the public health agencies of the United States, the U.S. territories and freely associated states, and the District of Columbia, as well as the more than 100,000 public health professionals these agencies employ. ASTHO members, the chief health officials of these jurisdictions, are dedicated to formulating and influencing sound public health policy and to ensuring excellence in public health practice. SOURCE Association of State and Territorial Health Officials Related Links www.astho.org WASHINGTON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) has appointed Molly Gimmel, of Design To Delivery Inc (D2DInc) as Chair of the 2018-2019 Board of Directors. The NAWBO National Board is comprised of a diverse representation of the women business community across the country. While each board member brings their own unique strengths and business experience to the table, all come with the same common goal to help elevate women business owners through education, community support, and by raising awareness and engagement about policies to ensure women business owners excel in our national economy. "This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of The Women's Business Ownership Act, a legacy of the NAWBO organization, and singlehandedly, the most pivotal piece of legislation for women business owners in America," said Molly Gimmel, NAWBO National Board Chair. "I know with this amazing group of women our efforts this year will echo those of our predecessors, educating fellow women entrepreneurs and advocating for policies that advance women business owners for generations to come." Molly K. Gimmel is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of D2DInc Molly has been working in the field of government contract and acquisition management since 1991. Before founding D2DInc, she spent eight years working in the government practices of three of the "Big Five" accounting/ consulting firms. She is a recognized expert in government contracting and is regularly asked to speak to small business organizations and other groups interested in federal contracting. Gimmel was named an Enterprising Woman of the Year in 2014 by Enterprising Women magazine. The 2018-2019 NAWBO Board of Directors will be comprised of: Molly Gimmel Chair; Kathleen Warnick Past Chair; Jeanette Armbrust, Shaila Rao Mistry, Cristina Morales Heaney, Tanya R. Allen, Susan Dawson, Lydia Chicles, and Karen Bennetts. The new board will be installed on June 18 in Washington, D.C. and formally introduced to the business community at "Work Well- Live Well" the NAWBO Women's Business Conference held September 23-25 in Spokane, Washington. About NAWBO Founded in 1975, NAWBO is the unified voice of America's more than 10 million women-owned businesses representing the fastest growing segment of the economy. NAWBO is the only dues-based organization representing the interests of all women entrepreneurs across all industries. NAWBO develops programs that help navigate women entrepreneurs through the various stages of their business growth. To learn more, please visit www.nawbo.org. SOURCE National Association of Women Business Owners Related Links http://www.nawbo.org COLUMBIA, Md., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Bronchoscopy is one of the most common interventional pulmonology procedures and most practitioners take it for granted that reprocessing (the multistep process of cleaning and disinfecting or sterilizing the device) of bronchoscopes is effective. A new study, funded by 3M Company and supported by Healthmark Industries, has shown that this is not the case. Even when cleaned and disinfected according to current reprocessing guidelines, the study found that the majority of patient-ready, reusable, flexible bronchoscopes were contaminated and damaged. "The results are worrisome as patients undergoing bronchoscopy are commonly at high risk for infection due to transplant status, critical illness, or immune-suppression due to malignancy or chronic disease," the study said. The study, presented last week at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control's annual conference APIC 2018, concludes that "shifting toward using sterilized or single-use bronchoscopes" could reduce the risk of life-threatening infection transmission among patients. "The study validates what we have been saying for years, that single-use bronchoscopes are a better alternative than those that are cleaned and reused," said Lars Marcher, CEO and President Ambu A/S, a medical device maker that has pioneered the disposable bronchoscope. "Single-use bronchoscopes, like the ones we have been manufacturing and selling since 2009, are safe, effective and protect patients from viruses, bacteria and pathogens that can cause illness and even death." The study will be published in an upcoming issue of Chest Journal. The work was done in collaboration with scientists at several institutions, among them Cori L. Ofstead, MSPH, Mariah R. Quick, MPH; Harry P. Wetzler, MD, MSPH; John E. Eiland, RN, MS; Otis L. Heymann, BA of Ofstead & Associates in St. Paul, Minnesota; David A. Sonetti, MD and J. Scott Ferguson, MD, FCCP of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Ofstead and her colleagues conducted the study at three large hospitals in the United States in 2017, including two transplant centers. The researchers examined 24 clinically used flexible bronchoscopes after they were cleaned and disinfected in accordance with their institutional practices. (Protocols for effectively reprocessing bronchoscopes are complex and include bedside pre-cleaning, leak testing, manual cleaning, and sterilization or high-level disinfection (HLD) followed by drying.) The researchers observed reprocessing practices, visually inspected ports and channels, and assessed storage conditions. Contamination was detected using microbial cultures and tests for protein, hemoglobin, and adenosine triphosphate. Reprocessing practices were found to be substandard at two of the three hospitals studied. Although numerous cases of microbial transmission and infections linked to insufficient reprocessing of reusable flexible bronchoscopes have been reported, this study shows that current reprocessing guidelines -- even when done properly -- are "ineffective." After manual cleaning, the researchers found that 100% of the bronchoscopes evaluated had residual contamination. Microbial growth was found in 14 (58%) of the fully-reprocessed bronchoscopes, including mold, Stenotrophomonas maltophilia, and Escherichia coli/Shigella spp. Researchers say that even more bacteria, yet to be identified, may be found on the bronchoscopes and no tests were done to detect viruses such as Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, or influenza. Visible irregularities were observed in 100% of bronchoscopes, including retained fluid; brown, red, or oily residue; scratches; damaged insertion tubes and distal ends; and filamentous debris in channels. Storage conditions could also have contaminated reprocessed bronchoscopes, as visual inspections and ATP tests determined that storage cabinets were not clean. At one of the sites, results of tests done on a new bronchoscope suggest contaminants were introduced to the bronchoscope during initial cleaning, even before any clinical use. In addition, nursing staff at two of the hospitals were observed handling and transporting patient-ready bronchoscopes with bare hands, potentially exposing the bronchoscopes to contaminants. About Ambu For more information, please visit www.ambu.com. SOURCE Ambu Related Links http://www.ambu.com SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Newday Investing, a financial technology and institutional asset management company bringing socially responsible investing to the mainstream, today announced the public opening of its platform and its availability in the iOS store. With just a $5 minimum, investors can choose among six proprietary, themed funds that are tailored to the causes investors identify with most. Newday is the first and only mobile app offering a true asset allocation approach to impact investing based on modern portfolio theory, with personalized recommendations based on an investor's interests. Each Newday Impact Portfolio is a unique and targeted investment strategy built to benefit a specific area of impact: global impact, climate change, gender equality, animal welfare, ocean health and freshwater. The investment team at Newday is led by Cara Barr, chief strategy officer and former director of investment strategy at BlackRock. "Our mission is to make socially conscious investment solutions and education available to anyone and everyone, and our proprietary investment strategies are the lynchpin of that commitment," CEO Doug Heske explained. "Rather than simply being a distribution channel for off-the-shelf investment products, we wanted to demonstrate that it's possible to offer affordable, accessible, specialized and institutional-grade portfolios that could achieve the same or better rate of return while putting money to work for good." The six proprietary funds available to investors at launch are: Global Impact: Companies with core businesses addressing social and environmental challenges in accord with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Climate Action: Companies operating at significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions or developing technologies used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Gender Equality: Companies with employment policies offering similar benefits for family and caring responsibilities to women, men, non-binary and transgender individuals. Animal Welfare: Companies considering animals' well-being, including adequate housing, nutrition, disease prevention and treatment, responsible care and humane handling. Ocean Health: Companies that work for the protection and preservation of ecosystems in oceans and seas, such as restoring damaged marine ecosystems and preserving vulnerable species. Freshwater: Companies that lead their respective fields in maximizing water efficiency and are committed to combating pollution and ensuring affordable and equitable access to water resources. Each portfolio will benefit a selected NGO partner, which will receive 5 percent of the portfolio's management fees. Newday's Global Impact Equity is partnering with Conservation International while the benefiting organization for the Ocean Health portfolio is the Lonely Whale Foundation. "Creating a healthier, more prosperous planet is an urgent challenge requiring new and creative approaches," said Anastasia Khoo, chief marketing officer of Conservation International. "We're proud to partner with Newday to encourage investors at all levels to direct their investing dollars to companies that reflect their values." Dune Ives, executive director of Lonely Whale, said, "Lonely Whale is excited to see the potential impact that can arise from Newday's Oceans portfolio. It is inspiring to see investors' commitment to clean water, protecting marine life, and creating meaningful positive change for our planet." Newday Co-Founder and President Alex Meek said, "Our ultimate goal is to reallocate capital to better companies on a massive scale. By investing in socially responsible and sustainable companies, we can not only generate competitive returns but also change the way that people make their investment decisions." Newday's board of advisors has deep financial services and sustainability expertise and includes: Wayne Osborne , CEO of a major Bay Area family office , CEO of a major Bay Area family office Nancy Heinen , former general counsel at Apple Computer for 17 years , former general counsel at Apple Computer for 17 years Wendy Harrington , former EVP and chief marketing officer at Franklin Templeton Investments , former EVP and chief marketing officer at Franklin Templeton Investments Rich Moran , former president of Menlo College and partner at Venrock VC , former president of and partner at Venrock VC Mark Michael , former general counsel at 3Com , former general counsel at 3Com Nathan Dungan , CEO of financial education company, Share Save Spend , CEO of financial education company, Share Save Spend Mark McKee , president, Capital Alternatives Group and board member, Hall Capital Partners Newday was founded in 2016 by Alexander Meek and Anthony Randazzo, who bring strong backgrounds in asset management and technology development, respectively. Doug Heske, CEO, brings more than 22 years of investment management leadership. About Newday Investing Based in San Francisco, Newday is a technology-enabled asset manager that provides affordable, transparent and easy-to-understand impact investment solutions to the mass market. By investing in socially responsible and sustainable companies, Newday aims to generate competitive return and, most importantly, drive meaningful change in the way companies in our portfolios adopt environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices and policies. In order to be effective in driving positive impact on corporate behavior, Newday adopts an active ownership model, engaging with companies' decisions as they affect their stakeholders including communities, employees and shareholders. For more information visit www.newdayinvesting.com Contact: [email protected] SOURCE Newday Investing Related Links http://www.newdayinvesting.com EAST HANOVER, N.J., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Novartis announced today that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the inclusion of new evidence that Cosentyx (secukinumab) significantly slows the progression of joint structural damage at Week 24 versus placebo in those with active psoriatic arthritis (PsA).1 The data will be added to the drug's prescribing information and is effective in the US immediately. Cosentyx is the first and only interleukin-17A (IL-17A) antagonist approved to treat active PsA, active ankylosing spondylitis, and moderate to severe plaque psoriasis in adults.1 PsA can lead to reduced mobility and irreversible joint damage if left untreated.2,3 The update to the prescribing information is based on data from FUTURE 5, the largest Phase III study for a biologic done in PsA to date (996 patients). "While daily psoriatic arthritis symptoms can seriously affect a patient, the progressive nature of this disease should not be ignored. The joint damage that often results from having the disease over time can potentially be permanent," said Marcia Kayath, Head US Clinical Development and Medical Affairs, Novartis. "Now physicians and their patients with psoriatic arthritis can be confident that Cosentyx not only offers significant symptom relief, but also helps slow the progression of the disease." PsA affects an estimated 2 million people in the US and is characterized by joint pain and stiffness.3 PsA can lead to irreversible joint damage and disability caused by years of inflammation.3,2 More than 74,000 patients in the US have been prescribed Cosentyx in the post-marketing setting across all indications since launch.4 About Cosentyx (secukinumab) and interleukin-17A (IL-17A) Cosentyx is a fully human monoclonal antibody (mAB) that selectively binds to the interleukin-17A (IL-17A) cytokine and inhibits its interaction with the IL-17 receptor.1 Cosentyx is approved in more than 75 countries, which includes the European Union countries and the US, across all indications psoriatic arthritis (PsA), psoriasis and ankylosing spondylitis (AS). Cosentyx is approved for the treatment of PsA in 77 countries, including the US, Canada, the European Union countries and Australia. About the FUTURE 5 data (NCT02404350)5 In the study, participants (n=996) with active psoriatic arthritis (PsA) were randomized to receive Cosentyx 300 mg with loading dose (LD), 150 mg with LD, 150 mg without LD, or placebo. All groups received Cosentyx or placebo at baseline (BL), Weeks 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then every 4 weeks. At Week 16, placebo non-responders (patients with <20% improvement from BL in tender or swollen joint counts) were switched to Cosentyx 300 mg or 150 mg; remaining placebo patients were switched at Week 24. The primary endpoint was ACR20 at Week 16 and the key secondary endpoint was radiographic structural progression, as measured by mTSS, assessed by two blinded readers, based on hand/wrist/foot X-rays obtained at BL, Week 16 (non-responders), and Week 24. About psoriatic arthritis (PsA) Closely associated with psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis (PsA) is part of a spectrum of long-term diseases impacting joints, known as spondyloarthritis.3,6 Up to 2 million people are currently diagnosed with PsA in the US and approximately one in four of people with psoriasis may have undiagnosed PsA.3 Symptoms of PsA include joint pain and stiffness, skin and nail psoriasis, swollen toes and fingers, and persistent painful tendonitis.3 INDICATIONS Cosentyx is a human interleukin-17A antagonist indicated for the treatment of: moderate to severe plaque psoriasis in adult patients who are candidates for systemic therapy or phototherapy adults with active psoriatic arthritis (PsA) adults with active ankylosing spondylitis (AS) IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION Do not use Cosentyx if you have had a severe allergic reaction to secukinumab or any of the other ingredients in Cosentyx. See the Medication Guide for a complete list of ingredients. Cosentyx is a medicine that affects your immune system. Cosentyx may increase your risk of having serious side effects such as: Infections Cosentyx may lower the ability of your immune system to fight infections and may increase your risk of infections. Your doctor should check you for tuberculosis (TB) before starting treatment with Cosentyx. If your doctor feels that you are at risk for TB, you may be treated with medicine for TB before you begin treatment with Cosentyx and during treatment with Cosentyx. Your doctor should watch you closely for signs and symptoms of TB during treatment with Cosentyx. Do not take Cosentyx if you have an active TB infection. Before starting Cosentyx, tell your doctor if you: are being treated for an infection have an infection that does not go away or that keeps coming back have TB or have been in close contact with someone with TB think you have an infection or have symptoms of an infection such as: fevers, sweats, or chills muscle aches cough shortness of breath blood in your phlegm weight loss warm, red, or painful skin or sores on your body diarrhea or stomach pain burning when you urinate or urinate more often than normal After starting Cosentyx, call your doctor right away if you have any signs of infection listed above. Do not use Cosentyx if you have any signs of infection unless you are instructed to by your doctor. Inflammatory Bowel Disease New cases of inflammatory bowel disease or "flare-ups" can happen with Cosentyx, and can sometimes be serious. If you have inflammatory bowel disease (ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease), tell your doctor if you have worsening disease symptoms during treatment with Cosentyx or develop new symptoms of stomach pain or diarrhea. Serious Allergic Reactions Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get emergency medical help right away if you get any of the following symptoms: feeling faint; swelling of your face, eyelids, lips, mouth, tongue, or throat; trouble breathing or throat tightness; chest tightness; or skin rash. If you have a severe allergic reaction, do not give another injection of Cosentyx. Before starting Cosentyx, tell your doctor if you: have any of the conditions or symptoms listed above for infections have inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis) are allergic to latex. The needle caps contain latex. have recently received or are scheduled to receive an immunization (vaccine). People who take Cosentyx should not receive live vaccines. receive live vaccines. have any other medical conditions are pregnant or plan to become pregnant. It is not known if Cosentyx can harm your unborn baby. You and your doctor should decide if you will use Cosentyx. are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. It is not known if Cosentyx passes into your breast milk. Tell your doctor about all the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. Know the medicines you take. Keep a list of your medicines to show your doctor and pharmacist when you get a new medicine. How should I use Cosentyx? See the detailed Instructions for Use that comes with your Cosentyx for information on how to prepare and inject a dose of Cosentyx, and how to properly throw away (dispose of) used Cosentyx Sensoready pens and prefilled syringes. Use Cosentyx exactly as prescribed by your doctor. If your doctor decides that you or a caregiver may give your injections of Cosentyx at home, you should receive training on the right way to prepare and inject Cosentyx. Do not try to inject Cosentyx yourself, until you or your caregiver has been shown how to inject Cosentyx by your doctor or nurse. The most common side effects of Cosentyx include: cold symptoms, diarrhea, and upper respiratory infections. These are not all of the possible side effects of Cosentyx. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch, or call 1-800-FDA-1088. Please see accompanying full Prescribing Information, including Medication Guide. 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 Cosentyx [Prescribing Information]. East Hanover, NJ : Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; 2018. Villani AP, Rouzaud M, Sevrain M, et al. Prevalence of undiagnosed psoriatic arthritis among psoriasis patients: Systematic review and meta-analysis. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2015;73(2):242-8 National Psoriasis Foundation. Media Kit. Available at: https://www.psoriasis.org/sites/default/files/for-media/MediaKit.pdf. Last accessed May 2018 . Data on File. Number of Patients Prescribed Cosentyx. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp; February. 2018. Mease P, van der Heijde D, Landewe R, et al. Secukinumab improves active psoriatic arthritis symptoms and inhibits radiographic progression: primary results from the randomised, double-blind, phase III FUTURE 5 study. Ann Rheum Dis.2018; 77:890-897 Spondyloarthritis. American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Web site. https://www.rheumatology.org/I-Am-A/Patient-Caregiver/Diseases-Conditions/Spondyloarthritis Accessed October 2017 . 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] Jeannie Neufeld Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation +1 862 778 2104 (direct) +1 201 650 2728 (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.novartis.com SAN JOSE, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Nubeva Technologies LTD. ("Nubeva" or the "Company") (TSX-V: NBVA), is pleased to announce that, subject to regulatory approval, it has retained Mackie Research Capital Corporation to initiate its market making service to provide market making services to the Company in compliance with the policies and guidelines of the TSX Venture Exchange and other applicable legislation. Mackie will trade shares of Nubeva on the TSXV with the objective of maintaining a reasonable market and improving the liquidity of Nubeva's common shares. Under the terms of the agreement, Mackie will receive $4,000 per month payable quarterly in advance. The agreement will continue in effect unless terminated by either party. There are no performance factors contained in the agreement and Mackie will not receive shares or options as compensation. Mackie and the Company are unrelated and unaffiliated entities, but Mackie may provide investment banking services to the Company and Mackie and/or its clients may have an interest, directly or indirectly, in the securities of the Company. About Mackie Research Capital Corporation Mackie is one of Canada's largest independent full-service investment firms, and proudly traces its roots back to 1921. Mackie is privately owned by many of its 300 employees. As a fully integrated national investment dealer, Mackie offers a full complement of capital markets and wealth management services to private clients, institutions and growth companies. About Nubeva Technologies Ltd. Nubeva Technologies Ltd. develops Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) software and services that enable enterprises to run best-of-breed cybersecurity in public cloud environments. Nubeva's products provide enhanced visibility and control over network traffic and simplified automation and operation that is essential to run top-tier security technologies and services in the cloud easily and at low costs. With Nubeva, organizations can leverage existing policies, technologies and operations and accelerate their move to the cloud with confidence. San Jose, CA-headquartered Nubeva is committed to the vision of dramatically broader and lower cost availability of the world's best security to confront the rising cyber-crime threat. Visit www.nubeva.com for more information. Forward Looking Statements This news release includes statements containing forward-looking information. Actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. Undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Company can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE Nubeva Technologies Ltd. AKRON, Ohio, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program offered at Herzing University-Akron has been accredited by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) for five years, the university announced today. Accreditation by CCNE shows that Herzing's BSN program is sufficient across several criteria, including: institutional resources quality curriculum and teaching practices program outcomes related to completion rates, pass rates and employment Herzing also has a systematic evaluation plan that includes ongoing assessments of the programs to show that the university continues to meet CCNE accreditation standards. "Northeastern Ohio is a major hub for the healthcare industry, and local employers pay close attention to the quality of education and training that students receive," said Herzing-Akron Campus President Bill Cassidy. "This accreditation further proves our ongoing commitment to excellence in nursing education." According to the Center for Health Affairs, Northeast Ohio could face a shortage of 3,500 nurses by 2020. Nationally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment for registered nurses will grow by 15 percent through 2026. The BSN program at Herzing's Akron campus offers year-round study, allowing students to graduate in as little as three years. Direct admission is available for Herzing's nursing programs, which are offered at the Akron campus or online. Herzing's nursing program integrates theoretical instruction with clinical experience to provide a broad, holistic and reality-based understanding of the roles and responsibilities of a professional nurse. In addition to learning in a nursing simulation lab, students gain real-world experience by completing required clinical work at healthcare organizations across Northeast Ohio. "We applaud the Akron nursing faculty and staff for their dedication and commitment to ensuring our nursing programs effectively train students for the complex, diverse and ever-changing needs of the healthcare industry," said Pat Edwards, System Dean of Nursing Operations at Herzing University. Officially recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education as a national accreditation agency, CCNE is an autonomous accrediting agency, contributing to the improvement of the public's health. CCNE ensures the quality and integrity of baccalaureate, graduate, and residency programs in nursing and serves the public interest by assessing and identifying programs that engage in effective educational practices. As a voluntary, self-regulatory process, CCNE accreditation supports and encourages continuing self-assessment by nursing programs and supports continuing growth and improvement of collegiate professional education and nurse residency programs. The Akron campus is at 1600 South Arlington Street, 100. For more information, visit the campus during business hours or call 330-509-7482. 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 BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Omega Law Group, PC has been retained to represent the severely injured victim of a Long Beach accident involving a police cruiser and Metro bus. The accident took place on May 11, 2015, just before 1 a.m. Our client was quickly transported to the hospital to receive care for his injuries, while police provisionally shut down the 710 Long Beach Freeway to investigate the cause and extent of the car crash. Taking place on the southbound lanes of the freeway just before the Pacific Coast Highway exit, the wreck was cleared away overnight as traffic flowed freely the morning after. "Our client has incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills and unfortunately will never be the same," said Attorney Edwin Saghian of Omega Law Group, PC. Mr. Saghian went on to say, "We fully intend to pursue all responsible parties aggressively and we intend to attain maximum compensation for our client's injuries and will not rest until we do so." The victim of this accident is in more than capable hands with the representation and guidance of the California personal injury attorneys of Omega Law Group, PC. More information can be found about this accident by clicking here. In the event you or a loved one is involved in a car accident, call Omega Law Group, PC to reach California personal injury lawyers who have the skill and experience to successfully advocate on your behalf. As a victim of another's negligence or misconduct, you have every right to fight for the compensation you deserve--whether it be for loss of work and wages, medical expenses, property damages, or emotional trauma in the form of pain and suffering. To schedule an initial consultation with one of the attorneys at Omega Law Group, PC, please call (310) 504-1852. SOURCE Omega Law Group, PC On World Sickle Cell Day, ASH Takes Action to Improve Global Health Outcomes American Society of Hematology (ASH), with the Sickle Cell Disease Coalition, debuts videos that shed light on the global state of sickle cell disease to help improve screening and early care for children in Africa with Sickle Cell Disease NASHVILLE, Tenn., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- OnlineSchoolsCenter.com has recently released their list of the Top Online Bachelor of Science in Nursing Degree Programs of 2018, a comprehensive and up-to-date index of the finest schools offering BSN degrees. You may view the list, along with a description of the benefits of each institution, by clicking the link below: https://www.onlineschoolscenter.com/top-20-online-nursing-degree-programs/ Nursing is perhaps the most popular career path in the nation. Students in this discipline work in the health care field and have the distinct advantage of working in multiple specialties, or changing to a new specialty with ease. These professionals work closely with doctors and patients, and have a particularly strong knowledge of medicine and the human body, as well as bedside manner. Working with other professionals throughout healthcare and medical environments of all kinds, nurses fill an absolutely crucial role in this field. These 20 online schools represent some of the finest higher education institutions in America. Students in any one of these programs have access to outstanding academic and career resources, faculty members, and advising throughout their careers both in and out of school. Earning a BSN is a highly prudent decision and gives students access to more far reaching areas of the health care field. According to lead researcher and writer, Rowan Jones, "Today, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree program is required for students to enter into various specialties within the field, such as plastic surgery or dermatology. Students in these schools will be able to explore the diverse areas of nursing and understand what they want out of their career." Below we have listed the schools that have made the Top Online Bachelor of Science in Nursing Degree Programs of 2018: Ball State University Muncie, IN Western Governors University Salt Lake City, UT University of Alabama at Birmingham Birmingham, AL Penn State World Campus University Park, PA University of Kentucky Lexington, KY Boise State University Boise, ID University of Texas at Tyler Tyler, TX Fort Hays State University Hays, KS University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Oshkosh, WI Western Kentucky University Bowling Green, KY University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH University of Rhode Island Kingston, RI North Dakota State University Fargo, ND West Texas A&M University Canyon, TX Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ Marian University Indianapolis, IN Rutgers University Brunswick , NJ , NJ University of South Carolina Columbia, SC University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, IL University of Texas at Arlington Arlington, TX Contact: Rowan Jones Researcher/Writer OnlineSchoolsCenter.com Email: [email protected] Cell: (931) 636-4286 SOURCE OnlineSchoolsCenter.com ONTARIO, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ontario International Airport (ONT) has welcomed the arrival of the busy summer travel season by continuing a double-digit surge in domestic and international travel that has made ONT one of the fastest-growing airports in Southern California. Domestic and international travelers totaled 438,974 during May, up 12.4% from May of last year when passenger volume was 390,516. While domestic volume increased 10.7% last month, the number of international passengers grew 63.3%. The dramatic rise in international travel was the result of new daily service between Ontario and Taiwan launched by China Airlines in March this year. Through the first five months of 2018, nearly 2 million passengers traveled through ONT, an increase of 11.1% over the same period in 2017. "Our customers continue to show great confidence in our airport, a testament to all that is being done to develop Ontario into a first-class international gateway," said Mark Thorpe, chief executive officer of the Ontario International Airport Authority (OIAA). "Business and leisure travelers alike see the value of our facilities, services and amenities, not to mention the seamless, hassle-free experience which has become our hallmark." Ontario officials estimate more than 1.4 million air passengers will travel through ONT from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, up more than 12% from 2017. Frontier Airlines, which established service at ONT in October, will add daily service to Orlando in August, the first ever non-stop service from the Inland Empire to Florida. JetBlue previously announced it will return to ONT after a 10-year absence with daily round-trip service to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport beginning in September. In addition to the strong passenger gains in May, Ontario experienced 22.1% growth in cargo volume from 51,793 tons in May 2017 to 63,258 tons last month. On a year-to-date basis, cargo tonnage, including freight and mail shipments, grew 17.1%. Ontario's passenger terminals are currently undergoing a major transformation of dining and retail concessions with capital investments totaling more than $8 million. Popular national brands including WPizza by Wolfgang Puck, Einstein Bros Bagels and Rock & Brews are already open for business. May 2018 May 2017 % Change YTD 2018 YTD 2017 % Change Passenger Traffic Domestic 417,891 377,607 10.7% 1,928,255 1,745,295 10.5% International 21,083 12,909 63.3% 70,898 54,727 29.5% Total 438,974 390,516 12.4% 1,999,153 1,800,022 11.1% Air Cargo (Tons) Freight 60,360 49,231 22.6% 276,684 235,278 17.6% Mail 2,898 2,561 13.2% 12,441 11,707 6.3% Total 63,258 51,793 22.1% 289,126 246,985 17.1% About Ontario International Airport Ontario International (ONT) Airport is located in the Inland Empire, approximately 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles in the center of Southern California. It is a full-service airport with nonstop commercial jet service to 18 major airports in the U.S. and Mexico, and connecting service to many domestic and international destinations. There is an average of 64 daily departures offered by 8 air carriers. More information is available at www.flyOntario.com. Follow @flyONT on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram About the Ontario International Airport Authority (OIAA) The OIAA was formed in August 2012 by a Joint Powers Agreement between the City of Ontario and the County of San Bernardino to provide overall direction for the management, operations, development and marketing of ONT for the benefit of the Southern California economy and the residents of the airport's four-county catchment area. OIAA Commissioners are Ontario Mayor Pro-Tem Alan D. Wapner (President), Retired Riverside Mayor Ronald O. Loveridge (Vice President), Ontario Council Member Jim W. Bowman (Secretary), San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman (Commissioner) and retired business executive Julia Gouw (Commissioner). News Media Contacts: Atif Elkadi, Senior Director of Marketing, Communications and External Affairs, (858) 361-9319 [email protected] Steve Lambert, (909) 841-7527 [email protected] SOURCE Ontario International Airport Related Links http://www.flyontario.com/ SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Orange Fab, a leading platform for connecting innovative startups with corporations, has announced the launch of Fab Connect(ai) a Silicon Valley acceleration program designed to identify and support early stage startups with resources for empowering smart connectivity. Fab Connect(ai) is being launched in collaboration with prominent partners, including Google Cloud's Startup Program, NVIDIA's Inception Program, Microsoft IoT & AI Insider Labs, LAB IX Flex Ventures, Publicis Groupe, Groupe Seb, Michelin, Valeo, Ping An Technology and Lumi. Fab Connect(ai) has created a deliberately crafted ecosystem of resources for seed-stage startups who are building the bridge between AI and ubiquitous smart connectivity. The platform will offer the combination of artificial intelligence, networking technologies, chipsets, and sensors, which will realize the unfulfilled promises of the intelligent enterprise, smart home, AI-driven factory, and smart city. Orange Fab created Fab Connect(ai) based on the observation that existing ecosystems are too fragmented to work together. There are complex operating environments, with distinct technology providers and multiple stakeholders, and Fab Connect(ai) partners collaborate to bridge these gaps and provide entrepreneurs with an integrated network to better facilitate the rise of smart connectivity empowered by AI. Startups that participate in Fab Connect(ai) will have access to a network of seed-stage investors and corporations providing technical resources and real-world business challenges. Multinational corporations have a new opportunity to link their networks together through Fab Connect(ai) to source external innovation. Each season of Fab Connect(ai) will focus on a unique technology topic of strategic interest to all participants. The first season will focus on startups working at the intersection of AI and IoT. "Fab Connect(ai) is one of the first accelerator programs to align capital with global growth opportunities sustained by such a network of partners," noted Georges Nahon, CEO of Orange Silicon Valley, the home of Orange Fab. "Our goal with Fab Connect(ai) is to identify the most promising startups in AI & IoT, a domain of growing importance for Orange and our Fab Force members." "Fab Connect(ai) is the only global initiative designed to empower AI with the benefits of smart connectivity, from a collaborative and global perspective, and with an extensive network of influential partners," said Denis Barrier, co-founder and CEO of Cathay Innovation. "As a global venture capital fund deeply committed in the fourth industrial revolution, Cathay Innovation believes that this approach can be helpful for the rise of a Super AI able to foster the next wave of digital transformation." "Fab Connect is a disruptive global acceleration experience. It connects the next generation of Industry 4.0, AI and smart connectivity startups with world class industry leaders to help them disrupt their space. Fab Connect is building bridges between startups and innovative corporates, which we are familiar with at Iris Capital, thanks to our Venture initiative built in partnership with leading corporate partners, and we look forward to supporting this unique accelerator," adds Julien-David Nitlech, Partner at Iris Capital To learn more about the program and apply to Fab Connect(ai)'s inaugural cohort: www.orangefab.com/connect About Orange Fab Orange Fab, an Orange Silicon Valley initiative, is a platform connecting innovative startups to corporations for proof-of-concept projects, distribution, or investment opportunities utilizing our onsite team of industry analysts, online content platform, CVC network, and thought leadership events. About Orange Silicon Valley Orange Silicon Valley (OSV) is the San Francisco Bay Area presence of Orange, one of the world's leading telecommunications operators. We actively engage with San Francisco and Silicon Valley and participate in the disruptive innovations changing the way we communicate. About Cathay Innovation Cathay Innovation is a global venture capital fund, created in affiliation with Cathay Capital Private Equity. It was founded around the shared conviction that supporting digital entrepreneurs by providing them with a platform bridging 3 continents North America, Europe and China constitutes a particularly powerful value-creation strategy. As a multi-stage fund, Cathay Innovation partners with visionary entrepreneurs, committed to driving change through technology. Such transformation is accelerated by leveraging Cathay Capital Private Equity's extensive network with corporates and solid experience in operational excellence. Cathay Innovation has offices in San Francisco, Paris, Beijing and Shanghai. For more information visit www.cathayinnovation.com or follow us on Twitter @Cathayinnov About Iris Capital Iris Capital is a European venture capital funds' manager specialized in the digital economy. It fuels entrepreneurs at various stages of maturity, from early-stage to growth equity. With its deep sector specialization and extensive experience acquired over 30+ years, as well as the backing of its corporate sponsors, Iris Capital provides active support to its portfolio companies, through its presence in Paris, Berlin, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Dubai. IrisNext, Iris Capital's new fund, includes for its first closing industry leaders such as Orange, Publicis and Valeo, joined by financial investors and institutions such as Bpifrance and BRED Banque Populaire. Iris Capital investments include, among others, companies such as Agorize, Armis, Careem, iAdvize, Kyriba, Mojio, Netatmo, PlaceIQ, Scality, Shift Technology, Talend, Unu Motors and Zeta Global. For more information, visit www.iriscapital.com Media contacts Orange Group Olivier Emberger [email protected] Orange Fab Julie Leclercq [email protected] +1 415 712 5365 Cathay Innovation For France Yoann Besse Citigate Dewe Rogerson [email protected] +33 6 63 03 84 91 For the US Margot Edelman - Edelman [email protected] Iris Capital Emmanuelle Flahault-Franc [email protected] +33 1 45 62 73 67 SOURCE Orange Fab Adopting a unit testing practice that is scalable across the team is critical to ensure the delivery of high-quality applications, as stated in Gartner's January 2018 paper, Adopt a 'Shift Left' Approach to Testing to Accelerate and Improve Application Development : "When testing is emphasized in the incorrect areas, quality, cost and time are at risk. When and how we test is important. We should test early and with automation. What we test is equally important, and we should be testing the implementation of the product with weighted importance. Testing frequently starts from the outside of the application and works in. This is incorrect. Proper testing starts at requirements and has the greatest significance at code-level unit test." To help Java developers achieve early, automated, and efficient testing, today's release of Parasoft Jtest focuses on enabling quality at speed with enhancements to the Parasoft Jtest Unit Test Assistant. By eliminating the often tedious and manual process of unit testing, Parasoft Jtest helps users achieve code coverage requirements in less time with reduced effort. As stated by one user, a Senior Software Architect at a multinational wholesale retailer, "Jtest helps us get to our code coverage number faster and makes unit testing go by quickly making everyone happy." With today's release, Parasoft's proprietary Change-Based Testing technology is now also integrated within the IDE, providing users with the ability to quickly understand how to thoroughly test their source code changes with existing test suites, and quickly execute only the unit tests affected by those source code changes. This powerful technology helps drive improvements to developer productivity and ensures that code is comprehensively tested before submitting into the CI/CD pipeline. New features and enhancements in Parasoft Jtest 10.4.0 include: New code coverage recommendations to focus users on reusing existing tests to drive meaningful and accurate test coverage Introduction of Change-Based Testing technology into the IDE, increasing developer productivity and reducing test suite maintenance Extended support for both IntelliJ and Eclipse IDEs For more detail about the latest release, and to learn about how to cut unit testing time in half, please read our latest blog: https://blog.parasoft.com/jtest-uta-optimizes-unit-testing-by-reducing-testing-overhead-by-half About Parasoft: Parasoft provides innovative tools that automate time-consuming software testing tasks and provide management with intelligent analytics necessary to focus on what matters. Parasoft's technologies reduce the time, effort, and cost of delivering secure, reliable, and compliant software, by integrating static and runtime analysis; unit, functional, and API testing; and service virtualization. Parasoft supports software organizations as they develop and deploy applications in the embedded, enterprise and IoT markets. With developer testing tools, manager reporting/analytics, and executive dashboarding, Parasoft enables organizations to succeed in today's most strategic development initiatives agile, continuous testing, DevOps, and security. SOURCE Parasoft Related Links http://www.parasoft.com DALLAS, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Simmons Bank, as Trustee of the Permian Basin Royalty Trust (NYSE: PBT) ("Permian") today declared a cash distribution to the holders of its units of beneficial interest of $0.044080 per unit, payable on July 16, 2018, to unit holders of record on June 29, 2018. This month's distribution decreased from the previous month due to a decrease in oil and gas production, offset by an increase in pricing for oil but a slight decline in the pricing for gas during the month of April on the Waddell Ranch Properties. Net Production of the Waddell Ranch Properties are also affected when the various expenses fluctuate as they did this month resulting in lower Net to Trust production volumes. Conoco Phillips made an adjustment of approximately $400,000 for the previous year Joint Operating Agreement overhead. This adjustment is under review at this time. Production and pricing of both oil and gas on the Texas Royalty properties increased over the previous month. WADDELL RANCH Production for the underlying properties at the Waddell Ranch was 51,457 barrels of oil and 298,636 Mcf of gas. The production for the Trust's allocated portion of the Waddell Ranch was 13,628 barrels of oil and 80,047 Mcf of gas. The average price for oil was $62.83 per bbl and for gas was $2.65 per Mcf. This would primarily reflect production and pricing for the month of April for oil and the month of March for gas. These allocated volumes were significantly impacted by the pricing of both oil and gas. This production and pricing for the Underlying Properties resulted in revenues for the Waddell Ranch Properties of $4,025,233. Deducted from these would be the Lease Operating Expense (LOE) of $2,328,269, taxes of $267,766 and Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) of $66,089 totaling $2,662,124 resulting in a Net Profit of $1,363,109 for the month of May. With the Trust's Net Profit Interest (NPI) of 75% of the underlying properties, this would result in a net contribution by the Waddell Ranch Properties of $1,022,332 to this month's distribution. Underlying Properties Net to Trust Sales Volumes Volumes Average Price Oil (bbls) Gas (Mcf) Oil (bbls) Gas (Mcf) Oil (per bbl) Gas (per Mcf) Current Month Waddell Ranch 51,457 298,636 13,628 80,047* $62.83 $2.65** Texas Royalties 23,211 22,073 20,299 19,282* $61.59 $6.42** Prior Month Waddell Ranch 55,246 319,493 20,941 122,074* $59.53 $2.91** Texas Royalties 20,882 20,360 18,074 17,596* $60.49 $6.91** *These volumes are the net to the trust, after allocation of expenses to Trust's net profit interest, including any prior period adjustments. **This pricing includes sales of gas liquid products. TEXAS ROYALTY PROPERTIES Production for the underlying properties at the Texas Royalties was 23,211 barrels of oil and 22,073 Mcf of gas. The production for the Trust's allocated portion of the Texas Royalties was 20,299 barrels of oil and 19,282 Mcf of gas. The average price for oil was $61.59 per bbl and for gas was $6.42 per Mcf. This would primarily reflect production and pricing for the month of April for oil and the month of March for gas. These allocated volumes were impacted by the pricing of both oil and gas. This production and pricing for the underlying properties resulted in revenues for the Texas Royalties of $1,571,447. Deducted from these were taxes of $182,410 resulting in a Net Profit of $1,389,037 for the month of May. With the Trust's Net Profit Interest (NPI) of 95% of the Underlying Properties, this would result in net contribution by the Texas Royalties of $1,319,587 to this month's distribution. General and Administrative Expenses deducted for the month were $289,365 resulting in a distribution of $2,054,519 to 46,608,796 units outstanding, or $0.044080 per unit. The worldwide market conditions continue to affect the pricing for domestic production. It is difficult to predict what effect these conditions will have on future distributions. Permian's cash distribution history, current and prior year financial reports, including a summary of reserves as of 1/1/2018, tax information booklets, and a link to filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission, all can be found on its website at http://www.pbt-permian.com/. SOURCE Permian Basin Royalty Trust Related Links http://www.pbt-permian.com FORT COLLINS, Colo., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Persistent Systems, LLC ("Persistent") is pleased to announce a major expansion of its presence in Fort Collins, Colorado, due to increased demand for the company's Wave Relay mobile ad hoc networking (MANET) technology and ancillary services. Persistent will be tripling its existing Fort Collins office footprint through a new lease extension, with build-out of the new space to be completed in time for an opening ceremony on October 1, 2018. "At Persistent, we are committed to meeting the needs of our customers," said Adrien Robenhymer, VP of Business Development at Persistent Systems, "and this expansion will help meet the significant increase in demand for our Wave Relay MANET products and applications." The team at Fort Collins office focuses on government and commercial applications. Federal customers include the intelligence, cyber defense, and nuclear protection communities, while commercial customers in agriculture and mining industries rely on the Wave Relay MANET to network their Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and Machine to Machine (M2M) systems. The new Fort Collins space will include a Systems Integration Lab (SIL), secure meeting and training rooms, custom workspaces, and fully-equipped testing facilities. Persistent is also hiring field support, program management, business development, IT, and sales staff to grow the Colorado office to 60 employees. "The Fort Collins area offers an outdoor lifestyle that resonates with our team members and with our customers who visit," Robenhymer said. "We have many employees who bike to and from work, and we often enjoy heading into the Rockies, a few miles west of our office, to test our products in the mountains." About Persistent Systems, LLC Headquartered in New York City since 2007, Persistent Systems, LLC is a global communications technology company that develops and manufactures a patented and secure Mobile Ad hoc Networking (MANET) system: Wave Relay. Wave Relay transmits and receives data, video, voice and other applications under the most difficult conditions. Their suite of products is utilized in Commercial, Military, Government, Industrial, Agriculture, Robotics, and Unmanned Systems markets. Please visit http://www.persistentsystems.com to learn more. Follow Persistent Systems on Twitter to get updates on the latest developments @pswaverelay. SOURCE Persistent Systems, LLC Related Links http://www.persistentsystems.com ANN ARBOR, Mich., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Pet Ear Care Center at Cupertino Animal Hospital in Northern California is now offering on-site CT scans for pets with VetCAT, a small portable CT scanner from Xoran Technologies LLC. VetCAT CT scans take only 10 seconds and generate high-quality, 3D X-ray images of the anatomy, enabling the veterinarians at Cupertino Animal Hospital to quickly identify hidden diseases and injuries at the time of their patients' exams. This means more accurate diagnosis and faster treatment for pets. Because the CT scan is displayed on the VetCAT unit itself, pet owners can see their pet's CT scan in real time, allowing them to better understand their pet's problem and make informed decisions about the treatment options presented by their doctor. By adopting advanced imaging technology for on-site diagnosis, Cupertino Animal Hospital stands out from other veterinary clinics which typically refer pets to offsite locations for CT scans on conventional full-body "donut" style CT scanners. These full-body scanners are so massive, complex, and expensive that they are typically seen only in hospitals and large imaging centers. In eliminating the delay and costs for off-site referral for CT scans, Cupertino Animal Hospital can give pet parents immediate answers about their pet's condition and peace-of-mind in their decisions about treatment options. "Seeing the joy of passionate veterinarians when discovering 3D images of their patients for the first time is an amazing experience," said David Sarment, DDS, MS, President of Xoran Technologies. "We are excited to use cutting-edge technology. With VetCAT, I can finally see X-rays of the head in three dimensions. The diagnosis of ears, sinuses, teeth, and orbit pathology is more precise. It is easy to use and makes me a better doctor," said Dr. Munir Kureshi, DVM, owner of Cupertino Animal Hospital in Cupertino, California. About Xoran Technologies: Xoran is a pioneer and medical market leader in point-of-care CT scanners since 2001. Founded by research scientists from the University of Michigan, Xoran is a privately held company, self-funded through NIH grants and operational revenue from its suite of innovative CT systems and services. Xoran is dedicated to exceptional customer service, and all its CT systems are supported by Xoran engineers with OEM parts. In addition to its VetCAT scanner, Xoran's product line includes MiniCAT IQ and MiniCAT 2020 upright point-of-care CT scanners, and xCAT XL and xCAT IQ portable medical CT scanners for use in the ER, OR, and ICU. Learn more at www.xorantech.com About Cupertino Animal Hospital: Cupertino Animal Hospital is a full-service veterinary hospital providing complete veterinary medical and surgical services for dogs, cats, birds, reptiles, guinea pigs, rabbits, ferrets, and rodents. It is the preferred and leading veterinary hospital in the Silicon Valley, providing state-of-the-art veterinary medicine, individualized patient care, friendly customer service, and a great workplace. Learn more at www.cupertinovet.com SOURCE Xoran Technologies SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- PlanGrid, the leader in construction productivity software, today announced it has experienced almost 200 percent growth in year-over-year annual recurring revenue specifically from customers in the heavy civil segment. More than 300 construction firms that develop civil infrastructure such as roads, bridges, tunnels, and airports now rely on PlanGrid to collaborate across large teams that are often spread out over long distances with no mobile or Internet connectivity. On average, large infrastructure projects cost 80 percent more than budgeted and run 20 months late, according to IHS Markit, and PlanGrid is proven to empower general contractors and subs to deliver on time and on budget. In the past six months alone, PlanGrid has demonstrated immediate time-to-value with infrastructure projects including: These new projects add to PlanGrid's existing partnerships with general contractors undertaking shoring up infrastructure projects such as the Zoo Interchange in Milwaukee; Sound Transit's East Link Light Rail Extension Project in the Seattle area; Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Transbay Tube Seismic Retrofit in San Francisco; I-225 Light Rail Line in Denver; 3rd Street Viaduct Bridge Rehab in Missouri; and Transco Natural Gas Pipeline in Pennsylvania, among many others. PlanGrid is used on heavy civil projects in every major metro in the United States, as well as in heavy civil projects outside of the US. PlanGrid Addresses Unique Challenges of Civil Infrastructure Environment While the entire construction industry struggles with a skilled labor shortage and inefficiencies from paper-based processes, teams working on civil infrastructure face challenges unique to large-scale projects that are typically underground, outside or under water. Jobs are often spread out over long distances, with hundreds of team members who need to stay in constant contact. The jobsite trailer can be several miles away and there is typically little or no mobile connectivity; frequent and necessary trips to the trailer can take up several hours of a work day, reducing the team's ability to communicate quickly and work effectively. Once work is completed, it is often buried or covered by concrete, and documentation for future reference by owners is a challenge. Government agencies often require meticulous record-keeping and unlike commercial owners, always award jobs to general contractors with the lowest bids, increasing pressure to keep margins low. With an uptick in P3 projects, construction teams also need to be able to use a centralized information hub to collaborate with government owners, JV partners and subs, without disrupting business systems that may already be in use by each party. PlanGrid addresses these many challenges by acting as a mobile-first central hub for real-time information on projects, increasing communication between all team members whether they're online or offline. For example, field reports, as-builts and plan mark-ups can be documented and shared with the whole team as work is done, instantly eliminating trips to the trailer so workers can spend time where it matters most. GPS-tagged photos can be attached on plans to a specific location, providing a view of actual field conditions during the design phase, tracking problems and progress during build, and also documenting work that's been completed and then buried. Delivering a complete turnover package to owners and government agencies is easy with a comprehensive data set of all field work completed, and large-scale close-outs that previously took as much as six months can be reduced to as little as 30 days. "Each infrastructure project we work on requires seamless coordination between every team member," said Nick Everson, Regional Operations Manager for The Walsh Group. "For our work on the Milwaukee Zoo Interchange, PlanGrid allowed us to update more than 11,000 blueprints in real-time, and our field team was always in sync. This level of complex coordination is another advantage that can helps us prepare the lowest bid on future work." "By 2030, more than $57 trillion must be invested in global infrastructure to keep up with GDP growth and improve the world's roads, railways and ports," said Tracy Young, CEO of PlanGrid. "Governments and civil owners are looking to leverage technology to strengthen infrastructure faster and more cost effectively, and ultimately, save taxpayers money. For owners, joint venture partners and subs working together on massive projects, PlanGrid is the single source of truth allowing everyone to work off one master set and keep up with ever-changing construction documents, without disrupting any existing business systems." About PlanGrid PlanGrid is the leader in construction productivity software. Used on more than one million projects in 84 countries, PlanGrid's value extends over numerous phases of construction, building a massive and accurate history of every jobsite through everyday use that creates a data-rich record set at turnover that is essential to long-term operations. PlanGrid is the first construction productivity software that allows contractors and owners in commercial, heavy civil, and other industries to collaborate easily from their mobile devices and desktop, managing blueprints, specs, photos, RFIs, field reports, and punch lists. The company has secured over $69 million in funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capita, and several other top firms. For more information, please visit: https://www.plangrid.com/. SOURCE PlanGrid Related Links http://www.plangrid.com LINKOPING, Sweden, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- International medical imaging IT and cybersecurity company Sectra (STO: SECT B) has signed a digital pathology contract with Instituto Portugues de Oncologia de Lisboa (IPO Lisboa). IPO Lisboa is renowned for its cancer care and is the first hospital in Portugal to seamlessly include digital pathology in its existing VNA. The solution allows pathologists to access images from any workstation within the hospital as well as remotely, and enables integrated diagnostic workflowsespecially important for improving cancer care. "Sectra's digital pathology solution gives us access to already-proven calculation algorithms that will translate into greater reproducibility of results and have an impact on clinical decisions," says Dr. Jose Cabecadas, Pathology Manager, Instituto Portugues de Oncologia de Lisboa. IPO Lisboa is expanding its medical imaging IT solution for radiology to also include pathology. The solution will provide pathologists with instant access to images and related data, digital tools for reviewing the images and the ability to collaborate across both departments and locations. "The use of a single system for the entire hospital guarantees a universal availability of resources and the possibility to work remotely," continues Dr. Cabecadas. "An immediate additional benefit is that the solution will provide increased efficiency in the preparations for multidisciplinary meetings." Sectra's digital pathology solution Sectra's digital pathology solution includes digital tools which enable the pathologists to make their diagnoses and carry out reporting with higher precision and less time spent per case. It is a complete, vendor-neutral solution for primary diagnostics that includes storage solutions and an advanced review workstation. Sectra's pathology solution is part of Sectra's Enterprise Image Management (EIM) solution. Sectra's enterprise imaging portfolio provides a unified strategy for all imaging needs, and improves patient outcomes while lowering operational costs. The scalable and modular solution supports the most image-intense departmentsradiology, breast imaging, pathology, cardiology and orthopaedics. Being built on the same technical platform, customers can easily extend a departmental solution to create a comprehensive VNA. Read more about Sectra Enterprise Image Management and why Sectra PACS is "Best in KLAS" at https://www.sectra.com/medical/. For further information, please contact: Dr. Torbjorn Kronander CEO and President Sectra AB +46 (0)705-23-52-27 Marie Ekstrom Tragardh Executive Vice President Sectra AB and President Sectra Imaging IT Solutions +46 (0)708-23-56-10 This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com http://news.cision.com/sectra/r/portuguese-hospital-expands-its-vna-from-sectra-with-digital-pathology-to-improve-cancer-care,c2551292 The following files are available for download: http://news.cision.com/sectra/i/portuguese-hospital-expands-its-vna-from-sectra-with-digital-pathology-to-improve-cancer-care,c2435382 Portuguese hospital expands its VNA from Sectra with digital pathology to improve cancer care SOURCE Sectra DANVILLE, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- PRISM Logistics today celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding June 19, 1993 by Jere Van Puffelen and Paul Van de Roovaart. The team celebrates the journey from two guys with a vision, no warehouse and no customers to become one of the best respected third-party warehouse logistics companies in the country. President Jere Van Puffelen credits a great deal of the company's success to the faith in them expressed by Mr. Dick Rooney, who managed logistics for General Mills in 1993 and made what many would see as a risky decision to shift the flour business to Prism. Said Mr. Rooney, "I do business with people, not companies," adding that for him, it was not much of risk, knowing these men, their work ethic, experience with his business and commitment to deliver on their promises. Jere pointed out that with a customer laying it on the line in that manner, "Of course I would do the same for him, and do whatever it took to deliver!" That philosophy of saying 'yes,' and doing what it takes to deliver on promises, has become instilled as company culture. In 2014, Paul Van de Roovaart retired and Jere's sons Jeremy and Zech Van Puffelen along with Mike Mayo became partners and now serve as the executive leadership team. The company has grown to operate more than 1.2 million square feet of food grade, safety certified warehouse capacity for some of the most respected Food and Beverage and Consumer Goods companies in the world. About PRISM Logistics, Inc. Founded in 1993, PRISM Team Services serves Northern California and the US West from a network of facilities in Hayward, Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto and Livermore, California. PRISM is a leader in its field by virtue of technology and systems investment, providing 'leading edge' efficiency and effectiveness for the highly demanding, high-value customers served. PRISM boasts state-of-the-art warehouse management systems (WMS), and highly automated, radio frequency enabled processing that creates a paperless warehouse network with capacity in excess of 1,200,000 sq. ft. For more, go to www.prismlogistics.com. Michele Carroll 925.980.1767 [email protected] Related Images image1.jpg image2.png Related Links PRISM link SOURCE PRISM Logistics LEHI, Utah, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- There is no slowdown in sight for franchisor Property Management Inc. (PMI) as owners and employees of 26 new PMI franchise locations completed the PMI training program in the first half of the year. The PMI property management training program centers on PMI's proven system that gives entrepreneurs the tools they need to successfully operate and grow their own property management business. Property Management Inc. "The strength of the PMI network comes from giving property managers a strong foundation that allows them to adapt to serve the needs of their local markets," said Randall Henderson, PMI Executive Director of Training. "The combination of franchise support and flexibility makes our franchises stronger and has contributed greatly to PMI's growth. We provide the best training and support possible to our new franchisees and make sure they have the tools they need to bring the best value to property owners." PMI's training curriculum aids both new and experienced property managers in operating and growing a property management business. Attendees complete a full schedule of online training courses including one-on-one weekly phone calls followed by a week-long in-person training workshop at PMI corporate headquarters. The coursework focuses on essential business topics including sales, marketing, and software use. Once an owner has completed training, they are ready to open the doors to their PMI property management franchise and begin offering services to their community. PMI continues to grow its network of professional property managers across the country from coast to coast. See a current list of locations here. PMI's 4 Pillar business model gives franchisees the chance to offer multiple types of property management services, with residential, commercial, association and vacation rental programs in place. About Property Management Inc. Property Management Inc. is a property management and real estate services company providing leading-edge technology, training, systems, and support to more than 200 franchises. The PMI network manages more than $7 billion in assets globally and is recognized as a leading property management franchise. Its innovative franchise program provides the only platform that unifies the four pillars of property management: residential, commercial, association, and vacation. PMI is named on the Inc. 5000, Entrepreneur's Franchise 500 list as "Best in Category" winner for 2017 and 2018. Additionally, PMI is ranked as one of the Top 100 Global Franchises in 2017 by Franchise Direct. For more information, please visit www.propertymanagementinc.com. Media Contact: Cassie James, Property Management Inc. [email protected] 385.455.4151 SOURCE Property Management Inc. With the intention of keeping art accessible to the masses, Kevin Richardson's 'Dance as Art: The New York Photography Project' celebrates both dance and the city of New York by showcasing dancers as they perform in the streets for all to enjoy. His photography captures those moments in which the dancers and the city combine as art. Richardson began taking photos in 2014 as a hobby and has conducted location photo shoots nearly every week since. His work has been featured in solo shows and private collections around the world. "My work is all about the intersection of our city and the art that is created here," said Richardson. "Having the ability to showcase my work in a place where people may not otherwise expect to encounter art was really intriguing to me. The fact that PurePoint has chosen to support and celebrate local artists, says a lot about the type of company it is." The Park Ave. Financial Center opened in August 2017 to serve Manhattan clients and offer them a modern, streamlined and cashless savings experience. Clients also enjoy market-leading rates on savings accounts and CDs, no monthly fees, as well as the ability to meet with knowledgeable savings professionals for questions about FDIC insurancei and how best to save. "Ever since we opened, we have featured beautiful artwork in our Financial Center and I can't tell you how many people stop to take it in as they walk by our windows," said Eliane Tchikanda, PurePoint Financial Market Executive for New York. "Not only do we offer this artwork to our clients to enjoy, but in a way we've opened the gallery up to the countless New Yorkers who pass by our windows every day." Prior to Richardson's work, the Park Ave. location featured the work of photographer Rachel Neville. Her work was recently auctioned off and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Project LIFT, a New York Theater Ballet charity that provides opportunities to talented, at-risk children. PurePoint will match Rachel's donation with proceeds going to the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program. PurePoint Financial launched in February 2017, and the hybrid digital bank has continued to offer a unique savings experience tailored to the evolving needs of consumers and emphasizing service to their clients and local communities. "Initially the idea to feature artwork in our New York financial center was born from our desire to celebrate the local culture of the city," said Maha Madain, Head of Marketing for PurePoint Financial. "Our first gallery and artist were so well received, that we decided to expand the effort and now we have similar galleries, each featuring the work of local artists, in Chicago and Houston with another planned to open in Miami later this year. When we were looking for our next artist in New York, Kevin's work immediately jumped out at all of us. Not only did it celebrate dance, but the backdrop of the city just made his work all the more unique and special." About PurePoint Financial PurePoint Financial is a division of MUFG Union Bank, N.A., a proud member of the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), one of the world's leading financial groups. As the next evolution in the financial services industry, PurePoint Financial is the modern way to save online, over the phone or in person. PurePoint offers market-leading CD and savings rates, no monthly fees and all the flexibility and convenience of online banking with 24/7 access from your computer, tablet or mobile devices. PurePoint also offers Financial Centers at select locations staffed by knowledgeable team members who are committed to delivering exceptional experience. 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 PurePoint Financial Related Links https://www.purepoint.com/ SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Qardio, the leading digital health company, today announced its remote monitoring platform, QardioMD is integrated with Greenway Health's electronic health record (EHR) and practice management solutions. QardioMD platform offers Qardio's medical grade products and remote monitoring solutions to doctors, to help manage their patients' health more efficiently while making billing for such care easier. Addressing the growing market needs, Greenway Health doctors can now utilize the QardioMD platform in conjunction with their EHR system, and have their patient data and files seamlessly synced between both platforms. As a part of the solution, doctors can provide their patients with Qardio's medical-grade products such as wireless blood pressure monitors and smart scales and body analyzers, so patients can easily be monitored outside the doctor's office. This new integration gives Greenway doctors an opportunity to grow their practices and revenues, and offer better care. "We're pleased to partner with Qardio through the Marketplace to enable our customers to easily evaluate and select solutions such as Qardio's that support their success in care delivery," said Greg Shilling, Greenway VP of Corporate Development. QardioMD platform increases practice efficiency by reducing routine visits, adding contextual patient health data to drive better health outcomes, and supporting preventative and chronic care management reimbursable under new CPT codes. "The QardioMD remote monitoring solution is part of our commitment to preventative health and is a revolutionary tool to help doctors using the Greenway platforms to work more efficiently, grow their practices and offer better care. Doctors get faster and more efficient access to remote monitoring that fits easily in their daily workflow," said Martina Janeckova, VP of Business Development. "Moreover, with new CPT 99091 code now reimbursing doctors for remote care, doctors get paid for working smarter too." The QardioMD remote monitoring solution is available to Greenway Health doctors via Greenway Marketplace at www.greenwayhealth.com/marketplace/qardiomd. Doctors using other EHR systems can learn more at www.QardioMD.com. About Qardio: Qardio is a leading digital health company with the mission to give the world easier, smarter and better heart health through technology. Qardio's award-winning products are powered by elegant design, innovative technology and smart data analytics. For more information, visit www.getqardio.com and www.QardioMD.com. Media Contact: Lucy Donahue +1 (206) 604-5829 [email protected] SOURCE Qardio Related Links http://www.QardioMD.com One important subject of the forum was how blockchain technology and smart contracts could be utilized to implement reliable solutions for the IoT industry. Timo Gessmann, director of the Bosch IoT Lab, also the founder of Bosch Cooperation IoT and blockchain solution, invited QoodBlock to become a member of the Bosch IoT Lab. The Bosch IoT Lab would support deeper cooperation between QoodBlock and automotive industry leaders on IoV (Internet of Vehicles) and blockchain technology supported solutions. During the forum, Allen Liang and Timo Gessmann had an extensive discussion over a series of issues regarding blockchain and IoV data exchange market, issues such as how to break data isolations among the Telematics, how to deal with "data ownership rights" of IoV data transactions due to the recent GDPR regulations by the Europe Union, and how data security and the classification of data make data exchange efficiently. Allen and Timo reached a conclusion that the introduction of blockchain technology in IoV industry would lead to innovating solutions for secure, legitimate and efficient IoV data exchanges. Currently, the Security and Privacy of IoV Data does not gain the attention it deserves. The data owners (car owners) have to worry about the privacy issues and expensive Telematics service fees. As a result, most users don't willingly pay for the renewal of Telematics services. Thus, the previous IoV infrastructure investments from automobile enterprises are under-utilized. According to the GDPR enacted by the Europe Union, there is a clear redline on information collection, management and utilization, which improve the protection of privacy to an unprecedented height. The biggest challenge of IoV data transaction is "data ownership rights". Without mutual agreement between vehicle users and auto manufactures, data trading cannot be achieved. For this, QoodBlock provides the QoodShares module for data ownership rights. It is a highly flexible, highly reliable digital ownership distribution framework. Based on QoodShares, vehicle users and auto companies can mutually agree on how ownership of IoV data would be distributed between them, then the IoV data can be traded in the QoodBock data exchange. www.qoodblock.io www.iot-lab.ch www.boschsi.cn/china/insights/iot-hotpot-roadshow-cn.html SOURCE QoodBlock CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Quick Base, the leader in no-code application development platforms, announced the appointment of Doug Wendell as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Wendell will be responsible for overseeing Quick Base's financial planning and analysis, accounting, sales operations and business enablement functions. Wendell brings 20 years of experience in the software industry, having advised senior leadership teams and their boards on both financing and strategic transactions. Prior to joining Quick Base, Wendell was a managing director in the Technology Investment Banking Group at Jefferies LLC, focused on the enterprise software sector. He also spent 13 years at Citigroup, where he was a managing director in their Technology Investment Banking Group specializing in the software sector. Additionally, he served as a trust officer at Northern Trust Corp. in the firm's International Client Services Group. "I am thrilled to add someone with the breadth and depth of Doug's software experience to our world class leadership team," said Rick Willett, CEO of Quick Base. "The next phase of our growth acceleration will undoubtedly leverage strategic partnerships and Doug's experience and relationships across the broader software and services ecosystem will be invaluable." "From my perspective, the future of software development is a platform that empowers those closest to the work, not always pro-developers, with the ability to automate and continuously improve their processes and work environment," said Wendell. "I am excited to join the clear market leader and contribute to Quick Base's significant upside growth potential." Wendell received an M.B.A from The Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University and a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Vermont. He and his family live south of Boston. About Quick Base Quick Base provides a cloud-based platform that empowers problem solvers to quickly turn ideas for better ways to work into apps that make their organizations more efficient. For nearly 20 years, people of all technical backgrounds have been using the Quick Base platform to create solutions that streamline processes, capture real-time data, and improve company operations while working in concert with existing IT systems. Based in Cambridge, MA and a former division of Intuit, Quick Base has thousands of customers spanning all industries and company sizes. For more information, please visit: www.QuickBase.com CONTACT: Danny Casarella, 347-599-9631, [email protected] SOURCE Quick Base Related Links http://www.quickbase.com MEMPHIS, Tenn., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Previously owned by AZT Corporation, one the neighborhood's largest shopping centers has been sold to ABS Management & Development. The new owners have already begun to maximize the appearance and structure of the 19-tenant shopping mall. The added new features will include: Modern facade upgrades LED Lighting Parking lot repairs Advanced security system to ensure highest level of customer safety Raleigh Springs Marketplace is currently 85% occupied with tenants ranging from Subway to the Veterans Affair Clinic. Other big retailers available to shoppers include Save a Lot, T-Mobile, and Rainbow. Vacancies are available and the new owners are actively seeking the right tenants to fill this space. The site of the marketplace is seeing several positive changes as well. The City of Memphis has begun constructing a brand new multi-million-dollar development to be the home of a new library, police precinct and skate park. It will also feature an 11-acre lake with a walking trail. Construction is expected to reach full completion by June 2019. With a 100% tenant renewal rate, the new management team is dedicated to maintaining and striving for continual success and growth for optimal business for their valued tenants. They are highly confident that the area is going to experience a huge turn around. Mr. Reuven Rivlin, president and founder of ABS Management and Development Corp., says he is excited to bring these transformations to the neighborhood for residents to enjoy. He adds that it is sure to drive consumers and be a gold mine for business owners. ABS Management & Development is a private real estate investment group based in Brooklyn, New York focusing on value-add retail centers throughout the United States and Canada, as well as a full portfolio including multi-family, industrial, and residential projects in New York City. Spanning 20+ years, ABS's mission remains to identify hidden development potential in underutilized properties and reimagine them for attractive profits without ungainly risk factors. ABS organizes its business geographically in the New York Metropolitan area, in communities with the highest standards. Consequently, the company is in the position to see local opportunities before other investors and leverage the ideas they produce in various cities and states. The company is committed to the belief that a real estate business requires the presence of principals that are in close geographic proximity to the properties, to consistently deliver quality management services to the resident and property owner alike. President Reuven Rivlin explains that, "As part of our core values, we choose to collaborate with forward-thinkers, visionaries, and creatives both within the industry and immediately outside it. Without exception, our proudest projects were, and continue to be, the result of many minds pursuing common goals to perfection." www.absmgt.com/ SOURCE ABS Management & Development Related Links http://www.AbsMgt.com SINGAPORE, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- China Yuchai International Limited (NYSE: CYD) ("China Yuchai" or the "Company"), wishes to announce that all the resolutions as set out in its Notices of Annual General Meeting dated May 18, 2018 were duly passed at its Annual General Meeting held today. About China Yuchai International China Yuchai International Limited, through its subsidiary, Guangxi Yuchai Machinery Company Limited ("GYMCL"), engages in the manufacture, assembly, and sale of a wide variety of light-, medium- and heavy-duty engines for trucks, buses, passenger vehicles, construction equipment, marine and agriculture applications in China. GYMCL also produces diesel power generators. The engines produced by GYMCL range from diesel to natural gas and hybrid engines. Through its regional sales offices and authorized customer service centers, the Company distributes its engines directly to auto OEMs and retailers and provides maintenance and retrofitting services throughout China. Founded in 1951, GYMCL has established a reputable brand name, strong research and development team and significant market share in China with high-quality products and reliable after-sales support. In 2017, GYMCL sold 367,097 engines and is recognized as a leading manufacturer and distributor of engines in China. For more information, please visit http://www.cyilimited.com. For more information, please contact: Investor Relations Kevin Theiss Tel: +212-521-4050 Email: [email protected] SOURCE China Yuchai International Limited Related Links http://www.cyilimited.com (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/707911/Orbis_Rohingya.jpg ) Since February, international eye care charity Orbis has been screening people within one of the camps. As the first eye care organisation to establish services within the camps, Orbis has worked with local partners to deliver 2,763 treatments in just two months. With nearly 5,000 screenings taking place during this time, this is a treatment rate of more than 50%. So far 159 cataract surgeries have been delivered - almost three times as many as expected. Most are severe cases as the majority of Rohingya people have never had access to eye care. Other treatment includes antibiotics for infection and the provision of glasses. Rebecca Cronin, Chief Executive of Orbis UK commented: "Our work in the camps has shown that an already vulnerable population are in need of more support than we envisaged. Low vision means they will be less able to look after themselves and their dependents with flooding, cyclones and landslides becoming real threats as monsoon season approaches. "Relatively straightforward interventions such as surgery, antibiotics and glasses can transform the lives of Rohingya people, which will lead to greater independence and self-sufficiency within the harsh environment of a refugee camp." The Qatar Fund for Development (QFFD) asked Orbis to devise a programme to help those struggling with vision loss within the relief camps and the local community. Orbis is working closely with Cox's Bazar Baitush Sharaf Hospital, NGOs, and the local government to provide as much assistance to the Rohingya population as possible. The screening centre is located next to a food distribution point, to help with awareness of the service. Whilst screening and treatment continues, Orbis will be conducting comprehensive research to better understand the prevalence and incidence of blinding conditions amongst the camp populations. This will enable Orbis and its partners to scale up services. This project is an extension of the existing partnership between Orbis and QFFD in Bangladesh: QFFD have committed $8 million to tackle child vision loss in India and Bangladesh through the Qatar Creating Vision initiative, coordinated by Orbis. For more information please visit: http://www.orbis.org.uk SOURCE Orbis SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP put another "Big Law" firm on notice today that gender discrimination and retaliation are illegal. This morning the Firm filed a Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) representative action lawsuit against Jones Day on behalf of partner Wendy Moore and other California female attorneys at Jones Day. The action was filed in California Superior Court for San Francisco County. In the Complaint, Ms. Moore alleges that Jones Day operates as a fraternity, in which men mentor and advantage other men, ultimately resulting in men being paid more. Moore further claims that Jones Day's "black-box" compensation system and subjective performance reviews are designed to hide pervasive pay discrimination against women. Moore increasingly voiced concerns about the Firm's systemic gender discrimination at the beginning of 2018. In retaliation, the Firm slashed her hours, forbade her from working with a powerful male partner, and, in response to her decision to hire counsel, terminated her employment. Moore has filed her Complaint under California's PAGA, which authorizes employees to sue and recover civil penalties on behalf of themselves, and other employees and further imposes strict penalties for retaliation. Moore and the class are represented by a Sanford Heisler Sharp team led by David Sanford, firm founder and chairman; Russell L. Kornblith, managing partner of the Firm's New York office; Deborah Marcuse, managing partner of the Firm's Baltimore office; and Danielle Fuschetti of the Firm's San Francisco office. Ms. Moore was a partner at Jones Day for more than four years. She joined the firm in California in 2013, with more than 14 years of experience at other elite law firms. In 2015, she was promoted to Jones Day's Hiring Partner for Silicon Valleya role in which she recruited an associate class that Jones Day's leaders in Northern California hailed as one of its best. According to the Complaint, Ms. Moore resigned her position as hiring partner because she felt she could not be transparent with female recruits about their compensation, prospects for advancement, and the firm's culture. The complaint further alleges that "female law students were unambiguously stating in their interviews with Jones Day that the Firm's express support for Mr. Trump and its black-box compensation model left female attorneys behind." (Complaint paragraph 38) Ms. Moore then informed the Firm that "women did not want to risk the adverse impact on their careers by joining a Firm that proudly supported Mr. Trump and black-box compensation." (Complaint paragraph 38) The Complaint alleges that, in response to Ms. Moore's concerns as hiring partner, "the Firmwide Chair of Recruiting and a member of the Firm's Diversity & Inclusion Task Force, Sharyl Reisman, directed Ms. Moore to tone down her criticism, lest she provoke a negative response from Firm management." (Complaint paragraph 38) The Complaint alleges that Ms. Moore sent an email in December 2017 to firm leadership about "gender pay disparities; the male leadership's unfair lack of support for and marginalization of female attorneys, including Ms. Moore; the unfair scrutiny to which female attorneys were subjected (particularly those with caretaker responsibilities); the Firm's sexist culture; and the ways in which Jones Day's male leadership creates barriers to advancement for female attorneys." (Complaint paragraph 48) The Complaint further alleges that on Feb 22, 2018, Ms. Moore again exercised her statutory right by raising concerns of gender discrimination (Complaint paragraph 55). Six days later, on February 28, Ms. Moore was terminated. After Ms. Moore's termination, the Complaint alleges that Jones Day clawed back money from Ms. Moore's personal bank account that it had paid to her for work that she had already performed. "Jones Day's message in terminating Wendy could not be clearer," said David Sanford, "Ms. Moore was punished soon after she summoned the courage to speak out against gender discrimination and demand the same pay that her male peers received." "Ms. Moore's Complaint paints Jones Day as a firm in which female attorneys receive neither the compensation nor the professional and business development opportunities of their male peers," said Deborah Marcuse. Sanford Heisler Sharp is no stranger to taking on gender discrimination and equal pay in "Big Law." The firm has pursued and resolved class action cases against several law firms ranked in the AmLaw 100 and is currently litigating class action cases against Morrison & Foerster (MoFo) and Ogletree Deakins & Nash. MEDIA CONTACT: Jamie Moss, 201 788 0142; [email protected] About Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP is a public interest class-action litigation law firm with offices in New York; Washington, D.C; San Francisco; Nashville; San Diego; and Baltimore. Our attorneys have graduated from the nation's top law schools, clerked for judges throughout the United States, and amassed extensive experience litigating and trying cases that have earned over one billion dollars for our clients. The Firm has significant experience in civil rights and general public interest cases, representing plaintiffs with claims of employment discrimination, sexual violence, labor and wage violations, consumer fraud, False Claims Act, elder abuse and whistleblowing, among other claims. Along with a focus on class actions, the Firm also represents individuals and has achieved extraordinary success in the representation of executives and attorneys in employment disputes. For more information go to www.sanfordheisler.com or call (202) 499-5200 or email [email protected]. For the latest news, visit our newsroom or follow us on Twitter at @sanfordheisler. SOURCE Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) has conducted the first in-house overhaul of its Mil Mi-35P (NATO reporting name: Hind) gunship, the service announced. An overhauled NAF Mi-35P combat helicopter (Credit: Nigerian Air Force) According to NAF, the acceptance ceremony took place on June 9 at the base of the 115th Special Operations Group (SOG) in Port Harcourt (Rivers State, Nigeria). "The NAF has successfully conducted the first in-house overhaul of its Mi-35P (NAF 531) combat helicopter," the press department of the NAF said in a statement. According to the service, the works were conducted at the base of the 115th SOG with involvement of foreign technical specialists. During the ceremony, Air Vice Marshal Oladayo Amao said the overhauled helicopter would reinforce Nigeria`s counter-terrorism assets and beef up the Internal Security forces. "It has been the first Nigerian in-house extension of the Mi-35P`s service life. The program has allowed us to save money and train our technicians," Amao said. He added that the works to maintain the second NAF Mi-35P (NAF 530) helicopter had already started. According to the Military Balance 2018 analytical book published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the NAF operates 13 Mil Mi-24-family gunships (including two Mi-24P (Hind), four Mi-24V (Hind), three Mi-35 (Hind), the Mi-35P and two Mi-35M (Hind-E)). The NAF Mi-35P combat helicopters are reported to be armed with a side-mounted twin-barrel GSh-30 30 mm automatic cannon, 9M114 Kokon (AT-6 Spiral) anti-tank guided missiles and S-5/S-8 57 mm/80 mm unguided rockets. Copyright 2018 TASS. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. WASHINGTON, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- U.S. Small Business Administration Administrator Linda E. McMahon today issued the following statement in response to a U.S. Department of Labor rule expanding access to Association Health Plans (AHP): The President's decision to expand access to affordable, quality health care through Association Health Plans (AHPs) is welcome news to tens of thousands of small businesses. This reform will help empower small businesses with the kind of buying power that has long been available to large employers, and as a result, many more small businesses will be able to gain access to coverage. It's an important step in reversing a multi-year downward trend in the number of small business owners offering health insurance to their employees as a result of rising premiums and increasing deductibles. About the U.S. Small Business Administration The U.S. Small Business Administration makes the American dream of business ownership a reality. As the only go-to resource and voice for small businesses backed by the strength of the federal government, the SBA empowers entrepreneurs and small business owners with the resources and support they need to start, grow or expand their businesses, or recover from a declared disaster. It delivers services through an extensive network of SBA field offices and partnerships with public and private organizations. To learn more, visit www.sba.gov. Contact: [email protected] (202) 205-6552 Release Number: 18-44 Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs & Instagram SOURCE U.S. Small Business Administration Related Links http://www.sba.gov NEW YORK and CANNES, France, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Screenvision Media, a national leader in cinema advertising, today announced Audi's "Parking Lot" holiday campaign as the winner of the esteemed Hegarty Advertising in Cinema Excellence (ACE) Award at the Adweek Creative 100 celebration in Cannes. Audi's "Parking Lot" campaign was a humorous look at the struggles of holiday shopping season, creatively showcasing the Audi RS3 and RS7 models, whilst depicting two fathers' frustrations over battling it out for the last parking space in a mall parking lot. "Audi's "Parking Lot" holiday campaign is a prime example of when great ideas and exceptional creativity come together with flawless execution," said John Partilla, Screenvision Media CEO. "Exceptional creative work pushes our entire industry forward, while underscoring the powerful impact of the cinema canvas for any and every ad." Unveiled in Cannes in 2017, the award celebrates the most creative ad campaigns which were debuted in-cinema within seven days of launching. The winner of the annual Hegarty ACE Award, is awarded $1 Million in media consideration in Screenvision Media's Front + Center preshow, for any pro-bono or charitable causes for June 2018 June 2019. "I believe cinema is an exceptional canvas for creatives to have their work displayed upon," said Sir. John Hegarty, Creative Chair in Residence, Screenvision Media. "Audi's spot was the perfect example of pairing an outstanding ad with a truly impactful medium to really entertain, inform, and inspire." The panel of judges was led by Sir John Hegarty, Creative Chair in Residence at Screenvision Media, and consisted of Colleen DeCourcy, Chief Creative Officer at Wieden+Kennedy; Corinna Falusi, CCO and Partner at Mother; David Droga, Creative Chairman and Founder at Droga5; David Lubars, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer at BBDO; and Scott Donaton, Chief Content Officer at Digitas. Judges abstained from any work they either worked on directly or had oversight of in any capacity. Venables Bell & Partners was the creative agency on Audi's "Parking Lot" holiday campaign. All creative that ran within the launch pad inventory from July 2017 until May 2018 was eligible for review by Sir John Hegarty for the Hegarty Award. ABOUT SCREENVISION MEDIA Headquartered in New York, N.Y., Screenvision Media is a national leader in cinema advertising, offering on-screen advertising, in-lobby promotions and integrated marketing programs to national, regional and local advertisers; and providing comprehensive cinema advertising representation services to top-tier theatrical exhibitors presenting the highest-quality movie-going experiences. The Screenvision Media cinema advertising network is comprised of over 15,000 screens in 2,300+ theatre locations across all 50 states and 94% of DMAs nationwide; delivering through more than 150 theatrical circuits, including 7 of the top 10 exhibitor companies. For more information: http://screenvisionmedia.com/. Media Contact: Caitlin Wiig Olson Engage for Screenvision Media 212.656.9143 [email protected] SOURCE Screenvision Media Related Links http://www.screenvision.com SEATTLE, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Seattle Children's has opened a pioneering chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell immunotherapy trial for children and young adults with relapsed or refractory HER2-positive central nervous system (CNS) tumors where CAR T cells will be delivered directly into the brain. In the phase I trial, BrainChild-01, cancer-fighting CAR T cells will be infused through a catheter, either into the cavity where the tumor has been removed or the CNS ventricular system, depending on the location of the tumor. CNS tumors, which are found in the brain and spine, are the most common form of childhood cancer and are the leading cause of cancer-related death in children under the age of 19. More than 4,000 children in the U.S. are diagnosed with brain tumors each year. While approximately 70% of children with newly diagnosed CNS tumors survive with standard therapy, the disease is often fatal for the approximately 30% of children who relapse. "While survival rates have improved, many of the children we care for have no life-saving therapy options if their disease recurs," said Dr. Nick Vitanza, a neuro-oncologist at Seattle Children's and lead investigator for the BrainChild-01 trial. "We have to find a way to give them a life after they recur and ultimately be able to offer initial treatments with fewer long-term side effects." In the BrainChild-01 trial, T cells will be reprogrammed to target the protein HER2, which is widely known for its presence in breast cancer, but also expressed by many common brain tumors in children, including medulloblastoma, ependymoma, and glioma. In targeting this protein, the CAR T cells will be able to find and destroy the cancerous tumor cells while preserving healthy brain tissue, which does not express HER2. "Solid tumors are challenging to target compared to blood cancers because they express a diverse array of proteins and are harder to reach," said Vitanza. "In looking for a common denominator that is present on many types of tumors, but not present in healthy brain tissue, we were pleased to find that HER2 could be a common thread that helps us target several of the brain tumors we treat in children and young adults." Vitanza and the research team, led by Dr. Mike Jensen at the Ben Towne Center for Childhood Cancer Research at Seattle Children's Research Institute, plan to enroll a minimum of 18 patients over the course of the trial. Patients will be enrolled in one of two arms based on the location of their tumor after researchers confirm it expresses HER2. Once the patient's CAR T cells have been reprogrammed, those children in the first arm will have their T cells infused through a catheter into the tumor resection cavity. Children in the second arm will have their T cells infused through a catheter into their CNS ventricular system. By infusing the CAR T cells directly into the brain instead of into the blood intravenously, researchers believe the delivery will be more effective since the T cells will not need to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, which often prevents drugs from getting into the brain at the necessary concentrations. Researchers also hope patients may have fewer side effects, like neurotoxicity and cytokine release syndrome, since the reprogrammed T cells will not circulate widely through the blood. This clinical trial will examine the safety and feasibility of this approach. Patients will receive one dose of CAR T cells weekly, up to six doses on the study. Depending on the patient's response and tolerability to the experimental therapy, they will have the option to continue receiving doses. BrainChild-01 is the next step in Seattle Children's quest to harness the immune system and bring better therapies and cures to children worldwide. With one of the most robust pipelines of open T-cell immunotherapy clinical trials for children and young adults, Seattle Children's is dedicated to working to improve this therapy for a variety of childhood cancers to the point that it helps patients achieve long-term remission and ultimately a cure. With this long-term goal in mind for treating CNS tumors, Vitanza said BrainChild-01 will likely only be the beginning. With the vast array of tumor types and more aggressive tumors, this research may also open new doors to treatment strategies that involve targeting different or multiple proteins simultaneously. "Our eventual goal with this research is to find a therapy that is safe, curative and serves as a platform to combine multiple targets in order to treat the most aggressive cancers," said Vitanza. "I was inspired to go into neuro-oncology after experiencing too often how little can be done for most kids with aggressive or recurrent brain tumors. Using CAR T cells, we are determined to develop a therapy that will give these kids an option that they desperately need that will help them be able to live a longer and fuller life." The T-cell immunotherapy trials at Seattle Children's are funded in part by Strong Against Cancer, a national philanthropic initiative with worldwide implications for potentially curing childhood cancers. If you are interested in supporting the advancement of immunotherapy and cancer research, please visit Strong Against Cancer's donation page. For more information on immunotherapy research trials at Seattle Children's, please call (206) 987-2106 or email [email protected]. About Seattle Children's Seattle Children's mission is to provide hope, care and cures to help every child live the healthiest and most fulfilling life possible. Together, Seattle Children's Hospital, Research Institute and Foundation deliver superior patient care, identify new discoveries and treatments through pediatric research, and raise funds to create better futures for patients. Ranked as one of the top children's hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report, Seattle Children's serves as the pediatric and adolescent academic medical center for Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho the largest region of any children's hospital in the country. As one of the nation's top five pediatric research centers, Seattle Children's Research Institute is internationally recognized for its work in neurosciences, immunology, cancer, infectious disease, injury prevention and much more. Seattle Children's Hospital and Research Foundation works with the Seattle Children's Guild Association, the largest all-volunteer fundraising network for any hospital in the country, to gather community support and raise funds for uncompensated care and research. Join Seattle Children's bold initiative It Starts With Yes: The Campaign for Seattle Children's to transform children's health for generations to come. For more information, visit seattlechildrens.org or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or on our On the Pulse blog. Media Contact: Alyse Bernal [email protected] or 206-987-5213 SOURCE Seattle Children's Hospital Related Links http://www.seattlechildrens.org Sep. 7th - 9th: Wanxiang Blockchain Hackathon Sep. 10th: Tech Open Day Sep. 11th - 12th: The 4th Global Blockchain Summit Location: Shanghai, China Expected participants: 2000+ Event Website: http://www.blockchainlabs.org/week2018 Registration Period: Hackathon participants must register before August 1st and await approval. Tech Day and Summit Tickets are being sold online with limited supply, and early bird tickets are available now. Host: Wanxiang Blockchain Labs History October 2015: The 1st Global Blockchain Summit, over 300 participants. September 2016: The 2nd Global Blockchain Summit, over 700 participants. (Part of the Shanghai International Blockchain Week 2016) September 2017: The 3rd Global Blockchain Summit, over 1200 participants. Three years ago, when Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, a leading Chinese research institution focused on the development of blockchain technology hosted the 1st Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai, more than 300 technicians, entrepreneurs, academics, investors, representatives from financial institutions and regulatory bodies attended. Since then, the blockchain industry has been on a fast track, while this annual Global Blockchain Summit captures its latest development, challenges, and regulatory concerns with unique perspectives provided by world-renowned speakers from various industries and regulatory bodies. One can easily observe the level of attention of this summit by its previous speakers. An industrial gathering that cannot be missed "I have attended this annual blockchain summit held by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs as speakers in the past three years. It is one of the most serious and informative blockchain events I have ever attended," said Zeen Zhang, Vice President of Factom, "THE SUMMIT, that is what I would call it. The level of connections and perspectives you can acquire here are beyond comparison. I will be in Shanghai for this year's event, definitely." A hackathon with a real-world challenge As the warm-up event for the Blockchain Week, the two and a half days long hackathon will be a gathering for excellent development teams from around the world to demonstrate their innovative ideas through competition within limited timeframe. There are two types of challenges: one is provided by Wanxiang Blockchain Labs which is detailed as follows, and the other is provided by sponsors that will be introduced at the venue. Wanxiang Innova City is dedicated to new energies and smart city innovations, and the main theater for the deployment of blockchain application scenarios. The ultimate goal is to build a smart city where 90,000 people will study, research, work, and reside. Incorporating blockchain, artificial intelligence, IoT and cognitive computing on the edge, Innova City pioneers the next stage of urban intelligence that provides smart services, smart residence, and smart transportation. Tech Open Day On Tech Open Day, founders, development leads, and developers from major blockchain platforms will, among other things, introduce the latest development of their respective platforms and explore potential solutions to the technological challenges facing the industry. The speakers will dive into consensus mechanisms, side-chain and cross-chain systems, privacy protection, among other topics, in order to gain a better understanding towards the underlying technology of blockchain platforms. The 4th Global Blockchain Summit The two days long 4th Global Blockchain Summit will invite representatives from various industries to share their insights regarding the solutions empowered by blockchain technology, envisioning the true value of blockchain technology in the future industrial application. In the mist of hype, confusion, and exploration throughout the year, practitioners and leaders from various industries will share their thoughts and ideas relating to the further development and the real-world value of this empowering technology. SOURCE Wanxiang Blockchain Labs SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- SigFig, a financial technology company for banks, advisors, and consumers, announced today that it has raised $50 million in Series E funding. The round was led by General Atlantic, a leading global growth equity firm, with participation from existing investors including Bain Capital Ventures, DCM Ventures, Eaton Vance, New York Life, Nyca Partners, UBS, and Union Square Ventures. Founded in 2007, SigFig makes high-quality investment advice more accessible and affordable for investors of all wealth levels. The company's platform uses data science, technology, and simple design to help empower investors with the information and guidance they need to achieve their financial goals. SigFig provides this offering directly to consumers through SigFig.com and also offers an end-to-end Enterprise Digital Wealth Management platform that powers automated investment services for leading financial institutions such as Wells Fargo, UBS, and Citizens Bank. These partnerships represent more than 70 million customers. The platform allows SigFig's partners to bring wealth management services to previously underserved consumer segments, especially mass affluent consumers who otherwise might have been limited to do-it-yourself solutions such as online brokerages or commission-based mutual fund products. "For over a decade, SigFig has provided access to premium, tech-enabled financial services for customers, banks, and wealth advisors," said Mike Sha, CEO and Co-Founder of SigFig. "We are now aggressively expanding our services and reach to improve how banks utilize technology with their clients and increase the number of everyday people using technology to manage their finances." This latest round of funding will accelerate SigFig's investments in technology as it broadens its solutions to help consumers, advisors, and financial institutions modernize the advice experience. "The market for digitally-native investment advisors continues to grow due to increasing customer demand for accessible and affordable financial advice," said Paul Stamas, Managing Director at General Atlantic, who will join the company's board of directors. "With its B2B2C model, SigFig leverages its industry-leading technology alongside its partners' existing physical infrastructure and human capital to create a best-in-class advice solution. We look forward to partnering with Mike and his talented team to support the company's next phase of growth." "General Atlantic's deep expertise in the financial services sector and their long-term orientation makes them the ideal partner for SigFig to accelerate our growth," added Sha. About SigFig Founded in 2007, SigFig is a financial technology company powering the future of banking for banks, advisors, and consumers. SigFig's Wealth Management Platform provides consumers with high-quality advice and guidance regardless of wealth level. Through its partnerships with financial institutions including Wells Fargo, UBS, and Citizens Financial, their solutions are available to over 70 million consumers. SigFig has already helped millions of households gain access to personalized investment advice designed to help them achieve their goals. SigFig is backed by top-tier venture capital firms, including Bain Capital Ventures, Union Square Ventures, DCM, Nyca Partners, and General Atlantic and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Learn more at www.sigfig.com About General Atlantic General Atlantic is a leading global growth equity firm providing capital and strategic support for growth companies. Established in 1980, General Atlantic combines a collaborative global approach, sector specific expertise, a long-term investment horizon and a deep understanding of growth drivers to partner with great entrepreneurs and management teams to build exceptional businesses worldwide. General Atlantic has more than 115 investment professionals based in New York, Amsterdam, Beijing, Greenwich, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, Mumbai, Munich, Palo Alto, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Singapore. www.generalatlantic.com Contact: For SigFig Kendall Clark [email protected] For General Atlantic James Maloney Edelman for General Atlantic 212-738-6103 [email protected] SOURCE SigFig Related Links http://www.sigfig.com This new Advanced Clinical Spa, located in in Rome, Georgia, opens in partnership with esteemed board-certified dermatologist and dermatological surgeon Dr. Jason Smith. After receiving his Doctorate of Medicine degree from LSU School of Medicine, he then completed a one year internship at Lafayette Charity Hospital in Louisiana before entering LSU-Tulane's three-year residency program for dermatologic surgery. Dr. Smith always highlights the importance of implementing a rigorous at-home skincare regimen to complement professional procedures to ensure every patient obtains his or her desired results. Northwest Georgia Dermatology specializes in integrated skincare programs and offers a full range of customizable treatments including laser, micro-needling, dermaplaning, facials and more. Dr. Smith says, "Our partnership with SkinCeuticals will allow us to seamlessly combine our state-of-the-art procedures with scientifically-backed skincare, ultimately resulting in superior patient outcomes. SkinCeuticals C E Ferulic, a Vitamin C serum, is my number one recommended product because it not only helps speed up the recovery process post-procedures, but it also protects skin from damaging free radicals and UVA/UVB rays." Of the partnership, Christina Fair, SkinCeuticals US General Manager, says, "We are thrilled to partner with Northwest Georgia Dermatology. Dr. Smith's dedication to providing patients with a holistic skincare regimen aligns with SkinCeuticals' goals to improve overall skin health and superior patient outcomes." ABOUT SKINCEUTICALS Founded in Dallas, TX in 1997, SkinCeuticals discovers, develops, and delivers an advanced line of scientifically backed cosmeceutical treatments. As leaders in antioxidant and sun protection technology, SkinCeuticals products have been shown to dramatically improve skin health by protecting skin from environmental damage and visibly improving skin clarity, tone, and texture to minimize the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles. For more information, visit the brand on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, or at www.skinceuticals.com. Contact: Laura Cummins at SkinCeuticals: (212) 984-4907/[email protected] SOURCE SkinCeuticals Related Links http://www.skinceuticals.com IRVINE, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- SmartBug Mediaa leading intelligent inbound marketing agency that assists businesses in generating leads, increasing awareness, and building brand loyalty through inbound marketing, digital strategy, design, marketing automation, and public relationsannounced that its founder and CEO, Ryan Malone, has been appointed an Industry Fellow at the University of California, Irvine's (UCI) Center for Digital Transformation within The Paul Merage School of Business. Malone, an alumnus of UCI's prestigious MBA program, returns to his alma mater as an advisor to share his marketing expertise and grow the Center's digital presence. UCI's Paul Merage School of Business is a world-renowned institution of higher learning and a leader among business schools. In 2017, the Financial Times ranked the Merage School's Full-Time MBA program 30th in the U.S. and 13th among public universities. UCI was ranked 9th in the nation among public universities in U.S. News & World Report's annual Best Colleges List; its Undergraduate Business Program ranked 34th. The Merage School's Center for Digital Transformation is one of seven centers of excellence that bridges the school to the surrounding business community. By providing opportunities for students and the business community to enhance their educational experience and update their professional expertise, the Center helps businesses, governmental leaders, and society compete in today's digital economy. "In order to fulfill our mission as a vital center of influence in the digital economy, we work hard to attract some of the area's best and brightest business leaders," said the Center's associate director, Coni Zingarelli. "As the founder of a highly successful inbound marketing agency and an alumnus of our MBA program, Ryan will play an important role in helping us implement and communicate the value of digital transformation within marketing organizations." As its newest Industry Fellow, Ryan Malone will advise the Center on digital marketing strategies and their impact on digital transformation. He will also advise the Center on ways to grow its digital presence by assisting with strategic planning and implementing processes to bring it to scale. "I'm excited to return to UCI as a thought leader, and I look forward to imparting my knowledge of best practices in transforming digital marketing programs to help businesses keep up with the latest, most effective and fastest-moving trends," added Malone. "I am also immensely thrilled and honored to give back to a school and a community that has given so much to me." UCI's Center of Digital Transformation draws upon the expertise of top business leaders in one of the country's most thriving business and technology hubsOrange County, California. Malone joins a team of Industry Fellows from MIT and nexxworks. Notable members of the Center's Advisory Board include executives from Amazon, SpaceX, KPMG, Qantas and Pacific Life. About SmartBug Media For 10 years, SmartBug Media has been helping businesses increase sales leads, close more customers, and enhance the reach of their brands. SmartBug Media is one of a handful of HubSpot Diamond partners in the world and is the highest-rated agency in the history of the HubSpot ecosystem. SmartBug Media also boasts the highest ROI documented from any HubSpot partner: 3,558 percent and 14,500 percent ROI on a six-month and three-year campaign, respectively. SmartBug Media is also a certified Great Place to Work, Inc. 5000 company, and the winner of 36 MarCom Awards in 2017 and 32 AVA Digital Awards in 2018. SOURCE SmartBug Media Related Links https://www.smartbugmedia.com The 2018 World Blockchain Technology Forum will be held from June 22-24. The 3-day event is co-organized by Soom Foundation (Representative: Park, Ki-up), the first company in the world that commercializes the 4th blockchain technology based payment solution, and China Association for Small & Medium Commercial Enterprises (CASME). The "2018 World Blockchain Technology Forum" is a new forum co-located with the "World Convention of Small and Medium Enterprises", an international event that is held every year in China to promote exchanges between Chinese SMEs and global SMEs. Reflecting the worldwide interest on blockchain, the forum will play host to discussions on the future of blockchain with experts, lawyers and business leaders gathering at the Beijing Yanxi Lake International Convention Exhibition Center, the venue for the G20 Summit. It is a rare opportunity where leaders get together to form an alliance that can foster technological collaboration and innovation that can grow together with small and medium companies. At the 2018 World Blockchain Technology Forum, Minister of Industry and Commerce of Liberia, Wilson K. Tarpeh; former Italian Prime Minister, Massimo D'Alema; Chairman of China Small and Medium Business Association, Wang Min Wang; and Chairman of Japan Small and Medium Business Association, Yutaka Kitamura, will give congratulatory speeches. In addition, Professor Kwon Dae-jung of Kyunghee University, President of Korean Blockchain Industry Association and Korea Blockchain Industry Promotion Association (KBIPA) will provide information sessions on regulations, implications and case studies on blockchain. Followed by short lectures, Baker McKenzie, Australian lawyer of Bill Pugle, and Park Jong-Bae from Pacific Law Firm will be giving legal advices on the blockchain industry. Ki Eob Park, president of Soom Foundation, said, "There will be in-depth discussion on core blockchain technologies among policy makers and business leaders. I am expecting this forum to be a great opportunity for introducing new blockchain technologies and let participants explore possibilities of convergence among blockchain technologies and other current industries." SOURCE Soom Foundation (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/707082/Stylus_Cannabis.jpg ) 1. Cannabis Versus Cocktails Cannabis has the potential to match alcohol as the recreational product of choice in the US. Use among US college students is already climbing, while drinking is declining. It plays a similar role to alcohol, lending itself to party-goers, parents and others looking to unwind - even serving as a host gift in lieu of wine. It's especially appealing to those eager to avoid hangovers or alcohol's calorie count. 2. 'Canna-Curious' Hubs Commercialized cannabis is maturing into an opportunity expected to be worth $57bn globally by 2027, according to Arcview Group. Catering to an influx of newly intrigued consumers, brands are demystifying cannabis via strategies such as subscription boxes, cannabis socials for product sampling, and even Tinder-like apps. The next stage in educating consumers and cultivating fans will be cannabis tourism. California-based Flow Kana is turning a defunct winery into an experience center that will offer educational tours of its cannabis farm, along with tastings. 3. Female Focus A 'by and for' women's sector is booming in the industry. Women are among the fastest-growing cohorts of cannabis consumers, and increasingly prolific as cannabis entrepreneurs. As a result, products that skew towards feminine tastes - from menstrual-relief products to sleek pipes and jewelry that doubles as a sophisticated roach clip - are proliferating. Women are defining the future of cannabis. 4. Medical-Grade Marijuana Cannabis hasn't yet been widely integrated into the mainstream medical community, but that will change. We'll see an upswing in education available for healthcare providers and patients, and an evolution of products geared to patient use - enabling users to more precisely control dosing, for instance. Legalization is bringing more biotech and other start-ups into the space, all likely to advance understanding of how cannabis can aid patients and help adapt it to clinical use. 5. New Pet Essential As several key medical benefits of cannabidiol (CBD, the non-psychoactive compound of cannabis) - including relief from anxiety and joint pain - appear to help animals as much as humans, CBD-infused products for pets are booming. The potential here is enormous, given that Americans now spend nearly $70bn annually on their pets, and younger owners in particular are embracing alternative remedies to ensure optimal animal health. About Stylus Stylus is a global innovation research and advisory company. We provide proprietary research and advice to more than 500 of the world's leading consumer brands, businesses and agencies. http://www.stylus.com This is a sample of Stylus' latest research into the cannabis market. For additional commentary please contact: Natasha Fish, PR Manager [email protected] +44 20 3892 7544 SOURCE Stylus.com STAMFORD, Conn., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Sublime Communications, a full-service marketing and communications company and Eureka, the floorcare brand behind the world's leading home cleaning appliances manufacturer, have been honored with a Bronze award by The One Club for Creativity's 45th annual One Show, the prestigious global awards competition celebrating excellence in creativity of ideas and quality of execution. The companies were recognized for the successful "Clean My Path video campaign in the Social Media Influencer category for Sublime Communications' work on the launch of the Eureka FloorRover vacuum. The "Clean My Path" campaign was also named a 2018 Gold SABRE Awards finalist in the category of Consumer Products by the SABRE Awards North America, which celebrates superior achievement in branding, reputation and engagement and is presented by The Holmes Report. The 2018 SABRE Awards shortlist included an estimated 300 campaigns, selected from more than 2,000 entries in this year's competition. The award-winning program was part of an integrated marketing effort to revitalize the Eureka brand and engage consumers and trade with the launch of the new FloorRover that showcased the iconic brand's latest innovation in technology and design. Having been dormant in the category for several years, Eureka wanted to announce the brand was back and reclaim a leadership position in the vacuum cleaner space. Sublime Communications was up to the challenge of creating a video that would "go viral" and be shared by millions of consumers. With a brilliant, breakthrough stunt, featuring Coco Austin (Ice T's wife) and daughter, Chanel, the "Clean My Path" video had the paparazzi chasing them down the sidewalks of New York City as their path was being cleared by Eureka's new FloorRover. The videos captured achieved over 30 million views for Eureka in just a few weeks on social media, many originating from actual bystanders who caught video live when the stunt was happening and immediately shared. The "Clean My Path" campaign was further supported with new Eureka branding and logo, a product-specific microsite and a variety of tactics that included: coordinated social posts that took advantage of Coco's millions of followers; influencer partnerships to further drive the reach of the viral campaign; and important search engine marketing to drive purchases in store and on line. Sublime Communications continues to create breakthrough work for Eureka with the introduction of a new campaign to support the launch of the brand's latest productthe Eureka PowerPlush Lightweight Cordless vacuum cleaner. This new effort is centered on another video, "Messy Girl," that takes a humorous spin on the convenience and effectiveness of the new Eureka vacuum, while turning the tables on the traditional female/male stereotypes of 'who is typically messy vs. neat.' The video will be released on Eureka's YouTube channel, and, as with the previous work, will also supported by integrated initiatives. "Sublime Communications is proud to be recognized along with Eureka for our creative, out-of-the box campaign and partnership," said Nicole Enslein, CEO of Sublime Communications. "It's great to be recognized by our peers for the work we do for our clients, but even better when that work gets results." "With consumers busier than ever before, we know that cleaning habits have changed so we're creating products that fit into every lifestyle and make cleaning easier," said Ting Ting Cheng, Vice President at Eureka. "Our goal in working with Sublime was to make sure that our marketing reflects and reaches today's consumer in a way that is fresh and relevant and we're thrilled to see our work recognized." About Sublime Communications Sublime Communications, is a full-service marketing communications company with global reach. Staffed by a team of perfectionists, the firm offers the talent and resources of a large agency along with the attention and responsiveness of a small one. The agency's capabilities spans every media channel with experience that covers every sector from technology and cyber security to consumer products and luxury brands. With longstanding partnerships, Sublime helps partners differentiate. For more information, visit www.sublimecommunications.com and interact with the company on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. About Eureka Founded in 1909 in Detroit, Michigan, USA, Eureka offers a full line of vacuums, including uprights, canisters, sticks, handhelds, and cordless. For over 100 years, Eureka continues to innovate and bring to market new and exciting products, making it a household name in North America and all around the world. Eureka was acquired by Midea America Corp. in 2016, a partnership that combines Eureka's heritage with Midea's extended manufacturing capabilities and full market coverage. For more information, visit www.eureka.com. Media Contact: Edwige Buteau [email protected] 917-655-3843 SOURCE Eureka CHICAGO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- It may come as a surprise to see whom is among Summerfest's most loyal attendeesthe corporate and government communities of Taiwan. On Wednesday, June 27 at 1:00 PM CST, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) will present its Opening Ceremony at the TAIWAN EXCELLENCE EXPERIENCE ZONE at Summerfest, showcasing more than 50 products named as this year's TAIWAN EXCELLENCE award winners. "Taiwan has highlighted products at Summerfest since 2016," said Mia Liang, Director of TAITRA, overseeing 13 states in the Midwest. "Taiwanese companies learn a great deal about the American consumer, and we connect with United States representatives looking to do business with Taiwan." The TAIWAN EXCELLENCE Awards exemplify innovative research and development, quality, design and marketing. Products selected for these Awards are promoted by the government to shape the creative image for Taiwanese businesses. This year marks the 26th selection, making the symbol of TAIWAN EXCELLENCE a prestigious brand in Taiwan, and is highly reputed throughout the world. With the theme, "Experience The Imagine-Nation," TAITRA will introduce products with smart technologies. Among them, the Pawbo+ Interactive Pet Camera allows users to stay with pets even when they are far away. Pacific Cycle's NEW BIRDY folding bike has a completely new DNA, making the bike faster, smaller and more rigid. There will also be products in the health, beauty and gaming sectors. Other activities include a RoboHero Dance Off and daily saxophone performances. Attendees can show their creativity to have a chance to win a Carol Mobile Karaoke Loudspeaker System. Visit https://events.taiwanexcellence.org/2018Sfest/album.html for more information, TAITRA is kicking off its Summerfest presence with events at Discovery World Science & Technology Museum (6.26.18) and the Betty Brinn Children's Museum (6.27.18), both starting at 10:00 AM. The TAIWAN EXCELLENCE EXPERIENCE ZONE is situated near The Marcus Amphitheater in Henry Maier Festival Park June 27-July 1. For more information, visit https://events.taiwanexcellence.org/2018Sfest/. ABOUT TAIWAN EXCELLENCE The symbol of Taiwan Excellence was established in 1992 by Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs. Subsequently, the Taiwan Excellence Selection was launched the following year. The selection is based on the distinct criteria of R&D, quality, design, and marketing. Products that have been selected for the Taiwan Excellence Awards serve as examples of the domestic industries and be promoted by the government in the international market in an effort to shape the creative image for Taiwanese businesses. This year marks the 26th selection, making the symbol of Taiwan Excellence a prestigious brand for enterprises in Taiwan to strive and be recognized by, and is highly reputed throughout the world. ABOUT THE BUREAU OF FOREIGN TRADE, MOEA The Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT), under The Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) of Taiwan, is responsible for implementing policies and regulations governing foreign trade, economic cooperation, and foreign investments. Established in January 1969, BOFT's role and position have undergone ongoing adjustments to meet the needs of a shifting international economic and trade environment. BOFT has been guiding and working with the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) in numerous trade promotion projects and activities both internationally and domestically. Having worked closely with TAITRA for many decades, BOFT continues to entrust TAITRA with various critical government projects relating to trade and investments, promoting Taiwan on every international aspect. ABOUT TAITRA Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) is the foremost non-profit, semi-governmental trade promotion organization in Taiwan. Founded in 1970 to help promote foreign trade, TAITRA is jointly sponsored by the government, industry associations, and several commercial organizations. TAITRA assists Taiwanese businesses in strengthening their international competitiveness and in dealing with the challenges they face in foreign markets. TAITRA boasts a well-coordinated trade promotion and information network consisting of over 1,200 trained specialists stationed throughout its Taipei headquarters and 60 branches worldwide. Together with its sister organizations, the Taiwan Trade Center (TTC) and Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC), TAITRA has created a wealth of trade opportunities through effective promotion strategies. CONTACT Michael Shmarak 312.919.9222 SOURCE Taiwan External Trade Development Council Related Links http://www.taitra.org.tw BERLIN, Germany, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. as the 2018 recipient of the Klaus Tschira Human Resources Innovation Award and a 10,000 prize that Teva elected to donate to The END Fund. Teva is committed to providing access to affordable medicine around the world. Over the years, the company underwent a series of mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures, growing its workforce to over 45,000 employees. To complement this growth, the company embarked on a digital HR transformation journey and maintained a strong talent management and succession planning program. With the help of SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite, including the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution, it was able to: Turn HR into a strategic function with the support of technology and metrics Simplify and harmonize HR processes globally using cloud technology Replace 30 local HR solutions in 60 countries and consolidate all core HR data into one system Improve talent acquisition, management, development and retention Support its company vision to establish a people-focused culture and way of working Provide managers with access to high-quality HR data relevant to their responsibilities Create shared service centers for cost-effective service delivery Achieve faster and more accurate reporting to the board and business units The Klaus Tschira HR Innovation Award, commissioned by SAP, commemorates SAP cofounder Klaus Tschira and his vision for SAP to revolutionize human resources to help organizations unleash the full potential of their employees. It is awarded to a customer of SAP SuccessFactors solutions that exemplifies a unique and innovative solution in the field of HR. "I'm delighted that the teams at Teva were selected to receive this year's Klaus Tschira HR Innovation Award," said Greg Tomb, president, SAP SuccessFactors. "Anat Markus will join me on stage as a panelist in our keynote in Berlin and represent the teams in accepting this award. Under her leadership guidance, the HR and HR IT teams walked the talk of an integrated business strategy by working hand in hand along their entire HR transformation journey. And at every step, they put Teva's leaders and employees at the center of that journey. It's impressive to see the commitment they have as an industry leader in delivering affordable medication to people around the world. Teva's selection of The END Fund as the recipient of the Klaus Tschira HR Innovation Award charitable contribution demonstrates that commitment. We're pleased to make this donation in their name and expect it to have a meaningful impact on the work of this organization." "With our rapid growth across 60 countries around the world, we needed a solution that would not only scale quickly but unify a global workforce in a short amount of time," said Anat Markus, senior vice president, Global HR Operations and Employee Services, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. "The SAP SuccessFactors solutions are helping us attract, develop and enable the agile workforce of the future as we continue to build a consumer-centric organization. We'd like to thank SAP for its gracious 10,000 donation to The END Fund. Together, we can help put an end to these parasitic and bacterial infectious diseases and improve the lives of billions of people living in some of the most vulnerable and poverty-stricken places across the globe." The END Fund is the only private philanthropic initiative dedicated solely to ending the most common neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), which affect more than 1.5 billion of the world's most impoverished people, including 836 million children. The END Fund engages a community of philanthropists, manages high-impact strategic investments and works in collaboration with government, NGO, pharmaceutical and academic partners to take a systems approach to understanding, engaging with and influencing the broad ecosystem of stakeholders working to end NTDs. The global organization primarily works in African nations, as well as Yemen, Afghanistan and India. As part of its commitment, a Teva employee will join the "Summit to See the END" that will engage dedicated visionaries, humanitarians and entrepreneurs to join the hike of a lifetime, while simultaneously raising awareness and funds to treat NTDs. For more information, visit the SAP SuccessFactors Web site or the SAP News Center. Follow SAP SuccessFactors solutions on Twitter at @SuccessFactors and SAP at @sapnews. About SAP As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 388,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com. Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates. 2018 SAP SE. All rights reserved. SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE in Germany and other countries. Please see https://www.sap.com/copyright for additional trademark information and notices. For customers interested in learning more about SAP products: Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24 United States Only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727) For more information, press only: Geraldine Lim, SAP, +1 (415) 418-0945, [email protected], PDT SAP News Center press room; [email protected] Kate Lavoie-Mayer, PAN Communications, +1 617-502-4338, [email protected], EDT SOURCE SAP SE Related Links http://www.sap.com NEW YORK, June 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ipreo, a leading global provider of financial services technology, data and analytics, announced today that the Thailand Government Pension Fund (GPF) has selected the iLEVEL platform to monitor, analyze and report on their private market investments. iLEVEL is the premier cloud platform of choice for hundreds of private market investors globally to control and leverage their data to enhance the entire investment lifecycle - including portfolio management, reporting, analytics, compliance, and valuation. "Our priority is to achieve long-term returns within an appropriate risk framework while adopting and encouraging corporate governance and best practices in the investment community," said Vitai Ratanakorn, Secretary General. "Using iLEVEL to collect and monitor data such as cash flows and investments for our private market portfolio enables us to support our deep commitment to transparency and efficiency." The private markets division of GPF selected Ipreo as their technology partner after conducting a competitive RFP process, citing the firm's reputation and experience in the private markets as a key factor in the decision. "We are thrilled to welcome GPF to the Ipreo family of clients," said Kevin Black, EVP and Head of Ipreo's Private Capital Markets (PCM) division. "They are a true regional leader, and epitomize the thought-leading organizations joining us in our mission to positively transform the private markets through technology and data." In 2017, Ipreo PCM more than doubled its client base in the Asia Pacific and this growth is accelerating even faster thus far in 2018. For more information about Ipreo's Private Capital Markets division in Asia Pacific, please contact [email protected]. About Ipreo Ipreo is a leading global provider of financial services technology, data, and analytical services, supporting all participants in the capital-raising process including sell-side professionals, finance officers at private and public companies, institutional investors, and asset managers. Ipreo's Private Capital Markets' solutions are the premier choice for the private capital industry to address growing pressures for transparency and regulatory compliance. Our full range of products offers solutions for portfolio assessment, valuations, investor reporting, operating metrics, or investment performance. Ipreo has nearly 2000 people serving clients in every major financial hub around the world. Learn more at ipreo.com/private-markets/ SOURCE Ipreo SHANGHAI, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The ten-day 21st Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) was unveiled on June 16 with the 21st Golden Goblet Ceremony. Over ten thousand guests in the film industry from more than 70 countries and regions in the world join Chinese filmmakers in this annual film gala. At the Red Carpet of Golden Goblet Ceremony held on the evening of June 16, Jason Statham, Christoph Waltz, Nicolas Cage and other stars around the world appeared. The presidents of film festivals and the representatives of film agencies worldwide, including Thierry Fremaux, director of Cannes Film Festival, and Chinese and oversees film crews participating in the competitions and presentations made their appearance together, attracting media from all over China and the rest of the world, leaving Shanghai with a star-studded night. The 21st SIFF organizes a film submission globally for the competitions and panorama. It has attracted 3,447 film entries from 108 countries and regions and selected 13 films from countries to enter the Main Competition of Golden Goblet Awards. The jury of the Awards led by Chinese director and actor Jiang Wen have already begun the selection; more than 500 Chinese and foreign films selected for screening are divided into 30 units and are shown in 45 theaters in Shanghai. The crews of over 100 films will meet the audience in the theaters, which will attract hundreds of thousands of fans from all over China. On the first day of the film festival, representatives of 31 film festival agencies from 29 countries signed the cooperation memorandum of The Belt and Road Film Festival League. The activities of The Belt and Road Film Week have also been fully carried out; revolving around the theme of "Film Co-Production", the film market has held more than 100 activities in various forms, intriguing the guests in the film industry from countries. Daily negotiating activities have taken place one after another in warm and friendly atmosphere, and the number of buyers and sellers participating in the presentations has also increased significantly. The SIFForum has become a hot topic these days and drawn extensive attention. The theme of exploring the new development of Chinese film industry has also aroused a strong interest of Chinese and national counterparts. China is moving steadily from a country with large film production to one with high-quality film production. The discussion of the theme of the SIFForum will help people in the film industry broaden their horizons, inspire ideas and promote development. During the festival, there are also activities such as the selection of Asian New Talent Award, SIFF Project, film plan and project launches. Among them, the "Shanghai Film and Television Shooting Guide", "Songjiang Hi-tech Films and Televisions City", "Internet Summit" and other press conferences introduce Shanghai service policies for filming, setting-up, and cooperation for Chinese and foreign film and television agencies, which attract a great attention from a large number of film festival guests. SOURCE The Organizing Committee of Shanghai International Film Festival PETALUMA, Calif., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Many companies find it difficult to measure the benefits of social media for their company. Does a post with 1,000 shares mean they will have an increase in products sold? Could a brand awareness campaign convert followers into customers? The answers to these questions differ from one company to the next. Brandon Frere, CEO and marketing expert, recommends that business leaders develop a consistent marketing strategy based on data analytics for their social media presence in order to maximize their ROI. "Business leaders need to remember how important data analysis is for developing their overall brand strategy. Whether the numbers are from their website, social media or email campaigns, they need to reflect on what was successful and what success means to them. For example, are we successful when we gain 100 new followers or 10 more sales?" says Frere. "Social media strategy is not an exact science and trends are constantly changing. CEOs or small business owners should try to be patient and look into different methods until they find one or several that work for their brand." What are the tangible benefits of social media for consumers? For some, they are receiving good suggestions, finding better prices than brick-and-mortar stores, making new friends and networking for jobs. For businesses, digital marketing can increase sales when done correctly. According to a report, 72 percent of Millennials base their purchasing decisions for fashion and beauty products on what they see on Instagram. The same report showed that 71 percent of the users they questioned were more likely to buy a product online if a friend recommended it. This reveals a new trend in marketing, in which opinions and approval from peers are more sought-after than other methods of advertising. "Peers help guide our clients through the complicated web of products and services advertised on the internet," commented Brandon Frere. "This is why I value the reviews I receive for my different enterprises, which our users can view on our company websites. We hope that our services instill confidence in our clients for their financial futures." 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 social-media-is-an-important.jpg Social Media is an Important Marketing Tool Credit: hugolacasse/Bigstock image2.png Related Links Frere Enterprises home page SOURCE Frere Enterprises Related Links http://www.FrereEnterprises.com FRAMINGHAM, Mass., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- T.J.Maxx is creating a community that encourages women to embrace their individuality together. Despite the fact that every woman has something that makes her special, new research shows that over half of women filter their individuality just to succeed in society. But there's good news: 75% of women say that when they see others being true to who they are, they're inspired to do the same.* In other words, individuality isn't a solo sport: when a woman is true to herself, it isn't just good for her it's also good for the women around her. The Maxx You Project Debra Messing Laila Ali Mattie James Dr. Serena Chen The Maxx You Project Research Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8345851-tj-maxx-debra-messing-maxx-you-project/ In its second year, The Maxx You Project will host a series of workshops and an online community to connect women with one another and surround them with a 'shecosystem' to inspire and co-create solutions -- and allow women to tap into the momentum of others to accelerate their own journeys. The program kicks off with actress and advocate Debra Messing, who attributes her ability to embrace her own individuality, personally and professionally, to the women she's met along the way. "I'm really lucky to have so many women in my life who live as their true, authentic selves," said Messing. "From pursuing my career to starting a family, I've looked to those inspiring women as part of my own community. They didn't get to where they are alone, and neither have I. I want to pass it on." This year, The Maxx You Project was inspired by insightful research the brand commissioned in partnership with Dr. Serena Chen, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, who studies how identities are formed. The research didn't only reveal how much women are holding back who they truly are, but highlighted that individuality is contagious. "Research shows that many women celebrate individuality in others but not in themselves," said Dr. Chen. "When women are true to themselves, they report stronger, more satisfying relationships. They were happier (96%), more successful (87%) and less stressed (89%) when they embraced who they are as individuals."* Join Our Community of Women Embracing Our Individuality Together. Maxx You with Us. The Maxx You Project Workshops: The Maxx You Project Workshops will be one-day workshops designed to inspire and support women as they learn how to embrace their individuality. Each participant will be invited to come to the workshop, which includes intimate talks from keynote speakers, networking opportunities and more. Saturday, July 28 : Los Angeles Hosted by Maxx You Project veteran Laila Ali , World-class Athlete, TV Host, Best-selling Author, Wife & Mom , World-class Athlete, TV Host, Best-selling Author, Wife & Mom Submissions close: Sunday, July 8 Saturday, August 25 : Atlanta Hosted by Mattie James , Blogger & Influencer , Blogger & Influencer Submissions close: Sunday, August 5 Thursday, September 20 : New York City Special celebrity host to be announced later this summer Submissions close: Sunday, August 26 The Maxx You Project Group on Facebook: As part of its mission to expand its commitment to women's individuality through the power of community, T.J.Maxx is launching The Maxx You Project Group on Facebook, making it easy to connect, collaborate and embrace your individuality. The group will offer women a digital space that will inspire her with online resources, connections and the support she needs to embrace her individuality. "T.J.Maxx believes in the power of individuality. No two T.J.Maxx stores are the same, just like no two women are the same, which is why we offer a selection of merchandise as unique as she is," said Jillian Rugani, Manager of Marketing, T.J.Maxx. "We're proud to continue our mission to help women, at every age and every life stage, embrace their individuality with The Maxx You Project." To apply to attend one of our workshops in Los Angeles, Atlanta or New York, and learn more about The Maxx You Project, go to www.maxxyouproject.com. Find your community with The Maxx You Project Group on Facebook. ABOUT T.J.MAXX Since its first store opening in 1977, T.J.Maxx has helped customers maximize what matters most in their lives by offering an ever-changing selection of high-quality, brand name and designer fashions at amazing value. T.J.Maxx is the nation's largest off-price retailer, with more than 1,200 stores spanning 49 states and Puerto Rico. Visit tjmaxx.com or download the T.J.Maxx app to shop online and locate your nearest store. THE MAXX YOU PROJECT CONTEST RULES No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. The Maxx You Project is sponsored by The TJX Companies, Inc. Open to women who are legal residents of the 50 U.S., D.C. and Puerto Rico, 18 & older. Begins 8:00 a.m. ET on 6/18/18 and ends 11:59 p.m. ET on 8/26/18. For Official Rules and specific entry periods, visit www.maxxyouproject.com. SOURCE* T.J. Maxx, in partnership with Dr. Serena Chen, commissioned a 20-minute online study of 2,000 American women. Oct-Nov 2017. Media Contact: Shawn Jackson II (212) 277-3753 [email protected] SOURCE T.J.MAXX NEW YORK, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TransPerfect, the world's largest provider of language and technology solutions for global business, today announced it has completed the acquisition of TranslateNow, a former competitor, with operations in Shenzhen and San Francisco. Financial terms were not disclosed. The addition of TranslateNow will provide TransPerfect with its first physical location in Shenzhen. Known as "China's Silicon Valley", Shenzhen is home to some of the country's largest companies including Huawei, Tencent, ZTE, and BYD. The acquisition will further strengthen TransPerfect's ability to address the rapidly growing market for translation services and technology in China and throughout the entire Asia-Pacific region. TranslateNow Co-Founder Matt Arney will join TransPerfect's management team as a Vice President, and the successful company will continue to operate as a TransPerfect division. Arney will lead day-to-day operations of the newly created division, and virtually all members of the TranslateNow team will retain their current roles. "Asia is the fastest-growing region in the global language industry, increasing by some estimates at more than 20% each year," said Arney. "We're excited to merge our extensive experience and brand recognition in China and throughout Asia with the depth of resources and best-of-breed technology that TransPerfect offers." TransPerfect CEO Phil Shawe remarked, "Unlike typical deals that large translation industry competitors may attempt, this transaction is not at all about 'synergies' or cost cutting through the elimination of jobs; it is quite the opposite. The TransPerfect-TranslateNow merger is all about like-minded entrepreneurs going to market together and capturing opportunity in the Asian marketplace. We'd like to offer the TranslateNow team a warm welcome into the TransPerfect family, and we're completely confident that the whole of our combined companies will be greater than the sum of our parts." About TranslateNow TranslateNow was founded to fulfill the increasing demand for high-quality Asian language translation services. With 20 years of experience in Asia, the team are recognized experts in managing complex translation and localization projects for many of the world's leading companies. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, CA with an additional presence in Shenzhen, China. About TransPerfect TransPerfect is the world's largest provider of language services and technology solutions for global business. From offices in over 90 cities on six continents, TransPerfect offers a full range of services in 170+ languages to clients worldwide. More than 4,000 global organizations employ TransPerfect's GlobalLink Product Suite to simplify management of multilingual content. With an unparalleled commitment to quality and client service, TransPerfect is fully ISO 9001 and ISO 17100 certified. TransPerfect has global headquarters in New York, with regional headquarters in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit our website at www.transperfect.com. SOURCE TransPerfect Related Links http://www.transperfect.com Intelligent automation platform simplifies compliance readiness and adherence to enable businesses to grow and prosper in a post-GDPR world SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Tugboat Logic, Inc., an innovator in enterprise security and privacy, today announced the launch of its Enterprise Security and Sales Management offering, the first solution to use automation and intelligence to simplify IT and sales compliance for every enterprise. It creates a scalable governance system of record for business teams to quickly and easily manage security policies and controls that in turn support critical business functions like sales, with real-time compliance information needed to complete customer RFPs and contracts. "Tugboat Logic has developed a new way for enterprise sales to get the real-time support they need from their IT and security teams," said Tugboat Logic co-founder and CEO, Ray Kruck. "We are breaking new ground with workflow automation combined with industry insights that empower organizations to collaborate and communicate for more effectiveness in sales and IT operations." "The breakthrough has been to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and patent-pending techniques to enable auto response in RFP management that dramatically shortens response times and eases the burden of accurate information gathering," said Tugboat Logic co-founder and CTO, Ingrum Putz. "We combine an intuitive user experience, turn-key policy management and security awareness training to help the organization get secure and sell more." Tugboat Logic also helps enterprises get ready to support numerous regulatory and industry standards including the European Union's newly implemented General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements. It is an ideal solution for smaller companies, without substantive IT staff or resources, to meet compliance adherence challenges with a straightforward and right-sized approach at a lower total cost of ownership. "Our clients are regulated, and we can't sell them our solutions unless we can confirm adherence to their strict IT and regulatory compliance requirements," said Wayne Gomes, founder of Grapevine 6. "Tugboat Logic gives us a central place from which we can respond to client proposals or questionnaires with greater speed and effectiveness." "We were looking for technology solutions to help with our GDPR readiness," said Michael Kuhlmann, CEO of Colony Networks. "We found Tugboat Logic had the policy framework and workflow we needed to supplement our compliance operations and process within our product development team and with our clients in Europe." "We found an invaluable partner in Tugboat Logic for our compliance readiness," said Marc Pavlopoulos, CEO of US Bound. "We needed to get our new offering ready for market, so privacy and data protection policies were a key part of our launch plan." About Tugboat Logic Tugboat Logic is a privately held technology company based in the US and Canada. It makes security and privacy a key business enabler for every enterprise. Tugboat Logic's cloud-based Security and Sales Management Platform is an integrated governance solution with advanced policy management in Policy Deck, audit-ready workflow for employee awareness training in Training Deck and RFP auto-response with centralized management with Project Deck. Tugboat Logic is a leader in using automation and intelligence to help companies without expert staff or with limited resources get more secure and ready for meeting any compliance challenge. In a digitally connected marketplace, every business needs to establish trust to win customers and grow, it's just logical! It's Tugboat Logic. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to learn more. SOURCE Tugboat Logic BALTIMORE, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Frost & Sullivan, a global growth partnership company focusing on growth, innovation and leadership, has recognized CPower Energy Management as the 2018 Customer Value Leader in the Demand Response Industry. "To achieve leadership in customer value is never an easy task," said David Frigstad, Chairman of Frost & Sullivan, "but it is one made even more difficult considering today's competitive intensity, customer volatility, and economic uncertainty Within this context, your receipt of this Award signifies an even greater accomplishment." John Horton, President and CEO of CPower, added, "It is an honor to receive this award, mainly because of everything it stands forCustomer Value Leadership. Our slogan at CPower is 'We're Here To Help'. This means we're going to help our customers master their organization's energy spend, improve their bottom line and enhance their sustainability efforts. When our customers succeed, we are in alignment with everything we stand for here at CPower." Frost & Sullivan's research identified several key aspects of the CPower experience that consistently deepen customer relationships and deliver a clear, demonstrable ROI, including: Customer service experience , exemplified by an end-to-end "People-Powered Process" business philosophy and dedicated CPower teams in each open independent service operator (ISO) market , exemplified by an end-to-end "People-Powered Process" business philosophy and dedicated CPower teams in each open independent service operator (ISO) market Exceptional price/performance value , ensured by customizing energy goals and conducting ongoing CPower training and preparedness programs, resulting in significant ROI for clients , ensured by customizing energy goals and conducting ongoing CPower training and preparedness programs, resulting in significant ROI for clients Operational efficiency , in which keeps all back-end operations of CPower's businessenrollment, dispatch, settlement, and paymentsin house, empowering the company to be significantly more efficient and proactive in addressing customer-related issues Frost & Sullivan also noted that CPower's branding strategygreat customer experience and client successpositions CPower as a market leader prepared to expand into Canada, and tap into rising opportunities, such as, DERs (distributed energy resources), energy efficiency (EE), and energy storage + demand response. "This proactive initiative clearly exemplifies the direction and growth strategy that CPower wishes to take and will no doubt maintain ahead of the competition when such markets fully mature," they said. About CPower CPower is a demand-side energy management solutions provider. We help commercial, industrial and government organizations of all types in the open U.S. energy markets save on energy costs, earn revenue through energy curtailment, enhance their sustainability efforts, and contribute to a balanced, reliable grid. We create customized energy strategies designed to help our customers achieve success through demand response and demand management programs including automated curtailment, storage, and energy efficiency monetization. For more information on how CPower can help your organization, please visit CPowerEnergyManagement.com. About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages more than 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the investment community from 45 offices on six continents. For more information on Growth Partnerships, please visit http://www.frost.com. Media Contact CPower Energy Management Glenn Bogarde Senior Vice President, Sales [email protected] 410-346-5294 SOURCE CPower Related Links http://CPowerEnergyManagement.com PITTSBURGH, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- UPMC Health Plan president and CEO, Diane Holder, will be a featured speaker on the "Health Systems of the Future" panel taking place during the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival and Spotlight Health, presented by the Aspen Institute in partnership with The Atlantic, from June 21-24, 2018. Moderated by Politico Pro health care editor, Joanne Kenen, Holder and other panelists will engage in a thought-provoking discussion on how business models like UPMC's payer-provider integration, hospital consolidation and new reimbursement mechanisms will drive the future of health care. With monumental leaps in technology and treatments in recent years, health care is on the cusp of meaningful breakthroughs. As the landscape quickly evolves, improvements to systems will need to be on par so that patient value can be delivered at the same pace. The fifth annual Spotlight Health, a three-day conference, brings together thought-leaders to discuss cutting-edge issues in medicine and health care. Holder's panel will take place on Friday, June 22 from 9:10-10:00 a.m. Mountain time. With over 30 years of health care executive leadership experience, Holder will shed light on how to improve value, aligning the incentives between the provider, payer and consumer. About UPMC A $16 billion world-renowned health care provider and insurer, Pittsburgh-based UPMC is inventing new models of patient-centered, cost-effective, accountable care. UPMC provides more than $900 million a year in benefits to its communities, including more care to the region's most vulnerable citizens than any other health care institution. The largest nongovernmental employer in Pennsylvania, UPMC integrates 80,000 employees, more than 30 hospitals, 600 doctors' offices and outpatient sites, and a 3.4 million-member Insurance Services Division, the largest medical insurer in western Pennsylvania. As UPMC works in close collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences, U.S. News & World Report consistently ranks UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside on its annual Honor Roll of America's Best Hospitals. UPMC Enterprises functions as the innovation and commercialization arm of UPMC, and UPMC International provides hands-on health care and management services with partners around the world. For more information, go to UPMC.com. SOURCE UPMC Related Links http://UPMC.com WASHINGTON, June 18, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, by majority vote, has issued a letter to Attorney General Sessions and Secretary Nielsen urging the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to stop separating children from their families after crossing our southern border. This policy changed longstanding border enforcement practices with no clear evidence that it increases border security. The policy ignores the reality that many of those coming to the border are desperately seeking asylum, fully within the parameters of our nation's immigration laws. The Commission majority views this policy as inhumane and against the best interests of the children and families. The Commission calls on the Departments to stop this approach, which subverts the fair administration of justice and may discriminate against families on the basis of their national origin. The letter can be viewed here. Also at their June business meeting, Commissioners heard presentations on the Commission's 1968 six-day public hearing on the civil rights of Mexican-Americans, and from the chairs of our Minnesota and New York Advisory Committees on their recent reports on policing practices. We invite you to view the full meeting. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, established by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, is the only independent, bipartisan agency charged with advising the President and Congress on civil rights and reporting annually on federal civil rights enforcement. For more information about the Commission, please visit http://www.usccr.gov and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Contact: Brian Walch Email: [email protected] Tel: 202-376-8371 SOURCE U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Related Links http://www.usccr.gov HOD HASHARON, Israel, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Valens, the developer of HDBaseT technology for in-vehicle connectivity, is announcing today the launch of its PCIe Module, an evaluation platform to demonstrate the long-distance transmission of PCIe data over an HDBaseT Automotive link. HDBaseT Automotive's ability to extend PCIe signals simplifies complex in-vehicle architectures by optimizing resource sharing of ECUs (Electronic Control Units), communication devices, SSDs (Solid-State Drives), and more. HDBaseT Automotive enables symmetric tunneling of data, with native networking capabilities over a single unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cable for up to 15 meters (50 feet). A key application for the PCIe Module are smart antennas and telematics, as HDBaseT Automotive can connect the numerous antennas on top of a car to an ECU located in a more environmentally-friendly location than the roof, with only unshielded twisted pair (UTP) cables. The PCIe Module is also able to converge other interfaces over the same cable (such as I2S, UART, side-band signals, etc.), as part of the telematics unit. "The PCIe Module was designed to assist OEMs and Tier-1s with concept feasibility, showcasing the many benefits of long-distance PCIe transmission over thin, flexible, and light-weight UTP cables," said Micha Risling, Head of the Automotive Business Unit at Valens. "PCIe is an optimal solution for several applications, such as telematics, ECU-to-ECU and ECU-to-end-node connectivity, and backbone connectivity." Valens' PCIe Module tunnels PCIe Gen3 traffic over cost-effective, 15m UTP cables. The PCIe Module can be connected to legacy PCIe devices, switches or bridges. The PCIe protocol can be used as a high-speed, low latency, power efficient backbone. The HDBaseT Automotive PCIe Module will be available for customers as of Q3 2018. xxxContact [email protected] for more information. Valens' HDBaseT Automotive PCIe capabilities will be showcased at the Valens' stand at the Automobil Elektronik Kongress 2018, in Ludwigsburg, Germany, on June 19-20th. To schedule a meeting with a Valens representative at the conference, please contact [email protected]. Join Dror Jerushalmi, Founder and CEO, on June 20th, at 13:45, to learn more about HDBaseT Automotive. About Valens Valens Automotive, a division of Valens, was established in 2014 to deliver the world's most advanced in-vehicle connectivity chipset technology to the automotive world. Valens' HDBaseT Automotive chip technology enables unparalleled in-vehicle connectivity, converging audio & video, Ethernet, USB, controls and power over a single cable. Valens' patented HDBaseT technology is used by the world's largest audio/video component manufacturers, enabling the highest quality of connectivity without the limitations of legacy infrastructure. Valens, a private company headquartered in Israel, continues to push the boundaries of wired connectivity everywhere. For more information, visit https://www.valens.com/automotive-solutions, or follow @ValensAuto. Contact: Sandra Welfeld Communications, Valens [email protected] +972-52-4007283 SOURCE Valens Related Links http://www.valens.com VALLEY FORGE, Pa., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Vanguard today announced a new framework, jointly developed with Mercer, that helps pre-retirees and retirees better understand the financial planning implications of annual health care costs and long-term care expenses. The comprehensive research paper, Planning for healthcare costs in retirement, outlines key health care cost factors and personal considerations, as well as frames health care expenses as an annual cost rather than a lifetime lump sum. Vanguard believes framing healthcare costs in this constructive and familiar way helps investors better understand total annual expenditures and plan accordingly during their retirement years. "Most analyses available in the marketplace today point to a daunting out-of-pocket healthcare expense over the lifetime of a retiree. These large dollar values can be demotivating for investors from a psychological and behavioral perspective," Jean Young, co-author and senior research associate in the Vanguard Center for Investor Research, said. "Instead, our model focuses on the more manageable task of planning for incremental, annual healthcare costs, while separately considering and integrating the potential for long-term care expenses." Understanding what impacts healthcare costs Based on the joint analysis, Vanguard recommends several important changes to the way healthcare costs are typically discussed and modeled, and recommends that investors focus on five key areas: health care cost factors, replacement ratios, annual cost framing, substitution effects, and long-term care. One of the most impactful inputs in understanding potential costs is the volume of healthcare services a person may consume in retirement, which can be estimated based on pre-existing chronic conditions and family health history. Another significant influencer on out-of-pocket healthcare costs is the type of Medicare coverage that a retiree selects, and whether their income dictates additional surcharges. Individuals retiring before age 65 will need to have a financial strategy to bridge their healthcare coverage until Medicare eligibility begins. "The model we have developed with Vanguard has enabled us to take a fresh look at existing industry data, complement it with new findings, and build a forecasting model that more clearly identifies variations in the estimated annual healthcare costs expected in retirement," Derek Guyton, Partner, in Mercer's Health business, said. "We think this flexible, actionable approach to healthcare cost framing can lead to better planning and better outcomes for retirees." Planning for incremental healthcare costs in retirement Due to the variations in a person's life and health status year over year, the research encourages investors to focus on factors they can control and plan accordingly using the following guidelines: Understand costs. Individuals should understand how their health status and other personal factors might affect their annual health care costs. Coverage choices should be informed by health status, retirement age, and income. Individuals should understand how their health status and other personal factors might affect their annual health care costs. Coverage choices should be informed by health status, retirement age, and income. Understand employer subsidies. Individuals should understand the difference in the health coverage cost they pay now with the help of any employer subsidies, and what they will have to spend in retirement. Having a clear picture can help avoid potential "sticker shock" and better prepare retirees for their out-of-pocket healthcare expenses. Individuals should understand the difference in the health coverage cost they pay now with the help of any employer subsidies, and what they will have to spend in retirement. Having a clear picture can help avoid potential "sticker shock" and better prepare retirees for their out-of-pocket healthcare expenses. Target higher replacement ratios. Some retirement savers may encounter a large incremental change in health care costs when they retire due to the loss of generous employer subsidies or declining health, and may want to save at higher rates now to offset these factors in the future. Some retirement savers may encounter a large incremental change in health care costs when they retire due to the loss of generous employer subsidies or declining health, and may want to save at higher rates now to offset these factors in the future. Consider health savings accounts. Health savings accounts can be used as a means to save, in a highly tax-efficient manner, for unforeseen healthcare expenses in retirement. Investors can save in these accounts today, and reduce the impact of future health care costs by having earmarked tax-free savings. Health savings accounts can be used as a means to save, in a highly tax-efficient manner, for unforeseen healthcare expenses in retirement. Investors can save in these accounts today, and reduce the impact of future health care costs by having earmarked tax-free savings. Weigh Medicare enrollment options carefully and revisit annually. Decisions involving the choice between traditional Medicare coverage only, traditional Medicare with a supplement, or Medicare Advantage depend on each retiree's needs and circumstances. Retirees should assess their situation each year and make adjustments accordingly. However, the opportunity to adjust may be limited. The great unknown: Taking charge of long-term care planning Long-term care costs represent a separate planning challenge given the wide distribution of potential outcomes. Half of individuals will incur no long-term care costsbut 15% could incur expenses exceeding $250,000.1 Even if the probability is low, Vanguard encourages retirees to confront the possibility of an extended, expensive long-term care stay, given the magnitude of the potential cost. Retirees should first consider unpaid care options such as family support and acceptable types of paid care, as well as Medicaid rules should resources be depleted. Funding for long-term care expenses can take many forms, with the biggest resource being private, out-of-pocket spending. In building a framework for retirement, individuals should have assets that serve as a source of annual income, as well as a contingency reserve to cover long-term care costs or other unexpected expenses. Additional considerations can include home equity, and income annuities for surviving family members. About Vanguard Vanguard is one of the world's largest investment management companies. As of May 31, 2018, Vanguard managed more than $5.0 trillion in global assets. The firm, headquartered in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, offers 397 funds to its more than 20 million investors worldwide. For more information, visit vanguard.com. About Mercer Mercer delivers advice and technology-driven solutions that help organizations meet the health, wealth and career needs of a changing workforce. Mercer's more than 23,000 employees are based in 44 countries and the firm operates in over 130 countries. Mercer is a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies (NYSE: MMC), the leading global professional services firm in the areas of risk, strategy and people. With nearly 65,000 colleagues and annual revenue over $14 billion, through its market-leading companies including Marsh, Guy Carpenter and Oliver Wyman, Marsh & McLennan helps clients navigate an increasingly dynamic and complex environment. For more information, visit www.mercer.com. Follow Mercer on Twitter @Mercer. 1 Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) Issue Brief, Long-Term Services and Supports for Older Americans: Risks and Financing, ASPE Research Brief, revised February 2016, Table 5. The health care cost forecasting model provides likelihoods of estimated lifetime and annual health care costs expected in retirement, in addition to estimates of long-term care costs. It relies on numerous assumptions and underlying data sources. All estimates are based on the information available at a point in time and are subject to unforeseen and random events. Therefore, any projection must be interpreted as having a likely range of variability from the estimate. Mercer built this model exclusively for Vanguard. Mercer is not responsible for use of this model by any other parties. The Vanguard Group, Inc. and its affiliates do not make recommendations to purchase insurance policies or products, including health care or long term care policies. SOURCE Vanguard Related Links http://www.vanguard.com LAS VEGAS, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Veristor Systems, Inc., a leading provider of transformative business technology solutions, today announced that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has presented Veristor with its US Hybrid IT Partner of the Year 2018 award. The award was presented yesterday during the HPE Global Partner Summit 2018 at HPE Discover 2018 in Las Vegas. The 2018 HPE Partner of the Year Awards recognize HPE business partners' outstanding performance and accomplishments that raise the standard for business excellence and customer satisfaction. Winners are chosen for their excellent financial performance and for driving meaningful business results to mutual customers. "It's a distinct privilege to be named HPE's US Hybrid IT Partner of the Year," said Ashby Lincoln, President and CEO, Veristor. "For our customers, the hybrid IT solutions from HPE deliver impressive options to reduce complexity while streamlining and speeding operations. By reducing operational friction and offering a cloud-like experience across the entire infrastructure, HPE's hybrid IT solutions help our customers redeploy their resources onto the new projects that give them a competitive edge." "It's an honor to award partners who are raising the standard of business excellence," said Paul Hunter, Worldwide Head of Partner Sales, HPE. "HPE is committed to enabling mutual growth with channel partners, and our awards recognize those who develop business opportunities with our joint customers." Veristor is an HPE Platinum Partner who carries HPE's complete line of solutions for cloud computing, composable infrastructure, data center infrastructure, high performance computing, hybrid IT with cloud, hyperconverged infrastructure, mobile and internet of things and more. The HPE product portfolio is offered as part of Veristor's suite of Data Center Solutions that are custom-designed to solve business challenges through the intelligent application of next-generation technology combined with design, implementation and management services. For more information visit: https://veristor.com/datacenter. About Veristor Systems, Inc. A leading provider of transformative business technology solutions, Veristor helps its customers accelerate the time-to-value for the software, infrastructure and systems they deploy. We do this by harnessing deep expertise in today's most advanced data center, security, networking, hybrid cloud, and big data technologies and guiding businesses to the right solutions for their most pressing challenges. And with a full suite of design, deployment, support, and managed service offerings, we work shoulder-to-shoulder with our customers at every step of their technology journey to make technology truly work for them. IT's just who we are. Learn more at veristor.com. SOURCE Veristor Systems, Inc. Related Links http://www.veristor.com PHOENIX, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Virtua Partners has successfully recapitalized two Phoenix Area single family residential development projects. The two infill properties include a 12-acre site located at Union Hills and 13th Street in Phoenix, and a 15-acre site at Thomas and 119th Avenue in Avondale. The two projects are planned for 183 houses. The bridge debt investors received a 16% internal rate of return. "We're very bullish on the economic prospects for Phoenix," said Nick Montague, President of Virtua affiliate Quyp Development. "We continue to expand our Phoenix MSA holdings, with an emphasis on infill residential developments designed for millennials." "Virtua sponsors a variety of fixed income products for high net worth investors," said Derek Uldricks, President of Virtua Capital Management. "Our fixed income products include mezzanine debt, bridge debt, and structured finance. These two projects were financed with bridge debt from individual investors with a 16% annual yield, paid monthly." About Virtua Partners: Virtua Partners is a private equity firm specializing in commercial real estate. Virtua sponsors a variety of funds and commercial real estate projects across the country. Investment products include fixed income, growth to income, growth, and aggressive growth. Through its affiliates, Virtua provides debt and equity origination, asset and property management, workout consulting, development, and fund management. Please visit http://www.virtuapartners.com to learn more about our investor services. Media contact: Derek Uldricks 619.764.9633 SOURCE Virtua Partners Related Links http://www.virtuapartners.com HOLMDEL, N.J., June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Vonage (NYSE: VG), a business cloud communications leader, today announced an expansion of its contact center footprint. The Company now offers its advanced omnichannel contact center product suite, Vonage CX Cloud, to businesses of all sizes using its cloud-native unified communications platform, Vonage Business Cloud (VBC). Vonage CX Cloud is an integrated platform with NICE inContact CXone, the market-leading cloud customer experience platform that has been available to businesses using the Vonage Enterprise unified communications solution since 2013. Vonage CX Cloud now delivers best-in-class customer contact solutions to both large enterprises and SMBs, enabling them to provide an exceptional agent and customer experience through the latest technology. Vonage business customers can customize Vonage CX Cloud through leading-edge intelligent technologies powered by Nexmo, the Vonage API platform. Some examples of enhanced capabilities using Nexmo APIs include: Real-time sentiment analysis, which offers real-time insight into caller sentiments and emotions, enabling better decision-making, customer support and outcomes. Enhanced self-service capabilities like chatbots or visual IVRs that bring resolution to customers quickly and seamlessly by providing the tools via traditional voice or embedding these interactions in mobile apps or websites. Customers with a need for increased Quality of Service (QoS) have the option of adding SmartWAN, Vonage's award-winning SD-WAN solution, to Vonage CX Cloud, offering businesses enhanced reliability and a streamlined unified communications system to keep offices connected and running smoothly while maintaining the highest voice quality possible. "Vonage CX Cloud is a robust contact center solution that provides businesses the tools to create modern, meaningful, and memorable customer experiences," said Omar Javaid, Chief Product Officer for Vonage. "We're excited to continue our partnership with NICE inContact, and extend to our Vonage Business Cloud customers a solution that enables them to interact with their customers with the highest levels of reliability, flexibility and engagement." "More and more businesses are replacing dated premises PBXs with cloud-based unified communications every day," according to Sheila McGee-Smith, Principal Analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. "Vonage CX Cloud offers Vonage Business customers a feature-rich, omnichannel cloud contact solution that far exceeds the call center functionality that is available with legacy PBX systems and is more in keeping with the digital interaction demands of today's consumers." Core capabilities of Vonage CX Cloud include: Flexible, reliable, fast and intelligent customer communications tools that ultimately lead to better customer satisfaction; Integration with Vonage's UCaaS solution allowing better customer service though seamless communications between agents and back office users; Omnichannel routing not only connecting customers to the right agent on their preferred channel, at the right time, but allowing agents to work with customers on multiple channels simultaneously; Enhanced analytics to drive better visibility for supervisors to coach, train and keep agents engaged in their work, reducing agent attrition; Improved overall productivity through intelligent workflow tools that allow businesses to create smart integrations that streamline agent effectiveness while driving effective customer experience designs; The power to scale quickly and easily in response to business needs such as seasonality, new product introduction or other unplanned interaction volume changes; and The ability to quickly and simply augment an existing contact center with cutting-edge services and intelligent technology, providing a better customer experience at a lower cost. "We are thrilled to reinforce our long-standing partnership with Vonage to deliver a truly unique cloud contact center solution for their business customers, whether small companies or large organizations," said Paul Jarman, CEO of NICE inContact. "Businesses today are quickly learning that by combining the power of a leading customer experience platform with a proven unified communications solution, their contact center can deliver the best possible customer experience, every time." Attendees of Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas can learn more about the advanced Vonage CX Cloud solution during the Unlock the Value of an Advanced Contact Center Solution session in the Vonage pavilion on Thursday, June 21 at 11:40am PT from Brian Gilman, VP Product Marketing, Vonage; Colter Hammer, Contact Center Practice Director, Vonage; and Ashish Seth, VP Product and Alliances, NICE inContact. About Vonage Vonage (NYSE:VG) is redefining business communications. True to our roots as a technology disruptor, we've embraced technology to transform how companies communicate to create better business outcomes. Our unique cloud communications platform brings together a robust unified communications solution with the agility of embedded, contextual communications APIs. This powerful combination enables businesses to collaborate more productively and engage their customers more effectively across messaging, chat, social media, video and voice. The Company also provides a robust suite of feature-rich residential communication solutions. Vonage Holdings Corp. is headquartered in Holmdel, New Jersey, with offices throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Israel. Vonage is a registered trademark of Vonage Marketing LLC, owned by Vonage America Inc. (vg-a) SOURCE Vonage Related Links http://www.vonage.com "Water.io started off by adding a sensor to disposable water-bottles, and then transformed the water-bottles into smart bottles by fitting the cap with a sensor that can measure the level of liquid remaining to remind people to hydrate," said Nandini Natarajan, Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "Water.io's technology can be applied to solids and utilized to remind and replenish a consumer with his vitamins make sure he takes every day and deliver a new pack when almost done. Thereby enabling the brand to develop a loyal client-base who are happy the brand is assisting them in their well-being." Through the information presented on the brand dashboard, companies receive alerts to replenish the product at the consumer's site. This way, brands can also offer direct delivery of the item to the consumer, eliminating the need for traditional and online retailers. This ability to provide brands with a wealth of value-added data on the ways in which consumers use their product is a truly unique feature. Furthermore, the platform boasts environmental benefits because refills require less material to produce and are lighter to transport. Water.io designed its sensors to fit into CPG and pharmaceutical brands' existing caps and closures for simple integration, without affecting the size of the cap. Its business model is to sell or license the cap and closure production while charging for the data and analytics capabilities. "The data and insights created by the platform are not available from any other product in the market today. Additionally, the platform is built in such a way that the brand does not need to invest in building any technology since it is all integrated into the brand's systems," noted Natarajan. "By generating revenue and working with the largest CPG and pharmaceutical brands in the world despite its relative nascence, Water.io has proved itself a name to be reckoned with in the smart packaging technology market." Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in devising a strong growth strategy and robustly implementing it. The recipient has shown strength in terms of innovation in products and technologies, leadership in customer value as well as speed in response to market needs. The award looks at the emerging market players in the industry and recognizes their best practices that are positioned for future growth excellence. Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry. About the Internet of Packaging by Water.io Water.io and its Internet of Packaging platform work in collaboration with leading CPG and pharma companies to deliver great experiences to consumers and patients around the globe. The company invests in improving everyday products, the experience of using them and promoting the general well-being of the consumer and the services they can receive. Water.io is building a next-generation CRM system for CPG companies, enabling the latter a first-time direct engagement with their consumers. Water.io was founded in 2015, and its headquarters are based in Israel. Contact Netta Kailer P: +972-549-222-424 E: [email protected] General mail: [email protected] About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion. Contact: Samantha Park P: 210.247.2426 F: 210.348.1003 E: [email protected] SOURCE Frost & Sullivan Related Links http://www.frost.com NEW YORK, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- WeissLaw LLP is investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of law by the Board of Directors of Cheniere Energy Partners LP Holdings LLC ("CQH" or the "Company") (NYSE: CQH) in connection with the proposed acquisition of the Company by majority stakeholder Cheniere Energy Inc. ("LNG") ("NYSE: LNG). Under the terms of the agreement, CQH shareholders will receive 0.475 shares of LNG for each CQH share they own. This represents consideration of $29.94, based on LNG June 19 trading price of $63.04. WeissLaw is investigating whether CQH's Board acted to maximize shareholder value prior to entering into the agreement, and whether CQH's shareholders will obtain their fair and proportionate share of the Company's continued success and growth prospects. If you own CQH shares and would like more information about your rights or our investigation, or if you have information to share with us, please contact Joshua Rubin by telephone at (888) 593-4771 or by email at [email protected]. WeissLaw LLP has litigated hundreds of stockholder class and derivative actions for violations of corporate and fiduciary duties. We have recovered over a billion dollars for defrauded clients and obtained important corporate governance relief in many of these cases. If you have information or would like legal advice concerning possible corporate wrongdoing (including insider trading, waste of corporate assets, accounting fraud, or materially misleading information), consumer fraud (including false advertising, defective products, or other deceptive business practices), or anti-trust violations, please email us at [email protected] or fill out the form on our website, http://www.weisslawllp.com/energy-partners-lp-holdings-llc/ SOURCE WeissLaw LLP Related Links http://weisslawllp.com NEW YORK, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- WindRose Health Investors, LLC, the healthcare-focused private equity firm, announced that its portfolio company, Ovation Fertility has announced a partnership with Institute for Reproductive Health in Cincinnati, OH, in which the Institute for Reproductive Health will merge its laboratory with Ovation Fertility. The Institute for Reproductive Health represents Ovation's sixth partnership with physician practices and second in the last year. Ovation Fertility is a platform of industry-leading Assistive Reproductive Technology ("ART") laboratories performing all aspects of treatment and testing for infertility patients, including laboratory and genetic services as part of the in-vitro fertilization ("IVF") process. Ovation Fertility Cincinnati allows Ovation Fertility to expand its growing nationwide laboratory network into the Midwest. The partnership also supports Ovation Fertility's affiliated physicians in their quest to collaborate in the field of reproductive medicine with the addition of Sherif Awadalla, M.D., Michael Scheiber, M.D., M.P.H., and Thomas Burwinkel, M.D. The Institute for Reproductive Health has been a premier source for andrology and embryology laboratory services in the Midwest since 2001. Its laboratory director, Erica Behnke, Ph.D., HCLD, who is the acting Commissioner for the Reproductive Laboratory Accreditation Program for the College of American Pathologists (CAP), and her team of laboratory professionals plan to continue this tradition of excellence as Ovation Fertility Cincinnati. According to Nate Snyder, chief executive officer of Ovation Fertility, "We are excited to collaborate with the team of scientists in Cincinnati and partner with Drs. Awadalla, Burwinkel and Scheiber. The larger we become, the more force we have supporting our business model, which will magnify our ability to advance our mission to reduce the average cost of a live birth through more efficient and effective care." Ovation Fertility Cincinnati is the second acquisition in six months with additional partnerships to be announced shortly. "Adding Cincinnati to our growing list of laboratories demonstrates our business model is attractive to physicians and scientists looking to participate in the next generation of fertility care." Snyder says. About Ovation Fertility Ovation Fertility is a national network of reproductive endocrinologists and scientific thought leaders focused on reducing the cost of live birth through more efficient and effective fertility care. Ovation Fertility's IVF and genetics laboratories and affiliated practices work collaboratively to raise the bar with state-of-the-art, evidence-based fertility services that give hopeful parents the best chance of a successful pregnancy. Physicians partner with Ovation Fertility to offer their patients advanced preimplantation genetic testing for aneuploidy (PGT-A) and chromosomal structural rearrangements (PGT-SR). Ovation Fertility also provides donor eggs that come with the world's first Euploid Embryo Guarantee, as well as secure frozen egg, embryo and sperm storage; consultative services to help IVF laboratories improve quality and performance; and fertility preservation programs that enable more women to freeze their eggs and build future families. Learn more about Ovation Fertility's vision of a world without infertility at www.OvationFertility.com. About the Institute for Reproductive Health The Institute for Reproductive Health provides high-quality care in the field of reproductive endocrinology and infertility. Since 2001, the fertility specialists and laboratory professionals in the practice have utilized the latest assisted reproductive technology (ART) to deliver individualized and highly effective fertility care in an environment that is warm and caring. Learn more about the Institute for Reproductive Health and its mission to make dreams of parenthood come true at www.CincinnatiFertility.com. About WindRose Health Investors WindRose Health Investors, formerly MTS Health Investors, makes equity investments in companies that operate within the services sectors of the healthcare industry. WindRose Health Investors focuses on companies with profitable business models and a demonstrated ability to deliver cost-effective solutions. WindRose Health Investors manages over $700 million of capital and is currently investing out of its fourth fund. WindRose Health Investors is based in New York City and invests in companies throughout the United States. For more information, please email us at [email protected]. Contact: Caroline Luz Owen Blicksilver Public Relations, Inc. 203-656-2829 [email protected] SOURCE WindRose Health Investors BEIJING, June 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Yirendai Ltd. (NYSE: YRD) ("Yirendai" or the "Company"), a leading fintech company in China, announced today that Goldman Sachs, a leading global investment banking firm, has provided the Company with RMB 324 million of funding for a term of 3 years. "We are very excited to see the substantial progress we have made in developing institutional relationships," commented Mr. Dennis Cong, Chief Financial Officer of Yirendai. "This funding facility demonstrates Goldman Sachs' recognition of our proven operating capabilities and leading position in the industry. We remain committed to working with more financial institutions to better address the under-served financing needs of the prime population in China." About Yirendai Yirendai Ltd. (NYSE: YRD) is a leading fintech company in China connecting investors and individual borrowers. The Company provides an effective solution to address largely underserved investor and individual borrower demand in China through an online platform that automates key aspects of its operations to efficiently match borrowers with investors and execute loan transactions. Yirendai deploys a proprietary risk management system, which enables the Company to effectively assess the creditworthiness of borrowers, appropriately price the risks associated with borrowers, and offer quality loan investment opportunities to investors. Yirendai's online marketplace provides borrowers with quick and convenient access to consumer credit at competitive prices and investors with easy and quick access to an alternative asset class with attractive returns. For more information, please visit ir.yirendai.com. SOURCE Yirendai Ltd. Related Links http://ir.yirendai.com "I joined Ziften 3 plus years ago to be part of a company with endless opportunity," said Mike Hamilton. "The opportunity that lies in front of Ziften is enormous. I am hyper-focused on accelerating our innovation, and delivering threat protection for our customers. Their security and success will drive us. I am deeply honored and incredibly energized to lead Ziften." "On behalf of the Ziften Board of Directors, I would like to thank Mr. Leaver for his service to our company," said Brian Beard, Chairman of the Board of Ziften. "Ziften made considerable progress under his leadership the last 6 years." "It has been a sincere pleasure to lead Ziften and I am proud of all we accomplished," said Mr. Leaver. "I am thankful for the opportunity to have worked with a first-class team of professionals. I believe that the company will continue to succeed and excel." About Ziften: Ziften delivers all-the-time visibility and control for any asset, anywhere client devices, servers, and cloud VMs whether on-network or remote; connected or not. 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). Learn more at https:/ziften.com. Follow Ziften: Ziften Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Ziften Media Contact: Zonic Group Public Relations Gregory Cross [email protected] SOURCE Ziften Technologies Related Links https://ziften.com Los Angeles, June 19 : Actress Amy Adams thinks it's "sexy" of her husband Darren Le Gallo to have good parenting skills. The 43-year-old actress opened up to magazine Marie Claire about parenting her daughter Aviana Olea, 8, with her husband, reports people.com. "It's sexy to see him raising a girl and teaching her how a man should treat her in a lovely way," she said of Le Gallo. Adams and Le Gallo, who married in 2016 after nearly 15 years together, welcomed Aviana, their only child, in 2010. The actress features in the series "Sharp Objects", an adaptation of author Gillian Flynn's debut novel, which tells the story of a woman who returns to her Missouri hometown to solve the murder of two young girls. "There's just so much truth in the darkness and the sadness and I'm willing to explore it now in a different way," she said of the role. "Before, I thought people wouldn't like me or they would think I was crazy. Now I know I can navigate my own personal darkness and it won't consume me." On the subject of aging gracefully, Adams said: "I want to do everything I can that does not involve needles or knives." Washington, June 19 : US President Donald Trump has attacked the German government's approach to immigration, as he comes under pressure over his own crackdown on migrants. Trump said German Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition looked "tenuous". Merkel is in the middle of a serious domestic row after defending her government's immigration policy. Meanwhile, Trump has adopted a highly criticised "zero-tolerance" approach, which has split families crossing the Mexican border. That position has been condemned by many, including former First Lady Laura Bush - wife of Republican ex-president George Bush - who wrote about it in the Washington Post newspaper. "(Trump's) zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart," she wrote, citing stories of children held in detention centres. In a series of tweets, the President defended his stance. "We don't want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!" he said. Meanwhile, Merkel is in a migration dispute with her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer. On Monday, Seehofer gave her two-week ultimatum to come up with a European Union (EU)-wide deal on migration, or he will start turning away migrants at the border - a move that could destroy the fragile coalition. Seehofer wants to refuse migrants if they have already registered elsewhere in the EU, but Merkel has refused to back his plan. The disagreement has opened up a rift between Merkel's Christian Democrats and Seehofer's Bavarian CSU party - two parties that have been closely aligned since the end of World War II. Other claims in Trump's tweets have already been debunked by various German news sites, especially his assertion that "crime in Germany is way up". They pointed out that Germany's crime rate is at its lowest since 1992, according to official figures released last month. New York, June 19 : US rapper XXXTentacion, who shot to fame with consecutive hit albums, has been killed aged 20. He was reportedly shopping for a motorcycle in south Florida when a gunman opened fire on his vehicle, reported BBC. Police in Broward County said XXXTentacion, whose real name is Jahseh Onfroy, was taken to hospital and later pronounced dead. He was often described as one of rap's most controversial artists and was facing domestic violence charges. A witness told celebrity news website TMZ that multiple shots rang out outside the motorcycle dealership. Jerusalem, June 19 : Israel has charged a former cabinet minister with spying for Iran, the Shin Bet internal security service says. Gonen Segev, a medical doctor who served as Energy Minister in the 1990s, was allegedly recruited by Iranian intelligence while living in Nigeria. He was detained during a visit to Equatorial Guinea in May and extradited following a request by Israeli police, a BBC report said. The 62-year-old was jailed for five years in 2005 for smuggling drugs and forging a diplomatic passport. He also had his medical licence revoked, but he was allowed to work as a physician in Nigeria when he moved there after his release from prison in 2007. A statement issued by Shin Bet on Monday said Segev was detained immediately upon his arrival in Israel last month. He was questioned about information which indicated he might have been in contact with Iranian intelligence agents and assisting their activities against Israel. Investigators discovered during the interrogation that Segev had made contact with officials in the Iranian embassy in Nigeria in 2012 and that he visited Iran twice to meet his handlers, Shin Bet said. Segev, it added, had also met his handlers in other countries and was given a classified communications system to send them coded messages. Shin Bet alleged that he had given the handlers information relating to Israel's energy sector, security sites in Israel, and officials in political and security institutions, and also put the handlers in contact with some Israelis involved in the security sector by introducing them as businessmen. On Friday, Segev was indicted in a Jerusalem court on charges of "assisting an enemy during a time of war and espionage against the State of Israel", as well as multiple offences of "handing over information to the enemy". A gag order on the case was lifted on Monday, but some details remain sealed. Segev's lawyers stressed that the full indictment painted a "different picture than the Shin Bet statement", Israeli media reported. Ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when religious hardliners came to power, Iran's leaders have called for Israel's elimination. Iran rejects Israel's right to exist, considering it an illegitimate occupier of Muslim land. Israel sees Iran as a threat to its existence and has always said Iran must not get a nuclear weapon. Its leaders are worried by Iran's expansion in the Middle East. Washington, June 19 : Facing a flak over its contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- the agency that's behind the forced separation of children from parents at the US-Mexico border -- Microsoft said it was not working with the agency on any project. In a blog post in January, Microsoft had described a contract with the ICE for its Cloud-based software Azure, saying Azure meets all security and compliance standards necessary to handle ICE's most sensitive unclassified data. "Microsoft is not working with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or US Customs and Border Protection on any projects related to separating children from their families at the border," the tech giant said in a statement late Monday. "Contrary to some speculation, we are not aware of Azure or Azure services being used for this purpose," it added. According to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), nearly 2,000 children were separated from their families after illegally crossing the US border in April and May. "As a company, Microsoft is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border. Family unification has been a fundamental tenet of American policy and law since the end of World War II," the firm said. Microsoft has worked for over 20 years to combine technology with the rule of law to ensure that children who are refugees and immigrants can remain with their parents, it added. The pressure is building on US President Donald Trump to act upon the family separation practice, who has squarely blamed Democrats for this situation. "We urge the administration to change its policy and Congress to pass legislation ensuring children are no longer separated from their families," Microsoft said after people took to social media, asking the company to take a stand on the current immigration debate. A man was shot and killed Saturday morning at an apartment complex off West University Avenue. Around 7:30 a.m., Alachua County Sheriffs Office deputies responded to a report of an emergency at Fox Hollow Apartments, located at 7301 W. University Ave., according to an ACSOs Facebook post. The deputies discovered the body of 21-year-old Jeremy Provin with a bullet wound in his chest. Provin was from Jacksonville and had been staying in an apartment with Montric Thomas Jr., 21, for the past several months. After the incident, a resident of the apartment was able to tell a neighbor, who then contacted the sheriffs office. Thomas Jr. was in the apartment when the victim died but left in a resident of the apartments Ford Focus before deputies arrived, according to an ACSO media release. ACSO Public Information Officer Brett Rhodenizer said Thomas Jr. left and was headed to the Jacksonville area. Jacksonville Sheriffs Office was able to contact Thomas Jr.s family in Jacksonville, Rhodenizer said. His family and JSO were able to convince him to talk with detectives at the sheriffs office in Jacksonville. Thomas Jr. arrived at JSOs office Saturday afternoon and was arrested on a warrant from ACSO soon after for murder, tampering with evidence, possession of a firearm by a delinquent and tampering with a victim, witness or informant. He will be brought to Alachua County in the coming days, according to ACSOs media release. His bond is set at $1.8 million, according to JSOs Department of Corrections. Follow Devoun Cetoute on Twitter @Devoun_Cetoute and contact him at dcetoute@alligator.org. Enjoy what you're reading? Get content from The Alligator delivered to your inbox Subscribe Now New Delhi : The current global economy is caught in a major paradox. We live in a world where systems using artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and automation are matching or exceeding human performance in more and more domains. Yet, global productivity levels have been stagnant since the economic crisis of 2008. The global total factor productivity (TFP), which measures the efficiency with which inputs such as labour and capital are used, grew at 1.2 percent per year on an average between 1999 and 2008, slowed to 0.3 percent till 2012, and has stagnated since then. For the advanced economies, including the US, Japan and the Eurozone, TFP growth has either stagnated or fallen into negative territory while the developing countries have shown a mixed performance. India and China have experienced a TFP growth of 1 per cent and 0.8 per cent, respectively, while Brazil and Mexico have witnessed a fall of 0.4 per cent and 0.9 per cent, respectively. These trends are more problematic for the developing world than the advanced nations. After all, rising productivity, or output per worker, directly determines the improvements in the standard of living of a nation's citizens. And, in absolute terms, the TFP levels of advanced nations are almost five times higher than the emerging economies. So, low growth or stagnation of TFP can grossly undermine the ability of poorer nations to catch-up with their richer counterparts. As economist-columnist Paul Krugman aptly commented: "Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it is almost everything." However, it is almost inexplicable to experience such productivity trends in the face of rapid technological advancements. British economic journalist Martin Wolff recently suggested that the stagnation of productivity in the developed world could probably be a lull before the storm. A similar productivity pause was seen in the US in the 1920s when electricity was revolutionising lives. Soon after the lull, productivity levels shot up rapidly. If that is the case, the emerging economies have all the more reason to be concerned about rising cross-country disparities. A sudden acceleration in productivity growth of advanced nations, as suggested by Wolff, will make it even more difficult for poorer nations to catch up; it will also introduce extreme levels of cross-country inequality. One of the reasons for the low productivity growth levels of developing nations was suggested by Diego Comin and Marti Ferrer of Dartmouth University in a 2013 paper. In a cross-country analysis, they showed that even though these nations have been quick to adopt technologies from the industrialised nations, their penetration rates have been low. This has sustained the gap in productivity levels of the Western and non-Western world. To make matters worse, the various channels of technology adoption are under threat these days. There are three broad channels for knowledge and technology flows between advanced and emerging economies: International trade, foreign direct investment and cross-country research collaborations. Firms regularly gain access to technology through the process of reverse engineering after importing goods from abroad. Investing in other countries also results in a transfer of technology. Finally, location of research centres abroad to take advantage of cost differences can lead to knowledge flows between countries. However, in a post-Trump world, as countries close up their economies, these synergies can come to nought. In such a scenario, the adoption of technologies could take a hit and the productivity disparities between advanced and emerging economies. It is crucial that the rate of productivity growth in developing nations rebound as broad-based increases in standards of living are at stake. The best way for these nations to climb up the ladder of prosperity would be to eliminate all structural impediments to the adoption and penetration of newer technologies. The popular fear of job losses due to higher automation has also been negated by a recent analysis by the Asian Development Bank. In an analysis of 12 developing Asian economies between 2005 and 2015, it was found that a rise in demand more than compensated for the job losses that resulted from automation. In particular, it was estimated that during this period, about 134 million new jobs were created as opposed to a loss of 101 million jobs to technology. So, contrary to expectations, the adoption of newer technologies has induced higher productivity and economic growth in Asian economies. In the light of these facts, the NITI Aayog's latest move to shift the policy focus on AI to stimulate social and inclusive growth is a positive step. Such applications of digital technology can unleash higher levels of productivity gains and push the envelope on the delivery of public goods on a national scale. The real litmus test will be the execution of the policy, but for now it can be said that India has entered the AI playground at the perfect time. (Amit Kapoor is chair, Institute for Competitiveness. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at amit.kapoor@competitiveness.in and tweets @kautiliya. Chirag Yadav, senior researcher, Institute for Competitiveness, has contributed to the article) San Francisco, June 19 : The US senate has voted to reinstate a ban on Chinese telecom company ZTE which prevents it from buying US components and using US software despite President Donald Trump's attempts to lift sanctions on the firm, the media reported. The Senate has passed the annual National Defense Authorization Act which included an amendment to stop Trump's deal allowing US companies to trade with ZTE. Several Republican and Democratic Senators said their vote related to national security issues after numerous intelligence warnings about ZTE this year. "The legislation which is considered crucial for continuing defense funding, was passed with 85-10 votes, one of a handful of times the Republican-controlled Senate has deviated from a Trump policy," Business Insider reported on Tuesday. Mark Warner, Vice-Chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee had tweeted that the Senate had "blocked" the Trump administration from making a "bad deal with ZTE". "The amendment is not guaranteed to become law. The bill will now need to be reconciled with a House version -- where the amendment could be stripped out -- voted through both the House and the Senate and signed into law by Trump," the report added. The Shenzhen-headquartered telecommunications firm was hit with a trade ban by the US Commerce Department for seven years after failing to follow through with a punishment for violating sanctions on Iran and North Korea. That ban essentially shut down ZTE, which relies on US parts like Qualcomm processors. However, on Trump's orders, the administration made a deal earlier this month to end ZTE's sanctions in exchange for a $1 billion fine. ZTE, which employs 70,000 people in China, described the move by the US regulators to cut it off from its US parts suppliers as a "death sentence". Tokyo, June 19 : Japanese authorities on Tuesday issued landslide alerts in Osaka, after a strong earthquake a day earlier measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale left four dead and 381 injured. Heavy rain is expected to continue until Wednesday in Osaka which may cause landslides as the quake had loosened the terrain, Efe news reported quoting the Japan Meteorological Agency. Government spokesperson Yoshihide Suga advised people to monitor the situation through television and radio news. Suga also confirmed the death toll and the number of injured while admitting that the exact number of missing in the earthquake that had struck Japan's second most important city on Monday, is not yet known. The public transport service resumed on Tuesday after 80 flights were cancelled and 113 bullet trains were suspended on Monday, affecting 230,000 commuters. Gas and water supply continued to be interrupted even in cities bordering Osaka, while neighbouring towns have pitched in with assistance as authorities consider relief options. According to the company Osaka Gas, it will take around 10 days to restore gas supply in the 110,000 homes currently without it. Electricity supply has almost been restored in its entirety to the 170,000 homes that were affected, Efe news reported. The earthquake, which damaged 334 houses, also caused several buildings to collapse with at least six catching fire, confirmed the fire service. San Francisco, June 19 : As part of its attempt to win over students and educators, Microsoft has acquired video discussion platform Flipgrid which is used by more than 20 million teachers and students across the world. "Thrilled to welcome @Flipgrid to Microsoft!" Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, tweeted on Monday. "To bring the power of video-based social learning to everyone, we'll be making Flipgrid free for all educators and offering prorated refunds to everyone who has purchased a subscription from Flipgrid in the last year," said Eran Megiddo, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Education. Flipgrid was created with the aim of helping educators recast the role of video in the classroom, from a passive experience to a tool that empowers and amplifies every student's voice. "Fans of Flipgrid can rest assured the Flipgrid they know and love, in joining Microsoft, will continue to grow and thrive across the Microsoft, Google and partner ecosystems, all the while retaining its distinct brand, culture and team," Megiddo added. For Microsoft, which is facing increased competition in the classroom from both Apple and Google in recent years, the acquisition of Flipgrid is the latest in its effort to appeal to students and teachers, The Verge reported. Microsoft has been improving its Office 365 for education offerings, and also overhauling its web versions of Office to be more modern and faster to use for collaboration, the report added. New Delhi, June 19 : To guard journalists from falling prey to false news stories, Google India on Tuesday said it will provide training to 8,000 journalists in English and six other Indian languages in the next one year. For this, the Google News Initiative India Training Network will select 200 journalists from cities across India who will hone their skills in verification and training during five-day train-the-trainer boot camps that will be organised for English and six other Indian languages. This network of certified trainers will then train more journalists at two-day, one-day and half-day workshops organised by the Network. Training workshops will be conducted in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada in cities across India, Google India said in a statement. The focus of the training will be fact-checking, online verification and digital hygiene for journalists, using a curriculum built by experts from First Draft, Storyful, AltNews, BoomLive, Factchecker.in and DataLeads. "Supporting trusted, authoritative media sources is a top priority for Google, which is why we are proud to collaborate with Internews, DataLeads and BoomLive to support journalists in their fight against misinformation in India," said Irene Jay Liu, Google News Lab Lead, Asia-Pacific. "Our goal is to train more than 200 trainers, who will then train 8,000 journalists in six languages over the next year, making this Google's largest training network in the world," Liu added. Ranchi, June 19 : Maoists on Tuesday abducted a trader and slit his throat on charges of being a police informer in Jharkhand's Giridih district. Police said that Vinod Agrawal was going on a motorcycle when he was seized, taken to a jungle and killed at Bhelwaghati. The guerrillas left pamphlets at the site claiming responsibility for the killing and branding Agrawal a police spy. According to family members, Agrawal left home after getting a telephone call. Maoist guerrillas are active in 18 of the 24 districts of Jharkhand. New Delhi, June 19 : The BJP on Tuesday ended its alliance with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and pulled out of the PDP-led Jammu and Kashmir government. "It has become untenable for the BJP to continue in the alliance government," Bharatiya Janata Party leader Ram Madhav told the media here. Moscow, June 19 : The tri-service joint Russia-India military exercise Indra-2018 will take place in an Indian military base in the second half of this year. According to Interfax news agency, a Russian military delegation has visited India to discuss the logistics of the exercise. Combined military units of the Russian Eastern Military District will participate in the drills, it said. Members of the Indian defence forces will also be involved in planning of the exercise including practical operations of the units besides catering, consumer services and medical support for the Russian units. In addition, the parties will agree on the procedure for receiving and servicing of military transport aircraft in India. SINGAPORE, June 12, 2018 - Top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un (R) and U.S. President Donald Trump take a walk during their summit meeting in Singapore on June ... Image Source: IANS : Top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un (R) and U.S. President Donald Trump take a walk during their summit meeting in ... Image Source: IANS Beijing, June 19 : North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on Tuesday arrived on a two-day China visit and met President Xi Jinping, just a week after his historic meet with US President Donald Trump in Singapore on the Korean nuclear crisis. The Chinese state broadcaster showed Xi and Kim holding talks at the Great Hall of the People. Kim is understood to have briefed the Chinese President on his meeting in Singapore last week. The development comes amid an ugly trade spat between the US and China, with experts viewing the visit as Beijing's show of leverage it holds over Pyongyang. This is Kim's third visit to China since March this year and the previous two were not made public until the leader left the country. His back-to-back China trips reflect the warming of ties between the Communist countries whose relations were hit hard after Beijing cleared UN economic sanctions on Pyongyang for firing off ballistic missiles and conducting nuclear tests. China is the sole ally of North Korea and always appealed for calm and diplomatic approach whenever tempers frayed between Pyongyang and Washington. In the unprecedented summit between a serving US President and a North Korean leader in Singapore, the two decided to leave the acrimonious past behind and pledged to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula. China was quick to signal that economic sanctions on North Korea should be lifted; a suggestion rejected by the US, which said any such move would come only after Pyongyang dismantles its nuclear arsenal. The animosity between North Korea and the US dates back to 1950 when Pyongyang invaded the South, prompting Washington to fight by the side of Seoul. The North was backed by China and Russia in the Korean War until an armistice was put in place in 1953. North Korea said it built up its arsenal because it feared invasion by Washington and Seoul. China has been Pyongyang's ally since then. Beijing has a strategic interest in keeping the Peninsula calm as it fears that war between Pyongyang and Washington would trigger an influx of North Korean refugees into its border. Thiruvananthapuram, June 19 : The opposition UDF on Tuesday put the CPI(M)-led LDF government on the mat over the alleged assault case involving KC(B) MLA K B Ganesh Kumar. Moving a submission on the issue, congress MLA Anil Akkara asked sardonically whether the LDF government had given MLAs blanket authority to do whatever they pleased. Mr. Akkara charged the government with trying to protect Ganesh Kumar. The government was trying to let Mr. Kumar off the hook by slapping only a petty case against him but had registered a case against congress Kollam unit president Bindu Krishna, who tried to draw public attention to the issue through a protest, he said. The government was slapping cases under serious sections on the victims while at the same time trying to protect the perpetrator, he added. Responding to the submission, minister for co-operation Kadakampally Surendran, in a bid to quash charges of bias on the part of the government, asserted that the government had transferred the sub-inspector at Anchal police station for taking a stand favourable to Mr. Kumar in the case. However, giving the lie to the government claim that the Anchal SI was transferred in connection with the incident, Manorama News channel later in the day reported that the SIs transfer was not a disciplinary action since the order transferring him was issued by the government on May 30 while the assault incident involving the MLA took place on June 13. A youth had accused Mr. Kumar of assaulting him and verbally abusing his mother for not giving way to the MLAs car near Anchal in Kollam district last Thursday. A healthy, fast-casual restaurant is opening in Butler Plaza at 2905 SW 42nd St. on Friday. The new restaurant, Bolay, uses a build-your-own bowl concept. Its Gainesville location will be the sixth restaurant for the company and the first in central Florida. The restaurant has an entirely gluten-free menu, and customers are invited to build their own bowl with a base, protein, vegetables, toppings and sauces. This is not the first bowl-concept restaurant to hit the Gainesville food scene. However, Dan Risick, a 2006 UF alumnus and the branchs operating manager, believes the atmosphere of the restaurant and its bold flavors will help set it apart from others in the area. Our flavors are unique but keep you craving more, Risick said of the food. Risicks childhood best friend and fellow UF alumnus Matthew Woolsey will be working with him as the stores manager to integrate Bolay as a neighborhood restaurant in the town of their alma mater. Hannah Peterson, Bolays marketing director, said the location would be attractive to students in the area. Students absolutely love our food because youre getting a very healthy meal, but youre in and out, and its a very quick meal, Peterson said. Catering to the hectic student life wasnt the only reason Bolay decided to open a location in Gainesville, Peterson said. Our culture is surrounded by living bold, adventure, outdoors, doing things that push your limitations, and we found that the Gainesville market really embraces that, Peterson said. We really are excited to join the Gainesville community and embrace what you guys have going on. Follow Sloan Savage on Twitter @sloanasavage and contact her at ssavage@alligator.org. Enjoy what you're reading? Get content from The Alligator delivered to your inbox Subscribe Now Panaji, June 19 : The Goa State Industrial Development Corporation on Tuesday issued a show cause notice to Vasudev Parab, whose industrial unit at the Pissurlem industrial estate was raided last week by the DRI officials. During the raid, the DRI (Directorate of Revenue Intelligence) officials had seized more than 100 kg of banned ketamine drug, from the premises. "We have asked him why his industrial plot should not be taken back, because media reports have said that a DRI raid had seized ketamine being manufactured there," the Corporation's chairperson and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Glenn Ticlo told reporters on Tuesday. The show cause notice comes a day after Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar had ruled out a state government probe into the ketamine racket being allegedly operated from Parab's shed at the industrial estate located in North Goa's Bicholim sub district. Since the raid, the industrial shed has been sealed by DRI sleuths. Ticlo also said Parab had been given seven days to respond to the notice. In a three-day operation code-named 'Operation Vitamin', the DRI last week busted an international drug syndicate, seizing 308 kg ketamine, two tonnes of raw material at various sites in Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat, arresting 10 persons including two from UK and one from Vietnam. Used as a tranquiliser for veterinary purpose, ketamine is a common party drug and is known for its hallucinating effects. While the Congress has claimed that Parab is a North Goa BJP office bearer, the ruling BJP has rejected the allegation. New Delhi, June 19 : India on Tuesday repatriated six Pakistani prisoners back to their country, the External Affairs Ministry said. "Six Pakistan prisoners were repatriated today via Attari/Wagah border," the ministry said in a statement. "In addition, four Pakistan prisoners have already been released and repatriated in 2018, so far," it stated. "India attaches high priority to addressing all humanitarian issues, including early release and repatriation of Indian fishermen and prisoners in Pakistan's custody," the statement said, adding that India has secured the release of 147 Indian prisoners, including 146 fishermen, from Pakistan in 2018 so far. In October last year, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj suggested that the two sides could progress on humanitarian issues related to elderly, women, children and mentally unsound prisoners when Pakistan High Commissioner Sohail Mahmood called on her after freshly assuming office. Then in March this year, then Pakistan Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif approved the humanitarian proposals received from India regarding the civilian prisoners incarcerated in both India and Pakistan. New Delhi, June 19 : The BJP-PDP was an opportunistic alliance but the BJP pulling out of the coalition government at this point may push Jammu and Kashmir into "greater uncertainty", the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) said on Tuesday. It also stressed that the BJP could not wash its hands of the deterioration in the situation and of "deepening the alienation of the people". "The decision of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to withdraw from the coalition government with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir at this particular moment has the potential of creating greater political instability in the state. It signifies the total political failure of the BJP's approach in the state," the CPI-M said in a statement after the BJP quit the uneasy coalition. "This alliance was untenable since the beginning. It was an alliance between forces that never saw eye to eye on any issue but came together in an act of sheer opportunism to share the spoils of office," it added. The CPI-M emphasised that the BJP was party to all decisions of the state government during the past three years and hence could not be absolved of any responsibility for "contributing to a further deterioration in the state and towards deepening the alienation of the people". It pointed out that the BJP, as a coalition partner, had promised the people of Kashmir a slew of confidence building measures and initiating a political process by way of a comprehensive dialogue with all stakeholders in the Kashmir Valley. "Neither of these two promises which were publicly announced by the Union Home Minister after the all-party delegation visited the Valley in September 2017 have been fulfilled. If they were sincerely followed u,p the situation could have improved," the statement said. It said the Central government "unilaterally" announced the ceasefire and later withdrew it. "Under these circumstances, plunging the state into greater uncertainty and the impending imposition of President's rule may not help in addressing the issue of the deepening alienation of the people," it said. New Delhi, June 19 : The Congress on Tuesday ruled out the possibility of a coalition with the Peoples Democratic Alliance (PDP), making Governor's rule look imminent in Jammu and Kashmir after the BJP pulled out of the PDP-led coalition government. Reacting to the development, senior Congress leader and former J&K Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said the question of an alliance with the PDP "does not arise". "Whatever has happened is good. People of Jammu and Kashmir will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined Kashmir and have now pulled out," Azad said. He stressed that the question of Congress forming an alliance with PDP "does not arise". Congress spokesman Randeep Singh Surjewala pointed out that in the last four years, 373 security personnel and 239 civilians have been killed in Jammu and Kashmir due to heightened militancy. What did the nation get out of this?" Surjewala said in a tweet. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal pointed out that the Modi government had claimed that demonetisation in 2016 had broken the back of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir but that did not seem true. "Didn't BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened?" he asked. London, June 19 : Britain's Prince Harry and wife Meghan Markle will visit Dublin in July, Kensington Palace said on Tuesday. The royals would travel to Ireland between July 11-12 at the request of the UK government, according to the palace. "They are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and experiencing its rich culture as well as meeting the people who are shaping the country's future," Kensington Palace tweeted. Prince Harry and Markle's trip to the Emerald Isle would become their first official visit following their wedding on May 19 at Windsor Castle, Efe news reported. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have since attended various engagements, such as the annual military parade "Trooping the Colour" in celebration of Queen Elizabeth II's official birthday. British monarchs traditionally celebrate two birthdays each year: their actual birthday and an official one that is usually held on the second Saturday of June, depending on the weather. Last week, Markle accompanied the queen on an official visit to the northwestern city of Chester. New Delhi, June 19 : Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday decided to end his nine-day-long protest at Lt Governor Anil Baijal's office-cum-residence after IAS officers agreed to attend Delhi government meetings. "All the top officers including the Chief Secretary were present at meetings called by ministers today," Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia told the media. Kejriwal will be leaving Raj Niwas along with his cabinet colleague Gopal Rai, nine days after he began camping there along with Sisodia and Minister Satyendar Jain demanding that IAS officers who he said were on strike should attend meetings of his government. Kolkata, June 19 : A solo exhibition of works of celebrated Indian artist Dashrath Patel, tracing his artistic journey across mediums and types over his long lifetime, will open here on September 13, a statement said. Never restricting himself to a particular style, Patel (1927-2010) is considered a visionary in the field of design, and is often referred to as 'India's Renaissance Man'. A whole body of his work -- line drawings, ceramics, photographs and collages -- will be on display in the exhibition titled "School". Curated by design expert Pinakin Patel, the exhibition comes from Emami Art, part of the Emami Group of companies. "Even though each medium and its imagery were perfectly evolved, he resisted the need to formalise that particular body of work as 'his style', and risk being typecast or iconified. His work was his 'search' and he actively followed that ideology," the organisers said in a statement. A contemporary of modern masters Tyeb Mehta, M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza and V.S. Gaitonde, Patel practiced in diverse art fields as a painter, ceramist, a graphic designer, industrial design and exhibition design. "School" particularly explores Patel's photography, a medium for which is he not well known. The exhibition features key works from the Dashrath Patel Museum, Alibag. Patel was awarded Padma Shri in 1981, and Padma Bhushan posthumously in 2011. Paris, June 19 : The dynamism infused in the Indo-French relations during the visit of French President Emmanuel Macron to India in March seems to be building up as the two countries have committed to raising their bilateral trade from 9 billion euros to 15 billion euros in the next two years official sources said. Besides this, boosting French investment in India was one of the several issues that Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj discussed with her French counterpart Jean Yves Le Drian on Monday evening during her maiden visit to France. The French have been keen to significantly enhance their presence in Indian business ecosystem, especially in areas where they have inhouse strengths, notably sustainable development, transport and smart cities. The two ministers also discussed numerous international issues such as the impact of the decision by US President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris Climate Change Treaty as well as the Iran nuclear deal. Regional issues such as terrorism and situation in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region were also discussed. Sushma Swaraj thanked Le Drian on behalf of the Indian government for the unstinted support that France has given to India's bid to be inducted as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as the Nuclear Suppliers Group. According to a statement issued by the Indian External Affairs Ministry, Sushma Swaraj and Le Drian reviewed the wide gamut of bilateral relations as well as exchanged views on contemporary matters of regional/international interest. "The two ministers reaffirmed the strong mutual ties and the expanding convergences which underpin the bilateral Strategic Partnership, now in its 20th year," the statement said. The two leaders also exchanged a letter of intent for collaboration in conservation of prehistoric monuments. This document which was signed between the Ministry of Culture of India and the Ministry of Culture of France will aid conservation efforts at the Bhimbetka caves in India and the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in France. Sushma Swaraj also called on President Macron on Monday evening and conveyed the personal greetings of Indian President Ram Nath Kovind and Prime Minister Minister Narendra Modi. As part of her engagements here on Monday, Sushma Swaraj was also the chief guest at a ceremony held to name the Indian Culture Centre in the memory of Swami Vivekanand. According to the ministry statement, Sushma Swaraj on Tuesday visited the India House, Maison de l'Inde, which is a hostel for Indian students in the University City of Paris. She addressed the residents of The India House, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year An Indian community reception was held in honour of the visiting minister at the Indian Embassy where she addressed the members of community and emphasised on the importance attached by India on the links with the Indian diaspora. Sushma Swaraj also handed over certificates of appreciation to Indian community organisations and individuals who have contributed to the Swacch Bharat Kosh. She also announced that India will construct an Indian Armed Forces Memorial in Villiers Guislain, France, to honour the valour and sacrifice of the thousands of Indian soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought in World War I. She also released a publication "States of India" prepared by the Indian Embassy which is meant for increasing awareness of the business climate and invest potential of various states of India and would prove to be a handy guide for French investors, chamber of commerce and others. Sushma Swaraj arrived here from Italy on Monday on the second leg of her week-long four-nation tour of Europe which will also see her visiting Luxembourg and Belgium. (Ranvir Nayar is managing director of the Media India Group. He can be contacted at r.nayar@mediaindia.eu) Mumbai, June 19 : Weak global markets, coupled with the outflow of foreign funds, suppressed the key Indian equity indices on Tuesday with the benchmark 30-scrip Sensex on the BSE losing over 200 points. Globally, key markets were weighed down by signs of a resurgent trade war after reports said that US President Donald Trump might consider imposing tariffs on additional $200 billion worth of Chinese goods. According to analysts, the depreciation of the Indian rupee also eroded investor sentiment. Index-wise, the wider Nifty50 of the National Stock Exchange (NSE) closed at 10,710.45 points, down 89.40 points or 0.83 per cent from the previous close of 10,799.85 points. Similarly, the BSE Sensex, which had opened at its intra-day high level of 35,552.47 points closed at 35,286.74 points -- down 261.52 points or 0.74 per cent -- from its previous session's close of 35,548.26 points. The Sensex touched an intra-day low of 35,249.06 points. In the broader markets, the S&P BSE mid-cap declined by 0.98 per cent, while the S&P BSE small-cap ended 1.29 per cent lower from its previous close. The BSE market breadth was bearish with 1,951 declines against 676 advances. "The weakness came on the back of weak global cues as the trade spat between the US and China intensified," said Deepak Jasani, Head of Retail Research at HDFC Securities. He further said: "Major Asian markets have closed on a negative note. European indices like FTSE 100, CAC 40 and DAX are trading in the red." According to BNP Paribas Mutual Fund's Senior Fund Manager for Equities, Abhijeet Dey, persistent selling of Indian equities by foreign institutional investors also dampened investor sentiment. Investment-wise, provisional data with exchanges showed that foreign institutional investors sold scrip worth Rs 1,324.92 crore while the domestic institutional investors bought stocks worth Rs 653.68 crore. On the currency front, the Indian rupee weakened by 40 paise against the US dollar to 68.39, from its previous close of 67.99 per greenback. Sector-wise, all the indices ended the day's trade on the downside with the S&P BSE auto index losing the most, by 264.15 points, followed by the metal index which fell by 222.71 and the banking index ending 190.83 points lower. Stock-wise, the gainers on the Sensex were ITC, up 0.76 per cent at Rs 266.15; ONGC, up 0.30 per cent at Rs 164.85; HDFC Bank, up 0.20 per cent at Rs 2,025.40; and HDFC, up 0.11 per cent at Rs 1,826.70 per share. The top losers were Vedanta, down 3.55 per cent at Rs 224.05; Mahindra and Mahindra, down 2.23 per cent at Rs 892.40; Adani Ports, down 2 per cent at Rs 362.65, Reliance Industries, down 1.91 per cent at Rs 995.65; and IndusInd Bank, down 1.90 per cent at Rs 1,930.25 per share. Beed (Maharashtra), June 19 : Attired in smart-fit khakhi uniform and blue beret, constable Lalit Kumar Salve saluted his superiors here on Tuesday and rejoined duty a month after undergoing sex realignment surgery. Appearing cheerful and confident in his new 'avatar', the policeman, earlier called Lalita Kumari Salve, walked in the Majalgaon Police Station and reported to Senior Police Inspector Raju Talekar. This was the first case of a sex change operation for a woman police officer who became a policeman in the country and continues to remain in the force after battling tremendous hurdles, court, political and administrative battles and emerging successful. "My life has changed after the operation. It's like a re-birth for me... It is a very happy day for my family, me... The feelings I experience are beyond description, but we are overwhelmed," Salve told mediapersons. He said he felt more confident now as a man and would sport the dark blue beret meant for male constables. Lalita Kumari Salve was admitted to St. George Hospital in Mumbai on May 22 and after her successful surgery was discharged as Lalit Kumar Salve a week ago. In 2014, she underwent agony after developing transsexual gender symptoms and was attracted to females against males due to the chromosomal Y status found in her genes. After a series of tests, the medicos finally advised her to undergo a sex realignment surgery in 2016 as a permanent solution. "In absence of due medical care from state or police department she/he continued to live under serious mental trauma and social stigma," she had said in her petition before the Bombay High Court seeking permission to undergo a sex realignment surgery and continue in the police force as a policeman. The BA Literature graduate's issue caught the media attention and later Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis asked the Director-General of Police Satish Mathur to favourably look into her case. After the first phase of the surgery, in which the hospital initiated the process to elongate Salve's urethra by creating a tissue conduit, she will undergo the second stage of procedures after six months, according to Rajat Kapoor, Head of Plastic Surgery at St. George Hospital. Ghaziabad, June 19 : Police in Ghaziabad on Tuesday announced the arrest of five auto thieves and said they had recovered 19 stolen two-wheelers. The arrests follow the interrogation of two suspects who revealed that they were part of a gang which stole motor vehicles. The gang members were identified as Ravi Kumar and Vikky Thakur of Meerut, Rodass Gabhana of Aligarh as well as Ankur Ali and Kuldeep of Hapur. The police recovered 19 two-wheelers and seized two pistols. The gang revealed that they used to sell the stolen vehicles outside Uttar Pradesh. A court has sent them to judicial custody, said police Inspector Pawan Kumar Tripathi. Srinagar, June 19 : Jammu and Kashmir Governor N.N. Vohra on Tuesday evening suggested to the Union Home Ministry that Governor's Rule should be imposed for six months in the state after the PDP-BJP coalition collapsed, official sources said. The Jammu and Kashmir Constitution provides for Governor's Rule unlike other states which see President's Rule. Sana'a, June 19 : Yemeni forces backed by a Saudi-led air force coalition on Tuesday recaptured an airport that has exchanged hands several times in a violent battle to wrest control of port-city of Hudaydah from Houthi insurgents, military officials said. Abuzaraa al-Mahrabi, a commander for the Army loyal to the internationally-backed Yemeni government said that Houthi insurgents had relinquished control of the airport and fled north back into Hudaydah city. The strategic city is located on the Red Sea coast with its port as one of the main entry points for essential supplies to the country, which is suffering the most pressing humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the UN. Its conquest was seen by government forces as crucial in the wider objective of ending the insurgency. The Houthis were earlier pushed out of the airport on June 16 but managed to retake the complex the following day. The Yemeni ground force, loyal to the internationally-recognized government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi was joined by militiamen from Sudan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and received aerial support from the Saudi-led Arab Air Force coalition. The battle for Hudaydah was the Saudi-led coalition's largest military operation since it intervened in the Yemeni conflict in 2015. The Houthis, a majority Shia armed group allied to Iran, seized power in the capital Sana'a and eastern regions of the country between 2014-15, forcing the Hadi government into exile, from where it requested armed support from its Sunni neighbour Saudi Arabia. The ensuing civil war plunged the nation into a humanitarian crisis. According to the UN, which has limited access to Yemen, hundreds of thousands of people have fled fighting and as many as 8 million people were on the brink of starvation. The UN has warned that some 600,000 civilians in the settlement could be affected by the battle. Srinagar, June 19 : Two Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) militants were killed on Tuesday in a gunfight with security forces in Jammu and Kashmir's Pulwama district. Defence Ministry sources said that out of the three JeM militants hiding in Tral area, two have been killed. "A CRPF trooper was injured in the encounter. He has been shifted to Army's 92 Base Hospital in Srinagar," an official said. A gunfight started on Tuesday evening between the militants and the security forces in Pulwama. This followed a cordon and search operation launched by the Army's counter-insurgency Rashtriya Rifles, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and the Special Operations Group of the state police. "As the security forces tightened the cordon, the hidden militants fired at them, triggering the gunfight," police said. Protests immediately broke out in the area, with stone pelters trying to disrupt the operation. Reports said security forces used tear smoke shells to disperse the protesters. New Delhi, June 19 : Soon after Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal ended his sit-in-protest at Lt Governor Anil Baijal's residence, the BJP leaders also ended their counter-strike at the Delhi Secretariat. Union Minister Harsh Vardhan visited the Secretariat and offered juice to the BJP leaders sitting on hunger strike for last five days. "Five day indefinite hunger strike comes to an end after accepting juice from Dr Harsh Vardhan. Congratulations to the people of Delhi for their victory. The truth and struggle has won," tweeted west Delhi BJP MP Pravesh Singh Sahib Verma. Verma along with Leader of Opposition in Delhi Assembly Vijender Gupta, MLA Manjinder Singh Sirsa and suspended Aam Aadmi Party MLA Kapil Mishra started their indefinite hunger strike on June 15 against the "non-performance" of the Kejriwal government and its failure in providing water to the people. They had sat on counter protest outside Chief Minister's office in the Delhi Secretariat on Tuesday evening. Earlier in the day, Gupta was taken to GB Pant hospital due to failing health. New Delhi, June 19 : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday turned 48 and several senior Congress leaders reached his mother Sonia Gandhi's residence at 10 Janpath to greet him on his birthday while Prime Minister Narendra Modi and political leaders across the country also wished him. Former President Pranab Mukherjee, in a tweet to wish Gandhi, said that he had "an unparalleled legacy of nation building behind you and an outstanding responsibility in the future". Thanking Mukherjee, Gandhi said: "Thank you Pranab Da for your wishes and kind words. I appreciate them." West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee also wished Gandhi in a tweet. Party supporters and workers got into a celebratory mood, dancing to the beat of drums in the morning outside the Congress office on Akbar Road here. There were similar vibes outside 10 Janpath, where Youth Congress members led the celebrations. They also went inside to meet Rahul Gandhi. Among the leaders visiting Sonia Gandhi's residence were former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Randeep Surjewala, P.C. Chacko, Ajay Maken, Sushmita Dev and most of the steering committee members including A.K. Antony, Ambika Soni, Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ashok Gehlot, Motilal Vora, Mukul Wasnik, Sushilkumar Shinde and others. This is Rahul Gandhi's first birthday after becoming the party President. Greeting him, Modi tweeted: "Birthday greetings to Congress President Rahul Gandhi. I pray for his long and healthy life." National Conference leader Omar Abdullah said: "Here's wishing Rahul Gandhi a very happy 48th birthday. May the almighty bless you with good health, much success & many more years in the service of the nation." RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav tweeted: "Wishing a very Happy Birthday to Rahul Gandhiji. You have exhibited remarkable vision and exemplary leadership. On your birthday, I wish you peace, good health, success and happiness. Congratulations and Happy Birthday." DMK Working President M.K. Stalin also wished Rahul Gandhi, wishing him "many more years of service to the nation". Former Janata Dal-United leader Sharad Yadav also wished him. Gandhi later thanked everyone for the wishes and said: "I am overwhelmed by the birthday wishes that I have received from all corners of our country and abroad." "Your greetings, blessings and prayers are my strength. I want to thank each and every one of you for remembering me today. May God bless you all," he added. Dubai, June 19 : A senior United Arab Emirates (UAE) official on Tuesday blamed the Qatari leadership for its own isolation. UAE Minister of State Anwar Gargash said through his Twitter account that Qatar's proximity to Iran, the normalisation of ties with Israel and its relations with Lebanon's Iran-backed Hezbollah were isolating its people from surroundings. "The leadership's ambiguous political orientations were responsible" for Qatar's being isolated, reported pan-Arab TV news channel Al Arabiya, citing Gargash's tweets. Gargash also claimed that the Qatari government under its ruler Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani was not representing the people of Qatar, Xinhua news agency reported. "I do not imagine that Qatari citizens are satisfied with his government's support for Houthi or his country's close ties with Tehran, nor did they previously accept the normalization of the country with Israel or its relations with Hezbollah," he tweeted. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt and several other countries severed diplomatic and trade ties with Qatar on June 5, 2017, accusing Doha of aligning with non-Arab Gulf state Iran and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen against pan-Arab interests. The Arab Quartet also accused Qatar of supporting "extremism and terrorism", charges which the Al Thani government has denied. Qatar has increased trade relations with Iran and Turkey since then in order to mitigate losses triggered by the boycott. In another tweet, Gargash said "he does not think the Qatari government was accurately providing the real communication activities between its emir and the Iranian President. New Delhi, June 19 : Union Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi on Tuesday emphasied the requirement to empower and skill police agencies and other responders in addressing the crimes against children "professionally and diligently", and called for every police station to be equipped with 'Rape Investigation Kits' to deal with such cases on a priority basis. "The government has decided to take every step in addressing crimes against children in the best possible manner. The important requirements is to empower and skill the police agencies and other responders in addressing the crimes against children professionally and diligently," Gandhi said while launching a handbook on legal processes for police in respect of crime against children at a function here organised by Bureau of Police Research and Development (BPR&D). She said there is need for Rape Investigation Kits in every police station to facilitate the investigation on priority basis, while a proposal to print Pocso (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act) related laws on front and back of all the textbooks to increase awareness among children has been taken up with the Human Resource Development Ministry. Emphasizing the importance of forensic laboratories in India, she said that five such new laboratories are being established to cater to the investigation of the average 2,000 rape cases every year. The Minister also mentioned about the e-box Complaint System for the school children to come up against the issues of sexual harassment. Explaining about the handbook, she said that her ministry would work closely with identified stakeholders to ensure that it is available in every police station, preferably in local languages. Gandhi also urged all stakeholders "to unite in preventing and combating crimes against women and children". She hoped that the handbook will definitely prove to be a tool to enhance and fine tune the skills of the end user in the application of the laws, rules, rulings and related provisions pertaining to crimes against children. The handbook is a composite tool which will aid police to chart a step-by-step procedure to be adopted in cases of crime against children and the latest court rulings are also mentioned in it, the Minister said, adding a team led by Dr. P.M. Nair of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) has developed this comprehensive, user-friendly, process oriented document published by the BPR&D in partnership with TISS. The publication is part of an initiative taken by BPR&D to partner with reputed academic and research institutions across the country in undertaking research and developing quality tools and knowledge products to enhance the professional competence of the Indian police, she said. Gandhi highlighted that "the government is committed to create a nation free of violence against women and children". She elaborated upon the services offered by Child Line and Railway Child Line which have been highly successful in reuniting missing children with their families and stated that a short documentary "Komal" has been released to sensitize the children on "good and bad touch". New Delhi, June 19 : The Congress on Tuesday ruled out the possibility of an alliance with the Peoples Democratic Alliance (PDP), making Governor's rule look imminent in Jammu and Kashmir after the BJP pulled out of the PDP-led coalition government. Senior Congress leader and former state Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said the question of an alliance with the PDP "does not arise". "Whatever has happened is good. People of Jammu and Kashmir will get some relief. They (BJP) ruined Kashmir and have now pulled out," he said. Blaming the BJP for "devastating" the state government, Azad said that the regional parties like the PDP and Nationalist Conference should have been "left to themselves" in cobbling up a coalition among themselves and form the government. "We (Congress) had approached the PDP and I am glad that (NC leader) Omar (Abdullah) seconded the proposal of having a greater alliance of PDP-NC and Congress. The regional parties should have been left to themselves; they should have been given a choice to form a government. "They could have selected their own partner but the BJP government at the Centre did not allow them to do so and in these three years, the BJP and PDP have devastated the state government," he said. Meanwhile, as the Governor's rule looked imminent in the state, senior Congress leader and former Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram hoped that the Centre would not resort to a "muscular" approach in the Valley. "The muscular, militaristic policy was a disaster from Day One. Let us hope and pray that the muscular, militaristic policy does not come back under the guise of Governor's rule," he said in a tweet. "It is a relief that the opportunistic coalition has collapsed. The long-awaited break of the PDP-BJP coalition will be welcomed by all those who despaired that Kashmir may have been lost forever," he added. Congress spokesman Randeep Singh Surjewala pointed out that in the last four years, 373 security personnel and 239 civilians have been killed in Jammu and Kashmir due to heightened militancy. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal pointed out that the Modi government had claimed that demonetisation in 2016 had broken the back of militancy in Jammu and Kashmir but that did not seem true. "Didn't BJP tell us that demonetisation had broken the back of terrorism in Kashmir? Then what happened?" he asked. New Delhi, June 19 : Public money is "hundred per cent safe" in state-run banks,Interim Finance Minister Piyush Goyal said on Tuesday, allaying apprehensions in the wake of recent major scams unearthed in public sector banks (PSBs). Briefing reporters here following a meeting with PSB heads, Goyal, who holds temporary charge of the Finance Ministry, said that the government could consider giving additional powers to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to check misdemeanours in state-owned banks. "Public money is extremely safe and secure in PSU banks. The government stands behind them 100 per cent," he said in response to a query. Referring to a recent statement by RBI Governor Urjit Patel, in the wake of the Rs 13,000 crore fraud on Punjab National Bank by accused diamantaire Nirav Modi, that the central bank lacked powers to effectively regulate the PSBs, Goyal said: "Powers are available with the RBI. "Conversations take place between the government and the RBI, and if additional powers are needed, the government is open to the idea." The Minister, instead, said he is unsure how safe public money is in the hands of private companies which have huge income tax dues. "Frauds are committed by the private sector, by companies which use the PSBs as a medium to commit frauds. The few frauds come to light have all been committed by private companies." Goyal also said that it is for this reason that the government will have to become "stricter" in monitoring the private sector. Mumbai, June 19 : Budget passenger carrier AirAsia India (AAIL) on Tuesday refuted allegations against it in connection with an alleged bribery case to get FDI rules tweaked. According to the airline, it continues to cooperate with all regulatory agencies "to present the correct facts and hopes to bring early resolution to issues under investigations". The development comes after CBI on May 28 filed a FIR against company's Director R. 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. "The investigations pertain to, inter alia, the interactions of AAIL with government authorities. All such interactions were conducted in a transparent manner and AAIL has not engaged in any wrong doing in relation thereto. Consequently, AAIL refutes all such allegations made against it in the FIR," the airline said in a statement. "AAIL reviews its internal controls and process on a continuous basis to strengthen its operations." As per the statement: "No findings have been made against the Directors of AAIL and furthermore audits and forensic reports have not indicated any impropriety against any of the Directors of AAIL including R. Venkataramanan (Non-Executive Director, AAIL)." The airline said that in April 2016, the company's Board was seized of some inappropriate and questionable actions by the erstwhile CEO of AAIL. "AAIL appointed Deloitte India to examine such issues and based on the report of Deloitte India, AAIL filed criminal charges against its former CEO," the statement said. The budget airline also instituted a civil suit in June 2017 against its former CEO in the Civil Courts in Bangalore. "Based on a prima facie case, the court attached certain properties of the former CEO," the statement added. "The foregoing establishes that it was AAIL that had taken necessary steps to take legal action to remedy the wrongful actions including booking personal expenses on the company account by its former CEO." June 19 (IANS) With a heat wave sweeping Bihar, the primary sections of all public and private schools in the state capital have been ordered closed till June 23, an official said on Tuesday. Patna District Magistrate Ravi Kumar on Tuesday ordered summer vacation of students from class 1 to 8 be further extended till June 23 in view of heat wave conditions here. Last week, he had ordered extension of the vacations till June 19. Monsoon is still away from Bihar with met department officials saying that there is no chance of rains in next five to six days. Patna and Gaya districts recorded temperature above 42 degrees Celsius since last three-four days. The all-India weather summary and forecast bulletin issued by the India Meteorological Department stated that heat wave conditions are likely to prevail over eastern parts of the country during the next 48 hours.It also stated that heat waves were observed at isolated places over Gangetic Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar and Odisha. The much-awaited southwest monsoon is expected to reach Bihar by the end of June. "Monsoon is delayed and now will arrive by last week of this month," said met department official S.K. Patel. Monsoon normally hits the state between June 10 and 12. But no monsoon till the third week of June has triggered fears of deficit rainfall again, which could result in a drought-like situation in the state. Farmers were hopeful of normal monsoon like last year which had helped them increase their paddy output. Tehran, June 20 : Iran will not accept Saudi Arabia's proposal to increase crude output of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Iran's representative to the OPEC was quoted as saying on Tuesday. Iran, along with Venezuela and Iraq, is going to veto the Saudi Arabia's proposal at the June 22 OPEC meeting in Vienna, Hossein Kazempour Ardebili was quoted by Tehran Times daily as saying. "If Russia also increases its production, that would be a breach of the cooperation agreement," Ardebili said. OPEC members will discuss at the meet the proposal by Saudi Arabia to end the OPEC/ non-OPEC deal to balance the oil market and increase the oil price. Last year, OPEC members unanimously agreed on the oil price of USD 60 dollars per barrel, by cutting oil output by 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) to 32.5 million bpd. Non-OPEC members including Russia, Oman and Mexico also agreed to cut 558,000 bpd off their production to stabilise the market. Meanwhile, oil prices ended lower on Tuesday as investors awaited the upcoming OPEC meeting. The West Texas Intermediate for July delivery fell USD 0.78 to settle at USD 65.07 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, while Brent crude for August delivery was down USD 0.26 to close at USD 75.08 a barrel on the London ICE Futures Exchange. Panaji, June 19 : The Congress in Goa on Tuesday questioned Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar's silence on the issue of probing a factory, whose owner allegedly has BJP links and which was busted for illegally manufacturing date-rape drug ketamine by the DRI. "Parrikar should stop being silent over the seizure of ketamine, known as a date-rape drug, from the factory owned by his party office bearer. I dare the Chief Minister to come on record to declare that BJP office bearers are not in drug trade in Goa," state Congress president Girish Chodankar said in a press statement issued on Tuesday. "Goa wants to know how such a huge quantity of raw material required to manufacture the drugs landed in Goa. Who are responsible for stocking the same? How did Goa Police fail to intercept the same? "Hence, the major issue which surfaces is whether this is a case of intelligence failure or intelligence connivance? Is it only coincidence that such an activity was happening a factory owned by BJP functionary," Chodankar asked. The statement said the Chief Minister as the home minister has to answer these important questions. "Why did Parrikar refuse to respond to media queries on this issue is another question? The silence of the Chief Minister cannot be tolerated as it is about the future generation of our state." In a three-day operation code-named 'Operation Vitamin', the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence last week busted an international drug syndicate, seizing 308 kg ketamine, two tonnes of raw material at various sites in Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat, arresting 10 persons including two from UK and one from Vietnam. Nearly 100 kg ketamine and raw material used to manufacture the drug was also found at the premise operated by Vasudev Parab, who the Congress has alleged is an office bearer of the BJP's north Goa desk. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has denied the accusations, saying Parab has never been a member of the party. On Monday, Parrikar refused to say whether the state government would launch an independent probe into the ketamine manufacturing operation at Pissurlem industrial estate. On Tuesday, however, the Goa State Industrial Development Corporation issued a show cause notice to Parab, asking him to respond to the charges of ketamine being manufactured at the premises leased by the Corporation, failing which the industrial plot would be seized from him. Used as a tranquiliser for veterinarian purposes, ketamine is also a common party drug known for its hallucinating effects and is also referred to as a date-rape drug. Kolkata, June 19 : While the LGBT community across the world is busy celebrating "Pride Month", a Kolkata-based transwoman's account of how she was asked questions about her breasts, sexuality and ability to give birth during interviews for a teacher's post has again brought into the open the attitude towards sexual minorities in the country. Hiranmay Dey, who underwent a Sex Reassignment Surgery last year and became Suchitra Dey, said she was humiliated by the interviewers in various Kolkata schools. "Principals of reputable Kolkata schools asked me irrelevant and humiliating questions about my gender and sexuality, instead of asking me pertinent questions on my subject. "A male principal asked me whether I can conceive a child after intercourse while a lady principal in another reputable city school almost threatened me to change the credentials if I wanted a job there," Dey, a double Masters in English and Geography, told IANS over phone. Ironically, the unsavoury experience Dey went though earlier this month coincided with the celebrations of the "Pride Month" that commemorates the 1969 Stonewall riots in the US and is considered a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement. "I see that the mindset of people about transgenders has not changed yet. Teachers are considered future generation makers. If the educated people have this kind of mindset then what should one expect from the commoners?" she asked. Dey, an active member of the LGBT forums here, said the condition of transgenders in West Bengal is vulnerable and urged the society to accept the sexual minorities like her with more humility. "The condition of transgenders in Bengal is really vulnerable. A large section of the LGBT population comprises transgenders. I think I am one of the most educated transgenders in the whole of India. If I have to face such bias and discrimination, imagine the situation of others," said Dey, a Thakurpukur resident. "I think people like us should come out of the cocoon and express themselves. Also the society should accept us with all humility and treat us on an equal plane with other genders," she said. Vowing not to be bogged down by the bullies, the transwoman with 10 years of teaching experience at a private school here said she has written to the West Bengal Human Rights Commission seeking intervention in the matter. "Let's see what actions they take. I am waiting for their feedback." "I live with my mother. She is an old lady. So I need a job to sustain both of us. If every section of the society rejects us, then how will we live?" she questioned. Referring to the 2014 Supreme Court order that formally recognised transgenders by creating the 'third gender' category, she said discrimination against people like her was still rampant in the country. "I was harassed and bullied by the interviewers openly due to my sexuality. I have been facing such humiliation from my school and college days. This is a common problem that all transgenders face. What's alarming is that even the apex court's verdict could not change the scenario. Then what is the point of the verdict?" she asked. Bengaluru, June 19 : Karnataka should have a say implementing the decisions of the Cauvery Water Management Authority (CWMA), especially on releasing water when it is low in its reservoirs across the river basin, Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy said on Tuesday. "Karnataka should have a say on releasing the Cauvery water, especially on occasions when water is less in our dams and full in the dams of the neighbouring states in the river basin," Kumaraswamy told reporters here. Noting that the state's farmers would face difficulties if the Authority directed the state to release the river water once in 10 days in a month, the Chief Minister said it would be impossible to implement this if the state's farmers were directed to grow a particular crop in which they may not be interested. "But if the Authority decides that our farmers should grow a particular crop which may not be in their interest, it will be impractical to implement such a direction. This is one of the issues I raised and objected to in my meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi on Monday," Kumaraswamy said. At his maiden press conference after he assumed office on May 23, the Chief Minister said there were two or three technical issues on setting up the Authority which had to be sorted out before it starts functioning. "I requested (Union Water Resources Minister) Nitin Gadkari to change the clauses and he had responded positively," Kumaraswamy said. The Chief Minister also said he would send the names of the state's two nominees on the Authority and the Regulation Committee only after the technical issues were addressed. "Karnataka, however, will abide by the Supreme Court order on the sharing of the Cauvery water with Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry," he reiterated. The Chief Minister on Monday urged Modi against operating the Authority and its Regulation Committee till the issues related to the cropping pattern were addressed. "I request you to direct the Ministry of Water Resources not to operate the CWMA till issues related to changing the cropping pattern in Karnataka or Tamil Nadu are resolved," Kumaraswamy had said in a letter to Modi. Noting that changes in the agricultural system could not happen overnight, the letter said farmers would take a long time to realise the value of water and to switch over to modern farming practices. "It is impractical to force a particular cropping pattern on farmers who have a method of operating over the centuries. Attempt to impose restrictions on farmers on the type of crop to be grown or their agricultural practices will result in protests by farmers, leading to law and order problem," the letter added. As directed by the Supreme Court on May 18, the Centre on June 1 notified the CWMA for implementing the Tribunal Award on sharing of the river water between Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry. New Delhi, June 19 : Political compulsions seem to be a reason for the BJP and PDP parting ways in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday after their over three year old alliance left both parties apparently wary of their political base shrinking in view of feedback that things had not worked out as desired and could continue the same way till the Lok Sabha polls. The parties had formed the coalition despite having major differences of views on issues such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Article 370. While the BJP was keen to project a strong nationalist image, the PDP was keen on pursuing a "healing touch" policy that included more open borders and addressing the internal and external dimensions of the Kashmir problem through dialogue. Informed sources told IANS that the decision to pull out from the Mehbooba Mufti-led government was taken after feedback from the RSS that the BJP was losing its sheen on the issue of nationalism in view of militants repeatedly targeting security forces personnel and also soldiers. There was a feeling that the visuals of security personnel being pelted with stones or being targeted in ambush was neutralising the image that BJP had sought to build for itself after the surgical strikes of 2016, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly referred to in his election speeches. With less than a year left for the Lok Sabha elections, BJP chief Amit Shah, taking stock of the security situation with National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and also receiving feedback from other security agencies, assessed that situation was not likely to drastically improve in the coming months specially under the coalition government and the party will find it difficult to counter barbs on the issue of national security by the Congress and other opposition parties. Jammu and Kashmir has been an electoral issue for the BJP since its inception and the party could ill-afford being seen in the country as having been ineffective in dealing with the militancy and other problems in the state. Having won all its seats from Jammu and Ladhakh, the BJP was apparently sensing a growing sense of dissatisfaction in the two regions with the performance of the coalition government. There was an apparent realisation that pulling the plug too close to the Lok Sabha elections would make it difficult for the party to regain its support base. "Due to the prevailing situation in Jammu and Kashmir, we were losing our grounds in Jammu and Laddakh region. Any political party will be concerned with this kind of situation," a top BJP leader said on the condition of anonymity. Not extending ceasefire initiative after Ramadan and expending only Rs 35,000 crore of the total Rs 80,000 announced as package by Modi in 2015 were among the other reasons that forced the BJP to part ways with the PDP. As terrorist activities continued during the month-long Ramadan ceasefire, the Centre on Sunday decided not to extend its unilateral initiative, declared on May 16 to coincide with the holy month. The decision was taken even after Mehbooba Mufti urged the government to continue with the ceasefire. "She wanted to continue with the ceasefire but the Centre was adamant because ceasefire results were not on expected lines," a senior BJP leader familiar with the developments said. He also said that the Chief Minister had very "poor" control over the administration. "How can a person like Shujaat Bukhari be killed in daylight and that too in Srinagar. This clearly shows her (poor) grip on administration," he added. Bukhari, Editor-in-Chief of Rising Kashmir, was shot dead by militants outside his office on Thursday. His two security guards were also killed in the incident. The decision to pull out from the Jammu and Kashmir government was taken days after RSS top leadership held discussion on government policies at Surajkund in Haryana. They also attended the dinner at 7, Lok Kalyan Marg hosted by the Prime Minister. The two-day brainstorming session on strategy-building and stock-taking of the BJP-led NDA government took place as it has entered into its fifth year. Sources in the RSS told IANS that a report card over the Kashmir situation was also presented at the Surajkund meet and later forwarded to the Prime Minister. The issue also figured during the meeting of Modi, Shah and RSS leaders at the dinner. Another BJP leader, on the condition of anonymity, said that "our cadres and Jammu and Kashmir and across the nation were relieved after the decision". The decision to finally part ways was taken at a meeting of BJP's ministers and office bearers in Jammu and Kashmir with Amit Shah here at party headquarters. Minister of State in Prime Minister's Office Jitendra Singh said that the Centre under Modi did its best for the development of the state. "He never discriminated with any of the areas of Jammu and Kashmir and provided equitable opportunities to valley, Jammu and Laddakh region. No one questioned his commitment for the state," he said. (Brajendra Nath Singh can be contacted at brajendra.n@ians.in) Athens, June 19 : Indian President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday urged the European Union (EU) nations to not make distinction between "good" and "bad" terrorism and called for their partnership in battling terror taking root in the region between then. Addressing a Greek foreign policy think tank on the topic 'India and Europe in a Changing World', Kovind underlined India's commitment to "world peace" and cited the steps it has taken to further it. "India and the EU (European Union) must persuade the world to not distinguish between so-called 'good' and 'bad' terrorists, to shame and sanction state sponsors of terrorism, and to strengthen multilateral platforms such as the Financial Action Task Force and the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum," he said at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), as per an official statement. The President said that radicalisation and terrorism are pressing global concerns and pockets of instability and extremism can be found in the region to Europe's east and India's west. "They are a worry for both Europe and India," he said. Kovind assured the Europeans also of India's sincerity in combating the global pollution and promises made in the 2015 Paris Agreement. He said India's share of non-fossil fuel usage will be up from "current 31 per cent to 53 per cent by 2027" and that it is targeting 175 gigawatts of renewable energy, of which 100 gigawatts will be solar energy. Kovind said India-Greek trade at $530 million is way below its potential and with some efforts, this can easily be made to cross $1 billion. He invited Greek industries to invest in various Indian enterprises and said that Greek shipping industry will find "lucrative opportunities" in India's ambitious Sagarmala project. The President, who is on a visit to Greece, Suriname, and Cuba, ended his first leg, departing for the South American nation of Suriname later in the day. Mumbai, June 19 : The Maharashtra State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (MSCPCR) on tuesday issued notice to Congress President Rahul Gandhi and Twitter Communications Pvt. Ltd. for allegedly uploading videos of the three Dalit boys were stripped and paraded in the state's Jalgaon last week. MSCPCR Chairperson Pravin Ghuge took immediate cognizance of a complaint received from activist Amol Jadhav, who wrote letters to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and others, on the matter on Tuesday. State Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant said that they have not yet received the notice, but they would examine it in detail before commenting. "This is an attempt to divert the issue by the present government. It must be noted that the video in question was already viral on social media networks and uploaded by the perpetrators of the crime themselves," Sawant told IANS. Invoking relevant sections of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, the MSCPCR said that the complainant (Jadhav) has demanded action under these against Gandhi for uploading the video on his Twitter handle on June 15. The MSCPCR has given 10 days time to Gandhi and Twitter to reply to the notices on the offences - which can attract minimum six months jail term. A day after the issue broke out in the media, last Friday (June 15) Gandhi blamed the RSS and Bharatiya Janata Party politics after two Dalit and a tribal boy were paraded nude and assaulted for swimming a well in Wakadi village in Jalgaon district. "The sole crime of these Dalit children was they were taking a dip in a well. Humanity is struggling to save its dignity," Gandhi tweeted. He said "if we don't raise our voices against this politics of hate and poison" of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the BJP, "history would not forgive us". Around 3 p.m. on June 10, the three boys were stripped, beaten and paraded nude for swimming in a village well. Gandhi's comments on the issue, which snowballed into a major political controversy, came as a high-level team of the Maharashtra Congress led by legislator Abdul Sattar visited the village that day and expressed solidarity with the victims and their families. Union Minister for Social Welfare Ramdas Athawale has also strongly condemned the outrage on the boys for which two persons have been arrested and and the matter is currently being probed at a high level. Kolkata, June 19 : Gene therapy and biotechnology can be used to tackle environmental issues like deforestation and air pollution, while genetic modification in mosquitoes can solve the problems of epidemic diseases such as dengue and malaria, experts said here on Tuesday. "Gene therapy is very promising in solving the problems in curing diseases and genetic disorders that do not have any remedy at present. Genetic modification in mosquitoes can solve the problems of epidemic diseases such as dengue and malaria," Nabarun Ghosh, a biology professor at West Texas A&M University, said while addressing school students at Science City here. Biotechnology can help in finding out the level of Particulate Matter 2.5 in the air, which is a burning issue in big cities around the world, he said. "I worked in collaboration with another scientist, to make a filterless air purifier that will clean the air and destroy PM 2.5 which is found indoors as well. In 2005 when we started we were targeting MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria. We used AHPCO Cell (Advanced Hydrated Photocatalytic Oxidation Cell) and we could actually measure the saturation of PM 2.5 using our machine," said Ghosh. Researches are being conducted to find out the genetic effect of PM 2.5. "Initially we thought this only caused pulmonary diseases, but it is entering our whole body. When PM 2.5 crosses the cut-off line, patients die due to heart attacks and other problems like digestion and infection also aggravate," he added. "Researchers are trying to identify the effect on the gene due to pollution. We are doing the medication of the diseases without knowing the exact genetic effect of pollution causing a particular disease," said city-based doctor P.K. Banerjee. He said that to treat the patients of the state and know about the genetic effect, they need the data of PM 2.5 level of the entire state, adding that in Kolkata, the US Consulate maintains some data on it, while the West Bengal Pollution Control Board at times has it and, on other occasions, does not. The city's real-time Air Quality Index recorded in the last 48 hours revealed PM 2.5 level at 154, which is termed as unhealthy for the body. The safe levels of PM2.5 and PM10 are 60 and 100 microgramme/m3 respectively, and anything beyond is considered hazardous for the respiratory system. About Zika Virus, Ghose pointed out how scientists in the US used 25,000 mosquitoes and ran a trial to see if the population of 'Aedes aegypti' could be reduced. It was found that the disease-causing mosquitoes were infected with a bacterium called wolbachia, that affects reproductive ability, leading to infertility. "The scientists inserted this bacterium in the male mosquitoes which do not bite. When these males mate with wild females, which do not carry the same strain of wolbachia, the resulting fertilised eggs don't hatch because the paternal chromosomes do not form properly," he said. An alumnus of Hare School and Calcutta University, Ghosh, who has worked along with Department of Non-conventional Energy Sources (DNES) on the application of tissue culture technology in crop development, said it can tackle deforestation. "We are planting trees like Dalbergia sissoo, Ashoka tree, Albizia lebbeck, Albizia lebbeck and other fast-growing legumes, growing them quickly using gamma radiation and tissue culture," he said. Ghosh is also working on an ongoing project in collaboration with Indian scientists trying to analyse the percentage of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur in Triphala and identifying the particular chemical responsible for reducing cancer. "Currently I am also working in collaboration with other scientists on Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia). We have analysed and found that the biochemical of the plant can reduce blood sugar," he said. Bitter gourd can act as a preventive against diabetes and Triphala against cancer. New Delhi, June 19 : Union Health Minister J.P. Nadda on Tuesday released the National Health Profile (NHP) 2018, a major aid to policy makers, and launched the National Health Resource Repository (NHRR) project, which does the institutional profiling of the country. "National Health Profile is the most acclaimed publication which provides vital information on demography, socio economic status, health status including morbidity and mortality, health finance, human resources and health infrastructure," he said. NHP, brought out annually by Central Bureau of Health Intelligence (CBHI) since 2005, is widely used by government departments and institutions, policy makers, planners, administrators, researchers and academicians involved with health sector development. "Data is an indispensable part of governance and such incorporation of updated information from this publication would certainly help in policy planning and decision making and contribute to the improvement of the health services in the country," the minister said. Going beyond health profiling, the government launched NHHR in collaboration with Indian Space Research Organisation, World Health Organisation and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to profile the health facilities available in government and private sector across the country. The country's first health facility registry -- which is expected to list down about 25 lakh hospitals, doctors, clinics, diagnostic labs, pharmacies and nursing homes spread over the country on over 1,400 variables -- will enable evidence based planning and policy making, Nadda said. NHRR will be the ultimate platform for comprehensive information of all healthcare establishments including health facilities of Railways, Employee's State Insurance Corporation, defence and petroleum. It will be IT-enabled repository of India's healthcare resources. Nadda said: "For convergence and efficient use of information, NHRR will be cohesively working with Ayushman Bharat and Central TB Division on an integrated plan for the larger benefit ensuing hospital empanelment and private sector engagement." Paris, June 19 : Unesco chief Audrey Azoulay on Tuesday condemned the slaying of prominent journalist and newspaper editor Shujaat Bukhari and his two police bodyguards in Indian-administered Kashmir last week. "I condemn the murder of Shujaat Bukhari and his bodyguards," said Azoulay, the Director-General of United Nations culture organisation. "I trust the authorities will spare no effort in seeking and prosecuting the killers who were undeterred by the presence of police in their determination to silence a journalist known as a voice of moderation." Bukhari, editor of the Rising Kashmir newspaper, was shot by unidentified gunmen as he was leaving his office in Srinagar on June 14. The two police guards escorting him were also killed in the attack. Bukhari had been under police protection since an earlier attack in 2000. Kashmir is at the centre of a decades-old territorial dispute between India and Pakistan. Both countries claim Kashmir in its entirety and control different parts of it. India has also been battling armed militant groups who are fighting against New Delhi's rule in Kashmir. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people over the years. Bukhari lobbied for peace in Kashmir in by organising conferences and summits in the US, Britain and other parts of the world. Lucknow, June 19 : In a bid to boost religious tourism in the state, the Uttar Pradesh cabinet on Tuesday approved a proposal of setting up a Special Council for beautification and expansion of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi, officials said. The cabinet meeting chaired by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath gave its nod to the necessary ordinance, said state Health Minister and spokesman Siddharthanath Singh informed. Noting that the temple, falling the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was one of the 12 'Jyotirlingas' in the country, he said that a proposal was mooted by officials to conserve historical and religious heritage buildings and undertake beautification of areas around the temple, which draws millions every year. Under this ordinance, it is proposed that the Gadhwaasi Told and Dashshmedh Ghat wards be expanded and notified. Many private houses and buildings around the temple will also be removed and according to officials, as many as 166 plots and buildings will be acquired at an earmarked budget of Rs 413 crore. In the current financial year, a budget of Rs 150 crore is being sanctioned for this work. The Special Area Development Council has been set up for this purpose only, the minister added. The cabinet also approved a new bus depot at Ayodhya which will be built at a cost of Rs 7 crore on a 1.384 hectare land which will be provided free to the Tourism Department. The cabinet also ratified a proposal of providing Rs 403 crore for a para-medical college at Jhansi. Kolkata, June 19 : In a bid to bring creativity of transgenders to the fore, Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, would hold the first-ever literary meet for transgender writers in Kolkata next month, a member of the event's advisory committee said. However, the Bengal government does not have any role in organising the unique literary meet. "This is not a state government programme. It is being organised by the Sahitya Akademi. It is an unique initiative to bring the writings of transgender writers to light," Manabi Bandyopadhyay, who is also the first transgender college principal in the country, told IANS. "I am a part of the advisory body. So when I was contacted by the Sahitya Akademi official here about the programme, I provided him with the names of some transgender poets and their writings," she said adding that the venue and other details of the event are still being discussed at an official level. Describing literary meet as a powerful platform for the sexually marginalised community to display their creative flair, she said many members of the community want to prove themselves in society. "As a member of the transgender community, I think the academicians, writers and creative persons among us want to prove that we also have an imagination and creativity. We also have dreams. Sahitya Akademi is big platform. So I think it is a good opportunity for us to prove ourselves," she added. Srinagar/New Delhi, June 19 : Jammu and Kashmir Governor N.N. Vohra on Tuesday evening suggested to the Union Home Ministry that Governor's Rule should be imposed for six months in the state after the PDP-BJP coalition collapsed, official sources said. Officials in the national capital said that Home Ministry has received the recommendation which will be sent to President Ram Nath Kovind for his assent. The Jammu and Kashmir Constitution provides for Governor's Rule unlike other states which see President's Rule. : New Delhi: Vijay Gokhale, an Indian Foreign Service Officer of the 1981 batch, took over as Foreign Secretary of India from S. Jaishankar on Jan. 29, 2018. . Image Source: MEA/IANS Vijay Gokhale, an Indian Foreign Service Officer of the 1981 batch, took over as Foreign Secretary of India from S. Jaishankar on Jan. 29, 2018. Image Source: MEA/IANS New Delhi, June 19 : India and Japan on Tuesday discussed cooperation in the areas of maritime security and counter-terrorism among other issues during the fifth dialogue under the 2+2 mechanism that involves and foreign and defence policies of the two sides, a statement said. "Both sides reviewed the entire gamut of India-Japan relations and discussed issues having overlapping foreign policy and security dimensions of India-Japan cooperation and consultations," the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement. "Both sides reaffirmed their common desire to build on the strong foundations of bilateral cooperation and exchanges in order to forge a relationship of mutual benefit," it said. "In this context, both sides discussed measures to strengthen cooperation in fields such as counter-terrorism, maritime security, defence equipment and technology, peacekeeping operations, etc." India and Japan, along with the US and Australia, are part of a quad that was revived late last year that aims to work for peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region. India and Japan elevated their bilateral relationship to that of a Special and Strategic Global Partnership during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Japan in 2014 for the annual bilateral summit with his Japanese counterpart Shinzo Abe and, according to the statement, Tuesday's meeting was held in keeping with this. "The discussions, which also centred on important issues covering regional and global dimensions, helped to further underscore the shared values and interests between India and Japan," the statement added. The 2+2 vice-ministerial dialogue was led by Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale and Defence Secretary Sanjay Mitra on the Indian side while the Japanese side was led by Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Takeo Mori and Vice-Minister of Defence for International Affairs Ro Manabe. New Delhi, June 19 : India and Australia have agreed to further strengthen counter-terrorism cooperation, including cross-border terrorism, through exchange of information and capacity-building efforts, the External Affairs Ministry said on Tuesday. According to a statement issued following the 10th Meeting of the Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism held here on Monday, "both sides assessed and exchanged views on prevailing terrorist threats in their respective regions including the problem of cross-border terrorism" in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. It said the two countries discussed contemporary counter-terrorism challenges such as radicalisation and violent extremism, use of internet for terror purposes, and foreign terrorist fighters and also ways to combat financing of terrorism. "The two sides agreed to further strengthen counter-terrorism cooperation through regular exchange of information, capacity building efforts, mutual legal assistance, sharing of best practices on countering violent extremism and cooperating in multilateral fora such as the United Nations and the FATF (Financial Action Task Force)," the statement said. While Indian delegation was led by Mahaveer Singhvi, Joint Secretary, Counter Terrorism, in the Eternal Affairs Ministry, the Australian side was led by Paul Foley, Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism. Washington, June 19 : The US plans to announce its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday, media reports said. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who had last year threatened to pull out of it given longstanding US complaints that it is biased against Israel, along with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, plans to announce the withdrawal at the State Department here at 5 p.m., Bloomberg reported, quoting two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity. On Monday, the Geneva-based council began its latest session. The announcement will come a day after UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein slammed US President Donald Trump's immigration policy separating migrant children from their parents, The Times of Israel reported, also quoting sources. The Trump administration earlier pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. Washington, June 20 : US President Donald Trump has defended his policy of splitting up families entering the US illegally, defying a growing chorus of condemnation. Speaking at a business convention, Trump said children have to be taken away if their parents are jailed for illegally crossing the US border. The President had earlier sparked outrage for tweeting that undocumented immigrants would "infest" the US. Mexico's Foreign Minister has called the US policy "cruel and inhuman". "I don't want children taken away from parents," Trump said on Tuesday during a speech at a National Federation of Independent Businesses event in Washington DC, reported BBC. But he added: "When you prosecute the parents for coming in illegally - which should happen - you have to take the children away." He also claimed that separating families was "the only solution" to end illegal immigration, even as he noted that he does not support the practice. Trump said he wanted to "end the border crisis" by giving border officials the resources to "detain and remove illegal immigrant families altogether". US immigration officials say 2,342 children have been separated from 2,206 parents from May 5 to June 9. Trump has blamed "Democrat-supported loopholes" in federal law for the family separations, but critics of the policy say the recent spike is due to the enforcement of US Attorney General Jeff Sessions' "zero tolerance" approach. Sessions has rejected claims that US holding centres for child migrants separated from parents are like Nazi concentration camps. America's top law official told Fox News the "zero tolerance" policy was about enforcing border security. Trump is meeting Republican lawmakers later to discuss a bill that proposes to curb the policy. Sessions was asked on Fox News about a tweet by former CIA Director Michael Hayden likening what happened at Auschwitz concentration camp, where millions of Jews and other minorities were killed, to the separation of undocumented immigrant families at the US border. "Well, it's a real exaggeration, of course," the Department of Justice chief said in Monday night's interview. "In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country." Sessions said: "Fundamentally, we are enforcing the law. Hopefully people will get the message and not break across the border unlawfully." In a remark that provoked criticism, Fox News host Laura Ingraham said the detention centres were "essentially summer camps" for migrant children. It is not the first historical analogy inspired by the policy - former US First Lady Laura Bush has compared it to the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Trump tweeted on Tuesday that immigrants threatened "to pour into and infest our Country", triggering further outrage. Washington, June 20 : The US has pulled out of the United Nations Human Rights Council. The body is "hypocritical and self-serving" and "makes a mockery of human rights", said Nikki Haley, the US envoy to the UN. Haley last year accused the council of "chronic anti-Israel bias" and said the US was reviewing its membership, a BBC report said. Formed in 2006, the council has been criticised for allowing countries with questionable human rights records to be members. UN officials are yet to comment on the US announcement. The New York-based group Human Rights Watch condemned the move, and called President Trump's human rights policy "one-dimensional". The move comes amid intense criticism over the Trump administration's policy of separating child migrants from their parents at the US-Mexico border. UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad has called the policy "unconscionable". Haley announced the US's intention to quit the council at a joint news conference with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. She called the council a "cesspool of political bias", but stressed: "I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from our human rights commitments." Last year, she told the council it was "hard to accept" that resolutions had been passed against Israel yet none had been considered for Venezuela, which at the time saw dozens of protesters killed during political turmoil. Israel is the only country that is subject to a permanent standing agenda item, meaning its treatment of the Palestinians is regularly scrutinised. Zsar has received an investement by Finnish Industry Investment Ltd, or Tesi. In addition, the outlet village appointed Simon Cunningham, former COO of Value Retail, as a new member of its Board of Directors. At Value Retail Cunningham was responsible for driving sales of 3 billion in 11 luxury outlet [] A vacant block comprising of over 700 square metres, across the road from the Ettalong foreshore with views to Lion Island and beyond, has been listed for sale. It is offered by Larry Altavilla from One Agency. Located at 44 The Esplanade, Ettalong Beach, it provides an opportunity for development with a current zoning of B2 Local centre, and for development with a mixture of residential and commercial. A new unit complex just metres down the road have all but sold off the plan. Ettalong Beach offers a relaxed sea side lifestyle and is the gateway to both Brisbane Water and Pittwater offering many opportunities for water activities, from boating, fishing, swimming, snorkelling, surfing and more. The town itself hosts many cafes, restaurants, a supermarket and speciality shops as well as the Ettalong Diggers Club and Ettalong Beach Pub. Ettalong is also host to the Ettalong Markets complex offering weekend market stalls. The town has a six screen cinema complex. It is located a 15-20 minute drive to Gosford and Erina Fair shopping complex, five minutes to Woy Woy rail station, a 20 minute ferry ride to Palm Beach and an hour drive to Sydney. A retail property leased to The Good Guys in Warrawong, New South Wales, has been sold to a local investor for $7.15 million. The new owner would be holding the site as an investment, with the current lease having about three-and-a-half years left to run, plus a five-year option. Savills Australias Clinton Baxter, Nick Peden and Jesse Radisich brokered the deal for 75-89 King Street on behalf of AFR Rich Lister, Andrew Muir, whose father founded The Good Guys. The consumer electronics retail chain was subsequently sold to JB Hi-Fi for $880 million in 2016. We are witnessing renewed strength and confidence in the large format retail sector, as investors continue to digest the presence of Amazon in Australia, Baxter said. The sale finalises Savills Australias brokerage of a $150 million portfolio of properties leased to The Good Guys across Australia. The Muir family put the portfolio of 15 stores up for sale in April 2017 with expectations of about $130 million after selling the chain to JB Hi-Fi in 2016 for $870 million. The North Carolina State Bar is joining a group of legal technology pioneers in driving necessary awareness, adoption and changes in the way legal services are provided in this current age of digital living. Systems East, Inc., a leading provider of comprehensive finance, billing, and payment solutions since 1981, announced today that it will be attending and exhibiting at the North Carolina Bar Association Annual Meeting, hosted in Wilmington, North Carolina, from June 21- 24, 2018. This years North Carolina State Bar Annual Meeting will focus on technology and how it impacts current and future trends in the practice of law. The program schedule will offer Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit for courses on cloud computing, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. Further, the NCBA is proposing that one out of twelve required CLE hours include technology training. The North Carolina Supreme Court is set to review these recommended changes for approval in time for them to go into effect for the 2019 CLE compliance year. Those in the legal industry will recall that, in 2006 and 2015, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended to address how legal practitioners should address and handle technology. Since then, the American Bar Association has included technology education requirements in its Rules of Professional Conduct, the California State Bar issued an Opinion making learning about eDiscovery and technology an ethical obligation, and the Florida State Bar became the first to adopt a technology CLE requirement for its licensed practitioners. As Education and Training SME for Systems East, Inc., Melissa Rogozinski observes, This is an exciting time for State Bar Associations. The North Carolina State Bar is joining a group of legal technology pioneers in driving necessary awareness, adoption and changes in the way legal services are provided in this current age of digital living. Since our ePayments product and education strategy revolve around technology and related training, we knew we wanted to be a part of this event and support the North Carolina Bars leadership and progress in this area. The North Carolina Bar Association is a voluntary statewide organization composed of more than 20,000 lawyers, judges, paralegals and law students. The NCBA was founded 1899 and is based at the N.C. Bar Center, located at 8000 Weston Parkway in Cary. Volunteer service and leadership permeates virtually every aspect of the organization, from four divisions devoted to young lawyers, senior lawyers, paralegals and law students, to 31 practice specialty sections, to the various committees, commissions and task forces of the NCBA. The NCBA Diversity Statement: The North Carolina Bar Association is an inclusive organization committed to recognizing, respecting, promoting and encouraging diversity among its leadership, its membership and the entire legal community. Systems East, Inc. is headquartered in the Finger Lakes Region of Central New York and maintains satellite offices in South Carolina, Florida, and Arizona. The company has an established record of providing professional assistance to thousands of clients all over the nation. In its history approaching four decades, the experienced staff has specialized in the development of a variety of software products that are comprehensive, easy to use, and cost-effective. Systems East has consistently enjoyed steady and sustainable growth, resulting in a positive financial position every year, has no debt and has never sought or received funding from external sources such as banks or venture capitalists. This financial independence permits a focus on quality and service instead of shareholder income and is consistent with a management strategy that focuses on attraction and retention of both clients and employees. Systems East assists its clients in handling billions of dollars in transactions annually. 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. WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. The 42nd annual Air Race Classic is a dream thats been building since the freshman year for Purdue students Alyssa Harvey and Tiffany Imhoff. Theyve been friends their entire collegiate career at Purdue. Harvey has been interested in flying the race since she heard stories from her first flight instructor at Purdue. She would tell me stories about flying in the Air Race Classic and I remember thinking it would the best thing to do, Harvey said. Now, four years later and here we are. For the second year in a row, two teams of Purdue students will take to the skies to compete in the annual womens cross-country competition. Harvey will pilot and Imhoff will co-pilot the plane representing Purdue University in this years race while pilot Nicoletta Fala, co-pilot Cathy Troyer and third team member Morgan Pietruch are representing the on-campus group Purdue Pilots, Inc. This is the third race since 2005 in which more than one Purdue student team has entered the race. It is the only womens air race in the United States. The race takes place from June 19-22 and runs a total of 2,656 miles. Pilots, which follow a different route for the race each year, begin in Sweetwater, Texas, and end in Fryeburg, Maine, with stops in eight states along the way. Purdue has been represented by a team in the Air Race Classic for more than 20 years. This years field consists of 55 teams, with 119 racers from 34 states and 5 foreign countries. Fala said her excitement kept her from sleeping the night before last years race and she could eat very little. Everything changes, however, once they take off. I think the most stressful time is sitting on the ground waiting to take off, she said. But the moment you take off, everything is so normal, just like any other flight. The stress just all goes away, it just disappears. For video of the Fala/Troyer team, go to https://youtu.be/_pkmJPdpkAQ. Fala is a doctoral student while Troyer will be pursuing her masters degree in the fall. Pietruch is a junior in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The west-east route this year makes maximizing tail winds among the strategies for teams. The Air Race Classic follows a different route every year. A lot of times last year the chances of rain didnt become rain so we changed our whole strategy for nothing, Harvey said. Were going to change our strategy this year, but not to the point of being overly aggressive. In addition to the pilot and co-pilot, a ground crew works to give racers the best and fastest route for their journey. Crew members analyze weather conditions, including winds and front locations, as well as forecasts and hazardous weather. The crew also calculates fuel burn and helps with decisions on whether to try flying the next leg of the race or wait for better weather. Fala said the level of cooperation between racers was something she didnt expect going into last years race. I learned that its not a competition against each other, she said. Were all in it to win it, but we know everyone is willing to help each other out. It was a huge change in mentality for me and I didnt expect it at all. We still want to do well this year, but we want to help everyone else too. The event is not your standard race. Each plane receives a unique time handicap prior to the race. The team that beats its handicap by the largest margin wins. About the Air Race Classic The first race took place in 1929, originally called the Womens Air Derby and included a field of 20 women pilots that included Amelia Earhart, who would later join the faculty at Purdue University. That race flew from Santa Monica, California, to the Cleveland Air Races in Ohio. The All Women's Transcontinental Air Race (Powder Puff Derby) was formed in 1948 and ran until 1977. The ARC ran its first race in 1977 with a 2,400-mile race from Santa Rosa, California, to Toledo, Ohio, and is the longest running air race in the U.S. Writer: Brian L. Huchel, 765-494-2084, bhuchel@purdue.edu Sources: Nicoletta Fala, 765-518-6598, nfala@purdue.edu Alyssa Harvey, 219-671-8700, amharvey@purdue.edu Note to Journalists: Broadcast-quality B-roll of the Harvey/Imhoff team is available at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RDKyniq6cNDVTS-pbaB9IBVQF1AvNQcI. The Fala/Troyer team is available at https://goo.gl/7DGzy4. Sony Pictures Television Networks (SPTN) has unveiled in the Netherlands Film1, a premium pay direct-to-consumer subscription movie service which marks is first expansion into the Western European over-the-top market. Described as a unique destination for premium movies in the Netherlands, Film1 allows customers to watch over three hundred first run films on-demand, direct to a screen whenever it suits them. At launch on 21 June, the new service will come with unlimited, instant access to titles such as Blade Runner 2049, Spider-Man: Homecoming and Baby Driver. The new service running on PC, Mac, IOS and Android will have a live stream of the Film1 Premiere linear channel and an extensive range of over three hundred movies on-demand including the latest films of major film studios.The launch of Film1 as a direct-to-consumer OTT movie service is said to build on SPTNs existing pay-TV business, which consists of four Film1 channels, movies on-demand and a Film1 app which offers the most extensive first pay movie service in the Dutch market. With the monthly or yearly subscription through Film1, films can be streamed online, via Film1 app, Film1 site, Android tv, Chromecast, AirPlay and PlayStation. With a subscription through a TV operator and a set-top box, there is access to the four linear film channels as well.Commenting on the new launch, SPTN executive vice president, Western Europe, international networks, Kate Marsh said: Were delighted to be expanding into OTT with the launch of our new Film1 service. We take pride in securing the latest and best film content for our Dutch audience, and this new direct to your screen service complements our partnerships with pay-TV operators and delivers a new way for people to access our top-quality content. Parade Media has inked a production deal with Foxtel Lifestyle Channel and UKTVs Good Food with brand new adventure show, Jack Stein: Inside the Box, starring the eponymous UK chef. Keeping up the family tradition begun by his father Rick, Jack Stein will embark on an adventure visiting ten global cities, sharing the history and flavours of quintessential English dishes with local chefs and everyday eaters some of whom may have never encountered these dishes before. The programme will focus on his favourite classic British dishes and then he will endeavour to flip the norm by creating his own cooking box to tour these dishes around the world and try them out on locals.Parade Media worked with Australian-based indie new media house Projucer and Stein himself to develop and craft the 10 x 30 programme which is in currently in production with shooting commencing in June and expected to air early 2019.It has been ordered by Foxtel with pre-investment from UKTV . The deal was brokered by UKTVs acquisitions manager, Charlie Charalambous, and Parade Medias CEO, Matthew Ashcroft. Parade is responsible for its distribution.Commenting on the commission, Foxtel Lifestyle Group , general manager, Hannah Barnes said: We are thrilled to be working with Jack Stein on this brand-new project. Jack has enormous talent and comes with real pedigree in the Food world. It will be exciting for Australians to see Jack give us a global view on traditional UK dishes.Added Parade Media s Ashcroft: In a world of globalisation, networks and audiences everywhere demand local relevance with global appeal. Working with best in class talent like Jack Stein and collaborating with leading independent producers ensures we meet these demands and deliver cut through original content - this culinary adventure promises to transcend culture and cross boarders as a global hit TV series. The head of Nato has warned that the deep divisions between the US under Donald Trump and its European allies are not going away and there is no certainty that the transatlantic relationship and its military alliance will survive. WASHINGTON -- Many weeks -- every week? -- in the age of Trump are depressing. This last one has been sickening. That is strong language for a moment that President Trump has declared a triumph, with his historic meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The problem is not the fact of the meeting itself. Diplomacy -- even Trump's brand of slapdash, what-me-prepare diplomacy -- is better than the war-mongering alternative, and the president deserves credit for putting out even a fire partly of his own creation. But. Trump's consistent, unnecessary, escalating, praise for Kim merits the word sickening. Diplomacy may entail saying nice things to bad people for good ends, but Trump's language about Kim represents a nauseating betrayal of American values -- and a telling exposure of Trump's own. "Hey, he's a tough guy," Trump told Fox News' Bret Baier. "When you take over a country -- a tough country, tough people -- and you take it over from your father, I don't care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean, that's one in 10,000 that could do that. So he's a very smart guy. He's a great negotiator." Baier persisted: "But he's still done some really bad things." Trump: "Yeah, but so have a lot of other people have done some really bad things. I mean, I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done." Shades of Trump's moral equivocating on Russian president Vladimir Putin ("There are a lot of killers. We got a lot of killers," Trump told Fox's Bill O'Reilly last year. "What, you think our country is so innocent?"), but so much worse. Consider Trump's own words less than five months ago: "No regime has oppressed its own citizens more totally or brutally than the cruel dictatorship in North Korea." Contrast Trump's new fawning, in person and afterward, with Barack Obama's 2015 encounter with Cuban president Raul Castro. Agree or not with Obama's outreach to Cuba, fault him for not doing enough to insist on improvements on human rights -- at least he brought the subject up, to Castro's face. At least he didn't praise Castro's toughness. Having left the summit with the gauziest of assurances about denuclearization, Trump assured us, in a tweet, that "there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea." Is he a charlatan or a fool? The categories are not mutually exclusive. Nothing concrete was promised, by an adversary that has proven itself untrustworthy. Trump's North Korea performance is bad enough on its own. Add the jarring, unwarranted mistreatment of our closest allies, before, during and after the G7 economic summit. Add the jarring, unwarranted suggestion that Russia -- the country that meddled in the 2016 election, on Trump's behalf; the country that the United States and others have just penalized for trying to assassinate a former spy -- should be invited back into the G7. And add, if your stomach isn't already churning, what is happening on the home front. Parents are being separated from their children in the service of deterring illegal border crossings -- and with the false excuse that it is "the fault of bad legislation passed by the Democrats." One Honduran woman claimed that immigration agents took her daughter while she was breastfeeding. Others have been told, chillingly, that their children are being taken off to bathe, only to have them disappear. It is hard to believe I am typing these words, about my own country. And it's almost as hard to believe that spineless Republicans acquiesce in the behavior of a president who, again this week, asserted that "Our Country's biggest enemy is the Fake News." There are episodic, ineffective bleats of protest from lame-duck lawmakers with no election left to lose. But as the results of Tuesday's primary elections made clear, the Grand Old Party has degenerated into the Don't Poke the Bear Party. Elected officials, as soon-to-be-former Rep. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., can tell you, cross Trump at their peril. Wednesday's chilling message from the chair of the Republican National Committee: "Anyone that does not embrace the agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake." Proving the point made by departing Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker, that Republicans "have a cult-like situation as it relates to a President that happens to be purportedly of the same party." Meanwhile, the president of what was formerly known as the party of Lincoln cheers the election of Corey Stewart, a white supremacist sympathizer, to be the Republican Senate candidate in Virginia. The word sickening is not strong enough. (c) 2018, Washington Post Writers Group Good news abounds lately for America. Jobs numbers continue to soar and, per a new CNN poll, Americans have grown more confident in the direction of the country than at any time in a decade. Not surprisingly, President Trumps job approval ratings also are on the rise, particularly among independents. In spite of these successes or perhaps because of them the presidents critics continue to direct the most extreme possible language at him, invective that reached full-scale apoplexy regarding our countrys border policies. The lawful separation of children from illegal immigrants who cross our border without permission has elicited a cacophony of wildly hyperbolic condemnations, and not only from the rabidly anti-Trump quarters of the left and the mainstream media. Former first lady Laura Bush wrote that border enforcement is cruel and immoral and reminiscent of World War II Japanese internment camps. Never mind the misery that her husbands administration brought to innocent children in far-flung war zones. Speaking of those wars, George W. Bushs CIA director, Michael Hayden, took the criticism of U.S. law enforcement to a whole new level, tweeting out a picture of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp with the text: Other governments have separated mothers and children. This illogical and offensive comparison fails on every level and it insults the memory of those slain in those horror chambers, and the few who survived. Hayden should apologize to the heroic troops of the Greatest Generation who fought and died to extinguish the evil Nazi regime that created those camps. What kind of American scorns the brave men and women of Homeland Security by equating them with the fascist monsters of the SS? In point of fact, the Nazis conduct was the opposite of Americas today. The Third Reich declared that German citizens who happened to be Jewish were no longer citizens (and not even human). In contrast, the United States seeks to protect our citizens, of any faith, color or ethnicity, by controlling our border, just as parents protect their family by locking their doors at night. Regarding borders, Hayden should realize that the Axis powers transgressed borders across the world in violent conquest, while we simply seek to maintain our lawful demarcation. While such deranged rhetoric is singularly unhelpful, as a country of immigrants with a big heart, we should pursue the smartest policies to deter such unlawful criminal entries that compel family separation. The most obvious measure is to fulfill the central promise of Donald Trumps 2016 election and build the wall, thus creating controlled entry points. At such checkpoints anyone can already request asylum and avoid family separation if their claim has merit. The vast majority of recent asylum applicants travel from Central America all the way through Mexico to the U.S. border, rather than requesting asylum in nearby Mexico, which suggests that these are really economic migrants rather than people fleeing targeted governmental persecution in their homeland. Regarding asylum, a sensible reform that Congress should consider would be allowing non-Americans to apply in their home countries via embassies and consulates instead of only on U.S. soil. But the idea pushed by Trump critics that any adult who breaks into our country with children in tow (who may not even by theirs) should be allowed into the country without any charges being filed against them actually endangers children all the more by effectively making them tickets to gain U.S. entry. Far from anti-immigrant, the United States remains an incredibly hospitable country to newcomers. With just 4 percent of worlds population, America boasts one-fifth of the total number of global immigrants. These new Americans bring us cultural vibrancy and economic vigor. We owe those many legal immigrants a just system of border control. We are not Nazis. Controlling who enters our country is not racist, mean-spirited, or xenophobic. After decades of permitting a dangerous and porous border, we have a man in the White House showing what real leadership looks like. This administration is merely demanding that we address the border crisis with smarts as well as compassion. As Trump has shown on so many issues, his first priority will not be to please the borderless predilections of the globalist Davos elites, but rather the safety and prosperity of the American citizens he serves. Trump and the Invasion of the West "It is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart," says former first lady Laura Bush of the Trump administration policy of "zero tolerance," under which the children of illegal migrants are being detained apart from their parents. "Disgraceful," adds Dr. Franklin Graham. "We need to be ... a country that governs with a heart," says first lady Melania Trump. "No one likes this policy," says White House aide Kellyanne Conway, even "the president wants this to end." And so it shall -- given the universal denunciations and photos of sobbing children being pulled from parents. Yet striking down the policy will leave America's immigration crisis still unresolved. Consider. Since 2016, some 110,000 children have entered the U.S. illegally and been released, along with 200,000 Central American families caught sneaking across the border. Reflecting its frustration, the White House press office declared: "We can't deport them, we can't separate them, we can't detain them, we can't prosecute them. What (the Democrats) want is a radical open-border policy that lets everyone out into the interior of this country with virtually no documentation whatsoever." Where many Americans see illegal intruders, Democrats see future voters. And with 11,000 kids of illegal immigrants in custody and 250 more arriving every day, we could have 30,000 in custody by summer's end. The existential question, however, thus remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization? The U.S. Hispanic population, already estimated at nearly 60 million, is predicted to exceed 100 million by 2050, just 32 years away. And Europe's southern border is more imperiled than ours. A week ago, the new populist regime in Rome refused to allow a boat full of migrants from Libya to land in Sicily. Malta also turned them away. After a voyage of almost a week and 1,000 miles, 630 migrants were landed in Valencia, Spain. Why did Italy reject them? Under EU law, migrants apply for asylum in the country where they first enter Europe. This burdens Italy and Greece where the asylum-seekers have been arriving for years. Of the landing in Spain, Italy's interior minister Matteo Salvini, a leader of the populist League party, chortled: "I thank the Spanish government. I hope they take in the other 66,629 refugees (inside Italy). We will not be offended if the French follow the Spanish, the Portuguese and Maltese, we will be the happiest people on earth." If the migrants boats of the Med are redirected to Spanish ports, one suspects that the Spanish people will soon become as unwelcoming as many other peoples in Europe. And Trump is not backing down. Monday he tweeted: "The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin coalition. Crime in Germany is way up. Big mistake made all over Europe in allowing millions of people in who have so strongly and violently changed their culture!" Whatever European leaders may think of him, many Europeans are moving in Trump's direction, toward more restrictions on immigration. In Germany, a political crisis is percolating. The Bavarian-based CSU, longtime coalition partner of Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU, is now talking divorce if Merkel does not toughen German policy. Merkel has never fully recovered from the nationalist backlash against the million migrants she allowed in from Syria's civil war. A New Year's Eve rampage in Cologne, featuring wilding attacks on German girls by Arabs and Muslims, cost her dearly. Among the reasons Bavarians are pulling away from Berlin is that, being in the south of Germany, Bavaria is a primary point of entry. Virtually every one of the populist parties of Europe, especially of the right, have arisen to contest or to seize power by riding the issue of mass migration from Africa and the Middle East. Yet the progressives adamantly refuse to act, apparently paralyzed by a belief that restricting the free movement of peoples from foreign lands violates one of the great commandments of liberal democracy. We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western suicide. If Europe does not act, its future is predictable. The population of Africa, right across the Med, is anticipated to climb to 2.5 billion by midcentury. And by 2100, Africa will be home half of all the people of the planet. If but a tiny fraction of the African and Middle Eastern population decides to cross the Mediterranean to occupy the emptying towns and villages of an aging and dying continent, who and what will stop them? Trump may be on the wrong side politically and emotionally of this issue of separating migrant kids from their parents. But on the mega-issue -- the Third World invasion of the West -- he is riding the great wave of the future, if the West is to have a future. COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM Facing widespread backlash to its "zero tolerance" policy that has resulted in the separation of migrant families at the southern U.S. border, the Trump administration have settled into a defensive posture, with the president blaming political opponents for his own directives. After offering conflicting and false statements over the weekend about the policy and its consequences, President Trump and various officials defended their approach on Monday. "Illegal entry is a crime. Illegal immigrants have put their children at risk," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told reporters at the daily White House briefing. "DHS is no longer ignoring the law." In a speech at the National Sheriffs Association meeting earlier in the day, Nielsen said the administration "will not apologize for the job we do, or for the job law enforcement does." The statement came just hours after she falsely claimed in a tweet that the administration did not have a policy of separating children from parents at the border. We cannot detain children with their parents, so we must either release parents and their children or the adult and the minor will be separated as the result of prosecuting the adult," she said. "Those are the only two options. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who announced the policy April, echoed those sentiments at the same gathering Monday. "We do not want to separate children from their parents," he said. "But we do have a policy of prosecuting adults who flout our laws to come here illegally instead of waiting their turn or claiming asylum at any port of entry. We cannot and will not encourage people to bring children by giving them blanket immunity from our laws." At a White House event in the East Room, Trump argued that "the United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility." And even as his own party controls Congress, the president also issued a series of tweets attempting to pin blame on Democrats and arguing for broader immigration policy changes and concessions. "Children are being used by some of the worst criminals on earth as a means to enter our country," he tweeted. "It is the Democrats fault for being weak and ineffective with Boarder Security and Crime." Meanwhile, troubling images of cages, foil blankets, and crying children at U.S. detention centers near the border seem to have cut across traditional partisan lines. All four living former first ladies have publicly opposed the program. "I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel," wrote Laura Bush in an op-ed. "It is immoral. And it breaks my heart." And Melania Trump said she "hates to see children separated from their families." Lawmakers in both parties traveled to border areas and detention centers over the weekend to survey the scene for themselves, and many expressed concern about the separation policy. Some have called on Trump to reconsider his approach. This comes as the president is slated to travel to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to meet with Republican lawmakers. "The administrations decision to separate families is a new, discretionary choice," Republican Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska wrote in a Facebook post urging Trump to reverse the policy. "Anyone saying that their hands are tied or that the only conceivable way to fix the problem of catch-and-release is to rip families apart is flat wrong." New surveys show majorities of Americans disapprove of the administration's approach, though Republican respondents largely agree with it. A CNN poll found that 60 percent of Americans disapproved of the family separation approach, while 28 percent approved. Among Republicans, 58 percent approved, while majorities of independents and Democrats disapproved. A Quinnipiac University survey found 66 percent of American voters in opposition while 27 percent were in support. Among Republicans, 55 percent approved, while 35 percent disapproved. "When does public opinion become a demand that politicians just can't ignore? Two-thirds of American voters oppose the family separation policy at our borders," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. "Neither quotes from the Bible nor get-tough talk can soften the images of crying children nor reverse the pain so many Americans feel." House lawmakers are expected to consider two immigration-related bills this week. One measure, championed by a group of moderate GOP members, would offer legal protections for Dreamers -- young people brought to the country illegally by their parents -- and an eventual path to citizenship. Another measure, considered to be a more conservative proposal and sponsored by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, would provide temporary protections for Dreamers and would include cuts to legal immigration. Both would provide funding for a border wall -- and both have the presidents backing, Nielsen said during the White House press briefing. Both measures are also expected to include language aimed at allowing children to remain with their parents while in detention, addressing a court order known as the Flores Settlement that bars the government from detaining migrant children. "The drafts of both bills clarify the Flores Settlement by ensuring accompanied alien minors apprehended at the border can remain with their parent or legal guardian while in DHS custody," a House GOP source said. "Drafters are also working to include a provision that not only addresses DHS custody but DOJ custody as well." In addition to addressing that aspect of the current crisis, the administration is also asking Congress to reform asylum laws and to close what they see as legal loopholes. The administration has argued that its zero-tolerance policy was designed as a response to a previous "catch and release" program, in which illegal immigrants were seized at border and released into the United States to await a hearing. They argue that that policy created opportunities and incentives for those immigrants to come and stay in the country illegally. In an interview with NPR last month, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly described the new policy, including the resulting family separation, as a "tough deterrent" for illegal immigration. "The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long," he said at the time. Nielsen, however, called the notion of using family separation as a deliberate deterrent "offensive" It's unclear whether immigration legislation could pass one or both chambers of Congress, given that lawmakers have been unable to pass previous measures to deal with former DACA recipients, and that midterm election politics complicate the ability to find agreement on contentious issues. Some lawmakers have urged the administration to halt its policy until they can agree on a legislative fix. "Separating children from their families at the border is a policy many of my constituents and the American people in both political parties oppose," Kansas GOP Rep. Kevin Yoder, who chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee of Appropriations, wrote in a letter to Sessions. "As Congress pursues legislation to address this issue this week, an interim solution is needed. I ask that you take immediate action to end the practice of separating children from families at the border." But the administration dismissed such calls. "We want to fix the entire system," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters. In the eagerly awaited redistricting case, Gill v. Whitford, the United States Supreme Court vacated a lower court ruling directing the Wisconsin legislature to redraw Assembly district maps that were alleged to have been gerrymandered to favor Republicans. The court did not accept the plaintiffs claim, finding that they seemed to lack standing (i.e. they had not demonstrated the particularized individual injury that is required to bring litigation in a federal court). The court did not dismiss the case but remanded it to give the plaintiffs an opportunity to show that they have suffered such an individualized harm, i.e., that their own districts were drawn in a way that diluted their vote. Perhaps more importantly the court did not attempt to create a new, arbitrary standard or doctrine that could be used to dictate how states draw maps. Such a decision would have disenfranchised voters in every state and dealt a serious blow to states rights. Fortunately, the court did not go that route. In a sense, it is fair to say that the justices punted. But that punt may well have pinned the plaintiffs deep inside their own territory. Here's the problem. The plaintiffs claim in Gill focused on the statewide outcome of elections conducted under the challenged maps. The problem was not that the districts are oddly shaped or violate traditional districting principles (they dont) but that the lines had been manipulated in a way to pack and crack Democrats in more or less subtle ways, so the electoral outcomes exhibited partisan asymmetry. Put simply, the percentage of seats won by Democrats significantly lagged behind the percentage of the aggregate votes for Democratic Assembly candidates. This caused Judge William Griesbach, who dissented from a lower court decision finding that the maps were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, to complain that his colleagues found a gerrymandering without a gerrymandering. I have criticized the merits of the plaintiffs claim here. Even though the justices decision did not fully reject the plaintiffs claim, their treatment of standing may turn out to be fatal for the plaintiffs claim. The court made clear that an individual's claim of vote dilution cannot be based on the fact that maps have been drawn in a way that diminishes the statewide prospects for that voter's preferred political party. The majority held that the plaintiffs interest "in their collective representation in the legislature, and in influencing the legislatures overall composition and policymaking, does not constitute "an individual and personal injury of the kind required for Article III standing." If that's true, then plaintiffs are going to have to show some constitutional violation in the drawing of their individual district and that harm cannot be inferred from a statewide impact. In a concurrence joined by the other liberal justices (but, significantly, not by Anthony Kennedy), Elena Kagan suggests an easy way out. All a plaintiff must do is show that another set of statewide maps would have resulted in more "balanced" districts, conferring standing on plaintiffs whose districts "could be" made more competitive. But that seems to simply restate the theory of injury that the majority rejected. There must be some constitutional injury that is distinct from the statewide effect. Showing that some voters could be placed in more competitive districts conflates remedy with violation. The choice not to decide avoids what would have been an unwelcome and anti-democratic development. Democrats in Wisconsin (and elsewhere) tend to win fewer seats than the total statewide votes for Democratic candidates because they are more geographically concentrated. The plaintiffs in Gill sought nothing less than a constitutional obligation to draw lines in a way that would compensate for this national disadvantage. At least so far, the court has not mandated a duty to gerrymander for competitiveness. And by making clear that the court is not responsible for vindicating generalized partisan preferences and that standing must be rooted in a particular district level injury, it may be unlikely ever to do so. Given that the maps in Wisconsin appear to conform to traditional redistricting principles, it may be a challenge for a plaintiff to establish standing with respect to any of them. But even if individual plaintiffs can point to something about the creation or contours of their district that might support a claim, the majority also warned that the remedy may be district-specific. Chief Justice John Roberts decision warned that standing is not dispensed in gross and that a plaintiffs remedy must be tailored to redress the plaintiffs particular injury. The courts decision can be described as a punt, but it may have hit the coffin corner. The Western world owes its success since the end of the Second World War to its well-functioning system of institutions. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization protects against military aggression; the World Trade Organization establishes rules on how to do business with each other; and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank help stabilize international finance and fight economic and humanitarian crises. Finally, the United Nations and the G-7 safeguard a platform for crucial conversations among world leaders as tensions loom -- they ensure that problems are faced before they escalate. The failure of this months G-7 summit in Canada shows that this structure is on the verge of falling apart. The American president seems to have no desire to support a body that is not dedicated first and foremost to serving U.S. interests. Trump has long shown his disdain for international organizations. In La Malbaie, however, Trumps distaste for any forum where one is called upon to listen to others and compromise burst out into the open for everyone to see. The breakdown of the G7 meeting leaves two fundamental questions: First, will Donald Trump succeed in crushing these institutions? And if the answer is yes, what does that mean for the world? The answer to the first question very much depends on whether Europeans are able to stick together. If they do -- and Donald Trumps disruptive policy approach may even help them to -- there is a chance that at least some of the structure can be rescued from the rubble. The majority of trade in Europe takes place among European countries, so there is a huge shared interest in maintaining an operable rulebook and its corresponding institutions. Is the formation of a G6 without the United States feasible? Probably, at least for some time. However, if Donald Trump continues to drive wedges between Europeans -- as he did with his suggestion to bring Russia into the group -- the constant noise from Washington could wear down European solidarity over time. That solidarity would be especially vulnerable were Europe to enter an economic downswing as a result of losing significant parts of the U.S. market due to higher protective tariffs. Some countries might be inclined to close bilateral trade deals with the United States to ease any economic pain. While there is good hope that the economic institutional framework will not immediately disintegrate, the Western military alliance is a greater concern. A president as unpredictable as Trump, who expresses support for an idea only to change course a few hours later, cannot be considered a reliable force when it really matters. Europeans remember how long it took the U.S. president in 2017 to commit to the principle of common defense laid down in Article 5 of the North Atlantic treaty. Europe has for way too long relied on the United States in security matters. Now they have to scramble to pull European defense systems back on their feet. This can take years -- and that will leave Europe vulnerable for the time being. Hopefully, Europeans will not turn to Russia for rescue instead. Now, will a world without strong Western institutions be a safer place? Hardly. It is worthwhile taking a look into the history book. One example is the case of the League of Nations of 1920. The organizational precursor of the United Nations was intended to prevent another conflict like World War I. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson fought vigorously for the idea, but he never managed to secure a majority in Congress for U.S. membership. Without the United States, the organization was toothless. Less than 20 years later, the world entered into another, even more catastrophic war. Markus Ziener is a professor of journalism in Berlin and a former correspondent in Moscow, Washington and the Middle East. The views expressed are the authors own. NATO is gearing up for its next summit. The Alliances Brussels summit in July will take place against the backdrop of growing Transatlantic strains. Europes chagrin over U.S. policies on the Iran deal, climate, and trade is mirrored by U.S. President Donald Trumps dissatisfaction with European allies share of NATO defense spending. Even in this difficult environment, the summit will beget progress on a number of areas, such as updating the NATO command structure; improving military readiness and mobility; and strengthening NATO training missions in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries aimed at fighting terrorism. However, there is one concrete initiative that can unite allies across the Atlantic and bolster our collective security: strengthening NATOs partnership with Ukraine. Ukraine wants to join NATO. This is not immediately possible given the current security situation and the status of Ukraines defense reforms, although it must remain on the table. For now, the Alliance can increase its cooperation with Ukraine independently of the membership question. While not a replacement for membership, inviting Ukraine to become an Enhanced Opportunities Partner is the natural next step in Kyivs relationship with NATO. NATO launched the Enhanced Opportunities Partnership for Dialogue and Cooperation in 2014. Its goal was to strengthen the interoperability developed between allies and key partners in the aftermath of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan. EOP status is awarded to those partners which have most significantly contributed to NATO missions. The list of designated countries remains small, comprising Australia, Finland, Georgia, Jordan, and Sweden. Ukraine does not count among them, but Kyiv has more than met the criteria needed to earn this designation. First of all, Ukraine pulls its weight in NATO missions. It has increased its contribution to the Resolute Support Mission, which provides training, advice and assistance for Afghan forces and institutions. Kyiv has been a significant contributor to allied operations in the Balkans and the Mediterranean, and it is one of just four non-members to contribute to the NATO Response Force, together with Georgia, Finland, and Sweden. Ukraine currently contributes 5 percent of its gross domestic product to defense, more than any NATO ally. Four years of war against Russian-backed forces in the Donbas have forged the most battle-hardened troops on the European continent and bolstered a significant military-industrial sector. Ukrainian capabilities, knowledge, and technical expertise would be of significant value to the Alliance. No one else has as much knowledge of Russia as Ukraine, nor as much practical expertise in combatting Russian use of cyber-attacks, disinformation, and other forms of hybrid warfare aimed at undermining our democracies. Ukraine will also play a major role in Alliance efforts to strengthen its security in the Black Sea in order to protect NATOs southeastern flank. EOP status would recognize that special relationship and take the partnership to the next level. It would bring Kyiv into more political consultations with NATO at the ambassadorial and working level, would grant it more access to exercises, and would increase information sharing. Far from being a one-way relationship, it would also significantly enhance NATOs expertise and operational skills. Some allies may be reluctant to support this step, but strong U.S. leadership could make it happen. Debate within the Alliance on this issue has been deadlocked for several months by Hungarys refusal to agree to a meeting of NATO and Ukrainian heads of state during the Brussels Summit. Hungary has raised questions about the application of Ukraines new Education Law to Hungarian-speaking minorities in Western Ukraine. In response, Kyiv has offered a series of measures to ensure that Hungarian speakers can continue to take courses in the Hungarian language at all levels while also mastering the state language. There are indications that Budapest may now be ready to delink this issue from the security and sovereignty of Ukraine and allow a heads-of-state meeting to take place, perhaps pairing Ukraine and Georgia since the latter also faces Russian threats to its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Such a meeting would be a positive move and would open the way to a favorable decision on granting EOP status to Ukraine. It would also deprive Russian propagandists of an opportunity to sow divisions between Ukraine and NATO. The Trump administration has shown that it is willing to support Ukraines security, not least through the recent decision to supply Javelin anti-tank missiles. Now Washington can show that it can unite NATO allies by further strengthening the Alliances partnership with Ukraine, the main victim of Russian aggression. Ukraine has shown itself to be worthy of taking the next step in its relations with NATO. Granting Ukraine EOP status would not only be a symbolic reward for its hard work in support of the Alliance, but a boost for NATOs own security as well. Alexander Vershbow, a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council, is a former Deputy Secretary General of NATO, Assistant Secretary of Defense, and US Ambassador to NATO and Russia. The views expressed are the author's own. Veterans Day, which fell on Nov. 11 but is observed this year on Nov. 12, is a chance for everyone to recognize the sacrifices made by the men In a stock market where investors are used to being disappointed, Tuesday's plunge still shocked. China's benchmark equity gauge sank almost 5 percent at one point and by the close, the escalating tensions with the U.S. had sent 1,023 stocks down by the daily 10 percent limit -- or more than one in four. Greasing the losses was the Shanghai Composite Index's slide below 3,000, a level previously breached during market crashes in 2015 and 2016. With Washington and Beijing threatening tit-for-tat moves over import tariffs, investors are worried a trade war will act as a brake on China's economy and hollow out an already deflating equity market. Selling intensified last week after data showed weak spots in China's economy. Rising corporate defaults and the government's financial deleveraging campaign are also undermining sentiment. But the death of buy-the-dip is all the more dramatic at a time when company profits are rising, a sign that investor pessimism may be snowballing beyond repair. "Seeing the benchmark dropping below the 3,000 level hurts sentiment even more," said Hao Hong, chief strategist with Bocom International Holdings Co. in Hong Kong. "Things could get a lot worse if the trade war escalates and China fights back in an unconventional way. I would advise against buying into the selloff." China on Tuesday said it will retaliate "forcefully" after President Donald Trump threatened duties on $200 billion in Chinese imports, and another $200 billion after that if Beijing retaliates. It follows last week's publication of the U.S.'s final list of $50 billion in tariffs, and China's statement over the weekend that all recent agreements on trade would become void. Trump's tariffs dealt a blow to a market that's yet to recover from a $5 trillion collapse that began almost exactly three years ago. The Shanghai Composite is among the world's worst performing benchmarks this year -- only a handful of emerging markets have fared as bad. Almost 80 percent of the Chinese index's stocks closed at fresh four-week lows on Tuesday. Even foreign investors, who had been faithful buyers of yuan-denominated shares for 29 consecutive sessions via the exchange links with Hong Kong, turned net sellers. While the Shanghai Composite Index now trades at less than 11 times projected earnings, its cheapest relative to global shares since early 2015, bargain hunters are hard to find. It's too early to call the bottom in mainland equities, especially as the U.S. has yet to officially implement tariffs on Chinese products and any restrictions on investment from China, according to Louis Lu, a fund manager at CSOP Asset Management in Hong Kong. He expects more volatility as talks continue in the summer months. "Investors were surprised that Trump changed his attitude so fast," Lu said. "Previously they expected a good result after the Singapore summit and the Chinese government's favorable monetary policy." The rout has taken the benchmark below even the most bearish year-end forecast from December, blindsiding strategists' calls for a better performance this year. Traders had previously speculated that China's so-called national team would be committed to defending the 3,000 level, which proved to be a key level of support for stocks at the beginning of last year. "It's perceived as a place where the government steps in and moves the levers," said Ritesh Jain, a Mumbai-based chief investment officer at BNP Paribas Asset Management India Private. "This heavy hand should appear soon, though I'm not sure it would have a lasting effect unless monetary policy is eased, the currency is allowed to fall or a fiscal lever is used." With little sign of state intervention, bearish sentiment may persist, even as the Shanghai Composite closed at a technical level that may signal it's dropped too far, too fast. "We have to be cautious," said Stephen Innes, head of trading at Oanda Corp. in Singapore. "This escalation is weighing on the big macro picture and probably wise not to pick bottoms." - - - Bloomberg's Amanda Wang contributed. NORTH CANAAN - State Rep. Brian Ohler (R-64) was invited to participate in a two day training course at Geer Village, focused on mental health. According to Ohler, who is a member of the Litchfield County Opiate Task Force, there is a direct link between mental health and opioid misuse and abuse. I was invited by Valerie English Cooper, the programs lead instructor and fellow member of the Litchfield County Opiate Task Force. It is incredibly important that we, as a community, take a proactive step in fighting the opioid epidemic and to learn as much as we can about related causes. It is clear to me that there is a great amount of negative stigma attached to conversations about mental health, but training sessions like the one held at Geer Village is a step in correcting the publics misunderstanding of the subject, said Ohler. Ohler is a volunteer firefighter and EMT, where he is trained in a variety of safety response techniques. However, he challenged himself to lead by example and completely immerse himself in training and education about mental health and related issues. There is a huge initiative by the federal government to make Mental Health First Aid as common as CPR training, said Valerie English Cooper, a community educator for Mental Health Connecticut, who has performed the training at UConn. Like its CPR counterpart, Mental Health First Aid is a universal experience taught the same way everywhere. It originated in Australia in 2001. The training included simulations to demonstrate various scenarios. Additionally, the program showed Ohler how to recognize common risk factors and warning signs of specific types of illnesses like bipolar disorder, eating disorders, schizophrenia, and depression. The five-step action plan includes: Assess for risk of suicide or harm; listen nonjudgmentally; give reassurance and information; encourage appropriate professional help; encourage self-help and other support strategies. Girl Scouts offer extended membership Girl Scouts has introduced an extended-year membership opportunity for NEW members! Both girls and adults who have not joined Girl Scouts before can register for a 16-month, $35 prorated membership that allows them to begin Girl Scouts during the summer then transition right into the traditional troop experience in the fall. This is an opportunity for girls to enjoy all the thrills of Girl Scout Camp and start right back with a troop in the fall. It's also a way for volunteers who want to start a new troop to beat the rush and get set up, trained and ready to dive right into all of the exciting programs and leadership building experiences that Girl Scouts has to offer. Register today at gsofct.org or call 800-922-2770 EdAdvance announces free summer food services LITCHFIELD This summer, EdAdvance will again participate in the federally-funded Summer Food Service Program (SFSP). Each year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture partners with local schools and community organizations to provide free meals to children when school is out for the summer. There are no income or registration requirements to receive summer meals. Free summer meals will be available at the following Torrington locations to anyone age 18 or younger: Coe Memorial Park, Coe Place; Vogel School, 68 Church St.; William L. Besse Pool, 277 Winthrop St.; Woodland Hills Apartments, 330 Highland Avenue. EdAdvance, in partnership with End Hunger Connecticut and Connecticut State Department of Education, is seeking volunteers to participate in Torringtons Blitz Day, a day of community outreach dedicated to increasing awareness about the availability of free summer meals. In Torrington, Blitz Day will be held on Wednesday, from 3-6 p.m. Volunteers should meet at Coe Park, 101 Litchfield Street, where they will receive tote bags with a supply of outreach materials to spread the word across the community. Volunteers can sign up to participate in person that day or in advance by visiting www.endhungerct.org or www.ctsummermeals.org. In addition, the Winchester Public Schools will host the Summer Food Service Program in Winsted. A separate Blitz Day is scheduled in Winsted on Monday, June 18th from 3 PM to 6 PM at the Gaylord Tiffany Building at 75 Rowley Street. Volunteers are needed for this event as well. Free summer meals will be available at the following Winchester locations to anyone age 18 or younger: Gaylord-Tiffany Building 75 Rowley St.; Litchfield Heights Apartments, 15 Mountain View Terrace. For more information about EdAdvances Food Services Programs contact, Becky Tyrrell, EdAdvance Director of Food Services, tyrrell@edadvance.org or 860-567-0863. Colebrook holding annual chicken barbecue COLEBROOK The annual Chicken BBQ dinner is being held at the Colebrook Senior and Community Center in the center of historic Colebrook on Saturday, June 23, 5-7 p.m. 5 Tickets are $14 for adults and $7 for children, and may be reserved by calling 860-738-9521. Dine in or takeout meals include a half of a BBQ chicken, baked potato, homemade coleslaw, fresh baked roll, watermelon slice and a beverage. The Kenn Morr Band will perform a free concert outdoors during the BBQ. Bring a chair, get your dinner to go and eat while you enjoy the music. Colebrook Senior and Community Center is located at 2 School House Road. For information call 860-738-9521. Denim & Diamonds benefits VNA LAKEVILLE Rae and Marshall Schwarz are hosting Denim & Diamonds, a fundraiser benefiting Salisbury Visiting Association at Quarry Hill Farm in Lakeville. The event is on Saturday, June 23, beginning with cocktails at 6 p.m., a barbecue at 7 p.m. and a presentation of Arabian horses at 8:30 p.m. The Red Ribbon Champion tickets are $200 per person. There are three levels of sponsorship available: National Champion $2,500 (6 tickets), Grand Champion $1,000 (4 tickets) and Blue Ribbon Champion $500 (2 tickets). Those interested in attending Denim & Diamonds may purchase tickets by calling 860-435-0816 or purchase them online: https://www.salisburyvna.org/2018-denim-diamonds-registration/ by June 8, 2018. A limited number of tickets for the event are available. Founded in 1904, the Salisbury Visiting Nurse Association is the oldest and most comprehensive home care, hospice and private care agency serving all of the Northwest Corner of Connecticut. The not-for-profit, state licensed and Medicare certified home health and hospice agencys mission is to provide advanced, compassionate care at home and in the community. Serving: Canaan, Cornwall, Falls Village, Goshen, Kent, Lakeville, Norfolk, North Canaan, Salisbury, Sharon, Taconic and Warren. Photo credit: Amada44/Wikimedia These smooth walled, well maintained, igloo-shaped mud houses near the village of Mateka, in Lesotho, belie their age. Although they appear very recently built, these houses are nearly two hundred years old and have been continuously inhabited, generation after generation, by the descendants of the original people who built them in the early 19th century. The Ha Kome Cave Village lies a bit off the beaten track, which is true for pretty much any place in the landlocked country of Lesotho that is completely surrounded by South Africa. What is now Lesotho was originally inhabited by the SothoTswana people when the Zulus started attacking villages and encroaching on their land, forcing the Sothos to flee up into the mountains. Here, continuous attacks from the Zulus forced local tribes to join together for protection, and by 1824, King Moeshoeshoe had established himself as king. This difficult time of widespread chaos and warfare is known as Difaqane or Mfecane, and is one of the darkest periods in the history of Lesotho. It was during Difaqane the ghastly practice of cannibalism arose. The plundering raids, compounded by drought brought famine so severe that groups of people in several parts of Lesotho began to eat each other. What originally started out of hunger eventually became a habit as the cannibals took a liking for human flesh. Cannibals were said to form themselves into hunting parties and set off daily in search of victims. D.F. Ellenberger, a missionary who arrived in Lesotho in the 1860s, estimated that there were about 4,000 active cannibals in Lesotho between 1822 and 1828, who each ate, on an average, one person a month. Extrapolating these figures, one arrives at a staggering figure of 288,000 people who fell victim to cannibalism. Overall, between one to two million people lost their lives due to warfare during a ten year period. Photo credit: Amada44/Wikimedia To escape the gruesome slaughtering and cannibalism, a handful of tribesmen fled to what is now the Ha Kome Cave Village, and built the mud houses inside the cave. The mud houses lie under a huge overhanging rock with the rock wall serving as the back of the houses. King Moeshoeshoe himself was personally affected by cannibalismhis own grandfather was abducted and devoured when they were passing through a cannibal-infested area. When the King learned about the tragedy, instead of wreaking revenge, he decided to make peace with the cannibals. The story goes that Moshoeshoe instructed his warriors to capture the cannibals but not harm them. The captured cannibals were then given a sumptuous feast at the end of which Moshoeshoe offered each one a cow and a plot of land on which to build a house, saying, You are the graves of my ancestors, you belong among us. King Moeshoeshoe Moshoeshoe was an astute, benevolent leader whose tact was way ahead of his time. It has been suggested that Moshoshoes diplomacy may have influenced modern South African leaders, and the example of Moshoeshoe forgiving the cannibals who ate his grandfather is compared to Nelson Mandela act of reconciliation in taking tea with Betsy Verwoerd, the wife of South African Prime Minister and the the architect of apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd. Cannibalism died out by the late 1830s, but these stories survived both in oral tradition and songs, as well as in literary works and history texts. The stories are complemented by the existence of cave houses such as the Ha Kome Cave Village and other sites associated with cannibalism in the landscape. Photo credit: Chr. Offenberg/Shutterstock Photo credit: Gil. K/Shutterstock Photo credit: Amada44/Wikimedia Planting a "For Sale" sign in front of the house is probably the very first way anyone ever spread the word that they're selling their home. Only these days, this simple sales tactic seems to be on the chopping blockone town in Connecticut may soon ban "For Sale" signs completely. The Board of Realtors in New Canaan, CT, has voted to take down all such signs in front of homes on July 1. After a six-month trial period, the board will assess its impact on the market and, if positive, make this ban permanent. But why? "We wanted to declutter our residential neighborhoods with what has become an obsolete and archaic form of advertising," John Engel, a Realtor and chairman of the Town Council (New Canaan's legislative body), told realtor.com. "Signs have been replaced by more modern forms of communicationparticularly search engines and cellphone mapping." True, most people shop for real estate online, but don't "For Sale" signs still catch at least a few drive-by buyers? Perhaps, although more and more experts are subscribing to the idea that in an upscale market (like Connecticut's Fairfield County), signs can potentially undermine a real estate marketespecially if the signs are tackily done (think huge photo of a smiling agent) or planted in front of numerous houses (which suggests everyone's trying to flee). "The benefits of a sign ban far outweigh the risks," Engel says. And the town's residents tend to agree. "The signs disrupt the charm and quaintness of the town," one resident told Fox News. Or, in the words of another, If you drive around this town, it looks like a yard sale. ... It starts to look ugly and desperate." 'For Sale' signs: Too 'tacky' in today's market? New Canaan is hardly alone in thinking "For Sale" signs are a real estate relic better off scrapped. "Other towns like Nantucket, MA, and Greenwich, CT, have long imposed restrictions on real estate signs, and we believe it contributes to the success of their real estate markets," Engel says. "I believe other towns will recognize this as an opportunity to make an improvement and will follow our lead." It's hard not to notice that all of the aforementioned towns (New Canaan, Nantucket, and Greenwich) have median home prices above $1.5 million, according to data on realtor.com/local. So apparently, if you're in a hoity-toity rich town, "For Sale" signs are considered pushy and gauche? "Almost predominantly wealthy communities are banning 'For Sale' signs, and I believe it predominantly benefits wealthy home owners," says William Fastow, a real estate agent at Appleton Properties Group in the Washington, DC, area. "'For Sale' signs give buyers a visual representation of how much inventory is available on the market. A buyer who drives down a street and sees a half-dozen 'For Sale' signs might ask why everyone is moving. By placing a moratorium on signs, these communities maintain an image of desirability and exclusivity, regardless of real estate market conditions." Reasons to keep 'For Sale' signs alive But some agents argue that this hurts home sellers and the whole neighborhoodeven rich areasmore than it helps. "This is unfortunate," says Cedric Stewart, a real estate agent in Washington, DC. "According to the National Association of Realtors, 7% of buyers found their home via yard or open house signs. If 10,000 people are searching, that eliminates 700 potential buyers. Who would you want to do that?" The fact is, not everyone is glued to online listings 24/7particularly if they aren't actively looking, but might buy if they spotted a "For Sale" sign in front of their perfect home. "I cant tell you how many clients Ive had call me and say, 'We werent looking to buy, but we just saw this "For Sale" sign on a house weve always loved and we want to make an offer,'" says mortgage expert Todd Huettner. "These people would never wind up buying these homes were it not for yard signs." "I have clients in the high-end market that often prefer not to have a sign, but I always push them to put one up," says Haven Duddy, a real estate agent in the Philadelphia area. "I think its a great way to let people who might not necessarily be searching for a home know that your home is on the market. Or if someone lives in a neighborhood and has a friend that they know is looking, they can communicate that a house came up that they might be interested in seeing." However, agents agree that "For Sale" signs should be tastefully done, and that many cross the line. "I have seen some ugly, inappropriate signs, so limiting the size, number, placement to commercially reasonable standards is understandable," says Atlanta real estate agent Bruce Ailion. "Often condos and townhouses will only allow signs in the windows. I was in Florida a few years ago in a community that only allowed 6-by-12-inch signs." Probably the biggest no-no? Showing a photo of a real estate agent grinning ear to ear, or showing two thumbs up. "The sign should not have agents' faces on them," Duddy adds. "That I find to be very tacky." But all in all, New Canaan's real estate agents had better think twice about banning signs entirely. "If I were serving high-end clients, I'd be violating my fiduciary responsibility if I didn't post a 'For Sale' sign," says California land developer Tyler Drew. "What's happening here is a case of real estate agents too invested in the towns they live in making dangerous decisions that have unknown consequences." The post Sorry, Sellers: Your 'For Sale' Sign May Be 'Ugly and Desperate'Here's Why appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com. ANSONIA How sweet it is! Thats just what Mayor David Cassetti said Friday as he joined about 75 others who gathered at the Valleys iconic Eddys Bake Shop downtown for its grand re-opening. The mainstay on Main Street for decades has been open for business since late January, but a grand opening celebration was never held until now. It took the new owners Raul and Arlene Cardenas a few months to work out the kinks, but business has been booming and the famous rye bread, poppy-seed Danish, fruit tarts, hard rolls, cupcakes and more tasty treats are selling like hotcakes. The Cardenas bought the business from brothers Paul and Mike Ciocca, whose family owned Eddys for more than 50 years, but decided to finally hang up their aprons and retire last August. Eddys remained closed for several months after the sale, while the Cardenas did some remodeling and spent time learning some of the famous recipes at the shop, located at 317 Main St. Arlene Cardenas, an Ansonia High School graduate, who also owns the well-known Marjolaines bakery on State Street in New Haven, said being able to keep Eddys open in the Valley is a dream come true. Shes been working at Marjolaines since she was a teenager. Its been a journey to get here, Arlene Cardenas told the crowd. I have the best staff in the world. I think we are bringing a good thing to the community, and Eddys will be here for a very long time. While unable to attend Fridays grand re-opening, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, one of Marjolaines customers and major fan of its Danish and pies, sent well wishes via a representative to the Cardenas, calling Eddys a local treasure that she knows the couple will do proud. Cassetti, a major fan of the poppy-seed Danish, said new businesses popping up along Main Street is becoming a common and welcome occurrence in downtown Ansonia. He was thrilled to see Eddys remain open after the Cioccas retired. Ansonia resident Eileen Sorak, another fan of Eddys for years, agreed with Cassetti, saying the poppy-seed Danish is the best Ive ever had, and reminds me of being back in my grandmothers kitchen. The Cardenas said the Danish recipe was handed down from the original owner of Marjolaines, a French pastry chef. Frank and Donna Kilijanski, longtime patrons of Marjolaines, were excited to see the Cardenass expand their artistry and baking talents. Weve been to a French bakery in Epcot and their stuff doesnt even compare to what the Cardenas do, Frank Kilijanski said. Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce President Bill Purcell said Eddys remaining in the Valley is sweet news for all. Eddys is one of the Valleys most iconic businesses, and to see it get a new lease on life is wonderful, Purcell said. The Cardenas and their staff stayed up until 2 a.m. Friday, baking up a storm for the grand re-opening. Their hard work was expertly displayed on long tables inside the shop, piled high with Danish, brownies, mini cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies, bagels, croissants, cake and breakfast goods for the public to sample and enjoy. Aldermanic President Lorie Vaccaro, on hand for the celebration, said the rye bread that helped put Eddys on the map, is even better than ever. The interior of the shop also received a makeover, with the once white walls now awash in pink, covered in historic Eddys photographs, Marjolaines bakery awards and inspirational signs. jean.sos@snet.net. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (R) shakes hands with China's Defense Minister Wei Fenghe before their meeting at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh, June 18, 2018. China and Cambodia announced on Tuesday that Beijing has pledged $100 million in military grants for training and equipment for the Cambodian military, a move one critic said would help Prime Minister Hun Sen resist international pressure over his crackdown on political opponents in an election year. Cambodian Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Chhum Socheat unveiled the aid package during a five-day visit to the country by Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe. Wei met Hun Sen and his Cambodian counterpart Tea Banh. Weis visit was to implement any deals signed between the two countries, especially any deals brokered between Hun Sen and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the past., and especially to promote and deepen mutual military cooperation, Hun Sen posted on his Facebook page. China has supported Cambodia with millions in aid and trade benefits in recent years, garnering the Phnom Penh governments strong support for Chinese positions in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other regional diplomatic groupings. China has backed Hun Sen, who has ruled Cambodia for 33 years, stepping in with arms sales when western countries have shunned Phnom Penh over human rights abuses. Analyst Hang Vitou told RFAs Khmer service he was concerned about the latest Chinese aid announcement, which comes in the lead up to national elections on July 29, and with Cambodia estranged from most traditional aid donors in Europe and North America. Hun Sen has accused the United States of being behind a plot by the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) to topple his government, arresting the partys president, Kem Sokha, in September and having courts dissolve the party in November for treason. Cambodia will get more criticism from the West and the grant will encourage (Hun Sens regime) to continue the election without the National Rescue Party, said Hang Vitoui, head of the Young Analyst Group. The grant will also motivate Cambodia to abuse human rights, added the analyst, who said he believed reliance on China would harm Cambodias independence. Reported by RFA's Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Paul Eckert. Cambodias judiciary fails to comply with several fundamental fair trial rights, including the presumption of innocence and whether confessions are obtained under duress, a local NGO said Tuesday, in a report based its observance of a year of criminal cases at the countrys Court of Appeal in the capital Phnom Penh. In an annual report entitled Fair Trial Rights in Cambodia, Monitoring at the Court of Appeal, covering the period of Nov. 1, 2016 to Oct. 31, 2017, the Cambodian Center for Human Rights (CCHR) analyzed data gathered through the daily monitoring of 340 randomly selected cases at the Court of Appeal. The monitoring period did not include a number of more recent high-profile cases, such as those involving members of the now-dissolved opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) on charges of treason, although observers have criticized the court for its handling of those trials based on several of the concerns the group highlighted. CCHR found that a number of key fair trial rights were guaranteed before the Court of Appeal during the monitoring period, including protections against double jeopardy and non-retroactivity, as well as of the right to understand charges, the right to adequately prepare ones defense, and the right to a public judgment. But while the group welcomed what it called steady improvements in the adherence to some of the procedures that underpin fair trial rights, it warned that many areas of concern remain. CCHRs monitoring showed that the presumption of innocence was not fully respected, and insufficient attention was given to allegations that a confessionwhich often form the basis for convictionswas obtained under duress or violence, despite 40 defendants making such allegations before the Court of Appeal, the report said. In more than 65 percent of the cases monitored, the judge also failed to inform the defendant of their right to remain silent, CCHR noted. Earlier this month, after CNRP President Kem Sokha was refused bail from detention while awaiting trial on charges of allegedly plotting to topple the government, his lawyer suggested that the Court of Appeal had violated the presumption of innocence principle by denying him the right to appear at the hearing, and said her clients rights had been severely restricted, as if he had already been convicted. Meanwhile, the right to legal representation was not always respected, CCHR added, with 21 percent of defendants attending hearings without lawyers. CCHR called the lack of respect for the right to a reasoned judgment one of the most concerning findings in its report, noting that international standards require that a convicted person have access to written judgments, duly reasoned, for all instances of appeal, and that such access is necessary in the Cambodian context so that the accused have the possibility of appeal to the Supreme Court. It said that in two-thirds of the cases it monitored, the defendants were found guilty, and in a significant number of cases, the Court of Appeal upheld the decisions of the Courts of First Instances. This, taken together with the lack of reading the reasoned decision, creates cause for concern as to whether the accuseds fair trial rights were respected, CCHR said. In nearly all the cases, the judges failed to justify their ruling. They failed to state the provisions of the law and the evidence which they relied upon in their verdict. Instead, the judges only read and announced the ruling. In May, after deliberating for two minutes, Judge Plang Samnang said Cambodias Court of Appeal decided to uphold the Phnom Penh Municipal Courts verdict of 2015 that found 11 CNRP members guilty of insurrection and ordered their continued detention, without providing a reason for the ruling. CCHR said it also found that the rights of juvenile defendants, who should be given special protection under international human rights law and in Cambodian law, are often ignored. No specific measures are put into place to protect the rights of juveniles, and all but two of the 35 juveniles whose cases were monitored by CCHR had been held in pretrial detention, the report said. Call for protections In a statement, CCHRs Fair Trial Rights Project coordinator Hun Seang Hak expressed hope that the data presented in the report will help facilitate an increased respect for fair trial rights in Cambodia. We also urge the authorities to promptly take all appropriate steps to ensure that fair trial rights, and particularly the presumption of innocence, the right to a reasoned judgment, and the protection of juveniles privacy, are vigorously protected, he added. CCHR called on the Ministry of Justice to organize regular trainings on the implementation of fair trial rights for the judges of the Court of Appeal, based on local and international standards, and suggested that the court follow the best practices of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)the United Nations tribunal that has investigated Khmer Rouge era atrocities since 2006. The group also urged all courts to adopt a standard form that includes the offense with which the defendant is charged and the relevant laws; the date, time, and location of the alleged offense and relevant parties, and the fair trial rights to which the defendant is entitledin particular their right to be presumed innocent until a final judgment is rendered, and the fact that the burden of proof is on the prosecutor. It also called on judges to ask defendants directly whether they understand the charges and their rights. Failure to provide the case information at the beginning of a trial should constitute grounds to appeal a conviction, the group added. Several CNRP officials and activists have fled Cambodia since the party was banned in November last year and are currently living in self-imposed exile to avoid facing cases widely seen as politically motivated and tried in a court system beholden to Prime Minister Hun Sens ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP). The opposition has suggested that the countrys judicial system, especially the courts, are institutions under Hun Sens power and lack independence from the ruling party, and those living outside of the country routinely refuse to attend hearings in their cases. Nearly three dozen former security guards for the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia held a protest in front of the mission in the capital Phnom Penh on Tuesday, saying they were wrongfully terminated over accusations that they had shared child pornography online. The demonstration, during which protesters held banners displaying portraits of Cambodias Prime Minister Hun Sen and U.S. President Donald Trump, came three months after the U.S. Embassy fired 32 security personnel from the facility for allegedly posting the material to a chat group on Facebook Messenger. Former security guard Long Sengkimhong told reporters that he and other protesters had delivered a petition to embassy staff demanding evidence to support the claims, and calling for severance pay. We have been waiting for the past three months, but there hasnt been any information, he said, adding that embassy personnel promised to speak with their representatives, but had yet to do so. Long Sengkimhong said the embassy had prevented its Cambodian workers from forming a labor union and alleged the U.S. mission had violated local laws and its own employee handbook by handing the security guards pink slips in March. We never expected that the U.S.a democratic countrywould violate Cambodian laws, he said. The former security guards have also petitioned Hun Sens cabinet, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Labor to help resolve their dispute, he added, but have so far received no response. According to a report by the Associated Press, the protesters acknowledged that some pornographic images had been shared but said it had been on a private chat group they set up on Facebook Messenger and not the official embassy chat group. Media reports have said that some of the shared images included people under the age of 18, but protesters rejected those claims Tuesday. The former security guards vowed to continue protesting until their dispute was fairly resolved. Arend Zwartjes, the U.S. Embassys public affairs officer, refused to comment on what he said were internal personnel issues. We respect the right of anyone to protest peacefully, including these former guards, he told RFAs Khmer Service. The U.S. government takes incidents involving child pornography and child exploitation very seriously, he added. Hun Sen has been openly critical of the U.S. in the lead up to national elections on July 29, and suggested Washington was behind a plot by the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) to topple his government. Both the U.S. and the CNRP have denied any involvement in the alleged plot, but the Supreme Court dissolved the party in November for acts of treason. Reported by RFAs Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua Lipes. The ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, located approximately midway between the modern cities of Baghdad and Basrah, in southern Iraq, is one of the earliest known cities of the world. At least five thousand years old, Girsu became the capital of the Lagash kingdom, a sacred metropolis devoted to the Sumerian heroic god Ningirsu, and continued to be its religious center after political power had shifted to the city of Lagash. It was at Girsu that evidence of Sumerian civilization was first discovered in the form of thousands of cuneiform tablets with records of economic, administrative and commercial matters of the city. Over fifty years of excavations of this mega archeological site has brought to light some of the most important monuments of Sumerian art and architecture, including a 4,000-year old bridge built of baked brick, which is the oldest bridge discovered in the world to date. Aerial view of the Bridge of Girsu. Photo credit: British Museum Girsu was first excavated by a team of French archeologists in 1877, which was unfortunate, because the site was excavated too early before modern techniques of excavation and preservation had been invented. The French were also not very keen to follow protocol and paid little attention to preserving architectural remains. Treasure hunters then looted large quantities of tablets and other artifacts and sold them to collectors. It is estimated that between 35,000 to 40,000 tablets were looted from Girsu and subsequently appeared on the market, as opposed to only 4,000 tablets excavated by the French. The Bridge of Girsu was first discovered in the 1920s. At that time it was variously interpreted as a temple, dam and water regulator. It was only recently that the structure was identified as a bridge over an ancient waterway. Since the excavation nearly a century ago, the bridge has remained open and exposed to the elements, with no effort made at conservation or plans to manage the site. Girsus modern Arabic name is Tello, and this site is currently being used by the British Museum, with funding from the UK government, to train Iraqi archaeologists in cultural heritage management and practical fieldwork skills. According to a recent announcement made by the museum, restoring the 4,000-year-old bridge will be part of the training program. Photo credit: British Museum Photo credit: IRAQesque/Twitter Photo credit: IRAQesque/Twitter via TYWKIWDBI Authorities in China have detained or questioned at least 500 people in the past year over online comments in support of exiled billionaire Guo Wengui, who is on Beijing's most-wanted list for a number of criminal charges, RFA has learned. Guo, who also goes by the name Miles Kwok, had an Interpol "red notice" issued for his arrest in April 2017. He has vowed to expose what he calls a small clique of corrupt "kleptocrats" in charge of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Beijing-based rights activist Zhang Baocheng said at least 500 people have been hauled in to "drink tea" with the state security police over their apparent support for Guo on social media since last year. "I am absolutely certain that more than 500 people have been asked to 'drink tea' and so on, at the very least," Zhang told RFA on Tuesday. "There are so many groups on WeChat where people have been called down to their local police station to give a statement just for being a member of a chat group [where something sensitive was posted]." "They were also forced to withdraw from these groups ... some of which had several dozen members." Zhang said the authorities regard any mention of Guo and his overseas threats to reveal Communist Party secrets as particularly problematic. "Internet censorship is very tight now, particularly when it comes to Guo Wengui, and that includes WeChat groups," he said. Others detained Not everyone gets off with just a bout of questioning and a warning, however. Authorities in the northeastern province of Liaoning recently detained Zhao Qin, known by her online nickname Tian Ai, on suspicion of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble" after she made comments about Guo's revelations to overseas media organizations. And fellow social media user Shi Jinsheng, known by his online nickname Cangtian Youxian, is currently out on bail after being detained for writing about Guo online. A source close to Zhao told RFA that she was detained in Liaoning's port city of Dalian on the morning of June 7 after given a foreign media interview. "She gave an interview ... in which she expressed support for Guo Wengui, so they blocked off the door of her home by having a tipper truck dump a load of stones outside," the source said. "When she went down to the police station to report it, they held her under criminal detention." Zhao is well-known in the local rights community for championing the rights of vulnerable people and for campaigning against official corruption, the source said. She frequently posted to WeChat and Twitter, hitting out at the current social system in China, and the dictatorial rule of late supreme leader Mao Zedong. Meanwhile, Shi Jinsheng was released on a year's bail on June 15 after being detained on suspicion of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble," the source said. He frequently posted on WeChat in support of Guo, and supported his view that the Chinese leadership is largely a "kleptocracy." "He will be under residential surveillance for a year," the source said. "They can just accuse you of spreading online rumors and detain you, without even any kind of formal notification," the source said. "Then they wait to see if you set up more WeChat groups, or if you persist in your support for Guo Wengui." Seeking asylum Guo, who has applied for political asylum in the U.S., has warned that the threat to the U.S. from Chinese espionage is "100 or 1,000 times" greater than that posed by major terror attacks on U.S. soil. The Associated Press has reported that Chinese prosecutors are investigating Guo "for at least 19 major criminal cases," which included allegedly bribing intelligence officials, kidnapping, fraud, and money laundering. In August, the AP revealed that Chinese authorities have requested a second Interpol warrant for Guo, on a claim that he raped a 28-year-old former personal assistant. Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. North Korean security officers are carefully guarding the remains of Japanese citizens kidnapped 40 years ago by state agents, monitoring the storage of their ashes in advance of possible talks normalizing relations between the two countries, sources in Pyongyang say. The remains are kept in urns at a storage facility in the Nakrang district of Pyongyang, a source in the capital told RFAs Korean Service. The State Security Department has been taking care of the remains of the dead abductees, reporting their cause of death as illness and secretly cremating them, RFAs source said, speaking on condition of anonymity. As talks between North Korea and Japan are expected, the Central Committee has recently been double-checking the condition of the remains, he said. The last Japanese abductee known to have died was a woman named Yokota Megumi, later called Kim Seon Mi in Korean, who passed away in April 2012, RFAs source said. She was sent to Prison Camp No. 1 in 2010 after being convicted of homicide. Later, she was transferred to a mental facility, No. 49 Hospital in Sungho county near Pyongyang, but she died while receiving treatment, he said. Some may still be held Also speaking to RFA, a second source in Pyongyang said that two crematories in Pyongyang, one in Nakrang district and the other in Taesong, were constructed with funds donated by the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. Pyongyang citizens are aware of the source of the donations, but they dont know that Japanese abductees have been cremated there, he said. Some abductees are still living in a special residential area in the outskirts of Pyongyang, the source said, adding, Their lives are completely controlled by the State Security Department. I dont know their names, but they are teaching Japanese language to officials at [North Koreas intelligence service] the Reconnaissance General Bureau and to spies, he said. Beginning in 1977, at least 17 Japanese citizens were abducted by North Korean agents, with some kidnapped in Japan and others abducted while traveling abroad, according to Japanese government figures cited last month by South Koreas Yonhap news service. Over 800 other Japanese citizens have been reported missing and possibly abducted, with their status unknown, Yonhap said. Of the 13 Japanese citizens North Korea admits to having held, eight have died, and five have already been sent home to Japan, Pyongyang says. Reported by Hyemin Son for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Richard Finney. A Rohingya volunteer guides fellow refugees upon their arrival at the Balukhali refugee camp in Ukhia, a sub-district of Coxs Bazar district in southeastern Bangladesh, Jan. 21, 2018. A Rohingya leader who had criticized ARSA insurgents and often interacted with Bangladeshi officials and visiting foreign dignitaries due to his language skills was slain in a refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh, police and local sources said Tuesday. The news came as the Bangladeshi foreign ministry confirmed to BenarNews that the U.N. secretary general and president of the World Bank would both visit Rohingya refugee camps in the southeast next month. Arifullah, a leader at the Balukhali-2 camp in Coxs Bazar district, was hacked to death on Monday, Mohammad Abul Khayer, officer-in-charge of the police station in Ukhia upazila (sub-district), told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. Police are trying to nab Arifullahs murderers, Khayer said, adding that Arifullah had previously received death threats. Sources in the refugee camp said Arifullah was an outspoken critic of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the insurgent group that launched attacks against government security outposts in Myanmars Rakhine state last August, killing at least 12 people. Myanmars security forces responded with a brutal counter-insurgency clampdown that engulfed Rakhine in violence and forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to cross the border into Bangladesh. Arifullah frequently accompanied foreign delegations during their visits at Rohingya refugee camps, local official Mohammad Nikaruzzaman Chowdhury said. Arifullahs killing underscored infighting that has become common in the refugee camps, camp leaders told BenarNews. Just a day before his slaying, at least 10 Rohingya refugees were injured when two rival groups clashed in the same camp, according to Mohammad Atikullah, officer-in-charge of the police station in Teknaf, another sub-district of Coxs Bazar. Two were in critical condition, he said. Foreign ministry confirms UN, WB visit In Dhaka on Tuesday, a Bangladeshi foreign ministry official said that U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim were scheduled to visit the refugee camps on July 1. Khandakar Masudul Alam, deputy chief of protocol at the foreign ministry, said Guterres was expected to meet with Rohingya in Coxs Bazar either on June 30 or July 1. He will be accompanied by the World Bank chief during this visit, he told BenarNews. In April, a delegation from the U.N. Security Council paid an unprecedented visit to the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh. The 24-strong delegation also visited refugees camped out in a no-mans land along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border and later stopped by the sprawling Kutupalong refugee camp. In November 2017, Myanmar and Bangladesh struck a bilateral deal to repatriate hundreds of thousands of Rohingya. But the process has not yet begun and U.N. officials have expressed misgivings on whether conditions are safe enough for the refugees to return to Rakhine. During the past two months, meanwhile, the Bangladeshi and Myanmar governments have separately signed memoranda of understanding with the United Nations for U.N. agencies to assist them in the voluntary repatriation of refugees. Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service. Myanmar former child soldier Aung Ko Htway stands outside the the Dagon Seikkan Township Court in Yangon, June 5, 2018. A detained former child soldier who appeared in a Yangon court on Tuesday to face charges for desecrating Myanmar's seal after he stomped on a copy of the country's constitution during a previous hearing called on the national military to be transparent about its efforts to recruit children into its ranks. Aung Ko Htway, 27, is serving two years of hard labor after he was convicted in late March for public incitement under Section 505(b) of the countrys Penal Code for describing his abduction and forced military service as a minor in an interview last year with RFAs Myanmar Service. On Tuesday, he appeared at Dagon Seikkan Township Court in Yangon for a hearing on the desecration charges stemming from an incident in January when he and three others trampled on a copy of the military-drafted 2008 constitution in a sign of protest. They each face a maximum sentence of three years in prison if found guilty. The military hasnt shown transparency in revealing its child soldier recruitment, Aung Ko Htway told the court. The announcements and statements [the military has made] are not transparent. The military has announced that 877 child soldiers have been returned to their parents, but they were actually returned because the parents reported the cases to UNICEF and the ILO, he said referring to the United Nations Childrens Fund and the International Labor Organization. I would like to ask the military to declare its child soldier recruitment with transparency, Aung Ko Htway said. I would like to ask the military commander-in-chief not to use child soldiers in battle and [tell him] that they are engaging in warfare based on hatred [against ethnic-minority nationals]. Aung Ko Htway also said that he had been arrested and jailed because the military fears him speaking out about its injustices and human rights violations. New court request Robert San Aung, a prominent Myanmar attorney who is defending Aung Ko Htway, asked the judge on Tuesday to change the court location to Mingala Taung Nyunt Court or Tamwe Court for his clients current charge. The judge will issue a decision on June 26, Robert San Aug said. Aung Ko Htway was abducted by a Myanmar army sergeant in 2005 when he was 14 years old and later imprisoned after he and two others escaped and robbed the owner of a motorcycle. One of the other boys had strangled the man, though Aung Ko Htway maintains that he did not participate in the murder. He served seven months at a prison camp in Lashio, the largest town in Myanmars northern Shan state, where he was shackled and fed a mixture of rice and sand until he agreed to sign a confession. Though Aung Ko Htway was originally sentenced to death, his sentence was reduced twice under presidential amnesties. He was finally released on July 15, 2017, and returned home where he started a business with his sisters help selling cotton clothing in Kalawae village in Yangon regions Thanlyin township. Interviewed about his experiences by RFA in August 2017, he was arrested about a week after his story aired. UNICEF reported in June 2017 that the Myanmar military had released 849 children and young people since 2012 when it signed an action plan with the U.N. Country Task Force on Monitoring and Reporting on Grave Violations against Children to end the use of child soldiers. Though the army had taken significant steps to reduce child recruitment, it had yet to sustainably root it out, UNICEF said at the time. Seven of Myanmars ethnic armed groups also use child soldiers, according to another 2017 U.N. report. Reported by Aung Theinkha for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Civilians displaced by armed conflict move into new government-built homes in Waingmaw township, northern Myanmar's Kachin state, June 19, 2018. Development authorities in northern Myanmars war-torn Kachin state resettled 95 refugee families in newly built low-cost housing in Waingmaw township on Tuesday evening, the first time that the government has built shelters in the area for civilians internally displaced by civil war. The homes were built under the direction of the Department for the Development of Border Areas and National Races under Myanmars Ministry of Border Affairs, local officials said. Authorities will hold an opening ceremony on Wednesday and provide food for the new inhabitants who have been residing temporarily in the Thagara Thayettaw Monastery, Khat Cho, and Mongna Catholic internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. The households participated in a raffle to determine which homes they would be placed in, said Myint Aung, leader of Thagara Thayettaw Monastery camp. As soon as they know which houses they are going to live in, authorities will arrange trucks for them to move in, he told RFAs Myanmar Service. They can live in these houses forever, but they cant sell the homes or land, he said. Renewed fighting between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), a rebel militia, and the Myanmar military in June 2011 has displaced more than 100,000 civilians in Kachin state, many of whom have been unable to return to their homes as the conflict continues. About 40,000 refugees live in 100 IDP camps in government-controlled area of the state. The conflict between Myanmar forces and the KIA have escalated in several areas of the state since the beginning of this year, including Sumprabum, Tanaing, Waingmaw, Hpakant, and Injangyang townships. The intensified clashes have raised questions about the militarys possible role in hindering the governments efforts to end the countrys civil wars and forge lasting peace. The fighting continued on Tuesday when KIA Battalion 6 launched an offensive against Myanmar army troops traveling between Nam Ya and Manaw Pa villages in Hpakant township, according to a report by the online Kachinland news service. Two days earlier, a column from the Myanmar armys Light Infantry Battalion attacked a KIA front-line post under the 7th Brigade in a battle that lasted about 15 minutes, the report said. Camp and prison inspections In an interview with RFA on Tuesday, Yu Lwin Aung, a member of the Myanmar National Human Rights Commission (MHRC), said some commissioners are visiting IDP camps in Kachin state as well as inspecting jails, prison cells, and holding cells at police stations and courts to determine whether prisoners and detainees are being dealt with according to United Nations standards. We visited two IDP camps in Putao township last month and we will visit 15 IDP camps in Myitkyina township during this trip, he said. We will observe whether these IDP camps adhere to basic human rights. The MHRC, an independent group consisting of 11 retired bureaucrats and academics, is responsible for protecting the fundamental rights of citizens under Myanmars constitution. Commissioners also inspect jails in other parts of the country for human rights violations. We have visited 47 jails and still need to check three jails in Kachin state, Yu Lwin Aung said. We visited Mohnyin prison this morning. Most of the prisoners and detainees complained about health care, such as not having enough medicine, nurses, and doctors, the rudeness of health workers, and the bad quality of food and water, he said. We will report what we find to the relevant ministries. Reported by Kyaw Myo Min and Khin Khin Ei for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. written in English by Roseanne Gerin. An American citizen detained in Vietnam on public order charges confessed Monday night on state television, apologizing for his role in public demonstrations that rocked the country earlier this month and promising to stay away from protests in the future, news sources said on Tuesday. William Nguyen, a 32-year-old graduate student from Houston, Texas, was beaten by police and detained on June 10 in Ho Chi Minh City, also called Saigon, for attending what began the day before as a peaceful protest over government plans to grant long-term leases to foreign companies operating in special economic zones (SEZs). News of the proposed concessions had stirred public fears that the leases would go to Chinese-owned firms. In tweets posted from the rallies, Nguyen had described clashes between citizens and the police and said that protesters were also demonstrating against a cybersecurity bill that would further restrict citizens use of the internet. The law, approved by Vietnams National Assembly last week, required companies like Google and Facebook to delete posts considered threatening to national security and to store users personal information inside Vietnam. Speaking to RFAs Vietnamese Service on Tuesday, Vietnam-based blogger Nguyen Lan Thang said that Nguyen had clearly been singled out by authorities for arrest. Seeing him at the protest on June 10 was very encouraging to other protesters, and it was also encouraging to young Vietnamese in the United States and in other places, he said. The government is very worried about further protests on the same scale, because the size of this last protest was completely beyond their expectations. There are people who want to return to Vietnam to contribute to changes in this country, and this decision was a warning to other Vietnamese living overseas who might have any interest in coming back, he said. Its a spiritual crackdown, he said. Protests meanwhile continued over the weekend, with protesters detained on Sunday in Ho Chi Minh City. Thousands also demonstrated in central Ha Thinh province, following clashes earlier in the week in south-central Binh Thuan province, where protesters wielded bricks and Molotov cocktails against police and damaged official buildings. Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Viet Ha. Written in English by Richard Finney. YEREVAN -- Lawmakers have stripped a prominent retired general of his parliamentary immunity, after security agents raided his homes and found vast quantities of weapons, food, and other supplies meant for Armenia's soldiers. The June 19 vote came amid mounting questions -- and outrage -- about Manvel Grigorian's motivation for storing the cache of goods at his properties in and around Echmiadzin, in western Armenia. A former deputy defense minister and veteran of the Nagorno-Karabakh war in the early 1990s, Grigorian is a prominent voice for military affairs and a member of the Republican Party of former President Serzh Sarkisian. But he has long been dogged by corruption allegations. Republican Party officials and others were initially outraged after security agents raided his properties on June 16, alleging arms possession and embezzlement. But video of the raids, taken by the National Security Service and broadcast widely, prompted his allies in parliament to vote to strip him of his parliamentary immunity. The footage showed weapons, stockpiles of food, large amounts of underwear, medication, and field rations provided by the Defense Ministry for soldiers. Also found, according to the security agency, were care packages intended for soldiers serving in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, where Armenian and Azerbaijani soldiers have faced since the conflict ended in 1994. Some of the packages contained letters written by children to soldiers on the front lines. The National Security Service said he used canned food to feed tigers, bears and other wild animals at a private zoo inside one compound. Grigorian's son was forced to resign as mayor of Echmiadzin on June 18. Vahram Baghdasarian, the Republican Party faction leader in parliament, said the National Security Service video "totally changed the situation." Ahead of the vote, Prosecutor-General Artur Davtian told lawmakers there was sufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges. In a letter released on June 18, Grigorian urged his allies to give the green light to his prosecution, saying he would prove his innocence. Grigorian, 61, served as deputy defense minister from 2000 to 2008. He is also the chairman of an influential veterans organization. The scandal comes with public impatience growing about widespread corruption in the country. The current prime minister, Nikol Pashinian, rose to prominence after street protests about corruption helped force Sarkisian to step aside. The leaders of France and Germany have called for a joint response to the European Union's immigration challenge -- a deeply divisive issue among the bloc's member states. President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Angela Merkel met on June 19 in Meseberg, near Berlin. "Our aim remains a European answer to this challenge," Merkel said, following the day-long meeting. Macron echoed her words, saying that "a European answer" is needed to the challenges that migration poses. He said all 28 EU member states had to be involved. Both Macron and Merkel highlighted the need for the EU's external borders to be strengthened by boosting the so-called Frontex border and coast-guard agency. Macron also said Paris and Berlin wanted agreements that would allow EU member states to reject at their borders asylum seekers already registered elsewhere in the bloc -- usually the first port of entry. The EU has struggled with the surge of migrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, fleeing war and seeking economic stability. The issue has sharply divided EU member states and helped fuel the rise of populist political movements, many of which are anti-immigrant and xenophobic. In Germany, the question of how the country should handle migrants has pushed Merkel's governing coalition to the brink of collapse. Based on reporting by AFP and dpa An international human rights watchdog has called on Russian authorities to drop charges against Viktor Korb, a journalist who faces terrorism charges for transcribing and publishing a 2015 speech that a Kremlin critic gave at his trial. Human Rights Watch has documented a number of cases of Russian authorities bringing groundless charges for online speech, including for reposting alleged extremist information. Now there is one more, Vladislav Lobanov, research assistant at the New York-based group, said on June 19. Early on May 18, a team of police and security services agents raided the apartment of Korb, a journalist from Omsk in southwestern Siberia, conducted a 10-hour search, and seized electronic devices belonging to him and his family. Two days later, the journalist was briefly detained by law enforcement officers as he was about to board a flight from Omsk to Moscow. He was told that he was not allowed to leave Omsk due to an ongoing criminal investigation. Korb is facing a possible sentence of up to seven years in prison if convicted of the charges against him: incitement to terrorism, justification of terrorism, and terrorist propaganda. The charges stem from a court transcript Korb posted on his website Patriofil in April 2015. Its the transcript of a speech made by Kremlin critic Boris Stomakhin at his trial. The court jailed Stomakhin on charges of promoting terrorism and extremism, which he described as politically motivated. Lobanov said that Stomakhins closing speech "indeed contains odious, offensive views," but he added that "nowhere in Korbs publication does he express support of what Stomakhin said in this speech. The Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) also called for all charges against Korb to be dropped, saying in a May 25 statement, Prosecuting a journalist for publishing the text of a speech that was delivered publicly is arbitrary and a perfect example of the absurdity of Russias counterterrorism legislation and how it is used. Iran has slammed a U.S. call for OPEC to increase production, as ministers from the oil cartel traveled to Austria for their annual meeting. Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh on June 19 said President Donald Trump's comments had cast doubt on the prospect of a new deal to stabilize oil prices. The issue "has been politicized by President Trump," he was quoted as saying. "OPEC is not an organization to receive the instruction from President Trump and follow it," he said. Trump has called on OPEC to incease production, sending out tweets this month, and in April, saying that the cartel instead was allowing prices to rise. The ministers will also be meeting with Russia, a non-OPEC country that since has cooperated with the cartel to limit production. Ahead of the meeting, observers had predicted the group to consider an increase in production of about 1 million barrels a day. That would end the output cut the group agreed to two years ago. Based on reporting by AP, Reuters, and AFP Two UN rights experts have called on Iranian authorities to halt the planned execution of a man convicted of killing his teacher at the age of 15. In a June 19 statement, the experts cited reports suggesting that Mohammad Kalhori will be executed shortly after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended last week. "Iran has committed itself to prohibiting the use of the death penalty for all those under 18 by its ratification of both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child," said Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, and Renate Winter, who heads the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. "As such, this execution is unlawful and arbitrary," they added. Callamard and Winter also noted that in 2013, Iran amended its Penal Code to allow judges to pronounce alternative sentences for juvenile offenders if there was any uncertainty about their "mental development" at the time of the crime, or if they did not fully realize the nature of the crime committed. They pointed out that Iran's state forensic experts concluded that Kalhori, who was convicted of killing his teacher at the age of 15, was not mentally mature at the time of the crime. A court initially sentenced Kalhori to prison and a fine, but the Supreme Court overturned the verdict and he was sentenced to death during a retrial, the experts said "Notwithstanding the clear prohibition of the application of the death penalty for those under the age of 18, this case demonstrates flagrant disregard for the amendment to the Penal Code itself," Callamard and Winter said. The UN experts issued their "urgent appeal" a day after the United States and human rights watchdogs condemned Iran's execution of a man who was convicted of killing three police officers. Iran is one of the world's leading executioners. Amnesty International said in April that 507 people were executed in the country last year, including at least five juvenile offenders. ORAL, Kazakhstan -- Four journalists with the Uralskaya Nedelya newspaper in Kazakhstan's western city of Oral have been summoned to a police office and questioned about a video the media outlet posted on Facebook. The journalists were summoned on June 19 after an Internet user registered on Facebook as Zhan Baizhan posted a comment to the video calling on Kazakhs to take part in rallies planned by the opposition Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK) for June 23. RFE/RL correspondent Sanat Orynaliev was also summoned after he interviewed Uralskaya Nedelya's publisher, Tamara Eslyamova, as she was leaving following questioning by police. Police warned Orynaliev against working for groups that are designated as extremist organizations in Kazakhstan, including DVK. Orynaliev has no connection to DVK. A day earlier, police summoned several local activists and urge them not to take part in any activities organized by DVK. DVK was established by former Energy Minister and ex-banker Mukhtar Ablyazov, a fugitive critic of President Nursultan Nazarbaev. Ablyazov and several other Kazakh opposition figures living abroad announced the creation of the DVK movement in April 2017, saying its goal would be "democratic reforms in Kazakhstan." In March, a court in Kazakhstan branded DVK an extremist organization and banned its operations in the country. Ablyazov has called on his supporters in Kazakhstan to hold mass antigovernment rallies across the country on June 23. Macedonian lawmakers have started debating an agreement with Greece to change the former Yugoslav republic's name, as hundreds of protesters gathered in the center of Skopje for a third day to vent anger over the deal. The National Assembly on June 19 voted 69-40 for the adoption of a shortened ratification procedure for the accord, which changes the country's formal name to the Republic of North Macedonia. During a speech by Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov, the deputies of the opposition nationalist VMRO-DPMNE party shouted "traitor" and left the legislature to protest against the name change. Two parliamentary committees were set to consider the draft law on ratifying the deal later in the day. Parliament speaker Talat Xhaferi has said he expects the accord to be ratified by the end of June 22. The draft legislation on ratifying the deal requires a simple majority from at least 61 deputies required for a quorum. The deal, signed by the two countries' foreign ministers on June 17, ends a 27-year dispute between Athens and Skopje and paves the way for Macedonia to begin membership talks with the European Union and NATO. But it will take months to complete and faces several hurdles on the way, with President Gjorge Ivanov pledging to veto the deal if it is ratified by parliament. That would force lawmakers to repeat the vote, and if the deal is ratified again -- this time with an absolute majority -- then Ivanov will be unable to block it. Prime Minister Zoran Zaev has also pledged to hold a referendum on the deal later this year. If Macedonians vote in favor, the next step will be for lawmakers to approve a constitutional amendment formally changing the country's name. The Greek parliament would then vote on the deal, which has split the governing coalition and is rejected by most opposition parties. The name dispute between Skopje and Athens dates back to 1991, when Macedonia peacefully broke away from Yugoslavia, declaring its independence under the name Republic of Macedonia. Greece has objected to the name Macedonia, fearing territorial claims on its eponymous northern region. Because of Greek objections, Macedonia was admitted to the UN under a provisional name, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Greece, an EU and NATO member, has also cited the dispute to veto Macedonia's bid to join the two organizations. With reporting by MIA and AP Russia's economy minister has said Moscow will retaliate against the United States for tariffs it imposed on imports of steel and aluminum. In a statement on June 19, Economic Development Minister Maksim Oreshkin said additional tariffs will hit a range of U.S. imports to Russia. "Russia is using its rights at the World Trade Organization and is introducing balancing measures on imports from the United States," he was quoted as saying. He did not specify which imports, but said it would include those that have domestic equivalents to avoid hurting the Russian economy. A list will be released in the coming days, the ministry said. Washington imposed tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum in March, citing national security reasons. The White House said the move was aimed at limiting imports from China. President Donald Trump later temporarily exempted Canada and Mexico, along with Brazil and South Korea. Several Russian industrial conglomerates own steel-production facilities in the United States, including NLMK, Evraz, and Rusal. Another, Severstal, has filed a lawsuit with the U.S. Commerce Department over the tariffs. Based on reporting by AP, Reuters, and Interfax SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine -- A Russian court in Crimea has convicted five Crimean Tatar activists of taking part in "mass disturbances" in February 2014 and handed them suspended prison sentences ranging from 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 years. The court in Simferopol, the capital of the Russian-controlled Ukrainian region, pronounced the verdicts and sentences on June 19. The five men -- Ali Asanov, Mustafa Degermendzhy, Eskendir Kantemirov, Eskendir Emirvaliev, and Arsen Yunusov -- were among a group who staged a protest outside the regional legislature in February 2014. The demonstration occurred as Russia moved to seize control of the Black Sea peninsula following street protests in Kyiv that pushed Moscow-friendly Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from power. The five were arrested and charged by Russian authorities in 2015. Akhtem Chiygoz, a prominent leader of the Crimean Tatars local assembly, was also charged for his participation in the protest. He was sentenced to eight years in prison in September 2017, but weeks later he was taken to Turkey and freed. He later moved to Kyiv. Moscows takeover of Crimea in March 2014 was vocally opposed by many members of the Crimea Tatar population, who make up a sizable minority of the peninsula. Exiled from their homeland en masse by the Soviet authorities under dictator Josef Stalin during World War II, many Crimean Tatars are very wary of Russia and Moscow's rule. Russian President Vladimir Putin promised in 2014 that Russia would treat the mostly Muslim minority well and would address what he asserted were rights and issues that were ignored or mishandled by the Ukrainian authorities. But rights groups and Western governments have denounced what they call a campaign of repression targeting members of the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatar minority and others who opposed Moscow's seizure of the peninsula. BISHKEK Kyrgyz authorities have jailed a second former prime minister in a corruption case that is making waves in the Central Asian country. The State Committee for National security (UKMK) said that Jantoro Satybaldiev was placed in a detention center on June 18. Satybaldiev, who held office under then-President Almazbek Atambaev from 2012-14, is the second former prime minister to be arrested in a graft case that stems from modernization work at a power plant in Bishkek. Sapar Isakov was jailed on June 5, along with former Bishkek mayor Kubanychbek Kulmatov. Former Energy Minister Osmonbek Artykbaev has also been arrested in the same case. Isakov, who was appointed prime minister by Atambaev in August 2017, lost his job after his cabinet was dismissed in April following a no-confidence vote. Kulmatov served as a presidential adviser and as governor of the northern Chui region in 2013 and was the mayor of Bishkek between 2014-16. Artykbaev served as energy minister between 2013-14. The charges against the former officials stem from 2013 when they were involved in implementing a project to modernize the Bishkek Thermal Power Station. Isakov was deputy head of Atambaev's administration at the time. The three are accused of allegedly using their positions to lobby for the interests of a Chinese company in the selection process of a contractor for the modernization of the power plant, inflicting damage on the Kyrgyz state and society. The Chinese company TBEA was 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. The case is playing out amid tension between Atambaev and current President Sooronbai Jeenbekov, an ex-prime minister who was tapped by Atambaev as his favored successor in Kyrgyzstan's October 2017 presidential election but who has clashed with his former boss in recent months. Atambaev, who was limited to a single six-year term by the constitution, initially kept a low profile after leaving office in November. But following his election as head of the ruling Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan (SDPK) on March 31, he has publicly criticized Jeenbekov on several occasions. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is scheduled to give a closely watched speech about the United Nations Human Rights Council, amid reports that Washington is preparing to withdraw from the agency. Reports say Pompeo will be joined by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley in the June 19 presentation, set for 5 p.m. local time (2100 GMT/UTC). Bloomberg and Reuters reported on June 19 that Pompeo was expected to announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Geneva-based council. U.S. officials, and many activists as well, have complained for years about the composition of the council, which has included countries deemed to be serial offenders of basic human rights. Washington has sought to reform the body, but Reuters last week reported that the negotiations had failed. Based on reporting by Bloomberg and Reuters U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to maintain U.S. dominance in space as China, Russia, and other countries make advances in the race to explore the moon, Mars, and other planets. "America will always be the first in space," Trump said in a speech at the White House on June 18, accompanied by Vice President Mike Pence and the National Space Council advisory body he created last year. "My administration is reclaiming America's heritage as the world's greatest space-faring nation," Trump said. "We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We've always led." While the United States has dominated in space since the 1969 moon landing, China recently has made significant advances, while Russia -- which at the beginning of the Space Age in the 1950s had the world's most advanced space progam -- recently has mostly stagnated amid budget cutbacks. Trump said he wants to stay ahead of strategic competitors like China and Russia, but he said he wants to nurture the space ambitions of private billionaires like Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and the Blue Origin space company. "Rich guys seem to like rockets," Trump said. "As long as it's an American rich person, that's good, they can beat us," he said. "The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons and to tame new frontiers." In his latest directive on space matters, Trump called for the Pentagon to create a new American "Space Force" that would become the sixth branch of the U.S. military -- a proposal that requires congressional approval and is opposed by some legislators. "We are going to have the Air Force, and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal," Trump said. The U.S. armed forces currently consists of the Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy, and Coast Guard. "When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space," Trump said. The Pentagon, where some high-level officials have voiced skepticism about establishing a separate Space Force, said it will work with Congress on Trump's directive. "Working with Congress, this will be a deliberate process with a great deal of input from multiple stakeholders," Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said. Since his election, Trump has repeatedly vowed to send people back to the moon for the first time since 1972 -- this time, he says, as a preparatory step for the first human missions to Mars in coming decades. He has also promised fewer regulations to make it easier for private industry to explore and colonize space. The U.S. commercial space sector already is booming under NASA policies that have shifted the role of the government away from being the sole builder and launcher of rockets for decades since the 1960s. The U.S. space agency now mostly sees its role as working with private space companies like SpaceX and Orbital ATK to develop new space capabilities and carry them out. SpaceX, which NASA currently pays to take cargo to the International Space Station, and Boeing are expected to start regular astronaut missions to low-Earth orbit next year. Since 2012, when NASA's space shuttle program ended, the U.S. space agency has also relied on Russian Soyuz spaceships to transport astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. Trump has said he wants to privatize the space station after 2025 -- another idea viewed as controversial in Congress -- so Washington can spend more on NASA's plans to return astronauts to the Moon and eventually to Mars. "This time, we will establish a long-term presence" on the moon, Trump said on June 18. NASA is working with private industry on its most powerful rocket ever, called the Space Launch System, to send astronauts and their equipment to the moon and one day, Mars. It also wants to build a lunar outpost. While seeking to create a new Space Force at the Pentagon, Trump also signed a directive on June 18 handing the Pentagon's current authority to regulate private satellites to the Commerce Department. He also issued a directive on space-traffic management, which is aimed at boosting the monitoring of objects in orbit so as to avoid collisions and debris strikes. A statement released by the White House said the move "seeks to reduce the growing threat of orbital debris to the common interest of all nations." The Defense Department says there are 20,000 pieces of space debris and 800 operational U.S. satellites circling the Earth, a number that grows every year. With reporting by AFP, AP, and Reuters LVIV, Ukraine -- Mykola Yurchenko recalls the time, in this western Ukrainian city, when he literally had to pay the price for being a Roma. It was a winter day one year after the Soviet collapse in 1991, with a lawless capitalism emerging from the collapsed communist economy. A police officer showed up at the store where the young newlywed with an engineering degree was trying to make a living selling fur hats. The officer ordered Yurchenko to hand over $100 in cash to an elderly woman who he said had been robbed by "some Gypsy." The sum was enough to support a family for months, and Yurchenko refused. The cop responded by threatening Yurchenko's wife and advising him to "go to your people and collect a dollar from each of them," he says. "I had to pay the money," Yurchenko, now a mustachioed 50-year-old, recounts over a coffee a stone's throw from some of central Lviv's architectural gems, built under Polish and Habsburg rule. Within seven years of that run-in with the unscrupulous cop, Yurchenko had founded a Romany advocacy group called Ternipe (Youth) to help young Roma find better education and employment and overcome the discrimination that so many Romany Ukrainians face. That broader hostility has been on stark display in recent months in two major cities, Kyiv and Lviv, where self-proclaimed nationalists have launched attacks on at least four Romany encampments. WATCH: Attack On A Romany Camp In April (natural sound) In the first case, in April, police initially declined to investigate until video circulated of thugs from the right-wing C14 group, armed with clubs and chemical spray, torching makeshift shelters in a nature reserve in the capital, sending panicked families fleeing. (It later emerged that C14 gets Ukrainian government grants to promote "national-patriotic education projects.") In the latest incident, in early June, police mostly looked on or chatted amicably with the attackers after right-wingers turned up with axes and hammers to raze another temporary settlement of Romany families. Entrenched Feelings As in many countries in the former communist bloc, where social payments were routinely used to paper over yawning cultural and educational gaps, Roma in Ukraine are the target of persistent stereotyping. "I always stay away from Gypsies," says Olena Fomenko, a 54-year-old music teacher from the capital. "Any time I see a Gypsy woman, I avoid eye contact and never answer their questions, [I] just keep going without looking at them." Even young Ukrainians with more exposure to the notions of liberal democracy and tolerance profess a dislike for Roma, with polls in recent years suggesting around half of those aged 14 to 35 don't want Romany neighbors. Such antipathy is not lost on the tens or hundreds (depending on who you believe) of thousands of Roma in this post-Soviet country of 44 million people. "These little jokes about Romany: Can you sing? Can you dance? Can you ride a horse? What about stealing? Where's your gold?" Ivan Korzhov*, a sturdily built 27-year-old IT professional, tells RFE/RL. Currently a regional director for Infopulse, a technical-solutions provider that claims to be one of Ukraine's largest IT outsourcing companies, he recalls that before his first day of elementary school his parents instructed him not to tell anyone he was a Rom. Korzhov says Yurchenko's Ternipe organization helped him get his start through an internship at a government office in Lviv. Even now, he adds, "Some educated, tolerant Ukrainians tell me, 'You're just fine, integrated, you're a Rom; those others are unintegrated, uneducated, they're Gypsies." That is practically a rule of thumb for Ukrainians like Lviv resident Roksolana Lisovska. In January, Lisovska founded a vigilante group called Lovtsi, or Catchers. She told reporters at the time that she and her fellow enforcers would patrol the citys streets to "prevent Gypsies from stealing from our pockets and purses." "My attitude to Romany is normal -- to Gypsies, negative," the 26-year-old psychologist tells RFE/RL. "Roma are the people whose ethnicity I respect; Gypsies are the bad people who don't deserve respect and whose work I prevent." After Yurchenko complained to police about Lovtsi's activities and met with Lisovska to explain that her language was offensive, she removed references to "Gypsies" from the group's online presence. She insists the raids discouraged some thieves and pickpockets but declines to share photos or any other details about the patrols. Mixed Bag There are fewer than 50,000 Roma in Ukraine, according to the country's latest census, conducted in 2011. But Yurchenko puts the actual number closer to 300,000 among nearly a dozen sub-ethnic groups of strikingly different linguistic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Some are Hungarian-speakers from the western Carpathian region; others come from neighboring Romania or Moldova; so-called Ruska Roma hail from Russia; and there are communities of Muslim Roma from Crimea or Central Asia. All of them survived decades of communist rule, when official pressure to settle went hand in hand with educational quotas, promotion of their music and culture, and films about Roma striving to become full-fledged denizens of some "internationalist," racism-free, Soviet utopia. Most Ukrainian Roma now are well-integrated, says Yurchenko says, with steady jobs and lifestyles that differ little from those of their neighbors. But he adds that they frequently hide their ethnic background -- like young Korzhov, admonished by his parents to keep quiet -- self-identifying as Greeks, Azeris, or Armenians. Yurchenko estimates that there are still several thousand nomadic Roma, or "travelers," many of them impoverished Hungarian-speakers from the Carpathians, who distrust authorities and other Romany groups. But the numbers are notoriously unreliable, says Anna Hrytsenko, a human rights activist based in the eastern city of Kharkiv. Such itinerant families "live in tent camps, without IDs, education, or normal jobs -- that's why they either collect scrap metal, or, as sometimes happens, are involved in petty crime." "It's very hard for them to escape this situation by themselves, while the state and the public don't do anything to help them," she says, citing a reluctance on the part of many potential employers to hire Roma. "This is the problem no one wants to solve." Joblessness is exacerbated by the current economic slowdown brought on in part by Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, an ongoing war with Moscow-backed separatists in the industrial Donbas region, and the related souring of economic ties with Russia. Where To Turn? After dozens of young men in balaclavas stormed a Romany encampment in a forested suburb of Lviv on May 10 -- burning down tents as the horrified "travelers" fled -- Yurchenko says it took him a week to convince a Romany man beaten up by the attackers to file a police complaint. Police soon closed the investigation, calling the arson a case of "negligent use of fire." The apparent lack of urgency, in the Lviv case, in both recent Kyiv incidents, and when more than a dozen masked men fired into the air and torched tents to evict Roma from another improvised camp in the western Ternopil region, concerns Romany activists and international rights groups. "This is turning into a tendency, this is not just an accident," Mykola Burlutskiy, a Baptist pastor, who is Romany, from the eastern city of Kharkiv, tells RFE/RL. "People are depressed, they are frightened." UN officials and the United States Embassy have urged Kyiv to investigate the recent attacks, but there has yet to be a single prosecution in any of the four cases. Back in Lviv, Yurchenko fears that if authorities are slow to punish the perpetrators of such incidents, "a chain reaction" of violence could follow. But he also finds hope in the younger generation of Roma eager for social justice. "The youngsters are taking up the banner," Yurchenko says. "There's a new generation of [Romany] civil activists, there are more of them than us, and they're better educated." * CORRECTION: This story has been amended to correct the first name of Ivan Korzhov. We regret the error. The United Nations' special envoy for Syria says there is "some common ground" among Russia, Iran, and Turkey about how to move forward on writing a new constitution for war-torn Syria. Staffan de Mistura made the statement on June 19 after representatives from the three countries and other parties held what he called substantive talks on setting up a constitutional commission. More talks are scheduled in coming weeks, he said. "During the meeting, constructive exchanges and substantive discussions took place on issues relevant to the establishment and functioning of a constitutional committee, and some common ground is beginning to emerge," de Mistura said following the talks in Geneva. The parties are trying to find a way to bring an end to the seven-year conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands and nearly torn the country apart. Meanwhile, Syria's Foreign Ministry condemned Turkish military forces, who started patrols around the northern Syrian city of Manbij a day earlier. Manbij is held by a U.S.-backed alliance dominated by a Kurdish militia considered by Ankara to be "terrorists." Turkey has threatened to attack the city outright. Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) says nearly 69 million people who have fled war, violence, and persecution were forcibly displaced in 2017 -- a new record for the fifth year in a row. The number of refugees and internally displaced people increased by 4.6 percent in 2017 as compared to the previous year, according to the UNHCR's annual Global Trends Report published on June 19. It said nearly 70 percent of the refugees have fled from five countries: Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Burma, also known as Myanmar, and Somalia. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said the flow of refugees could be slowed down greatly if some of the wars and crises in these countries were solved. "But we haven't seen any significant progress in peacemaking or peace-building in any of these countries," he added. By the end of last year, Syria's conflict pushed more than 6.3 million people out of the country, accounting for nearly one-third of the global refugee population, UNHCR said. Another 6.2 million Syrians are internally displaced. The second-largest refugee-producing country, Afghanistan, saw its refugee population grow by 5 percent in 2017 to 2.6 million people. The increase was due mainly to births and more Afghans being granted asylum in Germany, the report said. Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Iran were among the main host countries for refugees. Based on reporting by AFP, AP, and dpa The United States and human rights watchdogs have condemned Iran's execution of a Sufi man who was convicted of killing three police officers during clashes between police and a Sufi sect in February. Mohammad Reza Salass rushed execution is the latest example of the Iranian regimes disregard for the human rights of its citizens," U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement late on June 18. "The application of the death penalty, without affording Mr. Salas the fair trial and appeal guarantees to which he was entitled, is a clear violation to Irans international human rights obligations," she also said. Following Salass execution near Tehran at dawn on June 18, his remains were buried in Borujerd, hundreds of kilometers from the Iranian capital, under heavy security presence, according to human rights groups. Amnesty International condemned in the strongest terms Salass execution, which it called a travesty of justice that is abhorrent and unconscionable." The Iranian judiciarys determination to execute Salas after rushing his trial and sentence despite serious allegations of torture betrays the legal systems core function of upholding justice, Human Rights Watch said. The Salas case centered on the deaths of three officers who were run over by a bus during battles between security forces and followers of one of Irans largest Sufi orders in Tehran in February. Salas's supporters have said he maintained his innocence but claimed he was tortured into a forced confession. Followers of the Nemattolah Gonabadi order, known as dervishes, were protesting the arrest of members of the sect. Some 300 dervishes were reportedly arrested following the violence. Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, is not illegal in Iran but rights groups accuse the Iranian government of harassment and discrimination against its followers. Nauert called on Iranian authorities to "release the hundreds of Sufis who remain imprisoned on account of their beliefs." "The Iranian people deserve rule of law, transparent and accountable governance, and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, not the callous impunity that continues to define the regime," she said. With reporting by AP The U.S. Senate has passed a major defense bill that would block the sale of U.S. F-35 fighter jets to Turkey unless it abandons a deal to buy S-400 missile-defense systems from Russia, drawing criticism from Ankara. The legislation, passed 85-to-10 late on June 18, also contains a provision to block President Donald Trump's deal with China to allow the telecommunications giant ZTE to stay in business despite violations of U.S. sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The two provisions targeting Turkey and ZTE are part of the massive National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes over $700 billion in defense spending on military programs and weapons. The House of Representatives has passed its own version of the bill, and the two measures must now be reconciled before a compromise measure can be passed and sent to Trump for his signature or veto. There have been bipartisan efforts in both the Senate and House to stop the sale of the most advanced U.S. fighter jet to Turkey, a NATO ally that has an increasingly strained relationship with Washington. Turkey is currently one of the partner countries in the F-35 program and had plans to buy about 100 of the stealth jets, which are manufactured by Lockheed Martin Corp. The Senate bill would prevent delivery of the jets unless Trump certifies that Turkey is not threatening NATO, purchasing defense equipment from Russia, or detaining U.S. citizens. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on June 19 that the Senate's passage of the bill was unfortunate and went against the spirit of strategic partnership. He said that Turkey has alternatives and that the bill would not make the country vulnerable. NATO officials have repeatedly warned Turkey that the Russian S-400 systems it agreed to buy in 2016 are not compatible with NATO defenses, but Turkey has largely dismissed those concerns and proceeded with the Russian deal. U.S. legislators in approving the provision also have cited concerns about Ankara's warming ties with Moscow under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his arrest of U.S. citizens and consulate staff as part of a purge of his opponents since an aborted coup against him in July 2016. The Senate defense bill's provision to kill Trump's agreement to allow ZTE to resume purchases from U.S. technology companies so that it can stay in business is not included in the House version of the bill, which has a narrower ban on the Defense Department using equipment or services from ZTE or fellow Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Republicans and Democrats expressed national security concerns about ZTE after it broke an agreement to discipline executives who had admitted to a conspiracy to evade U.S. sanctions by selling sensitive equipment to Iran and North Korea. Under the Trump deal, ZTE would have to pay another $1 billion in fines for its sanctions violations in exchange for the United States dropping an earlier ban on its purchases of equipment from U.S. suppliers, which the company contended would put it out of business. The move to block Trump's deal caused a plunge of almost 17 percent in ZTE's stock value in the first few minutes of trading on the Hong Kong stock exchange on June 19. The company's stock has fallen by about 60 percent as a result of the U.S. debate over its future. With reporting by dpa, AP, AFP, and Reuters MOSCOW -- The head of the Russian opposition party Yabloko's branch in Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, has been detained while protesting the government's plan to increase the pension age. An RFE/RL correspondent saw police detain Mitrokhin as he protested alone in front of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, on June 19. Police took him to a nearby precinct house. On June 16, the government submitted a bill to the Duma that proposes to raise the retirement age from 60 to 65 by 2028 for men and from 55 to 63 for women by 2034. The increases would be gradual and begin in 2019. The changes would shorten the retirement period for many people in Russia. President Vladimir Putin would have final say on the pension reform plan, which must be adopted by parliament before it goes to the president for signature or veto. More than 1.5 million people had signed a petition against the reform on the Change.org website by June 19. Tulum hotel facing criminal charges for defying federal closures Tulum, Q.R. A criminal report has been filed against a Tulum hotel for violating several closure notices placed by federal authorities. The Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (Profepa) has found that the owners of the Acuario hotel in the municipality of Tulum have violated the seals of closure for a third time. In March, the hotel was closed for not having an environmental impact permit to build within the Tulum National Park. Those seals were removed and construction, continued. Profepa officials verified that the owners of the Acuario hotel have again not complied with the closure seals placed by federal authorities. They say the hotel had been closed for not having environmental authorization granted by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat). They say the third visit to the hotel was made June 5, where they found the site had again removed the closure seals and continued with construction in an area of 669 square meters. The report from Profepa was handed over to the prosecutors office to be included in a legal criminal complaint that was filed March 13. Hotel Acuario in the Parque Nacional Tulum is located at kilometer 230 of the Cancun-Chetumal highway. Report: Army achieves great victories on battlefronts over 24 hours [18/June/2018] SANAA, June 18 (Saba) The Yemen army and poplar committees have achieved great victories by launching military offensive operations on Saudi troops in several battle fronts during the past 24 hours, according to military reports combined by Saba News Agency on Monday. In Yemens western coast, the army and committees destroyed over 44 of Saudi-paid mercenaries military vehicles, as well as the army and committees blockaded and cut off mercenaries reinforcement lines in Nukhailah, Faza and Jah. Also in Western coast, dozens of mercenaries were killed and hundreds wounded, evacuating them by the sea, while artillery shelling of the army and committees destroyed a military vehicle. In Jizan border province, a ballistic missile, Badr 1, was fired towards a new- camp. In Saudi border province of Asir, a missile, Zilzal-2, Katyusha rockets and artillery shells were fired toward gatherings of Saudi soldiers and their mercenaries, causing heavy casualties in Alb border crossing. In Najran border province, an infiltration attempt, which backed with air cover, towards ADhyaq area in front of Khadhra border crossing was repelled, killing and wounding dozens. Also in Asir, artillery and missile shells targeted hills, which the mercenaries stationed in, toward Adhyaq area, while missile bombing targeted Saudi soldiers gatherings in Sahn beyond Sudais, killing and wounding dozens. Furthermore, a Saudi soldier was shot dead in Sawh, a military vehicle was bombed by an explosive device in Boqea, killing all its crew. In Bayda province,the army and committees repelled an infiltration towards Natea front, killing and wounding dozens of the mercenaries. Also in Bayda, a military vehicle of the mercenaries was destroyed during repelling their infiltration. In Jawf province, a military vehicle of the mercenaries was destroyed by an explosive device in Mahamisha area of Kkub-Washaf district, killing all its crew. In Lahj province, artillery force of the army and committees targeted gatherings of Saudi-backed mercenaries in Karash district. In Nehm district, the army and mercenaries destroyed a BMB armored vehicle with a guided missile, killing and wounding of those on board. Written by Sameera Hassn Saba Researchers at Los Alamos and partners in France and Germany are exploring the enhanced potential of carbon nanotubes as single-photon emitters for quantum information processing. Their analysis of progress in the field is published in this week's edition of the journal Nature Materials. "We are particularly interested in advances in nanotube integration into photonic cavities for manipulating and optimizing light-emission properties," said Stephen Doorn, one of the authors, and a scientist with the Los Alamos National Laboratory site of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT). "In addition, nanotubes integrated into electroluminescent devices can provide greater control over timing of light emission and they can be feasibly integrated into photonic structures. We are highlighting the development and photophysical probing of carbon nanotube defect states as routes to room-temperature single photon emitters at telecom wavelengths." The team's overview was produced in collaboration with colleagues in Paris (Christophe Voisin) who are advancing the integration of nanotubes into photonic cavities for modifying their emission rates, and at Karlsruhe (Ralph Krupke) where they are integrating nanotube-based electroluminescent devices with photonic waveguide structures. The Los Alamos focus is the analysis of nanotube defects for pushing quantum emission to room temperature and telecom wavelengths, he said. As the paper notes, "With the advent of high-speed information networks, light has become the main worldwide information carrier. . . . Single-photon sources are a key building block for a variety of technologies, in secure quantum communications metrology or quantum computing schemes." The use of single-walled carbon nanotubes in this area has been a focus for the Los Alamos CINT team, where they developed the ability to chemically modify the nanotube structure to create deliberate defects, localizing excitons and controlling their release. Next steps, Doorn notes, involve integration of the nanotubes into photonic resonators, to provide increased source brightness and to generate indistinguishable photons. "We need to create single photons that are indistinguishable from one another, and that relies on our ability to functionalize tubes that are well-suited for device integration and to minimize environmental interactions with the defect sites," he said. "In addition to defining the state of the art, we wanted to highlight where the challenges are for future progress and lay out some of what may be the most promising future directions for moving forward in this area. Ultimately, we hope to draw more researchers into this field," Doorn said. The term alloy usually refers to a mixture of several metals. However, other materials can also be alloyed. In the semiconductor industry, for instance, oxide and nitride alloys have long been used successfully to tune the material's functional properties. Usually these changes occur gradually and the properties of the base materials are still easy to recognize. However, if compounds are mixed whose crystal structures do not match at all, "heterostructural alloys" are formed. In these alloys, the structure changes depending on the mixing ratio of the components. Sometimes, this yields surprising properties, which differ remarkably from those of the base materials. It is these very oxide alloys that Empa researcher Sebastian Siol is interested in. He not only wants to discover them, but make them usable for everyday life. In his quest to find the desired material, he has to keep an eye on several materials properties at once, such as the structure, the electronic properties -- and the long-term stability. Siol joined Empa last year. Previously, he conducted research at the National Renewable Energy Research Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, where he left behind a notable publication: alloys with "negative pressure." Together with his colleagues, he mixed manganese selenide and manganese telluride using a cold-steam technique (magnetron sputtering). At certain ratios, the base materials merged to form a crystal lattice that was "uncomfortable" for both components. Neither of the partners could force its favorite crystal structure, which it prefers in a pure state, upon the other. The resulting compromise was a new phase, which normally would only form at "negative pressure" -- i.e. when the material is permanently exposed to tension. These materials are extremely difficult to produce under normal conditions. Siol and his colleagues at NREL have managed to overcome this difficulty. The new material, now accessible thanks to this method, displays many useful properties. For instance, it is piezoelectric. In other words, it can be used to generate electricity, produce detectors -- or conduct semiconductor experiments, which would not have been possible with the pure base materials. Researching stable systems At Empa, Siol will bring his experience in making "impossible" oxide alloys to the table. He aims to discover oxide mixtures with a variable structure and thus stabilize them to such an extent that they become fit for everyday use. The Laboratory for Joining Technologies & Corrosion headed by Lars Jeurgens has plenty of experience in practical applications for stable oxide layers and alloys. The initial focus is on mixed oxides made of titanium and tungsten oxide, which could be of interest for window coatings, semiconductor technology or sensor technology. Siol's colleague Claudia Cancellieri has been researching the electronic properties of oxide interfaces for several years and contributes her expertise to the project. "The material combination is very exciting," explains Siol. Titanium oxides are extremely stable and used in solar cells, wall paints and toothpaste. Tungsten oxides, on the other hand, are comparatively unstable and are used for smart windows, gas sensors or as catalytic converters in petrochemistry. "In the past, research often focused solely on optimizing material properties," says Siol. "It is crucial, however, that the material can be used for several years in the respective field of application." For instance, this would be important for semiconductor coatings in electrochromic windows, which have to last for decades in aggressive environments, exposed to sunlight and temperature fluctuations. The Empa researchers are seeking this long-term stability. To produce these oxide phases Siol and his colleagues use different industrially scalable techniques: controlled oxidation of thin metal films in a tube furnace or electrolyte solution, as well as reactive sputtering, where the metals are oxidized directly during the deposition process. "Impossible" oxide alloys, the subject of fundamental research until now, are thus gradually becoming tangible for industrial applications. Even "modest" action to limit climate change could help prevent the most extreme water-shortage scenarios facing Asia by the year 2050, according to a new study led by MIT researchers. The study takes an inventive approach to modeling the effects of both climate change and economic growth on the world's most heavily populated continent. Roughly 60 percent of the global population lives in Asia, often with limited access to water: There is less than half the amount of freshwater available per inhabitant in Asia, compared to the global average. To examine the risk of water shortages on the continent, the researchers conducted detailed simulations of many plausible economic and climate pathways for Asia in the future, evaluating the relative effects of both pathways on water supply and demand. By studying cases in which economic change (or growth) continues but the climate remains unchanged -- and vice versa -- the scholars could better identify the extent to which these factors generate water shortages. The MIT-based team found that with no constraints on economic growth and climate change, an additional 200 million people across Asia would be vulnerable to severe water shortages by 2050. However, fighting climate change along the lines of the 2015 Paris Agreement would reduce by around 60 million the number of people facing severe water problems. But even with worldwide efforts to limit climate change, there is a 50 percent chance that around 100 million people in southern and eastern Asia will experience a 50 percent increase in "water stress" -- their inability to access safe water -- and a 10 percent chance that water shortages will double for those people. "We do find that a mitigation strategy can reduce the heightened risk of water stress in Asia," says Adam Schlosser, deputy director for science research at MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the findings. "But it doesn't solve it all." The paper, "The Impact of Climate Change Policy on the Risk of Water Stress in Southern and Eastern Asia," is being published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The authors are Xiang Gao, a Joint Program research scientist; Schlosser; Charles Fant, a former Joint Program postdoc and a researcher at Industrial Economics, Inc; and Kenneth Strzepek, a Joint Program research scientist and a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado. advertisement The research team also uses models that track municipal and industrial activities and their specific water-demand consequences across many smaller subregions in Asia. Irrigation tends to be a major driver of water consumption, leading to diminished access to water for other uses. Overall, the researchers conclude, through the mid-21st century, "socioeconomic growth contributes to an increase in water stress" across the whole region, but climate change can have "both positive and negative effects on water stress." The study turns up a notable amount of regional variation in the effects of climate change within Asia. Climate change by itself is likely to have a more adverse impact on water access in China than in India, for instance, where a warming climate could produce more rain. Apart from the most likely scenarios, another significant finding is that the potential for extreme water stress is associated with unabated climate change. As the authors state in the paper, "A modest greenhouse gas mitigation pathway eliminates the likelihood of ... extreme outcomes" in water access. But without any such climate measures, "both countries have a chance of experiencing extreme water shortages by midcentury," Gao says. The study is part of a series of papers the research team is producing to assess water risks across southern and eastern Asia, based on modeling that captures the natural and managed aspects of the water systems across the region. A 2016 paper by the group established that there was a significant risk of water shortages for about 1 billion people in Asia by 2050. The current paper focuses on the impact of climate change policy, and a future paper will analyze the implications of adaptation strategies. 'There are no easy options," Schlosser says, of the various ways of limiting climate change. "All of them carry associated costs, and our continued research is looking at the extent to which widespread adaptive and water-efficient measures can reduce risks and perhaps be cost-effective and more resilient." The study was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as the government, industry and foundation sponsors of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Indonesia and Malaysia together account for nearly 85% of global palm oil production. This oil is commonly used in processed foods, cosmetics and biofuels, and while it is inexpensive, the environmental and social costs are high. Each year, thousands of hectares of rainforest disappear in order to meet the growing demand for the oil worldwide. In 2012, Indonesia had the highest deforestation rate in the world, according to a study published in 2014 in Nature Climate Change. Thomas Guillaume, a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL's Ecological Systems Laboratory (ECOS) and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), is the lead author of a synthesis study on the environmental impact of oil palm cultivation in Indonesia. The article, which was published on 19 June in Nature Communications, analyzed the carbon costs and benefits of converting rainforests into oil palm plantations. Drawing on more than two years' worth of data collected by the University of Gottingen on the soil and vegetation in central Sumatra, the researcher compared the impact of oil palm monoculture with that of intensive and extensive rubber cultivation practices. Converting rainforest land into oil palm plantations leads to the most important carbon emissions: one hectare of converted land equates to a loss of 174 tons of carbon, and most of this carbon will find its way into the air as CO2. "The quantity of carbon released when just one hectare of forest is cleared to grow oil palms is roughly equivalent to the amount of carbon produced by 530 people flying from Geneva to New York in economy class," says the researcher. Higher than the IPCC's figure This loss estimate is higher than the figure published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to quantify the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by oil palm farming; it is also higher than the figure used by sustainable palm oil certification bodies. The study also shows that carbon loss in the soil must not be overlooked as it is currently happening with the present methodologies when plantations are established on non-peatland. Intensive rubber farming, on the other hand, is associated with a loss of 159 tons of carbon, while extensive rubber production corresponds to 116 tons. This difference between oil palms and rubber plants owes largely to the shorter plantation rotation time of oil palms. However, oil palm farming is more efficient than intensive and extensive rubber farming in terms of the number of tons of biomass produced annually versus the resulting loss of carbon. In other words, more can be produced on a smaller area of land. But this positive finding should not obscure the downsides. Following the harvest, the amount of biomass that returns to the soil to feed living organisms in the ground can be 90% lower than in a rainforest. This is because almost no natural "litter" -- dead leaves and wood -- goes back into the ground, as the soil on oil palm plantations is constantly being cleared and treated with pesticides to make the farmers' work easier. As a result, large amounts of fertilizers are needed to make up for the loss of fertility in the soil and the decrease in its biological activity. "The quantity of biomass that humans take away in order to produce palm oil compared to the quantity left for the ecosystem sheds real doubt on the sustainability of this form of farming," says Guillaume, who also compared microorganism activity in cultivated fields and in the rainforest. Short- and long-term solutions This study also offers some practical advice on reducing the short-term environmental impact of both rubber tree and oil palm monocultures. For one, deforestation should be done only if the wood that is felled can then be used -- such as for construction purposes -- without being burned. In addition, a more abundant layer of vegetation should be left on the ground as a natural fertilizer. Finally, the waste from palm oil mills should be returned to the soil as another form of fertilizer. For a longer-term approach, Guillaume points to the OPAL project (Oil Palm Adaptive Landscapes), which is being funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The group led by Professor Alexandre Buttler, the director of EPFL's ECOS lab, is studying the carbon footprint of oil palm plantations that do not entail deforestation: they are looking at plantations set up in grassland plains or in the savanna in Colombia, and at intercropped plantations in Cameroon. These efforts are aimed at minimizing the need to clear natural land for agriculture. On June 6, 2018, the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware entered a final judgment against Richard A. Bailey, a former officer of GH3 International, Inc., for his role in a scheme to manipulate the company's stock. The judgment orders Bailey to pay disgorgement of $108,000, prejudgment interest of $63,445.91, and a civil penalty of $108,000. The SEC's complaint alleged that Bailey and several co-defendants participated in a pump-and-dump scheme involving GH3's common stock that generated more than $700,000 of illicit profits. Without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations, Bailey previously consented to a judgment entered on January 23, 2018 that permanently enjoined him from violating Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder and Sections 5 and 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933; barred him from participating in any offering of a penny stock; barred him from serving as an officer or a director of a public company; and reserved issues relating to monetary relief for subsequent determination. The final judgment concludes the SEC's litigation as to Bailey. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Delaware; the Delaware State Police; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and the Internal Revenue Service. For further information, see Litigation Release Nos. 21053 (May 21, 2009), 21463 (March 29, 2010), 22256 (Feb. 10, 2012), 22421 (July 25, 2012), 22626 (Feb. 27, 2013), 23348 (Sept. 15, 2015), 23350 (Sept. 16, 2015), 23412 (Nov. 23, 2015), 23563 (June 9, 2016), and 24036 (January 30, 2018). On June 19, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a Dallas-based oil-and-gas company and its chief executive officer in connection with a series of allegedly fraudulent unregistered oil-and-gas securities offerings that raised millions of dollars from investors. In its complaint, the SEC alleges that Jefferey Gordon and Texas Coastal Energy Company, LLC (TCEC) cold-called investors across the country, soliciting their interest in financing the drilling and completion of oil-and-gas prospects in Kansas and Texas in exchange for a share of future oil-and-gas production revenue. According to the complaint, Gordon and TCEC used a combination of false and misleading offering materials and sales pitches to deceive investors. Among other things, Gordon and TCEC lied to investors about TCEC's experience and track record, the advice and success rate of its geologists, the potential reserves on its prospects, the potential return on investments therein, and the manner in which TCEC would use investor funds. Ultimately, Gordon and TCEC raised more than $8 million from at least 80 investor victims. While investors lost almost every dollar invested, TCEC and Gordon misappropriated over $2.6 million of investor funds for their own use. The SEC's office of Investor Education and Advocacy has issued an Investor Alert describing 10 red flags that an unregistered offering may be a scam, many of which were present here. The SEC's complaint charges TCEC and Gordon with violations of Sections 5(a), 5(c), and 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 also charged Gordon with violating Section 15(a) of the Exchange Act based on his alleged role as an unregistered broker. Without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations, TCEC and Gordon consented to the entry of a final judgment that permanently restrains and enjoins them from violating these provisions. TCEC and Gordon also agreed to be restrained and enjoined from certain activities in connection with the purchase, offer and sale of securities in the future. Additionally, TCEC and Gordon will be ordered to pay disgorgement, prejudgment interest and civil penalties totaling $7.2 million. Finally, Gordon has offered to consent to associational and penny stock bars. The SEC's investigation was conducted by Christopher Reynolds and Melvin Warren, with assistance from Joseph Dugan and Janie Frank, and supervised by Scott F. Mascianica, David Reece and Eric R. Werner. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that Web Light has no impact on your search rankings in Google. It is just a way for Google to display your content to those with slow devices, after they click from the Google search results to your web site. It has no impact on ranking in Google. Web Light doesn't change rankings, it's purely a way of making your content more accessible to folks with lower-end devices & connections. You can check the impressions & clicks for it in Search Console now if you want to decide based on that :) John .o()o. (@JohnMu) June 15, 2018 I get why some people think it is a page speed issue or maybe related to AMP and the carousel, but it is not. It is not new, we covered it ages ago and now it is for the first time visible as a filter in Google Search Console. You have very little control if your pages are going to be served over web light or not. You can opt out of it, but outside of that, you cannot push people easily from Google search to your web light pages - nor would you want to. If you wanted to push them to something like it, you'd likely opt for AMP pages over web light. So don't worry about web light and Google rankings. Forum discussion at Twitter. he owner of a San Francisco herb shop faces multiple felony charges after prosecutors say he funneled prescription and banned drugs through his Chinatown store. The charges against 67-year-old Vi Thieu Binh are the result of an investigation that spanned over three years, and a search warrant that allegedly uncovered hundreds of products that were prescription-only, contaminated, counterfeit, mislabeled or barred by the Federal Drug Administration, according to the San Francisco district attorneys office. Binhs store, Hue An Co., was flagged by the FDAs Office of Criminal Investigations following a broader probe into Anti Rheuma capsules. The anti-inflammatory drugs are intended to treat rheumatoid arthritis symptoms, but the ingredients were removed from the U.S. market after the FDA deemed them unsafe or ineffective. The investigation stemmed from an incident in November 2014, when a 73-year-old man was hospitalized after ingesting Anti Rheuma capsules. Prosecutors said the man purchased the pills from an unlicensed seller in Oakland. As part of this investigation, FDA officials received information that Hue An Co. was also a potential seller of the capsules. Regulations on who can sell prescription drugs exist to protect consumers, District Attorney George Gascon said in a statement. In this case, someone became seriously ill as a result of acquiring drugs from an unlicensed seller. Special agents executed a search warrant at Binhs store in January and seized nearly 600 products that were either illicit or prescription only, according to the district attorneys office. Officials said Binh sold these types of drugs on multiple occasions between December 2016 and October 2017. 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. Gascon urged consumers to contact the Food and Drug Branch of the California Department of Public Health if they suspect a retailer is unlawfully selling prescription drugs. Officials said consumers can spot an illegal retailer if the seller does not require a prescription from a doctor before completing the sale or fails to display a license to dispense prescription drugs. Megan Cassidy is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganrcassidy It can be as simple as guiding someone to a toilet instead of a urinal, or pausing to consider which pronoun to use when addressing a dementia patient or the persons partner. Growing awareness of gender identities and sexual orientations is prompting policy changes in law enforcement, medical care and the military. Now, in the Bay Area, advocates hope it will also change how professional caregivers for the elderly interact with LGBT seniors, particularly those with dementia. The city of San Francisco, through its Department of Aging and Adult Services, is funding a $400,000 effort to train hundreds of workers at companies and public agencies on how to better communicate with aging LGBT adults. Primarily aimed at home care aides and staffers at senior centers, it is also offered to organizations that interact with seniors regularly, like Meals on Wheels and public transit employees. About 12 percent of seniors age 60 and above in San Francisco roughly 19,200 people identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, according to estimates from the citys Human Services Agency. The demographic faces challenges specific to its generation and gender identity and sexual orientation, aging policy experts say. LGBT seniors are more likely to live alone, and only 15 percent have children, often the de facto caregivers for aging adults; and many worry that disclosing their sexual orientation or gender identity to caregivers or peers in a care facility may lead to discrimination, said Edie Yau of the Alzheimers Association of Northern California, which is leading the training with Openhouse, the San Francisco advocacy group for LGBT seniors. Some who have dementia regress to a previous period in their life, before they came out or transitioned, making conversations with family and care aides confusing and frustrating. It was very eye-opening, said Arnel Valle, who coordinates activities for seniors at On Lok Lifeways, a San Francisco long-term care provider for the elderly with four locations in the city and three elsewhere in the Bay Area. Valle is one of several On Lok employees who have taken the LGBT dementia training in recent months. Valle says the workshop made him more aware of the trauma LGBT seniors in his care may have endured earlier in their lives. It brought me back to San Francisco in the 80s and 90s, Valle said. They survived the AIDS crisis; they survived alienation from family, being legally fired because there were no (workplace antidiscrimination) protections, housing discrimination. Valle recently began leaving out copies of the Bay Area Reporter, a free newspaper for the LGBT community, at the senior center, alongside copies of other free publications like Chinese and Korean language newspapers and SF Weekly. Yau, of the Alzheimers Association, advises caregivers to be careful about the language they use. 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. Today the younger generation has reclaimed the word queer, but if youre talking to an 80-year-old, they may not be accepting of that word, given it was pejorative for them, Yau said. Many of us steer away from using homosexual, but some older people grew up referring to themselves as such. Often, listening to a client and how they refer to themselves is really important. On July 1, a new state law will take effect requiring programs funded by some state health and aging agencies like CalFresh and some Meals on Wheels programs to collect data on the gender identity and sexual orientation of people who use their services. Its voluntary to disclose such information, which is collected along with other demographic information. The data are aggregated and anonymized, and are used to help identify gaps in care for aging LGBT adults in the health and social services system. There are limited data on whether LGBT seniors face greater risk of developing cognitive impairment and dementia than seniors in the general population. But early research indicates they may in part due to stressors earlier in their life, like alienation from family and friends and discrimination at work, school or housing. They are an age group that was traditionally more conservative, said Jason Flatt, a UCSF assistant professor who researches health and aging in the LGBT population. There is a fear of having to go back into the closet or not being able to express yourself openly, or worrying there will be negative consequences. ... There is a fear of, Will I be able to be myself? Will they treat me with respect? Catherine Ho is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: cho@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Cat_Ho Apps such as Uber, Pokemon Go and Snapchat can pinpoint where users are down to the side of a block. But 911 dispatchers have to rely on distant cell towers, sometimes-faulty GPS and the caller who is likely in distress to figure out where calls are coming from. In an effort to thrust 911 call centers into the 21st century, Apple announced Monday that the next major update to iPhone software will allow users in the U.S. to automatically share location data with emergency responders. Software and a data clearinghouse built by New York startup RapidSOS will let 911 centers receive callers locations. San Francisco call centers started testing RapidSOS technology on Monday. If it works as promised, Teresa Burns, a 911 telecommunications manager for the city, said the technology could save dispatchers crucial moments when deploying resources to an emergency. Eighty percent of 911 calls nationwide are made on cell phones. Right now, we get wireless location information, and its not always the most accurate, Burns said. Wireless companies like AT&T and Verizon transmit the location of the cell tower closest to a caller with 911 calls, but that often isnt enough to go on, especially in a dense city like San Francisco. Obviously other businesses outside of the (911) industry are using far more advanced technology to get locations. Apples CEO Tim Cook, who announced the new feature at a National Emergency Number Association conference in Nashville on Monday, said the company believes 911 centers should have the best available technology at their disposal. The software update for iPhone users will be available later this year, and RapidSOS says it expects to integrate with the majority of 911 centers by the end of 2018. Apple said user data cannot be used for any nonemergency purpose, and only the responding 911 center will have access to the users location during an emergency call. Federal regulators estimate that saving a minute off emergency response times could save as many 10,000 lives a year. San Francisco has until very recently struggled with a more prosaic problem: getting the phone answered by a dispatcher promptly. Due to a significant increase in emergency and nonemergency calls since 2011, as well as staff shortages, San Francisco frequently failed to meet the national standard of responding to 90 percent of calls in under 10 seconds. In fiscal years 2016 and 2017, only 74 percent of all calls were answered in 10 seconds. The city has since increased its hiring , and says it is improving call responses ; since November, the rate has hovered around the 90 percent benchmark. Answering the 911 call is different than receiving the location, said Paul Troxel, president of CalNena, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of California emergency dispatchers. There is no one simple answer. ... There are a ton of variables to get a dispatch center to handle calls within a certain threshold. Among those variables: time of day, staffing levels and the type of calls that are being answered. Still, time saved on one call helps speed a dispatcher to the next. Eric Gornitsky, dispatch operations supervisor of San Franciscos Department of Emergency Management, said location technology can make the citys 911 call centers more efficient. San Franciscos call center will test a version of the system before committing to updating its software, Gornitsky said. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes With the test system, if a caller cannot articulate where they are, the dispatcher can log their cell phone number into the system and get their location. Gornitsky said the number of people who cant give a location is relatively small. They are often tourists who are unfamiliar with the city or people who cannot speak English and require an interpreter service. We are eager to look at anything that is going to help us in that small percentage, Gornitsky said. In the Bay Area, emergency departments in San Ramon and Solano County and at the University of California at Berkeley also use RapidSOS. A company spokeswoman says that its deployed in less than half of the United States. Apple isnt the only smartphone maker attempting to modernize the 911 system. In February, Google, which makes the software that runs Android phones, conducted a trial with RapidSOS and West Corp., another company that counts 911 centers as customers. According to RapidSOS, location data in more than 80 percent of the 911 calls made using the technology were more accurate than the carrier data in the first 30 seconds of the call. Its hard to describe how intense it is at the call centers, said Michael Martin, CEO of RapidSOS. It is extraordinary the work that 911 does. This tech is really a product of this whole industry coming together in a way that hasnt been done before. If you own a Tesla and use its self-steering Autopilot feature, the company still wants you to keep your hands on the wheel. So, it turns out, does the federal government. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Tuesday ordered a company not affiliated with Tesla to stop selling Autopilot Buddy, a device designed to trick Autopilot into thinking a humans hands are touching the steering wheel. Autopilot issues visual and audible reminders if it does not detect the pressure of the drivers hands on the wheel. The palm-sized Autopilot Buddy, which sells for $199, uses magnets to attach itself to the wheel, fooling the system so it doesnt issue what the products website calls nagging reminders. The website also adds, in smaller print, that the product is not intended for street use. A product intended to circumvent motor vehicle safety and driver attentiveness is unacceptable, said NHTSA Deputy Administrator Heidi King, in a press release. The administration sent the products maker Dolder, Falco, and Reese Partners of Valencia (Los Angeles County) a cease and desist letter saying the company must immediately stop marketing and selling the product in the United States. The company must reply to the administration by June 29, verifying that it had complied with the order. The Autopilot Buddy website on Tuesday included a notice saying it would only accept international orders. We are not taking orders inside the U.S.A. at this time, the site reads. We are hopeful to resolve this by as quickly as possible. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes A Tesla representative said the Palo Alto company supported the administrations action. Autopilot has received increased scrutiny since a Tesla Model X functioning on Autopilot struck a concrete freeway barrier in Mountain View in March, killing its driver. According to federal investigators and Tesla, the drivers hands were not on the wheel at the time of the crash. David R. Baker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DavidBakerSF As a stream of people walked through a recruiting event at the Oakland Marriott City Center on a recent morning, a woman stopped at a table advertising a federal agency that calls itself a startup. She looked confused. Welcome! a recruiter said, as the young woman peered at the agencys information card. Have you heard of us before? No, she answered. Zero name recognition and a tough time recruiting? The United States Digital Service just might be a startup after all. The agency, which President Barack Obama once called a SWAT team for technology and charged with updating government websites following the rocky launch of HealthCare.gov, has other problems today. Recruiting from Silicon Valley was tough enough when it meant convincing talent to leave behind playful offices and high salaries. Now, Matt Cutts, the agencys acting administrator, has to persuade candidates to sign on to an administration led by a man many of them didnt vote for. But now, well into the second year of the Trump administration, Cutts has a message: The United States Digital Service is doing just fine. And, yes, it can still get the important work of modernizing government done. Im happy to say that after a year and a half, were still working on things that matter, were still hiring, and were still here, Cutts, the former head of search quality at Google, said at a Code for America conference last month in Oakland, where he spoke excitedly about digitizing federal forms and handed out his business cards from a crumpled ziplock bag. In a notoriously chaotic and understaffed administration, Cutts says, the digital service has quietly endured. Thats largely because, he said, veterans still need easy access to their benefits online, taxes need to be secure, student loans need to be easy to repay and immigration forms need to get digitized. Meanwhile, there are signs of what some might characterize as resistance at the service. On LinkedIn and Twitter, the USDS logo bears the rainbow stripes of LGBT Pride Month, one of the few federal government acknowledgments of the summer celebration. USDS and a similar organization called 18F that is part of the General Services Administration were the results of a web of social hyperlinks built between Washington and Silicon Valley during the Obama administration: Software engineers brought in for tours of duty brought fresh thinking and the newest technologies to D.C. , and they returned with knowledge of government processes and connections inside the Beltway. After President Trump was elected, some decided to leave or end their contracts. The agency was placed under a hiring freeze and couldnt replace those who departed. A few months into the administration, the White House unveiled a new Office of American Innovation that seemed like it might overshadow or take the place of the existing agencies. Even though the new office which has been closely associated with White House adviser Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law has no significant accomplishments to its name, the USDS and 18F have gotten little mention under Trump. When Mikey Dickerson was the agencys administrator, he said he met with President Barack Obama at least once every three months. Cutts said he has yet to directly meet with Trump but meets frequently with officials from the Office of American Innovation. After the hiring freeze was lifted, the service got back to 170 employees, which is about the same number it had under Obama. And, as proof of their productivity, Cutts points to their list of accomplishments: making it easier for veterans to access their health and education benefits online and a digitized application for U.S. citizenship. The agency frequents recruitment events and conferences like the one in Oakland in an attempt to raise its profile and attract new talent. Like a startup, its mostly selling people on the mission in this case, getting government apps and websites into the 21st century. Product Manager Julie Meloni, who has a USDS logo tattooed on her arm, said shell be the first to tell you that the job isnt glamorous. There is no analogy in the private sector to the type of work that we do, she said. We actually have a sticker that says This job is weird. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes And demanding, she said. When we bring people in, we are looking for people who have a breadth and a depth of knowledge to basically handle anything, but are also able to step back and do the traditional tactical work, but also ramp up and talk to cabinet secretaries at any given time. Laura Lanford, who works for San Francisco health care data startup Nuna, said shes been tempted by the idea of serving a tour at the digital service, in part because the tech it builds has a lasting impact. There are so many logistical challenges that are independent from ideology, she said. Lanford has seen the service at recruitment events before, and is plotting when the best time for her to make the jump is. But for now, shes admiring their work from afar. Unlike many at the conference, she knew what the USDS is. I love that you guys exist, she said, leaning against the table. At some point, Ill feel like its my time. Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani Generations of Strength is an apt theme for this years 48th annual San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Parade, which has gained strength over the generations as one of the citys most important cultural events and has morphed into a celebration shared by the young and the not-so-young, the straight and the not-so-straight. In our uncertain political climate, the massive parade which begins downtown roughly at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, June 24 will be an opportunity for everyone to just have fun and be themselves, even as we are mindful of the present and the past, and the things that bind us all. SALIDA, Colo. We were warned. On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasnt approaching it already had arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was the opening salvo of the age of climate change. Thirty years later, its clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small some obvious, others less conspicuous. Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage. Over 30 years the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations the worlds annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more nearly 1.6 degrees. The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that were no longer thinking just about the future, said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University. Climate change is here, its now, and its hitting us hard from all sides. Warming hasnt been just global, its been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined. South central Colorado, the climate division just outside Salida, has warmed 2.3 degrees on average since 1988, among the warmest divisions in the contiguous United States. When she was a little girl 30 years ago, winery marketing chief Jessica Shook used to cross country ski from her Salida doorstep in winter. It was that cold and there was that much snow. Now, she has to drive about 50 miles for snow thats not on mountain tops, she said. T-shirt weather in January, that never used to happen when I was a child, Shook said. When Buel Mattix bought his heating and cooling system company 15 years ago in Salida, he had maybe four air conditioning jobs a year. Now hes got a waiting list of 10 to 15 air conditioning jobs long and may not get to all of them. And then theres the effect on wildfires, which now consume more than twice the acreage in the United States than they did 30 years ago. The AP interviewed more than 50 scientists who confirmed the depth and spread of warming. Since the 1800s scientists have demonstrated that certain gases in Earths atmosphere trap heat from the sun like a blanket. Human activities such as burning of coal, oil and gasoline are releasing more of those gases into the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. U.S. and international science reports say more than 90 percent of the warming that has happened since 1950 is man-made. Overall, NASA satellites have shown three inches of sea level rise in just the past 25 years. With more than 70 percent of the Earth covered by oceans, a 3-inch increase means about 6,500 cubic miles of extra water. Thats enough to cover the entire United States with water about 9 feet deep. Its a fitting metaphor for climate change, say scientists: Were in deep, and getting deeper. Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance, NOAAs Arndt said. The train is in our living room now. Seth Borenstein and Nicky Forster are Associated Press writers. SACRAMENTO A state lawmaker is asking Gov. Jerry Brown to recall California National Guard troops from the southern border over what he called the cruel, immoral and potentially illegal policy of the Trump administration that separates immigrant children from their parents. State Sen. Kevin de Leon, who is trying to unseat fellow Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein in the November election, said California should follow the steps of Republican governors in Maryland and Massachusetts and Democratic governors in Virginia and North Carolina who have already pulled their troops because of the policy. Together, those states had sent or committed a dozen service members and three helicopters to the border with Mexico. Nearly 2,000 children have been taken from their parents at the border over the past six weeks, according to figures from the Department of Homeland Security that were obtained by the Associated Press. This is a shameful chapter in American history and California should have no part in it directly or indirectly imposing irreparable trauma on thousands of vulnerable young children, de Leon, D-Los Angeles, wrote to Brown in a letter made public Tuesday. We should not be complicit in this administrations use of children as political leverage designed to advance an immigration agenda driven by racial animus. De Leon is the author of the SB54 sanctuary law minimizing local law enforcements cooperation with federal immigration agents. That law is the target of a Trump administration lawsuit. Brown agreed in April to send 400 Guard troops to the border at President Trumps request, but stipulated that the service members could not enforce immigration laws and instead would beef up state efforts at the border targeting gangs, smuggling and trafficking. Because of the limited scope of the mission, Browns office said there were no plans as of Tuesday to recall the troops. 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. Well continue to assess and review this just as we have since personnel were originally mobilized back in April, Brown spokesman Evan Westrup said. In January, Brown said he does not support breaking up migrant families, calling it callous and very insensitive. Westrup said that is still the governors position. Trump asked states to send their National Guard troops to the border to stop migrants fleeing Central America from crossing into the country. Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez To most San Franciscans, its just Glide the iconic institution at Ellis and Taylor streets in the Tenderloin that feeds the hungry, cares for the sick and hosts some of the most rollicking, joyful church services in the city. But technically, the name is Glide Memorial United Methodist Church. And its the middle part of the name that led to unforeseen heartache over the weekend and could result in a split from the national United Methodist Church altogether. On Saturday night, Kaye Foster, the chair of Glides board of trustees, received an email with startling news. Minerva Carcano, the bishop overseeing United Methodist churches in California and Nevada, will remove Glides two associate pastors on July 1, with no immediate plans to replace them. Shell send the Rev. Theon Johnson III to Downs Memorial United Methodist Church in Oakland and the Rev. Angela Brown to serve as a minister of community engagement, advocacy and justice in Carcanos administration. That leaves Glide with no reverend to lead church services and without the church hierarchys permission to find one. Please know that Bishop Carcano does not intend to appoint any pastoral leadership to Glide until we can get to a better place organizationally with the church and the foundation, the Rev. Staci Current, a district superintendent for the church and one of Carcanos deputies, wrote in the email to Foster. You are not free to hire any pastor(s) to assume leadership over the church. It continues to be our hope for Glide to have an effective foundation to provide for the needs of the community, Current wrote. It is also of the utmost importance to have a vital, functioning United Methodist Church. Glide has already weathered a tumultuous few months. The Rev. Jay Williams left the church pastor position in April after less than a year. He had succeeded the Rev. Cecil Williams, the 88-year-old force behind Glide, who retired but remains active in the church. The two men are not related. That left Johnson and Brown to take turns preaching, but now theyll be gone, too. Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle 2015 Currents email to Foster did not explain what the bishop believes isnt functioning at Glide, and the bishops spokesman on Monday said there would be no comment at this time. But Glides leadership is pretty sure they know. In short: too much emphasis on social services and not enough on church. They believe that the influence of the church is whats really missing, Foster said. Our focus is on saving lives and not saving souls. Thats been the mission of Glide for more than a half-century. The church was the creation of Lizzie Glide, a Methodist philanthropist who bought the plot of land in 1929 and opened the church two years later. In 1963, the Methodist Church made a move of a different sort: It sent the Rev. Cecil Williams, a native of Texas, to San Francisco to lead the tiny, struggling congregation. He quickly turned it into a thriving, super-liberal, super-inclusive church where everybody from prostitutes to drug addicts to high society and Hollywood stars was welcome. He removed the cross, altar and hymnals from the church and helped create the famous choir and band. He presided over same-sex weddings decades before they were legal. Meanwhile, the churchs foundation blossomed. It serves more than 700,000 meals every year and runs programs for the homeless, people living with HIV, abused women and others. Apparently, Glides unique approach hasnt jibed with the more conservative, traditional style of Bishop Carcano. Glides leadership believes the move reflects the wider crisis within the United Methodist Church of whether to remain one entity or to split, with one of the primary dividing lines being whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry in the church and whether gays and lesbians should be ordained. We believe that schism is reflective in the way things are playing out here at Glide, said Karen Hanrahan, CEO of Glide. This bishop brings a much more conservative philosophy and approach that is inconsistent with Glides more progressive and radically inclusive values. Current announced the changes during church service at Glide on Sunday morning. And it didnt go well. As shown in videos posted on Facebook, members of the congregation booed and shouted, Oh my God! and Wheres the bishop? Shes too coward to come here! I have shared my announcement with you, Current continued. Im sorry that you have responded in this way. Johnson, the associate pastor being reassigned to Oakland, tried to quiet the crowd by talking about how sunsets are proof that even an ending can be beautiful, too and how sunsets are accompanied by sunrises. But the crowd wasnt having it. We dont care about sunrises! one person shouted. 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. Cecil Williams was sitting in a wheelchair at the front and tried to talk to the congregation, but his voice is too quiet to be heard on the video. Poet Janice Mirikitani, Williams wife and co-founder of the modern-day Glide, then rose to speak, and there was no trouble hearing her. She recalled that when she and her husband took over the church, some members left, but thousands more walked in. Weve been hit by trains before, but guess what? she said. We have a choice to get off the damn track and take control of our lives, take control of this church. Finally, the crowd was on board with a speaker, standing and clapping. The church is not a denomination, she continued. The church is the people. And thats where this train appears to be headed. Asked whether Glide might split from the United Methodist Church, Hanrahan said, Were not talking about that at this point. But Foster said the boards main responsibility is to ensure the stability of Glide not just its church, but its social services, too. We would have to consider that as an option, she said of severing ties with the United Methodist Church. Our services for so many people in this city are a safety net, and for many others, its the hope that they have one place they can come and truly be unconditionally heard, represented and served. At the end of the day, that is what we stand for, she said. Weve stood for that for decades. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf As of Friday, it is again legal in California for doctors to help their terminally ill patients to die. The controversial 2015 legalization of medical aid in dying was in effect for almost two years before it was ruled unconstitutional on May 25 by Riverside County Superior Court Judge Daniel A. Ottolia. Fridays reinstatement of the law, while the appeals process plays out, is another twist in the increasingly dramatic fight that goes to the core of what Californians want when it comes to choices at the end of life. The End of Life Option Act went into effect two years ago on the heels of an emotional campaign highlighting the life and death of Brittany Maynard, a young woman dying of brain cancer. Suddenly it was legal for doctors to provide life-ending medications to certain terminally ill patients who requested them. This new option initially struck many of us physicians as anathema to our professional ethic. But it is hard to argue with a law that 65 percent of Californians support. And so many institutions and physicians proceeded urgently to develop processes and infrastructure to care for patients requesting this option, whether that meant full compliance with the act or opting out. This recent legal back and forth is an opportunity for our state to further clarify what services should be provided to patients approaching the ends of their lives. I am a physician who practices palliative care in a public hospital in Oakland. Along with many of my colleagues, I was struck by the contrast between the public outcry for access to medical aid in dying and the collective shrug when it comes to access to hospice and palliative care. Palliative care is a relatively new medical sub-specialty focused on mitigating the suffering that so often accompanies serious illness, particularly at the end of life physical symptoms as well as emotional burdens and spiritual challenges. It also works to restore the autonomy and dignity that is often lost in our default interventionalist approach. At the core of palliative care lies the principle that patients must be treated as whole and complex beings, with unique preferences and goals to be elicited through honest and skillful communication. And yet this type of care is still woefully underused in our health care system. Only a fraction of the people who would benefit from it actually receive it. Or even know about it. And yet it is shown to be immensely effective at mitigating the suffering that can occur at the end of life. Data from Oregon where aid in dying has been legal for more than 20 years indicate that for every 200 people considering the option, only one actually ingested the lethal medications. About half changed their minds after receiving better symptom management, more support for quality of life, and attention to their concerns. To me, this demonstrates that the real need being expressed is not so much about wanting to die as it is about being supported to live life well. Whether or not this law is ultimately reinstated permanently, we need to make sure that we are providing every citizen with an assurance that she will be treated with respect and compassion as she approaches the end of her life. Very few people will ever end their lives with medications provided by a physician. But almost everyone will one day benefit from aggressive pain and symptom management, compassionate attention to concerns, and support for their loved ones. We need to make it a state, indeed a national, priority to get people the medical services that will enable them to thrive during this vulnerable time. And that is hospice and palliative care. Where is the outcry? Dr. Jessica Nutik Zitter practices ICU and palliative care at the county hospital in Oakland. She is the author of Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life (Avery, 2017). Cuidado vatos! Quixote is on the loose. That crazy old man only hes not crazy, just demented. More than that inspired, heartbreaking and very funny. The new Quixote, Quixote Nuevo by Octavio Solis, in its world premiere at Cal Shakes, transforms the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes into a moving, contemporary parable that reaches beyond just our times. Veteran actor Emilio Delgado carries the soul of the production as Quijano, a retired literature professor living in the Texas border town of La Mancha, who transforms himself into Don Quixote. He calls himself an out-of-print scholar who observes, The world makes you do your worst. Delgado is best known as Luis the Fix-it Shop owner on Sesame Street. He worked on the show from 1971 until 2016, when his contract was not renewed. Only an actor with the gravitas of Delgado could make this work. Solis brilliant stroke in reimaging the work casts Quijano as a cranky elder whose visions may or may not be dementia. Hes cared for by his sister, Magdalena (Michele Aprina Leavy), and her daughter, Antonia (Gianna DiGregorio Rivera), but they often cannot control him. He has increasingly violent reactions to his visions, which take the forms of Day of the Dead calacas. When Magadelena tries to put Quijano in an assisted-living facility, he escapes. While on the run, he becomes the modern-day Quixote, righting wrongs where he finds them. He conscripts his neighbor, the local ice cream man, to become his Sancho Panza. Its a brilliant turn by Juan Amador as part of the lively, versatile eight-person ensemble, which includes fine performances in multiple roles from all, particularly Carlos Aguirre, Amy Lizardo, Sol Castillo and Hugo E. Carbajal. Cervantes novel, published in two volumes in 1605 and 1615, ranks as one of the most influential works of literature of all time. Adaptations, references and homages in the work of writers who followed Cervantes are legion. Solis first worked with the material in 2009, for a period-based commission from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I saw that typically lush OSF production, which honored Cervantes often overlooked comic vision in a respectful adaptation. Solis modernized the piece for a Shakespeare Dallas version, but here he has truly made it his own. Its revelatory how seamlessly Solis integrates up-to-the-minute issues of our border with Mexico into the various episodes from Cervantes novel. The potential wall between the two countries looms as a specter throughout the production, while Quixote and Sancho see firsthand the often tragic consequences for those trying to cross over through the stretches of harsh, unforgiving desert lands. Solis also makes Quixotes search for lost love Dulcinea (Sarita Ocon) a moving, melancholy coda. Director KJ Sanchez skillfully guides the rich production, alternating anarchic pageantry with nuanced pathos. The clever, evocative Tejano music and songs are composed by music director and sound designer David R Molina and music director Eduardo Robledo. Quixote Nuevo presents Cervantes through a prism of contemporary Chicano culture thats also the prism of all our lives. Its the anxiety of anyone dealing with putting a relative into an assisted living facility. Its also the deep ache of regret in love lost. Quixote rides low and slow, triumphant in his dreams. Marcus Crowder is a Northern California-based arts writer and critic. Democrats criticizing the Trump administrations separation of migrant children from their parents at the southern border are trying to reap a political windfall over the issue particularly in California races where Republicans have sought to put the party on the defensive over sanctuary laws. While Republicans scold Democrats for politicizing the issue, theyre teetering between supporting President Trump and appealing to their constituents who are offended by the news coming from the border. A CBS News poll released Monday found that 67 percent of adults surveyed including 66 percent of independent voters found it unacceptable to separate children from parents who have been apprehended trying to enter the country illegally. The same survey reported that approval of Trumps policies on immigration had dropped from 40 percent in May to 35 percent this month. This has the potential to get a lot of new people involved people who dont necessarily get involved in the daily back and forth of political stuff, said Karthik Ganapathy, rapid response director for the liberal activist hub MoveOn. The group announced plans for marches on June 30 in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere to draw attention to the issue. People see this as different because it involves kids taken from their parents, Ganapathy said. You dont need to be a genius to know that wont play well, not only in California but across the country. One race where the issue could have an impact is in the Central Valley congressional district represented by Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock (Stanislaus County). Even though Denham has been at the forefront of efforts to put undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors on a path to citizenship, his Democratic opponent in the November election is seeking to tie him to Trumps actions on the border. The images, the videos that were seeing are frankly atrocious and cruel not a representation of American values, said Josh Harder, who finished second to Denham in this months primary. To see people locked up in cages its deeply mobilizing for people in this district. It could be deeply mobilizing because 40 percent of Denhams 10th Congressional District is Latino, and the Republican had a weak showing in the primary landing only 38 percent of the vote in an eight-candidate field. Last week, Harder and representatives of more than a dozen organizations demonstrated in front of Denhams district offices to call attention to the migrant issue. This is where these problems are front and center, Harder said. Everybody in the Central Valley knows folks who are affected by these sorts of policies. Denhams district is one of seven in California that Democrats have targeted as part of their campaign to win 23 GOP-held seats nationwide in November and retake the House. After several months of Republican efforts to shore up their California seats by campaigning against Democrats sanctuary state laws, Democrats see the migrant-children issue as an opportunity to refocus the immigration debate. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco called on Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to resign Monday, with Pelosi calling the administrations actions barbaric. Nielsen has been at the center of Trumps zero tolerance policy for migrants at the U.S. southern border, a change from the practice of releasing detainees who arrive with children as their legal cases proceed. As a result of the change, the government is holding at least 2,000 migrant children whose parents are being held separately in detention centers. On Monday, Nielsen told the National Sheriffs Association in New Orleans, We will not apologize for the job we do, or the job law enforcement does, or the job the American people expect us to do. Later, at a White House news conference, she said that if lawmakers want to keep children from being separated from their parents, they should act on immigration legislation pending before the House. Two bills could come up for votes this week, but Democratic support for them is minimal to nonexistent because they would restrict legal immigration and spend billions on a wall along the Mexican border. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has introduced legislation that would bar families from being separated, but it has no Republican co-sponsors. John Cox, the GOP candidate for California governor in November and one of the Republicans who has denounced sanctuary policies that limit local authorities cooperation with federal immigration agents, sought to put the responsibility for children being taken from their parents on politicians in Washington and made a distinction between them and Trump. The president of the United States has tried to solve this problem, Cox said. Get the politicians together and solve this problem, get a plan that works so we can have an immigration system where we get people in this country and we dont separate women and children. GOP consultant Dave Gilliard said Denham and Republicans he represents who are facing tough House races in Orange County Rep. Mimi Walters, R-Irvine, and Young Kim and Diane Harkey, who are running for seats being vacated by GOP incumbents all oppose separating migrant families at the border. They also all oppose Californias sanctuary state laws. Gilliard thinks voters can make the same distinction. A voter can make a conscious decision that the sanctuary laws that the state has are bad and not productive in the way that we approach immigration law, Gilliard said. And they can also believe that we shouldnt be separating families. Nathan Miller, a Republican who has been working to organize opposition to sanctuary laws, agreed, but said Monday that he worried that the migrant children issue is being taken out of context. This is being used, Miller said, as a tool to motivate people on the left. MoveOns Ganapathy said even people not into politics were moved Monday by media coverage of children sobbing at detention camps. It put the issue in a league of its own, he said, noting that some opponents have likened separating children from their parents to interning Japanese Americans during World War II. People are saying, What would you do if you were there then? Ganapathy said. It feels like a historic moment, in a horrifying way. San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report. Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicles senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli Gregory Bull / Associated Press SACRAMENTO Republican gubernatorial hopeful John Cox does not support a ballot initiative pushed by venture capitalist Tim Draper to split California into three states, saying there is a simpler answer: We need to do a better job of managing the state. Cox, the GOP candidate in the fall election for governor, declined to comment on the measure last week after it qualified for the November ballot, and remained silent for several days. But at a Sacramento news conference Monday on efforts to repeal a state gas tax increase, Cox said he opposes splitting up the state he wants to govern. Danica Roem is the first openly transgender candidate to be elected and serve in a state legislature, but thats not why she was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates last year. The Democrat defeated Bob Marshall, a 13-term Republican incumbent who described himself as the states chief homophobe, by talking about how horrible the traffic was on the highway through her district and how shed fix it something people in her district really cared about. While the rest of the country wanted to talk about her gender during the campaign, Roem wanted to talk about Route 28. And now, after a year on the job, Roem is settling into the nitty-gritty of legislative work and tending to her constituents needs. And when it comes to how she wants to treat her constituents, she has an unusual role model, at least for a politician: the heavy metal band Metallica. Theres a lot you can learn from heavy metal which would be really good for politicians to know and for candidates to know, Roem told The Chronicles Its All Political podcast. One of them is: Authenticity matters. The Metallica homage isnt surprising, as Roem has sung in metal bands for more than a decade which is almost as unusual as her gender status among the repp tie-wearing political set. She learned about the Bay Area metal bands work ethic and personal touch during an episode of VH-1s Behind the Music that she saw as a youth. In its early days, band members would sign every autograph and pose for every photo that fans requested. That always really, really stuck with me, Roem said. Now, as a local delegate with a national profile, she said, she often spends two hours after speaking appearances talking to people. I go back to that Metallica work ethic, Roem said, who was in San Francisco along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to address a fundraiser for Emerge America, a national training program for Democratic female candidates. I will shake every hand. I will have every conversation. And I will take every photo until they kick us out. The other thing she promised voters is that she would be a full-time legislator. That is hard, given that Virginia delegates earn $17,640 a year. So Roem is working on a book even though during the campaign, opponents attacked her with a mailer that accused her of running for office just so she could get a book deal. Roem has an idea for a title that would lampoon the charge. Shed call it: Transgender Candidate Writes Book. Deep dives and late takes California Democrats are outraged over the Trump administrations separation of migrant children from their parents. They also see it as a chance to reframe the immigration debate. [Chronicle] Sen. Kamala Harris calls for the Trump official running the zero tolerance immigration operation that splits up families to resign. [Chronicle] Being rich and pouring money into your own campaign has never been a guarantee of election victory in California. It was no different in this years primary. [Chronicle] Some groups that spent big during the primary were more interested in discouraging other candidates supporters than in turning out the vote. [Chronicle] After days of silence over a measure headed for the November ballot that would split California into three states, GOP governor candidate John Cox finally takes a position. [Chronicle] An Oakland city councilwoman says Mayor Libby Schaaf is vulnerable to an election challenge. But she wont be the one to do it. [Chronicle] San Franciscos dwindling population of African Americans sees the election of London Breed as mayor as a reason for hope. [Chronicle] A protest against splitting up migrant families at the border and World Refugee Day events are coming up on the Bay Area political calendar. [Chronicle] The Political Punch newsletter publishes every Tuesday and Thursday between noon and 3 p.m. It is produced by the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle and edited by politics editor Trapper Byrne. Email: tbyrne@sfchronicle.com For better or worse, San Francisco is perpetually in a state of flux. Nowhere is the push and pull of established and new more obvious than in the Mission, where outposts of burgeoning Bay Area chains like Smitten Ice Cream, Tacolicious and Souvla have cropped up alongside long-standing mom-and-pop eateries. The following, which includes everything from high-end cocktail bars to restaurants with globally inspired menus, are some of our favorite places that have opened in the last couple of years. Were also loving that while not necessarily new stalwart neighborhood bar Docs Clock is experiencing a renaissance in its new location. Not every new restaurant will necessarily survive long enough to join the ranks of old-timers like La Taqueria (see Hall of Fame), and sadly, even some of the beloved classics are finding it hard to thrive in the evolving neighborhood. However, each of these places proves that while change may not always be easy, it can at least be delicious. Sarah Fritsche, sfritsche@sfchronicle.com Green tea-spiked sweets at Stonemill Matcha Samovar, Philz, Ritual theres no shortage of spots for a caffeine buzz in the Mission, but the month-old Stonemill Matcha teahouse and cafe is something special. Sourcing stone-ground Japanese matcha from Kyoto, founder Eijiro Tsukada and his team have taken over the former Bar Tartine space on Valencia to create a casual yet elegant gathering place. The main attraction is a lovely selection of tea drinks, a blend of East and West, with offerings like tea lattes, sparkling matcha and classic hand-whisked first-crop stone mill-ground green tea. But of particular note is a sweet and savory menu thats just as thoughtfully curated. Pastry chef Mikiko Yui, whose resume lists Coi and State Bird Provisions, creates stunning desserts. A matcha and black sesame cake has an ethereal texture reminiscent of angel food. A yuzu meringue tart showcases a pleasingly tart yuzu curd nestled in a tender matcha crust. Tartine Bakery has collaborated with the venture with flaky Japanese-inspired variations of its classic pastries, including furikake croissants and kinako (roasted soybean flour) morning buns. On the savory side, Japanese comfort foods like pork cutlet sandwiches (katsu sando) and a riff on ochazuke (a salmon and rice dish) get an elevated touch from chef Keisuke Akabori. It may be an ocean away from the teahouses of Kyoto, but Stonemill certainly brings a sophisticated touch of zen to bustling Valencia Street. S.F. 561 Valencia St., near 16th Street Japanese beer & banh mi at Dolores Outpost Mochi muffins, sushi, a killer selection of Japanese beers and single-serving size sake cups this is not your typical corner shop. It is, however, a genius move to cater to the hordes of young, hip and culinarily savvy crowds that descend on nearby Dolores Park. The sushi is solid something I never thought I would say about a convenience store outside of Tokyo but the house-made banh mi is the thing to grab. I cant think of a better way to picnic in the park than with a roast pork sandwich with caramelized pineapple compote and nori aioli, plus a Japanese microbrew. S.F. 698 Guererro St., at 19th Street Aguachiles & ceviches at Rincon Nayarit There is no shortage of great Mexican restaurants in the Mission. Over the years, long-standing favorites like Gallardos, San Jalisco, La Taqueria and La Palma have all rightfully earned a regular spot on Mexican food lovers dining rotation. Though just over a year old, Rincon Nayarit, deserves to be added to the list. There are plenty of standard dishes on the menu burritos, enchiladas, menudo and the like but the specialty at this bright and airy corner restaurant is the seafood. In particular, seafood dishes from the coastal state of Nayarit, which lies on the Pacific, between Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlan. The ceviches and aguachiles are some of the best in the Mission, but where the kitchens skill truly shines is in the homey cooked fish dishes like the filete a la cucaracha, a moist and tender bass fillet thats sauteed in an earthy and slightly spicy chipotle sauce, and the rich and buttery filete a limon. These deceptively simple dishes are deeply complex in flavor and hauntingly delicious. Odds are, as youre sitting at a table scooping up pleasantly tart and spicy chunks of fish, shrimp and octopus with crisp tortilla chips, youll find yourself wondering how soon you can return to Rincon Nayarit. S.F. 1500 South Van Ness Ave., at 26th Street 1960s cocktail hour at The Beehive Glittering with gold wallpaper and honeycomb-shape mirrors, the new cocktail bar Beehive was designed to capture a long-lost era in order to attract a new generation of Mission dwellers. Phil and Cameron West shut down their beloved 12-year-old restaurant Range at the end of 2016 for a new concept they thought would be more in line with current trends: a cocktail bar that evokes a 1960s dinner party straight out of Mad Men. Though the bites menu is playful, with fondue, pigs in a blanket and house-made Spam rillettes, the attempt at quality is dead serious. The rillettes, for one, come in a Spam-shaped and seared slab of the tender shredded pork, served with pineapple chutney and house-baked Ritz-style crackers. Cocktails have adventurous herb and floral notes like the crystalline hit of cardamom in the Beauty Mark, with lime, gin and egg white foam with a dot of cacao bitters. Though the drink wasnt as sublimely focused during a second visit on a busy Saturday night, the bar seems to be hitting the audience it was intended for. Tara Duggan 842 Valencia St., near 19th Street PBR at Docs Clock There was an outcry last summer when we learned that beloved dive bar Docs Clock would be displaced from its original location where it had been since 1951. It moved two blocks down Mission Street, and now, after nearly a year, the bars iconic neon sign has been restored there. The new Docs, in fact, looks and feels eerily similar to the old Docs: same seedy lighting, same cash-only policy. Its still the best place in the Mission to get a $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon. Esther Mobley 2417 Mission St., at 20th Street Pastrami breakfast sandwich at Newkirks Sandwiches Potrero Avenues newest deli takes seriously the art of the breakfast sandwich, with seven egg-and-cheese variations on its daily menu. Old standby BEC (bacon, egg, cheese) is a fine specimen here, but the pastrami breakfast sandwich is the move. A buttery poppyseed kaiser roll contains fluffy omelet, a melty mess of cheese and folds of smoky, spicy pastrami flown in from New York. E.M. 1002 Potrero Ave., at 22nd Street Japanese grazing at Bon Nene This sweet, cozy Japanese cafe seems to come out of nowhere on a corner without any other restaurants or retail. Its proximity, though, to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital might explain why its busy even at lunch in the middle of the week. While traditionally Japanese in concept, many dishes incorporate Western and local ingredients like the kale gomaae, with blanched greens marinated a light sesame dressing, and the mentaiko spaghetti, tossed in a buttery mix of cod roe, shiso and seaweed. The namesake nene potstickers are connected by a lacy batter on top and filled with shiitake or pork. Bon Nene just started offering a traditional Japanese breakfast set on weekends, complete with chickpea miso soup, grilled fish, onigiri and two other sides. T.D. 2850 21st St., at Alabama Street Rotisserie chicken meal at Alma Cocina Of all the recent new additions to the 24th Street restaurant roster, Alma Cocina might just represent the best value. This casual Peruvian spot makes great ceviche and turns out exceptional pollo a la brasa, rotisserie chicken. A half chicken comes with chimichurri and two sides we like the arroz chaufa and the crispy yuca and it is more than enough dinner for two. E.M. Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. 2801 Folsom St., at 24th Street All things meze at Tawla You can have a plate of ho-hum hummus at any number of Middle Eastern-sourced restaurants in the city, but if you want to be delighted/intrigued/surprised by bread spreads, order the three labnehs here: super-thick yogurts blended with dried mint and marash pepper, with zaatar and with hazelnut dukkah with coriander and cumin. Then order up the spring pea chermoula, a punchy and vibrant herb sauce. Then the marinated anchovies. Then the big trumpet mushrooms with fiddleheads, another spring specialty. Spread/pile/glob them all on the fresh, fragrant house bread. Share glasses of the interesting house wines, settle into the pretty setting with good lighting and you have the perfect communal meal. Kitty Morgan 206 Valencia St., at Duboce Avenue Starters at The Morris Everyone raves about the smoked duck at Paul Einbunds restaurant, which earned a spot on the Top 100 Restaurants list earlier this year. Its a great dish, but my two favorite items on the menu can be found in the Nibbles section: the super savory chicken and foie gras dumplings are plump and juicy, with a rich burst of liver and broth almost reminiscent of a soup dumpling while, on the other end of the textural spectrum, the crunchy pork cracklings with honey are so freshly fried that when they hit the table, they continue to crackle and pop as you snack away. S.F. 2501 Mariposa St., at Hampshire Street Fish and chips at the Crafty Fox In 2017, this Mission Street alehouse, run by Irish-born cousins Barry Smyth and Micheal McCloskey, was voted the best beer bar in California. The beer list, which includes an excellent selection of sour, tart and funky beers, is righteous, but dont overlook the elevated pub grub thats coming out of the bars tiny kitchen. In particular, the perfectly cooked fish and chips, which come with a spicy jalapeno and cabbage slaw, is exactly the kind of dish you want to accompany a pint. S.F. 1700 Mission St., at Duboce Avenue Mushrooms and dip at True Laurel For those nights when you cant shell out $195 for a 15-course tasting menu at Lazy Bear, you can visit True Laurel, where chef-owner David Barzelay and beverage guru Nicolas Torres offer bites and cocktails in a casual, no-reservations bar setting. Barzelays famous sour cream n alliums dip with (extremely dippable) fried hen of the woods mushrooms is a high point of the bar food-style menu. Torres cocktails are among the citys most interesting right now. Try not to be intimidated by the obscure cocktail ingredients, like black sudachi (a type of lime) or Berto (an Italian vermouth). E.M. 753 Alabama St., near 20th Street Chicken biriyani at Ritu Indian Soul Food Just two years since opening Dum Indian Soul Food on 24th Street, chef Rupam Bhagat is seeking to differentiate his restaurant from his incredibly popular food truck, which until recently shared the same name. Along with a name change for the brick-and-mortar comes a slight shift in the menu that will now focus more on seasonality. Happily, Bhagats flavorful chicken biriyani some of the best to be had in the Bay Area will remain a menu staple. S.F. 3111 24th St., near Folsom Street House-made pastas at Barzotto At 2-year-old Barzotto, 2017 Chronicle Rising Star Chef Michelle Minori is cranking out house-made pastas that are not only some of the best in the city, they also wont break the bank. Dishes like pappardelle with slow-braised beef and mushrooms and lumache with marinara and ricotta are standouts. For those who want to cook their own pasta at home, the restaurant sells pasta by the pound and sauce to go. S.F. 1270 Valencia St., at 24th Street The lowly plastic straw has become the focus of high controversy. California state lawmakers are considering a law requiring restaurants to provide straws like other plastic products, an environmental hazard only on request. Cities including San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley are moving to outlaw plastic straws entirely. Meanwhile, companies such as Ikea and SeaWorld have announced plans to ban single-use straws and utensils from their properties. Even McDonalds is considering going plastic straw-free. But as drinking moves greener, bars and restaurants are finding one unexpected consequence: Paper straws, the most popular replacement to plastic, are in such high demand that theres a shortage. Aardvark, the Fort Wayne, Ind., manufacturer that is Bay Area bartenders preferred purveyor of paper straws, has seen a 5,000 percent increase in sales and demand in the past two years. Even with production running 24/7, that demand has created serious delays in fulfilling orders. The lead time for Aardvark is up to seven weeks, if you prefer a certain color or design, said Justin Lew, a co-owner of San Franciscos Alamo Square bar Horsefeather and the soon-to-open bar Last Rites in Duboce Triangle. We are asking people to please plan way ahead and place orders now for the months to come, said David Rhodes, Aardvarks global business director, and to beware of inferior copycat imports that dont perform well at all. Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle Aardvark is prioritizing orders from coastal regions like the Bay Area where plastic straws can wreak havoc on ocean habitats. (Anyone whos seen the viral video of the sea turtle with the plastic straw in its nose knows why.) To ride out the shortage, some Bay Area bars are exploring other alternatives, such as biodegradable plastic straws. But these in fact are not compostable, according to Sunset Scavenger, the waste management company that recycles, composts and picks up trash for many San Francisco bars. H. Joseph Ehrmann, owner of Elixir Saloon in San Franciscos Mission District, learned that the hard way when he switched to biodegradable straws a few years ago. Sunset Scavenger told him that it wasnt possible for their process to distinguish between regular plastic and biodegradable. So when they see a batch of compost with them in it, Ehrmann said, they have to discard the entire batch. Apart from paper, only straws marked by the manufacturer with a 100 percent compostable mark or with a green stripe are allowed in the compost bin an extremely rare feature. If theres no mark, recyclers have to consider it trash. But paper straws have their share of problems, availability aside. They usually cost a few more cents each than plastic. And many people simply dislike drinking from them: Some paper straws, especially lower-quality ones, turn soggy sitting in a drink. Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle Even higher-quality paper straws, which dont get soggy as easily, require habit changes on the part of the drinker. William Prestwood, general manager at Pagan Idol in San Francisco, finds that people like to play with their straws, which can lead even the best paper versions to collapse or rip. If people understand that the straw is not a fidget spinner or stress reliever, theyll work as intended, he says. Stirring your drink, fishing out garnishes, chewing a straw or just poking mindlessly these are hard habits to break. Even Lew has his grievances. While he appreciates paper straws, which can have colorful patterns that play off the vibrant drinks he makes at Horsefeather, they can have negative effects on certain drinks. We have a cocktail on cobbled ice for Last Rites thats in an oddly shaped glass that tapers at the bottom, said Lew. When you poke around with the straw, as one does, it flattens at one end between the ice and the side of the glass and clogs. Basically, you cant use the straw to drink. Frustrated, his staff has suggested that they move back to plastic, but Lew has a hard time justifying it on a moral basis. The dilemma has caused some bartenders to ask whether straws are needed at all. Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. You need to break bartender habits as well as customer habits, said Ehrmann, who is seeing a two- to three-week delay on paper straw orders. In the current shortage I have put the emphasis on my staff to get used to not putting a straw in every drink. Jessica Maria, owner of the Hotsy Totsy Club in Albany, has gone further. Since moving to paper, she offers straws only by request. We posted a few signs around the bar with a cute sea turtle on it briefly explaining why there is something missing from their drink, Maria said. People have been receptive. The end goal would be to remove straws entirely, but Im not sure the consumer is ready for that just yet. Metal straws could be a viable option. At Horsefeather, Lew and his staff use metal straws to taste drinks before serving them. But Ehrmann reports that his customers dont always enjoy drinking out of them and that theft of metal straws is an issue. The ecological gains of ditching plastic straws are obvious, but there may be intangible losses, too. We play with plastic straws while we drink, wave them to gesture and, as Prestwood points out, use them as a stress reliever. One friend admitted that he would miss the squeaking sound of a plastic straw poking through a lid. There needs to be a gradual implementation plan that is executed over a reasonable amount of time, said Aardvarks Rhodes. As much as we would all like to see plastic straws gone tomorrow, it will take time. Lou Bustamante is a Bay Area writer and author of The Complete Cocktail Manual. Email: food@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thevillagedrunk German authorities on Monday detained the chief executive of Volkswagens Audi division, Rupert Stadler, as part of a probe into manipulation of emissions controls. The move follows a search last week of Stadlers private residence, ordered by Munich prosecutors investigating the manager on suspicion of fraud and indirect improprieties with documents. Audi CEO Rupert Stadler was provisionally arrested this morning, the company said. It said shortly afterward that a judge had ordered him kept in custody pending possible charges at prosecutors request. The company said that it couldnt comment further due to the ongoing investigation but stressed that the presumption of innocence remains in place for Mr. Stadler. German news agency Dpa reported that prosecutors decided to seek Stadlers arrest due to fears he might try to evade justice. A former head of Audis engine development unit is already in investigative detention. Technology Microsofts ICE tweak Microsoft scrubbed an online reference to its work for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the agency faces criticism for its role in separating families at the U.S.-Mexican border. On Jan. 24, Tom Keane, a Microsoft executive, wrote a blog post about new contracts with the U.S. Air Force and ICE for the companys Azure cloud-computing service. Keane touted Azures ability to help the agency handle sensitive unclassified data and use tools such as facial recognition and identification. The agency is currently implementing transformative technologies for homeland security and public safety, and were proud to support this work with our mission-critical cloud, Keane wrote in the post. As of Monday morning, the portion of the post mentioning ICE was missing. The earlier, full version of the post was accessed via the Wayback Machine, a historical record of websites maintained by the Internet Archive. On Monday, Bloomberg News asked Microsoft about the work, and the removal of that section of the blog. Soon after, it was back online. An employee edited the blog after seeing commentary in social media. This was a mistake and as soon as it was noticed the blog was reverted to previous language, a Microsoft spokesman said. Over the weekend, several lawmakers and human rights organizations blasted the White House policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. Tech Workers Coalition, an advocacy group, wrote on Twitter that Microsoft employees should decide whether they will be complicit in the administrations immigration policies. Some other tech executives weighed in, too. Microsoft currently has $19.14 million in active contracts with ICE, according to Bloomberg Government data. Cloud-computing and software rivals, including Amazon.com, Google and IBM, regularly compete for similar government work. Some of these other companies have been criticized for such activity in particular Google and a contract with the Pentagon. Cryptocurrency Virtual coin fits Square hole Square shares hit their highest price ever after New York granted the company a virtual-currency license, letting customers in the state buy and sell bitcoin. CEO Jack Dorsey said this year that the company would introduce bitcoin trading to almost all users of Square Cash, which allows people to transfer money to friends and family. Bitcoin trading has helped fuel growth for the app, which had more than 7 million monthly active customers in December. The New York State Department of Financial Services said Monday it had approved a virtual currency license for the company. Shares climbed 2.7 percent to $66.20 Monday. The stock has surged more than 80 percent since the start of the year. Publishing High Times for Vicente Fox Former Mexico President Vicente Fox, who calls himself a soldier in the global campaign to legalize marijuana, is joining the board of directors of cannabis publication High Times to advance his agenda. Fox foresees a day when a robust legal marketplace will produce new jobs and medicines while sharply reducing cartel violence in his home country. Speaking with the Associated Press about his views on cannabis and his new appointment, Fox says he also sees pot being part of the North American Free Trade Agreement among Mexico, Canada and the U.S., where some 30 states are embracing legalized marijuana in some form. Privacy Backlash on Amazon tool Some Amazon investors are siding with privacy and civil rights advocates who are urging the tech giant to halt a powerful face recognition tool used by police. The American Civil Liberties Union is spearheading the effort against Amazons Rekognition product, delivering to its Seattle headquarters Monday a petition with 152,000 signatures telling the company to cancel this order. Theyre asking Amazon to stop marketing Rekognition to government agencies because of privacy issues they say can be used to discriminate against minorities. A group of 19 investment managing companies including Harrington Investments, Inc. and Walden Asset Management also sounded the alarm on the tool, which they say could open the company up to lawsuits. Chronicle News Services This article was first published on NerdWallet.com. The recipe for the perfect foodie vacation is simple: Combine equal parts adventure, conversation and well-loved regional specialty dishes and a dash of surprise and delight. If you love to eat and travel, its an irresistible combination. Thats why making it a priority to discover tasty treats on your next getaway might be the best decision you ever make. Heres how you can spice up the itinerary on your next trip, according to four food and travel bloggers. Make a must-try list When planning a trip, food and travel blogger JB Macatulad always starts by asking, What are the national dishes? If we go to certain cities, like Yogyakarta or Bandung [in Indonesia], are there regional specialties that we can only find there that we should try? After compiling a list, he starts looking for well-reviewed restaurants in the area that serve these specialties. RELATED VIDEO: These Are the 10 Best Food Cities in the World, According to TripAdvisor Macatulad and his wife, Renee, who live in Quezon City, Philippines, also maintain an epic list of must-try dishes from every country in the world on the travel and food blog they co-founded, Will Fly for Food. On their tasty to-do list: pastizzi in Malta, dumplings in China and bratwurst in Germany. Ask locals for recommendations Often, the best food recommendations come from locals. While traveling in Vietnam, Macatulad and his wife struck up a conversation with their tour guide, who lived in the area. He got so excited by the fact that we were so excited about Vietnamese food that after the tour, he took us to his favorite Vietnamese restaurant and showed us a dish we didnt even know about, says Macatulad, who previously lived in San Francisco. It was a delicious noodle dish called banh canh. It was the best thing we ate in our whole two weeks, and it wasnt even expected. Embrace the cuisine When youre unfamiliar with a countrys local fare, its tempting to stick with what you know. Dont. Be open to local food, Macatulad says. Ive been on tours where a lot of people were kind of afraid of the foreign food, which is kind of a shame, because [theyre] really missing out on a lot. Go on a food tour To get a feel for a local food scene, it helps to go on a food tour on the first day of your trip, says Brittany Kulick, founder of the travel and food blog The Sweet Wanderlust. Typically, food tours take you to at least five restaurants and bars where you can sample new foods and drinks, says Kulick, a full-time traveler based in Melbourne, Australia. While nibbling on those samples, you might get to learn more about the history of the local cuisine. On one food tour in Rome, for example, Kulick remembers dining in a 2,000-year-old wine cellar. We ate pork shoulder prepared with apples and honey, made using the recipe of Julius Caesars chef, Gaius Matius, she says. What in the world? Thats probably still my top foodie experience. Were in Rome, eating something Julius Caesar would have eaten thousands of years ago. Taste a local specialty Melbourne is where I fell in love with freakshakes, says Kulick, who previously lived in Dallas. Freakshakes, which are milkshakes overflowing with elaborate toppings, were invented in Canberra, Australia. But Melbourne later took the trend and ran with it, Kulick notes. They put doughnuts and fairy floss and waffles and lollipops and all kinds of ridiculous stuff on milkshakes. And theyre just so beautiful and bright, she says. If your destination has a similar specialty, make it sure to try it at least once. Take a cooking class When I travel to places that are really known for food I try to take a cooking class when I go and learn a dish when Im there, says Rachelle Lucas, founder of the travel and food blog The Travel Bite. She notes that cooking classes can range in price from about $30 to $100. In one cooking class in Barcelona, we learned how to make paella. We made little appetizers. It was probably half a day, says Lucas, who lives in Orlando, Florida. We just walked from where the cooking class was to the local market and picked out stuff wed actually be cooking. The best part: At the end of a cooking class, you get to eat what you make. Visit the local farmers market Farmers markets are typically open-air venues where you can purchase fresh food from local farmers, bakers and chefs. When you visit them while traveling, there are always surprises, depending on the fruits and vegetables that are grown locally, Lucas says. You might discover a type of berry youve never tasted before, or a leafy green that you wouldnt have been able to find at your hometown grocery store. Just be sure to bring along some cash, because you might not be able to use plastic. Try the same dish at different restaurants When food and travel blogger Heather Carlson travels with her family, they have a tradition of trying the same dish at multiple restaurants. It all started after they once ordered roasted potatoes, a common Italian side dish, in a restaurant in Orvieto, a small town in Umbria, Italy. The spuds which the family later dubbed magical potatoes were unforgettable. They were really tender inside, but they had this sort of crisp almost like they had been battered, but they werent at all battered, says Carlson, of Boise, Idaho, founder of the Italian food and travel blog A Merry Feast. Previously, she and her family lived in Milan, Italy, as expats. They must have been rolled in something. They had this crunchy, kind of salty exterior. Afterward, the family started ordering a side of roasted potatoes at each Italian restaurant they visited, comparing them with that delicious recipe. They laugh about it now, she says, noting that theyre from Idaho, a state famous for potatoes. So far, those magical potatoes they tried in Orvieto are still No. 1, she says. Go to a food festival Food festivals, or outdoor events where you can sample foods from several vendors, can be a great way to taste local produce thats in season. In Italy, for example, you can find truffle festivals or onion festivals during certain times of year, Carlson says. Food festivals typically happen at the same time each year, she notes, so theyre easy to plan around. Aside from writing about food and travel, Carlson also leads food tours in Italy each fall, where she takes travelers to an olive harvest festival in Umbria. Buy food-centric souvenirs Instead of picking up random tchotchkes in souvenir shops, go for foodie items. Some of my favorite souvenirs to bring home are cookbooks or ingredients from places I visit, Carlson says. A lot of times you can find a dual-language cookbook from the region that you go to, so you can try some of these things when you come home. You could treat your friends and family to a dinner party, she says, and make recipes based on the food you tried while traveling. If youre returning to the U.S. from an international trip, just be sure to declare food items in customs to avoid costly penalties. Claire Tsosie is a writer at NerdWallet. Email: claire@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @ideclaire7. The article One Perfect Foodie Vacation, Coming Right Up originally appeared on NerdWallet. If anyone has a successful track record in staring up new airlines, its David Neeleman. And now the founder of JetBlue and Brazils Azul is reportedly planning to try his luck in the U.S. market again by launching another new carrier here. The report comes from the trade publication Airline Weekly, which said it heard about Neelemans newest project from two persons familiar with his plans, and said it has also seen a presentation on the new airline. The publication said it contacted Neeleman directly, but he refused to comment. In any case, the publication says that Neelemans new U.S. airline will be called Moxy. (Its not clear if that name might face a challenge from Marriott International, which already has a hotel brand named Moxy.) The new airline is reportedly amassing start-up capital of $100 million, provided partly by Neeleman himself and two partners Robert Milton, a former CEO of Air Canada; and Henri Courpron, the former CEO of ILFC (International Lease Finance Corporation), one of the worlds largest lessors of aircraft to commercial airlines. Airline Weekly said Neelemans venture is ordering 60 CS300 aircraft from Bombardier, the Canadian regional jet manufacturer. The new airline would reportedly concentrate its operations on smaller secondary U.S. airports like Burbank, Ft. Worth, and Providence. Frequent travelers are no doubt familiar with Bombardiers CRJ series of regional jets, which are used for the regional flights of many major U.S. airlines, and its Q series of turboprops like the twin-engine Q400. The CS300 is part of the manufacturers newest line, the C series which Bombardier calls the only single-aisle aircraft optimized for the 100- to 150-seat market. The company says its use of advanced materials saves enough weight in the C series jets to give them a 20 percent advantage in fuel efficiency over competing aircraft. See interior and exterior images of the C series jet here. The U.S. launch customer for Bombardiers C series is Delta, which has ordered 75 CS100 aircraft, with an option for 50 more. Delta said it will use the aircraft on short- to medium-haul routes throughout its network. Air Baltic Bombardier itself is due to be taken over next month by Airbus, which is acquiring a majority stake in the company. Before he launched JetBlue in 1998-99, Neeleman had worked for Southwest and had been involved in the founding of Canadas WestJet. After he left JetBlue in 2008, Neeleman started Brazils Azul, which is now that countrys third-largest airline. In 2015, he and other investors acquired a majority stake in TAP Air Portugal. Neeleman isnt the only one who apparently sees a growth market in smaller jets serving smaller cities. His former creation JetBlue is currently an investor in JetSuiteX, which operates 30-seat jets out of smaller California airports, and so is Qatar Airways. JetBlue recently started putting its code onto JetSuiteX flights even though the latters operations dont link up with JetBlues network. Whaddya think? Is the US ready for another airline? Would a strategy of serving smaller airports work? Please leave your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page. 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. A police shooting late Monday night in Union City ended with an injured teen boy and three male juveniles accused of attempted murder after a car stop turned chaotic, authorities said. Officers initiated the stop because the vehicle the teenagers were driving in was reported stolen, according to information the Union City Police Department released Tuesday afternoon. One boy suffered a gunshot wound, but is expected to fully recover, said Lt. Travis Souza, a Union City police spokesman. Two of the boys are 16 years old and one is 15, and all three were arrested on suspicion of attempted murder of a police officer and numerous weapons violations, authorities said. Officers attempted to make a traffic stop at 11:35 p.m. near E Street and Railroad Avenue when an exchange of gunfire rang out between the vehicles occupants and several officers, according to Union City police. No officers suffered injuries during the exchange of gunfire. After shots were fired, one suspect allegedly drove the car near the area of Railroad Avenue and Whipple Road, and all three suspects fled the vehicle into surrounding neighborhoods. All three suspects were eventually apprehended. We have a big crime scene with multiple locations, Souza said. We havent even interviewed all the officers yet. When thats done, well have a better picture of what truly happened. An investigation into the shooting is ongoing. Anyone with information can contact the Union City Police Department at 510-675-5289. Erin Stone is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: erin.stone@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Erstone7 Getting a jump on the trade deadline to add talent to the back of their bullpen, the Washington Nationals picked up right-hander Kelvin Herrera from the Kansas City Royals on Monday for three minor-leaguers. The Nationals sent infielder Kelvin Gutierrez, outfielder Blake Perkins and 17-year-old pitcher Yohanse Morel to Kansas City in the deal announced during Washingtons doubleheader against the New York Yankees. Herrera, 28, is playing on a one-year contract. He helped the Royals win the 2015 World Series. A two-time All-Star, he has 14 saves and a 1.05 ERA this season. Its just a moment you dont want to see, Herrera said about leaving K.C. Its always hard. I was born and raised (as) a player here. The Nationals avoided parting with any of their highest-regarded prospects. They said former As All-Star Sean Doolittle will remain their closer. Angels optimistic about Ohtani:Angels manager Mike Scioscia says the club is very optimistic about Shohei Ohtanis progress in his recovery from a sprained ligament in his right elbow. The two-way star has been simulating swings with a bat in his left hand and participating in strength training and running for the past three to four days. A right-handed pitcher and left-handed batter, he wont throw for at least two more weeks. Were not quite there yet, Scioscia said. But I think within the two- or three-week range from now, when hes evaluated, well certainly have an idea of what you can add to his workload, what hes able to do. Ohtani, who turns 24 next month, hasnt played since June 6, when he left a start after four innings due to a blister. Kershaw nears return:Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw has taken another step forward in his recovery from a strained lower back. Kershaw threw a three-inning simulated game before Los Angeles series opener against the Cubs, later postponed. He said he felt really good and plans to pitch somewhere in four or five days, either in a minor-league rehab start or for the Dodgers. Briefly: Javier Baez said he could return to the Cubs lineup from his bruised elbow as early as Tuesday. ... The Indians activated first baseman Yonder Alonso from the family medical emergency list and optioned outfielder Greg Allen to Triple-A Columbus. Cleveland also signed reliever Marc Rzepczynski to a minor-league deal and assigned him to Columbus, and outfielder Melky Cabrera, designated for assignment by the team last week, cleared waivers and elected free agency. ... Activated from the DL: Rangers shortstop Elvis Andrus and Mariners reliever Juan Nicasio. ... The Phillies optioned former closer Hector Neris to Triple-A. ... The Astros extended the contract of general manager Jeff Luhnow through the 2023 season. Dr. Adel Mahmoud, an infectious-disease expert who played a vital role in the development of lifesaving vaccines, died on June 11 in Manhattan. He was 76. His death, at Mount Sinai St. Lukes Hospital, was caused by a brain hemorrhage, his wife, Dr. Sally Hodder, said. As president of Merck Vaccines from 1998 until 2006, Mahmoud oversaw the creation and marketing of several vaccines that brought major advances in public health. One prevents rotavirus infection, a potentially fatal cause of diarrhea in babies. Another protects against human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes cancers of the cervix, anus, genitals and middle of the throat. Mahmoud also helped usher in a combination vaccine against measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, and one to prevent shingles, the painful and debilitating illness that can develop when a previous chickenpox infection is reactivated. The rotavirus and HPV vaccines were contentious subjects and might never have reached the market without Mahmouds determination, said Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, an executive vice president at Merck & Co., and former head of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She joined Merck after Mahmoud retired but described him as a lifelong mentor. Mahmoud championed those vaccines because he recognized their potential to save lives, she said. Globally, cervical cancer and rotavirus infections kill hundreds of thousands of women and children every year. The problem with a rotavirus vaccine was that another company had already developed one but then had to take it off the market because it was found to increase the risk of bowel obstruction in infants. Opponents argued that it would take a large study and a huge investment of time and money to test Mercks candidate vaccine, and then to overcome public fears. Everyone wanted to kill it, Gerberding said. Adel said, Not only are we going to do it, but were going to make our study even larger to prove it works and is safe. Mahmoud took a similar approach to the HPV vaccine, which also had its detractors. Some doubted that it would work. Others thought parents would reject it, fearing that administering the vaccine to young girls would somehow encourage them to start having sex. That fear was based on the virus being sexually transmitted and the view that the vaccine was most effective if given before girls become sexually active. Mahmoud prevailed, and Mercks HPV vaccine, Gardasil, approved in 2006, was the first to be marketed. Last month, in a call to eliminate cervical cancer worldwide, the head of the World Health Organization called HPV vaccines truly wonderful inventions and said that all girls should be given them. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he had called on Mahmoud many times to advise his institute. He clearly had a knack for understanding the big picture, Fauci said. He was a 40,000-foot kind of guy, who could understand areas of science, research, policy and clinical medicine well beyond his own specific designated area of expertise. Mahmoud also had an amazingly likable personality, Fauci said. Even though he was dead serious when advising you on important matters, he had this effervescent, bubbling personality, he added. Adel Mahmoud was born on Aug. 24, 1941, in Cairo, the eldest of three children. His father, Abdelfattah Mahmoud, was an agricultural engineer. His mother, Fathia Osman, did not work outside the home, though she had hoped to study medicine and had been accepted by the University of Cairos medical school. Her brother, a medical student, had stopped her from attending because he did not think women should be doctors. A boyhood experience had a profound influence on Mahmoud. When he was 10, his father contracted pneumonia, and young Adel was sent to the drugstore for penicillin. He ran home with it only to find that his father had died. As the eldest son, he was now head of the family. I often wondered if his strength as a leader and his clear vision originated from being forced into those roles at an early age, his wife, Hodder, said. Mahmoud studied medicine at the University of Cairo, graduating in 1963. He left Egypt for Britain in 1968 and earned a doctorate from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1971. He did research on diseases caused by parasitic worms and the role of a certain type of blood cell in the bodys efforts to defend itself. Mahmoud emigrated to the United States in 1973 as a postdoctoral fellow at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He later led the universitys division of geographic medicine and was chairman of the department of medicine from 1987 to 1998. He met Hodder there in 1976, and they married in 1993. She is also an infectious-disease specialist. Merck recruited Mahmoud in 1998. He retired from the company in 2006, and then became a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the department of molecular biology at Princeton University. In 2013, when an unusual strain of meningitis caused an outbreak on campus one for which there was no vaccine made in the United States Mahmoud used his expertise, powers of persuasion and connections in the pharmaceutical world to help the university acquire a European vaccine and obtain permission from the government to offer it to students on an emergency basis. After the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, Mahmoud began advocating for the creation of a global vaccine-development fund. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a stepson, Jay Thornton; his sister, Dr. Olfat Abdelfattah; and his brother, Dr. Mahmoud Abdelfattah. Denise Grady is a New York Times writer. WASHINGTON The United States announced Tuesday it was leaving the U.N. Human Rights Council, with Ambassador Nikki Haley calling it an organization that is not worthy of its name. It was the latest withdrawal by the Trump administration from an international institution. Haley, Trumps envoy to the United Nations, said the U.S. had given the human rights body opportunity after opportunity to make changes. She lambasted the council for its chronic bias against Israel and lamented the fact that its membership includes accused human rights abusers such as China, Cuba, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo. MCALLEN, Texas Politicians and advocates flocked to the Mexican border to visit U.S. immigration detention centers and turn up the pressure on the Trump administration amid a growing uproar Monday over its policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. A group of congressional lawmakers on Sunday visited an old warehouse in South Texas where hundreds of children are being held in cages created by metal fencing. One cage held 20 youngsters. Those kids inside who have been separated from their parents are already being traumatized, said Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon. It doesnt matter whether the floor is swept and the bedsheets tucked in tight. Nearly 2,000 children were taken from their parents over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a zero tolerance policy when it comes to prosecuting those arrested for illegally entering the country. Church groups and human rights advocates have sharply criticized the policy, calling it inhumane. The policy has divided Republicans, with former first lady Laura Bush saying in a guest column in Sundays Washington Post that the practice of separating immigrant parents and children along the nations southern border is cruel and immoral and breaks my heart. Bush likened the policy to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Even former Fox News host Bill OReilly, who has been a supporter of many of President Trumps policies, called the practice unacceptable. The government should know how bad this looks and how innocent children are actually suffering. That kind of scenario is unacceptable to most Americans as exemplified by former First Lady Laura Bushs withering criticism, he tweeted. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker cited the administrations cruel and inhuman policy separating children from their parents in reversing a decision to send a National Guard helicopter from his state to the Mexican border. Migrant advocates announced they would rally outside the federal courthouse in Phoenix on Monday afternoon to protest the policy. Trump emphatically defended his administrations policy Monday, again falsely blaming Democrats. The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility, he declared. Not on my watch. In San Diego, Rep. Juan Vargas, who represents the city, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus were leading members of Congress on a visit Monday to several immigration detention facilities. Vargas, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers hoped to meet with men, women and children detained at the international boundary. Inside the southern Texas warehouse, hundreds of immigrant children waited inside chain-link enclosures. Scattered about were bottles of water, bags of chips and blankets that looked like large sheets of metal foil. At the federal courthouse in McAllen on Monday, some among the estimated 80 immigrants preparing to plead guilty on immigration charges asked the judge questions such as, Whats going to happen to my daughter? and What will happen to my son? Attorneys at the hearings said the immigrants had brought several dozen boys and girls with them to the U.S., and the judge replied that he didnt know what would happen to their children. Typically, parents are sent to court, while children go to government facilities as the Trump administration carries out the new zero tolerance policy. There have been stories of children being torn from their parents arms and parents not being able to locate their sons and daughters. CBS This Mornings Gayle King hosted Mondays show from outside one of the governments facilities in McAllen, where she said Customs and Border Protection was uncomfortable with the networks decision to refer to the holding cells as cages, even though they admitted it was accurate. They said its not inaccurate, but theyre very uncomfortable with using the word cages, King reported. They said they may be cages, but theyre not being treated like animals. The Philadelphia Inquirer contributed to this report. Nomaan Merchant is an Associated Press writer. (ANSA) - Berlin, June 19 - German Chancellor Angela Markel said Tuesday that she and French President Emmanuel Macron understood the Italian government's demands for greater assistance from its European partners in dealing with the flow of asylum seekers from North Africa. "We conceive migration as a common challenge," Merkel told a news conference after meeting Macron in Meseberg. "Our object remains a European response. "We want to avert Europe dividing. We support the Commission's proposal and the reinforcement of (EU border agency) Frontex. "We understand Italy's evaluations on migration". Macron also said that a European response was needed when asked about the case of NGO-run migrant-rescue ship Aquarius, which docked in Spain at the weekend after Italy denied it access to its ports. Macron said that he had guaranteed more cooperation to Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte, whom he met last week. "We'll react in a coordinated way," he said. "We cannot respond in an efficient way without coordination". Coast Guard ship with over 500 migrants headed to Pozzallo Coast Guard vessel Diciotti also transporting dead body (ANSAmed) - Rome, June 19 - After a long wait in waters off Malta for the assignment of a port of safety, the Italian Coast Guard ship Diciotti is heading to the Sicilian port of Pozzallo with 519 asylum seekers on board. The people were saved in seven different operations at sea. The Diciotti, which is expected to dock late on Tuesday, is also carrying a dead body. Another migrant-boat wreck, meanwhile, has taken place off the coast of Libya. The Libyan coast guard managed to save 115 people, but five drowned. Jordan: Kushner, US peace envoy meet king Abdullah (ANSAmed) - AMMAN, JUNE 19 - The US envoy for Israeli-Palestinian peace and top advisor of Donald Trump met king Abdullah on Tuesday for talks on means of pushing peace talks forward, officials said. Jared Kushner, senior advisor of Trump and his son in law, and Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt met king Abdullah of in Amman ahead of a crucial visit to the region to kick-start peace talks. "Building on previous conversations, they discussed increasing cooperation between the United States and Jordan, regional issues, the humanitarian situation in Gaza, and the Trump Administration's efforts to facilitate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians," a US embassy sent to ANSA said. The meeting comes one day after a flash encounter between king Abdullah and Israeli prime minister Benjamnine Netanyahu in Amman to discuss peace efforts in the region. The two US officials are set to visit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Israel this week ahead of the expected unveiling of Trump's plan to broker Mideast talks, what is being called "Deal of the Century." Jordan maintains crucial interest in the peace talks as the kingdom is considered custodian of the holy sites in east Jerusalem. The holy city is expected to be at the centre of final peace arrangement. Jordan is also home to more than two million Palestinian refugees, who are expected to be directly impacted by the outcome of the final status talks. (ANSAmed). Sonoma County sheriff's deputies arrested two convicted felons on suspicion of weapons offenses after shots were fired at a home early Saturday afternoon in unincorporated Sonoma County west of Rohnert Park. Witnesses living in the 4100 block of Stony Point Road reported gunfire around 1:15 p.m., sheriff's Lt. Orlando Rodriguez said. Witnesses said a suspect who appeared to be breaking into a residence with a tire iron fled north on Stony Point Road in a black Cadillac. Another witness said a person inside a home shot at the Cadillac as it fled and later was seen picking up shell casings from the ground, Rodriguez said. Another resident was seen carrying what appeared to be a bag of marijuana back into the residence after the Cadillac fled, Rodriguez said. The residents were uncooperative with deputies but reported a heavy-set white male suspect around 30 years old tried to rob them with a tire iron and fled in the Cadillac, Rodriguez said. One of the residents allegedly shot at the Cadillac and the other resident allegedly helped him conceal the handgun and the shell casings, Rodriguez said. The residents, who are convicted felons, were identified as Phillip J. Carlton, 28, and Reed R. Carman, 56, and are prohibited from carrying firearms and ammunition, Rodriguez said. Deputies found a Glock 9mm semi-automatic handgun, ammunition and shell casings at the home, Rodriguez said. Carlton and Carman were arrested and booked in the Sonoma County Jail on suspicion of conspiracy, negligent discharge of a firearm and the weapons and ammunition possession offenses. 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 Sonoma County Sheriff's office has identified the diver who died at Salt Point State Park Saturday afternoon as Mark Alcott, 51, of Fremont. Alcott was scuba diving with a friend in Gerstle Cove South about 200 feet from shore when his friend went to his aid and found him unconscious, unresponsive and partially submerged with his face underwater, sheriff's Sgt. Orlando Rodriguez said. The friend tried to remove him from the water but Alcott sank out of sight in 30 to 50 feet of water. A diver found Alcott around 5:30 p.m. and a California State Parks' lifeguard and rescue swimmers brought him to shore where he was pronounced dead at 5:38 p.m., Rodriguez 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. BERKELEY (BCN) A homeless man has been charged with misdemeanor battery on an emergency officer for allegedly punching and giving a concussion to a Berkeley police officer who was trying to help him, authorities said. The officer went to the corner of Allston Way and Shattuck Avenue at about 5:20 p.m. last Wednesday to check on the welfare of 33-year-old Zhong Xin Yang, who reportedly was passed out and unresponsive, police spokesman Officer Byron White said. The officer, who's a trained medic and Crisis Intervention Team member, started a conversation with Yang, who's also known as Dong Yang, and the Berkeley Fire Department arrived to perform a medical evaluation on him as well, according to White. But when the officer tried to keep Yang there for medical personnel to treat him, he turned around and punched her in the face, White said. The officer got on her radio and called for emergency "Code 3 cover" for other officers to assist her but Yang continued his attack and tackled her on the ground, according to White. Arriving firefighters who saw Yang attacking the officer quickly jumped in to help her restrain Yang until additional officers could arrive, White said. Yang was arrested on suspicion of felony assault on a peace officer, resisting arrest, and possession of drug paraphernalia. But the Alameda County District Attorney's Office only charged Yang with misdemeanor battery on an emergency officer. The officer was treated at a local hospital for cuts, bruises and a concussion and was then released, White said. Yang is being held at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin in lieu of $5,000 bail and is scheduled to return to court on Thursday to enter a plea. 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) An Alameda County Superior Court jury today found five protesters not guilty of misdemeanor assault charges that were based on allegations that they attacked a President Trump supporter at a rally in Berkeley last year. Prosecutors alleged that Taylor Fuller, Scott Hedrick, Nathan Perry, Jeff Armstrong and Dustin Sawtelle beat Daniel Quillinan at the March4 Trump rally at the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Rally in Berkeley on March 4, 2017, during the first of several clashes between pro- and anti-Trump protesters in Berkeley last year. Berkeley police Sgt. Jesse Grant wrote in a probable cause statement that Quillinan was seated at Milvia and Kittredge streets being treated for a three-inch laceration that required stitches when the five counter-protesters kicked and punched him numerous times. In addition to the misdemeanor assault charge, Perry was also charged with a misdemeanor count of possession of a leaded cane or billyclub. However, jurors today found the defendants, who don't live in Berkeley, not guilty of all charges. Armstrong, 33, lives in Oakland, Perry, 35, lives in Modesto, Hedrick, 31, lives in Martinez, and Fuller, 34, and Sawtelle, 40, live in San Francisco. The activist group By Any Means Necessary, or BAMN, describes the defendants as "the Berkeley 5 anti-fascist protesters." BAMN said the five men "are local heroes who stood up to neo-fascist attacks" and alleged that "they are falsely charged by neo-fascists and local law enforcement to advance Trump's agenda in the direction of a police state." BAMN described Quillinan as "a self-proclaimed fascist sympathizer and one of the main organizers of the repeated alt-right protests in Berkeley in 2017." 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 San Jose man was killed when his motorcycle collided with a vehicle and he was struck by another vehicle in San Rafael late Saturday night, a California Highway Patrol officer said. The Marin County coroner's office identified him as 43-year-old Devendra Dilip Joglekar. Joglekar was riding a Harley-Davidson Heritage motorcycle south in the slow lane on U.S. Highway 101 near North San Pedro Road when it collided with Toyota Prius in the next lane around 11:15 p.m., CHP Officer Andrew Barclay said. Officers have arrested a man allegedly seen twice on surveillance video violently attacking two separate victims near San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, in what appear to be unprovoked attacks, police said Monday. The first alleged attack happened on May 24 around 3:35 p.m. on Leavenworth Street near McAllister Street. The victim, a 38-year-old homeless man, was lying down on the sidewalk when the suspect approached him and, without warning, began kicking him in the face. The suspect then turns around and casually walks away toward United Nations Plaza, leaving the victim with serious injuries that required hospitalization, according to police. In the other alleged attack, also recorded on surveillance video, the same suspect allegedly approached a 28-year-old man while on a San Francisco Municipal Railway bus near Mission and Eight streets on May 29. The suspect yelled at the victim, grabbed the victim by his hair and repeatedly slammed the victim's face into the bus' steel handrail. The victim suffered a broken nose, among other severe injuries. An Alameda County Superior Court jury Monday found five protesters not guilty of misdemeanor assault charges that were based on allegations that they attacked a President Trump supporter at a rally in Berkeley last year. Prosecutors alleged that Taylor Fuller, Scott Hedrick, Nathan Perry, Jeff Armstrong and Dustin Sawtelle beat Daniel Quillinan at the March4 Trump rally at the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Rally in Berkeley on March 4, 2017, during the first of several clashes between pro- and anti-Trump protesters in Berkeley last year. Berkeley police Sgt. Jesse Grant wrote in a probable cause statement that Quillinan was seated at Milvia and Kittredge streets being treated for a three-inch laceration that required stitches when the five counter-protesters kicked and punched him numerous times. In addition to the misdemeanor assault charge, Perry was also charged with a misdemeanor count of possession of a leaded cane or billyclub. However, jurors Monday found the defendants, who don't live in Berkeley, not guilty of all charges. A man known as "Jogger Joe" pleaded not guilty Monday in Oakland to a second-degree felony robbery charge for allegedly stealing the cellphone of a man who confronted him for throwing a homeless man's belongings into Lake Merritt. Oakland police Officer Michael Ransom II wrote in a probable cause statement that Henry Sintay, 38, was recorded committing a strong-arm robbery of a cellphone on June 9 and Sintay confessed to the crime when he was interviewed by police. Prosecutors allege that Sintay, who lives in the 1300 block of East 27th Street in Oakland, near Highland Hospital, has a prior felony conviction for selling or transporting marijuana in Riverside County in 2009. Sintay is charged with stealing a cellphone belonging to Matt Nelson. Nelson said in an online posting that the theft occurred on June 9 when he used his cellphone to videotape Sintay when he asked Sintay why he threw a homeless man's belongings into Lake Merritt the previous evening, June 8. The Marine Mammal Center will respond to a blue whale carcass that washed ashore Monday a few miles south of Limantour Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore. "This is only the 10th blue whale carcass that our team has responded to in our 43-year-history, so this is a rare chance to learn more about the overall health and life history of this species," Marine Mammal Center researcher Barbie Halaska said in a statement. The Marine Mammal Center's rescue department first received public reports Saturday evening of the carcass floating two miles east of the Farallon Islands. The Marine Mammal Center has responded to eight whale carcasses this year. Ship strikes and entanglement in fishing hear are leading causes of whale mortality. The Marine Mammal Center and the California Academy of Sciences will develop a plan Tuesday to perform a necropsy to determine the cause of death. A great white shark that washed up on a beach in Santa Cruz County Sunday will get a necropsy this week, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The shark was found on a beach near Aptos Sunday morning, according to Peter Tira, a spokesman for the department. The dead shark was male and about nine feet long, Tira said. Pathologists from the department will perform a necropsy in hopes of finding out what killed the shark, which has been removed from the beach and taken to a laboratory, Tira 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. SANTA ROSA (BCN) Two men were arrested Sunday on suspicion of robbing a woman of her purse outside a bank and trying to rob two people in a car at a gas station in east Santa Rosa, a police lieutenant said. One of the men was armed with a BB pellet gun during the robbery and attempted robbery, Sgt. Josh Ludtke said. The man allegedly approached a woman whose car broke down in the parking lot of the Bank of America at 2420 Sonoma Ave. and took her purse when she said she had no money. The woman described the suspect as a high school age boy wearing a distinctive white and black striped shirt. He and the driver allegedly fled in a tan sedan. As a police officer investigated the robbery, the police dispatch center broadcast a similar robbery in progress at a nearby Valero gas station at 1400 Farmers Lane, Ludtke said. In that robbery the suspect in the striped shirt demanded money at gunpoint from two people in a vehicle. The victims said they had no money and were living in their car, and the suspect demanded drugs or jewelry. One of the victims questioned whether the suspect's gun was real and got out of the vehicle and chased the suspect around the car, Ludtke said. The suspect tried to strike the victim with the gun before he got into the sedan's passenger seat as it drove away. Officers allegedly located the sedan several blocks away and closed traffic in the area of Farmers Lane near Sonoma Avenue for a high-risk traffic stop. The driver, Bijan Almassi, 19, of Santa Rosa, got out of the car but the passenger who was wearing the striped shirt, Ryan James Kahle, 18, of Santa Rosa, refused to leave the car for several minutes as officers tried to smash the car windows, Ludtke said. Police recovered the woman's purse and a BB gun that closely resembled a firearm, Ludtke said. Both men were booked in the Sonoma County jail on suspicion of robbery and attempted robbery and are scheduled to be arraigned in Sonoma County Superior Court Tuesday afternoon. Police learned an additional robbery may have been attempted or committed at the Safeway store at 2785 Yulupa Ave. in Santa Rosa. Anyone with information as a victim or witness of that incident is asked to call police at (707) 543-3590. 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 BRUNO (BCN) Officers are looking into an unconfirmed report of a mountain lion sighting Monday morning near Parkside Intermediate School in San Bruno, police said. San Bruno police have contacted the California Department of Fish and Game and are investigating the unconfirmed report. In the meantime, police have tips for residents on how to deal with the problem. Police said not to feed deer, which is illegal in the state and attracts mountain lions that might stalk the deer. Residents are also advised to avoid plants deer like to eat. Pet food should be brought inside to avoid attracting raccoons, opossums and other potential mountain lion prey, police said. Small children and pets should not be left outside unattended, police said. Residents should install motion-sensitive lighting around the house. Pets should not be allowed outside when mountain lions are most active: during dawn, dusk and at night, according to police. Residents should not walk, hike or jog alone, and should keep a close watch on small children, according to police. 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. Following a restructuring of the Egyptian governments cabinet, Air Marshal Younes Al Masry has been appointed as the countrys Civil Aviation Minister. He succeeds Sherif Fathy, a former EgyptAir group chairman and an IATA executive who had also worked with US airlines as part of a civil aviation career development. Al Masry (pictured right) is the former Air Chief ofSstaff and at the time of his appointment by President Abdel Fatah El Sisi, was the Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Air Force. The reshuffle came following negotiations with the Parliament to nominate new ministers after President Sisi ordered new Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly to form a new government to succeed that of Sherif Ismail, who resigned on June 5. As it traditional the entire serving cabinet resigned at the election, but the appointments appear to indicate a strengthening of the military influence. Lt. Gen. Mohamed Ahmed Zaki, who had been the head of the presidential guard, was appointed minister of defence, replacing Gen. Sedki Sobhi. Mahmoud Tawfik, who had previously led the National Security department, which focuses on anti-terrorism and homeland security, replaced Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar at the Interior Ministry. The new civil aviation minister wasted no time in checking into his role and on Saturday Al Masry instructed the civil aviation businesses to coordinate with the Ministry of Interior to maintain the efficiency of security measures taken at Cairo International Airport. According to local media the minister directed to review the situation of the suspended projects and plans to resume them. During his first inspection tour of the airport, the minister met with staff and listened to their suggestions about operations. KhalifaSat, the first fully UAE-built Earth observation satellite, has been flown to South Korea prior to its launch in Japan later this year. Steve Nichols reports. KhalifaSat was transported from Dubai to Incheon International Airport in South Korea on an Emirates SkyCargo Boeing 777 freighter aircraft, which was chartered for the project. Emirates SkyCargo also unveiled a special branded truck to mark the event. Given the delicate nature of the shipment, teams from Emirates SkyCargo and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) had worked together since November 2017 to prepare and plan all the steps. The satellite was transported from MBRSCs manufacturing facility in Dubai to the Emirates SkyCentral DWC freighter cargo terminal at Dubai World Central Airport. The road trip was completed using a remotely monitored Emirates SkyCargo truck travelling with a police escort. The satellite was then loaded through the main deck doors of the B777 freighter for onward delivery to South Korea. Nabil Sultan, Emirates divisional senior vice president, cargo, said: Over the years Emirates SkyCargo has carried a wide variety of unusual items, but being able to transport the first satellite manufactured in the UAE is a unique honour. We are delighted to bring our expertise in air transportation to the table on this historic and momentous occasion. KhalifaSat is a 350kg Earth observation satellite which, after launch, is due to orbit roughly every 90 minutes at a height of around 600 kilometres. The Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) launched its first satellite DubaiSat-1 in 2009. It passes over the UAE four times a day providing 2.5 metre resolution colour images. The much bigger DubaiSat-2 was launched in 2013, providing 1 metre resolution panchromatic (black and white), plus 4 metre multispectral (colour) photographs across a 12km-wide imaging swath. KhalifaSat will better these resolutions thanks to developments in imaging sensors and optics. DubaiSat-1 and DubaiSat-2 were built in partnership with Satrec Initiative (SI), a South Korean satellite manufacturer. But, with the knowledge gained through this cooperation, MBRSC engineers designed and developed KhalifaSat in the UAE without SIs assistance. With its four solar panels, the new satellite will have a resolution of 0.7 metres for panchromatic images and 2.98 metres for multi-spectral imagery. The satellite will be able to store 1,024 images, each representing a 12km x 12km area. The total image size that can be stored by the satellite will be 12km x 1,350km. His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai, recently visited the MBRSC to see the progress of the KhalifaSat project. He said: Emirati engineers are the first in the Arab world to construct a satellite without foreign assistance. This is a major achievement that signifies the high level of capabilities UAE youth have acquired in space technologies. The high level of expertise that Emirati scientists and engineers have developed creates a strong foundation for the future scientific and technological development of the UAE. The KhalifaSat project is part of MBRSCs long-term strategy to encourage innovation, stimulate technological progress, promote sustainable development and create a generation of Emirati scientists and engineers who will contribute to a scientific renaissance and lead ambitious space projects over the next decade. The MBRSC has an agreement with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd (MHI) for the launch of KhalifaSat to take place in Japan. The launch vehicle will be the H-IIA rocket and is scheduled to launch at an unspecified date later in 2018. Once in orbit, MBRSC says KhalifaSat will provide detailed high-quality imagery for a variety of uses, allowing the UAE to provide competitive Earth-observation services across the world. The MBRSC ground station in Dubai, UAE, will support KhalifaSat, and its high-resolution imagery of the Earth will be used for various purposes, including urban planning, change monitoring, area classification, monitoring environmental change and aiding relief efforts for natural disasters. Pegasus Airlines is adding Omans capital Muscat and Saudi Arabias business hub Dammam to its flight network, to open up new markets in the Arabian Gulf to business and leisure travellers. Three times weekly flights will be launching on July 3, 2018 between London Stansted and Muscat International Airport from London Airport and Muscat International Airport (via Istanbul). Since June 6 the airline has also been serving daily flights between London Stansted and Dammam (via Istanbul). KOLOMNA, Russia Walking to a store in March, Olga Yevseyeva was hit by the familiar, noxious stench of rotten eggs wafting from the town landfill a few miles away. It was a moment that changed her life. This smell just made me explode with anger, she recalled of that spring night in Kolomna, a town about 60 miles southeast of Moscow. And I realized something had to be done, because you cant just go on like this. BEIJING North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing on Tuesday amid an escalating trade conflict between China and the United States, one that gives him an opening to play the powers against each other as Washington presses him to dismantle his nuclear arsenal. This could be regarded as an intuitive response to Trumps escalation of the trade war, Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said of Chinas invitation to Kim. The surprise trip, just a week after his landmark summit meeting in Singapore with President Trump, is the North Korean leaders third visit to China since March. His two-day trip was announced by Xinhua, Chinas official news agency, as Kim was arriving Tuesday morning; his previous stops in China were not made public until after they were over. For his first one, in March which was also his first trip abroad and his first meeting with a head of state since becoming the Norths leader Kim arrived in Beijing aboard an armored train and he spent two days in the capital for talks with President Xi Jinping. In May, Kim visited the port city of Dalian, also spending time with Xi. This time, Kim arrived much as any other foreign leader might, landing at Beijings international airport and taking a stretch limousine to the city center. Xinhuas report gave no details of the agenda for Kims visit. But he was likely to deliver a personal briefing about what happened behind closed doors during three hours of talks with Trump last week, the first meeting ever between leaders of the United States and North Korea. Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on North Korea who has lived in the North and still has ties there, said Kim would be seeking to take advantage of the trade conflict between the United States and China, deepening their rivalry to ensure they do not join forces against him, as they did last year on the U.N. sanctions over his weapons program. He wants to further disrupt the united China-U.S. front, which somewhat surprisingly emerged last year, but now is in critical condition due to the trade war, Lankov said. For its part, China would like Kim to pull back a bit on the bonhomie he showed Trump in Singapore, analysts in Asia said. China, they said, sees the trade dispute with Washington as a more serious threat than Kims nuclear arsenal. Jane Perlez is a New York Times writer. JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images SEOUL U.S. and South Korean defense officials formally suspended a major joint military exercise in hopes of advancing nuclear negotiations with North Korea. Its a bold gamble that could trigger a serious security crisis if the talks falter and the allies are forced to resume the drills, infuriating North Korea, analysts say. The cancellation, abruptly decided by President Trump at his summit last week with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was formally announced by the Pentagon on Monday. South Koreas Defense Ministry simultaneously confirmed the suspension of the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises, consisting largely of computer-simulated war games. WASHINGTON President Trump has directed the U.S. Trade Representative to prepare new tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports as the two nations move closer to a trade war. In response, China has threatened what it called comprehensive measures, raising the risk that it would target operations of major American companies in China. Trumps proposed new tariffs would amount to the latest round of punitive steps in an escalating dispute between the worlds two largest economies. The two appear to be edging toward a trade fight that analysts say would undermine both their economies and likely slow global growth. The White House has accused China of forcing U.S. companies to share advanced technology with Chinese partners as a condition of doing business there. The administration also revived its complaints Tuesday about Americas gaping trade deficit with China, which it says reflects an unfair trading relationship. Trump previously ordered tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods in retaliation for Beijings forced transfer of U.S. technology and for intellectual property theft. Those tariffs were matched by Chinas threat to penalize on U.S. exports, a move that drew the presidents ire. Neither side has yet imposed tariffs on the other in their growing dispute over technology and the U.S. trade gap; the first round is to take effect on July 6. But the rhetoric is intensifying. The president asserted in a statement Monday night that China is determined to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage. China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology, Trump said in the statement. Rather than altering those practices, it is now threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong. U.S. stock markets fell sharply Tuesday, with investors increasingly nervous about the impact of the escalating fight. Should China impose its proposed expanded tariffs, Trump warned, that he would slap duties on an additional $200 billion of Chinese imports. All told, Trump is now threatening to penalize up to $450 billion of Chinese goods a value representing about 90 percent of Chinese imports last year. Chinas Commerce Ministry assailed Trumps latest threat, saying it was an act of extreme pressure and blackmail. If the U.S. becomes irrational and issues this list, China will have no choice but to adopt strong countermeasures of the same amount and quality, the statement said. Zeke Miller and Jeff Karoub are Associated Press writers. SANAA, Yemen Fierce fighting raged Tuesday outside the airport of the vital Yemeni city of Hodeida, pitting thousands of pro-government fighters supported by a Saudi-led coalition against Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels, Yemeni military officials said. The United Arab Emirates-backed Amaleqa brigades, supported by air strikes and naval shelling from the Saudi-led coalition, have been trying to storm the southern and western parts of the airport, the officials said. However, land mines and Houthi snipers have been hindering efforts to get the airport under government control, they said. It is a vast, open area and the Houthis have covered the ground with land mines to prevent the forces advancements, one Yemeni military official said. Its back-and- forth battles. The official said it was a matter of hours before the forces take full control of the airport. The Amaleqa brigades have captured dozens of rebel fighters, including minors, in the airport fighting, the officials added. Combat has been raging at the southern runway less than a mile from the main airport compound. Witnesses said warships and warplanes from the Saudi-led coalition have been hitting the airport and the east side of Hodeida around the clock since late Monday, aiming at cutting off the main road that links the port province and the capital, Sanaa. Government forces have been trying for days to capture the Kilo 16 road to trap the Houthi rebels inside Hodeida and the western coast and block supplies from coming in from Sanaa. Witnesses said fighting forced dozens of families to leave their homes in the area around the Kilo 16 road toward the countryside at the east side of Hodeida province. They said the rebels have fortified the area in preparation for a likely coming battle against government forces. Ahmed Al-Haj is an Associated Press writer. The world is currently experiencing a general boom of startups. There are small businesses sprucing up in literally every part of the world at a fast pace more than ever before. One of the places where this situation is all too relevant is in Latin America. Virtually every single Latin American country has experienced an accelerated growth of startups in recent years. There are many reasons why startups are moving to Latin America in droves. One of the key reasons is the availability of funding and general support for startups among the local populations. Governments have also been instrumental to the growth of startups as they have created a great environment that supports business accelerators. In a region where countless accelerators can now be identified, the following three are the most visible. Start-Up Chile This seed accelerator is one of the well-known startup champions in Chile. The accelerator is a project of the Government of Chile and it has a great footprint in the industry. It was started in 2010 and it has since then inspired so many other countries around the world to have similar projects. Many startups have seen their success due to the work of Start-Up Chile. The accelerator is not only focused on the Chilean market but also on the whole of Latin America. While the Chile office is the most active and grandest of all, the work of Start-Up Chile can also be seen in neighboring countries albeit on a smaller scale. In terms of figures, around $45,000 USD is offered as part of equity funding to startups. IncuBAte In neighboring Argentina is the IncuBAte is the leading incubator for both local and foreign startups. The country has been through tumultuous times in recent decades but that has not stopped it from having its business-minded approach in all affairs. Today, the country hosts one of the largest startups in Latin America and all these have been as a result of the commitment by the government. There are many services provided by IncuBAte including financial assistance, advice, and workspace for everyone who ventures into the market of Buenos Aires. The city itself has many accolades in addition to the great natural atmosphere that is prominent throughout the year. Entrepreneurship has been considered a priority by the city's authorities and this is evident in the many business-friendly policies that the officials have adopted. Parallel18 Puerto Rico is not particularly known for its innovativeness. The country has gone through several natural and economic disasters that have left it devastated. The country, however, has a great commitment in the area of investment and this has led it to establish Parallel18. The seriousness of the government has been visible through the benefits that the government offers. Anybody interested in starting up a venture in the country can access mentorship, consulting, up to $40,000 USD in funding among various other benefits. The great gesture by the government has definitely drawn in serious startups and there are currently over 30 startups doing business from Puerto Rico. A particularly successful example is Abartys Health, which is already accolades for its work in the health sector. Abartys Health is doing a great job of showing the world how the Puerto Rican environment is great for startups. It is also having a significant impact on supporting the rise of the Puerto Rican economy from the shambles. Experts have consistently insisted that startups are not just a necessity for the innovative industry in Puerto Rico. Instead, startups are a necessity and the lifeline that the country desperately needs to get out of the worrisome economic times. In Summary Most South American nations and their cities are widely known for their impressive weather. The countries are thus a magnet for tourists from all around the world. While these qualities are enough to attract investment, the surety that the regulatory environment offers is also commendable. Most governments in this region have been at the forefront of creating a suitable environment for investment. The region has also seen a huge rise in investments within the past few years. There is, therefore, a great air of entrepreneurship that will be great for any startups venturing into the region. Countries in other parts of the world that have been known to be great hubs for investment are definitely getting significant competition from Latin America. Read More News Foreign Exchange Market and its Structure in India 7 killed in Guatemala volcano eruption, over 1 mn residents affected (Composite) If Trump's infrastructure plan became reality STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The Advance asked all eight congressional candidates: "What one project would you advocate for on Staten Island should President Trump's $200 billion infrastructure investment become a reality?" Here are their responses. Don't Edit Michael DeVito Michael DeVito, a Westerleigh resident who works with at-risk Island youth, said that he would advocate for a light rail on the Island's West Shore. "The President's infrastructure plan relies on private and state dollars. I advocate for public infrastructure investment in keeping with the [Progressive Change Committee Campaign's] budget," said DeVito. "The most critical piece of infrastructure I would focus on is the West Shore Light Rail with a connection to the Hudson-Bergen Line, which would offer a new pathway to travel for hundreds of thousands of Staten Islanders." Don't Edit Staten Island Advance Rep. Dan Donovan Rep. Dan Donovan (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) said that he would continue advocating for a West Shore light rail. "I'm proud to be working closely with President Trump on infrastructure and applaud him for making this issue a top priority," said Donovan, who received Trump's endorsement in May. "I have already put in appropriations requests for studies for the West Shore light rail and the North Shore BRT so the ball is already rolling. My relationship with the President and his familiarity with Staten Island and our transportation challenges puts us in a unique position to fight to get this done." Donovan also said that he'll pursue additional infrastructure and transportation options. "I am also pursuing funding for fast ferry service and an HOV lane on the Goethals Bridge," said Donovan. "These projects will go a long way toward improving our quality of life and transportation options." Don't Edit Courtesy Zach Emig 2018 Zach Emig Zach Emig, a Tompkinsville bond trader, told the Advance that Republicans aren't committed to infrastructure. "Let me be clear up front: Republicans have controlled the White House, House, and Senate for sixteen months; during that time, they've passed a massive tax cut for the Trump family and business, but haven't even proposed an infrastructure plan," said Emig. "I won't play along with the fiction that the DC Republican party cares one bit about infrastructure here in New York." Emig said that he would advocate for a double-decker highway if elected to Congress. "It's up to the Democratic Party to put the effort and money behind improving America's infrastructure, and my top priority for Staten Island is to build up the expressway and 440 into double decker highways -- building up rather than out," Emig said. "By adding an elevated set of lanes to the existing highways, we'd increase speeds, reduce commute times, and separate interstate traffic from local drivers. Finally, reducing time spent idling in highway traffic also helps improve air quality on the island." Don't Edit Staten Island Michael Grimm Michael Grimm, Staten Island's former congressman, said he would advocate for a fast ferry. "A modern fast ferry system that incorporates the West Shore, South Shore, and Mid-Island that would link Staten Islanders to both Downtown and Midtown Manhattan," he said. Don't Edit Don't Edit Courtesy Mohan for Congress Radhakrishna Mohan Radhakrishna Mohan, a longtime community and civic activist, proposed seven projects that he would advocate for, including a 13-mile West Shore light rail. "The money can be used to build: a permanent fast ferry service from South Shore, complete the HOV lane up to Goethals Bridge, improve the aged subway and transport systems by modernizing it, to fund the North Shore Bus Rapid Transit System to provide bus only path for a distance about 5 miles, provide escalators or elevators at the Brooklyn subway system to provide access to disabled and seniors to the train system as they cannot climb the stairs, implement West Shore Light Rail for a 13-mile route along the West Shore, from Richmond Valley to Elm Park, carrying Staten Island commuters over the Bayonne Bridge to connect with New Jersey Transit's Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Line, to build roads, strengthen the bridges and tunnels," Mohan said. Don't Edit Courtesy Paul Sperling for U.S. Congress Paul Sperling Paul Sperling -- a Tottenville resident endorsed by a U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders-inspired grassroots group -- said that he would attempt to bring a subway line to Staten Island. "Being a borough of New York City, our community deserves equal access to NYC's most essential public service: the subway," Sperling said. "In Congress, I will bring home the funding to finally connect Staten Island with the subway system and drastically cut the commute by running express trains to and from the island." "Staten Island has one of the longest commutes in the entire country. Many of us are waking up prepared for a two-hour commute or longer," said Sperling, 25. "We are also the only borough without a connection to the subway system. It is about time we fixed this unfair imbalance." Don't Edit Courtesy Omar Vaid for Congress Omar Vaid "Increased public transportation would be the priority, with increased transport across the Bayonne and Verrazano bridges with free connections to local light rail, and a public water taxi terminal on the south shore," Vaid said. Don't Edit Courtesy Max Rose for Congress Max Rose Max Rose, a U.S. Army combat veteran and Purple Heart recipient, said that Staten Island shouldn't settle for one project since New York sends close to $50 billion to Washington, D.C. "I reject the premise that we need to settle for one project. Our transportation woes can't be solved by piecing together solutions one project at a time," said Rose. "New York sends Washington $48 billion more than it gets back in federal spending. It's time we changed the funding formulas so that we can mount a full-court offense, like the transportation plan I unveiled in April, to improve our historically bad commute times." Rose's plan included implementing a full HOV lane on the Staten Island Expressway, putting an HOV lane on the Goethals Bridge, fighting to change a federal rule that cities with more than 200,000 residents can't receive federal funds for operating expenditures, and proposing two-way tolling on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to reduce truck traffic. Rose said that if elected he'll seek to be put on the House's Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. "That starts with taking a seat on the House of Representatives' Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to fight for a South Shore ferry, North Shore BRT, and finish the expansion of the SIE and West Shore Expressway," said Rose. "The people of Staten Island and South Brooklyn deserve a seat at the table where all federal infrastructure decisions are made. We've already had members of Congress who make a half-hearted attempt to get one piece of infrastructure improved and we're suffering the consequences." STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The city's latest budget will allocate funds to form an Immigrant Affairs Unit at the Richmond County District Attorney's Office. District Attorney Michael E. McMahon, the borough's City Council delegation, and local immigration activists worked to bring the unit to the borough. "The Immigrant Affairs Unit will be a vital asset, allowing us to directly communicate with these communities, prevent them from being victimized and vigorously prosecute those who do them harm, as we continue our mission of building trust between law enforcement and all people of this borough," McMahon said in a statement. Council member Debi Rose said she fought for the resources, because it will protect public health and safety, and increase community outreach. "Staten Island is home to thousands of immigrants, and yet we have been the only borough without an immigration unit in the District Attorney's Office," she said. "A dedicated immigration unit will not only serve our immigrant population living in fear of deportation, but also address crucial outreach issues, such as the dearth of crime reporting from the immigrant community -- something that impacts the safety of all Staten Islanders." Executive Director of El Centro del Inmigrante Favio Ramirez-Caminatti said the 100,000 foreign-born people living in the borough will be helped by the new unit, and that it will help make Staten Island a safer place. "Immigrants and new Americans are potential witnesses and victims that frequently face language and cultural barriers to access our legal system," he said. "The trust in law enforcement and our legal system is key to have a safer city, and that is what we are adding an Immigrant Affairs Unit." The unit, which is projected to cost around $150,000, will be comprised of a senior district attorney and a paralegal, who will focus on crimes that target vulnerable immigrant populations and help establish better relationships between the district attorney's office and the various immigrant communities it serves. Staten Island is the last borough to get such a unit, which McMahon said was because of a lack of funding from City Hall. Cesar Vargas, a local immigration activist, and New York's first undocumented immigrant admitted to the New York State Bar, saw the missing unit as a lack of initiative from McMahon. "Great, we have an immigration unit now that is funded, but we want to make sure that it is a workable, and functional immigration unit that is going to address the concerns of immigration," he said. He said there was a more of an urgency in the other four boroughs that wasn't present on Staten Island. Vargas even wrote a piece published in the Huffington Post in 2017 urging the creation of such a unit. Vargas said he will be trying to work with the City Council to ensure the money from the city will be allocated properly. "It's not just about hiring any lawyer,'' he said. "It's not about just hiring any paralegal. It's about you truly working with the community to address the attack on immigrants we're seeing across the country." Samuel Owusu-Sekyre, president of the Ghanaian Council of Staten Island, applauded the new unit, and said it will help the well being of the community it represents. "It is about time that Staten Island takes its fair share of NYC community resources for its immigrant residents," he said in a statement. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The Staten Island-bound side of the Goethals Bridge will be closed Friday night so the span's final traffic configuration can be implemented. The span for motorists traveling from New Jersey to New York will be closed from 10 p.m. Friday, June 22, to 8 a.m. Saturday, June 23. Staten Island bound-traffic will be diverted to the Bayonne Bridge and Outerbridge Crossing. During that time, the contractor will shift the bridge's lanes into their final configuration. When it reopens, both sides will have with three, 12-foot lanes with shoulders on each side, according to the Port Authority. Although the New Jersey-bound span of the Goethals Bridge opened last month, work remained to reconfigure the other span, which had previously been used to service two-way traffic. Once the reconfiguration is complete, the Port Authority anticipates that the new three-lane span will reduce travel times during peak hours by 10 to 15 minutes. Some work still remains on the Goethals Bridge, with the not-yet-completed pedestrian walkway/bikeway set to open by the end of the summer. The Port Authority also advises all travelers to make use of its Summer Weekend Survival Guide, a list of tips and tricks to prevent motorists from getting stuck in standstill summer traffic. MCALLEN, Texas -- Politicians and advocates flocked to the Mexican border to visit U.S. immigration detention centers and turn up the pressure on the Trump administration amid a growing uproar Monday over its policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. A group of congressional lawmakers on Sunday visited an old warehouse in South Texas where hundreds of children are being held in cages created by metal fencing. One cage held 20 youngsters. "Those kids inside who have been separated from their parents are already being traumatized," said Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon. "It doesn't matter whether the floor is swept and the bedsheets tucked in tight." Nearly 2,000 children were taken from their parents over a six-week period in April and May after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a "zero tolerance" policy when it comes to prosecuting those arrested for illegally entering the country. Church groups and human rights advocates have sharply criticized the policy, calling it inhumane. The policy has divided Republicans, with former first lady Laura Bush saying in a guest column in Sunday's Washington Post that the practice of separating immigrant parents and children along the nation's southern border is "cruel" and ?immoral" and "breaks my heart." Bush likened the policy to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker cited the administration's "cruel and inhuman" policy separating children from their parents in reversing a decision to send a National Guard helicopter from his state to the Mexican border. Migrant advocates announced they would rally outside the federal courthouse in Phoenix on Monday afternoon to protest the policy. President Donald Trump emphatically defended his administration's policy Monday, again falsely blaming Democrats. "The United States will not be a migrant camp and it will not be a refugee holding facility," he declared. "Not on my watch." In San Diego, Rep. Juan Vargas and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus were leading members of Congress on a visit Monday to several immigration detention facilities. Vargas, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and other U.S. lawmakers hoped to meet with men, women and children detained at the international boundary. Inside the South Texas warehouse, hundreds of immigration children waited inside chain-link enclosures. Scattered about were bottles of water, bags of chips and blankets that looked like large sheets of metal foil. It was the same facility the U.S. Border Patrol allowed reporters to briefly visit on Sunday. Agents did not allow reporters to interview detainees or take photos. More than 1,100 people were inside the large, dark facility, which is divided into separate wings for unaccompanied children, adults on their own, and mothers and fathers with children. The cages in each wing open out into common areas so that detainees can use portable restrooms. The overhead lighting in the warehouse stays on around the clock. At the federal courthouse in McAllen on Monday, some among the estimated 80 immigrants preparing to plead guilty on immigration charges asked the judge questions such as, "What's going to happen to my daughter?" and "What will happen to my son?" Attorneys at the hearings said the immigrants had brought several dozen boys and girls with them to the U.S., and the judge replied that he didn't know what would happen to their children. Typically, parents are sent to court, while children go to government facilities as the Trump administration carries out the new "zero tolerance" policy. There have been stories of children being torn from their parents' arms and parents not being able to locate their sons and daughters. In Texas' Rio Grande Valley, the busiest corridor for people trying to enter the U.S., Border Patrol officials argue that they have to crack down on migrants and separate adults from children as a deterrent to others trying to get into the U.S. illegally. "When you exempt a group of people from the law ... that creates a draw," said Manuel Padilla, the Border Patrol's chief agent here. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- For years, rumors have been circulating that the VA Medical Center in Brooklyn, which many Staten Island veterans depend on for critical care and services, would be closing or services would be cut. Concerned veterans say the hospital offers little, if any, communication about the hospital's future, periodically leaving them panicked. "It amounts to a breach of trust," said Kristen Rouse, an Army veteran and president and founding director of the NYC Veterans Alliance. A closure would force Staten Island and Brooklyn veterans to trek to the Manhattan VA Medical Center. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 17,000 veterans living on the Island. Rouse said she has heard veterans say they would not seek medical care if forced to travel to Manhattan. "It's been really frustrating," she said. LEGISLATION REQUIRES TRANSPARENCY New legislation being introduced by Rep. Daniel Donovan would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to notify veterans of any planned closures or service changes at VA medical centers across the country. The Veterans Awareness Act would require the administration to notify veterans and the local congressional representative of planned service changes or terminations 60 days before the proposal can be implemented. Additionally, the VA would have to host a forum where veterans and other stakeholders can testify about the changes and how they would impact their lives. "We really appreciate that it will at least mandate that the VA would have to tell us [about a change]. It's finally something we could hold them accountable for," Rouse said. Donovan (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) said that veterans deserve better than the lack of transparency they're receiving from the VA. The idea for the legislation came after numerous roundtable conversations with veterans. "A doctor's office would never just cease service and not proactively contact their patients -- it shouldn't be any different at a VA facility. My bill will increase transparency regarding decisions being made at the VA to better support veterans and ensure their concerns are heard," Donovan said. DONOVAN QUESTIONS HOSPITAL'S PLANS Donovan penned a letter to Martina Parauda, the director of the VA NY Harbor Health Care System, emphasizing the importance of accessibility, services and communication that the hospital provides to his veteran constituents and their families. "Veterans from my district rely on the facility to easily access the quality care, rehabilitation programs, and medical support they not only earned, but deserve. Unfortunately, constant closure threats and termination of certain services has caused hardships for many Staten Island and Brooklyn veterans. Year to year, they worry about having services dwindle or even worse, seeing the facility close completely," Donovan said in the letter dated Monday. "Let me be clear, any modification to the Brooklyn facility that limits or changes the services offered to thousands of local veterans will be extremely harmful," he went on to say. Additionally, Donovan asked how the hospital plans to prevent staffing vacancies in the future, how they plan to alert patients about service changes and closures, and what the future of the hospital is. ENT CLINIC TO REMAIN OPEN Most recently, the VA posted a sign on the facility's ear, nose and throat (ENT) clinic stating it would be shuttering its doors on June 27 because of staffing issues. The ENT clinic is staffed by doctors from SUNY Downstate Medical Center. The clinic's closure would have forced veterans to travel to the VA medical centers in Manhattan or the Bronx. "[The clinic] is a major thing for veterans. There are few veterans I know that suffer from tinnitus, snoring and sleep apnea issues -- especially from 9/11 and from inhaling burn pit smoke. The ENT Clinic deals directly with service connected issues," Rouse said. Following a rally with local veterans groups, leaders from the NYC Veterans Allicance, Donovan and others, the Brooklyn VA reversed its decision to close the clinic. Parauda told The Post that the clinic will hire two to three part-time staff doctors to replace the physicians from SUNY by the end of June. The VA NY Harbor Health Care System did not immediately return a request for comment. Hector Meza, 40, is shown in a photo posted by the FDNY on social media. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A homeless man is accused of starting a massive fire that ripped through several St. George businesses earlier this month, officials said. Hector Meza, 40, was arrested by fire marshals and charged with fourth-degree arson, reckless endangerment and criminal trespass stemming from the June 6 incident, the FDNY said in post on social media. Meza allegedly allowed a candle to burn carelessly, igniting combustibles in an alcove in the rear of one of the buildings on Stuyvesant Place, and leaving the scene without alerting anyone to the fire or calling 911, the FDNY post said. Meza is homeless, according to an NYPD spokesman. The three-alarm blaze engulfed three stores, including the Dunkin' Donuts and St. George Pharmacy. The floors, ceiling, windows and roof of the coffee shop and the pharmacy were destroyed. Al Gentile, owner of the St. George Pharmacy, previously told the Advance the fire started on the back porch. He and five customers were in the store at the time, and were able to get out unharmed. "It filled up with smoke in a minute," he said. Gentile says he's had issues with the homeless people who hang out on the porch behind his store, and the city has not helped with the situation. "Their rights seem to be more important than tax-paying business owners," he said. Meza was taken to an area hospital after his arrest. It was not immediately clear when he would be arraigned. A single issue -- electability -- transcends all others in next week's Republican primary between Rep. Daniel Donovan and former Rep. Michael Grimm. If the candidate who wins the nomination loses the general election, this district's congressional representative will be aligned with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and other leading Democrats as they seek to undermine, and perhaps even impeach, President Donald Trump. Although Donovan, a proven vote-getter, appeared headed for an easy re-election, Grimm's entry into the race has convinced the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that it can flip the seat in November. Grimm has been fueling Democratic optimism for months now, attacking Donovan relentlessly and, in the process, creating bitterness and division among Republican voters. He's also succeeded in forcing a primary for the Conservative nomination, raising the prospect of a nightmare scenario for Republicans. If Donovan should win the Republican primary but lose the Conservative contest, both candidates would be on the ballot in November. That, of course, would be tantamount to handing the seat to the Democrats. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the DCCC has included this district's seat in its Red-to-Blue campaign, which pledges organizational and fundraising support for select Democratic candidates. Grimm's electability problem is his status as a convicted felon, even though his prosecution wreaked of political malice. While he's intelligent and articulate, it's precariously naive to believe that his felony conviction wouldn't seriously impair his chances in a district that includes a slice of Brooklyn and Staten Island's heavily Democratic North Shore. This is not lost on Trump, who has not only strongly endorsed Donovan, but bluntly warned that Grimm can't win in November. In fact, the president compared his candidacy to that of the deeply flawed Roy Moore, which cost Republicans the U.S. Senate race in Alabama. Republican voters also should be worried about the potential for new criminal charges arising out of the Grimm's campaign's scheme to deprive Donovan of the Reform Party nomination. The episode unfolded in April after the Reform Party had filed designating petitions with the Board of Elections to give Donovan its line. A separate BOE form, known as a "cover sheet," was neither filed nor required because there were fewer than 10 pages in the filing. Thereafter, only minutes before midnight on April 12, the last day to file designating petitions, Joe Shikhman, a Grimm campaign aide, filed additional Reform Party petitions that, though ostensibly for Donovan, were actually calculated to deprive him of that party's nomination. The existence of this second volume rendered the Reform Party's petitions for Donovan out of compliance with BOE rules because they now required a cover sheet. The plot failed, however, as the Board of Elections concluded that the Grimm campaign had not only attempted to perpetrate a fraud, but may also have committed a crime or crimes. The board thus awarded the Reform line to Donovan, and referred the matter to city, state and federal prosecutors. The Grimm campaign's plot was not only sleazy but astonishingly stupid. It had no realistic chance of succeeding, while exposing the perpetrators to potential criminal liability. The campaign remained clueless and unrepentant, however, telling cable network NY-1 breezily, "Since Donovan was frantically seeking paid help to get his signatures, we thought we'd help him out for free. You'd think he would be more grateful." Under two sections of the New York Penal Law, "offering a false instrument for filing" is either a felony or a misdemeanor, depending on the circumstances. And, indeed, there have been numerous criminal prosecutions under these sections involving nominating petitions. The signatories on the petitions filed by the Grimm campaign expressly designated Donovan as a candidate for the Reform Party nomination. So facially they were fine. In this case, however, appearances were intentionally deceiving because the petitions were calculated to do the precise opposite of what they purported to do. Given the legislative intent behind these penal law sections, it certainly could be argued that the petitions were substantively false, and that filing them constituted a crime. Moreover, their impact on Donovan aside, the Grimm campaign's scheme also appears to have imperiled the federally protected voting rights of Reform Party members. Whether criminal conduct did, in fact, take place here is an intriguing legal question that federal and state prosecutors will have to decide. It would not be surprising, however, if they conclude that it did, and proceed accordingly. That possibility will continue to stalk Grimm's campaign should it endure beyond next week's primary. Grimm's people may think what they did was funny, but in the end, it may be the Democrats who have the last laugh. Email Daniel Leddy at column@danielleddylaw.com. Follow him on Twitter @LegalHotShots. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! The former chief executive of JP Morgan in Australia, Rob Priestley, is resigning from the boards of the ASX and the Future Fund, saying the cartel case over ANZ's capital raising may become a "distraction". JP Morgan, which Mr Priestley now chairs, was a joint lead manager along with Citi and Deutsche Bank on ANZ's $2.5 billion capital raising in 2015, which is the focus of a court action alleging criminal cartel behaviour. Former JP Morgan Australia chief Rob Priestley said he looked forward to the facts and circumstances of the ACCC cartel case being clarified. Credit:Louie Douvis Charges were laid this month against ANZ, Citi, Deutsche Bank and six senior executives, including former Australian bosses of Citi and Deutsche Bank, following an investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The banks are denying the allegations, while JP Morgan is believed to have immunity and has declined to comment on the matter. Mr Priestly was not charged and there is no suggestion he was knowingly involved in the alleged cartel between the banks. Advertising mogul and media columnist Harold Mitchell has timed a move to offload a landmark $45 million office in South Melbourne to coincide with city fringe offices coming back into favour with investors. The media identity owns Emerald House at 105 York Street, an office built for his company Mitchell Communication Group in 2010. Emerald House at 105 York Street is on the market. Mr Mitchell sold the business to Japanese media giant Dentsu Aegis who have fully occupied the office on a lease set to expire in 2021. Dentsu has the option to extend its lease and is understood to have given up a city-wide hunt for a new 20,000 square metre space in favour of staying at Emerald House and looking for 8000-12,000sq m close by. One of the first high-rise apartments in Melbournes Fishermans Bend will launch this weekend as a Singapore-owned developer banks on being a first mover and price savings to draw buyers to the area. CEL Australia's project, a $140 million 29-level tower, will be the first of three planned for a site at 15-85 Gladstone Street in South Melbourne. The backing of Chip Eng Seng will allow CEL to begin work in September. Credit:CEL Australia The 222-unit building, designed by architects Elenberg Fraser, will be among the first high-rises to be built in Australias largest urban renewal precinct, which will ultimately be home to 80,000 new residents. The developer will offer the first 70 buyers significant incentives, up to $29,000 in furniture and audio visual packages and throw in the first year of owners-corporation fees. Google's most senior lawyer and top public policy executive has warned Australia it risks stifling innovation and hurting the growth of its technology sector if it takes a hard line against big internet companies. "Australia must not risk inhibiting its economic growth and squandering an opportunity to become a world leader in digital innovation by suffocating technological development," Kent Walker, Google's general counsel, said. Mr Walker also defended the $US820 billion ($1.1 trillion) search giant's record on combating fake news and hate speech, and played down a dispute with an Australian founded tech start-up that has caught the attention of the media. Kent Walker, Google's SVP of legal Credit:Jessica Aromas, Fairfax He also criticised recent 'safe habour' copyright reforms that removed protections for Google when users distribute infringing material. Fifteen piracy websites will be blocked in Australia after the Federal Court gave the green light to Foxtel's latest bid to stop its shows being downloaded for free. The pay TV company brought court action against Telstra, Optus, TPG and 46 other internet service providers (ISPs) in March, seeking to block access within Australia to the piracy sites which use 28 different addresses. Foxtel said the sites including 123hulu, HDO and ETTV infringe on its copyright by offering free episodes of shows including Game of Thrones and prison drama Wentworth. Game of Thrones is one of the shows illegally downloaded in Australia. Credit:HBO On Tuesday, Federal Court justice John Nicholas agreed, ordering the sites be blocked for a period of three years, after which Foxtel can apply to have the orders extended. Sydney CBD heritage property owners are the beneficiaries of a rise in demand from tenants keen to occupy a modern-style site for a creative office with a point of difference. But there remain many new buildings being developed, including a possible $1 billion, 45,000 square metre office tower at Circular Quay by Mirvac. To satisfy the demand, heritage building owners are undertaking extensive internal refurbishment works that will also help to capture higher rents, according to Colliers International. This heritage office block at 25 King Street, Sydney is on the market. In the past few months, almost $100 million worth of heritage properties have changed hands, equating to about $16,933-$17,969 per square metre per annum. Controversial comedian Kathy Griffin has hit out at Melania Trump, labelling the US First Lady a "feckless complicit piece of s---", following revelations Donald Trump's zero-tolerance immigration policy had separated as many as 2,000 children from their parents in the past six weeks. "F--- you, Melanie," Griffin wrote in a viral tweet, mispelling Trump's name. "You know damn well your husband can end this immediately...". Griffin's lashing directly referencing late night comedian Samantha Bees recent "feckless c---" attack on Melania, which drew demands from the White House her show be axed was in response to a statement from the First Lady saying she "hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform". Leaked documents from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency reveal a disturbing level of confusion and inaction over the case of a doctor accused of allegedly prescribing elderly patients potentially lethal doses of drugs to prematurely end their lives. They show Australias health practitioner regulator failed to investigate notifications made in 2014 about a former GP, Alan Kosky, after confusion between its investigative area and the Medical Board of Australia. Dr Alan Kosky in December, 2015. Credit:Jason South APHRA and the Medical Board work closely together to investigate complaints about doctors and are tasked with ensuring public safety. But even though Dr Kosky was the subject of three notifications to AHPRA, which raised serious allegations about his conduct, AHPRA acknowledged in writing earlier this month that there had yet to be any investigations into the most alarming complaints. In a development that proves she has well and truly been accepted by the royals, Meghan Markle has reportedly earned herself a toff nickname. According to the Daily Mail, the Duchess of Sussex has received a friendly upper-class moniker from her father-in-law, Prince Charles. And, don't worry: it isn't racist! Meghan Markle has received her own royal nickname, according to reports. Credit:PA (No word on what Prince Philip's nickname for the Suits actress might be. Moving on.) "He was the first man I ever killed." Accused murderer David Harold Eastman, 73, allegedly whispered this sentence alone in his Reid unit a year after Canberra's top cop had been executed. On the same day, Mr Eastman also allegedly said: "I had to kill him sitting down". The phrases were captured by police bugs, installed to spy on Mr Eastman, by detectives investigating Colin Winchester's 1989 assassination. He was a larrikin and a movie star, an artist and a pin-up. But most of all, Heath Ledger was a Perth boy who made it big, and left behind an archive of stuff from a rich but all-too-short career. Under wraps: National Film and Sound Archive CEO Jan Muller with Heath Ledger's Harley- Davidson. Credit:Sitthixay Ditthavong Canberra fans will soon have the chance to see some of Ledgers stuff up close, when a new exhibition about his life in movies opens at the National Film and Sound Archive in August. The show will feature film costumes and props, celebrity portraits, personal souvenirs and awards, including the Oscar Ledger won posthumously for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight. Police are warning of an increase in scams targeting Canberra's Chinese community. ACT Policing said a phone scammer claiming to be a Chinese official was threatening to arrest victims or their family unless they made an electronic money transfer. In some cases, the victim was transferred to someone claiming to be a more senior official, who then extorted more money. In extreme cases, the scams have escalated to involve further ransom demands from the victim's family. Reports of the scam in the ACT and nationwide have noticeably spiked since late March, and an ACT Policing spokesperson said the scammers may target the wider community. The running of Bull The escape yesterday in the Austrian mountains of Australian drug trafficker Barry Bull is a big blow to the National Crime Authority. Bull, 42, who escaped while being transported between the towns court and prison and disappeared on a waiting motorcycle was one of the authoritys most sought-after prizes. He had been arrested in April at a border crossing for carrying a forged passport and Australian authorities had since been seeking his extradition. Senators son gets snippy Senator Michael Baumes son, Patrick, a year 10 student at St Ignatius, went to school with his hair cut in what his hairdresser, Alan Spackman of Mark of Zorros in Glebe, described as a flat-top. After being told he was suspended for a week, he says its a bit of a shock. The reason was that my haircut did not comply with the schools rules. Theres a vague thing that you shouldnt be identified with a subculture but I didnt go out seeking a mod or punk cut. Punting priest The only way to send a clear message to powerful religious organisations about institutional concealment of child sexual abuse is to send Adelaide Archbishop Philip Edward Wilson to jail. That was the powerful parting message that Crown prosecutor Gareth Harrison had for Magistrate Robert Stone on Tuesday as Archbishop Wilson, the most senior Catholic cleric in the world to be found guilty of failing to report child sexual abuse to police, faced a sentencing hearing in Newcastle Local Court. Weve gotten to a stage where the courts and the community will no longer accept or tolerate the endemic cover-up of sexual abuse by adults on the most vulnerable members of the community, Mr Harrison said. Mr Harrison said the need to punish Archbishop Wilson, denounce his conduct, deter others from similar offending and recognise the harm done to the victims loomed large in what was a case so high profile last months landmark verdict was heard around the world. Recriminations are flying among Liberal Party members in Sydneys south and beyond following a brawl outside a cafe in Arncliffe on Monday. Investigators appointed by the NSW Liberal Party as well as the NSW Police are likely to confront at least two conflicting accounts of what happened before and during the brawl, which occurred outside Najis Cafe on Firth Street at about 6.35pm. On one version, fault for the brawl lies in the behaviour of associates of the cafe owner, Bayside Councillor Michael Nagi, and his allies. On this version, a group of Liberal Party members not associated with Mr Nagis faction attempted to join the meeting, were denied access, and were accosted during a subsequent argument. Properties linked to family members and business associates of Salim Mehajer have been raided by police and forensic accountants in search of financial records to manage his bankruptcy. The disgraced former deputy mayor of Auburn council was declared bankrupt by the Federal Circuit Court in March, while he was in prison awaiting trial on charges of perverting the course of justice. Salim Mehajer. Credit:AAP Eight properties across western Sydney were targeted on Tuesday by forensic accountants and investigators from the Australian Financial Security Authority, alongside police and representatives from Mehajer's registered bankruptcy trustee Pitcher Partners, who requested the raids. In a statement Pitcher Partners said the properties were linked to "accountants, lawyers, family members and other associated entities" of Mehajer, who were "believed to be holding records pertaining to Mehajers business property and affairs". A Filipino woman who has called Brisbane home for more than a decade will be separated from her eight-year-old son when she is deported from the country next month. Bernadette Romulo has spent the past five months on bridging visas, trying to appeal the federal governments decision to deport her. Brisbane-based Bernadette Romulo and her son Giro. On Thursday, she was told she had until July 11 to leave the country, a move which would tear her away from her eight-year-old son Giro. The young boy was born in Australia and can not leave the country due to partial custody arrangements with his father. A Dreamworld Thunder River Rapids Ride operator has told the inquest into the four deaths that he pressed the red conveyor stop button "several times" as he saw two rafts headed for a collision but the conveyor did not stop. Peter Nemeth is the first of the Thunder River Rapids Ride operators to give evidence. Mr Nemeth said he noticed the water level dropping and that rafts were still moving along the ride's conveyor. "I remember seeing the rafts moving along the conveyor," he said. Citylink's 'Cheese stick'. Credit:Justin McManus Victorian drivers would not cop more than one toll road fine a week under a plan by the Greens to stop motorists incurring mountainous debts. On Wednesday, the Greens will introduce a private members bill to stop drivers receiving more than one fine over a seven-day period, regardless of how many times they use the road. The Magistrates Court is currently flooded with toll road matters, which account for the greatest number of charges in Victoria. The Greens bill would also allow VicRoads to more easily pass email addresses and phone numbers to toll road operators so they can chase up fines before debts become insurmountable. Professor Matthew Porteus, holds test tubes of DNA. Credit:Ala Victoria Police will have the power to take DNA swabs from every person arrested for a serious crime, before they're even charged, under proposed new laws set to be tabled on Wednesday. Police say more than 10,000 unsolved crimes could be unravelled if Parliament passes the new legislation to be introduced by the police minister. The proposal would give police the power to capture suspects' DNA results, fingerprints and mug shots without a court order. This includes offenders aged 15 to 17 suspected of committing serious violent or sexual offences. US presidential candidate and cryptocurrency firebrand John McAfee will use a soon-to-be launched Perth blockchain technology in his bid for the White House in 2020. ClearPoll, which was developed using the same technology that underpins Bitcoin, allows users to anonymously create and vote on opinon polls and is pitched at replacing the opinion surveys commissioned by the news media during election campaigns. US presidential candidate John McAfee is using a technology developed in Perth to help him win the White House in 2020. Credit:AP Photo/Ambergris Today Online-Sofia Munoz ClearPoll director and co-founder Daniel Abela said the technology would allow polls to be created then stored on a blockchain, which would be accessible by any user and prevent results being hidden or altered. He said the technology would create a system more trustworthy than current methods of opinion polling. The most expensive school precinct ever built in NSW claimed the biggest share of the money to be spent on building and upgrading schools over the next 12 months. More than $121 million has been allocated to finishing the state's first high-rise high school, Arthur Phillip High, and its neighbouring primary school in Parramatta, making up 10 per cent of the major works budget for the next financial year. The total cost of the project is estimated at $225 million. The second most expensive project in the next financial year, according to the budget papers, will be the last stages of a new high school at Ballina, which will cost $33 million. But almost 100 communities including a community school at Alexandria Park, a new school at Oran Park, and a new school at Marsden Park were left waiting for money to begin their school upgrades and new schools. The source of funding for a revamped ANZ Stadium at Olympic Park will wait on a final business case for the project, while the government plies on with a $729 million new stadium for Moore Park. The failure of the business case for the replacement stadium at Moore Park to show that the benefit of the new stadium will outweigh its costs means that the government cannot fund the project from its Restart NSW funds money reserved from privatisations and windfall tax revenues. But funding for a new $360 million stadium at Parramatta, as well as the $810 million slated for a redevelopment of ANZ Stadium, continues to be reserved from Restart NSW. Funding for a revamped ANZ Stadium waits on a final business case for the project. Credit:Anna Kucera The Treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, touted the stadium funding as addressing historical inadequacies, while also emphasising the governments support for local sporting infrastructure. Labors plans to reform Victorias political donations system are on the brink of collapse after the Coalition controversially pulled support for the legislation at the 11th hour. The government is now scrambling to cobble together support for its plan, which it says would take corporate money out of politics. Daniel Andrews in Parliament on Tuesday. Credit:Justin McManus Labor will now be forced to turn to upper house crossbench MPs for the required votes in a last-ditch effort to secure the passage of the legislation. Under the changes, donations to political parties would be capped at $4000 per person or entity over a four-year term but about $45 million in taxpayer funds would go towards political campaigns. Yangon, Myanmar: Former East Timor president and revolutionary leader Taur Matan Ruak has been announced as the country's new Prime Minister five weeks after the Alliance of Progress and Change coalition won a majority of 43 in the nations 65 seat legislature. Taur Matan Ruak then president of East Timor, with then Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2013 Credit:Andrew Mears The new government will be sworn in by Francisco "Lu-Olo" Guterres, the nations largely ceremonial President, ending 11 months of gridlock. It follows the inconclusive July 2017 election and the fresh poll on May 10. Loading Xanana Gusmao, 73, who led the alliance to victory over arch rivals Fretilin, was originally expected to return as prime minister. But he has been named Minister Adviser to Prime Minister" instead, sealing the reconciliation between the two men. Gusmao and Ruak, 43, also known as Jose Maria Vasconcelos, were once brothers-in-arms but fell out during Gusmaos 2012-2015 prime ministership while Ruak was president. Gusmao eventually stepped aside. China wants to export not just its goods to continental Asia and beyond, but also its industrial expertise, manufacturing overcapacity, technological standards, and development philosophy. Pakistan, long politically close to China, is being showered with infrastructure projects. Fast trains are heading south through Thailand and Vietnam. More than 100 freight trains a week head west from China all the way to Europe. Much of this is trade and investment that might have been happening anyway, but it has been bundled under the Belt and Road Initiative umbrella in an exercise of geo-economic shock and awe. Beijing is already locked in a contest with the US for control of the East and South China Seas, an area through which most of the countrys trade now passes. With a string of allies, from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia in the south, Imperial Washington still retains its title as the capital of "Maritime Asia" in the region, although it is hanging on by its fingertips in the face of a challenge from China. Beijing aims to hedge the instability it faces off its east coast, where it is locked in territorial disputes with numerous countries, by creating a secure, prosperous and politically friendly string of nations to the west. The Belt and Road Initiative is not without risks, something Chinas technocratic elite have been increasingly pointing out in public in recent months. Loading With Xis personal imprimatur on the program, Chinese banks and state and private companies, and every province and city, have a political duty to fund investments in target countries. But the countrys bureaucrats, mindful of the billion-dollar losses the Chinese have suffered overseas in recent years in such countries as Venezuela and Angola, have started to urge caution. Li Ruogu, the former head of the Ex-Im Bank, one of the countrys biggest overseas lenders, warned that countries slated for big projects might not have the financial capacity to handle them. There are few countries with credit ratings above the BB level and the investment risks are relatively large, he said. Raising enough funds for the development of these countries is arduous. In one recent case, a Chinese state company gained control of a port in Sri Lanka after the local company couldnt pay back the $US1.3 billion in loans used to build the facility. The port was built seven years ago, before the formal launch of the Belt and Road Initiative. But the episode was an embarrassment for Beijing nonetheless, because it played into the most potent criticism of the initiative, that it was creating debt traps that would leave countries at Chinas mercy. Furthermore, Chinas struggle to internationalise its currency, the renminbi, means that many of the projects will have to be funded in US dollars, something that runs counter to the initiative's aims. Like the Marshall Plan did for the US, China had wanted to use the billions of dollars of projects to elevate its currency, eventually giving it the global financial clout now wielded by the greenback. Hambantota port in Sri Lanka. A number of projects, such as the port in Sri Lanka, have been beset by allegations of graft, and a sense that Beijing is using the Belt and Road Initiative to capture elites, without much benefit to the broader population. In a range of countries, governments, and NGOs, are pushing back against projects that fall under the initiative's umbrella. In many places, such as Malaysia and Indonesia, the influence of the ethnic Chinese business class has long been a sensitive issue. Whether these are just the teething problems of a new imperium, or fatal design flaws, is too early to tell. In the meantime, about 70 countries have signed on to the project. Beijing: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has arrived in Beijing, where he is expected to brief Chinese President Xi Jinping on his summit with Donald Trump last week. Unusually, Kims surprise visit was announced by Chinese state media within an hour of his plane touching down at Beijing airport on Tuesday morning, and as major roads saw increased security ahead of the arrival of his motorcade. Chinese police escort Kim Jong-un in Beijing on Tuesday. Credit:Sanghee Liu Kims first visit to the Chinese capital as leader, by train, in March was shrouded in secrecy and not announced until after he had departed. The secrecy, and heavy policing as officers sought to stop cameras even photographing Kim's armoured car, appeared to reflect a fear of assassination during the young dictator's first visit abroad. His arrival in Beijing on Tuesday, amid publicity, marks his third visit to China, after he flew to the northern coastal city of Dalian in May to talk with Xi ahead of the June 12 Singapore Summit. Paris: France's strike-prone and ill-equipped air traffic controllers are responsible for a third of all delays in the skies over Europe, a senate report has concluded. The delays are costing airlines 300 million ($471 million) per year, it found. Passengers walk through a terminal at Charles de Gaulle airport as Tricolour livery sits on the tail fin of Air France planes. Credit:Bloomberg The report by the French senate's finance committee came after weeks of delays due to industrial action by controllers, forcing some planes to skirt the country's airspace. According to the report, between 2004 and 2016, France's controllers were on strike for 254 days. That placed them far ahead of second-placed Greece, with 46 days of stoppages. In third place came Italy with 37 days and Germany with four, according to the report seen by Le Parisien. Paris: A hat attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte and said to have been dropped on the battlefield at Waterloo 203 years ago was bought on Monday for more than $500,000. It was another sign, if one were needed, that the French emperor continues to fascinate collectors and curators across the globe. The hat one of Napoleon's iconic black felt bicorns was sold at an auction in the central French city of Lyon for 350,000 ($550,000), including fees, far beyond the presale estimate of 30,000 to 40,000. The buyer was a private collector from Europe whose identity was not made public. The hat worn by Napoleon Bonaparte, recovered on the battlefield of Waterloo by the captain of Holland Dragons and sold on Monday for half a million dollars. The hat is one of about 120 two-cornered military dress hats that Napoleon was said to have worn during his rule between 1799 and 1815, as first consul and then emperor, minus a period of exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. Fourteen US soldiers have been killed in three days of fighting, the military announced on Thursday, as US-led troops continued to press simultaneous offensives in and around Baghdad. The news came hours after a suicide bomber exploded an oil tanker south of Iraq's oil-rich city of Kirkuk, killing 15 people and wounding 66, including policemen and local politicians. The bomber blew up the tanker outside police headquarters and a cluster of government buildings in Suleiman Beg, about 90 kilometres (55 miles) from the northern city of Kirkuk, police and hospital officials said. "Several of the wounded are city council members and police officers, including the chief of police in Suleiman Beg, Hassan Ali Al-Bayati," a local hospital official said. The latest attack -- two days after a Baghdad bomb killed 87 people -- was carried out as the US military pressed an air and ground assault on suspected Al-Qaeda strongholds north of Baghdad. And his supporters say the party has little choice in an election where Democrats are eager to register their opposition to a president they despise and that the only way to succeed in a campaign driven by turning out the party base is to focus on what grass-roots conservatives care most about. "It's an issue folks are emotionally attached to," said Andy Surabian, a Republican strategist and former Trump aide. "I know that upsets some people in the donor class, but it's the reality of where the party is." Trump's anti-immigrant remarks are aimed at the conservative base of the party that elevated his candidacy and is dominant in red states and House districts, especially those with largely white populations. Teens who have been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States, stand in line at a facility in McAllen, Texas. Credit:US CBP The Republican grass-roots were already hawkish on immigration, while the president's takeover of the party has further diminished its pragmatist wing. And while hard-line Republicans are a minority of the country's voters, the GOP cannot retain its grip on Congress without this bedrock of its base going to the polls. The president's pugnacity on immigration took flight in 2015 when his vows to build a border wall drew an enthusiastic response at his rallies and soon became his signature proposal. But stoking fears about "the other" has always been appealing to Trump, going back decades to his early days in New York real estate. The issue of Germany and migrants has resonated for Trump for more than a year, people close to him say. When he thinks of Chancellor Angela Merkel, he is reminded of her difficulties with immigration far more than his clash with her at the G7 or any bilateral issues. The danger for Republicans is that the political map this year is sharply bifurcated: The most competitive House and Senate contests are taking place instrikingly different parts of the country. Teens who have been taken into custody on the US-Mexico border rest in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas. Credit:US Border Protection Trump's broadsides against Hispanic migrants, like his criticism of black athletes who will not stand for the national anthem, may resonate in the deeply red states where the battle for control of the Senate is playing out. But such culture war attacks will likely alienate voters in the affluent, heavily suburban districts Republicans must win to keep control of the House. Further, some in the party believe that by pursuing a hard-line approach to families at the border a policy that is deeply unpopular among independent voters, according to polls Trump is handing Democrats the high ground on immigration instead of making them defend their support for less popular immigrant protections like sanctuary cities. "Somehow I don't think that putting kids in cages is likely to go over very well with suburban moms," said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster uneasy about running on the culture wars. Ayres said his party should campaign on "the concrete accomplishments of a Republican-held government." People taken into custody sit in one of the cages at a facility in McAllen, Texas. Credit:AP "A fabulously strong economy, a record stock market, ISIS defeated and a world without any major wars that are killing lots of Americans on a weekly basis," he said, laying out the case. Republicans got a lesson last year about the risk of elevating immigration in campaigns where they depend on suburbanites. In the Virginia governor's race, the Republican nominee, Ed Gillespie, thought women in vote-rich Northern Virginia could be won over with a get-tough message on MS-13, the gang with ties to Central America that has gained a foothold in the Washington, DC, region. But voters in suburban Fairfax and Loudoun counties overwhelmingly rejected these appeals, supporting Governor Ralph S. Northam with landslide margins in large part to send a message about their disdain for Trump. The unease with a hard-line approach on immigration is strongest among House Republicans who hail from diverse districts. Many of these lawmakers signed a discharge petition that would have forced a vote offering legal status for Dreamers, children brought to the country by unauthorised immigrants. And as Liesl Hickey, a veteran Republican strategist who previously ran the House congressional campaign arm, pointed out, it is Republican lawmakers like Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida, Will Hurd of Texas and Steve Knight of California who face some of the most daunting re-election challenges. "I think it's pretty clear that this is not a winning issue in the form that some want to take it," said Hickey, alluding to the hard-line approach. In a sign of the Republican alarm about the family separations at the border, Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said on Monday that he would ask the Trump administration "to stop needlessly separating children from their parents." Yet some of Trump's advisers have told the president he needs to live up to what he promised voters on immigration. These aides have told him that what he is doing is similar to what President Barack Obama did, and suggested that the news media is cherry-picking images of children that can be used to portray Trump's policy in the harshest of lights. Trump, absorbing these arguments, has related to allies that he thinks he is being mistreated by the media and sought to shift the conversation to the broader immigration debate. But Democrats believe he is making a costly mistake by taking his rhetoric too far. "He has taken an issue that is a decent wedge in swing places for Republicans and turned it into this preposterous notion that Democrats are responsible for family separation, Democrats are responsible for all immigrant crime, and Democrats are responsible for MS-13," said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster. "Nobody believes that." Brain damage has been confirmed for a young New Zealand mum who suffered a heart attack while visiting her premature baby in hospital. North Shore resident Kate Meldrum gave birth to daughter Ruby on May 6 after 26 weeks and five days gestation, with Ruby weighing just 530 grams. The 29-year-old then suffered a ruptured heart valve while visiting Ruby in Auckland City Hospital's NICU on May 21 and was rushed into emergency open-heart surgery. Kate Meldrum with partner Joe Turner and daughter Ruby in the NICU, prior to Meldrum's heart attack. Meldrum's sister Steph Everest said brain damage was confirmed after an MRI scan. PHILIPSBURG:--- The United Nations' (UN) World Refugee Day is observed on June 20 each year. This event honors the courage, strength and determination of women, men and children who are forced to flee their homeland under threat of persecution, conflict and violence. In some countries, it is a day when activists protest against using former prisons to detain migrants and asylum seekers while visiting them in detention to offer moral support. Some communities dedicate an entire week that includes World Refugee Day to encourage people to think about the lives of refugees and the human right to a secure place that one can see as home. A refugee is a displaced person who has been forced to cross national boundaries and who cannot return home safely. Such a person is seeking a form of protection and may be called an asylum seeker until granted refugee status by the contracting country. Most of the times those people are of special humanitarian concern. A recurring item on TV news are scenes of refugees fleeing their home countries en route to more secure destination. Some countries slams their doors to refugees, other countries embrace newcomers as assets to their economies and cultural diversity. The shores of St. Maarten may not yet have been the target for large groups of refugees, as with, for instance Curacao and Aruba, where authorities have to deal with an influx of refugees from their neighboring country Venezuela, from which refugees are clandestinely arriving by sea. The Dutch government has offered technical support to Aruba and Curacao to help them deal with the flow of migrants from the crisis-hitting Venezuela. The Dutch government has also emphasized that Aruba and Curacao concern two autonomous countries within the kingdom and that these areas have their own responsibilities to solve the refugees and migration issues. In Sint Maarten, immigration authorities would deal with refugees, once they reach our country. It is not uncommon that some refugees are opting to stay on illegally, while others choose to cross the border to the northern side, Saint Martin, and apply for asylum. According to figures released by the sous-prefecture on the French part of St. Maarten, last April, some 345 asylum requests were received in 2016. This was 300 more than in 2015. Of these more than 78 percent were asylum seekers from Venezuela. Caribbean Migration The Second Meeting of the Caribbean Migration Consultations (CMC) - Refugee Protection was hosted by the Government of the Commonwealth in The Bahamas from 4-6 December 2017. This was done with the logistical and technical support of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The meeting concluded with a 2017 report on Caribbean migration recommending that all member countries pass legislation on refugee protection. The report was compiled after a meeting on the topic and ideas were presented for study visits, from one country to another, to see how other jurisdictions address the same issues. From the group chaired by The Bahamas, priorities were given, included the need for local training and sensitization support across governments to process and treat refugees in a humane manner, and for capacity building for officials. Contingency planning for natural disasters was also discussed. Individual countries identified either developing legislation or acceding to relevant conventions as priorities, including the conventions on statelessness, and looking more closely at potential statelessness within their borders. National Development Relevance Movement of people, most often through migration, is a significant part of global integration. Yet St. Maarten (Dutch side) is not alone where it concerns reliable statistics on migration, which are difficult to collect and are often incomplete, creating a challenge for exact figures on refugees entering St. Maarten. Special attention from countries is needed to ensure that these vulnerable people will not be left behind when the 2030 Agenda is implemented. This entails efforts to ensure the right to health for both, displaced populations and for people who are transgressing national borders in their often dangerous and desperate search for security. In 2016, 193 countries signed the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, which emphasizes education as a critical component of the international response to the global refugee crisis. This is instrumental to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 4 for quality education. Sint Maarten has embraced the 2030 Agenda with its Sustainable Development Goals as part of countrys development agenda. SDGs 8, decent work and Economic Growth and SDG 16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions are dealing with issues related to refugees and migration as a wider perspective thereof. The government of Sint Maarten advocates working in partnership (MDG 17) with non-governmental institutions, the private sector and stakeholders abroad to contribute to a better world for its citizens and visitors on Sint Maarten. Interested persons can reach out to The Department of The Interior and Kingdom Relations (BAK), program manager for SDGs Drs. Loekie Morales on 5271223 to know more about how to work together to realize the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development on Sint Maarten. WILLEMSTAD, CURACAO:---The Public Prosecutors Office of the island of Curacao (former Netherlands Antilles) requests the help of the people of St.Kitts & Nevis. The Public Prosecutors Office has received information from various sources that a suspect of an armed robbery and murder of a Chinese merchant on Curacao is to believed to be on St.Kitts. His name is Quincley Emanuell Poppen, he was then 18 years old, and is now 23 years old. He speaks English, Papiamentu (native language on Curacao) and Dutch. The armed robbery on the Chinese supermarket Hua Jiant on Curacao took place on May 9, 2013. The merchant was killed at short distance in front of his wife and child and was recorded by cameras in the store. The Public Prosecutors Office has issued a reward of 10.000 Guilders (approx. 5.500 US Dollars) for the person that provides crucial information that leads to the arrest of Poppen. Poppen risks a prison sentence of maximum of 18 years. This according to the criminal Code of Curacao, article 2:291, theft with violence. It is believed that Poppen has moved between different islands in the Caribbean. He was on St. Maarten and other nearby islands in recent months, but is now, according to sources, believed to be hiding on St.Kitts & Nevis. In view of this, it is very important to distribute photographs and the video of Poppen through the media, Facebook and other social-media in order to enable recognition the community. PHILIPSBURG:---The Minister of Justice, the honorable Cornelius De Weever honored all members of the Sint Maarten Police Force, on Thursday June 14th during a ceremony held at the Police Head Quarters in Philipsburg. The members of police force were awarded a certificate of appreciation as well as a gold medal for their hard work and contributions in the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria. The certificate states: In acknowledgement of your exemplary contributions and assistance rendered as a member of the Sint Maarten Police Force in the aftermath of the 2017 hurricane season. We recognize your commitment to serving and protecting your community and the island of Sint Maarten. The Minister of Justice would also like to thank the police force of Curacao (KPC) and the police force of Aruba (KPA) for their support, their tremendous input and going the extra mile to help maintain safety and security and get the island up and running again. TerraX appoints David Suda as President and CEO Posted by Publisher Internet TerraX Minerals Inc. (TSX-V: TXR; Frankfurt: TX0; OTC Pink: TRXXF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLSt_VpUzmw&t=1s&list=PLBpDlKjdv3yoX1N3x4RmnEyhecw5EVhv9&index=4 ) is pleased to announce that David Suda has been appointed as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company, effective immediately.? Mr. Suda will work closely with Joseph Campbell, the Executive Chairman of TerraX, to help lead the company towards continued success in discovery while enhancing the Company?s profile within the investment community. \David Suda?s appointment is an exciting milestone and comes at an integral time for TerraX?, says Joe Campbell, Executive Chairman. \David?s people-focused leadership style and capital markets experience will improve the company?s ability to finance and fully capitalize on TerraX?s exploration successes and exceptional opportunities.? David Suda has over 11 years of capital markets experience. He graduated with honours from York University with a Bachelor?s Degree in Environmental Studies. ?Most recently, Mr. Suda was Head of Trading and Managing Director at Beacon Securities. ?He has established relationships with investors including institutional managers and public companies.?? His extensive capital markets experience with a focus on public resource-based companies will provide TerraX access to a skill set which includes marketing, corporate strategy and investment banking. David Suda, President and CEO stated ?It is an exciting and unique opportunity to work with a gold exploration company with so much upside and access to infrastructure in a favorable mining jurisdiction such as Terrax. The work of the team led by Joe Campbell and the commanding land position that has been assembled around two of the highest grade historic gold mines in Canada are the reasons I have decided to join the company.? I look forward to working with such a strong technical team to broaden the profile, heighten interest and provide increased value to shareholders.? Joe Campbell further stated ???David brings new energy, vision, strategic thinking and discipline to TerraX as we move towards achieving our long term goal of establishing a major world class Canadian gold district. In addition, David?s background in Environmental Studies will ensure that we maintain and grow our strong relationship with the community in Yellowknife. ?I am excited to mentor David in his new role, and to follow his lead on investment and corporate strategy.? TerraX Minerals Inc. has agreed, subject to regulatory approval, to grant incentive stock options to Mr. Suda on 1,250,000 common shares at an exercise price of $0.41 per share for a period of three years from the date of grant.? These options will vest over an eighteen month period. To accommodate Dave Suda?s appointment, Stuart Rogers has agreed to step down as President and to serve as Chief Financial Officer, replacing Mark Gelmon, who will be leaving the Company at the end of June. About the Yellowknife City Gold Project The Yellowknife City Gold (\YCG\) project encompasses 772 sq km of contiguous land immediately north, south and east of the City of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Through a series of acquisitions, TerraX controls one of the six major high-grade gold camps in Canada. Being within 10 km of the City of Yellowknife, the YCG is close to vital infrastructure, including all-season roads, air transportation, service providers, hydro-electric power and skilled tradespeople. The YCG lies on the prolific Yellowknife greenstone belt, covering 70 km of strike length along the main mineralized break in the Yellowknife gold district, including the southern and northern extensions of the shear system that hosted the high-grade Con and Giant gold mines. The project area contains multiple shears that are the recognized hosts for gold deposits in the Yellowknife gold district, with innumerable gold showings and recent high-grade drill results that serve to indicate the project\-\-s potential as a world-class gold district.? For more information on the YCG project, please visit our web site at www.terraxminerals.com.? Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release contains forward-looking information, which involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual events to differ materially from current expectation. Important factors including the availability of funds, the results of financing efforts, the completion of due diligence and the results of exploration activities that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company\-\-s expectations are disclosed in the Company\-\-s documents filed from time to time on SEDAR (see www.sedar.com). Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. The company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, events or otherwise. With summer temperatures on the rise, the American Red Cross suggests staying indoors and avoiding strenuous exercise during the hottest part of the day. The door was locked June 15 at the Cultural Council of Georgetown County's Front Street office and gallery. The city of Georgetown plans to withhold funding for the Winyah Auditorium until City Council can review the findings of a financial audit of the organization. This graphic shows all of the potentially hazardous asteroids (and their orbital paths) around Earth (not to scale). As of 2013, scientists had counted over 1,400 of these potentially hazardous asteroids. Earth is hit every day by small bits of space dust. Slightly larger chunks burn up colorfully in the atmosphere, causing the shooting stars you see in the sky. Occasionally even bigger rocks hit our atmosphere; they are known as fireballs, because the light from them burning up is particularly bright. These tend to smack the Earth a few times a year and may produce a few fragments for rock-hunters to find. NASA and other organizations do regular scans of the sky to catalog any small bodies that are at risk of crashing into our planet. No imminently threatening bodies have been found yet, but it's clear that sooner or later Earth will be struck by something big. The organizations are actively researching the best ways to protect Earth from asteroids, meteoroids or comets that may come crashing down. NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies and the International Asteroid Warning Network list recent "close calls." Asteroids refer principally to small, rocky bodies. Comets contain more ice and can also pose a threat to Earth. Before fragments enter our atmosphere, they are known as meteoroids. During their path in the atmosphere, they are called meteors. If any of these pieces reach the ground, those pieces are called meteorites. The best hunting ground on Earth for meteorites is Antarctica because the ice makes it so easy to see the fragments, and the ground is not disturbed as much as a typical urban area or forest. The difference between a meteoroid and an asteroid is a little vague. In 1961, The International Astronomical Union (the official body for naming objects in space) said a meteoroid is much smaller than an asteroid, but bigger than an atom. A 2010 Meteoritics and Planetary Science paper led by Alan Rubin, a geophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested that the limit for meteoroids be about 1 meter in size. It's common for smaller bodies to escape notice until they are right beside the Earth, or slamming into it, because Earth's telescope network is designed for spotting asteroids of a much larger size. This is why in June 2018, for example, an estimated 6-foot (2-meter) rock called 2018 LA was found only a few hours before incinerating in the atmosphere. Keeping track of these bodies is also difficult, due to their size and low reflectivity as well as limited telescope time. In mid-May 2018, astronomers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics lost roughly 11 percent or 900 near-Earth asteroids of the over 17,000 candidates identified between 2013 and 2016, according to Newsweek. In other words, after the initial sighting, scientists lost track of where these asteroids moved next. In 2017, scientists confirmed the first interstellar asteroid, which was known 1I/2017 U1 'Oumuamua. The interloper quickly zoomed through our solar system, showing its origins by its unusual path as it traveled by Earth at a safe distance. Scientists continue follow-up studies on the data, such as this 2018 study showing that 'Oumuamua is tumbling. A 65-foot-wide (20 meters) asteroid exploded without warning over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February 2013, blazing a superbright trail across the winter sky. (Image credit: Neuromainker via YouTube/Screenshot by Irene Klotz for Discovery News) Characterizing the threat It is clear that even small bodies can pose a threat; the asteroid that broke up over without warning over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was roughly 56 feet (17 meters) across, shattering glass and injuring hundreds of people. In 1908, an estimated 130-foot (40-meter) object exploded over Siberia and flattened trees over 825 square miles (2,137 square kilometers). Around 50,000 years ago, before human civilization began, a rock about 150 feet wide (46 meters) smacked into what is now called Arizona. It left behind Meteor Crater, which is roughly 0.7 miles (1.2 kilometers) wide today. Even bigger collisions happened far in the past. The dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago by an object about 6 miles (10 km) wide, which left behind a 110-mile (180 km) crater in Mexico known as Chicxulub. But that's nothing compared to evidence of another impactor found in 2014. A rock formation in our planet's crust pointed to a possible impactor 23 to 36 miles (37 to 58 kilometers) across that smacked into Earth 3.26 billion years ago, just a few million years after life evolved. NASA began tracking near-Earth objects (NEOs) in the 1970s. Its goal is to find objects that are at least tens of meters in size, "which could cause significant harm to populated areas on the Earth if they were to strike without warning," NASA stated in 2014. Congress directed NASA in 1994 to find at least 90 percent of potentially hazardous NEOs larger than 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) in diameter, which NASA fulfilled in 2010. Congress also asked NASA in 2005 to find at least 90 percent of potentially hazardous NEOs that are 140 m (460 feet) in size or larger. That's supposed to be finished by 2020; multiple media reports indicate NASA will miss that deadline due to funding challenges, although NASA points out its pace of discovery is accelerating due to better observatories NASA created a Planetary Defense Coordination Office in 2014 a year after Chelyabinsk to better coordinate its efforts, in response to an Office of the Inspector General report. Other space agencies such as the European Space Agency also have their own offices, and the different nations regularly collaborate with each other. NASA does regular "tabletop" exercises with its partners (such as this 2017 one) to simulate threatening asteroids and an appropriate response. An artist's concept for the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission led by the European Space Agency to intentionally strike an asteroid and test deflection capabilities that could protect Earth. (Image credit: ESA) Scanning the sky NASA works with several sky surveys to maintain a list of potentially hazardous objects. These include the Catalina Sky Survey (University of Arizona), Pan-STARRS (University of Hawaii), Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research or LINEAR (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Spacewatch (University of Arizona). These observatories are constantly upgrading their capabilities to try to catch fainter asteroids. Asteroids are also observed from space by several telescopes, but the one most regularly used for NEO searches is called NEOWISE. It's the new mission of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope, which launched in 2009 and was revived from hibernation in 2013 to search for asteroids. The telescope is expected to keep operating until 2018, when the angle from the sun in its orbit will be too bright to search for asteroids. In April 2018, the mission released a fourth year of survey data, including information on 788 near-Earth objects and 136 comets. A follow-up mission called Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) was proposed for 2021, but it lost out to other missions. NEOCam received another year of funding and may compete in future mission proposals. NASA acknowledges that with roughly two-thirds of the near-Earth asteroid population unknown, a NEOCam-like mission would be helpful. There are other NASA missions that are looking to get up close to asteroids to better characterize their composition. Some recent examples: The Dawn mission visited asteroid Vesta between 2011 and 2012, and has now been at Ceres (a dwarf planet) since 2015. OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) departed for asteroid Bennu in 2018 for a sample-return mission, which will come back to Earth in 2023. Additionally, NASA uses data available from other space agency missions that visited asteroids, such as the Japanese Hayabusa (completed) and Hayabusa 2 (in progress). Some planned missions would have taken even more daring steps at asteroids. NASA previously worked on concepts for an Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) that would have a robot move a small body into the moon's orbit, for astronauts to study. ARM was abandoned in favor of long-term space exploration policies for the moon and Mars. Another mission would have seen NASA, the European Space Agency and other partners are planning a mission called AIDA, or Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment. The goal is to change the path of a small moon orbiting the asteroid Didymos using a kinetic impactor. ESA announced its part of the mission wouldn't be funded in 2016 to make more budgetary room for ExoMars (a rover), but NASA continues study of its part of the mission. (ESA has also expressed the hope it will participate in some form later on.) A kinetic impactor (perhaps with a nuclear bomb inside) would deflect the orbit, tugging the asteroid slowly using a spacecraft, redirecting it with solar heat, or blasting it with a laser. That is just one idea. There is ongoing research as to what sort of asteroid deflection technique would be best. The best approach depends on many factors, such as cost, the composition of the asteroid, time to impact and technology maturity. Studies are ongoing in these fields; in 2007, NASA said that non-nuclear kinetic impactors had the most mature technology. In 2018, a group of U.S. scientists and engineers proposed an early-stage mission called HAMMER that would use a nuclear warhead to disintegrate large asteroids or move them off course. Two of the 28 Dove cubesats that make up Planet Lab's "Flock 1" constellation are seen deploying into orbit from the International Space Station on Feb. 11, 2014. Cubesats are miniature satellites that have been used exclusively in low Earth orbit for 15 years, and are now being used for interplanetary missions as well. In the beginning, they were commonly used in low Earth orbit for applications such as remote sensing or communications. As of mid-2018, a pair of cubesats was deployed on a mission flying to Mars, and a host of other cubesats are being considered for the moon and Jupiter. The cubesat design was first proposed in the late 1990s by two professors: Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University and Bob Twiggs of Stanford University. They were trying to help students gain engineering experience in satellites, which are traditionally expensive to build and launch. The idea for the cubesat came in part from the miniature toy craze of the day, Beanie Babies, according to Spaceflight Now. Inspired by the individualized stuffed animals, Twiggs' idea was to allow students to build their own miniature satellites. The basic design of a cubesat is a 10-centimeter (4-inch) cube with a mass of less than 1.33 kilograms (2.93 lbs.), the article added. But variations on the theme are possible. Cubesats can also be designed to encompass two, three or six 10-centimeter units for more complicated missions. Cubesats reduce launch costs in two fundamental ways. They don't weigh that much, which means a rocket doesn't need a lot of fuel to heft them. In most cases, they also share a rocket with a larger satellite, making it possible to get to space on the coattails of the heavier payload. There are some design challenges with cubesats, however. The electronics are smaller and are therefore more sensitive to radiation. Because they are small, they cannot carry large payloads with them. Their low cost also means they are generally designed to last only a few weeks, months or years before ceasing operations (and for those in low Earth orbit, falling back into the atmosphere.) Three small cubesats float above the Earth after deployment from the International Space Station. Astronaut Rick Mastracchio tweeted the photo from the station on Nov. 19, 2013. (Image credit: Rick Mastracchio (via Twitter as @AstroRM)) Brief history The first six cubesats were launched in June 2003 from Russia's Plesetsk launch site. At the time, according to a 2004 Space.com article, the going rate for a cubesat's launch was about $40,000, which is a bargain compared to a typical satellite (many are millions of dollars.) Cubesats were made possible by the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, which allows instruments such as cameras to ride into orbit at a fraction of the size of what was required at the beginning of the space age in the 1960s. "Peep inside a cubesat and you'll spot off-the-shelf circuitry in the familiar form of microprocessors and modem ports, and other microchip devices typically used in cell phones, digital cameras and hand-held Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite navigation units," wrote Space.com insider columnist Leonard David in 2004. Tiny cubesats are revolutionizing how scientists, students and even private companies explore and utilize space. See how cubesat technology makes satellites smaller in our full infographic (Image credit: By Karl Tate, Infographics Artist) For the first decade, most cubesats that flew came from university or research applications. Only a handful of satellites launched every year; then in 2013, the number of launches suddenly numbered in the dozens. It was in that year that the commercial sector began to launch satellites, according to SpaceDaily. New technologies are being pioneered to improve the use of cubesats, such as a 2017 NASA parachute project that could land the small satellites without the need of boosters. And several high-profile projects have been announced in the public sector, including NASA "swarms" of Earth-observing cubesats, the adoption of a satellite by public radio station NPR, and a Canadian student cubesat competition. There have been more than 2,100 cubesats and nanosatellites as of mid-2018, according to nanosats.eu. Among the prominent uses of Earth-orbiting cubesats today: Planet Labs, an Earth observation company, has dozens of cubesat-sized Dove satellites in orbit, as well as a few RapidEye cubesats. The cubesats are used in everything from disaster response to climate monitoring. The NanoRacks Cubesat Deployer on the International Space Station launches cubesats after they have been hauled to orbit aboard a visiting ISS vehicle. NASA's Cubesat Launch initiative provides launch slots for cubesats aboard traditional rocket launches. Some space industry experts worry that the popularization of cubesats will create a lot of junk in low-Earth orbit, as companies and researchers race to get their ideas into space without considering the long-term consequences. In March 2018, the Federal Communications Commission alleged that one U.S. company launched several small satellites without permission after the FCC blocked the launch, saying the satellites were too small for sensors to track. Moving outside of Earth orbit Starting in 2018, cubesats began to venture outside of Earth orbit. Here are some of the projects under way, or still being planned: Mars Cube One (MarCO) the first cubesats to leave Earth launched on May 5, 2018, along with NASA's InSight lander. InSight is expected to land on Mars on Nov. 26, 2018; it is currently en route and the cubesats are flying just behind it, as they separated independently from the rocket during launch and are running on solar power. The cubesats are nicknamed "WALL-E" and "Eve" after the 2008 animated Pixar movie "WALL-E," which follows the adventures of robots in space. When InSight lands, the cubesats will attempt to send data back to Earth about its descent. This is a test flight and the information will not be critical, as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will do the same job. MarCO's mission will end shortly afterwards. NASA's first Space Launch System test launch in 2019 will pioneer the rocket expected to bring humans out of low Earth orbit for the first time since the 1960s. The initial, uncrewed launch will include up to 13 microsatellites. Concept ideas include Lunar Flashlight, which reflects sunlight to peer into permanently shadowed craters on the moon, and NEA Scout, which will use a solar sail to fly to near-Earth asteroid 1991VG. NASA is considering a mission to Jupiter's icy moon Europa in the 2020s or 2030s. In 2014, NASA said it was considering including cubesats on the mission, which would carry out functions including "reconnaissance for future landing sites, gravity fields, magnetic fields, atmospheric and plume science, and radiation measurements." NASA confirmed the cubesats would be included in May 2018, and asked the science community for their ideas. The European Space Agency and NASA previously considered a joint mission to investigate the asteroid 65803 Didymos and try to move its moon via an impactor. The mission was called Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA) mission. For the European part, they considered including two cubesats to do supplemental observations. The Europeans elected not to fund their part of the mission in 2016 to give more money to the ExoMars rover mission, but NASA is continuing development on its part. The launch has been delayed into the 2020s. Additional resources When two wormholes collide, they could produce ripples in space-time that ricochet off themselves. Future instruments could detect these gravitational "echoes," providing evidence that these hypothetical tunnels through space-time actually exist, a new paper suggests. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has already detected space-time ripples, called gravitational waves, emanating from merging black holes discoveries that led to the Nobel Prize in 2017. But while LIGO's detection was just one of many observations supporting the existence of black holes, these exotic objects still pose theoretical problems. For instance, they seem to be inconsistent with the laws of quantum mechanics. One way to resolve these problems is if black holes were actually wormholes. Point of no return One of the main features of black holes is the event horizon, a region of space-time beyond which nothing can escape, not even light. If you throw anything into a black hole, it's lost forever to an extent. Stephen Hawking discovered that, thanks to a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, black holes could actually produce a tiny bit of radiation, which would come to be known as Hawking radiation. Over a long time, black holes could even evaporate away due to this radiation. "But what comes out is random," said Amber Stuver, an astrophysicist at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the new research. The radiation contains no clue as to what went into the black hole. [Stephen Hawking: A Physics Icon Remembered in Photos] "In quantum mechanics, if you know everything about a particular system, then you should be able to describe its past and its future," she said. But because any information that goes into a black hole is gone for good, an event horizon doesn't jibe with quantum mechanics. To resolve this so-called black hole information paradox, some physicists have suggested that event horizons don't exist. Instead of abysses from which nothing can return, black holes actually could be a host of speculative black-hole-like objects that lack event horizons, such as boson stars, gravastars, fuzzballs and even wormholes, which were theorized by Albert Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen decades ago. Black hole look-alikes In a 2016 study in the journal Physical Review Letters, physicists hypothesized that if two wormholes collided, they would produce gravitational waves very similar to those generated from merging black holes. The only difference in the signal would be in the last phase of the merger, called the ringdown, when the newly combined black hole or wormhole relaxes into its final state. Because wormholes don't have event horizons, gravitational waves that hit these objects could bounce back, producing an echo during the ringdown. "The interior of the object is a sort of cavity where gravitational waves are reflected," the researchers of the new study told Live Science in an email. "The production of gravitational echoes is not very different from ordinary sound echoes in a valley." In the paper, published in January in the journal Physical Review D, the team of physicists from Belgium and Spain analyzed wormholes that rotate, which are more realistic than the non-spinning variety studied in the 2016 work. They calculated what the resulting gravitational-wave signal would look like if the wormholes merged. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics] Because the strength of the signal drops during the ringdown, that section of the signal would be too weak for LIGO's current configuration to detect. But that could change in the future, as researchers continue to upgrade and fine-tune the instrument, the researchers said. "By the time we are running at full design sensitivity, I believe it may be possible to resolve the ringdown phase where these echoes are predicted to be," said Stuver, who's also a member of the LIGO team. Still, wormholes are less science fact than science fiction, often used in movies and books as intergalactic highways. For wormholes to be traversable, however, you would probably need some unknown exotic matter to keep them open. Last December, physicists came up with traversable wormholes that don't need exotic matter, but, like all wormholes, they're highly speculative. "On the other hand, the repercussions of a detection of echoes would be of dramatic importance in physics," the researchers wrote in an email to Live Science. "So, given that an actual experimental test will be available soon, it is worth exploring them." "Now it's the time to take seriously the possibility that there are other objects which can be as massive and compact as black holes," said Vitor Cardoso, a physicist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, who was part of the earlier study on nonspinning wormholes. "This is one of the most exciting things we can do with gravitational waves." Originally published on Live Science. A new study suggests that rapid cooling within the Earth's mantle through plate tectonics played a major role in the development of the first life forms, which in turn led to the oxygenation of the Earth's atmosphere. The study was published in the March 2018 issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Scientists at the University of Adelaide and Curtin University in Australia, and the University of California at Riverside, California, USA, gathered and analyzed data on igneous rocks from geological and geochemical data repositories in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States. They found that over the 4.5 billion years of the Earth's development, rocks rich in phosphorus accumulated in the Earth's crust. They then looked at the relationship of this accumulation with that of oxygen in the atmosphere. Phosphorus is essential for life as we know it. Phosphates, which are compounds containing phosphorus and oxygen, are part of the backbones of DNA and RNA as well as the membranes of cells, and help control cell growth and function. To find out how the level of phosphorus in the Earth's crust has increased over time, the scientists studied how rock formed as the Earth's mantle cooled. They performed modeling to find out how mantle-derived rocks changed composition as a consequence of the long-term cooling of the mantle. Their results suggest that during an early, hotter period in Earth's history the Archaean period between four and 2.5 billion years ago there was a larger amount of molten mantle. Phosphorus would have been too dilute in these rocks. However, over time, the Earth cooled sufficiently, aided by the onset of plate tectonics, in which the colder outer crust of the planet is subducted back into the hot mantle. With this cooling, partial mantle melts became smaller. As Dr. Grant Cox, an earth scientist at the University of Adelaide and a co-author of the study, explains, the result is that "phosphorus will be concentrated in small percentage melts, so as the mantle cools, the amount of melt you extract is smaller but that melt will have higher concentrations of phosphorus in it." Phosphorus' role in the oxidation of Earth The phosphorus was concentrated and crystallized into a mineral called apatite, which became part of the igneous rocks that were created from the cooled mantle. Eventually, these rocks reached the Earth's surface and formed a large proportion of the crust. When phosphorus minerals derived from the crust mixed with the water in lakes, rivers and oceans, apatite broke down into phosphates, which became available for development and nourishment of primitive life. The scientists estimated the mixing of elements from the Earth's crust with seawater over time. They found that higher levels of bio-essential elements parallel major increases in the oxygenation of the Earth's atmosphere: the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) 2.4 billion years ago, and the Neoproterozoic Oxygen Event, 800 million years ago, after which oxygen levels were presumed to be high enough to support multicellular life. Even before the GOE, from approximately 3.5 to 2.5 billion years ago, some of the earliest life forms possibly generated oxygen through photosynthesis. However, during that time, most of this oxygen reacted with iron and sulfur in igneous rocks. To understand how these reactions affected oxygen levels in the atmosphere over a period of four billion years, the scientists measured the amounts of sulfur and iron in igneous rocks, and figured out how much oxygen had reacted. They compared all of these events with changes in levels of atmospheric oxygen. The scientists found that decreases in sulfur and iron along with increases in phosphorus paralleled the Great Oxidation Event and the Neoproterozoic Oxygen Event. A cross section of the Earth, showing the exterior crust, the molten mantle beneath it and the core at the center of the planet. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Universite Paris Diderot - Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris) An explosion of life All of these events support a scenario in which the cooling of the Earth's mantle led to the increase of phosphorus-rich rocks in the Earth's crust. These rocks then mixed with the oceans, where phosphorus-containing minerals broke down and leached into the water. Once phosphorus levels in seawater were high enough, primitive life forms thrived and their numbers increased, so they could generate enough oxygen that most of it reached the atmosphere. Oxygen reached levels sufficient to support multicellular life. Dr. Peter Cawood, a geologist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, comments to Astrobiology Magazine that, "it's intriguing to think that the [oxygen] on which we depend for life owes its ultimate origin to secular decreases in mantle temperature, which are thought to have decreased from some 1,550 degrees Celsius some three billion years ago to around 1,350 degrees Celsius today." Could a similar scenario be playing out on a possible exo-Earth? With the Kepler discoveries of a growing number of possibly Earth-like planets, could any of these support life? Cawood suggests that the finding is potentially significant for the development of aerobic life (i.e. life that evolves in an oxygen-rich environment) on exoplanets. "This is provided that [phosphorus] within the igneous rocks on the surface of the planet is undergoing weathering to ensure its bio-availability," says Cawood. "Significantly, the phosphorus content of igneous rocks is highest in those rocks low in silica [rocks formed by rapid cooling] and rocks of this composition dominate the crusts of Venus and Mars and likely also on exoplanets." Cox concludes by saying that, "This relationship [between rising oxygen levels and mantle cooling] has implications for any terrestrial planet. All planets will cool, and those with efficient plate tectonic convection will cool more rapidly. We are left concluding that the speed of such cooling may affect the rate and pattern of biological evolution on any potentially habitable planet." The research was supported by the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) element of the NASA Astrobiology Program, as well as the National Science Foundation Frontiers in Earth System Dynamics Program and the Australian Research Council. This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program. This version of the story published on Space.com. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. WASHINGTON President Trump on Monday threw a wrench into the Pentagon's carefully laid out plans to analyze how best to reorganize the military's space forces. In remarks kicking off a meeting of the National Space Council, Trump pointedly directed the Pentagon to create a Space Force as a "separate but equal" branch of the U.S. military. "We are going to have the Air Force, and we are going to have the Space Force. Separate but equal. It is going to be something," Trump said. "I'm hereby directing the department of Defense and the Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. That's a big statement." Addressing Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump said, "If you would carry that assignment out, I would be greatly honored."[Presidential Visions for Space Exploration: From Ike to Trump] According to sources, Trump's remarks were not off-the-cuff. He had planned to make this announcement weeks ago, and Pentagon officials had been advised the president would be directing the creation of a Space Force at the June 18 National Space Council meeting. Trump mentioned his desire to have a Space Force at four different events in recent months, and the feedback he received was mostly positive, which motivated him to get the process started sooner rather than later. President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon to create the Space Force, a new branch of the U.S. military, at the White House June 18, 2018 during the third National Space Council meeting. (Image credit: White House) So what comes next? Congress has to rewrite Title 10 of the United States Code that outlines the roles and missions of the armed forces. "The president proposes, but Congress disposes," pointed out Doug Loverro, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for space policy. Loverro is an adviser to congressional committees and has been a proponent of a separate military service for space. "Only Congress can organize the military," Loverro told SpaceNews. The National Defense Authorization Act of 1947 created the Air Force. The Air Force today oversees about 90 percent of the military's space funding, programs and personnel. Conceivably the 2019 NDAA that is now going through the legislative cycle could create the Space Force, Loverro said, although Congress would have to give the Defense Department at least one or two years to execute such a large reorganization. "General Dunford can do a lot in preparation for it," he said. "But at the end of the day it requires Congress to create a new service." According to a defense official, "The Joint Staff will work closely with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, other DoD stakeholders and the Congress to implement the President's guidance." At the White House on Monday, Trump talked about the Space Force in the context of his broader concerns about the United States' dominance in space being challenged by China and Russia. Although he believes the military today is dominant in space, he wants more, Trump told Dunford: "Congratulations on your tremendous success but we're going to have far more success." Creating a Space Force and promoting space exploration by NASA and the private sector will be "important for the nation's psyche," he said. "It's going to be important monetarily and militarily. We don't want China and Russia and other countries leading us. We're going to be the leader by far." White House spokesman Raj Shah said in a statement that the president wants the Pentagon to immediately begin the process to organize a Space Force. "The president's National Strategy for Space calls for American leadership, preeminence, and freedom of action in space, and he sees a separate service focused on space as a critical piece of that end state," said Shah. "The National Space Council and other White House offices will work closely with the Department of Defense on successful implementation of the presidents direction." The president's directive sets the stage for a contentious debate as the House and Senate prepare to hash out a final version of the 2019 NDAA. The House almost certainly will be enthused by the presidential push for a Space Force. In the past two years it has led efforts to create a Space Corps, but the legislation was opposed by the Senate and by the Pentagon. "Last year out of a lot of frustration and a commitment to do better in space, we set up a separate Space Corps," Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Mac Thornberry told reporters last week. The committee feels strongly that the U.S. military has to be better prepared and equipped to dominate in space, Thornberry said. "As we get all these briefings about what adversaries are doing, our dependence on space, its clear that we have to do better, he added. Organizational changes dont fix all the problems. But on the other hand they can sometimes help make sure space gets the kind of priority it should have, like cyber, as a domain of warfare." See more A tweet by Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat that is closely involved in space issues, suggested the president should not yet assume the Space Force is a done deal. "The president told a U.S. general to create a new Space Force as a sixth branch of the military, which generals tell me they don't want," Nelson tweeted on Monday. "Thankfully the president cant do without Congress because now is NOT the time to rip the Air Force apart. Too many important issues at stake." This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry. This small meteoroid impact on Mars within the last 10 years created this crater seen by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The long, dark trail streaking down a slope to the lower left was caused by an avalanche triggered by the impact. NASA released this image on June 15, 2018. A small space rock crashed into Mars recently, and NASA has captured an amazing view of its crater grave site, as well as the trail from an avalanche triggered by the impact. The new Mars crater was likely caused by a meteoroid impact within the past 10 years, NASA officials explained in an image description. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)spotted the crater from orbit, and the agency released the image on June 15. "The crater itself is only 5 meters [16.5 feet] across, but the streak it started is 1 kilometer long!" NASA officials wrote. "Slope streaks are created when dry dust avalanches leave behind dark swaths on dusty Martian hills. The faded scar of an old avalanche is also visible to the side of the new dark streak." [Latest Photos by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter] The impact crater is tiny, but the mark it left, as you can see in the image, is massive. When the meteoroid that caused this crater hit Mars, it destabilized the slope it collided with, which caused an avalanche of Martian dust, dirt and sand. This event left a dark streak, known as a slope streak, across the Martian surface. And as NASA pointed out, you can still see the "scar" from an older avalanche nearby. Sights like the long, dark streaks on a Martian hill are not uncommon on the surface of the Red Planet. And researchers agree that these dark slope streaks are caused by dust avalanches. The Martian surface is covered in sand, dirt and dust granules, and the planet is known to have storms and be struck by meteoroids. (A meteoroid is a small rock in space. When it enters an atmosphere and flares up, it is known as a meteor. Any fragments that reach the surface are called meteorites.) However, for years, scientists have pondered the origins of these marks. Previously, researchers suggested that these dark streaks could be caused by transient, flowing briny water, perhaps indicating that Mars is habitable, as many have suspected over time. Researchers thought that subterranean water could have been rising to the surface and causing the dark streaks. This theory was supported when MRO detected hydrated salts in these streaks. Some even suggested that the streaks were caused by seasonal carbon-dioxide frost. However, a study published last spring in the journal Nature Geoscience points to avalanches as the leading cause of the streaks. MRO took this spectacular new impact-crater image using HiRISE, or High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., of Boulder, Colorado,and is operated by the University of Arizona. HiRISE has taken some of the most spectacular and detailed images of the Martian surface to date. NASA's MRO spacecraft launched to Mars in August 2005 and arrived in early 2006. It has been studying the Red Planet from orbit ever since. Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her @chelsea_gohd. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. Update: Variety has shared some details on a few of the potential series in the Star Trek universe such as one set at Starfleet Academy as well as a Wrath of Khan story. New Production Agreement Includes Expanding the "Star Trek" Franchise for TelevisionAlex Kurtzman, a prolific writer-producer of film and television and co-creator of STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, has extended his production agreement with CBS Television Studios through 2023. Under the agreement, CBS Television Studios will have exclusive rights to produce all television content created and developed by Kurtzman and his Secret Hideout production banner for the next five years. Heather Kadin serves as president of Kurtzman's company, and Aaron Baiers is senior vice president of television.As part of the new production deal, Kurtzman will supervise the expansion of CBS' "Star Trek" franchise for television, developing new series, mini-series and other content opportunities, including animation. Under Kurtzman's leadership, the newest addition to the franchise, STAR TREK: DISCOVERY, made an impressive creative and commercial mark in its first season. DISCOVERY launched to widespread critical acclaim and commercial success in the U.S. on CBS All Access and around the world. Production for season two of DISCOVERY is under way, and Kurtzman directed the premiere episode.In addition to growing CBS' "Star Trek" universe, Kurtzman and Secret Hideout will develop new, original series across the full spectrum of broadcast, cable and streaming platforms. As part of this process, Secret Hideout will expand its production operation, adding diverse voices and cultivating new creative talent to align with the company."There is a very short list of writer-producer-directors that every film and television studio wants to be associated with, and Alex and his Secret Hideout team are always at the top," said David Stapf, President, CBS Television Studios. "His talent, taste and ability to shepherd a successful project is unparalleled. Alex has done remarkable work for our Studio, dating back seven years to the launch of HAWAII FIVE-0, and we are thrilled that he, Heather and their team will be partnering with us for a long time to come.""Heather, Aaron and I are thrilled to continue Secret Hideout's amazing partnership with CBS Television Studios," said Alex Kurtzman. "Since our first collaboration with HAWAII FIVE-0 almost a decade ago, Les, David and the full team at CBS Studios have been our foremost collaborators and champions, treating each project with integrity, supporting the creative visions and working breathlessly to make each episode of every show the best it can be. CBS has also allowed us the great pleasure of reintroducing the world of Star Trek audiences new and old, and we are very excited to keep working alongside them to expand that world."Since 2010, Kurtzman has served as executive producer of the series HAWAII FIVE-0, which remains one of the top-20 most-watched programs on television and a mainstay of CBS' Friday night schedule. He is also currently developing "The Man Who Fell to Earth" for Hulu with Jenny Lumet ("Rachel Getting Married"), Tandem Productions, Timberman/Beverly and Studio Canal. The series, based on a novel by Walter Tevis, is about an alien who arrives on earth at a moment of intense geopolitical crisis and must confront his own past to determine the world's future.Kurtzman is known as one of the most prolific creators in film and television, co-creating and launching some of the most successful franchises of the past two decades including multiple films in the "Star Trek," "Now You See Me" and "Transformers" series. He has also written, directed or produced such projects as INSTINCT, SALVATION and the recently completed run of "Scorpion" for CBS, as well as "Mission Impossible III," "The Proposal," "Sleepy Hollow," "Alias" and "Fringe." Welcome To SpoilerTV We bring you a comprehensive and up to date spoiler service on all the major US TV shows and Movies. You can find specific show content by clicking the menu system at the top of the screen. We scour the Internet for spoilers as well as posting our own exclusive spoilers (Scripts, Casting Calls, Set Photos etc) as well as recaps and other fun articles and polls. We hope you enjoy your stay. Kim Jong Un visited China on the same day the Pentagon officially suspended a key military exercise with South Korea, two moves underscoring the North Korean leader's success in rolling back the U.S.-led "maximum pressure" campaign against his regime. Kim was expected to begin a two-day visit to Beijing on Tuesday, China's official Xinhua News Agency said, the North Korean leader's third trip to the country since March. While neither Chinese nor North Korean state media explained the visit, Kim would likely confer with Chinese President Xi Jinping about his landmark summit with U.S. President Donald Trump last week in Singapore. Kim's visit to neighboring China -- announced amid reports he'd landed -- illustrates how comfortable the once-reclusive leader has become traveling abroad since Trump agreed to the meeting. When Kim made his first trip overseas later in March, he traveled in secret via armored train and it wasn't announced until he was safely home. Trump promised Kim unspecified "security guarantees" in their joint statement after the Singapore meeting, which has been criticized for failing to secure North Korea's commitment to a disarmament plan. Trump separately announced that he had decided to halt military exercises with South Korea, describing the "war games" as too costly and "provocative" -- a frequent North Korean criticism of the drills. Xi holds a unique combination of carrots and sticks that could make or break talks between Trump and Kim. China supplies more than 80 percent of North Korea's imports and its donation of the Air China Ltd. jet that carried Kim to Singapore last week highlighted the country's role in assuring his security. "Kim is reaching out to traditional friends and rivals and it really complicates the U.S. position of maximizing pressure on North Korea," said Stephen Nagy, a senior associate professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo. "As long as we have diplomacy, the rational for war games and American troops in South Korea becomes more and more diluted." There are already signs of disagreement between the two sides of the pace and sequence of North Korea's disarmament and sanctions relief. Trump and his point man for talks, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said Kim could only see penalties relaxed after he "completely denuclearized," while North Korean state media said the U.S. president had agreed to a "step-by-step" process. The U.S. and South Korea announced Tuesday morning, Seoul time, that the allies had agreed to indefinitely delay their Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercises planned for late August and early September. Pentagon spokesman Dana White said that the two sides were still coordinating and that no other joint exercises would be affected by the move for now. The annual drills trace their origin back to Ulchi Exercises started in 1968 after a failed raid on the South Korean presidential palace by North Korean commandos. Although the allies describe them as defensive and intended to improve coordination, North Korea last year called them "reckless saber-rattling" that risked sparking an accidental war. The freeze fits with China's push for a "suspension-for-suspension" process, in which each side would build trust through a series of diplomatic and military gestures. China last week called on the United Nations Security Council to revisit sanctions against the regime. In the run-up to the Singapore summit, Kim visited China twice to meet with Xi. During their March meeting in Beijing, Xi told Kim that China had made a "strategic choice" to have friendly ties with North Korea, and that they would "remain unchanged under any circumstances." "Now the ball is back in the North's court," said Shin Beomchul, director at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies' center for security and unification. "If it responds with sincere denuclearization steps, more planned drills will be suspended, which eventually can be led to discussions to reduce U.S. forces in South Korea." I t is a truth universally acknowledged that if Goldman Sachs is trying to sell you something, you should run a mile. Theyre smarter than you, and if the thing was worth having, they wouldnt be trying to flog it. So, when Goldmans private equity fund decided to offload shares in retirement homes group McCarthy & Stone in 2016, City fund managers should have run a mile. Sadly they didnt, and your and my pension bought the stock at 235p a share. Surprise surprise, the price crashed a few months later. Now, after a profit warning and sudden departure of the chief executive today, theyre 110p. In fairness to Goldman and its fellow private equity funds, Anchorage and TPG, they didnt sell all their stock back then, so theyre hurting too. Like us, they will not be mourning the CEOs passing. But we should all have seen todays profit crisis coming. Three of the four legs of McCarthys Zimmer frame of a business model have been wobbling for a long time. Leg one is the property market. For McCarthy to sell its flats, middle-class elderly types have to sell their four-bedroom homes to afford them. Right now, with property prices frozen or falling, Granny isnt selling. Leg two is its construction of new retirement homes. Brexit has sent thousands of skilled European tradesmen back home. Competition for the remaining workforce is fiercer than ever as the pace of housebuilding grows. Meanwhile, the weakened pound has driven up materials costs. Leg three is its reliance on ground rents. McCarthy needs this extra income stream and uses it to fund the long-term construction of its homes for the elderly residents. But the government wants to scrap them, fearing abuse by unscrupulous landlords. Uncertainty around this key income stream has made it harder for McCarthy to bid high when competing with other developers for land. Luckily, leg four stands strong: this is the leg of demographics. In an ageing population, where the old are wealthier than ever before, providing them with safe, easy-to-manage places to live must be a sweet spot. Thats why investors should not lose hope. McCarthy has been in worse positions than this. When Goldman and Co first bought in, it was sitting on hundreds of millions of pounds of debt, having nearly collapsed after an HBOS-funded buyout in 2006. At its peak, net debt was 900 million. Now its more like 76 million. With todays pledge to take clearer control on build costs and more flexible offers for customers, it should be able to crawl out of this hole. Ideas such as offering properties for rent and part exchange show it is thinking creatively about new ways of winning customers. B arring a last-minute coup by Brexiteer outliers, John Allan, the chairman of Tesco and Barratt Developments, will today be sworn in as the new president of the CBI. Allan takes over at a bloody time for the UKs biggest business lobbying group. At the top of his weighty agenda is facing down the critics who will not forgive the CBI for taking such a partisan line campaigning for Remain at the referendum. Often referring to itself as the UKs voice of business, the CBI was nicknamed the voice of Brussels by the Leave campaign and has been criticised by members and politicians, including the now Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, for being so passionately involved in the campaign. Even so, the CBI has continued to lobby for a Brexit so soft as to be skin-deep. Will the new boy be more politically astute? The omens are not good. In an interview at the weekend, Allan could not resist taking a swipe over the governments fudge: If the UK is to leave the EU, its going to have an impact on the economy. Lets do it in the most orderly way that maximises our chances of success thereafter. Hardly encouraging talk. Of course business wants an orderly negotiation. Who doesnt? Yet, as any decent businessman or woman knows, conducting negotiations of the size and the intricacy of those between the UK and the EU is a fraught, complex affair. Shouldnt the CBI be supporting the governments position, or at the least not be publicly critical? Pontificating about the intricacies of Brexit is the easy bit. The greater challenge facing Allan is to help the CBIs members cope with the concerns of a rapidly changing workplace if their employees are to flourish. The CBI claims to speak for 190,000 businesses which employ nearly seven million people, about one third of the private sector-employed workforce. That sounds like a lot, yet most companies are members through trade associations; the CBI has only 1500 direct members, and those numbers are declining fast. So are the numbers of businesses joining all the UKs most influential lobbying groups. The Federation of Small Business has seen membership drop from 200,000 to 165,000 today, only a tiny per cent of all the UKs 5.7 million SMEs. Membership of the Institute of Directors has seen the most catastrophic collapse, falling by nearly half since 1999, when it had 60,000 members, to 32,350 today. Thats a dramatic fall, one which the IoD claims dates to the financial crisis in 2008, after which numbers dropped off sharply. The latest crisis at the IoD, which saw Lady Judge resign as chairman, with two senior directors, following allegations she made racist comments about staff, will not have helped morale. Like the CBI, the IoDs senior directors also took to the airwaves during the referendum, arguing strongly for Remain, a stance which is said to have angered past and present members. Rather than grandstanding at Westminster, the CBI and IoD should be using their lobbying clout to focus on issues that really matter to businesses. Why not take on late payments to small companies? Or deal with the vexed issue of employment rights? Or help members tackle how technology disrupts how we live and work? These are the critical concerns. Half of the UKs 31.9 million workforce are employed in SMEs, with around five million people self-employed and one million people working in the so-called gig economy. With trade union membership also collapsing, surely now is the time for such business groups to speak up for looking after their workers? If they forget their membership, or get the composition wrong, others will fill the void. Some already are. In just a few years, Enterprise Nation has become a leading small business membership group, providing support to over 70,000, mainly female entrepreneurs. And the new trade union, Community, wants to sign up more than 100,000 self-employed workers as part of a radical project to overhaul rights for surging numbers of freelancers. T he Merkel and May Show sounds a bit like a missing sketch from Tracey Breaks the News. But quirks of fate unite the plight of the two leaders separated by the Grand Canyon of Brexit. Both face moments that imperil their leadership and tell a story of uneasy times. Each is faced by a single issue they cannot resolve nor escape. And, one way or another, their respective woes are determining their endgame in power. Chancellor Merkel is contending with a failure to handle the aftermath of her decision to admit a million refugees at the height of the humanitarian crisis in 2015 but also a corrosive sense that ensuing problems of integration are being ignored. Her global status is much higher than our Prime Ministers (no one misspells her name on the main noticeboard at Davos, as happened to May this year) and the Chancellors cushion of support in the outside world bolsters her status with those who fundamentally share her moderate outlook. But this is not much help in a domestic firefight with the CDUs sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, whose objections to allegedly lax border policy towards asylum seekers reflect worries broader than the border fixation of ultra-Conservative southerners. Merkel has, in the short term, faced down Horst Seehofer, her CSU interior minister, by describing the argument as one essentially about policy competences in other words, who gets to run what. Anne McElvoy But it is also a sleight of hand of the kind the Chancellors critics object to, with some justification using technocratic language to smother wider discontents or questions. The pertinent one is whether Germany is at home with a slight tightening of border controls and tougher rules on asylum. Or whether it backs a shift away from Merkels mixture of first welcoming refugees then supporting ways of keeping subsequent applicants on the edge of the EU while at the same time campaigning for other states to take a greater share of refugees. She is, however, always a keen strategist, even when at bay. This time her concern is that any tightening of border controls at home will set off similar responses elsewhere. For a leader who has so defended free movement within the EU (to the extent of ruling out any deviation from it, which might oil the wheels of a post- Brexit deal), the prospect of unilateral border arrangements is abhorrent. Yet a lasting solution, as opposed to a brief buy-off of affected countries, still looks elusive. The British and German governments are wobbly because both depend on the erratic tolerance of others to survive. Merkel cannot afford to lose the Christian Social Union, nor will her main coalition partner, the Social Democrats, stomach a hardening of the line on asylum provision. So her solution is that nothing much must change on the matter in a two-week cooling-off period but it must nonetheless looks like a compromise. The intervention of Donald Trump was, however, an unexpected gift and proof that leaders under fire should often just wait for some deus ex machina. I never thought Id be so pleased to hear from the White House, says one of Merkels close aides. The US Presidents intervention on the state of Germanys coalition and crime statistics will have solidified Merkels case, since even Germans who are concerned about integration and the low rate of removal of failed asylum claimants are not given to being so crudely hectored from across the Atlantic. And the less so on a day when the attack looked like a distraction from a story of inhuman treatment of families at the Mexican border. "Their electorates' divisions of opinion and disposition are far sharper and less tractable than they were." One leader who understands these constraints is May, propped up by the DUP (Protestant Bavarians, so to speak). She heads a party riven between hard Leavers, who wonder why Brexit is taking so long, soft Brexiters who want withdrawal to take as long as possible and Remainers who hope that the ping-pong between Lords and Commons will ensure it does not happen at all. Another Merkel-May commonality is that both are intent on avoiding new elections which neither would survive. At home, Mays choices on Brexit are now past the point where they are internally coherent, beyond avoiding the Government falling before an EU deal either emerges on Brexit or clearly does not. In this case, a second referendum or early general election will be more seriously in the air. But May has adapted one other Merkellism: the habit of delaying arguments and redefining their terms to the point where most of the public loses patience. The meaningful say promise to Remain supporters is a classic example of something that gives ground but has Coke Zero levels of nutritious content. It is balanced by this weeks calorie-free Brexit bonus to Leavers an overdue spending rise for the NHS funded by the taxpayer, since there is no discernible Brexit bonus. In raw political terms, however, voters are more likely to think a rise in health spending is a good thing than fret too much about the window dressing or who is taking the credit. The Europe May and Merkel inhabit is ill at ease with itself, and their electorates divisions of opinion and disposition are far sharper and less tractable than they were. Both countries have had a single party in charge for a lengthy period but fear a shift to the main alternatives, which sucks air out of the debate and boosts frustrations. The politically hot June in Berlin and London is the result, with two stressed incumbents counting the days to recess to escape from the push and pull of their warring factions. Merkels good fortune is that hers comes a few weeks sooner. I T WOULD be possible to dismiss actress Thandie Newtons attempt to surround her children with dolls, images and role models that reflect the diversity of her family and their community as mere political correctness (Thandie: Action figure of Star Wars Val helps my children learn about identity, June 12). This would, however, be an error. As we have better understood what good parenting constitutes, we have recognised that helping children to develop skills in forming and maintaining relationships, deal with adversity or make the most of opportunities is linked to how they feel about themselves. Those who are confident about their own identity are more likely to do well, including coping better with disappointment. Newton has had to stand up to harassment and to cope with the problems that followed. If we want our children also to be able to stand for what is right, we need to help them be confident in their own skin. Dolls, images and role models are not sufficient but they do play a part in helping children feel that they belong. Jabeer Butt CEO, Race Equality Foundation EDITOR'S REPLY Dear Jabeer In the Seventies the only doll on the shelf that represented African-Americans was the golliwog. Times have moved on, thank God, and so have icons. I like it that Thandie Newton says she keeps dolls of Val, the character she plays in Solo: A Star Wars Story, and Maeve from her role in Westworld, as an emblem of whats changed. Newton also said it was her son who played with these dolls, another marker of progress. Youre right: this isnt everything. But every childs toybox is their version of the world, and what goes in it matters. Joy Lo Dico, Editorial Executive Women were sold a myth that gender equality is already here I came across Sophie Tredwells Machinal first when I was 20. A rushed reading an hour before I was due to discuss it in class yielded little understanding [Feminist play should be history, says lead star, June 12]. This play was thought good? It was dated at best. Women had choices. At least thats what I thought. It is hard to determine which of the conditions of my life is more disabling: having cerebral palsy or being a woman. For many of my generation, we were sold the myth that gender equality is already in practice, all that was left to do was tie up a few loose ends. But with being raised on that unreasonable expectation also comes a vile disappointment, and, thankfully, a refusal to settle for less than what was promised. As Tredwell wrote, Ive submitted to enough I wont submit to any more. Athena Stevens Womens Equality Party Extra charge punishes owners of older cars Further to your article on the 12.50 extra charge to drive in London [Sadiq Khans expanded emissions zone risks splitting London in two, June 12], how will this clean up the air? Those with older cars will have no option but to pay. Neil Collas Let principle steer Brexit deal vote Last December the House of Commons chose to have a meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal. The Government has now put forward an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill that would leave Parliament with even less power than if the original meaningful vote amendment had carried. The Governments behaviour falls into a familiar pattern of the executive seeking to monopolise power. It is the job of MPs on our behalf to challenge the executive when it abuses power, or tries to do so. It seems likely that this issue will return to the Commons this week, and MPs must decide if they place party loyalty above the fundamental principles of democracy and parliamentary sovereignty. If I were an MP I know how I would want my vote recorded for posterity. Ian Morley Legalise drugs to fund health care Im sorry but I must disagree with the piece from Martin Bentham in response to the suggestion that drugs should be legalised [The Reader: County lines crime shows the failure of current drugs policy, June 14]. The better solutions may be laudable but Ive got more chance of coming up on the Lottery than this Government finding the vast amount of money any of that would require, not to mention the time it would take. Legalisation means regulation and making things safer for users. This is a public health issue as much as anything else. The lessons of Prohibition should be learned just saying no wont keep people from what they want. Want to fund health and social care properly? Legalise and regulate cannabis to start with. Vanessa Smith Freelancers should have known better I was surprised to see Jim Armitage siding with the freelancers regarding the HMRC clampdown on this tax timebomb [The Reader, June 15]. As a freelancer for many years, I too had a limited company. For many years, when I paid myself a salary, I paid National Insurance and income tax. My company paid employers National Insurance, corporation tax and VAT. I suppose the freelancers caught up in this action would regard me as a mug? Freelancers caught up in this mess should have known what they were doing. Caveat emptor. Dare I suggest they looked no further than the offer to get out of paying tax? I'm sat outside a cafe on Broadgate Circus waiting for the designer Charles Jeffrey to join me when I spot him bounding down a flight of steps. A sight for sore eyes against a backdrop of grey suits, he sports above-the-thigh denim shorts with a matching denim jacket and red-and-white striped socks pulled up to the knee. On his head is a black beret (stolen from his friend Sophie) which covers an acid yellow dye job. As he heads for our table, Friday morning commuters bound for nearby offices do a double take. The 27-year-old designer, last spotted skipping down the London Fashion Week Mens catwalk in the same pair of denim shorts, isnt phased. I dont dress for anybody else except for myself, he says, recounting an incident that took place just seconds earlier when some catcalling builders shouted abuse at him as he made his way to our meeting. Theres still a lot of hatred out there. But that sort of thing pisses me off way less than it used to. Charles Jeffrey and David Beckham attend the NEWGEN London Fashion Week Men's Breakfast / Dave Benett 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}} Jeffrey, once hailed the ringleader of Londons next generation of club kids, burst onto the fashion scene in 2016 with his brand Loverboy. A spin-off from the Stoke Newington club night which was to millennials what BoomBox was to those 10 years their senior, Loverboy is proudly queer in every sense of the word and stands as a celebration of true individuality. Its a safe space, says Jeffrey, who is arguably in possession of the cheekiest grin in the business and, given the achingly cool reputation that precedes him, about 10,000 times warmer than I expect. With three unforgettable ready-to-wear shows under its belt, a British Fashion Award and a growing number of stockists worldwide, Jeffreys label has emerged as more than just a fashion brand but a collective which hopes to be as inclusive as it is entertaining. Jeffreys Pride collection launches at Topshop Oxford Circus on Friday (Thurstan Redding/Topshop ) / Topshop Dedicated to his cause, Jeffrey moonlights as a stylist and an artist. The latest extension of this is a collection created for Topshop Topman, which launches on Thursday to coincide with Pride month. Featuring five T-shirts inscribed with a fundamental LGBTQI right, priced at 30, the range is a collaboration with a some of Jeffreys favourite illustrators. Loverboy has always been about inclusivity and about supporting artists so I wanted to do a collection within the confines of Topshop that worked on that level, he says. But for Jeffrey, who is a candid spokesperson on LGBTQI issues and a supporter of Diversity Role Models a mentoring charity that tackles homophobia at school level to which 30 per cent of proceeds from the collection will be donated this is about more than checking an unticked box on his to-do list. Charles Jeffrey Loverboy show for spring/summer 2019 / Rex Features Beforehand, when I thought about Pride Id always just thought about getting drunk in Soho. Its important to remember that its purpose is to fight for our right to be treated like a normal human being in this world. I think a lot of the time the young LGBTQI community forget that. We live in a bubble now. Undoubtedly Jeffrey has endured a few battles of his own. Born in 1990, he moved from Scotland to Germany and then to various locations (his adoptive dad was in the Army) before landing back in Cumbernauld at the age of nine. There, with very little cash at his disposal, he struggled to find his path, relying on fashion to indulge the creative soul that hid within. From about 14 I was always interested in clothes, that was always my identity, being the stylish one. I used to hang out with a bunch of neds. And dressing was my way to express myself but still hide the fact that I was gay. Clothes have always paid an important role. It was in Glasgow, aged 16, when he was punched in the face by a stranger that Jeffrey had his first aggressive encounter with homophobia. After that my mum was always terrified of me getting hurt. These days London provides a safe haven. Some days I dress a lot more provocatively than others, but this city has always been somewhere that I am able to be completely myself. Charles Jeffrey Loverboy show at London Fashion Week Men's SS19 show / PA Wire/PA Images Its Jeffreys unapologetic approach to identity that means he is a beacon of positivity for the LGBTQI community as well as a role model for young men and women finding their feet. Following his show on Monday, one of the models took to Instagram to thank the designer for saving his life. Suffering from severe suicidal depression, the model had been sleeping rough on the streets before being swept up in the Loverboy world. Jeffrey also tells me that DMs from men on the cusp of coming out are a regular occurrence. Charles Jeffrey Loverboy AW18 collection 1 /6 Charles Jeffrey Loverboy AW18 collection Charles Jeffrey Loverboy AW18 PA Wire/PA Images Charles Jeffrey Loverboy AW18 PA Wire/PA Images Charles Jeffrey Loverboy AW18 PA Wire/PA Images Charles Jeffrey Loverboy AW18 PA Wire/PA Images Charles Jeffrey Loverboy AW18 PA Wire/PA Images Charles Jeffrey Loverboy AW18 PA Wire/PA Images Undoubtedly the Loverboy movement is an echo chamber for those looking for a place to express the purest expression of their identity. But he is keen to point out, theres more than one way to be gay, adding: Whatever scene youre part of, its all a journey of identification. What we need now is more awareness of where we stand in the world. Crediting Netflixs drag queen spectacular Jeffrey references RuPaul for the positive effect the show has had on the gay community but is quick to point out its limitations. From the moment your alarm goes off to the second you race out of the door, weekdays mornings run on autopilot. We eat the same breakfast (seven minutes), have the same shower routine (11 minutes) and make the same half-baked attempt at putting on make-up (3.5 minutes). The problem arises as soon as we open our wardrobe when, faced with a crumple of un-ironed shirts and jeans with bits of Sundays brunch still on them, the routine goes out the window. So whats the solution? To carefully plan each outfit the night before? Tricky if youre busy having a life. Instead, Londoners have adapted to replace the 6:55am clothing conundrum with one simple, failsafe formula take one dress and add a pair of trainers. As ingenious in its ease as it is unfailing in its execution, this killer combination has rapidly become a uniform among those in the capital who dont have the headspace for much beyond sourcing caffeine before their day has begun. All you need is to perfect the basics. (Sandro ) / Sandro 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}} Starting with the dress. Short shifts are off the agenda, unless you wish to channel harassed commuter with heels in handbag. Instead, seek out swishy, summery styles. Mid-calf is the length to aim for not only is it more flattering, its also more office appropriate than a mid-thigh hemline paired with plimsolls. Arkets fluid floral crepe dress is the dream. Though if youre on the petite side, you can cheat a longer length by opting for a sheer fabric overlay (see Danish brand Baum und Pferdgarten) or a thigh split (a la French label Sandro). Baumund Pferdgarten Print, too, is key for nailing the breezy summer brief floral is the fashion packs current favourite (walk into any high street shop to have your pick of at least 10), or seek out polka dot, gingham or deckchair stripes. So thats half your outfit sorted. Now for the trainers. Thanks to the current zeitgeist for ugly kicks, Nikes Air Max 95s have emerged as an unlikely summer hit and work well as far as adding edge to an otherwise pretty dress. Boxfresh white is a safe option as far as versatility is concerned also see Reebok Classics or make like every other commuter currently adopting the dressy-casj uniform and choose a pair of Vejas classic V-10s. T he story of the greatest king youve never heard of will be told in a new exhibition that recreates an ancient civilisation whose remains were targeted by Islamic State. Assyria was governed by King Ashurbanipal whose seventh century BC capital Nineveh, in Mosul, modern-day Iraq, was the centre of an empire stretching from Egypt and Iran to Turkey. The place has been a battle field for much of the past 15 years and statues, sculptures and buildings, including a set of gates guarding the ancient city, were plundered and destroyed by militants in 2014. Curator Gareth Brereton said he hoped the British Museum exhibition would shed light on what has been a terrible time for Iraqi cultural history.Mr Brereton said: Sites have been bulldozed and dynamited, it has been awful. The exhibition, called I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria, features more than 200 objects including huge stone sculptures, a large collection of cuneiform documents, wall paintings and carved ivory furniture many of which were found on archealogical sites since ransacked by Islamic State. There will also be a recreation of the kings library which was thought lost for hundreds of years after the city was destroyed by invaders around 627BC. Mr Brereton continued: The city was sacked after his death when the empire fell apart, and his library was burnt down. But because it was all on clay tablets, burning them actually preserved the documents so we are able to tell so much of the story. The exhibition will also highlight the work of the Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme which oversees the training of Iraqi archaeologists with the aim of saving threatened sites. Lost treasrures: An artistic impression of the discovery of Nimrud Mr Brereton added: This autumn, the British Museum will reveal the history of Ashurbanipal, the greatest king youve never heard of. We hope many visitors will discover the stories of ancient Assyria and Ashurbanipal for the very first time, and experience the splendour of his palace at Nineveh and the impact of the Assyrian empire. As present day Iraq looks to recover the history of damaged sites at Nineveh and Nimrud, this exhibition allows us to appreciate and relive the great achievements of an ancient world and celebrate its legacy. Review at a glance T his is a rollicking adaptation by Rotimi Babatunde of Nigerian poet Lola Shoneyins debut novel, which promises four women, one husband and a devastating secret. Sure enough, its a portrait of polygamy and rivalry, haunted by the legacy of trauma and by one characters self-delusion. Baba Segi is a buffoonish patriarch, well-off and desperately obtuse. Hes unapologetic about his enthusiasm for having multiple wives, and Patrice Naiambana amusingly captures the noisy smugness of a man who treats sex as if its a pleasurable but banal bodily function (a case of going gbam, gbam, gbam as one wife puts it). In the novel he is characterised as open-ended his senses were directly connected to his gut and anything that didnt agree with him had a way of accelerating his digestive system. Naiambana revels in suggesting every nuance of his queasy flatulence, a weakness that eats away at Baba Segis charisma. The delights and disappointments of the body loom large throughout. Far and away the ripest scene in Femi Elufowoju Jrs enjoyably clamorous production involves Baba Segi struggling to control not his endlessly troublesome bowels, but another of his organs. Its a moment of extravagantly lubricated humour thats also very knowing about the shape of male pride. Much of the plays appeal derives from Baba Segis blustering short-sightedness. He may in theory preside over the household, yet hes mostly oblivious to the power struggles convulsing it. His wives do all the work, while their seven children caper around him. First wife Iya Segi (imperious Jumoke Fashola) is crafty and materialistic. Second wife Iya Tope (Christina Oshunniyi) is comparatively reticent and seems to derive her greatest satisfaction from braiding childrens hair. Third wife Iya Femi (Layo-Christina Akinlude) is fiery, vengeful and vain. His newest wife is university graduate Bolanle, whos given a nice mix of abrasiveness and vulnerability by Marcy Dolapo Oni. Unaware of the familys existing dynamics, she is naive and isolated. But her arrival complete with harrowing back story threatens to cause turmoil. The fact that she wants children and is seemingly unable to have them brings the unconventional nature of Baba Segis domestic arrangements into alarming focus. As the action hops between past and present, the tone switches repeatedly from the comic to the brutal. Elufowojus staging is lean, with few props, and instead the emphasis is on movement. There are credits for two choreographers, Kemi Durosinmi and Uche Onah, and members of the cast drum irrepressibly or perform choral interludes. This is an exuberantly entertaining show. Although the humour is often broad, theres an unflinching seriousness in its depiction of violent abuse (and worse). Tellingly, too, it portrays a society that may notionally be overseen by men yet is actually run by women, and the line that lives in the memory is Iya Segis withering observation that men are like yam you cut them how you like. I ts been a strong couple of months for Indian and Indian-inspired cookery. Evening Standard columnist Mallika Basu has published her second book, Masala: Indian Cooking for Modern Living (Bloomsbury, 26), filled with gorgeous but accessible home cooking ideas and troubleshooting tips; Will Bowlby, chef and co-founder of Kricket restaurants in Brixton and Soho, has penned a new book, Kricket: an Indian-inspired cookbook (Hardie Grant, 26), to represent the cooking he does as a chef, while Harneet Banweja, Devina Sath and Nirmal Save, co-founders of Gunpowder, Madame D and Gul & Sepoy restaurants, are newly published authors of a stunning book of modern tales on their family recipes, called Gunpowder: Explosive flavours from modern India (Kyle Books, 25). There's also cooking expert Maunika Gowardhan, author of Indian Kitchen: Secrets of Indian Home Cooking (Hodder & Stoughton, 27), who's created a new app filled with Indian recipes where there are ideas available to cooks of all standards. We asked each of our London experts where in the city they go to buy the best ingredients for their Indian cookery. EVERYTHING UNDER ONE ROOF Indian grocery stores tend to sell all dry supplies like spices, rices and pulses, as well as fats and fresh fruits and vegetables, explains Mallika Basu. "So the good news is that if you make the trek to a specialist store you will find all of these goods housed under one roof. 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}} Indian Spice Shop, Euston indianspiceshop.co.uk Just by Euston station, its central and has the added benefit, says Basu, of being next door to Gupta, the sweet shop, which also does the most authentic samosas in London. Once you finish shopping, suggests Gowardhan, head out the the other side of the street and get some Indian sweets or savoury snacks from Ambala! She calls it her staple for buying rice and pulses, in order to make dal, khichdi and sambar. I buy a big bag of lentils, dried pulses and beans which usually last a few months. Bhavins, Tooting The uncle who sits in the dry grocery section is very helpful and opinionated and are happy to help if shoppers are stuck or lost, offers Basu, while Bowlby remembers driving here for bhel mix and spices when we had the shipping container in Brixton. Its also good for rice and pulses; the store has everything! Taj Stores, Brick Lane tajstores.co.uk Gowardhan comes here to buy things to cook for larger events. She admires its fruit and veg section, in particular, seasonal items like Alphonso mangoes. When shes not making her own ghee, shell buy any oils and butters and ghee from here too. Bowlby says he likes that Taj Stores is bigger and also has a good stock of dishes, pots and pans. He comes here to buy vegetables, curry leaves, huge bunches of fresh coriander and okra: Things you need to cook a perfect Indian curry! Gunpowders Save is also a regular here. Borough Market boroughmarket.org.uk Gowardhan adores Londons oldest market and comes here to buy almonds, cashew and olives. Meanwhile Bowlby buys chillies, garlic and some fish here, and calls it an absolute fave for some of the best produce, which he stocks up on whenever hes going by train to see his family in Sussex for the weekend. Sainsburys When it comes to supermarkets, Sainsbury's is Basus first choice when it comes to the range and best value for money fish and meat. Unsplash SPICES Spice Shop, Blenheim Crescent indianspiceshop.co.uk Gowardhan loves this for Indian, Lebanese and Mexican spice blends. Spice Mountain at Borough Market thespiceshop.co.uk It has really good quality spices if readers cant get to any of the Asian stores, recommends Gowardhan who, though Newcastle-based, stays near the market when shes in London for work. Queens Market, Green Street, Newham friendsofqueensmarket.org.uk This is another really good spot for finding a good range of useful spices and produce, thinks Gowardhan. FATS Butter Culture (order online @ butterculture.bigcartel.com) This is Bowlbys go-to place for cultured butter, which he uses in his Soho restaurant on the house-made breads. The other three use the generalist shops for oils and ghee, although Gowardhan says she tends to make her own more often these days. FLOURS Brixton Windmill brixtonwindmill.org Bowlby often buys his flour from Londons only remaining windmill - its milled using grain from Harpenden, and you can buy it locally. Taj Stores, Brick Lane Gowardhan thinks supermarkets are best for buying most regular flour although she shops in Taj Stores for atta flour to make chapattis as the bags are bigger. FISH You don't really need a specialist shop, says Basu, just one with a wide enough range, but if buying fish for a fish curry, she recommends buying a firm fleshed one that doesn't flake when heated. Moxons fishmongers, branches in South Kensington, East Dulwich, Clapham South This is great if you feel like a bit of a splurge on fish - the quality is always fantastic. says Basu. Furness, Borough Market boroughmarket.org.uk/traders/furness-fish-markets Recommended by Gowardhan for its flavour and freshness. Bowlby also uses the market for fish when hes buying in small quantities. Unsplash MEAT M Moen and Sons, Clapham moen.co.uk These guys will dice cuts of meat to your liking and even order in goat meat if you fancy doing curries the proper Indian way, says Basu, who lives locally. Ginger Pig, branches across London thegingerpig.co.uk One of Gowardhans two suggestions for consistently good, if expensive, quality meat. Turner and George, Clerkenwell turnerandgeorge.co.uk Gowardhan comes here when shes near Angel as she says she can depend on the high quality, range and the butchers knowledge. Taj Stores, Brick Lane Gowardhan also advises visiting the lovely butcher at the back of Taj stores for specific cuts of meat for Indian cooking. There they can cut the lamb/chicken how you want it for curries and so on. Goan Cuisines, order online goancuisine.co.uk T he family of a public schoolboy who died after being punched once by a club promotor during a night out in Malia said they are relieved his killer has finally been brought to justice. Harrow pupil Archie Lloyd was celebrating the end of his A-Level exams with friends in the Greek resort in August 2015 when he was knocked to the floor by a single punch Sebastian Trabucatti. Three judges and four jurors took less than an hour to find the 25-year-old guilty of first degree manslaughter after a trial at the Court of First Instance in Heraklion on Tuesday. After a short deliberation, judges decided he would be spared any immediate jail time and handed him a suspended four-year prison sentence. Sebastian Trabucatti was found guilty / PA Mr Lloyd's parents James and Claire sat hand-in-hand as they waited for the verdict, supported by a large crowd of relatives many of whom burst into tears as it was announced. Trabucatti, of Haywards Heath, West Sussex, punched 18-year-old Mr Lloyd and pushed over his best friend Andy Hutchinson in the drunk row at 5am in the middle of a street off the town's main strip, the court heard. The group had exchanged insults which culminated in Mr Lloyd saying to Trabucatti: "One day you will work for me" before walking off. Archie Lloyd: The 18-year-old died in Crete / Archie Lloyd/Facebook He was charged in 2015 and the year after a UK coroner recorded a verdict of unlawful killing at an inquest. A family statement released through lawyers said: "We have been waiting almost three years for the day when Archie's attacker was brought to justice and we are relieved that this moment has finally come. "Sebastian Trabucatti took our wonderful son, brother and friend away from us when he attacked him, shattering many lives as a result. The court in Heraklion, Crete / PA "While nothing will bring Archie back, we are pleased that he was found guilty of the first degree criminal offence of which he was accused." Dressed in a grey suit, white shirt and a silver and blue striped tie, Trabucatti looked bewildered and cried during most of the proceedings as he sat hunched on a bench at the front of the court. It is the first time he has publicly answered questions about the incident, after refusing to attend the inquest. He ignored requests for a comment after the case ended. In court he denied being responsible for the death, claiming it was a slap and not a punch, and said: "I never expected anything like this to ever happen." He and several other English witnesses gave evidence aided by an interpreter. A teenager has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a man was stabbed to death near a busy north London Tube station. Edmond Jonuzi, 35, was found with serious knife wounds near Turnpike Lane station, in Haringey, on Saturday, June 9. Mr Jonuzi, also known as Edmond Preci, was pronounced dead at the scene. A 19-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder at about 4pm in Tottenhall Road, in nearby Wood Green, on Monday, Scotland Yard said. He has been taken to a north London police station where he remains. In statement, the Met Police said: Police investigating the fatal stabbing of 35-year-old Edmond Jonuzi, also known as Edmond Preci, in Green Lanes, on Saturday, June 9, have made an arrest. A 19-year-old male was arrested on suspicion of murder at 4pm in Tottenhall Road, Wood Green. He has been taken to a north London police station. Brian Cooke also branded the men criminals in an extraordinary outburst on Twitter. The men, aged between 19 and 23, were found dead on tracks near Loughborough Junction on Monday morning. It is believed the men were graffiti artists and the driver of the train did not spot them. Spray cans and other materials were found near their bodies. Three killed at Loughborough Junction Writing about the horrific incident, Mr Cooke posted on Twitter: "Why do @BBCNews @tomedwards keep referring to the guys killed at #LoughboroughJunction as graffiti 'artists'. "They are no such thing they are common scum and criminals who cost the railway millions and keep fares high". Brian Cooke sparked outrage with the tweet / Twitter Mr Cooke is a former Conservative association chairman in south-east London who was suspended by the Tories this year for calling the former Mayor of Bromley, Ian Payne, a two faced little s*** on social media. He was also sacked as chairman of the capitals travel watchdog London TravelWatch after declaring his support for Boris Johnson days before the 2008 mayoral election, breaching the terms of his appointment. Under fire: Brian Cooke / Glenn Copus Many people have taken to twitter in outrage at the "disgraceful" tweet. One person said: What a horrible & disgraceful thing to say. Theyre peoples sons, show some respect! A police officer searches the tracks where three people were hit and killed by a train near Loughborough Junction Another said: What the hell are you talking about you disgraceful human? 3 young men died, put aside your foolish and archaic preconceptions. Think before you vocalise such brutal opinions. Another added: 3 lives lost, undoubtedly a traumatised train driver... shame on you for such reckless and thoughtless comments and opinion on a tragedy spare a thought for their families before you type! Police at Loughborough Junction on Monday / AFP/Getty Images Mr Cookes account on the social media site has since been made private. It comes after the three mens bodies were discovered at about 7.30am on Monday. A source said spray cans were found near the site where they died. A British Transport Police spokesman said: The three men have not yet been formally identified, but we now believe them to have been aged 19, 23 and 23. They were all from the London area. Their families have been informed and are now being supported by specially trained officers. Efforts are still under way to establish the circumstances of how the men came to be on the tracks this morning. E U leaders are set to tell the Government to pull yourselves together and are ready to warn businesses to prepare for Britain crashing out of the bloc with no deal. They expect little progress to be made at a summit in Brussels, starting a week on Thursday, amid deep splits in the Cabinet and Parliament over Brexit. They are expected to criticise the Governments position on a backstop arrangement for the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic if no deal is reached on the issue. The tone will not please the UK, said one EU diplomat involved in the talks. The message to the UK is serious. Pull yourselves together. The EU could soften its tone if there are signs of a breakthrough. But there were also warnings today that the shape of a trade deal may only be agreed in December, rather than the autumn, just months before the UK quits the EU. They came as Theresa May faced the threat of a Commons defeat tomorrow over giving Parliament a meaningful vote on a Brexit deal, particularly if there is not one. MPs will vote on a Lords amendment to the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, tabled by Viscount Hailsham and passed with a majority of 119, which would require the Government to allow the Commons to vote on how it would proceed in the absence of a Brexit deal by January 21. If it came to such a scenario, MPs would be able to amend a motion tabled by the Government but it would not be justiciable so could not be used to block Brexit through the courts. Former Attorney General Dominic Grieve said he still hoped it would be possible to come to a sensible compromise with the Government that would address the concerns of both sides. However, he dismissed suggestions that the rebels would bring down the Government if it was defeated as complete nonsense. Ministers have been accused of reneging on concessions, which rebels say Mrs May signalled, and which staved off a rebellion last week. Asked whether he still trusted the Prime Minister, Mr Grieve said: I am very conscious that the Prime Minister is in great difficulty ... I have a great understanding of some of the problems she faces. I would be very happy if we can resolve this in a way which makes me feel that the trust I always try to place in the Prime Minister is honoured. In a speech in Vienna, EU lead negotiator Michel Barnier said the EU needs strong safeguards on human rights and data protection in any post-Brexit police and security deal. This trust doesnt fall from the sky, he said. The Government wants to maintain links to Europol, and continue cross-border extradition under the European arrest warrant post-Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn has also shared his thoughts on the attack one year on: His full statement read: A year on from the tragic attack outside Muslim Welfare House London in Finsbury Park when a man filled with hate drove into a crowd of people after prayers, we remember the life that was lost and those still suffering from the aftermath and the inspiring response of our community. One man, Makram Ali, was killed and eight people were injured in this terrible attack that brought terror to our streets. But the response of our community people of all faiths and none was to come together in solidarity and strength. We showed that we would not be divided or defeated and we never will be. L ondon fell silent to honour the victims of the Finsbury Park terror attack a year after Darren Osborne ploughed a van into a crowd of Muslims as they left a mosque during Ramadan. Grandfather Makram Ali, 51, was killed and 12 others injured when Osborne drove into worshippers leaving Muslim Welfare House in the early hours of June 19 last year. Today politicians, faith leaders and those affected by the attack gathered at Islington Town Hall in memory of Mr Ali. London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and MP Emily Thornbury all vowed not to let racism and extremism divide us as they gave rousing speeches to crowds paying their respects. Imam Mamhoud speaks at the service / Alex Lentati Ms Thornbury said: There is no community like Islington. We have extreme wealth living next to poverty, we all live on top of each other, we hardly have any green space and we like it that way. Politicians and faith leaders called on Londoners to unite against terror / Alex Lentati She hailed the communitys unity as an example to the world of how people can live together. That is why the extremists and the racists hate us. They can do what they like to us but they will not divide us because we are one. There is no other in Islington, there is only us, she said. Finsbury Park terror attack - one year on Mr Khan echoed Ms Thornburys powerful words as he remembered Mr Ali and shared prayers and love top his family and friends and those injured in the attack. He hailed the heroic actions of emergency services and bystanders who helped the injured and praised Imam Mamhoud who protected Osborne from angry onlookers until police arrived. Crowds turned out at Islington Town Hall to pay their respects / Alex Lentati This is the kind of story that gives us hope. Our values will always be stronger than the hatred of the extremists, he said. This is our city, this is our way of life and those who seek to divide us should know this: You will never succeed, the mayor concluded to rapturous applause. One year anniversary of the Finsbury Park attack 1 /12 One year anniversary of the Finsbury Park attack Alex Lentati PA Alex Lentati Alex Lentati Alex Lentati Alex Lentati Alex Lentati Alex Lentati Alex Lentati Alex Lentati Alex Lentati Alex Lentati Labour leader Mr Corbyn, who lives close to Muslim Welfare House on Seven Sisters Road, described how he and Mr Khan spent the night at the mosque following the attack. Emily Thornbury and Sajid Javid with members of the community / Alex Lentati He praised Mr Ali and reminded mourners of a plaque erected in his memory at a play park he frequented with his children and grandchildren. He spoke of his pride in schoolchildren who paid tribute to Mr Ali playing All You Need is Love as they walked around Finsbury Park in the days after the attack. Makram Ali was killed in the attack / Metropolitan Police In memory of Makram the children playing together, laughing together, they are the answer to the racists, we will be united forever, we will be strong forever, they will never divide us. Crowds gather in Islington / Alex Lentati In Makrems memory, stay united, stay together, support each other, Mr Corbyn said in a rallying speech. A powerful minutes silence was held in memory of Mr Ali and those injured in the attack. Last night the words #LondonUnited were projected onto the side of the mosque as Imam Mamhoud called for a national day to combat Islamaphobia. Jeremy Corbyn was among those who spoke / Alex Lentati He told ITV News: Tackling the issue is a priority of this government now and that it's been given precedence as part of their agenda to deal with all forms of terrorism as it is not unique to one group." The words #LondonUnited were illuminated onto the wall of the Muslim Welfare House / NIGEL HOWARD Members of the emergency services also paid tribute on the anniversary of the attack with Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick saying: Today our thoughts are with Makram Ali, who died in the attack at Finsbury Park last year. A husband, father, brother, grandfather much loved and deeply missed. In the Met we also remember all those who were injured that night and those who were caught up in the horror. Finsbury Park attack June 19 1 /25 Finsbury Park attack June 19 Treating the wounded: Paramedics and police at the scene of the crash in Finsbury Park James Gourley/Rex The suspect is pinned to the ground by brave members of the public Forensic investigators examine the van Jeremy Selwyn James Gourley/Rex Features Injured: Paramedics take one of the wounded away James Gourley/Rex Features Rescuers: Emergency services staff treat victims after a vehicle hit pedestrians in Finsbury Park Thomas van Hulle/PA Crash: The scene in Seven Sisters Road PA Response: An armed police officer mans a cordon on the Seven Sisters Road at Finsbury Park Yui Mok/PA Shock: Local people observe prayers at Finsbury Park Yui Mok/PA Emergency service workers at Finsbury Park in north London Yui Mok/PA Fears: Police officers talk with local people at Finsbury Park Yui Mok/PA Paramedics: Ambulances in Finsbury Park Jennifer Heape/PA Police on one of the cordons in north London Yui Mok/PA Patrol: Armed officers near Seven Sisters Road Yui Mok/PA Cordon: Police in Finsbury Park Yui Mok/PA People scuffle near a police cordon near Finsbury Park EPA PA Muslims pray on the street NIGEL HOWARD Armed Police at the scene in Seven Sisters Road Nigel Howard Finsbury Park attack: The scene at Seven Sisters Road where a van believed to be involved mounted the pavement Jeremy Selwyn Forensic investigators at Finsbury Park PA The suspect is put in the back of a police van after being restrained at the scene Police at the scene neat Seven Sisters Road Chloe Chaplain Aerial view of forensics at the scene of Seven Sisters Road Jeremy Selwyn Flowers are left near the scene at Seven Sisters Road Chloe Chaplain "London is a city of many faiths and many nationalities. Our strength is our unity. The way the local community in Finsbury Park of all faiths and all backgrounds came together and remains so strong together is inspirational. A true reflection of our City." Osborne was jailed for 43 years over the murder of Mr Ali The attack was third to hit London in three months following atrocities at Westminster Bridge and at London Bridge and Borough Market. T he Duke and Duchess of Sussex will join the Queen at Royal Ascot for the horse racing today. Harry and Meghan will present the winning trophy for the 4.20pm race, the St James Palace Stakes, according to the official Royal Ascot programme. The newlyweds will be attending the famous sporting event together for the first time. It comes as Kensington Palace revealed that the couple would be visiting Dublin, Ireland, in July. Meghan Markle with the Queen last week / Getty Images Harry and Meghan "are looking forward to learning more about Ireland's history and experiencing its rich culture, as well as meeting the people who are shaping the country's future", a spokesman said in a statement. The visit to Ireland will take place on July 10 and 11. Royal Wedding 2018: Best Pictures 1 /67 Royal Wedding 2018: Best Pictures Prince Harry and Meghan Markle kiss on the steps of St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle PA Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, places the wedding ring on the finger of Meghan Markle Jonathan Brady/AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle ride a horse-drawn carriage after their wedding ceremony Benoit Tessier/Reuters Meghan Markle and her mother, Doria Ragland Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images Princess Charlotte and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge leave St George's Chapel after the wedding Jane Barlow/WPA Pool/Getty Images Meghan Markle and her mother, Doria Ragland are driven along the Long Walk Yui Mok/WPA Pool/AFP/Getty Images Meghan Markle arriving at her royal wedding ceremony Owen Cooban/MoD/EPA Prince Harry with his brother and best man, the Duke of Cambridge Jane Barlow/PA David and Victoria Beckham attend the wedding Hugo Philpott/WPA Pool/EPA George and Amal Clooney arrive at St George's Chapel Chris Radburn/PA Abigail Spencer and Priyanka Chopra Chris Jackson/Getty Images Patrick J. Adams and wife Troian Bellisario Ian West/PA Marcus Mumford and Carey Mulligan Chris Jackson/Getty Images George Clooney greets Serena Williams as Idris Elba and Sabrina Dhowre look on Owen Humphreys/WPA Pool/Reuters James Blunt and Sofia Wellesley Hugo Philpott/WPA Pool/EPA Meghan Markle arrives at St George's Chapel Andrew Matthews/WPA Pool/Reuters Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle Jonathan Brady/PA Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, looks at his bride, Meghan Markle, as she arrives accompanied by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales in St George's Chapel Jonathan Brady/WPA Pool/AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry places the wedding ring on the finger on Meghan Markle Jonathan Brady/WPA Pool/AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle walk down the steps of St George's Chapel Ben Birchall/PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leave St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle after their wedding Reuters Prince Harry and Meghan Markle kiss Ben Birchall/PA Doria Ragland, mother of the bride, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall walk down the steps of St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle after the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in Windsor Jane Barlow/WPA Pool/Reuters Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex waves from the Ascot Landau John Sibley/WPA Pool/Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle kiss as they ride in a carriage down the Long Walk after their wedding Yui Mok/WPA Pool/AP Prince Harry and Meghan Markle ride in an Ascot Landau along the Long Walk after their wedding in St George's Chapel Yui Mok/PA Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex wave from the Ascot Landau Carriage during their carriage procession on Castle Hill outside Windsor Castle Reuters Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and the Duchess of Cambridge with Prince George and Princess Charlotte leave St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle after the wedding Andrew Matthews/Pool/Getty Images Meghan Markle walks down the aisle in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle PA Princess Charlotte waves to the crowd Andrew Milligan/PA Windsor Castle Guards from 1st Battalion Irish Guards play for the crowd Nigel Roddis/EPA Meghan Markle arrives at St George's Chapel Brian Lawless/WPA Pool/Getty Images Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, walk away from the High Altar toward the West Door at the end of their wedding ceremony in St George's Chapel Danny Lawson/WPA Pool/AFP/Getty Images The Reverend Michael Curry delivered a 10 minute long flamboyant speech Owen Humphreys/WPA/Pool/Reuters Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle for their wedding Dominic Lipinski/PA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leave St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle Dominic Lipinski/WPA Pool/Reuters Doria Ragland, mother of the bride during the wedding service Prince Charles, Prince of Wales and Britain's Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall wait in the chapel for the wedding ceremony Jonathan Brady/WPA Pool/AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry looks at his bride, Meghan Markle, as she arrives accompanied by Prince Charles, Prince of Wales during their wedding Jonathan Brady/WPA Pool/Getty Images Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and The Duchess of Sussex kiss on the steps of St George's Chapel Danny Lawson/WPA Pool/Getty Images) Meghan Markle waves to the crowds Matt Cardy/Getty Images Well-wishers line the Long Walk leading to Windsor Castle ahead of the wedding and carriage procession Daniel Leal-Olivias/AFP/Getty Images Well-wishers watch a giant screen broadcasting the wedding ceremony Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images The Queen Elizabeth II with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh Alastair Grant/AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex set off in the Ascot Landau Carriage after their wedding ceremony Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and The Duchess of Sussex ride along the Long Walk in the Ascot Landau carriage during a procession after getting married at St Georges Chapel Hannah McKay/WPA Pool/Getty Images The Queen and other members of the royal family wave after the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at St George's Chapel Andrew Milligan/WPA Pool/Reuters Prince Harry and Meghan Markle walk down the steps after their wedding Ben Birchhall/WPA Pool/AP Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leave after their wedding ceremony at St. George's Chapel Andrew Matthews/WPA Pool/AP Meghan Markle glances back towards her mother, Doria Ragland, as she leaves St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle with Prince Harry Danny Lawson/WPA Pool/AP A woman is painted with a British flag on her face, as they wait at The Long Walk to watch the carriage procession Emilio Morenatti/AP Royal fans wave flags as they wait for the newlyweds to go past after the wedding ceremony of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle Emilio Morenatti/AP Prince Harry looks at his bride, Meghan Markle, as she arrives accompanied by the Prince of Wales in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle Owen Humphreys/PA Flowers adorn the front of the organ loft inside St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle for the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle Danny Lawson/WPA Pool/Getty Images) Meghan Markle walks up the aisle with the Prince of Wales at St George's Chapel Dominic Lipinski/Pool /Reuters Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and the Duchess of Sussex in the Ascot Landau carriage during the procession on The Long Walk after getting married St George's Chapel Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan Markle leave St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle Neil Hall/WPA Pool/EPA Prince Harry and Meghan Markle ride in an open-topped carriage through Windsor Castle after their wedding in St George's Chapel Aaron Chown/WPA Pool/Reuters Royal fans smile on the Long Walk leading to Windsor Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and The Duchess of Sussex ride in the Ascot Landau carriage during a procession after getting married at St Georges Chapel Andrew Milligan/WPA/Getty Images Meghan Markle arrives at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle Neil Hall/WPA Pool/Reuters Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and The Duchess of Sussex leave Windsor Castle in the Ascot Landau carriage during a procession after getting married at St Georges Chapel Phil Noble/WPA/Getty Images Prince Harry and Meghan Markle ride in an open-topped carriage through Windsor Castle after their wedding in St George's Chape Victoria Jones/PA Prince Harry salutes members of the Royal family as he and his wife Meghan Markle ride in an open-topped carriage after their wedding ceremony of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at St. George's Chapel in Windsor Castle Andrew Milligan/WPA Pol/AP Prince Harry and Meghan Markle leave St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle Dominic Lipinski/WPA Pool/Getty Images Two women wipes their tears when watching Prince Harry and Meghan Markle exchange vows on a video screen on the Long Walk Peter Dejong/AP Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex begin their carriage procession in the Ascot Landau Carriage after their wedding ceremony at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle Chris Radburn/AFP/Getty Images On Tuesday morning, Ladbrokes had Meghan as 7/4 favourite to wear pink for her day at the races. William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, did not attend Royal Ascot together until 2016 five years after they married. The Queen and the rest of the Royal Procession are expected to arrive at 2pm, half an hour before the first race. The Queen and the rest of the Royal Family last week / AFP/Getty Images Carriages will leave Windsor Castle earlier in the afternoon and travel into the racecourse through the golden gates before they pass crowds in front of the grandstand. The Queen attends Ascot each day and members of the Royal Family in the procession change each day but she is often joined by her husband Prince Philip. T he UK will today fall silent to mark the first anniversary of the Finsbury Park terror attack. Father-of-six Makram Ali died when Darren Osborne ploughed a rented van into a group of worshippers outside Muslim Welfare House Mosque. A further 12 people were injured in the attack in the early hours of June 19 last year. Osborne, 48, was jailed for 43 years for murdering 51-year-old Mr Ali after deliberately driving into the crowd on Seven Sisters Road during Ramadan. Makram Ali died in the attack on June 19 last year / Metropolitan Police The UK will fall silent at 9.30am to remember Mr Ali and those hurt in the third terror attack to hit the capital in just three months including those at Westminster Bridge and London Bridge. Vigil after Finsbury Park mosque attack 1 /11 Vigil after Finsbury Park mosque attack People in the crowd hold bunches of brightly coloured roses JEREMY SELWYN A line of people who have come to pay their respects observe a moment of silence Londoners make their way to a vigil outside Finsbury Park mosque Men, women and children observe a moment of silence Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick joins the crowd A woman wipes away a tear at a vigil for those affected by the Finsbury Park mosque attack Signs bearing messages of solidarity were held aloft at the vigil JEREMY SELWYN Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick joins faith leaders for the vigil JEREMY SELWYN People in the crowd hold bunches of brightly coloured roses JEREMY SELWYN People in the crowd hold bunches of brightly coloured roses JEREMY SELWYN Hundreds of people gathered for the vigil outside Finsbury Park mosque JEREMY SELWYN The silence will follow a remembrance service at 9am at Islington Town Hall due to be attended by Home Secretary Sajid Javid and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. T he Prime Minister has never smoked cannabis, her official spokesman said today following the announcement of a review into the medicinal use of the drug. The use of cannabis to treat conditions such as epilepsy and multiple sclerosis was brought into the political spotlight after appeals from parents who said the drug should be made available to help their children. On Tuesday Home Secretary Sajid Javid announced that the use of the drug for medical purposes would be reviewed, which could lead to patients being prescribed drugs from the banned plant. The Home Secretary firmly rejected a call by former Foreign Secretary Lord Hague for cannabis to be legalised for recreational use. And the decision was backed by scores of MPs from all parties - including former health minister Norman Lamb who alleged that "probably half the Cabinet" have used the class B drug. Home Secretary, Sajid Javid / PA The Liberal Democrat MP said the Government's policy towards cannabis represented a "dreadful hypocrisy". "Probably most of the Cabinet drink alcohol, the most dangerous drug of all, he said. Probably half of the cabinet has used cannabis - possibly even the Home Secretary - unless they're a group of very odd people. Following the debate, Tory former minister Sir Desmond Swayne used a point of order to ask: "Where is everybody? Sajid Javid announces review of cannabis for medicinal use I hope in the light of the extraordinary accusations of (Mr Lamb) they are not behind the bike sheds having a spliff." But, when asked by the Press Association whether Theresa May had ever smoked cannabis, the Prime Minister's official spokesman replied: "No." In 2017 the PM said in an interview that the "naughtiest" thing she had ever done was running through a farmer's fields of wheat. In 2017 the PM revealed the "naughtiest" thing she had ever done was running through fields of wheat / PA In the interview with Julie Etchingham of ITVs Tonight, she said: "Well, nobody is ever perfectly behaved, are they? I mean, you know, there are times when... I have to confess, when me and my friend, sort of, used to run through the fields of wheat." Following the Home Secretarys announcement on Tuesday, the mothers of two young boys whose severe epilepsy require them to have medicinal cannabis said they were overwhelmed by the amazing news. On Tuesday, Mr Javid had authorised a licence to be issued for six-year-old Alfie Dingley, after his mother said she had been waiting three months for Mrs May to fulfil a personal assurance that he would be allowed to receive cannabis oil. Alfie's mother said she had been "overwhelmed" by the announcement and voiced hope it would be easier to access to get cannabis medication in the future, saying it would be "madness" for sufferers to miss out. Charlotte Caldwell, mother of 12-year-old Billy Caldwell, speaks outside Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, as Sajid Javid announced a review of the medicinal use of cannabis / PA Hannah Deacon said she also wanted the Government to make it easier to do research into the medical properties of the plant, saying: "Hopefully we will have a more forward thinking way of doing things in this country and medicinal cannabis will hopefully, in five or 10 years time, be the norm. Days before, Mr Javid intervened to permit the use of cannabis oil to treat severely epileptic 12-year-old Billy Caldwell, who had been admitted to hospital with seizures after supplies his mother had brought from Canada were confiscated at Heathrow. Billy's mother Charlotte described the announcement of a review as "amazing news" which she "applauded". She said: "The power of the mothers and fathers of sick children has bust the political process wide open and it is on the verge of changing thousands of lives by bringing cannabis laws in line with many other countries. P redicted grades should not be used by universities to make offers to students, lecturers and head teachers have said. The UK is "out of step" with the rest of the world on university admissions, according to the University and College Union (UCU) which is calling for an overhaul of the system. Currently, institutions use a potential student's predicted grades, typically for A-levels, when deciding whether or not to offer them a place on a degree course. The place is then confirmed on A-level results day, once a student has their final results. But the UCU argued that the UK is the only nation which uses predicted grades, noting that research has previously shown that as few as one in six A-level grade predictions are correct. It also suggested that the system encourages the use of unconditional offers, whereby students are awarded places regardless of their grades. Research commissioned by the union, published on Tuesday, examines university admissions in 29 countries, plus England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It concludes: "No country in the study, with the exception of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has a system of pre-qualification admission where the offer of a place in higher education is based on the results the student are predicted to achieve. "England, Wales and Northern Ireland are real outliers in terms of their reliance on predicted grades to determine how prospective students are offered higher education places in comparison to the diverse range of countries featured in this study." The findings come just weeks before students learn whether they have scored the A-level results required for their university places. UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said: "We are alone in the world in using a system where students are offered university places based on highly inaccurate predicted grades." She added: "Unconditional offers have made a mockery of exams and led to inflated grade predictions, while putting students under enormous pressure to make a snap decision about their future. "The simplest and fairest way to deal with these problems is for us to adopt a system of post-qualification admissions, where offers are based on actual achievement rather than estimated potential, as the rest of the world does. "It's time for the Government to give the system the urgent overhaul it needs." Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: "ASCL echoes the concerns in this report about the use of predicted grades to award university places and calls on the Government to review the system urgently. "Out of date and no longer fit for purpose, it is a historical quirk which is not mirrored in other countries and creates unnecessary problems. "In particular, we are extremely concerned about the rising number of unconditional offers made to students before they have taken their A-levels. "This practice can demotivate students and lead to under-performance in these important qualifications which disadvantages them if prospective future employers take their A-level grades into account. "Moving to a system of post-qualifications admissions would end the practice of unconditional offers. "There are practical challenges in introducing a system of post-qualifications admissions but we do not believe these are insurmountable." D onald Trump has ordered the US military to create a sixth branch of its armed forces named the Space Force to help ensure Americas supremacy in space. The US leader said it is not enough merely having a US presence in space to defend the country, saying we must have American dominance as he unveiled the plans on Monday. A congressional aide to Mr Trump said the order is consistent with efforts to dedicate resources to warfighting outside the Earth's atmosphere. In a speech at the White House, Mr Trump also promised the US would "return Americans to the Moon" and would eventually send people to Mars. A rocket owned by private space firm SpaceX blasts off from its launch pad in Florida (file image) / John Raoux/AP The president framed space as a national security issue, saying he does not want "China and Russia and other countries leading us." While the US has dominated in space since the 1969 moon landing, China is making strong headway, while Russia is in decline. Mr Trump holds up a Space Policy Directive he signed at a meeting of the National Space Council on Monday / REUTERS "My administration is reclaiming America's heritage as the world's greatest spacefaring nation," Mr Trump said in the East Room, joined by members of his space council. "The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons and to tame new frontiers." He is directing the Department of Defence and Pentagon to immediately begin the process of establishing the countrys sixth branch of its armed forces. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said that the department understands the president's guidance, and is working on the matter while taking into consideration the implications for intelligence operations for the other services. "Working with Congress, this will be a deliberate process with a great deal of input from multiple stakeholders," she said. A senior congressional aide said that Trump's order is consistent with efforts by members of Congress over the past two years to find a way to dedicate additional resources to the country's warfighting in space. D onald Trump has replaced his White House photos of French President Emanuel Macron with images of his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un. Photos tweeted by political journalists in the US showed that the President had re-adorned the walls of the West Wing in the White House with photos of his summit with the North Korean leader. The new photos took the place of images taken during the French Presidents visit to Washington DC last month. The tweets showed six photos on the wall at the top of the West Wing Staircase. Images include the moment Kim and Mr Trump signed an agreement committing to denuclearisation. Another photo shows US citizens returning home after being released from prison in North Korea. The wall also includes an image taken during a visit from the top North Korean aide Kim Yong Chol to the White House, where he delivered a letter from Kim Jong-un pledging to go ahead with the summit in Singapore. Mr Trump described his meeting with Kim as a tremendous success. The US president announced that US-led military exercise, or war games, to counter the North Korean threat would be called off as diplomacy is ramped up, though economic sanctions would remain for the time being. Emmanuel Macron visited Donald Trump at the White House in April 2018 / AFP/Getty Images The Presidents improved relationship with the North Korean leader came as he received criticism from US allies over his decision to impose international tariffs on goods including steel and aluminium imports. The move drew criticism from Mr Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Canadas Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, among others. D onald Trump is poised to pull the US out of the United Nations Human Rights Council in his latest shun of an international institution An announcement about the move is expected to be made by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is expected on Tuesday. The US is half-way through a three-year term on the main UN rights body and had long threatened to quit if it was not reformed, accusing the 47-member Geneva-based body of being anti-Israel. The withdrawal from the council would be the latest in rejection of multilateral engagement after it pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and then the Iran nuclear deal. The United Nations HQ / AFP/Getty Images It also comes as Mr Trump faces intense and widespread criticism over an immigration policy that involves detaining children separately from their immigrant parents at the US-Mexico border. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein on Monday called on Washington to halt its "unconscionable" policy. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric declined to comment until a US decision was announced, but added: "The Secretary-General is a strong believer in the human rights architecture of the U.N. and the active participation of all states." Ms Haley said a year ago that Washington was reviewing its membership and called for reform and elimination of a "chronic anti-Israel bias." The body has a permanent standing agenda item on suspected violations committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories that Washington wants removed. Ann Coulter on Fox News: warns Donald Trump not to fall for 'child actors' playing crying immigrant children "The UN Human Rights Council has played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel," said Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth. The council last month voted to probe killings in Gaza and accused Israel of excessive use of force. The United States and Australia cast the only "no" votes. Israel's ambassador in Geneva castigated the council for "spreading lies against Israel." D onald Trump today threatened to impose tariffs on a further $200 billion worth of Chinese goods in a dramatic escalation of the trade dispute between the worlds two largest economies. The president said the 10 per cent penalties would take effect if China refuses to change its practices. Beijing hit back, accusing the US of blackmail and vowing to match any White House tariff hikes. Last week, Mr Trump announced 25 per cent tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods in retaliation for intellectual property theft, only for China to respond with a similar tax on an array of American products. Experts fear the dramatic new escalation will lead to a full-blown trade war between the two superpowers. Today, I directed the United States Trade Representative to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for additional tariffs at a rate of 10 per cent, Mr Trump said in the surprise announcement. These tariffs will go into effect if China refuses to change its practices, and also if it insists on going forward with the new tariffs it has recently announced. The president claimed Beijing had shown no sign of redressing a trade imbalance between the two countries that has hampered US businesses. By retaliating, he said, China was threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong. This latest action by China clearly indicates its determination to keep the United States at a permanent and unfair disadvantage, which is reflected in our massive $376 billion trade imbalance in goods. This is unacceptable, he said. Further action must be taken to encourage China to change its unfair practices, open its market to United States goods and accept a more balanced trade relationship with the United States. A controversial bill which proposed a filming ban on Israeli soldiers has been amended after the Attorney-Generals Office ruled it illegal. The initial bill proposed by the ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition, made filming or publishing footage "with intent to harm the morale of Israel's soldiers or its inhabitants" punishable by up to five years in prison. It was approved by the Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday under the provision that a number of changes were made to its wording before it is presented to parliament on Wednesday. The amended bill will call for the banning of interfering with Israeli soldiers while they are on duty prohibiting them from doing their job and will not totally prohibit filming as previously stated. It is anticipated that the amended bill will pass with the coalitions support. The bill appears to have been prompted by the filming of Israeli soldier Elor Azaria fatally shooting an incapacitated Palestinian attacker in the West Bank city of Hebron who was lying on the ground in March 2016. Mr Azaria was convicted of manslaughter and served nine months of an 18-month prison sentence. The case bitterly divided the nation. Israel's military pushed for his prosecution, saying he violated its code of ethics. But many Israelis, particularly on the nationalist right, defended his actions. The bill's sponsor, Robert Ilatov of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party, insisted in a radio interview Monday that the bill "does not impinge on free speech." He said it only prevents obstruction of soldiers in the line of duty. Ilatov wrote on Facebook last week that the bill's aim is to prevent "left wing organisations from disseminating (soldiers') pictures for the sake of shaming them." Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Yisrael Beitenu party, praised the bill on Sunday for helping protect Israeli soldiers from "Israel-haters and terror supporters trying to denigrate, humiliate and harm them." The text of the bill specifically mentions B'Tselem, Machsom Watch and Breaking the Silence - Israeli advocacy groups critical of the West Bank occupation - as "anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian" organisations whose activity documenting the Israeli military the legislation seeks to combat. "Most of these groups are supported by foundations, organisations and governments with clear anti-Israeli perspectives and agendas, which use these tendentious materials for harming the state of Israel and its security," the bill reads. Jerusalem US embassy: Israel-Palestine tensions erupt in violence 1 /24 Jerusalem US embassy: Israel-Palestine tensions erupt in violence A Palestinian man uses a slingshot during clashes with Israeli forces along the border with the Gaza strip east of Khan Yunis AFP/Getty Images A Palestinian demonstrator kicks a burning tire during a protest against U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem and ahead of the 70th anniversary of Nakba, at the Israel-Gaza border Reuters An Israeli border policeman fires tear gas at Palestinian demonstrators during a protest against U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem and ahead of the 70th anniversary of Nakba in Bethlehem Reuters Palestinian protesters look at tear gas and smoke billowing from burning tyres, east of Gaza City AFP/Getty Images U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman is seen during a reception hosted by the Orthodox Union in Jerusalem ahead of the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem Reuters Palestinian demonstrators burn tyres near the Gaza-Israel border, east of Gaza City AFP/Getty Images A Palestinian man throws leaflets dropped by the Israeli military during a protest against the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem Reuters A Palestinian demonstrator drags a burning tire during a protest against U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem and ahead of the 70th anniversary of Nakba, at the Israel-Gaza border, east of Gaza City Reuters Palestinians carry a demonstrator injured during clashes with Israeli forces near the border between the Gaza strip and Israel east of Gaza City AFP/Getty Images A Palestinian boy holds a leaflet dropped by the Israel military, east of Gaza City AFP/Getty Images A Palestinian demonstrator runs as smoke billows from burning tyres during clashes with Israeli forces near the border between the Gaza strip and Israel east of Gaza City AFP/Getty Images Palestinians carry tyres to be burnt during clashes with Israeli forces near the border AFP/Getty Images A Palestinian demonstrator injured during clashes with Israeli forces lies on the ground AFP/Getty Images A Palestinian man holding his national flag walks in the smoke billowing from burning tyres during clashes with Israeli forces along the border AFP/Getty Images Palestinians carry a protester injured during clashes with Israeli forces along the border AFP/Getty Images Palestinian demonstrators gather at the Israel-Gaza border during a protest against U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem and ahead of the 70th anniversary of Nakba, east of Gaza City Reuters A Palestinian woman walks through black smoke from burning tires during a protest on the Gaza Strip's border with Israel AP Palestinian protesters burn tires during a protest on the Gaza Strip's border with Israel AP A wounded Palestinian is evacuated during a protest against U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem and ahead of the 70th anniversary of Nakba REUTERS Palestinian hold flames and signs reading 'We will return' during a rally in the West Bank city of Hebron ahead of the US embassy inauguration in Jerusalem EPA Palestinian protesters burn tires during a protest on the Gaza Strip's border with Israel AP A Palestinian demonstrator moves a burning tire during a protest against U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem Reuters Israelis wave their national flags during a march at the Western Wall Getty Images People march with the body of Jamal Affana (15) as he brought through a Rafa, Gaza alleyway after he succumbed to a gunshot wound sustained during protests last Friday at the Gaza border fence with Israel Getty Images The bill is the latest in a series of legal measures passed or proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's nationalist government to curb organisations critical of Israel's occupation of the West Bank. Opposition lawmakers and rights groups said they were surprised the legislation made it this far. "If there is a problem with the reality that the occupation creates, we should change it, not try to hide it," said Tamar Zandberg, head of the liberal opposition Meretz Party. Talia Sasson, president of the New Israel Fund, a liberal advocacy group that supports groups that document rights abuses in the West Bank, called the bill "an arrow shot into the heart of the state of Israel." Israeli journalists also criticised the proposal, saying it would hinder their ability to work. Israeli photographer Ohad Zwigenberg said journalists must be allowed to "document reality as it is." "A world without real journalism that is free and neutral is an insane world," he said. F rom the pleasant Bavarian countryside to the vibrant streets of Munich, the word on everyones lips is Regierungskrise (political crisis). Chancellor Angela Merkels conservative coalition partner, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has ruled Bavaria since 1957. But this week the CSU has been at the heart of one of Europes most serious political deadlocks. The stakes are clear: either Ms Merkel closes the German border to the inflow of refugees, possibly triggering a European crisis, or the CSU withdraws support for her government. Bavaria was on the front line of the refugee crisis in 2015. After Ms Merkel announced Germanys non-compliance with the Dublin Regulation on registration, tens of thousands of migrants entered in a single week, mostly on trains from Austria. The CSU had its worst ever result in federal elections last year and is keen to avoid a repetition in state elections this November. I met Franz, 85, from the town of Landau-an-der-Isar. He has voted CSU all his life. But he tells me that the refugee crisis has shaken his faith in Ms Merkel and her coalition. He hopes that strong support for the Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD) will force the conservatives to the Right. He may be correct. The CSU has increasingly attempted to attract angry AfD voters with hardline social and immigration policies. Ms Merkel spent the weekend in intense negotiations with CSU leaders who demand a hardening of Germanys refugee policy. German police check cars arriving from Austria amid a row over immigration policy / Getty Images Not everyone is impressed by this political shift. Iris, from a leafy suburb of Munich, grimaces when she speaks to me about the CSU. Its blind nativism to appeal to the countryside. I like Merkel, but Im ashamed Bavaria is represented by these people. To defend Ms Merkels moderate legacy, she plans to vote for the Greens in November. Eleonore, an 18-year-old student of political science from Breitbunn-Am-Chiemsee, is one of the liberal voters the CSU has abandoned. Germanys refugee policy is obviously imperfect, she says, but the CSUs master plan is nothing of the sort. Closing the border would turn a Bavarian problem into a European problem. Yesterdays Suddeutsche Zeitung carried a blistering attack on the CSU plotters. Columnist Ferdos Forudastan condemns the unprincipled ideologues on the Right, who are taking advantage of the migrant question to bring down Ms Merkel. An uneasy ceasefire has taken hold until the EU summit at the end of the month. Nevertheless, Ms Merkels obituary need not be written just yet. The CSUs position is not as strong as they claim, and she has history on her side. The EUs longest-serving leader has overcome crises before. From what Ive heard, she can do it again. M eghan Markle arrived at Royal Ascot in a horse drawn carriage accompanied by her husband Prince Harry. For the newly titled Duchess of Sussex, this marks her very first Ascot in which she dressed accordingly in a white Givenchy number, which she paired with a black and white fascinator by Philip Treacy. Meghan Markle wore a white Givenchy dress / AFP/Getty Images Exactly one month after her wedding day, in which she also wore a Givenchy bateau wedding dress by Clare Waight Keller, the royal opted for a custom button-front collared shirt dress with floral embroidery and a belt to cinch the silhouette. Duke and Duchess of Sussex at Royal Ascot - In pictures 1 /20 Duke and Duchess of Sussex at Royal Ascot - In pictures Meghan Markle waves to fans as she arrives at Royal Ascot SplashNews.com Meghan and Harry walk arm in arm on their Royal Ascot debut Getty Images Meghan and Harry smile with the Queen, dressed in yellow, at Royal Ascot today Reuters Meghan Markle and Prince Harry in the horse-drawn carriage together Reuters Meghan and Harry meet racing adviser John Warren Reuters Meghan Markle and the Countess of Wessex arrive on day one of racing at Ascot SplashNews.com Meghan and Harry side by side on day one of the famous races Getty Images Royal wave, Prince Edward, the Countess of Wessex and Meghan Markle wave to the crowd AP The royals were greeted with rapturous applause Getty Images A delighted Meghan Markle points out to the crowd on her first visit to Royal Ascot with husband Prince Harry SplashNews.com Meghan wore an all-white ensemble by Givenchy AP Prince Harry, left, and Meghan Markle arrive to the delight of Ascot racegoers AFP/Getty Images Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Prince Edward and Sophie, the Countess of Wessex in their carriage at Ascot SplashNews.com Race day: Prince Charles chats to Meghan Markle PA Meghan and Harry on day one of the events today Getty Images Prince Harry, Sophie, the Countess of Wessex and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex SplashNews.com Prince Charles, Harry and Meghan Markle examine the day's race card PA Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, arrive at the parade ring in their carriage AP Meghan Markle wore a white Givenchy dress AFP/Getty Images Harry and Meghan walk arm in arm at the races Getty Images Taking inspiration from this look, weve gathered the best shirt dresses to tap into the Meghan effect. The closest alternative Givenchy Cotton-blend Shirt Dress From the same label Meghan wore at Ascot, this Givenchy number is a close replica of the Duchesss custom dress. It features a button front fastening, an oversized belt detail and it is composed of a crisp cotton blend. 824 | My Theresa | Buy it now The Dupes New Look Shirt Dress For a lower cost alternative, this New Look dress will certainly see you off to races in wholly affordable style. The button front shirt dress is available in white, khaki and mid pink but the white gives Meghans Givenchy number a run for its money. The dress has a collared addition and a tie waist belt. 17.99 | New Look | Buy it now Crystal Detail Shirt Dress Mangos answer to a shirt dress has a very similar look to that of Meghans but with a crystal embellishment on the collar. The maxi dress has a cinched waist, long sleeves and a button front. 69.99 | Mango | Buy it now Lipsy Flute Hem Shirt Dress This white shirt dress from Lipsy gives a more casual alternative to Meghans sophisticated option. In a midi length, the dress has a chic peplum trim addition as well as cuffed sleeves and a belted waist. 30 | Next | Buy it now Royal Ascot 2018 - In Pictures 1 /68 Royal Ascot 2018 - In Pictures Royal Ascot: Day Four Nicki Chapman during day four of Royal Ascot PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day Four Belinda Strudwick during day four of Royal Ascot PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day Four Queen Elizabeth II arrives during day four PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day Four Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York and daughter Princess Beatrice during day four PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day Three A fashionable racegoer during day three PA Royal Ascot: Day Three Racegoers pose for a picture as they arrive on Ladies Day AFP/Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day Three Racegoers pose on Ladies Day PA Royal Ascot: Day Three Women pose for a selfie on Ladies Day AFP/Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day Three Racegoers pose on Ladies Day AFP/Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day Three Racegoers with large, flower and 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Images Royal Ascot: Day Two Kirsty Gallacher poses for photographers on day two of Royal Ascot PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day Two Racegoers attend the second day of the Royal Ascot AFP/Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day Two Marina Zubkova poses for photographers during day two of Royal Ascot PA Royal Ascot: Day Two Rachel Dawson during day two of Royal Ascot PA Royal Ascot: Day Two Esther Maca and Ina Redemann PA Royal Ascot: Day Two Larisa Katz poses for photographers during day two of Royal Ascot PA Royal Ascot: Day Two Larisa Katz poses for photographers during day two of Royal Ascot PA Royal Ascot: Day Two Fran Bishop at Royal Ascot day two SplashNews.com Royal Ascot: Day Two Declan Donnelly and his wife SplashNews.com Royal Ascot: Day Two Nazer Bullen poses for a photo during day two of Royal Ascot PA Royal Ascot: Day Two Charlie Elmy-Britton poses for photographers on day two of Royal Ascot PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day Two Charlie Elmy-Britton and Layla Leigh PA Royal Ascot: Day Two Ilda Di Vico poses for photographers during day two of Royal Ascot PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day Two The Tootsie Rollers pose for photographers during day two of Royal Ascot PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day Two Chelsey Baker poses for photographers during day two of Royal Ascot PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day Two Ilda Di Vico poses for photographers during day two of Royal Ascot PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day One The Duchess of Sussex arrives at her first ever Royal Ascot Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One Princess Beatrice attends Royal Ascot Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One The Queen wore the bookies favourite colour, yellow AP Royal Ascot: Day One Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie during day one of Royal Ascot PA Wire/PA Images Royal Ascot: Day One Kelly Brook arrived at Royal Ascot in Berkshire wearing a football themed hat PA Royal Ascot: Day One Lizzie Hoad arrives for day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse PA Royal Ascot: Day One Racegoers arrive for day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse PA Royal Ascot: Day One A female racegoer arrives for day one PA Royal Ascot: Day One Lana Halloway arrives for day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse PA Royal Ascot: Day One A group of ladies wearing brightly coloured dresses and hats attend Royal Ascot Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One Kelly Brook arrived at Royal Ascot in Berkshire wearing a football themed hat PA Royal Ascot: Day One Kate Garraway during day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse PA Royal Ascot: Day One A racegoer wearing a hat adorned with a horse during day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse PA Royal Ascot: Day One Scarlett Cheng (left), Nazer Bullen and Alexandra Bertram (right) arrive for day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse PA Royal Ascot: Day One Racegoers arrive at the Berkshire venue PA Royal Ascot: Day One A racegoer poses for a photograph Reuters Royal Ascot: Day One Chelsey Baker from Surrey during day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecours PA Royal Ascot: Day One A woman wears a hat with white flowers during Royal Ascot Day 1 at Ascot Racecourse Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One A woman wears a white hat Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One Ilda Di Vico (left) and Chelsey Baker arriving during day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecours PA Royal Ascot: Day One Racegoers arrive on day one Reuters Royal Ascot: Day One Flora Johnstone arriving during day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse PA Royal Ascot: Day One Mrs. Stephen Hayden-Stapf during day one of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse PA Royal Ascot: Day One A woman wearing a black hat stands in front of the Union Jack flag during Royal Ascot day one Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One A racegoer poses for a photograph on day one AFP/Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One A woman checks the racecard on day one Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One Racegoers coordinate in pastel hues AFP/Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One A racegoer poses for a photograph on day one AFP/Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One Princess Michael of Kent Getty Images Royal Ascot: Day One Edite Ligere from London wearing a Sarah Marshall Milliner PA Wire/PA Images Best Variations Stripe Shirt Dress We are loving this shirt dress on offer at Topshop - think Montenegro afternoons with an oversized sun hat. Featuring a tie front and buttoned cuffs, this modern monochrome is a year-round winner. 49 | Topshop | Buy it now Belted Shirt Dress Ideal for summer, this bold green Mango shirt dress will fit right at home in your seasonal wardrobe. The bold patterned dress has a button fastening and a drawstring waist belt, pair it with white trainers sleek black flats. 39.99 | Mango | Buy it now Pleated Wrap Dress In a bold red hue, this shirt dress will take you from the office to the BBQ with ease. The dress has a wrap front with a belted waist. Whats more, the chic pleated skirt has an on-trend asymmetric hem. 58 | Next | Buy it now Kamala Belted Spot Shirt Dress This playful polka-dot print shirt dress may just be the versatile piece you have been looking for. 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Ant McPartlin was pictured with his personal assistant Anne-Marie Corbett over the weekend, months after splitting from his wife of 11 years. It was revealed the pair have been dating after growing close in the wake of his admission to rehab. Armstrong has been inundated with supportive messages from fans after revealing she was friends with Corbett, including one from TV personality Nicola McLean who tweeted: Sending my love Lisa!! Really feel for you worst pain ever x. But one user took aim at the outpouring of sympathy, claiming Armstrong split from McPartlin so has no right to be upset about him moving on. Split: Ant with his estranged wife Lisa Armstrong / Dave Benett They tweeted: What about Ants pain what about what he has been through she didn't want him she split up with him so its none of her business who he sees #jealous much (sic). Armstrong snapped back, posting: No I didnt thank-you! X. McPartlin and Corbett grew close after living in each others pockets, day in, day out, while the Britains Got Talent host recovered from his addiction and drink-driving arrest, according to The Sun. Armstrong, who is currently still married to the TV presenter, posted a string of tweets on Sunday night as she revealed she had not been informed about her husbands new relationship before the news broke. This morning comments on Ant McPartlin situation Responding to a Twitter follower who had said she hoped he didnt let you find out from the media, Armstrong replied: Nope. Just how you guys did. Coleen Nolan also defended Armstrong as she slammed Corbett for betraying her friend by violating girl code. Its a real betrayal and I imagine Lisa is feeling devastated and terribly angry, she told the Daily Mirror. One of my sisters once dated my ex. It was really upsetting. Your friend should be there as a shoulder to cry on when a relationship ends not to date your ex. icheal B Jordan took aim at Roseanne Barr as he received this years MTV Movie Award for Best Villain, saying he expected the disgraced TV actress to pick up the accolade. The US actor won the annual prize for his villainous role in Marvel smash hit Black Panther during this years ceremony and used the opportunity to publicly slam Barr following her recent racist tweet . Im shocked that I won this award for Best Villain. I thought Roseanne had this in the bag, he said on stage. As well as getting a round of applause from the audience in the ceremony, it seems that Jordans comment also went down well with viewers. W ill Ferrell is reportedly set to write, direct and star in a film based on the Eurovision Song Contest for Netflix. According to Deadline, the Anchorman star will feature in the film entitled Eurovision, set at the annual song contest extravaganza. Ferrell is expected to write the screenplay with former head writer of Saturday Night Live, Andrew Steele. The 50-year-old attended this years Eurovision Song Content and is thought to have been a fan of the event after his Swedish wife introduced him to it. New: The film is set to be Ferrell's second Netflix production / Ian West/PA During his visit Ferrell watched various stages of the competition and spent time with some of the contestants. It was then that he was reportedly given the go-ahead to make the film by the organisers.Although Eurovision is nowhere near as popular in America as it is in Europe, the film has been seen as an attempt for Netflix to appeal to its international audience. Ferrell previously worked on Ibiza, a comedy starring Gillian Jacobs which was released last month. Eurovision Song Contest 2018 in 90 seconds It is yet to be revealed as to whether Ferrell will sing in the film as he has sung previously during his role in Step Brothers. He has also sung in several skits during his time as a cast member on American show Saturday Night Live. Standard Online has contacted Will Ferrell and Netflix for comment A ndroid fans get ready: Samsung is on the brink of launching its brand new smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. The South Korean company is preparing for the announcement of its phablet smartphone, only a few months after the release of its current flagship, the Samsung Galaxy S9. And, after recently being crowned the number one smartphone maker in the world again, the stakes are high for the Note 9 to help Samsung retain the lead over Huawei and Apple. Heres everything we know so far about the next Samsung smartphone. Samsung Galaxy Note 9: what will it look like? The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is going to roughly look the same as the Galaxy Note 8 but it will be whats on the inside that counts. Size-wise, the phones screen will stay at 6.3-inches like its predecessor, though the device itself will be slightly wider and thicker. There is no iPhone X notch on the smartphone renders weve seen so far, instead Samsung is keeping the slim bezels from the Galaxy Note 8. Following the leak of an official intro video, the new phone will come in a sleek blue edition, along with a yellow S Pen. Its likely it will also come in black and a bronze/brown colour, via Evan Blass. Inside, the phone is going to be powered by a Snapdragon 845 chipset, the small chip which powers the phone. This is the same as the Samsung Galaxy S9. However, in some countries, Samsung fans will be treated to an upgraded processor, sources told Bloomberg, though were not sure which countries this will be. As well, the Galaxy Note 9 will have 6GB of RAM, between 64GB and 512GB of storage, and run Android 8.1, the latest Android operating software. If its battery size you care about, then the Galaxy Note 9 could be the one. Rumours are suggested that the Note 9 will have a 4,000mAh battery, which is bigger than the Galaxy S9 Plus. This should power you through your day and then some. With a battery this big, Samsung will have been more than careful in all its test to ensure it doesnt repeat the mistakes on the Note 7. Samsung is definitely retaining the headphone jack for fans. Samsung Galaxy Note 9: the features were looking forward to When Samsung released the Galaxy S9 earlier this year, the focus was all on the camera. That means expectations are running high for the Note 9 camera. Its likely there will be an improved dual-lens camera on the Note 9, though not a triple-lens job like the Huawei P20 Pro. As well, according to renders by OnLeaks and 91Mobiles, the new smartphone will have moved its rear-mounted fingerprint scanner to below the camera. This is a good move because fingerprint scanners next to rear-cameras can be frustrating as half the time your finger automatically smudges the camera lens instead of finding the scanner. If this is true, this will be a helpful design change by Samsung. OnLeaks and 91Mobiles renders of how the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 could look (OnLeaks/91Mobiles ) / OnLeaks/91Mobiles As well, we're hoping to see some new and improved Bixby features. With the Samsung Galaxy S9 launch, there were some significant updates to Samsung's artificial intelligent assistant, particularly when it came to the camera features such as Bixby's food and health skills. But, Bixby still isn't as good as the Google Assistant or Siri. So let's hope Samsung pushes out some new AI updates for the Galaxy Note 9. Honestly were interested in the battery prowess of the Note 9. This teaser video points to the new Samsung phone having a mega battery that can withstand constant usage without the need to re-charge. Lets hope this lives up to its potential. Dont forget the S Pen Having recently tried out a Samsung S Pen on the companys new Galaxy S4 Tablet, its great how seamless the pen works. There have been some strong hints about the S-Pens improvements but these have been kept under wraps so well have to wait till Thursday to find out. How much will the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 cost? For such a big device, that aims to be one of the best in 2018, it is going to be pricey. Rumours suggest the Galaxy Note 9 could cost round 869 for the basic level, if Samsung launches it with the same price as the predecessor. This would make the Galaxy Note 9 over 100 cheaper than the iPhone X in the UK making a decision between Samsung or Apple easier for smartphone fans. This is a whole lot cheaper than the prices that have been suggested for the Samsung Galaxy X, the companys rumoured folding smartphone, which is thought to cost around 1,500. Samsung Galaxy Note 9: release date Samsung will be unveiling the new Note 9 at an unpacked event in New York this Thursday (August 9). 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 Prosecutor Felix Banila says he has confidence in President Klaus Iohannis' ability to make a decision in full knowledge of the facts with regard to his appointment as head of the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), informs Agerpres. Felix Banila's statement comes in response to the letter sent by representatives of DIICOT to President Klaus Iohannis, in which they request the latter to reject the former's appointment as chief prosecutor of the Directorate. "I cannot comment anything in relation to this demarche and I cannot speculate anything because (...) firstly, it is not ethical and secondly because of the procedure. I am waiting for Mr. President [Klaus Iohannis, ed.n.]'s decision and I have confidence in his capacity to discern and make a fully informed decision. You well now - it is his constitutional right, he can either appoint me or not, and all this matter is up to him. The law clearly regulates the stages of this procedure, as well as the role and attributions of each of the actors involved in this procedure, namely the Justice Minister, the Supreme Council of Magistrates and Romania's President," Felix Banila told AGERPRES. Prosecutors reunited in the General Assembly of the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) decided on Monday to send a letter to President Klaus Iohannis requesting the rejection of Felix Banila's appointment as chief prosecutor of DIICOT. DIICOT prosecutors say that the positive opinion given by the Prosecutor's Section of the CSM, with a majority of 4 to 3, including the vote of Minister of Justice Tudorel Toader turned the "serious shortcomings" proven by Felix Banila in the interview into real "qualities". The sources also say that the document sent to the president also mentions that during the hearing at the CSM, Felix Banila showed an "inexcusable and superficial knowledge" regarding the activity of DIICOT. DIICOT prosecutors also argued that Felix Banila does not speak a foreign language, did not answer in the interview about the legal provisions regarding the quality of the police officers seconded at DIICOT, nor about the questions regarding the national strategy to fight organized crime and the national strategy on combating trafficking in human beings and migrants. One of the conclusions of the DIICOT prosecutors was that Felix Banila's "aspirations are far beyond his knowledge of DIICOT." The objective of the ruling coalition is for Romania's criminal legislation to be subordinated to the ruling party, the Social Democratic Party (PSD), reads a People's Movement Party (PMP) press release issued on Monday. According to the cited source, the speed of the adoption process of the Criminal Procedure Code, including the final vote, demonstrates the "discretionary and political affiliation character of some people with serious urgent criminal issues." "The Criminal Procedure Code follows a line drawn by the events that took place during this PSD-ALDE [Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, minor at rule, ed.n.] government, as was the case of the Ordinance 13, the insistence on the revocation of the National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA) Chief Prosecutor, the amendments to the Justice laws. The objective of the ruling coalition is for Romania's criminal legislation to be subordinated to PSD," the press release said."(...) PMP does not legitimize the process and procedure in the Special Committee, the withdrawal of the representative proving now an appropriate measure because we could not have accepted the simulation in the drafting of a law essential for the future of Romania," the PMP release says.The Special Parliamentary Committee on Systematization, Unification and Ensuring Legal Stability in the Field of Justice adopted on Monday a favorable report with amendments to the draft law on the Code of Criminal Procedure. The Chamber of Deputies subsequently adopted the draft with 175 votes "in favour", 78 votes "against" and one abstention. The opposition's Romania Together Movement (RO+) cautions that following the amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code that freshly cleared Parliament, the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD) no longer acts in the interest of Romanians but only in the interests of legally embattled groups. "Certain amendments that got the lawmakers' nod can give PSD head Liviu Dragnea a leg up in his criminal lawsuits. PSD proves yet again that they divert the legislative power the citizens have vested them with to the interests of the legally embattled party head. PSD thus turns into a party that no longer acts in the interest of Romanians but only in the interests of legally embattled groups," states a release on the website of the Romania Together Movement. The party argues that some of the fresh amendments "obviously show PSD's intention to help Liviu Dragnea and other Coalition dignitaries at a cost that could be immense for Romania and the country's judiciary.""The organized crime group is redefined, the provisions on false testimony are amended, and a new avenue for revision is introduced for the case the sentencing decision is not signed by the judge who participated in the settlement of the case. Last night's vote also shows that PSD defies the message of the foreign strategic partners and will keep on assaulting the Criminal Codes and the justice laws against the interest of the citizens and against Romania," assert the representatives of the Romania Together Movement.They further argue that US Secretary of State for European and Eurasian affairs Wess Mitchell, who is currently visiting Romania, "had clearly warned that in Romania's relation with the US, the independence of the judiciary and the fight against corruption are of a fundamental importance.""Meanwhile PSD was preparing the Chamber of Deputies plenary meeting where the amendments to the Criminal Procedure Code were to be passed, without waiting for the expert commission's report. The only concern of the PSD-ALDE ruling coalition in a key moment for Romania's Euro-Atlantic future is to adopt dedicated amendments for law offenders. At this moment we raise a red flag, that a man who fears law is at the helm of a party that drags Romania back to the time before EU accession, destroys the reform of the judiciary and treads down the rule of law for his own interests. This man and the party supporting him attempt to instate the rule of lawlessness in Romania. Each citizen and every political or civic voice are bound to oppose these amendments," the release further states.The bill amending the Criminal Procedure Code cleared Monday evening the Chamber of Deputies plenary by a vote of 175 to 78 and one abstention. Save Romania Union (USR, opposition, ed.n.) Chairman, deputy Dan Barna, declared Monday evening, after the adoption of the amendments for the Criminal Procedure Code, that Romania has been transformed into a "criminal state", informs Agerpres. "Today you have officially transformed Romania in a criminal state, formally and legislated. As of today, it will be impossible to arrest those who commit tax evasion and money laundering and after they steal our money, they will be able to leave for Brazil or Costa Rica. As of today, with your vote, paedophiles, murderers and other criminals that were filmed with a mobile phone by a witness will get away if there are no other pieces of evidence. By means of today's vote, women, daughters or abused children will have to look in the eyes of their rapists or criminals, during statements," Barna said. He added that Romania has reached this point because there are people with criminal cases that hold office in public positions. "As of today Romania is a safe haven for criminals and we have reached this point because there are criminally indicted people who hold public office. When the time comes for USR to govern, it will commit itself to repairing all that you have done to this country. No more criminals in public positions!," Barna said. The Chamber of Deputies' plenary sitting adopted on Monday the bill to amend the Criminal Procedure Code, with 175 votes "in favour", 78 "against" and one abstention. It is aimed at raising awareness against misinformation and providing new tools to the fourth estate against fake news. Technology giant Google on Tuesday announced the launch of a training programme for journalists, aimed at raising awareness against misinformation and providing new tools to the fourth estate against fake news. New Delhi: Technology giant Google on Tuesday announced the launch of a training programme for journalists, aimed at raising awareness against misinformation and providing new tools to the fourth estate against fake news. "The Google News Initiative India Training Network will provide training to 8,000 journalists in English and six other Indian languages in the next one year," Google said in a statement. For this, the network will select 200 journalists from cities across India, who will hone their skills in verification and training during five-day boot camps that will be organised for English and six other Indian languages, it added. This network of certified trainers will then train more journalists and the workshops will be conducted in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada in cities across India, it added. "The focus of the training will be fact-checking, online verification and digital hygiene for journalists, using a curriculum built by experts from First Draft, Storyful, AltNews, BoomLive, Factchecker.in, and DataLeads," the statement said. Google News Lab Lead (Asia-Pacific) Irene Jay Liu said supporting trusted, authoritative media sources is a top priority for Google. "When journalists and communities work together, armed with the online tools to verify information, they can build a bulwark of trusted media to fight the tide of misinformation," Liu added. The death of Professor Bernard Lewis, former Professor of History at Princeton on May 19 at the amazing age of almost 102 was reported throughout the US media with reverence and appreciation. According to the New York Times, which set the tone, Few outsiders and no academics had more influence with the (George W) Bush administration on Middle East affairs. The president carried a marked up copy of one of his articles in his briefing papers and met with him before and after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. (The imagination fails at the thought of George W. Bush ever actually reading a book) Not only was none of this ludicrously excessive outpouring of praise and acclaim justified, but no countervailing voices were allowed in the ranks of the Orwellian MSM, or MainStream Media in the United States. Until he was past his mid-fifties and close to the age when most academics retire or have run out of steam, Lewis was a marginalized and even widely despised figure in British academia. His only serious academic work on the Middle East had been on the Tanzimat Reform program in Ottoman Turkey in the first half of the 19th century. A strong supporter of Israel, he does not appear to have set foot in any major Arab nation during at least the 30 years from 1950 to 1980. Nor did he seriously study or respect the work of those who did. His knowledge of the detailed political and economic developments in emergent Arab nations was nonexistent. He based his assessments of the region on travels there during the 1930s, well before World War II. When I studied Modern Middle East history at the London School of Economics in the mid-1970s, serious scholars of the region regarded him as a clown. But after emigrating to the United States in 1974, Lewis found his real calling as a justifier and public ideologist for the forces of aggression and empire, much as Leo Strauss, the patron and founding father of the neoconservatives had done at the University of Chicago decades earlier. In both cases, each man was able to escape the contempt that superficial and intolerant work had provoked in their original academic environments and they both played to the same eager-to-listen and willingly credulous audience. The emerging Reagan Republicans, Evangelical Christians and so-called muscular anti-communists in reality usually anti-Russian racists of the Democratic Party all eagerly danced to Lewis intolerant tune. In such circles, his ludicrous distortions and falsehoods went unchallenged. He claimed the success of the Crusaders at the end of the 11th century proved how weak and ineffectual Islam had become. Yet the Crusader enclave in Palestine survived for less than a hundred years before the great Sultan Saladin effectively annihilated it. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the early 1970s loved his assertion that there was no such thing as Palestinian nationalism. He loved the Turkish past but he hated and despised the Arab present. Lewiss rise to eminence in Washington started under in the 1970s through the patronage of Senator Henry Scoop Jackson, who was also the patron of the first generation of neoconservatives. A quarter century later, by the time of President George W. Bush it was complete Lewis, though he later tried to claim otherwise, was a central and extremely important figure in the relentless efforts after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to use them as a justification for the US invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq. Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us, he memorably wrote about Arab societies. The truth was precisely the opposite. Islamic extremism was only marginal throughout the Sunni Arab world before the Bush administration, urged on by Lewis and his fellow neocons, undertook their colossal project of pulverizing one stable society after another in the name of Lewiss mythical freedom. His incompetence and record of fraudulent claims and false prophecy were legion. In 2002, he claimed Iraqis would rejoice when the US armed forces invaded their country. The Iraqi popular insurrection that exhausted the US Army and took thousands of US lives took him completely by surprise. But facts and common sense were irrelevant and only minor distractions for Lewis and his coterie of True Believers. He made sweeping generalizations which were recognized as absurd by everyone with any first-hand knowledge of the Arab societies of the Maghreb, the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula. He welcomed the Arab Spring explosion of protests across the Middle East in December 2010 and into the following year as another great opportunity to replace autocratic regimes throughout the region with US-backed democratic regimes. Instead, the opposite happened. Wherever the Lewis Solution of US military occupation was applied it backfired and produced precisely the opposite results from those he had promised. The rise of Islamic extremism in Iraq and Syria was the direct result of the pulverization both countries by US military power and by the groups Washington armed and financed. Lewiss real heritage is clear: It lies in the millions of refugees, the smashed societies, the more than a million dead in Iraq since 2003, the more than 600,000 killed in the wars in Syria and in the continuing specter throughout the region of wars without end. It would be fitting to imagine him now exposed amid the fires of Hell to the death screams of the myriad victims of the policies he so recklessly, ignorantly and shamelessly advocated for so long. Alas, I have my doubts. A "mysterious" attack on Syrian government forces in southwest Syria on June 18 has left as many as 52 Syrian (and Iraqi) troops dead. The Syrian media blames Washington, which has been warning Syria for several weeks to leave ISIS forces alone in the area. Who did itand why? With their almost 27-year dispute finally resolved, Greece and Macedonia signed a historic agreement on June 12 to rename the latter the Republic of North Macedonia. This paves the way for Skopje to join NATO and the EU. The agreement still has to be ratified by both countries' parliaments and win approval in a referendum in Macedonia. The process is not going smoothly. The countrys president has refused to sign off on the deal, so it must face another vote in parliament. Plus, the police have yet to quell the street protests. Actually, the North Atlantic Alliance was ready to back the idea of initiating the membership procedures at its summit in 2008, but the name dispute with Greece obstructed the process. NATO can extend a membership invitation at its July 11-12 summit. Macedonia was given its Membership Action Plan (MAP) in 1999. The EU summit, which is scheduled for June 28-29, will decide whether to offer a green light for the membership talks to begin. Moscow is an important trade partner for Skopje. EU membership means joining the anti-Russian sanctions and suffering the inevitable financial losses. NATO evidently wants to speed the process up. Its top leaders, including the Secretary General, exerted pressure on Macedonia and Greece to encourage them to remove the main obstacle to that membership as quickly as possible. US officials openly admit that Washington played a silent role in the process of resolving the name dispute between Macedonia and Greece. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Wess Mitchell believes that NATO should be more active in the Western Balkans in order to counter Russias influence. Greece and the United States share strongly a vision of deeper integration of the Western Balkans into European and Euro Atlantic Institutions, said US Ambassador to Greece Jeffrey Pyatt just a few days before the agreement was reached. According to Richard Hooker, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia with the National Security Council, the Trump administration would welcome Macedonias entry into NATO. Kay Bailey Hutchison, Americas ambassador to NATO, explained that the US and the allies are in favor of expansion as a way to keep those countries out of what she called the Russian sphere. She thinks Macedonia meets the standards and is genuinely close to membership. The ambassador complacently avoids any discussion of Macedonias rampant corruption and lingering ethnic tensions. So, its not about making a contribution to NATO or meeting certain standards, the real goal is to keep Moscow at a distance. Croatia and Albania joined the bloc in 2009. Montenegro entered in 2017. New members are needed now so as to make the process unstoppable. Besides, the Vardar River links Central Europe and the Aegean Sea. The plans for the expansion of the Turkish Stream gas project include passage through Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary to reach Central Europe. Skopje will benefit as a transit country. It is in the Americans best interests to deny Russia and Turkey this route, as it wants no rivals able to challenge American shale gas exports to Europe. The landlocked country of Macedonia cannot offer any serious contribution to the blocs military might, with an army of 8,000 and no navy or air force. Its weapons systems and equipment are obsolete. The inadequate standards there pose a very serious problem. This means that militarily, Macedonia is more of a burden that must be shouldered than an asset. And at the current time NATO is facing an ongoing rift, as the majority of its member states are reluctant to give in to US pressure and raise their military expenditures to 2% of their GDP. And thats not all. The interethnic conflicts in Macedonia will become NATOs headache. Skopje has a problem with its ethnic Albanian community that makes up a quarter of the countrys population. The North Atlantic Alliance has severed Kosovo from Serbia. This means that one potential scenario would see Macedonia losing some of its northwestern regions that have a predominantly ethnic Albanian population. Why not? They did it once theyll do it again. Itll be a great tragedy and a serious problem for Macedonia but not for America, which is obsessed with driving Russia out of that region at any cost. The hope is that Serbia can be made more pro-Western and vulnerable to pressure if it is surrounded by NATO members. Macedonias accession will serve that goal. Itll be used. But membership will complicate NATOs decision-making process even more. Skopjes accession was blocked by only one member Greece. A single government holds veto power over the alliance. Their interests do not always coincide. Just remember 2003, when the US invasion of Iraq was opposed by France and Germany, thus preventing it from becoming a NATO operation. What if a small country like Macedonia were to block a decision that was important for the US? An increased number of members means an increased risk of gridlock. What the people of that country will gain is unclear. Their national interests will be eclipsed by the foreign-policy goals of other major players. So, expansion for the sake of expansion is a very dubious policy that is of benefit to neither NATO nor Macedonia. The constantly growing number of member states does not make NATO stronger, quite the opposite. Skopje hardly needs the protection offered under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. Who could invade it? And everything else could can be achieved just with special status in the organization, thus leaving more wiggle room for independent foreign-policy decisions. Membership has its downsides, which are being ignored by both NATO and Macedonia. In the end, Skopjes integration into NATO does not look like a win-win decision. What an odd outcome: After all the threatened fire and fury, all the earlier bluster about complete, irreversible, verified, denuclearisation, and all the neocon bravura about Kim Jong Un having to transfer his nukes to the US, and having to undertake irreversible steps to strip himself nuclear-naked, as it were, prior to Trump lifting his little finger all this melted away, like snow, into a show of BFFE (best friends for ever). The Singapore summit was long on theatre and largely devoid of substance, writes Professor Steven Walt, save for a typical Trumpian giveaway. This time Donald Trump impulsively offered to suspend military exercises with South Korea (without notifying Seoul in advance) in exchange for a North Korean pledge to do well, nothing. If the self-proclaimed master negotiator keeps making deals like this, there will be a Kim Jong Un Hilton in Honolulu, before there is a Trump Tower in Pyongyang. The most significant development in Singapore was to complete the transformation of Kim into a serious and engaged world leader, of some stature. Was this just an example of creative, Trump unorthodoxy (face-to-face meeting in advance of substantive agreement) i.e. the voiding of a blockage? Or, was it because the outlines to Kim Jong Uns policy objectives have been clear since at least 2013, but the tilt point in turning it from something latent into substantive form, was the metamorphos in South Korea which gave Moon the clear mandate to seek the reunification of the Peninsular (something the North Korean leadership had long sought)? Let us be clear: Russia, China and the South had already seized, and have been running hard, with this ball (the critical shift in sentiment in the South). The US was not leading the process, despite all its hullabaloo it was reacting. Was Singapore simply about Washington sensing that it was in danger of missing the group-of-fours boat? Maybe. Perhaps too, it was becoming plain to all in Team Trump, that a wholly front-loaded denuclearisation, in return for wholly incomplete and reversible US post-hoc assurances, simply was not doable. Will it work? Will it result in complete denuclearisation? That really is not the point what we have is a process parked ad interim. And North Koreas threat to deliver a 9/11 type event to the US homeland is relieved. But, perhaps Trumps sudden twist reflects something else, too? Iran, perchance, and Trumps only substantive foreign policy objective: a Middle East regional settlement that secures Israel? The main difference between North Korea (NK) and Iran, of course, is that the former presented a direct threat to the US homeland. Iran however, posed, and poses, no threat to the US mainland. It cannot weapons de-nuclearise, since it does have any unlike NK. Another difference is that NK's neighbours are taking forward an economic-led, political process (and pulling along the US in its wake). And they intend to continue to put economic facts on the ground (ahead of the US negotiations). Whereas in the Iran instance, matters are just the opposite: Irans neighbours are committed to no detente, at almost any cost and to initiating regime change: i.e. Iran's neighbours represent an active negative political process unlike NK's 'group of four' which acts positively for a political outcome. Again no question President Trump committed substantial political capital, and accepted domestic risk, with the NK summit, whereas with Iran, again, just the opposite: the US and Israel actively are blocking any European or any other political capital being committed to a political solution with respect to Irans non-possession of nuclear weapons. Similarly, just as Trump parades NK's agreement to complete de-nuclearisation of the Peninsular as a huge win, in the case of Iran, just such a declaration has been made impossible (though Iran has long advocated a Middle East free of nuclear weapons). Netanyahu's show of Iranian documents, allegedly purloined from Tehran, precisely was designed to undercut any similar de-nuclearisation statement by Iran, by making it meaningless: "They lied. Any Iranian commitments are worthless", the Israeli PM suggested. Netanyahu thereby effectively has blocked any mirroring of the North Korea summit. It is in this context of the disparity between NK best friends summit, and the blocks being erected towards any political solution in respect to Irans nuclear programme, that the tweets this week by the well-respected, and credible, Saudi blogger Mujtahidd become significant. Mujtahidd tweeted that Kushner had informed Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) of the background to the North Korea summit (informally translated): Kushner told Mohamed Bin Salman a secret about the Trump-Kim summit, only known to a very closed circle in the White House, probably unknown even to Congress after Mohamed bin Salman expressed his concern that this step may be repeated with Iran with Trump suddenly opening up to Iran with no preconditions, turning his back on bin Salman. Kushner told bin Salman that before military confrontation with Iran, Trump wants to promote himself as a man of peace and was therefore keen on this achievement [the Singapore Summit]. Kim initially had been enthusiastic about announcing denuclearization before the summit, but when China noticed Trumps enthusiasm, it decided to blackmail him into ending the trade war with China in return for holding the summit [with Jong Un] China then instructed Kim to resile on his initial agreement to hold a summit, and this is what occured until Trump secretly promised China to halt the trade war against it. The evidence to this was the lifting of the ban on Chinas telecom operator ZTE, accused of technical and commercial spying on the US When Congress rejected the presidents decision to lift the ban on ZTE, Trump promised the Chinese, according to Kushner, that he would veto the congressional decision. After this was explained to him by Kushner, bin Salman was reassured that confrontation with Iran is progressing. Knowing this secret has given him a lot of pride, which he has expressed in closed [Saudi] circles. This fits. There is no evidence to support these claims, but Mujtahidd has a long record of being proven correct. The Singapore photo op has given Trump the plausible image of a man of peace. There will be there can be no UNSC resolution supporting US action against Iran, but the Singapore Photo Op can stand in its stead it represents Trumps bona fides. It further suggests Trump has been always open to negotiation (which is not true in the case of Iran except in the event of the overthrow of the government). And the Best Friends photo-op inoculates him from accusations of being 'just another neocon'. The North Korean process is 'parked' for now (whilst the lengthy negotiations continue), and Trump is free to pursue heightened attrition against Iran, and without the very real concerns appertaining to North Korea since Iran cannot in any way, threaten the US homeland. Putin, at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting, which President Rouhani attended, explicitly committed to supporting Iran and the JCPOA and China, at the same event, invited Iran to make use of the Shanghai commodity options market for its energy exports. Russia and China can protect Iran from imploding economically, but neither Russia nor China can run a peace process against an aggressive US-Israeli tide, in full spate. So, what was afoot at Singapore? It seems Trump has just added the US neocons to his electoral constituency (in time for the mid-term Congressional elections). Bolton was present in Singapore, and the US President made a point of introducing Bolton (of all people), the neocon flagship, to Jong Un (there is a long history to North Koreas strong dislike for Bolton and with good cause). Bolton participated, and not a peep was heard from him along the usual lines that NK lies, because deceit is their nature. Bolton was strangely affable and polite. What then might be the quid pro quo for Boltons uncharacteristicly affable assent? Here, Mujtahidd may have given us the answer (courtesy of Jared Kushners desire to keep MbS sweet): Before confrontation with Iran, Trump wants to promote himself as a man of peace, and was therefore keen on this achievement [the Singapore Summit]. And if confirmation was wanted that some planned major geo-political confrontation and misery lay behind all the sweetness and light of Singapore, then Norway gave it to us. With all their unerring ability to misjudge things, they echoed the suggestion of Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Mujtahidd must be right, then. Will Iran be besieged into capitulation? Trumps tightening noose will fail. Maybe then, some in the Israeli leadership will perceive more clearly that the G7 unipolar era is over, and the Russia-China multi-polar world is in the ascendant.